Myth Maker, Myth Maker, Make Me a Myth

Abstract

There are unique rhetorical employments of myths such as mythopoeia that are often overlooked in rhetorical scholarship. In this paper, I argue that C.S. Lewis employed mythopoiesis as he spoke one of the greatest sermonic works of the twentieth century entitled The Weight of Glory. Kilby (1964) contends that mythopoeia through a Lewisonian lens encourages a greater understanding of existence through “picture-making” but, more significantly, issues a “deep call from that Reality” (p. 81). In other words, the employment of mythopoeia by a rhetor is, in a sense, a summons to enter into and experience the myth-world being constructed or, in the case of Lewis, the myth-world of Christianity. Although, collectively, the world experienced one of its greatest travesties during the Second World War, it was at this very exigence that Lewis’s rhetoric provided a summons to experience the world anew through religious communication. Therefore, this essay will examine C. S. Lewis’s sermon The Weight of Glory at Oxford University in 1941 and his employment of mythopoiesis to persuade students to believe in the Christian mythos and thus long for a “far-off country,” thereby giving hope at a desperate moment during the war.