The Mind of Knox | Preface to "The Wine of Certitude: A Literary Biography of Ronald Knox" | David Rooney | Ignatius Insight
The Mind of Knox | Preface to The Wine of Certitude: A Literary Biography of Ronald Knox | David Rooney | Ignatius Insight
http://ignatiusinsight.com/features2009/drooney_rknoxpref_jan09.asp
The English Catholic literary revival had already been thriving for almost
three-quarters of a century when Ronald Knox, fourth son of the Anglican Bishop
of Manchester, was received into the Roman communion on September 22, 1917. It
had begun with the conversions of the clergymen John Henry Newman and Henry
Edward Manning, both later to become cardinals, and the layman William George
Ward, whose son and granddaughter would carry on the apostolate of the pen, the
former through books and essays, and the latter primarily as cofounder with her
husband of the most famous Catholic publishing house of the twentieth century.
[1]
In the early 1900s, that world of letters was the domain of Hilaire Belloc and
G. K. Chesterton (though Chesterton's formal entry into the Church wouldn't
come until 1922), and of the prolific but short-lived novelist Robert Hugh
Benson, himself the convert son of an Archbishop of Canterbury. It was a world
in which many well-educated men and women had come to see the Church of England
as insufficiently countercultural in the face of materialism, agnosticism, and
alternating moods of self-pride and despair, and who then saw in Rome a
constancy and a consistency betokening a sure guide to the meaning of the
Gospel message. There were converts among scientists, among historians, among
novelists, even among actors, and the impression they produced, especially
during the decades of Knox's prominence (the 1910s through the 1950s) was
fortifying to those already in the Church, encouraging to those thinking about
conversion, and vaguely alarming to those who retained the prejudice against
Rome so thoroughly inbred in the nominally tolerant, vestigially Protestant culture
that dominated the printed and spoken media.
Two fairly recent books have chronicled that world through an examination of
many of the figures who experienced conversion to Catholicism. Patrick Allitt's
Catholic Converts surveys both sides of
the Atlantic Ocean for writers to profile and consequently includes sketches of
figures such as Theodore Maynard, Dorothy Day, and Carlton Hayes along with the
British intellectuals whose works were likely to be found on the Sheed and Ward
book list. [2] Joseph Pearce's Literary Converts focuses solely on the British writers but
illustrates well the web of contacts that continued to breathe life into the
movement up to the days when Alec Guinness converted. [3] Not surprisingly both
historians accord Knox a respectable chapter or so, but in such comprehensive
overviews one would not anticipate finding more than a brief analysis of some
of his signature works.
In a way, Knox was blessed in his choice of biographer and literary executor.
Evelyn Waugh was certainly one of the most celebrated novelists in
mid-twentieth-century England, and he was a friend who genuinely admired Knox
for what he wrote and how he crafted what he wrote. Waugh had access to Knox's
private papers, and with Waugh being only fifteen years Knox's junior, Waugh's
circle of friends intersected enough with Knox's to allow him to mine
reminiscences fairly effortlessly while working on his biography. Yet the
formidable shadow of Waugh, coupled with the temporary eclipse Knox suffered
during the postconciliar years, may have deflected later historians from
producing another biography in the near half century since Knox's death. Waugh
had assumed, incorrectly as time was to show, that in the years after Knox's
death, scholars would pore over Knox's writings, dissertation following
dissertation in theology faculties much as they have on, say, Newman or Thomas
Merton. Knox's niece, the gifted writer Penelope Fitzgerald, did write a highly
acclaimed (and recently reissued) composite biography in the 19705 of the four
Knox brothers: Edmund (her father), Dillwyn, Wilfred, and Ronald. The reader
interested in Knox's life will find in her book some personal touches that supplement
what Waugh provides in his more formal biography. In the mid-1960s, Robert
Speaight, an accomplished actor and biographer of personages as disparate as
Belloc and Teilhard de Chardin, wrote a lengthy essay on Knox's contributions
to apologetics, detective fiction, satire, and other genres. This was then
bound in hardcover by Sheed and Ward (ever obliging to Knox's memory) to an equally
long essay by Father Thomas Corbishley on Knox's spiritual writings. Much time
has passed since then, and more than one commentator has noted some slips of
the pen in Speaight's essay. Twenty years later, Father Milton Walsh wrote a
doctoral dissertation for the Pontifical Gregorian University that concentrates
primarily on Knox's apologetics, though it also notably presents some
previously unpublished sermons Walsh discovered on a visit to Knox's final
resting place in Mells, home to the Earl of Oxford and Asquith. Father Walsh
kindly sent me a copy some years ago, and its scholarly merit is evident. It has
now happily been made available in updated form for the reading public as Ronald
Knox as Apologist. [4]
The time then may be auspicious for an overview of the full range of the mind
of Ronald Knox, a fifty-year-later retrospective of a fifty-year career in
letters, which commenced at Eton College in 1906 and was stilled only when
death from liver cancer overtook him on August 24, 1957. The present, work is
an intellectual portrait of the kind that I flatter myself might have qualified
for the English Men of Letters series of a century ago. The following pages do
not attempt to add anything to the story of Knox's life. The first chapter is
included merely to provide the reader who has not read either Waugh or
Fitzgerald with a framework within which to peg chronologically Knox's literary
endeavors, which are segregated largely by subject matter in the remaining
chapters. Likewise, it does not purport to address his place in modern
theology, a subject Father Walsh is far better equipped to analyze than I am.
It is instead a purely armchair survey of what Knox wrote in a variety of
genres, with the attendant advantages and disadvantages of such an exercise.
The seasoned historian, and even more so the student of theology, who scans the
footnotes will no doubt find too frequently the reference to a less-definitive
study on some topic, read and cited merely because it happened to occupy a more
convenient place on a home or institutional bookshelf. On the other hand,
armchair readers will find that most of the references are to books available
in reasonably large university libraries, and none to manuscripts or letters
rendered practically inaccessible to them because they repose in out-of-the-way
archives, or for that matter to books written in tongues the author is
insufficiently conversant in to read more rapidly than at the pace
d'un escargot. [5]
As with all writers, Knox was influenced by other writers, yet neither Waugh
nor Fitzgerald was particularly interested in charting those influences; it was
enough for them simply to write their biographies with the occasional nod
toward Knox's literary achievements. This book too was initially planned as a
portrait of his mind and no one else's. But others necessarily found their way
onto the canvas. Some, like W. H. Mallock and Father Maturin, entered by
invitation lest the portrait be missing something; some entered by brute force
of personality; like Arnold Lunn; others, like Samuel Butler, wandered in
unexpectedly, while yet others, like Bertrand Russell and Julian Huxley, were
ushered in to provide some needed chiaroscuro. As a result, the final portrait
differs from those of Allitt and Pearce, not only in the far greater attention
devoted to but one Catholic convert, but also in being more inclusive (even if
at times only in the footnotes) of Catholic-from-birth thinkers like Fathers
Martin D'Arcy and Herbert Thurston, as well as of various symposiasts, BBC Brains
Trust commentators, and others to whom Knox had to react in his public ministry
as apologist for Catholicism.
The reader will observe too that around one-quarter of this book was actually
written by Knox himself, so frequent and so lengthy are the quotes included in
the text. Indeed, in writing and assembling it, I have often considered the
work in light of the "mosaic" approach used by the great contemporary
historian Emmet Larkin, who so skillfully has patched together extensive
extracts from Irish bishops and other personages to make the period from 1850 to
the early twentieth century in Irish ecclesiastical history emerge so vividly
from the printed page in his multivolume series. [6]
At the same time, when as in the present work the quotes are so predominantly
issuing from the writings of one person, the author/arranger must often guard
against the inclination to present the reader with too much of the best of what
the subject has written, thereby inadvertently fostering the impression in the
reader's mind that there is no need to go back to the originals, since the
purest gold has already been extracted from the ore of commonplace writing, and
so any expenditure of energy directed to sifting through the rest would be
superfluous. Let the reader be assured that such is not the case with Knox's writing.
In editing and reviewing the quotes used, I am frequently tempted to employ far
more material; how much more edifying, indeed, it would be, just to reprint
whole sermons rather than paragraphs from them. When Philip Caraman edited
Knox's sermons and Oxford conferences alone, he ended up with three volumes of
small print, each running to well over four hundred pages.
There are over forty thousand words taken from Knox's writings in the present
book, but they represent well under 1 percent of his published output. The
other 99 percent is of the same quality. The reader need only randomly consult
any of his books to verify that assertion. He was a consummate writer: every
word in its place, every sentence carrying forward an argument or an image,
every thought intelligible and, far more often than not, compellingly
persuasive. If the present work does not encourage the reader to seek out and
read a book written by Knox, and not just a book about Knox, it will have
failed in its intent.
It should also be mentioned in passing that a little over a decade ago, the
publisher of this book brought out a volume called The Quotable Knox. [7] No doubt it is a good introduction to its
subject, but with a deliberateness bordering on scrupulosity, I have avoided
ever seeing it, not to mention perusing it. That is simply because I did not
want to be influenced in any way by what its estimable editors considered quotable
in his writings while I was selecting what I found useful to quote. If there is
an overlap, it may then be attributed to the overwhelming effect certain
Knoxian paragraphs produce on whoever reads them. The same probability of
overlap might have been presumed to exist vis-ˆ-vis Father Walsh's study, but
in actuality the overlap is not at all great, so quotable is our common quarry.
Finally, the reader will, I hope, excuse a personal note, which a preface seems
to demand. As was mentioned above, this study is of the armchair variety and
was cobbled together outside normal duties, which revolve around teaching
university students in such noncongruent subject matter to literature and
theology as aerodynamics and structural analysis. The staff of Hofstra
University Library, especially its interlibrary loan office, has been very
helpful in tracking down whatever books I needed so that I could follow through
on a line of investigation.
I should admit that I was already well into my adult years when I first became
familiar with Ronald Knox's writings, even though I had read continental
writers like Jacques Maritain, Josef Pieper, and Karl Adam a long time earlier.
Around 1990, I was serving in a very part-time capacity as literary editor for
a small Midwestern Catholic monthly journal of opinion when I received a batch
of potential review books containing, among other items, a new printing of A
Retreat for Lay People. I owned at the time
only a copy of Enthusiasm among
Knox's titles, and I regret now to say that it had remained unread because its scope
and its subject seemed a bit too peripheral to my reviewing interests in modern
American and British Church history. In any case, I read the retreat book and
was henceforth a Knox admirer.
Which brings me to my largest debt of gratitude. I deeply appreciate the
patience of my wife Mary and of my five children, Mary Therese, Margaret,
Bernadette, Claire, and Robert, during the years I have worked on this project
in the hope of introducing a new generation of readers to a remarkable writer
and expositor of philosophical and theological truth. My children can no longer
be unaware of Ronald Knox: his books cover a fair number of shelves and will
increasingly invite inspection as adulthood rapidly approaches. May they and other
children grow into full womanhood and manhood appreciating them and achieving a
deeper faith with their assistance.
ENDNOTES:
[1] Technically W. G. Ward too had been a clergyman, but he had become
convinced that Anglican orders were invalid and was engaged to be married even
before he was stripped of his Oxford degrees for his advanced Roman-leaning
views. He subsequently entered the Catholic Church a vociferous member of the
laity.
[2] Patrick Allitt, Catholic Converts: British and American Intellectuals
Turn to Rome (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1997).
[3] Joseph Pearce, Literary Converts: Spiritual Inspiration in an Age
of Unbelief (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
1999).
[4] Milton Walsh, Ronald Knox as Apologist: Wit, Laughter and the
Popish Creed (San Francisco: Ignatius
Press, 2007).
[5] "Of a snail".
[6] See, for example, Emmet Larkin, The Making of the Roman Catholic
Church in Ireland, 1850-1860 (Chapel Hill,
NC.: University of North Carolina Press, 1980).
[7] George Marlin, Richard Rabatin, and John Swan, The Quotable Knox:
A Topical Compendium of the Wit and Wisdom of Ronald Knox (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996).
Related IgnatiusInsight.com Links:
• IgnatiusInsight.com Author Page for Monsignor Ronald Knox
• The Monsignor and the Don | An Interview with Fr. Milton Walsh
• Monsignor Ronald Knox: Convert, Priest, Apologist | An Interview with Fr. Milton Walsh
• Experience, Reason, and Authority in the Apologetics of Ronald Knox |
Milton Walsh | From Ronald Knox As Apologist
• The Four Marks of the Church | Ronald A. Knox
• Review of The Belief of Catholics | Carl E. Olson
• Ronald Knox, Apologist | Carl E. Olson
• A Lesson Learned From Monsignor Ronald A. Knox | Carl E. Olson
• Converts and Saints | An Interview with Joseph Pearce
The Wine of Certitude: A Literary Biography of Ronald Knox
by David Rooney
David Rooney has authored a well written and in-depth overview of the life and literary accomplishments of Ronald Knox, the famous Catholic convert and apologist from England who was a major figure in
the English Catholic literary revival during the first half of the twentieth century.
Rooney examines the full range of Knox's writings including apologetics, detective fiction, satire, novels and other genres and offers an intellectual portrait that is both fascinating and engaging. The
author includes many samples of Knox's own writings throughout his book. Rooney thus uses a mosaic approach that makes the works and the person of Knox emerge from the pages in a vivid and lively way.
Knox was a prolific author who wrote over seventy-five books, as well as many articles and homilies. He utilized many genres including satire, novels, spirituality, and detective stories. His literary
works include The Hidden Stream, The Belief of Catholics, Captive Flames, Pastoral and Occasional Sermons and many more. With the "Knox revival" going on today and the renewed interest in his writings,
as evidenced by the large Ronald Knox Society of North America, this book provides a timely and valuable addition.
David M. Rooney, an expert on the writings and life of Ronald Knox, is an Associate Professor of Engineering at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y. Aside from his professorial research in
experimental aerodynamics, he has published several articles and many book reviews in Catholic periodicals. He is a long time member of the American Catholic Historical Association.
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