BILL MOYERS:
So the courage to love became the courage to affirm against tradition, whatever knowledge stands confirmed in one’s own experience.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
Yeah.
BILL MOYERS:
Why was that important in the evolution of the West?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
Well, it was important in that it gives the West this accent, as I’ve been saying, on the individual, that he should have faith in his experience, and not simply mouth terms that have come to him from other mouths. I think that’s the great thing in the West. The validity of the individual’s experience of what humanity is, what life is, what values are, against the monolithic system.
BILL MOYERS:
Was there some of this in the legend of the Holy Grail?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
Yes. Wolfram has a very interesting statement about the origin of the Grail.
He says the Grail was brought from heaven by the neutral angels.
There was the war in heaven between God and Lucifer, and the angelic hosts that sided one group with Lucifer, and the other with God. Pair of opposites, good and evil, God and Satan.
The Grail was brought down through the middle, the way of the middle, by the neutral angels.
BILL MOYERS:
What is the Grail representing, then?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
Well, the Grail becomes the, what we call it, that which is attained and realized by people who have lived their own lives. So the story very briefly is of this — I’m giving it now as Wolfram gives it — but this is just one version. The Grail King was a lovely young man, but he had not earned that position. And the Grail represents the fulfillment of the highest spiritual potentialities of the human consciousness. And he was a lovely young man, and he rode forth from his castle with the war cry, “Amor!” And as he’s riding forth, a Moslem, a pagan warrior, a Mohammedan warrior, comes out of the woods, a knight. And they both level their lances at each other, they drive at each other, and the lance of the grail king kills the Mohammedan, but the Mohammedan lance castrates the Grail King.
What that means is that the Christian separation of matter and spirit, of the dynamism of life and the spiritual, natural grace and supernatural grace, has really castrated nature. And the European mind, the European life, has been as it were, emasculated by this; true spirituality, which would have come from this, has been killed. And then what did the pagan represent? He was a person from the suburbs of Eden. He was regarded as a nature man, and on the head of his lance was written the word, “Grail.”
That is to say, nature intends the grail. Spiritual life is the bouquet of natural life, not a supernatural thing imposed upon it.
And so the impulses of nature are what give authenticity to life, not obeying rules come from a supernatural authority, that’s the sense of the Grail.
BILL MOYERS:
And the Grail that these romantic legends were searching for is the union once again of what had been divided?
The peace that comes from joining?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
The grail becomes symbolic of an authentic life that has lived in terms of its own volition, in terms of its own impulse system, which carries it between the pairs of opposites, of good and evil, light and dark. Wolfram starts his epic with a short poem saying, “Every act has both good and evil results.” Every act in life yields pairs of opposites in its results. The best we can do is lean toward the light, that is to say, intend the light, and what the light is, is that of the harmonious relationships that come from compassion, with suffering, understanding of the other person. This is what the Grail is about.
BILL MOYERS:
When we say God is love, does that have anything to do with romantic love? Does mythology ever link romantic love and God?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, that’s what it did do. Love was a divine visitation, and that’s why it was superior to marriage. That was the troubadour idea. If God is love, well, then, love is God, okay.
BILL MOYERS: There’s that wonderful passage in Corinthians by Paul, where he says “Love beareth all things, endureth all things.”
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, that’s the same business. Love knows no pain.
BILL MOYERS: And yet, one of my favorite stories of mythology is out of Persia, where there is the idea that Lucifer was condemned to hell because he loved God so much.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yeah, and that’s a basic Muslim idea, about Iblis, that’s the Muslim name for Satan, being God’s greatest lover. Why was Satan thrown into hell? Well, the standard Story is that when God created the angels, he told them to bow to none but himself. Then he created man, whom he regarded as a higher form than the angels, and he asked the angels then to serve man. And Satan would not bow to man. Now, this is interpreted in the Christian tradition, as I recall from my boyhood instruction, as being the egotism of Satan, he would not bow to man. But in this view, he could not bow to man, because of his love for God, he could bow only to God. And then God says, “Get out of my sight.” Now, the worst of the pains of hell insofar as hell has been described is the absence of the beloved, which is God. So how does Iblis sustain the situation in hell? By the memory of the echo of God’s voice when God said, “Go to hell.” And I think that’s a great sign of love, do you agree?
BILL MOYERS: Well, it’s certainly true in life that the greatest hell one can know is to be separated from the one you love.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yeah.
BILL MOYERS: That’s why I’ve liked the Persian myth for so long. Satan as God’s lover.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yeah. And he is separated from God, and that’s the real pain of Satan.
BILL MOYERS: You once took the saying of Jesus. “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 the sun to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the just and the unjust.” You once took that to be the highest, the noblest, the boldest of the Christian teachings. Do you still feel that way?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, I think the main teaching of Christianity is, “Love your enemies.”
BILL MOYERS: Hard to do.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I know, well, that’s it — I mean, when Peter drew his sword and cut off the servant’s ear there, in the Gethsemane affair, and Jesus said, “Put up your sword, Peter,” and put the ear back on, Peter has been drawing his sword ever since. And one can speak about Petrine or Christian Christianity in that sense. And I would say that the main doctrine of Christianity is the doctrine of Agape, of true love for he who is yours, him who is your enemy.
BILL MOYERS: How does one love one’s enemy without condoning what the enemy does, accepting his aggression?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, I’ll tell you how to do that. “Do not pluck the mole from your enemy’s eye, but pluck the beam from your own,” do you know?
Now, I have a friend whom I met by chance, a young Buddhist monk from Tibet. You know, in 1959 the Communists crashed down and bombed the palace of the Dalai Lama, bombarded Lhasa, and people murdered and all that kind of thing. And he escaped, he escaped at the time of the Dalai Lama. And those monasteries, I mean, there were monasteries with 5,000 monks, 6,000 monks, all wiped out, tortured and everything else. I haven’t heard one word of incrimination of the Chinese from that young man. There is absolutely no condemnation of the Chinese here. And you hear this from the Dalai Lama himself. You will not hear a word of condemnation. This recognition of the way of life through which that vitality of the spirit is moving in its own way. I mean, these men are sufferers of terrific violence, and there’s no animosity. I learned religion from them.
No comments:
Post a Comment