How many of you are at the library for the first time tonight . While, double welcome to you. How many of you attended the library of Congress Flagship presents the National Book festival . Nice. Nice to see that. Welcome back. How many of you have attended one of these National Book festival presents . Good, keep coming back. We like you. Thank you so much. 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 institutions, the library of congress, your library. This is a brandnew effort to which we hope to spark conversation and engage and 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 pelkey, to a conversation with the haitianamerican wonderful literary novelist [inaudible] to the program you 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 delight in provoking the kind of exchanges that make all of us more informed and mindful citizens could they are part of that collective mission by peter tonight and thank you for joining us and thank you for helping us carry this storage. I hope you have taken a moment to look at the display of religious texts our curators have put out for you nextdoor. Perhaps youve taken a tour of some of the librarys 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, of your library. But to cut 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 who has contributed richly to our understanding of faith, scripture and history of religions around the globe. She is, of course, Karen Armstrong, the current investor for the United Nations alliance civilization and the event you dont know what that alliance is its a dedicated ambitious body within the United Nations that mounts actions 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 defuse tension between those who profess different faiths. She is also one of the forces behind the charter for compassion, a campaign she began about ten years ago after she won the ted prize. The charter for compassion is a publicly created document in more than 30 languages that urges the people and religions of the world to embrace the essential values of compassion so fundamental to many of the worlds core beliefs. This is 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 of Saint Annes College in 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, she has been an explainer, a connector, the lesson throughout in her new book, the lost art of scripture, is about the worlds major faiths and religions have more in common than you might think. The differences over which the been fought and the hard hatreds that have been made harder are, if you study the very heart of scripture, actually very few and surmountable. Its a hopeful message. Karen armstrong is the author of the bestselling history of god, she is given us consistently brilliant, deeply researched and thoughtful works among them, through the narrow gauge, tongues of fire, the holy war about the crusades, mohammed, a biography. Buddha, faith after september 11, 12 steps to compassionate life and my own favorites, her gripping memoir, the spiral staircase, my climb out of darkness. Now she gives us this timely and important new work, the lost art of scripture, a book that explains where faith resides in our brains and our hearts and it is in short, an examination of the way sacred tests 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, she argues so well that sacred texts are works of art and they are tools to approach the divine, roads to a Higher Consciousness and were never meant to be rigid and unbending written in stone. She is here to tell us about this clarifying work of history in a time of intolerance and mutual comprehension, her voice is at once, a comfort and a clarion call. At the end of her top talk we will take your questions and i hope you will formulate them as she speaks to you. Please, help me welcome the prodigiously talented writer and thinker, Karen Armstrong. [applause] thats a wonderful welcome. Thank you. Why is scripture a lost art . Well, first of all, lets think if you are reading a book like pride and prejudice. You are not astonished or even dismayed to hear that mr. Darcy or mr. Bingley never existed. [audio difficulties] we are reading of scripture and a very factual way. We are factual people. In the early modern. We started turning in europe and here in the United States towards reason, logic, enlightenment and all of these things, in science particularly have done one of all things for the world. But its no good reading scripture or they say the stories of scripture as though they were factual. Anymore than pride and prejudice is. Because before about the 18th century 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. We learned, develop the science of archaeology and learned how to decipher ancient languages, that we could make, that we could recreate the world of the past. But 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. [laughing] as 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 and the stories of scripture, what they mean, rather than what actually happened. Now, ive got only a few minutes to talk and its quite a fat book as you can see. I thought i would just focus on three things about how we misinterpret scriptures and lost art. One of the things im not going to go into in great detail but intrigued me first and get me started on this project was the fact that scripture was essentially a performative art. Some of you may have seen those wonderful bibles on display, but thats a fairly 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 the catholic child i got scripture filtered through the gregorian chant and the 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 rituals, 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. I am told people, 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 that scripture tells us what we must believe. That it gives us truth that we must accept. Its a very odd idea. Came in rather late, roundabout the time of the protestant reformation. And you will remember that luther said famously that a poor man armed with scripture can learn as much about the faith than any pope or bishop. Give everybody the bible and they will be fine. Well, that didnt work because as the reformers soon found that they couldnt agree with one another about what scripture said, even on absolutely fundamental matters like the eucharist. This was so disturbing that from the beginning the Protestant Movement was split, and scripture is full it is not teaching us anything. How can it, because it is talking about a reality, we call it god over here, in india they call it the and that means the all, it is everything that is. Its reality itself 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 eight, i learned my catechism, and one of the questions was what is god . And in a single sentence we had him summed up. God is the supreme spirit who alone exists of itself and is infinite in all perfections. Well, at age eight i have to say that left me rather cold. [laughing] but i now think it is quite entirely incorrect, because first of all it takes it for draw a breath and define a word a breath and define a word as i said that means to set limits upon our reality that is, that cannot be grasped. And furthermore alone exists of himself . Thomas aquinas before the modern. Probably something european thought in his great theological and said god is not one of the things that exists. All things that we know exist are very temporary. They come and they go. They failed. They are able. Feeble god is being itself. That force of life. It is certainly not a he who alone exists. And it tells you nothing about god and neither does the bible. I guess what ive only got a little while, i just want to take one scripture that you probably, any of you will know well, the book of genesis. In chapter one of genesis, the famous chapter one, we have a portrait of god, and 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 creation is no great struggle to him, as he speaks and it is done. And god is totally good and fair, and at the end of every day he is very benign. He blesses everything that he is made and says it is good. Even his old enemy the sea monster that he was supposed to have destroyed, he blesses him and they are made peaceful. The rest of the book of genesis systematically undercuts that nice picture of god. [laughing] by the end of chapter three, the god who was in total control of his creation, has lost control, cant manage them all, human beings. They are off on their own. The god who was so benign becomes a cruel destroyer in the time of the flood, in a fit of what we can only call peak. He decides to destroy the whole human race. He saves noah and his family. Wonders why, as soon as no a get out of the ark he gets drunk and commits some horrible secular act. But he wipes out the entire world. So much for the benign god. And the god who is completely impartial in chapter one, blessing all that he has made, has favorites. Hes endlessly choosing one person after another for no good reason as far as we can see. Cain and abel, jane brings his sacrifice, god says no. He takes a bowls sacrifice instead. Why . No reason at all. And hebrew tells us his face crumples like the face of a child when it is shot by something and it puts iron in his soul as you have the first murder and he kills his brother, abel. And he goes on doing this, god does, he chooses jacob rather than easel, the older twin and youre made to feel the pain of the rejected one. Have you no blessing for me, father . He christ in despair. Father, bless me, too. I cannot do it. And poor hagar just dont in the desert dumped with her baby son by abraham at gods command to face 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 intervene 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 steadily undercut because this is a world that we know. This is a world where people do die in terrible, senseless disasters, natural disasters. This is a world that is not fair. None of those people he has chosen is particularly good or better than the other, and yet they are the ones that prosper and get the blessing, and that is what we see, always. And we are left at the end wondering what is this god . And notice 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, i am what i am. Now, thats been translated to say god is saying he is a selfsufficient being, but this is the early hebrew and it didnt have that kind of metaphysical thought yet. They had not developed a metaphysical tradition. Its a phrase used in hebrew of deliberate vagueness. When you say, the bible will say they went where they went, it means i dont know where they went. [laughing] basically what god is saying is my drug business, dont ask me. And similarly he chooses moses, the stamerer, to speak for him. Moses says to them look, god, why are you choosing me . Ever since i child ive had this terrible speech impediment and no one can hear a word i say. And god says never mind. Your brother will speak for you. So were only getting what god has said to moses secondhand, and you wonder really how much moses has understood. And furthermore, it is aaron, the speaker who is guilty of the 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. Moses, he still prefers moses, cannot speak because god is unspeakable. The great taoist scripture begins the tao that can be named is not the eternal tao. If you could say what god is, you can say what that tao is. Thats not the tao. If you can say what it is, thats not god at all. And so heaven does not speak to 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 taoist scriptures, confucius nephew is supposed to say i sit quietly and 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 rather opening our minds and hearts to the fact that we we speak about god we do not know what were talking about. The tao that cannot be named is not the eternal tao. Very early in the tenth century, the priests of india, ancient india, used to have a competition, and they would go off into the wilderness and they would fast and pray, and they would come together to the indians loved competitions. The object of it was to find a word that sums up the all, that is everything that is. And so the first priest, a challenger, drawing on all these huge learning and all his mystical experience would come out with a phrase that he thought summed up the brahmin, the all. The other priests would have to reply, build upon that and reply, but the priest who won the competition was the one that reduced the all to silence, and in that silence, he was present. The brahmin was not present in the learned declarations but in a sudden realization of impotence of speech, when you face the divine. And so when we go why did we have catechisms in the first place . Because after reformist and the couldnt agree themselves upon scripter they said they were still thought of ordinary people read the bible anymore. That was clearly out, and so they had to have catechisms instead, and both the catholic leaders and the protestants did this. So you would approach the scriptures through a set of catechism on theological answers divided by human beings like that, what is god. One of indias favorite scriptures is the story, a terrible story of an appalling war. Its hard to see any light a 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 heaven at all actually. You are not left wondering whether heaven exists, and certainly youre left in grave doubt about what they were up to and that is one of their 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 scripture. 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 the earliest account of something or the earliest version of a story of something, and we go back to the original text. And indeed thats what the protestants, reformers wanted to do. They wanted to go back to the early church to reproduce the early church. Theres a problem about that because they were men and women of the early modern period, not the First Century of christianity, and its impossible for us to go back, especially as all the first christians were jews who had an entirely different view of scripture. We are still doing that today. Sometimes in very distorted forms. Youve got in saudi arabia, for example, the one hobbies who reproduced a lot of century customs and mores wahhabi going back to what the prophets had done at the time but they are not men and women of the seventh century. There are even fundamentalists in this country who have suggested that they revive the old hebrew legislation, which would include the stoning of disobedient children. We are not programmed to do this. In every scripture tradition that i stated, and i found this out while i i didnt think this at the beginning of my research, it consists that you move forward and apply it 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 that spirituality is centered around the temple and theres a terrible hole right in the heart of the scripture. They didnt just chuck it up. They develop something called midrash. Which means to go in because go in search of something. You would take, someone would come to one of the rabbis and ask him a question, and if he would answer it by taking a verse from the book of psalms, lets say, or another verse from one of the prophets, and another from the book of genesis, texts that have no relation to one another, bundled them altogether and there you got an answer that answers this particular question. So it was inventive, and midrash was invented and perfected by the great rabbi who died, he was killed by the romans in the early second century. And there was a story told about it, the fame of his brilliance was so great that it reached heaven, and moses got to hear about this. And he was intr