Jan Hus

Jan Hus (born c. 1370, Husinec, Bohemia [now in Czech Republic]—died July 6, 1415, Konstanz [Germany]) was the most important 15th-century Czech religious reformer, whose work was transitional between the medieval and the Reformation periods and anticipated the Lutheran Reformation by a full century. He was embroiled in the bitter controversy of the Western Schism (1378–1417) for his entire career, and he was convicted of heresy at the Council of Constance and burned at the stake.

Early life and teaching career

Hus was born of poor parents in Husinec in southern Bohemia, from which he took his name. About 1390 he enrolled in the University of Prague, and two years after his graduation in 1394 he received a master’s degree and began teaching at the university. He became dean of the philosophical faculty there in 1401.

At this time the University of Prague was undergoing a period of struggle against foreign, chiefly German, influence as well as an intense rivalry between, on the one hand, German masters who upheld nominalism and were regarded as enemies of church reform and, on the other, the strongly nationalistic Czech masters, who were inclined to realist philosophy and were enthusiastic readers of the philosophical writings of John Wycliffe, a bitter critic of nominalism. Hus studied Wycliffe’s works and later his theological writings, which were brought into Prague in 1401. Hus was influenced by Wycliffe’s underlying principles, though he never accepted their extreme implications, and was particularly impressed by Wycliffe’s proposals for reform of the Roman Catholic clergy. The clerical estate owned about one-half of all the land in Bohemia, and the great wealth and simoniacal practices of the higher clergy aroused jealousy and resentment among the poor priests. The Bohemian peasantry, too, resented the church as one of the heaviest land taxers. There was thus a large potential base of support for any church reform movement at a time when the authority of the papacy itself was discredited by the Western Schism. Attempts at reform had been made by the Bohemian king Charles IV, and Wycliffe’s works were the chosen weapon of the national reform movement founded by Jan Milíč of Kroměříž (died 1374).

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Leader of Czech reform movement

In 1391 Milíč’s pupils founded the Bethlehem Chapel in Prague, where public sermons were preached in Czech (rather than in Latin) in the spirit of Milíc̆’s teaching. From 1402 Hus was in charge of the chapel, which had become the centre of the growing national reform movement in Bohemia. He became increasingly absorbed in public preaching and eventually emerged as the popular leader of the movement. Despite his extensive duties at the Bethlehem Chapel, Hus continued to teach in the university faculty of arts and became a candidate for the doctor’s degree in theology. Hus also became the adviser to the young nobleman Zbyněk Zajíc of Hazmburk when Zbyněk was named archbishop of Prague in 1403, a move that helped to give the reform movement a firmer foundation.

In 1403 a German university master, Johann Hübner, drew up a list of 45 articles, presumably selected from Wycliffe’s writings, and had them condemned as heretical. Because the German masters had three votes and the Czech masters only one, the Germans easily outvoted the Czechs, and the 45 articles were henceforth regarded as a test of orthodoxy. The principal charge against Wycliffe’s teaching was his tenet of remanence—i.e., that the bread and wine in the Eucharist retain their material substance. Wycliffe also declared the Scriptures to be the sole source of Christian doctrine. Hus did not share all of Wycliffe’s radical views, such as that on remanence, but several members of the reform party did, among them Hus’s teacher, Stanislav of Znojmo, and his fellow student, Štěpán Páleč.

During the first five years of Zbyněk’s reign as archbishop of Prague, his attitude toward the “evangelical party” radically changed. The opponents of reform won him over to their side and, in 1407, succeeded in charging Stanislav and Páleč with heresy, and they were cited to the Roman Curia for examination. The two men returned completely changed in their theological views and became the principal opponents of the reformers. Thus, just when Hus had emerged at the forefront of the reform movement, he came into conflict with his former friends.

Hus and the Western Schism

Since 1378 the Roman Catholic Church had been split by the Western Schism, during which the papal jurisdiction was divided between two popes. As the leader of reform, Hus unhesitatingly quarreled with Archbishop Zbyněk when the latter opposed the Council of Pisa (1409), which was called to dethrone the rival popes and to reform the church. The council had the support of the Czech masters at the University of Prague, whereas the German masters were opposed to it. The German masters, who carried a voting majority in university affairs, supported the archbishop, which so enraged King Wenceslas that in January 1409 he subverted the university constitution by granting the Czech masters three votes each and the Germans only one; the result was a mass emigration of the Germans from Prague to several German universities. In the fall of 1409 Hus was elected rector of the now Czech-dominated university.

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The final break between Archbishop Zbyněk and Hus occurred when the Council of Pisa deposed both Pope Gregory XII, whose authority was recognized in Bohemia, and the antipope Benedict XIII and in their place elected Alexander V. The deposed popes, however, retained jurisdiction over portions of western Europe; thus, instead of two, there were now three popes. The archbishop and the higher clergy in Bohemia remained faithful to Gregory, whereas Hus and the reform party acknowledged the new pope. After being forced by the king’s punitive measures to recognize Alexander V as the legitimate pope, the archbishop, through a large bribe, induced Alexander to prohibit preaching in private chapels, including the Bethlehem Chapel. Hus refused to obey the pope’s order, whereupon Zbyněk excommunicated him. Despite his condemnation, Hus continued to preach at the Bethlehem Chapel and to teach at the University of Prague. Zbyněk was ultimately forced by the king to promise Hus his support before the Roman Curia, but he then died suddenly in 1411, and the leadership of Hus’s enemies passed to the Curia itself.

In 1412 the case of Hus’s heresy, which had been tacitly dropped, was revived because of a new dispute over the sale of indulgences that had been issued by Alexander’s successor, the antipope John XXIII, to finance his campaign against Gregory XII. Their sale in Bohemia aroused general indignation but had been approved by King Wenceslas, who, as usual, shared in the proceeds. Hus and his former student Jerome of Prague gave a famed public disputation, which climaxed with the burning of John XXIII’s decree authorizing the sale of indulgences. Hus also publicly denounced these indulgences before the university. In doing so, he lost the support of Wenceslas, which was to prove fatal to him. Hus’s enemies then renewed his trial at the Curia, where he was declared under major excommunication for refusing to appear and an interdict was pronounced over Prague or any other place where Hus might reside, thereby denying certain sacraments of the church to communicants in the interdicted area. In order to spare the city the consequences, Hus voluntarily left Prague in October 1412. He found refuge mostly in southern Bohemia in the castles of his friends, and during the next two years he engaged in feverish literary activity. His enemies, particularly Stanislav and Páleč, wrote a large number of polemical treatises against him, which he answered in an equally vigorous manner. The most important of his treatises was De ecclesia (The Church). He also wrote a large number of treatises in Czech and a collection of sermons entitled Postilla.