Karen Armstrong’s latest book is daunting. Even for a writer who has already studied the history of the concept of God, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, adding to her purview ‘the development of major scriptural canons in India and China’ must have been a formidable task. For the reader, too, it can sometimes be a slog following the Vedas, the Upanishads and the Mahabharata, and the twists and turns of Confucianism and Daoism.
There is perhaps also a question as to how far texts deriving from such different cultures are really comparable, as when we move from Indian Buddhism to Athenian tragedy. The Chinese texts, in particular, seem something of an outlier; whereas Armstrong is persuasive in arguing that the texts of the other traditions are rooted in ritual, where the sounds of the words and the accompanying music, and the movements of the participants are part of the effect, the Chinese tradition, with some exceptions, seems to be more an external philosophy of life, and Confucianism in fact became the basis of the standard course of study for Chinese civil servants.
One other part of her investigative framework is open to question. She believes that we are in an age of rationalism and empiricism, and yet it is the age of Brexit and Donald Trump.
Armstrong describes how the various ‘scriptures’ have been rewritten over time to reflect historical experiences, and for the Hebrew bible the experience of the Judahite exiles in Babylon was crucial. Part of this process was midrash, interpretation or exegesis, which in the Jewish tradition, after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE, became as important as the biblical text itself. Armstrong’s default position is to regard the biblical texts as more midrash than history; she holds that exodus from Egypt is not a historical event. She also follows Arthur J. Dewey, who argues that the first Christians knew little about what happened on Calvary because they were in hiding.
When she discusses Islam, for obvious reasons, Armstrong devotes considerable attention to attitude to violence in the Islamic tradition. Jihad, generally translated as ‘struggle’, can have the sense of moral endeavour, but the military dimension was, Armstrong argues, brought to the fore by the Second Crusade in 1148: ‘Jihad, which had been all but dead, was resurrected not by the inherent violence of the Quran, but by a sustained assault from the West’ (p. 283). In an interesting analysis of the papers found among the possessions of the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, Mohamed Atta, she highlights the influence of the scholar Sayyid Qutb, whose book Milestones, she says, distorted the Quran by exaggerating the role of violence in the lives of the ‘pious ancestors’ (salaf) This is the origin of the Salafist strain in Islam, which emphasises the need for Muslims to come to the aid of their fellows oppressed in Palestine, Chechnya and, of course, by the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
In the Christian tradition, the sixteenth-century Reformation, with the invention of printing and the increase in literacy, made the bible accessible to the mass of the people, and thereby introduced a new individualism in interpretation. If the great divide was between Catholics and Protestants, there was sometimes no love lost between the Reformers. ‘Beware of Zwingli,’ said Luther, ‘and avoid his books as the hellish poison of Satan, for the man is completely perverted and has completely lost Christ.’ The response of the Catholic Church was to freeze the bible in Latin, driving personal response into private mysticism of communal pietism.
The development of science and rationalism forced Christians onto the defensive. There were weird attempts to apply science to the bible, as when William Miller announced that the Second Coming of Christ would occur in 1843. There was also the rise of creationism, which unaccountably persists in some areas of the United States. It would take time for scientific biblical criticism to redress the balance, even if it lost the sense of transcendence that Armstrong regards as important: ‘whatever our “beliefs”, it is essential for human survival that we rediscover the sacrality of each human being and resacralise the world’ (p. 429).
Francis McDonagh has worked for two leading Catholic development agencies, translates for the international theological journal Concilium, and is an occasional contributor to the Tablet.