[In the following review of Jesus, Cupitt criticizes Muggeridge for failing to present a sustained argument and for indulging in harsh criticism of contemporary moral and religious practices.]

‘It is one thing to be crucified: it is quite another thing to be a Professor of the fact that someone else was crucified,’ wrote Kierkegaard, showing that it is possible for a great religious writer to be waspish. But great religious writers are excessively rare. Their mark is a certain perfectly sustained purity and intensity, such as would be destroyed at once by the slightest taint of the borrowed, the self-conscious or the meretricious.

On this count, Mr Muggeridge['s Jesus] cannot be considered successful, for his style and tone are astonishingly uneven. Even in his best passages—those on madness, and on the two great commandments—he strains after his effects. Sometimes he writes pastiche of John Donne: as, on his own death, ‘see my ancient carcass, prone between the sheets, stained and worn like a scrap of paper dropped in the gutter …’ or ‘I never knew what joy was until I gave up pursuing happiness, or cared to live until I chose to die.’ Sometimes he reaches a banality seldom equalled even in the pulpit: as, on donkeys, ‘it is one of Christianity's minor, but most estimable, services to have raised these dear beasts from a somewhat lowly position in the animal hierarchy to a share in the glory of the first Palm Sunday’ (page 38)—but note that by page 141 the animal has turned into an ass, and the day is no longer glorious. Banality again in this: ‘God is the divine joker in our pack’—which has the inauthentic facetious ring that elsewhere annoys him. The lapses of taste can be breathtaking; as when, rhetorically invoking the power of evil, he momentarily sees the Devil as ‘a moustached life-peeress easy on marijuana’.

Too often, these smart phrases have little behind them. ‘Clerical Playboy fans’, for example, is based solely on page 75 of John A. T. Robinson's Christian Ethics in a Permissive Society, where Robinson is making a moral distinction between eroticism (‘not intrinsically evil … but a distortion, by isolation, of something good’) and pornography, which is evil. Robinson's text is a perfectly serious piece of casuistry. But, in thus contrasting Robinson's text with the myth that has been built up about him, I am admittedly invoking just that distinction between history and myth which Muggeridge rejects. He is a fideist, who relies on an instant cleansing of the doors of perception to reveal all religious truth. And his fideism goes with his asceticism.

But the doors of perception ought to be clearer. There is much to be said for asceticism, and disdain for modern follies, but it should not be expressed like this: ‘In humanistic times like ours, a contemporary virgin—assuming that there are any such—would regard [an Annunciation] as illtidings of great sorrow, and a slur on the local family-planning centre.’ In a discussion of the Incarnation, the sentence would be gross enough even without that aside in the middle of it: with it, it is horrible.

The book is handsomely produced, with many good pictures to remind us of the days, long past, when there was such a thing as innocent Christian art. Mr Muggeridge's text bears eloquent witness to the corruption of the times. It is fair to add that, in the last section of the book, the story shows more signs of getting hold of him, though the fact that his asceticism makes him recoil from the Eucharist should surely make him wonder about the correctness of his view of Christianity.

Alas, 20th-century religious writers, including even T. S. Eliot, often show a pastiche spirituality, tricked-out in borrowed clothes. Let us take up Grace Abounding.