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  • The Bell and The Time of the Angels: The Philosophy of Love and Virtue in Iris Murdoch’s Ecclesiastical Fiction
  • Farisa Khalid (bio)

In his study of Iris Murdoch’s 1958 novel The Bell, Peter Edgerly Firchow considers the symbiotic merits of both Murdoch’s philosophy and her fiction: “it is not necessary to delve first into Murdoch’s philosophical work before one reads her fiction,” Firchow observes. “A good argument can be made that it is better to start with the fiction even if one’s ultimate aim is to understand the philosophy, since the fiction is, almost explicitly at times, presented as a testing ground for the philosophy—hers, or for that matter, anyone else’s” (158). Firchow situates Murdoch in the European tradition of philosopher-novelists, which includes Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Jean-Paul Sartre, who use the arena of fiction as a moral testing ground where characters are placed on a chessboard to experience how a system of idealized behavior would manifest itself in actuality:

Instead of enquiring abstractly about the nature of good and whether and under what circumstances it might be possible to be good—or to seek abstractly to examine the bases of what might make a good society, as say, Thomas More or even Plato do—Murdoch presents us with individuals who are trying to live good lives or trying to establish a society in which it may be possible to live a good life.

(Firchow 159)

Born in 1919, a year after the end of World War I, Murdoch was among a generation of British writers who lived through the haunting trauma and intermittent violence of the twentieth century (World War II, the Cold War) and its uneasy periods of respite (the Depression of the 1930s, 1950s postwar austerity). In her essay “Against Dryness,” Murdoch notes, “We live in a scientific and anti-metaphysical age in which the dogmas, images, and precepts of religion have lost much of their power. We have not recovered from two wars and the experience of Hitler. We are also the heirs of the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Liberal Tradition. These are the elements [End Page 137] of our dilemma” (287). The novel, as an art form, allowed Murdoch to integrate her art and philosophical inquiries while also expanding her abilities to work within certain literary traditions. Throughout her career, Murdoch professed a great admiration for nineteenth-century novelists such as Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy who rendered their moral philosophy in their novels by crafting vast social panoramas. In her essay “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited,” Murdoch remarks, “The great novelist is not afraid of the contingent; yet his acceptance of the contingent does not land him in banality”; his novels have “a plurality of real persons more or less naturalistically presented in a large social scene.… [of which the] great novelist is essentially tolerant” (271). Murdoch’s own novels, often involving conflicted upper-middle-class characters struggling to come to terms with changing social and cultural patterns in postwar Britain, placed her within the liberal tradition of novel writing. With her intellectual sharpness and lucidity of prose, Murdoch became a singular chronicler of twentieth-century experience, both a philosopher and a novelist, the literary heir to Mary Wollstonecraft and George Eliot.1

A subject that fascinated Murdoch was the concept and practice of organized religion. Religion was always a source of interest and curiosity for Murdoch. A passionate Communist from her undergraduate years at Somerville College, Oxford during the liberal 1930s, Murdoch had been raised in a religious household. Her family background was Ulster Protestant. She was confirmed into the Church of England while she was at school, giving her “a feeling of communing with God” (qtd. in Martin and Rowe 40). Her novels offer a narrative into how individuals may live a good life without adhering to a strict concept of God. Even atheists and agnostics still find solace through the solidarity of lay communities and in the aesthetic beauty of religious iconography. “Everything I have ever written has been concerned with holiness,” Murdoch notes (qtd. in Rowe 4). In The Red and the Green, a...

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