A Spiritual Aeneid

By Ronald Knox

As Ronald Knox was preparing to enter the Catholic Church, he took with him, as a spiritual-reading traveling companion, Virgil’s Aeneid. The physical journey of Aeneas toward Rome provided a well-polished mirror to the spiritual voyage of Knox to that other, perfect Rome—the Eternal City of Christendom. “Ingeniously constructed on the Virgillian frame,” as Evelyn Waugh writes in his Foreword, A Spiritual Aeneid is Knox’s account of his conversion from the Anglican Church to the one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church. And the Aeneid is the template par excellence for a conversion account—in Knox’s own words: “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. In an Aeneid…you may be driven from your course; but, to crown the sense of adventure, in an Aeneid you do not even know where your port lies; you must make experiments, hark back to beginnings, throw yourself upon a celestial guidance.”

If you can steadily face all this mountain of assertion about the greatness of God in comparison with man, you may be a Catholic yet—but can you? (Ronald Knox)

As moving and memorable today as when it first appeared in 1918, A Spiritual Aeneid endures as the “essential introduction” to Monsignor Ronald Knox, a devoted servant to the One who makes all things new.

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Ronald Knox (1888–1957) was an English Catholic priest, theologian, and author, and one of the most prominent twentieth-century converts from Anglicanism to Catholicism. Best known for his contemporary English translation of the Scriptures (the “Knox Bible”), he wrote numerous works of apologetics and collections of ser­mons, retreat conferences, and lectures, as well as six detective novels.

Paperback: 270pp.

ISBN: 978-1685951481