The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man. The objective world remains what it was, but, because of a shift of emphasis within the subject, is beheld as though transformed. Where formerly life and death contended, now enduring being is made manifest-as indifferent to the accidents of time as water boiling in a pot is to the destiny of a bubble, or as the cosmos to the appearance and disappearance of a galaxy of stars. Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachment to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible. Thus the two are the terms of a single mythological theme and experience which includes them both and which they bound: the down-going and the up-coming (kathodos and anodos), which together constitute the totality of the revelation that is life, and which the individual must know and love if he is to be purged (katharsis=purgatorio) of the contagion of sin (disobedience to the divine will) and death (identification with the mortal form).
— Joseph Campbell
Campbell's architecture is seductive precisely because it never fails. Tragedy and comedy, descent and ascent, kathodos and anodos — each term is folded into the other so that the system becomes airtight. Whatever the soul suffers, the myth provides the corresponding upswing, and the individual who "knows and loves" the totality is purged of death's sting. Notice what that move costs: suffering is absorbed into structure, and the structure is always already completed. The bubble dissolves but water endures; the galaxy disappears but the cosmos persists. The individual grief is real for a moment, then metabolized by the larger indifference. This is spiritual bypass operating at the level of cosmology — not a consolation offered from outside, but a system in which tragedy is pre-redeemed by its position in the larger arc.
The phrase worth sitting with is "disobedience to the divine will" as the definition of sin. That is not Homer's understanding of suffering, nor Hillman's. It assumes a will already knowing where the soul should go and calls the soul's wandering from that path a contamination. The purgation model depends on that assumption. What drops out is the possibility that the soul's particular suffering is not a deviation from a cosmic script but something irreducibly itself — not transcended, not metabolized, simply endured and known.
Joseph Campbell·The Hero With a Thousand Faces·2015