Myths to Live By

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by Joseph Campbell


  We can safely say, therefore, that whereas some moralists may find it possible to make a distinction between two spheres and reigns—one of flesh, the other of the spirit, one of time, the other of eternity—where ever love arises such definitions vanish, and a sense of life awakens in which all such oppositions are at one.

  The most widely revered Oriental personification of such a world-affirming attitude, transcending opposites, is that figure of boundless compassion already discussed at considerable length, the Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara, known to China and Japan as Kuan-yin, Kannon. For, in contrast to the Buddha, who at the conclusion of his lifetime of teaching passed away, never to return, this infinitely compassionate one, who renounced for himself eternal release to remain forever in this vortex of rebirths, represents through all time the mystery of a knowledge of eternal release while living. The liberation thus taught is, paradoxically, not of escape from the vortex, but of full participation voluntarily in its sorrows—moved by compassion; for indeed, through selflessness one is released from self, and with release from self there is release from desire and fear. And as the Bodhisattva is thus released, so too are we, according to the measure of our experience of the perfection of compassion.

  It is said that ambrosia pours from the Bodhisattva’s fingertips even to the deepest pits of Hell, giving comfort there to the souls still locked in the torture chambers of their passions. We are told, furthermore, that in all our dealings with each other we are his agents, whether knowingly or not. Nor is it the aim of the Bodhisattva to change—or, as we like to say, to “improve”—this temporal world. Conflict, tension, defeats, and victories are inherent in the nature of things, and what the Bodhisattva is doing is participating in the nature of things. He is benevolence without purpose. And since all life is sorrowful, and necessarily so, the answer cannot lie in turning—or “progressing”—from one form of life to another, but only in dissolving the organ of suffering itself, which—as we have seen—is the idea of an ego to be preserved, committed to its own compelling concepts of what is good and what is evil, true and false, right and wrong; which dichotomies—as we have likewise seen—are dissolved in the metaphysical impulse of compassion.

  Love as passion; love as com-passion—these are the two extreme poles of our subject. They have been often represented as absolutely opposed—physical, respectively, and spiritual; yet in both the individual is torn out of himself and opened to an experience of rediscovered identity in a larger, more abiding format. And in both it is the work of Eros, eldest and youngest of the gods, that we must recognize: the same who in the beginning, as told in the ancient Indian myth, poured himself forth in creation.

  In the Occident the most impressive representation of love as passion is to be found undoubtedly in the legend of the love potion of Tristan and Iseult, where it is the paradoxology of the mystery that is celebrated: the agony of love’s joy, and the lover’s joy in that agony, which is by noble hearts experienced as the very ambrosia of life. “I have undertaken a labor,” wrote the greatest of the great Tristan poets, Gottfried von Strassburg, from whose version of the legend Wagner took the inspiration for his opera, “a labor out of love for the world and to comfort noble hearts: those that I hold dear, and the world to which my heart goes out.” But then he adds: “Not the common world do I mean, of those who (as I have heard) cannot bear grief and desire but to bathe in bliss. (May God then let them dwell in bliss!) Their world and manner of life my tale does not regard: its life and mine lie apart. Another world do I hold in mind, which bears together in one heart its bitter sweetness and its dear grief, its heart’s delight and its pain of longing, dear life and sorrowful death, dear death and sorrowful life. In this world let me have my world, to be damned with it, or to be saved.”19

  Do we not recognize here an echo of that same metaphysically grounded sense of a coincidence and transcendence of opposites that we have already found symbolized in the figures of Satan in Hell, Christ on the cross, and the moth consumed in the flame?

  However, in the medieval European experience and understanding of love, as interpreted not only by Gottfried and the Tristan poets, but also by the troubadours and Minnesingers of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, there is an altogether different tone from anything of the Orient, whether of the Far, Middle, or Near East. Essentially the Buddhist quality of “compassion,” karuṇā, is equivalent to the Christian of “charity,” agapē , which is epitomized in the admonition of Christ to love your neighbor as yourself!—and even better, beyond that, in the words that I take to be the highest, the noblest and boldest, of the Christian teaching: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust....”20

  In all the great traditional representations of love as compassion, charity, or agapē , the operation of the virtue is described as general and impersonal, transcending differences and even loyalties. And against this higher, spiritual order of love there is set generally in opposition the lower, of lust, or, as it is so often called, “animal passion,” which is equally general and impersonal, transcending differences and even loyalties. Indeed, one could describe the latter most accurately, perhaps, simply as the zeal of the organs, male and female, for each other, and designate the writings of Sigmund Freud as the definitive modern text on the subject of such love. However, in the European twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, in the poetry first of the troubadours of Provence, and then, with a new accent, of the Minnesingers, a way of experiencing love came to expression that was altogether different from either of those two as traditionally opposed. And since I regard this typical and exclusively European chapter of our subject as one of the most important mutations not only of human feeling, but also of the spiritual consciousness of our human race, I am going to dwell on it a little, before proceeding to the final passages of this chapter.

  To begin with, then: Marriage in the Middle Ages was almost exclusively a social, family concern—as it has been forever, of course, in Asia, and is to this day for many in the West. One was married according to family arrangements. Particularly in aristocratic circles, young women hardly out of girlhood were married off as political pawns. And the Church, meanwhile, was sacramentalizing such unions with its inappropriately mystical language about the two that were now to be of one flesh, united through love and by God: and let no man put asunder what God hath joined. Any actual experience of love could enter into such a system only as a harbinger of disaster. For not only could one be burned at the stake in punishment for adultery, but, according to current belief, one would also burn forever in Hell. And yet love came, even so, to such noble hearts as were celebrated by Gottfried; not only came, but was invited in. And it was the work of the troubadours to celebrate this passion, which in their view was of a divine grace altogether higher in dignity than the sacraments of the Church, higher than the sacrament of marriage, and, if excluded from Heaven, then sanctified in Hell. And that the word amor was the reverse in spelling of Roma seemed marvelously to epitomize the sense of the contrast.

  But wherein, then, lay the special quality of this new order of love, the love that was neither agapē nor eros, but amor?

  Debates of the troubadours on the subject were a favorite theme of their poems, and the most fitting definition achieved was that which has been preserved to us in a stanza by one of the most respected of their number, Guiraut de Borneilh, to the point that amor is discriminative—personal and specific—born of the eyes and the heart.

  So, through the eyes love attains the heart:

  For the eyes are the scouts of the heart,

  And the eyes go reconnoitering

  For what it would please the heart to possess.

  And when they are in full accord

  And firm, all three, in one resolve,

  At that time, perfect love is born

  From what the eyes hav
e made welcome to the heart.

  Not otherwise can love be born or have commencement.

  Than by this birth and commencement moved by inclination.21

  To be noted well: such a noble love is not indiscriminate. It is not a “love thy neighbor as thyself no matter who he may be”; not agapē , charity or compassion. Nor is it an expression of the general will to sex, which is equally indiscriminate. It is of the order, that is to say, neither of Heaven nor of Hell, but of earth; grounded in the psyche of a particular individual and, specifically, the predilection of his eyes: their perception of another specific individual and communication of her image to his heart—which is to be (as we are told in other documents of the time) a “noble” or “gentle” heart, capable of the emotion of love, amor, not simply lust.

  And what, then, would be the nature of a love so born?

  In the various contexts of Oriental erotic mysticism, whether of the Near East or of India, the woman is mystically interpreted as an occasion for the lover to experience depths beyond depths of transcendent illumination—much in the way of Dante’s appreciation of Beatrice. Not so among the troubadours. The beloved to them was a woman, not the manifestation of some divine principle; and specifically that woman. The love was for her. And the celebrated experience was an agony of earthly love: an effect of the fact that the union of love can never be absolutely realized on this earth. Love’s joy is in its savor of eternity; love’s pain, the passage of time; so that (as in Gottfried’s words) “bitter sweetness and dear grief” are of its essence. And for those “who cannot bear grief, and desire but to bathe in bliss,” the ambrosial potion of this greatest gift of life is a drink too strong. Gottfried even deified Love as a goddess, and I brought his bewildered couple to her hidden wilderness-chapel, known as “The Grotto for People in Love,” where stood, in the place of an altar, the noble crystalline bed of love.

  Moreover—and this, to me, is the most profoundly moving passage in Gottfried’s version of the legend—when, on the ship sailing from Ireland (with which scene Wagner’s opera commences), the young couple unwittingly drank the potion and became gradually aware of the love that for some time had been quietly growing in their hearts, Brangaene, the faithful servant who by chance had left the fateful flask unattended, said to them in dire warning, “That flask and what it contained will be the death of you both!”

  Fig. 8.3 — Tristan and Iseult

  To which Tristan answered, “So then, God’s will be done, whether death it be or life. For that drink has poisoned me sweetly. I do not know what the death of which you tell is to be, but this death suits me well. And if delightful Iseult is to continue to be my death this way, I shall gladly court an eternal death.”22

  What Brangaene had meant was only physical death. Tristan’s reference to “this death,” however, was to the rapture of his love; and his reference then to “an eternal death” was to an eternity in Hell—which for a medieval Catholic was no mere flourish of speech.

  I think of that Moslem figure of Satan, the great lover of God, in God’s Hell. And when I recall, furthermore, in the light of these words of Tristan, that scene of Dante’s Inferno where the poet, describing his passage through the circle of the carnal sinners, tells of having beheld there, carried past on a burning wind, the whirling, screaming souls of all the most famous lovers of history—Semiramis, Helen, Cleopatra, Paris, and yes! Tristan, too; telling of how he had spoken there to Francesca da Rimini in the arms of her husband’s brother Paolo, asking what had brought those two to that terrible eternity; and she told him of how they had been reading together of Guinevere and Lancelot and at a certain moment, looking at each other, kissed, all trembling, and read no more in the book that day... When I recall, as I say, that passage in the light of Tristan’s welcome of “an eternal death,” I cannot help wondering whether Dante could have been quite correct in regarding the condition of his souls in Hell as of unmitigated pain. His point of view was that of an outsider; one, furthermore, whose own love was bearing him onward and upward to the summit of the highest Heaven. Whereas Paolo and Francesca had the inside point of view of a passion of a much more fiery sort, for a clue to whose terrible joy we may take the word of another visionary, William Blake, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “As I was walking among the fires of Hell, delighted with the enjoyments of genius which to Angels look like torment and insanity...”23 For the point about Hell as of Heaven is this: when there, you are in your proper place, which, finally, is exactly where you want to be.

  Fig. 8.4 — Paolo and Francesca

  The same point has been made in Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit, where the setting is a hotel room in Hell, sparely furnished in Second Empire style and with an image of Eros on the mantel. Into this single chamber three permanent guests are to be introduced by the bellhop, one by one.

  The first, a middle-aged pacifist journalist, has just this minute been shot as a deserter, and what his pride now most requires is to be told that his attempt to escape to Mexico and publish there a pacifist magazine was heroic; he was not a coward. The second to be ushered in, then, is a lesbian who lost her life when a young wife whom she had seduced turned on the gas secretly in her apartment and expired with her, asphyxiated, in bed. Immediately despising the craven male who is to be her companion here forever, this coldly intellectual female gives him no comfort whatsoever in his need. Nor can the next and final entrant, a man-crazy young thing who had drowned her illegitimate child and driven her lover to suicide.

  This second female, of course, becomes immediately interested in the male, who requires, however, not passion but compassion. The lesbian blocks every attempt they make to reach some kind of accord, making moves of her own, meanwhile, toward the other female, who has neither any interest in, nor understanding of what the first woman wants. And when these three—so exquisitely matched—have brought their unrelenting demands on each other to such a pitch of frustration that escape, one way or another, would seem to be the only thing that anyone in such a spot could desire, the locked door of their room swings open—showing outside an azure void—and nobody leaves. The door swings shut, and they are locked forever in their chosen cell.

  Bernard Shaw says much the same in Act III of his Man and Superman: that delicious scene where a little old lady, faithful daughter of Mother Church, is informed that the landscape through which she is happily strolling is not of Heaven but Hell. She is indignant. “I tell you, I know I am not in Hell,” she insists, “because I feel no pain.” Well, if she likes (she is told), she can easily stroll on over the hill into Heaven. However, the strain of remaining there has been found intolerable (she is warned) for those who are happy in Hell. There are a few—and they are mostly English—who nevertheless remain, not because they are happy, but because they think they owe it to their position to be in Heaven. “An Englishman,” states her informer, “thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.” And with that telling Shavian quip, I am carried to my final reflections on this chapter’s theme.

  For it was in the legend of the Holy Grail that the healing work was symbolized through which the world torn between honor and love, as represented in the Tristan legend, was to be cured of its irresolution. The intolerable spiritual disorder of the period was represented in this highly symbolic tale in the figure of a “waste land”—the same that T. S. Eliot in his poem of that name, published in 1922, adopted to characterize the condition of our own troubled time. Every natural impulse in that period of ecclesiastical despotism was branded as corrupt, with the only recognized means of “redemption” vested in sacraments administered by authorities who were themselves indeed corrupt. People were forced to profess and live by beliefs they did not always actually hold. The imposed moral order held precedence over the claims of both truth and love. The pains of Hell were illustrated on earth in the torture of adulteresses, heretics, and other villains, torn apart or set afire in public squares. And all hope of anything better was pitched high aloft to that celestial
estate of which Gottfried spoke with such scorn, where those who could bear neither grief nor desire were to be bathed in a bliss everlasting.

  In the legend of the Grail, as rendered in the Parzival of Gottfried’s very great contemporary and leading literary rival, Wolfram von Eschenbach, this devastation of Christendom is symbolically attributed to the awesome wounding of the young Grail King Anfortas, the meaning of whose name is “infirmity”; and the expected issue of the labors of the awaited Grail Knight was to be the healing of this dreadfully wounded youth. Anfortas—significantly—had only inherited, not rightly earned, the high office of guardianship of the supreme symbol of the spiritual life. He had not, that is to say, been properly proven to his role, but instead still moved in the natural way of youth. And like all noble youths of that period, he rode forth one day from the Castle of the Grail with the battle cry “Amor!” And he encountered immediately a pagan knight from a land not far from the walled garden of Paradise, who had come riding in quest of the Grail and with its name engraved on his spearhead. The two settled their lances, rode at each other, and the pagan knight was slain. But his lance, inscribed with the name of the Grail, had already unsexed the young king, and its head, broken off, remained in the excruciating wound.

 

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