American Academy of Religion

Why Joseph Campbell's Psychologizing of Myth Precludes the Holocaust as Touchstone ofRealityAuthor(s): Maurice FriedmanReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 66, No. 2 (Summer, 1998), pp.385-401Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1465679 .Accessed: 23/12/2011 08:56

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Journal of the American Academy of Religion 66/2

AESSAY

Why Joseph Campbell's Psychologizing of Myth Precludes the Holocaust as

Touchstone of Reality Maurice Friedman

WHAT CHARACTERIZES the modernization of myth in general is the substitution of a secondary meaning for the dramatic immediacy of myth. This modernization means a decisive step toward the psychologizing of myth; for in the end it is not a myth for community but for the indi- vidual. The central paradox in T. S. Eliot's waste-land myth, for example, is that the myth itself, the evocation of history and tradition, and the depiction of modern civilization all depend for their force on a sense of community, of common destiny and common suffering. Yet the solution offered is one that leads the individual off to his own private purgation, to set his own lands in order, leaving the universal statement with only a negative meaning. There has been no general rebirth, only an individual one. We are still in the waste-land world. I can seek some meaningful life for myself, but our civilization itself is decadent and crumbling.

The same thing can be said of the use of myth by the great twentieth- century psychologist Carl G. Jung. The myths that Jung evokes are com- munal myths. Yet the uses he puts these myths to in his psychology are all individual ones, connected with the individuation, or integration, of the

Maurice Friedman is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, Philosophy, and Comparative Litera- ture, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA 92182.

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isolated individual, who rediscovers the myth in the archetypal depths of the collective unconscious via the route of the personal unconscious (Friedman 1992:chap. 11). Jung looks upon his psychology as satisfying "the need for mythic statements" by a world view "which fits man mean- ingfully into the scheme of creation and at the same time confers meaning upon it." Like other contemporary interpreters of myth, he fails to recog- nize the difference between the dramatic immediacy of myth and the reflective mediacy of Weltanschauung. He clearly sees his own "myth" as a saving gnosis for contemporary humanity that would take the place of the no longer efficacious myth of Christianity. It is "the myth of the necessary incarnation of God"-"man's creative confrontation with the opposites and their synthesis in the self, the wholeness of his personality." "That is the goal," the "explanatory myth which has slowly taken shape within me in the course of decades."

Among Jung's disciples, many like Erich Neumann and Karl Kerenyi have dealt with myths, and others, like Marie Louise von Frantz, with their first or second cousin, the fairy tale. But it is Joseph Campbell who has given us the most widespread understanding of folklore and myth the world over and their relevance for us contemporaries. Through his televi- sion interviews with Bill Moyers, Joseph Campbell has achieved posthu- mous fame, and his books are now widely read throughout America. It is not possible or even desirable here to try to survey the vast edifice of what he has written and in particular the four classic volumes on The Masks of God. Rather I shall try to discover the way he uses myth and his attitudes toward myth through three strata of his work: The Hero with A Thousand Faces (1949), Myths to Live By (1972), and The Power of Myth (1988).

Campbell uses myth not only to see metaphysics in terms of psychol- ogy but also, as he explicitly points out, psychology in terms of meta- physics. ("The unconscious=the metaphysical realm.") Nonetheless, the total effect is that of the psychologizing of myth, if we use "psychologiz- ing" in the broader sense of finding myth in the depths of the soul rather than in the reality of communal life.

Campbell's psychologizing of myth is primarily not in Freud's sense but in Jung's. Campbell does not reduce myth to instinctual drives but locates both meaning and "the spiritual" in the unconscious. Mythological figures are not only symptoms of the unconscious "but also controlled and intended statements of certain spiritual principles, which have remained as constant throughout the course of human history as the form and ner- vous structure of the human physique itself." The meaning of the biblical image of the Fall, to Campbell, is nothing other than the lapse of super- consciousness into the state of unconsciousness (1949:257, 259).

There can be no doubt that for Campbell, as for Jung and for James Hillman, the world is, in John Keats's phrase, "a vale of soul-making." God

Friedman: Why Joseph Campbell's Psychologizing of Myth Precludes the Holocaust 387

"is but a convenient means to wake the sleeping princess, the soul." "Wher- ever the hero may wander, whatever he may do, he is ever in the presence of his own essence." "The modern hero-deed must be that of questing to bring to light again the lost Atlantis of the co-ordinated soul" (1949:260, 386,388).

The goal of myth, according to Campbell, is to dispel life ignorance (the Hindu maya) by effecting a reconciliation of individual consciousness and universal will. This in turn is done "through a realization of the true relationship of the passing phenomena of time to the imperishable life that lives and dies in all." The hero dies to his personal ego and arises again established in the Self (a term which Campbell sometimes seems to use in the Hindu sense of the term as identical with Brahman and sometimes in Jung's sense of individuation). The hero does not fear the destruction of permanence by change but rather permits the moment to come to pass. He does this through giving up the particular and the unique in favor of the general and the universal. "The Law lives in him with his unreserved con- sent" (1949:236-238, 243). "Looking back at what had promised to be our own unique, unpredictable, and dangerous adventure, all we find in the end is such a series of standard metamorphoses as men and women have undergone in every quarter of the world, in all recorded centuries, and under every odd disguise of civilization" (1949:12f.).

Even the hero cannot be seen as modern but must be transformed into the universal human being: "The hero has died as a modern man; but as eternal man-perfected, unspecific, universal man-he has been reborn. His ... solemn task and deed ... is to return then to us, transfigured, and teach the lesson he has learned of life renewed" (1949:20).

If we sense an elitist note in what Campbell has written about the hero journey, we shall not be mistaken. Once at an alumnae meeting at Sarah Lawrence College I asked Joseph Campbell about persons like Franz Kafka who do not have the personal resources to make the hero journey. "The bones of those who do not make it lie on either side as we climb to the top," Campbell responded. My own feeling was that I did not want to make it to the top if Kafka had to be dismissed as just another failed hero journeyer! This same note sounds out loud and clear in the first chapter in Campbell's Myths to Live By (1972), a collection of lectures from 1961 to 1971. "Lies are what the world lives on, and those who can face the chal- lenge of truth and build their lives to accord are finally not many, but the very few."

The subtitle of this essay suggests that in addition to those for whom the Shoah, or Holocaust, is a "touchstone of reality," to use my own phrase, and those for whom it is not, there are some for whom it cannot be a touchstone of reality. Not significant here are those who do not know about the Holocaust or do not believe it happened or even, for our pur-

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poses, those who willfully deny that it happened because of their own Nazi origins or sympathies. What is significant here is that for an American through and through like Joseph Campbell the psychologizing of myth, coupled with a liberal dose of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, preclude him from finding in the Holocaust a touchstone of reality.

By raising this question I am not making a moral judgment against Joseph Campbell or anyone else who knows about the Holocaust and does not find in it a touchstone of reality. I am, rather, pointing to a limit case in which the possibility of its being a touchstone is no longer present. Forty years ago when I was Visiting Professor at Hebrew Union-College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati-the seminary that trains Reform rabbis-I was lecturing on the thought of Mordecai Kaplan to a class on contemporary Jewish thought. In my lecture I criticized Kaplan's state- ment in one of his books that "History proves that progress is inevitable."' I told the students that this did not fit with my conception of history. What is more, I could not imagine how he could make that statement in the face of the Holocaust-the impact of which was not yet as central as it became in the years since. "Doctor, you don't understand," said one of the students who was about to go forth into the world as a Reform rabbi. "The Holo- caust was just a sidestream in the great sweep of history." "If the Holocaust was just a sidestream," I replied, "I am not interested in the 'great sweep of history'!" Influenced by the evolutionary philosophy of the professor of Jewish history at Hebrew Union College, this student was precluded from confronting the Holocaust in any serious way.

No one has a right to make moral judgments on other's touchstones of reality, as I point out in the opening chapter of the book of that title (1972). For me, as an American Jew who did not experience the Holocaust firsthand, it might also not have been a touchstone if It were not for my openness to the written accounts of the Holocaust and, almost equally sig- nificant, my friendship with Elie Wiesel which necessitated that I imagine through his eyes what it must have been like. But the blind spots that pre- ventit from being a touchstone are nonetheless significant, and Campbell's universalist approach to myth is one of them.

Since the publication of Touchstones of Reality I have often been asked whether there can be negative touchstones of realty. Certainly, and the Shoah, or Holocaust, itself is the prime example. Yet our response even to a negative event is not itself necessarily negative, as the work of Elie Wiesel has shown. What is most impressive about Elie Wiesel, indeed, is that he has been able to take this negative touchstone of reality and, without gloss- ing over or denying it in any way, make of it the most positive and mean- ingful affirmation of life. It is certainly more meaningful than for those who imagine that they can affirm human existence by looking away from

Friedman: Why Joseph Campbell's Psychologizing of Myth Precludes the Holocaust 389

what is evil and problematic in it. "The Holocaust happened," writes Ter- ence Des Pres:

That in itself is the intractable fact we can neither erase nor evade. And the more we think of it, the more it intrudes to occupy our minds, until l'univers concentrationnaire becomes a demonic anti-world that under- mines our own. After Auschwitz, nothing seems stable or unstained-not the values we live by, nor our sense of self-worth, not existence itself.... The Holocaust has forced upon us a radical rethinking of everything we are and do.

Every age produces the event which defines it, and in our time the Holocaust is ours. It demands that we face the kind of limitless horror our technological and bureaucratic civilization makes possible. (Fine:xi f.) The whole of Wiesel's works makes use of the Holocaust as a touch-

stone of reality in precisely this sense. "In the beginning is Auschwitz,' Wiesel stated in 1966. It is the unavoidable starting point. "For me, as a Jew of this generation, the Holocaust is the yardstick,"' Wiesel said in 1968. "I measure the value of an idea only in the light, in the fiery shadow, of the Holocaust as the central event of our lives." "Only if you take the Holo- caust as a measure can you understand what is taking place today," Wiesel asserted in 1973. Wiesel sees the Holocaust as the greatest event of his own life, of his people, and of humankind (Friedman 1987:chap. 10).

That the Shoah should be a touchstone of reality for Elie Wiesel, who, more than anyone stands before the world as "the Job of Auschwitz," as I have often called him, is not surprising. Nor is it surprising for one like Abraham Joshua Heschel who, while not a survivor himself, was, as he himself put it, "a brand plucked from the fire." Heschel saw his whole family, community, and culture destroyed by it. Nor, despite some cur- rent controversy on the subject, is it astonishing that it was a touchstone for Martin Buber who said that there was not an hour when he did not think of it. "Standing, bound and shackled, in the pillory of mankind, we demonstrate with the bloody body of our people the unredeemed- ness of the world," Buber wrote in 1947 (Friedman 1984:47; Lawritson).

We could expand this list to include any number of Jewish thinkers like Emil Fackenheim and Yitzhak Greenberg and non-Jewish theologians like my former Temple University colleagues Franklin Littell and Paul Van Buren.

What is significant for our present purposes, however, is someone like Joseph Campbell who is excluded from finding in the Holocaust a touchstone of reality. To understand this phenomenon we must grasp the correlation between Campbell's universalist approach to mythology and religion and his negative approach to the historical and the unique in gen- eral and Judaism in particular.

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The true meaning of the myth of the Fall, according to Campbell, is that our knowledge of good and evil has "pitched us away from our own center" and from that eternal life which is already ours "since the enclosed garden [of Eden] is within us." "Good and evil" are relegated by Campbell to the merely external whereas "eternal life,' in true Nietzschean fashion, is "beyond good and evil"! This Nietzschean note becomes explicit in Camp- bell's book The Power of Myth where, in conversation with Bill Moyers, Campbell states that we must return to the Eden before the Fall so that the child learns to shed every "Thou shalt" that "inhibits his self-fulfillment" (1988:154).

We shall not be misled if we discern here an alarming relativism and amoralism that jettisons social and even interhuman concern. (We cannot make the world a better place, says Campbell. We must leave as it is.) Jesus says that we should love our enemies, for they too are children of God on whom the rain falls as it does on us. The Hasidic master Rabbi Yehiel Mik- hal of Zlotchov in a tale to which Buber gives the title, "Love for Enemies," adjured his sons to pray for their enemies that all may be well with them because "more than all prayers, this is, indeed, the service of God" (Buber 1961:156). Joseph Campbell, in quintessential psychologism, said to Bill Moyers, "Love thine enemies because they are the instruments of your destiny" (1988:159).

Campbell does not hesitate, subtly but no less unmistakably, to apply this admonition to our relation to Hitler himself. Campbell was a great admirer of the German novelist Thomas Mann, who left Hitler's Germany for America and lectured widely during the Second World War on "The Coming Victory of Democracy." Not only did Campbell not share Mann's concern for democracy, he also could not take seriously the Nazi Germany that Mann staked his life against. Mann's capacity for love was tested, said Campbell in a 1967 lecture, when the blue-eyed Hans and blond Ingeborg of his story "Tonio Kroeger" were transformed "under Hitler, into what he could only name and describe as depraved monsters." Campbell responds to his own question, "What does one do under such a test?": "There is a deep and terrible mystery here, which we perhaps cannot, or possibly will not, comprehend; yet which will have to be assimilated if we are to meet such a test. For love is exactly as strong as life. And when life produces what the intellect names evil, we may enter into righteous battle, contending 'from loyalty of heart': however, if the principle of love (Christ's 'Love your enemies!') is lost thereby, our humanity too will be lost" (1972:173).

The conclusion we must draw from this is that we are to love Hitler and that we cannot judge him. I, for one, belong to those who not only can not but also will not comprehend such a "mystery." A love which places no demand on the other is not a true love, as Jesus himself exemplified.

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In a famous and controversial article for The New York Review of Books, the New Yorker writer Brendan Gill reports that three days after Pearl Har- bor Campbell gave a lecture to Sarah Lawrence College students on "Per- manent Human Values" urging them not to be tricked into missing their education because a "Mr. Hitler collides with a Mr. Churchill." He urged them instead to remain aloof from the political cockpit, giving no thought to the "undoing of an enemy." Campbell sent a copy of this speech to Thomas Mann, one of his two literary heroes along with James Joyce. At this very time Mann was devoting much of his energy to arousing the world to the menace of Hitler and the Nazis. Mann replied to Campbell:

As an American, you must be able to judge better than I, in a country which just now, slowly, slowly, under difficult and mighty obstacles, I hope not too late, has come to the true recognition of the political situ- ation and its necessities, whether it is appropriate at this particular mo- ment to recommend political indifference to American youth....

It is strange, you are a friend of my books, which therefore according to your opinion must have something to do with "Permanent Human Values." Now these books are forbidden in Germany and in all countries that Germany rules, and whoever reads them or even should sell them, and whoever would so much as praise my name publicly would be put into a concentration camp and his teeth would be bashed in and his kid- neys split in two. [Mann was perhaps unaware of the frequent killings in the concentration camps even before the "Final Solution."] You teach that we must not get upset about that, we must rather take care of the mainte- nance of permanent human values. Once again, this is strange. (Gill:16)

In 1953 in the face of universal criticism in Israel and the Jewish press in America Martin Buber accepted the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. The reason he did so was that he refused to judge the German peo- ple as a whole and wished to help them in their fight for the human

against the antihuman. But with the Nazis themselves it was different. At the beginning of his speech on this occasion before the President of the West German Republic and other high German officials, Buber said:

About a decade ago a considerable number of Germans-there must have been many thousands of them-under the indirect command of the German government and the direct command of its representatives, killed millions of my people in a systematically prepared and executed procedure whose organized cruelty cannot be compared with any previ- ous historical event. I, who am one of those who remained alive, have only in a formal sense a common humanity with those who took part in this action. They have so radically removed themselves from the human sphere, so transposed themselves into a sphere of monstrous inhumanity inaccessible to my conception, that not even hatred, much less an over-

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coming of hatred, was able to arise in me. And what am I that I could here presume to "forgive"! (1990:232)

In my essay for The Philosophy ofMartin Buber volume I wrote, "One's

antagonist may, indeed, be the devil or Hitler, but even such a one must be

faithfully answered, contended with!" Buber responded to me with what he himself labelled as a "careful clarification":

On the one side, I hold no one to be "absolutely" unredeemable, and if a devil existed, then I would believe that God could redeem him, and even that God would do so. And not that alone, but I could also conceive that God might expect and trust in man for a share in this work of re- demption. But as soon as we reflect on it with wholly concrete serious- ness, a limit becomes evident that is no longer restricted to the symbolic, like the traditional image of the devil, but bears a wholly empirical char- acter. Here it is no longer for me to speak of God, but solely of myself and this man.

Hitler is not my antagonist in the sense of a partner "whom I can confirm in opposing him," as Friedman says, for he is incapable of really addressing one and incapable of really listening to one. That I once expe- rienced personally when, if only through the technical medium of the radio, I heard him speak. I knew that this voice was in the position to annihilate me together with countless of my brothers; but I perceived that despite such might it was not in the position to set the spoken and heard word into the world. And already less than an hour afterward I sensed in "Satan" the "poor devil," the poor devil in power, and at the same time I understood my dialogical powerlessness. I had to answer, but not to him who had spoken. As far as a person is a part of a situation, I have to respond, but not just to the person.(Schilpp and Friedman: 198, 725f.)

If I have above set Joseph Campbell and Martin Buber in opposition to each other, this is something that Campbell himself did in his 1970 lec- ture on "The Confrontation of East and West in Religion." Telling of his

only encounter with Buber in a Columbia University Seminar on biblical faith to which I personally invited him, Campbell wrote:

This eloquent little man-for he was, indeed, remarkably small, en- dowed, however, with a powerful presence, graced with that mysteri- ous force known nowadays as "charisma"-held forth for some five or six weekly sessions with extraordinary eloquence. In fact, in that English was not his first but his second language, his fluency and easy eloquence were astonishing. As the talks went on, however, I gradually came to realize ... that there was one word the doctor was using that I was failing to under- stand. His lectures were on the history of the holy people of the Old Testament [actually they were a good deal on the New Testament as well], with references also to more recent times; and the word that I was failing to understand was "God." Sometimes it seemed to refer to an imagined

Friedman: Why Joseph Campbell's Psychologizing of Myth Precludes the Holocaust 393

personal creator of this magnitudinous universe which the sciences have revealed to us. Sometimes it was clearly a reference simply to the Yah- weh of the Old Testament, in one or another of his stages of evolution. Then again, it seemed to be somebody with whom Dr. Buber himself had been in frequent conversation. In the midst of one lecture, for example, he broke suddenly off and, standing for a moment bemused, shook his head and quietly said to us, "It pains me to speak of God in the third person .... At this point Campbell told Buber that he did not know what he

meant by "God":

"You have been telling us this evening that God has hidden his face and no longer shows himself to man. [It was above all in connection with the Holocaust that Buber spoke of the "eclipse of God."] Yet I have just re- turned from India ... where I found that people are experiencing God all the time."

Buber's reply, as Campbell quoted it, "Everyone must come out of his Exile in his own way," Campbell characterized as "good enough from Dr. Buber's point of view but from another standpoint altogether inap- propriate, since the people of the Orient are not in exile from their god." Like Jung, Campbell proclaimed the new religion of pure psychic imma- nence in which even an historical event of the magnitude of the Holo- caust can be reduced to a psychological problem:

The ultimate divine mystery is there [in the Orient] found immanent within each. It is not "out there" somewhere. It is within you. And no one has ever been cut off. The only difficulty is, however, that some folk sim- ply don't know how to look within. The fault is no one's, if not one's own. Nor is the problem one of an original Fall of the "first man," many thou- sand years ago, and of exile and atonement. The problem is psychological. And it can be solved. (1972:92f.)

These last two sentences stand at the very heart of the correlation to which this essay is pointing between Campbell's approach to myth and his approach to the Holocaust.

It is interesting that Jean Houston, a prominent New Age spokesman who takes a universal myth position similar to Campbell's, tells the story of Campbell's "meeting" with Buber in a roughly similar way in her auto- biographical book A Mythic Life (67f.)

It is illuminating to contrast Campbell's report of this incident with my own account of it. In the course of our seminars on biblical faith Buber responded to a questioner's suggestion of a connection between the Holocaust and the spiritual break that arose in Judaism since the Enlight- enment by an assertion, made "with utter sincerity, emphasizing every

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word, 'I could not believe in a God who would condemn six million peo- ple to death because of their sins."' In the very next sentence I tell of the interchange between Campbell and Buber:

Joseph Campbell asked Buber, "Is this God of Israel the same as Shiva?" Buber, who did not know Campbell and his interest in universal mytho- logical motifs, responded that only God can liberate the religions from their exile and melt down all the images of God into the one imageless God. Buber was referring to a stance that he had already adopted more than thirty years before when he founded Die Kreatur, the only journal in Germany (or anywhere else for that matter) to be co-edited by a Jew, a Protestant, and a Catholic:

Every religion has its origin in a revelation. No religion is absolute truth, none is a piece of heaven that has come down to earth. Each reli- gion is a human truth. That means it represents the relationship of a particular human community as such to the Absolute. Each religion is a house of the human soul longing for God, a house with windows and without a door; I need only open a window and God's light penetrates; but if I make a hole in the wall and break out, then I have not only become houseless but a cold light surrounds me that is not the light of the living God. Each religion is an exile into which man is driven; here he is in exile more clearly than elsewhere because in his relationship to God he is separated from the men of other communities; and not sooner than in the redemption of the world can we be liberated from the exiles and brought into a common world of God. But the religions that know that are bound together in a common expectation; they can call to one another greetings from exile to exile, from house to house through the open windows.

Later I told Buber about Campbell's universalistic approach to reli- gion ... and that Campbell had edited some of the books of Heinrich Zimmer, the German scholar on Indian religion. "Ah, I knew it," Buber exclaimed, meaning that he sensed where Campbell was coming from. He and Paula [Buber's wife] talked warmly of Zimmer, whom they knew and who had married the daughter of Buber's friend Hugo von Hof- mannsthal. (Friedman 1984:228f.). Buber was not, as Campbell assumed, speaking of our exile from

the Garden of Eden, the original fall, or even the "eclipse of God." He was speaking of our exile from one another (which, as one who has twice lec- tured and sojourned in India I can witness is there as strongly as in any other part of the world, vide the enmity between the Hindu and Muslim, which led to the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi, and that between the Hindu and the Sikh, which led to the assassination of Indira Gandhi) and of the impossibility of precisely that sort of perennial philosophy that Campbell and so many others put forward.

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It seems to be a temptation that many modern thinkers cannot resist-to put forward their own central discoveries as the core of all the world's religions: C. G. Jung's archetypes, Erich Fromm's humanistic religion, Aldous Huxley's unitive knowledge, Henri Bergson's elan vital, Ananda Coomaraswamy's dragon and dragon-slayer, Abraham Maslow's peak-experiences, and Campbell's hero journey, among others. Even when they know something about the world's religions, they do not hesitate to ignore all the phenomena that do not fit their personal perception and with it the very fact that in spelling out an "essence" of all religions in one formula or another, they necessarily lose it.

Even more important for our purposes, Campbell was speaking out of that total misunderstanding of biblical and modern Judaism that led him to dismiss Judaism as purely external and literal with a totally transcendent anthropomorphic personal and vengeful God. To Campbell, the exile is the fault of those people who do not know how to look within. Those are above all, for him, the believing Jews and next to them the believing Chris- tians. This attitude I experienced consistently in our fourteen years as fel- low teachers at Sarah Lawrence College. Although I never taught a course in Judaism or even in the Hebrew Bible, Campbell insisted on referring to me as "the College rabbi:' At one point he told students who came to be interviewed by him that they could not take his course on Folklore and Myth if they had taken my course on Comparative Religions! Campbell gave cogent written expression to this stance in a footnote to The Hero with a Thousand Faces:

This recognition of the secondary nature of the personality of what- ever deity is worshiped is characteristic of most of the traditions of the world... In Christianity, Mohammedanism, and Judaism, however, the personality of the divinity is taught to be final-which makes it com- paratively difficult for the members of these communions to understand how one may go beyond the limitations of their own anthropomorphic divinity. The result has been, on the one hand, a general obfuscation of the symbols, and on the other, a god-ridden bigotry such as is unmatched elsewhere in the history of religion. For a discussion of the possible origin of this aberration, see Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (sic) ... (1949:258f., n. 5) In the lectures in Myths to Live By Campbell's attitude toward Judaism

and the so-called monotheistic religions comes through still more clearly. In the essay in that book entitled "The Confrontation of East and West in Religion" Campbell writes:

The Biblical image of the universe simply won't do any more; neither will the Biblical notion of a race of God, which all others are meant to serve (Isaiah 49:22-23; 61:5-6; etc.); nor again, the idea of a code of laws

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delivered from on high and to be valid for all time. The social problems of the world today are not those of a corner of the old Levant, sixth cen- tury B.C ..... The problems of our world are not even touched by those stone-cut Ten Commandments that we carry about as luggage . .. (1972:90) If we leave to one side Campbell's monumental misunderstanding of

the national universalism of Deutero-Isaiah and his all too obvious con- tempt, we still have here the repetition of his Nietzschean attack on the Ten Commandments. Nietzsche was paradigmatic of that first type of Modern Rebel that I call the "Modern Promethean." Once Joseph Campbell and I had a "dialogue" before the whole of Sarah Lawrence College on "Oedipus and Job." "He will speak of the universal Oedipus and the universal Job," a colleague who was an eminent historian of ideas predicted to me, and so it turned out. The contrast Campbell made was between the Hellenic civi- lization and the Sumerian one with the only reference to Job being Job's statement about repenting. Campbell could have no slightest inkling of the Job to whom I pointed whose dialogue with God included both trust and contending. Instead he misrepresented the Greeks as seeing God as simply immanent and he misrepresented the Hebrews as seeing God as simply transcendent. It was not until I read a closely similar passage in Campbell's 1961 lecture, "The Separation of East and West" that I understood that the "dialogue" between us was really a confrontation of Campbell as the "Modern Promethean" and myself as the "Modern Job" (my second type of Modern Rebel) (Friedman 1970). Campbell, to be sure, could recognize only one type of Modern Rebel and necessarily saw my Modern Job as slavish submission to an anti-human God:

The Greeks ... are on man's side, both in sympathy and in loyalty; the Hebrews, on the contrary, on God's. Never would we have heard from a Greek such words as those of the sorely beaten "blameless and upright" Job, addressed to the god who had "destroyed him without cause" and who then came at him in the whirlwind, boasting of his power.

"Behold," pleaded Job, "I am of small account ... I know that thou canst do all things. ... I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes."

Repent! Repent for what? In contrast, the great contemporary Greek playwright Aeschylus, of

about the same fifth-century date as the anonymous author of the Book of Job, puts into the mouth of his Prometheus-who was also being tor- mented by a god that could "draw Leviathan out with a fishhook, play with him as with a bird, and fill his skin with harpoons"-the following stunning words: "He is a monster. ... I care less than nothing for Zeus. Let him do as he likes."

And so say we all today in our hearts, though our tongues may have been taught to babble with Job. (1972: 82)

Friedman: Why Joseph Campbell's Psychologizing of Myth Precludes the Holocaust 397

The debate was moderated by the then Dean of Sarah Lawrence who was herself a Catholic. "He is a lapsed Catholic," she said to me before the meeting, "who has turned black about all that he was raised with. I would not argue with him about the color of a rose!" It is not Judaism alone indeed that visibly aroused in Joseph Campbell an anger that he could hardly control. In "The Confrontation of East and West in Religion" he attacks Judaism and Christianity together as religions that teach not iden- tity with the Godhead but relationship to a named God and that demand of their followers submission to social institutions and membership in an exclusive club:

And how is such a relationship to be achieved? Only through membership in a certain supernaturally endowed, uniquely favored social group. The Old Testament God has a covenant with a certain historic people, the only holy race-the only holy thing, in fact-on earth. And how does one gain membership? The traditional answer was most recently (March 10, 1970) reaffirmed in Israel as defining the first prerequisite to full citizenship in that mythologically inspired nation: by being born of a Jewish mother. And in the Christian view, by what means? By virtue of the incarnation of Christ Jesus, who is to be known as true God and true man (which, in the Christian view, is a miracle, whereas in the Orient, on the other hand, everyone is to be known as true God and true man, though few may have yet awakened to the force of that wonder in themselves). Through our humanity we are related to Christ; through his divinity he relates us to God. And how do we confirm in life our relationship to that one and only God-Man? Through baptism; and, thereby, spiritual mem- bership in his Church: which is to say, once again through a social institu- tion. (1972:97f.)

Brendan Gill aroused a storm of controversy in his New York Review of Books article by bringing out into the open Campbell's anti-Semitism: "Campbell's bigotry had another distressing aspect, which was a seemingly ineradicable anti-Semitism. By the time I had come to know him, he had learned to conceal its grosser manifestations, but there can be no doubt that it existed and that it tainted not only the man himself but the quality of his scholarship."

Along with indignant denials Gill's article evoked many personal wit- nesses of Campbell's anti-Semitism. When the astronauts landed on the moon, Campbell said to Brendan's wife Anne (whom Campbell and I both taught at Sarah Lawrence) that the moon would be a good place to put the Jews. Carol Luther of San Anselmo, California, reports that when she exclaimed in response to a lecture of Campbell's, "What about the six million that were gassed during World War II?", Campbell shrugged and responded, "That's your problem." Robert A. Segal, author of Joseph

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Campbell: An Introduction, testifies that not only Campbell's comments to his friends but his published writing (as we ourselves have seen) make clear that he was an anti-Semite. In his books Campbell "invariably dis- paraged Judaism as literalistic, chauvinistic and parochial-stock anti- Semitic epithets."

Our concern with Campbell's anti-Semitism, as with his reduction of the Shoah to an internal, psychological matter, lies in the fact that it is closely linked with his psychologizing of myth-his rejection of history, the event, the unique, and the particular in favor of the internal, the psy- chological, and the universal. The causes of anti-Semitism will always remain mysterious and, to use a phrase of Freud's, "over-determined." In Campbell's case, I think that it is undoubtedly connected, at least in part, with his virulent rejection of the "Thou shalt" of the Ten Commandments. It has often been suggested that a predominant cause of anti-Semitism is the resentment that the peoples harbor against the moral prescripts that entered into Christianity with its acceptance of the Hebrew Bible (the so- called "Old Testament"). In this we can perhaps see the joint root of Campbell's black anger against Judaism and his native Catholicism.

I do not want to leave the reader with the impression that my aim here is to defame Joe Campbell or that my heart is filled with resentment and bitterness against him. Quite the contrary. My personal relations with him were always most cordial even though politically as well as intellectually we found ourselves on opposite sides. I found him a remarkably charming person and an electric lecturer with an encyclopedic knowledge of and love for the very particulars that his philosophy tried to subsume under the universal. Once in a class on modeling with clay that I participated in with my two small children at the Contemporary Arts Center next to Pen- dle Hill (the Quaker Study Center in Wallingford, PA, where I taught for many years), I followed the teacher's suggestion to model a clay figure after some stories of Campbell's that she read us. I chose the story of a whale with the spirit boy atop it and made an approximation of it. My teacher happened to see Joe later at a conference and related this fact, whereupon he exclaimed "I forgive him everything!" The last I saw Joe Campbell in person was when he lectured at San Diego State University in the 70s. I organized a party for him and drove him afterward to his hotel. Later he wrote me a most gracious letter saying that he was glad I had ended up in the most beautiful city in the world.

In his own discussion of myth Martin Buber makes an illuminating distinction between that approach to myth which sees it as bound to the existential and the historical, and the gnosticizing of myth that takes it out of the historical and universalizes it. In an essay on "Christ, Hasidism, and Gnosis" Buber rejected the notion of the self-sacrifice of Deutero-Isaiah's

Friedman: Why Joseph Campbell's Psychologizing of Myth Precludes the Holocaust 399

"suffering servant" as a dromenon-a drama that awaits transposition into life and embodiment in history-in favor of the fulfilled devotio in which the servant stands in relation to the many for whom he or she wants to sacrifice his or herself:"I hold the myth to be indispensable, yet I do not hold itto be central, but man and ever again man. Myth must authenticate itself in man and not man in myth. What is evil is not the mythicization of reality that brings the inexpressible to speech, but the gnosticization of myth that tears it out of the historical-biographical ground in which it took root. Existential responsibility and myth bound to faith go together; existential responsibility and myth without faith do not go together" (1988b: 248f.).

Buber refuses the alternatives of factual history or universal and time- less myth and proclaims the history that gives rise to myth, the myth that remembers history: "What is preserved for us here is to be regarded not as the 'historization' of a myth or a cult drama, nor is it to be explained as the transposition of something originally beyond time into historical time: a great history-faith does not come into the world through interpretation of the extrahistorical as historical, but by receiving an occurrence experi- enced as a 'wonder,' that is, as an event which cannot be grasped except as an act of God" (1985:46).

It is not fantasy that is active here but memory, Buber asserts-that believing memory of the souls and generations of early times that arises without arbitrary action from the impulse of an extraordinary event. Even the myth that seems most fantastic of all is created around the kernel of the organically shaping memory (Buber 1988a: 16f.).

This approach to event does not dismiss the comparative aspect of the history of religion, but leaves room for uniqueness (Buber 1988a: 136). Buber's concern with uniqueness is a natural corollary of what he called the bond between the Absolute and the concrete, or the particular (as opposed to the more familiar notion of the bond between the Absolute and the universal). Some myths contain within themselves the nexus of a historical event experienced by a group or by an individual; many have lost their historical character and contain only the symbolic expression of a universal human experience. Even in the latter case, countless concrete meetings of I and Thou have attained symbolic expression in relatively ab- stract form. The universality and profundity of these myths lie in the fact that they are products of actual human experience and tell us something about the structure of human reality that nothing else can. The myth of the Garden of Eden is universal, for example, not as a timeless truth aris- ing from somewhere beyond concrete human existence or as a picture of intrapsychic reality, as Campbell would have it, but rather as something that happens anew to every human being.

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I should like to add one more thing here to bring out what I see as the most basic underlying issue in the contrast that I have made between Campbell's and Buber's approach to myth. In Buber's view and my own the self in its integrity, its uniqueness, and its individuality is not the sub- ject and center of religious experience but the sharer and participant in a religious reality that transcends it. There are depths within the self that lie largely unexplored, and it is for this reason that an emphasis upon the need of centering and inwardness, or what the Quakers call the "inward light," is not amiss. Yet it is not simply by voyaging inward-to the arche- typal depths that unfold to us when we attain "individuation" or even to the nondualistic, nonindividual Self of the Upanishads-that the self be- comes a sharer in religious reality. In transcending and denying the self and going inward one is likely to end up in absolutely affirming the self. Nor is the ground that the self has thereby attained as shoreless and infi- nite as it at first appears. Without the life of dialogue, without the genuine meeting with otherness that cannot be removed into the self (or even the Self), some part of the wholeness of human existence-and with it the address to us of the divine in the particular-will deny itself to us.

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1988a Moses: The Revelation and the Covenant. Atlantic High- lands, NJ: Humanities Press International.

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1990 Pointing the Way: Collected Essays. Trans. and ed. with an Introduction by Maurice Friedman. Atlantic High- lands, NJ: Humanities Press International.

Campbell, Joseph The Hero with A Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton 1949 University Press.

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