Seeing Iris, part three: Jonathan Wooding has more on a profound Quakerly thinker

‘It may be that Murdoch couldn’t escape the version of Quakerism inherited from her head teacher.’

In ‘A Summer Night’, Wystan – WH – Auden, who was an English teacher at a Quaker school in the 1930s, appears to be sitting in a silent meeting. ‘Equal with colleagues in a ring | I sit’, he writes, and experiences an ‘opening light’ whose ‘dove-like pleading’ drives fear away, and provides a ‘strength’ which endures. He dedicates his poem to Geoffrey Hoyland, the head teacher at The Downs Malvern School. Auden enjoyed some of the happiest years of his life there; the poem is optimistic enough for Benjamin Britten to co-opt some of its verses for his post-war Spring Symphony.

In the 1980s, Iris Murdoch is contemplating this poem as she attempts to write her great philosophical epic of the religious sensibility, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, eventually published in 1992. What can endure after all the destruction, all the wrongheadedness? She puts the words of the poem into the mouths of two of the principal characters, Jenkin and Gerard, in the novel she is working on (The Book and the Brotherhood). By temperament and by education these characters have an instinct for that ‘strength’ which endures. They know they could give up everything for it, but do they have the courage?

For what by nature and by training
We loved, has little strength remaining.
Though we would gladly give
The Oxford colleges, Big Ben,
And all the birds in Wicken Fen,
It has no wish to live.

I have been making a case in these pages (see 4 December 2020, 19 February and 9 April 2021) that, during the 1980s, Iris Murdoch, while struggling to compose her great statement on the future of religious sensibility, was drawing on her Quaker heritage. She is charting the religious crisis of her generation – its dissatisfaction with the general assault from all sides on the sanctity of the creative individual. The characters in her novels duly inhabit this precarious metaphysical climate. They tend to be freethinking bohemians, of course, and they all spend time craving simplification, authenticity, and even asceticism. They seem bound by their conventional, if troubled, years of elite education, and yet they are determinedly unattached, unhoused, and passionately wilful. They are all antinomians, believing that Christians are released by grace from the obligation of observing moral law, and also existentialists – spiritual flâneurs! Isn’t that Quakerish?

Murdoch’s father was educated at a Quaker school, and she herself attended Badminton School, whose head teacher, Beatrice May Baker, was (according to AN Wilson), a ‘Socialist-Quaker’ who taught sympathy with ‘all the world’s liberal causes’. But insofar as Quakerism was presenting itself as ‘socialistic’, I imagine this as problematic for Murdoch, who was suspicious of socialism’s theological cowardice and intolerance. Is this why she never declared herself a Quaker?

She looks (apparently) elsewhere in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals for that sense of the ‘something more’ that modernity has crushed. She explores Martin Buber’s Eclipse of God and Katsuki Sekida’s Zen Training: Methods and philosophy. And while she’s not entirely happy with Don Cupitt, whose Sea of Faith Network convened at the end of the 1980s, she does appreciate his ambitions: ‘His brave and ferocious book Radicals and the Future of the Church.’ She likes his ‘frequent references to Buddha and to Void’, his insistence on ‘the retention of the word “God”, while suggesting various ways in which it can be filled with sense’. Don Cupitt has often suggested the Quakers as a model religious society. Graham Shaw points out, in Time and Tide: Sea of faith beyond the millennium, that this appears to be ‘more a matter of praise than of practice’, however, and this may have been Murdoch’s perhaps unconscious position too.

Murdoch’s characters in The Book and the Brotherhood, seem all to acknowledge that atheistical thinking is clearly not the end of religion. Rather, it is the very stuff of religion – clearing the decks for greater clarity. Significantly, in both this book and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals we find a quotation from Paul Valéry: ‘A difficulty is a light. An insuperable difficulty is a sun.’ And in both books we find too words from Augustine: ‘before the countenance of God my soul shrivels like a moth’. The implication is that God remains as God has always been, either an opportunity for illumination and sustenance, or desiccation and the bitterness of denial and self-reproof.

One character, a prototype Sea-of-Faith ‘atheist priest’, advises the troubled Tamar on ‘prayer, how it was simply a quietness, an attentive waiting, a space made for the presence of God’. Jenkin seeks a post-theistic religious solution, but at his funeral it is significant that ‘the solemn words of the Prayer Book, so sober and so beautiful’ are used. Rose and Jean, at ‘Quaker boarding school’ together, seem to be aspects of Murdoch’s own Quakerish sensibility – silence and honeycakes, one might say, and heterodoxy, defiance of convention – Rose wanting to be a priest, Jean a Dostoyevskian femme fatale. There is much talk of the importance of friendship, and of being ‘out on the edge of things’. It is a ‘most holy farrago’, as the priest conceives his own theological position. The characters await a kind of new scripture from Crimond, whose wrongheadedness is evident in his nihilism and utopianism. It is the silent and decent and kindly Gerard who finally realises that a ‘gospel’ vitiated by elitism and cynicism must be challenged, and that this is his vocational task.

It may be that Murdoch couldn’t escape the version of Quakerism inherited from her head teacher. To see Quakerism as a robust and continuing theological position, rather than just a refuge for kindly but ineffectual mystics, we have to look to another writer from the 1980s, Graham Shaw, who wrote of the Quakers in this way in The Cost of Authority. He went on to explore a God of Peace in God in our Hands, then ‘resigned my office though not my orders’ and became clerk to a Quaker Meeting. He acknowledges his debt to Murdoch in an extraordinary essay entitled ‘The vulnerability of faith’.

But the guiding light, the sun of The Book and the Brotherhood? Well, it’s a parrot called ‘Grey’. The ‘insuperable difficulty’ for Gerard is the disappearance of his childhood feathered friend. He is at risk of shrivelling like a moth. Grey is not actually a Quaker parrot – those are green – but he may have called up in Murdoch’s mind her family’s Quaker past. Gerard’s grey parrot has a scarlet tail (like a phoenix) and ‘wise gentle witty eyes’. The parrot is ‘an avatar, an incarnation of love’, with a ‘sense of an attentive responding intelligence’. When Gerard has his revelation, it is this grey parrot, derided by the charismatic Crimond, who has the strength and ‘wish to live’.

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