A Third Testament: A Modern Pilgrim Explores the Spiritual Wanderings of Augustine, Blake, Pascal, Tolstoy, Bonhoeffer, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky 

by Malcolm Muggeridge, Orbis Books, 2004

By The Paperboy May 31, 2013, in the Pallokaville Press.

In a dexterous feat of modesty, celebrated author Malcolm Muggeridge has succeeded in making himself invisible in A Third Testament. He puts all his featured writers in the center of the stage while he functions as the stagehand who manipulates the curtains to reveal the spiritual insights of one author or another. Muggeridege himself is an intellectually brilliant and a highly respected writer, but he highlights the thought of others in this book

However, like any good master of the stage, his handicraft is evident to the one who looks for it. For instance, in his commentary on Pascal, Muggeridge writes, regarding Pascal’s choice of keeping the Bible and St Augustine’s Confessions when he gave away all his other books, that is was “a very wise choice.”

When Muggeridge inserts himself into the narrative, he keeps a low and humble profile. When discussing William Blake, he qualifies his insight on Blake’s prediction of the camera by adding that it is in his “opinion.” Support for his view, incidentally, comes from Blake’s words that we believe lies “when we see with, not through the eye.”

Another time Muggeridge acts as supporting cast to the main actors of his drama is when he talks of Blake’s words on the title page of Francis Bacon’s Essays. Muggeridge gives us his thought on Blake’s negative assessment of the book by saying simply that he likes Blake’s comment a great deal.

Only in the introduction does Muggeridge manifest mainly his own ideas. It is there that he explains the uniting principle behind all of the thinkers he chose. Of course, the individuals whom he chose speak volumes about what Muggeridge is trying to say. He was astute enough to find the thread that binds these disparate men together. They all had one aspect in common. Muggeridge describes their efforts as relating “their time to eternity.” He says that from time to time in human history there is a need to call people back to the real meaning of life. The call to reform happens when people think they can do it all themselves, and do not realize or admit their utter dependence on God.

This idea encapsulates the role of the prophets in the Old Testament, for they were men who went against the current of the times to tell humankind what it did not want to hear. In the New Testament Muggeridge says that God was his own prophet. And since then, Muggeridge proclaims, “Between the fantasies of the ego and the truth of love, between the darkness of the will and the light of the imagination, there will always be a need for a bridge and a prophetic voice calling on us to cross it.”

Muggeridge’s World War II experience of participating in espionage activities for the British Secret Service gave rise to his idea of portraying each of his chosen thinkers as God’s spies. The territory these men were assigned to is being held or could possibly be held in the future by God’s archenemy.

His first agent for God lived at a crucial time in the history of the Church and of the world. St. Augustine of Hippo was a convert to Christianity who lived a dissolute life before his conversion. When he came to be a Christian after many of years of his mother’s prayer, and soul searching by Augustine himself, he became a priest, and, against his wishes, the Bishop of Hippo. As it turns out, this was fortunate because he could exert his influence to keep the Church strong in a time of turbulence, when the barbarians were at the door and finally in the house in Rome. Eventually the barbarians arrived at the city walls of Hippo, and were entering as Augustine was dying. But his writing lived on and flourished and helped the Church to flourish throughout the succeeding ages.

Many centuries later Blaise Pascal had his task, and it was to stem the tide of godlessness, indulgence, and unlimited freedom that threatened the landscape in his time. In that time, the threat to truth was not the darkness of the Dark Ages, but the blazing light of humans knowing too much and considering themselves to be gods. When God called his name, Pascal wrote a magnificent apologia for the Christian faith and other works to counteract the falsehoods of the age.

Dostoyevsky was a confirmed anti-Marxist in a time when it was dangerous to be against the revolution. But, Muggeridge tells us, with an unerringly clear vision he was able to discern “how the terrible pride and dynamism of godless man seeking to construct an earthly paradise would infallibly prove destructive to themselves, their fellow human beings, and ultimately to what we still call Christendom.”

A philosopher and a poet, Soren Kierkegaard and William Blake, are two more of Muggeridge’s post-biblical prophets.  They were most probably not acquainted with each other, though they were contemporaries for part of their lives. But they did share a high concern with the socialism and consumerism that were emerging in their day. They also were prescient in their awareness of the capability of science to do harm to the human race. Blaise Pascal (who was an eminent scientist) also looked ahead and saw that science would, in the words of Muggeridge, “come to belong to man’s quest for power, not truth.”

Dostoyevsky had a Christian view of life, and in the early years of the Communist regime he was attacked for it. It was impossible to find his books at the time when Muggeridge was in Moscow, in the thirties. Part of this condemnation stemmed from a speech Dostoyevsky gave in 1880 when a statue of Pushkin was unveiled. On this important occasion in Moscow, Dostoyevsky eloquently described the destiny of Russia, which was to unite all men in a Christian brotherhood and by this means, not a Marxist one, end the lack of equality and justice for those who are suffering.

Ironically, the Soviets eventually brought back Dostoyevsky’s books, but, in order for them to serve the Soviet cause, they were interpreted to seem to be in compatibility with the Party Line, Muggeridge tells us, “by virtue of an amazing exercise in ideological gymnastics.”

One wonders what Muggeridge would think of the fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent awakening of Christianity in Russia today. His hope is reflected in these words, written, according to the copyright information, in 1983, “…somehow I knew without a shadow of doubt that his [Dostoyevsky’s] vision of Christ’s gospel of love triumphing over Marx’s gospel of power was certain, ultimately to be fulfilled.”

Tolstoy’s books, including Resurrection and War and Peace, also have a Christian point of view. Muggeridge interviewed a man for the BBC television who was raised in the Soviet Union. He sounded like a Christian, so Muggeridge asked him about that. The man said he was baptized in secret, and said that Stalin erred by not banning Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy in their efforts to rid the Communist country of Christianity.

Concerning another of his prophets, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Muggeridge wonders about what this person, who sacrificed his life so others could live in freedom, would think of today’s world. He was killed just as the war was ending, initially jailed because he participated in a plot to kill Hitler, and subsequently executed. At the Berlin Wall, Muggeridge tries to envision Bonhoeffer’s thoughts if he had stood there, the barren east on one side and the bloated west on the other.

Muggeridge’s prophet, William Blake, was a poet and an artist, but he was no romantic dreamer. That came later in the Age of Romanticism. He had his eye absolutely fixed on reality. He saw beyond the surface into the deeper reality of human life on earth. He used the faculty of the imagination to be able to do this. Blake said, “The imagination is not a state, it is human existence itself.” He remained true to his ideal of being a religious man to the day of his death. During a life of adversity he avoided evil and was focused on heaven. In the last hours of his life, he prayed with thankfulness that he didn’t have money and status during his life to distract him from his vision of the Lamb of God as the center of his life.

One of his poems quoted by Muggeridge is about the need to die to ourselves and put all our hopes in God:

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity’s sun rise.

As Muggeridge reminds us: “In a materialistic age like ours, nothing is real except what is false. People believe in money, for instance, but not in God, whereas money is a fantasy, but God is the living truth.”

Muggeridge compares Karl Marx and Soren Kierkegaard, two important thinkers of the twentieth century. That Marx’s predictions of an earthly paradise turned out to be false and the prophecies of Kierkegaard, based primarily on his intuitive imagination, have happened to an amazing extent, is something no one would have predicted. For instance, Kierkegaard was concerned that if humans lost their emphasis on God and the dignity of the individual is lessened, people would come to rely on mass communication for how to think. This has come to be the norm in our times. Can our media be recognized in the following quote of Kierkegaard’s? “On the whole the evil in the daily press consists in its being calculated to make, if possible, the passing moment a thousand or ten thousand times more inflated and important that it really is. But all moral elevation consists first and foremost in being weaned from the momentary.”

One quality all of these prophets share is outstanding courage. A prophet needs to have courage in order to stand up to the ways humans are turning away from God, and predict what will happen if these ways continue. For instance, it took courage for Kierkegaard to declare that the natural sciences would become a problem for moral thinking, as people tried to find ethical answers by using the scientific methods of measuring and experimenting.

All of Muggeridge’s prophets endured great hardships, chosen in the service of a greater good. Kierkegaard, for one, spent every penny of his inheritance to have his writings published, not for his glory but for the glory of God. He was scorned, endured loneliness, and suffered bad health. He saw himself as an auditor for Christ, exposing lies where he found them.

The greatest hardship Dostoyevsky underwent was his imprisonment in Russia after the revolutionary group he met with was exposed by the secret police. He was sentenced to be shot, and was given a lesser sentence of four years only as the rifles of the firing squad were actually raised and ready to fire. His greatness was forged in the extreme harshness of the prison conditions in the years that followed.

In the story of Raskolnikov, the hero in Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky shows that redemption will come when suffering is accepted. The message of the world is opposed to that. It says to avoid suffering at all costs. Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler shows the ultimate futility of money, getting and losing money from the simple turn of a wheel. No effort need be made; only pure chance determines the result. Regarding Dostoyevsky, Muggeridge marvels at “how one man’s genius can, as it were, pick up all the strands of an age, revealing its pattern….”

Leo Tolstoy was a prophet for Christianity in a time that desperately needed the Christian message. He used the Gospels to spread his conviction about the doctrine of universal love found there. Tolstoy’s great strength was that despite formidable obstacles he believed that the teachings of Christ should be the guides for living, and he did his best to carry out his beliefs. He knew full well that the perfect life called for in the Gospels is not within the ability of man to attain on this earth. But it is in attempting to do so that humans fulfill their destiny.

The book comes full circle with the life of Bonhoeffer. Just as Augustine’s death occurred at the end of an empire and during the burning of a great city, so did Bonhoeffer’s, who was killed by the Nazis as the Third Reich fell. As Hitler gained power in the thirties, and the Nazi regime began its persecution of the Jews, Bonhoeffer looked at the persecutions as an intentional assault on Christ Himself.

In prison for taking part in a plot to assassinate Hitler, Bonhoeffer wrote the powerful classic, Letters and Papers from Prison. As a result of Bonhoeffer’s experience in his cell, Muggeridge tells us, he became a mystic and a martyr. His sufferings enabled him to bring hope to many. As he is prone to do, Muggeridge brings the time of Bonhoeffer forward to the later half of the century. He sees the great price paid to rid the world of a monster who endorsed euthanasia, among many other evils. Muggeridge finds it ironic that some are supporting euthanasia now after having paid that great price in the past.

Muggeridge sums up how writing about these post-biblical prophets affected him:

“It has made me grasp as never before that God has an inner strategic (as distinct from tactical) purpose for His creation, thereby enabling me to see through the Theater of the Absurd, which is what life seems to be, to the Theater of Fearful Symmetry, which is what it is. Thus reality sorts itself out, like film coming into sync, and everything that exists, from the tiniest atom to the illimitable universe in which our tiny earth revolves, everything that happens, from the most trivial event to the most seemingly momentous, makes one pattern, tells one story, is comprehended in one prayer: Thy will be done.”

Marion the Librarian