A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Rarely are two books published simultaneously and independently which are so complementary as these. Tracing the two extremes which have fueled Western spirituality, the two surveys manage to outline a third history: that of organized religion as a cultural force. Each side supplies a perspective on how monotheism--Christianity, especially--ascended to a position of complete dominance, only to watch its power undone by its own excesses.

Armstrong's History of God is easily the more ambitious of the two, and that she falls short of her ambition is not surprising, considering how high she's aiming. Having spent time both as a Roman Catholic nun and as an Oxford professor, she brings a valuable mix of academic analysis and spiritual experience to her topic. Her lively prose and thoughtful construction of the story of monotheism make for a fascinating, urgent narrative.

The story begins with the development of pagan gods and the way in which one of them, Yahweh Sabaoth (a war god), begins to usurp the roles of others among the Canaanites. Through his cult's efforts, Yahweh achieves a certain ruthless character, much like a modern executive buying up a company's shares for a hostile takeover. "His" greatest coup is convincing the Jews (whom he has just been credited with leading out of Egypt, the basis for his rise to fame) that he is the same god as "El Shaddai," with whom Abraham had dealt long ago and who was almost certainly the old Canaanite high god El.

Eventually, of course, the cult of Yahweh obliterated the other gods by forbidding their worship, and over the centuries developed the concept of "the only god." The strain of maintaining this new concept is aptly illuminated by the way Christianity, trying to have its cake and eat it too, floundered for an explanation of how Jesus and Yahweh could both be God. Thus developed "the holy trinity," which became a great conceptual liability.

Armstrong's account is insightful and informative, yet she strives (and largely succeeds) for more than a history: she wants to solve the riddle of human spirituality and create a kind of meta-theology. She contends that humans are inherently religious animals, which leads her to dismiss humanism as "a religion without God--not all religions, of course, are theistic."

It's a notion quite worthy of discussion, but she doesn't attempt to back up the generalization, and it weakens her credibility. She does chart the evolution of atheism alongside that of God, making the valid points that, historically, atheism required a particular deity to deny and that atheist was a term most believers of one faith would call those of another faith. And, indeed, atheism may be relative, even reactive, but it is an ideology different in kind, not degree, from religion. Ultimately, Armstrong fails to explain how "an increasingly secularized society" has become so prevalent among the species she calls "Homo religiosus."

Additionally, her writing voice is sometimes ambiguous about historical truth; she often slips directly into the mindset of the people in question, saying "This was so" rather than "This was generally held to be so." It's a kind of anthropological shorthand that becomes confusing when she relates possibly historical but probably mythical events. In a history, it does make a difference whether something happened factually or mythically.

This unfortunately ties in with her central thesis, which is that not only is God so ineffable that we can only speak of "Him" through a mythic symbol of an approximation of him, but that all major religions consciously maintain this distinction--between the "God" we talk about and the supposedly real God. It's not that the thesis is wrong, exactly, though denominations which contradict it could be raised. The problem is that her insistence on taking everything "symbolically, rather than literally," becomes numbingly tautological by the end. Without a literal referent somewhere down the line, a symbol is meaningless. Likewise, if God is so ineffable that no discourse actually relates to the reality of God, why bother talking about God at all?

Turner's offering is almost as antithetical to Armstrong's as their respective topics; it's wry, breezy, and much shorter--almost a coffee-table book, with sumptuous color plates of various "artist's conceptions" of hell. Of course, the subject matter lends itself perfectly to this treatment; if God is impossible to consider, let alone picture, hell is a concept custom-made for literalistic depiction.

Where Armstrong tries to write off the recent rise of fundamentalist thinking as an exception, Turner recognizes the basic appeal of religious literalism and revels in it. She cites not only Galileo's "playful" calculations of hell's dimensions, but also the August 28, 1990, Weekly World News: "Hell is nine miles beneath the surface of a point in western Siberia where Soviet engineers drilling for oil broke through. They capped their hole after smelling the smoke and hearing the cries of the damned."

That footnote adds more than levity. According to Turner, a recent Gallup poll found that 60 percent of Americans claim to believe in an actual hell. For any of them--as well as those of us interested in hell as a literary theme--she recounts the various permutations of geography and composition that have defined hell across time, from the old drab underworld through the ecstatically terrible medieval hell to the latest irreverent commercial.

In contrast to God's domain, hell's concentration of flesh, vice, and sadism makes it a lot of fun, and its fires do manage to illuminate the character of God from below. In fact, one of the notable ways this book supplements the other is in showing how monotheism was weakened by the paradox of an allgood God creating an obviously sinful world, requiring another god responsible for evil. And though Turner states that "this book is not about the devil," the evolution of Satan as a principal character is one of the most fascinating aspects of hell, and the most striking component of many of the paintings reproduced here.

Turner generally keeps the tone fresh and nonscholarly, but she does delve somewhat into the psychology of the "abominable fancy." This was the idea of hell not only as a place to concern those who are in it but as a source of Schadenfreude for those who have escaped it. Countless pictures, narratives, and sermons depict heaven's inhabitants looking down and delighting in the torment of the damned. There was little logical excuse for this situation (everybody's already been judged, after all) except to make heaven seem that much more satisfying, in terms of the saying Turner cites: "It is not enough to succeed; others must fail."

In our world, success and failure are relative. Forget about serving in heaven or ruling in hell--would you rather have an almost-successful book about the very essence of spirituality or the smashingly successful one about people's eternal desire to punish one another? The best solution is to read both and get the proverbial "everything in between."