A History of God and The Battle for God, by Karen Armstrong

I read the earlier History of God first, since it covers the broadest swath of history, and then The Battle for God, which focuses on the past 500 years or so. The latter is strongly recommended by Pullman in his essay Miss Goddard's Grave. He writes:

Karen Armstrong, in her book The Battle for God, explains the nature of fundamentalism very well. She sets out the difference between 'mythos' and 'logos', differing ways of apprehending the reality of the world. Mythos deals with meaning, with the timeless and constant, with the intuitive, with what can only be fully expressed in art or music or ritual. Logos, by contrast, is the rational, the scientific, the practical; that which is susceptible to logical explanation.

Her argument is that in modern times, because of the astonishing progress of science and technology, people in the Western world 'began to think that logos was the only means to truth, and began to discount mythos as false and superstitious'. This resulted in the phenomenon of fundamentalism, which, despite its own claims to be a return to the old true ways of understanding the holy book, is not a return of any kind but something entirely new: 'Protestant fundamentalists read the Bible in a literal, rational way, that is quite different from the more mystical, allegorical approach of pre-modern spirituality.' (Daemon Voices 409)

Armstrong's later book MYTHS has an introductory essay by Pullman. It may well be that his character Mary Malone, like Armstrong an ex-nun turned scholar, owes something to the prominent author, as well. Armstrong, in turn, draws heavily on this concept of mythos and logos as set forth by Sloek in Devotional Language, along with important works by the likes of Eliade, Scholem, Tillich, Marsden, Steiner, and many others I don't recognize.

Armstrong has garnered many admirers. Her organization Charter for Compassion, launched in collaboration with TED and with chapters around the globe, aspires to convert her scholarship into action, but may well founder on that same underlying difficulty of balancing mythos and logos in individuals and the world which so drives her argument. Both History and Battle are tremendous, and I'm scarcely able to do them justice in this brief note on Pullman's sources. My only critique is that they give very little room to any number of incredibly important parts of the story of religion; long as they are, of course they can't hope to include everything. But to cite just a few examples which I consider absolutely critical to any history which pretends to grapple with religion, black churches in the US and Kierkegaard receive terribly scanty mention, and CS Lewis and his forebear MacDonald are dismissed as "more marginal writers" -- albeit in comparison to Milton (BG 309). Still, Armstrong gives a brilliant overview of Western history through the lens of monotheism and fundamentalism, arguably two of its most significant contributions.