SOURCE: Davis, Joseph K. “Campbell on Myth, Romantic Love, and Marriage.” In Uses of Comparative Mythology: Essays on the Work of Joseph Campbell, edited by Kenneth L. Golden, pp. 105-19. New York: Garland Publishing, 1992.

[In the following essay, Davis delineates Campbell's treatment of romantic love.]

Among the constant, continuing themes Joseph Campbell explores through his method of comparative mythology, none is more provocative, certainly none more timely, than that of romantic or passionate love and its expected outcome, marriage. Recognizing that in the West romantic love and marriage exist today in genuine crisis, Campbell speaks throughout his works to aspects and attributes of this subject from a perspective at once mythopoeic in its formulation, historical in its development, and personally transformative to individuals by its appearance and force in their lives. From Campbell's treatment in his books and collected essays and from his comments in those last volumes of interviews, it is possible, first, to organize a constructive focus of his views on the nature and the function of romantic love, including its Western origin, and, then, to explore its presence amid contemporary dysfunctions.¹

The nature of true romantic love gives absolute primacy to the individual and to his or her experience of life. Such an orientation surmounts all other priorities and obligations: those to family, society, nation, church, and God. Here, then, as Campbell interprets it, is radical “new ground” in the life of Western people:

It is the ground, unique and new, on which stands the modern self-reliant individual—in so far, at least, as he has yet been able to mature, to show himself, and to hold his gained ground against the panic weight in opposition of the old and new mass and tribal thinkers. … The world is now showing itself in its own sweet light and form, at least, to men and women of sense, who are daring to look, to see, and to respond. … The aim, rather, was life directly in the experience of love as a refining, sublimating, mystagogic force, of itself opening the pierced heart to the sad, sweet, bittersweet, poignant melody of being, through love's own anguish and love's joy.

(Creative [Creative Mythology] 178)

Thus, in contradistinction to millennia of humankind's existence on this planet, the advent and the continual intensification of Western individualism would have each person live and act simultaneously in two worlds: in “the inward” world of one's “own awareness” and also in “an outward” world of participating in the life and history of one's particular “time and place” (Creative 92).

The implication of such an orientation dramatically places the center of individual life in what Campbell explains as the adventure of being completely alive and the accompanying challenge to live one's personal life to the fullness of that person's energies and capabilities (cf. Creative 30, 678). At one point in The Power of Myth, Campbell says to Bill Moyers:

People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive. That's what it's all finally about, and that's what these clues [from myths] help us to find within ourselves.

(5)

This experience of being alive and of ultimately relying on a personal interpretation of self and its experiences begins, according to Campbell, in the late Middle Ages and finds its most radical expression in the newly evolving notion of personalized romantic love:

The troubadours, minnesingers, and epic poets of the [twelfth] century, in their celebration of amor, remained in Nietzsche's sense “true to this earth,” this vale of tears where the devil roams for the ruin of souls. For in their view, not heaven but this blossoming earth was to be recognized as the true domain of love, as it is of life, and the corruption ruinous of love was not of nature (of which love is the very heart) but of society, both lay and ecclesiastical: the public order and, most immediately, its sacramentalized loveless marriages.

(Creative 183)

Here, then, according to Campbell, is that nexus out of which the modern West emerged. With its inception in the twelfth century, personalized romantic love became, so to speak, the pivot upon which ever-increasing numbers of people turned from civic, social, and ecclesiastical authority to that of self: the individual, alone, would henceforth authorize final judgment and render personal allegiance by his or her own perceptions of the experience of life (cf. Occidental [Occidental Mythology] 520-522).

In The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology, Campbell observes that the High Middle Ages, especially as signalled by the advent of romantic love with its far-reaching implications, marks the termination “of the simple tribal orders of paleolithic man” (504) and thus of humankind's obedience to those impersonal dogmas of tribal, racial, social, and religious traditions. The result of this change, Campbell believes, created the modern West—with all its wonders and with all its woes.

Certainly one remarkable outcome of this radical shift of culture lies in the beginning redemption of planet earth from its theological damnation by an enraged God and subsequently its rule by Satan and his minions (Creative 20). Emphatically in the province of romantic love, and gradually in other aspects of human life, men and women began to recognize more and more intimate affinities, both of body and of spirit, with Mother Nature, whose time-bound body is simply this earth. Similarly, the advent of the dominance of human reason and the rise of the empirical sciences and their ancillary technologies began in this historical era.

If the inspiration inherent in romantic love resulted from a complex of forces rising to a boil in Western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the obvious reason at that time lay in the institution of marriage. Campbell has much to say on the state of marriage at that time, such as the following:

Marriage in the Middle Ages was an affair largely of convenience. Moreover, girls betrothed in childhood for social, economic, or political ends, were married very young, and often to much older men, who invariably took their property rights in the women they had married very seriously.

(Creative 53)

Confirming Campbell and extending the argument, the French author Amaury de Riencourt, in Sex and Power in History (1974), believes that such a view of marriage denotes “a transaction between two groups of men” so that “women are merely means to an end—the strengthening of ties between men, who, as males, always remain in full control of all important social arrangements.”² As one of the holy sacraments, moreover, this masculine principle was reinforced when the medieval church exalted the social order emphatically above and beyond the natural one. Romantic love, in fact, was considered a great danger, even a heresy, and acts committed because of such passion were subject to severe punishments, including that of death. Understanding that the whole structure of a social order is finally masculine in external organization and that the natural order signifies the feminine—with woman as nature's intermediating power—one recognizes a wide perspective indeed to the radical cultural shift beginning at that time.³

The initiators of romantic love at that time were, Campbell shows, the troubadours of southern France who, in verse and in song, proclaimed the “noble heart” of the beloved as the supreme virtue or “boon” possible in human existence.⁴ Campbell often cites Guiraut de Borneilh (c. 1138-1200?) as central to the rise of this ideal:

For the eyes are the scouts of the heart,
And the eyes go reconnoitering
For what it would please the heart to possess.
And when they are in full accord
And firm, all three, in the one resolve,
At that time, perfect love is born
From what the eyes have made welcome to the heart.
Not otherwise can love either be born or have commencement
Than by this birth and commencement moved by inclination.

(Creative 177)

Here the human heart is linked with the faculty of sight, and thus with the world of the senses; and both are identified not with the human soul but with the human body. Such a linkage raised issues that the medieval order had sought to suppress; namely, the intimate affinities between a person's deep feelings and intuitions (associated with the heart/body) and the objective natural world (experienced by the senses/body). Nature and the human body, of course, comprise earthly territory occupied by the omnipresent Devil (Creative 20).

Perhaps more ominous to ecclesiastical authority, the primacy accorded to the human heart and the senses recalled those forces and spirits of nature clearly pre-Christian in origin—actually pre-Hellenic and pre-Biblical—whose aspects and awesome powers were paramount in the myths and the tribal cults of the ancient Sumero-Babylonians, the Celts, and the Aryans. The wells of Levantine and of Northern European mythologies, in effect, seemed again reopened and their earthbound, nature-begotten, energy-creating images began to seep through the crust of orthodox medieval Christianity (Occidental 509-510). Central to this dangerous pantheon, for the medieval church, was the ancient pagan god Dionysus and his antecedent Eros (Roman Cupid). Such pagan notions signified to the Middle Ages inordinate, demonic physical desire and bestial, orgiastic lust.

In discussing such events, Campbell makes a clear distinction between, on one hand, the ancient figure of eros⁵ and the Christian agape⁶ and, on the other, the medieval amor. Eros and agape, he explains, are impersonal: the former is concerned with natural, physical urges and delights in the flesh, especially in sexuality; the latter stresses spiritual charity and affectionate compassion for all within a spiritual community. Amor, however, is only individual, personally specific. It is, Campbell explains,

neither of the right-hand path (the sublimating spirit, the mind and the community of man [i.e., agape]), nor of the indiscriminate left (the spontaneity of nature, the mutual incitement of the phallus and the womb [i.e., eros]), but is the path directly before one, of the eyes and their message to the heart.

(Creative 177)

To Campbell, amor signals the birth of that psychological “middle way” of the mediating image between polar opposites.⁷

In exploring the meaning and the ramifications of amor, Campbell turns to the story of Tristan and Isolt and also to that of Parzival. In a detailed, protracted analysis of both medieval tales, Campbell stresses the newfound loyalty that each lover vows to the other. All former loyalties pale by comparison, especially loyalty to the social and the ecclesiastical orders with their corrupted institution of sacramentalized marriage. Clearly, the romantic love symbolized by amor is, as Campbell says, “a divine visitation” (Occidental 509; also Power [The Power of Myth] 203). Its invasion of the noble, uncorrupted heart fosters a recognition of the “other” as one's self and thus integral with one's personal destiny; and in this awareness each lover will live his/her life, through love, to the utmost, ever striving to be that which each may or should become. Only a failure to retain “absolute loyalty to that outward innermost object” (Creative 567) of one's love will frustrate or destroy divine amor.

Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan (c. 1210), Campbell feels, fails this test (see Creative 567), but Parzival does not. Admitting that Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival (c. 1215) is his “favorite love story” (Journey [The Hero's Journey] 106), Campbell sees Parzival (“the Great Fool”) and (conduire-amours, “to conduct, to serve, to guide love”) as lovers elevated by romantic love to an ideal (Creative 459-460). “On a tide beyond their knowledge or control they were to be carried,” Campbell says, “to the work—the destiny of surpassing themselves—to which they were assigned” (Creative 191). That is, within the throes of romantic love, the lovers—compelled by the messages of their senses which, in turn, energize their noble hearts—experience both an objective and an intimate dimension that, in its intensity, opens to transcendence (see Creative 241-242). For Campbell, romantic love works in harmony with life to promote human meanings and destinies in accord with that so-called “ground of all being” which transcends human description and human understanding (cf. Journey 40).

In Campbell's view, moreover, only Wolfram's Parzival offers a solution to the dilemma of la joie d'amor versus marriage. He does so, Campbell explains, “by setting the ideal of love above marriage and, simultaneously, the ideal of an indissoluble marriage beyond love; then by moving his heroes to this end through adventures undertaken, without pretense and with unvacillating courage, on the impulse of their uncorrupted hearts” (Creative 567-568). Expressed another way, one might say that the divine visitation of amor/romantic love creates by the pure union of the two a true marriage—one made, the Christians would say, in Heaven. Such a marriage, however, was not then viewed, nor perhaps henceforth consistently practiced, as a social institution sacramentalized by only an ecclesiastical rite and dogma. Its personal, specific life centers not in spirit alone but also in this earth, so that lovers are to participate fully in all the joys and the sorrows, the raptures and the pains, that flesh and body may experience (see Myths [Myths to Live By] 163-164).

If, however, Wolfram's Parzival reconciles romantic love and marriage, men and women in the centuries following the thirteenth have all too infrequently experienced this joyful ideal union—either of love or of marriage, often failing, and occasionally doing so in ways that ensured their own destruction. Today the gulf between love and marriage has widened until it now resembles a violent sea that many Westerners regard as unnavigable.

Joseph Campbell comments at some length on the problem of love and marriage, particularly in those volumes of interviews given in the last decade of his life. His remarks are especially pointed in his conversations with Bill Moyers:

The true marriage is the marriage that springs from the recognition of identity in the other, and the physical union is simply the sacrament in which that is confirmed. It doesn't start the other way around, with the physical interest that then becomes spiritualized. It starts from the spiritual impact of love—Amor.

(Power 190)

When Moyers inquires about amor/romantic love, its actual nature and its sudden manifestation, Campbell admits: “That's very mysterious. It's almost as though the future life that you're going to have with that person has already told you. This is the one whom you will have that life with” (Power 202). He quickly reinforces this view by commenting that vrai amor “has to do with the mystery of time and the transcendence of time. But I think we're touching a very deep mystery here” (202). Campbell is now speaking in the wider context of that inexplicable mystery implicit in the appearance of love. At one point in The Hero's Journey, Campbell alludes to the “mysticism of love,” declaring it “an intuitive experience that disregards time and space” (41).

The way of romantic love, Campbell here suggests, is that it mysteriously strikes an individual in the manner of an awesome fate⁸—that is, an inexorably determined event that, by rational and socially prescriptive rules, cannot be understood, causally reckoned, or logically resolved: only by its being experienced—accepted and lived out—by each individual, so to speak, can it yield its marvelous meanings and produce its fabled richness. Once accepted, moreover, love compels a reorientation of individual ego; for romantic love works a transformation of a person's conscious limits and narrow concerns, so that henceforth that person will identify with the other, the beloved, and will do so, paradoxically, by acquiescing to the beloved as equal to, and also as integrated into, one's own self.⁹

Complete loyalty to the beloved and self-submission in romantic love are the decisive personal acts; for while each person always remains his or her separate self, both lovers now realize their lives in perfect exchange with each other. Such transformation is possible because true love signals—again, paradoxically—a submission to the beloved outside of self and a submission within self to a higher determinant than one's own ego or, indeed, one's own life. In Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion, the American psychiatrist Ethel Spector Person draws out these new-won characteristics in this manner:

Though love is born in the imagination, it promotes real changes in personality organization. It is through the sense of merger and identification with the beloved that the boundaries of the self are changed. Love not only heals the breach between body and soul, but leaps over the chasm that separates the self from the Other. The lover achieves that almost impossible task: he both possesses the Other and surrenders himself. In the process, he is not obliterated but, paradoxically, enlarged and changed, having incorporated into himself aspects of the Other as well as recovering buried parts of himself.¹⁰

In other words, in romantic love and the relationship it generates the two individuals go past, beyond, the pair of opposites into the fullness of the love-relationship—an act in which both experience a reunion of the divided duad (cf. Journey 41; also Occidental 234 and Power 6).

As mysterious and inexplicable as romantic love's appearance is, its presence involves, from the perspective of each lover, a successful and an accepted projection of an ideal “other” upon a specific person: an anima projection by the male; an animus projection by the female.¹¹ Each suddenly confronts the “other”—that is, psychologically speaking, each recognizes the other as his/her counterpart; or, in mythopoeic expression, both lovers now experience that long-awaited reunion of an “ancient of days” separated androgynous state (Power 6). Yet an anima/animus projection, if at once mysterious in appearance and natural in manifestation, cannot last (Journey 90-91). What then does the lover think or do when, after this projection, he/she confronts the living reality of the holistic, other person? In other words, what does a man do when his ideal turns out to be just a specific woman; or a woman do when her ideal turns out to be only a particular man?

Campbell, speaking from the perspective of a male, comments on this inevitable rupture:

I have really found when I look around that the romantic love I see is this ideal, the anima. The anima is the ideal that you [men] carry within yourself that you put onto the different entities out there and you unite with that. Pretty soon you see through the projection. And then what happens?

(Journey 85)

Campbell answers his own question: “The ordeal of marriage is to let this projection dissolve and [to] accept what comes through. When that's done, you can have a really very rich love relationship that goes on and on” (Journey 86). Campbell understands, of course, that getting anima/animus out of a true love relationship does not mean that it forever disappears. It will continue to crop up in one's life again and again. Yet this problem is to be dealt with beyond the true commitment to the relationship one is experiencing (see Journey 91).¹² As Campbell himself puts it,

The pure anima is the thing that's got to go, to vanish. You've married this phenomenon and it's not quite what you thought you were going to get. Then the acquiescence in the characteristic of life as here exhibited is what we call maturation.

(Journey 90)

Campbell comments many times about this vital need for individual “maturation” and about how myths offer “hints” of what each individual needs to achieve in his/her own life (e.g., Power 6). Yet, with respect to romantic love, Campbell tells Bill Moyers: “Mythology in a general way doesn't really deal with the problem of personal, individual love” (Power 203). In The Hero's Journey, moreover, he says that romantic love cannot be said to have occurred only in the twelfth century and following (103-104); rather, in this era what occurred was “the celebration of love as superior to marriage” (104)¹³—clearly a result of the radical shift of ground from the impersonal to the personal in human life, discussed early in this essay. Yet myths, Campbell often demonstrates, speak in tropes, not in personalized facts; thus myths employ masculine and feminine principles and reveal how an individual necessarily must confront and experience these life-affirming polarities. In this metaphorical way, myths, he says,

teach you that you can turn inward, and you begin to get the message of the symbols. … Myth helps you to put your mind in touch with this experience of being alive. It tells you what the experience is. Marriage, for example. What is marriage? The myth tells you what it is. It's the reunion of the separated duad. Originally you were one. You are now two in the world, but the recognition of the spiritual identity is what marriage is.

(Power 6)

For Campbell, marriage, like romantic love, also seems misunderstood today. In approaching the relationship between true love and marriage, Campbell always distinguishes between romantic love and “a love affair”:

Marriage is not a love affair. A love affair is a totally different thing. A marriage is a commitment to that which you are. That person is literally your other half. And you and the other are one. A love affair isn't that. That is a relationship for pleasure, and when it gets to be unpleasurable, it's off. But a marriage is a life commitment, and a life commitment means the prime concern of your life. If marriage is not the prime concern, you're not married.

(Power 200-201)

A crucial aspect of marriage, according to Campbell, is for each lover to recognize that in the love relationship and its true marriage a lifetime “commitment” is too often misunderstood as always demanding that each lover sacrifice to (or, worse, give in to) the other:

When you make the sacrifice in marriage, you're sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a relationship. … You're no longer this one alone; your identity is in a relationship. Marriage is not a simple love affair, it's an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one.

(Power 7)

This “one” is neither of the lovers, since each yet remains a separate self, but rather it is the mysteriously created “unity”—simply, the relationship-as-marriage. Thus, any sacrifice is always to this unity, not to the other person.

The intense experience of romantic love, as of a true marriage, nevertheless involves suffering and pain. Such a relationship constantly tests each lover's ability to remain constant within a noble heart and to continue in his or her personal life and development. The authentic love-marriage unity cannot prevail or endure without personal growth by each lover. During the months and years of a relationship, the initial love must mature into what Campbell calls “the mystical marriage,” suggesting a flowering within each of spiritual life. Similarly, the passion so characteristic of romantic love at its inception should now be enriched and strengthened, as it should properly and correctly be contained within the love-marriage unity. In time, both lovers may be lucky enough to develop also that compassion which Campbell sees as central to countless mythic patterns he has examined throughout his lifetime (Journey 87).

Certainly Campbell empathizes with the distinct, separate personal life necessarily experienced by those involved in romantic love and marriage, but he insists that the needed transformation of individual consciousness inhering in such love must be acquiesced to, accepted, and lived with. “Love,” he says, “is the burning point of life, and since all life is sorrowful, so is love. The stronger the love, the more the pain” (Power 205). Bill Moyers immediately retorts, “but love bears all things,” to which Campbell as quickly responds: “Love itself is a pain, you might say—the pain of being truly alive” (Power 205).

If, then, the rise of romantic love in the West during the Middle Ages rested upon a radical shift from the impersonal to the personal in human life, the scholarly demonstration Campbell offers contains its caveats, along with its wonders. First, both love and marriage hinge upon relationship; yet a genuine relationship is only possible between two individuals 1) who have a center—an authentic self—and 2) who are able to surrender, to acquiesce, to that transformative personal experience of letting go of ego-centeredness. The individual's ego, Campbell repeatedly reminds readers, arrogates control of human consciousness for its own self-interests, its own private wishes and desires; but the ego's plan is not that of the heart-body life (Power 146-149). In fact, Campbell's metaphoric use of the human heart as “the organ of opening up to somebody else” (Power 189) recalls the troubadours' songs of the “noble heart” that alone may experience romantic love. For such a heart not only opens outward to the beauty of form, with its potential for transcendent inspiration, but also opens inward, as Campbell says, “toward the mystery of character, destiny, and worth” (Creative 187).

A modern-day symbol of this dual openness of the heart in true love appears, for example, in Ireland—the Celtic home of the Arthurian tales—in the traditional Claddagh rings. These gold rings consist of an exquisite crown in the shape of a human heart. Upon a woman's engagement, the ring is worn so that the heart points outward; after marriage, the ring is turned so that the heart points inward. What more telling modern-day “reminder” of the way of vrai amor than the message conveyed by these rings?

Unfortunately, many today live with shattered lives, fragmented centers, or none at all, and thus cannot open—either inward or outward—in an act of surrender, of acquiescence and acceptance. Romantic love, Campbell several times admits, is regrettably not possible for everyone (Creative 187, 568). Simply, the personal human conditions necessary for true love are, sadly, beyond the capabilities of many, many people.

The fear of letting go, certainly the fear of intense intimacy with another, precludes for many individuals the “risk-taking” necessary in romantic love. Ethel Specter Person comments on this dilemma:

Falling in love is, by its nature, predicated on risk-taking. In order to achieve mutual love, one must gamble on opening up psychically to achieve real intimacy and mutuality. But by revealing oneself to the Other, one becomes vulnerable. Therefore, falling in love—and the ultimate achievement of genuine love—requires an ability to trust oneself as well as the Other, to reveal one's weaknesses and foibles and [to] risk becoming the object of fear and hatred, of condescension, humiliation, or rejection.¹⁴

People who cannot trust and risk everything in the experience of romantic love, including possible annihilation, will never find such love or unity in marriage.

Similarly and equally unfortunately, far, far too many men and women in this century seem compulsive, obsessive in their drive to experience a personal relationship—too often, any relationship.¹⁵ These individuals too will likely search in vain for a relationship grounded in authentic, mysteriously visited romantic love. Health professionals and counselors today confirm what the late British psychotherapist R.D. Laing, in The Politics of Experience (1967), observed of those couples so psychologically situated: “We hope to share the experience of a relationship, but the only honest beginning, or even end, may be to share the experience of its absence.”¹⁶ The pain and the suffering predictive in these instances are not redeemed by the joys, or by the psychological and the spiritual growth inhering in romantic love. Worse, the children of such dysfunctional people and their hapless unions will suffer as innocents the rubble and the abuse of their parents' broken and emotionally shattered lives.

At one point in “Analytical Psychology and Education,” the late Swiss analytical psychologist C. G. Jung remarks that “the love problem is part of mankind's heavy toll of suffering, and nobody should be ashamed of having to pay his [/her] tribute.”¹⁷ The “love problem” and its expected outcome, marriage, seem today in serious crisis. Yet Western societies talk endlessly about love but never say what love is about. “Love is a mighty daemon [i.e., a divine power],” the wise Diotima says to Socrates in Plato's Symposium. Certainly romantic love is not a sentiment, nor is it an attitude or even an emotion. It is, simply, “a mighty power.” As befits a mighty power, the ways of love are finally mysterious, unknowable—as Campbell might say, transcendental. For while love, once it appears, can indeed be cultivated and nurtured or neglected and destroyed, it can never be created by human powers. It comes of its own, moving spontaneously and by its own designs. Individuals may fear it or may yearn passionately for its appearance, all to no avail. Yet, as Campbell shows, to be struck by love's power is to be supremely challenged. For true love asks not servitude; rather, it offers its service. That is, love seeks only to promote an individual's being or becoming the very best that that individual is or can be within the mysterious union of the two now become one.

Notes

1. The following works by Joseph Campbell directly treat romantic love and are cited in this essay: The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work (1990); The Masks of God: Creative Mythology (1968) and Occidental Mythology (1964); “The Mythology of Love” [1967] in Myths to Live By (1972); An Open Life: Joseph Campbell in Conversation with Michael Toms (1988); and The Power of Myth, with Bill Moyers (1988).

2. Amaury de Reincourt, Sex and Power in History (New York: McKay, 1974), 11-12.

3. Cf. ibid., 14-48.

4. The most comprehensive, authoritative work on romantic love still remains that of Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgion, rev. and aug. ed. (1940; Garden City: Doubleday, 1956). Thoroughly conversant with myth and its importance in human history, de Rougemont argues that events in the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries constitute a Christian heresy—one continuing into this time in the West—and that Tristan and Isolt seek not love's joys and union but personal death by means of a divinely elevated Eros. If differing markedly here from the conclusions drawn by Joseph Campbell, de Rougemont nevertheless offers scholarly support in exploring 1) the enormous significance of what occurred during this medieval period and 2) the cultural shift in views of romantic or passionate love and marriage and how both now in the twentieth century have reached cultural dysfunctions having far-reaching implications and consequences for modern Western civilizations.

5. Campbell's argument that the god Eros denotes an impersonal, biologically based love works well within the emphases and the parameters he sets. Yet in Occidental Mythology (229-236), Campbell himself acknowledges the complex nature of Eros presented by Plato in his Symposium; namely, the role of Eros in stressing the beauty of sensorily perceived forms but also Eros's potential to guide one from a particular “beauty of form” to “transcendent universal beauty.” With this idea, Campbell comments, “[W]e have ascended now to such an Elysian height as to have transcended words” (232). Indeed, Campbell subsequently declares that in time Eros became a personalized matter and that “this dramatic, epochal, and—as far as our documentation tells—unprecedented shift of loyalty from the impersonal to the personal [is that] that I want to characterize here as the Greek—the European—miracle” (236). Among others, de Rougemont insists that Eros promotes “infinite transcendence” and by generating “boundless desire” urges “man's rise into his god,” but that, unfortunately, “this rise is without return” (de Rougemont, 52; his emphases). The problem with Eros seems to be its ability to father in humanity simultaneously two states of consciousness—both an animal and a spiritual one. In “On the Psychology of the Unconscious,” C. G. Jung (The Collected Works of Carl G. Jung, 7, ed. Herbert Read and others, trans. R. F. C. Hull [New York: Pantheon, 1953], 8-117) offers what may be a mediating position: “Eros is a questionable fellow and will always remain so, whatever the legislation of the future may have to say about it. He belongs on one side to man's primordial animal nature which will endure as long as man has an animal body. On the other side he is related to the highest forms of the spirit. But he only thrives when spirit and instinct are in right harmony. If one or the other aspect is lacking to him, the result is injury or at least a lopsidedness that may easily veer towards the pathological. Too much of the animal distorts the civilized man, too much civilization makes sick animals. This dilemma reveals the vast uncertainty that Eros holds for man” (28).

6. In most of the New Testament, particularly in the writings of St. Paul, three words for love exist: agape (a divine-like love that values a person not for what he/she is but for what the lover is); philos (brotherly love that exists among those in Christian community); and eros (physical attraction, but not necessarily prurient, although including that). Campbell does not mention philos.

7. Campbell is well aware of the complex historical development of what he terms “the imbroglio of eros, agape, and amor” (Creative 333). See, in particular, his discussion of Thomas Mann's “undiscriminating eros” (Creative 331-333); also his contrast of La Queste del Saint Graal (c. 1215?-1230?) with Wolfram's Parzival: the former attempts to redeem from secular (natural) impulses the idea of the Holy Grail; the latter, to integrate (if paradoxically) the spiritual and the natural, with each simultaneously playing out its role in life (Creative 564-569). For Campbell, then, amor signals the “middle way.”

8. Campbell thoroughly discusses the meaning of “fate” in Creative Mythology (138-140).

9. Contemporary psychiatrist Ethel Spector Person (Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion [New York: Norton, 1988]) discusses in great detail these “transformations” generated by romantic love; see Person, especially Chapter Two, 50-72.

10. Ibid., 72.

11. Campbell derives his usage of animus/anima, of course, from C. G. Jung; for his definitions, see particularly Jung, “Marriage as a Psychological Relationship,” Collected Works, 17, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), 187-201.

12. In explaining how true love and a marriage commitment “contain passion,” de Rougemont comments on the radical change a committed husband perceives in his view of women: “When a man is faithful to one woman, he looks on other women in quite another way, a way unknown to the world of Eros: other women turn into persons instead of being reflections or means” (de Rougemont, 327). Campbell also sees this change and comments positively on the emergence today of woman as person: see Campbell, Open, 126-128.

13. If romantic love began in the West, it also seems to have occurred in other regions at about the same time. In addition to the troubadours of southern France, Campbell also notes “the popular Indian Puranic legends of Krishna and the Gopis and the passionate Gita Govinda of the young love poet Jayadeva (fl. 1170 A.D.)” and similarly in the Moslem world in “the mystic movement of the Sufis” (Creative 61). Yet only in the West did it become an integral part of the culture.

14. Person, 44.

15. The British psychiatrist Anthony Storr expresses some reservation about the current idée fixe that only in an intimate male-female relationship may an individual find true personal fulfillment and contentment: “I am less convinced that intimate personal relationships are the only source of health and happiness. In the present climate, there is a danger that love is being idealized as the only path to salvation” (Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self [New York: Ballantine, 1988], 8). Although highly favorable to Freud, Storr himself believes that part of this contemporary obsession with an intimate relationship results from Freudian bases of psychotherapy: “Today, the thrust of most forms of psycho-therapy, whether with individuals or groups, is directed toward understanding what has gone wrong with the patient's relationships with significant persons in his or her past, in order that the patient can be helped toward making more fruitful and fulfilling human relationships in the future” (6). In the twentieth century, no relationship in the West receives as much emphasis as does the intimate one between a man and a woman.

16. R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York: Ballantine, 1967), 56.

17. Jung, “Analytical Psychology and Education” (1926/1946), Collected Works, 17 (1954), 63-132.