The Case for God: Karen Armstrong at St Paul's Cathedral

good evening ladies and gentlemen and on behalf of the chapter of some walls cathedral and the whole cathedral community a very warm welcome here this evening for the next in our series of forum debates the case for God we're delighted that you all here this evening and we should take this opportunity of thanking Elizabeth Foy who manages the forum series for us and has devised this excellent program that we're in the middle of and also Rob Gordon of the simples Institute who facilitates the debates by broadcasting them on the cathedral website and also on our youtube channel so thanks to them and thanks to all of you for being with us I'll introduce our speaker in a moment but on behalf particularly of those of you who may not have been to one of our debates before let me just explain the shape of the evening and how it all works in a moment Karen Armstrong will speak about why she thinks there is a case for God in our lives if you've got a question for her write it down on the back of the leaflets that you've been given while she's speaking and then you hold it up in the air and you probably have to wave it around a little bit and one of the ones Minh will come over and take it off you and it'll be taken away and then sent to me on my laptop so that I can ask it of Karen Armstrong but that will carry on until about seven thirty so if you have a question write it down wave it in the air and somebody will come and take it off you and then we'll finish promptly at eight o'clock and Karen Armstrong's books I'm delighted to say are on sale here this evening here under the dome and she's very kindly agreed to sign copies of them so do come forward afterwards if you'd like to but now it gives me great pleasure to introduce our speaker Karen Armstrong is one of the world's leading commentators on religious affairs she spent seven years as a Roman Catholic nun in the 1960s but then left her teaching order in 1969 to study English at Oxford and in 1982 she became a full-time writer and broadcaster she's the best-selling author of 15 books including the spiral staircase her memoir of her own spiritual awakening after leaving the convent and books about Christianity and Judaism the Buddha Islam myth the Bible and indeed the case for God what religion really means she's also a passionate campaigner for religious liberty and the founder of the Charter for compassion she's addressed members of the United States Congress and the Senate and has participated in the World Economic Forum and we're honoured and delighted to have her with us tonight so please give a very warm welcome to Karen Armstrong [Applause] mmm when I was a child I had to learn this definition of God in the Roman Catholic catechism what is God was the question and not fazed at all by the enormity of that question this was what we had to reply God is the supreme Spirit who alone exists of himself and is infinite in all perfections now I have to say that at eight years old that didn't mean much to me and I still find it a rather arid and pompous definition but as a result of my studies now for over 20 years of the world religions I've also come to the conclusion that it is incorrect because it takes it for granted first of all that you can simply draw breath and define a word whose a literal original meaning define means to set limits upon a reality that has to go beyond all we can think and know despite the extreme sophistication of our scientific and literary culture our thinking about God and religion is often rather primitive undeveloped perhaps the two are related in some way and certainly I if I look back at some of the great luminaries of the past Maimonides in the Jewish tradition Thomas Aquinas in the Christian tradition even Cena in the Muslim tradition they would have been appalled by that definition Maimonides for example and here he was followed very much by most of the great monotheists said you cannot even say that God exists because our notion of existence is so limited that it cannot possibly apply to God the you can't say that God is good we talk about a good meal or a good dog and a good person how can we apply goodness archon our splintered concept of goodness to God and so that certainly God is not the Supreme Spirit or the Supreme Being because that suggests he's just a being like us but at the top of the hierarchy whereas when we're speaking about God we're talking about something very different and frankly many people as wills taught thick fine tonight find that definition of God not only incorrect as I do but incredible and we've made a problem for ourselves and I want to sort of explore that tonight in about the 10th century before Christ the priests of India the Brahmins developed a form of religious discourse which I think becomes a model of theology it's called the Brahma Jia competition and the object of this competition was to find a formula a verbal formula for speaking about Brahman the ultimate reality of the Hindu tradition now Brahman the word Brahman can be translated the all Bronfman is everything that exists so you can't possibly define it because it is everything and you can't talk to Brahman because Brahman is in you is it's you you are Brahman as well as something it's not something out there a Brahman is impersonal it is utterly indescribable and yet these priests were setting themselves the task of finding a way to use words to speak about brahman so the Challenger would kickoff and drawing on his immense learning and spirituality he would come out with a statement about brahman which was perhaps very learning riddling poetic illusive and the other priests would have to listen and then drawing upon that they would have to take it a step further and so they would go on each building on the learning and spirituality of the last speaker but the winner of the competition was the priest who made them all keep silence where they heard what he said they fell into silence and in that moment of silence the Brahman was present it was felt to be present the Brahman was not in our world worthy definitions but in the stunning realization of the impotence of speech and that's what really good theology should be instead of saying telling us what God is in a single sentence it should lead us to realize the idiocy of what we're saying in the kindest possible way it's a bit like the the that moment at the end of a concert when the last notes of the symphony died away there's often a very full very emotional beat of silence in the hall before the applause starts now good theology should be helping us like the bra as the bra modular copper 2 competitors did to live in that moment of full silence when we realized that we've come to the end of what words and thoughts can do because transcendence is built into the way we experience the world that we experience life whether we call it God or Brahma Norton or not we are constantly coming up against the limits of what we can say and know and we seek such moments out so that when if we don't find them in a church like this anymore we'll look for it in dance or music or sex or art or poetry something that makes we seek out moments of what's called ecstasy the Greeks call it ecstasy which means stepping outside where we feel transported beyond ourselves and that we're fulfilling our humanity living our humanity more intensely and fully than usual and yet it's very difficult to put those moments into words and yet we we seek them out that's what theology did all the great world religions including the three monotheism's have all developed their own form of Brahma diya competition we'll be talking about San Thomas Aquinas --is a bit later but in a couple of weeks ago I was in San Petersburg and we attended the liturgy there and I very much remembered had in my mind Dennis the areopagus some of you will never have heard of Dennis and yet in the Middle Ages until the Reformation he what this Greek Orthodox thinker was one of the most important and seminal authorities in Western theology Western Christian theology and the fact that we don't know him now is a sign a symptom of our spiritual predicament of our undeveloped rather primitive way of talking about the divine because in the liturgy Denis would constantly be saying to the audience when he came to preach you listen to the scripture and when you hear God called a rock you know God is not a rock when you hear God called a warrior you know God is a warrior and yet not a warrior and you go on further to say God is not good God is not one God is not three and at the end you are coming up to that bro Maggio moment when you cross over into transcendence into ecstasy they made evils had a word for that part of the mind that tips over into transcendence they called it intellectus now you might say well what about revelation then I mean that may be all right for a religion such as Buddhism or Hinduism but we believe that our God has revealed itself to us in scriptures in the man Jesus and in the in the world around us there has been revelation but again we mustn't think as we do in the modern world that revelation means that everything is now cut and dried and we have it all sewn up the here I like to tell some story two stories about the Jewish rabbis in the time of the Talmud because the the idea if the the rabbis had was that revelation is never finished we are all still standing beside Moses on Mount Sinai and every time a Jew confronts the scripture it means something different because the Word of God is infinite and cannot be tied down to a single interpretation I say you God look up you know what God says about this because it will mean something different something that the biblical author would never have thought of and the person who invented this very inventive form of scriptural interpretation was Rabbi Akiva who was probably martyred by the Romans in these early second century it was said of Rabbi Akiva that his brilliance was so extraordinary that his fame reached heaven and Moses heard about it and he was absolutely intrigued so he came down to earth one day and attended Rabbi Akiva zs-- Torah class and he sat at the eighth row at the back of all the other students and found to his acute embarrassment that he couldn't understand a word of what Rabbi Akiva was saying about the Torah the law which had been revealed to him Moses on Mount Sinai and he went back to heaven shaking his head and saying my children have conquered me my children have gone beyond me rather like a proud father and one of the other rabbis put this rather more succinctly he said what God what was revealed to Moses what was not revealed to Moses was revealed to Rabbi Akiva and his generation revelation goes on and there is no definitive form another story of the early rabbis involves the great Rabbi Eliezer who had was a very opinionated man and one day he was standing having an argument with a couple of his colleagues in the house of studies about a particular point of Jewish law and he could not bring them round to his own interpretation so in desperation he asked God to perform some miracles to prove that he was right and sure enough a carob tree moved 300 meters of its own accord from right to left the water in a canal started flowing uphill against the laws of nature and the walls of the house of studies suddenly shook and seemed on the point of collapse but the other rabbis were simply not impressed in fact Rabbi Joshua spoke very severely to the walls and said it is not suitable that walls should collapse when the sages are inside discussing serious matters and finally our rabbi akiva in said I want a voice from heaven to tell me who is right and obligingly a voice boomed down from the sky why are you quarreling with Rabbi Eliezer the Torah is always exactly as he says and Rabbi Joshua looked up and said no and he quoted back to God his own Scripture quite out of context it is not in heaven from Deuteronomy and the commentator of this story says that what he meant was that on Mount Sinai the law left heaven and came down to earth it is no longer the business of heaven it is now enshrined in the heart of every Jew and nobody not even a divine voice can tell another Jew what to think now this is the kind of freedom in a sense this creative freedom with the sense of exploration and newness that we tend to have lost as we cling nervously to orthodoxy part of it is a misunderstanding of what we call myth in popular parlance a myth is often something that simply isn't true if a politician is accused of a peccadillo in his past life he'll often say oh well it's a myth it didn't happen but the word myth in pre-modern the pre-modern world was not a an inferior version of history a myth was more than history it's been well described in this way a myth is something that in some sense happened once but which also happens all the time it's the timeless element in a story that you have to bring out and apply to your own circumstances it's also been said very well that myth is an early form of psychology all those stories about God's going in search of maidens in and going through labyrinths and killing monsters and demons they're not meant to be real as historical events but they're telling us what to do in ourselves when we have to cope with our own labyrinthine psyche and fight our own demons and risk our own lives in the accomplishment of truth and the myth is some is above all a program for action it's no good just reading a myth you won't get it unless you put it into practice and I think this in particular is something that we've lost now let's look at the creation myth which is causing us all a great deal of trouble these days God created the world in seven days etc now since the beginning of the scientific year and I'll come to that in a minute we've tended to read our texts literally our scriptures with the literalism that is absolute the unparalleled in the history of religion the creation myth was telling you something timeless the priestly author was saying something very clear to his own people at that time who were living in captivity under the Babylonians about the difference of their God from Marduk the Creator God of the Babylonians who created the world in huge battles and killing and catastrophe and created the world by a kit by taking one of these one of these defeated gods and splitting him in half no said the priestly author our God doesn't need to fight he simply creates the world in out of sheer command and instead of violence and fighting God blesses everything that he has made and says that it is very good and rests on the Sabbath so it is giving a very ironic view of the creation process no one thought of reading the first chapter of Genesis as a literal account of the origins of life the in in here in Europe right up until the Reformation a people were encouraged to read their scriptures allegorically you would start it was a four-step process and to every word of scripture every verse of scripture every story of Scripture you applied for four methods first you read the plain text and you had to do the plain text seriously and study it and see what was happening then you move to what they call the spiritual or the allegorical sense then you moved up and went to the moral sense and extracted from this morale that the biblical author would never have thought of but which applied to your own situation just as the rabbi's did and finally the mystical sense the eschatological sense and I have to say that as a Catholic child this was roughly how we were taught to read the Bible we didn't read the Bible very much we thought that was a rather Protestant thing to do but we were nevertheless we read it in this way and the word evolution never cropped up at all as a religious problem now the early fathers of the church who came across these extraordinarily difficult ask biblical texts for example so we cannot take these things literally Oregon that first one of the first grade exegetes we cannot take these texts literally in fact he said God has actually put the contradictions in Scripture to remind us to spring up to this spiritual sense to the allegorical sense and st. Augustine oh you can call him if you like the founder of the Western rationale tradition said that if a scriptural statement contradicted reputable science you must find an new allegorical interpretation of that verse because God could not contradict science and right on the cusp of the Scientific Revolution you have Calvin no less being taking to task what he calls those frantic persons who like to vilify what they don't understand he's commenting on the first chapter of Genesis and he says that there are some people with the new scientific discoveries who are trouble because they seem to contradict Scripture for example the Bible says that the Sun and the oonh are the largest of the heavenly bodies and now our scientists he says are telling us that Jupiter is bigger than the moon well the problem is says Calvin that they're not talking about science the science he says it's very useful and must not be impeded by these frantic persons who don't know what they're talking about saya that Scripture is not talking about science it's talking about other things and if you want to find out about the cosmos or astronomy don't look in scripture look elsewhere well now you may say well you know God as the literal creator of the world this is how we think of it and we think of Thomas Aquinas who after is famous for I have evolving five proofs for God's existence he decides that God is the first cause God is the he's using he's not frightened of science Aquinas is looking at the physics and science of Aristotle at a time when it was considered very very risky and unorthodox to do so they were now Aristotelian sciences a bit absurd to us today but it was cutting-edge at the time Aquinas was writing and so he takes Aquinas his proofs and he looks at what Maimonides and even Xena had to say about this again he wasn't at all afraid of learning from Jewish and Muslim sources and he says yes God was is the highest excellence God is the unmoved mover God is the first cause one after the other and at the end of these five proofs he says at the end of each one that is quad honors deacon dome that is they're roughly the sort of thing that everybody means when they say God here's the first cause God is necessary being God is you know the the unmoved mover and then and this is the bit that people don't read Aquinas pulls the rug from under our feet and says but we don't know what it is we've proved we haven't a clue what we mean when we talk about necessary being all the beings we know come from another being in some way they are contingent beings we're talking about a being that is necessary that is being itself God is not one of the things that our God says Aquinas is not a sort of thing God is being itself as they say absolutely and when we talk about God being simple simple being itself again we don't know what this means because as Aquinas we are composite beings we have bodies we have spirits there are things you can say about it's like we're female or male or fat or clever or old or a dancer you can't say any of those things about God God is being itself again we don't know what this is all we've proved is the existence of a mystery now the word mystery gets us because we get another of those words that have got devalued mystery is often seen to be a sort of mumbo-jumbo some sort of difficult thing we don't know what what an earth it can mean but we just believe it but this is a white boundaries mystery a mysterium in the the originally in the Greek word it was an activity the ancient Athenians would take part every year in the you see nyan mysteries at elusive about 20 miles away from Athens a sort of three-day ordeal where they fasted they walked where they were exhausted they were exposed to terrible things and they were it's exposed to beautiful things they got no sleep and it was an intense experience and at the end of this so Claire carefully orchestrated were these mysteries that they they found some of them that they were no longer afraid of dying they had somehow come to terms with their mortality with with that with the reality of their own death and a mystery is something that we do rather than something that we just accept notionally on faith another of these words that have got mislaid we thought today we seem to equate faith with believing things in so much so that we often say of a religious person is he or she a believer as though accepting certain creedal propositions was the main thing that they do know the word belief has also changed its meaning believin in Middle English meant to trust to be loyal to to commit yourself accept to my believer says the night saucers night to his Lord accept my fealty my loyalty and the King James translators used the word belief therefore to translate the Greek word pista s' Jesus is constantly asking for pistols for faith but he's not asking people to believe that he's the son of God or the second person of the Trinity because pissed this again means commitment action a dedication Jesus is asking for piss tests that is for disciples who will give all they have to the poor who will work night and day for the coming of the kingdom who will love their enemies live like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field having pissed ease having trust in God their father and when the when some jerem translated the Greek word pista s' into Latin he used the word feeders but feeders hasn't got a verbal form faith so he used the word credo which comes from a root meaning cord oh I give my heart and so he when the early Christians were baptized they would go through a colossal ceremony and one of the earliest ones we have is written down by Cyril of Jerusalem in the Holy Sepulchre Church in Jerusalem and the new candidates for baptism on Easter these Easter night would stand outside the church they'd been fasting and preparing for all the six weeks of Lent and this was a mysterium this was an ordeal a mystery that would that they had to do and so they would start off outside the church looking to the west the towards Egypt just as the Israelites had done because they were going to make their own crossing through the baptismal waters as the Israelites passed through the sea of reeds they came into the church they were stripped of their clothes and plunged into the baptismal waters three times in each the celebrant would say as they pulled them under do you have pistols or do you have belief feeders in the father and they would come out spluttering and crying piss tail in the son in the Holy Spirit now these people were not sitting on the end of that baptismal pool and saying well having surveyed all the evidence I can now come to the conclusion that I have decided to believe in God this was an act of commitment and a mystery of mysterium that changed them just as the Greeks were changed at allusive I made them you would you it was a powerful performance and it was an act of commitment and dedication at a time when it was sometimes very dangerous to be a Christian and could cost you your life now belief and myth is about doing things not about thinking things and we have turned our religion into a head-trip religion religious knowledge is a practical skill it's like driving or swimming you can't you can't sit on the edge of the pool and read a book about swimming you have to get into the water and start learn the knack of floating and once you've learned how to float your cards imagine how you could never do it and you nor can you explain how you've done it it's like driving again you can't learn to drive simply by reading the highway code and studying the car manual you've got to get into the vehicle and manipulate the brakes until finally you're doing it without knowing how again how you're doing it now we have lost the knack of religion we become very self-conscious we're trying to crack our heads open to believe a whole lot of mysteries and and weird definitions of God instead of doing it how did we get to this well briefly very briefly in the 17th century Sir Isaac Newton towering genius discovered the solar system and he could only account for the intricacy of the solar system by saying that someone must have been there planning it God was a was was had become a scientific explanation he said from what I see we now know that the we can prove scientifically what the Bible has always told us that there is a being up there that is supremely intelligent and supremely wise and we can infer that he is supremely benevolent - and said Newton and here I quote clearly we're very well-versed in mechanics and geometry now this would have made Thomas Aquinas as I say horrified because and indeed all the Fathers of the Church the great fathers of the Athanasius who designed the and the the nicene creed that we recite in churches like this said that the new doctrine and it was a new doctrine that God had created the world out of nothing that was new in the fourth century unheard of in antiquus no gods created the world out of nothing they could only help along or order a creative process that was already fairly well advanced and that includes yahwah in the first chapter of Genesis but so Athanasius said if we believe that God created the world out of nothing that proves that the world can tell us nothing about God because it's on tose it's being is nothing nothingness and it can have nutkin tell us nothing about being itself which is what we mean by God so that the idea that you could look at the physical world and draw conclusions about the nature of God with something entirely revolutionary and good or Newton a with it you know you have to try and apply your science to your other attitude to your religion and the rest of life but of course it was only a few generations later before other scientists like Laplace for example found that they could dispense with God as the first cause because they proved that you could that matter could start up on its own that you didn't need an outside agent but that wouldn't have mattered a jot but the churches took up Newton's I idea and it became absolutely central Newton's Newton's theology became central to the both to the Enlightenment and to great deal of Christianity and people lost the old apophatic or silent modes of thought of Denis the areopagus that primordia sense the idea that we know nothing about God and said we'd know exactly that God is a good mathematician very much domesticating transcendence and they lost the older habits of thought and so when Darwin came along they had many people were flummoxed and had no recourse [Applause] but let's just look for example quickly at Trinity I which is a mystery now this would be have been this doctrine we now know would have been imparted to the new Christians after they'd been through the mysterium of their baptism it not before but afterwards and they weren't told now God is one and God is three and they all obediently bleated this out like sheep and believed it it was a mysterium it was a meditation it was something that you do if you want i if anyone wants to ask me during question time about this Greek the Greek idea of Trinity I'll be happy to do so with our anxious to get to the questions but the I the point of this meditation was a meditation about the nature of God where you swung your mind from God's absolute indescribable ineffability something we could never know to the three hypotheses that we did know that gave us some intimation of what God was like goddess God is the word as in the man Jesus as in creation and back then back to the ineffable the three revelations and the and the one Lucia which is as beyond our Ken as a as a computer is beyond the can of a goldfish and it was a meditation that stopped people stopped Christians thinking about God as though god were a simple personality that you could define in the way that the Catholic catechism did and Gregory of Nyssa who is one of the great Greek fathers who formulated this doctrine of Trinity spoke about this meditation and he said when I think of the one my mind is drawn to the three the Father Son and spirit and then back to the one and he said my eyes filled with tears and I lose all sense of where I am now in the West we haven't done that meditation and therefore Trinity often doesn't make a great deal of sense to us it's like those mathematical conundrums one did at school whereby you went through a whole involved process of reasoning and at the end you could say that a equals B 2 squared a formula which would men have meant nothing unless you'd been through the whole process similarly because the the mysterium of Trinity was not the fact that it was um indescribable and incomprehensible but because it was a meditation it was something you did with your mind that would affect the way you thought about God what we have in the Bible is a starterkit' something to work on God is a personality a very belligerent personality sometimes in the early books of the Bible and we learn about this God very often when we're small children at the same time as we're learning about Santa Claus but over time our understanding of Santa Claus changes and develops but our idea of God remains often at an infantile level and if we are just thinking that we'll get to God if we sort of go through cut make ourselves believe in it it's putting the cart before the horse all religious people Jews Christians and Muslims religion is something that you do you behave in a different way you do things with your mind in a different way you learn to live in compassion with other people all day and every day as confucius said and then you begin to have some understanding of what we mean by God even though you can never define it thank you Karen thank you very much indeed that was immensely exciting and in an age when we are deeply concerned about things like religious extremism to hear your caveat about the way in which we limit God was was very moving and very timely so thank you I've got a question for you but while I'm asking it can I remind the audience about your moment to write down your questions and wave your question in the air and we'll come and collect them and then put them to Karen and Karen the myth of creation we make an appearance in that myth when we're told that we're made in the image of God and one wonders if that's the first point at which we start to limit God by projecting an image of ourselves onto God and saying that's what God looks like he looks like us because we're made in the image of God Dorothy L sayers the early 20th century detective novelist but also writer of popular theology challenged that interpretation of Genesis chapter 1 verse 27 by saying up until the point at which we're told that we're made in the image of God the only thing we know about God is that God created and therefore to be made in the image of God means that we are most godlike when we're being creative and I wanted a that sat within your assertion that myth is a program for action yes very nice because the creativity is a is something that you do that you're involved with that you get a knack for that involves it putting yourself to one side - you're not going to be a good creative person if you're endlessly talking about yourself and and it is the great spirit the the it's where we put ourselves at the center of the picture that we have problems and you know and also this idolatry that you mentioned that God is just like us this this has been a very dangerous idea because it's only one step from you were talking about extremists the Crusaders went into battle crying God wills it when they slaughtered thousands of gnu's Muslims and Jews they were projecting all their own hatred and loathing of these rival faiths on to this being and giving giving it a sacred seal of divine approval and hideous things are done and that is why all the great monotheistic thinkers were so careful to say we cannot think about God as a personality like us writ large with likes and dislikes similar to our own this is idolatry and we can have idolatry it's not just bowing down in front of a statue idolatry is also a doctrine we can make a doctrine of our doctrinal statements about God we can make an idol of them and also I something else we can do with the God we are in God's image I am a complete mystery to myself to be honest I'm constantly doing things that surprise me or treat having odd thoughts or having weird dreams or saying now why on earth did I do that and I'd love to be able to get this is what Trinity is about actually God's essential Lucia we try and transmit from this this weirdness that we call ourself that we find hard to define we try to transmit it outside in our words in our gestures and that's roughly what they were thinking of in Trinity God trying to make itself accessible to us as I am trying right now to make myself accessible to you in the words that I'm choosing but we have to remember that if we are mysterious to ourselves every single human being that we meet is in God's image and is also a mystery is also absolutely mysterious whoever they are and that means that we talk about one another it's such an omniscient way oh you know the trouble with her is so you could sum up that complicated human being in a single sentence and we do it with whole peoples and whole nations to our great detriment oh well the trouble with Islam is and very often when you hear someone say that what they know about Islam could be comfortably contained on the back of a small postcard now so we're in God's image male and female created he them we're all an icon of the divine and that's an icon in the Greek Orthodox world you look through it to the divine and we should try as one of the great Muslim thinkers even Rav said every single one of us is an incarnation of one of God's hidden names an unrepeatable revelation of God to the world and our job is to look beneath the unpromising exterior - that word that God that has been expressed in that particular person and the it also reminds us that we can't sum up God because if you think that every single one of us in the room in this room right now it's a unique and unrepeatable revelation of God to the world and then every single person who's been born in whatever faith he or she is and if therapy is very clear about that you can't some God up or say what God is it's another way a form of meditating on the transcendence of the Divine a member of the audience is asking whether there was one particular event or experience perhaps that confirmed God and your understanding of God in your life it's simply I went away from religion for 13 years after I left my convent I thought what did nothing to do with it ever again that's it I thought and when I used to see people on the underground reading books about religion I used to feel quite ill never thinking that I would be writing some of these myself one day so you never know I mean one is a mystery to oneself well you never know but for me what changed it was my study not a single incident but studying day by day for my life was I've written about it in the spiral staircase a series of career disasters until I was nearly 50 I never intended to do this work I wanted to be an English literature professor and failed and then a whole lot of other things failed and found I found myself writing about religion and first of all the silence because by this time after my latest career disaster I was completely washed up lost all my friends living in a very remote part of London and there was just me and the text and there was no one as let as there had been when I was working in television to egg me on to be outrageous and provocative as I was in my early works and debunking there was just me in the texts theology is poetry and you cannot read a poem by Rilke for example at a nightclub you need silence and by relation to this texts and the subject matter started to change and then I encountered quite early this phrase by the lui messini on the great Islamist scholar who said that a historian of religion must approach the subject with what he called the science of compassion science not in the sense of Newton science or physics chemistry but Ski NC a-- a form of knowledge that comes with compassion that he said you cannot regard the spiritualities of the past or spiritual as the spirituality of other cultures from the vantage point of post enlightenment Western rationalism you have to put that to one side and in a scholarly way reproduce all the circumstances in which that spirituality came into being and not leave it until you could imagine yourself in similar circumstances feeling the same and I thought well that's what I have to do and so when I was writing about Muhammad peace be upon him I had even though I would have said I didn't believe in God at that stage belief and who dearth was God but that was come later but I had to put myself in the position of a man in the hell of seventh century Arabia who sincerely believed he'd been touched by God and unless I could do that I would miss the essence of the Prophet and I was doing this as its again it's doing it you see putting I had to put clever overeducated Curren on the backburner forget about all I knew and immerse myself in something else it was a way of getting beyond ego it was X versus stepping outside oneself and that gave made the whole of religious experience come alive to me in a different way but it's doing it it's putting yourself to one side and then in addition to ourselves how do we help someone if we should help them if we can help them whose faith has dried up how do we encourage them leave them alone [Laughter] you know people have faith and you have come in all kinds of ways you speak to people where they are not ever where you think they ought to be from where they are and who knows what what religion is or what faith is I mean I've moved a long long way I mean that they would be Catholics if the audience perhaps who think I'm lapsed you see that I've gone away from all that and I'm a lost soul maybe I am but people find holiness in all kinds of ways in I hate to sound corny but in their child's face or a book as I did or an animal or you know or or in a beautiful numinous service or in a piece of music people find a certain sanctity holiness that lifts you up and makes you think oh and our and and so leave people alone to do don't bombard them with theology or doctrines or try to Shepherd them onto the true path that is there on their own journey all one can do is try and make sure that their lives are as free from pain as you can possibly make them and Dorothy L says used to get Red Cross about the way in which the church kept ordaining good Christian and she said people can actually be good Christians without having to be ordained all the time yes open Church bazaars she was it and it was Christopher smarts cat Jeffrey the spirit of the Living God when he was in the depths of despair he saw images of God in his cat thinking of some of your opening remarks what one or two questions that are coming in about if we aren't to say that God is good how do we deal with expressions that are important to us nevertheless about God being loved or how do we know whether God is benevolent or not we'll never know a religion is about unknowing but I think I think perhaps I should correct what I said we because theology for all it's supposed to be geared to transcendence and unknowing is a very wordy discipline people like myself have written reams about God and spirituality and faith but the idea is just to hold yourself back a little bit and say yes hear yourself talking hear yourself say God is good god is love God is beauty God is justice all those things and then realize at the end of it that really it's very hard to apply goodness as we know it which is always fractured always tainted in some way because we're such complex beings all love love is I really try not to use it very much to be honest because I think we've debased it so much in our culture oh you know I'd love a gin and tonic you know I love that movie and I used to have troubled me greatly as a child that I had to say I loved God and frankly I preferred the dog I mean as someone pointed out same letters you know just switch them around a bit but you know and I knew in my heart that what I win what I meant by love bore no relation to anything I felt for God and and if you'd look around the world and you say God is good and yet God is all that is and if you believe in some analogical mysterious way that God is creator and you know and if believe in Providence then you really do have a problem about the goodness of God we've made we've made the word love very gooey as well so that quite often that's another way of limiting God in relation to this sort of Richter smile or in anger in that it can be such a flimsy way of expression so it's about feeling - and what we you people like Dennis the areopagus said you can't experience God emotionally any more than you can conceive him intellectually so don't worry if your feelings are drying up this is all so these difficulties just to be careful about what you say about God just hold a little distance so that you are not making God to domestic and cutting him ridiculous pronoun down to size making him something that fits into our little puny mindset a lot of people are asking questions Karen about if religion is something we do rather than believe what are your tips for doing religion well compassion I think I mentioned it with with the whole idea that well of my study learning to put myself and feel because a compassionate means feeling with the other putting yourself in other people's shoes and the fact that every single one of the major world faiths has developed a version of the Golden Rule independently never treat others as you would not like to be treated yourself and says that's the essence of religion that's the test of spirituality tells us something about the structure of our humanity and I think if we see all traditions have moments of Epiphany when you see the divine in another person where you where you behave will you put yourself to one side and reach out to the other add it to behave we now have to behave as confucius said who he was the first person who formulated the golden rule 500 years or so before christ in a form that was actually written down and he said it was the center central thread that pulls through all his teaching master they said which of your teachings can we put into practice all day and every day and confucius said never treat others as you would not like to be treated yourself and all day and every day we have a habit don't we of saying when we done something nice for somebody well that's my good deed for the day as though we could then return to the for the next 23 hours to our usual greed bit and selfishness no but all day and every day to put yourself empathetically and with a great deal of intelligence and insight into the position of the other you then begin to lose that meet me first ego full characteristic that is what holds us back from God or for what we call God they all say that because we get stuck within our puny selfish egotistical little selves and as a young nun we did all kinds of things to get rid of ego you know kissing the floor and kissing people's feet and confessing our sins in public it was all a complete worse waste of time because these kind of practices made one you know so we enumerated yet again our many sins it's you were stuck in the ego that you were supposed to transcend far better to pour yourself out in compassion and respect which doesn't have anything to do with love or feeling for the other all others whoever they are and frankly I think if we don't do that today and interpret the golden rule globally so that we treat all peoples as we would wish to be treated we are not going to have a viable world the sages who composed the golden rule were living Confucius Hillel Jesus the sages of the Upanishads they were all living in societies like our own where violence and greed had reached an unprecedented crescendo and they all realized that unless we observe this rule human beings would destroy one another and that is even more true today Karen when we consider the Bible as allegory our mind flies perhaps the certain historical events which Christians would say are crucial to their faith Jesus's resurrection somebody's asking is it real time event or is it allegory it's not allegory is only one of those steps let's say it's mythos which means it not that it isn't true or that it didn't happen but that it is timeless it's like Exodus in the Jewish sense exodus which is the great myth of the Hebrew people and commemorated and Passover and the Passover liturgy says that every single Jew must consider himself as one of the people who escaped from Egypt you it's timeless you have to make that journey and we have to be resurrected - now if you'd notice it if you read the New Testament clearly it's not at all clear what actually happened on Easter Sunday we've got numerous versions as an empty tomb and mark finishes his gospel the tomb is empty and then later they add that extra bit because they found that a bit ball balled and you've got all kinds of different stories about what Jesus did and you know people recognize him in other people or he suddenly he's not his not a body getting out at the tomb because this body comes and goes he's suddenly with them or he disappears or that and sin Paul has a completely different account where he looks at the resurrection of Jesus the resurrection appearances of Jesus and says this is and finally he appeared to me - as though these were visions that people were having I say they are not telling us what happened what they're telling us is the effect this happened and how how the check this radically changed this frightened group of Christians and how they experienced it let's look for example at the story Luke tells of the road to Emmaus you've got two of the disciples and they're not mentioned that says this is significant because the other they're very keen to say who these people were this is all of us they're two disciples and they're wandering around they're extremely distressed because of the crucifixion and a stranger joins them and the stranger says what's what what's troubling you and I always think it's really a good thing that these disciples weren't Brits British because they'd say oh nothing thanks we're fine in the end of the conversation but they do they allow this stranger into their raw grief taking that risk if the stranger could have just said you must think what that poor Sep the Messiah you must be joking but they made that act of faith and he they allow that stranger to change their faith as they hear II interprets the scripture in a different way and so they they see new things in it then they come to the place where they're lodging and they invite him to have dinner with them and he breaks the bread at in that moment they recognized the Lord and his gone now what this story seems to me to be saying is that in future we will find Christ the risen Christ in our study of Scripture in that rabbinic study of Scripture where you're looking for something new in the rich liturgy in the breaking of bread together and in an encounter with the stranger because Luke's community were a mixed community of Jews and Christians living together having to accommodate one another's differences and allowing the stranger into our lives these I think they are if a body walks out of a tomb that's very interesting but it's got to come into my life and what myth does what myths do is they show you how you can make the resurrection experience something in your life and it's even done say with the Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him who we have a great deal more detail historical detail about him but his life has been and the way he behaved has been in cotton informs it's the basis of Muslim law so that Muslims will pray and wash and speak and greet people as he used to and they are making the Prophet peace be upon him their own they're lifting him from the seventh century and bringing him into their own lives and into the present and similarly in relation to the resurrection appearances action the breaking of bread perhaps also that the flying of fish on the seashore facilitate recognition then in Jesus is teaching ministry someone's asking what exemplifies doing in in relation to Jesus in the way in the way that you use the word doing yes what teachings what what what in what is in what ways does Jesus exemplify doing in his teaching ministry in the sense that you always going out to people on the outside you know so often Christians are very sort of respectable and you know Orthodox and you do this and you're the people out there as sinners and or they're not Christians or have you found Jesus or you haven't found Jesus sorry or no now Jesus seemed to spend his life breaking down these barriers having dinner with the wrong people talking to tax collectors and sinners the people called sinners by the Jewish establishment breaking down these barriers he had what one of the Chinese sage is called Yan I concern for everybody and an anarchic figure in many ways and I think that's the thing that impresses me the most uncomfortable figure I always found him extremely uncomfortable as a young girl and my impressions have not changed I mean he he had had a temper and he would say sometimes you know that woe unto the korazim woe unto the Bethsaida identif have you any of you ever been to korazim I thought the bagent it as a sort of Galilee in Las Vegas or something but I when I went this poor little place you know nothing and he won I I found him very alarming in that respect and I think he would have been an uncomfortable figure and I offer what wonder what would he think of this place what would he or buy fan to take my own particular fantasy was to show him around the Vatican or the Lambeth conference I you know so I think feeling that sense of discomfort with him that he's not just got a lamb on one hand and a little baby on the other this is a very vibrant human being who upset a lot of people but who went out and reached out continually to people who were on the outside but could also take people away and deal with them privately and it's interesting in the Zacchaeus story that he takes in a way and dines with him and something extraordinary happens that we're unclear about except the the result of this and that's perhaps the answers the the troubling disturbing Jesus maybe maybe who knows because he's so we've got not one Jesus for each of the Gospels presents Jesus in a very different way and and that's deliberate because by that time the New Testament is being compiled Jesus is much too vast of a phenomenon in Christian lives to be tied down to a single view and so that some and some Paul who was not interested in Jesus teaching us all life at all afraid G for Paul Jesus is a mysterium something that you do you have to go into the tomb with Christ you have to suffer and you have as he said to put yourself at the back in the in Philippians be like Christ who emptied himself and you do it then you get what Christ is a very good question here for remember the audience is asking what do you think about intercessory prayer can we ask God for things well I really can't myself but that's because I've always been absolutely hopeless at praying I was absolutely as a nun this was a complete drawback because but you know I this is where actually I actually found the Latin much more very helpful as a girl because it reminded you that this isn't speech like we're having now and I think intercessory prayer is difficult I think all prayer is difficult I'm uncomfortable with you know the idea of praising God as though he's sitting up there expecting all this kind of praising oh and less you know say we're miserable sinners and all the rest of it you know so God is supposed to know all this already God is nearer to you than your jugular bone bones the Koran so what I see I see prayer if you are praying in this way as for us rather than for God I think what it helps you to do because it's tough out there in the world we very rarely apologize for anything straight you know if we say we're sorry we usually make it clear that the other person has also been at fault and had something to do with it too there's just the odd word here there and we never express complete need and we can't afford to let our guard down on that side or too low to let people know how frightened we are or to or pray how often we do we ever praise people wholly and sincerely and my favorite remark in that way was when somebody came up to me and said congratulations on all your wonderful reviews and two minutes later said have you put on weight recently you know we somehow feel that if we're praising somebody we are ourselves impaired in some way now in prayer you can express your need express your yearnings and what you'd like to see happen and learn to use language in a different way and that might rub off do I think God is going to answer my prayers no because I don't think God does do that you know if he does answer my prayers and say I've got I've been having some difficulty with my back at the moment and if I ask God to take away my backache I'd have real problems then because why didn't God answer the prayers of the six million Jews who died in Hitler's camps or the 60 million people who died under Stalin or they're all people who had children who are dying or that little girl who was killed you know is taken away and abducted last week you know it because this is because we are now approaching an apathetic moment where we say God will answer our prayers and yet God clearly is not doing that and yet we continue to have trust somehow that we can can that there is some benevolence or some plan because we are beings that feel fall very easily into despair well then I I might ask very nervously as the person who oversees the worship of this place as presenter what about worship is worship just for us no I think I think worship should change you and I know I think but I think it does it in all kinds of ways that isn't about words I think ritual and again what I took away from my convent years was the liturgy we and the plain song singing the Rory in chant I can't sing at all but it was very we all had to be in the choir and I'm glad I did learn about it and how it expressed things without words and gestures when I was in that Russian Orthodox service I felt very at home because of this taught this singing which just brings you into a sense of sacredness so I think worship is tremendously important but I very often and in a place like this you know you're reminded of the imperial court and the Russian liturgy was very much based on you know the imperial court of Constantine in Byzantium and I don't like thinking of God as some emperor sucking up all these praises and you know this is an inadequate idea of God we need to pass on and say God is not like that it should make you realize that we are together where we can express our need and I think transcendence is important where music can lift you and do things for you that words can't do the Christianity is a bit too wordy you remember in Passage to India when mrs. Moore is having her experience of nothingness in that cave she is feeling absolute despair and utter desolation and she says that she can get in this moment forget no help at all from what she calls poor little talkative Christianity some don't mean need a bit of silence in our worship and silence can be produced by music or just to give us something where we can feel ourselves taken over by the community where the fact that we're together and yearning and lifting up and hoping for something and bringing the suffering of the world into the room I think we need to do that the the Church of England's contemporary worship common worship has is its preface liturgy is not liturgy unless you do it which chimes vary with what you're saying but this is from the liturgical Commission that then produced ten volumes of words for us to do that worshiping with Karen you are you spoke in your lecture about you gave us a broader interpretation of the word belief and you taught us about the the Middle English word from which we get the word belief and you talked about commitments for example remember the audience is asking if religion is simply a commitment to a life in service to something greater than ourselves how different is this commitment to anything else for example commitment to politics or commitment to a love affair what does religion add to that commitment you see I think this is another of the words that we don't understand religion this is a word at a concept that we've developed in the West in the 17th century a little bit in early modern period people like Locke and Hobbes and people who were creating the modern nation-state and after the Wars of Religion we said let's keep religion out of politics now No and we developed this idea of religion as something that is private personal that has you know it's in sort of established bases like this it's got Creed's and it's got a set of practices that are distinctly religious this no other though other culture has any concept that corresponds to that of religion as something separate from life a religion pervaded everything and so it would pervade politics every pala political ideology before the modern period was imbued with religion and what we've tried to do is it's like it was like the gin in a cocktail and we've tried to take the gin out of the cocktail and put it back into a separate flask and say don't get it mixed up with these other things so I I think and the word religion used to mean before the modern period it used to mean a monk or a nun or the religious life was the life of a monk or nun as a composed to a secular clergyman perhaps like yourself who was in the world but the world was also holy and so we tried to hive holiness off into into a separate thing I think you see Confucius who's founded the Golden Rule he wouldn't have known what we meant by separating religion from politics when he was asked by his disciple master how can we apply this to politics he said go among the common people as if you were in the presence of an important guest never treat others as you would not like to be treated yourself you seek to establish yourself then seek to establish this is these are all ways of service and you may find yourself totally turned off by religion and him singing and things but you can give a life of service a number for me that is profoundly religious and you can lose yourself and make a difference to the world and experience transcendence or what we call God in other people not containing worship within the church building one of the best place communion prayers is the one that says send us out to be a living sacrifice and worship can also involve doing what we do extremely well in the world rather than making do the second best or turning religion on as we go into a church and I'm a married I've never been married but marriage seems to me literally a mysterium a mystery I don't know how people do it every day you have to forgive something or to accommodate somebody else this is a process of spirituality and that that whole activity is of its essence of what this is how we are we try for ecstasy's getting outside the self in all kinds of endeavors and we fail when we put ourselves first and we fail in a marriage or we fail in politics or we fail as artists Karen a final question and apologies that we haven't been able to ask everybody's Crashers a very very large number I have been coming in which i think is a response in its own way to to what Karen's offered us this evening but a final question Karen that might perhaps also lead you into some closing thoughts which we very much appreciate is it possible to say anything positive and meaningful about God yes as long as you realize that it's only limited you can say you must save the things that are positive about God but just as I say keeping on listening to that listening to yourself listening to and then tipping over to say ah but God is the Muslim say allahu akbar god is always greater greater that we can conceive so you affirm and deny at the same time and it's it's a and you'd be and and so it's it's a sort of dialectical process one eggs on the other but remember too that as jesus said it is not those who say lord lord who will come into the kingdom that we can have make all these fine speeches and we can have all these wonderful literature's and soaring hymns of praise and they're all fine but we always though we always remember how limited our minds are and how little we know how little we know about other people other people ourselves let alone God what we mean by God and that the great joy is to realize the limitation of our minds and to realize that there is something what we call the all the brought man they all and but speech isn't enough and belief isn't enough those who say Lord Lord it's not enough it will must go out and take that experience that reverence that sanctity that we're trying to express when we speak about God the holiness and see it in others and confer it on others I think the great insight of Confucius was that he took the old rituals of courtesy that had been in Chinese society for a long time which was supposed to give when you were courteous to your father you bestowed on your father a sort of godlike sanctity the act conferred a sanctity Confucius saw the moral point of this that when we treat other people whoever they are with absolute respect they become worthy of that respect they become when we're giving them holiness we're passing holiness on to other people because God is everywhere God is the all God is everything that's why it's so difficult to say anything about him him and and how and even as we use that pronoun it's a good reminder of the limitations of our speech but the idea is not justice to conceive God intellectually but to bestow that holiness on others and to see it in others but in seeing the holiness in others you convey that you make people holy you bring sanctity into the world Karen at one level we've been doing what we shouldn't which is sitting and talking about it rather than doing it but you've talked about it so actively and in such an energizing way that it hasn't felt like merely sitting talking about it and I think also you've shown us that understanding our limitations actually sets us free so thank you very very much indeed for being with us and for sharing what you've shared with us tonight ladies and gentlemen Karen Armstrong [Applause]

Channel: St Paul's Cathedral

Views: 100,949

Rating: 4.6582108 out of 5

Keywords: The Case for God, Karen Armstrong, St Paul's Cathedral, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Religion, God, St Paul's Forum, Lecture, Education, Theology, London

Id: uEoAdopw_-A

Length: 92min 48sec (5568 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 19 2012