March 29, 2000

After 20 Years a Classic Recording is Available Again.

Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead reviews “Tenor & Fallen Angels” (hatology) the new reissue by Joe McPhee.

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Contributor

Kevin Whitehead

Other segments from the episode on March 29, 2000

Fresh Air with Terry Gross, March 29, 2000: Interview with Karen Armstrong; Review of Joe McPhee's album "Tenor & Fallen Angels."

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March 29, 2000

44:20

A History of Fundamentalist Movements.

Religion scholar and former nun Karen Armstrong. She’s the author of the bestselling book, “A History of God.” Her new book, “The Battle for God” examines the fundamentalist movement in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic faiths that began to emerge in the 1970s. She writes that today’s fundamentalist movements differ from previous ones, in that they are no longer throwbacks to the past, but are complex movements that are shaped by the modern culture they also decry.

Interview

Karen Armstrong

Transcript

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: MARCH 29, 2000
Time: 12:00
Tran: 032901np.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Interview With Karen Armstrong
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:06

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

TERRY GROSS, HOST: From WHYY in Philadelphia, I'm Terry Gross with FRESH AIR.

On today's FRESH AIR, the emergence of fundamentalism in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and the fears and anxieties behind it. We talk with Karen Armstrong, author of the new book "The Battle for God," and the best-seller "A History of God." Before she became a scholar of the world's religions, she was a nun for seven years.

Also, jazz critic Kevin Whitehead reviews the reissue of a recording that was long out of print, "Tenor and Fallen Angels," by saxophonist Joe McPhee.

That's all coming up on FRESH AIR.

First, the news.

(BREAK)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

My guest, Karen Armstrong, is the author of the new book "The Battle for God." It's a history of the fundamentalist movements that have surfaced in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. She says the fundamentalist movements of these different faiths have a lot in common, and they've been a reaction against the difficulties of life in the modern secular world.

Armstrong is also the author of the best-seller "A History of God." She was a nun for seven years.

After leaving the convent, she became a scholar of the world's religions. She teaches at Leo Beck College for the Study of Judaism and received the 1999 Muslim Public Affairs Council Media Award.

At the beginning of her new book, she describes the emergence of fundamentalism as "one of the most startling developments of the late 20th century." I asked her why.

KAREN ARMSTRONG, "THE BATTLE FOR GOD": In the middle of the 20th century, people generally assumed that religion had had its day as a public force. It was assumed that secularism was the rising ideology and that never again would religion play a major role in public affairs.

But then suddenly, in the late 1970s, that changed. We had events such as the rise of the Moral Majority here in the United States, where you had this startling spectacle of the Iranian revolution, which actually managed to topple what seemed to be a powerful and stable government. Israel, a defiantly secular country, started in the 1980s to become more dominated by the religious parties than anyone had ever conceived.

So it was startling in that it reversed the expectations that people had developed over the years. People were demonstrating, sometimes violently and sometimes in a quite frightening way too, that they wanted to be religious, and they wanted to have religion reflected more clearly in their polity, whatever the intellectuals, politicians, or the pundits may have thought.

GROSS: So whereas a lot of people expected that science and rationalism would crowd out religion, in some sectors the opposite happened, and religion was used as a way to deny science and to deny rationalism.

ARMSTRONG: Well, yes, the -- we developed in the Western world an entirely new type of mentality based entirely on scientific rationalism, and this has been wonderful and liberating, and science has achieved spectacular results in such fields as medicine, for example, and technology. But it's unable to answer ultimate questions. Any scientist would say that he or she is not equipped to answer questions about the meaning of life.

And people -- there was, from quite an early stage, a void in modern culture, a sense of meaninglessness and anomie, a sense of despair, malaise, that has been reflected very strongly in the fundamentalist religions that have erupted in every single major religion throughout the globe.

Now, in the U.K., in England, which we're not at all a religious country, and only about 6 percent of the population, it was revealed in a recent poll, attend a religious service on a regular basis, our dismay, I think, with the modern world can be seen in our football hooliganism. And I say that with all seriousness. It -- this puzzling and devastating phenomenon in Britain demonstrates many of the same aspects of rage and frustration and despair, the desire to belong to a team and to express yourself, that we see fueling some of the fundamentalist movements.

GROSS: In trying to understand the development of fundamentalism, you write about two principles, mythos and logos. You say the spiritual lives of people in the past were different than ours. They evolved two ways of thinking which scholars have called mythos and logos. Let's start with mythos. Would you describe what is meant by that expression?

ARMSTRONG: Well, in our society, in popular parlance, the word "myth" or "mythos" is often used to describe something that isn't true. If a politician is accused of a peccadillo, he's likely to say it's a myth, i.e., it didn't happen.

But in the premodern world, people realized that not all truth that we experience in our lives can be rationally spelt out. We find that in art, for example. It would be very difficult to say in logical, discursive prose what a late Beethoven quartet means to you. And there are all kinds of aspects of the spiritual life, too, that can't be given in a sort of neat, rational discourse.

In the premodern world, a myth was something that had in some sense happened once, but which also happens all the time. Now, we have no concept in our modern society for such an event, because we've developed an entirely chronological view of history, which sees events as unique and as happening once only in the distant past, or the recent past.

But a myth is an event, often told in a symbolic way, which is reactivated by the practices of religion and brought into the lives of worshipers. An example is for the strange story of the Exodus from Egypt that we read about in the Bible, when the people of Israel crossed over the Sea of Reeds and Pharaoh's army was drowned in the waters.

Now, some well-meaning people in the modern period have said, Well -- pointed to the prevalence of flash flooding in the region and tried to show how it's quite plausible for this to have happened. But that's entirely on the wrong track.

The story of the Exodus is written up precisely as a myth. There were many other myths current in the ancient Near East at this time which talked about a god splitting a sea in half to create a new reality, which spoke of immersion in the deep as an important rite of passage. And these -- the story is made central to the lives of every single Jew by means of the ritual of the Passover seder, when people relive that and bring it alive.

In fact, you could say that unless an event is mythologized in cult in this way, it can't be a religious event.

GROSS: Now, a lot of people today take what you describe as myth literally. It says it in the Bible, therefore it happened. How do you know that our ancestors, you know, that in the premodern world, our ancestors didn't take this literally?

ARMSTRONG: Well, I think a very salient example comes in the 16th century Jewish movement, founded by Isaac Luria, a Kabalist Jew, in Palestine. He developed a myth about the creation which was entirely different from the story of the Book of Genesis, but which was accepted immediately by Jews all over the world. It was the one single theology that could appeal to the whole Jewish people all over the world, because it was a very violent myth. Instead of the orderly progression of events that you have in the Book of Genesis, this was a terrifying scenario of false starts and explosions and things getting trapped in the wrong place.

And -- but it reflected immediately, it spoke to the condition of the Jewish people at this time who were themselves being trapped in the wrong place and pulled into all kinds of violent and terrifying positions.

Now, today, if someone proposed such a scenario, they would -- people would say, Well, I'm sorry, but that's not in the Bible. There was no way that anyone could verify this creation story. But people knew that it was expressing a reality, and it became a force in the spiritual lives of Jews all over the world by means of the special rituals that Luria devised, which helped people to act out their sense of homelessness in their Jewish exile and express their sense of grief at their separation and the cruelty of the world they lived in.

GROSS: So myth is what provides meaning, context, to our larger lives, and as you say, it can't be demonstrated by rational proof. Its insights are more intuitive.

What about logos, what is logos?

ARMSTRONG: Well, logos, or -- where we get our word "logical" from, that we know very well, because we -- our whole society is built on reason, scientific reason. Now, people always knew that they needed logos and science in order to function effectively in the world, even if it was only to sharpen an arrow correctly to make it fly completely actively to its mark. And people needed hard, good, sensible, rational logos in order to run their societies effectively.

Myth and logos were kept in separate spheres, and it was considered very dangerous to mix the two, because if you -- what worked very well in -- for the inner world of the psyche could be disastrous if applied to the world of political affairs and events, whereas myth always looks back to primordial beginnings.

Logos is always reaching out for something fresh, for something new, and trying to make things happen in the world. Logos has to be -- to prove itself by being -- working effectively in the world and to work rationally.

And you know, we -- well, we all know, our whole society is now highly efficient. What happened in the course of the European and American experience during the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries was that logos, science, achieved such spectacular results that myth became discredited, and people thought that only reason and only science could bring them to truth. And that, of course, affected our religion.

GROSS: Do you think fundamentalism is the first time in the history of religion that religious people feel the need to scientifically try to prove the truth of certain Bible stories?

ARMSTRONG: Yes. I do think this has been a new departure, because we're not trained mythically any more. We're not trained to cultivate our sense of myth in our education, even in our spiritual lives. Pastors often tell us, you know, that the truths of religion are entirely verifiable. And this causes many people alarm, because they don't find that the proofs, say, for the existence of God, actually work for them.

This has been a problem largely because of the extraordinary and spectacular and exciting success of science in our world.

Now, in the Muslim and the Jewish world, their preoccupations are rather different. Christians are hung up about beliefs and doctrines. That's our particular Achilles heel, and it's also one of the ways we love talking about ourselves, doctrinally about our faith in terms of beliefs.

Now, in both Judaism and Islam, there's less emphasis on doctrine. They want to make their religion work effectively in the world and make it into -- so that it's like an effective ideology. And so Jewish and Muslim fundamentalist movements are less concerned with, say, the doctrinal truth of the creation of the world, as revealed in the Bible or the Koran, but in making their religion work effectively in the world, as -- just as logos does, making it politically viable.

GROSS: My guest is Karen Armstrong, author of the new book "The Battle for God." We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is religion scholar Karen Armstrong, who's also a former nun. Her new book is called "The Battle for God."

Let's get back to Protestant fundamentalism, and the idea of logos and mythos. Let's talk about evolution and the Scopes trial, in which evolution versus the Bible was first argued in the courts. And this is still in the United States such a controversial issue in the world of education and religion.

Let's get back to the Scopes trial. What is the background you think we need to know to understand the context for it?

ARMSTRONG: The First World War had caused the first chink in people's belief about -- in science. For the first time, it was realized that the exact sciences could be applied to weaponry with devastating effect. I mean, the whole generation of European young men were lost in that war, and Europe has probably never recovered from this utter devastation.

People began to be very, very terrified, even here in the United States, which hadn't seen combat in its own country. And the Scopes trial was largely a way of saying, Stop! to science. They -- the fundamentalists, especially William Jennings Bryan, who defended the anti-evolution law, believed passionately that it was Darwinism, the evolutionary theory of the survival of the fittest and that only the strong could survive, which had led to the so-called atrocities of the German people during World War I, and that therefore this heinous nation, the Germans, who'd fallen in love with Darwin, who had produced the higher biblical criticism of the Bible, had produced a race of monsters, of horrible men who had no moral scruples.

And this had to be stopped. But he chose the wrong forum. This was a highly inaccurate picture of Darwinism. Darwin was not at all interested in debunking religion. He was proposing a scientific hypothesis. But he -- Bryan believed that science had to be stopped, and that meant that Darwinism couldn't be taught in the schools because it would infect American youth.

Now, Scopes, the young teacher who opposed the law and put himself on trial, was believing in free speech, as was his defender, Clarence Darrow. So it was one of those struggles that have constantly recurred in the coming of the modern period between two wholly irreconcilable points of view. Both sides felt that they were absolutely right and correct. You had the same kind of clash in the Salman Rushdie crisis towards the end of the century.

And -- but what happened was highly significant, because Bryan made a complete mess of trying to explain his position, which was, in fact, untenable in logical terms, and Darrow made mincemeat of him on the stand. Plus, and this was an important development, the secular rationalist press went to town and did a real number on the fundamentalists, jeering at them, humiliating them, ridiculing them.

And as a result, fundamentalists after the Scopes trial swung from the left to the extreme right of the political spectrum, and took themselves out of society. And this we'll see often in the development of fundamentalism, which always becomes more extreme when attacked viciously by secularists.

And so that's -- fundamentalism exists in a kind of symbiotic relationship with an aggressive modernity. It's also true that after the Scopes trial, the fundamentalists, Protestants in the United States, became much more literal in their interpretation of the Bible than they had been before it.

GROSS: Are you surprised that teaching evolution is still controversial, that there's still this movement to prevent the teaching of evolution in the schools, or do you think that that's to be expected?

ARMSTRONG: I find it surprising in one sense, because it seems to me to be such a total red herring, as we say in England. This is -- this -- too -- mis -- and understand Genesis in this literal way is just -- it's just a mistake. (inaudible)...

GROSS: Well, (inaudible), let me stop you here. If we're using the principles of mythos and logos which you talked about, if you say that religions at one time were understood to combine both, this kind of practical, more scientific knowledge along with a kind of more archetypal, spiritual, mythological knowledge, how would a religion explain both Darwinism and Genesis as coexisting?

ARMSTRONG: Well, let's go back for a moment, if we may, to Calvin, who is followed by most of the people who call themselves fundamentalists in the United States. Calvin was absolutely -- who was still -- Calvin was still a man in the premodern world, and he had -- he's -- he was quite certain that the Bible had nothing to teach us about cosmology, astronomy, geography. It was teaching us about spiritual truth. It was an attempt, he said, at baby talk, was what he said. It was trying to express highly complex spiritual events in language that everybody, all human beings, whatever their intelligence, could understand.

So I think that the mythos of the Genesis story is not telling us anything concrete about the physical origins of life on earth. As it was originally designed, it's a polemic against current paganism, and it's telling us what our relationship is with the divine, that there is a benevolent power, as it were, watching over us, blessing us, holding us in being.

But as to how exactly this came about, whether it happened in six days and that God rested on the seventh day, this -- the Bible is not -- is writing a poem here, not writing a scientific account of reality. It's a way of finding order in what seems to be a perplexingly chaotic and fright -- and often frightening world.

And I think it's really interesting that in the Muslim world, there's been very, very little worry about Darwin at all. The Bible, as I said earlier, insists that every single one of its statements about God, as God -- as cre -- for example, it's the -- God created the world, is an ayiah (ph), it's a parable, and not meant to be understood literally.

Darwin, I think, shows us the huge complexity and wonder of the creative process, and I think that if mod -- like -- much modern cosmology that looks into the dark world of uncreated reality and makes us realize that things are just not as simple as a sort of creator God producing the world like cut -- rout -- conjuror produces a rabbit out of a hat.

But there has been -- that the whole of life is a vast mystery, a huge and miraculous course of chain and event that holds us in wonder. And I think that that's what religion is designed to do. Religion is at its best when it holds us in an attitude of deep awe, wonder, and reverence, and at its worst when it seeks to answer our nitty-gritty questions. And it should -- it -- I think science can lead us to grasp, more than ever before, the absolute ineffability of the divine.

GROSS: Karen Armstrong is the author of the new book "The Battle for God." She'll be back in the second half of the show.

I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

GROSS: Coming up, we continue our discussion with religion scholar Karen Armstrong about fundamentalism, and we'll hear why she left the convent after seven years as a nun.

And Kevin Whitehead reviews "Tenor and Fallen Angels," the nearly 24-year-old recording by saxophonist Joe McPhee, which has just been reissued.

(BREAK)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR.

I'm Terry Gross, back with Karen Armstrong, author of the new book "The Battle for God." It's a history of fundamentalism in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Armstrong is a scholar of the world's religions. She was a nun for seven years.

She says that the spiritual lives of people of the past were different than ours. They evolved two ways of thinking and acquiring knowledge, mythos and logos. Logos was the rational and practical approach to daily life. Mythos concerned itself with the stories and metaphors that helped give meaning to live.

Let me quote you. You write, "Protestant fundamentalists turned Christian mythos into scientific facts and created a hybrid that was neither good science nor good religion."

ARMSTRONG: Yes, we saw at the Scopes trial where they were trying to express their worry about science, and by trying to argue that God really had created the world in six days. This was bad science. And let's face it, these -- this worry about science was important. We're still concerned about the morality of scientific -- genetic experimentation, for example. There are all kinds of moral issues that are important. But the fundamentalists expressed this badly.

If you try to make your religion scientific, you're distorting it, because science has another job to do, and religion has another job to do. Religion is about helping us to cultivate a sense that life has some ultimate meaning and value, just as we have to cultivate our sense of the aesthetic. We have to cultivate and work hard at gaining a sense of the divine by means of our rituals, by means of our cult, and not just accept the truths of the Bible as though they were simply literal messages from God, because there's nothing very mysterious or wonderful about that.

So God created the world in seven days. So what? It can be just as miraculous to see God creating the world over as period of billions of years, with this astonishing evolutionary pattern.

GROSS: Now, you say that you think American Protestant fundamentalists have tended to overlook the intuitive and the mystical and to have lost touch with the unconscious, the deeper impulses of the personality, and to have lost touch with the mystical aspects of religion.

I'd like you to give us an example of what you mean and explain what impact you think that has had on fundamentalism.

ARMSTRONG: Well, I think the very effort to see the truths of religion as though they were simply statements of scientific fact cuts out the mystical way in which people used to approach the Bible before. And I try and show this in my book, try to give -- I give examples how in the past people never felt at all shy of meditating upon Scripture in both the Christian, Jewish, and in the Muslim world too, or meditating (inaudible) coming up with entirely new doctrines and entirely new visions and entirely new ideas about their faith.

And they weren't at all worried about factual things. They saw the Word of God as infinite and therefore capable of multiple interpretations.

Now, we are not really taught, whether we are fundamentalists or indeed Christians, in the more mainstream churches, to meditate in this way, to use our minds intuitively, to cultivate the prac -- special disciplines of concentration that have been evolved in all the major world religious traditions to help us descend beneath the layer or the rind of rational control into the depths of the unconscious.

These -- this requires work and effort. And we're not -- we don't do this much in our churches. We're always talking to God in our church services. There's very little silence in our religion where we can let the divine see -- lift us momentarily beyond ourselves, or sink deeply into the ground of our being, where we can experience the sacred presence, or with informing God that He created the world and that we are miserable sinners, and that He saved us through Jesus Christ, as though God didn't know all this already.

This is just the way we are, and I think that people are showing this, not just in fundamentalism. There's a real interest in the United States in Buddhism, for example, which can sic -- which does teach people to meditate and enter into their deeper selves in this way.

Quakers, for example, are -- in my country are getting a whole lot of new converts, because they listen to the silence instead of talking all the time, and reduce -- you see, it's always dangerous to reduce God to a system, a human system of thought, because then we're cutting Him -- ridiculous pronoun -- down to size and making Him fit our preconceptions.

But God is ineffable, indescribable, and can't be nailed down in a theological system, however august.

GROSS: My guest is Karen Armstrong. She's a scholar of the world's religions. She was a nun for seven years. She's the author of the best-selling book "A History of God" and of the new book "The Battle for God," which is about fundamentalism around the world.

Many of us think of fundamentalism as an antimodern approach to religion that's about a return to earlier values. But you describe fundamentalism as really a modern approach to religion. In what sense is fundamentalism modern?

ARMSTRONG: Well, in the -- fundamentalist movements are all opposed to the rational ethos of scientific modernity and to the secularism of our societies. And so they are trying to create a counterculture in opposition to this prevailing mainstream rationalistic secular ethos.

But in order to fight this secularism and rationalism, they have to use some of the same methods. And so there -- in that respect, even though they all claim to be returning to a sacred past, they are doing so in an entirely modern way.

For example, the whole notion of reading your Bible as though it were literal fact, literal scientific fact, is a modern development. The Ayatollah Khomeini, for example, who was represented in the Western press as a sort of throwback to the Middle Ages, was in fact a man of the 20th century. Much of his politics was typical third world politics, anti-imperialism, for example, anticolonialism, a rebellious movement against the hegemony of the West.

And what he did for Shi'ism was as revolutionary as though the pope should abolish the mass. It overturned centuries of sacred tradition. So even though he claimed to be going back to the original spirit of Shi'ism, he was highly innovative.

Now, unless we can see Khomeini as a man of our time, however bizarre that may seem to say so on the surface, we will have failed to either understand the Iranian revolution or our own time.

GROSS: You argue in your book that people of all religions should try to understand each other and that secular people should try to understand religious people and visa-versa. Yet in the book, you are pretty critical of the fundamentalist approach to religion, the approach where the Bible and other religious texts are taken literally, where there's an attempt to scientifically prove what the Bible says instead of separating science and mythos.

And I wonder how you feel being in this position of being critical of the religions practiced by many people.

ARMSTRONG: Well, my chief worry about the fundamentalist movements is not so much this business about scientific truth. My chief worry is that sometimes fundamentalists, wheth -- be they Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, ignore the rule of compassion. Now, to claim that your God inspires you to kill other people and deny the sacred value of human life, that is something that's -- of -- that I'm more critical of than the attempt to scientificize religion, which I see as natural.

But I do criticize fundamentalists when they lose the compassionate ethos. But also I criticize secularists sometimes for being equally uncompassionate towards people who have -- feel that they've been shunted out of mainstream society. I actually surprised myself in the course of my research for this book by finding myself in deep sympathy with the fundamentalists a great deal of the time.

Every single movement that I've studied in the Muslim, Jewish, or Christian world, has been impelled by a sense of profound fear, a terror of annihilation. Every single movement that I've studied is convinced that mainstream secular society is about to wipe out religion, to wipe them out. They feel attacked and assaulted. And sometimes this has not been entire paranoia.

Jewish fundamentalism developed and became strong after the annihilating experience of the Nazi Holocaust. Much Jewish fundamentalism is a desire to recreate the lost European Jewry that was destroyed by Hitler.

Similarly, the most virulent forms of Suni fundamentalism in the mainstream Islamic world developed in Egypt in the concentration camps into which Nasser had interned members of the Muslim Brotherhood, many of whom had done nothing more incriminating than selling a few leaflets or attending meetings.

Similarly, the Shah's prisons, torture chambers, produced the fundamentalism that fueled the Iranian revolution. The Shah used to have his soldiers walk through the streets, taking off women's veils with their bayonets and ripping them to pieces in front of them.

So secularism has sometimes been coercive and uncompassionate and has filled people with this terror. And we pride ourselves on the compassionate and tolerant nature of our society. I think if my book is trying to do anything, it's not so -- an attempt so much to criticize as to call for an understanding, call for us to try to listen to what the fundamentalists are trying to tell us about their sense of alienation, their sense of have -- being excluded and colonized by alien values, and their deep and profound fear.

If you look, for example, at the myths that Protestant fundamentalists have developed about the end of days, which they believe is very imminent, that Jesus will soon return with a sword and smash modern society with terrible bloodshed and genocide, as these -- the -- in this apocalyptic scenario, Protestant fundamentalists see the United Nations, the European Union, and the World Council of Churches as satanic bodies. They see -- say the antichrist will be a peacemaker, that some of the inst -- modern institutions of which we are so proud, they see as profoundly wicked.

Now, if somebody brought such fantasies to a psychotherapist, they would be diagnosed as indicative of extreme disturbance. And I think that what we have to realize is that much as we may relish the freedoms of modernity -- I do myself -- we must also realize that modernity fills people with deep gut visceral terror and dismay, and that as a tolerant society, we must listen to these fears and try to decode the fundamentalist imagery to understand what they're telling us about their anxiety, and try to assuage it, because these are anxieties that no government, no society, can safely ignore.

GROSS: My guest is Karen Armstrong, author of the new book "The Battle for God." We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

GROSS: My guest is Karen Armstrong. She's a scholar of the world's religions and a former nun. Her new book is called "The Battle for God," and it's a book about the history of fundamentalism in Protestantism, Judaism, and Islam.

You were a nun for seven years, and I'm wondering if you ever found it difficult to reconcile mythos and logos, to reconcile the stories of the Bible with the more practical, rational, scientific part of the world that you inhabited.

ARMSTRONG: Yes, in a word, absolutely. And I really thought, both in the convent that -- and in the years after I left my convent, that I was losing my faith, because I studied enough church history to see that many of the doctrines about Jesus, for example, or the Trinity, were man-made. I watched these things developing, and I thought, Hey, hey, hang on, (inaudible) these things were supposed to be revealed.

I started to get very, very worried that modern science had disproved God. And I eventually thought I'd finished with God, to be frank, because I found God, frankly, incredible. I also found it very difficult to reconcile the Western classical view of God as supremely benevolent and supremely compassionate and supremely powerful with such atrocities as the Nazi Holocaust.

Eventually I gave up religion, and I thought I'd finished with God. But then, by strange course of events, I found myself becoming a writer. I'd never intended to be a writer, but I found myself becoming one. And started to research the history of other traditions, Judaism, Islam, Greek and Russian Orthodox Christianity, and discovered the world of mythos, and discovered the fact that in all these traditions, eminent theologians, not just people (inaudible) picking out of the marginalia, had said that God was not another being, not even the Supreme Being.

It was better to say that God did not exist because our word "existence" is too limited to apply to God, that the truths of religion could make no sense unless one prayed. It was no good to say -- sort of trying to satisfy yourself intellectually about the rational truths of your faith, because without prayer, without cult, without ethical compassion, these myths remain opaque to us, rather like a musical score, which for most of us remains black marks on a page, and which we need to have interpreted for us by skilled musicians before we can see this beauty.

I found that this -- my study of these other traditions brought me back to God and made me see that there was no conflict, and that the traditions had been saying this all along.

GROSS: You know, one of the popular phenomenons in the United States now is a kind of personal relationship with God, a personal relationship with Jesus in which the person feels they can actually communicate directly, and that Jesus will do things to help the individual succeed in everything from career to personal life.

And I'm wondering how you, how you interpret that.

ARMSTRONG: Look, I've never been much good at this talking to God, to be honest. I was a complete flop at it in my convent. I couldn't pray at all, and I've discovered a new -- a different form of spirituality now, mainly through my study. So I don't talk to God or ask Jesus for things.

But I come back to the compassionate test. If your vision of a personal God and of a personal Jesus who's your friend and who'll help you makes you a more loving, kind, benevolent, compassionate person, then I'm all for it, because that is the one test (inaudible), you know, that is the one test.

The New Testament is full of that, that on the last day, when you're -- when humanity's divided into the sheep and the goats, the people who come into the Kingdom, or into the divine presence, are not those who had the right beliefs or adopted the correct sexual morality, but those to whom Christ said, "I was hungry, you gave me to eat, sick, naked, and in prison, and you visited me." That's the test that will get you into the divine presence.

So if your personalized view of God brings you into the divine presence and makes you charitable, fine, I'm all for it. It's not my form of spirituality.

But if such a belief makes you sort of belligerent to other people or condemnatory to other people, as sometimes some forms of religion can, then I'm a bit worried about it.

GROSS: So do you not pray at all now, or do you have a kind of prayer that's just different for the prayer you were encouraged to do when you were a nun?

ARMSTRONG: I was so bad at praying, and I tried for seven years to sort of storm the heavens, expecting to have an encounter with something outside myself and feeling a complete failure at it, that the thought of praying now fills me with this sort of dread and exhaustion and anomie and malaise.

But I've found that when I'm sitting at my desk or in -- at the library immersed sometimes in a sacred text, I will get moments of absolute awe and wonder and transcendence, just miniseconds of it. Now, in London, I teach at a rabbinical college, and my colleagues there laugh at me and tell me this is a very Jewish form of spirituality. This is what Jews do or experience when they immerse themselves in Torah and Talmud. And they tell me I should have been a rabbi, perhaps.

So -- and also St. Benedict used to teach his monks to spend a certain time every afternoon in divine study, lexio divina. And in the course of that, he would say, they would get moments, seconds of orazio, or prayer. So I seem unwittingly to have stumbled onto a form of spirituality that is recognized, but that isn't the talking to God any more. I can't do that any more. And I'm told that a lot of Jews can't do it any more either after the Holocaust.

GROSS: Do you go to worship services at all?

ARMSTRONG: No, and I realize this is a huge flaw in my position, because I -- at the moment I call myself a freelance monotheist because I draw sustenance and nourishment from all three of the monotheistic religions, seeing each of them as completely on a par, none is superior to any of the others, all equally valid paths to God. But it is a flaw in my religious life that I have no community, and community is one of the chief ways of getting to God.

So sometime in the future, I'm going to have to address that. At the moment, I'm just relishing the fact that I'm now coming back to religion after years of alienation from it and finding it fulfilling in ways that I've never expected all those years ago when I was a nun. But in some ways, too, my life has con -- is a bit nunlike today. I mean, I've never married, I live alone. And even though I live in many ways a worldly, secular life full of all kinds of unnunlike enjoyments, I spend my days writing, thinking, speaking, and experiencing moments of the divine.

GROSS: Well, I want to thank you so much for talking with us.

ARMSTRONG: Thank you very much.

GROSS: Karen Armstrong is the author of the new book "The Battle for God," which is a history of fundamentalism.

Coming up, jazz critic Kevin Whitehead reviews the reissue of a long-out-of-print recording by saxophonist Joe McPhee.

This is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

TO PURCHASE AN AUDIOTAPE OF THIS PIECE, PLEASE CALL 877-21FRESH
Dateline: Terry Gross, Philadelphia, PA
Guest: Karen Armstrong
High: Religion scholar and former nun Karen Armstrong is the author of the best-selling book, "A History of God." Her new book, "The Battle for God," examines the fundamentalist movement in Chrisitian, Jewish and Islamic faiths that began to emerge in the 1970s. She writes that "today's fundamentalist movements differ from previous ones, in that they are no longer throwbacks to the past, but are complex movements that are shaped by the modern culture they also decry."
Spec: Religion; Karen Armstrong; "The Battle for God"

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: MARCH 29, 2000
Time: 12:00
Tran: 032902NP.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Kevin Whitehead Reviews "Tenor & Fallen Angels"
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:52

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

TERRY GROSS, HOST: Joe McPhee is a multi-instrumentalist from the Hudson River town of Poughkeepsie, New York, where he's lived almost his entire life. Twenty-five years ago, he had little contact with musicians from New York City just 60 miles south. But he had begun working regularly in Europe, often as a solo improviser.

McPhee plays coronet, valve trombone, and soprano saxophone. But jazz critic Kevin Whitehead says he's made his greatest statements on tenor saxophone, including one classic recording unavailable for 20 years, till now.