Karen Armstrong (1) (1944–)

I read this memoir through the night last night, under the covers, by the light of the iPad. It’s title is taken from a T.S. Eliot poem, Ash Wednesday.

At the first turning of the third stair
Was a slotted window bellied like the figs's fruit
And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene
The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green
Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.

On spiral stairs, each step provides a shift in perspective, and Karen Armstrong has had many perspectives in her show more long life. This autobiography details those abrupt shifts.

Born in 1944, she grew up in Birmingham, England. Armstrong’s story really begins when she is 17, and joins a Catholic religious order to become a nun. This first stage lasts 7 traumatic years. While a novice and postulant she is repeatedly scolded and, she says, abused. Her personhood was attacked; complete submission was required. However, during that time she matriculates to St. Anne’s College of Oxford University, pursuing a degree in literature, and is still attending when she leaves the order, and loses her faith in God.

The next 7 years she spends at Oxford. She does well, but during this time, she has fainting spells, and times when the world becomes surreal, or when she has no idea how she ended up in a place doing a particular thing—great chunks of amnesia or sleepwalking or some other mental malady. She sees psychiatrists, and spends occasional weeks in mental hospitals, all the while being successful academically, but emotionally distant, apart, the other.

Her career in Oxford ends in bitter disappointment—she drew an unsympathetic professor on her PhD examination board, and her dissertation on Tennyson was rejected.

After this failure, she finds a position at a private high school for girls. During this time she discovers her psychological problem—she has epilepsy. Another 7 years, and she is let go from that position owing to many missed days.

Then she embarks on a television career, making series about St. Paul, about Islam, about Judaism, until that falls apart, and finally she begins to engage in her true calling, lecturing and writing books on comparative religion, the most successful of which is A History of God.

Writing A History of God results in a reacquaintance with the presence of God in her life. The final chapter of The Spiral Staircase details her spiritual beliefs, although she doesn’t like the word “belief.” In her reading she finds that the greatest theologians “insisted that God was not an objective fact, was not another being, and was not an unseen reality like the atom, whose existence could be empirically demonstrated. Some went so far as to say that it was better to say that God did not exist, because our notion of existence was too limited to apply to God.” She would define God as “practical compassion,” as recognizing the inexpressible awe of encountering the essence of being human. She aligns herself with the mystics, and with the elusive truth of myth. She insists one cannot think or reason God; rather, one has to feel it.

I’m rather firmly entrenched in rationality as a life strategy, so this kind of rejection of reason makes me nervous, conjuring up, in its extremes, snakes and speaking in tongues and such. But Armstrong’s skill in developing her argument belies an approach devoid of reason, and I have to admit, the idea of religion without the “personhood” of God does have its attractions. show less

Armstrong is quickly becoming one of my favorite non-fiction authors. This is because, in addition to writing about interesting topics, she is a truly superb story teller. In this book, Armstrong weaves together history, the revelations of Biblical scholarship, and the Bible itself to form the story of the Bible's writing and canonization and the different ways it has been perceived throughout history.

At a high level, all of the content in this book is in textbook introductions to the Bible, show more but this book is a much more interesting read. It also has a different balance. Where textbooks focus on the origins and content of the Biblical texts and spend little time on the process of canonization and the subsequent history of the Bible, Armstrong spends time on all of those things. Overall, Armstrong's book was a quick, entertaining, and educational read. If you read only one book about the Bible, I recommend this one.

The limitation of Armstrong's style is that it does not allow for much detail. She limits herself to the most generally agreed on claims of Biblical scholarship and does not spend time discussing different theories or their merits. When there are legitimate differences of opinion within the scholarly community, she limits herself to the common kernel (e.g., when discussing books with a disputed date of composition, she limits her claims of composition date to a general period). To get those sorts of details, you are going to need a textbook.

One of the most useful things I got out of this book was the overview of Jewish thought, especially how it evolved after the Hebrew canon was closed. I think that people who have not been educated otherwise often assume that Jewish thought stopped after what was recorded in the Bible. I know that people who use the New Testament as their main reference on Jewish thought at the time of Jesus have an unfairly negative view of the Jews of the time. Learning a little about the actual history of Jewish thought shows how many of the tenants of Christianity which people now claim were novel innovations actually followed quite directly from the thoughts of the Jewish contemporaries of Jesus and his followers. show less

In seven chapters and 159 pages, religious scholar Karen Armstrong attempts to give a brief outline of the history of mythology, producing an engaging, thoughtful book that, while perhaps not completely successful as history, is certainly a persuasive argument for the great meaning and significance of her subject matter.

In the first chapter, Armstrong examines the nature of myth - what it is and what it does - arguing that it is a particularly powerful type of storytelling that humans use to show more make sense of the world around them and their place in it. Its five characteristics are: 1) being rooted in death, and the fear of extinction, 2) being inseparable (usually) from ritual, 3) addressing the extreme and unknown experience, 4) demonstrating how one should behave, and 5) addressing parallel planes of existence, usually divine. The author argues that the truth of myth lies, not in its factuality, but in its effectiveness in providing insight into the meaning of life.

In the second chapter, the author examines the mythology of the Paleolithic Period (c. 20,000-8,000 BCE), or "the mythology of the hunters." This is the period in which human evolution was completed (for now, one assumes), and is characterized by myth which teaches humans to look beyond the tangible world. Many early mythologies had sky gods, perhaps indicating a human desire to "get above" the human condition, whether that means to transcend it, or simply to understand it more fully. It also addresses the growing human awareness of the ethical quandary of living in a world that requires killing other creatures in order to survive. As the author notes, "mythology often springs from profound anxiety about essentially practical problems, which cannot be assuaged by purely logical arguments."

In the third chapter, Armstrong looks at the mythology of the Neolithic Period (c. 8,000-4,000 BCE), or "the mythology of the farmers." During this time we see many creation myths, particularly in Europe and North America, that imagine people emerging from the earth, like plants, teaching them that they belong to the earth. The more agricultural Earth Mother is a transformation of the Great Mother of many hunting societies. The cyclical nature of agriculture gives rise to a new optimism about death in many myth traditions, with the possibility that it is not the end being considered.

In the fourth chapter, the author examines the mythology of the early civilizations stretching from c. 4,000 to 800 BCE. The first emergence of cities, in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, India and Crete, lead to a new concern with order and chaos in mythology, perhaps pointing to the great fragility of these new human population centers. Urban life changes mythology, and the gods begin to seem more remote from the people.

In the fifth chapter, Armstrong discusses mythology in the Axial Age (c. 800-200 BCE), in which many of the religions and philosophies of the modern age had their birth. She focuses on Confucianism and Taoism in China, Buddhism and Hinduism in India, monotheism in the Middle East, and rationalism in Greece. Although sometimes very different, in their approach to how myth was used, each of these belief systems puts emphasis on a more interior, ethical interpretation of myth and ritual.

In the sixth chapter, the author looks at mythology in the Post-Axial Period (c. 200 BCE - c. 1500 CE), specifically examining myth in the West during this period. Because Western religion claims to be historical in origin, rather than mythical, its traditions have had a more problematic relationship with myth.

Finally, in the seventh and final chapter, Armstrong examines the "Great Western Transformation" (c. 1500-2000 CE), in which emphasis on logos leads to the death of myth. She examines the decline of myth, and the rise of existential despair in western societies, and how this has led to such horrors as the witchcraft craze of the 16th and 17th centuries, and the destructive and nihilistic ideologies of the 20th (fascism, communism).

Although long aware of Karen Armstrong's work, I had never picked up any of her books until A Short History of Myth was assigned as a class text in the course on the history of children's literature I took while getting my masters. On the whole, I found it an interesting book. I can see why some reviewers were unimpressed, feeling that too much had been left out, and that the book was too general, and not informative enough to be called a history. While I understand readers wanting more, I think that the qualities they critique are an inevitable result of the book's length and purpose. Perhaps if it had been called "A Short Introduction to Myth," it would not have aroused so much ire? I am not sure. In any case, I found the book engaging, even if it didn't cover much new ground, and I particularly enjoyed the final chapter, in which Armstrong argues for the importance of myth in human life, and posits authors and artists as the new keepers of that myth. This accords with my own analysis (and that of many other scholars) of fantasy fiction in particular - its relationship to folklore and myth, and the power it therefore has for contemporary readers. In point of fact, I taught a class on the connections between children's fantasy fiction and folklore while still an undergrad, something that remains a cherished experience.

Recommended particularly to readers interested in beginning to delve more deeply into folklore and mythological studies, but not sure where to start. show less

Most folks review this book more as a memoir from a nun who left her order, focusing on her struggles to fit into a secular world that seems to have left her behind. And I suppose that's a perfectly fine way to read Armstrong's narrative. But there is a deeper current running just under that thin stretch of ice: Does God exist? What is His nature? What are the implications of faith? Once lost, can it be found again? What does a re-constituted faith look like? There's also a fair bit of show more criticism for fundamental (not only Catholic, mind you) religion - it's a subject [[Jimmy Carter]] has taken on several times in the last few decades as fundamentalism has worn away the fabric of our society to uncover the unkind and hateful underbelly of organized, political religion. Armstrong, though, critiques it from a much more personal place, exposing the immediate and tangible affects of spiritual manipulation. As an Oxford literary scholar, she weaves her account around T.S. Eliot's Ash Wednesday, finding hope for a new faith in what many see as a rather bleak account of religious exercise. Upon finishing this part of her story, her faith has quickened again, and it promises to blossom in a very different way.

Highly recommended.

5 bones!!!!! show less