John Huss (Rashdall)/Section 1
Section I.— INTRODUCTORY.
Endeavours have been made by ingenious theorists to connect the religious revival which took place in Bohemia in the latter half of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth centuries, with the Greek origin of the Bohemian Church and the independent position which it continued to enjoy long after it had formally submitted to the Roman Pontiff. But, as a matter of historical fact, all traces of that independence had disappeared by the fourteenth century. By the reign of the Emperor Charles IV. the Sclavonic language and the Greek ritual had everywhere fallen into disuse in the services of the Church, and the host was no longer administered to the laity dipped in the consecrated wine. The Bohemian reformers were, in fact, quite unconscious of the Greek parentage of their Church. Equally unfounded is the theory which traces the Bohemian movement to Waldensian, or (as far as the early part of the movement is concerned) to Wycliffite influence. Like all truly great religious revivals, it was of indigenous growth. It began before the rise of Wycliffism in England; and, like the movement which is connected with the name of the Oxford doctor, it was only one part of a many-sided outburst of national vitality. The latter half of the fourteenth century was characterised both in England and in Bohemia, not only by a most remarkable religious revival, but by great social and political improvement, by great scholastic activity, and by a vigorous growth of vernacular literature.
The position Bohemian nation this period is thus described by Dean Milman. It was “a nation which spoke an unformed language, intelligible to themselves alone, and not more akin to German than to Latin; a nation, as it were, intruded into the Teutonic Empire, thought barbarian, and from late circumstances held in hostile jealousy by the Teutonic commonwealth.”[1] Before the reign of Charles IV., Bohemia was no doubt as much behind the rest of Germany in civilization, as Germany was behind Italy. It was to the Germans very much what Scotland was to our own ancestors. But in the course of the reign of the Bohemian Emperor, the Sclavonic kingdom became rather an envied, than a despised, intruder into the Teutonio commonwealth. His vigorous administration established order amongst its wild and warlike nobles and knights[2]: Churches, Monasteries, and Schools were built; the Capital became, to quote the description given by Æneas Sylvius in the next century, “a town as large and as noble as Etruscan Florence.” Above all, the establishment in 1348 of the University of Prague at a time when no German University yet existed, made the Bohemian Capital in many respects the most important city in the Empire.
But while the Bohemian kingdom rose to a higher position than it had ever held before, the danger of Germanization, long the bugbear of Bohemian patriots, was proportionately increased. Thousands of German students flocked to Prague, where they far out-numbered those of Bohemian birth. The rivalry of nations put on the guise of an opposition of philosophies. The Bohemians became Realists; the Germans adopted the principles of Nominalism. At a later time this apparently irrelevant circumstance exercised an important influence upon the fortunes of the Bohemian reform-movement. For, while the liberal tendencies which soon began to develop themselves in the Bohemian “nation” at Prague were not unlike those of the anti-papal party which at the beginning of the fifteenth century succeeded in completely crushing the Franciscans and establishing its own supremacy in the University of Paris, a difference of philosophical creed prevented the smallest sympathy arising between the reform-parties in the two Universities. At Constance the nominalist Reformers of Paris were among the noisiest of those who clamoured for the condemnation of the realist Reformers of Prague.
The very period at which the danger of Germanization was at its height, at which the national language seemed in the eyes of the Bohemian nationalist to be in no small danger of actual extinction, was a most flourishing epoch in the history of Bohemian literature. The tone of the Bohemian literature of this period, like that of most of the vernacular literature of the Middle Ages, was decidedly anti-hierarchical. The Jesuits of later times assumed that everything that was Bohemian must necessarily be heretical; but enough has escaped the ravages of their Vandalism to enable those who have explored that unknown field of literature to pronounce that there were poets in Bohemia in the fourteenth century not unworthy of comparison with the father of English poetry. Satires on the Clergy must have lent some help to the Bohemian reformers; nor were there wanting writers of those vernacular hymns, the existence of which is a sure sign of the growth of religious feeling too deep to be satisfied by the mechanical repetition of Paters and Aves, or by listening to the unintelligible, if solemn and imposing, Psalmody of the Church. But incomparably the most important service which the Bohemian literature of this period rendered to religion was the translation of the whole of the Scriptures into Bohemian, which appeared towards the close of the fourteenth century; and if Mr. Wratislaw’s account of the general diffusion of education among all classes of society during this period be not exaggerated,[3] the Bohemian people must have been at least as capable of appreciating that translation as our own countrymen were of deriving benefit from Wyclif’s Bible.
At about the same time,—soon after 1360,—two great preachers established themselves in Prague, the German Conrad of Waldhausen and the Moravian Milicz of Kremsia. Conrad preached in German to the German townspeople and the more educated classes among the Bohemians, and in Latin to the students: Milicz preached in their native language to the masses of the people. The preaching of these men was on the whole characterised by a sobriety which was too often wanting both in the orthodox and in the heretical religious movements of the Middle Ages. Milicz was, indeed, a more excitable man, and a more sensational preacher, than the quiet, earnest Augustinian, Conrad of Waldhausen. He had experienced the full force of that temptation, by yielding to which so much of the piety of the Middle Ages was lost to the world. He had felt a strong desire to enter a cloister: but the desire was resisted. Instead of shutting himself up in a monastery which would have made him useless to his generation, or founding a new religious order which would have been worse than useless to succeeding generations, he established a school in which he trained two or three hundred young men to become preachers, who were afterwards sent forth, like the “poor priests” of Wyclif, to become instructors of those whom the parochial clergy neglected, and the Friars made a gain of. The preaching of Conrad and Milicz changed the character of whole districts of the city. A part of the town called “Little Sodom” was so reformed as to acquire the name of “Little Jerusalem;” and it may be doubted whether any Mission was ever attended with more extraordinary success. And from the fact that the preachers were permanently stationed in one town, this success was more lasting than was often the case with those wild outbursts of enthusiasm which were awakened by the preaching of the itinerant revivalists of the Middle Ages.
The almost universal sympathy with which John Huss’ protests against Sacerdotalism were greeted in the next generation, was due in no small measure to the discontent with the prevalent religion of form and ceremonies which was the inevitable result of the influence of really spiritually-minded teachers such as Milicz and Conrad of Waidhausen. They were indeed Bevivalists rather than Reformers. But in one respect they could not help being Reformers: they were both of them enemies of the Mendicant Friars. It was hardly possible in that age for a secular priest to preach at all, without trenching on what the Friars Preachers and the Friars Minors regarded as a monopoly of their own; and it was quite impossible for any one to preach a spiritual religion without preaching a different religion from theirs. The religion which the Friars preached, at all events to the laity, was a religion of bought indulgences, bought dispensations, bought absolutions, bought sacraments. In their view religion was impossible for a layman: it was an impertinence in him to affect it; all that he could do was to compound for not being religious. Against this system Conrad of Waldhausen and Milicz spent their lives in protesting. And by their preaching the influence of the Mendicant Orders in Bohemia appears to have been well-nigh destroyed; so that in the time of Huss they do not appear to have been powerful enemies. Huss was in consequence brought less into collision with the Friars than most other Mediæval reformers.
Conrad and Milicz died before Huss was born. But there was another remarkable teacher, who was still living in Prague when Huss took his Bachelor’s degree. Matthias of Janow was not a preacher, but a theologian or devotional writer. His great merit was the clearness with which he saw the necessity for a restitution to its original dignity of the oflice of Parish Priest. It was chiefly on account of their interference with the parochial system that he objected to religious orders and monastic institutions of every kind. And it is in respect of his emphatic condemnation of that mediæval distinction between the Evangelical “counsels[4]” and the Evangelical „precepts“ upon which the principle of Monasticism was based, that “it may be said,” as Canon Robertson remarks, “that the later reformer Huss rather fell short of him . . . than exceeded him.”[5] The general character of his aims is well shown by the following passage quoted from his principal work by Neander. “I have myself come,” he says, “to a settled conclusion that it would be a salutary thing, and calculated to restore peace and union to Christendom, . . . . to bring back the Christian Church to those sound and simple beginnings where it would be needful to retain but a few, and those only the Apostolical laws.”[6]
However, the intense strength of conviction with which John Huss adhered to tenets which he had once embraced, more than compensated for the smaller range of the practical measures of reform which he advocated. To show the general inferiority of Janow to his disciple it is enough to mention one fact, that he recanted; although it is true that the subject of his recantation was not distinctly a matter of faith. He had advocated the frequent, if not daily, Communion of the laity; and by implication, if not explicitly, the Communion of the laity in both kinds. His language on this subject he was compelled to retract at a Synod held at Prague in 1389, when the laity were positively forbidden to communicate more frequently than once a month.[7]
- ↑ “Latin Christianity.” Bk. xiii. ch. 8.
- ↑ The constitution of the country was not feudal. The Bohemian Knights were a distinct inferior order of nobility, not the vassals of the Baronage.
- ↑ “Native Literature of Bohemia in the Fourteenth Century,” p. 3.
- ↑ Perfect obedience to the commands of our Lord was commonly held to involve the observance of the three “counsels of perfection,” Chastity, Poverty, Obedience, which was attainable only by those who had embraced the “religious” life.
- ↑ “History of the Church,” book viii. chap. vii.
- ↑ Neander, “Eccl. Hist.” vol. ix. p. 285 [Eng. Trans.]
- ↑ Gieseler contends that the assertion that Matthias of Janow advocated lay Communion in both kinds was based upon his use of the words “Communicatio corporis et sanguinis J. Christi” in reference to the laity—language which the doctrine of concomitance rendered perfectly orthodox. (Gieseler, Eng. Trans., vol. iv., p. 241–2. Note.) But it is impossible so to understand the language attributed to him by Neander with out a very forced construction of the words: he held “that the whole multitude should taste the sweetness of the Sacrament that is hidden beneath the species of the bread and wine.” (Neander, General Church History,” vol. ix. p. 313–4.)