Religious Historian Karen Armstrong - The Lost Art of Scripture Part 1

[Music] thank you the art of Scripture what Scripture is an art form and there and when you approach an art a particular art you or you have to approach it in the right way when people for example read Pride and Prejudice they're not devastated to hear that mr. Darcy or mr. Bingley never existed but because we know that is the genre and so and but we are still getting whether this is literally true or not important insights and truths about the human condition and before the modern period it was impossible to write history as we do it today finding out what actually happened it's not until the 18th century when the British Museum was created for example where we have the knowledge of ancient languages and the science of archaeology to uncover the truths about the past in most of you many many people today they are reading scripture in this very literal way and think if something didn't happen if they say something happened when it didn't it isn't true but what scripture does it teaches us what to remember and those of you who are like myself inching towards the old age will find that it's more natural for human beings to forget and history is it the historical teachings that we have in in in scripture are designed specifically to help to show what what what was important about this particular incident not what actually happened which has got lost in the midst mists of time furthermore Scripture was a performative art until about the 18th century most people couldn't read and until the invention of printing it was impossible for people to get a copy of say the Bible which was all kept in different different manuscripts people listened to Scripture the Quran is called the word Quran means recitation and Muslims listened to their texts people often tell me in a rather aggressive way when I read the Quran I said he probably haven't because Muslims don't read it on the page like that they listen and when they're learning the Quran by scripture by heart as they do they don't read it learn it from a page it's recited to them and the recitation is itself an art form people will go for miles to hear a well-known Quran reciter just as they have to hear a an important soprano today so really reading scripture in the way we do today is not unlike reading the libretto of an opera half the effect of it has is missing now you can see those of you who got a copy is that this is a thick book so I've got three points here that that I want to develop that's gets us to I hope to the heart of the matter looking at some of the ways that people think scripture should be read and then showing how it's been read over the ages because in the West when we started to create our scientific culture we started thinking much more factually and looking out for sort of historical accuracy and the literal truth of Scripture but that it was a new development and it has been rather disastrous for our view of religion so the first my first point is that scripture does not impart facts or certainties which we are obliged to believe scripture is not telling us what we should believe in fact it's telling us when we read scripture we should realize the limits of what we know the DAO that can be named is not the eternal down that's that's how the doubt aging the most important Taoist Scripture begins if you can say what the Dow is that's not the down and the same applies to God a word we crash around we're very easily and we have certain ideas about him these days you know there he is in heaven looking down on us he looks he is watching us all and is judging us all and we will join him and Jesus late at the end of our lives if we're lucky this is what I learnt at eight years old in the Catholic catechism the question was what is God and quick as a flash I chanted 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 left me rather cold but I now think it's incorrect because it takes it for granted that you can simply draw breath and define a word whose literal meaning is to set limits upon a reality that is inimitable that is in that it cannot you cannot say what God is and that is what scripture is telling us except that we now we look for facts so the Mahabharata for example at the end of that extraordinarily popular scripture in India you haven't a clue what the gods are really up to the heroes are going to heaven and by the time that they the scripture has played around with you and you don't know whether Heaven exists or not whether it's a just a chimera and you don't know what an earth was the point at the absolutely devastating appalling war that ushered in our present age was was worth saving when millions of people died and only a few were left and yet this is one of India's most loved scriptures and the fact that he gives no certainty plunges you into doubt is not a block it's not is not seen as a as a problem and when you look at when the Chinese talk about heaven that is that their heart their their ultimate reality and it is but John could also be pronounced nature as well it's not just heaven it's not a place in the sky where God lives but heaven is inseparable from Earth and inseparable from humanity these things are all intertwined the Brotman in India it means the all God is all that is all that is and the brockman is in me and in you and in this podium in in animals and plants in a glass of water the Brahman is present that's why Indians hold their hands together and bow where they're in red in contact with they're looking they're looking for the divine in you which is everywhere omnipresent Wordsworth tried and Blake both tried to hold us back from that this definition of God this God the old man in the sky and the same was happening in Germany where Romantic poets were tried to hold us back from this rationalism which was destroying this sense of the divine as all-encompassing and within you and within me and he said was worth of course as you know he used his very simple language but this but you need to look at the words because he's using them in a very exact way and I want you to notice two of these words one of them is learned he's learned it he says to look at nature in a different way in his old days he when he was a young man he used to be absolutely intoxicated with nature which filled him with wild joy and terror something utterly different that seems to seem to knock him sideways not now now he's learned to look at it you is a mystic like just like the religious mystics who learned to use certain parts of the brain that's helped us to see the wholeness of things knocked the analytic part of the left brain which looks analyzes and separates so he said and the other word that he I want you to look out for is something I mean we use that word so glibly don't we what should we have for supper tonight oh I don't know eggs or something but he's meaning what he's saying here is some thing I'm not going to say God because that word us now got so devalued I'm going to say something something is there at women we don't know what it is he says so I have learned to look on nature not just I did when I in that my mad youth but hearing oftentimes the still say music of humanity so the divine and nature are utterly intertwined knots not separate as they were before and I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused whose dwelling is the light of setting Suns and the round ocean and the living air and the blue sky and in the mind of man emotion and a spirit that impels all thinking things all objects of all thought and rolls through all things now interesting that just at the time when we were creating this idea of that's limited idea of God in this factual way of reading scripture the Jesuits went to China as missionaries they were a new order part of the Catholic Reformation and they were also great scientists many of them were founder members of the new Royal Society that was being developed in London and they took this science with them to the Chinese where they lived among the Confucian literati and the Chinese love the new science they couldn't get enough of it they had no problem with Galileo and Copernicus which caused great stink here in in in in at least in Europe they had no problem with it at all but oh dear oh dear oh dear one of them says when they try and talk about the ultimate reality God they call it seminal matters they talk about a deity that has created the entire cosmos but lives in a tiny little part of it they say they do not understand the limits of their language the new western god hitting the Chinese world heaven is all encompassing and I just like so how does scripture deal with this well I like to take a scripture which will be familiar to some of you most of you I should think here on the book of Genesis caused a lot of problems with evolution and stuff you know this is not how doesn't doesn't gel with Darwin but anyway in Chapter 1 we are presented with a God who is everything that a God should be yeah there he is all-powerful he simply he doesn't have to fight monsters some of the biblical stories said to create the world he just has to speak and it comes into being just been a shear word all he has speak and it is made and this is a very benign God he blesses everything that he has made he doesn't have favorites he's totally impartial and he blesses even his old enemy Leviathan and in total command been kind benign but the rest of the book of Genesis is systematically undermines that the image of chapter 1 so that by chapter 3 God has completely lost control of his creation they're all doing what they want and he he can't manage them at all the God who was so benign and kind and wonderful creator bringing all things into being becomes a cruel destroyer in the time of the flood wiping out almost the whole of the human race in what can only be called a fit of pique I repent me that I've created man he says for no good reason as one could see and devastation devastation cruelty shock and the God who had was so impartial monstrous favoritism he chooses cable rather than cane and Hebrew tells us that when he came sacrifice is refused his face crumples like that of a small child in shock and it puts iron into the man's soul so if he kills his brother that we had the first murder and Esau is rejected in favor of his younger brother Jacob now Esau may not be the brightest pebble on the beach but Jacob can behave in an appalling way sometimes because we've all got faults and Jacob certainly has them here though he has his great wonderful moments too like many of us but ASA you're made to feel his pain have you no blessing for me father he cries Oh father bless me too can't be done and poor Hagar dumped in the desert by Abraham with her little baby Ishmael and runs back and forth in terror until God says look it's gonna be okay I'm going to make your son a great father over great people to heals father of the Arabs but still in the Hajj every year Muslims make remember how God they run back and forth on the site to remit remember that terrifying incident because Ishmael will be the father of the Arab people's and then finally the God who was continually butting in and interfering and and had advising and choosing in the early part of Genesis he just disappears and Joseph of his but his brothers have to cope with their own dreams and insights and struggle without any divine help just as we do so that got nice neat God is continually undercut it's interesting that the the image that Mystics and people Jews kept coming back to was vision of Ezekiel at in the first chapter of the Ezekiel's prophecy of the most bewildering image of God you're told he looks something like this but not completely and something like that and and it fills the vision fills Ezekiel with both a rage and bitterness because he's just had the trauma of being exiled and taken off to Babylonia in in a captivity but also when he tastes the scroll that God hands him with all these curses written on it it tastes too sweet as honey and it's that blue ill during notion that's confusion that is the true a picture of God God we're not being told what we should believe as theirs we're not so don't look for certainties in scripture if you think you're certain about God you've got an almost an idol that you've created in your own image and likeness remember there's a 14th century English mystic who wrote a book called the Cloud of Unknowing that I loved as a young woman and the his student asks the the writer what is God and the the mystic react writer says I have to tell you I do not know weird in the presence of a reality that goes beyond what words and thoughts can do even the word sacred words of Scripture well that's point 1 point 2 scripture does not require that we go back to the beginning and find out what scripture said originally now that's a habits that we've got this is typical scholarship doesn't it always goes back to the original text get back to the great work is being done with with this and we've got we have fundamentalists even here in this country Christian fundamentalists who want to go back to the to revive the ancient Israelite legislation in the early parts of the Bible which would include the stoning of disobedient children this is going right back then you're going back to the beginning we got this from the Protestant reformers who wanted if you remember to go back to the early church the first so they'd be like the first Christians but the with the best will in the world they were men and women of the early modern period they were not men and women of the first century and in first the first Christians were nearly all Jews so these Christian some of whom were anti-semitic we're not going to be able to do this and civilly you have it in Saudi Arabia where they're the revived more the mores of the seventh century the time which the prophet lived to get more authentic but they are not living in the seventh century the hell of seventh century Arabia it's quite a different place so instead scripture is an innovative art and I think we have we see this very clearly in rabbinic Judaism after the temple had been destroyed by the Romans in the year 70 after the after the long war with Rome Jews found it that's the old scriptures almost impossible to read because the temple was the center of their spirituality the focal point on which they all depended they made pilgrimages there from all over the Diaspora it was crucial now it had gone and áback um-- and some felt that it couldn't survive judaism could not survive this terrible shock but this rabbis didn't just throw out scripture instead they developed what they called Midrash which is a word that derives from a root meaning to go in search of something that is not self-evident so if Iraq someone would come to one of the rabbis and ask him a question instead of quoting from a bit of Scripture he would take a sentence say from the Book of Psalms another sentence from one of the prophets and another sentence from Genesis three totally unconnected text string them together and say that's your answer speaking bringing together takes to make new meaning that spoke to the present now the person who invented this this inventive form of exegesis was Rabbi Akiva who was killed by martyred by the Romans in early in the second century and there's a wonderful story about him it says that says that he the fame of his brilliance reached heaven and Moses got to hear about it and was intrigued so he thought he'd go and try and find out for himself what was actually happening so he came down to earth and sat in rabbi akiva scripture class in the back row among the other students but found to his intense embarrassment and dismay he couldn't understand a word of the Torah that Rabbi Akiva was expounding that it had been revealed to him to Moses on Mount Sinai but instead of going back in a huff were in a rage he goes back to heaven well you can almost hear him shake see him shaking his head rather like a proud father saying my children have defeated me like by children of better than I they've gone ahead another rabbi put it more succinctly he said that which was revealed to Moses that which was not revealed to Moses was revealed to rabbi akiva and his companions scripture was not something that had happened once in the distant past revelation was not confined to a distant point on Mount Sinai it occurred every time a Jew a student confronted the sacred text and with his he would stand with his teacher as if they were both standing was all Moses receiving a new revelation and in some of the early portions of the of the Talmud you have a blank page for the student to put in his own insights and if he didn't add that this revelation would be incomplete because it would continue every time so there will be something new you must make scripture speak to the time the voice of God God is not did not trumpet those words to one person a little while ago he and to come back to my original point let's Moses for a moment that script God does that the scriptures are not clear about God he chooses a prophet that has the most terrible stammer I cannot I ever since childhood says Moses tells God I've had this appalling stamin no one can understand a word I say no no no worries of God your brother Aaron speaks beautifully and clearly he'll be able to speak for you so in what we're only getting God's words that second hand through Aaron and goodness knows how much Aaron managed to understand of what Moses was saying and furthermore it's Aaron clear voluble sort of lucid Aaron who is guilty of the Israelites greatest idolatry with worshiping God in the form simplified form of a golden calf they don't want lucid things in in Scripture and the rabbi's weren't going to be lucid either and so Midrash really is the New Testament it actually they have a they developed a very similar kind of exegesis than people the early Christians rather the same as the Qumran community who lived beside the Dead Sea which saw references to their own modern movement in Scripture and they never the Mathew for example never misses an opportunity to bring in a text completely out of context to apply it to Jesus when at one point the baby Jesus who had to flee Herod go to go into Egypt and become a refugee in Matthews Matthews story quite different from Luke's story they you know there's no consistency here Matthew quotes Prophet Hosea who says I brought my son out of Egypt well Hosea was obviously referring to Israel being led out of captivity in Egypt by Moses I didn't have Jesus in mind but Matthew applies it strictly to Jesus but this could sound like some a bit of a clever dick stuff where you just pick out a text and in the cerebral way but it was not it was an emotional very emotional feeling for form of reading scripture and we have a an instance of it in some Luke's Gospel which was written probably in the early second century in this lovely story it's just happened after Jesus has been crucified and two of the disciples who are not named interestingly are walking away from Jerusalem and to the nearby town of Emmaus and they're in great distress they they're beside themselves with sorrow and a stranger passes them and says look I can see you're really upset would you like to share this with me I'm always relieved that those disciples weren't stiff upper-lip Brits who would have said oh no thanks we're fine and that would have been the end of the matter but they don't they take this they take this stranger into their confidence and he could have laughed at them and make them feel a lot worse but they take that risk and said well we thought Jesus was the Messiah and his and look what happened to him and the screegit says oh slow of heart and not to read the scripture and starting with Moses and going right the way through the prophets he shows how he was always predicted that the Messiah would be suffer a dreadful fate and be killed and well the scripture says no such thing but this is this inventive exegesis they they found texts very often though the ones with the sorrowful texts about about the man of sorrows by it written by an unknown prophet who we call second Isaiah which to apply to Jesus suffering those he may have cited anyway these anyway they're comforted by this and only when they get home they have supper together and Jesus breaks the bread the stranger rather breaks the bread and in that moment they recognized Jesus and he disappears he goes immediately the point is they say this is my point did not our hearts burn within us when he opened the scriptures to us this is an emotional thing that gave you insight not just some as I say some clever dick playing around with with texts Muslims to have this always had this invented a streak of about 60 years after the prophets death he wouldn't recognize this lamb was in an entirely different situation they were in charge of a huge empire and they developed all kinds of new spiritualities that still are still important today shi ism sufism Ficker that's leches disputants and and and asceticism all kinds of new ideas but I'm quitting even Arabi a 12th century mystic and philosopher whom I may refer to again at the end and he said every time you recite notice he says recite not read every time you recite the Quran it should mean something different to you and if it doesn't mean something different you're not read reciting it correctly you're not in the moment that God is telling you something from now not what yes what he'd have said yesterday or tomorrow and the susi a Confucian told his students do not read current beliefs into the sacred text don't look for the Orthodox doctrines don't look for something new that is speaking to you today and we've lost that and tied ourselves up in knots trying to be authentic me going back to basics when what the scripture is demanding is not traditionalism but to apply the divine the unknowable divine to one's situation here and now and make it speak to the present

Channel: The Progressive Forum

Views: 3,853

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

Id: m6xRv-g0GwY

Length: 32min 43sec (1963 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 10 2019