A Book Review . . . Msgr. Knox: A Fearless Thinker And Writer
By MITCHELL KALPAKGIAN
The Wine of Certitude: A Literary Biography of Ronald Knox, by David Rooney (Ignatius Press: San Francisco, 2009), 427 pp. Available through www.amazon.com as a paperback or on Kindle.
A comprehensive account of the life, works, and apologetics of one of the great Catholic controversialists of the first half of the twentieth century, this book provides a thorough introduction to the thought of a prominent convert to the Catholic faith, a prolific writer, and an eloquent defender of the faith in a period of history permeated with agnosticism and skepticism.
Ordained an Anglican priest like his father, Bishop Edmund Knox, Ronald embraced the Catholic Church much to the disappointment and chagrin of the father — a situation that created a rift in their relationship that never perfectly healed (“When Bishop Knox died in 1937, Ronald’s name was not found in his will”).
Attracted to the high church wing of the Anglican Church that had culminated in the Oxford Movement of the nineteenth century, “Ronald thought then that a closer adhesion to Roman Catholic belief and usage would save the Anglican Church from dissolution in relativism”— a position similar to John Henry Newman’s view before his conversion.
Unsure of the validity of Anglican orders and dissatisfied with the liberal direction of the Church of England, Knox entered the Catholic Church in 1912, five years after his ordination as an Anglican priest. Ordained then to the Catholic priesthood in 1919, Knox taught from 1919-1926 at St. Edmund’s College, both a preparatory school and a seminary — a period when he distinguished himself as a gifted apologist renowned for his logical mind, lucid precision, and gift for wit, satire, and parody.
Appointed Catholic chaplain at Oxford, Knox counseled the minority of Catholic undergraduates at the university, provided the sacraments and daily Mass, and found time for composing some of his best works like The Belief of Catholics (1927). Commissioned by the English hierarchy to translate the Bible for a modern English translation, Knox served as a chaplain for the Acton estate in Aldenham from 1939 to 1947 where he devoted himself to the arduous task, the Knox translation of the New Testament published in 1945, soon to be followed by his translation of the Old Testament in 1948.
His classic Enthusiasm (1950) followed, a work that exposes what Rooney calls “heart-religion”: all the various heresies throughout the ages infused with some kind of excessive emotionalism approaching madness in its most extreme forms — sects like the Montanists, Donatists, Jansenists, Albigensians, and Anabaptists. Even in his autobiography A Spiritual Aeneid, this topic receives great attention.
Rooney writes, “And the innate logician in Knox seems irreconcilable with the emotion-laden, hymn-drenched spirituality cultivated by Wesleyanism.”
Knox’s efforts as an apologist, however, established his reputation as a fearless thinker willing to clash with the prominent figures who attacked the Christian faith. In Caliban in Grub Street (1930) Knox attacks the deism espoused by writers like Arnold Bennett and Rebecca West, and in Broadcast Minds (1929), Knox confronts the agnostic and atheist thought of Julian Huxley and Bertrand Russell.
Knox’s Catholic faith clashed with his father’s evangelical low-church beliefs that advocated a personal savior rather than the mediation of a priest, that urged the primacy of Scripture over the authority of the Church and tradition, that held the vague, invisible ideal of Christian unity as “the Spirit of Truth” rather than the visible body of the Catholic Church, and that relied upon what Rooney calls “direct illumination of individual consciences” rather than the Magisterium as the final arbiter in matters of faith and morals. Knox found these views untenable because, in his words, “A religion of experience displaces a religion of sacraments; a religion of the Spirit supplants a religion of authority.”
His orthodoxy contended with the modern theologians of his day who questioned the miracles of the Bible and doubted the literalism of Jesus’ temptation in the desert, who diluted Christian faith and surrendered to an irreligious public they deemed unqualified to ponder mysteries like Christ’s divine and human nature, the miracles of the Resurrection and Ascension, dogmatic teachings formulated from the councils that settled heresies, or the hard truths in the Gospels and concepts like redemptive suffering.
In Essays in Satire (1928) Knox addresses these modern theologians with his genius for parody: “What I believe is what the Church believes: / Yet some might find it matter for Research, /Whether the Church taught him, or he the Church.”
Knox describes these thinkers who accommodate the spirit of the age as obscurers or minimalists who suppress the fullness of the truth intended for all the members of the Body of Christ, and he identifies the malaise of the Anglican Church as self-inflicted: “…Ever since the English Church began her separate existence, she not only tolerated, but authoritatively permitted different and conflicting schools of thought within her fold.”
As an apologist Knox rejected the popular liberal belief in progress. In Sanctions the main character André Kaloczy, a Hungarian emigrant, decries the naive belief in the inevitability of human improvement. Arguing with his opponent that “you will insist on regarding it as a sort of scientific law that the world gets better and better,” he responds, “There is no such law; why on earth should there be?” He finds it nonsensical that “because things are modern . . . we are all bound to sit by and applaud such development.”
In Reunion All Round Knox modeled his satire of inauthentic ecumenism on the grandiloquent rhetoric of a character from William Mallock’s The New Republic (1900) who affirms that all the various sects of Christianity, other religions, and the beliefs of heretics all share in “a common element of good” influenced by both Catholic teaching and the ideas of infidels. This ludicrous character typifies for Knox “the ecumenist gone to seed.”
Knox also targeted the agnosticism and Spiritualism of Arthur Conan Doyle and the realm of the occult, accusing many of the skeptics of outgrowing “the religion of their childhood without ever exactly discovering what it was” and “suggesting substitutes for it” after “they have thrown the creeds into the wastebasket.”
He spared none of the faddish, trendy thinkers and ideas of the day: not Matthew Arnold’s humanist Christ as moral teacher, the skeptical German biblical critics, Rebecca West’s sentimentalism, the Darwinism of Julian Huxley, or the atheism of Bertrand Russell.
As Rooney explains, “The modern apostles of unbelief tend usually to be found offering incense at the altar of birth control, sexual freedom, or some other totem of self-gratification.”
Knox’s sermons provide a treasury of spiritual wisdom and a fountain of knowledge that deepens Christian faith and cultivates a greater love of God and His Church. In the background of the moral relativism of Anglicanism and the scientific doubts that questioned the authority of the Bible and the reality of miracles, Knox’s apologetic writings and sermons offer conviction and certitude concerning the divine nature of a universal Church founded by Christ as the ultimate authority on all matters of faith and morals.
To submit to the Church, he argues, provides great peace of mind because the Catholic faith appeals to man’s mind, heart, and conscience. The assent of human reason to the Church’s authority, he writes in The Belief of Catholics, does not eliminate all difficulties or questions; however, the Catholic believer “does not measure the veracity of the Church by the plausibility of her tenets; he measures the plausibility of her tenets by the conviction he has already formed of her veracity.”
Defending the created order as an expression of order, design, and wisdom, Knox finds no credibility in the doctrines of evolution, chance, and accident as explanations for an intelligible universe. Arguing that “order can only be the expression of a mind,” he asks, “Who has put that order in nature, which we discover with our scientific instruments?” Knox finds no inherent contradiction between science and religion that produced much of the skepticism of his age. Asking why water does not flow uphill but downward, he does not find blind chance a logical explanation, adding that neither Boyle nor Newton willed it. Nature is not a person but “an abstraction”; thus the only possible answer is “an ordering mind.” Therefore, “have we no right to argue from a law to a legislator?”
Knox makes full use of the historical record for a further proof of God’s true nature, one that does not conform to Matthew Arnold’s image of Christ as a messenger of “sweetness and light,” the sentimentalist view of Christ as a benevolent humanitarian who helps people with kind favors, or the picture of Christ as simply a human being with the title “Son of Man.” Knox writes that the Gospels do not portray Christ as helping an old woman carrying bundles, jumping in the water to save someone, or contributing money to the poor: “No, there is no trace of that, he didn’t jump into the water, he walked on the water. When people were hungry, he didn’t distribute money, he distributed bread, miraculously multiplied. He didn’t comfort the sick, he healed them.”
For all the Arians of the modern world that do not accept the divinity of Christ and the wonder of His miracles, Knox affirms that the miracles inform the entire nature, being, and life of Christ for whom the supernatural is normal because “when the light shines, the darkness yields to it.”
To accommodate the skeptics’ disbelief in miracles and doubts about Jesus’ claims to divine authority, Knox jokingly censored all the episodes in the Gospel of Matthew that presumably offended their sensibilities and reduced the entire twenty-seven chapters to four pages.
Likewise, Knox responds to the critics who reduce Christ’s Resurrection to a theory of “a vision of Jesus.” He argues that the Jews had no motives to hide the body lest anyone proclaim Christ had arisen from the dead (“It was in their interest to keep the body”), that Pontius Pilate had no reason to remove the body (“its presence might conceivably lead to rioting and disturbance”). The women at the tomb could not have removed the stone or overthrown the guard. If Joseph of Arimathea or Nicodemus had removed the body, “why did not the agent who had removed the body give any sign, afterwards, of what he had done” if he were friendly to the disciples or to the Jews if he were partial to them?
By citing many of Christ’s sayings and parables, Knox responds to all who conceive of the Kingdom of Heaven, not as the visible body of the Catholic Church, but as the total number of the saved or a selection of the elect.
In his In Soft Garments (1942), Knox compares the Kingdom of Heaven to the Church in which all the ten virgins belong, five wise and five foolish, but only five are saved. He likens the Kingdom of Heaven to a great supper to which many are invited, “but one of them is found to be without a wedding garment, and is cast into the exterior darkness.” He compares the Kingdom also to a fishing net cast into the sea “which brings in some fish which are eatable, and some that are worthless.”
And he likens the Kingdom to a field “in which some of the crop is honest wheat, and the rest mere useless cockle.”
Thus, he concludes, do not Christ’s words “make it clear that his Church is something different from that ideal assembly of the elect which the old-fashioned Protestants declared it to be?”
Defending Timeless Truth
In his most famous work Enthusiasm, Knox sees no evidence in the history of the Church that condones irrational emotionalism as a logical basis for religion, extremes of fanaticism “that must find something to forbid which the Church tolerates” and “stampede the Church into greater severity” — not allowing widows to remarry, not forgiving sins lest the guilty feel permitted to sin again, rejecting marriage as indulgence in the carnal, opposing infant Baptism, castigating frequent Holy Communion for the unworthy, urging human beings to live as the pure spirits of angels rather than as persons of body and soul, imposing self-tortures, and reserving salvation only for the spiritually elite.
He writes of the beliefs of Jansenists that “none is more clearly un-Catholic than the readiness with which they assume their neighbor’s damnation.”
With copious detail and inclusive range, Rooney portrays the intriguing story of a fearless thinker and writer who defended the Church he loved with all his natural gifts and great talents in an age of disbelief in a culture hostile to Catholic orthodoxy.
With the Ockham’s razor of an incisive intellect and a comic genius for ridiculing nonsense, Knox presents the belief of Catholics as a defense of sanity, intellectual honesty, and timeless truth.
