Reviews and Comments
Krishna or Christ?
Owen A. Jones
A Fire in the Mind: The Life of
Joseph Campbell, by Stephen and
Robin Larsen, New York: Doubleday,
1991. 636 pp. $21.95.
THIS IS the story of how an overly sensi-
tive, bright, and precocious son of an
alcoholic travelling salesman became
successful in post-Christian America. A
Fire in the Mind is a sympathetic treat-
ment, on the order of spiritual biogra-
phy, of the life of Joseph Campbell by
two people who shared his dreams (lit-
erally: Stephen Larsen is a “licensed
dream therapist”).
Joseph Campbell became famous late
in life, with the help of a PBS special
series of interviews on The PowerofMyth
that was created by Bill Moyers. But A
Fire in the Mind is not really an important
historiography of myth. It is about the
man himself and his search for himself.
Since many Americans today are in
search of themselves, it is a story of a life
that perfectly mirrors its time.
Joseph Campbell was born in 1904 to
upper middle class, “self-reliant,” New
England Roman Catholics. He suffered
as a young boy from the major dishar-
mony caused by an itinerant but suc-
cessful alcoholic father, and serious
bouts of illness. He treated his family
dysfunction by retreating into the world
Modem Age
LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG
ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED
of fable and wonder that he discovered
in Iroquis myths. His physical illnesses
were treated with morphine.
He became “fascinated with the primi-
tives,” and while an undergraduate at
Columbia he found the book that changed
his life: The Golden Bough, by Sir James
Frazer. Ayoung poet had recently caused
a sensation in the literary world with his
poem The WasteLand, which used mythic
images to describe the bits and pieces of
a chaotic and disordered civilization. T.
S. Eliot courageously pushed beyond the
level of myth, reconnecting those bits
and pieces in one of the greatest Chris-
tian poems of our tradition.
Campbell’s life continued t o veer in
the direction of chaos. His attempts to
join his father in the business world
havingfailed, he returned to Columbia to
do graduate work, focusing on “Arthurian
Studies,” while dabbling in theosophy
and astrology.
His personal journals of this period
reveal “abrooding introversion,” accord-
ing to his biographers. What also a p
pears in his journal is a manic desire to
be accepted and loved by others as a
knowledgeable and important person:
My own plan is to study psychology so
that I may someday be a great teacher. I
shall write & teach &do anything that will
165
 assist me on my way and win me money.
I shall save my money. Then-if my life
begins t o get tedious I shall pack off to the
Orient or the south seas to write &study
and teach there. Someday I shall have
gained experience & prestige enough to
d o as 1 please-then I think I shall write
and teach some more.”
His college journal entries are remark-
ably prescient. In another self-sketch he
writes:
“I feel now that my lifework will be finally
discovered. I feel as though my destiny
impels me toward my goal & 1 shall relax
t o its efforts hereafter.”
His biographers describe this journal
e n t r y a s evidence of Campbell’s
metanoiu, “a deeper change of mind.”
Readers with the most basic philosophi-
cal knowledge will detect more in the
way of an adolescent ego-expansion than
any real conversion.
Indeed, upon leaving Columbia noth-
ing changed but the venue. Campbell
threw himself into t h e alchemy of
Picasso’s Paris and John Steinbecks
Monterey Peninsula, searching for a sys-
tem that would satisfy his yearnings,
while drinking other people’s booze, lust-
ing after their women, and dancing in the
nude.
His goal was “to initiate the world into
his creative discovery.”But was the world
really big enough to appreciate him?
Perhaps Campbell doubted that it was.
What else would explain his skepticism
of all of the great religious traditions of
the world?
“Clearly Christianity is opposed fun-
damentally and intrinsically t o every-
thing that I am working and living for,”
wrote Campbell in his Asian Journal-a
mature opinion penned in 1955, “and for
the modern world, I believe, with all of its
faiths and traditions, Krishna is a much
better teacher and model than Christ.”
Krishna, being one of the avatars of
Vishnu, and hero of the Bhagavad-Cita,
166
LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG
ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED
is a member of the Hindu pantheon.
Hindus expect that someday Vishnu will
return t o earth, eliminate all evil, and
usher in a Golden Age of mankind. Hope
for such an apocalyptic victory over
d i s o r d e r may have been o n e of
Campbell’s life-sustaining dreams.
For whatever reason, he refused to
investigate the apocalypse of the soul
promised by Christ to his followers. Did
Campbell understand the teaching of
Christ o r Krishna? Or was he content t o
“sit around and look wise,” as he once
described his family role in his boyhood
journal?
The Sanskrit scholar Jeffrey Masson
doubted Campbell’s credentials to say
anything credible about the East:
“He’s very much a Jungian.. . .When I
met Campbell at a public gathering he
was quoting Sanskrit verses. He had no
clue as t o what he was talking about; he
had the most superficial knowledge of
India but he could use it for his own
aggrandizement. I remember thinking: this
man is corrupt. I know that he was simply
lying about his understanding. . . . I tried
t o point this out t o him politely.”
Campbell artfully dodged such criti-
cism throughout his life, as in this poten-
tially damaging exchange with Martin
Buber:
“Excuse me, Professor Buber,” he said,
“but there’s one word you’ve been using
quite a lot that I don’t quite understand.”
“Yes,Mr. Campbell,” said Buber, “what
is that word?”
“God,” answered Campbell.
There was a shocked silence. “You
don’t understand what I mean by the
word ‘God,’ Mr. Campbell?”
“Well, sometimes you seem t o be refer-
ring to a universal cosmic principle, and
still at other times, to the Jehovah of the
Old Testament, and still others t o s o m e
one with whom you have personal con-
versations. I’ve just come back from
spending seven months in India, where
people have constant and daily experi-
ence of God. They dance God, sing, play,
Winter 1992
 eat, live with God-God is anything but
absent .”
Buber drew himself up to his full five
feet and glowered at Campbell, raising his
hands in an almost ritual gesture of ward-
ing: “Surelyyou don’t mean to compare...”
Campbell was rescued from almost cer-
tain physical retaliation at that point by
the host!
The Larsens delight in these encoun-
ters, as if they prove the “monolithic”
and authoritarian nature of organized
religion, versus Campbell’s ability to tran-
scend such particularities of time and
place.
But Campbell’s aversion to religion
and reason seems to suggest a darker
side to his persona. If you are familiar
with Paul Johnson’s magnificent treat-
ment of modern paranoia, The Intellectu-
als, you will possess the key to unlock
the mystery of Joseph Campbell. His
own private journals reveal the inner
wanderings of a gnostic intellectual, an
alchemist and magician, who saw him-
self to be “a visionary or shaman of the
aesthetic.”
As early as 1934 he was convinced
that a soul-his soul-could experience
“all experience” and achieve “perfect
sympathy and understanding.” Students
of Emerson and Spengler will immedi-
ately recognize the resonant symbol-
isms. Campbell sent copies of Decline of
the West to his girl friends and made his
wife read it cover to cover. While holding
court with the crew filming his life story
he shouted, “Yes, Emerson is one of the
few Americans who got it!” Campbell
then referred to Emerson’s “transcen-
dentalism.” Students of Emerson will
recognize the self-divinizing qualities of
both characters.
The Larsens unwittingly reveal what
appealed t o Campbell the most: The self-
divinizing characteristics of all primi-
tive myths that are perfectly suited to
the lifestyles of modern artists and intel-
lectuals who live off of government
Modem Age
LICENSED TO UNZ.ORG
ELECTRONIC REPRODUCTION PROHIBITED
grants.
“God is not the creator of man; man is the
creator of God.” [from an anonymous
Indian Holy Man, quoted in his Asian
Journal].
“The Sage knows from the deepest con-
viction that he [emphasis added] is con-
sciousness and that he has attained what
has to be attained.” [Sri Krishna Menon]
Campbell agreed with these sages in
his journal, adding, “I am willing to be-
come as though lost in thought and ac-
tion, knowing all the time that therein is
consciousness and experience: samsara
and nirvana being one and the same.”
Despite a good effort by his biogra-
phers to describe Campbell’s aesthetic
vision, we only sense the presence of a
lonely child of an alcoholic who is des-
perately trying to manage life and the
materials of life, who probably became
alcoholic himself, whose brother died
young of alcoholism, who describes his
own first drunk in glowingly mystical
terms that are typical of the alcoholic
drinker, who died of a typical alcoholic’s
malady-cancer of the esophagus. (Paul
Johnson discovered a similar alcoholic
pattern in his study of modern intellectu-
als).
It is the great witness of Western Civi-
lization that God is not manifest in magi-
cal signs and wonders but in virtue. “It is
a wicked and adulterous generation that
seeketh after a sign,” said Jesus of
Nazareth.
In virtue lies the power of life and the
victory of life over the elemental powers
of the universe that sow confusion,
chaos, and even death in the hearts and
souls of men. Our tradition teaches us
that we are each obligated to develop
the necessary intellectual and moral vir-
tues to discern the difference. That is
what makes us free.
This is not an ethnocentric prejudice.
It is an empirical observation. It need not
be defended propositionally. We have
167