Ronald Arbuthnott Knox died on this day in 1957. He was born in Kibworth, in Leicestershire, to an important Evangelical Anglican family; his grandfather on his mother's side had been Bishop of Lahore, and his father eventually became the Bishop of Manchester. He studied at Eton, where he began, much to the dissatisfaction of his family, to take an interest in Anglo-Catholic movements in the Church of England and eventually ended up in the University of Oxford at Balliol College, where he thrived, and afterward was elected fellow of Trinity College. Shortly thereafter he became an Anglican priest and became chaplain of the college. After serving in British intelligence during the Great War, he taught at Shrewsbury School. Then in 1917, he converted to Catholicism, resigning his chaplaincy, which provoked a family crisis, as his father then cut him out of his will. He was ordained a Catholic priest and began teaching at St. Edmund's College.
Knox was a prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction alike, a significant member of the Detection Club, a major figure in early broadcasting, and the translator of the Knox Version of the Bible. From Heaven and Charing Cross, his book of Corpus Christi sermons:
...You see, we are so materialistic, our minds are so chained to the things of sense, that we imagine our Lord as instituting the Blessed Sacrament with bread and wine as the remote matter of it because bread and wine reminded him of that grace which he intended the Blessed Sacrament to bestow. But, if you come to think of it, it was just the other way about. When he created the worlds he gave common bread and wine for our use in order that we might understand what the Blessed Sacrament was when it came to be instituted. He did not design the Sacred Host to be something like bread. He designed bread to be something like the Sacred Host.
Always, it is the things which affect us outwardly and impress themselves on our senses that are the shams, the imaginaries; reality belongs to the things of the spirit. All the din and clatter of the streets, all the great factories which dominate our landscape, are only echoes and shadows if you think of them for a moment in the light of eternity; the Reality is in here, is there above the altar, is that part of it which our eyes cannot see and our senses cannot distinguish.... (pp. 13-14).
