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Signs of the Times Australia / NZ edition — lifestyle, health, relationships, culture, spirituality, people — published since 1886 |
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It is interesting for more than one reason that Karen Armstrong uses the image of the spiral staircase from T S Eliot’s “Ash- Wednesday” to illustrate her journey. As she says, the image of the staircase’s progressing yet cycling, the constantly turning back on itself while moving steadily upwards encapsulates her rejection of her life as a young nun and her consequent search for security and purpose.
Armstrong’s search for a safe place in the religious or academic life is constantly thwarted, resulting in a cycle of what are almost rebirths as her journey repeatedly takes her back to new beginnings. Eliot’s poem is about a spiritual journey, but Armstrong’s journey away from the institutional church is the opposite of that of Eliot the Anglican convert.
Although Armstrong’s life in the convent is described in a previous volume of autobiography, we are given a picture of the harshness of a regime that discouraged friendships in order to focus on God, and bent the will through pointless and contradictory tasks.
Armstrong began to question both this monastic structure and the structure of her belief. There is the underlying assumption in the book, underlined by Armstrong’s repeated assertions that she no longer believes in the traditional sense, that rational people no longer believe God actually exists, and that metaphysical truth was never what the religions were on about anyway.
Armstrong tells the story of a superior asking her not to let this secret out to the other nuns. This reminded me of the German nun in Don DeLillo’s White Noise , who explains that nuns keep up the appearances of belief not for their own benefit, but for others: nuns are supposed to believe—that illusion keeps the world going round.
What, specifically, is the nature of this illusion? For Armstrong, it is that God exists (she suggests that mystics of many traditions felt “existence” was too limited a word to apply to God), that Jesus was God, that Jesus rose from the dead. She writes of inconsistencies in the Gospel accounts, and says that the early church spoke of resurrection as purely metaphoric, that it was Jesus’ inspiration that lived on, but the church perverted this for its own selfish means.
Obviously, this is not Christian teaching.
While there is mystery in faith, it is clear from the many inspirational Christians around us that intelligence does not preclude traditional faith.
Nevertheless, Armstrong’s spiritual and emotional journey makes for fascinating reading. The alien nature of the world into which she emerged and her steep learning curve is illustrated by the fact that she did not know who the Beatles were in the midst of the swinging 60s. Added to this disorientation is her battle with long-undiagnosed epilepsy, which she describes as trying to view the world through a glass screen or the wrong end of a telescope.
Armstrong describes the joy of her relationship with Jacob, the autistic son of atheistic Oxford academics who ask her to take Jacob to worship at the local Catholic church, and the heartbreaking failure of Armstrong’s own Oxford academic life, which ultimately led her to pursue the solitary life of writing books about religion.
About her life of writing she says that it has led her to view religion as doing rather than believing. We can agree that compassion, a virtue she values highly, is a good yardstick to judge religious belief. While we emphasise God’s grace in our salvation, we also value doing good by our neighbours because, as the song goes, they’ll know we are Christians by our love. But I’m not sure I agree that the search for truth is an exclusively modern phenomenon— one only need look at the Greeks for evidence.
It’s only natural that the trauma of Armstrong’s life in the convent has influenced her subsequent approach to religion, but T S Eliot shows that Armstrong’s version of religion is not the only option for us moderns.
Extract from Signs of the Times, March 2007.
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