Mystical Marxism

Extract

The life of Mr. Middleton Murry as told by himself in the early part of his book on God is moving and tragic; tragic, not only because of the temperamental difficulties which made his relations with his wife, Katherine Mansfield, so painful both to him and to her, not only because of her sudden though not unexpected death, but because his own character is such that he seems to have spent most of his life in a state of spiritual darkness, struggling to find a gleam of light, and yet, by some strange psychological perversity, shutting his eyes when the light appeared. He has studied the Gospels. The sayings of Christ fall from his pen as easily as from the lips of a fervent Christian. But he is not a Christian (though he has said in the Scots Observer that he counts himself one), for he rejects Christ’s claim to be divine. He is not even a theist, for he has written in so many words ‘God does not exist’ (God, p. 233). Yet he looks upon himself as a mystic. ‘We mystics, we fanatics! Yes, that is true .... Out of our serene impartiality, out of our final loss of all illusion, arises mysticism, arises fanaticism.’ (The Necessity of Communism, pp. 113-4).