The most recent Star Wars movie has revived discussion about the franchise’s supposed mythological-legendary structures, particularly regarding George Lucas’s reliance on the idea of the “monomyth” as popularized by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. I must admit that I have never found Campbell to be a very impressive intellectual. Ancient myth has long fascinated me, but the Jungian appropriation of these stories always felt like a cheap way of legitimizing that particular philosophy of the human mind. At its best, the monomyth feels like a curious theory of comparative religion; at its worst, it may be an excuse Dr. Campbell concocted to justify his apostasy from the Catholic Faith. Or maybe it’s just academic fraud.
Let’s begin!
Campbell, like so many Freudians, Jungians, and comparative religionists before him, reduces religion to a set of taboos concocted via the irrational movements of the unconscious interacting with waking society. Similarly, he believes that “myth” is an outworking of individual dreams as shared between dreamers and elaborated upon over time. The “monomyth” is Campbell’s attempt at tossing all heroic stories together to find their common core.
This supposed common core is surprisingly complicated. Mircea Eliade’s description of the heroic trope is much simpler and comprehensible, comparing it to the solar cycle: “Like the sun, he fights darkness, descends into the realm of death and emerges victorious” (The Sacred and the Profane, 157-8). Campbell is not content with something so clean, and provides an elaborate, seventeen-step framework that can supposedly be found in heroic myths throughout the world:
Departure (i. The Call to Adventure, ii. Refusal of the Call, iii. Supernatural Aid, iv. Crossing the Threshold, v. Belly of the Whale)
Initiation (vi. The Road of Trials, vii. The Meeting with the Goddess, viii. Woman as Temptress, ix. Atonement with the Father, x. Apotheosis, xi. The Ultimate Boon)
Return (xii. Refusal of the Return, xiii. The Magic Flight, xiv. Rescue from Without, xv. The Crossing of the Return Threshold, xvi. Master of Two Worlds, xvii. Freedom to Live)
(From “Action Philosophers”)
The problem with this 17-Step Program to Heroic Success is that it cannot really be found in any heroic myths in its fullness before Campbell’s book. Examples from specific steps can be found in stories throughout the world, but even Campbell seems unable to provide even one example of a heroic story that uses this entire framework. Many of the stories Campbell references are merely useful for one or two steps, and it’s only by referencing larger mythological libraries (like the total mythic tradition of the Greeks) that he can find enough material to fill in the gaps.
In other words, Campbell invented the seventeen-step framework and selectively picked fragments from many myths and legends to fit into his preconceived model. He does come close to admitting this deficiency a few times, for instance:
Many tales isolate and greatly enlarge upon one or two of the typical elements of the full cycle (test motif, flight motif, abduction of the bride), others string a number of independent cycles into a single series (as in the Odyssey). Differing characters or episodes can become fused, or a single element can reduplicate itself and reappear under many changes. (Hero, 212)
That fact is that myths, even heroic myths, are far less neat and structured than the monomyth theory would lead one to believe. The search for the monomyth is something like the physicist’s search for the Grand Unified Theory, and just as successful. Describing the “hero’s journey” in any but the broadest terms is bound to lead to pedantry and logical fallacies, carts before horses and tails wagging dogs.
The malign influence that the monomyth has had on storytelling since Campbell is obvious from the legion of novelists and screenwriters who use his framework as a paint-by-numbers outline. It discourages the storyteller from observing human psychology and behavior as it occurs around him, and from delving deeply into his own soul to understand the mystery of humanity.
Common motifs between cultures, religions, and poetic traditions are always interesting to note. One must, however, fight the temptation to make too much out of them. One cannot claim that all myths or all religions are basically the same without immediately needing to fend off a thousand exceptions. Too many scholars respond to that call for reality with outright refusal.
Bravo! You are spot on in your observations.
Joseph Campbell claimed to see what he calls the hero’s journey in the stories of the world’s religious figures, Buddha, Moses, and Christ—all of whom he equated. According to Campbell, in the hero’s journey, they are all heroes: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”
Campbell claimed the existence of an overarching monomyth. The implication is that since all religions share similarities, all religions have borrowed from each other, and all are equally untrue. Critics in his field have accused Campbell of gross oversimplification, but the laudatory Bill Moyers TV series about Campbell’s syncretic theories has infected the religious thinking of a generation of PBS watchers, and his books have contributed to the confusion of many more.
For Joseph Campbell, “God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It’s as simple as that.” Or as wrong as that.
A character is seen reading Joseph Campbell in the new movie 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. A bit later in the film this quote is recited: “All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells, are within you.” The quote ends up featuring prominently in the movie’s story line. Sad, For Christians there is “objective truth.” And, this objective truth was embodied in the ultimate hero, Jesus Christ of Nazareth.
I think this is a little unfair.
Campbell isn’t trying to create a paint-by-numbers formula for understanding myths and legends (though the original Star Wars film followed it pretty closely) so much as try to identify patterns of archetypes within the world’s base of legends and myths, which is a really big deal. The fact that there are archetypes presenting themselves across cultures with no knowable connections is huge news and deserves to be investigated. I have a lot of issues with Campbell and can barely stand watching interviews with him, but a lot of his work was profound and costly and forms the legwork of a lot of what we can do as Catholics to contribute to that conversation.
His main study is of the cyclical archetype of life-death-rebirth and the fascination it has for us as a human race, and the other parts of the Hero’s Journey are just different ways that people have filled in those parts in their stories over time. The lasting myths don’t contain every step, obviously, but they do have one of each of the three. Not only that, but the mystical tradition of the major religions also says that this cycle is the path to unity with God – we have John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila leading the charge, but the poetry of Rumi and the Tao Te Ching are saying things that sound awfully familiar to any student of Carmelite thought and spiritality. Campbell is fascinated by those points of spiritual and cultural intersection and dedicated his life to exploring them (with varying degrees of success) – it is a crime that so far there has been no Catholic intellectual giant (that I’ve heard of, so correct me if I’m wrong) that has taken on the same task and drawn compelling insights onto why this happens in the world. This is huge.
Campbell doesn’t believe what Catholics do about the world and about God, and so of course he is going to use Jesus’ story as another entry in the world’s library of great stories – how could he not? It would be intellectually disingenious to do otherwise. Some might call for rejecting his work, but the implications of these “ripples” of how God works in the world (and in the human unconscious) is huge, either from a psychological or mystical point of view. Our inability to accept the whole of the theory doesn’t mean we have to throw out the baby with the bathwater – and insinuating that a person’s socio-cultural work is just an effort to justify their leaving the Church is a fallacy and injustice to intellectual integrity.
We should be finding more ways to cooperate with perceived imperfect theories to draw out what truth there is in them, rather than ridiculing them for the imperfections. And that’s when the exciting part starts: the long process of reconciling the results of research from other spheres with what we believe about how God lives and moves. Now we just need some grant money 🙂
It’s untrue that no Catholic intellectuals have noted the similarities between world religions. During the Medieval and early Renaissance eras, it was a commonplace that pagan religions echoed each other and the true religion, both because they were degenerations of the primordial religion of Adam, and because they were misty prefigurements of Christ or preparations for the Christian Faith. There’s nothing new in the observation that world religions (Christianity included) have many correlations. Campbell was late to the game, but he tried to pawn off that insight as original, thus implying that his childhood religion was behind the times.
The basic outline of the heroic path is certainly one worthy of study, but Campbell makes it far more complicated than it needs to be. The simplified version offered by Eliade is more workable for academic purposes. Each element of Campbell’s 17-step “journey” is interesting and potentially fruitful in its own right, but they don’t belong together as part of a unified framework.
For all that, Campbell’s real purpose was not historical study or academic persuasion in regards to comparative religion. His primary interest was psychological, and in using the “hero’s journey” as a method for psychiatric health. Whether or not it is effective to that end, I don’t know, but the whole exercise seems to have been an excuse for convincing patients that they could participate in the collective unconscious of the human race throughout history for their own mental well-being.
I’ve of heard of those theories of “prefigurement” (there’s a reference to them as well in the Catechism) and I’d love to read anything by a theologian from back then who was interested in the work of wrestling with the implications those ideas hold for the human psyche and soul. It’s a theme that really needs to be taken up again right now as it would offer, among other things, a potentially compelling avenue to approaching comparative religions from a Catholic perspective.
Your last point there is spot-on – I read a book of his once (can’t think of the title for the life of me) and there was a section where he described what his definition of eternity was. For him, eternity wasn’t so much living forever after death as it was a sense of connectedness to the greater human story. So, being aware of archetypes (and allowing oneself to embody them) would presumably connect a person to all seekers and strivers in history. So living your story with authenticity (whatever that means to him) would be an act of embodying the Human Story. Potentially metaphysical elements aside, the practice itself definitely has psychological value (even if it’s not the kind Campbell applied to it) and also has a bunch of parallels to our tradition of praying through the psalms (as it’s been described to me). A person can pray through a mournful psalm while not actually being in mourning because they are praying within (and connecting to) the context of the Universal Church. The litany of the hours being another example of the concept.
But, yeah, if I was in therapy and my shrink asked me whether my anxiety was caused by the fact that I haven’t meet with the goddess yet I’d totally be a little “uh…what?”
Dante went on at length about the pagan prefigurements of the Faith, especially with the pre-Christian Romans. Jean Seznec’s “The Survival of the Pagan Gods” and C.S. Lewis’s “The Allegory of Love” both examine how the classical myths survived into Christian times largely by turning them into symbols of aspects of the human psyche (another thing the Jungians claimed was original to them).
I’m not so sure I would want to embody the Human Story in my own life. I’d have to start with the Fall!
He claimed that he was picking here and there to show how wide-spread it was. But I kept noticing it was cherry picking the elements he wanted.
Long before Campbell, Freud and Jung the apostolic church knew how the gospel might be “mythologized.” Saint Peter, or one of his disciples, addressed the topic in 2 Peter: “We did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming* of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we had been eyewitnesses of his majesty. For he received honor and glory from God the Father when that unique declaration came to him from the majestic glory, “This is my Son, my beloved, with whom I am well pleased. We ourselves heard this voice come from heaven while we were with him on the holy mountain.
Saint Luke also deliberately locates the time and place of Jesus’ life from birth at a specific time and place to his death. Many of those who heard his gospel must have paused to think, “Where was I when Augustus was the emperor, Herod was king in Judea,” and so forth. Just as we might pause and recall what we were doing the day C.S. Lewis died (11/22/1963.)
As a hospital chaplain I meet a lot of History Channel Catholics who are ready to explain recent findings about Mary Magdalene, the Resurrection and Noah’s Ark. At the very moment when they might pray in solidarity with the Church they amuse themselves with mythological interpretations of the Gospel. Only reluctantly do they surrender these pipe dreams to confront the realities of sin, sickness, death and hope.
Some myths are useful — like the darling story of Saint Christopher — but we do better when we stick to the Gospel.
Far be it from me to speak ill of the great saint Christopher the Christ-bearer!
I highly recommend Professor Rolland Hein’s book: Christian Mythmakers. I’ll say no more.
My problem with the Campbells and Jungs of the world is their animating impulse, ie the notion that religious similarities are especially interesting. It’s actually the exact opposite: the fact that Muslims worship one god just like Christians, or that Hindus worship a god of love, and that these gods want them to pray and repent, do charity, etc. are the least interesting things about them.
You know what’s interesting about Islam? Jihad, something that doesn’t exist in Christianity. Or Hinduism: you worship a blue skinned elephant god? That’s not something you’re going to see in Christianity. Surely that’s more interesting than hearing that the Hindus have their version of the golden rule too.
Away with all these absurd attempts to establish likeness, it’s time to start heightening the differences.