In Joseph Campbell’s monomyth model of the hero quest, the hero may not immediately agree to undertake the quest on receiving the call to adventure. Refusals of the call are quite common in fairy tales, myths, and other sacred tales. The hero does eventually consent to undertake the quest, but there are plenty of examples of people never undertaking the quest to which they have been summoned. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell cites an example of a reluctant hero and heroine from the Arabian Nights story cycle and examples of those who altogether refuse from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and The Bible. Refusal in these cases has a calamitous outcome: the nymph is transformed into a tree; God refuses to help those who have refused his call.
For the Christian, human life can be considered a quest to which all are called by the fact of their birth into this world. St. Augustine conceptualizes each Christian as a warrior engaged in spiritual warfare against the devil (though in Augustinian...
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Bibliography
Campbell, J. (1949). The hero with a thousand faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Freud, S. (1961). Civilization and its discontents. In The standard edition of the complete psychological works (J. Strachey, Trans.). London: Hogarth Press.
Ovid. (1955). The metamorphoses (M. Innes, Trans.). Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha. (1973). New York: Oxford University Press.
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Mills, A. (2020). Refusal of the Call. In: Leeming, D.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24348-7_564
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