The God-Ridden Bigotry of the Globalist Monomyth

Over 200 people died today in Sri Lanka as victims of bomb blasts at three hotels and three churches.

It was Easter Sunday.

The President of Ireland posted a statement on the attacks:

“At a time of religious significance”? When the people killed were in church? Perhaps President Higgins had just been searching his iPad on Google and was confused about why the people were in church (sorry, “places of worship”). After all, Google (at least in its mobile mode) didn’t seem to know.

Or maybe, like myself, President Higgins was spending the weekend reading Joseph Campbell—that great source of religious wisdom behind so much of our modern myth-making (see Star Wars).

I read this passage this morning right before going to church:

The recognition of the secondary nature of the personality of whatever deity is worshiped is characteristic of most of the traditions of the world. In Christianity, Mohammedanism, and Judaism, however, the personality of the divinity is taught to be final—which makes it comparatively difficult for the members of those communions to understand how one may go beyond the limitations of their own anthropomorphic divinity. The result has been, on the one hand, a general obfuscation of the symbols, and on the other, a god-ridden bigotry such as is unmatched elsewhere in the history of religion. For a discussion of the possible origin of this aberration, see Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism.

See? It is the “god-ridden bigotry” of Christians, Muslims, and Jews that makes them incapable of apprehending the wisdom of Campbell’s own myth-making—not his tendentious claim to have discovered the One True Myth underlying all religious story-telling.

Campbell pretends throughout The Hero with A Thousand Faces (1949) simply to have uncovered the “truths disguised for us under the figures of religion and mythology by bringing together a multitude of not-too-difficult examples and letting the ancient meaning become apparent of itself,” but—just like Google and President Higgins—his understanding of “religious significance” is highly selective.

True myths, according to Campbell, have the same symbolic structure as dreams. Mythology, in this view, “is psychology misread as biography, history, and cosmology.” Whereas Christians insist that Jesus of Nazareth was not only a historical person, but God become incarnate in history, the psychologist skilled in the interpretation of dreams knows better:

We [that is, the psychologically-trained interpreter] do not particularly care whether Rip van Winkle, Kamar al-Zaman, or Jesus Christ ever actually lived. Their stories are what concern us: and these stories are so widely distributed over the world—attached to various heroes in various lands—that the question of whether this or that local carrier of the universal theme may or may not have been a historical, living man can be of only secondary moment.

Indeed, to care about whether Jesus of Nazareth actually lived “will simply obfuscate the picture message.” Only when read on “universal grounds, rather than sectarian” will the significance of the archetype become clear.

By contrast:

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history or science, it is killed. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history mythology is absurd. When a civilization begins to reinterpret its mythology in this way, the life goes out of it, temples become museums, and the link between the two perspectives is dissolved. Such a blight has certainly descended on the Bible and on a great part of the Christian cult.

According to Campbell, theology is even worse in its attempt to discern “the personality or personalities of God—whether represented in trinitarian, dualistic, or unitarian terms, in polytheistic, monotheistic, or henotheistic terms, pictorially or verbally, as documented fact or as apocalyptic vision.” All such attempts obscure the significance of the symbols, which only the psychologist can unlock. Even more to the point: only the psychologist is capable of discerning the universal significance of the various local versions of the monomyth:

Totem, tribal, racial and aggressively missionizing cults represent only partial solutions of the psychological problem of subduing hate by love; they only partially initiate. Ego is not annihilated in them; rather, it is enlarged; instead of thinking only of himself, the individual becomes dedicated to the whole of his society. The rest of the world meanwhile (that is to say, by far the greater portion of mankind) is left outside the sphere of his sympathy and protection because outside the sphere of the protection of his god.

And thus, with the stroke of his pen, Campbell—and, thereby, all his devotees—declares himself in his enlightened modernity wiser than centuries of theologians because he and he alone in his guise as medicine man is able to see beyond the egotistical tribalism of all those who identify with a “tribe, church, nation, class, or what not” other than “the world”:

The world is full of the resultant mutually contending bands: totem-, flag-, and party-worshipers. Even the so-called Christian nations—which are supposed to be following a “World” Redeemer—are better known to history for their colonial barbarity and internecine strife than for any practical display of that unconditioned love, synonymous with the effective conquest of ego, ego’s world, and ego’s tribal god, which was taught by their professed supreme Lord.

Christians—or so Campbell insists—have got their faith in God as love all wrong. Whereas they see him as loving the world so much that He entered into it through the womb of His own creature, becoming man so that He might humiliate Himself even unto death on the cross, Campbell knows that this is just a “provincially limited ecclesiastical, tribal, or national rendition of the world [archetype].” He, on the other hand, has seen through the tribalism to the universal story on which the Christian understanding of love of God is properly based:

The good news, which the World Redeemer brings and which so many have been glad to hear, zealous to preach, but reluctant, apparently, to demonstrate, is that God is love, that He can be, and is to be, loved, and that all without exception are his children....

The community today is the planet, not the bounded nation; hence the patterns of projected aggression which formerly served to co-ordinate the in-group now can only break it into factions. The national idea, with the flag as totem, it today an aggrandizer of the nursery ego, not the annihilator of an infantile situation.... Nor can the great world religions, as at present understood, meet the requirement. For they have become associated with the causes of the factions, as instruments of propaganda and self-congratulation.... The universal triumph of the secular state has thrown all religious organizations into such a definitely secondary, and finally ineffectual, position that religious pantomime is hardly more than a sanctimonious exercise for Sunday morning....

General propaganda for one or another of the local solutions, therefore, is superfluous—or much rather, a menace. The way to become human is to learn to recognize the lineaments of God in all of the wonderful modulations of the face of man.

It is hard to know whether to laugh or to cry. As Christians around the world prayed today for their brothers and sisters in Sri Lanka, the devotees of Campbell’s Universal Monomyth sententiously tweeted about “Easter worshippers” lest (at a guess) they give historical credibility to the existence of Christ:

After tweeting from my iPad about our robot overlords not knowing that it was a day “of religious significance,” I checked Google again on my Mac. There, like the hero of Campbell’s monomyth, I found a clue—possibly left by a dragon! A little egg, inviting me to click on it. I clicked—and the heavens (a.k.a. the top of the screen) rained more eggs while the white background turned a fertile green.

The Easter eggs were hidden there all along! Just as—if you know anything about Christianity—the Christian underpinnings of Campbell’s own bigotry are plain to see. Do you care that over 200 people died in Sri Lanka today while they were celebrating the resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ? Could it possibly be because you believe that they, like you, are made in the image and likeness of God—God who loves all his children so much that he died for them and rose again that they might share in his kingdom? Of course, the Google doodle makes no mention of Christ—or Easter. It just showers the screen with smiling sweeties. But for those of us trained to look for the signs of God’s love in all His creatures, the “unconscious desires, fears, and tensions that underlie the conscious patterns of human behavior”—not to mention, Campbell’s mythologizing—are clear to see.

Campbell may have been able to fool himself into believing that he had discovered the myth that overrode the historical truth of Christ. But Christians can see right through him to “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”

For further meditation on the ways in which the Incarnate Logos underpins our experience, go here.