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Signs of the Times Australia / NZ edition — lifestyle, health, relationships, culture, spirituality, people — published since 1886 |
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Signs of the Times Australia / NZ edition — lifestyle, health, relationships, culture, spirituality, people — published since 1886 |
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Malcolm Muggeridge, described in the subtitle of A Third Testament as a “modern pilgrim,” was a well-known British commentator and writer who converted to Catholicism toward the end of his life. The text of this book borrows from his BBC television series on the seven spiritual wanderers—Blake, Augustine, Pascal, Tolstoy, Bonhoeffer, Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky. Although written in the late 1970s, it is still fresh today, and Plough Publishing House now offers it in a neat, updated edition. Like Robert Hughes, Muggeridge is critical yet energetic. The fact that he is writing toward the end of his long life gives him insight and empathy, in addition to creating, at times amusingly, the tone of a grumpy old man.
Looking for a thread with which to link his subjects, Muggeridge suggests they were all spies for God, and that the role of each was to “relate their time to eternity”—in other words, like the Old Testament prophets, they recognised where humanity was going wrong and called us back to God. As author Annie Dillard has written, pointing to the example of King Josiah discovering the lost Scriptures in a temple spring clean, we need prophets in every generation, as each generation needs to “remember” God and clean up their act.
Blaise Pascal, himself a gifted scientist, railed against the self-indulgence of “godless men of science” and insisted that the illuminations of science should point to the Creator. The poet and illustrator William Blake, who lived through the American and French Revolutions, warned against casting God aside in favour of new political ideologies.
Of course, like a spy, being a prophet is dangerous work. Prophets are never received well by earthly rulers. But the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky and Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer both found in the misery of prison their most profound spiritual experiences.
Muggeridge points out the absurdity of contemporary Western thinking that we can be spiritually rich in the absence of worldly riches. Dostoevsky was imprisoned for revolutionary activity, and Muggeridge describes the thrill of narrating for the BBC series in a Moscow street during the Communist era, quoting an anti-Marxist speech by Dostoevsky.
Strange though, that Dostoevsky’s works of fiction, along with Tolstoy’s, were not banned in the USSR. They make a compelling case for Christianity. Using the disguise of literature, they subverted the regime that put them on pedestals as giants of Russian culture.
Profound messages can be disguised by seeming madness too. Think of John the Baptist looking like something the cat dragged in. The biographer Peter Ackroyd paints a picture of William Blake as a radical eccentric visited by visions. Indeed, he was, but Muggeridge suggests we in current Western society are in no position to judge Blake as mad, what with our embrace of worldly riches over the spiritual, not to mention our fantasies of humanistic utopias after a century of horrific warfare.
Muggeridge delights in describing the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard roaming the streets in ill-fitting clothes at war with himself, but then contrasts what Muggeridge calls the “science” of Marx, that has amounted to little, and the “imagination” of Kierkegaard, that has accurately predicted the West’s descent into mind-numbing sensuality and nihilism.
We may fear that Christianity is no longer dominant in our own society. But throughout human history, mainstream society has always turned away from God. We can be inspired by Muggeridge’s seven, who each had their flaws and struggles in their faith but who remind us that when we sing “onward Christian soldiers,” we’re singing not about defending a fort but about moving into enemy territory.
A Third Testament, by Malcolm Muggeridge,
Orbis Books, 2004.
Extract from Signs of the Times, September 2004 .
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