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‘Magic against Magic’: an atheist priest's use of Christ in Iris Murdoch's The Book and the Brotherhood
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
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In Henry and Cato Iris Murdoch describes what it might be like for a priest to lose his belief in God - God understood ‘in the traditional sense of that term; and the traditional sense is perhaps the only sense’. In two later novels Murdoch returns to the theme of a priest’s loss of belief in God and, as was the case in Henry and Cato, she makes the priest’s acknowledgement of that loss central to her portrayal of his integrity as a man; in one case she also hints at the almost unbearable grief the priest suffers as he drifts into the darkness of atheism. In The Book and the Brotherhood, however, Murdoch takes a different path: she describes how a priest, who lost his faith in God ‘in the traditional sense’ long before, nonetheless uses ‘Christ’ to help a young woman recover from despair.
The young woman, Tamar Hemshaw, takes the advice of another character (who suggests that ‘Abortion is nothing, it’s a method of birth control’) to have her pregnancy terminated. Resolving not to ‘think about babies thrown away with the surgical refuse, dying like fishes snatched out of their water, dying like little fishes on a white slab’, Tamar enters the clinic ‘as one in a dream’ and leaves it ‘all raw anguished tormented consciousness’. Murdoch does not spare the details of Tamar’s self-torture:
She saw now, now, when it was so dreadfully absolutely just too late, that she had committed a terrible crime ... against herself, against the helpless fully-formed entirely-present human being whom she had wantonly destroyed. She had condemned herself to a lifetime of bitter remorse and lying.
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- Copyright © 2000 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Murdoch, Iris, Henry and Cato (London: Chatto and Windus, 1976)Google Scholar.
2 Murdoch, Iris, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970Google Scholar; reprinted, London: Routledge, 1991), p. 79.
3 Murdoch, Iris, The Philosopher's Pupil (London: Chatto and Windus, 1983Google Scholar; reprinted, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1984), and The Green Knight (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993Google Scholar; reprinted, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1994).
4 Fr. Damien, in The Green Knight, is described by Bellamy as having ‘despaired’, and following ‘the way of brokenness’ (Penguin ed., p. 465).
5 Murdoch, Iris, The Book and the Brotherhood (London: Chatto and Windus, 1987Google Scholar; reprinted., Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1988). Page references are to this edition.
6 Ibid., p. 328.
7 Ibid., p. 328
8 Ibid., p. 344.
9 Ibid., p. 344.
10 Ibid., p. 344.
11 Ramanathan, Suguna, Iris Murdoch: Figures of Good (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 199CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 Murdoch, Iris, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, London: Chatto and Windus, 1992Google Scholar; reprinted, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993). p. 453.
13 Murdoch, Iris, ‘Above the Gods’, in Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues (London: Chatto and Windus, 1986Google Scholar; reprinted, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), p.101
14 Ibid., p. 104.
15 The Book and the Brotherhood, p. 488.
16 Ibid., p. 493.
17 Ibid., p. 487.
18 Ibid., p. 541.
19 See David Lodge's account of diegetic and mimetic modes of narration in “Middlemarch and the idea of the classic realist text” in After Bukhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism (London and New York Routledge, 1990)Google Scholar
20 ‘The use of the past tense, or ‘epic preterite’, still implies the existence of the author as the source of the narrative; but by deleting the tags which affirm that existence, such as ‘he said’. etc, and by using the kind of diction appropriate to the character rather than to the authorial narrator, the latter can allow the sensibility of the character to dominate the discourse, and correspondingly subdue his own voice, his own opinions and evaluations’ (Lodge, ibid., p. 49).
21 The Book and the Brotherhood, p 517.
22 Ibid., p. 517.
23 Ramanathan also has difficulty knowing what to make of the sentence beginning ‘Behind the doubt there was truth.’. She asks ‘And even there, who knows how much and at what times something is believed or disbelieved’ (198)—suggesting that she herself feels some empathy with Father McAlister.
24 'Above the Gods', Penguin ed., p. 119.
25 Dawes, Hugh, Freeing the Faith (London: SPCK, 1992)Google Scholar.
26 The Book and the Brotherhood, p. 365.
27 Hawkins, Peter S., The Language of Grace: O'Connor, Flannery, Percy, Walker and Murdoch, Iris (USA: Cowley Publications, 1983), p. 118Google Scholar.
28 The Book and the Brotherhood., p. 493.
29 Ibid., p. 492.
30 Ibid., p. 483
31 Ibid., p. 490.
32 Ibid., p. 541.
33 Ibid., p. 509.
34 Ibid., p. 510.
35 Ibid., p. 543.
36 Ibid., p. 544.
37 Ibid., p. 594.
38 Ibid., p. 595.
39 Murdoch, Iris, The Good Apprentice (Chatto and Windus, 1984Google Scholar; reprinted., Harmondsworih: Penguin, 1985)
40 The Book and the Brotherhood, p. 544.
41 Ibid., p. 544.
42 Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Penguin ed., p. 504.
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