Fearful Symmetry

Forty years in 1978, the English convert Malcolm Muggeridge gave two memorable speeches at the University of Waterloo in Ontario. At one point he recalled how the Communist tyrant Stalin, in a moment of desperation during the height of WWII, restored the imprisoned Russian Orthodox Patriarch of Moscow to his previous position and dignity. Stalin wanted the churches to open once again. The spiritless and bankrupt ideology of Karl Marx and Lenin was not sufficient to motivate the people to fight anew. Something more was needed. Muggeridge then made what seems to be a prophetic statement, saying: “This easily might happen again. The people emerging as Christians in the USSR may become so strong that the Soviet government will adopt Christianity. There is a strain of irony in our human affairs. [William] Blake’s phrase for it is ‘fearful symmetry’. What a wonderful example of fearful symmetry it would be if on the selfsame day that Marxism is thrown out the Kremlin window, the Vatican is impelled by the pressure of Christian-Marxist dialogues with Jesuits and others to issue an encyclical… de necessitate Marxisme! Stranger things have happened” notes Muggeridge. Hmmm. Is not Russia open to Christianity? And from some reports, if they can be believed, they are even open to message of Fatima and consecration. Meanwhile we are pursuing what could be classified as a form of Marxism with a Jesuit Pope! Muggeridge continues: “This irony is written into our mortal existence. It is conveyed beautifully in medieval cathedrals where you have a steeple climbing up into the sky, symbolizing all the wonderful spiritual aspirations of human beings. But at the same time in the same roof you have these little grinning gargoyles staring down at the earth. The juxtaposition of these two things might seem strange at first… but I contend they are aspects of the same attitude of mind… an awareness that at the heart of our human existence is this mystery, interwoven with our affairs: this ..