Mediæval Heresy & the Inquisition

by Arthur Stanley Turberville

Like Luther after him, then, Wycliffe insisted upon the inner reality of religion, of which the individual is conscious in the depths of his own being. Like Luther also he insisted on the necessity of appeal direct to the Scriptures, as to the supreme authority for the Christian life. As he looked to the laity to reform the Church, so it was necessary that they should be well acquainted with its text. The translation of the Bible into the vulgar tongue became, therefore, an integral part of Wycliffe’s scheme. There were extant in Wycliffe’s day portions of the Scriptures in the vernacular.[149] He conceived the idea of translating all. Probably he himself translated only the Gospels, or perhaps the whole of the New Testament; one of his disciples did the translation of the Old Testament, and may have completed most of it before Wycliffe’s own death.[150] The significance of this great undertaking lies partly in its completeness; but even more in the intention with which it was adopted. The laity must be able to read the actual text of the Scriptures for themselves without the glosses of traditional interpretation and theologians’ exegesis, so that they may know the gospel in its simplicity and view the realities of religion clearly for themselves. To the Bible in the vernacular as such the Church had no objection, but there must be proper safeguards. The people must be taught how to read the Scriptures with understanding by their spiritual masters. The gospel of Christ had been entrusted to the clergy for them to ‘administer gently’ to the laity. Wycliffe’s method meant that the ‘gospel pearl’ was ‘cast forth and trodden down by swine.’[151]

Wycliffe was an idealist, and confessedly his entire conception of the Church and Society is an ideal conception. In spite of its curiously matter-of-fact feudal foundations, Wycliffe’s structure is not of the earth, but Utopian. His conclusions were indeed whittled down by certain important qualifications. Thus, although all men were ideally equal, the existing mode of society and government was sanctioned by God; and it was therefore unlawful to seek to gain by force the equality of possession which flagrantly did not exist—so that Wycliffe’s communism, in so far as it was not spiritual only, was purely anticipatory of a new order in the future; so also it was unlawful to challenge the right to rule of the civil lord on the ground of personal unworthiness, for his power also is sanctioned. As Wycliffe put it in a celebrated phrase, ‘God ought to obey the Devil.’[152] Thus while the ideal theory of dominion ‘founded in grace’ is suggestive of antinomianism and revolution, Wycliffe’s practical teachings were marked by devotion to the existing temporal order. On the other hand, it is not surprising that both opponents and followers should have tended to fasten upon the former aspects of his tenets and give to them a revolutionary interpretation. And indeed the truly significant part of Wycliffite doctrine is revolutionary in the emphasis that it lays upon the individual; and as time went on both the logic of events and the logic of the beliefs to which controversy drove him rendered Wycliffe more and more unequivocal in the essential radicalism of his attitude.

Anti-sacerdotalism led Wycliffe later on to attack a doctrine to which the clergy owed much of their hold upon the popular mind, whence largely came the peculiar veneration in which they were held—the doctrine of Transubstantiation. The miracle of the mass obtained a special note of awesome mystery from that doctrine; and to the ignorant or superstitious mind it was natural to regard those who by the simple pronunciation of the prayer of consecration could transform bread and wine into the body and blood of the Blessed Lord as miracle-workers. For the orthodox philosophy of Wycliffe’s day, Nominalism, there was little difficulty in believing in such a transformation. Wycliffe was a realist, and to him the nominalist position seemed untenable altogether. In the days of Abelard, and again in those of Thomas Aquinas, Realism had been the orthodox philosophy, and Aquinas in demonstrating that the abstract and general truths of Christianity were acceptable to the reason did the Church of his day a great service. But another realist had come after him, who had most trenchantly attacked St. Thomas, destroying all the reasonableness of the great Doctor’s philosophic structure, and emphatically ousting the reason and substituting the authority of the Church as the only sure guide in the sacred mysteries of religion, the only sure foundation of faith. There were action and reaction in the abstract thought of the Middle Ages, as indeed there have ever been in history. The reaction against the Realism of St. Thomas, apparent in Duns Scotus, grew intenser when the principles of Ockham became the popular, and were recognized as the orthodox, principles of Christian theology. It could easily be shown that Realism was apt to lead to exaggerations either heretical or absurd, very apt to end in Pantheism.[153] The fact of the matter was that either school of the scholastic philosophy might be productive of heresy, by laying especial emphasis on one particular aspect of truth to the exclusion of others; that different generations, changing subtly in mental outlook and spiritual temperament, are susceptible to different phases of truth. It is not a matter of Yea or Nay, but simply a varying stress of mode or fashion. But we do not look for recognition of such a fact on the part of any mediæval controversialist. There are no half lights and compromises with them; they have each his own vision of truth, and bitterly assail their opponents as enemies of the light.

So Wycliffe, beginning with a standpoint which could be shared, and in fact was shared, by many of the most orthodox Catholics of his time, growing as he went on more profoundly conscious of, and convinced of, the rightness of his essential principles, became less and less compromising, more and more the opponent not only of practices but of the doctrines with which such practices were associated. He became urgent against the reigning nominalist creed, but most especially against its theories of the Sacrament. For him space and time, matter and form were objective realities. The bread and wine were not a part of Christ and could not become so; they remained bread and wine in substance and could never be anything else, only Christ was present in them.[154] The doctrine of identification between the bread and wine and the body and blood of Christ was pernicious.[155] Nothing could be more horrible than the notion that a priest had the ability to ‘make’ God daily.[156] The language of the service of the Eucharist was not literal, but figurative.[157] The literal interpretation was an invitation to mere idolatry, an encouragement to the ignorant to worship the Host itself.[158] Christ indeed was present in the Sacrament, and the bread and wine were not merely commemorative symbols; on the other hand, there was no miraculous transformation of the elements. This is very much the same theory as Luther’s doctrine of Consubstantiation. Wycliffe united with it the tenet that a priest living in mortal sin could not consecrate.[159]

The extent and nature of the influence of Wycliffitism in England is a difficult and somewhat controversial question.[160] The translation of the Bible certainly had its permanent influence; and the device of the Poor Preachers spread the new doctrines further afield than would have been possible in those days only with the aid of lecture, sermon and treatise. Wycliffe’s character does not appear to have been such as to have enabled him to become the leader of a great popular movement. He was too much of a schoolman; his method was too academic.[161] But the preachers—not to be thought of as crude, semi-educated men, for they were mostly clerks of Oxford, who had studied under Wycliffe—touched a wider public than their master himself reached. Clearly in popularizing, they also exaggerated his doctrines, making them more downright, more practical, more mundane, emphasizing their social tendencies, those communistic elements which had a natural popular appeal.

The Lollards prospered greatly at the first, being particularly successful in the capital itself, Norwich, Bristol, Leicester, Northampton and the larger towns generally. The protection of John of Gaunt and other nobles helped them, while Wycliffe’s denunciation of the friars met with the support of public opinion generally.[162] There seemed a prospect of Wycliffitism becoming really widespread. But separatist tendencies soon showed themselves, and already in 1392 Lollards in the diocese of Salisbury were undertaking ordinations. The Lollards, then, soon showed a tendency to develop into a separate sect, and their hold on the country and their national influence decayed with extraordinary suddenness. This was partly due to the fact that the movement had owed much to the purely ephemeral factor of John of Gaunt’s support; partly to the fact that the favour that its social teachings had won among the peasants was more than counterbalanced by the conservative apprehensions of the larger population who viewed the activities of such men as John Ball with dismay; partly to the fact that the movement produced sharp divisions in families, between father and son, master and servant, and this sort of thing could not last beyond a generation.[163] Extremists took possession of Lollardy and it began to betray a distinct iconoclastic character. But the orthodox zeal of Henry IV and Henry V forced it very much underground, and there were a number of recantations.[164] Lollardy survived into the days of the Tudors, in small communities in country districts, such as the Chilterns, and there was certainly a measure of Wycliffite leaven in the nation; but it is going too far to discover in Lollardy a direct and potent influence in bringing about the English Reformation.

The influence of Wycliffe was deeper and more lasting and vital outside England than within it—for there is a clear and very important connection between Wycliffitism and Husitism in Bohemia. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to regard Wycliffe as the sole parent of the movement inaugurated by Hus; for Hus had forerunners in Bohemia itself, earnest reformers, such as Conrad Waldhäuser, John Militz Kremsier, and Matthias of Janow.[165] The two former were never accused of harbouring heretical opinions; they were simply protestants against clerical abuses. Matthias of Janow, on the other hand, was definitely interested in dogma, a professed theologian. He was notable in appealing directly to the simple people of Christ in his denunciation of the invocation of Saints and his insistence on the administration of the Communion in both kinds to the laity.[166]

The beginnings of the religious movement in Bohemia centre in the drama of the University of Prague, the struggle between the German and native parties—a national struggle which had its significant philosophic counterpart, for Teutonic Nominalism warred against Czech Realism. The struggle was decided in favour of the native party by the famous proclamation of Wenzel, which led to the German exodus from the University. The departure of the German scholars from Prague was a momentous event. Hus and Jerome of Prague had been expounding the doctrines of Wycliffe; the German majority had pronounced these heretical. Wenzel’s decision was therefore a triumph at once for Bohemian nationalism and for the reforming Husite party, a victory for Realism—for heresy. Hus’s satisfaction was great.[167] It was not only the religious issue that appealed to him strongly: he was an intense patriot as well as a religious reformer. The spread of the Husite doctrines, however, naturally received a considerable impetus. The association of certain religious opinions with those national aspirations, to which the revolution at the University had given so marked an encouragement, inevitably converted Husitism into a popular movement. The cause of Husitism and the cause of Bohemian nationalism became so completely dovetailed the one into the other that they were inseparable.

Hus received a papal summons to appear at Bologna to answer for his heretical opinions, which were making Husitism an European question, a dangerous problem to the Church, as serious as Waldensianism and Catharism had been.[168] Hus did not go, appealing from the Pope to Christ. The opinions of the great Bohemian leader were not original; and indeed his greatness is much more moral than intellectual. Starting his career solely as a protestant against sacerdotal abuses, he was led by the influence of the doctrines of Wycliffe, which the close association between England and Bohemia at the time made familiar in the latter country, into adopting many of the tenets of the Oxford heresiarch.[169] His ‘De Ecclesia’ is little more than a translation of Wycliffe. On the whole, he remained distinctly more orthodox than his master. His writings abound in denunciations of the worldliness of the clergy, in particular of the papacy; denunciations of simony (which is heresy), of the claim of the papacy to overlordship of the Church, based on no better foundation than the death of St. Peter in Rome.[170] Heresy, he also declared, was not triable by the Church.[171] But the really fundamental article of his questionable doctrines was his conception of Predestination. Here he was following Augustine; but he was under the influence of Wycliffe’s idea of ‘dominion founded in grace,’ which gave the right of lordship and possession only to the elect.[172] This principle, involving the position that only the ‘rule of the saints’ is legitimate, had clearly a dangerous tendency, subversive of law and order in an imperfect world, both in the secular and the ecclesiastical spheres. Yet the principal element of danger in Husitism was the simple fact of its success. So serious was this that when the remarkable attempt was made to heal the wounds of Christendom by means of General Councils, the fathers aimed at dealing with the problem of heresy together with those of the restoration of the unity, which had been broken by the Schism, and the reform of clerical abuses.