A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam by KarenArmstrongReview by: Herbert MasonThe American Historical Review, Vol. 100, No. 2 (Apr., 1995), pp. 481-482Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2169011 .

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General 481

there is plenty in Levy's. But much of it is old history-I found few works cited that are later than the mid-1970s-and dated. Although the book is arranged chronologically, Levy is at his best once he hits the late seventeenth century and handles case after case, publication after publication, context after context. He gives a more than adequate account of the modern history of the offense of blasphemy (religious and civil) and nicely emphasizes its new prominence in the thought and writing of sixteenth- century ecclesiastical reformers who were reluctant to apply the term "heresy" to matters of religious dis- agreement but no less eager to impose stiff penal sanctions on those with whom they disagreed.

In legal history from the seventeenth century to the present Levy is on solid and familiar ground, and in bringing his earlier account up to the present he traces the legal idea of blasphemy in both England and the United States in great detail. For earlier periods Levy is not as reliable, nor does he consider continental developments. He depends too much on translated materials and outdated scholarship, and he gets medieval Europe quite wrong. Ignoring the work of Craun and Casagrande, he subordinates medieval concerns with blasphemy to those of heresy, the development of which idea Levy seems not fully to understand although he cites the best general litera- ture in English.

The complementarily of these books is expressed in one more aspect: the cover of Lawton's reproduces William Blake's watercolor illustration of Leviticus 24:16; that of Levy reproduces Andres Serrano's Piss Christ. One fancies that in some blasphemous collu- sion on the part of the cover designers, they might have been reversed.

EDWARD PETERS

University of Pennsylvania

KAREN ARMSTRONG. A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. (A Borzoi Book.) New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1993. Pp. xxiii, 460. $27.50.

This is a plucky book that attempts single-handedly and in documented form to disfranchise God from the credulous minds ofJews, Christians, and Muslims. What one has finally to assess in reviewing this book, however, is its possible contribution to the literature of the disenchanted. Because it is not scholarly in the strictest exegetical sense and thus contributes noth- ing to textual and tradition studies, and because by its own admission it pretends to no knowledge gained through mystical experience (although it does gener- alize about mystics and other religious experts), it must be considered as a contemporary contribution to our age-old devil's advocacy literature of debunk- ing or, in the fashion of recent decades, deconstruc- tion.

Karen Armstrong is perfectly straightforward or, in literary terms, autobiographically frank about her

disillusionment with Abrahamic monotheism after her vocational experience as a nun. In fact, her writing has a disarming appearance of a victim's sincerity (especially among her newfound rationalist friends honored eloquently in chapter 11, entitled "Does God Have a Future?") and of academic exper- tise, as is demonstrated by her copious footnotes, maps of early Jewish, Christian, and Muslim historic and religious sites, and exhaustive suggested primary and secondary reading material.

At times highly learned scholars, to say nothing of believers, may wince or whine respectively at some of her facile generalizatiops and judgments about words, ideas, spiritual conditions, and persons who have spent their lives in one tradition or another trying to understand and be understood. Of special irritation to traditionalist Muslims, for example, would be her assertion: "It is not surprising that Muhammad found the revelations such an enormous strain: not only was he working through an entirely new political solution for his people, but he was composing one of the great spiritual and literary classics of all time" (p. 140). This is high praise for a fellow composer perhaps, but nonetheless reduction- ist in its familiar repetition of the old cornerstone of Jewish and Christian excising of God from the author- ship of the Holy Qur'an.

Her book, in its generously broad sweep, may contribute in its own way, as does the oft-cited be- liever in mythic unity, Joseph Campbell, to the pres- ervation of the amateur spirit as it maneuvers gamely through the Scylla of academic theological specialism and the Charybdis of resurgent fundamentalism in search of some haven of intellectual, if not religious, authenticity. And it does so, unlike Campbell's works, by indicating with some modesty that it is not "a history of the ineffable reality of God itself, which is beyond time and change, but a history of the way men and women have perceived him from Abraham to the present day" (p. xx).

Its hubristic title, however, recalls an effort by the late Jesuit Cardinal Jean Danielou in the 1950s to promote the same deity to the clearly manifest ubiq- uitous mover of history in his Essai sur le mystere de l'histoire, translated into English as The Lord of History (1958). In that instance, the author, a recognized member of the guild of Patristic scholars, was indulg- ing his desire to reach a wider audience with a popular apologetic book. By contrast, Armstrong, a sometime media figure in Britain and generalist author on big religious topics, has been drawn to enter the specialist lists with her laborious excising of God, who has, in her view, never existed as generally conceived and is only a linguistic fabrication of sadly yearning, self-deceived minds.

The effort in both cases is too obviously driven by bias to be convincing and could have been under- taken more persuasively, with less narcissism, as in Dani6lou's case, through prayerful hiddenness, and in Armstrong's, by a simple farewell whisper of "no."

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 1995

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482 Reviews of Books

Such would contribute more than does hundreds of pages of manipulated sources and ideological antag- onisms to the once-serious debate, which recently has fallen on hard times, between belief and unbelief, auditory silence and probing constructs, reverence and denial. What has ensued in this instance is a mound of documentation spurred upward ponder- ously by an author convinced that bulk persuades.

'James Joyce got it right in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," Armstrong tells us in her oddly ingenu- ous introduction. It is thus that a Mephistophelian critic is inadvertently given an invitation to look at this author's enthusiasm and wonder about the mo- tive for flashpoints of resurgent rationalism or unful- filled zeal.

"In the beginning, human beings created a God who was the First Cause of all things, and ruler of Heaven and earth" (p. 4), Armstrong writes at the beginning of chapter 1. St.John's Gospel is corrected at last. Next to this sentence the Icarian lyric of Joyce's flight to aesthetically "forge in the smithy of (his) soul the uncreated conscience of (his) race" sounds modest indeed. Perhaps Armstrong does con- tribute, again inadvertently, to the much-needed re- marking of the boundary, blurred so elegantly by T. S. Eliot, between the religious and the literary impulse.

"The mystics have long insisted that God is not another Being; they have claimed that he does not really exist and that it is better to call him nothing" (p. 396). Which mystics is Armstrong referring to? Who, when, why, how was this idea expressed? Is this resurgent iconoclasm? Is the author identifying with the neo-gnostic yearning for an impersonal, utterly non-human, non-incarnational, transcendent idea in which to believe? Or does generalizing deconstruc- tion end simply in nothing? Yet this nothing may be prelude to the emergence of something, as seems to follow most dogmatic declarations of presumed noth- ingness.

Armstrong, albeit neither a clever devil nor a selfless angel, yearns beneath her mound of verbal debris "to create a vibrant new faith for the twenty- first century" (p. 399). But Goethe also got it right (Faust I, 1936-39) when he said through Mephisto- pheles: "Who would know and describe a living thing,/Seeks first to expel the spirit within,/Then he stands there, the parts held in his grasp,/Lostjust the spiritual bond, alas!"

HERBERT MASON

Boston University

MICHAEL ADAS, editor. Islamic and European Expan- sion: The Forging of a Global Order. (Critical Perspec- tives on the Past.) Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 1993. Pp. xiii, 379. Cloth $49.95, paper $18.95.

This book is the first in a series prepared under the auspices of the American Historical Association to advance cross-cultural and global perspectives in the study and teaching of world history. The essays are

meant to provide secondary and college teachers with comprehensive reviews of recent historiographical perspectives and research findings in the Islamic, modern European, and colonial eras. A considerable effort has been made to incorporate a global perspec- tive and to avoid a Eurocentric view of the world. There is a chapter on the world economy before the rise of Europe, two chapters on the Islamic world, and several essays on European relations with the rest of the globe, including the Columbian discoveries, the slave trade, and colonialism. Due weight is given to movements of protest and resistance in colonized areas. There are several essays on European military history, the Industrial Revolution, and gender issues. The overall quality is exceptionally high. The essays give exemplary accounts of the new historiographical perspectives, provide excellent notes and bibliogra- phies, and serve well the needs of nonspecialist readers.

There remain, nonetheless, important problems. The underlying issue of the book, although not fully explicit, is the rise of the West, "ending with the processes by which the nation-states of the West attained domination over all other civilizations and culture areas" (p. xi). The implied question is whether it is valid to see all world history as leading up to and perhaps culminating in the hegemony of Europe or whether this is a Euro-American prejudice that has to be overcome in the interest of creating a more genuinely balanced global history. Obviously the authors and sponsors are committed to broaden- ing the concept of world history to include non- Europeans, and to recognizing how the "European drive for global hegemony ... has been profoundly influenced by the responses of African, Asian, Latin American, or Oceanic peoples" (p. x). In a number of ways, however, the book shies away from a full con- frontation with its own underlying concerns.

First, there are a number of critical omissions. We have too little on the origins of European hegemony in the early modern period. An article on Immanuel Wallerstein's thesis of the rise of the world-capitalist system, much commented on and criticized in other essays, and a more general review of the processes of European state formation, would have better illumi- nated the reasons for the emergence of European hegemony.

Moreover, although the book presents excellent materials on demographic trends, trade, industrializa- tion, and gender relations, and gives due weight to the history of slavery, racism, and to movements of protest and resistance, -it has scarcely anything on science, technologies, and on institutional, cultural, and sociocultural history. This is partly a reaction to the overemphasis of previous generations of histori- ans on intellectual history, and partly a reaction to the use of cultural history to make a case for European superiority and to legitimize Western colonial domi- nation. The neglect of scientific, technological, cul- tural, and religious issues may also be a reflection of

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 1995

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