a third testament malcolm muggeridge A modern pilgrim explores the spiritual wanderings of Augustine, Blake, Pascal, Tolstoy, Bonhoeffer, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky Please share this e-book with your friends. Feel free to e-mail it or print it in its entirety or in part, but please do not alter it in any way. If you wish to make multiple copies for wider distribution, or to reprint portions in a newsletter or periodical, please observe the following restrictions: • You may not reproduce it for commercial gain. • You must include this credit line: “Copyright 2007 by Plough Publishing House. Used with permission.” This e-book is a publication of Plough Publishing House, Farmington, PA 15437 USA (www.plough.com) and Robertsbridge, East Sussex, TN32 5DR, UK (www.ploughbooks.co.uk) Copyright © 2007 by Plough Publishing House Farmington, PA 15437 USA All Rights Reserved Cover artwork © by Max Grafe / Levy Creative Management contents introduction _______________________________v saint augustine _____________________________1 blaise pascal ______________________________16 william blake _____________________________31 søren kierkegaard __________________________50 fyodor dostoevsky__________________________67 leo tolstoy________________________________85 dietrich bonhoeffer________________________103 afterword _______________________________119 the author _______________________________120 introduction No, no, no! Come, let’s away to prison: We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage… And take upon’s the mystery of things As if we were God’s spies. King Lear It often happens that the reason for doing something only emerges clearly after it has been done, conscious intent and all the various practicalities which go therewith being but the tip of an iceberg of unconscious intent. In any case, as has often been pointed out, time itself is a continuum, and not divisible into past, present and future tenses. Thus, it was only after the completion of the series of television pro­ grams whose scripts are here collected, when I was asked to explain why I had chosen Saint Augustine, Blaise Pascal, William Blake, Søren Kierke­ gaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy and Dietrich Bonhoeffer to be their subjects, that I fully grasped the theme to which they all belonged. Previously, I had seen them singly and separately as seven characters in search of God, and as such of great interest, and a formative influence in my own thinking and questing. Considering them as a group, it became clear to me that, although they were all quintessentially men of their time, they had a special role in common, which was none other than to relate their time to eternity. This has to be done every so often; otherwise, when the lure of self-suf­ ficiency proves too strong, or despair too overwhelming, we forget that introduction vi men need to be called back to God to rediscover humility and with it, hope. In the case of the Old Testament Jews, it was the prophets who thus called them back to God –and when were there more powerful and poetic voices than theirs? Then came the New Testament, which is concerned with how God, through the Incarnation, became His own prophet. Nor was even that the end of prophets and testaments. Be­ tween the fantasies of the ego and the truth of love, between the dark­ ness of the will and the light of the imagination, there will always be the need for a bridge and a prophetic voice calling on us to cross it. This is what my seven seekers after God were destined to provide, each in his own way and in relation to his own time. So I came to see them as God’s spies, posted in actual or potential enemy-occupied territory, the enemy being, of course, in this particular case, the Devil. As it happens I was myself involved in espionage opera­ tions in the Second World War, when I served with MI6, the wartime version of the British Secret Service, or SIS. We had, for instance, what were known as stay-behind agents in German-occupied France, who were required to lie low until circumstances arose in which they could make themselves useful by collecting and transmitting intelligence, or organizing sabotage. While they were waiting to be activated, it was essential that they should make themselves inconspicuous by merging into the social and political scene, and, in their opinions and attitudes, echoing the current consensus. Thus, it would be appropriate for a stay- behind agent posted in, say, Vichy France, to be ostensibly Pétainist in politics, Catholic in religion, and bourgeois in way of life, eschewing any association with resistance organizations and, equally, the more fervid pro-Nazi ones. By this means he might hope to establish himself as a loyal supporter of Marshal Pétain, and so, when the time came, be the better placed to act effectively on behalf of the belligerent Gaullists and their Anglo-American allies. A Third Testament introduction vii Those who direct our intelligence services are not blessed with the insights and visionofGod–though they aresometimesproneto suppose so. Nor are our human calamities in God’s eyes what they seem to be in ours. There is no imagery that can convey even the similitude of God, let alone forecast His purposes; to know Him at all we are beholden to the great mercy of the Incarnation. Even so, in considering the place of a Saint Augustine in history, it is possible to see his role as that of a stay-behind agent posted by a celestial spymaster in a collapsing Roman Empire with a brief to promote the Church’s survival as custodian of the Christian revelation. Certainly, no one could have been better qualified for such a role than the famous Bishop of Hippo, ardent, as he was, for Roman civilization as only a North African could be, and ardent for Catholic orthodoxy as only a convert and sometime Manichean heretic could be.* His worldly credentials were impeccable –a highly successful professorship of rhetoric at Milan University, which in his regenerate days he called his Chair of Lies, friends and acquaintances in the high­ est circles and occasional speech-writing jobs for the Emperor himself. As for his pièces justificatives, as the French police call supporting docu­ ments, who could ask for anything better than his Confessions, the first great autobiography and still reckoned among the greatest, and his City of God, which laid down the guidelines for Christians, first to survive, and then to set about building a new great civilization to be known as Christendom? When Augustine came to die, the barbarians were already at the gates of Hippo, and were pillaging and burning the city while his body lay in his basilica awaiting burial. His services on behalf of his Church, however, by no means ended with his life, but continued through the succeeding Dark and Middle Ages, defining and strengthening the faith *Manicheism, to which Augustine adhered for some nine years before his conversion, was based on the notion of an eternal conflict between light and darkness. Its followers were expected to practice extreme asceticism. A Third Testament introduction viii he had so cherished, thereby facilitating its movement westward to leave in its train great cathedrals like Chartres to mark its progress. If St. Augustine appeared today, and had as little authority as his defenders, he would achieve nothing. God guided His Church well by sending him earlier, and investing him with the proper degree of authority. Thus wrote Blaise Pascal some ten centuries after Augustine’s death. By that time new dangers were threatening. The great torrent of creativity released by Christianity now looked as if it were overflowing its banks, sweeping aside the dikes and dams designed to hold it back. In place of the Cloud of Unknowing between God and us, a Cloud of Knowing was gathering; now, the threat was of light, not darkness–a dazzling, blinding light. This time God’s finger pointed inexorably at Pascal himself. He it was who would be required to counteract a two-fold attack: on the one hand, a clamor for self-indulgence, freedom from all restraint, license to, in his own words, “lick the earth”; and, on the other, the first crazy rumblings of godless men of science, so blown up with pride in their own achievements and the staggering potentialities thereby opened up, that they were beginning to think they were gods themselves, capable of shap­ ing their own destiny and creating a kingdom of heaven on earth. Pascal’s credentials as God’s spy in these particular circumstances were no less impeccable than Augustine’s had been in the situation created by the fall of Rome. Ostensibly, he was supremely a man of his time; by virtue of his mathematical and scientific attainments in the same class as a Newton, as a thinker on equal terms with a Descartes, and as a polemicist and stylist equipped to aim effective barbs at a Montaigne. As a Jansenist* sympathizer, Pascal was deep in the controversies raised by the Reforma­ tion, and came within an ace of being excommunicated– something, *Jansenism, a heresy derived from the Augustinianism of Cornelius Jansen, in Pascal’s time Bishop of Ypres. It holds that grace is irresistible, and has therefore been regarded as deterministic and in line with Calvinism. Its followers, who included the religious of Port Royal, among them Pascal’s sister Jacqueline, practiced extreme asceticism. A Third Testament introduction ix incidentally, liable to happen to God’s spies at all times, whether at the hands of the Inquisition, political police, or, the latest variant, the Media Pundits. His Lettres provinciales, venomously attacking the time­ serving Jesuits, were by universal consent a masterpiece of demolition and irony, and all in all there seemed every reason for regarding him as an outstanding and characteristic product of the Renaissance and a harbinger of the Enlightenment to come. Yet all this amounted only to what Pascal called “distractions,” in­ tended, as he put it, “to amuse us and bring us imperceptibly to death.” The divine briefing had already taken place, and he knew just what he had to do, which was no less than to use every scrap of knowledge he had acquired, his scientific explorations and experimentations, all the gifts of the intellect and the imagination God had endowed him with, to produce his great masterpiece, his superb apologia for the Christian faith itself, posthumously named his Pensées. Furthermore, by a signal grace, due to his early death at thirty-nine, this splendid exercise in faith at its most durable and thought at its most perceptive, was left behind him in the form of notes on scraps of paper rather than the long, conscientiously worked over, and possibly tedious, treatise he had envisaged. The notes, revealing, as they do, the working of his brilliant mind, have been uniquely effective in their impact; personnel bombs exploding unpredictably instead of with a single devastating blast. Furthermore, the impossible task of putting the notes together in the order Pascal may be presumed to have intended has kept scholars busy who might oth­ erwise have turned their attention to form-criticism and reinterpreting, rather than just rearranging, what Pascal wrote. If only some similarly blameless exercise had occupied contemporary biblical scholarship, especially New Testament commentators, the Bultmanns and Kungs and Robinsons, what a blessed deliverance that would have been! It A Third Testament introduction x was surely significant that Pascal’s worldly achievements should have included inventing the computer, which has become twentieth cen­ tury man’s topmost graven image, before which he readily prostrates himself, and whose cryptic utterances he receives like Delphic oracles. Pascal’s services as God’s spy were correspondingly illustrious – no less than the exposition and celebration of the true Christian faith in words so luminous that they have continued to shine with their own inner light ever since, like an El Greco portrait. I turn my eyes to the Schools & Universities of Europe And there behold the Loom of Locke, whose Woof rages dire, Wash’d by the Water-wheels of Newton: black the cloth In heavy wreathes folds over every Nation: cruel Works Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic Moving by compulsion each other, not as those in Eden, which, Wheel within Wheel, in freedom revolve in harmony & peace. These lines from William Blake’s Jerusalem were written about a cen­ tury and a half after the Pensées, and in Blake’s inimitable way convey a sense similar to Pascal’s that knowledge is but a vast cul-de-sac, and the technology derived from it a dread servitude –cogs tyrannic moving by compulsion instead of revolving in harmony and in peace as in Eden. No two human beings could have been more different in their back­ grounds and pursuits, in their social position and upbringing, and in the times in which they lived, than Blake and Pascal. Yet they stood side by side in their common awareness of the enormous dangers arising A Third Testament