Building the Microcosmos, Part 2: Mythos

We build the microcosmos to perceive Truth, so how is it built?

I want to tell you a story about my father.

When I was about 23 or 24, I had moved an hour away from home and was finally living on my own, with a bachelor’s degree and an apartment and everything. I was getting by, but it wasn’t a fulfilling time in my life. I was still getting used to teaching, I didn’t really know if I wanted to keep doing it or what I should do next, and I was in a semi-long-distance relationship that wasn’t going well. These issues came to a head one week and I can’t remember if I texted my dad something to blow off steam, or if I mentioned them to my mom, but I was in a bad way at home one afternoon and suddenly there was a knock at the door, and I found my dad standing there.

Historically, this was a bad sign. All the worst mistakes I made growing up weren’t punctuated with spankings or a loss of privileges, but with A Serious Conversation, courtesy of my father, usually over something like ice cream. He always made sure to take the gravity of whatever I needed to hear away from my everyday environment, which was his way of putting me at ease while he delivered whatever rhetorical payload I needed to hear. To see him at my door unannounced made me feel like I was about to be taken to the local phosphate joint and freight-trained by some galling revelation about adulthood and maturity that I hadn’t the sense to see coming.

Instead, my dad just said that he was worried about me and figured a visit would be more productive than a phone call. We talked in my tiny den for about half an hour, general advice and reassurance going back and forth, until finally he said, “Alright, show me where you go for a beer around here. But let me use the bathroom first.”

I told him it was through my bedroom and on the left. I heard him walk into my bedroom as I gathered my wallet and keys, but after a few seconds I couldn’t hear the bathroom fan (a tiny apartment, I stress), and I poked my head into my bedroom to see my dad with his back turned to me. He was looking at my dresser, which was next to my icon corner. On top of my dresser was my Bible, a pocket sized ESV that I’d had since 8th grade. I saw him look down at it, and then take his finger and run it across the front cover. He drew it up to his face to get a closer look at all the dust he had gathered in just one swipe and my stomach, freshly laden with embarrassment, dropped through the floor. “Here we go,” I thought. “He’s going to be furious. This is where I get the ballistic talk.”

But that didn’t happen. He stood there for a moment, then wiped the dust off his finger, turned, and went to the bathroom. He didn’t notice me standing there, watching him. We went on our way for beers and he never mentioned it.

Now, what I’ve just done is given you a tiny part of the mythos of my father. I can’t really guess what that story means to you, an observer, reading it for the first time now, but to me it’s become one of the memories that’s on the Mount Rushmore of my dad. Without saying a word, it marked a titanic change in our relationship and his parenting style, and to this day, I don’t think I’ve ever told him that I saw what he did, or what it communicated to me. I didn’t need to, after all. He knew that eventually I would see my Bible with a giant streak through all of its accumulated un-use and put it all together. The fact that he hadn’t said anything would tell me everything he wanted me to hear.

That streak through my Bible, a simple, physical separation of dust and leather, has now taken on symbolic significance for me. It has entered my microcosmos as an attribute of my dad, of Scripture, of daily spiritual nourishment, of parenting, fatherhood, sonship, discipline, guidance, teaching, and a host of vast, plain, meaning. Within the branch of things concerning my father, that streak also relates to every other memory of him; how he disciplined me growing up, how he spoke to me, how he taught me, how I would have expected him to react in that moment before he surprised me, and so on.

To bring this in line with our current subject: the microcosmos- the union of material and spiritual reality that exists in us -is a network of connections, attributes, and relationships that constitute our knowledge and experience, and we use words, logoi, to designate said knowledge.

We started with Logos in the previous post, because The Logos- Christ, Truth, the Word -has bound himself in our minds with His name. He created the universe, and the universe proceeded, in all of its life, its death, its physics, its history, its beauty, its calamity, and its mundanity, because He set it in motion. Though there is so much we have yet to learn, what we have encountered so far, generally speaking, has received its own logos, its word, which was made possible by the Logos.

So, a logos is not just a term, or a definition, or a typographical designation for a thing, it is a symbol that represents something, and then connects that thing to all other symbolic connotations possessed by that thing, in our microcosmoses, from the very beginning of time until now.

Just… take a second. Please.

My head mentor in the Circe apprenticeship first described it to me like this: contemplate the word “wolf.” The word wolf is not just the letters w-o-l-f, labeling a particular carnivorous mammal in the canine family. No. Wolf is a logos, and that logos is tied to anything and everything that has ever been related to wolves and wolf-ness- whether we know it or not! -throughout time. It is a grey wolf, it is Little Red Riding Hood, it is Kevin Garnett, it is Jordan Belfort, it is all the symbolic attributes- greed, ferocity, loneliness, loyalty -that are personified by wolves in all the stories we have ever told. All of those things are contained in that word.

Of course, though every logos is full of symbolic meaning and connection, that knowledge cannot be known merely by learning the term. No, the meaning is given and conveyed through mythos, by placing the logos in a story, which grows, tree-like, expanding the logos into new branches of meaning and understanding. As Heidi White put it in the same talk mentioned here, “Myth is the tree.”

A child’s microcosmos is built from mythos. As I wrote in the last post, Classical Education looks to the past, principally, to lay the foundation of education, because within the mythos of the past are the earliest and most influential symbols that build the microcosmos. The Bible, Aesop’s Fables, fairy tales, pagan myths, ancient poetry- all of these things give us a primary understanding of how our material reality possesses symbolic meaning- the substance of its spiritual reality -that we share between each other. Further, all of this symbolic knowledge has one thing in common: it is shared through stories, it is bestowed in mythos.

A student who knows his or her Aesop has the symbolic knowledge and microcosmic connections that Aesop imparts, but there is often more to be shared. He knows that foxes are clever. She knows that lions are tyrants. Together, when they meet on the playground, as they get to know each other and become friends, their respective symbolic knowledge begins to fill in the gaps in their understanding, for perhaps the boy knows that lions may be tyrants, but they may also be righteous, and perhaps the girl knows that foxes are clever, but that cleverness often repays them in desperate irony.

Mythos is the means by which these connections are made. The stories we tell our students give way to the stories they read for themselves, then to the stories they share with each other, and each one imparts deeper, richer meaning to every logos they encounter. Over the course of their life, different logoi will transform for them in the tree of myth, in their microcosmos, expanding their understanding of logoi, the Logos, and the propriety that propounds Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, until something as simple as a streak of dust on a Bible can represent so much more than what it is, because ultimately, what it represents is what it actually is.

The process of sharing mythos and spreading symbolic knowledge, the mutual increase in understanding of logoi between our students, is the basis for forming human relationships, and this will bring us to our final topic in this series: Ethos.

May our Lord illuminate the righteous path He has laid before each of us and compel us to walk it dutifully and with joy.