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
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.
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