The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers [68]
CAMPBELL: That’s the most sophisticated interpretation of why Christ had to be crucified, or why he elected to be crucified. An earlier one was that the sin in the Garden of Eden had committed mankind to the Devil, and God had to redeem man from the pawnbroker, the Devil. So he offered his own son, Jesus, as the redemption. Pope Gregory gave this interpretation of Jesus as the bait that hooked the Devil. That’s the redemption idea. In another version, God was so offended by the act of impudence in the Garden that he became wrathful and threw man out of his field of mercy, and then the only thing that could atone man with God was a sacrifice that would be as great in its importance as the sin had been. No mere man could make such a sacrifice, so the son of God himself became man in order to pay the debt.
But Abelard’s idea was that Christ came to be crucified to evoke in man’s heart the sentiment of compassion for the suffering of life, and so to remove man’s mind from blind commitment to the goods of this world. It is in compassion with Christ that we turn to Christ; and the injured one becomes our Savior.
This is reflected in the medieval idea of the injured king, the Grail King, suffering from his incurable wound. The injured one again becomes the savior. It is the suffering that evokes the humanity of the human heart.
MOYERS: So you would agree with Abelard that mankind yearning for God and God yearning for mankind met in compassion at that cross?
CAMPBELL: Yes. As soon as there is time, there is suffering. You can’t have a future unless you have a past, and if you are in love with the present, it becomes past, whatever it is. Loss, death, birth, loss, death—and so on. By contemplating the cross, you are contemplating a symbol of the mystery of life.
MOYERS: That is why there is so much pain associated with the true religious transformation or conversion. It is not easy to lose yourself.
CAMPBELL: The New Testament teaches dying to one’s self, literally suffering the pain of death to the world and its values. This is the vocabulary of the mystics. Now, suicide is also a symbolic act. It casts off the psychological posture that you happen to be in at the time, so that you may come into a better one. You die to your current life in order to come to another of some kind. But, as Jung says, you’d better not get caught in a symbolic situation. You don’t have to die, really, physically. All you have to do is die spiritually and be reborn to a larger way of living.
MOYERS: But it seems so foreign to our experience today. Religion is easy. You put it on as if you are putting on a coat and going out to the movies.
CAMPBELL: Yes, most churches are for nice social gatherings. You like the people there, they are respectable people, they are old friends, and the family has known them for a long time.
MOYERS: What has happened to this mythic idea of the self-sacrificing savior in our culture today?
CAMPBELL: During the Vietnam War, I remember seeing on the television young men in helicopters going out to rescue one or another of their companions, at great risk to themselves. They didn’t have to rescue that greatly endangered young man. And so there I saw this same thing working, the same willingness of which Schopenhauer wrote, of sacrificing one’s own life for another. Men sometimes confess they love war because it puts them in touch with the experience of being alive. In going to the office every day, you don’t get that experience, but suddenly, in war, you are ripped back into being alive. Life is pain; life is suffering; and life is horror—but, by God, you are alive. Those young men in Vietnam were truly alive in braving death for their fellows.
MOYERS: But a man said to me once after years of standing on the platform of the subway, “I die a little bit down there every day, but I know I am doing so for my family.” There are small acts of heroism, too, that occur without regard to the notoriety that you attract for it. For example, a mother does it by the isolation she endures on behalf of the family.
CAMPBELL: