Wisdom, sparkling


Ronald Knox and English Catholicism Terry Tastard


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or British Catholics growing up in the 1930s and 1940s, Mgr Ronald Knox – “Ronnie Knox” as he was always known – was an important and influential figure, the most polished and effective Catholic apologist of the day. The son of an Anglican bishop, educated at Eton and Balliol; learned, witty and deeply thoughtful both as preacher and writer; courteous, self-effacing, gently ironic, a classicist of the first rank, he seemed the epitome of the English gentleman scholar. He was thus a living refutation of the then widely held view of the Catholic Church as alien and quasi-idolatrous, and of Roman Catholics as sinister, gullible or Irish. A slightly modified version of Chesterton’s well-known quatrain gives the flavour of the regard in which he was held by his fellow Catholics and a hint of the boost he gave to their self-confidence:


Mary of Holyrood may smile indeed, Knowing what grim historic shade it shocks


To see wit, wisdom and the Popish creed


but the prelude to the incisive violation of a girl’s sexuality. Treachery and terror are the bleeding


heart of these stories, and never more so than in the eponymous title tale. Cut to the quick and with the most incisive brevity, Anne Lauppe-Dunbar describes a set piece involving a cellar, a series of cages, coloured buckets and human parchment: a macabre stage set orchestrated by a seemingly innocuous “urchin” who directs and performs an act of flawless, excruciating sadism. Waifs, generally feminine, reappear in as


many guises as in Ovid. The uncertainty of what seems and is, of whom to trust or betray, or of when intimacy spells death, is their hallmark. The scenery shifts across the centuries, including the familiar environments of modern housing estates, city bars, even tourist resorts populated by drifters and wasters, but incipient terror remains. In contrast to a tradition that once was


oral, open to alteration in every telling, the power here lies in the writing. English is a second language for several authors: the text has the richness of one language infused by another. It is a compliment to say that the writing is so strong overall that each story bears reading aloud – and embeds itself anew in these telling tales. Amanda Hopkinson


Cluster and sparkle in the name of Knox.


His conversion to Catholicism apart, Knox’s life was undramatic. The start of the First World War found him as chaplain and fellow of Newman’s old college, Trinity. An ardent Anglo-Catholic, he suffered acutely from the loss of friends killed in the war, taught briefly at Shrewsbury, became increasingly disillusioned with the Anglo-Catholic position and in 1916, to the great and lasting sadness of his evangelical Protestant father, was received into the Catholic Church. In 1919 he was ordained as a priest, taught at St Edmund’s, Ware, and from 1926 to 1939 was chaplain to the Catholic male undergraduates at Oxford. He then lived as, in effect, a private chaplain, first to the Actons at Aldenham and then to the Asquiths at Mells, where he produced the first new and complete Catholic translation of the Bible into English since the early seventeenth century. He died of liver cancer in 1957, three years before preparatory work began on the Second Vatican Council. This concise and workmanlike biography


by Fr Tastard is – surprisingly – the first comprehensive account of Knox’s life and enormous literary output to appear since Evelyn Waugh published his Ronald Knox in 1959. As such, it is to be warmly welcomed. Constructed as it is from written records, it lacks the colour and immediacy of an account by someone who knew Knox and the pre-Vatican II Church at first hand. There is a whiff here and there of the doctoral thesis: “synapses”, “alterity” and “affectivities” are not words which spring readily to the lips of the ordinary reader. But the book is for the most part eminently readable, covers all the main events of Knox’s career and successfully conveys the flavour of his voluminous and diverse literary output, satirical, theological, devotional and simply entertaining.


Of special interest are the contrasts


Tastard draws between Catholicism today and Catholicism as Knox presented and defended it. Tastard’s description of the Tridentine Mass and the intense private devotion it fostered is a powerful reminder of why liturgical reform aroused and still arouses so much passion. The paramount importance which Knox attached to authority and his “unsparing” emphasis on doctrine, which “in his day would not have seemed unusual”, now “seems old-fashioned and even reactionary”. The emphasis today (Tastard suggests) is on spirituality rather than doctrine, with the result that faith “risks becoming the cultivation of feeling”. Knox would probably have agreed with that diagnosis, and regretted it. Whether he would have been surprised is another matter. For already as an Anglican he had been quick to detect


When suave Politeness, temp’ring bigot Zeal Corrected “I believe” to “one does feel”. David Goodall


13 November 2010 | THE TABLET | 25


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