The Spiral Staircase: A Review - Part 3

The Spiral Staircase by Karen Armstrong: A Review - Part 3

This is the final part of the review of the book by Karen Armstrong (you can breathe a sigh of relief!); finally found time to finish writing it.

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In the last part of her book, Karen Armstrong has said how she understands religious belief; she sees religious discourse as "a species of poetry" and not "the language of everyday speech, of logical discursive prose". She then goes on to ask the question: "Does this woman believe in God or not? Is there, or is there not, anything out there? Does she, or does she not, worship a personal God?.. To believe or not to believe: that is surely the religious question, is it not?"

Against this, she argues that many of the most eminent Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians and mystics "insisted that God was not an objective fact, was not another being. 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. It was even misleading to call God the Supreme Being, because that simply suggested a being like us, but bigger and better, with likes and dislikes similar to our own." So she argues that talk about God is simply "one symbolic way of speaking about the divine"; otherwise we end up with a man-made God, and fall into the modern Western fallacy, "dating only from the eighteenth century, to equate faith with accepting certain intellectual propositions about God". Here she places the doctrine of the Trinity as in part showing "that you could not think about God as a simple personality", and instead gave a symbol of a "far more elusive reality".

Instead, she regards "faith" as "the cultivation of a conviction that life had some ultimate meaning and value, despite the tragic evidence to the contrary"; the Middle English word "beleven" originally meant "to love", the Latin "credo" probably derived from "cor do", I give my heart. So that the saying of Anslem, "credo ut intelligam" should be translated not "I believe that I may understand", but "I commit myself in order that I understand". As she concludes, "you must first live a sacred way, and then you would encounter within a sacred presence that monotheists call God, but which others have called the Tao, Brahman, or Nirvana"; and today we might add, Wiccans would call the Goddess.

Of course the criticism of this approach is that it might lead to a pick-and-mix, anything goes, kind of spirituality, in which we could think what we liked about God. Not so, she says, for all the great religious traditions are in unanimous agreement: "the one and only test of a valid religious idea, doctrinal statement, spiritual experience or devotional practice was that it must lead to practical compassion. If your understanding of the divine made you kinder, more empathetic and impelled you to express this sympathy in concrete acts of loving kindness, this was good theology. But if your notion of God made you unkind, belligerent, cruel or self-righteous, or if it led you to kill in God's name, then it was bad theology". So compassion becomes the marker, the "litmus test", which can be found in "the prophets of Israel, the rabbis of the Talmud, for Jesus for Paul and for Muhammad, not to mention Confucius, Lao tzu, the Buddha or the sages of the Upanishads".

But how does it go wrong, as with the crusaders? She sees them as killing Jews and Muslims in the name of God, because they had forgotten this, and fallen into a kind of idolatry, making a God in their own image and likeness; hence also making a God with all their own fear and loathing. They had lost the compassion, and lost sight of the fact that God transcended personality, and given their hatred a seal of divine approval.

In conclusion, she sees compassion at the core of faiths, and of attaining enlightenment, as her study of Buddhism revealed; as well as classic yoga (which she notes is immeasurably more rigorous that most of the Yoga practised in the West), compassion also gives "the release of the mind from the toils of self-seeking", that lets the person come to enlightenment, Nirvana. In all faiths, compassion "dethrones the ego from the centre of our lives and puts others there, breaking down the carapace of selfishness that holds us back from an experience of the sacred".

That does not mean not speaking against injustice, she notes that "we should cry out against injustice and cruelty wherever we find it, as the prophets did, especially when it occurs in our own society or on 'our side'", but we must also "find room for the other in our minds", for "if we cannot accommodate a viewpoint in a friend without resorting to unkindness, how can we hope to heal the terrible problems of our planet".

In this, she has found that she has learnt also from periods of solitude, where silence has "also opened my ears and eyes to the suffering of the world. In silence, you begin to hear the note of pain that informs so much of the anger and posturing that pervades political and social life.. Silence and solitude strip away a skin, they break down that protective shell of heartlessness which we cultivate in order to prevent ourselves from being overwhelmed by the suffering of the world that presses in upon us all sides."

At the end of the book, she comments that "the best theologians and teachers have never been afraid to admit that in the last resort there may be 'Nothing' out there. That is why they spoke of a God who in some sense did not exist. It is why the Buddha refused to comment on the metaphysical status of a Buddha after death, and why Confucius would not speak of the Tao. What is vital to all the traditions, however, is that we have a duty to make the best of the only thing that remains to us - ourselves. Our task now is to mend our broken world; if religion cannot do that; it is worthless. And 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".

As well as telling her story, she also tells of her quest to seek meaning in life, and to present a deeper understanding of the nature of belief, and what differing belief traditions have in common. The old stereotypes which she dealt with in her book on fundamentalist movements (The Battle for God), she sees as sterile, and the position that I am right and you are wrong, is a form of dogmatic arrogance which we simply cannot afford any longer. The book is both a personal reconciliation of her beliefs with post-modernity, and a signpost for others who seek this path.