the hero with a thousand faces goodreads

They are there to comfort and challenge, to explain and confuse, to point out the way forward and to appreciate the road not taken.

And their ostensible purpose is to help us through life, and ultimately into death. These symbols are gifts we did nothing to earn them. They themselves are not divine, as Plato thought but they are manifestations of the incomprehensibly divine made suitable for human consumption. They unite us but allow us to think we are entirely independent of one other. They are part of us yet entirely separate. We have no way of assessing their scope or the full character of their existence. And, who knows, perhaps they are as powerful as they appear. Hence they appear omnipotent in the specific sense that the Divine Aesthetic includes all aesthetics (including itself, in defiance of pedestrian, finite, human logic). Befitting their status, these symbols are beyond our control. These latter appear to arrive with our genes they are quite literally bred into us. Some we create for ourselves, some that others create we are born into, and some are essentially eternal. We live in a world of symbols and complex arrangements of symbols we call stories. Its followers are everyone who can speak, and even infants and the infirm who can’t. Its scripture includes fairy tales and learned treatises. It is constantly the same and yet manifests itself in uncountably many ways, in art, music, dance, science, technology, literature, and of course religion. It applies in every culture and in every age.

It presents, therefore, not an aesthetic idea of God, but God as an aesthetic, the Divine Aesthetic.Ĭampbell’s Divine Aesthetic is divine because it is “the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find, together with a challengingly persistent suggestion of more remaining to be experienced than will ever be known or told.” It is both universal and infinite. It is a description of this God as a way of perceiving both the world and oneself. Hero With A Thousand Faces is a theology of the God of hope.

By avoiding the idea of faith entirely, Campbell keeps alive a religion of hope. But upon re-reading it I find it as revelatory as it was then. I was introduced to it in my mid-twenties, almost half a century ago. Written in 1948, Hero With A Thousand Faces is only slightly younger than I am.

The hero with a thousand faces goodreads