Iris Murdoch’s practical mysticism

Central to Iris Murdoch’s moral-aesthetic philosophy is her conception of prayer, which she describes as “an attention to God which is a form of love” (OGG 344). She derives this concept largely from Simone Weil’s theory of attention, and from Plato’s Eros. In both philosophers she finds a model for moral perfectionism as the turning away from fantasy towards reality and the good. She locates among the most seductive of fantasies the unified image of a personal God, and thus, I argue, seeks to theorize a “demythologized” form of prayer without God, or a practical mysticism of the Good. This position hews close to Weil’s mystical “attention,” but Murdoch trades Weil’s God for Plato’s Good, and diverges from both thinkers in placing greater emphasis on the imaginative practice afforded by art, especially the reading of tragic literature. This paper considers how her practical mysticism poses a modest resolution to “the old quarrel between philosophy and poetry” initiated by Plato, who professed a grave mistrust of literature.

Murdoch understood herself to be writing against the background of what she called “an untheological time,” characterized by the general “demythologizing of religion” (EM 233) as well as literature. She recognized the marks of an “untheological” disposition in philosophy and literature alike, in the anti-metaphysical Oxford philosophy of the mid-twentieth century and in what she dubs the “existentialist novel,” which she sets in opposition to the “mystical novel.” She characterizes both of these literary forms as developments of a “demythologized” modern consciousness, but distinguishes between them—with a preference for the mystical novel—on the basis of how each construes freedom: “The existentialist novel shows us freedom and virtue as the assertion of will. The mystical novel shows us freedom and virtue as understanding, or obedience to the good” (EM 223). For Murdoch, the existentialist picture of freedom responds to the absence of God by asserting a fantasy of the existentialist hero as “abandoned by God, struggling on bravely, sincerely and alone” (EM 227). The mystical novel responds to God’s absence rather by representing freedom as the truth-seeking effort to understand reality, and its hero as “believing in goodness without religious guarantees” (EM 227). In this respect, the mystical novel comes closer to achieving what Murdoch wants from literary tragedy: a form of art that, without offering any consolation, no ego-edifying final triumph of the will, “must break the ego, destroying the illusory whole of the unified self” and offer “some dreadful vision of the reality and significance of death” (MGM 104). The mystical novel and literary tragedy emerge as figures for a non-consoling form of imaginative contemplation that displaces the ego and trains one’s attention upon reality, especially the difficult reality of death. 

Murdoch envisions this imaginative contemplation as analogous to the purification of Eros formalized by Plato in the allegory of the cave. Yet Plato was suspicious of art. The question arises for Murdoch: how to square Plato’s banishing of the tragic poets with her commitment to the role of art and literature, especially literary tragedy, in the cultivation of an erotic attention to the good? Her essay, “The Fire and the Sun,” is devoted to addressing “the old quarrel” that Plato initiates between poetry and philosophy. Rather than defend art from the charges leveled against it by Plato, she argues more modestly that art, in its basic sense as an imaginative activity which in a sense we all engage in every day, is an unavoidable feature of human life, and can be no more easily banished than can language itself. I argue that implicit in this modest “defense” of art—it verges on non-defense—is a theory of reading as a mystical practice that continues to have purchase in an “untheological” world, and can pose an alternative to the damaging politics of fantasy therein.