The Beginning of a Revolution
The Beginning of a Revolution
“Indeed, no one does more injury in the church than he who acts perversely and yet has the name and order of sanctity.” – attributed to Jan Hus
In 1398, Hus was appointed examiner, lecturer at the Faculty of Arts, and a professor of theology at his alma mater, which was a requisite for his master's degree. A total of 23 students were placed under his charge, and it was his goal to secure the post of master at Charles University, but his progress was thwarted by the rambling queue of qualified professionals vying for the same position. At the time, the university was home to 500 bachelor of arts holders, about 200 doctors, and 30,000 eager students.
Forced to keep his ambitions on hold, Hus remained in the boarding house that he resided in throughout his university years, and during this time, he directed his efforts towards enhancing his portfolio. On top of his arts and theology lectures, he picked up a few odd jobs, mainly tutoring and serving as a guest lecturer at associated universities. Although he was not the most educated scholar on the university's roster, his students were drawn to the energy and passion he exhibited in his lessons on a daily basis. The impact he had on his students, coupled with the loyalty and respect they had for their professor, would be especially evident in the later years of his life.
Hus was a jack of all trades, but a master of none. For instance, he was somewhat practiced in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, but his knowledge in these subjects paled in comparison to the more seasoned professors on the staff. He was, however, well-versed in the works of Plato and Aristotle, basing many of his lectures on the latter's On the Soul, as well as On Generation (And Corruption). Records also suggest that he taught physics and metaphysics, but the extent of his grasp on other scientific subjects is unknown. In the spring of 1398, Hus also served as the master of the ceremony for the graduating class, among them John Cerny of Recice.
Hus was celebrated by his students not for his proficiency in the subjects he was assigned, but for his unique philosophy when it came to education. Knowledge, particularly in secular subjects, Hus insisted, was not everything. An excerpt from one of his sermons told listeners, “First of all, we must learn that which is most necessary to salvation, that which stimulates us to love, for we should not learn for vainglory or curiosity, but to the edification of ourselves and of our neighbors, and to the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. There are some who wish to know, for the sake of knowing, and that is curiosity. And there are still others who wish to know, in order to sell their knowledge for wealth and honor, and that is ignoble desire for gain. But there are likewise some who desire to know, in order to edify, and that is love, and still others who desire to know, in order to be edified themselves, and that is wisdom.”
All the while, even with his habitual indulgence purchases, he remained deeply remorseful of his past conduct, as evidenced in this letter he later wrote to Master Martin, one of his students: “You have known my preaching and exhortations from your childhood; but I beseech you, by the mercy of our Lord, not to follow me in any of the vanities into which you have seen me fall. Know, alas, that before I became a priest, I consumed a great deal of my time in playing chess, and in that doing so, I was often angry at myself and provoked others to anger. I beg your prayers for this sin of mine and for my innumerable transgressions.”
During the weekends, Hus continued to assist and sing for the choirs of the local churches. His work ethic and perseverance eventually paid off, as he was ordained as a priest in the summer of 1400. He had at long last entered the clergy, but he was not bound to any one church, so he preached at the Church of St. Michael in the Old Town and other parishes in the neighborhood. Hus was overjoyed by his ordination - not only was he now licensed to spread the gospel, he was finally granted the financial security and satisfactory standard of living he had been pining after for so long. At the same time, Hus continued to plug away at his academic career, which resulted in a promotion to dean of the philosophical department at the university in 1401.
On the 14th of March in the following year, Hus was hired as one of the resident preachers at the Bethlehem Chapel and thereupon began to refer to himself as the “rector and preacher in the Chapel of the Holy Innocents of Bethlehem in the old and great city of Prague.” He wore the wordy title like a badge of honor, as he was proud to be part of such a prominent and thriving institution. Although the chapel was erected in 1391, just 11 years before his appointment, the church had become one of the largest religious establishments in all of Europe, boasting well over 3,000 members.
As thrilled as he was to now be formally attached to a parish, Hus immediately took notice of the shortcomings of his seemingly impressionable and potentially corruptible colleagues, as well as the problematic system employed by his workplace. As Hus himself later confessed, he decided against ruffling any feathers for fear of losing his newly acquired position, choosing instead to give his colleagues the benefit of the doubt. What it was that changed his mind is still debated to this day.
As previously mentioned, there was not a singular, metamorphic “conversion experience” that opened his eyes to his own infirmities and the disappointing failings of the Church. According to Hus, “When the Lord gave me knowledge of Scriptures, I discharged from my foolish mind that kind of stupid fun-making, and in time, saw the light.” The majority of his biographers, however, believe that John Wycliffe played an instrumental role in steering Hus towards his ultimate path.
Wycliffe
Hus was first introduced to Wycliffe by Jerome of Prague, a close friend of his and a fellow martyr in the making, in 1402. Upon returning from his trip to England, Jerome loaned Hus a collection of Wycliffe's works, which he had painstakingly copied by hand while studying at Oxford University. Jerome proclaimed, “Young men and students who did not study the books of Wycliffe would never find the true root of knowledge.” Curiously, Jerome conveniently failed to mention the reformer's troubling reputation, namely that he had been branded a blasphemous heretic by the religious authorities in England. Even more concerning, Wycliffe's devotees were being forced to disavow the heretic, and those who refused were promptly executed.
Hus was eventually apprised of Wycliffe's reputation by an unidentified friend who caught him scrutinizing the English reformer's texts. That friend attempted to coax him into chucking the dangerous literature into the Vlatva River, but Hus, who had become deeply engrossed in Wycliffe's unorthodox, but compelling ideas, would do no such thing. His admiration for the reformer was evinced in the notes he scrawled on the margins of the manuscripts, one of which read, “Dear Wycliffe, may God grant you eternal bliss...Wycliffe, you will turn many a head.”
A contemporary depiction of Wycliffe’s books being burned
Wycliffe, who was frustrated with the deterioration of the Church and the delinquency of its officials, had campaigned to restore order to the institution. First and foremost, he questioned the concept of transubstantiation, “the change by which the substance...of the bread and wine in the Eucharist becomes Christ's Real Presence – that is, his body and blood…The bread while becoming by virtue of Christ's words the body of Christ does not cease to be bread.” He picked apart the sacrament of confession: “Private confession...was not ordered by Christ, and was not used by the apostles.” He urged all Christians to forgo the Church's dubious new-age teachings, and to return to Christ. “Trust wholly in Christ,” wrote Wycliffe. “Rely altogether on his sufferings. Beware of seeking to be justified in any other way than by his righteousness.”
Furthermore, Wycliffe protested against the installation of two popes, as well as the papacy itself. “England belongs to no pope,” Wycliffe declared in his Civil Dominion of 1376. “The pope is but a man, subject to sin, but Christ is the Lord of Lords and this kingdom is to be held directly and solely of Christ alone.”
What truly caught Hus' attention was Wycliffe's scathing criticism of simony and indulgences. Wycliffe railed against the practice, writing, “The indulgences of the pope...are a manifest blasphemy, in as much as he claims a power to save men almost without limit, and not only to mitigate the penalties of those who have sinned, by granting them the aid of absolution and indulgences, that they may never come to purgatory...The friars give a color to this blasphemy, by saying that Christ is omnipotent...and that the pope is his plenary vicar on earth, and so possesses in everything the same power as Christ in his humanity.”
Hus was also moved by Wycliffe's initiative, especially his decision to translate the Latin Bible into English with the help of John Purvey. The Church, inevitably, resisted the idea, and officials asserted, “By this translation, the Scriptures have become vulgar, and they are more available to lay, and even to women who can read, than they were to learned scholars, who have a high intelligence. So the pearl of the gospel is scattered and trodden underfoot by swine.” Still, Wycliffe stood his ground, replying, “Englishmen learn Christ's law best in English. Moses heard God's law in his own tongue; so did Christ's apostles.” This was most likely what motivated Hus to modernize the Bohemian Bible in later years.
Hus also found muses among local theologians. One of them was Konrád Waldhauser, an Australian author, preacher, and reformer who was invited to Prague in 1363 by Emperor Charles IV. Waldhauser's sermons, which stressed the importance of Scripture and censured the avarice of local priests and simony practitioners, were supposedly so popular that they attracted various sects of the Christian faith and even Jews. Waldhauser's lambasting of the Church, naturally, incited the wrath of the city's clerics, but he, too, persisted with his fiery campaign.
Soon thereafter, Waldhauser's ideas were adopted by Milic of Kromerize, also hailed as one of the fathers of the Bohemian reformation. Milic's preaching style, characterized as “entirely biblical” as opposed to “scholastic,” earned him equal shares of praise and condemnation. He spotlighted the rise of the “anti-christ” and the “abomination of desolation” running rampant within the Church, but his assertion that ascetic, devout laymen were morally superior to unrighteous clergymen was what fueled most enmity towards him.
It was only after being introduced to the aforementioned reformers' ideas that Hus began his crusade against the Church. Hus honed in on Father Bernard, the leader of St. Michael's Church, whom he called “a very great enemy of the Word of God.” He confronted the incumbent head of the establishment at private dinners, arguing with him about the various inconsistencies of the Church's doctrine. When Hus realized that their heated exchanges were bearing no fruit, he made the Church's backwards canons the subject of his sermons.
A contemporary depiction of Hus preaching
Although Hus refrained from singling Bernard out in his sermons, the church leader was still livid about the tendentious preacher's apparent mission to divide the already crumbling congregation. Bernard stormed into Hus' living quarters and vehemently demanded that he put an end to his “misguided” tirades at once. Perhaps fearing the forfeiture of his newly-acquired post, Hus grudgingly agreed to water down his criticisms for the time being.
Although Hus undoubtedly placed Wycliffe on a pedestal, he did not share all of the reformer's beliefs. Joseph Kalmer and Paul Roubiczek, authors of Warrior of God: The Life and Death of John Hus, note that Hus “did not fiercely attack the adoration of saints, nor the medieval church service...he only fought against the abuses within the church.” He was also not opposed to the idea of transubstantiation; instead, he urged the Church to administer to all laypersons full communion. At the time, laypersons were only allowed to consume the body of Christ, while the blood of Christ was reserved for priests.
Not surprisingly, Hus initially had no intentions of creating a new sect. Trevor O'Reggio, author of John Huss and the Origins of the Protestant Reformation explained, “Hus was not calling for any new doctrine, but for what he believed was a restoration of pure Christianity as taught in the Bible. Although at first, theological and devotional, the Bohemian reformation swiftly turned into a social revolution. As Hus began to see more clearly the errors of the church, the gap between the Bohemian reformers and the establishment became so wide that their views became irreconcilable.”
Church leaders were unquestionably fearful of Hus' increasing influence within the community, and rightfully so. Though he was barely 30, he had access to tens of thousands of pliable minds, a tremendous congregation that most in his position could only dream of in Europe. Throughout the 12 years of Hus' tenure at Bethlehem Chapel, he headlined over 3,500 sermons (twice a day every Sunday), and that doesn’t count the services he held in neighboring churches. Christians from all walks of life, ranging from lowly peasants and artisans to nobility (including Queen Sophia of Bavaria, the consort of King Wenceslaus IV) poured into the chapel unfailingly every week, anxious to hear the electrifying sermons of the young priest.
The Martinická Bible’s representation of Hus, the oldest known surviving depiction of him
Unwilling to squander the prodigious platform that he had been gifted, Hus quickly revived his campaign against the corruptions of the Church. The sanctity of rectitude and repentance, Hus declared, had been sullied, as sinners were committing sins everywhere, pursuing extramarital affairs and engaging in all forms of debauchery. They no longer felt the need to honor the laws laid down by Scripture, for they were now protected by a sheet of paper that allegedly cleansed them of all wrongdoing. One could even purchase indulgences on behalf of their family and friends, deceased or otherwise, a concept that made no sense to traditionalists such as Hus.
Simony aside, Hus preached against the wave of fake miracles that had taken Europe by storm. He took issue with the false relics displayed by the greedy proprietors of churches near and far, insisting that they were only interested in the donations the relics attracted. One church, for example, was caught when their relic, purportedly a brain fragment belonging to St. Peter, was found to be nothing more than a hunk of pumice stone. John Calvin would later remark, “If all the relics were brought together in one place, it would be made manifest that every apostle has more than four bodies, and every saint two or three.”
Unwanted foreign intervention was yet another lesser-mentioned facet of the Bohemian reformers' opposition towards the Church. Matthew Spinka and Frantisek M. Bartos, who wrote Hus' biography on Encyclopedia Britannica, elaborated on this: “At this time, the University of Prague was undergoing a period of struggle against foreign, chiefly German, influence as well as an intense rivalry between, on the one hand, German masters who upheld nominalism and were regarded as enemies of church reform, and on the other, the strongly nationalistic Czech masters, who were inclined to realist philosophy.” A relevant excerpt from one of Hus' sermons read, “The Czechs in this part are more wretched than dogs or snakes, for a dog defends the couch on which he lies, and if another dog tries to drive him away, he fights with him. A snake does the same. But we let the Germans oppress us and occupy all the offices, without complaint.”
The reformers' conflict with the Catholic Church ran much deeper than disagreements regarding indulgences and false relics. The Church controlled roughly half of Bohemian territory, ownership that invited decades of dormant resentment from the land's disgruntled residents. Local low-earning priests such as Hus were especially aggrieved at the seemingly untouchable affluence and irreproachable status of the Church, and peasants also complained about the hefty land taxes the Church imposed upon them. Thus, there was plenty of promise for the budding reformation movement in Bohemia.
In October 1402, Hus was appointed rector of Charles University, but his promotion was short-lived. By the spring of 1403, the Wycliffe backlash, which initially began as an incipient trend, had reached a frenzied pitch, and when Hus was outed as one of Wycliffe’s most vocal adherents, he was immediately sacked and replaced with a German master named Walter Harrasser. On May 28, 1403, Harrasser published an edict that prohibited the discussion of 24 Wycliffian articles, echoing the ban issued by the English officials at the Blackfriars Synod back in May 1382. Not long after, Johann Hubner added another 21 articles to the list and labeled all 45 of these articles “heretical.” Topping the list was the condemnation of transubstantiation.
Nonetheless, Hus remained undeterred. Just a few months later, he translated one of Wycliffe's treatises, Trialogus, into the Bohemian language and disseminated the forbidden literature to his congregation.
As that made clear, Hus was not bothered by the rising animosity towards him. A few years earlier, he had taken a pious nobleman by the name of Zbynek Zajic of Hazmburk under his wing, and Zajic had since been named the 5th Archbishop of Prague. He served as a defender for Hus, who used the blessings of the highest-ranking ecclesiastical figure in the district as cover for his continued quest to reform the Church. Hus was also instructed to keep an eye on his fellow clergymen and report all their Scripture violations and other transgressions to the archbishop himself. Needless to say, the guilty priests detested the informant, who was vilified as a self-righteous lapdog. They were further convinced of their own postulations when Hus was selected as the synodal preacher in 1405 and again in 1407.
Despite his controversial status (or perhaps in part because of it), Hus' following continued to grow with each passing day. Among his most fervent supporters were his former classmate and professor, Stepan Palec and Stanislav of Znojmo, respectively. The pair visited Hus' quarters frequently, analyzing and deliberating over Wycliffe’s works and discussing ways to implement the Englishman’s ideas.
In 1405, Hus penned and released a treatise of his own, “Concerning the Whole Blood of Christ Glorified,” an offensive launched by Hus against unethical churches that knowingly advertised the false miraculous properties of their relics. In the months leading up to the publishing of his treatise, Hus, as ordered by Archbishop Zajic, conducted an official probe into the legitimacy of the miracles that supposedly took place at Wilsnack in Brandenburg, Germany. Back in August 1383, a raging fire tore across the village of Wilsnack, leaving a large portion of the town, including its parish church, in ruins. The clerics sent to inspect the damage of the church allegedly discovered three unleavened wafers (sacramental bread) in the rubble, unscathed. Strangely enough, the wafers, the clerics claimed, began to discharge a crimson stream, which they claimed was the blood of Christ. As such, the church, which they rebuilt, became a popular place of pilgrimage, and unwitting pilgrims flocked to the home of the bleeding hosts and presented valuable gifts and sizable donations in exchange for blessings. Rumors about the miracles birthed by the bleeding hosts began to spread unchecked, including a story about the skeptical Count Dietrich von Wenckstern, whose cynicism was wholly reversed when the hosts supposedly restored his vision.
Hus declared the miracle of the bleeding hosts, one of the main subjects of his treatise, a hoax, writing, “Christ, at the moment of his resurrection, reassembled and glorified his body and all its parts, hence, no blood could remain behind.” The crimson tinge on these wafers, Hus claimed, was either colored in by the clerics themselves or the product of an explainable natural phenomenon. Hus concluded, “Christ called upon his disciples to take and eat the hosts, not to take and preserve it.”