Man Bites God

JESUS REDISCOVERED by Malcolm Muggeridge. 217 pages. Doubleday. $5.95.

It must be 40 years or more since Malcolm Muggeridge, veteran journalist and television ogre, learned the first rule of his trade. All stories must answer the questions: "Who? What? When? Where?" God, who by his very nature is indefinable and omnipresent (he either has done everything or nothing), is obviously an impossible subject for such questions. Yet Muggeridge's new book--a compilation of interviews and essays--boldly deals with the deity. Is it news when newspaperman bites God?

Improbably, Jesus Rediscovered is a lively work. It succeeds in defiance of what might be called Auden's Law, in which the poet, himself a religious man, insists that it is impossible to write religious poetry. Prayer is a dialogue between man and God. No third party need apply. This powerful objection applies also to religious prose. The works of St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila are there to warn against imprudent attempts to communicate about the incommunicable. Fortunately Muggeridge (now 66), a highly professional journalist with a sprightly native wit, writes better and with considerably more verve than these celebrated mystics.

He sets a brisk pace through the long series of events that eventually led to his conversion to Christianity. It was the end of the Great War that disgusted him with a godless humanity. On the night when victory was celebrated in London, Muggeridge saw "for the first time what human beings were like when they cast aside all restraint --shouting, grimacing, flushed in their jubilation. The scene with its apocalyptic flavor," he continues, a trifle apocalyptically, "recalled to me vividly the lurid Dore illustrations in an edition of Dante's Inferno among my father's books." He took to brooding on the Passion of Christ (whom he addresses somewhat embarrassingly as "You") as a tragedy "in the sense that Lear's was, or Macbeth's."

Years later in Australia, Muggeridge came to a harrowingly personal perception of the "tragic-You." He was at a sheepshearing. "It quite often happened that the mechanical shears drew blood. The sight agitated me abnormally, the blood so red against the wool so soft and white. Why was the sight somehow familiar? My mind went back . . . to being washed in the blood of the lamb. That was it: the sacrificial lamb, Agnus Dei."

This revelation, of course, is far from satisfactory as a means of communicating Muggeridge's experience. So, most often, is the linear description of any overwhelming emotional experience, as anyone will know who has rashly attempted to describe even so much as a disturbing dream. Gallantly trying to explain "the marvel of his experience . . . fitfully glimpsed, inadequately expounded but ever present," Muggeridge vainly invokes Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Blake and Bunyan, St. Augustine and Simone Weil. We respect but may not share his feeling that Christ himself once was with him and the BBC television crew on the road to Emmaus. His epigraph from George Herbert perhaps speaks most adequately for him: "O that Thou shouldst give dust a tongue to crie to Thee."

Gabardine Swine. Fortunately Muggeridge, however weak on God and grace, is brilliantly funny on their adversaries the world, the flesh and the devil--as befits a former editor of Punch. Fiat Nox (let there be night) he sees as the first commandment of the modern world. The result of seeking heaven on earth is hell. "Four freedoms lead to forty times more servitudes," cries Muggeridee, and Savonarola in top form and full throat from the pulpit of the Duomo cried no louder. We are gabardine swine losing life and liberty in the pursuit of happiness. The real modern religion is "utopianism," and by that ism, Muggeridge means the universal creed of the modern world. No more "fatuous" slogan was ever devised than the pursuit of happiness asserted in the Declaration of Independence. "The darkness falls to idiot cries of progress achieved, of mankind having come of age," Muggeridge writes, "with vistas of technological bliss, and LSD trips over the hills and far away."

Muggeridge's conversion grew from religious impulses implanted in him by his father, whose religion, as it happened, was socialism--the new faith at the turn of this century of the English Disestablishment. "A sort of agnosticism sweetened by hymns," as Muggeridge puts it, adding that there is more "Methodism than Marxism" in the British Labor Party. This chapel heritage enables him to update Calvin, Knox, Cotton Mather, Praise-God Barebone, and all scourgers of the flesh since St. Paul. Anglican bishops, priests and politicians of every stripe feel his lash, as well as all persons seeking happiness by sun, the Pill, pot, sex or Playboy. Sacred cows of all sorts from Winston Churchill to Eleanor Roosevelt are flogged to the abattoirs. Despite some archness and excesses of language, Convert Muggeridge often succeeds in convincing. As he presents them, the Christian churches and their priests--especially the Anglicans "drivelling away their lives"--do not seem good enough, nor the Pope himself sufficiently papal, to minister to the spiritual needs of our bewildered world. The Muggeridgiad stays amusing withal; cap and bells are this prophet's hair shirt.

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