Iris Murdoch and Love of the Truth

Abstract

‘Good art is truthful.’¹ On this text Iris Murdoch has based (so far) twenty-four novels and three books of philosophy, aiming to show in her technique of writing that the artist is a truth-teller, and to show in her themes that all people should be no less lovers of the truth if they are to be truly human. In fact, Murdoch believes (following her great mentor, Plato) that the quest for the truth is the search for the Good, and to love the one is to love the other. Even a passing experience of falling in love can make someone more keenly aware of what is true in the surrounding world. In Murdoch’s vision of reality, there is thus an indissoluble bond between truth, love and goodness, and the reader of her novels becomes a traveller through regions of moral value as well as intense passion. Murdoch does not profess to believe in an objectively existing and personal God, but the interest of her work for a Christian theologian is summed up in a remark of one of her characters: ‘That’s what God is for, to make our lies truth.’²