A New Jerusalem Amongst the Satanic Mills

Karen Armstrong was in town this past weekend at the First United Methodist Church as part of her tour in promotion of her newest book, The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions. I won't go into depth about her life, but in a nutshell, she was a nun from age 18 until 25 when she left the Church. She left religion for about 15 years before returning. In 2000, she described her beliefs thusly:

I usually describe myself, perhaps flippantly, as a freelance monotheist. I draw sustenance from all three of the faiths of Abraham. I can't see any one of them as having the monopoly of truth, any one of them as superior to any of the others. Each has its own particular genius and each its own particular pitfalls and Achilles' heels.

Never having read any of her books, but having read interviews with her, Ms. Armstrong's presentation on Saturday seemed to rehash general ideas that she's espoused before in the context of her new book.

She began her speech by echoing various blurbs I've read about The Great Transformation, namely that the period of roughly 900 B.C.E. to 200 B.C.E. is the period when mankind collectively thought its way to an apogee of religion, spirituality, and general world outlook. She borrows the term "Axial Age" from German philosopher Karl Jespers because the period "proved to be the axis or the pivot of the spiritual history of humanity". The ideas from this age, which come from 4 corners of the globe, continue to inform us today: Confucianism/Taoism in China, Hinduism/Buddhism/Janism in India, monotheism in Israel, and philosophical rationalism from Greece. After listing the names of various people from this period, she claimed, "…we've never gone beyond these great insights." Rabbinic Judaism and Islam are "secondary flowerings" of the Axial Age's spirit. Ms. Armstrong noted that the insights from this period completely changed humanities outlook at the time of their initial propagation. She also mentioned the tremendous impact of the Enlightenment or the Great Western Transformation, as she called it. Her claim was that it was a scientific and technological transformation which has changed how we view the world, but that no great spiritual advances have come about because of this Second Axial Age.

It became clear shortly after this introductory part, that Ms. Armstrong clearly idealizes this period and the insights from the traditions mentioned above. She explained that compassion is perhaps the greatest insight of the Axial Age and spent quite a bit of time noting that we seem to ignore this much of the time. While I don't think that her proselytizing shrouded in a history lesson was wrong or bad, it did come off as a bit pedantic. What I mean is that she seemed to be saying that the Axial Age provided us with a Truth that religion equals compassion and we've lost our way. I got the distinct impression that she felt that many things which pass for religions today are really shell of religion because they don't give primacy to compassion.

Ms. Armstrong continued by noting that today faith is equated with belief in certain creeds and then she tried to distinguish the two. Until the 18th century, she claimed, faith meant trust, not belief, and equating them was a byproduct of the rise of science. And by trust she meant a trust that "against all the dispiriting evidence to the contrary, life had some ultimate meaning and value." This part of her speech confused me a bit because she intimated that, not only were belief and trust separate, but also that one needn't have belief in order to have trust. She illuminated this idea by saying that St. Paul was referring to this kind of trust when he described Abraham as having it when God promised him that he would become the father of a mighty nation even as this same god was asking him to kill his own son. As I sat there listening to her, I was a bit perplexed because, how can you separate the trust from the belief in God? In a semantic sense, I understand the distinction but I still don't grasp how one can place the kind of trust in a deity without having a belief in the deity. How can one trust a deity that one does not believe exists? If you're going to posit the notion that life has ultimate meaning and purpose which is given by a deity, then belief in this deity is strictly necessary and must be prior to the trust.

At this point she rather strangely dismissed theology. It's not the dismissal I find strange but rather how she did so. Before saying that the great sages of the Axial Age had no use for theology, she remarks that the same went for Jesus and Martin Luther, two figures quite apart from the Axial Age. Though she did mention the Qu'ran. This line of thought seemed like another attempt to distance her argument from belief. Her point was that orthodoxy was irrelevant and that the transcendent is beyond theology and beyond thought, i.e. – that transcendent reality was unknowable.

During her speech, she illustrated her points by telling short stories or pointing out attitudes of the past. For instance, when talking about the transcendent, she mentioned that the Greek Orthodox Church used to have a principle that all statements about God had to have two characteristics: 1) that it was paradoxical, "that you couldn't fit God into a neat human system" and 2) that it lead one to silence. By the latter, she explained that contemplating God should be so beautiful that it leaves you speechless. I appreciated these examples as they showed how the principles were put into action and made them clearer. But there were times when, just as I thought I had grasped a concept, she threw me for a loop. For instance, she said that Brahman is present when "you discovered that you were at the end of what words and thoughts could do." Now, I readily admit that I would make a horrible Hindu. If an unknowable transcendent reality begins where human thought ends, then, well, to me that's bullshit. And it's premised on the belief in a transcendent reality. I'll stake out the phenomenological territory, thank you. Perhaps this is just confusion on my part because of my ignorance and too little Socratic defining of terms. But to me, it's one thing to make an epistemological argument about the limits of human knowledge and another to make claims about the nature of what lies beyond it. Let's say you're wandering around a land and you come to a wall. It stretches on to infinity and there's no way of getting around it. You are reasonably certain that there's land on the opposite side of the wall so you call it "transcendent reality". Fine. But where do you get off making claims about it? How do you know it's the ultimate anything? Why can't it just be another vast parcel of land? And perhaps, if you wander it long enough, you'll find another wall. This whole business comes across to me as an instance of having the conclusion first and then inducing the clues second.



I was flummoxed even further when she said that it was an axiom of the Axial Age thinkers to question everything - Buddha and Socrates didn't want us to take anything on faith. Truth and knowledge were to be found within oneself and thusly religion ought not to be an orthodoxy passed on from one generation to another. Instead it must be questioned and modified; it must be tailored to the individual. This is something Ms. Armstrong really pushed. Religion, in its highest form, isn't about towing the line, it's a set of guidelines for self-improvement. "It was about doing things that changed you at a profound level," she said. And these guidelines were for getting rid of one's ego. She then talked about the "spiritual technology" that is yoga. Humorous, she distances the original, the "pure" yoga from what many people practice today a couple hours a week after work. Yoga was not an aerobic exercise but was "a disciplined assault on the ego". It was a way to overcome our egoistic human natures. Her main point here, beyond the concept of removing the ego, was that yoga was a practice; it was something one did and not a series of thoughts. Doing instead of thinking. "Behave as though your self does not exist" and you'll find happiness. A corollary of this is to value others above oneself.

She took the opportunity here to recount her days in a convent when she was instructed to meditate on her sins and her failings. This was the opposite of letting go of ones ego and she remarked that this really hindered her own spiritual development. And this led to one of the cruxes of her thought. She said that the Buddha found that the best way to let go of ones ego was to constantly practice compassion. "Compassion – the ability to feel with the other – is the essence of Axial Age spirituality." The discussion of compassion led to the Golden Rule, which, I found out, was first articulated by Confucius. At least his is the oldest one that survived. Another important point Ms. Armstrong made was that one cannot practice compassion on members of one's own group but rather that it must be extended to everyone and everything. Many anecdotes about this were told and perhaps the one that I found the most interesting concerned ancient Greece. The Greeks' insights on compassion came via their dramas. During the 5th century B.C.E. during the Festival of Dionysus, all citizens, at least all men, had to watch a trilogy of plays. Yes, attendance was mandatory. The dramas illustrated human pain and agony and also forced the audience to contemplate them. The chorus asked the audience to have compassion for the tragic figures. The lesson that Ms. Armstrong wanted us to understand was that compassion was equivalent to seeing the divine in others. From this it follows to renounce violence.

Ms. Armstrong noted how the Indians were the first to remove violence from their liturgies and the rise of the notion that spiritual enlightenment could only be found through non-violent means – compassion and contemplation. Before her time expired, she noted how the book of Genesis presented a peaceful creation story. Instead of the world arising from a battle amongst gods, Yahweh created the universe peacefully and pronounced it good. She did admit, however, that there are passages in the Bible which mention Yahweh battling a monster in a primordial sea but it is Genesis that is the accepted Christian creation myth.

Ms. Armstrong spent her final minutes discussing "what went wrong" and why religious people are often not compassionate. As she stated it, "What's the fun of being religious if you can't disapprove of other people from time to time?" One of her best descriptions was that people worship one day a week for a brief respite from everyday life but remain "unscathed by the demands of the tradition". The thinkers of the Axial Age, she said, wanted religion to be a more consuming task and one that really changed a person for the better. They tried to construct religion so that it would help people to transcend the drudgery and the nastiness of life and to bring about peace. Ms. Armstrong argued that we shouldn't endeavor to change religion to conform to our scientific views, but rather we should try to fulfill the promise of religion to bring about peace.

It was certainly a positive and uplifting message. And there were many nods of agreement from the First United Methodist congregation as it is a liberal one, accepting as they seem to me of everyone regardless of color, race, sexual orientation, etc. But I was left wondering, if compassion is the proximate goal and it underlies the world's major religions, do we really need religion? I mean, if you remove all the violence of the Old Testament and the completely ridiculous notions about Jesus Christ, tridentine transubstantiation, and his resurrection, then you don't really have Christianity, do you? If you leave out all the preposterous irrational beliefs, you don't have much of a religion. Positing that people should be compassionate and observe the Golden Rule isn't a religious mandate, it's a moral proposition. I think that Ms. Armstrong's failing here (and this weakness may be explained more fully in her books) is that she argues for a certain moral view and links it to religion without ever really justifying this. The moral proposition becomes tainted by religion when the ultimate goal becomes a glimpse of a transcendental reality. But one doesn't need to believe in a mysterious, ineffable transcendental reality to justify being nice to another person. I interpreted her as saying that we should be compassionate to rid ourselves of our pesky egos and getting rid of ego moves one towards The Great Mystery. And why is this Great Mystery the ultimate goal? She never really said why. I guess it was something we had to take on faith, i.e. – the trusting variety. If, as she admits, many religious people don't practice compassion, then we should really think about whether or not religion is a prerequisite for being compassionate.

Ms. Armstrong mentioned more than once that the Axial Age was a very violent time and that the ideological and spiritual movement towards peace and compassion was a reaction to this. I thought these comments bespoke to a contingent nature of religion but she seemed to think that the Axial Age thinkers hit up a Truth – with a capital T. You know, something that isn't a contingency. While I enjoyed the parts of her speech which were historical expositions immensely, I found her overall argument to be wishy-washy. She eagerly reduced religion to compassion and loftily pronounced everything else we associate with religion to be unnecessary or to not be “true” religion. No matter how she wanted to disassociate belief from this whole morass, she couldn’t. If you accept that compassion is the path to transcendental reality, then you must believe in the TR and she often equated TR to Yahweh, Brahman, and the rest.

Another bit of her argument that I can’t agree with is her notion that all the great religions preach the same thing – compassion. She thinks that they’re basically interchangeable because what she views as their core messages are the same. That just doesn’t wash with me. She said that the Axial Age was a violent time and, as a reaction, the sages of the period all turned to compassion. Then she turns around and says things such as that Islam is a restatement of the Axial Age’s mantra to practice compassion. OK, so you’re telling me that a brigand turned warlord was actually telling his followers to adhere to the Golden Rule when he urged them to kill all the infidels? My perception is that Ms. Armstrong likes to selectively declare certain elements of religion to be “baggage”, if you will. She likes to redefine things to suit her needs. This allows her maintain the notion of religion which she seems intent on doing at all costs. My interpretation of this is that she is intellectually unable to ground morality in anything other than religion.

While I have a copy of her speech, I do not have a recording of the Q&A session that followed. I do recall her admission that she’s a pessimist and, if memory serves, some of the other questions allowed to her denounce the venture in Iraq. I don’t mean the latter to say that she got all political, but rather that it was a prominent example of not practicing compassion and the Golden Rule. A gentleman asked about the role of atheism in her scheme and she did this avoid the question/setup a straw man dance. First she remarked that the word “atheism” didn’t originally mean the denial of the supernatural. Instead, it was a for someone to describe another person who believed in different gods. E.g. - Christians are atheists with respect to Zeus or Odin. It’s not that Christians deny the existence of a deity, they just believe in a different deity. She then proceeded to disparage what she called “lazy atheists”. From my recollection, the only definition she gave for this term was something along the lines of people who want to “get rid of religion.” Again her perfervid desire to maintain the concept of religion comes to the fore. She labels 99% of the elements of what we consider to be religion today to be superfluous, if not counterproductive, but she has to keep that 1%. And she idealizes it and says that it's "true" religion. But this suits her, what I consider to be essentially dishonest, endeavor. She labors to remove belief via semantics when belief is the foundation. And then takes secular ideas & activities of the Greeks and labels them religious. She initially set the Greek philosophical rationalism apart from the other traditions and then later calls their activities religious. That both Socrates and the Buddha urged people to question everything doesn't mean the Socrates was promoting religion. That both traditions have elements in common with one another doesn't make them two peas in a pod. Ms. Armstrong has chosen her carrot – experiencing the divine/transcendental reality – and cannot conceive of morality outside of religion and its bait. For her, practical compassion can only be achieved via religion. Religions can be good or bad depending on how well they compel followers to act upon the Golden Rule but atheism for her is a dead end because she cannot conceive of it as offering a carrot. To me, this is a very limited and incorrect view of morality.

Despite all this, I'd like to read her books as the speech I heard could only touch on her ideas and not explore them fully.



Next year's lecture will be on 28 April and will be given by The Rev. Dr. James Alexander Forbes, Jr., Senior Minister of The Riverside Church. For more on him, read this interview from NOW with Bill Moyers.