SOURCE: Breslin, John B. “Jesus and St. Mug.” America 133, no. 10 (11 October 1975): 207-10.

[In the following essay, Breslin contrasts Muggeridge's iconoclastic reputation with his increasingly Christian outlook on life.]

In a review of the second volume of his autobiography, I referred to Malcolm Muggeridge as a “formidable commentator” on the follies of the recent past and present. As I traveled down from London to spend an afternoon with him at his cottage in Sussex several weeks ago, that phrase came back to haunt me.

I took some comfort from the assurances of people I knew who had met Mr. Muggeridge that he was both gracious and genial in person, even to interviewers. But the baleful look I remembered so well from BBC telecasts and the astringent tone of the two books I had just finished reading made me wonder again whether I was heading for the lion's den with eyes wide open. For was I not a member, if only tangentially, of a generation he had largely despaired of—the young whose rebellion against the phony world of their fathers had led them down an even more dismal road littered with artificial stimulants and casual commitments?

And even if my profession might absolve me on that score, did it not identify me with an institutional church Mr. Muggeridge delighted in castigating for its abject surrender, with few exceptions, to the Mammon of secular liberalism and materialism? It might be a rather long afternoon, I thought.

The reality, of course, was quite otherwise. Because of a mix-up in letters, only my last-minute phone call from the London station warned my host of my imminent arrival. To add to the confusion, the train I was traveling on proved too long for the rural station, and I was compelled to enter the scene from a rear coach by leaping onto the tracks and treading gingerly along 25 yards of railway ties to the raised platform in the company of two Moroccan student-workers, one of whom was dressed in flowing native robes. (Mr. Muggeridge confided to me afterwards that, when he saw the three of us approaching, he had the sinking feeling that I was the strangely garbed individual and was some kind of religious nut who had descended on him for the afternoon.)

I was delighted to see him waiting at the station since I had no idea where his cottage was and was not even certain, after the call, that he would be free. Dressed casually in trousers and a blue pullover that hinted at recent painting efforts, he greeted me warmly and made me feel immediately that I was in the presence of a favorite uncle.

As we walked out to his car, the two Moroccans who had alighted with me approached and asked directions to a work camp in the area. Mr. Muggeridge explained to them in fluent French that it was some distance off, and there was little chance of public transport since it was the end-of-summer bank holiday. They seemed disappointed but resigned, and trudged off. He then turned to me across the car and said in what I took to be very characteristic fashion: “I suppose we should take them out there. Do you mind?” The hesitation, the concern for his guest's convenience and yet the sure conviction that there was really only one thing to do—all of these endeared the man to me.

When he discovered that the two Moroccans were students from Casablanca, he engaged them in conversation about their studies and mentioned casually that he had spent two years teaching at the University of Cairo in the early 1930's. The remark passed without comment. Later at lunch he confessed with much self-deprecating laughter that he had expected at least an ooh or aah from his riders when they learned they had a former professeur as their chauffeur. That curious combination of vanity and irony cheered me once again.

Lunch itself was a pleasantly informal affair built around homegrown vegetables and fruit and enlivened by the presence of his wife, Kitty, and a journalist friend. Even in so brief an encounter I could see why his wife hovers over his autobiography like an oft-invoked tutelary spirit. After almost 50 years together, they give every indication of preferring one another's company to any other. After lunch, Mr. Muggeridge invited me to his book-lined study for a longer chat. The complete works of Swift, I noted, were prominently displayed, and on one wall he had hung a cartoon of himself dressed in a monk's habit and beads with the inscription, “St. Mug.”

Religion has indeed become Mr. Muggeridge's overriding concern, and the title of his new book, Jesus: The Man Who Lives, illustrates his particular focus. Seven years ago he published a collection of talks, sermons and essays entitled Jesus Rediscovered, and since that time he has worn the mantle, not always comfortably, of England's leading Christian apologist. Unlike C. S. Lewis, his most recent predecessor in that unofficial post, however, Muggeridge stoutly refuses identification with any institutional body.

As we talked, he admitted that at times he wishes he had grown up within the Catholic Church, but at this point he cannot bring himself to join it, despite the admiration he feels for individuals like Mother Teresa, Jean Vanier and Fr. Martin D'Arcy, S. J. Part of the reluctance stems from an unwillingness to give his allegiance to a body he will afterwards feel compelled to castigate publicly for its deviations from the path of the gospel.

Surely, Mr. Muggeridge knows that the church has seldom been without its internal critics, whether from right or left, and one more would certainly do no irreparable harm. But it is a mark of the man, I think, that for all his acerbic wit he has no wish to embarrass his coreligionists by his actions.

Before he made any public announcement of his “rediscovery” of Jesus, for example, he engaged in a lengthy program of asceticism. As he put it in an interview several years ago: “It would be very wicked of any man to say that he had completely achieved mastery of his fleshly appetites, but I felt able to declare myself a Christian when I was reasonably sure that a scrutiny of my life would not disgrace the inconceivably high standards that Christians I admire—like Tolstoy and Pascal—have set.”

A far deeper psychological reason, I believe, for this reluctance to join a church can be traced to his uncomprehending attitude toward the Eucharist, the central theological and religious point of every High-Church ecclesiology. He mentioned it briefly in Jesus Rediscovered when describing Mass in a Trappist monastery in Scotland: “The essential notion of eating Christ's flesh and drinking His blood is something I neither understand nor appreciate.”

In his latest book, he returns to the question with a definite note of regret: “Happy, indeed, the guests at this feast, but I, alas, have never been among them, nor most probably ever will be. Sadly, I have to admit that its sublime symbolism has always eluded me. … Was this, I ask myself, what sent Judas out into the night to betray his Master?—that the bread and wine remained for him, as for me, untransubstantiated, the Presence unreal?” Mr. Muggeridge spoke fondly of the pastor of the village church where he and his wife had attended Mass every morning during their three months in southern France last year, but this inability to join in Communion with his fellow worshipers helps explain, I think, his distance from full participation in the life of the church.

But there is something else as well. An English Jesuit colleague, who remains quite sympathetic to Mr. Muggeridge, put it most succinctly when he described the man as “something of a misanthrope.” Unlike the often caricatured liberal humanist who loves mankind but can't stand people, Malcoln Muggeridge finds many individuals quite attractive, including not a few clerics, but mass movements or people in large numbers, in or out of church, put him off. He seldom visits London these days and never misses an opportunity to attack all forms of mass communication and entertainment, most especially television, the medium that made him a national celebrity.

For some time now, the favorite object of his misanthropy has been that curious creature, “secular man,” or—more theologically appealing perhaps—“man come of age.” (Ironically, Malcolm Muggeridge is a great admirer of Dietrich Bonhoeffer—the popularizer of the latter phrase—whom he lists along with Simone Weil as one of the greatest contemporary witnesses of the gospel.) “What will finally destroy us,” he ventured at one point, “is not communism or fascism, but man acting like God.” This brand of practical atheism has no neat ideological limits. It exists everywhere that the thoroughly human notion of drama has been replaced by the mechanical notion of process.

Mr. Muggeridge returned several times to this contrast, which he had elaborated at greater length in Jesus Rediscovered. To leave out the twists and turns, the unexpected reversals and the sudden recognitions of drama in favor of a speedy ride along a barren expressway is to leave all the mystery out of life, reducing it to a series of ever more complex problems only requiring higher levels of ingenuity to solve.

Mr. Muggeridge illustrated his point with a story about a seminar he had attended recently in Canada. After a lengthy discussion, one of the brighter students turned to him with some puzzlement and asked quite sincerely how someone as obviously intelligent and well-informed as he could accept “such a blinkered vision” as Christianity. As in a similar encounter with medical students at Guy's Hospital in London, Mr. Muggeridge said he only realized fully at that point just how wide the gap was between himself and these young people.

The fact that this “blinkered vision” had been accepted and propagated for almost two millennia by the most intelligent and sophisticated of thinkers in Western civilization meant nothing to these students. Somehow, several generations had grown up convinced, not that Christianity was a dangerous doctrine to be fought against, but, far worse, that it hardly deserved the attention of a well-educated modern. Not fierce opposition, but contempt and dismissal. In such a world Mr. Muggeridge sees the Christian becoming more and more isolated and the panoply of the institutional church growing increasingly outmoded. I mentioned that he shared that vision with no less a contemporary theologian than Karl Rahner—which seemed to please him—and I promised to send him Fr. Rahner's writings on the “diaspora” church.

No wonder, then, that Malcolm Muggeridge finds the most hopeful signs of Christian rebirth in Central Europe, where the harsh antithesis of God and Caesar, which has been blunted in the West, underscores the gospel's insistence on decision (krisis). “Confronted by Caesar with his naked might, they are thrown into the arms of Christ.” He spoke movingly of the Russians, young and old, he had seen crowded into a Moscow church on Sundays for the long Orthodox services. When I mentioned the frequent charge that the price for this limited “freedom of worship” is the collusion of church leaders with the Kremlin, Mr. Muggeridge replied with a balance for which he is not often given credit: “There must be Mindszentys, but there must also be those who have to perform the far more distasteful task of dealing with Caesar.” “No one can convince me,” he went on, “that it would be better not to have those services every Sunday.”

The spiritual hunger he saw on those faces in Moscow and elsewhere in Eastern Europe touched Malcolm Muggeridge very deeply. He could identify with these people because many of them, too, were “rediscovering” Jesus. But where is Mr. Muggeridge himself in the process of rediscovery? Jesus: The Man Who Lives provides some clues.

Ever since the rise of modern biblical criticism, “biographies” of Jesus have been on the wane, and Mr. Muggeridge acknowledges as much in discussing the 30-year gap in the Gospel narrative: “The purpose of the writers of the Gospels … was evangelism, not biography or documentation.” But the urge to write a commentary on Jesus' life remains strong. He begins his own with some reflections on Ernest Renan's century-old version. Like Renan, Malcolm Muggeridge drew much of his inspiration from visiting the Holy Land, but with very different results: “Whereas … in his [Renan's] case the effect had been to bring the story down to earth, making, as it were, a pastoral out of a Mystery play, in my case it worked the other way round: it was the Mystery that came to life.”

Two perceptive and talented writers, both keenly aware of the intellectual and spiritual currents of their day, both confronting the same story—and yet such opposite reactions. Proof once again that in attempting to tell the story of Jesus, it is the teller's life that stands most revealed.

For Mr. Muggeridge, faith is the key, and it is to one of his perennial heroes, William Blake, that he turns for his rationale: “Truth can never be told so as to be understood and not be believed.” The truth that he sees written large everywhere in the Gospels is the great paradox of life through death, of strength through weakness, a truth that Jesus taught (most memorably in the Beatitudes) but, more importantly, a truth that Jesus lived. Mr. Muggeridge's claim for this truth—with all its variations—is simply that it works, that the world is better served by those who do not seek its rewards, that happiness pursued is most often happiness lost, that renunciation does lead to freedom.

This belief also explains his unrelenting criticism of contemporary mores, for if there is a leitmotif playing through the cacophony that surrounds us, it supports a single theme: the race is to the swift and the battle to the strong. “With us affluence is a religion. Supermarkets celebrate it—buy this in remembrance of me! Banks are its holy of holies—spend this in remembrance of me! The television studios are chapels-of-ease.” Behind the wit lies the radical choice Jesus spoke of: God or Mammon. You can't have it both ways, simply because they are mutually contradictory.

By his own admission, Mr. Muggeridge catches himself in a similar trap when he talks about the church, which he can neither join nor let alone. In his most Savanarola-like manner, he predicts the collapse of Western civilization and the coming of a new Dark Age, and he focuses especially on the subversion of the church. But he balances his plaint with a telling self-description: “We bemoan the passing of a liturgy in which we never participated, or an obedience we never accorded and an orthodoxy we never accepted and often ridiculed.” The admission in no way invalidates the critique, but it tempers the carping tone Mr. Muggeridge too easily adopts on occasion.

The positive contributions of the book, however, far outweigh these rhetorical slips. When, for example, he compares Jesus' healing actions to the experience of transfusion, in which you see your blood flowing into the body of a stranger, Luke's mysterious statement that “power came out of Him and cured them all” becomes suddenly luminous. Again, in his handling of the mystical element in the Gospels, Mr. Muggeridge manages at the same time to suggest the ecstasy of the disciples and to discount the pretensions of the writer to capture it: “The descent to words—those clumsy and inflexible bricks—is like trying to play the Missa Solemnis on a mouth-organ, or to dance the Mazurka with no legs.” Mr. Muggeridge refuses to take himself or anyone else solemnly, and that makes him as dangerous around potentates (be they publishers or princes) as the clear-eyed little boy who knew a naked emperor when he saw one.

He does, however, take Jesus and His message with utmost seriousness, as anyone who reads this book will testify. Jesus: The Man Who Lives is a splendidly illustrated and beautifully written “Life” of Jesus. More importantly, it is a statement of faith, all the more convincing because it is, as he says at the end, the considered judgment of “a typical product of these confused times, [a man] with a skeptical mind and a sensual disposition. …” The best recommendation I can offer for Mr. Muggeridge—and by extension for his book—comes from another English Jesuit colleague, and, after our brief meeting over lunch, I am sure it is the one Malcolm Muggeridge would most appreciate. “However annoying he may be at times,” my friend remarked, “he is someone who is clearly searching for God.”