by Iris Murdoch
‘At stake? Everything’s at stake.’
‘If you don’t really have to raise a finger, everything is not at stake.’
‘I mean - it’s a totally different world.’
‘The world of faith, of your faith?’
‘I know … that there is always … more quietness, more silence … more space … into which I can move … on … and be made … better, somehow … It’s not a drama, not sort of exciting, or violent, like things being at stake.’
‘I like your picture. Morality makes mincemeat of metaphysics by the simplicity of its claims. And that fool Ivor Sefton thinks that metaphysical imagery is paranoiac! We are all image-makers. So a quiet life and no guilt? What do you do in your parish work?’
‘I enact rites. I wait for people to summon me.’
‘A fireman priest! Not a fisher of men.’
‘I am a fish not a fisher, a fish in search of a net.’
‘I will make you fishers of men if you follow me. There was a little sect who used to sing that, in Burkestown, when I was a child.’
‘They’re still there, down beside the railway.’
‘Simple faith. They think they are saved.’
‘Faith means - at least, not having to count your sins.’
‘But if there is no God you must count your sins, since no one else will, or do you believe that virtue is a harmony of good and evil?’
Father Bernard was horrified. ‘I am not a Gnostic! A most detestable heresy! That really is magic!’
‘Heresy! Are you not up to your neck in it? But why magic?’
‘The desire to know can degenerate into mere trickery. Our natural love for evil makes us think we understand it. Then we read good into it, like turning lead into gold. But it’s not like that - the difference between good and evil is absolute - the two poles are not in view - we are not gods.’
‘You believe in this absolute difference, this - distance?’
‘I think we experience it at every moment. Yes, I believe in it - don’t you?’
Rozanov said after a moment, ‘Why are we so sure about this? Is it the sort of thing we can be sure about? What would be a test? What does seem clear is that the spiritual world is full of ambiguities, full of these “readings”, full of the magic you are so afraid of. If you appeal to experience, well we experience that all right. What about your mystic Christ. Isn’t he an ambiguous magical figure? For instance, you are in love with him, aren’t you?’
Father Bernard had begun to feel upset, annoyed with Rozanov, and even more with himself for having so crudely spoken about things which were, when unspoken, so clear and pure. He said, ‘I shouldn’t have spoken of him.’
‘Ah, I understand, I understand. We’ll leave him alone. But isn’t religion bound to descend into consolation? You don’t want to change, or to sacrifice anything, but because of some vague experience you regard yourself as excused, as innocent, simul iustus et peccator?’
They were now quite close to the Common, walking through Druidsdale, and the priest noticed that Rozanov, who had hitherto allowed his companion to determine the route, had taken a sharp right-hand turn in order to avoid going along the road where George McCaffrey lived.
Father Bernard did not answer directly, but said, ‘You were right to mention love. Isn’t that somehow the proof that good and evil exclude each other?’
‘Plato might have thought that, Plotinus might have felt it, but I doubt if you can make sense of it.’
‘Perhaps I can’t - but - when we love people - and things - and our work and - we somehow get the assurance that good is there - it’s absolutely pure and absolutely there - it’s in the fabric - it must be.’
‘We like to make much of this word “love”, to pat it and stroke it - but does love as we know it ever appear except as a mask of self? Ask your own soul. Who was that?’
At that moment they had been passed by Nesta Wiggins’s father, who raised his hat respectfully to the philosopher.
‘Dominic Wiggins, a tailor, he lives in Burkestown, a nice man.’
‘I remember the Wigginses,’ said John Robert, ‘they were Catholics.’
They were now walking on the Common where the ground was damp and muddy. Father Bernard hated getting mud on his shoes. Part of his cassock had become unpinned and was trailing on the wet grass verges. He was beginning to want a drink. If they stayed on the shorter path back into Burkestown by the old railway cutting they could reach the Green Man in twenty minutes. Or had someone told him that the confounded philosopher was a teetotaller?
Father Bernard said, ‘We like to say that everyone is selfish, but that’s just a hypothesis.’
John Robert said, ‘Good, good!’ He added, ‘Your mind interests me. But you haven’t answered my question.’
‘When we love pure things we experience pure love.’
‘People? Wretched crooks, thugs to a man?’
‘Loving others as Christ - I mean loving Christ in them.’
‘That really is sentimental twaddle. Kant thought we should respect Universal Reason in other people. Bunkum. If ex hypothesi I wanted you to love me, I should want you to love me, not my reason or my Christ nature.’
‘Well - yes - of course you are right.’
‘And things - I believe you mentioned loving things - how’s that done?’
‘Anything can be a sacrament - transformed - like the bread and wine.’
‘What for instance? Trees?’
‘Oh trees, yes - that tree — ’
They were just passing a hawthorn bush, it could scarcely be called a tree, which was putting out, amid its healthy shining thorns, sharp little vivid green buds.
‘The beauty of the world,’ said John Robert. ‘Unfortunately I am insensitive to it. Though it might have point as a contrast to art. Art is certainly the devil’s work, the magic that joins good and evil together, the magic place where they joyfully run together. Plato was right about art.’
‘You enjoy no art form?’
‘No.’
‘Surely metaphysics is art.’
‘That is - yes - a terrible thought.’ The philosopher was silent as if appalled by some dreadful vision which these words had conjured up. He said, ‘You see - the suspicion that one is not only not telling the truth, but cannot tell it - that is - damnation. A case for the millstone.’
As Father Bernard could think of nothing to say to this the philosopher went on:
‘Your idea of loving pure things is trickery, and I doubt if the notion of loving Christ in rotten swine like you and me even makes sense. It’s sentimentality. It’s all done with mirrors like the Ontological Proof. You imagine a perfect love which emanates from a pure source in response to your imperfect love, in response to your frenetic desire for love - then because this gives you a warm feeling you say you’re certain.’
‘I know that my Redeemer liveth.’
‘Mutatis mutandis! I suppose that’s what’s called faith. You feel it all coming beaming back. But you would need the God you don’t believe in to make it real. It’s all the same imperfect stuff churning to and fro. You want a response. You can’t have a real one so you fake one, like sending a letter to yourself.’
Father Bernard said, ‘It’s true - we do hunger for love - that’s deep all right. You too - you long to be loved - don’t you?’
After a moment Rozanov said, ‘Yes, but it’s a weakness - that’s the thing that I say in a whisper. Ah - well. Do you love your parishioners, the chap you visited? You see, after all you do visit them.’
‘A woman - well - not exactly.’ The image of Miss Dunbury accused Father Bernard and he laughed. ‘No - but I’m glad she exists.’
‘You laugh? She makes you feel happy, pleased?’
‘Yes, she’s funny. She’s virtuous and absurd.’
‘Isn’t happiness your good then?’
‘No, no, no. Good is my good.’
‘What does this tautology do for us? Good is a Cheshire cat.’
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‘But don’t you think then that we can - do - anything?’
‘Morally? We can be quiet and sensible and feel contempt for ourselves. And there is the idea of duty, an excellent conception. I mean, these things go on. But chiefly - we can see ourselves as petty and ridiculous and - and base.’
‘That is your happiness.’
John Robert laughed. ‘There isn’t any deep structure in the world. At the bottom, which isn’t very far down, it’s all rubble, jumble. Not even muck, but jumble.’
‘Isn’t this stoicism, protecting yourself from being surprised by anything? Nil admirari.’
‘Protecting yourself from being surprised, or disgusted, or horrified, or appalled into madness - by anything - especially by yourself.’
‘Is morality a mistake then?’
‘A phenomenon.’
‘I think you are being - shall we say - insincere.’
‘Insincere. Good. Go on.’
‘You seem to me to be a very moralistic person. For instance, you seem to set some absolute value on truth.’
‘Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth — well, it’s like brown — it’s not in the spectrum.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s not a part of morality, not like you mean morality. Truth is impersonal. Like death. It’s a doom.’
‘Cold?’
‘Oh, these metaphors!’
‘But you can’t just recognize one value.’
‘Why not?’
‘I mean if you recognize one value won’t you find all the others hidden inside it? Must one not be able to?’
‘What sort of “must” is this? Are all values to come tumbling out of one like goodies out of a stocking? Truth is sui generis. And as for the rest - there is no spectrum, that was a bad image, a slip.’
‘A significant slip, I think.’
‘The idea of the internal connection of virtues is pure superstition, a comforting illusion, the sort of thing that I believed when I was twenty. That doesn’t bear close examination.’
‘Oh no — ’ said Father Bernard, or rather he murmured it. ‘Oh no,’ no.’
They were now in sight of the Ennistone Ring, the point at which the sage must at all costs be prevented from setting off diagonally across the Common and out into the countryside. Father Bernard was glad to see that he was flagging a little. The path had been uphill and they were both short of breath.
‘Bill the Lizard saw a flying saucer up here,’ said Rozanov.
‘But you don’t believe in such things?’
‘Why not? Think what we can do, and add a million years.’
‘But they don’t - appear - interfere.’
‘Why should they? They’re studying us. I should like to think that there were intelligences absolutely unlike my own. It would somehow be such a relief. Perhaps they live longer and have - oh -wonderful - real- philosophers.’
‘I find the whole idea uncanny,’ said Father Bernard, ‘and somehow-horrid.’
‘Bill didn’t feel this. He felt it was something good - a wholly good visitation. But then - he would be likely to see - something good.’
‘Even if it wasn’t there? I imagine you don’t class Mr Eastcote as one of us rotten swine?’ This casual characterization had been festering in Father Bernard’s mind.
‘No,’ said Rozanov with discouraging curtness. Then, ‘Why, whatever have they done to the Ring?’
The priest and the philosopher gazed at the megaliths which were arranged in a broken circle some sixty yards in diameter. There were nine stones. The earliest reference to them is eighteenth-century, when four of them were standing. The others were uncovered and collected and erected in their present still-disputed positions by a nineteenth-century archaeologist. Six of them are tall and narrow, three (one of these fragmentary) roughly diamond-shaped, suggesting the two sexes. Here even speculation ended. It was hard to believe that mortal men had placed them there at some time for some purpose. There they stood in the pale sad damp light, occupying a temporal moment, wet with rain, transcending history, oblivious of art, resisting understanding, monstrous with unfathomable thought, and dense with mysterious authoritative impacted being. The wind blew the long grasses at their feet, while beyond and between them could be seen rounded hills and woods where here and there grey church towers were successfully illumined by the shifting cloudy light.
‘They’ve spoilt them!’
‘There was a lot of argument,’ said the priest.
‘They’ve taken off all the moss and those yellow rings.’
‘They cleaned them with electric wire brushes. It shows the grain of the stone, but of course all that spotty lichen has gone.’
‘They cleaned them, they scratched them with vile brushes, they dared to touch them, these, the nearest things to gods that our contemptible citizens will ever see.’ Rozanov stood there, his coat blowing, his mouth open, his face crinkled up with pain.
The priest watched him, then ventured to pull at his sleeve so as to urge him back in the direction of the town. Then as they started down the hill it began a little to rain, while they saw before them the sunlight momentarily touching the gilded cupola of the Hall and the golden weathercock of St Olaf’s Church.
‘What do you regret most in your life?’ said the philosopher.
‘What kind of regret? Not to have established unselfish habits. Not to be destined to be alone. Well, no, not that. And you?’
‘Lies. The sin of silence. What do you fear most?’
‘Death.’
‘Death is nothing, you will not know it, you mean pain, you see you still confuse the two.’
‘Oh all right - and you?’
‘To find out that morality is unreal.’
‘But isn’t that just what you think - that it is a phenomenon?’
‘A phenomenon is something. Duty is something, a barrier. But to find out that it is not just an ambiguity with which one lives - but that it is nothing, a fake, absolutely unreal.’
‘To find that there are no barriers?’
‘That there could come a place, a point, where morality simply gave way, did not exist.’
‘There can be no such place.’
‘God would be needed to guarantee that, and any existent God is a demon. If even one thing is permitted it is enough. A prison with one way out is not a prison.’
Father Bernard thought for a moment.
‘Aren’t you just doing what you wouldn’t let me do? I wanted to draw all good out of one good. You want to discredit all good because there is one evil which good can’t get at.’
‘A good image. If in the pilgrimage of life there is any place beyond good and evil, it is our duty to go there.’
‘Our duty?’
‘That is the final paradox. When one reaches a certain point, morality becomes a riddle to which one must find the answer. The holy inevitably moves toward the demonic. Fra Angelico loved Signorelli.’
‘Perhaps he did. But then didn’t Signorelli love Fra Angelico? The demonic moves toward the holy.’
‘No. That is my point. If the holy even knows of the demonic it is lost. The flow is in that direction, the tide runs that way, water flows down hill. That is what “no God” means, which is still a secret even from those who babble it. Everything in the cosmos is reversed, as in some theories in physics. Philosophy teaches us that, in the event, all the greatest minds of our race were not only in error, but childishly so. The holy must try to know the demonic, must at some point frame the riddle and thirst for the answer, and that longing is the perfect contradiction of the love of God.’
‘This sounds like - that awful - doctrine — ’
‘No, not your puerile heresy.’
‘I don’t follow you. Nothing in heaven or earth can alter my duty to my neighbour.’
‘It can put it ever so little out of focus. Have you not felt just that, you who are tainted by the holy?’
The priest considered silently. He sai
d, ‘It’s nonsense. But what is the way out of what you call the prison? Do you mean suicide?’
‘The proof. It could be. There are many gates. But for one man perhaps one gate.’
‘One thing he is tempted to do which would make everything else permissible? Why not murder then?’
‘Why not?’
‘And you become the demon who is God.’
‘We are being carried away by a metaphor, it is my fault, I have lived too long with images. One thinks one is on a high place, at an edge, where the air is purer and clearer.’
‘You had better stop thinking,’ said Father Bernard.
‘I can’t. But don’t worry — ’
‘You’re not tempted to commit suicide or murder?’
‘Certainly not.’
‘But you are - tempted - to do something awful - the - as you said - the proof?’
‘No,’ said Rozanov, ‘no, no.’
They were descending a grassy slope into the abandoned railway cutting, sometimes known as Lovers’ Lane, a place of leafy resort for courting couples, which served as a path from the Common into Burkestown. The cutting ended, on the Common side, in the abrupt bricked-up mouth of a tunnel, and became gradually shallower on the Ennistone side where it ended at a level crossing near to the station. A few drops of rain still fell, and Father Bernard noticed shining drops poised upon the primroses and pendant grasses and raggedy hawthorns, and celandine and fretty chervil and brambles and briar bushes which now rose up above their heads. Suddenly there was a rushing tearing sound as if a ghostly train had emerged from the tunnel, or one of John Robert’s demons were charging in the form of a large animal through the foliage. Something big and heavy and extremely agitated came rolling and bundling down the bank and out on to the level grass in front of the walkers’ feet. This, a moment later, turned out to be Tom McCaffrey and Emmanuel Scarlett-Taylor still engaged in a scuffle which had started at the top of the slope. They sat up laughing still clutching each other, then became aware of witnesses and leapt up, making way.
‘Hello,’ said the priest raising his hand, as he and Rozanov now continued their journey, passing between the two boys who had stood back, one on each side.
‘Hello, Father.’