The Power of Myth

The epigraph for Chapter 7 is a love poem by French troubadour Guiraut de Bornelh, which the editor includes in full because Moyers and Campbell reference specific lines in the chapter’s conversation. The poem explores the experience of love, which was thought to be a spiritual experience of the transcendent. Importantly, this poem suggests that love begins with sight, with the eyes recognizing the one to be loved:

So through the eyes love attains the heart:

For the eyes are the scouts of the heart,

And the eyes go reconnoitering

For what it would please the heart to possess (231).

Campbell states that the kind of love expressed in this poem was threatening to the Church because it jeopardized the institution of arranged marriage. By teaching that the individual could seek a personal love, troubadour philosophy suggested that the individual could experience the divine without the mediation of the Church.

Campbell explains that troubadours exalted Amor over other kinds of love. He defines Amor as a spiritual, person-to-person love that comes from the meeting of eyes. The name Amor comes from the Roman counterpart of the Greek Cupid, whose piercing arrows make a person experience the ordeal and suffering of love. Amor is different from Agape—another spiritual kind of love—because it is more selective. Moyers defines Agape as “a religious impulse” of compassion that can be felt for any living being (233). The last form of love Campbell defines—though there are other types, like Philia and Storge—is Eros, which is a sexual desire coming from “the zeal of the organs for each other” (233). Campbell celebrates the troubadour concern with Amor because it mimics his advice to follow the individual experience of bliss. In Moyers’s words, “the courage to love became the courage to affirm one’s own experience against tradition” that dictates one’s path of life from the outside (234).

As an example of Amor, Campbell tells the story of Tristan and Isolde, a popular 12th-century romance. Tristan is meant to escort Isolde to her arranged marriage with King Mark, but the two accidentally drink a potion and fall hopelessly in love with each other instead. Tristan willingly accepts any punishment that comes from his love because “his love is bigger even than death and pain” (236). From the troubadours’ perspective, Tristan and Isolde experience “the spiritual impact of love” (236) that transcends Isolde’s societal obligation to the arranged marriage. Under the dominant Christian perspective, by contrast, Tristan and Isolde’s love is simply adultery. Campbell notes that Tristan appears in Dante’s Inferno suffering in the pits of hell with other adulterers. This story shows how the affirmation of individual experience was threatening to societal norms and rules and was grounds for punishment.

Moyers expresses a fear that if everyone followed their desires and whims, society would fall into anarchy. Campbell assures Moyers that a middle path between individual preference and duty to societal norms can and should exist. He explains that troubadour stories of courtly love still had rules that the lovers were expected to follow: “They were not those [rules] of the Church, but they were rules for playing the game harmoniously and with the results that were intended” (240). As courtly love was primarily for the noble class, knights had codes of conduct to follow. The five knightly virtues were temperance, courage, love, loyalty, and courtesy, where courtesy was a “respect for the decorum of the society in which you are living” (239). These rules allow the individual to follow their bliss without causing too much disruption in society.

Campbell says that the troubadour affirmation of individual love began to seep into Christian ideology in the 12th and 13th centuries. In this period, various writers, such as Abbot Joachim of Floris, began to believe that divinity could “[speak] directly to the individual,” who could then recognize the divinity of their own life (249). Campbell highlights St. Francis as a spiritual leader who popularized seeking individual enlightenment and Christ-like experiences. St. Francis is also known for his belief that nature reflects God’s divinity. St. Francis embodies two of Campbell’s main theses: the importance of following individual intuition, and the need to see the world through a global lens. Campbell calls St. Francis and other similar spiritual leaders “troubadours of Christ” for their desire to affirm individual spiritual connections to God (248).

Campbell continues the discussion of marriage begun in earlier chapters, highlighting the transcendent aspect of the relationship. Marriage involves a “submission of the individual to something superior to the self,” which is the abstract, non-visual relationship that unites two people (251). Marriage is the recognition that the couple are “two aspects of the same being” (251). Marriage is different from a pleasure-based love affair because it involves long-term commitment and loyalty to the union. Picking up his argument from Chapter 6, Campbell suggests that, in a heterosexual marriage, the man is put in touch with the feminine, and the woman is put in touch with the masculine, opening both to the unity that exists beyond oppositions.