John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers/Chapter 13
CHAPTER XIII.
CONDEMNED AT OXFORD.
HE time had come when Wyclif had reached his last stage of heresy, and he made up his mind to declare boldly against the miraculous and non-natural element in the sacrament of the altar. After many meanders, as we have seen above, the Reformer found himself at the centre of the labyrinth, with his doubts resolved and his resolution taken.
According to Netter of Walden, he began to lecture at Oxford against the docrine of transubstantiation ("incepit determinare materiam") in the summer of 1381; but the actual date of the inquiry which was held in this year by Chancellor Berton, at the instance of the archbishop and bishops, is somewhat in doubt. Easter, as Dr. Shirley points out in dealing with this subject, fell in 1381 on April 14th; and the Confession which was written by Wyclif after the inquiry had been held bears the date of May 10th. Perhaps the four weeks between these dates leaves time for all that is recorded as having happened. The inquiry itself was very much in the nature of a foregone conclusion. The issue of the condemnation under the Chancellor's seal, its promulgation in Wyclif's presence, the appeal to John of Gaunt and his response, with the writing of Wyclif's rejoinder, may certainly have happened within a month, and are scarcely likely to have been dragged out over thirteen months.
The articles attributed to Wyclif, for which the Chancellor called him to account, were these:
1. The consecrated host which we see upon the altar is not Christ, nor any part of him, but an efficacious prefigurement of him.
2. No partaker can see Christ in the consecrated host with his physical eyesight, though he may do so with the eye of faith.
3. The faith of the Roman Church was expressed of old in the declaration of Berengarius, that the bread and wine which remain after the benediction are the consecrated host.
4. By virtue of the sacramental words, the eucharist contains the body and blood of Christ in a true and real sense, down to the minutest particular.
5. Transubstantiation, identification, and impanation—terms which have been given to the eucharistic symbols—have no foundation in Scripture.
6. It is contrary to the opinion of the holy fathers to maintain that there may be an accident without a substance in the host.
7. The sacrament of the eucharist is in its nature bread or wine, containing, by virtue of the sacramental words, the true body and blood of Christ, down to the minutest particular.
8. The sacrament of the eucharist is in figure the body and blood of Christ, existing by conversion of the bread or wine, whereof something definite remains after consecration, although, so far as concerns the faithful, it has been exhausted ("sopitum").
9. There is no foundation for saying that an accident exists without a substance, for in that case God is reduced to nothing, and a distinct article of the Christian faith disappears.
10. Every person or sect is infected with heresy who obstinately maintains that the sacrament of the altar is mere bread (per se existens), decidedly lower in nature and less perfect than "panis equinus."
11. Everyone who obstinately maintains that the said sacrament is an accident, a quality, quantity, or the aggregate of these, falls into the like heresy.
12. Wheaten bread, with which alone it is lawful to celebrate, is decidedly more perfect in nature than bread made of beans or rats' flesh, either of which is more perfect in the scale of nature than a simple accident.
In addition to these contentions, Wyclif was charged before the Chancellor with maintaining that the body of Christ could not be multiplied in regard to its dimensions or its limits, though he admitted that it might be multiplied in a virtual sense, as He can be said to be present in every part of his kingdom. It was quite possible, he said, that the bread might be converted and yet remain the same bread—just as the paschal lamb remains a lamb when it is made a sacrament and figure of Christ. The bread becomes Christ figuratively, virtually, and tropically, but not corporeally, or even with the body which Christ now wears in heaven.[1] It is more accurate to say that Wyclif defined transubstantiation than to say that he denied it.
That some of these ideas, or the manner in which they are stated and illustrated, should have shocked both such as had not thought the question out and such as, having thought it out, would have preferred that Wyclif should have shown himself a little more squeamish in dealing with it, is not to be wondered at. Amongst the latter may have been Dr. Rygge—if this member of Berton's Council is to be identified with the future Chancellor; which seems, indeed, a little improbable. But, if it were so, he would not by any means be the only prominent man of his day whom Wyclif contrived to win over from the ranks of his enemies.
The inquiry into Wyclif's new teaching was held by the Chancellor and twelve doctors in the Augustinian schools, where Wyclif himself attended, and maintained his opinions with his usual vigour. The doctors in question were Lawndreyn and Rygge, professors of the "sacred page," Mowbray, a doctor of canon and civil law, Gascoyne, a doctor of decretals, Crump, of the Benedictines, with John Wells from the abbey at Ramsey, three Preaching Friars, Chessam, Bruscombe, and Wolverton, the Franciscan Tyssyngton, Shipton of the Augustinians, and Lovey of the Carmelites.
The Chancellor's decision was given with the unanimous consent of his twelve advisers. It does not contain Wyclif's name, but selects for special condemnation these two contentions—that the substance of material bread and wine remains after consecration, and that the body and blood of Christ are not essentially, substantially, and corporeally present in the sacrament, but only figuratively or tropically. These "pestiferous" errors the judgment emphatically condemns, and a solemn monition—primo, secundo, tertio, et districtias—is launched in the usual canonical terms, to the effect that no man thereafter should openly teach or defend those conclusions, or either of them, in the schools or outside, within the University of Oxford, under pain of imprisonment, suspension from all his offices, and the major excommunication.
Wyclif is said to have been disconcerted by this condemnation and threat; but no actual sign of confusion is mentioned. On the contrary, he sat in his chair and listened to the decision, and after it had been read out he contended that neither the Chancellor nor any of his colleagues had been able to break down his argument. Truly a pertinacious heretic, as Netter says of him in this connection!
Nevertheless it must have been a very unwelcome fact for the Reformer and his friends that he should have been condemned, even in this indirect fashion, by the Chancellor of the university with which he was so closely associated, and where he was held in such high honour by a majority of masters and students. The effect of the condemnation must have been greatly weakened by the evident unfairness of putting six friars and two monks on a committee of twelve, selected by a secular clergyman, to inquire into the orthodoxy of a man who on independent grounds had had so many passages of arms with the regular clergy. The University at large appears to have taken this view somewhat decidedly; and thereafter, for at least another twelve-month, the authority of Wyclif amongst his Oxford adherents was greater than ever. Some of them, no doubt, fell away from their allegiance when they found that the authorities were going against him, but he clearly had a strong party up to the middle of 1382. The successor of Berton in the chancellorship was a friend of Wyclif's, Robert Rygge, and no doubt the state of public feeling influenced the selection of a Wycliffite. It should be mentioned that Berton was subsequently credited with having approximated in some measure to the position of the man whom he had condemned.
Wyclif himself had no idea of sitting down calmly under a condemnation pronounced by his personal enemies, and by a Chancellor who had plainly gone beyond the sentiment of the University. He did not affect to treat the decision as impersonal, and therefore one that might be safely ignored. He took it home to himself, and went to the length of addressing a direct appeal to the Crown.
It was the natural and proper appeal under the circumstances. Berton had conducted the inquiry and pronounced his decision as Chancellor, and in the exercise of his authority on a question of university teaching and discipline. His judgment, indeed, was scarcely equitable, and at any rate it strangely jumbled together the academic and the ecclesiastical functions. Berton, like Wyclif, was a secular priest and a regent of divinity, but in both respects the Reformer was senior to the other by several years. The talk of excommunication, however, was only a threat; the effectiveness of the judgment was in its prohibition of certain teaching; and it was against this prohibition that Wyclif rightly appealed from the Chancellor to the Crown. He was, in fact, simply acting in conformity with the royal decree of 1366, and with the consistent claim of the University to be independent in its own sphere of bishops as well as of popes.
At any rate the appeal reached the King's Council; and it is stated by one authority that John of Gaunt himself brought the answer down to Oxford. What was the answer? Was Wyclif still so far potent with the Court as to obtain a technical victory over Berton and the twelve doctors? That would make it easier to understand the temporary removal or withdrawal of the Chancellor, and the elaborate treatises in which Berton himself, Tyssyngton, and others proceeded to combat the views of Wyclif when the Committee of Doctors had failed to silence him. Either the success or the rejection of the appeal would be consistent with the action of the Duke of Lancaster, who is said to have enjoined his friend not to speak further of the new question which he had raised.
It is impossible to help smiling at the magniloquent phrase which Netter, the confessor of Henry V., applies to the grandfather of his monarch in this connection. Hitherto he has had no good word for John of Gaunt, but rather the contrary. Now that the Duke has begun to grow cool towards the heresiarch, he is styled nobilis dominus dux egregius, et miles strenuus, sapiensque consiliarius Dux Lancastriæ, sacræ ecclesiæ filius fidelis. The corrector of William Courtenay and William of Wykeham would scarcely have recognised himself under such a legend. There is no doubt that by this time John of Gaunt was exhibiting far less zeal in the cause which he formerly had so much at heart. He may have found the Church directly and indirectly a good deal stronger than he expected. He may have foreseen that he would need the help of the hierarchy in other and more attractive schemes which were forming themselves in his mind. And observe, by the way, that it was the influence of the Church which set the crown on the head of his son in 1399, and would have set it on his own head if he had lived to the age of sixty. At all events he must have found that to govern through the mother and the Council of the young King was by no means so easy as it had been to govern in the name of his doting father. Be the reason what it may, he had begun to conciliate and flatter the prelates, without in any way regaining thereby the popularity which he had lost amongst the masses of Englishmen. So far had he gone back upon his old policy that, nine years after the exclusion of the clergy from the. higher offices, less than three years after he had undone the work of the Good Parliament, and stripped Wykeham of his temporalities, we find him contriving the nomination of Archbishop Sudbury as Chancellor—apparently in order to make him and the Church in part responsible for the obnoxious poll-tax.
However little sympathy Wyclif might have had with the oppressed labourers and serfs—and we know that his sympathies for them were keen—he would certainly be revolted by this double retrogression. He could not but recognise that he was passing out of touch with the King's uncle; and it may well have happened that this knowledge strengthened and confirmed his independence.
So, when the Duke came down to Oxford (if indeed he came in person) and bade him suppress his conscience, and leave what he considered the idolatry of the mass unchallenged, he positively declined to fall in with the suggestion. Not only so, but he thought it necessary to make his position in the matter still more plain. This he did by means of a Confession, addressed apparently ad suos Oxonienses, and dated on the feast of Saints Gordian and Epimachus (May 10th), in the year 1381.
In the course of this dignified and moderate document, one of the last of his Latin treatises (for he still shrank from disturbing the belief of unlettered persons on so critical a point of faith), Wyclif fully admitted that there was a sense in which Christ's body was really present in the host. But he "could not venture to say that the consecrated bread was essentially, substantially, corporeally, and identically the body of Christ." There were, he said, three modes of presence in the host—virtual, spiritual, and sacramental. The second mode implies (præexigit) the first, and the third implies the other two. Christ's body was more really present in this than in the other sacraments; but it was still more really present in heaven. And this declaration he makes in agreement with the true meaning (logicam) of Scripture, of the holy doctors, and of the canon of the Roman Church. It was only such as could not believe on all this evidence who started the idea that an accident might be the body of Christ. We may well hold that "by virtue of the words of Christ, the bread becomes and is, in miraculous fashion, the body of Christ," in the sense that the parts of that body are spiritually and severally in the consecrated bread and, if the parts of the body, yet more certainly those of the soul. Yet foolish persons continue to raise the old question (idiotæ remurmurant), asking how this could possibly be, unless Christ were present in very substance, and in the natural sense. To which Wyclif replies that he explains it precisely as the Roman doctors explained the incarnation.
Wyclif's conclusion is clearly stated. The consecrated host is naturally bread and wine; but sacramentally it is the body and blood of Christ. The sacrament which we worship is not the substance of bread and wine, but the body and blood of Christ. But the "worshippers of accidents" adore it not even as the simple accident, without the substance; they worship the actual sacramental sign—the bread and wine as being the actual body and blood of Christ. We hold to Christ's very words: "This is my body." nd so we worship the body, no longer the visible bread and wine.
Then he quotes in his support the old doctors of the first millennium, Ignatius, Cyprian, Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, Nicholas II., and the custom of the Church. With these Wyclif contrasts the moderns, who dishonour Christ's body. And he ends with stern words against those who receive the testimony of Innocent and Raymundi rather than the sense of Scripture, and the later rather than the earlier doctrine.
"Above all and once again, woe to the obstinate tongue of the apostate who buries the Roman Church beneath a pile of false utterances, whereby he pretends that the later Church, when opposed to the earlier, has rectified the faith, declaring that this sacrament is an accident without a subject, and not actual bread and wine, as both the Gospel and the canon of the Church affirm. For Augustine is our witness that no priest of Christ can make an accident without a subject. Yet these priests of Baal, falsely after the pattern of their father, so highly extol the sacredness of this accident that they hold every other form of mass unworthy of being listened to, and pretend that all who dissent from their falsehoods are ignoramuses, I suppose, from some university in the realms of darkness. But I believe that the truth will finally bring them into subjection."
There seem to have been many rejoinders to this Confession. John Tyssyngton, a friar of the Order of Franciscans, wrote a terribly long-winded treatise in order to confute Wyclif's views on the sacrament, which Netter has preserved amongst the "wheat" of his promiscuous gleaning (in the Fasciculi Zizaniorum cum Tritico); and an Augustinian friar, Thomas Wynterton, wrote still more at length in his tract Absolutio. Berton and Sutbraye, too the latter a monk of St. Alban's, and both of them members of the Synod which met at the Blackfriars priory in the following year—took up their pens against the irrepressible heretic; and a certain "Dunelmenensis" followed suit. It is clear that the persistent courage of Wyclif, which inspired him to stronger utterance after each successive attempt to crush him, gave abundant provocation and stimulus to the zealous orthodoxy of his contemporaries amongst the regular and secular clergy.
According to Henry of Knyghton, canon of Leicester, who wrote and died in the reign of Richard II., and was therefore a contemporary of Wyclif, as well as a near neighbour, the Rector of Lutterworth made his peace with the Church on this occasion, in order to avoid death, and "abandoned his defence not of divine wisdom but of his hollow professions." Here is the Confession as given by Knyghton—and apparently by him alone.
"I knowleche that the Sacrament of the autar is verry Goddus body in fourme of brede: but it is in another maner Goddus body then it is in hevene. For in heven it is sene fote (seven feet high) in fourme and figure, of fleshe and blode. But in the Sacrament Goddus body is be (by) myracle of God in fourme of brede, and is he nouther of sene fote, ne in mannes figure. But as a man leeves for to thenk the kynde of an ymage, whether it be of oke or of asshe, and settys his thought in him of whom is the ymage, so myche more schuld a man leve to thenk on the kynde of brede, but thenk upon Christ, for his body is the same brede that is the Sacrament of the Autere, and with alle clennes, alle divocion, and alle charite that God wolde gif him, worshippe he Christ; and then he receyves God gostly, more medefully than the Prist that syngus the Masse in lesse charite. For the bodely etyng ne profytes nouth to soule, but in als mykul as the soule is fedde with charite. This sentence is provyde be Crist that may nought lye. For as the Gospel says, ' Crist, that night that he was betraiede of Judas Scarioth, he tok brede in hise hondes, and blesside it, brak it, and gaf it to hise disciplus to ete.' For he says, and may not lye, 'This is my body.'"
Clearly, however, this is no retractation at all, but only a statement of belief in general terms, such as might be used by men almost as opposite in their ultimate conclusions as Wyclif and Courtenay. It is not so much on the symbols of faith that devotees have been wont to quarrel with and burn each other as on their interpretations of the symbols, or rather on the words in which they have attempted to express their interpretations. Mr. T. Arnold has hazarded a suggestion that Knyghton and his friends, in their zeal for orthodoxy, may have put this short English statement into circulation as though it were the substance of the Confession, or the actual Confession, made by Wyclif at Oxford. One would imagine that if his enemies could have brought themselves to such a point of dishonesty they would have taken care to make a better bargain with their consciences.
There are other possible explanations. If the "I knowleche" paper is a genuine production of Wyclif's, and if it was at any time written or accepted as a confession, in order to protect the writer from an unpleasant alternative, the immunity was certainly purchased cheap. But it might have been so. There would have been nothing dishonourable in Wyclif's saying, "If this paper will satisfy you, without elaboration and comment, I am willing to sign it, for it expresses my honest belief." And there would be nothing very extraordinary in Courtenay's accepting it on those terms, for it may have saved him at some particular moment an infinity of trouble, and still have given him the appearance of a triumph, which he could trust the friars to make the most of throughout the country.
This hypothesis, indeed, is scarcely more satisfactory than the other. The last thing which Wyclif would be likely to do of his own free will would be to give his astute foes the opportunity of proclaiming that he had retracted his mature and deliberate opinions. It is possible enough that he may have written such a paper in order to hand it in at the beginning of Berton's inquiry in 1381, or of one of the inquiries held by Courtenay in the following year, as an abstract or text for elucidation. In that case it is easy to understand how the document might come to be called, as it is by Knyghton, a "refugium mortis."
That Wyclif, however, was not merely the obstinate old man who clings to his opinions with senile perversity, and because he has lost the spirit of conciliation, is proved by an admission which he makes in the Trialogus, written after his withdrawal to Lutterworth. "I have undertaken," he says, without indicating when or to whom the promise was made—it may have been either to John of Gaunt or to Courtenay—"not to use out of the schools the term 'substance of material bread and wine.'" It must have cost him dear to make even this conditional promise, which of course is a very different thing from a retractation.
- ↑ Wyclif, said S. T. Coleridge, "was much sounder and more truly Catholic in his view of the Eucharist than Luther. And I find, not without much pleasure, that my own view of it, which I was afraid was original, was maintained in the tenth century—that is to say, that the body broken had no reference to the human body of Christ, but to the kara noumenon, or symbolical body, the Rock that followed the Israelites."—(Table Talk.)