Nuns and Soldiers Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  PENGUIN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CLASSICS NUNS AND SOLDIERS

  Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919, grew up in London, and received her university education at Oxford and later at Cambridge. In 1948 she became a Fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford, where for many years she taught philosophy. In 1987 she was appointed Dame Commander, Order of the British Empire. She died on February 8, 1999. Murdoch wrote twenty-six novels, including Under the Net, her writing debut of 1954, and the Booker Prize-winning The Sea, The Sea (1978). She received a number of other literary awards, among them the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Black Prince (1973) and the Whit-bread Prize for The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974). Her works of philosophy include Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1993), and Existentialists and Mystics (1998). She also wrote several plays and a volume of poetry.

  A former Catholic nun, Karen Armstrong teaches at Leo Baeck College for the Study of Judaism in England. Her books include The Battle for God; A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam; Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths; In the Beginning: A New Interpretation of Genesis; Islam: A Short History; and her biography, Buddha, published in the Penguin Lives series.

  By the same author

  Philosophy

  SARTRE, ROMANTIC RATIONALIST

  THE FIRE AND THE SUN

  ACOSTOS: TWO PLATONIC DIALOGUES

  METAPHYSICS AS A GUIDE TO MORALS

  EXISTENTIALISTS AND MYSTICS

  Fiction

  UNDER THE NET

  THE FLIGHT FROM THE ENCHANTER

  THE SAND CASTLE

  THE BELL

  SEVERED HEAD

  AN UNOFFICIAL ROSE

  THE UNICORN

  THE ITALIAN GIRL

  THE RED AND THE GREEN

  THE TIME OF THE ANGELS

  THE NICE AND THE GOOD

  BRUNO’S DREAM

  A FAIRLY HONOURABLE DEFEAT

  AN ACCIDENTAL MAN

  THE BLACK PRINCE

  THE SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE MACHINE

  A WORD CHILD

  HENRY AND CATO

  THE SEA, THE SEA

  NUNS AND SOLDIERS

  THE PHILOSOPHER’S PUPIL

  THE GOOD APPRENTICE

  THE BOOK AND THE BROTHERHOOD

  THE MESSAGE TO THE PLANET

  THE GREEN KNIGHT

  JACKSON’S DILEMMA

  Plays

  A SEVERED HEAD (with J. B. Priestley)

  THE ITALIAN GIRL (with James Saunders)

  THE THREE ARROWS

  THE SERVANTS AND THE SNOW

  THE BLACK PRINCE

  Poetry

  A YEAR OF BIRDS

  (Illustrated by Reynolds Stone)

  eISBN : 978-1-101-49426-4

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  First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus Ltd 1980

  First published in the United States of America by The Viking Press 1981

  Published in Penguin Books 1982

  Edition with an introduction by Karen Armstrong published in Great

  Britain by Vintage, an imprint of Random House UK Ltd 2001

  Published in Penguin Books 2002

  Copyright © Iris Murdoch, 1980

  Introduction copyright © Karen Armstrong, 2001

  All rights reserved

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either

  are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and

  any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments,

  events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  CIP data available

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  INTRODUCTION

  It is difficult at first, perhaps, to imagine two groups of people who have less in common than the nuns and soldiers of the title, but a possible link is suggested in the very first scene of the novel. Guy Openshaw is dying and, with the terrible eloquence of so many of Iris Murdoch’s characters, he unflinchingly contemplates the prospect of his imminent extinction. Does one, he asks, die as an animal, in exhaustion or in some kind of trance? ‘Our breaths are numbered,’ he remarks. ‘I can see the imaginable number of my own - just coming - into view.’ He wants to die well, ‘but how is it done?’ When will he decide to stop shaving forever? Guy’s mind is beginning to fragment: he utters disconnected, mysteriously elusive phrases, which disturb his wife Gertrude and his friends. They show that he has already started the journey into ‘that future when I won’t exist any more’.

  Human beings are the only animals who have to live with the knowledge of their own mortality. This fear of annihilation, of nonbeing, is a constant reality in our lives. We are creatures who fall very easily into despair, and we have been ingenious in our search for solutions that will save our sanity. Many of us prefer not to think of the void that awaits us some time in the future, but we can never entirely block out the reality of death. Other people choose to confront the spectre, and to lose their fear of extinction by meeting it head on. This is the task of the soldier. He undergoes a rigorous training that enables him to walk directly into the firing line, ignoring, for what he sees as a higher good, that clamorous instinct for self-preservation which has enabled our species to survive. The soldier’s disciplined lack of self-regard has long been seen by poets and philosophers as an emblem of human courage. And yet this heroism also reveals the tragedy of our predicament, because it brings no special dispensation. Homer’s military heroes all fear death, because they know that it leads only to a shadowy nonexistence in the underworld. The single appropriate response, as they see it, is to behave nobly in the face of this unavoidable fate.

  But there is another form of courage, which has fallen somewhat into disrepute in our secularized society, but which had also been hailed as heroic. This is the path of the monk, the nun and the mystic, who voluntarily adopt a lifestyle that has been carefully designed to quench the selfishness and egotism which, they believe, hold human beings back from their full potential. The Buddha, for example, was not seen by his contemporaries in the sixth century B.C.E. as a feeble, deluded drop-out when he left the world to pursue the spiritual life; he was often described in martial terms, as a young nobleman ‘capable of leading a crack army or a troop of elephants’. An ascetic was seen as a pioneer, who, at great cost to himself, faced up to the void to bring some vision of hope to more ordinary mortals. The mon
astic life has emerged in strikingly similar forms in nearly all cultures, and must, therefore, fulfil a need for many men and women. It has been found that the monastic regime and such disciplines as classical yoga or contemplative prayer constitute a devastating assault on the ego and eventually take the ‘I’ out of the thinking of a skilled practitioner. Like the soldier, therefore, the nun also seeks an experience of annihilation, but if she is sufficiently dedicated, she discovers that this death to self brings her an enhanced mode of being, a transcendence that gives her a sense of infinity and eternity in this mortal life. This transcendence has been called many things: Nirvana, the Tao, the Sacred or Brahman. Buddhists would claim that there is nothing supernatural about it but that it is an essential component of our human nature. Jews, Christians, and Muslims, however, have personalized this transcendence and called it ‘God’. But all agree that to attain an experience of this reality, one must die to the selfishness and egotism that fetters us to an inferior, incomplete version of ourselves.

  But such self-abandonment is very difficult. Soldiers can become deserters and nuns can leave their convents, as I did, because they do not really want to leave themselves behind. In their private lives, soldiers can be as selfish as any civilian, and nuns can be as trivial and egotistic in their cloister as anybody else. Nevertheless, the ideal persists. A significant group of people have found that they become most fully themselves when they give themselves away; and that when they deliberately court annihilation and nothingness, they encounter a larger reality.

  In the ancient world, people explored this paradox by means of myth, which has aptly been called a primitive form of psychology; it charts the elusive, interior world of the psyche in its stories of death and resurrection, and of a hero’s descent into the underworld to gain new life and insight. Iris Murdoch, however, does not use the archaic symbols of labyrinths, monsters and a far-off, distant time. In this novel, she is writing a modern myth set in contemporary, well-heeled London. And the soldier and nun of this novel, both of whom are present at Guy Openshaw’s deathbed, are fully involved in ordinary, civilian life. Peter Szczepanski, a Polish exile, known to his friends as the Count, is not a member of the armed forces but his personal history has, he feels, made him a conscript in the hopeless battle for his home-land. He has no illusions about Poland in the last years of the Cold War (when this novel is set), but he is still convinced, in spite of everything, that Poles aspire to a ‘spiritual destiny, an anguished longing for freedom of spirit’. He feels that as a Pole he too is somehow enlisted in the ranks of those who fight oppression everywhere, regardless of their personal safety, until after ‘their brief, and apparently useless struggle for freedom and virtue, they rotted away quietly into a slow anonymous death’. In real life, the Count is merely a civil servant, but his belief that he should be involved in this heroic battle has set him apart. It affects his physical, heel-clicking bearing, and informs his moral behaviour. He knew ‘that he was not a gentleman volunteer in the army of the moral law ... He stood in his mind as still and expressionless as the soldiers at the Unknown Warrior’s grave.’ Spiritually, the Count stands at attention, but beside a void, because the Poland of his imagination has been obliterated by the terrible events of the twentieth century, which he constantly reviews late at night in his lonely flat.

  Anne Cavidge, on the other hand, has been a nun in a Roman Catholic enclosed order, but when the novel opens, she has left her convent. She too faces an emptiness. For years the religious life had made sense to her, but gradually her belief in the personal God of Christianity has faded away. Yet she cannot abandon the ideal. She intends now to live in the world as a secret nun, an anchorite, ‘the spy of a non-existent God’. What Anne has discovered is what the theologians have called ‘the God beyond God’. 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. It is not ‘another being’, they insist; it cannot even be said to exist, because our notion of ‘existence’ is far too limited to be appropriate here. This Nothingness is in fact the goal of the mystical quest. As the fourteenth-century contemplative Meister Eckhart explained: ‘Man’s last and highest parting comes when, for God’s sake, he takes leave of God.’ Anne is now groping past the God of conventional religion towards this Void. When she has a vision of Jesus, he is a Buddhist Christ, who tells her that he cannot save her: she must save herself and find her own answers. Anne is determined not to fall back into the triviality of her life before she entered the order. She still has the impulse to rush forward into an apparent oblivion, in rather the same way as she plunges on one occasion into a dangerous sea. Now she realizes that she must be ‘alone ..., with no plan and no visions, homeless and invisible, a wanderer, a no one’.

  Not everyone is capable of this type of self-abandonment, however. Yet we all need to be saved from our fear of death and our suspicion that life is essentially without meaning. We all seek ecstasy and an experience that takes us beyond ourselves. If we do not find this in conventional religion, we turn to art, music of all sorts, dance, sex, sport or even to drugs. This search for some form of transcendence is basic to our condition. Iris Murdoch is one of the few modern novelists to take this quest seriously. She is not afraid of themes that are often dismissed by the secular intellectual as ‘religious’. But instead of describing conventional faith, she depicts a spirituality of everyday life, showing what it is in human experience that lies behind the myths and practices which have become debased and incredible to an increasing number of people.

  Art is one of the chief ways of endowing our lives with some ultimate value, and in some Murdoch novels, characters discover that a painting, for example, can startle them out of their self-obsession and give them intimations of a reality that is wholly separate from themselves, absolute, and entirely removed from their personal needs and desires. Tim Reede, a distant cousin of Guy, and his girlfriend Daisy are painters, but they are certainly not producing work of this calibre. They pride themselves ‘on being free and having no possessions’, but they have got stuck, artistically and personally, in a destructive mode of life and find that they cannot progress. Tim in particular lacks the dedication and discipline that is as essential for an artist as for a nun or a soldier. As a result, he can copy other artists’ work to perfection, but produces nothing valuable of his own. He is also chronically short of money.

  But when, after Guy’s death, Tim goes to live in the Openshaws’ house in France, as a caretaker, he has a classic experience of the numinous. Long before human beings mapped their world scientifically, they developed what has been called a ‘sacred geography’. Certain places - mountains, groves, or rivers - have seemed to speak of ‘something else’. The devotion to a ‘holy place’ was one of the earliest and most universal expressions of the religious impulse, and is so common that it must tell us something about the way men and women have experienced the physical world as a place of wonder and mystery. Even today we have not secularized the world entirely: many of us have special places to which we like to repair in a moment of crisis or for renewal; these places may be linked with our childhood and have something of the glamour of beginnings; they may be connected with an important experience, when we felt we were living most intensely; or something strange in the locality may fill us with awe. Tim has no religious beliefs and certainly does not attribute his experience in France to a supernatural deity, but when he suddenly finds himself confronted by a great rock face, he feels that dread, exhilaration and joy, which the German philosopher Rudolph Otto describes in The Idea of the Holy as characteristic of an encounter with the Sacred. Tim is both afraid of the rock and yet irresistibly drawn to it; it is, in Otto’s words, terrible et fascinans. He also has ‘that pure, clean, bless
ed beginning-again feeling’. Immediately, he sits down and begins to paint, producing his first serious work for some time.

  In his normal life, Tim is perpetually on the scrounge. Anne Cavidge once caught him stealing food out of the Openshaws’ fridge. He is constantly dodging and ducking; his motto is the Greek verb lanthano: I escape notice. In his ceaseless, uphill struggle for survival, he is often economical with the truth. But there is something about the rock and the small round pool beneath it that shocks him out of his endless compulsion to turn everything to his own advantage. It makes him aware of a dimension beyond himself. The rock is not a scene that Tim can exploit for his own profit, turning out one of his usual daubs to sell at his local Bloomsbury pub. He felt that it would be sacrilegious to drink from the pool or to bathe in it. And once he has glimpsed a reality which is entirely separate from his concerns (in Hebrew the word for ‘holy’ is qaddosh: Separate, Other), he is ready not only to paint again but to fall in love.

  Few writers have been able to describe the cataclysmic and numinous experience of love as vividly as Murdoch. Today we tend to write more freely about sex than our ancestors, but can be rather embarrassed by the phenomenon of ‘falling in love’. But for Murdoch, love is no delusion but a revelation. The sudden realization that another human being exists in an absolute sense is another of the ways in which men and women have found holiness in our profane, flawed and tragic world. Out of the blue, Tim and Gertrude, Guy’s widow, are seized with love for one another. Gertrude experiences this visitation of Eros as an extremity. It is an ‘unmistakable seismic shock; that total concentration of everything into one necessary being, mysterious, uncanny, unique, one of the strangest phenomena in the world’. The beloved becomes an expression of everything that gives life ultimate value, rather as ‘God’ did in the age of faith. Like the disciplines of religion, love transforms the lover. Gertrude ‘had a new consciousness, her whole being hummed with a sacred love awareness’. Other characters in the novel speak of their love in similar terms.