ARTICLE: "The Myth of the Civil War"

Tuesday, July 03, 2018

This is an excerpt from an excellent article on the mythic significance of the American Civil War from First Things:

In Lincoln’s vision we can see the great universal human themes and archetypes—birth, initiation, trial, death, and rebirth—interpreted in a way that is distinctly Christian (even Judeo-Christian, one might say, given the centrality in Jewish thought of the Exodus event and the cycles of collective chastisement-and-restoration). For a people whose mental habits are conditioned by the Bible, seeing these themes and conflicts enacted in the external world confirms our deepest intuitions and hopes about life and history: that the movement of human existence is toward freedom and equality; that there is judgment on sin (even  in history); that guilt can be purged through suffering, contrition, and repentance; that self-division can be overcome and reconciliation effected; that God wishes not the death, but rather the reformation, of sinners; that a newness of life in righteousness (despite continuing imperfections) is possible. Lincoln’s ability to evoke the “mystic chords of memory” has inspired the production of a vast secondary literature; in fact, more books and articles have been published in the English language on America’s sixteenth president than on any other person in the history of the world, with the two exceptions of Jesus Christ and William Shakespeare.

So tempting are the archetypal themes and patterns in the Civil War that few narratives on the subject—even if they consciously strive to purge themselves of all “myth,” “romance,” and “theology”—can avoid mythic language and constructions altogether. As Daniel Aaron, a scholar of American literature, has put it: “From its very beginning, the War seemed designed for literary treatment as if history itself had assiduously collaborated with the would-be writer. He had only to plagiarize from the plot of the authorial Providence who first blocked out the acts and scenes of its cautionary epic, to draw upon the coincidences, portents, climaxes, tragic heroes, and villains of the heavenly scenario.”

Read more here:  The Myth of the Civil War

P-B