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...
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