Part 3: "What is Religion?" Feature Lecture (Karen Armstrong)

it is now my great pleasure to introduce car and Armstrong one of the world's most thought-provoking prolific and original public thinkers on the role of religion in historical and in contemporary life she is an international authority on religious fundamentalism and monotheism a leading voice in promoting the core elements of religious traditions that encourage mutual justice and respect her poignant writing and captivating talks have sparked worldwide debate and respectful dialogue through best-selling books such as 12 steps to a compassionate life the case for God and a history of God she examines the deep differences and profound similarities among a richly diverse array of religious cultures and belief systems in 2008 she was awarded the TED Prize in recognition of her call as well as in support of that effort for a Council of religious and spiritual leaders to draw up a charter for compassion the resulting Charter applies shared moral priorities to foster greater global understanding and it has grown to a considerable international following a network of compassionate cities is now emerging to endorse and to implement the Charter practically and creatively as a speaker and writer she reminds us eloquently that all major religions embrace the core principle of what is understood in some as the Golden Rule which requires individuals to treat others as they themselves wish to be treated tonight we celebrate her innovative contribution to tolerance understanding and compassion globally Karen Armstrong Thank You Vancouver thank you Robert Thank You Alastair and thank you professor mark Winston who's been working on these 12 days for such a long time it's it's wonderful to be with you here right now the lecture what is religion now I bet you think you know the answer to that we all know what religion is when we see it but actually I it's not as simple as you might think it's now generally admitted in religious studies that there is no answer to this question our view of religion in the West in the modern West which sees religion as a separate autonomous activity that sealed off from such matters as politics and ordinary life something that is an internal quest an internal search for the transcendent and that doesn't mingle much with secular matters this is a modern concept developed in the West in the 17th century at the start of our modernity it's the Charter myth of the nation-state the secular nation state but in other cultures there is no equivalent to that concept of religion and so I just open with that and I hope I'll close with some thoughts that link back to that to remind us that we don't always know what we're talking about when we speak and pontificate about religion because our thinking despite our extraordinary technological and scientific genius are thinking about religion is often rather childish indeed sometimes primitive let me give you an example when I was quite a small child I had to learn the Catechism definite definition in the Roman Catholic catechism what is God a small question and a short answer our one drew breath and replied God is the supreme Spirit who alone exists of himself and is infinite in all perfections now I must say that at eight years old that didn't mean much to me and I still find it as somewhat arid boring definition but I have since decided that it's also incorrect because after you know over twenty years now of studying the world religions I can imagine the great luminaries of the past Maimonides in the Jewish tradition even Sina in the Islamic tradition Thomas Aquinas in the Christian tradition turning in their graves all of them insisted that God is not the Supreme Spirit God is not the Supreme Being God is not a being at all God is being itself si si absence at Thomas Aquinas it's wrong said Maimonides even to think that God exists because our notion of existence is far too limited to apply to God when we're talking about God we're talking about a different mode of reality but what's really so what's really wrong with that definition is that it takes it for granted that it's possible simply to draw breath and define a word whose literal meaning is to set limits upon a reality that has to go beyond everything we can think and know and in the pre-modern world good theology was meant to tip you into a moment of transcendence and silence where you realized that you'd gone beyond the each of words and concepts because our minds are tuned to transcendence it's a peculiar quality of the human mind that we have ideas and experiences that we can't easily put into words and we seek out moments which give us that we seek out activities that give us such moments the made evils had a word for that place in the brain in the mind where we tip over into transcendence they call it intellectus our intellect and we have made our intellect something much more rational and down-to-earth but way back in the 10th century before the Common Era the people of India who were always in the van of religious progress developed a form of religious discourse which would remain normative and would be repeated in different ways in all the great world traditions it was called the bra Maggio competition the object of the of this was to define the Brahman to find a verbal formula to encapsulate the Brahman who is the which is which I should say not who is the ultimate reality in the Hindu tradition Brahman is not a person not a personal God you can't speak to Brahman and parade of translating Brahman is the all so you can't possibly define Brahman because Brahman is everything that is it is being itself and it's no good really speaking to to Brahman because Brahman is also in you you are Brahman as well as everything else that we see around us but nevertheless this was the exercise these priests which would set themselves and the Challenger would start off kick off by you using all his great spirituality and intellect and learning with an enigmatic riddling paradoxical poetic formulation of brahman and the others would listen intently and drawing on their great erudition and they're great spirituality they too would try to respond to that and build upon it answer it in some way but the priest who won was the priest who reduced everybody to silence and in that silence the Brahman was present the Brahman was not present in the wordy definitions and formulations the Brahman was known in the stunning realization of the limitations of speech and the limitations of thought now you might say well that's all right for the people of India but we monotheists in the Western tradition believe in revelation words and scriptures have come down from on high have been revealed cast in stone and there are things that we actually know about God that have been revealed by God well no it isn't that simple because the the idea of revelation a rigid had meant something rather different revelation was not fixed once for all in the in the Jewish tradition the early rabbis created a form of interpretation of Scripture which they call Midrash it comes from the word - to go to go in search of to investigate to investigate something that is not immediately self-evident and you each time that a rabbi duly prepared exposed himself to the sacred text it would mean something different um and his Midrash was not complete until he'd found something in the text new something new different something that would probably never have occurred to the biblical author but which he could answer the specific needs of the community because revelation was ongoing it are continued every time a a a Jew opened himself to that text because God's Word is infinite and could not be tied down to a single interpretation I mean in the in the in the Christian world you have the Greek fathers of the church such as Santa tenacious saying if we're speaking about revelation it tells us that we know nothing about God we can know nothing about God at all that's why things have to be revealed and a lot of the early doctrines of the church that like such as Trinity which I may come back to later or incarnation Word devised precisely to tell Christians that they couldn't think about God as a simple personality and that Reb the revelation of God in Jesus Christ the man meant the Sir Thomas Aquinas that we don't know even Jesus never mind God Thomas Aquinas was thinking of the verse in the Acts of the Apostles when Jesus ascends to heaven and it says that a cloud covered him from now on Jesus has gone from us in a way says Thomas Aquinas and we are left not knowing there's a very famous English 14th century English text the call the Cloud of Unknowing in which the master is teaching the novice a way of prayer and he says to me to him when now you're going to ask me he says to the novice what is God and I am going to tell you that I haven't the faintest idea and that is uh we are we find it difficult to accept unknowing in our world we like if you say do you believe in God or do you believe or not and we like to have something definite if we someone asks us a question we don't know the answer we'll say I'll look it up there's no question in our minds that there is an answer the before the modern era they were a little more humble and there's no question of Revelation sealing things off and stopping people thinking the person who invented this Jewish Midrash through great rabbi akiva who died in the early years early as years of the second century he developed this inventive form of Midrash and there was a story about him in the Talmud it said that the fame of his profound learning and brilliance reached heaven and Moses heard about it and he was intrigued so he thought he'd come down and find out what was going on so he came down from heaven and joined Rabbi Akiva 'he's a torah class sitting in the eighth row behind all the other students and found to his intense embarrassment that he couldn't understand a word of the revelation that was being had been revealed to him on mount sinai and he goes back to heaven shaking his head saying why did god did you choose me to be the bearer of revelation when i don't have a moment oh say a mini minuscule part of that intellect another rabbi put this more succinctly he said that which was not revealed to Moses was revealed to rabbi akiva and his generation so revelation is continuous it's not sealed off once and for all and there's no question of anybody telling you what not to think there's a wonderful story in the Talmud which I think should be inscribed over every seminary and over the doors of every Department of Religious Studies one day the great rabbi eliezer was having an argument in the house of studies with two of his colleagues about an abstruse point of law in the scripture and he couldn't bring them round to his way of thinking and so he asked God would God mind performing some miracles in order to prove that he was right and sure enough a canal started flowing uphill against the laws of nature a carob tree moved two or three hundred yards of its own accord to the left and the walls of the house of studies caved in as if they were about to collapse the other rabbis were just not impressed they in fact Rabbi Joshua was rather disapproving of these divine pyrotechnics he spoke severely to the walls and said it is not proper to collapse when the sages are inside discussing serious matters finally in desperation Rabbi Eliezer asked for a voice from heaven to adjudicate and obligingly a voice Boom down why are you quarreling with Rabbi Eliezer the halaqa ilya the law is exactly as he says and Rabbi Joshua says no and he then quotes back to God his own scripture out of context meaning something quite different it is not in heaven from Deuteronomy and the gloss tells us that on Mount Sinai the lure came down from heaven to earth it is not the business of heaven anymore and therefore we do take no notice of a heavenly voice not even a not even God can tell a Jew what to think and this is admirable I mean we may laugh but we have lost that confidence and we cling in a servile way to things that we've been told or to literal interpretations of Scripture instead of launching out into the unknown now one of the things that we found very difficult and has made religion very difficult for us is that we've we no longer understand the distinction between mythos myth and logos reason in the ancient world in the pre-modern world indeed in most cultures it was well established that there were two ways of knowing things one was mythos one was logos now log us we're all very familiar with logos is what we use when we're doing science or mathematics or medicine and when we're trying to organize our societies or plan a battle we need logos - they are thoughts to respond absolutely accurately to events in the and facts of the outside world otherwise it just doesn't work but mythos is quite different myth in modern parlance often has become so debased in the modern period that it's just thought to be something that isn't true if a politician is accused of a peccadillo in his past life he is liable to say oh well it's a myth that said it didn't happen but that's not how people understood myth in the ancient world myth mythos described or tried to articulate all those elements in life for which there were no easy answers are those those puzzling disturbing things that we cannot pin down things that cause us grief we need both of them if your child dies or you witness a terrible natural disaster yes certainly you want Lagos you want to find out what exactly happened and why it happened but you also perhaps want to sit quietly perhaps to watch a sunset perhaps to listen to some music to sit quietly holding the hand of a friend in silence dealing with the turbulence and grief and rage that you are experiencing and this was the task of myth myth has been very aptly described as an early form of psychology all those stories in the in the ancient myths about gods or heroes going down into the underworld are threading their way through labyrinths fighting demons were not describing historical events what they were doing was telling explaining how we negotiated the complex labyrinthine world of our own psyche and it's noticeable that when Freud and Jung charted the modern scientific search for the soul how easily they turned to the old myths finding them very germane think of the myth of Oedipus the myth of narcissus and so myth has been well described as a something that in some sense happened once but which also happens all the time and many of our biblical stories and religious doctrines are myths in this sense that doesn't mean they're less than truth they're more than history they're telling you what these things could have meant and how they mean something in a timeless way thus the story for example of the crossing of the sea of reeds sometimes called the Red Sea in the book of Exodus and I think you know you live there's Israelites are escaping the waters open they go through Pharaoh and his army come after them and they're all drowned now this has been the people have been in our literalistic modern world modern people have said well you know the but this is would you an account of flash flooding which is very common in the region and it's Noble and but this is missing the point because this story whatever happened we have no idea is described precisely as a myth the middlee ancient Middle East was filled with the story of God's splitting seas in half to create the world have it in the Babylonian great creation myth it was part of the common mythology but this time what is being split in two is a sea but what is coming out of it is not a cosmos not not a world not a universe but a people a people is being born and similarly in most cultures the idea of immersion and going through water we have it in baptism is a is a great symbol of transformation and inner transformation so something more important is being said than some freak of nature that and furthermore what why is this myth important because every year in ritual it's brought alive at Passover with Jewish Seder and the Seder tells you that every Jew must consider that he is a member of that generation that escaped from Egypt it's timeless it's bought into the life and heart of every Jew and it becomes a living reality and this is religion this is this is what religion is is trying to do now the most important thing about myth however is that myth is essentially a program for action it's a program for action you either myth can put the story the myth can place you in the right correct spiritual posture but it's up to you to take the next step it's up to you to take part in a mindful way in that ritual just as it's up to you as a Christian to take part in the ritual of Christ's of the Eucharist and experience the presence of Christ within you the myths were always either re-enacted as if symbolically as in the seder or in the communion service or literally reenacted in the ancient world in great dramatic festivals and these dramas would bring the inner meaning just like any great theatrical performance would bring them in a meaning of this story right into the heart of the that the participants those who took part people who took part in the Eleusinian mysteries in Athens were really rigorous ritual lasting several days really taxing frightening came out of them often feeling that they no longer were afraid of death ah add up these bit rituals have a profound effect also later I won't put them into practice in an ethical way but the point is that an less you do perform these rituals turn them into these myths turn them into an action and bring them alive in your own life they remain opaque so our peculiar belief in the modern period and it is peculiar I mean in this in the original sense of being one of a kind one of its own it we first have to believe a lot of myths and then we decide whether we're going to live a a good religious life would be regarded as pretty nonsensical by people such as the Buddha religion then you get it now in the modern period we've turned our knowledge into very much a sort of head trip um it's it's a billet you believe things there are these doctrines and I'm coming to that all that in a moment but religion is actually a religious knowledge is actually a form of practical knowledge like driving or swimming and you can't learn to swim by reading a book and sitting on the side of the pool you have to get in and mercé yourself into the element and learn how to float and once you master that you can't imagine why you ever found it difficult to tori has got a knack but you have to do it and no amount of explaining it or telling you how to manipulate your limbs will substitute for doing it similarly driving you can't learn to drive simply by reading the highway code or the car manual you have to learn to get in and manipulate the brakes until you it's second nature and you can't really explain to anyone libera ously how you do it a dancer or a gymnast have to practice for years for years ever all day and every day until they learn to move with an unearthly Grace and perform feats that are absolutely impossible for an untrained body now religious people have found through the centuries that certain rituals ritualizing these myths which explain what is going on in the psyche in your mind in your heart and lift you up to transcendence they find and also vet certain ethical practices one of the kingpin of those is compassion is that if you practice these assiduously you like a dancer acquired new capacities but new capacities of heart and mind that are incomprehensible to an untrained person now what happened how did we get to this state that we've as it were put the cart before the horse well the word belief has become central to the religious experience we so much so that we actually call religious people believers as though accepting certain doctrines of in the Creed with the most important thing that they ever did but the word belief has changed its meaning in it met it means believer in middle english right up to the seventy and right up to the 17th century it meant to trust cook to commit yourself loyalty accept a my believer said Chaucer's night to his lady except my loyalty my fealty and so when they were translating the Bible into English the King James and other translators and other translators found this Greek word in the New Testament pista s' and that means to commit yourself to trust and so they translated it believer now in when some jerem was translating pista s-- into at in um he quit he used the word feeders which means faith loyalty commitment but there wasn't a verbal form for piss this foot foot foot foot for Fidesz so he used the word credo are now translated I believe but originally it meant um I give you Gordo I give you my heart I give my heart to this so when Jesus is asking for belief or faith we assume that is asking that we believe that he is the second person of the Trinity an idea he'd have found rather strange um but um in fact Jesus is not asking for this at all he's asking people to commit themselves he is asking for people to live rough to live with sleep rough with you know the son of man has nowhere to lay his head to live like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field trusting having pista s-- in God their father to give all their possessions to the poor and to work night and day for the coming of the kingdom when rich and poor will sit at the same table and that in regards commitment and hard work and early in the house would work in ritual we know that this very early baptismal ceremonies were very elaborate affairs and for adults only I mean that the ancients thought that religion was a serious matter and not really for children so the the new the new Christians would wait outside the church they had midnight they've been preparing for this all during Lent on Easter Sunday they would be baptized and all the six weeks they've been intensively preparing for this moment and a very dramatic ritual and they would go into the church they would be stripped of their clothes and they would then be immersed in the baptismal pool it's going through their own red sea their own immersion and their their thinking very much of the people of Israel going through that that that that purification that that moment of creation this is a new creation to have cast off their old selves and they are plunged down underneath the pool and the officiant will say do you have pista' s-- or feeders in God the Father and they would come up spluttering crying Castillo I commit myself in the son Postell credo now these people were not sitting on the edge of the pool sinking saying on having weighed all the evidence I can now affirm that there is a God and that I'm ready to go not at all this was an act of absolute commitment at a time when it could be very dangerous to be a Christian and it was and the rituals changed them and it was only after that that they were introduced to some of the more difficult articles of faith such as Trinity now what happened in the early modern period was that that the word belief started to change its meaning to mean an intellectual assent to a somewhat dubious proposition and we first find it used by Newton one of the first usage as he said when he devised his solar system that he had it in mind that it might work with considering men for belief in a deity Newton believed and really believed that he had found in this in intricate solar system an absolute proof for God's existence because it was so intricate that it must have had an intelligent mind to start the whole thing off God was absolutely central to Newton's physics and he said this week it's now clear we can now prove what it says in the Bible that there really is an all intelligent being that is wise and good it must be good because it's preserving us all and he said clearly a very well versed in mechanics and geometry now what you're doing here I mean this kind of thing would have absolutely made people like Thomas Aquinas turn in his grave or the the great early Greek fog Fathers of the Greek Church said it but the world physical world can tell us nothing about God nothing about God because God is being itself and can have nothing in common with the world which is created from nothing whose being whose essential being is nothingness but um and a Newton's theory was soon disproved and within two or three generations scientists like such as Laplace we're saying that actually you don't need that hypothesis you can imagine this coming about of its own accord now none of this would have mattered much if the churches as well as the enlightenment philosophers hadn't taken up Newton's God and felt that they who really could prove God's existence I haven't time to go into Thomas Aquinas 'iz proofs for the existence of God they're not proofs they they're a reform of the bra Maggio competition at the end of them he says we don't know what it is we've proved all we've proved is the existence of a mystery pushing you into a state of transcendence and but that we got so hooked on this what we call natural theology that we lost the old habits of mind and heart what I call the apophatic the silent which when you're reduced to sigh and so when Darwin came along we were left without recourse and people were floundering and as globalization has spread our this kind of thinking has spread to other parts of the world and so you get Muslims and even Jews and Buddhists even beginning to think in these sort of literalistic terms about their faith now so religion is a form of practical action and what is it most that they are asking that what they all ask us to do is compassion this is the meaning of the doctrine of Trinity for example Trinity was revealed to those catechumens after their baptism the after they'd been introduced after they'd had this extraordinary experience of ritual and Trinity wasn't just they didn't just say I Got News for You God is one and one is and God is three they it was a meditation it was a meditation which rather like the Buddhist mandala where you thought of the absolutely unknowable essence of God and then you swung your mind back to the three manifestations of God to the world and then back to the unknowable again to remind you that you couldn't think about God as a simple personality and if but if you don't do the meditation you don't get it any more than you know those baths Ematic 'el problems we learnt at school where you go through a whole line of reasoning and at the end you come out so a equals B x-squared a formula which is nonsense because if you haven't gone through the reasoning before one of the reasons why we've always found Trinity difficult in the West is that we didn't do the meditation and Trinity is all about to about letting go of the self that the Trinity as its depicted often in a rush iconography shows the three and three angels that appeared to Abraham and if you look at them there's a very famous one by Andrei Rublev and each one represents one of the Trinity and you're you are yours they're sitting around a table and you're sitting opposite them and your eye is drawn to the central figure that I which represents the word the second person but he doesn't look at you he's looking to the left at the one representing the spirit who also doesn't return his gaze but looks over to the one on the far right which is the Father circling around but this isn't a god that he's looking taking you on head on each empties itself and passes on to the other because what are they that that myth is telling us is that holding on to ourselves and our egos and our selfishness and demand and at all costs is what holds us back from the divine and the safest way to get rid of ego is through compassion where you D thrown yourself from the center of your world and put another there and that is why every single one of the major world religions has put compassion right at the heart of its teaching and says that this is the test of true faith my favorite Golden Rule story is probably refers to the great Pharisee Hillel who was once approached by a pagan who promised to convert to Judaism on condition that the rabbi could recite the whole of Jewish teaching while he stood on one leg and Hillel replied simply that which is hateful to you do not to your fellow man that is Torah and everything else is only commentary go and study it everything else is only commentary no mention of the unity of God the creation of the world exodus from Egypt that's a commentary on the golden rule never treat others as you would not like to be treated yourself confucius the first person that I know to formulate the golden rule said that it was a central thread that ran through all his teaching and that pulled it all together and he said he said to his disciples you must practice it all day and every day not just when you feel like it not when you are you know how we well perhaps you don't do this in Canada but we have a habit in the UK when we've done something nice for someone of saying well that's my good deed for the day as though we can now return to the next that twenty three hours to our usual bitterness greed and selfishness know all day and every day to do what the golden rule says you look into your own heart discover what gives you pain and then refuse under any circumstance whatsoever to inflict that pain on anybody else all day and every day it means all there every day you're stepping outside the ego and putting yourself in the place of another and that says says the Confucian scripture Analects is what brings you into transcendence because the Greeks had a word for this they called it ecstasy which means stepping outside you're standing outside the self and it is that that brings us into relation to transcendence when we lay aside the greedy grasping ego and I think it's important to note that here I come full circle to when I was saying that before in in in the pre-modern period all ideology was in some way religious religious perm religion permeated everything and so these are great thinkers and sages and I'm talking about the Buddha and whew Jesus the rabbis the prophets the sages of the Upanishads the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him they were all are working in societies like our own where violence had reached an unprecedented crescendo and they were looking into an abyss of course that violence was miniscule compared with what we face today but they were convinced that if we went on are behaving in this inimical way to ask each other we would destroy ourselves and they all insisted you couldn't confine your benevolence to your own group you had to give it even to your enemies nothing to do with feeling nothing to do with feeling love for your enemies but putting that making sure that you were out for his good looking out for his well-being that you would be loyal to him and come to his aid and this is the sort of love that we must give to our enemies and they were not but they were quite political in their thinking in China the Confucians would become major advisors to the Emperor and what they were trying to do was counterbalance the Emperor and his armies and warfare all the apparatus of the state with this ethic of compassion they're offering an alternative the buddha did the same at a time when India was reaching a sort of height of aggression and commercial a new commercial life was dawning and greed was taking over he was offering another way of being human based on compassion and kindness and respect King won one of the kings came to visit him one day to thee and looked at the way the monks were looking at each other he said with eyes as gentle as wild deer and this is another way to be human and Jesus you are you see Jesus in the Gospels standing before the Roman governor standing before the Roman governor talking about another kind of kingdom another kind of way for human beings to live together rather than one based on power and Christ crucified becomes an emblem of all the horror the cruelty the violence that men inflict upon other men and women women too ah the ex a homo this is is that famous were often painted depiction of Jesus with the crown of thorns and suffering that is the human being suffering at the hands of other human beings um and similarly the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him who was operating at a time in Mecca when vile and and Arabia when violence had reached an unprecedented crescendo and the Quran is a call for compassion a call not verb sort of touchy-feely compassion but that that you look after the poor you devote your life to creating a just and decent society where all people even the most vulnerable are treated with respect this is what we are called to do it is a struggle it's an effort but in doing this we leave the grasping greedy insecure frightened ego behind and we encounter a transcendence that we call God or Bradman or Dao or Nirvana and it's a long road but it is it is that it is I think lies at the heart of a great deal of some of the best of the religious spiration x' in all of the world traditions thank you

Channel: SFU Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue

Views: 31,921

Rating: 4.6777253 out of 5

Keywords: Simon Fraser University, Centre for Dialogue, SFU, Vancouver, Karen Armstrong, TED Prize, Charter for Compassion

Id: Yp4ZaNpU-nY

Length: 49min 18sec (2958 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 23 2012