Uncertain Pilgrim

Some years ago in the Bangkok YMCA restaurant a couple who were deep in conversation passed my table on their way out. I caught only one sentence, spoken by the man in Antipodean English. “It was inhabited,” he said slowly, “by a rather disreputable brand of angel.” Nothing else, just those words as he and his companion walked out of my life, leaving an almost unbearable curiosity about the context of that remarkable statement.

I had all but forgotten the incident, but it was recalled unexpectedly this year when I renewed acquaintance with Malcolm Muggeridge’s Jesus Rediscovered (Doubleday, 1969). In the foreword the author employs the familiar device of appearing to repudiate criticism by simply reporting it. “Old enemies,” he writes, “dwell on the obscenity of aging lechers that lash out resentfully at sensual pleasures they can no longer enjoy.” (Mr. Muggeridge, it should be said, is a great national thumper of the pornographic legions in Britain.)

Had I at last, then, encountered a representative of the angelic disreputable? Muggeridge’s career has been, in the language of genteel euphemism, “colorful.” He makes no secret of it, and from his repetition of the fact in sundry places and divers manners may not feel totally crushed by memory of a wild and wayward past. That no one will deny how impressively equipped he is for a telling sermon on the Prodigal Son is now further confirmed by publication of the first volume of his biography: Chronicles of Wasted Years: The Green Stick (Collins).

He was born seventy years ago in Croydon, near London. His father was an enthusiastic socialist who was latterly a member of parliament. Malcolm graduated at Cambridge, taught in Egypt and India, reported for the Manchester Guardian, married into the first family of Fabianism, sought utopia by flight to Moscow only to be disillusioned and to see fading the dream of the kingdom of heaven on earth (“one always … underestimates the staying power of human folly”).

It soon becomes apparent that he likes John’s Gospel, Paul’s Epistles, Augustine, Francis, Bunyan, Blake, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Bonhoeffer, and Simone Weil. While it may be unkind to suggest that such a list is possible only through a certain selectivity, particularly in approaching the Pauline Epistles, one might learn more about Muggeridge by gathering together his dislikes—and by noting that none of them is older than the latter half of the nineteenth century. They include Freud, D. H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell, Churchill, Picasso, Martin Luther King, Christiaan Barnard, the former bishop of Woolwich, Eleanor Roosevelt, Women’s Lib, family planning—and “moderate men of all shades of opinion.”

Institutional Christianity also Muggeridge detests, with its “unspeakable clergymen twanging electric guitars” and its total doctrinal confusion. Rome has surrendered to the forces of scientific materialism at the very time they were about to withdraw in disarray. Mixed-up leaders of the Protestant establishment are “drivelling away their lives in pursuit of a phantom kingdom of heaven on earth.”

As for the ecumenical movement, Muggeridge once told a friend of mine, it provoked a vivid childhood memory of “about twenty people reeling out of the pub door. They all had their arms round each other’s shoulders, because if they didn’t they would fall down.” On the same occasion he suggested that revival was more likely to happen in Russia than in America, “where the terrific emphasis on materialism has become absolutely grafted onto the Christian churches.” Over and over in both books mentioned above he reiterates Paul: “To be carnally minded is death, to be spiritually minded is life and peace.”

The Great Society is and always was a myth. The world abounds in ramshackle status quos. The human race today is united not by the Internationale but by Thomas Cook and the American Express, with tourism a more dynamic force than revolution. Yet elsewhere we find Muggeridge too pessimistic to be a travel agent: “Wherever the Americans are they create Communism, and wherever the Communists are they create anti-Communists.”

For all his own world-rejecting, Muggeridge is indifferent to many orthodox Christian doctrines such as the Virgin Birth, the Trinity, and the Resurrection. “Did You live and die and rise from the dead as they say? Who knows, or, for that matter, cares?” Having breezily acquitted himself of responsibility by admitting he is a “theological ignoramus” (a ploy used by C. S. Lewis to serve a better end), he lets go on theological themes with that astounding dogmatism usually found only in agnostics. And uncertain whether he is indeed a Christian, he is unfettered by Christian restraint in sneering, mocking, and pointedly pitying all those who disagree with him, whether Christians or not. But didn’t one of the Pauline Epistles he professes to admire exhort to salt-seasoned speech and wise conduct toward outsiders?

This is not to say that his barbs are always misdirected or undeserved, as his wicked eye exposes our pretensions and even our appalling jargon. Many a rueful smile will greet his mention of a Methodist minister’s public prayer about one of his listeners who had fractured a limb: “Lord, we offer unto thee Miss Ogilvie’s leg.…”

The one consistent thread Muggeridge finds running through the whole of his life is that he has always been a stranger in this world, which is a mere staging post on the journey home. “The only ultimate disaster that can befall us,” he says, “is to feel ourselves at home here on earth.” Altogether, his writings and addresses are a bewildering hotchpotch. They will provoke to thought, but chiefly they will entertain. No one can touch Muggeridge’s brilliance in tearing down the tinsel walls of Vanity Fair and exposing the tricks of the trade.

But to do that and little more is to fall prey to that petrifying cynicism not uncommonly found in professional escorters of words into print. When (to paraphrase Muggeridge) the motley is taken off, make-up washed away, studio lights extinguished, sound effects silenced, cameras put to sleep—what then? The haunting conviction of homelessness leading to pursuit of a “still small voice” whose origin is ill defined and whose message is uncertain? Is this really all?

Meanwhile Mr. Muggeridge gamely makes the best of it. No British religious TV discussion is complete without that arrogant drawl as he clobbers the spirit of the present age. He prides himself on being a loner, nobody’s man. Perhaps that is the key to his constant repetition of sentences like “God comes padding after me like a Hound of Heaven.” A little less Francis Thompson and a little more study of John’s Gospel, professedly his favorite, would bring that pursuit to a happy conclusion.

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