In July 1987 I drove my wife Helen to the Outpatients Department of Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge. She was to receive the results of a previous investigation and scan. I sat in the waiting room until she returned. As soon as I saw her I flinched. Something was obviously wrong. Her face was distorted; her walk was agitated. The scan had revealed growths on her bladder, a serious case of cancer. I held her as she sobbed the news. I was shocked, stunned. The accustomed world dissolved. A new world appeared. It was a heavy burden to take up, and of course I shrank from it. It was the last thing I ever wanted.
Yet I realised immediately what I must do. I must do whatever I could to help and support her. I didn’t make a decision. I didn’t weigh up the pros and cons and then decide. It was as though a light were switched on and immediately I saw, I recognised, I accepted. This light shone with authority. What else could I do? I knew at once that I was necessary, absolutely necessary to my wife. A great work was entrusted to me, a more important work than anything I had ever done. It was most needful and in the most special and intimate way possible it was mine. I knew all this at once without having to put it into words.
Recently I have been re-reading Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good. (2019 marks the centenary of her birth). The book is full of psychological insights and philosophical discussions. However, I feel in some ways uncomfortable with the title, ‘sovereignty’. It usually means the summit of power. ‘We must take back sovereignty,’ we have recently often been told, as though in the modern world we didn’t know that power has to be shared. ‘Sovereignty’ seems to suggest the sort of power exercised by Roman emperors such as the murderous Constantine or by equally murderous kings such as Henry VIII and Louis XIV. Their power was backed up by armies and executioners. They order, command, control: obey – or else.
Does ‘the Good’ or ‘God’ exercise this kind of sovereignty and control? No, the operation of the Good is entirely different. As experienced by me in that hospital waiting room, it is a power so immense and all-pervasive that it simply possesses one in a moment. It is not an extraneous force against which one might struggle: it is something that is embedded in oneself that emerges, makes itself manifest of its own accord. The decision is there without ever having to be made, as it were. It is true that I may struggle against the situation that has made this response necessary, but the response has an inevitability all of its own.
Can we, by using different words, approach what people in the past were trying to get at when they used the word ‘God’? If we use different words is it possible we may still mean the same thing, or something very similar? In her book Iris Murdoch considers such questions but reaches no easy conclusion. How far is ‘the sovereignty of Good’ equivalent to ‘the kingdom of God’? Don Cupitt has pointed out that the word ‘God’ has largely fallen out of use in popular English speech, but very often the word ‘life’ has taken its place. Naturalistic idioms seem set to take over from traditional religious language.
Where this remains (and it would surely be a great cultural loss to lose it), it has increasingly to be understood in a poetic, metaphorical, non-literal way. (Though isn’t this the way that religious language has always had to be understood, if it is to make sense?). Iris Murdoch was one of those willing to explore new forms of religious experience and fresh ways of describing it in language. She believed that people, even the least educated, the ‘peasants’ (sic) have a non-dogmatic unformulated faith in the reality of the Good and that this would remain even if theology disappeared.
The long-drawn-out end of Iris Murdoch’s life was sad. Over several years Alzheimer’s disease gradually took away her intellect, memory, creativity, beauty, dignity, mobility and independence. Her husband John Bayley faced the same situation that I confronted in the hospital waiting room. He had to deal with it over many more years in much more difficult circumstances than I had to. He has written about his experience with great honesty, realism and insight. He was, as we all are, an imperfect person in an imperfect world. Even so, he was surely possessed of the love that bears all things. He looked after his wife with the greatest devotion and determination. It was down-to-earth practical love.
He shouldered the burden of day-to-day nursing with its constant round of menial tasks. Love bears all things. Love suffers long and is kind. ‘Camerado, I give you my hand,’ said Walt Whitman. ‘Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?’ John Bayley stuck by Iris Murdoch, and all honour to him for that.
The situation I found myself in during that hospital visit was hardly unique. It was and is the most commonplace everyday happening. Every minute of every day millions all over the world share this experience. Neither was my response (or that of John Bayley) unusual. Untold millions respond in similar fashion. Surely in this they are not far from the kingdom of God? This universal human response has resulted in the most important practical consequences. Amongst them is the setting up in so many countries of national health services which ensure that more help is given than can be achieved by anyone acting alone.
Humans are above all others the most to be feared. We lay waste the earth and there is no one to say us nay. The range of our cruelty is more ingeniously evil and long-lasting than that of any other creatures. We need to heed the appeal made to us by Nietzsche: ‘Of all evil I deem you capable: therefore I want the good from you.’ Most animals care for their young with total and often self-sacrificial devotion. They do not care for the sick, the wounded or the abnormal. These they attack and kill. Humans are special in their devotion to the injured, the wounded, the sick and disabled. This is the glory of our kind, a witness to whatever spark of divinity there may be within humankind.
In the hospital waiting room this spark may glow. There emerges within people very powerfully and unmistakably the will, the determination to help. They could not do otherwise, or so many feel. It is so strong and universal, it has such a depth of feeling, it is so unmistakable and assured, it is so supreme a value that in its service is perfect freedom. It is the love of the Good, the promise of the Kingdom of God.
Can you love the human race? History says emphatically No. In the hospital waiting-room a different answer becomes possible. In the hospital waiting-room (not inevitably, not automatically, not always, but often enough to warm the heart) the sovereignty of Good mysteriously lures us on, inviting, persuading us to attempt the impossible. In the hospital waiting-room the Light shines, luring us on. Without that Light, humanity would shrivel and extinguish itself.
Frank Walker was a Unitarian minister (and teacher of English in Further Education) in Halifax, Bristol and Cambridge, 1959–2000.