John Wycliffe
born c. 1330, Yorkshire, England
died December 31, 1384, Lutterworth,
Leicestershire
English theologian, philosopher, church
reformer, and promoter of the first complete
translation of the Bible into English. He was
one of the forerunners of the Protestant
Reformation. The politico-ecclesiastical
theories that he developed required the church
to give up its worldly possessions, and in 1378
he began a systematic attack on the beliefs and
practices of the church. The Lollards, a
heretical group, propagated his controversial
views.
Early life and career
Wycliffe was born in the North Riding of
Yorkshire and received his formal education at
the University of Oxford, where his name has
been associated with three colleges, Queen’s,
Merton, and Balliol, but with some uncertainty.
He became a regent master in arts at Balliol in
1360 and was appointed master of the college,
but he resigned in 1361 to become vicar of
Fillingham, the college’s choicest living, or
church post. There is some doubt as to whether
or not he became soon afterward warden of
Canterbury Hall, a house for secular (pastoral)
and regular (monastic) clergy; but there was a
petition from the university to the pope in 1362
to “provide” for him, and he was given a prebend
(a stipend) at Aust in the church of
Westbury-on-Trym. He drew his prebend while
residing elsewhere, a practice he condemned in
others. In 1363 and 1368 he was granted
permission from the bishop of Lincoln to absent
himself from Fillingham in order to study at
Oxford, though in 1368 he exchanged Fillingham
for Ludgershall, a parish nearer the university.
He became a bachelor of divinity about 1369 and
a doctor of divinity in 1372.
Political activities and theories
On April 7, 1374, Edward III appointed
Wycliffe to the rectory of Lutterworth in place
of Ludgershall, and about this time the
theologian began to show an interest in
politics. He received a royal commission to the
deputation sent to discuss with the papal
representatives at Brugge the outstanding
differences between England and Rome, such as
papal taxes and appointments to church posts. In
this work, Wycliffe showed himself to be both a
patriot and a king’s man.
He
complemented this activity with his political
treatises on divine and civil dominion (De
dominio divino libri tres and Tractatus de
civili dominio), in which he argued men
exercised “dominion” (the word is used of
possession and authority) straight from God and
that if they were in a state of mortal sin, then
their dominion was in appearance only. The
righteous alone could properly have dominion,
even if they were not free to assert it. He then
proceeded to say that, as the church was in sin,
it ought to give up its possessions and return
to evangelical poverty. Such disendowment was,
in his view, to be carried out by the state, and
particularly by the king. These
politico-ecclesiastical theories, devised with
ingenuity and written up at inordinate length,
may be criticized as the work of a theorizer
with a limited sense of what was possible in the
real world. Exhibiting an ingenuousness and lack
of worldly wisdom, he became a tool in the hands
of John of Gaunt (1340–99), Duke of Lancaster
and a younger son of Edward III, who, from
motives less scrupulous than those of Wycliffe,
was opposed to the wealth and power of the
clergy.
Wycliffe preached acceptably in London in
support of moderate disendowment, but the
alliance with Gaunt led to the displeasure of
his ecclesiastical superiors, and he was
summoned to appear before them in February 1377.
The proceedings broke up in disorder, and
Wycliffe retired unmolested and uncondemned.
That year saw Wycliffe at the height of his
popularity and influence. Parliament and the
king consulted him as to whether or not it was
lawful to keep back treasure of the kingdom from
Rome, and Wycliffe replied that it was. In May
Pope Gregory XI issued five bulls against him,
denouncing his theories and calling for his
arrest. The call went unanswered, and Oxford
refused to condemn its outstanding scholar.
Wycliffe’s last political appearance was in the
autumn of 1378 when, after Gaunt’s men killed an
insubordinate squire who had taken refuge in
Westminster Abbey, he pleaded for the crown
before Parliament against the right of
sanctuary. Wycliffe defended the action on the
ground that the king’s servants might lawfully
invade sanctuaries to bring criminals to
justice.
Wycliffe’s attack on the church
He returned to Lutterworth and, from the
seclusion of his study, began a systematic
attack on the beliefs and practices of the
church. Theologically, this was facilitated by a
strong predestinarianism that enabled him to
believe in the “invisible” church of the elect,
constituted of those predestined to be saved,
rather than in the “visible” church of Rome—that
is, in the organized, institutional church of
his day. But his chief target was the doctrine
of transubstantiation—that the substance of the
bread and wine used in the Eucharist is changed
into the body and blood of Christ. As a Realist
philosopher—believing that universal concepts
have a real existence—he attacked it because, in
the annihilation of the substance of bread and
wine, the cessation of being was involved. He
then proceeded on a broader front and condemned
the doctrine as idolatrous and unscriptural. He
sought to replace it with a doctrine of
remanence (remaining)—“This is very bread after
the consecration”—combined with an assertion of
the Real Presence in a noncorporeal form.
Meanwhile, he pressed his attack
ecclesiastically. The pope, the cardinals, the
clergy in remunerative secular employment, the
monks, and the friars were all castigated in
language that was bitter even for 14th-century
religious controversy. For this exercise,
Wycliffe was well equipped. His restless,
probing mind was complemented by a quick temper
and a sustained capacity for invective. Few
writers have damned their opponents’ opinions
and sometimes, it would appear, the opponents
themselves, more comprehensively.
Yet most scholars agree that Wycliffe was a
virtuous man. Proud and mistaken as he sometimes
was, he gives an overall impression of
sincerity. Disappointed as he may have been over
his failure to receive desirable church posts,
his attack on the church was not simply born of
anger. It carried the marks of moral earnestness
and a genuine desire for reform. He set himself
up against the greatest organization on earth
because he sincerely believed that organization
was wrong, and if he said so in abusive terms he
had the grace to confess it. Neither must his
ingenuousness be forgotten. There was nothing
calculated about the way in which he published
his opinions on the Eucharist, and the fact that
he was not calculating cost him—in all
probability—the support of John of Gaunt and of
not a few friends at Oxford. He could afford to
lose neither.
Translation of the Bible
From August 1380 until the summer of 1381,
Wycliffe was in his rooms at Queen’s College,
busy with his plans for a translation of the
Bible and an order of Poor Preachers who would
take Bible truth to the people. (His mind was
too much shaped by Scholasticism, the medieval
system of learning, to do the latter himself.)
There were two translations made at his
instigation, one more idiomatic than the other.
The most likely explanation of his considerable
toil is that the Bible became a necessity in his
theories to replace the discredited authority of
the church and to make the law of God available
to every man who could read. This, allied to a
belief in the effectiveness of preaching, led to
the formation of the Lollards. The precise
extent to which Wycliffe was involved in the
creation of the Lollards is uncertain. What is
beyond doubt is that they propagated his
controversial views.
In
1381, the year when Wycliffe finally retired to
Lutterworth, the discontent of the labouring
classes erupted in the Peasants’ Revolt. His
social teaching was not a significant cause of
the uprising because it was known only to the
learned, but there is no doubt where his
sympathies lay. He had a constant affection for
the deserving poor. The archbishop of
Canterbury, Simon of Sudbury, was murdered in
the revolt, and his successor, William Courtenay
(1347–96), a more vigorous man, moved against
Wycliffe. Many of his works were condemned at
the synod held at Blackfriars, London, in May
1382; and at Oxford his followers capitulated,
and all his writings were banned. That year,
Wycliffe suffered his first stroke at
Lutterworth; but he continued to write
prolifically until he died from a further stroke
in December 1384.
Assessment
It is no wonder that such a controversial
figure produced—and still produces—a wide
variety of reactions. The monks and friars
retaliated, immediately and fiercely, against
his denunciations of them, but such criticism
grew less as the Reformation approached. Most of
Wycliffe’s post-Reformation, Protestant
biographers see him as the first Reformer,
fighting almost alone the hosts of medieval
wickedness. There has now been a reaction to
this, and some modern scholars have attacked
this view as the delusion of uncritical
admirers. The question “Which is the real John
Wycliffe?” is almost certainly unanswerable
after 600 years.
The Rev. John Stacey
