The Lost Art of Scripture summary

Meanwhile, around 1500 BCE, nomads from the Caucasus called Aryans were getting fed up with herding cattle. They wanted to settle down, and they picked the rich Punjab region, in modern-day Pakistan, as their new home. This was very bad news for the people who already lived there. The former nomads were tough customers – hard-drinking ruffians who lived by looting. Peasants were their favorite prey.

But there was also a spiritual element to their culture. Through visions, Aryan seers called rishis transmitted the hymns of their ancient gods. 

Let’s hop over to China. Around three thousand years ago, the warlike Zhou clan conquered China’s first dynasty, the Shang. The Zhou had a novel belief system; to them, the cosmos consisted of complementary yet opposing forces. The world balanced in the middle, between these forces, and its success depended on a harmonious relationship between the two.

To justify overthrowing the Shang, the Zhou claimed they had the Mandate of Heaven. The Shang, they said, displeased heaven with their corruption and immorality, upsetting the cosmic balance. This was the first time ethics appeared in Chinese religion. From then on, politics and religion would be closely entwined.

How would you deal with terrifying, unpredictable political upheaval? If you answered “run away,” well, you’re not alone. During the Warring States period in China, many people just threw in the towel and retired from public life. A Chinese bureaucrat named Confucius, however, took the opposite approach. He founded an influential academy for princes – a place where they could learn to implement the Mandate of Heaven and run the state ethically. 

Confucius’s teachings, compiled in a scripture called the Analects, were meant to inspire kindness and compassion, transcendence of the ego, and devotion to rituals. Service to the community began in one’s own family, he taught, and expanded to include the whole world.

Siddatta Gotama, a young Indian aristocrat you know as the Buddha, had always been a devout adherent to the religion that, in English, we now call Hinduism. He was especially gifted in the practice of yoga, and he eventually developed a new style of yoga practice, centered around directing love at every living thing. Through this practice, he achieved enlightenment, or nirvana: liberation from endless karmic rebirth. This is what allowed him to become the Buddha we know today.

What did that mean for his followers? It was actually incredibly relaxing. Just because people believed in the potential for enlightenment didn’t mean they didn’t get sick or sad. But the realization that the cosmic cycle could be arrested gave them a sense of inner calm. That calm enabled Buddhists to live serenely with the pain and discomfort brought on by life’s changes. 

The final destruction of the temples in Jerusalem had two major developments. First, it led to the development of rabbinic Judaism. A rabbinical academy was established, and scribes began revising the new scripture, the Torah, to be more relevant to people in their radically altered world. Rabbis, drawn from the Israelite elite, engaged in spirited, ongoing reinterpretation of old stories in the scripture. 

The other development was the growing popularity of a barefoot peasant from the town of Nazareth. The scriptures produced by his followers announced a new testament, or contract, between God and humanity. The peasant, of course, was Jesus.

Jesus wasn’t the last prophet to rock the Middle East. In 610, a merchant called Mohammed fell into a trance in a mountain cave outside of Mecca. He came back to consciousness to find the first words of a new Arabic scripture pouring from his lips. 

Mohammed was seriously anxious about the state of the world. Upset with the ruthless competition of the market economy in Arabian city-states, he wanted to return to a bygone communal way of living. Allah, the god who had visited him in the cave, was not a distant god. Instead, he commanded his followers to “come near” so he could guide them. At the end of every recitation, supplicants were instructed to touch their heads to the ground, or surrender the individual ego in favor of communal religious experience. In Arabic, Islam means “surrender.” 

The year 661 was pretty eventful for Muawiyyah, the son of one of Mohammed’s rivals. First, he murdered Ali, Mohammed’s son-in-law, who some viewed as his rightful heir. Ali’s followers became known as the Shia, or “Partisans.” 

Then, Muawiyyah founded the Umayyad empire, with a capital in Damascus. But that’s where his plan ended. 

Mysticism, like egalitarianism, was trending everywhere – everywhere, that is, except the Christian world.

In Islam, Sufism was a reaction to the dogmatic view that only certain theologians, descended directly from Mohammed, could interpret the Quran. Sufis had an earthier, more intuitive relationship with their faith. They developed meditation practices, involving chanting and specific body alignment, to understand how Mohammed may have been feeling when Allah spoke to him. 

The sixteenth century was a wild time in Europe. Exciting changes were coming in thick and fast, in the form of geographic and technological discoveries. But there was also new peril, as the Black Death ravaged the continent.

The new rhythms of life left many disoriented. Then German professor Martin Luther had a vision. In 1517, he nailed a sheet of paper bearing 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, and changed Christendom forever. One thesis stated that the only thing Christians need to commune with God is scripture – not the Church.

If you’re wondering why people continued bothering with religion when it was making things in Europe so messy, well, you raise a good question. The first European atheists began appearing in the sixteenth century. They were Marranos, descendents of Spanish Jews who had been forced to convert to Christianity during the Spanish Inquisition. Barred from their Jewish traditions, and only paying lip service to Christian ones, they became alienated from the ritual aspect of religion. This made it a lot harder to sustain the myth.

Scientists and philosophers hadn’t given up on God. But they struggled to find evidence for His existence in scripture. Europeans were now using empirical evidence to make revolutionary advancements in science and technology. Evidence alone proved if something was “true.” That meant, if something couldn’t be observed, it was considered to be false. 

Scripture is a living, breathing art form, meant to inspire communion and compassion. It was never meant to be taken literally. But for a new breed of religious fundamentalists, scripture was all they had. What’s more, because fundamentalist communities spring up in response to a perceived crisis, they experience religion as a battle. When they are challenged, they perceive it as attack and cling all the more tightly to their literal interpretations of scripture. 

In America, Protestant Evangelism began attracting followers in the mid-nineteenth century. Its adherents subscribed to everything Enlightenment philosophers abhorred: dreams, signs, miracles, and ecstatic physicality, all based on a literal interpretation of scripture. It’s now the most popular religion in the US.