Another Kind of Heaven. I

The fortnight past has been most meaningful. I experienced heaven. Not only did I experienced en vivo the meaning of perfection on the stage between two musicians in constant dialogue with each other, I found a spiritual companion. She is Karen Armstrong. She wrote a book. The book is called "The Case for God" (2009). It is subtitled: "What Religion Really Means". Questions like "what is the meaning of life in general and my life in particular",  "what is the nature of religion in general and God, the Tao, Being and Nothingness in particular", "What is the relationship between religion and science in general and between religions and philosophy, psychology, biology, neurology, anthropology, sociology, cultural history in particular"  and other analogous and associated problems have plagued me the whole of my life. I have read extensively on such subjects and have come to certain conclusions of my own. Karen Armstrong, an ex-Catholic nun turned comparative religion writer, must have done so too and has also come to her own conclusions. She has written a number of books on various religions, including Through the Narrow Gate (1982), The First Christian: Saint Paul's Impact on Christianity (1983), Beginning the World (1983), Tongues of Fire: An Anthology of Religious and Poetic Experience (1985), The Gospel According to Woman: Christianity's Creation of the Sex War in the West (1986), Holy War: The Crusades and their Impact on Today's World (1988), Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet (1991),  (1991), The English Mystics of the Fourteenth Century (1991), The End of Silence: Women and the Priesthood (1993), A History of God: the 4,000-year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (1993) , Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths (1996), In the Beginning: A New Interpretation of Genesis (1996), Islam: A Short History (2000), The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (2000), Buddha (2001), Faith After September 11 (2002), The Spiral Staircase (2004), A Short History of Myth (2005), Muhammad: A Prophet of Our Time (2006), The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions (2006), The Bible: A Biography (2007), Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010). She has also appeared in a number of popular BBC programmes. I first came to know about her as the author of A History of God.

When I turned to end of the book first, as is my custom whenever I read a new book, I was absolutely delighted to find Armstrong's conclusions were in so many ways exactly those that I have reached on my own. Now Im so happy to find that I am not alone in thinking what I am thinking. It's as if I had reached heaven: an intellectual, religious and emotional heaven! What does she have to say? 

To Armstrong, the task of religion was not to provide us with factual answers to questions like" how the world came into being", which, a bit like Gould, (who thinks that it falls within the magisterium of science) she thinks is the role of the logos or reason. It was, she says, like art, "to help us live creatively, peacefully and even joyously with realities for which there were no easy explanations and with problems that we could not solve: mortality, pain, grief, despair and outrage at injustice and cruelty of life." People of all cultures have discovered that by pushing logic and language to their limits and by living as selflessly, as lovingly and as compassionately as possible, they could transcend  their suffering "with serenity and courage" and thereby endow such suffering with a meaning which it would not otherwise have. However, religion does not work "automatically" and calls for "a great deal of effort" and it must never be "facile, false, idolatrous or self-indulgent.".

Like the ancient philosophy (love of wisdom) of Socrates, religion is not merely or primarily an intellectual matter. The "religious" is an attitude, a practice, a way of life. It is, as she says, "a practical discipline" the insights of which are "not derived from abstract speculation but from spiritual exercises and a dedicated lifestyle." and the truth of its doctrines cannot be understood without such actual practice.  To Armstrong, too many people have forgotten that religious teaching is "essentially and crucially a program for action". She says, "'You had to engage with a symbol imaginatively, become ritually and ethically involved with it and allow it to effect a profound change in you." and to that extent the "faith" of a practitioner of religion must be a "living faith". The practice must be a "self-emptying" and "compassionate" practice. But not many can do so today because as she says, "faith" has come to mean "intellectual assent to set of purely notional doctrines." To her, such a faith would make no sense unless its notions are put into practice. 

Many modern monotheistic faiths have become what Armstrong describes as "idolatry". Because its chief symbol was conceived of as "a personalized deity", God risks being imagined as "a larger, more powerful version of (the faithfuls) themselves, which they could use to endorse their own ideas, practices, loves and hatreds." e.g  a particular idea of God, "Creation science", "Family Values", Islam (understood institutionally and culturally) etc. To Armstrong, this is in fact a "sacrilegious denial of everything that "God" stands for" (meaning I believe selfless love, infinite compassion, tolerance, understanding, justice) because it "elevates an inherently limited value to an unacceptably high level."  A lot of so-called religious people do not really understand what true "transcendence" means. They try to limit "God" to their own limited, unimaginative fact bound way of thinking and understanding. They turn transcendent and intangible poetic feelings into prose. They treat the "myths" of their own religion as if they were scientific "facts": hence the hullabaloo and the quite unnecessary controversies surrounding "creationist science" and its strategically and religiously motivated but barely disguised contemporary effort under the disguised rubric of "intelligent design."  They know not the "mystery" that is  "God": his infinities, his intangibility, his ineffability and even his "impersonality". They mistake the gesture for that which the gesture is "suggesting". They take the finger pointing to God, the Tao, the Nothingness as that to which it points. They mistake the map for the territory. They take the sign for that which is "signified". They take the "effigy", the "image"  or the "symbol" for the "reality" of that which we refer to as "God, "the One", "the Absolute", the "Uncaused Cause", the "Self-Identical God.". They suffer from a horrible and pitiful lack of "imagination" but they mistake the force of their own tunnel-vision "conviction" as the force of their "argument." They confuse the subjective with the objective and they fail to realize the "subjectivity" of their purported "objectivity".

The root of this contemporary malaise Armstrong traces to the Western desire for certainty in the early modern period. She says, "Western people fell in love with an ideal of absolute certainty that, it seems, may be unattainable."   But some are still undaunted despite of all the advances of modern science and perhaps, paradoxically, because of them and are reluctant to give up their attempt and as a result, "they have tended to overcompensate, claiming certitude for beliefs and doctrines that can only be provisional." This, she says, may have contributed to the "aggressive tenor of of a great deal of contemporary discourse", from both theists and atheists. There are fundamentalists on both sides of the divide between "believers", "unbelievers", the "faithfuls" and "infidels",  the "orthodox" and the "heretics". Fanaticism is blind. It is blinded by its own self-inflicted blinkered vision. Unfortunately, there are far too few Socratic philosophers who know that they lack wisdom these days, she laments. "Too many people assume that they alone have it and in matters secular as well as religious appear unwilling even to consider a rival point of view or seriously assess evidence that might qualify their case." There seems a lack of aporia or an acknowledgement that the "other" side may also have some merits in their arguments.

To Armstrong, religious knowledge is never easy. Tremendous efforts have to be made by yogins, hesychasts, Cabbalists, exegetes, rabbis, ritualists, monks, scholars, philosophic and mystics and lay people in liturgical observance to learn a "different" kind of "knowing", one which pushes them to the limits of rationality because it requires a kind of ekstasis which lifts us out of our selfhood, which transcends the normal desires of the "self/ego", one which does not seek to actively control, to master and to manipulate what we regard as our own "self/ego" or others or the world. Such knowledge can only be acquired if people learn through prolonged practice to be receptive, sensitive, open, responsive to the influence of others or of the world, the way we respond to music, art or poetry. It requires a kenosis or a "negative capability"and "wise passiveness" and a heart which "watches and receives".

All religions are one in suggesting that the "ultimate" can never be adequately or fully expressed by any theoretical system because it is beyond words and concepts. Armstrong cites the Catholic definition of God in its catechism as "the Supreme Spirit, who alone exists of himself and is infinite in all perfections". She was never taught as Denys the Areopagite has taught in Pseudo-Dionysius, that God is not a spirit, that "he" has no gender, and that we have no idea of what we mean when we say that a being "exists" who is "infinite in all perfections". In an ultimate sense, the notion of "God" or "Absolute Reality" is indefinable, unspeakable, indescribable, inexpressible, unutterable and utterly beyond words. It can only be "experienced" because God is the reality within which we exist and have our being. According to Armstrong, in the early modern period, the concept of God was reduced to a scientific hypothesis. He became the ultimate explanation of the existence of the universe and to such an extent, be "reduced in effect to a deva, a lower case god that was a member of the cosmos with a precise function and location" when he should have been the ground of all being. Scientific rationality was put upon a pedestal and became the only acceptable path to truth. He became one of the "clear, distinct and self-evident" ideas of a Descartes! 

To Armstrong, if religious dialogue lacks either compassion or kenosis, it cannot lead to any truly creative insight or enlightenment. She says, "Religious truth has always developed communally and orally; in the past, when two or three sat down together and reached out towards the 'other', they experienced transcendence as a 'presence' amongst them.". Thus she thinks the debates between theists and atheists can also be fruitful in that they may help reveal the limitations of the literalist mindset now blocking understanding. To her, it is much better to study the "original meaning" of the ancient cosmologies in the first chapter of the Genesis and apply them analogically and symbolically to our own situation instead of arguing that an ancient mythos is factual. I can't agree more with her there. Revelation was amongst the ancients, not "an event that happened once in the distant past, but was an ongoing, creative process that required human ingenuity....Instead of clinging nervously to the insights of the past, they expected people to be inventive, fearless and confident in their interpretation of faith". But today, "because we assume that because we rationalize faith and regard truths as factual, this is how it was always done." She quotes Peter Berger:" The past is relativized in terms of this or that socio-historical analysis. The present, however, remains strangely immune to relativization...The New Testament writers are seen as afflicted with a false consciousness rooted in their time, but the analyst takes the consciousness of his time as an unmixed intellectual blessing.". We now tend to think of the modern as superior in all spheres just because it has been so in science, mathematics and technology. But this is not necessarily true.And the sooner we divest ourselves of this kind of mindset, the better it may be for the world, including the world religions, and in particular the monotheistic religions like Judaism, Christianity and Islam three of the most influential religion in the West.