Angus Macnab

Angus Macnab was born in London of New Zealand-Scots parents. He received a classical education at the ancient “Public School” of Rugby and at Christ Church College, Oxford. He was a gifted translator of Latin and Greek poetry, but as a profession he chose teaching. Mr. Macnab’s interest in Spain began in 1936, and after the Second World War, in which he served as a volunteer ambulance driver, he learned Spanish and decided to make Spain his home.

For many years Macnab lived with his Irish wife and three children in the charming Plaza de Santo Tome (opposite the church of the same name) in Toledo. While there he received a number of distinguished visitors from England and America including novelists Evelyn Waugh and James Michener, musician and Tibetologist Marco Pallis, and publisher Tom Burns. In 1938, under the influence of G.K Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, Angus Macnab embraced neo-scholasticism and traditional Catholicism. For some this could have been an intellectual straitjacket, but in conjunction with his classical roots and his later oriental studies, it provided Macnab with a fine philosophical tool for a subtle examination of the two traditional cultures (Christian and Islamic) of Medieval Spain. The fruits of his investigation in this field were his books Spain under the Crescent Moon and Toledo, Sacred and Profane.

Angus Macnab’s article, “The Monk and the Caliph,” appears in Ye Shall Know the Truth: Christianity and the Perennial Philosophy (edited by Mateus Soares de Azevedo), and two chapters of his fascinating book Spain under the Crescent Moon are included in Sufism: Love and Wisdom (edited by Jean-Louis Michon and Roger Gaetani).