‘There are innumerable points at which we have… to attend upon the grace that comes through faith.’ Photo: Ida Kar/National Portrait Gallery
Seeing Iris, part two: Jonathan Wooding has more on a profound Quakerly thinker
‘Just sitting quiet will help. Teach it to children.’
If Iris Murdoch had ministered to Friends (as some of her relatives did) I suspect we would have welcomed this: ‘Perhaps (I believe) Christianity can continue without a personal God or a risen Christ, without beliefs in supernatural places and happenings, such as heaven and life after death, but retaining the mystical figure of Christ occupying a place analogous to that of Buddha: a Christ who can console and save, but who is to be found as a living force within each human soul and not in some supernatural elsewhere.’
These words are from her Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, and two novels she was working on at the same time feature Quaker characters: The Philosopher’s Pupil, and The Message to the Planet. If religion had a future it was to be non-supernatural, abandoning the ‘miracle, mystery and authority’ with which various grand inquisitors of the Christian tradition have endowed it. ‘The religion of the future?’ the exiled priest, Bernard, seems to ask, at the end of The Philosopher’s Pupil. Well, it will arise from a gospel of ‘charmless holiness’.
Forgive me if I claim that this charmless holiness sounds very much like the Quaker way, which nurtures and nourishes my needy (and sober) self, proffering no magical tricks or grand providential promises. The stultified philosopher in The Philosopher’s Pupil longs for ‘simple lucidity’ and ‘thoughts which were quiet and at rest’. If only he’d listened to Bernard, or to his friend William Eastcote, mainstay of the novel’s Quaker community, who speaks lucidly during Meeting against being silent in the face of philosophical cynicism.
Even if Iris Murdoch was not actually thinking of the silent Meeting for Worship when she wrote about the future of religion, then Quaker practices and sensibilities (‘the douce blank Quaker rites’, to which her novel’s narrator affectionately refers) do not contradict what she elucidates so comprehensively. Here is one of the many passages in her writing from 1992, which sounds like an entry in Quaker faith & practice: ‘Looking (concentrating, attending, attentive discipline) is a source of divine (purified) energy… There are innumerable points at which we have to detach ourselves, to change our orientation, to redirect our desire and refresh and purify our energy, to keep on looking in the right direction: to attend upon the grace that comes through faith.’
Murdoch, and her characters, can be said to represent those who accept the death, let’s say, of the old dispensation – a father God, a sacrificial atonement, a mediating priestly caste – but feel that religion nevertheless, in a different guise, continues. She’s only too aware, let’s remember, of the propensity of tyrants to be quite happy with the discontinuance of religion – unless they can turn it to their controlling advantage. (This must be the uncomfortable burden of the scientific atheist.) And true religion is iconoclastic anyway. Those who’ve truly cultivated holiness, grace and godliness are always being charged with irreligion, blasphemy and dissent, aren’t they?
Murdoch is quite clear that the legitimate disposal of ancient theologies of divinity and salvation, and virtue and congregation, need not lead to the disappearance of our religious life. ‘The concept of the holy must not be lost’, she writes, startlingly, in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. In Murdoch’s writings we find close scrutiny of the shamanic, magical and supernatural modes in religious and atheistical thinkers alike. She dispenses too with structuralism and its hostility to God and the self. She finds them too deterministic and elite. But prayer, holiness, mysticism? Well, they all survive, after all her rigorous philosophical investigations. They’re efficacious still.
Again, William Eastcote’s dying words are striking (for a late twentieth-century novel): ‘Pray always, pray to God.’ The words do not serve to count him out as anachronistic, nor as an anomaly or a redundancy. It so happens that whether to pray or not is a prominent theme in this novel, and is, too, in Murdoch’s philosophy. The Anglican Book of Common Prayer (BCP) is referred to as a ‘sacred text’ for some of the characters – those who are only ‘occasional church-goers’, or those who have even ‘taken leave of God’. It is sacred too for Bernard, who has ‘been expressly told not’ to use Cranmer’s prayer book by his ecclesiastical superiors (who presumably prefer 1980’s Alternative Service Book). Bernard is doubly heretical in this case – lover of Cranmer, and atheistically inclined, too.
Bernard in fact is mocked for giving a sermon on prayer that seems to be all about silence and breathing exercises. But it’s clear that he cannot leave spoken prayer alone for long, either. Prayer is his recommendation to others, and he practises what he preaches. Most impressive is his (and clearly Murdoch’s) close acquaintance with Cranmer’s lost, dying, traduced and proscribed words. For instance, did you know that there was ‘A Prayer for persons troubled in mind or in conscience’ in the BCP? (Look for ‘The Order for the Visitation of the Sick’: ‘Break not the bruised reed, nor quench the smoking flax.’) Bernard offers this prayer for the demonic philosopher’s pupil himself (a birthright Quaker, no less, whose brothers at least attend Meeting regularly). And how appropriate this is to a novel which pays close attention to its variously benighted characters, and whose narrator, like Murdoch in her philosophical writing, is concerned with ‘careful sober lucidity and a quiet truthful clarified reflection’ for all. Spoken (or silent) prayer just might still get us there, don’t you think?
A final philosophical fantasy, if you’ll permit me. Murdoch’s acknowledgement (in 1992) of our godless and savage modern age seems to lead her at last to Meeting. She imagines a despairing cry: ‘Someone may say, what can we do now that there is no God?’ And her response to this is brave and familiar: ‘This does not affect what is mystical. The loss of prayer, through the loss of belief in God, is a great loss. However, a general answer is a practice of meditation: a withdrawal, through some disciplined quietness, into the great chamber of the soul. Just sitting quiet will help. Teach it to children.’
She sets aside the hubris and ‘magic’ of the metaphysicians and systematic philosophers, the sneering cynicism of the fundamentalist atheist, in the name of a gracious unknowing, an ‘unselfing’, a charmless holiness: ‘There is another way which consists of constructing a huge hall of reflection full of light and space and fresh air, in which ideas and intuitions can be unsystematically nurtured.’
Take away the word ‘huge’ and, well, what does that sound like?
Comments
A very informative supplement to Part 1,deeply felt . Thankyou Jonathan . Also a very interesting development to have this two part structure ,which allows for more development of a theme than the usual 500 word or two page article .I would like to see more of them ,as one often senses writing Friends have had to compress their thoughts somewhat to fit in to the Friend’s format .
By Neil M on 9th April 2021 - 13:05
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