Karen Armstrong's "The Case for God"

This is an excellent review of human religious views over the past 10,000 years. It claims to be a "case for God" but really doesn't argue for God. I'm putting this book onto my list of "favourites" and would love to have time to read it again and again to really absorb all that is in it. It is a great sourcebook that will point you in many directions.

It presents the many views of God over the years and, as the viewpoints are reviewed, it gives away the specific preferences of Karen Armstrong. It is a book that combines a history of ideas with a bit of Karen Armstrong's view of what religion should be. I enjoyed both. Although I differ in modest ways from what Armstrong presents.

• She does what a lot of historians do: she present a fairly linear view of history with a clear "plot line" with various persons presented as iconic and/or heroic. In reality, history is much more muddy & confused and there really isn't as much progress as it would appear. There are collapses of civilization which, when translated into the tale this book is telling, there are regressions in religion. But Armstrong doesn't linger over these.


• She is much more enthusiastic about "ritual" than I am. But this is the great divide in our cultural pasts. She comes from the Catholic side and I from the Protestant. She gives more creedance to authority and discipline and distrusts individualistic practices. I reverse that. But we both agree that there is an innate religiosity in people, that it arises from our social impulses and wonder at the world, that the best theology recognizes the limits of language, and that practice and community are as important as ideas.


• I appreciate her attempts at a global perspective which includes Chinese (Taoism and Confucianism), Indian (Hindu and Buddhism), Greek (mystery religions), as well as the three great monotheistic religions. As is to be expected from a person raised in the Western tradition her book is about 95% focused on the Christian tradition. I'm not competent to comment on much of the various religious traditions, but if her failings in getting the details of modern physics are any indication, she has only a superficial grasp of them. Enough to sound impressive to somebody with no background, but not that profound a knowledge. But I do appreciate her efforts to include these other traditions. I only fault her in not putting up serious "hazard" signs around the most egregious religious horror stories. In particular, she treats Islam with kid gloves which I find a bit hard to stomach. She does mention the horrors in Christianity's closet but blithely ignores those in Islam and she doesn't explore in any serious way the theological concepts of Islam or the divergences within this community over time.


• As always in a book like this there is a problem with traditions that are overlooked or insufficiently explored. I recognize that it is necessary to cut a book down to size. I want more. But it is pretty obvious from Armstrong's writing career, she will be exploring the topics in the book more since her own writings have shown a clear direction toward exploring religious ideas across the cultures and through history. I can hardly wait for her next book. The previous ones have all delighted me.

Enough of generalities, let's look at her book. I want to pull out quotes that will give you a feel for the scope and depth of the book.

She looks at religion starting well into pre-history:

If the historians are right about the function of the Lascaux caves, religion and art were inseparable from the very beginning. Like art, religion is an attempt to construct meaning in the face of the relentless pain and injustice of life. As meaning-seeking creatures, mean and women fall very easily into despair. They have created religions and works of art to help them find value in their lives, despite all the dispiriting evidence to the contrary. The initiation experience also shows that a myth, like that of the Animal Master, derives much of its meaning from the ritualized context in which it is imparted. It may not be empirically true, it may defy the laws of logic, but a good myth will tell us something valuable about the human predicament. Like any work of art, a myth will make no sense unless we open ourselves to it wholeheartedly and allow it to change us. If we hold ourselves aloof, it will remain opaque, incomprehensible, and even ridiculous.

Religion is hard work. Its insights are not self-evident and have to be cultivated in the same way as an appreciation of art, music, or poetry must be developed.

...

As the German scholar Walter Burkert explains, it is pointless to look for an idea or doctrine behind a rite. In the premodern world, ritual was not the product of religious ideas; on the contrary, these ideas were the product of ritual. Homo religiosus is pragmatic in this sense only; if ritual no longer evokes a profound conviction of life's ultimate value, he simply abandons it.

Here is what she has to say about early Christian theology:

One of the most brilliant and influential of these early exegetes was Origen (185-254), who had studied allegoria with Greek and Jewish scholars in Alexandria and midrash with rabbis in Palestine. In his search for the deeper significance of scripture, Origen did not cavalierly cast the original aside but took the plain sense of the scripture very seriously.

...

Like a human person, scripture consisted of a body, a psyche, and a spirit that transcended mortal nature; these corresponded to the three senses in which scripture could be understood. The mystes had to master the "body" of the sacred text (its literal sense) before he could progress to anything higher. Then he was ready for the moral sense, an interpretation that represented the "psyche," the natural powers of mind and heart: it provided us with ethical guidance but was largely a matter of common sense. The mystes that pressed on to the end of his initiation was introduced to the spiritual, allegorical sense, when he encountered the Word that lay hidden in the earthy body of the sacred page.

...

Origen's method of reading scripture according to the literal, moral, and spiritual sense became standard throughout the Christian world. The monastic reformer John Cassian (360-435) introduced this type of exegesis to western Europe and added a fourth sense: the anagogical, which described the eschatological dimension of any given text. This fourfold method remained in place in the West until the Reformation.

Here is a bit about Islam which skips over the initial violent coercive history (see here for a bit about this):

Eventually, when the war with Mecca was turning in his favour, Muhammad adopted a policy of nonviolence. Wehn Mecca finally opened its gates volunarily, nobody was forced to enter Islam and Muhammad made no attempt to implement an exclusively Islamic state there.

Like any religious tradition, Islam would change and evolve. Muslims acquired a large empire, stretching from the Pyrenees to the Himalayas, but true to Qur'anic principles, nobody was forced to become Muslim. Indeed, for the first five hundred years after the Prophet's death, conversion to Islam was actually discouraged, because Islam was a din for the Arabs, the descendants of Abraham's elder son, Ishmael, just as Judaism was for the sons of Isaac and Christianity for the followers of the gospel.

While the above is broadly true, it ignores a lot of details that aren't as anodyne as presented.

After presenting the religious evolution during the Middle Ages, she summarizes it with:

But the theology of Scotus and Ockham was incomprehensible to all but a few experts. The theology of unknowing had encouraged humility; the new speculations of the schoolmen seemed to inflate their conceit and could be imparted to anybody who had the intelligence to follow it, regardless of his moral stature. Theology was not only becoming aridly theoretical; without the discipline of the apophatic, it was in danger of becoming idolatrous. Europe was on the brink of major social, cultural, political, and intellectual change. As it entered the modern world, spirituality was at a low ebb, and Europeans might find it difficult to respond creatively to the challenge.

Here is how she presents the Reformation:

In premodern society, men and women had experienced the sacred in earthly objects, so that symbol and the sacred had been inseparable. The Eucharistic bread and wine had been identical with the transcendent reality to which they directed attention. Now the reformers declared that the Eucharist was "only" a symbol and the Mass no longer a symbolic reenactment of Calvary but a simple memorial. They were beginning to speak about the myths of religion as theough they were logoi, and the alacrity with which people seized upon these new teachings suggests that many Christians in Europe were losing the older habits of thought.

The theological quarrels between Rome and the reformers and, later, among the reformers themselves were giving more importance to the exact formulation of the abstruse doctrines.

She has an interesting bit about the Marranos (forced Jewish converts to Christianity) who evidence the early modern trend toward skepticism and the loss of religion.

Here is a bit of her review of the Enlightenment:

Scarred by the theological wrangling and violence of the Reformation and the Thirty Years' War, European Deism was marked by anticlericalism but was by no means averse to religion itself. Deists needed God. As Voltaire famously remarked, if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

The Enlightenment was the culmination of a vision that had been long in the making. It built on Galileo's mechanistic science, Descartes' quest for autonomous certainty, and Newton's cosmic laws, and by the eighteenth century, the pilosophes believed that they had acquired a uniform way of assessing the whole of reality. Reason was the only path to truth. The philosophes were convinced that religion, society, history, and the workings of the human mind could all be explained by the regular natural processes discovered by science. But their rational ideology was entirely dependent upon the existence of God. Atheism as we understand it today was still intellectually inconceivable. Voltaire regarded it as a "monstrous evil," but was confident that because scientists had found definitive proofs for God's existence, there were "fewer atheists today than there have ever been." For Jefferson, it was impossible that any normally constructed mind could contemplate the design manifest in every atom of the universe and deny the necessity of a supervising power.

She then talks about the Pietist movement that reacted to the impersonal Deistic universe by focusing on a "religion of the heart" that emphasized a personal relationship with God:

The Enlightenment tendency to polarize heart and head could mean that a faith that was not capable of intelligeent self-appraisal degenerated into emotional indulgence. This became clear during the religious revival known as the First Great Awakening that erupted in the American colony of Connecticut in 1734. The sudden death of two young people in the community of Northampton plunged the town into a frenzeied religiosity, which spread like a contagion to Massachusetts and Long Island. Within six months, three hundred people had experience "born-again" conversions, their spiritual lives alternating beween soaring highs and devastating lows when they fell prey to intense guit and depression. When the revival burned itself out, one man committed suicide, convinced that the loss of ecstatic joy must mean that the was predestined to hell. In premodern spirituality, rituals such as the Eleusinian mysteries had been skillfully crafted to lead people through emotional extremity to the other side. But in Northampton, the new American cult of liberty meant that there was no such supervision, that everything was spontaneous and free, and that people were allowed to run the gamut of their emotions in a way that for some proved fatal.

There was a paradox in the Enlightenment. Philosophers insisted that individuals must reason for themselves, and yet they were only permitted to think in accordance with the scientific method. Other more intuitive ways of arriving at different kinds of truth were now belittled in a manner that would prove highly problematic for religion.

I think her claim that the devotees of the Eleusinian mysteries were "properly" conducted is an unfounded generalization. There is far less known of the personal tragedies of those who "went off the deep end" with the Eleusinian mystery cult. But the conflict between rationalistic Deism and the new Pietism is a sound point. Armstrong is at her best -- in my view -- when she is teasing out these trends in religion over vast time periods.

Here is an excellent summary of the Age of Reason:

For d'Holbach, religion was born of weakness, fear and superstition; people had created gods to fill the gaps in their knowledge, so religious belief was an act of intellectual cowardice and despair. First, men and women had personified the forces of nature, creating divinities in their own image, but eventually they had merged all these godlings into a massive deity that was simply a projection of their own fears and desires. Their God was "nothing but a gigantic, exaggerated man," rendered incredible and unintelligible "by dint of keeping together incompatible qualities." God was an incomprehensible chimera, a mere negation of human limitations. His infinity, for example, simply meant that he had no spatial boundaries, but such a being was utterly inconceivable. How could you reconcile the goodness of an omnipotent God with human suffering? This incoherent theology was bound to disintegrate in the Age of Reason. Descartes, Newton, Malebranche, and Clarke, who had all tried to save God, were simply atheists in disguise.

She traces the roots of Evangelicalism:

The Evangelicals brought natural theology, hitherto a minority pursuit, into the mainstream. Even though they continued to insist on the transcendence of God, they believed paradoxically that he could be known through science as a matter of common sense. Wary of learned experts, they wanted a plain-speaking religion with no abstruse theological flights of fancy. They read the scriptures with an unprecedented literalism, because this seemed more rational than the older allegorical exegesis. Like scientific discourse, religious language should be univocal, clear, and transparent. The Evangelicals also brought the Enlightenment concept of "belief" as intellectual conviction to the center of Protestant religiosity and perpetuated the Enlightenment separation of the natural from the supernatural. Finally, in an attempt to ground their faith in something tangible, they followed the philosophes in making the practice of morality central to religion. They wanted a rationalized God who shared their own moral standards and behaved like a good Evangelical.

As we pass into the modern era we pass into a time of skepticism and disbelief. This is the modern era of "God is dead":

When the German philospher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) looked into the hearts of his contemporaries, he found that God had already died, but as yet6 very few people were aware of this. In The Gay Science (1882), he told the story of a madman who ran one morning into the marketplace, crying: "I see God!" In mild amusement,the sophisticated bysteanders asked him if God had run away or emigrated. "Where has God gone?" the madman demanded. "We have killed him -- you and I! We are all his murderers!" The astonishing progress of science had made God quite irrelevant; it had caused human beings to focus so intently on the physical world that they would soon be constitutionally unable to take God seriously. The death of God -- the fact that the Christian God had becvome incredible -- was "Beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe."

She also talks about the rise of Pentacostals:

At the other extreme of the intellectual spectrum, a form of Christian positivism developed that represented a grassroots rebellion against modern rationalism. On April 9, 1906, the first congregation of Pentecostalists claimed to have experienced the Spirit in a tiny house in Los Angeles, convinced that it had descended upon them in the same way as upon Jesus's disciples on the Jewish festival of Pentecost, when the divine presence had manifested itself in tongues of fire and given the apostles the ability to speak in strange languages. When they spoke in "tongues," Pentecostalists felt they were returning to the fundamental nub of religiosity that existed beneath any logical exposition of the Christian faith. Within four years, there were hundreds of Pentecostal groups all over the United States, and the movement had spread to fifty other countries. At first they were convinced that their experience heralded the Last Days: crowds of African Americans and disadvantaged whites poured into their congregations in the firm belief that Jesus would soon return and establish a more just society. But after the First World War had shattered this early optimism, they say their gift of tongues as a new way of speaking to God. ...

With the Great War, an element of terror had entered conservative Protestantism in the United States. Many believed that the catastrophic encounters at the Somme and Passchendaele were the battles that, according to scripture, would usher in the Last Days; many Christians were now convinced that they were on the front line of an apocalyptic war against Satan. The wild propaganda stories of German atrocities seemed proof positive that they had been right to fight the nation that had spawned the Higher Criticism. But they were equally mistrustful of democracy, which carried overtones of the "mob rule" and "red republic" that had erupted in the atheistic Bolshevik revolution (1917). These American Christians no longer saw Jesus as a loving savior; rather, as the leading conservative Isaac M. Haldeman proclaimed, the Christ of Revelation "comes forth as one who no longer seeks either friendship or love... He descends that he may shed the blood of men."

Then things took an even worse turn:

During their time in the political wilderness, the fundamentalists became more radical, nursing a deep grievance against mainstream American culture. Subsequent history would show that when a fundamentalist movement is attacked, it almost invariably becomes more aggressive, bitter, and excessive. Rooted as fundamentalism is in a fear of annihilation, its adherents see any such offensive as proof that the secular or liberal world is indeed bent on the elimination of religion. Jewish and Muslim movements would also confirm to this pattern. Before Scopes, Protestant fundamentalists tended to be on the left of the political spectrum, willing to work with socialists and liberals in the disadvantaged areas of the rapidly industrializing cities. After Scopes, they swung to the far right, where they have remained.

The ridicule of the press proved to be counterproductive, since it made the fundamentalists even more militant in their views. Before Scopes, evolution had not been an important issue; even such ardent literalists as Charles Hodge, knew that the world had existed for a lot longer than the six thousand years mentioned in the Bible. Only a very few subscribed to so-called creation science, which argued that Genesis was scientifically sound in every details. Most fundamentalists were Calvinists, though Calvin himself had not shared their hostility to scientific knowledge. But after Dayton, an unswerving biblical literalism became central to the fundamentalist mind-set and creation science becamse the flagship of the movement.

Here is Armstrong's critique of literalism:

Their literalist approach showed a complete misunderstanding of the purpose of myth, which is "not to present an objective picture of the world as it is. ... Myth should be interpreted not cosmologically but ... existentially." Biblical interpretation could not even begin without personal engagement, so scientific objectivity was as alien to religion as to art. Religion was possible only when people were "stirred by the question of their own existence and can hear the claim that the text makes." A careful examination of the Gospels showed that Jesus did not see God as "an object of thought or speculation" but as an existential demand, a "power that constrains man to decision, who conftonts him in the demand for good."

Here is her summary of the 20th century theological Paul Tillich who tries to get past the literalism of both rationalist and evangelical Christianity:

For centuries, symbols such as "God" or "providence" enabled people to look through the ebb and flow of temporal life to glipse Being itself. This helped them to endure the terror of life and the horror of death, but now, Tillich argued, many had forgotten how to interpret the old symobolism and regarded it as purely factual. Hence these symbols had become opaque; transcendence no longer shone through them. When this happened they died and lost their power, so when we spoke of these symbols in a literal manner, we made statements that were inaccurate and untrue. That was why, like so many premodern theologians, Tillich could state without qualification: "God does not exist. He is being itself beyond essnse and existence. Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him."

She also discusses the modern conflict between science and religion and how various thinkers try to resolve it:

[Stephen Jay] Gould revived, in new form, the ancient distinction and complementarity of mythos and logos in what he called NOMA (Non-Overlapping Magisteria). The "magisterium," he explained, was "a domain where one form of teaching holds the appropriate tools for meaningful discourse and resolution." Religions and science were separate magisteria and should not encroach on each other's domain:

The matisterium of science covers the empirical realm: what is the universe made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory)? The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they emcompass all inquiry.

The idea of an inherent conflict between religion and science was false. They were two distinct mageisteria that "hold equal worth and necessary status for any complete human life, and ... remain logically distinct and fully separeate in lines of inquiry."

She finishes with a look at the conflict between theism and atheism and considers the embrace of uncertainty by postmodernism as a possible resolution:

"If modern atehism is the rejection of a modern God, then the delimitation of modernity opens up another possibility, less the resuscitation of premodern theism than the chance of something beyond both the tehism and the atheism of modernity."

I see postmodernism as a poorly grounded movement and do not expect any future solutions to come from it. I do accept that what comes after the modern era will be an intellectual worldview that embraces the limits of knowledge and the uncertainty at the heart of our greatest intellectual edifices, e.g. quantum indeterminism and the incompleteness theorem of Kurt Gödel. But I reject the post-modernist relativity that holds all viewpoints are "equally valid". That simply isn't true. Different viewpoints have much to offer, but not all are equally acceptable or insightful or true.

From the epilogue of the book, you get a glimpse of Karen Armstrong's resolution of this puzzle about God:

Each tradition formulates the sacred differently, and this will certainly affect the way people experience it. There are important differences between Brahman, Nirvana, God, and Dao, but that does not mean that one is right and the others wrong. On this matter, nobody can have the last word, All faith systems have been at pains to show that the ultimate cannot be adequately expressed in any theoretical system, however august, because it lies beyond words and concepts.

...

There is much to be learned from older ways of thinking about religion. We have seen that far from regarding revelation as static, fixed, and unchanging, Jews, Christians, and Muslims all knew that revealed truth was symbolic, that scripture could not be interpreted literally, and that sacred texts had multiple meaning, and could lead to entirely fresh insights. Revelation was not an event that had happened once in the distant past but was an ongoing, creative process that required human ingenuity.

That is an idealized version of religion. In reality people don't rise to that level of insight and tolerance and understanding for others. It is a wonderful goal and a nice statement of Armstrong's religious aspirations, and maybe it is the way the world is headed, but it isn't clear. I accept her thesis that there is a common human religiosity underneath all the world's religions, but I don't buy that they are all equally valid nor do I even accept that historical religions are still a useful tool for our religious aspirations. I think the critiques of the militant atheists have merit. So the resolution is not yet clear to me.

I do buy into her vision of religion as an on-going enterprise that brings together communities through ritual to strengthen empathy and justice. But that isn't any historical religion I know. And, worse, I'm not sure how to get there from here.

The book is well worth reading. It will acquaint you with our cultural history and the evolution of religious thinking in the West (with a taste of religion from other parts of the world). This is one of those books that I would like to read several times because there is much to absorb. It is also a book that provides many jumping off places to dig into persons and historical events to understand them better.

Update 2010jan10: Here is Chapter 1 of Armstrong's book and a review in the NY Times. From Chapter 1 we get a glimpse of the structure of the book:

We need to understand how our world has changed. The first part of this book will, therefore, go back to the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when the people of Western Europe had begun to develop their new science. We will also examine the mythical piety of the premodern agrarian civilization, so that we can see how the old forms of faith worked. It is becoming very difficult to be conventionally religious in the brave new world. Modernization has always been a painful process. People feel alienated and lost when fundamental changes in their society make the world strange and unrecognizable. We will trace the impact of modernity upon the Christians of Europe and America, upon the Jewish people, and upon the Muslims of Egypt and Iran. We shall then be in a position to see what the fundamentalists were trying to do when they started to create this new form of faith toward the end of the nineteenth century.

Fundamentalists feel that they are battling against forces that threaten their most sacred values. During a war it is very difficult for combatants to appreciate one another's position. We shall find that modernization has led to a polarization of society, but sometimes, to prevent an escalation of the conflict, we must try to understand the pain and perceptions of the other side. Those of us — myself included — who relish the freedoms and achievements of modernity find it hard to comprehend the distress these cause religious fundamentalists. Yet modernization is often experienced not as a liberation but as an aggressive assault. Few have suffered more in the modern world than the Jewish people, so it is fitting to begin with their bruising encounter with the modernizing society of Western Christendom in the late fifteenth century, which led some Jews to anticipate many of the stratagems, postures, and principles that would later become common in the new world.