A New Awakening, Part 4

In earlier installments of this series, I've talked about the need for a "new awakening" of spirituality in America that would reunite us and bestow on us once again as a society the four primary functions of a mythological understanding of who we are and what we're doing here. According to the late Joseph Campbell, who spent a lifetime studying the wisdom of ancient mythological beliefs, mythology can have a fourfold function in human society even today:

1. The metaphysical function: awakening a sense of awe before the mystery of being.
2. The cosmological function: explaining the shape of the universe.
3. The sociological function: validating and supporting the existing social order.
4. The pedagogical function: guiding the individual through the stages of life.

Myth-aware understandings informed the spirituality of Europeans during medieval times and even into the Renaissance. Yet on the whole, the Renaissance set the stage for the eighteenth-century Enlightenment whose purpose was "to reform society using reason, challenge ideas grounded in tradition and faith, and advance knowledge through the scientific method. It promoted scientific thought, skepticism and intellectual interchange and opposed superstition, intolerance and ... abuses of power by the church and the state."

Accordingly, mythology was out. I'd like to see it come back into spiritual focus, in ways that Campbell discussed with PBS's Bill Moyers in the series of mid-1980s interviews collected as The Power of Myth.

But here's the rub. The Renaissance and the Enlightenment stand in sequence as successive engines of Western progress, or so the history books tell us. If, during the Renaissance, Europeans didn't engage in the Age of Discovery, there would be no America today. If not for the Enlightenment, science, industry, and technology could not have transformed the way we live.

Never mind that there have been no truly magnificent cathedrals built since the Middle Ages — a thought that was brought out by Campbell in his interviews with Moyers:

You can tell what's informing a society by what the tallest building is. When you approach a medieval town, the cathedral is the tallest thing in the place. When you approach an eighteenth-century town, it is the political palace that's the tallest thing in the place. And when you approach a modern city, the tallest places are the office buildings, the centers of economic life.

We all depend today more on office buildings than on "political palaces," and more on political palaces than on cathedrals. The twin towers of the World Trade Center that were destroyed in the September 11, 2001, attacks were apt symbols of what I'd call our "office-building priorities" in the present age.

U.S. Capitol
at night

Political palaces were quite common in post-medieval Europe. In our American context, we can think of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, with its lovely dome, as a sort of political palace.

Of course, the Washington Monument is taller, and as an obelisk, it reminds us of ancient Egyptian structures which held, for their builders, a symbolic significance. Obelisks, in the religion of ancient Egypt, were phallic or penis symbols related to the Egyptian Sun god, Ra. I personally have no objection to a spirituality that encompasses such frank symbolism. Yet I have to admit that many Christians would blanch at that idea.

What I'm seeking, hence, is a spiritual awakening that is open to the resonances of myths and symbols which Christianity has shut out for 2,000 years.

In the sixteenth century, there were of course Christian saints such as Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross who, as mystics, taught a kind of spirituality that invests arcane symbols with profound significance for faith. Yet this is not the sort of teaching most Christian people are brought up to believe in today.

Joseph Campbell's thought encouraged just such an outlook. Here we have, unfortunately, the makings of a stark controversy in which defenders of the faith as it presents itself today will line up on one side, and "Campbellites" such as myself will line up on the other.

* * * * *

That's one major source of resistance to the kind of spiritual awakening I'm urging. Another is the very fact that our vaunted progress in the West has grown out of, as I say, attitudes the Enlightenment has imbued in us. We are consequently, as a culture, quite rich materially. Though some of us are indeed downright poor, most of us in America are far better off materially than most people who have lived in any other society that ever existed.

Plus, as beneficiaries of that material wealth, we today enjoy a great deal of freedom and personal sovereignty. Most of the impetus for the breaking of old taboos has been, indeed, a widespread search for ever greater individual freedom.

I'm recommending a spiritual awakening that would intrinsically serve to rein us in. It would do so not by forcing the old externally imposed no-no's on us, as much as by revivifying the systems of stories, teachings, and observances that would (as Joseph Campbell hoped) guide the individual through the various stages of life from early childhood to approaching death. With the right sort of guidance, as we ought to remember from past human experience, the individual soul can grow over its lifetime to incorporate, and ultimately render unnecessary, the requisite external strictures.

What, after all, is supposed to keep male members of the armed forces from bullying, harassing, assaulting, and even raping women in uniform? That's a question that is of major importance today, both in and of itself and because it can be taken to represent the entire gamut of misbehaviors, sexual and otherwise, that we read about in the papers every day. Wall Street greed? It, like a vast array of sexual crimes, grows out of the urges of the "lower" psyche, if those urges fail to be harnessed to the good of the community by shared belief systems that rein us in and keep us "on the line."

So, on the one hand, many religious conservatives will balk at what I am getting at, while on the other hand, those who are jealous of their material wealth and unfettered individual freedom will look askance.

But never mind. I intend to press ahead with my call for a "new awakening" of myth-aware spirituality in further posts in this series ...