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.

The Spiral Staircase: A Review - Part 2

The Spiral Staircase by Karen Armstrong: A Review - Part 2

Karen Armstrong, like many people, had "assumed that Islam was an inherently violent religion", and she began her book "Muhammad" very much as a polemic, intending to answer the controversy and "inbuilt cultural suspicion of Islam". She found that Muhammad emerges as a far more human figure than Jesus or the Buddha: "We see him laughing, carrying his grandchildren on his shoulders, and weeping over the death of friends. We see his doubts, his griefs, his moments of despair and terror." The Pakistani scholar Akbar Ahmed told her that "your book is a love story".

Her book on the prophet was written shortly after the furore occasioned by Salman Rushdie and his Satanic Verses, and she realised that her study must be sensitive, and avoid levity, or witty, biting remarks. She had to subdue her own ego, keep herself "in the background", which was for editorial reasons, but as she saw, also was one of the most universal religious principles, keeping out the ego, which is seen as "a prerequisite for religious experience". She also found her study was in many ways "a constant concentration of mind and heart that was in fact a type of meditation"; this was because she had to "make a daily effort to enter into the ghastly conditions of seventh century Arabia", leaving "twentieth century assumptions and predilections behind. to develop a wholly different way of looking at the world." Yet while this was undertaken for study, and writing a book, she came to reflect on it and see it as a spiritual discipline, that of transcendence, or "standing outside": "All the traditions tell us, one way or another, that we have to leave behind our inbuilt selfishness, with its greedy fears and cravings. We are most fully ourselves when we give ourselves away, and it is egotism that holds us back from that transcendent experience that had been called God, Nirvana, Brahman or the Tao".

Islam, as she came to see, is like Judaism, not so much concerned with imposing official doctrine: "it propagates no creed, and is rather dismissive of theological speculation". The word "kafir", often translated as "unbeliever" really means one who is ungrateful to God. "Instead of accepting a complex creed, Muslims are required to perform certain ritual actions, such as the hajj pilgrimage and the fast of Ramadan, which are designed to change them. The physical discipline was meant to affect their
inner posture."

As time went on, and she began teaching again, she also came to understand that most religious discourse is like poetry: "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 as you might listen to a beautiful piece of music. You have to give it your full attention, wait patiently on it, and make an empty space for it in your mind. And finally, the work declares itself to you, steals deeply into the interstices of your being, line by line, note by note, phrase by phrase, until it becomes part of you. Like the words of a poem, a religious idea, myth or doctrine points beyond itself to truths that are elusive, that resist words and conceptualisation."

The Spiral Staircase - A Review: Part 1

The Spiral Staircase by Karen Armstrong: A Review - Part 1

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This is a book which is a reflective memoir of part of Karen Armstrong's life. Karen became a nun in the 1960s, before the changes of Vatican II, when nuns had a severe dress code; that was symptomatic of the repressed and disciplined servility of their society. Seven years later, she left that life as a nun, and returned to the outside world, trying to make sense of the strange cultural landscape she found herself in, and trying to find her own path in life. In this, she describes her journey in a vivid image used by T.S. Eliot in his sequence of poems called "Ash Wednesday"; she says that "the experience of spiritual progress and illumination was represented by the symbol of a spiral staircase", in a slowly turning movement, changing perspectives, "slowly ascending to one new insight after another".

There is much in the book that is interesting, and here I select a few instances at random. One of the areas that she began to notice, and later to research in some depth, was the rise of religious fundamentalism - not just Christian fundamentalism, but a growing movement, reacting against the strain of civilization, and the barren spirituality of modernity. "The old ways had been dismantled, but as yet nothing new had appeared to take their place. 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 Kohmeini. In Britain they voted for Margaret Thatcher." That was significant because she epitomised "an attitude of unquestioned and unquestioning superiority", and influenced a culture of money, with little time for the "large numbers of homeless men and women now sleeping rough on the streets"; the economic and political certainty had "pushed people on to the streets". Karen Armstrong comments that "certainty made people heartless, cruel and inhuman. It closed their minds to new possibilities; it made them complacent and pleased with themselves." In this was a special danger for religions of all kinds, because "religious people seemed particularly prone to this dogmatism" which "made people ride roughshod over other people's sensitivities."

When looking at the lives of some of her friends who were not particularly religious, she notes that they kept diaries, and "in every evening they record the events of their day". She comments that "it was, I could see, another form of meditation, or even an examination of conscience; it was a way of making sense of their lives".

There is a wonderful anecdote about one of her friends who was commiserating with an elderly couple who were moving house about the trials and upheavals it caused. "Moving is hell, isn't it", he said, and the old man replied that it was terrible, but "fortunately I have a friend who makes the whole thing bearable"; her friend was utterly perplexed and confused when the "friend" turned out to be Jesus, and told her he could not understand it. She comments sharply that she agreed "especially as the historical Jesus would have been more likely to tell the couple to give all their possessions to the poor rather than help them convey their worldly goods around the country in heavily insured vans!"

She tells of her encounter with Judaism during the making of a religious programme for television, and how for Judaism, belief was not as much of an issue as with Christianity, with "orthopraxy instead of orthodoxy" - "right practice rather than right belief", as Judaism saw their beliefs more as "poetry, ways of talking about the inexpressible". Her Jewish friend cited the story of the Jewish teacher Hillel to illustrate this: "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 others as you would not have done unto you. That is the Torah. The rest is commentary. Go and learn it.' "

As time went on, she came to see that she had to follow her path: "The great myths show that when you follow someone else's path, you go astray. The hero has to set off by himself, leaving the old world and the old ways behind. He must venture into the darkness of the unknown, where there is no map and no clear route. He must fight his own monsters, not somebody else's, explore his own labyrinth, and endure his own ordeal before he can find what is missing from his life. Thus transfigured, he - or she - can bring something of value to the world that has been left behind. But if the knight finds himself riding an already established track, he is simply following in somebody else's footsteps, and will not have an adventure. In the worlds of the Old French text of the quest of the Holy Grail, he must enter the forest 'at that point he himself had chosen, where it was darkest, and where there was no path'." Against this, she sees a "waste land" where "people live inauthentic lives, blindly following the norms of their society and doing only what other people expect".

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