By closely examining the agonistics of mythos pursued by Milbank in Theology and Social Theory, I aim to problematise the idea of inter-mythic relations as fundamentally a matter of conflict. I go on to suggest that Milbank’s appeal to taste, considered in light of Jean-Louis Chrétien’s phenomenology of prayer, can be better thought as a participation in the perichoresis of the Trinity and of the creature’s return to its creator. By privileging the dynamics of desire and erotics over that of agonistics, I attempt to orient mythopoiesis toward the desire for God. Finally, I consider the way that mythoi can challenge or critique one another from within one another, allowing a new understanding, a new encounter with meaning, to emerge from the making of a new narrative and a new practice. In this I seek to point toward how it is possible to discern the movement of the Spirit in and through human cultural production (including mythopoiesis) working to bring all things, including our sinful and broken making, into God’s desire.

Certain stories act upon us. They shape the way that we see, encounter, and understand the world. A phenomenological approach to a narrative encounter with the world in terms of the mythic helps to illuminate a certain sensibility that mediates the world to human persons such that it is experienced as meaningful. Understanding the mythic in terms of a sensibility rather than in terms of a genre of literature or a form of cultural expression sheds light on how mythopoiesis is not a phenomenon restricted to archaic societies and the tales of either a bygone age or a culture or religion not our own. Among the most visible places of such mythopoiesis is so-called ‘mythopoieic literature’, fantasies that actively play with the sense of the possible, with narratives shaping the lives of characters, and what can be brought to the surface when meaning and being more closely and obviously co-inhere. A phenomenology of play, both in terms of the ludic fancy of the mythic and fantastic and the perception-shaping power of a game’s rules over the players, opens up the way that stories act upon our perception of the world and the meaning that we encounter.

For Aristotle, the main thing to grasp about a child is what it is not – a creature that has not yet reached the age of reason: childish. But Heraclitus had exploited that ‘deficit’ view of childhood to create characteristic paradoxes in which he exhibits children as however also wiser and sharper than adults. In one of his most enigmatic aphorisms (Fr. 52), he represents the dynamism that propels and sustains us right through life as that of a child at play. After analysis of that paradox and other Heraclitean sayings about children, the chapter turns to Plato’s interest in children and their play, and to his no less paradoxical thesis in the Laws that what, if anything, is truly serious in human life is playful activity, conceived as participation in the ordered play of the gods. We see here an anticipation of Huizinga’s thesis (in Homo Ludens) that in application of the concept of play lies the route to understanding not only children’s games and the place of sport in the lives of adults, but all of what may be regarded as the higher forms of culture, not least law and religious ritual.

Erich Auerbach (1892–1957) and Johan Huizinga (1872–1945) shared an interest in late medieval Burgundian art. My essay reads Auerbach’s famous Mimesis (1946) as addressing one of Huizinga’s most pressing concerns, namely periodization, not only as he articulated them in Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919), but also as they dominated several of his (Huizinga’s) less well-known texts on the Renaissance that challenged the Burckhardt-inflected way both periods were understood at the time. Auerbach’s reception of Huizinga’s understanding in Autumn of late medieval realism in particular in a series of texts beginning in 1921 and running up through 1946 rattled at the foundation of the assumption that periodization was a relevant way of looking at cultural history at all. The alternative represented by his Mimesis focuses, rather, on what Auerbach describes in the “Epilegomena to Mimesis” (1954) as the “existential realism” he finds in texts from across the ages.