Sizing up Karen Armstrong’s Spiral Staircase
A friend recently handed me a copy of Karen Armstrong’s 2005 Bestseller, The Spiral Staircase.
Armstrong entered the convent in 1962 at the age of 17. These were very difficult years for her, due to the rigid religious dogma that permeated her training. She ultimately renounced her vows at the age of 24. Armstrong has written numerous books on religion since that time, focusing on all of the major monotheistic religions. She makes regular appearances on NPR. The Spiral Staircase was Armstrong’s account of her own struggles with regard to her personal beliefs.
As I read passages of The Spiral Staircase, I was intrigued by my own difficulty of categorizing Armstrong. I wondered why she would cling to traditional notions of worship at the point when, intellectually, she had already reduced “God” to a all-but-abstract principle. Though she seems to be a fence sitter, she’s firmly there. She refuses to allow any atheist or theist knock her off. See, again, how should one describe her? Is she a Christian, a sympathizer of Islam, an agnostic, an atheist, a Buddhist or something else? She admits that she was, at one time in “an agnostic, perhaps an atheist.” (Page 272). Is she now really a freelance monotheist?:
…I usually describe myself, perhaps flippantly, as a freelance monotheist I draw sustenance from all three of the faiths of Abraham. I can’t see any one of them as having the monopoly of truth, any one of them as superior to any of
