Reading Watson’s The Age of Atheism has proved to be an even more dangerous endeavor than I thought, since it keeps sending me on tangents of reading primary source material and introducing me to new thinkers – a pleasant and enriching danger! Right now, I’ve been on a sideways incursion into Iris Murdoch‘s work. I was familiar with some of her fiction and knew of her philosophy, though had never really dipped into it before. Like many people, I knew of Iris Murdoch mostly from the biopic Iris, but there’s much more to her than torrid intellectual Oxford affairs and Alzheimers.
How many 20th century philosophers also take religion seriously, follow in the footsteps of Plato, and are acclaimed novelists? It’s enough to make one feel a bit shabby and slacker-esque (perhaps it would have been better to be a philosopher before the internet but then, dear reader, I wouldn’t be blogging and talking to you, would I? The conundrum of too much information to take in and too many ways to communicate it – and too many ways to be distracted…). But no matter how you slice it, Murdoch is impressive and interesting by virtue of both her range of interests and her tendency to wrestle with pre-modern material and questions just as seriously as so-called modern concerns. As an article in First Things from 1995 says of her:
Recently the Divinity School at the University of Chicago sponsored a conference to investigate and celebrate the theological importance of the writings, especially the novels, of Iris Murdoch. The attitude expressed by many of the theologians involved was one of abject, almost pathetic, gratitude to Murdoch for taking religion seriously-not many noted artists do so, after all, nor, come to think of it, do all of the theologians themselves. Confronted with the spectacle of these highly trained men and women genuflecting in the direction of a novelist, however brilliant, one struggles to recall that theology was once named Queen of the Sciences.
Electric Genizah 