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Chapter 2

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 believed his defiance of the curia was not simple disobedience of canon law, but rather a preamble to a cosmic battle between good and evil, in which neutrality was impossible. Only weeks after he had left Prague, Hus exhorted his followers there not to be led astray by the Antichrist, meaning the ecclesiastical synod in Prague, who had issued the final excommunication.¹⁴ Using this kind of indirect language, Hus advised his sympathizers to be wary of all decrees, regulations, and instructions that came from the same ecclesiastical body, in effect telling them to be selective about accepting its authority.

Hus spoke more directly in a letter to his friend, colleague, and mentor Master Christian, in spring 1413, calling the pope “Satan” and “Antichrist” and his disciples (the cardinals) the “satellites of Antichrist.”¹⁵ This is one of the most explicit attacks on the pope and his cardinals, describing the church as completely captivated by the forces of evil, with “Satan incarnate” residing in the place of Peter (“in loco Petri resideat Sathanas cum 12 superbissimis dyabolis incarnates”).¹⁶ In another letter to the same master, Hus stated his resolve to fight against the Behemoth, whom he described as the pope and his masters, doctors, and lawyers, who “cover up the ugliness of the beast by a false name of sanctity.”¹⁷ Hus’s harsh pronouncement came on the heels of his refusal to accept a ruling by the theological faculty at the University in Prague. They put forth what they considered an orthodox definition of the church, but Hus instead clung to his own understanding of the church, inspired by Wyclif and recently formulated in his treatise De ecclesia. By stating that Satan resides in the place of Peter, Hus declared that he considered the authorities in Rome to be illegitimate.¹⁸ The conflict between Hus and the authorities was no longer an internal matter within the church, but a battle between the forces of good and evil.

By calling the pope and cardinals the Antichrist, Hus distanced himself from the authorities, creating a divide between himself and his followers on the one side and the pope and cardinals on the other. Applying such damning words to the pope also helped clarify why the curia persecuted Hus in the first place: the pope and cardinals opposed goodness and could not help attacking an innocent man who threatened them. In fact, to be prosecuted and exiled by the Antichrist spoke exceedingly well of Hus and further underscored his innocence. His overall strategy served two ends: Hus was able to distance himself from the curia (creating his own faction) and, at the same time, to force the undecided to take a stand in the conflict.

Hus as an Old Testament Prophet and Another Christ

Every good narrative needs a hero, and Hus willingly cast himself in this role. In his letters from exile to his colleagues, noble supporters, and lay sympathizers, Hus employed Scriptures to present himself as an innocent victim of unrighteous persecution and interpolated contemporary events into his preconceived framework of a cosmic battle between the people of God and the forces of the Antichrist.

Hus’s wish to sway the public opinion in his favor is best displayed in one of his open letters, written to the people of Prague in November 1413.¹⁹ A year into his life in exile, Hus continued to exhort his followers to persevere and emphasized the manifold rewards for those who did, along with the painful punishment for those who fell astray. But what were the letter’s addressees supposed to persevere in doing? When Hus visited the city, which was seldom because of the threat of an interdict, perhaps they could host him in a city filled with hostile clerics, but it would seem that Hus demanded something greater than help with travel arrangements. Hus needed his sympathizers to believe his interpretation of contemporary events and trust him when he told them who was a friend and who was an enemy.

In speaking to laymen, Hus drew parallels between himself and various scriptural persons, as well as between his situation and various scriptural events. He thought that his recent persecutions and suffering were signs of his innocence, and he used the Bible to legitimize this claim. For example, in one letter (in which Hus also rejected the advice of the theological faculty in Prague to stop preaching), Hus argued that it was better to die well than to live poorly. He especially elaborated on the blessedness of suffering and mused about the heavenly reward it would ultimately bring, alluding to a number of New Testament passages.²⁰ When writing from exile in November 1413 to the inhabitants of Prague, Hus underlined the fact that, like him, the apostles also suffered unjust persecution.²¹ Writing from his jail cell in Constance, mere weeks before his death, Hus cited a similar passage: “Blessed shall you be when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you, and shall re proach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of Man’s sake. Be glad in that day and rejoice; for behold, your reward is great in heaven.” He saw himself as an apostle, stating that he would ultimately partake of the same crown of glory and imagining that they passed through fire in the same way that he soon would.²² In this schema, his suffering and persecution served as a proof that he was innocent.

Hus’s persecution and suffering confirmed that he was, indeed, a chosen servant of God. Hus used Old Testament prophets, apostles, and Christ as examples to underscore this point. Referring to Luke 6:22–23, in which Christ stated that the world hated true prophets and loved false ones, Hus argued that the world’s hatred for him proved that he was, in fact, a true prophet.²³ This parallel was expanded in a letter, written in the vernacular to his friends in Bohemia from his jail cell at the end of June 1415, twelve days before his death. In it, Hus instructed the citizens of Prague to not be afraid if they saw his books burned in a public spectacle (in the manner of Wyclif’s books, burned by the archbishop in July 1410). The letter then listed a number of Old Testament prophets who had suffered a similar fate, such as Jeremiah, Baruch, and other, esteemed biblical figures.²⁴ Hus also alluded to Christian saints, such as John Chrysostom, twice accused of heresy by priests, but whose reputation God cleared after his death. By associating himself with those whose saintliness had stood the test of time, Hus appeared equally blameless and innocent, vindicated by God against all his earthly opponents.

Hus also claimed that the circumstances of his persecution and arrest were similar to those of Jesus. The parallels began to appear shortly after Hus’s departure for exile in October 1412. In a letter written from an unknown location to the inhabitants of Prague, Hus addressed his audience in the vernacular. His words were reminiscent of the apostle Paul, speaking to those who love God in truth, await the Savior, and follow his law.²⁵ Of course, “following his law” meant acting in the manner determined by Hus. In the body of the letter, Hus encouraged his audience to resist the temptation to be afraid. It is left unclear what the audience might fear, presumably the clerics who persecute Hus. Not only should they not be afraid, Hus wrote, the faithful ought to rejoice in their trials.

In a seamless transition, Hus turned from talking about his own troubles to the persecution of Christ, emphasizing the parallels between their situations. In Hus’s recounting of Christ’s life, Christ was called a heretic and was excommunicated, condemned, and crucified. In Hus’s view, Christ had endured heavy abuses from bishops, priests, and scribes. They called him a ravenous drinker, demoniac, and blasphemer, saying “this man is not from God” and exposing him as a slanderer. Hus’s paraphrase of Christ’s life emphasized Christ being a heretic, someone not from God, and someone excommunicated, all of which paralleled Hus’s experience. By this time, Hus had been exiled from Prague, banned from preaching, called a heretic, accused of spreading error and bad teachings, and excommunicated. Another reference to the life of Christ that paralleled Hus’s own life appeared in a letter written shortly before December 25, again to the inhabitants of Prague. In the letter, Hus advised the audience to ignore the ban on attending Bethlehem Chapel. “They have no reason to keep you away from the word of God being preached, especially now that I am away.”²⁶ But the main focus of the letter was for Hus to justify his departure from Bethlehem and from Prague. Citing instances when Jesus would deliberately elude his persecutors (like Hus, choosing to leave his hometown in order to preach elsewhere), Hus praised Jesus for his (and, implicitly, Hus’s own) foresight and cunning in avoiding his persecutors and fleeing the city.²⁷ In his own view, Hus fled in the same way and for the same (good) reasons as Jesus did. And because no one could possibly dispute Jesus’s infinite, divine wisdom and accuse him of cowardice, Hus’s actions were, by association, to be understood in the same (indisputably good) way.

Hus’s manipulation of Scriptures must have caused quite a splash, since in winter 1413 the doctors of theology at the university in Prague officially criticized his practice of scriptural interpretation. In the document entitled Consilium doctorum facultatis theologiae studii Pragensis, they argued that Hus read the Bible according to his own ideas and not the church’s.²⁸ The criticism suggests that Hus employed the Bible for his personal ends and deviated from the acceptable interpretation. The masters especially objected to Hus’s use of biblical verses to justify his calls for disobedience of ecclesiastical authorities. However, Hus’s response to the Consilium in June 1413, addressed to Magister John, cardinal of Rejnštejn, indicated that he had no interest in changing his practice. Hus would continue to interpret his own persecution as suffering for the sake of truth.²⁹ And in this narrative, accepting Hus’s interpretation of contemporary events and his role in them was necessary for salvation.

Hus’s vernacular letters describe his predicament using the language of the Bible. Hus depicts himself as a hero of biblical proportions: an unjustly persecuted fighter for the truth who must battle the Antichrist himself. In a telling example of Hus’s use of the Scriptures, Hus applied Jesus’s words that his elect were “those who hear my word and obey it, and who suffer with me.”³⁰ This kind of rhetoric was instrumental to how Hus managed to create such a tight-knit group around himself, a veritable faction. Not only did Hus keep tabs on who did and did not belong among his followers, he insinuated that this state of belonging had eternal consequences. Remaining faithful to Christ’s law (as taught and proclaimed by Hus) now served as the litmus test for determining eternal reward or punishment. The followers’ willingness to suffer for the sake of truth marked them, in Hus’s view, as the chosen ones of God. At the final judgment, Christ’s apostles would show special recognition to the apostles of Hus.³¹ In this way, Hus’s own partisan interpretation of the Scriptures became for his followers synonymous with the law of Christ. It is likely that the laity was unaware that Hus was presenting them with highly polemical interpretations. The Bible became a weapon that Hus used for his own end.

Hus’s Vernacular Catechesis: Spiritual Call to Practical Action

Since his exile in October 1412, Hus also wrote vernacular treatises, in fact, most of his vernacular works date from this period of exile.³² These “exilic” treatises are seldom subject of scholarly inquiry, although there has been interest in them as evidence regarding the development of Hus’s spirituality. Thomas Fudge offered an analysis of them in his discussion of Hus’s spirituality, with useful summaries of the different works not addressed in this chapter.³³ Antonín Váhala offered another reading of these treatises, suggesting that we take them as a testament to Hus’s “calling to holy orders and the cure of souls.”³⁴ This latter view paints a recent view of Hus as the pastor of souls and contains an entirely unexamined assumption that these pastoral treatises are not polemical, not written against someone or something. The analysis here assumes the opposite. Having been banished from the capital, Hus smarts from punishments that he views as unjust and wishes to inculcate the faithful with the kind of learning that would eventually vindicate him.

These vernacular treatises mostly addressed the common people and aimed to inculcate Hus’s particular vision of a healthy spiritual and moral life. Like his letters, these works have often been ignored until recently, seen as secondary to Hus’s life work, mostly because they were thought to contain little in the way of theological or spiritual novelty, and much of the content appeared elsewhere in Latin either in Hus’s own works or in Wyclif’s.³⁵ This section will consider his five principal vernacular works, Hus’s trilogy of Expositions (of Faith [that is, of the Apostle’s Creed], of the Decalogue, and of the Lord’s Prayer),³⁶ his vernacular Postil,³⁷ and his work On Simony.³⁸ Through his vernacular works, Hus tried to teach his listeners what he considered a productive spiritual life, giving them advice for how to deal with enemies both spiritual and worldly. However, much of his advice consisted of lambasting corrupt clerics and general criticisms of the state of the church and as such was deeply divisive. To live a good spiritual life, according to Hus, necessitated standing up to corrupt authorities, much as he did.

The Expositions Trilogy

The Expositions were a trilogy, intended to teach the laity the fundamentals of belief, of moral action, and of prayer. That those formed a self-contained unit is evident from the first chapter of the first of these three treatises, where Hus stated that there were “three duties of a Christian: to believe, fulfill God’s commandments, and pray to God,” which correspond to the three works, on the creed, on the Ten Commandments, and on the Lord’s Prayer.³⁹ His Exposition of the Faith focused on key concepts of the Christian faith: sin, forgiveness, and salvation, while the Exposition of the Lord’s Prayer explained each of the lines of the Lord’s Prayer. The middle work in the trilogy, the Exposition of the Decalogue, is the largest and the most comprehensive of the three, taking up not only the Ten Commandments, strictly defined, but addressing different kinds of sins as well as different life situations (for clerics, nobles, and ordinary faithful) and various questions that might arise. The breadth of potential scenarios is so vast that the Exposition of the Decalogue can be seen more like a comprehensive guidebook to life than a mere commentary on ten Old Testament prohibitions. Combined, the three Expositions go much beyond any discussion of the three duties of a Christian, but offer spiritual and practical advice for both clerics and laity in all walks of life.

Hus’s Vernacular Postil

The fourth work considered here is Hus’s Postil, a cycle of vernacular sermons for every Sunday in the liturgical year with a few extras, completed on October 27, 1413. It was a dedicated attempt to deepen the audience’s knowledge of the Bible, most likely composed as a continuous text rather than a report of actual sermons.⁴⁰ Its inner logic unfolds over the course of the entire work, which may be why it was (to our knowledge) so seldom excerpted from, circulating instead as a whole set.⁴¹ In the Postil, Hus translated the relevant biblical pericope into the vernacular and followed it with additional explanations of the passage. As he explained in the Postil’s introduction: “And because they do not generally have [biblical] readings written in Czech, and interpretation is accepted without a foundation, that is why I wish first to give the reading and then my interpretation, so that the word of our Savior would sound the loudest and be given to the faithful for salvation.”⁴² In making the Postil available in the vernacular, he deliberately went against clerics who would rather have kept biblical knowledge to themselves. They did so, Hus explained, so that the laity would be unable to compare them to the biblical models and criticize and punish them, that they would not lose esteem in the eyes of the laity, and that the laity would be less likely to discern bad preaching.⁴³ Clearly, Hus considered the struggle over the Bible to be one of the key struggles in the ongoing war against bad clerics.

On Simony

Hus wrote his treatise On Simony “so that the faithful would avoid it and so that some simoniacs would repent.”⁴⁴ Hus defines simony as the “selling and buying of holy things” and develops a comprehensive understanding of what is involved in such transactions.⁴⁵ Hus takes up every rank in the church in turn and shows the different ways in which the people occupying it could theoretically be involved in simony, concluding that nearly all clergy are involved in the practice unless they specifically exclude themselves. Hus had a junior priest, who wished to avoid being implicated in simony but who served under a more senior cleric, ask how he could avoid simony. The advice coming from Hus is uncompromising: “stand up to it and refuse to participate in it” even it means risking jail, for “it is blessed to suffer for the truth … and even if he were to die in jail, what better fate can one meet in the world than holy martyrdom?”⁴⁶ Hus’s discussion of simony leads to many an excursus about the nature of the church, which is distinctly Wycliffite.

Conceptualizing the church as an invisible communitas praedestinatorum allows Hus to question and undermine the authority of those authority figures who live immoral and corrupt lives, stating, for example, that popes and bishops who do not follow Christ lack authority in the church.⁴⁷ Of all of Hus’s post-1412 vernacular treatises, On Simony is addressed largely—though by no means exclusively—to a clerical audience, which is why he relied on venerated church authorities (Pope Innocent, Pope Gregory, St. Augustine, and St. Bernard) to support his arguments as much as on his more usual resource, the Bible. All five works, the Expositions, the Postil, and On Simony are works of spiritual instruction, but they also contain a lot of information about Hus’s life, as well as criticism, much of it quite severe, of contemporary clergy.⁴⁸

Regarding the spiritual advice contained therein, none of the five treatises is entirely original, but rather each repeats ideas expressed elsewhere. The treatise On Simony is a translation and adaptation of his earlier Latin work De simonia.⁴⁹ And whereas in the Expositions Hus reworked Wyclif’s Latin work Decalogus seu de mandatis divinis,⁵⁰ the vernacular Postil is a reworking of Hus’s Latin Postil, written between 1410 and 1411, the so-called Sermones in Bethlehem.⁵¹ In the reworking, Hus eliminated church authorities in favor of scriptural quotations and added more contemporary context at the expense of scholastic commentaries.⁵² What was new is the sheer number of comments about Hus’s own life and about the state of the contemporary church, either justifying his conduct or lambasting bad priests and corrupt authorities.

It is clear that Hus’s interpretation of his life, his struggle against injustice and persecution, indelibly influenced his view of the spiritual life, what was at stake, and how it could best be lived, which he communicated through his vernacular writings. Thus the treatises also show a bitter critic of clerical shortcomings and of the clerical culture in general, a disappointed man whose spiritual advice instilled rejection of contemporary religious customs, division, and partisanship. Hus lambasted immoral priests (whom he sometimes identified by name), complained about the blindness and outright corruption of the church’s higher-ups, and stressed the importance of choosing the right side in the ongoing spiritual struggle against the forces of the Antichrist.

Hus’s spirituality has been the subject of a number of scholarly investigations and much ground has already been covered. A very helpful overview of Hus’s spirituality has recently been offered by Thomas Fudge.⁵³ After considering Hus’s vernacular works written mostly after 1412, he synthesized a number of principles that governed Hus’s spiritual outlook, contextualizing them within late medieval culture and showing that Hus’s spirituality followed rather traditional lines. His spirituality focused on love, nurtured by mystical, or quasi-mystical, experiences of Christ, shunning or even rejecting outward forms of religion should they interfere with the inner.⁵⁴ To put it in the words of another biographer, “Hus combats the external, mechanical piety of the time by opposing it to the piety of the heart and the spirit.”⁵⁵ Prayer was central in this life, and it was to be humble and social,⁵⁶ the latter emphasis on community being perhaps a surprising aspect of spirituality in someone as committed to the inner life of a mystic. Perhaps this insistence on communality in prayer and in spiritual pursuits in general is a sign that Hus was fundamentally thinking about communities and groups and not necessarily individuals, which, in turn, helps us understand his focus on creating a community of faithful followers. Importantly, Hus wrote works of pastoral care even from his prison cell at Constance, dedicating them, somewhat poignantly, to his jailers.⁵⁷ This detail alone looms large: what Hus chose to do in the last weeks of his life shows clearly where his priorities lay, not with theological argumentation but with works of pastoral care.

The persistent theme, a thread woven through all of Hus’s writing from the last three years of his life, is one of contemptus mundi: the idea that temporal life ought to be shunned as unimportant and even potentially deleterious to spiritual ambitions.⁵⁸ And while holding to this principle is nothing out of the ordinary for a spiritual writer, Hus elevated his rejection of the world to a new level, a level at which it actually became quite problematic. In addition to shunning worldly temptations, Hus’s rejection of the world encompassed also a rejection of worldly authorities (those with whom he disagreed, that is), even including the courts. More than a principle of internal introspection, contemptus mundi thus in Hus’s hands became an animating—and deeply polarizing—political principle.

And Hus acted on it often. Most memorably, in publishing what came to be known as his “Appeal to Christ” on October 18, 1412, discussed in the previous chapter. This document, circulating in both Latin and Czech, was addressed to “all faithful Christians” and publicly announced Hus’s rejection of temporal jurisdiction on account of its abuse of the law.⁵⁹ The appeal was unprecedented in the history of medieval canon law and, in effect, illegal. But it was a public-relations coup: Since he was unable to win the lawsuit brought against him by the curia, Hus reframed the contest as something he could win and claimed a moral, if not a legal, victory.

But Hus was no mere rebel; his rejection of authorities—when he explained it publicly—was always meticulously documented from the Scriptures, allowing the Bible to speak directly into his situation as a live voice of divine disapproval. Virtually all of Hus’s complaints about clerical failings (and there are many such complaints) come with a direct quotation of a New Testament passage in support of it. When speaking about interdicts, for example, Hus asks, “Because what is worse for Christians than to deny them funerals, baptisms, confessions, communion? … And this is the great suffering which the Savior talks about” in Matthew 24:21–22.⁶⁰ When he criticizes clerics for disallowing preaching, he rails against them saying, “They do not preach against evil and prevent others from doing so. They ‘stop Jesus from speaking’ as Luke says in 11:53, and they curse those who believe in him as John 9:28 says.”⁶¹ Hus is clearly intent on acquainting his audience with what the Bible has to say and showing specifically how the Bible proves his opponents to be in the wrong.

To be sure, many of his interpretations were partisan and controversial, but the Bible was strictly at the heart of his catechetical effort and of his spiritual advice throughout the Expositions. In his Exposition of the Decalogue, Hus wrote that the laity must “honor the books that contain God’s commandments.”⁶² In his Exposition of the Lord’s Prayer, Hus justified his project by stressing the fact that the prayer was taken strictly from the Bible, that it was something that “the merciful lord himself taught to his disciples.”⁶³ In his Exposition of the Faith, Hus stated that what was not in the Bible was not necessary to the faith and also admonished that everyone should accept truth pointed out to them from the Bible.⁶⁴ This was a direct attack against the clerics who attacked him (as well as an eerily accurate prefiguration of Martin Luther’s stand at Wittenberg).

Hus believed firmly that the Bible belonged in the hands of the laity. His explanation for why it was unacceptable—and unbiblical—to keep the Scriptures away from the laity hinged on his interpretation of the kingdom of heaven. In his view, the kingdom of heaven could sometimes be used interchangeably with the Scriptures, which, in turn, allowed him to insist that not only must the Bible be kept open to anyone wishing to enter into it but also that clerics were obligated to invite the laity to partake of it. But Hus went even further. His stated intention was to empower the laity to make their own decisions about what was true and whom to follow, the kind of decision making that prelates wanted to prevent by keeping the Bible a closely guarded secret.⁶⁵ In the background of Hus’s decision to bring a vernacular Bible to the laity were audible echoes of Hus’s own experience with the church’s hierarchy: by now he had been maligned, refused hearing, and excommunicated. Bringing knowledge of the Bible to his followers would equip them to act with similar resolve should something similar happen to them.

In addition to his partisan interpretations, Hus also devoted much attention to concepts fundamental to the faith. He did not shy away from notoriously difficult Christian subjects such as God, the nature of Christ, his crucifixion and resurrection, or the kingdom of heaven. He even tackled subjects that Christian preachers tend to avoid, then as now, bravely explaining a definition of the Holy Trinity.⁶⁶ And regardless of the subject, he showed where and how his explanations were contained in the Scriptures. It is clear that Hus was serious about catechesis and preferred to give as much biblical background explanation as was possible.

However, Hus did not limit himself to fundamental questions of the faith but also addressed less elevated subjects, answering questions that any believer might feasibly ask. Among them were queries such as why are some prayers answered and others not, why should we love our neighbor even when he or she treats us badly, what is the best posture for prayer, or why did the Savior actually spend time with sinners?⁶⁷ In each case, Hus considered the question at hand with seriousness and responded not with pat answers but with compassion and theological insight. He explained the following: God does not answer some prayers, because some people are not worthy of being heard and because some requests are not good for salvation.⁶⁸ We should love our neighbor even if he or she is evil, because all were created by God, in God’s image and likeness.⁶⁹ The best body postures for prayer are kneeling down or prostration.⁷⁰ And the Savior spent so much with the sinners for several reasons, to lead them out of sin and to show them that he was the Savior of sinners, as it is written in Luke 19:10.⁷¹

Hus also found the time to entertain lesser subjects, those that did not have a bearing on one’s salvation at all, honoring the sheer curiosity of the faithful. For example, he paused his discussion of Jesus’s preaching in Galilee to remark on New Testament geography and culture, explaining that Tyra and Sidon were both towns and that Galilee was the term one used to describe the whole region in the Jewish land and that it was also where Christ was born.⁷² Elsewhere, Hus explained words like “scribe … in Latin ‘publicanus,’ ”⁷³ and “ ‘tabernacula,’ which means eternal tents.”⁷⁴ The explanations might seem superfluous, pertaining neither to salvation nor moral goodness, but they were important enough for Hus to include them for the sake of knowledge.

Throughout the Postil, Hus paused to address questions of translation, often giving his audience the Latin term or phrase before reflecting on how best to translate them. Sometimes, he admitted, the Czech vernacular did not have an appropriate term, in which case he attempted to find a phrase or circumlocution that would convey what was needed. Most controversially, Hus frequently admitted that a multiplicity of interpretations of the scriptural text at hand was possible, both in the Postil and in the Expositions. For example, in a sermon written for the second Sunday after Easter, Hus explained that some understood the “sheepfold” mentioned by Jesus to refer to the ultimate conversion of Jews to the Christian faith, but others thought it referred to a full conversion of the elect.⁷⁵ Drawing attention to the Bible’s potential for multiplicity of meaning appears counterproductive to Hus’s stated intention to educate, as it might usher in confusion and uncertainty. However, acknowledging that multiple readings existed allowed Hus to make a clear distinction between the biblical text and its interpretation, moreover underscoring the importance of a competent interpreter.

The injunction to make sure one obeys the right kind of cleric is at the heart of Hus’s spiritual advice but has seldom been commented upon.⁷⁶ Yet it seems clear that Hus’s advice to the laity was influenced by the events of Hus’s own life, especially the way he has been treated by the ecclesiastical authorities since his excommunication and exile. The external events that proved especially formative (and that he mentions frequently) were his excommunication, the interruption of divine services, the ban on preaching in Bethlehem Chapel, and the threat of the chapel’s destruction.⁷⁷ Related to these events were personal decisions that Hus made in response to them. They too shaped Hus’s spiritual advice to the laity, especially those that he was not fully sure about, often wondering in writing whether he had made the right choice and reassuring himself that he had. Two decisions especially haunted him: his refusal to travel to Rome to defend his appeal in 1410 and his subsequent decision to abandon his post at Bethlehem Chapel in face of excommunication and interdict in the fall of 1412. The events framing Hus’s life influenced Hus’s spirituality: he called for struggle against unjust authorities, promoted active discernment of which clerics were worth obeying, and called on the believers to stand up against the forces of the Antichrist.

Indeed, Hus interwove serious criticisms of priests who abused their power or failed in their duties all through his spiritual exhortation. In On Simony, Hus told his audience how to recognize those who are the inheritors of Balaam. They were “those who preach for money and wrongly condemn people.”⁷⁸ This contains a contemporary reference: an accusation of those who preached in favor of indulgences and who excommunicated him. And there were other contemporary references. For example, Hus lambasted the decision, by a papal bull by Alexander V, to ban preaching in private chapels, a decision that was clearly supposed to put a stop to Hus’s preaching in Bethlehem.⁷⁹

But excommunication proved to be his most frequent example. Hus explained on more than one occasion that the authorities were excommunicating people (such as himself) for the wrong reasons, certainly not out of love, wishing for amendment of their ways. “But they excommunicate a lot of priests but Christ accepts them, and I too hope for his holy mercy that he would accept me even though they have rejected me, because I preach his word in spite of them.”⁸⁰ Hus insisted that any spiritual punishment meted out in error could not harm the soul, because clerics could not override God’s decision. And although the clerics might threaten and say that any excommunication was damaging, “know that if you are certain that you are innocent, you need not fear that this excommunication would harm you, for it is impossible that anything should harm your soul if you are free of sin.”⁸¹

This was a recipe for rebellion: According to the canon law, of course, even excommunication that was thought to be unjust had to be obeyed, otherwise the system would fall into pieces.⁸² But Hus ignored that and advised his followers likewise to ignore decisions that he or they considered erroneous. In telling the faithful to be discerning about decisions made by his clerical superiors, he communicated to them that the punishments meted out against him were unjust and invited them to consider carefully any church ruling issued against them.