A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages; volume II

by Henry Charles Lea

All these tenets of which they were accused the Wickliffites admitted and defended in the most incisive fashion, but there were two articles which they denied. Wickliff’s teaching so closely resembled that of the Waldenses that it was natural that the orthodox should attribute to him the two Waldensian errors which regarded all oaths as unlawful, and held that priests in mortal sin could not administer the sacraments. To the former, his followers replied that, though they rejected all unnecessary swearing, they admitted that “If hit be nedeful for to swere for a spedful treuthe men mowe wele swere as God did in the olde lawe.” As to the latter, they said that the sinful priest can give sacraments efficient to those who worthily receive them, though he receive damnation unto himself. The prominence of the Fraticelli also suggested the imputation that the Wickliffites believed the entire renunciation of property to be essential to salvation; but this they denied, saying that a man might make lawful gains and hold them, but that he must use them well.[485]

All these antisacerdotal teachings flowed directly from the resoluteness with which Wickliff carried out to its logical conclusion the Augustinian doctrine of predestination, thus necessarily striking at the root of all human mediation, the suffrages of the saints, justification by works, and all the machinery of the Church for the purchase and sale of salvation. In this, as in the rest, Huss followed him, though the distinction between his principles and the orthodox ones of the Thomists and other schoolmen was too subtle to render this point one which the Church could easily condemn.[486]

The one serious speculative error of Wickliff lay in his effort to reconcile the mystery of the Eucharist with the stubborn fact that after consecration the bread remained bread and the wine continued to be wine. He did not deny conversion into the body and blood of Christ; they were really present in the sacrifice, but his reason refused to acknowledge transubstantiation, and he invented a theory of the remanence of the substance coexisting with the divine elements. Into these dangerous subtleties Huss refused to follow his master. It was the one point on which he declined to accept the reasoning of the Englishman, and yet, as we shall see, it served as a principal excuse for hurrying him to the stake.

Wickliff’s career as a heresiarch was unexampled, and its peculiarities serve to explain much that would otherwise be incomprehensible in the growth and tolerance of his doctrines in Bohemia, and in the simplicity with which Huss refused to believe that he could himself be regarded as a heretic. Although, as early as 1377, the assistance which Wickliff rendered to Edward III. in diminishing the papal revenues moved Gregory XI. to command his immediate prosecution as a heretic, yet the political situation was such as to render ineffectual all efforts to carry out these instructions; he was never even excommunicated, and was allowed to die peacefully in his rectory of Lutterworth on the last day of the year 1384. No further action was taken by Rome until the question of his heresy was raised in Prague. Although, in 1409, Alexander V. ordered Archbishop Zbinco not to permit his errors to be taught or his books to be read, yet when, in 1410, John XXIII. referred his writings to a commission of four cardinals, who convoked an assembly of theologians for their examination, a majority decided that Archbishop Zbinko had not been justified in burning them. It was not until the Council of Rome, in 1413, that there was a formal and authoritative condemnation pronounced, and it was left for the Council of Constance, in 1415, to proclaim Wickliff as a heresiarch, to order his bones exhumed, and to define his errors with the authority of the Church Universal. Huss might well, to the last, believe in the authenticity of the spurious letters of the University of Oxford, brought to Prague about 1403, in which Wickliff was declared perfectly orthodox, and might conscientiously assert that his books continued to be read and taught there.[487]

The marriage of Anne of Luxembourg, sister of Wenceslas of Bohemia, to Richard II., in 1382, led to considerable intercourse between the kingdoms until her death, in 1394. Many Bohemians visited England during the excitement caused by Wickliff’s controversies, and his writings were carried to Prague, where they found great acceptance. Huss tells us that about 1390 they commenced to be read in the University of Prague, and that they continued thenceforth to be studied. No orthodox Bohemian had hitherto ventured as far as the daring Englishman, but there were many who had entered on the same path, to say nothing of the secret Waldensian heretics, and the general feeling excited throughout Germany by the reckless simony and sale of indulgences which marked the later years of Boniface IX. Thus the movement which had been in progress since the middle of the century received a fresh impulsion from the circumstances under which the works of Wickliff were perused and scattered abroad in innumerable copies. All of his treatises were eagerly sought for. A MS. in the Hofbliothek of Vienna gives a catalogue of ninety of them which were known in Bohemia, and it is to those regions that we must look for the remains of his voluminous labors, the greater part of which were successfully suppressed at home. In time he came to be reverenced as the fifth Evangelist, and a fragment of stone from his tomb was venerated at Prague as a relic. Still more suggestive of his commanding influence is the fidelity with which Huss followed his reasoning, and oftentimes the arrangement, and even the words, of his treatises.[488]

John of Husinec, commonly known as Huss, who became the leading exponent and protomartyr of Wickliffitism in Bohemia, is supposed to have been born in 1369, of parents whose poverty forced him to earn his own livelihood. In 1393 he obtained the degree of bachelor of arts; in 1394 that of bachelor of theology; in 1396 that of master of arts; but the doctorate he never attained, though in 1398 he was already lecturing in the university; in 1401 he was dean of the philosophical faculty, and rector in 1402. Curiously enough, he embraced the Realist philosophy, and won great applause in his combats with the Nominalists. So little promise did his early years give of his career as a reformer that, in 1392, he spent his last four groschen for an indulgence, when he had only dry crusts for food. In 1400 he was ordained as priest, and two years later he was appointed preacher to the Bethlehem chapel, where his earnest eloquence soon rendered him the spiritual leader of the people. The study of Wickliff’s writings, begun shortly after this, quickened his appreciation of the evils of a corrupted Church, and when Archbishop Zbinco of Hasenburg, shortly after his consecration in 1403, appointed him as preacher to the annual synods, Huss improved the opportunity to address to the assembled clergy a series of terrible invectives against their worldliness and filthiness of living, which excited general popular hatred and contempt for them. After one of peculiar vigor, in October, 1407, the clamor among the ecclesiastics grew so strong that they presented a formal complaint against him to Archbishop Zbinco, and he was deprived of the position. By this time he was recognized as the leader in the effort to purify the Church, and to reduce it to its ancient simplicity, with such men as Stephen Palecz, Stanislas of Znaim, John of Jessinetz, Jerome of Prague, and many others eminent for learning and piety as his collaborators. To some of these he was inferior in intellectual gifts, but his fearless temper, his unbending rectitude, his blameless life, and his kindly nature won for him the affectionate veneration of the people and rendered him its idol.[489]

Discussion grew hot and passions became embittered. Old jealousies and hatreds between the Teutonic and Czech races contributed to render the religious quarrel unappeasable. The vices and oppression of the clergy had alienated from them popular respect, and the fiery diatribes of the Bethlehem chapel were listened to eagerly, while the Wickliffite doctrines, which taught the baselessness of the whole sacerdotal system, were welcomed as a revelation, and spread rapidly through all classes. King Wenceslas was inclined to give them such support as his indolence and self-indulgence would permit, and his queen, Sophia, was even more favorably disposed. Yet the clergy and their friends could not submit quietly to the spoliation of their privileges and wealth, although the Great Schism, in weakening the influence of the Roman curia, rendered its support less efficient. Preachers who assailed their vices were thrown into prison as heretics and were exiled, and the writings of Wickliff, which formed the key of the position, were fiercely assaulted and desperately defended. The weak point in them was the substitution of remanence for transubstantiation; and although this was discarded by Huss and his followers, it served as an unguarded point through which the whole position might be carried. The synod of 1405 asserted the doctrine of transubstantiation in its most absolute shape; any one teaching otherwise was pronounced a heretic, and was ordered to be reported to the archbishop for punishment. In 1406 this was repeated in a still more threatening form, showing that the Wickliffite views had obstinate defenders; as, indeed, is to be seen by a tract of Thomas of Stitny, written in 1400. Already, in 1403, a series of forty-five articles extracted from Wickliff’s works was formally condemned by the university. Around these the battle raged with fury; the condemnation was repeated in 1408, and in 1410 Archbishop Zbinco solemnly burned in the courtyard of his palace two hundred of the forbidden books, while the populace revenged itself by singing through the streets rude rhymes, in which the prelate is said to have burned books which he could not read; for his ignorance was notorious, and he was reported to have first acquired the alphabet after his elevation.[490]

In the strife between rival popes it suited the policy of King Wenceslas, in 1408, to maintain neutrality, and he induced the university to send envoys to the cardinals who had renounced allegiance to both Benedict XIII. and Gregory XII. In this mission were included Stephen Palecz and Stanislas of Znaim, but the whole party fell, in Bologna, into the hands of Balthasar Cossa, the papal legate (afterwards John XXIII.), who threw them all in prison as suspect of heresy, and it required no little effort to secure their release. This adventure cooled the zeal of Stephen and Stanislas; they gradually changed sides, and from the warmest friends of Huss they became, as we shall see, his most dangerous and implacable enemies.[491]

In this affair the university had not seconded the wishes of the king with the alacrity which he had expected, and Huss took advantage of the royal displeasure to effect a revolution in that institution, which had hitherto proved the chief obstacle in the progress of reform. It was divided, in the ordinary manner, into four “nations.” As each of these nations had a vote, the Bohemians constantly found themselves outnumbered by the foreigners. It was now proposed to adopt the constitution of the University of Paris, where the French nation had three votes, and all the foreign nations collectively but one. The vacillation of Wenceslas delayed decision, but in January, 1409, he signed the decree which ordered the change. The German students and professors bound themselves by a vow to procure the revocation of the decree or to leave the university. Failing in the former alternative, they abandoned the city in vast numbers, founding the University of Leipsic, and spreading throughout Europe the report that Bohemia was a nest of heretics. The dyke was broken down, and the flood of Wickliffitism poured over the land with little to check its progress. In vain did Alexander V. and John XXIII. command Archbishop Zbinco to suppress the heresy, and in vain did the struggling prelate hold assemblies and issue comminatory decrees. The tide bore all before it, and Zbinco at last, in 1411, abandoned his ungrateful see to appeal to Wenceslas’s brother Sigismund, then recently elected King of the Romans, but died on the journey.[492]

This removed the last obstacle. The new archbishop, Albik of Unicow, previously physician to Wenceslas, was old and weak, and more given to accumulating money than to defending the faith. He was said to carry the key of his wine-cellar himself, to have only a wretched old crone for a cook, and to sell habitually all presents made to him. Thoroughly unfitted for the crisis, he resigned in 1413, and was succeeded by Conrad of Vechta, who, after some hesitation, cast his lot with the followers of Huss. Yet, during these troubles, the papal Inquisition seems to have been established in Prague, and, strangely enough, to have seen nothing in the Hussite movement to call for its interference, though it could act against Waldenses and other recognized heretics. When, in 1408, the king ordered Archbishop Zbinco to make a thorough perquisition after heresy, Nicholas of Vilemonic, known as Abraham, priest of the Church of the Holy Spirit in Prague, was tried before the inquisitors Moritz and Jaroslav for Waldensianism, and was thrown into prison for asserting that he could preach under authority from Christ without that of the archbishop. Huss interposed in his favor, but his liberation was postponed through his refusal to repeat, on the Gospels, an oath which he had already sworn by God. One of the accusations brought against Huss at Constance was the favor which he showed to Waldensian and other heretics; and yet, when he was about to depart on his fateful journey to Constance, the papal inquisitor Nicholas, Bishop of Nazareth, gave him a formal certificate, attested by a notarial act, to the effect that he had long known him intimately, and had never heard an heretical expression from him, and that no one had ever accused him of heresy before the tribunal. The Hussite and Waldensian movements were too nearly akin for Huss not to sympathize with the acknowledged heretics, and in the virtual spiritual anarchy of these tumultuous years Waldensian influence must have made itself more and more felt, and the sectaries must have been emboldened to show themselves ever more openly.[493]