Ronald Knox
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Msgr. Ronald Knox (February 17, 1888-August 24, 1957) was an English theologian, priest and crime writer.
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[edit] Life
Ronald Arbuthnott Knox was born in Leicestershire, England into an Anglican family (his father was Edmund Arbuthnott Knox who became bishop of Manchester), and was educated at Eton College and Balliol College, Oxford. In 1910, he became a fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. He was ordained as an Anglican priest in 1912, and was appointed chaplain of Trinity, but left in 1917 when he converted to Roman Catholicism. He explained his spiritual journey in two privately printed books, Apologia (1917), and A Spiritual Aeneid (1918). In 1918 he was ordained a Roman Catholic priest; in 1919 he joined the staff of St Edmund's College, Ware, Hertfordshire, remaining there until 1926.
He wrote and broadcast on Christianity and other subjects. While a Roman Catholic chaplain at the University of Oxford (1926-1939) and as domestic prelate to the Pope 1936, he wrote classic detective stories. In 1929 he codified the rules for detective stories into a 'Decalogue' of ten commandments, see Golden Age of Detective Fiction.
Monsignor Knox singlehandedly translated the St. Jerome Latin Vulgate Bible into English. His works on religious themes include: Some Loose Stones (1913), Reunion All Round (1914), The Spiritual Aeneid (1918), The Belief of Catholics (1927), Caliban in Grub Street (1930), Heaven and Charing Cross (1935), Let Dons Delight (1939), and Captive Flames (1940). Monsignor Knox's Roman Catholicism caused his father to cut him out of his will. Fitzgerald, The Knox Brothers (1977) at p. 261. This did not make much difference to his finances, however, as Knox earned a good income from his detective novels.
An essay in Knox's Essays in Satire (1928), "Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes", was the first of the genre of mock-serious critical writings on Sherlock Holmes and mock-historical studies in which the existence of Holmes, Watson, et al. is assumed. Another of these essays (The Authorship of "In Memoriam") purports to prove that Tennyson's poem was actually written by Queen Victoria. Another satirical essay ("Reunion All Round") mocked the fabled Anglican tolerance in the form of an appeal to the Anglican Church to absorb everyone from Muslims to atheists, and even Catholics after murdering Irish children and banning Irish marriage and reproduction. Knox was led to the Catholic Church by the English writer G. K. Chesterton, before Chesterton himself converted. When Chesterton did convert to Roman Catholicism, he in turn was influenced by Knox. Knox delivered the homily for Chesterton's Requiem Mass in Westminster Cathedral.
In 1953 he visited the Oxfords in Zanzibar and the Actons in Rhodesia. It was on this trip that he began his translation of the Imitation of Christ and, upon his return to Mells, his translation of Thérèse de Lisieux's Autobiography of a Soul. He also began a work of apologetics intended to reach a wider than the student audience of his Belief of Catholics (1927). But all his activities were curtailed by his sudden and serious illness early in 1957. At the invitation of his old friend, Harold Macmillan, he stayed at 10 Downing Street while in London to consult a specialist. The doctor confirmed the diagnosis of incurable cancer.
He died on August 24, 1957, his body was brought to Westminster Cathedral. Bishop Craven said the requiem at which Father Martin D'Arcy, a Jesuit, preached the panegyric. Knox was buried in the churchyard of St Andrew's Church, Mells.
His first biography appeared a few years after his death, the work of his friend and literary executor, Evelyn Waugh. Waugh, a devout Catholic and fervent admirer of Knox's works, had obtained his friend's permission for the task. The second biography of Knox devoted equal weight to him and his three brothers (E. V. Knox, Dillwyn Knox and Wilfred Knox); it was the work of his niece Penelope Fitzgerald, whose sympathies seem to have been with Wilfred's Anglo-Catholicism but are still deeply respectful of Ronald.
[edit] Radio hoax
In 1926, for one of his regular BBC radio programmes, Knox broadcast a pretended live report of revolution sweeping across London entitled Broadcasting from the Barricades. In addition to live reports of persons being lynched, his broadcast cleverly mixed supposed band music from the Savoy Hotel with the hotel's purported destruction by trench mortars. Because the broadcast occurred on a snowy weekend, much of the UK was unable to get the newspaper until days later, and a minor panic ensued.
A 2005 BBC report on the broadcast suggests that the innovative style of Knox's programme may have influenced Orson Welles' 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast, and also foreshadowed it in its consequences. The script of the broadcast is reprinted in Essays in Satire (1928).
[edit] Selected Works
Bible Translation, Knox's Translation of the Vulgate, Modern English Bible translations.
Spiritual Aeneid (1918)
A Barchester Pilgrimage
The Scoop and Behind the Screen (1983) (Originally published in The Listener (1931) and (1930), both written by members of the Detection Club)
Let Dons Delight, one of Knox's most famous works, though currently out of print, takes as its theme the history of Oxford from the reformation to shortly before World War II. It records the conversations of the dons of Simon Magus, a fictional college, first in 1588, and then by fifty year intervals. The episodes are generally light, showcasing Knox's brilliance with words, but the dominance of religious topics permits Knox to make subtle arguments for the Catholic Faith, a goal primarily accomplished by driving his Protestant debaters into dead-ends and contradictions. Knox intersperses the episodes with parodies of well-known historical works, such as Boswell's and Anthony a Wood's, that mention his fictional characters. In the final episode, 1938, the exclusively agnostic dons argue with a viciousness absent in the preceding centuries, and the book ends on a desparate note.
[edit] Novels
- The Viaduct Murder (1925)
- The Three Taps (1927)
- The Footsteps at the Lock (1928)
- The Body in the Silo (1933)
- Double Cross Purposes (1933)
- Still Dead (1934)
