New view of the narrow gate

In 1962, at the age of 17, Karen Armstrong entered a very rigid, austere, anti-intellectual convent in Sussex, England. In 1981, 12 years after she left the convent, she recorded the experience in her first book, “Through the Narrow Gate.” Two years later, in “Beginning the World,” she continued her story, recounting her attempts to adjust to secular life as an Oxford student. After writing 12 more books on a variety of religious topics, the British journalist and former Roman Catholic nun is again attempting to understand her life. At age 60, the amazingly prolific Armstrong returns to her convent experience in “The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness,” the third review of the trauma of her early life. As she says, “We should probably all pause to confront our past from time to time, because it changes its meaning as our circumstances alter.”

All three of Armstrong’s autobiographical books focus on her seven-year “formation.” In religious societies, the term “formation” means the very systematic process of turning ordinary secular people into members of the religious society -- some of us would call it brainwashing. The humanizing reforms of Vatican II had not yet reached her order, and the work of formation, in Armstrong’s case, was extraordinarily rigorous. Her convent superiors controlled her thoughts, emotions and even movement of her body; this formation went on every minute, every hour, every week, every month, every year.

As Armstrong repeats frequently in all three books, “formation was meant to last for a lifetime and did.” It was during those years that she was made to practice sewing daily on a machine with no thread and scrub stairs with a nailbrush, exercises designed to break her down and destroy her individuality and intellectual coherence. The three books chronicle her attempts to free herself, to repair the damage that has been done to her. Her successes in repairing herself come only after great, sustained effort and much pain.

By writing this new, elegantly integrated memoir, Armstrong has given the reader the rare opportunity to see how this same experience looks a quarter-century later. In her earlier memoirs, the graphic, detailed narrative is rawly emotional; the sense of immediacy and confusion make them gut-wrenching. In “The Spiral Staircase,” she has left out many of the messy details in the first years after the convent, the most obvious examples being her self-mutilations, her first date and her first love affair. She says, “Writing about these relationships was a lowering experience for me .... I see no reason to dwell on those episodes here, because none of them developed into anything significant.” And that may or may not be fair in a memoir.

“The Spiral Staircase” repeats, embellishes and reassesses. While anchoring herself in the present, Armstrong skillfully interweaves her convent and Oxford experiences, putting them in the wider context of world events. Her narrative skill is light-years away from the earlier memoirs. She has gracefully added literary allusions and explications to suggest her state of mind; these are marvelously authentic and add great nuance to the book. Her sensitivity to literature works well and makes one wonder what she would have written about poetry if her Oxford dissertation had not been rejected for political reasons.

The center of “The Spiral Staircase” is Armstrong’s account of Dame Helen Gardner’s lecture at Oxford on T.S. Eliot’s “Ash-Wednesday.” In this sequence of poems, Eliot uses the symbol of a spiral staircase to represent spiritual recovery. At this lecture, four years after leaving the convent, Armstrong felt the first flicker of her own recovery. For the first time since entering the convent, she felt spontaneously moved; she had an emotional response to poetry. “Ash-Wednesday” becomes central to her life. She realizes that she cannot undo the formation of the convent, that “whether I liked it or not, I was different.”

Armstrong accepts that she cannot change. She accepts the damage that the nuns caused, that she allowed them to cause. She insists, oddly, that she alone is responsible. She knows that building a new identity will “be a lifelong task, requiring alert attention to the smallest detail, dedication, and unremitting effort.” Her life will be a constant struggle, always resisting the convent formation. She will never be “like anyone else.” This acute sense of always being an outsider pervades the book.

In the last third of “The Spiral Staircase,” Armstrong continues the story of her recovery, her “climb out of darkness.” In 1982, while auditioning for a documentary television series, she finds herself freed from the convent diatribes against intellectual pride; she is again able, and with pleasure, to talk about her own ideas. The chapter on her life as a television personality is refreshing. Focusing on external events, she stops her intense introspection and seems to be having a good time. When the prospective series falls apart, she decides to cheer herself up -- by writing her epic bestseller “A History of God.”

When Armstrong describes her work on that book, she speaks in a new voice that I would have liked to hear more often. I lost all sense of craft. I felt no artifice. I was happy just to listen to her voice. As she describes herself writing in her cottage, walking down the paths of her garden, cherishing her solitude, waiting for the text to speak to her, she sounds like a contemplative monk. Her comments on silence are especially beautiful and insightful. I would have liked more sustained treatment of the hermitic Armstrong. The book ends with reflections on Sept. 11, 2001, which again changed her life, forcing her back into the world as an oft-cited expert on Islam.

Armstrong is still searching, still climbing upward on her spiral staircase (“I hope, toward the light”). Her hunger for God is nearly palpable. Armstrong’s paradoxical journey from traditional religion to agnosticism to a contemplative life is the stuff of myth. She thought that the convent had God in its pocket, and she now knows that God is in no one’s pocket. God isn’t anywhere or anyone. She went to the convent because she wanted to find God. Forty years later, she is finally totally immersed in the “ultimately satisfying mystery that we call God.” Perhaps in another 20 years, Armstrong will tell us what she saw from the top of the spiral staircase. *

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From The Spiral Staircase

In Eliot’s “Ash-Wednesday,” we watch the poet painfully climbing a spiral staircase. This image is reflected in the twisting sentences of the verse, which often revolves upon itself, repeating the same words and phrases, apparently making little headway, but pushing steadily forward nevertheless. My own life has progressed in the same way. For years it seemed a hard, Lenten journey, but without the prospect of Easter.... For a long time I assumed that I had finished with religion forever, yet in the end, the strange and seemingly arbitrary revolutions of my life led me to the kind of transformation that -- I now believe -- was what I was seeking all those years ago, when I packed my suitcase, entered my convent, and set off to find God.