What Scripture Is For

The Lost Art of Scripture: Rescuing the Sacred Texts by Karen Armstrong.  Knopf.  605 pp.  $35.00.   *****

The Lost Art of Scripture is a colossal feat of scholarship; I can’t think of one I admire more.  Karen Armstrong has studied scriptures from a wide variety of cultures, and summed up the basic messages from the scripture of every major religion and a number of minor ones.  Her thesis is that scripture has not traditionally been a collection of writings set in stone, but was regarded as tentative attempts to reflect the divine.  It’s stunning to see the variety of ways that human beings have done that, beginning with “a small ivory figurine in the Ulm Museum” which “may be the earliest evidence of human religious activity.”  It is estimated to be 40,000 years old.  Confronting the ineffable mystery of how we got here and what our life is intended to be, human beings have come up with any number of answers.  The idea that one of them is “right” seems preposterous.

At various times in human history, in fact, religious groups which today are at war actually read one another’s scriptures and learned from them.  People didn’t isolate themselves as belonging to this or that religion; humankind faced the mystery and people learned from one another.  And the tendency toward fundamentalism, the idea that scripture represents a historical truth and that it is one hundred percent accurate in everything it says, is a late arrival.  It doesn’t show up in Christianity until the late nineteenth century, for instance.  Until then scriptures weren’t presumed to be historical accounts (especially because they often contradicted one another).  They were stories that were intended to convey meaning.

Looking at this vast output, and considering its huge breadth, makes me proud to be human (a rare occurrence these days).  It also makes me glad to be living in an age when we can see the extent of all this.  In the past, people were often confined to the scripture of their own religion.[1]

When you look at these scriptures as a whole, one of the most startling things is the way Christianity emerged as a world religion.  Judaism was focused on the Torah and commentaries on it, which formed a vast tradition and were in many ways as important as the original words.  Jesus was somewhat independent of that, a wandering teacher from a background of poverty who taught not as a scholar but as a healer and intuitive teacher who’d had his own revelation.  He was crucified as a criminal—a common punishment at the time—and Armstrong thinks the act probably happened in obscurity; she thinks the accounts of the trial with Pontius Pilate were made up later, because Jesus wasn’t terribly significant at the time.

Nothing was written about him during his lifetime; the letters of Paul came first, preceding the Gospels by a number of years.  The Gospels are similar, but each is its own book, with its own emphasis.  The idea that Paul’s letters to early Christians and these four differing accounts could be cobbled together with Hebrew scriptures to form a vast world religion with any number of denominations is mind boggling.  In the history of world religion, it doesn’t seem that substantial a collection of writings.  And it’s definitely a collection, not a single entity.

Far vaster and more varied are the Indian scriptures, which go way back in history.  It’s ironic that India today is rallying around being a Hindu nation, because according to Armstrong the word Hindu was coined by Westerners to describe a collection of writings that hardly form a coherent religion.  It’s a rich source of stories, staggering in its extent.

Islam is a comparatively late arrival, since Mohammed lived in the eleventh century.  He drew on the older Abrahamic traditions, of course, but the Quran was a series of revelations that came to him through agony and difficulty; they weren’t dictated from above but required a lot of work to be expressed in verbal form.  It’s odd, then, when parts of the work are taken to be etched in stone.  They didn’t come to Mohammed that way.

I find myself drawn to the Chinese tradition, the early writings of Daoism as well as what Confucionism adds, especially through the years as Buddhism joined the mix to create the Chan/Zen tradition.  I can still remember in my mid-thirties—a little late, I suppose—encountering the Dao De Ching and feeling immediately that it expressed an appropriate sense of awe and mystery in the face of the Divine.  Christianity has a similar feeling in the apophatic[2] tradition, but I didn’t come across that until years later.  And of course sitting meditation captured me immediately, far more than any Buddhist scripture.

Armstrong talks from the start about how scripture was meant to be not just a left-brain activity, to be read and pondered, but a right-brain activity as well, through being performed and chanted.  In Zen we do both things, read and talk about and interpret koans, but also meditate with them and chant famous teachings.  Revelations about scripture come just as often from chanting as from study.  Our understanding is intuitive more than rational.

It seems petty to mention that Armstrong left something out, but I definitely noticed that the towering figure Eihei Dogen is not even mentioned.  Armstrong couldn’t read everything, of course, and, as many a Zen student has discovered, Dogen’s writings are a vast and intriguing sinkhole from which one never emerges.  But they’re a great example of what Armstrong is talking about.  Dogen was a brilliant intellectual and scholar, as well as an intuitive mystic whose writings reflect the relative and the absolute all at once.  They’re an important part of world scripture.

The impression I was left with eventually is not of a world divided by religions, but a world confronting a mystery and coming up with a variety of ways to explain it, including, eventually, people who find a scientific explanation adequate.  Armstrong writes about Western philosophers and atheists as well.  Descartes was pivotal; though he himself was a religious person, his emphasis on thinking took an essentially right-brained activity and focused it on the left brain, where it often doesn’t make much sense.  Religion became something where you affirmed a set of beliefs instead of exploring a mystery.  It became a set of answers rather than a set of questions.

I’ve long been an Armstrong fan, and am shocked to think that, at age 75, she has published this mammoth work that sums up so much, and may be her chef d’oeuvre.  I hope she continues to write for many years.  But I can’t imagine a greater accomplishment than this.

[1] I vividly remember my grandfather, who grew up on a West Virginia farm, talking about the doctrines of Calvinist Presbyterianism as if they were, so to speak, Gospel truth.  “That’s what we believe,” he would say to me.  Why? I wanted to ask, but I don’t think that question ever occurred to him.  He rooted for Presbyterianism the same way he rooted for the Pirates and the University of Pittsburgh (to beat Notre Dame, which they never did.  One time my uncle was rooting for Alabama in a bowl game against Notre Dame, and I asked him why.  He said, “Because I don’t want every Catholic in the country saying he’s number one”).

[2] “Apophatic theology, also known as negative theology, is a form of theological thinking and religious practice which attempts to approach God, the Divine, by negation, to speak only in terms of what may not be said about the perfect goodness that is God.”