John Knox

John Knox’s influence on the modern world has been enormous. He shaped the Scottish Reformed church, and so shaped the faith and culture of the corners of the world to which Scottish Reformed missionaries and pastors spread. Yet, it’s been nearly thirty years since we’ve seen a major biography.

As the TLS reviewer of Jane Dawson’s John Knox observes, this is not for lack of evidence. Yet the evidence presents subtle challenges: “so much of it is filtered through Knox himself, particularly through his marvellously quotable, massively tendentious History of the Reformation of Religion in the Realm of Scotland. The History has been described as Knox’s disguised autobiography. That may be an exaggeration, but the fact remains that most of what we know about Knox is what Knox intended us to know. ” Dawson has uncovered some fresh evidence, but mostly she has, in the view of the reviewer, made creative use of the evidence everyone else has used.

Several points stand out. One is Dawson’s emphasis on the effect of Knox’s early career as a Catholic priest: “Dawson argues convincingly that he was moulded by the Catholic Church far more profoundly than he cared to admit. Throughout his life, the version of the Bible that he knew best was the Latin Vulgate. Even his adversarial debating style, which we might think of as typical of his militant Protestantism, reflects his familiarity with the relentlessly logical, legalistic style of argument that would have been drilled into him as a student of canon law at university. In Dawson’s pithy summary, he was ‘a churchman through and through.’”

Dawson places “Knox back into a British rather than an exclusively Scottish context. Much of his early career was spent in England, and if Edward VI had lived longer it is quite possible that Knox would have accepted a London parish, perhaps even a bishopric, and be remembered today as one of the principal architects of the English Reformation.” 

The most significant revisionist move is Dawson’s assessment of Knox’s psychology: “She sees him as a deeply troubled man suffering from a species of selfdoubt which he called ‘dolour’ and we might call depression. Wisely, she does not attempt to psychoanalyse Knox, except to suggest that he may have experienced survivor’s guilt at having come through the Marian persecutions unscathed. But if we could put Knox on the psychiatrist’s couch, we might be tempted to diagnose a case of impostor syndrome, as he struggled with the tension between his public role as a preacher and his inward sense of sinfulness. In one of his most revealing letters to Mrs Bowes, he describes what he was secretly thinking as he stood in the pulpit looking out over his congregation, compelled by duty to ‘thounder out the threatnyngis of God” while all the time “knowing my self criminall and giltie in many things that in otheris I reprehend.’”

Knox’s preaching barely survives at all, and that is a loss: “Preaching and writing – coupled, of course, with immense personal charisma and moral authority – were the only tools he had to exercise political leverage. If only we had more of his sermons we might be better able to appreciate the extraordinary skill with which he wielded them, to say nothing of his virtuosity in creating a public image for himself. It takes an iconoclast to recognize the power of imagery.”