Memoir: Thomas Aquinas, one of the supreme Christian thinkers, declared after a mystical experience of God that he considered his vast output of philosophy and theology as so much straw.
That insight into the radical failure of all human discourse about the divine has been shared by many other mystics from a wide variety of religious traditions. Nevertheless, even as they acknowledge the ineffable mystery of God, there has never been any shortage of religious leaders eager to construct scarecrow gods in the image of their own desiccated hearts and minds.
Karen Armstrong's remarkable book recounts her passionate search for a God in whom she could believe and who would offer her some proof of his objective reality. It was a pursuit filled with misadventure, frustration, trauma and gut-wrenching unhappiness. She has already written about her seven wretched years as a nun in a previous autobiography, Through the Narrow Gate. What was not appreciated during those convent years, or while on her stress-filled way to a brilliant Oxford degree, was that there existed a physical basis for her recurring psychological illnesses. After experiencing the horror of severe depression, hallucinations and memory loss, she was eventually diagnosed as having focal lobe epilepsy. While her health improved subsequently, her very sensitive and highly-strung temperament was permanently damaged by those long years when she felt herself to be a failure and outcast - "Unable to love or accept love, I had become less than human". It is surely worth asking if Karen Armstrong's strenuous rejection of a "personal" God was not at least partly caused by her fractured sense of her own identity and by her never having had any conviction of God's presence.
Significantly, she devotes little attention to Jesus Christ. Her account of New Testament scholarship regarding the identity and mission of Jesus is both superficial and partisan. Though neither mad nor bad, Jesus was of course decidedly dangerous to know. Profound engagement with so vivid and compelling a personality as his does not make for facile dismissal. An elusive and invisible divinity is much more easily dispatched.
Researching a TV documentary on the conflicting faiths of the Middle East led Armstrong, quite unexpectedly, to her true and enduring vocation: the study and explanation of the world's major religions. In time she became a successful writer and lecturer, especially sought-after to speak on Muslim history and culture. The frantic and lonely woman of previous decades, who feared she would be permanently confined to a psychiatric hospital, is today a widely recognised authority in her chosen field of study, a scholar operating at the very centre of the concerns of a world that once seemed to have no use for her.
The immense courage and integrity Armstrong brings to her life story is most praiseworthy. If she is unsparing of God for his maddening inaccessibility, she is equally unsparing of herself. She has the grace again and again to admit to changing her mind on important issues. Despite her tendency to be excessively cerebral, she learned to empathise deeply with the history and beliefs of a wide variety of religions and peoples.
Armstrong argues persuasively that, if the world is to be habitable, we must strive to understand the values of other faiths from their point of view rather than from our own. She lauds the far greater importance some non-Christian faiths give to good actions than to good theological arguments.
In some truly inspiring pages she shows that in many religions compassion is the transcendent value.
Always drawn irresistibly to the sacred and always repelled by many of its human associations, "compassion" might indeed be her best name for the God she consistently berates. Yet this is also the God who, by her unrelenting immersion in his mystery, she intrinsically affirms.
This autobiography is written in an admirably clear and fluent style. It distils a vast amount of reading and reflection in an easily understood though challenging way. If this book is not God's gift to all who delight in the world of ideas and in the vagaries of human experience, it is emphatically Karen Armstrong's.
• John Feighery is a Divine Word Missionary priest with a special interest in questions of international peace and justice