My Irreligion
Knox, Ronald
November 4, 1925 THE COMMONWEAL 645 ment, the second on the Eucharist and the alleged communion rites in pagan cults. To judge by the highly laudatory newspaper articles which appeared on the...
...The president of the congress, however, in the closing session suggested a means of remedying this defect...
...But why should they feed it to us in the daily press ? Do they expect us to lie down and say-- "There is one God, and Gigadibs is his prophet...
...When Mr...
...I have been irresistibly reminded of this story by the recent action of an English morning paper in start- ing a series of articles by well known novelists under the heading My Religion...
...Et~6ENE C. DOLSON...
...he wants Almighty God's religion...
...Your Letter The words in your letter Are sea-shells-Castaways that whisper Unmistakably Of the home whence they came...
...It has shown, as on its part, the Vatican Exposition showed, the incomparable re-sources secured for the service of science by the col- laboration of missionaries...
...The others write of religions which are their own invention, for which they themselves are responsible--their religion and nobody else's...
...The wearer, when challenged for an explanation, said the first two letters stood for "my own," and that he meant to go on wearing it...
...As I would do, gin I were God, And thou wert Martin Elginbrodd...
...In that shadow-world he is sole demiurge...
...human life would have flickered out painlessly at the age of ninety...
...Soviet Russia is not the only land in which the history of religions and that of primitive religions in par- ticular (religious ethnology) are used as a means to propagate indifferentism and atheism...
...It is certain, in any case, that the defense of our Faith demands the development of this study...
...He wanted a god to beat the Germans with...
...he can predestine his hero to live hap- pily ever afterwards, his villain to throw himself over a precipice, or (what is more common nowadays) the other way round...
...Arnold Bennett really want to float a new religion, it is no good for them to sit down in an arm-chalr and think it out...
...it may be only of his mood...
...Birth and coming of age are alike marked by ceremonies which bestow a religious and a political status, make a man a communicant (so to speak) and consequently a citizen...
...Compton Mackenzie replies to the editor's question by offering some of the considerations which led him to become a Catholic, it explains itself naturally enough...
...Wells wrote God the Invisible King, it was doubt- ful whether it reflected his mind...
...During the interval to elapse before the next re-assembly, he urged the organization of smaller national conventions of three or four days, instead of international meetings of a week's time...
...If he had been the Omnipotent, he tells us, there should have been no pain in the world except perhaps such pain as was personally deserved, and calculated to reform the character which had merited it...
...Any intelligent man could make up half-a-dozen quite interesting creeds before break- fast...
...When he has finished his dictation, he can sit down and (on the jacket) pro- nounce his work very good...
...it has nothing proprietary in it, nothing egotistic...
...we don't need literary men to dictate it to us...
...The very word religion means restraint, implies a power which is greater than you and outside your control, a power which imposes itself on you...
...Of all men, Gigadibs is the last who should he turned loose on this sort of thing...
...This one, for ex-ample, that I am leading up to, about the man at the Cowes Regatta, who met an acquaintance of humble origin and plebian speech, wearing the blazer, or pea- jacket, or whatever it is, of the Royal Yacht Club...
...there is no mistaking his attitude...
...Nothing restrains him except the canons of art, and these not much...
...Now, if Gigadibs's idea of the natural order as it ought to be is so differ- ent from the natural order as it is, what sense is there in assuming that Gigadibs's idea of the supernatural order as it ought to be corresponds with the super- natural order as it is ? The probability is that Gigadibs is as badly out in the one case as in the other...
...But I hope I am not alone in feeling that most of the other contributions suggest a quite different interpretation of the word "my...
...Mean-while the plain man does not want Gigadibs's religion...
...and when Mr...
...The result is not difficult to foresee...
...If Mr...
...What wonder if such a man thinks of the supernatural world as a continuation of his last best.seUer, a world whose conditions his own fancy can impose, a world which will be the mirror of his own mind...
...Have mercy on my soul, Lord God...
...Mackenzie writes about "my religion" just as a Dane (say) might write for the English public about "my country...
...ideally, the religion of all men whatsoever...
...Even a tribal cult, which does not pretend that its god is the god of any neighboring tribe--would regard it, indeed, as plagiarism if neighbors were to adopt its own tenets-- nevertheless identifies itself eagerly with the whole life of that one tribe...
...To the Italians, who have nearly abandoned the field of ethnology and history of religions to the rationalists, the congress has revealed the existence of a Catholic science very rigorous in its methods and most con- fident in its conclusions...
...he can make his characters come in for a fortune or go bankrupt at a moment's notice ; he puts every word into their mouths, every thought into their heads...
...I have called this article My Irreligion, because I could quite easily sit down and draw up paper reli-gions for myself...
...And that revelation, however ludicrous it may be, may possibly catch on as a freak religion, but precisely because it is not theirs...
...He is a creator, although his puppets live only in a shadow-world...
...But such pleasing fancies have this disadvantage, that the trains will not run ac- cording to my revised edition...
...It is just as easy to imagine a creed without hell as it is to imagine a world without pain...
...But what would you ? I am only Martin Elginbrodd...
...and the next day met the same acquaintance in the same blazer, but with the letters, M. O. R. Y. C., embroidered over the pocket...
...natural religion" is a perfectly sensible thing, and was indeed in most parts of the world the only light man had before the Chris- tian era...
...My" religion means, commonly, the religion that suits itself to my particular tempera- ment...
...He can dictate to a stenographer the color of his heroine's hair (what is left of it) her early struggles and inhibitions, her improbable par- tiality for sheiks and cave-men...
...Gigadibs offers us a picture of the supernatural world as it would be if he had had the creating and the ordering of it...
...One point deserves special stress...
...It suggests that you have invented the religion for yourself...
...For your writer of fiction is accustomed to ape the airs of creative in...
...they will run according to Bradshaw, as it is...
...telligence...
...H. G. Wells or Mr...
...Just so I could easily re-write Bradshaw's rail-road guide if I chose, in a way which would be far more satisfactory to myself...
...To judge by the highly laudatory newspaper articles which appeared on the congress, notably in Italia, the Corriere and the Osservatore Romano, and by the congratulations offered by numerous Church digni-taries, the impression produced by the gathering at Milan would seem to have been excellent...
...The word loses its whole force if your "religion" is simply a mirror of yourself, reflecting your own fads and foibles, your own kinks and prejudices...
...consequently, a greater number of writers, professors and mission- aries would be enabled to take advantage of the op- portunity...
...The praise and encouragement lavished on the congress by the Holy Father and his representatives will, it is to be hoped, help to multiply these workers...
...Their best course is to take hashish or something, and then they may get a revelationDof sorts...
...False science must be opposed without delay by a science that is better informed and impartial...
...one can only restate the thesis of that often quoted, seldom read, never refuted, work, Butler's Analogy...
...Not even of his mind, necessarily...
...My" religion is a daunting phrase because it sug- gests idiosyncrasy...
...In short, what everybody naturally de- mands of a religion is that it should be, not his reli- gion, but the religion of all good men...
...It is unfortunate that present circumstances and lack of funds will not permit, as was possible in the past, the publication of a report of the meetings, use- ful as such a document would undoubtedly be to extend the action and increase the fruits of this scholarly re- union...
...Conventions such as that of Milan have the double virtue of doing honor to Cath- olic learning and of preparing select workers in this field...
...it was quite certain that it reflected his mood...
...For it is, surely, one of the accidental glories of any religion, true or false, that it should be a bond which unites men in the observance of it...
...Here lie I, Martin Elginbrodd...
...All jokes, but especially anecdotes, will have to be en- tered at the Library of Congress here, or at Stationer's Hall, in England, and it will be illegal to release one without giving its age--"strictly fresh," "storage," "pre-war," and so on...
...Thus would be avoided the difficulty of high traveling expenses as well as that of multiplicity of languages...
...He does his imaginative job conscientiously, no doubt, creditably perhaps...
...there would have been no madmen, no hereditary criminals, and so on...
...only I should not call them religions but irreligions, because they would not bind me, where- as the function of religion, by mere force of words, is to bind...
...Would not this, in fact, be a happy solution of the problem for America and England, in both of which an international congress now seems impossi- ble by reason of depreciated continental currencies...
...For Gigadibs, that is but a small stretch of the imagination...
...He protested in horror, explaining that that sort of thing wasn't done...
...I do not mean that a religion must necessarily be a revealed religion...
...it is daunting also because it carries with it a flavor of ownership...
...As it is, you never know which stories are new and which are old...
...Note Step-anov's recent work in Russian, Principles and Methods of Anti-Religious Propaganda...
...The more re-cent and reflective religious organizations of the world go further, and insist that if things were as they should be, not one tribe only, but the whole of mankind would be united in holding this or that creed, however tenu- ous, fulfilling these or those religious duties, however 646 THE COMMONWEAL November 4, 1925 unexacting...
...November 4, 1925 THE COMMONWEAL 645 ment, the second on the Eucharist and the alleged communion rites in pagan cults...
...But natural religion depends upon the horse- sense of the human mind...
...it is the supernatural seen from my particular angle of vision, however myopic, however distorted...
...suring for the common mortal who looks for religious leadership to be confronted with a pile of helpful theories labeled--"A poor thing but mine own...
...MY IRRELIGION By RONALD KNOX W HEN the millennium arrives, as there is every reason to think it will before long, there will, no doubt, be an Index Jocorum, or official Joe Miller, which will be a blessing to writing fellows on both sides of the Atlantic, and still more to the public...
...none will tell you so more loudly than he...
...but what sort of guarantee have we that the supernatural world as it really is cor- responds to what Gigadibs thinks it ought to be ? There is no room here for original argument...
...The phrase, of course, is a perfectly legitimate one...
...If Gigadibs had created our visible world of sense and of cer-tainty, would he have produced the world we see around us ? Not he...
...It is inevitable that a man's religious sentiments, if they depend on no revelation, should become thus in- dividualized...
...It is hardly reas...
Vol. 2 • November 1925 • No. 26
