We live in an age of science and technology. Science determines our view of the universe and technology the way we live. Nowadays revelations of the universe happen through measurements of the Higgs boson or “God Particle”, gravitational waves or a even a vague picture of a black hole. Ordinary people do not understand mysteries like these and need scientists as contemporary priests to explain their meaning and importance. In our daily lives we are overwhelmed by technology. We have the whole world in our handhelds. These miraculous devices are often revealed in annual rituals that are supposed to leave the spectators in awe.
Rescuing the Sacred Texts
Who needs scripture? Sacred texts seem to be completely irrelevant in our modern world. Only traditionalists still seem to hold on to these texts, but they often do so in such a literalistic and self righteous way that they completely miss the spirit and intentions in which they were written.
In her new book The Lost Art of Scripture Karen Armstrong is on a mission. She wants to save the sacred texts. Karen Armstrong is one of the world’s leading commentators of religious affairs. She has spent seven years of her life as a Roman Catholic nun, but left her order in 1969. She has written over a dozen of bestselling books on a broad range of religious topics and comparative religion in particular. She is a passionate campaigner for religious liberty and has received many honorary titles and awards, among which the TED Prize in February 2008 that marked the beginning of the Charter of Compassion, a charity that has grown into a worldwide organization.
The central theme of her new book is that in modern societies we have lost the skills to read sacred texts. Sacred texts are not ordinary texts. They are written to transform our mind and hearts. The underlying scope of most religious texts is to attune our mind to a higher order of things, a transcendent state of mind that goes beyond our immediate worldly concerns.
Armstrong shows in her book that nearly all the scriptures
“insist that men and women must … discover the divine within themselves and the world in which they live; they claim that every single person participates in the ultimate and has, therefore, unbounded potential”.
How to read scripture
Therefore scripture cannot be read superficially. They require special treatment. Sacred texts have to be interpreted and we need our imagination to understand their meaning. Myths are not fake news from a distant past. Most of the time they represent a timeless truth that in some sense happened once but which also happens all the time. Sacred texts require full engagement. In rituals we can even involve our own bodies to bring the meaning of scriptures to life. According to Karen Armstrong scriptural exegesis is an art, a holistic art that is never finished and will always be work in progress.
In her book she shows how interpreters of all living wisdom traditions have approached their scriptures, continuously adding multiple new perspectives from the times in which they lived.
Insights of neuroscience
Karen Armstrong regrets that in our own times we seem to use scripture mainly to confirm our own views. This may seem an opinion from a grumpy old lady, but she based her book not only on historical documents. She even used the latest insights of neuroscience to come to this conclusion.
Neuroscience is hot. Neuroscience determines more and more the way we think about ourselves. Dutch neuroscientist Dick Swaab famously wrote that We Are Our Brains, reducing the most famous of the Delphic maxims from Ancient Greece “Know Thyself” practically to “Know Your Brains”.
Karen Armstrong catches the neuroscientific spirit of our age when she writes that we are wired for transcendence. She mentions The Master and His Emissary. The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, a seminal book written by psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist that seems to have been a major inspiration for her.
Dominant left hemisphere
Brains have a right and a left hemisphere, each with a different perception of reality. The right hemisphere always tries to construct a holistic picture of reality. It is aware of its surroundings, understands the interconnectedness of all things, is less self-centred and is at the same time the seat of empathy. The left hemisphere on the other hand constructs a reductive version of reality. This part of our brain is analytical, selective and more pragmatic. It favours concrete, material things and tends to suppress information that it cannot grasp conceptually.
According to both Armstrong and McGilchrist the left hemisphere of our brains has become the most dominant part in modern Western culture. Both agree that this has been an unhealthy development. In the metaphor used by McGilchrist the Emissary has taken precedence over its Master. Karen Armstrong shows how the left hemisphere makes us approach scripture in a literalistic way, sometimes with a ridiculous focus on details. The Art of Scripture has been lost in the process.
Parallel missions
The Lost Art of Scripture is an important and timely book. It has a clear vision and scope. The historical picture of scriptural exegesis through the ages presented in this book will be open to debate. Neuroscience will also progress in the coming years and undoubtedly provide us with new revolutionary insights about our brains. In my evaluation of The Lost Art of Scripture however I will not activate the left hemisphere of my brains too much to dissect this book in minute detail, because my dominant right hemisphere is in total agreement with its central message.
In many ways the mission of Karen Armstrong in this book coincides with the mission of the Gamma Tao and this website. You may say that the Gamma Tao is about “The Lost Art of Wisdom”.
The Gamma Tao is not based on scripture, but on a symbol (or visualisation model) that intends to integrate the areas and functions of our brains with three perennial human principles and key values in order to build a wisdom mindset. Just like scripture, the Gamma Tao is work in progress, open to both the latest scientific findings and the insights of all wisdom traditions.
Karen Armstrong has sometimes been criticized for the anti-Western tendencies in her work and her rosy picture of non-Western traditions. There may be such a bias in this book as well, but it does not affect the validity of the central theme of this book at all.
We must certainly not be blind for all the crimes and violence that human traditions, both religious and secular, have caused in the world. Karen Armstrong herself has written a whole book about religion and the history of violence.
All traditions have black pages. But even then, we still may be able to learn something from their golden pages: their scriptures.
In order to do so we must approach these scriptures in more skillful ways. You can put on Gamma glasses, like I always try to do, or take the advice of Karen Armstrong and learn the Art of Scripture.
If we succeed in mastering the Art of Scripture again, we may first transform ourselves and ultimately even find new creative solutions to the problems of our times.
