Existentialists and Mystics

“In 2024, believe it or not, (or believe it and pity me if you’re comfortably atheist), I remain as open to any notion of God as ever. In fact, I want to be the next prophet. This is not an easy goal. For life is too short, the task is too absurd, and I’m too simple.”

I wrote this in 2024. It’s 2025, and not much has changed. Life is still short, the task is still absurd, and I’m still simple.

A few things have shifted, though. I’ve grown extremely protective of my God-related naivety and innocence. It feels rare, at thirty-five, to be both so clueless and so curious at the same time. I’m not sure how I’ve managed to combine these two opposing traits, but as I said, I really am clueless.

I don’t know why I feel protective, but I know this much: I don’t want to lose my current religion the way I gained it, passively, by adopting whatever my group believed. I want to come to it differently, through the back door, after long nights, strange conversations, and emotional music.

My desire is to have a simpler and ordinary God. I still want to be a prophet, but I want to be a prophet of a simple religion and a simpler God, not a God of grand leaps or heroic defiance, but a God found in paying attention, in looking outward with love. 

That’s why Iris Murdoch’s essay Existentialists and Mystics struck me so deeply. She’s using novels as a lens to explore who we are in the world. I love it, not just because it’s Murdoch, whom I admire, but because I enjoy novels and the way they reveal us to ourselves.

Her fiction is full of existentialist characters (self-willed, dramatic, rebellious), yet she sets them in mystical worlds where the real test is learning to see and to love.

And coincidentally, I’ve just begun reading Middlemarch, which, I learned today, was Murdoch’s favorite novel. It’s a vast web of relationships, society, history, and moral growth. Characters aren’t “heroes of will”, they’re people whose choices are tangled up with others.

At least six people have told me it’s a “Mona novel” and that I’m “Dorothea-esque.” To me, that’s a happy revelation: perhaps I’m finally becoming easier to understand, even to myself.

Below are some parts of the Existentialists and Mystics essay:

We know this existentialist novel and its hero well. The story of the lonely brave man, defiant without optimism, proud without pretension, always an exposer of shams, whose mode of being is a deep criticism of society. He is an adventurer. He is godless. He does not suffer from guilt. He thinks of himself as free. He may have faults, he may be self-assertive or even violent, but he has sincerity and courage, and for this we forgive him. 

[...] 

It pictured man as divided between his fallen nature and a separate spiritual world. His goodwill was the tension which connected him to this higher realm. The indubitable claims of duty were the proof that this other world was real. For the modern existentialist descendant of this line of thought, this spiritual elsewhere has ceased to exist. Duty speaks less sternly and a good deal less clearly. Yet man is divided still. His will, that adventurous instrument which makes him so different from sticks and stones and billiard balls and greengrocers and bank managers, his will is separate from the rest of his being and uncontaminated. He might do anything.

The mystical novel is both newer and more old-fashioned. What is characteristic of this novel is that it keeps in being, by one means or another, the conception of God. Man is still pictured as being divided, but divided in a new way, between a fallen nature and a spiritual world. I call these novels mystical, not of course as a term of praise, but because they are attempts to express a religious consciousness without the traditional trappings of religion. (Existentialists are not worshippers, mystics are.) No (conventional) God, no Church, no social support or protective institutions. No simple or secure connection with morality. Mystics too have dispensed with these things and have inhabited a spiritual world unconsoled by familiar religious imagery. Mystics who are artists invent their own imagery, which we often find hard to understand. Other mystics are speechless. What I call the mystical novelist may or may not be a good man or a good novelist, but what he is attempting to do, perhaps unsuccessfully, is to invent new religious imagery (or twist old religious imagery) in an empty situation.

Both kinds of novelist have their characteristic defects and temptations. The existentialist may become so obsessed with the powerful self-assertive figure of his hero (or anti-hero) that he presents a mediocre person as being important and valuable simply because he is contemptuous of society and gets his own way. This is a fairly familiar contemporary failure. The mystic on the other hand may be lacking in the existentialist virtues of sincerity and courage, and may merely reintroduce the old fatherly figure of God behind a façade of fantastical imagery or sentimental adventures in cosy masochism. This is familiar too. It is easy to say there is no God. It is not so easy to believe it and to draw the consequences. 

[...]

I have in this exposition put the existentialist first and the mystic second, and I think this order is right both logically and chronologically. The existentialist response is the first and immediate expression of a consciousness without God. It is the heir of nineteenth-century Luciferian pride in the individual and in the achievements of science. It is, or tries to be, cheerfully godless. Even its famous gloom is a mode of satisfaction. From this point of view, man is God. The mystical attitude is a second response, a second thought about the matter, and reflects the uneasy suspicion that perhaps after all man is not God. 

[...]

As we readily recognise and sympathise with the hero of will-power, so we can also recognise and sympathise with the mystical hero. He too is a man in tension, but here the tension is not between will and nature, but between nature and good. This is the man who has given up traditional religion but is still haunted by a sense of the reality and unity of some sort of spiritual world. The imagery here is an imagery of height and distance. Much is required of us and we are far from our goal. The virtue of the mystical hero is humility. Whereas the existentialist hero is an anxious man trying to impose or assert or find himself, the mystical hero is an anxious man trying to discipline or purge or diminish himself. The chief temptation of the former is egoism, of the latter masochism. The philosophical background or protective symbolism is fairly clear in each case. The first hero is the new version of the romantic man, the man of power, abandoned by God, struggling on bravely, sincerely and alone. This image consoles by showing us man as strong, self-reliant and uncrushable. The second hero is the new version of the man of faith, believing in goodness without religious guarantees, guilty, muddled, yet not without hope. This image consoles by showing us man as frail, godless, and yet possessed of genuine intuitions of an authoritative good.