Religion against hypothalamus: Round Two

“St. Paul” is a new book by the British Religious Researcher Karen Armstrong, who reached us less than a year after the publishing of the original. The demand for her work in our country and, as a result, their rapid translatedness seems to be due not so much by their scientific novelty, provocative theses or a brilliant syllable, how well they fit into the Newage Matrix of the consciousness of the mass reader and consist with the political agenda of the day in the sense of the segregation of “bad ideas, xenophobia or terrorism from“ good ”from“ good ”from the“ good ” religion. This applies to Russia, Great Britain, the United States and a number of other countries: it is interesting, for example, how it is read in France, where most of educated people are sure of the relationship of both. However, closer to business.

Already in the introduction of Armstrong gives a general scheme of his “research program”, what it will prove: Pavel “denounced the injustice of the Roman Empire” and “fought for the destruction of national, class and gender prejudices” (p. 30–31). Since many accuse the Apostle of sexism, merchants and apologies of slavery, the author takes the task of rehabilitating him and show that all the hardest passages from his messages (and only half of those who entered the New Testament, probably belongs to Paul) or were not written by himself, or are later inserts.

Actually, this is what Paul is doing throughout its small book: exposes injustice, fights against prejudices and in passing to scatter those who stand in his way: spiritual Christians, protognostics and stubborn Jews, who advocated elitism against his egalitarianism. A similar program, which ultimately reduces everything to the ethics and ideas of sacrificial love, compassion for neighboring and community in the future of an all-wrapping transcendental deity, is characteristic of all Armstrong books, and the reader already had the opportunity to get acquainted with her in her other works, “The Battle of God”, “Bloody Fields”, and especially in “Twelve Steps to Submissive Life”, in Russian called "Tao of Religion." The image of Christ in Paul, in this prospect, comes down to the image of a social reformer, the defender of the oppressed and morality teacher, without special ceremonies executed according to Roman laws, but “justified” by God and the right now. The veneration of the criminal as the Messiah, thus, turns the entire social structure upside down and shows that the Divine court is not like human. Suspiciously, it is true that the resurrected and ascended Jesus somehow entered the “Divine Council of Heavenly Creatures” (p. 37). Who, when, and why managed to create such an organ, is a big riddle.

Since Paul’s thought seems exclusively a social doctrine that you need to be kind, share with your neighbor and push your raging ego to hell, in the presentation of Armstrong there was no place for many ambiguous existential topics: death, sin, temptation, body, flesh, law, grace - to which we are so accustomed to the works of Augustine, Luther, Luther Kierkegara, Shestova or Bart. Of course, all these theological and religious-philosophical, and not strictly scientific interpretations, but after all, in the words “all of us, baptized in Christ Jesus, were baptized into death” (Rome 6: 3) some kind of deep meaning? The author several times mentions that the Apostle was a mystic, was delighted to the seventh sky and so on, but writes about it very pale and only then, then, then, to return to the distribution of food between the poor and the rich again.

It is difficult to understand those who express the sympathies to the language that the book is written and calls it “exciting”, “fascinating” or “artistic”. “St. Paul” is really written very simply (even simplified), but the text lacks the beauty of the texture that distinguishes brilliant historical books from the usual ones: all these endless mention of the agrarian system, oppressed classes and social injustice sometimes seem to be clippings from a nasty textbook on history or some semi-transcussible matches from the sphere of the Marxist unconscious. The ideological calculations of the author sometimes look like crimes not only against the coherence of the narrative, but also against good taste: for example, in one place she mentions the Pavlova interpretation of the concept of sin and writes that it can be associated with “... with instincts that are generated in the hypothalamus and inherited from our ancestors-consumers. They helped our species preserve, forcing us to run away from danger, fight for the territory and status, assign accessible resources and produce offspring. In them, “I” are in the first place ”(p. 66). The absurd certificate regarding the “real” state of affairs plays the role of a pig in the orchestra: the whole monstrously tense existential drama of sin and the alarming gap between action and excitement leads to some ancestors-conservals there. You can also understand when Dokins do this, but he is both a militant atheist and a biology specialist. A little more naturally excursion into the development of the brain of human ancestors looked in the past work of Armstrong, “bloody fields”, but even there it boils down to a simple metaphysical scheme: the violent “old” brain is opposed to the compassionate “new”, this first is embodied in state structures, and the second in religious ethics in which there is no bad. Of course, this is still the same chariot drawn by two horses from the Platonovsky “Fedra”, only in a new way and hardly related to the problems of apostolic letters. Here you can complain about the fact that Armstrong writes about his experience of sin as “devilish power”, although there was no talk of any devil in our understanding until the II century.

Of course, there are positive points in the book. Armstrong interestingly demonstrates how Pavel refracts and inverts the official imperial discourse in his letters: if there are the terms lord, the Savior, the kingdom, etc. belonged to the emperor, then here - to the criminal crucified on his cross. A similar language analysis looks fresh and enjoys. He touches the critical and in some way the ironic attitude to the Apostle Luke, the author of the third Gospel and Acts, who is usually customary to love and be considered a good historian, but which the author is cranny for fiction and attempts to somehow pole Rome in his conflict with Pavel. Therefore, the description of the death of the latter-more precisely, the absence of such a description-again, favorably differs from an orthodox point of view: yes, instead of being solemnly decapitated in the main square, he could simply perish somewhere in the casemates or be killed as a dog, like a hero of the “process” of Kafka, although Roman citizenship should have to protect him from it.

The only drawback of “St. Paul” in terms of publication is that links to the Bible in it are given in the form of end footnotes, and not in a more familiar form (MK 4: 3–9), which makes them look somewhat unnatural. The translation was made by Gleb Zheastrebov, a well -known biblicalist, the author of an excellent book on the search for historical Jesus (“Who was Jesus from Nazareth?”). And, to be honest, if someone was torn between the book of Yastrebov and Armstrong's book, then this first should be chosen, and to read something else about Paul.

Alexey Zygmont