A Spiritual Aeneid

“Virgil—or at any rate the Aeneid—I had never learned to value before: it was only when I was forced to look below the surface that I lost my heart to him.” So Ronald Knox wrote in A Spiritual Aeneid, his account of how and why he came to leave the Church of England and become a Roman Catholic. That his conversion story will be told in a distinctively Virgilian way is made clear on the first pages of that book, where he explains his choice of title by distinguishing an Odyssey from an Aeneid. For “wherever your Odyssey takes you, it must involve coming back home at the end of it.” But “an Aeneid involves not merely coming home, but coming home to a place you have never been in before—one that combines in itself all that you valued in the old home with added promises of a future that is new.”

“Readers will struggle to find so profound and pithy a summary of the Aeneid’s story elsewhere,” according to Professor Matthew McGowan, author of one of the three critical essays included in the book here under review. It presents for the first time the celebrated lectures on the Aeneid that Knox delivered to undergraduates in Hilary Term, 1912, at Trinity College, Oxford. After more than a century, at last we have the good fortune to be able to read the lectures that were tantalizingly described by Evelyn Waugh in his biography of Knox (published in 1957) as still being “fresh, witty, and original” in spite of “all the subsequent innovations in educational methods” in the intervening years. They demonstrate the depth and breadth of Knox’s familiarity with the classics, the fruit of his immersion in them as a precocious child. He began learning Latin at the age of four, was reading the Aeneid at six, and wrote his first Latin play at the age of eight (albeit one that was “ineffably tedious” according to Waugh). It was an education that was fast becoming dated in his own lifetime. He once mused that he might write a lecture to complain “that the classical tradition as an idea in education has already become obsolete, that we are teaching scholarship to specialists, and giving people degrees for knowing how to admire Praxiteles, but no longer attempting to saturate people with the classics, as our grandfathers were saturated with them.” One can only wonder what he would think of the state of classical education in our own time.

The editor, Dr. Francesca Bugliani Knox, who is married to Knox’s great-nephew, is to be commended for the determination and detective work needed to publish the lectures. They had lain dormant in various archives after some scholarly admirers of them had tried and failed to have them published fifty years ago, “a casualty,” she writes, “of the commercial imperatives of the postwar publishing industry.” Those admirers included Robert Speaight, Henry Wansborough OSB, and Sir R.A.B. Mynors, the latter being one of Britain’s most distinguished classicists. Readers may now see for themselves why the lectures were remembered so fondly by those who read them or heard them viva voce.

The eight lectures cover Virgil’s political outlook, religious outlook, his romance and pathos, his art and treatment of his story, his appreciation of scenery, his use of his sources, the composition of Book III, and the characteristics of his style and versification.

Knox is particularly adept at elucidating how Virgil is indebted to the epic poems of Homer, but imitates him in a way that refines and raises them to something more noble. For instance, he discusses what Virgil means by pietas and pius, key words in the Aeneid that are often applied to the protagonist Aeneas. Knox is particularly good at close readings of how Virgil imbues a single word with a wealth of nuance and significance, a quality that Tennyson refers to in a line from his poem To Virgil quoted by Knox: “All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely word.” Virgil uses pietas to mean not mere affection but the virtue of knowing what is owed to the gods and of dutifully carrying it out with the right rituals. Hence, the repeated phrase “pius Aeneas,” according to Knox, means “Aeneas, that trained liturgiologist.” 

But pietas is not a mere superstitious scrupulosity for taboos, which it might have been in primitive Roman religion. Virgil moralizes it into a virtue of dutifully heeding divine warnings and loyally giving thanks in return for divine favor by offering sacrifices. Pietas is also used at times more loosely to describe being loyal to ancestors, to one’s own kin and king. But a consequence of Virgil’s more refined conception is that whereas a sacrifice in Homer is “simply a bribe, which the god can take without in any way binding himself, to be influenced by it,” for Virgil the gods owe pity and favor to those who are faithful to them. “There is a sort of pact or covenant between the god and his worshipper.” Even the gods exist within a moral order.

As a consequence, fate in the Aeneid is no longer an inscrutable force overwhelming gods and men alike: 

[T]here is less sense in Virgil than in Homer of destiny overruling the will of individual gods. . . . In Homer Zeus simply holds the scales in his hands, and one of them, for no ostensible reason, wins the day. . . . Fate in Homer, if it has any moral determination at all, is uniformly cruel and unpleasant. Virgil if he does not reach the idea of Providence, at least rises to that of destiny.

Aeneas’s Trojans are destined to emerge victorious not arbitrarily, but because of the virtue of their cause. Free will has a role in choosing whether to find out what is decreed by destiny and obeying or flouting it. Dido’s tragedy, Knox remarks, is that she keeps consulting the seers, but with no intention of following their oracles, because of her consuming desire to keep Aeneas by her side, rather than letting him pursue his destiny to found Rome.

This might make us think Virgil is callous toward the death of Aeneas’s accomplices, kinsmen, and enemies, whose lives are sacrificed along the way in pursuit of his destiny. We might think the moral of the Aeneid is “Aeneas is the strong man; the strong is bound to win, and the weakest must go to the wall.” (That seems to be Simone Weil’s view.) On the contrary, Knox claims that Virgil should “be considered the first romantic poet the world has seen” because 

this is precisely the way in which Virgil does not commend Aeneas to our admiration . . . One of the easiest differences by which to distinguish romantic from classical literature, is that the sympathies of romantic literature are always on the side of the underdog. 

Think of the reversal of the obvious that we see in the story of David and Goliath, or in fairy tales like Cinderella. Aeneas attracts our sympathy not for being a warrior, but for being on the losing side in the war against the Greeks and suffering the hardships of exile. In fact, compared to the Iliad, in the Aeneid “the characters of the hero and the villain are reversed.” When Aeneas’s rival and enemy, Turnus, is described in an oracle as “a second Achilles,” Knox points out that this conveys something important. “It is Turnus, not Aeneas, who has succeeded to the character of Achilles. The hero of Homer is the strong man, Achilles: Hector, the pious man, is doomed to defeat; in the Aeneid, Turnus is the strong man, and he is going to get beaten by the pious man [i.e. Aeneas].”  

Whereas the Iliad ends in tragedy, Aeneas’s fortunes are reversed in typical romantic fashion, as the underdog eventually triumphs over evil. But there is a pathos that reveals how Virgil is sensitive to the costs of Aeneas’s victory. One of the examples Knox mentions is the reaction of Evander to learning of his young son’s death in battle at the hands of Turnus, which “so affects the poet’s mind that the world itself seems all out of joint.” Knox speculates that the death of Marcellus, a prominent young member of the imperial family, whose death is foreseen by Aeneas, had such an impression on the Roman world that it “made Virgil so peculiarly sensitive to the tragedy of early death, so peculiarly prone to dwell on its sadness. This is not a characteristic of the Iliad.”

“Virgil is romantic enough to make us feel that in the end there will be no wrong unavenged, no wrong uncompensated” by the reversal of Aeneas’s fortunes. But he “nevertheless is always touching our feelings with the tenderest pathos at what is to him the saddest of all sights—that of a beautiful life brought to an unmerited and untimely close.” With those words, Knox brings the lecture on Virgil’s romance and pathos to a close. It is poignant to read those words today. Knox could hardly have known when he delivered his lectures in 1912 that in only a few years most of those young men listening to him would be dead in the First World War.

The lectures are preceded by Professor Charles Martindale’s foreword, in which he makes a lyrical case for why we should still read Virgil today and take seriously Knox’s (now very unfashionable) approach to it. There follows an introduction by the editor, in which she provides a thorough account of the context in which the lectures were delivered, some background about Knox’s life and contribution to classical scholarship, and what happened to the manuscripts after his death. Three critical essays follow the lectures. Professor Matthew McGowan’s essay discusses broadly and appreciatively how Knox’s lectures compare to the scholarship that was contemporary with Knox and with that which is contemporary with us. He is particularly effective at distinguishing Knox’s insightful discussion of how Virgil seems on the cusp of the Christian vision of the afterlife, of sin and expiation, of liturgy and piety, from the more overtly “adventist” readings of T. S. Eliot (“What is a Classic?” and “Virgil and the Christian World”) and Theodor Haecker’s Virgil, Father of the West. Dr. Francesco Montarese looks in detail at some of the original exegetical claims Knox makes and shows that many have been either upheld by later scholars or are worthy of being considered anew. The citations and close readings make it a suitable chapter for those studying the Aeneid at an undergraduate or graduate level. The final essay rounds off the collection in an unfortunate way. It is a discussion of a lecture Knox gave to the Virgil Society in 1946, giving much excessive information with little gained by it, leaving one with the impression of its being frankly a superfluous addition to the volume.  

Robert Speaight, who once described Knox as being “like Newman, an anima naturaliter Virgiliana,” wrote in a panegyric of his lectures: “Many of us who love our Virgil will now understand him better because Ronald Knox loved and understood him so well.” As long as readers are not hindered by the exorbitant price tag—an unavoidable feature, unfortunately, of all academic publications now (“O Tempora!” et cetera)—then they will find in this book an insightful and witty commentary, suitable both for the serious student of the poem and for the layman reading it in translation. If it encourages anyone to read Virgil with fresh eyes or for the first time, it will have served its purpose.  

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