Confessions of a Twentieth-Century Pilgrim

I finally found another one! What am I talking about? I'm talking about the Malcolm Muggeridge book that I found at the public library bookstore. I only buy used books, which is a good way of cultivating patience since the delay could be a few years (assuming I don't use Amazon, in which case the delay is only a few days). But the delayed gratification this time was worth it. I had never even heard of Muggeridge's Confessions of a Twentieth-Century Pilgrim before pulling it down in trembling excitement, my gasp of pleasure sounding loud among the silent shelves.

Muggeridge's autobiographical Confessions was at times merely a collection of quotes, at times a strangely impersonal narrative of his life, at other times a heartfelt cry of prayer. But at all times it was fascinating to read. Opening on the scene of his induction into the Catholic church at an advanced age, the author then turns a backwards glance on the stages of his life that had brought him to that moment. The boy, the teacher, the journalist, the soldier are some of the parts that the Englishman Muggeridge played on a variety of continents and in a variety of countries. While some could fault the almost desultory quotes from Augustine, Solzhenitsen, Simone Weil, among many, and Muggeridge's own philosophical reflections for breaking up the flow of the biography, they were my favorite part. I can't resist copying some of these reflections.

"the pursuit of knowledge without reference to truth which alone gives knowledge its validity" (51).

"The other true purpose of school studies--education--is to inculcate humility--not just a virtue, but the condition of virtue. From this point of view, it is perhaps even more useful to contemplate our stupidity than our sin." --Simone Weil (52).

"In great wealth, great poverty; in health sickness; in numbers, deception. Gorging, left hungry; sedated, left restless... So we press on through the valley of abundance that leads to the wasteland of satiety, passing through the gardens of fantasy; seeking happiness ever more ardently, and finding despair ever more surely" (64).

"Darwinian evolution, a very rickety hypothesis based on some old bones or a tooth discovered in Kenya or Nanking, and infiltrating all the different disciplines of learning, and making an ultimate nonsense of them all" (76).

"Of course, she enjoys the inestimable advantage of never looking at TV, listening to radio or reading the newspapers, and so has a clear notion of what is really going on in the world; the siren-voice of the consensus does not reach her" (136).

Why did Muggeridge become a Catholic? In part at least, "it was the Catholic Church's firm stand against contraception and abortion which finally made me decide to become a Catholic" (140).

Throughout his book there is one recurrent theme, somewhat contradictory to the idea of an autobiography: the theme of humility.

"He set a window in the tiny dark dungeon of the ego in which we all languish, letting in a light, providing a vista, and offering a way of release from the servitude of the flesh and the fury of the will into what St Paul called 'the glorious liberty of the children of God'" (131).

"God, humble my pride, extinguish the last stirrings of my Ego, obliterate whatever remains of worldly ambition and carnality, and help me to serve only Thy purposes, to speak and write only Thy words, to think only Thy thoughts, to have no other prayer than 'Thy will be done'" (75).

And that's a pretty good thought to end with.

Malcolm Muggeridge, Confessions of a Twentieth-Century Pilgrim. San Francisco, Harper and Row Publishers. 1988. Originally: Conversion, A Spiritual Journey

The Pride in Monkey

I am currently taking a world literature class. (Who would have guessed.) Anyway, I am. Despite my early fears that its primarily non-western selection of readings would make for a terrible class, I have been pleasantly surprised. We read a few chapters from a long Chinese novel. (At a few thousand pages, longer than a Russian novel even.) I don't think "novel" is even the best way to describe it; it is more like an epic or something. Journey to the West or Monkey as it is more often called, chronicles the journey of a Buddhist priest named Tripitaka from China who is commissioned to find "scriptures" in India. Along the way he picks up a number of helpers or "disciples" to assist him. The first and most important of these is the title character: Monkey.

The story is definitely fantastic (I mean like a fantasy, but it's pretty good too). Monkey really is a monkey, and along with him a whole host of other talking monsters make their appearance in the tale. My class is an on-line course so for this 16th century story by Wu Ch'eng-en we were asked to examine the flaws in Monkey's character. The thing that most struck me and that relates to my last post on C.S.Lewis is how Monkey is consumed by pride and a desire to show off. He says himself: “I only care for fame” (56). This leads him into conflict with supposed monsters rather than stating his mission as he was ordered. If he had done everything right, things would have gone better for the pilgrims but, of course, we also would not have much of a story to read.

Monkey's pride is his greatest fault. At the very beginning he wishes to elevate himself over all the other monkeys and be their king(12). It is a desire to “show off his own powers” that goads him to many of his actions, as the heavenly buddha Kuan-yin points out (27). It is his pride that makes him leave Tripitaka in a huff when rebuked for killing the robbers and for pursuing his own will in so many other episodes. But what shows this better than anything else is what Monkey calls himself: “The Great Sage Equal to Heaven.” The arrogance of this is stunning. Monkey is basically saying that he (remember, a monkey) is on the same footing as all the deities of heaven. Was not this the same over-weaning pride of Satan when he set himself up in opposition to God? For this sin, of which we only get a flashback of because it happens before the opening of the story, Monkey is imprisoned and later put on probation to learn humility under the care of Tripitaka, a common buddhist priest.

The fact that Monkey acknowledges Tripitaka as his “master” is a sign that Monkey is on the right path to learning humility. Before he “had no master and indeed refused obedience to any power in heaven or earth” (26). The examples above, however, along with many other illustrations of his actions, show that he still has a long way to go. The Dragon King admonishes: “You must learn to control yourself and submit to the will of others, if you are not to spoil all your chances (22). We only read a few chapter from the start of the tale so I only got to see an itty-bitty improvement in Monkey but supposedly by the end (and remember it's a long story) he does indeed learn to control his pride and, in Buddhist fashion, reach "enlightenment." There is a dual quest in Monkey that makes it worthwhile reading; the outward exciting journey to India for "scriptures" and the inward delineation of a character on a personal journey.

Wu Ch'eng-en. Monkey (Journey to the West). The Norton Anthology of World Literature: Volume D: 1650-1800. Ed. Sarah Lawall and Maynard Mack. New York: W.W.Norton and Co, 2002. 2nd ed.

Mere Christianity, Part 3: The Great Sin.

Normal pride.

“If I am a proud man, then, as long as there is one man in the whole world more powerful, or richer, or cleverer than I, he is my rival and my enemy” (123).

“Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better looking than others. If everyone became equally rich, or clever, or good-looking there would be nothing to be proud about. It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest” (122).

“Real thorough-going pride may act as a check on vanity; for, as I said a moment ago, the devil loves curing a small fault by giving you a great one. We must try not to be vain, but we must never call in our pride to cure our vanity” (126-27).

Spiritual pride.

“It is purely spiritual: consequently it is far more subtle and deadly” (125).

“Whenever we find that our religious life is making us feel that we are good—above all, that we are better than someone else—I think we may be sure that we are being acted on, not by God, but by the devil” (124-5).

“An individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for special reasons— marriage, or meat, or beer, or the cinema; but the moment he starts saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning” (78-79).

The real cure for both vanity and pride; normal and spiritual:

“To love and admire anything outside yourself is to take one step away from utter spiritual ruin; though we shall not be well so long as we love and admire anything more than we love and admire God” (127).

Lewis, C.S. Mere Christianity. HarperSanFrancisco, HarperCollins Publishers, 2001

Mere Christianity, Part 2: well, sort of

The somewhat longish gap in time since my last post was not intentional. In fact, I've had a draft just sitting in Blogger for nearly two weeks now. After writing it, however, I decided not to post it immediately. Something didn't seem quite right. Since then it has seemed to me more and more uncharitable. Besides, it was on the free-will controversy which can't really be treated in 3 or 4 hundred words! Interestingly enough though, Calvinism has come up a lot during the time I've been considering what to do with what I wrote. Anyway, what first got me going was reading (as the title of this post suggests) Mere Christianity. It shouldn't do any harm to quote the passage that was meant to be at the heart of the post that was meant to be in place of this one that was meant to be posted days ago, in which I meant to rebut the Calvinist argument against freewill, but, alas, it was not meant to be. I hope you have the means to see what I mean.

I leave you with C.S.Lewis on freewill:

Free will is what has made evil possible... though it makes evil possible it is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata—of creatures that worked like machines—would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight... And for that they must be free (48).

Lewis, C.S. Mere Christianity. HarperSanFrancisco, HarperCollins Publishers, 2001

Jan. 22

Jan. 22 is the anniversary of Roe v. Wade I was reminded while perusing some blogs. On Geneveith.com I found this quote from Mother Teresa.

“America needs no words from me to see how your decision in Roe v. Wade has deformed a great nation. The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships. It has aggravated the derogation of the father’s role in an increasingly fatherless society. It has portrayed the greatest of gifts—a child—as a competitor, an intrusion, and an inconvenience. It has nominally accorded mothers unfettered dominion over the independent lives of their physically dependent sons and daughters.”

I just read a short biography on Thomas Jefferson, so I see the irony particularly strong of a nation that presumably holds to the self-evident truth that all have the inalienable right to LIFE, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Today it would seem that the liberty and happiness of some is more important than the life of others.

Mere Christianity I: The Moral Law

I've been reading with interest, lately, the arguments for the existence of right and wrong. Actually some of what I have read could not technically be called arguments. For instance, I was interested that Plato in his Gorgias assumes without question that right and wrong exist and that doing the good is the most important thing possible. Just because Plato and Socrates said it does not mean it is true; however, it casts serious doubt on the occasional letter-to-the-editor-writer and average skeptic who say everyone can just do what they want and make up their own morality myths. Usually these types are terribly inconsistent by throwing in a clause like: “so long as they don't hurt anybody else,” thus showing that, aaah-ha, there really is some general guideline to be followed. But while I get a good chuckle (really I shouldn't) out of this illogical position, there are also the scary few who actually appear to believe what they say.

C.S.Lewis also addresses this issue of right and wrong or “The Rule of Decent Behavior” in Mere Christianity. The book opens with the chapter heading: “Right and Wrong as a Clue to the Meaning of the Universe.” His general premise is that “the human idea of decent behavior [is] obvious to everyone” (5). And the funny thing is that what Lewis and all the ancient philosophers and your parents and grandparents all the way back to Adam have been saying is much more believable than a sprinkling of university professors in Europe and the United States who claim it is not so. I mean, come on, if I slapped them in the face would they really not consider that unjust? Lewis very cogently makes his conclusion about the human race: “they know the Law of Nature [Moral Law] ;they break it. These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in” (8).

Lewis goes on and ruthlessly slays the further objections of some about multiple moralities and so on. A few quotes to sum up should finish this post very well but stay tuned for some more excerpts from Mere Christianity coming up.

“We are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table” (7).

“If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilized morality to savage morality, or Christian morality to Nazi morality. In fact, of course, we all do believe that some moralities are better than others” (13).

“In the same way, if the Rule of Decent Behavior meant simply 'whatever each nation happens to approve,' there would be no sense in saying that any one nation had ever been more correct in its approval than any other” (14).

“We do not merely observe men, we are men. In this case we have, so to speak, inside information; we are in the know. And because of that, we know that men find themselves under a moral law, which they did not make, and cannot quite forget even when they try, and which they know they ought to obey” (23).

Lewis, C.S. Mere Christianity. HarperSanFrancisco, HarperCollins Publishers, 2001

If an Imagination Is so Great...

Having shown the prevalence and usefulness of imagination in the first half of his book The Educated Imagination, Northrop Frye uses the second half to briefly outline the order literature should be approached to best train the imagination. Frye says, interestingly enough, that:

“the Bible forms the lowest stratum in the teaching of literature. It should be taught so early and so thoroughly that it sinks straight to the bottom of the mind, where everything that comes along later can settle on it” (110).

I find it somewhat ironic that a secular scholar should say something like this at a time when even many Christians have almost forgotten about the Bible. Literature aside, shouldn't all Christians be taught what the Bible says, “so early and so thoroughly that it sinks straight to the bottom of the mind, where everything that comes along later may settle on it”?

Just like Victor Davis Hanson, Frye also advocates early training in Greek and Latin authors before exploring later modern writers. Biblical and classical knowledge is foundational to understanding both the allusions of later authors and basic literary forms, yet Frye states that there is “a deficiency in the earliest stages of literary teaching for both poet and reader” (113). A few hundred years ago authors were taught the Bible and the classics, today, “modern poets don't get the same kind of education, as a rule: they have to educate themselves” (113). In case you think this is a slightly too dismal accusation of our education system, consider the Ancient World Literature course at my community college. The catalogue reads: “a majority of the works will be selected from a non-Western literary tradition.” As if this were not bad enough, the course isn't even offered this semester so I am stuck with World Literature After 1500 (again, the majority of works in this are from a non-Western tradition). (Plus, they canceled the only American Literature course when I tried to register. Does anyone have a conspiracy theory I can subscribe to that will explain this or should I make one up?)

Fry, Northrop. The Educated Imagination. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana, 1964, (2006?).