Recently the Divinity School at the University of Chicago sponsored
a conference to investigate and celebrate the theological importance of
the writings, especially the novels, of Iris Murdoch. The attitude expressed
by many of the theologians involved was one of abject, almost pathetic,
gratitude to Murdoch for taking religion seriously-not many noted artists
do so, after all, nor, come to think of it, do all of the theologians themselves.
Confronted with the spectacle of these highly trained men and women genuflecting
in the direction of a novelist, however brilliant, one struggles to recall
that theology was once named Queen of the Sciences.

Yet if any contemporary writer, in the English-speaking world anyway,
deserves this kind of attention it is Iris Murdoch. Until her retirement
a few years ago, she taught philosophy at St. Anne's College, Oxford, and
her five philosophical books would by themselves add up to a pretty substantial
career. But her reputation rests chiefly on her twenty-five novels, which
collectively constitute one of the more impressive bodies of fiction produced
in English in this century. Interestingly, her most ambitious-and, I would
argue, most successful-work in both fields has been produced in the last
decade, which is to say, well after her sixtieth birthday. She is now seventy-five,
and continues to turn out complex, challenging, and lengthy novels at the
rate of about one every other year-though she seems, unaccountably, to
have broken stride momentarily in order to publish, two years ago, a substantial
expansion and revision of her 1982 Gifford Lectures under the title Metaphysics
as a Guide to Morals (my copy of which weighs in at 520 pages). But
when The Green Knight, her most recent novel (and at 472 pages her
briefest in more than a decade), appeared in Great Britain in 1993 it became
clear that the completion of Metaphysics had scarcely exhausted
her energy.

In these two most recent books, Murdoch seems to be reaching, perhaps
not a culmination of her work (who knows how many more books she will produce),
but a clarification and focus of its key themes. She seems to be expressing
her philosophy more directly and forcefully than ever, and connecting it
with the whole range of her interests. And, though it may seem inappropriate
to say so about so expansive a writer, it would seem that her focus is
directed chiefly on a single question, one might even say a single letter,
the letter "o": the presence or absence of that letter can determine
the ground of our moral lives.

What I mean can be discovered in a sentence near the end of Metaphysics
as a Guide to Morals: "Good represents the reality of which God
is the dream." Or: "We can lose God, but not Good." Murdoch
is a Platonist, to a degree and with a purity almost unknown in modern
thought: it is the Good that she seeks, the Idea or Form of the Good. (Platonist
thought requires the frequent use of capital letters.) All else, including
God, is an image or a substitute for this utter Good, and may be useful
to us as we move toward perfection; but because our human tendency is to
substitute the image for the reality, the guidepost for the destination,
even the worship of God may distract us from our proper pursuit.

Murdoch is convinced that each of us pursues the Good according to
our understanding of it; evil, in her thinking, is little more than the
natural consequence of misinformation about or a misconception of the Good.
As such it gets little attention in her writings: a consideration of the
view that people are evil and human life miserable takes up but one part
of the shortest chapter in Metaphysics, and most of the characters
in her novels are basically decent people who are rather puzzled when they
come upon what appears to be evil. In The Green Knight even a murderer
seems more confused than malicious. (He is a scholar whose remarkable intellectual
integrity suggests that he has simply failed to extend the morality he
exhibits in one activity to the rest of his life.) The prototypical Murdoch
character is young Edward Baltram in The Good Apprentice (1986).
Edward surreptitiously, jokingly, gives a friend a dose of LSD, and when
the friend in mid-trip leaps or falls from a high window to his death,
Edward, overwhelmed by guilt, begins to seek some understanding of his
experience, some moral or spiritual categories within which it can be comprehended,
perhaps even some kind of redemption. On the last page he and his stepbrother
(whose quest for a moral life gives the book its title) and stepfather
drink to "all the good things in the world," though they admit
not being sure what those things are. They drink, one might say, to an
unknown Good.

Perhaps this one example is sufficient to indicate that Murdoch takes
the moral life more seriously than almost any other well-known contemporary
novelist, and, moreover, that the virtues and shortcomings of her work
are tightly interwoven. Her insistence that a good life is possible, and
that many people actively pursue it, including those who don't know that
they are doing so, marks a fresh and exciting alternative to the more common
themes of today's "serious" fiction: detailed accounts of adultery
in the suburbs, or of the mental worlds of serial killers, or of the contents
of a kitchen cabinet in a trailer home in rural Missouri. But in order
to make the pursuit of goodness seem both attractive and possible, Murdoch
tends to avoid raising hard questions about those who quite evidently aren't
interested in goodness, or those who fight with little success against
their evil impulses. As a Christian I would say that the great lack in
Murdoch's moral philosophy is an adequate concept of the will. Augustine's
Confessions turns up from time to time in Metaphysics, but
any hope that she might at some point consider the philosophy of will elaborated
there is disappointed. Her only reference to it merely notes that Augustine
"pictures will as a blend of intellect and feeling."

Nevertheless she does understand as well as any modern novelist just
how complicated our moral lives can be, which is perhaps why she tends
to write big novels, since their open and expansive form can make room
for complexity and for a certain quite realistic lack of coherence. In
one particularly stimulating chapter of Metaphysics she questions
the preeminent position of tragedy among literary genres: "If it must
be a play, is it not necessarily too short and simple?"

Moreover, doesn't the association of tragedy with death enforce a certain
too-neat closure? Murdoch suggests that King Lear would be a still
more powerful-indeed, perhaps unbearable-play if Lear did not die at the
end, but was forced to go on living with his crushing burden of knowledge
and guilt. (This is of course what does happen to Oedipus at the end of
Sophocles' first play about him.) Murdoch suspects the Aristotelian doctrine
of catharsis on the ground that a play which obeys it settles too many
issues and closes too many emotional doors. More generally, referring to
philosphy as well as art, she says that "the achievement of coherence
is itself ambiguous. Coherence is not necessarily good, and one must question
its cost. Better sometimes to remain confused." By contrast she praises
the novel because "in the traditional novel the people, the story,
the innumerable kinds of value judgments both illuminate and celebrate
life, and are judged and placed by life, in a reciprocal process. We read
great novels with all our knowledge of life engaged, the experience is
cognitive and moral in the highest degree." Such experience is also
too diversified to be fully coherent.

One is not wholly comfortable with Murdoch's suspicion of coherence;
it links up too readily with her resistance to stopping the pursuit of
the Good with Jesus or Yahweh or Allah. The traditional believer is not
confused about the object of his or her worship, which is in Murdoch's
view often unfortunate. But her willingness to tolerate confusion is nonetheless
valuable for its recognition that the moral life cannot be reduced to rule-governed
behavior. Not that she is against moral rules; they are, she argues convincingly,
an "indispensable," if insufficient, part of the moral life.

Especially interesting in this regard is her rehabilitation of the
Kantian notion of duty, so scorned by many modern moral philosophers for
"imposing" a supposedly external or, to use Paul Tillich's word,
"heteronomous," standard upon the moral agent. "A realistic
view of morality cannot dispense with the idea," she argues; "duty
is for most people the most obvious form of moral experience." It
is where moral neophytes-a category that includes but is not confined to
children-find their starting point. As one grows morally and spiritually,
one moves toward a more natural selflessness; but "meanwhile requirements
and claims . . . demand to be met." And it is good for all concerned
that we acknowledge and meet those demands.

This position, admirable in itself, Murdoch puts to some troubling
uses. Rules, structures, and duties, along with symbols, rites, even gods
and all other objects of worship-in short, all given forms of the religious
life-are in her view useful primarily as training wheels, to be replaced
or removed when the rider no longer needs them. Thus she tends to portray
characters who begin their moral quests by seeking a place within the structures
of more-or-less traditional religious belief. Bellamy James in The Green
Knight, for instance, finds a cloistered priest to serve as his spiritual
advisor, and seeks to live a monastic life in the world, hoping that ascetic
discipline will give him a clearer vision of Christ. But such characters
are not allowed to find lasting satisfaction within those structures: internal
and external circumstances tend to force them into more individualistic
and amorphous modes of religious experience. Bellamy's spiritual advisor
seems to be speaking for Murdoch when he leaves the church and tells Bellamy
to "remember Eckhart's advice (for which he was deemed a heretic):
do not seek for God outside your own soul." He also says, "You
should stay with Christ, that presence need not fade, it can be an icon"-but
of course this is a significant demotion, from Savior to mere sign or token
of an impersonal and unrepresentable Good. In one of the two dialogues
in her book Acastos, Socrates tells a young man that if he prays
to whatever God he knows, he will be answered. Yet it is clear that she
also believes that, if one is not spiritually stagnant, any God will eventually
cease to answer, at which point one must move on to higher and better things.

The French statesman Georges Clemenceau famously remarked that he would
disown his son if the young man were not a Communist at age twenty, and
would do the same if he were still a Communist at age thirty. Murdoch seems
to have the same attitude toward adherence to traditional forms of religion:
admirable and necessary in a moral beginner, unforgivable in a morally
mature person. It is this conviction that lies behind her claim that she
is a Christian Buddhist, or Buddhist Christian: she envisions a Christianity
in which Jesus plays the same role that Buddha does in the more sophisticated
forms of Buddhism, that of (at most) an avatar of a transcendent Good that
he cannot exhaust or even adequately represent.

This should not be confused with what has often been called "ethical
Christianity." Murdoch repeatedly insists that morality, as commonly
conceived, is not self-supporting. She rejects the liberal humanistic tradition
according to which morality itself can be the ground of a good life; to
the contrary, she argues, morality itself must be grounded in religious
commitment. Religion, as Murdoch defines it, demands more of us than any
mere morality can; it requires our unswerving allegiance, its claims upon
us are absolute. In this sense, while the desire to be good or to be a
better person may be a merely moral project, the pursuit of the Good is
genuinely religious. The true encounter with Christ (or the Buddha, or
whomever) will be a mystical vision of the Good that shines through him,
not a simple acknowledgment of his ethical superiority and the value of
following his example.

Still, the religion Murdoch envisions-as many of her characters come
to believe, as Socrates preaches in Acastos, and as Murdoch herself
repeatedly argues in Metaphysics-is necessarily, for reasons that
by now should be obvious, a religion without gods. Not only can
we lose God, but if we are to retain Good, at some point we must
lose God. "The 'demythologization' of religion is something absolutely
necessary in this age." Moreover, the abandonment of the "old
dogmatic literalistic myths" may well, she thinks, be going on right
now in churches around the world without anybody noticing. This process
can happen silently because "a Christian who loses belief in God and
resurrection and immortality, while remaining religious, is not necessarily
making a radical change in his value world."

Murdoch is aware that some people will doubt that the transformation
she recommends is so simple:

Can one simply decree this sort of status for the risen Christ and still
keep a Christian structure and observance as before, as if it did not matter
all that much? The transformation of Christianity into a religion like
Buddhism, with no God and no literally divine Christ, but with a mystical
Christ, may be, if possible at all, a long task. . . . Or could an individual
perhaps one day decide to "look at it in this way"? Do not people
so decide? And suppose a good many of them do? Is one being too rigid and
solemn about it all? Do not a large number of those who go to church already
think in a new nonliteral way without bothering about theology and metaphysics?

This, it seems to me, is wishful thinking. Even the most superficial
investigation of the demographic data reveals that, while most Christians
would agree that they care little for theology or metaphysics, those who
actually go to church on a regular basis (and this is as true in Great
Britain as it is in North America) tend to believe pretty literally in
the creeds they recite each Sunday. Those who do not tend eventually to
stop going to church altogether, finding the Sunday New York Times-that
"parish magazine of self- congratulatory liberal enlightenment,"
as Alasdair MacIntyre has so vividly called it-a less demanding way to
meet their spiritual needs.

One may deplore or applaud this tendency, but one cannot simply ignore
its existence, or assert its opposite. Murdoch is quite singular in her
assumption that the structures of religion are of greater importance than
the beliefs that have historically generated and then undergirded those
structures. It may seem obvious to her that, in British Christianity, the
abandonment of a belief in a personal God would be of little significance,
while the loss of the Authorized Version of the Bible and Cranmer's Prayer
Book marks a religious disaster of the first magnitude; or that if "our
minds are . . . full of readily available religious imagery . . . there
is no need to expel [it] simply because . . . we do not believe in God."
But it is difficult to imagine that others will find such notions equally
obvious, or perhaps even comprehensible. And at times Murdoch acknowledges
that those who believe that untrue ideas should simply be dispensed with
have an argument worthy of consideration.

Religious forms and structures, then, are important to Murdoch for
pragmatic reasons: they are pegs on which to hang spiritual experiences
that might otherwise be too amorphous and indefinable to be made sense
of. But the Good itself, well, that is another matter-isn't it? Surely
Murdoch, as a self-proclaimed Platonist, believes in something like a "literal
way" in the existence of the Good-doesn't she? One might so conclude,
if one had read only the first five hundred or so pages of Metaphysics
as a Guide to Morals. But right at the end she gives the game away.

There is a story Murdoch tells in this book, a Tibetan story:

A mother asks her son, a merchant setting off for the city, to bring
her back a religious relic. He forgets her request until he is nearly home
again. He picks up a dog's tooth by the roadside and tells the old lady
it is a relic of a saint. She places it in her chapel where it is venerated.
It begins miraculously to glow with light.

On its first telling, this little tale illustrates a point about the
role of stories in religion. It does not seem very important. But Murdoch
returns to it several times, and finally, near the end of the book it suddenly
appears to be something like the key to her whole philosophy:

Keats says that "what the imagination seizes as beauty must be
truth, whether it existed before or not." It must be truth.
Simone Weil quotes Valery: "The proper, unique, and perpetual object
of thought is that which does not exist." Here we may make sense of
the idea of loving good. "At its highest point, love is a determination
to create the being which it has taken for its object." Here indeed
we come back to the Ontological Proof in its simpler version, a proof by
perfection, by a certainty derived from love. The good artist, the true
lover, the dedicated thinker, the unselfish moral agent solving his problem:
they can create the object of love. The dog's tooth, when sincerely venerated,
glows with light.

Murdoch neatly escapes a recurrent dilemma of Platonism, which is to
explain the mode of existence of the Good and of all the Forms, by denying
that they have an existence at all independent of those who believe in
them. The Good is not worshipped because it exists, but exists insofar
as it is worshipped. It may, unlike God, be indispensable, but this indispensability
is purely pragmatic and heuristic. We cannot live in the way we most want
to live, or at least the way some of us want to live, without it. Murdoch's
Good is what the poet Wallace Stevens called a "supreme fiction":
a story, a metanarrative, by which we can direct our lives, and the origin
of which is our own creative imagination. If, as Jean-Francois Lyotard
has claimed, postmodernism may be defined in a phrase as "incredulity
toward metanarratives," then Iris Murdoch (like Stevens) is a modernist;
that is to say, one whose incredulity is limited to metanarratives written
by others.

Many of the more curious features of Murdoch's novels become more comprehensible
once one understands this belief that the Good is an imaginative creation:
for instance, the seemingly minor yet recurrent instances of paranormal
phenomena. In The Philosopher's Pupil (1983) a man's life is changed
by his vision of a flying saucer; a key episode in The Good Apprentice
turns on what appears to be the effects of a love potion; a young girl
in The Green Knight exerts an involuntary telekinesis over the stones
that she has collected in her room; in the same novel the goodness of a
man named Peter Mir (Mir meaning, in Russian, both "world" and
"peace," as several characters note) seems to be contagious,
bringing sweet dreams and love to those with whom he comes in contact.
But more questions are raised than answered. I will here note only three.

First, why do the various spiritual seekers of her novels tend to move
in the same direction, that is, to conceive of or imagine goodness in roughly
the same way? There may be several plausible answers to that question,
but Murdoch doesn't give any.

Second-a point noted earlier-how are we to explain those people who
do not seem to give a damn for the Good or for moral action in any form?
Do they simply have deficient imaginations? Moreover, how should we respond
to them? What kinds of arguments, if any, could we formulate that would
call them to account for their behavior, and even to see the error of their
ways? In The Green Knight, the good Peter Mir confronts the murderer,
and seems to have no resources with which to bring about moral conviction
in the man; their several conversations end in frustration and no closure
is reached. At one point in Metaphysics Murdoch quotes, with apparent
approval, Wittgenstein's claim that certain moral questions cannot be profitably
discussed: "There are, indeed, things which cannot be put into words.
They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical."
But of course, there are many people to whom such "things" are
obviously not manifest. What then?

The third question is the most important. Earlier I quoted Murdoch's
claim that "the 'demythologization' of religion is something absolutely
necessary in this age." Throughout the book she takes it for granted
that the "old dogmatic literalistic myths" must go, indeed have
gone; the only question is what "we" will replace them with.
The recurrent use of the plural pronoun and her constant reference to traditional
religion in the past tense-"should we let [the word 'God'] dwindle
and go, together with the person whom it used to designate?"-are
equally telling. That Murdoch feels qualified to speak for a "we"
which presumably includes all of her readers is indicated by the fact that
she offers neither a defense nor even an explanation for her determination
to demythologize. To Murdoch it goes without saying that historic Christianity
is not an option. Yet it does not seem likely that her audience is as uniform
as all that; and even those readers who do not share this writer's commitment
to traditional religion may still wonder whether, if we are going to create
our own object of worship, the exchange of a personal, loving God for an
impersonal, unresponsive Good is an appealing trade. Why-this is my third
question-should anyone agree to such an exchange?

Insofar as Murdoch does answer this question, the answer is only implicit,
and appears to be a pragmatic one. It is a matter of what "we"
can bring ourselves to believe in. From time to time she notes that "we
can no longer believe" in traditional Judaism or Christianity-that
is, in the notion of a personal God, or a Savior who rose from the dead,
or personal immortality in the familiar sense. This is a familiar sort
of statement, yet it begs many, many questions. Many people do believe
in these things; many people in the past did not. Many contemporary skeptics
would find it easier to believe in a personal God than in "a Christ
who . . . is to be found as a living force [only] within each human soul."
If indeed Murdoch thinks her philosophy is for the modern person more "believable"
than the historic religions, one needs to be convinced and not just told.

This is an important issue because Murdoch implicitly acknowledges
from time to time that her Good is in many ways less appealing, less satisfying,
than a personal God. Her nostalgia for the ancient Jewish and especially
the Christian faith is palpable throughout Metaphysics and, albeit
less directly, in many of her novels. "The charm, attraction, and
in many ways deep effectiveness of faith in a personal God must constantly
strike the critical or envious outsider." Of the Gospels she writes,
contrasting them with the forceful rhetoric of Paul's letters, that they
"are in a sense easy to read, can seem so (even I would think for
a complete stranger to them), because they are the kind of great art where
we feel: It is so." And that this is not a merely aesthetic reaction
is indicated by these curiously ambivalent words, from the same page: "What
happened immediately after Christ's death, how it all went on, how the
Gospel writers and Paul became persuaded He had risen: this is one of the
great mysteries of history. It is difficult to imagine any explanation
in purely historical terms, though the unbeliever must assume there is
one." The narratives of Christ's redemptive acts touch Murdoch because
they reveal a God who, in the Apostle Paul's formulation, came to save
us while we were yet sinners, before we had loved him. The Platonic Good
can be, like the Jewish and Christian God, lovable; "however, God
sees us and seeks us, Good does not."

That Murdoch cannot find a way to accept this God who sees and seeks
(who redeems), but instead embraces an impersonal and probably fictional
Good, makes it ironic-perhaps contradictory would not be too strong a word-that
she would conclude her book with these words from Psalm 139 (in the Authorized
Version, of course):

Whither shall I go from thy spirit, whither shall I fly from thy presence?
If I ascend into heaven thou art there, if I make my bed in hell, behold
thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost
parts of the sea, even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand
shall hold me.

Ironic and contradictory, because each property here attributed by the
psalmist to the Lord is that of a person, one whose love is active and
(in the old word) prevenient. Murdoch concludes her long, confusing, and
stimulating book by appealing to an image of the Ultimate that she has,
overtly and firmly, if regretfully, abandoned.

The Gospel-and not just the Gospel, but the fundamental Judeo-Christian
belief in a loving personal God-is, according to the apostle, "foolishness
to the Greeks." We believers are fools. But Murdoch's rejection of
God in favor of her supreme fiction, the Good, is worse than foolish, it
is empty. Her interpolated "o" adds nothing; in the end it proves
to be a zero. Another Fool may have understood, though his words seem harsh:
he told his master Lear, "now thou art an O without a figure. I am
better than thou art now; I am a Fool, thou art nothing."