John Wycliffe and Jan Hus: Forerunners of the Reformation

Introduction: Seeds of the Reformation

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 sown years before Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, or Knox came onto the scene. Two of the foremost sowers of reform were John Wycliffe and Jan Hus. This paper discusses the lives, writings, and activities of these two men and shows how they facilitated the setting of the stage for the later Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century.

John Wycliffe: Authority, Sin, and the Church

Wycliffe was the English Catholic priest who most directly prepared the ground for the Reformation. In the latter half of the fourteenth century, while stationed in England, he penned two enormous works: On Divine Dominion and On Civil Dominion. There were a number of central arguments in both works — among them the idea that the Church should divest itself of all its property (a notion that would later be enforced by the Protestants once England fell to that camp).¹ Another key argument was that all authority was derived directly from God and could be forfeited on account of sin. Thus, if a person in a position of power in either the Church or the government demonstrated a particularly sinful disposition, it stood to reason that he would fall out of favor with God and therefore lose the authority entrusted to him.² It was Wycliffe's contention that this principle applied to kings and popes just as much as it did to 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 eighteen points taken from Wycliffe's On Civil Dominion and issued papal orders to have Wycliffe arrested by English authorities.

Wycliffe was undeterred by the Roman pontiff and began redefining a number of the Church's teachings. He rejected the tradition of the Holy Eucharist and transubstantiation — the doctrine holding that the bread 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 gone too far.

Wycliffe had grown up in the shadow of the Black Death, the plague that swept Europe in the fourteenth century, resulting in a massive loss of life throughout the continent — a sign which Wycliffe took to indicate that the "Last Age of the Church" was upon the world.³ The antipope of Avignon likewise cast a shadow over events at this time, and the politics of the day alongside the Church's laxity and growing corruption shaped his outlook. (Chaucer's Canterbury Tales would memorably portray in 1400 the full range of virtue and vice among both laity and churchmen in England.) Wycliffe's writings on sin, authority, the Church, and civil government were thus consistent with the urgent issues of the day, even if his particular conclusions proved deeply problematic for Church authorities such as Gregory XI. Circumstances did not improve in 1381, when a peasant revolt in England put Wycliffe's teachings front and center.

The peasant class looked to Wycliffe for leadership and support, quoting his treatise about corrupt officials forfeiting their authority. Wycliffe, however, refused to declare the king and noblemen of England so sinful as to be no longer legitimate rulers. Even though he thus stepped back from the real-world application of his own assertions — demonstrating by his reluctance just how dangerous and difficult it could be to assess matters of sin and authority — he was nonetheless expelled from Oxford. He returned to his old parish position in Lutterworth, where he launched a new campaign: translating the Bible into English and recommending that every ordinary person have access to Scripture in their own language.

Wycliffe's Radical Theology and Legacy

Wycliffe did not stop with biblical translation. He began to employ lay preachers, clearly laying the groundwork for the Protestants by eroding the separation between clergy and laity. His earlier attacks on the Sacrifice of the Mass had already prepared for this move: 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 perform priestly activities, and laity were perfectly capable of taking up such work. Wycliffe's lay preachers were among the first to support Luther when his writings arrived in England in the following century.

Wycliffe died in his sleep in 1384 — but his body was not left to rest for long. With the coming of the Protestant Reformation, pontifical anger came to target Wycliffe especially. In 1415, the Council of Constance convened, declared Wycliffe a heretic, sanctioned the burning of his writings, and ordered that his body be disinterred from the consecrated ground in which it had been buried — heretics and suicides were not permitted burial in consecrated earth. Wycliffe's remains were accordingly exhumed, burned, and his ashes scattered into the river running through his Lutterworth parish.

Conclusion: The Unraveling of Medieval Church Authority

In this manner, the Church attempted to stem the growing reaction to abuses within its ranks, as well as the anger festering among the noble classes with regard to Roman authority. The wheels had essentially begun to come off, and as the pendulum swung toward severity — in the manner of Savonarola — Rome reacted by bearing down and attempting to tighten its grip. It was too late, however. The doctrine of the Church had become too confused for many, errors had spread too widely, and the common faithful were simply too undereducated to judge between one teaching and another.

As one of the early Jesuits would remark to Ignatius upon entering the Rhineland during the Reformation, the problem was not with the faithful but with the lack of leadership among the clergy — for too many clergy were living openly in sin, scandalizing the laity, and driving them into the arms of the Reformers. Wycliffe and Hus, each in his own way and in his own national context, had illuminated precisely these failures decades before Luther nailed his Theses to the door at Wittenberg.

Bibliography

Atwood, Craig. The Theology of the Czech Brethren from Hus to Comenius. PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009.

Fudge, Thomas. Jan Hus: Religious Reform and Social Revolution in Bohemia. NY: I. B. Tauris, 2010.

Greenaway, James. The Differentiation of Authority: The Medieval Turn Toward Existence. DC: Catholic University Press of America, 2012.

Lahey, Stephen. John Wycliff. UK: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Murray, Thomas. The Life of John Wycliffe. Edinburgh: Boyd, 1829.

Wilhelm, Joseph. "Jan Hus." The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 7. NY: Robert Appleton Company, 1910.