‘Theology is political.’ Photo: Ida Kar/National Portrait Gallery
Seeing Iris, part four: Jonathan Wooding has more on a profound Quakerly thinker
‘She demonstrates (prophetically!) the Quaker position for the twenty-first century.’
In her 1987 novel, The Book and the Brotherhood, one of Iris Murdoch’s characters, Jenkin, finds himself playing the waiting game, anticipating change, though ‘in some way he could not yet determine’. He’s not ‘going over to God’ in any conventional way, no, but nevertheless something is dawning upon him. Our narrator employs a significant metaphor in conveying Jenkin’s state of mind: ‘It was as if some large white blankness were opening before him, not a dead soiled white like the Berlin Wall, but a radiant live space like a white cloud.’ Let’s remember that in the mid-1980s that dead soiled white wall was very much still operational, and the communism (which Murdoch once espoused) very much in charge, happily abolishing the radiant live space of God.
Murdoch was struggling during the 1980s to shape her 1982 Gifford lectures on ‘the knowledge of God’ into a convincing book of philosophy. What’s the hold-up? She and the characters in her novels of the 1980s often refer to Paul Valéry’s illuminating idea on such a stalemate situation: ‘a difficulty is a light, an insuperable difficulty is a sun’. Waiting expectantly, hesitating wisely, dwelling fearlessly in uncertainty – these are Murdoch’s code of conduct. They are the hallmarks too, it so happens, of the philosopher Simone Weil: ‘At the border-lines of thought and language we can often “see” what we cannot say: and have to wait and attempt to formulate for ourselves and convey to others our experience of what is initially beyond and hidden’, Murdoch summarises, when she finally publishes Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals in 1992. None of this is unfamiliar to those in a silent Meeting for Worship.
The dead-end Berlin Wall may have been the ‘insuperable difficulty’ from which Murdoch could not turn at that time. Millions of people were living idealistically without God, without religion, behind that wall, weren’t they? Well, they had that in common, in fact, with millions of people on this side of the wall too, and didn’t Iris the moral philosopher and many of the characters in her novels think that this abolition wasn’t altogether a bad thing? Godless Marxism on the one hand, scientific atheism on the other. Atheism is no threat to the Berlin Wall – no objections – but a radical form of religiosity? Could she make the case for religious atheism, the properly iconoclastic progress?
Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Murdoch, in her seventies, did finally publish her testament to the continuing vibrancy, truthfulness and humanity of religious sensibility. That Marxist ‘rejection of God and religion’ had apparently failed. And Murdoch is able to amend her Gifford lectures in the light of this: ‘Happily, since I wrote the above, the Zeitgeist, assisted by very many courageous individuals, has discredited and is demolishing Marxism.’ Even more affirmatively: ‘How true it is that nevertheless the human spirit cannot be quenched is proved by the events of 1989 in eastern Europe.’ The uniqueness of each individual person is, she realizes, the ‘concept for which, in 1989, the people of eastern Europe fought their tyrants’. Not for consumer capitalism, note, but for precious interiority, creative spirit, secular holiness.
In distinguishing herself from the cruel utopianism of Marxism, the elitism of major philosophers, and the complacency of consumer capitalism, Murdoch herself re-affirmed in Quaker fashion ‘the requirement of a careful sober lucidity and a quiet truthful clarified reflection’, which might give us courage and set us free. It’s not the death of God that divides us – those on either side of the Berlin Wall had that in common. But, should we rather say the death of truth-seeking theology, at any time, will lead to the death of value and virtue? Let’s say, rational debate about the nature and truth of divinity, (and its relation to common humanity)? What is life like, even in western democracies, without this concept of divinity? Could the rebirth of the God-concept pose a serious threat to the Berlin Wall?
Murdoch had been writing about ‘concept-starvation’, or ‘thinking-by-slogans’ as a practice of authoritarian regimes in their attempt to subdue their citizenry: ‘Orwell’s book 1984 exhibits such impoverishment as deliberately fostered by cynical rulers.’ Such rulers traffic in depleted, inadequate, grandiose and self-deceiving offerings only, just as, she notes, the advertising industry does on this side of the Wall. And, ‘concept-starvation makes it easier for a few leaders to turn their citizens into a centrally directed herd’. Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals is clearly preoccupied with the lost and vanishing concepts of God, holiness, the inner life and virtue, and to defend such concepts seems as much an act of dissident defiance and audacity, as the actions of the political martyrs she acknowledges. Theology is political. Of course! And there is hope if we honestly pay attention to these concepts: ‘time… will (we hope) continue at intervals to restore the divine power of language (as it has begun to do in eastern Europe since 1989).’
In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals she writes, ‘The mythology of religion does not necessarily vanish but finds a new and different place as religion is newly understood.’ This is self-evidently true in the case of Quakerism, with its origins in a time of ecclesiastical and theological upheaval. Though Murdoch may have hesitated, in her time, to join a Quakerism that perhaps appeared too Christian socialist, or perhaps, too puritan, she must have known that the founding Friends (of the Truth) were reacting as much to a corrupt Church of England as to the authoritarian, chauvinistic and belligerent tendencies of those of puritan sympathy. And wasn’t communism something along those lines too? Christmas and the Book of Common Prayer were banned, but I’m not sure Quakers were responsible for that.
I would like to argue that Iris Murdoch, though perhaps no more than a one-time attender, demonstrates (prophetically!) the Quaker ‘position’ for the twenty-first century. Not an exclusively moral or philosophical position, not reducible to a manifesto or creed, not obviously the mission statement for an institution or political party. It seems to me, nevertheless, that she provides the best and most rigorous defence of the perfectly rational and perfectly human need to appreciate both what is beyond reason and what transcends the tragic human condition – ‘our experience of the unconditioned and our continued sense of what is holy’, as she writes. One doesn’t whimsically ‘invent’ holiness, after all, though having once discerned, intuited, understood or discovered holiness, one may well, responsibly, have a stab at describing and expressing, even addressing it. No? The affirmation of value and meaning inherent in the proper using of the word God (or holiness) can shape all our perceptions and understandings (of the Berlin Wall, for instance). And in that ordinary and necessary judging of life’s possibilities we learn where we belong, and who we are. As Martin Buber writes, faith ‘is not a feeling in the soul of [people] but an entrance into reality, an entrance into the whole reality without reduction and curtailment’. In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals Iris Murdoch ensures that this is something newly understood, whichever side of that dead soiled white wall we might be on.
Comments
I’ve gone back to this essay after several months - it well repays re-reading (as do Murdoch’s novels and philosophical writings). It is a worthy quest for Quakers, especially but not only for ‘non-theists’, to work towards creating a religion that is fit for our time, that acknowledges our need for a sense of holiness, a place in our minds and hearts for that which transcends reason and the practical demands of private and public life. It is perfectly possible to nourish such spiritual awareness while rejecting a God or a Heaven ‘out there’ and embracing a life of service in the here and now.
By joanna.dales on 8th January 2023 - 21:02
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