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