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Caliban in Grub Street 1930 [Leather Bound]

Book by Ronald Knox · 9 quotes · Faith, Religion, Love

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Caliban in Grub Street 1930 [Leather Bound] Quotes

“I will content myself with observing that a religion which shrinks from intellectual inquiry and takes refuge in emotional affirmation can at best only be a weak and lopsided religion. For it does what Christianity has always been accused of doing; it treats the intellect, the reason, as something to be feared and distrusted; as if this, too, were not the gift of God. Not, indeed, that it would have the astronomers stop astronomizing or the biologists biologizing; it has nothing of the Tennessee spirit. On the contrary, it has much to say in praise of the scientist, and much in condemnation of a (quite imaginary) attitude of antipathy towards it on the part of the orthodox. But it blasphemes our divine gift of reason by treating it has if it had no say at all in the affairs of the soul; as if it were a mere hewer of wood and drawer of water to provide for our material needs. It is not allowed to enter into the discussion of religion, on the ground that religion is something too holy for it.”

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“You may show what atomic groupings are necessary in order that life may emerge out of matter, sentience out of life, or intellect out of sentience; but you cannot thereby reduce life, let alone sentient life and intellectual life, to terms of matter; you have only succeeded in tabulating the material coefficients of things which are not themselves material. I do not mean that Mr Russell would not be able to put up a case against this argument; I only complain that he simplified his task by pretending to misunderstand what the argument was; by assuming that it was merely physical when as a matter of fact it is metaphysical.”

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“What he [Max Plowman] has done is to adopt the Christian maxim, God is Love, to reverse it, quite arbitrarily, into the pagan maxim, Love is God; and then to argue that, because love is an emotion, and consequently to intellectual formula can exhaust its content, there is not need to argue about the existence of God at all. But what has Mr Plowman really proved? Nothing more than that the emotion of love, whether it be love of God or love of a woman or love of a five-pound note, is something unanalysable in terms of atoms and space-time. If he is prepared to deify this instinct, he is welcome to do so, but it is hard to feel the cause of any theology is benefited by the process.”

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“What we mean, in the last resort, by 'an answer to prayer', is that from the beginning of time, before he set about the building of the worlds, God foreknew every prayer that human lips would breathe, and took it into account. That, and nothing less, is the staggering claim which we make every time we say the 'Our Father'. If I could have collected all the symposiasts in a room, this is the issue I would have put to them, to 'try their spirits'. By all means (I would have said) let us leave dogma on one side, let us take no notice of all the secular disputes which divide the sympathies of Christian people, let us refrain as far as possible from prying into the mysterious secrets, too high for our ken. But- do you believe that God runs the world, and cares what happens in the world? For, if so, you will have to find something better than a pale, pantheist abstraction to satisfy your notion of God. And if not, you may spare your inkstands; nothing you can tell us about your religion will ever strengthen an infirm purpose or heal a broken heart.”

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“I may be a bigot, I may be a pedant' but I believe I have the ordinary Englishman with me here. He does not want 'religion'; he wants God. And if you tell him that he knows God by an intuitive perception, you will only make him unhappy. He is fully conscious that the word came into his vocabulary when he was a child, when he was accustomed to accept from his elders a multitude of traditions, some of which his riper mind has discarded; that he has lived with the idea and grown accustomed to it, that it has formed part of a fairyland which he would like to find true. Precisely for that reason, he distrusts the sentiment; he suspects himself of fostering a grateful illusion, suspects that the wish was father to the thought. The notion of God fits in with his higher ideals, with his dearer hopes; all the more reason to surmise that it has been coined, by successive ages of mythology, for that purpose. The very reason why you ask him to believe in God, namely, that he wants to believe in God, is his main reason for doubting. The elders, when they heard Helen plead, made allowances for the beauty of her voice, lest they should be spellbound by its influence; what if this hope, too, should be an illusion of the Sirens? The Englishman wants truth of fact; you will not get him to replace it by artistic values. The pressure of fact is all around him, reflected in the daily urgency of living; you must give him a metaphysic of fact, for the alternative is despair.”

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