One of these National Book festival presents . Good. Keep coming back, we like you. Thank you so much. [laughter] well, welcome to the library of congress National Book festival presents, a vibrant new series of programs inspired by the National Book festival and meant to bring you into the heart of this historic, dynamic institution, the library of congress, your national library. This is a brand new effort through which we hope to spark conversations, engage, inspire and entertain you with some of the most diverse, provocative and notable writers of the day. In every program that we put before you, say from the childrens writer dave pilke to a conversation with the haitianamerican wonderful literary novelist [inaudible] to the program youve come to hear tonight, we mean to connect the works of living writers to a larger history, a deeper understanding. We delight in making those connections for you, and we delight in provoking the kind of exchanges that make all of us more informed and mindful citizens. Theyre part of that collective youre part of that collective mission by being here tonight. Thank you for joining us, and thank you for helping us carry this torch. I hope youve taken a moment to look at the display of religious texts our curators have put out for you next door. Perhaps youve taken a tour of some of the librarys vast holdings that will make tonights conversation come alive for you. We try to incorporate these features in every program, and we want you to experience the depth and breadth of this library, or of your library. But to cut to the task at hand, im thrilled to be standing here to introduce one of the worlds great minds on spiritual studies, a writer and scholar who has contributed richly to our understanding of faith, scripture and the history of religions around the globe. She is, of course, karen armstrong, the current ambassador for the United Nations alliance of civilizations. In the event you dont know what that alliance is, its a dedicated, ambitious body within the United Nations that mounts action internationally against any form of extremism. Karen armstrong would like to make the world talk to one another. Its an alliance that nurtures communication and strives to diffuse tensions between those who profess different faiths. Shes also one of the forces behind the charter for compassion, a campaign that she began about ten years ago after she won the ted prize. The charter for compassion is a publiclycreated document in more than 30 languages that urges the peoples and religions of the world to them brace the essential values of 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 at st. Annes college at oxford to study english literature. She has been a teacher, a historian, a writer, a Television Personality on religious issues. But always and above all, he has been an explainer, a connector. The lessons throughout her new book is that the worlds major faiths and religions have more in common than you might think. The differences over which wars have been fought and the hard hatreds that have been made harder are, if you study the very heart of structure, actually very few and surmountable. Its a hopeful message. Karen armstrong is the author of the best selling history of god. She has given us consistently brilliant, deeply researched and thoughtful works. Among them, through the narrow gates, tongues of fire, the holy war, the crusades, mohamed a biography, buddha, faith after 11, september, 12 steps to a passionate life x my own favorite, the spiral staircase my climb out of darkness. Now she gives us this timely and important work, the lost art of scripture, a book that explains where faith resides in our brains and our hearts. It is, in short, an examination of the way sacred texts have been coopted by hardliners and fundamentalists around the world who insist that these books should be taken literally at their word when, in fact, as she argues so well, sacred texts are works of art. They are tools to approach the divine, roads to a higher consciousness. They were never meant to be rigid and unbending, written in stone. Shes here to tell us about this clarifying work of history in a time of intolerance and mutual incomprehension. Her voices is at once a comfort and a clarion call. At the end of her talk, we will take your questions. I hope you will formulate them as she speaks to you. Please, help me welcome the prodishesly talented writer and thinker, karen armstrong. [applause] what a wonderful welcome. Thank you. Well, why is scripture a lost art . Well, first of all, lets think if youre reading a book like pride and prejudice. Youre not astonished or even displayeded to hear that mr. Dari or mr. Darcy or mr. Bingley never existed. [inaudible] [audio difficulty] were reading scripture in a very factual way. Were factual people. In the early modern period, we started turning in europe and here in the United States towards reason, logic, the enlightenment. All of these things, science particularly, 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 the, before about the 18th century it was impossible to write history as we know it today. Because its only since the 18th century when we started to learn about ancient cultures, we learned, developed the science of archaeology and learned how to decipher ancient languages that we could make, that we could recreate the world of the past. As human beings, as perhaps the older members of the audience will agree with me, its more natural for us 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 these texts in the stories of scripture, what they mean rather than what actually happened. Now, ive got only a few minutes the talk, and its quite a fat book, as you see. Laugh that laugh [laughter] so i thought that i would just focus on three things about what, how we misinterpret scriptures. One of the things that im not going to go into in great detail but intrigued me first and got me started on this project was the fact that scripture was essentially a formative art. Now, youve been probably some of you may have seen those wonderful bibles on display. Thats a very recent thing. Scripture before was memorized. Most people couldnt read until the 18th century. You recited your scripture. You sang it. The quran means recitation, and muslims dont read the text as we do. Even when theyre learning it by heart, they dont learn it from a text. Its recited to them, and they learn it that way. As a catholic child, i got scripture filtered through the gregorian chant and the haunting cadences of that chant. But we never read the bible much. It was always done in the setting of music and also acted out in ritual. Because we learn things far more with our bodies than with our minds. We learn more about human nature and the world through movement and gesture. Im told that people, if someone is talking and they use a lot of gestures, people will believe the gesture rather than the words. [laughter] because the body doesnt lie so much. [laughter] but im going to take three different things, and the first one is the scripture tells us what we must believe. That it gives us truth that we must accept. Its a very odd idea. It came in rather late. Round about the time of the protestant reformation. And youll remember that luther said famously that a poor man armed with scripture can learn as much about the faith as any pope or bishop. Give everybody the bible and theyll be fine. Well, that didnt work. Because as the reformers soon found, they couldnt agree with one another about what scripture said. Even on absolutely fundamental matters like the eucharist. And this was so disturbing that from the beginning the Protestant Movement was split. And scripture is full of it is not teaching us anything. It how can it . Because it is talking about a reality, we call it god over here. In india they called it the bra brahman. It is everything that is. Its reality itself with a capital r. So you cant define it, a word which literally means from the latin root to set limits upon something. You cant limit god. As a catholic child at the age of 8, i learned my catechism. And one of the questions was, what is god. And in a single sentence, we had him summed up. [laughter] god is the supreme spirit who alone exists of himself and is infinite in all perfections. Well, at 8 i had to say that left me rather cold, but i [laughter] but i now think its quite entirely correct, because it taxes, first of all, it takes it for granted that you can simply draw breath and define a word, as ive said, that means to set limits upon a reality that is inlimitable. That cannot be grasped. And furthermore, who alone exists of himself. Thomas aquinas, before the modern period, probably summed up european thought in his great three lodge yall theological, god is not one of the things that exist. They come and they go, they fail, theyre feeble. God is [speaking in native tongue] he says, being itself. Like the br ahman, that force of life. And its certainly not a he who alone exists and is infinite he tells you nothing about god and neither does the bible. And i just want, actually, weve only got a little while, i just want to take one scripture that you probably, many of you will know well, the book of genesis. In chapter one of genesis, the famous chapter one, we have a portrait of god. Everything a god should be. 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, sea monsters in order to creations no great struggle for him. He speaks and it is done. And god is totally good and fair. At the end of every day, hes very benign. He blesses everything that he has made. And says it is good. Even his own enemy leviathan, the sea monster that in other stories is supposed to destroy can, he blesses him. Now, the rest of the book of genesis systematically undercuts that nice picture of god. [laughter] by the end of chapter three, the god who is in total control of his creation has lost control, cant manage human beings. Theyre off on their own. The god who was so benign becomes a cruel destroyer in the time of the flood. In a ship, in a fit of what we can only call pique, he decides to destroy the whole human race. He saves noah if his family. One wonders why. As soon as noah gets out of the ark, he gets drunk [laughter] and commitments some horrible commits some horrible sexual act. But he wipes out the entire world. So much for the benign god. And the god who was completely impartial in chapter one, blessing all that he has made, has monstrous favorites. Hes endlessly choosing one person after another for no good reason as far as we can see. Cain and abel. Cain brings his sacrifice, god says no. No reason at all. And when hebrew tells us that his face crumples like the face of a child when it is shocked by something, and it puts iron in cains soul, and you have the first murder when he kills his brother abel. And he goes on doing this, god does. He chooses jacob rather than the older twin. And youre made to feel the pain of the rejected one. Have you no blessing for me, father . Esau cries in despair. Father, bless me too. And poor hagar just dumped in the desert with her baby son by abraham to face an almost certain death. This is not the benign god we think. And at the end of the book of genesis, god was continually butting in and interviewing, interfering and advising, disappears from the world. And joseph and his brothers have to struggle with their own insights and dreams just as we do. And that image of god has been because this is the world that we know. This is a world where people do die in terrible, senseless disasters. Natural disasters. And we, and this is a world that its not fair. None of those people that hes chosen is particularly good or better than the other, and yet theyre the ones that prosper and get the blessing. And that is what we see always. Finish and were left at the end wondering, what is this god . And notice when later on moses meets god in the burning bush and says what is your name, because to know the name of someone gives you power over them, god says [speaking in native tongue] in hebrew that means i am what i am. Now, thats been translated to say gods saying hes a selfsub sis tent being. This is very early hebrew, and they didnt have that kind of metathat physical metaphysical force. Its a phrase used of deliberate when you say, the bible will say they went where they went [laughter] it means i dont know where they went. [laughter] and what god is saying is basically mind your own business. [laughter] dont ask me. And similarly, he chooses moses, the stammerer, to speak for him. And moses says to him, look, at one point, why are you choosing me . Ever since i was a child ive had this terrible speech impediment, and no one can understand what i say. And god says, never mind, aaron will speak for you, his brother. You wonder really how much moses is understood. And furthermore, it is aaron, the facile speaker, who is guilty of the archetypal idolatry. Because its his idea that the israelites worship the god in the form of a golden calf, narrowing god down to a single image. And moses, he still prefers moses, cannot speak because god is unspeakable. And the great scripture begins, the dow that can be named is not the eternal dow. You can say what god is, if you can say what the dow is, thats not the dow. If you can say what it is, its like [inaudible] in the catholic catechism. Thats not god at all. And so heaven does not speak, says confucius, of the highest reality in confucianism. Heaven does not speak. We just get glimpses of what we can see. And in one of the daoist scriptures too, confucius nephew is supposed to say i sit quietly, and i forget. I forget everything ive been told. Not building up all this knowledge about god. So scripture is not telling us what we should believe. It is the, rather, opening of our minds and hearts to the fact that when we speak about god, we do not know what were talking about. The dao that can be named is not the e personal eternal dao. Very early in the 10th century the priests of india, ancient india, had, used to have a competition. And they would go off into the wilderness, and they would fast and pray, and then they would come together. The indians loved competitions. And the object of it was to find a word that summed up the brahman that i mentioned earlier, the all that is everything that is. And so the first priest, the challenger, drawing on all his huge learning and his mystical experience, would come out with a phrase that he thought summed up the brahman, the all. 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 them all to silence. And in that silence, the brahman was present. The brahman was not present in the learned declarations, but in the sudden realization of impotence of speech when you face the divine. And so when we go and why did we have catechisms in the first place . Because after the reformers found they couldnt agree themselves upon scripture, they said there was no thought of letting ordinary people read the bible anymore. That was clearly out. And so they had to have catechisms instead. And both the catholics, catholic leaders and the protestants did in the. So you had the, so that you would approach the scriptures through a set of catechism answers, theological answers divined by human beings like that what is god. And the muddle of scripture. One of indias favorite scriptures is a story of, a terrible story of an appalling war. Its hard to see any light or glimmer of hope in it at all. Even at the very end when they all go to heaven, its not clear that there is a haven at all a haven a heaven at all, actually. Youre left wondering if heaven exists, and certainly youre left in great doubt about what the gods are up to. And yet that is one of indias best loved scriptures because instead of giving us answers, it plunges us into obscurity. Get rid of your catechisms and oppose let yourself see the ambiguity of our scripture. Okay. Point two here. Scripture does not look, expect us to go back to the original meaning of the text. Now, in modern scholarship thats what we do, isnt it . We go back to find the earliest account of something or the earliest version of a story of something. We go back to the original text. And in the, thats what the protestant reformers wanted to do. They wanted to go back to the early church, to reproduce the early church. Theres problems about that, because they were men and women of the early modern period, not the First Century of christianity. And they couldnt its impossible for us to go back. Especially as all the first christians were jews who had an entirely different view of scripture. Were still doing that today and sometimes in very distorted forms. Youve got, in saudi arabia, for example, the wahhabis who reproduced a lot of second century customs and mores, going back to what the prophets had done at that tame. But theyre at that time. And there are even fundamentalists in this country who have suggested we revise the old hebrew legislation which would include the disowning of disobedient children. Were not programmed to do this. Scripture is an innovative art, and in every scripture that i have studied and i found this out while i was, i didnt think this was at the beginning of my research it insists that you move forward and apply it to your, to the present. Invent it, if you like. The jewish people, after they lost their temple which was destroyed by the romans in the year 70, could not read the old hebrew text in the same way because the whole of their spirituality had centered around the temple, and there was a herbal hole right in the heart of a terrible hole right in the heart of the scripture. But they didnt just chuck it out. They developed something called mid [inaudible] which means to go in search of something. So you would take so someone would come to one of the rabbis and ask him a question, and he would answer it by taking a verse from the book of psalms, say, or another verse from one of the prophets and another from the book of genesis, text that had no relation to one another, bundle them all together, and there youve got an answer that a answers this particular question. And so it was invented. And there was, this form was invented and perfected by the great rabbi akiva who died, was killed by the romans in the early second century. And there was a story told in the telm if ud about it that the frame of his brilliance was so great that it reached heaven, and moses got to hear about this. He was intrigued. So he came down to earth and attended rabbi akivas scriptur