I've just finished reading Karen Armstrong's memoir of her time as a nun in a restrictive Roman Catholic order in the 1960s. A very good read indeed - though given Ms Armstrong's less than fastidious approach to religious history you must wonder, all allowances being made for the novelistic style, whether everything really did happen quite like that. The contrast between the etiolated emotional life of the convent and the warm, supportive community of women students the former nun has entered at the end of the book is a little too neat and tidy. What emerges most strongly is the bizarre attempt such orders made to live entirely in the head, to the extent of repeatedly ignoring what were clearly physical illnesses (not just Karen Armstrong's, though years later her fainting fits were traced to temporal lobe epilepsy) on the grounds that the sisters concerned were hysterical or not being tough enough. 'If seven years in the order taught me anything', Ms Armstrong states, 'it was the relative feebleness of the human will' - a lesson which should have been a fundamental assumption in any Christian spiritual venture. Vatican II got shot of a lot of things which would have been better retained, but the excessive and very unChristian Platonism of the religious orders is not one of them.
You do have an interesting blog, Rev (if I may be so familiar) - Goth artist's St Catherine, and now Karen Armstrong...
ReplyDeleteIncidentally, since I am about to launch into a couple of her books, should her less than fastidious approach to religious history be a serious worry for a reasonably ignorant general reader? A note below would be helpful - but I appreciate you might be too busy with the chutney, and also hanging St Catherine in the right place...
You may indeed, and thank you.
ReplyDeleteAh, Karen Armstrong. She writes so very convincingly, but this review is pretty damning : http://www.newenglishreview.org/Hugh_Fitzgerald/Karen_Armstrong%3A_The_Coherence_of_Her_Incoherence/. She has an agenda along the lines of All-religions-really-believe-the-same-don't-they-so-can't-we-all-just-get-along, which is ecumenical and reasonable enough, but then she will bend the past to fit it. You can also look at the Heresiarch's dissection of her article on the British Museum's Treasures of Heaven exhibition last year, too: http://heresycorner.blogspot.com/2011/07/karen-armstrong-and-relics.html. That's a good examination of her overall, basically un-historical, approach.
Indeed. Chutney involves far too much of my time.
Wow. Thanks Rev, most helpful. I'll check it out and think on't. And please remember - a chutney is not for ever - but it is damned good with cheese!
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