John Huss: his life, teachings and death, after five hundred years/Chapter 7

by David Schley Schaff

CHAPTER VII

HUSS’S WITHDRAWAL FROM PRAGUE

Nomen hæretici præ omnibus malis nominibus abhorrentium.—The Counsel of the Eight Doctors of the Univ. of Prague, Feb. 6, 1413.

The name of heretic is to be abominated above all other evil names.

The sentence of aggravated excommunication was awaiting Huss and the papal interdict was about to be laid upon the city of Prague.^[1] The announcement of the latter bull was followed by Huss’s retirement from the city and his absence for a period of two years. October, 1412–October, 1414.

Many supporters as Huss had, the larger part of the clergy still held back from his movement or openly declared against him. The old order had been tried for centuries and had prevailed against all attacks from heretics and princes. The conservative habit of mind clings to approved institutions. It is not so much its guilt that it does not appreciate the necessity for change or discern the signs of the coming time. It is given only to a few, moved by strong and independent convictions and endowed with prophetic insight, to see beyond the order which from their earliest knowledge has been around about them. Even John the Baptist wavered, though he was appointed to be the forerunner. Later, another John, John of Staupitz, halted while Luther went forward. To those bold leaders who have opened out new paths, that prove to be good paths, across the oceans and toward new horizons of thought and feeling, human society is under an unspeakable debt. Theirs is the cause of progress.

To the latter group Huss belongs. In his case his former colleagues not only failed to approve of the wisdom of his course in threatening to break with the old, but it is quite possible they also felt a certain amount of jealousy for the popular feeling in his favor and, as Huss charged, fear of offending their superiors. In the case of Luther, the element of rivalry does not seem to have been an appreciable factor in the opposition to him when he entered upon his Reformatory career. No intimate friends turned against him and took a positively hostile attitude toward him.

At the beginning of the year 1412, Huss was attacked by one whom he designates “a hidden assailant of the truth or an inquisitor.” In his spirited reply entitled Against the Hidden Adversary—a writing which played a part in the council of Constance—Huss took occasion to defend his course in attacking the vices of the clergy. The charges made by his opponent were first, that Huss by his preaching had discredited the law, and second, that he was destroying the influence of the priesthood. Huss replied that he was not attempting to discredit the priesthood but to abash vicious and unfaithful priests. In taking this course, he was following Christ, who wept over Jerusalem, which was later destroyed by Titus. Christ entered into the temple, rebuked those who sold doves and cast them out. Charles IV, king of Bohemia, had protected the Word of God by restraining and reprimanding insolent and unfaithful priests. It is for kings to purge the church as Nebuchadnezzar released the three young men from the fire. There is an order of priesthood which continues in heaven; it consists of all those who make an offering of themselves unto the Lord. This priesthood, as well as the priests who officiate at the altar in this world, do justly in rebuking, evil and unfaithful priests.

Upon the whole, the papal court of the Pisan line, next to maintaining its own existence, had no case to attend to comparable in importance with the refractory movement in Bohemia. It was kept well informed of what was happening. Michael de Causis was in Rome, pleading against the preacher of Bethlehem chapel. The hostile wing of the Prague clergy was insisting that Huss be punished to the extent of the law. A communication which it forwarded to the pope in the beginning of 1412, branded Huss as a heretic, a despiser of the keys, and a Wyclifist.^[2] It declared that “every heretic and schismatic deserves a place with the devil and his angels in the flames of eternal fire.” Many men in high position and also an infinite number of women had been seduced to believe the XLV Articles of Wyclif. John was entreated to protect the sheep against ravening wolves and, if necessary, by turning Huss and his sympathizers over to the civil arm. Thus the pernicious seeds might be prevented from germinating before it became impossible to exterminate them. Infamous though John XXIII was rumored to be, a very devil of a cardinal—diavolo cardinale—the communication addressed him as Most blessed father, most righteous and merciful prince of fathers.

Ill treatment had been meted out to Jesenicz and the other pleader of Huss’s case at Rome. They had been thrown into prison, although, as Huss wrote, they were free from all crime. His case, which had been transferred from Colonna and put into the hands of four cardinals, was now again committed to a single prelate, Peter Stefaneschi, cardinal of St. Angelo.^[3] The curial proceedings culminated in the aggravated excommunication pronounced by this cardinal, that is, the excommunication pronounced by Colonna reaffirmed with emphasis. It bound Huss in the tightest grip of the greater anathema. Under threat of excommunication, the faithful were instructed to avoid the contumacious son of the church in all places, public and private, at meat and drink, in conversation, in buying and selling. They were to refuse him all hospitality, fire, and water. Should Huss after twenty-three days persist in his contumacy, then in all churches, chapels, and convents, on all festival days and Sundays, by the extinguishing of tapers and casting them to the ground, he was to be pronounced excommunicate aggravate, and reaggravate.”^[4] Every locality where he might tarry was to be placed under the interdict during the term of his sojourning there and for one natural day more. Divine services were to be held behind closed doors and the eucharist distributed only to the sick.

Should Huss happen to die while bound by the censure, church sepulture was to be denied him and, if he were already in his grave when the sentence was pronounced, his body was to be disinterred “on account of his rebellion and contempt of the Apostolic mandates as unworthy of church burial.” In token of eternal curse three stones were ordered thrown against the house where he might be dwelling. Thus the sentence would be repeated which God had meted out to Dathan and Abiram, who were swallowed up alive of the earth. By speaking or standing or rising up, by walking or riding, by salutation or association, by eating or drinking, by cooking or laboring, by buying or selling by furnishing clothes or shoes, by giving drink or water or any of the other necessities of life, by offering consolation or any help whatsoever, all the faithful of Christ were enjoined from having any part or lot with the unfortunate man, and any one presuming to do the same was also to share in the anathematization. Thus Cain’s curse was put upon Huss as far as it was in human power to do it. He was a vagabond on the earth, deprived of all means of livelihood and of all human aid.

Sentences as destitute of common human mercy and equally or more violent in expression had been pronounced before. Popes had felt free to invoke the terrors of this world and to extend furious execrations to the life that is to come. So the bull of Clement VI against Lewis the Bavarian in 1346 ran: “Let his going out and his coming in be cursed. May the Lord strike him low with madness and blindness and fury of mind. May the heavens send forth against him their thunderbolts. And may the wrath of God omnipotent and his blessed Apostles, Peter and Paul, burn itself against him in this world and the world to come. May the earth fight against him and the ground open and swallow him up alive. May all the elements contend against him, and all the saints who are at rest put him to confusion and in this world fall upon him with their vengeance.” The bull blasphemously damned the emperor’s house to desolation and his children to exclusion from their abode, and it invoked upon the father the curse of beholding with his own eyes the destruction of his children by their enemies.^[5] How far different was the spirit of Huss who, putting aside the fearful examples of divine punishment recorded in the Old Testament as of a nature suited exclusively to God’s immediate execution, dwelt upon the mercy of the Gospel, Christ’s refusal to grant the petition of the disciples to call down fire from heaven, and who again and again quoted as a rule of conduct for prelatical action and all daily life the divine words: “Judge not that ye be not judged.”^[6]

All evils that could hurt Huss in body and soul were invoked against him except the blow of the sword or consuming fire, a sentence for which the church was, in theory at least, dependent upon the magistrate. Huss was a heretic, and in due time the church would find opportunity to turn him over to the civil authorities for the punishment to which the custom of centuries had consigned heretics. Sentences, like this one against Huss, have been justified on the plea that they are beneficial for the church in preserving the flock from infection. The individual’s rights in the sight of God as the supreme judge over living and dead are made subject to the decision of an organization called the church, or rather to a restricted official group which is regarded as its representative. It was Huss’s merit, as it was Wyclif’s merit before and Luther’s one hundred years later, to fight against this fell theory and to hazard his life, as they did theirs, for the Christian theory which prevails to-day. In the works already cited, Huss contended manfully for the rights of the individual, as we shall also find him doing in his Treatise on the Church and in other statements to the end of his life. The time was now at hand for him to assert these rights for himself with all his might against the powers of the church which were against him.

From the sentence of aggravated excommunication, which deprived him of everything but bare existence, Huss appealed to the supreme judge, Jesus Christ—ad supremum judicem appellavi.^[7] The appeal is introduced by a confession of God as one in essence and three in person and of Jesus Christ, who suffered an unjust and bitter death to redeem from condemnation those elected from before the foundation of the world—Jesus Christ, who left to his disciples the highest example of suffering and the lesson that in memory of him they should commit their cause to an omnipotent, omniscient, and all-gracious Lord. Huss begged for the divine help and compassion in the midst of his enemies who were speaking and plotting ill against him and who were declaring that God had forsaken him. He recalled the examples of John Chrysostom and Andrew of Prague, who had appealed from ecclesiastical decisions, and especially the example of Robert Grosseteste of Lincoln, who had appealed from the pope to the “supreme and most righteous judge who is not deceived by false witnesses or moved by fear.” His friends of Bohemia of high and low estate, conjoined with him in the papal fulmination, he reminded of the busy activity of Michael de Causis at the curia. He also reminded them of John XXIII’s refusal during a period of two years to grant a hearing to his procurators and the pope’s neglect to give attention to the sealed testimony of the university and to his own reasons for not heeding the citation and appearing at Rome. Moved not by contumacy but by prudential concern, he had declined to appear, his very life, as it seemed, being threatened were he to enter upon the journey. The canonical course for a man accused of an offense, so he urged, was that he should be examined at the place where the offense was committed and be tried in an impartial court. In closing his protest, he commended himself, a bachelor of theology of the university of Prague, priest and authorized preacher at Bethlehem chapel, to “the most righteous judge, Jesus Christ, who knows, protects, and judges the righteous cause of every man perfectly, makes it known and most surely rewards his servants.”

Huss did not appeal to a general council, because, as he wrote in his Treatise on the Church, the calling of a council involved delay and also because a council was an uncertain mode of relief. Consequently, finding his appeal from Alexander V to his successor of no avail, he appealed to Christ. The interdict which probably was received in Prague in August, 1412, brought with it fierce penalties which at once began to be felt. Priests refused to administer the sacraments, even the sacrament of baptism, and to accord the rites of sepulture. Some of the king’s courtiers, it is said, joined in burying the dead. As for its effects upon Huss, even his old friends, Palecz and Stanislaus of Znaim, made attacks upon him in the pulpit. Stanislaus, preaching before Duke Ernest of Austria in the church of St. Mary the Virgin, inveighed against the five Wyclifite articles defended by Huss; and in St. Gallus, Palecz declared Huss to be a worse heretic than either Sabellius or Arius, for he dared to intrench himself behind the Scriptures. Palecz also used as an argument against the Hussites their alleged timidity and boasted of the confidence and boldness of the other party. We can go, he said, “with our faith wherever we choose, but they dare not travel abroad, for in Germany or before the Roman curia, if they did not renounce their faith, they would be burned.”

Still another bull was forthcoming, which ordered Huss seized and delivered up to the archbishop of Prague or the bishop of Leitomysl to be condemned and put to death. The Bethlehem chapel was ordered razed to the ground as a nest of heresy. A mob of German citizens who had taken sides against Huss, and of Czechs led by a Bohemian, Chotek, furnished themselves with swords and other weapons and proceeded to the Bethlehem chapel with the purpose of executing the papal order, but their attempt was foiled by the congregation, which at the time was assembled for service.^[8] At a formal meeting in the town hall, Germans and some Bohemians voted to execute the pope’s fulmination against the chapel, but the majority of the Bohemians present announced themselves against it. On the other hand, the Hussites were not to be easily subdued. They gained the victory at the university by the election of Christian of Prachaticz as rector. The election was carried through in the face of the combined resistance of the theological masters. Prachaticz was a devoted friend of Huss and so remained to the end. Some of Huss’s letters giving the deepest insight into his convictions were addressed to this noble man.

Sophia, the queen, also remained steadfast and continued to attend the services at the chapel. John of Jesenicz, who had escaped from his Italian jail, was seized and imprisoned on his return to Prague. Released through the intervention of the university, he held a public dispute in its halls, December 18, 1412, seeking to prove that the sentences against Huss were without legal basis. Huss reports that both John XXIII and the cardinals received horses, silver cups, and other gifts as bribes from the party hostile to him, and intimates that one reason the case went against him at Rome was that Jesenicz declined to bribe the papal court.^[9]

It was evident that the king was inclined to support the excommunicated preacher, but to have done so openly would have been to defy the papal power. It would have meant for his realm civil war and for himself quite probably the loss of his crown. Popes were prepared for such emergencies. They had deposed Henry IV, Frederick II, John of England, Lewis the Bavarian, and, later, Elizabeth herself, and Wenzel had none of the strength of these strong personalities. As the electors, at the pope’s demand, had chosen a rival emperor in the past, so at this juncture they would probably again have heeded a papal mandate to supersede the Bohemian king if one had been given. In fact, all that was required was for them to recognize his brother Sigismund, already elected heir to the throne. For such an issue that prince was, no doubt, quite ready. On a former occasion he had seized his brother at the appeal of the barons. Much more would he be ready to seize him in deference to a call from the spiritual head of Christendom.

Had Wenzel been as strong and cautious a character as was later Frederick the Wise of Saxony, he might have become the patron of a radical and permanent reformation, as the elector became the patron of the Protestant movement by preventing any violence being done Luther by the Roman party and by insisting that Luther should have a fair hearing.

It was a friendly act for Wenzel when he called upon Huss to withdraw from the city, which was suffering from the woes of the interdict. From the standpoint of expediency, it was also a wise thing for the king to give Huss this counsel. It is not to be supposed that Wenzel had any very deep religious convictions, although he may have felt the justice of Huss’s attacks on local clerical conditions. Huss complied with the king’s wishes. He left the city, October, 1412, and his semi-voluntary exile, interrupted by occasional visits to Prague, continued to October, 1414, when he started on his journey to Constance. He found refuge and hospitality in the castle of Kozi hradek, belonging to John of Austi, in Southern Bohemia. People were soon asking where Huss was, though they had no thought that he was dead, as Albrecht Dürer and others thought of Luther after his seizure at the Wartburg.

By withdrawing from Prague, Huss saved the city from the continued pressure of the interdict. It must be recalled that this extreme papal ban was equivalent to a religious starvation. Huss’s removal by death or by exile was the indispensable condition of its suspension. His enemies at once took advantage of his retirement to make the damaging charge that he had been banished by the king or the still more damaging charge that he had fled from fear. In the earlier list of charges brought against him at Constance, 1414, was the charge “that he was expelled from Prague on account of rebellion and disobedience.”^[10] There was some ground for the charge of banishment, provided a king’s counsel is to be treated as tantamount to law, but no official order was issued. Huss’s course afterward became the occasion of much trouble to his conscience, whether he had done right or not in leaving the city. Writing to the Praguers at the close of 1412, he declared that he withdrew of his own will, and in so doing felt he was following Christ’s example. In justification of his course he quoted the passages, “They sought to take him and he went forth out of their hands,” John 10: 39, and “Jesus walked no more openly among the Jews, but departed thence into the country near to the wilderness,” John 11: 54.

Albik, who at this juncture retired from the see of Prague, was succeeded by Konrad of Vechta. The retiring prelate was provided with the provostship of the Wyssehrad, a rich office, and made titular archbishop of Cæsarea. He bought a house which he occupied with his aunt and two daughters until his death in 1427. His successor, who was inducted into the office, July, 1413, in his latter days espoused Hussitism.

The Bohemian heresy was fast becoming a byword, darkening the fair fame of the land throughout the Christian world.^[11] In the hope of removing the causes of “the pestiferous religious dissensions among the clergy,” and acting in connection with the bishops of Olmütz and Leitomysl, Wenzel called an extraordinary national synod, which met in Prague, February 6, 1413.

The synod had laid before it memorials from the theological faculty of the university and from Huss, setting forth the conditions on which religious peace might be re-established. Huss was prevented by the sentence of excommunication from being present, and his position was defended, as seems probable, by Jesenicz and also by Jacobellus, of whom we shall hear more.

The memorial of the theological faculty, drawn up by Stanislaus of Znaim and Palecz, took the position that the church’s official decisions are final.^[12] It was out of the province of the Prague clergy to sit in judgment upon the pronouncements of the papal see and to question whether they were just or not. On all subjects, doctrinal and disciplinary, such as the seven sacraments, the worship of relics and regard for indulgences, Bohemia’s glory had consisted in its strict orthodoxy. Bohemia had always felt and taught as the Roman Church taught and not otherwise. This reputation must be sustained and, if necessary, by recourse to the severest measures. The memorial affirmed that the pope is the head and the college of cardinals the living body of the Roman Church—corpus romanæ ecclesiæ. They are the successors of Peter and the other Apostles. It is theirs to define the theology of the Catholic Church in all the world and to purge it of all errors. The causes of the trouble in Prague, it asserts, were three. The first cause was the refusal to accept the condemnation of the XLV Wyclifite Articles, including Wyclif’s views of the seven sacraments. No one of these articles was Catholic.

The second cause was the dispute in regard to the source of authority. Some made the Scriptures the only rule in matters of faith and judicial decision. This view set aside the ordinance of God, who had chosen to appoint the apostolic see as the tribunal of judgment. The true view Innocent III had laid down in his bull, per venerabilem, by his interpretation of Deut. 17: 8–12.^[13] To confirm this interpretation as the memorial quotes. Innocent adduced the Lord’s fictitious conversation with Peter outside the walls of Rome, when Peter was fleeing from the holy city. The Apostle, meeting the Lord, said to him: “Lord, whither art thou going?” He replied, “I go again to Rome to be crucified.” Understanding what the Lord’s meaning was, the Apostle returned again to the city.

The third cause of the trouble was the denial to the decisions of the holy see finality in cases where what is purely good is not forbidden and the purely evil not commanded, as well as in other cases. Here the memorial quotes Matt. 23: 3, ‘All things that the scribes and Pharisees bid you, these do and observe.’ These two passages from the Old and the New Testaments, Huss took up in his reply to the memorial and gave to them prolonged discussion in his Treatise on the Church.

The measures which the theological faculty proposed for the settlement of the controversy were as follows: (1) That all the doctors and masters of the university take an oath in the presence of the archbishop and the other prelates denying that they held any of the XLV Articles. (2) That they accepted the seven sacraments and the veneration of indulgences and relics in no other sense than the Roman Church taught, whose head was the pope and whose body was the cardinals. (3) That submission be made to the decisions of the apostolic see and prelates in all matters whatsoever. (4) That Wyclif’s teachings concerning the seven sacraments be declared contrary to Roman doctrine and false. All refusing to take the oath, professors, clergy, or laymen, were to be punished with excommunication and exile from the realm. They were to be treated as heretics, “a name to be abhorred above all other evil names.” The odious and scandalous songs, recently forbidden, should be suppressed, by royal command, on the streets and in taverns. As for Huss, he should be estopped from preaching or in any way impeding the public services of religion by his presence in Prague so long as he was under the condemnation of the curia. Absolution the faculty was willing to intercede with the curia to grant, provided Huss and his followers subscribed to the four conditions named above.

In his counter-memorial Huss took the position that the existence of heretics in Bohemia was an assumption unproved and that his own excommunication, being founded upon false information given to the apostolic see, was null. Stanislaus and Palecz themselves had at one time held and defended many of those very Wyclifite articles which were now reprobated. How, then, could they honestly pronounce every one of them uncatholic? He appealed to the solemn agreement of July 6, 1411, entered into by Zbynek on the one hand and the masters of the university and himself on the other, an agreement attested by solemn seals. He called for the observance of the customs and immunities of the kingdom of Bohemia and demanded the right to appear in a native synod and answer charges that might be brought against him. He also demanded that iſ the charges were not proved, the author should be punished according to the lex talionis. The king should issue a decree calling for public charges. In case no accusers presented themselves, then the Roman curia should be informed by the hostile party that Prague was not infected with heresy and that the kingdom had been defamed when charged with being heretical. The interdict should be liſted and also the papal decree against the free preaching of the Word of God.

In demanding that regard be paid to the customs and immunities of Bohemia, Huss no doubt had in mind, as Loserth says, the practice followed in England. The ancient rites and customs of England were repeatedly invoked by the successors of William the Conqueror in their struggles against the encroachment of the papal see. When William was called upon by Gregory VII to do him homage, he replied: “Fealty I have never willed nor will I now. I have never promised it nor do I find that my predecessors did.” He forbade papal letters to be received or published in the realm without his consent and no ecclesiastic was to leave the kingdom without the king’s permission.^[14] Of these rights Wyclif was an intrepid defender and he advocated the renunciation of John’s contract to pay annual tribute of one thousand marks to Rome.

Fair as Huss’s demand for an open trial may in this age seem to be, the matter was quite a different thing in the fifteenth century. The pope’s right to fulminate censures had been treated as absolute. The method of the inquisition was to regard a heretical suspect guilty, laying upon him the burden of proving himself innocent. With us the relation is reversed; a man is treated as innocent until he is proved guilty. From the papal decisions there was no appeal. Absolute submission was the condition of religious existence and of life itself. To refuse it meant separation from eternal life as well as physical death.

In defending Huss, Jacobellus took the advanced ground that a process should follow the rules of Christ’s law, a course which would have carried the court back of the letter of the canon law. He demanded procedure against the clergy for simony, adultery, fornication and concubinage, and their renunciation of worldly goods and dominions. By their preaching, John Huss and his followers were laboring to secure obedience to Christ’s law. The ill fame of heresy, said to attach to Bohemia, did not hurt the kingdom any more than ill fame could hurt the true child of God. Bohemia cannot be hurt, if it has the peace and concord of the saints.

A memorial drawn up by other masters of the university denied the main statements urged by Palecz and Stanislaus. It opened by clearly repudiating the definition whereby the pope is the head of the church and the cardinals its body. On the contrary, Christ is the head and all true Christians make up the body. Nor are the pope and the cardinals the only successors of Peter and the Apostles. All bishops and priests are their successors. The “evangelical clergy” was right in pronouncing the condemnation of the XLV Articles unjust and pernicious. Obedience in all things is not due to the pope. Pontiffs have been heretics, have often recalled their bulls, err, and are often mistaken. Yea, a pope may be among the reprobate. The papal decisions against Huss were no more to be obeyed by the Prague clergy on the bare ground that they were issued and promulgated than the devil himself is to be obeyed because our parents, Adam and Eve, hearkened to him. The kind of reasoning applied in Huss’s case would apply also to the action of Pilate, who condemned Christ because the priests and people at Jerusalem condemned him.

The exact issue of the synod is not known. However, on receiving the memorials, the bishop of Leitomysl, who was not in attendance, in a document dated February 10, 1413, recommended that a vice-chancellor be appointed for the university to have close watch for heretics and erroneous teaching, and that Huss should not only be strictly kept from preaching but also from issuing writings in the language of the people. He should be forced out of Bethlehem chapel as the ravening wolf should be forced out of the fold, lest he destroy the flock. God is the Lord of peace and not of dissension. What are prelates of the church for, if not to keep the sheep from attacks from wolves and foxes! Zbynek’s agreement, to which Huss appealed, had no validity. It had not been approved by the apostolic see. Huss’s demand to be tried in Bohemia and not in Rome was against the example set by Paul, who appealed to Rome and purposed to die there rather than prosecute his case anywhere else. In his demand that the interdict be annulled and he be allowed to preach freely, Huss was concealing under his words the laughter of foxes and the howling of wolves, who pretend that their voices are evangelical and do lie. Huss was lying when he pretended that his voice of dissension and schism was the voice of the Gospel and of charity.

The author of these severe sentiments, John Bucka, bishop of Leitomysl, was known as the Iron Bishop. Huss had no more inveterate enemy than this prelate. At the synod of Constance he was persistent in his demand for the application of severe measures, and, after Huss’s death, he was commissioned by the council to put down the Hussite revolt in Bohemia. He belonged to that group of hard ecclesiastical disciplinarians who insist upon the rigorous enforcement of the letter of ecclesiastical rules and allow no room for individual dissent to tradition and custom.

The state of Huss’s mind for this period of his absence from Prague is revealed in seventeen letters which are preserved from his pen.^[15] Here we are admitted to the inner realm of his feelings in regard to his leaving his work in the city and also in regard to the possible violent death which persistency in his views might bring upon him. His conscience, as has been said, was much exercised as to whether he had done right or wrong in leaving Prague. He was in a quandary as to which of the two classes of passages he ought to have followed, the one urging flight in time of danger, the other readiness to suffer death in the face of it. As between these two, he did not know which to choose. He had meditated upon the words: “A good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep, but an hireling and he who is not the shepherd, whose the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming and leaveth the sheep and fleeth and the wolf ravens them and destroys the sheep.” On the other hand, he had meditated upon the words: “When they persecute you in one city flee to another.” He quoted Augustine for the principle that if a person was sought out in his individual capacity—singulariter—he was justified in fleeing, as did Athanasius. Huss might also have recalled the case of Cyprian, who fled on one occasion from persecution and later surrendered his life.

In being absent from Prague, Huss wrote, he might be guilty of withholding the Word of God from his people. If, indeed, it should be found that he had fled from the truth, then he prayed that the Lord would give him an opportunity to die in the profession of the same truth. The interdict, he wrote, had led to great unrest and commotion among the people, as baptism and burial of the dead were forbidden, and, on that account, great disorder was to be feared, should he return. “Whether I did right or wrong in withdrawing, I hardly know.” Huss visited Prague a number of times, first at Christmas time, 1412.

As for the trials through which he was passing, he wrote to his friends of Bethlehem chapel that the devil had been going about roaring against him for several years, but had not hurt a hair of his head. On the contrary, his joy and gladness had increased. Again and again he quoted passages describing the sufferings of Christ and Christ’s exhortations to his disciples to expect tribulation and to bear up under it, trusting in him. If Christ suffered at the hands of priests and Pharisees, who said, “This man is not of God,” why should we be surprised if the ministers of antichrist speak evil of his servants to-day, excommunicate them, and put them to death, for they are even more greedy and cruel than the Pharisees. Christ said: “I send you as sheep among wolves. Be ye, therefore, wise as serpents and harmless as doves. And beware of men, lest they deliver you up to councils.” He heard that they were going about to destroy Bethlehem chapel and to put an end to preaching in other churches, but he believed God. They would accomplish nothing. The Goose, a tame and domestic bird, would break through the nets spread for it, while other birds exceeding it in power of flight would be caught in the snares. Seeing the true God is with us, who is able to separate us from Him? The chief priests, scribes and Pharisees, Herod and Pilate and others of Jerusalem condemned truth and sentenced Christ to death. Yea, they branded him with heresy and excommunicated him, and outside the walls of the city crucified him as a malefactor. But he rose again, came forth as conqueror, and, in his place, he sent forth twelve other preachers. If the true God, our most mighty and righteous Protector, be with us, who can prevail against us in spite of their wicked designs?

His friends in Prague he exhorted to remember that Christ came to separate man and man and it was predicted that many false prophets should arise and seduce men. But they should also remember the promise that not a hair of their heads shall perish and remain true to the Word of Christ. “What, after all, do we lose if for his cause we suffer loss of goods, friends, the honors of this world, and our wretched life itself? Certainly, at last, we shall be delivered from the misery of this present world and, having received a hundredfold more goods and friends and more perfect joy, death shall not deprive us of these things. For whoso dies for Christ, he conquers. He is delivered from all misery and attains that eternal joy unto which the Saviour deigns to bring us all.” He begged his correspondents to offer up their prayers for those who were preaching the Word of God with grace, and for himself that he might be permitted yet more abundantly to preach and write against the malice of antichrist. No excommunication but God’s excommunication can do injury. May the most excellent Bishop give to us all the benediction, saying: “Come, ye blessed of my Father, receive the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” Although he was not yet shut up in prison, yet was he prepared, if called upon, so he wrote, to die for Christ’s sake.

Five of the letters written during the exile period were addressed to his friend Christian of Prachaticz, rector of the university, and abound in the consolations offered in the Scriptures to those who are oppressed for righteousness’ sake. “I want,” Huss wrote, “to live godly, and it behooves me to suffer in the name of Christ and thus to imitate Christ in his trials.” He exhorts Prachaticz and his colleagues to be prepared for the great conflict which he expected to follow the preliminary skirmishes which were going on with antichrist. With reference to the action of the theological faculty, he wrote: “So Christ our Lord help me. I would not heed its proposition, even if I knew the fire was prepared for me and I was standing close to it. I hope that death may take to heaven or to hell either myself or the two who have turned from the truth before I give consent to their judgment.”

The two referred to were Stanislaus and Palecz, as he goes on to say, men who called Huss and his followers Wyclifists and infidels and wanderers from the sound faith of Christ. They had once followed the truth according to Christ’s law, but, struck through with fear of punishment, had turned and were flattering the pope. He hoped that, with God’s grace, if it should become necessary, he would be willing to stand up against them even to consuming fire. “It is better to die well than to live ill. One should not flinch before the sentence of death. To finish the present life in grace is to go away from pain and misery. He who fears death loses the joy of life. Above all else truth triumphs. He conquers who dies because no adversity can hurt the one over whom iniquity holds not sway.” Here we think both of Wyclif and Melanchthon—Wyclif, who in a solemn moment, after the council of London, 1381, had declared, “I believe that in the end the truth will conquer,” and Melanchthon, who, before dying, put in parallel columns the benefits of living and of dying, giving the advantage to dying.

At another time he wrote to the rector that he could not accept the statement that the pope is the head of the Holy Roman Church and the cardinals the body, for thus he would be forced to accept all the deliverances of the Holy Roman Church. In such a statement “truly the snake lurks in the grass; for, if it were true, then the pope and cardinals would constitute the whole Roman Church, even as the body and the head together make up the whole man. If the statement were true, then all the decrees of popes and curia must be obeyed and, if Huss does not accept them all, then he is an incorrigible heretic fit only for the fire. Boniface had solemnly declared that Wenzel was not to be accepted as king of the Romans or Sigismund king of the Hungarians: therefore neither of them is now king. Liberius was a heretic as well as were other popes. In the memorial of the theological faculty Palecz and Stanislaus did not even make mention of Christ. If the pope lives according to the rule of Christ, then is he the head of as much of the Catholic Church as he rules over. If he lives contrary to Christ, then is he a thief and a robber, a ravening wolf, the chief antichrist.”

From Huss in exile, we turn our attention to scenes being enacted at Rome. There the authorities were proceeding against Wyclif’s memory and books. By a decree of John XXIII, February 10, 1413, and the council sitting in the holy city, which John called a “general council,” Wyclif’s books were branded as containing many heretical doctrines and many errors. The mad poison of their teachings—rabidum venenum—were pronounced like the pestiferous leaven of the Pharisees, corrupting the true Catholic erudition, like the abomination of desolation in the holy place, like leprosy in the human body which threatened to turn true Christians into scorpions and serpents. In accordance with the words, that every branch that abideth not in Christ should be cut off and burned. Wyclif’s writings were condemned to be publicly committed to the flames wherever they were found. An example was set in Rome itself, where all copies upon which hands could be laid were burned in front of the doors of St. Peter’s.

Shortly after Easter, 1413, in order to restore tranquillity to his realm, the king appointed a commission consisting of Albik. Prachaticz, and two others, with instructions to arbitrate between the two parties and to secure their agreement to some formula of peace. Representatives of both parties were summoned, including Stanislaus of Znaim, Stephen Palecz, John of Jesenicz, and Simon of Tissnow. They met the commission in the parish house of St. Michael’s, the residence of Prachaticz. They mutually agreed to abide by the decision of the commission and, upon default, to pay sixty thousands groschen and be exiled from the realm.

In regard to the sacraments and some other matters, the representatives agreed to accept the definition of the Roman Church. On the definition of the church they divided, Palecz and his party insisting upon defining the church as the pope and the cardinals then living. The Hussites defined it as the body of which Christ is the head, the pope being the vicegerent. About this and other questions the commission decided to proceed on the assumption that the two parties were in substantial accord, and it proposed on the next day to bring forward matters of personal dispute between them, and at the same time a decision upon those matters. When the day came, Palecz and his friends offered unconditional objection to the several clauses incorporating the commission’s decision. One clause was that the Roman Church should be submitted to “as far as a good and faithful Christian ought to submit.” A second clause stipulated that Palecz and his party should write to the curia that they knew of no heresy in Bohemia and that no heretic had been found. Their refusal to comply with this second clause was in part on the ground that such a recommendation would give the lie to their former statements and in part on the ground that a proper search for heretics had not been made.^[16]

Hereupon the anti-Hussites, Peter of Znaim and Stanislaus of Znaim, John Elias, and Palecz, were found contumacious and were consigned by royal edict to perpetual banishment. Their canonries as well as their offices at the university were transferred to their four opponents. The University Chronicle states that the banished theologians “did not visit Prague again until after the king’s death, for that they had precipitated themselves into the penalty of exile.” Stanislaus, however, never returned, but died as he was about to set out for the council of Constance. The banishment of these four leaders by a decree, which was pronounced irrevocable, was a severe blow to the anti-Hussite party. Another blow was the reduction of the German element in the city council of the old town. For a century or more this element had had the preponderance. By an order at this time, issued by the king, the representation was equally divided between the Bohemians and Germans, nine from each nationality.

If these events seem to indicate a strong determination on the part of the city and court to stand by Huss, the feeling in the country was even more pronounced in his favor. To this feeling his words referred which he uttered at Constance: “Truly I have said it: of my own free will I came here, and so numerous and so powerful are the Bohemian nobles who love me that I should have been right able to find refuge and safety within the walls of their castles, and that, if I had not willed to come hither, ncither that king—Wenzel— nor this king—Sigismund—would have been able to come and take me away by force.”

Huss continued at Kozi hradek until April, 1414, when, by the death of the lord, the guardianship of the castle passed into hands not favorable to him. Huss then found housing in the castle of Krakowec, belonging to Henry Lefl of Lazan, a high favorite at the court. By his own testimony he preached in the open fields, woods, highways, and public squares, going from village to village and from castle to castle, everywhere followed by large concourses of people. He especially mentions a linden-tree near the castle of Kozi hradek under which he was accustomed to preach. In one of his sermons he said: “Jesus went about on foot preaching, and not drawn in a splendid carriage as are the priests to-day. But I, alas, also am drawn about in a carriage, and I accuse myself of this indulgence of not going about on foot to preach even as my Redeemer was accustomed to do, and I do not know whether in the future it will be a fitting excuse that I am not able quickly to reach distant localities on foot.”

During this period he found time to write much, including his chief work, the Treatise on the Church, and the tracts in answer to Stanislaus and Palecz. A tract entitled Six Errors to be Avoided^[17] contains in preliminary headings the words which were inscribed on the walls of the Bethlehem chapel, June 21, 1413. These headings are: (1) On Creation. It is not true that the priest, as the people are seduced to believe, creates at the mass the body of Christ, so that it is evident that he is the creator of his Creator. (2) On Faith. Faith can be truly exercised in God only and not in the blessed Virgin, the pope, or the saints. (3) On Remission. Priests cannot remit sins and absolve from punishment and guilt—a pœna et culpa. (4) On Obedience. Inferiors are not bound in all things submit to superiors. (5) Excommunication. If unjust, it does not separate from the communion of the faithful or deprive of the sacraments of the church. (6) Simony. Alas, it taints the larger part of the clergy and is to be crushed out.

In his elaboration of these principles, Huss lays down the propositions that neither good nor bad angels, much less men, can create anything at all, and that we ought to obey God rather than men. All the principles of this tract are set forth in greater fulness in his Treatise on the Church. In the decision on matters concerning the church and its relation to the nations and society, the university of Paris was, next to Rome, the most important earthly tribunal, and to the attention of the Parisian theological faculty the Bohemian matter was officially carried by the cardinals of Pisa and Rheims and by other prelates and doctors. The allegation was that the writings of a certain John Huss should be examined and judgment pronounced upon them. Copies of these writings had been brought to Paris by Peter of Prague. Gerson, the rector of the university and dean of its faculty of sacred theology, wrote two letters to Konrad, archbishop of Prague, under date of September, 1414, in regard to Huss.^[18]

John Gerson, 1363–1429, among the illustrious men in the history of France, was one of the most influential leaders of the first half of the fourteenth century. He labored with great zeal to bring the papal schism to an end, and the principle for which he contended he saw recognized—that a general council is superior to the pope and may depose popes. He opposed some of the superstitions of his day inherited from other times and emphasized the authority of the sacred text, but he stopped short of the principles of the Reformation and saw in the organization of the church a remedy for all its ills. He was a prominent actor at the council of Constance and voted against Huss. In the first of his letters he called Konrad’s attention to the pernicious tares sown by Wyclif, which for many years had been infecting the field of the church. Heresies should be exterminated with the scythe or hoe of miracles and councils and, in desperate cases, they and their authors were to be cut down with the axe wielded by the secular arm and committed to the flames—excidens hæreses cum auctoribus suis et in ignem mittens. Other measures proving of no avail, the rector exhorts the archbishop to resort to the secular arm, that the axe might be laid at the root of the unfruitful and corrupt tree; surely it should be invoked for the salvation of the sheep, lest the pastures, corrupted with the deadly seed of poisonous doctrine, breathe out death instead of life.

The second communication Gerson accompanied with a list of twenty errors extracted from Huss’s works. The one which he pronounced the most radically pernicious was that a reprobate or one living in mortal sin—pope, lord, or prelate-had no right to exercise authority over Christian people, an error, he affirmed, which had often been condemned, as in the case of the Waldenses and Beghards. In his humble opinion—parvitati meæ—it seemed that such a tenet should be destroyed by fire and the sword rather than the attempt made to overcome it by a process of subtle ratiocination. Power to govern on earth was not derived from the title of predestination, which is manifestly uncertain, but from ecclesiastical and civil laws. Among the other tenets condemned by Gerson were: that those popes only are of the church who imitate in their lives Christ and the Apostles, an error, he affirmed, in faith and morals full to the brim of arrogance and temerity; that the pope should not be called most holy, nor are his feet blessed and to be kissed; that Christ alone, and not the pope, is the head of the church; that tithes and gifts to the church and to ecclesiastics are pure alms; that an excommunicate person is to be spared if he appeals to Christ; that ecclesiastics evil in their lives may and ought to be coerced by laymen by the withdrawal of tithes and other temporalities; and that all acts done without love are sinful.

Some of these errors had been held by the Donatists in the fifth century and more recently, so Gerson declares, by Marsiglius of Padua and John of Jandun and had been condemned. In regard to Huss’s insistence upon the right to preach. Gerson insists that there is a zeal against the vices of the clergy which is without knowledge. Vices and errors cannot be uprooted by vices. In Beelzebub’s kingdom demons were not cast out by demons. Not to set oneself against such errors as those cherished by Huss is to approve them. Princes and prelates are under obligation to proceed with diligence against such errors and to punish their asserters with the severest penalties of the law.

John XXIII also wrote to Konrad, calling upon him to do his duty. Simon, cardinal of Rheims, reminded the archbishop of the case of Arius and, resorting to the tried terminology, urged him to act with boldness in hunting up the foxes that destroy the vine, in cutting out the putrid flesh, and casting away the diseased sheep that it may no longer infect the flock. “Let us,” he went on, “place ourselves as a wall for the defense of the house of God, that we may stand in the battle in the day of the Lord.”

In a brief reply to Gerson, Konrad expressed readiness to be diligent in extirpating the errors of that pernicious arch-heretic John Wyclif, deceased. But his language does not betoken zeal in the matter of Huss’s prosecution.

Thus Huss had against him the pope, the curia, the university of Paris, and the great theological authority of Europe, John Gerson. In the case of Luther, the universities of Paris, Cologne, and Louvain burned his books and Leo X and the curia were against him, but no theological leader of the fame of Gerson was represented among his enemies. The fame of Erasmus, who half-heartedly put himself on the opposite side, was of another sort. Only too well did Huss know what it meant to be a heretic. Writing to Prachaticz, April, 1413, he had said: “They pronounce me a heretic. For it follows that whatever decision is sent forth by the Holy Roman Church, that is, by the pope in conjunction with the cardinals, that decision is to be held as the faith. He with his household decides that indulgences emptying pocket and purse^[19] are catholic, therefore this decision must be held as of the faith. But thou, Huss, hast preached the opposite. Therefore renounce thy heresy or be burned.”

The end of the period of his retirement was near its close. Events were rapidly converging toward the council to be held in Constance. Later, behind the dungeon walls in that city, he must often have gone back with pleasure to the days of preaching in the free country of Bohemia and, at the same time, he must have asked himself the question whether per haps another course than the one he took in absenting himself from Prague might not have proved the most profitable to the cause he was advocating and for which he was soon to die.

 

1. In his Address to the German Nobility, V: 17, Luther speaks of ‘ecclesiastical suspensions, irregularities, aggravations, reaggravations, and depositions, thunderings, lightnings, cursings, damnings, and what-not—all these should be buried ten fathoms deep, that their very name may be remembered no more.
2. Doc., 457–461.
3. Doc., 461–464.
4. The greater and lesser anathema, according to Gregory IX, differed by the ritual solemnity with which they were pronounced. See Wetzer and Welte under Anathema. All writers on canon law, such as P. Hergenröther, pp. 566 sq., do not make this distinction. Huss, de eccles., chap. XXII, defines the minor excommunication as the deprivation of the sacraments; major as the separation from the communion of the faithful.
5. Mirbt, p. 167. Schaff, V, 2: 98 sq.
6. Mon., 1: 139, etc.
7. Mon., 1: 305, 325, 393. For the text of the appeal, Doc., 192, 464–466.
8. Doc., 727 sq.
9. Mon., 1: 408–420. Doc., 726.
10. Doc., 46, 203.
11. Regnum Bohemiæ infamia denigratum. Doc., 495. Huss called it infamia sinistra et mendosa regni Bohemiæ, p. 491.
12. Doc., 472–504, gives the propositions in Latin and Czech, proposed by Huss and the theological faculty, and the statements of Jacobellus, the bishop of Leitomsyl, etc.
13. Mirbt. 138–140. Innocent also quotes I Cor. 6: 3. “Know ye not that ye shall judge angels? How much more the things that pertain to this life?”
14. Gee and Hardy. Doc., 57.
15. Doc., 34–66. Workman and Pope’s Engl, transl., 83–138.
16. A vivid account of the conference and the differences between the two parties, written by Palecz himself, is given in Doc., 507–510. There is no possible doubt of Palecz definition of the church. He said with precision, per Romanam ecclesiam intelligimus papam cum cardinalibus.
17. De sex erroribus. Mon., 1: 237–243.
18. Doc., 185–188, 523–529.
19. A pera et a bursa, a play on the words a pœna et culpa. Doc., 58. Mon., 1: 398.