Thoughts on Karen Armstrong's History of God

I just finished reading Armstrong's book this last week. I read it because I felt I should. It is a book that is fairly well known, and was a New York Times bestseller for a while. I've had several friends inform me I should read it. So, I picked it up a few months ago thinking it would be a bit of light side-reading. This was not particularly the case. A good way to describe this book is difficult yet accessible. It is certainly no easy read. Armstrong has an impressive vocabulary, and certainly is not shy about displaying her scholarship. Yet, this is not an impossible book, and given that it's mostly history it does a good job of not being too boring.


For any interested in hearing her speak for herself, a good talk can be found here:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/karen_armstrong_makes_her_ted_prize_wish_the_charter_for_compassion.html

This book began by going over the history of the time surrounding the birth of Judaism. Armstrong does gloss over many contours of this history, but I don't get the impression she does so in ignorance. The point of the book is to display the evolution of the concept of God among the three prophetic faiths. She is attempting to show that each of the three faiths have had an amazingly varied conception of God that can be traced throughout history. To achieve this feat, Armstrong has no option but to be reductive, and still it is a far cry from being simplistic of any of these faiths.













One point that she hammers out through the entire book is the subjectivity of God.
"Indeed, the statement 'I believe in God' has no objective meaning, as such, but like any other statement only means something in context when proclaimed by a particular community."

She points out that many of the most profound religious thinkers of the last two millennia have all known that their experiences of God were totally subjective. All their descriptions were not of objective realities but only similes and metaphors for what would always defy language. I find it difficult to state just how relieving I find such an attitude.

Another claim which I found equally refreshing was the idea of the nothingness of God. Thousands of years ago theologians came to the realization that all that can be said of God is what he is not. All positive statements, due to their being anchored in common mundane reality, equate God with something that he is far beyond. We say God is personal, yet he is certainly much more than anything we would identify as "a person". Therefore he is not personal, since he is far beyond the scope of that word. All the things that we would say God is, he really is not. So, in a profound since God is Nothing, or No-Thing. He cannot be encompassed by out thoughts, our language, our beliefs, doctrines.

As an intellectual, I found this unbelievably relieving. While to some I could see how such thoughts could lead to the demise of faith, for me it came as a resuscitating breath. I had heard such thoughts before, but Armstrong did a fantastic job of putting them into context, which seemed to make them much more accessible.

Perhaps my favorite insight in this book is the false dichotomy of intellectuals vs. mystics. Armstrong does a brilliant job of displaying that the most famous mystics were those who began as intellectuals, and that most intellectuals have some substantial mysticism to their thought. As such, they do not represent opposite poles, but flip sides of the same coin. Mysticism frequently is the end result of intelligence which has become aware of its own limits. This is not remotely close to a rejection of the value of knowledge, but rather an estimation of it which delivers one to a healthy realization of finitude. Nor is this necessarily a mysticism which involves feeling wrapped in the tender arms of the Lord, though it certainly could be. Mystics encompass an infinite range of experiences from smiling into the face of God to the lonely terror of the Great Silence where we once thought their was a personal diety. Neither is illegitimate.

This all validated much of the shock of Emptyness that I have felt for some time in regard to religion. It affirmed that none of us really know what we're talking about, yet that does not mean we have no reason to talk. Contrary to what Wittgenstein preposed, silence is not the only valid response, though it may well be a road that should be travelled more. In fact, Armstrong's work brought me to the realization that I was becoming just as intolerant of "believers" as fundamentalists were of "unbelief". As such I'm only serving to perpetuate the violence. The ever-important point is that understanding is the root of compassion, and I am certainly guilty of forsaking the attempt to understand those whom I oppose.