Karen Armstrong has written three
autobiographies. The latest one, The
Spiral Staircase, should be read in
conjunction with the first one, Through
the Narrow Gate, which was published in
1981. In between these two publications
there was another one, Beginning the
World, which she disdains as the worst
book she has ever written and is glad that
it is out of print. Through the Narrow
Gate sold so well that her publisher
commissioned a sequel. She feels that
following the publisher's guideline in
Beginning the World, she was too
boisterous and extrovert and did not tell
the whole story. She wrote The Spiral
Staircase to tell the whole story
truthfully.
I have not read the second book. The other
two chronicle an intimate, candid and moving
account of her life experiences. She is
eloquent and witty, but as usually happens
with sequels, there is quite a bit of
overlap between the two books. In The
Spiral Staircase she dwells an
inordinate amount on her medical history.
The spiritual message comes across in the
last two chapters. Also, if you have been
reading all her books, you will not find
anything new. But Karen Armstrong can never
be boring. The Spiral Staircase is
engaging, lucid and inspiring.
Through the Narrow Gate begins with
her entry into the convent at the age of 17,
much against the wishes of her parents, and
ends with her decision to leave the convent
seven years later. In The Spiral
Staircase she begins where she had left
off. She talks about the difficulty of
fitting into the secular world outside the
convent. For a while it appeared she had
exchanged one form of oppressive environment
for another. Life at Oxford and later on as
a teacher in a private girl's school had its
own rigid procedures and regulations, which
were confining for a creative thinker that
Karen is.
She advises all of us to confront our "past
from time to time, because it changes its
meaning as our circumstances alter".
Reflecting on her experiences of adjusting
to life outside the convent, she ties in
with larger issues, "I was experiencing
something akin to the culture shock of those
who have been forced to leave home in
Pakistan, Palestine, or Zimbabwe and migrate
to a western country."
The title, The Spiral Staircase, is
derived from a sequence of six poems on
spiritual recovery, "Ash Wednesday" by T.S.
Eliot, which begins with, "Because I do
not hope to turn again / Because I do not
hope / Because I do turn." She says that
she imagined T.S. Eliot's staircase as a
narrow spiral one. "I tried to get off it
and join others on what seemed to me to be a
broad, noble light of steps, thronged with
people. But I kept falling off, and when I
went back to my own twisting stairwell, I
found a fulfilment that I had not expected
before. Now I have to mount my staircase
alone. And as I go up, step by step, I am
turning, again, round and round, apparently
covering little ground, but climbing upward,
I hope, towards the light."
This aptly sums up her experiences. From the
day she entered the convent in search of God
till 1976, her life was a series of failures
and disappointments laced with brilliant
academic achievements. She failed as a nun,
as a teacher, and as a TV presenter. She was
no good at mingling with people socially and
could not get into a satisfactory
relationship with any man. She failed her
PhD at Oxford. The nuns dismissed her
forgetfulness and fainting spells as
attention getting techniques and spiritual
failure, and the psychiatrists assigned it
to some traumatic experience in her
childhood. In 1976, her disease was
diagnosed as temporal lobe epilepsy. Though
there is no permanent cure for epilepsy,
with the right treatment she was able to
cope with life much better. She finally
emerged as the foremost writer on religious
affairs in the late 1980s.
In 1984, Channel 4 of London commissioned
her to make a six-part documentary on St
Paul. The assignment took her on several
trips to Israel. She was appalled at what
she saw: the killing of defenceless
Palestinians. She found this contrary to the
value system she was brought up with and she
wondered about the integrity of the western
culture. She turned her negative experiences
into positive energy and began researching,
Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. In 1988,
she published Holy War: The Crusades and
Their Impact on Today's World.
After September 11, 2001, she felt that she
could not isolate herself from the problems
of the world. Since then she has been much
in demand as a writer and speaker on
religion and particularly Islam.
"Islam might have become more intolerant
during the last half century; this seems to
be due to the peculiar strains of our
modernity. In general it has been far more
respectful of other faiths than
Christianity. The stereotypical view of
Islam, first developed at the time of the
Crusades, was in some profound sense
essential to our western identity," she
writes.
Karen Armstrong does not believe in God in
the traditional sense and could not find him
through traditional means. She has moved
away from the narrowness of orthodoxy to
become the leading interpreter of
comparative religion and an outstanding
commentator on the human need to believe in
religion. "God was thus simply a projection
of human need. "He" mirrored the fears and
yearnings of society at each stage of its
development. Jews, Christians, and Muslims
had all produced the same kind of God," she
says.
She explores the richness of all religions
and draws interfaith parallels. "In all
great religions, seers and prophets have
conceived strikingly similar visions of a
transcendent and ultimate reality...The
monotheistic faiths, however, call this
transcendence 'God'", she writes.
She goes to the heart of the problem, zeroes
in on human insecurities and longings and
explains the violence and upheavals of
modern times in spiritual terms. She is the
author of A History of God, a history
of the idea of God; and the battle for God
on the rise of fundamentalism. Her fans can
look forward to her next book on the axial
age, a period in history when "Buddha,
Confucius, the prophets of Israel and Greeks
all emerged. And they all began with a
recoil from violence."
Her other books are: The First Christian:
St. Paul (1983); Tongues of Fire: An
Anthology of Religious and Poetic Experience
(1985); The Gospel According to Women:
Christianity's Creation of the Sex War in
the West (1986); English Mystics of
the Fourteenth Century (1991);
Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet
(1991); Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths
(1996); In the Beginning: A New
Interpretation of Genesis (1996);
Islam: A Short History (2000); Buddha
(2002). |
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