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    Conversion Ronald Knox

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    Quo Primum
    Ronald Knox was an English Anglican who converted to Catholicism in 1917 after a period of questioning his religious views and intellectual process. He found that the Catholic Church was the sure source of authority that resolved his uncertainty. In a 1950 preface, Knox wrote that he never regretted his conversion and found the Church molded him comfortably without constraint on his intellect.

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    Conversion Ronald Knox

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    Quo Primum
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    Ronald Knox was an English Anglican who converted to Catholicism in 1917 after a period of questioning his religious views and intellectual process. He found that the Catholic Church was the sure source of authority that resolved his uncertainty. In a 1950 preface, Knox wrote that he never regretted his conversion and found the Church molded him comfortably without constraint on his intellect.

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    Ronald Knox was an English Anglican who converted to Catholicism in 1917 after a period of questioning his religious views and intellectual process. He found that the Catholic Church was the sure source of authority that resolved his uncertainty. In a 1950 preface, Knox wrote that he never regretted his conversion and found the Church molded him comfortably without constraint on his intellect.

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    Download as TXT, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as txt, pdf, or txt
    209 views3 pages

    Conversion Ronald Knox

    Uploaded by

    Quo Primum
    Ronald Knox was an English Anglican who converted to Catholicism in 1917 after a period of questioning his religious views and intellectual process. He found that the Catholic Church was the sure source of authority that resolved his uncertainty. In a 1950 preface, Knox wrote that he never regretted his conversion and found the Church molded him comfortably without constraint on his intellect.

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    of 3

    Ronald Knox's Conversion Story

    Englishman Ronald Knox (1888-1957) converted to Catholicism from


    Anglicanism in 1917, and was the chaplain at Oxford from 1926 to 1939. In
    the 1940s, he translated the Bible, based on the Latin Vulgate, a work,
    according to a scholarly Protestant source, "generally agreed to be a
    remarkable achievement and among the best of modern renderings" (1). His
    many important books include Enthusiasm, Let Dons Delight, The Belief of
    Catholics, and God And The Atom. Evelyn Waugh, another convert of great
    literary repute, wrote of Knox in the preface of the latter's conversion
    autobiography, A Spiritual Aeneid:

    He was the most brilliant and versatile churchman of the


    English-speaking world . . . At Oxford all the coveted distinctions .
    . . came to him as by-products of an exuberant intellectual and social
    life . . . There seemed no limit to the prizes, political, academic or
    literary, which a smiling world held out to him . . . In him, the
    Roman Church had found her most notable English convert since Newman.

    Let's follow, then, the highlights of Knox's description of his journey,


    from the aforementioned book:

    It is not easy for one who has abandoned a point of view . . . to


    explain, or even describe, how he came to change his attitude . . .
    This book was begun in the week after its author was received . . .
    Your religion builds itself up you know not how; some habits of
    thought stepped into unconsciously, others imbibed from study, others
    acquired by prayer. And beyond that, the whole complex of your
    psychology, moulded by innumerable influences not merely religious,
    predisposes you this way or that . . . (2)

    In regard to orthodoxy, my views when I left Eton were orthodox above


    the average; my oracle was G.K. Chesterton (3) - he is so still. (4)

    I read . . . Milman's (soundly Protestant) History of Latin


    Christianity . . . he comments upon the extraordinary precision with
    which, time after time, the Bishops of Rome managed to foresee which
    side the Church would eventually take in a controversy, and "plumped"
    for it beforehand . . . Each time Rome . . . thinks today what the
    world will think tomorrow . . . the Catholic party is the party in
    which the Bishop of Rome was, and nothing else . . . The Papacy seemed
    to be the thing which medieval Christendom was certain about . . . I
    had taken no new intellectual step: I saw the same set of facts, and
    my intellect made an entirely different report of them . . . If I was
    wrong then, how could I be certain I was not wrong now? . . . In this
    intolerable distrust of my own intellectual process I lay, miserable
    and inert. (5)

    Now, I felt no pull either way, but complete inertia . . . I had


    become habituated to indecision, and found in myself no positive
    craving for light; the glamour of the Seven Hills had died away. (6)

    Authority played a large part in my belief, and I could not now find
    that any certain source of authority was available outside the pale of
    the Roman Catholic Church . . . I did not crave for infallible
    decrees; I wanted to be certain I belonged to that Church of which St.
    Paul said proudly, "We have the Mind of Christ" . . . I had a more
    exacting idea of what "being inside the Church" meant. (7)
    I arranged my rule of life for the retreat . . . about five hours a
    day spent in prayer, and one or two more in study . . . Before the end
    of my first week, I knew that grace had triumphed . . . I turned away
    from the emotional as far as possible, and devoted myself singly to
    the resignation of my will to God's will. (8)

    I had been . . . fully prepared to find, that the immediate result of


    submission to Rome would be the sense of having one's liberty cramped
    and restricted in a number of ways . . . My experience has been
    exactly the opposite. I have been overwhelmed with the feeling of
    liberty . . . You can carry a weight so long that you cease to feel
    it; instead, you feel an outburst of positive relief when it is
    withdrawn. The suppressed uncertainty of mind was like a dull
    toothache that had been part of my daily experience . . . It was not
    till I became a Catholic that I became conscious of my former
    homelessness . . . I now found ease and naturalness, and stretched
    myself like a man who has been sitting in a cramped position . . . Nor
    do I feel cabined and cramped because intellectual speculation is now
    guided and limited for me by actual authority, as it had been . . . .
    by my own desire for orthodoxy. (9)

    In 1950, Knox wrote a new preface to the Spiritual Aeneid, "After 33


    Years":

    The step which I took in 1917 is one which I have never had the wish .
    . . to retract . . . . I have never experienced a mood of
    discouragement or of hesitation, during these last 33 years, that has
    suggested . . . the possibility of going back where I came from . . .
    On the two or three occasions when converts whom I knew have gone back
    to the Church of England, I found it quite impossible to follow the
    workings of their mind . . .

    The Church is better than your expectations, because she puts your
    ideas right about what you ought to expect . . . She moulds and
    mellows us . . . I do not find myself high and dry, but comfortably
    afloat in a fair depth of water. And that is, I think, no uncommon
    experience among converts who look back over a length of years. (10)

    FOOTNOTES

    * 1. Cross, F.L. & E.A. Livingstone, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the
    Christian Church, Oxford Univ. Press, 2nd ed., 1983, p.787.
    * 2. Knox, Ronald, A Spiritual Aeneid, NY: Sheed & Ward, 1950 ed.,
    pp.2-4.
    * 3. Chesterton was not yet Catholic at this point (1910), but had just
    written the very "Catholic-sounding" theological masterpiece
    Orthodoxy.
    * 4. Knox, ibid., p.107.
    * 5. Ibid., pp.192-6.
    * 6. Ibid., pp.205-6.
    * 7. Ibid., p.212.
    * 8. Ibid., pp.213-14.
    * 9. Ibid., pp.218-220,222.
    * 10. Ibid., pp.xviii-xx.

    [Image]
    Chesterton Index / Main Index / Church Index

    Edited by Dave Armstrong in 1991.

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