Forerunners of the Protestant Reformation Wycliffe and Hus Essay

Wycliffe and Hus

The Protestant Reformation was not an event that sprang full-grown upon Europe like Athena out of the head of Zeus; the seeds of the Reformation had in fact been sewn years before Luther or Zwingli or Calvin or Knox came onto the scene. Two of the foremost seeders of "reform" were John Wycliffe and Jan Hus. This paper will discuss the lives, writings and activities of these two men and show they facilitated the setting of the stage for the later Protestant Reformers of the 16th century.

Wycliffe was the English Catholic priest who set the foremost stage for the Reformation when in the latter half of the 14th century he penned two enormous works: On Divine Dominion and On Civil Dominion while stationed in England. There were a number of thrusts to his argument in both works -- such as the idea that the Church should divest itself of all its property (a notion that would be enforced by the Protestants once England fell to that camp);[footnoteRef:1] another was that all authority was derived directly for God and could be lost on account of sin. Thus, if a person in a position of power in either or the Church or in the government demonstrated a particularly sinful proclivity, it stood to reason that he would fall out of favor with God and therefore lose the authority entrusted to him through a process of forfeiture.[footnoteRef:2] It was Wycliffe's contention that the principle applied to kings and popes just as much as it did to lesser persons of lower stations in life. These works were highly inflammatory. When Pope Gregory XI returned to Rome in 1377, following the end of the Avignon Papacy, he condemned 18 points taken from Wycliffe's On Civil Dominion and issued papal orders to have Wycliffe arrested by English authorities. [1: Stephen Lahey, John Wycliff (UK: Oxford University Press, 2008), 47.] [2: James Greenaway, The Differentiation of Authority: The Medieval Turn Toward Existence (DC: Catholic University Press of America, 2012), 127.]

Wycliffe was undeterred by the Roman pontiff and began redefining a number of the Church's teachings -- for example, he rejected the tradition of the Holy Eucharist and transubstantiation (the doctrine holding that the water and wine consecrated by the priest at Mass become the physical body and blood of Jesus while still maintaining the appearance of bread and wine) and held that Jesus was not present in either substance. This was so radical a heresy that even many of his supporters felt that Wycliffe had deviated from the right track.

Wycliffe had grown up in the shadow of the Black Death, the plague that swept Europe in the 14th century, resulting in a massive loss of life throughout the continent, and a sign which Wycliffe took to indicate that the "Last Age of the Church" was upon the world.[footnoteRef:3] The antipope of Avignon (the challenger to the claim to the See passed down by Peter) likewise cast a shadow over events at this time and the politics of the day alongside the Church's laxity and growingly evident corruption (Chaucer's Canterbury Tales would define in 1400 the English populace -- churchmen and women included -- in a remarkable presentation of the range in virtue that existed among both laity and churchmen). Wycliffe's writings on the issues of sin, authority and the Church and civil government were thus consistent, in terms of subject, with the issues of the day. His own take on these issues, however, is it what was the problem for Church authorities like Gregory XI. Circumstances did not improve in 1381 when a peasant revolt in England put Wycliffe's teachings front and center. [3: Thomas Murray, The Life of John Wycliffe (Edinburgh: Boyd, 1829), 29.]

The peasant class looked to Wycliffe for leadership and support and quoted his treatise about the corruption of officials causing them to lose their authority. Wycliffe, however, refused to come to the aid of the peasants and declare the king and noblemen of England to be so sinful that they were no longer the legitimate officials of the realm. Even though Wycliffe thus stepped back from his assertions and, when it came to applying them in the real world, proved by his own reluctance just how dangerous and difficult it could be to assess matters of sin and authority, he was still nonetheless expelled from Oxford. He thus returned to his old parish position in Lutterworth where he began a new campaign: this time he set about translating the Bible into English, recommending that every peasant have the Bible in his own language.

Wycliffe did not stop there, however; he began to employ lay preachers (clearly laying the groundwork for the Protestants by removing the separation between clergy and laity). His attacks on the Sacrifice of the Mass had essentially already prepared for this, for if there was no real consecration or transubstantiation at the Mass, then there was no real need for the consecrated hands of a priest to do priestly activities: laity were perfectly capable of taking up the job, so Wycliffe felt. Wycliffe's lay preachers were among the first to come to the support of Luther when his writings arrived in England in the following century.

Wycliffe died in his sleep in 1384 -- but his bodied was not lain to rest for long. With the coming scourge to the Church that was the Protestant Reformation, pontifical ire came to target Wycliffe especially. In 1415, the Council of Constance convened, declared Wycliffe heretical, sanctioned the burning of his writings and ordered that his body be displaced from the consecrated ground in which it was lain (heretics and suicides were not permitted to be buried in consecrated earth). Thus, Wycliffe was burned and his ashes scattered into the river running through his Lutterworth parish.

Jan Hus came to a similar fate -- except he was burned at the stake while still alive. Hus was a Bohemian of the 14th century, educated in Prague and eventually consecrated to the priesthood of the Church in Czech. The corruption of clergy in the Church by the 14th century was a strong motivator for Hus to lash out at abuses and call for reform. Instead of appealing to traditional teachings accepted by the Church, however, he pushed for reform on the grounds of doctrine, too. In this arena, he was highly influenced by the writings of Wycliffe and began to attack (like the Protestants after him) while some viewed him as attacking the doctrine of transubstantiation (they believed that Hus taught that God became bread -- a contradiction of the Church teaching that God became flesh under the species of bread and wine), the Eucharistic sacrifice of the Mass, and matters of ecclesiology, others viewed Hus as a return to the kind of medieval scholasticism that had flourished in Christendom centuries earlier -- a defender of the Faith that had been lost throughout Europe as a result of clerical corruption, simony and an abuse of ecclesiastical authority.[footnoteRef:4] What Hus objected to was the error of certain priests of his time to boast that they themselves were responsible for turning the bread into the Body of God when, for him, the action of transubstantiation was wholly dependent upon the action of God. Hus placed emphasis on the divine intervention and dismissed the action of the priest as a vain boast. Likewise, he "objected to people's placing their faith in the Virgin Mary or one of the saints rather than in Christ" -- though he was not opposed to veneration of the saints; this point put him in line with the coming Puritanical approach to the exercise of the Christian religion (Christ-centered with a step away from devotion to the saints/Virgin for the sake of intercession).[footnoteRef:5] [4: Joseph Wilhelm, "Jan Hus," The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 7 (NY: Robert Appleton Company, 1910); Craig Atwood, The Theology of the Czech Brethren from Hus to Comenius (PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), lxxii.] [5: Craig Atwood, The Theology of the Czech Brethren from Hus to Comenius (PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), lxxii.]

Like Wycliffe, Hus too was impacted by the Western Schism (the effects of the Avignon papacy) and ended up supporting the antipope Alexander V, whom the Council of Pisa had attempted to make legitimate as the actual pope -- though Gregory did not accept the declaration and it would be overturned less than a decade later at the Council of Constance. Hus's willingness to support the "secessionist cardinals" at the Council of Pisa indicated that he was open to taking a stance against the papacy in Rome -- and his defense of Wycliffe in response to the papacy's proclamation that the heretic's writings be confiscated and burned showed as much.[footnoteRef:6] [6: Joseph Wilhelm, "Jan Hus," The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 7 (NY: Robert Appleton Company, 1910).]

Hus was summoned by the pope to justify his actions regarding his defense of Wycliffe even after the latter's writings were condemned. Hus refused to…