The End of Christendom Quotes

“People think of faith as being something that you don't really believe, a device in helping you believe simply it. Of course that is quite wrong. As Pascal says, faith is a gift of God. It is different from the proof of it. It is the kind of faith God himself places in the heart, of which the proof is often the instrument...
He says of it, too, that it is the heart which is aware of God, and not reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not be reason.”
― Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom

“[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, The End of Christendom

“There's a large strain of irony in our human affairs... 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, The End of Christendom

“Stalin made one fatal error: he neglected to suppress the works of Tolstoy. [...] If you scoured the literature of the centuries of Christendom for the books that might most help an oppressed people in relation to our Lord and the Christian faith, you could find nothing better than the short stories and the later novels of Tolstoy. The efforts of Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberation, the Voice of America, and the Oversees Service of the BBC, all put together, wouldn't equal one single short story of Tolstoy in keeping alive in the hearts of human beings the knowledge of the love of God.”
― Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom

“God has mercifully made the fantasies - the pursuit of power, of sensual satisfaction, of money, of learning, of celebrity, of happiness - so preposterously unrewarding that we are forced to turn to him for help and for mercy. We seek wealth and find we've accumulated worthless pieces of paper. We seek security and find we've acquired the means to blow ourselves and our little earth to smithereens. We seek carnal indulgence only to find ourselves involved in the prevailing erotomania. Looking for freedom, we infallibly fall into the servitude of self-gratification or, collectively, of a Gulag Archipelago.”
― Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom

“[The U.S.S.R. was] a government which had dedicated itself totally to destroying not just Christian faith, but every sort of transcendental belief, every tiny flicker of a transcendental idea (sixty years of that in operation). [...] So contrary to what might be expected, this fantastic steamroller trying to destroy every trace of Christian faith has failed. All the efforts of the most powerful government that's ever existed in the world, in the sense of taking to itself the most power over its citizenry, have been unable to shape these people into the sort of citizens it wants them to be. Of all the signs of our times, this is the one that should rejoice the heart of any Christian most, and for that matter of anyone who loves the true creativity of our mortal existence.”
― Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom

“I once had occasion to conduct an interview with a Soviet writer (Anatoli Kusnyetsov). (...) He made a remark which is one of the most extraordinary remarks anyone has ever made to me and has echoed in my mind more often than I can say. He said to me this: that if in this world you are confronted with absolute power, power unmitigated, unrestrained, extending to every area of human life - if you are confronted with power in those terms, you are driven to realise that the only possible response to it is not some alternative power arrangement, more humane, more enlightened. The only possible response to absolute power is the absolute love which our Lord brought into the world. (...) I can see, though we in the West have not experienced this absolute power, that there would be something futile and ridiculous even in the attempt to meet such tyranny with some alternative propaganda or ideology. As between Caesar at his most absolute and God at his most remote, there is only Christ. And that was what this man said.”
― Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom

“The best example of the incarnate presence of Christ to withstand worldly power is Solzhenitsyn, the most distinguished contemporary Russian writer. [...] He realized that we can be free only if we are free in our souls; that a man in a prison camp who has learned to be free inside himself is freer than the freest man, whether in the so-called free world of the West or in the ideological Marxist world of the East.

One chapter in his second Gulag book is called 'The Ascent'. In that chapter he describes this process of illumination in a classic document of what it means to be liberated, to be free through Christ. St. Paul called it 'the glorious freedom of the children of God', the only authentic freedom that exists in this mortal life.”
― Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom

“The strange and mysterious and highly amusing thing is that probably you would have very great difficulty in finding a single Marxist in the U.S.S.R. You would only find Marxists among left-wing Jesuits in the faculties of universities in the West, which is one of God's little jokes.”
― Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom

“Previous civilizations have been overthrown from without by the incursion of barbarian hordes. Christendom has dreamed up its own dissolution in the minds of its own intellectual elite. Our barbarians are home products, indoctrinated at the public expense, urged on by the media systematically stage by stage, dismantling Christendom, depreciating and deprecating all its values.”
― Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom

“All earthly cities are vulnerable. Men build them and men destroy them. At the same time there is a City of God which men did not build and cannot destroy and which is everlasting.”
― Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom

“Now we see Christendom likewise sinking. But the true point is this: that Christ's kingdom remains. Indeed, it can be seen more clearly and appreciated more sharply by contrast with the darkness and depravity of the contemporary scene. (...) A wonderful sign (...) is the amazing renewal of the Christian faith in its purest possible form in, of all places, the countries that have been most drastically subjected to the oppression and brainwashing and general influence of the first overtly atheistic and materialistic regime to exist on earth. (...) Soviet citizens had no access to the Gospels, few religious services available, no literature of the mystics, no devotional works, no religious music, and an education brutally atheistic and secular.”
― Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom

“Christendom is something quite different from Christianity, being the administrative or power structure, based on the Christian religion and constructed by men. (...) The founder of Christianity was, of course, Christ. The founder of Christendom I suppose could be named as the Emperor Constantine.”
― Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom

“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, The End of Christendom

“Most of the great universities of the West were founded with the conviction that theology is the queen of the disciplines. (...) Now, in the latter part of the twentieth century, that tradition has almost disappeared.”
― Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom

“These three people, Pascal, Blake, and Dostoyevsky, illustrate perfectly what I have long believed to be the case, that history consists of parables whereby God communicates in terms that the imagination rather than the mind, faith rather than knowledge, can grasp.”
― Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom

“In the present situation of the overt Russian Orthodox Church in the U.S.S.R., which has the bishops and patriarchs and metropolitans, the leadership has to make concessions to the Soviet government. On the other hand, through making those concessions, certain churches in Moscow and Leningrad and Kiev remain open. Beautiful services are made available, the very beautiful words of the Gospels are read aloud. In these matters you have to weigh the relative advantages and disadvantages. You can't take a definitive position about it. The solace of those services is so great, the importance of those words being kept alive and in circulation is so important, that the sacrifices, the compromises that are made must be accepted. But it's a very difficult equation to work out. It's the equation with which our Lord himself left us, that we must render unto God the things that are God's and unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's. He neglected to tell us what proportion we owed, so that of course people like myself can hope to get by with offering Caesar very little. [...] The cleverness of that reply was of course that it didn't specify exactly how much was due to Caesar and how much to God. He left us to work out.”
― Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom

“The early Christians had the great advantage of believing that the world would soon come to an end. That was a sort of miracle in their favour because it prevented them occupying their minds with irrelevant matters.”
― Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom

“Twentieth-century man has created his own fantasies through science (...). What fantastic achievements have thereby been made possible in the way of moving faster, growing richer, communicating more rapidly, mastering illnesses, and altogether overcoming the hazards of our earthly existence. But all the achievements have led to a true nature of our being: in other words, an alienation from God. If it were possible to live without God, it would not be worth living at all.”
― Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom

“There can never be a lasting civilization any more than there can be a lasting spring or lasting happiness in an individual life, or lasting stability in a society. (...) The world is full of the debris of past civilizations (...). This applies also to utopias of every kind, whatever their ideology may be, from the garden of Eden onwards. Such dreams of lasting felicity have cropped up and no doubt always will, but their realization is impossible for the simple reason that a fallen creature like man, though capable of conceiving perfection and aspiring after it, is in himself and in his works forever imperfect. Thus he's fated to exist in the no man's land between the perfection he can conceive and the imperfection that characterizes his own nature and everything he does.”
― Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom

“Christendom has also retreated from freedom. In the much talk today about human rights, we forget that our human rights are derived from the Christian faith. In Christian terms every single human being, whoever he or she may be, sick or well, clever or foolish, beautiful or ugly, every single human being is loved of his Creator, who has, as the Gospels tell us, counted the hairs of his head.”
― Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom

“I must also leave you to analyze the cultural decline of Western art and literature. In the cycle of a great civilization, the artist begins as a priest and ends as a clown or buffoon. Examples of buffoonery in twentieth-century art, literature and music are many: Dali, Picasso, John Cage, Beckett.”
― Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom

“Stalin knew that to get the Russian people to fight to the end with their backs to the wall, he needed something more than Marxist materialism. (...) What he did do was a characteristic Stalinist thing, he fetched the patriarch (of the Russian Orthodox Church) and one or two other prelates from the labour camp where they were languishing and brought them to the Kremlin and set them up in business again. It's one of those very significant incidents that tends to get forgotten.”
― Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom

“Religious enthusiasm among students is now an embarrassment; belief in the authority of the Bible and the deity of Jesus Christ is treated as naivety to be enlightened rather than life to be nourished. Scholars in the arts, letters, and sciences who show signs of Christian devotion are likely to be shrugged off as simplistic and eccentric.”
― Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom

“I've always thought that the Cold War when it was on was one of the most bizarre wars in history because wherever you had the Americans, they created Communists and wherever you had the Communists they created anti-Communists. So that really the Cold War became the question of whether the Americans would create more Communists than the Russians would create anti-Communists. At the present moment the Americans are doing rather well.”
― Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom

“Another area of the moral and spiritual decline of Christendom is the abandonment of Christian mores. The movement away from Christian moral standards has not meant moving to an alternative humanistic system of moral standards as was anticipated, but moving into a moral vacuum, especially in the areas of eroticism.”
― Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom