If that’s not one of the truest things that was ever written on T&S, I dunno what is.

Like attracts like. We are a church of romance and Mystery, though and through, from the restoration of the priesthood, to the blessings of ordinaces–in the temple and without, to ongoing revelation, to brotherhood, sisterhood, Heavenly Parents, and eternal progression.

I have often lamented the lack of celebration that this aspect of our faith endures. It is there. The beauty is evident, when noticed. We just keep it out of the spotlight. Burn me at the stake, but I cannot help but delight in the Mysteries, the romance, and the beauty of it all.

Latter-day Saints are such different creatures than the rest of the world; but those differences are fundamental to our window on the world, and thus, easily overlooked. The average LDS’s world/religious/spiritual view is more romantic, frankly than most anyone even in the so-called ‘pagan’ community with their multiple gods, calculated mythologies, and colorful ‘worship’ that half the time is indistinguishable from an SCA event.

“One could easily say that it is only through narratives that we can see the commonality of experience and how to obtain it. Narratives relate personal experiences in a fashion that propositional models don’t.”

Right, I agree; isn’t this what I’m saying? Narratives make experiences common; they can make truths experiential, and thus transitory and relational; they embed them in layer upon layer of stories, which gives us a sense of a meaningful world that we move through even though untangling the propositional, individual, “just the facts” truth of all those stories would be impossible. Maybe I’m missing something, but I’m not sure how you disagree with me (about the importance of the romantic sense, at least; the more specific question of the place of the romantic in Mormonism is something else).

“[W]hat I think C.S. Lewis was getting at by talking about the ‘true myth’ is that in Christ they can and do coexist. That’s why I think the contrast between myth and satisfied longings that you set up is also wrong. True myths are those that can actually satisfy Romantic longings.”

It’s quite possible I’m mixing a couple of unrelated concepts here. But let me try again. C.S. Lewis came to faith because he came to understand that the story of God was sublime; it was joyous and beautiful, and that’s what he thought we are all looking for, whether we realize it or not. But we do not, for the most part, use a language or categories of wonder and enchantment in describing our faith in God; instead, we tend to speak of “power” and “knowledge.” Perhaps this is just a trivial terminological difference, but I’m not certain. I think Lewis’s “true myths” are, of course, “true” in the sense that one can express them in propositional form: God came to earth and died for our sins. But they also remain myths–stories that, while it is accepted that God really did come down and die for our sins, about which it is far more important to appreciate the telling of the story, our reception of it as part of a narrative that moves us because we’re part of it. The magic that Lewis thought was dwelling, hidden, always present but always out of reach, in the world could be glimpsed through English literature and fairy tales and folklore; so thus did Christ similarly make His story known through similar stories, of saints and great heroes and Christian history. The power of narrative is subjective, embedded, unquantifiable; hence that which is known through stories is only incidentally known as a recitation of facts.

But it may be that I’m reading much to much hermeneutic philosophy into Lewis. Maybe this all just comes down to the simple fact that Americans aren’t very romantic in this sense. I mean, romanticism came here by way of Europe, not the other way around; they’re the ones with the haunted castles and mysterious old standing stones and 700-year-old literary traditions and everything else, not us. We have some pretty sublime landscapes, but not much by way of myths. So perhaps all this is just a rather Tory-esque way of asking the question, Is Mormonism American (or, more specifically, Why Isn’t Mormonism English)? And the answer to that is, of course, obvious.

That seems a false opposition to me. One could easily say that it is only through narratives that we can see the commonality of experience and how to obtain it. Narratives relate personal experiences in a fashion that propositional models don’t. Myths work because they demonstrate a structural truth in a fashion that is living even if elements are false. That is, it is a presentation in terms of a kind of experiencing.

That would actually be much more in keeping with the pragmatists as well who emphasized lived experience as the basis for knowledge rather than dry theory. (Although clearly they engage in a lot of theorizing as well)

John: I do think that Latter-day Saints are “romantic� in this sense, far more so than other “Americanized� (as you put it) Christian denominations. Zion, or the theory of it, pervades our entire religious perspective (or should), and what is more romantic, as you have noted, than the ideal of a Zion society?

To be fair, I don’t think that is true in the least. I think many Evangelicals, for instance, share that holistic perspective on religion. Indeed I suspect that’s a big reason why religion flourishes in the United States and not Europe. In Europe religion became focused primarily on the god of the philosophers. The Lewis article in the New Yorker touches upon this as well. In the United States, religion never stopped being a living religion. It prevented the “death of God” that the madman of Nietzsche warned of. Europeans killed God while Americans saved him, in a fashion. (Although clearly not just Americans – living Christianity flourishes outside of Europe)

Eric: Now I think its generally right that romance and poetry can’t coexist with knowledge and truth very well.

That rather depends upon the poet, doesn’t it. Thinking back to Plato, there are two kinds of poets. The one, whom Plato focuses in on, who is focused on representations of representations. They don’t have the truth. Then there is the poet – the mantic that Nibley talks about with respect to Plato – that brings people to the experience of truth.

I disagree that:

‘the longing reflected in fantasy stories–the world of fairie and myth so important to Lewis–is fundamentally about escape, whereas faith is about discipline and an acceptance of some particular view of “reality.â€?’

SciFi & Fantasy aren’t about escape; unless it is escape into a fantastic world where the individual will have a more central role in life, and concomittantly, more responsibility.

For a wise and glorious purpose
Thou hast placed me here on earth
And withheld the recollection
Of my former friends and birth;
Yet oft times a secret something
Whispered, “You’re a stranger here,”
And I felt that I had wandered
From a more exalted sphere.