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  • Malcolm muggeridge and the end of Christendom (2)

    Malcolm muggeridge and the end of Christendom (2)

    In the first part of this review of the inaugural Blaise Paschal Lectures on Christianity and the University delivered at the University of Waterloo by the great 20th century British journalist, Malcolm Muggeridge, in October, 1978, we observed the distinction that the lecturer made between ‘Christendom’ and the Christianity that can be traced directly to the founder of the faith, the simple and humble carpenter from Nazareth. While Christendom derived its origin from the adoption of the Roman State of Christianity as the formal religion of the empire by Emperor Constantine and has sourced its authority, influence and prestige from state patronage in diverse countries, Jesus stayed far from the palaces of the powerful or the courts of royalty or the citadels of the intellectual elite but turned the first century world upside down through the faith and proselytizing zeal of ordinary men and women with no earthly acclaim or appeal. He declared pointedly that his kingdom was not of this world.

    Malcolm was of the view that though the Christianity traceable to Christ has continued to thrive and turn around lives, the State-centric ‘Christendom’ had come to an end in any meaningful sense as at the time he delivered his Paschal inaugural lectures. Nearly five decades after he rendered his thoughts on the issue, it is difficult to fault Muggeridge’s conclusions – indeed the situation may have worsened for a steadily declining ‘Christendom’. Given his latter conversion to Christianity, first in its Anglican and later Catholic, varieties as he grew older and wearied of the aggressively immoral, pleasure -seeking pursuits of his early youth to middle ages, Muggeridge was fitting to deliver the lectures of a Paschal whose mores and values he had come to identify with.

    Muggeridge was enthusiastic about delivering the inaugural Paschal Lectures because he admired the humble disposition of the French mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher and Catholic writer of the 17th Century who refused to be associated with the secular arrogance and disdain for the spiritual and supernatural that was increasingly associated with the life of scholarship and the intellect. As he put it in the lecture, “Although Paschal was a very proud man, but he put aside his pride to bow himself down at the altar rail with his fellow Christians, whomsoever they might be, in perfect brotherliness”. He was of the view that although a superlatively great scientist, Paschal eschewed the overweening arrogance characteristic of many scientists in our contemporary world and “practiced true humility, which is the greatest of all virtues. Indeed, as he points out, humility is the very condition of virtue”.

    One thing that stands out strikingly in Muggeridge’s Blaise Lectures is his passionate love for the written word, which is not surprising given his legendary success as a life-long journalist who practiced mostly in the first half of the 20th century in the United Kingdom, United States, India and the early years of the communist Soviet Union. Referring to what he described as the extraordinary skill and beauty of the language of Paschal’s magisterial apologia in defense of the Christian religion, ‘Les Pensees’, he avers that “I have always had a sort of mania about words – it’s the only consistent and abiding passion I have ever had. For that reason, if for no other, Paschal made an immediate appeal. I think the most wonderful sentence ever penned is in the first chapter of St. John’s Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word…”. How tremendous are its implications”.

    Continuing, he writes enchantingly, “In the beginning was the Word…”. It had to be the Word. It couldn’t be, for instance, “In the beginning was the video tape…”, “In the beginning celluloid…”, or “In the beginning was a microphone…” – none of that. In the beginning was the Word, and one of the things that appalls me and saddens me about the world today is the condition of words. Words can be polluted even more dramatically and drastically than Rivers and land and sea. There has been a terrible destruction of words in our time”. He laments the easy pollution of words like love, freedom or liberation and submits that “The truth is that if we lose the meaning of words, it is far more serious in practice than losing our wealth or our power… Without our words, we are helpless and defenseless; their misuse is our undoing. For instance, we speak of liberalizing our abortion laws, which means simply facilitating more abortions. Or we speak of reforming our marriage laws, when we mean creating more facilities for breaking more and more marriages”.

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    He argued that the beautiful lucidity of his mind and the wonderful clarity of Paschal’ s thought puts a lie to the widespread notion today that believers are credulous, sentimental people and that it is materialists and scientists and humanists who have a sceptical mind. Rather, he contends that “I believe myself that the age we are living in now will go down in history as one of the most credulous ever. How could anyone look at television advertisements without reaching that conclusion? All those extraordinary potions that are offered to make your face beautiful, those things you can swallow to make your breath fragrant, are all apparently believed in to the extent that people buy the products…here, in the Western world, the most highly educated, the most progressive, the most advanced part of the earth, there is a reservoir of credulity beyond the wildest dreams of a wizened witch doctor from Africa”.

    Muggeridge avers that Paschal was the first to warn about the deleterios consequences of the exaggeration of the importance of the human ego “in contradistinction to the cross , symbolizing the ego’s immolation” and the romantic, arrogance -derived expectation at the time of the Enlightenment “that man, triumphant, would bring to pass that earthly paradise whose groves of academe would ensure the realization forever of peace, plenty and beautitude in practice. But what a nightmare of wars, famine, and folly was to result therefrom”. He deplores the scholastic and philosophical arrogance responsible for the celebrated presumed ‘death of God’ at the Enlightenment noting significantly that it was Nietzsche who first announced the death of God and that “Then, growing bolder, he went on to insist that God had been murdered by his creature, man, this being, according to Nietzsche, the most glorious and promising event in human history”.

    He then continues ruefully that “Not surprisingly, Nietzsche ended in an insane asylum in Venice and continued his observations about the death of God from a padded cell. But in a world that has itself gone mad like him, in excess of arrogance and self-conceit ,his ravings continue to be seriously regarded, as for that matter do those of other lunatics down to and including the Marquis de Sade”. It is thus appropriate that Muggeridge quotes from the American critic, Leslie Fiedler, in portraying the pathetic dilemma of contemporary man, particularly Western man, thus, “God has been abolished by the media pundits and other promoters of our new demythologized divinity. We continue to insist that change is progress, self-indulgence is freedom and novelty is originality. In these circumstances it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that Western man has decided to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brings the walls of his own city tumbling down”.

  • Malcolm Muggeridge and ‘the end of Christendom’ (1)

    Malcolm Muggeridge and ‘the end of Christendom’ (1)

    Ever since my first encounter over a decade and a half ago with his fascinating reflective narrative on the life of the founder of Christianity titled ‘Jesus: The Man Who Lives’, I have strived to obtain as much of the writings of the 20th century British journalist, author, film maker, television personality, satirist and engaging polemicist, Malcolm Muggeridge, that I can lay my hands on. ‘Jesus: The Man Who Lives’ is a magisterial portraiture of the most enduring and impactful personality to traverse the portals of human history and coming from a most unlikely quarter. One of the blogs on the back of the book simply states that ‘This man writes like an angel’! Muggeridge is a master of the written word. He is a keen and acute observer of society and human behavior and deploys his cutting wit to effortlessly devastating effect.

    Born on 24 March, 1903, Malcolm Muggeridge died on 14 November, 1990 at the age of 87. At various times, he was a school teacher before venturing into journalism, an exchange correspondent on war and peace with Mahatma Ghandi in India, a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian in Moscow in the nascent years of the communist regime, worked as Editor of the Statesman in Calcutta, India, and served in the military in various capacities during the second World War. He wrote for the Evening Standard, was appointed Deputy Editor for The Daily Telegraph and was Editor of Punch magazine from 1953 to 1957.  Later, in his career, he became better known as a broadcaster and documentary film maker. Married to Katherine Dobbs (1903-1994), Malcolm Muggeridge ‘s life appeared to be sharply divided into two phases. For a substantial part of his life as an active journalist, he was an agnostic who did not appear to place much stock on Christian moral values even though he and his wife maintained a life-long relationship.

    In a rather unflattering perspective on his life during this period, an online entry reports that “Muggeridge was described as having predatory behavior towards women during his BBC years. He was described as a “compulsive groper”, reportedly being nicknamed “The Pouncer” and as “a man fully deserving of the acronym NSIT – not safe in taxis”. His niece confirmed these reports, while also reflecting on the suffering he inflicted on his family and saying that he changed his behavior when he converted to Christianity”. Mother Theresa’s influence through her work with the poor in India was a key factor that motivated his inclination to Christianity and his later rejection of the Anglican communion and conversion to the Catholic Church. He wrote a book that popularized the life and work of Mother Theresa titled ‘Something Beautiful for God’s. Another of his works, ‘A Third Testament’ focused on the lives of seven spiritual writers and philosophers who influenced his conversion to the Christian faith, namely Augustine of Hippo, William Blake, Blaise Paschal, Leo Tolstoy, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Soren Kietkegàard and Fyidor Dostoevsky”.

    The focus of this review derives from the second phase of Muggeridge’s life when he had become an outspoken critic of the sexual licentiousness, rampant drug use and corrosive irreligiosity that had become a defining characteristic of modern, ever increasingly secularized society. During this period, he resigned from the position of Rector of Edinburgh University to which he had been elected in protest against the Students’ Representative Council’s support for the use of “pots and pills”. His new disposition to faith and spiritual values informed the choice of Muggeridge in 1978 to deliver the inaugural addresses of the ‘Pascal Lectures on Christianity and the University’ at the University of Waterloo. As the organizers of the annual lecture series wrote, “Blaise Paschal (1632-1662) is remembered today as the forerunner of Newton in the establishment of calculus, and as the author of the Christian meditations, Les Penses”.

    Continuing, they explained that “Members of the University of Waterloo, wishing to commemorate the spirit of Pascal, have established this annual lecture series to generate discourse within the University community on some aspect of its own world, its theories, its research, its leadership role in our society, challenging the University to a search for truth through personal faith and intellectual inquiry which focus on Jesus Christ”. And justifying the choice of Muggeridge to kickstart the delivery of the lecture series, Professor John North submitted that “Malcolm Muggeridge is a fitting choice to inaugurate the Pascal Lectures on Christianity and the University. During the first half of the twentieth century, he moved easily among the renowned: politicians, scientists, academics, churchmen and socialites. As a commentator in the press, then radio and television, he became increasingly caustic about the figures and movements of our time. Disillusionment mounting at times to anger began to characterize his work. Then came a transformation as wholehearted as that of Pascal, and an allegiance to the same master. The focus of his work has changed from the superstars to the meek of the earth”.

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    Muggeridge then went on to deliver two lectures published under the common title of ‘The End of Christendom’ published in a slim volume of 62 pages along with his responses to questions from members of the audience on the two occasions. In the first lecture, he advances the thesis that Christendom has reached a dead -end and in the very throes of its demise. But he makes a distinction between the ‘Christendom’ that is the product and derivative of the powers, mores and values of the institutions of this world and the Christianity that springs from the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, which he sees as remaining a vibrant and virile entity which is alive and well. The latter is the focus of the second lecture titled ‘But Not of Christ ‘.

    Clarifying the issues, Muggeridge noted that ‘Christendom’, however, is something quite different from Christianity, being the administrative or power structure, based on the Christian religion and constructed by men….The founder of Christianity was, of course, Christ. The founder of Christendom I suppose could be named as the Emperor Constantine. You might even say that Christ himself abolished Christendom by stating that his kingdom was not of this world – one of the most far reaching and important of all his statements. Christendom, on the other hand, began when Constantine, as an act of policy, decided to tolerate, indeed, positively favour, the Church, uniting it to the secular state by the closest ties. This was at the beginning of the fourth century”. Is the contemporary Pentecostal church especially in Nigeria and the United States not making the grave mistake of seeking to derive its power no more from the risen Christ but through association with the wielders of State power hence it’s current excessive preoccupatipn with partisan politics in both countries?