John Huss (Rashdall)/Section 3
Section III.
HUSS AT CONSTANCE.
Huss reached Constance on the 3rd of November, 1414. The Pope, who had arrived three days before, sent to inform him that he had determined to relax the Interdict: the observance of which would have made the holding of the Council impossible, and the Excommunication which laymen were not likely to obey even in Constance. He was enjoined to keep away from the churches; but he continued to celebrate mass daily in a room adjoining his lodgings. He occupied himself in preparing the apologetic discourses which he hoped to be allowed to deliver before the Council. But soon after the arrival of his Bohemian enemies, headed by Palecz and Michael de Causis, his liberty came to an end. They had brought copies of his works with them; and accusations of heresy were posted on the doors of every church in Constance. Other Articles were drawn up by Gerson, the famous Chancellor of Paris. It was represented to the Cardinals that so dangerous a heretic should be deprived of a freedom which might lead to the dissemination of his errors. It was thought desirable that the contemplated violation of Sigismund’s safe-conduct should take place before the arrival of that monarch. Accordingly, on Nov. 28, two Bishops appeared at Huss’ lodgings and invited him to follow them to the Papal palace. Chlum remonstrated with his accustomed vehemence; but there were soldiers drawn up in the street, and Huss could only obey. On arriving at the palace, they found the Cardinals assembled, Being informed that he was accused of having propagated “capital and manifest errors in Bohemia against the Catholic Church,” Huss replied in the formula which he was in the habit of employing on such occasions, that he would rather die than be convicted of any heresy; and that if he were convicted of any error, he would abjure it without hesitation. It is not easy to say whether it was from a grim kind of humour or from a want of humour, that he constantly spoke as if he did not know that the word “conviction” meant one thing in his mouth, and another in his opponents’. It is certain that such language often excited unfounded hopes in his enemies and unnecessary fears in his friends. In the afternoon, he was told that he was to be a prisoner in the house of the Precentor of the Cathedral.
Here Huss remained for eight days under an armed guard. Then he was removed to a pestilential dungeon close to a sewer, in a Dominican convent on the Rhine. Chlum hastened to inform Sigismund of the conduct of the Cardinals. The Emperor was at first extremely angry, and threatened to break open the doors of the prison if Huss were not released. But when he arrived in Constance, he was informed that the grant of a safe-conduct to a heretic was beyond the powers of any temporal prince. In that age, the Church claimed a coercive jurisdiction, at least over the clergy, as of right, and not as a concession of the temporal power: it was only when blood was to be shed that she became fastidious about wielding the secular sword. Though he was a man of honour, and his conscience long remained ill at ease on the subject, Sigismund was a devout Churchman; and if ever superstition can be pleaded in palliation of a breach of the moral law, surely it can be pleaded on behalf of one who yields to the express commands of an authority which he believes to be infallible. That faith must not be kept with heretics to the prejudice of the Catholic faith, was and is as much a doctrine of the Roman Church[1] as the doctrine of Transubstantiation or of the Immaculate Conception. Had Sigismund delivered John Huss out of the hands of the Council, he would have deliberately proclaimed himself a heretic, and have brought about the dissolution of an assembly which was on the point of effecting that Reunion of Christendom which had been the noblest object and the most ambitious dream of his life.
Never, indeed, since the darkness closed in around the Church, had the prospects of Reform, to the superficial observer, appeared so fair. Never, in the whole history of the Middle Ages, was so formidable a blow aimed at the Papacy, as the deposition of a Pope by a General Council. And not only was the Papal authority declared to be inferior to the authority of the Council: it seemed as if doubts were beginning to arise in the minds of Churchmen as to the mysterious efficacy of Episcopal consecration. An assembly which attempted to go back to the traditions of the Undivided Church, listened with approval while the Cardinal of Florence declared that “an ignorant Bishop was a mitred ass.” A crowd of courtiers whom the Pope had made Bishops of Italian villages or Eastern cities which they had never seen, had come to Constance to support their patron, by sheer force of numbers, against the attacks of Archbishops who were the equals of Princes, and Bishops who ruled in the Council-chambers of Kings. They were now told that the representatives of culture and learning were to be on a level with the descendants of the Apostles. Generals of Orders, Doctors of Divinity and of Civil and Canon Law, Proctors of absent Bishops and Proctors of Chapters, were to have equal voices with Cardinals, Bishops, and Abbots. Even lay Princes or their representatives voted on all matters not “de fide.” Moreover, the Council was to be divided into four nations, and every question was to be decided by a majority of nations. Thus the seven representatives of England enjoyed a voting power equal to that of the whole herd of Italian Prelates and Papal Chamberlains. It was determined that every matter to be brought before the Council should be discussed first by each nation separately, and then by an assembly of all the nations together. The solemn Sessions in the Cathedral, with their elaborate introductory ceremonial, merely ratified what had been already determined upon in the informal Congregations.
The Council of Constance represents the fleeting triumph of Gallicanism. But in spite of the facility which it showed in breaking with the traditions of the past, it soon became apparent that a Reform of the Church, or even such a reform of the morals of the clergy as the Church of Rome did succeed in effecting in the seventeenth century, was as little to be expected, without strong pressure from without, of a priestly Democracy or a priestly Aristocracy, as of a priestly Absolutism. The theologians of Constance might alter the distribution of sacerdotal authority; but they were as firmly attached to the maintenance of that authority, they were as little disposed to favour any questioning of the power of the priesthood over the souls of men, as the Franciscans of that day or the Jesuits of this. John Huss stood as small a chance of obtaining fair treatment from the Reformers who asserted the superiority of Councils over Popes and the legislative equality of Bishops and Priests, as he would have done in the Court of a Cardinal who lived upon simony and judicial bribery in his Palace at Avignon or at Rome. Various efforts were, indeed, made to induce Huss to agree to some kind of compromise. But they were prompted by a conviction that Huss’ submission in any form would have been a greater triumph for the Council than his execution. Huss never showed the smallest disposition for compromise, even where many honest men would have had no scruples in yielding. He refused to abjure even those opinions which he had never held: and he was probably not wrong in thinking that such an abjuration would have been construed into an admission that he had held them.
While Huss was a prisoner in the Dominican dungeon, the effluvia from the sewer had brought on a severe attack of fever and vomiting. It was feared that the victim might die before his time; the Pope sent his own physician to attend him, and he was moved to a less noisome cell. But the misfortunes of the Pope altered his position for the worse: with the rest of the Papal retinue, the gaolers followed their master in his ignominious flight. The Emperor transferred Huss to the custody of the Bishop of the diocese, who sent him to his castle of Gottleben, three miles from the town. The Papal “Clerks of the Chamber” had shown their prisoner some kindness: now he was kept in chains day and night; and the hemorrhage and racking headache which the close confinement brought on, procured no relaxation in the rigour of his imprisonment.
Before his trial came on, news arrived from Prague which seriously aggravated the prejudice already existing against Huss. A zealous disciple of his, one Jacobel of Misa, Parish Priest of S. Michael’s, had put himself at the head of an agitation for the restoration of lay communion in both kinds, and had actually administered the Chalice to laymen in his own church. Opinion among the Hussites was divided upon the subject; and the advice of their leader was sought for. Huss declared himself in favour of the practice in a treatise[2] which he sent to Prague. And from henceforward, the right of the laity to the Chalice became the watchword of the Bohemian Reformation. The refusal of the Cup to the laity asserted in a more ostentatious manner than any other practice of the Roman Church the spiritual inferiority of the laity to the clergy, as well as the right of the Church, not to interpret or to supplement, but to repeal the commands of Our Lord Himself. Resistance to this innovation was, therefore, peculiarly exasperating to the sacerdotal mind. Upon Huss naturally fell the odium of all that had been done by his disciples in Prague, and of much which they had not done. The most exaggerated reports were industriously circulated: it was said that the blood of Christ was carried about in flasks; that laymen administered the Sacrament to one another; that cobblers heard confessions and gave absolution.
All through his imprisonment, Huss had manifested the greatest anxiety to obtain a full and free hearing before the whole Council, and especially before the Emperor. It was with the greatest difficulty that he succeeded in obtaining a hearing at all. Two commissions[3] were successively appointed for the preliminary investigation of the case. At first, indeed, it was intended that the Council should act solely on the report of the last of these commissions; but, though he explained what his opinions were, Huss declined to defend them except before the Council itself; and the Bohemian nobles induced the Emperor to promise that he should not be condemned unheard. Accordingly, on the 6th of June, he was brought back to the city, and confined in a Franciscan Convent. In the refectory of this Convent, on three successive days, he appeared before “an assembly of all the nations.”
The first of these congregations was on the 6th of June, 1415. The Fathers were proceeding with the case in the absence of the prisoner; but Huss’ friends hastened to inform Sigismund, who sent orders that he should be allowed to appear. He was accordingly brought up from his cell. Copies of his books were placed on a table before him, and he admitted the authorship of them. Then the reading of the Articles began. What followed may be told in the quaint language of L’Enfant’s translator: “They had scarce made an end of the first with the Evidences supporting it, when so terrible a noise arose, that the Fathers could not hear one another, much less the answers of John Huss. When the clamour was a little over, John Huss, offering to defend himself by the authority of the Scriptures and the Fathers, was interrupted as if he had spoke nothing to the purpose, and they set upon him with reproach and banter.”[4] The behaviour of this congregation was so disgraceful that its more moderate members interfered, and succeeded in carrying an adjournment till the next day.
At the second hearing, a certain amount of decency was ensured by the presence of the King of the Romans, who had been prevailed upon to attend by the Bohemian nobles. The first charge examined was the alleged denial of Transubstantiation. Huss could with justice maintain that he fully believed in Transubstantiation and he believed it on the strength of that realistic dogma of the accidens sine substantia, which had once been almost as much a part of the orthodox creed as the doctrine itself. But now Gallicanism, and consequently Nominalism—the doctrine of the once suspected Abelard, was completely in the ascendant. To the Cardinal d’Ailly and his friends it seemed that a Realist could not consistently believe a doctrine which as a formal Article of Faith owed its existence to an extravagance of Realism. He began to browbeat the Bohemian Master with questions about his views on the universale a parte rei and similar scholastic pedantries. The good sense of an Englishman put a stop to this irrelevant discussion: he declared that the Council ought to be satisfied with Huss’ assurances on the subject. L’Enfant thinks that his advice was taken, and that this was one of the two Articles which were expunged from the accusation. Then he was questioned about his defence of the forty-five Articles of Wyclif; his views as to the voluntary character of tithes; his Appeal to Christ; his sympathy with Wyclif; the part he had taken against the Germans in the matter of the three votes, and the part he was supposed to have taken in procuring the banishment of the four Bohemian Doctors. Lastly, he was reproached with having asserted that he had come to Constance voluntarily. This brought up the honest Knight of Chlum. “Though I am one of the meanest Lords in Bohemia,” he exclaimed, “I would undertake to defend him for a twelvemonth against the forces of the Emperor and the King.” The session concluded with a speech from Sigismund, who acknowledged that Huss had come voluntarily, thanked the Council for answering so well his intentions in the matter of the safe-conduct, he had apparently persuaded himself that the safe-conduct promised nothing more than protection on the way and a fair hearing, and urged Huss to recant.
At the third congregation, Huss was for the first time allowed something which might be called a hearing.On the former occasions he had merely been exposed to a running fire of questions or reproaches from any member of the Council who chose to insult the accused. But even now he could not make a connected speech: he was permitted to state, but not to defend, his opinions. The Articles extracted from his books were read; and he was allowed to explain, correct, or disown them. But not the slightest attention was paid to his explanations: the charges were not amended, even when proved to be garbled by actual reference to the books from which they were alleged to be extracted. So much, indeed, was his condemnation a foregone conclusion, that the Articles of Charge were framed with incredible carelessness. Well might Cardinal d’Ailly exclaim that the “De Ecclesia” contained heresies far worse than those which appeared in the extracts which had been made from it. In some cases passages to which exception might reasonably be taken, appear in a form in which it is difficult to understand how any one could possibly find fault with them. For instance, Huss had maintained that “if a man be virtuous, whatever he doth, he doth it virtuously; whereas, if he be vicious, whatever he doth, he doth it viciously.” In Article XII. of the accusation, this passage becomes, “A vicious man acts viciously, and a virtuous man acts virtuously.”[5] Although worn out with prolonged suffering, Huss showed his habitual anxiety to let the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth be known about him and his opinions. He corrected the extracts even when the corrections were more damaging than the original Articles. All the Articles, however, whether heretical or orthodox, whether truisms or paradoxes, were alike condemned. It was determined that if the heretic recanted, he should be suffered to live in perpetual imprisonment; that if he remained obstinate, he must die.
A month elapsed between the last appearance of Huss before the congregation, and the day of his formal sentence and its execution. Repeated attempts were made both by secret friends and open enemies to induce him to recant: both alike were in vain. The efforts of the advocates of authority were directed not to proving the truth of the determinations of the Council, but to proving the duty of submitting to them without asking whether they were true or false. In the Middle Ages far more stress was laid upon the duty of blind submission to the Church, than upon the doctrine of its infallibility. The great Gallican champion of Councils, Cardinal d’Ailly, admitted that General Councils may err and have erred even in matters of Faith[6]: but that concession did not in his view interfere in the smallest degree with the duty of submission on the part of individuals to the decisions of those Councils. It was this exaltation of a humility falsely so called into the position of the crowning virtue of the religious life, which converted not a few of the most strenuous opponents of the moral corruptions of the Mediæval Church into zealous champions of its doctrinal corruptions. Huss was, however, not for one moment to be persuaded that it was his duty to smother, or by the use of forced interpretations and ambiguous language to make the smallest effort to smother, the dictates either of his reason or of his conscience.
Physical exhaustion has often proved a severer trial to the constancy of brave men than the prospect of a cruel death. To the illness from which Huss had been suffering all through his trial in consequence of the closeness of his confinement, there had now been added the torture of the stone. His last days were further darkened by the brutality which his enemies showed on their visits to his prison. On one occasion he heard Michael de Causis say to the gaolers, “By the grace of God we shall shortly burn this heretic, who has cost me many florins.”[7] Palecz came to him “at the time of his greatest weakness,” and said in his hearing that “since the birth of Christ there had not arisen a more dangerous heretic than Wyclif and he,” and that all who had attended his sermons were affected with this heresy: “The substance of the material bread remaineth in the Sacrament of the Altar.”[8] Ill at ease in his conscience at the reflection which could not have failed to suggest itself to him, that he was bringing to the stake one whose opinions he had once to a large extent shared, Palecz seems to have felt it necessary to persuade himself that in spite of all denials Huss must be heretical on this cardinal doctrine of the Theology of the time; though it is difficult to understand how he could suppose that one who was ready to die rather than recant one heresy, should so obstinately repudiate another, had he really held it. But, at last, even Palecz was touched by Huss’ gentleness and unmistakable sincerity. Huss asked him to put himself in his place. “What would you do,” he asked, “if you were sure that you had not held the errors attributed to you? Would you abjure them?” “It is a hard case,” said Palecz, and he began to weep. A few days before his end, Huss asked that Palecz might be his confessor. “Palecz,” he said to the commissaries, “is my greatest enemy; I should like to confess to him: or send me some other suitable man, I pray you for God’s sake.” A confessor was allowed him, but not Palecz; and from him he received absolution. Palecz afterwards “came,” says Huss in the letter already quoted, “and wept much with me, when I asked him to forgive me if I had spoken bitterly against him, and especially for calling him a fabricator[9] in my writings.” In spite of his tears, however, Palecz did not consider that he had any cause to ask for the forgiveness of his former friend.
On the 6th of July, a solemn Session of the Council was held in the Cathedral. While mass was being celebrated, the heretic was not suffered to enter the Church, lest the mysteries should be profaned by his presence. Then he was brought in, and a sermon was preached at him by the Bishop of Lodi. This discourse concluded with words very expressive of the spirit of the times. “Destroy,” said the Bishop, “all heresies and errors, but particularly (pointing at Huss) that obstin heretic.” Sixty Articles from Wyclif’s works were then read, and condemned; then thirty Articles from the works of his Bohemian follower. When the first Article was read, he attempted to explain himself, but was silenced. Some of the charges he apparently heard now for the first time. Among them was the ridiculous accusation of having asserted that he should himself become a fourth person of the Trinity. At various parts of the reading, he tried to get in a word of protest. When he was accused of slighting the Pope’s excommunication, he maintained that the treatment his proctors had received at Rome justified his disobedience; and it was that, he added, which had induced him to come to Constance “of his own accord under the public faith of the Emperor here present.” Here he looked Sigismund full in the face, and the Emperor was seen to blush deeply. Then the books were condemned to the flames, and their author to degradation. For the last time he was arrayed in the eucharistic vestments; and then, one by one, the insignia of the seven orders were taken from him, each with an appropriate malediction. Finally, a paper cap inscribed with the word “Heresiarcha” and painted with devils, was placed upon his head, with the Church’s parting curse, “We devote thy soul to the infernal devils.” It has been said that the logic of persecution is perfect, that the body is burned to save the soul: if so, the logic of persecution was not yet invented.
The degraded heretic was now delivered over to the secular arm. The Elector Palatine, Vicar of the Empire, and his officers conducted him to the place of execution between the city walls and the moat. A guard of eight hundred armed men was thought necessary for the security of the executioners or the dignity of the occasion: an immense crowd followed the procession. On the road he declared to the people that he had been guilty of no heresy, that he had been unjustly condemned, that his enemies had been unable to convict him of any error. When he came within sight of the stake, he knelt down and said several of the penitential Psalms, and constantly repeated the words, “Lord Jesus, have mercy upon me. Into Thy hands I commend my spirit.” “What this man may have done before,” said some of the bystanders, “we know not; we only know that he hath made excellent prayers to God.” A confessor was allowed him, in spite of the protest of a “priest on horse-back, in a green jacket lined with red,” who said that heretics must not be allowed confessors: but as he would not recant, absolution was refused. Huss replied that he had no need of a confessor, for he was not conscious of any mortal sin. As the fire was kindled, an old woman was seen busily engaged in heaping up the wood round the heretic. “What holy simplicity!” said Huss: and then, as the flames leapt up, he again commended his soul to God, and prayed for the forgiveness of his enemies. As he spoke, the hideous cap fell off his head. Later tradition said that the flames had no power over it.[10] A soldier picked it up and replaced it, saying, “He shall be burned with all his devils.” Long after the flames had choked his utterance, his lips were seen to move as if in prayer. His ashes were thrown into the Rhine, lest his disciples should make relics of them. But their pious devotion was not to be so thwarted; they carried away the very earth on which he had suffered, to the land which was already preparing to avenge the patriot’s death in arms.
That the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church, is sound doctrine, though liable to exaggeration. But it was not merely as one of that noble army that Huss prepared the way for the Reformation of the sixteenth century. Hundreds of men and women whose names have perished, had testified against the corrupt doctrine and the more corrupt lives of the mediæval Priesthood; and had sealed their testimony with their deaths. And the death of the most obscure Waldensian who suffered at Toulouse was in itself not less heroic than than the death of John Huss. They did not perish in vain. But the circumstances which attended the condemnation of Huss were such to appeal with peculiar force to the conscience of Christendom. A great Council had assembled for the Reformation of the Church: all the Churchmen of the age most eminent for their piety or their learning were among its members; it enjoyed the hearty support of the Emperor and all the great Potentates of Europe. Yet neither the piety of its members nor the strength of its supporters effected the smallest improvement even in the external morality of the Clergy of that or of the succeeding age. Simony never flourished more vigorously than among the Reformers of Constance; the morals of the town suffered from the presence of the Council, as they would have suffered from the neighbourhood of an English race-course. Neither the advocacy of the King of France nor the authority of the University of Paris was sufficient to procure the unqualified condemnation of one who had unblushingly defended assassination. Those who deposed one Pope, failed to put any effectual check upon the despotism of the next. The most considerable achievement of the deliberations of three years and six months was the burning of two heretics, one of whom had been promised freedom to return to his own country by the Emperor and by the Pope. Such a termination of a Council from which such magnificent results were promised, could not but shake the faith of mankind in the wisdom of such assemblies, and their confidence in the religion which represented either such assemblies, or the Popes whom they could depose, as mouthpieces of the Holy Spirit “in matters of Faith and of Morals.”
To inveigh against the Fathers of Constance for sending a heretic to the stake, would indeed be to judge of the conduct of one age by the standard of another. But that is not the crime which has fixed upon the memory of the Council, and of the Church which it represented, a stain which can never be wiped off so long as that Church calls herself infallible. Huss was condemned for heresies certainly, but also for opinions which do not affect religious belief at all, for opinions which he had never held, for opinions which no one could seriously have believed that he had held. Implicit credence was given to the testimony of his bitterest enemies: he was not allowed to cross-examine the witnesses; he had no opportunity of fully explaining and defending his opinions. Above all, the safe-conduct which the Emperor had granted, and which the Pope had promised to observe, was violated by his arrest even more shamelessly than by his execution. The Council of Constance pronounced a formal divorce between Religion and Morality. Christendom was now made aware that her infallible guides were not bound by that respect for plighted faith which forms the basis of all social life, which places some restraint even upon the actions of savages in their dealings with their enemies, and of brigands in their dealings with their captives.
- ↑ L’Enfant, vol i., p. 514.
- ↑ This treatise is full of quotations from the Fathers, Decretals, Acts of Councils, &c. If it was written, as is most probable, without reference to books, the retentiveness of Huss’ memory, or (as some have thought) of his common-place books, must have been extraordinary.
- ↑ One appointed by the Pope, the other by the Council, after his flight.
- ↑ L’Enfant. “Council of Constance.” Vol. 1., p. 323.
- ↑ L’Enfant, vol. 1., p. 343.
- ↑ L’Enfant, vol. 1., p. 74. ⟨Op.⟩ fol. lxix. a.
- ↑ Hussi Opera, fol. lxvii., Ep. 30.
- ↑ Op., fol. lxvii., Ep. 30.
- ↑ “Quod vocavi eum Fictorem in scripto.”
- ↑ Perhaps the most interesting circumstance connected with this tradition is that Luther seems to have implicitly believed it. (See his Preface to Huss’ Works.) According to his account, the cap was not replaced, but torn away by a soldier when it would not burn on the martyr’s head, and thrown into the fire separately.