ethaisa

I'm going to try and keep track of the books I read; we'll see how long I can keep it up. I'm mean, after all, I could be reading more rather than writing about the ones I've already read!

The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness, Karen Armstrong

Biographies usually don't tempt me, but I've read most of Armstrong's other work (A History of God, Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths, Islam, The Battle for God etc. etc) so I was interested in reading something more personal from her. I found The Spiral Staircase, the title appropriately harkening back to the metaphor of T.S. Elliot's poems of spiritual progression, both engaging and insightful and at moments very dark indeed. There are also moments of brilliant clarity, and while I don't agree with her views in their entirety, there were many passages that particularly spoke to me, so here I'll share a couple of them.


Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed. The myths and laws of religion are not true because they confirm to some metaphysical, scientific, or historical reality, but because they are life enhancing. They tell you how human nature functions, but you will not discover their truth unless you apply these myths and doctrines to your own life and put them into practice.

And...

Theology is - or should be - a species of poetry, which read quickly or encountered in a hubbub of noise makes no sense. You have to open yourself to a poem with a quiet, receptive mind, in the same way you might listen to a difficult piece of music. It is no good trying to listen to a late Beethoven quartet or read a sonnet by Rilke at a party. You have to give it your full attention, wait patiently upon it, and make an empty space for it in your mind. And finally the work declares itself to you, steals deeply into the interstices of your being, line by line, note by note, phrase by phrase, until it becomes part of you forever. Like the words of a poem, a religious idea, myth or doctrine points beyond itself to truths that are elusive, that resist words and conceptualization. If you seize upon a poem and try to exort its meaning before you are ready, it remains opaque. If you bring your own personal agenda to bear upon it, the poem will close upon itself like a clam, because you have denied its unique and separate identity, its own inviolable holiness.