Time and Eternity

by Malcom Muggeridge

  The Christian shrines themselves, and the extensive souvenir and relic trade which has grown up around them, provided another inescapable contact with present-day Israel. What about a crown of thorns, locally manufactured, modestly priced? Or a flask of Jordan water - the real stuff? Or a cross made of wood from the Mount Olives? As there were few foreign tourists because of the war, we were the target of all the vendors, who gathered round us, desperately waving and rattling their rosaries, crucifixes and other impediments. Local tourists - charabanc-loads of Israelis from Tel Aviv and Haifa - came pouring into what had been Jordan, and traipsed listlessly through the Christian shrines, churches and monasteries. Some of the monks found the scanty attire of the Israeli girls disturbing; one, a little man with one eye, in a Greek Orthodox monastery high above the desert, and seemingly hewn out of rock, told me with the utmost satisfaction of how two of these girls had fallen down a gorge and been killed.

  The most famous of the shrines, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, remains propped up with scaffolding, the necessity thus to prop it up,as a delightful French Dominican explained to me, being the only point of agreement the various sects and denominations who control the church have ever been able to find. Agreement on the next step eludes them. On the Sunday that I went, two masses - a Coptic and a Greek Orthodox - were in progress in adjoining chapels, with the celebrants literally yelling against one another. It seemed all too true an image of the present plight of Christendom.

  Bethlehem, from my point of view, was little better. We went there early in the day, and I sat by myself in the cave underneath the Church of the Nativity where Christ is supposed to have been born. The actual spot is marked with a silver star, and nearby is a hollowed out stone, allegedly the manger. Overhead are numerous silver and bronze lamps, and the stone walls are covered with silk and damask, now mostly threadbare.

  Seated there in the half-light, a fit of melancholy seized me; the essential point of Christ’s birth, as I see it, is that it happened in the humblest and poorest circumstances conceivable. He, who was to be worshipped through twenty centuries by the most ardent spirits and perceptive minds of a great civilisation, was born more obscurely than probably anyone else that day in the whole world. What a stupendous moment in history - when for the first time men were to see their god, not in terms of wealth or power or pulchritude, but of penury, weakness and obscurity. I loved the bare stone of the cave’s walls, and resented the coloured hangings which hid it, thereby hiding the true significance of Christ’s birth, and of what His life and death were to fulfil. Truly we humans have an astonishing faculty for thus snatching fantasy from the jaws of truth. It is not just that history is distorted or falsified; it becomes its own opposite. From the first Christmas to Christmas 1967, from Golgotha to the crowning of a Pope, from St Paul to the Bishop of Woolwich, from Bethlehem to Regent Street - such is history’s gamut, which we must run. It was a great relief to get to Galilee, where I forgot the shrines and suddenly felt happy. The Lake, the hills, even the ruins of Tiberias and Caperneum -it was all somehow perfect, uncontaminated, miraculous. One realised that in some mysterious way only in this land could Christ’s mission have been undertaken and fulfilled; nowhere else. Its earth and its contours, its very texture and vegetation, were a book in which the Christian story was written, and where it could always be read. In that sense, despite everything, it was truly a Holy Land. We followed out the story as best we might - climbing up the Mount of Beatitudes to listen to that stupendous sermon; going out into the desert to encounter the devil and with his three temptations -to turn stones into bread and thus augment the Gross National Product, to fly to the moon and thus impress the unbelieving, and to take over the kingdoms of the earth to ensure the everlasting reign in them of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

  We saw the fishermen lay down their nets and go running after a voice which called them; we heard the poor lunatic crying out for release from the evil spirits which were tormenting him, and saw the Gadarene swine go racing over the cliff. We noticed how the sheep and goats were separated, how women gathered round wells to draw water as precious as truth, how thorns grew in sand shining like precious jewels in a crown, how the light of the setting sun beats down on a mountain peak to make a Transfiguration.

  Not one single detail seemed to be missing. There was the road to Jericho along which the Good Samaritan passed, and Bethany where Mary and Martha lived, and the Mount of Olives with its view of Jerusalem - the city seen from there having about it some excruciating and yet entrancing poignancy, which makes Christ’s famous cry from the heart all too comprehensible:

  ‘O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings….’

  It is even possible to take the road to Emmaus, as Cleopas and his companion did, thinking along the way like them about the events of the Crucifixion - two thousand years ago or yesterday - to the point that one becomes aware, as they did, of another presence detaching itself from the shadows and accompanying one along the dusty stony way.

  20

  The Gospel Of Jesus Égalité

  It has always seemed to me obvious that any religious response to life, however primitive, conveys more about its true nature than any intellectual one, however sophisticated. On this basis, an animist bowing down before a painted stone is nearer to the ultimate reality of things than ever Newton was when the apple fell on his head; and any Buddhist monk at his prayerwheel outshines an Einstein or a Bertrand Russell when it comes to grasping and responding to our essential human predicament.

  Thus, however sceptical my own state of mind might otherwise be, I have always had a great appreciation of worship, and of the sacred music, architecture and other embellishments that go therewith. My fellow-humans, likewise, have seemed to me at their most appealing when they are kneeling in prayer, or singing their creator’s praises. Contrariwise, at their most repellent when, as the Prayer Book has it, they are following too much the devices and desires of their own hearts. For instance, anguishedly watching the little roulette ball settle, or staring randily at erotica, or engaging in demagogy, mouth cavernously opening and arms gesticulating, or obsequiously helping a putative patron on with his overcoat after listening with a fixed smirk to his tedious tales.

  I used to love it in Cairo when the muezzin sounded (before it was taped), and the hawkers and hucksters all broke off to unfold their little mats, turn towards Mecca, and, summoning up an expression of humility and sweetness, began to intone their prayers. The moment they had finished, of course, they resumed their hawking and huckstering more stridently than ever, at the precise point they had broken off; but there had been an interlude. That’s what worship is - an interlude.

  Again, in French villages, those weird old crones in black, with their lined parchment faces, kneeling and mumbling and handling their rosaries before a candle-lit Madonna. Or, on a Sunday morning, families making their way to Mass; the bustling mother with wisps of lace about her head, the children self-consciously in their best clothes, the father washed and brushed and moving stiffly in durable black cloth, the bell insistently sounding to quicken their footsteps. So many and so diverse occasions - mantras heard across the muddy waters of the Ganges, plainsong sublimely filling the towering spaces of Chartres Cathedral, a Salvation Army band triumphant at a street corner, Rabbis assiduously wailing at their Wall - but always, in every case, a sense of pride being broken, of flesh humbled as knees are bent or a forehead is lowered into the dust, of brotherhood and equality realized in worship rather than fraudulently asserted in a polling-booth. Always that little clearing made in the dark jungle of the human will.

  Today, it must be admitted, worship in any traditional shape or style is out of fashion; churches and chapels and temples and mosques are alike emptying, and the priestly function has largely passed to
mind-mending psychiatrists, body-mending doctors, and society-mending ideologues and miscellaneous enragés. Indeed, worship itself has in many instances taken a leaf out of the books of these latter-day priests, producing a bizarre amalgam of their jargon and the noises of contemporary entertainment. The aspiring worshipper is all too often offered the melancholy alternatives of muted matins or evensong in the company of the tiny residue of the faithful, and what amounts to Jesus-orientated discotheques.

  In this modernizing process, whether in the most august Roman Catholic congregations or the most wayward and obscure of Little Bethels, the same principle would seem to be at work - to make worship as like as possible to everyday life, in its language, its exhortations, its music and its petitions. Whereas the great cathedrals and other monuments to Christendom’s two thousand years were designed to express the awe and wonder and joy of men audaciously reaching up to God, and the corresponding thankfulness that God should have deigned to become incarnate and reach down to them, the present tendency is, as it were, to look God straight in the eye and address him accordingly. It is as though the sansculottes had taken over in Heaven, deposing God the father, transforming the Son into a Jesus Égalité. and incorporating the Holy Ghost in twanged electronic pieties.

  How amazed an Anthony Trollope would be today at what passes for worship in many an ancient Anglican edifice! No more ‘Dearly beloved brethren, I pray and beseech you, as many as are here present ...’ Rather, God is urged to redress the terms of trade in favour of the underdeveloped countries, or to ensure that the Security Council comes out strongly in favour of majority rule in Rhodesia. At an evening service I attended recently a moon-faced young cleric with luxuriant mutton-chop whiskers prayed that we all might be made ‘thinkers like Karl Marx’, adding presumably to obviate any possibility of being misunderstood on high, ‘some of whose ideas are good and some bad’. I entered a private reservation to contract out of this request, having no particular fancy to be a thinker, least of all one like Karl Marx.

  Such petitions, as it seems to me, imply a naïvely partisan attitude scarcely becoming in a deity who has for aeons past been watching over the affairs of the universe He created. While it is perfectly comprehensible that there should be more joy in Heaven over one repentant sinner than over all the hosts of the just, who will seriously suppose that similar rejoicings attend, say, the replacement in a newly constituted African State of a white authoritarian regime by a black one? Only, perhaps, the World Council of Churches, that ponsasinorum of all Christian endeavour. For myself, I much prefer the style of the Book of Common Prayer, whose requests to God are carefully related to the frailties of our human disposition and uncertainties of our mortal circumstances. Witness, the delightful prayer of St Chrysostum, which asks that our desires and petitions may be fulfilled, but only ‘as may be most expedient for us’.

  Then there are the new translations of the Bible, each more flat-footed and banal than the last, from which the lessons are usually read. Who in his senses can prefer - choosing at random from innumerable examples - Those who live on the level of our lower nature have their outlook formed by it, and that spells death; but those who live on the level of the spirit have the spiritual outlook, and that is life and peace, to the Authorised Version’s For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace? Yet so it is among the great majority of clergy today. The reason they adduce for their strange preference is that the meaning is clearer, forgetting that in too ardent a quest for meaning the first casualty is liable to be truth. My own baptism of fire in this matter came when I was editor of Punch. Readers quite often wrote in to ask what a particular joke meant, and in attempting to explain it I invariably found that I drained it of whatever humour it possessed, to the point that recipients of my explanation would write back to tell me how now they understood the joke, but it didn’t make them laugh. Laughter and mystical ecstasy are two twin heights (hence the gargoyles on cathedrals) to which the human spirit may aspire; they can be climbed but not explored, still less surveyed for building sites.

  It is in the sermon, naturally, that the full force of modernization is felt. A trendy preacher commonly begins by denouncing his congregation as a lot of structured prigs who suppose that coming to church makes them morally superior to their fellows outside, whereas, in point of fact, any pimp, prostitute or criminal is nearer to Christ than they are. Thus lambasted, I find myself reflecting that, though I cannot claim to have been on more than nodding terms with any pimps, I have in the course of a mis-spent life been acquainted with a certain number of prostitutes and criminals. Neither category, in my experience, live up to the claims so often made for them from the pulpit, the former being sluttish, lazy and self-indulgent, and the latter intolerably conceited, arrogant and self-centred. To insist that the founder of the Christian religion had a special affinity with them would seem to me as preposterous as suggesting that Quaker pacifists are never more at home than among Bornean head-hunters, or vegetarians at a dinner of the Worshipful Company of Butchers. Christ came into the world to save sinners, certainly, but not to exalt them; he was merciful to the woman taken in adultery, and exposed the hypocrisy of her accusers, but his last word to her - usually, by the way, omitted in permissive celebrations of this episode - was to go away and sin no more.

  After his initial assault on the congregation, our preacher more often than not proceeds to confound them with denunciations of the church, its doctrines, its liturgy and history, its snivelling hymns and grovelling prayers, its derisory Thirty-Nine Articles, its very ornaments and missals, which, he thunders, would be far better sold and the proceeds given to the poor. I once heard a Dean carrying on like this in his own cathedral, and ending up with an appeal for funds to complete some structural alterations which had been put in hand. By this time we were all too battered and broken to make the obvious retort, and meekly contributed our mites; like mariners responding to an appeal from the captain for money to repair their ship just after he had announced his intention of running it onto the rocks. In the light of these and many other buffooneries, it must be considered little short of miraculous that Christian worship continues to attract any congregation at all. As Hilaire Belloc once remarked of his church, it had obviously enjoyed God’s special favour and protection; otherwise, in view of the inane and often mischievous hands controlling its destiny, it would long since have disappeared.

  In this connection, I recall an experience some years ago when I had occasion to pass several hours at Chicago Airport waiting for a plane connexion. Looking round desperately for an escape from the appalling noise, to my surprise I found, among the various amenities offered, a signpost pointing to a chapel. This proved to be a small twilit room with a Bible opened on a podium and a few rows of chairs. I settled down thankfully in one of these, only to find that even here the loud-speaker system operated, so that any meditation one might attempt was interrupted every few moments by an announcement that flight number so-and-so was boarding at such a gate, and all aboard, please. It seemed like a perfect image of much contemporary worship.

  21

  On The Side Of Life

  The great public excitement over the acquittal of Dr Leonard Arthur at Leicester Crown Court of the attempted murder of a Downs Syndrome, or mongol baby, carried my mind back to 1938. For it was in that year that Dr Aleck Bourne, a senior obstetrician, decided that it was his duty to perform an abortion on a 14-year-old girl who had been raped by several guardsmen. He duly carried out the operation, was tried, and like Dr Arthur, acquitted, to the accompaniment of considerable acclaim. Few, if any, of those who applauded him will have envisaged his acquittal making straight the way to abortion on demand some years later. This, however, was what happened, and Dr Bourne, observing it happen, came to regret his action; became, indeed, in due course, an ardent anti-abortionist.

  How easily a compassionate impulse can thus be translated into a holocaust is well illustrated by th
e manner in which the acceptance in the Weimar Republic of euthanasia as enlightened and estimable, provided the initial justification in Hitler’s Third Reich for the genocide programme of 194145.’Technical experience gained first with killing psychiatric patients,’ Fredrick Wertham, writes in his deeply disturbing book, A Sign For Cain, ‘was utilised later for the destruction of millions. The psychiatric murders came first.’ While pictures of the Nazi holocaust were horrifying television and cinema audiences throughout the western world, all unbeknownst to them another ostensibly humane holocaust was being mounted, no less terrible than the other, for being aimed at enhancing the quality of life.

  It requires no great prophetic power to foresee that the trial and acquittal of Dr Arthur may likewise be expected to prepare the way for acceptance of euthanasia as part of our contemporary way of life. At first, it will be a matter of disposing of seriously handicapped children who, for whatever reason, may be plausibly regarded as unlikely to appreciate the full quality of life available today - that is to say, to travel, drive a motorcar, have sex, watch television, and otherwise relish the devices and desires on offer in the twentieth century. We may assume, then, that soon there would be no more mongol children needing special care at home or institutions. Materialistically considered, this would be a solid gain; the quality of human livestock will be to that extent improved.