A Question of Faith
Nolte, William H.
"A Question of Faith" accounts of his life, by how genuine the man was. He was a terror as a reviewer because he simply could not tolerate bad work, and as a result he made enemies (Conrad Aiken being a famous example)....
...In fact it is what I've always found with the agnostic—what happens to him in the end is that he becomes sentimental...
...Like all these harridans who gathered around Lawrence, an atrocious woman...
...Would he not reach the conclusion that the paintings were obviously related to one another...
...Thus, old issues find no solution, while new ones are constantly being added...
...Worse, he is incurable, for disappointment, being essentially an objective phenomenon, cannot The American Spectator December 1977 9 permanently affect his subjective infirmity...
...Muggeridge: Well, touché, touch...
...He's gone, and all he achieved has gone, and it has made absolutely no difference...
...I would even go so far as to say that faith must be irrational since it does not place any particular importance upon empirical evidence...
...Faith may be defined as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable...
...In other words, he needs a God, needs some sort of transcendental perspective to understand the nature of his own life and to make that life bearable...
...Jeffers was religious in what is more nearly like a Wordsworthian sense, a pantheistic sense...
...First, I don't think that contemporary Malcolm Muggeridge is the author of many books on Christianity, including Jesus: The Man Who Lives and Something Beautiful for God...
...And so that's all I really know about him...
...It is in the Incarnation that the relationship of finite man and infinite God is dramatized...
...Your deity, for example, is anthropomorphic...
...There is a separatist movement in almost every country of Asia and Africa: In Lebanon such movements have wrecked what 18 months ago was a highly prosperous country...
...Nolte: If I were to name them you would accuse me of infidelity, of sacrilege...
...Nolte: Jeffers' ? 11_ 12 The American Spectator December 1977 Muggeridge: Well, only a bit of it—it bled...
...The New Testament conveys the life and teaching of Christ and also the drama of his death, passion, and resurrection and all that followed therefrom...
...Muggeridge: Well, I'm sure I don't have to say to you that that line comes from Shakespeare's sonnets...
...another was a German professor and he had gone mad...
...Even Shakespeare, after all, limped at times...
...It is a narrow-minded clannishness succinctly The American Spectator December 1977 13...
...Nolte: Johnson made an impression—as did Shakespeare an even larger impression—upon those people who were or are aware of him...
...Because a lot of time existed before he was here, and a lot will exist after he's gone...
...For example, you are a great admirer of Pascal...
...And I object to that even more than I object to the other...
...Muggeridge: I am not saying that he considered himself more intelligent necessarily, because I admire Mencken, too...
...and on and on...
...Nolte: Jeffers, incidentally, was a very religious man...
...Muggeridge: I don't know, then, how you can account for those achievements in the course of man's existence in which you, as a very fine scholar of literature and a great appreciator of literature, take such pleasure...
...The American Spectator December 1977 11 Muggeridge: Therefore, there's no particular point in his having existed...
...Like a candle wasting...
...Exeunt omnes...
...Nolte: I won't argue about the beauty that man has created nor will you, I am sure, argue about the nuisance he's created...
...You waste time whenyou do or say second-rate things when first-rate things are available...
...In journalism, for instance, there is an inevitable pursuit of the second-rate...
...and that—throughout our civilization—I would say throughout all civilizations—faith has been an extremely fertile and rewarding approach to the dilemmas of human life...
...An age of renascent faith: Christ said, Marx wrote, Hitler says, And though it seems absurd we believe...
...The notion that somehow or other there came into existence a universe...
...Meanwhile, new separatist movements arise, such as that of the Palestinians, an entity artificially created by the British in 1918, F.S...
...perhaps, I was more guilty than others...
...Nolte: No, Blake was mad to begin with...
...You are asking a microbe to prove the existence of the giant on whose carcass it is living...
...Nolte: Yes...
...If you believe in eternity, do you mean that man has no part in eternity...
...that magical humor which sees the real comedy of man precisely in his position, his balancing position, between time and eternity...
...Nolte: It would be rewarding to me...
...This reminds me of Mencken's definition of faith, which I'll read to you since it's always been a favorite of mine...
...Sad children, yes...
...For a little while he measured his wits against eternity, for a little while before he was snuffed out, and with his snuffing out it was as though he had never existed...
...Only three people had ever understood the Schleswig-Holstein question, Viscount Palmerston, old and gouty, said apropos of yet another separatist imbroglio that from 1850 until 1864 convulsed Europe: One was the Prince-Consort and he was dead...
...I would be considered an atheist by many people even though I do believe in a certain divine force...
...Anyway, quite properly he was put in a padded cell, wasn't he...
...that the whole of the universe was created and man came into existence in order to go through that process and then be extinct...
...And then, in order to illustrate his point, he says it is as though he were offered a wager as to whether or not God exists...
...Nolte: But one cannot always say first-rate things...
...Muggeridge: Yes, his madness bore beautiful fruit too...
...However, in 1967, following the Six-Day War, a band of determined men created a spurious nation and a genuine terrorist organization, and today hardly a day passes without the issue of a future Palestinian state being discussed by statesmen, international organizations, and the media...
...Muggeridge: And do you know what another was, the most awful of all...
...Nolte: Oh, absolutely, as did the dinosaur...
...The wager, though, if you'll forgive my saying so, is not intended to be taken literally...
...Why do you call it Chronicles of Wasted Time...
...Others not so well disposed think it's due to the fact that as the capacity to engage in sins of the flesh diminishes with advancing years, one solaces oneself by denouncing them...
...Nolte: I don't see how it could have changed...
...Ubermensch...
...that somehow or other through millions of years this rather ridiculous little species that you and I belong to would exist in it, would perform certain wonders of science and civilization, and then would expire—such a view has been inconceivable to human beings from the very earliest times and will never be conceivable to them...
...Nolte: It is nonsensical because that's not the complete story of man...
...How could Mencken admire such a conclusion...
...and countless Christians have not accepted it...
...But as I was reading I reflected that, after all, they could also be related to one another because they had the same creator...
...Muggeridge: Yes, but of course this is just silly, because you are asking me, a finite man, living in time, with a finite mind, to use that little mind to prove to you the existence of something infinitely greater, something in eternity, in whose purposes I am a tiny participant...
...Nolte: In what instance were you doing the second-rate...
...Nolte: Well, my objection is that you are basing your convictions purely upon an irrational faith...
...Muggeridge: Then let me ask you this...
...And that he would not tolerate....But oh, if you published something he liked...
...Without that, I entirely agree that this emptiness you speak of has got to be accepted...
...It is the source of all the truly profound insight that has ever been achieved by human beings in the course of their history, and specifically for us as Western Europeans, in the last twenty centuries...
...Of course, the good man, in postulating such a wager, was risking being taken au pied de la lettre , and should have realized that his words were going to be scrutinized by agnostics and atheists...
...Muggeridge: Would you say Blake died mad...
...if you lose, you lose nothing...
...That is a sign of grace in you...
...That strikes me as being an excellent definition of my kind of atheism...
...Nolte: I believe that Mencken would admire—in fact I know that he admired Pascal...
...What Mencken is saying in effect is that looking back on the history of Christendom—on the whole of Christian civilization and everything that it has produced—the people responsible for all these great achievements are nincompoops...
...Nolte: He will have played his part in the past tense—he will have played it...
...the Tamils from Ceylon...
...Nolte: I knew that...
...To Jarrell, one had an obligation to oneself, and to one's talent...
...Dreams of empires, commonwealths, and supranational bodies have all foundered on the rocks of man's innate parochialism...
...Curtains...
...What Pascal is saying in effect is that through faith we are aware of eternity, and that we can accept this faith and realize what eternity is, or we can reject it...
...It was called Nietzsche...
...so suffice it to say that they threaten the existence of Canada, Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and, given half a chance, the Soviet Union...
...The conclusion of the Pen.thes is that the intellect is a washout, that it's a cul-de-sac, that knowledge as such leads nowhere, and that man's only hope on earth is faith...
...Muggeridge: They lacked the essential element in humor that 10 The American Spectator December 1977 you find in a truly religious writer, like Cervantes, like Gogol, like Shakespeare...
...Secondly, I think the essential thing about man, and the thing that takes one straight to God, is that he is a fallen creature...
...Indeed, where separatism and nationalism are concerned, anything goes...
...Beagle in a rather beautiful illustrated edition, and I was struck by the degree to which Darwin's actual conclusions were both extended and made more dogmatic...
...That's the only thing that I can remember...
...the Meo hill tribes from Laos and Cambodia...
...Muggeridge is an unabashed Christian, since I have never been able to decide for myself what a Christian really was...
...Shakespeare's Macbeth said it all in his "Out, out, brief candle" lament...
...And your explanation is that I find myself so at odds with contemporary man that I find it inescapable to look towards a God...
...But you, of course, are being humorous in insisting that Mencken considered himself more intelligent than all those who went before him...
...Muggeridge: But I think that he was very doubtful about the arrogance with which people like Huxley applied it...
...I agree with you, though, that there is not an awful lot...
...A lot of my friends—old friends—regard my Christian faith as a sign of total senility...
...Muggeridge: No, but what I mean is that you deliberately or for interested motives relate yourself to the second-rate when the first-rate is accessible...
...Muggeridge: Then while he's on this earth, he has a part in eternity...
...Muggeridge: "Wasted" in that sense, of course, does not carry —and again I don't have to say this to you—precisely the same meaning as "wasted" does today...
...Or anthropocentric terms, I should say...
...I too am an admirer of Pascal, although I have always been astonished that people would use his famous wager as a means of praising him since that wager has always struck me as being the most pragmatic and even degrading form of self-aggrandizement imaginable...
...But then eternity goes on, and man has no subsequent part in it, according to you...
...If one didn't want to choose Jesus, one could choose one of the Greek figures or any number of the thousands of gods who are, or were once thought to be, omnipotent, omniscient, eternal—Aztec gods or whatever...
...Muggeridge: What saint are you thinking of...
...The novelist Peter Taylor has written: If you published something he didn't like, he behaved as though you had been disloyal to him in some way—or not that so much—more as if you had been disloyal to some other friend of his—your other self, that is, your artist self...
...I always remember Nietzsche's remark about the earth having askin and that skin having many diseases, one of those diseases being man...
...Muggeridge: The definition of faith by Mencken has all the characteristics of Mencken...
...Most authorities argue that separatism is the misshapen offspring of 19th-century nationalism...
...With a little practice you'll believe anything...
...Muggeridge: The first-rate is simply any single thing in one's life, any single relationship in one's life, that truly aspires after what is perfect...
...But I object to the belief in anthropomorphic gods...
...Muggeridge: It is an error, but the point is that insofar as one has chosen the second-rate, and there's a great deal of choosing of second-rateness in life, perhaps particularly today, time was wasted...
...It's just that I disagree with you when you say that it is inconceivable that this creature, man, should perish...
...There are, after all, some excellent stories about man and I'm not convinced that there isn't a little good left in him yet...
...It is lonely to be an adult, you need a father...
...That is to say it's well written, it's piquant, and it's utterly superficial...
...On your showing, Johnson existed as, it might be, a midge or a dragonfly exists...
...It's no good saying that Christendom went on for 18 or 19 centuries, and that its art and its literature and its thought and everything about it was due to a lot of deluded half-witted people...
...Muggeridge: It is utterly unimportant whether it was or not...
...Actually somebody cut off his ear there...
...I would like to ask, also, if perhaps your love of God is not in large part, if not entirely, a reaction against man today, whom by the way you distinguish from man as you conceive him to have been in past ages...
...That is, you speak of his faith in the pursuit of happiness, faith in material things, faith that is nonsensical, needless to say...
...Actually Darwin himself—although I think he was a pest in that he promoted one of the great errors that have afflicted the human race—was a man of exceptional sensitivity and diffidence, and there is much reason to suppose that he was by no means pleased with the results of the application of his theory...
...This is, Pascal insists, a truly wonderful bet in which if you win, you win everything...
...Muggeridge: None at all...
...Muggeridge: And that suddenly in Baltimore a light shone and there was a man who could see that the whole of this was just self-deception...
...It simply means that that is the only way in which he can convey to human beings the presence of a ghost on the stage...
...Nolte: It is an either/ or question which assures the true believer of winning one way or the other...
...Muggeridge: I think he was a pest...
...So all creation is by the same hand, viz., God's...
...William H. Nolte A Question of Faith Last April, Malcolm Muggeridge spent three weeks at the University of Dallas as a visiting lecturer...
...all he need do is simply believe...
...One of the funny things about becoming a Christian in the twentieth century is that everybody like you looks around for some explanation other than the fact that one believes Christianity to be true, which, indeed, is the only basis on which anyone could become a Christian...
...Do you remember that...
...Muggeridge: And nothing that it's achieved will have in any way affected the cosmic scheme—which I call God's purpose for his creation...
...You said at the beginning that you didn't know what being a Christian was, and I would just like very briefly to point out that being a Christian is being a follower of Christ, which is a perfectly clear, straightforward thing...
...Except to himself...
...Nolte: Am I going to ask you now to prove to me that there is a God, Mr...
...To me, faith is not an acceptance of defeat, but rather the projection of understanding...
...Muggeridge: That's true, that's true...
...And countless Christians through their writings, their lives, their devotions, through every aspect of their existence have manifested that they don't accept it...
...I think he was a splendid journalist and I admire anyone who excels at journalism...
...Some such dictum could be applied to every separatist movement now afflicting our world...
...What he says, in substance, is this: 'Let us trust in God, Who has always fooled us in the past.' " Can we trust in God if that trust does tend to fool us, and if we have no better evidence for believing than just the desire to believe...
...One winter when I was staying in London, I had two ten-page letters from him about two stories of mine he had seen in print...
...Whereas, it seems to me that it's inconceivable that he won't perish...
...We do reside in a world of flux, just as we reside in eternity, and I see no reason for one's having to have faith in order to grasp the vastness of eternity—to realize how unfathomable that vastness is...
...Muggeridge: Oh, in hundreds of ways...
...Nolte: Have you never sacrificed sense for a melodious phrase...
...For example, George Santayana once wrote that his atheism, like Spinoza's, is true piety towards the universe, and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image to be servants of their human interests...
...Muggeridge: In all our discussion we've left out what to a Christian is the essence of all truth...
...Let me read you a few lines from a poem written in the 1930s: How many turn back toward dreams and magic, how many children Run home to Mother Church, Father State, To find in their arms the delicious warmth and folding of souls...
...What better could you have done...
...Nolte: He has a part only during the time he lives in this world...
...To be a Christian is to base one's life on those events and that drama...
...And died in a lunatic asylum...
...Augustine was a credulous idiot...
...Nolte: Not upon the essential beauty and harmony of the universe...
...Randall Jarrell was one of our finest critics...
...Nobody has ever tried to do this until our time, and it is part of the imbecility of science to have reduced people to thinking that there is nothing in the universe whose existence we can't prove or disprove, in terms of our own little limited standards...
...This is another explanation...
...I refer, of course, to the Incarnation...
...Nolte: I might begin by saying that I was somewhat shaken to learn that Mr...
...He is a species who has come into being and will go out of being...
...Muggeridge: But, I'm not very impressed with that, partly because it's a cheap trick to equate faith in God with faith in the other figures that he lists there...
...I have no objections, mind you, to a man's having faith in whatever, so long, anyhow, as his faith doesn't constitute a public nuisance, but I think you'll admit that a person could have faith in some particular thing or abstraction and that that faith would act as an aid to him or a crutch...
...There is thus a flavor of the pathological in it...
...But I sometimes wonder if Robinson Jeffers wasn't correct when he spoke of our age as being a great age of faith...
...Muggeridge: I've read the passage many times because this is one of the things that is held against Pascal, and I think that in your presentation of it there is a total misunderstanding...
...It is a phrase I like very much, and I was really saying almost what Proust said—A la recherche du temps perdu—that it was wasted time, time that had gone, that had been consumed...
...the Ibos from Nigeria...
...Nolte: Jeffers did go to Taos—he never met Lawrence...
...Nolte: No...
...When Shakespeare brings a ghost onto the stage, he presents that ghost in the lineaments of the person the ghost once was...
...Nolte: To whom could it have made any difference...
...Such a view leaves out of account everything that has been truly great in all human history...
...That's all...
...Muggeridge...
...Johnson, for whom we share a great admiration, weren't we...
...But I know that you object to evolution...
...But that is not the essential point...
...We've got to agree to differ on that, and you've got to allow me to say that there is a dimension in human thought, in man's attempt to grasp the nature and circumstances of his existence, that is not purely factual or intellectual, and that has been called faith...
...Nolte: No, I do not see how I am leaving any of that out...
...Muggeridge: But what you're suggesting is that when Homo sapiens dies out, so many million years hence, it will be as though the species had never been...
...Nolte: A moment ago you remarked that man was a fallen creature...
...What impression did they make upon you or have they made upon me...
...it goes beyond the normal intellectual process and passes into the murky domain of transcendental metaphysics...
...William H. Nolte, chairman of the English department at the University of South Carolina, went to Dallas to dispute with Mr...
...the Karens from Thailand and Burma...
...Muggeridge: Right...
...Muggeridge: But it will make no difference and it will leave no dent...
...F.S...
...During that time he produces art, literature, geniuses of all kinds, he speculates, measures his strength, delves into what that wonderful anonymous work of 14th-century Europe calls "the cloud of unknowing"—all these things happened, and then, finished...
...You see, Nietzsche's bore ugly fruit...
...Muggeridge: And in that sense, he's played no part in it at all...
...Muggeridge: And he was having his hair cut by one of them and she cut off his ear very properly...
...Muggeridge: No, you're not, because if you do you will be wasting your time...
...in Iraq, the Kurds are fighting a desperate guerrilla war...
...that not a single one of them —whether it was the builders of Chartres Cathedral, or the painters of Renaissance Italy, or the saints and mystics—had anything like the grasp of the nature of human life and reality and truth that he, Mencken, had...
...I can't think of any more unrewarding exercise...
...Muggeridge: Yes, you could bring up a few small points like that, but would they in the totality prove that you loved her...
...Muggeridge: To anyone who has, through faith, grasped this transcendental dimension of life it makes an enormous difference —only I quite agree that it's a difference that cannot be understood and experienced except through the central Christian concept of God becoming a man and a man reaching up to God...
...But that faith need not necessarily be in, say, the person of Jesus...
...Much was heard about Arab terrorism, and there were Palestinians in refugee camps, but nobody then spoke of a "Palestinian homeland...
...when the Ottoman heritage was carved up by Britain and France...
...And the intimations of his being a fallen creature do vary from time to time and, of course, one is more aware of them in one's own time...
...This summer, the Indians and Eskimos of Northern Canada met to discuss the creation of an independent native state in Canada's Arctic...
...Mark Twain, as a matter of fact, produced the same idea in a very much briefer form...
...Then man lives in it for so many billions or whatever it may be of years...
...That's point number one...
...Muggeridge: And you think that when he dies—as did the dinosaur and as will all created things—his part in eternity is terminated totally...
...Muggeridge: No, no, it wouldn't because, first of all, it wouldn't convince you even if I could prove the existence of God, and, secondly, because you are asking me to do something in one dimension in relation to something in another dimension...
...It is a poetry the likes of which few can write, and the likes of which few have written...
...With all respect...
...man is a more despicable or more unsatisfactory figure than man was a century ago or five or ten centuries ago...
...He worshipped the god of atoms, the god who reveals himself in the atomic consistency of the universe...
...Nolte: No...
...None...
...Muggeridge: No, but he met those dreadful harridans who lived around Lawrence...
...This, however, is to take too short a view of history...
...Nolte: Of course they will...
...Muggeridge: Not mine...
...Nolte: But was it faith that enabled Pascal to be a good scientist...
...Imagine a roomful of all Rembrandt's paintings, from the very earliest to the very last, and suppose that someone goes into the room who knows nothing about Rembrandt or who had painted the pictures...
...Of course, he undoubtedly concluded that all the different species were connected with one another, and the very beautiful pictures by the artist with him on the Beagle supported such a notion...
...To list them all would probably fill a greater part of this magazine...
...As indeed they were, being all by the same hand, viz., Rembrandt's...
...Your devotion, in other words, strikes me as a kind of residue of your disgust for the animals that Christ was rumored to have died for...
...Muggeridge: It was Dorothy Brett, a deaf lady and a friend of Lawrence who, as is recorded in Mabel Dodge Luhan's memoirs, cut off his ear...
...Muggeridge, a moment ago you spoke of the great destiny of mankind, and it seems to me that his destiny is obviously to oblivion...
...You are connecting whom he knew with what he said...
...Muggeridge: And, therefore, if by some accident man hadn't happened, the working of the cosmic scheme would be precisely the same...
...Because love is something much greater than all the different small manifestations that it has on earth, and so, believe me, is our Creator...
...His brief candle flickers between the two enormities of Before and After...
...Nolte: Mr...
...With the end of the British mandate in 1948, the Palestinians more or less vanished, the West Bank having been annexed by Jordan and the Gaza Strip being under Egyptian rule...
...Curiously enough, I recently read the Voyage of the H.M.S...
...How on earth can you prove the existence of a deity except through, as you say, faith, which is not satisfactory proof...
...If we could agree on that, then we could proceed...
...Muggeridge for his Christian views...
...Nolte: But I'm not asking you to prove an emotion, I'm asking you to prove an existence...
...Lawrence at Taos...
...Muggeridge: I am delighted...
...And the more we learn about the cosmos, the fewer questions we have to ask that were once answered with such firmness by the Fathers of the Church in the Middle Ages...
...It means consumed...
...What I'm saying is that our species, once it is extinct, will no longer play a part in the working out of the cosmic scheme...
...In the most primitive human beings, as in the most developed and intelligent and imaginative, we find intimations all the time, in their work, in their dreams, in their hopes, in their faith—I use that word again—of belonging to an existence which transcends this one...
...In light of it, however, it doesn't surprise me to find in those lines an appalling sentimentality...
...Muggeridge: Please...
...Muggeridge: Yes, but not in my sense...
...This is childish...
...Muggeridge on the Christian faith...
...In the dark abyss of the night, I sometimes wonder what on earth you could have done with your life, better than you have done, and are doing...
...It's equally untrue, in point of fact, and for two reasons...
...The Incarnation, that is to say, provides an essential drama, which means nothing to you, but to a Christian exactly embodies what we are talking about...
...In other words: "There is no God, ergo, man is God...
...But I don't think much of the lines...
...Nolte: In most of your writing, Mr...
...But he was appalled by man's worshipping his fellow man—in brief, by his anthropocentric delusions...
...And the accumulated experience and faith of these people is there to be seen, to be read, to be looked at...
...Nolte: Only during the time that man was here...
...But I don't accept it...
...Indeed, the two could not be separated...
...Now, I realize that you may object to my referring to the Christian "myth...
...I think this worried him greatly...
...It would be like saying to me, "Prove to me that you love your wife...
...We were talking as we came in about Dr...
...What I am saying is that his definition of faith, if you're going to take it at its face value, rules out the contributions of people like Pascal...
...Muggeridge: I think it will be a subject of derision among posterity...
...Muggeridge, you object to the fact that man today has no faith in anything other than the things of this world...
...Nolte: That's an error that any fine writer would make...
...He has been with us—what?—three or four million years now, and that he will last that much longer is pretty difficult to believe...
...What has led me to take this position is a realization that man cannot live simply in terms of his own humanity, that it is not possible for him to create a kingdom of Heaven on earth...
...Nolte: Let me ask you one further question...
...William H. Nolte is a regular contributor to The American Spectator...
...Of course there will be periods of time, like now, when men have so lost their contact with the transcendental aspect of life—an aspect totally left out in your calculations—that to them it seems inconceivable that there should be any projection of this finite existence in time into an infinite existence in eternity...
...And these were the chronicles of time that had been consumed...
...and agnostics and atheists, in my experience, are the most humorless people the world holds...
...Nolte: I give her a present every 12 months...
...Nolte: Then give me an example of the first-rate...
...The following is taken from the transcript of the conversation...
...He is not a mere ass: he is actually ill...
...Nolte: There you go, you see...
...that a man like Pascal—who was one of the most brilliant scientists of his time, and to whom, even on his own criteria, Mencken would be forced to accord a high place—was simply beating the air in the Pensies...
...Pascal explains in the Pensées, first, how he arrives at faith and, secondly, the illumination of life in all its aspects that faith brought to him...
...I would say that all this talk about mankind having existed for so long, mankind becoming extinct, this being the total story of man, is completely nonsensical...
...That's like asking whether it was faith that enabled a man to win the football pools...
...A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought...
...for instance, in Chartres Cathedral...
...Nolte: In other words, Voltaire, Mark Twain, Mencken—those men weren't humorous...
...The age weakens and settles home toward old ways...
...His faith takes on the virulence of a chronic infection...
...Nolte: Your memoirs, which I am delighted by, are entitled Chronicles of Wasted Time...
...Nolte: He was honest enough, mind you, to accept the coin where it fell by reading the facts as he discerned them and then arriving at a conclusion that was inductive, not deductive...
...Muggeridge: How could he...
...I rather agree with that Frenchman who once said that we should never attack Christianity until it's been tried, and I am certainly not going to attack Mr...
...Muggeridge: Yes, but they are going to be snuffed out...
...Faith really is based not on empirical evidence but on nothing more than man's wish to prolong life, his wish to abolish death, his wish to know the unknowable...
...That is a very sentimental quote which a poet like George Herbert, who really did have faith, would have demolished...
...the Nagas want to secede from India...
...Muggeridge: The only thing I knew about Jeffers was that he consorted with that ludicrous collection of human beings around D.H...
...Nolte: Incidentally, I object to most of Nietzsche because he simply takes the God that had died in the minds of men and puts that God into man himself...
...And then this one line following: "Faith returns, beautiful, terrible, ridiculous...
...Muggeridge: What is perfect is what fulfills in the highest degree man's destiny as a citizen of what Augustine called the City of God, not just as a sojourner in the Earthly City, which he rightly says disappears along with the earth itself, and which you say is the story of man...
...Manor Fevers of Rebellion Craving self-determination and status, Irishmen murder their fellow Irishmen, Basques slaughter Basques, Arabs massacre Israeli athletes, and South Moluccans hijack Dutch trains...
...It is a poetry we must not allow to become lost...
...He also wrote a marvelous, witty novel, Pictures from an Institution...
...Nolte: I think we can agree on that, although I would put in this qualifier: Many men have lived, worked, accomplished a greatdeal, and then died without having had any faith in an abstraction...
...You remember the wager...
...But that doesn't mean that Shakespeare thinks ghosts are like that...
...She was cutting his hair for him...
...Muggeridge: Well, of course, that is an explanation...
...Instead, I will begin by saying that it doesn't surprise me that various intellectuals like Malcolm Muggeridge, appalled by the emptiness and absurdity of the nihilism of, say, Sartre, have turned their backs on the modern world and affiliated themselves with the Christian myth...
...And if one were on the same side of the Atlantic with him, there would be longdistance telephone calls that went on and on....Once you were a student of Randall's, once you were a friend of Randall's, it was for life...
...Nolte: No...
...Muggeridge, that's why he was called the Baltimore Sage...
...Nolte: Wait now, some saints have died mad too...
...Nolte: What is that...
...Nolte: Of course not...
...But I do think, as a matter of fact, that I did waste quite a lot of time, as almost anybody who looks back on his life must feel...
...Nolte: Well, Mr...
...Why not...
...But his genius was in his poetry, which is of the first order...
...He has published two volumes of his memoirs, Chronicles of Wasted Time, and is presently writing the third...
...And we have to reckon with people like that...
...Manor is senior editorial writer for the Winnipeg Free Press...
...There might be some grain of truth in it, but in my opinion the degree to which it has been accepted, and above all the deductions that have been made from it, will strike posterity as rather funny...
...I think that is the most ridiculous proposition ever...
...Nolte: No, no...
...Nolte: The much larger and more important world outside, of which man is a very finite part, will continue on as if man had never resided on this lovely globe...
...The second point I have to make is this: In a way, it's not much good bandying to and fro these ideas because your view of faith, as Mencken's, is so utterly unlike what I mean by faith that it's almost impossible that we should find any common ground for considering it...
...For example, Charles Darwin, who I think was one of the great men of all time...
...that a man on the Baltimore Sun in the first part of the twentieth century exceeded in wisdom and perceptiveness all the makers and creators of 2,000 years of Christian civilization...
...Mencken would say that a man like St...
...Looked at in cosmic terms, it is difficult for all of us—and I think it's very difficult for you—to view things other than in anthropomorphic terms...
...Muggeridge: Of course not...
...I don't think we ought to go on too long just on the question of faith...
...In the same way God became incarnate because it was the only way he could convey a divine presence in the world...
...Nolte: But think of all the people who have resided on the earth, of whom we are not aware...
...the third was himself, and he had forgotten all about it...
...It is, like Wordsworth's, a poetry of the common, the ordinary, the human...
...I find that quite unimpressive...
...You say, there is this universe and in some way or another—we don't know how—man came into it...
...Nolte: No, that was van Gogh...
...Muggeridge: Oh, I know it well...
...I like to think of him as being a risen creature, one that has risen out of the carbon, out of the mud...
...There has to be because journalism is for today, and what is for today predominantly consists of the second-rate...
...Nolte: You are avoiding the essential problem...
Vol. 11 • December 1977 • No. 2
