John Huss: his life, teachings and death, after five hundred years/Chapter 3

by David Schley Schaff

CHAPTER III

HUSS’S DEBT TO WYCLIF

Wyclif . . . the master of deep thoughts.—Huss, App. Creed.

Doubtless Huss’s experiences as a preacher would have been a repetition of the experiences of his predecessors in the pulpit of Prague, had not a new element of religious thought been introduced into Bohemia from abroad. Large and sympathetic audiences would have hung upon his words and perhaps rival priests and monks would have resented his strictures upon their clerical habits and spied out suspicious or heretical passages in his discourses and formulated them in charges. Like Matthias of Janow, he might have yielded to authority or, as did Milicz, have gone to Rome and sought to explain his utterances. Instead of this, his career ended in the awful penalty visited upon heretics. The explanation is offered in the foreign influence which moved him at the very foundation of his convictions and also stirred up the university of Prague, as few universities have been stirred by influences from without. This influence was the personality and teaching of John Wyclif, who died 1384, several years before Huss entered upon his studies in the university, and nearly twenty years before he was called to Bethlehem chapel. By the Englishman’s writings Huss was fed and by the memory of his personality made morally strong.

In the controversies over the English master’s teachings, in which the university of Prague was involved, Huss stood out as the chief figure. Not because he had preached against the abuses of the clergy was he excommunicated, so one well acquainted with him, Andrew of Broda, said, 1414. Because he was the advocate and defender of Wyclif he went to the stake.^[1] As important as the influence of Paul upon the mind of Luther and more important than the influence of Calvin upon John Knox, was the influence of Wyclif upon the opinions and the career of Huss. Wyclif was the original and bolder mind—the pathfinder. Huss came after, was receptive, but, as it proved, made a deeper impression upon his people. As moral personalities impelled by the truth they stand out with equal prominence in their generations. The first year of his pastorate at Bethlehem had not passed before Huss was publicly identified with the Wyclifite discussions which were to agitate the university, keep in turmoil the body of its professors for more than a decade and also shake the ecclesiastical foundations of the Bohemian nation. In May, 1403, Wyclif’s teachings were brought to the official attention of the university by two members of the cathedral chapter as containing, it was charged, the seeds of heretical error.

The university of Prague, founded by a double charter from the pope and Charles IV, 1347–1348, at once became the chief ornament of the Bohemian capital and made it famous throughout Europe as a seat of study. It was the first university north of the Alps in Central and Northeastern Europe. The universities of Bologna, Paris, and Oxford alone were more famous. Soon after their origin the universities of Europe became the restless centres of intellectual and literary life. Democratic in their constitution, they fostered free inquiry and were adapted to unsettle inquiring minds in the inherited institutions of church and society. They owed their beginnings to the enthusiasm of single teachers, but Innocent III and other popes, quick to discern their importance and their menace, early took hold of them and, in the case of Paris, prescribed its curriculum. However, they had a hard task in keeping their studies within safe limits. In fact, masters and students—who together were called the university—constituted a world by themselves, a distinct corporation. It is true that out of Bologna, the seat of the study of canon law, went forth the great popes, Alexander III and Innocent III. But Paris issued some of the severest attacks against the theory of papal absolutism. With that institution Gerson and d’Ailly were connected. Wyclif’s teaching made Oxford a seat of heresy. Wittenberg, the last of the medieval universities, protected and fostered Luther. Hussitism was begotten at the university of Prague.

The numbers given as attending the universities seem to have been greatly exaggerated. Paris is reported to have had 25,000 students and Oxford 30,000, or, according to Wyclif, prior to his time 60,000, though for his own day he gives the reasonable figure of 3,000. Prague likewise was reported to have had in 1408 by one who lived but a short time later 30,000, with 200 masters, and 500 bachelors, a number altogether extravagant, according to Palacky.^[2] Flajshans gives the number at from 5,000 to 7,000, a number which includes retainers. The population of the city was then 80,000. The university of Prague, which had been preceded by a number of grammar-schools connected with the parish churches of the city, had the four faculties—theology, law, medicine, and philosophy. In 1372 the faculty of law was made a distinct body, with a rector of its own. German students who had flocked to Bologna and Paris, in the absence of other universities in the North, now turned to Prague. The universities of Vienna and Heidelberg were not founded till 1365 and 1385. Partial provision was made at Prague for the support of professors by gifts from the royal exchequer and contributions from the revenues of monasteries and chapter rights. Several special foundations were endowed for the aid of poor students.

Oxford is mentioned in the annals of the Bohemian university in 1367 when the faculty of philosophy and the arts ordered its bachelors to use for their comments the writings—scripta et dicta—of its professors and the professors of Paris as well as the writings of members of the Prague faculties.^[3] The masters or doctors were allowed to give original lectures of their own—propria dicta dare.

The German element in the Prague faculties and student body followed the principles of the Nominalists, which had been adopted at Paris and taught that general concepts are mere names and are derived from individual existences. Following Wyclif and Oxford, Huss and the Czech element fed on Realism, which taught that general concepts have a real existence. Huss’s realism was brought against him at his trial in Constance.

The transmission of Wyclif’s writings and influence to Bohemia was furthered by the marriage of Richard II of England, in 1382, to Anne of Luxemburg, sister of the Bohemian king, Wenzel. Anne, who died in 1394, was a woman of culture and carried with her to England copies of the Bible in Latin, Czech and German. Referring to the queen’s interest in the Scriptures, Huss said that to make her out a heretic for having the Bible in translation would have been a satanic folly.^[4] Among the Bohemians who followed Anne to England were students who went to Oxford for study. By the teachings of Wyclif, Oxford had become notorious as a seat of advanced and even heretical thought, and young men predisposed to freedom of inquiry would easily be attracted there.

At any rate, in Anne’s reign Wyclif’s writings were carried to Prague, where they were studied in the university. This is clear from Huss’s own testimony. He wrote to the English Carmelite, John Stokes, in 1411, that Prague had possessed and been reading Wyclif’s works for twenty years and more.^[5] The statement of Æneas Sylvius, that the first to win ill fame in Prague by introducing Wyclif’s manuscripts was a certain Faulfisch, is now doubted, and this person is identified with Nicholas Faulfisch, who, in 1306, carried with him to Bohemia an Oxford document attesting Wyclif’s orthodoxy.^[6] It is certain, however, that among the earliest Bohemian students who carried copies of Wyclif’s writings back from England to Bohemia was Jerome of Prague about 1401, the friend of Huss who followed him to the stake. On his trial at Constance Jerome deposed that he had copied Wyclif’s Dialogus and Trialogus and carried them to Prague. Huss perhaps became acquainted, if not with Wyclif’s writings, certainly with his teachings while he was still a student. Some of his teachers anticipated him in the knowledge of Wyclif’s tenets. He himself made five copies of Wyclif’s philosophical writings which are extant in the royal library of Stockholm, “written with his own hand, 1398,” and carried off by the Swedes, 1648, and he also made a translation of the Trialogus.

As for Wyclif’s doctrines, according to Sigismund’s testimony at the council of Constance, they were known and spread in Bohemia when that king was but a youth.^[7] Sigismund was born 1368. Wyclif’s doctrine of the Lord’s Supper was known in Bohemia before 1400 and had already at that time unsettled some minds. One of these was the distinguished Czech writer, Thomas of Stitny, who, writing in 1400, when he was in his seventieth year, declared his faith in the transubstantiation of the elements had been shaken.^[8]

Wyclif’s name was held in even more honor in Bohemia than in his native land. In England, under the name of Lollards, dissenters adopted and perpetuated some of his teachings, as they also used his translation of the Bible. But his leading sympathizers recanted. In Bohemia the very names, Wyclifite and Wyclifist, were given to dissenters to indicate the extent of his influence. In Bohemia Wyclif was called the fifth evangelist. Huss himself, in 1412, was called by some of the Prague clergy in an appeal to the pope a “son of iniquity, a Wyclifist,” the two expressions being practically synonymous.^[9] Gradually, after Huss’s death, the designation Hussite superseded that of Wyclifist.

No man of the Middle Ages, if we except Marsiglius of Padua, was so independent in his thought or quite so fearless in his utterances as John Wyclif,^[10] and no churchman in the history of Christendom, not even Luther, has been more merciless in his attacks upon the existing church order or more uncompromising in his assaults upon the failings of popes. He had none of Luther’s good humor, but his pen was as keen and mordant asa Damascus blade. Wyclif was a Schoolman and professor at Oxford. But he was more than a scholastic. He was a patriot, a popular preacher, and the champion of practical religious as well as theological reform. Strange to say, it was not until the closing decades of the nineteenth century that an effort was carried through to publish his works and not until the middle of that century did his translation of the Bible appear in print. Through the labors of the Wyclif society a stately array of his Latin works have been set before the public as also his English treatises, tracts and sermons through the editorial care of Arnold and Mathews. His tracts form a distinct chapter in the rich history of English tractarian literature. They differ from the tracts of the Puritan age and the Oxford movement in this, that they had practically no opponents who replied with the pen. They and Wyclif’s followers were met by the methods of the inquisition and with fire. As a patriot, Wyclif gave his voice and pen to the Good Parliament of 1376, which repudiated the papal right to collect the annual tribute pledged by King John when he yielded England up as a fief to the apostolic see. The popular feeling against the usurpations and exactions of Rome and the monks found popular expression through Piers Ploughman, who exclaimed: “Take her lands, ye lords, and let her live by domes”–tithes. The mutterings of the nation against foreign ecclesiastical jurisdiction, which had been heard since the reign of William the Conqueror, found in Wyclif a more cultured and no less determined mouthpiece than the Ploughman. With a frankness which is startling, he preached and wrote against the friars, their idleness and good living, and against the pope’s secular authority. The old chronicler portrays him as running about from place to place and barking against the church. He contended that the lords, in case of necessity, might seize the possessions of the clergy, and the pope he styled the antichrist, the proud and worldly priest of Rome, the most cursed of clippers and cut-purses.

It was not until the last year of his life that Wyclif attacked systematically the strictly dogmatic tenets brought to perfection by the mediæval church. As early as 1377 he was under the condemnation of the church authorities. Summoned in that year before Courtenay, bishop of London, he was protected by the duke of Lancaster, but the pope, Gregory XI, took up his case and issued a batch of at least five bulls against him addressed to the king, to the university of Oxford, the archbishop of Canterbury, and the bishop of London. These bulls condemned nineteen articles taken from his writings as dangerous to state and church. Gregory called upon Archbishop Sudbury to imprison Wyclif until final sentence should be passed by the papal court^[11] and, addressing the chancellor of Oxford, he charged Wyclif with vomiting out from the filthy dungeon of his heart most wicked and damnable heresies, by which he proposed to bring destruction upon church and state alike. The pontiff put him into the same category with those arch-destroyers and heretics, Marsiglius of Padua and John of Jandun.

Among the nineteen condemned articles were the propositions that priestly and papal excommunication is of no avail if not in accord with the law of Christ and that even a pope may be lawfully impeached by laymen. In spite of the papal edict, they were pronounced by the Oxford masters true, although to the car they sounded ill.

Wyclif saw the papal schism established and lived six years after its inception, a period fully long enough for him to discern the evils arising from a dual papal government and to have forced upon his mind the question of the origin and authority of the papacy and the question of the nature and functions of the church. In pointing out abuses in church administration and doctrine, he went beyond Marsiglius of Padua and undertook the positive work of construction. Like John Wesley, and General Booth of the Salvation Army, he undertook to relieve the spiritual destitution of England by sending out a body of “pore priests,” as they were called, and laymen who should preach the Gospel up and down the land—men whom Bishop Courtenay arraigned as “itinerant preachers who teach erroneous, yea, heretical assertions, publicly, not only in churches but also in public squares and other profane places, and who do this under the guise of great holiness, but without having obtained any episcopal or papal authority.”

“In 1381,” so Walden reports, “Wyclif began to determine matters upon the sacrament of the altar.” The denial of transubstantiation constituted the subject of the first three of the twenty-four articles listed against him by the Earthquake council, which met in 1382 under the presidency of Courtenay. Christ, Wyclif asserted, is not in the sacrament of the altar essentially, truly and really in his own corporal presence. The other more important heresies ascribed to him were that a bishop or priest in mortal sin cannot ordain, consecrate, or baptize; that after Urban VI’s death the English church should acknowledge no pope but become independent like the Greeks and that it is contrary to Scripture for ecclesiastics to hold temporal possessions. Wyclif was inhibited from preaching at Oxford and was thenceforth confined to his parish of Lutterworth.

The chronicler, Walsingham, no doubt represented the official clerical opinion when he characterized the death of Wyclif as “the death of that instrument of the devil, that enemy of the church, that author of confusion to the common people, that image of hypocrites, that idol of heretics, that maker of schism, that sower of hatred, that coiner of lies, who, when he died, breathed out his malicious spirit into the abodes of darkness.” The dead was not left in peace. By Archbishop Arundel’s bidding, Wyclif’s writings were suppressed and by the Lateran decree of 1414 were ordered burned. And against his followers the English Parliament, in 1401, issued the law that heretics should be burned. The list of nineteen errors ascribed to him by Gregory XI grew enormously. The council of Constance accepted forty-five. Netter of Walden increased the number to more than threescore. An Oxford doctor of divinity, the Bohemian John Lucke, enlarged it to two hundred and sixty-six, and Cochlæus, in his work against the Hussites, to three hundred and three heresies, a weight heavy enough, it would seem, to crush the most callous of heretics and appalling enough to frighten away any good churchman.

Almost all the distinctive doctrines elaborated by the mediæval theology were cither questioned or flatly denied by Wyclif. He insisted that the Bible should be put into the hands of the people. It is the Book of Life—liber vitæ—the Christian Faith—fides christiana—the whole truth, the immaculate law. Its authority is supreme and its precepts to be obeyed, no matter what the church may set up as commandments. The priesthood’s chief duty is to make known its contents. Every Christian should have it in his native tongue, that he may follow Christ and come to heaven. Huss knew of Wyclif’s translation and in his reply to John Stokes made the statement that Wyclif had translated the whole Bible out of the Latin into Anglo-Saxon.^[12]

In taking this position in regard to translations of the Bible and their popular circulation, as well as in regard to its supreme authority to which every individual has the right to appeal, Wyclif was out of accord with his times. In 1408 the synod of Oxford forbade translations in the absence of church authority. “The complement of the wickedness of John Wyclif, that pestilent writer of damnable memory,” Archbishop Arundel pronounced to be that, “he prepared a new translation of the Scriptures into his mother tongue.” And the year before Huss’s death the English Parliament forbade the reading of the English Scriptures upon forfeiture of “land, cattle, life and goods.”

Wyclif’s definition of the church as the body of the elect was opposed to the current tenet that the church is the corporation of the baptized presided over by the pope and hierarchy and the popular idea that the church is the pope and the cardinals. As for the papacy, Wyclif uttered far more vigorous words about individual popes than did Huss. He put pontiffs into hell as freely as did Dante. He declared not only that the papacy is not infallible but likewise that it is not necessary to the church. Obedience to it is always to be determined by the agreement of the papal commands with the teachings of the Scriptures. Basing his doctrine of the keys and his attack upon the worldly dominion of the papacy upon his interpretation of Matt. 16, Wyclif also was the forerunner of Huss. But in one vital respect Huss held back from the Englishman’s views—the doctrine of the eucharist. Not without uncertainty, at one time in his career as it would appear from the testimony of others, Huss held to the old view.

The charge of holding to the remanence of the material elements continued to be made against him to his dying breath. However, his writings stand for the doctrine of transubstantiation. In one of his Bohemian sermons on the Apostles’ Creed he set forth this view when he said: “The humble priest doth not exalt himself above the Virgin Mary or say that he is the creator of Christ, the Son of God, but that the Lord Christ by his power and word, through him, causes that which is bread to be his body; not that at that time it began to be his but that there on the altar begins to be sacramentally in the form of the bread what previously was not there and therein.”^[13] Further reference to Huss’s position in this matter will be made later.

The English reformer, abandoning the doctrine of transmutation, pronounced it a novelty taught by the modern church—novella ecclesia. He praised God for having been delivered from the laughable and scandalous errors taught in regard to it. It is a lying fable and idolatry. Christ is in the elements virtually and potentially as a king is in his dominion and the sunlight in the glass, and in no other way. In breaking the glass you do not break the sunbeam. The impossibility of an elemental transubstantiation Wyclif based upon the philosophical consideration that the substance of a thing cannot be separated from its accidents or property. Transubstantiation necessitates transaccidentation. He also laid stress upon the figurative meaning of Christ’s language instituting the Supper. The theory that the substance is changed while the accidents remain he pronounced “grounded nether in Holy Writt ne reson ne wit but only taughte by newe hypocritis and cursed heretikis that magnyfyen there own fantasies and dremes.”

These and other teachings, carried from the older university across the channel to Bohemia, took root not only among certain of the clergy but also among the nobility, and threatened the old religious order. Before the first clash occurred in the halls of the university of Prague, it seemed as if the entire theological faculty were going over to Wyclif. But the faculties soon became divided into two antagonistic factions. Among those who imbibed the Wyclifite principles before Huss were his teachers and warm friends, Stanislaus of Znaim and Peter Palecz; and the saying went about that Wyclif begat Stanislaus of Znaim, Stanislaus of Znaim begat Peter of Znaim, Peter of Znaim begat Palecz, and Palecz begat Huss.^[14] When the church began to proceed in earnest against Wyclifism, all but Huss abandoned their views and became willing subjects to the church authorities.

The formal breaking-out of the dissension over Wyclif is set by the chronicle of the university on September 28, 1403, the date on which the articles, presented by the two members of the cathedral chapter, were appointed to be read, discussed and finally determined. They consisted of the twenty-four articles condemned at the Earthquake council, 1382, and twenty-one others extracted, or alleged to be extracted, from Wyclif’s writings by John Hübner, a Pole and a master in the Prague university.^[15] The main propositions were as follows: The substance of bread remains in the sacrament after the words of institution, and Christ is not corporally present.—A bishop or priest living in mortal sin cannot ordain, consecrate at the Lord’s Supper, or baptize—It is heresy to assert that it is of the essence of the Gospel that Christ ordained the mass.—Where there is true contrition of heart, outward confession is of no profit—God ought to obey the devil—A reprobate pope is a member of the devil’s household and has no authority over the faithful—The Holy Spirit forbids clerics to hold worldly possessions.—No prelate may pronounce excommunication unless he know beforehand that God has excommunicated the offender—A prelate excommunicating one who has appealed to the king is a traitor to God and the civil power—Those who, on account of a decree of excommunication, cease to preach the Word of God or to listen to it are excommunicate.—A deacon or presbyter may preach in the absence of license from pope or prelate—No one in mortal sin may exercise the authority of civil lord or prelate—Temporal lords may seize the worldly possessions of clerics who habitually offend.—The public may at will rebuke offending lords.—Tithes are pure alms and parishioners may withhold them from offending curates.—Those who enter a religious order are made more foolish thereby and less capable of obedience to God’s commands.—Holy men endowing religious orders have sinned in so doing.—Friars ought to support themselves by the labor of their hands.—The prayers of the reprobate are of no avail.—All things come of necessity.—Universities, university studies, and the graduation of masters profit the church as little as the devil does.—To endow the clergy is against Christ’s law.—Constantine erred in endowing the church.—The church of Rome is the synagogue of Satan and the pope is not the immediate vicar of Christ —The election of the pope by cardinals was introduced by the devil.—It is not necessary to salvation that one believe that the Roman church is supreme over other churches.—The belief in indulgences is foolish—Augustine, Benedict and Bernard were damned if they did not repent of having had worldly possessions and having founded religious orders.

By a majority vote, the university forbade all to hold, preach, or assert these articles either in private or in public. Our record has come down to us certified by the seal of an imperial notary who was present. The presiding officer on the occasion was the Bavarian, Walter Harasser, who succeeded Huss as university rector. Instead of healing differences, as has been said, this decision was the real starting-point of the religious controversy which raged in Prague for a dozen years or more. Many of the articles concerned questions about which there was wide-spread unrest in the church, such as the nature of the eucharistic sacrament, the validity of prelatical fulminations, and the liability of clerics to deposition, even by the civil power, for unworthy conduct. The charge was made and properly, that some of the articles misstated Wyclif’s opinion and Huss wanted to know whether the falsifiers of a man’s teachings were not as deserving of punishment as were two men who a short time before had been burned in Prague for adulterating saffron. Stanislaus of Znaim went to such lengths in defending the articles that some of the masters refused to listen and left the room. Throwing a copy of one of Wyclif’s writings on the table, Palecz announced his readiness to defend it in the face of any one who dared to say a single word against it.

The obligation which Huss was under to Wyclif, for large paragraphs in his writings, will be referred to further on. It is enough here to say again that Huss was considered to be Wyclif’s faithful disciple. The Englishman Stokes represented this opinion at the council of Constance, when he said to him: “Why do you glory in these writings, falsely labelling them as your own, since, after all, they belong not to you but to Wyclif, in whose steps you are following?” Certain it is, that Huss was deeply infected with Wyclifism, and it was chiefly for his attachment to Wyclif that he got into trouble at Prague and was burned at Constance.

There is no evidence to bear out the statement, made by Æneas Sylvius in his History of Bohemia, that Huss had derived his views from the Waldenses. Æneas, who spent some time in Bohemia and calls the Waldensian sect wicked, an insanity and a leprosy, mentions amongst its dogmas, that bishops are equal to the Roman pontiff, there is no difference between priests, the lives and not the sacerdotal dignity of priests are of avail, there is no purgatorial fire, prayers for the dead are useless and the invention of priestly avarice, images of the saints are to be destroyed, priests should remain poor and be content with alms, every one is free to preach the Word of God, auricular confession is of no avail, prayers to the saints are useless for they cannot help us and it is enough to confess our sins in secret.

The followers of Peter Waldo very early carried their doctrines across the Alps and planted them in the diocese of Passau, just beyond the frontier of Bohemia, and to other parts of Austria. In the early part of the fourteenth century a bishop estimated their numbers at eighty-five thousand, and Dominican and Franciscan inquisitors were despatched to Passau to put the heresy down.

Nowhere does Huss make the slightest intimation that he was in any way dependent upon the Waldenses for his teachings. The fact that he laid stress upon the primary principle in vogue among them expressed in the words: “We ought to obey God rather than man” is probably only a coincidence. The Bohemian Brethren, who were followers of Huss, drew from the Waldenses. Gerson and other writers at the time of the council of Constance joined together the Waldenses and the Wyclifists as flagrant copartners in heretical depravity. Huss explicitly denied all dependence upon the Waldensian heresy.^[16]

 

1. Doc., p. 520.
2. Gesch., III, 1: 183. Rashdall, 2: 584 sqq., makes 1,500 to 3,000 the maximum number at Oxford. Flajshans, Mistr J. Hus, p. 46.
3. Rashdall, 2: 223. Palacky, Gesch., III, 1: 188, gives quotations from the Mon. Hist. Univ. Prag., recording the rule.
4. Mon., 1: 136.
5. Mon., 1: 135.
6. Hist. of Bohemia, chap. 35. See Loserth, p. 70 sqq.
7. Doc., p. 315.
8. Palacky, Gesch., III, 1: 190. Loserth, p. 75 sq. On Stitny as a leader of Bohemian culture, see Palacky, p. 187 sqq.
9. Doc., p. 460. See Loserth, p. 83 sqq., and below.
10. For Wyclif, see Schaff’s Church History, V, 2: 314–358.
11. Gee and Hardy, Documents, 105 sqq.
12. Monumenta, 1: 136.
13. Erben, quoted by Wratislaw, p. 352.
14. Huss’s Reply to Palecz, Mon., 1: 318.
15. A. D. 1403 incepit notabilis dissensio in clero regni Bokemiæ, magistris, sacerdotibus et prelatis, propter quosdam articulos ex J. Wycleff doctoris Anglici libris non bene extractos. Palacky, III, 1: 196. See also Berger, XXXV, XXXVI. Doc., p. 323–331, gives all the XLV Articles and Gee and Hardy, Documents, p. 108 sqq., gives the twenty-four.
16. Gerson, Du Pin’s ed., 2: 227, etc. Doc., 32. Mon., I: 371, 379. Schaff, Ch. Hist., V, part 1, p. 493 sqq. Flajshans, 37, 38.