Rediscovering Saint Mugg

he journalist, writer, and latter-day Christian apologist Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990) was once well known by the cultivated public on both sides of the Atlantic. His television programs and BBC documentaries drew huge audiences (his 1971 documentary and accompanying book on Mother Teresa of Calcutta – Something Beautiful for God – first brought her to the attention of the larger world). Muggeridge wrote sparkling prose in works such as his autobiography Chronicles of Wasted Time and in his beautiful meditation on the enduring human and theological significance of Christ in an age of skepticism and ideology, Jesus the Man Lives. The latter conveys far more spiritual insight than all of contemporary scripture scholarship, but is, alas, out of print.

Muggeridge’s life was dramatic without being self-dramatizing. Muggeridge was a faithful friend of people who mattered from Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell to William F. Buckley, Jr. (he was a particularly delightful guest on Buckley’s “Firing Line”). Muggeridge had been a reporter in Moscow for the left-leaning Guardian in the early 1930s and was among the first to tell the truth about Soviet Communism and all its works. He also served as a spy for MI-6 during the Second World War. Obviously, Muggeridge was no ordinary journalist. He was a man at the center of the intellectual and political life of the century who nonetheless knew that happiness could not be found solely through human efforts. An astute student of politics, he coolly assessed power and sharply chronicled dislocations and decadence (his work The Thirties is still very much worth reading).