Bill Moyers

When I was in the tolerant-Christian-zone, I didn’t ‘get’ Joseph, so to speak. It’s hard to put my finger on one thing; it was just hard to see him as ‘everything’ which is I guess what I preferred when I was a tolerant-Christian. Joseph Campbell isn’t for everybody. Obviously the harmful robots don’t like him, although that never bothered me. His example of a beautiful non-Western cultural experience is visiting Japan or whatever, not going to see a blues band or a Mayan shaman; that’s his choice. He is very respectful but he’s not a Christian. He talks about conversing with a Catholic priest and saying, No, Father, I don’t believe in a personal God. He doesn’t wrastle with him about how God is a tyrant and getting back that he’s a loving tyrant and having it be yes he is no he isn’t yes he is. He just sees the personal God as not being his belief. I once thought of that personal-universal God as being fun and reliable, but now I can appreciate Joseph feeling that it’s a tyranny and I feel similarly. I also wondered at Joseph talking so much about the mythological—the personal—but not putting faith in a personal God, but now I guess he feels that no single face of the hero’s thousand faces is the Ultimate Face, you know. I have come to agree with him about that. I feel actually that the personal-yet-universal, the particular-yet-absolute, god is one of the great misconceptions of our times. Really, it’s one or the other. The Gnostics love the Absolute Impersonal God and ignore the personal god. The bhaktas worship the personal Krishna or whoever and don’t need to see beyond. You can go from closer to one end of the spectrum to closer to another end, like Joseph, usually talking about stories (basically a phenomenon of the relative), and occasionally mentioning what lies beyond. You can travel from New York to LA. But unless you’re so absolute that you’re everywhere or nowhere—and here I’m saying in this metaphor it’s as though relative and absolute were different cities—you can’t be both in Beverley Hills and the Upper East Side. Maybe you can’t even be both primarily an Angeleno and a New Yorker, you know. (Of course, the metaphor breaks down in that both cities are far more similar than say Shankara and Ramanuja, but in the popular speech they’re the bookends of America, so just go with it, okay.)… (mere)