Religion: What’s God got to do with it?

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Religion: What's God got to do with it?

NS Special Issue

Karen Armstrong

Monday 10th April 2006

 

 

The great faiths share the same historical roots - and believing in

a deity hasn't always been necessary, writes Karen Armstrong

 

The activity that we call religion is complex. Religious and non-

religious people alike often share the same misperceptions. Today in

the west, it is often assumed that religion is all about the

supernatural and that it is inseparable from belief in an external,

personalised deity. Critics claim that religion encourages escapist

fantasies that cannot be verified. The explosion of terrorism (which

is often given a religious justification) has convinced many people

that religion is incurably violent. I have lost count of the number

of times a taxi driver has informed me that religion has been the

cause of all the wars in history.

 

Yet we find something very different when we look back to the period

that the German philosopher Karl Jaspers called the "Axial Age"

(c.900 to 200BCE) because it proved to be pivotal to the spiritual

development of humanity. In this era, in four distinct regions of

the world, the traditions that have continued to nourish humanity

either came into being or put down roots. Hinduism, Buddhism and

Jainism emerged in India; Confucianism and Taoism in China;

monotheism was born in Israel; and philosophical rationalism

developed in Greece. It was a period of astonishing creativity; we

have never really succeeded in going beyond the insights of such

sages as the Buddha, the mystics of the Upanishads, Confucius, Lao-

tzu, and the great Hebrew prophets. Rabbinic Judaism, Christianity

and Islam, for example, can be seen as a later flowering of the

religion that had developed in Israel during the Axial Age.

 

Despite interesting and revealing differences in emphasis, these

traditions all reached remarkably similar solutions. They can,

perhaps, tell us something important about the structure of our

humanity. The God of Israel was an important symbol of

transcendence, but in the other Axial faiths the gods were not very

important. Confucius discouraged speculation about spirits and the

afterlife: how could you talk about other-worldly phenomena, when

there was so much that you did not understand about earthly matters?

 

During the Indian Axial Age, the ancient Vedic deities retreated

from the religious imagination. They were seen as unsatisfactory

expressions of the sacred, and were either demoted to human status

or seen as aspects of the psyche. Many of the Axial sages were

reaching beyond the gods to a more impersonal transcendence - to

Brahman, Nirvana or the Tao - that was also inseparable from

humanity. Yogins and Taoists did not believe that their ecstatic

trances represented an encounter with the supernatural, but regarded

them as entirely natural to humanity. Later, the more sophisticated

theologians in all three of the monotheistic religions would make

similar claims about the experience of the reality that they called

God.

 

None of these sages was interested in dogma or metaphysics. A

person's theological opinions were a matter of total indifference to

a teacher like the Buddha. He insisted that nobody should ever take

any religious teaching, from however august a source, on faith or at

second hand. One of the Buddha's disciples pestered him continuously

about metaphysics: was there a God? Who created the world? He was so

preoccupied with these matters that he neglected his yoga and

ethical practice. The Buddha told him that he was like a man who had

been shot with a poisoned arrow but refused to have any medical

treatment until he discovered the name of his assailant and what

village he came from: he would die before he got this perfectly

useless information.

 

The Taoists were also wary of dogmatic conformity; they believed

that the kind of certainty that many seek in religion was

unrealistic and a sign of immaturity. Eventually, the Chinese

preferred to synthesise the schools which had developed during their

Axial Age, because no single tradition could have the monopoly of

truth. In all four regions, when a sage started to insist upon

strict orthodoxy, this was usually a sign that the Axial Age was

drawing to a close.

 

The prophets of Israel were more like political commentators than

theologians; they found the divine in analysis of current events

rather than metaphysics. Jesus, as far as we know, spent no time

discussing the trinity or original sin, which would later become so

important to Christians; and the Koran dismisses theological

dogmatism as zannah, self-indulgent guesswork that makes people

stupidly quarrelsome and sectarian.

 

Religion was not about believing credal propositions, but about

behaving in a way that changed you at a profound level. Human beings

have always sought what the Greeks called ekstasis, a "stepping out"

of the mundane, in moments when we feel deeply touched within and

lifted momentarily beyond ourselves. The Axial sages all believed

that if we stepped outside of our egotism and greed, we would

transcend ourselves and achieve an enhanced humanity. Yoga, for

instance, one of the great spiritual technologies of the Axial Age,

was a formidable assault on the ego, designed to take the "I" out of

the practitioner's thinking.

 

 

 

But the safest way to achieve this ekstasis was by the practice of

compassion. Compassion - the ability to feel with another - was not

simply the litmus test of any true religiosity, but the chief way of

encountering the ineffable reality of Nirvana, Brahman, God and Tao.

For the Buddha, compassion brought about ceto-vimutti, the "release

of the mind" that was a synonym for the supreme enlightenment of

Nirvana, a sacred realm of peace in the core of one's being.

 

All the Axial religions, in different ways, regarded what has been

called the Golden Rule as the essence of religion: "Do not do to

others what you would not like them to do to you." Confucius was the

first to formulate this maxim. It was, he said, the thread that

pulled all his teachings together and should be practised all day

and every day. Five hundred years later, Rabbi Hillel was asked to

sum up the whole of Jewish teaching while he stood on one leg. He

replied: "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour.

That is the Torah. The rest is commentary. Go and study it."

 

The Chinese sage Mo-tzu (c.480-390) insisted that we had to have

jian ai, "concern for everybody". The priestly authors of Leviticus

urged the Israel-ites to love and honour the stranger; the Buddha

taught layfolk and monks alike a method of meditation called "the

Immeasurables", in which they systematically extended benevolent

thoughts to the four corners of the world. Jesus told his disciples

to love their enemies. This impartial sympathy would break down the

barricades of egotism, because it was offered with little hope of

any return.

 

If a ruler practised jian ai, Mo-tzu taught, war would be

impossible. The Axial religions all developed in regions that were

convulsed by violence on an unprecedented scale. Iron weaponry meant

that warfare had become more deadly; states had become more

coercive; in the market place, merchants preyed on each other

aggressively. In every case, throughout the Axial Age, the catalyst

for religious change was always a disciplined revulsion towards this

violence.

 

In the 9th century, the ritualists of India systematically extracted

all the violence from the sacrificial ritual, and in seeking the

cause of aggression in the psyche, discovered the inner self.

Renouncers, Buddhists and Jains all insisted that

ahimsa, "harmlessness", was an indispensable prerequisite to

enlightenment. In the Tao Te Ching, Lao-tzu pointed out that

violence could only elicit more violence. The sage-ruler must always

seek to bring a military campaign to a speedy end: "Bring it to a

conclusion, but do not intimidate." Some of the gospels present

Jesus as a man of ahimsa who taught his followers to turn the other

cheek.

 

Socrates, one of the greatest figures of the Axial Age, also

condemned retaliation as evil. In general, however, the Greeks did

not eschew violence. Ultimately, they did not have a religious Axial

Age. Their great transformation was philosophical, scientific and

mathematical, and pagan religion continued to flourish in Greece

until it was forcibly replaced by Christianity in the 5th century

CE.

 

Compassion is an unpopular virtue. All too often, religious people

have preferred to be right rather than compassionate. They have

shielded themselves from the demands of empathy by making secondary

and peripheral goals - such as theological correctness or sexual

orthodoxy - central to their faith. As the Chinese sages pointed

out, vehement professions of belief were essentially egotistic, a

pompous trumpeting of self, and, therefore, they impeded

enlightenment. Denominational chauvinism, like nationalism, should

also be seen as a form of collective egotism or, in monotheistic

terms, idolatry.

 

Nevertheless, in our torn, conflicted world, we need to revive the

Axial ethos. This does not require orthodox belief and need not

involve the supernatural. In the Axial Age, individualism was

beginning to supersede the older tribal or communal expressions of

identity. The sages were trying to moderate the clash of competing

egos and they were all concerned about the plight of society. We are

still rampant, chronic individualists, but our technology has

created a global village, which is interconnected electronically,

militarily, politically and economically. If we want to survive, it

makes practical sense to cultivate jian ai. We need to apply the

Golden Rule politically, and learn that other nations, however

remote from our own, are as important as ours.

 

Karen Armstrong is the author of The Great Transformation: the world

in the time of Buddha, Socrates, Confucius and Jeremiah (Atlantic

Books, £19.99)

http://www.newstatesman.com/200604100023