My life in books

An early work by the acclaimed writer on religious issues Karen Armstrong, The First Christian: St. Paul's Impact on Christianity, explores the life and writings of St. Paul, giving insight both into how his became the voice that shaped the philosophical core of Christianity, and why it was his views that prevailed over those of other early interpreters of christian ideas and ideals.

It places the source of many key elements of Pauline Christianity - the most important of these for me being the anti-sex and anti-woman sentiments that strongly informed church teachings - in the cultural milieu, the nature and survival needs of the nascent Christian church, and the deeply felt millennialism of Paul himself.

Interesting read for anyone curious about the history of religions in general or Christianity in particular.

A Short History of Myth, Karen Armstrong

Intended as an introductory volume to a planned series of short novels by Canongate Books in which modern novelists offer re-imaginings of ancient myths from a number of different cultures, this is the first of Armstrong’s books that I’ve not been fully satisfied with. Instead of taking a fresh look at the roles and functions of myth in many cultures Armstrong has here relied primarily on revisiting her previous works on the development of monotheistic religions, and the cultures of the Axial age. It’s a good introduction to Armstrong’s very important scholarship on the development and modern manifestations of monotheistic religions, but it does not, I think, give the reader much insight into the history and, more importantly, the purposes of myth. Myth and religion can work hand in hand, but they are different, and equally important and powerful, forces in human thought and culture.

By focusing on where and how myth and religions are connected, and by drawing so deeply on her work with specific kinds of religions, I think Armstrong has missed out on a great deal that could be useful to a student of myth in general, and a reader of a series based on reworkings of old myths for a new age in particular.

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.