THE GOD LIFE • A History of God by Karen Armstrong, Heinemann, London, £16.99 This is the age of biographies. We are fascinated, it seems, by other people's lives. Perhaps they help us the better to understand our own. No-one who has been famous for five minutes is safe from a biographer. Anyone who has made an impact on history has also created a fortune for publishers. Last year A N Wison did Jesus. This year Karen Armstrong has gone one better and done God.
Well, not exactly God, more the idea of God. For Karen Armstrong, God is the idea of God. How could he - yes, he - be anything else? So this "history of God" is the story of man's (mostly) and woman's (occasionally) changing ideas of God. Not the gods, but God with a big G: the particular deity born in the creative imagination of Abraham, or perhaps stolen by the great patriarch from a neighbouring and more creative tribe. What Armstrong calls "the 4000-year quest for God" starts with the old man of Ur and ends with Cupitt. And how the Unchanging has changed in the process!
It is, let it be said at once, a profoundly wise and reverent book. Karen Armstrong has long outgrown her seven years in the nunnery, but she has lost none of her awe. She remains lost in wonder, love and praise before her subject, always ready to forgive him his trespasses, which are legion, and ever slow to chide and swift to bless. The result is that, at a time in history when we are conscious as never before of the evils done in the name of God and religion, she succeeds in reminding us that the idea of God as focus of the highest aspirations of humanity has inspired the best as well as the worst, and can still do so.
In the beginning were the tribal gods of Canaan:
Marduk, Baal, Anat, El, and later Yahweh. It does not seem to have been the case, says Armstrong, relying on modern biblical textual analysis, that Abraham and his son Isaac and his grandson Jacob were monotheists. "Indeed it is probably more accurate to call these early Hebrews pagans who shared many of the religious beliefs of their neighbours in Canaan". Abraham is depicted by later generations as having a special relationship with El, later conflated or confused with Yahweh, "a brutal, partial and murderous god: a god of war...
He is passionately partisan, has little compassion for anyone but his favourites and is simply a tribal deity. If Yahweh had remained such a savage god, the sooner he vanished, the better it would have been for everybody". But Yahweh did not vanish.
He evolved in Hebrew thought and history to become the only god, a universal god, the creatorGod and thus the father of all, even the Gentiles. "The new theology [of the later prophets] succeeded", says Armstrong, "not because it could be demonstrated rationally but because it was effective in preventing despair and inspiring hope...
It spoke profoundly to their [the Jews'] condition".
It rang true, and therefore was true. "All religions change and develop. If they do not, they will become obsolete". So monotheistic Judaism absorbed much of the philosophy of the Greek-Roman world of which it became a small part - and enter Jesus, "a charismatic faith healer (who) `Every culture has to create its own idea of God' began his career in the north of Palestine" and about whom "we know very little". Like many other charismatics of his time, he was said by some to be the Messiah, what Greeks called the Christ - but no Jew believed the Messiah to be a divine figure. Even Paul, founder of a New Israel embracing Gentiles as well as Jews, never thought to call Jesus "God".
That came later, when the churches got to work.
Somewhat audaciously, Armstrong gives Jesus no more than a walk-on part in her 4000-year drama.
God's career took a new turn when Muhammad ibn Abdullah borrowed Jewish and Christian elements to create an inspirational ideology for the Arab peoples. "Every culture has to create its own idea, of God". Armstrong writes with great warmth and sympathy of the early passionate idealism of Islam, corrupted later, not least by Christian violence and racism. Islam accepted much Christian theology but could not reconcile monotheism with notions of Incarnation and the Trinity, which Muslims simply found blasphemous. "Instead, as in Judaism, God was experienced as a moral imperative".
By the way we meet congenial characters like Ar-Razi, a tenth-century Muslim philosopher. "He was perhaps the first free-thinker to find the concept of God incompatible with a scientific outlook... In a debate with a more conventional Muslim, he argued that no true Faylasuf [Muslim philosopher] could rely on an established tradition but had to think things through for himself, since reason alone could lead us to truth. Reliance on revealed doctrines was useless because the religions could not agree. How could anyone tell which one was correct?" The more mystical Al-Ghazzali warned his readers not to take his own explanations of religion literally, since (in Armstrong's paraphrase) "we can only discuss these matters in the figurative language that is the preserve of the creative imagination".
Some medieval mystics in all three monotheistic traditions denied the "existence" of God, since to say he existed devalued him. Some declared theology a form of poetry. Many denied a personal God. "The personal God [of Judaism, Christianity and Islam] reflects an important religious insight: that no supreme value can be less than human... Yet a personal God can become a grave liability. He can be a mere idol carved in our own image, a projection of our limited needs, fears and desires.
We can assume that he loves what we love and hates what we hate, endorsing our prejudices instead of compelling us to transcend them... The very fact that, as a person, God has a gender... means that the sexuality of half the human race is sacralised at the expense of the female and can lead to a neurotic and inadequate imbalance in human sexual mores. A personal God can be dangerous".
But this is no new realisation of the all-wise twentieth century. There have been many in the churches, mosques and synagogues who have read the warning signs and have "sought to transcend the personal conception of supreme reality". Some have experienced "God" as "a subjective experience that involves an interior journey, not a perception of an objective fact outside the self; it is undertaken through the image-making part of the mind, the imagination". To Symeon, tenth century Abbot of St Macras in Constantinople and known as the "new theologian", God was "not an objective fact but an essentially subjective and personal enlightenment".
Whatever its libertarian features (which surely were many), the Reformation badly damaged imaginative religion. "Calvinist... predestination showed what could happen when the paradox and mystery of God were no longer regarded as pOetry but were interpreted with a coherent but terrifying logic... The God of the Bible [as understood by Bible Protestants] ceases to be a symbol of a transcendent reality and becomes a cruel and despotic tyrant." Early Christianity: not so much a belief'system, more 'a carefully cultivated attitude of commitment' Science has disposed of God the First Cause (though some conservative scientists still claim from time to time to discover an empty tomb). Science and nineteenth century philosophy effectively despatched what was left of the old anthropomorphic deity, but left untouched the God of the human imagination, the God who exists only as an imaginative emblem of our highest human values. This God is indestructible. But this God, this religion, is not some strange new growth, begotten by Cupitt out of semiology.
Armstrong's achievement is to demonstrate that God as moral imperative, as the culturally created, linguistic symbol of our highest aspirations, is nothing new in Christianity, Judaism or Islam.
Modem fundamentalists are the ones who have broken with tradition as established by the mystics. "Like [Bishop John] Robinson, Cupitt has arrived intellectually at an insight that mystics in all three faiths have reached by a more intuitive route... The idea that God does not really exist and that there is Nothing out there is far from new." Christian obsession with "belief" was a relatively late developer. The first Christians "would have found it hard to list their `beliefs' and may not have been conscious of evolving a distinctive system of thought... Their religion had no coherent `theology' but could more accurately be described as a carefully cultivated attitude of commitment. When they recited their 'creeds', they were not assenting to a set of propositions. The word credere, for example, seems to have derived from cor dare: to give one's heart. When they said 'credo!' this implied an emotional rather than an intellectual position." Religion as a carefully cultivated attitude of commitment! We must write that into our SoF Statement of Intent when we next revise it!
A final quote from this truly magnificent book: "Religion, like art, often consists of a dialogue with the past in order to find a perspective from which to view the present. Tradition provides a jumping-off point which enables men and women to engage with the perennial questions about the ultimate meaning of life.' David Boulton was perhaps the first free-thinker to find the concept of God incompatible with a scientific outlook... In a debate with a more conventional Muslim, he argued that no true Faylasuf [Muslim philosopher] could rely on an established tradition but had to think things through for himself, since reason alone could lead us to truth. Reliance on revealed doctrines was useless because the religions could not agree. How could anyone tell which one was correct?" The more mystical Al-Ghazzali warned his readers not to take his own explanations of religion literally, since (in Armstrong's paraphrase) "we can only discuss these matters in the figurative language that is the preserve of the creative imagination".
Review of A History of God by Karen Armstrong, Heinemann, London, £16.99.