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Ronald Knox

Ronald Knox Quotes

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Famous Ronald Knox 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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Book:Caliban in Grub Street 1930 [Leather Bound]
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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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Book:Caliban in Grub Street 1930 [Leather Bound]
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