Scholar Karen Armstrong seeks art in scripture
Not letting sacred texts speak to us is doing religion all wrong
Make a list of the subjects that cause people to bristle when told they’re doing it all wrong. Sex, politics and religion have to be the top three, right? I suppose parenting is up there, though not in the trinity because all parents surely succumb and admit to moments of surrender and helplessness.
Karen Armstrong may make some readers uncomfortable when she suggests we’re doing religion all wrong. And before twisting into a defensive posture, consider a moment that she thinks your counterparts practicing other faiths are also doing it all wrong, too. She sees — or more aptly hears — the rigid rules that we see as defining faith more like songs that have been subverted over time and turned into opportunistic orthodoxy.
That’s the crux of “The Lost Art of Scripture,” the latest book by the author of “A History of God.” At 74, Armstrong remains empathetic to those who practice faith, any faith, which is remarkable considering the abuse she has described as a young Catholic in a convent, experiences she touched on in her 1982 book “Through a Narrow Gate.” Armstrong has since researched, pondered and written about religion with deep feeling but also a skeptic’s eye for the ways belief systems transform across time.
Armstrong’s research for “The Lost Art of Scripture” finds her dusting off a lot of scripture from long ago to reveal texts that have been selectively parsed to codify contemporary belief systems. She makes a strong case for revisiting the sacred texts — the Bible, the Quran and the Torah — with the idea of interpretive performance rather than as justification for exclusionary and aggressive actions, thus the “art” of the title.
And hers is not an argument that science prevails over faith. Quite the contrary: She believes no such debate exists — that science is a field unrelated to faith and scripture, and that living and lively interpretations of these texts should prompt a kinder and more compassionate world, as the texts intended. History, too, has no place at the table. The originalist vision for scripture she presents is a set of guidelines for decent human interaction.
This subject will be the thread she pulls in a discussion when Armstrong visits Houston on Monday as a guest of the Progressive Forum.
Q: This was an interesting read because, well, these aren’t really the best of times …
A: Oh, dear, you’re right about that. Things are very bad in the world right now, yes.
Q: I feel like people have hunkered down with these rules they embrace from some kind of fear or anxiety — and I should be clear, there’s ample reason for fear and anxiety in the 21st century. I’m intrigued what your portal was, what sent you into this specific subject.
A: Yes. When I started writing this book, my main interest was primarily scripture as performative art. It wasn’t something you read as much as it was something you listened to. I wanted to explore that much more, that whole area. And it was interesting to me how it became something that spoke to our circumstances here and now. It completely surprised me that it was this invented art. The rudiments are in old Israelite legislation, or the Saudi culture going back to the 7th century. As Muid ad-Din ibn al-Arabi (a 12th-century mystic and philosopher) said, if you’re reading scripture and it doesn’t mean something new to you, then you’re not reciting it correctly. We consider scripture as how it gets us into heaven, and how it polishes our own spirituality. But it’s about doing something good in the world. About action. And action in monotheisms is a call for equality. The struggle against injustice. These were rituals, and there was nothing scientific about them. It was a creative attitude that we have obviously lost.
Q: Compassion being a crucial component?
A: It has to be in compassion. It’s the golden rule developed by every thinker starting with Confucius five centuries before Christ. It’s in Hebrew scripture.
A believer desires for the neighbor as he desires for himself. That is the standard. It doesn’t mean promoting oneself at the expense of others.
Q: Do you think fear is the driving force? A need to try to control the things that feel uncontrollable to us?
A: I think that probably is true. And there’s also a set about the preservation of the self, which is what frightens us, of course. We feel swamped and destroyed. And scripture tells us to leave the self behind: selfhood and ego. That drives us to belittle others, and it makes us puff up our own sense of value. We think we’re important. Very, very important. But that’s a hallmark of civilization. In the premodern world. There was a tiny aristocracy with servants and others on retainer working with a focus. And that forced the peasants to live at subsistence level. That’s the basis of so many civilizations.
Q: You write about a playfulness in scripture and how that has disappeared. That we’ve interacted with scripture in a very limited way.
A: Yes, the ritual of it is important. And what a great loss. Physicists tell us today we can learn a lot through our bodies, maybe more from our bodies than our brains. You can get more from a gesture than words. And that’s interesting. Reading scripture is rather like trying to read a libretto of an opera. It’s meant to be sung. It’s always sung. So many people before the 18th century couldn’t read. So they listened to scripture. The Quran, the word means “recitation.” To this day, people say they read the Quran. But they haven’t listened to the Quran. Even if you learn the words by heart, you don’t learn by printed text. You learn something that is recited to you. Recitation of the Quran is an art form. People travel around the world to hear a famous Quran reciter the same way they’d travel to hear a famous soprano. In my childhood, growing up Catholic, we all listened to scripture in the context of listening to Mass. The bodily actions and the plainsong, we don’t work with scripture these days the way they used to.
Q: You make the point that as an art, it’s more ethereal. That it’s not definable in ways we like to define things.
A: Yes, scriptures completely wipe out that certainty. Nobody can say what god is. It’s interesting that God chooses Moses, a man with a speech impediment. God says, ‘Never mind, let your brother, Aaron, speak to the people.’ Only it becomes second-hand, from Aaron. Who knows if Aaron understands his gibberish. Our talk about God is idolatrous. We’ve cut him down to human size. All the scripture says we don’t know. The Quran has 99 names for god. But we need to cut him down so the image of God is small enough for our little brains (laughs). One that suits us. We’ve created him in our own image.
Q: You don’t invite science to the table. Because you don’t see science as relevant in this discussion.
A: No, no. The physics of it, consider Einstein, who looked at the world and found it totally incomprehensible. His take was brilliant. This idea of being present inside what you can’t understand.
Karen Armstrong
When: 7:30 p.m. Monday Where: Concregation Emanu El, 1500 Sunset
Details: $70-$150; 713-702-2245, progressiveforumhouston.org