Campbell, Joseph (1904-1987) Influential scholar and educator in world religions and mythology.
Campbell’s books and videos have enjoyed worldwide acclaim. He was well ahead of most of his peers by immediately recognizing the film Star Wars as a contemporary variant, par excellence, of the age-old hero myth.
With others like Mircea Eliade and Carl Jung, Campbell helped to open the door for the syncretic study of psychology, myth and religion, a door that previously had been locked up tight by the more pedantic or dogmatic thinkers in the field.
Campbell has an impressive knowledge of textual material from a wide variety of interconnected fields.
However, critics say that his opinions are sometimes simplistic and, contrary to his dictum of “follow your bliss,” every now and then he comes off a bit autocratic, particularly in reference to his beliefs about orthodox Catholicism.
This is a problem not just with Campbell but with many past and present Gnostic, Fundamentalist, Protestant, New Age, Humanistic, scientific and even environmental thinkers who arguably lump “The Church” into one big personal projection of “The Big Bad Wolf.”
Campbell, himself, was a so-called “fallen away Catholic,” a fact that may have had some bearing on his negative treatment of Catholicism. He seems to highlight the Catholic Church’s past mistakes without fully appreciating its positive aspects–e.g. what the Eucharist means to present-day believers.
Another difficulty in his analyses of world religions recalls problems found in Jung’s work. At times Campbell seems to say that the various paths found in world mysticism involve identical mystical experiences and lead to the same kind of afterlife abode.
This may be a politically correct view and, for all we know, could be true. But ultimate claims about the afterlife cannot be made with any certainty (unless one believes they have pipeline to God, as so many zealots do).
These shortcomings aside, Campbell remains a significant contributor to the study of myth, religion and culture. Videotaped lectures given just months before his unfortunate death of cancer reveal that, in his own dignified way, he was just as heroic as a Heracles or Luke Skywalker. » Mythic Dissociation, Mythic Eternalization, Mythic Identification, Mythic Inflation, Mythic Subordination
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