Today, as secularization proceeds apace, and the “quiet revival” of Christianity turns out not to have been all it was jazzed up to be, we labor under all the horror of Good Friday — the loss of the good — but taste little of the hope. Ours is a world in which it seems that God is indeed dead, even as the devil carries on.

Few cultural texts have come closer to capturing this predicament than The Exorcist, William Friedkin’s classic horror film from 1973. The movie concerns priests, the devil, and God, and thus is an apposite rewatch over the Christian high holy days, which culminate on Easter Sunday.  The Exorcist puts its finger on a growing threat to the West: our consistent tendency to name evil, but not the good, a loss that is eroding us from within. 

In The Exorcist, Catholic priest Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) accidentally brings an Assyrian demon, Pazuzu, back from an archaeological dig in Nineveh, Iraq, and it possesses young Regan (Linda Blair). Regan’s distraught mother Chris (Ellen Burstyn) finally consults a local priest, Father Damien Karras (Jason Miller) — and is astonished to discover that even he is skeptical of demons. In the 1970s, priests weren’t what they used to be. 

More from this author

The West’s great infantile disorder

By susan pickard

This, it turns out, makes Karras an existentialist hero of our times. He is both a priest and a psychiatrist at Georgetown Medical School, and though he is losing his faith, he still has the sense of moral responsibility that accompanied it. He embodies a contemporary dilemma: we make commitments freely, as a matter of individual choice, yet in the absence of secure authority, those commitments feel anxious and fragile.

Indeed, like most of us, Karras straddles two worlds: an older world of fixed values presided over by legitimate authority — and a rational, materialist world, which, in the 1960s, and ’70s when the Exorcist was filmed, was fast turning into a therapeutic domain. The therapeutic approach of the “psy” disciplines (psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis) offers a softening of rational materialism, and performs a substitution of explanation for judgment. Instead of judging a person as “wicked,” these modalities will explain them as “unhappy” or “troubled.” They will ask: what wound or trauma accounts for this? This can be humane and often correct. But as explanation replaces judgment, the ability to name corruption, cruelty, and selfishness fades. We are left without the language that would help us identify what must be resisted.

This shows up clearly in The Exorcist, in which adversaries can be authoritatively demonic. Chris consults doctors and psychiatrists, who argue over the possibilities of central nervous disorders, temporal lobe epilepsy, lesions in Regan’s brain, and so on. All the while, the devil is gaining ground. He has the advantage of knowing what he is, long before others recognize the danger. 

The doctors never wise up: after consulting 80 experts, Chris is told by one doctor to seek an exorcism. This is not because said doctor believes in the Catholic faith and its rituals. But because Regan thinks she is possessed, the doctor reasons, an exorcism might work through auto-suggestion. This way, the old wisdom is folded seamlessly into the therapeutic culture, a process that obscures the moral and spiritual battle actually taking place.

Father Karras eventually changes his mind on the existence of demons and together with Father Merrin does battle for Regan’s soul. However, in the symbology of the film, he is a figure of doubt, wearing a medallion of Saint Joseph, the patron saint of “people in doubt.” In one sense, the film suggests that doubt, although a key aspect of our cultural mentality, is a fatal weakness when faced with evil. In a deeper sense, it captures our cultural ambiguity. Karras comes to accept evil but still doubts the good. The exorcism works, and the demon jumps from Regan to Karras, who then jumps to his death to end the possession. But we are never given any sure indication that his faith is restored. Pazuzu reveals himself but God does not.

It would be easy to treat such narratives as relics of a more superstitious age. And yet even in a culture that increasingly explains behavior through trauma and pathology, the language of evil has not disappeared. To be sure, we are more inclined to explain individuals than to judge them. But  at the level of systems, histories, and political enemies, we readily invoke evil. This is evident in official rhetoric — from Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” to George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” — as well as in the popular imagination, which has thrilled to panics over evil, including the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, the conspiracy theories of QAnon, and the Epstein mythos. Most recently there has been chatter that the Labubu dolls resemble Pazuzu, reviving fears of possession in an otherwise secular culture. 

We are never in doubt of what we are fighting against, but we rarely ask ourselves what we are fighting for.

The inability to answer this question lies at the heart of the exhaustion of the West, its crises of meaning and self-belief. The problem has been framed in terms of the decline of religion; it is, I suggest, less the need to believe in God than to believe in the good. By this, I mean the sense that there is something outside us — objectively — that sets a standard and demands to be seen and responded to. From the perspective of classical theism, the good is God, and ordinary goods are a participation in the higher Good. The Enlightenment retained part of this conviction, even as religious faith declined; moral life was still oriented toward truth, order, and hierarchy as external realities. What has changed more recently is not simply lack of belief in goodness, but the erosion of that orientation altogether. Without it, the existentialist emphasis on freedom, choice, and individual responsibility collapses into a shallow focus on success on the one hand, nihilism on the other.

In ancient Assyrian cosmology, figures such as Pazuzu occupied a strange and unstable position: they were lesser demons, invoked to ward off other, greater evils, and served a similar function as gargoyles or the “wrathful deities” in Buddhism. What is striking in Assyrian religion is not simply the proliferation of such forces, but the absence of any clear, unifying conception of the good. The result is a world structured around dangers, rather than purposes — a world, in other words, very much like our own. 

For us, this brings new threats. In The Exorcist, when Merrin finds the amulet of Pazuzu, he also finds nearby a Christian medallion of Saint Joseph, an echo of the one Karras wears. In older times, the smaller, named evils protected us from ultimate Evil; but when we doubt the existence of the opposing force of good, these small evils become dangerous in their own right. 

If the problem is not a lack of God, but a lack of the good, then we might turn to the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, who sought a way of recovering moral reality without restoring dogma. In her landmark text The Sovereignty of the Good, Murdoch didn’t advocate attempting to go back to the days of religious fervor; instead she located the good in the everyday benevolent actions of ordinary human beings, and the sense we have that “there is more than this” when we look compassionately at people. Such moments do not have to be grand. Indeed, she insisted that such insights must remain small, almost imperceptible, in order to not become theological. 

Murdoch referred to the good as something with a metaphysical position, but no fixed metaphysical form. It has no doctrine, but it can be perceived with a kind of disciplined attention in which we do not allow our egos, fears, and desires to blind us to reality. This is the opposite of the modern injunction to “be kind” and suspend judgment; judgments must be harder, sharper, and less self-flattering. 

Suggested reading

The Pope versus the populists

By Sohrab Ahmari

The good has slipped out of our conversations and our dramas; it goes unnamed. In The Exorcist, the frame of Christian theology allows the possibility of a literal triumph of God over Satan, by the film’s logic. But for secular audiences, the good in the film is glimpsed in small things, as Murdoch might have imagined it, and is easily missed against the backdrop of dramatic evil. We see it especially in the friendship between Karras and Father Joseph Dyer (played by an actual priest, the Rev. William O’Malley), who grasps Karras’s hand as he lies dying on the infamous Georgetown steps, offering both Last Rites (salvation, in the Catholic understanding) but also human comfort — the best we can ask for in a world without God. 

The concept of the good, could, in its own quiet way, prove revolutionary in our current civilizational crisis. The virtuous person, attuned to the good, Murdoch says, looks outward at others and at the world around her, not inward, at self. She is required to be truthful and view both others and herself as they are, not as she would like them to be. Such moral practice is a skill, rather than a set of rules, and it opposes the tendencies of modern therapeutic society and very much departs from today’s ethos of non-judgmental “kindness.” Murdoch believed such forms of seeing could “unwind” a long historical process that began with the Enlightenment and eventually “sundered” truth from virtue, returning us to the great classical insight that the two belong together — indeed, that the two are the same and thus convertible.

Is any of this possible in a world where we believe in “our own truth” instead of “the truth”?  Perhaps not, but if we cannot believe in the good, the unquestionable persistence of evil, both small and large, should goad us on. We know evil exists, and not only in the movies. The good does not announce itself so clearly. It has to be seen. And yet its presence is a story our culture continues to tell, even as it forgets how to name it, leaving no answer or consolation to our cry: Eli, Eli. . . .

We shared a taxi back to her home and, with a slightly fan-boy giddiness, I distinctly remember the thrill of being able to share with her my gratitude for the things she had written. Years later, I met her on a number of occasions in Oxford town centre when I had become a College Chaplain. She was suffering from Alzheimer’s and spent her days watching Teletubbies.

My grandmother, too, had Alzheimer’s at the time. She had a difficult life, rejected by the village she lived in for fraternising a little too intimately with German and Italian prisoners of war. For my grandmother, Alzheimer’s proved to be a release from her demons. For Murdoch, it felt more like a tragedy.

In church, we would sing a line from a popular hymn “re-clothe us in our rightful mind”. Iris Murdoch’s rightful mind was that of a writer and intellectual. For my grandmother, dancing around her nursing home with a newfound fondness for bright colours and fancy scarfs, it almost felt as if Alzheimer’s had given her a new lease of life. I will always think of this period of carefree abandon as my grandmother’s “rightful mind”. It wasn’t so for the great philosopher.

Further Reading

Who broke the Left?

By Giles Fraser

Murdoch would have turned 100 next week. Her great contribution to moral thought was to articulate the nature of our rightful mind as an orientation towards the Good. I capitalise the word Good because, like God, the Good was almost a person, a thing in itself, independent of our all-too-human way of seeing things. And, for her, the true journey of the human self – like the journey of the self in Plato’s famous allegory of the cave – was to travel from illusion to true reality. Unlike Plato, and more like the Christianity whose doctrines she found impossible literally to accept, this moral journey required what she called unselfing.

“In the moral life,” she wrote, “the enemy is the fat relentless ego.” A few decades earlier, the great Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple had written “the great aim of all true religion is to transfer the centre of interest from self to God”. Substitute the word Good for God, and that is Murdoch’s philosophy in a nutshell. In her novels and within her academic philosophy, Murdoch sought to describe exactly what this process looked like within real lives and for flawed characters like you and me.

The importance of this insight has to be understood against the background of the prevailing winds of academic philosophy of the time. Much of Oxford philosophy had abandoned the idea that goodness was a challenge for the self, a life’s work to get beyond the constantly nagging, insistent demands of the “fat relentless ego”.

Further Reading

How Parliament disdains the people

By Giles Fraser

Utilitarianism, partly designed as a moral system that had no need of God, sought to make the moral life into a kind of calculation, an attempt to establish what the best decision might be in particular circumstances. Though there are various formulations, roughly speaking a decision is good if it maximises the sum total of pleasure (or utility) in the world. There is nothing here that speaks of the reconstruction of the self.

Alternatively, the existentialists sought to describe a moral life in which being true to one’s self – being authentic and thus rejecting the demands of social conformity – was its defining feature. Here the task is to create by will and live more fully within one’s ‘true self’ (whatever that is), rather than seek to overcome it. Murdoch had no time for any of these positions.

Murdoch’s novels often describe human beings caught up in ever descending, ever narrowing cycles of self-absorption, of people trapped within their own selfishness. These are people who collapse in on themselves, crushed by inward pressure of their own egos. The ego functioned, for her, as a kind of Freudian version of the Christian idea of original sin. And release from its bondage required a movement outwards, towards others.

Further Reading

How moral is mockery?

By Giles Fraser

This unselfing could be prompted by the needs of other people and also – unlike for Plato – by art. Looking at a work of art demands attention, an important concept in her moral vocabulary. It requires that one allows the work of art the time and the intellectual space to reveal itself on its own terms.

One of the proudest moments as a parent was when my eldest daughter returned home from art school with her first tattoo. Most middle-class parents tend to go spare at this discovery. But my daughter had chosen well. Inked on her arm were words from one of Murdoch’s favourite plays, The Tempest, spoken by Prospero to his daughter: “What see’est thou else.”

The demand to look again, and look deeper were, for Murdoch, as essential to the moral enterprise as they were to the artistic enterprise. It is attention to that which is other – to other people, art etc – that leads us out of the cave-like labyrinth of the self and towards the true reality of the sun, the Good. And this attention needs to be schooled. As Oxford philosopher Anil Gomes rightly put it: “A talented botanist, for instance, sees more in a field of wild flowers than a bored urban walker.”

Further Reading

On Twitter, I too become an arse

By Giles Fraser

Likewise, with people. Murdoch’s novels are a study in attention towards flawed humanity, schooled over hours of watching and listening.

And finally, attention is redemptive. In The Sovereignty of Good, she gives the example of looking out of the window, “brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige”, when all of a sudden a hovering kestrel comes into view. All at once, everything changes. The centre of attention is shifted from self to other, to a perception of reality as something other than oneself. And with this shift, the pain of self-regard is momentarily lifted. The gain of morality, of unselfing, is that one is released from one’s demons. One finds one’s rightful mind.

Yes, there are things to quarrel with about Murdoch’s moral vision. For my money, hers is located a little too parochially within the moral concerns of bourgeois, North Oxford academia. Murdoch rarely faces the effects of, for instance, crushing poverty upon the trajectory of unselfing; she’s not always sufficiently aware that there are those for whom the circumstances of their lives mean that their self needs self-protecting, cradling, from the ravages of chance and fate.

I also think she underestimates the role that something like church-going has in the formation of our moral sensibilities. Attention requires liturgies, the discipline of constant practise, mini-rehearsals of organised goodness. Going to the art gallery and the theatre, the whole structure of university life – these things don’t do it for most people.

Further Reading

Jesus was a ‘somewhere’. Paul was an 'anywhere'

By Giles Fraser

But these are minor cavils when set against the current and diminished state of moral thought, with its widespread and uncritical acceptable of rights and law as being able to do most of the heavy lifting of moral purpose – see the brilliant John Gray article published here last week. None of these set the self the same sort of challenge that Murdoch proposes. Nor do they offer the increasingly abandoned idea that morality has some sort of redemptive effect.

Iris Murdoch came closest to offering a moral world view for a post-religious world with something of the same dense moral texture of the Christianity she rejected. Though personally, I prefer the real thing. “Reclothe us in our rightful mind” – taken from the hymn, Dear Lord and Father of Mankind – goes on:

“Drop they still dews of quietness
Till all our strivings cease;
Take from out souls the strain and stress,
And let our ordered lives confess,
The beauty of thy peace,
The beauty of thy peace.

Breathe through the heats of our desire
Your coolness and your balm.
Let sense be dumb, let flesh retire,
Speak through the earthquake, wind and fire,
O still small voice of calm.
O still small voice of calm!”

We are back to the kestrel again. This is the promise held out by the sovereignty of the Good. The redemptive power of the transference of interest from self to reality. But it is expressed more poetically, more powerfully, more universally – I believe – by the sovereignty of God.