Citation: Armstrong,
Karen. The Lost Art of Scripture: Rescuing the Sacred Texts. London: The
Bodley Head, 2019.
(Here are some of my [jkk's] initial personal
takeaways from watching some video clips of Karen Armstrong lecturing about the
book and a quick browsing of the book itself. Hopefully, it will urge people to
go and read the book itself. See below for links to some public lectures by
Armstrong on youtube.)
***
"The Bible" (and sacred scripture
in general) is frequently thought at least in the West to be writings where one
can find eternal, immutable, and foundational truths that people have to
consult or should learn and put into practice in order to attain an ultimate
goal which, in traditional Christianity, meant “being saved” or "getting
to heaven."
Karen Armstrong in her book The
Lost Art of Scripture (2019) seeks to correct that common misunderstanding
and set the record straight about what might be the true purpose of
"scripture" in a spiritual tradition.
And what would that be? She insists
that "scripture" is an "art form" (p. 7). Being an art form
... it is the product of and is concerned primarily with touching the
right-brain human functionalities of intuition and artistic sense, rather than
the left-brain characteristics of rationality and logic. Unfortunately, in the
West, since the Enlightenment, scholarship has sort of imposed many left-brain
functionalities upon the scriptures. That has in turn resulted in our missing
and losing its original identity of being an art form.
The following are noteworthy points that I randomly picked up from listening to Armstrong's online lectures and browsing through the book. They contain some insights about some essential ways by which—Armstrong thinks—scripture functions.
Lesson #1: Scripture Invites Us
to Enter Mystery
The notion <that scripture tells
us what we must believe; that it gives us truths we must accept> is
not really correct! (Library of Congress lecture: timestamp 13:00) Instead, there is a deliberate vagueness about
even some important matters throughout the Bible. That is an invitation for us
to plunge deeper into mystery and not fool ourselves into thinking that we have
received a quick and complete answer to our perplexing questions by consulting the
book like a manual.
This deliberate vagueness that acts
as an invitation to enter mystery is symbolized by the name of God in Hebrew:
אֶהְיֶה
אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה ... The word was
possibly read as "Ehyeh asher Ehyeh" meaning "I am that I
am." Another possible, perhaps better translation might be: I will
be who I will be. That phrase is intentional in suggesting deliberate
vagueness. For example, if someone asks you where some friends of yours went
and you answer, “they went where they went,” you are basically saying, “I don't
know where they went.” When God, therefore, tells Moses that his name is YHWH (with
the above-mentioned vague meaning), that basically means that God doesn’t want
to box the divine identity in some fixed category, hence, God will be who God
wants to be. To be curt about it, God was in effect telling Moses and the
people, “Mind your own business” “Don’t think that you know who I am or who I
will be.”
Examples from other religious
traditions: Way back in the 10th century BCE, in India, they developed a form
of religious discourse known as the brahmodya competition (See: The
Great Transformation, p. 127). It was a competition among priests about who
could discourse on sacred mysteries best. It was carried out by having a series
of profound reflections from different priests about the nature of the sacred. The
priest who won the competition would be the one who reduced everyone to silence
because everyone would be at a loss for words to express the sacred mystery.
And in that silence—it was recognized—the Brahman (the ultimate reality)
was present.
Tao Te Ching of Confucianism
declares: The Dao (the Way, the Ultimate Principle) that can be named is not
the Dao'
Hence, scripture does not really tell us what we have to believe. Rather, it opens us up to the reality that when we speak about God, we actually don't know what we're talking about. It's a limit concept - shows us our limitation! cf. again the Brahmodya competition.
Lesson #2: Scripture is Primarily
Forward-Looking
[Scripture (as a community’s spiritual-religious
text) does not primarily expect us to go back to the original meaning of the
text. This is the opposite of what modern scholarship does because scholars want
to go as close as possible to the original texts and study them. But this
scholarly project is a post-enlightenment quest. That’s not how many believers
treated their scriptures in the beginning: they used scripture to engage life
in the present so that the future could be better
If there’s one thing we can say
about the nature of these ancient texts, it would be: It's actually impossible
for us to go back perfectly in time. Scholarly efforts to reconstruct the past
based on scripture will always be incomplete and imperfect. (As a scholar I
would add though: scholarship is of course important to make us understand
better what scripture meant in the past and how we can correctly apply it to
the present!)
So, it is again clear that Scripture is an innovative art; it is creative; it insists that you move forward by applying scripture’s lessons to the present. The Jewish practice of midrash (creative interpretation of tradition to make it applicable to present realities) wonderfully illustrates this character of scripture.
Lesson #3: Scripture Invites Us
to Transcend Ourselves
Scripture is not about me. Scripture
is not meant to just tell us about our own private spirituality but must rather
issue in practical action. Scripture tells us to act! It seeks to conquer EGO
in concrete ways.
Illustrative here is the story of
Buddha. After he attained enlightenment, he was resistant to the idea of
teaching it to others because that would hold many challenges. In the end,
however, he had to share and teach his enlightenment with the whole world in
order to help people to find a solution to the problem of suffering.
This quality is also illustrated in the Confucian teaching of compassion that forms the heart of the Golden Rule = shu 恕 (in Japanese 思いやりomoiyari). This virtue urges us to discover what gives us pain, and resolve not to inflict that on others. Moreover, according to Confucius, this has to be practiced all day and every day. If done so, it will give the practitioner enlightenment.
***
There are various youtube videos of
Karen Armstrong talking about the central points of the book and they're useful
if one wants to gain a bird's eye view of the essential points of this voluminous
work:
A talk she gave in Huston, TX on
the book divided into three parts:
Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6xRv-g0GwY&t=1492s
Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKutgk1W-DY&list=WL&index=45&t=746s
Part 3 (Q&A): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsYYiF9DpR0&list=WL&index=46
Lecture at the Library of Congress: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsG8DEszSbk&list=WL&index=3&t=1483s
Lecture at the Toronto Public Library: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF03oKfZxq8
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