Jan Hus

Czech religious leader

• Born: 1372 or 1373
• Birthplace: Husinec, southern Bohemia (now in Czech Republic)
• Died: July 6, 1415
• Place of death: Constance (now in Germany)

Through preaching and writing against the abuses of the medieval church attendant on the divided Papacy, the greedy and indolent clergy, and the rigid anti-layperson doctrines, Hus laid the foundation for the Protestant Reformation one hundred years later. His martyrdom at the Council of Constance made him a national hero to the Czech people.

Early Life

Jan Hus (yahn hews) derived his name from the small hamlet in which he was born, Husinec, which literally means “Goosetown.” No agreement exists about his exact date of birth or the nature of his early schooling, but it is known that his family was poor and his mother vowed that her son would enter the priesthood. In 1390, Hus entered the University of Prague, and by 1398, he had garnered both the bachelor of arts and master’s degree to join the arts faculty as a full member. During the winter semester of 1401/1402 he served for a term as dean of the arts faculty before enrolling in the faculty of theology to pursue the highest degree available in a medieval university, the doctor’s degree in theology. After earning the bachelor of divinity degree in 1404, as a first step he began to lecture on the Bible and then, in 1407, on Peter Lombard’s Sententiarum libri IV (1148-1151; The Books of Opinions of Peter Lombard, 1970; better known as Sentences). He was within a year or two of his goal when his life was engulfed in controversy. From humble origins, Hus had climbed to the top rung of the academic ladder in his native land.

What was going on in his mind and heart during these years? Not much is known about these personal matters. All students and faculty were members of the clergy at that time, which did not mean that they were ordained as priests or monks but which did preclude marriage and secular occupations. Hus does not tell how he survived his prolonged apprenticeship in the lower ranks of the university, and unlike his celebrated successors in the Reformation (especially Martin Luther, 1483-1546), he does not divulge his religious thinking. He was ordained as a priest in June of 1400 and appointed preacher at the Bethlehem Chapel on March 14, 1402. This privately endowed religious institution in Prague had only been established in 1391, but it had already become a center for the Czech reform movement. Hus was to become its most famous advocate.

Amid the disarray caused by the papal problems in the fourteenth century the Babylonian Captivity in Avignon, France, from 1305 to 1378, which was sharpened by the Great Schism from 1378 to 1417 there were calls for church reform throughout Europe. Add to this the chronic political unrest caused by the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453) and the ghastly Black Death outbreaks beginning in 1347-1348, all of which spawned the peasant revolts of 1356 in France and 1381 in England, and the calls for reform became cries for revolution. It was out of this context that John Wyclif emerged to become the leading religious reformer and the spiritual mentor of Hus.

Life’s Work

Hus’s philosophy was formed by the Czech reform movement and the theology of Wyclif. The Czech reform movement had been started in 1363, when the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV and the Archbishop Ernest of Pardubice called to Prague an Augustinian preacher from Vienna named Conrad Waldhauser. This preacher castigated the German clerics and merchants with electrifying zeal, and in the process he converted John Milíč of Kroměríž, who took up the call to exhort his own people to repent and reform. Following Milíč came Matthew of Janov, who in his short life translated the Bible into Czech and compiled five volumes of theology called Regulae veteris et novi testamenti (1388-1392). This full-fledged religious movement prepared Hus to receive and respond to the powerful message from across the English Channel.

Wyclif cast his heavy shadow over the life and career of Hus. Although the Czechs in general and Hus in particular were strongly attracted to Wyclif’s views on church reform and Christian doctrine, they did not agree completely with him. Hus differed from Wyclif on most of the views certified as heretical, but he was labeled as a follower of Wyclif and burned at the stake as a heretic because of his sympathy for Wyclif.

As a moralist, Wyclif questioned the legitimacy of the pope, the sacramental authority of the clergy, and even secular lords and kings, when corrupt. Although many of his followers in England, called Lollards, were persecuted and suppressed, Wyclif himself managed to stay out of trouble and died just as his doctrinal pronouncements were beginning to disturb the peace of Christendom. The Czech religious leaders were learning about Wyclif when Hus was becoming a preacher.

As a theologian, Wyclif denied the doctrine of transubstantiation in the sacrament of Holy Communion. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 had pronounced that the bread and wine were “transubstantiated” into the body and blood of Christ. Wyclif, rejecting this dogma, argued that it was impossible for the “real” elements, that is, the bread and the wine, to be annihilated by their transformation into the body and blood of Christ. This denial of transubstantiation led him to question the legitimacy of priests who administered the sacrament, to challenge the pope, who was the chief priest of the church, and even to attack the tithes collected to support the Church. Moreover, Wyclif proposed that Communion be offered to the laity “in both kinds,” which meant giving wine as well as bread to the laity. Finally, he based his criticism of transubstantiation and other doctrines on the Bible, as well as on philosophical arguments. Emphasizing the need for scriptural grounding of doctrine, he became a stout supporter of the translation of the Bible into vernacular languages.

Hus began as an orthodox teacher and preacher. From 1402 to 1408, he exhorted his parishioners at the Bethlehem Chapel to stop sinning and to improve their lives. Yet he did not confine his criticism to the meek and lowly of his parish and community. He recognized that many of the problems that led his parishioners to suffer and sin were caused by clerical abuses and the corruption of the clergy. Being a proud Czech in a world dominated politically and ecclesiastically by Germans, Hus did not hesitate to lambaste the German leaders, clerical and lay, for the evils of the world and the confusion in doctrine. In so doing, Hus became a leader of discontented poor people who wanted to revolt against tyranny and a spokesman for discontented Czechs of all classes who wanted to overthrow the German Holy Roman Emperor. Even though Hus himself entertained no such exalted revolutionary ambition, he was accused of being subversive.

Hus was actually a theologian rather than a political ideologue. He assumed that human wretchedness was a consequence of the Fall in the Garden of Eden. He believed that the sacraments of the Church could restore the spiritual virtues that were not entirely destroyed by Original Sin. Baptism and Communion were essential for salvation. While Hus did not deny the importance of the other five sacraments, he and his peers focused attention on these two. Baptism was not yet the issue it would become in the next century. The controversy that was going to convulse the Christian world for the next two centuries revolved around Communion.

Hus did not subscribe to Wyclif’s rejection of transubstantiation, but he welcomed his anticlericalism and his reliance on the Bible. Because of his sympathy for Wyclif’s reform sentiments, Hus defended Wyclif against the charge of heresy. That made Hus vulnerable to the ever-increasing assault from the theologians and ecclesiastical politicians who would ignore his fine distinctions. The assault began in 1402 in Prague and ended only at Constance in 1415.

When the new archbishop of Prague, Zbyněk Zajíc of Hasenburk, attacked Wyclif’s theology in 1402, he provoked Hus to argue that the transubstantiated bread remained in the sacrament after its consecration. While Hus did not accept Wyclif’s position theologically, for Hus did accept the doctrine that Christ’s real body and blood were present physically, he did agree with Wyclif’s position philosophically. That is, Hus did believe that it was “real” bread that contained Christ’s physical remains. The theologians who were dominant in Bohemia and who prevailed at the Council of Constance were scandalized by the notion that there was anything “real” like bread in the sacrament. They held further that Christ’s body and blood could be perceived only by faith.

Hus’s opponents also insisted that even a wicked priest could confer a valid Communion sacrament, which was orthodox doctrine from Saint Augustine’s pronouncements a thousand years earlier. Beginning in 1407, however, they provoked Hus to reply that a layperson who knowingly receives the sacrament from a wicked priest is guilty of a grave sin. While Wyclif’s original argument had verged on a heretical denial of ordination, Hus remained orthodox by affirming the validity of ordination while denying the corrupt priest any possibility of salvation. Since Hus persisted in defending the Wyclifite excoriation of bad priests and sinfully obedient laypeople, he opened himself up to be condemned as a Wyclifite.

The ecclesiastical politicians launched their successful assault in 1411 when they provoked Hus to oppose the papal crusade against the king of Naples, who supported Gregory XII. Not only did Hus protest against the secular use of papal power, but he also railed against the sale of indulgences that supported the enterprise. On October 18, 1412, the antipope John XXIII excommunicated Hus for nonobedience (not for heresy) and placed Prague under interdict until Hus left. Hus went into exile in southern Bohemia, where he lived with many nobles in several different castles. During his exile, he wrote his principal work, De ecclesia (The Church , 1915), and several polemical articles against his critics. Again, he vainly struggled to disentangle his respect for Wyclif the reformer from his nonadherence to Wyclif’s heretical ideas.

On October 31, 1413, Emperor Sigismund compelled John XXIII to call a new council to convene in Constance (1414-1418) exactly one year later. The emperor then invited Hus to leave his safe retreats and attend the council. He promised him safe conduct to the conference, and he gave the impression that he promised him safe conduct to return home. It made little difference though, because once Hus had been lured to the conference, he was doomed. On November 3, 1414, Hus arrived at Constance, six weeks ahead of the emperor’s entourage. The council was formally opened on November 16, and Hus was arrested on November 28 and imprisoned in a monastery dungeon from December 6 to March 24 of the next year. After many postponements, Hus was granted two public hearings in June, but there was no debate allowed. On July 6, 1415, Hus was formally condemned for Wyclifite heresy, and when he refused to recant, he was burned at the stake.

Significance

Jan Hus was a Czech leader in a political system dominated by Germans. He was a Wyclifite reformer in an ecclesiastical setting run by opponents of Wyclif, whose books were burned on February 10, 1413, in front of the basilica of Saint Peter in Rome. As a conscientious human being, Hus was unlucky to live at a time when religious reform was necessary to fight for but not possible to achieve. Yet Hus was not a failure in the ultimate sense. By the standards of his own age and religion, he was vindicated by his martyrdom.

As a child of his age, Hus shared the theologically shaped view of the world and differed from his peers mostly by placing greater emphasis on scriptural authority and patristic teachings of the first five centuries of the Christian era. In this respect, he stood on the threshold of the Reformation, which preferred the Bible to the pope. As the subsequent intellectual revolutions in science and democracy have repudiated the medieval worldview and superseded the authority of the Christian clergy, Hus the embattled Wyclifite theologian (who tried not to follow Wyclif into heresy) has faded away. All that remains is Hus the martyr. In his moral stature, his unyielding devotion to truth as he knew it, the purity and integrity of his character, and his unswerving loyalty to Christianity as he believed it, Hus has become an inspirational figure to many generations. In the last analysis, Hus was not the victim of the Council of Constance; he stands as its judge.

Bibliography

Fudge, Thomas A. The Magnificent Ride: The First Reformation in Hussite Bohemia. Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1998. Presents a cultural and social history of the reform movement in Bohemia. Maps, bibliography, index.

Loomis, Louise R. The Council of Constance: The Unification of the Church. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961. A primary source on the proceedings of the Council of Constance and the condemnation of Hus.

Lützow, Franz. The Life and Times of Master John Hus. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1921. An older but highly readable biography.

Odložilík, Otakar. Wyclif and Bohemia. Prague: Nákladem Královské ceské spolecnosti nauk, 1936. A Czech view of Wyclif’s impact on Christian reform sentiment in Bohemia.

Schaff, David S. John Hus: His Life, Teachings, and Death After Five Hundred Years. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915. This is the best older biography. It is very sympathetic to Hus and his cause.

Spinka, Matthew. John Hus and the Czech Reform. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941. Spinka is the outstanding Hus scholar writing in English. This biography places Hus in his Czech setting, which Spinka believes is essential to understand Hus. Spinka writes in the shadow of the Munich Conference in 1938, and this event colors his interpretation of Hus’s betrayal by the German emperor at the Council of Constance.

Spinka, Matthew. John Hus at the Council of Constance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1965. Contains the proceedings of the Council of Constance and Hus’s correspondence.

Spinka, Matthew. John Hus’ Concept of the Church. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966. Spinka’s presentation of Hus’s theology attempts to establish Hus as a major medieval theologian who admired Wyclif but did not follow him into heresy. He points out that many of Wyclif’s other Czech followers were more heretical, even though they opposed Hus and supported Hus’s condemnation.

Stacey, John. John Wyclif and Reform. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1964. Wyclif is seen as a religious reformer in theology who remained prudent in politics.

Ullman, W. The Origins of the Great Schism. London: Burns, Oates, and Washbourne, 1948. Gives the background for the religious corruption and moral confusion that set the stage for Hus’s career. It deals with the rise of two popes, two Colleges of Cardinals, and two papal genealogies in the century preceding Hus.

Wylie, James Hamilton. The Council of Constance to the Death of John Hus. London: Longmans, Green, 1900. A comprehensive source in English for this subject.