The Hero With a Thousand Faces
by
by
The Divine Aesthetic of Hope
Written in 1948, Hero With A Thousand Faces is only slightly younger than I am. I was introduced to it in my mid-twenties, almost half a century ago. But upon re-reading it I find it as revelatory as it was then. By avoiding the idea of faith entirely, Campbell keeps alive a religion of hope. Hero With A Thousand Faces is a theology of the God of hope. It is a description of this God as a way of perceiving both the world and oneself. It presents, therefore, not an aesthetic idea of God, but God as an aesthetic, the Divine Aesthetic.
Campbell’s Divine Aesthetic is divine because it is “the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find, together with a challengingly persistent suggestion of more remaining to be experienced than will ever be known or told.” It is both universal and infinite. It applies in every culture and in every age. It is constantly the same and yet manifests itself in uncountably many ways, in art, music, dance, science, technology, literature, and of course religion. Its scripture includes fairy tales and learned treatises. Its followers are everyone who can speak, and even infants and the infirm who can’t.
We live in a world of symbols and complex arrangements of symbols we call stories. Some we create for ourselves, some that others create we are born into, and some are essentially eternal. These latter appear to arrive with our genes; they are quite literally bred into us. Befitting their status, these symbols are beyond our control. Hence they appear omnipotent in the specific sense that the Divine Aesthetic includes all aesthetics (including itself, in defiance of pedestrian, finite, human logic). And, who knows, perhaps they are as powerful as they appear. We have no way of assessing their scope or the full character of their existence. They are part of us yet entirely separate. They unite us but allow us to think we are entirely independent of one other. They themselves are not divine, as Plato thought; but they are manifestations of the incomprehensibly divine made suitable for human consumption.
These symbols are gifts; we did nothing to earn them. And their ostensible purpose is to help us through life, and ultimately into death. They are there to comfort and challenge, to explain and confuse, to point out the way forward and to appreciate the road not taken. But above all else, these are symbols of hope, that whoever or whatever is their source knows us better than we know ourselves, and knows us to be bigger, larger, more comprehensive, more inclusive than we can imagine. We are the heroes of our own stories, if we are willing to take these stories seriously.
To call these stories myths is accurate but, in the way of language, vaguely pejorative since the implication is that they are ‘merely’ fictional and therefore not a component of reality. The word disguises the fact that these stories are “the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation.” These are not conventional moral tales; they are stories of adventure, “unpredictable, and dangerous adventure,” from which we will not survive.
We embark on our unique adventure but we are never alone. Our contemporaries are always there to compare notes, to provide encouragement, to share confusion and pain as necessary. And the records of the past adventures of the dead are readily available. So our ‘congregation’ is as large as we care to make it. And aside from access to a reasonable library (ah, the internet!) we have no need for additional resources. The Divine Aesthetic is Green as well as companionable.
Of course there are essential rituals within the Divine Aesthetic, points at which one comes more closely to the source of the symbols and their stories. As Campbell puts it: “from the tomb of the womb to the womb of the tomb, we come: an ambiguous, enigmatical incursion into a world of solid matter that is soon to melt from us, like the substance of a dream.” It is perhaps that point of melting, which is really our extinction, that each ritualistic step in the hero’s journey is meant to emphasize. Dust to dust, but between the two is something exciting. Or at least we are entitled to hope.
Written in 1948, Hero With A Thousand Faces is only slightly younger than I am. I was introduced to it in my mid-twenties, almost half a century ago. But upon re-reading it I find it as revelatory as it was then. By avoiding the idea of faith entirely, Campbell keeps alive a religion of hope. Hero With A Thousand Faces is a theology of the God of hope. It is a description of this God as a way of perceiving both the world and oneself. It presents, therefore, not an aesthetic idea of God, but God as an aesthetic, the Divine Aesthetic.
Campbell’s Divine Aesthetic is divine because it is “the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find, together with a challengingly persistent suggestion of more remaining to be experienced than will ever be known or told.” It is both universal and infinite. It applies in every culture and in every age. It is constantly the same and yet manifests itself in uncountably many ways, in art, music, dance, science, technology, literature, and of course religion. Its scripture includes fairy tales and learned treatises. Its followers are everyone who can speak, and even infants and the infirm who can’t.
We live in a world of symbols and complex arrangements of symbols we call stories. Some we create for ourselves, some that others create we are born into, and some are essentially eternal. These latter appear to arrive with our genes; they are quite literally bred into us. Befitting their status, these symbols are beyond our control. Hence they appear omnipotent in the specific sense that the Divine Aesthetic includes all aesthetics (including itself, in defiance of pedestrian, finite, human logic). And, who knows, perhaps they are as powerful as they appear. We have no way of assessing their scope or the full character of their existence. They are part of us yet entirely separate. They unite us but allow us to think we are entirely independent of one other. They themselves are not divine, as Plato thought; but they are manifestations of the incomprehensibly divine made suitable for human consumption.
These symbols are gifts; we did nothing to earn them. And their ostensible purpose is to help us through life, and ultimately into death. They are there to comfort and challenge, to explain and confuse, to point out the way forward and to appreciate the road not taken. But above all else, these are symbols of hope, that whoever or whatever is their source knows us better than we know ourselves, and knows us to be bigger, larger, more comprehensive, more inclusive than we can imagine. We are the heroes of our own stories, if we are willing to take these stories seriously.
To call these stories myths is accurate but, in the way of language, vaguely pejorative since the implication is that they are ‘merely’ fictional and therefore not a component of reality. The word disguises the fact that these stories are “the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation.” These are not conventional moral tales; they are stories of adventure, “unpredictable, and dangerous adventure,” from which we will not survive.
We embark on our unique adventure but we are never alone. Our contemporaries are always there to compare notes, to provide encouragement, to share confusion and pain as necessary. And the records of the past adventures of the dead are readily available. So our ‘congregation’ is as large as we care to make it. And aside from access to a reasonable library (ah, the internet!) we have no need for additional resources. The Divine Aesthetic is Green as well as companionable.
Of course there are essential rituals within the Divine Aesthetic, points at which one comes more closely to the source of the symbols and their stories. As Campbell puts it: “from the tomb of the womb to the womb of the tomb, we come: an ambiguous, enigmatical incursion into a world of solid matter that is soon to melt from us, like the substance of a dream.” It is perhaps that point of melting, which is really our extinction, that each ritualistic step in the hero’s journey is meant to emphasize. Dust to dust, but between the two is something exciting. Or at least we are entitled to hope.
posted by The Mind of BlackOxford @ January 16, 2019
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