KAREN ARMSTRONG
In the modern period she points to strands of thought and important individuals who have retained a balance between logos and mythos, between knowing and unknowing. They show the way forward. For instance, she quotes that giant of 20th-century science, Albert Einstein: “The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the sower of all true art and science … To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself to us as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our full faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms — this knowledge, this feeling is at the centre of all true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the ranks of devoutly religious men.”
The Case for God: What Religion Really Means
THERE is a vast website, RichardDawkins.net, set up by American fans and fellow travellers of the famous British atheist.
A tongue-in-cheek part of the site is devoted to “fleas”, a term referring to the spate of books that has emerged in opposition to Dawkins’s bestseller The God Delusion. The playful and slightly mocking description of his opponents as these tiny parasitic insects comes from Dawkins.
While these books refuting Dawkins vary in the quality of their writing and arguments, this latest addition to their number, The Case for God, is from a heavy hitter and deserves to be taken seriously. It shouldn’t be dismissed or disparaged as the annoyance of a mere flea.
Karen Armstrong is one of the most popular and highly esteemed contemporary commentators on religion. The former Catholic nun, also from Britain, has written a succession of prescient books that have skilfully diagnosed and analysed the religious issues of our era: A History of God; Islam: A Short History; Buddha; The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam; Muhammad: A Prophet for our Time; and The Bible: A Biography. She is much in demand as a speaker across the world, even being asked to address the US congress in the aftermath of the September11 attacks, to bring American politicians up to speed on Islamic extremism. Her books deftly straddle a range of academic disciplines: theology, philosophy, history, sociology, literary criticism and analysis of the sacred scriptures from all the main traditions.
Though this book — with its cover design mimicking that of The God Delusion — is set up to be a direct refutation of Dawkins, Armstrong’s aim is much deeper and broader. She sees Dawkins as a symbol or a symptom of what she describes as our present facile, infantile, undeveloped and inept view of God and religion.
She argues that throughout history, atheism hasn’t been “a blanket denial of the sacred perse” but a rejection of particular notions of the divine. For instance, early Christians were called atheists because they rejected traditional Jewish beliefs and practices.
So atheism is “parasitically dependent on the form of theism it seeks to eliminate and becomes its reverse mirror image”.
What the “new atheists” such as Dawkins are reacting against is contemporary fundamentalist religion. Armstrong points out that in the process they are thinking and behaving like fundamentalists themselves. She diagnoses the resulting polarisation at best as counterproductive, going against the best in mainstream science and religion, and at worst as dangerous.
In a nutshell that’s her summary of the problem, but her analysis doesn’t end there. At length, and in fascinating detail, she outlines other more productive and “normal” modes of being religious that have been eclipsed in our modern era by a narrow and superficial vision of religion. And she explains how science and religion can provide complementary rather than opposing ways of looking at the world.
The book is divided into two parts: The Unknown God (from 30,000BCE to 1500CE) and The Modern God (1500CE to the present).
The Unknown God is perhaps a misleading title because in using the word unknown she doesn’t mean that during all those millennia of human history God was not known at all. On the contrary; she argues that during that period humans were generally more literate and sophisticated than today in their experience of God and religion, and they achieved this because they were comfortable with what she calls unknowing. She shows how people then had a good appreciation of the two basic ways of thinking and acquiring knowledge, mythos and logos.
“Logos (reason) was the pragmatic mode of thought that enabled people to function effectively in the world,” she explains. “But it had its limitations: it could not assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life’s struggles. For that people turned to mythos or myth.”
In religion people brought mythos and logos together, and by carefully and repeatedly practising religious ethics, compassion and rituals, they pushed themselves beyond the confines of self and rational understanding.
They gained an intuitive insight into transcendence beyond words and rational concepts. This is what Armstrong means by unknowing, and it is still a necessary part of creative achievement in the arts, in poetry, music, painting and, she argues, even in the big breakthroughs in mathematics and science. But about 500 years ago, at the beginning of the modern period, “Western people began to develop an entirely new kind of civilisation governed by scientific rationality … 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 has become the predominant ethos, a narrow and intolerant literalism that has infected science and religion, and broader culture.
So, Armstrong says, “We have lost the knack for religion”, but it is not a total loss.
In the modern period she points to strands of thought and important individuals who have retained a balance between logos and mythos, between knowing and unknowing. They show the way forward. For instance, she quotes that giant of 20th-century science, Albert Einstein: “The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the sower of all true art and science … To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself to us as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our full faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms — this knowledge, this feeling is at the centre of all true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the ranks of devoutly religious men.”
In this book Armstrong quietly, confidently, calmly chides the strident and rancorous voices of atheism and fundamentalism. She offers an optimistic alternative vision, but it is not something radically new. It’s there at the heart of our diverse cultures, history and religious traditions if we care to look.
By Karen Armstrong
The Bodley Head, 376pp, $32.95
Peter Kirkwood worked for 23 years in the religion and ethics unit of ABC television. He has a masters degree from the Sydney College of Divinity and is author of two nonfiction books on Islam and inter-religious dialogue.
