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Ronald Knox as Apologist: Wit, Laughter and the Popish Creed by Fr. Milton Walsh, Ignatius Press, 2007. 248 pages.
My interest in the life and writing of Ronald Knox is owing to the story of his life which was written by his friend, Evelyn Waugh. Thus it was Waugh’s biography which, in a sense, encouraged me to read this book by Fr. Walsh, a priest in the Archdiocese of San Francisco.
The book has three parts, the first of which is a cursory summary of Knox’s life in light of his apologetical work. It is this first section which I found the most disappointing: there is almost nothing in it, I felt, which couldn’t be had in a better form from Waugh’s biography. In fact, if one hadn’t read Waugh’s biography of Knox prior to reading Fr. Walsh’s book, I’m inclined to think that a person would wonder why the interest in Knox in the first place; what was so special about him? Waugh convinces us that Knox was little less than a genius from this early youth, whereas Walsh seems to take this for granted and hopes that his reader does as well.
Fr. Walsh completed his S.T.D. dissertation at the Gregorian University in 1985; it bears the same title as this book and, as I imagine, this book is a revision of that dissertation for popular publication. As best I can see from this book, Walsh’s primary contribution to the scholarship on Ronald Knox consists in the research he made on Knox’s unpublished papers, conferences, and sermons. In Ronald Knox as Apologist Walsh gives us several of these previously unpublished, short pieces in illustration of various facets of Knox’s apologetical work. They are all interesting, though on the whole, I wouldn’t say that neither their number (which is 5, of a few pages each) nor their theological or literary value would justify, on their own, the purchase of this book.
One reason I find the figure of Knox interesting is because neither traditionalists nor conservative Novus Ordinarians nor liberals have made him their own. Of the three groups, perhaps the Novus Ordinarians are closest to having the most interest in him. (I’m speaking very speculatively.) But one thing the traditionalist reader will notice in Walsh’s book is an almost apologetic attitude towards Knox’s apologies of the Catholic Church. Knox wasn’t a Feeneyite, but neither was he a loosey-goosey, “we’re all Christian brothers and sisters” kind of theological thinker. I had the sense, though maybe I was reading too much into it, that Walsh felt the need to explain, albeit subtly, to his assessors at the Gregorian that he himself did not avow Knox’s sometimes “harsh”, pre-Vatican II theology of the Church.
For example: “For Orthodox and Protestant Christians, ‘undivided Christendom is a memory in the past, a figment in the present, a dream of the future; not a living reality as it is for us’ (Knox’s The Belief of Catholics, p. 119). It would be difficult to find a clearer articulation of the Roman Catholic understanding of unity as it was envisioned in the first half of the twentieth century.”
Why the qualification, Walsh? The Catholic Church has always understood herself to be one and indivisible; she didn’t just hit on that idea during the first half of the 20th century and then drop it like a hot potato during the Second Vatican Council.
Despite these occasional “sensitivities”, Walsh’s book should not, I think, make the traditionalist uncomfortable. I can recommend the book as a brief survey of Knox’s life and as providing a sampler of Knox’s literary abilities.
Perhaps the part I liked best about the book were the verses from which Walsh takes the title. They were written by a friend of Knox’s, one Gilbert Keith Chesterton:
Mary of Holyrood may smile indeed,
Knowing what grim historic shade it shocks
To see wit, laughter and the Popish creed
Cluster and sparkle in the name of Knox.
“Knox wasn’t a Feen(e)yite” I should say not. Here is Knox’s obituary, courtesy of St. Benedict Center. (When Oxford gets snubbed, remember that Fr. Feeney studied there, too.)
http://www.catholicism.org/problem-knox.html
TP, I’m intrigued by that obituary. It’s the first wholly negative critique of Ronald Knox that I’ve read. If we restrict ourselves for the moment to considering Knox in light of his thinking about EENS, I imagine that I detect a certain diffidence in Knox on this point. Not because he was a secret heretic, but because of a life long struggle to account for those who hadn’t followed him into the Church. His Anglican friends or the heretics about whom he writes in Enthusiasm were many of them very good men; humanly speaking, at least, it’s hard to think that their end is none other than hell. Even Newman - I hope the St. Benedict Center doesn’t have a dislike for him, too - said of Origen that he “refused to believe that so great a soul was lost”.
It’s unfair to Knox, I think, to say that he was in league with the Masons and their Jewish progenitors. As the book I reviewed illustrates, Knox spent his whole life (post conversion) engaged in Catholic apologetics in one form or another. Read his The Belief of Catholics: while he gives a good deal of room to invincible ignorance, he is solidly orthodox. To be sure, he doesn’t take Fr. Feeney’s line, but then to be orthodox, one need not.
I enjoy Knox’s writings for many of the reasons which the article from the St. Benedict Center dislikes him: he’s clever, witty, and very well-spoken. You can tell he’s a subtle thinker, sympathetic to his opponent. That’s not everyone’s style, of course, but I imagine that it did a deal of good in the society and place where he lived.
I don’t know what to say about his Bible - I’ve never read it. In any case, it’s a dead point: it was never adopted (fully) and most people today have never heard of it. It’s not even in print.
Finally, even if it were true that Knox was a Masonic collaborator, it’s no less true (so it seems to me) that his writing has been ignored by the folks today whom you’d think (judging by his putative Masonic leanings) should be most enamored of him, namely today’s liberal Catholics. And, as I tried to explain in my review, I felt as though I could sense Walsh apologizing to his assessors at the Greg for having an interest in and for writing about such a hard-nosed, pre-Vatican II, EENS kind of Catholic writer. (I mean, whether Walsh was apologizing to the guys at the Greg, I don’t know, but he was certainly “apologizing” to his present readers: (e.g.) this is how they talked pre-Vatican II, this is how they viewed the unity of the Church pre-Vatican II, etc.
Thanks, Iosephus, very interesting. I’m a big fan of Knox and I take it as a very positive thing that anyone should be writing about Knox at all, even if the book’s not great. Even Belloc and Chesterton have had a very tough time being noticed or read since the Council, for the same reason: it’s downright embarassing to recall that our recent predecessors in the Faith held the views they held.
The obit. is indeed interesting. Knox was constantly engaged with liberalism, it drove him out of the Anglican Church; his autobiography is fascinating on that point (’A Spiritual Aeneid’). In his fair-minded way, however, I think that he made as much concession to it as seemed reasonable. So he stresses the limitations on papal authority, the role of the human author of the scriptures, and so on. I’m interested to see that list of liberal-sounding remarks, but it could easily be balanced by anti-liberal ones. One of my favourites is his refusal to baptise an infant using the vernacular: ‘The baby doesn’t understand English, and the Devil understands Latin.’
Your remarks remind me of something from the Spiritual Aeneid which Walsh does mention: that it was, in part, his anti-modernist zeal which drove Knox from Anglicanism into the Church and, once there, Knox found himself rather more zealous against the modernists than many of his new co-religionists.
“Even Newman - I hope the St. Benedict Center doesn’t have a dislike for him, too - said of Origen that he “refused to believe that so great a soul was lost”.”
The St. Benedict Center has a two-part critique of Newman’s Development of Doctrine written by Orestes Brownson in 1846 on