I remember years ago when I would make my regular trawl of the seemingly endless shelves of Kenny’s Bookshop on Abbeygate Street, I would encounter any number of titles by Monsignor Ronald Knox (1888-1957 ). A virtually forgotten name now.
Yet, not only was he one of the finest Christian apologists of his day, he also wrote five sparkling detective novels; broadcast in 1926 on the BBC a fictitious ‘live report’ of revolution sweeping London that influenced Orson Welles’ 1938 War of the Worlds radio play, and, single-handedly translated the entire Latin text of the St Jerome Vulgate Bible into English, the authorised version until the recent New Jerusalem Bible.
Ronald Knox was born into an Anglican family; his father was Bishop of Manchester. Apart from Ronald, there were three other sons. Edward edited the humorous magazine Punch; Dilwyn was a gifted mathematician, and Wilfred was an Anglican monk and New Testament scholar.
A brilliant classical scholar at Balliol College, Oxford, he was ordained an Anglican priest in 1912 and served as chaplain of Trinity College until 1917. In that year he became a Roman Catholic, following in the footsteps of another Oxford man, John Henry Newman.
Even before his conversion, Knox had grown uneasy with the Church of England’s tendency to water-down doctrine, as if to insist on something so ‘medieval’ was almost bad manners. In one of his sharply witty poems, written before he became a Catholic, he observed:
“When suave politeness, tempering bigot zeal,
Corrected ‘I believe’ to ‘one does feel’.”
Although liberal in his own presentation of the faith, he thought that without a solid grounding in doctrine, Christianity was in danger of becoming merely, as a recent biographer put it, “the cultivation of feeling”. Knox believed that feeling – the heart – was an essential dimension of faith, but without reason as the foundation, it could easily degenerate into a vague ‘spirituality’, leaving it vulnerable to the criticism of intelligent agnostics and atheists, but, more dangerously, make it seem that doctrine – which he thought the “poetry of faith” - cold and abstract compared to the validation of feeling.
Knox wrote more than 50 books, many of them still in print or being reprinted. In Soft Garments is a collection of talks given to undergraduate Catholic students at Oxford in the early 1940s. Evelyn Waugh, author of Brideshead Revisited and a convert himself, was his official biographer, and writes in his introduction:
“In what Msgr Knox calls the ‘4am’ mood, a sense of futility creeps in, a suspicion that the Christian system does not really hand together, that there are flaws in its logic, that there are many unresolved contradictions. To this mood with its temptation to despair, Msgr Knox talks with unfailing kindness ... this book ... should be at every bedside, ready to be opened at 4am.”
Perhaps his finest work of apologetics is The Belief of Catholics, written in 1927 and revised several times afterwards. His own spiritual odyssey is described in A Spiritual Aeneid, while Enthusiasm – his own favourite – is a study of the extremist movements in Christianity throughout the centuries, from the Gnostics to the various ‘End of the World’ sects claiming direct inspiration from God, often with disastrous consequences.
Knox was criticised in his own day for his satirical streak, and there is certainly something of the university common room about some of his humour. Graham Greene, for example, another convert, never warmed to him. But though Greene’s Catholicism was a much bleaker and more questioning faith than that of Knox, still he acknowledged “these priests are as necessary to the Church as the apostles of the darker, poorer, more violent world”.
Yet it is his humour, combined with an abiding sense of loneliness, which makes him an engaging character. It was an enduring sadness to him that his father never forgave his conversion, and like many who came of age in the years leading up to World War I, he lost many close friends in that bloody conflict, while his last years were plagued by the pettiness of some in the Catholic hierarchy who criticised his translation of the Bible.
As the war ended, appalled by the destruction wrought by the Atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Knox wrote God and the Atom. It was not his style to make public pronouncements, but on this occasion he felt moved to speak out as a Christian, and suggest “... that it would be a fine gesture if the Allied Powers, having shown what the new bomb can do, cease to use it. A self-denying ordinance now would make a much deeper impression on the conscience of humanity than any amount of ... resolutions.”
It was greeted with a stony silence.
