John Huss (Rashdall)/Section 4

by Hastings Rashdall

Section IV.

THE CHARACTER OF JOHN HUSS, AND HIS POSITION AS A REFORMER.

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“On Transubstantiation,” says Dean Milman, (notwithstanding the subtleties of his adversaries), the Communion in one kind, worship of the Saints and of the Virgin Mary, Huss was scrupulously, unimpeachably orthodox.”^[1] Thus far Dean Milman’s judgment upon Huss’ theological position may be upon the whole accepted, though perhaps not without some reservation.^[2]

As to the Communion in one kind, it is true that Huss was orthodox, if by that is meant that he accepted the doctrine of Concomitance.^[3] But he distinctly supports the practice of lay communion in both kinds, as desirable if not obligatory.^[4] To speak of the “Worship of the Saints and of the Virgin,” is to use language which few Romanists would recognise as a correct description of the practices of their Church. The intercession of Saints and of the Virgin, Huss firmly believed in:^[5] and in his letters he prays for that intercession.^[6] He attached considerable importance to the doctrine of a Treasury of Merits, though he denied the power of Pope or Bishop to make any one a participator in those merits. He held that it was better to help the “sleeping church” in Purgatory by adding to the sum of the good works of the Church (which in his view meant holiness of life, and not Masses or “whole Psalters”), than to pray for its deliverance. The most important practical measure of Reform which Huss urged upon the clergy of his day, was the abolition of the thirty Requiems and other lucrative superstitions with which the obsequies of all but the very poor were celebrated. His teaching as to prayers for the dead is, if anything, rather in advance of Wyclif’s position than behind it. He declares that “neither the Prophets, nor Christ and his Apostles, nor the saints who lived just after their time, explicitly taught men to pray for the dead; but they taught the people very earnestly that he who lived without fault was a holy man.”^[7] At the same time Huss did not absolutely condemn prayers for the dead, although he thought it better that they should be offered on behalf of all the dead than for any particular person. He held that every Mass was “a sacrifice for the living and the dead;” but he unequivocally condemned all the mediæval superstitions which had gathered about this undeniably ancient, although post-apostolical, doctrine. He held that no Masses should be said specially for one dead person; he attached no value to the mere number of Masses said, and he held that it was simoniacal for a priest to take money for saying them. It is curious to observe how in his hands a belief in Purgatory becomes positively an argument against Sacerdotal pretensions: he condemned the Indulgences granted in favour of the dead as well as of the living by John XXIII., on the ground that such Indulgences would dispense with the necessity of purgatorial probation.^[8] In this as in other cases he rejects Romish doctrines just where they favour Sacerdotal pretensions, or, at all events, just where Sacerdotal pretensions become immoral.

He was, indeed, completely under the thraldom of the theory which erects an eternal, impassable barrier between the Priest and the layman. He adhered to the traditional distinction between the Evangelical Precepts and the Evangelical Counsels. Matthias of Janow had, however, taught him that the calling of the Parish Priest was higher than that of the Monk or the Friar. Yet he shrank from the assertion of Wyclif and of Nicholas of Welesnowicz, that it was lawful for all men to preach the Gospel, because he imagined that that would imply that it was obligatory upon all men to preach the Gospel. He contented himself with placing the Priesthood in the position which the popular Theology of the day assigned to the Regulars: for them the Evangelical counsels were precepts; they were bound, others were only encouraged, to aim at “perfection.”

His view of the obligation of the Priesthood to obey the Evangelical counsels in all the strictness of the letter, led him into a kind of Quakerism. He taught that the clergy might not under any circumstances engage in war, or in litigation for temporal matters, or take an oath.^[9] We have alluded to his defence of Nicholas of Welesnowicz, who refused to take an oath before the Inquisition. And he acted upon the same principle himself by refusing to make answer upon oath, though required to do so by the Archbishop, to the Articles exhibited against him in 1409.^[10]

But the very point on which Huss is most sacerdotal,—his doctrine as to the obligation of the Clergy, and of them only, to obey the Law of Christ in all its strictness,—was the foundation of his anti-hierarchical doctrines. The powers and rights of the Priest were, as he held, so indefeasibly theirs that a Priest “living according to the law of Christ, and having a knowledge of the Scripture,” might not lawfully cease from preaching or administering the Sacraments, in obedience to the commands of any ecclesiastical authority whatsoever. He ascribes the origin of the Papacy solely to the supposed donation of Constantine:^[11] he declares that at some future time the Church may be ruled without a Pope or Cardinals, as was actually the case during the first three hundred years of its existence. He denies, in short, as an historical fact, the Primacy of S. Peter, and the jus divinum of the primacy of his successors. The commands of the Pope are only to be obeyed when in the judgment of the person commanded they are in accordance with the law of Christ. “The faithful disciple of Christ,” he says, “is bound to consider whence a command given by the Pope is derived (quomodo emanat), whether it is expressly the command of any Apostle, or of the law of Christ, or has its foundation in the law of Christ; and when he has satisfied himself of that, he is bound reverently and humbly to obey a command of this kind. If, however, he truly satisfies himself that the command of the Pope is contrary to a command of Christ, or tends in any way to the hurt of the Church, then he is bound boldly to resist it, lest he be a participator in the crime by consent.”^[12]

The power of Bishops Huss does seem to place upon a somewhat higher footing than that of the Pope. But the Apostolical succession would seem in his estimation to confer upon them no power whatsoever except that of conveying Orders. He sets exactly the same limits to the duty of canonical obedience in the case of Bishops as he does to the Papal supremacy. A Bishop in mortal sin is no Bishop. His commands are only to be obeyed when they are in accordance with the law of Christ, and the inferior is bound to examine them before he obeys them.^[13]

Huss entirely denies both to Bishops and Clergy what may be called destructive powers. That excommunication which shuts a man off “from participation in the favour of God, from a worthy participation of the Sacraments, and from a participation in the prayers which prepare for eternal life” can only be pronounced when the Bishop knows by special revelation^[14] that the offender is already excommunicated by God. And he nowhere implies that such revelations were to be expected. Practically, the only excommunication which he recognises is “the public exclusion from the conversation of Christians by the sentence of a spiritual or secular judge;” and this is only to be pronounced as a punishment for mortal sin. In short, he makes excommunication a purely temporal penalty, and it is to be disregarded when unjustly imposed.

On Absolution his doctrine is much the same. No priest ought to pronounce unconditional absolution, unless he knows by special revelation that the penitent is absolved by God. “Wherefore,” he says, “the wise priests of Christ do not assert simply that the person confessing is loosed from his sins, but only under the condition, ‘If he is sorry, and will sin no more, or has faith in the mercy of God, and will henceforward observe the commandments of God.’”^[15]

We hope that we have already shown sufficient grounds for rejecting the conclusion of Dean Milman, that the heresy of John Huss “has never been clearly defined,”^[16] and that it did not consist in “any of those tenets of belief rejected afterwards by the German and English Reformers.” It is perfectly true that “he was the martyr to the power of the hierarchy,” but that was because he had denied the powers of the hierarchy; and a belief in those powers was as essential a part, as it was, in our estimation, by far the most dangerous part of the Roman Creed.

But whatever may have been his opinions upon other points, there is one matter in which he is absolutely, unhesitatingly, a Protestant: in which he is as opposed to the teaching of one half of the Anglican Church as to the teaching of the whole of the Roman Church. He denies the claim of any man, or any body of men, to Infallibility. He will own no authority in matters of Faith but Holy Scripture: neither Fathers, nor Popes, nor General Councils. In so far as the Reformation was an assertion of the right of Private Judgment, Huss asserted it as fully and as clearly as any of the German Reformers, and far more clearly than our English Reformers. He expressly denies that any man, or any body of men, has a right to tell another what he is to believe: and he denies that it is lawful for any man thus to believe a doctrine upon the authority of another, or to say that he believes it when he does not. If this be not Protestantism, the word has no meaning.

But in spite of the clearness with which he asserts the right and the duty of Private Judgment, he certainly believed that his doctrinal system was as a matter of fact in perfect harmony with the teaching of the Fathers, and of the Popes and Councils of the Western Church until within a comparatively recent period. His Patristic learning was vast. But in reading the Fathers, his attention was fixed exclusively upon the Evangelical side of their writings: he entirely ignores that side of their teaching which supports claims of authority. It is difficult to fix the exact period from which he would have dated the corruption of the Church’s doctrine. For he was a consummate debater; and his knowledge of ecclesiastical history was very remarkable for those times. He was thus constantly able to quote the decretals of earlier Popes against those of their successors, of earlier Councils against later Councils: he delighted in refuting the claims of the Popes out of their own mouths. The Decretals, the Extravagants, the Canon Law, all furnish him with weapons against the claims of the authority which they were intended to support. But although in some of these citations he is certainly ironical, although sometimes he uses his authorities merely as argumenta ad hominem, he does not seem to have been aware to what an extent the right of Private Judgment had been denied, or how indissolubly the whole Church-system of the Middle Ages was bound up with those views of Hierarchical authority and of the Infallibility of the Church which he rejected. He does not seem to have realised that Doctors for whom he had the greatest respect, such as S. Cyprian, or Pope Gregory, or S. Bernard, would have rejected with indignation the claim of an individual priest to interpret Scripture for himself. Those writers who, apparently with a view of aggravating the guilt of his judges in putting him to death, have pronounced that Huss was an orthodox Catholic according to the notions of his time, seem to have been content to accept his undoubted belief in his own orthodoxy as a sufficient refutation of the charge of heresy. But the very fact that he should have maintained that he was orthodox and the Council unorthodox, shows that his mind was so wholly uncatholic in its bent, that he really did not know what orthodoxy meant.

From the point of view of the individual conscience, Huss was, as we have said, quite clear in his assertion of the right and even the duty of private judgment. And to a very considerable extent he maintained also what we may call the political right of Liberty of Conscience. The whole tenour of his protests against the ill-treatment of good and hard-working priests on account of opinions which in some cases he admitted to be erroneous, leaves upon the mind the impression that he means to condemn all persecution on account of opinion. He constantly urges that those who accuse others of error, should refute and convince, instead of trying to suppress them. But when asked at Constance what was to be done with heretics who were deaf to all argument, he admitted that they must be punished in the body, he does not say burned to death.^[17] If an answer made under such circumstances is to be taken as representing the settled opinion of the speaker, we may at all events feel sure that he would have interpreted the term “Heretic” liberally. Although he could not quite get rid of the mediæval notion which made Heresy a crime or worse than a crime; yet in his own works the term is more often applied unlawful and immoral practices, such as Simony, than to diversities of doctrine. The fact is that the toleration which he demanded was a toleration by the Church as well as by the State. He would have been beyond his age indeed if he had seen that it might be right for the State to allow the public preaching of one whom the Church might rightly condemn. His advocacy of Toleration sprang not from any abstract conclusion of political science, not from what is called in modern times liberality of mind, but from the breadth of his Christian sympathies. He wished not that those whom he denounced as heretics should be suffered to live, but that the Christian Church should include all whose lives were the lives of Christians. In this respect he shows a largeness of heart which contrasts very favourably with the temper of most of the Reformers of the Sixteenth Century.

The great work of John Huss was to make a protest on behalf of the rights of Conscience. The most marked characteristic of his mind and of his character was an intense, an unsurpassed conscientiousness. This conscientiousness, this scrupulous sincerity, was the source of all his Protestantism. The key-note of his Theology and of his life is sounded in the title of one of his works, the treatise "On the sufficiency of the law of Christ." The Gospel was to him primarily a law, a rule of life; his great aim was to find out what was the will of Christ upon the smallest details of his own life and of the lives of his flock. On their purely contemplative or speculative side he was ready to accept the traditional beliefs of his age, or those beliefs modified by that Augustinism which was as the life-blood of the sound part of the Mediæval Church. With doctrines which did not directly affect practice, such as Transubstantiation and Purgatory, he had no quarrel. The power of binding and loosing, the power of giving and withholding the body of Christ, he did not in the abstract deny to the Clergy; but the moment such doctrines were so understood as to involve—and in an age in which Balthasar Cossa could be a Pope and Albert of Uniczow an Archbishop, they inevitably did involve at every turn—the calling of evil good and good evil, Huss was at war with them. This practical, pastoral bent of his mind saved him at once from the mediæval danger of Mysticism, and from the Protestant danger of Dogmatism. It constituted his great excellence as a religious teacher; but it constituted also the weakness of his position as a Reformer.

John Huss was indeed a Protestant before Protestantism, rather than a Reformer before the Reformation. He viewed the corruptions of the Church too much from the point of view of the pulpit,—it may almost be said of the confessional. It was in this respect that he most conspicuously fell behind Wyclif. The abolition of the Papal supremacy, of religious orders, of monasteries, of the enforced celibacy of the clergy, of Latin services, of Chantries and endowments for Masses,—all these measures Wyclif saw to be necessary conditions of any permanent Reform. Huss denounced the abuses and the erroneous doctrines connected with these institutions, instead of demanding the abolition of the institutions with which they were indissolubly bound up. From the want of a definite plan of Reform, such as he might have bequeathed to them, the Bohemian nation, agreeing in nothing but in reverence for his name, speedily became split up into two factions; one of which demanded reforms too moderate to be effectual, and too moderate to be lasting; while the other drifted into extravagances almost as wild, if not as immoral, as those of the Anabaptists of the succeeding century. When we consider the enormous influence which he wielded during his lifetime and the devotion which his memory inspired after his death, we cannot help feeling that had Huss possessed something of the political common-sense of Wyclif or of our Edwardian Reformers, the result of the Bohemian Reformation might have been very different to what it was. It is melancholy to reflect that a nation which has perhaps suffered more in defence of religious and political liberty than any other in Europe, should now be a province of the Austrian Empire, covered with the hideous Pagan temples which attest the triumph of Jesuitism,^[18] the most immoral development of that religion against the immorality of which Huss protested. They have laboured, and others have entered into their labours.

Wyclif was, as we have seen, a more thorough, a more violent but also a more statesmanlike reformer than John Huss. He was more conscious than Huss of the antagonism in which his principles stood to those of the Mediæval Church, and saw more clearly the necessity for vigorous legislative reform as well as for a revival of religious life. But in one important matter, both of them belonged to the age which was passing away, and not to the generation which was to prepare the way for the movement which was to carry out what Huss had begun. At the Council of Constance the disciples of the Angelical Doctor and the Master of the Sentences sat side by side with men who are still celebrated for the elegance of their Latinity or for the re-discovery of forgotten Classics. Huss and Wyclif were schoolmen. Both of them, indeed, are still remembered as champions of their native languages; and both of them preached and wrote powerfully in them, when they were addressing themselves to the populace. But their minds were thoroughly in bondage to Scholasticism: when they wrote for the learned, they wrote in syllogisms. Wyclif’s more logical mind saw through the absurdity of the accidens sine substantia, with which Huss was perfectly satisfied: but both Huss’ defence and Wyclif’s denial of Transubstantiation were alike based upon scholastic grounds. A rebellion against Philosophy, as it was then understood, was as necessary for the emancipation of human thought as a rebellion against Sacerdotalism. When the Reformation came, Philosophy was its foe; Literature was its friend. The sympathies of Wyclif, Huss, and Jerome of Prague were with the decaying Scholasticism of the Middle Ages, and not with the dawning Revival of Letters.

There were standing by the fires in which Huss and Jerome perished, men who most unconsciously were to do something to set forward the cause for which they died. Poggio and Æneas Sylvius have left us accounts of the constancy of their deaths. The tone in which they write shows how very cold Faith was to become in the age which was yet an indispensable preparation for the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century. Æneas Sylvius says: “We don’t find that any of the philosophers ever suffered death with so much courage as they endured the fire.^[19]” Poggio is similarly reminded, not of the saints of Christianity, but of the heroes of Paganism. He calls the account of Jerome’s death “a History so much like to those of Antiquity. Mutius Scævola did not express more constancy when he saw his arm burnt than Jerome did at the sight of his whole body in the flames.”^[20] The South of Europe had to go through a period of revived Paganism before the North could produce men who should unite the enthusiasm of Huss and Jerome with the scholarship and literary culture of Æneas Sylvius and Poggio.

The deficiencies of John Huss as a Reformer were the noblest testimony to the beauty of his character as a man. He was unconscious of the fact that he was playing a great part in history. He possessed an extraordinary gift of inspiring strong personal affection in those with whom he was brought into contact; yet he knew not what power he wielded. He possessed few of those qualities which are generally necessary to secure the applause of multitudes. He was eloquent, but less so than his far less respected associate Jerome of Prague. He possessed none of Wyclif’s bitter, keen satirical power, or of the rough, hearty humour of Luther; he was, we should gather, habitually serious, though not stern.^[21]

There was in him nothing of the braggadocio of the Puritan: nothing, on the other hand, of the ostentatious humility of the Mediæval Saint. Few men who have enjoyed so much popularity, and that the dangerous popularity of a religious leader, have been so absolutely free from affectation. His life was devoted to the assertion of a great principle which had been obscured for centuries: he thought that he was asserting a principle in defence of which good men of all ages would have gladly died. He behaved at Constance as one who was falling a victim to the malice of personal enemies, as one who grieved at being misunderstood; not as one who rejoiced, with a lawful pride, at being accounted worthy to die for a great cause. Few Reformers have been less violent even in words: hardly was he betrayed, even by a righteous indignation, into a single word or action which his maturer judgment would have condemned; yet he became the national hero of a people whose ferocity in religious warfare stands unexampled in the history of Christendom. No man was ever less of a demagogue, no man was ever more gentle or more humble; yet it may be doubted whether a whole people ever conceived such an enthusiastic affection for one who was so worthy of it.

 

1. “Latin Christianity,” book xiii., chap. ix.
2. Huss accepted the orthodox formula as to Transubstantiation on the strength of the dogma of the accidens sine substantia. The Realists held that there was a “substance” in class of things represented by a generic name which made that thing what it was, apart from the qualities perceived by the senses, which were called “accidents” of the thing. After consecration, the “substance” of the host was the “substance” of the Body and Blood of Christ, but the “accidents”—powers of affecting the taste, touch and sight—remained those of the bread and wine. Huss adhered rigidly to this doctrine, and hence disapproved of many of the popular expressions which were used with regard to the consecrated bread. He objected to its being said that the Body of Christ was tasted or handled or seen. He refused, though required to do so by his Diocesan, to give up applying the term “bread” to the host after consecration, on the ground that the word “this” in the words of institution could only mean “this bread.” In his assertions of the dogma, he constantly uses such qualifications as these: “Sufficit multis sanctis credere et sufficit indoctis et simplicibus Christianis informatione carentibus ampliori,” “sacramentaliter,” “mysterialiter,” “in sacramenti mysterio.”—De Cœna Domini, Opera, vol. i., fol. 39. All these expressions show that his views were far removed from the grossness of the popular view of Transubstantiation. He dwelt little upon the miraculous aspect of the Sacrament, which to his adversaries was everything,—far less than many Anglican upholders of the doctrine of the Real Presence; much upon its commemorative value.
3. In this respect he was once able to retaliate the charge of heresy upon his Diocesan, who had directed his clergy to preach that after consecration “nothing but the body of the Lord remains in the bread, and nothing but the blood of the Lord in the wine.”—See the “Ordo Procedendi” drawn up by Huss, in Palacky’s “Documenta.”
4. Fol. 42.
5. Fol. 148, 149. The Virgin is there called the “reparatrix humani generis et porta cœli . . sine cujus suffragio impossibile est salvari aliquam peccatorem.”—Quoted by L’Enfant, vol. i., p. 434.
6. L’Enfant, vol. i., p. 434.
7. Opera, vol. ii., fol. lii., b.
8. Op., vol. i., fol. 185 a.
9. Quaestio de Indulgentiis, cap. ii., fol. 188–9, a.
10. “Ad quos respondi . . . . sine juramento.”—These answers, according to Palacky, were made just before his departure for Constance.
11. 221 a., 225 a.—Huss does sometimes appear to recognise the divine origin of the Papacy, but he does so merely in the sense in which he would have said that secular authorities derive their power from God. He followed Wyclif in holding that secular as well as ecclesiastical authorities had no power when in mortal sin.
12. § Fol. 236 a.
13. Fol. 239.
14. [[De Ecclesia. The Church|De Ecclesia, cap. xxii.
15. Fol. clxxv. 6 ad fin., and clxxvi. a.
16. “Latin Christianity,” book xiii., chap. 9. [Vol. viii., p. 297, Cabinet Edition.]
17. L’Enfant, vol. 1., p. 342.
18. Almost every Gothic Church in Bohemia was destroyed in the troubles of the Hussite Wars.
19. L’Enfant, vol. 1., p. 593.
20. L’Enfant, vol. 1., p. 599.
21. The following character is given of him by the Jesuit Balbinus:—“He was more subtil than eloquent; but the modesty and severity of his manners, his unpolished, austere, and entirely blameless life, his pale thin visage, his good nature and affability to all, even to the meanest persons, were more persuasive than the greatest eloquence.” L’Enfant, vol. 1., p. 24.