Art and Meaning
Art seems to bypass my logical defenses and speak to something deep inside of me. A symphony feels like staring into the ocean’s depths. A good story can move me like sitting beside a cathedral organ at full volume. Beauty doesn’t just impress me—it feels like it’s telling me something true.
So I began to wonder: Why does beauty feel like truth? Why do some stories seem more real than reality? Those questions eventually led me to an idea that changed how I see the world—and why I create. It’s something J.R.R. Tolkien described as the True Myth. And for artists, I believe it’s one of the most powerful ideas we can hold onto.
What Is a Myth, Anyway?
Not long ago, I heard astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson commenting on the Bible’s creation story. He pointed out that Genesis describes stars as “just little points of light, much lesser than the sun.” In a way, he’s right. The Hebrew text literally refers to the sun as the greater lamp, while the moon and stars are lesser lamps. “To even write that,” he went on, “means you don’t know what those things are.” Tyson’s comment caught my attention because it illustrates how differently the ancient and modern minds see the world.
C.S. Lewis, through his own wrestlings with the nature of ancient literature, was able to articulate this kind of difference with striking clarity. In his book The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, a boy named Eustace tells a star (in human form), “In our world, a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.” The star gently replies, “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of.” That’s not a rebuttal; it’s a translation. It’s as if Lewis is saying to the modern mind, “Your radio is tuned to the physics station, but meaning plays on a different frequency.”
This is where myth enters the picture. One challenge here is that laypeople and scholars mean different things by the word myth. In popular language, myth means something false or made-up. But in the academic or literary world, myth refers to something deeper: a sacred story that expresses how a people understand their identity and purpose. In this sense, myth isn’t deception. It’s meaning-making. It’s truth told in the language of ancient imagination. And when we look at the Bible—especially Genesis—it becomes clear that it’s not shying away from this mythic mode of communication. It’s entering into it. Subverting it. Redeeming it.
The Bible’s Mythic Power
When I first learned that the Bible’s creation story shared motifs with other ancient myths—deceiving serpents, divine image, humans formed from clay—it unsettled me. Was the Bible just another myth among many? Over time, however, I came to see that Scripture wasn’t merely imitating those ancient stories—it was responding to them.
Take the sun, for example (since Tyson brought it up). In many ancient stories, the sun was a god—an entity worthy of worship because it brought order from chaos. But the biblical account gives the sun a different meaning, seen precisely in how it reimagines those ancient stories. In Genesis, the sun is just a lamp. A tool. It’s as if the author is saying, “The sun is a god? No. Our God is so powerful, he made the sun. It’s just a lamp he hung in the sky.”
That’s not science. That’s theology. That’s poetry. That’s myth used intentionally—to tell a truer story in the language its first hearers would understand. This isn’t a rejection of myth; it’s a redemption of myth. It’s God entering the ancient imagination and saying, Let me show you a better story.
Tolkien’s Breakthrough: The Myth That Was True
That framework helped me—myth as a vehicle for truth, an imaginative language for meaning. Still, when it came to Jesus, this mythic mode of communication unsettled me once again. It’s one thing to say creation narratives are symbolic, but I remember wrestling with whether or not I could in good conscience say that I believed the Jesus story if it, like Genesis, was mythic in nature. Jesus’ life unmistakably echoes mythic themes: a virgin birth, God descending from heaven, resurrection from death. Was the Jesus story just another myth among many?
C.S. Lewis, for a time, felt the same tension. He once described myths as “lies breathed through silver”—beautiful, but ultimately untrue. That was part of his barrier to Christian faith: he saw mythic beauty in the accounts of Jesus and struggled to see what made the Christ story more believable than any other sacred story. But his friend J.R.R. Tolkien had insight on this point. Whereas many might argue that the Christ story is not myth, Tolkien told Lewis, in essence, “Yes, the Gospel is a myth. But it’s the True Myth.” Not a myth with merely spiritual meaning, but a myth that distinguished itself from the others by stepping into history. In other words, the old stories became a lived story. In Jesus, the poetic and the historical kissed. Once again, God stepped into the mythic world—and redeemed it from within.
Tolkien didn’t dismiss myths as empty stories. Instead, he saw them as vehicles for truth—ancient longings waiting to be fulfilled, shadows outlining the silhouette of the True Myth that stepped into history. This insight helped Lewis on his spiritual journey, which is why he later wrote: “The story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference—that it really happened.”
Making Art in the Light of the True Myth
Tolkien’s insight doesn’t just change how we read ancient literature—it changes how we as artists create. When we make art, we are not merely entertaining; we are echoing something deep and true. If the ancient myths—themselves works of art—could prepare the world for the myth that became fact, then it stands to reason that the art we create now can also prepare the world for an encounter with the one who gave meaning to the longings those ancient myths expressed.
There’s a concept in instrument-making called sympathetic strings. They vibrate in harmony—not because they were struck, but because they’re tuned to the same frequency. That’s what myth does. And that’s what all great art can do. When we paint, sculpt, dance, or tell stories, we cannot help but resonate—to greater or lesser degrees—on the frequency of the True Myth. This is why we feel art so deeply. It’s not just personal. It’s cosmic. We’re tuned, in some mysterious way, to the same frequency as the Great Myth.
Inspiration to Create
So yes, art still gets past my defenses—like the vastness of the ocean or the rumble of an organ. If you’re reading this, you probably know the feeling. I don’t need to explain it. If this vision of reality is true, then in creating, we’re not just making art; we’re remembering. Echoing. Tuning the world to the myth that was true.
Whether or not you share Tolkien’s Christian faith, his idea of the True Myth offers something worth pondering. Why does beauty feel like something ancient being remembered? Could it be an echo of something true? And if you do share that faith, as I do, I hope Tolkien’s vision strengthens you. I hope it can be what it has been for me: a compass for why I create—not to escape reality, but to tune myself to it. Not to pass time, but to point toward what matters.
So, artists: keep creating. Whether you’re writing novels, painting canvases, or scoring symphonies, you’re not just making noise. You’re resonating. You’re making the world vibrate with meaning.