The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness.

The Spiral Staircase My Climb Out of Darkness By Karen Armstrong Published by Knopf Canada, 2004, ISBN: 0-676-97467-8 Hardcover, pp. 306, $35.95 CAN

This is the third autobiography of this much-published author; it elucidates the material in the earlier two. Born in England, she entered an (unnamed) convent in that country in 1962 when she was seventeen and left after seven years, just before the time for taking final vows. She blames the convent discipline for taking away her spontaneity and self-confidence and, by its constant fault-finding, making her feel guilty and inadequate. She was in the convent during the difficult days when religious communities, especially of women, were changing, Slowly, into what they are today. She had been allowed to study English literature at Oxford University, and the contrast between university and convent life had an effect on her leaving.

Armstrong says that she left the convent because she had not found God. This is an unusual claim after a seven-year search. And she later said: "In fact, the more I thought about God these days, the more I realized how much I had probably always, subconsciously, disliked him. These days it seemed that he had lurked in my life like Big Brother in George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-four, spying on everything I did, thought, and felt, endlessly dissatisfied, and doling out favours and punishments indiscriminately" (p. 205).

A serious factor also was that she was epileptic, though no one knew it. The nuns thought she was simply looking for attention by fainting during epileptic attacks, and gave her no medical attention. When she left the convent, the attacks became stronger and more terrifying and, after many consultations with psychiatrists, she learned that they were caused physically, and that the kind of attacks she suffered could be well controlled with medicine.

Armstrong didn't fit into society when she re-entered the secular world. So much had changed, and her attacks were a constant worry. She did well as an undergraduate at Oxford and was awarded a grant for graduate work. After she spent years preparing for a doctorate in English literature, the degree was not awarded, apparently because of a tragic train of events. She taught high school for a year or two but couldn't find happiness in it. She then became involved in broadcasting and writing, and succeeded in writing quite a few books and doing a number of TV programs with the British Broadcasting Corporation. The ironic aspect of this is that she was linked with the BBC's religion editors, all of whom, she tells us, were atheists and despised religion. She herself had also become a belligerent atheist.

Though her acquaintances were apparently all atheists and she was one herself, she found herself still searching for God. She studied, and wrote about, the Jewish, Muslim, and Christian religions, highly favouring the first two of these, and not adverting to the great saints or other glories of the third.

She says that today she is still searching for God. But there are problems with her search that will keep her from her goal. One is that she doesn't want certainty: "As far as I could see, certainty made people heartless, cruel, and inhuman. It closed their minds to new possibilities; it made them complacent and pleased with themselves" (p. 204). But of course we cannot be sure that there is a God if we are uncertain about it.

A second problem is that she downplays faith and wants compassion to be a sufficient criterion of a good life: "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 does not exist.... What is vital to all of the traditions, however, is that we have a duty to make the best of the only thing that remains to us--ourselves. Our task 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" (pp. 303-04). But, we may ask, what can be meant by the sacred value of human beings if there is no God? Human life is sacred only when it reaches beyond physical death to God and life eternal. Otherwise we are not much better than plants or animals."

Two weird incidents are related in this book. While in the convent, Armstrong was writing an account of the evidence we have for the resurrection of Christ. When the teacher said that the account was good, Armstrong asked: "But, Mother, it isn't true, is it?" And the teacher said, "No, Sister, it isn't true. But please don't tell the others." Armstrong adds: "What I had written was not true, because the insights of faith are not amenable to rational or historical analysis" (pp. 32-33). Her teacher had been immersed in the new "biblical criticism." Certainly an incident like this could be enough in itself to drive a nun out of the convent, since the resurrection of Christ is at the very heart of Catholic faith.

The second weird incident took place in a Dominican chapel at Blackfriars in Oxford. It was a truncated baptismal ceremony in which Armstrong, an atheist, was the only godparent, and the boy being baptized had no reasonable expectation of being brought up as a Catholic (pp. 184-87). No doubt such a blatant disrespect for such an important sacrament could also have a harmful effect on Armstrong.

The author had climbed out of darkness because she had overcome a lack of self-confidence, the terror of undiagnosed epilepsy, and atheism, but only to be mired in agnosticism. Let us pray that she may yet find God.