The Case for God

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by Karen Armstrong


  Acknowledgments

  As always, I have so many people to thank. First, my agents, Felicity Bryan, Peter Ginsberg, and Andrew Nurnberg, who have given me indispensable encouragement, affection, and support for so many years, as well as my wonderful editors, Jane Garrett, Robbert Ammerlaan, Louise Dennys, and Will Sulkin. I know how fortunate I am to have each one of you as a beloved friend and colleague.

  But I must also express my gratitude to Michele Topham, Jackie Head, and Carole Robinson in Felicity Bryan’s office for their unfailing patience, kindness, and practical help, and to Leslie Levine, Jane Garrett’s assistant at Knopf. Many thanks, too, to the host of people who have worked on the text and production of this book with such skill, dedication, and commitment: Louise Collazo, Wesley Gott, Ellen Feldman, Claire Bradley Ong, Gabriele Wilson, and Jörg Hensgen. Finally, my thanks to the publicists, some of whom have become old and valued friends after our years on the road together: Sheila O’Shea, Kim Thornton, Sheila Kay, Laura Hassan, and Francien Schuursma. It is a joy to work with each and every one of you.

  In the autumn of 2007, I had the good fortune to give the William Belden Noble Lectures at Harvard University, which gave me the opportunity to present some of the ideas that I have developed in this book. I also aired some of these themes at the Chautauqua Institution in the summer of 2008. I want to thank all my friends at the Harvard Memorial Church (especially the Faith & Life Forum) and at Chautauqua, who have listened to me so loyally and kindly over the years and given me such encouragement.

  During the last year, it has been a great delight and privilege to work with TED Conferences on the Charter for Compassion, an attempt to implement practically the thesis of this book. Thanks especially to Chris Anderson and Amy Novogratz, and to all the TED-sters who have contributed to this project with such extraordinary generosity, creativity, and awe-inspiring commitment. It has been an inspiration.

  Finally, a big thank-you to Eve, Gary, Stacey, and Amy Mott and to Michelle Stevenson, who make it possible for me to do my work by looking after Poppy so devotedly during my many absences.

  I could not have managed without any of you.

  Notes

  Introduction

  1. Johannes Sloek, Devotional Language, trans. Henrick Mossin (Berlin and New York, 1996), pp. 53–96.

  2. I have discussed the role of mythology more fully in A Short History of Myth (Edinburgh, 2005).

  3. Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (London, 1958), pp. 453–55.

  4. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton, N.J., 1949).

  5. Sloek, Devotional Language, pp. 75–76.

  6. The Book of Zhuangzi 17.3 in Martin Palmer with Elizabeth Breuilly, trans., The Book of Chuang Tzu (London and New York, 1996).

  7. Ibid.

  8. Denys Turner, Faith, Reason and the Existence of God (Cambridge, U.K., 2004), pp. 108–15.

  9. George Steiner, Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say? (London, 1989), p. 217.

  10. George Steiner, Language and Silence (London, 1967), pp. 58–59.

  11. Steiner, Real Presences, p. 217.

  12. Steiner, Language and Silence, p. 59.

  13. I have discussed this more fully in The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism (London and New York, 2000), and there is a more extended discussion of fundamentalism in chapter 12.

  ONE Homo religiosus

  1. Joseph Campbell, Primitive Mythology: The Masks of God, rev. ed. (New York, 1988), p. 305; Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth (New York, 1988), p. 79.

  2. Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Treasures of Prehistoric Art (New York, n.d.), p. 112. This rules out the suggestion that the paintings were simply a form of hunting magic.

  3. Ibid., p. 118.

  4. John E. Pfeiffer, The Creative Explosion (New York, 1982), p. viii.

  5. Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Les religions préhistorique: Paléolithique (Paris, 1964), pp. 83–84; Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, 3 vols., trans. Willard R. Trask (Chicago and London, 1978, 1982, 1985), 1:16.

  6. Joseph Campbell, Historical Atlas of World Mythologies, 2 vols. (New York, 1988), 1, 1: 58.

  7. Ibid., 1, 1: 65.

  8. Leo Frobenius, Kulturgeschichte Africas (Zurich, 1933), pp. 131–32; Campbell, Primitive Mythology, p. 300.

  9. Eliade, History of Religious Ideas, 1: 24.

  10. Campbell with Moyers, Power of Myth, pp. 85–87.

  11. Ibid., pp. 72–79; Historical Atlas, 1, 1: 48–49; Eliade, History of Religious Ideas, 1: 7–8.

  12. Walter Burkert, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, trans. Peter Bing (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1983), pp. 16–22.

  13. Walter Burkert, Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1980), pp. 54–56; Burkert, Homo Necans, pp. 42–45.

  14. Campbell, Historical Atlas, I, 2: xiii.

  15. Ibid., 1, 1: 93.

  16. Campbell, Primitive Mythology, p. 66.

  17. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, or Cosmos and History, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, N.J., 1954), pp. 1–34.

  18. Huston Smith, The World’s Religions, rev. ed. (New York, 1991), p. 367.

  19. Eliade, History of Religious Ideas, 1:17.

  20. Mircea Eliade, Birth and Rebirth: The Religious Meanings of Initiation in Human Cultures (New York, 1958); Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries: The Encounter Between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities, trans. Philip Mairet (London, 1960), pp. 194–226; Campbell with Moyers, Power of Myth, pp. 81–85.

  21. Eliade, Myths, Dreams, p. 225.

  22. Herbert Kuhn, Auf den Spuren des Eiszeitmenschen (Wiesbaden, 1953), pp. 88–89; Campbell, Primitive Mythology, pp. 307–8.

  23. Abbe Henri Breuil, Four Hundred Centuries of Cave Art (Montignac, France, 1952), pp. 170–71.

  24. Campbell, Primitive Mythology, p. 311.

  25. Burkert, Homo Necans, pp. 27–34.

  26. Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (London, 1958), pp. 331–43.

  27. Alexander Marshack, “Lunar Notations on Upper Palaeolithic Remains,” Scientia 146 (1964).

  28. Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, pp. 146–85.

  29. Burkert, Homo Necans, pp. 78–82.

  30. Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, pp. 1–124, 216–39.

  31. Mary Boyce, Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices, 2nd ed. (London and New York, 2001), p. 2; Peter Clark, Zoroastrians: An Introduction to an Ancient Faith (Brighton and Portland, Ore., 1998), p. 18.

  32. Boyce, Zoroastrians, pp. 9–11.

  33. Jan Gonda, Change and Continuity in Indian Religion (The Hague, 1965), p. 200; Louis Renou, “Sur la notion de brahman,” Journal Asiatique 237 (1949).

  34. Louis Renou, Religions of Ancient India (London, 1953), pp. 10, 16–18; Michael Witzel, “Vedas and Upanishads” in Gavin Flood, ed., The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism (Oxford, 2003), pp. 70–71.

  35. J. C. Heesterman, The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship and Society (Chicago and London, 1985), pp. 70–72, 126.

  36. Zhuangzi, The Book of Zhuangzi 6:29–31.

  37. Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts (New York and London, 2001), pp. 41–79.

  38. Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, pp. 367–88; Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York, 1959), pp. 50–54, 64; Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism, trans. Philip Mairet (Princeton, N.J., 1991), pp. 37–56.

  39. Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, pp. 38–63; Eliade, Myths, Dreams, pp. 172–78; Wilhelm Schmidt, The Origin of the Idea of God (New York, 1912), passim.

  40. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, pp. 120–25.

  41. Rig Veda 10.129.

  42. Rig Ve
da 10.90.

  43. Gwendolyn Leick, Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City (London, 2001), p. 268.

  44. Thorkild Jacobsen, “The Cosmos as State,” in H. and H. A. Frankfort, eds., The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man: An Essay on the Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East (Chicago, 1946), pp. 186–97.

  45. “The Babylonian Creation” 1.1 in N. K. Sanders, trans. and ed., Poems of Heaven and Hell from Ancient Mesopotamia (London, 1971).

  46. Enuma Elish 6.19, in Sanders, Poems of Heaven and Hell.

  47. E. O. James, The Ancient Gods (London, 1960), pp. 87–90.

  48. Psalms 89:10–13; 93:1–4; Isaiah 27:1; Job 7:12; 9:8; 26:12; 38:7.

  49. Eliade, Myths, Dreams, pp. 80–81.

  50. Chandogya Upanishad (CU) 6.13; my italics. All quotations from the Upanishads are from Patrick Olivelle, trans. and ed., Upanisads (Oxford and New York, 1996).

  51. CU 6.11–12.

  52. CU 6.10.

  53. Brhadaranyaka Upanishad (BU) 4.5.15.

  54. BU 3.4.

  55. BU 4.5.13–15.

  56. BU 3.5.1.

  57. Mircea Eliade, Yoga, Immortality and Freedom, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York, 1958).

  58. Women participated in Upanishadic spirituality and, later, in Buddhist practice.

  59. Patanjali, Yoga Sutra 2.42, in Eliade, Yoga, p. 52.

  60. BU 1.4.1–5.

  61. BU 1.4.6.

  62. BU 1.4.10.

  63. BU 4.3.21.

  64. Samyutta Nikaya 53:31. The quotations from the Pali Canon of Buddhist scriptures are my own version of the texts cited.

  65. Sutta-Nipata 43:1–44.

  66. Majjima Nikaya 29.

  67. Vinaya: Mahavagga 1.6.

  68. Confucius, Analects 17.19. Unless otherwise stated, quotations from the Analects are taken from Arthur Waley, trans. and ed., The Analects of Confucius (New York, 1992).

  69. Analects 4.15.

  70. Analects 15.23.

  71. Ibid.

  72. Analects 12.1. Translation suggested by Benjamin I. Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1985), p. 77.

  73. Ibid.

  74. Analects 9.10.

  TWO God

  1. Genesis 2:23. All quotations from the Pentateuch—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—are taken from Everett Fox, trans., The Five Books of Moses (New York, 1993); all other biblical quotations are taken from The Jerusalem Bible (London, 1966) unless otherwise stated.

  2. I have discussed this at length in The Bible: The Biography (London and New York, 2007).

  3. Michael Fishbane, Text and Texture: Close Readings of Selected Biblical Texts (New York, 1979), pp. 21–22.

  4. Genesis Rabbah Ecclesiastes 4:4.10.

  5. Margaret Barker, The Gate of Heaven: The History and Symbolism of the Temple in Jerusalem (London, 1991), pp. 26–29; R. E. Clements, God and Temple, (Oxford, 1965), p. 64.

  6. Psalms 89:9–19; 65:2; 78:69. Ben C. Ollenburger, Zion, the City of the Great King: A Theological Symbol of the Jerusalem Cult (Sheffield, U.K., 1987), pp. 54–58.

  7. Genesis 3:8.

  8. Genesis 3:24.

  9. I Kings 6:15–38; 2 Chronicles 3:8–13.

  10. Numbers 21:8–9; 2 Kings 18:14.

  11. See, for example, Psalm 122.

  12. Psalm 42:4.

  13. Psalm 84:2, 3, 6, 10.

  14. William G. Dever, What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? What Archaeology Can Tell Us About the Reality of Ancient Israel (Grand Rapids, Mich., and Cambridge, U.K., 2001), p. 280.

  15. Frank Moore Cross, From Epic to Canon: History and Literature in Ancient Israel (Baltimore and London, 1998), pp. 41–42.

  16. George W. Mendenhall, The Tenth Generation: The Origins of Biblical Traditions (Baltimore and London, 1973); N. P. Lemche, Early Israel: Anthropological and Historical Studies on the Israelite Society Before the Monarchy (Leiden, the Netherlands, 1985).

  17. R. E. Clements, Abraham and David (London, 1967); Fishbane, Text and Texture, pp. 64, 124–25; Peter Machinist, “Distinctiveness in Ancient Israel,” in Mordechai Cogan and Israel Ephal, eds., Studies in Assyrian History and Ancient Near Eastern Historiography (Jerusalem, 1991), p. 434.

  18. Exodus 14:21–22.

  19. Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic: Essays in the History of the Religion of Israel (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1973), pp. 103–24.

  20. Exodus 15:1.

  21. Exodus 15:14–15. “Rams” was probably a technical term for “chieftains” in Canaan, as it was in Ugarit.

  22. Joshua 3:1–5:15; Cross, From Epic to Canon, p. 44; Cross, Canaanite Myth, pp. 103–5, 133–38.

  23. Joshua 5:1.

  24. Joshua 4:10–12.

  25. Deuteronomy 32:8–9.

  26. Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (New York and London, 1990), pp. 44–49.

  27. Genesis 28:10–19.

  28. Genesis 28:10–11.

  29. Genesis 28:12–13.

  30. Genesis 28:16–17.

  31. 31. Genesis 18:1–22.

  32. Genesis 22:1–10.

  33. Martin Buber, On the Bible: Eighteen Studies, ed. Nahum Glatzer (New York, 1982), p. 42.

  34. I have described this in detail in A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (New York, 1993), pp. 27–66, and in The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions (New York, 2006), pp. 86–101, 157–83, 211–20.

  35. Psalm 135:15–18; see also Psalm 115:4–8; Jeremiah 10.

  36. 2 Kings 22:8.

  37. Deuteronomy 7:5.

  38. 2 Kings 23:4–20.

  39. Deuteronomy 12:20–24; 16:18–20; 17:8–13; Bernard M. Levinson, Deuteronomy and the Hermeneutics of Legal Innovation (Oxford and New York, 1998), pp. 50, 114–37.

  40. Deuteronomy 17:18–20; Levinson, Deuteronomy, pp. 138–43.

  41. Deuteronomy 11:21, 12:5.

  42. Clements, God and Temple, pp. 89–95; Barker, Gate of Heaven, pp. 7–8; S. David Sperling, The Original Torah: The Political Intent of the Bible’s Writers (New York and London, 1986), pp. 146–47.

  43. I Kings 8:27.

  44. 2 Kings 23:29.

  45. Exodus 3:14.

  46. Exodus 24:10–11.

  47. Exodus 33:22–23.

  48. Exodus 19:18; 24:15–17.

  49. Psalm 137:7–9.

  50. Elias J. Bickerman, The Jews in the Greek Age (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1988), pp. 47–48.

  51. Ezekiel 1:1–2:15.

  52. Leviticus 17–26.

  53. Exodus 25–31; 35–38; 40.

  54. Exodus 29:46.

  55. Cross, Canaanite Myth, pp. 298–300; Clements, God and Temple, pp. 114–21.

  56. Cross, Canaanite Myth, 321.

  57. Andrew Mein, Ezekiel and the Ethics of Exile (Oxford and New York, 2001), p. 137.

  58. Leviticus 19:2.

  59. Leviticus 26:12.

  60. Leviticus 19:34. Jerusalem Bible translation.

  61. Mary Douglas, In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of Defilement in the Book of Numbers (Oxford and New York, 2001), pp. 25–26.

  62. Leviticus 1:1–3; Mary Douglas, Leviticus as Literature (Oxford and New York, 1999), pp. 68–69.

  63. Douglas, Leviticus as Literature, pp. 150–73.

  64. Leviticus 11:31–39, 43–44.

  65. Numbers 11:31–33.

  66. Genesis 1:2.

  67. Genesis 1:14–18.

  68. Genesis 1:21–22.

  69. Genesis 1:3, 11, 14.

  70. Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts (New York and London, 2001), pp. 161–71.

  71. Genesis 1:31.

  72. Exodus 25–31, 35–40.

  73. Exodus 39:32, 43; 40:33; 40:2, 17; 31:3, 13.

  74. Isaiah 40:1.

  75. Isiaah 43:11, 12.

  76. Isaiah 11
:15–16.

  77. Isaiah 46:1; see also Isaiah 45:21.

  78. Isaiah 42:13.

  79. Isaiah 41:17–24.

  80. Isaiah 41:12, 16; 51:23.

  81. Isaiah 42:1–4; 49:1–6; 50:4–9; 52:13–53:12.

  82. Isaiah 42:2–3.

  83. Isaiah 50:5–6, 9.

  84. Isaiah 52:13–53:5.

  85. Isaiah 49:6.

  86. Ezra 7:6, translated by Michael Fishbane, in The Garments of Torah: Essays in Biblical Hermeneutics (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1989), p. 66.

  87. It is notoriously difficult to date this period. See Gosta W. Ahlstrom, The History of Ancient Palestine (Minneapolis, 1993), pp. 880–83; Elias J. Bickerman, The Jews in the Greek Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), pp. 29–32.

  88. Nehemiah 8:7–8. The Levites were second-ranking priests, serving those who were the direct descendants of Aaron, Moses’s brother.

  89. Ezra 10.

  90. Fishbane, Garments of Torah, pp. 64–65; Gerald L. Bruns, “Midrash and Allegory; the Beginnings of Scriptural Interpretation,” in Robert Alter and Frank Kermode, eds., The Literary Guide to the Bible (London, 1987), pp. 626–27.

  91. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, What Is Scripture? A Comparative Approach (London, 1993), p. 290.

  THREE Reason

  1. Jonathan Barnes, ed. and trans., Early Greek Philosophy (London and New York, 1987), pp. 55–80; Anthony Gottlieb, The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance (London, 2000), pp. 4–20; Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, trans. John Raffan (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), pp. 305–11; Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View (New York and London, 1991), pp. 19–25; Oswyn Murray, Early Greece, 2nd ed. (London, 1993), pp. 247–51; Huston Smith, “The Western Way: An Essay on Reason and the Given,” in Essays on World Religion (New York, 1992), pp. 179–85.

  2. Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Society in Ancient Greece, 3rd ed., trans. Janet Lloyd (New York, 1996), pp. 102–4,113; Burkert, Greek Religion, pp. 219–25.

 

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