The Spiral Staircase

THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE

KAREN ARMSTRONG

COPYRIGHT

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This edition published by HarperPress 2005

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2004

Copyright © Karen Armstrong 2004

Karen Armstrong asserts the moral right to be

identified as the author of this work

PS Section copyright © Georgina Laycock 2005

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the Estate of

T. S. Eliot and Faber & Faber Ltd, for permission to reprint an excerpt

from the poem ‘Ash-Wednesday’, from Collected Poems, 1909–1962 by T. S. Eliot.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007122295

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PRAISE

From the reviews of The Spiral Staircase:

‘A book full of riches’

MICHÈLE ROBERTS, Literary Review

‘Unputdownable – absorbing, moving and hopeful’

Daily Mail

‘Her prose is admirably lucid … She writes with great insight and clarity about shifting states of mind and of feeling and about the evolution of thought, and she gives a more exact and vivid account of the pleasures of writing than any I have come across in a literary biography’

LUCY HUGHES-HALLETT, Sunday Times

‘Open, accessible, writing without jargon or denominational loyalty, Armstrong manages to put into words something that most of us cannot express … She tells a good tale at her own expense. She recounts the challenges she faced on her journey with amusement, a good ear for dialogue and an absence of self-pity or piety’

New Statesman

‘This terrifically readable book … is a fine testament to how the effort to escape self-pity and sustain the spirit in adversity is itself richly creative and can reward’

SALLEY VICKERS, Spectator

‘Written with enormous charm and elegance … If you are mystified as to why religion, which you thought was all but dead and buried, has bounced back with such alarming impact on to the human scene, then Karen Armstrong is probably your best guide’

Scotsman

EPIGRAPH

Because I do not hope to turn again

Because I do not hope

Because I do not hope to turn

Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope

I no longer strive to strive towards such things

(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)

Why should I mourn

The vanished power of the usual reign?

Because I do not hope to know again

The infirm glory of the positive hour

Because I do not think

Because I know I shall not know

The one veritable transitory power

Because I cannot drink

There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again

Because I know that time is always time

And place is always and only place

And what is actual is actual only for one time

And only for one place

I rejoice that things are as they are and

I renounce the blessèd face

And renounce the voice

Because I cannot hope to turn again

Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something

Upon which to rejoice

And pray to God to have mercy upon us

And I pray that I may forget

These matters that with myself I too much discuss

Too much explain

Because I do not hope to turn again

Let these words answer

For what is done, not to be done again

May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly

But merely vans to beat the air

The air which is now thoroughly small and dry

Smaller and dryer than the will

Teach us to care and not to care

Teach us to sit still.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death

Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

T. S. ELIOT

Ash-Wednesday, I.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Epigraph

Preface

1 Ash Wednesday

2 The Devil of the Stairs

3 I Renounce the Blessèd Face

4 Consequently I Rejoice

5 Desiring This Man’s Gift and That Man’s Scope

6 The Usual Reign

7 Infirm Glory

8 To Turn Again

Keep Reading

P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features …

About the Author

Interview With Karen Armstrong

About the Book

Extract from Through the Narrow Gate

Read On

Have You Read?

If You Loved This You’ll Like …

Find Out More

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

PREFACE

This is the sequel to my first book, Through the Narrow Gate, which told the story of my seven years as a Roman Catholic nun. I entered my convent in 1962, when I was seventeen years old. It was entirely my own decision. My family was not particularly devout and my parents were horrified when I told them that I had a religious vocation. They thought, quite correctly as it turned out, that I was far too young to make such a momentous choice, but they allowed themselves to be persuaded because they wanted me to get it out of my system as soon as possible. I was usually quite a biddable child but I was anxious to test my vocation immediately, instead of waiting until after I had been to university, as my parents would have preferred. My unusual resolution in the face of their opposition impressed them, and they feared that I might spend my college years in a state of mulish obstinacy, failing to make the most of the opportunities of university life, and longing for it all to be over so that I could do what I really wanted. So, on 14 September 1962, I packed my bags and joined twelve other girls at the novitiate.

Why was I so determined to take this step? The motivation behind this type of decision is always complex, and there were a number of interlocking reasons. It is true that at this time I was very shy and worried about the demands of adult social life, but even though the religious life might seem a soft option, it was tough and I would not have lasted more than a few weeks if it had simply been a means of escape. I wanted to find God. I was filled with excitement and enthusiasm on that September day, convinced that I had embarked on a spiritual quest, an epic adventure, in the course of which I would lose the confusions of my adolescent self in the infinite and ultimately satisfying mystery that we call God. And because I was only seventeen, I imagined that this would happen pretty quickly. Very soon I would become a wise and enlightened woman, all passion spent. God would no longer be a remote, shadowy reality but a vibrant presence in my life. I would see him wherever I looked, and I myself would be transfigured, because, as St Paul had said, my puny little ego would disappear and Christ, the Word of God, would live in me. I would be serene, joyful, inspired and inspiring – perhaps even a saint.

This was, to put it mildly, an eccentric career option. I was almost the first student of my convent school to become a nun. Birmingham, my home town, was a materialistic place, where money was king. Most of my immediate family and friends were nonplussed – even slightly irritated – and I, of course, revelled in the sense of striking out and being just that little bit different. But I may have been more in tune with my times than I realized, since many of my generation, born in the last years or in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, had the same inchoate yearning for transformation. Post-war Britain was not an easy place in which to grow up. We may have defeated Hitler, but the war had ruined us. Britain was now a second-rate power, and food, clothing and petrol were strictly rationed well into the 1950s. Because thousands of homes had been destroyed during the Blitz, there was a grave housing crisis. Our cities were scarred with desolate bombsites and filled with towering heaps of rubble. The centre of Birmingham was not completely rebuilt until after I left for the convent. After the war, we were in debt to the United States for three billion pounds, our empire was dismantled, and, though we were fed on a surfeit of films celebrating Britain’s endurance and victory, nobody seemed prepared to look facts in the face, and decide what our future role in the world should be. Young Britons, like myself, who came to maturity in this twilight confusion of austerity, repression, nostalgia, frustration and denial, wanted not only a different world but to be changed themselves.

In 1948, 60 per cent of British people under thirty wanted to emigrate; we wanted to be somewhere else. Hence, as the music historian Jon Savage explains in England’s Dreaming: the Sex Pistols and Punk Rock (1991), the quasi-religious fervour inspired by the Rock’n’Roll records that fell, like manna from heaven, between 1954 and 1959 on a country that had no tradition of Afro-American music. The unabashed rebellion and sexual explosiveness of these records seemed to promise a new world. They were ‘so transforming that nobody who heard them could find a language to explain them except in the phrases of the songs themselves, which talked in tongues: “A Wop Bop A Loo Bop”, “Be Bop A Lula”.’ People used to say of a record: ‘It sent me!’ as though they had been magically transported, without any effort of their own, to another place. In the world conjured up by Rock’n’Roll, nobody had to do National Service or listen to endless stories about the war. People could reject the self-sacrifice preached by their parents, live intensely, run wild, have sex, consume freely and ‘do as much as they could as soon as they could’.

This might seem a far cry from the convent. But, in my own way, I shared what Savage calls the ‘first time intensity’ of my generation. The raw, disturbing beat of Rock’n’Roll had penetrated my convent school, even though I was neither able nor equipped to answer its summons. I did not like being a teenage girl in the 1950s. I was awkward, plain, bookish and unpopular with boys. I looked absurd in the fashions of the day: the wide swirling skirts, pert ponytails, and backcombed beehives. In 1961, the year before I entered the convent, my parents tried to entice me from my intended course by talking me into joining a young people’s party at the Birmingham Catholic Ball. It was a ghastly affair. Encased in a stiff brocaded dress, with a skirt that stuck out aggressively, my feet squeezed into an agonizing pair of pink satin shoes with long pointed toes, I was hobbled. On the few occasions when I was invited to dance, and grimly quickstepped, waltzed and fox-trotted with a herd of others, I felt like a prisoner going round and round the exercise yard. At one point, my partner and I left the main room, and for ten blissful minutes managed to escape. We weren’t doing anything unlawful; we weren’t smoking, drinking alcohol or kissing – just sitting on the stairs and talking – but a friend of my mother’s pounced on me and frog-marched me back into the ballroom. I felt like a Victorian girl who had been compromised in some way. There had to be more to life than this.

Of course there were alternatives. We were told that, within reason, we could do anything we wanted: we could study, travel and have a career – until we got married. But even though I shrank from the appalling prospect of being an Old Maid, marriage did not look particularly appealing either, since most of the women I knew spent their lives ceaselessly cleaning, baking and washing, chores that I detest to this day. When my father had business problems, my mother took a job, and started an interesting career in the medical school of Birmingham University. I could see how she blossomed in this new environment, but the cooking and washing-up still had to be done. By contrast, the nuns seemed remarkably unencumbered. They had no men to tell them what to do, they ran their own lives, and were, presumably, concerned with higher things. I wanted that radical freedom.

I was looking for the sort of transformation that others were seeking in Rock’n’Roll, an option that was closed to me. As a convent schoolgirl, I was protected from the street culture, and lived in a separate world from most of my fellow-countrymen and women. In the 1950s, most people in Britain still paid lip-service to religion, but Catholicism was beyond the pale. Its extravagant statues with bleeding hearts and crowns of thorns, its Latinate ritual, its Irish priests, and its orientation to Rome made it highly unBritish, and therefore suspect. Catholics lived in self-imposed ‘ghettoes’: we socialized together, went to separate schools, did not attend Protestant services, and were taught to hold aloof from the ‘non-Catholic’ mainstream. As a result of this upbringing, I think that many of us have never felt entirely English, and continue to feel outsiders in British society. My head was filled with the imagery of Catholicism, with the lives and example of its saints, and the soaring theatre of its liturgy. I too wanted to be ‘sent’, to experience an ecstasy that would lift me to a different dimension, to go to another place, and live more authentically than seemed possible in the world I knew. Like my peers, who loitered menacingly in the El Sombrero coffee bar in Birmingham, I too could reject the values of contemporary society. The cloister seemed a radical and daring solution. So while my peers ‘opted out’ in hippie communes, experimented with mind-altering drugs, or tried to change the world politically, I sought intensity and transformation in the life of a nun.

Needless to say, the convent was not what I expected. I entered in 1962 as an ardent, idealistic, untidy, unrealistic and immature teenager, and left seven years later, having suffered a mild breakdown, obscurely broken and damaged. This was nobody’s fault, even though I assumed that the failure was entirely my own doing. I had embarked on the religious life at a particularly difficult moment, since my superiors were involved in a painful period of change, and were trying to decide what exactly it meant to be a nun in modern society. The Catholic Church was also seeking transformation in the post-war world. During my first few months in the convent, the Second Vatican Council convened in Rome. It had been summoned by Pope John XXIII to fling open the windows of the Church, and let the fresh air of modernity sweep through the musty corridors of the Vatican.

One of the areas tackled by the Council Fathers was the religious life, which urgently needed reform. Many of the orders were stuck in a traditional rut. Customs that had made perfect sense in the nineteenth century, when my own community had been founded, now seemed arbitrary and unnatural. Practices that had no intrinsic spiritual value but were cultural relics of the Victorian age had acquired sacred significance, and change was regarded as betrayal. The Council urged the religious orders to go back to the original spirit of their founders, who had been men and women of insight and imagination, innovators and pioneers, not guardians of the status quo. Nuns and monks should also let the bracing spirit of change invade their cloisters; they should throw out the rubble that had accumulated over the years and craft a new lifestyle that was in tune with the times.

This proved to be a monumentally difficult task. Nuns had to decide what was essential in their Rule, and then translate this into present-day idiom. But they themselves had been shaped by the old regime at a profound level and many found that they could not think in any other way. They could modernize their clothes, but they could not change the habits of their minds and hearts, which had been formed by a training that had been carefully designed in a different world and was meant to last a lifetime. For some, this was a time of great anguish. They saw a cherished way of life disappearing while nothing of equal value was emerging to take its place. I left the religious life in 1969, just ahead of a massive exodus of religious who left their convents and monasteries like flocks of migratory birds during the 1970s. The intense discussions surrounding the reforms had led them to call everything into question, even their own vocation. This, I believe, was a healthy development. The title of my first book, Through the Narrow Gate, comes from a text in St Matthew’s gospel, in which Jesus tells his disciples that ‘only a few’ find the narrow gate that leads to life. By the end of my seven years in the convent, I had come to the conclusion that only a very small number of people could live up to the demands of a life that requires the entire subjugation of the ego and a self-abandonment that, I realized sadly, was beyond me. I knew nuns who beautifully enshrined this ideal, but I realized that I was not of that calibre. I suspect that many of those who left during the 1970s had also faced up to this hard truth.

So I arrived at my convent at a difficult juncture, and would be one of the last people to be trained according to the old system. The reforms set in motion by the Vatican Council came just too late for me. And I experienced the traditional regime at its worst. A young nun in those days had to undergo a long period of intensive training. In my order, we spent the first nine months as postulants, wearing a sober black dress with a little white veil, and practising selected portions of the Rule. The Postulantship was a period of probation, designed to test our resolve, and about half of us dropped out. I must emphasize that there was never any pressure to stay. We all knew that we were free to leave at any time, and often a girl would be sent home because it was clear that she was not suited to convent life.

At the end of the nine months, we received the habit and began two years in the novitiate. This was a particularly testing time, and we were often told that if we did not find it almost unbearable, we were not trying hard enough. My superiors should, therefore, have been delighted with me, because I spent a good deal of my novitiate in tears. As if to fend off unwelcome change, they had appointed a particularly conservative nun as Novice Mistress the year before I arrived. In Through the Narrow Gate, I called her Mother Walter. She was unswervingly devoted to the old ways, and revived many disciplines that her two predecessors had discarded as unsuitable for twentieth-century girls. The system she devised, I now believe, was extremely unhealthy, but I threw myself into it because I was convinced that the harder I found it, the sooner it would bring me to God. Much later I was told that several nuns had been concerned about what was happening in the Noviceship during those years. As I shall explain in the early chapters of this book, the system was a form of conditioning. It was meant to change us irrevocably and it did – in my case, for the worse. I suspect that pressure was brought to bear upon Mother Walter, however, because towards the end of my novitiate, she relaxed some of her draconian innovations. A new batch of novices had arrived who were older and more worldly-wise than my own set and they simply would not put up with some of her more outrageous rules. But again, the change came too late for me.

Yet Mother Walter, too, was undergoing a painful transition, watching the religious practices that she had known and loved for so long thrown aside. It must have been a period of great suffering for her. It would never, of course, have occurred to me at the time but I now suspect that she was not very intelligent, and therefore unable to understand the effect of some of her policies. I remember once that, towards the end of my Noviceship, when she was savaging us for what she regarded as a failure in obedience, I suddenly cracked and told her that I no longer knew what obedience really was. ‘We seem to swing, like a pendulum, from one extreme to another,’ I protested, ‘from one disorder to another! One day we will be told off for not obeying absolutely to the letter, however absurd the command may be, and the next day we’ll be in trouble because we did obey blindly instead of using our intelligence and showing initiative! What are we supposed to do? What is obedience?’ I was astonished at myself, because we were never supposed to challenge our superiors in this way, especially while we were being reprimanded. My fellow-novices were gazing at me in dismay, clearly waiting for a thunderous riposte. But Mother Walter looked shocked, and for a moment was quite lost for words. She soon recovered herself, though the scolding she gave me was not up to her usual standard of scathing invective. But during those few seconds, while she fumbled for a suitable response, I could almost see an unwelcome insight breaking the surface of her mind, and forcing her to question the wisdom of her methods of training in a way that, perhaps, she had never done before.

Despite my difficulties, I was allowed to make vows of poverty, chastity and obedience for five years on 25 August 1965. It was a triumphant day. I felt that, like the heroes of myth, I had come through an ordeal and that things could only get better. I would soon get over the strains and tension that had made my life so miserable. Very quickly now, I would become mature and holy, and in five years’ time, if all went well, I would take the final vows that would commit me to the society for life.

And at first, things did go well. After the Noviceship, we left the Mother House in Sussex and went to London for two further years of training, known as the Scholasticate. During the novitiate, we had concentrated on our spiritual lives. We had spent most of the time learning about prayer and the meaning of our Rule. Ironically, considering my aversion to domesticity, we also spent our days doing simple, manual tasks, though in the second year we had been permitted to read a little theology. In the Scholasticate, however, we began our professional training. Since our order was dedicated to the education of Catholic girls, most of us were destined to become teachers in one of the society’s many schools. I had already completed the matriculation requirements for college, and it was decided that I should now prepare for the competitive entrance examinations to Oxford University, where the order had been sending nuns ever since women had been allowed to take degrees. For the next twelve months, I attended classes and tutorials at a ‘crammer’ near Marble Arch. My subject was to be English Literature. That meant that I had to take two three-hour papers in literature, one paper in English language and philology, two translation papers – one in Latin and the other in French – and a paper on topics of general interest. I loved it. I am a natural student and like nothing better than immersing myself in a pile of books. After the years of dreary domestic toil, I was in heaven. I also took a correspondence course in theology, scripture and church history.