The evolution of monotheism

“A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam” by Karen Armstrong

This is not an easy book to read nor to review, due to the imense amount of information presented. And also, not everyone is ready to read this book. Heck, it took me 14 years since the day I purchased the book to finally read it.

The book was the one that introduced me to Karen Armstrong 17 years ago, before I decided to purchase it 3 years later but only to be kept in the pile of unread books ever since. Sure, I’ve read 7 of her other books since then, I’ve watched the documentary with the same name “A History of God”, I’ve even read the little summary book of it while reading bits and pieces from random chapters in the book, but I’ve never actually read it cover to cover.

But I guess as they say the teacher will appear once the student is ready. Now, in the yellowing pages of the book lie some of the most fascinating sentences that have so far summarised my reading journey in religious matters, some 61 books on various religions later. And it fits, as without my prior knowledge from the books I’ve read in the past decade or so I wouldn’t be able to fully comprehend this book, accept its thesis, or appreciate it. Funny how one of the earliest books I’ve bought on religion turns out to be the one that can sum it all.

The main thesis of the book is to show how throughout history the concept of God has been reshaped or reconstituted according to the new or changing cultural contexts, and that human necessity for the divine is what made God always exist and never really abandoned. The premise of religion to support this concept has also been one of the main tools (if not THE main tool) to implement social control in any society, whether for the good or for the bad, and that the exploitation of religion or justification using it for any bad deed are nothing new and have been going on since way back in the BCE era.

However, as Ms. Armstrong made it very clear, “this book will not be a history of the ineffable reality of God itself, which is beyond time and change, but a history of the way men and women have perceived him from Abraham to the present day.” In other words, the book is not a history about our Creator – which is beyond our ability as merely spec of dusts living among 200 trillion galaxies – but it is rather a history about how us humans interpret Him and create a reflection of Him, in us.

And it focuses on the three Abrahamic religions that have monotheism at its core: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Hence the title of the book, which is not a history of many gods, not a history of multiple deities, but a history of God. One God. Although as we can see in the book human interpretation has created many different versions of one God: The philosopher God (since the days of Plato to scholars such as Ibn Rusd and Thomas Aquinas), the mystic God (best reflected through Sufi and Kabbalah), a God for reformers (the many branches of Protestantism), and the concept of God for scientists and even atheists.

As in the case of any Karen Armstrong books, this book is so very dense with important information and stories, in an impressive mix of tales of religion and their many historical contexts. The gems of the book are definitely the many behind-the-scene historical events, from the schism, to the theological debates between many factions, or even escalation to war among them, with the winners got to shape their respective religions into the arguably more simplified version today.

Here are some of the most notable lines from the book, quoted verbatim:

• The more I learned about the history of religion, the more my earlier misgivings were justified. The doctrines that I had accepted without question as a child were indeed man-made, constructed over a long period of time.
• My study of the history of religion has revealed that human beings are spiritual animals. Indeed, there is a case for arguing that Homo Sapiens is also Homo Religiosus.
• Like any other human activity, religion can be abused but it seems to have been something that we have always done. It was not tacked on to a primordially secular nature by manipulative kings and priests but was natural to humanity.
• Our current secularism is an entirely new experiment, unprecedented in human history. We have yet to see how it will work.
• Instead of waiting for God to descent from on high, I should deliberately create a sense of him for myself.
• A few highly respected monotheists would have told me quietly and firmly that God did not really exist – and yet that ‘he’ was the most important reality in the world.
• When one conception of God has ceased to have meaning or relevance, it has been quietly discarded and replaced by a new theology.
• This was, of course, a most unfair and reductive description of Canaanite religion. The people of Canaan and Babylon had never believed that their effigies of the gods were themselves divine; they had never bowed down to worship a statue tout court. The effigy had been a symbol of divinity. Like their myths about the unimaginable primordial events, it had been devised to direct the attention of the worshipper beyond itself. The statue of Marduk in the Temple of Esagila and the standing stones of Asherah in Canaan had never been seen as identical with the gods but had been a focus that had helped people to concentrate on the transcendent element of human life.
• In the beginning, human beings created a God who was the First Cause of all things and Ruler of heaven and earth. He was not represented by images and had no temple or priests in his service. He was too exalted for an inadequate human cult. Gradually he faded from the consciousness of his people. He had become so remote that they decided that they did not want him any more. Eventually he was said to have disappeared. That, at least, is one theory, popularised by Father Wilhelm Schmidt in The Origin of the Idea of God, first published in 1912.
• Schmidt suggested that there had been a primitive monotheism before men and women had started to worship a number of gods. Originally they had acknowledged only one Supreme Deity, who had created the world and governed human affairs from afar. Belief in such as High God (sometimes called the Sky God, since he is associated with the heavens) is still a feature of the religious life in many indigenous African tribes.
• Atheism has often been a transitional state: thus Jews, Christians and Muslims were all called ‘atheists’ by their pagan contemporaries because they had adopted a revolutionary notion of divinity and transcendence. Is modern atheism a similar denial of a ‘God’ which is no longer adequate to the problems of our time?
• All religion must begin with some anthropomorphism. A deity which is utterly remote from humanity, such as Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, cannot inspire a spiritual quest.
• Nobody expected religion to be a challenge or to provide an answer to the meaning of life. People turned to philosophy for that kind of enlightenment. In the Roman empire of late antiquity, people worshipped the gods to ask for help during a crisis, to secure a divine blessing for the state and to experience a healing sense of continuity with the past. Religion was a matter of cult and ritual rather than ideas; it was based on emotion not on ideology or consciously adopted theory.
• Today we have become so familiar with the intolerance that has unfortunately been a characteristic of monotheism, that we may not appreciate that this hostility towards other gods was a new religious attitude.
• During the first century, Christians continued to think about God and pray to him like Jews; they argued like Rabbis and their churches were similar to the synagogues. There were some acrimonious disputes in the eighties with the Jews when Christians were formally ejected from the synagogues because they refuse to observe the Torah. We have seen that Judaism had attracted many converts in the early decades of the first century but after 70, when Jews were in trouble with the Roman empire, their position declined. The defection of the Godfearers to Christianity made Jews suspicious of converts and they were no longer ancious to proselytise. Pagans who would formerly have been attracted to Judaism now turned to Christianity but these tended to be slaves and members of the lower classes. It was not until the end of the second century that highly-educated pagans became Christians and were able to explain the new religion to a suspicious pagan world.
• In the Roman Empire, Christianity was first seen as a branch of Judaism but when Christians made it clear that they were no longer members of the synagogue, they were regarded with contempt as a religio of fanatics who had committed the cardinal sin of impiety by breaking with the parent faith.
• If the Logos himself were a vulnerable creature, he would not be able to save mankind from extinction. The Logos had been made flesh to give us life. He had descended into the mortal world of death and corruption in order to give us a share of God’s impassibility and immortality. But this salvation would have been impossible if the Logos himself had been a frail crea-ture, who could himself lapse back into nothingness. Only he who had created the world could save it and that meant that Christ, the Logos made flesh, must be of the same nature as the Father. As Athanasius said, the Word became man in order that we could become divine.
• When the bishops gathered at Nicaea on 20 May 325 to resolve the crisis, very few would have shared Athanasius’s view of Christ. Most held a position midway between Athanasius and Arius. Nevertheless, Athanasius managed to impose his theology on the delegates and, with the Emperor breathing down their necks, only Arius and two of his brave companions refused to sign his Creed. This made creation ex nihilo an official Christian doctrine for the first time, insisting that Christ was no mere creature or aeon. The Creator and Redeemer were one.
• But Christians were still confused: if there was only one God, how could the Logos also be divine? Eventually three outstanding theologians of Cappadocia in eastern Turkey came up with a solution that satisfied the Eastern orthodox church. They were Basil, Bishop of Caesarea (329-79), his younger brother Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa (335-95) and friend Gregory of Nazianzus (329-91). The Cappadocians, as they are called, were all deeply spiritual men. They thoroughly enjoyed speculation and philosophy but were convinced that religious experience alone could provide the key to the problem of God. Trained in Greek philo-sophy, they were all aware of a crucial distinction between the factual content of truth and its more elusive aspects. The early Greek rationalists had drawn attention to this: Plato had contrasted philosophy (which was expressed in terms of reason and was thus capable of proof) with the equally important teaching handed down by means of mythology, which eluded scientific demonstration. We have seen that Aristotle had made a similar distinction when he had noted that people attended the mystery religions not to learn (mathein) anything but to experience (pathein) something.
• Behind the liturgical symbols and the lucid teachings of Jesus, there was a secret dogma which represented a more developed understanding of the faith. A distinction between esoteric and exoteric truth will be extremely important in the history of God. It was not to be confined to Greek Christians but Jews and Muslims would also develop an esoteric tradition. The idea of a ‘secret’ doctrine was not to shut people out. Basil was not talking about an early form of Freemasonry. He was simply calling attention to the fact that not all religious truth was capable of being expressed and defined clearly and logically. Some religious insights had an inner resonance that could only be apprehended by each individual in his own time during what Plato had called theoria, contemplation. Since all religion was directed towards an ineffable reality that lay beyond normal concepts and categories, speech was limiting and confusing. If they did not ‘see’ these truths with the eye of the spirit, people who were not yet very experienced could get quite the wrong idea. Besides their literal meaning, therefore, the scriptures also had a spiritual significance which it was not always possible to articulate.
• In the Koran an ‘unbeliever’ (karir bi na’mat al-Lah) is not an atheist in our sense of the word, somebody who does not believe in God, but one who is ungrateful to him, who can see quite clearly what is owning to God but refuses to honour him in a spirit of perverse ingratitude.
• On addressing Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses: Three of the Arabian deities were particularly dear to the Arabs of the Hijaz: al-Lat (whose name simply meant ‘the goddess’) and al-Uzza (the Mighty One), who had shrines at Taif and Nakhlah respectively, to the south-east of Mecca, and Manat, the Fateful One, who had her shrine at Qudayd on the Red Sea coast. These deities were not fully personalised like Juno or Pallas Athene. They were often called the banat al-dahr, the Daughters of God, but this does not necessarily imply a fully-developed pantheon. The Arabs used such kinship terms to denote an abstract relationship: thus banat al-dahr (literally, ‘daughters of fate’) simply meant misfortunes or vicissitudes.
• The Koran does not condemn other religious traditions as false or incomplete but shows each new prophet as confirming and continuing the insights of his predecessors. The Koran teaches that God had sent messengers to every people on the face of the earth: Islamic tradition says that there had been 124,000 such prophets, a symbolic number suggesting infinitude.
• During the ninth century, the Arabs came into contact with Greek science and philosophy and the result was a cultural florescence which, in European terms, can be seen as a cross between the Renaissance and the enlightenment… Arab Muslims now studied astronomy, alchemy, medicine and mathematics with such success that, during the ninth and tenth centuries, more scientific discoveries had been achieved in the Abbasid empire than in any previous period of history. A new type of Muslim emerged, dedicated to the ideal that he called falsafah.
• The ulema had always been suspicious of Falsafah and its fundamentally different God but Ibn Rushd had managed to unite Aristotle with a more traditional Islamic piety. He was convinced that there was no contradiction whatsoever between religion and rationalism. Both expressed the same truth in different ways; both looked towards the same God. Not everybody was capable of philosophical thought, however, so Falsafah was only for an intellectual elite. It would confuse the masses and lead them into an error that imperilled their eternal salvation. Hence the importance of the esoteric tradition, which kept these dangerous doctrines from those unfitted to receive them.
• As the Koran had taught, all truth came from God and should be sought wherever it could be found. It could be found in paganism and Zoroastrianism as well as in the monotheism tradition.
• Unlike dogmatic religion, which lends itself to sectarian disputes, mysticism often claims that there are as many roads to God as people. Sufism in particular would evolve an outstanding appreciation of the faith of others.
• Ibn al-Arabi developed the positive attitude towards other religions which could be found in Koran and took it to a new extreme of tolerance… The man of God was equally at home in synagogue, temple, church, and mosque, since all provided a valid apprehension of God.
• The situation of the Jews in the Islamic empire, where there was no anti-Semitic persecution, was far happier and they had no need of this Ashkenazi pietism. They were evolving a new type of Judaism, however, as a response to Muslim developments. Just as the Jewish Faylasufs had attempted to explain the God of the Bible philosophically, other Jews tried to give their God a mystical, symbolic interpretation.
• In March 1492, a few weeks after the conquest of Granada, the Christian monarchs gave Spanish Jews the choice of baptism or expulsion. Many of the Spanish Jews were so attached to their home that they became Christians, though some continued to practice their faith in secret: like the Moriscos, the converts from Islam, these Jewish converts were then hounded by the Inquisition because they were suspected of heresy. Some 150,000 Jews refused baptism, however, and were forcibly deported from Spain: they took refuge in Turkey, the Balkans, and North Africa. The Muslims of Spain had given Jews the best home they had ever had in the diaspora, so the annihilation of Spanish Jewry was mourned by Jews throughout the world as the greatest disaster to have befallen their people since the destruction of the Temple in CE 70.
• A new type of Twelver Shiism had become the state religion in Iran under the Safavids and this marks the beginning of a hostility between the Shiah and the Sunnah which was unprecedented. Hitherto Shiis had had much in common with the more intellectual or mystical Sunnis. But during the sixteenth century the two formed rival camps that were unhappily similar to the sectarian wars in Europe at this time.
• Shah Ismail, the founder of the Safavid dynasty, had come to power in Azerbaijan in 1503 and had extended his power into western Iran and Iraq. He was determined to wipe out Sunnism and forced the Shiah on his subjects with a ruthlessness rarely attempted before. He saw himself as the Imam of his generation. This movement had similarities with the Protestant reformation in Europe: both had their roots in traditions of protest, both were against the aristocracy and associated with the establishment of royal governments.
• While Muslims like Findiriski and Akbar were seeking understanding with people of other faiths, the Christian West had demonstrated in 1492 that it could not even tolerate proximity with the two other religions of Abraham. During the fifteenth century, anti-Semitism had increased throughout Europe and Jews were expelled from one city after another: from Linz and Vienna in 1421, from Cologne in 1424, Augsburg in 1439, Bavaria in 1442 (and again in 1450) and from Moravia in 1454. They were driven out of Perugia in 1485, Vicenza in 1486, Parma in 1488, Lucca and Milan in 1489 and from Tuscany in 1494. The expulsion of the Sephardi Jews of Spain must be seen in the context of this larger European trend.
• Muslim fundamentalists have toppled governments and either assassinated or threatened the enemies of Islam with the death penalty. Similarly, Jewish fundamentalists have settled in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with the avowed intention of driving out the Arab inhabitants, using force if necessary. Thus they believe that they are paving a way for the advent of the Messiah, which is at hand. In all its forms, fundamentalism is a fiercely reductive faith.
• Ever since the prophets of Israel started to ascribe their own feelings and experiences to God, monotheists have in some sense created a God for themselves. God has rarely been seen as a self-evident fact that can be encountered like any other objective existent. Today many people seem to have lost the will to make this imaginative effort. This need not be a catastrophe. When religious ideas have lost their validity, they have usually faded away painlessly: if the human idea of God no longer works for us in the empirical age, it will be discarded. Yet it the past people have always created new symbols to act as a focus for spirituality. Human beings have always created a faith for themselves, to cultivate their sense of the wonder and ineffable significance of life.