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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ (00:04.418)
Hello and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Alison Knight, Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Studies in the Department of English at the Royal Holloway University of London. And I'm excited to talk about her book, The Dark Bible, Cultures of Interpretation in Early Modern England. Dr. Knight, wonderful to have you on today.
Alison Knight (00:26.802)
Thank you for having me. Glad to be here.
PJ (00:30.01)
So talk to us a little bit why this book? Why do we need to understand these cultures of interpretation in early modern England?
Alison Knight (00:38.666)
So why this book? It's a tricky one. It emerged out of my PhD work on the book Job in early modern England. You know, I and the way it was used in literature in early modern England. And the reason I focused on that book when I was doing my PhD was because it's such a hard book. It's not just in terms of content, you know, that impossible question of, you know, why do bad things happen to good people?
But also the way it's written, the Hebrew, the text itself, and the different versions of it exist are kind of quite difficult to interpret. St. Jerome said that the book was slippery like an eel. You know, when you try to grab hold of it, it just slides through your fingers basically. And I love that. I really like those kinds of difficult, hard to grapple with.
hard to understand questions. And the book of Job, the book that I've written, The Dark Bible, it's not just about Job, but that's kind of what got me started on it. That book is, the book of Job is a book about questions. You know, the friends, Job is asking, he responds in questions. The friends respond to that with more questions. When God finally emerges from the whirlwind, he doesn't provide answers, he just provides more questions. One of which,
is very apt for this podcast, which is, you know, can you draw Leviathan out with a hook, which is a way of kind of saying like, these answers, you can't handle these answers. This is too big for you. You can't, you can't deal with it. So, yeah, so I'm really interested, that got me started on thinking about questioning questions and questioning approaches and difficulty and how, especially in the Protestant Reformation, a time
was very much about, in some ways, about certainty, and was very much arguing, one of Luther's core precepts was that the Bible was clear, that it was, that it shines with clarity, that anyone can understand it, that you don't require the interpretive apparatus of the church in order to explain the Bible to you, you can just have a direct relationship with it.
Alison Knight (03:01.662)
So, you know, this is kind of a founding precept of the Protestant Reformation. So how does it deal with the fact that the Bible can be very challenging actually, you know? Not all of it, but a lot of it. So yeah, that was really what got me started on the book was how did people in this time when the Bible was meant to be illuminatingly clear, how did they deal with the fact that sometimes it maybe wasn't?
PJ (03:28.766)
Yes, yeah, and one, I think I wrote this in the email, God bless you for saying Job. Every time, like, that's where I got Chasing the Viathan from, was from Job, but I've gotten Hobbes, Melville, Milton, I think just because of the painting of Satan being cast down from heaven, all those things. And so, and that's, it's precisely what you said about it's these questions that are too big, and this idea that we can just keep, like, that verb.
podcast about pursuing truth. And I'm actually, it's funny that you mentioned that, I'm actually reading through, it's going to take a while, but the Moralia in Job by Gregory the Great. Yes, so that's pretty amazing, amazing collection of homilies, but very, yeah, very long and very much in the spirit of these kind of dark interpretations. So,
Alison Knight (04:08.11)
Oh gosh, wow.
Alison Knight (04:24.19)
Hmm. Yeah.
PJ (04:29.306)
So, and I think you mentioned, is it Tyndale? Shoot, I should know that off the, but talks about the Bible being guarded off and these fences. And so can you talk a little bit about these kind of like counter metaphors of darkness that, or brambles or hedges that people would use to describe these difficult passages.
Alison Knight (04:33.17)
Mm-hmm.
Alison Knight (04:55.85)
Yeah, I mean, and Tindal is such a surprising one that because he is one that tends to use more frequently the much more common metaphor for the Bible, which is light, lanterns, you know, candle, that it's something that's illuminating. But then you'll still find people like Tindal who, you know, Tindal describes it as, yeah, a hedge of briars and darkness and a maze and kind of a labyrinth that you can get lost in if you don't take the right approach to it.
So many amazing metaphors for how we negotiate the Bible. Theodore Beza also describes that it's kind of like that the Bible has these lurking rocks under the surface that are kind of waiting to shipwreck you. Yeah, so, and these are again reformers who are very much more commonly describing the Bible as this source of light, of illumination. And so that's why I was kind of interested in the dark.
side of it, dark in the sense of obscure, you know, hard to understand. I think there's a lot of people worry or perhaps interested and think that I'm writing about kind of a cult approach and that's not what the book is about. Although I have also written an article on how people approach scripture that seems rude or how you deal with scripture that's just a little like, ooh.
PJ (06:06.85)
Yeah.
Alison Knight (06:20.962)
Because, I mean, it deals with every aspect of humanity, right? And there's some parts in it that, you know, just like humans are not always savoury, there are definitely parts of it that make a person blush. But yeah, that's not what this book is about. It's about darkness as obscurity and that difficulty and kind of trying to wrap your head around, like, what does this mean?
PJ (06:50.562)
And what, you know, as they're walking through this, these people who are championing this light, and then they start talking about the darkness, what value did they find in these passages that were dark, and what value did they find in this darkness as obscurity?
Alison Knight (07:10.33)
That's a really interesting question. I think a lot of the time they're really invested in kind of pretending that they're not there, that those dark places aren't there, because they, you know, very much reformers had this project of trying to make the case that everyone can read the Bible. And it was often the argument of people who didn't want that to say, you know, it's too difficult for people, they're going to misunderstand it. So
It was often a very divided approach of not necessarily wanting to admit that there were difficult patches, that there were any problems that people might encounter. But then also when people did encounter those patches to say, like, oh, no, it's normal, don't worry, you can get through them. And yeah, there might be some benefits to it. And there were all sorts of benefits that various Protestants would talk about, like...
the fact that it's a good thing to have to turn to somebody else for expertise. You know, so instead of it being framed as like, oh, you know, you don't know what's going on in the Bible. You have to turn to a priest in the church to tell you. It's kind of like, oh, isn't it great how the difficulties of the Bible make you turn, make you turn to your to your priest and make you turn to this wider community to provide some explanation that also dark patches.
make you kind of build bonds between people, that, you know, that's when you're going to talk about problems, you're going to reach out to other people and charity with one another to kind of help each other through the difficult interpretations. But then, yeah, what I'm also looking at in the book is the ways that these can be as well moments that spur creativity that spur different kinds of relationships with God that
can, and with the Bible itself, that it can provoke a deeper kind of relationship. There's one example that I look at on the chapter on defects in scripture. So these are passages where there might be words missing, there might be kind of necessary grammatical elements of verses that aren't there and need to be filled in a little bit. And a preacher called Daniel Featley
Alison Knight (09:39.166)
preaches a sermon on one such passage, Hosea 13.9, I believe. No, I'm not great with numbers. The numbers always fly right out of my head. But so he, and what he says about this is that he compares these gaps in the biblical account that people are struggling with to like the rests between musical notes in a song or he compares it to a
a classical painting called The Sacrifice of Iphigenaea. That's where the artist, in order to kind of represent grief beyond expression, paints her father with a veil over his face. And that these veiled moments are actually even more expressive of God's truth, because there are these moments that you have to fill in.
And the only way you can do that is through a deeper relationship with the text and a deeper taking to heart of what's going on in the text. And then you can kind of fill those gaps as a relationship, as opposed to just kind of like finding your way in the darkness. So, yeah, there's definitely advantages to uncertainty, both kind of in terms of how they were viewing and understanding the church and also...
in terms of kind of creativity and human relationship and all those fun things.
PJ (11:13.154)
Do you see any relationship between kind of the, you know, some of the timing can be a little bit off, but like the scientific revolution and that certainty and some of the stuff that's going on with like the Protestant theology?
Alison Knight (11:33.606)
Yeah, certainty and kind of approaches to rationality tend to come about later in the 17th century. So my book is, I'm trying to, because what we tend to say that the 17th century, later in the 17th century, the second half of the 17th century, moving into the 18th century is when people discovered that the Bible.
was, had perhaps some critical problems with it that meant that you couldn't just treat it necessarily as a transparent window into truth. That Bible, the Bible wasn't necessarily your access point for understanding philosophical truth in particular. That's how that gets framed as we go later into the 17th century. And
Definitely what I'm trying to do is establish more of a prehistory to that, you know, the 17th, later 17th century wasn't when people discovered that the Bible could be, could have some approaches that needed some critical eye, that needed a critical eye. But, but I do think that there was certainly something different in how the 16th century and early 17th century was tending to approach some of these issues.
I suppose what I'm saying is that people knew that these issues were there, but they just had different sets of answers that were kind of acceptable. So something like contradiction, which is what I look at in the first chapter.
in the, you know, prior to the later 17th century, people were very much tying themselves in really fascinating interpretive knots to reconcile parts of the Bible that seemed, that they always stressed it in terms of it, it only seems, but that seemed to contradict one another. Because it was very much an interpretive precept about how you approach the Bible, and this wasn't just in the Protestant Reformation, it was very much like,
Alison Knight (13:47.098)
was set down by, well, Augustine was one of the most kind of noted proponents of this view, but that something called the analogy of faith, you know, this is expressed even in, you know, the New Testament, that the faith is always analogous with itself, that it's always, you know, all parts of the Bible have to fit within one another and have to belong, have to be reconcilable with one another because, you know, God is singular.
God is unified with himself. He's not going to be expressing different things in different parts of the Bible. If it has the singular author, it has to be unified overall. So what do you do with contradictions? And working from that precepts of contradictions cannot exist. That's how we have to approach the text. That if they seem to be, we're going to have to find a way to work it out. To...
find a way of reconciling and finding a singular story here. As you get into later into the 17th century, second half of the 17th century, you start to have people saying like, well, it must just be contradictory. Maybe it's contradictory because it's contradictory. So there start to be a different set of answers that become more acceptable, even though it's grappling with the same issues. And those answers start to then
as you go into the 18th century, 19th century, you start to spur different approaches, like, you know, even leads to approaches like the documentary hypothesis that, you know, maybe some of these are coming from the fact that different authors and different time periods were involved in kind of the building up of a text of different books of the Bible over long processes. And maybe that's an explanation for some of these things. So yeah, just...
often, you know, same old problems, new answers. In terms of the scientific revolution, I mean, it was always very much, again, what comes first in the Protestant Reformation, the early modern period. It wasn't as if people were saying that science didn't exist, but was it a... Did it take priority over God's truth?
Alison Knight (16:09.154)
No, was basically the answer that any truth that you were finding through observation of the natural world had to also be reconcilable with truth that was understood to be revealed through the Bible. And as we move, you know, later into the 17th century, into the 18th century, that starts to change. Again, what is truth? How do we know what is true? Is it through
observation of the natural world and coming up with laws on the basis of that? Or is it, you know, God's law and the natural world's going to have to fit in with that?
PJ (16:47.214)
Yeah, and so I like one of the big names here and talking about late 70s. So this is like we're talking Spinoza, right? Like the theological political treatise, right? When you're talking about this, like, you know, maybe it is just contradictory. Like, and, you know, even as you're talking about this, you have people who are acknowledging problems, people are claiming clarity. And it's interesting to see kind of the story of this, right?
Alison Knight (16:53.197)
Yeah.
PJ (17:14.642)
And then they're like we can figure it out a different way by talking about it And then everyone will understand what how all this works and then after about several like about a hundred years of like religious wars, they're like Maybe not, you know Yeah, yeah, and so yeah that
Alison Knight (17:30.546)
Maybe not. Yeah. Well, I mean, it is very much the case that throughout the 16th century, that does seem to be the assumption that if only my opponents would see things from my point of view, if only I could spell these things out, then they would see the truth here. But they've been blinkered and blinded by the fact that
it was again, it's what comes first. It was very much framed as there's no way you could possibly recognize the truth if you didn't have right faith to start with. So if you're coming from the position of having the wrong of not believing in the right thing, then of course you're not going to understand the truth. So, you know, but when both sides have that assumption, then it's it.
PJ (18:22.524)
Yeah, right.
It's not gonna, yeah. Yeah, and so you automatically assume that your opponent is operating in bad faith, you know, like this is where you get like the rampant use of Romans 1 like suppressing the truth and unrighteousness, you know what I mean? It's like, well, that's just because you're a bad person. That's why you disagree with me, you know? It's like, I like, yeah. You see that with Martin Luther, right? Like, it's like, it starts off like, he's like, oh
Alison Knight (18:27.324)
Yeah.
Alison Knight (18:47.05)
Bye!
PJ (18:53.13)
We could reach an agreement and then like by the end you're like, uh, he, he definitely, anyways, sorry. I wanted to, I wanted to make sure I'd stay on, on your book. I'm sorry. I'm geeking out a little bit, but the, um, you mentioned contradiction and I did want to ask, uh, because he is such a notorious figure, but also he's like in many ways, a very misunderstood figure, uh, Henry the eighth, uh,
Alison Knight (19:00.911)
Yeah.
PJ (19:21.666)
his great matter, Leviticus versus Deuteronomy. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Alison Knight (19:26.446)
Yeah, and I think, I mean, so that was, you know, this is early in the kind of Reformation and people in that at that time weren't quite sure how all how all of this was going to go. And it's very much, what I think is interesting about that, and a lot of people have written on the divorce and, you know, what caused it. And there's so many different points of argumentation in there.
There's so many factors that lead into it, but what I think is interesting is that he did consistently frame his scruples about his marriage to Catherine of Argonne in scriptural terms, that it was, it was always a, you know, framed as a question of hermeneutics. You know, yes, absolutely. That, that question of Leviticus versus Deuteronomy. Leviticus says that you must not marry, do not marry your brother's wife. Deuteronomy says you must marry.
your deceased brother's widow and provide children in his name. And Catherine of Aragon, of course, was married to Henry's brother for a few months. Henry's older brother, Henry was the second son, he wasn't supposed to be king. Henry's older brother passed away after only a few, not even a few months, just a few weeks really of marriage to Catherine of Aragon.
You know, Henry VII didn't want to lose Catherine of Aragon's sizeable dowry, which had only been half paid at that point. And so she stays around in the country for quite a while. And then when Henry VIII becomes king, he marries her and gets a papal dispensation for this because of that previous marriage to his brother. Then after 20, you know, fast forward 20 years.
Is it because Catherine hasn't provided a male heir? Is it because Henry's had, you know, that Anne Boleyn has caught his eye? But what he frames it as is that he's now started to have this scruple of conscience because of Leviticus, that Leviticus has said, you know, you cannot marry your brother's wife, or specifically, you know, do not reveal the nakedness of your brother's wife, and that if you do this, you will not have children.
Alison Knight (21:51.046)
And so he's seeing this as an explanation for why. Perhaps he's not had an heir. And basically this is an example of where an apparent seeming contradiction in scripture and both sides of the debate were very much, that it was just an apparent contradiction.
it became an apparent contradiction of scripture becomes a world, you know, across the world stage or at least across the European stage. Um, and is argued about across Christendom. Um, and the arguments that pile up on this, I mean reams and reams of, of words of paper, of, of opinions going about the Pope even, you know, at one point,
says no one is allowed to write any more opinions about this on pain of excommunication because just stop. But yeah, and what yeah so the fact that this was this was very much an exegetical question you know how do we approach scripture and how do we weigh because of course you know Henry frames it as Leviticus says I can't do this but Catherine's side brings in Deuteronomy and says no not only can you have to.
PJ (22:50.782)
Ha!
Alison Knight (23:14.85)
So how those that seeming contradiction is reconciled is crucial to how the divorce goes on. And you know one of the things I say in the book is that it's it tells us so much about how about approaches to scriptural hermeneutics in that time. So you know for example
approaches to the Hebrew texts was really emerging. And you're really starting to see crucial arguments to and for and recourses to the original text of Hebrew. And that quite a few of what have been defined as kind of crucial early defenses of returning to the Hebrew sources and using those as a reliable way to elucidate what the text really means.
are being written in the context of the divorce and trying to explain how we should really try to fit these two verses together. It's also very much that...
Alison Knight (24:28.934)
you know, that kings and high politics weigh on how we approach understanding the text of the Bible. Um, but another thing that I think is really important there is that, you know, the way that people have tended to view the divorce and certainly people have talked about scripture in it before, but because they've been talking more about what scripture approaches to scripture can tell us about the divorce. And I'm looking at more what the divorce can tell us about approaches to scripture. Um, it's,
the people have tended to focus on kind of like who won that the scriptural argument there. And what I say is nobody won the scriptural argument with Henry VIII's great matter. He just made a new church. Nobody, you know, donned tools and was like, oh yes, you are right. This is, you've got the answer, you hit it. It just, you know, each side amasses this opinion
you know, and it really is fantastic how much they decide what their opinion is and they amass opinions to support it and kind of, you know, you're wrong if you just think the other way. Like, so Henry get, and Catherine's side did this as well, the emperor, her nephew Charles the fifth also consult both of them, Henry and Catherine's side consult all the universities of Europe basically to amass all this.
these opinions about, you know, which one, Leviticus or Deuteronomy, which one? And that wasn't an unusual thing, you know, to get a university opinion weighing in on a particular issue, but what Henry especially really wanted to establish was consensus, because this is the point that these verses can't contradict.
it doesn't help to just say, oh, well, these people say this and these people say that, so I want consensus. So he very much frames it as it's framed as he doesn't want all, he doesn't want the best theologians, he wants all of them. And he published, he published under, on behalf of Henry's published a report of these university's decisions about, okay, which first takes priority here, which, you know,
Alison Knight (26:52.658)
what applies in this case rather than takes priority, because of course all scripture is equally important, but which takes priority in this, which applies in this instance. And he publishes it and it's published and it's a look at this universal consent to all the universities of Christendom that all agree that basically Leviticus applies in this case and Henry shouldn't have married his wife.
PJ (26:57.962)
Right, right.
Alison Knight (27:19.55)
But he really what happened was he just didn't publish the ones that were received in the negative. So you just leave those ones out. So yeah. Yeah, it definitely shows how even at the start of this period, you know, you mentioned before that you've got a hundred years where at the end of it people, you know, you might say it's kind of just gotten to the point of exhaustion and maybe people realize you can't just keep shouting.
PJ (27:28.502)
Convenient, yeah.
Alison Knight (27:48.706)
I think this against I think that. But the period starts that way. It keeps on going that way. And there's a really fantastic work, a book by Nicholas Hardy called Criticism and Confession, which is looking at that later kind of, not just the second half of the 17th century, but more into the 17th century, this period where you tend to be thinking of biblical criticism.
PJ (27:55.94)
Yes.
Alison Knight (28:16.91)
and being built on kind of rational argumentation and all that and showing how very much, it's still very much a confessional issue. Fantastic book, but it keeps on being that confession that someone's religious beliefs, so the beliefs they start out with basically, with Henry, with his case, the beliefs that they started out with, about who was right and who was wrong, shape exactly all the arguments that you're making that you can't just kind of...
be just rational about these things, so much as people might frame it in those terms, that confession very much is a huge driver to these arguments. And so that's, I guess, returning to that kind of scientific question again, or perhaps in a different way, talking about issues of secularization, we might call it, you know, the merge of rationalization is...
secularization. These are different words for saying that your religious beliefs should come from the evidence that's before you, shouldn't shape the evidence. And people in the Protestant Reformation before would have absolutely agreed with that, 100%, by the way. They would have completely agreed that, no, your beliefs come from the text. But equally, that you can't...
you can't get out from underneath it because it shapes everything about how you understand the text to work, all of your priorities about how these things, how the Bible makes meaning are shaped by the beliefs that you bring to it, even as they are shaping the beliefs that you have. So as you get on into rationalization, rationality, secularization, you know, secularization, you can talk about that in terms of you can still be...
in the 19th century in particular, you can still be looking at religious topics, and you can still have a religious point of view, but the way that you approach argumentation is meant to be able to convince someone who has completely different religious views, that you can kind of take the religious views out of the equation and still be convincing, even if they're still there. Which, yeah. So kind of getting...
Alison Knight (30:41.49)
tied up in knots as I often do when you're talking, especially the divorce, you know, they were tied up in knots. Everyone was tied up in knots with it because that was the point was so confusing. How do we wade through this?
PJ (30:46.496)
Oh, yeah.
PJ (30:54.29)
Yes, and it definitely it feels confusing. Though if one were a little perhaps uncharitable in their own interpretation of the situation, it's like, oh, wow, we follow Deuteronomy when only half the dowry was paid. But once the dowry was paid in full, we want to follow Leviticus and Spain, who has paid the dowry and sees their daughter or cousin as an asset.
is, um, oh, no, it's definitely Deuteronomy. You know, it's like, all of a sudden that seems a little clearer. Yeah.
Alison Knight (31:30.419)
I mean, to be fair, they didn't frame that Catherine staying in England as a question of Deuteronomy because most, that was the thing, like, it was more that people were like, you can't bring in Deuteronomy now, like, no one practices Deuter, it's called
Alison Knight (31:51.954)
widow of your deceased brother. No one practices that, so no one was making that argument. So this was something that Henry's side was very much saying, like, you can't bring that in all of a sudden now. Nobody uses that. And that was very much framed as a question of which parts of the Old Testament still apply to Christian believers at that time? What do we actually have to take from this as...
something that we still have to follow and what can we say? Well, that was just for, it was a different time, that's just for them. So that was a real question as well, just to add to the complexity. But yeah, no, in Catherine's case, I think that was very much a case that was, you know, her father didn't want to return that, didn't want to pay the rest of the dowry. And
PJ (32:26.115)
Yeah.
Alison Knight (32:43.694)
Henry didn't want to give up the half that had been given and wanted to get the other. So she was very much in just the, this is off topic, but she was very much just in a limbo for a good while, but she actually became one of the first female ambassadors as a result of that, which kind of happened just because we're like, well, we need to have a name, a role for her. She can't just be the Dowager Princess of Wales. So, but so she, yeah, I mean an amazing, wonderful woman who did.
some fantastic things and argued very staunchly for her rights in this period, which was part of this really fascinating story of interpretation. And just as again, as a little side note, I always refer to it as the divorce, not the annulment. A lot of people make the argument now that you should call it the annulment because that's what Henry wanted. He didn't want a divorce. He wanted...
just that this marriage was null and void, it had never been allowed, so it had never taken place. And actually, Catherine's side was always very adamant of like, let's call a spade a spade, you want a divorce. And they always use the frame, the words of divorce. And so, I mean, you know, I guess it comes down to whose side are you on? But yeah.
PJ (33:56.086)
Yeah, right, right. Yeah, I mean, that's pretty amazing that 500 years later, like, whose side you're on still matters. Yeah.
Alison Knight (34:06.194)
Yeah, and it does. And sometimes, you know, that's always so fascinating. You can see these little lights of people just kind of distilling it down to things like that. So after the consultation with all the universities, Henry also then, you know, most likely on Cranmer's suggestion, extended that question to the Protestant.
to the reformers, to the magisterial reformers at the time, so like Luther and echolumpanias and Butser and all these newly emerging Protestant figures. And they did not agree. So this is, you know, we say you can still see continuities in terms of people are still kind of forming their arguments around what their beliefs are. But equally at this time,
This is kind of early days of the Reformation, and there's not really a clear camp of what everyone thinks. So they're writing letters, the reformers are writing letters to themselves, and really reformers have kind of evenly split on what they think about this whole thing. So, and even amongst the Henry supporters, Catherine supporters, there's not necessarily a clear cut split in terms of doctrine, because those things all get a little bit more solidified.
later on down the picture where there's already, okay, now we have a clear set of doctrines and a clear articulation of what everyone believes and we'll kind of have camps as opposed to just, we're all trying to figure out what's going on here. But what, so just to return to that point about seeing these, these moments where sometimes people do just really seem to distill through all the confusion and yeah, Luther basically says, it just comes down to, you know,
conscience and he says she said it because you know whether or not Catherine consummated her marriage with them with Arthur was a was a big issue too but he just like this comes down to whose conscience you rely on more Catherine's or Henry's and I rely more on Catherine's so there you go
PJ (36:09.846)
Yeah
Yeah, and all of this too, the complexity goes back to your earlier point of they were like, everyone is talking about God's law in this and everyone takes for granted that like the curse of Leviticus is something to be like that has causal power versus like scientific, you know, like it's like, or maybe Henry can't have kids that might be, you know, but that's and so that's part of the complexity.
uh... is this uh... that god's law over science like you're talking about earlier
Alison Knight (36:46.722)
A king not able to have children? Are you kidding? No! Yeah, obviously. Obviously. Yeah, well, but why would God put in on the throne someone who can't have children? Come on now.
PJ (36:52.402)
It must be the wife's fault. Right. Yeah, that's...
PJ (36:57.635)
Um, yeah, when I go
PJ (37:04.53)
Yeah, yeah, right. There's all these things. It's like, uh, I mean that almost takes us back to joe But it's like like, you know, if you actually read that a little more carefully Maybe you would see like god doesn't always just like line things up like that. But you know, um the go ahead Yeah, I know right I think some people did I don't think it worked out well for them, um the uh Uh, it's actually something I want to make a connection with. Uh, I had an earlier episode that uh, it's
Alison Knight (37:19.607)
But you tell Henry that.
Alison Knight (37:25.728)
I'm sorry.
PJ (37:33.614)
coming out soon on Carolingian medicine and religion, how they're tied together. And one of the, it's Dr. Leia, and she talked about the transmission of manuscripts, and she was showing the prehistory of how the classics were kept alive. But, and there were definitely people who were interested in the original languages. It was just that you had to hand copy them, and what a difference that made. And so I wonder if you could talk about a little bit of the impact. You're talking about...
Henry's desire to get a consensus was relatively new, like this universal consensus, and how much of that is tied to the ability to actually achieve consensus because of the printing press?
Alison Knight (38:15.73)
Well, so actually I would say that the desire to achieve consensus is not new. I'd say that actually is a really, a hangover from really older methods of how do you handle religious disputes, basically. Because, I mean, that's very much like a, from the late antique period into the medieval period, you know,
PJ (38:35.183)
Okay
Alison Knight (38:43.206)
And it comes down to the question that we, I think we've been talking about this, in our whole discussion is, where does truth come from? How do you know what truth is? And for the way that this was framed in Christian hermeneutics writ large over the long term was, you know what is true based on God's revelation in the Bible, but then also his revelation through individuals.
And so, you know, this is in terms of the prophets and then later into kind of saints, etc. So for the Catholic Church, you have the written truth in scripture, and then you also have unwritten verities, they're called, in, you know, what major figures and the apostles, what knowledge they had and passed on.
verbally with one another within the longer tradition of the church. So then if you have any disputes about what that tradition, what that truth has revealed in scripture and has kind of passed on through figures like the apostles, if you have disputes about it, then how do you resolve that? One of the ways is with church councils.
So like the Council of Nicaea, for example, that was formed to really resolve the disputes about the personhood of Christ and the divinity of Christ. But aside from councils, the other way that you establish what route to take in a dispute is through what was called the consensus of the Fathers. So you go and look at the Fathers and you say, okay, what have the major thinkers, the major theologians said?
about these issues. But the difficulty with, okay, we'll just turn to the fathers and we'll see what the church fathers have said. The difficulty with that is they don't always agree. It's exactly the same problem that we're seeing with the divorce and getting opinions, is that the church fathers don't always agree. So then what do you do? You look for the consensus of the fathers. So what do most of the fathers have to say? Sorry, this is all probably very
PJ (40:50.412)
Right.
PJ (41:07.818)
No, this is great.
Alison Knight (41:10.106)
you know.
PJ (41:10.762)
I mean, obviously, so I was gonna say, obviously we like this has no value for today because we don't struggle with how religion and truth interact today at all, right? No, not at all. Sorry, no, I am listening and this is, no, this is good, at least I'm enjoying it. So please continue.
Alison Knight (41:22.39)
No, surely not. Yeah.
Alison Knight (41:32.102)
I mean, I can go on for ages, you have to stop. So you try to find consensus. And then you also try to, some fathers are kind of have more cashes than others or worth more than others. So in particular, you want to find the kind of major, the major...
PJ (41:33.814)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Alison Knight (41:55.57)
fathers. So in particular, so the Antinestine fathers, those are really good. So the closer that you can get to Christ, that's always good because then you don't have this kind of, you know, time has all of its accretions and people get the wrong ideas, et cetera. So you don't have that kind of impurity. But also, so the major fathers that you really want to have on your side would be the four Western fathers, which would be Gregory the Great, who you mentioned earlier, Ambrose, Jerome.
Augustine is really also a really heavy hitter here. And then you also have the three Eastern Fathers, which are Basil, John Chrysostom, and Gregory Naziansen. So if you can get those ones on side, then that's a really good thing. But then if they disagree, that's a problem as well. But yeah, but this was how you established authoritative tradition. This was how you established truth when people disagreed, because people disagree all the time, was to try to establish consensus.
So in some ways, you know, that was very much a kind of a way of arguing with a long history. Okay, we're going to consult the theologians, but I can't just come in and bring in a bunch of modern people's disparate opinions where half of them say this and half of them say that. I have to try to establish consensus here. The approach of I'm just going to delete the ones that don't speak for me.
It actually also has a really long tradition. People always cherry pick what they, what they, what, who, who's speaking for them and who isn't.
PJ (43:25.598)
Is that, that to me almost sounds like, uh, Henry didn't fully understand what the printing press was changing, right? And how easily the, is that, is that a fair read of that situation?
Alison Knight (43:38.242)
I should also say, you know, Henry, it's framed as, you know, coming from Henry, but he very much had a team of scholars working on his behalf, like Steven Gardner and Cranmer and quite a few that I have to remind myself of all the names. But I think you're absolutely right that the printing press starts to make a real difference. I mean, it starts to certainly make a real difference in terms of polemic.
where one person is making a pronouncement on this and then there's going to be several different rebuttals in print that everyone can read. I mean, this is where we have that kind of, it's being argued about, he says, you know, my marriage is being argued about across Christendom, across the over the high mountains and all that. And so, yeah, so that's a big difference that it's gonna then become something that everyone weighs in on. But.
you still do see kind of older modes at work here. So there's a figure called Richard Croke and he was a Greek scholar and he is sent by Henry to Italy to get Italian, Italian theologians on side to make pronouncements and trying to get some opinions there. But another thing that he's trying to do, and I don't think that this was something that I mentioned in the book.
And I'm just trying to remember all the details now, but, um, another thing that he was sent to do was to look at, look in Italian libraries to try to find. Now, again, I might have the details of this wrong, but I believe that it was perhaps it was perhaps Steven Gardner or it was someone else had in their head that maybe St. Basil had said something about this. Maybe St. Ambrose.
But there's definitely a really good church father who is sad that Leviticus is the one that matters and not Deuteronomy. And so it's really just a case of like, there's a manuscript in Italy somewhere. I can't remember where, and this is them saying it, not just me, but saying like, there's a manuscript, go to Italy and find it. It's by probably Ambrose or maybe Basil or...
PJ (45:41.39)
BWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWBWB
PJ (45:50.814)
Yeah.
Alison Knight (46:01.294)
It's probably in Venice or maybe the Vatican. They won't let you look it in the third, but like, and so it's that kind of stuff. There's a manuscript somewhere that has the key, that has the real kicker here. And that if you can find it, then you can really make the definitive argument here. And so that's very much a kind of an earlier prior to the printing press mode of going about.
PJ (46:04.815)
Oh, man.
Alison Knight (46:29.978)
argumentation, but it's showing that we have this, there's still very much a sense of, you know, yes, we have the printing press, but the real juicy material is in libraries, in single manuscripts, in this tradition that has been kept, and this is where the real meat of, if I can find this and the other side doesn't have it, then that's where I'm really going to be able to have that home.
argument.
PJ (46:59.582)
Yes. Two things. One is how much I enjoy the way you describe this. Sounds like some like kids picking football teams on the playground. Right. It's like if I could just get Basil the Great on my side, you know, or, you know, I just have to write. But the good.
Alison Knight (47:16.123)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, and Richard Grubbs' description of his journey into Italy, and it's just like one disaster after the other. And then when he finds out, like, oh, there was never a manuscript, nobody even said that. But yeah, but it does absolutely have that sense of like, these are the good ones that you want. And I mean, that doesn't really change. There's very much.
PJ (47:35.456)
Oh.
Alison Knight (47:41.982)
For Protestants, people tend to think, oh Protestants don't care about the fathers. They don't care about that church tradition. They don't want that. That's absolutely not the case. And especially England sitting in an uneasy kind of balance of these approaches, absolutely still has a huge attachment to these modes of argumentation.
and we can absolutely still see, especially I think in the divorce, when it is just on the cusp of early days of the Protestant Reformation, you can absolutely see that there's new approaches, but still very much kind of traditional, very traditional approaches, very much making the argument in the context of the divorce for the kinds of law in the Bible, which is a
Yeah, you can and it's very much people trying to say, okay, what's going to work? What's going to obliterate my opponent? And so it'll be these are the traditional ways we've made arguments. And then also I have this new cutting edge research on Hebrew manuscripts, and I'll throw that one in.
PJ (48:53.054)
Yeah, I want to be respectful of your time. So if I could ask you one more question, and it's kind of a big one, so I understand you can't get into all the specifics. But even as I look at the rest of your book, because we didn't get past the divorce, but that makes sense. Like you said, it ties you in knots. It's so, yeah. But how does this continual work through these dark and obscure passages?
Alison Knight (49:11.791)
I'm so sorry.
PJ (49:20.278)
How does that inform and even shape the study of language and rhetoric even through to today? Like what do we see in that kind of the history of how interpretation grows? How do we deal with contradictions? How do we deal with idioms and figures, that sort of thing.
Alison Knight (49:38.734)
Yeah, so thank you. I mean, so I will just... Yes, first one is on contradiction, but then the next one's on ambiguity, then on defects, then on disorder. So like when the Bible isn't organized, especially when it's not chronological. And then idiom, as you said, and then finally the fact that it's...
And I think that the fact that it's figurative is one of the most intractable problems for people in this period, you know, especially with something like the Eucharist is a huge one. Like, how can you tell basically if something is figurative or not? You know, if it says, oh, it is like this, like if Christ had said, I'm like the vine,
then that would be, you know, a lot easier. But he says, I am the one. But people had no problem with that one actually. And again, this comes back to the fact that so many of these problems that are framed as linguistic problems are, you can't separate them from confessional problems. Because yeah, no one ever had a problem with, no one ever said that Christ had leaves and bore grapes and that sort of thing.
in a literal sense, there was no argument about whether or not that was figurative. The only time people bring in that quotation really of Christ saying, I am the vine, I'm the true vine, is when they're talking about this is my body, when they're talking about the Eucharist and whether or not it's figurative, and they always bring that in as a foil basically to be like, look it's obvious, you can just tell. And yeah, that is actually...
one of the arguments that I make that it often boils down to that. They're just like, I think it's this. And yeah, so that was the one problem is how can you tell if something's figurative? And then assuming that everyone agrees, okay, it's figurative, then you have the problem of okay, and now what does it mean? Yeah. So many, all of the chapters of my book are really are focusing on problems.
Alison Knight (51:55.63)
of language and how much religion is in it is it is a religion you know happens in language it also happens in other forms you know there are material sides to religion certainly but you know in terms of Christianity it is very much framed no matter which you know type of Christianity you're talking about as in terms of language and so you know this is this is
something that people talk about a lot as well in this time is that, you know, God knows that, you know, that we need language and that language is insufficient to communicate his truth. Like, you know, it exceeds anything that human language is capable of, but he knows that and he accommodates his truth to the realities of our language. So
Don't, so often you do see that kind of argument of like, don't get so hung up on the fact that language, that maybe it's language itself is causing the problem here and that God, you know, God isn't going to be contradictory. It's just that we need human language, that God doesn't have any defects in his truth, but human language often fails, or manuscripts fail, or that sort of thing. So these are all very much problems of language.
how humans grapple with language, how we make meaning, how we understand meaning, how we communicate it to somebody else. And in fact, you know, I do, it's, they're so inseparable, but I do try to, as much as possible, say, you know, I'm not, I'm talking about problems or uncertainties, confusions that people had that were based on the Bible's, the phrase that was in the time was the Bible's own way of speaking,
It's not about those intractable mysteries of religion. So for example, something like, what's the nature of the Trinity? That's, you know, that God is beyond our capacity to understand rather than the Bible itself. So that's very much focused on the way that the Bible uses language.
Alison Knight (54:16.142)
and how people then use language to explain that language. So yeah, we can't get out from underneath it. We need language. I mean, different sex would say we don't, that we can just sit in the mystery and just let it all wash over you, the fact that it's beyond us. But for a text-focused religion like...
especially Protestantism bringing to bear such intense scrutiny on the language of the Bible. You can't get out from under the fact that idioms, like you mentioned, that language, especially when you're trying to translate something, one language says something in one way and you can't quite get it to fit into the exact same contours. Even if people want to believe that it can.
the preface to the King James Bible says translation is that which opens a window, you know, it cracks the shell so we can get the kernel. So it's basically saying that that's the whole premise of that you can translate the Bible into vernacular. You don't need to just, you know, just keep it in Latin or Greek or Hebrew, depending on your approach to textual authority, but that you can put it in these.
PJ (55:37.986)
Right.
Alison Knight (55:39.89)
different languages and you can still have that truth. You can still have that kernel of truth, which transcends language and you can move it from one shell to another shell. So they do say that, but then equally.
They actually say, just slightly later on in that preface to the King James Bible, that they want the Bible to speak like itself, like in the language of Canaan. And they're like, those two things don't... Don't... So, yeah, there's absolutely... And this comes out in argumentation over the period as well. There's absolutely this sense that, yes...
PJ (56:10.749)
Right, right.
Alison Knight (56:22.762)
God's truth transcends language, and so it can move between languages, but equally, language is the only thing we have to get at it. And so...
Alison Knight (56:37.43)
It's kind of like, I don't know, a cup of water, right? If you move it into a different size cup, you basically, have you changed the water? The water is in a different shape, but it's still water. But also, can you have a cup of water without the cup? Not really, not functionally. Sorry, a bit of a strange metaphor. We always, you know, metaphors, they can be helpful, but they can also be...
PJ (56:58.962)
Right.
Alison Knight (57:06.186)
just confusing sometimes and not that helpful. But yeah, they can be obscure. They can, they can. Yeah.
PJ (57:10.319)
They can be obscure, yes.
PJ (57:18.686)
Dr. Knight, thank you so much. I really appreciate sitting down with you today thinking through it's interesting to you know, as we've kind of gone through different historical periods, not intentionally I've just been it's just worked out that way. I really appreciated seeing the value and the some of the same debates happening, you know, with slightly different Yeah.
Alison Knight (57:44.97)
over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over
PJ (57:47.766)
back then as they're even happening now.
Alison Knight (58:12.114)
before Christ, you go to the earliest days of, you know, origin, says this kind of thing. Augustine, absolutely so many of the things that I'm talking about, that are articulated by Augustine and how to approach them is explained by Augustine, but you know, people are still arguing about it centuries later. Absolutely, the medieval period has very interesting approaches to some of these things, and these keep being.
issues and problems. Well, now there's still people still have very intense debates about how we understand the truth of the Bible now. And, you know, I think that that's wonderful. I love the fact that we still keep talking about these issues. And I like the fact that you can still kind of keep hearing.
the same argument over and over. People find the same argument for themselves in their own time. It's so interesting. So something like, you mentioned Spinoza, a while back, he very much does make the case that the Bible, you should read it and approach it like any other text. But then you also get people...
So in the 19th century they kind of thought that they invented this approach as well. So someone named Benjamin Jowett wrote essays and reviews that basically, yeah, you have to approach the Bible like any other text and people were like, what? So, you know, you just keep seeing the same observations over and over, but equally it doesn't mean that it's always the same. So another, I kind of finished the book with saying that...
So an early Reformation figure, Sebastian Castelho, who ran afoul of Calvin and Beza basically because he disliked and argued against the persecution of individuals by religious, because of their religious beliefs and that made the argument that you shouldn't kill people on the basis of their religious beliefs.
Alison Knight (01:00:34.294)
And very much also because the Bible is so difficult, he frames it that way, like the Bible is so difficult to understand. How can you kill someone on the basis of how you're interpreting it and what your interpretation is? So, you know, that argument looks really similar to arguments that you can get now, arguments that you can get in the later, in the 17th century.
PJ (01:00:48.298)
Mmm.
Alison Knight (01:01:03.25)
for religious toleration. Does that mean that it means exactly the same thing? Not quite. Context is very important and the, you know, we can see things that, everything's always different in the past and then also things always stay the same. So you can, we can see real points of connection across the wide sweep of history, but also, you know, I think.
PJ (01:01:22.871)
Yeah.
Alison Knight (01:01:31.15)
when you dig into the details of the context, you can see how much is being driven, as in the divorce, by the context and needs of the time.
PJ (01:01:41.994)
I think that's an incredible way to end today. That's, no, I can hear you. Can you hear me?
Alison Knight (01:01:43.534)
Oh dear, I think... You may have frozen, or I may have frozen, I'm not sure.
PJ (01:01:53.782)
But no, so I can hear you, I can see you. I want to say thank you and really appreciate what you shared today. I think that's an incredible way to end. Thank you.