Melanie McDonagh’s Converts is a fascinating account of Catholic converts in the twentieth century from amongst artists, writers and intellectuals. Although, Malcolm Muggeridge was a later convert and doesn’t feature in McDonagh’s book, he was nevertheless part of that significant movement of the Spirit and was probably the first of those eminent Catholic converts that I read in any depth.
In the 1970s and ‘80s, as a young Evangelical Christian, I read a lot of Muggeridge’s books alongside the likes of Francis Schaeffer and Hans Rookmaaker. My interest was primarily with those who related Christian faith to wider issues albeit, at the time, within a relatively conservative framework. My bookcases still house copies of Jesus Rediscovered, Something Beautiful for God, A Third Testament, Christ and the Media, Chronicles of Wasted Time, and In a Valley of this Restless Mind, but not, surprisingly, Jesus, the Man Who Lives. It may be that, as books were harder to come by at that time and available funds were lower, I thought that by reading Jesus Rediscovered I had already encountered Muggeridge’s key ideas when it came to Jesus.
While that would not have been entirely inaccurate, what I would have missed out on at the time was, in the words of Sally Muggeridge (Malcolm’s niece), a skilfully constructed ‘portrait of Jesus’ ‘from the perspective of an artist’. Muggeridge was, first and foremost, a great writer in his ‘uniquely free journalistic style’ which meant that he ‘engaged in conversation with his reader’. He possessed the gift of composing memorable phrases – ‘God Incarnate was Jesus, and Jesus Resurrected was God’ - while also being adept at the interweaving of engaged commentary with journalistic description and the apposite piling up of similes in ways that overwhelm emotionally and aesthetically. All these skills came into play in this intriguing profile of Christ, his incarnation, death and resurrection.
Peter Hitchens, who provides the Introduction to this Fiftieth Anniversary Edition, situates our reading of the book in relation to the ‘strong, reasoned and spirited counterattack’ that followed the “new atheist” assault on faith and has subsequently ‘revived interest in religion among the young’. As a child of his time, some of Muggeridge’s commentary relates primarily to the issues and affairs of his day, and some (particularly discussion of mental health) uses now obsolete or unhelpful language. However, that is not where the burden of this book lies, and so Hitchens’ point is a fair one flagging the potential of this revised edition to contribute to contemporary debate.
Muggeridge structures the book as a free-flowing meditation on the life of Christ covering his incarnation, three years of ministry, and death and resurrection in three chapters. The respective length of each indicates something of where Muggeridge’s interests primarily lie. Although the crucifixion and resurrection are the ‘climax of the story of Jesus, the point to which everything has been leading’, his account of both and their significance is actually relatively brief.
This means he realises the significance of the incarnation itself which, to use the frame developed by Samuel Wells, is about God simply being with us as opposed to doing with us or doing for us. In The End of Christendom Muggeridge neatly summarises the argument made more expansively in Jesus, the Man Who Lives:
‘Thanks to the great mercy and marvel of the Incarnation, the cosmic scene is resolved into a human drama. God reaches down to relate himself to man, and man reaches up to relate himself to God. Time looks into eternity and eternity into time, making now always and always now. Everything is transformed by this subtle drama of the Incarnation, God’s special parable for fallen man in a fallen world.’
His great hymn to the significance and impact of the Incarnation was written in response to what he called ‘the fathomless inanity of D. H. Lawrence’s The Man Who Died’ and the draining of the New Testament of ‘its transcendental elements’ as found in Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus. Ever the journalist and satirist, Muggeridge needed a target to inspire the taking flight of his engaged prose.
Although Muggeridge became closely associated, through initiatives such as the Festival of Light, with a reactionary and conservative Christian agenda, this was not principally how he came to faith or where his faith interests primarily lie. The examples provided by saints and mystics who genuinely followed in Christ’s footsteps, whether contemporary, as with Mother Teresa, or literary, as with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, were what inflamed his incipient faith. He writes that it is on behalf of the ‘Holy Words’ of the Gospels:
‘that majestic buildings like Chartres Cathedral have been constructed, and that great saints like St. Francis of Assisi have so joyously and wholeheartedly dedicated their lives to the service of God and their fellow men. To the greater glory of these words Bach composed, El Greco painted. St. Augustine laboured at his City of God and Pascal at his Pensées; in them a Bunyan found his inspiration in describing a Pilgrim’s journey through the wilderness of this world, and a Sir Thomas More comfort on his way to the scaffold. In our own time, they enabled a Dietrich Bonhoeffer to go serenely to his death, and a Simone Weil to derive solace and enlightenment from the affliction that was her lot.’
Here, in summary, is the argument later made more expansively by Tom Holland in Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, that ‘everything truly great in our art, our literature, our music’ comes from ‘the moral, spiritual, and intellectual creativity’ which derives from the way ‘that was charted for us in the birth, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ’.
Although his ‘despair at the decline of morality in a new age of relative affluence’ endeared him to those of a more conservative, even literalist or fundamentalist mindset, such supporters cannot have been reading Muggeridge’s actual writings on the Gospels, which were often – as with his musings on the role of Judas or the literalism of the resurrection – light years away from the established views of fundamentalism. Muggeridge’s realisation earlier in his career of ‘just how often the truth is suppressed’, which Hitchens notes as a key moment in his life and thought, led him to challenge such suppression wherever he saw it. As a result, he rarely and wholeheartedly identified with any group or movement. This quality is a part of what continues to make his prose worth reading, both in its enthusiasms and challenges.
Sally Muggeridge, in her Afterword, accurately summarises her uncle’s achievements both as a ‘controversialist’ and as a writer with ‘a unique literary style’ able to ‘write, lecture, and broadcast about faith and ethical issues’ in ways ‘to which many people found they could personally relate and respond’. Jesus, the Man Who Lives is rightly reckoned his masterpiece. One that, as well as ‘providing a fresh insight into the life of Jesus Christ and its transcendent meaning’, also enables us to ‘learn a lot about its author as an ardent convert’.
Muggeridge argued that ‘Every writer, however lowly, must seek above all else to produce words that are alive, in the hope that they, too, may go on existing gracefully and truthfully’. He then stated, ‘How much more so when they relate to the Word which became flesh in the person of Jesus!’ This is Muggeridge’s intent and achievement with Jesus, the Man who Lives, to have crafted a poetic portrait of Jesus that imparts ‘heartfelt truth’ in ways that continue to touch the lives of many, whether public figures or ordinary men and women around the world.
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