Caliban in Grub Street 1930 [Leather Bound] Quotes

“The influence of religion upon conduct in its widest extent; the question whether 'duty' exists, or whether kindness is the only thing that matters; the value to be attached to purity, or decency, or self-control- all these questions, as if by an organized conspiracy, they leave on one side. They may have held that purity is a superstition and self-control a crime against nature, but why did they not say so? They leave off talking about religion just where becomes interesting to two Englishmen in every three. They make the old Victorian assumption, which in our time has patently broken down, that you can obliterate the religious beliefs of a nation without affecting its standards of morality. Ideally of course you can; ideally the pagan has the same ethical duties as the Christian. But in practice, after so many centuries of identification, religion and morals are deeply interconnected. And that plain fact is that whereas our fathers asked themselves whether the creed was true, their sons are asking whether the Ten Commandments matter.”
― Ronald Knox, Caliban in Grub Street 1930 [Leather Bound]

“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.”
― Ronald Knox, Caliban in Grub Street 1930 [Leather Bound]

“The prime purpose of the Christian revelation was not to show men what they ought to do, but to give them the inspiration (if you dislike the word grace) to do it.”
― Ronald Knox, Caliban in Grub Street 1930 [Leather Bound]

“Prayer, to me, is committing my aspirations, however childish, to a Power which, if I ask for a stone, will nevertheless give me the bread I need.”
― Ronald Knox, Caliban in Grub Street 1930 [Leather Bound]

“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.”
― Ronald Knox, Caliban in Grub Street 1930 [Leather Bound]

“Superstition always begins to step in where religion dies; the gambler has his mascots, and the fortune-tellers reap their harvest, and men believe, or half-believe, in their lucky or unlucky stars.”
― Ronald Knox, Caliban in Grub Street 1930 [Leather Bound]

“I know that a silly habit has grown up in recent years of pretending that nature overshadows Man; that the destructions of a city means only an infinitesimal alteration in the death statistics of one particular kind of animal, quite unimportant as compared with the majestic upheaval that has caused it. This is cant and folly; there is nothing majestic about an earthquake unless there are men to know about it and to feel the consequences of it; there is no importance at all about a Mars-quake, if such things occur. The materialist may put up a case for saying that man does not matter; but if he proves his case it is quite certain that nothing else matters; he should be called an immaterialist for his pains.”
― Ronald Knox, Caliban in Grub Street 1930 [Leather Bound]

“Abstractions are themselves the creatures of the mind; and if the mind itself were an abstraction, we should have no abstractions at all.”
― Ronald Knox, Caliban in Grub Street 1930 [Leather Bound]

“The modern world is brain-shy; that is the trouble. It dislikes the doctrines of the Church for precisely the same reason for which it dislikes the argumentations of Mr Russell, because it takes trouble, demands a real exercise of the speculative intellect, to expose the latter or avoid the cogency of the former. And it prefers its dreams.”
― Ronald Knox, Caliban in Grub Street 1930 [Leather Bound]

“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.”
― Ronald Knox, Caliban in Grub Street 1930 [Leather Bound]

“What he [Max Plowman] has done is to adopt the Christian maxim, God is Love, to reverse it, quite arbitrarily, into the pagan maxim, Love is God; and then to argue that, because love is an emotion, and consequently to intellectual formula can exhaust its content, there is not need to argue about the existence of God at all. But what has Mr Plowman really proved? Nothing more than that the emotion of love, whether it be love of God or love of a woman or love of a five-pound note, is something unanalysable in terms of atoms and space-time. If he is prepared to deify this instinct, he is welcome to do so, but it is hard to feel the cause of any theology is benefited by the process.”
― Ronald Knox, Caliban in Grub Street 1930 [Leather Bound]

“You may show what atomic groupings are necessary in order that life may emerge out of matter, sentience out of life, or intellect out of sentience; but you cannot thereby reduce life, let alone sentient life and intellectual life, to terms of matter; you have only succeeded in tabulating the material coefficients of things which are not themselves material. I do not mean that Mr Russell would not be able to put up a case against this argument; I only complain that he simplified his task by pretending to misunderstand what the argument was; by assuming that it was merely physical when as a matter of fact it is metaphysical.”
― Ronald Knox, Caliban in Grub Street 1930 [Leather Bound]

“The ordinary Christian finds in his Christianity a threefold satisfaction of his nature. He finds satisfaction for his intellect- not in the sense that his religion makes it any easier for him to understand what is the relation between force and matter, or how the chicken comes out of the egg, but in the sense that he no longer regards the order of things around him as merely fortuitous, or merely malignant. He finds satisfaction for his will- not in the sense (heaven knows) that he always lives up to the highest promptings of his religion, whether you take him in the individual or in the mass, but in the sense that he is able to plan his conduct so as to meet the approval of Somebody Else; he is not simply making it up for himself as he goes along. And he finds satisfaction for his emotional nature- not in the sense that he has found a substitute for human loves and human loyalties, but in the sense that he has a fixed Centre, whither his whole being gravitates when it is at its best and freest; he has an aim.”
― Ronald Knox, Caliban in Grub Street 1930 [Leather Bound]

“Is it not rather our experience that, while men are in health, their health is the last subject which preoccupies them; that is only when symptoms of age or decay begin to set in that that air their maladies for public inspection? The same reflections applies to the body politic: in the piping time of Victorian prosperity people did not talk about trade or employment- it would have been almost vulgar: nor did people exercise their minds over the continuance of our world-hegemony; they took it for granted. It is when the public mind becomes less easy on such topics that they are freely ventilated. If these analogies have any worth, it is difficult not to conclude that a society talks about religion more freely and more publicly when religion is beginning to die out. Like the enfeebled pulse or the dwindling exports, the empty pew begins, for the first time, to arrest our attention.”
― Ronald Knox, Caliban in Grub Street 1930 [Leather Bound]