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A nuanced exploration of the part religion plays in human life, past and present, from one of the foremost commentators on religion at work today.
Moving from the Paleolithic Age to the present, Karen Armstrong details the great lengths to which humankind has gone in order to experience a sacred reality that it has called God, Brahman, Nirvana, Allah, or Dao. Focusing especially on Christianity but including Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Chinese spirituality, Armstrong examines the diminished impulse toward religion in our own time, when a significant number of people either want nothing to do with God or question the efficacy of faith. Why has God become incredible? Why is it that atheists and theists alike now think and speak about God in a way that deviates so profoundly from the thinking of our ancestors? Answering these questions with the same depth of knowledge and profound insight that have marked all of her acclaimed books, Armstrong makes clear how the changing face of the world has necessarily changed the importance of religion at both the societal and the individual level. And she makes a powerful, convincing argument for drawing on the insights of the past in order to build a faith that speaks to the needs of our dangerously polarized age.
520 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
In the early modern period, when the West was developing a wholly rational way of thinking about God and the world, philosophers and scientists were appalled by the irrationality of the Trinity. But for the Cappadocian fathers 鈥� Basil, Gregory and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus (329-90) 鈥� the whole point of the doctrine was to stop Christians thinking about God in rational terms. If you did that, you could only think about God as a being, because that was all our minds were capable of. The Trinity was not a 鈥榤ystery鈥� that had to be believed but an image that Christians were supposed to contemplate in a particular way.
one day the Gestapo hanged a child with the face of a 鈥榮ad-eyed angel鈥�, who was silent and almost calm as he climbed the gallows. It took the child nearly an hour to die in front of the thousands of spectators who were forced to watch. Behind Wiesel, one of the prisoners muttered: 鈥榃here is God? Where is He?鈥� And Wiesel heard a voice within him saying in response, 鈥榃here is He? Here He is 鈥� He is hanging here on this gallows.鈥�
The idea of God is merely a symbol of indescribable transcendence and has been interpreted in many different ways over the centuries. The modern God - conceived as a powerful Creator, First Cause, Supernatural personality realistically understood and rationally demonstrable - is a recent phenomenon.
Like all religious fundamentalists, the new atheists believe that they alone are in possession of truth; like Christian fundamentalists, they read scripture in an entirely literal manner and never seem to have heard of the long tradition of allegoric or Talmudic interpretation.
There is a wonderful description, the first I have come across, of the Eleusinian Mysteries of ancient Greece. Armstrong describes this ritual, emphasizing how inherent in it were two key concepts: "mythos" and "logos." Mythos was a "story that was not meant to be historical or factual but expressed the meaning of an event or narrative and encapsulated its timeless, eternal dimension." Mythos was a teaching tool; one that helped to impart to the initiate or religious a sense of the sacred. The other term is Logos. Logos means "dialogue, speech; reasoned, logical, and scientific thought." In the past, religion was always a matter of practice. Practice is defined as daily ritual. Like the Mass, for instance, in Catholicism; or the five daily prayers in Islam; or the Passover seder in Judaism. Religion was not, she stresses, about "belief." No one was expected to believe in God. In fact, the idea of belief as we know it today did not then exist. There was, too, among all monotheistic religions, a remarkable lack of rigidity when it came to interpreting the holy books (Bible, Talmud, Koran). The object being not to pick interpretations that were correct and inflexible, but to find new and innovative interpretations. In fact, if the initiate was not finding some new twist in the scriptures, some novel interpretation, that person was considered remiss in his or her practice. And practice was the only way to know the sacred.
Then the Enlightenment came along, and with it the scientific revolution. The scientific method taught that facts were right or they were wrong. Either you could repeat the experiment, or you could not. Many early scientists were religious. Newton, for one, but many others as well. Gradually there was a shift from kenosis, from the gentle act of self-emptying for purposes of contemplation of God in silence, to one which began to seek "scientific proofs" of God's existence. For instance, it was at first thought that the incredible detail revealed in microscopic structures was a sign of the divine. How else could these astonishingly minute structures have occurred but through God's hand. This way of knowing God flourished. God thus became an outsize if finite being, to the extent that he was knowable. For a while science continued to provide these "proofs" of his existence.
Then something happened, two things really that threw this approach to knowing God on its ear: the first were certain advances in geology. Geology showed that the earth was not created in six days, as stated in Genesis. It pointed to time spans that were almost beyond human conception. Then came Evolution. Darwin showed us that Man and his fellow creatures were not created all at one time and set down on the planet in their current form. Evolution, in fact, showed us that there was no Intelligent Design, for its process (selection) was not in any way directed. That is to say, it was a geologically slow and muddled process marked by eons of struggle, most of it futile, and mass extinction. Persons of faith, however, were by this time hooked on their concept of "belief," which they had gleaned from the sciences. The silent contemplation of early monotheism--unknowing, kenosis--had been lost in the West. Faith began to be sustained through a literal (i.e. rigid) interpretation of scripture. So here we are in the present day. The Fundamentalists believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible. Something never required of early worshippers. Somehow, it has come to be thought, that religion must be made to match science, truth for truth. And of course religion can never do that. Historically, it has never functioned in that way. Yet we need it in our lives. Why? Why can't we do away with it as the New Atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens, et al.) seem to believe we can? Armstrong quotes Jean Paul Sartre saying that when we do away with religion there is left in the human psyche a "God-shaped hole." Armstrong argues here, makes her case for god, for maintaining touch with the old, kenotic ways of belief. She is very persuasive. I treasure this book and look forward to rereading it.