In order to examine the presence of the hero’s journey displayed in Ruusbroec’s theology of spiritual formation, the methodology of this research must focus on letting Ruusbroec’s writing speak, albeit in a way not previously recognised. According to Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002), the hermeneutical process involves acquiring ‘a horizon of interpretation’, which itself ‘requires a fusion of horizons’, typically understood in terms of past and present.2 This is a fitting description of the methodology employed in the present project. Language, says Gadamer, ‘has its true being only in dialogue, in coming to an understanding’, and ‘understanding always includes interpretation’.3 Therefore, the methodology of this research consists of a hermeneutical ‘fusion of horizons’, in which leading narratological voices that have identified and, to a significant degree, codified the characteristics of the hero’s journey are brought into dialogue with Ruusbroec’s writing and his theology of spiritual formation. In so doing, the narratological voices help reveal the patterns and tropes of the hero’s journey inherent in Ruusbroec’s formational path, establishing a new ‘horizon of interpretation’ for Ruusbroec’s work.
The two horizons to be examined are the hero’s journey and Ruusbroec’s work. Therefore, the first task is to consider the interpretation of the hero’s journey according to modern literary theory, focusing on the primary figures to be engaged in the hermeneutical dialogue of the present research. Following that will be a survey of the interpretation of Ruusbroec’s work, especially focusing on his theological orientation, his literary milieu, and his aesthetic approach.
Interpreting the hero’s journey
In both the modern literary era and for millennia prior, storytellers of diverse backgrounds have told their versions of the story of a hero’s journey in line with, at least to a recognisable degree, the genre’s stages and character actions. The characteristics that have come to define the genre were identified and largely codified by scholars in the first half of the twentieth century. Though their findings have been questioned and occasionally even denounced, they have withstood such criticisms and remain viable and authoritative for numerous contemporary storytellers and scholars.
Vladimir Propp understood the hero’s journey in terms of invariable character actions that remained the same across numerous and varied settings. Joseph Campbell recognised the hero’s journey as characterised by narrative archetypes rooted in both conscious and unconscious psychological, anthropological, and spiritual expressions. These two are part of a community of predecessors, contemporaries, and successors in the wider field of hero studies, many of which have contributed to the interpretation of the hero’s journey to be employed in the present work.
Vladimir Propp
The first narratological voice whose work will be authoritative in the present research is that of Vladimir Propp. Propp’s foundational work with the hero’s journey emerges from his ‘pioneering analysis of the structure of Russian fairy tales’, which marked ‘an important development in the study of folk (and other) narratives, and subsequently became an essential work in structuralist narratology’.4 Indeed, Propp’s work is seen as establishing the ‘most important precedent’ in the development of structuralism in the twentieth century, especially in his ‘pathbreaking’ Morphology of the Folktale, first published in 1928, but not translated into English until 1958.5 Situated alongside the field of structuralism, which is a text-oriented methodology emphasising ‘the intrinsic and structural aspects of a literary work’, Russian formalism emerged in the early twentieth century as a critical method that ‘profoundly influenced the evolution of modern-day narrative theory’ by ‘uncoupling theories of narrative from theories of the novel’.6 Propp made ‘one of the most influential contributions of Russian formalism to the structuralist theories of the twentieth century’ in his ‘character typology, which reduces the indefinite number of characters in literary works to a limited list of recurrent types’.7
In his Morphology, Propp ‘abstracted 31 functions, or character actions defined in terms of their significance for the plot, from a corpus of Russian folktales; he also specified rules for their distribution in a given tale’.8 His Morphology builds on the index of folktale themes developed by Antti Aarne, who catalogued folktales into ‘types’ and, in Propp’s own assessment, ‘rendered the study of the tale an enormous service’.9 Propp defines his ‘morphology’ as ‘a description of the tale according to its component parts and the relationship of these components to each other and to the whole’.10 Focusing on the fairy tales, or ‘wondertales’, numbered 300–749 in Aarne’s index, Propp describes his manner of presentation in Morphology:
For each function there is given: (1) a brief summary of its essence, (2) an abbreviated definition in one word, and (3) its conventional sign. (The introduction of signs will later permit a schematic comparison of the structure of various tales.)11
This presentation of Propp’s functions will be seen in the employment of his morphology for the present research, including a ‘schematic comparison’ of the overall structure of Ruusbroec’s formational ‘tale’ in the Conclusion (see Table 7.1).
Propp is among those who ‘laid important groundwork for narratological research. For example, in distinguishing between “bound” (or plot-relevant) and “free” (or non-plot-relevant) motifs’.12 At the core of his work is the observation that the same motif, or function, can take many forms. He offers the example of the story ‘Morozko’.13 In the story, a stepmother sends her stepdaughter into the woods to Morozko [Frost], who tries to freeze the girl to death. But she speaks to him so sweetly and humbly that he spares her, rewards her, and lets her go. Meanwhile, the old woman’s biological daughter fails the same test and perishes. Propp examines two other versions of the story in which the girl is not tested by Morozko, but by a wood goblin in one case, and a bear in another. ‘But surely it is the same tale!’ says Propp.14 ‘Thus’, he continues, ‘though several kinds of narrative occur, they can be analyzed by the same methods’.15
Here is an example of the free, non-plot-relevant motif, as well as a glimpse at the heart of Propp’s functions of dramatis personae, with the same character action seen in different forms. As will be explored in the present study, Ruusbroec’s motif taken from Matthew 25:6 (‘See, the bridegroom comes; go out to meet him’) is a bound, plot-relevant motif in The Spiritual Espousals. However, the same motif can be extrapolated as a free, non-plot-relevant motif illustrating the functions or character actions that form Ruusbroec’s larger theology of spiritual formation across his corpus. Therefore, Ruusbroec’s theology of spiritual formation will be examined in light of Propp’s functions of dramatis personae, which will be placed alongside the stages of the hero’s journey presented by the other primary voice for the present study’s hermeneutic, Joseph Campbell.
Joseph Campbell
If Vladimir Propp helped lay the foundation of the modern study of narrative and the hero’s journey, Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) has proven to be the most influential, albeit perhaps the most controversial, builder on that foundation. Any familiarity of Propp and Campbell with each other’s work is unclear. Propp’s Morphology was released in Russian twenty years before Campbell’s seminal 1949 work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, yet it was not translated into English until nearly ten years after. Nevertheless, as the present research will examine, each man’s respective analysis of the hero’s journey parallels the other’s in almost every significant point.
Campbell’s approach is rooted in myth criticism, which is ‘similar to Propp’s character typology’ as it ‘exposes patterns of myth … as deep structures underlying a variety of texts’; and it is rooted in archetypal criticism, which ‘works along similar lines [to myth criticism] by searching texts for collective motifs of the human psyche’.16 Both myth criticism and archetypal criticism are ‘in line with the methodology of formalist schools, which delve beneath the surface of literary texts in their search for recurrent deep structures’.17
Despite the scholarly context of his research, which includes thirty-eight years as a professor of literature, Campbell’s unconventional approach, combined with his reception by and influence on popular culture, has resulted in both celebration and derision. An example is Dean Miller’s assessment. He is appreciative of Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, but more dubious about the following decades, in which he claims Campbell ‘relentlessly inflated, desecularized, and apotheosized the heroic role’ in a ‘bifurcated’ treatment that was ‘part scholarship of a more or less orthodox Jungian marque, and partly mystagogic proclamations all too redolent of (or too easily parasitized by) New Age “cosmic consciousness”’.18
Fair or unfair (and likely both), Miller’s criticism is typical of most of Campbell’s critics, especially in Miller’s ultimate admission: ‘What Campbell does to aid a study of the hero is to set up stages and categories of the heroic biography and experience that can be tested against the data’.19 And that is what Miller proceeds to do, confessing that he needs Campbell, at leas...
