The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [116]
And then it takes him five years of ordeals and embarrassments and all kinds of things to get back to that castle and ask the question that heals the king and heals society. The question is an expression, not of the rules of the society, but of compassion, the natural opening of the human heart to another human being. That’s the Grail.
MOYERS: And it is a kind of love that—
CAMPBELL: Well, it is spontaneous compassion, a suffering with.
MOYERS: What was it Jung said—that the soul cannot exist in peace until it finds its other, and the other is always a you? Is that what the romantic—
CAMPBELL: Yes, exactly, romance. That’s romance. That’s what myth is all about.
MOYERS: Not a sentimental kind of romance?
CAMPBELL: No, sentiment is an echo of violence. It’s not really a vital expression.
MOYERS: What do you think all of this says about romantic love? About our individual selves?
MOYERS: It says that we’re in two worlds. We’re in our own world, and we’re in the world that has been given us outside, and the problem is to achieve a harmonious relationship between the two. I come into this society, so I’ve got to live in terms of this society. It’s ridiculous not to live in terms of this society because, unless I do, I’m not living. But I mustn’t allow this society to dictate to me how I should live. One has to build up one’s own system that may violate the expectations of the society, and sometimes society doesn’t accept that. But the task of life is to live within the field provided by the society that is really supporting you.
A point comes up—for instance, a war, where the young men have to register for the draft. This involves an enormous decision. How far are you going to go in acceding to what the society is asking of you—to kill other people whom you don’t know? For what? For whom? All that kind of thing.
MOYERS: That’s what I meant a minute ago when I said society couldn’t exist if every heart were vagrant, every eye were wandering.
CAMPBELL: Yes, that’s certainly so. But there are some societies that shouldn’t exist, you know.
MOYERS: Sooner or later they—
CAMPBELL: —crack up.
MOYERS: The troubadours cracked up that old world.
CAMPBELL: I don’t think it was they, really, who cracked it up.
MOYERS: It was love.
CAMPBELL: It was—well, it was much the same thing. Luther was, in a way, a troubadour of Christ. He had his own idea of what it meant to be a priest. And that smashed up the medieval Church, really. It never recovered.
You know, it’s very interesting to think of the history of Christianity. During the first five centuries, there were lots of Christianities, lots of ways of being Christian. And then, in the period of Theodosius in the fourth century, the only religion allowed in the Roman Empire was the Christian religion, and the only form of Christianity allowed in the Roman Empire was the Christianity of Byzantium’s throne. The vandalism involved in the destruction of the pagan temples of antiquity is hardly matched in world history.
MOYERS: Destroyed by the organized Church?
CAMPBELL: By the organized Church. And why couldn’t Christians live with another religion? What was the matter with them?
MOYERS: What do you think?
CAMPBELL: It’s power, it’s power. I think the power impulse is the fundamental impulse in European history. And it got into our religious traditions.
One of the very interesting things about the Grail legends is that they occur about five hundred years after Christianity has been imposed upon Europe. They represent a coming together of two traditions.
Around the end of the twelfth century, the Abbot Joachim of Floris wrote of the three ages of the spirit. After the Fall in the Garden, he said, God had to compensate for the disaster and reintroduce the spiritual principle into history. He chose a race to become the vehicle of this communication, and that is the age of the Father and of Israel. And then this race, having been prepared as a