>> Michele Glymph: Good
evening, Ladies and Gentlemen.
We have a brief announcement
before we begin.
First, please silence or
turn off your cell phones
for the duration of the program.
Second, we are delighted
that Karen Armstrong
has graciously offered
to sign books immediately
following the program.
We have a few guidelines
for that process.
To join the signing line,
you must have a signing line
ticket signifying purchase
of her book, of her new
book, Lost Art of Scripture.
These tickets are
distributed when you pick
up your pre-ordered books or
buy books in the front lobby
where you checked in and can
be obtained after the program.
For those with special physical
needs or with an infant,
we will provide an
opportunity for you
to join the signing
line before others.
And now, ladies and gentlemen,
please welcome the Director
of Literary Programs,
Maria Arana.
[ Applause ]
>> Marie Arana: Thank you
very much, and welcome!
Good evening.
I am the Literary Director for
the Library, and it's a joy
to welcome you here
this evening.
How many of you are
at the Library
for the first time tonight?
Ah! Well, double welcome to you!
And how many of you
attended the,
the Library of Congress'
flagship event,
The National Book Festival?
Ah! Nice, I like to see that.
Welcome back.
And how many of you
have attended one
of these National Book
Festival Presents?
Good! Keep coming
back, we like you.
Thank you so much.
[Laughter] Well,
welcome to the Library
of Congress' National
Book Festival Presents,
a vibrant new series
of programs inspired
by The National Book Festival,
and meant to bring you
into the heart of this
historic, dynamic institution,
the Library of Congress,
your national library.
This is a brand-new effort
through which we hope
to spark conversations, engage,
inspire, and entertain you
with some of the most
diverse, provocative,
and notable writers of the day.
In every program that
we put before you,
say from the children's writer
Dav Pilkey, to a conversation
with the Haitian American
wonderful literary novelist
Edwidge Danticat, to the program
you've come to hear tonight,
we mean to connect the
works of living writers
to a larger history, a
deeper understanding.
We delight in making
those connections for you,
and we delight in provoking the
kind of exchanges that make all
of us more informed
and mindful citizens.
You're part of that collective
mission by being here tonight.
Thank you for joining
us, and thank you
for helping us carry this torch.
I hope you've taken a moment
to look at the display
of religious texts our curators
have put out for you next door,
and perhaps you've
taken a tour of some
of the Library's vast holdings
that will make tonight's
conversation come alive for you.
So we try to incorporate these
features in every program,
and we want you to experience
the depth and breadth
of this Library, of your
Library, but to cut to the task
at hand, I'm thrilled to be
standing here to introduce one
of the world's great minds
on spiritual studies.
A writer and scholar who
has contributed richly
to our understanding of faith,
scripture, and the history
of religions around the globe.
She is, of course,
Karen Armstrong,
the current Ambassador for
the United Nations Alliance
of Civilizations, and in the
event you don't know what
that Alliance is, it's a
dedicated, ambitious body
within the United Nations that
mounts action internationally
against any form of extremism.
Karen Armstrong would like
to make the world talk
to one another.
It's an alliance that nurtures
communication and strives
to diffuse tensions
between those
who profess different faiths.
She's also one of the
forces behind the Charter
for Compassion, a campaign that
she began about ten years ago
after she won the TED Prize.
The Charter for Compassion is
a publicly created document
in more than 30 languages that
urges the peoples and religions
of the world to embrace the
essential values of compassion,
so fundamental to many of
the world's core beliefs,
no matter what your religion.
Karen Armstrong began her
career as a religious Sister,
a member of the Roman Catholic
Sisters of the Holy Child
in England from which she
separated when she enrolled
in studies at St.
Anne's College in Oxford
to study English literature.
She has been a teacher,
a historian, a writer,
a television personality on
religious issues, but always
and above all, she has been
an explainer, a connector.
The lesson throughout in her new
book, The Lost Art of Scripture,
is that the world's major
faiths and religions have more
in common than you might think.
The differences over which
wars have been fought
and the hard hatreds that
have been made harder, are,
if you study the very
heart of scripture,
actually very few
and surmountable.
It's a hopeful message.
Karen Armstrong is the author of
the best-selling History of God.
She has given us consistently
brilliant, deeply researched
and thoughtful works, among
them, Through the Narrow Gate,
Tongues of Fire, The Holy War
about the Crusades, Muhammad,
A Biography, Buddha, Faith
after 11 September, Twelve Steps
to a Compassionate Life,
and my own favorite,
her gripping memoir,
The Spiral Staircase:
My climb out of darkness.
Now she gives us this timely and
important new work, The Lost Art
of Scripture, a book that
explains where faith resides
in our brains and our hearts.
It is, in short, an examination
of the way sacred texts have
been co-opted by hardliners
and fundamentalists
around the world who insist
that these books should be taken
literally at their word when in,
when in fact, as
she argues so well,
"Sacred texts are works of art.
They are tools to
approach the Divine,
roads to a higher consciousness.
They were never meant
to be rigid
and unbending, written
in stone."
She's here to tell us about
this clarifying work of history
in a time of intolerance
and mutual incomprehension,
her voice is at once a
comfort and a clarion call.
At the end of her talk, we
will take your questions.
I hope you will formulate
them as, as she speaks to you.
Please help me welcome the
prodigiously talented writer
and thinker, Karen Armstrong.
[ Applause ]
>> Karen Armstrong: Well,
that's a wonderful welcome!
Thank you!
Oops! Not so good.
Now why is scripture a lost art?
Well, first of all, let's
think if you're reading a book
like Pride and Prejudice.
You're not astonished or even
dismayed to hear that Mr. Darcy
or Mr. Bingly never existed.
[ Inaudible ]
We're reading scripture
in a very factual way.
We're, we're factual people.
In the early modern period,
we started turning in Europe
and here, over here in the
United States towards reason,
logic, the Enlightenment,
all of these things,
and science particularly
have done wonderful things
for the world.
But it's no good
reading scripture
or let's say the
stories of scripture
as though they were factual any
more than Pride and Prejudice is
because in the, before about the
18th Century, it was impossible
to write history as we know
it today because it's only
since the 18th Century
when we started to learn
about ancient cultures.
We learned, developed the
science of archeology,
learned how to decipher ancient
languages that we could make,
that we could recreate
the world of the past.
With human beings, as
perhaps the older members
of the audience will agree
with me, it's more natural us
to forget rather
than to remember.
[Laughter] And scripture tells
us what we should remember,
and it does so in
a way that brings
out the reasons why we
should remember these texts
and the stories of scripture,
what they mean rather
than what actually happened.
Now, I've got only a
few minutes to talk,
and it's quite a
fat book as you see.
So I thought that I would
just focus on three things
about what's, how,
how we misinterpret
scripture as a lost art.
One of the things that
I'm not going to go
into in great detail,
but intrigued me first
and got me started on
this project, was the fact
that scripture was
essentially a performative art.
Now you've been probably
some of you have seen,
may have seen those
wonderful Bibles on display,
but that's a fairly
recent thing.
Scripture before was memorized.
Most people couldn't read
until the 18th Century.
You recited your scripture.
You sang it.
The Koran means "recitation,"
and Muslim's don't read the,
the text as we do, even when
they're learning it by heart.
They don't learn it from a text.
It's recited to them, and
they learn it that way.
And as a child, a Catholic
child, I got scripture filtered
through the Gregorian
chant, and, and the beauty,
the haunting cadences
of that chant.
But we never read
the Bible much.
It was always done in
the setting of music
and also acted out in ritual.
Because we learn things
far more with our bodies,
neurologists tell us,
than with our minds.
We learn more about human
nature and the world
through movement and gesture.
I'm told that people, if
they, someone is talking,
and they use a lot of
gestures, people will,
people will believe the gesture
rather than the words [laughter]
because the, the body
doesn't lie so much.
But I'm going to take
three different things,
and the first one is
that scripture tells us
what we must believe,
that it gives us truths
that we must accept.
It's a very odd idea.
It came in rather late,
round about the time
of the Protestant
Reformation, and you'll remember
that Luther said famously
that, "A poor man armed
with scripture can lend as
much about the faith though at,
than any Pope or bishop.
Give everybody the Bible,
and they'll be fine."
Well, that didn't work because
the reformers soon found
that they couldn't
agree with one another
about what scripture said,
even on absolutely fundamental
matters like the Eucharist.
And this was so disturbing
that from the beginning,
the Protestant movement
was split, and it is,
scripture is full of contra--
it is not teaching us anything.
It foc-- and how can it because
it is talking about a reality,
we call it God over here.
In India they called
it the Brahman,
and Brahman means, "the all."
It is everything that is.
It's reality itself,
with a capital R.
So you can't define it.
A word which literally means,
coming from the Latin root,
"to set limits upon something."
You can't limit God.
As a Catholic child,
at the age of eight,
I learned my catechism.
And one of the questions
was what is God?
And in a single sentence,
we had him summed up.
[Laughter] God is the supreme
spirit who alone exists
of himself and is
infinite in all perfects.
Well, at eight, I have to say
that left me rather
cold [laughter].
But I now think it's quite,
it's entirely incorrect
because it takes, first of
all, it takes it for granted
that you can simply draw a
breath and define a word,
as I've said, that means to
set limits upon a reality
that is inimitable,
that cannot be grasped.
And furthermore, who
alone exists of himself.
Thomas Aquinas, before
the modern period,
who probably summed
up European thought
in his great Summa Theologica
as saying, "God is not one
of the things that exists.
All things that we know that
exist are, it's very temporary."
They come and they go.
They fail.
They're feeble.
God is [foreign language],
he says, "Being itself."
Like the Brahman, with
that force of life.
And it's certainly not a he,
[inaudible] exists of him
and is infinite in
all [inaudible].
And it tells you nothing about
God, and neither does the Bible.
And I just want, because
we've only got a little while,
I just want to take one little,
scripture that you probably,
many of you will know
well, the Book of Genesis.
In chapter one of Genesis,
the famous chapter one,
we have a portrait of God.
Everything a God
should be [laughter].
There he is in total
control, totally powerful.
He simply has to speak
and it comes into being.
Unlike other creation stories,
which the Bible also includes,
God doesn't have to fight any
terrible monsters, sea monsters,
in order to-- creation's
no great struggle to him.
He speaks and it is done, and
God is totally good and fair.
At the end of every
day, he's very benign.
He blesses everything that he
has made and says, "It is good."
Even his old enemy,
Leviathan, the sea monster,
that in other stories he's
supposed to have destroyed,
he blesses him, and, and the
two are made, are peaceful.
Now the rest of the book of
Genesis systematically undercuts
that nice picture of God.
[Laughter] But by the end of
chapter three, the God who was
in total control of his
creation, has lost control
and can't manage them
at all, human beings.
They're off on their
own [laughter].
The God who was so benign
becomes a cruel destroyer
in the time of the flood.
In a shift of a fit that
we could only call pique,
he decides to destroy
the whole human race.
It meant he saves Noah and his
family yet wonders why as soon
as Noah gets out of the ark, he
gets drunk, and commits some,
some horrible sexual act.
But, but he, he wipes
out the entire world.
So much for the benign God.
And the God who was completely
impartial in chapter one,
blessing all that he has
made, has monstrous favorites.
He's endlessly choosing
one person after another
for no good reason,
as far as we can see.
Cain and Abel.
Cain comes and brings
his sacrifice.
God says no.
He takes Abel's sacrifice
and said, "Why?"
No reason at all.
And the Hebrew tells us that
his face crumples like the face
of a child when it is shocked
by something, and it puts iron
in Cain's soul, and you
have the first murder,
and he kills his brother Abel.
And he goes on doing
this, God does.
He, he chooses Jacob rather
than Esau, the older twin.
And you're made to feel the
pain of the rejected one.
"Have you no blessing
for me, Father?"
Esau cries in despair?
"Father, bless me, too,"
and Isaac cannot do it,
and poor Hagar, just dumped in
the desert with her baby son
by Abraham at God's command
to face almost certain death.
This is not the benign God
we think, and at the end
of the Book of Genesis, God
was continually butting in
and intervening and
appearing and advising,
disappears from the world, and
joseph and his brothers have
to struggle with
their own insights
and dreams, just as we do.
That image of God has
been steadily undercut
because this is the
world that we know.
This is a world where
people do die in terrible,
senseless disasters,
natural disasters.
And we, and this is a
world that is not fair.
I, none of those people he's
chosen is particularly good
or better than the other,
and yet, they're the ones
that prosper and
get the blessing,
and that is what we see always.
And we're left at the end
wondering what is this God?
And notice when later on, Moses
meets God in the burning bush
and says, "What is your name?"
because to know the name
of someone gives
you power over them.
God says, [foreign language].
In Hebrew, that means,
"I am what I am."
Now, that's been translated
to say God's saying he's a
self-subsistent being, but it,
this is very early Hebrew,
and they didn't have that kind
of metaphysical thoughts
as of yet.
They hadn't developed a
metaphysical tradition.
It's a phrase used in Hebrew
of deliberate vagueness.
[Laughter] When you
say, the Bible will say,
"They went where they went."
It means, "I don't
know where they went."
[Laughter] And what God
is saying is basically,
"Mind your own business.
Don't ask me."
And similarly, he chooses Moses,
the stammerer to speak for him.
And Moses says to
him, "Look, God."
At one point, "Why
have you chosen me?
Ever since a child, I've had
this terrible speech impediment,
and no one can hear
a word I say."
And God says, "Never mind,
Aaron will speak for you,
your brother Aaron,
he will say-- ."
So we're only getting what
God has said to Moses.
It's second-hand, and you
wonder really how much Moses has
understood, and furthermore,
it is Aaron, the-- .
The facile speaker who is guilty
of the archetypal idolatry
because it's his idea that
the Israelites worship the god
in the form of a golden
calf, narrowing God
down to a single image.
And we, Moses, he still
prefers Moses who cannot speak
because God is unspeakable,
and the great Taoist scripture,
the Tao Te Ching, begins,
"The Tao that can be named
is not the eternal Tao."
If you can say what God is,
or if you can say what the
Tao is, that's not the Tao.
If you can say what
it is, as I glibly did
in the Catholic Catechism,
that's not God at all.
And so heaven does not
speak, says Confucius,
of the highest reality
in Confucianism.
Heaven does not speak.
We just get glimpses
of what we can see.
And in one of the
Taoist scripture, too,
Confucius' nephew is
supposed to say, "I,
I sit quietly and forget.
I forget everything
I've been told."
Not building up this, all
this knowledge about God,
so scripture is not telling
us what we should believe.
It is rather opening up
minds and hearts to the fact
that what went, when
we speak about God,
we do not know what
we're talking about.
It's the illimitable, the Tao
that can be named is
not the eternal Tao.
Very early in the tenth century,
the BCE, the priests of India,
ancient India, had, used
to have a competition,
and they would go off into the
wilderness, and they would fast
and pray, and then they
would come together.
The Indians loved competitions,
and the object of it was
to find a word that
summed up the Brahman
that I mentioned earlier, the
all that is everything that is.
And so the first priest, the
challenger, drawing on all
of his huge learning
and his, and his,
all his mystical experience
would come out with a phrase
that he thought summed
up the Brahman, the all.
And the other priests
would have to reply,
build upon that, and reply.
And but the priest who
won the competition,
was the one that reduced
them all to silence,
and in that silence,
the Brahman was present.
The Brahman was not present
in the learned declarations,
but in the sudden realization
of the impotence of speech
when you face the Divine.
And so when we go, why
did we have catechisms
in the first place?
Because after the reformists
found they couldn't agree
themselves upon scripture,
they said there was no thought
of letting ordinary people
read the Bible anymore.
That, that was clearly out.
And so they had to have
catechisms instead,
and both the Catholics,
Catholic leaders
and the Protestants
did this, so you have,
so that you would approach
the scriptures through a set
of catechism answers,
theological answers derived
by human beings like
that What is God?
And the not the model
of scripture.
One of the India's favorite
scripture is the Mahabharata,
a story of, a terrible
story of an appalling war.
It's hard to see any light or
glimmer of hope in it at all,
even at the very end when the
[inaudible] all go to heaven.
It's clear that there is
a heaven at all, actually.
You're left, you're left
wondering whether heaven exists,
and certainly you're
left in grave doubt
about what the gods are
up to, and yet that is one
of India's best-loved
scriptures because instead
of giving us answers, it
plunges us into obscurity.
Get rid of your catechisms
and oppose,
let ourself see the
ambiguity of scripture.
Okay, point two here.
Scripture does not look,
expect us to go back
to the original meaning
of the text.
Now in modern scholarship,
that's what we do, isn't it?
We go back to find the
earliest account of something,
or the earliest version of,
of a story or something?
We go back to the original text.
And in the, that's what
the, the Protestants,
reformers wanted to do.
They wanted to go back
to the early church
to reproduce the early church,
but there's a problem about that
because they were men and women
of the early modern period,
not the first century of
Christianity, and they couldn't,
it's impossible for
us to go back,
especially as all the
first Christians were Jews
who had an entirely
different view of scripture.
But we're still doing
that today and sometimes
in some very distorted forms.
You've got in Saudi
Arabia, for example,
the Wahabis who reproduced a
lot of seventh century customs
and mores going back to what the
prophet had done at that time,
but they're not men and
women of the seventh century.
And there are even
fundamentalists in this country
who have suggested
that they revive,
we revive the old
Hebrew legislation
which would include the
stoning of disobedient children.
We're not programmed to do this.
Scripture is an innovative art,
and in every scripture tradition
that I have studied, and I've
found this out while I was,
I don't think, knew this at
the beginning of my research,
it insists that you move
forward and apply it
to your, to the present.
Invent it, if you like.
The Jewish people, after
they lost their temple
which was destroyed by
the Romans in the year 70,
could not read the old
Hebrew text in the same way.
And again, because the whole of
their spirituality had centered
around the temple, and there
was a terrible hole right
in the heart of,
of the scripture.
But they didn't just
chuck it out!
They developed something called
[foreign language] which means
to go in-- it comes from a verb
[foreign language] which means
to go in search of
something, so you would take,
so someone would come
to one of the rabbis
and ask him a question.
And he would answer it by taking
a verse from the Book of Psalms,
say, or another verse from the
prophet, one of the prophets,
and then perhaps another
from the Book of Genesis,
texts that have no
relation to one another,
bundle them all together, and
there you've got an answer
that answers this
particular question.
And so it was, it was inventive.
And there was a story,
this, this form,
[foreign language] was
invented and perfected
by the great Rabbi Akiva who
was, who died, he was killed
by the Romans in the
early second century,
and there was a story told
in the Talmud about him,
but the fame of his
brilliance was so great
that it had reached heaven, and
Moses got to hear about this,
[laughter], and he
was intrigued.
So he wanted to find
out what was happening,
so he came down to
earth, and went
and attended Rabbi
Akiva's scripture class,
and he sat in the back row
among the, the very back.
But found to his
intense embarrassment
that he couldn't understand
a word of the Torah
that Rabbi Akiva was expounding,
the Torah that had been
revealed to him on Mt. Sinai.
But instead of being miffed
about it, he goes back
to heaven, shaking
his head proudly,
rather like a proud
father saying,
"My children have defeated me.
But they've grown up,
they've gone beyond me."
One rabbi put it this way.
He said that, "Every time the,
that which was not revealed
to Moses was revealed to Rabbi
Akiva and his generation."
Scripture revelation
was not something
that happened once
in the distant past.
It was present whenever
a Jew, a Jewish student
with his teacher
confronted the sacred text
and found something new in it.
And in the early versions of the
Talmud, there would be a page
on which the student must
imbibe his own thoughts,
his own discoveries.
He would be standing, and they
were told to imagine that they,
that he and his master were
standing together on Mt. Sinai
with Moses, and taking
the revelation further
because revelation
was not something
that had happened
once in the past.
It happened every time a Jew
confronted the sacred text.
And the New Testament, the
writers of the New Testament,
Matthew, Mark, and Luke
particularly have formed their
own kind of [foreign language].
Theirs is a little different,
more like the sectarians
in Qumran by the Dead Sea
which saw their own movement
predicted in the past.
Matthew, for example, never
misses a chance of taking a bit
from the Old Testament,
as we, as they called it,
and applying it to Jesus.
He, he quotes the prophet
Hosea and said, "I took my son
out of Egypt," and while
obviously Hosea was talking
about the Exodus of
Egypt with Moses, but no,
Matthew applies it to the
Baby Jesus who was forced
to flee King Herod, and but when
things died down, he came back
to Palestine and he was
brought out of Egypt.
That's just one example.
And there's one story in the
Gospel of Luke, second century,
early second century Gospel
which shows how this works.
This wasn't just a
clever dict stuff.
It was something was
profoundly emotive.
After the crucifixion,
two disciples, distraught.
They thought Jesus was
going to be the Messiah,
and he died this terrible death.
They, they're leaving
Jerusalem and going
to the nearby village of Emmaus.
And they're sad and
distressed, obviously,
and a stranger approaches
them and says,
"Look, you're awfully upset.
Is there anything
I can do to help?"
I'm always relieved that
those disciples weren't sort
of stiff upper lip
Brits [laughter]
who would have replied a cheery,
"Oh, no thanks, we're fine."
And that would have been
the end of the whole story,
but, but he, but they do.
They let, they themselves are
vulnerable, and they, they--
this stranger would have
laughed at them, but they say,
"We thought Jesus
was the Messiah,
and look what's happened."
And he said, "Oh,
slow of heart."
And then starting
with Moses, going,
he goes through all the
scriptures showing it applies
to Jesus and all
predicted his crucifixion.
Well the scriptures don't
say nothing of the sort.
This is more inventive [foreign
language], and at the end,
you know the end of the story.
They have supper together.
When the stranger
breaks the bread,
they see that it's
Jesus, and he disappears.
And they say, this
is the important bit,
"Did not our hearts
burn within us
when he opened the
scriptures for us?"
Their hearts swelled with
joy and was an emotive,
insightful thing, not just
a cerebral cleverness.
And that, Luke is saying, is
how we'll see Jesus today,
in the breaking of bread,
in this inventive scripture,
and reach, when we reach out
towards the stranger for help.
So if [inaudible] sums it all
up, he said that every time,
even [inaudible] 12th
Century, wanted to pull Jewish,
this is a mystic
and philosopher,
every time you recite
a piece from the Koran,
it should mean something
different to you.
And if it doesn't mean
something different to you,
you're not reciting it correctly
because you're not sufficiently
in the moment to say
what you're going to do.
Now finally, I'm
looking at the time.
But there's a lot
of spirituality today
that is all about Me.
You know, not condemning
any of this.
But yoga, for example,
it was not designed
as a sort of aerobic exercise.
It was designed to get rid
of ego, that selfish thing,
part of us, that always turns
everything on towards ourselves
and is always thinking
about ourselves.
Let the ego go.
And.
So and similarly mindfulness.
The Buddha designed
mindfulness and told his monks
to practice it, not so they
could feel more centered
in themselves, for before,
because they would realize
their selves did not exist.
The self was a fiction;
it had no reality.
And so there's--
scripture is not about Me.
It can't just tell us
about our own private,
internal spirituality or
relationship with God.
It must issue in
practical action.
And the, the story
about the Buddha,
we often see him, don't we?
Lost in contemplation
in yogic trance,
and he did do a lot of yoga.
And there's a story about him
in the Buddhist scriptures
that when he had achieved
enlightenment, he was basking
in this new-found peace, and the
inconvenient thought occurred
to him that perhaps he
should teach other people
about how to do this.
[Laughter] And he thought,
"Well, no, I'm not going to do
that because it's
very difficult.
It means you've got
to let the ego go,
and most people aren't going
to be interested in that.
I'm not going to do it,"
at which point Brahma,
the highest god in the highest
of heavens gave a terrible cry,
and he said, "Then
the world is lost;
the world is utterly lost."
And he descends from heaven,
and the god kneels before the
enlightened man, and he says,
"Lord, please preach
your method.
Look at the world."
And the Buddha, we're told,
looked at the world with the,
with the eye of a Buddha and
saw the pain of the world,
and spent the next 40
years-- we never see this,
but it's in the scriptures,
tramping round the towns
and villages of India,
helping people to deal
with their suffering, and
the way to overcome it.
And this is all the
scriptures tell us to act.
Later, he would, he would
tell his monks to do the same.
"After achieving enlightenment,"
he said, "you must go back
to the marketplace,
immerse yourself in the pain
and the nastiness of the
world in order to assuage it.
You've got a job to do."
And this, so this, this was,
this outward turning
was, was crucial.
The Confucians thought further.
They said, "Don't wait until
you've achieved enlightenment.
You will gain enlightenment
by helping other people,"
because you're again, it helps
you to put yourself to one side.
And the Gospels are
full of it, too.
On the last, when, when
the Kingdom comes to earth,
those who get into the Kingdom,
Jesus says, "are not those
who will cry, 'Lord, Lord,'"
and say their prayers nicely.
But I was hungry,
you gave me to eat.
Thirsty, you gave me to drink.
Sick, naked, and in
prison, and you visited me.
Reaching out to the
suffering of the world.
Sometimes, you know, you go
to church, sing a few hymns,
and then go home to lunch,
and that's the end of it.
It isn't. The end of the Mass,
I don't know what they do now,
but they used to, the priest
would say, [foreign language].
"Go, you are sent forth."
And that's, he didn't mean
go home to lunch, [laughter],
he meant, he meant you're now
to go and immerse yourself
in the pain of the world.
And I want to end with this,
the Confucian vision of how
that should be done because
I think it's very opposite
to our polarized and
unequal world today.
Instead, he said, "You learn
compassion," the Confucians say,
and that meant the Golden Rule.
Confucius was one
of the first people
to enunciate the Golden Rule.
His disciples asked
him, "Master,
which of your teaching
can we put
into practice all
day and every day?
And what's the single
thread that runs
through all your teachings?"
And he said, [foreign
language] which means,
"likening to the self.
Look into your own heart.
Discover what gives you
pain, and then refuse,
under any circumstance
whatsoever to inflict that pain
on anybody else, and you do it
not just when you feel like it,
but all day and every day.
And that means that
all day and every day,
you're leaving yourself
behind and putting yourself
in the position of another,
and that's how you
gain enlightenment."
Anyway, you start,
the Confucians would say
later, "in the family."
You've got-- that's where
you learn compassion,
how to live with other people
in relation to the family.
And you can't go and
put the world to rights
if your own family
is in disarray,
but it can't stop
with the family.
You then move out
into the next circle.
The city in which
you dwell and look,
ask yourself how many
people are sleeping
in the streets this year?
In London, for example,
where I come from, rich city,
25% of the population
are living in poverty.
We should be going out to that.
Then to the third circle,
to move out into the,
the whole country, but
finally, to the whole world.
And the whole world is now
we are so globally small,
linked together as never
before, unable to get away
from one another, and
yet we're retreating
into nationalistic
ghettos like Brexit.
To, moving away from
the fact that we have
that outward reach
towards the whole world.
So those are, that's what
the scriptures are saying,
not to focus just to sing a few
hymns, not to slavishly find
out what scripture said 500
years, even 1000 years ago.
What is it saying to you now?
How will it heal the moment now?
And remember that it will
tell you nothing about God.
It will make you realize
that when you're in,
before the Divine,
you've come to the end
of what words and
thoughts can do.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> Marie Arana: Thank
you so much!
That extraordinarily
illuminating
and inspiring talk,
Dr. Armstrong.
Thank you so much.
We will have a question and
answer with the audience,
but I have a little
surprise, and I'm going
to ask my colleague,
Mark Dimunation,
one of the great curators of
this Library, to present it.
Mark?
>> Mark Dimunation: Hello again.
>> Karen Armstrong:
Oh, hello again!
Thank you.
>> Mark Dimunation:
Hello everyone.
You will recall you came through
and we had the opportunity
to show you some sacred texts,
and those of us who are fans
of yours know that we've been
on this journey for many a book
in which we've learned that the
sacred text changes over time
and place, both in terms
of use and meaning.
Whether it be, in our
case, in our collections
from 14th Century Hungarian
manuscript of the Bible
to the printing of the Gutenberg
Bible in 1454 to the printing
of the King James Bible
in 1611 and beyond,
sacred text has always
been in flux.
However, there's one
aspect of the materials
that we showed you today which
is a constant, it's true.
And even as far back as
the 15th Century was real,
and that is Jerusalem,
and so whether it comes
from Breydenbach's pilgrimage to
Jerusalem in the 1470s and '80s.
Or to this, the image
of Jerusalem
from the Nuremberg Chronicle
in 1493, Jerusalem has remained
as the center, an image
of truth and reality.
When all the rest of the
world was displayed in fiction
and fantasy, Jerusalem was
always portrayed realistically.
So as a remembrance of
your time with us today,
I'd like to give you Jerusalem.
>> Karen Armstrong: Thank you!
[ Applause ]
>> Mark Dimunation:
Shall I take it?
I'll take it back with me.
Thank you.
[ Inaudible ]
>> Marie Arana: It's
so wonderful
when we can connect what we
have in this vast library
with something that
you've just said, so that,
that's a thrill for us.
We will now take questions.
Should we raise the house lights
so that we can see one another?
Questions for Dr. Armstrong?
We have microphones
floating through the room,
and they will be happy
to hand you a microphone
and give you a voice.
>> Participant: Thank
you for your talk.
Do you think humanity has
finished writing scripture?
Do you see us creating
more scripture?
>> Karen Armstrong:
I think, well,
one of the interesting
things that my editor
in New York asked me to do
when he read the first draft
of my new book, he
said, "You know,
you say that scripture starts
going off in the modern period
when we start getting
all analytical and,
and scientific about things.
And yet scripture
is an art form.
Perhaps there are artists who at
that time were writing
scriptures better."
And I had fun with
this, and I was right.
So he said, "Why don't
you include some?"
So I did, first of all
Milton's Paradise Lost.
Now, Milton's god is
a disaster [laughter].
Really, that is the god of
the catechisms that's coming.
He's endlessly blabbing on
about fore-ordained and pre-this
and pre-that, utterly boring.
But Satan is a triumph.
[Laughter] Because what,
because what he's doing is
rescuing goodness.
The, Milton was a Calvinist, but
he did not agree with Calvin's,
the Calvinist doctrine
of predestination
that when you're born, you
are predestined to go to hell
or to heaven, because
this caused, A,
this is a disgusting view
of God, and B, it was,
it was really torture.
People were really
having breakdowns,
and Satan had become a figure
of absolutely monstrous evil.
Now we know that
Milton read Hebrew.
He was one of the few people who
were allowed to read scriptures
because the reformers said
you could only read scripture
if you could read it in
the original languages
which would put most of us out
of the count, Greek and Hebrew.
And he read the Talmud, and
on the last day of Creation,
the rabbis noticed that God,
instead of saying, "It is good,"
he said, "It is very good."
Why? Because, said the rabbis,
on that day God created the evil
inclination in human beings,
because we human beings are the
only evil beings in the world.
Adam was [inaudible] evil,
but we have these big
brains that make us do evil.
But so is the evil inclination
good, asked the rabbis?
Yes, they said, because without
it, a man would not marry a wife
or engage in trade, for example.
The sexual instinct is good,
but it can easily be perverted
and become hurtful and
harmful and dangerous.
And in trade, which the
rabbis were very keen on,
you have to do it, your
partners down, and win
and put other people
out of business.
But without it, we are a
mixture of good and evil,
and that's what Satan is.
Satan, he's a human being.
He's a, he's made an evil human.
There's one passage in Milton's
Paradise Lost where he see Eve
for the first time
before she's fallen.
And he becomes, Milton
said, "stupidly good."
He's so lost and entranced
by her, and he puts,
Milton puts onto Satan's lips
soliloquies that are worthy
of Hamlet of McBeth about his
regret for what he's done,
the mixture of good and
evil that all of us are.
And so there are other
scriptures that I mentioned
as I also looked at Thomas
Mann's Joseph books, a trilogy,
four books that tell the story
of Joseph and his brothers,
but also discussing the rise of
Nazism in Germany at that time.
It's a comment on his
own time, and finally,
I took David Grossman's little
book, The Myth of Samson,
a difficult story, but Samson
is a very unlikely hero.
He's a kind of thug, really.
But Goldman does, if you want
to see what [foreign language]
is like, he, you see it in,
you see it with Goldman.
He takes-- Grossman, rather,
he takes every single sentence
and comments on it, and comes
out with some beautiful thoughts
about human nature in the person
of that unlikely hero, Samson.
So yes, I think we
can probably--
there are attempts to
find scriptures, new ones.
They can become rather
sloppy and sentimental,
but when they're applied
with rigor in the way
that Milton did, and
Grossman and Mann, you find,
you have an intelligence
that makes you see the
scriptures differently
and apply them to your own age.
>> Marie Arana: It's a
wonderful combination
of scripture and literature.
Thank you for that
complete answer.
There's a, oh, right over there?
>> Participant: Hello,
my name's Chuck.
I had a quick question.
Given the fact that we're in
the world's largest library,
and tonight you've reminded
us that throughout the history
of writing, the primary way
we've communicated, taught,
and learned was through
oral technique,
much of which we've probably
forgotten since we've engaged
in writing so much since.
Not only the invention
about the press,
but everything you've talked
about a couple centuries later.
Do you see that in modern
technology, social media,
the world of, all the
various devices that we have,
that we are shifting
in some historic way,
away from understanding and
communicating to something
that is morphing
to some combination
of something that's
less writing,
and again becoming
more oral and visual?
And something different than
we've experienced before?
Are we moving into a
new way of communication
that may be something similar
to the ancient, but not quite?
>> Karen Armstrong:
You may well be right.
I'm not very hot
on social media.
I'm too old, and oh yes,
you may well be right.
What slightly worries me, we
were talking about this earlier,
about, about the phone.
Is that we're never in
the moment anymore though.
I was telling a story.
I was in Singapore recently, and
I was in a restaurant, and two,
a couple came in to have
lunch together, and they sat
down at the table
and immediately took
out their phones and started
talking to other people,
which they did for
the entire lunch,
and then when the guy's lunch
arrived, he took a photograph
of his hamburger to, [laughter]
so he could say, "We had lunch,
and this was the
hamburger we had."
Instead, scripture is asking
us to be in the moment,
and very often when you see
people, I see them walking up
and down my street,
which is a very pretty
and 18th Century street
in the middle of London.
Beautiful curve.
They're not looking at
it, they're [inaudible]
on to somebody on the phone.
Or you, people are walking along
a beautiful cliff and the sea,
and they're chatting to
someone in the office.
We have to be in the moment, so
I, I worry too in social media
about the, about the ugliness
of some of it, the bullying.
The fact that children
are sometimes being driven
to suicide by the unkindness,
because you don't have
to look someone in the face and
tell them something horrible.
You can do it anonymously
without,
without taking the consequences.
And we've had, I don't
know what you've--
probably you've had this here,
but there have been suicides
and there are even websites
where you can go to find out how
to commit suicide
as a 14-year-old child did
quite recently in Birmingham.
So I think like all, but
I'm not saying it's evil,
because it's good and
evil mixed, I think.
It could, it could bring us
together more, but and I think
of the prophet Muhammad
for a moment
because when the Koran
came down, he wasn't always
on some lonely mountaintop
like Moses.
People would come and
ask him about a problem
in the community, a
naughty problem, and they,
and we're told that he wouldn't
just say, "Oh, I'll just think
about that," or no, he
would think deeply into it,
so deeply that he
would grow pale
and sweat even on a cold day.
Sometimes he would shake
with the effort of struggling
to find an answer, and then
outward come this message
from the Koran, from
the depths of his heart,
the depths of his being.
Sometimes he would say,
"Cover me up," he would shake.
But out of that effort, what he
was doing was really entering
into that moment with the whole
of him, his body and his soul,
entering to get as deeply
into that problem as possible.
And I fear that some, with,
you know, the whole idea
of the Tweeting a thought in
whatever characters it is,
I think this will, could
become a simplification as well
as an escape from
the present moment.
The present moment
is all we have.
We might not, we might all
be dead the next moment
if something happened, or a
terrorist suddenly marched in.
We don't know.
And the scripture tells
us to live in that moment.
But I don't want to sound too
much like a sort of iconoclast
of this, of this new-- -
because I'm a bit too old
to enjoy it and inhabit
it fully.
And I haven't embraced it much.
I don't want to be
endlessly chatting,
and I hate the telephone,
even the regular ones.
[Laughter] I, I find I always,
you know, find it an intrusion
when I'm writing or thinking.
So I really prefer seeing
people face to face.
But, but still I may be
one of those iconoclasts.
Just-- but there's probably
a bit of good and a big
of evil, as all things are.
>> Marie Arana: That was a
great question, thank you.
And a marvelous answer.
We have time for one
more question, I believe.
>> Participant: I'm prefacing
this by I'm interpreting you
as saying that a scripture is
not closed, even though we talk
about sacred scripture
in canons.
And that B, the engagement
with scripture should
not be something
that we are just taking
and freezing in time.
Okay. In much of human endeavor,
that's what we want to do.
That is both religious
scripture,
that is to take the United
States, the Constitution,
to take communism, the works
of Marx and Lenin, et cetera.
It occurs to me that
there's a dynamic here,
and I would like
her comment on this.
That that dynamic
is one of fear.
And it comes to me
from the standpoint
that once upon a time, I
pretended to be a musician,
and as a musician, I never
performed a work exactly the
same, because if I
did, it was dead.
If I engaged with it, I
discovered something new.
So my question to you is what
you are saying about scripture,
it is like somebody
performing a piece of music.
You must constantly engage.
It is a challenge, you don't
know where it's going to go,
and that that should be
informing how you relate
to people whose scriptures
are different than yours.
>> Karen Armstrong: Yes, I think
that's a really profound remark.
I do, I do think, and I
think about the fear, too,
because I think about fear.
We are all frightened beings.
We have good reason to be
fearful at the present moment.
And it is, I think
scripture teaches us,
I think what I heard you
say, scripture makes us look
at things we're afraid
of like extinction.
That if you do the
same thing over
and over again exactly the
same, somehow it's died,
a sense of fear, and we
are all frightened beings.
We've all, we're all going to
face our own death, and it,
we have to live with that.
I think perhaps some of what
you're saying is probably a bit
about the death fear, and
we want to leave our mark
for when we've gone in, in that.
And we go back to the past, but
make it, revive it, as it were,
and make it live
again in the present.
And so what was the
last thing you said?
>> Participant: Music.
>> Karen Armstrong: Music?
>> Participant: The fact
of performing a piece
of music, you know.
>> Karen Armstrong: Don't
repeat, don't repeat it.
[ Inaudible ]
Yes, definitely, because we
are now living in a world
where we know about other
people's scriptures.
And other people's religions.
We used to hear, travelers
would come back from far,
distant lands and tell us, "We
have stories about what goes
on in other parts of the world.
You know, Muslims running
around a little building.
What on earth are they doing?"
Now we understand the depth of,
and the profound similarities
that we see right in China,
India, the Muslims, Christians,
Jews in their scriptures.
And we see how profound
the likenesses are
as well as the differences.
And that makes some
people afraid
because they want their faith
to be singular, and it's when,
it's when we began to find out
about other people's scriptures,
that we started getting
fundamentalisms,
people going back and
saying, this is the,
this is the bedrock of faith.
Mine's better.
But and, and that's linked
up too with the terrible wave
of nationalism that is
coming up at the moment.
Brexit, for example.
I keep saying it, but then if
you've just come from Britain,
that's all we hear
about these days.
It fills us, some
of us, with despair,
and I honestly don't know
how the country's going
to come back together
again after this.
We are so profoundly
divided, but here you have,
remember when the
Berlin Wall came down,
and people were dancing
in the street?
And we see people cheering
at the prospect of a wall
between Mexico and
the United States.
So that you have a sense of
wanting your little scripture,
your little world to be the one.
We can't do that anymore because
the world is coming to us,
and it comes to us in the form
of migrants dying every day
to try to get into Europe
and the United Kingdom.
You heard this terrible
story about those 29 people
from Vietnam recently who just
died in a refrigerated car
at Essex, tried to get
into the United Kingdom.
This, keeping out, keeping other
people's scriptures at bay is,
is a result of fear, and yet
the scriptures are all asking us
like Confucius, to open,
to go out from in a series
of concentric circles
to embrace the world.
To go out to all
tribes and nations.
Let me finish on a word, on the
Koran, the phrase from the Koran
which is seen by so many
people as an evil scripture,
but most of them haven't
read it, of course,
and if they have read it,
I say that's not how
you read the Koran.
Muslim's don't read the Koran,
they listen to it
in Arabic, not this.
But this is his last
message to his community.
He knew he would be dying soon.
They made the Meccan pilgrimage
together, and he spoke,
and he told was them not
to fight one another.
A Muslim must never fight others
because we're all one family,
and he ended with this phrase
in which God speaks to the whole
of humanity, and I
think it's something
that we need to learn today.
"Oh, Humankind."
And he's, he's using, he's
talking about Adam and Eve,
that we all came from a
single person, but I'm going
to do a bit of [foreign
language] and suggest
that we all come from
a man and a woman.
We're, each one of us, a fusion
of opposites coming together
to make a new person.
"Oh, Humankind," God says to the
people, the people of the world.
"We have created you all
from a male and a female,
and we have formed you
into tribes and nations
so that you may get
to know one another."
And that should be
our task today.
[ Applause ]
>> Marie Arana: Dr. Armstrong,
thank you for that
enlightening talk
in which you have brought
us down deep to places
where we don't usually
go, and then brought us
up to an illuminated explanation
of faith and its true roots.
Thank you so much.
Please help me thank Dr.
Armstrong, and please meet her
at the signing tables next door
where you can actually ask her
another question or two perhaps.
Thank you so much for
joining us tonight.
[Applause]