Randy Hoyt has written at length on two types of thinking: mythos and logos. This is a fascinating subject for me, and I’ve begun exploring it recently, most notably in this post at The Rabbit Room and to a lesser extent in this post here.
Randy concludes that mythos and logos are complementary ways of thinking, and I agree. I’m inclined, with Clyde Kilby, to give mythos the priority:
Myth is necessary because reality is so much larger than rationality. Not that myth is irrational, but that it easily accommodates the rational while rising above it.
Randy doesn’t give one priority over the other in his article, and rightly notes that “an equal amount of damage has been done on account of both mythos and logos.” He does, on the other hand, illustrate my proposed hierarchy here:
Logical thinkers have figured out, for example, how to cure illnesses and prolong the average human lifespan, but they have learned through mythical thinking to value human life enough to bother.
To me, the “value of human life” is the spiritual truth underlying the pursuit of the scientific “fact” of the cure. In other words, I’m more inclined to say that mythos pertains to spiritual, rather than “subjective,” truth, while logos pertains to rational, moral, and scientific thought built upon the necessary foundation of spiritual knowledge. The value of human life is the “more permanent thing.” If we’re thinking about iconological literary criticism, the anagogical is the foundation for the allegorical, moral, and surface levels.
I think those who embrace mythic thinking, of whatever persuasion, at a very root level of their existence do so in the same way that C.S. Lewis described his belief in Christianity:
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
So I’d want to frame the discussion, or at least express my view in the matter, this way: pre-modernity (an age of mythos) needed to precede modernity (an age of rationality), and (now agreeing with Randy) the modern age of rationality has, quite unfortunately, abandoned mythic thinking.
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St. Maximus the Confessor wrote about this distinction in his exegesis of the Divine Liturgy (The Mystagogy of the Church) as the relation of nous and logos. If I understand it correctly (very much in doubt), the two stand in relation to one another as cardiac and cranial intelligence, the latter being a shade and extension of the latter as the Energies of God are aspects of God’s Essence, specifically the infinite nature of the shared substance of the three Hypostases.
All of that only to say that I think Travis is right — and that one of the enlightened Fathers of the Church, who escaped the Cave and lives in God’s Glory, says something resonant with his take on this distinction.