Ronald Knox - Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion : With Special Reference to the XVII and XVIII Centuries

Knox, Ronald Arbuthnott, 1888-1957

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A CHAPTER IN THE HISTORY OF RELIGION

GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE WELLINGTON BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS KARACHI LAHORE DACCA CAPE TOWN SALISBURY NAIROBI IBADAN ACCRA KUALA LUMPUR HONG KONG

WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE XVII AND XVIII CENTURIES

Honorary Fellow of Trinity College Oxford

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AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

RICARDUS J. ROCHE, S.T.D.

CENSOR DEPUTATUS

ARCHIEPISCOPUS BIRMINGAMIENSIS

FIRST PUBLISHED 1950

REPRINTED LITHOGRAPHICALLY IN GREAT BRITAIN AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, OXFORD FROM CORRECTED SHEETS OF THE FIRST EDITION

1951, 1957, 1959, 1962

There is a kind of book about which you may say, almost without exaggeration, that it is the whole of a mans literary life, the unique child of his thought. Other writings he may have published, on this or that occasion; please God, the work was not scamped, nor was he indifferent to the praise and the blame of his critics. But it was all beside the mark. The Book was what matteredhe had lived with it all these years, fondled it in his waking thoughts, used it as an escape from anxiety, a solace in long journeys, in tedious conversations. Did he fmd himself in a library, he made straight for the shelves which promised light on one cherished subject; did he hit upon a telling quotation, a just metaphor, an adroit phrase, it was treasured up, in misers fashion, for the Book. The Book haunted his day-dreams like a guilty romance.

Such a thing, for better or worse, is this book which follows. I have been writing it for thirty years and a little more; no year has passed but I have added to it, patched it, rewritten it, in the time that could be spared from other occupations. Those friends who have asked what I was doing all this time need ask no longer; the secret is out. Those who have expressed surprise at my possessing odd fragments of historical information will understand now how they got thereit all came into the Book. Those who cherished the belief that I. was writing a refutation of all the heresies must be prepared for a disappointment; I have only dealt with certain selected points of view, they were not exactly heresies, and I have not refuted them.

To be sure, when the plan of the Book was first conceived, all those years ago, it was to have been a broadside, a trumpet-blast, an end of controversy. It was to fill up the picture outlined in Bossuets Variations, in Moehlers Symbolik; here, I would say, is what happens inevitably, if once the principle of Catholic unity is lost! All this confusion, this priggishness, this pedantry, this eccentricity and worse, follows directly from the rash step that takes you outside the fold of Peter! All my historical figures, Wesley himself included,

were to be a kind of rogues gallery, an awful warning against illuminism. But somehow, in the writing, my whole treatment of the subject became different; the more you got to know the men, the more human did they become, for better or worse; you were more concerned to find out why they thought as they did than to prove it was wrong. The result, I am afraid, is a hotch-potch; I shall be blamed for not defending Pascal more, or Nayler less. But I could not go on for ever revising my estimates; as it is, I have completely rewritten five out of the first six chapters, so instinctively does the mind quarrel with its own judgements of ten or fifteen years back.

A hotch-potch, put together as best I could, between tasks mastering my authorities in trains, or over solitary meals, taking notes on rough pieces of paper and losing them, reading chapters aloud to patient critics, talking over the implications of this or that movement with my friends. It is not to be supposed that this haphazard process of composition will have justified my selection of material, or produced a literary unity; but how it endears the pages to their author! What varied memories he can use for bookmarkers! Of hours spent in private librariesthe library at Beaufort, burnt down since, where I quarried in Fleury; the library at Keir, where I ran across Hepworth Dixons Spiritual Wives; the library at Aldenham, with those six volumes of Gregoire, and the old copy of Lady Huntingdons Life, uncut by Acton! Of books that have passed through my hands, bought, taken out, or borrowed, from the eleven volumes of Bremond down to the more modest ambit of Noakes Worcester Sects\ Of evenings with undergraduate societies, where I have tried out a chapter here and there, under the guise of a lecture! Do not doubt that one in my position feels, once again, the delicious tremors of first authorship; forgets his bibliography, and ranks in his own mind as homo unius lihri.