Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  Protestant theology and popular Romantic theology have made something of a cult of suffering. From this angle we may see Luther as the first romantic, and first modern man. A later nomination could be Rousseau, an earlier St Augustine. This cult is, as I suggested, absent from classical Greek literature and almost entirely absent from Shakespeare. Kant, a Protestant and a puritan, made thrilling self-castigating emotion an aspect of his austere doctrine. In our relation with the authority of the moral law and with the contingency of the world our suffering is combined with a kind of (quasi-sexual?) excitement. (Freud was not, I think, particularly perspicacious about sado-masochism, he was too much of an all-male grandee to appreciate this phenomenon.) In Kant’s picture when we feel (an emotion, not a rational concept) respect for the moral law our desires suffer like souls in purgatory in the presence of Reason. In sublime experiences we suffer and exult in the contest of Reason with the terrible contingent sinful world. These are great Romantic ideas which we may trace in many of Kant’s successors in the existentialist line, for instance in Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Sartre and Simone Weil.

  The eclipse of death by creative suffering and the transformation of suffering and death into art are ways in which human beings make the intolerable tolerable, and Christian theology made use of those remedies long before the Romantic Movement. Psychoanalysis has come to share the tasks of religion both as therapy and as theology. Wittgenstein, as I quoted earlier, speaking of Freud, said that we are comforted to be told that our life, instead of being a senseless mess which we have made ourselves, is an intelligible drama deriving from some original scenario. Jung celebrates the unillusioned entry, or re-entry, of religion into myth: I quote from Answer to Job, page 72 and following.

  ‘Christ’s biography and psychology cannot be separated from eschatology. Eschatology means in effect that Christ is God and man at the same time and that he therefore suffers a divine as well as a human fate. The two natures interpenetrate so thoroughly that any attempt to separate them mutilates both ... The oldest scriptures, those of St Paul, do not seem to have the slightest interest in Christ’s existence as a concrete human being ... There is no evidence that Christ ever wondered about himself or that he ever confronted himself. To this rule there is only one significant exception in the despairing cry from the Cross: “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” Here his human nature attains divinity: at that moment God experiences what it means to be a mortal man and drinks to the dregs what he made his faithful servant Job suffer. Here is given the answer to Job, and clearly this supreme moment is as divine as it is human, as “eschatological” as it is “psychological”. And at this moment too where one can feel the human being so absolutely, the divine myth is present in full force. And both mean one and the same thing. How then can one possibly “demythologise” the figure of Christ? ... What is the use of a religion without a mythos, since religion means if anything at all precisely that function which links us back to the eternal myth? ... Myth is not fiction; it consists of facts that are continually repeated and observed over and over again. It is something that happens to man, and men have mythical fates just as much as Greek heroes do. The fact that the life of Christ is largely myth does absolutely nothing to disprove its factual truth – quite the contrary. I would even go so far as to say that the mythical character of a life is just what expresses its universal human validity. It is perfectly possible, psychologically, for the unconscious or an archetype to take complete possession of a man and to determine his fate down to the smallest detail ... the life of Christ is just what it had to be if it is the life of a god and a man at the same time. It is a symbolum, a bringing together of heterogeneous natures, rather as if Job and Yahweh were combined in a single personality. Yahweh’s intention to become man, which resulted from his collision with Job, is fulfilled in Christ’s life and suffering.’

  This authoritative dictum from Jung raises questions and doubts which are even more apt now than when he wrote. He suggests that we can preserve and develop religious mythology, no longer by reference to any traditional ‘good’ or ‘absolute’, but by fostering in our own souls a natural harmony of opposites, good and evil, masculine and feminine, dark and light. In the battle between Plato and the presocratics, Jung is definitely on the side of the latter, cosmic soul is God, there is no absolute beyond the explanations of religious experience which he pictures in terms of myth. Here presocratic cosmic Taoism can, it seems, energise and renew the Christian myth as well. The spiritual energy which Plato and Christian thinkers saw as disturbing a fallen world by its magnetic attraction to a transcendent absolute, Jung pictures as immanently circulating to produce an experiential harmony in which there is no positive vision of good as opposed to evil, but good and evil are seen as aspects or shades of a self-adjusting whole. This powerful challenge attractively suggests that we can retain the ‘genuine’ mythological stuff of religion while rejecting a faith which is now impossible to a modern man. Jungian therapy certainly uses myth in ways which can command the co-operation of patients and help their condition. But Jung is not just offering a therapeutic tool, he is offering what he feels to be a relevant and necessary metaphysic. This Gnostic monism cannot be taken as a plausible account of morality. A relativistic view of good supports a relativistic view of truth, and vice versa. Self-contained soul-experience obscures, and is no substitute for, the struggle with an alien reality which engenders and imposes and develops absolute distinctions between good and evil and truth and falsehood. The idea of transcendence cannot be dissolved by enclosing it inside a soul distended by mythological archetypes. Let us here consider Jung’s hypothesis about the survival of Christianity, since it raises fundamental questions about a demythologised religion.

  Can western religion survive, retain continuity, without the old dogmatic literalistic myths, what would this state of affairs be like? We are not talking about a dream world where one can regard real history as the adventure of an individual (cosmic) soul. Buddhism has no (literal, historical) central dogma similar to the Christian one, but has a large mythology, readily understood by simpler believers, used in a more reflective manner by the sophisticated. However, eastern religion has always made close links between religion, morality and philosophy, areas which western thought has tended to separate. The simpler believer in many parts of the west now tends to become an unbeliever, and the sophisticated (educated) believer has a new problem about how to use mythology. Every man his own theologian. The relation of religion, morality and philosophy is perhaps the great intellectual problem of the age, as Heidegger indicated. The reflective believer in the east is supported by a long tradition of thought on these matters which does not exist in the west. Even if we accept Jung’s assumption that mythological processes have a zeitgeistlich momentum of their own, can this momentum continue in a self-conscious age of the world after people like Jung have been telling us how it happens? Can the Christian mythology thus transform itself in front of our eyes? Must not myth be more spontaneous, and more unforcedly traditional, if it is to be a live spiritual guide? This point may be exaggerated. Those seeking guidance can to some extent use, even select, a mythology. Yet is not this a dangerous relationship? Jung tells us we have mythical fates; he also celebrates our ability to use myth creatively in our lives. Clearly individuals, and groups, are often taken over or held in place by deep unreflective myths, old tribal myths or new social myths. The concept overlaps with that of ‘ideology’. But in the new ‘liberated’ awareness which Jung postulates and which many thinkers draw attention to, we can surely, and ought to, decide upon our attitudes to myths and may well choose not to have a mythical fate. It sounds indeed a rather egoistic and self-indulgent thing to have; and to insist that everybody has one, whether consciously or voluntarily or not, is to deprive the concept of sense. We have to keep returning to the centre of the dilemma as we see it and feel it. Can the figure of Christ remain religiously significant without the old god-man mythology somehow understood? Can C
hrist, soon enough, become like Buddha, both real and mystical, but no longer the divine all-in-one man of traditional Christianity? Jung says that a myth is not a fiction, and that ‘the mythical character of a life expresses its universal human validity’. A ‘lived’ myth, one that guides deep attitudes and important actions, may be said ipso facto to be no mere fiction, and it may also be expressive of some unity of the individual with ‘humanity’ or some group thereof. But all this can happen irrespective of the quality of the myth. The hero of Crime and Punishment was animated by a myth, so were Hitler’s followers. History and literature are full of stories of men destroyed by myths. The long knife of morality prises the concept apart. Our relation to myth is subject to moral judgment. (Plato’s myths are metaphors.) To take another sort of example, is the myth of the Mother Goddess as completing the Trinity now expressive of some ‘compulsory’ human value? The relation of such a figure to the liberation of women is extremely dubious. Life and politics is picking about in the real. So do we now have to choose, if we reject Jung’s method of rescuing traditional religion, between a self-conscious manipulation of a personal mythology and a denuded choice of ‘religious values’ without any icons? Many interested people, I think, feel faced with some such choice; but the situation is both more complicated and more hopeful. Jung inflates the concept of myth in a way which obscures the complexity of the religion — morality — philosophy relationship. His appeal or surrender to myth is a frank example of the transformation of death into suffering and suffering into art. On the scale on which Jung envisages it, it may be seen as a kind of Hegelian view, where history becomes myth-history or mythical historicism, history ‘seen from the outside’, from a standpoint in metaphysics. God answers Job’s complaint by an assertion of supreme power, but still feels uneasy and has to silence Job by becoming Job in Christ. Present-day demythologisation may be seen as part of the long mythical story of Christian theology, growing and changing with the ‘growing-up’ of the human race. A sceptical spectator might view it as some non-Marxists viewed Marxism, not accepting its large claims, but treating it as a suggestive, perhaps instructive, theoretical pattern to be laid down, as it were, on the world, so as to emphasise facts and values which might not otherwise be evident. In both cases the concept of ‘the will of history’ must be criticised by the outsider both as an empirical hypothesis (does it deeply and comprehensively explain what is going on?) and as a moral guide (if we accept this world-view are we more likely to lead a good or satisfactory life?). Moral judgment may look to metaphysics, but can always undermine it. We are reluctant to think we are the creatures of unconscious or irresistible forces, but must at times consider the possibility. These are not remote considerations, but aspects of ordinary judgment and decision.

  It may be said that, in accordance with Eliot’s view of theology continually (instinctively) rendering itself believable, we have the God and the theology that we (deeply) desire; and our desires are affected by a great variety of forces. A main tenet of the Kantian metaphysic has merged into popular, or semi-popular, moral argument. We must internalise the demand of duty, understand it, judge it, make it our own, be autonomous not heteronomous. Duty is not a rigid external code, it is a rule I impose on myself, felt as external by my mixed and imperfect nature. We must now also internalise our God. An omnipotent supernatural father figure imposes a heteronomous religion. We must stop thinking of ‘God’ as the name of a super-person, and indeed as a name at all. Can we then be saved by a mystical Christ who is the Buddha of the west? A Buddhist-style survival of Christianity could preserve tradition, renewing religious inspiration and observance in a vision of Christ as a live spiritual symbol. The historical Buddha became the mystical Buddha-nature; but this process developed during a pre-scientific pre-rationalistic age. Can Christian thought and feeling consciously effect such a change now? Must we otherwise envisage a denuded existentialist ‘God’ as a symbol of commitment to ‘religious values’, or the vanishing of religion into political activity or technological utilitarianism? A Christian theology student in New York once said to me: ‘We don’t emphasise Jesus now, we prefer to talk about God because that unites us with the Jews.’ Here we see religious mythology in the making with people consciously choosing between two myths and having a reason for their choice. For others, a demonic magical Pauline Christ may be the god that the age requires rather than a calm though demanding figure symbolising our spiritual nature. The figure of Christ does not cease to be paradoxical.

  We are now self-conscious and critical about religion in a way which is new, and the Christian west is better informed about the religions of the east. Schopenhauer’s interest in Hinduism and Buddhism was regarded as a slightly feverish personal eccentricity of no importance to western philosophy or theology. We now begin to know better; and have at the same time witnessed the ‘abolition’ of religion in totalitarian states. Western people may now find themselves both inside and outside religion. On the one hand we increasingly see it as a historically determined phenomenon, and ourselves as emerging from an era where myths were regarded in an unreflective way as ‘real’, into a scientific era where, making a distinction which people in the past did not make, we treat them as symbols or purveyors of truth, though not factually true. On the other hand, if we do not want to dismiss all religion as childish fiction, we have to decide, as people in the past did not, what exactly religion is and where in the mass of religiosity and religious stuff it ‘really resides’. One judgment which may be made is that mythical historicism of the kind offered by Jung is inadequate precisely in that it is a transformation into art, a magical overcoming of the contingent, a resort to providence (God or the unconscious), in effect a continuation of the old vague consolations of religion which the modern consciousness is rejecting. One of the difficulties of a modern view of religion is that one may seem forced to suggest, and for many kinds of reasons (modesty, historical sensibility) is reluctant to, that the religion of the past was for most people a consoling, though perhaps ethically efficacious, fiction. Pasteur is reported to have wished he had the faith of a Breton peasant, or rather (when it was suggested that this was inappropriate for a man of science) of the Breton peasant’s wife. Of course simple faith cannot be dismissed as superstitious illusion, it may be more ‘in the truth’ than modern scepticism. Our huge jumbled history is a religious history from which we must learn. We may judge past beliefs, knowing that the past is another country, and we too will be said to have been deceived. We may say that of course in the past there were many who accepted easy religious consolation (and who is to blame them) while a hardy few took loftier and more truthful paths. The same may be said of the present, except that now (in the west) consolation-seekers abandon religion, and the others feel more confused and isolated, not supported by a mythical consciousness shared by their whole society. Must all ‘religious’ people now be mystics? Eastern religion has seen mysticism as something close to the ordinary religious consciousness.

  However that may be, one must still hold on to the present problem of distinguishing ‘true religion’ from the comforts of mythology, old or new. Much art and religious myth has the effect, and the intended effect, of concealing the fact of death and the absolute contingency of existence which is an aspect of that fact. Of course human life is also happy, funny, pleasant, full of the rewards of love and knowledge. These art and popular religion can handle. It is the other thing that is difficult. The idea of metempsychosis, transmigration of souls, in eastern religion, which may be thought of in supernatural terms of personal immortality, is in a more sophisticated sense a symbol of the unreality of the self. It appears in this sense at the end of the Republic. What is mechanically determined is unreal, as in the metaphysic of Kant. ‘Neurosis’ is characterised, almost in a popular sense defined, by a mechanical repetitive imprisoning of the mind. The idea of the unreality of the self mediates the idea of death, which has a greater hold upon the religion of the east. It is not difficult to distingu
ish between absolute or deathly pain, and what one might call relative or art pain. The latter can of course be severe, but is different because it can be manipulated and does not altogether destroy one’s ordinary world and sense of one’s being. It does not radically alter one’s consciousness, but can be looked at with some degree of detachment. The sufferer can become an artist in relation to his own consciousness, he can for instance dramatise the situation. ‘I wonder who’s kissing her now?’ can express a very painful state of mind, but one about which one can usually do something. This is (usually) not deathly pain, such as people experience in bereavement, in vain remorse for some terrible act, or as the helpless and hopeless victims of extreme poverty, oppression or violence, pain which relates to the ground of our being. The contrast between relative and absolute is conveyed in Tolstoy’s story Ivan Ilyitch: yet not altogether well conveyed, since we feel too much the presence of the story-teller. We feel, it’s a good story. Religion, and tragedy if it exists, must concern the absolute in a specifically moral way. Documentary films about massacres or prisons or concentration camps are not in themselves tragic or religious. The contemplation or experience must be connected to, enlightened by, seen in the light of, something good (pure, just). This is the sense in which stoicism is not a religion. The tragic image of death in art is a counterpart or reflection of selfless decreated being, it is contingent mortal existence held in a clear gaze. The philosopher, as religious man, practises dying; he may gradually internalise the conception of death or may be confronted with it face to face in extreme affliction. Absolute pain is absolute in that it realises the idea of death. There is no place here for personal histrionics, wry glances, black humour or sado-masochistic play. There is no space for such relief, no space into which to retreat. The illusions of the ego are destroyed and most of its ordinary goals seen as worthless, the whole of reality, suddenly bereft of the warm glow of selfish desire and purpose, stands, as it were, coldly by, frighteningly visible. In the extreme situation we are not conscious of morality with its claims and pluckings, it is present with a kind of necessity, we have to see the truth which is held up before us. Outsiders often help bereaved people by reminding them that they have urgent duties and must not remain in stilled contemplation of what is uniquely terrible. There are immediate tasks, arrangements to be made, others to be comforted, ordinary life at last to be carried on. Can less extreme lessons enable us to take in our mortality and see the world in its light? Can it be done through art, through meditation, through psychoanalysis, through reading books or listening to preaching? No doubt a usual response to absolute pain is, after the first shock, instant flight, despair, blank self-enclosed misery. When we recover from bereavement we know we have been in another country upon which we resolutely turn our backs. We do not look. In these (usual) cases the pure morality or religious vision (justice, wisdom, unselfing, acceptance of death and chance) can only reside in the silent eye of some rarely gifted beholder, or in the working or speaking eye of a great artist. In the latter case we have tragedy, the moral vision residing in the work, not in the man.