The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
Book Review #1
One of the most popular books of the 20th century in the field of comparative religion is Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. He was a contemporary of Carl Jung corresponding with him often and had a similar understanding of human nature as him. Comparative religion, or comparative mythology, is a field of study that attempts to synthesize and boil down the various myths around the world. The goal is to find common themes and tropes in these myths and to attribute them to some reason for similarity.
The Main Point
The main point of this book is the idea of the “Monomyth”. The monomyth is a story-arc that cultures throughout the world have inserted into their mythological stories. The monomyth is usually depicted as a journey that a hero goes on to reach some sort of enlightenment or life-shaping experience reaching the divine. Think of Frodo and the One Ring or Luke Skywalker. Campbell lays out some of the common experiences that a hero may face on each stage of his journey. The figure below lays out each of these stages.
Not every single one of these stages are included in every single myth. Some myths highlight certain parts of them and others omit some completely. His claim is that all myths throughout the whole world have at least a few of these stages included if you boiled them all down. You can begin to see some biblical themes in the stages from the onset, I know I did when I was initially reading this book. You see the atonement of the father, temptation, being in the belly of the whale, and the nature of the two worlds (one physical and one spiritual) for example. Personally, I was more concerned with the biblical themes when reading this book, however I did begin to wonder as I was reading it. Why do all the myths carry similar themes in them? Let’s explore that now.
His main thesis is that each story (or religion) detailing the life of some hero, is actually a retelling of one hero. This is fallacious from the onset because it claims that he (Campbell) has the privileged epistemological standpoint in his theory and all other religion’s stories truly don’t know what they are aiming at. Think of it like this:
If the monomythical true hero is an elephant and
Each religion’s story is a hand of humanity touching this elephant then
he (Campbell) is the only human that is actually taking a step back and looking at the full picture of the entire elephant. He has epistemological superiority… or so he claims.
For example, Hindu’s and their myths may be touching the trunk of the elephant, Muslims an ear, and Christians the tail, but Mr. Campbell can really see what the full picture is. This is insane pride and a fallacy most pantheist and spiritual people run into when they claim that all religions have a hint of truth in them and point to the same spirituality. It is true that they may all contain hints of truth, but what they mean is that all religious paths lead to the same destination. Its pride to say that you are enlightened enough to know the true end of this path, like you’ve somehow already traveled there.
Obviously for the Christian, the one hero is the Lord Jesus Christ! Unfortunately, Mr. Campbell places the true identity of the hero within all of us. He says we are the hero of the book, each one of us goes through this cycle. Yes, we do all walk in the story that the Lord’s providence lays out for us. However, the idea of the hero carries with it one of victory, but in the end we die and that is the end of the story. For us Christians we know it is not the end, but Campbell is connecting the idea of the hero to the story of us here on earth which means he has misplaced the identity of the true hero that these stories are typological of. Because humans are made in the image of God, these stories will naturally reflect him to some extent packaged in a human way because we are writing these stories. Overall my main contention here is that the monomyth is Christ and not us.
How do we evade the problem I laid out above, namely that we aren’t prideful ones thinking our Lord Jesus is the elephant that we can have the epistemological prowess to see clearly, while all the other hands of humanity are grasping at only parts of the elephant? We evade this by rejecting that other religions are touching Christ. They may be touching on parts of humanity reflecting the image of God, and the idea of God himself, that are true, but they fundamentally get wrong the essentials of who Jesus Christ is and his atoning work on the cross. So, we don’t agree that their “path” leads to Christ, the monomyth. It actually leads away from Christ while inconsistently understanding true parts of humanity and God that the monomyth includes.
Another idea present in the book is that Campbell thinks that myths are only helpful and apply today as symbolic teachings of the journey that each of us must go through, because remember we are the hero of the story. Campbell is attempting in this book to synthesize religion and myth into one way of life for each of us, and rationalize it into the subconscious. We, in Campbell’s view, are not always aware of the journey we are on and at times it rests solely in the subconscious of the psyche. The modern man has suppressed this symbolic subconscious journey and we rather desire to live in the conscious state, which in turn makes us miss our journey. So basically, for Campbell, we have left religion, because the modern man hates symbols and our ability to understand them found in the subconscious. He completely avoids the biblical answer, which is that they hate God and suppress the truth in unrighteousness by nature after the fall.
He claims that consciousness cannot produce symbols, only unconsciousness. What is mathematics then? Symbolic logic? We may not actively think of symbols at times, but I do think we do it often. I've trained myself more and more to see things symbolically as I have grown as a Christian because the bible is littered with symbolic meaning. I can actively appreciate and interact with symbols now in a way. I’m not even too sure it was trapped in my subconscious. Maybe subconsciously I was preprogrammed by God to be able to accept symbols when they are taught to me, but I doubt that they were already there by nature.
The last claim to highlight is a paradigm shifting worldview issue. He claims that the metaphysical is just the unconsciousness. It isn’t another plane in existence that transcends above the physical, but rather an artefact of our subconsciousness in the human mind. This is reminiscent of the idea of emergentism, which is a philosophical system that says that consciousness is an emergent property, it rises out of the human mind at some point in human history. This is a radical shift from the biblical worldview and should be rejected wholeheartedly. If metaphysical truths are emergent from the subconscious, then why should they be trusted? The process that lead to the subconscious could have been malicious or flawed in some way. You get epistemological problems that only the bible can solve.
I do not claim to have represented Campbell perfectly in the above discourse, but these are some of the main thoughts and issues that I personally took away. I do think it is a book worth reading and I would love to hear your own thoughts! To transition, here are some helpful thoughts on the idea of myth and Christianity by two giants of literature. Enjoy!
“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 be seriously 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?”
— G.K. Chesterton (1)
“Myth in general is not misunderstood history…nor diabolical illusion…not priestly lying…but at its best, a real unfocused gleam of divine truth on human imagination.”
— C.S. Lewis (2)
Conclusion
This book is interesting, in that it tries to provide a roundabout way of valuing myth and metaphysical truths without actually adopting a whole belief system. The symbols of religion are all we need for our own personal journey, we don’t actually need to take seriously the archaic ethical teachings of rejecting homosexuality, opposing feminism, etc. It is a trojan horse to reprogram religion in a psychological framework. The enemy obviously knows that he cannot snuff our religion, so he has to provide a cultish outworking of religion to lead people astray.
The last thing I will say is that at the end of the hero’s journey, laid out in the figure above, the hero departs from his time in the higher plane no longer fearing death or what the physical world can throw his way. The only way death can be defeated is through the Lord Jesus Christ. You can get to a mental state where you don’t fear death anymore, but you’ll still die and after comes judgement. God will still judge you whether or not your reached what you thought was enlightenment on this earth. If you want to REALLY conquer death you must believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. You will no longer fear death, and you will actually be resurrected with a new body on the last day! Be at peace with Christ, and not a false peace that Mr. Campbell would have you believe.
For The King, Rocky
Bibliography:
(1) Chesterton, G. K. The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton. The Ignatius Press ed., InteLex Corporation, 2002, 375.
(2) Letter to Arthur Greeves, October 18, 1931. Lewis, C. S., et al. Letters of C. S. Lewis. Rev. and enl. ed. / edited by Walter Hooper, rev. Harvest ed., Harcourt Brace, 1993.
Resources:
https://harvardichthus.org/2020/03/finding-christ-in-the-heros-journey/