The Spiral Staircase. Karen Armstrong
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that it would cramp her own style, she refused to study the novel at all. As was customary at Oxford, we had to read our essays aloud to our tutor during the weekly tutorial, and Charlotte was obviously perplexed, even repelled by mine. ‘Idon’t know how you churn out all this stuff,’ she had said to me once. ‘It’s beautiful in a way. Your essays are like Gothic cathedrals, with all the right scholars and theories slotted together and built into a massive structure of conformity.’ I wasn’t sure that I liked the sound of that. I enjoyed reading the literary criticism that Charlotte hated. I found it fun to weigh one scholar against another and make a pattern of my own out of other people’s thoughts. But I was uneasily aware that not much of myself was going into my work, and that what I was presenting, week after week, was other people’s ideas rather than my own.
That would not be allowed this term, however. Our new tutor was a rather affected but reputedly very clever young don at one of the more modern colleges. We sat in his bright, book-lined room overlooking the forecourt, watching some students teasing the goldfish in the moat. Dr Brentwood Smyth sprawled elegantly in a large leather armchair, leaping up occasionally to consult a text. ‘You got a Violet Vaughan Morgan prize, didn’t you?’ he asked me. ‘Impressive. You must be very good at exams.’ I could tell that he did not think much of this accomplishment. He seemed more interested in Charlotte, whose original, thoughtful response to his questions clearly intrigued him.
‘Oh, don’t let’s have a fixed time!’ he cried impatiently when I asked him when we should come for tutorials. ‘That’s the trouble with the women’s colleges! They’re organized like high schools. Just ring me up when your essay is done.’
‘What should we write about?’ I asked him.
‘Oh, anything you like! I’m not going to set you one of those dreary exam questions. I’m sure you get quite enough of those at St Anne’s. No. Just write me something on one poem. Take “Frost at Midnight”. Coleridge. Don’t read any literary criticism. Just live with the poem for a week and then tell me what it means to you. Not to anybody else. When you’re ready, give me a call.’
This was music to Charlotte’s ears, but worrying for me. I could see that it was a good idea and, indeed in later years when I came to teach literature myself, I would often set my students a similar task. But the problem back then was that I just couldn’t do it. I needed to escape into other people’s books and minds because, when left entirely to my own devices, I found that I had nothing to say. It wasn’t exactly that the poem did not speak to me. It was clearly an extraordinary work. I could have made it the basis for a fascinating essay on the English Romantic movement. But what did the poem say to me? That was what Dr Brentwood Smyth wanted to know and I didn’t know what I was going to tell him. I found myself thinking of some other lines by Coleridge, written in a period of deep depression, when he looked out at the evening sky ‘with its peculiar tint of yellow-green’, at the thin clouds, the moon and the stars:
I see them all so excellently fair,
I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!
I should have been pierced by the poem, and then have leapt out to meet it. I used to be like that. I remembered how deeply poetry had touched me while I was at school. But yet again, as with my relations with people, there was only deadness, nothingness. I was now impervious even to the literature that I thought I had loved.
An initiation is supposed to make you self-reliant, but mine had made me dependent. As I struggled to fill the requisite number of pages for my essay, I had to face the grim fact that I no longer had ideas of my own. Indeed, I had been carefully trained not to have them. There had been a moment early in the Postulantship, when I had heard a warning bell. We were doing a little course in Apologetics, which explained the rational grounds for faith. I was set an essay: ‘Assess the historical evidence for the Resurrection.’ I had read the requisite textbooks, could see what was required, and duly produced a discussion of the events of the first Easter Sunday that made Jesus’ rising from the tomb as uncontroversial and unproblematic historically as the Battle of Waterloo. This was nonsense, of course, but that did not seem to matter in Apologetics.
‘Yes, Sister, very nice.’ Mother Greta, the pale, delicate nun who was supervising our studies, smiled at me as she handed back my essay. ‘This is a very good piece of work.’
‘But, Mother,’ I suddenly found myself saying. ‘It isn’t true, is it?’
Mother Greta sighed, pushing her hand under her tightly-fitting cap and rubbing her forehead as if to erase unwelcome thoughts. ‘No, Sister,’ she said wearily. ‘It isn’t true. But please don’t tell the others.’
This did not mean that Mother Greta did not believe in the resurrection of Jesus, or that she had lost her faith. But she had studied at the prestigious Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium and knew that the kind of essay I had written was no longer regarded as a respectable intellectual exercise. A careful study of the resurrection stories in the gospels, which consistently contradict each other, shows that these were not factual accounts that could ever satisfy a modern historian, but mythical attempts to describe the religious convictions of the early Christians, who had experienced the risen Jesus as a dynamic presence in their own lives and had made a similar spiritual passage from death to life. As I stared wordlessly back at Mother Greta I knew that, if it had been up to her, she would have scrapped this course in Apologetics and introduced us to a more fruitful study of the New Testament. But, like any nun, she was bound by the orders of her superiors. What I had written was not true, because the insights of faith are not amenable to rational or historical analysis. Even at this early stage, in a confused, incoherent way, I knew this, and Mother Greta knew that I knew it.
It was a sobering moment, and when I look back now on that scene in the Postulantship, with the autumn sun coming through the window, the older nun mentally tired and demoralized, while the postulant gazed at her blankly, both of us deliberately turning our minds away from the light, I wonder what on earth we all thought we were doing. I had been set a quite pointless task. For a week, while preparing my essay, writing it and learning how to dispose of the obvious problems with various mental sleights of hand, I had been doing something perverse. I had been telling an elaborate lie. I had deflected the natural healthy bias of my mind from a truth that was staring me in the face and forced it to deny what should have been as clear as day. Years later, while I was having my breakdown, I learned that Mother Greta had been very anxious indeed about the way we were being trained, had voiced her disapproval, and had been overruled. What had our superiors been about, and why did I not tear up that dishonest piece of work, or at least argue with Mother Greta? I had simply gone along with the whole unholy muddle.
But I was only eighteen years old and this had not been an isolated incident. On the very first day of our Postulantship, Mother Albert, our Mistress, explained that during the first years of our religious lives we would constantly be told things that seemed incredible or irrational. But they only seemed this way because we were lacking in spiritual maturity. We were learning to inhabit a different element from the rest of the world, to breathe another atmosphere. We were still fresh from ‘the world’ and its taints; we still thought and responded like secular people, but now we had to enter into God’s perspective. Had God not told Isaiah:
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
My ways are not your ways,
For as high as the heavens are above the earth
So are my thoughts above your thoughts, my ways above your ways.
So when we were tempted to question the ideas, principles and customs of the order, we must remember that as yet we were simply not in a position to understand. We were like babies, learning an entirely new language. One day, in the not too distant future, when we had developed spiritually, we would see all these matters quite differently. Until then, we just had to wait patiently, in what the mystics had called the cloud of unknowing, and all would be revealed. So my lying little essay on the Resurrection was part of this larger programme.
So was the fact that I had once, during my Postulantship, spent hours treadling a sewing machine that had no needle. To be fair,