Download A third Testament by Malcolm Muggeridge

A Third Testament: A Modern Pilgrim Explores the Spiritual Wanderings of
Augustine, Blake, Pascal, Tolstoy, Bonhoeffer, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky by
Malcolm Muggeridge, Orbis Books, 2004
In a dexterous feat of modesty, celebrated author Malcolm Muggeridge has succeeded in
making himself invisible in A Third Testament. He puts all his featured writers in the
center of the stage while he functions as the stagehand who manipulates the curtains to
reveal the spiritual insights of one author or another. Muggeridege himself is an
intellectually brilliant and a highly respected writer, but he highlights the thought of
others in this book
But like any good master of the stage, his handicraft is evident to the one who looks for
it. For instance, in his commentary on Pascal, Muggeridge writes, regarding Pascal’s
choice of keeping the Bible and St Augustine’s Confessions when he gave away all his
other books, that is was “a very wise choice.”
When Muggeridge inserts himself into the narrative, he keeps a low and humble profile.
When discussing William Blake, he qualifies his insight on Blake’s prediction of the
camera by adding that it is in his “opinion.” Support for his view, by the way, comes
from Blake’s words that we believe lies “when we see with, not through the eye.”
Another time Muggeridge acts as supporting cast to the main actors of his drama is when
he tells of Blake’s writing on the title page of Francis Bacon’s Essays. Muggeridge gives
us his thought on Blake’s negative assessment of the book by saying simply that he likes
Blake’s comment a great deal.
Only in the introduction does Muggeridge manifests mainly his own ideas. It is there that
he explains the uniting principle behind all of the thinkers he chose. Of course, the
individuals whom he chose speak volumes about what Muggeridge is trying to say. He
was astute enough to find the thread that binds these disparate men together. They all had
one aspect in common. Muggeridge describes their task as relating “their time to
eternity.” He says that from time to time in human history there is a need to call people
back to the real meaning of life. The call to reform happens when people think they can
do it all themselves, and do not realize or admit their utter dependence on God.
This is the role of the prophets in the Old Testament, for they were men who went against
the current to tell humankind what it did not want to hear. In the New Testament
Muggeridge says that God was his own prophet. And since then, Muggeridge proclaims,
“Between the fantasies of the ego and the truth of love, between the darkness of the will
and the light of the imagination, there will always be a need for a bridge and a prophetic
voice calling on us to cross it.”
Muggeridge’s World War II experience of participating in espionage activities for the
British Secret Service gave rise to his idea of portraying each of his chosen thinkers as
God’s spies. The territory these men were assigned to is being held or could possibly be
held in the future by God’s archenemy.
His first agent for God lived at a crucial time in the history of the Church and of the
world. St. Augustine of Hippo was a convert to Christianity who lived a dissolute life
before his conversion. When he came to be a Christian after many of years of his
mother’s prayer and soul searching by Augustine himself, he became a priest, and,
against his wishes, the Bishop of Hippo. As it turns out, this was fortunate because he
could exert his influence to keep the Church strong in a time of turbulence, when the
barbarians were at the door and finally in the house of Rome. Eventually the barbarians
arrived at the city walls of Hippo, and were entering as Augustine was dying. But his
writing lived on and flourished and helped the Church to flourish throughout the
succeeding ages.
Many centuries later Blaise Pascal was given his task, and it was to stem the tide of
godlessness, indulgence, and unlimited freedom that threatened the landscape in his time.
In Pascal’s time, the threat to truth was not the darkness of the Dark Ages, but the blazing
light of humans knowing too much and considering themselves to be gods. When God
called his name, Pascal wrote a magnificent apologia for the Christian faith and other
works to counteract the falsehoods of the age.
Dostoyevsky was a confirmed anti-Marxist in a time when it was dangerous to be against
the revolution. But, Muggeridge tells us, with an unerringly clear vision he was able to
discern “how the terrible pride and dynamism of godless man seeking to construct an
earthly paradise would infallibly prove destructive to themselves, their fellow human
beings, and ultimately to what we still call Christendom.”
A philosopher and a poet, Soren Kierkegaard and William Blake, are two more of
Muggeridge's post-biblical prophets. They were most probably not acquainted with each
other, though they were contemporaries for part of their lives. But they did share a high
concern with the socialism and consumerism that were emerging in their time. They also
were prescient in their awareness of the capability of science to do harm to the human
race. And Blaise Pascal was an eminent scientist who also looked ahead and saw that
science would, in the words of Muggeridge, “come to belong to man’s quest for power,
not truth.”
Dostoyevsky had a Christian view of life, and in the early years of the Communist regime
he was attacked for it. It was impossible to find his books at the time when Muggeridge
was in Moscow, in the thirties. Part of this condemnation stemmed from a speech
Dostoyevsky gave in 1880 when a statue of Pushkin was unveiled. On this important
occasion in Moscow, Dostoyevsky eloquently described the destiny of Russia, which was
to unite all men in a Christian brotherhood and by this means, not a Marxist one, end the
lack of equality and justice for those who are suffering.
Ironically, the Soviets eventually brought back Dostoyevsky’s books, but in order for
them to serve the Soviet cause, they were interpreted to seem to be in compatibility with
the Party Line, Muggeridge tells us, “by virtue of an amazing exercise in ideological
gymnastics.”
One wonders what Muggeridge would think of the fall of the Soviet Union and the
subsequent awakening of Christianity in Russia today. His hope is reflected in these
words, written, according to the copyright information, in 1983, “…somehow I knew
without a shadow of doubt that his [Dostoyevsky’s] vision of Christ’s gospel of love
triumphing over Marx’s gospel of power was certain, ultimately to be fulfilled.”
Tolstoy’s books, including Resurrection and War and Peace, also have a Christian point
of view. Muggeridge interviewed a man for the BBC television who was raised in the
Soviet Union. He sounded like a Christian, so Muggeridge asked him about that. The
man said he was baptized in secret, and said that Stalin erred by not banning Dostoyevsky
and Tolstoy in their efforts to rid the Communist country of Christianity.
Concerning another of his prophets, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Muggeridge wonders about
what this person who sacrificed his life so others could live in freedom, would think of
today’s world. He was killed just as the war was ending, initially jailed because he
participated in a plot to kill Hitler, and subsequently executed. At the Berlin Wall,
Muggeridge tries to envision Bonhoeffer’s thoughts if he had stood there, the barren east
on one side and the bloated west on the other.
Muggeridge’s prophet, William Blake, was a poet and an artist, but he was no romantic
dreamer. That came later in the Age of Romanticism. He had his eye absolutely fixed on
reality. He saw beyond the surface into the deeper reality of human life on earth. He
used the faculty of the imagination to be able to do this. Blake said, “The imagination is
not a state, it is human existence itself.” He remained true to his ideal of being a religious
man to the day of his death. During a life of adversity he avoided evil and was focused
on heaven. In the last hours of his life, he prayed with thankfulness that he didn’t have
money and status during his life to distract him from his vision of the Lamb of God as the
center of his life.
One of his poems quoted by Muggeridge is about the need to die to ourselves and put all
our hopes in God:
He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity’s sun rise.
As Muggeridge reminds us: “In a materialistic age like ours, nothing is real except what
is false. People believe in money, for instance, but not in God, whereas money is a
fantasy, but God is the living truth.”
Muggeridge compares Karl Marx and Soren Kierkegaard, two important thinkers of the
twentieth century. That Marx’s predictions of an earthly paradise turned out to be false
and the prophecies of Kierkegaard, based primarily on his intuitive imagination, have
happened to an amazing extent, is something no one would have predicted. For instance,
Kierkegaard was concerned that if humans lost their emphasis on God and the dignity of
the individual is lessened, people would come to rely on mass communication for how to
think. This has come to be the norm in our times. Can we not recognize our media in the
following quote of Kierkegaard’s? “On the whole the evil in the daily press consists in its
being calculated to make, if possible, the passing moment a thousand or ten thousand
times more inflated and important that it really is. But all moral elevation consists first
and foremost in being weaned from the momentary.”
One quality all of these prophets share is outstanding courage. A prophet needs to have
courage in order to stand up to the ways humans are turning away from God in their
times, and predict what will happen if these ways continue. For instance, it took courage
for Kierkegaard to declare that the natural sciences would become a problem for moral
thinking, as people try to find ethical answers by using the scientific methods of
measuring and experimenting.
All of Muggeridge’s prophets endured great hardships, chosen in the service of a greater
good. Kierkegaard, for one, spent every penny of his inheritance to have his writings
published, not for his glory but for the glory of God. He was scorned, endured loneliness,
and suffered bad health. He saw himself as an auditor for Christ, exposing lies where he
found them.
The greatest hardship Dostoyevsky underwent was his imprisonment in Russia after the
revolutionary group he met with was exposed by the secret police. He was sentenced to
be shot, and was given a lesser sentence of four years only as the rifles of the firing squad
were actually raised and ready to fire. His greatness was forged in the extreme harshness
of the prison conditions in the years that followed.
In the story of Raskolnikov, the hero in Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky shows that
redemption will come when suffering is accepted. The message of the world is opposed
to that. It says to avoid suffering at all costs. Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler shows the
ultimate futility of money, getting and losing money from the simple turn of a wheel. No
effort need be made; only pure chance determines the result. Regarding Dostoyevsky,
Muggeridge marvels at “how one man’s genius can, as it were, pick up all the strands of
an age, revealing its pattern….”
Leo Tolstoy was a prophet for Christianity in a time that desperately needed the Christian
message. He used the Gospels to spread his conviction about the doctrine of universal
love found there. Tolstoy’s great strength was that despite formidable obstacles he
believed that the teachings of Christ should be the guides for living, and he did his best to
carry out his beliefs. He knew full well that the perfect life called for in the Gospels is not
within the ability of man to attain on this earth. But it is in attempting to do so that
humans fulfill their destiny.
The book comes full circle with the life of Bonhoeffer. Just as Augustine’s death
occurred at the end of an empire and during the burning of a great city, so did
Bonhoeffer’s, who was killed by the Nazis as the Third Reich fell. As Hitler gained
power in the thirties, and the Nazi regime began its persecution of the Jews, Bonhoeffer
looked at the persecutions as an intentional assault on Christ Himself.
In prison for taking part in a plot to assassinate Hitler, Bonhoeffer wrote the powerful
classic, Letters and Papers from Prison. Bonhoeffer’s experience in his cell, Muggeridge
tells us, made him into a mystic and a martyr. Because of his sufferings, he was able to
bring hope to many. As he is prone to do, Muggeridge brings the time of Bonhoeffer
forward to the later half of the century. He sees the great price paid to rid the world of a
monster who endorsed euthanasia, among other evils. Muggeridge finds it ironic that
some are supporting euthanasia now after having paid that great price in the past.
Muggeridge sums up how writing about these post-biblical prophets affected him:
“It has made me grasp as never before that God has an inner strategic (as distinct from
tactical) purpose for His creation, thereby enabling me to see through the Theater of the
Absurd, which is what life seems to be, to the Theater of Fearful Symmetry, which is
what it is. Thus reality sorts itself out, like film coming into sync, and everything that
exists, from the tiniest atom to the illimitable universe in which our tiny earth revolves,
everything that happens, from the most trivial event to the most seemingly momentous,
makes one pattern, tells one story, is comprehended in one prayer: Thy will be done.”
Author Information
Malcolm Muggeridge
Thomas Howard has an excellent portrait of Muggeridge in this book, The Night is far
Spent. In his assessment, Howard hails Muggeridge for his courageous conversion to
Christianity and for his enthusiastic and compelling writing.
Muggeridge’s birth occurred at the turn of the last century in 1903. His life spans the
twentieth century; he died in 1990 in England. He received his education at Cambridge.
He began his writing career by covering such exotic places as Moscow, Cairo, and
Calcutta, as well as Washington D.C., as a foreign correspondent.
His life could have been the basis of a fascinating novel. As it turned out, he did write
the story of his life in two volumes and called it Chronicles of Wasted Time. It has been
highly praised by critics and readers alike. He worked at such disparate jobs as officer in
the British Intelligence Corps, editor of Punch, and rector of Edinburgh University. In a
media age, he appeared on television and wrote numerous articles. Another of his books,
Something Beautiful for God is a biography of Mother Teresa, and was instrumental in
introducing her and her work to the West. Other books he wrote include Confessions of a
20th Century Pilgrim, Jesus Rediscovered, and Christ and the Media.