In such wise as the corruptible body is one thing and further the immortal soul is another thing, yet one man is constituted of them both, so from the mortal and the immortal, from the corruptible and from the incorruptible, and from what is subject to beginning and from the nature which has no beginning, that is, of God the Word, I confess one prosôpon of the Son.
– from a homily of Nestorius called “Concerning the Faith”

First Acts

Bust of Emperor Theodosius II

The fate of Nestorius is sealed long before the Council of Ephesus opens. Emperor Theodosius II nominates Nestorius, the pupil of Theodore of Mopsuestia, a teacher for whom the emperor’s grandfather had the greatest respect, for the position of Bishop of Constantinople. The nomination is part of a deliberate plan to weaken the political influence of his older sister, Pulcheria, who had gained effective control over imperial affairs and all the powerful parties of Constantinople while acting as his guardian for years until he came of age. The debut of Nestorius – an unknown outsider whose temperament does not permit him to undertake things gradually – is a storm of zeal to inaugurate a new age of reform and doctrinal purity within Byzantium. From the outset, his naivete and lack of political experience set him at odds with the populace and with some of the most prominent and influential individuals in Constantinople.

Immediately he takes steps to suppress the assemblies of Arians, Novatianists, and Quartodecimans, and the followers of Macedonius. Of the groups considered heretical in the West, he will favor only the Pelagians; several Pelagian bishops receive refuge with him at the capital as they had received refuge at Mopsuestia with his mentor Theodore years before. Nestorius next takes action against the immorality of Constantinople’s theatrical entertainers; this irritates the nobility, as does his attempt to disconnect monks in the empire’s archiepiscopal see from the day-to-day affairs of the capital and from close relationships to members of the nobility. The new regulations of Nestorius humiliate the monks of Constantinople, outrage the aristocracy, and belittle the emperor’s sister, who is the monks’ strongest supporter. Within a few months, all these powerful groups become his adversaries.

Next, as the spiritual father and pastor of the most influential city in the world, Nestorius devotes his strength and resources to articulate and vindicate those points of doctrine that he considers to be most in danger of misunderstanding. One of these is the notion, commonplace in fifth-century Constantinople, that Mary gave birth to God when she gave birth to her son Jesus, a notion that Nestorius fears may engender a false doctrine of the relationship between the human and the divine. In November 428, six months into his term as Bishop of Constantinople, a presbyter whom Nestorius has brought with him from Antioch preaches against the popular use of the epithet Theotokos (Èåïôüêïò, “God-bearer”) with reference to Mary, the mother of Jesus. A crisis develops. Nestorius silences the protesters by force, and on Christmas Day he begins a course of sermons in the chaplain’s defense. Faithfully following Theodore of Mopsuestia’s christology to a logical conclusion, Nestorius declares that the Divine Nature cannot be born any more than it can die, that the human nature of Jesus was born of Mary while the Divine Nature was not. Further, he risks explaining the mystery of the Incarnation as a prosopic union in terminology easily misunderstood. Then to appease and at the same time correct his vast congregation, Nestorius gives them permission to call Mary Christokos, “Christ-bearer,” saying that while it is theologically correct to say “Christ was born of a woman” it is not orthodox to say “God was born of a woman.” The faithful of the city, who often call Mary Theotokos in songs and prayers, are surprised that the newly appointed bishop of their city should stand up in the cathedral and order them to stop it. Alexandrian spies, no doubt, are both shocked and delighted.

That Spring on the Feast of the Annunciation—the celebration of the incarnation of Jesus in the womb of Mary—Proclus, the unsuccessful rival of Nestorius for the position of Bishop of Constantinople a year before, preaches in the cathedral at Constantinople before the patriarch Nestorius at the latter’s invitation. Proclus so firmly asserts the propriety of the epithet Theotokos in his sermon that Nestorius is constrained to rise from his patriarchal throne during the service and reply. A few weeks later, during Eastertide, Nestorius addresses Proclus in three sermons and then writes his arguments into a circular Easter letter, which makes it official: The Patriarch of Constantinople considers reference to Mary as Theotokos to be a heresy. Alexandrian agents in the capital begin to set up anonymous placards near the churches throughout the city juxtaposing phrases from Nestorius with sayings of the old Antiochene heretic Paul of Samosata. The placards draw attention, and people in Constantinople begin to gossip about Nestorius’s flawed orthodoxy.

Cyril of Alexandria, painted by Rousanu

Matters are ripe for foreign intervention, and the antagonism and jealousy of the Alexandrian school toward the Antiochene school find determined and unscrupulous expression in Cyril, the new Bishop of Alexandria, who is as eager to get rid of Nestorius as his predecessor had been to get rid of the Antiochene patriarch and reformer John Chrysostom, who in 403 was deposed and led to die in exile, as Nestorius will be.

In June, after Pentecost, Cyril sets into motion the series of events that will lead to the downfall of Nestorius: He stirs up his own clergy, encourages dissidents at Constantinople, begins a vigorous correspondence with bishops around the Roman Empire and, by beggaring the clergy of his own diocese to bribe the officials of the imperial court, manages to address himself to both the sister and the wife of the Emperor Theodosius. The emperor’s sister and the rest of the aristocracy, the monks, and the populace of the capital are collectively driven by abhorrence of their bishop and personalize it in the zeal of Cyril to challenge Nestorius.

Celestine I, Bishop of Rome

The next year, around Easter, Cyril sends a letter to Celestine, the Bishop of Rome, and encloses a careful selection of the writings of Nestorius. Cyril appeals to Celestine to hold in his city a council to settle the controversy. Celestine, who appreciates being asked to take precedence over the Bishop of Constantinople, is delighted. At about this same time Nestorius is approached by the Pelagian exiles, who have been designated as heretics in Rome but whom he has received favorably; Nestorius takes the occasion to write to the Bishop of Rome concerning them and to give his own account of the dispute. Celestine naturally resents any questioning of his Roman decision concerning the Pelagians; that summer at a church council in Rome, Celestine makes the determination that correct Christology requires the use of the term Theotokos. Celestine condemns Nestorius and instructs Cyril to carry out the sentence. With Celestine’s letter in hand, Cyril pressures the emperor, who reluctantly agrees to convoke a council on the assumption that Nestorius and the Antiochene tradition will be vindicated thereat. The council is to be convened at Ephesus on Pentecost.

Cyril sends out a synodical letter, his third against Nestorius, with twelve anathemas, or denunciations, attached. In December, Nestorius receives Cyril’s letter and Celestine’s sentence of excommunication (which cannot immediately be put into force owing to the imperial letter calling the council). Nestorius preaches two new sermons and sends them with counter-anathemas to Cyril; then, with the aid of Cyril’s list of anathemas, he wins over John, the Bishop of Antioch, who enlists the Bishops of Samosata and Cyprus on the side of Nestorius.

Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople

 Nestorius (born circa AD 386, perhaps of Persian parents, in Germanicia, a small town in the patriarchate of Antioch on the fertile plain at the foot of Mount Tauras in the Euphrates district of Syria, now known as Kahramanmaras, South Turkey – died circa 451 at Panopolis, now Akhmim, in the desert of the Egyptian Thebaid) was consecrated Patriarch of Constantinople on April 10, 428 and served until June 22, 431, when he was deposed and later sent into exile. Little is known of the details of Nestorius’s life outside of the records kept in the months leading up to and during the council at which he was deposed. He received his education near Antioch, at the neighboring monastery of Saint Euprepius, probably as a pupil of Theodore, Bishop of Mopsuestia, the early companion and friend of the then late patriarch John Chrysostom. As a monk, Nestorius gained a reputation for asceticism and eloquence. Elevated to the coveted position of Bishop of Constantinople and Patriarch of the East, Nestorius was one of the last high official representatives of the catholic and orthodox Imperial Church to hold uncompromisingly to doctrines regarding the nature of Christ that are necessary tenets for one to recognize and acknowledge the manifestation of God as Christ in the Second Advent Age. In his capacity as bishop and defender of the faith, he upheld the doctrines of his teacher Theodore, who distinguished between the “man whom God put on” in the Incarnation and the Logos who put on the man, and who spoke of the divinity of Christ as an “indwelling” of the Logos in the man. For Nestorius, the Incarnation occurred for the purpose of revelation, and union in Christ was the perfect revelation of God. The opponents of Nestorius made of his position a heresy and used his name to anathematize those churches of the East that they could not reconcile to themselves by naming those churches for him. After Nestorius, catholic and orthodox doctrine promoted one or another conception of Jesus as man-God.

There is nothing harder to the souls of men than the sickness of ignorance.
– the opening of a homily by Nestorius

Council of Constantinople 381, fresco from Stavropoleos Church, Bucharest, Romania

 The Imperial Stage
There are two dramatic elements at work in the theater of the christological controversy: imperious church councils and longstanding rivalries. Both play out across centuries and shape the tragic fate of our protagonist, Nestorius. General church councils mark the opening, the climax, and the denouement of the drama. The drama opens with the Council of Constantinople (381) requiring all those who would call themselves orthodox Christians to believe that Jesus Christ was and is God incarnate, and to confess that God is a single divine being eternally existing as three distinct persons or subsistencies. The climax of the drama takes place at the Council of Ephesus (431), which ends with all Christians of the Imperial Church bound to a dogmatic formula taken almost word for word from the letters written to Nestorius by his main antagonist, Cyril of Alexandria: “One and the same is the eternal Son of the Father and the Son of the Virgin Mary, born in time after the flesh; therefore, she may rightly be called Mother of God.” The denouement begins at the Council of Chalcedon (451), with the acceptance of the “Rule of Faith” expounded at Ephesus by Cyril and the adoption of a reconciliatory Definition of Christ, it continues to unfold over the next 1,543 years.

The second major element of the tragedy is the deadly rivalry between the Christian leaders of Antioch and Alexandria. The city of Alexandria, which at times rivaled Rome as cultural headquarters of the empire and to which theological focus shifted during the second and third centuries, envies the new upstart capital, Constantinople. Antioch, with less influence than Alexandria in the imperial scheme of things but with an old and venerable heritage as the first city where Christians were so called, looks to the new imperial city as a place to regain influence and power. Constantinople, with no great heritage itself, is the stage of action, a “power vacuum” to be filled: Whoever is Bishop of Constantinople is Patriarch of the Eastern Church.

At the council that opens the drama in 381, the christology of Apollinarius, the theological hero of Alexandria, is condemned. Antiochenes consider this a great victory; Alexandrians, a defeat. By the time Nestorius is appointed patriarch, Alexandrians are not only resentful about Apollinarius but fearful that their greatest hero, Athanasius, may too be criticized if not condemned. The appointment of Nestorius comes as a blow to the Alexandrian dream of domination but also as an opportunity to regain it, and Alexandrian spies lurk around the capital watching and waiting to catch Nestorius or some other Antiochene repeating some old Antiochene heresy.

Detail of Francis from the fresco “St. Francis Preaches to the Birds” painted on the west side of the nave of the lower basilica in the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi.

News of disturbances among the friars in Italy reached Francis in the East and compelled him to return: The two vicars-general whom Francis had left in charge of the Order had convened a chapter in his absence to impose innovations more severe than the rule required, and the papal protector, Cardinal Ugolino, had conferred on the Poor Ladies a written rule practically identical to that of the Benedictine nuns, which the friar charged with their interests had accepted. To make matters worse, one of the first companions of Francis was attempting to form a new brotherhood of lepers, and rumors were circulating that Francis was dead. Five thousand friars and five hundred novices were present at this famous Chapter of Mats held at the Portiuncola during the season of Pentecost 1220–1221. The simple and unceremonious ways that had characterized the movement disappeared. Cardinal Ugolino had undertaken the task of “reconciling inspirations so unstudied and so free with an order of things they had outgrown.”* It was on this occasion that Francis resigned direction of the Order.

In the last years of his life, while his fraternity was passing through its transition under papal influence, Francis grew increasingly ill. In the summer of 1224 he retired with some brothers to the rugged mountain retreat of La Verna (Alvernia), not far from Assisi, where it is said he beheld a marvelous “seraphic” vision. (After the death of Francis, Brother Elias announced to the Order by circular letter that as a sequel to the vision Francis had received the five wounds of the stigmata, and after the canonization of Francis, Brother Leo, the saint’s confessor and intimate companion, left a written testimony of the event.) Francis lived two years longer. At times his eyesight failed him and, during an excess of anguish, Francis paid a visit to Clare at St. Damian’s. There, in a little hut of reeds made for him in the garden, he composed the “Canticle of the Sun.” Not long afterwards, the pope ordered that Francis undergo an operation on his eyes which entailed cauterizing his face with a hot iron. Although the operation was unsuccessful, at the urging of others, Francis underwent further medical treatment until 1226, when alarming dropsical symptoms developed. He grew increasingly ill and was carried to his beloved Portiuncola, where he passed his last days near the chapel in a tiny hut that served as an infirmary. On his last day, Francis removed his shabby clothing and lay down on the bare ground in the form of a cross and, facing the sun, made his transition, asking that his soul be released from its prison.

On July 16, 1228, Francis was canonized by the newly elected pope, Gregory IX (the former Cardinal Ugolino, the papal protector of the Friars Minor) at St. George’s in Assisi. From that moment and for the next two hundred years, the influence of Francis and his name was the greatest power at work in the growing civilization of Europe. The Franciscan movement advanced with astonishing rapidity and, in the course of a few years, established over all of central Italy a network of religious houses in his name. The new pope saw in the mendicant Order a means for counteracting the love of luxury, a weapon for suppressing heresy, an army of soldiers ready to preach the gospel at the risk of their lives; and in the Third Order, unlike anything attempted before, he saw a way to draw laypersons from the entire continent into a magic circle supposed to secure the hereditary inheritance of Franciscan principles. Sporadic attempts to revive the authentic concepts of Francis, such as that of the spiritual Franciscans, met powerful resistance, and by the end of the fourteenth century, the movement had more or less spent its strength.

On the day following the canonization of Francis, Gregory IX laid the first stone of the church in Assisi erected to honor the new saint. That church grew into the Basilica of St. Francis, which became the birthplace of a new age in painting and European art. Frescoes were begun in the lower basilica around 1250. Within a few decades, the walls of the upper and lower basilica were covered with religious scenes illustrating the stories of the Bible and the lives of the saints. The life of Francis became a passionate tradition painted everywhere, full of color and dramatic possibilities, inspiring more iconographic cycles and more allegorical scenes than any other saint. And as the life of Francis brought about the birth of Italian art, his love of song called forth the beginning of Italian vernacular poetry: “The Canticle of the Sun” is one of the earliest poems written in Italian. Italian poets of the 13th- and 14th-century dolce stil nuovo (“sweet new style”), which reached its greatest brilliance in the lyric poems of Dante, have as their precursors Francis and the troubadours of Provence.

_______________________

* It is not difficult to recognize Cardinal Ugolino’s hand in the important changes made in the organization of the Order. And it is clear that the rule of the Brothers and Sisters of Penance, in the form it has come down to us, and confirmed by Pope Nicholas IV in 1289, does not represent the original rule. The customary date to assign for the foundation of this new Order—which was later used by the Roman Church to re-Christianize medieval society and whose members came to include Dante, Petrarch, Tasso, Giotto, Michelangelo, Christopher Columbus, and Galileo—is 1221.

—Robert Petrovich, 2003

* * *

REFERENCES

Historical sources on Francis are his own writings, as they are preserved, early papal bulls, and a few diplomatic documents. The Franciscan friar Thomas of Celano wrote his hagiographic “First Life” of Francis by order of Gregory IX soon after the canonization of Francis; a “Second Life,” which reflected the new official perspective in France, between 1244 and 1247 by commission of Crescentius, the then minister general of the Order; and a treatise on the miracles of Francis about ten years later at the bidding of John of Parma, the successor of Crescentius as minister general of the Franciscan Order. In addition to these Lives are a joint narrative compiled by his intimate companions Leo, Rufinus, and Angelus about 1246, a legend of Francis by Bonaventure about 1263, a more polemic legend attributed to Brother Leo, several 13th-century chronicles of the Order and a few later chronicles. Upon these works are based all later biographies of Francis. In recent years, a large controversial literature has grown up around them. In addition, energetic research work has recovered several important early texts and resulted in the careful reediting and translating of Francis’s own writings and of the contemporary manuscript authorities bearing on his life.

What still remains is to review the life and works of Francis in light of the Second Advent.

Detail of Francis from the fresco “St. Francis Preaches to the Birds” painted on the west side of the nave of the lower basilica in the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through all that you have made,
And first my lord Brother Sun,
Who brings the day; and light you give us through him.
How beautiful is he, how radiant in all his splendor!
Of You, Most High, he bears the likeness.
— “The Canticle of the Sun,” Francis of Assisi

Francesco di Pietro di Bernardone (born 1181/1182, Assisi—died October 3, 1226, Assisi, Italy), known as Francis of Assisi, is the principal patron saint of Italy, the original founder of all Franciscan Orders, and the leader of Roman Catholic reform movements of the early 13th century. His father was a wealthy cloth merchant; his mother, a noble woman from Provence. He was born and grew into adolescence in warring times, when it was customary for nobles of neighboring towns to engage in military skirmishes and while the popes of Christendom called up the Third and Fourth Crusades against the Islamic forces in Palestine. In youth Francis was handsome, gallant, courteous, and witty, a humorous imp and king of frolic who would as soon empty his pockets for a beggar as for himself, popular with everyone in town and the romantic ringleader of the young nobles. He fancied himself a disciple of the Provençal “joyous science,” a troubadour. He early resolved on a military career, and in late 1205 he attempted to join the papal forces against Frederick II, the Holy Roman emperor; Francis’s biographers tells us that a series of dreams or visions urged him back to Assisi where, after a period of uncertainty, he began to seek an answer to his calling in solitary prayer. Not long after, as Dante sings, Francis solemnized his nuptials with Lady Poverty. In 1208, while Pope Innocent III proclaimed a crusade against the “Albigenses” that eradicated the language and culture of Provence, Francis exchanged the remnant of his fashionable clothes for a single tunic in the style of the poorest Umbrian peasant and wandered into the hills behind Assisi, improvising hymns of praise and identifying himself as “herald of the Great King” and “God’s troubadour.” Whatever he did in the name of God he did with the same appearance of great import and seriousness and the same light humor and grace he had used in younger days, mischievous and merrily sly, to undermine the tyrannies that complicate human life.

He evolved into a profound mystic and teacher. He made his life into a drama, at times as an example, at other times as a lesson to be watched and not imitated, in order to awaken and return a half-dead Christendom to God. Thoroughly in touch with his age, he used his life to reflect and evoke what was in the heart of the people, and from him the people learned to live in the hope of immortality. He blended the natural and the supernatural so closely in his life that he clothed his asceticism in romantic charm and impregnated his language with the chivalry and poetry of the chanson de geste. In his concept, Courtesy was the younger sister of Charity and one of the qualities of God himself; the Divine was reflected in all things; there were sermons in stones; and all things were his brothers and sisters. The life he wished to communicate was the life of Christ, “The Mirror of Perfection,” and he took on the persona of Christ as a role he played. He never intended to found an Order (he was ordained a deacon later in life under protest) but a brotherhood that expressed God’s brotherhood, of which all created things were a part. He did not intend to be a reformer: He tried to correct abuses by holding up Images of God. To those who sought “better gifts,” he opened his arms; the others he left alone. His mission was to rekindle the love of God in the world and to reanimate the life of the spirit in the hearts of all.

His example began to attract followers in 1209. When the number of his companions numbered eleven, Francis drew up a rule of life for them to follow, styled his group the Penitents of Assisi, and set out for Rome to seek the approval of the Holy See. Accounts of their reception differ, but it seems Pope Innocent III verbally approved the Rule, and so the members received the ecclesiastical tonsure. (This “first Rule,” as it is now called, has not come down to us in its original form.) After their return to Assisi, the brethren, now called by Francis the Friars Minor— that is, the Lesser Brothers—obtained a permanent foothold near Assisi about 1211 through the generosity of the Benedictines of Monte Subasio, who gave the brethren the little chapel of St. Mary of the Angels, the now-famous Portiuncola. Adjoining this humble sanctuary, a few small huts of straw and mud enclosed by a hedge became their first convent and the central spot in the life of Francis. From here, Francis sent forth the Friars Minor two by two like children “careless of the day,” singing in their joy and calling themselves the Lord’s minstrels. During Lent 1212, Clare, a noble eighteen-year-old heiress of Assisi, sought out Francis to become his spiritual student. In her, Francis found the embodiment of the Lady Poverty whom he had served from afar. Francis gave her a religious habit similar to his own and eventually lodged her in the church of St. Damian with her sister Agnes and a few other female companions who followed her. Thus was founded the sisterhood of Poor Ladies (now known as the Poor Clares).

Francis convoked the first general chapter of the Friars Minor at the Portiuncola in May 1217. At this gathering, Francis apportioned the provinces of the Christian world into so many missions. Francis reserved France for himself, but he was dissuaded from going there by Cardinal Ugolino (soon after made protector of the Friars Minor by Pope Honorius III), who sent Francis to Rome to preach before the pope and cardinals in the pope’s own cathedral of St. John Lateran in order to allay the prejudices that had been growing among the Roman Curia at the methods Francis was using. At the second general chapter of the Order in May 1219, Francis assigned a separate mission to each of his foremost disciples. For himself, he selected the seat of the newly pronounced Fifth Crusade against the Saracens. In June he set sail for Egypt with eleven of his companions. Francis was present at the siege and the taking of the city of Damietta by the Christian crusaders. In the midst of the battle, Francis preached to the crusaders, then passed over to the enemy camp where he was arrested and led to the sultan. It is reported that the sultan received Francis with courtesy and gave him permission to visit the holy places in Palestine. It is also reported that the sultan, charmed by Francis, said: “I would convert to your religion, which is a beautiful one—but both you and I would be murdered.”

< PART 2 >

Joseph Campbell

God is a metaphor for a mystery that absolutely transcends all categories of human thought. . . . It’s as simple as that.
—Joseph Campbell, in an interview with Gary Abrams of the Los Angeles Times

Joseph Campbell was born on March 26, 1904, into a staunch Roman Catholic family and enjoyed an upper-class upbringing in New York state. He undertook academic studies at Columbia University and at the University of Munich, where he studied Sanskrit and Indo-European philology. In 1934 he began his teaching career at Sarah Lawrence College and soon after married dancer and choreographer Jean Erdman. Between the years 1949 and 1983, he published his major works on comparative mythology. He died in Honolulu, Hawaii, on October 31, 1987.

Campbell was first drawn to mythology by his interest in Native Americans. After seeing Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show at Madison Square Garden, he read every book he could find about American Indian tribes and toured the American Museum of Natural History whenever he had time, enthralled by the Indian exhibits there. In prep school he studied the ancient cultures of the South Pacific, and by the time he entered college he had a wide knowledge of folklore and mythology. At Columbia University, Campbell earned degrees in English and medieval literature, and as a member of the university’s track team he traveled to California, Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, and Cuba. On one of those trips, a meeting with Jiddu Krishnamurti sparked his interest in Hinduism and Buddhism. Campbell dropped out of the doctoral program at Columbia when he was told that mythology was not a fit subject for a dissertation.

For several years after his exodus from Columbia, Campbell studied mythology on his own. In 1927, on an excursion to Paris to study Old French and Provençal, Campbell encountered James Joyce’s labyrinthine novel Ulysses. When he got to chapter 3, “Proteus,” he was puzzled by the opening: Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read. . . .” He took his enigma to Sylvia Beach, at Shakespeare and Co., 12 Rue de l’Orlean, in a high state of academic indignation, and she gave him the clues he needed to read it. This conversation changed his career. What Campbell discovered became the foundation of his work in comparative mythology and moved him to explore Joyce’s literary creations for sixty years. When he returned to the United States, he spent a year and a half in a cabin in the woods around Woodstock, New York, reading scholarly works on mythology, legends, and folklore. In 1932 he took a teaching position with his old preparatory school. A year later he sold his first short story, “Strictly Platonic.” The next year he moved to Sarah Lawrence College where he taught literature until 1972.

During his years as a teacher, Campbell produced a massive body of work in the fields of comparative mythology, folklore, and religion. He began in the 1940s by editing the unfinished works of the late Heinrich Zimmer, a noted lecturer in Indology at Columbia, who was his friend and mentor. After ten years of work on Indian art and philosophy, Campbell made a long-postponed journey to Asia, which became another turning point in his life. His six months of disillusionment and revelation in India is recorded in his published journals Baksheesh and Brahman.

Campbell’s first book as sole author, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), took him four years to write. In this work, Campbell attempted to unite the world’s mythologies into a “monomyth,” the single underlying story that all myths tell. He found that story to be an outline of the proper way for humans to live. Early reviewers were put off by the volume’s mystical tone. In the four-volume work The Masks of God (1959–1968), Campbell surveyed the world’s mythologies while he argued on behalf of his idea of the monomyth. The first volume begins with the religious ideas of the Bronze Age. The second turns to the East to trace the emergence of the particularly Asian idea of reincarnation and transcendence of the ego. The third begins with the prehistoric belief in a mother-goddess and follows the course of Western religious belief down through the centuries. In the concluding volume, Campbell shifts his attention away from the anonymous myths of the past toward the personal myths of the present created by artists and writers such as Dante, Joyce and T.S. Eliot, and argues the need for a new mythology that speaks to the entire human race in modern terms. With The Mythic Image (1974), Campbell turned to the origins of myth. His argument is that the human unconscious mind, particularly dreams, form the basis of all mythology. Four hundred illustrations collected from all over the world and ranging from prehistoric cave paintings to avant-garde works of the present day are used as evidence of the relationship between myth and dream in humankind’s artistic creations. Swiss psychologist Carl Jung had earlier raised the same point with his theory of the Collective Unconscious. In The Mythic Image, Campbell gave the theory clear and splendid demonstration. In 1983 Campbell published the first of a planned six-volume series titled Historical Atlas of World Mythology. Campbell meant this work to relate the mythological history of the world in a single, all-encompassing narrative. The intended six volumes of the Atlas were never completed.

In addition to writing, Campbell produced a number of video interviews with Bill Moyers for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) television special The Power of Myth. These interviews, broadcast together in 1988 as a six-part series, drew an audience of 2.5 million people per episode. A best-selling book based on the televison program was also released. A second PBS program, Transformations of Myth through Time, collected thirteen of Campbell’s lectures on the evolution of myth. In 1989 the series of lectures was released in book form.

Since Campbell’s death in 1987, several volumes of interviews, essays, and other works have been published. An Open Life is the transcription of ten years of interviews on diverse subjects. A more intimate collection of interviews is contained in The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Works. Campbell’s exposure via PBS made him known to more people after his death than while he was alive. This exposure transformed him into the rarest of intellectuals in American life: the serious thinker who is embraced by popular culture. He will be remembered for his efforts to rediscover, for a world deprived of meaning, the fundamental mythological pattern of the human spirit.

Robert Petrovich, 2001

What the Divine plan of his life is, man can only learn as he advances faithfully and adventurously along the path which is marked out for him by God, and which he can never be at a loss to know, if he but seeks to know it. But since the path is of God’s devising and not man’s, it follows that it must be one of high adventure, and one that is often beset with clouds and darkness. The life of the faithful man must, therefore, be one of constant discovery: on the one hand of the goodness and love of God, on the other of his own growing power and destinies.
—R. H. Charles, Gambling & betting: a short study dealing with their origin and their relation to morality and religion, 1925

R. H. Charles

Robert Henry Charles (1855–1931) received a doctor of divinity degree from Trinity College and a doctor of letters from Oxford, was accepted as a Fellow of the British Academy, and in 1919 was appointed archdeacon of Westminster. Charles began his education at a private school near his home in Ulster, Ireland, but was dissatisfied with the quality of instruction and requested to be transferred to Belfast Academy. He made rapid progress and soon entered Queen’s College, where he earned his B.A. (1877) and M.A. (1880) with first-class honors. During his undergraduate years at Belfast, he passed through a spiritual crisis that led him to seek ordination; accordingly, he entered Trinity College, Dublin, and there opened a brilliant career in classics and theology. He served as professor of biblical Greek at Dublin, as lecturer at Oxford, and as canon and, later, archdeacon of Westminster. But it was his rare work as a scholar of Jewish eschatological, apocryphal, and apocalyptic literature that distinguished him and brought him fame.

In 1880, at the end of his master’s courses at Queen’s College, Charles spent some time in Germany and during his stay at Heidelberg met the woman who would later become his wife. He was ordained a deacon in 1883 and a priest in 1884. During the succeeding six years he served curatorships in Whitechapel, Kensington, and Kennington with such zeal and energy that his health was seriously impaired and prolonged rest became necessary. With his wife he went to Germany for a year. It was during this visit that he began his study of religious developments within Judaism during the intertestamental period, particularly the exposition of the apocalyptic literature of that age. When Charles returned to England, he settled at Oxford and began the publication of a long series of works of first-rate importance. The series opened with an English translation of the Book of Enoch (1893) and was crowned by a massive edition of the Apocalypse of John or Book of Revelation in two volumes (1920) and a great commentary on the Book of Daniel (1929). In the intervening years he published masterly English translations, with reliable commentaries, of many apocalyptic works that had only recently come to light. To do so he made himself a master of the languages of the genre—Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopic—by years of industrious and concentrated study.

His knowledge was vast and accurate. His critical editions of the Book of Jubilees, Enoch, and Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs still stand as models of scholarship and remain indispensable for students. While pursuing his own researches with characteristic zeal, he gathered about him at Oxford a band of scholars with similar interests and abilities. The result of their joint labors was the two volumes of The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English (1913), in which, besides the general editorship, Charles contributed a large share of the detailed work. He had worked at and revised his own contributions to that collection—2 Baruch, 1 Enoch, 2 Enoch, Martyrdom of Isaiah, Book of Jubilees, Assumption of Moses, Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and Fragments of a Zadokite Work—over a period of nearly twenty years. His Ethiopic version of Enoch was edited from twenty-three manuscripts with additional Greek and Latin fragments; his Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, from nine Greek manuscripts with Armenian, Slavonic, Hebrew, and Aramaic versions. Like the unequaled scholar of a later generation, Theodor Gaster, R. H. Charles produced excellent translations of scriptural texts newly come to light and believed it to be his duty as a scholar to present them to laypersons for their elevation.

Robert Petrovich, 2002

     It seems that a new religion must exalt the Sun of Life more successfully than Christianity has ever succeeded in doing. . . . Akhenaten in his gardens by the Nile had a vision of what might be, but it was too soon. If we cannot move nearer to this vision now, it will be too late. . . .
      Meanwhile the sun shines upon us all in turn. . . . There is just a chance that it may awaken us to a Good Morning.
—Man and the Sun, Jacquetta Hawkes

A young Jacquetta Hawkes PHOTO: Nicholas Hawkes

Jacquetta Hawkes (1910–1996) was the daughter of Nobel Prize–winner Sir Frederick Hopkins, the first cousin of poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hawkes began to grow an awareness of the poetry of history at an early age and was drawn to archaeology, which she read for her degree at Newnham College in her hometown of Cambridge. In 1931 she began her lifelong work conducting research and excavations in Britain, Ireland, France, and Palestine. Her first book was on the archaeology of ancient Britain; her last, on the archaeology of the entire ancient world. During and immediately after World War II, she held several government posts and founded the United Kingdom Commission for UNESCO, the United Nations education and cultural organization. Over the next forty years Hawkes wrote prolifically, authoring bold and poetic books on archaeology, geology, and the history of humankind.

In 1962 she published Man and the Sun. The book was regarded by some to be a belated product of the school of comparative religion founded by Sir James Frazer. Her earlier book Man on Earth (1954) had been an informative and beautiful synthesis of science and imagination that attempted to give to the layperson an impression of what has been happening to humankind on earth, a history of the emergence of the human species. Man and the Sun went further. This book was a synthesis of cosmography, geology, biology, archaeology, and the cultural history of religions in which Hawkes showed her wide and deep learning in condensed and felicitous language and provided poetic descriptions that detail not only humanity’s physical dependence on the radiations of the sun but also the sun’s pervasive effects on human minds and spirits. Her marvelous presentation of the early history of the Roman Church, its marriage to the older religions that flourished in the empire, and its emergence as an organized and universal state religion graphically depicts the transition of Christianity from a mystical Church into a temporal one. Her treatment of the older religions that revered the sun contributes greatly to humanity’s knowledge of the past. The book also contains the hope for a future religion of Christianity that will respond to the higher aspects of the sun and the Intelligible Light that it transmits to the world.

What Jacquetta Hawkes wrote on the subject of religion enlightens the reader and leads to new avenues of thought. Her writings are a valuable contribution toward general recognition of the future and the importance of a newly emerging Christianity.

Robert Petrovich
October 2002

Theodor Gaster. ARCHIVE PHOTO

Even if the Torah be correctly expounded by prophet and teacher, men, it was held, can and will receive it only if they be correctly attuned. And that attunement comes—if we may mix the metaphor—through inner “enlightenment.” . . . The acquisition of that light, however, was not attributed to any sudden, spontaneous act of grace. Rather it was the result of man’s own voluntary exercise. . . . The choice of using it or ignoring it had been left, in the case of man, to his individual will. If he heeded the gift, he achieved harmony with the eternal cosmic scheme and broke the trammels of his mortality. Automatically, he was embraced in the communion of eternal things; he became one with the great forces of the universe, with what we would call Nature, and with the non-mortal beings of the celestial realm-—the “holy ones” who stood for ever in direct converse with God. He achieved, in short, what mystics term the “unitive state.”

It was this state that the members of the community claimed for themselves. This was the ultimate goal of their entire spiritual adventure; the aim and raison d’ tre of the Torah and of the disciplined life which it enjoined. They held that by virtue of their “enlightenment” they were members not only of the consecrated earthly brotherhood but eo ipso of the Eternal Communion. . . . This is . . . the sound mystic sense that, given the right spiritual posture, given the victory over that darkness which is set before him along with the light, man may live even on earth in a dimension of eternity.
— T. H. Gaster, Dead Sea Scriptures in English Translation, pp. 6–7

Theodor Herzl Gaster (1906–1992), a scholar of comparative folklore, had an academic career that spanned five decades. He was one of the world’s most distinguished Hebraists and an authority on the intertestamental period, from which the Dead Sea Scrolls derive. His father, a recognized scholar of Samaritan literature and biblical studies, went blind when Gaster was a boy, and the boy became responsible for reading books out loud to keep his father abreast of scholarship, an experience that heightened Gaster’s interest in language, scholarship, and mythology. In his youth he studied Greek, Latin, and archaeology at the University of London; in 1943 he received his PhD from Columbia. During his academic career, Gaster wrote ten major books and contributed numerous articles to periodicals, encyclopedias, and dictionaries. Of the ten books, two were translations, The Oldest Stories in the World (1952) and Dead Sea Scriptures in English (1956), and five dealt explicitly with Jewish myth, legend, and folklore—all focused on the traditions of the Near East.

Like his contemporary Joseph Campbell, Theodor Gaster had a gift for storytelling, and he applied his historical and linguistic acumen to the texts and societies of the early Hittites, Canaanites, and Hebrews. Unlike Campbell, who saw myth as a story from which the modern-day reader may gain some insight, Gaster saw myth as a testament to a different mind-set. Gaster’s goal was to understand myths in the context of the time in which they were created. All words, he said, are only translations of the thoughts behind them. Gaster gave us a clue to the deep significance this statement had for him when he wrote his commentary on a fragmentary text from the Dead Sea Scrolls:

The interpretation rests on the device . . . of reading further meaning into a text by mentally correlating it with other passages in which the same words are used in different contexts.

This, he said, is the way ancient words were interpreted and elaborated by the authors of the Scrolls and is a device of rabbinic tradition. Gaster might also have said that this statement serves to describe his own scholastic method as well.

Gaster was able to work in twenty-nine languages and dialects, an ability that enabled him to amass the cross-cultural parallels of whatever he was working on from the original sources. Gaster considered Sir James G. Frazer, the author of The Golden Bough and of Folklore in the Old Testament, to be his “great predecessor” whose “disjointed disquisitions” on the Old Testament he, Gaster, was able to bring to complete coverage (The New Golden Bough, 1959). Yet Gaster recognized that he did so “by standing on the master’s shoulders” and by applying Frazer’s method of comprehensive comparison. Gaster’s published researches—his books—are each in their own way intended to be exhaustive. Gaster worked from a card file that he began to compile in 1934. The file had run to seventeen thousand items by the time he wrote his last major work, Myth, Legend, and Custom in the Old Testament. This last book, published in 1969, was, in his words

an attempt to gather into one place all that can be derived from Comparative Folklore and mythology for the interpretation of the Old Testament. . . . What I have done, then, is to go through the Old Testament from cover to cover and pick out, verse by verse, anything on which Comparative Folklore or mythology may throw light. In this effort, I have kept my sights not only on elucidating the overt sense of the text but also on recovering by the aid of such material the undercurrents of thought and the subliminal elements of the writers’ minds.

Of his method of interpretation in this project he had this to say:

In interpreting . . . I have generally used the control of context, choosing that explanation which best accords with the acknowledged tenor and meaning of other usages with which it is ceremonially associated.

Gaster employed a similar method to produce his translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls. With Dead Sea Scriptures in English Translation his purpose was to provide a complete and reliable translation of all the principal and intelligibly preserved documents retrieved from the Dead Sea caves, together with the related Zadokite Document, which was discovered nearly fifty years earlier in an old synagogue in Cairo. Gaster concerned himself only with what the scrolls themselves had to say, not with what was being said about them. In this way, he provided us with his most valuable contribution: his interpretation of the Dead Sea Scriptures, an expression made in both his careful translation of the Scrolls and the considered commentaries on the Qumran Community that he was able to draw from them. Gaster recognized that the scriptural passages that were interwoven in all the texts of the scrolls by their authors were often understood by them in an uncommon way. He consulted ancient versions of Old Testament texts in the original languages in the attempt to recover from those sources any traces of the tradition that the authors may have followed, and he found in them clues to expressions in the scrolls that would otherwise be obscure. He combed through New Testament texts to find the affinities there, and he compared the practices of the spiritual Community described in the scrolls with the practices and traditions of the edah Community of the early Church in Palestine, of the Mandeans, of the Samaritans, and of the Manichaeans—all in order to approach the same understanding of the words of the scrolls as the authors themselves had. Gaster earned significant recognition in the late 1940s when he was among the first scholars to examine the newly discovered scrolls. His Dead Sea Scriptures, one of the first English translations of the Dead Sea Scrolls, he single-handedly edited and translated from facsimiles of the original scrolls at a feverish pace, taking only thirty days, during which he consumed vast amounts of hot tea and wrapped his head in cold towels to ward off sleep.

Dead Sea Scriptures sold over 200,000 copies from the first edition in 1956 to the last edition in 1976. Today it is out of print. Perhaps this fact is significant. A comment he makes in the final paragraph of the preface to Myth, Legend, and Custom in the Old Testament, his last book, about the difficulties he had faced throughout his career is telling:

I have had no help from colleagues in preparing this book, and have indeed been constrained, over these long years, to plow a lonely furrow.

Robert Petrovich
October 2002

*   *   *

A bust of Virgil from his tomb at Naples, Italy. PHOTO: A. Hunter Wright

Both Virgil’s act of creation and the ambivalent act of destruction and recycling performed by the Egyptian populace were acts of remembrance; both were self-serving, and both were accidentally and unconsciously irreverent. Both had borrowed materials from a predecessor in order to apply them to a new purpose, and both had performed a service to people of the future and a disservice to God: They had profaned an image devoted to God and thus unknowingly salvaged it from oblivion. In time, this secret has been revealed.

In the mid-nineteenth century, on the east bank of the Nile, halfway between Memphis and Thebes, the ruins of an ancient and unidentified city, literally covered by the sands of time, were found by the army of Napoleon excellently preserved. Its outlines were mapped by the army’s engineers, and the reliefs on its tombs and temples and boundary steles were recorded by archaeologists. Later in that century, a poor woman of the house of Ishmael, who was digging on the ancient site for nitrogen-rich fuel for her hearth, accidentally uncovered a cache of three hundred letters written in cuneiform on clay tablets that identified the unknown city as Akhetaten and its builder as the then-unknown pharaoh Akhenaten. Today the sacred city of Akhetaten remains the only ancient Egyptian city whose internal plan is preserved in detail. During the twentieth century, three millennia after the mysterious and damaging enmity that arose between Egyptians and Israelites, more than one student of Egyptology has proposed that Akhenaten might be another child of the Hebrew scriptures, one whose name was also banned in Egypt and whose memory was buried in Israel by biblical redactors. Among the ancient adherents of this school are Lysimachus, Tacitus, Strabo, and Manetho; among the modern adherents are Sir Matthew Flinders Petrie, James Henry Breasted, Arthur Weigall, Alan Gardiner, E. Wallis Budge, Sigmund Freud, and Ahmed Osman. Breasted was the first modern scholar to recognize that the name Moses means “child” in the ancient Egyptian language (The Dawn of Conscience, 1934, page 350). Freud popularized this meaning to identify the Jewish figure Moses with the Egyptian Akhenaten or one of the heretic king’s followers (Moses and Monotheism, 1937). Osman went further and put this meaning into a theory with dramatic context (The Hebrew Pharaohs of Egypt, 1987; Moses and Akhenaten, 1990) by historical identification of biblical characters: All the kings who ruled from the sacred city of Akhetaten, the so-called Amarna kings—Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV), Semenkhkare, Tutankhaten (Tutankhamun), and Aye—are identified as descendants of the house of Jacob; that is to say, Israel, through Yuya, the vizier to Amenhotep III, who was, historically, the biblical patriarch Joseph. The usurper Horemheb is identified as the biblical oppressor king “who knew not Joseph” (Exodus 1:8); Akhenaten he identified as the biblical Moses. Osman proposes that after Akhenaten fell from power and fled into exile—when it became a crime to utter the name Akhenaten, the name that had been part of his royal and religious power while he sat on the throne—he was referred to unofficially as “the fallen one” or “the rebel of Akhetaten”; and his followers, faced with the accusation that their leader was not the real heir to the throne and being forbidden to speak his name, invented for him a nickname—Mos, meaning “the child” or “the son” or “the son and rightful heir”—to indicate that Akhenaten was the legitimate son of Amenhotep III and the rightful heir to his father’s throne. That nickname, claims Osman, has come down to us in its Greek transliteration, as Moses.

In 1907, after centuries of speculation, three British scholars published extensive findings and thorough research to prove that the prophetic Hebrew image of the Golden Age of the future had been grafted into Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue (Virgil’s Messianic Eclogue: Its Meaning, Occasion & Sources). A century of historical and literary clarifications followed. Our time offers a further point of clarification: The Divine Child who would fulfill the original intention of the oracle was born not around 40 BCE, as Virgil had hoped, nor nearly forty years later in Bethlehem, as medieval Christians believed, but in the year 1959 of our own age. The Child’s name was Jamil (See Jamil: Child of Light).*

_______________________

* My note “The Divine Child of Virgil” provides an account of how the image of the Divine Child came to enter Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue and a summary of these findings.

Robert Petrovich
July 2012

FURTHER READING:

Jamil: Child of Light, Gene Savoy (1973)
< For ebook, click HERE >
< For printed text, click HERE >

A bust of Virgil from his tomb at Naples, Italy. PHOTO: A. Hunter Wright

Late in the year 40 BCE, the young Roman poet Virgil composed a poem to celebrate his patron Pollios on the latter’s ascension to consulship. The poem has come down to us as Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue. In it the poet praises Pollios in his praise of the blossoming promise of a divine child to come, a child expected to be born within the year, the first year of his patron’s consulship. The poem sings of the Roman consul, speaks of a crime committed by the Roman people and a mysterious act of primeval treachery, and announces the impending birth of a divine boy-child, “the Light of Ages,” whose coming is to be the sign of the beginning of a new Golden Age. Virgil, a poet and not a prophet, attributed the inspiration of his poem to the Cumaean Sibyl in order to call to mind in his Roman readers the renowned Libri Fatales, or Books of Fate, which we know, in the form we have them, as The Sibylline Oracles. Romans had often imagined a Golden Age that belonged to the infancy of the world. In his poem, however, Virgil gave to Rome images of a Golden Age of the future, announced by the birth of a wondrous child of divine nature, the firstborn of a new race to which nature itself would respond by bringing forth fruit in abundance, by making rough places smooth, and by bringing to the world a universal peace in which even the animals would share. When Virgil incorporated these prophetic images of the Golden Age to come into his poem, he knew their oracular power would resonate with the rulers and populace of Rome. What Virgil did not know is that his copy of the Sibyl’s book had been grafted, three centuries before, with Hebrew prophecy translated into Greek and that the passages from The Book of Fates that he had borrowed for his poem were part of this prophecy.

The original purpose of the Hebrew words had been to reveal how God’s purpose in the world would be fulfilled. When Virgil embedded these words into his poem, he used them for a Roman purpose: to announce and illuminate the birth of a hoped-for boy-child who would restore the Roman world to a place of glory in the cosmos. As fate would have it, the wondrous boy-child whom Virgil expected did not appear.

The void in Virgil’s prophecy remained to be fulfilled in a future century. In 339 CE Emperor Constantine’s bishop of Caesarea, Eusebius—under the mistaken impression that he was living in the fourth century of the prophesied millennial Golden Age—proposed to fill that void when he identified the Divine Child of Virgil’s poem with Christ Jesus (Oration in Praise of Constantine, chapters 19–20), thus making Virgil into the gentile prophet of Christ for Christians of the Middle Ages and beyond.

* *

Another such act of fabrication was committed in Egypt centuries before Virgil: In the early fourteenth century BCE, in the semicircle of the Amarna Plain, generations of villagers picked out adobe bricks from the walls of uninhabited houses and palaces in a broken, antique city, whose name they probably did not know, to build for themselves new homes along the rim of the plain. The mud bricks that the villagers did not bother to remove, in time, were reduced to ruin and ultimately into deposits of nitrogen-rich soil—that is, all but the foundational ones, which were preserved by the clean, dry sands blown in by desert winds over the ages that followed.

Unknowingly, these villagers had violated an image devoted to God. The convenient-sized mud bricks they took for themselves had once been used to construct the ephemeral holy city Akhetaten, the political capital dedicated to The One and Universal God. The city had been constructed on a sacred tract of land centuries before them by a king who had been raised from childhood to inherit the throne of Egypt: Amenhotep IV, who, once he was consecrated as chief priest and prophet to The One God, Aten, called himself Akhenaten.

Detail from a statue of Horemheb with the god Horus. PHOTO: Captmondo on wikipedia.com

The dismemberment of the walls by the villagers was the last act in the erasure of the city and its founder from memory, an act of forgetfulness first undertaken and encouraged by the general Horemheb, who usurped Akhenaten’s throne for himself and made himself king. In the first years of his illegitimate reign, Horemheb proposed to destroy the memory of the One God and his heretical prophet and to restore the country of Egypt to the stability of religious convention: He forbade the worship of The One God and ordered all standing monuments in the city of Akhetaten to be pulled down and thoroughly smashed. The kings who succeeded Horemheb systematically demolished the stonework of the city’s palaces and temples. Ramses II alone shipped thousands of limestone blocks from the temples of Akhetaten across the Nile to rebuild the temple at Hermopolis. The usurper king also attempted to erase from history the kings of the holy city Akhetaten. He ordered their names expunged from the walls of temples and palaces and monuments throughout Egypt, just as king Akhenaten decades before him had ordered the names of all deities other than The One God to be expunged from the kingdom. After Horemheb, the names of the kings of the holy city were ignored in all Egyptian records and omitted from the ancestral king-lists: the name Horemheb followed the name of Akhenaten’s father in the records and not the name Akhenaten. And just as Akhenaten had proscribed in his reign the utterance of the plural word for the gods, netaru, so did Horemheb in his reign decree it a crime punishable by death to utter the name Akhenaten. The two opponents, Horemheb and Akhenaten, both followed the same Egyptian creed: so long as an inscription exists in the wrong form, the wrong beliefs live. Only one of them followed that cultural creed to good purpose.

* * *

< PART 2 >