On Tim Keller's Use of "Mythos"

Tim Keller, the Thinking Evangelical's Favourite, has written a book on marriage. And it has caused much a goodly stir in Christian circles. Moi, I haven't read the book, but I did read Keller's far shorter essay on marriage and singleness, on which, by all accounts, the book is based.

The essay is excellent, not the least for his situating Christian singles and marrieds within the wider community of the people of God, and in arguing for theological reasons for marriage. Tim Keller is also a big C.S. Lewis fan, and is responsible for introducing Lewis to a whole generation of young Christians of the 21st Century.

However, as each new generation reads 'the old books' with the preoccupations of the present age, so what Keller uses of Lewis is reflective of what 21st century Western Christians are concerned with. There is a simplification of Lewis' thought, and, to a certain extent, the reinvention of an idea, or at least a far narrow application of a Lewisean theme.

A comprehensive Attraction

Keller's book on marriage contains a beautiful exhortation to wisdom in choosing 'the one to love.' Keller argues for a 'comprehensive attraction' between prospective marriage partners, one that is not based on superficiality nor sexuality. Rather, he advocates a love and commitment for the other person that is based on character, as well as their 'mission in life.' Such attraction encompasses not only who the other person currently is (imperfect as he/she may be), but who they will become - their hopes, their longings. One must love who the other person is becoming, and be committed in helping to bring about this future self:

'Marriage partners can say, “I see what you are becoming and what you will be (even though, frankly, you aren’t there yet). The flashes of your future attract me.'

These are lovely, profound ideas, which challenge the lens through which we might look at prospective marriage partners. Keller asks us not to necessarily look for Mr. Perfect-Epitome-of-Christ-Right-Now, or Miss-Paragon-of-Godliness-Already-Perfected, but to find someone flawed, but one who is growing, and who is willing to change and be moulded throughout their life by grace.

Mythos Misapprehensions?

But then Keller narrows his definition, to suggest that comprehensive attraction should be directed towards someone who shares your longing for God:

Ultimately, your marriage partner should be part of what could be called your “mythos.” C.S. Lewis spoke of a “secret thread” that unites every person’s favourite books, music, places or pastimes. Certain things trigger an “inconsolable longing” that gets you in touch with the Joy that is God. Leonard Bernstein said that listening to Beethoven’s Fifth always made him sure (despite his intellectual agnosticism) that there was a God. Beethoven’s Fifth doesn’t do that for me. But everyone has something that moves them so that they long for heaven or the future kingdom of God (though many nonbelievers know it only as bittersweet longing for “something more”).

Sometimes you will meet a person who so shares the same mythos thread with you that he or she becomes part of the thread itself. This is very hard to describe, obviously.

This is the kind of comprehensive attraction you should be looking for in a future partner.

Again, this is thoughtful, sensitive and helpful advice (even if it narrows down my potential marriage partners to a possible 7 people in the world: 4 of them dead, 2 Octogenarians - one married, another still sexily single, and the final one probably yet to be born!) Keller is essentially arguing that we ought to look for someone who understands our Sehnsucht, our longing for something beyond this earth. All well and good, as far as it goes.

What makes me nervous, however, is that Keller inadvertently simplifies CS Lewis' argument regarding Sehnsucht/Longing. For readers of Keller who have not encountered Lewis, they might mistakenly understand Sehnsucht to be that quixotic mixture of deep joys and passions, which, if shared with you, will ear-mark someone as your 'soul mate' or 'kindred spirit.' It would also seem that Sehnsucht is located in the realm of romantic love, and is part of the mysterious magic of such. Sehnsucht then becomes subsumed within the search for the one who will understand and relate to such deep feelings within us, and who will, in Keller's words 'become part of the thread itself.'

I am not suggesting for the faintest moment that Keller is idolising Sehnsucht, and I would be the first to declare that a marriage founded on a weaved unity of 'secret threads' of joy must surely be beautiful and wonderful. But I cannot help but think that a cursory reading of Keller on this will lead to either a misunderstanding (and unhelpful idealisation) of 'Sehnsucht', or an over-zealous longing for romantic relationships that will recognise our Sehnsucht.

Mythos Realigned: Getting back to Our Source

For Lewis, Sehnsucht was never something to be found patterned in another human being. That is, while we might find some (or a great deal) of common longing in another, so that we might meet a person and exclaim: 'And so you like this too? But I thought I was the only one!', Sehnsucht essentially shows our aloneness, which longs for understanding, but which cannot be found fully in anything or anyone of this earth, but in God himself.

Keller quotes CS Lewis' use of 'secret thread' without elaborating the context in which Lewis makes his case (and really, how can he? Keller is after all writing a book on an entirely different theme - marriage!) The phrase comes from Lewis' The Problem of Pain, in which Lewis caps off his work on suffering with a moving chapter on the Longing for Heaven. This secret thread, while Lewis acknowledges others to possess, is uniquely our own. We rarely, argues Lewis, actually find many others who share the same pangs at the sight of beauty:

You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw -- but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of ...

But such should not discourage us, but merely show us our essential uniqueness. Your soul has been made unlike any one else's, and, is always, utterly and bereftly, incomplete, until it finds its refuge and fulfillment in its Maker:

Our soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance ... [Sehnsucht] ... if it should really become manifest - if there ever came an echo that did not die away, but swelled into the sound itself - you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say "Here at last is the thing I was made for." We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is ....

Sehnsucht is Augustine exclaiming in his Confessions:

"You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you."

But what about Relationships in the Here and Now? Friendships? Marriage, even?

Of course, Lewis is not saying that we can't find fellow humans who see a similar beauty, or joy, or longing in the things of this world that stir it up in us. Indeed, he spends a lengthy paragraph, in The Problem of Pain, and in Surprise by Joy, as well as a whole chapter in The Four Loves, detailing the joyous meeting of such friends.

But in the end, Lewis' conclusion is that it is because the love of friends and the love of marriages fail, that Sehnsucht is seen for what it really is. Such longing cannot be fulfilled in human relationships alone, and our 'connection' with one another is limited. Sehnsucht points to the exclusive relationship that we, the created ones, must share with our Creator. That is the very nature of Sehnsucht - a tantalising teaser, echoes heard in song, and promises hinted at in sunrises - glimpsed in our relationships perhaps - but pointing to fulfilment elsewhere.

Romantic Love, or the love between friends, of the deepest and intimate kind, will never be enough. They are honourable, glorious things, to rejoice in, and not dismissed (as if we're cold-blooded cardboard saints who are beyond human relationships). But it is only when they are put in their rightful place is a believer's life, as one of the lesser gods, that the True God enters. And by entering, enable us to enjoy these lesser loves, in the whatever form he has chosen for us - be it in marriage, or in singleness with rich friendships and in solitude.

Please don't hear me saying that looking to marry your 'secret thread' friend and lover is bad. But that is not the point of Sehnsucht in our lives.

The very purpose of Sehnsucht is to point to something outside the relationship. Looking for a secret thread partner, as if he or she is the one to fulfill your Sehnsucht, is foolhardy and oxymoronic. And though it might be wise for a life-long relationship to begin with an understanding of each other's Sehnsucht, there is no rule that says that a secret thread of Sehnsucht must be the basis of any relationship.

To misunderstand the power and reason for Sehnsucht in our lives is a pitiful waste of a gift of God. Perhaps this is the hardest of all for single people, as we live in a world where romantic love is touted to be the ultimate union and connection two people can have together. What are we singles to do with such longing that seems to point towards fulfillment in another of flesh and blood, but there is none?

This entry is already too long for me to mount an argument that single people reflect the humanity that is to come, and plagiarise Halden and Myers, who suggest, with delicious provocativeness, that 'if Christ is truly the fullness and definition of authentic humanity, we must say categorically that marriage, sex, and parenthood tell us nothing whatsoever of ultimate significance about humanness, since Jesus himself did not participate in any of these experiences.'

I can only acknowledge the unfulfilled longing of singles, and echo Walter Trobisch's challenge: "The task we have to face is the same, whether we are married or single: To live a fulfilled life in spite of many unfulfilled desires."

We live in a broken world. Not many things happen as we wish. But God is still sovereign, and our Father. What else is there to do, but to trust and obey; pleading for more faith and courage, each day? At the same time, we're allowed to rail and wail to God, and to question all we need. Just see some of the Psalms.

One must also understand that the secret thread can be found between friends, not merely lovers. The thread might come in singular, but the things that it ties together are plural. If we understand Lewis' argument regarding the individuality of each person correctly, one person will never fully share your Sehnsucht, but perhaps a number of dear friends (not excluding your spouse) might share in the varied experiences that bring you to joy.

In the final analysis, Lewis himself would have told you, that all longings (for marriage, for deep friendships, for understanding, for beauty, and for love), force us to go back to the Original Source, the love that is Christ's self-giving to us, and the glorious, 'big-picture' future that is already been secured for us:

But God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it -- made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand ... For it is not humanity in the abstract that is to be saved, but you - you, the individual reader, John Stubbs or Janet Smith. Blessed and fortunate creature, your eyes shall behold Him and not another's. All that you are, sins apart, is destined, if you will let God has His good way, to utter satisfaction.