From Golden Boy to Rabble-Rouser

      Jan Hus and His Preaching Career

      The career of Jan Hus exemplified both the opportunities and limitations of the fifteenth-century church.¹ As a boy of humble background, born around 1370, Hus had originally decided to become a priest because of the increased status and higher social standing he would gain.² He enrolled at the University of Prague in 1390; three years later he received his bachelor’s degree in liberal arts. In 1396, Hus received his master’s degree from Stanislav of Znojmo and began teaching at the university while studying toward a bachelor in theology. In 1400, he was ordained a priest. When the opportunity to obtain a post presented itself six years later, Hus did not hesitate, and, in a decision that would prove momentous, in 1402 he agreed to take over preaching at the Bethlehem Chapel, a nonparochial institution with links to the university dedicated to Czech preaching.

      At the time of its founding in 1391, the chapel was the first ever secular establishment dedicated solely to vernacular preaching. And Hus did well there. In the chapel’s heyday, thousands of listeners would come to hear him preach. Thanks to his unique venue, Hus was able to reach thousands of listeners and speak to them in their native tongue. But his preaching alarmed the authorities. Six years later, the first set of charges against him was submitted to the archbishop. Four years after that, his preaching was banned altogether. His influential position made him uniquely dangerous because of his power to incite the laity against his fellow clerics. Unlike other contemporary religious experimenters, Hus could not find a workable compromise with the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The question of why he was unable to do so illustrates the fault lines between what was and was not negotiable in Prague’s fifteenth-century religious culture, illuminating the opportunities and limitations of fifteenth-century religion.

      When Jan Hus started his clerical career, he was a favorite of Prague’s archbishop Zbyněk, who spoke of his admiration for reform in general, and for Hus in particular.³ A charismatic, university-educated cleric, dedicated to preaching and spiritual care for the laity, he encapsulated the hope and promise of the Bohemian tradition of reform, to which he proudly adhered.⁴ From his pulpit in the Bethlehem Chapel, he encouraged interior conversion and moral renewal and also lambasted corrupt and immoral clerics. But using the pulpit at Bethlehem to air complaints about the clergy in Prague crossed the boundary of permissible reform behavior, and Hus’s vernacular preaching soon marked him as a rabble-rouser.

      Hus was always critical of underperforming clerics, but his preaching against clerical error and immorality intensified around 1410, and he became increasingly aggressive in response to escalating sanctions against him. He had previously faced a few accusations of seditious and heretical preaching, but those he had been able to dispute, explain, or otherwise avoid. His legal difficulty resulted from defending Wyclif. Specifically, Hus disagreed with the archbishop of Prague’s order that all in possession of Wyclif’s books turn them over to the archbishop’s office, a decision confirmed by the Prague ecclesiastical synod in June 1409.⁵ Hus and a few others appealed the decision to the pope, but in the meantime, the archbishop gained the support of Pope Alexander V, whose bull issued in December 1409 also banned preaching at Bethlehem Chapel. (After Alexander V’s death, Hus filed his appeal with his successor John XXIII, which began his legal case at the curia.) The archbishop publicized Alexander V’s bull at the ecclesiastical synod in June 1410 and a month later had Wyclif’s books publicly burned much to the dismay of the king and many university masters. It is tempting to think of the appeal, which would ultimately prove Hus’s undoing, as a heroic stance in support of Wyclif and his ideas. In reality, it had as much to do with local politics and personal animosities as with principle. Hus believed all books deserved to be studied, thus he did not hesitate to speak up against an odious archbishop and support the king’s objection to the book burning. But once initiated, the legal proceedings could not be stayed and eventually led to further convictions. On October 18, 1412, the annual synod in Prague pronounced a sentence of major excommunication against Hus and, employing the threat of interdict against the entire city, forced him into exile.⁶ The legal proceedings sparked by this appeal haunted Hus all the way to the tribunal in Constance.

      The ecclesiastical sanction had a curious effect on Hus. Instead of skulking away in shame or pleading with his superiors, he responded by involving the laity in his acts of defiance, and by exhorting them to disobey corrupt authorities. And although Hus preached that each individual should decide which authorities to respect, in reality his own opinions on the subject commanded considerable sway with the laymen. In the summer of 1412, responding to a new wave of accusations, Hus made a number of public statements that the church held no authority in its statements against him. In order convincingly to make his case, Hus made a number of statements about the nature of the church’s authority and argued that the pope and his cardinals were not legitimate heirs of the apostles because of their immoral and avaricious ways. This may perhaps seem as a mere invective, but Hus spoke from a theologically sophisticated, if not immediately obvious, standpoint. Drawing on Wyclif’s understanding of the church, Hus defined it as an invisible “community of the predestined ones,” communitas praedestinatorum⁷. This was a difficult concept when it came to organizing and governing the church, because the fate of each individual in it—whether it be eternal salvation or damnation—was known to God alone. This in turn meant that individuals who saw themselves as being a part of the church, even members of the high hierarchy including the pope, might not in actuality be among the saved. This introduced tremendous instability and vagueness into church affairs. Is this priest really a part of the communitas praedestinatorum? And this bishop? Or the pope? In this conception, it was not entirely clear who in the contemporary hierarchy was actually a member of the church. Some of the more scrupulous among the ordinary faithful began to have doubts about their own status in the church, wondering if they were among the saved or destined for eternal torment. To the troubled ordinary faithful, Hus advised that they trust that their faith, nurtured by acts of charity, would suffice.⁸ When it came to judging the salvation of others, matters became more complicated. Of course, ideally, one did not need to and ought not to judge. New Testament epistles seemed to support this view. But, in the life of an institution such as the church, ambiguity is not always workable. Not knowing who was really a member of the church made it impossible to know whose dictates were to be obeyed and whose were not.

      With self-serving cleverness, which has gone unacknowledged as such by Hus’s biographers, Hus offered a solution to the ambiguity that he himself had created, repeating Jesus’s words “By their fruits you shall know them” (Matthew 7:16), in effect inviting the ordinary faithful to judge those tasked to lead them.⁹ In so doing, the behavior of clerical elites became open to judgment by the ordinary faithful. He invited the laity to decide for themselves whose authority was legitimate and whose was not, but also insisted that they listen to and obey him. Or in theory he did. Although his sermons and later writings were peppered with exhortations