The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [119]
MOYERS: I think that’s the core of the question. If the eyes scout for the heart and bring back that which the heart passionately desires, is the heart only going to desire once?
CAMPBELL: Love does not immunize the person to other relationships, let me just say that. But whether one could have a full-fledged love affair, I mean a real full-fledged love affair, and at the same time be loyal to the marriage—well, I don’t think that could happen now.
MOYERS: Because?
CAMPBELL: It would break off. But loyalty doesn’t forbid you to have an affectionate, even a loving relationship to another person of the opposite sex. The way in which the knightly romances describe the tenderness of the relationships to other women, of one who is being loyal to his own love, is very graceful and sensitive.
MOYERS: The troubadours would sing to their ladies even if there was very little hope of furthering a relationship with them.
CAMPBELL: Yes.
MOYERS: Now, does mythology say anything about whether it is better to have loved and lost?
CAMPBELL: Mythology in a general way doesn’t really deal with the problem of personal, individual love. One marries the one that one is allowed to marry, you know. If you belong to that clan, then you can marry that one but not that one, and so forth.
MOYERS: Then what does love have to do with morality? CAMPBELL: Violates it. MOYERS: Violates it?
CAMPBELL: Yes. Insofar as love expresses itself, it is not expressing itself in terms of the socially approved manners of life. That’s why it is all so secret. Love has nothing to do with social order. It is a higher spiritual experience than that of socially organized marriage.
MOYERS: When we say God is love, does that have anything to do with romantic love? Does mythology ever link romantic love and God?
CAMPBELL: That’s what it did do. Love was a divine visitation, and that’s why it was superior to marriage. That was the troubadour idea. If God is love, well then, love is God. Meister Eckhart said, “Love knows no pain.” And that’s exactly what Tristan meant when he said, “I’m willing to accept the pains of hell for my love.”
MOYERS: But you’ve been saying that love involves suffering.
CAMPBELL: That is the other idea. Tristan was experiencing love—Meister Eckhart was talking about it. The pain of love is not the other kind of pain, it is the pain of life. Where your pain is, there is your life, you might say.
MOYERS: There’s that passage in Corinthians where Paul says, “Love beareth all things, endureth all things.”
CAMPBELL: That’s the same thing.
MOYERS: And yet one of my favorite myths is the story from Persia that Satan was condemned to hell because he loved God so much.
CAMPBELL: Yes, that’s a basic Muslim idea about Satan being God’s greatest lover. There are a number of ways of thinking about Satan, but this is based on the question, Why was Satan thrown into hell? The standard story is that, when God created the angels, he told them to bow to none but himself. Then he created man, whom he regarded as a higher form than the angels, and he asked the angels to serve man. And Satan would not bow to man.
Now, this is interpreted in the Christian tradition, as I recall from my boyhood instruction, as being the egotism of Satan. He would not bow to man. But in the Persian story, he could not bow to man because of his love for God—he could bow only to God. God had changed his signals, do you see? But Satan had so committed himself to the first set of signals that he could not violate those, and in his—I don’t know if Satan has a heart or not—but in his mind, he could not bow to anyone but God, whom he loved. And then God says, “Get out of my sight.”
Now, the worst of the pains of hell, insofar as hell has been described, is the absence of the Beloved, which is God. So how does Satan sustain the situation in hell? By the memory of the echo of God’s voice, when God said, “Go to hell.” That