When I was a
teenager, the Christmas holidays were a time for reading books. The
distractions of the internet and alcohol did not exist, the only television in
our house was firmly under the control of my parents, and social life was
confined to a few dutiful visits to relatives’ houses. I had plenty of time to
myself, and I filled that time by reading. These days, there are far more other
demands on one’s time. Still, I was able to get through three books over the
holidays this year, three very different books offering varying degrees of
pleasure. But they were all interesting, in their way, and worth reading.
I should like
to write a brief word about each of them. I do not propose to review them as
such, merely to highlight a couple of things that stood out at me while
reading. I will begin with The Life of Right Reverend Ronald Knox by Evelyn Waugh. I discovered Knox’s
writings during a recent browsing session in the bookshop of the Oxford
Oratory. In case you are unfamiliar with him, Knox (1888 – 1957) was the son of
an evangelical Church of England bishop, and after a brilliant career at Eton
and Oxford, became an Anglican minister and one of the leaders of the
Anglo-Catholic movement. He converted to the Roman Catholic Church in 1917.
After a spell as a master at St Edmund’s, a Catholic school and seminary in
Hertfordshire, he served as chaplain to the Catholic students of Oxford from
1926 to 1939. During the Second World War he completed a translation of the
Bible into English that is still in use. His literary achievements include apologetic
works, sermons, conferences, satirical poems, detective stories and
translations, among them the autobiography of St Thérèse of Lisieux.
Many of
Waugh’s favourite themes – public schools, Oxford, Catholicism, literature –
find a reflection in Monsignor Knox’s life and make him an ideal match for his
subject. The book is an absolute pleasure to read.
One thing
that strikes you from the book’s very first page is what a superb writer Waugh
is. Reading his description of two old photographs of Knox’s grandfathers, and
the detail he draws forth from them (“a plump complacent face, clean-shaven
save for a wisp of side-whisker; the nose is large, the eyes small, the lips
prim with a hint of cruelty; the hair is thin, long and soft; baldness lends a
spurious height to the smooth brow”), you are forcefully reminded that he tried
to be a visual artist before he ever published a book.
Another thing
that strikes you is the character of Knox himself. He had a personality that
one can only describe as holy, holy in the true sense of ‘set apart.’ At the
age of seventeen, while at Eton, he took a private vow of celibacy; he did not
want the affection of others, which he loved and craved, to get in the way of
his relationship with God. He prayed a great deal, and at the outset of the
Great War in 1914, in which many of his friends were to die, he spent up to six
hours a day in prayer. (He himself did not enlist in the army because he was in
Anglican holy orders. When, just before his conversion to Catholicism, he decided
that he was not truly an ordained priest, he offered to join up but was not
accepted.) Much later in his life, a schoolgirl who entered a chapel while he
was praying there alone remembered that walking between him and the altar was
like cutting through the supernatural.
There is
something rather old-worldly about the character of Knox, and this was evident
to him in his own time. In his youth, the rivalry between different factions of
Christianity in England could be intense. His conversion to Catholicism greatly
upset his evangelical father. But when he returned to Oxford as Catholic
chaplain, he found that his chief enemy was now not Protestantism but rather a
dull, creeping secularism, a general indifference to religion in general. This
new world was one with which he had difficulty coming to terms. After he
stepped down from his Oxford post in 1939, Knox spent the rest of his life
living in large country houses as the guest of wealthy Catholic families. It
was only grudgingly that he allowed the Latin phrases in the later editions of
his books to be translated into English. Waugh notes that, incredibly for the
21st century reader, he frowned on the practice of opening letters
at the breakfast table, considering it vulgar. He did not see his first “talkie”
until 1954.
Waugh is
careful not to portray Knox as some kind of superhuman plaster saint. He had
his weaknesses, and Waugh mentions them. Knox was what some people today would
call a Little Englander; he liked what was English and familiar, and distrusted
anything unfamiliar or foreign. This may seem an unfair thing to say about a
man who published acclaimed translations from Latin and French. But after he
had become a Catholic he had to spend some time in a seminary before being
ordained a priest, and there was talk of sending him to Rome, where there was a
college, the Beda, which specialised in late vocations. However, Knox was ultimately kept in
England, in St Edmund’s. It will surprise some readers that he felt relieved at
this decision. When, as an old man, he travelled to Africa to meet Lord and
Lady Acton, he took little interest in the sights of the place, a fact not lost
on the sharp-eyed author of Waugh in
Abyssinia. He was a somewhat delicate man, and protested that he was
overworked as chaplain in Oxford, where he had a few dozen undergraduate souls
under his care. (Waugh notes that the average parish priest at the time would
have had many more people to look after.) The privations of wartime could make
him irritable.
But a picture still shines through this book of a truly saintly man, a man who strove to serve God
as best he could and with the very particular weapons put at his disposal. Knox
was a man of particular tastes and habits; his world was the world of the
school, the university and the country house, and in these places he thrived.
At Oxford, his door was always open to students, and he was greatly loved by
the nuns and schoolgirls to whom he acted as chaplain at Aldenham during the
World War II, in addition to his work of translating the Bible. Pope John Paul II
was said to have remarked of C.S. Lewis that he well knew what his apostolate
was. Knox, too, knew what his apostolate was, and he pursued it. He was not
called to preach the Gospel in far-off heathen lands (as his grandfather, a Protestant
missionary in Asia, had been); he was not called to practice heroic poverty or
martyrdom, or to profound mystical experiences (although he did apparently have
a mystical experience at his Catholic confirmation). He was called to discover
and then to defend the faith; and whether he defended it against Protestantism
or secularism or everyday human weaknesses, he always did so in a wise, frank,
coherent and often humorous manner. That is why his writings are still read
today, why they still retain the ring of truth, and why Waugh’s
biography is a worthy addition to the shelf of anyone interested in Catholic
history or apologetics.
