June 26, 2009
‘Because "God" is infinite, nobody can have the last word’
We have much to unlearn about religion before we can go on to a new understanding
Karen Armstrong
One of the peculiar characteristics of the human mind is its ability to have ideas and experiences that exceed our conceptual grasp. We constantly push our thoughts to an extreme, so that our minds seem to elide naturally into an apprehension of transcendence.
Music has always been inseparable from religious expression, because, like religion at its best, music marks the “limits of reason”. Because a territory is defined by its extremities, it follows that music must be “definitively” rational. It is the most corporeal of the arts: it is produced by breath, voice, horsehair, shells, guts and skins and reaches what the British critic George Steiner calls “resonances in our bodies at levels deeper than will or consciousness”. But it is also highly cerebral, requiring the balance of intricately complex energies and form relations, and is intimately connected with mathematics. Yet this intensely rational activity segues into transcendence. Music goes beyond the reach of words: it is not about anything. A late Beethoven quartet does not represent sorrow but elicits it in hearer and player alike; and yet it is emphatically not a sad experience. Like tragedy, it brings intense pleasure and insight.
We seem to experience sadness directly in a way that transcends ego, because this is not my sadness but sorrow itself. In music, therefore, subjective and objective become one.
Language has limits that we cannot cross. When we listen critically to our stuttering attempts to express ourselves, we become aware of an inexpressible otherness. “It is decisively the fact that language does have frontiers”, Steiner explains, “that gives proof of a transcendent presence in the fabric of the world. It is just because we can go no further, because speech so marvellously fails us, that we experience the certitude of a divine meaning surpassing and enfolding ours.”
Every day, music confronts us with a mode of knowledge that defies logical analysis and empirical proof. It is, as Steiner says, “brimful of meanings which will not translate into logical structures or verbal expression”.
Hence all art constantly aspires to the condition of music; so too, at its best, does theology. A modern sceptic will find it impossible to accept Steiner’s conclusion that “what lies beyond Man’s word is eloquent of God”. But perhaps that is because we have too limited an idea of God. We have not been doing our practice and have lost the “knack” of religion. During the 16th and 17th centuries Western people began to develop a new kind of civilisation, governed by scientific rationality and based economically on technology and capital investment. Logos achieved such spectacular results that myth was discredited and the scientific method was thought to be the only reliable means of attaining truth. This would make religion difficult, if not impossible.
As theologians began to adopt the criteria of science, the mythoi of Christianity were interpreted as empirically, rationally and historically verifiable and forced into a style of thinking that was alien to them. Philosophers and scientists could no longer see the point of ritual, and religious knowledge became theoretical rather than practical. We lost the art of interpreting the old tales of gods walking the Earth, dead men striding out of tombs, or seas parting miraculously. We began to understand concepts such as faith, revelation, myth, mystery and dogma in a way that would have been very surprising to our ancestors.
In particular, the meaning of the word “belief” changed, so that a credulous acceptance of creedal doctrines became the prerequisite of faith, so much so that today we often speak of religious people as believers as though accepting orthodox dogma on faith were their most important activity.
This rationalised interpretation of religion has resulted in two distinctively modern phenomena: fundamentalism and atheism. The two are related. The defensive piety popularly known as fundamentalism erupted in almost every major faith during the 20th century. In their desire to produce a wholly rational, scientific faith that abolished mythos in favour of logos,Christian fundamentalists have interpreted Scripture with a literalism that is unparalleled in the history of religion. In the US, Protestant fundamentalists have evolved an ideology known as creation science, which regards the mythoi of the Bible as scientifically accurate. They have, therefore, campaigned against the teaching of evolution in the public schools, because it contradicts the creation story in the first chapter of Genesis.
Historically atheism has rarely been a blanket denial of the sacred per se but has nearly always rejected a particular conception of the divine. At an early stage of their history, Christians and Muslims were both called atheists by their pagan contemporaries, not because they denied the reality of God but because their conception of divinity was so different that it seemed blasphemous.
Atheism is therefore parasitically dependent on the form of theism it seeks to eliminate and becomes its reverse mirror image. Classical Western atheism was developed during the 19th and early 20th centuries by Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, whose ideology was essentially a response to and dictated by the theological perception of God that had developed in Europe and the US during the modern period.
The more recent atheism of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris is rather different, because it has focused on the God developed by the fundamentalisms, and all three insist that fundamentalism constitutes the essence and core of all religion.
This has weakened their critique, because fundamentalism is in fact a defiantly unorthodox form of faith that frequently misrepresents the tradition that it is trying to defend. But the new atheists command a wide readership, not only in secular Europe but even in the more conventionally religious US. The popularity of their books suggests that many people are bewildered and even angered by the God concept they have inherited.
It is a pity that Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris express themselves so intemperately, because some of their criticisms are valid. Religious people have indeed committed atrocities and crimes, and the fundamentalist theology, the new atheists attack is indeed “unskilful”, as the Buddhists would say. But they refuse, on principle, to have dialogue with theologians who are more representative of mainstream tradition. As a result, their analysis is disappointingly shallow, because it is based on such poor theology.
In fact, the new atheists are not radical enough. Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians have insisted for centuries that God does not exist and that there is “nothing” out there; in making these assertions their aim was not to deny the reality of God but to safeguard God’s transcendence. But in our talkative and highly opinionated society, we seem to have lost sight of this important tradition, which could solve many of our current religious problems.
I have no intention of attacking anybody’s sincerely held beliefs. Many thousands of people find that the symbolism of the modern God works well for them: backed up by inspiring rituals and the discipline of living in a vibrant community, it has given them a sense of transcendent meaning. All the world faiths insist that true spirituality must be expressed consistently in practical compassion, the ability to feel with the other. If a conventional idea of God inspires empathy and respect for all others, it is doing its job. But the modern God is only one of the many theologies that developed during the 3,000-year history of monotheism.
Because “God” is infinite, nobody can have the last word. I am concerned that many people are confused about the nature of religious truth, a perplexity exacerbated by the contentious nature of so much religious discussion at the moment. My aim in this book is simply to bring something new to the table. I can sympathise with the irritation of the new atheists, because, as I have explained in my memoir The Spiral Staircase, for many years I myself wanted nothing whatsoever to do with religion, and some of my first books definitely tended to the Dawkinsesque. But my study of world religion during the past 20 years has compelled me to revise my earlier opinions. Not only has it opened my mind to aspects of religion as practised in other traditions that qualified the parochial and dogmatic faith of my childhood, but a careful assessment of the evidence has made me see Christianity differently.
One of the things I have learnt is that quarrelling about religion is counterproductive and not conducive to enlightenment. It not only makes authentic religious experience impossible but it also violates the Socratic rationalist tradition. In the first part of this book I try to show how people thought about God in the pre-modern world in a way that, I hope, throws light on some of the issues that people now find problematic — scripture, inspiration, creation, miracles, revelation, faith, belief and mystery — as well as showing how religion goes wrong.
Religion is complex; in every age, there are numerous strands of piety. No single tendency ever prevails in its entirety. People practise their faith in myriad contrasting and contradictory ways. But a deliberate and principled reticence about God and/or the sacred was a constant theme not only in Christianity but in the other major faith traditions until the rise of modernity in the West. People believed that God exceeded our thoughts and concepts and could only be known by dedicated practice. We have lost sight of this important insight and, I believe, this is one of the reasons why so many Western people find the concept of God so difficult today.
One of the conditions of enlightenment has always been a willingness to let go of what we thought we knew in order to appreciate truths we had never dreamt of. We may have to unlearn a great deal about religion before we can move on to new understanding. It is not easy to talk about what we call “God”, and the religious quest often begins with the deliberate dissolution of ordinary thought patterns. This may be what some of our earliest ancestors were trying to create in their extraordinary underground temples.
© Karen Armstrong 2009. Extracted from The Case for God — What Religion Really Means by Karen Armstrong (The Bodley Head, £20); £18 including UK p&p from Times BooksFirst, 0845 2712134; 0870 1608080 / www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
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