Religion: 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 crème-de-la-crème 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."