The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [129]
MOYERS: The face of the saint beholding God?
CAMPBELL: It doesn’t matter who it is. You could take someone whom you might think of as a monster. The aesthetic experience transcends ethics and didactics.
MOYERS: That’s where I would disagree with you. It seems to me that in order to experience the epiphany, the object you behold but do not want to possess must be beautiful in some way. And a moment ago, when you talked about your peak experience, running, you said it was beautiful. “Beautiful” is an aesthetic word. Beauty is the harmony.
CAMPBELL: Yes.
MOYERS: And yet you said it’s also in Joyce’s epiphanies, and that concerns art and the aesthetic.
CAMPBELL: Yes.
MOYERS: It seems to me they are the same if they’re both beautiful. How can you behold a monster and have an epiphany?
CAMPBELL: There’s another emotion associated with art, which is not of the beautiful but of the sublime. What we call monsters can be experienced as sublime. They represent powers too vast for the normal forms of life to contain them. An immense expanse of space is sublime. The Buddhists know how to achieve this effect in situating their temples, which are often up on high hills. For example, some of the temple gardens in Japan are designed so that you will first be experiencing close-in, intimate arrangements. Meanwhile, you’re climbing, until suddenly you break past a screen and an expanse of horizon opens out, and somehow, with this diminishment of your own ego, your consciousness expands to an experience of the sublime.
Another mode of the sublime is of prodigious energy, force, and power. I’ve known a number of people who were in Central Europe during the Anglo-American saturation bombings of their cities—and several have described this inhuman experience as not only terrible but in a measure sublime.
MOYERS: I once interviewed a veteran of the Second World War. I talked to him about his experience at the Battle of the Bulge, in that bitter winter when the surprise German assault was about to succeed. I said, “As you look back on it, what was it?” And he said, “It was sublime.”
CAMPBELL: And so the monster comes through as a kind of god.
MOYERS: And by the monster you mean—
CAMPBELL: By a monster I mean some horrendous presence or apparition that explodes all of your standards for harmony, order, and ethical conduct. For example, Vishnu at the end of the world appears as a monster. There he is, destroying the universe, first with fire and then with a torrential flood that drowns out the fire and everything else. Nothing is left but ash. The whole universe with all its life and lives has been utterly wiped out. That’s God in the role of destroyer. Such experiences go past ethical or aesthetic judgments. Ethics is wiped out. Whereas in our religions, with their accent on the human, there is also an accent on the ethical—God is qualified as good. No, no! God is horrific. Any god who can invent hell is no candidate for the Salvation Army. The end of the world, think of it! But there is a Muslim saying about the Angel of Death: “When the Angel of Death approaches, he is terrible. When he reaches you, it is bliss.”
In Buddhist systems, more especially those of Tibet, the meditation Buddhas appear in two aspects, one peaceful and the other wrathful. If you are clinging fiercely to your ego and its little temporal world of sorrows and joys, hanging on for dear life, it will be the wrathful aspect of the deity that appears. It will seem terrifying. But the moment your ego yields and gives up, that same meditation Buddha is experienced as a bestower of bliss.
MOYERS: Jesus did talk of bringing a sword, and I don’t believe he meant to use it against your fellow. He meant it in terms of opening the ego—I come to cut you free from the binding ego of your own self.
CAMPBELL: This is what is