Life & Death of a Monsignor

Monsignor Ronald Knox was skittish about moths, mice and telephones. He was at his ease among pogo sticks (once he navigated a flight of stairs on one), the pipe smoke and verbal parry of Oxford common rooms, Latin verse and the English language. Temperamentally an esthete, he nonetheless made sense and clarity the chief goals of his monumental translation of the Bible. Intellectually the most ornamental English convert to Roman Catholicism since John Henry Newman, he was too diffident and self-effacing to aspire to a cardinal's red hat. His was the subtler role of a kind of religious Mr. Chips to several generations of Oxford undergraduates and a wellspring of Christian living to his friends.

Seven years before his death in 1957, Knox appointed one such friend, Evelyn Waugh, novelist and fellow convert, as his literary executor. In Monsignor Ronald Knox (Little, Brown; $5), Biographer Waugh guards his friend's privacy like a medieval moat; whenever the book becomes personal, it is full of private jokes. Waugh's portrait is curiously Graham Greene-like, with Knox's outward urbanity masking a certain amount of inner anguish, his scrupulous conscience making him uneasy at any ease of faith.

Virgil at Six. For Ronald Arbuthnott Knox, religion was the family vocation. Both his grandfathers were Anglican prelates, and his father became Bishop of Manchester in 1903. The youngest of four brothers and two sisters, little Ronald was left motherless at four and became a precociously scholarly tot. At six, he could read Virgil, knew Latin and the Bible thoroughly. At Eton he copped almost every prize except the Newcastle scholarship; the boy who beat him crammed so hard that all his hair fell out. No crammer, Ronald was a bit of a prankster. He particularly disliked Classmate Hugh Dalton, later Chancellor of the Exchequer. On an exam paper asking "What are the oldest parts of the book of Exodus?" Ronald altered Dalton's paper to read "oddest," and the future politico listed all of the grosser passages.

Knox had yet to feel any sense of religious vocation, but he had more than the nominal teen-ager's attraction to the religious life. At 17 he made a vow of celibacy: "The uppermost thought in my mind was not that of virginity . . . I must have 'power to attend upon the Lord without impediment.' "

Incense for Paw. At Oxford, Ronald Knox was briefly "infected" with the impediment of Fabian socialism. He shortly parodied his drawing-room-pink period:

Conceive me if you can

A creme-de-la-creme young man;

A fervid Etonian

Anti-Gladstonian

Down-with-the-rich young man . . .

Even before he became an Anglican priest and took the chaplaincy of Trinity College, Oxford (1912), Knox was a "Romanizer." He was attracted to the rituals, vestments, "Mariolatrous hymns" and incense that his father among others was bent on stamping out. As a family joke Ronald once scented his father's private chapel with incense. Wrote Knox: "I can't feel that the Church of England is an ultimate solution."

Spiritually, he saw the priesthood as a sacramental office rather than a hortatory one. Emotionally, the conversion of some of his closest friends and the lengthening roll of classmates dying in World War I stirred him deeply. He was struck when a fellow cleric was refused an army chaplaincy on being asked what he would do for a dying man and answering "Hear his confession and give him absolution." The correct military answer was: "Give him a cigarette and take any last message he may have for his family." In the spring of 1915 Knox drew up 31 propositions pro and con his submitting to the Church of Rome, but it was not until September 1917 that the pros won.

Vegetables in Pain. Within a decade of his conversion he was back at Oxford (1926) as Roman Catholic chaplain to the undergraduates, dispensing port and bananas along with basic spiritual nourishment. He never proselytized, regarding himself "as the shepherd with the crook, not the fisherman with the hook." Determinedly antimodern (he was 66 years old when he saw his first movie), Knox spoofed the pretensions of science by offering a lecture on the newly audible sounds of "vegetables in pain." He was a classic conservative who spoke of putting up "some kind of barrage against this revolting age.''

Once when a young couple sought to have their infant baptized in the vernacular, Knox snorted: "The baby doesn't know English, and the Devil knows Latin." Despite the seemingly arrogant assurance of some of his publicized dicta (e.g., "All the identity discs in Heaven are marked R.C."), Knox went through ordeals of parched spirituality, notably in respect to prayer. He once wrote: "In the great bulk of my prayers, vocal and mental, all my life, I have not felt I was talking to God in his presence, but rather apostrophizing him in his absence."

Enter Lady Acton. As Waugh tells it, Knox was in depression toward the end (1939) of his Oxford chaplaincy. As a writer, he deplored what he referred to as two decades of potboiling. (Among other works he had churned out six popular detective novels to help foot the port-and-banana bills.) A glowing young convert, Lady Acton, and her husband gave Knox a psychological lift by offering him a writing retreat and private-chaplain status at their country estate, Aldenham. With this haven in view, Knox secured the English hierarchy's commission to translate the New Testament. From the beginning Knox assumed that he was to redo the entire Bible. This led to misunderstandings with the hierarchy, further aggravated by traditionalist opposition to the translation as it progressed. In return for a modest stipend for living expenses while he was working on the translation, Knox signed over his copyright to the hierarchy. At the time of his death, -L-50,000 had been realized from sales of the Knox Bible. The monsignor once remarked "drily but without bitterness" to Waugh that no one had ever uttered a word of thanks to him for this benefaction.

When he knew he was dying of cancer of the liver in the spring of 1957, Ronald Knox asked friends to "ask our Lord to let me have the gift of perseverance." To one, he wrote with characteristic diffidence, "I gather this kind of cancer doesn't mean suffering in any acute form--I expect I'm not worthy of it." His last three days were spent in a coma. Once he roused, and a Lady Eldon at his bedside asked if he would like her to read to him from "his" New Testament. He replied with a faint but distinct "No"; then after a long pause there came from the deathbed, just audibly, "Awfully jolly of you to suggest it, though." They were his last words.

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