Karen Armstrong, mystery, and getting along

From the NY Times,conservative columnist Ross Douthat reviews Karen Armstrong's new book The Case for God.

Both modern believers and modern atheists, Armstrong contends, have come to understand religion primarily as a set of propositions to be assented to, or a catalog of specific facts about the nature of God, the world and human life. But this approach to piety would be foreign to many premodern religious thinkers, including the greatest minds of the Christian past, from the early Fathers of the Church to medieval eminences like Thomas Aquinas.

These and other thinkers, she writes, understood faith primarily as a practice, rather than as a system — not as “something that people thought but something they did.”

What I find interesting about the book (and may actually drive me to read it) is this by Douthat:

... religion was a set of skills, rather than a list of unalterable teachings — a “knack,” as the Taoists have it, for navigating the mysteries of human existence.

It’s a knack, Armstrong argues, that the Christian West has largely lost, and the rise of modern science is to blame. Not because science and religion are unalterably opposed, but because religious thinkers succumbed to a fatal case of science envy.

Instead of providing the usual portrait of empiricism triumphing over superstition, Armstrong depicts an extended seduction in which believers were persuaded to embrace the “natural theology” of Isaac Newton and William Paley, which seemed to provide scientific warrant for a belief in a creator God. Convinced that “the natural laws that scientists had discovered in the universe were tangible demonstrations of God’s providential care,” Western Christians abandoned the apophatic, mythic approach to faith in favor of a pseudo scientific rigor — and then had nowhere to turn when Darwin’s theory of evolution arrived on the scene.

An Aquinas or an Augustine would have been unfazed by the idea of evolution. But their modern successors had convinced themselves that religious truth was a literal, all-or-nothing affair, in which doctrines were the equivalent of scientific precepts, and sacred texts needed to coincide exactly with the natural sciences. The resulting crisis produced the confusions of our own day, in which biblical literalists labor to reconcile the words of Genesis with the existence of the dinosaurs, while atheists ridicule Scripture for its failure to resemble a science textbook.

To escape this pointless debate, Armstrong counsels atheists to recognize that theism isn’t a rival scientific theory, and that it is “no use magisterially weighing up the teachings of religion to judge their truth or falsehood before embarking on a religious way of life. You will discover their truth — or lack of it — only if you translate these doctrines into ritual or ethical action.” Believers, meanwhile, are urged to recover the wisdom of their forebears, who understood that “revealed truth was symbolic, that Scripture could not be interpreted literally” and that “revelation was not an event that had happened once in the distant past but was an ongoing, creative process that required human ingenuity.”

Douthat goes on to scold Armstrong (saying "The casual reader, however, would be forgiven for thinking that the leading lights of premodern Christianity were essentially liberal Episcopalians avant la lettre."), and I think he's missing the point (he is a conservative Roman Catholic and thus rather....authoritarian by instinct). But the comments in the review I've quoted seem applicable to other threads going on, and can be also reached by the concept of mystery, which I may extend to ambiguity. Doxy has a post about mystery:

I am still trying to figure out for myself what *I* believe---why I feel this need to hold “truth” and “mystery” in tension with one another and let the baby splash in the bathwater without throwing either of them out.

While I am definitely a rationalist, I also "believe" in mystery. The mystery of love, for example, and art. At some level, sure, those can be reduced to firing of neurons in the brain, but in how they are perceived or experienced, they are so much more than that. I would not tell anyone the "truth" of their own perception of love, any more than I would tolerate them reducing my love to some mere biological (f)act. (Which is one of the reasons I am so passionate on the marriage equality front). Religious belief is neither a justification nor an excuse to attack another's perception or being. And frankly, neither is non-belief.

Can't we all just get along?


(cross-posted at Street Prophets)

Dead leaves

Fall arrived this weekend. Last week it was still scorching late Indian summer, with a threat of Santa Ana winds and wildfires. Then suddenly it changed. It was spectacularly beautiful this weekend, with clouds scudding overhead, picturesque white-caps dotting the ocean, and a coolness sufficient to drive me finally out of my summer uniform of shorts and Hawaiian shirts to jeans and a sweater. The light seems more pale and yellowed than it did last week, as the sun continues its southward slant, and today there just seemed to be a stillness in the air and in the crowds on the street.

I generally enjoy the transition to crispness and the shortening days, but this year I just feel melancholy. Autumn eases us to days of dark and cold, of change and death and loss. Another year draws a close, another birthday looms ahead. I'm feeling very blue these days, depressed by work burdens and by aspirations unreached and now unreachable. "I coulda been a contenda", an internal Marlon Brando voice protests, knowing that the chance is gone, fallen like the leaves. The darkness comes. I am in my Matthew Arnold place:

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the A gaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

People of Faith in Maine oppose Question 1

Glad to see them standing up and being vocal:

Faith leaders from the Religious Coalition for the Freedom to Marry in Maine gathered simultaneously today in Portland and Bangor to endorse NO on 1/Protect Maine Equality. Representing 18 faith traditions from Fort Kent to Kittery and from Farmington to Castine, the coalition of active and retired clergy believe that all Maine families should be treated equally under the law.

The coalition, according to its key spokespersons, said only marriage equality confers full dignity and respect to loving and committed gay and lesbian couples. The religious leaders also said they are speaking out so that people of faith know that many faith leaders believe deeply in fully supporting all their congregant families.

“I believe that faithful, lifelong, monogamous relationships are among the building blocks of a healthy and stable society, “ said Rt. Rev. Steven T. Lane, IX Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Maine. “Last spring, the rights and obligations of civil marriage were extended to all Maine citizens. The passage of Question 1 would deny those rights . . . create two classes of citizens and deny one group what we believe is best for them and for society.”

Feet of Clay

Jake is having a discussion about institutions and authority. There seems to be a convergence of issues related to these questions, including some rather high profile criminal cases. Power,as they say, corrupts.

Bishop Charged with Solicitation

Bishop in child porn case surrenders

Sex abuse cover up by LA Diocese alleged

A correpondent of Andrew Sullivan writes,

For the Church itself should have remained a pilgrim. No cathedrals and episcopal palaces. No mitres, croziers, and gorgeous vestments. No princes of the Church. Just plain men and women going out to find and care for lost sheep, the wisest among them showing the way by example and quiet counsel.

It might have gone that way. It could yet. But the need to overawe people and demand obedience from them is powerful and seductive. It is a part of that world that the kingdom of heaven is not of.

But me, as usual, I turn to my favorite philospher:

For, though I speak it to you, I think the king is but a man, as I am: the violet smells to him as it doth to me: the element shows to him as it doth to me; all his senses have but human conditions: his ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man; and though his affections are higher mounted than ours, yet, when they stoop, they stoop with the like wing. Therefore when he sees reason of fears, as we do, his fears, out of doubt, be of the same relish as ours are: yet, in reason, no man should possess him with any appearance of fear, lest he, by showing it, should dishearten his army.*

*(Wm. Shakespeare, Henry V, IV:i)