John Knox (c. 1514-1572)

A son of Lothian, priest and notary

Knox was born around 1514 at Giffordgate, a suburb of Haddington, a small town in Lothian east of Edinburgh^[2]. His mother, a Sinclair, died early; his father was probably a small farmer^[3]. He attended Haddington grammar school, where he acquired a solid Latin, later supplemented by a smattering of Greek and Hebrew^[4]. Contrary to what the universities of Glasgow and St Andrews later claimed, no university degree of Knox is attested; yet he knew law well enough to quote the Pandects of Justinian aptly and not infrequently in his later writings^[5].

He was ordained a Catholic priest and served as apostolic notary of the diocese of St Andrews: a notarial deed names him thus, in Latin, Johannis Knox, sacri altaris minister, sancte Andreæ diocesis auctoritate apostolica notarius — John Knox, minister of the holy altar, notary of the diocese of St Andrews by apostolic authority^[6]. Almost nothing is known of his priestly ministry; historians can only suppose that he already doubted certain points of Catholic doctrine by 1540, the year he first appears as a private tutor^[7]. From 1540 to 1547, he worked as a tutor for several Lothian families, though the names of most of his pupils are unknown^[8].

George Wishart and the murder of Cardinal Beaton

The turning point came with George Wishart, a Protestant preacher returned from the Continent, whose devoted disciple and bodyguard Knox became, sword in hand, in 1545^[9]. Wishart was arrested in January 1546 and burned at St Andrews on 1 March following, on the orders of Cardinal David Beaton, Archbishop of St Andrews^[10]. On 29 May 1546, a group of Protestant gentlemen murdered the cardinal in his own castle, in revenge. Knox openly approved of this murder, reporting it later in his History with, in the words of the Catholic Encyclopedia, a cheerful and mocking lightness strangely unbecoming in a Christian preacher^[11].

These things we write in merry style, not that we take pleasure in the misfortunes of others […] but so that posterity may see how the vengeance of God, though late, never sleeps, especially when prince and people do not consent together to punish iniquity. — John Knox, on the murder of Cardinal Beaton, History of the Reformation in Scotland, Book I^[12]

Having taken refuge with the murderers of Beaton, entrenched in St Andrews Castle, Knox joined them in April 1547 as tutor to the children of the garrison, and was drawn there into preaching publicly for the first time^[13]. The siege, conducted by French troops allied with the regent Mary of Guise, ended with the surrender of the castle on 31 July 1547^[14].

The life of the galley slave

Taken prisoner with the rest of the garrison, Knox was deported to the French galleys, where he rowed in chains for nineteen months, between July 1547 and February 1549, on the Loire near Nantes and then at Rouen^[15]. Conditions were harsh: the convicts received a coarse tunic, two shirts and two pairs of canvas trousers, a daily ration of soup, biscuit and water, supplemented with wine during the winter lay-ups ashore^[16]. Knox, then about thirty-three years old, contracted a serious illness there but survived, helped by two winters spent ashore rather than at sea^[17]. During his captivity, he composed theological treatises and preached to his fellow chained companions^[18].

"May Our Lady save herself"

His galley bore the name Nostre Dame. One day, an officer presented the Scottish prisoners with a painted statue of the Virgin so that they would give it the kiss of veneration. According to the account reported by Knox himself — in the third person, as was his habit when narrating his own deeds — one prisoner refused, seized the image and threw it into the water, declaring:

"May Our Lady save herself now; she is light enough, let her learn to swim!" — Episode reported in the biographical tradition of John Knox, on the galleys of the Loire, around 1547-1548^[19]

The episode, famous in Protestant historiography, illustrates both Knox's iconoclastic zeal and the difficulty of distinguishing, in his History, what comes from direct testimony from what belongs to edifying reconstruction — Knox often speaking of himself as an anonymous third party^[20]. No further attempt at religious coercion was, it is said, exercised on the Scottish prisoners afterwards^[21].

Freed in February 1549, Knox chose England rather than Scotland, safer for a former convict notoriously hostile to the regent^[22]. He received a preaching licence at Berwick-upon-Tweed, where he served for about two years, then at Newcastle, before being appointed a royal chaplain in 1551^[23]. He preached twice before the young King Edward VI and was offered, in October 1552, the bishopric of Rochester — which he refused, judging the Anglican Church still too close to "Roman doctrine," particularly on kneeling for communion, which he opposed head-on^[24]. This marks a clear point of divergence with Thomas Cranmer, who on the contrary tried to preserve in the new Anglican worship a form of liturgical continuity with the old rite.

The Frankfurt schism

On the accession of the Catholic Mary Tudor in July 1553, Knox continued for a time to preach cautiously, even publishing a prayer for the queen, before fleeing to Dieppe in early 1554^[25]. There he married Marjorie Bowes, fifth daughter of an English Calvinist widow, Mrs Bowes, on whom he would remain lastingly dependent spiritually and materially^[26]. From Dieppe, he travelled to Geneva to consult Calvin on the lawfulness of resisting by force Mary Tudor in England and Mary of Guise in Scotland^[27]. In September 1554, he accepted the chaplaincy of the English exiles at Frankfurt; but his puritanism revolted against the Edward VI prayer book and the Anglican ceremonial still in use, provoking a schism within the congregation. The city authorities ordered him to leave; he returned to Geneva in March 1555 to serve the English congregation there^[28].

"The most perfect school of Christ"

Knox spent most of the years 1554-1559 in Geneva, where he absorbed from Calvin's teaching the "rigid and autocratic ideas" of ecclesiastical discipline which would mark all his Scottish work^[29]. He made remarks about Calvin's city that have remained famous:

"[Geneva is] the most perfect school of Christ that ever existed since the days of the apostles." — John Knox, letter to a correspondent, quoted by Philip Schaff^[30]

There he fathered two sons, Nathaniel and Eleazar^[31]. After a brief return to Scotland in the summer of 1555 — during which he persuaded the Protestants gathered at the house of the laird Erskine of Dun that no "believer in the Gospel" could any longer attend Mass — he left again for Geneva at the end of 1556; summoned in his absence before the Scottish courts, he was condemned, outlawed and burned in effigy in the public square at Edinburgh^[32].

The Protestant theologian and historian Philip Schaff, in his History of the Christian Church, would later rank Knox among "the greatest names in the history of the Protestant Reformation," alongside Luther, Zwingli and Calvin, describing him as "the Scot of Scots, as Luther was the German of Germans"^[33]. This shows how much, for Protestant posterity, Knox alone embodies the Scottish nation converted to the Reformation — a judgment which the Catholic Church can follow only halfway: Knox did lastingly shape the religious identity of Scotland, but at the price of a rupture which no free popular consent ever validated before it was imposed by force and by law.

The First Blast against the monstrous government of women (1558)

In 1558, still in Geneva, Knox published his most sensational pamphlet, directed against the three Catholic queens of Western Europe — Mary Tudor of England, Mary of Guise, regent of Scotland, and Catherine de Medici, regent of France — as well as implicitly against Mary Stuart^[34]. The text states its central thesis from the opening:

"To promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion, or empire above any realm, nation, or city is repugnant to nature, contumely to God, a thing most contrary to his revealed will and approved ordinance, and finally it is the subversion of good order, of all equity and justice." — John Knox, The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstruous Regiment of Women, Geneva, 1558^[35]

Knox goes so far as to demand that the supporters of this "monster in nature" be removed from authority and that the "sentence of death" be carried out against them^[36]. The calendar turned cruelly against him: Mary Tudor died a few months after publication, and her half-sister Elizabeth I, Protestant but a woman, succeeded her. Although Knox shared her Reformed faith, Elizabeth never forgave him for this pamphlet; in 1559 she refused him the passport needed to cross England, holding Knox and the city of Geneva responsible for its publication^[37].

Three Catholic queens (and, in the background, the future Mary Stuart) were thus targeted by the pamphlet, before a twist of the calendar turned it into a weapon aimed back at his own camp:

The Appellation: the right to resist idolatrous princes

Still in 1558, Knox published the Appellation and a Letter to the community of Scotland, in which he extended his reasoning to every "idolatrous" sovereign, man or woman — that is, every Catholic sovereign^[38]. In it he attacked head-on the doctrine of Christian obedience defended by William Tyndale, calling it a sinful doctrine, and reversed the received teaching: in his view, obeying the unjust commands of an ungodly sovereign exposes one to a divine punishment far more terrible than any earthly penalty for treason^[39]. This is a clean break with the great so-called "magisterial" reformers — Luther, Calvin and Zwingli himself — who, according to contemporary Protestant historiography, had "never considered armed resistance justified" before Knox and depended on civil authorities already won over to their cause^[40]. Written while he was still staying in Geneva, the Appellation displeased Calvin himself, who feared the political consequences of such a doctrine^[41].

The Perth sermon and the riot of 11 May 1559

After the accession of Elizabeth I, Knox judged Scotland safe once more. Refusing the English safe-conduct offered to him, he sailed directly for Leith from Dieppe, where he landed on 2 May 1559^[42]. On 1 January of that same year, an anonymous tract, the "Beggars Summons," had been posted on the doors of the mendicant convents of Scotland, threatening the friars with violent expulsion in the name of the "true poor"^[43]. The queen regent, Mary of Guise, ill and weakened, no longer had the means to repress the fast-spreading Protestant movement^[44].

On 11 May 1559, Knox preached at St John's Church in Perth a sermon against idolatry. The inflamed crowd immediately stripped the church of its ornaments, images and altars, then poured into the street and sacked the town's rich religious houses — including the charterhouse^[45]. In a private letter, Knox attributed this violence to "brethren"; in his History, written for Calvinist readers who condemned such excesses, he blamed it on a "rabble of rascals" without ever mentioning his own part in triggering the riot^[46].

"We seek neither tumult nor change of authority, but only the reform of religion and the suppression of idolatry." — John Knox, letter to a Genevan correspondent, 1559^[47]

This denial contrasts starkly with the facts: at Saint Andrews, despite Archbishop Hamilton's threat to welcome him "with a dozen culverins," Knox preached again, and the same scene of destruction was repeated — the abbeys of Scone and Lindores were in turn pillaged^[48]. The Scottish monasteries were never formally dissolved by an act comparable to Henry VIII's English dissolution: they were left abandoned, their last monks dying without successors, while their stones were plundered to build private houses — as with Saint Andrews Cathedral^[49].

The Lords of the Congregation and the English alliance

The religious revolution rested on a coalition of nobles, the Lords of the Congregation, united from 1557 by a first "band" (covenant) against "Satan and all wicked power," led notably by the Earls of Argyll, Glencairn and Morton, and by Lord Erskine^[50]. This coalition marched on Stirling and then Edinburgh, forcing the regent to fall back on Dunbar^[51]. On 7 July 1559, Knox was chosen as minister of the Protestants of Edinburgh^[52]. To secure the decisive support of England, he himself went on a secret mission to the English secretary of state William Cecil, bringing back letters "more or less favorable" but still inconclusive^[53]. The English fleet eventually intervened in the Firth of Forth; besieged in Leith, the regent took refuge in Edinburgh Castle, where she died on 10 June 1560^[54]. Knox, who never ceased to slander her in her lifetime, saw his posthumous reputation challenged by contemporary opinion, which rejected his "outrageous accusations about the morality" of that "unfortunate princess"^[55].

The Reformation Parliament (August 1560)

A month after the regent's death, the Treaty of Edinburgh was signed between English and French representatives, arranging the withdrawal of the troops of both crowns. Parliament met on 1 August 1560; Knox preached there daily "special and vehement harangues on the necessity of rebuilding the temple"^[56]. Since the legitimate sovereign — the young Mary Stuart, then Queen of France through her marriage to Francis II — was not represented there, the Catholic Encyclopedia observes that it was "not truly a parliament"^[57]. The assembly nevertheless adopted, on 24 August 1560, three decisive acts: the annulment of all earlier laws contrary to the new Reformed Confession, the reduction of the sacraments to two (baptism and the Lord's Supper) and the repudiation of all papal jurisdiction in Scotland^[58]. The celebration of Mass was forbidden under pain of death on the third offence^[59]. In Knox's own words, the royal ratification of these acts — never obtained in Mary Stuart's lifetime — was but a "mere vain ceremony"^[60]. The Catholic Church of Scotland was thus, in the phrase of the Catholic Encyclopedia, "extinguished, as far as human power could extinguish it"^[61].

The Confession of the Six Johns

In barely four days, Parliament tasked a committee of six theologians — all named John, hence the nickname of the "Six Johns": John Knox, John Winram, John Spottiswoode, John Willock, John Douglas and John Row — with drafting a confession of faith^[62]. The Scots Confession, in twenty-five articles, was read out and approved article by article before Parliament on 17 August 1560^[63]. Of moderate Calvinist character, it stresses, more than later Reformed confessions would, the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist — a presence that is nevertheless strictly spiritual, worked by the Holy Spirit in the heart of the believer who receives worthily, not by a conversion of the bread and wine themselves^[64]. On this precise point, Knox departs from the pure memorialism of Zwingli to follow Calvin's middle way — a subject already treated in detail in the article devoted to the latter.

The First Book of Discipline

Parliament then entrusted Knox and three other ministers with drafting a complete plan of church organization, ready by 20 December 1560 for the first General Assembly^[65]. The First Book of Discipline, inspired by the Ordinances of Geneva and the formularies of the German Churches of London (1550), is "thoroughly Calvinist in spirit"^[66]. Its opening words lay down that all doctrine "contrary to the new gospel" must be suppressed as "damnable to man's salvation," and that all "old superstition" must be "cleared out of the land"^[67]. It establishes superintendents — not bishops, but itinerant preachers charged with overseeing whole regions and planting new congregations where trained ministers are still lacking^[68]. The text also provides for a vast national education plan, elementary, secondary and university, as well as a redistribution of ecclesiastical property for the benefit of the poor and the schools — a plan that remained largely a dead letter, most Protestant nobles having kept for themselves the spoils of the old Catholic foundations while professing the new faith^[69].

"Converted in matters of doctrine, [these lords] were the most avaricious, the most bloodthirsty and the most treacherous of men." — Judgment reported on the Scottish Protestant nobles by the Catholic Encyclopedia, concerning the failure of the First Book of Discipline's redistribution plan^[70]

Toward Presbyterian government

A frequent anachronism must be avoided: Knox himself never knew, in his lifetime, the full Presbyterianism as later practiced. The First Book of Discipline provides for ministers, elders and deacons, but also for superintendents with a transitional, quasi-episcopal function^[71]. Only after Knox's death, in 1572, did the theologian Andrew Melville draft a Second Book of Discipline (1578), which removed the last vestiges of episcopal government and established four ordinary offices — pastors, doctors, elders and deacons — in a fully presbyterian system, with no hierarchy of orders^[72]. Knox is thus the founder of the movement, not the finished architect of its final structure.

One Mass alone is more fearful than ten thousand armed men

In December 1560, the young King of France Francis II, whom Knox called the husband of our Jezebel, died; Marjorie Bowes, the wife of Knox, died at about the same time^[73]. The Catholic earls invited the young widow Mary Stuart to return to Scotland; she distrusted them and entrusted herself instead to her Protestant half-brother, Lord James Stewart, who promised her toleration for a private Mass in her chapel^[74]. Mary landed at Leith on 19 August 1561; the very next Sunday, Mass was celebrated in her chapel at Holyrood, provoking protests and riots^[75]. Knox then declared:

One Mass alone was more fearful to him than ten thousand armed men landed anywhere in the realm to plant idolatry there. — John Knox, on Mary Stuart's private Mass at Holyrood, August 1561^[76]

Four interviews that became famous

Between 1561 and 1563, Knox was received four times in private audience by the queen, and his History recounts these four famous dialogues at length: two weeks after her arrival in August 1561, then on 13 December 1562, in spring 1563 after Easter — concerning priests caught celebrating Mass in Ayrshire — and on 24 June 1563, on the queen's planned Spanish marriage, this last interview particularly stormy, with the queen bursting into tears^[77]. Knox publicly denounced that Roman antichrist, compared the Catholic Church to a prostitute, and went so far as to compare himself to Saint Paul and the queen to Nero, sometimes reducing the queen to tears by his vehemence^[78]. In his History, he reports his own arguments at length while passing over Mary's answers in silence, politely calling it reasoning^[79].

24 October 1563 was not a fifth private interview: the setting changed. After a crowd broke into the chapel at Holyrood during Mass, two burgesses of Edinburgh were prosecuted and Knox circulated a letter summoning the brethren to support them. Cited before Mary and the Privy Council for what looked like a seditious summons, he defended himself step by step as performing a lawful act as a minister of the Kirk, and the lords voted that there was no case to pursue^[80].

On the question of the Mass privilege granted to the queen, the Protestant lords themselves were divided: Lord James (now Earl of Moray), Morton and the Earl Marischal supported the queen, while Knox and the preachers fiercely opposed it, going so far as to propose referring the matter to Calvin himself — the lords finally deciding in favour of royal toleration^[81]. In spring 1562, a public controversy pitted Knox against the Benedictine abbot Quintin Kennedy on the doctrine of the Mass, while a polemical correspondence opposed him to the Catholic apologist Ninian Winzet^[82].

In 1564, the lords publicly censured Knox for his violence of language and behaviour toward the queen; he answered them by comparing her to Jezebel and maintaining that idolaters must die the death, the executioners being the people of God^[83]. Called upon to cite the opinion of Luther, Calvin and Melanchthon against him, the lords asked Knox for a written judgment from the continental Churches; he flatly refused to write to Master Calvin and the learned men of the other Churches^[84].

The murder of Rizzio and the fall of Mary

In 1566, in an atmosphere darkened by the exile of the Earl of Moray and the ascendancy gained at court by the Italian Catholic secretary David Rizzio, the latter was murdered before the very eyes of the queen, on 9 March 1566, by a group of Protestant conspirators close to her second husband Darnley^[85]. Whether Knox knew of this plot in advance is unknown; but his judgment on the deed, reported in the Memorials of his secretary — the act was most just and worthy of all praise — leaves no doubt as to his approval^[86]. He then withdrew to Ayrshire to write his History, thus escaping the murder of Darnley, Mary's abduction by Bothwell and their marriage of 15 May 1567^[87].

After the disaster of Carberry Hill and Mary's imprisonment at Lochleven, Knox reappeared in Edinburgh despite the warnings of the English ambassador Throgmorton, resuming from the pulpit his invectives against the fallen sovereign and the French alliance^[88]. On 29 July 1567, he preached for the coronation of the young King James VI at Stirling, protesting against the royal anointing as a relic of popery^[89].

The St Bartholomew's Day massacre

Having become, in his own words, a man already dead to all civil affairs, Knox saw his pre-eminence decline after Mary's fall, although he kept the ear of the new regent, the Earl of Moray^[90]. The assassination of the latter in January 1569 affected him deeply; he preached at his funeral a sermon which, it is said, made three thousand people weep over the loss of so good and godly a governor^[91]. A stroke of apoplexy, the following autumn, weakened him permanently. He withdrew in spring 1571 to St Andrews for fifteen months, continuing to write and preach with his former zeal despite his infirmities^[92].

In August 1572, barely back in Edinburgh, he learned the news of the St Bartholomew's Day massacre in Paris; he thundered from his pulpit — having himself almost carried into it — before the French ambassador himself, denouncing that cruel murderer and false traitor, the King of France^[93]. On 9 November 1572, he still took part in the installation of his successor, James Lawson, as minister of St Giles^[94].

Go where I cast my first anchor

Knox died on 24 November 1572 in his house in Edinburgh, surrounded by his second wife, Margaret Stewart, and his secretary Richard Bannatyne, who recorded his master's last days in his Memorials^[95]. On his deathbed, he is said to have told his wife: Go where I cast my first anchor — she then opened her Bible at chapter 17 of Saint John; at the end of the reading, Knox is said to have whispered: What comfort in this chapter!^[96]

About seven o'clock in the evening, we stopped reading, thinking he was asleep. He lay motionless until after ten o'clock [...] Half an hour after ten, we began our usual prayer. — Richard Bannatyne, account of John Knox's last hours, Memorials of Transactions in Scotland, 24 November 1572^[97]

He was buried two days later in the churchyard of St Giles. The Regent Morton, presiding over the funeral, spoke the epitaph that has remained famous:

Here lies a man who, in all his life, never feared the face of man. — Regent Morton, funeral oration for John Knox, 26 November 1572^[98]

What Trent answers on the Eucharist and the Mass

The Council of Trent answers directly, a few years after the Scottish events, the positions defended by Knox and by all the reformers on the Eucharist. Its thirteenth session (11 October 1551) anathematizes anyone who denies that the body and blood of Christ are contained "truly, really and substantially" in the sacrament, beyond a mere presence "as in a sign or a figure"^[99]. Its twenty-second session (17 September 1562) further teaches that the Mass is an authentic and proper sacrifice, offered to God in an unbloody manner, in memory of and in application of the bloody sacrifice of the Cross — the very doctrine that the legal abolition of the Mass by the Scottish Parliament of 1560, on pain of death for a third offence, aimed precisely at rooting out^[100]. On this Eucharistic matter, the full Catholic argument is developed in the article devoted to John Calvin, whose doctrine of spiritual presence Knox faithfully repeats.

The destruction of sacred heritage and the Second Council of Nicaea

The Church had already answered, eight centuries before Knox, the charge of idolatry brought against holy images. The Second Council of Nicaea (787), the seventh ecumenical council, teaches that the honour paid to the image "passes to the prototype" represented, and carefully distinguishes the veneration (proskynesis) due to images from the adoration (latria) due to God alone^[101]. The Council of Trent would take up this distinction in its decree of 3-4 December 1563, ordering bishops to instruct the faithful on "the intercession of the saints and their invocation, the honours due to relics and the lawful use of images", while correcting real abuses — superstition, indecency, pursuit of gain — without ever calling into question the principle of veneration itself^[102]. The sacking of the abbeys of Perth, Scone and Lindores in May 1559, far from "correcting abuses", purely and simply destroyed a liturgical and artistic heritage that neither Nicaea II nor Trent ever allowed to be treated as idolatry to be eradicated.

The "monstrous government of women" and Catholic Tradition

The central argument of the First Blast of the Trumpet — that it would be contrary to nature and to the will of God for a woman to govern a kingdom — corresponds to no Catholic doctrine. The Tradition of the Church has crowned, anointed and supported many reigning queens — Isabella of Castile, whose union with Ferdinand of Aragon received pontifical blessing, or indeed Mary Tudor herself, crowned by a Catholic bishop. The Salic law, which excludes women from the throne, is a French dynastic custom of feudal origin, never raised to a doctrine of faith by the magisterium. By naming Catholic queens in particular in the name of a supposed natural order, Knox confused a circumstantial theological and political grievance — hostility toward sovereigns who protected the old faith — with a supposedly universal principle, which he would not hesitate to soften when the Protestant Elizabeth I herself ascended the throne he had just declared contrary to nature.

A theology of resistance without precedent

The most consequential point in Knox's work is perhaps not doctrinal but political: his theology of the right — and the duty — to overthrow an "idolatrous" sovereign by force, set out in the Appellation of 1558, goes markedly further than the classical teaching of Luther and even of Calvin, who reserved at most a limited right of resistance for "inferior magistrates"^[103]. Catholic teaching, as summarized today by the Catechism of the Catholic Church, certainly admits that citizens must not follow civil prescriptions contrary to the moral order or to fundamental rights, and recognizes a right of resistance to oppression — but only under strictly defined conditions: certain, grave and prolonged violation of fundamental rights; all other recourse exhausted; no worse disorders caused; well-founded hope of success; no better solution reasonably foreseeable^[104]. Nothing in the government of Mary Stuart or Mary of Guise — who in practice tolerated a growing Protestant worship — met these conditions. The sacking of the abbeys, the armed insurrection of the Lords of the Congregation and the legal abolition of Catholic worship in 1560 belong, from the standpoint of this doctrine, not to legitimate resistance to oppression but to a religious revolution imposed by force on a majority which, still in 1560, remained very largely Catholic in fact if not in public practice.

What a Catholic can acknowledge

It would be unjust to reduce Knox to his excesses. His physical courage in adversity — nineteen months in the galleys, an exile of nearly ten years, repeated death threats — is disputed by no historian, even if a Protestant biographer qualifies the image of permanent heroic courage by noting that he "was at his bravest when he had armed men behind him"^[105]. His material integrity is likewise noted by the Catholic Encyclopedia itself: unlike the Protestant lords allied with him, Knox died poor, having never enriched himself from the spoils of the Church he had helped bring down — "a trait in which he contrasts strikingly with the Protestant lords and lairds who were his friends and supporters"^[106]. His talent as a writer and preacher, finally, is unanimously praised: his History of the Reformation in Scotland remains, in the very words of his Catholic biographers, "by far the most remarkable specimen of sixteenth-century vernacular Scots that has come down to us"^[107].

But the Catholic Encyclopedia also concludes, uncompromisingly, that "the reaction against the Catholicism of his youth seems to have carried him beyond Christianity itself", so permeated is his work with an "Old Testament spirit" and a "sombre austerity of the ancient prophets", without "the least recognition of the teaching of the Gospel" or of "the gentle, humble and merciful character of the Christian dispensation"^[108]. It is precisely this imbalance — Law without mercy, the Justice of God without His Goodness — that the Catholic Church reproaches in Knox's theology and, still more, in his political practice: less the error on this or that point of Reformed doctrine, already treated in the articles devoted to Luther and to Calvin, than the use of violence, insurrection and civil law to impose by force what persuasion and free preaching had not sufficed to obtain.

Knox can only be understood in connection with the constellation of the great reformers and the doctrinal matters that his Scottish revolution brought into play.

• On the Genevan reformer of whom Knox was a disciple on the Eucharist and predestination: John Calvin.
• On the Swiss reformer whose iconoclasm foreshadows that of Perth and St Andrews: Huldrych Zwingli.
• On the English Reformation, contemporary yet so different in its liturgical forms: Thomas Cranmer.
• On the principle that governs Knox's entire theology: Why do Catholics not follow sola Scriptura?
• On the Catholic doctrine that Knox and the Parliament of 1560 sought to abolish by law: Answers to Protestantism and What does the Church say about Protestants?
• On the council that answered point by point the theses of the Reformation on the Eucharist, images and relics: The Council of Trent (1545-1563).