Pleasure.

As I see it, the only pleasure of living is that every joke should be made, every thought expressed, every line of investigation, irrespective of its direction, pursued to the uttermost limits that human ingenuity, courage and understanding can take it. The moment that limits are set, then the flavor is gone.

Malcolm Muggeridge, from "America Needs a Punch"

Hope.

I conclude that civilizations, like every other human creation, wax and wane. By the nature of the case there can never be a lasting civilization anymore than there can be a lasting spring or lasting happiness in an individual life or a lasting stability in a society. It’s in the nature of man and of all that he constructs to perish, and it must ever be so. The world is full of the debris of past civilizations, and others are known to have existed which have not left any debris behind them but have just disappeared….

In these circumstances why should anyone expect Christendom to go on forever or see in its impending collapse a cosmic catastrophe?  If, then, all the signs point to the decline and impending fall of what we continue to call Western Civilization, to be followed by another Dark Age, this no more represents any finality in human history than other such developments have in the past.

I think of St. Augustine when in A. D. 410 the news was brought to him in Carthage that Rome had been sacked. It was a sore blow, but as he explained to his flock: “All earthly cities are vulnerable. Men build them and men destroy them. At the same time there is the City of God which men did not build and cannot destroy and which is everlasting.

So, amidst the shambles of a fallen Christendom, I feel a renewed confidence in the light of the Christian revelation with which it first began. I should hate you to think that this view that I’ve put before you is a pessimistic view. Strangely enough, I believe it to be the only way to a proper and real hope.

Malcolm Muggeridge, from The End of Christendom

Therefrom.

Pascal was the first and perhaps is still the most effective voice to be raised in warning of the consequences of the enthronement of the human ego in contradistinction to the cross, symbolizing the ego's immolation. How beautiful it all seemed at the time of the Enlightenment, that man triumphant would bring to pass that earthly paradise whose groves of academe would ensure the realization forever of peace, plenty, and beatitude in practice. But what a nightmare of wars, famines, and folly was to result therefrom.

Malcolm Muggeridge, from The End of Christendom

Suffering.

Learning from experience means, in practice, learning from suffering; the only schoolmaster. Everyone knows that this is so, even though they try to persuade themselves and their fellows otherwise. Only so is it possible to understand how it came about that, through all the Christian centuries, people have been prepared to accept the Cross, ostensibly a symbol of suffering, as the true image and guarantee of their creator's love and concern for them. To climb the highest, stoniest mountain to set it on its peak, to carry it to the remotest, darkest, most forbidding corners of the earth; to build great cathedrals to glorify it; to find in it the inspiration for the most sublime achievements and noblest lives over the last two thousand years.

Malcolm Muggeridge, from The Green Stick

Credulous.

It is one of the fantasies of the twentieth century that believers are credulous people, sentimental people, and that you have to be a materialist and a scientist and a humanist to have a skeptical mind. But of course exactly the opposite is true. It is believers who can be astringent and skeptical, whereas people who believe seriously that this universe exists only in order to provide a theatre for man must take man with deadly seriousness. I believe myself that the age we are living in now will go down in history as one of the most credulous ever. How could anyone look at television advertisements without reaching that conclusion?

Malcolm Muggeridge, from The End of Christendom

Pleasure.

As I see it, the only pleasure of living is that every joke should be made, every thought expressed, every line of investigation, irrespective of its direction, pursued to the uttermost limits that human ingenuity, courage and understanding can take it. The moment that limits are set then the flavor is gone.

Malcolm Muggeridge, from "America Needs a Punch," Esquire, April, 1958

Interwoven.

Interwoven with our affairs is this wonderful spirit of irony which prevents us from ever being utterly and irretrievably serious, from being unaware of the mysterious nature of our existence.

Malcolm Muggeridge, from The End of Christendom

Nearer.

From a 1980 episode of Firing Line, Buckley and Malcolm Muggeridge discuss religion and the need for religions institutions (the segemnt from 12:39 -31:14 is outstanding) ...

BUCKLEY

Mightn't it be said, with some confidence, that the search for historical and sociological knowledge teaches us what in fact you have formulated in one of your propositions, the way you put it is as follows: "There can never be a good government, only governments that are less bad than others.  The quest for a perfect government ends infallibly in anarchy or the Gulag Archipeligo.

That is an anti-utopian conviction of yours that I happen to share, and it, once again using the Christian metaphor, distinguishes the City of Man from the City of God, does it not?  But, isn't it true that a pursuit of knowledge teaches us the limitations of government?

MUGGERIDGE

It should -- but it doesn't always.  In that it's done for itself alone, it tends to increase people's arrogance, rather than teach them humility, which, of course, is the condition of all awareness of truth.  Simone Weil says that the only purpose of seeking knowledge through education is to make men realize the inadequacy of their knowledge.  Realizing that, of course, then they're brought nearer to God.  But when you make knowledge an end in itself, then it's destructive of truth.

Resist.

I hate government. I hate power. I think that man’s existence, insofar as he achieves anything, is to resist power, to minimize power, to devise systems of society in which power is the least exerted.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Life.

Never, our archaeologists of the future will surely conclude, was any generation of men intent upon the pursuit of happiness more advantageously placed to attain it, who yet, with seeming deliberation, took the opposite course—toward chaos, not order; toward breakdown, not stability; toward death, destruction and darkness, not life, creativity and light.

Malcom Muggeridge

From a classic episode of Firing Line, Buckley and Muggeridge discuss the topic, "How Does One Find Faith?" ...

Carried.

For myself, as I approach my own end, which cannot now be long delayed, I find Jesus' outrageous claim to be, himself, the resurrection and the life, ever more captivating and meaningful. Quite often, waking up in the night as the old do, and feeling myself to be half out of my body, so that it is a mere chance whether I go back into it to live through another day, or fully disengage and make off; hovering thus between life and death, seeing our dear earth with its scents and sounds and colors, as I have known and loved them, more, perhaps, as Bernanos said, than I have dared to admit; recalling the golden hours of human love and human work, at the same time vouchsafed a glimpse of what lies ahead, Eternity rising in the distance, a great expanse of ineffable light - so placed, Jesus' words ring triumphantly through the universe, spanning my two existences, the one in Time drawing to a close and the one in Eternity at its glorious beginning. So at last I may understand, and understanding, believe; see my ancient carcass, prone between the sheets, stained and worn like a scrap of paper dropped in the gutter, muddy and marred with being trodden underfoot, and, hovering over it, myself, like a butterfly released from its chrysalis stage and ready to fly away. Are caterpillars told of their impending resurrection? How in dying they will be transformed from poor earth-crawlers into creatures of the air, with exquisitely painted wings? If told, do they believe it? Is it conceivable to them that so constricted an existence as theirs should burgeon into so gay and lightsome a one as a butterfly's? I imagine the wise old caterpillars shaking their heads - no, it can't be; it's a fantasy, self-deception, a dream. Similarly, our wise ones. Yet in the limbo between living and dying, as the night clocks tick remorselessly on, and the black sky implacably shows not one single streak or scratch of grey, I hear those words: I am the resurrection, and the life, and feel myself to be carried along on a great tide of joy and peace.

Malcolm Muggeridge

CONNECT

Find.

Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr. and Malcolm Muggeridge: "How Does One Find Faith?" ...

Into.

Let’s think of the steeple and the gargoyle. The steeple is this beautiful thing reaching up into the sky admitting as it were, its own inadequacy–attempting something utterly impossible–to climb to heaven through a steeple. The gargoyle is this little man grinning and laughing at the absurd behaviour of men on earth, and those two things both built into this building to the glory of God… [The gargoyle] is laughing at the inadequacy of man, the pretensions of man, the absolute preposterous gap–disparity–between his aspirations and his performance, which is the eternal comedy of human life. It will be so until the end of time you see…Mystical ecstasy and laughter are the two great delights of living, and saints and clowns their purveyors, the only two categories of human being who can be relied on to tell the truth; hence, steeples and gargoyles side by side on the great cathedrals.

Malcolm Muggeridge

Thank you, Kurt.

Faith.

William F. Buckley visits with Malcolm Muggeridge on Firing Line discussing "How Does One Find Faith" ...

Faith.

From the September 6, 1980 episode of Firing Line, William F. Buckley Jr. discusses religious faith with Malcolm Muggeridge ...

Mysterious.

Hammershøi, Interior: The Quiet Room, 1906

Interwoven with our affairs is this wonderful spirit of irony which prevents us from ever being utterly and irretrievably serious, from being unaware of the mysterious nature of our existence.

Malcolm Muggeridge