FATHER KNOX
_Our new curate preached, a pretty hopefull young man, yet somewhat raw,
newly come from college, full of Latine sentences, which in time will
weare off._--JOHN EVELYN.
There is a story that when Father Knox was an undergraduate at Oxford he
sat down one day to choose whether he would be an agnostic or a Roman
Catholic. "But is there not some doubt in the matter?" inquired a friend
of mine, to whom I repeated the tale. "Did he really sit down and
choose, or did he only toss up?"
The story, of course, is untrue. It has its origin in the delightful wit
and brilliant playfulness of the young priest. Everybody loves him, and
nobody takes him seriously.
Few men of his intellectual stature have been received with so little
trumpet-blowing into the Roman Catholic Church, and none at all, I
think, has so imperceptibly retired from the Church of England. For all
the interest it excited, the secession of this extremely brilliant
person might have been the secession of a sacristan or a pew-opener. He
did not so much "go over to Rome" as sidle away from the Church of
England.
But this secession is well worth the attention of religious students. It
is an act of personality which helps one to understand the theological
chaos of the present-time, and a deed of temperament which illumines
some of the more obscure movements of religious psychology. Ronnie Knox,
as everybody calls him, the eyes lighting up at the first mention of his
name, has gone over to the Roman Catholic Church, not by any means with
a smile of cynicism on his face, but rather with the sweat of a struggle
still clinging to his soul.
He is the son of an Anglican bishop, a good man whose strong evangelical
convictions led him, among many other similar activities, to hold
missionary services on the sands of Blackpool. His mother died in his
infancy, and he was brought up largely with uncles and aunts, but his
own home, of which he speaks always with reverence and affection, was a
kind and vigorous establishment, a home well calculated to develop his
scholarly wit and his love of mischievous fun. Nothing in his
surroundings made for gloom or for a Calvinism of the soul. The
swiftness of his intellectual development might have made him sceptical
of theology in general, but no influence in his home was likely in any
way to make him sceptical of his father's theology in particular.
He went to Eton, and the religion in which he had been brought up stood
the moral test of the most critical years in boyhood. It never failed
him, and he never questioned it. But when that trial was over, and after
an illness which shook up his body and mind, he came under the influence
of a matron who held with no little force of character the views of the
Anglo-Catholic party. These views stole gradually into the mind of the
rather effeminate boy, and although they did not make him question the
theology of his father for some years, he soon found himself thinking of
the religious opinions of his uncles and aunts with a certain measure of
superiority.
"I began to feel," he told me, "that I was living in a rather provincial
world--the world described by Wells and Arnold Bennett."
This restlessness, this desire to escape into a greater and more
beautiful world, pursued him to Oxford, and, for the moment, he found
that greater and beautiful world in the life of Balliol. Bishop Ryle, a
good judge, has spoken to me of the young man's extraordinary facility
at turning English poetry at sight into the most melodious Greek and
Latin, and of the remarkable range of his scholarship. He himself has
told us of his love of port and bananas, his joy in early morning
celebrations in the chapel of Pusey House, his tea-parties, his delight
in debates at the Union, of which he became President, and of his many
friendships with undergraduates of a witty and flippant turn of mind.
Like many effeminate natures, he was glad of opportunities to prove
himself a good fellow. In spite of no heel-taps when the port went
round, he won the Hertford in 1907, the Ireland and Craven in 1908, and
in 1910 took a first in Greats.
He became a Fellow and Lecturer of Trinity College for two years, then
its Chaplain for five years, and, after leading a life of extravagant
and fighting ritualism as an Anglican priest, at the end of that period,
1917, he retired from the Church of England and was received into the
Church of Rome.
The consolations of Anglo-Catholicism, then, were insufficient for the
spiritual needs of this scion of the Low Church.
What were those needs?
Were they, indeed, _spiritual_ needs, as he suggests by the title of his
book _A Spiritual Æneid_, or _æsthetic_ needs, the needs of a
temperament?--a temperament which used wit and raillery chiefly as a
shield for its shrinking and quivering emotions, emotions which we must
take note of if we are to understand his secession.
He was at Eton when a fire occurred in one of the houses, two boys
perishing in the flames. He tells us that this tragedy made an
impression on him, for it fell at a time in his life when "one begins to
fear death." Fear is a word which meets us even in the sprightly pages
of _A Spiritual Æneid_, a volume perhaps more fitly to be termed "An
Æsthetic Ramp."
He loved to dash out of college through the chill mists of a November
morning to worship with "the few righteous men" of the University in the
Chapel of Pusey House, which "conveyed a feeling, to me most
gratifying, of catacombs, oubliettes, Jesuitry, and all the atmosphere
of mystery that had long fascinated me."
He tells us how his nature "craved for human sympathy and support," and
speaks of the God whom he "worshipped, loved, and feared." He prayed for
a sick friend with "both hands held above the level of my head for a
quarter of an hour or more." He was a Universalist "recoiling from the
idea of hell." He believed in omens, though he did not always take them,
and was thoroughly superstitious. "The name of Rome has always, for me,
stood out from any printed page merely because its initial is that of my
own name." "At the time of my ordination I took a private vow, which I
always kept, never to preach without making some reference to Our Lady,
by way of satisfaction for the neglect of other preachers." He was a
youth when he took the vow of celibacy. He had the desire, he tells us,
to make himself thoroughly uncomfortable--as Byron would say, "to merit
Heaven by making earth a Hell." His superstitions were often ludicrous
even to himself. On one occasion in boyhood, he was trying to get a fire
to burn: "Let this be an omen," he said. "If I can get this fire to
burn, the Oxford Movement was justified."
A visit to Belgium hastened the inevitable decision of such a
temperament:
. . . the extraordinary devotion of the people wherever we went,
particularly at Bruges, struck home with a sense of immeasurable
contrast to the churches of one's own country. . . .
He did not apparently feel the moral contrast between Belgian and
English character.
. . . The tourist, I know, thinks of it as _Bruges la Morte_, but
then the tourist does not get up for early Masses; he would find
life then . . . he can at least go on Friday morning to the chapel of
the Saint Sang and witness the continuous stream of people that
flows by, hour after hour, to salute the relic and to make their
devotions in its presence; he would find it hard to keep himself
from saying, like Browning at High Mass, "This is too good not to
be true."
Might he not perhaps say with another great man, "What must God be if He
is pleased by things which simply displease His educated creatures?" In
a country where the churches were once far more crowded than in Belgium,
I was told by a discerning man, Prince Alexis Obolensky, a former
Procurator of the Holy Synod, that all such devotion is simply
superstition. He said he would gladly give me all Russia's spirituality
if I could give him a tenth of England's moral earnestness. And he told
me this story:
A man set out one winter's night to murder an old woman in her
cottage. As he tramped through the snow with the hatchet under his
blouse, it suddenly occurred to him that it was a Saint's Day.
Instantly he dropped on his knees in the snow, crossed himself
violently with trembling hands, and in a guilty voice implored God
to forgive him for his evil intention. Then he rose up, refreshed
and forgiven, postponing the murder till the next night.
Undoubtedly, I fear, the devotion of priest-ridden countries, which
evokes so spectacular an effect on the stranger of unbalanced judgment,
is largely a matter of superstition; how many prayers are inspired by a
lottery, how many candles lighted by fear of a ghost?
But Father Knox, whose æsthetic nature had early responded with a vital
impulse to Gothic architecture and the pomp and mystery of priestly
ceremonial, felt in Bruges that the spirit of the Chapel of the Sacred
Blood must be introduced into the Church of England "to save our country
from lapsing into heathenism." What, I wonder, is his definition of that
term, heathenism?
Bruges had a decisive effect, not only on his æsthetic impulses, but on
his moral sense. His conduct as an Anglican priest was frankly that of a
Roman propagandist. I do not know that any words more damning to the
Romish spirit have ever been written than those in which this most
charming and brilliant young man tells the story of his treachery to the
Anglican Church. Of celebrating the Communion service he says:
. . . my own principle was, whenever I spoke aloud, to use the
language of the Prayer Book, when I spoke _secreto_, to use the
words ordered by the Latin missal.
He said of his propaganda work at this time:
The Roman Catholics . . . have to serenade the British public from
the drive; we Anglican Catholics have the _entrée_ to the
drawing-room.
His enthusiasm for the Roman service was such that in one place
I had to travel for three quarters of an hour to find a church
where my manner of celebrating, then perhaps more reminiscent of
the missal than of the Prayer Book, was tolerated even in a Mass of
Devotion.
About this time I celebrated at a community chapel. One of the
brethren was heard to declare afterwards that if he had known what
I was going to do he would have got up and stopped me.
At the conclusion of one of his celebrations abroad, an Englishman in
the congregation exclaimed, "Thank God that's over." After his first
sermon in Trinity Chapel, an undergraduate ("afterwards not only my
friend but my penitent") was heard to declare excitedly:
"Such fun! The new Fellow's been preaching heresy--all about
Transubstantiation."
Such fun! This note runs through the whole of _A Spiritual Æneid_. A
thoroughly undergraduate spirit inspires every page save the last.
Religion is treated as a lark. It is full of opportunities for plotting
and ragging and pulling the episcopal leg. One is never conscious, not
for a single moment, that the author is writing about Jesus of Nazareth,
Gethsemane, and Calvary. About a Church, yes; about ceremonial, about
mysterious rites, about prayers to the Virgin Mary, about authority, and
about bishops; yes, indeed; but about Christ's transvaluation of values,
about His secret, about His religion of the pure heart and the childlike
spirit, not one single glimpse.
Now let us examine his intellectual position.
In the preface to _Some Loose Stones_[7], written before he went over to
Rome, he explains his position to the modernist:
. . . there are limits defined by authority, within which theorising
is unnecessary and speculation forbidden.
But I should like here to enter a protest against the assumption
. . . that the obscurantist, having fenced himself in behind his wall
of prejudices, enjoys an uninterrupted and ignoble peace.
The soldier who has betaken himself to a fortress is thereby in a
more secure position than the soldier who elects to fight in the
open plain. He has ramparts to defend him. But he has, on the other
hand, ramparts to defend. . . . For him there is no retreat.
The whole position stands or falls by the weakest parts in the
defences; give up one article of the Nicene Creed, and the whole
situation is lost; you go under, and the flag you loved is forfeit.
[Footnote 7: An answer to the volume called _Foundations_.]
And yet:
I can feel every argument against the authenticity of the Gospels,
because I know that if I approached them myself without faith I
should as likely as not brush them aside impatiently as one of a
whole set of fables.
They would be fables to him unless he approached them with faith. And
what is faith? He tells us in the same preface: "Faith is to me, not an
intellectual process, but a divine gift, a special privilege."
It is fair to say that he would now modify this definition, for he has
told me that it is a heresy to exclude from faith the operations of the
intellect. But the words were written when he was fighting the battle of
the soul, written almost on the same page as that which bears these
words:
You have not done with doubt, because you have thrown yourself into
the fortress; you are left to keep doubt continually at bay, with
the cheerful assurance that if you fail, the whole of your
religious life has been a ghastly mistake . . .
for this reason, they have, I think, a notable significance.
Is it not probable that Father Knox has thrown himself into a fortress,
not out of any burning desire to defend it, but solely to escape from
the enemy of his own soul? Is it not probable that he was driven from
the field by Fear rather than summoned to the battlements by Love?
I find this inference justified in numerous ways, and I do not think on
the whole that Father Knox himself would deny it. But chiefly I find it
justified by the form and substance of his utterances since he became a
Roman Catholic--fighting and most challenging utterances which for me at
any rate are belied, and tragically belied, by a look in his eyes which
is unmistakably, I am forced to think, the look of one who is still
wrestling with doubt, one, I would venture to hazard, who may even
occasionally be haunted by the dreadful fear that his fortress is his
prison.
On the day that Newman entered that fortress the triumphant cry of St.
Augustine rang in his ears, _Securus judicat orbis terrarum_; but later
came the moan _Quis mihi tribuat_, and later still the stolen journey to
Littlemore and that paroxysm of tears as he leaned over the lych-gate
looking at the church.
Not long ago I went one Sunday evening to Westminster Cathedral. It was
winter, and the streets of tall and sullen houses in that gloomy
neighbourhood were darkening with fog. This fog crept slowly into the
cathedral. The surpliced boy who presented an alms-dish just within the
doors was stamping his feet and snuffling with cold. The leaves of
tracts and pamphlets on the table blew up and chattered in the wind
every time the door was thrust open.
The huge building was only half filled, perhaps hardly that. Through the
fog it was not easy to see the glittering altar, and when three priests
appeared before it their vestments so melted into the cloth that they
were visible only when they bowed to the monstrance. The altar bell rang
snappishly through this cold fog like the dinner bell of a boarding
house, and in that yellow mist, which deepened with every minute, the
white flames of the candles lost nearly all their starlike brightness.
There seemed to be depression and resentment in the deep voices of the
choir rumbling and rolling behind the screen; there seemed to be haste,
a desire to get it over, in the nasal voice of the priest praying almost
squeakily at the altar.
People were continually entering the cathedral, many of them having the
appearance of foreigners, many of them young men who looked like
waiters: one was struck by their reverence, and also by their look of
intellectual apathy.
Father Knox appeared in the pulpit, which is stationed far down the
nave, having come from his work of teaching at Ware to preach to the
faithful at Westminster. He looked very young, and rather apprehensive,
a slight boyish figure, swaying uneasily, the large luminous eyes, of an
extraordinary intensity, almost glazed with light, the full lips, so
obviously meant for laughter, parted with a nervous uncertainty, a wave
of thick brown hair falling across the narrow forehead with a look of
tiredness, the long slender hands never still for a moment.
I will endeavour to summarise his remarkable sermon, which was delivered
through the fog in a soft and throaty voice, the body of the preacher
swaying monotonously backward and forward, the congregation sitting back
in its little chairs and coughing inconveniently from beginning to end.
It was the strangest sermon I have listened to for many years, and all
the stranger for its unimpassioned delivery. He spoke of the Fall of Man
as a certainty[8]. He spoke continually of an offended God. Between
this offended God and His creature Man sin had dug an impassable chasm.
But Christ had thrown a bridge, from heaven's side of that chasm, over
the dreadful gulf. This is why Christ described Himself as the Way. He
is the Way over that chasm, and there is no other.
[Footnote 8: "It is a very singular and important fact that, from the
appearance in Genesis of the account of the creation and sin and
punishment of the first pair, not the faintest explicit allusion to it
is subsequently found anywhere in literature until about the time of
Christ. . . . Jesus Himself never once alludes to Adam, or to any part of
the story of Eden."--ALGER.]
But Christ also described Himself as a door. What is the definition of a
door? It is not enough to say that a door is a thing for letting people
in and letting people out. It is a thing for letting _some_ people in,
and for shutting other people out.
To whom did Christ entrust the key of this door? To St. Peter--to the
disciple who had denied Him thrice. What a marvellous choice! Would you
have thought of doing that? Should I have thought of doing that? Would
any theologian have invented such an idea? But that is what Christ did.
And ever since, St. Peter and his successors have held the keys of
Heaven and Hell, with power to loose and bind. What? you exclaim, were
the Keys of Heaven and Hell entrusted to even those Popes who lived
sinful lives and brought disgrace on the name of religion? Yes. To them
and to no others in their day. Whatever their lives may have been at
other moments, when they were loosing and binding they were acting for
St. Peter, who stood behind them, and behind St. Peter stood Jesus
Christ.
Such in brief was the sermon delivered that Sunday evening to the
faithful in Westminster Cathedral by one of the wittiest men now living
and one of the cleverest young men who ever came down from Oxford with
the assurance of a great career before them.
How is it that he has come to such a pass?
I feel that he is in part whistling to keep up his courage, but in chief
forcing himself to utter an extreme of traditional belief in order to
destroy the last vestige in his mind of a free intellectual existence.
Auto-suggestion has a power of which we only begin to know the first
movements.
The man who has said that he would not choose as the battleground of the
Christian religion either "the credibility of Judges or the edibility of
Jonah," the man who is blest with an unusual sense of humour and
intellectual subtlety of a rare order, is here found preaching a
theology which is fast being rejected by the students of Barcelona and
is being questioned even by the peasants of Ireland. What does it mean?
Is it possible to understand such a perversion of mind?
His intellectual position, as he states it, is a simple one--for the
present.
He asks us, Is Truth something which we are ordered to keep, or
something which we are ordered to find?
Is our business holding the fort? Or is it looking for the Pole?
The traditionalist can say, "Here is the Truth, written down for you and
me in black and white; I mean to keep it, and defend it from attack;
will you rally round it? Will you help me?"
He shows you the modernist wandering in the wilderness of speculative
theology looking for the Truth which the traditionalist, safe, warm, and
secure of eternal life, keeps whole and undefiled in his fortress.
It is like a fairy tale.
How simple it sounds! But when Father Knox looks in the glass does he
not see its staring fallacy?
Did he keep the Truth of his boyhood--the Truth of his father's church?
Did he not go outside the fortress of Evangelicalism and seek for Truth
in the fortress of Anglo-Catholicism? And here again, did he not break
faith, and once more seek Truth outside its walls? If Truth is not
something to be found, how is it that he is not still in the house of
his fathers?
Does he fail to see that this argument not merely explains but
vindicates the rejection of Christ by the Jews? They had their
tradition, a tradition of immemorial sanctity, perhaps the noblest
tradition of any people in the world.
Does he not also see that it destroys the _raison d'être_ of the
Christian missionary, and would reduce the whole world to a state of
what Nietzsche called Chinaism and profound mediocrity?
Every religion in history, from the worship of Osiris, Serapis, and
Mithras to the loathsome rites practised in the darkness of African
forests, has been handed down as unquestionable truth commanding the
loyalty of its disciples. What logic, what magic of holiness, could
destroy a false religion if tradition is sacrosanct and all innovation
of the devil?
The intellectual duty of a Christian, Father Knox lays it down, is "to
resist the natural tendencies of his reason, and believe what he is
told, just as he is expected to do what he is told, not what comes
natural to him."
Such a proposition provokes a smile, but in the case of this man it
provokes a feeling of grief. I cannot bring myself to believe that he
has yet found rest for his soul, or that he can so easily strangle the
free existence of his mind. His present position fills me with pity, his
future with apprehension.
He is one of the modestest of men, almost shrinking in his diffidence
and nervous self-distrust, an under-graduate who is mildly excited about
an ingenious line of reasoning, a wit who loves to play tricks with the
subtlety of a curiously agile brain, a casuist who sees quickly the
chinks in the armour of an adversary. But with all his boyishness, and
charm, and humility, and engaging cleverness, there is a light in his
eyes too feverish for peace of mind. I cannot prevent myself from
thinking that his secession, which was something of a comedy to his
friends, may prove something of a tragedy to him.
He seems to me one of the most pathetic examples I ever encountered of
the ruin wrought by Fear. I think that the one motive of his life has
been a constant terror of finding himself in the wrong. The door, which
for Dr. Inge has no key, because it has no lock, is to Ronald Knox a
door of terror which opens only to a single key--and a door which as
surely shuts out from eternal life the soul that is wrong as the soul
that is wicked. He must have certainty. He dare not contemplate the
prospect of awaking one day to find his religious life "a ghastly
mistake."
At the cross roads there was for him no Good Shepherd, only the dark
shadow of an offended God. He ran for safety, for certainty. Has he
found them?
It may be that the last of his doubts will leave him, that the iron
discipline of the Roman Church and the auto-suggestion of his own
earnest passion for inward peace, may deliver him from all fear, all
uneasiness, and that one day, forsaking the challenging sermon and the
too violent assertion of the Catholic faith, he may find himself sitting
down in great peace of mind and with a golden mellowness of spirit to
write an _Apologia pro Vita Sua_ more genial and less shallow than _A
Spiritual Æneid_.
Such a book from his pen would lack, I think, the fine sweetness of
Newman's great work, but it might excel all other books of religious
autobiography in charming wit and endearing good humour. The Church of
Rome has caught in him neither a Newman nor a Manning. It has caught
either a Sydney Smith or a Tartar.
He has too much humour to be a bigot, and too much humanity to be
satisfied with a cell. For the moment he seems to embrace Original Sin,
to fling his arms round the idea of an offended God, and to shout at
the top of his voice that there is no violence to his reason and to his
common sense which he cannot contemplate and most gladly accomplish, in
the name of Tradition; but the pulses cool, the white heat of enthusiasm
evaporates, fears take wing as we grow older, and whispers from the
outer world of advancing and conquering men find their way into the
oldest blockhouse ever built against the movements of thought.
"Science," says Dr. Inge, "has been the slowly advancing Nemesis which
has overtaken a barbarised and paganised Christianity. She has come with
a winnowing fan in her hand, and she will not stop till she has
thoroughly purged her floor."
I am sure Ronald Knox was never meant to shut his eyes and stop his ears
against this movement of truth, and I am almost sure that he will
presently find it impossible not to look, and not to listen.
And then . . . what then?
DR. L.P. JACKS
JACKS, LAWRENCE PEARSALL, Principal of Manchester College, Oxford, since
1915; Professor of Philosophy, Manchester College, Oxford, since 1903;
Editor of the _Hibbert Journal_ since its foundation, 1902; b.
Nottingham, 1860; m. 1889 Olive Cecilia, d. of late Rev. Stopford
Brooke. Educ.: University School, Nottingham; University of London
(M.A., 1886); Manchester College; Göttingen; Harvard, U.S.A.; Hon. M.A.,
Oxford; Hon. L.L.D., Glasgow; Hon. D.D. Harvard; entered Ministry as
assistant to Rev. Stopford Brooke, in Bedford Chapel, 1887; subsequently
at Renshaw Street Chapel, Liverpool, and the Church of the Messiah,
Birmingham.
[Illustration: Dr. L.P. Jacks]