"God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that"
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Campbell yanks "God" out of the courtroom of doctrine and drops it into the poetry section. Calling God a metaphor is less a demolition than a reframing: he is not arguing against the divine so much as against the idea that divinity can be captured by arguments. The line "that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought" is doing heavy lifting. It flatters the mind, then tells the mind it has limits. If you are looking for God as a proposition, Campbell implies, you are already holding the tool wrong.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to both fundamentalists and smug skeptics. Literalists reduce God to a factual claim to be defended; hardline rationalists reduce God to a claim to be debunked. Campbell treats both as category errors. Myth, in his framework, is not primitive science but psychological and cultural technology: it points beyond language to experiences people keep having - awe, terror, moral rupture, ecstatic unity - that refuse to stay neatly inside concepts.
Context matters: Campbell wrote in an era when comparative religion was going mainstream, when Freud and Jung had taught educated audiences to read spiritual symbols as interior realities, and when postwar America was both religious and newly hungry for "spiritual but not religious" vocabulary. "It's as simple as that" is the rhetorical mic drop: a deliberately plainspoken close meant to stop theological hair-splitting and redirect attention from belief to encounter. The intent is not to settle God, but to relocate the conversation from proof to practice, from creed to consciousness.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to both fundamentalists and smug skeptics. Literalists reduce God to a factual claim to be defended; hardline rationalists reduce God to a claim to be debunked. Campbell treats both as category errors. Myth, in his framework, is not primitive science but psychological and cultural technology: it points beyond language to experiences people keep having - awe, terror, moral rupture, ecstatic unity - that refuse to stay neatly inside concepts.
Context matters: Campbell wrote in an era when comparative religion was going mainstream, when Freud and Jung had taught educated audiences to read spiritual symbols as interior realities, and when postwar America was both religious and newly hungry for "spiritual but not religious" vocabulary. "It's as simple as that" is the rhetorical mic drop: a deliberately plainspoken close meant to stop theological hair-splitting and redirect attention from belief to encounter. The intent is not to settle God, but to relocate the conversation from proof to practice, from creed to consciousness.
Quote Details
| Topic | God |
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