Justified True Belief

(●) The Prague preacher who told a church council that Christ, not the pope, is the head of the church, and was burned for saying so. + On any Sunday morning between 1402 and 1412, a visitor to Prague could walk into a plain barn-like hall near the river and find it packed to the walls with ordinary Czechs: bakers, weavers, servants, students, the queen’s ladies at the back. They were there because the man in the pulpit preached in their own language, which almost nobody did, and because he told them about the priests of their own city in words they recognised from the street. His name was Jan Hus, and thirteen years later a council of the whole Western church would strip him of his orders, meaning the ordination that had made him a priest, put a paper crown on his head, and burn him outside the walls of Constance. He is worth a Christian reader’s attention because of the question he was killed over, which is not a medieval question at all. When the institution that taught you the faith tells you one thing and the text it handed you says another, which do you follow? Hus gave an answer that sounded reasonable to him and treasonous to his judges: obey the church in everything, except where obedience would mean disobeying Christ, and be shown your error from Scripture before you are asked to swear it is an error. A hundred and six years later a German friar would give almost the same answer at Worms, and would say he had learned it partly from Hus. The thing about him a reader tends to remember is the paper trail. More than eighty of his letters survive, many of them smuggled out of prison, and they are not the letters of a symbol. He asks after a friend’s wife, thanks a woman for her kindness, worries about who will preach in his old pulpit, and a week before the fire he asks his young secretary to keep his fur cloak in memory of him.

(●) c. 1372 AD: Born to poor parents in a Bohemian village, he sang in churches to pay his way through the university. + He came from Husinec, a village in southern Bohemia not far from the Bavarian border, and he took his name from it: Jan of Husinec, shortened in ordinary use to Hus. The birth year is not certain. Older scholarship settled on 1369 on evidence its own editors called doubtful, and current work generally puts it around 1372; every date in his early life carries a little of that softness. Of his parents, his brothers and his sisters we know essentially nothing, except that in his last weeks he was anxiously arranging the education of a brother’s sons. At Prague he was poor enough to sing in churches and do menial work for his keep, and he was, by his own later account, an ordinary devout young man rather than a saint in training. He reproached himself in old age for the hours he had wasted at chess, and for not being able to lose a game without losing his temper. When a pardon-seller came to the Vyšehrad in 1392 he handed over his last four groschen for an indulgence and lived on dry bread afterwards, a detail worth holding on to, because twenty years later the sale of indulgences would be the thing that broke his career. He took his bachelor’s degree in arts in 1393 and his master’s in 1396, and began lecturing in 1398. In 1400 he was ordained priest, and he was candid about the motive: he wanted the comfortable living that the clergy had. The following year he was made dean of the faculty of arts, and from the autumn of 1402 to the end of April 1403 he served a first short turn as rector of the university, on rather thinner evidence than the rest of his university career rests on.

(●) 1402 AD: He was given the Bethlehem Chapel, and for ten years preached in Czech to a hall built to hold three thousand. + The Bethlehem Chapel had been built and endowed by two wealthy laymen of Prague in 1391, and their deed of foundation attached one unusual condition: its preacher was to be a parish priest rather than a monk, and he was to preach every Sunday and feast day in Czech and in nothing else. The name was chosen to make the point. Bethlehem means house of bread, and the founders said the common people should be refreshed there with the bread of preaching. A room was attached to the building with a staircase running straight up into the pulpit, so the preacher lived, in the most literal sense, over his work. Hus was appointed to it in March 1402, and the appointment made him. He was not the first of his kind. Prague had already had a generation of reforming preachers, Konrad Waldhauser, Jan Milíč of Kroměříž, Matěj of Janov, who had denounced clerical greed and called for frequent communion; the ground was prepared. What Hus added was ten years of steady weekly preaching to the largest lay audience in the kingdom, in a hall whose walls he eventually covered with painted texts so that people who could not read a book could read the wall. He also, in these years, read John Wycliffe. Hus had copied out five of the Englishman’s philosophical tracts in his own hand in 1398, and in the autumn of 1401 his friend Jerome of Prague came home from Oxford carrying copies of Wycliffe’s Dialogus and Trialogus that he had transcribed himself. Bohemia and England had been talking since Anne of Bohemia married Richard II, and Czech students had been going to Oxford ever since. What arrived with them was a body of writing that gave Hus’s instincts a theology.

(●) 1409 AD: A royal decree handed the university to the Czechs, the German masters walked out, and Hus was made rector of what was left. + A medieval university did its voting in blocs called nations. Masters were sorted by the part of Europe they had come from, and each bloc cast a single vote no matter how many men were standing behind it, rather as a committee might give one vote to each department however large the departments are. Prague had four of them, and only one was Bohemian, so the Czechs could be outvoted three to one in their own capital by masters from abroad. That arrangement had been an irritation for years, and in 1409 it collided with a bigger crisis. Western Christendom had two rival popes, each with his own cardinals and his own obedient half of Europe, and was about to acquire a third; a council at Pisa, an assembly of bishops and theologians drawn from across the West, was trying to end the mess. King Wenceslas wanted his university to back Pisa; the German masters would not. Hus led the argument that the Czechs should have the votes their kingdom entitled them to, and on 18 January 1409 the king decreed it: three votes for the Bohemians, one for everybody else. The Germans left. Estimates in medieval chronicles run into absurd figures, but the matriculation rolls of the new university they founded at Leipzig suggest something under a thousand, walking out on foot and horseback and in wagons, and leaving a Czech remnant of a few hundred behind them. The victory was credited to Hus, and in October the masters elected him rector of the university he had just shrunk, his second turn in the office. "Praise God," he said in a sermon, "we have excluded the Germans." It is the least attractive thing in his life, and his own later letters read like a man who has worked that out. Herbert Workman, editing the letters in 1904 with obvious sympathy for his subject, called it one of the most fatal moves he ever made, and it was remembered against him for the rest of his life: at Constance, some of the men most determined to see him burned were masters he had helped drive out of Prague.

(●) 1410 – 1412 AD: His archbishop burned Wycliffe’s books, Rome sold pardons in Prague, and three young men were beheaded for repeating what he preached. + Archbishop Zbyněk had once trusted Hus enough to make him the preacher before the Bohemian synod and put him on a commission investigating a relic fraud. By 1410 the trust was gone. The archbishop forbade preaching in private chapels, which meant the Bethlehem, had Wycliffe’s books collected and burned in his courtyard on 16 July 1410, and excommunicated Hus within days for going on preaching. Excommunication was the heaviest ordinary weapon a churchman had: the man under sentence was shut out of the sacraments and, on paper at least, out of the company of Christians altogether, and the sentence would be renewed against Hus later in far harsher terms. Prague answered with street songs mocking the archbishop for burning books he had never read. Then came the sale. In 1411 and 1412 John XXIII, one of the three claimants to the papacy, proclaimed a crusade against Ladislaus, King of Naples, and offered the same indulgences for fighting or funding it that had once been offered for Jerusalem. An indulgence, in the theology of the day, was the remission of the temporal penalty owed for sins already confessed and forgiven; it was never, in the fine print, a licence to sin or a pardon bought over a counter. But as Workman dryly observed, men do not sin in Latin. In May 1412 Wenzel Tiem, dean of Passau, arrived in Prague and opened the trade, with money chests set up in the cathedral, the Týn church and the Vyšehrad, and middlemen working the country parishes for payment in kind. Hus placarded the church doors with theses against it and, on 7 June 1412, disputed the matter publicly in the great hall of the university against eight doctors of theology, one of them Stephen Páleč, the friend of his youth. A month later three young men, Martin, Jan and Stašek, interrupted the pardon-sellers in the Prague churches and called the whole business a lie. They were arrested. Hus went to the town hall with masters and students behind him, protested for them, and offered to bear the punishment himself. He was given an assurance that came to nothing, and the three were beheaded a few hours later, on 11 July 1412. Onlookers dipped cloths in the blood. A woman gave white sheets to cover the bodies, and a crowd of students carried them to the Bethlehem Chapel chanting Isti sunt sancti, these are holy, where Hus buried them and the chapel took the name of the Three Martyrs.

(●) 1412 – 1414 AD: Under interdict and driven from Prague, he lived in country castles and wrote De ecclesia, the book that would kill him. + Rome answered the disputation with the heaviest weapons it had. In July 1412 Cardinal Peter Stefaneschi, who had the case in hand at the curia, the papal court with its cardinals, its officials and its lawyers, excommunicated Hus in the fullest form: cut off from food, drink, buying, selling, conversation, hospitality, the giving of fire and water, and any place that sheltered him fell under interdict, which meant its churches closed. Prague under interdict was a city where the dead went unburied in consecrated ground and parents baptised their own children in a panic. In October 1412 Hus stood up in the Bethlehem and read out an appeal, over the head of the pope, to Jesus Christ as the supreme and just judge, who is neither swayed by gifts nor deceived by false witnesses. It was a magnificent gesture and, at his trial, a damning one. King Wenceslas, caught between his archbishop, his pope and his own popular preacher, asked him to leave, and by the end of 1412 he had gone. He spent most of the next two years in the south of the kingdom under the protection of friendly noblemen, at the little castle of Kozí Hrádek and later at Krakovec, preaching in barns, in fields and at crossroads to people who had walked in from the villages. Exile made him a writer. In 1413 he finished De ecclesia, his book on the church, the work his judges would mine for most of the articles read against him. In the same stretch of months he wrote the Czech Sunday Postil, a postil being a book of sermons written out for the readings appointed for each Sunday, so this was a full year of preaching in his own language, the Knížky o svatokupectví against the buying and selling of holy things, an exposition of the Creed, the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer, and a small devotional book for the young women of Prague. He had spent his career writing scholarship in Latin. Now he wrote for people who had none.

(●) 1414 AD: He rode to Constance under Sigismund’s written safe-conduct, and was in a cell within four weeks. + A general council was called at Constance to end the papal schism and reform the church, and Hus wanted to go. He had been asking for years for an open hearing before an assembly that was not his own diocese, and here it was. Sigismund, King of the Romans and Wenceslas’s brother, issued him a safe-conduct dated at Rothenburg on 8 October 1414. Hus did not wait for it. He left Prague on 11 October with a handful of Czech noblemen, chief among them John of Chlum, let the document overtake him on the road, and reached Constance on 3 November. For three weeks he was left more or less alone. Then, on the morning of 28 November, two bishops and the burgomaster of Constance, the chief magistrate of the town and the nearest thing it had to a mayor, came to his lodging at breakfast time to say that the cardinals were now ready to hear him. Chlum looked out and saw that the house was ringed with soldiers. "The devil himself," he told the burgomaster, "if he came to plead, ought to have a fair hearing." Hus stood up from the table and said he had not come to address the cardinals but the whole council. He went with them anyway, said goodbye on the stairs to his weeping landlady, and rode away on a small horse to the pope’s palace, and never slept a free night again. They put him first in a house by the cathedral, then in a cell next to the latrines in the Dominican convent on an island in the lake, where he fell so ill that his friends despaired of his life and the pope sent his own physician to keep him alive for his trial. Chlum did everything an honest man could do. He read the safe-conduct aloud to the notables of the city and nailed a protest to the cathedral doors. When Sigismund arrived he blustered for a few days, and then a deputation from the council warned him on 1 January that interference with a heresy trial would break up the council, and he gave way, remarking that the matter of Hus and other details of small consequence must not hold up the reform of the church.

(●) 1415 AD: On 6 July they crowned him with paper devils and burned him, and he sang until the wind turned the flame into his face. + He was heard at last in June, on the fifth, seventh and eighth, and the hearings went badly, though not in the way his enemies expected. What the council wanted from him was abjuration, and it helps to be clear about what that involved: standing up in front of the assembly and swearing on oath that he had held the listed opinions, that they were false, and that he renounced them. There lay the trouble. Many of the articles read out against him he insisted he had never held and could not recognise in his own books, so to abjure them was to swear a lie about himself in order to save his life. As for the articles genuinely drawn from his writings, he said over and over that he would recant the moment anyone showed him from Scripture that they were false. "Do you desire to be wiser than the whole Council?" a bishop demanded. "Than the whole Council, no," he answered, "but give me a portion, however small, of the Council to teach me by Scriptures of greater weight and value, and I am ready to recant." On 1 July he wrote out his final refusal in his own hand, saying he feared to offend God and feared to fall into perjury. On the morning of 6 July he was brought to the cathedral and made to stand in the aisle while the Bishop of Lodi preached on the duty of destroying heresy and promised Sigismund undying glory for it. Seven bishops dressed him in the vestments of a priest and then stripped them off him one by one; when they fell to arguing over whether his tonsure, the round patch shaved on the crown of a priest’s head to mark him out as clergy, should be shaved away or cut, he turned to the king and said that these bishops could not even agree in their blasphemy. They set on his head a paper crown a yard high, painted with three demons clawing at a soul and lettered Heresiarch, chief of heretics. "The crown which my Redeemer wore," he said, "was heavier and more painful than this." The priests sang that they committed his soul to the devil. He answered that he committed it to the most gracious Lord Jesus. They led him out through the churchyard, where his books were burning, and he laughed and told the bystanders not to believe the lies about him. At the execution ground the crowd insisted he be turned to face west, because a heretic must not face the east. Asked one last time whether he would recant, he said that God was his witness the evidence against him was false, and that he would gladly die in the truth of the gospel he had preached. When the fire was lit he sang twice, in a loud voice, "Christ, Thou Son of the Living God, have mercy upon me." He had begun the words about the Virgin Mary when the wind blew the flames into his face, and he died praying, with his lips still moving. His ashes were shovelled up and thrown into the Rhine so that Bohemia should have nothing to bury. The following May, on the same ground, they burned Jerome of Prague.

What He Taught

(T1) The church is the whole company of those God has chosen, and Christ alone is its head. + Every parish keeps a register, and every parish priest knows the register is not the same thing as the flock. Some names in it belong to people who have not been near the building in thirty years; some of the most faithful people in the town are not written down anywhere. Hus took that ordinary gap between the list and the reality and built his whole doctrine of the church on it. The church, he argued, is not the buildings, not the clergy, and not the administrative machine with its head in Rome. It is the totality of the predestinate: everyone God has determined from eternity to save, in every century, living, dead and not yet born. Alongside them, mixed in with them and indistinguishable from outside, are those he called the praesciti, the foreknown, people God knows will not persevere. A congregation is therefore always a mixed body, and no office anyone holds settles which side of the line he is on. The consequences were what alarmed Rome, and they follow quickly. If the church is the company of the predestined, then its head has to be someone who can see the whole of it at once and hold it together across the centuries, the dead and the unborn along with the people in the pews this morning, and no living man can do that. Christ is the head, and the pope, at best, is his deputy. Worse, Hus was willing to say the obvious next thing: a pope who is not himself among the predestined is not truly the head of anything, whatever his title says. Scripture had given him a good deal of the material. Paul calls Christ the head of the body, the church (Colossians 1:18, Ephesians 5:23), and speaks of a people chosen in him before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:4). What his judges heard, and they were not imagining it, was a definition on which no one could ever be quite certain that the visible church he was sitting in was the church at all.

(Q) "Christ alone is the head of the universal church, which church is not a part of anything else." + Source: Jan Hus, De ecclesia, chapter 4 (David S. Schaff translation, 1915). The first of the conclusions drawn in the chapter titled "Christ the Only Head of the Church," written in exile at Kozí Hrádek in 1413 while he was under sentence of excommunication. Twenty-six of the articles his judges read out against him at Constance were taken from this one book (T1).

(T2) A command binds a Christian only so far as it agrees with the law of Christ. + Suppose your foreman tells you to falsify a safety record. You do not conclude that foremen never have to be obeyed, or that you are now free to ignore the rota. You conclude that this particular instruction has run past the edge of what the job entitles him to ask, and you decline it while turning up for work on Monday. That distinction, obvious enough on a building site, is what Hus spent his life applying to bishops. He called the standard the lex Christi, the law of Christ: Scripture, together with what follows necessarily from it. Canon law, papal bulls, synodal decrees and the customs of centuries all sat underneath that, and were binding exactly as far as they agreed with it and no further. He was not a man looking for excuses to disobey. He obeyed his archbishop for years, went on submitting appeals through the proper channels long after they had stopped being answered, and travelled to Constance of his own free will when he could have stayed in a Bohemian castle where nobody could reach him. The test came in 1412, when papal legates asked him in the archbishop’s presence whether he was willing to obey the apostolic commands. He said he was, with all his heart. The legates took that as agreement to preach the crusade, because to them apostolic and papal meant the same thing, and Hus had to spell out that by apostolic commands he meant the teaching of the apostles of Christ. He would obey the pope’s orders so far as they agreed with that, and not one step further. Peter had said the same thing to the Sanhedrin: "We must obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29). A hundred and six years later Martin Luther would say a version of it at Worms.

(Q) "But if I see anything in them at variance with this, I will not obey, even if you kindle the fire for the burning of my body before my eyes." + Source: Hus’s own account of his interview with the papal legates at Prague in 1412, translated in Herbert B. Workman and R. Martin Pope, The Letters of John Hus (1904). He is finishing the sentence he had just begun: so far as the pope’s commands agree with the commands and teaching of the apostles, he is heartily ready to obey them. The last clause was rhetoric when he said it. Three years later it was a description (T2).

(T3) What Christ instituted outranks what the church has grown used to. + Most families do something a particular way because someone once had a reason, and the reason has been quietly lost while the practice went on. Usually it does not matter. Occasionally you look into it and find that the original arrangement was better, and then you have a decision to make: keep doing what everyone has always done, or go back to the thing the custom replaced. The dispute that made this concrete in Bohemia was about the communion cup. By the fourteenth century the ordinary lay Christian in the West received the bread only; the chalice was reserved to the priest. The reasons were practical before they were theological, chiefly a fear of spilling, and they were backed by the doctrine of concomitance, which holds that Christ is wholly present under either kind, so that no one who receives the bread alone receives less of him. Jakoubek of Stříbro, a fellow master at Prague who had been in the reforming party from the start, concluded in the second half of 1414 that the plain sense of the institution should be restored, and four Prague churches began giving the cup to the laity. From this came the word that would name the Czech reformation for two centuries: utraquism, from the Latin sub utraque specie, "under both kinds." Hus had shown little interest in the question and had conceded the Roman practice in an earlier treatise. In prison he changed his mind, and backed Jakoubek in writing, on the ground that Scripture said nothing against giving the cup and everything in favour of it, and that a custom, however old, could not overrule what Christ had done and what Paul had told the Corinthians to keep doing (1 Corinthians 11:26). The Council of Constance formally forbade the cup to the laity on 15 June 1415, three weeks before it burned him, and Hus wrote from his cell that he could not understand how anyone could call Christ’s own act an error. Christians still differ about the chalice, and Rome itself has restored it in modern times; what does not vary is the principle Hus was reaching for underneath the argument.

(Q) "Only we ought not to follow custom, but the example and truth of Christ." + Source: Letter to Gallus, preacher at the Bethlehem Chapel, 21 June 1415, in Workman and Pope, The Letters of John Hus (1904). Written in chains fifteen days before his death, to the man who had taken over his own pulpit and was attacking Jakoubek over the cup. Hus asks him to stop, so that there will be no split among the faithful to the delight of the devil, and to be ready to suffer for the practice himself (T3).

(T4) Money must not be able to buy what God gives away. + There is a scene in Acts that the church has never quite lived down. A man named Simon, newly baptised, watches the apostles lay hands on people and offers them money for the ability to do it, and Peter tells him his silver can perish with him. The sin took his name: simony, the buying or selling of holy things. Hus wrote a whole book about it in Czech, the Knížky o svatokupectví, and he defined it broadly: not only purchased bishoprics, but fees demanded for burials and baptisms, masses said for cash, benefices traded like farms, a benefice being a church post with a fixed income attached to it, and pardons retailed to villagers who paid in grain because they had no coins. He knew the transaction from the inside. At about twenty he had given a pardon-seller his last four groschen and gone hungry for it, and he never wrote about the trade as a man who found it merely disgusting. He wrote as a man who had once believed it worked. The break it caused cost him more than his career. Stephen Páleč had been the friend of his youth, and it was Páleč who first put the articles of the indulgence bull, the sealed decree in which a pope announced a thing to the whole church, into Hus’s hand, in his own writing, with a note that they contained palpable errors. Then Páleč consulted a colleague, thought better of it, and crossed to the other side, where he became one of the most determined of the men who prosecuted Hus at Constance. The last words Hus ever addressed to him have the sound of a door closing quietly. In fairness to Páleč and to the doctors who argued against Hus, the theology of indulgences as the schools taught it was a great deal more careful than the sale in the marketplace; the trouble was that the peasants of Bohemia were buying the sale.

(Q) "Palecz is my friend, Truth is my friend; of the two it were only right to honour Truth most." + Source: Hus’s own report of what he said to Stephen Páleč at a meeting in the rectory of Christian of Prachatice in 1412, translated in Workman and Pope, The Letters of John Hus (1904). The last thing he said to his oldest friend, and a deliberate echo of the schoolroom tag about Plato and truth that every master in Prague would have recognised. Páleč went on to help draw up the articles that condemned him (T4).

(Q) "Moreover, dearly beloved in Christ Jesus, stand in the truth whereof you have knowledge; for it wins its way before all else and waxes strong even for evermore." + Source: Letter to the University of Prague, 27 June 1415, in Workman and Pope, The Letters of John Hus (1904). Nine days before the fire, writing to the university that had made him and then turned on him. In the same letter he asks God to forgive the friends who betrayed him, tells the masters that he has not recanted a single article, and asks them to look after the Bethlehem. The confidence that truth wins in the end was not original to him, and he would not have claimed it was; it is an old thought, and it runs all through his Czech writing. It outlived him too: Pravda vítězí, truth prevails, was taken up by Tomáš Masaryk as the motto of the new Czechoslovak republic after 1918, and it flies today on the standard of the president.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) Bohemia refused to give him up, and put the chalice on its banners for two hundred years. + The council had expected the death of one Czech priest to close the matter. Instead, on 2 September 1415, less than two months after the burning, more than four hundred and fifty Bohemian and Moravian nobles set their seals to copies of a letter of protest, and within four years the kingdom was in open revolt. The Hussites split into the moderate Utraquists, who wanted the cup and a reformed clergy, and the radical Taborites, who wanted a great deal more; five papal crusades were preached against them, and all five failed, several of them against the blind general Jan Žižka, who has a fair claim to be the most inventive soldier of the century. The war ended at a negotiating table, which is the remarkable part. By the Compactata agreed with the Council of Basel in 1436, Rome conceded communion in both kinds to the laity of Bohemia and Moravia. It was a narrow, grudging and much-disputed settlement, and it was still the first time the medieval West had granted a national exception of that kind. The most durable inheritance came from Czechs who wanted the reform without the fighting. In 1457 a group of them formed the Jednota bratrská, the Unity of the Brethren, a small, disciplined, pacifist church that kept its own ministry, printed its own Bible, and survived persecution, near-extinction and exile. Refugees from it settled at Herrnhut in Saxony in the 1720s and became the Moravian Church, whose missionaries reached the Caribbean, Greenland and Labrador before most of Europe had thought of foreign missions. It was at a Moravian meeting in Aldersgate Street in 1738 that John Wesley’s heart was strangely warmed.

(†) A century later Luther discovered that he had been a Hussite without knowing it. + At the Leipzig disputation in the summer of 1519, Johann Eck laid a trap that has become famous. In Germany a century after Constance, calling a man a Hussite was not a comparison. It was a charge: it named him the disciple of a condemned heretic whom the church had burned, and it was expected to finish whoever it landed on. So Eck pressed Luther on papal authority, and kept pressing, until Luther conceded that among the articles of Hus and the Bohemians condemned at Constance there were some that were most Christian and evangelical, and that a general council had therefore erred. Consider where he was standing when he said it. The university of Leipzig had been founded by the very masters who walked out of Prague in 1409, so of all the halls in Europe this was the one where the word Hussite carried the longest grudge. Calling Luther a Hussite there was meant to end him. In the room it very nearly did. Afterwards Luther went and read Hus for himself, and in February 1520 he wrote to his friend Georg Spalatin in something between astonishment and delight that he had unknowingly held and taught everything of Hus’s, that Johann von Staupitz had done the same, and that in short, "we are all Hussites without knowing it." In 1537 he published a collection of Hus’s prison letters with a preface of his own, and thereafter the Reformers treated Constance as the standing proof that councils can condemn the truth. Bohemian and Lutheran tradition later gave the story a prophecy: that Hus at the stake foretold that they might roast this goose, hus being Czech for goose, but that in a hundred years a swan would come whom they could not roast. It is a good line and there is no eyewitness for it; the earliest accounts of the burning do not contain it, and it appears in Lutheran writing of the next century. What is genuine is the wordplay underneath it. Hus punned on his own name for years, writing from exile that the Goose, a tame domestic bird whose flight is low and short, had broken through the nets spread for it, and that birds who fly higher as they preach God’s word would make lighter work still of such traps. His friends played the same game back. When he wrote from his cell about a dream of the Bethlehem paintings, John of Chlum answered that the Goose was now laid on the altar and would one day wake from the sleep of this miserable life.

(†) Rome’s own verdict on him has softened, though it has never been reversed. + For four centuries the Catholic judgment stood where the council left it, and the standard Catholic reference works of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries still treated Hus as a heretic who got what the law provided. The change came slowly, through historians rather than through any act repealing the sentence, which has never been annulled. In the 1990s Cardinal Miloslav Vlk of Prague set up an ecumenical commission, Catholic and Protestant, to work out more exactly where Hus belonged among those who had sought a reform of the church. On 17 December 1999 John Paul II received the scholars who had gathered for an international symposium on Hus and told them he felt the need "to express deep regret for the cruel death inflicted on John Hus, and for the consequent wound of conflict and division which was thus imposed on the minds and hearts of the Bohemian people." He praised Hus’s moral courage in the face of death, and left the theological questions where the historians had left them. Modern Catholic scholarship has largely followed the same road: Hus is now widely read as a reformer of morals and pastoral practice who died partly for opinions that were Wycliffe’s rather than his own, in a trial whose procedure would embarrass any court. That does not make him a Protestant before the fact, and the details are worth having. He never denied transubstantiation, the teaching that the bread and the wine at the altar become the body and blood of Christ while going on looking and tasting exactly like bread and wine, and he said so under questioning to the end; he held to all seven sacraments; the hymn he was singing when the flames took him was turning from Christ to the Virgin; and he asked at the stake only that the church correct him from Scripture, which is the request of a man who expects the church to be able to do it.

(†) Where his own record is open to criticism: a church nobody can identify, and a university broken to win an argument. + Honesty requires the other column, and it should be filled from what he himself did and taught rather than from what was later done in his name. - A church nobody can point at. Defining the church as the totality of the predestined solves one problem and creates another. If membership is settled by God’s eternal choice and is invisible from the outside, then the ordinary work of a congregation, admitting members, disciplining them, ordaining ministers, is being done by people who cannot know whether they or those they act on are in the church at all. Hus saw the difficulty and softened it, distinguishing being in the church "according to present righteousness", which is to say counted among the faithful by the way a person is living now, from being of it finally, which is God’s business and nobody else’s. Nor did he go as far as the Donatists, the North African party of the fourth century who held that a sacrament in the hands of an unworthy priest was no sacrament at all; Hus never denied that a bad priest’s sacraments are valid. Even so, his critics were pointing at a real gap, not inventing one, and later Protestant theology had to do a good deal of work on the visible and invisible church to close it. - Wycliffe, unacknowledged. Hus took a great deal from John Wycliffe, sometimes whole passages nearly word for word, without saying where it came from. David Schaff, who translated De ecclesia and admired its author, wrote that never did a man owe more to mortal teacher than Hus did to John Wycliffe; he also noted that it seems never to have occurred to Hus’s opponents in Prague to twit him with it, because medieval writers borrowed far more freely than we do, Gerson and d’Ailly among them. Still, defending a body of writing at that level of dependence, some of it he had plainly not weighed carefully, put him in the position of answering at Constance for opinions that were not his and that he refused, rightly, to admit were. - Prague and the Germans. The decree of 1409 was as much a nationalist stroke as a reforming one, and Hus drove it. Hundreds of masters and students left, the university he then led was a fraction of what he had inherited, and the sermon in which he complained that Czechs were more wretched than dogs or snakes for letting Germans hold the offices is not the voice of the man who wrote the prison letters. In the confession of faith he sent to John XXIII in 1411 he listed the charge that he had caused the expulsion among the falsehoods told about him, which is true only on a narrow reading: the decree was the king’s and the Germans left on an oath of their own, but Hus had campaigned for the decree and thanked God from the pulpit when it worked. In his last letter to the university he wrote that he had grieved over its disputes and secessions and had wanted to unite the country, and it reads like a man who has understood what he did. None of these is what he was burned for. The Council condemned him on articles it could not show him in his own books, refused the hearing he had been promised, and would not answer the one request he made to the end: show me from Scripture where I am wrong, and I will recant.