For their thirtieth-anniversary issue in 1961, the editors of The American Scholar asked sixty-three writers and critics to name some of the outstanding books published since 1931. The response by the American poet Phyllis McGinley (1905-78) is memorable:
“I do not
apologize for the curious book in which I have taken the most pleasure during
the last decade—Ronald Knox’s sole masterpiece, Enthusiasm.”
Knox’s subtitle is A Chapter in the History of
Religion (1950). His subject, he admits, is “elusive,” and his title
amounts to “a cant term, pejorative, and commonly misapplied, as a label for a
tendency.” Knox (1888-1957) refers to the schismatic nature of belief in the
context of Roman Catholicism – the always disturbing, often fruitful friction
between “the charismatic and the institutional.” The subject has applications
far beyond Christianity. McGinley writes:
“Supposedly
it is a history of Christian heresies and on that basis it is superb. But I find
it something more important. It is also a history of recurrent patterns of the
human mind, as applicable to literature, politics and government as to
religion.”
Knox’s own
religious history is telling. He was ordained an Anglican priest in 1912,
converted to Roman Catholicism five years later, and was ordained a priest in
that faith in 1918. As such, he might be presumed a disapproving chronicler of
“enthusiasts.” But something happened over the 30 years Knox worked on Enthusiasm. He explains in the
introduction:
“[W]hen the
plan of this book was first conceived, all those years ago, it was to have been
a broadside, a trumpet-blast, an end of controversy. . . . here, I would say,
is what happens inevitably, if once the principle of Catholic unity is lost!
All this confusion, this priggishness, then pedantry, this eccentricity and
worse, follows directly from the rash step that takes you outside the fold of
Peter!”
Knox then
makes an admirably honest admission, one most of us would be reluctant to make,
at least publicly: “[S]omehow, 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.”
McGinley was
a lifelong Roman Catholic. Her Times
Three: Selected Verse from Three Decades, with Seventy New Poems (1960) was
published with a foreword by W.H. Auden and awarded the Pulitzer Prize for
poetry in 1961. A self-described “housewife poet,” McGinley dedicated Times Three to her husband and two
daughters, “my critics, my champions, my copy.” Her reputation has
evaporated. If remembered at all, she is
dismissed as too middlebrow and middle-class. She was a wonderful poet. At the
end of her brief Knox reclamation she writes:
“To be
acquainted with this scholarly, brilliantly witty, crotchety book is to be
better acquainted with the planet and its odd occupants.”
[Go here and
here to read McGinley’s essay “The Consolations of Illiteracy” and here to read
Matthew Walther’s celebration of Ronald Knox.]
6 comments:
What a coincidence! I was in a seminary library yesterday and I *almost* checked out Knox's book. The library has a very nice copy of it.
Another neglected work of McGinley's is Saint Watching, which (Knox-like) she admits began as one book and ended another. Despite the title, and her Catholic faith, it is a book for everyone.
Enthusiasm's blend of exacting judgment and Christian charity makes it unique in my experience. How many men, wholly convinced of the correctness of their creed, could have written this -
But my aim is to interpret enthusiasm, not to criticize it. If we would interpret it rightly, there is one point that must be seized on above all the rest – in itself enthusiasm is not a wrong tendency but a false emphasis. Quietism exaggerates only a little the doctrine of the mystics about simplicity in prayer, about disinterested love. Quakerism does but enthrone in dangerous isolation the truth of God’s presence within us. Jansenism is the vigilant conscience of Christendom overshadowed by a scruple. Methodism is the call back to Christ in an age of Deism. What men like Pascal, Fenelon, and Wesley saw clearly was something true and something valuable: the exaggerations, the eccentricities, were hatched by the heat of controversy. The sympathy which those names evoke is not the index of a rebel spirit in us, who read of them; it is not because they fell foul of authority, and imperiled unity, that we attribute to them greatness. It is not surprising if those who are most sensitive to the needs of their age find their way, sometimes, on to the wrong side of the calendar. Fine instruments are easily spoiled.
Do you have a link to that issue of The American Scholar? Would love to see what other writers put down on their lists!
“Outstanding Books, 1931-1961,” The American Scholar, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Autumn, 1961)
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“Outstanding Books, 1931-1961,” The American Scholar, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Autumn, 1961)
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