More on Karen Armstrong's "Compassion"

"A thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for." - W. C. Fields

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Making compassion cool: an interview with Karen Armstrong

"NS: The Charter declares, “Any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate.” Can we be so sure of the meaning of these ancient texts? Could it be that an ethic of comprehensive compassion such as you propose requires us to look beyond those texts, to hold something else as a higher authority?

KA: The quick answer would be to read my book The Bible: The Biography. While researching it I found that when Judaism and Christianity became “religions of the book” during the first and second centuries CE, they both insisted that compassion was the key to the interpretation of scripture. The rabbis who composed the Talmud all insisted that “Love of God and neighbor” was the central principle of the Torah and that any other exegesis was illegitimate. When he formulated the Golden Rule, Rabbi Hillel, the older contemporary of Jesus, said that it was the Torah and that everything else was merely “commentary.” In the same spirit, St. Augustine, one of the great authorities of the Western tradition, insisted that if a biblical text seemed to teach hatred, it must be interpreted allegorically and made to speak of charity. And every reading of the Qur’an begins with an invocation of the Compassion and Mercy which is God. We need to get together and get back to these principles. We should also decide what to do with those difficult texts that are used by extremists in all traditions to justify hatred and even atrocity. We might not have the same taste for allegory as Augustine, but we need to find a way of making these more rebarbative scriptures speak of charity—in a twenty-first century way."
(emphasis mine)

Translation: "Let's make religious texts mean whatever we want them to mean!".

She cites religious figures who agree with (or seem to agree with) her, and ignores those who she disagrees with.

The problems with who counts as a "neighbor" aside (the command to love your neighbor comes before the command to perpetuate genocide), she is also giving a very simplistic and misleading summary of what St Augustine said (to focus in on just one of her misrepresentations).

The man actually endorsed war and genocide under certain circumstances (basically if God said to do it, it was perfectly fine). Likewise, St Augustine endorsed the persecution of heresy (sans physical violence). All this was brought under a framework of "love" and "compassion" (see below for more details).

If you confronted Armstrong with her disingenuousness, she would surely fudge. You can imagine that she has similarly perverted the ideas of other religious thinkers to make them say what she wants.


Love and Hate in Medieval Warfare: The Contribution of Saint Augustine
Russell, F.H

"For Augustine, love was the motive for all actions, and guided decision-making... What determined an individual’s moral status was the quality of his love, which was located in the inward disposition of his heart, his praeparatio cordis, rather than in his outward acts...

Proper love that sought to correct vices justified corporal punishment. Thus the father punished the child against its will but for its own good. Similarly, the schoolmaster’s rod was used to coerce his pupils to learn not only their immediate lessons but also the virtue of self-discipline. Likewise, the ruler and his officials such as soldiers were to inflict physical punishment to heal perverted souls even at the sacrifice of their bodies. Properly motivated punishment was aimed at the restraint of evil, wickedness and vice. With abundant familial imagery Augustine emphasised the need for love as the core of inflicting punishment, rather than malicious pleasure...

Out of these two psychologically perceived imperatives, to defeat Manicheans and to justify Christian participation in the ailing Roman Empire’s wars, Augustine fashioned his justification of war.

Augustine’s first task was to fix war within the providential control of a good God over the activities of a world made imperfect by evil and sin. He refused either to condemn war outright or to glorify it. War was both a consequence of sin and a remedy for it...

Augustine’s thought on war... located evil in warfare not in killing itself but in the often wicked inward motivations of the belligerent...

One of Augustine’s Manichean opponents, Faustus... claimed that God’s command that Moses wage wars was proof that God Himself was the author of evil. Augustine countered that Moses’ wars were just and righteous retribution to those who deserved it. Wars that punished sin and luxury might be waged by good men to curb licentious passions. Inspired by the Old Testament, Augustine argued that by divine judgement wars punished conquered people for their sins, and such punishment could be meted out even for crimes unrelated to the war. Wars as instruments of divine Providence chastised the wicked and tested the fortitude of the righteous. The Romans who destroyed Jerusalem were themselves wicked and ungodly, and yet they still served as God’s instruments in punishing the Jews...

If Christians were to wage war with full scriptural support, the right to warfare also needed a firm grounding in evangelical precepts. There were two especially troubling Gospel injunctions that had to be met head-on: ‘resist not evil’ (Matth. 5.39) and ‘turn the other cheek’ (Luke 6.29). Here Augustine returned to his analysis of love. The real danger in being a soldier was not military service itself but the malice and lust for revenge that often accompanied it. When done without taking pleasure in it, punishment of evil-doers to prevent them from doing further wrong became an act of love.’ The command to turn the other cheek referred to the intention rather than the act. Patience and benevolence of heart were not incompatible with inflicting physical punishment. When Moses put sinners to death he was motivated not by cruelty but by love. Hatred had to be overcome by love for one’s enemies, but love did not preclude a benevolent severity...

Practically any hostile act was justifiable provided it was motivated by love. The good Christian could suffer injury and yet retaliate, could love his enemy and yet kill him, both forgive him and punish him. The evangelical precepts of patience were transformed so that love was no longer an inhibition on warfare. In some cases it even necessitated it. Now the soldier of Christ could fight not only the sin within himself but also that of other men, men whose inward thoughts remained hidden to him...

In commenting on the eighth book of Joshua, Augustine said, ‘iusta bella ulciscuntur iniurias’; just wars avenge injuries. Injuries were committed when a people or a city neglected to vindicate wrongs done by its members, or to restore what it had wrongfully seized...

Augustine’s broad concept of justice... included respect for divine rights. True justice demanded righteousness, which in turn required that God be rendered His due. Hence any violation of God's laws could be seen as an injustice warranting unlimited punishment. Motivated by a righteous wrath, just warriors could kill with impunity even the morally innocent. Objective determination of individual guilt was both impossible and irrelevant; what mattered was punishment of the subjective culpa or guilt of the enemy population. Augustine’s emphasis on ulcisci iniurias when coupled with his near equation of justice with righteousness and his near equation of sin with crime paved the way for later justifications of holy wars and Crusaders to punish all manner of wickedness and vice. In effect Augustine espoused the concept of war guilt.

In the very same passage where he defined the just war Augustine declared that any war waged on divinely command was a just war...

In the Old Testament account of the war the Israelites with the Amorites (Numbers 21.21—25), the Israelites were depicted as defeating their foes, but in Augustine’s account it was God who effected the defeat of the Amorites in order to fulfill His promises to His Chosen People. God’s authority and aid justified a war that would otherwise appear to be an illicit usurpation of Amorite territory. This is just one example of how Augustine twisted the literal meaning of Scripture to fit his purpose...

Since wickedness included the sin of improper belief, Augustine was able to see a divine purpose in the persecution of heresy. He never explicitly related the just war to religious persecution, but his analysis of love was the common ground for his attitudes both toward such persecution and toward warfare. Augustine saw all forms of religious belief other than orthodoxy as posing a common threat to the faith, and he eventually concluded that the ecclesiastical hierarchy had the right and the duty to seek imperial coercion of heretics qua heretics...

Both Pharoah and Moses persecuted the Israelites, but the former was moved by hatred and libido dominandi, while the latter was moved by love to administer beneficial discipline. The Church as Moses’ successor was right to urge the persecution of heretics as an act of charity...

Since Peter had attempted to defend Christ by the sword, orthodox Christians could rightfully fight to defend the Church. (Here Augustine bent the meaning of Scripture, for Christ had actually rebuked Peter for wielding the sword). Christ’s injunction to ‘resist not evil’ did not preclude legitimate authorities from violently expelling impious men whose rule injured God. In effecting coercion of heresy the Church was imitating God himself...

As love for something presupposes hatred for its antithesis, so love of God required hatred for the enemies of God, or, more properly, for their sins. Is it any wonder then that the Old Testament wars or the wars of the Middle Ages undertaken supposedly on divine sanction were often so violent? Augustine provided a major inspiration for medieval holy wars, not only by his attitudes but by his juxtaposition of hostile and bellicose imagery with the imagery of love and family life. Since God could still order a just war, His earthly officials could do likewise when acting on divine inspiration...

Augustine’s life and writings are full of ironies, ambivalences and seeming contradictions. He hated war, and yet, perhaps in spite of himself, he gavc it its most potent Christian justification. As a former Manichean heretic he first developed his thoughts on warfare and his exegetical techniques out of necessities he perceived in his anti-Manichean polemic."

Keywords: religion