Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘I have never discovered a Knight of Faith, but I can easily imagine one. Here he is. I make his acquaintance, I am introduced to him. And the moment I lay eyes on him I push him away and leap back suddenly, clap my hands together and say half aloud: “Good God! Is this really he? Why he looks like an Inspector of Taxes!” ... I watch every movement he makes to see whether he shows any sign of the least telegraphic communication with the infinite, a glance, a look, a gesture, an air of melancholy, a smile to portray the contrast of infinity with the finite. But no! I examine him from head to foot, hoping to discover a chink through which the infinite can peer. But no! He is completely solid. How does he walk? Firmly. He belongs wholly to the finite; and there is no townsman dressed in his Sunday best who spends his Sunday afternoon in Frederiksburg who treads the earth more firmly than he; he belongs altogether to the earth, no bourgeois more so.’

  Kierkegaard wants to commend a private silent inner personal spirituality and to do so without romanticising religion. He goes on for some while describing his good man who looks like an Inspector of Taxes.

  ‘He is not a poet . . . When he comes home in the evening he walks as sturdily as a postman. On his way he thinks about the special hot dish which his wife has been preparing for him, a grilled lamb’s head garnished with herbs perhaps.’

  And so on. Is he overdoing it, we might think, surely there must be some outward and visible difference between a very spiritual man and an ordinary bourgeois? But of course this is a parable making a rhetorical point. By this time we are more likely to be thinking: what an endearing character! What a simple yet noble chap, a genuinely saintly being! Why, this fellow is just as charming as the other one! Avoiding one kind of romantic exposition Kierkegaard falls (so beautifully) into another; to avoid the traditional hero he conjures up a now not unfamiliar kind of anti-hero.

  It is difficult to talk eloquently at any length upon a religious subject without employing the consolations and charms of art. This is perhaps very obvious and one may say so what, or que faire? A saint described is a saint romanticised. Nor of course must a saint romanticise himself. So saints must be invisible both to others and to themselves. Is not this as unrealistic as that Tax Inspector? Yet in a way the difficulty, or paradox, is a familiar one, and indicates real distinctions and differences. Simple edifying religious homilies (as in sermons, Thoughts for the Day, etc.), using homely examples and excluding anything lofty or high-flown, are themselves a clearly recognisable art form. No wonder some thinkers say: don’t talk. Some religious orders limit the amount of ‘ordinary speech’ which is to take place, and many liturgical styles rely upon the constant repetition of traditional forms of words rather than upon verbal improvising. However, churches are public institutions, concerned with the progressive clarification and propagation of their ideas, and with their place and duties in society. In order to teach, to persuade, to explain, they must talk. It is indeed difficult to attend to any religious matter or object without drawing it down to some easily imagined easily handled level. Theology has always been concerned with how far, in this process, to go. Religion is for everybody, but how to reach everybody? T. S. Eliot said that Christianity has always been changing itself into something which can be generally believed. There may be a limit to this process, where a demythologised religion becomes intolerable. Recent Anglican theology exhibits these problems. A denuded ‘existentialist’ faith may lose its identity in the mind of the believer and become more like an unadorned high moral asceticism.

  ‘We want religion to be a severe inner discipline without any consolations whatsoever. The colder and clearer the better . . . Religious activity has now to be undertaken just for its own sake as an autonomous and practical response to the coolly perceived truth of the human condition. This is true religion: all else is superstition.’

  (Don Cupitt, The Listener, 13 September 1984.)

  Stern words deserving respect. On the other hand, a theologian, such as Maurice Wiles, who wishes to continue to draw upon the traditional images, feels in danger of living upon borrowed capital and invokes ‘a bold and creative use of the speculative imagination’ (The Remaking of Christian Doctrine, p. 120). A genius is needed. Christian theology may well begin to feel that whereas other (for instance scientific) modes of thought in this age are producing new and profoundly revolutionary ideas, its activity is limited to the manipulation of a given number of ageing concepts. A (drastic) way forward may have been suggested by a Catholic theologian, Brian Nolan, who told a conference (at Maynooth in September 1984) that after a more prolonged exposure to oriental religions, African Christianity, Liberation theology, and the Women’s Movement, traditional European theology would find itself (felicitously) put through the shredder.

  Both artist and client tend to use art as magic and read into it private fantasies and unrealised unities. Religion has always been a patron of the arts and has been served with enthusiasm and genius. Think what European painting has done for the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, and the doctrine of the Trinity. Religious puritanism is to a large extent a rejection of the role of art in religion. Puritans (and Plato is one) see that art is a danger to religion. Puritans, including Plato, are also of course aware of the strong sexual charge (for instance the sado-masochism) in religious doctrine and practice. Plato saw Eros, when purified, as the highest form of spiritual energy, but lower unredeemed Eros as a plausible tempter. The concept of tragedy is paradoxical because it attempts to display horror through charm. A great genius can integrate these; usually one or the other has to win at the expense of great art. At least it seems to make sense to ask, is the Christian story tragic? One may reply, no, it is just a piece of history. Or if not: God cannot be a character in a tragedy. And is there not a happy ending? Are the Gospels and St Paul’s epistles art? It is extraordinary (or miraculous) that they exist at all. 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. Perhaps there are many such events, only this is the most important and picturesquely documented. How did Christianity survive through those first centuries? E. R. Dodds (Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety) suggests that ‘the strongest single cause of the spread of Christianity’ was that, in a time of rootlessness and loneliness and fear, members of Christian communities cared for each other. The unbeliever may also of course feel that the story of the Crucifixion has a tragic ending since Christ, who may or may not have thought he was divine, in fact was not: tragic irony. ‘Why hast Thou forsaken me?’ The Gospel narratives show defeat turning into victory, the triumph of suffering over death, suffering set up as the adversary of death. The frightful story of Christ’s death becomes a supreme cosmic event. The terrified confused abandoned disciples turn into heroes and geniuses. The story of Christ is the story which we want to hear: that suffering can be redemptive, and that death is not the end. Suffering and death are now joined in such a way that the former swallows up the latter. Suffering need not be pointless, it need not be wasted, it has meaning, it can be the way. The dying Christ redeems suffering itself, even beautifies it, as well as overcoming death. This is the traditional and persisting picture upon which the light of modern theology attempts to fall with a difference.

  Wittgenstein remarks (Culture and Value, p. 30,) that ‘the spring which flows gently and limpidly in the Gospels seems to have froth on it in Paul’s epistles’. The Gospels 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. Paul’s writings, also great art, express a kind of demonic power, a sense of something being created before one’s eyes by a force of inspired will, which convinces by rhetoric. In fact these writings about Christ are not really easy to read, especially for Christians and ex-Christians who cannot readily assess them as ar
t and to whom they are so familiar as to seem transparent (magisterially authoritative). The ethical teaching, the religious promise, the beloved figure, the frightful suffering, the glorious and moving end. (The meeting in the garden, the disciples at Emmaus, it is all so perfect.) Can we accept a being who is both true God and true man without supernatural magic, can the extreme of positive evil and innocent suffering be represented, let alone explained or justified, as part of a larger whole? Religion is about reconciliation and forgiveness and renewal of life and salvation from sin and despair. It lives between cosy sentiment and magic at one end of the scale and at the other a kind of austerity which can scarcely be expected from human beings. As an institution, religion may covertly recognise that the highest teaching is for the few only. A subtle form of sentimentality is sado-masochism, whereby popular religion is infected by bad tragedy; a degeneration to which Christianity is particularly subject. The idea of redemptive suffering is difficult and ambiguous: a cult of redemptive suffering may become a cult of suffering.

  A question concerning the survival of demythologised Christianity may be put as: Can religion survive without art? Puritanical reactions against art are a familiar aspect of religious theory and practice, Plato is not the only religious thinker to disapprove of ‘theatre’. Puritanism comes in moods and phases as well as being permanently dominant in some traditions. The florid grandeur and illusory completeness and airy authority of art is suddenly seen as offensive, requiring a return to simplicity, modesty, humility, penitential nakedness, minimalism. Many present-day artists may be seen to be in puritanical revolt against the grand large-scale confident art of the nineteenth century and indeed of the whole post-Renaissance tradition. There are strong streaks of puritanism in structuralist thought. Deconstruction: dissecting, reducing, dismantling, breaking down. Chinese and Japanese Buddhism reacts against the polymorphous highly decorated religious styles of India. Zen Buddhism uses art as religious teaching, but therein also dispels its air of magisterial authority and grandeur. Plato would have appreciated this. Zen art is highly expert but deliberately simple and ungrand and (seemingly) unfinished. Of course puritanism has its own strong magic, its own form of degeneration into a sexually charged romanticism. More severe Protestant sects preach the fierce magical instant Christ of St Paul. (Roughly, St Paul is romantic, the Gospels are not.) Popular (diluted, popularised) Zen too appears to offer magical change brought about by interesting techniques. Needless to say, real change is usually a long job, but the attractiveness of religious styles is important too, it speaks to the emotions, it speaks to the individual temperament. Where art is rejected or suspected, some kind of theological magic may take its place. If we are to like religion we cannot be instantly confronted with nothing but the frightful austerity of what it is really asking! One aspect of demythologisation is a critique of traditional uses of art. But this does not necessarily result in a more rational kind of religion. (Darkness underlies it all.) Jung, who demythologises in order to remythologise, says that ‘we cannot tell whether God and the Unconscious are two different entities’. (The Answer to Job, p. 177.) Heraclitus more reliably informed us that the One who alone is wise does not wish, and does wish, to be called Zeus. Religion must move toward aesthetic formulation and systematic theology. This is an essential source of its energy, yet the need to clear these from the scene when they become idolatrous is equally essential.

  There is a problem about the difference between suffering and death, and there is an analogy between truth in art and truth in religion. Truth is unbearable and degenerates into illusions which may have some truth-contents. There is little great art or true religion, little holiness, few saints, much superstition and sentimentality. There is a counterpart in religion to the drive which moves art in the direction of pornography. Organised religion mitigates its failure by a doctrine of grace whereby the feeble efforts of sinners may benefit from the energy of a higher power, and something like this can really happen. Suffering is interesting, our views of it are often magically, sexually, charged. Real deathly suffering, such as we see in King Lear, is very difficult to portray, and in life terrible suffering is very difficult to contemplate. Of course if it is remote from us, something seen on television, even if we think it is ‘very important’, we arrange to be hardened enough to forget it fairly promptly. If, because the sufferer is oneself or a close other, we cannot do this, we use our life-energy to transform the experience as soon as possible, as we do in bereavement. Suffering, mercifully, offers a route back into the ego. Sado-masochism is also an escape route well known to its devotees. It is difficult to suffer well, without resentment, false consolation, untruthful flight. One consolation which is usually false is that suffering purifies the soul, as tragedy was supposed to purify the emotions it aroused. The idea of redemptive suffering, one’s own or another’s, is ambiguous and deep. The notion of purgatory is attractive because it combines the absolute of sin and just punishment with the then justified and clarified disappearance of the idea of death. The souls in Dante’s Purgatorio plunge gladly back into the flames. Well they may, they are living inside a work of art. Much religious belief is like living in a work of art. Art is not a small domain, it is everywhere. The image of the crucified Saviour is more familiar in the west than the most ubiquitous advertising cliché. In an ideal penal system every criminal would will his own punishment, like the souls in Dante, so that it becomes purification. In real life we have to do with the deep devious ingenuity of egoism, those ‘devices and desires of our own hearts’ which the Prayer Book tells us we have followed too much. Modern psychology has much plausibly to say about the ambivalent role of pain and suffering in the shadow play of the soul. There is a contrast between absolute (deathly) pain and the kind which can be managed, made part of a story, turned into art.

  Where the sufferer is someone else and not oneself the drama is played with a difference. The redemptive suffering of Christ, if not accepted in a simple spirit, is hard to think about, because so much traditional ‘working’ gets in the way. Some Christians, who accept the divinity and the teaching, find this bit difficult. Why should another be punished for my sins? And is this real punishment? The risen Christ can be seen beyond the appalling anguished sufferer. Together with the crucified one we see the terrifying authoritative figure of Piero della Francesca’s picture (of Christ stepping out of the tomb), or the strange magical being, portrayed by so many painters, who told Mary Magdalen not to touch him. It might be argued that Christ as a redemptive sufferer is more purely efficacious if not divine. If God exists he can cleanse the impurities from the confused egoistic souls of those who throughout the ages have identified with Christ’s passion. If God does not exist we are left with an experience which those who regard religion as a pernicious distraction from human betterment might call morbid. The idea of another’s suffering as redemptive is certainly intelligible. Christians may tend to connect it with Christ and see lesser human efforts as an imitatio Christi, but redemption can exist without God. The concept has strong emotive appeal, but also structure. The redeemed one is bought at the expense of another and thereby set free. The transaction is effective through the virtue, or relevant pure intent (or pure love), of the one who makes the sacrifice. The beneficiary must internalise the spectacle of suffering as a lesson whereby he is changed. A classic example might be the delinquent boy moved by the love and distress of his mother. Here the suffering may be more or less clearly ‘directed at’ the sinner. Sinners can feel persecuted by sufferers, and silent suffering may be more efficacious. This is a problem in Christianity too, where the lesson has to be understood by the individual, taken in in his own way. A crippled person in a family may behave in a way which has redemptive power. The patient good sufferer produces in the spectator shame, then love, then the creative energy required for amendment of life. Variants on this theme often appear in novels (in Dickens and Dostoevsky for instance) where the author may well intend to edify the reader. If Christ can redeem the
n a figure in a story can have redemptive power. There are many points at which the virtuous suffering of another may be related to our own consciousness of sin. People remote from us, such as dissident protesters against oppressive regimes, may stir us in this way, with or without the mediation of imitatio Christi. The subject is difficult, redemption is difficult, because the contemplation of suffering is difficult both in theory and practice. The operation occurs at a point where all sorts of illusions crowd in to tempt us. We have to attend in a certain way, if the experience is not to degenerate. We seek escape into passive admiration, ingenious sado-masochistic identification, pleasure that someone else is in trouble and not us. We must also, of course, find the right redeemer, and there is an obvious shortage of these. To keep the concept clear and uncorrupted we require an unmuddied example. A Christ who is a terrorist cannot be a redemptive figure. The redeemer must be, in respect of his suffering, innocent. In stories, and in real life where things are less clear, the suffering may be perfected by death. That is the perfect, the most impressive lesson, when another person dies for you. This is an image of the way in which the redeemer’s suffering must enter into the being and body of the redeemed, who then suffers creatively in bringing about the death of evil in himself. The idea of redemption, so familiar to Christians, yet so difficult, provides an example of how a moral-religious concept does work, how it demands and stirs practical thought at a deep level. It is a special case of the problem, which arises in a consideration of tragedy, of how to contemplate, depict and understand suffering. Contemplation of the suffering of the innocent can be redemptive when the spectator is moved by both guilt and love. Something like this can happen in art too when we identify with the sinner. The suffering of Cordelia is redemptive, that of Ophelia and Desdemona is not.