12. Ways of Knowing

Telling the story of how Christians learned to stop worrying and embrace the probable, this chapter considers how thinkers evaluated the certainty and truth of Jesus revelations, both canonical and contemporary. The latter included revelations made to women, with gender rendering their accounts especially unreliable, or, in the plain ken, especially trustworthy. Some writers used Jesus as a tool to demolish the claims of reason; others found in Jesus the compelling certainty they sought. Throughout the East, from Greece to Russia, hesychasts combined the Jesus prayer with breathing techniques to compensate for the instability of knowledge. Jean Gerson raised a difficult question: Should a priest celebrate the eucharist—that is, affect the presence of the body and blood of Jesus—after a nocturnal emission? His investigations led to the development of a plain-ken approach that celebrated a messy probabilism as an acceptable answer to uncertainty, first in ethics, and later more generally. In these ways a plain-ken vision of history, a messy world of contingency, arose between what was necessarily true and what was impossible.