Compassion, not belief.(Book Review)

The Spiral Staircase, by Karen Armstrong; Harper Perennial, 2004, $24.95.

THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE is an autobiography by an English scholar of religion, Karen Armstrong. It tells the story of her movement away from the life of a nun to her new life as a writer on religious traditions. Armstrong is probably most famous for her History of God and A History of Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths. She has carved out a unique place for herself as a scholar of the major monotheistic religious traditions: Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Surprisingly in our secular society, her books have been a runaway success.

Armstrong entered the convent as a seventeen-year-old and spent seven years leaving the convent. Some would say that she spent a lifetime trying to leave. In some ways, she has well and truly left the convent behind. She endorses a historical and secular version of religious history that the convent would reject. She is of the view that assenting to propositions such as "God exists" is not important for being religious, but that exercising compassion is. She finds it hard to answer the question, "Do you believe in God?" because in some ways she does not believe in the existence of a supernatural omnipotent, benevolent being. But she is in her own way more religious than many people. She spends her days discussing the meaning of religious beliefs and studying the history of religion in largely solitary pursuit.

What drew Armstrong to the convent at seventeen was--strange as it may sound--the idea of total freedom and a yearning to experience contact with the divine. She found in her own case, at the convent she attended, neither. Life at Cherwell Edge House was dreary and narrow-minded.

One particular episode of stupidity stands out. The mother superior chastised Karen for daring to point out that there were no needles at the sewing machine on which she was expected to work. She was then put onto another machine that was also without needles. But speaking up and telling the truth--"There are no needles!"--was discouraged. Karen kept quiet and the mother superior ordered Karen to work at a sewing machine without needles for hours. The scene is comparable to a scene out of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four in which the hero finally under torture is brought to admit that "two plus two is not four". The denial of truth is damaging to the intellect.

Karen came under increasing strain at the convent. She was, she says, unable to reconcile the critical mindset she was encouraged to exercise as a student with the dogmatic mindset of the nunnery at Cherwell Edge. Her tutors at St Anne's College, Oxford, would encourage her to think for herself and challenge authority, while the nuns at Cherwell Edge demanded unquestioning obedience. Cherwell Edge is on Norham Road, a stone's throw from St Anne's College, but miles away intellectually.

Karen's withdrawal from convent life and rejoining of secular society took place against the backdrop of the unfolding early 1960s, when old ways of thinking were being thrown away--both in the church and in the student body. The church was undergoing the liberalising reforms of Vatican II and the student body was beginning to let down its hair and worship the Beatles. No one seems to have been entirely certain of where they stood.