'The case for God'

Author: Karen Armstrong

Publisher: Bodley Head / 2009

Pages: 406

 

Karen Armstrong is a former Catholic nun who has written highly-acclaimed biographies of Muhammad, Buddha and, most recently, the Bible. She has also written two memoirs, Through the Narrow Gate and The Spiral Staircase.

This book, with its crucial sub-title, is more of a polemic, of the gentlest sort. It is clearly intended as a riposte to all those blasts of aggressive atheism from the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Reading Armstrong after these is like listening to a clever and kind adult after a bunch of strident adolescents.

This is a nuanced exploration of the part that religion plays in human life, drawing on the insights of the past in order to build a faith that speaks to the needs of our dangerously polarised age.

Armstrong details the great lengths to which humankind has gone throughout history in order to experience a "sacred reality".

When the guide switches off his flashlight in the underground caverns of Lascaux in the Dordogne, the effect is overwhelming. "The senses are suddenly wiped out," a visitor recalled, "the millennia drop away.... You were never in darker darkness in your life. It was - I don't know, just a complete knockout. You don't know whether you are looking north, south, east or west. All orientation is gone, and you are in a darkness that never saw the sun."

Normal daylight consciousness is extinguished, you feel a "timeless dissociation from every concern and requirement of the upper world that you have left behind".

Before reaching the first of the caves decorated by our Palaeolithic ancestors in the Stone Age, 17,000 years ago, visitors have to stumble for some 80 feet down a sloping tunnel, 65 feet below ground level, penetrating ever more deeply into the bowels of the earth.

Then the guide suddenly turns the beam of his flashlight onto the ceiling, and the painted animals seem to emerge from the depths of the rock. A strange beast with gravid belly and long pointed horns walks behind a line of wild cattle, horses, deer and bulls that seem simultaneously in motion and at rest.

In all there are about 300 decorated caves in this region of southern France and northern Spain. The earliest site, at Grosse Chauvet, dates from about 30,000 BC, when Homo Sapiens seems to have undergone an abrupt evolutionary change in this area. There was a dramatic rise in population, which may have brought social tension.

The paintings also express an intensely aesthetic appreciation of the natural world. Here we have the earliest known evidence of an ideological system, which remained in place for some 20,000 years, after which the caves fell into disuse in about 9,000 BC.

A remarkable picture, dated to about 12,000 BC, in a cave also at Lascaux known as the Crypt because it is even deeper than the other caverns, depicts a large bison that has been eviscerated by a spear thrust through its hind-quarters. Lying in front of the wounded beast is a man, drawn in a far more rudimentary style than the animals, with arms outstretched, phallus erect, and wearing what seems to be a bird mask; his stuff, which lies on the ground nearby, is also topped by a bird's head.

Fifty-five similar images in the other caves have been found, all showing men confronting animals in a state of trance with upraised arms.

Thus was religion born. Shamanism developed first in Africa and Europe during the Palaeolithic period, then it spread to Siberia and thence to America and Australia. Some scholars speculate that these caves were used for initiation ceremonies that marked the passage of adolescent boys from childhood to maturity.

When they reach puberty, boys are taken from their mothers and put through frightening ordeals that transform them into men. They are incarcerated in tombs, buried in the earth, told they were about to be eaten by a monster, flogged, circumcised and tattooed. The terror of such an experience, if skilfully handled, can lead to a constructive reorganisation of the young man's powers. He has faced death, come out the other side and is now psychologically prepared to risk his life for his people.

If the historians are right about the function of the Lascaux caves, religion and art were inseparable from the very beginning. Like art, religion is an attempt to construct meaning in the face of the relentless pain and injustice of life. As meaning-seeking creatures, men and women fall very easily into despair. They have created religions and works of art to help them find value in their lives, despite all the dispiriting evidence to the contrary.

It might seem a very long way from the caves at Lascaux to the history of religions but Armstrong guides us along in a volume that repays close unhurried reading.