A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living (Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) (16 page)

This is the “knowing” part of “to know, to love, to serve.” If you’re in trouble with this part because you do not really know what this thing refers to, then it will push you around. I’m very, very sure of that.

To dissolve such a concretization as an adult, you need to find what the reference of the symbol is. When that is found, you will have the elucidation. The symbol will move into place, and you can regard it with pleasure: as something that guides you to the realization of what its message is, instead of as a roadblock. This is an important point.

That is the downward-pointed triangle. It is either an obstruction or the field through which the realization is to come.

H
eaven and hell are psychological definitions. The Catholic definition of mortal sin should relieve you of the thought that you have committed one. As a Catholic, you learn that for a sin to be mortal, the kind that condemns you to hell, it has to be a grievous matter, over which there has been sufficient reflection, done with full consent of the will. So, a mortal sin is a deliberate exclusion of the gift of grace, and that is what the devil symbolizes. You cannot open to supernatural grace, to the voice of God.

Deliberately breaking the ritual law can be a mortal sin. But here’s the bizarre thing about such a religion of ritual laws: kill your mother in a passion, and that is not a mortal sin. That’s a venial sin, and you will have your two-thousand years in purgatory on that one. But one little mortal sin, and you’re bound for hell. Let’s all go in a big chariot. When the Church said that eating meat on Friday was no longer a mortal sin, there was a crisis in the entire Catholic community. In New York City, where there are a lot of Catholics, there was a great crisis, part of which had to do with the fish merchants.

When the symbols are interpreted

spiritually rather than concretely,

then they yield the revelation.

I want to tell about my relationship to confession. As a kid, you go to confession, and you say, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I disobeyed Mother three times, didn’t say morning prayers two mornings, and told a lie.” He says, “You mustn’t do these things. Say five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys, and you’re clear.”

I never got old enough to confess any significant sin. I don’t know what the hell would have happened. I did commit one little sin one summer, at Shelter Island out on Long Island. I was about nine years old. There was a wonderful hardware store named Ferguson’s. I remember it well. I’d go there with my mother and see her buy things. She’d say, “Charge it,” and then go out with them. One such trip, I saw a wonderful penknife with all these things on it. So a few days later I went in alone and said, “I want that knife.” the owner said, “Here, Joe.” I said, “Charge it.” He said, “Okay.”

I went home and said to Mother, “Look at the wonderful penknife I found.” She said, “Are you sure you found that?” I said, “Yes, yes, I found it.” Well, at the end of the month a bill came for the penknife, and Mother said, “Joe, come here. When you go to confession on Saturday, take that penknife to Father Isadore. Confess the sin, and then take the knife around to the sacristy and give it to him.

This was not easy. It was the most severe indication of what I’d done. Five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys were nothing like giving up that knife. So, I went to confession and tried to tell the priest what I had done. I was an altar boy at the time: you know, “mea culpa, mea culpa” stuff. Afterward, I went around to the sacristy and gave him the penknife. And he said, “Oh, Joe, I didn’t know it was that serious.”

I knew something then that I didn’t know before I stole that penknife: charging it without any idea of what the hell was going to happen was wonderful.

T
he forgiveness in Roman Catholic confession is conditional. The absolution the priest gives is conditional on a resolution on your part.

First, you need contrition, meaning you are really, really sorry for having committed that sin. Second, you make a resolution never to commit it again. That does not mean that you are not going to commit it again. It means that you sincerely resolve not to.

In that wonderful Arthurian Romance of
La Questa del St. Graal
, where all the knights go out to discover the Grail, Lancelot could not behold the Grail. Why? Because of his adulterous affair with Guinevere. But the real reason was that he could not honestly feel contrition for that love. How could Lancelot possibly have contrition for having experienced through Guinevere an illumination beyond what even the church had given him? And it is represented as such. He could not feel sorry, and he could not resolve to cancel it, so he was unworthy to behold the Grail.

The Grail is being in perfect accord

with the abundance of nature,

the highest spiritual realization,

the inexhaustible vessel from which

you get everything you want.

In a religion of duality,

the sin and eternal punishment

comes from the outside,

from the ruling concrete god.

There’s a knight in mortal sin. And yet, the monk who wrote that Romance had a sense of the charm of Lancelot’s life: he’s the most human, the most touching character in the whole context. These are ironical things, which is why, finally, the priest says, “God’s will? We don’t know God’s will. There may be forgiveness that we don’t know anything about.”

I will hold this love against God,

eternal damnation, anything.

That is true love.

When I was about sixteen years old, in prep school, and knew I was losing my childhood faith, I resolved that I would not quit the Catholic church until I knew why I was quitting, that is to say, until I had dissolved the symbols and knew what they referred to and meant. The whole thing wasn’t over until I was twenty-five years old and in Germany. I spent nine years working everything out, and then it just dropped off like a worn-out shirt. That’s the knowing thing. If you don’t know what the hell that symbol is saying to you, then it’s just there as a command, and there is going to be more and more of this hanging on. If you can’t use your mind in this rather complex field, I don’t know how you are going to work it out.

You become mature

when you become

the authority for your own life.

C
OULD
God exist if nobody else did? No. That’s why gods are very avid for worshipers. If there is nobody to worship them, there are no gods. There are as many gods as there are people thinking about God. When Mrs. Mulligan and the Pope are thinking about God, it is not the same God.

In choosing your god, you choose

your way of looking at the universe.

There are plenty of Gods.

Choose yours.

The god you worship

is the god you deserve.

When you say that God needs man and man needs God, that “God” that’s being talked about is the image of God, the concept of God, the name of God, the ethnic God. You bet he needs man. He wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for man.

In the tribe, deities were personifications of power.

In later years,

they became the source of power.

All the gods of the world are metaphors, not powers.

All imaging of God, if the word is going to mean anything besides “this is what Mother taught me,” is supposed to refer to that which transcends all knowledge, all naming, all forming; and, consequently, the word has to point past itself. In our tradition, the idea of God is so strongly personified as a person that you get stuck with that problem whenever you think of God.

God is not an illusion,

but a symbol pointing beyond itself

to the realization of the mystery

of at-one-ment.

Jung, in his book
Answer to Job
, deals with the image of God that has come down through the centuries. How can we relate to it? Well, the Old Testament image, Yahweh, is of a lawgiver, a very strong dictator, an angry father. And in the Book of Job, you have the epitomization of that image.

Here is this Job, who has been a good man, and Yahweh, the God, boasting to the devil, Satan, says: “Have you considered Job? How loyal he is to me? How he loves me?” And Satan says, “Well, you’ve been pretty good to him. Make it tough and see how long this is going to last.” Yawheh says, “I bet ya.” And Satan says, “I bet ya.”

Gilbert Murray has commented: “It’s as though someone says, ‘My dog won’t bite me no matter what I do.’ And someone else says, ‘I bet he will.’ The dog’s master says, ‘I bet he won’t.’ And the other person says, ‘Get going now, see how badly you can abuse him, and then see if he won’t bite you.’”

So that’s the situation, and after the wager, things get rough. What a time Job has! His family is killed, his wealth is taken from him, and he ends up on a heap of ashes with a case of boils. His friends, his so-called “comforters,” annoy him further by saying, “You must have been a pretty bad chap to deserve all this.” He says, “No, I’m good.” And he’s right: he
is
good.

Well, with this challenge to God, he finally has to come through and show himself. I mean, it’s a big deal. So, God shows himself, and what does he say? He says, “Who are you, you little worm, to question me? How dare you even consider that you could understand what is happening to you? Could you fill Leviathan’s nose with harpoons? I did it. Try it.”

Job is completely cowed. He suspends human judgment. He says, “I have heard of you with the hearing of my ears. Now I behold you with my eyes, and I am ashamed. I cover my head with ashes.”

Now, reading that in terms of its real spiritual message, what it means is that you cannot judge your destiny in terms of something that was done to you by somebody. I mean, what is actually happening there—although it is not admitted—is that the image of God as a person is exploded. When you get to the trans-personal, you can’t speak of “justice” and “injustice.”

What about all the landslides along the Big Sur coastline and the millions of dollars of damage they’ve caused? If you take these acts of nature as something that somebody has done to the people living there, you have the whole thing messed up. But that’s not the way the
Book of Job
has been understood. It has been under-stood in the way of submission to a
person
. And a person who would pull a deal like that on somebody is a pretty unappetizing type.

Actually, the
Book of Job
, which dates from around the fifth century
B.C.
, is anticipated by a Babylonian text from about 1500
B.C.
called the “Babylonian Job,” in which a king, who has been sacrificing to the deities and building them temples, has been overcome by, I think it was, leprosy. He tries to interpret his affliction in terms of what he has done in worship as a payment. Now, if you think of worship as a form of payment for something, you’re on the wrong track altogether. The
Book of Job
really breaks down that idea. But if you are going to hold to the image of God that is presented in the
Book of Job
, you have something that needs a little bit of refinement.

So then the Christians, as a next step, take the idea of the Incarnation of the second person of the Blessed Trinity offering himself in love to the world to be a higher, more illuminated, form. In other words, God has been tempered by taking the form of man and experiencing the world of man.

But, says our friend Jung, this is not the answer either, because Christ was a divine incarnation born of a virgin, so he really wasn’t man, he was God. Yet, Jung argues, “God wanted to become man and still wants to.” So he provided for his continuing incarnation, as it were, within man as the Holy Ghost, the third person of the Blessed Trinity. So, if you want to see God in the world, recognize it in mankind. That’s the essence of Jung’s answer to Job: Don’t throw this blame back on God, on the universe, or on anything of the kind. Realize that all notions of God are historically conditioned images for qualities that are to be recognized as actually being in man.

“The incarnation in Christ is the prototype which is continually being transferred to the creature by the Holy Ghost.”
—Jung
⁹⁴

 There is a darling little woman who comes to my lectures in New York, who was a nun. She left the con-vent after hearing a couple of my talks. She did. That’s one of my great credits, you old bastard up there. The last time I was lecturing and she was in the group, she came up to me afterward and asked, “Mr. Campbell, do you think that Jesus was God, was God’s son?” I said, “Not unless we all are.” “Ahh!” she said, and off she went.

And that’s what Jung is saying in his
Answer to Job
: it is actually the work of man that is projected in the image of an imagined being called God. And so, historically, the God image is really a mirror image of the condition of man at a given time.

Yet, I think most people take their image of God very concretely. Except for the French. A survey was taken in which people were asked, “Do you believe in God? Do you believe in hell?” The French—I think, seventy-five percent of them—did not believe in God, but did believe in hell! I like Alan Watts’ reply: “If you believe in God, I don’t. If you don’t, I do.”

My belief is that nobody experiences the ultimate rapture, because it’s beyond pairs of opposites, so if anyone did, there’d be nobody there anyhow. Jung is amusing on that point. “If you go beyond subject and object,” he wonders, “who is there to have the experience?” I think to give oneself a ground for anything other than monastic living, all one has to do is realize that such a thing is implied; that is to say, a mystery that is beyond subject, object, and all pairs of opposites is the mystery on the ground of which we ride.

When the physicist explores the depths of the atom or the outer reaches of space, he discovers pairs of opposites and mysteries that science hasn’t been able to penetrate. When it does penetrate to the next level, it’s still mysterious. They’ve got so many sub-atomic particles. One is named after Joyce’s “quark.” It seems to me that’s about as mysterious as you can get. There is the transcendent. Know it’s there, and then don’t worry about it. Simply behold the radiance everywhere.