The Golden Rule
A comment on a lecture given by Karen Armstrong
Before I launch on my theme for to-day I'd like to say that there will be an opportunity for audience participation half-way through - an opportunity, not a requirement. Dozing off, if that's your thing, is - as always - perfectly OK.
A while ago I attended one of those conferences at our HQ, Essex Hall, navel-gazing on the future of Unitarianism - if any - a conference that according to the programme only lasted one day but felt as though it went on for far longer - and in the afternoon we split into small groups, during which I suggested that what was wrong with our denomination was that Karen Armstrong didn't feel the need to join us, and David Usher replied "why should she?" I've felt warmth towards David ever since...
Karen Armstrong, as some of you I'm sure know, is a teacher, writer and broadcaster on religious issues. For my money she is simply the most powerful and compelling advocate for liberal religion that we currently have, and it was a great privilege to hear her give a talk not so long ago - although it was a public occasion, and anyone who was willing to spend £25 and go to the Holloway Road on a Friday night in June could be privileged as well as I was.
Well of course on these occasions what the speaker says and what anyone in the audience hears tend to be two different things. I certainly haven't discovered how to listen attentively for forty minutes at a time - in fact, isn't there some scientific research somewhere that says that no one can. So I make no claim to having 'got' the whole of what she was saying - but I certainly got enough for me to be quite sure that it was one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life, and one which - as far as I can - I would like to share with you to-day.
What she spoke of was by way of promoting her new book, which is fair enough - and those of you who have not yet read any of her previous works have a treat in store. She was talking about what she calls - following the German psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers - and I will return to the significance of one of those trades or professions - the "Axial Age." This is a name for the period from about 900 or 800 BCE to about 200 BCE which saw the emergence of the great religious traditions which still hold sway in the world to-day - Taoism and Confucian wisdon in China, the great Indian religious traditions of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism, semitic monotheism in the Middle East and in Greece the philosophy of Socrates and the tragedies of Sophocles (among others). Her case is that these traditions, diverse as they are, contain a common core of wisdom which represented something new. And it is that common core which still represents for us to-day as much of the Truth as it is humanly possible to know.
She suggests that these traditions developed in response to a major transformation in the condition of human existence - the only such transformation before the advent of "modernity" in the West which began with the Renaissance and with which we are still struggling and fumbling 500 years later. The transformation of the Axial Age she attributes to the intensification of warfare with the use of iron, and the intrinsic aggression of the marketplace. I am not wholly sold on that - I still think that consciousness itself, as we understand it, may not be much more than 3,000 years old - although I have friends whose archaeology and anthropology is better than mine who assure me that my view is bunkum. We agree to differ.
For whatever reason, it seems that the existing forms of religion no longer matched the realities of human existence in the Axial Age - forms, so far as I can make out, based on ritual, on sympathetic magic, and on the belief that one's own tribe was specially favoured by the gods. Re-read Genesis, as I did not so long ago, in a scholarly modern translation, and it is impossible not to be struck by the fact that you are reading an attempt to stitch together older and newer theologies - a tribal pantheon (sometimes disguised as angels) with an impersonal Holiness such as may equally to be found at the heart of Buddhism or Taoism.
The human experience had changed - and the old practices no longer worked, no longer took away the pain. What was proposed instead was remarkable - and remarkably simple, when compared to the elaborate rituals of shamanism or divine Kinghood.
Karen Armstrong re-told for us the famous story about the Jewish teacher Hillel, sometimes called Rabbi Hillel, who lived in the century before Jesus. A seeker proposed a deal to Hillel - he would convert to Judaism if Hillel could recite the entire Torah while standing on one leg. Hillel duly stood on one leg and said: "do not treat anyone else in a way in which you would not wish them to treat you. That is the Law - the rest is commentary."
All I can add to that is that the outcome of most of the subsequent commentary has been pretty disastrous. Part of the reason for that is no doubt that Hillel's Torah is of no use whatsoever to a ruler who wishes to use religion to cement his hold on power, but more, I suspect, it is because when we fully get hold of what he is saying - when we properly listen to it - it is seriously scary stuff.
The first thing to notice is what Hillel leaves out. Anyone notice what he's left out?
He's left out the word 'God' - he has no interest in theological debate of any kind whatsoever. Anyone whose self-respect is bound up with the notion that they worship the true God but other people don't is in deep trouble, according to Hillel. The idea that God has tipped the wink to human beings (more specifically, to some human beings but not others) that God likes this more than that is - at best - commentary, and at worst part of the problem of which it pretends to be the remedy. Another other thing that he's left out is any reference to life after death. And oh how we have ached all through history for some commentary on that - whether it be the elaborate funeral - journey rituals of ancient Egypt, the resurrection myth that humanity has told itself over and over again, or the various fairy stories that say that however much the wicked may seem to prosper in this world, they won't half cop it after they die whilst we get the well-earned opportunity to put our feet up for a bit - well, quite a long bit, actually. And finally, he doesn't mention, let alone describe or discuss, the idea of good and evil - which even those of us who preen ourselves on having got over the "god" problem and who see that brooding on the nature or even the likelihood of an afterlife is mere morbidity - well, we still like to get hung up on that one, for which we have a whole raft of fancy contemporary names like the Shadow, Gender Studies, and indeed liberalism itself.
John Maynard Keynes once said that all that is required, and all that will avail, is a little, a very little clear thinking. And that is what Hillel gives us. He gives us an instruction manual for how to do life, and it turns out to be a manual of the greatest possible simplicity. It was certainly too simple for Jesus, whose version runs
" 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbour as yourself.' All the law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments." (Matthew 22: 37-40 - if it matters to you.)
Yes, God's got back in there - either because there has been some purposeful misremembering between Jesus talking and Matthew writing or else because Jesus, like the Buddha, regarded the Golden Rule as a second best for those who weren't strong enough to devote their whole lives to retreat and contemplation. But it's the second part that interests me, because here I think Jesus does clarify something that Hillel leaves a little in the air - the necessity of loving ourselves.
After all, if I don't love myself, I can treat you cruelly without breaking the Golden Rule, because I don't have the slightest problem with you treating me cruelly - perhaps I even interpret almost everything others do as some form of cruelty - this is a commonplace in the hell that is active addiction, among other forms of mental illness. But what is it for me to love myself?
Karen Armstrong is in no doubt that what stops people from practising self-love is pride - and although there are other ways to skin this particular cat, hers will do nicely. When we think of pride, we tend to zoom in on one particular form of it - boastfulness, snootiness and so on. And since these traits tend to go with a very thick skin, we soon give up on such people (unless we are stuck with them at work or as in-laws, perhaps) and move on to others. But that is only one type of pride, and not even the most common one - in my experience, for every braggart there are several Uriah Heeps, more or less depressive for longer or shorter time-spans - depression has been described as "anger turned inwards" and anger - the "fight" end of the "flight or fight" reflex left over from our animal ancestry - is always a manifestation of pride. Look at the interpretations of the story of Jesus causing havoc in the Temple precinct - either as a justification of a wrathful, punishing God, or as an example of Jesus's humanity, as in "even Jesus couldn't get it right all the time." And therein lies a clue. To be human is to be imperfect We can aspire to perfection, we can even attain it fleetingly - da Vinci didn't spend his whole life painting the Mona Lisa, but he did paint it - and we certainly live in a society whose ethic of competition has no time for anything less than perfection - but if I am going to learn to love myself I am going to have to learn to love my imperfections and that means coming to terms with the fact that I am never going to be wholly free from pride in one or other of its manifestations. Indeed, it is perhaps one of those poisons which, sufficiently diluted, turn into a homeopathic remedy ... then we call it a sense of achievement.
So, how is pride to be diluted? No doubt prayer and meditation, if we feel comfortable with them, can help - but they are not without risks, particularly if our natural bent is to turn our anger inwards upon ourselves - a personality type which seems to be at least as common inside congregations as outside them. Unguided prayer and meditation can even do great harm, as such phenomena as hysterical stigmata remind us. More than that - if, as Hillel tells us, the Law is about our relationships with other people, then it seems implausible that anything we do in solitary splebdour is going to overcome the impediment to practising it. And of course, we are blessed to-day with another resource - the famous "talking cure" invented by Freud. Hillel's would-be follower, living to-day, would most likely turn to a therapist rather than a religious leader - and would even be well advised to do so, more often than not. One hopeful development in religion is the increasing awareness that a therapeutic training is a great asset in ministry - indeed, I wonder if it is wholly responsible to conduct pastoral work to-day without at least some such training and commitment to continuing professional development in that area.
Freud - and all those who have followed him, however much or little they accept his theories - gave us a technique for hunting down our inner demons, for it is surely the case that until each of us knows exactly what they are we cannot possibly come into the freedom to slay or to spare them - and I would like to suggest to you that the act of self-forgiveness is, at bottom a choice, the choice between changing myself and accepting myself - and that process will go on as long as I live. And as long as I am open to making that choice over and over again, then I cannot possibly be afraid of myself. And what I have learnt from my own journey is that when I am afraid of you what I am really afraid of is some part - maybe no more than a potential part - of myself.
I saw that process at work during the question time following Karen Armstrong's lecture. A woman in the audience stood up to complain that all the sages of the Axial Age were men. Anger then compassion crossed Karen Armstrong's face - anger perhaps because she too had once thought that, and compassion for another human being who had not yet moved on from there, who was still wrestling with a demon which she could not yet recognise, but only project onto the rest of the world. For the freedom I have been speaking of comes with a price, a terrible price - the pain inside me has to be so great that I will do anything, dare anything to be rid of it. The tragedy of those who live in emotional pain is not the pain itself, but that fact that it isn't painful enough - pride is still managing to hang on in there.
And that is why Hillel's Torah is seriously scary - because in order to follow it, we have to know what it is that we don't want others to do to us - and knowledge is not fantasy or wish-fulfilment (which Freud said our dreams take care of) . To conclude in an older, even ecclesiastical register - the bottomlessness of the human soul is all we will ever know or need to know of the mercy of God.
Submitted by Mike Killingworth