Going beyond God - Karen Armstrong's "The Spiral Staircase"

Going beyond God

Historian and former nun Karen Armstrong says the afterlife is a "red
herring," hating religion is a pathology and that many Westerners cling to
infantile ideas of God.
By Steve Paulson

May. 30, 2006 | Karen Armstrong is a one-woman publishing industry, the
author of nearly 20 books on religion. When her breakthrough book "A History
of God" appeared in 1993, this British writer quickly became known as one of
the world's leading historians of spiritual matters. Her work displays a
wide-ranging knowledge of religious traditions -- from the monotheistic
religions to Buddhism. What's most remarkable is how she carved out this
career for herself after rejecting a life in the church.

At 17, Armstrong became a Catholic nun. She left the convent after seven
years of torment. "I had failed to make a gift of myself to God," she wrote
in her recent memoir, "The Spiral Staircase." While she despaired over never
managing to feel the presence of God, Armstrong also bristled at the
restrictive life imposed by the convent, which she described in her first
book, "Through the Narrow Gate." When she left in 1969, she had never heard
of the Beatles or the Vietnam War, and she'd lost her faith in God.

Armstrong went on to work in British television, where she became a
well-known secular commentator on religion. Then something strange happened.
After a TV project fell apart, she rediscovered religion while working on
two books, "A History of God" and a biography of Mohammed. Her study of
sacred texts finally gave her the appreciation of religion she had longed
for -- not religion as a system of belief, but as a gateway into a world of
mystery and the ineffable. "Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet" also made
her one of Europe's most prominent defenders of Islam.

Armstrong now calls herself a "freelance monotheist." It's easy to
understand her appeal in today's world of spiritual seekers. As an ex-nun,
she resonates with people who've fallen out with organized religion.
Armstrong has little patience for literal readings of the Bible, but argues
that sacred texts yield profound insights if we read them as myth and
poetry. She's especially drawn to the mystical tradition, which -- in her
view -- has often been distorted by institutionalized religion. While her
books have made her enormously popular, it isn't surprising that she's also
managed to raise the ire of both Christian fundamentalists and atheists.

In her recent book, "The Great Transformation," Armstrong writes about the
religions that emerged during the "Axial Age," a phrase coined by the German
philosopher Karl Jaspers. This is the era when many great sages appeared,
including the Buddha, Socrates, Confucius, Jeremiah and the mystics of the
Upanishads. I interviewed Armstrong in the middle of her grueling American
book tour. She dislikes flying in small airplanes, so her publisher hired a
car service to drive her from Minnesota to Wisconsin, where I spoke with her
before she met with a church group. When she got out of her car, I was
greeted by a rather short and intense woman, somewhat frazzled by
last-minute interview requests. But once settled, her passion for religion
came pouring out. She was full of surprises. Armstrong dismissed the
afterlife as insignificant, and drew some intriguing analogies: Just as
there's good and bad sex and art, there's good and bad religion. Religion,
she says, is hard work.

Why are you so interested in the Axial Age?

Because it was the pivot, or the axis, around which the future spiritual
development of humanity has revolved. We've never gone beyond these original
insights. And they have so much to tell us today because very often in our
religious institutions we are producing exactly the kind of religiosity that
people such as the Buddha wanted to get rid of. While I was researching this
book, they seemed to be talking directly to us in our own troubled time.

What religions emerged during the Axial Age?

From about 900 to 200 BCE, the traditions that have continued to nourish
humanity either came into being or had their roots in four distinct regions
of the world. So you had Confucianism and Taoism in China; Hinduism,
Buddhism, Jainism in India; monotheism in Israel; and philosophical
rationalism in Greece.

You're saying all these different religions developed independently of each
other. But there was a common message that emerged roughly around the same
time.

Yes. Without any collusion, they all came up with a remarkably similar
solution to the spiritual ills of humanity. Before the Axial Age, religions
had been very different. They had been based largely on external rituals
which gave people intimations of greatness. But there was no disciplined
introspection before the Axial Age. The Axial sages discovered the inner
world. And religions became much more spiritualized because humanity had
taken a leap forward. People were creating much larger empires and kingdoms
than ever before. A market economy was in its very early stages. That meant
the old, rather parochial visions were no longer adequate. And these regions
were torn apart by an unprecedented crescendo of violence. In every single
case, the catalyst for religious change had been a revulsion against
violence.

So what was the spiritual message that rejected violence?

First of all, they all insisted that you must give up and abandon your ego.
The sages said the root cause of suffering lay in our desperate concern with
self, which often needs to destroy others in order to preserve itself. And
so they insisted that if we stepped outside the ego, then we would encounter
what we call Brahman or God, nirvana or the Tao.

You say one of the common messages in all these religions was what we now
call the Golden Rule. And Confucius was probably the first person who came
up with this idea.

All these sages, with the exception of the Greeks, posited a
counter-ideology to the violence of their time. The safest way to get rid of
egotism was by means of compassion. The first person to promulgate the
Golden Rule, which was the bedrock of this empathic spirituality, was
Confucius 500 years before Christ. His disciples asked him, "What is the
single thread that runs through all your teaching and pulls it all
together?" And Confucius said, "Look into your own heart. Discover what it
is that gives you pain. And then refuse to inflict that pain on anybody
else." His disciples also asked, "Master, which one of your teachings can we
put into practice every day?" And Confucius said, "Do not do to others as
you would not have them do to you." The Buddha had his version of the Golden
Rule. Jesus taught it much later. And Rabbi Hillel, the older contemporary
of Jesus, said the Golden Rule was the essence of Judaism.

Now, there is the question of whether all of these were actually religions.
I mean, the philosophies of the ancient Greeks -- Socrates and Plato -- were
not religious at all. Buddhism is essentially a philosophy of mind. And I
suppose you could see Confucianism as essentially a system of ethics.

That's a very chauvinistic Western view, if I may say so. You're saying this
is what we regard as religion, and anything that doesn't measure up to that
isn't. I think a Buddhist or a Confucian would be very offended to hear that
he or she was not practicing a religion.

Well, explain that. What is religion?

Religion is a search for transcendence. But transcendence isn't necessarily
sited in an external god, which can be a very unspiritual, unreligious
concept. The sages were all extremely concerned with transcendence, with
going beyond the self and discovering a realm, a reality, that could not be
defined in words. Buddhists talk about nirvana in very much the same terms
as monotheists describe God.

That's fascinating. So in Buddhism, which is nontheistic, the message or the
experience of nirvana is the same as the Christian God?

The experience is the same. The trouble is that we define our God too
closely. In my book "A History of God," I pointed out that the most eminent
Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians all said you couldn't think about
God as a simple personality, an external being. It was better to say that
God did not exist because our notion of existence was far too limited to
apply to God.

Didn't a lot of people say God is beyond language? We could only experience
the glimmer of God.

That's what the Buddha said. You can't define nirvana, you can't say what it
is. The Buddha also said you could craft a new kind of human being in touch
with transcendence. He was once asked by a Brahman priest who passed him in
contemplation and was absolutely mesmerized by this man sitting in utter
serenity. He said, "Are you a god, sir? Are you an angel or a spirit?" And
the Buddha said, "No, I'm awake." His disciplined lifestyle had activated
parts of his humanity that ordinarily lie dormant. But anybody could do it
if they trained hard enough. The Buddhists and the Confucians and the
greatest monotheistic mystics did with their minds and hearts what gymnasts
and dancers do with their bodies.

You're saying these ancient sages really didn't care about big metaphysical
systems. They didn't care about theology.

No, none of them did. And neither did Jesus. Jesus did not spend a great
deal of time discoursing about the trinity or original sin or the
incarnation, which have preoccupied later Christians. He went around doing
good and being compassionate. In the Quran, metaphysical speculation is
regarded as self-indulgent guesswork. And it makes people, the Quran says,
quarrelsome and stupidly sectarian. You can't prove these things one way or
the other, so why quarrel about it? The Taoists said this kind of
speculation where people pompously hold forth about their opinions was
egotism. And when you're faced with the ineffable and the indescribable,
they would say it's belittling to cut it down to size. Sometimes, I think
the way monotheists talk about God is unreligious.

Unreligious? Like talk about a personal God?

Yes, people very often talk about him as a kind of acquaintance, whom they
can second-guess. People will say God loves that, God wills that, and God
despises the other. And very often, the opinions of the deity are made to
coincide exactly with those of the speaker.

Yet we certainly see a personal God in various sacred texts. People aren't
just making that up.

No, but the great theologians in Judaism, Christianity and Islam say you
begin with the idea of a god who is personal. But God transcends personality
as God transcends every other human characteristic, such as gender. If we
get stuck there, this is very immature. Very often people hear about God at
about the same time as they're learning about Santa Claus. And their ideas
about Santa Claus mature and change in time, but their idea of God remains
infantile.

What about the supernatural, though? Do you need any sense of the miraculous
or of things that cannot be explained by science?

I think religions hold us in an attitude of awe and wonder. People such as
the Buddha thought miracles were rather vulgar -- you know, displays of
power and ego. If you look at the healing miracles attributed to Jesus, they
generally had some kind of symbolic aspect about healing the soul rather
than showing off a supernatural power. Western people think the supernatural
is the essence of religion, but that's rather like the idea of an external
god. That's a minority view worldwide. I really get so distressed on behalf
of Buddhists and Confucians and Hindus to have a few Western philosophers
loftily dismissing their religion as not religious because it doesn't
conform to Western norms. It seems the height of parochialism.

I think these questions are tremendously important now because more and more
people, especially those with a scientific bent, say we don't need religion
anymore. Science has replaced religion. You know, religion used to explain
all kinds of things about the world. But science for the most part does that
now. And people who are not religious say they can be just as morally
upright.

They can. I fully endorse that. I don't think you need to believe in an
external god to obey the Golden Rule. In the Axial Age, when people started
to concentrate too much on what they're transcending to -- that is, God --
and neglected what they're transcending from -- their greed, pompous
egotism, cruelty -- then they lost the plot, religiously. That's why God is
a difficult religious concept. I think God is often used by religious people
to give egotism a sacred seal of divine approval, rather than to take you
beyond the ego.

As for scientists, they can explain a tremendous amount. But they can't talk
about meaning so much. If your child dies, or you witness a terrible natural
catastrophe such as Hurricane Katrina, you want to have a scientific
explanation of it. But that's not all human beings need. We are beings who
fall very easily into despair because we're meaning-seeking creatures. And
if things don't add up in some way, we can become crippled by our
despondency.

So would you say religion addresses those questions through the stories and
myths?

Yes. In the pre-modern world, there were two ways of arriving at truth.
Plato, for example, called them mythos and logos. Myth and reason or
science. We've always needed both of them. It was very important in the
pre-modern world to realize these two things, myth and science, were
complementary. One didn't cancel the other out.

Well, what do you say to the scientists, especially the Darwinists --
Richard Dawkins would be the obvious case -- who are quite angry about
religion? They say religion is the root of much evil in the world. Wars are
fought and fueled by religion. And now that we're in the 21st century, they
say it's time that science replace religion.

I don't think it will. In the scientific age, we've seen a massive religious
revival everywhere but Europe. And some of these people -- not all, by any
means -- seem to be secular fundamentalists. They have as bigoted a view of
religion as some religious fundamentalists have of secularism. We have too
much dogmatism at the moment. Take Richard Dawkins, for example. He did a
couple of religious programs that I was fortunate enough to miss. It was a
very, very one-sided view.

Well, he hates religion.

Yeah, this is not what the Buddha would call skillful. If you're consumed by
hatred -- Freud was rather the same -- then this is souring your personality
and clouding your vision. What you need to do is to look appraisingly and
calmly on other traditions. Because when you hate religion, it's also very
easy to hate the people who practice it.

This does raise the question, though, of how to read the sacred scriptures.

Indeed.

Because there are all kinds of inflammatory things that are said. For
instance, many passages in both the Bible and the Quran exhort the faithful
to kill the infidels. Sam Harris, in his book "The End of Faith," has seven
very densely packed pages of nothing but quotations from the Quran with just
this message. "God's curse be upon the infidels"; "slay them wherever you
find them"; "fighting is obligatory for you, much as you dislike it." And
Sam Harris' point is that the Muslim suicide bombings are not the aberration
of Islam. They are the message of Islam.
Well, that's simply not true. He's taken parts of those texts and omitted
their conclusions, which say fighting is hateful for you. You have to do it
if you're attacked, as Mohammed was being attacked at the time when that
verse was revealed. But forgiveness is better for you. Peace is better. But
when we're living in a violent society, our religion becomes violent, too.
Religion gets sucked in and becomes part of the problem. But to isolate
these texts as though they expressed the whole of the tradition is very
mischievous and dangerous at this time when we are in danger of polarizing
people on both sides. And this kind of inflammatory talk, say about Islam,
is convincing Muslims all over the world who are not extremists that the
West is incurably Islamophobic and will never respect their traditions. I
think it's irresponsible at this time.

But many people would say you can't just pick out the peaceful and loving
passages of the sacred scriptures. There are plenty of other passages that
are frightening.
I would say there are more passages in the Bible than the Quran that are
dedicated to violence. I think what all religious people ought to do is to
look at their own sacred traditions. Not just point a finger at somebody
else's, but our own. Christians should look long and hard at the Book of
Revelation. And they should look at those passages in the Pentateuch that
speak of the destruction of the enemy. They should make a serious study of
these. And let's not forget that in its short history, secularism has had
some catastrophes.

Certainly, the major tragedies of the 20th century were committed by
secularists -- Stalin, Hitler, Mao.

And Saddam Hussein, a secularist supported by us in the West for 10 years,
even when he gassed the Kurds. We supported him because he was a secularist.
If people are resistant to secularism in Iraq now, it's because their most
recent experience of it was Saddam. So this kind of chauvinism that says
secularism is right, religion is all bunk -- this is one-sided and I think
basically egotistic. People are saying my opinion is right and everybody
else's is wrong. It gets you riled up. It gives you a sense of holy
righteousness, where you feel frightfully pleased with yourself when you're
sounding off, and you get a glorious buzz about it. But I don't see this as
helpful to humanity. And when you suppress religion and try and get rid of
it, then it's likely to take unhealthy forms.

That's when fundamentalism starts to appear.

Yes, because fundamentalism has developed in every single one of the major
traditions as a response to secularism that has been dismissive or even
cruel, and has attempted to wipe out religion. And if you try to repress it
-- as happened in the Soviet Union -- there's now a huge religious revival
in the Soviet Union, and some of it's not very healthy. It's like the
suppression of the sexual instinct. If you repress the sexual instinct and
try to tamp it down, it's likely to develop all kinds of perverse and
twisted forms. And religion's the same.

Well, it seems to me you're also saying that to be religious -- truly
religious -- is tremendously hard work. It's far harder than just ...

... singing a few hymns.

... or just reading the scriptures literally. You can't live that way.

Religion is hard work. It's an art form. It's a way of finding meaning, like
art, like painting, like poetry, in a world that is violent and cruel and
often seems meaningless. And art is hard work. You don't just dash off a
painting. It takes years of study. I think we expect religious knowledge to
be instant. But religious knowledge comes incrementally and slowly. And
religion is like any other activity. It's like cooking or sex or science.
You have good art, sex and science, and bad art, sex and science. It's not
easy to do it well.

So how should we approach the sacred texts? How should we read them?

Sacred texts have traditionally been a bridge to the divine. They're all
difficult. They're not a simple manual -- a how-to book that will tell you
how to gain enlightenment by next week, like how to lose weight on the
Atkins diet. This is a slow process. I think the best image for reading
scripture occurs in the story of Jacob, who wrestles with a stranger all
night long. And in the morning, the stranger seems to have been his God.
That's when Jacob is given the name Israel -- "one who fights with God." And
he goes away limping as he walks into the sunrise. Scriptures are a
struggle.

Is faith a struggle?

Well, faith is not a matter of believing things. That's again a modern
Western notion. It's only been current since the 18th century. Believing
things is neither here nor there, despite what some religious people say and
what some secularists say. That is a very eccentric religious position,
current really only in the Western Christian world. You don't have it much
in Judaism, for example.
But it's not surprising that religion has become equated with belief because
these are the messages we hear as we grow up, regardless of our faiths.
We hear it from some of them. And I think we've become rather stupid in our
scientific age about religion. If you'd presented some of these literalistic
readings of the Bible to people in the pre-modern age, they would have found
it rather obtuse. They'd have found it incomprehensible that people really
believe the first chapter of Genesis is an account of the origins of life.

So how should we read the story of creation in Genesis?

Well, it's not a literal account because it's put right next door to another
account in Chapter 2, which completely contradicts it. Then there are other
creation stories in the Bible that show Yahweh like a Middle Eastern god
killing a sea monster to create the world. Cosmogony in the ancient world
was not an account of the physical origins of life. Cosmogony was usually
used therapeutically. When people were sick or in times of vulnerability,
they would read a cosmogony in order to get an influx of the divine, to tap
into those extraordinary energies that had created something out of nothing.

That seems to be a question that scientists are struggling with now. Did the
big bang come out of nothing?

Exactly. And I think some scientists are writing a new kind of religious
discourse, teaching us to pit ourselves against the dark world of uncreated
reality and pushing us back to the mysterious. They're resorting to
mythological imagery: Big Bang, black hole. They have all kinds of
resonances because this is beyond our ken.

I'm curious about how these issues have played out in your own life because
you went into a convent at a rather young age -- at 17. You lived there for
seven years. You've written about how you tried to find God but couldn't.
And you left in despair. I don't know if you called yourself an atheist, but
you were certainly close to that. And then, as you worked on your book, "A
History of God," you seemed to discover something that you hadn't known
before.

I couldn't get on with religion in the convent because it was a very unkind
institution. I limped away from it. I wanted nothing to do with religion
ever again, but came back to it through the study of other religious
traditions -- initially, Judaism and Islam. Later, Buddhism, Hinduism and
Confucianism.

So it was actually studying the history and the texts that allowed you to
enter into the religious experience.

Yes, once I'd stopped prancing and posturing around on TV, where I was
expected to have an inflammatory opinion and to let people have it. All this
was pure egotism. I did some early television programs and expressed my
secularism very cleverly. I'm slightly down on cleverness, which can be fun
and witty at a dinner party and I enjoy that as much as anybody else. But it
can be superficial. Once my television career had folded, I was left on my
own with these texts. There was nobody to exclaim derisively about the
irrationality of a Greek Orthodox text or the stupidity of a certain Jewish
mysticism. I began to read them like poetry, which is what theology is. It's
poetry. It's an attempt to express the inexpressible. It needs quiet. You
can't read a Rilke sonnet at a party. Sometimes a poem can live in your head
for a long time until its meaning is finally revealed. And if you try and
grasp that meaning prematurely, you can distort the poem for yourself. And
because I'd been cast out from the media world, and was living in a world of
silence and solitude, the texts and I started to have a different
relationship.

Do you consider yourself a religious person?

Yes. It's a constant pursuit for me. It's helped me immeasurably to overcome
despair in my own life. But I have no hard and fast answers.

I take it you don't like the question, do you believe in God?

No, because people who ask this question often have a rather simplistic
notion of what God is.

What about an afterlife?

It's a red herring as far as I'm concerned.

But you must have thought about that question. Does everything end once we
die?

I don't know. I prefer to be agnostic on that matter, as do most of the
world's religions. It's really only Christianity and Islam that are obsessed
with afterlife in this way. It was not a concern in the Axial Age, not for
any of them. I think the old scenarios of heaven and hell can be
unreligious. People can perform their good deeds in the spirit of putting
their installments in their retirement annuities. And there's nothing
religious about that. Religion is supposed to be about the loss of the ego,
not about its eternal survival.
But certainly there are a lot of people -- both scientists and religious
people -- who speculate about whether there's some cosmic order. For the
evolutionary biologists, the question is whether there's some natural
progression to evolution. Who knows?

And is there an endpoint? From the cosmological perspective, was the
universe designed specifically for life? Are those important questions?

Yeah, I think they can be wonderful questions. But they don't occupy me very
much. I believe that what we have is now. The religions say you can
experience eternity in this life, here and now, by getting those moments of
ecstasy where time ceases to be a constraint. And you do it by the exercise
of the Golden Rule and by compassion. And just endless speculation about the
next world is depriving you of a great experience in this one.

-- By Steve Paulson
http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/05/30/armstrong/print.html

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