Study Group

May 20,2009

About a year ago Sarah (picture on left) and I decided to study several of Karen Armstrong’s books. We began with The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions. We read the book chapter by chapter discussing each in bi-weekly phone conversations. We learned about the Axial Age (about 900 – 300 BCE), a time Armstrong claims, “is pivotal to the spiritual development of humanity”. It was an age of great spiritual transformation, the period of the Buddha, Socrates, Confucius, the Hebrew Prophets, and the mystics of the Upanishads. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were all outgrowths of the original axial age. There has been nothing like it until, what Armstrong calls “The Great Western Transformation, which created our own scientific and technological modernity.”

For most of the axial age philosophers, doctrine and theology were of no interest. It did not matter what you thought about spirit or what you believed, but how you behaved. The only way you could encounter what they called “God,” “Nirvana,” “Brahman,” or “The Way” was to live a compassionate life. Karen Armstrong believes we must rediscover compassion. “In our global village, we can no longer afford a parochial or exclusive vision.” She calls for “a spiritual revolution that can keep abreast of our technological genius.” With her Charter for Compassion she is doing her part in creating such a revolution. ( http://charterforcompassion.com/)



I wonder what went wrong during the Axial Age, why didn’t the ethos introduced at this time get passed down to us? In the introduction to The Great Transformation, Karen Armstrong points out that “The Axial Age was not perfect. A major failing was an indifference to women.” Major indeed! How can spirituality be based in compassion and leave women out? There are no female axial sages. If we are not to repeat the same mistakes, this cannot be true of the “spiritual revolution” Armstrong is calling for. It must be grounded in women’s wisdom.

The next book Sarah and I read was Armstrong’s The Gospel According to Women: Christianity’s Creation of The Sex War in The West. This book is a scathing critique of the influence of Christianity on the lives of women throughout Western history. According to Armstrong, Western Christianity is the only major religion to hate and fear sex. Consequently it is only in the West that women are hated because we are sexual beings. In other cultures women are hated, dominated, and dismissed for a variety of other reasons, but not because they are sexual beings. This hatred of women and terror of sex created what Armstrong calls “the Christian sexual neurosis.” This neurosis, with its myths of virgin, martyr, mystic, witch, and later the myth of wife and mother, continues to oppress women and plague relationships between men and women today. Armstrong discusses each of these myths at length.

I was particularly interested in the section on female mystics who Armstrong says have something to teach women today. The mystic achieves liberation, not by achieving “equality” within the male world and participating in maintaining the status quo but by journeying outside this world altogether and finding her own truth and vision. This requires suspending rational processes and relying on intuition and the wisdom of the heart—modes of knowing associated, usually patronizingly, with women. Suspending habitual modes of reasoning and relating will be the basis for a spiritual revolution. (For examples of this mode of thinking see The Unknown She: Eight Faces of an Emerging Consciousness by Hilary Hart.)

The great mystical traditions are all adamant that after her enlightenment the mystic must return to the world. Although Armstrong gives several examples of Christian women mystics who got stuck and found mystical ecstasy another means of retreating from the world, others like Hildegaard of Bingen and Joan of Arc lived out their visions in the world. Armstrong compares the mystic to creative thinkers like Einstein and Darwin. “The mystic and the creative thinker are both journeying away from prejudice and already established categories toward something inconceivable and apparently incomprehensible.”

Joan of Arc was inspired to her actions to save France by internal mystical experiences, which were referred to as “her voices” in her trial. She was condemned to death for not merely hearing voices but for listening and acting on them. The second offence that led to her murder was that she wore men’s clothing. This may be hard to imagine today since so many women in “important positions” wear what could be considered men’s clothing. However, the Church Father’s proclamation that “cross-dressing” is a sin and not allowed is still alive in some quarters. I have had several experiences of being oppressed because I refused to wear a skirt. Fortunately they no longer burn women at the stake. I describe my experiences in my essay “Women in Pants” on my website.

When we got ready to read our third book by Armstrong, A Short History of Myth, four other women joined our little study group and we now meet on a conference call every two weeks. In this book Armstrong makes a distinction between mythos and logos. Logos is the logical, pragmatic and scientific mode of thought that enables us to function successfully in the world. Mythos serves to give meaning to events that may threaten to overwhelm and prevent action. When we experience ourselves involved in myth we are inspired to do great things. The world of myth is an imaginary world of sacred archetypes; it gives structure and meaning to life. In the pre-modern world people realized that myth and reason were complementary; each had its separate sphere, we need both these modes of thought.

Western modernity is the child of logos and the death of mythology. The heroes of Western modernity would be technological or scientific geniuses of logos, not the spiritual geniuses inspired by mythos. This means that intuitive, mythical modes of thought are neglected in favor of the more pragmatic, logical spiritual scientific rationality. Armstrong suggests “It has been writers and artists, rather than religious leaders, who have stepped into the vacuum and attempted to reacquaint us with the mythological wisdom of the past.” In the end she poses the question: “Can a secular novel replicate traditional myth, with its gods and goddesses?”

In an effort to find out our study group decided, at Sherry’s suggestion, to read The Passion of Mary Magdalen by Elizabeth Cunningham next. Our first meeting is tonight.