Destruction of Leviathan. 1865 engraving by Gustave Doré

“Mythology and folklore . . . are filled with symbols and fables expressing the deeply rooted resolve of Earth to find its way to Heaven; from which it follows that we may in a perfectly legitimate sense accept the fact that a generalized, implicit faith of humanity in humanity is older than all civilization, and that it is this, finally, which constitutes the basic impulse forming all our past history.” — Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man, pp. 186-87

“[T]he story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e., the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things’.” — C.S. Lewis