The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [110]
MOYERS: What had it been before that?
CAMPBELL: Before that, love was simply Eros, the god who excites you to sexual desire. This is not the experience of falling in love the way the troubadours understood it. Eros is much more impersonal than falling in love. You see, people didn’t know about Amor. Amor is something personal that the troubadours recognized. Eros and Agape are impersonal loves.
MOYERS: Explain.
CAMPBELL: Eros is a biological urge. It’s the zeal of the organs for each other. The personal factor doesn’t matter.
MOYERS: And Agape?
CAMPBELL: Agape is love thy neighbor as thyself—spiritual love. It doesn’t matter who the neighbor is.
MOYERS: Now, this is not passion in the sense that Eros mandates it, this is compassion, I would think.
CAMPBELL: Yes, it is compassion. It is a heart opening. But it is not individuated as Amor is.
MOYERS: Agape is a religious impulse.
CAMPBELL: Yes. But Amor could become a religious impulse, too. The troubadours recognized Amor as the highest spiritual experience.
You see, the experience of Eros is a kind of seizure. In India, the god of love is a big, vigorous youth with a bow and a quiver of arrows. The names of the arrows are “Death-bringing Agony” and “Open Up” and so forth. Really, he just drives this thing into you so that it’s a total physiological, psychological explosion.
Then the other love, Agape, is a love of the neighbor as thyself. Again, it doesn’t matter who the person is. It is your neighbor, and you must have that kind of love.
But with Amor we have a purely personal ideal. The kind of seizure that comes from the meeting of the eyes, as they say in the troubadour tradition, is a person-to-person experience.
MOYERS: There’s a poem in one of your books about this meeting of the eyes: “So through the eyes love attains the heart.…”
CAMPBELL: That’s completely contrary to everything the Church stood for. It’s a personal, individual experience, and I think it’s the essential thing that’s great about the West and that makes it different from all other traditions I know.
MOYERS: So the courage to love became the courage to affirm one’s own experience against tradition—the tradition of the Church. Why was that important in the evolution of the West?
CAMPBELL: It was important in that it gave the West this accent on the individual, that one should have faith in his experience and not simply mouth terms handed down to him by others. It stresses the validity of the individual’s experience of what humanity is, what life is, what values are, against the monolithic system. The monolithic system is a machine system: every machine works like every other machine that’s come out of the same shop.
MOYERS: What did you mean when you wrote that the beginning of romantic love in the West was “libido over credo”?
CAMPBELL: Well, the credo says “I believe,” and I believe not only in the laws, but I believe that these laws were instituted by God, and there’s no arguing with God. These laws are a heavy weight on me, and disobeying these is sin and has to do with my eternal character.
MOYERS: That’s the credo?
CAMPBELL: That’s the credo. You believe, and then you go to confession, and you run down through the list of sins, and you count yourself against those, and instead of going into the priest and saying, “Bless me, father, for I have been great this week,” you meditate on the sins, and in meditating on the sins, then you really become a sinner in your life. It’s a condemnation, actually, of the will to life, that’s what the credo is.
MOYERS: And libido?
CAMPBELL: The libido is the impulse to life. It comes from the heart.
MOYERS: And the heart is—
CAMPBELL: —the heart is the organ of opening up to somebody else. That’s the human quality as opposed to the animal qualities, which have to do with self-interest.
MOYERS: So you’re talking about romantic love as opposed to lust, or passion, or a general religious sentiment?
CAMPBELL: Yes. You know, the usual