Henry and Cato by Iris Murdoch Read Free Book Online

vanity, not a shadow of trickery or falsehood, but what this showed was how vastly perfectible human beings were after all. This Jesus was an old friend, a great saint whom he had often discussed with his father, as between them they had dissected Christianity, sorting out good from bad, truth from illusion. Christ was a good man. But the superstition, the symbolism, the hoax: Cato had perfectly understood, had studied it all with sympathy, had seen exactly why it happened and why it appealed to him and why it could never really attract him or even, profoundly, interest him. As a historian he was more interested in Islam.
    Then suddenly, with no warning and with a sense of immense barriers dissolving in the mind, he had tripped and stumbled into reality. Suddenly, with faculties which he had not been aware of, he experienced God. All that he had ‘known’ before now seemed a shadow land through which he had passed into the real world, into a form of being which indeed he did not ‘know’ because he lived it and was one with it. He entered quite quietly into a sort of white joy, as if he had not only emerged from the cave, but was looking at the Sun and finding that it was easy to look at, and that all was white and pure and not dazzling, not extreme, but gentle and complete, and that everything was there, kept safe and pulsating silently inside the circle of the Sun.
    And what was so strange too was that this new grasp of being came to him quite clearly identified as an experience of the Trinity, the Trinity was the Sun, so white and complete and when you looked straight at it so thrillingly alive and gentle. Of course Cato knew all about this strange doctrine, he had many times discussed it spiritedly and jocularly. Now it was present to him not as an idea but as reality, as the whole of reality, with an invasion of spirit which seemed totally alien to his ‘personality’ as he had known it before, but which became the very selfness of his self. This selfness partook of the Oneness of Christ with Father and with Spirit. How the Trinity was One, and how this Oneness was the law of all being, the law of nature, the electrical universal expression of love, he now saw with the opened eyes of the soul, and resting as he had never rested before he let this indubitable vision gather him into its silent power.
    In retrospect Cato found it difficult to connect these revelations with the ordinary history of times and places. He was doing some post-graduate work, writing a thesis on some aspects of eighteenth-century Russian history, at the provincial university where he had been a student, and looking out for a job. He had been at home that summer, staying amicably with his father, playing tennis with Colette. He had been tepidly in love and had had two tepid love affairs, now fortunately over. He was perfectly happy and unanxious and unafraid. Why then this visitation? Perhaps this animal happiness had led him to lay down the weapons of sharp egoism which protect the soul against God? Or perhaps it was itself a first automatic gleam reflected from the joy to come. His ‘conversion’ did not arise out of spiritual anguish, misery, extremity or any pressing need for transcendent consolation. He had been alone a great deal, walking in the summer heat, sitting beside rivers and watching dragon-flies, swimming naked in lonely flower-girt pools. He had been happy with the happiness of youth and innocence and intellectual self-satisfaction and infinite possibility. He was healthy, active, robust, successful in mind and body. And then—he had found, breathless with wonder and almost a spectator of himself, that this earthly joy was being steadily and entirely and quite independently of his will transformed into a heavenly joy.
    Cato never, at that time or later, dignified these happenings with any grand name, such as ‘mystical experiences’. What he had learnt was that all was mystical. He did not