2) Campbell: Trackless Way

[Guest guest]

III. The Trackless Way

 

"What greater misfortune for a state can be conceived than that

honorable men should be sent like criminals into exile, because they hold

diverse opinions which they cannot disguise? What, say I, can be more

hurtful than that men who have committed no crime or wickedness should,

simply because they are enlightened, be treated as enemies and put to

death, and that the scaffold, the terror of evil-doers, should become the

stage where the highest examples of tolerance and virtue are displayed to

the people with all the marks of ignominy that authority can devise?" 36

These are the words of Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677), a Jew in refuge

from his own synagogue, whom the German romantic Novalis (1772-1801) was to

celebrate as _ein gottbetrunkener Mensch_, "a God-intoxicated man." In a

period of appalling religious massacres, writing, as he declared, "to show

that not only is perfect liberty to philosophize compatible with devout

piety and with the peace of the state, but that to take away such liberty

is to destroy the public peace and even piety itself," Spinoza represents

as courageously and splendidly as anyone in the European record those

principles of enlightenment and integrity that he stood for. His own

writing was denounced in his time as an instrument "forged in hell by a

renegade Jew and the Devil." In a world of madmen flinging the Bible at one

another - French Calvinists, German Lutherans, Spanish and Portuguese

inquisitors, Dutch rabbis, and miscellaneous others - Spinoza had the

spirit to point out (what should have been obvious to all) that the Bible

"is in parts imperfect, corrupt, erroneous, and inconsistent with itself,"

whereas the real "word of God" is not something written in a book but

"inscribed on the heart and mind of man."

The world, men had begun to learn, was not a nest of revolving

crystalline spheres with the earth at its precious center and man thereon

as the chief concern of the moon, the sun, the planets, the fixed stars,

and, beyond all these, a King of Kings on a throne of jeweled gold,

surrounded by nine rapturous choirs of many-winged luminous seraphim,

cherubim, thrones, dominions, virtues, powers, principalities, archangels,

and angels. Nor is there anywhere toward the core of this earth a pit of

flaming souls, screaming, tortured by devils who are fallen angels all.

There never was a Garden of Eden, where the first human pair ate forbidden

fruit, seduced by a serpent who could talk, and so brought death into the

world; for there had been death here for millenniums before the species Man

evolved: the deaths of dinosaurs and of trilobites, of birds, fish, and

mammals, and even of creatures that were almost men. Nor could there ever

have occurred that universal Flood to float the toy menagerie of Noah's Ark

to a summit of the Elburz range, whence the animals, then, would have

studiously crawled, hopped, swum, or galloped to their continents:

kangaroos and duck-billed platypuses to far-away Australia, Ilamas to Peru,

guinea pigs to Brazil, polar bears to the farthest north, and ostriches to

the south.... It is hard to believe today that for doubting such

extravagances a philosopher was actually burned alive in the Campo dei

Fiori in Rome in the Year of Our Lord 1600; or that as late as the year of

Darwin's _Origin of Species_, 1859, men of authority still could quote this

kind of lore against a work of science.

"The fool says in his heart,'There is no God'" (Psalms 14:1; 53:1).

There is, however, another type of fool, more dangerous and sure of

himself, who says in his heart and proclaims to all the world, "There is no

God but mine."

Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), the indiscreet philosopher who was burned

in the Campo dei Fiori - where his statue by the sculptor Ferrari now

stands - was incinerated not because he had said in his heart, "There is

no God"; for in fact he had taught and written that there is a God, who is

both transcendent and immanent. As transcendent, according to Bruno's

understanding, God is outside of and prior to the universe and unknowable

by reason; but as immanent, he is the very spirit and nature of the

universe, the image in which it is created, and knowable thus by sense, by

reason, and by love, in gradual approximation. God is in all and in every

part, and in him all opposites, including good and evil, coincide. Bruno

was burned alive for teaching the truth that the mathematician Copernicus

had demonstrated five years before his birth; namely, that the earth

revolves around the sun, not the sun around the earth, which, as all

Christian authorities, Catholic and Protestant, as well as Bruno himself,

knew, was a doctrine contrary to the Bible. The actual point in question,

throughout the centuries of Christian persecution, has never been faith in

God, but faith in the Bible as the word of God, and in the Church (this

Church or that) as the interpreter of that word. Bruno held that the Old

Testament tales teach neither science, history, nor metaphysics, but

morality of a kind; and he placed them on a level with Greek mythology,

which teaches morality of another kind. He also expressed unorthodox views

on the delicate topics of the Virgin Birth of Jesus and the mystery of

transubstantiation. The function of a church, he declared, is the same as

that of a state; it is social and practical: the.security of the community,

the prosperity and well-doing of its members. Dissension and strife are

dangerous to the state, hence the need of an authoritative doctrine and the

enforcement of its acceptance and of outward conformity with it; but the

Church has no right to go further, to interfere with the pursuit of

knowledge, of truth, which is the object of philosophy or science."

The altogether new thing in the world that was making all the trouble

was the scientific method of research, which in that period of Galileo,

Kepler, Descartes, Harvey, and Francis Bacon was advancing with enormous

strides. All walls, all the limitations, all the certainties of the ages

were in dissolution, tottering. There had never been anything like it. In

fact this epoch, in which we are participating still, with continually

opening vistas, can be compared in magnitude and promise only to that of

the eighth to fourth millenniums B.C.: of the birth of civilization in the

nuclear Near East, when the inventions of food production, grain

agriculture and stockbreeding, released mankind from the primitive

condition of foraging and so made possible an establishment of soundly

grounded communities: first villages, then towns, then cities, kingdoms,

and empires. Leo Frobenius in his _Monumenta Terrarum_ 38 wrote of the age

that opened at that distant date as the Monumental Age - now closing - and

of the age now before us, dawning, as the Global.

"We are concerned no longer with cultural inflections," he declared,

"but with a passage from one culture stage to another. In all previous

ages, only restricted portions of the surface of the earth were known. Men

looked out from the narrowest, upon a somewhat larger neighborhood, and

beyond that, a great unknown. They were all, so to say, insular: bound in.

Whereas our view is confined no longer to a spot of space on the surface of

this earth. It surveys the whole of the planet. And this fact, this lack of

horizon, is something new."

Now it has been - as I have already said - chiefly to the scientific

method of research that this release of mankind has been due, and along

with mankind as a whole, every developed individual has been freed from the

once protective but now dissolved horizons of the local land, local moral

code, local modes of group thought and sentiment, local heritages of signs.

But this scientific method was itself a product of the minds of already

self-reliant individuals courageous enough to be free. Moreover, not only

in the sciences but in every department of life the will and courage to

credit one's own senses and to honor one's own decisions, to name one's own

virtues and to claim one's own vision of truth, have been the generative

forces of the new age, the enzymes of the fermentation of the wine of this

great modern harvest - which is a wine, however, that can be safely drunk

only by those with a courage of their own.

For this age is one of unbridled, headlong adventure, not only for

those addressed to the outward world, but also for those turned inward,

released from the guidance of tradition. Its motto is perhaps most aptly

formulated in Albert Einstein's statement of the principle of relativity,

set down in the year 1905: "Nature is such that it is impossible to

determine absolute motion by any experiment whatsoever."39 In these fifteen

words we find summarized the results of a decade of experiments in various

quarters of Europe, to establish some absolute standard of rest, some

static environment of ether, as a fixed frame of reference against which

the movements of the stars and suns might be measured. None was found. And

this negative result only confirmed what Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) had

already suspected when he wrote in his _Principia_:

 

It is possible that in the remote regions of the fixed stars, or

perhaps far beyond them, there may be some body absolutely at

rest, but it is impossible to know from the positions of bodies to

one another in our regions whether any one of these do not keep

the same position to that remote body. It follows that absolute

rest cannot be determined from the position of bodies in our region.40

 

It might be said, in fact, that the principle of relativity had been

defined already in mythopoetic, moral, and metaphysical terms in that

sentence from the twelfth-century hermetic _Book of the Twenty-four

Philosophers_, "God is an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere

and circumference nowhere,"41 which has been quoted with relish through the

centuries by a significant number of influential European thinkers; among

others, Alan of Lille (1128-1202), Nicholas Cusanus (1401-1464), Rabelais

(1490?-1553), Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), Pascal (1623-1662), and Voltaire

(1694-1778).

In a sense, then, our recent mathematicians, physicists, and

astronomers have only validated for their own fields a general principle

long recognized in European thought and feeling. Whereas formerly, in the

old Sumerian world view, preserved in the Old Testament, the notion of a

stable cosmological order had prevailed and was matched by the priestly

concept of an established moral order as well; we now find that, matching

our recent cosmological recognition of the relativity of all measures to

the instrument doing the measuring, there is a growing realization even in

the moral field that all judgments are (to use Nietzsche's words) "human,

all too human."

Oswald Spengler, in _The Decline of lhe West_, coined the term

"historical pseudomorphosis" to designate, as he explained, "those cases in

which an older alien culture lies so massively over a land that a young

culture, born in this land, cannot get its breath and fails not only to

achieve pure and specific expression forms, but even to develop fully its

own self-consciousness.''42 The figure was adopted from the terminology of

the science of mineralogy, where the word pseudomorphosis, "false

formation," refers to the deceptive outer shape of a crystal that has

solidified within a rock crevice or other mold incongruous to its inner

structure. An important part of the Levantine (or, as Spengler termed it,

Magian) culture developed in such a way under Greek and Roman pressures;

but then suddenly, with Mohammed, it broke free to evolve in its own style

the civilization of Islam;43 and in like manner the North European culture

developed throughout its Gothic period under an overlay of both classical

Greco-Roman and Levantine biblical forms, in each of which there was the

idea of a single law for mankind, from which notion we are only now

beginning to break free.

The biblical law was supposed to be of a supernatural order, received

by special revelation from a God set apart from nature, who demanded

absolute submission of the individual will. But in the classical portion of

our dual heritage, too, there is equally the concept of a single normative

moral law; a natural law, this time, however, discoverable by reason. Yet

if there is any one thing that our modern archives of anthropology,

history, physiology, and psychology prove, it is that there is no single

human norm.

The British anatomist Sir Arthur Keith testified to the psychosomatic

determination of this relativism some thirty-odd years ago. "Within the

brain," he wrote in a piece composed for what used to be called the General

Reader, "there are some eighteen thousand million of microscopic living

units or nerve cells. These units are grouped in myriads of battalions, and

the battalions are linked together by a system of communication which in

complexity has no parallel in any telephone network devised by man. Of the

millions of nerve units in the brain not one is isolated. All are connected

and take part in handling the ceaseless streams of messages which flow into

the brain from eyes, ears, fingers, feet, limbs, and body." And then he

moved to his conclusion:

 

If nature cannot reproduce the same simple pattern in any

two fingers, how much more impossible is it for her to repro-

duce the same pattern in any two brains, the organization of

which is so inconceivably complex! Every child is born with a

certain balance of faculties, aptitudes, inclinations, and instinc-

tive leanings. In no two is the balance alike, and each different

brain has to deal with a different tide of experience. I marvel,

then, not that one man should disagree with another concerning

the ultimate realities of life, but that so many, in spite of the di-

versity of their inborn natures, should reach so large a measure

of agreement.44

 

Thus, as in the world without, of Einstein, so in the world within,

of Keith, there is no point of absolute rest, no Rock of Ages on which a

man of God might stand assured or a Prometheus be impaled. But this too was

only something that in the arts and philosophies of post-Gothic Europe had

already been recognized; for instance, in metaphysical terms, in the

writings of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). This melancholy genius -

touched, like the Buddha, by the spectacle of the world's sorrow - was the

first major philosopher of the West to recognize the relevance of Vedantic

and Buddhistic thought to his own; yet in his doctrine of the metaphysical

ground of the unique character of each and every human individual he stood

worlds apart from the indifference of all Indian thought to individuation.

The goal in India, whether in Hinduism, Buddhism, or Jainism, is to purge

away individuality through insistence first upon the absolute laws of caste

(dharma), and then upon the long-known, marked-out stages of the way

(marga) toward indifference to the winds of time (nirvana). The Buddha

himself only renewed the timeless teaching of the Buddhas, and all Buddhas,

cleansed of individuality, look alike. For Schopenhauer, on the other hand

(though indeed in the end he saw the denial of the will-to-life as the

highest spiritual goal), not caste or a social order but intelligent,

responsible autonomy in the realization of character and in sympathy and

well-doing was the criterion of moral worth, having as general guide the

formula: "Hurt none; but, as far as possible, benefit all."45

For in Schopenhauer's view, the species _Homo sapiens_ represents

the achievement of a stage in evolution beyond the meaning of the word

"species" when applied to animals, since among men each individual is in

himself, as it were, a species. "No animals," he states, "exhibit

individuality to any such remarkable degree. The higher types, it is true,

show traces; yet even there, it is the character of the species that

predominates and there is little individuality of physiognomy. Moreover,

the farther down we go, the more does every trace of individual character

disappear in the common character of the species, until, at last, only a

general physiognomy remains."46

In the pictorial arts, Schopenhauer then observes, there is a

distinction between the aims of those addressed to the beauty and grace of

a species and those concerned to render the character of an individual.

Animal sculpture and painting are of the former type; portraiture in

sculpture and painting, of the latter. A mid-ground is to be recognized in

the rendition of the nude; for here - at least in the classical arts - the

figure is regarded in terms of the beauty of its species, not the character

of the individual. Where the individual appears, the figure is naked, not

properly a "nude."47 However, the nakedness itself may be advanced to the

status of portraiture if the address is to the character of the subject;

for, as Schopenhauer sees, individuality extends to the entire

embodiment.48

And so we now note that in classical art the culminating achievement,

the apogee, was the beautiful standing nude: a revelation physically of the

ideal of the norm of the human species, in accord with the quest of Greek

philosophy for the moral and spiritual norm. Whereas, in contrast, at the

apogee of Renaissance and Baroque achievement the art of portraiture came

to flower - in the canvases, for instance, of Titian, Rembrandt, Durer, and

Velazquez. Even the nudes in this period are portraits, and in the large

historical canvases, such as Velazquez's "Surrender of Breda" (in the

Prado), portraiture again prevails. The epochs of history are read not as

impersonal, anonymous effects of what are being called today the "winds of

change" (as though history moved of itself), but as the accomplishments of

specific individuals. And in the little as well as in the great affairs of

life the accent remains on character - as in the paintings of

Toulouse-Lautrec from the Moulin Rouge.

The masters of these works, then, are the prophets of the present dawn

of the new age of our species, identifying that aspect of the wonder of the

world most appropriate to our contemplation: a pantheon not of beasts or of

superhuman celestials, not even of ideal human beings transfigured beyond

themselves, but of actual individuals beheld by the eye that penetrates to

the presences actually there.

Let me quote again from the philosopher:

 

As the general human form corresponds to our general hu-

man will, so the individual bodily form to the individually inflec-

ted will of the personal character; hence, it is in every part char-

acteristic and full of expression.49

 

The ultimate ground of the individual character, Schopenhauer states,

in perfect accord with the finding of Sir Arthur Keith, lies beyond

research, beyond analysis; it is in the body of the individual as it comes

to birth. Hence, the circumstances of the environment in which the

individual lives do not determine the character. They provide only the

furtherances and hindrances of its temporal fulfillment, as do soil and

rain the growth and flowering of seed. "The experiences and illuminations

of childhood and early youth," he writes in a sentence anticipating much

that has been clinically confirmed by others since, "become in later life

the types, standards and patterns of all subsequent knowledge and

experience, or as it were, the categories according to which all later

things are classified - not always consciously, however. And so it is that

in our childhood years the foundation is laid of our later view of the

world, and therewith as well of its superficiality or depth: it will be in

later years unfolded and fulfilled, not essentially changed."50

The inborn, or, as Schopenhauer terms it, intelligible character is

unfolded only gradually and imperfectly through circumstance; and what

comes to view in this way he calls the empirical (experienced or observed)

character. Our neighbors, through observation of this empirical character,

often become more aware than ourselves of the intelligible, innate

personality that is secretly shaping our life. We have to learn through

experience what we are, want, and can do, and "until then," declares

Schopenhauer, "we are characterless, ignorant of ourselves, and have often

to be thrown back onto our proper way by hard blows from without. When

finally we shall have learned, however, we shall have gained what the world

calls 'character' - which is to say, _earned_ character. And this, in

short, is neither more nor less than the fullest possible knowledge of our

own individuality."51

A great portrait is, then, a revelation, through the "empirical," of

the "intelligible" character of a being whose ground is beyond our

comprehension. The work is an icon, so to say, of a spirituality true to

this earth and to its life, where it is in the creatures of this

world that the Delectable Mountains of our Pilgrim's Progress are

discovered, and where the radiance of the City of God is recognized as Man.

The arts of Shakespeare and Cervantes are revelations, texts and chapters,

in this way, of the actual living mythology of our present developing

humanity. And since the object of contemplation here is man - not man as

species, or as representing some social class, typical situation, passion,

or idea (as in Indian literature and art) 52 - but as that specific

individual which he is, or was, and no other, it would appear that the

pantheon, the gods, of this mythology must be its variously realized

individuals, not as they may know or not know themselves, but as the canvas

of art reveals them: each in himself (as in Schopenhauer's phrase) "the

entire World-as-Will in his own way." The French sculptor Antoine Bourdelle

(1861-1929) used to say to the pupils in his studio: "L'art fait ressortir

les grandes lignes de la nature." James Joyce in _A Portrait of the Artist

as a Young Man_ writes of "the whatness of a thing" as that "supreme

quality of beauty" which is recognized when "you see that it is that thing

which it is and no other thing."53 And we have also, again, Shakespeare's

figure of "the mirror."

And just as in the past each civilization was the vehicle of its own

mythology, developing in character as its myth became progressively

interpreted, analyzed, and elucidated by its leading minds, so in this

modern world - where the application of science to the fields of practical

life has now dissolved all cultural horizons, so that no separate

civilization can ever develop again - each individual is the center of a

mythology of his own, of which his own intelligible character is the

Incarnate God, so to say, whom his empirically questing consciousness is to

find. The aphorism of Delphi, "Know thyself," is the motto. And not Rome,

not Mecca, not Jerusalem, Sinai, or Benares, but each and every "thou" on

earth is the center of this world, in the sense of that formula just quoted

from the twelfth-century _Book of the Twenty-four Philosophers_, of God as

"an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere."

In the marvelous thirteenth-century legend called _La Queste del Saint

Graal_, it is told that when the knights of the Round Table set forth, each

on his own steed, in quest of the Holy Grail, they departed separately from

the castle of King Arthur. "And now each one," we are told, "went the way

upon which he had decided, and they set out into the forest at one point

and another, there where they saw it to be thickest" (la ou il la voient

plus espesse); so that each, entering of his own volition, leaving behind

the known good company and table of Arthur's towered court, would

experience the unknown pathless forest in his own heroic way.54

Today the walls and towers of the culture-world that then were in the

building are dissolving; and whereas heroes then could set forth of their

own will from the known to the unknown, we today, willy-nilly, _must_ enter

the forest _la ou nos la voions plus espesse_: and, like it or not, the

pathless way is the only way now before us.

But of course, on the other hand, for those who can still contrive to

live within the fold of a traditional mythology of some kind, protection is

still afforded against the dangers of an individual life; and for many the

possibility of adhering in this way to established formulas is a birthright

they rightly cherish, since it will contribute meaning and nobility to

their unadventured lives, from birth to marriage and its duties and, with

the gradual failure of powers, a peaceful passage of the last gate. For, as

the psalmist sings, "Steadfast love surrounds him who trusts in the Lord"

(Psalm 32:10); and to those for whom such protection seems a prospect

worthy of all sacrifice, an orthodox mythology will afford both the

patterns and the sentiments of a lifetime of good repute.

However, by those to whom such living would be not life, but

anticipated death, the circumvallating mountains that to others appear to

be of stone are recognized as of the mist of dream, and precisely between

their God and Devil, heaven and hell, white and black, the man of heart

walks through. Out beyond those walls, in the uncharted forest night, where

the terrible wind of God blows directly on the questing undefended soul,

tangled ways may lead to madness. They may also lead, however, as one of

the greatest poets of the Middle Ages tells, to "all those things that go

to make heaven and earth."