ABSTRACT

In 1918, Monsignor Ronald Knox (1888–1957) – English priest, author, theologian and translator – published a spiritual autobiography entitled A Spiritual Aeneid. The immediate fruit of his conversion to Roman Catholicism, it owes its ostensible structure quite untypically, as its title suggests, to Virgil’s pre-Christian Aeneid. It is also shaped (negatively) by the Protestant-inflected conversion narrative tradition and by Cardinal John Henry Newman’s Catholic conversion narrative Apologia Pro Vita Sua. In tracing these thematic, formal and intertextual influences in Knox’s A Spiritual Aeneid, this essay illustrates that Knox represents Catholic conversion as an intersubjective, protracted and rational process – in fact, an essentially Catholic process of intellectual suasion and wilful action – in order to differentiate it from the Protestant conversion narrative tradition. Far from being merely defensive, however, Knox’s differentiation from his own former Anglican self and community is subtly eirenic. In A Spiritual Aeneid, Knox successfully reconciles the predominantly English Protestant form and the Roman Catholic variant of Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua, mainly by using the extrinsic Latin of Virgil in multiple ways – allegorically, stylistically and, finally, sacramentally.

摘要

1918年，英国牧师，作家，神学家和翻译家罗纳德·诺克斯（Ronald Knox）先生（1888–1957）出版了题为《精神的埃涅瓦德》的精神自传。他conversion依罗马天主教的直接结果是，它的表面结构很不正常，正如其标题所暗示的那样，归功于维吉尔（Virgil）的前基督教艾尼德（Aeneid）。它也受到（受负面影响的）新教徒的conversion依叙事传统和红衣主教约翰·亨利·纽曼（John Henry Newman）的天主教conversion依叙事Apologia Pro Vita Sua的塑造。在追寻诺克斯的《精神的埃涅阿迪》中的这些主题，形式和互文影响，本文说明，诺克斯将天主教的conversion依表示为一个主体间的，长期的和理性的过程-实际上，这是本质上是天主教徒的智力劝说和故意行动的过程-旨在将其与新教conversion依的叙事传统区分开来。但是，诺克斯不仅具有防御性，而且与自己的前英国国教徒的自身和社区之间的区别也是微妙的。诺克斯在《精神的埃涅瓦》中成功地调和了以英语为主要的新教教派形式和纽曼的《Apoologia Pro Vita Sua》的罗马天主教派的变体，主要是通过多种方式使用了隐喻的维吉尔拉丁语，寓言地，风格上，最后是圣礼。