Durant's S o C
Vol VI The REFORMATION
pages 29-35
When Edward proposed to conquer France, few of his councillors dared to advise conciliation. Only when the war dragged on through a generation, and had burdened even the rich with taxes, did the national conscience raise a cry for peace. Discontent neared revolution when Edward’s campaigns, passing from victory to failure, threatened the collapse of the nation’s economy. Till 1370 Edward had profited in war and diplomacy from the wise and loyal service of Sir John Chandos. when his hero died, his place at the head of the King's Council was taken by Edward’s son, the Duke of Lancaster, named John of Gaunt. John carelessly turned the government over to political buccaneers who fattened there purses at the public expense. Demands for reform were raised in Parliament, and men of good will prayed for the nations happy recovery through the King’s speedy death. Another of his sons the Black Prince -- named probably for the colour of his armour-- might have brought new vigour to the government, but in 1376 he passed away while the old king lingered on. The “Good Parliament “ of that year enacted some reform measures, put two malfeasants in jail, ordered Alice Perrers from the court, and bound the bishops to excommunicate her if she returned. After the parliament dispersed, Edward, ignoring its decrees, restored John of Gaunt to power and Alice to the royal bed; and no bishop dared reprove her. At last the obstinate monarch consented to die (1377). A son of the Black Prince succeeded to the throne as Richard II, a lad of eleven years, amid economic and political chaos, and religious revolt.
JOHN WYCLIF: 1320-84
What gnawed at the purse nerves of laity and government was the expanding and migratory wealth of the English Church. The clergy on several occasions contributed a tenth of their income to the state, but they insisted that no tax could be laid upon them without the consent of their convocations. They gathered, directly or by proctors, in convocations under the archbishops of Canterbury and York, and determined there all matters dealing with religion or the clergy. It was usually from the ranks of clergy, as the best-educated class in England, that the king chose the highest officials of the state. The bishops’ courts had sole jurisdiction over tonsured offenders. Also, in many towns the Church leased property to tenants and claimed full judicial authority over these tenants, even when they committed crimes. Such conditions were irritating, but the major irritant was the flow of wealth from the English Church to the popes-- i.e. in the fourteenth century, to Avignon --i.e. to France. It was estimated that more English money went to the pope than to the state or the king. In 1333 Edward III refused to pay any longer the tribute that King John of England had pledged to the popes in 1213. In 1351 the Statute of Provisors sought to end papal control over the personnel or revenues of English benefices. The First Statute of Praemunire 1353, outlawed Englishmen who sued in “foreign“ ( papal ) courts on matters claimed by the king to lie under secular jurisdiction. In 1376 the Commons officially complained that papal collectors in England were sending great sums of money to the pope, and that absentee French cardinals were drawing rich revenues from English sees. The anticlerical party at the court was led by John of Gaunt, whose protection enabled John Wyclif to die a natural death.
Wyclif, the first of the English reformers was born at Hipswell near the village of Wyclif, in north Yorkshire about 1320. He studied at Oxford, became professor of theology there, and for a year ( 1360) was Master of Balliol College. His literary activity was alarming. He wrote vast Scholastic treatises on metaphysics, theology, and logic, two volumes of polemics, four of sermons, and a medley of short but influential tracts, including the famous “Tractatus de civili dominio“. Most of his compositions were in graceless and impenetrable Latin that should have made them harmless to any but grammarians. But hidden among these obscurities were explosive ideas that almost severed Britain from the Roman Church 155 years before Henry VIII, plunged Bohemia into civil war, and anticipated nearly all the reform ideas of John Huss and Martin Luther.
Putting his worst foot forward, and surrendering to Augustine’s logic and eloquence, Wyclif built his creed upon the awful doctrine of predestination which was to remain even to our day the magnet and solvent of Protestant theology. God, wrote Wyclif, gives his grace to whomever He wishes, and has predestined each individual, an eternity before birth, to be lost or saved through all eternity. Good works do not win salvation, but they indicate that he who does them has received divine grace and is one of the elect. We act according to the disposion that God has allotted to us; to invert Heraclitus, our fate is our character. Only Adam and Eve had free will; by their disobedience they lost it for themselves and for posterity.
God is sovereign lord of us all. The allegiance that we owe Him is direct, as is the oath of every Englishman to the king, not indirect through allegiance to a subordinate lord, as in Feudal France. Hence the relationship of man to God is direct, and requires no intermediary; any claim of Church or priest to be a necessary medium must be repelled. In this sense all Christians are priests, and need no ordination. God holds dominion over all the earth and the contents thereof; a human being can justly hold property only as His obedient vassal. Anyone who is in a state of sin- which constitutes rebellion against the Divine Sovereign -- loses all right of possession; for rightful possession ( “dominion” ) requires a state of grace.
Wyclif argued; Now it is clear from Scripture that Christ intended His apostles, their successors and their ordained delegates to have no property. Any church or priest owning property is violating the Lord’s commandment, is therefore in a state of sin, and consequently cannot validly administer the sacraments. The reform most needed in Church and clergy is their complete renunciation of worldly goods. As if this were not troublesome enough, Wyclif deduced from his theology a theoretical communism and anarchism. Any person in a state of grace shares with God the ownership of all goods; ideally everything should be held by righteous common. Private property and government ( as some Scholastic philosophers had taught ) are results of Adam’s sin. ( ie. of human nature ) and man’s inherited sinfulness; in a society of universal virtue there would be no individual ownership, no man made laws of either Church or state. Suspecting that the radicals, who were at this time meditating revolt in England, would interpret this literally, Wyclif explained that his communism was to be understood only in the ideal sense; the powers that be, as Paul had taught, are ordained by God, and must be obeyed. This flirtation with revolution was almost precisely repeated by Luther in 1525.
The anticlerical party saw some sense, if not in Wyclif’s communism, at least in his condemnation of ecclesiastical wealth. When parliament again refused to pay King John’s tribute to the pope( 1366) Wyclif was engaged as “peculiaris regis clericus “-- a cleric in service of the king-- to prepare a defense of the act. In 1374 Edward the III gave him the rectory of Lutterworth, apparently as a retaining fee. When John of Gaunt proposed that the government should confiscate part of the Church’s property, he invited Wyclif to defend the proposal in a series of sermons in London; Wyclif complied ( September 1376 ), and was thereafter branded by the clerical party as a tool of Gaunt. The preacher was summoned to appear before a council of prelates at St. Paul‘s. He came accompanied by John of Gaunt with an armed retinue. A fracas ensued and the Bishop thought it discreet to adjourn. Wyclif returned unhurt to Oxford. In May, Gregory XI issued bulls condemning eighteen of Wyclif’s proposals, mostly from the treatise “ On Civil Dominion “, and ordered Archbishop Sudbury and Bishop Courtenay to inquire whether Wyclif still held these views; if he did , they were to arrest him and keep him in chains pending further instructions.
By this time Wyclif had won support of a large body of public opinion. The Parliament that met in October (1376 ) was strongly anticlerical. The argument for disendowment of the Church had charms for many members, who reckoned that if the King should seize the wealth now held by English bishops, abbots, and priors, he could maintain with it fifteen earls, 1500 knights, 6200 squires, and have 20,000 pounds a year left for himself. At this time France was preparing to invade England, and the English treasury was almost empty; how foolish it seemed to let papal agents collect funds from English parishes for a French pope and a college of cardinals overwhelmingly French! The King’s advisers asked Wyclif to prepare an opinion on the matter. He answered in a pamphlet that in effect called for the severance of the English Church from the papacy. Wyclif recommended the ecclesiastical independence of England. “ The Realm of England, in the words of Scripture, ought to be one body, and clergy, lords, and commonality members of that body.” This anticipation of Henry VIII seemed so bold that the King’s advisers directed Wyclif to make no further statements on the matter.
The Parliament adjourned on November 28. On December 18 the embattled bishops published the condemnatory bulls, and bade the Chancellor of Oxford to enforce the Pope’s order of arrest. Half the faculty supported Wyclif, at least in his right to express his opinions. The Chancellor refused to obey the bishops, and denied the authority of any prelate over the university in matters of belief; meanwhile he counselled Wyclif to remain in modest seclusion. But it is a rare reformer who can be silent. In March 1378, Wyclif appeared before the bishop’s assembly at Lambeth to defend his views. As the hearing was about to begin, the Archbishop received a letter from the mother of King Richard II deprecating any final condemnation of Wyclif; and in the midst of proceedings a crowd forced its way in from the street, and declared that the English people would not tolerate any Inquisition in England. Yielding to this combination of government and populace, the bishops deferred decision, and again Wyclif went home unhurt-- indeed triumphant. On March 27 Gregory XI died and a few months later the Papal Schism divided and weakened the papacy, and the whole authority of the Church. Wyclif resumed the offensive, and issued tract after tract, many in English, extending his heresies and revolt.
He is pictured to us in these years as a man hardened by controversy, and made puritan by age. He was no mystic; rather a warrior and an organizer, and perhaps carried his logic to merciless extremes. His talent for vituperation now disported itself freely. He denounced the friars for preaching poverty and accumulating wealth. “ Prelates deceive men by feigned indulgences or pardons, and rob them cursedly of their money... Men be great fools that buy these bulls of pardon so dear.” If the pope had the power to snatch souls from purgatory, why did he not in Christian charity take them out at once? With mounting vehemence Wyclif alleged that “ many priests..... defile wives, maidens, widows, and nuns in every manner of lechery” and demanded that the crimes of the clergy should be punishable by secular courts. He excoriated curates who flattered the rich and despised the poor, who easily forgave the sins of the wealthy but excommunicated the indigent for unpaid tithes, who hunted, hawked, and gambled, and related fake miracles. Luther’s language is forecast. “Simony reigns in all states of the Church.... The simony of the court of Rome does most harm, for it is most common, and under the colour of holiness, and robs most of our land of men and treasure. “ Christ had not whereon to rest His head, but men say this pope has more than half the Empire . . . Christ was meek . . . the pope sits on his throne and makes lords kiss his feet. Perhaps, Wyclif gently suggested, the pope is the Antichrist predicted in the First Epistle of the Apostle John, the Beast of the Apocalypse, heralding the second coming of Christ.
The solution of the problem, as Wyclif saw it, lay in separating the Church from all material possessions and power. Christ and His apostles had lived in poverty, so should his priests. If the clergy should not disendow themselves by a voluntary return to evangelical poverty, the state should step in and confiscate their goods. Kings are responsible to God alone, from Whom they derive their dominion. Instead of accepting the doctrine of Gregory VII and Boniface VIII that secular governments must be subject to the Church, the state should consider itself supreme in all temporal matters. Priests should be ordained by the king. In general we should doubt the validity of a sacrament admistered by a sinful or heretical priest. Nor can a priest, good or bad, change the bread and wine of the Eucharist into the physical body and blood of Christ. Like Luther, Wyclif denied transubstantiation, but not the Real Presence. By a mystery that neither pretended to explain, Christ was made spiritually, truly, really, effectively present, along with the bread and wine, which did not , as the Church taught , cease to exist.
