an old fart rediscovered

I’m old enough to just remember Malcolm Muggeridge on telly, interviewing and being interviewed, a gloomy-looking irascible intellectual elder, someone who’d definitely lost the way to Fun City. I hope these old impressions don’t hopelessly prejudice me against the old fart, because I really would like to try to get into the state of mind of a religious believer, to tap into the emotional connection between believers and their deities (not that I’ll be looking much at the emotional or spiritual requirement of the deities themselves, I think it’s probably safer at this stage to concentrate on their worshippers).

I believe it was the poet Paul Valèry who wrote that believers always feel that non-believers are being insincere, and vice versa, and I have to guard against too much scepticism when dealing with what are clearly intended to be sincere professions of faith. However, with Muggeridge, in the few pages I’ve read so far (and I must admit to not being too keen to read the whole 200 pages of these essays collected under the title Jesus rediscovered – I just want to read enough to get the general gist of his position), there seems to be an attitude that comes close to disingenuousness.

In his foreword to these essays, published, and presumably written, in the sixties, Muggeridge claims to be a theological ignoramus, someone who has, moreover, never had the slightest interest in theology. Perhaps if I’d read this before I read his four-page essay, ‘Is there a God?’ I’d have been better armed against disappointment, for the essay doesn’t attempt to answer the question in any rational sense. Muggeridge is no abstract reflector, he’s more the rhetorical type, and his pages abound in topical references, to such knowns and unknowns as Ted Willis, Harold Wilson, Ulbricht, the Maginot Line, Rachmanism and Thomas Cook, and curmudgeonly throwaway lines such as ‘all I can find to say for the Genesis version is that it strikes me as more plausible than Professor Hoyle’s, and I certainly find the notion of the Virgin Birth as a notion more sympathetic than, say, family planning’. Someone of philosophical spirit could easily make short work of such remarks, but clearly we’re dealing with one of those people who will decide to be indifferent to all philosophical arguments when it suits him.

Disingenuousness or self-delusion? It seems to me that Muggeridge’s opening salvo in ‘Is there a God?’ brings about his immediate defeat. ‘I myself should be very happy to answer with an emphatic negative. Temperamentally, it would suit me well enough to settle for what this world offers, and to write off as wishful thinking, or just the self-importance of the human species, any notion of a divine purpose and a divinity to entertain and execute it.’ A glance through these pages though, convinces me of the exact opposite, that Muggeridge has the classic temperament of the frustrated idealist, full of irritation and even contempt for the things of this world, as ripe as anyone could be for the consolations of Christian eschatology.