Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe

X THE AGE OF WYCLIF AND HUS

X THE AGE OF WYCLIF AND HUS The last quarter of the fourteenth century and the first quarter of the fifteenth are dominated by two great critics of the Church, John Wyclif in England and John Hus in Bohemia. Both were university graduates in theology, Wyclif from Oxford and Hus from Prague, and both began their careers as scholars and teachers, developed points of view from which they criticized ecclesiastical abuses, and finally drew further and further away from orthodox doctrine, attracting large popular followings as they did so. Indeed, the linkage between learned heretics and popular followings in the cases of Wyclif and Hus is an important aspect of the late Middle Ages. John Wyclif was born around 1330 and spent most of his life at Oxford. His intellectual formation was shaped early by the nominalism of William of Ockham, but WycHf soon turned to a rigid theological Augustinianism and a biblical fundamentalism that led him to criticize ecclesiastical abuse harshly, as in his treatise on the increasingly popular doctrine of indulgences (no. 56) and further in his theological and political writings. In 1378 Pope Gregory XI wrote a letter to the masters and chancellor of Oxford University censuring some of Wyclifs opinions (no. 57), and Wyclifs reply to Gregory's successor, Urban VI (no. 58), suggests both his attitude and something of his sprightly style. Some of Wyclif's admirers spread his ideas through less learned ranks of English society and veered close to a kind of Waldensianism, and their work included the production of an English translation of the Bible. Academics, lower clergy, preachers, and pious lay people from the middle groups in society took over many of Wyclif's doctrines, and they and a group of men from the lower ranks of the nobility were collectively called Lollards. Between their [ 265 1 [ 266 1 Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe anticlericalism, reflected in the Lollard Conclusions of 1394 (no. 60), and their increasing theological deviance, the Lollards became not only the most significant group of dissenters in England, but one of the most interesting movements in lay piety in the later Middle Ages. Wyclif's doctrines appealed to other scholars as well, however, and even long after his death were regarded as sufficiently influential for them to be formerly condemned at the Council of Constance in 1415 (no. 59). Wyclif's ideas also traveled far beyond England, and some of them reached as far as Bohemia and elsewhere in the intellectually cosmopolitan university world of the late fourteenth century. The University of Prague had been founded in 1348 by the Emperor Charles IV, and by the end of the fourteenth century it had become a center for the reform of the Church in Bohemia. From the 1360s on, wandering preachers preached lay piety and anticlerical sentiments, in Czech, to sympathetic audiences. Matthias of Janov (d. 1394), a learned cleric, wrote treatises condemning the wealth and abuse of the Bohemian Church, laying out the principles of a revived spiritual life for lay people, expressing his fear of the coming of Antichrist, and urging frequent communion for the laity. Thus, the Bohemian reform movement, although originally independent of Wyclifism , came to espouse some of its strongest principles, particuarly after Wyclif's writings became known there. John Hus, who was ordained a priest in 1400, first encountered Wyclifs writings at the University of Prague, and when Hus turned his back on a conventional clerical career and became the resident preacher and pastor at the Bethlehem Chapel in Prague, he developed, under Wyclifite influence, his own unique vision of a Christian people and a reformed Church. Ecclesiastical opposition drove Hus into exile in 1412, when he sharpened his doctrinal ideas. His denunciations of clerical abuses (no. 61) and his treatise on the Church of 1413 brought him to the attention of the Council of Constance (1415-18). The council formally condemned Wyclif's doctrines (no. 62), called Hus before it, and examined, condemned, and burned him as a heretic (no. 63). Hus's execution launched a ferocious civil war in Bohemia, and gave the Czech master the character of a martyr. Hussitism and Wyclifism were the last great medieval heresies before the Reformation, and they swept along large numbers of popular followers. For the first time, learned heresy appealed to a popular audience, indicating a linkage that had profound results over the next two centuries. Wyclif, Occam, Marsiglio, and Hus were not, however, the only thinkers concerned with the Church...