Malcolm Muggeridge: Apostle of Experience

If I am going to take some time to describe some of God’s Spies, it seems only fitting that I should begin, not just with the man who inspired me to do so, but with a man who served, not only as one of God’s spies on earth, but as a very real spy in very human terms, having been involved, during World War II, in espionage while serving with MI6, the British Secret Service.

In the case of Malcolm Muggeridge, there is something refreshingly concrete to the analogy.

Anyone familiar with Muggeridge’s faith or politics later in life—that is, after he became famous—is surely surprised to discover that he who was destined to provide a bold voice to the cause of conservative morality; who used the pulpit of the media to rail against the futile efforts of men, was raised into an environment of pure, unrepentant socialism. Malcolm’ father, Henry, was one of the founders of London’s Fabian Society—a group of wealthy Londoners who were sympathetic to communistic ideals—and a Member of Parliament for the Labour Party (when that still meant something).

It is worth noting, of course, that this was a time before the horrors of these utopian dreams, put into practice, was really known. There may have been debate over whether the tenets of communism were really ideal or not, but the concept had not yet been linked to the great human evils that became inevitable under such a system; even a critic of communism would have found it difficult to believe that the system, devoted to equality, would lead, not just to great inequality, but to the death of millions.

Muggeridge was raised to believe that man was imperfect simply because he hadn’t yet done enough to save himself; he was raised to believe that human societies could, with the right laws, create a true earthly utopia. He came to believe in these things just as others come to believe in the Virgin Birth. In fact, he was sufficiently devoted to socialist ideals that, after discovering a passion for writing, he obtained a position at the Manchester Guardian—an anti-bourgeois paper devoted to the cause of the worker—and soon enough married Kitty Dobbs, a niece of Beatrice Webb (one of Britain’s premier socialists). Their communist sympathies led the young Muggeridge family, in 1932, to depart the evils of British capitalism and join the pilgrimage of mainstream journalists to Moscow, where he sought to inform the world of the glories of the Communist revolution.

The glories of Communism were not, of course, as evident as many had hoped. Though many journalists allowed themselves to be deluded by the Russian Politburo into thinking that present horrors were only temporary, Muggeridge’s disillusionment was almost immediate, as no amount of government control or censorship could keep him from noticing the truth of the bread lines or the famine spreading across the country, driven by the control of the Communist stormtroopers. After escaping the terrors of Russia, Muggeridge dramaticized what he found in Russia through his novel Winter in Moscow, which followed a group of journalists who allow themselves to ignore the horrors of Russia—it was as much an indictment of western journalism as it was the Soviet regime, and as a result it was practically unpublishable.

The failures of Communism—man’s greatest attempt at building a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth—left Muggeridge, as World War II approached, in a state of despair. He had traveled the world, from Moscow to India to Cairo, but had found no means of fulfillment, either for himself or for humanity. What he had not found in Communism, he now sought in war. Though he was a bit older than most recruits, which nearly prevented his enlistment, in the end he was accepted into the Secret Service and was shipped off to Lourenco Marques, Mozambique, a post that allowed him to start a new life, to live as a stranger, to practice espionage. And though life in Mozambique carried many new adventures and experiences, Muggeridge was led him to such depths of despair that, in what would be another defining moment of his life, he attempted suicide.

“One particular night,” he wrote in the second volume of his autobiography, Chronicles of Wasted Time, “after returning home, I lay on my bed full of stale liquor and despair; alone in the house, and, as it seemed, utterly alone, not just in Lournco Marques, in Africa, in the world. Alone in the universe, in eternity, with no glimmer of light in the prevailing blackness; no human voice I could hope to hear, or human heart I could hope to reach; no God to whom I could turn, or Savior to take my hand. Elsewhere, on battlefields men were killing and dying. I envied them; it was a solution and a solace of sorts. After all, the only bearable thing about war is the killing and the dying. That is its point. In the Blitz, with, as I thought, London falling about my ears, I had felt a kind of contentment; here in this remote, forgotten corner of the world, I fell into the final abyss of despair. Deprived of war’s only solace—death, given and received—it came into my mind that there was, after all, one death I could still procure. My own. I decided to kill myself.”

Muggeridge writes of swimming out into the ocean in an attempt to be swept away by the tide in order to drown in the Indian Ocean, never to be discovered. He swims far out, ready to do the deed, when suddenly he makes the mistake of looking back, of seeing the lights of town. “They were the lights of the world; they were the lights of my home, my habitat, where I belonged. I must reach them. There followed an overwhelming joy such as I had never experienced before; an ecstasy. In some mysterious way it became clear to me that there was no darkness, only the possibility of losing sight of a light which shone eternally; that our clumsy appetites are no more than the blind reaching of a newly born child after the teat through which to suck the milk of life; that our sufferings, our afflictions, are part of a drama—an essential, even an ecstatic, part—endlessly revolving round the two great propositions of good and evil, of light and darkness. A brief interlude, an incarnation, reaching back into the beginning of time, and forward into an ultimate fulfillment in the universal spirit of love which informs, animates, illuminates all creation, from the tiniest particle of insentient matter to the radiance of God’s very throne.” He turned and swam back to shore.

Something in his heart had begun to change. There was, as indeed there had always been, a nagging sense of spirituality hovering around him; he may not yet have been a Christian, but he knew, certainly, that there was no hope to be found anywhere else.

Returning from the war, Muggeridge returned to journalism. He spent the following decades growing in stature and public profile, first as the editor of Punch Magazine, then as a commentator on the radio and on the growing medium of television. Muggeridge writes with a deep sense of loss of these years, as, not yet a Christian, he fell deeply into the momentary solace of alcohol and adultery. But, as is the case when God is in control, even the greatest immoralities would be used for good, for through time wasted and false pleasures sought after, the truth of human life was becoming clearer to Muggeridge. Seeking after momentary pleasures and passions brought no lasting satisfaction, and no matter how hard men attempted to organize themselves in order to create a more perfect society, their attempts were destined to end in failure.

As these things became more evident, Muggeridge grew more and more conservative in his personal views. The context here is important: the change in Muggeridge’s views were not the consequences of his upbringing, nor of his education. His views were not founded on any preconceived political allegiances (his time in Moscow had cured him of those); rather, they arose as the natural consequence of decades of life experience. He had tried Communism, but found the very opposite of utopia; he had tried war, and found only that, rather than bringing a reason to live, it made him want to die; he tried sensuality and debauchery, but found that any pleasure was momentary and led to even greater emptiness.  If Malcolm Muggeridge could be certain of anything, it was that there was no hope to be found in earthly pleasures, and that the governments of men were just as incapable of offering salvation than the men who made them.

It all seems very cynical, and indeed it is hard to read anything from Muggeridge without a pang of hopelessness, but this impression really could not be more false. Yes, there is a sense of despair, but the despair is only lasting for one who has no hope outside of men. For those who place their hope elsewhere, the despair is momentary, giving way to a startlingly beautiful revelation! After a life of great, unceasing despair, Malcolm Muggeridge discovered great hope!

The seeds were planted, but it was only in the 1960’s that the first real steps toward Muggeridge’s spiritual awakening began. In 1969, Muggeridge produced a television special on a little-known Catholic Charity worker in India. The result was, not just a television special, but an accompanying book—Something Beautiful for God—which brought the first bit of international attention to Mother Teresa, while proving instrumental in Muggeridge’s acceptance of Christianity.

There was no single moment, no exact date, in which Muggeridge’s path toward conversion reached its culmination. What is clear is that by the end of the 1960’s, when he published a collection of essays entitled, Jesus Rediscovered, Muggeridge, the former womanizer, was now an evangelical Christian. St. Mugg, some called him in derision. His was one of the most public, and most controversial, conversions of the twentieth century, for he took his faith seriously; it was to guide the entirety of his public life for his remaining years.

The true glory of Muggeridge’s conversion is that, because it was really only the next step on the trajectory of his life, there was nothing truly dramatic about it. It was not an about-face—he just began to realize that he had been turning for some time and now found himself facing in an unexpected direction. Muggeridge did not stop studying current events in order to study theology—current events defined his theology. Or, rather, they reinforced his theology. The truth is that Malcolm Muggeridge’s theology was never very refined, as far as theology goes. He was never destined to be the next Martin Luther or Jonathan Edwards. He would never have been the sort of man likely to engage in a debate about the nuances of Calvinism or the essence of the trinity or even the differences between protestant and Catholic theologies (he did eventually join the Catholic church, but this was not exactly theological; it was, as he wrote, “the Catholic Church’s firm stand against contraception and abortion”). He was familiar with the scriptures, of course, but he always saw them, not as a matter of historical scholarship, but as a way of explaining the great and timeless struggle between God and Man. He saw them as representing beautiful spiritual truths rather than historical events (not that he disbelieved in their history; it simply wasn’t something he was concerned with).

The heart of Muggeridge’s theology (if it could be called that) was experiential. It was his first-hand observation (not faith) of the world. It was based on the failure of Communism, the futility of governments, the vapidity of sensuality. It was based on the continued, perpetual, persistent, failure of every one of man’s endeavors when they belong only to men. It was based, in short, on the truths of history, which are things not even the dourest of atheists could deny.

So there really is hope in Muggeridge’s theology, but it must begin with despair. The story of man striving after God is really the same story as Muggeridge’s own suicide attempt—for man, apart from God, really is one cosmic suicide attempt. Man seeks his own way until the moment he finally recognizes that he cannot do so any longer; and then he is faced with the choice: Life or Death. God is calling men to life. Muggeridge knew better than almost anyone what sort of death resulted when man made a conscious effort to abandon God and yet still try to achieve some sort of salvation. For Him there was nothing theoretical about any of it. There was no great leap of faith or shot in the dark. He simply arrived at a point in his life where he could no longer deny what had been patently obvious all along—he could no longer accept the desires of his flesh as the ultimate truth.

Muggeridge’s great contribution to Christian apologetics was to show that one needn’t strain themselves in an intellectual attempt to reason our way towards Christianity; not that Christianity is not reasonable, but that its truth is far more evident than we make it. When we struggle, intellectually, with Christianity, it is almost as if we are purposefully ignoring what the entire history of mankind (and the history of our own lives) has made obvious: we are, for whatever reason, trying to replace the perfect, joyous freedom of Christ with the freedom of man, which is really no different from slavery.

“A sense of how extraordinarily happy I have been,” Muggeridge wrote near the end of his life, “and of enormous gratitude to my creator, overwhelms me often. I believe with a passionate, unshakable conviction that in all circumstances and at all times life is a blessed gift; that the spirit that animates it is one of love, not hate or indifference, of light, not darkness, of creativity, not destruction, of order, not chaos; that, since all life—men, creatures, plants, as well as insensate matter—and all that is known about it, now and henceforth, have been benevolently, not malevolently, conceived, when the eyes see no more and the mind thinks no more, and this hand now writing is inert, whatever lies beyond will similarly be benevolently, not malevolently or indifferently, conceived. If it is nothing, then for nothingness I offer thanks; if another mode of existence, with this old, wornout husk of a body left behind, like a butterfly extricating itself from its chrysalis, and this floundering, muddle mind, now at best seeing through a glass darkly, given a longer range and a new precision, then for that likewise I offer thanks.”