SCORCHED BY LOVE: Weilian Mysticism in Iris Murdoch’s Nuns and

Soldiers

VANCE G. MORGAN

PROVIDENCE COLLEGE

Spring 2006

A. N. Wilson recently wrote that “to be touched by Simone

Weil . . . is not to be won over to this or that specific idea so

much as to be scorched by something like love.”1 This comment,

which I wish I had written as a summary of my own contact with

Simone Weil over the last twelve or so years, comes from Wilson’s

personal, humorous and insightful Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her, published

in 2004. He inserts the observation in a brief chapter that

focuses on the exceptional importance of Simone Weil to Murdoch’s

life and thought. This, of course, is not news; anyone familiar

with Weil’s thought cannot help but find traces of her influence

on Murdoch throughout the latter’s philosophical writings and

novels. Furthermore, Murdoch herself frequently makes explicit

reference in her work to this influence.

There are several specific ways relevant to the theme of

this conference in which Murdoch’s writings can shed light on

Weil’s reflections on mysticism and the transcendent. I wish, in

this paper, to reflect this interplay, focusing primarily on my

favorite of Iris Murdoch’s later novels, Nuns and Soldiers. Much of

Nuns and Soldiers is infused with Weilian themes; as Wilson writes,

“you feel Weil in the book.”2 He further suggests that it is possible1

to see one of the central characters of the novel, Anne Cavidge,

“as the figure Iris Murdoch would have become had she been

through Simone Weil’s range of experiences.”3 Whether this

striking claim can be justified remains to be seen. In order to

set the stage, we must first consider some crucial aspects of

both Weil’s and Murdoch’s treatment of two fundamentally

important, closely related concepts: idolatry and mysticism.

I: Idolatry and Mysticism

Toward the beginning of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Murdoch

writes that “We yearn for the transcendent, for God, for

something divine and good and pure, but in picturing the

transcendent we transform it into idols which we then realize to

be contingent particulars, just things among others here below.”4

We are, in short, idolaters by nature, reducing the transcendent

object of our highest hopes and dreams to contingent and less-

than-transcendent particular things. On several occasions in this

final philosophical work of Murdoch’s life, she draws attention

to the importance of the Second Commandment: “Thou shalt not make

unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is 2

in heaven above or in the earth beneath or in the water under the

earth,” noting, for example, that Kant considered this

commandment to be “the most sublime commandment of the Judaic

law” and that the real problem with the prisoners in Plato’s Cave

is that they are idolaters, wrongly taking “the images and

shadows of things to be the things themselves.”5

Keeping these points in mind, Murdoch provides the following

cogent definition of a mystic: “A mystic is a good person whose

knowledge of the divine and practice of the selfless life has

transcended the level of idols and images.”6 In other words, a

mystic is one who has managed to overcome the natural human

tendency toward idolatry, a tendency that threatens to short

circuit and prematurely close the human yearning for the

transcendent. Much of Murdoch’s philosophical work is concerned

with what becomes of the human longing for the transcendent in a

world in which many (or most) of the traditional organizing

metaphysical and religious frameworks for that longing are no

longer meaningful. She writes often of the “mystical hero,” whom

she describes as “the new version of the man of faith, believing

in goodness without religious guarantees, guilty, muddled, yet 3

not without hope,”7 committed to “attempts to express a religious

consciousness without the traditional trappings of religion.”8

Lest one think that Murdoch’s “mystical hero” is an

exclusively contemporary phenomenon, the withered remainder left

over when the contemporary person becomes disenchanted with

traditional idols and confronts “the uneasy suspicion that

perhaps after all man is not God,”9 she is careful to point out

that there has always been a close connection between this kind

of mystic and the moral life in general. Indeed, as she writes in

The Sovereignty of Good, “morality has always been connected with

religion and religion with mysticism . . . The background to

morals is properly some sort of mysticism, if by this is meant a

non-dogmatic essentially unformulated faith in the reality of the

Good.”10 True mysticism and morality are essentially identical,

“a kind of undogmatic prayer which is real and important, also

difficult and easily corrupted.”11

Murdoch frequently notes that even within the confines of

the most structured religions a place has often been reserved for

precisely such “mystical heroes.” Such persons dispense with the

traditional trappings of religion, but do not at the same time 4

dispense with the attitude of worship and attunement toward the

transcendent that, according to Murdoch, is both at the heart of

true religious energies and of morality in general.

“Mystics . . . have inhabited a spiritual world unconsoled by

familiar religious imagery.”12 True mystics are not aberrations

of the religious spirit; rather, “the fundamental nature of

religion is mystical.”13 and true mystics embody the knowledge

embedded in the following passage from Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals:

Any explanation or justification (pictures, accounts,

dogmatic formulations) of religion is a kind of lie, a

misleading clutter; a religious person does not explain

what “God” is, he goes there directly and not through

any external paraphernalia.14

A few pages later, Murdoch names two of the mystics who

have, within the parameters of Christianity, exemplified the

attitude and focus of the “mystical hero.”

The spiritual life is a long disciplined destruction of

false images and false goods until (in some sense which

we cannot understand) the imagining mind achieves an

end of images and shadows, the final demythologization of 5

the religious passion as expressed by mystics such as

Eckhart and St. John of the Cross.15

It is beyond the scope of this paper to establish whether Murdoch

is entirely justified in including Meister Eckhart and St. John

of the Cross in the company of what she means by “mystical

heroes.” Still, Eckhart’s famous “do not seek for God outside

your own soul” can be read as “an important warning against

idolatry,”16 against the ever present danger of “taking the

shadows for real.”17 More to our present purposes, Murdoch joins

Eckhart with Simone Weil in the following summary statement about

“mystical heroes” as religious ideals.

For a true religious ideal should we not turn to the

de-individualized individual of Buddhism or mystical

Christianity, the “empty” soul of Eckhart, the

“decreated” person of Simone Weil; the voice that cries

out in the Psalms, and so much affected Saint

Augustine, is that of one who, before the divine

countenance, “shrivels like a moth in a flame.”18

It is clear that Murdoch’s understanding of mysticism as

ultimately the only effective response to idolatry is heavily 6

influenced by her reading of Simone Weil. Murdoch explicitly

incorporates Weil’s focus on “decreation” and “attention” into

her own reflections on mysticism and morality, as in the

following passage from Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals:

The mystical man, “decreated” to use Simone Weil’s

term, who has broken the barriers of the ego, is an

ever-present religious ideal, a magnetic moral picture.

Eckhart, who suffered for telling Christians that God

was in, indeed was, the soul, is a thinker for today.

Do not seek God outside your own soul. Or to put it the

other way around, the mystical is an ever-present moral

ideal, that of extending ordinary decent moral

indefinitely in the direction of perfect goodness.19

To conclude this first section of the paper, I turn briefly to a

few passages from Weil from which Murdoch might have legitimately

drawn the above inferences.

As is typical when dealing with Simone Weil, the framework

of her considerations of idolatry and mysticism must be cobbled

together from a number of fragmented and seemingly off-handed

remarks in her notebooks and essays. Her comments on idolatry 7

frequently arise in the context of larger reflections on the

dangers of collective energies. For instance, in one of her New

York notebook entries she suggests that “the unconditional and

total adherence to everything which the Church teaches, has

taught, and will teach, which St. Thomas [Aquinas] calls faith,

is not faith but social idolatry,”20 and in her essay “Human

Personality” she defines idolatry as “the name of the error which

attributes a sacred character to the collectivity.”21 Her almost

pathological fear of the human tendency to be absorbed into the

collective, whether secular or religious, remained with her until

her death, as reflected in the following from The Need for Roots: “We

are really and truly suffering from the disease of idolatry, and

it is so deeply rooted that it takes away from Christians the

power to bear witness to the truth.”22 The remedy?

For religious feeling to emanate from the spirit of

truth, one should be absolutely prepared to abandon

one’s religion . . . In this state of mind alone is it

possible to discern whether there is truth in it or

not. Otherwise, one doesn’t venture even to propound

the problem in all its rigor.23

8

Elsewhere in her notebooks, Weil reflects on the nature of

idolatry in a context related, not to the specifics of religious

hierarchies, but rather to the larger problem of a contingent and

limited creature seeking for truth that is neither contingent nor

limited. She writes that “idolatry comes from the fact that,

while thirsting for absolute good, we do not possess the power of

supernatural attention and we have not the patience to allow it

to develop.”24 Weil frequently touches on precisely the tension

so crucial to understanding Murdoch—the pull between the

transcendent and the contingent. Idolatry, for Weil, is

ultimately a reflection of the human inability to wait, the human

tendency to close off what is open-ended. “The imagination is

continually working to stop up all the fissures through which

grace might pass.”25 Provocatively, this tendency is what Weil

considers to be the proper definition of sin: “All sins are

attempts to fill voids.”26 Ultimately, idolatry is the

willingness to embrace something else as a replacement for the

real thing, the most extreme negative example of what Weil calls

“attachment”: “We can be attached to something which we name

God.”27

9

Weil develops her understanding of idolatry and its

relationship to mysticism most fully in an important but

generally neglected essay entitled “A War of Religions.” Although

the focus of the essay is primarily sociological and political,

its general framework is important to our present discussion. In

this essay, she identifies idolatry and mysticism as two possible

ways of addressing what is perhaps the most fundamental problem

with which human beings have to grapple, “the opposition of good

and evil.”28 She calls this problem “the religious problem,” a

problem that cannot be evaded because humanity “finds the

opposition of good and evil an intolerable burden.”29 Written in

1943, close to the end of her life and during the darkest hours

of World War II, her observation that “there is perhaps not one

human being on earth today who is not suffering intimately, from

the repercussions of [this] single religious drama whose theatre

is the whole world.”30 is particularly poignant.

Weil identifies three possible ways of addressing the

religious problem. The first is to ignore or to deny the

opposition between good and evil, claiming that “all objectives

are equal.”31 This method, according to Weil, “leads to madness.”10

For the purposes of the present discussion, the second and third

methods require more attention. The second method of evasion is

idolatry, which she defines as “delimiting a social area into

which the pair of contradictories, good and evil, may not

enter.”32 She describes this as a “religious method, if one gives

to the word religion the meaning given to it by French

sociologists, that is to say, the adoration of the social under

various divine names. This was compared by Plato to the cult of a

great beast.”33

Within this very broad definition of “religious,” Weil

suggests that the method of idolatry can be employed in science,

art, politics, and religion (in the more traditional sense),

indeed anywhere where a social structure “circumscribes a closed

area within which there is no place for virtue or vice, whence

they conclude that in their capacity . . . they are absolved from

all moral responsibility.” For Weil, as for Murdoch, idolatry is

a human technique of avoiding intractable features of human

existence, whether the gap between the human and the transcendent

or the unbearable contradiction between good and evil. Murdoch

and Weil agree, in addition, that all idols are contingent and 11

perishable. Idolatry, in other words, is at best an

unsatisfactory escape mechanism, at worst destructive of the

soul. As Weil says, “to be safe, one must hide the soul

elsewhere.”34

This safe hiding place is found by the third method of

addressing the religious question, “the mystical way.”35 Weil’s

influence on Murdoch is clearly established by considering Weil’s

definition of mysticism.

Mysticism means passing beyond the sphere where good

and evil are in opposition, and this is achieved by the

union of the soul with the absolute good. Absolute good

is different from the good which is the opposite and

correlative of evil, although it is its pattern and its

source.36

For both Weil and Murdoch, then, the heart of mysticism involves

overcoming the temptations of idolatry by transcending them.

Mysticism, in short, is both the refusal to deny the existence of

the transcendent and the refusal to assume that one understands

what it is in any full sense. Drawn between the poles of the

human need for certainty and closure and the open-ended magnetic 12

attraction of the transcendent, the mystic refuses to “fill in

the blanks.” As Karen Armstrong writes in her introduction to the

latest reprinted edition of Nuns and Soldiers,

At a certain point, mystics in all faiths realize that

the myths and doctrines of their tradition are only

man-made; they are simply “pointers” to a transcendence

that cannot be expressed in normal words and concepts.

They often call this transcendent dimension of

experience “Nothing,” because it bears no relation to

anyone or anything in the ordinary sense of these words

. . . our notion of “existence” is far too limited to

be appropriate here. this Nothingness is in fact the

goal of the mystical quest. As Meister Eckhart

explained: “Man’s last and highest parting comes when,

for God’s sake, he takes leave of God.”37

With these considerations in hand, I now turn to Nuns and Soldiers

itself.

II: The Spy of a Non-Existent God

13

Although she is the nun referenced in the title of the book,

Anne Cavidge is just one of a dozen or so main characters in Iris

Murdoch’s brilliant meditation on love, honor, and belief, Nuns

and Soldiers. Just as Anne had shocked her fellow students at

Cambridge in her university days by first joining the Roman

Catholic church and then promptly becoming a cloistered nun, so

she has now, after several years, once again shocked her

acquaintances by just as inexplicably leaving the religious

order.

Early in the novel, Anne reflects on what it was like for

her when she first converted and entered the convent.

She took to a fervent belief in a personal God, a

personal Savior, with an ease which took her friends’

breath away . . . She felt both the distance of God,

and the reality of the magnetic bond that compelled her

to Him. The idea of holiness, of becoming good in some

more positive sense, naturally gained power in her mind

in the earlier years in the convent.38

Anne’s disillusionment happened incrementally, over the years.

There was no single moment of rejection, simply a gradual 14

recognition that what she had believed to be her final and

absolute truth was something evanescent and contingent.

She had imagined that the way to death lay straight and

clear ahead of her, a well illumined path, and that any

changes lying there in wait were the concern of God

alone . . . But now it was as if she was being required

to abandon what had been “achieved,” and to start all

over again.39

She knows that she can no longer stay in the convent; that idol

no longer serves a purpose. Yet she does not know where she is

going, aware only that she cannot simply “walk away” from the

experience of the transcendent that first jerked her up short so

many years ago. In words that could have perhaps been Simone

Weil’s after her own mystical experiences, Anne both rejoices and

despairs at her prospects:

She felt as if she were being sent back into the world

to prove something. Or perhaps she would be more like a

spy, one of God’s spies, the spy of a non-existent God.

What could be odder? . . . Had they been wasted, those

years, had she spent them inventing a false 15

Christianity and a false Christ? . . . Christ belonged

to her and would travel with her, her Christ, the only

one that was really hers. Can anyone who has once had

it really give up the concept of God? The craving for

God, once fully established, is perhaps incurable. She

could not rid herself of the experience of God’s love,

and the sense that only through God could she reach the

world. Could joy be sought elsewhere save at that true

source? . . . The dark night had not yet begun, but

would begin, and she would weep. I must be alone, she

thought, with no plan and no vision, homeless and

invisible, a wanderer, a no one.40

With this, Anne shows herself to be one of Murdoch’s “mystical

heroes” referenced earlier, “believing in goodness without

religious guarantees, guilty, muddled, yet not without hope,”

committed to “attempts to express a religious consciousness

without the traditional trappings of religion.”41

Anne’s progressive commitment to such a life is a powerful

thread throughout the novel. For instance, considering the

uniqueness of seemingly similar stones during a simple walk on 16

the beach in Cumbria causes her to reflect on the radical

contingency and uniqueness of each existing thing.

Anne said to herself, what do my thoughts matter, what

do their details matter, what does it matter whether

Jesus Christ redeemed the world or not, it doesn’t

matter, our minds can’t grasp such things, it’s all too

obscure, too vague, the whole matrix shifts and we

shift with it. What does anything matter except helping

one or two people who are nearby, doing what’s obvious?

We can see so little of the great game. Look at these

stones. My Lord and my God. She said aloud, “My God . .

. There they are.”42

This is a lived example of what Simone Weil called “attention,”

defined by Murdoch as a “loving gaze turned on an individual

reality.”43 The development of the ability to turn one’s energies

and attention toward something other than oneself is one of the

Weilian (and Murdochian) keys to overcoming or transcending

idolatry. Later in Nuns and Soldiers, Anne thinks once again of a

rock that she picked up during her earlier walk on the beach.

17

The numinous power of the rock shook her, even now in

memory, with a reverence which was a kind of love.

There had been as it were an announcement of truth, and

she felt still a magnetic tension as of a persisting

bond between himself and the rock. She could believe

that the rock existed now, continued to be, quiet and

alone, shadowed and gleaming in the sun, darkened in

the warm night. There was absolute truth in the thing,

something of wholeness and goodness which called to her

from outside the dark tangle of herself.44

That something as simple as a rock from the beach can serve as an

object of idolatry-avoiding attention is remarkable, yet entirely

within the framework of both Weil’s and Murdoch’s understanding

of mysticism. Furthermore, such attentiveness to particular

realities other than oneself, possible but not natural to human

beings, is at the heart of the development of human virtue. Guy,

the terminally ill husband of Anne’s best friend Gertrude, puts

it this way:

Our vices are general, dull, the ordinary rotten mud of

human meanness and cowardice and cruelty and egoism, 18

and even when they’re extreme they’re all the same.

Only in our virtues are we original, because virtue is

difficult, and we have to try, to invent, to work

through our nature against our nature. . . . Virtue is

awfully odd. It’s detached, something on its own . . .

Vices are general, virtues are particular.45

As Weil frequently points out, idolatry most often involves a

collective delusion, the creation of a collective space of safety

from the impossible demands of human existence. Mysticism,

attention, virtue—all of these involve and demand the

transcendence of such idols.

The central and profound event of Anne’s life, as well as of

the novel, begins half way through the novel when Murdoch blandly

informs the reader that “Jesus Christ came to Anne Cavidge in a

vision.”46 After a vivid dream in which she believed that she was

followed down a path by Jesus, she awakes with the awareness that

“there was somebody in the next room . . . standing in her

kitchen in the bright light of the early summer morning. And she

knew that person was Jesus.”47 Yet it is a Jesus unlike any

typical artistic portrayal, with “a strangely elongated head and 19

a strange pallor, the pallor of something which had been long

deprived of light, a shadowed leaf, a deep sea fish, a grub

inside a fruit.”48 Murdoch’s description of both the scene and

the ensuing conversation is striking, worth reading in its

entirety. For our purposes, suffice it to say that Anne emerges

from the mystical experience exhilarated, saddened,

disillusioned, and carrying a physical scar. In response to her

standard question “Sir, what shall I do to be saved?”, Jesus

answers “You must do it all yourself, you know . . . anything you

can think about it [salvation] is as imaginary as my wounds. I am

not a magician, I never was. You know what to do. Do right,

refrain from wrong.”49

As an illustrative object lesson, Jesus places on the table

one of the stones from the earlier walk on the beach. The miracle

of salvation is as mundane, as seemingly insignificant as a

stone. In response to her question “Is it so small?”, Jesus asks

one of her own: “What more do you want? A miracle?” “Yes.” “You

must be the miracle worker, little one. You must be the proof.

The work is yours.”50 In response to her final request for a

miracle, “to be made good . . . to be made innocent . . . to be 20

washed whiter than snow,” Jesus responds “Oh, I’m afraid that’s

impossible.”51 As he turns to go, she brushes the sleeve of his

shirt with the tip of one of her fingers; she feels a searing

pain in her hand and finds, after the vision ends, that her

finger appears to have been burnt.

Over the next several days, Anne finds herself incapable of

coming to a satisfactory inner peace concerning her experience.

She had thought, if I cannot have what I desire I shall

die. Now, in more despair, she thought, if I cannot

have what I desire I shall have to live on with some

new unredeemable horror of being myself. Was God

playing a game with her? After all he had played games

with Job. What game would it be here? . . . Anne could

not believe in a game-playing God. She wondered earlier

whether belief in God would ever return, sweep over her

one day like a great warm wet cloud. Now she felt more

absolutely godless than she had ever felt in her life.

Her good was her own, her evil was her own. Yet he, her

early morning visitor, was he not something? . . . Who

was he? . . . It came to her that he was real, that he 21

was unique. She was an atom of the universe and he was

her own Christ, the Christ that belonged only to her,

laser-beamed to her alone from infinitely far away. . .

. She found herself holding a stone. It was the chipped

grey stone which he had given her . . . the stone in

which he had shown her the cosmos, all that exists, and

how small it is.52

Certainly this encounter with the transcendent is incompatible

with any systematizing or dogmatizing efforts. One gets the sense

that Anne is being pulled by what Murdoch elsewhere calls “the

disturbing magnetism of truth [or God, or the Good],”53 the

attraction of a transcendent something that at times one would

just as soon ignore or forget. It is this inescapable awareness

of something Other, something that clearly must not be reduced to

an idol, that is the generating force of mysticism, the

transcending of earth-bound categories. In Anne Cavidge’s case,

this awareness is cultivated by waiting rather than acting, a

capacity at the heart of “attention,” a crucial concept in Weil’s

thought that has great influence on Murdoch.

22

Anne knew how terribly close, for human beings, all

things spiritual lie to the deep fires of the demonic.

Concerning this, she waited, she cultivated still the

metaphysics of waiting. And she noticed in herself, like

the slow growth of an innocent indifferent plant, a

renewed impulse towards worship and towards some kind

of prayer.54

But worship of what? Prayer toward or about what? Where is the

content, what is the object of this outward turning and waiting?

It is frustrating, but entirely possible, that the answer to

that may be, as Karen Armstrong suggested in an earlier quote,

“Nothing.” Elsewhere, Murdoch writes that “prayer is properly not

petition, but simply an attention to God which is a form of

love.”55 The transcendent, God, is not “Nothing” in the sense of

an absence, but “No-thing” in the sense that it cannot be

encompassed within the parameters of any object. In both

Murdoch’s and Weil’s terms, mysticism, understood as the refusal

to be an idolater, leaves one naked and rudderless. As Weil

writes in her notebooks, “Lacking idols, it often happens that we

have to labor every day, or nearly every day, in the void.”56 Yet23

in a strange way, this void is occupied, not by idols but by a

reality and a presence that cannot be denied. Anne Cavidge

muddles through her daily life, as we all do. Toward the end of

the novel, she tells a friend that perhaps, at the end of the

day, openness toward the transcendent can effectively transform

our understanding of our non-transcendent relationships. She

says,

Your life doesn’t belong to you. Who can tell where his

life ends? Our being spreads out far beyond us and

mingles with the beings of others. We live in other

people’s thoughts, in their plans, in their dreams.

This is as if there were God. We have an infinite

responsibility.57

Murdoch on occasion writes as if the actual existence of God is

beside the point—the “as if” in this passage is enough.

Anne Cavidge, however, even from before her vision of

Christ, has encountered the transcendent in such a way that she

cannot deny. At the end of the novel, she reflects on how her

life has been transformed, has been spoiled, by God.

24

Only God can be perfectly loved. Human love, however

behovable, is hopelessly imperfect . . . Happiness

sought anywhere but in God tends to corruption. This,

which had once been doctrine for her, she held to now

simply as a personal showing. She had been right after

all . . . to think that she had been irrevocably spoilt

for the world by God. And spoilt, and rightly spoilt,

even though she no longer believed in Him. . . . Anne

felt now that she too could pray so in her utmost need,

calling upon the name of the non-existent God.58

The God whom Anne believed called her to the convent no longer

exists. The “disturbing magnetism” of the transcendent, however,

remains. If Anne is a mystic, it is because she no longer seeks

to reduce the transcendent to an idol.

There was no God, but Christ lived, at any rate her

Christ lived, her nomadic cosmic Christ, uniquely hers,

focused upon her alone by all the rays of being. . . .

And Anne cried out in her heart to her living Christ,

“Oh Sir, your yoke is heavy and your burden is

25

intolerable.” and she was answered in his words, “The

work is yours.”59

In closing, I would like to briefly argue that Anne Cavidge, the

“spy of a non-existent God,” can indeed, as A. N. Wilson

suggests, be understood as partially embodying Simone Weil’s

conception of mysticism.

In his introduction to Waiting for God, Leslie Fiedler writes

that

The particular note of conviction in Simone Weil’s

testimony arises from the feeling that her role as a

mystic was so unintended . . . quite suddenly God had taken

her, radical, agnostic, contemptuous of religious life

and practice as she had observed it.60

After describing her mystical experiences at Assisi and Solesmes

in “Spiritual Autobiography,” Weil reflects on the unexpected

nature of what had happened to her. “I had never foreseen the

possibility of that, of a real contact, person to person, between

a human being and God.”61 And yet it did happen. She had never

been interested in reading mystical texts, a disinterest she is

grateful for because it proves to her that “I had not invented 26

this absolutely unexpected contact.”62 Similarly, there is no

explaining any of the steps in Anne Cavidge’s spiritual journey.

Anne is no more certain throughout her journey than Weil is

concerning the specific nature of what has contacted her but,

also as Weil, she has “felt both the distance of God, and the

reality of the magnetic bond that compelled her to him.”63

Furthermore, no framework of doctrine, belief or activity can

fully contain this relationship without becoming idolatrous. The

convent for Anne, the Catholic church (or any other social

construct) for Weil, are insufficient. Finally, there are

striking parallels between Anne’s vision of Christ and the

enigmatic experience Weil describes at the end of her Marseilles

notebooks.

As Eric Springsted mentions in his introductory notes to

“Prologue” in his recent selection of Weil’s texts, “there is

much debate as to whether this records an actual experience of

Weil.” Regardless, it provides us with a powerful insight into

Weil’s spiritual journey. She describes an intimate relationship

with another called only “he,” clearly Christ, God, the divine.

The relationship ends unexpectedly one day, however, when he says27

“Now go,” throwing her out unprepared and alone to engage with

the world. Similarly, the intimacy Anne experienced at the

beginning of her journey ends and she finds herself away from the

protection and organizing framework of the convent. Both Anne

and Weil understand the contingency of the relationship—Weil is

convinced that “he had come for me by mistake,”64 while Anne is

uncertain whether her visitation was real or a hallucination.

Both find themselves in the position of Murdoch’s mystical hero,

“believing in goodness without religious guarantees, guilty,

muddled, yet not without hope.”65 Their place is anywhere but in

the protective convent or garret, unsupported, uncertain, yet

aware that something is expected of them. And last, they are

aware both of their utter unworthiness and, paradoxically, of the

overwhelming love that will not let them go, as Weil poignantly

describes.

I know well that he does not love me. How could he love

me? And yet deep down within me something, a particle

of myself, cannot help thinking, with fear and

trembling, that perhaps, in spite of all, he loves

me.66

28

Endnotes

29

1 A. N. Wilson, Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her (London: Arrow Books, 2004), 106.2 Ibid., 110.3 Ibid.4 Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 56.5 Ibid., 306; see also 81, 395, 441.6 Ibid., 73.7 Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 227.8 Ibid.9 Ibid., 226.10 Ibid., 360.11 Ibid., 383.12 Ibid., 225.13 Murdoch, Metaphysics, 70.14 Ibid., 303.15 Ibid., 320.16 Ibid., 70.17 Ibid., 329.18 Ibid., 352.19 Ibid., 354.20 FLN, 133.21 SE, 14.22 NR, 256.23 Ibid., 247.24 GG, 53.25 NB, 150.26 GG, 21.27 NB, 241.28 SE, 211.29 Ibid.30 Ibid.31 Ibid., 212.32 Ibid.33 Ibid.34 Ibid., 214.35 Ibid.36 Ibid.37 Iris Murdoch, Nuns and Soldiers (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), x.38 Ibid., 54-55.39 Ibid., 58.40 Ibid., 60-61.41 Murdoch, Existentialists, 227.42 Murdoch, Nuns, 104-05.43 Murdoch, Existentialists, 327.44 Murdoch, Nuns, 241.45 Ibid., 67.46 Ibid., 280.47 Ibid., 282.48 Ibid.49 Ibid., 284.

50 Ibid., 285.51 Ibid., 286.52 Ibid., 296-97.53 Murdoch, Metaphysics, 14.54 Murdoch, Nuns, 304.55 Murdoch, Existentialists, 334.56 NB, 150.57 Murdoch, Nuns, 435.58 Ibid., 486.59 Ibid., 487.60 WG, viii.61 Ibid., 27.62 Ibid.63 Murdoch, Nuns, 55.64 NB, 639.65 Murdoch, Existentialists, 227.66 NB, 639.