Karen Armstrong’s relationship to God has been a long and varied one. At 17, against her parents’ advice and wishes, she entered the novitiate of a Catholic convent where she remained for seven years. Her account of these years, and her decision to leave the order, appeared in the first book of memoirs, Through the Narrow Gate. The Spiral Staircase is the result of years of further reflection on that crucial period and its aftermath, and is an attempt to reach closer to the truth about the effects on her own psychology and subsequent life and to chart her own spiralling relationship with religious belief.
The title comes from an image in Eliot’s Ash Wednesday and is suggestive of Armstrong’s own acute sense that her life has been a series of circular moves which have seemingly led nowhere but have nonetheless amounted to something. The reference is indicative of a sensibility in which art is the natural companion to religious belief. In fact a strong theme in the book is Armstrong’s growing awareness that art is an alternative route to the experience of liberation from self which she hoped, and failed, to find in the conventual life.
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