True myth.
That’s what C.S. Lewis called the Christian story.
These are challenging concepts to square. A myth is a story that is making a point, or pointing to transcendent truths rather than attempting a retelling of facts or truth. A true story is an account of historical facts.
How can a story’s main purpose be to convey transcendent truths while also adhering to factual truth? In most stories, facts have to be woven and bent in service of the myth or metaphor, or perfect symbolism has to be sacrificed to the cause and effect world of facts.
To do both at once would be some kind of extraordinary, unlikely story. Facts that lay themselves out in a perfect mythical structure. Metaphors that actually happened.
From what little I understand it, Orthodox iconography does a wonderful job of embodying this apparent paradox. Icons depict real people and events, and have the necessary visual elements to convey this, while also being layered in symbols and metaphors telling greater truths about the structure of reality. They have a mysterious and confounding mix of literal and non-literal imagery.
Or is it all literal? Or is it all non-literal?
That’s exactly what this kind of story causes us to question. The nature of truth, of fact, of symbol, of reality itself.
This act of questioning makes me stumble into something that pulls it all together. The concept of Logos embodied. The joining of the abstract and the concrete, the eternal and the temporal. Word and Truth. Symbol and Reality.