Q&A With Religious Historian Karen Armstrong - The Lost Art of Scripture

[Music] curious about your personal experience can you share an example of a text from Scripture where you might have enjoyed this artistic experience you're talking about or intimations of transcendence no no i-i've had it more when I started reading this book it's written researching this book for me scripture was very worrisome but as Catholics we didn't read it much but I I was it worried me and I did a lot of academic work on Scripture and you know found out when this was written when that was written and and so it all became rather academic I learned to look at I was talking about it to some of you earlier at all these texts in a different way when I read a footnote in a big book about Islam which talked about the science of compassion that you have to put yourself in the shoes of others and I put me he's learning about other people's scriptures have helped me to see what my own Scripture was tried to do at its best I was I was so worried about my own wretched salvation that all these texts seem to be condemning me or showing how imperfect I was and what these prophets fulminating away about this and that I found it disturbing except except when we sang it in the convent we we had the group gorian chant and that adds a whole new dimension to it because it was that's how it's meant to be read or sung awesome that's that's how it's it's not just a cerebral edge attitude there was one text with quite the Sun in Holy Week Christ was made obedient to us even unto death on a cross and they've got the song that claim song of that really really touches and touches the unthinking the self so I think we have to remember that Scripture is and meant to be sung and so or chanted and you have to have that that dimension when when Muslims chant the Quran it creates a sense of great sadness and sorrow I think they call it Huson which you can't just get by running your eyes over the page because it touches the touches another part of the brain so it for me I suppose reading scripture was always a rather terrifying experience but reading other people's scriptures somehow and seeing the immense struggle to find meaning in a life that could easily be seen as meaningless especially it when you're living as the Aryan Indians were in 1500 BCE a life of danger in conda's constantly just attacking other people to get enough food for today and constantly feeling in battle yet they have these extraordinary visions of the cosmos speaking about singing and practice you I was struck by your metaphor practice with Scripture is like reading an opera of libretto we're missing the singing we're missing half of it so what should we what could we be doing differently it's hard to get that back I think especially in the Protestant world and the Catholicism has become extremely Protestant eyes I think in this way how how could we get that back I think by looking at Scripture as a mandate for action because it's not just a question of reading your scripture and having and finding the Lord is my shepherd and how lovely that is and so you get a nice warm glow it's you have also to take it to the fact that a lot of Scripture is quite disturbing we found that in the convent when we had to swap from chanting the office which correct covered the whole sorter in Latin and do it in English now some of the Psalms and some of the sisters were very excited about this because they found the Latin incomprehensible I could do the Latin but I can I could see there were problems ahead because not all it got all the songs are lovely and sweets that I mean we all found ourselves imagine a room like this filled with polite English discipline nuns warbling politely Oh God smash their teeth in their mouths that's what we did we just corpse can tell about but what we didn't know how to deal with this and the only way we could could deal with it was going back to chanting it and not taking any notes of what it was saying and that's not as daft as it looks because you're it's not all about you we you know we and those days I was applying all this to me but in fact the Psalms and the voice of humanity and humanity is violent we talk about things being evil and we have created a Satan to imagine how evil got into the world but we are evil we're the only creatures that are evil animals aren't evil but we and we have these big brains that enable us to harm other people so scriptures have to have that violence in and we have to sort of remember the way this is not just a whip we are human beings they the scriptures reflect us and our violence moments where we all feel we'd like to smash someone's teeth in their bowels occasionally and acknowledge that within yourself but acknowledge it as a human train as well as the the great ecstasy's and goodness and kindness that we have and see our complexity so I think we need to see the Scriptures not just as applying to me personally but to be a record of what it means to be a human being with all these scriptures show violence and terror because that is part of the human life and part of the human existence every time we turn on the news we see these horrible things you're emphasizing to act how do you derive from say the New Testament the need to act on climate change for example it's not very good as I say the Indians and the Chinese are better on this I think we need to go to the Psalms for that source up some of the prophecies the Koran has some verses though that are good they're called the sign verses whereby your to--to look at the wonders of creation and it constantly tells you just think about this just think about that to think and contemplate it the New Testament isn't so hot on climate change but now we don't need to just confine ourselves to our inscriptions we've got the insights of the Confucians as well as we've got the writings of the new Confucians the wisdom of the indian sages who thought about that and we've got the suns and we've got the Koran i'm just trying to Rack my brains I can't really think of many it for Jesus it's more about human suffering that we see there he what human beings do to one another to take that pain into our hearts as well as as seeing Jesus transfigured and human being human beings could be transfigured the you know that there's a moment where they see him shining like the Sun etc almost in a Buddha light pose and this is human beings being I think having that potential we've got that there but we've also got a bad potential to we also nail people to crosses and and injure them and and all else and are not concerned we've got this habit these days I don't know whether you do it in the United States but we were watching the news when something unpleasant is about to happen the newscasters is now obliged to say a warning you may find this upsetting or distressing which gives you a chance to go and make a cup of tea or switch channels anything to block out yet another suffering that image that but we should take these into our into our bones and Hajj and the Scriptures tell us to do that fascinating start in your book you start with ancient cave art for thousand years old a carved statue of something called Lion Man where the beginnings of art the beginnings of religion I think the 201 I think religion is an art form I'll tell you about lion man those of you who haven't read this thick book already it we had we borrowed this from a German in the British Museum and and had him in an exhibition recently it was most moving he's 31 centimeters high discovered in southern Germany shortly before the outbreak of World War two and he's got the head of a cave lion which was the biggest predator of this region of southern Germany they the people who lived in this cave would have been terrified of the cave lion but he's got a partly human body and so they fused the two together and clearly this has been you could see that he's been stroked and as though he were passed around in worship while people at Old West told his story and it's important because people we see that the people who made that 40,000 years ago were had the ability to aim at to think of something that did not exist and I was invited to open that exhibition and I said you know that this this is the beginning of religion to this it was a it was a this was an exhibition about religion that we have the ability to think of what does not exist like God I said and then I'm getting everyone's good I said you don't don't get upset you know I'm about to say that God does not exist but so did Thomas Aquinas God he said it's not one of the things that exist God is si si a person being so and we have the capacity to think of transcendence of transcending ourselves and overcoming terror of this beast and seeing human and animal as as as one as one and as beautiful and as divine you see it also in the Lascaux caves which are later where where the local animals of the region are presented in as numinous creatures and there's one that also uses animal and human together that way and again something that we need we need to be aware of as where's massacring species you know just for our own gluttony do you still call yourself a freelance monotheists made that remark in a light-hearted way and it's dogs my heels all the time because I no longer so it was just a monotheistic I have since looked at other scriptures other works other where they don't believe in one God they have a load of gods all pointing in different ways to their transcendent divine I'm curious what's what's the basis for your belief in God is it based in Scripture or something else belief I think is grossly on a helpful world word and I discussed this last time I was in Houston with you it was the word belief it's now become you've got to believe in God you've got to believe in this and the word belief it means it's come to mean the acceptance of a rather dubious proposition but the word been me originally believer it meant to love to commit yourself Chaucer's Knight says to his lady acceptor my believer except my loyalty my fealty my love and credo I love that in for Craig I believe mean meant came from a core dari in to give your heart and faith meant loyalty to so they should Anselm whom I give quite a bad press to in this book but he had he once said a crater or tin telega I believe in order because I may understand that's how we always pronounced it but it shouldn't and I always thought you had to bludgeon your mind to accept all these impossible doctrines and and then if you could just steal that critical faculty and say yes I believe in three-in-one and God and three no Clarett the and then I would understand I'd have pushed myself into a different mode of nonsense he wasn't saying any such thing credo it meant I commit myself and then I will understand I will behave in a certain way and that will evoke new understanding in me the word changed its meaning believer beneath in the 18th century and it came to me in the acceptance of a rather dubious proposition and one of the first people to use it in their sense well was Isaac Newton the great scientist who wrote to a friend saying that when I when he discovered the whole essence what he thought was the solar system he said it was in my mind that it would give discerning people food for belief in a deity for accepting something that was logical and and and since then we now made belief in absolute fetish credo in Unum Deum man didn't mean I believe in one God it meant I commit myself to the transmits transcendent reality that I that I'll never know I and if I do know it I've created an idol in my own image and likeness and and that that that commitment also as we know from Scripture means a concern for justice I can stand you look for it in every human being you look for it in the cause of us you look for it in it in every the possibility in every single human being and so I think that's where my faith I won't believe is I was used to be terrorized by this idea of some large deity who could look into my heart knew everything I'd done or thought y'all can seem to be angry I sent his son down and got him crucified and this I was not looking forward to heaven but the other place seemed worse but it was very hard to live with this deity well it's a monstrous idea this is some kind of boat very depleted notion of God of the divine and just as Lion Man is the pewte was the fusion of both humanity and animal machine of God it is fused with the whole world we sit we must see him in others other people in the natural world in in in in the cosmos everything as as they did in ancient India ancient China everybody not it's not a matter of believing does not mean accepting a whole list of propositions and in fact that by what I forgot to say remember that definition of God I gave from the Catholic catechism the catechisms were invented by both Catholic and Protestant leaders after the Reformation because the the Reformers thought that once you've got to the Bible and the people got to vote they wouldn't need churches and councils and theologians to tell them what to believe or think they'd find it there clear as day in Scripture but then they found they couldn't agree with one another about what scripture said they had terrible Horrible's and from the moment that moment the movement was split I mean they couldn't agree about infant baptism for another one thing they couldn't agree the scripture says has nothing particularly to say about it they couldn't agree on the Eucharist what went was the Eucharist how to interpret that scriptures I said does not give us those kind of answers and so where and where Luther had said everybody should read the Bible at the beginning of the Reformation all a simple peasant with a Bible in his hand will be able to know more just as much as any pope or bishop he had to change his tune during the peasants war when Luther was not on the side of the peasant and he told the princess that the peasants that Prince's them they should go in and slaughter them the person the revolting peasants the but they but they heels the peasants he told the peasants you must accept turn the other cheek when you're and you must obey scripture but they had the temerity to answer back because they'd read scripture to and say said but Christ has made all men preen and Luther nonplussed by they said no one should read scripture XLS you can read them in the original languages in Greek or in Hebrew otherwise you'd have to have that so both but it's so they created these catechisms in both the Catholic and the Protestant denominations as filters which would enable you to give you the right doctrines like that what is God like the Supreme Spirit etc so you would bring that knowledge of you to Scripture and read it through the lens of Scripture speaking about your last appearance with us remembering you said the afterlife is mainly something Christianity and Islam focuses on does the prospect that there might not be an afterlife were you no no for me because I as I explained in in this lecture the afterlife was a real problem for me as I was convinced I wasn't gonna make it to the good place as a child and let's call this focus on getting into heaven so that the whole thing was all about me it was like it's affected me quite badly like a bad sexual experience this was a bad religious experience and you know and I thought what if I went into a convent I'd become I'd certainly get in you know that way but I realized that that wasn't quite right either and so now I I can see that it doesn't have to be like that beneath him at the afterlife or there's an expectation of our blood doesn't have to be like this but I had it I had not saying that's the fault of the Catholic Church or of nuns particularly I just was a concatenation of personnel who were giving me this kind of limited view of religion so I for me I just have to leave the afterlife alone and what I think we can do is to live now in the present as fully as one can and make the world a better place [Applause] two more questions I'm curious how you found yourself you said you didn't achieve success until you were fifty years old was scripture a factor in your ultimate success which what is your career advice no no it wasn't I everything I did collapsed after seven every seven years I was a nun for seven years left having had a breakdown and it was a real wreck then I went to Oxford and I wanted to and I did well and my first degree and I wanted to become an academic teaching English literature so I did a PhD and failed it now it's very difficult it's a great skill to fail a PhD at Oxford because you're not supposed to pay in it and if they give you a better point out how you could improve things well I had an examiner who from outside us who wrote and if you do fail in a thesis you've got to write quite and point by point anyway he wrote four lines saying I was a very clever young woman but that in his view this was not a PhD subject when the faculty went apeshit and said that he would never be invited to examine for Oxford again but now what to do with miss Armstrong and it was they argued about it for five months and then they decided I couldn't have it reexamined because it would at least the half of them it split the faculty completely down the middle and that there was a student body was in turmoil about it because they said it if they had a had it re-examined it would be c8 the sanctity of the Oxford Doctorate and she's the woman said she said she was very sorry for miss Armstrong and injustice had to be done had it was an injustice to be done but the the sanctity of the doctorate became first so that was the end of my academic career I then became a schoolteacher and seven years later I lost it because of ill health then I got into television I was rung up by channel 4 which was just starting up who asked me if I'd like to write and present a six-part documentary on Singapore so yes I said I was neatly out of work and they'd see I'd written my first book about being in but none at that time and and so this producer had seen me on TV they said would you I say yes I did and it was a success and I did some more television programs but then I worked with the television company who embezzled all the money that channel 4 had given them for the project for another project on the crusade so that I was tarred by association and went off into obscure this time I was nearly 50 and everything I did it seemed to collapse and then I was living alone and all my friends in the television world and fallen away there was no one to egg me on to be outrageous and and the text started to speak to me in a different way and I think I was talking earlier about the science of compassion to some of you I that the I was trying to write religious history my first books were very very skeptical and angry but this I found a footnote which said that you must practice the Sun a historian of religion must practice the science of compassion which didn't mean feeling sorry for the people of the past but to feel with them and that you had a historian must recreate all the you can't look back look at the spiritualities of the past from the vantage point of rationalism today but you must look at what was happening at that time when that spirituality was produced whether we're looking at it it cannot be what was the economy like what was the environment like what were the politics what was the state of the health situation medicine etc what dangers did people face and not leave that's spirituality without asking continually but why and why and not leave it until you could imagine yourself in these circumstances feeling the same in this way he said you will broaden your horizons and make a place for the other in your mind and heart and that she completely changed the way I saw the spiritualities of the past because you're putting yourself to one side that's what you have to leave clever over educated current on one side and enter into which we're writing about the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him a world of terror and deprivation in seventh century Arabia and not and see that that's where this spirituality comes from and and a plan and leave yourself behind it's ecstasy so it was that really that sort of brought me back to religion they not not just a text but learning to read a text in a less selfish way what are you hoping for you spent an intense life searching for answers you found some shared insights and great books spoken around the world what are you hoping for Oh at the moment I'm finding very difficult I hope for anything turn on the television news with brexit going on night and day and horrifying news from outside the world roll around the world and how heartless we all are about it and how we shut out pain and but then there are good people that you meet any odd my travels I be good people and I would just I haven't much hope at the moment I have the same but I I think if we could own if we could take our religions more seriously which point to so that it's not all about me or my nation or my church or my denomination but it's about suffering muddled human beings who who have moments of croute orrible cruelty but who could also imagine great the arts the music the everything that goes into those transcendent moments and there are good people you meet around that you know that surprise you just that you know sometimes and when i go to some countries where I go to say to Pakistan well the signal pool which I always thought was a rather sort of brash place you know with skyscrapers of the new but the love with which I was treated I you know what they had to hold people off me where it doesn't happen at home by up to 10 you I mean my best friends don't read my books at home but a bit that kind of Nod an openness and letting me talk to them about their religion that gives me hope that that even you know when you know they the things are difficult and bad that people open their hearts and and and and there is love and a desire to move forward and and and make the world a more compassionate place I have a gift Oh for you it's a clock because we like to say it's our time it's in great with your name tonight's event thank you for a beautiful evening car [Applause]

Channel: The Progressive Forum

Views: 1,287

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Keywords: karen armstrong, religion, history of religion, art of scripture, progressive views

Id: TsYYiF9DpR0

Length: 33min 35sec (2015 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 10 2019