[In the following essay, King examines Campbell's treatment of Gnosticism.]

The symbolic field is based on the experiences of people in a particular community, at that particular time and place. Myths are so intimately bound to the culture, time, and place that unless the symbols, the metaphors, are kept alive by constant recreation through the arts, the life just slips away from them.¹

In his conversations with Bill Moyers, recorded in the book and television series The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell succeeds in bringing the study of religion to the attention of a wide public audience. For scholars and teachers, his lesson of engagement with the concerns of the contemporary world is pedagogically useful. The refusal or inability of “specialists,” as he calls them, to write for and communicate with the public has left a gap between the public and the academy, and a void in academic research. Campbell has sought in his own writing and in his teaching to bridge this gap.

I believe Campbell has succeeded in reaching a large audience because his direct engagement with many issues of contemporary concern and his wonderful storytelling make his a compelling voice for many people. His books present in a sense “one man's view of things.” In the production of this view, he has consumed a major portion of the world's religious literature. For Campbell, the study of religion is very much the practice of religion; reading myth will help one to experience life, or, as he puts it, to find one's own “rapture.”² Drawing on this human richness, Campbell adds his personal engagement with these traditions, his animated oral style, and his love of sampling the smorgasbord of myth.

One attractive aspect of his thinking may also be that he shares certain values and perspectives that are popular in America: individualism³ (including a dislike for institutions and authority), American democracy, romantic love, an admiration for the selfless hero, a certain disdain for intellectualism, and an emphasis upon experiencing life. Part of his popularity is certainly due to the fact that the way those questions are formulated and the answers he suggests are quite culturally reflective of late twentieth-century America.

In considering the violence in Northern Ireland or the Middle East, for example,⁴ Campbell states that human beings can transcend differences in culture and values and achieve peace by appealing to a higher set of principles common to humanity. In his own writings, however, those higher principles are largely expressions of American individualism⁵ and democracy, principles that are particular to American culture rather than transcendent and universal. In the end, then, he does not himself rise above the particularity of his own culture to a “higher plane of common humanity” and in not doing so provides a good example of the difficulties of the project he insists we must achieve. This naiveté is a serious limitation throughout to the value of his work as a comparativist.

It is also a limitation to his work in terms of social responsibility. As will be discussed below, his denigration of the value of the sociological function of myth means that Campbell's treatment takes an uncritical “universal” stance that ignores the social and political contexts of particular myths. Though he wishes to eschew violence, such a stance has its own dangers.

However personally voiced, it is not difficult to locate Campbell's position within a particular historical/cultural tradition, which, for these purposes, we might call American Romanticism. This is one particular tradition of American religion, one whose primary symbol, ironically, is “universality.” Campbell frequently appeals to this and other doctrines of the Romantic tradition, such as the claim that truth lies in the authentic experience of the inner self, a self that is not only sacred but divine. His interest in Gnostic traditions lies precisely in the congruences he sees between these myths and aspects of his own (American) Romantic perspective; for example: the affirmation of the self as divine, the practices of asceticism and libertinism as rejection of ethical laws that block authentic experience, and the Gnostic rejection of the world as an affirmation of the interiority and transcendent quality of religious experience.

In the following consideration of Campbell's treatment of Gnosticism, I want to discuss each of these topics in turn from the perspective of a historian and student of ancient Gnostic myth. As a historian, a “specialist,”⁶ my own perspective differs from Campbell's “generalist” approach⁷ in rejoicing in the multiplicity of things, in the vitality of differences and change more than in the discovery of similarities. And in contrast to Campbell's consuming interest in myths as keys to human psychology and metaphysics,⁸ historians are notoriously interested in society, culture, and politics since they tend to believe implicitly that the “genuinely human” is encountered only in the “specifically cultural.”⁹ More particularly, there are moral issues involved in academic work, especially regarding standards of accuracy and comprehensiveness, and regarding social responsibility. In my opinion, there are serious problems with Campbell's work in these regards.

THE DIVINE SELF

According to Joseph Campbell, in the realm of myth “God does not become Man; but man, the world itself, is known as divine, a field of inexhaustible spiritual depth.”¹⁰ Discovering this divinity within is the basis for authentic experience of life, for “finding one's rapture.” Again and again Campbell turns to Gnostic sources to support his belief in the divinity of the self.¹¹ But what, we might ask, is this self?

Study in the “deep structure of Western theological traditions” has shown that even in the private search of the Gnostic for spiritual experience, there was an implicit political perspective, one that is mirrored in much of Campbell's writing—he calls it “the voice of reason.”

MOYERS:
The voice of reason—is that the philosophical way suggested by these mythological symbols?
CAMPBELL:
That's right. Here you have the important transition that took place about 500 B.C. This is the date of the Buddha and of Pythagoras and Confucius and Lao-tzu, if there was a Lao-tzu. This is the awakening of man's reason. No longer is he informed and governed by the animal powers. No longer is he guided by the analogy of the planted earth, no longer by the courses of the planets—but by reason.
MOYERS:
The way of—
CAMPBELL:
—the way of man. And of course what destroys reason is passion.(12)

This pattern of dualistic thinking in Western philosophy—reason versus passion—can be seen already in Plato's doctrine of the self. Karen Torjesen has traced the Western version of that pattern to the political model of the state conceived by Plato:

Convinced that democratic political institutions had failed to create a just society, Plato envisioned a return to an elite oligarchy where truly just rulers arose through a revolutionary educational program aimed at the formation of justice in the soul. … Plato's political philosophy, as well as his epistemology and metaphysics are all organized around a doctrine of the self, which fundamentally set the direction for Western thought for the next 2500 years. … Plato's doctrine of the self [constructs] a higher self and a lower self, which are in conflict with each other. The higher self is constituted by the reasoning or rational faculty; the lower self Plato designates as the irrational part of the self, the passions and the body.

This self is modeled on the sphere of social and political relations:

A similar or related phenomenon is visible within the patriarchal household in that the relations of dominance (master and mistress over slaves, parents over children and husbands over wives) were maintained primarily through the use of physical violence. This was accepted as a necessary and legitimate means of social control. The consequences of all of this, i.e., both physical and sexual domination, is that the values placed on body and sexuality were subverted by their being primarily seen as the instruments through which social dominance was exercised. As a consequence of this social function, the values of body and sexuality became symbols for weakness (or irrationality) rather than strength (or rationality), and thus in Plato's construction of the complex self, body, sexuality and passions represent the lower self, while ruling dominance and reason represent the higher self.¹³

Given that the female was identified with the earth, body, and reproduction, and the male was identified with mind and reason,

the social relations of dominance of male over female become the primary analogy for describing the self. By projecting these social relations onto the level of philosophical abstraction, the association of male with rationality and female with sexuality become part of the deep structure of the Western intellectual tradition, both philosophical and theological.¹⁴

One might also add: the Western mythological tradition.

At this point, readers of Campbell might point out his very positive, even pivotal, valuation of amor¹⁵ and the feminine principle, of body, sex, and nature. It is true—but contradictory—that Campbell does oppose the devaluation of the body and the world implied in the dualistic type of thought he supports:

The human woman gives birth just as the earth gives birth to the plants. She gives nourishment, as the plants do. To woman magic and earth magic are the same. They are related. And the personification of the energy that gives birth to forms and nourishes forms is properly female. … And when you have a Goddess as creator, it's her own body that is the universe. She is identical with the universe.¹⁶

Or again:

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.¹⁷

Campbell's admonition to return to harmony with nature¹⁸ will not succeed, however, because he has hung on to the view of the self (a higher, spiritual self of reason over a lower, physical self of passion) that is the basis for the rejection of nature, body, and sex in Western myths and because he continues to identify the feminine with earth (the universe), body, and reproduction, a position that is repeatedly taken by Campbell in his consideration of the Goddess.¹⁹

Torjesen goes on to draw out some implications for religious thought that are particularly applicable to Campbell's thought. She notes that “the disparity between the higher and lower self, when projected as a metaphysical framework, creates a nearly unspannable chasm between the concrete, particular and material on the one hand and eternal, unchangeable and universal on the other.”²⁰ This chasm appears in Campbell's statement that the ultimate is beyond human expression, but not human knowledge:

MOYERS:
But people ask, isn't a myth a lie?
CAMPBELL:
No, mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth—penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words, beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told. So this is the penultimate truth.(21)

All these factors are easily illustrated from Gnostic texts: the view of the self as divine, the need for the mind to transcend the body in order to achieve enlightenment and attain knowledge of the divine, and the connection between self and metaphysics.

A good example is Allogenes. In this Sethian Gnostic text, the writer, Allogenes (literally, the Stranger or Foreigner), gives an account of several revelations and visions, followed by an extrabodily ascent to a direct vision of the Unknowable One. His journey begins within with his discovery of his own divinity.²² After preparing himself for a hundred years, he receives a vision of the divine hierarchy and is transported out of his bodily garment, relying upon his own self-knowledge. Ascending from the lower to the higher realms, he reaches the pinnacle of mystical experience: a primary revelation of the Unknowable One—“that one who, when you know it, you must be ignorant of it” (59.30-32). Unlike a verbal revelation communicated through a mediator, this experience is metaphorically expressed as a direct vision and the knowledge that results is “an unknowing knowledge.”²³ This vision is then complemented with a description of the Unknowable primarily in terms of negative theology, i.e., a denial that the Ultimate can be known or described in any positive terms, even those of Goodness or Being.²⁴

I am reminded here of Campbell's statement quoted above that “mythology is the penultimate truth—penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. … Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.”²⁵ The narrative and the revelations prepare the soul for that journey, but each seeker must follow himself or herself. And the journey in this case is a tour of the metaphysical structure of the cosmos; the hero²⁶ of the story brings back the secret knowledge and writes it in a book preserving it for those who are worthy.

The entire schema of Allogenes—the identification of the self with an inner divine principle, the need to transcend the lower self in order to gain higher knowledge and experience the ultimate, and the organization of everything in an ascending hierarchical order—all these notions belong to the cultural sphere of antiquity out of which the mystical traditions of Christianity and Judaism arose. Joseph Campbell finds himself in agreement with modern versions of the first two points, but wishes to keep them while replacing the notion of an ontological hierarchy with democratic principles. The question is whether it is possible—or even desirable—to do so since the whole metaphysical schema he presupposes is based on a social-political pattern of hierarchy not acceptable to modern Americans.

The psychological effects of this divided self are also apparent in Gnostic myth. A particularly poignant example is the rape of Eve in The Hypostasis of the Archons.²⁷ When the wicked world-rulers (the Archons) attempt to rape her, she divides into two figures: The Female Spiritual Principle (Eve's higher self) abandons the merely physically (lower) Eve to the brutality of gang rape while She stands back laughing at their folly. Similar to the practice of extreme asceticism, this technique of psychic dissociation from the body successfully protects the self from the pain and suffering associated with life in the world, but at tremendous cost.

ETHICAL LAWS

Robert Bellah writes in Habits of the Heart that Americans

believe in the dignity, indeed the sacredness, of the individual. Anything that would violate our right to think for ourselves, judge for ourselves, make our own decisions, live our lives as we see fit, is not only morally wrong, it is sacrilegious.²⁸

This attitude in some cases is accompanied by a rejection of conventional ethics and the social institutions that promote them. In a modified form, Campbell's treatment of myth illustrates a deep mistrust of just such “sociological” aspects of culture, one of the four functions he ascribes to myth:

CAMPBELL:
The third function is the sociological one—supporting and validating a certain social order. And here's where the myths vary enormously from place to place. … It is this sociological function of myth that has taken over in our world—and it is out of date.
MOYERS:
What do you mean?
CAMPBELL:
Ethical laws. The laws of life as it should be in the good society. All of Yahweh's pages and pages and pages of what kind of clothes to wear, how to behave to each other, and so forth, in the first millennium B.C.(29)

In addition to illustrating his dislike for what he regards as “particularistic” ethical laws, this sentiment expresses a real misunderstanding of Israelite and Jewish tradition. The care taken—in what one eats, what one wears, how one prepares food, how one behaves toward others—to express and experience the presence of the divine in the everyday illustrates beautifully Campbell's own view of the deepest desire of the human heart:

I think what we are looking for is a way of experiencing the world that will open to us the transcendent that informs it, and at the same time forms ourselves within it. That is what people want. That is what the soul asks for.³⁰

The practice of classical Judaism is precisely this opening to the transcendent and the formation of one's life within it. It is regrettable that Campbell chooses as his example a common stock of Christian anti-Judaism, the charge of legalism. It is all the more regrettable considering its association with the violence of anti-Semitism in our own century. I believe Campbell sincerely regrets the violence related to religion, but he also illustrates the necessity of critically comprehending the “sociological” dimensions of myth in order to avoid political polemic and cultural misunderstanding. In terms of their current influence in world affairs, such sociological functions and ethical laws are certainly not “out of date.” Attitudes of individualism make it hard at times for persons who share those views to appreciate the richness of traditional communities, but this misunderstanding can be extremely dangerous and therefore must be acknowledged and addressed.

Campbell's suspicion that conventional ethics can block authentic experience is also quite apparent in his treatment of Gnostic ethics. The context for his discussion of Gnostic ethics is drawn at the beginning of Creative Mythology, the final volume in his Masks of God series. There Campbell states that he wishes to describe mythology that springs from authentic individual experience in contrast to the stultifying communal faith of “dogma, learning, political interests, or programs for the renovation of society.”³¹ He begins by acknowledging the enormous influences of social and cultural formation upon the individual,³² but he believes that experience is possible outside of moral and linguistic boundaries³³—indeed this experience is the basis of authentic individual faith, “faith in one's own experience, whether of feeling, fact, reason, or vision.”³⁴ Myths have served as “guides to the silence of the Word behind words and as the means to communicate its rapture.”³⁵

Joseph Campbell rightly notes that Gnostic Christian views differed from those of other Christians whose views became “orthodoxy” in that Gnostic Christians believed that the world was created, not by the good God of love, but by an ignorant and wicked lower divinity, the Demiurge. Most Gnostics considered the world to be corrupt, describing life as imprisonment, drunkenness, and death. Salvation meant escape from the fetters of materiality to the spiritual perfection of the place of light, the Pleroma. According to Campbell, Gnostics sought “release from corruption through a systematic disobedience of those laws (of God the Creator) in either of two ways, through asceticism or its opposite, the orgy.”³⁶ For Campbell, this disobedience is an affirmation that the individual needs to mark out his or her own path based on personal experience, not social mores, in order to have true faith and live authentically. Clearing away the debris of social convention is necessary in order to set out on the path toward one's own rapture.

As noted by Campbell himself,³⁷ our understanding of Gnostic beliefs and practices was limited until relatively recently because essentially what we knew about them had to be gleaned from descriptions written by other Christians who opposed them. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, discoveries of original writings by Gnostics themselves have become available to us. Because Campbell's work was based more on descriptions of Gnostics written by the Church Fathers intending to refute and repudiate Gnostic beliefs and practices rather than the newly available Gnostic texts, his descriptions tend to reflect the polemical attitudes of their detractors, as do all but the most recent studies.³⁸

Closer study of the new texts themselves, seen especially in the work of Michael Williams,³⁹ has put the widely-held position that Gnostics were either ascetics or libertines into considerable doubt. It appears that the charges of libertinism were based, not on good evidence of Gnostic practices, but on the polemical interests of Church Fathers who were ill-informed and may have misunderstood the sources they did have⁴⁰—much the same way as Christians were charged with cannibalism by hostile Romans who already disliked Christians and happily misinterpreted their ritual language about eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ. On the other hand, the texts we possess from the Gnostics themselves are unremittingly of an ascetic bent—a moral position much more difficult for the Church Fathers to attack than supposed libertine behavior.⁴¹ The ascetic practices of the Gnostic spiritual athletes, rather than opposing social values, expressed the moral values of the Graeco-Roman world to a considerable degree, differing more in intensity than in kind. The supposition that asceticism and libertinism were “two sides of the coin” of Gnostic dualism is not the case.

But my question here is whether Gnostics may have understood their ascetic practice as a way to “authentic existence,” to following their own “rapture.” It is clear from The Book of Thomas the Contender that at least some of them did. There Jesus distinguishes fools from the wise on the basis of their attitude toward “visible things.” For the fool:

… it [passion] will blind them with insatiable lust and burn their souls and become for them like a stake stuck in their heart which they can never dislodge. … And it has fettered them with its chains and bound all their limbs with the bitterness of the bondage of lust for those visible things that will decay and change and swerve by impulse.

But for the wise:

“Everyone who seeks the truth from true wisdom will make himself wings so as to fly, fleeing the lust that scorches the spirits of men.” And he will make himself wings to flee every visible spirit.⁴²

For Gnostics, the rejection of conventional morality is a rejection of the world and the body and all that goes with it, a kind of practical self-nihilism as a way to escape the bonds of deception and deceit, to find the truth and become free. Thus the information of new texts, while correcting errors in Campbell's presentation, nonetheless is capable of supporting and elaborating the position he described.

RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE AND METAPHYSICS

But, as we have seen, despite Campbell's dislike for ethical laws, he wants to get away from a dualistic metaphysics that rejects the value of the body and life in the world. This set of factors leads to some confusion in his treatment of Gnosticism.

This confusion is amplified by his treatment of Gnosticism as a unified, coherent phenomenon. In fact, the modern label “Gnosticism” houses a wide variety of distinct mythologies. Although Campbell recognized this fact at least in part, he still treated the different perspectives as aspects of a single phenomenon. At least three positions on metaphysics can be distinguished in Campbell's discussion of Gnosticism in Creative Mythology.⁴³ There we see him noting some of the variety of metaphysics present in Gnostic traditions, but linking them together as parts of a single encompassing perspective.

For Campbell's purposes, each type serves only to illustrate a different aspect of his own outlook: he cites examples of radical dualism when he wants to emphasize the need to transcend physical and culturally conditioned restraints to spiritual experience, radical monism when he wants to show the ultimate transcendence of all illusory divisions, and mild dualism when he wants to stress the value of amor and life in the world. Each of these types can be illustrated and elaborated from the newly discovered texts: We have seen already a radical dualism expressing extreme repugnance for the world in the encratite Book of Thomas the Contender. Campbell's favorite passage from The Gospel of Thomas, “the kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth and men do not see it,”⁴⁴ illustrates the mild dualism of that text⁴⁵ (though it should be noted that the Gnostic character of this text itself is hotly debated⁴⁶). The Valentinian Gospel of Philip expresses a radical monism, a view that the world with all its suffering is itself nothing, a lack or deficiency, which only deceptively appears to exist, and therefore cannot be truthfully described. The false dualism of opposites therefore produces illusory distinctions, while the truth itself is one.⁴⁷

The final type of metaphysics, described by Campbell as “the ‘hither shore’ variety,” can be illustrated from several texts that describe the “mythological end of days” in apocalyptic terms, for example On the Origin of the World⁴⁸ and The Apocryphon of John.⁴⁹ Both describe the end of the world and the final destruction or the eternal punishment of the wicked. “For,” as On the Origin of the World says, “everyone must go to the place from which he has come. Indeed, by his acts and his gnosis [“knowledge”] each person will make his nature known.”⁵⁰

My real problem with Campbell's treatment of Gnostic metaphysics here is that there is never any sustained analysis of particular Gnostic myths at all, even those easily available in the fifties and sixties. Instead, the bits and pieces of Gnostic myths he cites serve only as illustrations for his own preconceived views. Given this fact, one has the impression that the addition of further information made possible by the discovery of new texts would not alter Campbell's basic views at all. One can learn much about Joseph Campbell in reading his books, but very little about Gnosticism.

CONCLUSION

Campbell seldom considers the meaning and function of myths in their social and political contexts,⁵¹ nor even the social and political implications of his own views. These deficiencies are consequences of his personal understanding and appropriation of the individualism and universalism associated with American Romanticism. They have led him on the one hand to an inaccurate portrayal of Gnostic myths, and on the other hand to reproducing naively views that in the past have been the sources of violence. As we saw in two cases (Torjesen's analysis of the pattern of social dominance and violence implied in Campbell's view of the self, and Campbell's denigration of Israelite ethical laws), ignoring social and political contexts has inherent dangers of seriously misunderstanding the beliefs and practices of others and leading to violence, either in domestic violence,⁵² the psychic dissociation of the self, or in racism and religious discrimination. Consideration of myth apart from culture and history leaves us open to the onslaughts of unthinking violence. Social evils do not, however, seem to bother Campbell much.

CAMPBELL:
People ask me, “Do you have optimism about the world?” And I say, “Yes, it's great just the way it is. And you are not going to fix it up. Nobody has ever made it any better. It is never going to be any better. This is it, so take it or leave it. You are not going to correct or improve it.”
MOYERS:
Doesn't that lead to a rather passive attitude in the face of evil?
CAMPBELL:
You yourself are participating in evil, or you are not alive. Whatever you do is evil for somebody. This is one of the ironies of the whole creation.(53)

For those who do take a more active attitude toward evil and who experience a greater responsibility—and regret—for the ways in which we do in fact participate in evil, the study and analysis of religion cannot be limited to psychology and metaphysics, as important as those are, since even the most interior and world-rejecting traditions have clear social and political implications.⁵⁴

In terms of possible socially-redeeming qualities, the most appealing part of Campbell's presentation is his attempt to fill the void of the “empty self and empty relationships”⁵⁵ with an identification with the traditions and community of the whole world.⁵⁶ This is essentially what he wishes to communicate when he insists that there is no special revelation or special truth.⁵⁷ Though his own approach is problematic and naive insofar as he ignores the particular social and cultural contexts of myths, this criticism does not diminish the value of comparative analysis as a way to further understanding and global peace. Of greatest contemporary value in Campbell's work—and in comparative study generally—is the implicit appreciation that every human culture has something of value to offer.

Notes

1. Power, 59.

2. Ibid., 5.

3. See, for example, ibid., 187.

4. See, for example, ibid., xvii, 21, 24, 29, 32, 182.

5. For a short description and critique of American individualism, see Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), especially chapter 6. See also Robert A. Segal, Joseph Campbell: An Introduction (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987), 74-78.

6. See Segal's discussion of the difference in approaches to the comparativist study of myth in Joseph Campbell, chapter 8.

7. Campbell describes himself as a “generalist.” See Power, 9.

8. See Segal, Joseph Campbell, 131-32.

9. These are Campbell's terms; see Power, 9.

10. Occidental Mythology, 366.

11. See, for example, Occidental Mythology, 362-75.

12. Power, 28.

13. “Excavations in the Deep-Structure of the Theological Tradition,” Occasional Papers 14 (Claremont, Calif.: Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, 1989), 8 and 9.

14. “Excavations,” 11.

15. See Power, chapter 7.

16. Ibid., 167.

17. Ibid., 190.

18. Ibid., 31.

19. See ibid., chapter 6.

20. Torjesen, “Excavations,” 11.

21. Power, 163.

22. Allogenes 52.8-13.

23. See ibid., 61.1-4.

24. See ibid., 61.25-66.38.

25. Power, 163.

26. See ibid., 123ff., concerning Campbell's view of the hero.

27. See Karen L. King, “Ridicule and Rape, Rule and Rebellion” in Gnosticism and the Early Christian World, vol. 2 of Essays on Antiquity and Christianity in Honor of James M. Robinson, ed. James Sanders, James Goehring, and Charles Hedrick (Sonoma, Calif.: Polebridge Press, 1990), 1-22.

28. Habits of the Heart, 142.

29. Power, 31.

30. Ibid., 53.

31. Creative Mythology, 84.

32. See ibid., 86.

33. See ibid., 88-90.

34. Ibid., 84.

35. Ibid., 94.

36. Ibid., 146.

37. Occidental Mythology, 364.

38. Despite the fact that Campbell duplicates their descriptions of Gnostic ethics, he would have scandalized the Church Fathers since Campbell likes precisely what the Fathers opposed so strongly!

39. See “‘Gnosis’ and ‘Askesis,’” by Michael A. Williams in Aufsteig und Niedergang der römischen Welt 2.22, ed. Hildegard Temporini and Wolfgang Haase (Berlin-New York: Walter de Gruyter, forthcoming).

40. As an example of libertinism, Campbell quoted at length Epiphanius's account of the Phibionites (Creative Mythology, 159-61). There is considerable dispute among scholars about the accuracy of Epiphanius's report, but even so Phibionite practice is not an example of attempts to break every rule set down by the wicked Creator God, as Campbell portrays it in Creative Mythology, 156-57. See Stephen Benko, “The Libertine Gnostic Sect of the Phibionites According to Epiphanius,” Vigiliae Christianae 21 (1967), 103-19; Pagan Rome and the Early Christians (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 64-70; and James E. Goehring, “Libertine or Liberated: Women in the So-called Libertine Gnostic Communities,” Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism, ed. Karen L. King, Studies in Antiquity and Christianity 4 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), 329-44; and Williams, “‘Gnosis’ and ‘Askesis.’”

41. See Michael Williams, “‘Gnosis’ and ‘Askesis.’”

42. The Book of Thomas the Contender, in The Nag Hammadi Library in English, ed. James M. Robinson and Richard Smith, 3d ed. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), 203-4.

43. Ibid., 157-59.

44. Gospel of Thomas, 113.

45. For a fuller presentation of the dualism of The Gospel of Thomas and a short, but insightful critique, see Segal, Joseph Campbell, 72.

46. See Francis T. Fallon and Ron Cameron, “The Gospel of Thomas: A Forschungsbericht and Analysis,” Aufsteig II.25.6 (1988), 4230-36, for a short summary of the debate. What is clear, however, is that the world-affirming character of the text is due to the fact that it draws heavily upon traditions of Jewish Wisdom literature. See especially Stevan L. Davies, The Gospel of Thomas and Christian Wisdom (New York: Seabury Press, 1983).

47. Nag Hammadi Library, 142-43 with slight modification.

48. See ibid., 188-89.

49. See ibid., 120.

50. Ibid., 189, slightly modified.

51. See Segal's discussion in Joseph Campbell, 136-38.

52. It is interesting to note that when Moyers raises the issue of sexual discrimination in Western culture, Campbell's response is: “One can look back and quarrel with the whole situation, but the situation of women was not that bad by any means.” Yet two sentences later he affirms without criticism that: “Women are booty, they are goods. With the fall of a city, every woman in the city would be raped” (Power, 171).

53. See Power, 65.

54. See, for example, Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979), for a consideration of the political implications of Gnostic belief in docetism; Karen L. King, “Sophia and Christ in the Apocryphon of John” in Images, 158-76, concerning criticism of gender subordination; and “Ridicule and Rape, Rule and Rebellion,” for a biting Gnostic critique of totalitarian political power.

55. See Bellah, Habits of the Heart, chapter 6, especially 151-52.

56. This attempt at wide community formation satisfies a deep American need to express, as Bellah puts it, “an individualism that is not empty but is full of content drawn from an active identification with communities and traditions” (Habits of the Heart, 163).

57. Power, 25.