How to answer the New Atheists without words
Quentin de la Bédoyère says Karen Armstrong makes a brilliant defence of theism

28 August 2009

Orthodox Christian pilgrims carry crosses into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Good Friday (PA)

The Case for God
By Karen Armstrong
Bodley Head, £20

My wife has a deep musical sense, and when I press her to explain how she experiences music she struggles for words. She struggles unwillingly because anything she can say is a betrayal of the truth. The only answer is to say nothing. Music is for her an internal experience which enables her to move into a space outside herself beyond explanation.

I find this thought helpful in understanding the concept of apophatic (literally, wordless) theology which Karen Armstrong identifies as the traditional approach to God. Our modern way of thinking inclines to the literal: what cannot be expressed in language is dubious. Thus I can list the characteristics of God: in the words of the penny catechism "God is the Supreme Spirit, who alone exists of himself and is infinite in all perfections." But in doing so, I am only constructing God in my own image, infinitely magnified.

Anyone unfamiliar with the apophatic approach will balk at the great Jewish theologian, Maimonides, who claimed that one could only approach a closer understanding of God by recognising what he is not rather than what he is "so by each additional negative attribute you advance towards the knowledge of God". Or, to put it another way, in recognising the absence of human attributes in God, you approach an understanding of the transcendence of his nature. Maimonides is not an eccentric: his succinct words relate to the theology of Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius (fifth-sixth century) and Aquinas.

The grasp of God is not through an acceptance of dead propositions but through active encounter. Christ describes himself as "the way", but a way is not a destination but a path to a destination, and it is a path that we do not just contemplate but along which we are invited to travel. And, for Christ, the destination is his Father. In outline we know what lies on the path. It requires faith - which is not a belief in propositions but a confidence and a commitment, and it requires that we transcend ourselves through love for others, not by wishful thinking but through prayer and action. Belief is not a state of mind but a state of action.

This theology requires a different attitude to Scripture. We are not looking for literal and historic truths, though they may be there, but for our living response to the word of God, understood through his actions as the inspired writers related them within their own culture. Scripture, as the experts on lectio divina tell us, is not a handbook on God but a sacramental means through which we encounter him. Armstrong has developed this aspect more thoroughly in her recent The Bible.

At the heart of Armstrong's book is the contrast between this understanding of theology and modern thinking. We have become accustomed to propositions, to facts, and to evidence. Reason and investigation are the way to truth, and if we don't know everything yet, we are confident that in principle at least we will some day.

In the early stages it was held, with Newton as strong authority, that science could prove the existence of God - just as Paley could prove God's direct design through the ingenuities of nature, or Descartes could build an edifice of truth on the foundation of his one certainty cogito, ergo sum.

The Church itself played its part. The Counter-Reformation led, by way of the Council of Trent, to the definition of multiple aspects of doctrine and morals as clear and immutable propositions, thus inhibiting the development, the deeper understanding and the fertile ambiguity in our grasp of truth. It is sometimes necessary to retreat to a defensive trench, but stultifying to remain there after the danger has gone.

Armstrong finds fundamentalism at the two extremes of modern thinking: the fundamentalist Christian movement which, based on biblical literalism, believes that it can grasp God by the mere reading of a book, and scientific atheism which reduces the human being and his experiences to no more than chance, material, phenomena without transcendent meaning.

They share in common two characteristics. The first is that they are both spawned from fear - their backs are against their respective walls, and so their reaction to attack is to become more extreme and further alienated from reality.

And the second is their mutual dislike. Like Communism and Fascism, the two ends of the circle ultimately meet for their caste of mind is the same.

Armstrong is impatient with both. She has no difficulty with the disciplines of modern science provided that it accepts that its sphere is limited to the tangible, and no difficulty with orthodox theology provided that we are continuously aware that the truths which we try to grasp through human concepts are infinitely less than the reality to which they point.

Both must accept humility in their search for truth - realising that we will not arrive at the destination of certainty, and that the acceptance of ambiguity is the mark of the mature seeker, as it has been since Socrates.

In her worthy aim to communicate the great value of the "wordless" understanding of God, Armstrong fails to give enough emphasis to the fact that our more familiar approach to God is entirely valid in its own terms.

When Jesus says to Philip: "He who has seen me has seen the Father" he is expressing a meaningful truth, just as he taught us to pray to our Father. That God's fatherhood is infinitely greater than our human minds can grasp is undoubted, but it by no means devalues our human understanding.

We remember that Christ's discourse is distinguished by his ability to communicate the mysteries of God at a level suited to his listeners. But we note that in his teaching - whether direct, or paradoxical, or through parables - we are constantly led forward towards an ever deeper grasp of truth.