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 WYCLIF

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WYCLIF

ities. A number of prominent \\'}clifitcs were forced to make retractations (cf. Lollards), but nothing seems to have been demanded from the leader of the movement except a promise not to preach. He re- tired to Lutterworth and, though he continued to write voluminously both in Latin and EngUsh, re- mained there undisturbed till his death. He was probably cited to Rome but he was too infirm to obey. Indeed he was probably paralyzed during the last two years of his life. A second stroke came in 1384 while he was hearing Mass in his church, and three days later ho died. He was buried at Lutterworth, but the Council of Constance in 1415 ordered his remains to be taken up and cast out. This was done in 1428.

It is impossible to understand Wyclif's popularity, the weakness of the ecclesiastical authorities, or even the character of his teaching, without taking into account the extraordinary condition of the country at the end of tlie fourteenth century. The discredit which had been brought on the principle of authority in Church and State and the poi)ularity of revolu- tionary ideas have been touched upon in the article LoLL.\RDS, and the causes which exjilain the spread of Lollardy are responsible, to some extent at least, for Wyclif's own mental development. His earliest ftritings are mainly logical and metaphysical. He belonged to the Realist School, and claimed to be a disciple of St. Augustine, but it was his attitude in the practical and political questions of EvangeUcal poverty and Church government which gave him influence. The question of Evangehcal poverty was 1 burning one throughout the fourteenth century. Driginally a subject of bitter controversy within the ranks of the Friars Minor, it had received a wider L'xtension, and the chief theological WTiters of the time had taken sides. When the papacy declared for I he moderates, the extremists, with their literary >up])orters, Marsiglio of Padua, William of Ockham, ind others, assumed an attitude of hostility to Rome, ind soon found themselves advocating a church organ- zation without property and practically under the "ontrol of the State. From the mendicants, then, Wyclif inherited his hatred of clerical and monastic endowments, and in this he showed no great original- ity. Throughout the Middle Ages the wealth of the "lergj- was liable to attack, and that sometimes from
 * he most orthodox. W'hat is, however, characteristic

j{ Wyclif is the argimtient, half-feudal and half- Iheological, with which he supports his attack onthe [•lergj- and the monks; yet though connected with his name it was in part boiTowed from Richard Fitz- Ralph, an Oxford teacher and vice-chancellor, who lad since become Archbishop of Armagh. Fitz- Ralph had been himself an opponent of the "mendi- cants", but WycUf found in his theorj- of "lordship" 1 convenient and a novel way of formulating the incient but anarchical principle that no respect is lue to the commands or the property of the wicked. 'Dominion is founded in grace" is the phrase which iums up the argument, and (Irmiinium it must be ■emembered is a word which might be said to contain ho whole feudal theory-, for it means both sovereignty ind property. "Dominion", then, or "lordship"', belongs to God alone. Any lordship held by the Toature is held of God and is forfeited by sin, for Tiortal sin is a kind of high trea-^on towards God, the Dverlord. Fitz-Ralph had used this argument moan- ng to justify the distinction between "property" ind "use" which the moderate Franciscans had idopted and the extremists had rejected. Wyclif, lowever, brought it down into the market-place by ipplying it to clerical possessions. He even went '\irther than the argument authorized him, for he 'ame to hold that no monks or clergy, not even the ■ighteous, could hold temporal possessions without iin, and further that it was lawful for kings and princes

to deprive them of what they held unlawfully. Logi- cally, Wyclif's doctrine of lordship should apply to temporal lords as well as to spiritual; but this logical step he never took, and he did not, therefore, contrib- ute intentionally to the Peasant Revolt of 1381. Yet the assaults of so well known a man on church prop- erty must have encouraged the movement (of this there is a good deal of evidence), and the "poor priests", who were less closely connected with lay- men of position and property, are sure to have gone further than their master in the communistic direc- tion. Wyclif's attack on the property of the monastic orders and of the Church would necessarily bring him before long into conflict with the ecclesiastical authorities, and he was led to guard himself against the results of excommunication by maintaining that, as he put it, "no man can be excommunicated unless he first be excommunicated by himself" (viz. by sin), a statement which may be true of the effect of excom- munication on the soul, but which cannot be applied to the external government of the Church.

Thus by 1380 Wyclif had set himself in open oppo- sition to the property and government of the Church, he had attacked the pope in most unmeasured terms, he had begun to treat the Bible as the chief and almost the only test of orthodoxy, and to lay more and more stress on preaching. Yet he would have protested against an accusation of heresy. Great freedom was allowed to speculation in the schools, and there was much uncertainty about clerical property. Even the exclusive use of Scripture as a standard of faith was comprehensible at a time when the allegiance of Christendom was being claimed by two popes. It must be added that Wyclif frequently inserted qualifying or explanatory clauses in his propositions, and that, in form at least, he would declare his readi- ness to submit his opinions to the judgment of the Church. It seems to have been a time of much un- certainty in matters of faith, and the Lollard move- ment in its earlier stages is remarkable for a readiness of recantation. Wyclif's heretical position became, however, much more pronounced when he denied the doctrine of Transubstantiation. His own position is not quite clear or consistent, but it seems to approach the Lutheran "consubstantiation", for he appUed to the Blessed Eucharist his metaphysical principle that annihilation is impossible. To attack so fundamental a doctrine tended to define the position of Wyclif and his followers. Henceforth they tend to become a people apart. The friars, with whom the "reformer" had once been on friendly terms, became their chief enemies, and the State turned against them.

Old-fashioned Protestant WTiters, who used to treat medieval heresy as a continuous witness to the truth, found in WycUf a convenient hnk between the Albi- genses and the sixteenth-century reformers, and the comparison is, perhaps, of interest. Like the heretics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Wyclif started with an attack on clerical wealth; he then went on to dispute the authority of the Church and, finally, its sacramental system, but unhke them he avoided those Manichffian tendencies which threatened the most elementary moral laws. That madness had been exorcized by the great Scholastics. On the other hand, Wyclif resembled the Protestant Reformers in his insistence on the Bible as the rule of faith, in the importance attributed to preaching, and in his sacra- mental doctrine. Like them, too, he looked for support to the laity and the civil state, and his con- ception of the kingly dignity would have satisfied even Henry VIII. The doctrine of justification by faith does not, however, occur in Wyclif's system. The English Lollards carried on but very imperfectly the tradition of Wyclif's teaching. His real sj>iritual inheritor was John Hus, and it was through Bohemia, if at all, that he is directly connected with the Refor- mation.