John Wycliffe

He became an influential dissident within the Catholic priesthood during the 14th century and his ideas are often considered an important predecessor to Protestantism. His political-theological theory of dominion meant that the church was not allowed to own property or have ecclesiastic courts, and men in mortal sin were not entitled to exercise authority in the church or state, nor to own property. Wycliffe insisted on the radical poverty of all clergy.

Wycliffe has been characterised as the "evening star" of scholasticism and as the "morning star" or stella matutina of the English Reformation.

Certain of Wycliffe's later followers, derogatorily called Lollards by their orthodox contemporaries in the 15th and 16th centuries, adopted a number of the beliefs attributed to Wycliffe such as theological virtues, predestination, iconoclasm, and the notion of caesaropapism, with some questioning the veneration of saints, the sacraments, requiem masses, transubstantiation, monasticism, and the legitimacy or role of the Papacy. Wycliffe's writings in Latin greatly influenced the philosophy and teaching of the Czech reformer Jan Hus (c. 1369–1415).

Life and career

Early life

Wycliffe was born in the village of Hipswell, near Richmond in the North Riding of Yorkshire, England, although there is some dispute about the date. He has conventionally been given a birth date of 1324 but Hudson and Kenny state only records "suggest he was born in the mid-1320s" and Conti states that he was born "after 1331".

Wycliffe received his early education close to his home. It is unknown when he first came to Oxford, with which he was so closely connected until the end of his life, but he is known to have been at Oxford around 1345. Thomas Bradwardine was the Archbishop of Canterbury and his book On the Cause of God Against the Pelagians, a bold recovery of the Pauline–Augustinian doctrine of grace, greatly shaped young Wycliffe's views, as did the Black Death, which reached England in the summer of 1348. From his frequent references to it in later life it appears to have made a deep and abiding impression upon him. According to Robert Vaughn, the effect was to give Wycliffe "very gloomy views in regard to the condition and prospects of the human race". In September 1351, Wycliffe became a priest. Wycliffe would have been at Oxford during the St Scholastica Day riot, in which sixty-three students and a number of townspeople were killed.

Career in education

In 1356, Wycliffe completed his bachelor of arts degree at Merton College as a junior fellow. That same year he produced a small treatise, The Last Age of the Church. In the light of the virulence of the plague, which had subsided seven years previously, Wycliffe's studies led him to the opinion that the close of the 14th century would mark the end of the world. While other writers viewed the plague as God's judgement on sinful people, Wycliffe saw it as an indictment of an unworthy clergy. The mortality rate among the clergy had been particularly high and those who replaced them were, in his opinion, uneducated or generally disreputable.

In 1361, he was Master of Balliol College in Oxford. That year he was presented by the college to the parish of Fillingham in Lincolnshire, which he visited rarely during long vacations from Oxford. For this he had to give up the headship of Balliol College, though he could continue to live at Oxford. He is said to have had rooms in the buildings of The Queen's College. In 1362, he was granted a prebend at Aust in Westbury-on-Trym, which he held in addition to the post at Fillingham.

In 1365, his performance led Simon Islip, Archbishop of Canterbury, to place him at the head of Canterbury Hall, where twelve young men were preparing for the priesthood. In December 1365, Islip appointed Wycliffe as warden, but when Islip died in 1366, his successor, Simon Langham, a man of monastic training, turned the leadership of the college over to a monk. In 1367, Wycliffe's appeal to Rome was refused in 1371. The incident was typical of the ongoing rivalry between monks or friars and secular clergy at Oxford at this time.

In 1368, he gave up his living at Fillingham and took over the rectory of Ludgershall, Buckinghamshire, not far from Oxford, which enabled him to retain his connection with the university. Tradition has it that he began his translation of the Bible into English while sitting in a room above what is now the porch in Ludgershall Church. In 1369, Wycliffe obtained a bachelor's degree in theology, and his doctorate in 1372. In 1374, he received the crown living of St Mary's Church, Lutterworth in Leicestershire, which he retained until his death.

Politics

In 1374 Wycliffe's was part of a group negotiating in Bruges on behalf of the English Government with Gregory XI's papal envoys on a number of disputed points between the king and the pope which may have started his connection with the Duke of Lancaster John of Gaunt, a powerful magnate and power broker who was the third son of King Edward III, although that connection may have started as early as 1371. Soon after his return from Bruges he began to write tracts and longer works, being no longer satisfied with just using his college chair to promote his ideas. In his book De civili dominio ("On Civil Dominion"), concerning the government of God and the Ten Commandments, he attacked the temporal rule of the clergy, the collection of annates, indulgences, and simony.

According to the English Catholic historian Francis Aidan Gasquet, at least some of Wycliffe's program should be seen as (naive) "attempts at social reconstruction" in the aftermath of the continuing institutional chaos after the Black Death (1347–1349).

De civili dominio

Wycliffe entered the politics of the day with his great work De civili dominio ("On Civil Dominion"), which drew arguments from the works of Richard FitzRalph. This called for the royal divestment of all church property. Wycliffe argued that the Church had fallen into sin and that it ought therefore to give up all its property, and that the clergy must live in poverty. The tendency of the high offices of state to be held by clerics was resented by powerful nobles such as John of Gaunt whose power was challenged by the wealth and power of the clergy while also believing that church wealth could fund the government's military needs.

Conflicts with Church, State and University

In 1377, Wycliffe's ideas on lordship and church wealth caused his first official condemnation by Pope Gregory XI, who censured 19 articles of De civili dominio. He was summoned before William Courtenay, Bishop of London, to a convocation on 19 February 1377 at St Paul's Cathedral. The exact charges are not known, as the matter did not get as far as a definite examination. Lechler suggests that Wycliffe was targeted by John of Gaunt's opponents among the nobles and church hierarchy. Gaunt, the Earl Marshal Henry Percy, and a number of other armed supporters accompanied Wycliffe. A hostile crowd gathered at the church, and at the entrance, party animosities began to show, and there was an angry exchange between the Bishop of London and John of Gaunt about whether Wycliffe could sit.

Gaunt declared that he would humble the pride of the English clergy and their partisans, hinting at the intent to secularise the possessions of the Church. The assembly broke up and Gaunt and his partisans departed with their protégé. Anti-Gaunt riots followed the next day in London. Most of the English clergy were irritated by this encounter, and attacks upon Wycliffe began.

Wycliffe's second and third books dealing with civil government carry a sharp polemic.

On 22 May 1377, Pope Gregory XI sent five copies of a bull against Wycliffe, dispatching one to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the others to the Bishop of London, King Edward III, the Chancellor, and the university. Among the enclosures were 18 theses of his, which were denounced as erroneous and dangerous to Church and State: all were drawn from De Civili dominio.

Stephen Lahey suggests that Gregory's action against Wycliffe was an attempt to put pressure on King Edward to make peace with France. Edward III died on 21 June 1377, and the bull against Wycliffe did not reach England before December. Wycliffe was asked to give the king's council his opinion on whether it was lawful to withhold traditional payments to Rome, and he responded that it was.

Back at Oxford, the Vice-Chancellor confined Wycliffe for some time in Black Hall, but his friends soon obtained his release.

In March 1378, Wycliffe was summoned to appear at Lambeth Palace to defend himself. However, Sir Lewis Clifford entered the chapel and in the name of the queen mother (Joan of Kent), forbade the bishops to proceed to a definite sentence concerning Wycliffe's conduct or opinions. Wycliffe wrote a letter expressing and defending his less "obnoxious doctrines". The bishops, who were divided, satisfied themselves with forbidding him to speak further on the controversy.

De incarcerandis fidelibus

Wycliffe wrote De incarcerandis fidelibus (“On the Incarceration of the Faithful”), a late polemical treatise opposing the use of imprisonment as a coercive instrument of ecclesiastical discipline. The work is commonly described as consisting of thirty-three conclusions transmitted in both Latin and English, although modern scholarship is not uniform in describing the precise relationship between the two versions: no works that Wycliff wrote or preached in English are now known.

In the treatise, Wycliffe argued that incarceration should not be regarded as a legitimate or lawful consequence of excommunication and that coercive penalties imposed by church authorities exceeded their proper spiritual jurisdiction. He further maintained that those who were excommunicated or imprisoned unjustly should be permitted to seek redress through secular authority, including appeal to the king and his council, reflecting his broader view that temporal power had a corrective role when ecclesiastical authority was abused.

Wycliffe’s opposition to clerical imprisonment and his appeal to royal oversight are consistent with arguments found elsewhere in his political theology, particularly in works addressing the duties of kingship and the limits of ecclesiastical power.

Some ordinary citizens, some of the nobility, and his former protector, John of Gaunt, rallied to him. Before any further steps could be taken in Rome, Gregory XI died in 1378.

De officio regis

Wycliffe's stance against the papacy grew ever more extreme moving from respect to outright opposition. Wycliffe's stand concerning the ideal of poverty became continually firmer, as well as his position with regard to the temporal rule of the clergy.

Closely related to this attitude was his book De officio regis, the content of which had been foreshadowed in his 33 conclusions: for example, that a trial before Parliament and Synod was necessary for excommunication, that the King should (intervene and) not authorise imprisonment as a sentence for excommunication. This book, like those that preceded and followed, was concerned with the reform of the Church, in which the temporal arm was to have an influential part.

From 1380 onwards, Wycliffe devoted himself to writings that argued his rejection of transubstantiation, and strongly criticised the friars who supported it.

Anti-Wycliffe synod

In the summer of 1381, Wycliffe formulated his doctrine of the Lord's Supper in twelve short sentences, and made it a duty to advocate it everywhere. Then the English hierarchy launched proceedings against him. The chancellor of the University of Oxford had some of the declarations pronounced heretical. When this was announced to Wycliffe, he declared that no one could change his convictions. He then appealed – not to the pope or the ecclesiastical authorities of the land, but to the king. He published his great confession upon the subject, and a second writing in English intended for the common people.

As long as Wycliffe limited his attacks to abuses and the wealth of the Church, he could rely on the support of part of the clergy and aristocracy, but once he dismissed the traditional doctrine of transubstantiation, his theses could not be defended any more. This view cost him the support of John of Gaunt and many others.

In the midst of this came the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. The revolt was sparked in part by Wycliffe's preaching, carried throughout the realm by "poor priests" or "poor preachers" appointed by Wycliffe, and mostly laymen. A contemporary record claims local sympathetic knights would force local people to hear the preaching, sometimes acting as armed guards in the parish church to prevent disputation. The preachers didn't limit their criticism of the accumulation of wealth and property to that of the monasteries, but included secular properties belonging to the nobility. Although Wycliffe disapproved of the revolt, some of his disciples justified the killing of Simon Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury.

In 1382, Wycliffe's old enemy William Courtenay, now Archbishop of Canterbury, called an ecclesiastical assembly of notables at London. During the consultations on 21 May an earthquake occurred. The participants were terrified and wished to break up the assembly, but Courtenay declared the earthquake a favourable sign, which meant the purification of the earth from erroneous doctrine, and the result of the "Earthquake Synod" was assured.

Of the 24 propositions attributed to Wycliffe without mentioning his name, ten were declared heretical and fourteen erroneous. The former had reference to the transformation in the sacrament, the latter to matters of church order and institutions. It was forbidden from that time to hold these opinions or to advance them in sermons or in academic discussions. All persons disregarding this order were to be subject to prosecution. To accomplish this, the help of the State was necessary, but the Commons rejected the bill. The king, however, had a decree issued which permitted the arrest of those in error.

The citadel of the reformatory movement was Oxford, where Wycliffe's most active helpers were. The ban applied to them and they were summoned to recant. Nicholas of Hereford went to Rome to appeal.

On 17 November 1382, Wycliffe was summoned before a synod at Oxford. He still commanded the favour of the court and of Parliament, to which he addressed a memorial. In 1383 he was summonsed to Rome, but he suffered a debilitating stroke and was excused from travel. He was neither excommunicated then, nor deprived of his living.

Wycliffe aimed to do away with the existing hierarchy and replace it with the "poor priests" who lived in poverty, were bound by no vows, had received no formal consecration, and preached the Gospel to the people. Itinerant preachers spread the teachings of Wycliffe. The bull of Gregory XI impressed upon them the name of Lollards, intended as an opprobrious epithet, but it became, to them, a name of honour. Even in Wycliffe's time the "Lollards" had reached wide circles in England and preached "God's law, without which no one could be justified." Furthermore, not all anti-clerical people were Lollards, not all Lollards were Wycliffites, and not all productions attributed to Wycliffites were anti-Catholic, despite later conflation.

Death and posthumous declaration of heresy

In the years before his death in 1384 he increasingly argued for Scriptures as the authoritative centre of Christianity, that the claims of the papacy were unhistorical, that monasticism was irredeemably corrupt, and that the moral unworthiness of priests invalidated their office and sacraments.

Wycliffe returned to Lutterworth. From there he sent out tracts against the monks and Pope Urban VI. Urban VI, contrary to Wycliffe's hopes, had not turned out to be a reforming pope. The literary achievements of Wycliffe's last days, such as the Trialogus, stand at the peak of the knowledge of his day. His last work, the Opus evangelicum, the last part of which he named in characteristic fashion "Of Antichrist", remained uncompleted. While he was saying Mass in the parish church on Holy Innocents' Day, 28 December 1384, he suffered a stroke, and died a few days later. He started to be venerated as a local saint; some Bohemian followers "even took a piece of his tomb to Prague, where it was worshipped as a relic."

The anti-Lollard statute of 1401 De heretico comburendo classed heresy as a form of sedition or treason, and ordered that Lollard books, frequently associated with Wycliffe, be handed over and burnt; someone who refused and would not abjure could be burnt. The "Constitutions of Oxford" of 1408 established rules in Oxford University, and specifically named John Wycliffe as a Lollard and his writings as heretical; it decreed that new translation efforts of Scripture into English should be first authorised by a Bishop.

The Council of Constance declared Wycliffe a heretic on 4 May 1415, and banned his writings. The Council decreed that Wycliffe's works should be burned and his bodily remains removed from consecrated church ground, following the customary logic that heretics had put themselves outside the church. This order, confirmed by Pope Martin V, was eventually carried out in 1428. Wycliffe's corpse, or a neighbour's, was exhumed; unusually, on the orders of the bishop the remains were burned and the ashes drowned in the River Swift, which flows through Lutterworth.

None of Wycliffe's contemporaries left a complete picture of his person, his life, and his activities. Paintings representing Wycliffe are from a later period. In The Testimony of William Thorpe (1407) (possibly apocryphal), Wycliffe appears wasted and physically weak. Thorpe says Wycliffe was of unblemished walk in life, and regarded affectionately by people of rank, who often consorted with him, took down his sayings, and clung to him. "I indeed clove to none closer than to him, the wisest and most blessed of all men whom I have ever found."