The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness

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 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 show more 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

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 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 show more 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

Six-word review: Religious scholar wrestles with personal demons.

Extended review:

Whatever issues I may have had with religion don't seem to amount to much when compared with Karen Armstrong's sojourn in a convent and subsequent attempts to readjust to the secular world. The aftermath of spiritual crisis, thorny with guilt, resentment, confusion, self-doubt, and depression, plagued her for many years and seemed to mock her search for something resembling a normal life. Her repeatedly derailed journey through academe, her attempts to sustain various relationships, and her efforts to build a career on the considerable knowledge and skills she possessed constitute the substance of this exceptional narrative.

I have special appreciation for show more the account of how she dealt with her own agnosticism and atheism and ultimately arrived at a state of spiritual awareness that did not compromise her integrity.

As a distinguished scholar of the history and varieties of theology and religious practice, Karen Armstrong has written influential books and created presentations in other media. This personal history reveals the dark side of her struggle and the process by which she came to terms with her inner life. show less

As someone who has discarded religion but searches for spirituality, this book was a touchstone. Armstrong's description of finding bliss in her research and her writing is a place I can relate to. If nothing else, her final plea for practicing compassion as the antidote to religious extremism is an admirable call to action.

Her conflicted, unresolved frustrations with being an outsider in so many ways is something I equally identify with. I long for a final memoir or essay from her exploring how she's lived as an intelligent woman, single, in a world designed for couples.

In her memoir, Karen Armstrong talks of her motivations for joining a convent in her late teens, her physical and emotional struggles upon leaving the convent in her mid-twenties, and her journey back to a spiritually fulfilling life. The Spiral Staircase is mostly a satisfying and compelling read, with insights about monastic life, religion, and carrying on in the face of strife and failure. Inspiring without being An Inspirational Read, and it makes me more interested than ever in picking up one of Armstrong's books about theology, such as A History of God. If the memoir has any real failings, it is in its unevenness in reporting the ins-and-outs of Armstrong's life. The first half of the book pays close attention to the day-to-day: show more where Armstrong is living, who her friends are, how she's getting on in general. In the back half, much of this falls away, and while the second half of the book is more interested in Armstrong's spiritual life than her domestic situation, this change in focus leaves one wondering what happened to fascinating people introduced early in the book and occasionally leads to moments of confusion. Despite this flaw, recommended to anyone who enjoys memoirs or who is interested in theology or late-20th-century religious life. show less

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 I seem to remember that last time, I was 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 show more 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. show less

This is a new sequel to Karen’s first book, Through the Narrow Gate, after the first sequel, Beginning the World, flopped. Because, she says, she was “not truthful.”

Perhaps Karen overcompensated on the “truthful” part this time around. The result is a brutally honest autobiography of a repeat failure. At one point, Karen despairs, “I was an ex-nun, a failed academic, mentally unstable, and now I could add epileptic to this dismal list. … Even God, for whom I had searched so long, is simply the product of a faulty brain, a neurological aberration.”

Karen spent seven years as a nun in a Catholic convent, then tried to put God behind her and enter the secular world of London. Yet, God would never quite go away. God hung show more around in a love-hate relationship until Karen finally faced her demons, and found religion again … this time in writing about God. Faith, Karen learned, is not an intellectual assent but an act of will, a deliberate choice to believe. Believers (among whom Karen confesses multiple times she is no longer) cannot prove or disprove their doctrines, but must consciously decide to take them on trust.

One of Karen’s shortcomings as a nun was that she could never connect with God through prayer. There was simply nobody on the other end. Many years later, she realized she was looking for God where he could not be found. Faith, she came to understand, is not about belief, but about practice. Religion, says Karen, is a “moral aesthetic,” an “ethical alchemy.” If you behave 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. You will not discover them to be true until you put them into practice in your own life, where they compel you to act in such a way as to bring out your own heroic potential. Faith, Karen now believes, should make you more human, not less.

On the very last page, Karen looks down to find that, while she has climbed out of darkness, she has come full circle. The Spiral Staircase. “As I go up, step by step, I am turning, again, round and round, apparently covering little ground, but climbing upward, I hope, toward the light.” show less