Theology should be poetry
I was doing some research for an article earlier and found an interview of Karen Armstrong from a few years ago.
“I’m off to America tomorrow. I have a little book on the Buddha coming out in paperback, so I’m going to a literary festival to talk about it. Which is a nice rest from Islamic fundamentalism.” Was she regarded as an expert on Islam in the States? “Well, it has turned out a bit like that. I was supposed to be flying to America to take up a post at Harvard on September 12 in 2001 and was actually packing when the terrible news came through. So, when I got to Harvard I never even had a chance to set foot in the library. I was continually on the radio and writing articles. Vanity Fair and GQ and Time wanted huge articles on fundamentalism. I had to give two talks to the American Congress, to Senate and to the UN. Suddenly people wanted to know what Islam was.”
And the only person who could tell them was Karen Armstrong? Because Karen Armstrong is the only English-speaker in the world who knows anything about Islam, and there is no English-speaker in the world who knows more about Islam than Karen Armstrong? No, and no. Why was everyone demanding her then? Who knows – number of sales, name recognition, the thing where if you talk on the radio once then you become the person who talks on the radio every time after that – something along those lines. Whatever it is, it’s irritating. It’s especially irritating that even the US Congress and the UN couldn’t do better.
But that’s just a warm-up – the really irritating part comes later.
I don’t, though, think of myself as an ambassador for Islam. What I really want to do is make a plea to my own culture. And that began a long time ago during the Rushdie affair when I noticed that some of the liberal defenders of Rushdie segued very easily from a denunciation of the Ayatollah to an out-and-out denunciation of Islam. I began to think that we had learned nothing from the 20th century because it was that sort of cultivated inaccuracy that led to the death camps.
Notice the way she simply assumes (and assumes that Laurie Taylor will also assume) that ‘denunciation’ (which being interpreted means criticism) of Islam is bad and wrong and illegitimate. Then notice that she compares rabid loathing of Jews to criticism/’denunciation’ of Islam – as if they were exactly the same kind of thing and led in exactly the same direction. On the one hand a group of people, on the other hand a religion with its attendant ideas and rules and taboos.
But the tendency to read the Bible or the Koran as though they were literal texts, holy encyclopaedias where you look up information about God is an unfortunate offshoot of modernity…Religion is an art form. And it has always turned to art when it wants to express its truths, to architecture and music and poetry and dance. Theology should be poetry…[I]t should also fill you with the same sense of wonder and the same intimations of transcendence as when you read a great poem. Like poetry, religion is an attempt to express the inexpressible.
Yes, in Armstrong-land, but in the real world, that’s not what most believers mean by religion, to put it mildly.
Laurie Taylor suggests that that is a brand of self-serving nonsense that clerics and apologists fall back on when talking to skeptics. Armstrong is unmoved.
But religion was not about beliefs until the 18th century. That was the time when faith started to be equated with believing things instead of putting your trust in something. Until then religion had always been about doing things rather than believing things.
Really – then what was the Inquisition all about? What were the wars of religion about? What was Luther so agitated about? What were the post-Luther popes so worked up about? Why was there an Albigensian crusade? Why was there an Index?
Laurie Taylor asks related questions, but he claims to find Armstrong persuasive anyway. Well not me.
It really does seem as if Armstrong believes that by repeating this tosh often enough it will – perhaps by ritual conferral of transcendent intimations – become true. I’m currently wrapping up a history thesis centred on the intersection between Catholic and Protestant belief in the miraculous during the Jesuit Missions to England in the late-16th century. It’s all about belief. What can she possibly mean by “religion was not about beliefs until the 18th century? That until then religious ritual and art stood in isolation from religious belief? Even an undergraduate history student with only a passing familiarity with Western religious history would know that such a statement is demonstrably false. But what else could she mean?
This is from the Derveni Papyrus, written in Greece around 340 BCE (it’s fragmentary, but clear enough):
I would say that, 2,340 years ago, it seems like Greek theologians were clearly concerned with belief. Karen Armstrong is full of shit.
D’oh! The link above should be this:
http://persephones.250free.com/derveni-trans.html
I copied the wrong URL. My bad.
There is some good discussion of Armstrong’s claims about religion and beliefs here:
http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2009/07/id-have-baked-one.html
I recently read AC Grayling’s Towards the Light: The Story of The Struggle for Liberty and Rights that Made the Modern West*, and his historical summaries of the Inquisition and the Protestant Reformation (and reactions to it) — overviews that I think would be accepted by most historians — have beliefs bang at the centre. Indeed, it never fails to amaze me how crazily people can act over such tiny doctrinal differences (the absurdity of these doctrines per se is also an enduring source of puzzlement). So I agree that Armstrong is way off base in suggesting that, historically, religious devotion has not been a matter of belief (even if it has also been more than that), and agree that her claim in this regard should be challenged (even if just as a matter of historical scholarship).
However, we could also be extremely charitable and say, “OK, let’s not worry about whether, as a matter of historical fact, religion has been construed in terms of belief; let’s think of this as a prescription about how we should think about religion today”. In which case, Armstrong’s recommendation eviscerates religious traditions of all substantive ways of thinking our place in the world, and how we should act in it. It almost does the atheists’ job for them. The puzzle is then a psychological one: why would someone show no concern for the beliefs and doctrines of religion, yet still see such value in the traditions anyway? I don’t get it.
*Grayling’s Towards the Light also suggests that the thesis advanced by Robert Wright in The Evolution of God — that there is a tendency for religions to become more tolerant, more inclusive, less divisive, and generally more moral — could do with a bit of modification, to say the least. If Grayling’s history is on the money (and it seems to be when triangulated with other historical accounts), then religions have got better in spite of themselves, not because of some intrinsic drive towards moral improvement. Most increases in toleration have had to battle against traditional religions, which over time have had to adapt to a more secular world that doesn’t bow down to authority (be it of kings or the divine). So it seems perverse to accord these gains in morality to something intrinsic in religion, rather than something intrinsic to the decency of human beings and the power of rational thought (both factors having had to struggle against cultural constraints of the past few thousand years, but gaining much ground in the past few centuries).
Isn’t she contradicting herself here? What truths does religion express? The ones from their books that we shouldn’t take literally?
The scientific method and rational enquiry got off to a bit of a shaky start in Ionian Greece, but have gained on religion at an accelerating pace, particularly in the last 400 years. Until the Enlightenment, religion had a monopoly position for providing answers to the big questions of life, like how does the Universe come to be?; how does the world fit into it?; why are we humans here?
I submit that the most cogent answers to these questions are now provided outside of the framework of any religious doctrine, and God’s role is a retreating one: into an ever-diminishing number of ‘gaps’.
Armstrong is just one of many people who call for rational enquiry to stop short of critique of religious doctrine, on the grounds that it’s how death camps get going. A totally fatuous form of give-and-take, as in ‘you give and we take’.
Sociology can probably tell us more about why (say) total immersion vs partial immersion could become an issue sufficient to induce the Baptists to part company with the rest of Protestantism; more than all the tracts, denunciations and learned theological arguments provided by the participants in that particular schism.
Islam is in the modern world, and can’t get out: of the spotlight or from under the microscope.
Karen Armstrong makes a very simple and fundamental error. She says – and this actually has the virtue of being true – that fundamentalism is a product of modernity. But she deduces from this that earlier religion was not fundamentalist, that is, that it did not emphasise belief, but action and compassion.
This is a piece of comfortable nonsense. Modern fundamentalism is indeed a modern product, because modernity emphasises evidence and factuality. So religious beliefs play the same role in modern fundamentalist religion as empirical data in science.
However, this does not mean that earlier religion did not emphasise belief, and this is precisely why Armstrong is so unreliable. Belief was fundamental in earlier religion, but it did not play the theory-confirmation role that it plays in modern fundamentalism. It was merely authoritative speech, and in this sense it functioned much more in the way that, say, mathematical axioms function in mathematics.
Traditional Christianity does not read the Bible as literal text, but as authoritative text. The idea of literal text presupposes an independent, confirming reality, in the same way that scientific theories presuppose experiment and observation. In earlier tradition the Bible was not read in that way. It was simply authoritative text. It required no confirmation.
This is very evident, for instance, in some of the early Christian “fathers”. Irenaeus, for instance, points out how central the cross is in ordinary life, cross trees in sailing vessels, in house construction, etc. etc., thus confirming the reveletory content of the passion story. It’s not that the story is not about beliefs, but those beliefs have an entirely different relationship to everyday reality than is imagined by contemporary fundamentalists. Armstrong’s is a radical and complete misunderstanding of the religious function of sacred text in earlier religious tradition.
Whether this is simply a misunderstanding, or a deliberate piece of obfuscation is hard to say. Religions have difficulty respecting boundaries, so it may be the latter. But since she has made this misuunderstanding her stock in trade, it is difficult to believe that someone who spent years in a convent cannot be aware of this function of sacred, canonical text.
“Like poetry, religion is an attempt to express the inexpressible.”
God how tiresome. Poetry is the attempt (if we must phrase it in these terms) to express what is expressable in poetry and not by other means. Well, good poetry is. If it weren’t, all poetry would be a failure but we all know of counter examples to that proposition.
“Armstrong’s is a radical and complete misunderstanding of the religious function of sacred text in earlier religious tradition.”
Is it a misunderstanding, Eric, or, as I have seen claimed elsewhere, an overgeneralisation from a minor tradition? I would love to see an extended version of your comment here in one of the prints as a riposte to Armstrong whose ‘apaphatic’ line is gaining traction, I think.
“Like poetry, religion is an attempt to express the inexpressible.”
I’d describe it as an attempt to inexpress the expressible, since I don’t believe in the inexpressible.
Maybe we are currently incapable of expressing something, or maybe simply by chance it has yet to be expressed, but words are arbitrary. “Inexpressible” is a contradiction.
Well, yes, of course, John, the apophatic tradition is gaining traction. In a world in which evidence is vital to confirmation, religion only has the apophatic tradition to appeal to.
However, it is important to see that the apophatic tradition, though developed theologically/philosophically, began its life as kenoticism, in the idea, which is a part of the sacred tradition/script, that God hides himself. This comes first, perhaps, in Second Isaiah, the Isaiah of the exile. And it is, in fact, the imagery of this Isaiah that underlies the idea of the hiddenness of God in Jesus. In Jesus God empties himself and becomes one of us. God is hidden in the form of human flesh, etc. etc.
But you can only talk like this if there are beliefs in a God who is sovereign over all, a greatness the hiding of which could in itself be significant. The apophatic tradition only gets its purchase from belief. Without belief there is nothing to be hidden, nothing the knowing of which is in some sense impossible. But because impossible, then only possible through revelation, through the appearance (in the knowable) of that which is unknowable.
It’s all a bit much of a muchness. But it is simply prevarication for Armstrong to talk about apophaticism as though we could begin with unknowing, and be content with it. The whole point of the self-emptying of God in Christ is that we can know that God has self-emptied himself, and that that self-emptying is a paradigm of how God wants us, in turn, to be.
The cloud of unknowing only works if there is something that can be known, namely, that in the cloud there is something definitive and authoritative. My own supposition is that this is being used as a deliberate piece of obfuscation, to deny what is evident, that religion depends upon belief, and cannot exist without it. Sorry to repeat myself, but this is vital. Kenosis only works if there is something that empties itself. The self-emptying of emptiness simply wouldn’t work. Self-emptying has both an ontic and a moral significance, otherwise it is itself empty. Armstrong is playing with words.
Thankyou for that Eric. I have always felt some vague interest in the apophaticish attitudeto religion that comes across in the Wittgenstein of Philosophical Meditations but thought there was some sleight of hand at work in Armstrong’s latest (although I will read it when the paperback comes around). Yours is the first refutation I have read that seems to have some real theological and religious historical artillery behind it.
Well Eric – there is your mission if you want to undertake it. An article on The Errors of Armstrong.
Go on Eric! What you’ve written so far is fascinating, we’d love to read more…
That means I’d have to read her again. I threw out her books long ago – the ones I had. And to buy them?! And what about my book on assistance in dying?
Now, Eric – you’re simply not trying. You could address only the new book, and get that from the library (or the publisher). And you could write it alongside your book on assisted dying -by way of refreshment perhaps.
See? Simple!
But seriously. Just an article informing the uninformed in the way you do in the two comments above? You could recycle the material in those comments…Well, give it a thought, if you feel so inclined.
Interesting possibility. I’ll have to think about it.
It’s worthwhile mentioning, however, that, based on the linked interview, it seems pretty clear that Karen Armstrong never really left the convent. The mind has mountains, frightful, sheer, no man fathomed, as Hopkins said.
It also has walls. Take her claim that “The golden rule is that you treat everyone with absolute respect and you don’t exclude any creature, even a mosquito, from your radius of concern.” You have to have put up a wall somewhere to be able to say this. These are just empty words, and they reveal something about her use of language. Laurie Taylor says that he noticed “how carefully Karen constructs her sentences, her care with words, her capacity to alight on a perfect phrase with all the effortless delicacy of a sparrow on a washing line.” Well, but that’s not what she does. She sermonises. She uses empty words that “sound good”, that seem to be moved by something deep, but really they skate over the surface of things. I don’t know about you, but I swat mosquitoes! So much for radius of concern.
She sermonises. Every clergyperson has a stock of words and catch phrases that they can use ad libitum whenever the need arises. Listen to a long Baptist prayer, and you’ll hear all the stock phrases making an appearance, and everytime that minister or pastor is asked to say a prayer, the stock phrases are repeated over and over again, through dozens of prayers.
Or take the idea of the Hindus who bow to each other, and thereby acknowledge the divine in each person. It’s like everything that is done by religious people. Whether it has significance or not, it will be given it. Take the use of the word ‘thou’, used traditionally in direct address to God. During the time when liturgies were being modernised, ‘thou’ gave way to ‘you’. People objected, because ‘thou’ speaks of respectful distance. But of course that’s exactly the opposite of what was intended, because ‘thou’ in English is like ‘Du’ in German, used only with your closest friends, and in prayer. It communicated informality and intimacy. But that was only a rationalisation too.
Or take the claim that religious rituals are meant “to remind you that the world is not yours to do with as you choose.” No. The rituals developed because they were believed to be commanded by God. They were acts of obedience. However, environment is in, so it’s in in religion as well. The rituals only make sense in terms of some absolute command. Why would anyone do silly, ritual things otherwise? To remind you that you can’t do whatever you want with the world?
Nonsense. Listen to what she says: “Writing and study are my prayers.” It’s a way of “going beyond” and bringing “about a state of ecstasy.” She’s now like the Jews, because this is what they do when they study. No, it isn’t, because Jews do it because they are studying the words and thoughts of God, and this brings on ecstasy. The recitation of the Koran, says Hitchens, seems able to bring on exalted spiritual states. Yes, not because of the Arabic, though, however beautiful and mellifluous, but because it is thought to speak the words of a god.
“Karen Armstrong is a persuasive talker and writer.” Yes, she means to be. She’s a preacher. She’s picked up the smooth effortlessness of the born preacher, the cadence, the repeated catch phrases, the platitudes. She picked it up in the church. And yes. Of course she’s persuasive. But it doesn’t take us beyond, because it is focused on itself. Going beyond is the illusion of all effective preaching, an illusion of all effective religious language. That’s why changing it is so challenging to the religious. It bursts the bubble of illusion. Karen Armstrong knows the secret.
You can even lie through your teeth and seem to be making sense. Consider her claim that “doctrines are a peculiar disease of western Christianity.” First, this makes a nonsense of her claim that religious beliefs are the effect of modernity. But, second, trinitarianism, christology, and the relationship of the persons of the Trinity were thrashed out in the east, with people like Gregory of Nazianzus, Athanasius, Arius, etc.., in an argument that was scarcely understood in the west. How christology was understood did derive in large part from the way that Christ was adored in popular devotion and liturgy. But the heart of the argument was ontological, and how the being of God and the being of Christ and the being of the Spirit were understood. It is ridiculous to suppose otherwise, and to say that doctrine was a particular concern of the west is nonsense (as Bentham might say) on stilts!
Sorry to go on so.
Go on so? I’m sure no one would say that were! I for one almost always find your comments edifying – along with several other wonderful commenters you are one of the main reasons I check in on the Comments and not just the Notes.
As Eric pointed out earlier, what is the Nicene Creed – if not belief? Her strategy seems to be if one criticizes x definition of religion, then counteract with y. One must always keep religion a moving target.
Plus we get this gem:
“But if atheism is simply a flippant demand to get rid of all religion then that is silly because the religious enterprise is a serious one and must be taken seriously.”
Why must it be taken seriously? Because it is serious. Why is it serious? Who knows.
Have to admit I am getting an education in this trhead. Which leads to the question: Why does Karen Anderson have any scholarly credentials at all given the scholarship and history she is misunderstanding?
“The puzzle is then a psychological one: why would someone show no concern for the beliefs and doctrines of religion, yet still see such value in the traditions anyway?”
Because Armstrong is portraying them as parables, mere allegory with moral content, much like Aesop’s Fables. My concern with Armstrong’s project is twofold: one, no-one has ever claimed the Tortoise and the Hare were real; and two, no-one has ever claimed Aesop’s Fables were written by god in an attempt to inure them from criticism. Even without Eric’s breadth of knowledge on the history of religious beliefs, I can see that Armstrong’s claims regarding the interpretation of religious stories are pure poppycock.
Whoops: “Written by god” should say “the word of god”.
Eloquent and incisive, Eric! Do I remember correctly that you used to be a clergyman of some sort? If not, my apologies. If so, I’d appreciate you reminding all of us of your background.
Eloquent and incisive, Eric! Do I remember correctly that you used to be a clergyman of some sort? If not, my apologies. If so, I’d appreciate you reminding all of us of your background.
Eric *thank you* for your informative comments and do please consider OB’s proposal.
Go on… ;-)
Another for the main page.
Excellent stuff, Eric. Pins down what is so irritating about Armstrong.
Seconded!
Hugh Fitzgerald: ‘New English Review’ of some years ago – is also a good read.
Karen Armstrong: “The Coherence of Her Incoherence”
“History is for Karen Armstrong not so much putty as Playdoh. She can roll it about, she can pull it apart, she can twist and turn it with the same delight exhibited by a two-year-old when a-too-solid block of Playdoh is finally softened up for use by grown-up hands. But the two-year-old is an innocent at play, and even if he leaves a momentary mess, he has done no real harm. Karen Armstrong is not innocent, and manages to do a great deal of harm, careless or premeditated harm, to history.
I’ve always wondered if the HF who frequently posts comments on the Letters page is Hugh Fitzgerald. I suspect it is so.
Yeah, OB, that would be a coincidence, rather, if it were the case. ‘Islam in Africa’ is his latest offering. I see that your friend, Ibn Warraq has also got an article over there.
Once a nun – always a nun! Eric. :-)!
Well not a coincidence really – I wonder only because their interests seem to overlap. It wouldn’t be hugely surprising if Hugh Fitzgerald found parts of B&W interesting.