John Knox has not entered the annals as a controversialist regarding the Blessed Virgin Mary, but the men and women of his time felt the consequences of his beliefs about Mary acutely, whether for good or for ill. To be certain, Knox spoke of Mary in few words – in the six volumes and 3,450 pages of his collected works, what he says about her would fill a few typed pagesFootnote 2 – but to great effect. Although no contemporary scholar has yet devoted a treatise to Knox's mariology,Footnote 3 his notion of who Mary is – and is not – has influenced the lives of many, including Scots from the sixteenth century until the present.
The cult of Mary is a powerful lens with which to look at Knox's contributions to the Scottish Reformation; mariology sits at the confluence of scripture, tradition and magisterial authority, and as such Mary serves as a synecdoche for the whole pre-Reformation church. Looking at Knox on Mary gives us a condensed view of his theological enterprise, and most especially his distinctive understanding of sola scriptura and the context from which it arose. To that end, we will first examine the practice of Marian devotion and the growing unrest regarding it in sixteenth-century Scotland, followed by Knox's own consideration of the subject.
Marian devotion in Scotland before the preaching of John Knox
Marian devotion was a constitutive element of religion, culture and daily life in Western Europe throughout the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Popular piety gave the Blessed Virgin pride of place in art, private devotion, liturgical prayer, festivals, shrines and pilgrimages, celebrating the Marian dimension of every aspect of life.Footnote 4 Scottish Christians likewise practised a robust Marian piety from their first embrace of Christianity until and including the Reformation period.
Hector Boece's 1526 Chronicles of Scotland, translated into Scots in 1531, include a number of Marian stories as part of Boece's effort to show James V ‘how inuiolaitlie the faith of Criste has bene obervatt be thi anticessouris, nevir aberrant fra sikkir religioun and piete’.Footnote 5 In one key story, William the Lion rejoices at his brother's miraculous return from the Crusades, giving ‘thankis to God and to the Blissit Virgyn Mary that deliuerit his bruther fra sa mony dangeris and troubill and put haill in his native landis’.Footnote 6 By placing these words on the lips of William the Lion, Boece both emphasises the continuous practice of Marian devotion in Scottish history and admonishes James V about the piety necessary for kingly excellence.
Contemporary historical records reveal that the majority of sixteenth-century Scots probably shared Boece's belief about Mary's importance in the Christian life. Many acts of public and private devotion to the Blessed Virgin are recorded even up to the 1550s: thus we see Colville of Cleish's wife offering gold to the Virgin at a Loretto shrine in Inveresk in 1559,Footnote 7 Canon George Ker commissioning a new painting of Mary in 1523 to replace Glasgow Cathedral's dilapidated image,Footnote 8 and the city of Dundee reroofing the Our Lady Kirk in 1552.Footnote 9 In the hundred years before the 1560 Reformation, death testaments almost invariably included an invocation to the Virgin: ‘I commit (or commend) my soul to God Almighty, the Blessed Virgin Mary and all the Saints’.Footnote 10 Popular devotional primers featuring the Hours of the Virgin in Latin went through over one hundred editions before 1558, with occasional English editions dating back to the fifteenth century.Footnote 11 Pilgrimages to various shrines, especially shrines to Mary, were also a prominent form of Scottish piety immediately before the Reformation.Footnote 12 Even the sarcastic court poet William Dunbar praised her in his ‘Ane Ballat of Our Lady’, calling her ‘Hodiern, modern, sempitern, / Angelically regyne!’Footnote 13 These and many similar public manifestations of Marian piety suggest that Mary had no shortage of devotees at all levels of Scottish society on the eve of the Reformation.
But not all were equally content with the Blessed Virgin's role in Scottish Christianity. The Lollard movement which grew out of John Wycliffe's ideas in the fourteenth century probably reached Scotland in the early fifteenth century, bringing a profoundly anti-Marian sentiment which focused on the destruction of Marian images.Footnote 14 Knox paid homage to Lollardy without connecting himself to it genealogically by opening his History of the Reformation in Scotland with the account of the 1494 heresy trial of thirty Lollards from Kyle. There Knox indicates that the Lollards were known not only for rejecting Marian imagery, but also all forms of Marian devotion; one of the thirty-four heretical beliefs with which they were charged was, ‘That we should not pray to the glorious Virgyn Marie, butt to God only’.Footnote 15 Contemporary scholars have contested the strength of Lollardy in Scotland, but repeated government legislation against the movement in the fifteenth century and the 1494 heresy trial suggest that Lollardy and its beliefs achieved some notoriety throughout Scotland, even if its influence was mostly limited to Kyle.Footnote 16
A more influential branch of anti-Marian thought entered the public consciousness through the life and death of Patrick Hamilton, a 24-year-old who holds the dual honour of being the most prominent exponent of Lutheran theology in Scotland in the 1520s and the first to be burnt for it. After studying at Louvain and Paris between 1517 and 1523, where he became familiar with Erasmian and Lutheran teachings, he returned to Scotland to study at St Andrews. He became a convinced Lutheran sometime during the next four years, promulgating his ideas in a popular treatise known as Patrick's Places.Footnote 17 He was tried for heresy and burnt in 1528.
Patrick's Places presents a basic outline of the Christian faith as viewed through Luther's sola fidei doctrine. Probably a response to the nominalist theories of Gabriel Biel current at Paris and St Andrews,Footnote 18 Hamilton's work interweaves scriptural citations with paraphrases of Luther's Of the Liberty of the Christian Man to insist that faith in God alone can justify, and that the believer can have absolute certainty of his salvation.Footnote 19
Mary and the saints play no role in Hamilton's vision of the Christian life; he does not even allude to them in his treatise. Hamilton's actions during his martyrdom gave flesh to his theological ideas, revealing that the absence of Mary from his work was no oversight, but an intentional rejection of her cult. The sixteenth-century Protestant historian Lindesay of Piscottie says that, during his interrogation, he ‘decried the idolatrous use of images in the church, and he denied that the Virgin Mary and the saints are intercessors in heaven’.Footnote 20 Knox himself records that Hamilton was harassed by certain friars during his martyrdom, saying, ‘“Convert, heretick: call upoun our Lady: say Salve Regina”, etc. To whome he answered, “Departe, and truble me not, ye messingeris of Sathan”.’ From his martyr's pyre, Hamilton ignited a distinctly anti-Marian form of the faith which was to burn slowly for many years before spreading through Scotland like wildfire.
History does not bear out Knox's claim that Hamilton's death caused Protestantism to ‘wonderouslie increase’ in Scotland, but it did give a distinctly public form to the Lutheran sympathies growing out of St Andrews.Footnote 21 When John Knox was studying at St Andrews in the late 1520s and early 1530s, the university was in turmoil over Luther's ideas, which had probably been introduced with the intent of refuting them. After Hamilton's death, it became clear that they had taken hold even among the teachers; in 1534 the arts faculty had to cancel its annual festival because the accompanying sung mass and procession had become a source of contention among the professors.Footnote 22 St Salvator's college, where Knox studied, remained orthodox, but St Leonard's college had become so sympathetic to Lutheran views that it became proverbial to say of a suspected Lutheran that ‘he had drunk of St. Leonard's well’.Footnote 23
Luther, like Erasmus, believed that he was criticising Marian piety in order to purify it and maintained a deep devotion to the Virgin to the end of his life. This attitude did not survive its Scottish translation. The brand of Lutheran theology coming out of St Andrews rejected the cult of Mary and the saints root and branch as idolatry, arguing that devotion to Mary and devotion to God were mutually exclusive.Footnote 24 Although the men who picked up these radical beliefs at the university tended not to persevere in them,Footnote 25 the school nevertheless contributed to the growing disaffection with Marian piety.
Popular literature took up a similarly anti-Marian theme. More strident works denounced the idolatry of images in general and Mary in particular, and more irenic ones reduced Mary from intercessor to passive model of faith. David Lindsay's polemical poetry effectively spread Erasmian and possibly Lutheran ideas about Mary;Footnote 26 in his c.1529 Complaint, he longs for Christians to stop their ‘superstitious pilgrimages, / Praying to graven images, / Express against the Lord's command’, then describes how God punished idolaters in the Old Testament.Footnote 27 Likewise, in his Dialogue between Experience and the Courtier, he wonders what the difference is between pagan idols and images ‘Of blessed Mary virgin pure, / A pleasant babe upon her knee’, and concludes, ‘No difference bee, I say to thee, / From the Gentiles idolatry’.Footnote 28 Writing in a gentler mode, John Gau calls Mary ‘ane cleyne virgine’ in his 1533 translation of a Lutheran text called The Richt Vay to the Kingdom of Heuine, but the text nonetheless emphasises when commenting on the Ave Maria that, ‘heir euerie man sal mark that neyne sal put thair hop in the virgine Maria or trow that schw cane saiff ony man for prayer or seruice dwne to hir’.Footnote 29 Even the calm Gude and Godlie Ballads contain surprising passages which denigrate Mary's intercessory role.Footnote 30 The widespread popularity of these works suggests at least a curiosity about Protestant beliefs, and probably a support for them as well.
Until the 1530s, Protestantism remained a largely urban and intellectual movement in Scotland. Local lairds began to carry those ideas into action, as evidenced by the 1533 trial of Walter Stewart for decapitating an image of the Blessed Virgin, but the people were slow to adapt to the new ways.Footnote 31 Some rural people found the Protestant teachings attractive, but remained isolated from each other and the movement as a whole; religious unrest was unfocused, leaderless and diffuse. A major change came with the itinerant preaching of radicalised Dominican, Franciscan and Augustinian friars, who were both learned enough to speak convincingly and mobile enough to connect the disparate groups.Footnote 32 Knox himself was heavily influenced by Thomas Guillaume, the former prior of the Inverness Dominicans, whose preaching he heard while serving as a tutor in Lothian.Footnote 33 Unfortunately we have no direct evidence about the content of Guillaume's preaching, but we know that the ex-Dominican prepared the way theologically for his more influential successor, George Wishart.
The itinerant friars helped connect the disparate communities of Protestant sympathisers, but it was George Wishart who helped give the Scottish Reformation a decisive direction. Wishart had been exposed to the Protestant movements in England, Germany and Switzerland before beginning to preach in Scotland, and his ideas showed a marked Zwinglian influence. In particular, he followed Zwingli's interpretation of sola scriptura, arguing that any form of worship not stated explicitly in the Bible is by that fact unbiblical and therefore unchristian.Footnote 34
From 1544 to 1545, Wishart wandered through Scotland, preaching and lecturing on the Epistle to the Romans. His preaching was charismatic and convincing, as he urged people not merely to reject their old beliefs but to think for themselves about what the Bible actually teaches regarding Christian worship.Footnote 35 In particular he taught that the cult of Mary and the saints was not supported by the Bible, and won both intellectuals like Knox and rural people to his views, as evidenced by the substantial rise in mob iconoclasm which followed in his wake.Footnote 36
Wishart's teachings were primarily about the Bible, but opposition to Marian devotion was the hinge on which they turned. In his theory, devotion to Mary is necessarily connected to a higher-order question: can one interpret the Bible according to the church's tradition, or must one adhere exclusively to the positive precepts expressed in the Bible? Immediately before he was burnt as a heretic in 1546, Wishart endured a final confrontation akin to Hamilton’s: he was approached by ‘two fals feindis, (I should say, Freiris,) saying, “Maister George, pray to our Lady, that sche may be a mediatrix for yow to hir Sone.” To whome he answered meiklie, “Cease: tempt me not, my brethren.” After this, he was led to the fyre, with a rope about his neck, and a chaine of irne about his myddill’.Footnote 37 Foxe's ‘fals feindis’ knew what they were about: one prayer to Mary coming from his lips would have done more to refute his interpretation of sola scriptura than a thousand learned tracts.
John Knox and the Virgin Mary
How, then, did John Knox assimilate these currents and counter-currents into his own thought? A story from Knox's History sheds light on the attitude towards Mary that he adopted early in life and was never to change. Knox and his companions spent the winter of 1547–8 as prisoners in French galleys at Nantes, where, in the shadow of Nantes’ Notre Dame Cathedral, the prisoners reviled their captors’ religion, refusing to go to mass unless they could stab the priest, and yanking caps and hoods over their heads during the Salve Regina in mocking inversion of the traditional practice of baring one's head in honour of the Virgin. But the crucial act of defiance came from an unnamed Scotsman who was probably Knox himself. One night the French tried to make the Scots kiss an image of the Virgin while the Salve was being sung, but to no avail. When they came to Knox they forced the image bodily into his hands and he, ‘seing the extremitie, tooke the idole, and advisitlie looking about, he caist it in the rivare, and said, “Lett our Lady now saif hir self: sche is lycht aneuch; lett hir learne to swyme.” After that was no Scotish man urged with that idolatrie’. Knox proudly concludes the story by noting that these actions show the same ‘obedience that God requyred of his people Israell, when that thei should be caryed to Babylon’.Footnote 38
Both the story and the biblical commentary on it reveal how deeply sola scriptura theology influenced Knox's thought, acquired through personal acquaintance with George Wishart and possibly through familiarity with the 1539 edition of Calvin's Institutes.Footnote 39 The first public manifestations of his Protestant beliefs bear witness to a rigorist interpretation of the principle, which he was to maintain throughout his career. In his 1547 defence before John Winram he argues using Deuteronomy 4:2 (‘Not that thing which appearis good in thy eis, shalt thow do to the Lord thy God, but what the Lord thy God hes commanded thee, that do thow: add nothing to it; diminish nothing from it’) and Deuteronomy 12:32 (‘All that the Lord thy God commandis thee to do, that do thow to the Lord thy God: add nothing to it; diminyshe nothing from it’) to prove that Christian worship is only pleasing to God if he has commanded it ‘in expressed wordis’.Footnote 40 Knox commits himself to a strict view of biblical literalism, eschewing all attempts to draw out implicit teachings or to read texts in an accommodated way. Unless a teaching or a mode of worship is explicitly prescribed in the Bible, he considers it unbiblical and therefore unworthy of Christian belief.
The sola scriptura doctrine is primarily a matter of authority, which Knox interprets in a characteristically stringent way. He follows Wishart closely here, rejecting both the church's magisterial teaching and the witness of tradition except insofar as they are explicitly authorised by the Bible.Footnote 41 Knox is willing to grant some privileged authority to the four earliest councils of the church because of their proximity to the apostles and the rigour by which they ‘did examine all matters by Goddes Word’, but even these – and a fortiori all later councils – are beholden to the ‘plaine veritie of Goddes Word’; likewise, no father of the church is to be credited with any authority if ‘he plainely prove not his affirmation by God's infallible Worde’.Footnote 42
We must see Knox's zeal for the Bible and his hatred for what he considers unbiblical aspects of Christianity in the light of the ecclesiological concern for authority. If the Bible itself is the only locus of authority, then any act or interpretation which obscures the plain text of the Bible will sever people from God and prevent them from seeing the truth of the Word. By his literal interpretation of Deuteronomy 12:32, then, the words of consecration alone are enough to make the mass an ‘abominatioun befoir God’,Footnote 43 because the liturgical text both adds one word and subtracts others from St Paul's account of the institution narrative in 1 Corinthians 11:24, turning ‘hoc est corpus meum, quod pro vobis tradetur’ into ‘hoc est enim corpus meum’; Knox also rejects out of hand the Catholic defence that the five-word consecration mirrors the Virgin Mary's five-word acceptance of the divine will at the Annunciation (‘Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum’) as derogatory to the divine freedom.Footnote 44
Knox's disdain for the statue of Mary at Nantes flows directly out of his literalist interpretation of sola scriptura. Although the New Testament can be read to hold Mary as a model for all Christians and perhaps even an intercessor according to the literal meaning of several passages (e.g. Luke 1:48–9, John 2:1–5, John 19:26–7), Knox does not see these as commanding veneration or cult. He will not countenance saying a single word about Mary which is not expressly stated in the Bible, which leads him to omit two references to the ‘glorious virgin Marie’ from his 1548 summary of Henry Balnaves’ Treatise on Justification by Faith.Footnote 45 He will call Mary ‘Virgine’ because of Luke 1:27, but only calls her ‘our Lady’ out of derision, as at Nantes. The 1560 Book of Discipline which Knox helped write even forbids the liturgical celebration of Christmas, Epiphany, the Circumcision of the Lord and the Purification ‘becaus in Goddis Scripturis thai nather have commandiment nor assurance’.Footnote 46
Using the texts from Deuteronomy as a hermeneutic to understand the first and second commandments, Knox views his fight against the Virgin Mary, the cult of the saints, the mass and liturgical ceremony in terms of the ancient Israelites’ perpetual struggle against idolatry. Innovation in worship is therefore an abomination, even when it is intended to honour God; God ‘punisseth the inventouris and doeris thairof, as ye haif hard in Nadab and Abihu, by Gedion and dyvers uthiris Israellites setting up sumthing to honour God, whairof thai had no express commandement’.Footnote 47 The example of Nadab and Abihu is central to Knox's critique of Catholic religious praxis precisely because the scriptural text is so elliptical about the nature of their offence (Lev 10:1–3); what matters to him is that they transgressed the Lord's explicit command, for which they must die. Likewise, contemporary religious practices which are not directly enjoined in the Bible must cease, and those who do them must be expunged at any cost.
Of course the Catholic tradition against which Knox was reacting also valued biblical precedent, especially for the mass and the sacraments, but Knox believed that the traditional interpretation of the scriptures had been perverted by excessive accommodations and accretions. For instance, although the Catholic tradition reads 1 Corinthians 11:23–6 and its synoptic parallels as biblical warrant for the mass, Knox derides the notion with a straightforward syllogism: ‘All wirschipping, honoring, or service inventit by the braine of man in the religioun of God, without his own express commandment, is Idolatrie: The Masse is inventit be the braine of man, without any commandement of God: Thairfoir it is Idolatrie.’Footnote 48 He even rejects the Catholic practice of baptism as idolatrous because of the non-scriptural ritual accoutrements which accompany it, even if he denies that Catholics need to be rebaptised. For Catholics, the ornate rituals and rubrics associated with the mass and the sacraments were vital to the translation of Christ's words and deeds from the biblical past to the present; for Knox, they were idolatrous deformations which blotted out true understanding of the Word from the hearts of men.
But if ‘idolatry’ is a portmanteau word for any act of worship that Knox cannot find in scripture,Footnote 49 the cult of the Virgin is a useful exemplar of what he calls idolatry. The Virgin Mary was at the heart of medieval piety and was thus implicated in the invective that the reformers delivered against the medieval church, as educated Scots understood.Footnote 50 The very fact that Knox spends so little time attacking the cult of the Virgin is itself a critique of the central place she once occupied in the Christian life; by and large he refuses to talk about her even as he undermines the theological principles which sustain her cult.
We have seen how Knox's theory of sola scriptura allows him to appropriate his predecessors’ concerns about Marian devotion and imagery, but one final plank of his critique of the Marian cult remains: her role as intercessor or mediatrix. Taking 1 Timothy 2:5 as his starting point, Knox argues that prayer to Mary necessarily denigrates Christ's unique mediation, blasphemously putting a creature in the role of the Creator. Knox acknowledges that some people confess Christ as the one mediator but still desire the Virgin Mary to intercede for them to her son. About them he says merely: ‘Allace! whosoever is so myndit, scheweth planelie thame selves to knaw nothing of Jesus Chryst rychtlie’.Footnote 51 Knox sees a strict opposition between God's action and man's action; if the saints in heaven intercede for men on earth, then Christ's mediation is not complete, and if Christ's mediation is not complete, his offering on the cross was not perfect and he must not be God.Footnote 52
Knox's explicit reasons for rejecting Mary's role as intercessor stem from an anthropology of man's total depravity, in which the infinitely just God ‘must abhorre the societie and sacrifice of synneris’, even those whom the Catholic Church would call saints.Footnote 53 Yet even with this anthropological basis, his opposition to Mary's intercession is still at root an argument from sola scriptura. During his time at St Andrews, Knox would have learned the traditional answers to his objection about Christ's sole mediation, especially the scholastics’ notion of instrumental causality stemming from Aristotle and the Augustinians’ notion of participation stemming from the Neoplatonists. But these metaphysical solutions to the question are not explicitly stated in scripture, and as such fail to meet his single criterion for theological legitimacy. Because the problem of Mary's mediation and its compatibility with Christ's can only be resolved by appeal to premises foreign to the Bible, such reasoning is merely sophistical idolatry; consequently the only solution that is true to the Bible must be abandoning the notion of Mary's mediation entirely.
On 15 August 1560, the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Knox and the other leaders of the Protestant movement presented the Confession of Faith to the Scottish Parliament which, when ratified on 24 August, officially made Scotland a Protestant country. Knox's theological victory in Scotland is strongly attested to by Mary's absence from the document and its 1564 successor, except where the expanded creed calls her ‘Virgine’.Footnote 54 Before Knox, the image of Marian piety in Scotland was largely intact, with a few cracks formed by certain urban intellectuals and a minority of rural iconoclasts. Knox drove the chisel of his rigorous interpretation of sola scriptura into those cracks, and with the hammer of governmental legislation he was able to shatter it, effectively eliminating public acts of Marian devotion at a blow.
Conclusion
Mary occupies a quiet but important place in Knox's polemics. He never derides her person by crude names, even when throwing her image in a river; he spares her the invective that he pours upon the mass; and he rarely even sees fit to mention her. Yet in many ways the cult of Mary typifies the aspects of the church which he sought to reform, representing the supposedly unbiblical aspects of Christianity he hoped to purify with his stringent sola scriptura doctrine. More than five hundred and fifty years after the ratification of the Confession of Faith in Scotland and the Council of Trent in Italy, perhaps the time has come for Reformed Christians and Catholics to reconsider both Knox's concerns about the cult of Mary and his reserved silence about the dignity of her person in the light of the biblical witness to Mary's role in salvation history. If there is a path between Knox's two categories of ‘biblical’ and ‘unbiblical’, there may be room for Knox's followers to call Mary ‘Our Lady’ once again.
