Chapter Three
DESTROYING THE CREATOR
Anybody familiar with the Creator defined in the Bible would likely admit no idea on the face of the earth is more preposterous than the one implied in the title of this chapter. A Being like the one described in the Bible, by definition, could not be destroyed.
While the Creator described in the Bible could not be destroyed as a Being, all that is required to destroy the idea of the Creator is to persuade people such a Being as the One described in the Bible exists only as a concept in the mind of man.
Now most everybody on earth knows that a concept is nothing more than an idea, an explanation in words of something that exists in someone's mind. The concept of the Creator is well known. Briefly summarized, the concept goes like this: the Creator is a Being with a Will, and a Mind, and a Plan. The Creator is infinite, eternal, omniscient, omnipresent, omni-everything. The Creator is actually out-there, an aspect of objective reality, and is called "the Creator" because everything in the universe was created by the Creator. For thousands of years the Creator existed in western civilization as more than concept; to the great majority of people in western civilization the Creator was fact.
Joseph Campbell destroyed millions of people's ablility to see the Creator as fact. He accomplished this feat by changing the Creator from fact to concept in the minds of people.
It is absolutely critical that we see the distinction between fact and concept. Fact is an idea that exists in the mind. So too is concept. At this point it is impossible to distinguish fact from concept. The distinction becomes apparent when we see that fact is believed to have objective reality, whereas everyone agrees concept may exist only in the mind of a person.
The scientific method teaches us how to distinguish between concept and fact. The method through which we establish this most important distinction is called perception. Elementary science teaches us that all scientific knowledge begins with a hypothesis, a theory about some specific state of affairs. For instance, a student might wonder what water is composed of. Suppose the student theorizes, hypothesizes, conceptualizes that water is composed of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. This hypothesis is not fact--it is concept: it exists only in the mind of the student. Now if the student conducts an experiment and in that experiment perceives that mixing two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom creates water, and if other people reproduce the student's experiment exactly and perceive the same results, the student is led by science to see that the hypothesis is no longer concept, the concept is now called fact, scientific fact. Even though there has been no change in the elements of the idea in the mind of the student, there has been a fundamental change in the role those elements play in the mind of the student. Now that the concept has been changed to fact through perception of the results of the experiment, the student's options as a scientist are now determined, they are now ruled, by the thing that once was called concept but is now called fact. When it was concept, there was no authority in that thing to rule the student. Once the concept became fact it carried with it the authority to rule the mind of the student.
Joseph Campbell used the scientific method to destroy the Creator as fact. He changed the Creator from fact to concept and convinced the reader that Campbell's definition of god was fact. Remember what we read earlier, "...our view is no longer confined to a spot of space on the surface of the earth. It surveys the whole of the planet. And this fact, this lack of horizon is something new...Now it has been--as I have already said--chiefly to the scientific method of research that this release of mankind has been due, and along with mankind as a whole, every developed individual has been freed from the once protective but now dissolved horizons of the local land, local moral code, local modes of group thought and sentiment, local heritages of signs. But this scientific method was itself a product of the minds of already self-reliant individuals courageous enough to be free. Moreover, not only in the sciences but in every department of life the will and courage to credit one's own senses and to honor one's own decisions, to name one's own virtues and to claim one's own vision of truth, has been the generative forces of the new age..."
At the heart of Campbell's power was an analysis of reality that defined western civilization as a story of people who could not tell the difference between concept and fact. He believed the scientific method of research had provided "release of mankind" because it was through the scientific method that people became enabled to clearly distinguish between fact and concept.
Campbell gave concept a new name; he called it "the local heritage of signs" but he was still talking about what we commonly know as concept: "...and along with mankind as a whole, every developed individual has been freed from the once protective but now dissolved horizons of the local land, local moral code, local modes of group thought and sentiment, local heritages of signs." Campbell believed that the scientific method had freed people from inherited concepts that had ruled mankind in the past. It was through being delivered from the local heritage of signs that individuals were freed from the local land, local moral code, local modes of group thought and sentiment" that had once held them in bondage.
The local heritage of signs were the words a person inherited that explained the answers to the questions that had to be answered if an individual was to have a self-image. Campbell understood better than most that a person's self-image literally provided the structuring force that guided every action in the life of an individual.
Campbell contended that the scientific method allowed an individual to ignore the local heritage of signs and through ignoring the local heritage of signs, the individual became free from the local land, the local moral code, the local modes of group thought and sentiment. As a result of this freedom from "local" structuring forces, there was now the opportunity for new structuring forces to be chosen by the individual. Campbell would provide these new structuring forces.
At the heart of the local heritage of signs in western civilization is the concept of the Creator. Campbell explains it this way: "In the Western rangers of mythological thought and imagery, on the other hand, whether in Europe or in the Levant, the ground of being is normally personified as the Creator, of whom Man is the creature, and the two are not the same (italics mine); so that here the function of myth and ritual cannot be to catalyze an experience of ineffable identity. Man alone, turned inward, according to this view can experience only his own creaturely soul, which may or may not be properly related to its Creator. The high function of Occidental (western) myth and ritual, consequently, is to establish a means of relationship--of God to Man and Man to God. Such means are furnished, furthermore, by institutions, the rules of which cannot be learned through any scrutiny of nature, whether inward or without. Supernaturally revealed, these have come from God himself, as the myth of each institution tells; and they are administered by his clergy, in the spirit of the myth."
In order understand what has happened in the modern world it is necessary to understand what Campbell meant by "the spirit of the myth." Remember that Joseph Campbell presented himself as a scientist whose job was to teach us the science of mythology? He specifically stated that through the scientific method people were now in a position to know the facts about mythology. These "facts"--the discoveries Campbell believes himself to have made--comprise the totality of what he means by "the spirit of the myth."
And what are the facts that comprise "the spirit of the myth?" Campbell summarized the basic principle that governed everything he had to say about myth, "...it must be conceded, as a basic principle of our natural history of the gods and heroes, that whenever a myth has been taken literally its sense has been perverted; but also, reciprocally, that whenever it has been dismissed as a mere priestly fraud or sign of inferior intelligence, truth has slipped out the other door."
Basic principles are "basic" precisely because they form the base upon which every other fact is built. Basic principles are the facts that compose the table upon which rests other facts that comprise the jigsaw puzzle of understanding. Therefore any final understanding is determined, is a direct product, of the basic principles upon which the understanding is constructed.
Now let's examine what Campbell had to say about the "natural history" of the god myth chosen by the people of western civilization. We have already established that the myth was a myth about "the Creator, of whom Man is the creature, and the two are not the same..." It is most important to remember that Campbell proposed that two things must be understood before an examination of the Creator myth could occur: (1) "that whenever a myth has been taken literally its sense has been perverted"; (2) neither could it be "dismissed as a mere priestly fraud or sign of inferior intelligence".
Those who accepted Campbell's definition of myth were obliged to approach the study of the Creator after having presupposed the Creator could not be literally true. Campbell was exactly like a judge who instructed the jury before hearing the evidence that the person being tried had to be judged guilty. No matter what evidence was presented to the contrary, the Creator could never be judged to be literally true. Let us hope we never stand before a jury so instructed.
The question arises as to why these "myths" Campbell spent his life studying are important enough to warrant our attention if none of them are literally true. Campbell explains his view of the importance of these myths: "The comparative study of the mythologies of the world compels us to view the cultural history of mankind as a unit; for we find that such themes as the fire-theft, deluge, land of the dead, virgin birth, and resurrected hero have a worldwide distribution--appearing everywhere in new combinations while remaining, like the elements of a kaleidoscope, only a few and always the same. Furthermore, whereas in tales told for entertainment such mythical themes are taken lightly--in a spirit, obviously, of play--they appear also in religious contexts, where they are accepted not only as factually true but even as revelations of the verities to which the whole culture is a living witness and from which it derives both its spiritual authority and its temporal power. No human society has yet been found in which such mythological motifs have not been rehearsed in liturgies; interpreted by seers, poets, theologians, or philosophers; presented in art; magnified in song; and ecstatically experienced in life-empowering visions. Indeed, the chronicle of our species, from its earliest page, has been not simply an account of the progress of man the tool-maker, but--more tragically--a history of the pouring of blazing visions into the minds of seers and the efforts of earthly communities to incarnate unearthly covenants. Every people has received its own seal and sign of supernatural designation, communicated to its heroes and daily proved in the lives and experience of its folk. And though many who bow with closed eyes in the sanctuaries of their own tradition rationally scrutinize and disqualify the sacraments of others, an honest comparison immediately reveals that all have been built from one fund of mythological motifs--variously selected, organized, interpreted, and ritualized, according to local need, but revered by every people on earth."
From Campbell's point of view myths are important because everybody who ever lived was influenced in a fundamental way by them. But he had another reason: A study of mythology "compels us to study the cultural history of mankind as a unit." Remember Campbell's overarching goal? "...to work for the forces of unity". In order to create a unified world view, mankind must perceive itself to be a unit--to be one. Anything that contributed to this unified world view was a step in the right direction for Campbell. If it was possible to see the common thread that binds all mankind together regardless of apparent cultural distinctions, then a foundation for the unified world view had been found. Campbell believed a "natural history" of myth could allow people to see the structuring force that binds all people together.
Campbell continues, "A fascinating psychological, as well as historical, problem is thus presented. Man, apparently, cannot maintain himself in the universe without belief in some arrangement of the general inheritance of myth. In fact, the fullness of his life would even seem to stand in a direct ratio to the depth and range not of his rational thought but of his local mythology. Whence the force of these unsubstantial themes, by which they are empowered to galvanize populations, creating of them civilizations, each with a beauty and self-compelling destiny of its own? And why should it be that whenever men have looked for something solid on which to found their lives, they have chosen not the facts in which the world abounds, but the myths of an immemorial imagination--preferring even to make life a hell for themselves and their neighbors, in the name of some violent god, to accepting gracefully the bounty the world affords?"
Campbell believed that since man "cannot maintain himself in the universe without belief in some arrangement of the general inheritance of myth" someone might as well come up with a myth that has the power to bring all people together into a unified world view.
But here's the point that made Joseph Campbell a decisive influence in modern culture: the myth Joseph Campbell was constructed was a myth supposedly constructed out of the "facts" discovered through scientific research. He explains it best: "No one of adult mind today would turn to the Book of Genesis to learn of the origins of the earth, the plants, the beasts, and man. There was no flood, no tower of Babel, no first couple in paradise, and between the first known appearance of men on earth and the first buildings of cities, not one generation (Adam to Cain) but a good two million must have come into this world and passed along. Today we turn to science for our imagery of the past and of the structure of the world, and what the spinning demons of the atom and galaxies of the telescope's eye reveal is a wonder that makes the babel of the Bible seem a toyland dream of the dear childhood of our brain."