Fifth Sunday in Eastertide. Today’s readings: Acts 14:21-27; Psalm 145:8-9, 10-11, 12-13; Revelations 21:1-5a; John 13:31-33a, 34-35
In her paper On “God” and the “Good”, published in 1969 in The Anatomy of Knowledge, Irish-British philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch argues that “we need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central”.
As a deeply ethical and often mystical thinker, through her novels and thought she has the capacity to fill the post-religious spiritual space. Her critique of present-day moral philosophy is that it places emphasis on choices and willpower.
Placing love of someone other than one self at the centre entails having “a fresh vision” to engage in an alternative “mode of understanding”, enabling us to see more clearly, justly and compassionately in humility and love “the Good”. This type of understanding enables us to move and act attentively and unselfishly, constantly drawing from our inner depths.
Murdoch’s ‘existentialist’ viewpoint is critical of what she calls, on the one hand, an “over-optimistic doctrine” which is “unrealistic” and “purveyor of certain false values”, and on the other hand, the “flimsier creeds, such as humanism”, with which modernity attempts to fill the present void. Murdoch reminds her readers that the moral life is about “seeing and loving the Good”, and less about obeying rules and making choices. This “Good” is, in her perspective, a serious idea of moral truth that transcends us, and which therefore has the power to draw us out of ourselves, to love.
It is only ordered love which has the capacity to form a saving community with ‘open doors’ where ‘God dwells’ amongst us and where all are valued for who they are
One could argue that Murdoch’s worldview (even though she was not a confessional religious believer) is Augustinian in her emphasis to turn inwards attentively in search of the Good through self-scrutiny; in having the courage to painfully face our “fat and relentless” ego’s tendency to distort reality through selfish desire, and order or reorient love through self-knowledge, especially “where strong emotions of sexual love, or of hatred, resentment, or jealousy are concerned”. Murdoch argues that to trigger this reorientation we need embodied stories, not rules.
Marked by disordered loves, attachments to pleasure, ambition, and even friendships, that ultimately left him unfulfilled, Augustine faces the painful truth that, because of his misdirected affections, he struggled to love anything beyond himself. Unsatisfied with himself, in vain, he sought outside what he could not find within. Reorienting his love towards God and the Good, he gradually learnt to love others in themselves as autonomous beings, worthy of love as they are created in love by God.
From that narcissistic manipulative use of others as “mirrors for our desires”, Augustine moves to genuine love in self-gift; he moves away from what Terence Sweeney calls the “hooking up”, “plugging into”, “mirroring idol”, to gradually get his love right, for it is only ordered love that has the capacity to form a saving community with “open doors” where “God dwells” among us and where all are valued for who they are.
It is also from this perspective that Jesus says in today’s gospel: “I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another. This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
The Fourth Gospel reports these words of Jesus from the Last Supper in the context of his giving himself to us in the Paschal Mystery of the Passion, Death and Resurrection. His self-gift, ritualised in the washing of the feet, is in deep contrast with Judas’s voracity in terms of power and success leading him to the fateful choice to betray and leave Jesus and the Twelve. Jesus, reveals “the greatest truth: that life finds its true destiny in love – a love that involves offering our lives for our brothers and sisters, in following the call the Lord entrusted to us” (Pope Leo XIV).