A Journey or a Pilgrimage – Joseph Campbell and Spiritual Formation
I remember learning about the Hero’s Journey in elementary school. Part of it stuck: We learned that heroes go through the stages of leaving, trial, success, and returning home. As an elementary student, I got an elementary version of the Hero’s journey.
This week, I read the origins of that knowledge from elementary school – Joseph Campbell’s book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. He puts forward the idea of a monomyth – a story arc that he sees describes all myths. According to Campbell, all myths (and religions) follow this same patterned journey and are best understood through the psychoanalysis of Jung and Freud. Campbell says, “It is the purpose of this present book to uncover some of the truths disguised for us under the figures of religion and mythology.”[1]
I found it lacking. Campbell says he will “bring together a host of myths and folktales from every corner of the world, and to let the symbols speak for themselves. The parallels will be immediately apparent.”[2] It lacked the intellectual rigor and evidence his claims demanded, and the parallels were neither apparent nor immediate. He often connects myths and parts of stories to his framework and gives little evidence for their fitting. It appears to me he read these myths and folktales with his framework in mind and fit them into the framework rather than developing the framework from the stories.
I hope to make a redemptive point by connecting Campbell’s Hero’s Journey with Francois Fenelon and Robert Mulholland’s spiritual formation.
François Fénelon, the 17th-century French bishop and theologian, describes a traveler walking across a vast plain. He likens the plain to our hearts. He explains how we can believe that we have given our entire hearts, the plain, to God. Imagine being out in the plains of Kansas, where it’s so flat that you see the horizon in every direction. You see where the sky touches the earth, and it’s easy to assume that the world ends there. Fenelon says the traveler “sees nothing ahead of him but a slight rise which ends the distant horizon. When he tops this rise, he finds a new stretch of country as vast as the first.”[3]
Fénelon’s point is that we may have traversed the plain of our hearts and given all we’ve found to the Lord. Then, the Lord reveals a vast, unexplored new plain. That part of our heart still doesn’t belong to him.
The Hero’s Journey is like liminality and threshold concepts, where we must go through the process of becoming. Partaking in the Hero’s Journey means being exposed to and exploring these new vast plains—the space between the known world and the unknown.
In his book Invitation to a Journey, Robert Mulholland describes the Classical Christian Pilgrimage. Mulholland says that in this vast plain, “we begin to let the Spirit of God reveal to us aspects of our inner being that have been invisible to our view but that now we begin to see as hindrances to our growth toward wholeness in the image of Christ.”[4]
The Holy Spirit leads the Christian pilgrim through the vast plain for our transformation and formation in a process of awakening, purgation, illumination, and union. Through a makeshift Hero’s Journey, we become aware of our unlikeness to Christ in awakening. God leads us through a trial time of purgation where our unlikeness to Christ is mourned and given up. In the third step, illumination, we experience transformation, and our lives are different. Then, finally, in union, we enjoy God as we integrate this experience into our story.
Similarly, in The Hero’s Journey, Campbell says that the Hero will go through the basic formula “separation, initiation, and return” and that the Hero’s Journey “may be over-ground, incidentally, fundamentally it is inward-into the depths where obscure resistances are overcome, and long lost, forgotten powers are revivified, to be made available for the transfiguration of the world.”[5] Whereas the Christian pilgrimage is initiated at the point where we are unlike Christ, the hero journey for Campbell is connected to a destiny that has “summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown.”[6]
The Christian pilgrimage is initiated and fulfilled by God’s grace, whereas a call from an unknown place initiates the Hero’s journey. A pilgrimage is undertaken to experience the holy – a journey is undertaken to experience triumph.[7]
Here is my take-away from Campbell. There is a journey, and the stories we live and tell shape and form us. I want to be shaped by the grand story of God and the unique pilgrimage that God is writing in my life as I journey on this doctorate with him. I’m less interested in being shaped by my own Hero’s Journey and far more interested in experiencing God’s pilgrimage.
[1] Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 3. ed., with rev, The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell 17 (Novato, Calif: New World Library, 2008). xii
[2] Campbell, Hero, xiii
[3] François Fénelon, Christian Perfection (Minneapolis: Dimensional Books, 1975). 191-192
[4] Robert Mulholland, Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2016) 98
[5] Campbell, Hero, 22-23
[6] Campbell, 48
[7] Campbell, 30
About the Author
Robert Radcliff
Hi! I'm Robert, and I'm seeking to understand who God is calling me to be in my community while helping others do the same. I enjoy reading, training for triathlons, and using exclamation points!8 responses to “A Journey or a Pilgrimage – Joseph Campbell and Spiritual Formation”
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Robert,
Thank you for pointing out the common ground you see in Campbell’s work. There is a Journey, and there is a story. I am perplexed by what we do with the “hero” part of his work. Is one a “hero” simply by engaging with a journey and returning having crossed a threshold. Or is that an over-dramatization of what is normal and simply an attempt to downplay that which should truly be evaluated.
Darren, I don’t know. I think for Campbell, a hero today is somebody who saves society by understanding others; he writes, “Man is the crucial mystery” on page 337. He writes about humanity forging society in their image. I’m uncertain, but I think Campbell hopes that by identifying the monomyth, people will shed religious trappings and embrace the Jungian collective unconscious(?).
The modern hero for Campbell ventures from their normal world to the unknown and comes back dead to his personal ego and alive to self. (209) Then the elixir for the world is progress and to “teach the lesson he has learned of life renewed.” (15)
I think the easiest (and probably best) thing to do with Campbell is to drop all of his Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis and take the journey away. Nearly none of the articles or videos on the Hero’s Journey go into those areas. Leave it out and say here’s a neat way to tell a story and leave it at that.
Funny you should say that. When I first started looking into the book, it was fascinating. But by the end, it felt like an overplayed illustration that started to break down because it was taken too far.
Robert –
I am so glad you brought Mulholland into the conversation! The whole notion that our spiritual formation is “for the sake of others” immediately requires we step out of the self-focused, self-advancing current.
What are some ways that you’ve seen people retain a “for the sake of others” posture, even when navigating the complexity of their own (“hero’s”) journey?
Jeremiah, I think our mission is the meeting point of navigating our own journies and the sake of others’ posture. One of my teammates in Cambodia used to say God is at work in the life of the mission as much as he’s at work in the life of the missionary. It was a good reminder that we were there to grow our relationships with God as we model that for the local churches around us. The points where we are unlike God and where God wants to work are often the places where we struggle to fulfill the mission he has for us.
Thank you, Robert. That’s a great way to contextualize Jesus’ reminder that “apart from me you can do nothing” (Jn 15:5, NIV), and abiding in him is the way to fruitfulness. Thanks again!
Hi Robert,
I liked the point of your blog where you said the Hero’s journey is a process of becoming and that the Holy Spirit leads the Christian pilgrim through transformation. God is in our story. What a beautiful reminder that God is in our story and that the Holy Spirit powers the transformation. I am reminded that in some of our stories we enter into the Dark Night of the Soul, where God in His mercy becomes the pinnacle of our transformation story. Was there one story of adventure where you experienced the Hero’s journey?
Judith, I think about my time on the mission field. Before we left, I was good at speaking to churches about our passion and calling. In America, I’m a very competent person. When we arrived on the field, we were ahead of the curve and had a little bit of language and a lot of cultural exposure. Those first months were like being thrown into the deep end.
It was like returning to being a baby. I had no way to communicate my needs with the people around me, I struggled to eat, and I didn’t sleep well as my body adjusted to living 8 degrees north of the equator.
I learned about God’s grace, love, and mercy during that time. I went to Cambodia, knowing intellectually that I couldn’t change people – that’s a work of—that was, I didn’t understand how dependent I would be and become on thnity around me. The unknown world for me was being dependent on others for everything. Then, the return for me was re-learning independence in that context and being able to help others find it as well.