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The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The New York Times bestselling author of A History of God delivers the gripping, inspirational story about her own search for God.
“A story about becoming human, being recognized, finally recognizing oneself…. It fills the reader with hope.” — The Washington Post Book World
In 1962, at age seventeen, Karen Armstrong entered a convent, eager to meet God. After seven brutally unhappy years as a nun, she left her order to pursue English literature at Oxford. But convent life had profoundly altered her, and coping with the outside world and her expiring faith proved to be excruciating. Her deep solitude and a terrifying illness–diagnosed only years later as epilepsy—marked her forever as an outsider. In her own mind she was a complete failure: as a nun, as an academic, and as a normal woman capable of intimacy. Her future seemed very much in question until she stumbled into comparative theology. What she found, in learning, thinking, and writing about other religions, was the ecstasy and transcendence she had never felt as a nun.
“A story about becoming human, being recognized, finally recognizing oneself…. It fills the reader with hope.” — The Washington Post Book World
In 1962, at age seventeen, Karen Armstrong entered a convent, eager to meet God. After seven brutally unhappy years as a nun, she left her order to pursue English literature at Oxford. But convent life had profoundly altered her, and coping with the outside world and her expiring faith proved to be excruciating. Her deep solitude and a terrifying illness–diagnosed only years later as epilepsy—marked her forever as an outsider. In her own mind she was a complete failure: as a nun, as an academic, and as a normal woman capable of intimacy. Her future seemed very much in question until she stumbled into comparative theology. What she found, in learning, thinking, and writing about other religions, was the ecstasy and transcendence she had never felt as a nun.
306 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
About the author
Karen Armstrong
132 books3,217 followersKaren Armstrong, a comparative religion specialist is the author of numerous books on religion, including The Case for God, A History of God, The Battle for God, Holy War, Islam, Buddha, and Fields of Blood, as well as a memoir, The Spiral Staircase.
Her work has been translated into 45 languages. In 2008 she was awarded the TED Prize and began working with TED on the Charter for Compassion, created online by the general public, crafted by leading thinkers in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. It was launched globally in the fall of 2009. Also in 2008, she was awarded the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Medal. In 2013, she received the British Academy’s inaugural Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Trans cultural Understanding.
Her work has been translated into 45 languages. In 2008 she was awarded the TED Prize and began working with TED on the Charter for Compassion, created online by the general public, crafted by leading thinkers in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. It was launched globally in the fall of 2009. Also in 2008, she was awarded the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Medal. In 2013, she received the British Academy’s inaugural Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Trans cultural Understanding.
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January 11, 2021
Amends for a Guilty Generation
I share a generation with Karen Armstrong. We are baby-boomers. As such we also share a responsibility for the world as it currently exists. It is we who fought and subsequently ran the most destructive wars in history; we who pursued our personal economic success regardless of the cost to society; we who believed in the pursuit of ideals for making the world better, watched as it became less and less habitable; and we, those who happened to be Catholic anyway, who contributed to the destruction of the institutional credibility of the Church in which were brought up. Only this last would I, and possibly Armstrong, classify as an achievement.
Not that I regret my Catholic upbringing; nor does she. Catholic education in the 1950’s and early 1960’s was well-run, thorough, and remarkably consistent across national borders. It was conducted largely by women who dedicated themselves for little compensation and less recognition to children whose parents could not have afforded such pedagogical competence anywhere else. I have no doubt that we survived and prospered in life because of the discipline and habits of work those women instilled in us.
And they didn’t just teach academic and practical skills. The environment of the Catholic classroom was unremittingly moral. Virtue was more important than intelligence. Conscience was more compelling than law. I don’t think any of us could have known how distinctive this form of education is. How could we? Until, of course, we left it. And even today, after a longish life in business and academia, I find the world at large somewhat strange, precisely because it doesn’t share the ideals of virtue and conscience that I absorbed during 12 years of not just education, but of what religious communities call ‘formation’, the process of creation of responsible human beings.
But my gratitude to the Catholic Church for what they provided is tempered by a recognition. The institutional system that economically permitted this level of public service was founded on an abhorrent form of spiritual subjugation. The women who voluntarily devoted themselves so totally to my future welfare were actually subtly and insidiously exploited by men whose only rationale was that such subjugation was God’s will. The harm that this regime did to the women who accepted it was profound, as Armstrong reports in The Spiral Staircase and in her first book, Through the Narrow Gate. This harm, tempered and cooked in the young lives of their students, also takes a lifetime to live through.
Many of these women, like Armstrong, came to recognise the reality of what they had considered their divine calling - a way, certainly, to honourably avoid the oppressions of traditional Catholic marriage while pursuing an admirable profession; but also achieved at the cost of personal emotional stagnation and, often, the experience and repression of enormous rage. The consequences for their charges included not just a refined physical brutality but also a level of spiritual intimidation which clearly emanated from a projection of their own dissatisfactions.
Mortal sin is the dread of the Catholic child. It cuts him off entirely from communion with not just God but also with the rest of the Catholic community. If in such a state, he becomes a pariah in his own mind. He is told there is only one therapy, humiliating conversation with a man who alone has the divinely ordained power to repair this terrible condition. To be charged with an offense considered mortally serious is therefore of utmost impact. Hell is a compelling motivation to an eight year old.
Sex was frequently the matter involved but not solely so. Mortal sin, we were instructed, included: not completing one’s homework assignments properly (as this constituted the grave offense of not fulfilling one’s station in life); failure to carry-out the most trivial of religious rituals, like prayer before meals (thus demonstrating a profound disregard of divine beneficence); and disloyalty or disobedience to any member of the clergy, even regarding matters of some questionable virtue like commercial activities during school hours (a favourite was the collection of flower sets in the large cemetery for sale back to the local florists - for the African missions of course - which was to be kept secret from one’s parents).
It is a cliche to blame the dramatic decline of both ‘vocations’ to religious communities and Catholic liturgical devotion, to the changes instituted by the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960’s. My experience is that these changes merely allowed reflection on what Catholic religious practice had become, especially among religious congregations: an unthinking acknowledgement of obedience to authority as the only essential virtue. When the centrality of obedience was moved ever so slightly off-centre, the entire church-edifice trembled in eccentric, erratic movement. The structure of compulsion revealed itself and my generation fled from it in considerable confusion but intent on forgetting it. If only it had been that easy.
The spiritual abuse visited on the children was ingrained. But that was only an echo of the heavy-weight persecution visited on our teachers. Armstrong, herself preparing for life as a teaching sister, recounts many of the techniques used, and alludes to many more. They are often ghastly and senseless, but always justified as necessary for a closer union with God. It wasn’t enough to accept humiliation and degradation; one was expected to want it. Once seen for what these techniques were - methods of control by power - it is remarkable that an even greater number of religious congregations weren’t dissolved and churches closed.
The doctrinal certainty of the Catholic Church in its own ‘perfection’, which persists still, is the source of the delusions of my teachers as well as most of the continuing institutional problems of the Catholic Church. Paedophilia, misogyny, financial misconduct, organisational cover-up, and impermeability to administrative reform are all promoted and protected by the lingering idea of the societas perfecta., the self-proclaimed principle that the Church has everything it needs within itself for redemption. But of course it doesn’t.
Like any organisation the Catholic Church is prone to error. It needs to be criticised by those who can see it more clearly from the outside. To admit this however would be to admit its dependence on the world, something it dare not do. So it trundles on, effectively persecuting itself - first its clergy, then its congregations and most importantly its children, who have no defense against whatever visions of Hell are being used at the moment to enforce conformity. It’s self-image is as a religion of love. Many of us however experienced it as a religion of utmost fear... and even hatred.
Today the convent which housed the nuns who taught me is a police station. Karen Armstrong’s house of studies has become a graduate college of the University of Oxford.* The recycling of the buildings is somewhat easier than the recovery of the Spirit, the story of which Armstrong so movingly tells through her metaphor of the struggle up The Spiral Staircase. In it she is making amends, however incrementally, for the harm our generation has wrought in the world. Not as penance but as liberation.
* Coincidentally, my near neighbour in our small Cotswold village is an administrator of the charitable trust established with the proceeds of the sale of this building to Linacre College and the dissolution of the convent. My step daughter did her post-graduate work in this same location. Less than six degrees of separation, clearly.
Postscript: This piece, which demonstrates that the drive for Power is institutionalised to such a degree in the Catholic Church that even its leader can not mitigate it, appeared just after I posted the review: https://cruxnow.com/vatican/2017/12/2...
Post-post script: I have just seen the remarkable German film, Kreuzweg (Stations of the Cross), the story of a 14 year old girl brought up in an ultra-Catholic family of the 21st century, but summarising much of what was global Catholicism in the middle of the 20th century. I highly recommend it for therapeutic as well as artistic reasons.
I share a generation with Karen Armstrong. We are baby-boomers. As such we also share a responsibility for the world as it currently exists. It is we who fought and subsequently ran the most destructive wars in history; we who pursued our personal economic success regardless of the cost to society; we who believed in the pursuit of ideals for making the world better, watched as it became less and less habitable; and we, those who happened to be Catholic anyway, who contributed to the destruction of the institutional credibility of the Church in which were brought up. Only this last would I, and possibly Armstrong, classify as an achievement.
Not that I regret my Catholic upbringing; nor does she. Catholic education in the 1950’s and early 1960’s was well-run, thorough, and remarkably consistent across national borders. It was conducted largely by women who dedicated themselves for little compensation and less recognition to children whose parents could not have afforded such pedagogical competence anywhere else. I have no doubt that we survived and prospered in life because of the discipline and habits of work those women instilled in us.
And they didn’t just teach academic and practical skills. The environment of the Catholic classroom was unremittingly moral. Virtue was more important than intelligence. Conscience was more compelling than law. I don’t think any of us could have known how distinctive this form of education is. How could we? Until, of course, we left it. And even today, after a longish life in business and academia, I find the world at large somewhat strange, precisely because it doesn’t share the ideals of virtue and conscience that I absorbed during 12 years of not just education, but of what religious communities call ‘formation’, the process of creation of responsible human beings.
But my gratitude to the Catholic Church for what they provided is tempered by a recognition. The institutional system that economically permitted this level of public service was founded on an abhorrent form of spiritual subjugation. The women who voluntarily devoted themselves so totally to my future welfare were actually subtly and insidiously exploited by men whose only rationale was that such subjugation was God’s will. The harm that this regime did to the women who accepted it was profound, as Armstrong reports in The Spiral Staircase and in her first book, Through the Narrow Gate. This harm, tempered and cooked in the young lives of their students, also takes a lifetime to live through.
Many of these women, like Armstrong, came to recognise the reality of what they had considered their divine calling - a way, certainly, to honourably avoid the oppressions of traditional Catholic marriage while pursuing an admirable profession; but also achieved at the cost of personal emotional stagnation and, often, the experience and repression of enormous rage. The consequences for their charges included not just a refined physical brutality but also a level of spiritual intimidation which clearly emanated from a projection of their own dissatisfactions.
Mortal sin is the dread of the Catholic child. It cuts him off entirely from communion with not just God but also with the rest of the Catholic community. If in such a state, he becomes a pariah in his own mind. He is told there is only one therapy, humiliating conversation with a man who alone has the divinely ordained power to repair this terrible condition. To be charged with an offense considered mortally serious is therefore of utmost impact. Hell is a compelling motivation to an eight year old.
Sex was frequently the matter involved but not solely so. Mortal sin, we were instructed, included: not completing one’s homework assignments properly (as this constituted the grave offense of not fulfilling one’s station in life); failure to carry-out the most trivial of religious rituals, like prayer before meals (thus demonstrating a profound disregard of divine beneficence); and disloyalty or disobedience to any member of the clergy, even regarding matters of some questionable virtue like commercial activities during school hours (a favourite was the collection of flower sets in the large cemetery for sale back to the local florists - for the African missions of course - which was to be kept secret from one’s parents).
It is a cliche to blame the dramatic decline of both ‘vocations’ to religious communities and Catholic liturgical devotion, to the changes instituted by the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960’s. My experience is that these changes merely allowed reflection on what Catholic religious practice had become, especially among religious congregations: an unthinking acknowledgement of obedience to authority as the only essential virtue. When the centrality of obedience was moved ever so slightly off-centre, the entire church-edifice trembled in eccentric, erratic movement. The structure of compulsion revealed itself and my generation fled from it in considerable confusion but intent on forgetting it. If only it had been that easy.
The spiritual abuse visited on the children was ingrained. But that was only an echo of the heavy-weight persecution visited on our teachers. Armstrong, herself preparing for life as a teaching sister, recounts many of the techniques used, and alludes to many more. They are often ghastly and senseless, but always justified as necessary for a closer union with God. It wasn’t enough to accept humiliation and degradation; one was expected to want it. Once seen for what these techniques were - methods of control by power - it is remarkable that an even greater number of religious congregations weren’t dissolved and churches closed.
The doctrinal certainty of the Catholic Church in its own ‘perfection’, which persists still, is the source of the delusions of my teachers as well as most of the continuing institutional problems of the Catholic Church. Paedophilia, misogyny, financial misconduct, organisational cover-up, and impermeability to administrative reform are all promoted and protected by the lingering idea of the societas perfecta., the self-proclaimed principle that the Church has everything it needs within itself for redemption. But of course it doesn’t.
Like any organisation the Catholic Church is prone to error. It needs to be criticised by those who can see it more clearly from the outside. To admit this however would be to admit its dependence on the world, something it dare not do. So it trundles on, effectively persecuting itself - first its clergy, then its congregations and most importantly its children, who have no defense against whatever visions of Hell are being used at the moment to enforce conformity. It’s self-image is as a religion of love. Many of us however experienced it as a religion of utmost fear... and even hatred.
Today the convent which housed the nuns who taught me is a police station. Karen Armstrong’s house of studies has become a graduate college of the University of Oxford.* The recycling of the buildings is somewhat easier than the recovery of the Spirit, the story of which Armstrong so movingly tells through her metaphor of the struggle up The Spiral Staircase. In it she is making amends, however incrementally, for the harm our generation has wrought in the world. Not as penance but as liberation.
* Coincidentally, my near neighbour in our small Cotswold village is an administrator of the charitable trust established with the proceeds of the sale of this building to Linacre College and the dissolution of the convent. My step daughter did her post-graduate work in this same location. Less than six degrees of separation, clearly.
Postscript: This piece, which demonstrates that the drive for Power is institutionalised to such a degree in the Catholic Church that even its leader can not mitigate it, appeared just after I posted the review: https://cruxnow.com/vatican/2017/12/2...
Post-post script: I have just seen the remarkable German film, Kreuzweg (Stations of the Cross), the story of a 14 year old girl brought up in an ultra-Catholic family of the 21st century, but summarising much of what was global Catholicism in the middle of the 20th century. I highly recommend it for therapeutic as well as artistic reasons.
November 24, 2022
Karen Armstrong - image from TED
A nun’s tale. Armstrong tells of her experience from her seven years as a teenager and then young nun in the convent through a loss of faith, severe physical and mental challenges, trying to find her way in the world as an academic, and ultimately coming to a new understanding of spirituality. It is a reasonably quick read. I found that I was very interested at times, and at others just going through the motions. One notable absence here is any real detail on her experiences with men. She notes this herself, saying that she has written about it elsewhere. But the strength of the book for me was her take on the commonality of religious experience in the final hundred pages. True spirituality, true ecstasy, is a product of replacing the ego with compassion. And one way of achieving this, common to all good religions, is ritual, regularly repeated physical acts. A very interesting read.
February 6, 2018
Karen Armstrong is a bestselling author in the field of religious history. Some of her more popular books include A History of God, The Battle for God, and The Case for God. This is her memoir about life after leaving the Roman Catholic church. She was a nun. It's a wrenching story. Armstrong, for reasons not clear until much later in her life, entered as a novitiate at the age of 17 with a great belief in her capacity to find God. The discipline was brutal, the nuns, whom she describes as fundamentally good people, small-minded and vindictive. She endured for seven years. It was an initiation that ended up damaging her for life. When she left the convent she was in no way prepared for secular life. The convent had not only insulated her from the real world, it had all but erased her ability to think independently. At Oxford, she found she was very good at writing papers that discussed the ideas of others, but these papers were always devoid of her own ideas. The ironies pile up here at such a rate that the reader is left a little breathless. When she begins to faint periodically at the convent the nuns chalk it up to her selfishness, her penchant for self-dramatization. For years, at Oxford, she sees a psychiatrist who is so locked into the ideology of his discipline—he sounds like a Freudian—that he can't look beyond it to her real problems. He always sees her trouble in classic psychoanalytical terms.
Years later, after she faints in public and wakes in the hospital, the doctor there is astonished that the psychiatrist had never ordered a simple EEG as a means of ruling out organic causes. There is one, too: epilepsy. Before this diagnosis though she is implicated--falsely--in what appears to be a suicide attempt. This is 1964 or so. The attitudes in Britain at that time toward her perceived "self-indulgence" were positively barbaric. The hospital nurses barely veil their contempt, since she was after all someone "who wasn't really suffering." They never quite say it, but it's as if they view her as a malingerer. Anyway, it wasn't mental illness but a neurological syndrome: epilepsy, probably due to oxygen deprivation at birth.
The doctor keeps her in the hospital for two weeks trying different drugs, and finds the right one. Soon she feels better. It's when she moves into the writing phase of her life that she begins to heal psychically. Working day after day with the great texts from all three monotheistic traditions, she begins to experience the transcendent sacredness always denied her as a nun. I found the writing vivid, direct, persuasive, always pulling me along. If my interest ever flagged it was only briefly during the post Oxford years, when she was teaching at a private school. There's considerable humor here and an assessment of the period, which is necessary if we are to understand the ultimate success of her spiritual quest.
Years later, after she faints in public and wakes in the hospital, the doctor there is astonished that the psychiatrist had never ordered a simple EEG as a means of ruling out organic causes. There is one, too: epilepsy. Before this diagnosis though she is implicated--falsely--in what appears to be a suicide attempt. This is 1964 or so. The attitudes in Britain at that time toward her perceived "self-indulgence" were positively barbaric. The hospital nurses barely veil their contempt, since she was after all someone "who wasn't really suffering." They never quite say it, but it's as if they view her as a malingerer. Anyway, it wasn't mental illness but a neurological syndrome: epilepsy, probably due to oxygen deprivation at birth.
The doctor keeps her in the hospital for two weeks trying different drugs, and finds the right one. Soon she feels better. It's when she moves into the writing phase of her life that she begins to heal psychically. Working day after day with the great texts from all three monotheistic traditions, she begins to experience the transcendent sacredness always denied her as a nun. I found the writing vivid, direct, persuasive, always pulling me along. If my interest ever flagged it was only briefly during the post Oxford years, when she was teaching at a private school. There's considerable humor here and an assessment of the period, which is necessary if we are to understand the ultimate success of her spiritual quest.
August 26, 2011
I feel a little conflicted about Spiral Staircase. For one thing, it's Armstrong's third autobiography. She's a writer whose career started not with the religious histories for which she's now known, but with memoir-writing. Her abandonment at age 25 of a 7-year nun career aroused interest in the publishing world, leading to Through the Narrow Gate: A Memoir of Spiritual Discovery. This was followed by a sequel, Beginning the World. Spiral Staircase is in many ways a rewrite of Beginning the World, which years later she found too angry and inadequate. So, three autobiographies. This woman really must enjoy writing about herself. She really must have something important to say.
Well, she does have a few important insights about herself, insights which others could benefit from. As a doctoral student at Oxford, even though she had enough to live on, she became extremely frugal. She realized that her frugality was a subconscious manifestation of her belief that she didn't have a future, that she was not going to be able to earn her own living. The anorexia she developed after seven harsh years of convent living - the nuns quashing every expression of emotional life, ridiculing things like fainting spells as products of a frail mind and will rather than a body in need - was a symptom of her refusal to nourish herself physically and emotionally. Not eating was a statement: "I'm not worth it." As such, it was a cry for help, a wish for people to pay attention. It may all sound obvious to people steeped in therapy-speak, but I thought she expressed these mind-body conundrums well. Another nun became severely anorexic and eventually left the order, her illness utterly ignored and unaddressed by her superiors. "We did not know how to live anymore," writes Armstrong. "We had somehow lost the knack." The convent had taken them in, crushed the life out of them, and left them unable to forge an exterior identity and make their way in the world. Armstrong's psychiatrist is an utter failure - he keeps sidestepping her time in the convent, insisting her problems be sourced to childhood, parents, etc. I am very interested in stories of people who have lost the ability to be in, and of, the world, people who revert to interiority. As Armstrong writes: "For months, indeed, for years now - I had felt increasingly insubstantial. As Tennyson put it, I saw myself as a ghost in a world of ghosts. I had existed for so long in this twilight state that nothing seemed quite real any longer, and therefore nothing seemed to matter very much."
She is painfully honest about her love life, which is scant, calling herself a "failed heterosexual." (Not a lesbian, but a straight woman who has given up.) She links this to the aftereffects of convent life and the inability to forge lasting emotional bonds.
But apart from the passages where Armstrong really gets to the nub of what ails her, I didn't think her writing was very strong. An offending sentence:
Everything after "asked:" piffle.
I also dislike lazy writing like this:
So...the movements that rose up to follow leaders as diverse as Falwell, Robertson, Khomeini, and Thatcher all stemmed from lacking a clear sense of identity? Apart from being absurdly condescending, those sentences are so sweeping they mean nothing.
Armstrong relaxed her hostility to religion(s) and became enamored of researching and writing about them. It seems clear, though, that her hostility to faith remains. Is that a problem for a religion writer? I can't answer that completely as I haven't read her book-length writings on God, but as of now I'm 100% suspicious.
Well, she does have a few important insights about herself, insights which others could benefit from. As a doctoral student at Oxford, even though she had enough to live on, she became extremely frugal. She realized that her frugality was a subconscious manifestation of her belief that she didn't have a future, that she was not going to be able to earn her own living. The anorexia she developed after seven harsh years of convent living - the nuns quashing every expression of emotional life, ridiculing things like fainting spells as products of a frail mind and will rather than a body in need - was a symptom of her refusal to nourish herself physically and emotionally. Not eating was a statement: "I'm not worth it." As such, it was a cry for help, a wish for people to pay attention. It may all sound obvious to people steeped in therapy-speak, but I thought she expressed these mind-body conundrums well. Another nun became severely anorexic and eventually left the order, her illness utterly ignored and unaddressed by her superiors. "We did not know how to live anymore," writes Armstrong. "We had somehow lost the knack." The convent had taken them in, crushed the life out of them, and left them unable to forge an exterior identity and make their way in the world. Armstrong's psychiatrist is an utter failure - he keeps sidestepping her time in the convent, insisting her problems be sourced to childhood, parents, etc. I am very interested in stories of people who have lost the ability to be in, and of, the world, people who revert to interiority. As Armstrong writes: "For months, indeed, for years now - I had felt increasingly insubstantial. As Tennyson put it, I saw myself as a ghost in a world of ghosts. I had existed for so long in this twilight state that nothing seemed quite real any longer, and therefore nothing seemed to matter very much."
She is painfully honest about her love life, which is scant, calling herself a "failed heterosexual." (Not a lesbian, but a straight woman who has given up.) She links this to the aftereffects of convent life and the inability to forge lasting emotional bonds.
But apart from the passages where Armstrong really gets to the nub of what ails her, I didn't think her writing was very strong. An offending sentence:
Jesus said, 'Do unto others as you would have done unto you,' didn't he?" I asked, stirring my large mug of milky coffee.
Everything after "asked:" piffle.
I also dislike lazy writing like this:
Traditional boundaries and markers had come down, and many lacked a clear sense of identity. In America such people followed Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson; in Iran they turned to Ayatollah Khomeini. In Britain they voted for Margaret Thatcher...
So...the movements that rose up to follow leaders as diverse as Falwell, Robertson, Khomeini, and Thatcher all stemmed from lacking a clear sense of identity? Apart from being absurdly condescending, those sentences are so sweeping they mean nothing.
Armstrong relaxed her hostility to religion(s) and became enamored of researching and writing about them. It seems clear, though, that her hostility to faith remains. Is that a problem for a religion writer? I can't answer that completely as I haven't read her book-length writings on God, but as of now I'm 100% suspicious.
December 13, 2017
On a blind date many many years ago in Manchester, my companion said to me at one point late in the evening, "You're very cerebral, aren't you?" She didn't mean it as an insult, but she didn't mean it as a compliment, either. She meant that I was lacking in the ability to talk in ordinary language about ordinary things, to relate to others in an intimate, personal way, preferring the abstract and high-flown instead. This anecdote came to mind (she was wrong, incidentally; I was just shy and wary) upon completing Karen Armstrong's The Spiral Staircase, a memoir of her dialectical progress towards transcendence (her early convent years), away from transcendence (her middle atheist years), and back to a higher form of transcendence (religion without God). It is a fairly banal story made complex by Armstrong's epilepsy and the unusual starting point of her trajectory, but the book fails to ignite any strong empathy with the author simply because the recounting of her story is too, well, cerebral. Armstrong explains how her epilepsy and her career path have always rendered her an outsider, on the margins of society, and this is reflected in the detached descriptions she uses of both herself and others. It is as if she was watching herself from outside rather than living the life she describes. Consequently, despite her English degree and Oxford education, she fails to bring her own life to life. There are very few anecdotes to provide a fuller idea of her personality. There is little dialogue. There are next to no recognizable jokes or laughs to be had. What stories there are, are told in a flat, academic manner, with no sense of occasion - she misses the precise, acute observations, the minutiae that might lend a scene vividness. I got the sense that, for all Armstrong's arguments about compassion and God (not love, by the way; the word 'love' rarely appears), while she appears to understand the mechanics of these concepts and emotions, she seems not to have any understanding of intimacy, of what it means to be caught up in life, in community, in the world. It is only toward the end of the book, when she sees communities of Jews and Muslims at prayer and comes to understand how the act of prayer in itself, as a behaviour, shapes a person's outlook, habitus, and psychology, that she begins to understand what it means to truly be a part of a community, but because she herself has always been an outsider, the language she uses to describe events, to describe her own life, lacks vibrancy and vitality.
Although Armstrong was not trained as a philosopher, her memoir reminded me very much of the autobiography of Bertrand Russell, which I found disappointing for the same reason. The capacity to stand outside oneself and regard one's life in the cold harsh light of day, as one person among many, is an interesting exercise in objectivity (and a sine qua non for utilitarianism, perhaps), but the whole point of an autobiography is to draw out idiosyncrasies, the universal in the particular but also the particular in the universal. This book, like Russell's, read as though it was a story of someone long dead, written by someone dead at the time of writing it.
There's a joke about a tourist in Ireland asking a farmer for directions, and the farmer says, "You don't want to start from here." By contrast, while Armstrong's heart is clearly in the right place, it's the vehicle she travels by that makes her journey a disappointment.
Although Armstrong was not trained as a philosopher, her memoir reminded me very much of the autobiography of Bertrand Russell, which I found disappointing for the same reason. The capacity to stand outside oneself and regard one's life in the cold harsh light of day, as one person among many, is an interesting exercise in objectivity (and a sine qua non for utilitarianism, perhaps), but the whole point of an autobiography is to draw out idiosyncrasies, the universal in the particular but also the particular in the universal. This book, like Russell's, read as though it was a story of someone long dead, written by someone dead at the time of writing it.
There's a joke about a tourist in Ireland asking a farmer for directions, and the farmer says, "You don't want to start from here." By contrast, while Armstrong's heart is clearly in the right place, it's the vehicle she travels by that makes her journey a disappointment.
February 2, 2022
4.5*
Reread 2022: 4.5*
Reread 2022: 4.5*
January 26, 2008
This is a remarkably personal and insightful journey which takes us through the loss of hope and faith and then back to a higher realm of love and understanding. Here are my personal thoughts about this book:
1. By the end of the book, I felt a bond with her that is similar to something I have felt for some of my best professors and teachers who helped me understand complex things. Karen is extremely honest and open and able to describe emotions and reactions which many thoughtful people must have to orthodox religious training and dogma. She works so hard to do the right thing and yet she is unable to feel the connection to God and make the decision to accept things as they are. She is the opposite of the normal rebellious person who bolts. She is the long suffering special person who will follow the rules, sacrifice and do the right things over and over again to come up with the expected result of obedience and conformity. And yet, that brilliant and analytical mind of hers cannot allow herself to be tricked or cajoled into compliance. I feel that this is because she is brutally honest and pure.
2. She lets us into her very private and sometimes sad life. We know her every fear and understand that she is shy, awkward socially, and backward, and as she heals and moves to the next level of understanding in her life, we root for her and admire the things she is trying to do. Her accomplishments are huge and she has done it virtually all alone with extreme patience and many setbacks as well as thousands of days carefully studying the history of religion, various poets and other important writers. The ultra close relationship we have with her every day struggles helps us comprehend her conclusions and remarks about spirituality, religion and life. She has taken the time to do what many of us would like to do but can't do because of other more pressing obligations and, perhaps, addiction to regular shallow life things.
3. She is imprisoned by her unknown health problems, her religious obligations, fear and shyness, and yet we see her determination get her to a level of freedom experienced by very few people. She loses her faith, gains a cause to help others understand how religion at a certain level can be damaging, and as she reads and studies each of the three major religions, she gradually moves back to a spiritual understanding that gives her a new freedom and love of everyone. Along the way, she teaches us some of the basics about each of the religions and why we need to understand them before we assume that all others are incorrect and horrible. This gives us hope and makes us want to reexamine and study others and then move to that higher level that is taught by all of them. Certainly, it makes me want to study more about Judaism and the prophet Mohammed's teaching.
I finished the book with a great and positive feeling that there may be hope in the world if we could take the time to truly understand each other. It's a great book. Thanks, Karen.
1. By the end of the book, I felt a bond with her that is similar to something I have felt for some of my best professors and teachers who helped me understand complex things. Karen is extremely honest and open and able to describe emotions and reactions which many thoughtful people must have to orthodox religious training and dogma. She works so hard to do the right thing and yet she is unable to feel the connection to God and make the decision to accept things as they are. She is the opposite of the normal rebellious person who bolts. She is the long suffering special person who will follow the rules, sacrifice and do the right things over and over again to come up with the expected result of obedience and conformity. And yet, that brilliant and analytical mind of hers cannot allow herself to be tricked or cajoled into compliance. I feel that this is because she is brutally honest and pure.
2. She lets us into her very private and sometimes sad life. We know her every fear and understand that she is shy, awkward socially, and backward, and as she heals and moves to the next level of understanding in her life, we root for her and admire the things she is trying to do. Her accomplishments are huge and she has done it virtually all alone with extreme patience and many setbacks as well as thousands of days carefully studying the history of religion, various poets and other important writers. The ultra close relationship we have with her every day struggles helps us comprehend her conclusions and remarks about spirituality, religion and life. She has taken the time to do what many of us would like to do but can't do because of other more pressing obligations and, perhaps, addiction to regular shallow life things.
3. She is imprisoned by her unknown health problems, her religious obligations, fear and shyness, and yet we see her determination get her to a level of freedom experienced by very few people. She loses her faith, gains a cause to help others understand how religion at a certain level can be damaging, and as she reads and studies each of the three major religions, she gradually moves back to a spiritual understanding that gives her a new freedom and love of everyone. Along the way, she teaches us some of the basics about each of the religions and why we need to understand them before we assume that all others are incorrect and horrible. This gives us hope and makes us want to reexamine and study others and then move to that higher level that is taught by all of them. Certainly, it makes me want to study more about Judaism and the prophet Mohammed's teaching.
I finished the book with a great and positive feeling that there may be hope in the world if we could take the time to truly understand each other. It's a great book. Thanks, Karen.
July 16, 2017
Before I went to visit and spend two months in Bethlehem, Palestine, I wanted to read something about the history of the area, not a religious book, just something historical that went beyond the recent familiar history since the British abandoned those residing in these lands to their fate.
I chose to read Karen Armstrong's A History of Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths and actually read it while I was in situ. It was a history of multitudes of power shifts and massacres and when I finished it, I said to my then husband (born in Bethlehem), "Congratulations, you survived." And I wondered who these people really were, who have survived such a long, brutal history and come to be living in these towns of Jerusalem and Bethlehem today. One thing is for sure, they are survivors and most likely have traces of every people that has ever passed along this pilgrim trail.
Recently I was recommended a couple more of Karen Armstrong's books A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and The Great Transformation and I decided to add to this collection by getting this memoir The Spiral Staircase, about her life after leaving the convent, where she spent seven years leading up to her becoming the well renowned author she is today.
I wasn't interested in her life as a nun, or her leaving the convent, but how she had used what she learned in rejecting her faith to inspire her towards immersing herself in the history and catalyst for humanity's desire for organised religion.
This memoir thus starts as she is trying to finish her university education and doctoral thesis, then her foray into becoming the partial carer of an autistic child, her teaching, her involvement with Channel 4 and the BBC in producing a series of programs on St Paul and then the crusades, and finally launching herself into a writing career when it appeared all other options were closed to her.
Every venture she went into, except the writing career, followed a similar trajectory, where she did the thing she'd convinced herself was what she should be doing, only to eventually lose hope, which became the turning point, or the spiral in the staircase, where she changed direction, it always seemed dramatic and quite often was, however my perspective on those turning points is that they were a course correction, she went along a path for as long at it had something to teach her and then she'd be literally thrown out of it - this kind of thing usually happens when we know we need to change a circumstance but we do nothing, and seven years in the convent had conditioned her to ignore any kind of inner guidance or intuition, making these changes when they did occur seem more dramatic than they might have been, had she transitioned earlier.
I loved reading about her journey and couldn't help but the remember the nuns from my secondary school education, who were kind of elusive figures on the periphery of our lives, we lived in the same premises, for us it was a boarding school, for them in a separate wing, it was a retirement home, they were very, very old and the only time we saw them was in the chapel on Sundays. They were shadows of whoever they had been and we had no real interaction with them, except the ancient and tough 90 year old Sister Conway who still worked in the scullery and put her gnarled, arthritic hands into boiling hot water as if it were tepid.
Karen Armstrong took years to undo the conditioning of those years in the convent and even then probably will never be able to do so completely. An intellectual but not really suited to academia, she eventually finds her place studying the great religious and spiritual practices looking for common threads, she's less interested in differences than in commonalities.
As she researches and learns how to use empathy and compassion to inhabit the minds of those she seeks to understands, she comes closer to a spiritual experience than anything she experienced as a Christian. She has let go of God as objective fact and of belief as being a necessity, discovering instead 'practice' and compassion to be the one significant practice of all the faiths that succeeds in managing the ego sufficiently to create peace and harmony.
I enjoyed her honest, though often self deprecating account of this period in her life and particularly loved what she experienced when she visited Jerusalem, the cross cultural encounters and being told to drop the small talk and niceties:
It becomes even more humorous when she is invited to do the same:
which she surprises herself in doing after a particularly charged day when tensions were high and Joel had snapped at her rudely. His response is excellent, he is proud of her!
The other amusing experience in reading my copy of this book, was the presence of the previous reader in the margins, who not happy to have merely marked up the pages, but had to share her thoughts more vociferously and she clearly wasn't nearly as impressed as I was with the work and seemed to want to have a bit of a rant and share her own experiences, which were mostly entertaining but sometimes annoying, especially her conclusion! Here are some of her comments, since no one else is going to have this same reading experience, I have a unique copy!
page 123 After speaking about how her years as a nun had broken something in her, Karen Armstrong writes:
And my interlocutor writes
Armstrong mentions that she isn't going to write about her failed love relationships, seeing no reason to dwell on episodes that didn't develop into anything significant and writes:
to which my interlocutor responds:
and even adds later on
which is a mild but neverthelesless an example of the kind of behaviour that leads to disharmony, conflict, war even, for if there is a conclusion to what Karen Armstrong has learned and one lesson she gifts to her readers, known as Hillel's Golden Rule that all great leaders have taught, Confucius proclaimed it 500 years before him, Buddha and Jesus taught it, it is the bedrock of the Koran:
As one of her advisors Hyam Maccoby said
I chose to read Karen Armstrong's A History of Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths and actually read it while I was in situ. It was a history of multitudes of power shifts and massacres and when I finished it, I said to my then husband (born in Bethlehem), "Congratulations, you survived." And I wondered who these people really were, who have survived such a long, brutal history and come to be living in these towns of Jerusalem and Bethlehem today. One thing is for sure, they are survivors and most likely have traces of every people that has ever passed along this pilgrim trail.
Recently I was recommended a couple more of Karen Armstrong's books A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and The Great Transformation and I decided to add to this collection by getting this memoir The Spiral Staircase, about her life after leaving the convent, where she spent seven years leading up to her becoming the well renowned author she is today.
I wasn't interested in her life as a nun, or her leaving the convent, but how she had used what she learned in rejecting her faith to inspire her towards immersing herself in the history and catalyst for humanity's desire for organised religion.
This memoir thus starts as she is trying to finish her university education and doctoral thesis, then her foray into becoming the partial carer of an autistic child, her teaching, her involvement with Channel 4 and the BBC in producing a series of programs on St Paul and then the crusades, and finally launching herself into a writing career when it appeared all other options were closed to her.
Every venture she went into, except the writing career, followed a similar trajectory, where she did the thing she'd convinced herself was what she should be doing, only to eventually lose hope, which became the turning point, or the spiral in the staircase, where she changed direction, it always seemed dramatic and quite often was, however my perspective on those turning points is that they were a course correction, she went along a path for as long at it had something to teach her and then she'd be literally thrown out of it - this kind of thing usually happens when we know we need to change a circumstance but we do nothing, and seven years in the convent had conditioned her to ignore any kind of inner guidance or intuition, making these changes when they did occur seem more dramatic than they might have been, had she transitioned earlier.
I loved reading about her journey and couldn't help but the remember the nuns from my secondary school education, who were kind of elusive figures on the periphery of our lives, we lived in the same premises, for us it was a boarding school, for them in a separate wing, it was a retirement home, they were very, very old and the only time we saw them was in the chapel on Sundays. They were shadows of whoever they had been and we had no real interaction with them, except the ancient and tough 90 year old Sister Conway who still worked in the scullery and put her gnarled, arthritic hands into boiling hot water as if it were tepid.
Karen Armstrong took years to undo the conditioning of those years in the convent and even then probably will never be able to do so completely. An intellectual but not really suited to academia, she eventually finds her place studying the great religious and spiritual practices looking for common threads, she's less interested in differences than in commonalities.
As she researches and learns how to use empathy and compassion to inhabit the minds of those she seeks to understands, she comes closer to a spiritual experience than anything she experienced as a Christian. She has let go of God as objective fact and of belief as being a necessity, discovering instead 'practice' and compassion to be the one significant practice of all the faiths that succeeds in managing the ego sufficiently to create peace and harmony.
I enjoyed her honest, though often self deprecating account of this period in her life and particularly loved what she experienced when she visited Jerusalem, the cross cultural encounters and being told to drop the small talk and niceties:
"Karen! You are not in England now. There is no need to be a polite English lady here in Israel. We are not formal people. There is no point to speak if there is nothing to say."
It becomes even more humorous when she is invited to do the same:
"Do not be a polite English lady. If you think I am unreasonable, tell me to get lost, to shut up- whatever you like!"
which she surprises herself in doing after a particularly charged day when tensions were high and Joel had snapped at her rudely. His response is excellent, he is proud of her!
The other amusing experience in reading my copy of this book, was the presence of the previous reader in the margins, who not happy to have merely marked up the pages, but had to share her thoughts more vociferously and she clearly wasn't nearly as impressed as I was with the work and seemed to want to have a bit of a rant and share her own experiences, which were mostly entertaining but sometimes annoying, especially her conclusion! Here are some of her comments, since no one else is going to have this same reading experience, I have a unique copy!
page 123 After speaking about how her years as a nun had broken something in her, Karen Armstrong writes:
"And I did not want to nourish myself. What was the point of feeding my body, when my mind and heart had been irreparably broken?"
And my interlocutor writes
"as I was after the divorce"
Armstrong mentions that she isn't going to write about her failed love relationships, seeing no reason to dwell on episodes that didn't develop into anything significant and writes:
"Just as I was prevented from becoming an academic, so too I have never been able to achieve a normal domestic existence, and this, like my epilepsy, had also ensured that I remained an outsider in a society in which coupledom is the norm"
to which my interlocutor responds:
"oh do stop feeling sorry for yourself!"
and even adds later on
"perhaps you are just unloveable"
which is a mild but neverthelesless an example of the kind of behaviour that leads to disharmony, conflict, war even, for if there is a conclusion to what Karen Armstrong has learned and one lesson she gifts to her readers, known as Hillel's Golden Rule that all great leaders have taught, Confucius proclaimed it 500 years before him, Buddha and Jesus taught it, it is the bedrock of the Koran:
"Do not do to others as you would not have done unto you"
As one of her advisors Hyam Maccoby said
"It takes more discipline to refrain from doing/saying harm to others than to be a do-gooder and project your needs and desires onto other people."
August 8, 2010
"Theology is – or should be – a species of poetry, which read quickly or encountered in a hubbub of noise makes no sense." Karen Armstrong
I read The Spiral Staircase a few weeks back between road trips, first to visit an aunt and uncle in a small university community and second to attend an Episcopal peace conference at a mountaintop retreat / convent. The timing of my read of this memoir (about a nun who left the church to pursue graduate work at Oxford only to leave academia and make her way as an agnostic writing about religion) between these two trips was significant in molding my opinion of the book as were the circumstances and motivations that got it into my hands in the first place.
During the visit with our aunt and uncle, Frank and I shared that we'd joined a radically inclusive and diverse inner-city Episcopal Church, and what a remarkable experience it had been for us. The aunt and uncle (who'd always been so unwaveringly supportive of us through our educational and artistic success and struggles... what with graduate schools, relocations, under-employment and penury) were not pleased. In fact, they were quite appalled that we had joined what they considered a "blood cult" and that we had done something that seemed "so out of character for both of you." Nonetheless, they consoled themselves by saying that it was probably "just a phase" and we would get through it one way or another. (Neither aunt nor uncle were much for religion, especially Christianity.)
And then our aunt told me I should read one of Karen Armstrong's books because it recorded how she had gone through a similar religious phase, even to the point of becoming a nun at 17, but eventually "cured" herself of the debilitating religious condition. Though somehow I'd missed even knowing who Armstrong was, I was excited to be exposed to her books... not in small part due to my fascination with monastic life... Christian or Buddhist or whatever variety... and also that this fascination had been much of the motivation behind signing up for the peace conference at the convent. I really wanted to get even a tiny glimpse into how different monastic communities lived. I had so many mundane and practical questions, not to mention the scholarly and spiritual ones. Anyway, the aunt had a copy of the book, so I dove right into reading it while we were still on our visit.
So... while the familial words were harsh and the expressions disappointing, I was grateful for the book and remarkably un-offended, mostly because I know where the aunt and uncle are coming from. I've been there and felt that baffled confusion as I tried to make sense of other people's religious belief. But eventually not unlike Karen Armstrong (though her life experiences were superficially different than my own, what we'd experienced on a structural level was remarkably similar), I too had come to realize that faith is not about belief, but about practice. "Belief" is really more of a fundamentalist and literalist concern. Spiritual practice is something else quite entirely, and while some practices are solitary and others have the support of a religious community, practice is essentially about ritual, repetition, movements of the body, states of the mind and compassionate action.
As Armstrong says, "Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed. The myths and laws of religion are not true because they conform to some metaphysical, scientific, or historical reality but because they are life enhancing."
Anyway, I found the book to be a compelling read not just for the scholarly and spiritual content, but for the story itself. I particularly enjoyed reading about her stay with an academic couple from Oxford while caring for the couple's autistic son. The glimpses into the functioning of that household and the life of this child were quite strange and beautiful.
And though Armstrong didn't answer most of my curiosity about monastic life, she did afford glimpses into other ways of living and, surprisingly, mirror my own evolving spirituality. And at this point, I would have to disagree with our aunt who said Armstrong was somehow "cured" from religion. Seemed to me that Armstrong only became more conscious and thoughtful about religious practice.
I read The Spiral Staircase a few weeks back between road trips, first to visit an aunt and uncle in a small university community and second to attend an Episcopal peace conference at a mountaintop retreat / convent. The timing of my read of this memoir (about a nun who left the church to pursue graduate work at Oxford only to leave academia and make her way as an agnostic writing about religion) between these two trips was significant in molding my opinion of the book as were the circumstances and motivations that got it into my hands in the first place.
During the visit with our aunt and uncle, Frank and I shared that we'd joined a radically inclusive and diverse inner-city Episcopal Church, and what a remarkable experience it had been for us. The aunt and uncle (who'd always been so unwaveringly supportive of us through our educational and artistic success and struggles... what with graduate schools, relocations, under-employment and penury) were not pleased. In fact, they were quite appalled that we had joined what they considered a "blood cult" and that we had done something that seemed "so out of character for both of you." Nonetheless, they consoled themselves by saying that it was probably "just a phase" and we would get through it one way or another. (Neither aunt nor uncle were much for religion, especially Christianity.)
And then our aunt told me I should read one of Karen Armstrong's books because it recorded how she had gone through a similar religious phase, even to the point of becoming a nun at 17, but eventually "cured" herself of the debilitating religious condition. Though somehow I'd missed even knowing who Armstrong was, I was excited to be exposed to her books... not in small part due to my fascination with monastic life... Christian or Buddhist or whatever variety... and also that this fascination had been much of the motivation behind signing up for the peace conference at the convent. I really wanted to get even a tiny glimpse into how different monastic communities lived. I had so many mundane and practical questions, not to mention the scholarly and spiritual ones. Anyway, the aunt had a copy of the book, so I dove right into reading it while we were still on our visit.
So... while the familial words were harsh and the expressions disappointing, I was grateful for the book and remarkably un-offended, mostly because I know where the aunt and uncle are coming from. I've been there and felt that baffled confusion as I tried to make sense of other people's religious belief. But eventually not unlike Karen Armstrong (though her life experiences were superficially different than my own, what we'd experienced on a structural level was remarkably similar), I too had come to realize that faith is not about belief, but about practice. "Belief" is really more of a fundamentalist and literalist concern. Spiritual practice is something else quite entirely, and while some practices are solitary and others have the support of a religious community, practice is essentially about ritual, repetition, movements of the body, states of the mind and compassionate action.
As Armstrong says, "Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed. The myths and laws of religion are not true because they conform to some metaphysical, scientific, or historical reality but because they are life enhancing."
Anyway, I found the book to be a compelling read not just for the scholarly and spiritual content, but for the story itself. I particularly enjoyed reading about her stay with an academic couple from Oxford while caring for the couple's autistic son. The glimpses into the functioning of that household and the life of this child were quite strange and beautiful.
And though Armstrong didn't answer most of my curiosity about monastic life, she did afford glimpses into other ways of living and, surprisingly, mirror my own evolving spirituality. And at this point, I would have to disagree with our aunt who said Armstrong was somehow "cured" from religion. Seemed to me that Armstrong only became more conscious and thoughtful about religious practice.
September 4, 2008
The first book I read that helped me realize that I was not alone in my experience of post-seminary difficulty. Armstrong's account of leaving the convent was so powerfully analogous to my own experiences that I nearly wept as I read (something I only do on very rare occasions), both with remembered pain and grief and with joy that there was nothing peculiarly wrong with me or my experience as a refugee from a life of professional holiness.
February 20, 2017
From leaving the familiar environment of the nunnery, unfairly 'failing' her graduate dissertation, discovering her epileptic condition, spending years of her working life in a high school teaching job that failed to challenge or interest her, and crying nightly over her jobless and purposeless state-- Karen Armstrong courageously relates the trials that had seemed to wholly compose her life. I am thankful for it. Although I am not sure how to react to her almost uncritical paean to Mohammedanism when the religion poses a lot of the same problems that previously drove her away from Christianity, I am grateful for her message at the end of the book-- a passionate call to compassion and empathy as our only attitude in dealing with every person, no matter how different or difficult. I have thought about it a lot and I hope only that this is indeed what I will come to do
March 4, 2015
This book is excellent and a joy to read. Extremely uplifting too.
I may try and write a review on it.
I may try and write a review on it.
December 29, 2011
Every once in a while, I get around to reading a book that surprises me because the author has put into words things that I have felt the urge to say, but not had the words for, nor had ever seen in print. Karen Armstrong's memoir, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness, is one of these books. If a soul could be said to have emotional strings, then Karen's book resonated with those frequencies in mine, and this made the book a breeze to read.
It had sat on my shelf for several years before that. I had feared an intellectual treatise on religion and someone's struggles with obscure doctrines that I ought to know something about or might be curious about in a tangential way. What I got instead, from the very first chapter, and continuing almost without interruption to the conclusion, was a very personal account of the inner workings of a mind and a heart that struggled passionately through great confusion and frustration to deal with such mundane problems as eating enough, finding a job to support herself financially, and alongside that, defining a personal spirituality and discovering a mission in life. She concludes by sharing her experience of awakening to meaning in religious stories and rituals, an experience whose potential had been nearly beaten out of her by the harshness and inattention of those whom she turned to for answers, guidance, and help, though ultimately her understanding transcended any one particular religion and become a faith in the practice of compassion itself.
She recounts with a depth of understanding seldom shared publicly, how each door was closed to her in life, despite her hard work and persistent efforts to do the right thing by conventional standards and describes how she strangely met a much bigger success by defying convention and dedicating herself to an unpopular project that she knew was right for her to complete. And how the success in itself was not as important as getting a message out that she feared was not being heard. Having experienced not being heard many times by what seemed to be responsible people, Karen, a true "wounded healer," can hear what is going on in our world and our inner lives and offers a uniquely human perspective, which is flawed at times and deeply perceptive and deeply healing at others, like humans are in real life.
One reviewer wrote how people familiar with therapeutic frameworks might think it were pretty standard stuff to read of Karen's discovery that "her frugality was a subconscious manifestation of her belief that she didn't have a future, that she was not going to be able to earn her own living." I would say the reviewer did not have to anticipate being alone in her admiration of such insights, that even seasoned therapists and their clients can be a little awed because they were arrived at, not on a therapist's couch, but on a personal path in very undramatic moments of living day to day. Karen Armstrong's memoir encourages us all to find our personal path in life, the one that might lead to a mission that influences people on a global scale, or just make us a better person in our own lives.
It had sat on my shelf for several years before that. I had feared an intellectual treatise on religion and someone's struggles with obscure doctrines that I ought to know something about or might be curious about in a tangential way. What I got instead, from the very first chapter, and continuing almost without interruption to the conclusion, was a very personal account of the inner workings of a mind and a heart that struggled passionately through great confusion and frustration to deal with such mundane problems as eating enough, finding a job to support herself financially, and alongside that, defining a personal spirituality and discovering a mission in life. She concludes by sharing her experience of awakening to meaning in religious stories and rituals, an experience whose potential had been nearly beaten out of her by the harshness and inattention of those whom she turned to for answers, guidance, and help, though ultimately her understanding transcended any one particular religion and become a faith in the practice of compassion itself.
She recounts with a depth of understanding seldom shared publicly, how each door was closed to her in life, despite her hard work and persistent efforts to do the right thing by conventional standards and describes how she strangely met a much bigger success by defying convention and dedicating herself to an unpopular project that she knew was right for her to complete. And how the success in itself was not as important as getting a message out that she feared was not being heard. Having experienced not being heard many times by what seemed to be responsible people, Karen, a true "wounded healer," can hear what is going on in our world and our inner lives and offers a uniquely human perspective, which is flawed at times and deeply perceptive and deeply healing at others, like humans are in real life.
One reviewer wrote how people familiar with therapeutic frameworks might think it were pretty standard stuff to read of Karen's discovery that "her frugality was a subconscious manifestation of her belief that she didn't have a future, that she was not going to be able to earn her own living." I would say the reviewer did not have to anticipate being alone in her admiration of such insights, that even seasoned therapists and their clients can be a little awed because they were arrived at, not on a therapist's couch, but on a personal path in very undramatic moments of living day to day. Karen Armstrong's memoir encourages us all to find our personal path in life, the one that might lead to a mission that influences people on a global scale, or just make us a better person in our own lives.
November 14, 2011
Although this was more of a three in some ways, I'm giving it a four because of the way it spoke to me.
I loved Through the Narrow Gate: A Memoir of Spiritual Discovery, Armstrong's memoir of her years spent in a convent and her decision to leave. Aside from offering an intriguing description of a nun's life in the '60s (Armstrong lets us know on several occasions that it's probably much different now with the changes of Vatican II), I found that I related to it personally as a religious person and graduate of religious institutions. Certainly my experiences were not nearly as oppressive as some of the stories Armstrong tells; at the same time, I definitely connected with a lot of it.
In The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness, Armstrong continues her story and recounts her slow adjustment to secular life after the convent, an adjustment which was severely hampered by unanticipated setbacks like undiagnosed physical illness and career disappointments. Initially I found myself fascinated by Armstrong's descriptions of needing to relearn how to think for herself after years of teaching herself to submit to others and how to feel compassion after years of being criticized for her undue "sensitivity."
Unfortunately the narrative frequently dragged and got bogged down in excess detail. Perhaps I was ultimately less interested in the details of Armstrong's life once it was no longer convent-based and bore a stronger resemblance to my day-to-day routines; I don't know. I also felt like the story gradually degenerated into "and then I wrote this book...and then I made that film...and then I did that interview..." While it's true that Karen showed a great deal of self-respect and dignity in not sharing the details of, say, her love affairs and other things that might be more fascinating on a voyeuristic level, the book got dry and boring after a while though punctuated by occasional interesting insights.
So I guess it really was more of a three, but I'm still giving it a four because it did speak to me on many levels and I think Karen's post-convent adjustment is as worthy a topic as her life in the convent.
I loved Through the Narrow Gate: A Memoir of Spiritual Discovery, Armstrong's memoir of her years spent in a convent and her decision to leave. Aside from offering an intriguing description of a nun's life in the '60s (Armstrong lets us know on several occasions that it's probably much different now with the changes of Vatican II), I found that I related to it personally as a religious person and graduate of religious institutions. Certainly my experiences were not nearly as oppressive as some of the stories Armstrong tells; at the same time, I definitely connected with a lot of it.
In The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness, Armstrong continues her story and recounts her slow adjustment to secular life after the convent, an adjustment which was severely hampered by unanticipated setbacks like undiagnosed physical illness and career disappointments. Initially I found myself fascinated by Armstrong's descriptions of needing to relearn how to think for herself after years of teaching herself to submit to others and how to feel compassion after years of being criticized for her undue "sensitivity."
Unfortunately the narrative frequently dragged and got bogged down in excess detail. Perhaps I was ultimately less interested in the details of Armstrong's life once it was no longer convent-based and bore a stronger resemblance to my day-to-day routines; I don't know. I also felt like the story gradually degenerated into "and then I wrote this book...and then I made that film...and then I did that interview..." While it's true that Karen showed a great deal of self-respect and dignity in not sharing the details of, say, her love affairs and other things that might be more fascinating on a voyeuristic level, the book got dry and boring after a while though punctuated by occasional interesting insights.
So I guess it really was more of a three, but I'm still giving it a four because it did speak to me on many levels and I think Karen's post-convent adjustment is as worthy a topic as her life in the convent.
November 7, 2017
This is Armstrong's second memoir from when she leaves the convent and begins a scholarly life and career. Although she tries to detach herself from the religious life, the concept of transcendent does not leave her. Through her works, she has tried to understand the religions, what connects them and what makes them different. It is well worth mentioning that her book "Muhammad, prophet of our time" is one of the few unbiased western biographies of the life of the prophet Muhammad. What makes her works outstanding is that she believes in living the traditions in order to understand them. That is how she has spent her life and studied Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
Has she found God? That is the question people always ask her. Her answer: God is not an objective fact. God is indefinable; no establishment or institution can have the last word on the divine. It is better to say that God does not exist, because our notion of existence is too limited to apply to God. Rational analysis is useless for God but indispensable for mathematics, medicine or science.
Armstrong's suffers, struggles and seekings throughout the years eventually give her some insights which are mainly reflected in the last two chapters (7 and 8).
From the book:
"If conventional beliefs make you compassionate, kind and respectful of the sacred rights of others, this is good religion. If your beliefs make you intolerant, unkind and belligerent, this is bad religion, no matter how orthodox it is."
"Compassion, of course, does not mean feeling sorry for people. It means feeling with them."
"Like great art, the best theology tends to be universalistic."
"In every tradition, I was discovering, people turned to art when they tried to express or evoke a religious experience: to painting, music, architecture, dance or poetry. They rarely attempted to define their apprehension of the divine in logical discourse or in the scientific language of hard fact."
Has she found God? That is the question people always ask her. Her answer: God is not an objective fact. God is indefinable; no establishment or institution can have the last word on the divine. It is better to say that God does not exist, because our notion of existence is too limited to apply to God. Rational analysis is useless for God but indispensable for mathematics, medicine or science.
Armstrong's suffers, struggles and seekings throughout the years eventually give her some insights which are mainly reflected in the last two chapters (7 and 8).
From the book:
"If conventional beliefs make you compassionate, kind and respectful of the sacred rights of others, this is good religion. If your beliefs make you intolerant, unkind and belligerent, this is bad religion, no matter how orthodox it is."
"Compassion, of course, does not mean feeling sorry for people. It means feeling with them."
"Like great art, the best theology tends to be universalistic."
"In every tradition, I was discovering, people turned to art when they tried to express or evoke a religious experience: to painting, music, architecture, dance or poetry. They rarely attempted to define their apprehension of the divine in logical discourse or in the scientific language of hard fact."
May 4, 2014
Received through Goodreads First Reads. (Thanks!) Karen Armstrong is nothing less than a master of the written word. While this is a memoir of her life, it is also a powerful look into religious theology and personal transformation. I had previously read her outstanding book "A History of God", and was captivated by this read describing how she came to write such a book. Starting out as a catholic nun who later leaves the church and religious life behind, only to come full circle to a place of spiritual transformation which she describes as "The spirituality of empathy". She describes her feeling of being forever on the outside as an important part of her journey. After reading this book, I no longer look at failure in the same light. For it is only through her failures that life taught her exactly what was needed to reach a higher level of growth. I also learned that trying to find God through my rational thought is useless, as God transcends any kind of rational analysis. She takes us to the core of all religious beliefs for which there are no words, which go beyond words, and believes the litmus test for all religion, theology, etc. is, does it cultivate compassion? I believe this is an essential read for people of all faiths, for as she clearly states "what our world needs now is not belief, not certainty, but compassionate action and practically expressed respect for the sacred value of all human beings, even our enemies." I could not agree with her more as she says, "The study of other people's beliefs is now no longer merely desirable, but necessary for our very survival." I highly recommend this book, or maybe I should say work of art.
January 8, 2009
I enjoyed this book more and more the deeper I got into it. Karen Armstrong is such an appealingly intelligent and slightly odd person. A fascinating memoir.
November 4, 2014
The spiral staircase merupakan novel autobiografi ke tiga tulisan Karen Armstrong. Yg pertama adalah through the narrow gate, dan yang kedua, beginning the world. Mulanya, bg aku jumlah autobiografi yg sebegitu adalah absurd. Satu spatutnya dah cukup. Tapi ada sebabnya knp Karen tulis smp 3 autobiografi beliau.
Through the narrow gate adalah lebih kpd pengalaman beliau selama 7 tahun menjadi rahib bermula pd umur 17 tahun. Beginning the world pula merakamkan perjalanan hidup beliau pasca gereja (rupa2nya kehidupan di gereja begitu mengesankan mentally terhadap seseorng). Dlm buku autobiografi beliau yang ketiga ini, Karen mengakui bahawa ia merupakam suatu timbal balik terhadap buku keduanya itu kerana katanya, beginning the world adalah suatu buku yang gagal, dan ditulis terlalu awal (sewaktu beliau 40 an).
Nama buku ini berkait dengan puisi ash wednesday tulisan ts elliot. Puisi tersebut sangat signifikan di dalam membantu merajahkan kisah kehidupan Karen sehinggakan setiap bab dalam buku tersebut dinamakan dengan beberapa frasa daripada puisi tersebut (kecuali satu bab). Dan selepas membaca buku ini dengan merujuk silangnya dgn kehidupan Karen, aku mampu lihat kesyahduan puisi ini.
Karen di usia remajanya adalah seorang yg mencari2 erti dan diri. Namun proses indoktrinasi selama 7 tahun di gereja telah "mematahkannya" (dari sisi ini aku mampu berempati dgnnya, walaupun tempoh masa bg aku adalah lebih singkat). Karen masuk ke oxford dlm keadaan keimanannya telah luntur dan remuk. Pun begitu "agama" sering singgah ke dalam kehidupannya dalam waktu2 yg dia tidak jangka. Sehinggakan, tiba di bahagian hujung2 buku ini, Karen mengisyaratkan bahawa dia menjadi kembali beragama dalam erti yang lebih mendalam dan jujur.
Buku ini seronok untuk dihayati. Aku menjumpai sisa2 diri aku dalam Karen, terutama dalam pengalaman2 yg dilaluinya di dlm beragama.
Buku ini juga membantu aku untuk mengkategorikan Karen sbg penulis yg bagaimana (alangkah bagusnya kalau aku membaca buku ini terlebih dahulu sebelum A History of god dan the case for god. Tidak sangka pula sastera adalah kemahiran terkuat Karen (dan spt ramai sasterawan2 yg berbicara ttg cinta, Karen gagal dalam percintaan :p).
Through the narrow gate adalah lebih kpd pengalaman beliau selama 7 tahun menjadi rahib bermula pd umur 17 tahun. Beginning the world pula merakamkan perjalanan hidup beliau pasca gereja (rupa2nya kehidupan di gereja begitu mengesankan mentally terhadap seseorng). Dlm buku autobiografi beliau yang ketiga ini, Karen mengakui bahawa ia merupakam suatu timbal balik terhadap buku keduanya itu kerana katanya, beginning the world adalah suatu buku yang gagal, dan ditulis terlalu awal (sewaktu beliau 40 an).
Nama buku ini berkait dengan puisi ash wednesday tulisan ts elliot. Puisi tersebut sangat signifikan di dalam membantu merajahkan kisah kehidupan Karen sehinggakan setiap bab dalam buku tersebut dinamakan dengan beberapa frasa daripada puisi tersebut (kecuali satu bab). Dan selepas membaca buku ini dengan merujuk silangnya dgn kehidupan Karen, aku mampu lihat kesyahduan puisi ini.
Karen di usia remajanya adalah seorang yg mencari2 erti dan diri. Namun proses indoktrinasi selama 7 tahun di gereja telah "mematahkannya" (dari sisi ini aku mampu berempati dgnnya, walaupun tempoh masa bg aku adalah lebih singkat). Karen masuk ke oxford dlm keadaan keimanannya telah luntur dan remuk. Pun begitu "agama" sering singgah ke dalam kehidupannya dalam waktu2 yg dia tidak jangka. Sehinggakan, tiba di bahagian hujung2 buku ini, Karen mengisyaratkan bahawa dia menjadi kembali beragama dalam erti yang lebih mendalam dan jujur.
Buku ini seronok untuk dihayati. Aku menjumpai sisa2 diri aku dalam Karen, terutama dalam pengalaman2 yg dilaluinya di dlm beragama.
Buku ini juga membantu aku untuk mengkategorikan Karen sbg penulis yg bagaimana (alangkah bagusnya kalau aku membaca buku ini terlebih dahulu sebelum A History of god dan the case for god. Tidak sangka pula sastera adalah kemahiran terkuat Karen (dan spt ramai sasterawan2 yg berbicara ttg cinta, Karen gagal dalam percintaan :p).
July 3, 2010
It's interesting: I think I read this book several years ago (although it is possible I read THROUGH THE NARROW GATE, her previous memoir, instead). If I DID read this one, clearly I have changed since that time, because this time, it was Armstrong's struggle with faith that hit me hardest, and what I remember last time was being simply mesmerized by her account of life as a nun. Which is horrifying, by the way! When Armstrong talks about life as a nun - and as an ex-nun - and how her formation in the novitiate altered her development forever, I thought about ex-nuns I have known, and of the oddly walled-off quality they often have. That was interesting this time around, too.
But this time, I found myself much more intrigued by Armstrong's complete loss of faith, and her subsequent return, not to religion but to God. Her account of her struggle to begin using her mind freely again - after years of deliberately shutting down every vestige of independent thought - and her learning to dismiss the powerful effects of an authoritarian religion - yeah, all that was fascinating. I am Catholic myself, and though I do not experience my faith in the way Armstrong did, I really did understand at a visceral level what she was talking about - the fear of honest questions, the hesitation to use one's heart, mind or experience in approaching mystery. This can be a difficult book to read, in the sense that Armstrong has suffered a great deal of pain in her life and there is no happy-ever-after for her. But it is an honest and powerful book, and I'm glad I took the time to re-read it.
But this time, I found myself much more intrigued by Armstrong's complete loss of faith, and her subsequent return, not to religion but to God. Her account of her struggle to begin using her mind freely again - after years of deliberately shutting down every vestige of independent thought - and her learning to dismiss the powerful effects of an authoritarian religion - yeah, all that was fascinating. I am Catholic myself, and though I do not experience my faith in the way Armstrong did, I really did understand at a visceral level what she was talking about - the fear of honest questions, the hesitation to use one's heart, mind or experience in approaching mystery. This can be a difficult book to read, in the sense that Armstrong has suffered a great deal of pain in her life and there is no happy-ever-after for her. But it is an honest and powerful book, and I'm glad I took the time to re-read it.
September 9, 2015
Just re-read this book and it's still amazing. Not reading it in a class, it did feel a little more difficult to get through. Her story is truly unique, but it is hard to read for so long about the pain and sorrow, the trauma and to feel no hope. She does an excellent job helping you feel that despair through a good portion of the book.
In other words, you have to pay your dues to get to the insightful thoughts on theology. It really is the last chapter where you can't stop highlighting things she says. She phrases things so eloquently, and speaks to your spirit, what should we be getting out of religion? What do we have in common, believers of many faiths (particularly Christians, Jews and Muslims) and why do we do what we do? Why do we have religion?
The part that stuck out the most for me this time was a paragraph that I felt told me how I want to move forward in my religious journey,
“Theology is-- or should be-- a species of poetry,which read quickly or encountered in a hubbub of noise makes no sense. You have to open yourself to a poem with a quiet, receptive mind, in the same way you might listen to a difficult piece of music... If you seize upon a poem and try to extort its meaning before you are ready, it remains opaque. If you bring your own personal agenda to bear upon it, the poem will close upon itself like a clam, because you have denied its unique and separate identity, its inviolate holiness.”
Make space for the silence first, then read, study, and wait. The text will speak to you! Listen!
In other words, you have to pay your dues to get to the insightful thoughts on theology. It really is the last chapter where you can't stop highlighting things she says. She phrases things so eloquently, and speaks to your spirit, what should we be getting out of religion? What do we have in common, believers of many faiths (particularly Christians, Jews and Muslims) and why do we do what we do? Why do we have religion?
The part that stuck out the most for me this time was a paragraph that I felt told me how I want to move forward in my religious journey,
“Theology is-- or should be-- a species of poetry,which read quickly or encountered in a hubbub of noise makes no sense. You have to open yourself to a poem with a quiet, receptive mind, in the same way you might listen to a difficult piece of music... If you seize upon a poem and try to extort its meaning before you are ready, it remains opaque. If you bring your own personal agenda to bear upon it, the poem will close upon itself like a clam, because you have denied its unique and separate identity, its inviolate holiness.”
Make space for the silence first, then read, study, and wait. The text will speak to you! Listen!
June 30, 2014
For much of this book, I kept thinking "TMI"...too much information, way too much personal information.
But Armstrong captured me with her last pages which resonated very strongly with me and which wrapped up the first 263 pages and made me realize the necessity of her long litany of her religious life.
Part of me feels quite akin to Ms. Armstrong...I was always the rule follower, the doctrines were important...but in the past few years I've come to realize the perennial tradition that is strong in almost every religion...that describing God fully through doctrine reveals more of ourselves than it does of God...and, in a single seminary course, the concept of apophaticism that Armstrong mentions so late in her book...
Thank you, Ms. Armstrong!!
But Armstrong captured me with her last pages which resonated very strongly with me and which wrapped up the first 263 pages and made me realize the necessity of her long litany of her religious life.
Part of me feels quite akin to Ms. Armstrong...I was always the rule follower, the doctrines were important...but in the past few years I've come to realize the perennial tradition that is strong in almost every religion...that describing God fully through doctrine reveals more of ourselves than it does of God...and, in a single seminary course, the concept of apophaticism that Armstrong mentions so late in her book...
Thank you, Ms. Armstrong!!
February 17, 2011
Would be too difficult to enumerate all the reasons why this book is important to me. I feel like I found it at exactly the right time. It's a memoir about leaving a Catholic convent and trying to make sense of the secular world, but it seems to be more about figuring out how to build an adult faith. Since I read it on my Nook, I had to hand copy whole pages of it into my journal. Worth the effort to save those passages. Will probably need to buy the "real" book.
March 31, 2009
Before Karen Armstrong became an authority, both learned and accessible, on the religions of the world, she spent seven years in a convent. Her first memoir, Through the Narrow Gate, recounted those seven years. This book takes the reader beyond those years. through a period of intense sufferings and trials, and to the point where she discovers her true vocation.
The first part of this book recounts the end of her time in the convent. The brutal and, sometimes, absurd practices of the nuns numbed her mind and undermined her judgement. Ordered to practice sewing by a superior, she was punished for telling the older nun that the machine had no needle. ("You will go to that machine...and work on it every day, needle or no needle, until I give you permission to stop.") When she developed fainting attacks, complete with auras, she was told that she was looking for attention and sent to bed in disgrace. She lost her religious faith and faith in her academic abilities at the same time that her conscious mind became unreliable.
When she left the convent, she was emotionally exhausted and physically ill. Although she never thought that the fainting spells and terrifying visions were religious, she did believe what her doctors told her: they were "anxiety states" that could be treated by psychotherapy. (One doctor's words: "As long as you keep producing these 'interesting' psychic states, you are postponing the moment when you have to accept the unwelcome fact that when push comes to shove, you're not that interesting.")Her initial experiences in the outside world were unsatisfying and frightening. She tried to hide her lack of worldly skills with "a hard, intellectual manner that, [I:] thought, provided me with some protection." The spells grew much worse as she began to find herself in places or situations but had no recollection of how she had gotten there.
Help came on a strange path: a job as a babysitter for a bright young boy with autism and epilepsy. Although her Oxford thesis had been rejected, although she began to relinquish hope for a normal life, and although she attempted suicide, she received a gift - a strange gift, but a gift, nonetheless. She fainted in a subway station and was taken to a hospital, where she was diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy. No longer were her fainting spells, hallucinations, or unremembered activities a sign of emotional instability: they were physical symptoms of a brain insult, and they could be treated like any other physical illness.
"I could have been as emotionally stolid as a sloth and it would have made no difference," she writes. "For many people, a diagnosis of epilepsy must be unwelcome news, but for me it was an occasion of pure happiness."
As she recovered from the strain of years of needless suffering, she began to be interested in religion again. Commissioned to write and host television pieces about religion, she began to investigate and re-think all she had been taught. Her research began as an academic exercise, but led her from one surprise to another.
Historical scholarship about the New Testament led her to realize that not even Paul had considered Jesus divine: "... even he would have been dismayed by some of the theological conclusions that were later drawn from his letters." Her research expanded to other Abrahamic faiths, and, later, to Eastern religions.
As for Judaism :"From my earliest years, I had been taught that Judaism had become an empty faith: wedded to external observances and with no spiritual dimension... [Jews:] could no longer understand the spirit that had originally inspired these now soulless commandments."
A Jewish advisor, Hyam Maccoby, led her to understanding that Christianity (especially the Catholocism she knew best) did not have the same structure or expectations as other religions. "Theology is just not important in Judaism, or in any other religion, really. There's no orthodoxy as you have it in the Catholic Church. No complicated creeds to which everybody must subscribe. No infallible pronouncements by a pope. Within reason, you can believe what you like." Instead, he said, Jews have "orthopraxy": "right practice rather than right belief. That's all. ... It's just poetry, really, ways of talking about the inexpressible. We Jews don't bother much about what we believe. We just do it instead."
Her research and understanding of Islam ("surrender") led her to realize "we seemed to find it difficult to regard Muslim faith and civilization with fairness and objectivity. The stereotypical view of Islam, first developed at the time of the Crusades, was in some profound way essential to our Western identity.... Westerners had needed to hate Islam; in the fantasies they created, it became everything that they hoped that they were not, and was made to epitomize everything that they feared that they were."
Ultimately, Armstrong developed her own philosophy of religion, including her conclusion about the religious ecstasy that can be found in stepping outside of one's own ego, and developing a compassionate nature that is brought to bear in all of one's dealings with the world.
Armstrong continues to research and write about religion in a way that causes this "spiritual agnostic" understand and admire its achievements even while its abuses have changed the world - especially the modern world.
The first part of this book recounts the end of her time in the convent. The brutal and, sometimes, absurd practices of the nuns numbed her mind and undermined her judgement. Ordered to practice sewing by a superior, she was punished for telling the older nun that the machine had no needle. ("You will go to that machine...and work on it every day, needle or no needle, until I give you permission to stop.") When she developed fainting attacks, complete with auras, she was told that she was looking for attention and sent to bed in disgrace. She lost her religious faith and faith in her academic abilities at the same time that her conscious mind became unreliable.
When she left the convent, she was emotionally exhausted and physically ill. Although she never thought that the fainting spells and terrifying visions were religious, she did believe what her doctors told her: they were "anxiety states" that could be treated by psychotherapy. (One doctor's words: "As long as you keep producing these 'interesting' psychic states, you are postponing the moment when you have to accept the unwelcome fact that when push comes to shove, you're not that interesting.")Her initial experiences in the outside world were unsatisfying and frightening. She tried to hide her lack of worldly skills with "a hard, intellectual manner that, [I:] thought, provided me with some protection." The spells grew much worse as she began to find herself in places or situations but had no recollection of how she had gotten there.
Help came on a strange path: a job as a babysitter for a bright young boy with autism and epilepsy. Although her Oxford thesis had been rejected, although she began to relinquish hope for a normal life, and although she attempted suicide, she received a gift - a strange gift, but a gift, nonetheless. She fainted in a subway station and was taken to a hospital, where she was diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy. No longer were her fainting spells, hallucinations, or unremembered activities a sign of emotional instability: they were physical symptoms of a brain insult, and they could be treated like any other physical illness.
"I could have been as emotionally stolid as a sloth and it would have made no difference," she writes. "For many people, a diagnosis of epilepsy must be unwelcome news, but for me it was an occasion of pure happiness."
As she recovered from the strain of years of needless suffering, she began to be interested in religion again. Commissioned to write and host television pieces about religion, she began to investigate and re-think all she had been taught. Her research began as an academic exercise, but led her from one surprise to another.
Historical scholarship about the New Testament led her to realize that not even Paul had considered Jesus divine: "... even he would have been dismayed by some of the theological conclusions that were later drawn from his letters." Her research expanded to other Abrahamic faiths, and, later, to Eastern religions.
As for Judaism :"From my earliest years, I had been taught that Judaism had become an empty faith: wedded to external observances and with no spiritual dimension... [Jews:] could no longer understand the spirit that had originally inspired these now soulless commandments."
A Jewish advisor, Hyam Maccoby, led her to understanding that Christianity (especially the Catholocism she knew best) did not have the same structure or expectations as other religions. "Theology is just not important in Judaism, or in any other religion, really. There's no orthodoxy as you have it in the Catholic Church. No complicated creeds to which everybody must subscribe. No infallible pronouncements by a pope. Within reason, you can believe what you like." Instead, he said, Jews have "orthopraxy": "right practice rather than right belief. That's all. ... It's just poetry, really, ways of talking about the inexpressible. We Jews don't bother much about what we believe. We just do it instead."
Her research and understanding of Islam ("surrender") led her to realize "we seemed to find it difficult to regard Muslim faith and civilization with fairness and objectivity. The stereotypical view of Islam, first developed at the time of the Crusades, was in some profound way essential to our Western identity.... Westerners had needed to hate Islam; in the fantasies they created, it became everything that they hoped that they were not, and was made to epitomize everything that they feared that they were."
Ultimately, Armstrong developed her own philosophy of religion, including her conclusion about the religious ecstasy that can be found in stepping outside of one's own ego, and developing a compassionate nature that is brought to bear in all of one's dealings with the world.
Armstrong continues to research and write about religion in a way that causes this "spiritual agnostic" understand and admire its achievements even while its abuses have changed the world - especially the modern world.
March 16, 2018
I've read a few of Karen Armstrong's books (History of God, The Buddha, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life) but have tended to find her most compelling in long-form interviews, such as with Krista Tippett (On Being) and Doug Fabrizio (RadioWest). This memoir didn't speak to me quite like I had hoped.
Here's a passage I want to preserve:
_____
It was over egg and Tomato sandwiches at a small greasy-spoon café near the tube station that Hyam
delivered his bombshell. He was arguing that Jesus could well have belonged to the school of Rabbi Hillel, one of the leading Pharisees. Jesus had, after all, taught a version of Hillel’s Golden Rule.
“You know the story?” I shook my head. “Some pagans came to Hillel and told him they would convert to his faith if he could recite the whole of Jewish teaching while he stood on one leg. So, Hillel obligingly stood on one leg like a stork and said : ‘Do not do unto other as you would not have done unto you. This is the Torah. The rest is commentary. Go and learn it.’”
But something was still troubling me. “But how could Hillel say that his Golden Rule represented the
whole of Jewish teaching? That everything else was just commentary?” I asked. “What about faith? What about believing in God? What were those pagans supposed to believe?” “Easy to see you were brought up Christian.” Hyam didn’t have a high opinion of Christianity, I noticed. “Theology is just not important in Judaism, or in any other religion, really. There’s no orthodoxy as you have it in the
Catholic Church. No complicated creeds to which everybody must subscribe. No infallible pronouncements by a pope. Nobody can tell Jews what to believe. Within reason, you can believe what you like.”
I stared at him. I could not imagine a religion without belief. Ever since I had grown up and started to think, my Christian life had been a continuous struggle to accept the official doctrines. Without true belief you could not be a member of the church, you could not be saved. Faith was a starting point, the sine qua non, the indispensable requirement, and for me it had been a major stumbling block.
“No official theology?” I repeated stupidly. “None at all? How can you be religious without a set of ideas –about God, salvation, and so on – as a basis?”
“We have orthopraxy instead of orthodoxy,” Hyam replied calmly, wiping his mouth and brushing a few crumbs off the table. “ ‘ Right practice’ rather than ‘right belief.’ That’s all. You Christians make such a fuss about theology, but it’s not important in the way you think. It’s just poetry, really, ways of talking about the inexpressible. We Jews don’t bother much about what we believe. We just do it
instead.”
Here's a passage I want to preserve:
_____
It was over egg and Tomato sandwiches at a small greasy-spoon café near the tube station that Hyam
delivered his bombshell. He was arguing that Jesus could well have belonged to the school of Rabbi Hillel, one of the leading Pharisees. Jesus had, after all, taught a version of Hillel’s Golden Rule.
“You know the story?” I shook my head. “Some pagans came to Hillel and told him they would convert to his faith if he could recite the whole of Jewish teaching while he stood on one leg. So, Hillel obligingly stood on one leg like a stork and said : ‘Do not do unto other as you would not have done unto you. This is the Torah. The rest is commentary. Go and learn it.’”
But something was still troubling me. “But how could Hillel say that his Golden Rule represented the
whole of Jewish teaching? That everything else was just commentary?” I asked. “What about faith? What about believing in God? What were those pagans supposed to believe?” “Easy to see you were brought up Christian.” Hyam didn’t have a high opinion of Christianity, I noticed. “Theology is just not important in Judaism, or in any other religion, really. There’s no orthodoxy as you have it in the
Catholic Church. No complicated creeds to which everybody must subscribe. No infallible pronouncements by a pope. Nobody can tell Jews what to believe. Within reason, you can believe what you like.”
I stared at him. I could not imagine a religion without belief. Ever since I had grown up and started to think, my Christian life had been a continuous struggle to accept the official doctrines. Without true belief you could not be a member of the church, you could not be saved. Faith was a starting point, the sine qua non, the indispensable requirement, and for me it had been a major stumbling block.
“No official theology?” I repeated stupidly. “None at all? How can you be religious without a set of ideas –about God, salvation, and so on – as a basis?”
“We have orthopraxy instead of orthodoxy,” Hyam replied calmly, wiping his mouth and brushing a few crumbs off the table. “ ‘ Right practice’ rather than ‘right belief.’ That’s all. You Christians make such a fuss about theology, but it’s not important in the way you think. It’s just poetry, really, ways of talking about the inexpressible. We Jews don’t bother much about what we believe. We just do it
instead.”
December 18, 2009
After reading Muhammad a Prophet for our Time Eminent Lives by Karen Armstrong, I’ve become a Karen Armstrong enthusiast. The Spiral Staircase is her autobiography, and provides the shortest and most personal access to understanding how she got to her current position of being an interpreter of religious tradition in the face of its “cultured despisers” Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. If forced to speak in the most literal terms about a being within the universe, Armstrong is an atheist, but she believes that religious language is not meant to be interpreted literally, but rather expresses myth, ritual and the commitment to practice a particular kind of life.
For seven years Armstrong was a Roman Catholic nun, and though she was devoted and intelligent, she chafed at the mind-numbing obedience required. She was also epileptic, although her symptoms were not diagnosed until years later, and her superiors were small-minded in grasping her situation. She left the convent for an academic life, a difficult adjustment, and was also frustrated there, though showing great scholarship and talent. She emphasizes throughout her story that she made advances in her life only when she gave up preconceived expectations, and simply was grateful and open to being where she was.
She eventually advanced to a career of television documentaries and writing books on topics in comparative religion. She started out being critical in a feminist and “Dawkinsesque” sort of way, but eventually began to appreciate the religious traditions she was investigating, including her own. She attained a deeper understanding of both Judaism and Islam by doing a documentary in Israel, and has become a spokesperson of themes, such as compassion, that unite the Abrahamic faiths. She has also examined fundamentalism, in the context of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, in a diagnostic but not condemnatory way.
I am currently reading The Case for God by Karen Armstrong for a more nuts-and-bolts examination of the role of religious language and tradition, without taking it to be pseudoscience. Among the questions: What has been the traditional conception of God, if not a theistic conception?
For seven years Armstrong was a Roman Catholic nun, and though she was devoted and intelligent, she chafed at the mind-numbing obedience required. She was also epileptic, although her symptoms were not diagnosed until years later, and her superiors were small-minded in grasping her situation. She left the convent for an academic life, a difficult adjustment, and was also frustrated there, though showing great scholarship and talent. She emphasizes throughout her story that she made advances in her life only when she gave up preconceived expectations, and simply was grateful and open to being where she was.
She eventually advanced to a career of television documentaries and writing books on topics in comparative religion. She started out being critical in a feminist and “Dawkinsesque” sort of way, but eventually began to appreciate the religious traditions she was investigating, including her own. She attained a deeper understanding of both Judaism and Islam by doing a documentary in Israel, and has become a spokesperson of themes, such as compassion, that unite the Abrahamic faiths. She has also examined fundamentalism, in the context of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, in a diagnostic but not condemnatory way.
I am currently reading The Case for God by Karen Armstrong for a more nuts-and-bolts examination of the role of religious language and tradition, without taking it to be pseudoscience. Among the questions: What has been the traditional conception of God, if not a theistic conception?
May 25, 2016
Ahemm. By the end of the book, I find Armstrong making sense, saying things that I can mostly concur with, or at least that do not make her sound embarrassingly naive in regards to a primary theme of her life, namely an understanding of religion. Her insights are pertinent, and very worthwhile sharing in an age when religion is so often considered irrelevant and useless because it isn't provable or rational. As a report on her development throughout life to reach this point, her story holds some interest. That it took her so long - in spite of amazing experiences, encounters and studies that one would have expected could have opened her eyes so much earlier in her quests - is perhaps understandable, given the closed nature of her beginnings, and her reluctance to think for herself as she grew out of an oppressive religous environment. The book was a pleasure once I understood that I could often read a sentence that explained an episode or event, and then skim rapidly through the paragraphs or pages she used to turn that simple statement into artless and unnecessarily long, descriptive prose. The actual story of her life is unique and interesting, and ultimately she seems to have made good use of her exceptional challenges and opportunities. The world may be better for her sharing that story. I'm currently reading her "Short History of Islam," which is much more academic, well written and informative. Although this autobiographical book was sometimes better than tolerable (with skimming), her talents as a writer shine brighter in more academic prose.
December 16, 2007
From Publishers Weekly
In 1962, British writer Armstrong (The Battle for God, etc.) entered a Roman Catholic convent, smitten by the desire to "find God." She was 17 years old at the time—too young, she recognizes now, to have made such a momentous decision. Armstrong’s 1981 memoir Through the Narrow Gate described her frustrating, lonely experience of cloistered life and her decision, at 24, to renounce her vows. In its sequel, Beginning the World (1983), she tried to explain her readjustment to the secular world—and failed. "It is the worst book I have ever written," she declares in the preface to this new volume: "it was far too soon to write about those years"; "it was not a truthful account"; "I was told to present myself in as positive and lively a light as possible." The true story, which she relates in this second sequel, was far more conflicted and intellectually vibrant. Her departure from the convent, she writes, actually made her quite sad; she was "constantly wracked by a very great regret" and suffering on top of it with the symptoms of undiagnosed temporal lobe epilepsy. How she emerged from such darkness to make a career as a writer whose books honor spiritual concerns while maintaining intellectual freedom and rigor—this is Armstrong’s real concern, and the one that will be of most interest to the fans of her many acclaimed works.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
In 1962, British writer Armstrong (The Battle for God, etc.) entered a Roman Catholic convent, smitten by the desire to "find God." She was 17 years old at the time—too young, she recognizes now, to have made such a momentous decision. Armstrong’s 1981 memoir Through the Narrow Gate described her frustrating, lonely experience of cloistered life and her decision, at 24, to renounce her vows. In its sequel, Beginning the World (1983), she tried to explain her readjustment to the secular world—and failed. "It is the worst book I have ever written," she declares in the preface to this new volume: "it was far too soon to write about those years"; "it was not a truthful account"; "I was told to present myself in as positive and lively a light as possible." The true story, which she relates in this second sequel, was far more conflicted and intellectually vibrant. Her departure from the convent, she writes, actually made her quite sad; she was "constantly wracked by a very great regret" and suffering on top of it with the symptoms of undiagnosed temporal lobe epilepsy. How she emerged from such darkness to make a career as a writer whose books honor spiritual concerns while maintaining intellectual freedom and rigor—this is Armstrong’s real concern, and the one that will be of most interest to the fans of her many acclaimed works.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
June 27, 2008
Nancy Pearl has stated that if a book doesn't catch your attention within the first 40 pages, it is not worth your time.
I am glad that I don't prescribe to this belief.
Slogging through the first 100 pages of Karen Armstrong's memoir The Spiral Staircase was a task. Peppered with a constant, nagging reiteration of her thesis ("Nunnery ruined me and did not prepare me for secular life"), these pages drag on interminably. It all comes across as mewling and self-conscious.
When, however, Armstrong arrives at the thrust of her story - her own personal rediscovery - the book transcends sorrow and enters a sort of life-affirming joy, which Armstrong deftly weaves into a spiritual narrative.
"Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed." (p.27)
The book twitters out in the last chapter, Armstrong finally having reached her apex, but the majority of the last two-thirds is captivating and heart-breaking. This book is really deserving of 3.5 stars, but the dry, didactic beginning keeps it from achieving more.
I am glad that I don't prescribe to this belief.
Slogging through the first 100 pages of Karen Armstrong's memoir The Spiral Staircase was a task. Peppered with a constant, nagging reiteration of her thesis ("Nunnery ruined me and did not prepare me for secular life"), these pages drag on interminably. It all comes across as mewling and self-conscious.
When, however, Armstrong arrives at the thrust of her story - her own personal rediscovery - the book transcends sorrow and enters a sort of life-affirming joy, which Armstrong deftly weaves into a spiritual narrative.
"Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed." (p.27)
The book twitters out in the last chapter, Armstrong finally having reached her apex, but the majority of the last two-thirds is captivating and heart-breaking. This book is really deserving of 3.5 stars, but the dry, didactic beginning keeps it from achieving more.
January 2, 2018
I knew Karen Armstrong for her reputation as a comparative religion writer. I didn't know that the path that led her to where she is now was anything but a straight forward one. Rather, she likened it to a spiral staircase, an image used by TS Eliot in his religious poem, "Ash Wednesday."
Ms Armstrong opened up about her broken self and spirit after a rigorous 7 years in the convent, training to be a Catholic nun. She described her helplessness to connect to those around her, and their innocent ignorance at her struggle to fit back in into the secular world. She was downright depressed, but as much as she had a hard time conveying her needs, others also had difficulties to empathise to her predicaments. These sound all to familiar, even almosy 50 years later.
I thought that since Ms Armstrong was at Cambridge, at least her career was secured, but even at that she was tested. Then again, if not for those misses-and-turns, she wouldn't have kept climbing the spiral staircase until she found where her heart exactly is.
Ms Armstrong opened up about her broken self and spirit after a rigorous 7 years in the convent, training to be a Catholic nun. She described her helplessness to connect to those around her, and their innocent ignorance at her struggle to fit back in into the secular world. She was downright depressed, but as much as she had a hard time conveying her needs, others also had difficulties to empathise to her predicaments. These sound all to familiar, even almosy 50 years later.
I thought that since Ms Armstrong was at Cambridge, at least her career was secured, but even at that she was tested. Then again, if not for those misses-and-turns, she wouldn't have kept climbing the spiral staircase until she found where her heart exactly is.
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