John Wyclif (review)

The reputation of John Wyclif, writer and thinker, has become disjoined from his actual achievement, and many of the events of his life remain tantalizingly vague. The “real” Wyclif is therefore hard to pin down. Stephen Lahey has concentrated his excellent study on Wyclif the intellectual and writer, whom modern scholarship is perhaps in a better position to understand than any earlier generation. He leaves the question of Wyclif’s influence on the Lollards—and distantly on the Reformation—to the latter part of the book and treats it in a relatively cursory fashion. It is, as he notes, a subject in its own right. Lahey also lightly treats the personal impact on Wyclif of the controversies that swirled around him, which are covered chiefly in the preliminary short biography and not as an inseparable part of the forming of his mind and opinions.

After a preliminary chapter of biography and bibliography and another setting Wyclif’s work in its Oxford context, the arrangement is thematic. First comes an analysis of the foundation studies of “logic and metaphysics” that formed part of the Arts course; then chapters on “Denying Transubstantiation: Physics, Eucharist and Apostasy”; “The Logic of Scripture”; “Predestination and the Church”; and finally, a chapter proposing dominium as the “foundation of Wyclif’s political and ecclesiological vision.” This works well as a method of dividing the key topics of Wyclif’s own preoccupations, less well perhaps as a way of understanding how his thought developed.

Lahey also had to grapple with the problem of approach: the question of whether Wyclif’s preoccupation with these topics and other priorities should be explained first. The difficulty is that there are two intellectual “histories” to be related. On the one hand, there is the long heritage of theological writing that had shaped the work of contemporary schools. For example, in the case of “Predestination and the Church” the heritage was strongly Augustinian. It was St. Augustine who had realized the enormity of the difficulty of reconciling a doctrine of grace with a doctrine that there is nulla salus extra ecclesiam, and balancing both with the notion of free will and the conviction that to God all things are known and nothing happens that he does not intend. On the other hand, there were contemporary controversies and the still-unresolved uncertainty as to whether it is possible to speak of schools of thought or the distinctive influence of particular controversialists. The live battles of his university life manifestly sharpened Wyclif’s appetite and aroused his combative spirit.

The chapter on dominium comes late in the book, which is a pity, since it seems to have been Wyclif who gave the term its medieval currency and made it controversial in a new way. It was from his preoccupation with dominium that his subsequent troubles largely flowed, for it led him to challenge powerful vested interests in church and state.

This study provides a clear, orderly, and accessible analysis of the often technically obscure and immensely complicated arguments of a major medieval figure. Here we have Wyclif the “thinker” put in his place in a convenient short volume.