Campbell / Kennedy / Kudler Thou Art That

Transforming Religious Metaphor
1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61178-015-4
Verlag: Joseph Campbell Foundation
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten

Reihe: The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell

Woven from Joseph Campbell's previously unpublished work, this volume explores Judeo-Christian symbols and metaphors - and their misinterpretations - with the famed mythologist's characteristic conversational warmth and accessible scholarship.

Campbell's insights highlight centuries of confusion between literal and metaphorical interpretations of Western religious symbols that are, he argues, perennially relevant keys to spiritual understanding and mystical revelation

Reviews:

'[A] romp through the Judeo-Christian tradition - a lightning-paced tour with an extremely knowledgeable and provocative guide to illuminate some intriguing, untrammeled paths.'

- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

'It is Campbell the armchair speaker who shines through, buoyant with life and with comments that are eerily relevant to current times.'

- Parabola

'The work confirms the commonality of the human experience. A much-needed prescription in today's world.'

- San Francisco Chronicle

Autoren/Hrsg.

Campbell, Joseph

Kennedy, Eugene

Kudler, David

Leseproben

Editor’s Foreword

“Tat tvam asi” is a phrase that appears often in these collected spiritual reflections of the late Joseph Campbell. These words also inscribe a signature of celebration on his life and work. Translated from the Sanskrit as “thou art that,” this epigram captures Campbell’s generous spirit just as it does his scholarly focus. The great student of mythology not only understood the profound spiritual implications of the phrase but, quite unselfconsciously, lived by them as well.

Joseph Campbell was fond of asking Schopenhauer’s question, found in his essay “On the Foundations of Morality”: “How is it possible that suffering that is neither my own nor of my concern should immediately affect me as though it were my own, and with such force that it moves me to action?...This is something really mysterious, something for which Reason can provide no explanation, and for which no basis can be found in practical experience. It is not unknown even to the most hard-hearted and self-interested. Examples appear every day before our eyes of instant responses of the kind, without reflection, one person helping another, coming to his aid, even setting his own life in clear danger for someone whom he has seen for the first time, having nothing more in mind than that the other is in need and in peril of his life....”[1]

Schopenhauer’s response, one Campbell delighted in making his own, was that the immediate reaction and response represented the breakthrough of a metaphysical realization best rendered as “thou art that.”[2] This pre-supposes, as the German philosopher wrote, his identification with someone not himself, a penetration of the barrier between persons so that the other was no longer perceived as an indifferent stranger but as a person “in whom I suffer, in spite of the fact that his skin does not enfold my nerves.”[3]

This fundamental insight, as Schopenhauer continued, reveals that “my own true inner being actually exists in every living creature...[and] is the ground of that compassion (Mitleid) upon which all true, that is to say, unselfish, virtue rests and whose expression is in every good deed.”[4]

Joseph Campbell was not only moved by compassion in his personal relationships, as anybody who ever heard him speak or reads his works can easily sense, but he also grasped that this spiritual realization was central to understanding the metaphorical language through which both mythology and religion, whose images and energy flow from a common source in human imagination, express themselves. “The metaphors of any mythology,” as he wrote, “may be defined as affect signs derived from intuitions of just this play of the Self through all the forms of a local manner of life, made manifest through ritualized representations, pedagogical narratives, prayers, meditations, annual festivals, and the like, in such a way that all members of the relevant community may be held, both in mind and in sentiment, to its knowledge and thus moved to live in accord.”[5]

For Campbell, mythology was, in a sense, the powerful cathedral organ through which the tonal resonations of a hundred separate pipes were fused into the same extraordinary music. What was common in these multiplied themes was their human origin, as if each were a vessel of the same eternal cry of the spirit, inflected in extraordinary and dazzling variations, in the field of time. We men and women find ourselves in the creative expressions of our human longings, aspirations, and tragedies of our own particular tradition. Indeed, so familiar and almost natural do these seem to us that they almost exclude the possibility that the same feelings and ideals might be expressed quite differently through some other tradition. If we listen and look carefully, however, we discover ourselves in the literature, rites, and symbols of others, even though at first they seem distorted and alien to us. Thou art that, Campbell would judge, citing the underlying spiritual intuition of his life and work, tat tvam asi.

What Campbell heard, in these varied and sometimes all but indecipherable choruses, was a shared sense of wonder and awe at the mystery of being. The compassion that Campbell recognized as the most ennobling of all human reactions was not, as he well understood, evoked by all traditions with the same concern or conviction. The Judeo-Christian tradition, however, out of which he himself came, was a powerful source of teaching about compassion in a way that was not as sensitively developed or emphasized in the customs of some other cultures. When the Judeo-Christian tradition was brought to lands where it had not been known, it brought its often-criticized defects and excesses. It also brought, however, something new and revolutionary, a well-developed sense of compassion for the suffering of others.

That is why, in gathering together, indeed, in some cases, in grafting onto one branch, Joseph Campbell’s many reflections on the Judeo-Christian spiritual heritage, the theme of compassion emerges so eloquently. Many who were close to Joseph Campbell share a conviction about this remarkable, self-directed student of comparative religion. So absorbed was he when conversing about his subject that he was hardly aware of himself or of how much he knew. At times, questions from an audience or friends would elicit remarkable observations or explanations. These resembled the mythological treasures in the field, of which he sometimes spoke, that could only be unearthed by accident. “Where you stumble and fall,” he would say, recalling a theme about our common humanity, “there you discover the gold.”

This applies to the journey that the making of this book required, for many of Joseph Campbell’s insights into Judeo-Christian symbols and myths were embedded in lectures in which they were but examples of broader themes. So, too, question periods mined out of him, so to speak, treasures of learning that might not otherwise have come to the surface. These replies, which sometimes expanded into miniature lectures, often illuminated vast landscapes of Biblical history. They were delivered, however, in a way that placed the questioners on an equal plane with him, as if they were looking at the same problem together from the same equal fund of knowledge about the Bible, religion, and mythology. Many of these have been worked into the texts of this volume so that, perhaps for the first time in one place, much of what Joseph Campbell knew about the origins, symbols, and meanings of Judeo-Christian spirituality are presented together.

This is, of course, not a new way to produce a cohesive book. It is the method of mythology itself just as it is of many of the collected sayings and writings of any religious tradition. Some of these chapters are editions of specific lectures, as mentioned in the note of explanation. More typically, they represent the integration of several versions of the same lecture, to insure the best evocation of the speaker’s style and insights. Joseph Campbell the lecturer is, as previously observed, different from Joseph Campbell the polished prose-stylist. This allows us to encounter the speaker who engaged his hearers as a master teacher does his students and, like the historian Herodotus, knows how to use digressions as part of his plan.

Joseph Campbell, like an archaeologist calling back to life an ancient village known only by its dried up bones and artifacts, reveals the vitality in what seem, even to many Jews and Christians, dead and brittle relics of belief. He evokes, for example, the living quality of the Jewish people and the symbolic richness of the Old Testament, which by the reverse alchemy of those who regard them with stifling Cecil B. DeMille literalness, has been spiritually devalued over the centuries. Nothing will better belie the false accusation made after his death, of Campbell being anti-Semitic, than the unfeigned sensitivity and respect with which he illuminates the majesty of Jewish belief and history.

In the same way, Joseph Campbell reacquaints Christians with the aura of meanings that hover about the religious incidents and stories of the New Testament. As in treating Jewish history, it is in this aura—that is, in the connotations that by their nature blossom out of metaphors—that the deepest significance of the stories of Jesus’ life and work are to be found. To describe the testaments as myth is not, as Campbell points out, to debunk them. The contemporary impression of myth as falsehood has, as Campbell illustrates in these pages by recalling an obnoxious and ill-informed interviewer, led people to think of them as fantasies passing as truth. But mythology is a vessel of the truth that is far more reliable than census and almanac figures, which, subject to time as myth is not, are out of date as soon as they are printed. Joseph Campbell’s purpose in exploring the biblical myths is not to dismiss them as unbelievable but to lay open once again their living and nourishing core.

Many elements of the Bible seem lifeless and unbelievable because they have been regarded as historical facts instead of metaphorical representations of spiritual realities. They have been applied in a concrete way to great figures, such as Moses and John the Baptist, as if they were real-time accounts of their actions. That this heavy emphasis on the historical rather than the spiritual should have continued into the twenty-first century illustrates the lag-time that the leaders of institutional religions have allowed to open up between their static ideas and the rapidly developing understandings of solid new scholarship. A failure to follow Pope John xxiii’s injunction to “read the signs of the times” leaves them behind even their own...