Christmas reading: Monsignor Knox

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 21^st 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.