A Study of Peter Chelčický's Life and a Translation from Czech of Part I of His Net of Faith (1947)/Part 1/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II
PETER CHELČICKÝ – THE SETTING IN TIME
In the primitive church the chalices were of wood, the prelates of gold; in these days the Church hath chalices of gold and prelates of wood.
—Girolamo Savonarola.
Anno Domini 1500 Sandro Botticelli finished painting that populous Nativity which is one of the chief attractions of the London National Gallery; over it may still be read the painter's own words in Greek: "This picture was painted by me Alexander amid the confusions of Italy at the time prophesied in the Second Woe of the Apocalypse, when Satan shall be loosed upon the earth."
old Botticelli1 has never been outside the confines of his native Italy, hence he wrote of the "confusions of Italy." And truly a confused Italy it was; it was the Italy of the days when a cardinal could be known as the father of four children and yet be elected Pope; it was the Italy of the secularized princes of the Church and of municipal dictators, the Visconti and Sforza of Milan, the Scaligers of Verona, the Gonzagas of Mantua, and the Medici of Florence. The popes and the princes knew the difference between a good statue and a bad statue, but they knew not the difference between good and evil; they all fought each others in palace and in field, with daggers and with crosses, and many of them died of the disease of the age known as the tuberculosis of the Borgia: poison. In some city states they employed artists as ambassadors, while in Rome the rabble became so noisy and dangerous that several Popes had to flee St. Peter's dilapidated city to save their bare skins. Botticelli was certainly justified when he put those Gre ek words into his Nativita̍, "This picture was painted by me Alexander amid the confusions of Italy at the time prophesied in the Second Woe of the Apocalypse, when Satan shall be loosed upon the earth." * But had Botticelli visited the countries outside Italy, he would have had to write the same thing there; for there was confusion in France, confusion in Germany, in Bohemia, everywhere. England was absorbed in her War of the Roses; Spain was busy exterminating Indians in her newly discovered America, para la mayor gloria de Dios; Germany was in a state of chaos; in the West France lay exhausted from a hundred years' struggle to drive the English from the continent, and just then was saved from utter defeat by the picturesque and dramatic appearance of a 19-year old village girl from the Vosges who "lectured, talked down, and over-ruled statesmen and prelates."2 In the South, a Pope was calling the curses of heaven down upon a second Pope who put up his headquarters at Avignon, and who retaliated in kind. In the East the Turks were knocking down the last fences of the Byzantine Empire which had been kept alive only by repeated blood transfusions.
The fourteenth century at the close of which Peter Chelc̄icky̍ was born, was a strange century indeed. It was an era of great social ferments, natural catastrophies, famines, plagues, and unusual men. In this period the ice drift cut off communication with Greenland, and the advancing glaciers almost literally pushed the settlements into the sea Europe an chroniclers of the century recorded two excessive cold winters. Crops failed in Norway and then in England and in France. There were excessive rains. The Sequoia tree rings in California ran to abnormal width, the Caspian Sea expanded, and the Rhine, the Danube, the Thames and the Elbe froze. Fifty-five summers of this century saw wiolent floods and the Cathedral of Mayence was submerged to the famous frieze over the door. In the Netherlands seventy-two cities were destroyed by the sea in one night and 200,000 people were drowned in one year. The Black Death, the Asiatic Cholera, the Athenian Plague, and famine killed thirteen million people in China and reduced the population of France and England by one third.3 The common people was impoverished, ill-fed, ill-housed. Yet at the same time the secular and ecclesiastic princes lived in a byzantinesque luxury which only accentuated their aloofness from the common hoi polloi. While the peasants complained that they "haue the payne and traveyle, rayne and wynd in the feldes," the doorways of the castle of Vincennes had to be raised in order to accomodate the three-foot tall head-dress of Isabelle of Bavaria.4
A rigid caste system, perpetuating itself by a ruthless exploitation of the common people, was entrenched on the whole continent of Europe, upheld by secular powers and sanctioned urbi et orbi by the Church. The iron hand of authority and the cramped hand of plague were the two clutches which held Europe in a deadly embrace. However, by a strange twist of fortune, Bohemia was spared for a while at least of all these Egyptian plagues. It was soon recognized that the rich seem to be unaffected by the diseases; for they did not live in overpopulated cities and unhygienic suburbs of the poverty-stricken plebeians. At any rate, under the rule of the Luxembourg Emperor Charles IV (regnavit 1346–1378), Bohemia reached its peak of economic wealth and prosperity, and the King-Emperor inaugurated a new policy of tearing down old overcrowded city slums and building completely new districts, particularly in Prague, with wide streets, vineyards, and spacious palaces. Perhaps this sanitary urban re construction was one of the reasons why the plague stayed away so long from Bohemia (it appeared there only during the Thirty Years' War). Of course, the contemporaries did not explain it that way. They found their answer rather in supernatural phenomena. It became a common belief that Bohemia was under a special protection of God and St. Wenceslas, with the result that all the rich nobles of the entire continent, desirous of enjoying the cultural life in the Emperor's capital and to escape at the same time the sword of Damocles continuously hanging over their plague-infested towns, flocked in droves to Bohemia.5
All this glory and prestige and material wealth gave rise to many kinds of abuses and to a general moral de cadence. The Church was thoroughly enme shed in this demoralization. The Bohemian Church of that day possessed for instance not only extensive rights, but also one half of the entire area of the country.6
It is precisely at this moment of crisis that we hear the prophetic voices of protest, hurled from the pulpits and house-tops by Konrad Waldhauser (†1369), John Stēkna (†1369), Matthew of Janov (†1394), Mili̍c̄ of Kromēr̄i̍z̄ (†1374), and particularly John Hus (†1414). The results, finally crystallizing in the popular ups urge of the Hussite movement, are too known to be discussed here. Suffice it to say that after the martyrdom of John Hus his followers have honestly done away with the worst offences of the Church of Rome, but, in the process of doing so they supplanted the tyranny of Rome by two contending tyrannies of Prague7 and Ta̍bor.8 * There was a quaint habit among certain Roman Emperors as well as among many famous men of his time to spend the last years of their 'pensioned' lives tenderly raising cabbages after they had spent a lifetime killing off their fellow men. Chelc̄icky̍ had no such distinguished past; he had his own small cabbage patch and he would have liked to tend to his plowshare and pruning hooks to the end of his life, had he not been horn in an age of political turmoil and moral crisis.
While Bohemia was being torn by interne cine religious warfare Chelc̄icky̍ quietly plowed his fields and watched with concern the storms of wrath ravaging similar fields of his neighbors and the fields and pastures of peasants all over Europe. He became intensely interested in history and its meaning, and especially in the Christian answer to history. He sought the answer in the Bible and he came to a conclusion which challenged the whole Hussite philosophy of life; it became unmistakably clear to him that there are only two choices before men: either they make life have meaning, a single purpose, comprehensive enough to embrace every human activity and worthy of man's highest achievement, or life will end them. He saw no middle course left. And a meaning as comprehensive as that can come only from a life which has its basis beyond time. If we were to put Chelc̄icky̍'s challenge into a modern framework he would say to us: The Kingdom of God is a reality here and now, but can be realized completely only beyond history. We are a colony of heaven and as such, not bound by the earthly laws. Only by responding to God's agape̍, by doing His will, no matter how much this Divine will conflicts with human ratiocinations, are we citizens of that transcendental Kingdom of God. "Love and do as you please," says St. Augustine; we are not bound to obey the laws of the kingdoms of this earth if we obey the transcendent, eternal laws, we are slaves of this world only because of our sinful nature. The transcendent Kingdom of God is here, now, yes, cutting across our immanent world of reason and power, but we can never completely free ourselves from thie immanent "enslavement" except beyond history. We must improve society – and we can – but at best it will always remain an image of the Kingdom of God, it will not be come the Kingdom itself.
To have a picture of things, a design for living adequate to embrace and coördinate all our experiences, we must have a perspective so vast that the point where all lines meet is eternity. Nothing can really be changed in time unless the fulcrum of that change is eternity.9
Chelc̄icky̍ saw with his keen analytical mind that his contemporary Hussites and the majority of Christians, for that matter – sought the 'fulcrum of change' not in eternity but in time, endeavoring to bring it about by an infallible legislation, by a rationalistic immaculate perception, and by compulsion. If the Church is to live up to its pretensions, he taught, it must be in the hands of God, and not God in the hands of the Church. Yet precisely the latter was the official position of the Pope at Rome as well as of the Archbishop Primate of Prague and the Generalissimo of Ta̍bor. Chelčický would have been amply justified to inscribe his work, with apologies to Botticelli:
"This Net of Faith was written by me Peter amid the confusions of Bohemia and Europe, at the time prophesied in the Second Woe of the Apocalypse, when Satan, whose one horn is Protestant and the other Catholic, shall be loosed upon the earth."
1 vivebat 1446–1510.
2 George Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan, New York, Penguin books, 1946, p.l. (St.Joan of Arc lived from A.D. 1412 to 1431).
3 "Those ancient astronomers, the Chinese, said the fourteenth century had excessive sunspots." I am indebted for most of this barometric information to an excellent book in this field, Geography in Human Destiny, by Roderick Peattie (New York: Stewart, 1940). At the same time I do not subscribe to the isobaric determinism of history which it often approaches rather dangerously.
4 See Net of Faith, Book ii, ch. iv.
5 Many famous people could be found there at one time or another; from Italy, for instance, Cola di Rienzi and Petrarch, arrived to 'pay their respects.'
6 Zdenēk Nejedly̍, Od Husa k Ta̍boru; see reference to this situation in the Net of Faith, Book II, ch.viii.
7 Seat of the Utraquist Church.
8 Seat of the Taborite faction.
9 Gerald Heard, The Creed of Christ: An Interpretation of the Lord's Prayer. New York: Harper, 1940, p. 164.