My life in books

In The Beginning: A New Interpretation of Genesis, by Karen Armstrong

In addition to the great sweeping texts exploring aspects of religious thought throughout history and around the world that she has become deservedly known for, Karen Armstrong has also written a number of narrowly focused books on religious issues, such as this slim volume in which she undertakes a close examination of the events of the Biblical book of Genesis.

Perhaps the central tenet of all of Armstrong’s writing about religion is that as she says in the first chapter of this book, "the true meaning of scripture can never be wholly comprised in a literal reading of the text, since that text points beyond itself to a reality which cannot adequately be expressed in words and concepts."

For Armstrong, scripture – any scripture, not just that of the Judeo-Christian tradition – is not a matter of fact but a path to a transcendent experience:

In almost all cultures, scripture has been one of the tools that men and women have used to apprehend a dimension that transcends their normal lives. People have turned to their holy books not to acquire information but to have an experience. They have encountered a reality there that goes beyond their normal existence but endows it with ultimate significance. They have given this transcendence different names – Brahman, Dharma, Nirvana, or God – but, however we choose to describe or interpret it, it has been a fact of human life. We are constantly aware of an ideal level that contrasts with the world around us. We may not regard this realm as supernatural; we may prefer to find it in art, music or poetry rather than in a church. But human beings have persistently sought a dimension of experience that seems close to our normal lives and yet far from them.

The aspect of human experience that is addressed in Genesis, according to Armstrong, is beginnings – the beginnings of the relationship between the divine and the world of material existence, between human beings and the experience of the divine, between human beings in that nexus of personal beginnings, the family, and between human beings and their interior lives – their fears, desires, flaws, needs, shadows.

Armstrong sees the great stories of the patriarchs and matriarchs of Israel as a lesson that as human beings, we are constantly choosing how we will engage in all of these relationships, and that we cannot cut ourselves off from relationships without damaging ourselves. The stories of Genesis are stories of separation, rejection, denial, distance and division. In the actions of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, we see occasional examples of how openness to relationships and self-knowledge can bring transcendence, but far more often, we watch as cutting one’s self off from others and seeking only to serve one’s self leads to fear, pain, resentment, and grief.

The Coldfire Trilogy, by C. S. Friedman:
Black Sun Rising
When True Night Falls
Crown of Shadows

Imagine a world that responds in a direct and material way to your hopes, your dreams, your faith … and your fears. Friedman’s Coldfire Trilogy (part science fiction, part dark fantasy) is set on such a world, the very distant planet Erna, colonised more than a thousand years ago by settlers from Earth (in a universe without convenient faster-than-light space travel, so that the colonists are well and truly on their own. Unknown to the settlers, Erna harbours – in fact, is permeated with - a previously unknown kind of energy, which its newest inhabitants call the fae.

The interaction of thought, imagination and emotion with fae energy results in the real, material, manifestation of those thoughts, imaginings and emotions. For the native intelligent species of Erna, the rakh, this is a process they have evolved within, and manipulation of the fae is automatic and instinctively controlled. However, for the human colonists, it is often involuntary, often uncontrollable, and often draws on their strongest and deepest fears and terrors, with the consequence that the colony is almost destroyed by the horrors taken from the subconscious minds of its members and made flesh. Over time, human society adapts, finds ways to cope with life in a place where anything you imagine, even your gods, can become real. Technology reverts to pre-industrial levels – the less complex a thing is, the less your mind can cause to go wrong with it. Some people – perhaps naturally evolving, perhaps changed by the presence of the fae around them or the hopes of the colonists for some form of adaptation – are born with the ability to see, and to consciously use the fae for their own ends. Humanity survives.

Some nine hundred years before the time period in which the novels are set, one man, Gerald Tarrant, later called the Prophet, sees the potential for a better future for humanity on Erna if faith and trust in a beneficent and protective God and His Church can be so created and nurtured and channelled that there is no deep well of fear in the darkest corners of human minds for the fae to work with. His Church begins to grow, but Tarrant himself fails in faith and falls into pride and despair and the certainty of damnation.

As the first novel begins, the Church is powerful but by no means sufficiently monolithic to bring about its long-held vision to deliver humans on Erna from the dangers of the fae through faith in the one god. Most humans have learned how to avoid or moderate, at least often enough to survive and occasionally thrive, the worst effects of living with the fae. Adepts and sorcerers Work with it. Horrors old and new still threaten humans who are careless, caught unaware, or simply unlucky. And having made a bargain with the dark forces of Erna to avoid death, Gerald Tarrant, now called the Hunter, walks the night and preys on human blood and fear.

But there is something else happening on Erna as well, and despite mutual distrust and antipathy, both Tarrant and a sorcerer-priest, Damien Kilcannon Vryce, are drawn into an uneasy working relationship in an attempt to discover what lies behind the strange memory loss of an Adept, Ciani of Faraday. What they discover will lead them further on a journey that has the potential to save – or end – human life on Erna.

By binding together in such a quest a devout and committed priest who is also a sorcerer, and the undead and sworn to evil founder of the Church he adheres to, Friedman sets the scene for a complex and nuanced exploration of the nature of good and evil, purity and corruption, faith and despair, of fall and redemption, sacrifice and rebirth, and the classic ethical and moral issue: do the ends justify the means? Can any good come of allying with a creature so completely sworn to evil as Tarrant the Hunter? Can the Hunter justify an attempt to save humanity without forswearing his allegiance to evil? Can either man remain what he is in the presence of the other? And if one, or both, change, what are the consequences both for them and for their quest? Friedman herself offers a glimpse into the kinds of questions she has chosen to consider in the writing of this trilogy:

The religious themes in CF? They are the meat of the series for me, an investigation in to the nature and ramifications of human faith the way only SF can explore it. What will our religions become when god actually answers our prayers? Are we prepared to deal with the kind of power we say we want? How does good inspire man, how does evil corrupt him, and what are the names of the ten thousand shades of gray in between? The fae provides a mirror that lets us see all these issues more clearly and postulate how they might affect us. I believe there is a beauty in religious faith that transcends the doctrine of any one religion, and I struggled to capture that beauty. (source)

And in addition to giving the reader a great deal to think about, it’s also a well-written, well-plotted story with compelling protagonists, intriguing antagonists, strong secondary characters, a well-developed setting and lots of action. My main complaint is that so many of Friedman’s memorable women characters either die or are left behind as Vryce and Tarrant struggle on through challenge after challenge to the end of their journeys.

The Great Transformation, Karen Armstrong

Karen Armstrong is one of the best contemporary thinkers and communicators on the subject of religion and its place in human thought, culture, history and politics. Some of her other books – notably The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths, A History of God: From Abraham to the Present, the 4000 Year Quest for God and Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today's World – are, in my opinion, essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the context in which a great many of the important social, cultural and political trends and events of our time must be situated.

This is one of her more scholarly and historical works – it’s more about the development of the religious impulse in humanity from its beginning expressions to the foundations of the major religious traditions of history and the present than about how those traditions might affect us today. In this book, Armstrong sets the stage for, and carries the reader through, the Axial Age among the peoples of four distinct regions, tracing the origins and early developments of Confucianism and Daoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India; monotheism in Israel; and philosophical rationalism in Greece.

It’s an ambitious project that, by its very size, limits the depth of historical detail that Armstrong is able to provide. Also, one can, I think, legitimately raise some questions about the validity of the concept of the Axial Age as originally developed by German philosopher Karl Jaspers. For example, I don’t accept that only these four cultures developed religious traditions that exhibit “Axial” characteristics, as Jaspers posited and Armstrong has supported by examining only these four in her book. To quote a brief and lucid summary of Armstrong’s characteristics of Axial Age religions:

What are these radical principles of the Axial Age? First, the ability to recognize the divine in both the other and oneself, along with a "likening" of the other to oneself—an empathy later to be called "The Golden Rule." Second, the rise of introspection and self-discovery over external ritual and magic. Third, the recognition of the inevitability of suffering and the development of "spiritual technologies" for transcending it. Fourth, the capacity to see things as they really are—a realism terribly undervalued in our own time. Fifth, the spread of knowledge, beyond the confines of an elite, to ordinary folk. Sixth, an awareness of the limitations of human knowledge. Review by Michael Alec Rose

While these were certainly a part of the early development of the religions that Armstrong, following Jaspers, addresses, I am hesitant to accept the notion that these qualities did not develop as part of the religious thought, life and traditions of other cultures, both before and after the great ripple of the Axial age transformations.

As an animist, I was also annoyed by the argument that religious thought and experience based in an animist religious or spiritual tradition is necessarily “magical,” which in this context implies pre-Axial and hence not “developed.” There’s a part of me that wonders whether Armstrong has unconsciously dismissed – as many scholars do – the spiritual history of people who did not build great civilisations, in Western terms.

However, while I have some concerns about what may have been left out of the picture, the book is nonetheless well worth reading for what it does contain – a comparative tracing of the origins and ideas of some of the key religious and philosophical traditions of human history.