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.”

God’s Spies

It’s been two thousand years (or very near it) since the final words of the New Testament were penned. Two millennia since the canon was closed, since the final inspired words of God were given to men. But what has happened in the meantime? Has God stopped speaking to and through the words of men? Have the last of God’s prophets walked the earth? Are the last messengers of the wisdom of God gone and buried in forgotten tombs?

Quite frankly, I don’t think so.

Malcolm Muggeridge spoke to this point beautifully in the collection of essays (which were really transcriptions of television specials he had written) he called A Third Testament. Muggeridge did not believe that the work of God had ended with the closing of scriptures, but that He had proceeded to send spies into the world; spies whose words, if not the living breathing Word of God Himself, offered man a taste of the divine. “In the case of the Old Testament Jews,” Muggeridge wrote, “it was the prophets who thus called them back to God - and when were there more powerful and poetic voices than theirs? Then came the New Testament, which is concerned with how God, through the Incarnation, became His own prophet. Nor was even that the end of the prophets and testaments. 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 the need for a bridge and a prophetic voice calling on us to cross it.”

Muggeridge focused on seven figures who had shaped his own understanding of God; men who, though not producing scripture per se, “had a special role in common, which was none other than to relate their time to eternity. This has to be done every so often; otherwise, when the lure of self-sufficiency proves too strong, or despair too overwhelming, we forget that men need to be called back to God to rediscover humility and with it, hope.”

Muggeridge’s list of “Third Testament” prophets (by no means complete) consisted of Augustine of Hippo, Blaise Pascal, William Blake, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Soren Kierkegaard, and Dietrich Bonheoffer. Muggeridge called them ‘God’s spies’, for there was something secretive and subversive, something cloak-and-dagger, about their methods. Whether it was Pascal, who gained great fame as an eminent scientist before pursuing his far greater love of Christian apology; Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, who secreted spiritual truths into their beloved writings, which kept spirituality alive in Russia, even as Bibles were being banned; Kierkegaard, who sought to reform the church under the guise of pure philosophy; or Bonheoffer, who quite literally carried the word of God into the heart of the enemy camp, accepting death at the hand of the Nazis as consequence for his subterfuge.

If I was to make my own list, what would it look like? Which voices has God used most readily to draw me closer to eternity; to give me hope and understanding, to supplement and enhancing His living word?

It is a fair question—and an important question—though it seemed overwhelming at first. There is really no shortage of clear and compelling Christian writers in the world, many of whom have influenced my thinking very directly. But, as I have considered the question, a few obvious suspects have stood out. One need only look at the things I have written and notice that there are some voices that are quoted far more often than others, evidence that their ideas and their ways of putting things have somehow resonated within me.

As I have read Muggeridge’s portraits of those whose words have inspired him, I was (as was certainly his purpose) moved to discover them for myself. My reasons here are really the same—I hope to encourage others to seek these men out and to find inspiration from them first-hand, rather than as a byproduct of the influence they have had on me. These men are far more than the quotes I have stolen from them, their ideas are far deeper than their witticisms (with the possible exception of G.K. Chesterton, whose ideas may be exactly as deep as his witticisms, but only because his witticisms are unusually deep); but it is the quality of their writing as much as the quality of their thoughts that has allowed them to stand above others in my mind.

It should be no surprise that I should begin my list with Muggeridge himself, who would never have been so vain as to include himself on his own list of modern day prophets. Indeed, I would consider him perhaps the most influential on my notions of apologetics, though he would have scoffed at the notion of being called an apologist, just as he would have laughed at the idea that he was a theologian. The glorious truth of Malcolm Muggeridge was that he was honest about the endless troubles of his own life. When, very late in life, he finally found his way to Christianity, he realized that, in his unflinching honesty, he had really been writing about God all along, without knowing. One may look at Muggeridge’s words long before he accepted the truth of Christianity and discover that, miraculously, the evidence for God is everywhere.

G.K. Chesterton, on the other hand, was significantly more self-aware of his own purposes and methods. Where Muggeridge wrote at length of his own intimate experiences in search of God, Chesterton’s method forged an endless broadening of ideas that had once been seen as narrow. He delved at length into fiction and fantasy—in fact, even his most serious works are not immune to grand flights of fancy. Where Muggeridge saw the entirety of his life as worthless, wasted effort, for he had, for too long, been searching for fulfillment outside of God, Chesterton had the uncanny ability to discover God even in the most trivial things. Muggeridge’s apologetic is practical, Chesterton’s was almost endlessly ethereal. But though they may be (in some respects) opposites, they are certainly not opposed; they are, in fact, almost perfectly complementary.

C.S. Lewis, certainly the most popular name on my list, forged path somewhere in between those of Muggeridge and Chesterton. Like Muggeridge, much of his greatest explanations of faith come from telling his own story.  Both men came to faith only after a lifetime fleeing, as Francis Thompson described, from the Hound of Heaven. Neither men were seeking God—both did everything in their power to escape Him. And yet both were found. However, like Chesterton, Lewis also had a flare for the fantastic, which he thought complemented the down-to-earth. Lewis’ writing, like Chesterton’s, also conveys a striking gift for turning a phrase; producing streams of endlessly quotable (and supremely logical) observations on man and his need for God.

Soren Kierkegaard is the one name in which my brief list overlaps with Muggeridge’s, but I simply couldn’t help it. Kierkegaard is, I think, a true outlier on this list for many reasons. Kierkegaard was a strange, peculiar character, whose personal qualities may be seen as either amusing or frightening. Though he is popularly considered a Christian existentialist, for all practical purposes he was more of a Christian eccentric. Among the men I have mentioned, he is certainly the most purely philosophical, and while much of his writing is, as a result, intimidatingly dense, he benefited from strange and exciting moments of perfectly clarity. Kierkegaard stood alone among his fellow philosophers in that he was constantly pitting Christianity against philosophy, only to discover that it was Christianity that always survived the encounter. Like Muggeridge, Chesterton and Lewis, Kierkegaard fought, not just for Christian ideas, but for real Christian living, which set all of them apart from mere theologians of philosophers.

There are others, of course. “...we may be sure,” Muggeridge concluded, “that other spies have been briefed and posted. It would be foolish even to speculate on their identity and whereabouts. One thing is certain, though: whoever and wherever they may be, great services will be required of them and great dangers encompass them.” Still speaking and writing today, and still inspiring believers and stupefying skeptics, there is Ravi Zacharias, William Lane Craig, Hugh Ross, Lee Strobel, John Piper, and countless others who continue to bring the freedom to the gospel to the minds of the world, whether by means as traditional as a sermon on Sunday or through a scientific lecture or public debate. But in the posts to come I will focus, not on the voices of today, but on these four men of the past 150 years, whose lives are absolutely inseparable from their work; whose writings deserve to be added to the pantheon of modern day prophecy.

I will begin, in the post to follow, with Muggeridge, a metaphorical spy of God in a spiritual battle, and a very literal spy of the British Empire in the midst of war.