St. Mugg and the "wrestling prophets" - Muggeridge & Augustine pt II
Part I of this post finished by asking the question, “Why is Augustine a prophet not only for his own day, but also for today?” Here’s Malcolm Muggeridge again:
"It is easier for us to get inside Augustine's unregenerate skin than perhaps it would be for any of the intervening generations. The similarity between his circumstances and ours is striking if not to say alarming. There is the same moral vacuity, leading to the same insensate passion for new sensations and experiences; the same fatuous credulity opening the way to every kind of charlatanry and quackery from fortune telling to psychoanalysis; the same sinister combination of great wealth and pointless ostentation with appalling poverty and unheeded affliction. As Augustine wrote, 'O greedy men, what will satisfy you if God Himself will not?'"
What, indeed.
But after his conversion, Muggeridge makes clear, Augustine was no killjoy who abandoned the good pleasures of the earth just because these pleasures are so easily perverted by sin:
"No one must suppose that this great conversion which had befallen Augustine, this light which had shone into his life and would never again leave it, had turned him away from this world. On the contrary, it made him more conscious than ever before of its joys and beauties, more aware than ever before of the terrific privilege it was to be allowed to exist in time."
Or again,
"No one has ever been less of a Puritan in the pejorative sense. Everything in creation delighted Augustine. He spoke to his congregation of the gloriously changing colors of the Mediterranean, which he had so often observed. All created things should be loved, he insisted, because God made them. The sea, the creatures, everything that is, speaks of God."
At the same time, Augustine recognized that in a post-Constantinian world where Christianity had become socially fashionable, not everything that went on inside of churches "spoke of God." Muggeridge cites Augustine's own words on this score, with an obvious jab at the comfortable churches of our own time. Whoever entered a Roman church of that day, reported Augustine,
"is bound to see drunkards, misers, tricksters, gamblers, adulterers, fornicators, people wearing amulets, assiduous clients of sorcerers, astrologers. He must be warned that the same crowds that press into the churches on Christian festivals also filled the theatres on pagan holidays. . . . It is only charity that distinguishes the children of God from the children of the Devil. They all make the sign of the Cross, and answer 'Amen' and sing Alleluia, they all go to church and build up the walls of the basilicas."
So it goes on this earth, Augustine concluded: the City of God and the City of Man intermingle in one mass of confusion. "Through the Incarnation," Muggeridge paraphrases the great bishop, "we have a window in the walls of time which looks out on the Heavenly City." But as long as we are bound to this earth, we are weighed down by, to return to David Wells's image, the things our cultures do to make sin look normal and righteousness ridiculous (worldliness’s “photonegativity”).
Never, concludes Muggeridge, has the earthly city looked larger and more overwhelming than today: "Turning away from God, blown up with the arrogance generated by their fabulous success in exploring and harnessing the mechanism of life, men believe themselves to be at last in charge of their own destiny."
A mere few decades after these words were written, I see their fulfillment looming beyond even Muggeridge's sometimes over-dark imagination. Though when he used the phrase "mechanism of life," the journalist probably had in mind such life-meddling scientific advances as artificial contraception and abortion, we are now nearing what promises to be an absolute and horrifying sort of meddling, through advances in the fields of genetic engineering and cloning. (C S Lewis’s Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength saw ahead to such horrors.)
Muggeridge's fascinating gallery of wrestling prophets is full of such moments, in which yesterday's prophets pierce today's darkness.
What pulls us back, as readers, from the despair that Muggeridge did not always successfully fight are the other words he reports to us from these same historical prophets. These words are the tidings of that greater City, whose King walks with us in the midst of a photonegative world, upholding and strengthening us in the face of its self-righteous moral blackness.
Again, I hope soon to share more of both the darker and the brighter words of these prophets and the modern prophet who has written so sympathetically about them. Meanwhile, I’ve just discovered that Muggeridge’s entire Third Testament video series has been made available here on YouTube by Vision Video. Check it out!