Years the Locusts Have Eaten
Malcolm Muggeridge’s Chronicles of Wasted Time as an Apology of Love
by David Mills
“You to me are like Nicodemus,” Mother Teresa once wrote Malcolm Muggeridge, “and I am sure the answer is the same—‘unless you become like a little child.’ I am sure you will understand beautifully everything if you would only ‘become’ a little child in God’s hands. Your longing for God is so deep. . . . Christ is longing to be your Food. Surrounded with fullness of living food, you allow yourself to starve.”1
Though it tells the story of his life long before his conversion, in his autobiography Chronicles of Wasted Time, Muggeridge speaks to those who have happily stuffed themselves with the world’s delicacies and finally seen that they are starving nonetheless. He can move those spiritually alert people who see that the world, even at its most generous, is not enough—not only those who find that the world cannot satisfy them, but those who sense, as Muggeridge did from an early age, that we are made for something encompassing and transcending this world, something to which the good things we know are pointers, though (as Muggeridge found) we make them idols. He is the great apologist for those suffering mid-life crises.
He wrote the book in his late sixties, and it may be a book best understood by someone grown old enough to know failure and loss. I thought him wonderfully cynical when I went through a Muggeridge phase in my early twenties, when being world-weary was a juvenile form of worldliness and claiming to see through everything was a juvenile form of stupidity. I read him differently now.
I think this explains Muggeridge’s strengths and limits as an apologist: as an advocate and defender of the Christian faith and a scourge of the alternatives. (He was a great scourge.) The traditional apologist argues for the faith, but the literary apologist—a type not often enough recognized—shows what the cosmos is really like by telling stories. The stories may be real or invented, or the mixture of reality and invention that most people, including Muggeridge, manage when they try to write their own story.
Of the two types of apologist, I think the second is actually the more useful: He helps people fall in love, while the first can only help the lover get to the wedding. Most unbelievers need not arguments for something they do not believe, but a vision of something they do not see. Only when they see the thing do they need to argue about it.
Muggeridge was the second type of apologist. By the time he wrote his own story, he had a faith to share, and he shared it in the vision of life he offered: a vision in which human attempts to find happiness through the exercise of the will end in folly and squalor—the book is full of examples, his own and others—and salvation is found only through submitting the will to God.
“To accept this world as a destination rather than a staging-post, and the experience of living in it as expressing life’s full significance, would seem to me to reduce life to something too banal and trivial to be taken seriously or held in esteem,” he wrote at the beginning of the first volume. Speaking of all the “prospectuses for an earthly paradise,” communist or capitalist, he wrote that
[t]o attempt to expose and ridicule the fraudulence of such prospectuses is no more life-denying than exposing the fraudulence of one for building a housing estate on the slopes of Etna would be shelter-denying. . . . In other words, the Christian proposition that he that loves his life in this world shall lose it, and he that hates his life in this world shall see it projected and glorified into eternity, is for living, not for dying. . . . It is misers and Don Juans who moan; spendthrifts and saints are always laughing. . . . All I can claim to have learnt from the years I have spent in this world is that the only happiness is love, which is attained by giving, not receiving; and that the world itself only becomes the dear and habitable dwelling place it is when we who inhabit it know we are migrants, due when the time comes to fly away to other more commodious skies.2
The Two Volumes
David Mills has been editor of Touchstone and executive editor of First Things. He edits the opinion page of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
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