Books: Spiritual Eclectic

NOT AS THE SCRIBES (255 pp.)—John Middleton Murry—Horizon ($3.75).

This is a day of custom-made faiths. Men of religious spirit who, for reasons of rationality or temperament, cannot accept orthodox religions tailor these orthodoxies to suit their personal needs and imaginations. One of the more popular forms of spiritual eclecticism, and the one chosen by the late British man of letters John Middleton Murry, is to deny the divinity of Christ and reject most Christian dogma, but to cling to Jesus Christ, the man, as a kind of supreme culture hero embodying every man’s unending quest for his better self. At best noble in a pagan way, at worst blasphemous and sentimental, self-made religions are immune to true-false tests, and their devotees usually ignore the irony implicit in one of the play titles of Pirandello: Right You Are, if You Think So.

Fear of Resurrection. Right or wrong, Murry was far from self-righteous. In his religious quest, he enlisted a band of fellow pacifists early in World War II (though he later abandoned pacifism) and founded a Utopian community called Lodge Farm where, Sunday evenings, he delivered sermons. Not as the Scribes is a collection of these lay sermons, some of them infused with at least as much religious feeling as the average Sunday pulpit, and others simply emotional humanitarian tracts.

Christ as Saviour seems to have frightened Murry and he found the idea of physical resurrection “horribly shocking,” though he admits that G. K. Chesterton once told him “that I have no right to limit my conception of reality and of God to that which does not shock me.” Christ’s last terrible cry on the cross (“My God. my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”) strikes Murry as “the agony of foreboding that the God in whom he had believed and trusted did not exist, after all. God was beyond even his understanding. He had taken the risk and lost.” Murry goes on to say that Christ had indeed won, though his reasoning is esthetic. Christ, he argues, fired mankind’s imagination with the force of his own imagination, by the purity and intensity of the life he sacrificed to a kind of artistic myth. Murry comes very close to saying that just as Shakespeare gave Hamlet a form of immortality, so Jesus, with supreme creativity, made Christianity immortal.

The Real Jesus. In one of the book’s most remarkable passages, Murry defines what Jesus is to him. The writing is hortatory, eloquent, exalted, and yet to anyone who sees in Jesus not man but the Living God, the passage must sound uncomfortably like the kind of sentimentalities spouted by the humanist Devil in Shaw’s Man and Superman. Jesus, writes Murry, “is the spirit of liberated Man: Man’s Love, man’s Imagination; his passion for friendship; his unconquerable desire to trust; his inward knowledge that without trust there is no joy; no happiness; his everlasting longing to make a new beginning; his lovely humility, his hunger for laughter that is not cruel, his desire for a square deal, his loyalty to friendship, to love and to truth; his sense of shame for the other man who cheats him, or lets him down; his hankering for absolute simplicity, his passion for justice, and yet his greater passion for Love.

“This is what Jesus really is—and much more that I cannot think of. To have Jesus in our lives is to have these things in our lives, gradually filling up our lives, driving out the mean things, the selfish things, the resentments, the grudges, the sense of injustice, the sense of self-importance—all the myriad little things that stand between us and the joy of being alive, here and now . . .”