The Wisdom Of Fr. Ronald Knox

 

To My Readers: This past week saw an incredible demand on my time from both professional and personal obligations. To finish my post, I would have had to work into the late night getting maybe an hour or so of sleep before going to work today (1/11/21) for a twelve hour workday. Normally, that's what I would have done and it would have taken quite a toll on me. Thanks to A Simple Man, I am putting up one of his fine posts; the post I was planning for today will be finished up and published next Monday.

After all the disturbing and horrific events perpetrated by the forces of evil, I'm most happy to publish this edifying post on the life of the good and holy priest, Fr. Ronald Knox (1888-1957). Please feel free to comment to Simple Man, and I will respond as well in the evenings when I get the chance. I always respond to comments and queries, especially when addressed to me. Simple Man, thank you for another wonderful post and allowing me to get the sleep I needed! Be assured of my continual prayers for you, my dear readers---Introibo

The Wisdom Of Fr. Ronald Knox

by A Simple Man

In times where the One True Church has been eclipsed by the ecumenical farce known on this blog as the Vatican II Sect (mistakenly identified as the Roman Catholic Church by the world at large), the task of handing on the true teaching of the Church has been carried out diligently by Traditionalists scattered throughout the world. Although it is a great blessing to have been raised within the true Catholic religion in these times, it must be said that many Traditionalists were once strangers to Holy Mother Church (yours truly included). Whatever flavor of non-Catholic one may have been (including those who were temporarily “fallen away Catholics”, i.e. those who apostatized from the faith only to later return to it), there is a certain edification to be found in reading the writings of those who underwent similar struggles and difficulties in the past.

On the list of those who converted to Catholicism, famous names from recent centuries include (in no particular order, from both laity and clergy) G.K. Chesterton, John Henry Newman, Henry James Coleridge, Frederick Faber, Leonid Feodorov, Orestes Brownson, William Lockhart, Francis Paul Libermann, and Henry Edward Manning. One such convert whose words we shall turn to today was a man who went by the name of Ronald Arbuthnott Knox.

The following sources have been consulted for this post:

A Spiritual Aeneid (By R. A. Knox, it was written in 1918 and is an autobiographical depiction of his life leading up to his conversion. It is available online as a public domain work.)

Encyclopedia Britannica (Online edition, biographical entry on Ronald Knox.)

The Book of Catholic Authors (By Walter Romig, Sixth Series, published in 1960; online edition hosted by CatholicAuthors.com.)

Monsignor Knox, A Reluctant Legend (By Wilfrid Sheed, from the February 1957 issue of “The Catholic World”, published by the Missionary Society of St. Paul the Apostle, New York; online transcript hosted by EWTN.)

In Soft Garments (A collection of conferences held by R. A. Knox when he was the Chaplain serving Catholics attending Trinity College at the University of Oxford. Version cited is the 2010 edition by Ignatius Press.)

The Priestly Life (A retreat by Ronald Knox, online edition hosted by EWTN.)

The Essentials of Spiritual Unity (A companion work of sorts to his autobiography, written by R. A. Knox in fits and starts from August 1915 through September 1917. Online edition hosted by EWTN.)

The Mass in Slow Motion (By R.A. Knox, published in 1948 by Sheed & Ward, New York; online edition hosted by Corpus Christi Watershed. It is a collection of sermons for a convent school run by the Assumption Sisters.)

To summarize Fr. Knox’s life, he was born on February 17, 1888 as the youngest of six children. He spent much of his youth within a country rectory under the care of his father’s mother and siblings, immersed in a rural Protestantism that bore more similarities to the simple affectations of Evangelical devotion than to the codified doctrine and liturgical rituals of Anglicanism. However, Knox spoke fondly of the placid, God-fearing atmosphere of his Victorian home; with an Anglican bishop as a father and Anglican bishops as grandfathers (indeed, on both sides of his family!), this combination and pedigree seemed ill-suited to produce a “rebel”, as Ronald would sometimes refer to himself in retrospect.

A student of exceptional brilliance, he began writing hymns from the age of six, progressing to plays and verse in Greek and Latin by the age of twelve. From the boarding school of Eton College to the Balliol College of Oxford University, he seemed to shine wherever he went. At the age of seventeen, driven by his ascetic impulses and an inward recognition of how much his nature would crave the helps of a happy marriage, he made a vow of celibacy; after graduation, he became an Anglican priest in 1912 and was appointed Chaplain at Oxford’s Trinity College. Even so, his literary output continued in the form of poems and satirical works, to the point his humor was recognizable by much of the English public (even though he himself did not purposefully seek notoriety or self-aggrandizement). As such, his conversion to Roman Catholicism came as a shock to his Anglican brethren.

To those close to him, it might not have been so. Ronald Knox’s attachment to the Oxford Movement (known also as Tractarianism, it was a movement within “High Church” Anglicanism to restore older Christian traditions into the Church of England’s liturgy and theology that had fallen out of practice; John Henry Newman was a particularly famous proponent of this movement prior to his conversion to Catholicism) within the Anglican Church (which Knox’s father was opposed to as part of the Church of England’s Evangelical Party) was driven by his opposition to not only the popular skeptics and agnostics of that day, but also Anglicans who pursued ecumenism at the expense of doctrine and theology (sound familiar?). Among the many influences which drove him towards the One True Church included: two trips to Catholic Belgium (wherein he found himself desiring to transplant their religious practices to the Church of England); the deaths during the early years of World War I of Pope Pius X (whom he had never met), Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson (a convert from Anglicanism that he had met but once), and Father Maturin (a friend who perished when the Lusitania was sunk by a German U-boat); the Jesuit Fr. C. C. Martindale (Monsignor Benson’s biographer); Eusebius’s history of the Catholic Church in Greek (which enhanced his understanding of the Papacy’s importance to the early Church); the outbreak of the Great War, which drove many of his friends and pupils to becoming Catholic before they entered military service; and finally, a “spiritual exile” from Trinity College that lasted for over two years, during which he resided at Shrewsbury, worked for the British War Office in military intelligence, and then (at the suggestion of the Oratorian Fr. John Talbot, another convert from Anglicanism) underwent a retreat to the Benedictine abbey in Farnborough at Hampshire. It was there where Ronald Knox was received into the Church on September 22, 1917.

After his conversion, Ronald Knox was shortly thereafter ordained as a Catholic priest at Westminster; he was appointed as Chaplain for the Knights of Malta in 1922; from 1926 to 1939 he served as Chaplain to Catholic students at Oxford. Such was his reputation that he paved the way for other learned Englishmen to realize that Catholicism was not a religion to be ashamed of. (In an interesting turn of events, Knox referred to G. K. Chesterton as an “oracle” and his “earliest master and model”; in turn, Chesterton would credit Fr. Knox, to some degree, for his eventual conversion in 1922. Fr. Knox would return the favor by delivering a famous eulogy at Chesterton’s Requiem Mass in 1936.) He continued with his prolific literary output, which included not only collections of sermons and apologetical works, but also detective novels of great renown.

After retiring from the Oxford Chaplaincy in 1939, he began his work on a new English translation of Sacred Scripture at the request of the bishops of England and Wales. He would be the first Catholic since St. Jerome to not only attempt such a gargantuan task as a solitary effort (for even the Douay-Rheims and the majority of Protestant translations were due to the work of many hands and many minds), but to complete it; his translation of the New Testament was completed in 1945, and the Old Testament would follow four years later. His approved translation was so popular and widespread that it now simply goes by “the Knox Bible”. After completing this monumental work, he would go on to produce exemplary translations of both Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ and St. Therese of Lisieux’s autobiography. The latter would prove to be his last completed work (even though several of his books were published posthumously); after coming down with a sudden illness in 1957, he was diagnosed with an incurable cancer.

On August 24, 1957, Fr. Ronald Knox passed away at the age of sixty-nine.

Not a bad life, all things considered! He would probably feel quite chagrined at all the fuss being made about him and his catalog.

A scant excerpt of his many words follows: all spelling, italics, and punctuation are as cited. Bolded words are my emphasis.

“In order to preach the Gospel well, the ministers of Christ want to have pure hearts and pure lips. Pure hearts, because in proportion as their consciences reproach them with the kind of life they are living, the kind of thoughts they are thinking, in that proportion they will feel false inside, and to feel false inside means a want of conviction about the handing on of your message. Pure lips, because it is on the whole by what we say, and the way in which we say it, that other people judge our characters; and if the priest is given to backbiting, to outbursts of anger in his speech, to boasting, to flattery, to grousing, to lying, to blasphemy, to unseemly talk, he is not likely to impress the people who listen to his sermons. That does not apply only to the clergy. Every Christian is preaching Christ, every day, by the life he or she lives, by the words he or she utters, from day to day; you are all the time unconsciously influencing other people. Don't try to influence other people CONSCIOUSLY, to talk good and put on airs of goodness; it will only turn you into a prig, and your friends will see through it. Try to live near to our Lord; get inside the thought of what his words mean, live on that model, so that you may be a friend of his, so that you may be the kind of person he feels at home with. Then, unconsciously, you will influence other people. In this nasty, wind-swept world, in which charity has gone cold and there is a frost of winter all about us, your life will be a glow of love; a faint glow, perhaps, but one at which other people can just warm their hands.” – The Mass in Slow Motion, p. 41-42

“Why do Christian sects insist on monogamy? Not on any purely ethical ground, for such ground is lacking. Let us take monogamy as a case in point. On what ground is a Church which claims divine institution to deny access to her privileges to the bigamist? It is very hard to say that the principle is part of the common delivery of the conscience of mankind; the Mahomedans sanction other practices, so did the ancient Jews—communities where we find clear recognition of the intimate tie between morality and religion. The utilitarian test, always doubtful in this connection, breaks down absolutely in face of a great war [World War I] that stamps out a large part of the male population. We might say that in Europe it has become part of the recognized principles of society and could not therefore be abrogated without infinite confusions, but even this return to the practical appeal would be nugatory in those African countries where society at large tolerates the principle of the harem and those who desire to become Christians find great social difficulties in consequence. We must have a divine utterance to support us if we are to incur the odium of insisting on this particular taboo. In this ease [recte case], it appears, we are bound to invoke a supernatural authority, and, if we have once invoked it, we are henceforward its servants, wherever it chooses to lead us. That is to say, we must invoke an authority. In doing so, we must see clearly what we are doing. In order to plead an authority here, we are submitting to the dictation of our authority (whatever it may be) on all subjects on which it may choose to dictate-not merely on all matters on which we find it convenient to appeal to it, for this is clearly destructive of the very essence of authority. It must be such that we cannot say "I do not agree with it here"—for, if not, our friend with the four wives will ask us to take no notice of it in his case either. In emancipating ourselves from the indecisive rule of King Log—practical convenience, etc.—we are electing King Stork. In appealing to the bramble for a ruling, we are making it king of all the trees-not for this or that occasion, over this or that issue, but at all times and everywhere alike: With it, not with us, rests the decision as to how far it will carry us.” – The Essentials of Spiritual Unity, paragraphs 17-18

“For the theologians teach us that Our Lord, as Man, was "simul viator et comprehensor:" he lived in our world, and at the same time he enjoyed, even as man, that full and open vision of God which is to be man's reward in heaven. We cannot begin to understand such a conception; but it is theologically certain that while he lay in the manger at Bethlehem, stretching out his hands in helpless infancy to his Virgin Mother, while he hung upon the Cross, every muscle wearied out with the strain of his agony and every joint racked with suffering, he was even then enjoying in that secret fastness the open vision of God. Our Lord was, all his life, at one with the Church Militant and simultaneously at one with the Church Triumphant. "Semper agens"--there was no incident of mortality, sin only excepted, that he would not experience. "Semper quietus"--he achieved that experience without ceasing to enjoy, even in his human nature, the rest which is the supreme recompense for all human endeavor. And if we expect to find the Life of God mirrored in the human Nature of Our Lord, so we expect to find his human Nature mirrored in the Blessed Sacrament. Here, too, he is always active, yet always at rest. Always active; from day to day, through the hands of his priests, he offers himself upon a million altars for the world's salvation. Not, indeed, that he can labor or suffer or sorrow any more; that is all over; only once the Agony and the scourging, only once the nails and the lance and the Crown of Thorn. But the force which was generated, if we may so crudely describe it, by the Sacrifice made once for all on Calvary still pulsates and energizes in the Holy Sacrifice of the Altar. The Divine Victim is still at work, fresh graces to be won, fresh needs to be met, fresh sins to be atoned for. Think of a piece of music, that is finished, you might say, once for all when the composer's hand makes the last scratch upon the paper. In a sense, yes, but in a sense it has only just begun; the same piece of music will be played again and again all the world over; the echoes of the original composition will not die, it may be, as long as mankind lasts. So it is with our Lord's sacrifice; in a sense the stab of the lance put the final stroke to it, yet in a sense it has never ceased and never can cease while the world stands. Christ still lives among us, his fellow-men, and because he so lives, he is still at work. We go up to the altar with our hearts full of desires and longings which our conscious thoughts can hardly express; and all these desires and longings of ours are caught up and whirled away from us by the continuous stream of intercession which goes up from the Sacred Heart. It is a great furnace, this Sacrament of the altar, a great work-shop of prayer; never idle for a moment, while there are human needs to be met, and human tears to be wiped away.” – The Priestly Life, Chapter 1

“LET ME SUGGEST this point to you—that God, not man, must be the measure of the universe, must be the standard by which we are to judge all our experience. If we make man the centre of all our experience, then the riddle of existence becomes insoluble, and we had far better give it up. […] Now if you deny the existence of God, or if you deny it for practical purposes by treating it as a fifty-fifty probability, or if you use the word "God" in an insincere way, meaning a mere abstraction or a mere ideal when you use it, then you have to say that man is the measure of all things; that his thought is the highest form of wisdom which exists, that his conscience is the standard by which good and evil must be determined, that his intuitions are the only test of beauty. And indeed more than that; if you are to attain any kind of intellectual satisfaction, you must say that man’s thought is the source of all truth, makes things true; that his conscience is the arbiter of good, makes things right and wrong; that his intuitions are the origin of all beauty, make things beautiful or ugly. And that notion, if you press it, leads to mere intellectual despair.” – In Soft Garments, p. 19-20

“I’ve been trying to show that our Lord did claim to bring with him a unique revelation from God—not merely a new moral code, but the foundations of a theological certitude which previous ages had never even aspired to. And that is the conclusion which would, I think, be reached by any impartial critic approaching the documents for the first time. The reason why many non-Catholic writers, especially of the older generation, are blind to all that, don’t recognize the far-reaching nature of our Lord’s claims, is because they shrink from the corollaries which such a recognition would involve. They shrink, through a kind of rationalist prejudice, from having to admit that our Lord was, in a unique sense, the Son of God. They shrink, through a kind of sentimental reverence, from having to admit that one whose career has had so profound an influence on history was an impostor or a madman. But it is a mark of intellectual cowardice, to shrink from corollaries. God wouldn’t have given us an intellect, if he didn’t want us to think straight.” – In Soft Garments, p. 54-55

“The divine miracles, as we understand them are exceptional favours, bestowed here and there, now and then—birthday presents, as it were, to remind us that we are after all his children. He does not perform them as a rule to order, unfailingly, in answer to some special effort on our part…in the ordinary way he does mean miracles to be the exception, not the rule. We are not to pension off the doctors and neglect to have the drains seen to because, sometimes, there may have been a miraculous cure of typhoid. We are not to neglect prayers for the dead because, now and again, we have supernatural proof that a soul has missed its Purgatory. That is what is the trouble with these modern devotees of miracle; they overdo it, they make it the rule, not the exception. They want us to believe that there is no such thing as pain, that it cannot be God’s will for a human being to suffer. They want us to believe that there is no such thing as death, no plunge into the mysteries of the unknown. And that is not our philosophy, nor is it a human philosophy at all; we cannot believe that God countenances it, whatever manifestations may accompany it.” – In Soft Garments, p. 75

“You must join the Church as a religion, not as a party or as a clan. But if I am asked where I find peace in being a Catholic—does It look like it? Rather it seems to me that in the disintegration of the world, and of Europe in particular (far greater, perhaps, than we yet realize) which must follow [World War I], men will look for guidance to the two institutions which override the boundaries of country—International Socialism and the Catholic Church. And the forces of disintegration which will be at work will be in conflict most of all with the latter institution, because, being more centralized, it will be at once more formidable and more vulnerable. To feel every stab the Church feels, to rejoice in the triumph she celebrates, that should be enough to keep a man’s interests active, and his heart awake.” – A Spiritual Aeneid, p. 254

It would go far beyond the length of this blog to document all the words of Fr. Ronald Knox, that distinguished son of England; I will leave you with a particularly insightful excerpt regarding the year 1914, when Ronald Knox was still an Anglican priest, writing his satirical pieces to point out the issues affecting the Church of England as he saw them. To those of us suffering through a Post-Vatican II world, some of his words will seem quite awfully prescient:

“The argument of [Reunion All Round] was a simple reductio ad absurdum. If (as the British public seemed to think) it was the duty of all Christian bodies to unite for worship, sinking their differences on each side, why should the movement be confined to Christians? What about the Jews, from whom we were only separated by the Council of Jerusalem? And if the Jews, why not the Mohammedans? We could always split the difference between monogamy and tetragamy by having two wives all round. The Brahmins presented few difficulties: the worshippers of Mumbo-jumbo only needed a passing reference. At this point the spirit of satire carried me away, and I suggested with every appearance of misgiving that perhaps after all, given proper precautions, charity should demand of us that we should accept the submission of the Pope. After making arrangements for the suitable degradation of the Roman hierarchy, I went boldly forward to the case of the atheists, and suggested that we might join with them in a common definition of the Divine Nature, which should assert it to be such as to involve Existence and Non-existence simultaneously. Here, with a few exhortations to the public, I left my argument to my readers. Now, a reductio ad absurdum argument may be used merely for fun, and without any serious purpose of satire behind it. But I did not write in this vein of good-tempered exaggeration: I meant what I said—or rather, of course, I meant the opposite of what I said. If you are to do this, your logical developments must depend upon a valid reasoning process in satire, no less than in a mathematical treatise. Thus, although it was possible to regard Reunion All Round as merely a graceful jeu d'esprit, I meant it for much more than this: I meant that, if the principles of Kikuyu [Author’s note: Knox is referring to a 1913 missionary conference that had occurred in Kikuyu, Kenya – then known as British East Africa – where the matter of admitting non-Anglicans to the Anglican Communion was suggested, among other “heretical” proceedings.] were right, something like this (discounting, of course, the casual absurdities) did really follow as a logical consequence. If, in the name of charity, it was the duty of the Church to aim at the inclusion of all good men who were professing Christians, and herself make sacrifices in order to do so, why should she not have the same duty in connection with all good men simply because they were good? Why should a belief, often of the shadowiest, in the undefined "Divinity" of Christ be a touchstone of Church membership? For the life of me I could never see why we had to regret being out of communion with a good man like Dr. Horton, more than being out of communion with a good man like Professor Gilbert Murray, who repudiates Theism. If the Church, without being called "uncharitable," is to have tests and definitions at all, why should you draw the line at this test or that definition, and cry out in horror, "No, no, that would be uncharitable?" I know that some of my Anglican readers think all this very preposterous; but we must wait till Theosophy [Author’s note: Theosophy is an occult religion that originated in late 19^th century America, which has – among its many aims – an intent to eclipse all religions in pursuit of an “ancient, universal religion.” Naturally, it is rife with many elements common to Freemasonry.] has come out a little more into the light of day. I have read a manual of theosophical belief which declares confidently that the religion of the future lies in a combination of all that is best in Christianity and Brahminism—that very combination that tickled us so when we read it in Reunion All Round. And Mr. Wells, who is an adept at the logical carrying out of implied principles, has already provided us with a religion in which a personal God, not an Incarnate God, is asserted as a basis of doctrine.” – A Spiritual Aeneid, p.166-168

I can only wonder what Fr. Knox would have said if he had lived long enough to witness Vatican II promulgating the same ideas that he had satirically mocked decades prior!

In conclusion, Fr. Ronald A. Knox was a master of the literary craft, a tireless worker, and a humble man. In my personal opinion, his works are incredibly edifying, and would make wonderful gifts for anyone, be they non-Catholics ripe for conversion, or Catholics seeking to increase their understanding of the faith they profess. It is my sincerest hope that such a resolute and learned defender of the Catholic Faith is now among the saints of Heaven. Alas, lacking a true Pope to beatify or canonize, we can only pray for the repose of his soul: eternal rest grant unto Fr. Ronald Knox, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him. May he rest in peace.

Amen!