The notion that one cannot see God was established early in the Jewish tradition. The idea that the vision of Naples is so magnificent that there is nothing further to live for: “See Naples and die”, is taken one stage further in the Bible: see God and you will die. “But”, God said to Moses, “you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live” (Ex. 33.20).

In fact God is said in the Bible to have put in a number of appearances to the Patriarchs. To Abraham: “Then the Lord (Yahweh) appeared to Abram and said, ‘To your offspring I will give this land’” (Gen 12.7); “When Abram was ninety-nine years old the Lord appeared to Abram and said to him I am God Almighty (El Shaddai); walk before me and be blameless and I will make my covenant between me and you, and will make you exceedingly numerous’” (Gen 17.1-2). To Isaac: “The Lord appeared to Isaac and said, ‘Do not go down to Egypt, settle in the land that I shall show you ... for to you and to your descendants I will give all these lands, and I will fulfil the oath that I swore to Abraham your father’” (Gen 26.2-3); at Beersheba “And that very night the Lord appeared to him and said, ‘I am the God of Abraham your father, do not be afraid, for I am with you and will bless you and make your offspring numerous for my servant Abraham’s sake’” (Gen 26.24). To Jacob at Bethel: “God (Elohim) appeared to Jacob again . . . and he blessed him. God said to him, ‘Your name is Jacob; no longer shall you be called Jacob, but Israel shall be your name ... be fruitful and multiply ... the land that I gave to Abraham and Isaac I will give to you, and I will give the land to your offspring after you”’ (Gen 35.9-12). Exactly how God “appeared” is not made clear except in the second appearance to Isaac which was in a dream (Gen 26.24) and this may be true of all of them. It is not clear that anything was seen in any of these stories but in each case something was heard (or at any rate the recipient woke up with the conviction that God had communicated and this, of course, was expressed in certain words). All these five appearances to the patriarchs were covenantmaking events relating to land and descendants.

Iris Murdoch is a philosopher and a novelist. Her novels are not philosophy in narrative form: we would not expect her philosophical writings to be categorical formulations of her narrative line.

Why should Murdoch, an Irish agnostic, be of interest to the clergy or those with theological preoccupations? Well, perhaps because much modern theology and spiritual writing employs, consciously or otherwise, a neo-Cartesian mentalist individualist epistemology. Or perhaps because we must be attuned to hearing people’s stories, or perhaps because when we understand people’s mental furniture better, many of our tasks will be clarified.

Is there some more important reason? Yes. Because our way of praying, lamenting, celebrating, and perhaps what ever counts as prayer, will be affected by the kind of narrative we feel at home in.

It may seem odd to speak of us ‘feeling at home’ in a novel, but if we easily see ourselves as the hero of Lucky Jim or This Sporting Life, feeling more at home in that role, than in a piece of more chaotic, fabulist metafiction like, say, The Philosopher’s Pupil it should tell us something about the philosophical anthropology we are employing. Put it this way: there are philosophical reasons for the hero of many modem novels being a rather alienated character, engaged in a more or less fruitless attempt to be ens causa sui, but these are not good reasons.

A clue to what Murdoch is getting at may be found in her comment on the existentialist view of evil as found in Sartre’s La Naus?e ‘Sartre as Cartesian solipsist seems especially ... to exhibit a lack of any lively sense of the mystery and variousness of individuals’.

Many of us, if involved in pastoral or educational work, have witnessed a religious misunderstanding in the mind of someone in our care, and have tried to help untangle it For instance, an R.C.I.A. group leader uncovers simplistic fundamentalist contortions in an enquirer; or a primary teacher, preparing a class for their first experience of the sacrament of Reconciliation, is concerned about the children’s readiness to understand and experience God’s outpouring of forgiveness in the sacrament; or a secondary R.E. specialist is alarmed to discover that a child’s practice or concept of prayer has not changed since leaving primary school; or, finally, a parish priest or catechist, in charge of a first communion programme, is disheartened by the literalism and theological poverty of the parents. Sometimes the misunderstandings result in a good comic story to share with colleagues. Such stories can be simultaneously funny and depressing.

One recent encounter caused me to reflect on religious misunderstanding. It occurred when I attended a special-occasion Eucharist, celebrated in a retreat centre, at 5 o’clock on a Saturday afternoon. As we were queuing to go in, a woman in front of me (whom I did not know) turned round to ask: “Will this do us for tomorrow?”

I assumed that this woman, aware of her Sunday Mass obligation, was wondering whether a Mass at 5 o’clock on Saturday would count, or whether it was not a little too early. As she turned the question over in her mind, no doubt she thought that if there were some ruling on the matter, then she would know where she stood, and would also be aware of what she must do.

The late Sir William Golding, who died on 19 June 1993, was one of only four English writers to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was one of the greatest novelists in the years after the Second World War, for some the greatest. He was forty-two by the time his first and most famous novel Lord of Flies was published in 1954. He went on to write another ten novels culminating in Fire Down Below (1989), which was the final novel in the trilogy of a sea journey to Australia set in the early nineteenth century. The trilogy Rites of Passage, Close Quarters and Fire Down Below, was published in one volume in 1991 entitled To the Edge of the Earth and could be called the journey of modem man.

Golding’s second novel The Inheritors (1955) was his own favourite and the only one which he re-read. Critics regard it as his best novel, with some scholars regarding it as his most ‘perfect’ work. It complements Lord of the Flies, and the two novels together mark Golding’s ‘primitive period.’ “They deserve special reading as companion pieces.”

The Inheritors is a difficult novel and interest in Golding somewhat waned after its publication. By the time of his fourth novel Free Fall (1959) interest was reviving, and with Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors it forms a possible trilogy in which Golding explores the loss of human innocence and the consequent darkness of the human mind i.e. the emergence of evil, violence and cruelty.