A Fire in the Mind: The Life of Joseph Campbell.

In a fire in the Mind, an idolatrous biography of Joseph Campbell by the brothers Stephen and Robin Larsen, we learn that while he was still an undergraduate at Columbia University in 1924, Campbell found reading Thomas Aquinas's Summa contra Gentiles tough going, but before the semester started he got through "420 pages of this profound Aquinas person."

That Campbell found Aquinas uncongenial does not surprise me, as I was an undergraduate at Columbia before Campbell arrived, and while he was there a member of the faculty. In my judgment, his education there was formed by admiration for the wrong authors and the wrong books: by Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough, by James Stephens's Crock of Gold, by William Graham Summer's Folkways, not by the study of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, and William James. His knowledge and understanding of philosophy and psychology were derived like the aimless but endearing boozer Lucky Jim, in Amis's comic master-piece. If real people are like that, are they good raw materials for the vast utopian social experiment planned by the humorless Lenin?

In fact, the cruelties of totalitarianism are not unrelated to the loss of common sense that takes place most easily in small, closed groups like the Politburo or Hitler's alter Kampfer. Every small closed community has its idiosyncratic way that seems utterly normal and natural to it. The Manson gang had its way, the Symbionese Liberation Army its way, the cultists who committed suicide in Guyana their way. In such groups, there is terrific pressure to conform. Take Communist "democratic centralism": at the Moscow trials, brave and intelligent men confessed to baseless charges and went to their deaths rather than be separated from the Party. In this atmosphere mass murder becomes the thing to do.

For us the tribe has vanished and the family is sickly. More and more, the small closed community means the professions, the interest groups, and the academic disciplines. Common sense suggested that a lot of people were killed in Stalin's terror, or that the Soviet Union of Brezhnev still did not look like a "pluralist" system with "extensive political participation." But within the field of Soviet studies, with its wider sources, it special methods, its refinements, and its distinctive in-group psychology, we were unable to enunciate these truths clearly or, if we did, we paid the price Conquest paid. Likewise the concept "sexual harassment" seems to common sense to lump together actions of unequal seriousness, but to the "women's movement" it is a closed matter. Affirmative action looks a bit dubious to common sense, but obviously right to the civil-rights community." To the "arts community it is obvious that any obscene self-exhibition is art and deserves public funding, and so on.

Thus there is an intrinsic compatible between specialization and the agenda of the Left. which sees society as a mosaic of minorities, each exacting from the public the tribute due: that its particular obsession or jargon pass unreviewed by some wider American or Western or human awareness. And, since the new Deal, the words "expert" has been essentially synony-from from his reading of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Freud, Schopenhauer, and Jung - all sources of the gravest modern errors.

As a consequence, I have little interest in the details of Campbell's life and find the Larsen's fabulous account of the "supernatural events" attendant upon his death appaling. It might have been enlightening, though, to learn how his being reared as Roman Catholic and being mistaught its articles of faith and its theology led to his rejection of the religion in the late Twenties. The authors merely tell us that "although the cognitive and emotional gap between his inner convictions and Church doctrine was growing ever wider, never to close again, he had continued to attend Mass and had even done altar service in Paris."

From what Campbell himself wrote on the subject, I can only conclude that his understanding of the Christian creed and its theology was puerile. In that field he was an ignoramus.

The best example of this is found in The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, the book he wrote just before he died in 1987. In that book he clearly and explicitly states his views about the relation of mythology to religion. All his other books merely insinuate his subversive dismissal of all - all, not some - religions as misconstrued mythologies.

Readers will find a few traces of these views in this biography. On page 414, we find Campbell quoted as saying: "Clearly, Christianity is opposed fundamentally and intrinsically to everything that I am working an living for. Krishna is a much better teacher and model than Christ."

On page 42w9, Campbell is reported as having difficulty reconciling the basic mythologies of Christianity, and particularly Catholicism, with science. One wonders why mythologies, which are only poetically true, need to be reconciled with science. One might add that Aquinas through that the dogmas of his religion have factual, not poetically, truth and necessarily have to be reconcilable with everything that was then known in philosophy and in science.

I set forth my criticisms of this view in a book published in 1990, Truth in Religion. That effort was initially motivated by my negative response to the celebrated Moyers - Campbell TV programs entitled The Power of Myth. My old friend Bill Moyers seemed to me to have been as taken in by Campbell as are his biographers. He did not critically challenge the extraordinary misstatements made by Campbell about Christian beliefs.

Campbell did understand that while myths have poetical truth, the kind of truth all made-up stories have, they do not have the factual and logical truth to be found in historical narratives and in bodies of scientific knowledge. He must therefore have understood the difference between poetical and logical truth, being himself a social scientists. He must have understood the criteria by which the truth of generalizations in sociology or cultural anthropology can be tested, proved, and disproved, criteria he would not himself apply to poetical narratives or mythologies. Hence his statement that all religions are miscontrued mythologies asserts that, although they may have poetical truth, they are all factually and logically false.

It may be true that some religions are misconstrued having poetical but not factual or logical truth. But Campbell held that this is the case with all religions. That is an unqualified generalization on his part, and he asserted it as a social scientist - a cultural anthropologist.

How did Campbell support the truth of his scientific generalization? By logical argument? No. By evidence which, in the strict logical sense, has probative force? No. How then? By purely rhetorical means, ill-concealed innuendo intended to discredit, not disprove religious beliefs.

The substitle of The Inner Reaches of Outer Space is "Metaphor as Myth and as Religion." Every metaphor can be transformed into a simile, which asserts what something is like, not what it is. Myths are full of metaphors, for metaphors are essential ingredients in poetry. Aquinas explains why the divinely inspired language of Sacred Scripture is also full of metaphors (Summa Theological, Part 1, Q. 1, Art. 9). To say this is only to say that there is some similarity between a mythological text and a religious text; it is not to say that all religions are factually false, nothing but poetically true mythologies.

Finally, we come in A Fire in the Mind to the phrase "Follow your bliss," which sums up Campbell's basic preachment about how one should live one's life, supposedly distilled from all the "wisdom" he found in the world's mythologies.

That phrase, despite the great air of mystery and sophistication with which Campbell uttered it, expresses the most simple-minded hedonism: Do whatever you want to do if it gives you pleasure. This may be the "wisdom" of Essalin and the New Age, but it represents the oldest debasement of twentieth-century culture.

Mr. Adler is the author of 49 books, most recently Desires Righ and Wrong: The Ethics of Enough (Macmillan). He is Chairman of the Board of Editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and director of the Institute for Philosophical Research.