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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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“It is in the nature of things that Christian thought should always divide itself into a party of mildness and a party of sternness. To cite (not for the last time) the admirable remark of St. Francis de Sales to Mere Angelique, there will always be those who want to draw the meshes tight, so as to bring the little fishes in too, and those who want to leave the meshes wide, so that every catch shall be really worth catching.”

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Book:Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion
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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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Book:Caliban in Grub Street 1930 [Leather Bound]
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“The biography of John Wesley is surely unique. Here is a man born in the first decade of his century, who sees it through into the last; a man so far in reaction from the tendencies of his age that he seems a living commentary on them, yet so much the child of his age that you cannot think of him as fitting in with any other. A High Churchman in his youth, he makes for himself in the unsympathetic surroundings of Oxford an enclave of primitive observance and of ascetic living; such is his personal influence that he seems destined, if that were possible, to shake Oxford out of its long dream. Dis aliter visum; he undergoes an experience of conversion before his lifetime has reached its mid-point. A sensational conversion; the finished product of the schools becomes the disciple of a foreign visitor to our shores, by no means his match in intellect. Thenceforward, he must fight by other methods, and for the most part with other companions, that battle against irreligion to which he has dedicated his youth. He has made his own soul, but the battle is not yet over; he finds himself in conflict with the men who had been his closest comrades in arms, and who still share his own beliefs but exaggerate their emphasis in a degree which he thinks dangerous. A man who once seemed likely to do great things for the Church of England, yet whose influence, on the whole, was to damage her position in the eyes of his contemporaries; a man, nevertheless, who lived to see something of the old bitterness against him die down, whose age was cheered by public recognition at once welcome, unsought, and unexpected. So far, however, there is nothing unique about John Wesley. A careful reperusal of the foregoing paragraph will show that it all applies equally to the career of Cardinal Newman. Wesley and Newman-you might think that some elfin fate had arranged this odd consent between the stars of the two men, just so as to throw into relief the vast difference there was between them. Newman, so sensitive, so warm in his attachments, so revealing in This content downloaded from his literary confidences, Wesley, so unruffled by opposition, so half-hearted in his familiarities, so circumspect in his admissions; Newman, the recluse, Wesley, a lifelong vagabond in the service of his gospel; Newman, painstaking in his judgements, fastidious in his style, Wesley, leaping to infallible conclusions and throwing them at you with the first words that came to hand; Newman, such a child of the Renaissance, Wesley, so fundamentally a Puritan. And, deeper down, Newman the apostle of religious authority, Wesley, a cheerful experimentalist who in all the hesitations of a lifetime never asked himself by what right he ruled, or on what basis of intellectual certainty he believed.”

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Book:Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion
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“Let us note, from the first, that traditional Christianity is a balance of doctrines, and not merely of doctrines but of emphases. You must not exaggerate in either direction, or the balance is disturbed. An excellent thing to abandon yourself, without reserve, into God's hands; if your own rhetoric leads you into fantastic expressions of the idea, there is no great harm done. But, teach on principle that it is an infidelity to wonder whether you are saved or lost, and you have overweighted your whole devotional structure; you have ruled out a whole type of religious self-expression. Conversely, it is a holy thing to trust in the redeeming merits of Christ. But, put it about that such confidence is the indispensable sign of being in God's favour, that, unless and until he is experimentally aware of it, a This content downloaded from man is lost, and the balance has been disturbed at the opposite end; you have condemned one type of religious mind to despair.”

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Book:Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion
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“If we ask why such a man lapsed into heresy, the psychological answer, for what it is worth, lies on the surface. He was incurably a logician, his whole temper was impatient of compromises, of halfway houses. And in the debate which probably went on in his age, as it does in most ages of the Church, between the people who want to screw up the standard of Church discipline and the people who would adjust it to the weakness of human nature, he inevitably found his true home among the extremists. Not because he was a saintly idealist, with Wesley's distrust of the 'almost Christian', but because his intellectual bias impelled him towards the party of consistency; he preferred rigorism, not because it was a harder rule to live by, but because it was an easier principle to defend. Where was the sense in belauding martyrdom, yet allowing Christians to take refuge in flight when persecution threatened? Why should absolution be refused to the man who had denied his faith under torture, and then granted to the adulterer, who could make no plea of duress? We do not know what personal or accidental motives may have contributed to his false decision; but it is not difficult, I think, to see that decision as congenial to the bent of his mind.”

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Book:Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion
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