Interview with Karen Armstrong on "A History of God", "The Case for God", "Sacred Nature" HQ

[Music] welcome to sheffield and to sheffield cathedral thank you county author of a great many best-selling books i want to focus on two of them this one which is probably your most famous book a history of god and a more recent one called the case for god and then when we've talked about those two books i want to talk a little bit about your upcoming book sacred nature now before we turn to your publications let's talk a little bit about your biography because i think it's relevant for understanding for an understanding of your books i know this is a long time ago but for several years you were a roman catholic nun and then you abandoned that calling if indeed it was a calling why did you want to become a nun and why did you then decided not to continue with that well i thought that when i became a nun i would become serene holy wise and would somehow transcend all the struggles of adolescence all the the fears and the anxieties and i was a sincere believer at that time and of course it was uh being a nun uh joining a religious order was the best thing you can do and i never thought i would get married and i was right about that i never have been married uh but i thought that this would uh be a this would be a fulfilled life but i was very young far too young i think to make that kind of decision i was 17 years old and far more immature i think or worldly wise less worldly wise than a teenager would be today in in the 19 late 50s and 60s and trying to become a nun how did that how did that go what was your experience well it was hard going but i knew it would be hard going because you had to die to yourself and that meant you had to become another person and let all those complications and meannesses one has and fears and yearnings put it to one side and i thought i would become serene as i say and and and fulfilled uh but uh and and i i i couldn't see myself ever fitting into the world i was very very shy um and teenagers those days were much shyer and more introverted and protected than they are today i was not popular at school um and i thought i would never really make friends and and and so i i would become holy instead and and unfortunately that didn't happen so so one of the ideas was to sort of be at peace with yourself and and that didn't that didn't come to pass well no it's hard hard going in there and i was also had the misfortune of getting the training the training in the novitiate was on its way out i entered at the same time as the vatican council was convened in rome in 1962 and that completely turned the catholic church upside down and inside out and needed it it badly needed reform and one of the things that needed reform was the education of young religious like me so i went through the the i had the old system which had been in place since the victorian period uh at its last gasp um and it was as i was making my vows it was beginning to phase out and there were younger people well uh people coming in with after me who were much older and just wouldn't take the kind of treatment that we had um and so things things were definitely on the move so is it fair to say that it was a a very difficult experience for you yes but it was meant to be difficult because you are it's not meant to be just a lovely fulfilling time you know singing hymns and um that kind of thing uh you're meant to die to yourself and uh put that self to one side and get rid of all the worldly things not that i'd had much chance of being in the world but uh but but get rid of those those selfishness this uh uh and i cried most of my time all the way through you were continually being uh told off and and excoriated for the smallest possible things and this was to make us humble and to realize that we uh we we had so far to go before we became good nuns if we ever did and so um i i was very nervous and i was very nervous uh i noticed when the uh younger the year after me uh where they were much more mature uh older and more sure of themselves uh they wouldn't take this whereas i i i was just timid and frightened yes and and then and then you read english at uh at oxford uh at first i think it was still part of your education as a nun were you happier as a as a student of english oh well oxford is a a place of that's not without its own difficulties um and um and being a nun at oxford i didn't really spend much time with the students but i did very well uh scholastically and this slightly bewildered my religious order because um i came from uh they i found that a lot of them were very very class ridden very snobbish i came from my father was a scrap metal merchant who not only a scrap metal merchant one that went bankrupt i had no good pedigree and they that i was they didn't like it that i was doing rather better than some of the more aristocratic uh young nuns uh and so that was difficult but as i was being encouraged to think for myself by my tutors i started to question a lot of the things that were going on but it was a strain and that first year i felt i was being pulled apart in two directions i wanted i was terrified at the idea of leaving the religious life terrified but at the same time i i i couldn't stop thinking and thinking for myself and being more critical and eventually at the end of that year the first year of at my at oxford i had a breakdown and uh by the following christmas i decided to leave i had to apply to rome for a dispensation from my vows and had to wait till that dispensation came through from the pope but you continued uh reading english yes i yes i did i continued and and did well yeah is it did you then lose your faith was or was that a slow process it was slow um my faith had always been a bit flimsy uh struggling did i really believe this even in the convent it seems and this and i i also um was living in the house of uh atheistic dons i i looked after uh professor herbert hart who was a head professor of jurisprudence in oxford university very very famous professor very famous uh and his wife jennifer who was a a a history don at my college and they had a a child who had been brain damaged at birth and i had a free room in their house in return for looking after jacob a couple of nights a week well this utter atheistic household um was extraordinary and i remember i used to and we used to go down to their house their summer house in cornwall and i'd have to walk miles to get to mass on sundays and eventually i decided that i wasn't going to do this and someone said oh one of the guests said i'll run you down or for god's sake don't do that suggestive she's just beginning to get get out of all that stuff so i i i it was difficult but they were great to me actually because i was having serious breakdowns yeah i was being still finding it very difficult to make make it in the world i was suicidal at one point taken to hospital in the middle of the night and but still they kept me back and they gave you something of a house absolutely uh not in any sentimental way but just they were they were absolutely there for me and um i i'll never forget that that kindness and then you graduated you did really well got a congratulatory first and i think then you embarked on a postgraduate degree yes and um and that seemed to go all right but then um i failed and it's very difficult to fail at a doctorate at oxford but the examiner who is a very well-known english literature professor uh said that i was wrote four lines in his report and said i was a very clever young woman but in his view this was not a proper uh topic for a phd it was about tennyson wasn't it poetic style yeah but it was the topic that you had been given yes so did you not i mean i'm not recommending this obviously under any circumstances but did you not have a you know the desire to well go to the external and you know so this is absolutely unacceptable i was far too timid still i was still far too broken and timid and coming round and this gives another blow to my confidence but also i was told by my tutor who was absolutely enraged that uh this that half the uh the the body of government governors who made this decision were deadly dead against it yes and there had been a big row about it so they'd rowed about this and argued about it for six whole months before dame helen gardner herself uh said uh she was sorry for me but the sanctity of the oxford doctorate was more important um but i'm really glad that i failed yeah because i was going to also you couldn't become a nun and then you couldn't become an academic but then afterwards you did have this brilliant career so i don't want to say all's well that ends well because they were obviously still very difficult experiences but you then did get into um a profession that seems to have suited you really well well yes uh but it it wasn't done after i was finished at oxford i then went in for school teaching but i had ill health i have a form of epilepsy which they still weren't treating properly and was having a lot of time off and so after six years of that i was asked to resign again and i was wondering what on earth every six years my life seemed to be what's going to become of me yes what will happen um and but i had written my first book by this time was by rather angry book about my time as a nun and i i was seen by channel 4 television which was just starting up as and they liked that they liked my they did an interview they liked that and i was got a job in uh israel to do a six-part documentary as a presenter on st paul with an israeli film company now this was riotous in many ways the the israelis were not were extremely blunt and rude and and frank as they as they always are but we became very friendly they thought at first i was just a boring school teacher but then they decided i was okay and this was this turned out to be a success i was still very angry about religion but i did come to likes and paul very much because i had the reverend michael goulder not so long ago deceased who was a great new testament scholar and he'd been put to my advisor and he'd been very chariot with me at first but then at the end he was happy to put his name on the on the on the list the cast list and he liked it and we became good friends after that um so that that was wonderful and i and i learned there too quite a lot about islam i learned about middle eastern politics and it was a great great eye-opener for me but then my television career collapsed because i did another documentary with this same film company but this time they embezzled all the money and uh channel four was furious and i got uh sort of sacked as a result and you didn't get any money either presumably no um and so i there i was out on my own out on a limb and trying to uh struggle along on um and i was well into my thirties by this time struggle along writing the odd review um and writing some more of these angry books about religion um and then something changed i had a new supervisor who a new aide a new literary agent rather who was not particularly religious but she was starting up her own agency and she was wonderful and somehow what brushed off for me she never sat me down and said now look here about these books of yours i think you can do better than this her own standard of excellence rubbed off on me in some way and i began to see that i had to do something different and and and then that i think the whole of my life turned around considerably um i wrote a book called a history of god which i suspect it would at the beginning would take the skeptical line of its predecessors yes but i found that i was absolutely moved by the the the muslim jewish and christian especially the greek orthodox christian uh theology and could see it was beginning to see my way through to not being religious in the old way but religious in a different way yeah before we come on to the book is that sort of the the path by which you then climbed your way back to religion as it were yes by by study uh by the study of the research i was doing for these new books and it came about with the history of god which turned out quite differently i when i looked into the intricacies and the way that people uh had in different faiths uh sort of thought about the divine i realized what a limited idea of god i'd had before and so that that was that was enthralling but also during that time i discovered a footnote in a book a learning book about about his history of islam and it was quoting the great islamist louis messino who said that the historian of religion must learn to cultivate what he called the science of compassion that is a form of knowledge that came by compassion that didn't mean feeling sorry for people or sympathizing with them it meant feeling with them come pathane and so that uh he said when you are reading a a an account of a religious idea that sounds quite alien to you keep asking yourself but why but why and never leave it he said until you can see that in those circumstances in which he or she was living you would have felt the same in that way he said you will lay aside the self and develop what he called the science of compassion a form of knowledge that came by feeling with others by putting yourself in other people's shoes instead of endlessly spouting out your own feelings and that completely changed the way i both approached the work and the way i saw religion okay let's look at the argument in a history of god and the case for god in in a bit more detail the overarching uh argument of these two books it seems to me is that our perception of god has on undergone undergone something of a paradigm shift a sea change over over the centuries and you distinguish there between two different periods one period going from say 30 000 bc to roughly the end of the middle ages and then roughly from the end of the middle ages to renaissance until the present day and the the way people feud god in the first period the gold they had is what you call the unknown god and perhaps the best way in is to look at the best way into that is by looking at the distinction between mutas and logos can you say a little bit about that distinction yes i'd like to say first however that i i that that change uh that you saw is more uh clear in western christianity than it is in in either judaism or islam rabbinic judaism um and kabbalah all the uh are very profound uh but after uh you get in the west rather than in greek orthodox church you get a much more rationalistic view of god and as as we progress into the scientific world and lose a lot of of of the sense of mythos uh myth is has been dis uh defined as something that in some sense happened once but which also happens all the time yes it's expressing an eternal truth not a historical one and it is also intuitive rather than logical yes whereas the west was becoming more and more logical as we progressed scientifically and that's been the source of our uh of our greatness and uh in the world but also uh it has we've lost a sense of spirituality in it it's entirely different uh from greek orthodox christianity which has also been more profound more mystical and less uh logos driven so if we if we stick with uh christianity then uh you know be before uh before the second period so from again 30 000 bc till the end of the middle ages and obviously this is a generalization right one one has to generalize across these very big periods uh then you have mutos and logos logos something like gives us empirical scientific truth we need both and and mutos gives us a kind of experiential truth so a kind of insight that allows us to um an experience that allows us to live more intensely more creatively more deeply to come to terms with our uh imperfections and mortality as well uh yes and our struggles it's it's more about the intuitive part of ourselves rather than the logical part of ourselves and the key thing about that first period if i've understood you correctly is that people realized that they needed both they needed myth and they needed logos so you have a mythical they're different ways of approaching the world that are equally valid and they're complementary so it's not myth or scientific myth and science and that then starts to change in the renaissance is that a fair summary roughly yes i would say uh it's starting in the renaissance and then it goes on to the to the age of reason uh to the 18th century 19th century and people and then you have the rise of science which has been the great triumph of the west uh but uh when you try and apply uh you then there's all this fuss about how could god have created the world in seven days for example that then happens in that second period if we now go back to that first period and look at religion as a form of myth uh that takes us to the unknown god so within this period roughly speaking um how did people see god what does it mean to talk about the unknown god well basically we can never know god and that's what the enlightenment people failed to understand because what we call god uh is infinite and unknowable the cloud of unknowing for example the great 14th century mystical text uh says that you know uh that we that our minds cannot contain god and unfortunately we've got that biblical image of god in in christianity uh where he's he keeps behaving in a rather human way um appearing chatting to people uh choosing people having favorites and all the rest of it where uh whereas the mystics are saying yes we can start with that but as we go on we realize that uh god is something that we we will never be able to grasp logically as we became more scientific in the west uh in especially in places like europe and and england the myths of scripture became impossible for many people to understand a myth is something that in some sense happened once but which also happens all the time it's not meant to be logical and constantly the great world religions have insisted that we cannot say what god is now we in the west have never been very good at this i mean as a as a child i was led the catechism answer to the question what is god and in a single sentence i had to say god is the supreme spirit who alone exists of himself and is infinite in all perfections now i have to say that at the age of eight that didn't mean much to me but i've also not think it's incorrect uh because the whole idea of saying that you can say in a single sentence what god is uh defies the whole uh not only the christian but but islamic judaic traditions too god it's unknowable yeah so so if you if you accept that religious speaking is a form of mythical speaking yes uh then you realize holistic speaking yeah then you realize that god has a to put it in philosophical terms a different ontological status uh from ordinary objects so i can say this is a finger or i can say you are here now but i cannot point to god in the same way god is not that kind of object so um button russell has his famous essay why it talks about you know maybe god is less comparable to a celestial teapot but of course that is precisely the wrong starting point because that is not the kind of entity that god is um so the way people in a stick with christianity for the time being talked about god even in the middle ages was still very often through what is called a apophatic theology what is apathetic the apophatic theology means we don't know what we're talking about that when we say and we're and we fall into silence and that's when we say what god is we we have to stop talking and it is um sort of a moment of uplift now we in the west have tended to sort of pin god down to being a creator then the book of genesis doesn't help if you're going to translate this literally the greek orthodox don't have this problem they had their own very strong mythical tradition and were able to adapt that to uh much more as they say apathetic way of speech which it means that you fall into silence when you start talking about what god is you realize that you're speaking nonsense so it's really a kind of sometimes it's also called negative theology i think so that people recognize we can't say god is created but we can also not say god is not created because he is in in a sense not in a sense because he is beyond words so our job as it were is then to uh because we have this intuit tell me if i'm wrong if i'm understanding you wrongly um but we have this kind of sense this intuitive sense of god and then of away something we have an experience in intuition um and we don't try and talk about it but then at the same time we realize that everything we do we fall short of that experience that that in intuition and it is maybe precisely because we fall short of it that we realize this is really god if god were different if god were the way burton russell wanted him to be or richard dawkins wants him to be then he would be a kind of alien kind of super alien but he is precisely not that is that a good way of looking at it it is up to a point uh because it's not just a question of thinking it's a question of doing behaving um and sort of art to ritual now we've got rid of a lot of ritual uh in certain parts of christianity and that's been that's been a loss so we're relying on words you go to a greek orthodox uh or russian orthodox service and the music uh touches you i mean it's extraordinary the sound and it lifts you because it's dealing with the intuition and it's going beyond words and it's then it becomes kind of a motivating force to locate yourself differently in the world and act in a different way is that right you must do that uh but you must realize that when we talk about god we don't know what we're talking about uh there what must always be that sense of the apophatic that's difficult for us because of our scriptures where god is such a sort of personality and endlessly holding up the law down the law for us it's uh the and and it's something like the quran for example uh it's impossible for us really to read the quran because we read it in translation but the when it is sung it reduces people to tears and it's that aesthetic sense that gets us an intuition of what god is rather than just a sense of logic i remember in palestine uh one night i was careering around the west bank with a bunch of young palestinian men and they were not devout people uh they were all drinking beer for a start so that you know they clearly weren't good muslims but uh suddenly the koran came on the car radio and these boys were transfixed their eyes filled with tears they then started trying to tell me what the quran was saying it means this and this but it doesn't mean that it also means that and that because the quran is the language is so rich plus the chant and that it's that aesthetic sense not just a logical sense that takes us beyond ourselves beyond our reason and gives us intimations of something that lies beyond what we can talk about yeah so the the uh the theologian nicholas of kuza has got this wonderful phrase doctor ignorencia in other words the knowing ignorance so we know that all our knowledge of god is ultimately only pseudo knowledge um and yet we have this tendency as you say especially in the west to pin down for example the bible on you know a set of clear messages or a set of clear moral precepts now the interesting thing is and and i want maybe we can talk about this for for a little bit because we also have a tendency to think of the bible just as a unity kind of like the old testament but of course there were both in the old testament and in the new testament to a whole range of different authors can you talk people sometimes talk about j and e when it comes to the old testament so what are jay and and and e uh they're two different traditions one in the south of israel one in the north j is called called jay because it they call it yahwest because they like talking about god as yahweh and e is is rather more logical and he they call god elohim and they're just two different traditions there's also p just to complicate things which the priestly tradition yeah and then there's d the deuteronomists tradition and uh all this is is is good to up to a point uh and it helps us to and analyze the bible and we can see exactly what uh what where this where this came from this came from the south this came from the north but i think the important thing is that the the people who edited the bible just put it all together so that things didn't make all perfect sense or follow a certain logical thing and you and and if you start reading the bible from one page to another it's very difficult to know what god is uh because it's a contradictory thing and that again should bring us to a sense of apophysis a sense of silence that we don't but unfortunately uh we in the west with our nice logical scientific minds are not really comfortable with that uh and the we're sitting down reading the bible in this way was not something that people did there it was sung it it was it was part in part of the liturgy um and with all that lovely greek orthodox or russian orthodox music and um and and it it so it takes you out of the logical beyond saying who did what when um and making you realize that we're in the presence of something that can't be spoken about the other good thing though about knowing who did what when and who wrote what when uh is is that you realize that it isn't there isn't just one voice right right to use the term of the uh the the cultural theorists miguel bactine you have a polyphony of voices you have different voices and that means different ex perceptions of god different experiences of god so the bible already itself is telling us you know you can't pin this down this is god here he is and and and so on and yet we as you say we kind of resist that because that contradicts our scientific rational rationalistic mind and the new testament is just the same yes four completely different looks of what jesus was and then you've got paul coming in um and uh and the redactors are not worried about putting things side by side so that you have two completely different birth stories of the the story of jesus birth one in matthew one in luke they're saying different things matthew is saying jesus has come for the whole world so he has the major i come from uh iran to worship at the crib jesus luke is saying no he's come for the poor and he has the shepherds coming we've just bungled them all together so you see in the great masters uh a rather clean looking uh stable with kings and shepherds alongside each other but they're both saying different things um and john is saying something completely different again yeah but that's polyphony or polyvalence to use another posh term that is something that gets lost in this second phase of christianity from roughly the renaissance onward is that right where myth then becomes reduced to logos where the church itself then starts to rely on logos and identifies with science but then the problem with that of course is that the moment you transform myth into logos you transform religion into a form of logos and it's got to conform to the criteria of logos and then that doesn't work it doesn't work any more than when you read a poem and and and and then apply the rules of logic to it the poem won't work uh the the scriptures are works of art uh and we've taken them as sort of factual yeah uh and they don't work what kind of vision or or perception or view of god does that produce when when you have this when you reduce religion to logos what kind of god do we then end up with well the god of the enlightenment um and uh we have a god that creates the world newton for example and he has a god when he's asked what god is like he said he's god is clearly very well versed in mathematics and geometry as though he's just made a god in his own image and likeness newton has um and it it but very many people today still think of god in the way that newton has described it and many people say well i can't believe that god created the world uh in and scientifically and of course that's not what the book of genesis is saying at all so if you interpret god in that way if you if you try and make him into a scientific god that that ultimately then leads to atheism because then people will say well that kind of god doesn't exist or where is he where can i find him um you know or he can't have created the world in in six days and so on because we know that you know it took a much longer period it also means that we have to behave differently it's not just a question of reading uh the scriptures or just making into intellectual decisions our behavior also makes us respond differently and that means we have to in our behavior we have to practice kenosis that means self-emptying putting ourselves to one side uh loving others more than ourselves turning the other cheek when attacked um and uh and and without that kind of generosity and uh charity nothing not that religion is is nothing when you look at religion as not a form of myth but as a form of logos then you have a kind of scientific view of religion which for example wants to locate god in place and time which wants to read the bible literally as if it were some sort of biology manual which wants to then say okay so how did the earth come to be well because it was created by god and then you give the story in genesis and then you reject evolution and you replace that with creationism or in intelligent design so then if you have that sort of scientific understanding of religion ultimately and you end up with fundamentalism and it seems to me that the uh that what you're saying is yes that that happens but then there's also kind of a reaction to that a counter-reaction which then attacks that form of religious fundamentalism but which itself turns out to be a form of secular fundamentalism have i understood you correctly now i i think that the point about religion is to stop thinking that you know it all to stop uh thinking that you're right and other people are wrong nobody is right about religion we none of us know what god is um and uh or what nirvana is it and we will not uh be a and all the religions say that unless we behave differently yeah what we think is is rubbish uh the what the gospels are telling us is to give all you have to the poor uh to see honor everybody that you meet uh to be prepared to suffer for your for your beliefs and and to and uh and and just charity is is the word and that means not just when you feel like it but all day and every day so that all day and every day you put yourself to one side and reach and once as the self goes down the god becomes greater once we are enmeshed in arguments we are concerned about ourselves and our own cleverness and our own thinking and our own brilliance and then we are stuck in ego the religions are meant to work on us aesthetically uh so that we feel as you do when you listen to great music you feel enlarged within yourself the world uh appears to be a beautiful place um and but and religion says that you must then go outside and make the world a beautiful place by good action but it it unless you're behaving in a different way all these ideas about god are nothing and the the the uh the the quarrels about the creation and everything are all about ego people having their own arguments and hearing this is what i think and how how brilliant i am uh instead of saying the world is a an extraordinary mystery yeah so so it's really uh an unwillingness or an inability to accept a plurality of experience is that right yes and and to lay yourselves aside because you know we are taught are we to express ourselves and you know argue things well and to show how clever you are that has to go and instead you have what they call kenosis which is a sense which is in greek it means emptying emptying yours emptying yourself of ego and giving to others um the the the quran for example has has just really one message give what you have to others and make sure there's no one hungry in your in your life and and do that we have to act too as well as just think otherwise religion is barren let's talk about richard dawkins uh for uh for a moment because people always bring him up as you know the great critic of uh religion even though the critiques of the 19th century were arguably more powerful than the critique put forward by dawkins you strongly disagree with dawkins arguments can you say a little bit about why i mean it's implicit in what you've said but can you try and make it explicit i think what i most dislike about about him about his writing is it's ego it's all about him uh it's it there's there's an anger and a spite and a disdain in it and that is and and and the antithesis of what religion should be though it often it fails to be like that so in that sense it's similar but that's what i was trying to get at in that sense it's similar to religious fundamentalism because they think they are in the sole possession of the truth yes and once you say that you've beco you've lost the plot none of us know anything at the cloud of unknowing for example that mystical text we know nothing about god and it has to be it has to be brought down to the sense that we are in uh that the life is a mystery life is full of sorrow life is full of pain and yet somehow we if by if we behave in a different way and that means all of them insist on kindness tonight i'm going to be finishing off with a there's a buddhist prayer which says let all let all beings be happy whether they're high or lower state alive or still to be born may they all be perfectly happy and let your loving thoughts spread out to the world that we should be sending in our look at the world at the moment today with what's happening in in in the ukraine what's happening in uh in also in russia that the horror uh the the the the the way the iranians have been behaving but the way we've treated the iranians too uh the pain we've inflicted on one another and and and therefore the anger and despair this is what is stopping us understanding religion uh when we we go in for these if we're not worried about the pain of others if we're not trying to assuage the pain of others and doing what whatever we can to assuage it uh whatever we may think about god is neither here nor there yeah i think that's a great transition to because you mentioned your lecture that you'll be giving this evening to your upcoming book sacred nature can you say a little bit about that book i know it's not it's not it hasn't been published yet yeah well but you will be talking about it this evening i will um so tell us about sacred nature sacred nature um i i thought something should be said about religion and the environment and my publishers said do a short one this time you know and it's a sort of change your mind look um has it become a short one it ha it's much shorter than usual yes um and but it's it's we can all argue about the environment we've got to change the way we behave uh we've got to stop uh you know using our cars we've got to stop flying around so much and the way we've got and when we're not up to that at the moment we're all shooting back after the the pandemic into our cars and planes and things uh we've this is not this can't be but it's no good just the trouble is that we in the west have scientifically changed up the view of nature we think about it uh in terms of science and that's been very wonderful in many ways science and medicine and all that but we can't we've lost that sense of reverence for nature and we are not going to change the planet or save the planet unless we change the way we think and the way we speak not just about just just about uh you know cutting down on on petrol at that is this why i used to title sacred nature nature is sacred and we've lost that sense of socrality of nature in all the world religions and including the greek orthodox nature is permeated with the divine in india there is no uh single god that the the great the highest uh that value is is a force called uh and it it it it permeates the whole of humanity the whole of nature everything every plant every tree is an expression of the divine and it's expressed in terms of myth and therefore it's respected and loved whereas we've treated it as a commodity um as something that we we can just use and we've wrecked it uh this is in china uh india uh the all and and and as i say in in certainly in the quran the quran has a much stronger view of nature than in the bible the bible has very little time for nature the bible is more about god the god being present in history in events like the exodus or the coming of jesus in the of the world religions god is fi what we call god the sacred whether we call it ki or brahman uh it's imbued in the natural world it's in every trap flower or tree every wind and it therefore has and it's personified it's po it's done poetically and people respond to it uh and honor it and talk about we talk about the golden rule never treat others as you would not like to be treated yourself the chinese said this also applies to nature do not do to others do not do to nature what you would not have done to yourself um and and and it we are encouraged to sort of fill our heart approach it emotionally but with not just in a sloppy way where you wander lonely as a cloud but you use your brain in a in a different way are you optimistic about that no i'm not but you have to i'm asking you know as a as a calvinist and having a strong sense of man's to use adult fashion old-fashioned expression men's sinfulness and as you say you look around you and you look at all the see all the terrible things that are happening um can we be optimistic no but i i i don't think we should be pessimistic either because then you then then you give up i think that there has to be uh that sense uh we've got to uh start looking at nature we don't look at things anymore we just take photographs of them i was in a that people photograph everything these days i was in a a restaurant in in singapore and a couple of my next table ordered hamburgers and they both solemnly took photographs of the hamburgers before they had them seeing beautiful parts of the world is no no longer seems to generate a sense of awe but it's it's you know so that you can take a selfie and then send it via instagram or whatever to to other other people so you have had i mean max weber already talks talked about this at the you know the early 20th century a disenchantment of the world yes ever since the enlightenment at the latest yes and that that's been in the west chiefly but we spread that ethos throughout the world uh but unless we start thinking of nature as something that we revere and honor and admire and that uh almost worship that we see the sacred in it uh we're not going to save the planet we're just going to go on using it abusing it and so i've taken various points that to get that we could that we can do first of all learning about the way other people have seen nature and still see it very few people in the non-western world really understand our western view of nature they still have many of the old um the old poetic ways of looking at when i speak in pakistan sometimes i quote wordsworth uh when and and i'll be quoting words with tonight when he looks at nature and he's and he's looking at it as the religious people do he but he's doing it in a new secular way he said i've learned to look at nature differently and to hear the sweet sad music of humanity no harsh inaugurating though of either power to jason and subdue and i have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts a sense sublime of something far more deeply understood whose dwelling is the light of setting suns and the round ocean and the living air and the blue sky and in the minds of man a motion and a spirit that informs all thinking things all objects of all thought and rolls through all things and notice that he says he's learnt to he's he has worked to create that it's not just something that's dropped upon him he's carefully cultivated this and notice when he says something something far more deeply interviews he uses words very carefully we use the word something very loosely what should we have for supper or i don't know eggs or something no he is saying something he won't say god because our view of god stuck in the heavens is no longer is not what he's talking about he is looking for the imminent god that is in every flower every tree uh which is what has been cultivated for centuries in all the other world religions which you're saying is what we must try and find again we must somehow try and recreate that and that attitude in ourselves uh and i've tried to show little things that we can do even just spending a little time looking at nature um you know instead of dashing from here to yawn and but just sitting and listening to the birds looking at the trees just for 10 minutes a day i think that's a very good note to end this interview on that as well yes thank you very much thank you

Channel: Public Engagement at the University of Sheffield

Views: 24,934

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Id: 2Vi-wd9arSM

Length: 52min 27sec (3147 seconds)

Published: Thu May 05 2022