- "The process of coming to believe in particular doctrines and then coming to change your view is not, in real life, a strict logical process, with ergo’s and distinguo’s for its milestones. Your religion builds itself up you know not how; some habits of thought stepped into unconsciously, others imbibed from study, others acquired by prayer."— Msgr Ronald Knox, from A Spiritual Aeneid
Monsignor Ronald Arbuthnott Knox (17 February 1888 – 24 August 1957) was an English Catholic priest, theologian, radio broadcaster, and mystery novelist. He is known for works such as A Spiritual Aeneid (1918), The Belief of Catholics (1927), Captive Flames (1940), his "Slow Motion" series: The Mass in Slow Motion (1948), The Creed in Slow Motion (1949), and The Gospel in Slow Motion (1950), Enthusiasm (1950), and his own translation of The Bible, commonly dubbed the Knox Bible (NT 1945, OT 1949). In the literary world, he is known for creating his ten rules for detective fiction and codifying the Fair-Play Whodunnit.
Knox was born in Kibworth, Leicestershire, England; he was the youngest of a family of four boys and two girls. The Church of England was an integral part of his youth; his grandfathers were Anglican bishops, and his father, Rev. Edmund Arbuthnott Knox, would become Bishop of Manchester in the Church of England when Ronald was only seven.
When his mother died in 1892, Ronald spent four years at Creeton with his uncle, a bachelor cleric named Lindsay Knox. Lindsay taught Ronald the catechism, mathematics, French, Greek, Latin, and the Bible, all of them becoming lifelong influences. He was eventually educated with his older brother Dillwyn at Summer Fields School, entering Eton College with a scholarship in 1900. In addition to receiving a lot of intellectual development, Knox resolved upon a religious vocation, making a self-imposed Vow of Celibacy both as a form of self-denial and "to attend upon the Lord without impediment."
In 1906, his last year at Eton, Knox fell seriously ill and was visited by a High Church Anglican vicar. This was his first contact with the High Church movement in the Church of England, and he would latch onto it for ten more years; at the same time, his father attained leadership of the Evangelical Party, greatly opposing the High Church movement. In the meantime, he won multiple scholarships, like the Balliol in 1904 and the Davies from Eton, and monetary awards, like the Hertford in 1907 and the Chancellor Latin Verse award in 1910, allowing him to nearly support himself entirely when he transferred to Balliol College, Oxford.
After a trip to Oberammergau in 1910, where he attended the Passion Play, Knox accepted a fellowship at Trinity College; he was also ordained an Anglo-Catholic priest in 1912 and became its chaplain, the Bishop of Oxford having waived for him the usual theological training, but rather recommending that he prepare himself privately in retreat that summer at Caldey. Rev. Knox saw that his mission was to rescue the Church of England from the scepticism into which its young leaders have drifted and did this by means of satire. One of these works, Reunion All Around (1914), satirised the Anglicans who thought that all Christian bodies should unite for worship and sink their theological differences. This work won the admiration of one of his heroes, G. K. Chesterton. During World War I, Rev. Knox served in military intelligence for the British Armed Forces.
In 1914, the Caldey community submitted to Rome, and Knox's family (his father excepted) and his closest friends expected him to do the same. Early in the war, he began a service asking prayers for the recently deceased "Pius, Bishop of Rome, and Robert Hugh Benson, priest". He met the latter only once (like Rev. Knox, Benson was the son of an Anglican bishop and an Etonian who eventually converted to the Catholic faith), he wrote "I always looked on him as the guide who has led me to Catholic truth". During this period, Rev. Knox also delivered his only sermon from John Henry Newman's old pulpit at University Church, Oxford, with the congregation singing "Lead, Kindly Light", also by Newman; Rev. Knox later noted that this coincidence amused him. At the same time, during the war, a friend of his had his application refused because in an interview with the Anglican Chaplain-General, he was asked what to do for a dying man. Rev. Knox answered "Hear his confession and give him absolution", but the correct answer was "Give him a cigarette and take any last message he may have for his family."
Eventually, Rev. Knox took a leave of absence from Trinity for a year and a half at Shrewsbury to reappraise his religious convictions, where he ultimately resolved to become a Catholic. He met the Jesuit and convert, Fr. C.C. Martindale, SJ, who was gathering material for a biography of Benson, and abruptly asked him to be received into the Church because he "didn't believe the Church of England had a leg to stand on", but Fr. Martindale, in response, advised Knox to hold it off until he had positive reasons for becoming a Catholic. Knox returned home from Shrewsbury for the Christmas holidays in 1916, and he met opposition from his father, who threatened to resign as bishop if he became a Catholic, but Knox responded that his decision in a matter of conscience should not be influenced by how others interpret this. That said, Knox, at the suggestion of the convert and Oratorian, Fr. John Talbot, CO, Knox made a retreat at the Benedictine abbey of Farnborough. There, Knox was received into the Church on 22 September 1917 by Fr. Abbot, Sir David Hunter-Blair, a convert baronet.
As a consequence of Knox's conversion, he resigned as Anglican chaplain, prompting his father to omit him from his will. Knox's superior, Cardinal Bourne, sent him to live with the Oratorians to accustom him to Catholic life and practice, and he became a teacher at St. Edmund's College in Ware, Hertfordshire, where he remained until 1926. In the meantime, Knox wrote A Spiritual Aeneid (1918), defending his decision to convert to the Catholic faith, and on 5 October 1919, he was ordained a Catholic priest. As with his Anglican bishop, Fr. Knox was permitted to prepare himself personally without going to a seminary.
Fr. Knox was appointed Chaplain to the Catholic undergraduates at Oxford, which his four post-Reformation predecessors unofficially designated as Catholic Chaplain to the University, ministering to them until 1939. In the meantime, Fr. Knox wrote some classic detective stories, like The Viaduct Murder (1925), Footsteps at the Lock (1928), and Double Cross Purpose (1937), and he even codifying the rules for detective stories into a "decalogue" in his Introduction to The Best Detective Stories of the Year (1928).
In addition to writing detective fiction, Fr. Knox also wrote Essays in Satire (1928). Three of these essays include "Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes", a work of mock scholarship that assumes the existence of Holmes, Watson, et al.; "The Authorship of In Memoriam", which sought to prove that Queen Victoria, not Alfred, Lord Tennyson, was the author of the poem; and the aforementioned "Reunion All Round". He was also an occasional radio broadcaster, having once presented in January 1926 Broadcasting the Barricades, a simulated live report of revolution in London, which caused a national furor as a public scare incident (Orson Welles stated that the hoax inspired him to do a radio dramatization of The War of the Worlds, which led to similar panic among American listeners).
In 1936, Fr. Knox was elevated as a Monsignor, being included into the hierarchy in a committee to revise The Westminster Hymnal. Two years later, Cardinal Hinsley offered Msgr. Knox the presidency of St. Edmund's, Ware, in 1938, but both his confessor and his close friend and counselor, Fr. Martin Cyril D'Arcy, SJ, advised him not to accept on the grounds that he is not the administrator type and that his talents are better employed for writing, preaching, and lecturing. Instead, he was given the task of making a new English translation of the Bible. This translation, which came to be known as the "Knox Bible", served as his principal occupation for most of his remaining years, translating from the Vulgate while constantly using the Greek and Hebrew texts for cross-referencing.
During his last two years as chaplain of Oxford, Msgr Knox was the guest of Lord and Lady Acton at Aldenham (Lord Acton was the grandson of the historian). Shortly after resigning from Oxford in 1939, he became their private chaplain, and during World War II, he ministered to a group of Assumptionist nuns, teachers, and schoolgirls when they occupied Aldenham; this became the source of three of his "Slow Motion" books: The Mass in Slow Motion (1948), The Creed in Slow Motion (1949), and The Gospel in Slow Motion (1950). He was also elected an honorary Fellow of Trinity College in 1941.
In 1946, not long after World War II, the Assumptionists left Aldenham, and Lord Acton sold the estate. Msgr Knox became chaplain to the Asquiths at Mells, near Bath. While working on his translation of the Bible, he completed Enthusiasm (1950), which he had been writing intermittently since 1918, and he wrote On Englishing the Bible (1949), in which he explains his purpose and procedure in translating the Bible.
Msgr Knox was appointed a Pronotary Apostolic ad instar by the Holy See in 1951 and a member of the Pontifical Academy five years later. The National University of Ireland conferred an honorary D.Litt. unto him in 1954, and he delivered the annual Romanes Lectures for 1957 at Oxford. He also delivered a panegyric in memory of the famous Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc, and he influenced the reception into the Church in 1957 of a close friend and neighbour at Mells, the poet Siegfreid Sassoon.
In 1953, he visited the Oxfords in Zanzibar and the Actons in Rhodesia; he began his translation of the Imitation of Christ, a translation of the autobiography of the Carmelite St. Thérèse of Lisieux, and an apologetics work that was intended to reach to a wider audience than his earlier The Belief of Catholics (1927), but all this was curtailed by his sudden and serious illness in 1957. An old friend of his, Harold Macmillan, offered Msgr Knox to stay at 10 Downing Street while consulting a medical specialist in London, and the doctor confirmed that he was terminally ill with cancer; it claimed his life on 24 August 1957. Msgr Knox left his unfinished translation of the Imitation of Christ for Michael Oakley, a young novice he befriended while giving a retreat at Belmont Abbey, Hereford, to complete. His body was brought to Westminster Cathedral, with Bishop Craven saying the Requiem Mass and Fr D'Arcy preaching the panegyric; Msgr. Knox was later buried in the churchyard at Mells, and Evelyn Waugh became Msgr. Knox's literary executor and biographer.
Msgr Ronald Knox is not to be confused with Ronald Knox, a Grim Reaper from Black Butler, though the reaper is named after him.
Major Works:
- A Spiritual Aeneid (1918): Msgr Knox's autobiography, in which he chronicles his conversion to the Catholic faith from the Anglican faith. He likens his conversion to that of Virgil's Aeneid, in that the physical journey of Aeneas toward Rome provided a well-polished mirror to the spiritual voyage of Knox to that other, perfect Rome—the Eternal City of Christendom. In this work, Msgr Knox stated that Chesterton, a High Church Anglican at the time, played a role in his conversion to the Catholic faith. Amusingly, when Chesterton converted in 1922, he said Msgr Knox influenced him!
- The Belief of Catholics (1927): A book of Catholic apologetics in which he examines modernity's aversion to religion and aims to address those "essential and unavoidable" questions to which religion must provide the answers, like "Does God exist?" "Does he reveal himself to humanity?" "Is a loving relationship between God and human beings a myth or a reality?" "Is the Catholic Church what it claims to be: the means and end of salvation as promised by Jesus Christ?" It is often seen as a Catholic counterpart to C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity.
- Captive Flames (1940): A collection of sermons about some of his favourite saints, including St Cecilia, St Dominic, St Joan of Arc, and St Ignatius of Loyola
- The Holy Bible: A Translation From the Latin Vulgate in the Light of the Hebrew and Greek Originals (1940, 1949): Often called the "Knox Bible". Msgr Knox translated the Vulgate while constantly cross-referencing the Greek and Hebrew texts.
- The "Slow Motion" series: A collection of sermons he gave to schoolgirls in which he discusses different parts of the Mass, the Creed, and the Gospels.
- The Mass in Slow Motion (1948)
- The Creed in Slow Motion (1949)
- The Gospel in Slow Motion (1950)
- Enthusiasm (1950): A study on various different movements of the Christian faith, in which its adherents, claiming direct guidance from the Holy Spirit, sought to live a less-worldly life than the other Christians, only to break off into heretical sects; Quietism and Jansenism are given primary focus.
Tropes in the work of Msgr Ronald Knox:
- Fair-Play Whodunnit: Msgr. Knox wrote a preface for The Best Detective Stories of the Year in 1928, in which he codified ten rules for detective stories. Even so, he acknowledges that some exceptions may apply. He does not expect every writer to conform to these rules, and he points out that some of the stories selected in the volume have transgressed the rules he proposed in some way. The rules are as follows:
- The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.
- All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
- Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable, and such a passage may only be in a house or building for which it is appropriate by age or purpose. Msgr. Knox discourages establishing such passageways unless the action takes place in a house where such a passageway is to be expected. He cites an example from a story of his own, in which the house belonged to Catholics in penal times.
- No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
- No Chinaman must figure in the story. This is an admonition against using minorities as a suspect, something prevalent in the dodgy detective fiction of his time (think Fu Manchu). In his words, "Why this should be so I do not know, unless we can find a reason for it in our western habit of assuming that the Celestial is over-equipped in the matter of brains, and under-equipped in the matter of morals."
- No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right. Msgr. Knox clarifies that it is legitimate for a detective to have a moment of inspiration, but he must verify these by investigation first. As an example, he states that a detective should look for the lost will inside a grandfather clock because this is what he would have done if he were in the criminal's place, not because of some unaccountable intuition.
- The detective must not himself commit the crime. This is when the author vouches for the statement that the detective is a detective. That said, a criminal can fake being a detective and provide a Red Herring or two in an attempt to throw the characters and the audience off.
- The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader.
- The stupid friend of the detective, the "Watson", must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
- Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.
