Durants' S o C
Vol. VI THE REFORMATION
Pgs 169 - 172
THE BOHEMIAN REVOLUTION (cont.)
In the town of Tabor another party of Hussites formed, who held that real Christianity required a communistic organization of life. Long before Huss there had been in Bohemia little groups of Waldensians, Beghards, and other irrepressible heretics mingling religious with communistic ideals. They had maintained a salutary quiet until Zizka’s troops had over thrown the power of the Church in most of Bohemia; now they came into the open, and captured doctrinal leadership at Tabor. Many of them rejected the Real Presence, Purgatory, prayers for the dead, and all the sacraments except baptism and communion, and discouraged the veneration of relics, images, and saints; they proposed to restore the simple ritual of the Apostolic Church, and repudiated all ecclesiastical rites and robes that they could not find in early Christianity. They objected to altars, organs, and the splendour of church decoration, and they destroyed such ornaments wherever they could. Like later Protestants, they reduced divine worship to communion, prayer, Scriptural readings, a sermon, and the singing of hymns; and these services were conducted by clergymen indistinguishable from the laity in dress. Most of the Taborites deduced communism from millenarianism: Christ would soon come to establish His Kingdom on earth; in that Kingdom there would be no property, no Church or state, no class distinctions, no human laws, no taxes, no marriage; surely it would please Christ, when he came, to find such a heavenly utopia already established by His worshipers. At Tabor and some other towns these principals were put into practice; there, said a contemporary professor in the University of Prague, “ all is held in common, no one owns anything for himself alone; so to own is considered a deadly sin They hold that all should be equal brothers and sisters“.
A Bohemian peasant turned philosopher, Peter Chelcicky, went further, and wrote in vigorous Czech a series of Tolstoyan tracts advocating a pacifistic anarchism. He attacked the powerful and the rich, denounced war and capital punishment as murder, and demanded a society without lords or serfs, or laws of any kind. He bade his followers take Christianity literally as they found in the New Testament; to baptise only adults, to turn their backs upon the world and its ways, upon oaths and learning and class distinctions, upon commerce and city life; and to live in voluntary poverty, preferably tilling the land, and completely ignoring “civilization” and the state. The Taborites found this pacifism unsuited to their temperament. They divided into moderate and advanced radicals ( these preached nudism and a communism of women), and the two factions passed from argument to war. In the course of a few years unequal abilities developed inequalities of power and privilege, finally of goods; and the apostles of peace and freedom were replaced by ruthless lawgivers wielding despotic force.
Christendom heard with horror of this supposedly communistic Christianity. The baronial and burgher Hussites in Bohemia began to yearn for the Church of Rome as the only organisation strong enough to stop the immanent dissolution of the existing social order. They rejoiced when the council of Basel invited reconciliation. A delegation from the Council, without papal authorization, came to Bohemia, and signed a series of compacts so worded that complaisant Hussites and Catholics could interpret them as accepting and rejecting the Four Articles of Prague (1433). As the Hussites refused to recognise these compacts, the conservative Hussites joined with the surviving orthodox groups in Bohemia, attacked and defeated the divided Taborites and put an end to the communistic experiment. (1434) The Bohemian Diet made its peace with Sigismund, and accepted him as king (1436).
But Sigismund, accustomed to crowning his victories with futility, died the following year. During the chaos that ensued, the orthodox party secured the upper hand in Prague. An able provincial leader, George of Podebrad, organised an army of Hussites, captured Prague, restored the Utraquist Jan Rokycana to the archiepiscopal see, and established himself as Governor of Bohemia ( 1451). When Pope Nicholas V refused to recognize Rokycana, the Utraquists mediated a transfer of their allegiance to the Greek Orthodox Church, but the fall of Constantinople to the Turks ended the negotiations. In 1458. Seeing that Podebrad's excellent administration had restored order and prosperity, the Diet chose him king.
Podebrad in 1464 invited the monarchs of Europe to form a permanent federation of European states, with its own legislature, executive, and army, and a judiciary empowered to settle current and future international disputes. The kings did not reply; the reinvigorated papacy was too strong to be defied by a League of Nations. Pope Paul II declared Podebrad a heretic, freed his subjects from their oaths of obedience, and called upon Christian powers to depose him (1466) Matthias Corvinus of Hungary undertook the task, invaded Bohemia, and was crowned king by a group of Catholic nobles 9 1469). Podebrad offered the throne to Ladislas, son of Casimir IV of Poland. Then worn out with war and dropsy, he died aged fifty-one ( 1471). Bohemia, now Czechoslovakia, honours him as, next to Charles IV, her greatest king.
The Diet accepted Ladislas II, and the nobles took advantage of his youthful weakness to consolidate their economic and political power, to reduce the representation of the towns and burghers in the Diet, and to debase into serfdom the peasantry that had just dreamed of utopia. Thousands of Bohemians, during this period of revolution and reaction, fled to other lands. * In 1485 the Catholic and Utraquist parties signed the treaty of Kutna Hora, pledging themselves to peace for thirty years.
In Eastern Bohemia and Morovia the followers of Chelcicky formed (1457) a new sect, the Jednota Bratrska, or Church of the Brotherhood, dedicated to a simple agricultural life on the principles of the New Testament. In 1467 it renounced the authority of the Catholic Church, consecrated its own priests, rejected purgatory and the worship of saints, anticipated Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith, and became the first modern church to practice Christianity. By 1500 it claimed 100,000 members. These “Moravian Brethren” were almost exterminated in the fury of the Thirty Year’s War; they survived through the leadership of John Comenius; they still exist, in scattered congregations in Europe, Africa, and America, astonishing a violent and sceptical world with their religious toleration, their unassuming piety, and their peaceful fidelity to the principles they profess.
* The French, confusing the Bohemian exiles with Gypsies who in the fifteenth century were entering Western Europe, supposedly from Bohemia, made ‘Boheme’ their word for Gypsy. The name Gypsy is a corruption of “Egyptian’ and reflects the claim of the tribe to have come from ‘Little Egypt’. Burton traces them to India. In Byzantine lands they took the name Rom-- i.e. (eastern) Roman; in the Balkans and Central Europe they were called by variants of Arzigan (Czigany, Zigeuner, Zingary), a word of uncertain origin. In European records they first appear in the early fourteenth century as wondering groups of craftsmen, musicians, dancers, fortune-tellers, and --in general belief -- thieves. Usually, they accepted baptism, but they took religion and Commandments lightly, and soon ran foul of the Inquisition. Aside from the gay varicoloured dress and ornaments of their more prosperous women, their contribution to civilization lay in dancing and music-- whose alternations of sadness and exuberance have inspired some major composers.
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