Faith & Spirit Quote by Iris Murdoch

Murdoch frames art not as a noble calling but as a last, sly maneuver: the soul’s escape hatch when the alternatives are submission, silence, or spiritual exposure. “Final cunning” is doing a lot of work. It flatters art as ingenuity while also accusing it of evasiveness. The line suggests that creativity can be less revelation than misdirection - a way of staying busy, staying clever, staying human, so we don’t have to meet the “gods” head-on.

Those gods aren’t just literal deities. In Murdoch’s moral universe they read as whatever stands beyond our preferences: truth, death, contingency, the reality of other people, the demand to be unselfish. Art becomes the gorgeous detour around that demand. Notice how “would rather do anything” lands with a grim humor: the soul will build cathedrals, write epics, fall in love with its own symbols - anything to avoid the raw confrontation with what cannot be mastered.

The subtext is pointedly modern. In a secular age, “the gods” return as ethical and metaphysical pressures we can’t quite name but can’t entirely shrug off. Murdoch, a novelist steeped in philosophy, is also needling the romantic myth that art automatically redeems. Art can be a discipline of attention, yes; it can also be a highbrow form of procrastination, a sanctified way to keep control.

That tension is why the sentence works: it praises art’s power while denying it innocence, making beauty feel like both offering and alibi.