The force of nature that is Karen Armstrong
There remains a small minority in the Catholic Church in this country who continue to regard Armstrong as “a bad apple”
The former nun and writer on world religion talks to Peter Stanford about how early Christians experienced God in the natural world – a bond we must urgently recover in the face of the climate crisis
“I’ve long had trouble with God.” Karen Armstrong is talking
specifically about the contrast between Christianity with its concept of
a faraway God, “stuck in the highest heaven”, and Eastern religions
where there is much more of a sense of God being present and close at
hand in nature. It is the point she makes in her new and challenging –
“I don’t usually like telling people what to do but we are in real
trouble” – book, Sacred Nature, which examines how people of faith can rise emotionally and spiritually, as well as practically, to the climate crisis.
But
as the admission that this celebrated intellectual has trouble with God
tumbles out amid her flow of remarkable erudition, I find myself
reflecting that her words might just as easily encapsulate the
best-known parts of her life: struggling with praying to God as a young
nun in the Society of the Holy Child Jesus in the 1960s before she left,
disillusioned, after seven years; establishing herself as an acclaimed
and multi-award-winning international expert on world religions in 1993
with her best-selling A History of God; working with the US Senate and
House of Representatives after the 9/11 attacks in 2001 to encourage
them to separate out acts of appalling terror from the God that their
perpetrators claimed as inspiration; and in her many books that have
come since, exploring with her trademark scholarship and accessibility
where God is found, or not found, in the different faith traditions in
their relationship with the forces shaping our modern world.
There remains a small minority in the Catholic Church in this country who continue to regard Armstrong as “a bad apple” – her words, not mine – especially among that older generation of religious sisters who continue to regard her memoir, Through the Narrow Gate, her first book, published in 1981, as a betrayal. It was an unflinching and unfavourable description of the convent life she entered in 1962 as Vatican II began.
Armstrong, now 77, is aware of such lingering animosity to her – and indeed has, on occasion, encountered it at public events. Yet her memory of that unhappy period in her life remains vivid. “They tried to break me in the convent. It was to do with emotions, that is what got to me – the absolute coldness of it, the lack of affection. It gets into people’s hearts and souls and minds. And it is not easy to get back, to start being normal and affectionate, if you have done that for 20 or 30 years. I was only there for a little while.”
However, she is also clear that things have moved on since, for her and the Church. There have been meetings with sisters from her old order, who have read her books and admired her gifts as a communicator of complex religious ideas to a wide audience that all too often dismisses faith as irrelevant. There was even an invitation to supper with the remaining SHCJs in their central London house, and she has an enduring network of friendships with other former women Religious of similar vintage.
Warm and witty, Armstrong is definitely good company as we talk in her Georgian terraced house in north London. And it is me rather than her who brings up her Catholic roots – growing up in the West Midlands, her parents of Irish origins, her father a “bankrupt scrap-metal dealer”, educated by Holy Child Jesus nuns, entering the order and being sent by them to study at Oxford where her formidable intellect saw her excel in exams. It is all now so long ago, she says, and no longer something that she dwells on.
She does, however, begin Sacred Nature with a vignette from her days in the convent. Her university tutor had encouraged her to visit the British Museum (of which much later she was to become a trustee), where she gazed in wonder at handwritten manuscripts by Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats. “I simply wanted to be in their presence,” she writes. “It was a kind of communion.”
She has included that memory in the new book, she explains, because in their mourning for our broken relationship with nature, the Romantic poets can point a way forward in the climate-crisis debate, in line with her subtitle, “How we can recover our bond with the natural world”.
Disaster is looming because we have taken nature for granted, seen it as a resource and commodity rather than something alive, spiritually, psychologically and sensuously. Even our encounters with nature in the raw, when we go to coasts and mountains and lakes, are too often dominated, she laments, by the need to take photographs that only further distance us from them and any sense of the divine that inhabits such landscapes.
By way of response, she invokes Wordsworth as a role model to regain
what has been lost, especially in the West. She quotes spellbindingly
from his Lines composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey:
And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting
suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of
man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all
thought,
And rolls through all things.
“That
is it,” she says as she finishes, her eyes flashing. “Wordsworth
learning to look at nature differently. He had somehow put his mind in a
place where he could see what qi [for Confucians the energy that pervades all life, natural and divine] was saying. And if he has done it, we can do it.”
Her
point, I should make clear, is not that we should all become Confucians
– though she refers approvingly to one among their number “who wouldn’t
cut the grass because he said the grass and I are the same”. No,
instead she wants those brought up in the Judaeo-Christian tradition
(Islam is better on nature, she says, as are Eastern Orthodox
Christians) to change their mindset, as Wordsworth did, and rediscover a
lost sense of God as there in every blade of grass around us, that
every inch of land is holy.
“The more I read about the subject,”
she reflects of the research that lies behind the book – by design at
200 pages shorter and punchier than what she calls her “monumental”
works – “the more interested I became that people in China and India had
both had a similar conception developed over time quite independently
[of each other] not of a God as we know God in Christianity, but of a
force running through nature, a sacred force, that is programmed in us,
and is about how we should be seeing nature as something physical and
spiritual that we can’t even imagine but is there in everything.”
For
her, she says, it was a way of seeing that made God suddenly so much
more present. “In the convent, I could not pray, talk to God, because I
always knew I was really talking to myself. The way I get my
spirituality now is by studying, by reading, and I get moments of
insight, of uplift.”
Her prescription for the rest of us is a
simple one – something that goes alongside all the recycling, renewables
and heat pumps that everyone else is pushing. “We have to get out of
being obsessed with ourselves.” she says.
“We will only do it by
working on it, as Wordsworth did. I suggest that for just ten minutes a
day you turn off your phone off and listen to the birds. I spent a lot
of time in my study upstairs watching a tree outside the window,
especially during winter when the leaves have fallen, and I can see all
the creatures coming into it. It is a whole life in a tree. We can all
find a place.”
The early Christians, she suggests, understood what she is talking
about. And even as late as the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas was
speaking of God in his definitive Summa Theologiae as “present everywhere in everything”, not a being but rather “Being Itself ” (“esse seipsum”).
The
rot set in, in her account, when religion responded to the rise of
scientific rationalism from the seventeenth century onwards by ditching
time-honoured distinctions, for example between mythos and logos.
Regular readers of Armstrong will recognise this as one of the abiding
themes in her books.
Mythos is about conveying timeless meaning
and deeper truths, while logos is objective facts. Once they were
regarded by people of faith as complementary, but with the rise of
science mythos was sidelined. She quotes Descartes to make the point.
The seventeenth century mathematician, philosopher and Catholic remarked
of the new orthodoxy: “We will no longer have cause to wonder about
anything.” Yet a sense of wonder is precisely what Armstrong feels we
need, to grasp what nature is.
So, is she saying that
Christianity, by losing sight of God in nature, and thereby allowing it
to be plundered, has somehow caused climate change? “No, I am not. To
begin with, it is what we have made of Christianity … We have become
more concerned with our technology and science, which of course has done
wonderful things. But then look at Einstein. He got it about nature,
when he talks about transcendence and the absolute mystery of life, and
looking into the universe. ‘In that sense only,’ he says, ‘I am a
religious man.’”
Her ability to summon up examples and quotations
from history – often conveying the opposite of what we have come to
believe well-known thinkers would say – is humbling. And challenging too
the very quality that she has sought to instil in Sacred Nature:
a challenge to think differently in the face of climate change, to
recover ways of looking at things, including God (however troublesome),
that will give a spiritual and psychological underpinning to the huge
adjustments we must make in our lives.
“All the environmental
stuff is telling us is scientific facts. And they don’t move us
emotionally. They frighten us. Being frightened is no good. Yet we are
in great danger. Somehow with nature we have to recover a sense of it
that we would have had centuries and centuries ago.” Before, I hear
myself adding, it is too late.
Sacred Nature by Karen Armstrong is published by Bodley Head on 30 June at £14.99 (To obtain the Tablet price £13.49, call 020-7799 4064 or email Church House Bookshop)
No comments:
Post a Comment