The Bell and The Time of the Angels: The Philosophy of Love and Virtue in Iris Murdoch’s Ecclesiastical Fiction

Abstract

In his study of Iris Murdoch’s 1958 novel The Bell, Peter Edgerly Firchow considers the symbiotic merits of both Murdoch’s philosophy and her fiction: “it is not necessary to delve first into Murdoch’s philosophical work before one reads her fiction,” Firchow observes. “A good argument can be made that it is better to start with the fiction even if one’s ultimate aim is to understand the philosophy, since the fiction is, almost explicitly at times, presented as a testing ground for the philosophy—hers, or for that matter, anyone else’s” (158). Firchow situates Murdoch in the European tradition of philosopher-novelists, which includes Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Jean-Paul Sartre, who use the arena of fiction as a moral testing ground where characters are placed on a chessboard to experience how a system of idealized behavior would manifest itself in actuality: