Justified True Belief

(●) The Oxford philosopher who set Scripture above every other authority in the church, and whose followers put the whole Bible into English. + On the last day of 1384 a country rector died in his bed at Lutterworth in Leicestershire, and forty-four years later men came with spades and dug him up. The Council of Constance had ordered it. His bones were burned and the ashes tipped into the little River Swift that runs past his church. Very few teachers in the history of the church have frightened it that badly. John Wycliffe was the best philosopher in England in his generation before he was anything else, a master of Balliol and then a doctor of theology, a man who spent thirty years in Oxford lecture rooms arguing about universals and the being of God. In his fifties he turned that equipment on the church that employed him, and he asked the question the later West would keep asking. Suppose the pope rules one way, and the canon lawyers, the men trained in the church’s own body of law and sitting in its own courts, rule the same way, and the friars, the orders of preachers who lived by begging instead of shut away in a monastery, agree with them both. And suppose the Bible says something else. Which one is a Christian bound by? His answer, worked out at length in book after book, was that Scripture is the law God himself gave and that everything else in the church is measured against it. He was not the first to say something like this. He was the first to say it in a way that a king’s council, a parish congregation and an angry archbishop all understood at once, and the one whose followers acted on it by putting the whole Bible into the language people spoke at home. Two things should be said before the story starts, and the first is about dates. His birth year is simply not recorded. The evidence puts it somewhere in the mid to later 1320s, and the c. 1328 that gets attached to his name is a convention rather than a discovery; one recent argument places it after 1331. So every age and interval given for his life is worked from that convention, and should be read as an approximation rather than a measurement. The second is about his most famous title. He is called the morning star of the Reformation, but he never heard the phrase: the antiquarian John Bale gave it to him in 1548, more than a century and a half after his death.

(●) c. 1328 AD: Born in the north of Yorkshire, into a country the plague was about to empty. + The Wycliffes were minor gentry of the North Riding of Yorkshire, and they took their name from the village of Wycliffe-on-Tees, where the family held land. Tradition puts John’s birth a few miles off, at Hipswell near Richmond. Nothing survives of his childhood: no parents’ names we can trust, no schooling, no first sight of him until he turns up at Oxford as a young man already good at argument. What we do know is the weather of his youth, and it was terrible. The Black Death reached England in 1348, when he was about twenty, and killed somewhere between a third and a half of the population within two years. Whole villages went silent. Parishes lost their priests and were filled again in a hurry, sometimes with men who could barely read the service, and the church was left with a shortage of clergy and a surplus of grief. Everything Wycliffe later wrote about idle, absent and unlearned priests was written by a man who had watched that happen.

(●) 1356 – 1372 AD: Sixteen years in Oxford made him the sharpest philosopher in England before they made him a reformer. + Told as a career, it is an unremarkable one, and slower than you might expect of a man of his gifts. He was a junior fellow of Merton by 1356 and master of Balliol by 1360, and then, a year after reaching the head of a college, he gave the post up for the country parish of Fillingham in Lincolnshire, for the plain reason that it paid better. In 1365 the Archbishop of Canterbury made a John Wyclif warden of a new foundation, Canterbury Hall. Two years later a new archbishop turned him out in favour of a monk, and the appeal carried all the way to Rome was refused in 1371. Whether that warden was the reformer or another Oxford man of the same name has been argued over since the nineteenth century and is still unsettled, so the story is best told with the doubt attached. He took his doctorate in theology in 1372 or 1373, at about forty-five, which by the standards of the day was late. The real work of those years was philosophy, and it matters that he was very good at it. The great argument of the fourteenth century was about universals. Think of two dogs in a yard, a wolfhound and a terrier, as unlike each other as two animals can be. We call them both dogs. Is there something real that the two of them share, or is "dog" only a convenient name we have agreed on? The second answer, that the shared thing is only a name, is called nominalism, and it was winning; its most famous advocate, William of Ockham, had died in 1347, a few years before Wycliffe came up. Wycliffe took the older side, the one called realism because it holds that the shared thing is really there and not merely a word, and he pushed it further than almost anyone. Universals are real, he argued, they exist in God’s mind as the patterns of everything he makes, and language matters because it answers to a reality God has already fixed. That conviction is the hinge of everything he later said about the Bible. If words hook onto real things, then the words God has spoken cannot be bent by the men who administer them. He was also capable of turning that scrutiny on himself. Looking back in his book on Scripture, he confessed that "ofttimes, for the sake of vain glory I departed from the teaching of Scripture, both in what I maintained and what I opposed, when my double aim was to acquire a dazzling fame among the people, and to lay bare the pride of the sophists." A man who says that about his own lectures is not simply a controversialist.

(●) 1374 AD: The king sent him to Bruges to argue with the pope’s men about money, and he came home with a powerful patron. + England and the papacy had been quarrelling for years about cash and appointments. The popes were living at Avignon, inside the French sphere at a time when England was at war with France, and they were funding themselves partly out of English benefices. A benefice is a church post with an income attached to it: a parish, say, together with the land and the tithes that paid whoever held it. The popes taxed those incomes, and they handed the posts themselves to men the pope named, sometimes foreigners who never set foot in the parish and drew the money at a distance. To an English rector this was not an abstraction. It was his neighbour’s living, sent abroad. On 26 July 1374 Edward III named a commission to go and negotiate about it. Wycliffe’s name stands second on the list, after a bishop. He crossed to Bruges, spent some weeks there among cardinals, envoys and royal servants, and saw the machinery of the international church from the inside. The same year he was given the rectory of Lutterworth in Leicestershire, which he held for the rest of his life. And somewhere in this period he acquired the protection of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, the richest man in England and, during the last years of Edward III and the boyhood of Richard II, effectively its government. Gaunt had his own reasons for liking a theologian who argued that kings might take back church endowments, and Wycliffe was never naive about that; but without the Duke standing behind him he would probably have been silenced by 1378 and forgotten.

(●) 1377 – 1378 AD: Twice they put him on trial, and twice the hearing broke up before it reached a verdict. + On 19 February 1377 he was summoned to St Paul’s to answer for De civili dominio, his book on lordship. He arrived with John of Gaunt and Lord Percy on either side of him and a hostile London crowd outside. The proceedings never got as far as the charges. Percy told Wycliffe to sit down, Bishop Courtenay said he should stand, Gaunt lost his temper and reportedly threatened to drag the bishop out of the church by the hair, and the court dissolved into a riot. Rome moved next. On 22 May 1377 Pope Gregory XI signed five bulls against him at once, with a schedule of eighteen propositions attached, nineteen in some copies, all but one of them taken from that same book. A bull is a formal papal letter, named for the lead seal, the bulla, that hung from it and made it official, and by the fourteenth century it was the most solemn instrument Rome had for telling a bishop or a university what to do. Five of them signed on a single day is a measure of how seriously an Oxford doctor was now being taken. Three went jointly to Archbishop Sudbury and Bishop Courtenay, one to Edward III, and one to the chancellor of Oxford, so that the demand came at him from the church, the crown and his own university together. Then nothing happened, for a remarkably long time: the bulls were not published in England until 18 December, by which time Edward III was dead and the government was in the hands of men in no hurry to oblige Avignon. Early in 1378 Wycliffe finally appeared before the bishops at Lambeth with a written defence, more carefully worded than his usual style. That hearing collapsed too. Londoners forced their way in, and Sir Lewis Clifford arrived with a message from Joan of Kent, the young king’s mother, forbidding the bishops to pass sentence. He walked out of both trials unpunished, and he knew exactly how much of that he owed to politics rather than to the strength of his case.

(●) 1378 AD: Two popes were elected in one year, and the sight of it changed what he thought a pope was. + Gregory XI died in March 1378. In April the cardinals elected Urban VI in Rome; by September, having decided they had chosen under duress and having discovered that Urban meant to discipline them, most of the same cardinals elected Clement VII, who set up at Avignon. Neither would yield. Europe divided along the lines of its alliances, England for Urban and France for Clement, and each pope excommunicated the other’s obedience. The Great Schism lasted thirty-nine years. Wycliffe’s first reaction was hope. He wrote of Urban as an evangelical man who was putting the church right, and for a while he defended him. What killed the hope was watching what the two popes did with the quarrel. In 1383 the Bishop of Norwich, Henry Despenser, led an English army into Flanders under a papal banner, with indulgences on offer to anyone who paid for the expedition. An indulgence is a remission granted by the church of the punishment it held was still owed for sins already forgiven, and here it was being handed out in exchange for a contribution to an army. So a man in Norwich could buy relief for his soul by helping to pay for a crusade preached by one pope against the Christians who followed the other. To Wycliffe that was not a scandal in the office, it was the office exposed. These are the years of his two most important books. De veritate sacrae scripturae, on the truth of Holy Scripture, was written across 1377 and 1378; De ecclesia, on the church, followed immediately. Between them they set out the two claims that everything else in his reform depends on (T1, T3).

(●) 1380 – 1382 AD: He said that the bread on the altar is still bread, and Oxford, which had shielded him for twenty years, condemned him. + Attacking papal revenues had cost him nothing at Oxford. Attacking the Mass cost him the university. In 1380 or 1381 he published a set of conclusions denying that the bread and wine cease to exist when a priest consecrates them, that is, when he speaks Christ’s words over them at the altar and the church holds that they become Christ’s body and blood (T4). The chancellor, William Berton, put twelve doctors on a commission, and they condemned the teaching and forbade anyone to hold it. Wycliffe is said to have declared that neither the chancellor nor any of his colleagues could weaken his position, and he appealed, not to the pope, but to the king. John of Gaunt sent word that he should keep quiet about the sacrament. He did not. Then, in June 1381, the peasants rose. They burned Gaunt’s palace at the Savoy, dragged Archbishop Sudbury out of the Tower and beheaded him, and terrified the ruling class into a lasting fear of preaching that stirred up the poor. Wycliffe’s enemies made the connection at once and have never entirely let it go. It does not hold up. John Ball, the priest whose sermons the rebels loved, had been in trouble with Canterbury since the 1360s, before Wycliffe was publicly known at all, and the chroniclers report that the rebels swore to accept no king named John, which is not the oath of men loyal to John of Gaunt’s protégé. What is true is that the revolt made Wycliffe’s language about lordship sound dangerous in a way it had not sounded a year earlier. The reckoning came in May 1382, at the Blackfriars monastery in London, where Archbishop Courtenay assembled a council to examine twenty-four propositions drawn from his writings. Ten were condemned as heretical, fourteen as erroneous. While the council sat, an earthquake shook the city and the assembly nearly broke up in fright. Courtenay told them the earth was purging itself of noxious vapours as the church was purging itself of error; Wycliffe replied that God had shaken the ground in judgment on the men who were sitting on it. The name stuck: the Earthquake Council. Notably, the mandates that followed never named him. He was silenced at Oxford, his supporters were forced to recant one by one, to stand up in public and take back what they had taught, and he went home to his parish.

(●) 1384 AD: He died in his own parish on the last day of the year, still writing, and forty-four years later the church burned his bones. + The last two years at Lutterworth were the most productive of his life. He wrote the Trialogus, a conversation between Truth, Falsehood and Wisdom that puts his whole theology into a form a literate layman could follow, and he began the Opus evangelicum, a commentary on the Sermon on the Mount and the last discourses of John that he never finished. A later tradition reports a summons to Rome in this period, and historians from Lechler onward have doubted that any such citation was ever issued; what is certain is that a letter survives under his name explaining that he cannot travel, that Christ was the poorest of men and cast all worldly lordship away, and that the pope should do the same. Whether it ever reached Urban VI is disputed. That it says what Wycliffe thought is not. He had already suffered one stroke. On 28 December 1384, hearing Mass in his own church on the feast of the Holy Innocents, he suffered another and lost the power of speech. He died three days later, on 31 December, and was buried in the churchyard at Lutterworth. He was never excommunicated, never deprived of his living, and never burned. England’s bishops had made him harmless without making him a martyr, which was cleverer than they are usually given credit for. The verdict came later. On 4 May 1415 the Council of Constance declared him a heretic, condemned forty-five articles taken from his books, and ordered his bones removed from consecrated ground. In 1428, at the command of Pope Martin V, Bishop Richard Fleming of Lincoln carried the sentence out and had the ashes thrown into the River Swift.

What He Taught

(T1) Scripture is the law God himself gave, and it is enough. + Think of a family sitting in a solicitor’s office while a will is read. Everyone in the room has opinions about what the dead man would have wanted. None of those opinions changes a word of the document, and if the executor starts adding clauses, the family has been robbed. Wycliffe called Scripture the will and testament of God the Father, and he meant the comparison to bite exactly there. The church of his day did not deny that the Bible was God’s word. What it did was file the Bible alongside everything else that carried weight: the decrees of councils, the rulings of popes collected in the canon law, the sayings of the fathers, the glosses of the schools. A gloss is the explanatory note written in the margin of a text and copied down beside it ever after, and the schools are the universities and the theologians trained in them, so that last item amounts to the accumulated comment of generations of professionals. All of it went under one heading, authority, and in practice the newest ruling often did the most work. Wycliffe’s move was to break that shelf in two. Scripture is not one authority among several. It is the standard against which the others are tested, because Christ is its author and Christ is the church’s lawgiver, and a book by that author outranks every other book there is. Two things he did not mean are worth saying plainly, because both charges were laid against him. He did not mean that a Christian should read the Bible alone, cut off from the church’s teachers; he quotes Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose and Gregory constantly, and he spent years producing a running commentary on every book of the Bible. And he did not mean that the plain sense is always obvious. He held the opposite: that Scripture has a logic of its own, that most heresy comes from bad grammar and bad reasoning, and that the fault when a passage seems to fail is in the reader. What he did mean is that the church has been given a complete rule and has no authority to add to it. Later Protestants would call this sola scriptura, Scripture alone, and they were right to see him as an ancestor; but the phrase is theirs, not his, and his own emphasis falls less on how a doctrine is proved than on whose law the church is under (Acts 17:11; 2 Timothy 3:16).

(Q) "If Christ had gone more into detail, even in the least, the rule of his religion would have become to a certain extent imperfect; but as it now stands, whether layman or cleric, married man or monk, servant or master, a man may live in every position of life in one and the same service under Christ’s rule." + Source: De civili dominio II, chapter 13, as translated in Gotthard Lechler, John Wiclif and his English Precursors, trans. Peter Lorimer (1878), vol. 2, p. 21. The argument is about sufficiency, and it runs the opposite way from what a modern reader expects. Wycliffe is not saying the gospel is vague. He is saying that its very economy is the proof that God wrote it: a rule detailed enough to cover the monastery would have failed the ploughman, and the law Christ actually gave fits every station at once. That is why he thought the religious orders, with their supplementary rules, were adding to something already whole.

(T2) Every lordship is held from God on terms, and a man in mortal sin holds nothing by right. + A company car is a useful place to start. The salesman drives it, parks it at his house, keeps the keys. It is not his. He holds it from the firm for the firm’s purposes, and if he uses it to run a private business on the side, he does not own it any better for having had it longer. He loses it. That is roughly what Wycliffe meant by dominium, a word the Middle Ages used for lordship, ownership and jurisdiction all at once, and which is best translated here as rightful possession. God alone owns anything outright, because he alone made it. Everything any creature holds is held from him, on his terms, for his purposes. Wycliffe then adds the sentence that made him famous and dangerous: the terms include being in a state of grace. Mortal sin, in the language of the schools (T1), is deliberate and serious sin that cuts a man off from the love of God; and a man in that condition, Wycliffe argued, may keep possession in the eyes of the law but has no right before God to a thing he is using against its owner. Aimed at the church, that had a sharp edge. The endowments of the English church were enormous, and they had been given as alms, for prayer and preaching and the care of the poor. If the clergy holding them were using them for luxury, litigation and absentee comfort, then the condition of the gift had failed. Wycliffe concluded that kings and lords, who had made the endowments in the first place, could lawfully take them back, and that where the abuse was habitual they were obliged to. The propositions Gregory XI condemned in 1377 came out of that neighbourhood, and it is worth noticing which ones the schedule put first. It led with the propositions about perpetual civil inheritance, that is, about property passing down a family line and held for good, which is what every landowner in England was counting on for his sons. Set at the head of the list, the charge sounded less like a quarrel over abbey rents and more like an attack on ordinary property, and it was well calculated to make England’s nobles read the theologian as a threat to themselves. He was aware of the objection, and he answered it with a distinction that has to be held in view or the whole doctrine reads as anarchy: he was not proposing that anyone go through the country repossessing the goods of sinners. Civil law governs civil title, and he never told a tenant to stop paying rent. He was describing what a possession is before God, and drawing one practical conclusion from it, about endowments held by a church that had promised to use them for God.

(Q) "Just as it is of no use for travellers to carry their ship after they have crossed the sea in it, so it doth not advantage us to carry temporal things in our hearts, more than is requisite for our voyage." + Source: Trialogus, Book IV, in the chapter on the avarice of the clergy, as translated in Robert Vaughan, Tracts and Treatises of John de Wycliffe (1845), p. 170. Phronesis, the character who speaks for Wycliffe in the dialogue, has just said that a man who has taken in the spirit of the gospel pleases Christ the more, other things being equal, the poorer he is in carrying out his office. The image that follows is characteristically practical: property is transport, useful for the journey and absurd as a burden once it stops carrying you.

(T3) The church is the whole company of those God has chosen, and no office puts a man inside it. + In Wycliffe’s England, if you had asked a literate man what the church was, he would have answered with a list of people: the pope, the cardinals, the bishops, the monks, the friars, the parish clergy. Everyone else went to church; the clergy were the church. That usage is the target here. Wycliffe defined the church instead as the universitas praedestinatorum, the whole company of the predestined, and he was careful to say he had it from Augustine rather than invented it. Predestination means God’s eternal choice of those he will save; the elect are those he has chosen, and Wycliffe’s usual word for the others is the praesciti, the foreknown, those whose final refusal God has always seen. The church, on this definition, is not an institution that some people join. It is a company God constituted before the world was made, joined to Christ as a bride to a husband (Ephesians 5:25–27), and its membership roll exists in heaven and nowhere else. Follow that out and three consequences appear, and every one of them terrified his opponents. First, the tonsure proves nothing, and neither does the office that goes with it. The tonsure was the shaved crown of the head that marked a man out as clergy, recognisable across a market square, and on Wycliffe’s definition it settled precisely nothing about him: a bishop may be outside the church he governs, and a devout ploughman inside it. Second, the pope’s authority is conditional in a way canon law never allowed, because if he is one of the foreknown he is a limb of the devil and holds no power over Christ’s faithful at all; obedience is due to him only so far as he follows Christ. Third, and most quietly, the ordinary Christian’s access to God does not run through a priest as through a gate. Grace comes from God’s election, not from the clerical machinery, and a believer may go straight to him. Later Christians divided over this and still do. The Reformers took up his distinction between the visible church, the one with buildings and registers, and the invisible church known only to God, and made it standard. Catholic theology has always answered that Christ founded a visible body with real officers, and that a definition which makes the church invisible in principle leaves the visible church with nothing certain to do. The difficulty in Wycliffe’s version is real and he never fully solved it: a definition that no living person can check tells a frightened Christian nothing about where to go on Sunday.

(Q) "The holy catholic and apostolic church is the whole company of the predestined." + Source: De civili dominio I, chapter 43. The Latin runs ecclesia catholica sancta apostolica sit universitas praedestinatorum, printed from Vienna manuscript 1341 in Lechler’s notes (trans. Lorimer, 1878, vol. 2, p. 108, note 243) and rendered into English here. The same note shows the definition coming back, in almost the same words, in the Trialogus (IV, 22) and in his book on the commandments (chapter 23), and De ecclesia opens from it as well, which tells you how much weight it was carrying. He introduces it in De civili dominio not as an opinion but as a metaphysical truth that has to be assumed before anything else about the church can be said.

(T4) The bread on the altar is still bread, and Christ is present in it as in a sign. + Put a loaf on a kitchen table and ask a child what it is. Bread, obviously. You can see the crust, feel the weight of it, smell it. Now ask a harder question: if the bread itself were taken away, and the crust and the weight and the smell were all left behind on the table, what would be sitting there? That is not a party riddle. It is the question Wycliffe put to his own church, and the teaching that finished his career. It needs the vocabulary of the schools (T1) to be intelligible at all, and those terms are worth the trouble, because the whole quarrel turns on them. The doctrine he was attacking is transubstantiation, defined by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. It rests on a distinction from Aristotle between the substance of a thing, what it fundamentally is, and its accidents, the qualities you can see and touch: its whiteness, roundness, taste, weight. At the consecration, the doctrine says, the substance of the bread is changed into the body of Christ while the accidents of bread remain. Wycliffe’s objection was not that this is too high a view of the sacrament. It was that it is philosophically incoherent, and he had spent twenty years on exactly the branch of philosophy involved. An accident, on any account he could accept, is a quality of something. Take away the substance and you have not left the whiteness hanging in the air; you have left nothing. He called the resulting position an accident without a subject, and said it was the most abominable heresy in the church, because it required God to annihilate a good thing he had made in order to bless it. Christ cursed a fig tree, he noted drily, and the tree was still there. His own account has a name, remanence: the substance of the bread remains after consecration, and Christ’s body is truly present in it, not by having replaced it but sacramentally, as the thing signified is present in its sign. He kept a real presence and reached for John the Baptist to explain the grammar. John was Elijah, Christ said, and yet John was not personally Elijah; the identity is figurative and it is not therefore false. The consecrated host, the wafer the priest lifts at the altar, is the body of Christ in that way. He also kept the ordinary practice: he wanted the Mass said and received, and objected to the man who could not tell you what he was worshipping, not to the worship. Christians have disagreed about the Lord’s Supper ever since, and Wycliffe’s account does not settle it. What can be said is that his position is neither Catholic transubstantiation nor the bare memorialism of some later Protestants, the view that the Supper is a remembrance of Christ and nothing further; that his reasons were philosophical and scriptural rather than a wish to lower the sacrament; and that Luther, who kept a very high doctrine of the presence, would later make an objection to annihilation that sounds a good deal like his.

(Q) "This sacrament is, on the testimony of the Gospel, true bread naturally, and the body of Christ veritably and sacramentally." + Source: Trialogus, Book IV, in the chapter on how the heresy concerning the sacrament of the Eucharist grew up, as translated in Robert Vaughan, Tracts and Treatises of John de Wycliffe (1845), p. 145. It is the third of three conclusions he says he had already sent to the authorities, with a protest attached, and it is as compressed a statement of his view as he ever made: bread by nature, Christ’s body in truth, and the second by way of the sacrament rather than in place of the first. At the head of the same chapter (p. 144) stands the sentence that explains why he would not drop the subject: "I should be worse than an infidel were I not to defend unto the death the law of Christ."

(T5) God’s law belongs in the language the people actually speak. + Go back to the will being read in the solicitor’s office (T1), and imagine it read in a language nobody in the family understands, by the one man who stands to gain if they never find out what it says. That is the situation Wycliffe thought England was in. The Bible of the western church was the Latin Vulgate, Jerome’s translation, and Latin was the property of the clergy and the universities. Ordinary English people met Scripture in fragments: a lesson at Mass, a story in a sermon, a painting on a wall. The argument for changing that, as it appears in the treatise on the pastoral office that circulated under his name, is unfussy. Christ and the apostles taught people in the tongue those people knew best, so why should men not do the same now? The friars have already taught the Lord’s Prayer in English, as men say they do in the play at York, and the Lord’s Prayer is a part of Matthew’s Gospel; if that part may be turned truly into English, why not the whole? The French, whatever their difficulties, already have the Bible in French, and the lords of England read it in French; why should the commons of England not have the same in English? And since the commons know God’s law best in their mother tongue, hindering a man from knowing the gospel is hindering him from heaven. He did not, so far as any record shows, do the translating himself. Two Middle English versions came out of his circle in the years around and after his death: an early one, painfully literal, following the Latin word order so closely that it is hard to read aloud, and a later revision in real English prose. Nicholas Hereford’s hand has been identified in part of the first, and the second is traditionally credited to John Purvey, who had been with Wycliffe at Lutterworth. Careful scholars now say that assigning names to parts of the work is largely guesswork, and that the translation was a collaboration by men who had learned from him. What is certain is that they did it because of him, and that nobody in England had put the whole Bible into English before.

(Q) "The worthy realm of France, notwithstanding all hindrances, hath translated the Bible and the Gospels with other true sentences of doctors out of Latin into French. Why should not Englishmen do so?" + Source: De officio pastorali, chapter 15 of the English version, printed in F. D. Matthew, The English Works of Wyclif Hitherto Unprinted (Early English Text Society, 1880), pp. 429–430; spelling modernised here. A little further on, at the top of the next page, comes the line that gives the reason: "the commons of Englishmen know it best in their mother tongue, and thus it were all one to hinder such knowing of the gospel and to hinder Englishmen from following Christ and coming to heaven." One honest note about the text. Wycliffe wrote his own books in Latin, and a Latin De officio pastorali is certainly his. This chapter belongs to the English version, which comes down in the body of English writing published under his name, and modern scholars hold that the surviving English tracts and sermons are the work of his circle rather than his own pen. The thought is his; the English sentences may be a follower’s.

(Q) "We have no need to go among the heathen in order to die a martyr’s death; we have only to preach persistently the law of Christ in the hearing of Caesar’s prelates, and instantly we shall have a flourishing martyrdom, if we hold out in faith and patience." + Source: Trialogus III, chapter 15, as translated in Lechler, John Wiclif and his English Precursors, trans. Lorimer (1878), vol. 2, p. 286. Caesarean prelates was his standing phrase for churchmen who governed like princes. He wrote this in his last two years, when the safe course was obviously available to him, and he was right about the price even though he never paid it himself. Within twenty years of his death Parliament had passed a statute for burning heretics, and men who held what he had taught were dying under it.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) England got from him the first whole Bible in its own language, and a movement that would not go away. + His followers were nicknamed Lollards, apparently from a Dutch word for a mumbler, the sort of insult that gets adopted by the people it was aimed at. In the 1380s they were Oxford men: Nicholas Hereford, Philip Repingdon, John Aston, John Purvey, several of whom recanted under pressure and one of whom, Repingdon, ended as a bishop hunting heretics himself. Below the university were the itinerants, the poor preachers, walking from parish to parish in russet gowns with sermons and Scripture in English. The monument, though, is the Bible. More than two hundred and fifty manuscripts of the Wycliffite versions survive, which makes it by a wide margin the most copied English text of the Middle Ages, and that figure counts only the ones that escaped confiscation. Every copy had to be written out by hand, which made them expensive, so a household was far likelier to own a New Testament, or a single Gospel, than the whole Bible; only about twenty of the surviving manuscripts are complete Bibles, and people risked a great deal to keep what they had. They were right to think the risk was real. In 1401 the statute De haeretico comburendo had made obstinate heresy a burning matter, and in 1409 Archbishop Arundel promulgated constitutions forbidding anyone to translate Scripture into English on his own authority, or to read such a translation, without a bishop’s approval. A book in the house was now evidence. The remarkable thing is what that suppression did not accomplish. Lollard communities went underground and stayed there, in the Chilterns, in Bristol, in Kent, in the cloth towns, meeting in houses to read the English Scriptures aloud, for more than a century. When Tyndale’s printed New Testament reached England in 1526 there were readers waiting who already knew what an English Bible was for.

(†) Bohemia took him up more boldly than England did, and Jan Hus paid for it. + The road from Oxford to Prague was opened by a royal wedding. Richard II married Anne of Bohemia in 1382, and Czech students began arriving at Oxford in numbers. One of them, Jerome of Prague, copied out the Dialogus and the Trialogus at Oxford and carried them home in about 1401. Prague had its own reforming preachers already, and Wycliffe’s philosophy suited the Czech masters at the university, who were realists in the same tradition. His books were read there with an attention England had stopped giving them. Jan Hus, preacher at the Bethlehem Chapel in Prague, took over Wycliffe’s doctrine of the church almost entire; whole passages of his own De ecclesia of 1413 are taken from Wycliffe’s. He did not follow him on the Eucharist, and said so. It made no difference to his fate. The Council of Constance condemned forty-five articles of Wycliffe’s on 4 May 1415, and burned Hus on 6 July, having brought him there under an imperial safe conduct. Jerome of Prague was burned the following May. The story does not end there, which is the point. A century later, after the Leipzig debate in which Johann Eck told him that his view of papal authority was Hus’s, Martin Luther read Hus’s book for himself and wrote to Spalatin that they had all been Hussites without knowing it. The line of transmission from a Leicestershire rectory to Wittenberg runs through Prague.

(†) The Reformation claimed him as its morning star, and modern scholarship has given him back his philosophy. + The English Reformers needed ancestors, and Wycliffe was the best one available. John Bale called him the morning star in 1548, John Foxe gave him pride of place among the witnesses in the Acts and Monuments, and Thomas Fuller, writing his church history in 1655, turned the burning of the bones into the most quoted sentence ever written about him: the brook carried his ashes into the Avon, the Avon into the Severn, the Severn into the narrow seas and thence into the ocean, "and thus the ashes of Wicliffe are the emblem of his doctrine, which now is dispersed the world over." It was a generous reading, and it was not an exact one. Wycliffe did not teach justification by faith alone as Luther would state it, the doctrine that a sinner is accepted by God through trusting Christ and through nothing he himself has done; his reform begins with authority, jurisdiction and the use of money, not with the anxious conscience. His doctrine of the Supper is not Cranmer’s, and his doctrine of the church, resting on the eternal decree, sits closer to Augustine than to any sixteenth century confession. The last hundred and forty years have supplied the correction. The Wyclif Society, founded in 1882, printed the Latin works in more than thirty volumes and made it possible to read him whole for the first time since the fifteenth century, and the philosophical treatises turned out to be the foundation of the rest. Historians of medieval thought now treat him as a major realist metaphysician who happened to become a reformer, and historians of Lollardy, above all Anne Hudson, have shown that the English writings so long printed under his name cannot be securely credited to his own hand. He looks less like a Protestant born early and more like what he was: a fourteenth century Oxford theologian who followed his own principles until they broke his career.

(†) Where his own record will not bear him out: the name Antichrist, a test of ownership no court can apply, and a whole vocation condemned at once. + Three things in the primary sources are his own, and all three are fair to hold against him. - Calling the office Antichrist. In his last years he moved from saying that a bad pope acts as Antichrist to treating the papal office itself as the seat of Antichrist, and he used the word freely of friars and of churchmen who resisted him. It is worth remembering that the New Testament uses the term narrowly, of those who deny the Father and the Son (1 John 2:22), and that naming an opponent is not the same as answering him. Wycliffe could argue superbly. When he reached for this word he had stopped arguing. - A test of ownership no court can apply. The Blackfriars council listed as one of his errors that "no one is a civil lord, no one is a bishop, no one is a prelate, so long as he is in mortal sin," and in that form it is genuinely his. The trouble is not that it is untrue before God but that no human being can read another’s standing in grace. A rule that makes title depend on an unverifiable fact hands the decision to whoever holds the sword, and in England the men holding the sword were the lords who stood to profit from disendowment, from stripping the church of its lands and keeping them, one of whom was his own protector. He gave a principled answer to that charge (T2), but he never faced squarely how his doctrine would work in the hands of people who wanted the money. - A whole vocation condemned at once. Three of the conclusions censured in 1382 amount to the claim that the saints who founded the religious orders sinned in founding them and that men living in those orders are not of the Christian religion. Whatever the state of the friars in fourteenth century England, and it was bad, that sentence falls on Benedict, on Bernard and on Francis as well, and it is the same error he complained of in his own judges: condemning a whole class instead of examining a case. One charge often laid against him should be handled more carefully. The same list has him teaching that a bishop or priest in mortal sin does not ordain, consecrate or baptise. That would make a Christian’s baptism depend on a secret, the private state of the man who performed it, so that nobody could ever be sure of his own; and it is a question the church settled long ago in the Donatist controversy, the fourth and fifth century quarrel over clergy who had handed over the Scriptures under persecution, where Augustine established that the sacrament belongs to Christ and not to the minister’s virtue. The conclusions were drawn up by his opponents, some of them sharpened in the drawing, and Wycliffe protested that they misrepresented him. But the drift of his thought did run that way, and being misquoted in a direction you have been travelling is not a complete defence.