In the tribe, deities were personifications of power.
In later years,
they became the source of power.
All the gods of the world are metaphors, not powers.
All imaging of God, if the word is going to mean anything besides “this is what Mother taught me,” is supposed to refer to that which transcends all knowledge, all naming, all forming; and, consequently, the word has to point past itself. In our tradition, the idea of God is so strongly personified as a person that you get stuck with that problem whenever you think of God.
God is not an illusion,
but a symbol pointing beyond itself
to the realization of the mystery
of at-one-ment.
Jung, in his book Answer to Job, deals with the image of God that has come down through the centuries. How can we relate to it? Well, the Old Testament image, Yahweh, is of a lawgiver, a very strong dictator, an angry father. And in the Book of Job, you have the epitomization of that image.
Here is this Job, who has been a good man, and Yahweh, the God, boasting to the devil, Satan, says: “Have you considered Job? How loyal he is to me? How he loves me?” And Satan says, “Well, you’ve been pretty good to him. Make it tough and see how long this is going to last.” Yawheh says, “I bet ya.” And Satan says, “I bet ya.”
Gilbert Murray has commented: “It’s as though someone says, ‘My dog won’t bite me no matter what I do.’ And someone else says, ‘I bet he will.’ The dog’s master says, ‘I bet he won’t.’ And the other person says, ‘Get going now, see how badly you can abuse him, and then see if he won’t bite you.’”
So that’s the situation, and after the wager, things get rough. What a time Job has! His family is killed, his wealth is taken from him, and he ends up on a heap of ashes with a case of boils. His friends, his so-called “comforters,” annoy him further by saying, “You must have been a pretty bad chap to deserve all this.” He says, “No, I’m good.” And he’s right: he is good.
Well, with this challenge to God, he finally has to come through and show himself. I mean, it’s a big deal. So, God shows himself, and what does he say? He says, “Who are you, you little worm, to question me? How dare you even consider that you could understand what is happening to you? Could you fill Leviathan’s nose with harpoons? I did it. Try it.”
Job is completely cowed. He suspends human judgment. He says, “I have heard of you with the hearing of my ears. Now I behold you with my eyes, and I am ashamed. I cover my head with ashes.”
Now, reading that in terms of its real spiritual message, what it means is that you cannot judge your destiny in terms of something that was done to you by somebody. I mean, what is actually happening there—although it is not admitted—is that the image of God as a person is exploded. When you get to the trans-personal, you can’t speak of “justice” and “injustice.”
What about all the landslides along the Big Sur coastline and the millions of dollars of damage they’ve caused? If you take these acts of nature as something that somebody has done to the people living there, you have the whole thing messed up. But that’s not the way the Book of Job has been understood. It has been under-stood in the way of submission to a person. And a person who would pull a deal like that on somebody is a pretty unappetizing type.
Actually, the Book of Job, which dates from around the fifth century B.C., is anticipated by a Babylonian text from about 1500 B.C. called the “Babylonian Job,” in which a king, who has been sacrificing to the deities and building them temples, has been overcome by, I think it was, leprosy. He tries to interpret his affliction in terms of what he has done in worship as a payment. Now, if you think of worship as a form of payment for something, you’re on the wrong track altogether. The Book of Job really breaks down that idea. But if you are going to hold to the image of God that is presented in the Book of Job, you have something that needs a little bit of refinement.
So then the Christians, as a next step, take the idea of the Incarnation of the second person of the Blessed Trinity offering himself in love to the world to be a higher, more illuminated, form. In other words, God has been tempered by taking the form of man and experiencing the world of man.
But, says our friend Jung, this is not the answer either, because Christ was a divine incarnation born of a virgin, so he really wasn’t man, he was God. Yet, Jung argues, “God wanted to become man and still wants to.” So he provided for his continuing incarnation, as it were, within man as the Holy Ghost, the third person of the Blessed Trinity. So, if you want to see God in the world, recognize it in mankind. That’s the essence of Jung’s answer to Job: Don’t throw this blame back on God, on the universe, or on anything of the kind. Realize that all notions of God are historically conditioned images for qualities that are to be recognized as actually being in man.
“The incarnation in Christ is the prototype which is continually being transferred to the creature by the Holy Ghost.”—Jung94
There is a darling little woman who comes to my lectures in New York, who was a nun. She left the con-vent after hearing a couple of my talks. She did. That’s one of my great credits, you old bastard up there. The last time I was lecturing and she was in the group, she came up to me afterward and asked, “Mr. Campbell, do you think that Jesus was God, was God’s son?” I said, “Not unless we all are.” “Ahh!” she said, and off she went.
And that’s what Jung is saying in his Answer to Job : it is actually the work of man that is projected in the image of an imagined being called God. And so, historically, the God image is really a mirror image of the condition of man at a given time.
Yet, I think most people take their image of God very concretely. Except for the French. A survey was taken in which people were asked, “Do you believe in God? Do you believe in hell?” The French—I think, seventy-five percent of them—did not believe in God, but did believe in hell! I like Alan Watts’ reply: “If you believe in God, I don’t. If you don’t, I do.”
My belief is that nobody experiences the ultimate rapture, because it’s beyond pairs of opposites, so if anyone did, there’d be nobody there anyhow. Jung is amusing on that point. “If you go beyond subject and object,” he wonders, “who is there to have the experience?” I think to give oneself a ground for anything other than monastic living, all one has to do is realize that such a thing is implied; that is to say, a mystery that is beyond subject, object, and all pairs of opposites is the mystery on the ground of which we ride.
When the physicist explores the depths of the atom or the outer reaches of space, he discovers pairs of opposites and mysteries that science hasn’t been able to penetrate. When it does penetrate to the next level, it’s still mysterious. They’ve got so many sub-atomic particles. One is named after Joyce’s “quark.” It seems to me that’s about as mysterious as you can get. There is the transcendent. Know it’s there, and then don’t worry about it. Simply behold the radiance everywhere.
People know there is a way to have this spiritual development take place, but the Church is not helping us do it, because it’s talking about metaphorical events as if they were historical facts. The Pope is having a hard time now because nobody believes any of it. Who believes in the Virgin Birth? The Virgin Birth is metaphorical, and so is the Ascension. Sure, I can believe in the Ascension of Jesus, but I’ve turned the outer space into the inner space: he went into the place where heaven is: right inside. His Ascension represents the inward, mythological journey. And the Virgin Birth refers to the birth of the spiritual life in the human.
“…this birth befalls in the soul exactly as it does in eternity, neither more nor less, for it is the same birth: this birth befalls in the ground and essence of the soul.95
“God is in all things as being, as activity, as power. but he is procreative in the soul alone; for though every creature is a vestige of God, the soul is the natural image of God.… Such perfection as enters the soul, whether it be divine light, grace, or bliss, must needs en
ter the soul in this birth and no other wise. Do but foster this birth in thee and thou wilt experience all good and all comfort, all happiness, all being, and all truth. What comes to thee therein brings the true being and stability; and whatsoever thou mayest seek or grasp without it perishes, take it how thou wilt.”—M. Eckhart96
That font of life is the core of the individual, and within himself he will find it—if he can tear the coverings away.97
The idea that we will have a divine visitation by some friendly forms, benign forces from other planets who will come to our aid and save us, is a clear reflection of an outmoded understanding of the universe. Jung wrote that the modern myth of unidentified flying objects tells us something of humankind's visionary expectations. People are looking for visits from the outside world because they think our deliverance will come from there. But the space age reminds us that voyages into outer space turn us back to inner space. The Kingdom of God is within us, but we have this idea that the gods act from “out there.”
The Kingdom of the Father is not
going to come through expectation.
We bring it about in our own hearts.
The Kingdom is here.
One looks at the world
and sees the radiance.
The Easter revelation is right there.
We don’t have to wait
for something to happen.98
What has always been basic to Easter, or resurrection, is crucifixion. If you want resurrection, you must have crucifixion. Too many interpretations of the Crucifixion have failed to emphasize that relationship and emphasize instead the calamity of the event. If you emphasize the calamity, you look for someone to blame, which is why people have blamed the Jews. But crucifixion is not a calamity if it leads to new life. Through Christ’s crucifixion we were unshelled, which enabled us to be born to resurrection. That is not a calamity. So, we must take a fresh look at this event if its symbolism is to be sensed.
If we think of the Crucifixion only in historical terms, we lose the symbol’s immediate reference to ourselves. Jesus left his mortal body on the cross, the sign of earth, to go to the Father, with whom he was one. We, similarly, are to identify with the eternal life within us. The symbol also tells us of God’s willing acceptance of the cross, that is to say, of his participation in the trials and sorrows of human life in the world, so that he is here within us, not by way of a fall or mistake, but with rapture and joy. Thus the cross has dual sense: one, of our going to the divine; the other, of the coming of the divine to us. It is a true crossing.
In the Christian tradition, Christ’s crucifixion is a major problem: Why could the savior not have just come? Why did he have to be crucified?
Well, various theological explanations have come down to us, but I think an adequate and proper one can be found in Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians, where he writes in chapter 2 that Christ did not think that God-hood was something to be held to—which is to say, neither should you—but rather, yielding, he took the form of a servant even to death on the cross. This is joyful affirmation of the sufferings of the world. The imitation of Christ, then, is participating in the suffering and joys of the world, all the while seeing through them the radiance of the divine presence. That’s operating from the heart cakra, where the two triangles are joined together.
That’s what I see in the Crucifixion. Of all the explanations I’ve read, it is the only one that makes, what I would call, respectable sense. The others are all concerned with a wrathful god who has to be appeased by the sacrifice of his son. What do you do with a thing like that? It is a translation of the sacrifice into a very crude image. The idea of God being entity that has to be appeased is just too nasty a concretion.
Christ’s crucifixion,
his going to the Father, the spirit,
is not something
that should not have happened.
It must happen.
The hero’s death and resurrection
is a model for
the casting off of the old life
and moving into the new.
Not the animal world, not the plant world, not the miracle of the spheres, but man himself is now the crucial mystery. Man is that alien presence with whom the forces of egoism must come to terms, through whom the ego is to be crucified and resurrected, and in whose image society is to be reformed. Man, understood however not as “I” but as “Thou”: for the ideals and temporal institutions of no tribe, race, continent, social class, or century, can be the measure of the inexhaustible and multifariously wonderful divine existence that is the life in all of us.99
The central truth about Easter and Passover, which have the same roots, is that we’re all called out of the house of bondage, even as the Jews were called out of their bondage in Egypt. We are called out of bondage to our old traditions in the way in which the moon throws off its shadow to emerge anew, in the way life throws off the shadow of death. Easter is not Easter and Passover is not Passover, unless they release us even from the tradition that gives us these feasts.
Easter and Passover
make us experience in ourselves
a call out of bondage.
So experiencing them
doesn’t destroy
our religious traditions.
Understanding these symbols
in their transcendent spiritual sense
enables us to see our traditions freshly
and to possess them anew.
Easter and Passover are prime symbols of what we are faced with in the space age. We’re challenged both mystically and socially, because our ideas of the universe have been reordered by our experience in space. The consequence is that we can no longer hold onto the religious symbols that we formulated when we thought that the earth was the center of the universe.
The misunderstanding is reading
spiritual mythological symbols
as though they were references
to historical events.
The Kingdom of God is within us. Easter and Passover remind us that we have to let go in order to enter it. The space age demands that we change our ideas about ourselves, but we want to hold onto them. That’s why there is a resurgence of old-fashioned orthodoxy in so many areas at the present time. There are no horizons in space, and there can be no horizons in our own experience. We cannot hold onto ourselves and our in-groups as we once did. The space age makes that possible, but people reject this demand or don’t want to think about it. So they pull back into one true church or black power or the unions or the capitalist class.
Easter and Passover offer the perfect symbols, for they mean that we are called to new life. This new life is not very well defined, which is why we want to hold onto the past. The journey to this new life, a journey we all must make, cannot be made unless we let go of the past. The reality of living in space means that we are born anew; not born again to an old-time religion, but born to a new order of things: there are no horizons. That is the meaning of the space age. We are in a free fall into a future that is mysterious. It is very fluid, and this is disconcerting to many people. All you have to do is know how to use a parachute.
St. Augustine speaks of Christ’s going to the cross as a bridegroom to his bride. There is an affirmation here. In the Prado, there is a great painting by Titian of Simon of Cyrene as he willingly helps Jesus with the cross. The painting captures the free, human, voluntary participation we all must have in the Easter-Passover mystery. That is what we are all challenged to do. Self-preservation is only the second law of life. The first law is that you and the other are one.
IN Mark 13, Jesus says that the end of the world is going to come, and he describes it as a terrible crisis of fire and all kinds of other horrors. So, according to the teachings of the Catholic church, it’s going to be a concrete historical event. And in Mark 13:30, Jesus says, “Amen I say to you, this generation will not pass away till all these things have been accomplished.” But that generation did pass away, and the end
of the world didn’t come, so it’s often called “the great nonevent.” It didn’t happen. So then the Catholic church said that when Jesus used the words “this generation,” what he meant was the generation of mankind, and so this event is yet going to happen.
In the Thomas Gospel, on the other hand, when the apostles ask, “When will the Kingdom come?” Jesus says, “The Kingdom will not come by expectation. They will not say ‘see here, see there.’ The Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth, and men do not see it.”100 That’s Gnosticism.
Gnosticism is the Western
counterpart of Buddhism.
Thomas says, in other words, that there is a revelation possible to you right now. It is here. So, “to be happy with Him forever in heaven” means to reach that depth now. It’s a totally different slant.
If you read Christian mythology
in the Gnostic way,
it makes universal sense.
Yet because the Catholic church insists that the coming of the Kingdom of the Father is going to be a historical event, every now and then, especially every thousand years, people think the end of the world is coming. In the year 1000, for instance, it was thought the end of the world was going to come, so people with a lot of property gave their property to the church to gain merit. There are still cases in the French courts to get that property back. Now it’s time for the second millennium, so everyone is expecting annihilation. These expectations come automatically. There’s always a way to envision that the end is going to happen. I do not know what the situation will be in the year 3000, but if any of you happen to be around in a later incarnation, you can expect that there will be some kind of panic.
A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living (Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) Page 13