The contrarian in me wants to remonstrate with Dame Iris that if the transcendent reality really is "alien" then we cannot be so sure what it imposes on us is anything we would recognize as morality. But this is the side of me that produces the hideousness of Portraits and Ashes!
I only know of Quakerism as refracted through American writers like Whitman and Melville, but this jogged a memory of the other horrifying book I wrote in 2013, not P&A but my doctoral dissertation, in one paragraph of which I found myself arguing for the Quakerism of Virginia Woolf. (I had come across a pair of essays to this effect.) I quote a lightly edited paragraph of my grad-student prose—I'm sorry if your completism doesn't extend so far!—only because it makes Woolf and her own bourgeois mysticism sound a bit like what Murdoch is going for:
"Jane Marcus provocatively and famously compares Woolf to Lenin and Trotsky, but on the evidence of her metaphysical speculations, Woolf cannot simply be arrogated to the tradition of materialist critique. The ideals animating her radical politics do not, by her account, arrive to her from within the social. Marcus is on surer ground when, later in her essay, she notes that Woolf was influenced by her aunt, the Quaker theologian Caroline Emelia Stephen. According to Alison M. Lewis, Woolf possessed copies of Stephen’s work in her private library and wrote of her admiringly, 'All her life she has been listening to inner voices, and talking with spirits' (qtd. in Lewis n. pag.). For Lewis, Woolf’s privileged 'moments of being,' depicted in the epiphanic movements of affect beyond the self that Mrs. Dalloway’s Londoners undergo, are akin to the mysticism promoted by Stephen’s theology of the inner light that is part and parcel of God: 'These moments of revelation show a mystical unity to the greater whole, which brings us to the closest thing that Virginia Woolf may have had to a creed' (Lewis n. pag.). This 'mystical unity' is the force underlying the social unity Woolf’s fiction prophesies, where divisions of class, gender, and empire may be superseded in the supra-rational apprehension that 'the whole world is a work of art' (qtd. in Lewis; Moments of Being 72). [...] Thus, the itinerary for novelistic practice charted in 'Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown' here finds its telos: the movement of affect in the presence of others—what an earlier literary tradition valorized as sentiment—produces sensations that lead individual subjects outside themselves to a communion with all life, an experience, however rare, that streams back into concrete social reality to produce heretofore- unexpected affinities, like Clarissa’s for Septimus, or Elizabeth’s for the workers of the Strand, or Septimus’s for the very trees. Aestheticism’s license of the novel to turn inward permits a doubling back from the psyche toward the social that could not be accomplished by the extrinsic and all-too-rational social criticism of the novel as Woolf found it at the beginning of her career."
Ah, but Dame Iris is not talking about 'transcendent' reality here - at least not in the sense we normally use the term. She's talking about the mundane reality outside our heads, which is alien because it contains other selves. And it is through learning how to love these other selves that the impositions of morality become clear to us. The Samaritan understood this.
And thanks for sharing the fascinating passage on Woolf: I never really got a handle on her, perhaps because I assumed she was simply a girlboss avant la lettre (Murdoch almost never talks directly about feminism in her philosophy, but she does say in MGM that the relation of the figure of the Mother Goddess to the liberation of women is 'extremely dubious'). The idea that 'the whole world is a work of art' is indeed a good Murdochian metaphor, since unity in a work of art is achieved by the harmonious interplay between the different components that make up the work, rather than a dissolution of all differences.
Thanks, I see her point now. It may still underrate the alienness of those other selves, but maybe I am insufficiently charitable.
Woolf very consciously and cannily did the girlbossing in her nonfiction on the theory that if her class of women ("the daughters of educated men") didn't become the subjects of cultural discourse, they would be remain (e.g., Freud and Jung analyzing hysterics) its objects. I borrow the subjct/object formulation from my doctoral advisor, who on Marxist grounds critiqued Woolf avant la lettre for girlbossing avant la lettre, but I can appreciate a gesture of political realism, and in any case, the worldview encoded in her best novels is very different from that, a mysticism at the verge of nihilism.
I don't know anything about the relation between Murdoch and Woolf. In theory, there is none, as Murdoch was trying to get back behind modernism to 19th-century solidity of character in the name of those selves whom Woolf dissolves into haze. I googled it and found that someone had written a study about their affinity (Donna Lazenby, A Mystical Philosophy: Transcendence and Immanence in the Works of Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch), and, according to a review in the NYTimes by John Sutherland of Murdoch's letters, "When, in her 60s, she plowed through Virginia Woolf’s novels for a conference, she recognized a certain narrative skill but added, 'I can’t be very interested in her thoughts.'"
I too am sceptical of arriving at an absolute distinction between good and evil guided only by as fickle a force as love (perhaps St Paul was right to add the need for faith and hope, even secondarily).
I was going to say that we, too, have that line in our A&Q, and that it’s a good one. When I come to look it up, however, I see that the first word is different: “Do what love requires of you, which may not be the same as great busyness.” Now I am musing on the ramifications of the word “attend,” so important to Iris Murdoch by way of her respect for Simone Weil, who claimed that only attention could be required of a person, and not belief, since the intellect is free.
“Attend to what love requires of you” becomes a subtly different statement, in that light. Not, I think, a better or worse one, but one that draws out a slightly different set of considerations. Useful to think on.
In any case, I will admit to being pleased to hear that you attended a Quaker meeting. One of the more opinionated old ladies in my worship group is very clear that “we don’t evangelise,” but I will admit to a deep hope that Quakerism continues to exist for those who need it, and mentioning it in my writing is one way to get the word out. Whether you continue attending, or just take these reflections from the experience you had, it’s nice to think that my writing might be one influence among many that helps to keep Quakerism alive for people as an option.
The word "Attend" immediately recalled Weil and Murdoch for me too, which is part of why the meeting felt like something of a homecoming to me. I didn't mention in the piece how hopeful I felt afterwards, so I sincerely thank you for planting that seed. I also like the idea of conserving our spiritual options, perhaps as an analogue to the need to protect biodiversity.
A lot of what you say resonates with me, particularly the riffs on silence and the Iris Murdoch quote.
I haven't finished spelling out my vision of the "New Gnosticism" but I will say that it addresses some of the issues/concerns you raise if I'm understanding you correctly. For one, I think the radical antinomianism of gnosticism manifests in a very different way in today's world than it did in antiquity (sex, drugs, and rock n' roll ain't as radical as they once were, so what is truly transgressive/subversive then?).
I agree that Gnosticism can be thought as the shadow of the dominant culture, but I've also been toying with the idea of gnosticism as a spiritual play which reinvigorates existing traditions and creates new ones (playing as and for the divine spark within) vs. the spiritual work which constitutes exoteric religion (the climbing of hierarchies towards the divine above). Gnosticism (as I see it) is really about liberation, and liberation (from any and all forces which could tyrannize and enslave us, internal and external) is obtained from the balanced integration of gnosis, faith, and reason. Or something like that.
"Is there something to Paul Kingsnorth’s notion of the Cross as a rallying point for the human against the Machine?" This jives with some of my current thinking on gnosticism and I'm interested to learn more - do you have particular articles/podcasts/whatever that reference this idea?
Thanks for reading and responding! I look forward to the rest of your vision. I want to keep an open mind about all potential forces of revitalisation, whether on the left-hand or right-hand path, but history is not making me optimistic - I'm not sure most people even want to be liberated.
This article from Kingsnorth sets out his critique of modernity as the Machine that has uprooted us from tradition, drawing on Simone Weil (who in some moods came very close to gnosticism indeed): https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/the-great-unsettling
The contrarian in me wants to remonstrate with Dame Iris that if the transcendent reality really is "alien" then we cannot be so sure what it imposes on us is anything we would recognize as morality. But this is the side of me that produces the hideousness of Portraits and Ashes!
I only know of Quakerism as refracted through American writers like Whitman and Melville, but this jogged a memory of the other horrifying book I wrote in 2013, not P&A but my doctoral dissertation, in one paragraph of which I found myself arguing for the Quakerism of Virginia Woolf. (I had come across a pair of essays to this effect.) I quote a lightly edited paragraph of my grad-student prose—I'm sorry if your completism doesn't extend so far!—only because it makes Woolf and her own bourgeois mysticism sound a bit like what Murdoch is going for:
"Jane Marcus provocatively and famously compares Woolf to Lenin and Trotsky, but on the evidence of her metaphysical speculations, Woolf cannot simply be arrogated to the tradition of materialist critique. The ideals animating her radical politics do not, by her account, arrive to her from within the social. Marcus is on surer ground when, later in her essay, she notes that Woolf was influenced by her aunt, the Quaker theologian Caroline Emelia Stephen. According to Alison M. Lewis, Woolf possessed copies of Stephen’s work in her private library and wrote of her admiringly, 'All her life she has been listening to inner voices, and talking with spirits' (qtd. in Lewis n. pag.). For Lewis, Woolf’s privileged 'moments of being,' depicted in the epiphanic movements of affect beyond the self that Mrs. Dalloway’s Londoners undergo, are akin to the mysticism promoted by Stephen’s theology of the inner light that is part and parcel of God: 'These moments of revelation show a mystical unity to the greater whole, which brings us to the closest thing that Virginia Woolf may have had to a creed' (Lewis n. pag.). This 'mystical unity' is the force underlying the social unity Woolf’s fiction prophesies, where divisions of class, gender, and empire may be superseded in the supra-rational apprehension that 'the whole world is a work of art' (qtd. in Lewis; Moments of Being 72). [...] Thus, the itinerary for novelistic practice charted in 'Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown' here finds its telos: the movement of affect in the presence of others—what an earlier literary tradition valorized as sentiment—produces sensations that lead individual subjects outside themselves to a communion with all life, an experience, however rare, that streams back into concrete social reality to produce heretofore- unexpected affinities, like Clarissa’s for Septimus, or Elizabeth’s for the workers of the Strand, or Septimus’s for the very trees. Aestheticism’s license of the novel to turn inward permits a doubling back from the psyche toward the social that could not be accomplished by the extrinsic and all-too-rational social criticism of the novel as Woolf found it at the beginning of her career."
Ah, but Dame Iris is not talking about 'transcendent' reality here - at least not in the sense we normally use the term. She's talking about the mundane reality outside our heads, which is alien because it contains other selves. And it is through learning how to love these other selves that the impositions of morality become clear to us. The Samaritan understood this.
And thanks for sharing the fascinating passage on Woolf: I never really got a handle on her, perhaps because I assumed she was simply a girlboss avant la lettre (Murdoch almost never talks directly about feminism in her philosophy, but she does say in MGM that the relation of the figure of the Mother Goddess to the liberation of women is 'extremely dubious'). The idea that 'the whole world is a work of art' is indeed a good Murdochian metaphor, since unity in a work of art is achieved by the harmonious interplay between the different components that make up the work, rather than a dissolution of all differences.
Romantic realism, one might say!
Thanks, I see her point now. It may still underrate the alienness of those other selves, but maybe I am insufficiently charitable.
Woolf very consciously and cannily did the girlbossing in her nonfiction on the theory that if her class of women ("the daughters of educated men") didn't become the subjects of cultural discourse, they would be remain (e.g., Freud and Jung analyzing hysterics) its objects. I borrow the subjct/object formulation from my doctoral advisor, who on Marxist grounds critiqued Woolf avant la lettre for girlbossing avant la lettre, but I can appreciate a gesture of political realism, and in any case, the worldview encoded in her best novels is very different from that, a mysticism at the verge of nihilism.
I don't know anything about the relation between Murdoch and Woolf. In theory, there is none, as Murdoch was trying to get back behind modernism to 19th-century solidity of character in the name of those selves whom Woolf dissolves into haze. I googled it and found that someone had written a study about their affinity (Donna Lazenby, A Mystical Philosophy: Transcendence and Immanence in the Works of Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch), and, according to a review in the NYTimes by John Sutherland of Murdoch's letters, "When, in her 60s, she plowed through Virginia Woolf’s novels for a conference, she recognized a certain narrative skill but added, 'I can’t be very interested in her thoughts.'"
I too am sceptical of arriving at an absolute distinction between good and evil guided only by as fickle a force as love (perhaps St Paul was right to add the need for faith and hope, even secondarily).
On Murdoch's dismissal of Woolf, yes, Frances White discusses it here (https://soundcloud.com/user-548804258/austen-eliot-woolf-podcast)
She especially seems to have faulted Woolf for her lack of humour.
Yes, give or take Orlando, Woolf was (kind of like me) funny in the nonfiction but not in the fiction, a counterintuitive division.
No need for false modesty: MA is often hilarious!
I was going to say that we, too, have that line in our A&Q, and that it’s a good one. When I come to look it up, however, I see that the first word is different: “Do what love requires of you, which may not be the same as great busyness.” Now I am musing on the ramifications of the word “attend,” so important to Iris Murdoch by way of her respect for Simone Weil, who claimed that only attention could be required of a person, and not belief, since the intellect is free.
“Attend to what love requires of you” becomes a subtly different statement, in that light. Not, I think, a better or worse one, but one that draws out a slightly different set of considerations. Useful to think on.
In any case, I will admit to being pleased to hear that you attended a Quaker meeting. One of the more opinionated old ladies in my worship group is very clear that “we don’t evangelise,” but I will admit to a deep hope that Quakerism continues to exist for those who need it, and mentioning it in my writing is one way to get the word out. Whether you continue attending, or just take these reflections from the experience you had, it’s nice to think that my writing might be one influence among many that helps to keep Quakerism alive for people as an option.
The word "Attend" immediately recalled Weil and Murdoch for me too, which is part of why the meeting felt like something of a homecoming to me. I didn't mention in the piece how hopeful I felt afterwards, so I sincerely thank you for planting that seed. I also like the idea of conserving our spiritual options, perhaps as an analogue to the need to protect biodiversity.
I will be watching the MJE Quaker arc with great interest…
"admirably erudite" lol I'll take it, thank you!
A lot of what you say resonates with me, particularly the riffs on silence and the Iris Murdoch quote.
I haven't finished spelling out my vision of the "New Gnosticism" but I will say that it addresses some of the issues/concerns you raise if I'm understanding you correctly. For one, I think the radical antinomianism of gnosticism manifests in a very different way in today's world than it did in antiquity (sex, drugs, and rock n' roll ain't as radical as they once were, so what is truly transgressive/subversive then?).
I agree that Gnosticism can be thought as the shadow of the dominant culture, but I've also been toying with the idea of gnosticism as a spiritual play which reinvigorates existing traditions and creates new ones (playing as and for the divine spark within) vs. the spiritual work which constitutes exoteric religion (the climbing of hierarchies towards the divine above). Gnosticism (as I see it) is really about liberation, and liberation (from any and all forces which could tyrannize and enslave us, internal and external) is obtained from the balanced integration of gnosis, faith, and reason. Or something like that.
"Is there something to Paul Kingsnorth’s notion of the Cross as a rallying point for the human against the Machine?" This jives with some of my current thinking on gnosticism and I'm interested to learn more - do you have particular articles/podcasts/whatever that reference this idea?
Thanks for reading and responding! I look forward to the rest of your vision. I want to keep an open mind about all potential forces of revitalisation, whether on the left-hand or right-hand path, but history is not making me optimistic - I'm not sure most people even want to be liberated.
This article from Kingsnorth sets out his critique of modernity as the Machine that has uprooted us from tradition, drawing on Simone Weil (who in some moods came very close to gnosticism indeed): https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/the-great-unsettling