Vico and Bultmann On Myth The Problem With Demythologizing

Vico and Bultmann on Myth: The Problem with Demythologizing
Author(s): A. J. Grant
Source: Rhetoric Society Quarterly , Autumn, 2000, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Autumn, 2000), pp.
49-82
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A.J. Grant
VICO AND BULTMANN ON MYTH: THE PROBLEM WITH

DEMYTHOLOGIZING
Abstract: Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), an early Enlightenment critic of

Cartesianism, on one hand, demistfies the origin and nature of myths, while
Bultmann (1884-1976), a late modernist theologian, on the other engages
in a full-blown program of demythologizing. Vico subjects myth to analysis
and scrutiny, but finds lasting value in the big stories whereas Bultmann,
informed by a developmental view of histonr and a positivistic epistemology,
finds little of value in the Christian Myth, apart from an existential encoun-
ter with God. Vico sees a clear connection among the imagination, meta-
phor, myth and critical method, but Bultmann, uses formgeschichte (form
criticism) to expurgate the NT of myth.
INTRODUCTION
Let us consider abstract man stripped of myth, abstract education, abstract
mores, abstract laws, abstract government; the random vagaries of the ar-
tistic imagination unchanneled by any native myth; a culture without fixed
and consecrated place of origin, condemned to exhaust all possibilities and
feed miserably and parasitically on every culture under the sun. Here we
have our present age .... Man today, stripped of myth, stands famished
among all his pasts and must dig frantically for roots. (Nietzsche, The Birth
of Tragedy 137)
This paper provides an historical backdrop to the debate about the status
of the metanarrative (master narrative or myth) by examining Giambattista
Vico's and Rudolph Bultmann's treatment of myth, which illustrate two anti-
thetical approaches to myth that are very much alive today. I am using the
terms myth and metanarrative as largely synonymous, because both terms
denote stories that have a cosmic or political arche and telos. Further, the
beginning and end of the metanarrative define how one is to act in the interim
Moreover, these myths have been embraced by religious groups and/or politi-
cal groups worldwide. In other words, these grand narrratives have captured
the imagination of whole civilizations, cultures and/or nations.' Vico (1668-
1744), an early Enlightenment critic of Cartesianism, on one hand, demystifies
the origin and nature of myths, while Bultmann (1884-1976), a late modernist
theologian, on the other, engages in a full-blown program of demythologiz-
ing. In postmodern terms, Vico subjects the metanarrative to analysis and
scrutiny, but finds lasting value in the big stories whereas Bultmann, informed
by a developmental view of history and a positivistic epistemology, finds little
49 RSQ: Rhetoric Society Quarterly
Volume 30, Number 4 Fall 2000

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50 RHETORIC SOCIETY QUARTERLY
of value in the Christian Myth, apart from an existential encounter with God.
Vico sees a clear connection among the imagination, metaphor, myth and criti-
cal method, but Bultmann, uses formgeschichte (form criticism) to expurgate
the NT of myth. His demythologizing effort results in the kind of "erasure"
Jacques Derrida describes in "White Mythology":
White mythology-'metaphysics' has erased within itself the fabulous

scene that has produced it, the scene that nevertheless remains active
and stirring, inscribed in white ink, an invisible design covered over in
the palimpsest. (213)
New Testament scholars, especially those of the "Tiibingen School," utilized

form criticism to isolate, analyze and date the forms of the gospels (pronounce-
ment stories, miracles stories, apophthegms, etc.), effectively erasing the "fabu-
lous scene" of New Testament origins, namely the life and person of Jesus
(Neill 27-60). When Bultmann has finished with his analysis of the Synoptic
gospels in The History of the Synoptic Tradition, the historical Jesus has been
erased, whited-out by the early Hellenistic church for its own teaching, wor-
ship and apologetic needs: "The Christ who is preached [in the gospels] is not
the historic Jesus, but the Christ of the faith and the cult" (Bultmann, History
370).
Vico would agree with Derrida, that metaphysics, especially Cartesian
metaphysics of which Bultmann is an heir, actively sought to erase the story
and substitute "clear and distinct ideas" as the purview of philosophy and
theology.2 But Vico sees culture as an onion: if one peels away layers of myth
and language, one eventually has no onion at all, since myth, language and
community are inextricably bound together. Bultmann, however, views cul-
ture as a nut: one must pare away the outer shell of myth and metaphor, in
order to find the kernel of existential truth hidden within. Metaphoric and
mythical language are construed in the typical enlightenment manner, as adorn-
ment for the truth, and consequently must be removed to lay bare the truth.
But Bultmann's demythologizing fails to erase all of the New Testament myth:
we are left with the "cross and the resurrection," explicated by existential
propositions a la Heidegger rather than a metanarrative or unified myth about
a first century religious figure named Jesus.3
My claim is that Bultmann's analytical method of historical criticism,
tied to an Enlightenment view of myth and language, still the approach of the
"guild" of New Testament scholars (Johnson, Real 100-101), demolishes the
integrity of the mythic core of the New Testament in the name of a tenden-
tious, rational enterprise. Vico's synthetic method of historical criticism, on
the other hand, offers an alternative view of history that connects imagination,
metaphor and myth at the "creation" of Jove by the first theological poets.

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GRANT/ON MYTH 5 1
For Vico, reason need not displace myth since myth and reason are not contra-
dictory, but complimentary ways of knowing that imply each other.
Antipathy toward myth is not a new story; in the history of western phi-
losophy and rhetoric there has been a sustained attempt at erasing or whiting-
out the story back of the proposition.4 In the Republic, Plato wants reason
and dialectic, rather than imagination, to create and sustain a rational, civil
order, because he feared that the crude, contradictory and violent stories of
myth would incite the members of his ideal society to acts of violence and
immorality (377-78). Joseph Mali notes, "Ever since Plato decreed, that for
the sake of moral and social integrity in the state, 'we must begin . . . by a
censorship over our myth-makers', the debate about the legitimacy of mythi-
cal beliefs in rational and civil society has never been safely laid to rest" (153).
Francis Bacon, on the other hand, in On the Wisdom of the Ancients, argued
that the myths of antiquity contained an esoteric wisdom that could not be
attributed to the first philosophers. Mali comments:
Significantly, among the 'great and rare philosophers' whom he criti-

cizes, Vico singles out Plato and Bacon, two of his favorite authors.
Much as he admired their philosophical works, Vico felt that as in-
terpreters of myths they both erred because they did not set the myths
in any coherent historical framework which would delimit the range
of possible meanings, and as a result they came to attribute to them
inflated meanings, either too negative (as in Plato's Republic) or too
positive (as in Bacon's Wisdom of the Ancients), but in any case
meanings which could not possibly have been those conceived by
their original makers[.] (152)
The debate about myth was rekindled in Vico's day, largely due to the discov-
ery of "savage" lands and tribes in the new world. Mali points out that "[t]he
literature of travelogues, missionary relations and commercial reports mapped
out a new mythological world, a strange-but very real-world of icons and
rites; and because these myths of the new world were so meaningful and alive
they infused new meaning and life into the myths of the old world, turning its
giants, cave men, bards and warriors from mere literary images into real hu-
man beings" (145). Mali further notes that Bernard de Fontenelle's Of the
Origin of Fables and Joseph Lafitau's Moeurs des savages Ameriquains aux
moeurs des premiers temps both appeared in print in 1724, the same year of
the first edition Vico's Scienza Nuova. Both works presented an "identifica-
tion of the mythical with the irrational," and therefore continued the Platonic
and Enlightenment hostility to myth (147).
Vico, on the other hand, saw myth as pre-rational, historically speaking,
and argued that though mythos antedates logos, nevertheless, the two are com-

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plimentary and not antithetical ways o

gues that there could have been no philosophy apart from a mythical base on
which to reflect. From a rhetorical standpoint for Vico, Mali notes, mythos
and logos are related as topica and critica "not essentially opposed, but his-
torically complimentary, and equally valid" modes of discourse (160). The
first myth, that of Jove, is created by the theological poets by way of a meta-
phoric leap of the imagination (fantasia). With this metaphoric leap, the first
"imaginative universal" is created, as well as language, ethics and commu-
nity.5
The debate about the status of myth and the relationship between mythos
and logos has continued down through the nineteenth century and into the
twentieth. Bultmann's thoroughgoing demythologization of the New Testa-
ment is, finally, the culmination of three hundred years of Enlightenment work
on myth.6 As an advocate of the "History of Religions" approach to New
Testament studies, and an heir of the so-called "Quest for the Historical Jesus,"
Bultmann brought to fruition the idea that "the historical Jesus and the Christ
proclaimed in the gospels and by the church are not the same," an idea first
articulated in 1778 by Lessings' publication of Hermann Samuel Reimarus'
Von den Zwecek Jesu und seiner Jiinger: Noch ein Fragment des
Wolfenbiittelschen Ungenannten (Jeremias 3-4).7
In the spirit of Bultmann's demythologizing program, a number of
postmodern critics and philosophers argue that changes in our perception of
myth (or metanarrative) provide clear indicators of the shift from modernism
to postmodernism. In The Illusion of the End, Jean Baudrillard declares that
the notion of a final end (telos)-as set forth in the stabilizing myths of the
western religions-has disappeared. "The happy consciousness of eternity
and immortality is ended. The problem of the end becomes crucial and in-
soluble. There will no longer be an end. We enter upon a kind of radical
indeterminacy" (91). Jean-Francois Lyotard ("simplifying to the extreme")
defines postmodernism as "incredulity toward metanarratives" (xxiv), to wit,
the two alternative myths to science and technology: the French myth of the
"liberation of humanity" and the German myth of the speculative unity of all
knowledge (31-37). In short, according to Baudrillard and Lyotard, the big
stories with the big endings, religious and secular, are incredulous to a
postmodern sensibility.
For Lyotard and Baudrillard, the metanarrative (or Master (Mistress?)
Narrative) exhibits an arche (cosmic or political beginning) and a telos (cos-
mic or political end) towards which history is moving. The beginning and
end define how one is to act in the interim. Thus, in the western religions God
creates the world, providentially orders its events, then brings the world to a
final judgment where good and evil people are eternally separated. Believers
live righteously because God as creator, provider, redeemer and judge, brack-

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GRANT/ON MYTH 53
ets history as alpha and omega. In Marxism, a secular myth, the revolution of
the proletariat is followed by successive stages that eventuate in the egalitar-
ian society of pure communism. Believers live and act in order to bring about
the final stage of communism. These myth or metanarratives, and all others,
according to Lyotard, have disappeared or perhaps "gone underground" or
simply failed. In the face of this radical indeterminacy, we now live (each of
us) in a variety of sometimes overlapping, but often discontinuous petit recits
(little stories) (3 1-37).
In the spirit of Vico, contemporary philosophers like Alasdair MacIntyre
and Hans Blumenberg argue for the continued vitality of metanarratives.
MacIntyre, for example, has argued that humans, above all else, are storytelling
animals. We all participate in one or more stories and know how to act by
referencing (both consciously and unconsciously) the stories we inhabit: "I
can only answer the question 'What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior
question 'Of what stories do I find myself a part"' (216). Even if the
metanarratives, the big stories, are now dead to some postmodern thinkers,
nevertheless millions of people worldwide continue to participate in the big
stories-respond to, react to, and rewrite them perhaps-but finally perceive
their lives in terms of these myths.
Further, Hans Blumenberg (Work on Myth) has suggested that the big
stories kill-they kill both time and fear, and make the world a little less fright-
ening and a little more familiar (34). Myths ameliorate and quell "panic and
paralysis ... the two extremes of anxiety behavior" (6). Thus, it seems, people
participate in the big stories, because they remind them and others of who
they are, provide direction for decision-making, benefit them psychologically,
and connect them with other people in the same or similar stories. Blumenberg
also argues (The Legitimacy of the Modern Age) that the "crisis of modernity"
and its subsequent project of legitimization comes about because modern phi-
losophy, science and technology lacked the explanatory powers of the older
metanarratives. Astronomy, for example, provides a cosmic arche or telos but
this beginning and end has not yet displaced the big beginnings and ends of
the religious metanarratives; the big bang and collapsing universe theories
provide neither comfort nor direction to the believer in science.
Blumenberg speculates that even though the myths of one age are dis-
placed or subsumed by those of the next, nevertheless the problems and ques-
tions of one age continue to inform the "reoccupied positions" of the new age:
When modern thinkers abandoned the Christian 'answers,' they still

felt an obligation to answer the questions that went with them-to
show that modern thought was equal to any challenge, as it were. It
was this compulsion to 'reoccupy' the 'position' of the medieval
Christian schema of creation and eschatology-rather than leave it

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empty, as a rationality that was a

done-that led to the grandiose constructions of the 'philosophy of
history' (Robert M. Wallace, Introduction xx, Legitimacy; see 125-
205 for Blumenberg's account).
Blumenberg has in mind Hegelian and Marxist philosophies of history, myths

that attempt to displace the old Christian schema of creation and eschatology.
While Vico felt no compulsion to displace and reoccupy the position of the
myths of antiquity, Bultmann, utilizing the Hegelian schema of the History of
Religions school, sought to re-write early Christian history. Vico and Bultmann
both employ critical, historical methods to attempt to reconstruct the origins
of language, culture and religion on the one hand, and New Testament origins
on the other. Vico's historical method is found in Book III of the New Sci-
ence, "Discovery of the True Homer," while Bultmann's historical method,
"Form Criticism," is employed in its most rigorous way on the Synoptic Gos-
pels in the History of the Synoptic Tradition. Both employ a kind of source
criticism: Vico wades through extant eighteenth century documents from an-
cient Rome and Greece attempting to reconstruct and date the oral and written
sources back of these documents. Bultmann begins with the early twentieth
century "Two Source Hypothesis," which accounted for the similarities and
discrepancies among the synoptic gospels by positing that Mark and an un-
known "sayings" source designated "Q" (quelle) comprised the two sources
back of Matthew and Luke. From this critical perspective, he proceeds to
isolate, analyze, organize and date the stories and sayings of Jesus in the Syn-
optic gospels, attempting to reconstruct a probable sitz im leben kirche (and in
a few places a sitz im leben Jesu) for all the stories and sayings of Jesus.8
Both Vico and Bultmann attempt to see behind the layers of oral and
written tradition in their respective documents, necessarily confronting myths
and legends about gods, goddesses and heroes on the one hand and myths and
legends about Jesus on the other. Vico concludes that Homer should be seen
as a "binder or compiler of fables" (New Science 852), which fables had been
handed down orally from earlier generations.9 Homer himself can thus be
seen as a "fable" created by the Greek people. From this historical vantage
point Vico attempts to speculate about the prehistoric age of gods, which an-
tedates the heroic age of which Homer was a part.
Like Vico's Homer, Bultmann's "Jesus of faith" (the Jesus of the virgin
birth, miracles etc.) must be seen as a creation of the Hellenistic mission church,
even as Homer proves to be a creation of the Greek people. As Vico despairs
of recovering an historical personage, so too Bultmann despairs of recovering
the "Jesus of History," since his original Palestinian visage has been cloaked
in the mythological garb of the early Hellenistic church. Bultmann wants to
pare away the mythical and metaphorical shell of his cultural nut until he

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GRANT/ON MYTH 55
finds a core of existential meaning. "I Vico peels his cultural onion, then puts it
all back together-for there is no core of meaning apart from myth-the mythi-
cal layers of language, culture and religion constitute a unified whole.
While both Vico and Bultmann are concerned with historical reconstruc-
tion, and in particular, historical origins, Vico proceeds in what I wish to call
a synthetic way, while Bultmann in an analytic manner. Vico uses history to
recover the origins of human community in terms of imagination, metaphor
and myth, while Bultmann uses history to purge the New Testament of its
outmoded mythical "forms" contained in the Synoptic Gospels. Though Vico
rejects the Enlightenment view of language and rationality, Bultmann rigor-
ously applies the same. For both Vico and Bultmann, mvthos antedates logos
historically, but Vico concludes that the two interpenetrate each other, and, in
fact cannot exist in isolation. Bultmann coins the term "demythologizing,"
and argues that logos must displace mythos since myth is an infantile and
untenable (to the modern mind) way of perceiving the world.
In what follows I outline Vico's historical method in brief, then move on
to discuss what Vico means by myth or fable and why he sees it as the sinle
qua non of culture and religion. Next I will discuss Bultmann's historical
method in terms of the task of "demythologization." I then briefly examine
how Bultmann actually defines myth, and why he felt that the New Testament
needed to be demythologized for a twentieth century audience. I conclude
with a brief discussion of the resurgence of interest in myth in the twentieth
century and a Vicchian critique of Bultmann's program.
VICO'S METHODOLOGY
In Book III of the New Science Vico employs an historical method that
anticipates the source, form and redaction criticism developed in the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries by Old and New Testament scholars." Vico
utilizes his historical critical method to sift through and sort out the accretions
of myth regarding Homer and his two epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Based on a close reading of these epic poems, and the employment of a "meta-
physical criticism of the history of the obscurest antiquity" (905), Vico ascer-
tains three heroic periods in Greece, with "Homer" belonging to the last of
these. Vico concludes that Homer, like the stories he allegedly wrote, is in
fact a fiction, in the sense that he never existed historically as a single person.
Though Vico thinks one might reasonably assume from the evidence that Homer
"never existed as a particular man in the world of nature," nevertheless he is
willing to take the "middle ground that Homer was an idea or a heroic charac-
ter of Grecian men insofar as they told their histories in song" (873).
Vico's historical critical method yields skepticism about the existence of
Homer and lays bare the crude and violent life situations back of the Iliad and
the Odyssey. Vico has demystified both Homer and the two earlier heroic

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periods, leaving the reader skeptical of precise historical reconstruction and

wary of longing for the better times of this age. Further, early in Book III of
the New Science, Vico argues that Homer could not have been a philosopher,
since his writings do not exhibit "esoteric wisdom," and therefore, Homer
must have lived much earlier than even the pre-socratic philosophers (781).
The person who wrote the Iliad could not have written the Odyssey, since
each reflects a different time and place (801-803). Moreover, since "refine-
ments" of an age later than the first heroic age appear in the Iliad, Vico con-
cludes that a period of 460 years must have lapsed from the time of the events
of the epic and the form received by Homer. The two poems, in fact, must
have been "composed and compiled by various hands through successive ages"
(804). 2 Here Vico is practicing what later came to be known as source and
redaction criticism. He is speculating about the sources back of the Iliad and
Odyssey and about the ways in which the stories were altered in both oral and
written form by successive generations of redactors.
Based on the historical probabilities already established in "Poetic Wis-
dom," Vico now assigns Homer to the third age of the heroic poets:
The first age invented the fables to serve as true narratives, the pri-
mary and proper meaning of the word mythos, as defined by the
Greeks themselves, being the 'true narration.' The second altered
and corrupted them. The third and last, that of Homer, received them
thus corrupted. (808)
Since these early fables were "originally for the most part gross," Vico ob-
serves that they eventually lost their original meanings, and "were than al-
tered, subsequently became improbable, after that obscure, then scandalous,
and finally incredible" (814).
Homer, therefore, cannot be viewed as an author in the strict sense of the
word, but as a "binder or compiler of fables" (852). He simply "stitched" or
"linked" together oral narratives that were handed down from generation to
generation by rhapsodes. These epic poems, according to Vico, are not re-
duced to writing until around the time of Hesiod, since "vulgar letters" were
not introduced during the time of the Pisistratids and Aristarchus (856).
Now that Vico has a basic chronology in place, he contemplates the fact
that no one knows when Homer was born nor where Homer lived, yet every
city-state in Greece claimed him for its bard. He concludes that "the Greek
people themselves were Homer" (875). The blindness and poverty attributed
to Homer may be viewed as anachronistic qualities of the wandering rhapsodes
projected back onto the singular figure of Homer. The critics need not assail
Homer for his crude phrases and vulgarity, for he is "lost in the crowd of the
Greek peoples," and therefore "justified"(882-889).

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GRANT/ON MYTH 57
In spite of his skeptical conclusions about the "historical" Homer, Vico

considers him preeminent among the epic poets. Homer is to be "immortal-
ized," since he is the "founder of Greek polity or civility," the "father of all
poets," and the "source of all Greek philosophies" (891-901). I conjecture
that it is from the vantage point of his reconstruction of the three periods in the
heroic age, and his source critical analysis of the Iliad and the Odyssey that
Vico speculates about the "age of gods."'3 For men of the first period of the
heroic age to have "invented the fables to serve as true narratives," a theo-
logical world and life view must already have been in place for each nation. A
mythos must have been articulated by an earlier age. This age Vico calls the
age of gods, which is discussed throughout Book II of the New Science. Vico's
speculative reconstruction of the origin of myth, the "Jove conceit," stands at
the head of Book II.
In Section I of Book II of the New Science, Vico speculates that "the first
wisdom of the gentile world" began with
a metaphysics not rational and abstract like that of learned men

now, but felt and imagined as that of these first men must have been,
who, without power of ratiocination, were all robust sense and vig-
orous imagination. (375)
These sensuous founders of the Gentile nations, the "theological poets," must
have raised their eyes at some point and beheld the thunder and lightning:
"[T]hey pictured the sky to themselves as a great animated body, which they
called Jove ... who meant to tell them something by the hiss of bolts and the
clap of his thunder" (377). By this metaphorical connection of sky, thunder
and lightning with a cosmic body and voice,
the first theological poets created the first divine fable, the greatest
they ever created: that of Jove, king and father of men and gods, in
the act of hurling the lightning bolt; an image so popular, disturbing
and instructive that its creators themselves believed in it, and feared,
revered and worshiped its frightful religions. (379)
John Schaeffer notes that the name "Jove" is the "ligamen connecting thunder
and sky with body and voice." Further, "[t]he perception of this similarity
makes 'thunder' a word and coincidentally creates a fable for its origin"
(87). Thus, by way of a metaphoric leap, the first poets "create" both God
and language.'4 But community and religion are created as well, because the
first humans, out of fear of Jove, begin to practice monogamy and develop
religious rituals. "Thus language, God, religion, and community are created
simultaneously with the perception of the first metaphor" (Schaeffer 88).

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Vico immediately notes that "every gentile nation had its Jove," created by its
first "theological poets" (381), which means that every nation (or culture) has
at its beginning stories of gods and heroes.
Vico calls this first metaphor an imaginative universal and this metaphor
produces the first myth, both of which are created by the imagination orfan-
tasia: "Myth is the product of what Vico callsfantasia, or the 'making imagi-
nation.' Through fantasia, as a primordial power, the world is formed in terms
of gods and heroes, and these are, in Vico's term, "imaginative universals"
(universalifantastici)" (Verene, Return 62-63). Schaeffer notes that Vico's
notion of sensus comalmunis has its origin here, since the imaginative universal
"initiates those 'underlying agreements'as well as the 'mental dictionary' of
a people" (88). Another way of understanding imaginative universals, ac-
cording to Schaeffer, is to think of them as "class concepts" formed by the
fantasia:
Vico's point is that the original humans were incapable of conceptu-

alizing intelligible genera. Rather, because their experience was
emotional and their expressions poetic, that is, metaphorical, instead
of creating logical genera, they created imaginative ones. (88)
The need for imaginative universals arises out of the need for the first human
beings to respond to the existential terrors of the natural world and to make
sense of the flux of sensation:
The imaginative universal is thoroughly corporeal. It simply freezes

sensation in a kind of stop-action and attributes it to someone or
something else. The metaphorical translation thus effected allows
men to make sense out of their sensations, to objectify them in ways
that both constellate a meaningful interpretation of external reality
and generate a level of self-consciousness and sensation itself.
(Schaeffer 90)
The imaginative universal can also be viewed as "an expanded version of

the Baroque conceit," which Vico claimed could "'couch an argument," and
this first metaphor "makes a case, which argues for certain behavior"
(Schaeffer 90). The fable of Jove thus comprises the mental dictionary of the
first humans, while the agreement to flee to the caves and begin to practice
monogamy comprises the "underlying agreements" that created the first reli-
gious communities. Through an imaginative metaphoric leap, the theological
poets create the first myth as well as language, community and religion.
This speculative reconstruction of the origins of religion, language and
community possesses a number of implications. First, Bultmann's "demy-

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GRANT/ON MYTH 59
thologizing" of the New Testament involves the removal of an imaginative

universal, which could, ostensibly, dissolve both the mental dictionary and
the underlying agreements of a given community. On a sociological level this
might begin to explain the hue and cry that went up over Bultmann's pro-
gram." Second, it is important to note that Vico here rejects the Enlighten-
ment view of metaphor as adornment for propositional truth. The Jove con-
ceit, as a kind of cosmic metaphor, contains an argument, and for Vico, all
metaphors contain arguments.
Thus, Vico claims that conceits are arguments, that they teach by
uniting beauty and truth in an oral performance ... There is no
question of a clear argument with the mere addition of a decorative
figure. The metaphor is the argument. (Schaeffer 67)
For Vico one may demystify the origin of language, religion and community,
but to actually demythologize is to begin to dismantle the elements of the
mythos and the culture itself in terms of its beliefs and values, leaving humans
"stripped of myth" and "famished among all [their] pasts" digging "franti-
cally for roots" (Nietszche 137).
Third, the imaginative universal, according to Donald Verene, is the "mas-
ter key" to understanding Vico's thought and is responsible for Vico's under-
standing of concept formation, his theory of metaphor and his theory of the
existential conditions of existence (Imagination 66-69). Verene thinks that
for Vico, the imaginative universal is "the principle of human knowledge it-
self' and that metaphor is "the basis of thought" (Imagination 77). The rea-
son that Verene can say this is that metaphor, for Vico, "is that by which iden-
tity is originally achieved in perception" (Imagination 79) and that without
which "intelligible universals" (the "generic concept of Aristotelian logic")
simply cannot be understood (Imagination 74). In other words, the imagina-
tive forms of early life are always back of the rational categories of a later age,
even though one might attempt to erase or white-out these images and figures,
as Derrida suggests has happened with Western metaphysics. And this is why
Verene argues further that "philosophy [and I would add theology] must go to
school with the poets" in order to "learn the use of language, which is the key
to all its productions." Verene continues, "Philosophy is not poetry, but it
must maintain a dialectic with poetry, with the myth, with metaphorical think-
ing, in order to keep in touch with the root meanings and functions of language
which it requires. Whatever philosophy does, it does through language" (Re-
turn xiii). Though Bultmann's demythologizing may be viewed positively as an
attempt to accomodate what Schleirmacher called the "cultured despisers of
religion," the secularists of his age, neverthless he might have spent less time
refining form critical methodology and more time contemplating the meta-

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phorical and mythical richness of the gospels themselves.
BULTMANN'S PROGRAM OF DEMYTHOLOGIZING

In 1941 Bultmann published his watershed essay "New Testament and
Mythology." The essay initiated a heated debate about New Testament myth
that persists to the present day.' Roger Johnson points out that by the 1 950s
the debate had "become a discussion on an international scale, involving par-
ticipants of many languages, from Protestant and Catholic theological tradi-
tions, and from a variety of non-theological disciplines" (2). The core of the
debate can be found in the six volumes of Kervgnma und Mvthos, but the bib-
liography generated by the debate is staggering beyond description.'7
Bultmann opens his controversial essay with a description of New Testa-
ment cosmology:
The cosmology of the New Testament is essentially mythical in char-

acter. The world is viewed as a three-storied structure, with the earth
in the centre, the heaven above, and the underworld beneath. Heaven
is the abode of God and celestial beings-the angels. The under-
world is hell, the place of torment .... [T]he earth .. . is the scene of
the supernatural activity of God and his angels, on the one hand, and
of Satan and his daemons on the other. (I)
Bultmann then turns to a description of Christian redemption, which "pro-

claims in the language of mythology" that "the last time has now come" (2).
After describing early Christian redemption motifs, Bultmann observes, "All
this is the language of mythology, and the origin of the various themes can be
easily traced in the contemporary mythology of Jewish Apocalyptic and in
the redemption myths of Gnosticism" (3). He comments, "To this extent the
kerygma is incredible to modern man, for he is convinced that the mythical
view of the world is obsolete." Further, Bultmann asks, can we, as modern
preachers, expect modern listeners "to accept not only the gospel message,
but also the mythical view of the world in which it is set" (3). He continues:
If not, does not the New Testament embody a truth which is quite
independent of its mythical setting? If it does, theology must under
take the task of stripping the Kerygma from its mythical framework,
of 'demythologizing' it. (3)
Because human's "knowledge and mastery" of the world through technology

and science renders these myths obsolete, Bultmann feels that "[t]he only
honest way of reciting the creeds is to strip the mythological framework from
the truth they enshrine-that is, assuming that they contain any truth at all,

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GRANT/ON MYTH 61
which is just the question that theology has to ask" (4). Further, in pursuit of
this demythologizing, one cannot selectively retain one mythical element over
another. Demythologizing is an all or nothing proposition. "The mythical
view of the world must be accepted or rejected in its entirety" (5). Bultmann's
argument is couched in a metaphor, not of an onion, but of a nut. One must
pare away the outer, mythical shell of the nut to find the kernel of truth hidden
within. Metaphoric and mythical language is here construed in the typical
Enlightenment manner, as adornment for the truth, and, consequently, one
must pare away the adornment to reveal what really counts-the kernel of
truth.
With the rationale for his program in place, Bultmann now turns to his
understanding of myth:
The real purpose of myth is not to present an objective picture of the

world as it is, but to express man's understanding of himself in the
world in which he lives. Myth should be interpreted not cosmologi-
cally, but anthropologically, or better still, existentially. (10)
Unlike science and technology, myth presents a subjective view of the world,
a view unacceptable to modern sensibility. Unlike Vico, Bultmann does not
interpret myth socially or culturally, that is, myth cannot possibly have any
abiding social value, rather myth must be understood as anthropological pro-
jection or better yet, existentially, as an authentic response to God's redemp-
tive actions.
Further, myth is created out of a sense of inadequacy in the face of the
cosmos, and out of a belief that the origin of the cosmos must lie beyond this
world:
Myth is an expression of man's conviction that the origin and pur-

pose of the world in which he lives are to be sought not within it but
beyond it-that is, beyond the realm of known and tangible real-
ity-and that this realm is perpetually dominated and menaced by
those mysterious powers which are its source and limit. Myth is also
an expression of man's awareness that he is not lord of his own be-
ing. (10)
Bultmann here includes an important footnote to his understanding of the

meaning of the term myth:
Myth is here used in the sense popularized by the 'History of Reli-

gions' school. Mythology is the use of imagery to express the other
worldly in terms of this world and the divine in terms of human life,

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the other side in terms of this side ... Myth is not used in that modern
sense, according to which it is practically equivalent to ideology.
(10)
Vico would agree that myth attempts to explain the inexplicable in terms un-
derstood by a particular culture, but he would disagree with Bultmann's un-
derstanding of myth as non-ideological; for Vico myths are political in that
they argue for a way of being or believing in the world. For Bultmann, myth
does not contain an argument, but provides a simple (and naive) adornment
for whatever existential or anthropological truth might be found in religion.
After he describes his demythologizing program for the New Testament,
and defines what he means by myth, Bultmann proceeds to argue that in the
cross of Christ and in the early Christians' account of the resurrection, God
was acting in a decisive way within history.
To believe in the cross of Christ does not mean to concern ourselves

with a mythical process wrought outside of us and our world, with an
objective event turned by God to our advantage, but rather to make
the cross of Christ our own, to undergo crucifixion with him. The
cross of Christ ... is not an isolated incident which befell a mythical
personage, but an event whose meaning has 'cosmic' importance.
(36)
One can see in the redemptive aspect of the Cross of Christ "no mere mythical
event, but a historic (gestlich) fact originating in the historical (historisch)
event which is the crucifixion of Christ" (37).18 Christ acutally died within
the time-space continuum (historisch), but the death is not to be interpreted
mythically, rather it must be understood as historically significant (gestlich).
Here Bultmann opposes history, rather his historical method, to myth. Myth
is an ahistorical category that needs to be replaced with a view of history as a
closed continuum of cause and effect events. For Bultmann, "mythological
language" is only a "medium for conveying the significance of the historical
event," in the same way that a shell is the medium for carrying the seed or
kernel that grows into an oak tree. This historic event has created a "new
historic situation" (37).
But the Cross cannot be separated from the resurrection of Christ. The
two events comprise the single event that ushers in the new historic situation:
"Cross and resurrection form a single, indivisible cosmic event which brings
judgment to the world and opens up for men the possibility of authentic life"
(42). The resurrection must not be used as a "miraculous proof' for the
"truth" of Christianity; in fact, the resurrection "itself is not (my italics) an
event of past history" (historisch) (42). Rather, through the daily preaching of
the kerygnia, humans are confronted with God's "decisive" act in Christ and

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GRANT/ON MYTH 63
must act decisively and choose authentic selfhood over inauthenticity (43-
44). Bultmann now claims that the cross is not to be understood historically,
but existentially through the preaching of the kervgina.
Three important observations follow. First, Bultmann accepts unequivo-
cally the Enlightenment view of language whereby "truth" can be ex-
pressed only in rational propositions. The imagery of myth is merely an
adornment, a culturally conditioned and time-bound adornment, used to
express a rational proposition, in this case, authentic existence. Culture is
like a nut, not an onion, and one must pare away the outer shell to find the
kernel of truth within this cultural form. Thus the New Testament "embod-
ies" a truth independent of myth, and one must strip away the myth in order to
lay bare the kernel of truth. Vico, on the other hand, sees the theological poets
creating the first myth by way of a metaphoric leap of the fantasia, which
simultaneously creates language, community and religion. In other words,
the myth contains an argument for how people are to live since it creates the
mental lexicon and the underlying agreements of the particular culture.
Second, Bultmann, at one and the same time, speaks of wholesale demy-
thologizing-removing all mythical elements from the New Testament, but
also of interpreting myth existentially. On one hand, he thinks that he can
erase or white-out the mythology, as Derrida suggests the philosophical tradi-
tion has sought to do, and arrive at an existential core. On the other hand, he
recognizes that peel as one may, it's myth all the way down. Culture is, in
fact, more like an onion than a nut. One cannot arbitrarily separate the mythi-
cal from the non-mythical even as one cannot separate form from content in
the analysis of language. Curiously, Bultmann's "non-mythical" kernel or
core is the event of the Cross and Resurrection. This strange ambiguity, which
many critics consider an outright contradiction, is at the heart of the confusion
both about what Bultmann meant by demythologizing, and how he went about
applying his program to the New Testament: "Too often demythologization
has not been a process of translation, but replacement of one set of ideas by
another. Many, however, would argue that it is impossible to demythologize,
but that one myth may only be interpreted by another and that myth is the
necessary language of religion" (Fawcett 44).
Third, Bultmann identifies his approach with the History of Religions
school's assessment of myth. This school of biblical studies, which included
David F. Strauss (New Testament) and J.G. Eichorn (Old Testament) as forbears,
held to a developmental view of history wherein myth necessarily belonged to an
earlier primitive age whose views are now incredible and untenable to the mod-
ern mind. Thus, the mythical elements of the Gospels that do not square with
the modern scientific view of the world as a closed continuum of cause and
event sequences must be excised. In The Origins of Demythologizing Roger
Johnson describes the Enlightenment view of myth embraced by both Strauss

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and Eichorn and traceable back to the French Enlightenment theologian, Ber-
nard Fontenelle, in terms of three propositions:
1) A developmental view of history. The development of history in

its totality is understood as analogous with the development of the
individual human being. The age in which men make myths is re-
lated to the age of reason as childhood is related to maturity. 2) A
theory of primitive mentality. There is a certain type of mentality,
universally present in the history of man and qualitatively different
from modern mentality, which is the source of myths. 3) A scientific
view of reality as a unified cause-effect nexus. In the primitive stage
of history, in which the capacity for reason was not yet fully devel-
oped, man could not know the nature of reality. Hence, the pre-scien-
tific world view, defined according to its antithesis with a scientific
world view, came to be the essential criterion for the definition of myth.
(131)
We have already demonstrated above how a theory of primitive mentality and

a scientific view of reality as a unified cause-effect nexus shaped Bultmann's
demythlogizing program. These assumptions force him to oppose history to
myth instead of attempting to frame the historical context out of which the
myth arose as Vico did, in order to delimit a range of possible meanings for
the myth. Moreover, Bultmann's developmental view of history locked him
into a view of the "evolutionary progression" of forms from oral to literate
and simple to complex, which eventuated in the "easy fusion of Palestinian
and Hellenistic Christianity" in the gospel of Mark (Kelber 3-6), but oral folk-
lore forms do not simply develop, by some internal law, into written forms,
and oral forms cannot be construed as linguistically simplistic while written
forms as complex. Bultmann has failed to understand the socio-linguistic
(and, perhaps "psychodynamic") differences between orality and literacy.'
Further, Bultmann has ignored the social dimension of oral cultures, which
would have impeded or even prevented the easy fusion of Palestinian Chris-
tianity (the Jesus of History) and Hellenistic Christianity (The Jesus of Faith).
Oral transmission of traditional material is controlled by "the law of social
identification," which involves a variety of social groups, in Palestine, em-
bracing or rejecting the teachings of and stories about Jesus (Kelber 24-26).
To easily supplant these stories about the "historical" Jesus with a nsew story
of a dying and rising Hellenistic god (the Jesus of Faith) flies in the face of the
social dimension of the transmission of traditional material.
Bultmann's most rigorous application of his demythologizing schema had
as its focus the Synoptic Gospels, and is found in the History of the Synoptic
Tradition (1 963). "More than any other single work it provided the norms

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GRANT/ON MYTH 65
and set the course for the form-critical investigation of the synoptic transmis-
sion of traditions" (Kelber 1). Here Bultmann couples his fully developed
forrngeschichte with demythologization to produce a history of the early
church's preaching of Jesus (the kerngma). Relying on the "Two-Source Hy-
pothesis" of Source Criticism as his starting point, Bultmann proceeds to "give
an account of the history of the individual units of tradition, and how the
tradition passed from a fluid [oral] state to the fixed form in which it meets us
in the Synoptics and in some cases even outside of them" (3).
The sayings and acts of Jesus as we now have them, according to Bultmann,
flow out of very particular life situations (sitze im leben) encountered by the
early Hellenistic Church in its mission among the Gentiles. Every "literary
category" in the Gospels has a particular sitz ini leben unique to its form:
The sitz ini leben is not, however, an individual historical event, but
a typical situation or occupation in the life of the community. In the
same way, the literary 'category,' or 'form' through which a particu-
lar item is classified is a sociological concept and not an aesthetic
one, however much it may be possible by its subsequent develop-
ment to use such forms as aesthetic media in some particular literary
product. (4)
In other words, the Hellenistic church encountered a number of recurrent,

rhetorical situations to which typical responses, in the form of stories about
Jesus, were made by early preachers of the kerygna. It is important to note
that Bultmann speaks here of the sitze im leben of the Hellenistic Mission
Church, the second (and third) generations of Christians that carried the gos-
pel throughout the Mediterranean basin. The sitze im leben Jesu are irrecov-
erable, since the Hellenistic Church transformed the simple Palestinian preacher
of apocalyptic into a Gnostic dying and rising god. The "Jesus of History"
has been turned into the "Christ of Faith," because of the peculiar teaching,
apologetic and worship needs of the Hellenistic church:
The Christ who is preached is not the historic Jesus, but the Christ of
the faith and the cult. Hence in the foreground of the preaching of
Christ stands the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ as the saving
acts which are known by faith . . . Thus the kervgma of Christ is
cultic legend and the Gospels are expanded cult legends. (369-70)
The larger life situation that gives rise to the need for a gospel can be found in
the early Hellenistic Church's need for stories about Jesus, which stories took
the form of stories about Greek saviours:

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For if the kurios was essentially a cultic deity for the Hellenistic
church as well, then, in order to retain the peculiar character of the
Christian faith-the union of the cultic deity with the historical per-
son of Jesus-a tradition about the story of Jesus was necessary; and
the analogy of the Hellenistic saviours about whom stories were re-
lated could not help but further the demand for and consequently the
taking over of the tradition. (369)
The Christian tradition needed to be presented in a unified form, and

Mark was the first to put this form, the gospel, together:
The tradition had to be presented as an unity from the point of view

that in it he who spoke and was spoken of was he who had lived on
earth as the Son of God, had suffered, died, risen and been exalted to
heavenly glory. Mark was the creator of this sort of Gospel; the
Christ myth gives his book, the book of secret epiphanies, not indeed
a biographical unity, but an unity based upon the myth of the kerygma.
(371)
Since the Gospel of Mark looks more like a truncated passion narrative than a
biography, Bultmann concludes that the proclamation of the mythical Christ
event (cross and resurrection), rather than a need to remember the life and
teachings of Jesus, gives shape to the gospel. As the church moves to a place
where teaching needs to augment the preaching of the kerygma, it is only
natural that the need for a life of Jesus would arise, and that the Christ of Faith
would become fused with or "take over" the tradition of the Jesus of History.
What then can be said about the historical Jesus? As Bultmann analyzes
apophthegms, dominical sayings, miracle stories, legends and the passion
narrative, the greatest part of this mythical material has been created by the
church and projected back on to the Jewish Palestinian preacher of apocalyp-
tic. In an earlier work entitled "The Study of the Synoptic Gospels" (1934),
Bultmann concludes that all we can know about the Historical Jesus is that he
preached the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of God, was perceived by Ro-
man authorities as a threat, and, therefore crucified (71-73). The actual events
of his life are irretrievably lost, but his preaching of the eschatological in-
breaking of the Kingdom of God and its radical ethic belong to the "oldest
stratum of the tradition" (73). This message summons individuals to view the
"present instant" as the "moment of decision" in which each person may "yield
up every claim" and "submit obediently to the will of God" (74). In the final
analysis, the Jesus of History, in terms of his life and teaching, cannot be
recovered. But this is not critical-according to Bultmann. Somehow, when
all the myth is stripped away (except an existentially interpreted myth of God

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GRANT/ON MYTH 67
acting in a "decisive way" through the cross and the resurrection), one is con-
fronted with a summons to turn from the world to God and to live authenti-
cally.
Bultmann's philosophical and methodological presuppositions have been
analyzed and debated at length for the last sixty years.2 Yet in spite of the
serious questions brought against his program from its inception, most main-
line New Testament scholars accept as their fundamental premise the Enlight-
enment view of Myth. The question that shaped the Jesus Seminar of the late
1980's and early 1990's, for example, was "What did Jesus really say?" (Funk
ix). The conclusion, based on public voting and the color coding of individual
sayings by the scholars of the seminar (red: That's Jesus!; pink: Sure sounds
like Jesus; gray: Well, maybe; black: There's been some mistake.), concluded
that "82% of the words ascribed to Jesus were not actually spoken by him . .
. " (Funk 5). Luke Timothy Johnson notes that the question (What did Jesus
really say?), and the form-critical procedure used to answer the question,
leaves the critic with "a small pile of pieces"' (26), a pile, nonetheless, from
which the scholars of the seminar are able to reconstruct their own historical
Jesus.
CONCLUSION: THE RESURGENCE OF MYTH

Derrida's discussion of Anatole France's Garden of Epicurus suggests
that any attempt to displace or erase mythos with logos is finally doomed,
because metaphor and myth always lurk back of our rational concepts:
Abstract notions always hide a sensory figure. And the history of

metaphysical language is said to be confused with the erasure of the
efficacity of the sensory figure and the usure of its effigy. The word
itself is not pronounced, but one may decipher the double import of
usure: erasure by rubbing, exhaustion, crumbling away, certainly;
but also the supplementary product of a capital, the exchange which
far from losing the original investment would fructify its initial wealth,
would increase its return in the form of additional revenue, addi-
tional interest, linguistic surplus value, the two histories of the word
remaining indistinguishable. (210)
Derrida is playing on the double meaning of usure in French, which denotes

"both usury, the acquisition of too much interest, and using up, deterioration
through usage" (Alan Bass, Footnote One in "White Mythology" 209) In
short, metaphysicians' attempts to eradicate or erase metaphor and myth,
based on a perception that metaphor "promises more than it gives," but in
fact, results in loss, loss of the connection with the original figure. Philoso-
phy itself proceeds by way of metaphor and myth; the term "metaphysics"

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itself is metaphoric. In Aristotle one first attends to the phusics then after-
wards the metaphusics, that which "follows" the physics (or is "above" the
physics) (Derrida 212).21
Blumenberg seems to be arguing for the same thing as Derrida when he
suggests that the "boundary line between myth and logos is imaginary and does
not obviate the need to inquire about the logos of myth ... Myth itself is a high
carat work of logos" (Work 12). Blumenberg argues that the question about the
relative worth and validity of myth over and against reason remains undecided:
The question of what reason will accomplish in relation to man's

self-preservation has hardly been decided yet. To the extent that it
presents itself as the agency that establishes things rationally, it is
this even before any of its claims have been fulfilled, above all as the
authority that revokes things. As such an authority, philosophy em-
bodied a break with myth. It will not be possible to maintain that this
break was successful from the beginning or even in its early stages.
The proposition that everything is made of water is indeed different,
but that does not yet make it better than the proposition that every-
thing rests on Oceanus. What everything is made of is still an open
question, the only difference being that it is now of interest only in
the form of an endlessly subdivided list of questions. (Work 170)
Bultmann seems to want it both ways. On the one hand Oceanus is to be

erased with a list of critical questions, which produces numerous form critical
categories tied to various sitze im leben kirche; on the other, Oceanus must
now be understood as water, that is, one must thoroughly de-mythologize the
New Testament through fornigeschichte, but then one is still left with residual
myth (cross and resurrection), which is now reinterpreted as an existential call
to authentic existence. Bultmann's legacy is a technical method fettered to an
Enlightenment view of language and history, which, once it has accomplished
its task, leaves the reader with a "small pile of things," but hardly the stuff out
of which religion and community is made. What we have is an example of
what Verene calls the technical circle:
The beginning point for a technique is some result already arrived at

[the Jesus of history versus the Jesus of faith], one clearly and dis-
tinctly given by an earlier act of technical ordering. From this, by
dividing the situation into its parts and proceeding step-by-step to
work out what is desired [form criticism], a new advance in efficient
ordering is achieved. The efficiency of the process is guaranteed;
the circle is closed by a final act of checking the work and correcting
for any loose ends. (Return 152)

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GRANT/ON MYTH 69
The technical circle is an

Bultmann through the Je
late about what can and cannot be said of the historical Jesus. It is surprising,
and audacious, that these scholars attempt to say anything, given what little of
the historical Jesus is left, but they are willing to speculate even as the first
generation questers for the historical Jesus speculated:
The rationalists pictured Jesus as a preacher of morality, the idealists

as the ideal man; the aesthetes extolled him as the master of words and
the socialists as the friend of the poor and as the social reformer, while
the innumerable pseudo-scholars made of him a fictional character. Jesus
was modernized. These lives of Jesus are mere products of wishful
thinking. The final outcome was that every epoch and every theology
found in the personality of Jesus the reflection of its own ideals, and
every author the reflection of his own views. (Jeremias 5)
As was the case with the first quest for the historical Jesus, the third quest,
from the Jesus Seminar through the 1990's, has found a Jesus of its "own
ideals" and "own views." In Borni of a Woman: A Bishop Rethinks the Birth of
Jesus (1992), Bishop John Spong's liberal rationalism, not surprisingly, pro-
duces a cover-up on the part of the early church: "Mary was really a teenaged
girl who was raped and became pregnant with an illegitimate child. She was
the taken under the protection of Joseph" (Luke Johnson 33). A. N. Wilson
(Jesus 1992), following the History of Religions approach, says Jesus was an
invention of Paul and, against the triple tradition, presents Jesus as a "charis-
matic wonder worker" (Luke Johnson 36). For Steven Mitchell (The Gospel
According to Jesus 1991), a Jeffersonian, Jesus is a rational, Enlightenment
teacher who taught only one thing: "presence" (Luke Johnson 38). Finally,
Marcus Borg, a professor of religion and culture at Oregon State University
(Jesus, A New Vision: Spirit, Culture, and the Life of Discipleship 1994), pre-
sents Jesus as the "countercultural sage" (Luke Johnson 42).
On one level, the old quest, no quest, new quest and newest quest of the
historical Jesus scholars have succeeded in shredding the mythic core of the
New Testament: the larger-than-life figure of the Jesus of the traditional gos-
pels has disappeared behind a cloud of form critical categories only to be
replaced by a Jesus of the critic's own making-one myth swapped out for
another. The original myth, it seems, is as plausible as the others generated to
take its place:
With respect to the history of the New Testament period, then, the
claim of 'critical history' to have supplanted the internal myth of
Christian origins is false. Not only has critical scholarship generated

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multiple and conflicting hypotheses, but these can be considered, in

their own way, just as 'mythic' as the one they seek to supplant. In
the end, the 'myth of Christian origins' turns out to have, in many
respects, at least the same measure of plausibility as the theories that
have been generated to replace it. (Luke Johnson 103-104)
When one asks the fundamental question, Why a written gospel in the
first place'?, the History of Religions School replies with a form critical method
and the assumption that the early church transformed the simple, Palestinian
preacher into a dying and rising god for its own apologetic, teaching and wor-
ship needs. The Vicchian answer is far more satisfying: even as the "gentile"
theological poets created language, community and religion through their first
imaginative universal, Jove, so Mark, in writing the first gospel, created the
first imaginative universal of the early church, Jesus of Nazareth, and a new
sect of Judaism with a unique mental dictionary and set of underlying agree-
ments.
This is the approach of Werner Kelber who views the gospel of Mark as a
written "parable-myth," ".a developed hermeneutical reflection on parabolic
language" (123). Kelber bases this on the "insider-outsider dichotomy" set
up in Mk. 4:10-12 where Jesus says the mystery of the Kingdom of God is
given to those who are with him, but "to those on the outside" everything is
given in parables (121). The basic dichotomy, however, is reversed in the
reading of Mark, because the mission failed: the disciples (insiders) simply
did not understand the message, and the Messiah ended up suspended be-
tween heaven and earth on a cross. This ambiguity and reversal, for Kelber, is
the beginning of a theory of parabolic discourse with which to interpret Mark's
gospel (123-25). From the perspective of the reader, the insiders are outside
and the outsiders (the readers) have access to the inside even as the first shall
be last and the last shall be first. Thus, Mark, the writer of the first gospel,
perceives Jesus' sayings and deeds metaphorically, and this provides the im-
petus for the parable-myth that we call the gospel of Mark.22
Vico's (and Kelber's) synthetic approach to myth makes for a much more
fruitful read of the synoptic gospels than the form critical approach in that the
gospels are understood imaginatively, in terms of metaphor and myth, rather
than critically, in terms of form critical categories. The resurgence of interest
in myth and narrative in the late twentieth century, among scholars in a vari-
ety of disciplines, suggests myth is alive and well and that perhaps one impor-
tant key for understanding myth is the imaginative universal that posits a close
connection between metaphor and myth.c The perception of Jove or Jesus as
imaginative universals goes much further in explaining the vital impact of
these figures on their respective communities in terms of a vision for life and
an ethic, much further than an analytical method that arbitrarily slices and

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GRANT/ON MYTH 71
dices the sources and asks questions like, What did Jesus really say? After
dismantling the myth, Bultmann attempted to substitute what Vico called in-
telligible universals-abstract, rational concepts like existential encounter and
authentic existence, for an imaginative universal. It failed for most, because,
as Nietzsche so often argued, humans do not live by reason alone.
Admittedly, religious and secular metanarratives present us with a kind
of double-bind-on one hand they provide people with a sense of history and
identity, on the other they are often exclusive and generally stand in the way
of dialogue among participants of different stories. Moreover, the culture
wars engendered by mutually exclusive metanarratives too often erupt into
shooting wars. But this is an old tension, not likely to disappear with a
postmodern declaration that they have disappeared or become incredulous to
a postmodern sensibility. Plato knew about this tension and consequently
banned the poets, artists and rhetoricians from the Republic, only to turn to
myths and stories to justify the Republic itself.24 Plato's double-bind is yet
with us, and to declare metanarratives incredulous or to privilege logos over
rnvthos in our epistemological tool box is only to exacerbate the situation.25
Vico seems to have understood the importance of the big stories. A meta-
phoric leap of the imagination by the theological poets gave the Gentiles Jove,
and with this first imaginative universal, language, religion and community.
Bultmann apparently did not understand this. He thought he could pare away
the outer shell of the cultural nut to reveal its kernel of truth, but found that
culture is more like an onion-"language, myth and culture are indissolubly
linked. At most he accomplished the kind of white mythology Derrida de-
scribes; he was able to white-out, for a time, parts of the "fabulous scene" that
produced the New Testament, but "the scene . .. nevertheless remains active
and stirring, inscribed in white ink, an invisible design covered over in the
palimpsest" (213).
Communications Department
Robert Morris College
Notes
The metanarrative has been declared "incredulous" or even "dead" by
postmodern thinkers Jean Buadrillard and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Against the claims
of Lyotard and Baudrillard that the metanarrative is incredulous to postmodern sensi-
bility, Kenneth Burke, Hans Blumenberg, Samuel Huntington, Alisdair McIntyre and
Martin Marty all argue that the metanarrative is very much alive. These writers outline
psychological, sociological, and political reasons for recognizing the importance of
the big stories (religious and secular), if for no better reason than to be equipped to
critique them. If believing one (or more) of the big stories requires a leap of faith that
few postmodern thinkers can make, nevertheless both secular and religious institu-
tions often justify their existence and their missions by appealing to overarching sto-
ries and histories. For the problem of myth in biblical studies see Thomas Fawcett's

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historical overview in Chapter One of Hebrew Myth and Christian Gospel and the
extended discussion below on Bultmann's demythologizing program for the New Tes-
tament.
2 Donald Phillip Verene presents DesCartes as the modem Prometheus "who
supplies fire in the form of method" (Return 2). As the "first man of modernity,"
DesCartes' simplistic method, his notion of clear and distinct ideas and his "gift" of
the isolated self through the cogito, in one fell swoop, changed the ground rules for
philosophy (15-34). Most importantly, Verene argues, is the loss of cultural memory
that DesCartes' method requires and the substitution of ars critica for the ancient ars
topica: "Memory is at the heart of culture, for in memory are the myths, fables, the
tales that hold the conscience of the race together. Culture is in this sense a complete
speech, done both in words and in actions on the nature of the human" (35).
3 Karl Jaspers, in Myth and Religion, suggests that it is finally impossible to
demythologize; in the end one myth is simply interpreted by another. In this case the
traditional Christian myth is interpreted by Heidegger's existentialism (144).
'Among contemporary rhetoricians, Kenneth Burke has brought attention
to the importance of narration through his foundational notion of dramatism, which
taken together with the pentad (act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose), can be under-
stood as an attempt at a comprehensive and dynamic rhetoric or poetic. Burke, in fact,
could be understood as seeking a restoration of narration to its proper place in a full-
orbed theory of rhetoric. In a Grammar of Motives Burke suggests, "Ideas possess
properties derived both from the agent and from the various factors with which the
agent is in relationship. Where the ideas are in action, we have drama; where the
agents are in ideation, we have dialectic" (511-12). In the Rhetoric of Religion Burke
notes that his work on logology is an "attempt to study the point at which narrative
forms and logical forms merge (or begin to diverge!), the exquisite point of differen-
tiation between purely temporal and purely logical principles" (3-4). More recently,
John O' Banion (1 992) has shown the dialectical tension between story and list in the
history of rhetoric, starting with a passage in The Institutes of Oratory, where Quintilian
argues that story (narratio) and the logical proofs (probatio) are, in fact, "two different
versions of the same case" (Preface xii). O' Banion extends and applies Burke's
insights about the importance of keeping logic and narration together as complemen-
tary ways of knowing, and traces the rise and fall of the dialectical tension between
narratio and probatio in the history of rhetoric, calling for a restoration of story to its
proper place in rhetorical theory and practice in order to undo the negative effects of
the extreme logocentrism so typical of western philosophy and rhetoric.
I In Giambattista Vico and the Cognitive Science Enterprise, Marcel Danesi
sketches out "Current Views of Vico" in the first chapter, beginning with Benedetto
Croce's La Filosopfia di Giambattista Vico, published in 1911, through the "discov-
ery"' of Vico in the English speaking world through the works of Thomas Bergin, Max
Fisch, Giorgi Tagliacozza and Donald Verene (17-23). Verene's Vico's Science of the
Imagination (1981) is the critical work that fully analyzed Vico's notion of "imagina-
tive universals": "Verene has made us aware that it is a universal tendency of the
human mind to transform the body's urges and responses to environmental stimuli into
imaginative universals" (20).
6 For this history see Burton Feldman and Robert Richardson's The Rise of
Modern Mythology: 1680 to 1860. Feldman and Richardson have collected a large

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GRANT/ON MYTH 73
number of important essays by philosophers, historians, and other literati of the pe-
riod, some previously unavailable in English. Bultmann's Enlightenment view of lan-
guage can be traced back through D.F. Strauss, J.G. Eichorn to Bernard Fontenelle, all
of whose works are represented in Feldman's and Richardson's collection. See also
Roger A. Johnson's The Origins of Demythologizing, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1974, 127-68,
for an excellent discussion of "The Enlightenment View of Myth."
7 In "The Problem of the Historical Jesus," Joachim Jeremias describes the
"Old Quest" (1835-1900), the "No Quest" (Bultmann and the History of Religions
school, 1900-1948) and the "New Quest" (1953 to the present day) for the historical
Jesus. Luke Timothy Johnson, in The Real Jesus, points out that the "Jesus Seminar,"
founded in 1985 by Robert Funk and culminating in the publication of The Five Gos-
pels in 1993, "likes to think of itself as the vanguard of the 'third quest"' (4). Johnson
reviews the work of the seminar as well as the "flood of publications devoted to the
historical Jesus since 1990" (29) and points out that though the methodology and find-
ings of the Tubingen school have been challenged and controverted for the last 100
years, nevertheless this approach is still embraced by the "guild" of New Testament
scholars (81-104). For a fuller discussion of the rise of the Tubingen school through
the works of D.F. Strauss, F.C. Baur, and later Bultmann, as well as the sustained
British reaction to this work by B.F. Westcott, J.B. Lightfoot and F.J.A. Hort, see Chap-
ters One and Two of Stephen Neill's The Interpretation of the New Testament.
x The two-source hypothesis and form criticism have been challenged on
two fronts. W.R. Farmer revived the "Griesbach Hypothesis' in 1964 with his publi-
cation of The Synoptic Problem. The Griesbach hypothesis argues that Matthew was
written first then Luke and finally Mark. Against Farmer, see The Revival of the
Griesbach Hypothesis (1983) by C.M. Tuckett. Birger Gerhardsson and Harald
Riesenfeld of the "Scandinavian School" have argued for an oral tradition about Jesus
back of the four gospels, an oral tradition based on the "rigidly controlled transmission
of matter" practiced by Jewish Rabbis as they taught their students. (Riesenfeld, "Lim-
its" 17). This approach cuts through the form critical sitz in leben Kirche in a direct
path to the sitz im leben Jesu and validates, albeit tenuously, the historical reliability of
the gospels. See, especially, Gerhardsson's Memory and Manuscript (1 961), The Ori-
gins of the Gospel Traditions (1979) and Reisenfeld's "The Gospel Tradition and Its
Beginnings" (1957). For negative reviews of this approach, see Joseph Fitzmeyer's
"Memory and Manuscript: The Origins and Transmission of the Gospel Tradition" and
Morton Smith's "A Comparision of Early Christian and Early Rabbinic Tradition"
(1963). For a positive endorsement of this approach, see W.D. Davies "Reflections on
a Scandinavian Approach to the Gospel Tradition" (1964) and Albert Lord's "The
Gospels as Oral Traditional Literature" (1978). More recently Werner Kelber, in The
Oral and Written Gospel, has challenged, on one hand, Bultmann's failure to address
the shift from oral to literate modes in the production of the gospel of Mark (2-7) and
on the other, Gerhardsson's adoption of the rigidly controlled oral transmission of
Midrash by post-70 B.C.E. Rabbis to their disciples to explain the transmission of
gospel stories and sayings (9-15). Kelber relies on the works of Albert Lord, Walter
Ong, Jack Goody, Earl Havelock and other theorists of orality to posit that "the cir-
cumstances of performance, the composition, and the transmission of oral versus writ-
ten materials are sufficiently distinct so as to postulate separate hermeneutics" (14).
Kelber analyzes the Markan "heroic stories," "polarization stories," "didactic stories,"

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and "parabolic stories" and concludes that these stories exhibit the formulaic charac-
teristics of oral stories "linked together by stereotypical [oral] connective devices"
(44-65). In spite of the oral features of individual units of the tradition, nevertheless,
back of the written gospel of Mark, according to Kelber, and against Herder, there is
no oral gospel. Mark as a whole must be viewed as bearing "the brunt of a transition
from the oral to the written medium" and "is profoundly marked by a rebellion against
orality and its authoritative carriers" (105).
9Throughout this paper I will cite the paragraph numbers given by Fisch
and Bergin in their edition of the New Science.
'0 G.B. Caird, in New Testament Theology notes, "In 1926 Bultmann wrote:
'Critical investigation shows that the whole tradition about Jesus which appears in the
three Synoptic gospels is composed of a series of layers which can on the whole be
clearly distinguished.' Having stripped off the Hellenistic layer, which owes its origin
to the Gentile communities in which the gospels were actually written, we are left with
Palestinian material, where again 'different layers can be distinguished, in which what-
ever betrays the specific interests of the church . . . must be rejected as secondary"'
(348).
1' For a discussion of Vico's philosophy of history in terms of the three ages,
the verum-factum principle and the verum certum principle see Verene, Imagination
62-64.
12 Vico attempts to reconstruct a history and chronology of the western world's
major "events" based primarily. I believe, on his reconstruction of the "True Homer."
How he arrives at his chronology is not developed in the New Science, but I include
below Vico's chronology taken from the "Chronological Table" situated at the front of
Book I of the New Science and based on the current nomenclature utilized in historical
studies. Reckoning backward from Vico's date of 3660 (age of the world) as the year
of Alexander's conquest of Persia, which would be 330 B.C.E., one arrives at the
following dates for important historical events: The Flood-2334 B.C.E.; the gi-
ants-2134; the "gods-I 542; the beginning of the Greek "Heroic Age" and the
Heraclids-l 308; the "theological poets" (first age of heroic poets)-l 220; the Tro-
jan War (second age of heroic poets)-l 170; Homer (third age of heroic poets-
"vulgar letters not yet invented")-700; Aesop, Herodotus, and Hippocrates-656;
Seven Sages-584; Pisistratids-499; and Socrates-437 B.C.E. Thus the Greek
Heroic Age begins around 1308 and the first age ends around 1220 B.C.E. with the
"theological poets." The second age begins with the Trojan War (1170 B.C.E.) and
ends some time before Homer. The third age includes Homer and ends some time
before or after 700 B.C.E., the date assigned to Homer.
13 According to Vico every nation goes through a cycle (or cycles) of three
ages: "(1) The age of the gods, in which the gentiles believed they lived under divine
governments, and everything was commanded them by auspices and oracles, which
are the oldest institutions in profane history. (2) The age of the heroes, in which they
reigned everywhere in aristocratic commonwealths, on account of a certain superiority
of nature which they held themselves to have over the plebs. (3) The age of men, in
which all men recognized themselves as equal in human nature, and therefore there
were established first the popular commonwealths and then the monarchies, both of
which are forms of human government" (32).
14 Sandra Luft thinks that Vico is, in fact, more "radical" than Derrida in his

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GRANT/ON MYTH 75
speculations about the originary power of language. Luft presents Vico as more of the
"Jew/Poet" than Derrida in that Vico's first poets' metaphoric leap of naming Jove is
materially (ontologically) and not epistemologically grounded, as Derrida's view is.
Luft rightly observes that the Hebrew dabhar (word) is very different than the Greek
logos (word): "It was not the identification of word and idea, but word, thing and
deed" (74-75). Vico's theological poets truly "made" their worlds and believed their
makings to be true. According to Luft, Vico would also agree with Derrida on the power
of metaphor but would disagree on the "infinite equivocality" of the signifier (78).
'5 For a lively, popular account of the debate over demythologizing in Ger-
many see Der Spiegel: On the New Testament by Werner Harenberg, which contains a
series of articles Harenberg, a religion news writer, published in 1966 in The Mirror, a
German news magazine, about "what the 'biblical criticism' of modem theology means
for the 'confession of faith"' (ix).
16 See Luke Timothy Johnson's The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for
the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels, especially Chapters One
and Two, for an update on the quest for the historical Jesus.
17 A relatively complete bibliography covering the period through 1964 can
be found in Gunther Bomkamm's "Die theologie Rudolf Bultmann in der neuren
Diskussion," ThR, XXIX, (1963-64), 33-141.
18 The distinction between historie and geschichte goes back to Martin
Kahler's Der sogenannte Jesus und der geschichtliche, biblische Christus (1892).
"Kahler distinguishes, on the one hand, between 'Jesus' and 'Christ,' and, on the other
hand, between historisch ('historical') and geschichtlich (historic). 'Jesus' denoted
for KAhler the man of Nazareth, as the lives of Jesus had described and were describ-
ing him, while 'Christ' denoted the Savior proclaimed by the church. The term historisch
meant for him the bare facts of the past, while geschichtlich meant that which pos-
sesses abiding significance. That is, he placed over against one another the so-called
'historical Jesus,' as the writers of the lives of Jesus had sought to reconstruct him, and
the 'historic, bibilical Christ,' as the apostles had proclaimed him" (Jeremias 6).
'9 Research on literacy has moved beyond understanding literacy as the simple
ability to read and write to exploring the cognitive dimensions of the "shift" from
orality to literacy when a culture learns writing (Ong, Orality; Havelock, Muse; Goody,
Interface), to analyzing the differences between speaking and writing and how this
might affect writing pedagogy (Stotsky Comparison). The most recent studies, how-
ever, critique both the "great leap" (cognitive shift) and the "great escape" (the lone
writer) views of literacy (and writing) by arguing for literacy as a socially situated
cognitive phenomenon (Brandt, Involvement; Bizzell "Professing"; and Flower, Con-
struction).
Though Ong distinguishes between speaking and writing throughout Oral-
ity and Literacy, he nevertheless presents the two linguistic activities as invariably
intertwined and interrelated. Separating "primary oral," "literate," and "secondary
oral" cultures, Ong argues for a revolutionary psychological, epistemological, and so-
ciological restructuring of a culture when literacy becomes pervasive-what has come
to be known as the "great leap" model of literacy (Oralitv 31-115). This model "claims
that literacy brings about radical changes in the cognition of individuals and thus cul-
tural practices" (Daniell 79).
The works of Havelock, Goody and Ong in the 1 980s began to explore the

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relationship of the written to the spoken word, and the debate about that relationship
continues to this day. Moreover, as Mike Rose points out, there are "weak" and "strong"
versions of the cognitive leap model, and Ong, Goody, and Havelock tend to be more
careful in the claims they make for the leap into literacy, relying on "verbs like 'facili-
tate,' 'favor,' 'enable,' [and] 'extend"' to describe the shift from orality to literacy-
"the potential of human cognition is extended more than transformed" ("Narrowing
the Mind" 286).
Rosalind Horowitz and S. Jay Samuels have put together a comprehensive
analysis of research on the relationship between oral and written language through
1986. The empirical research up to this date, based on a plethora of language-in-use
experiments and observations, supported Ong's, Goody's and Havelock's contention
that there is a cognitive shift that occurs when a culture becomes literate or a child
learns to read and write, but that the "dichotomy between oral and written language
begs for research." The various studies included in Comprehending Oral and Written
Language attempt to demonstrate that "[o]ral and written language do not constitute
unitary structures. Rather there is much variation and overlap. Oral and written lan-
,guage forms depend upon the purposes for which they are used and the listener and
reader audience that they will serve" (8).
The cognitive view of literacy has been challenged and enriched by scholars
from a number of disciplines who have explored the social dimensions of literacy.
Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole studied the literacy situation of the Vai people in
northwestern Liberia, and conclude that the cognitive skills Westerners usually associ-
ate with literacy are not learned from literacy but from western styles of education
(1 981 "Unpackaging"). Harvey Graff critiques what he calls the "literacy myth," that
is, the sole emphasis on cognitive changes caused by literacy and argues that we can-
not ignore the social and cultural contexts of literacy (1982 "Legacies"). Shirley Brice
Heath, also in 1982, studied the social consequences of the uses of literacy for people
in Trackton, a working class, all-Black community in the Carolinas and concludes that
one cannot generalize about societal changes brought about by the advent of literacy.
Brice Heath cites two social historians about the universal potentialities of literacy:
people can be rational and make wise decisions without being literate, and literate
people are no wiser and no more in control of their worlds than illiterate people (368-
70).
Brian Street takes the social approach to literacy also, and defines literacy as
a "shorthand for the social practices of reading and writing" (I ). He believes that ideas
about reading and writing for a particular society depend upon context. He suggests
an "ideological model" for literacy as opposed to the "autonomous model" of Goody
and Ong, which attaches literacy to universal advances in cognition, freedom, and
social mobility (19-95). Deborah Tannen was the first to argue that rather than view
orality and literacy as a dichotomy, with oral cultures at one end and literate cultures at
the other, literacy and orality ought to be viewed along a continuum. While making
this claim she also points out that earlier researchers including Havelock, Goody and
Ong, already noted that literacy does not replace orality, rather the two coexist in any
culture and any individual. The introduction of literacy causes the two to be inter-
twined and superimposed on one another ("Oral/Literate" 1982).
More recently, Deborah Brandt (1990) and Linda Flower (1994) have at-
tempted to synthesize the cognitive and social dimensions of literacy. Brandt argues

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GRANT/ON MYTH 77
for a process, dialogical view of literacy and exposes the deficiency of "strong text,"
"great leap," and "great escape" versions of literacy. She advocates a view of literacy
that is strongly contextual and dialogical: "If literacy is sustained in talk and in re-
peated occasions of collective practice, then we have to see that its roots are local and
that it is embodied in contemporary relationships to family, neighbors, teachers and
friends" (1 17). Flower (I 994), argues for a "social cognitive" view of writing, which,
for her, signals a shift to discussing the 'practice of literacy" (2). She describes "liter-
ate action" as "a socially situated problem-solving process shaped not only by avail-
able language, practices, partners, and texts, but by the way people interpret the rhe-
torical situation they find themselves in, the goals they set, and the strategies they
control" (2).
The orality/literacy literature thus explores both the cognitive and social
dimensions of literacy and continues to support Ong's, Goody's and Havelock's con-
tention that there is a social and cognitive shift that occurs when a culture becomes
literate or a child learns to read and write. This research, in turn, supports Kelber's
analysis of the units of Mark's gospel as oral, but the gospel itself as a textual pro-
duction, "a transmutation more than mere transmission" (91) and a "subversion of
the homeostatic balance of the oral, social life world" (92). Moreover, an analysis of
Mark as bridging the gap between orality and literacy begins to explain the synoptic
problem, that is, the remarkable similarities and differences in the individual units of
the triple tradition. Kelber points out that the course of transmission of the units of
oral tradition exhibit "an insistent, conservative urge for preservation of essential in-
formation, while it borders on carelessness in its predisposition to abandon features
that are not met with social approval" (29-30). Kelber likens Mark's writing of the
first gospel to Havelock's analysis of Plato's polemic against poetry in the Republic,
which was actually "directed toward the normative, oral apparatus of Greek educa-
tion" (96). Mark's picture of Jesus as a failed Messiah and the disciples as failures at
inimesis is parallel to Plato's critique of Greek education as mimesis, and by implica-
tion, the oral model of education is critiqued as well. Kelber suggests that Mark, in
similar fashion, attacks the (oral) charismatic prophets who misrepresented Jesus (Mk.
13) and their orality as well. In effect, the oral prophets are defeated by a written text:
"Because the Markan narrative bears the brunt of a transition from the oral to the
written medium, it is profoundly marked by a rebellion against orality and its authori-
tative carriers" (109).
20 Karl Jasper's, in "Myth and Religion," objects to Bultmann's program,
arguing that "[mlythical thinking is not a thing of the past, but characterizes man in
any epoch" (15). As noted above, the Two Source Hypothesis and form criticism have
been challenged by the "Scandinavian School" which argues for an accurately trans-
mitted oral gospel back of the extant gospels that allow us to hear the ippsissiina vox
though not the ipsissima verba of Jesus and by the resurgence of interest in the Griesbach
Hypothesis. Though many New Testament scholars are less skeptical about the histori-
cal Jesus and less inclined to engage in full blown demythologizing, nevertheless form
criticism and demythologizing remain fundamental tenets of New Testament scholar-
ship. See, e.g., Werner George Kummel's discussion of the synoptic problem and
Markan priority in his Introduction to the New Testament, 35-150. See also G.B. Caird's
New Testament Theology. I am suggesting that a much more fruitful approach to the

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gospels is Vico's understanding of myth and

sition from an oral to written medium.
21 "Metaphor" is also a metaphor, comprised of meta (Gk: across or over)
and phor (Gk: carry or transport). One carries the meaning(s) of a signifier across to
another signifier. A friend of mine tells me there is a truck company in Greece called
"Metaphor." They transport goods across the country.
22 For a recent argument that "metaphors serve as the basis for inventing
narratives," see Richard D. Johnson Sheehan's "Metaphor as Hermeneutic."
23 The metanarrative (or myth) may be a thorny problem for post-modern-
ists, but it is very much alive. University of Chicago historian Martin Marty, for ex-
ample, presents the big stories as alive and well, and in fact growing, at least in terms
of the numbers who embrace them around the globe. The four volumes of his Funda-
mentalismns Project, the most recent of which was published in 1994, attempt to de-
scribe and detail the rise and consolidation of modem fundamentalist movements among
the world religions since the 1970s. Within these groups a great deal of mythification
occurs as the disparate groups encounter the "secular" world around them: "Funda-
mentalists set and maintain boundaries, identify and mythologize their enemies, seek
converts, and create and sustain an array of institutions in pursuit of a comprehensive
reconstruction of society" (2).
Along similar lines, Harvard professor of Political Science, Samuel P. Hun-
tington, in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, has argued
that a single, new world order based on democracy and capitalism, is not currently in
the making, rather eight ancient civilizations-Westem European, Japanese, Islamic,
Orthodox, Hindu, Sinic, African, and Latin American-steeped in clashing values,
beliefs, and myths-are remaking the world order since the collapse of the Soviet
Union. The rise of fundamentalisms around the world in the last two decades and the
possible regrouping of nations around ancient values, beliefs, and myths casts signifi-
cant doubt on Baudrillard's and Lyotard's claims that the metanarratives are no longer
credible to a postmodem sensibility, the same sensibility rooted in Bultmann's pro-
gram of demythologizing. Even if the metanarratives. the big stories, are now dead to
certain postmodern thinkers, nevertheless the majority of the world's population seems
inclined to participate in them, since these stories remind them and others of who they
are, provide direction for decision-making, benefit them psychologically, and connect
them with other people in the same or similar stories.
24 I am thinking especially of the myths of the three types of souls and the
Blessed Isles, which function as arche and telos for the Republic.
25 James Berlin has suggested that we need to understand the lasting appeal
of the metanarrative and he even suggests "the necessity for provisional, contingent
metanarratives in attempting to account for the past and present" (73). Since the po-
litically and economically privileged will continue to "sponsor histories from their
point of view" and frame "master narratives that authorize their continued power and
privilege," Berlin argues for an awareness of this rhetorical strategy as well as a will-
ingness to construct provisional and contingent metanarratives to function as "com-
plex cognitive maps" to guide thought and action (73-75).

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GRANT/ON MYTH 79
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Vico and Bultmann On Myth The Problem With Demythologizing

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