I’ve thought highly of the books of Karen Armstrong over the years; her approach to the study and history of religion and theology I have found very enlightening and thought-provoking. I’d never describe her works as popularising; they are detailed, careful, well-explained and do demand a certain amount of personal sympathy with the subjects she tackles.
This tome – The Great Transformation – however, I found rather different, and I will confess at the start that I skimmed a good deal of it, because there was so little in my existing knowledge that I could use to link in to the incredibly detailed exploration of the worlds of Buddha, Socrates, Confucius and Jeremiah over the space of several hundred years. In other words, here is a far less accessible work than any others of hers that I’ve read. The links with Jeremiah, Jewish history and the Hebrew scriptures and Christian Bible I could latch onto, the rest not so much.
So not a book for the general reader, even someone reasonably well-versed in the history of religion as I thought I was; there’s an enormous amount of minutiae here, as well as a great weight of (necessary) speculation, given that so much of what she describes is largely lost in the mists of time. She was interesting on the history of Israel, the territory, its gods (!) over time and the gradual emergence of monotheism and the eventual codifying of the Jewish faith and practice.
I think she is detailing the gradual movement from religion as mere ritual to its eventual emphasis on ethical behaviour, with the internalisation of religion as a crucial development. She also emphasises movement from oral to written tradition in scripture, particularly among the Jewish people. I’ve always had a sense of the Old Testament as a chaotic and repetitive text, and lately read much about its gradual and relatively late development, but from Armstrong I have a picture of its being even more chaotic, of its contradictory content, merged stories with varying and different purposes behind them. It seems even more of a mish-mash than I thought possible.
Equally, I was surprised to discover just how early on the notion of questioning and challenging everything in an effort to understand and get to the bottom of things developed in Greek philosophy, and the fact that it was getting on for two millennia later before the West fully embraced this approach.
Another book that I cannot recommend to a general reader; I’m glad I dipped into and skimmed it but there was just too much I could not really understand or make sense of from my relatively limited and Western perspective. It’s good to be reminded of one’s own limitations from time to time…
LIT.GAZ. 