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 n.o.body 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 t.i.tle of his book _A Spiritual aeneid_, or _aesthetic_ 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 aeneid_, a volume perhaps more fitly to be termed "An aesthetic 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 G.o.d 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 h.e.l.l." He believed in omens, though he did not always take them, and was thoroughly superst.i.tious. "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 h.e.l.l." His superst.i.tions 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 Ma.s.ses; 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 Ma.s.s, "This is too good not to be true."
Might he not perhaps say with another great man, "What must G.o.d 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 superst.i.tion. 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 G.o.d 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 superst.i.tion; how many prayers are inspired by a lottery, how many candles lighted by fear of a ghost?
But Father Knox, whose aesthetic 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 aesthetic 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 d.a.m.ning 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 _entree_ 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 Ma.s.s 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 G.o.d 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 aeneid_. 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 a.s.sumption ... that the obscurantist, having fenced himself in behind his wall of prejudices, enjoys an uninterrupted and ign.o.ble 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 a.s.surance 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.