JOSEPH CAMPBELL: We want to think about God. God is a thought, God is an idea, but its reference is to something that transcends all thinking. I mean, he’s beyond being, beyond the category of being or nonbeing. Is he or is he not? Neither is nor is not.
Every god, every mythology, every religion, is True in this sense:
it is true as metaphorical of the human and cosmic mystery.
He who thinks he knows doesn’t know. He who knows that he doesn’t know, knows.
There is an old story that is still good — the story of the quest, the spiritual quest, that is to say, to find the inward thing that you basically are. All of these symbols in mythology refer to you — have you been reborn? Have you died to your animal nature and come to life as a human incarnation? You are God in your deepest identity. You are one with the transcendent.
BILL MOYERS: The images of God are many. Joseph Campbell called them “the masks of eternity,” and said they both cover and reveal the face of glory. All our names and images for God are masks, Campbell said, they signify that ultimate reality, which by definition transcends language and art.
A myth is a mask of God, too, a metaphor for what lies behind the visible world. As teacher, scholar and writer, Joseph Campbell spent his life in the study of comparative religion. He wanted to know what it means that God assumes such different masks in different cultures. We go east of Suez and see people dancing before a bewildering array of fantastic gods. When those people come here, well, Campbell told the story of the young Hindu who called on him in New York and said, “When I visit a foreign country, I like to acquaint myself with its religion. So I bought myself a Bible and for some months now have been reading it from the beginning. But, you know, I can’t find any religion in it.”
Campbell, who became president of the American Society for the Study or Religion, was at home in the sacred scriptures of all the world’s great faiths. He found comparable stories in them: stories of creation, of virgin births, incarnations, death and resurrection, second comings, judgment days. Quoting one of his favorite Hindu scriptures which he translated from the Sanskrit, he concluded that “truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names.”
Joseph Campbell began his journey into this literature of the spirit after his imagination was excited by a visit to the Museum of Natural History in New York when he was just a boy. We met there a few months before his death and talked through a long evening, about the masks or eternity.
Is there something in common in every culture that creates this need for God?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, I think anyone who has an experience of mystery and awe knows that there is a dimension, let’s say, or the universe that is not that which is available to his senses. There’s a wonderful saying in one of the Upanishads, “When, before a sunset or a mountain and the beauty of this or that, you pause and say, ‘Ah, that is participation in divinity.'” And I think that’s what it is, it’s the realization of wonder. And also the experience of tremendous power, which people of course living in the world of nature are experiencing all the time. You know there’s something there that’s much bigger than the human dimension.
And our way of thinking in The West largely is that God is the source of the energy.
The way in most Oriental thinking, and I think in most of what we call ‘primitive’ thinking, also, is that God is the manifestation of the energy, not its source, that God is the vehicle of the energy.
And the level of energy that is involved or represented determines the character of the god.
There are gods of violence, there are gods of compassion, there are gods that unite the two, there are gods that are the protectors of kings in their war campaigns.
These are personifications of the energy that’s in play, and what the source of the energy is. What’s the source of the energy in these lights around us? I mean, this is a total mystery.
BILL MOYERS: Doesn’t this make of faith an anarchy, a sort of continuing war among principalities?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: As Life is, yes.
I mean, even in your mind, when it comes to doing anything, there will be a war : A decision as to priorities, what should you do now?
Or, in relationship to other people, there will be four or five possibilities of my way of action.
And the notion of divinity or divine life in my mind would be what would determine my decision.
If it were rather crude, it would be a rather crude decision.
BILL MOYERS:
But is Divinity just
What We Think?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL:
Yes.
BILL MOYERS: What does that do to faith?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, it’s a tough one about faith.
BILL MOYERS: You are a man of faith-
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I’m not…
BILL MOYERS: You’re a man of wonder and…
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yeah, I don’t have to have faith, I have experience.
BILL MOYERS: What kind of experience?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, I’ve experience of the wonder, of the life, I have experience of love, I have experience of hatred, malice — I’d like to punch the guy’s jaw, and I admit this. But those are different divinities, I mean, from the point of view of a symbolic imaging. Those are different images operating in me.
For instance, when I was a little boy and was being brought up a Roman Catholic, I was told I had a guardian angel on my right side and a tempting devil on my left, and when it came to making a decision of what I would do, the decision would depend on which one had most influence on me. And I must say that in my boyhood, and I think also in the people who were teaching me, they actually concretized those thoughts.
BILL MOYERS: They did what?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: It was an angel. That angel is a fact and the devil is a fact, do you see; otherwise, one thinks of them as metaphors for the energies that are afflicting and guiding you.
BILL MOYERS: And those energies come from?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: From your own life. The energy of your own body, the different organs in your body, including your head, are the conflict systems.
BILL MOYERS: And your life comes from where?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, there you are. From the ultimate energy that’s the life of the universe. And then you say, well, somebody has to generate that. Why do you have to say that? Why can’t it be impersonal? That would be Brahman, that would be the transcendent mystery, that you can also personify.
BILL MOYERS: Can men and women live with an impersonality?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yes, they do all over the place. Just go east of Suez. In the East, the gods are much more elemental.
BILL MOYERS: Elemental?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Elemental, less human and more like the powers of nature. I see a deity as representing an energy system, and part of the energy system is the human energy systems of love and malice, hate, benevolence, compassion. And in Oriental thinking, the god is the vehicle of the energy, not its source.
BILL MOYERS: Well, of course the heart of the Christian faith is that these elemental forces you’re talking about embodied themselves in a human being in reconciling mankind to God.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yes. And the basic Buddhist idea is that that is true of you, as well, and that what Jesus was a person who realized that in himself, and lived out of the Christhood of his nature.
BILL MOYERS: What do you think about Jesus?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: We just don’t, know about Jesus. All we know are four contradictory texts that tell us what he did.
BILL MOYERS: Written many years after he lived.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: But I think we know what Jesus said. I think the sayings of Jesus are probably pretty close. But when you read the Thomas gospel, the Gospel According to Thomas, which was dug up there in that, with those other gnostic texts, it has all the flavor of one of the synoptics, Matthew, Mark or Luke, except that it doesn’t say quite the same thing.
There’s one wonderful passage, it’s the last one in the gospel, actually. “When will the kingdom come?” Now, in Mark 13, I think it is, we hear that the end of the world is going to come. That is to say, a mythological image, that is, the end of the world, is taken as a reference to an actual, physical, historical fact to be. When you read the Thomas gospel, Jesus says, “The kingdom of the father will not come by expectation; the kingdom of the father is spread upon the earth and men do not see it.”
So I look at you now in that sense and the radiance of the presence of the divine is known to me, through you.
BILL MOYERS: Through me?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: You, sure.
BILL MOYERS: A journalist?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Jesus also says in this text, “He who drinks from my mouth will become as I am, and I shall be he. “He’s talking from the point of view of that being of beings which we call the Christ, who is the being of all of us. And anyone who lives in relation to that is as Christ. And anyone who incarnates, or rather brings into his life the message of the Word, is equivalent to Jesus. That’s the sense of that.
BILL MOYERS: So that’s what you mean when you say, “I am radiating God to you.”
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: You are, yes.
BILL MOYERS: And you to me.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: And I’m speaking this seriously, yes.
BILL MOYERS: Oh, I take it seriously. I happen to believe the same as you without being able to articulate it as you do. I do sense that there is divinity. The divinity is in the other.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: So you are the vehicle, you are as it were radiant of the spirit. And that’s…why not recognize it?
BILL MOYERS: I’ll tell you what the most gripping scripture in the Christian New Testament is for me. It says, “I believe. Help thou my unbelief.”
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I believe in what?
BILL MOYERS: I believe in this ultimate reality, and that I can experience it, that I do experience it, but I don’t have answers to my questions. I believe in the question, Is there a God?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I had a very amusing experience, which might be well worth telling. I was in the New York Athletic Club swimming pool, and you know, you don’t wear your collar this way or that way when you’re in a swimming pool. And I was introduced to a priest, “This is Father So-and-so, this is Joseph Campbell.” I’m a professor, he’s a professor at one of our Catholic universities. So after I’d had my swim, I came and sat down beside, in what we call, you know, the horizontal athlete situation, and the priest is beside me. And he said, “Mr. Campbell, are you a priest?” I said, “No, Father.” He said, “Are you a Catholic?” I said, “I was, Father.” He said, and now he had the sense to ask it this way, “Do you believe in a personal God?” I said, “No, Father.” And he said, “Well, I suppose there is no way to prove by logic the existence of a personal God.” And I said, “If there were, Father, what would be the value of faith?” “Well, Mr. Campbell, it’s nice to have met you.” And he was off. I really felt I had done a jujitsu trick there.
But that was a very illuminating conversation to me. The fact that he asked, “Do you believe in a personal God?” that meant that he also recognized the possibility of the Brahman, of the transcendent energy.
BILL MOYERS: Well, then, what is religion?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, the word religion means religio, linking back, linking back the phenomenal person to a source. If we say it is the one life in both of us, then my separate life has been linked to the one life, religio, linked back. And this becomes symbolized in the images of religion, which represent that connecting link.
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