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Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

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THOU ART THAT is the first volume in THE COLLECTED WORKS OF JOSEPH CAMPBELL which contains materials gathered from previously uncollected essays, letters, diaries, articles and lectures. As such it presents a broad sampling of Campbell's work on mythology and the Western religions.

Campbell believes that the stories in the Bible should be read metaphorically. By interpreting events historically institutional religions create a problem. When people realize that the events probably did not take place, then the power of the message is diminished. Examples of such events are the Fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and the Exodus from Egypt.

A fairly thorough discussion is introduced in Chapter VI of Judo-Christian symbols such as the Virgin Birth, Judas and the Flight into Egypt. Here we see why Campbell is so much admired for the breadth of his knowledge of mythology and his ability to bring this learning to bear on Jewish and Christian origins.

In one of the more interesting parts of the book Campbell describes the basic differences between the world religions of creed which are Buddhism, Christianity and Islam and the leading ethnic religions of birth which are Hinduism, Judaism and Shintoism.

Often Campbell points out that our ideas of the universe are being reordered by our experience in space. There are no horizons in space causing many people to retreat into fundamentalism.

For a small book THOU ART THAT is filled with much food for thought. I highly recommend it and am looking forward to reading future volumes in this series.

This is a wonderful taste of the large, unpublished work of Campbell yet to be shared. I would recommend this book to those who want a good introduction to Campbell's work. Hopefully it will inspire them to read more about mythology and deepen their knowledge. This book is concerned mainly with mythos (meaning) versus logos (symbol) and how many people get caught up in symbols, thus missing the meaning (the mistake most fundamentalists are trapped in). As always with Campbell, his explanations are so eloquent and educated that one cannot help but want more. The only complaint I have about this book is its size--only 100 pages of Campbell's writing (mostly from lectures and notes). It certainly could have been expanded to twice that with very little effort. However, for those used to Campbell's written work, they will be pleasantly surprised how different his lecturing is.
One mistake the editor, and many a reviewer, make is to try and say that Campbell focuses on the Judeo-Christian aspect of symbol abuse. If one were to read all of Campbell's work, they would find this to be quite wrong. Campbell is not so shallow. His concern is mythology, all of it, world-round. In fact, the majority of his work focuses on primitive mythology. He certainly spoke and expounded on the Judeo-Christian aspect much in his lecturing, but this is mostly because that is what his audience was interested in, especially the new-agers who desperately clung to Campbell in the last decades of his life.
But I encourage those interested to dig deeper than this book into Campbell's work where can be found a rich, scholarly depth and breadth of mythos/logos study.

"Mythology may, in a real sense, be defined as other people's religion," Joseph Campbell observes in this first volume of his Collected Works. "And religion may, in a sense, be understood as a popular misunderstanding of mythology" (p. 8). Campbell abandoned the Roman Catholic Church at age 25 when, as a student of mythology, "he felt the Church was teaching a literal and concrete faith that could not sustain an adult" (p. xvii). At his death in 1987, he left a significant body of unpublished work: uncollected articles, letters, diaries, notes, as well as recorded lectures (p. ix). This new volume is derived from that material and may be read as "an extended lecture" on finding new meaning in the metaphors of the Judeo-Christian tradition (p. xvi). Campbell examines the biblical myths, "not to dismiss them as unbelievable but to lay open once again their living and nourishing core" (p. xv).

"If we listen and look carefully," Campbell believed, "we discover ourselves in the literature, rites and symbols of others, even though at first they seem distorted and alien to us. Thou art that, Campbell would judge, citing the underlying spiritual intuition of his life and work" (pp. xii-xiii). Campbell makes a compelling argument in this book that the language of religion is metaphorical (p. 19), and that religious symbols "point past themselves to the ultimate truth which must be told: that life does not have any one absolutely fixed meaning" (pp. 8-9). He encourages us to search out the "deeper, vital meanings of symbols whose surfaces are so familiar that they have become static and brittle" (p. 43). For instance, the Virgin Birth may be viewed as a rebirth of spirit that everyone can experience, and the Promised Land may be viewed as the geography of the heart anyone can enter (p. xvii). The Kingdom of God is spread upon the earth, Campbell says, only men do not see it (p. 19). When they realize that, the end of the world as they know it has arrived (p. 83).

This book covers some familiar territory, which will provide readers new to Joseph Campbell with a good introduction to his work. Mythology, he writes, serves four functions. Myths awaken us to the mysteries of the universe (pp. 2, 24). They present us with a consistent image of the order of the cosmos (p. 3). Myths validate and support a specific moral order (p. 5), and they carry us through the passages and crises of life (p. 5). He encourages us to find our own paths through the forest, and to reach for the transcendent by studying poetry (p. 92). One must "search out one's own values and assume responsibility for one's own order of action and not simply follow orders handed down by some period past" (p. 30). "The heart," he tells us, "is the beginning of humanity" (p. 99).

Revisiting Campbell's ideas through this book reminded me how reading his HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES (1949) and POWER OF MYTH (1988) were life changing experiences for me. My only real criticism of this book is that at just over 100 pages, it is too short. But as an inauguration to the Collected Works of Joseph Campbell, it should not be missed.

G. Merritt

Campbell was quite prolific; why would he have published such a very short book? He didn't, actually, it was put together posthumously. Understanding the editor is key to understanding this book. I found odd that such a short book could nonetheless be so incoherent and incomprehensible. After researching its editor, Eugene C. Kennedy, it made sense. What the publishers of this book don't tell you (don't want you to know?) is that Eugene C. Kennedy was a Catholic Maryknoll priest for 22 years, teaches at the Jesuit Loyola University, and is the author of such classics of humanist mythological studies as "Would You Like to be a Catholic?" and "Cardinal Bernadin's Stations of the Cross". This information puts "Thou Art That" into perspective. The book starts out with (ex-)Father Kennedy's preposterous assertion that Campbell had some kind of deathbed conversion. Apparently Campbell's wife put Campbell in a Catholic hospital, then claimed that her husband had spent his entire life studying spirituality, mythology, and archetypes without ever once in his life "experiencing emotionally" their meaning... until he saw some kind of Catholic religious image before he died. This sounds like wishful thinking on the part of the "Doctrine of the Faith" department. I very much doubt this happened; the assertion puts Campbell's entire life's work into question. What kind of person could write about something his whole life without ever experiencing it emotionally? Reading Kennedy's selection of Campbell's works is like reading Thomas Aquinas's selection of Arisotle's works: the result is a confused, disjointed mess, because the material has been gerrymandered in a sometimes desperate attempt to make the author more palatable to Catholic theology. It appears that very little of Campbell's work suits Kennedy's purposes, which would explain why the book is both so short and so fragmentary. At the very least, such an editing misrepresents the author. Here's some Latin that the editor should have shared with you: "caveat emptor".

If one has any history with, or lives in a society influenced by the Judeo-Christian tradition, regardless of religious affiliation, this book will help you gain insight into some of your deepest questions. The only draw-back, as with the other posthumous Campbell books, is that it's more or less a compilation from various discourses. So it helps if you're familiar with several of Campbell's works. Even still, accepting that there is no driving thesis, one still comes away with a central understanding that the Bible has an equal place (not an exalted place) with the world mythologies. Fundamentalists may go into this journey with a critical eye, buth they can't deny the spiritual evaluation Campbell reverently evokes when putting Biblical mythology in proper context - with the universe and with yourself, for thou art that.

It's interesting. I've read a couple of previous reviews and they seem to be positive (except the dot to dot thing--what's with that? smells like random spam to me....), but complain that the book isn't expansive enough. Hmmm. I found Thou Art That to be JUST mindblowing ENOUGH. The ideas were cogent and thought-bending. I enjoyed the breezy tone, but didn't feel like anything was getting skipped. Honestly, I loved it.

Like Donald Wayne Mitchell, I need to preface this review with a disclaimer: I am a non-practicing Jew, so it is clear that the paths to enlightenment offered by scriptural, faith-based religions clearly have not given me the sense of connecting to the transcendent that I would like. I very respectful grant Mr. Mitchell's central thesis concerning Thou Art That--that a person of faith in the literal truth of the Old and/or New Testaments might find this book dissatisfying--I must disagree with a number of his points. Mr. Campbell's central argument is NOT, as Mr. Mitchell would have it, that there is 'artistic license' taken in the Bible. There have been enough of those books around--no one needed to look to Joseph Campbell for that. Rather, Campbell says that the symbols of the scriptures have been MISREAD by professional interlocutors as literal fact, as historical accounts rather than spiritual metaphors. The question isn't whether Noah really sailed the ark onto Mt. Ararat or Christ really lived the life described (so inconsistantly) in the Gospels. The question is what spiritual and psychological truths do these stories tell us about the journey we all take through our own lives.
I walked away from reading this book over the weekend with more respect for the tradition that bore me, if not necessarilly for the people who taught me the signs and symbols of that tradition. Even books of the Scripture that I've always really detested--the Book of Joshua, with all its blood, or the Book of Numbers with its interminable laws--appear to me in a very different light after reading this wonderful work.
(Having said all that, I did find the third chapter--on "Our Notions of God"--to be a bit choppy and confusing. Did anyone else experience this? Had I simply drunk to much coffee that day?)

Joseph Campbell puts things in such vivid perspective. It is good to have him helping us with images and metaphors like he does. While readers wouldn't stand for the likes of French Philosopher Paul Ricoeur on the subject of Myth, Campbell guides the bulk of general readership into the density of this complex subject making it seem so simple. And that is why this book is so powerful. Though I did my doctoral work in Ricoeur, I loved persuing Campbells "Thou Art That" as a bit of light reading that encourages me to keep my head when I'm forming silly conclusions based on conjecture rather than myth and reason. Powerful, plainly written, a must read for any aspiring student of theology, philosophy, and interpretation.

This short collection by the prolific, Joseph Campbell is disjointed, incomplete and misleading. That's probably due to the heavy handed editing mentioned a previous reviewer. The selections are skewed heavily toward traditional western religion, particularly, Christianity.

Most of Campbell's followers understand that his religious inclinations were more in line with Eastern religion and philosophy. Campbell did not believe in a personal God and made that fact well known throughout his life. Yet the editor appears to go out of his way to imply that Campbell had some sort of bedside conversion or Christian revelation just before he died. Ridiculous! It difficult to imagine just how this editor was able to arrange this work. There are many great books written by Joseph Campbell, but this is not one of them.

This volume is the next natural subject in the Joseph Campbell library. If you go back through his previous books, audio tapes, and video programs, you can pick out the themes that are displayed so righteously in this little volume. Kennedy did an outstanding job editing the talks, brief essays, interview, and discussions into a seamless thesis that begins and ends with the same statement evident throughout: The western problem is the misreading of religious metaphor as historical fact rather than connotative of a mystery that transcends human thought completely. Bravo to the Joseph Campbell Foundation for crystallizing a lifetime of brilliant thought and scholarly analysis into a truly life-affirming philosophy by a wonderful and engaging teacher.