Preachers, Partisans, and Rebellious Religion. Marcela K. Perett

      Creating a Faction

      Jan Hus and the Importance of Moral Victory

      The exile from Prague, following his “Appeal to Christ” discussed in the previous chapter, hit Hus very hard. But instead of accepting the injustice and backing down, he hit back with the only weapon available to him, his words. In the weeks and months following his departure from Prague, Hus campaigned on his own behalf through letters, sermons, and treatises, all in the vernacular, in an effort to persuade the laity that he was in the right and the curia in the wrong. To the extent that late medieval media allowed him, he “went public” with his disagreement, a decision that had lasting consequences.

      In the last three years of his life, Jan Hus used vernacular communications deliberately in order to present himself as an innocent victim of injustice and to create a faction of followers and sympathizers. To that end, he used his letters and his vernacular treatises, each with a different message and emphasis. The letters depict Hus’s quarrel with the curia as a cosmic battle between good and the Antichrist, with Hus in the guise of an Old Testament prophet, another apostle, or saint. The vernacular treatises, On Simony, the three Expositions (of the Faith, of the Ten Commandments, and of the Lord’s Prayer), and Hus’s vernacular Postil belabor these points, adding a devastating criticism of contemporary clergy as well as spiritual advice. They show that Hus’s experience at the hands of the curia also influenced his view of the spiritual life, how it could best be lived, and what was at stake. These writings reveal a pastorally minded Hus, a preacher striving to point his followers to the beauties of the interior life of the faith and a university master eager to educate the faithful in the Scriptures. But they also show a bitter critic of clerical shortcomings and of the clerical culture in general, a disappointed man whose spiritual advice demanded rejection of contemporary religious customs, discord, and partisanship.

      Hus’s quest to clear his tarnished reputation before the laity brought the latent divisions and disagreements out into the open and into the vernacular, creating a faction of supporters. Hus’s vernacular communications became an instrument of a “newly defined mode of political communication, in which, besides the economic and political elites, the social strata which had had no say in power decisions thus far—burghers, artisans, women, and the municipal poor—also played their part.”¹ This effort to captivate a larger audience was born of an immediate need; because he could not win the legal case brought against him by the curia, Hus retold the events in such a way that allowed him to claim moral victory. These interactions between Hus as the leader of the reformist party and the aristocratic and urban society “gave momentum to the formation of the late medieval public sphere in Bohemia.”² They were key to the creation of the public sphere in Bohemia and proved an important prerequisite for the success of the Hussite revolt. But how did Hus’s communications bring about “this creation of the new public”? In what way did the vernacular become “an instrument of a newly defined mode of political communication”?³ Hus did so by bringing the disputed questions out among the laity, effectively creating a kind of public forum, in which everyone, lay and cleric alike, was asked to have an opinion and to take a stand. In the last three years of his life, Hus deliberately polarized and offended; his was not pious catechesis but a manifesto of cosmic battle in which everyone was called on to participate. The so-called public sphere grew out of disagreements about fundamental matters of religious and political life, expressed publicly, disagreements that were made seem so momentous that they called for the audience’s immediate response, eventually fueling the Hussite revolution.⁴

      Mightier Than the Sword: The Evidence of Hus’s Letters

      Hus’s excommunication and exile in 1412 were the culmination of struggle over indulgences, in which Hus took an uncompromising stance against the sale of indulgences in the capital.⁵ It was costly. Hus lost not only the patronage of the king but also the support of most of his university colleagues.⁶ At that time, Hus had chosen to take a radical stance for something that he considered true; he would do the same when difficult times came again two years later. As before, he declared his intent to oppose the authorities to the laity and continued to write vernacular treatises explaining why he had chosen his course of action and, increasingly, why others should follow in his footsteps.

      Words were the only weapons permitted to Hus in his ongoing war against the curia. In the wake of the fourth excommunication issued against him, and with a threat of interdict on his beloved city, Hus left Prague on October 14, 1412.⁷ He found refuge at the castle Kozí in southern Bohemia that belonged to Jan of Ústí, one of his noble supporters. While there, he continued to write treatises both in the vernacular and in Latin. The majority of his vernacular output comes from this period, as does his most controversial treatise De ecclesia, in which he drew heavily on Wyclif’s teaching about the church. A few years later, the councilmen at Constance would mine De ecclesia for evidence of his heretical views.

      After leaving Prague, Hus also kept busy writing letters and vernacular treatises, but he did not take any official steps to have the excommunication revoked.⁸ It seems that he had given up on proving his innocence by canonical means, instead turning to the laity for support. Because Hus no longer had access to a pulpit from which he could proclaim his message,⁹ he turned to a written medium to address his followers and sympathizers. Hus often used biblical language to depict himself as a prophet or a Christlike victim, single-handedly battling the forces of evil in the church and the world. This was hardly the first instance of message manipulation in the history of heresy, but it was both effective and memorable for its boldness and its wide-ranging distribution. Because he could not win the legal case brought against him by the curia, Hus retold the events in such a way that allowed him to claim moral victory.

       The Antichrist as Hus’s Chief Enemy

      In his letters, which were, in effect, public documents, Hus interpreted recent events as a simple story of good versus evil. Hus chose the Antichrist as his enemy and did not hesitate to equate the evil figure with the pope and his cardinals.

      Saying that the pope was the Antichrist marked a new departure in Hus’s thinking. His earlier writings, prior to 1412, described the Antichrist in perfectly orthodox terms: an impersonal force opposed to God, actively luring clergy into enforcing their own commands rather than God’s will.¹⁰ Hus’s reluctance to align the Antichrist with any specific person or faction is evident.¹¹ In fact, Hus’s teaching on the Antichrist was at that time more traditional than that of his great teacher, John Wyclif.¹² But excommunication and exile drastically changed Hus’s view of his opposition. After the fall of 1412, many of his letters openly stated that the pope or the cardinals were the Antichrist or Antichrist’s servants. But these letters were all addressed to the university masters, inhabitants of Prague, and, on several occasions, “all faithful Czechs,” never to the pope or the cardinals themselves.¹³

      Hus