C.S. Lewis - Mere Christianity / Joseph Campbell - The Power Of Myth

“I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it.” – C.S. Lewis

“There [in Beirut] you have the three great Western religions— Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—and because the three of them have three different names for the same biblical god, they can’t get on together. They are stuck with their metaphor and don’t realize its reference.” – Joseph Campbell

"If you swear that 'there is no truth' and 'who cares', how come you say it like you're right?"-- Conor Oberst

Fact: religion trips me the fuck out. Mostly, honestly, because I find the arguing that goes on between religious groups to be profoundly retarded. Every religion is based on a series of improbable events and fundamentally unprovable shit, and arguing that someone else’s unprovable shit is dumber than your own is kind of like trying to write a convincing op-ed piece about which shade of blue is the ‘coolest’.

However, I do love to read, and I strive to understand other points of view, so after multiple friends recommended C.S. Lewis’s ‘Mere Christianity’, I took the task on. For a different take on human belief, I also read Joseph Campbell’s ‘The Power Of Myth’ and, as soon as I did, knew they had to be reviewed together.

First, Lewis:

I know, a fantasy author writing about the ultimate fantastical being is rife for parody on a level with a science fiction author inventing a religion involving space aliens, but Lewis’ endeavor is quite admirable. During the Battle of Britain, when Londoners were cowering in holes while the Luftwaffe carpet bombed their homes and businesses, former-atheist and Narnia-inventor C.S. Lewis presented a series of radio addresses about everyday, human (‘mere’) Christianity. These radio addresses were eventually edited and turned into a book which I read cover to cover, making copious notes throughout, agreeing and disagreeing with points in (roughly) equal measure. And I find myself more enriched for it, at least from the perspective that I understand more about the intellectual rationale behind Christianity.

Lewis does a great job (generally) of setting out a line of logic, and following it, and bringing the reader along, and most of his logic is extremely insightful. The concept of God as being out of time is brilliant, and his general argument for some sort of transcendent power in the universe is very strong. Other arguments, however, are neither strong nor brilliant. Example: Lewis says marriage is the ideal partnership, with the husband as the head of it. I ask, ‘why does it need a head?’ ‘To settle disputes definitively,’ Lewis responds, ‘since there is no third vote.’ I say, ‘fair enough— why can’t the wife be the head?’ ‘Hm,’ Lewis says (and I am not even kidding), ‘because who would you rather have discipline the neighbor’s dog if you caught it crapping in your yard—the husband or wife?’

Not only is this possibly the most retarded explanation for why men should have dominion over their families I have ever heard, he goes even further in his pandering, saying, in effect, ‘and women—you say you want to be in charge, but do you really want that? C’mon!’ General debate rule #37: if this guy could have thought up your argument, it’s probably not a good one.

Another point of contention came when Lewis took the leap from ‘there’s something beyond what we know in life’ to ‘the Fact of God’, partially due to an ever-thinning stream of logic, but mostly because of extremely poor language usage— something Lewis, as a linguist, complains about throughout the text. 'The word Gentleman has lost all meaning.' Sure. 'The word Christian will lose meaning similarly if used to describe any charitable person.' Most likely. 'The Fact of God.' Wait a tick...

Now, ‘Fact’ has many archaic definitions—‘a thing done’, a ‘crime’, a ‘feat’, but for the past few hundred years it’s been used to mean ‘a truth known by actual experience or observation’, ie. something provable, as in ‘it’s a fact that that your dog is dead’. But God, by every rational definition (including Lewis’ own), has no actual, physical existence and cannot be measured or studied or ‘actually experienced or observed’ and therefore it is hardly, argumentatively or linguistically, appropriate to call God a ‘Fact’. Nor it is appropriate to take a force which is completely and utterly beyond human comprehension and insist on calling it ‘He’. Sorry, linguist— God is not a fact, and God is not a dude.

This was partially what made the book less compelling for me—1) often specious logic which I noted and wrote about and, eventually, found some explanations for in ‘The Power Of Myth’, and 2) hypocritical, contradictory calls on a host of issues. Example: Lewis decries, at length, the ego-stoking and intellectual snobbery of many non-Christians (which surely exists), but then envisions Christianity as a secret society of freedom fighters that works incognito trying bring about a grand moral revolution— perhaps the most ego-stoking image that could possibly be assumed by the most powerful religious group in the most powerful nation on Earth.

Perhaps it sounds like I am slamming ‘Mere Christianity’, but to be quite honest, it’s probably the best piece of Christian literature I have ever read; it’s very persuasive in many ways, though-provoking and challenging throughout, and though I disagreed with many of Lewis’ postulates, the book does its job—it gives starting places for thought and reflection. What led me away from the ideas behind ‘Mere Christianity’, ultimately, was something I began questioning early on in the book and didn’t really grasp until I got into ‘The Power Of Myth’. Lewis argues hard for, indeed much of his case hinges upon, the existence of a universal moral law, his prime example being that everyone knows murder is never alright. This is imperative to his argument, and I couldn’t quite believe that this statement was true. I felt like it was true to a point, but only for the people of that faith within that community—outside groups were a different story.

Example: plenty of young American soldiers believe it is alright, or at least not so bad, to gun down Afghan or Iraqi civilians because they may disagree with our policies and actions. Plenty of Muslims are brought up believing wholeheartedly that it’s okay to blow up Americans, or members of opposing sects of Islam, but never a member of their own group. Ethnic/political/religious rivalries like this exist everywhere, and for almost every group, the rules for treating insiders and outsiders is different. Lewis’ assertion was just too clean-cut and convenient for me, too damn easy.

Then I opened Joseph Campbell's ‘The Power Of Myth’ and found this exact same dilemma—that within each individual society only the in-group benefits from supposed ‘morals’, which are hardly absolute. Campbell uses Deuteronomy 10:13-14 as an example, where God commands the Hebrews to invade other cities, slaughter all the males, and take every woman and child as property. Now, for a Hebrew to enslave or murder another Hebrew was unthinkable— a terrible crime— but to go into Canaan and kill everything in it was simply what God desired—the same God, coincidentally, who commanded ‘Thou shalt not kill’.

Lewis brings up a good point here in conjunction with capital punishment—that there were two words for ‘kill’ at the time. One meant generally ‘take the life of’ and one meant ‘murder the innocent’, which was the word used in the commandment. In that context, killing as punishment does not violate God’s law. But how can one possibly rationalize throwing baby boys off of castle walls or running through the old and infirm as anything but murder in cold blood, unless anyone in the out-group cannot be considered innocent, in which case the rules for treating the in and out-groups are expressly different and in a matter of pages Campbell has shot a hole the size of a Volkswagen through Lewis’ theory of universal morality.

Despite how it might seem, ‘The Power Of Myth’ is not the anti-'Mere Christianity'. Campbell takes an entirely different approach to the issue of human faith, not arguing for or against any specific belief system, but instead illuminating the basis for every single one of them—mystery and myth. The idea is that there is some endless force within the universe (much like Lewis’ original postulate) and that the entire story of human faith is the story of man trying to tap into this force. Every religion that has ever existed has concerned itself with that idea, and the particular belief system that each society develops is nothing but a metaphor, a useful way for them to explain the mystery of existence. Myth was/is a means of cluing people into this mystery, as well as disseminating knowledge and social expectations to new generations.

Campbell runs through an encyclopedic knowledge of ancient cultures and myths and belief systems, showing the endless common threads that run throughout all human experience of God. He shows how forest gods the world over take certain characteristics, and desert gods other characteristics, how hunting traditions and planting traditions have very distinct imagery associated with them, and how Yahweh is simply a clever synthesis of both. Campbell clues the reader into the common reference behind every metaphor and it becomes clear: each society has created a god or gods that fit their experience of the world as a way of explaining the unexplainable. In this sense, the Christian God is no more ‘correct’ or ‘true’ than any other god. The Christian God works as a metaphor for many, yet ultimately is but one face of the unknowable on a mask that can be spun around infinitely, and the sum of all those faces is the sum of human experience.

What we have here, between C.S. Lewis and Joseph Campbell, is the battle of the generalist vs. the specialist— Lewis knows more about language and the complicated logical processes behind explaining the Christian God, but he is woefully lacking in many other areas and, indeed, his terse appraisals of ‘Muhammadism’ and Eastern philosophies are almost laughable in their lack of complexity.

Lewis is like the PhD candidate, brilliant in his field, but Campbell is the guy with 17 degrees and a broad understanding of social anthropology, archaeology, human psychology, physiology, sociology, philosophy, history, literature, art, and comparative religions. And then we have his specialty: myth— the fundamental building blocks which create the various paths of proper being within every society. Had they ever debated, I think Lewis would have become quickly aggravated because while Campbell can tread water in Lewis’ ocean, the moment Lewis steps outside of his specialty, he is in way over his head.

The other thing which Campbell does is dispel the idea that the Bible was somehow divinely inspired—the literal word of God— by tracing back every major image, event, and theme in the Bible to myths and traditions thousands of years older than Christianity. The creation story, the Fall, the flood, the Savior dying and resurrecting, the virgin birth, walking on water, sacrificing a son to forgive sins, and so forth from cover to cover of the old and new testaments are echoed in myths from disconnected cultures across the globe, and once the underlying symbolism of all those stories is understood and context is established, it becomes difficult to say with a straight face that Bible stories are any more true in a literal sense than the Sumerian and Egyptian and Indian myths which informed them.

The case for a literal interpretation of the Bible is as weak as the case for a literal interpretation of Aesop’s fables, which isn’t to discredit or discount the function Christianity plays in my culture and many others—the messages behind the words are valid and useful, just as the morals of Aesop are valid and useful despite being explained through trolls and witches and wicked children. What is frustrating is that, until fairly recently in human history, those stories were understood and interpreted in terms of general application to human life, as a kind of culture-specific topographical map. What modernity has done is turn that general map into a GPS system which no three people can agree upon.

Lewis himself infers that the bible is a literal translation of God’s desires, ignoring the linguistic and literary aspects which he, as a specialist, should be well versed in: namely, the concept of poetic language versus prosaic language. Virtually nothing besides history texts (and even those are suspect) written more than a thousand years ago was written in prosaic language. Religious texts especially are full of poetic language and images and abstract ideas and metaphors within metaphors (uh, parables??). They were not written, nor intended to be read, as literal fact, and this is modernity’s big stumbling block: we’re a prosaic culture reading poetic words and using them to precisely order our lives. Poetics are meant to be fluid and we’ve turned them rigid, into a precise religious doctrine, confining their usefulness to one very narrow way of being.

Myth is poetic in nature and, as opposed to a system of ecclesiastical beliefs, isn’t concerned with one particular course of behavior. In fact, prominent myths in most cultures contradict each other— a tacit acceptance that there is not just one path to follow, and that giving several avenues will allow more people to pass. The battle for the individual is to choose a path which allows you to live in accord with society (because it’s useless not to) but not allow society to dictate too much of what you do within it (otherwise your life is already gone). Myth assisted this passage through life, strengthening society on the whole and man individually by giving multiple ways of being and hinting at the underlying wonder and mystery of life, and has been influencing mankind (and thus the world) since hominids first began to imagine and create.

As for the text itself, 'The Power Of Myth', being just a series of conversations, keeps a quick pace. Campbell does have his quirks— he stumbles into grouchy-old-man-land quite often with simplistic and unsupportable views on modern youth, and while I don’t agree with all of his ideas, I think there is much more knowledge and wisdom packed into it than ‘Mere Christianity’. Campbell explained to me in rational and sympathetic terms the human need for meaning and all the forms that it takes and, in fact, has made me even more supportive of Christianity— along with every other faith in equal measure— than the Christian scholar’s text, which is a pretty damn mysterious thing in and of itself.

But the final a-ha! moment came from the least likely of places—Rolling Stone. Several issues ago they had an interview with Win Butler, lead singer of The Arcade Fire, who pretty much summed up my feelings exactly. “There’s a lot of metaphorical language in the Bible,” he said. “There are things about organized religion that I find intriguing, [but] I think that people mistake describing something for understanding it—that happens in religion a lot.”