Preachers, Partisans, and Rebellious Religion. Marcela K. Perett
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Pope Gregory, St. Augustine, and St. Bernard) to support his arguments as much as on his more usual resource, the Bible. All five works, the Expositions, the Postil, and On Simony are works of spiritual instruction, but they also contain a lot of information about Hus’s life, as well as criticism, much of it quite severe, of contemporary clergy.48
Regarding the spiritual advice contained therein, none of the five treatises is entirely original, but rather each repeats ideas expressed elsewhere. The treatise On Simony is a translation and adaptation of his earlier Latin work De simonia.49 And whereas in the Expositions Hus reworked Wyclif’s Latin work Decalogus seu de mandatis divinis,50 the vernacular Postil is a reworking of Hus’s Latin Postil, written between 1410 and 1411, the so-called Sermones in Bethlehem.51 In the reworking, Hus eliminated church authorities in favor of scriptural quotations and added more contemporary context at the expense of scholastic commentaries.52 What was new is the sheer number of comments about Hus’s own life and about the state of the contemporary church, either justifying his conduct or lambasting bad priests and corrupt authorities.
It is clear that Hus’s interpretation of his life, his struggle against injustice and persecution, indelibly influenced his view of the spiritual life, what was at stake, and how it could best be lived, which he communicated through his vernacular writings. Thus the treatises also show a bitter critic of clerical shortcomings and of the clerical culture in general, a disappointed man whose spiritual advice instilled rejection of contemporary religious customs, division, and partisanship. Hus lambasted immoral priests (whom he sometimes identified by name), complained about the blindness and outright corruption of the church’s higher-ups, and stressed the importance of choosing the right side in the ongoing spiritual struggle against the forces of the Antichrist.
Hus’s spirituality has been the subject of a number of scholarly investigations and much ground has already been covered. A very helpful overview of Hus’s spirituality has recently been offered by Thomas Fudge.53 After considering Hus’s vernacular works written mostly after 1412, he synthesized a number of principles that governed Hus’s spiritual outlook, contextualizing them within late medieval culture and showing that Hus’s spirituality followed rather traditional lines. His spirituality focused on love, nurtured by mystical, or quasi-mystical, experiences of Christ, shunning or even rejecting outward forms of religion should they interfere with the inner.54 To put it in the words of another biographer, “Hus combats the external, mechanical piety of the time by opposing it to the piety of the heart and the spirit.”55 Prayer was central in this life, and it was to be humble and social,56 the latter emphasis on community being perhaps a surprising aspect of spirituality in someone as committed to the inner life of a mystic. Perhaps this insistence on communality in prayer and in spiritual pursuits in general is a sign that Hus was fundamentally thinking about communities and groups and not necessarily individuals, which, in turn, helps us understand his focus on creating a community of faithful followers. Importantly, Hus wrote works of pastoral care even from his prison cell at Constance, dedicating them, somewhat poignantly, to his jailers.57 This detail alone looms large: what Hus chose to do in the last weeks of his life shows clearly where his priorities lay, not with theological argumentation but with works of pastoral care.
The persistent theme, a thread woven through all of Hus’s writing from the last three years of his life, is one of contemptus mundi: the idea that temporal life ought to be shunned as unimportant and even potentially deleterious to spiritual ambitions.58 And while holding to this principle is nothing out of the ordinary for a spiritual writer, Hus elevated his rejection of the world to a new level, a level at which it actually became quite problematic. In addition to shunning worldly temptations, Hus’s rejection of the world encompassed also a rejection of worldly authorities (those with whom he disagreed, that is), even including the courts. More than a principle of internal introspection, contemptus mundi thus in Hus’s hands became an animating—and deeply polarizing—political principle.
And Hus acted on it often. Most memorably, in publishing what came to be known as his “Appeal to Christ” on October 18, 1412, discussed in the previous chapter. This document, circulating in both Latin and Czech, was addressed to “all faithful Christians” and publicly announced Hus’s rejection of temporal jurisdiction on account of its abuse of the law.59 The appeal was unprecedented in the history of medieval canon law and, in effect, illegal. But it was a public-relations coup: Since he was unable to win the lawsuit brought against him by the curia, Hus reframed the contest as something he could win and claimed a moral, if not a legal, victory.
But Hus was no mere rebel; his rejection of authorities—when he explained it publicly—was always meticulously documented from the Scriptures, allowing the Bible to speak directly into his situation as a live voice of divine disapproval. Virtually all of Hus’s complaints about clerical failings (and there are many such complaints) come with a direct quotation of a New Testament passage in support of it. When speaking about interdicts, for example, Hus asks, “Because what is worse for Christians than to deny them funerals, baptisms, confessions, communion? … And this is the great suffering which the Savior talks about” in Matthew 24:21–22.60 When he criticizes clerics for disallowing preaching, he rails against them saying, “They do not preach against evil and prevent others from doing so. They ‘stop Jesus from speaking’ as Luke says in 11:53, and they curse those who believe in him as John 9:28 says.”61 Hus is clearly intent on acquainting his audience with what the Bible has to say and showing specifically how the Bible proves his opponents to be in the wrong.
To be sure, many of his interpretations were partisan and controversial, but the Bible was strictly at the heart of his catechetical effort and of his spiritual advice throughout the Expositions. In his Exposition of the Decalogue, Hus wrote that the laity must “honor the books that contain God’s commandments.”62 In his Exposition of the Lord’s Prayer, Hus justified his project by stressing the fact that the prayer was taken strictly from the Bible, that it was something that “the merciful lord himself taught to his disciples.”63 In his Exposition of the Faith, Hus stated that what was not in the Bible was not necessary to the faith and also admonished that everyone should accept truth pointed out to them from the Bible.64 This was a direct attack against the clerics who attacked him (as well as an eerily accurate prefiguration of Martin Luther’s stand at Wittenberg).
Hus believed firmly that the Bible belonged in the hands of the laity. His explanation for why it was unacceptable—and unbiblical—to keep the Scriptures away from the laity hinged on his interpretation of the kingdom of heaven. In his view, the kingdom of heaven could sometimes be used interchangeably with the Scriptures, which, in turn, allowed him to insist that not only must the Bible be kept open to anyone wishing to enter into it but also that clerics were obligated to invite the laity to partake of it. But Hus went even further. His stated intention was to empower the laity to make their own decisions about what was true and whom to follow, the kind of decision making that prelates wanted to prevent by keeping the Bible a closely guarded secret.65 In the background of Hus’s decision to bring a vernacular Bible to the laity were audible echoes of Hus’s own experience with the church’s hierarchy: by now he had been maligned, refused hearing, and excommunicated. Bringing knowledge of the Bible to his followers would equip them to act with similar resolve should something similar happen to them.
In addition to his partisan interpretations, Hus also devoted much attention to concepts fundamental to the faith. He did not shy away from notoriously difficult Christian subjects such as God, the nature of Christ, his crucifixion and resurrection, or the kingdom of heaven. He even tackled subjects that Christian preachers tend to avoid, then as now, bravely explaining a definition of the Holy Trinity.66 And regardless of the subject, he showed where and how his explanations were contained in the Scriptures. It is clear that Hus was serious about catechesis and preferred to give as much biblical background explanation as was possible.
However, Hus did not limit himself to fundamental questions of the faith but also addressed less elevated subjects, answering questions that any believer might feasibly ask. Among them were queries such as why are some prayers