Abstract
The Spiral Staircase, Karen Armstrong’s self-narrative, shows the limitations of theological or religious reflections within a specific religious community. Leaving the Sisters of Charity for a tumultuous academic life, historian of religion Karen Armstrong lives a wrenching ontological dislocation that originates in her undiagnosed epilepsy and negative body experiences. Using semiotician Algirdas Greimas’s ‘Semiotic Square’ as an interpretive strategy, the unresolved tensions and contradictions exposed in the deep narrative structure of this non-traditional conversion memoir are resolved by ‘compassion’ at the manifest level. Armstrong’s experiences, both in and out of the convent, will inform her academic study and lead her to compassionate solidarity with the marginalized. Armstrong’s memoir reveals various internal and external forces that shape an individual woman’s way of being in the world, and that inform her investigation of multiple faith practices and beliefs. In a time of mass refugee migration and ‘homelessness’, the one woman, the one ‘other’, matters in how one thinks about the body and about God.
She Climbs Toward the Light: Karen Armstrong’s The Spiral Staircase in a World of Refugees “I seemed to move amongst a world of ghosts, and feel myself the shadow of a dream” (Armstrong, 2004: 92).
The tens of thousands of asylum seekers and refugees that flooded Europe in recent years are essentially unknown ‘others’. In general, no names were attached to photos of displaced persons experiencing chaos at the borders, nor identification of the bodies washing up on Mediterranean and Turkish beaches, with the exception of the young boy Alan Kurdi. His photograph, a photograph of one dead three-year old, lying face down in the sand, launched renewed understanding of the humanitarian crises and the travails encountered.
Amnesty International reported on 18 January 2016 that ‘female refugees face physical assault, exploitation and sexual harassment on their journey through Europe’:
Women and girls travelling alone and those accompanied only by their children felt particularly under threat in transit areas and camps in Hungary, Croatia and Greece, where they were forced to sleep alongside hundreds of refugee men. In some instances women left the designated areas to sleep in the open on the beach because they felt safer there. Women also reported having to use the same bathroom and shower facilities as men. One woman told Amnesty International that in a reception centre in Germany some refugee men would watch women as they went to the bathroom. Some women took extreme measures such as not eating or drinking to avoid having to go to the toilet where they felt unsafe (Female Refugees, 2016).
The analyses of these refugees and asylum seekers are considered from essentialist portrayals of gender, race, and religion. They are bodies en masse. The bodies are visible. An unnamed body is invisible. What Karen Armstrong accomplishes in The Spiral Staircase, her personal narrative, is to make her own body visible and in that creative act to alter the mode of perceiving a body, a transformation that is central to political and social transformation (Lennon, 2004: 107–22). As Edward Said remarks, minor literature can be ‘subversive’ because it creates an ‘opposite dream’ (Kang, 2014: 175). Armstrong’s autobiography creates an opposite dream, significant when communities of faith are frequently valued as counteracting the lone individual. Each tired lone displaced woman waiting to cross a border has a name, a face, a body, and a story worthy of theological consideration. Karen Armstrong is neither a refugee nor an asylum seeker nor an economic migrant, but she too experiences what anthropologists and psychologists say of displaced persons. She he is lost in a universe that suddenly becomes alien. Facing the grim realities of religiously articulated violence, Armstrong is driven out into a world that radically reshapes her sense of self.
‘I found myself in a wasteland, an inauthentic existence’ (Armstrong, 2004: 269)
Some 50 years before the Syrian refugee immigration began, Karen Armstrong entered Sisters of Charity (1962) as a 17 year-old Bride of Christ and began her own personal struggle with authority and the limits of her body. In her novitiate, she describes her initiation into the Ignatian Rule as becoming a sort of warrior – a soldier of God – who practised military obedience:
We were told that we were to die to our old selves and our secular way of looking at things. We were constantly undermined, belittled, publicly castigated or ordered to do things that were patently absurd. On our profession day we lay under a funeral pall, symbolically dead to the world, and to our greedy, needy selves (2004: 27–28).
Once she leaves the convent and encounters the 1960s cultural practices at Oxford – sexual freedom, gyrating dancers hypnotized by Beatle mania, and primitive drumbeats – her sense of being ‘dead’ and now deprived of the familiar physical and psychological restraints lead to a spiritual dislocation, an empty lunar landscape. ‘I seemed to have lost my way in a world that meant nothing to me’ (2004: 25). In her stunned bewilderment and loss of orientation, she sees the same look in the eyes of the Bangladeshi lady who works in a local corner shop. Not knowing how to interpret the world of the 1960s, her personal drama continues with palpable consequences. The traditional Catholic regime that persisted in the convent, even as the fresh winds of Vatican II began to seep through the cloister, shaped Armstrong’s postulancy in negative and torturous ways. 1 These practices – ‘cultural relics of the Victorian period’ – created personal anguish for her. Her torment and despair parallel the public, polarized, and often violent fundamentalist thinking Armstrong would later define and explain, the same fundamentalist thinking that sparked the current crises of terror sponsored by the so-called Islamic State. 2
As Armstrong points out, the explosion of religious conflict that creates frightening personal and public dramas in our time is largely due to the rise of fundamentalism, which in the East and the West is an intense and fierce response to the ‘tenor of modernity’ (1993: 367). The ‘battle for God’ as Armstrong describes the campaign is essentially the ‘attempt to fill the void at the heart of a society based on scientific rationalism’ (1993: 370). In Armstrong’s own early post-convent life, her personal ‘battle for God’ is over. She is ‘closed to the divine’ and will live ‘simply as a secular’ (2004: 45). However, she soon learns, as do the warring religious factions in the Middle East, that this encounter with the secular world creates its own alternative disillusion and isolation.
We know Karen Armstrong’s personal religious struggles through her memoir, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness. This article is a focused analysis of her spiritual autobiography as it says much about the contraries and contradictions that pull and push at religious belief, at her own embodied experiences, and that eventually lead to her work on the rise of fundamentalist movements in the history of Abrahamic religions. This is to say, the refugee family walking the railway tracks in Hungary or the Orthodox priest leaving behind one thousand year-old parchments, or the Yazidi woman living in a dusty refugee tent, those whose lives are traumatized by the ‘battles for God’, might experience like and unlike tensions as each embodies the narratives of war, violence, and the terror of belief. Ironically, Armstrong studies thousands of miles away from the sounds of falling bombs, the screams of women and children, the silent desecrated Palmyra ruins; but by the conclusion of her memoir, she has embraced ‘compassion’ as the central feature of the Abrahamic faith traditions (2010: 23). What complicates this seemingly-simple conclusion is that her epilepsy, undiagnosed for years, in combination with her own way of being in the world equally influence her ‘mythos of compassion’ (2010: 192).
‘A strange quartet of belief, unbelief’ (2004: 185)
In a particularly telling episode in her memoir, Karen Armstrong, godmother to Jacob, an Oxford don’s eight year-old autistic child, is asked to witness his baptism. Another witness to the baptism is Jacob’s mother, Jenifer Hart, a tutor in modern history at St. Anne’s, who regards Catholicism as ‘ludicrous’ (2004: 114), and is an avowed utilitarian. The third member of this strange quartet is the Dominican priest, Geoffrey Preston, who asks the catechetical questions and who places the blessed salt on Jacob’s tongue. The fourth quartet member is Armstrong herself who introduces Jacob to the world of religion, even as she is losing her own faith. Her hunger for God now ‘replaced by a malaise with all things religious’ (2004: 187).
At the moment of baptism, Armstrong observes, ‘Jacob gave a long audible sigh of satisfaction, while Jenifer and I, excluded from the source of this peace for very different reasons, exchanged glances and smiled slightly. We made a strange quartet of belief, disbelief ’ (2004: 187, 185). What does this ‘quartet’ mean; how is this ‘strange story’ to be interpreted? What might Armstrong’s anguish mean for those suffering from battles for religious power and dogmatic purity? As Armstrong puts it in Fields of Blood, ‘in such an interrelated world we are all implicated in one another’s tragedies’ (2015: 406). In this strange quartet, there is the atheist scholar, the ex-nun damaged in body and soul, the one who is autistic but feels comfort in what he cannot name, and the Dominican man of the cloth. The contraries, contradictions, and presuppositions – belief, unbelief, health, disease, hunger, nourishment, mystery, pragmatism – pull at each other, not only in social but also in personal environments and experiences. As Mikhail Bakhtin argues, an individual’s internal forum works as an interiorization of what happens externally:
As a result, the concept of “internal forum” seeks to render the idea that the intimate existence of human beings is often a tumultuous struggle of various and sometimes conflicting tendencies, which compete against each other like advocates in a forum behind the curtains of apparent unity of the human predicament (Leone, 2014: 358, n. 27).
Initially, Armstrong’s self-narrative might be read as a variety of a conversion narrative, but there is no dramatic turning point where her life is transformed by a distinct divine intervention as would be understood by a shared religious community. Moreover, if conversion is communicated through images, figures, gestures, behaviours, rituals, her external and internal language about transformational experiences more readily communicates something about the role of the body. Her struggle with her body in the convent and in her secular scholarly triumphs and failures conclude in a sort of ‘conversion’. This particular conversion gradually occurs after she is finally diagnosed as an epileptic and the result is her pursuit of rigorous study. Armstrong’s issues with her body create an emotional and social isolation, and that isolation, in turn, shapes her understanding of self throughout the memoir. Her body becomes a semiotic sign, an object of interpretation. As Paula Cooey notes in The Religious Imagination and the Body, the body becomes a mode of knowing (1994: 6, 63).
What Armstrong does know as she begins the twists and turns up the ‘spiral staircase’ is that her hope of eternity is dead. ‘God had gone too’. 3 Now living a secular life, the Eucharistic bread and the sacramental mystical words, ‘this is my body’, strikes her as highly ironic: God had taken a human body but the church had ‘developed a Platonic aversion to the body – particularly the bodies of women’ (2004: 219). When Armstrong does not receive her DPhil from Oxford due to an examiner’s hostility to her thesis, and Dame Helen Gardner makes a final decision that a reexamination would impair the ‘sanctity of the Oxford doctorate’, Armstrong experiences the decision as a ‘body blow’ (2004: 174).
This turning point of academic frustration augments her already poor self-image with self-descriptions as ‘irremediably odd and freakish’ (2004: 173–74). Her epileptic seizures are characterized by acute sensory experiences: a stench of rotten eggs, her brain as a cosmic potato masher, bells ringing in the distance, sensations of worms like live spaghetti, an aged senile mask with empty eyes (2004: 54). Her psychiatric sessions with Dr. Piet in just ‘talking about her childhood’, or episodes in Littlemore Psychiatric Hospital, only convince her that she is in Conrad’s heart of darkness, in Van Gogh’s tormented writhing olive trees, or Bosch’s hell. Dr. Piet might think Armstrong has a ‘Gothic imagination’, but Armstrong sees these sessions with him as ‘an esoteric discussion of medieval history while the house was on fire’ (2004: 74). Following his suggestion to ‘lose control’ she overdoses on pills. While taping a television pilot, she erupts with anger over the church’s attitude towards the human body and her memories of suffering in the convent with anorexia and epilepsy. She is no longer using the small whip as a spiritual discipline, but her disdain is clear in highlighting St. Francis’s reference to the body as ‘Brother Ass’ (2004: 219–20).
Internal tensions and contradictions that surface full force in the autobiography are not completely explained as scores she needs to settle with the church or securing a sense of self after ‘editing out the ego’ (2004: 278). A particularly helpful way to discover the tensions embedded in her autobiography is semiotic analysis. In this sense, the semiotic analysis is reading the text of Armstrong’s own body, as Armstrong herself does. French (Lithuanian born) Algirdas Greimas’s famous or infamous ‘semiotic square’ can provide a graphic representation that visualizes contrary and contradictory relationships in the deep narrative structure. 4 The binaries that are contradictory and contrary in the deep structure go through various transformations so that meaning is possible at the surface level. 4 One notable way to think about resolving dualisms and binaries is through process theology: if Armstrong’s arduous personal journey results in compassion, it is the relational and interdependent world views of the God of unsurpassable love (Hekman, 2017: 201). However, the use of the semiotic square is particularly helpful for this article, in that it can account for ways to explore Armstrong’s ‘quartets’ in the memoir: quartets that discover those contrary and contradictory relationships.
Moreover, the square when imagined visually accounts for Armstrong’s conversion, not to a religious belief system with an accompanying Damascus experience, but to an empathy she terms ‘compassion’. Her afflictions, anorexia and epilepsy create this ‘semantic microuniverse’ of the body, a particular body. Initially, the semiotic square, described below, shows how the narrative structure of Armstrong’s memoir positions her relationship to the Catholic Church, to God, and to her embodied experiences. The transformations of the square become a heuristic device anticipating Armstrong’s work on Muslim fundamentalism in future publications such as The Battle for God: A History of God, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, as well as her own return to bodily and emotional health.
To briefly explain this square’s oppositions and contradictions: the square is designated ‘the universe of meaning’ – Armstrong’s slow climb out the darkness, physically, emotionally, spiritually, and academically. 5
The bottom of the square posits another contradiction: world faith traditions with their respective ‘embattled faith’ postures and manifest in religious fervour oppose Armstrong’s emerging faith in humanity unhinged from any religious institution or belief system.
From the outset in the memoir, the contraries and contradictories, binary and oppositional relationships, are evident: failure and success, ignorance and knowledge, cultural innocence and cultural experience, personal drama and public drama. These relationships include her epilepsy which connects both her movement away from her convent rule-belief system and her intuitive experiences of unbelief. Throughout Armstrong’s convent years, her epilepsy went undiagnosed as a medical condition, and were treated as a form of exhibitionism and hysteria by her superiors (2004: 46). Following her suicide attempt, Armstrong essentially gives up crying for help and pledges with a raw resigned self-will to adjust to whatever happens. In 1975, Karen Armstrong fails her doctoral viva. In 1976, passing through a London tube turnstile, an intense experience of Damascus-like light blinds her. ‘I had entered a new dimension of pure joy. The world seemed transfigured, and its ultimate significance was revealed. This was God’. Not so, it was an epileptic seizure and her conclusion: ‘I was an ex-nun-a failed academic, mentally unstable, and now I could add epileptic to this dismal list’ (2004: 178).
The Staircase as Semiotic Path
In this ‘strange quartet of belief and unbelief’, Karen Armstrong experiences the foursome also as ‘a strange twist’. Using the semiotic square as a heuristic device to interpret her climb up the spiral staircase, several transformations occur, and, in each, unresolved tensions in the narrative are discovered. The matter of ‘transformation’ is complicated in Greimas’s theories, but essentially, the semiotic square exposes the movement from the deep (immanent level) to the surface (manifest) level. 6 At the immanent (deep) level, one might posit the four corners of the square as explained above. However, to arrive at the last ‘turn’ on the stairs in which Armstrong finds unexpected fulfillment, even as she climbs alone, contrary and contradictory relationships merge, and yet paradoxically remain in their respective corners. In the first transformation, the Dominican priest takes the category of the Roman Catholic structured belief system, and Armstrong takes the position of experienced unbelief; in the contradictory position (lower left) is Jenifer Hart, the liberal, free-spirited Oxford don who teaches modern history, and in the lower right corner the young baptismal candidate ‘who hungers for something that he could never have put into words’ (2004: 187). As Karen Armstrong mounts the spiral staircase and grapples with her own competence and performance in living, speaking, and writing, 7 an embodied transformation occurs.
It is helpful here to note that in the movement between levels and between contradictions and contraries, Greimas identifies ‘actants’ or certain forces in the text that are not equivalent to specific characters or ‘actors’ within the narrative structure. 8 However, in The Spiral Staircase as in many memoirs, the actant is the ‘actor’ Armstrong herself. How so? Greimas distinguishes three pairs of actants: Subject-object; Giver/sender-receiver; Helper-opponent (Rulewicz, 1984: 215). Armstrong is both subject and object, the one searching for something; she embodies the object as search for a whole self, emotionally, spiritually, and physically. Armstrong is the giver of gentle-child care to Jacob and the receiver of Jenifer Hart’s compassion after Armstrong’s suicide attempt; Armstrong is the helper of those who do not understand the heart of the Abrahamic religious traditions; Armstrong is the opponent of religious intolerance. Thus, the self-imposed positioning of ‘Armstrong’ in all four corners of the square as both ‘actant’ and ‘actor’ gives her agency to climb the staircase between deep and surface levels and offers her continuing ways to negotiate her self-identity.
Using a theatre analogy, Armstrong both presents the ideologies at the immanent level and is the character that ‘performs’ on stage at the manifest level. What these semiotic transformations present is not a time/space/place specific conversion, but a movement towards ‘Compassion’. As the deep level of the text is ‘staged’ into story, Armstrong’s ‘conversion performance’ moves from the enclosure of the convent to secular ‘enclosures’, widens out to the holy places in Israel, returns to a small television studio, and finally encompasses her in the confines of her study. This movement is narrated as she begins the great turn up the spiral staircase and a field of potential oppositions emerge. Descent is opposed to ascent. Emptiness and absence are opposed to presence. Failure is opposed to success. Ignorance is opposed to knowledge. Personal drama is opposed to public drama. Prayer is opposed to study. Armstrong embodies these contraries and contradictions, and as such they will transform again. Before that final transformation, what are the binaries that place Armstrong in the strange quartet of her life? In this theatre analogy, such embodied binaries do not negate the unity of body, mind, feeling, soul, but the analogy explores the many voices and faces within. As Victoria Rue artfully argues, ‘theatre is a signal through the flames. A place to witness and to be relieved of our inner loneliness. It is a free space, a prolepsis where everything is possible, a wild space of opportunities’ (Rue, 2017: 170).
In the convent, Armstrong experiences God, yet only in his absence – ‘I never experienced Somebody Else’ – (2004: 42). And even at her memoir’s end, ‘I could not really believe that the seconds of oratio that I experienced at my desk amounted to a real contact with the sacred. It was surely just a moment of delight in work that absorbed me. I was not directing prayer to anything or anybody. There was still emptiness where the personalized God used to be’ (2004: 300).
Her academic pursuits lead her to admit that her acutely felt absence of God is, strangely and paradoxically, a presence. Armstrong’s knowledge of the Greeks tells her that the masked God Dionysus is ‘everywhere and nowhere’ (2004: 301). In like manner, the sage Uddalaka in the Upanishads Armstrong acknowledges is one who understood that the ‘sacred’ is not exclusively ‘out there’ but also immanent in the world (2004: 302). Following 11 September 2001, thinking about the Jewish Kabbalah that imagines God as originally a ‘sacred emptiness’ (2004: 303), Armstrong rejects ‘religious certainty’ for doubt that valorizes ‘absence and emptiness’ (italics mine, 2004: 303). Complete rejection of religious certainty may be the only hope after the destruction of the World Trade Centre, and the same for her personally. To employ Laura Levitt’s perspective here on identity construction, ‘the language of interactive, intertwining, disparate experiences indicates the “strategy” of constructing [Armstrong’s] life’ (1997: 221–22).
Cut off from the roots of their culture and identity, migrants and refugees can feel that they are somehow withering away and becoming insubstantial. Their world – inextricably linked with their unique place in the cosmos – has literally come to an end (2004: 23–24).
Once she begins her secular role as a historian of religions and completes Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time (2006), a gift to the Muslim community, she spends her days in silence, alone with her books, listening to the ticking of her desk clock. What affects her, though, at this point, is how Muslims’ ritual actions are designed to change them. ‘[Their] physical discipline was meant to affect their inner posture’ (2004: 280). Gail Weiss appropriately notes in Body Images that it is not so much an awareness of objective anatomical body but the posture within, the body in the face of its tasks (1999: 10).
Armstrong’s self-imposed silence in her study allows her emotionally and internally to enter into similar postural affirmations of Muslims in prayer. The seemingly impossible ‘self-emptying’ of silence in the convent is contradicted by Muslims taking in the Word of God in the Mosque of Al-Aqsa, ‘positioning themselves in the place where God is’. She begins the turn to confessing that ‘silence itself had become my teacher’ (2004: 284), for in silence, you begin to hear the note of pain that informs so much of the anger in the ‘battles for God’. There is silence, and there is silence.
At the request of Channel 4, a British TV channel, to participate in a film series on her earlier memoir, The Narrow Gate, she sits in another dark confined space, a studio, speaking about her convent experiences. There, in the studio darkness in front of an audience she cannot see, she relives the ‘corporal mortification’ that was designed to subjugate the body to do the will of God: a practice that in fact separated her body from her soul. Her inner reality – in which there is no God and a ‘suspension of the self’ – is echoed in her external reality of no sense of place (2004: 241). As she begins her research on the Prophet Mohammed to offset the crusading certainty of the Ayatollah Khomeini, and to write a life of the Prophet that might help the West understand Islam, her personal geography is charted in unexpected ways that open her locked ego. Her enclosure as a Roman Catholic nun is contradicted and affirmed by the enclosure of academic study that paradoxically allows her to ‘penetrate another culture and develop a wholly different way of looking at the world ... [t]o enter empathically into the experiences of another’ (2004: 278–79). Her experience of marginality leads to her concern for those dislocated and deterritorialized, and as Kang argues, when one who is homeless looks for Home, ‘a radical openness’, ‘a passionate solidarity’, ‘a creative defamiliarization’ can occur (2014: 172).
‘Opening myself to the text, a kind of ekstasis’ 9
Contrary to Frederic Jameson’s contention that the semiotic square merely illustrates ideological closures, (Corso, 2014: 77) Armstrong’s use of the staircase with its characteristic ascent and descent not only provides a convenient metaphor for Armstrong to visualize her multiple emotional and spiritual moments of descent and ascent. Also projected three-dimensionally, the staircase offers a way to integrate and transform the meaning of the oppositional segments at the deep and surface levels. 10 As poet T.S. Eliot ‘climbs’ the staircase in Ash Wednesday – regarded as his ‘conversion’ poem and an inspiration for Armstrong’s ‘turns’ on her spiral staircase – Eliot seeks to make ‘sense’ of history and to make the spiritual visible (Kwan-Terry, 1998: 137). Eliot, in his poem Ash Wednesday, poetically imagines that persons are inescapably in history: ‘A moment that once was must now be repeated: an underlying continuum, between then and now, must therefore be made to exist’ (Kwan-Terry, 1998: 139). Eliot, and later Armstrong, hopes for total transcendence, but persons are time-bound: ‘time is always time/and place is always and only place’. 11 Bodies are always bodies. Armstrong’s ‘conversion’, as such, is ‘narrated, through the production of a paradoxical discourse wherein past, present, and future interlace in a complex temporal weaving’ (Leone, 2014: 378).
In her memoir, the moment/moments of metanoia are found in the course of her historical studies of religion: ‘doing things that change you’ (2004: 270). ‘In the course of my studies, I have discovered that the religious quest is not about discovering ‘the truth’ or ‘the meaning of life’ but about living as intensely as possible here and now’ (2004: 271). What has happened is that the semiotic square has transformed again into another signifying pattern: a pattern much like the dimensions viewed in a painting. The world of the three great religious traditions are read as a painted canvas. Greimas in ‘Figurative Semiotics’ refers to a reading grid, a ‘human reading of the world’, that can be projected upon a painted canvas so that the reading constructs the meaning and can ‘speak’ to the viewer. 12 What I am suggesting is that the image of the staircase can be plotted not only as a planar structure as if in a framed painting, but also as a three-dimensional axial object extending in a kind of conceptual space. Instead of the staircase moving diagonally, vertically, and horizontally as in the seemingly-flat square noted above, the staircase serves as a transforming agent to pull the square out into the world of ‘the other’: the square exceeds the flatness of the drawing. 13
The staircase projects the centrality of compassion out from the major world religions and into Armstrong’s study and way of being:
I discovered that in all three of the religions of Abraham, fundamentalist movements distort the tradition they are trying to defend by emphasizing the belligerent elements in their tradition and overlooking the insistent and crucial demand for compassion. You have to be prepared to extend your compassionate interest where there is no hope of return (2004: 295, 299).
The transformation, the meaning of her ‘conversion’ is embodied compassion. As Mikhail Bakhtin comments, ‘the knowledge through struggle’ 14 has led Armstrong to negotiating and strategizing processes that have the promise to create cultural and religious change as to how ‘others’ are viewed. Janet R. Jakobsen raises a cautionary tale here regarding ‘other/s’: can world faith traditions and belief systems be reimagined in an embodied way, in a way which recognizes Muslim bodies in public, not just a Muslim body politic, for example? (Jakobsen, 1997: 136).
Armstrong does not ‘convert’ to the God of the Abrahamic faiths; she ‘converts’ to the bodily expressions of compassion. So, in a sense, Armstrong experiences the broadest understanding of ‘conversion’, for as Viswanathan says, the visibility of belief-systems must be present to make a conscious selection (1998: 145). Armstrong, through her own tortured experiences and her distillation of the intellectual history of monotheism, has consciously selected ‘compassion’ as her habit, ritual practice, and permanent vow; her way of being in the world. ‘The wide spaces in my head open as I listen to the undercurrent of ideas, and “I fall in love with my subject”’ (2004: 287). The turns up the ‘staircase’ lead her to launch The Charter for Compassion. Her penultimate personal goal is ‘to restore compassion to the central place of religious life’. 15
In conclusion, Karen Armstrong abandons her own Catholic beliefs and religious certainty, and simultaneously remains, in large part, an anchorite living now on the outside. She still feels the groping, freckled, toad-like hands of the priest pressing against her long ago in the convent (1981: 229): she still remembers the bitter taste as her epilepsy forged her sense of helplessness. Her modes of experiencing her own body begin the journey up the twisting stairwell. The various transformations interpreted through the semiotic square pull her out into the dimension of ‘compassion,’ the heart of life and religion. In contemporary feminist work on embodiment, Armstrong’s ‘compassion’ parallels, if not embodies, the concept of the imaginary (Lennon, 2004). Zainab, a refugee in the Arbat camp in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq, 50 year-old Moazez in Beit Al Alia, Alaa, 21 and mother Miriam, 49, refugees in Cairo from a Damascus wash laundry, worry about feminine hygiene and health, wait in lines for food and water, are restricted to enclosures and external controls, and long for ‘home’ (Iraq Syrian Women). What each woman might contribute to feminist theological reflections is unknown, but, like Karen Armstrong, what they do contribute is a visible body, a face and a name in a particular historical time and place. Compassion to and for ‘these others’, for self and for faith communities, is always subject to variations, versions, revisions, and imaginative renderings, even if compassion, as a worthy value, forms a kind of solidarity across faith traditions. However singular and even isolated, Armstrong has opened the boundaries and borders to begin the ascent.
Now I have to mount my staircase alone. And as I go up, step by step, I am turning, round and round, apparently covering little ground, but climbing upward, I hope toward the light (2004: 305).
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.