Nuns and Soldiers by Iris Murdoch Page A

because everything was so provisional and moved so fast, and other people were behaving quite as wildly as she was. She felt that she was living at an accelerated speed through a whole era, a long period of time during which she was even growing old.
    When the era came to an end and she saw her great choice looming ahead she felt it was determined by her earlier rather than by her later life. She had not (as some of her friends believed) half accidentally bundled herself into solitude from disgust at too much society. Rather that had been a teaching, a way laid down perhaps from the start. She felt no surprise at what she was, when the time came, bound to do. She had been shown the world, and what in the world she herself was. She did not later judge her sins therein too harshly. She felt no morbid guilt. Of the ‘bad habits’ which she duly dropped some considerable time (for it was not easy to get in) before she entered the order, relations with the other sex were by far the easiest to surrender. She had perceived a contrast and had chosen with knowledge what she had earlier valued by instinct.
    When she was being converted she was already purposing to be a religious. Conversion could have, for her, no other outcome. Naïvely at the start, and later out of a deep personal reflection, she had thought of her goal, any goal which at that stage concerned her, in modest terms. She was giving her life for a quiet conscience. A fugitive and cloistered virtue was better than none. She would regain her innocence and keep it under lock and key. Innocence was then the form under which God appeared to her. She wanted to be eternally possessed of a quiet mind, in a life of enclosed simplicity. She wanted to be independent of worldly thoughts, her own and those of others, to reach a certain level where she could float free. She did not, at the start, think clearly of ‘goodness’ or ‘holiness’ as a visible goal. She took to a fervent belief in a personal God, a personal Saviour, with an ease which took her friends’ breath away. All these things, the flight, the inevitable refuge, the redemption, were mingled in her mind. She felt both the distance of God, and the reality of the magnetic bond that compelled her to Him. The idea of holiness, of becoming good in some more positive sense, naturally gained power in her mind in the earlier years in the convent. As Gertrude had said, her order was not one of the most intellectual, and as Gertrude had hinted, this had been a deliberate choice. Clever Anne Cavidge, in her desperate flight from the world, had shrewdly decided to make the sacrifice of the intellect as early and as irrevocably as possible. Of course there were ‘studies’. She was marked out to be a teacher and became a highly respected one. But there were intellectual achievements in which she took care to be no longer interested. That was not for her the direction in which salvation lay. The Aristotelian philosophy she was required to teach was simplified and brittle, and in so far as she was ever tempted to enlarge it the atmosphere was against her, and the talents of her pupils not suited to metaphysical speculation. Holiness not cleverness was the path. But this path, some while after it became real to her as a sense of direction, began to fill Anne with strange doubts, doubts which were however not directly connected with her ‘defection’. Her instincts and intuitions had begun quietly to point her back towards her earlier and simpler objectives, simplicity, innocence, a kind of negative humility which did not aspire to the name of goodness.
    That the concept of a personal God began to seem to her more and more problematic did not too much dismay her. She lived as a member of a small mutually tacit ‘intelligentsia’ among those of simpler faith, a faith which she and her like refrained from disturbing. ‘The clever ones’ looked into each others’ eyes and said, on the whole, little, certainly less than