D. Armstrong’s Aesthetic Humanism

Armstrong’s theory is described as representing an aesthetic humanism because she focuses on the capacity of the human being to create imaginative conceptions that evoke the sense of the sacred. Her emphasis, therefore, is on the creative agency of the human mind, as a catalytic force in the the encounter with the sacred, rather than on the encounter with an agency acting from beyond the human will, which compels the recognition of the presence of the holy, as in Otto’s theory.

In her focus on the creative powers of the human mind, her theory could be described as humanistic. In its concentration on imagination and artistic creativity, it could be said to be aesthetic. She depicts the being of the sacred as fundamentally transcendental in essence and therefore beyond the categories of cognition, a point similar to that made by Otto. She argues, therefore, that the awareness of this transcendental presence is best intuited through a discipline in which images representative of conceptions of this state of being are created and contemplated so as to evoke a sensitivity to its presence. These images could derive from any sphere of experience that represents the sacred in terms of the distinctive history of the individual. She cites as examples of this imaginative effort of evoking the sacred Dante’s interpretation of the femininity of Beatrice as emblematic of divine love, and the Islamic mystic’s Muid ad-Din ibn al-Arabi’s vision of Nazim, another female muse, as an incarnation of Sophia, the divine Wisdom. .

The emphasis, in Armstrong’s theory, therefore, is on the individual’s ability to actualize the sense of the sacred through the cultivation of a sensitivity to the evocative potential of his or her experiences and encounters as manifested in the course of their history. In her own words, writing about conceptions of religious symbolism in the ancient world:

Symbolism was part of the essence of religion: the divine was in some profound sense a product of the imagination, rather than a matter of fact. People would create images of God that worked in the same way as a poem or a great piece of music. These images would touch something buried within them and convince them-if only momentarily- that life had some ultimate meaning and value5.

Armstrong’s aesthetic humanism would seem to have been strongly influenced by her study of both the English Romantics as well as the Islamic mystic Ibn al-Arabi who are united in emphasizing a relationship between the imagination and the apprehension of spiritual truth.

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5 Karen Armstrong, The History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1993).