Since I teach ancient Humanities, I’m occasionally asked about Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, the story structure he outlined in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. My gut reaction has always been to reject his ideas, but since I’ve never studied them in detail, I decided to read the book itself. Hoo, boy. It’s bad. Campbell is entirely too fascinated with paganism to be of any use in the classroom. An example:
As Gilbert Murray has pointed out in his preface to Ingram Bywater’s translation of the Poetics of Aristotle, tragic katharsis (i.e., the “purification” or “purgation” of the emotions of the spectator of tragedy through his experience of pity and terror) corresponds to an earlier ritual katharsis (“a purification of the community from the taints and poisons of the past year, the old contagion of sin and death”), which was the function of the festival and mystery play of the dismembered bull-god Dionysos. The meditating mind is united, in the mystery play, not with the body that is shown to die, but with the principle of continuous life that for a time inhabited it, and for that time was the reality clothed in the apparition (at once the sufferer and the secret cause), the substratum into which our selves dissolve when the “tragedy that breaks man’s face” has split, shattered, and dissolved our mortal frame.
In other words, ancient mystery plays were rituals designed to carry the community (let’s call it the congregation) through tragedy by showing how death frees the spirit from the mortal body. Unfortunately, the spirit gets caught and trapped again, which is why these rituals have to happen over and over.
I spend quite a lot of time in class describing how the ancient pagans viewed the gods. It’s true that the gods were revered partly because they had escaped the confines of the mortal body, so from a purely historical standpoint, Murray’s statement is accurate. What I don’t need is some twentieth century literary critic making goo-goo eyes at this “principle of continuous life.”
Worse, some Christians see the monomyth as a precursor to the story of Jesus’s death and resurrection, which would imply that these ancient mystery plays were in some way prefiguring the gospel story. Nothing could be further from the truth. The pagan story is that death frees the spirit from the body, its prison, at least until twelve months’ worth of wickedness piles up again. The worshiper is united, not with the death, but with the spiritual life that goes on and on. The gospel story is that Christ died and we died with Him, freeing us from sin forever. Being united with His death is the whole point. Furthermore, in the gospel story, the separation of body and soul in death is a great discomfort that Christ will resolve when He returns.
Assuming Campbell’s analysis of myth is accurate (I’ll decide after I’ve finished the book), to teach my students that ancient myths foreshadow the gospel story would be to do them a disservice.
Christian Leithart 