Welcome to the library of congresss National Book festival a vibrant series of programs meant to bring you into the heart of this historical dynamic institution in the library of congress, your national library. Thilibrary. This is a brandnew after it to 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 save from the childrens writer to a conversation with the literary novelist to the program that you have come to hear tonight we connect the work of living writers to a deeper understanding and we delight in making those connections for you and in that kind of exchanges that make all of us more informed and mindful citizens. You are part of that by being here tonight. Thank you for joining us and for helping us carry the torch. I hope youve taken a moment to look at the display put out for your nextdoor and perhaps youve taken that were some of the librarys vast holdings that will make tonights conversati conversation. Wwe chide you incorporate thesee features in every program and we want you to experience the depth and breadth of this library, if your library. But to cut through to the task at hand, i am thrilled to be standing here to introduce one of the worlds greatest minds on spiritual studies, a writer and scholar that helped contribute to our understanding of faith, scripture and history of religion around the globe. She is of course the current ambassador to the United Nations alliance of civilizations and if you dont know what that is, if a dedicated ambitious body and the United Nations that amounts the actions internationally against any form of extremism. She would like to make the world talk to one another. Its an alliance that nurtures communication and strives between those that profess different faiths. Shes also one of the forces behind the charter for compassion, campaign that began about ten years ago after she won the prize. It is a publicly create createdo document and 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 worlds 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 that Saint Annes College in oxford to study english literature. She has been a teacher, historian, writer, Television Personality on religious issues, but always and above all she has been an explainer, connector. The lesson throughout is the worlds major faith and religion have more in common than you might think. The differences over which they have been fought and the hatreds that have been made harder are if you study the very heart of the scripture actually very few and surmountable. It is a hopeful message. Cara armstrong is the author of the bestselling history and has given up consistently deeply researched and thoughtful work among them is through the narrow gate, tongues of fire, the holy war about the crusade, mohammed a biography, buddha, safe after the 11th of september, stepped to a compassionate life, and my favorite, her gripping memoir my climb out of darkness. Now she gives us a timely and important new work that explains where faith resides in our brains and our hearts. It is in short an examination of the way tests have been coopted by hardliners and fundamentalists around the world who insist the books should be taken literally at their word when in fact as a she argues so well sacred texts are works of art. They are tools to approach the divine and to a higher consciousness. They were never meant to be rigid and unbending written in stone. Shes here tonight to tell us about this work of history in a time of intolerance and mutual incomprehension. It is a comfort and clarion call. At the end of the talk we will take your questions and i hope that you will formulate them as she speaks to you please hel top me welcome the talented writer karen armstrong. [applause] that was a wonderful welcome. Thank you why is scripture a lost art . Well, first of all, lets think if you are reading a book with pride and prejudice, you are not astonished or even dismayed to hear that he never existed. [inaudible] scripture in a very factual way where we are factual people in the early most period we started in europe and hear over here in the United States towards reason, logic, the enlightenment were these things, science in particular have done wonderful things for the world. But its no good reading scripture or the stories of scripture as though they were factual any more than pride and prejudice is because in about the 18th century it was impossible to write history as we know it today because its only since the 18th century where we started to learn about ancient cultures to develop the science of archaeology and learn how to decipher the ancient languages that we could make it create this world of the past but as human beings is the older members of the audience will agree with me it is to forget rather than to remember. [laughter] scripture tells us what we should remember and it does so in a way that brings out the reasons why we should remember that stand stories of scripture and what they mean rather than what actually happened. Now, ive got only a few minutes to talk and its quite a fast buck as you see. So i thought i would just focus on three things about how we misinterpret scriptures and the lost art. One of the things im not going to go to in detail is the fact that it was essentially a performative art. Some of you may have seen those wonderful bibles on display but that is a fairly recent thing. Before it was memorized. Most people couldnt read until the 18th century. You resize it your scripture. It meant recitation and muslims dont read the text as we do even when they are learning it by heart they dont learn it from a text. Its recited to them and that they learned that way. As a catholic child, i bought scripture through and through and the cadences of thought but we never read the bible much. It was always don is always dong of music and acted out in rituals because we learn things far more with our bodies than ar minds. We learn more about human nature iand the world through movement and gesture. If someone is talking and they use a lot of gestures, people will believe the gesture rather than the words because the body doesnt lie so much. But im going to take three Different Things and the first one is the scripture tells us what we must believe. It gives us the truth that we must accept. Its a very odd idea that came in rather late. Around about the time of the protestant reformation and you remember luther said famously a poor man armed with scripture can learn as much about the faith then any pope or bishop, gives everybody the bible and they will be fine. Well, that didnt work because the reformers soon found they couldnt agree with one another about what the scripture said even on absolutely fundamental matters. This was so disturbing that from the beginning the Protestant Movement was put. Its not teaching anything. How can it because it is talking about a reality. It means the all, everything that is. Its reality in itself. So you cant define a word that literally means for the latin root to set limits on something. You cant limit god. As a catholic child at the age of eight, i learned my cataclysm and one of the questions was what is god. In a single sentence, we had summed up. God is the supremgod is the supo alone exists in himself and his infinite in all perfections. I have to say that left me rather cold. But i now think it is entirely incorrect because the tapes first of all it takes for granted that you can simply draw a breath and define a word that means to set limits upon a reality that is not the mythical, that cannot be grasped. Furthermore, who alone exists with himself. Before the modern period before we summed up the european thought in the great logic, it isnt one of the things that exists. All things that we know exist are very temporary. They come and go in detail. They are feeble. It is being itself. It is a tells you nothing about god and neither does the bible. Weve only got a little while, i just want to take one scripture 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. 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 doesnt have to fight any terrible monsters in the new struggle to him he speaks and it is done. God is totally good and fair and the end of every day he blesses everything that he has made and says it is good. Even his old enemy the sea monster and other stories that it is supposed to have destroyed, he blesses it and if they are made peaceful. The rest of the book of genesis systematically undercuts that nice picture of god. [laughter] by the end of chapter three, the god that is in total control has lost control. They are on their own. The god who is so benign becomes a coo destroyer in the time of e flood in a fi and a fifth of whn only call the peak, he decides to destroy the whole human race but he saved noah and his family as soon as he gets out of the ark he gets drunk and commits a horrible act, but he wipes out the entire world so much for the benign god. As a god who is completely impartial in chapter one, blessing all that he has made, has monstrous favorites. Endlessly choosing one person after another for no good reason as far as we can see. Cain and abel. Kancain brings his sacrifice and god says no. He takes abels sacrifice instead. No reason at all. And when hebrew tells us that his face crumbles like the face of a child when its shocked by something and you have the first murder he kills his brother, abel. He goes on doing this, god does. He chooses jacob radova rather n esau, the older time and you are made to feel the pain of the rejected one. Have you no blessing for me, father, he cries. Bless me, too. And hagar just dumped in the desert with her baby son by abraham and gods command to face an almost certain death. This is not the benign god we think. At the end of the book of genesis, god is continually butting in and intervening and appearing and advising and disappears from the world. Joseph and his brothers have to struggle with their own insights and dreams just as we do and that image this is the world that we know. This is the world where people do die in terrible senseless disasters and this is a world that is not fair. None of the people that hes chosen is particularly good or better than the other and yet they are the ones that get the blessing and that is what we see old ways. And we are left at the end wondering what is this god, and notice when later on moses meets him in the burning bush and assess what is your name because to know the name of someone gives you power over them. He says i am what i am. Thats been translated to say he is a self sufficient being but its very early hebrew and they didnt have that kind of metaphysical thought. They havent developed the metaphysical tradition. It is a praise to the phrase used in hebrew. It will say they went where they went. It means i dont know where they went. [laughter] and what god is basically saying his mind your own business and dont ask me. Similarly, he chooses moses to speak for him and moses says at one point why are you choosing me. Ever since a child i had a terrible speech impediment and no one can hear a word i say. God says never mind. Your brother will speak for you. So we are only getting what god has said to moses secondhand and you wonder how much of it is understood. And furthermore, it is aaron, the speaker, who is guilty of the idolatry because it is his idea that the israelites worship the god in the form of a golden cast narrowing dog down to a single image. And she still prefers moses who cannot speak because god is unspeakable. The great scripture begins that which can be named is not the eternal. If you can say what god is, that isnt god. If you can say what it is, that isnt god at all. And so, having doesnt speak of confucius, of the highest reality in confucianism. Having does not speak. We just got glimpses of what we can see. In one of the scriptures, his nephew says i sit quietly and forget everything ive been told, not building up of his knowledge about god. So, scripture isnt telling us what we should believe. Its rather opening up our minds and heart to the fact when we speak about god, we do not know what they are talking about. Its the fundamental. Very early on in the tenth century, the priests of india, ancient india had a competition and they would go off into the wilderness and pray and come together. The indians left competitions. The object of it was to find a word that summed up when i mentioned earlier which is everything that is and so the first challenger drawing on the earnings and mystical experiences would come out with a phrase that he thought summed it up and the other priest would have to reply, build upon that and reply, but the priest who won the competition was the one that reduced the mall to silence and in that silence, he was present. He wasnt present in the learned declarations but in a certain realization of the impotence of speech when you face the divine. So, when we go why did we have cataclysms in the first place, because after they found they couldnt agree themselves, they said there was no thought of letting ordinary people read the bible anymore. That was clearly out so they had to have cataclysms instead, the catholic leaders and protestants did this so that you would approach the scriptures through a set of theological answers devised by human beings like thats what is god and not the model of scripture. One of the favorites is a terrible story of an appalling war its hard to see any light or glimmer of hope in it at all even in the end it isnt clear that there is a heaven at all actually. Youre not left wondering whether it exists and certainly a great doubt about what the dogs are up to and get that is one of the best loved scriptures because instead of giving us answers, it plunges into obscurities and lets you see the ambiguity of scripture. Okay, point number two. It doesnt expect us to go back to the original meaning of the text. In modern scholarship thats what we do. We go back to the original text and they want to go back to reproduce the early church. But the problem about that, they were men and women of the early modern period. Wwere still doing that today. Youve got in saudi arabia for example and going back to what the prophets ha have done at tht time but they are not of the seventh century and there are fundamentalists in this country whove suggested that they revive the old hebrew legislation which would include children. We are not programmed to do this. In every tradition that i have studied, and i didnt notice this at the beginning of my research it insists that you move forward and apply it to the present. They were destroyed by the romans and could not read the old hebrew text in the same way because the whole of the spirituality there was a terrible cold right in the heart of the scripture. And now another from the prophet and another from the book of genesis it had no relationship to one another and their youve got an answer that answers this particular question. So it was invented and it is perfected by the great rabbi who was killed by the romans in the second century and there was a story told about it that the fame of his brilliance was so great that it reached heaven and moses got to hear about it and he was intrigued so he came down to earth and tested his scripture and stacke sat in thek row among the found to his intense embarrassment he couldnt understand a word. But he goes back shaking his head proudly saying my children have defeated me that theyve grown up, theyve gone beyond me. A jewish student with his teacher conferences the sacred text. And there would be a page of which he would invite his own thoughts and discoveries and they were told to imagine he and his master was standing together on mount sinai with moses and taking the revelation further but it wasnt something that happened in the past. It happened every time they confronted the sacred text. And the new testament particularly have formed their own. Its a little different more like the sectarians which solvel their own Movement Predicted in the past and matthew, for example, never misses the chance of taking it from the Old Testament as they called it and applying it to jesus. He says i took my son out of egypt. Matthew applied to baby jesus who was forced to flee and when things died down he came back to palestine and was bought out of egypt. That is just one example. Theres one story in the gospel of luke which shows how this worked. It wasnt just a stunt. It was profound. After the crucifixion, two disciples distraught, they thought jesus was going to be the messiah and he died in this terrible death and they leave jerusalem anjerusalem indigo byy village and theres the stress obviously and a stranger approaches that emphasize a. That could have been the end of the old story but they do. The. Thatof how it applies to jesusd it says nothing of the sort it is more of a rash and at the end you know the end of the story they see he disappears. And they say this is the important bit dead our hearts not burn within us when he opened the scripture for us so it swells with joy and its an insightful thing not just a cleverness. And that is how we will see jesus today in the breaking of bread in this inventive scripture and when we reach out to a stranger for help. So he says every time a you recite a piece it should mean Something Different to you and if it doesnt mean Something Different to you youre not reciting it correctly. Not condemning any of this but for example, it isnt signed as a sort of aerobic exercise. It was designed to get rid of that selfish part. It cant just tell us about our own private internal spirituality relationship with god there is a story about him when he had achieved if it was basking in the newfound peace perhaps they should teach other people about how to do this its very difficult. Then the world is lost, the world is utterly lost and he descend from heaven and yields before the enlightened man and he says lord, please preach your message. Look at the world. So he looked at the world and solve the pain of the world and spend the next 40 years we would never see this but its in the scriptures chanting around the villages hoping people to deal with their suffering and a way to overcome it. This is all the scriptures tell us to act. Later, i think that he would tell them to do the same after achieving enlightenment, he said, you must go back to the place and immerse