‘The Prism of Truth’: The Truth of Myth
A review of ‘The Prism of Truth’, by Anthony O’Hear; Cascade Books, 2023.
When you see a title like The Prism of Truth, you can almost hear the echo of a chapel bell, or see an old Cambridge don holding court in a library. It is a title that suggests light, precision, something lightly refracted. It also sounds faintly like a fantasy novel. But no matter. Anthony O’Hear, a philosopher, former editor of the magazine Philosophy and co-founder of the Journal of Applied Philosophy (not someone who merely dabbles, then), has written a book that means to do something bold, serious and deliciously counter-cultural.
What he wants to do is defend a kind of truth that cannot be measured in T.S. Eliot’s coffee spoons nor in peer-reviewed journals. It is the kind of truth that refuses to sit still for neat and tidy analysis. Myth, he says — yes, that thing we have all been taught to brush off as charming but pre-scientific nonsense — is not just an ancient form of storytelling. It is a way of seeing: a mental tool, if you like. It is a way of pointing at the unsayable and saying, Look — there it is. There is no use in my telling you that a landscape is beautiful: I have to take you to see it. And though O’Hear is not at all prone to drama, there is a quiet tenacity, like a thread of silk, that runs through this book. We have the sense that O’Hear is trying to rescue myth from the attic, blow off the dust, and hold it up to the light. See, he seems to say? Still luminous.
What he wants to do is defend a kind of truth that cannot be measured in T.S. Eliot’s coffee spoons nor in peer-reviewed journals.
But let’s get into it. Anthony begins in 1931 with that well-trodden Oxford path, Addison’s Walk. C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Hugo Dyson are out for a stroll, talking about death and gods and whether Christ might be one of those too-good-to-be-true stories that somehow is true. As one does. Lewis was sceptical; but Tolkien noted that Lewis revered the myths of Balder, Adonis, and Bacchus — figures who, like Christ, died and rose again. He thought these stories were rich, beautiful, and charged with meaning. So why, asked Tolkien, could Lewis not take the story of the Resurrection seriously? This question led fairly quickly to the conversion of Lewis, who realised that he had been over-intellectualising the central Christian myth. He later said that myths were ‘profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp’ even when those meanings could not be put into ‘cold prose.’ O’Hear argues that this is the key: myths reveal truths that resist literal articulation.
What truths are these, we wonder? Well, those unavailable to us by means of science and reason. O’Hear dismantles the idea that only the measurable is real: scientism, as he calls it—the worldview that says that the only way to render truth about the world is through the scientific method—cannot justify itself by the methods of science. Science rests on unprovable assumptions. More still: the scientific image, which concerns objective, measurable phenomena, has nothing to say about love, blame, freedom, resentment, praise. These qualities are in the realm of what Wilfrid Sellars calls the manifest image, which deals with the world as we experience it. Most analytic philosophers treat the scientific image as primary; but O’Hear argues the opposite. For the manifest image is fundamental, he says. It is where our most important concepts reside. And if it were not for the meanings, values and intentions that inhabit this manifest image, we would never have bothered developing science in the first place.
Most analytic philosophers treat the scientific image as primary; but O’Hear argues the opposite. For the manifest image is fundamental, he says. It is where our most important concepts reside.
It is a point worth making. Tarski’s ‘correspondence theory’ of truth — snow is white is true if snow is, in fact, white — works beautifully for snow. It is less well-suited for promises, say, or poetry. Or faith. Even the early Wittgenstein, whose Tractatus is a masterwork of cool logic, acknowledged this, saying that those things that could only be shown and not spoken of (‘whereof one cannot speak’) were the most important things. So O’Hear isn’t taking shots at science: he just wants us to see that there are different registers of truth. ‘He is a true friend’ means something quite different from ‘the temperature is twelve degrees.’ Both matter, and one cannot replace the other.
I was a bit surprised at this point to see Jordan Peterson, of ‘clean up your damn room!’ fame, pop up. But O’Hear is less interested in his political views and more in his earlier work on meaning. The two agree that some truths are not about facts or logic, but about how we live: that truths show up in loyalty, courage, and action. And from here, the book shifts into a more lyrical mode. O’Hear talks about myth as something like poetry: something that uses narrative to show what cannot be argued or explained. He talks of St. John on Patmos, whose image graces the cover and who is traditionally seen as the author of the Book of Revelation. O’Hear views his experience, sitting on a rock and receiving divine inspiration, as a moment of truth breaking into human time. The point is not to do with historical accuracy; it is not about whether the skies opened. He suggests that revelation is a kind of spontaneous disclosure of knowledge that may be true or partially true.
Myth, then, is like analogy: pointing, rather than saying. This puts me in mind of what Zen, which claims not to be the moon, but to be a finger pointing at the moon. Through zazen and other Zen practices, we experience the moon. But the moon, that is, ultimate reality, can only be experienced. O’Hear turns to Aquinas, who, you will remember, was rather clever about analogy. When we say ‘God is good,’ we are not talking about measurable goodness, he says. We are speaking across a chasm, using language as a kind of rope bridge. What is ‘good’ in respect of us mere mortals is not the same as what is ‘good’ when we talk about God. Well, fine. But O’Hear wants more. He suggests myths are even better than analogies for getting across what cannot be pinned down.
Myth, then, is like analogy: pointing, rather than saying. This puts me in my mind of what Zen, which claims not to be the moon, but to point at the moon.
The question arises here whether the kind of knowledge conveyed by myth is always, in a sense, true and, if so, how Christianity can coexist with, say, Hinduism, or Islam. O’Hear is not a relativist. He proposes a kind of revelatory pluralism. Not all myths are equally true, but all might be true up to a point, he says. That is to say that the truths revealed by myths are partial; and since no myth can capture the whole, we might do well to listen to several, side by side, as though at a dinner party with guests from every tradition. I don’t know about you, reader, but I think this is a lovely idea, because it is quite radical, if in a gentle, humble sort of way. He invokes Lewis and Wittgenstein and Aquinas, but also Islamic philosophers, and there is a meaningful if brief interfaith dialogue.
The final chapter is his most unbuttoned. Here he brings in Marcilio Ficino, a soulful Renaissance Neoplatonist who believed in joy over doctrine and love over logic. Ficino thought myths were better at reconciling opposites than any syllogism. O’Hear rather swoons for him, and we cannot really blame him. Ficino saw the divine not as a visitor from elsewhere but as something already present in the world. For him, the incarnation was not an exception to the rule but a brilliant example of a larger truth: the sacred is always here, making itself known. We just have to be open to it.
Ficino thought myths were better at reconciling opposites than any syllogism.
Really, O’Hear writes here almost like a man in love. He uses the phrase ‘vessels of noetic light’ — which is just barely tolerable, but we forgive him. This is the most poetic section of the book. He seems sincerely to be trying to share something he finds beautiful. He warns us that myth, as the Greeks knew, as Tolkien knew, is not superstition. It is a form of attention: a way of looking at the world with reverence, of hearing its music and allowing its majesty to wash over us.
Now, there are flaws. The book meanders (but if you wanted bullet points, you are probably not much interested in myth). O’Hear could have plunged more deeply into non-Western waters (what about the stories etched into Mayan temples, or the tales of Chuang Tzu?). But better he writes from a place of deep knowledge than ranges over unfamiliar terrain for the sake of pluralism. In the end, The Prism of Truth is not the luminous shard its title implies; but if it does not dazzle, it does glow, like candlelight on old stone. It may make you look again — at myth, at truth, at the grounds for your belief. And sometimes, that is enough.
