Resurrected writers: Muggeridge

The dead still speak:

An occasional series by Maxwell Ryan

T

he trouble with many contemporary Christians is that they’re so intellectually locked into their time frame. They never seem to have heard of, let alone read, authors who were giants in their time and whose elegant and fiery prose still stirs the imagination, informs the mind and fires passion. For intellectual rigour, for clarity of thought, for a well-turned phrase that says it just right – read the old authors, and some who are not that old.

In this brief essay I have in mind Malcolm Muggeridge, colloquially known as “Saint Mugg” by his admirers, of whom there were, and are, many. He was a British journalist, author, satirist, media personality, soldier-spy and Christian scholar whose dates are March 24, 1903 – November 14, 1990. Muggeridge was born in Croydon, England, into a highly political middle class home where the faith was socialism.

In his early years he was infatuated with communism, and in the 1930s was Moscow correspondent for the left-leaning Manchester Guardian. A turning point in his view of communism came as he witnessed the Ukrainian famine (deliberately initiated by Stalin). He wrote truthfully about the death and devastation caused by the famine. And for this he was pilloried by his friends, most of who were fashionably leftwing. Never again would he view communism as a panacea for the ills of the world.

As an intellectual gadfly, bon vivant and rising literary luminary, Muggeridge eschewed Christianity as a crutch for those who were weak and intellectually inferior. He made his living with words, as a newspaper editor in India, correspondent in Washington and later as editor of Punch, the well-known British satirical magazine. He served in the British intelligence corps during World War II. His well honed wit and mastery of language ensured him many supporters and detractors as a popular radio and TV commentator and writer on the current scene.

Decisive in his later embrace of the hitherto despised Christianity was his friendship with Mother Teresa, whom he interviewed for a TV documentary, Something beautiful for God, and who was the subject of a book by the same name that he wrote. In reflecting on his conversion, he wrote in Confessions of a Twentieth Century Pilgrim: “What, then, is conversion?… Some, like the Apostle Paul, have a Damascus Road experience… No such experience has been vouchsafed me; I have just stumbled on, like Bunyan’s pilgrim, falling in the Slough Despond, locked up in Doubting Castle, terrified at passing through the Valley of the Shadow of Death; from time to time, by God’s mercy, relieved of my burden of sin, but only, alas, soon to acquire it again.”

Having professed publicly to being an agnostic for most of his life, he found his Christian voice, publishing Jesus Rediscovered in 1969, a collection of essays, articles and sermons on faith. It became a best seller. Jesus: The Man Who Lives followed in 1976, a more substantial work describing the gospel in his own words. In A Third Testament, he profiles seven spiritual thinkers, or God’s Spies as he called them, who influenced his life: Augustine of Hippo, William Blake, Blaise Pascal, Leo Tolstoy, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Søren Kierkegaard and Fyodor Dostoevsky. In this period he also produced several important BBC documentaries with a religious theme, including In the Footsteps of St. Paul.

In 1982, he surprised many people by converting to Roman Catholicism at the age of 79 along with his wife, Kitty. This was largely due to the influence of Mother Teresa. His last book was Conversion, published in 1988 describes his life as a 20th century pilgrimage - a spiritual journey. He revealed that he was not a quiescent Roman Catholic when he wrote, “The more enchanted I become with the person and teaching of Christ the farther away I feel from all institutional Christianity – especially this particular institution [the Catholic Church] which is now racing at breakneck speed to reproduce all the follies and fatuities of Protestantism, and will surely before long arrive at the same plight, with crazed clergy, empty churches and doctrinal confusion.” Wrote one Catholic priest in response, “The plain fact is that we do not find elderly journalists with a gift of invective useful allies in presenting Christian standards.”

Muggeridge was a controversial figure and was widely known as a drinker, heavy smoker and womanizer in earlier life. However, his best work came as a result of finding his faith late in life, eloquently expressed both in broadcast and in writing, and fighting energetically on moral issues. From his book, Jesus: The Man Who Lives, he says, “If the greatest of all, Incarnate God, chooses to be the servant of all, who would wish to be the master?”

So, what is the value in discovering, or re-discovering this writer who in his later years was known by many as the successor to C. S. Lewis? If there is a way to be delighted, challenged and intoxicated by the sheer beauty of language it is to read Muggeridge, who wrote at least 20 books and countless articles. Even in his pre-Christian days his writings reveal a wordsmith whose descriptions remain in the memory even when his conclusions may be rejected. Below is a list of his books, many of which are being republished by The Malcolm Muggeridge Society.

So, where to start? If you’re interested in contemporary ideas, I would suggest Christ and the media. If it’s the man himself, then try his two volume autobiography Chronicles of wasted time. A well-honed mix of theology and biblical reflection make Jesus rediscovered the book to inform and challenge you. Thoughtful reading! It will be worth the time. And who knows what God will say through this prophet who “yet being dead, still speaks.”

• Three flats: a play in three acts (1931)
• Winter in Moscow (1934)
• The Earnest Atheist. A study of Samuel Butler, London : Eyre & Spottiswoode (1936)
• The Thirties, 1930-1940, in Great Britain (1940, 1989)
• Affairs of the heart (1949)
• Tread softly for you tread on my jokes (1966)
• Jesus Rediscovered (1969)
• Jesus: The Man Who Lives (1976)
• Conversion: The Spiritual Journey of a Twentieth Century Pilgrim (1988,2005)
• Something Beautiful for God (1971)
• In a valley of this restless mind (1978)
• A Third Testament: A Modern Pilgrim Explores the Spiritual Wanderings of Augustine, Blake, Pascal, Tolstoy, Bonhoeffer, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky (1976, 2002)
• Christ and the Media (1977)
• Chronicles of Wasted Time: An Autobiography (1972, 2006)
• The End of Christendom (1980)
• Jesus, the man who lives (1975)
• Like it was: The diaries of Malcolm Muggeridge (1981)
• Picture Palace (1934, 1987)
• Paul, envoy extraordinary (1972) with Alec Vidler

Writer: Lieut.-Colonel Maxwell Ryan is a former Editor in Chief in Canada and the UK. In retirement he is a part-time chaplain in a Salvation Army hospital in Winnipeg, Canada and a copy editor of theRubicon.

2 Comments to Resurrected writers: Muggeridge

1. Dear Colonel Ryan:

   Your timing couldn’t be better . Reading John Norton’s recent post made me think Muggeridge. The first time I heard of him was on CBC TV about 40 years ago when he moved to Saltspring Island on Canada’s West Coast. What presence!

   Part of what made him so memorable was his being such a distinctive character with clear convictions. Hitchens and Dawkins are clever fellows and Hitchens is not lacking in personality, but neither have his fire…and by definition they couldn’t!

   M.M. was awfully brilliant but it’s important (and reassuring to me) to remember that no-one is saved or lost on intellect alone.

   Thanks so much,

   Andrea
Andrea 614 Regent on April 23rd, 2007

2. Maxwell:

   Thanks for this terrific summary of one of my heroes.

   As a recalcitrant teen in the UK during the 1970’s I would nevertheless revel at the wit and repartee of Malcolm Muggeridge dissecting and debunking numerous secular critics on the BBC.

   This is my favorite quote - one that captures his penchant for evocative language, in this case musing the distinctly bleak future of Western Civilization:

   “So the final conclusion would seem to be that whereas other civilizations had been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions and providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense. Thus did Western man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania; himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down. And having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer, until at last, having educated himself into imbecility and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over, a weary, battered old brontosaurus, and became extinct.”

   Magnificent Malcolm!
Richard Munn on April 24th, 2007

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