Jan Hus
Bohemian religious leader
Hus also spelled Huss
born c. 1370, Husinec, Bohemia [now in Czech Republic]
died July 6, 1415, Konstanz [Germany]
Main
the most important 15th-century Czech religious Reformer, whose work was
transitional between the medieval and the Reformation periods and
anticipated the Lutheran Reformation by a full century. He was embroiled
in the bitter controversy of the Western Schism (1378–1417) for his
entire career, and he was convicted of heresy at the Council of
Constance and burned at the stake.
Early life and teaching career
Hus was born of poor parents in Husinec in southern Bohemia, from which
he took his name. About 1390 he enrolled in the University of Prague,
and two years after his graduation in 1394 he received a master’s degree
and began teaching at the university. He became dean of the
philosophical faculty there in 1401.
At this time the University of Prague was undergoing a period of
struggle against foreign, chiefly German, influence as well as an
intense rivalry between, on the one hand, German masters who upheld
nominalism and were regarded as enemies of church reform and, on the
other, the strongly nationalistic Czech masters, who were inclined to
realist philosophy and were enthusiastic readers of the philosophical
writings of John Wycliffe, a bitter critic of nominalism. Hus studied
Wycliffe’s works and later his theological writings, which were brought
into Prague in 1401. Hus was influenced by Wycliffe’s underlying
principles, though he never accepted their extreme implications, and was
particularly impressed by Wycliffe’s proposals for reform of the Roman
Catholic clergy. The clerical estate owned about one-half of all the
land in Bohemia, and the great wealth and simoniacal practices of the
higher clergy aroused jealousy and resentment among the poor priests.
The Bohemian peasantry, too, resented the church as one of the heaviest
land taxers. There was thus a large potential base of support for any
church reform movement at a time when the authority of the papacy itself
was discredited by the Western Schism. Attempts at reform had been made
by the Bohemian king Charles IV, and Wycliffe’s works were the chosen
weapon of the national reform movement founded by Jan Milíč of Kroměříž
(d. 1374).
Leader of Czech reform movement
In 1391 Milíč’s pupils founded the Bethlehem Chapel in Prague, where
public sermons were preached in Czech (rather than in Latin) in the
spirit of Milíc̆’s teaching. From 1402 Hus was in charge of the chapel,
which had become the centre of the growing national reform movement in
Bohemia. He became increasingly absorbed in public preaching and
eventually emerged as the popular leader of the movement. Despite his
extensive duties at the Bethlehem Chapel, Hus continued to teach in the
university faculty of arts and became a candidate for the doctor’s
degree in theology. Hus also became the adviser to the young nobleman
Zbyněk Zajíc of Hazmburk when Zbyněk was named archbishop of Prague in
1403, a move that helped to give the reform movement a firmer
foundation.
In 1403 a German university master, Johann Hübner, drew up a list of
45 articles, presumably selected from Wycliffe’s writings, and had them
condemned as heretical. Because the German masters had three votes and
the Czech masters only one, the Germans easily outvoted the Czechs, and
the 45 articles were henceforth regarded as a test of orthodoxy. The
principal charge against Wycliffe’s teaching was his tenet of remanence—i.e.,
that the bread and wine in the Eucharist retain their material
substance. Wycliffe also declared the Scriptures to be the sole source
of Christian doctrine. Hus did not share all of Wycliffe’s radical
views, such as that on remanence, but several members of the reform
party did, among them Hus’s teacher, Stanislav of Znojmo, and his fellow
student, Štěpán Páleč.
During the first five years of Zbyněk’s reign as archbishop of
Prague, his attitude toward the “evangelical party” radically changed.
The opponents of reform won him over to their side and, in 1407,
succeeded in charging Stanislav and Páleč with heresy, and they were
cited to the Roman Curia for examination. The two men returned
completely changed in their theological views and became the principal
opponents of the Reformers. Thus, just when Hus had emerged at the
forefront of the reform movement, he came into conflict with his former
friends.
Hus and the Western Schism
Since 1378 the Roman Catholic Church had been split by the Western
Schism, during which the papal jurisdiction was divided between two
popes. As the leader of reform, Hus unhesitatingly quarreled with
Archbishop Zbyněk when the latter opposed the Council of Pisa (1409),
which was called to dethrone the rival popes and to reform the church.
The council had the support of the Czech masters at the University of
Prague, whereas the German masters were opposed to it. The German
masters, who carried a voting majority in university affairs, supported
the archbishop, which so enraged King Wenceslas that in January 1409 he
subverted the university constitution by granting the Czech masters
three votes each and the Germans only one; the result was a mass
emigration of the Germans from Prague to several German universities. In
the fall of 1409 Hus was elected rector of the now Czech-dominated
university.
The final break between Archbishop Zbyněk and Hus occurred when the
Council of Pisa deposed both Pope Gregory XII, whose authority was
recognized in Bohemia, and the antipope Benedict XIII and in their place
elected Alexander V. The deposed popes, however, retained jurisdiction
over portions of western Europe; thus, instead of two, there were three
popes. The archbishop and the higher clergy in Bohemia remained faithful
to Gregory, whereas Hus and the reform party acknowledged the new pope.
After being forced by the king’s punitive measures to recognize
Alexander V as the legitimate pope, the archbishop, through a large
bribe, induced Alexander to prohibit preaching in private chapels,
including the Bethlehem Chapel. Hus refused to obey the pope’s order,
whereupon Zbyněk excommunicated him. Despite his condemnation, Hus
continued to preach at the Bethlehem Chapel and to teach at the
University of Prague. Zbyněk was ultimately forced by the king to
promise Hus his support before the Roman Curia, but he then died
suddenly in 1411, and the leadership of Hus’s enemies passed to the
Curia itself.
In 1412 the case of Hus’s heresy, which had been tacitly dropped, was
revived because of a new dispute over the sale of indulgences that had
been issued by Alexander’s successor, the antipope John XXIII, to
finance his campaign against Gregory XII. Their sale in Bohemia aroused
general indignation but had been approved by King Wenceslas, who, as
usual, shared in the proceeds. Hus publicly denounced these indulgences
before the university and, by so doing, lost the support of Wenceslas.
This was to prove fatal to him. Hus’s enemies then renewed his trial at
the Curia, where he was declared under major excommunication for
refusing to appear and an interdict was pronounced over Prague or any
other place where Hus might reside, thereby denying certain sacraments
of the church to communicants in the interdicted area. In order to spare
the city the consequences, Hus voluntarily left Prague in October 1412.
He found refuge mostly in southern Bohemia in the castles of his
friends, and during the next two years he engaged in feverish literary
activity. His enemies, particularly Stanislav and Páleč, wrote a large
number of polemical treatises against him, which he answered in an
equally vigorous manner. The most important of his treatises was De
ecclesia (The Church). He also wrote a large number of treatises in
Czech and a collection of sermons entitled Postilla.
The final trial
With the Western Schism continuing unabated, King Sigismund of Hungary,
as the newly elected (1411) king of Germany, saw an opportunity to gain
prestige as the restorer of the church’s unity. He forced John XXIII to
call the Council of Constance to find a final solution of the schism and
to put an end to all the heresies. Sigismund, therefore, sent an
emissary to invite Hus to attend the council to explain his views—an
invitation Hus naturally was reluctant to accept. But when John
threatened King Wenceslas for noncompliance with the interdict, and
after Sigismund had assured Hus of safe-conduct for the journey to
Constance and back (no matter what the decision might be), Hus finally
consented to go.
He left for Constance but did not receive the safe-conduct until two
days after his arrival there, in November 1414. Shortly after arriving
in Constance he was, with Sigismund’s tacit consent, arrested and placed
in close confinement, from which he never emerged. Hus’s enemies
succeeded in having him tried before the Council of Constance as a
Wycliffite heretic. All that the earnest intervention by the Bohemian
nobles could obtain for him was three public hearings, at which he was
allowed to defend himself and succeeded in refuting some of the charges
against him. The council urged Hus to recant in order to save his life,
but to the majority of its members he was a dangerous heretic fit only
for death. When he refused to recant, he was solemnly sentenced on July
6, 1415, and burned at the stake.
Beliefs and writings
There has been much dispute over the extent to which Hus was indebted to
Wycliffe for his theological beliefs. At Constance he refused to submit
to the council’s demand that he disavow Wycliffe entirely, and he
undoubtedly did support the doctrine of predestination and advocate the
supremacy of biblical authority over that of the Catholic church. Hus’s
views can also be interpreted as the culmination of the Czech national
reform movement, however. His followers and subsequent Bohemian
religious Reformers adopted the name Hussites.
During his exile in 1412–14, Hus substituted for his popular
preaching in Prague a series of writings in Czech; these have since
become classics of Czech literature and are equally important in the
history of the Czech language, because Hus developed a new and simpler
orthography. The most important of these works is his popular tract
Vyklad viery, desatera a patere (“Exposition of the Faith, of the Ten
Commandments, and of the Lord’s Prayer”). Hus’s writings in Czech and
Latin include other religious tracts, learned treatises and lectures,
collections of his sermons, and personal letters.
Matthew Spinka
František M. Bartoš
Encyclopaedia Britannica
