The Time of the Angels was heavily influenced by Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and likewise contrasts the Apollonian world of reason, clarity and morality with the Dionysian realm of irrationality, emotionalism and formlessness. Murdoch portrays this conflict in her characterisations of the two male protagonists, Marcus Fisher, a headmaster who is a Platonist and writer of a Nietzschean-style treatise on moral philosophy entitled “Morality in a World without God” (19), and his older brother Carel Fisher, an Anglican cleric who professes “to be the priest of no God” (182). In this novel, Murdoch plays out the central concern of her moral philosophy, namely the search for meaning in a world without God. Ostensibly echoing Carel’s ontological stance, Murdoch states in The Sovereignty of Good (1967) that “there is, in my view, no God in...
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Citation: Grimshaw, Tammy. "The Time of the Angels". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 09 February 2004 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=10025, accessed 13 December 2025.]
