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When someone writes a four-hundred page summary of the monotheistic West’s ideas about God, there are a few things a reviewer can’t say. You can’t say that the author left things out; of course, that’s the nature of the project. You can’t say that the treatment of certain things was cursory; of course it will be. You can’t expect to agree with the author’s take on every prophet, saint, mystic, and theologian from the entire tradition.

However, there are certain things that are worth looking for and, if they are absent, worth noting in a review. Outright bigotry, or a pattern of bias, is worth pointing out; serious deficiencies or infantile conceptions need to be addressed. A four-hundred page book about God will not say everything, but it can say a lot, and it is worth little if it is not reliable.

Karen Armstrong’s summary of Judaism’s, Christianity’s, and Islam’s conceptions about God is widely available still more than a decade after it was printed. She is still writing and the book will probably be available for a few decades more. But the book has serious deficiencies. There are enough errors to warrant concern; and the book is for the most part bigoted, designed to uphold a single quasi-religious conception, which is most closely associated with the post-1960s West.

In fact the book is not really a history; that word tends to imply at least some objectivity. But she is really not interested in the varieties of the religious experience. She knows what’s good and what isn’t, and that prejudgement – or prejudice – colors the narration of the history. At the same time, her standards are not consistent – the same action taken by one person is abhorrent in another.

In short, this book is not a dispassionate account of various ideas about the nature of God. Armstrong has a very specific idea of what God is. God is not about rules, not about sacrifice, not about hierarchy – he’s not even that much into peace, love, or justice. He’s not personal. He’s not rational. The best term for him might be “nothing.” He does not exist just as much as he does exist. I will let her confess her own creed:

It should be obvious that the imagination is the chief religious faculty. It has been defined by Jean-Paul Sartre as ability to think of what is not. Human beings are the only animals who have the capacity to envisage something that is not present or something that does not yet exist but which is merely possible. The imagination has thus been the cause of our major achievements in science and technology as well as in art and religion. The idea of God, however it is defined, is perhaps the prime example of an absent reality which, despite its inbuilt problems, has continued to inspire men and women for thousands of years. (233)

Later she castigates philosophers, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim – for not realizing this:

Instead of seeing the idea of God as a symbol of a reality which had no existence in the usual sense of the word and which could only be discovered by the imaginative disciplines of prayer and contemplation, it was increasingly assumed that God was simply a fact of life like any other. (291)

Regardless of whether you agree with Armstrong’s creed or not, it mars her presentation: by polemically getting up on her soapbox at various times in the book, she distracts the reader from any fair contemplation of any other ideas about God. And in fact, her dogmatism seeps into almost everything she says, staining her objectivity.

The phrase she uses to sum up her opinion is that God is “a subjective experience.” He’s not much into religion, but he’s really into spirituality. She agrees with the mystics who make God beyond all things. This presumably relativizes God somewhat, but Armstrong has another God she uses more polemically, the liberal God. The liberal God is all about compassion. He surfaces in her rather dismissive discussion of Luther:

Luther … remained a disturbed, angry and violent man. All the major religious traditions claim that the acid test of any spirituality is the degree to which it has been integrated into daily life. As the Buddha said, after enlightenment one should “return to the marketplace” and practice compassion for all living beings. A sense of peace, serenity, and loving-kindness are the hallmarks of all true religious insight. Luther, however, was a rabid anti-Semite, a misogynist, was convulsed with a loathing and horror of sexuality and believed that all rebellious peasants should be killed. His vision of a wrathful God had filled him with personal rage…. (279)

First of all, it might be wise to question whether all the major religious traditions have the same “acid test,” or whether there can be a legitimate “acid test” for what was only a short time ago defined as a “subjective experience.” But beyond that, there is the deeper irony that Armstrong herself does not seem to live up to her own standards of “true religious insight,” the presence of “peace, serenity, and loving-kindness.” A lack of true religious insight would be a major reason not to bother with the book. The following is at least part of her creed, by which we can measure her:

Jews, Christians, and Muslims who punctiliously attend divine services yet denigrate people who belong to different ethnic and ideological camps deny one of the basic truths of their religion. It is equally inappropriate for people who call themselves Jews, Christians, and Muslims to condone an inequitable social system. The God of historical monotheism demands mercy not sacrifice, compassion rather than decorous liturgy. (392)

Of course we can ask how, precisely, Armstrong knows what “the God of historical monotheism” demands. She elsewhere decries the idea of God as an “alien lawgiver” in the most contemptuous terms (“the image of the divine Tyrant imposing an alien law on his unwilling human servants has to go” (394)), although any God who would demand mercy and an equitable social system would certainly be demanding things that are alien to the natural patterns of life on earth. And there is plenty of evidence to believe that most worshippers of “historical monotheism” have disagreed with her. For the most part they think that God distinguishes between those who follow him and those who do not. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have all built tiered systems for society, and as far as I know, the Gospel is the only part of this tradition that seems to advocate treating your enemies and your friends equally.

But the “acid test,” by Armstrong’s own standards, is whether or not she lives up to her value of not denigrating people who belong to “different ethnic and ideological camps.” I am not certain that “peace, serenity, and loving-kindness” describe the way she describes the founder of the Order of the Sacred Heart:

A highly neurotic woman, who confessed to a loathing of the very idea of sex, suffered from an eating disorder and indulged in unhealthy masochistic acts to prove her ‘love’ for the Sacred Heart, Marguerite-Marie shows how a religion of the heart alone can go awry. (317)

But rationalist approaches to God do not leave her feeling pacific either: “The God of the philosophers is the product of a now outdated rationalism” (396). This is her take on Nicholas of Cusa’s theo-philosophical speculations:

The mathematical idea of ‘the maximum’ and ‘the minimum’ were apparently opposites but in fact could logically be seen as identical. This ‘coincidence of opposites’ contained the idea of God: the idea of ‘the maximum’ includes everything; it implies notions of unity and necessity which point directly to God. Further, the maximum line was not a triangle, a circle, or a sphere, but all three combined: the unity of opposites was also a Trinity. Yet Nicholas’ clever demonstration has little religious meaning. It seems to reduce the idea of God to a logical conundrum (274).

Her take on Milton is a good example of her method. He gets two whole pages, but is quoted only on the topic of free will. She gives us the passage where Milton has God state that men could not accuse

Thir maker, or thir making, or thir Fate;
As if Predestination over-rul’d
Thir will, dispos’d by absolute Decree
Or high foreknowledge; they themselves decreed
Thir own revolt, not I; if I foreknew,
Foreknowledge had no influence on thir fault,
Which had no less prov’d certain unforeknown…
I formed them free, and free they must remain,
Till they enthrall themselves; I else must change
Thir nature, and revoke the high Decree
Unchangeable, Eternal, which ordaind
Thir freedom; they themselves ordaind thir fall. [sic; 3.113-119; 124-128]

This is her analysis of the passage:

Not only is it difficult to respect this shoddy thinking, but God comes across as callous, self-righteous, and entirely lacking in the compassion that his religion was supposed to inspire. Forcing God to speak and think like one of us in this way shows the inadequacies of such an anthropomorphic and personalistic conception of the divine. There are too many contradictions for such a God to be either coherent or worthy of veneration (309).

This really is the mood of the book: a series of quotations followed by rude dismissiveness. Paradise Lost is not my favorite book, but it is clear enough that Milton localizes the compassion that Armstrong finds so important in God the Son; and one of the results of this is that despite the apparent contradiction between them, both stern adherence to law and compassion end up being divinely ordained, an idea I as a teacher of young students find personally most interesting. Yes, it is important to be compassionate with them, and to forgive their offenses. But it is also important to hold them accountable and demand a strict code of conduct. The parent who allows a child to disregard all rules when crossing the street, for instance, is not a good parent. The teacher who allows error, cruelty, and disrespect in his classroom, all in the name of Christian tolerance and forgiveness (“peace, serenity, and loving-kindness”) similarly does no service to his students. And there are many other instances where we seem to stumble across a natural limitation on the goodness, or at least utility, of compassion. But I fear that if Armstrong feels entitled to treat Milton this way, who she must know is not a “shoddy thinker,” it is not likely she will have much respect for anyone who disagrees with her.

The above passage may serve to explain one major aspect of her beliefs about God: the God of laws, at least in the Christian context, means nothing to her. This makes her partiality to Judaism and Islam all the more curious, but that probably has roots other than doctrinal ones. This makes her a fairly typical 1960s liberal. Ideas such as the notion that giving laws can itself be an act of compassion is simply beyond her. And the interesting notion of a God who hates is utterly unthinkable to her. As indeed it would be to people of her sort. But I think it would be very interesting to have people study, without any finger-wagging, the relationship of hatred and religion. The Armstrong types would quickly say that God and hate have nothing to do with one another, but why does this have to be so? How does God feel about rape, or torturing children, or genocide? Is it possible that he hates them? And if he feels otherwise – either indifference or some kind of pleasure – what does this say about the nature of God? And again, if hatred has no divine origin, then where does it come from? Do animals feel it, or is it specific to humans? If the latter, then is it a natural outgrowth of consciousness? Or an evolutionary asset? If God does not hate, or at least countenances genocide and rape and torture, should we countenance them as well? Would not all of these questions be interesting ones, especially viewed in the light of history? But we are not going to get this kind of consideration from Armstrong.

Armstrong’s views about God also clearly color her ability to be scholarly. Jesus must be purely compassionate, and any deviation from that must be “inauthentic”:

In St. Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus is made to utter violent and rather unedifying [for whom? for her?] diatribes against “the Scribes and the Pharisees,” presenting them as worthless hypocrites. Apart from this being a libelous distortion of the facts and a flagrant breach of the charity that was supposed to characterize his mission, the bitter denunciation of the Pharisees is almost certainly inauthentic. (81)

She claims to have knowledge of “the facts” about “the Pharisees,” although it is unclear precisely what those would be. Apparently the Pharisees were “passionately spiritual Jews” (72). But how can one decide this? Is it not better to say that “other sources do not agree with this,” and leave it at that?

Presumably, there is a reason for this. Armstrong does not want any hint of stridency in Jesus, who must be all about compassion, the “acid-test” of spirituality, so whatever she finds does not fit, must be inauthentic. (It is also worth pointing out that one of the typical modern-liberal responses to a stereotype (like “the Pharisees were hypocrites”) is to argue for the opposite stereotype rather than transcending it entirely.)

She also objects to the idea that Jesus was divine. She decides to fight this argument using Paul, a most curious idea. I believe that Paul can perhaps be accused of deifying Jesus at the expense of Jesus’ manhood; but Armstrong decides to argue the opposite: “As a Jew, Paul did not believe that he [Jesus] had been God incarnate” (86)). One may as well comment here on Armstrong’s stereotypical way of thinking: “Jews do not believe God can be incarnated; Paul is a Jew; therefore…” I imagine a plausible case for this can be made, especially in a short book like this directed at mass-market, religious dilettante-type readers: simply quote the passages where Paul talks about Jesus as a man, but leave out the parts where he talks about Jesus as God. But she seems to do precisely the opposite, whether from guilty conscience or ineptitude I cannot say. So for instance she decides to quote Paul’s letter to the Philippians in order to prove her point:

Who subsisting in the form of God
did not cling to his equality with God
but emptied himself,
to assume the condition of a slave,
and he became as men are.

She then gives this passage the following astonishing analysis:

Paul was too Jewish to accept the idea of Christ existing as a second divine being beside YHWH from all eternity. The hymn shows that after his exaltation he is still distinct from and inferior to God…. (88-89)

How is it possible that she could have used the passage where Paul talks about Jesus’ “equality with God” in order to prove that he was “inferior to God”?

It is obvious enough that she has an axe to grind here, and it is important to her that the Incarnation, which admittedly does not square with her own theology, not have old roots. But why did she decide to fight this battle using Paul? Later, she admits that Paul and John ascribe to Jesus “some kind of preexistent life,” but that they were merely

indicating that Jesus had transcended temporal and individual modes of existence. Because the ‘power’ and ‘wisdom’ that he represented were activities that derived from God, he had in some way expressed what was there from the beginning.

The important term is “in some way.” Armstrong is not going to say how. It is one thing for her to say that she is unsure how many early Christians really believed that Jesus was one person of a Trinity; this sounds fair enough. She could also say that many of the sources which denied Christ any divinity have probably been destroyed. But what she presents is mere intellectual sloppiness attempting to back up her own dogmatic utterances. Think about how many vague words are in her argumentation above: “indicating”, “transcended”, “temporal and individual modes of existence,” “represented”, “activities”, “derived”, “expressed”. Despite the polysyllabic words, it would be hard to be more vague or vapid than this. And of course, I will say, that it is acceptable to be intellectually vapid. But it is not acceptable to proclaim something in the face of a couple of millennia of both impassioned and dispassionate analysis and then retreat behind a mass of verbiage. I repeat how strange I find it that she tries to make this argument using these texts. She also mentions, strangely, that Paul talks repeatedly about all Christians as being “in Christ” and part of his body. These appear to be divine qualities. Perhaps she should be applauded for offering the reader precisely the texts which make her arguments seem untenable. And there are many other places, not mentioned in Armstrong’s text, where Paul clearly seems to deify Jesus. In fact, she herself specifically associates the Trinity with Christianity and she repeats the old chestnut that Paul was the true founder of the Christian religion. The result is mere opinionated incoherence.

There are plenty of other dogmatic pronouncements which get no argumentation at all. So she claims knowledge of what Jesus meant by “faith”: “By faith, of course, he did not mean adopting the correct theology but cultivating an inner attitude of surrender and openness to God” (82). Of course. So much for that problem. She knows the meaning of the book of Job: “The author of Job is not denying the right to question, however, but suggesting that the intellect alone is not equipped to deal with these imponderable matters.” Muhammed was a social reformer with a program: “Muhammed was convinced that unless the Quraysh learned to put another transcendent value at the center of their lives and overcome their egotism and greed, his tribe would tear itself apart morally and politically in internecine strife” (133). Is this a legitimate reason for starting a new religion? I suppose it does not matter, because it is merely Armstrong’s assertion, and nothing – no source, none of the hadith, nothing – suggests that this was Muhammed’s motivation.

In fact, Armstrong seems to suffer from the typical problems attendant in the crisis (some might say collapse) of Western scholarly methods and the assault on the possibility of objectivity. While objectivity might only be approached asymptotically, it still traditionally is one of the goals of the scholar. Armstrong, however, is a child of the Orwellian age of propaganda. One of the crucial scholarly distinctions is deed (which is observable and hence falsifiable to some extent) and motive, which is utterly invisible and can only be surmised. This distinction, admittedly, is rarely talked about by older scholars because it probably was imbibed by osmosis from their Latin: Latin distinguishes between clauses which merely state observable facts (in the indicative) from those which ascribe motivation, purpose, or causal relationships (subjunctive). Armstrong has none of this scholarly equipment (along with many other writers today) and treats motives as facts. We may as well add that she uses Latin and Greek for her argumentation from time to time, but knows nothing about them and is the prey of any bad scholarship which agrees with her worldview. She wants to make the faith of the primitive Christians an emotional, not an intellectual affair, so she says the following:

When they recited their “creeds,” they were not assenting to a set of propositions. The word credere, for example, seems to have derived from cor dare: to give one’s heart. When they said “credo!” (or pisteuo in Greek), this implied an emotional rather than an intellectual position. (93)

This is simply false. Credere’s origins, like those of most words, are very obscure (though let it be said that none of the eytmological dictionaries second Armstrong’s claim), but there are analogues in both Sanskrit and Irish, meaning that it is an ancient word whose etymology would have been no more important to the Romans than the etymology of “believe” is to us. Its social context, however, would have been important to the Romans: but it did not have the emotional connotation Armstrong gives it. It can mean trust, but especially trust in terms of a person’s honesty and their financial solvency; this is where the word credit comes from. It also can mean a person’s opinions – it often is used to describe a person’s feelings for certain propositions (and so it often introduces what is called an indirect statement). And in Christian terms, it is, in fact, used for creeds, that is to say, the social repetition of a set of religious postulates. And the Greek pisteuo certainly does not have anything to do with giving of one’s heart and means “I am convinced.” It is decidedly intellectual, and was considered the goal of oratory – to gain the other person’s pistis, or conviction that you were right and your opponent (particularly in court) was wrong. Of course, later mystics can make as much hay with these words as they want. But there is ample evidence to convince me that Armstrong is projecting her own desires onto the meanings of these words.

This accounts for her description of the Council of Nicaea:

When the bishops gathered at Nicaea on May 20, 325 to resolve the crisis, very few would have shared Athanasius’view of Christ [what does the ‘would have shared’ here mean? Did they or didn’t they? Does she know or not?]. 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 companions refused to sign his Creed. (111)

This is, needless to say, a highly polemical account. She begins by asserting what the rest of the bishops believed. Then she uses the term “impose.” Could “convince” be the word she means? Athanasius had no power to compel anyone, and it has never been certain that Constantine really had a preference (though our sources do indicate that he wanted an answer quickly). The evidence of the Council seems to indicate that substantial agreement was achieved, and that it endured: this is still the Creed used by all the Catholic Churches, both East and West, and many of the Protestant ones as well. But Armstrong disapproves of the conciliar process (which for the most part is what the West now calls “democracy”: a set of representatives reach as much consensus as possible, vote, and the result is used as the standard for the community subsequently): it is an imposition on the subjective God, and so she needs to make it seem as unattractive as possible.

We might just say that Armstrong is an judgemental old curmudgeon who found none of the inherited forms of religion appropriate to her, and that her book is a kind of compendium of all of her biases and prejudices about them. But it does go beyond that. She couples this negativity with an interesting praise of non-Western cultures. In this case, Islam gets the most prefential treatment (Armstrong has also written a book called Muhammed: A Prophet for Our Time, which I mention just to dispel the idea that one is to look for objectivity from her on this issue). Her double standard is quite remarkable, and presumably it must be referred to the typical pattern of her generation, which found the West the cause of all bad things in the world.

Epictetus said that every phenomenon has two handles, a good handle and a bad handle, and one may take it by either one. Everything that has to do with Islam she grabs by the good handle. One might think that she would not be a fan of the tribal system of vendettas and personal strength which preceded Muhammed and to some extent survived him in Arabia, but she can find some good in it:

Brutal as it undoubtedly was, however, muruwah had many strengths. It encouraged a deep and strong egalitarianism and an indifference to material goods which, again, was probably essential in a region where there were not enough of the essentials to go round… (134)

This kind of positive thinking might be pleasing if it were applied equally. But it is not. And it comes with a very curious pattern, that of concluding her thoughts with a sidewise look at Christianity. For her, Islam is merely a stick to beat the West with.

The Koran constantly stresses the need for intelligence in deciphering the “signs” or “messages” of God. Muslims are not to abdicate their reason but to look at the world attentively and with curiosity. It was this attitude that later enabled Muslims to build a fine tradition of natural science, which has never been seen as such a danger to religion as in Christianity. (143)

What about the West? Does it not have a “fine tradition of natural science”? If it does, then how did it occur? Is it really true that “Christianity” – including people like Newton, whose religious views she dismisses fairly abruptly as insufficient (“Newton had clearly no understanding of the role of mystery in the religious life” (305)) – can be discussed as a block like this? But this is part of Armstrong’s method: stereotypes along religious lines are the lifeblood of the narrative. The Muslims are pro-science. Therefore she does not discuss Islamic anti-science proverbs like “there is no knowledge save of the Koran.” The story about the Islamic rationale for burning the library of Alexandria (“If these books agree with the Koran, they are superfluous; if they do not, they are lies”) is also left out. All this is fine; this anti-intellectualism is only a strain in Islam, as it is only a strain in the West. But to say that Islam’s tolerance of reason leads to scientific flourishing, while Christianity’s suspicion has been a stumbling block to intellectual progress, does not seem to explain the facts of history well. She later reports a claim by a Muslim scholar that Muhammad was Plato’s philosopher-king, and that Islam and reason have always been uniquely entwined:

… in the Koran reason and religion had marched hand in hand for the first time in history. Before the career of the Prophet, revelation had been attended by miracles, legends, and irrational rhetoric, but the Koran had not resorted to these more primitive methods. It had “advanced proof and demonstration, expounded the views of the disbelievers and inveighed against them rationally.” (364)

Yet elsewhere she notes that we should not judge the Koran by any rational standards, and it cannot be translated, but instead we need to hear it in Arabic in order to be swept away by the power of its words.

Muslims say that when they hear the Koran chanted in the mosque they feel enveloped in a divine dimension of sound, rather as Muhammad was enveloped in the embrace of Gabriel on Mount Hira… It is not a book to be read simply to acquire information… By approaching the Koran in the right way, Muslims claim that they do experience a sense of transcendence, of an ultimate reality and power that lie behind the transient and fleeting phenomena of the mundane world. Reading the Koran is therefore a spiritual discipline, which Christians may find difficult to understand because they do not have a sacred language, in the way the Hebrew, Sanskrit, and Arabic are sacred to Jews, Hindus, and Muslims. (144)

First of all, the Christian churches have always had sacred languages in precisely the same way, and those languages formed the basic fault lines of division for those churches. The Greeks have the language of the Gospels, which they preserve unchanged in their liturgy; the Russians have Old Slavonic; the Syrian Christians claim they have the actual language of Jesus, Aramaic. Look at the façade of any church in Rome if you don’t believe that the “Latin West” (a term even Armstrong uses) has no sacral language. This is another phenomenon of religion which might have been discussed with an eye to its cross-cultural applicability. But the main point here is the equation of Islam’s methods with reason. The untranslatability of the Koran cannot be squared with rationality. Newton’s laws are not more valid in Latin than they are in Arabic. The fact that readers find the Koran “boring and repetitive,” as she claims, in translation, is a sign that its appeal is not to reason.

There are many more examples of these block stereotypes, in which the Christian West is always the religion that lags behind. When she deals with mystics, she says,

The West did not develop an esoteric tradition but adhered to the kerygmatic interpretation of religion, which was supposed to be the same for everybody. Instead of allowing their so-called deviants to go private, Western Christians simply persecuted them and attempted to wipe out nonconformists. In Islamdom, esoteric thinkers usually died in their beds. (176)

These are stereotypes at best, but lies might better describe them. The West has no esoteric tradition? None at all? Armstrong herself talks about (some) of the mystics of the West. And certainly persecution has not been the West’s only response to nonconformity. And indeed, Islam has been guilty of persecution as well. One of Muhammed’s dying wishes, our sources tell us, was “expel all the idolaters from Arabia.” The entire ninth sura of the Koran, the Sura of the Sword, might be called “the Sura of religious persecution.” Of course none of these things are mentioned. But at least she does confess that the two muslim mystics she spends the most time on, al-Hallaj and Suhrawardi, were both executed by muslim religious authorities. Of course, in these instances she does not harp on their persecuters but on them: “Al-Hallaj refused to recant when accused of blasphemy and died a saintly death” (228). “Like al-Hallaj, however, Suhrawardi was also put to death by the ulema in Aleppo in 1191, for reasons that remain obscure” (230). One gets the impression that the crucifixion al-Hallaj endured, had it been in the West, would have been called by Armstrong something more graphic than a “saintly death.” And curiously, she declares that the mystic interpretation of Islam known as Sufism, which is so appealing to the West, was “normative in many parts of the Islamic empire” (230). It would be interesting to see the proof for this. Usually “esoteric” traditions are the opposite of “normative.” And usually people are not executed by societies for their normative ideas.

A fine study in contrasts revealing her bias is her account of Josiah returning to Jerusalem. The Biblical account describes him “looking on as the altars of the Baals were demolished,” and he “smashed the sacred poles and the carved and cast idols.” She says:

We are far from the Buddha’s serene acceptance of the deities he believed he had outgrown. This wholesale destruction springs from a hatred that is rooted in buried anxiety and fear. (54)

All this is well. She is entitled to her pop-psychology understanding of Josiah, though it is not very helpful, I think. But what about Muhammed’s return to the Kaaba and his “cleansing” of the Kaaba? She does not describe that moment, but merely approves of Muhammed’s noble unwillingness to compromise:

The sources show that Muhammed absolutely refused to compromise with the Quraysh on the matter of idolatry. He was a pragmatic man and would readily make a concession on what he deemed to be inessential, but whenever the Quraysh asked him to accept a monolatrous solution, allowing them to worship their ancestral gods while he and his Muslims worshipped al-Lah alone, Muhammed vehemently rejected the proposal. As the Koran has it: “I do not worship that which you worship, and neither do you worship that which I worship… Unto you your moral law, and, unto me, mine!” The Muslims would surrender to God alone and would not succumb to the false objects of worship – be they deities or values – espoused by the Quraysh. (149)

This all sounds lovely. But why is it not basically the same viewpoint as Josiah? How was Josiah not nobly refusing to succumb to “false objects of worship” but merely acting from “a hatred that is rooted in buried anxiety and fear”? What information does Armstrong have about these men that we lack, that she can distinguish between them? And it really must be noted how Armstrong uses a most curious quotation. She justifies Muhammad’s refusal to permit any tolerance with a line about tolerance: “Unto you your moral law, and unto me mine.” But that is what his opponents were proposing. This is the viewpoint he denies; his moral law was to be the moral law. She is utterly confusing tolerance and intolerance. In fact, it closely resembles Armstrong’s psychic makeup, and may help explain why she finds Muhammad so attractive.

She seems to be filled with rage at the West, to which she constantly refers in derogatory terms. She can barely praise any non-Western religious idea without instantly referring back to its inferior Western counterpart. When she praises the esoteric traditions of the East, she simply has to give a glance back West: “The Christians of Europe were not able to produce such a positive spirituality” (271). “In the West Christians were slower to develop a mystical tradition” (252). What is the purpose of this comparison except to reveal its bias? It is the method of the old propagandists. A racist writer might replace “Christians” with “the Africans” or “the Semites.” What are these broad stereotypes good for? In Armstrong’s hands, they can be so crude as to be comic:

The intolerance that many people condemn in Islam today does not always spring from a rival vision of God but from quite another source: Muslims are intolerant of injustice, whether this is committed by rulers of their own – like Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi or Iran – or by the powerful Western countries. (152)

Well, I suppose it’s good to get that cleared up (I was wondering where that intolerance in Islam comes from), although perhaps Armstrong should castigate Muhammad more for so deeply implanting this hatred of injustice in the Muslims. If they dislike injustice, how are they ever going to find “peace and serenity,” then, with neighbors like Westerners?

There are other great moments. This is her description of the high middle ages:

At the same time as European Christians were bent on the destruction of Islam in the Near East, Muslims in Spain were helping the West to build up its own civilization. (205)

But she does mention elsewhere that the tradition of Muslim philosophy was dependent on Plato and Aristotle, although almost none of the great Muslim philosophers learned Greek: instead they relied on Christians to translate for them. Was this not helping them “build up” their civilization? And while the Muslims in Spain were doing this, what were the Muslims in Asia Minor doing? Was it Muslims who destroyed Byzantine civilization, or was it someone else? What kind of inspiring example can we get from Turkish policies in the Balkans? And we really must be on guard against this “golden age of Islamic Spain” myth, wherever it came from. No one thinks that this civilization had anything even approaching equal rights, and in terms of cultural flourishing, no one really would deny that Spain’s golden age of cultural importance was inaugurated, not ended, by the reconquista: it was during the 16th century that Spanish architecture, painting, and literature rose to greatness, and Spain’s language became one of the world’s major tongues.

Of course this kind of arguing can go on forever. The important point is that Armstrong insists on localizing all that is good in the East, while the West is the source of everything evil. Luther is a misogynist and anti-Semite, but Muhammad is on a quest to build a just society (events such as the elimination of the Jewish population in Medina via a massacre which is attested in all the old sources about Muhammad, religiously sanctioned cultural practices such as polygamy or reduced legal rights of women, or verses in the Koran which call into question Armstrong’s theses, are never discussed). She praises Islam’s tolerance for and interest in Hinduism, which is at best a debatable thesis. She then praises Mir Abu al-Qasim Findiriski, who

… spent a good deal of time in India studying Hinduism and Yoga. It would be difficult to imagine a Roman Catholic expert on Thomas Aquinas at this time showing a similar enthusiasm for a religion that was not even in the Abrahamic tradition. (263)

But al-Qasim died in the seventeenth century, after Jesuits, trained very well in Aquinas, had explored, described, catalogued, and occasionally (and to some scandalously) cooperated with non-Abrahamic faiths all over the world. The stories of the Jesuits experimenting with ancestor-worship Catholicism in China are famous. Are there counter-examples, of less tolerant Jesuits and Christians? Of course. But these examples sufficiently refute her rhetoric. What is more, no Roman Catholic expert on Aquinas would have been without years of study of Plato, Aristotle, and the Roman poets such as Vergil and Ovid, all of whom were from a religion not in the Abrahamic tradition.

She also claims that holy war is a unique characteristic of the West:

the crusading religion of Western Christendom had separated it from the other monotheistic traditions…. the Christianity of the Angles, the Saxons, and the Franks was rudimentary. They were aggressive and martial and they wanted an aggressive religion. (196-7)

If such analysis were extended impartially to Islam, might that not explain some of the history of the past millennium and a half? So her analysis about the misogyny of St. Augustine:

Western Christianity never fully recovered from this neurotic misogyny, which can still be seen in the unbalanced reaction to the very notion of the ordination of women. While Eastern women shared the burden of inferiority carried by all women of the Oikumene at this time, their sisters in the West carried the additional stigma of a loathsome and sinful sexuality which caused them to be ostracized in hatred and fear. (124-5)

As far as I can tell, the ordination of women is a Western invention. How did that happen, since the West has not recovered from its neurotic misogyny? I cannot find it in the non-Western monotheistic traditions at all. In Islam, women are not even allowed to worship in the main part of the mosques, but are “ostracized” in the back (I will not attempt to psychologically determine whether it is “in hatred or fear” or not). Does it not make more sense to place the relations between men and women in a much larger context? Surely it cannot be the case that St. Augustine caused the stigmatization of women.

In the end, Armstrong’s book is a polemically inspired screed which selectively applies its chosen criteria and ignores or distorts facts as seems appropriate in order to achieve its polemical objectives. Its main value is as a specimen for study of the propaganda of a certain modern liberal viewpoint. It is also an interesting document for the bookselling industry, which for the most part relies on this bourgeois liberal bookbuyer. Armstrong has been called upon by this industry to refashion man’s entire religious tradition in her own image, a calling she has been most willing to accept.

Most striking about her viewpoint is its combination of a creed of tolerance with intolerance in spirit and practice. This generates a good deal of spiritual tension, which perhaps helps explain the bilious spirit of the book. And it is not possible for her to be completely unaware of this problem in herself. This may help explain the longing for a more quietistic religion: one where peace and serenity and loving-kindness actually prevailed in her heart. But lacking that in herself, she feels that she can blame her spiritual ancestors for it: the Western spiritual tradition is to blame. This may be another one of the reasons that she admires Islam: it has long been in a hostile relationship with the same West Armstrong herself blames for her unhappiness. She then makes an idol of it (and the Indian traditions as well), and puts in their spiritual basket all the qualities she feels she needs in order to be whole again.

This is one of Armstrong’s key prejudicial criteria in judging religions. A good religion will be “healthy,” and a bad one will be “unhealthy.” I am interested in this idea myself, but I don’t imagine that people who think otherwise – who believe that perhaps one may derive religious insight from sickness, for instance (I myself have noticed how much more compassion I feel for people after an illness of my own) – are necessarily wrong. But healthiness resurfaces again and again in the narrative:

The new born-again Christianity that was beginning to appear in the West during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was frequently unhealthy and characterized by violent and sometimes dangerous emotions and reversals. (323)

This could have been a reaction to the repressive Puritan ethic, with its unhealthy concentration on the sinfulness of mankind. (322)

Contrast this with Dostoevsky’s fascinating ideas about God, from Crime and Punishment:

“What is that they usually say?” Svidrigailov muttered as if to himself, turning aside and inclining his head slightly. “They say, ‘You’re sick, and therefore what you imagine is all just nonexistent raving.’ But there’s no strict logic here. I agree that ghosts come only to sick people; but that only proves that ghosts cannot appear to anyone but sick people, not that they themselves do not exist.”

“Of course they don’t!” Raskolnikov insisted irritably.

“No? You think not?” Svidrigailov went on, slowly raising his eyes to him. “And what if one reasons like this (come, help me now): ‘Ghosts are, so to speak, bits and pieces of other worlds, their beginnings. The healthy man, naturally, has no call to see them, because the healthy man is the most earthly of men, and therefore he ought to live according to life here, for the sake of completeness and order. Well, but as soon as a man gets sick, as soon as the normal earthly order of his organism is disrupted, the possibility of another world at once begins to make itself known, and the sicker one is, the greater his contact with this other world, so that when a man dies altogether, he goes to the other world directly.’ I’ve been reasoning it out for a long time. If one believes in a future life, one can believe in this reasoning.” (Pevear & Volokhonsky translation, p. 289)

But Armstrong is absolutely unable to approach such a question openmindedly. Health is one of her foreordained goals. What health means in the face of death (which curiously and significantly makes almost no appearance in this book; usually death does not exist in the liberal mind), or what it means to a person who might be by nature chronically and seriously unhealthy, is not discussed: it is simply one of the values of life. The idea that religious insight is sometimes a compensation for lack of health – which is always especially interesting when one considers the role of epilepsy in religious history (Muhammad being one of the more famous epileptics) – is not the kind of idea which would make an appearance in this book. One way or another, the relations between religion and health might be a good topic of dispassionate discussion in a “history of God,” but it does not appear in this one.

I will close with one of her statements of her ideal:

Instead of making God a symbol to challenge our prejudice and force us to contemplate our own shortcomings, it can be used to endorse our egotistic hatred and make it absolute. It makes God behave exactly like us, as though he were simply another human being. Such a God is likely to be more attractive and popular than the God of Amos and Isaiah, who demands ruthless self-criticism. (55)

Is this not her own method?

P.S.  I will close this with a selection of quotations from the book. The first ones do not require much comment. Later I go into more detail.

“The Imitation of Christ, with its rather dour, gloomy religiosity, became one of the most popular of all Western spiritual classics” (272).

“Enthusiasm for relics and holy places also distracted Western Christians from the one thing necessary.  People seemed to be concentrating on anything but God” (273).

“Puritans based their religious experience on Calvin and clearly found God a struggle: he did not seem to imbue them with either happiness or compassion” (283).

“The continuing popularity of the Pensees shows that Pascal’s darker spirituality and his hidden God appealed to something vital in the Western religious consciousness” (298).

“Western theology had tended to overemphasize the importance of rationality ever since Thomas Aquinas, a tendency which had increased since the Reformation” (350).

“Europeans … often displayed a superb ignorance of world history.” The ignorance of Muslims, however, is completely justifiable:

If Muslims were underwhelmed by the Western Renaissance, this did not necessarily reveal an irredeemable cultural inadequacy. Muslims were, not surprisingly, more concerned with their own not inconsiderable cultural achievements during the fifteenth century. (259)

“History shows that it is impossible to reconcile the so-called goodness of God with his omnipotence. Because it lacks coherence, the idea of God is bound to disintegrate” (344).

She never mentions free will as a response to this problem.

“Satan … was increasingly represented as a vast animal with a priapic sexual appetite and huge genitals” (275).

I have never seen such a representation, in all of European painting. Such may well exist, but is this the traditional European image of Satan?

“In the New Testament, the Pharisees are depicted as whited sepulchres and blatant hypocrites. This is due to the distortions of first-century polemic. The Pharisees were passionately spiritual Jews” (72).

All of them? how do we know this? from the other side of the polemic?

“Western Christians have been particularly prone to the flattering belief that they are God’s elect” (55).

“Particularly” in comparison with whom? The Jews? The Muslims? Armstrong herself confesses that the Islamic world has struggled in the past centuries particularly because it is a

religion of success. The Koran taught that a society which lived according to God’s will (implementing justic, equality, and fair distribution of wealth) could not fail. Muslim history had seemed to confirm this. Unlike Christ, Muhammed had not been an apparent failure but a dazzling success. (366)

She sums this up by saying that because of Islam’s success, “the ummah [that is to say, the muslim world, Islamdom] had acquired an almost sacramental importance and had disclosed the presence of God.” In other words, muslims were God’s special people whose existence proved God’s existence. So why then are Western Christians the ones who are so prone to this belief?

Sometimes Armstrong decides to waste words in the most bizarre and condescending ways, as when she explains the meaning of “something”:

Always concerned with accuracy of expression, Wordsworth would only call it [the Spirit he felt in nature] ‘something,’ a word which is often used as a substitute for exact definition. (348-349)

If this is what happens to a pop-culture ‘expert,’ someone who has been called by the publishing industry to be the mirror to their target audience – that they feel called upon to give their own brilliant definitions of words that everyone knows the meaning of – then heaven defend good people everywhere from becoming pop-culture experts.

She is also willing to interpret the significance of doctrines without either analysis or context. She declares that

Christians shared the Gnostic view of the world as inherently fragile and imperfect, separated from God by a vast chasm. The new doctrine of creation ex nihilo emphasized this view of the cosmos as quintessentially frail and utterly dependent on God for being and life. (108)

In fact most Gnostics did not believe in creation by God at all: the world was created by an evil lesser deity known as the demiurge. Matter itself was therefore a prison for spirit, and the world inherently evil. The orthodox responded with the idea of creation ex nihilo and by God, indicating that all things are good because they come directly from God. If Armstrong were to look at the sources, she would find that of the Christian philosophers who support ex nihilo creation all maintain that the world, therefore, must be good. In what way would believing that matter was not made by God close the “vast chasm” separating us from God?

She is also incredibly contrarian. It is clear that she disapproves of celibacy, and considers it unhealthy and extreme. Yet she defends Origen, a second century Christian who castrated himself (castration has been regarded by the orthodox as extreme and unhealthy):

Castration was quite a common operation in late antiquity; Origen did not rush at himself with a knife, nor was his decision inspired by the kind of neurotic loathing of sexuality that would characterize some Western theologians, such as St. Jerome. (101)

What is this supposed to be? A defense of autocastration?

She also (having been there, I suppose) knows all about “Church services” for the early Christians:

Church services were noisy, charismatic affairs, quite different from a tasteful evensong today at the parish church. (87)

So she dislikes tasteful evensongs and decorous liturgies (if they are Western), but I must note, she also dislikes American-style charismatic churches. Oh well. Not everyone can have the proper subjective experience.

The idea of a personal God seems increasingly unacceptable at the present time for all kinds of reasons: moral, intellectual, scientific, and spiritual. (396)

The God of the philosophers is the product of a now outdated rationalism… (396)

In the United States, we have seen that ninety-nine percent of the population claim to believe in God, yet the prevalence of fundamentalism, apocalypticism, and “instant” charismatic forms of religiosity in America is not reassuring. (398)

This is a shame, because from time to time it is clear in life that people do get a tremendous amount of satisfaction from these lawgiving Gods, personal Gods, first-cause type Gods, and Bible-beating Gods. Thomas Paine used to say that we should not make laws abridging religious freedom not because governments do not have the right to interfere with human affairs but because they do not have the right to interfere with God’s right to seek worship from human beings as he sees fit; and that God has apparently been pleased to make the manners of religion multifarious, for his own good pleasure. But for Armstrong this is not permissible. She never lapses into rhapsodes about the feelings Augustine had of God when he began to write, or Cromwell had when in the field, or Sibelius playing his violin alone in the forest. In fact she is not very appreciative at all – when you put the book down, you have a rather dour view of our religious past (this is of course part of the liberal outlook: as we know, pleasure came into the world with the arrival of the Beatles, but before that everyone was miserable). But then you think again: people rolling in the aisles of their churches in Alabama, or Thomas Tallis’ forty-part religious motets, or Bernini’s St. Theresa, or Beshr the Barefoot in bliss in the streets of Baghdad, or the saying of Haydn, when asked why his religious music was so jolly: “Because when I think of our dear God I just get undescribably happy.” They say that when Goethe heard this story, his eyes welled up with emotion. But Armstrong is not a fan of whatever you might call this – the God of the philosophers or the personal God – indeed she is not a fan of anything but herself.  Imprinted on the inside of her skull, and implicit in every sentence she writes, is the dictum L’infer, c’est les autres.