{"id":30641,"date":"2023-01-30T08:51:24","date_gmt":"2023-01-30T16:51:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=30641"},"modified":"2023-01-30T18:21:01","modified_gmt":"2023-01-31T02:21:01","slug":"eternity-in-our-hearts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/eternity-in-our-hearts\/","title":{"rendered":"Eternity in our hearts"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to Time Magazine, Joseph Campbell wrote one of the 100 most influential books of the 20th century in \u201cThe Hero With A Thousand Faces.\u201d[1]<\/a> I had been exposed to Campbell\u2019s work through a Psychology course I took as an undergraduate; we were assigned to watch \u201cThe Power of Myth\u201d, the 1988 series of PBS interviews between he and Bill Moyers.<\/p>\n

Long after that class, I encountered the Monomyth again: A story developer at Disney named Christopher Vogler wrote a memo he called \u201cA Practical Guide to Joseph Campbell\u2019s A Hero With A Thousand Faces.\u201d[2]<\/a> \u00a0In the memo (that would later be developed into an important book on screenwriting called \u201cThe Writer\u2019s Journey\u201d) Vogler outlined stages of the Hero\u2019s journey and explained how it could be embedded as the template for the story arc of an epic film. That memo quickly circulated all over Hollywood and since then it has directly influenced hundreds of screenplays as diverse as the Lion King, the Matrix, Harry Potter, Toy Story, and Die Hard.<\/p>\n

When I realized that movies like Star Wars (before Vogler\u2019s memo), and most every epic film I loved (since the memo), were ultimately based on \u201cThe Hero With A Thousand Faces\u201d, I was all in! As a lover of legends, myths, films, and stories, the understanding gained through Campbell\u2019s scheme was helpful in recognizing why I relished these narratives.<\/p>\n

So, with great anticipation I prepared to dig into the original source for myself, only to realize upon reading the book that I didn\u2019t enjoy it, at all.<\/p>\n

I found the writing itself to be dense\u2014full of details about and connections between individual myths\u2014but there seemed to be little evidence to support the claims Campbell made about each stage of the Hero\u2019s journey. Additionally, much weight was put on the work of Carl Jung (and to a lesser extent Freud) interpreting legends and myths through the lens of now-suspect psychoanalytical theory, often in ways that stretched credulity at best, and at worst applied a narrow western interpretation to elements of beautiful stories that are as diverse as the world and history itself.<\/p>\n

In short, like a rare instance of a movie being better than the book it\u2019s based on, I was much more benefited by other people\u2019s commentaries and interpretations of the book than I was with the book itself.<\/p>\n

However, it wasn\u2019t just the writing style I had challenges with: Though I have long appreciated the idea of a nearly universal pattern for a hero\u2019s journey, and must give Joseph Campbell credit for that, I disagree with his conclusions in this book about what that pattern means for humanity.<\/p>\n

Campbell starts off by stating the book\u2019s goal: \u201cit is the purpose of this present book to uncover some of the truths disguised for us under the figures of religion and mythology\u201d.[3]<\/a> It became clear to me that he believes the Bible, including Jesus\u2019 redemptive story, is simply another myth (though not entirely denying some of its historicity, as he claims a myth can contain elements of historical truth[4]<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Campbell postulates that the similarities in myths that also show up in the Bible (creation, virgin birth, resurrection, etc.) are universal precisely because they are all part of some deep human longing that gets manifested through legend: \u201cThe symbols of mythology are not manufactured; they cannot be ordered, invented, or permanently suppressed. They are spontaneous productions of the psyche, and each bear within it, undamaged, the germ power of its source.\u201d[5]<\/a><\/p>\n

So, as a believer in a real, personal God who is revealed through Scripture and in the unique historical person of Jesus, what am I to make of Campbell\u2019s works?<\/p>\n

I find encouragement in C.S. Lewis understanding of Myth. As a significant 20th<\/sup> century mythmaker, Lewis believed that \u201cthe story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it\u00a0really happened\u201d[6]<\/a> . His embrace of this truth\u2014that was part of his own conversion story\u2014was because of a conversation with another friend who was also a great mythmaker and storyteller; J.R.R. Tolkien.<\/p>\n

Both Tolkien and Lewis were influenced by the writer and apologist G.K. Chesterton. He wrote against the reasoning that because myths had similarities with the Bible, that the stories found in the Bible were simply copies of those other myths. Chesterton argued that myths containing elements of Biblical narrative were signs of God working in the hearts of humans to foreshadow the truth. That when humans express a universal longing through myth, it doesn\u2019t disprove the truth of the Gospel, but proves there is a God who created everyone with that common yearning, preparing in us a way to recognize the fulfillment of that hunger when we encounter it in truth. An example of his reasoning he writes:<\/p>\n

\n

The story of a Christ is very common in legend and literature. So is the story of two lovers parted by Fate. So is the story of two friends killing each other for a woman. But will it seriously be maintained that, because these two stories are common as legends, therefore no two friends were ever separated by love or no two lovers by circumstances? It is tolerably plain, surely, that these two stories are common because the situation is an intensely probable and human one, because our nature is so built as to make them almost inevitable.[7]<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Ecclesiastics 3:1 says that \u201cGod has set eternity in the human heart.\u201d Maybe part of our eternal longing, and the God-shaped hole Blaise Pascal talked about, gets expressed through Myths that point to the truth of God\u2019s engagement with humanity.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> (https:\/\/entertainment.time.com\/2011\/08\/30\/all-time-100-best-nonfiction-books\/slide\/the-hero-with-a-thousand-faces-by-joseph-campbell\/<\/a>).<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> https:\/\/www.ilchiefs.org\/vogler-7-page-memo<\/a><\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With A Thousand Faces.<\/em> xii.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Page 21-22<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Page 1-2<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> https:\/\/www.cslewis.com\/lewis-on-tolkien-3\/<\/a><\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> https:\/\/www.memoriapress.com\/articles\/g-k-chesterton-and-the-historical-defense-of-christianity\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

According to Time Magazine, Joseph Campbell wrote one of the 100 most influential books of the 20th century in \u201cThe Hero With A Thousand Faces.\u201d[1] I had been exposed to Campbell\u2019s work through a Psychology course I took as an undergraduate; we were assigned to watch \u201cThe Power of Myth\u201d, the 1988 series of PBS […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":169,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2489,789],"class_list":["post-30641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dlgp02","tag-campbell","cohort-dlgp02"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/169"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30641"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30641\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30644,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30641\/revisions\/30644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}