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Chapter 1

From Golden Boy to Rabble-Rouser

Jan Hus and His Preaching Career

The career of Jan Hus exemplified both the opportunities and limitations of the fifteenth-century church.¹ As a boy of humble background, born around 1370, Hus had originally decided to become a priest because of the increased status and higher social standing he would gain.² He enrolled at the University of Prague in 1390; three years later he received his bachelor’s degree in liberal arts. In 1396, Hus received his master’s degree from Stanislav of Znojmo and began teaching at the university while studying toward a bachelor in theology. In 1400, he was ordained a priest. When the opportunity to obtain a post presented itself six years later, Hus did not hesitate, and, in a decision that would prove momentous, in 1402 he agreed to take over preaching at the Bethlehem Chapel, a nonparochial institution with links to the university dedicated to Czech preaching.

At the time of its founding in 1391, the chapel was the first ever secular establishment dedicated solely to vernacular preaching. And Hus did well there. In the chapel’s heyday, thousands of listeners would come to hear him preach. Thanks to his unique venue, Hus was able to reach thousands of listeners and speak to them in their native tongue. But his preaching alarmed the authorities. Six years later, the first set of charges against him was submitted to the archbishop. Four years after that, his preaching was banned altogether. His influential position made him uniquely dangerous because of his power to incite the laity against his fellow clerics. Unlike other contemporary religious experimenters, Hus could not find a workable compromise with the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The question of why he was unable to do so illustrates the fault lines between what was and was not negotiable in Prague’s fifteenth-century religious culture, illuminating the opportunities and limitations of fifteenth-century religion.

When Jan Hus started his clerical career, he was a favorite of Prague’s archbishop Zbyněk, who spoke of his admiration for reform in general, and for Hus in particular.³ A charismatic, university-educated cleric, dedicated to preaching and spiritual care for the laity, he encapsulated the hope and promise of the Bohemian tradition of reform, to which he proudly adhered.⁴ From his pulpit in the Bethlehem Chapel, he encouraged interior conversion and moral renewal and also lambasted corrupt and immoral clerics. But using the pulpit at Bethlehem to air complaints about the clergy in Prague crossed the boundary of permissible reform behavior, and Hus’s vernacular preaching soon marked him as a rabble-rouser.

Hus was always critical of underperforming clerics, but his preaching against clerical error and immorality intensified around 1410, and he became increasingly aggressive in response to escalating sanctions against him. He had previously faced a few accusations of seditious and heretical preaching, but those he had been able to dispute, explain, or otherwise avoid. His legal difficulty resulted from defending Wyclif. Specifically, Hus disagreed with the archbishop of Prague’s order that all in possession of Wyclif’s books turn them over to the archbishop’s office, a decision confirmed by the Prague ecclesiastical synod in June 1409.⁵ Hus and a few others appealed the decision to the pope, but in the meantime, the archbishop gained the support of Pope Alexander V, whose bull issued in December 1409 also banned preaching at Bethlehem Chapel. (After Alexander V’s death, Hus filed his appeal with his successor John XXIII, which began his legal case at the curia.) The archbishop publicized Alexander V’s bull at the ecclesiastical synod in June 1410 and a month later had Wyclif’s books publicly burned much to the dismay of the king and many university masters. It is tempting to think of the appeal, which would ultimately prove Hus’s undoing, as a heroic stance in support of Wyclif and his ideas. In reality, it had as much to do with local politics and personal animosities as with principle. Hus believed all books deserved to be studied, thus he did not hesitate to speak up against an odious archbishop and support the king’s objection to the book burning. But once initiated, the legal proceedings could not be stayed and eventually led to further convictions. On October 18, 1412, the annual synod in Prague pronounced a sentence of major excommunication against Hus and, employing the threat of interdict against the entire city, forced him into exile.⁶ The legal proceedings sparked by this appeal haunted Hus all the way to the tribunal in Constance.

The ecclesiastical sanction had a curious effect on Hus. Instead of skulking away in shame or pleading with his superiors, he responded by involving the laity in his acts of defiance, and by exhorting them to disobey corrupt authorities. And although Hus preached that each individual should decide which authorities to respect, in reality his own opinions on the subject commanded considerable sway with the laymen. In the summer of 1412, responding to a new wave of accusations, Hus made a number of public statements that the church held no authority in its statements against him. In order convincingly to make his case, Hus made a number of statements about the nature of the church’s authority and argued that the pope and his cardinals were not legitimate heirs of the apostles because of their immoral and avaricious ways. This may perhaps seem as a mere invective, but Hus spoke from a theologically sophisticated, if not immediately obvious, standpoint. Drawing on Wyclif’s understanding of the church, Hus defined it as an invisible “community of the predestined ones,” communitas praedestinatorum⁷. This was a difficult concept when it came to organizing and governing the church, because the fate of each individual in it—whether it be eternal salvation or damnation—was known to God alone. This in turn meant that individuals who saw themselves as being a part of the church, even members of the high hierarchy including the pope, might not in actuality be among the saved. This introduced tremendous instability and vagueness into church affairs. Is this priest really a part of the communitas praedestinatorum? And this bishop? Or the pope? In this conception, it was not entirely clear who in the contemporary hierarchy was actually a member of the church. Some of the more scrupulous among the ordinary faithful began to have doubts about their own status in the church, wondering if they were among the saved or destined for eternal torment. To the troubled ordinary faithful, Hus advised that they trust that their faith, nurtured by acts of charity, would suffice.⁸ When it came to judging the salvation of others, matters became more complicated. Of course, ideally, one did not need to and ought not to judge. New Testament epistles seemed to support this view. But, in the life of an institution such as the church, ambiguity is not always workable. Not knowing who was really a member of the church made it impossible to know whose dictates were to be obeyed and whose were not.

With self-serving cleverness, which has gone unacknowledged as such by Hus’s biographers, Hus offered a solution to the ambiguity that he himself had created, repeating Jesus’s words “By their fruits you shall know them” (Matthew 7:16), in effect inviting the ordinary faithful to judge those tasked to lead them.⁹ In so doing, the behavior of clerical elites became open to judgment by the ordinary faithful. He invited the laity to decide for themselves whose authority was legitimate and whose was not, but also insisted that they listen to and obey him. Or in theory he did. Although his sermons and later writings were peppered with exhortations that the faithful do just that, the reality was somewhat messier: Hus put himself into the role of the new arbiter, the one passing judgment on his colleagues, deciding which cleric was credible (and to be obeyed) and which was not. In this way, Hus offered a solution and a way out of instability and confusion in the church ranks, which he had himself created through his writing and preaching in various contexts.¹⁰

In the course of his career, Hus transitioned from the the archbishop’s favorite preacher to a rabble-rouser who rejected all temporal authority. What set Hus apart from other difficult clerics was the fact that, at every crisis moment, he turned to the laity with a direct and deliberate message. He advised, exhorted, and cajoled, eventually creating a kind of parallel church structure, an invisible church defined by the believers’ loyalty to himself.

Bethlehem Chapel: The Perfect Venue for Hus’s Subversive Message

Knowing how his life would end predisposes us to see Jan Hus as a tragic figure, grossly distorting our understanding of Hus’s day-to-day life. In fact, many of his contemporaries might have thought him a lucky man, someone whose sense of his own vocation in life combined perfectly with the needs and possibilities of his professional situation.

Hus was dedicated to working with the laity and the office of preaching in particular. Conveniently, there was a demand for preaching in Bohemia, encouraged by two generations of pro-reform clerics in Prague starting in 1360s or so.¹¹ Preaching campaigns by preachers, such as Conrad Waldhauser and Jan Milíč of Kroměříž, who were not attached to regular parishes or monastic orders, that were aimed at spiritual renewal of the laity were a frequent occurrence, sometimes even annoying local clerical establishment.¹² The question of Hus’s reform “forerunners” has been debated extensively and lies outside of the scope of this book.¹³ Primarily Czech-speaking scholars have argued that Hus’s reform trajectory was native in origin. Other scholars pointed to the influence of Wyclif as formative and decisive in propelling Hus on the reform path.¹⁴ The truth lies somewhere in the middle. Wyclif’s ideas certainly made an impression on Hus and his circle of colleagues, as will become evident in later chapters. But Hus was also, and perhaps originally, shaped by the reform ideals that had arisen among reform-minded masters at Prague University, emphasizing frequent Eucharistic communion and moral life. Hus certainly learned from clerics often described as his “forerunners,” such as Conrad Waldhauser, Jan Milíč of Kroměříž, Matthew of Janov, as well as John Wyclif.¹⁵ This is, of course, not to say that the outcome of Hus’s career was in any way preordained, but it does explain how Hus’s affinity for reform ideals shaped his sense of his own vocation: all of his role models saw preaching as extremely important. Preaching was an “essential duty of the cleric and the fulfillment of his role in the order of salvation,” and it marked the community of preachers as living in harmony with Christ’s law.¹⁶ In other words, preaching was at the heart of the reform and served as a marker of a pro-reform cleric. As for what marked pro-reform laity, this was less clear. But Hus would eventually create a marker: for the laity to be pro-reform would mean supporting him.

Bethlehem Chapel: A Reformed Place

In a rare confluence of passion and opportunity, Jan Hus saw preaching as his life’s vocation, and he was given the perfect space for it. Bethlehem Chapel was founded solely to provide space for preaching in the Czech vernacular, quite a novelty for a chapel that was neither parochial nor attached to a monastic order.¹⁷ The incentive came from the upper echelons of the Prague society: John of Milheim, who served as confidential adviser to King Wenceslas IV, went to great lengths to secure the foundation. He obtained the archbishop’s consent as well as royal protection for the chapel with the king himself authorizing the charter. The chapel was founded in 1391 and consecrated three years later, in 1394. It was a large structure measuring 798 square meters that could hold about three thousand faithful, which made it one of the largest structures for that purpose in Prague. The chapel still stands in Prague’s Old Town, not far from the well-known astronomical clock in the Old Town Square.¹⁸

The difficulty of carving out the necessary physical space for the new chapel illustrates how crowded the urban landscape had become by the end of the fourteenth century. When the project was first conceived, it proved impossible to find a new building site anywhere; the chapel was literally squeezed into the urban landscape.¹⁹ It was impossible to build an entirely new building, so walls and pillars from surrounding structures were used in the construction. The new chapel was built over the garden of another building, on top of a graveyard belonging to the neighboring church, and even over the local well. Before the construction could begin, multiple financial and legal claims needed to be settled. It was necessary to ensure public access to the well, which ended up on the inside of the chapel’s building, and to compensate the priest in the adjacent church for his losses of income with an annual donation.²⁰ The chapel must have done well financially in its early years: when in 1403 the priest in the adjacent church died and the compensation agreement was renegotiated, his successor’s annual compensation was doubled.²¹

The chapel’s founders made preaching in the Czech vernacular central to Bethlehem’s mission.²² In the charter, issued on May 24, 1391, they explained that “no center could be found in which preaching would be the main part of the service” and that “clerics desiring to preach in Czech struggled with enormous difficulties and have to be satisfied with private homes or obscure places.”²³ The charter stipulated that there would be two sermons on all feast days, in the morning and after lunch, but during Advent and Lent only one (in the morning) so that the faithful could attend services in their own parishes.²⁴ The charter allowed for masses to be celebrated but did not specify their number or frequency. Those were left to the priest’s discretion, confirming that mass was not considered central to the mission of Bethlehem Chapel in the same way as preaching in the vernacular was.

Although the emphasis on vernacular preaching is often cited as the most defining feature of the chapel, the founders were aiming even higher: their intention was to create not so much a place for reform but a reformed place, not only a place from which reform would be announced but a place that had already enacted it. The chapel’s financial arrangements stipulated by the charter make this abundantly clear. They were even more elaborate than the ritual arrangements, suggesting that money—or a certain way of handling it—was at the core of what constituted a reformed place, a view that fits with common fifteenth-century concerns about clerical greed and corruption, which were, incidentally, central not only to Hus’s preaching but to the local reform tradition that preceded him.

The different provisions anticipated numerous possible ways in which a less-than-dutiful cleric might try to take advantage of the post and made those impossible. The charter’s provisions were intentionally specific and elaborately set out so as to combat three grave sins that, according to the charter’s authors, plagued the contemporary church: plurality of benefits, clerical laziness, and greed.²⁵ In order to eliminate these vices, at least from the chapel’s premises, the charter stipulated that the priest must reside at the chapel and not take on additional benefices while serving at Bethlehem. The charter recognized that “it is often the case that some seek their own good and not that of Jesus Christ, so when they receive a benefice, they care little for the work involved.” The charter also stipulated that “if the preacher leaves for any reason not deemed reasonable and approved by the local ordinary or general vicars, his rent is to be cut in accordance with the length of his absence and that money be used for building, equipment or other needs of the chapel.”²⁶ If the priest left his post for another, for any period of time, he lost a part of his salary. This provision aimed to remove the attraction of taking on additional benefices. It is clear that the founders meant to ensure that the chapel would not fall prey to priests interested in the money but not in the work.

The chapel’s provisions spelled out the priest’s compensation in no less detail and were also tailored to preemptively combat potential embezzlement by imposing controls and limits on how money was to be spent and by whom. The priest was to live off the endowment, but was to be paid no more than twenty groschen and was specifically prohibited from asking for more money.²⁷ The provisions allowed for no pay raise except in the case of the priest deciding to use his own money to do so. The charter was also specific about the way in which gifts, alms, and other contributions were to be handled, again making it preemptively difficult to cheat. The knowledge that his income was fixed and that there was no further available funding was probably supposed to free the priest from plotting to make money and dreaming up ways for how. This was eminently important to the chapel’s founders, who—along with Prague’s pro-reform clerics—saw greed as the greatest stumbling block in the life of a priest and, therefore, of the church.

In order to lessen the temptation and also to weed out candidates interested solely in additional incomes, the founders spoke explicitly about the problem of greed in the charter’s provisions. The charter described greed as the “mother of all temptation leading many to their downfall.”²⁸ Underscoring the temptations of greed, the charter’s author wrote, for the first time switching to a firstperson narrative, “I decided that gifts, alms, and other contributions will not be handled by the preachers for any reason; they are to be locked in a common chest and kept under three locks. The first key will be in the hands of the preacher, the second in the hands of the masters, and the third in the hands of the patron or whomever he entrusts the key to.”²⁹ This arrangement was supposed to make it impossible for the priest to embezzle the chapel’s funds. To ensure honesty and fairness, the funds were to be handled only by the three overseers. It was an intricate arrangement. The gifts were to be used for the following in this order: to pay the priest from the adjacent church (ninety groschen twice a year); if anything was left over, it was to be used for the building and reconstruction of the chapel. If there was no need for such expenditures, it was to be used for books for the chapel and for the preacher, and when there were enough of them, all surplus money was to be kept and used to increase the salary for the chaplain. If there was money left over, it was to be used to establish another preacher, and—if there was not enough money in the endowment—to supplement his income from the surplus money; and after that, the surplus was to be used to buy an annual rent; once that was established, it was to be used to support one able student, who was poor but dedicated to the study of theology. If there was yet additional surplus, then two (or more) students were to be financed in this way; the establishment of the students (duties, rule, manner of life) was left up to the preacher and the three masters of the university at the time.³⁰

The charter spelled out a hierarchy of payments: the priest in the adjacent parish church, whose revenues were bound to shrink with the establishment of Bethlehem and whose opposition could create problems for the fledgling foundation, the building itself, then books for the preacher and for the chapel. Any surplus was then to be used to augment the salary of the chaplain up to a specific amount and, with his payment ceiling having been reached, for the establishment of another preacher (whose duties were to be shared with the chapel’s original preacher) and, last, for the establishment of students. These financial arrangements show that the founders saw careful money management as integral to the chapel’s success, as a reformed place, that is to say, as a place that preemptively combated what the founders perceived to be the worst and most persistent errors of the contemporary church, with the chapel’s provisions mimicking the complaints made by reform clerics of the clerical culture as a whole. This suggests that the reform efforts at this time were primarily aimed at clerics, making the reform a curiously clerical affair. The laity, on the other hand, appears almost peripheral to the efforts of reforming the church.

Hus’s Tenure at Bethlehem

Bethlehem did not become instantly popular. Little is known about the decade immediately after the chapel’s founding, but frequent personnel changes (three different priests in six years) suggest some uncertainty about its direction. However, the chapel began to draw big crowds with the arrival of Jan Hus in 1402.³¹ Hus was about thirty-two years old when he was appointed to Bethlehem Chapel.³² And while the income from the chapel was not large, to the best of our knowledge, Hus never sought another, better-paying job.³³ He worked there tirelessly, preaching sermons that drew vast crowds, until he was excommunicated and forced to leave Prague in October 1412.³⁴ The chapel was not a part of Prague’s parish network, but rather a kind of para-church organization, adherence to which was voluntary and constituted a commitment beyond regular church attendance. This suggests that the audience was self-selecting and motivated, both of which would become important characteristics in Hus’s quest to build a reformed faction.

During his tenure at Bethlehem, Hus preached about 3,500 sermons,³⁵ many of them extant.³⁶ According to contemporary accounts, the chapel was usually full to the bursting point. Given the fact that many would first attend mass in their own parish church and then go to hear Jan Hus speak, we can assume that Hus had a charismatic presence and a message that resonated.³⁷ Indeed, Hus was a performer, combining spiritual exhortations with sharp critique of his contemporary society and its higher echelons. On some days, he would hold his audience’s attention for hours, occasionally even preaching two sermons back to back. The vast majority of his sermons were recorded in Latin and not in Czech, which was the language in which they were delivered, and so we will never know exactly how he spoke, what jokes he made, or if his words were infused with irony or sarcasm. But we do know that he was lively and his words had traction.

However, Hus’s vernacular preaching eventually proved contentious because he used the pulpit at Bethlehem to air complaints about the clergy in Prague. That is to say, Hus’s seditious preaching was the original reason why he was noticed by the authorities. He first came under attack in 1408, six years after he took over the pulpit at Bethlehem,³⁸ when the clergy of Prague accused him of sedition before the archbishop. The fact that the first complaint came from the clergy of Prague, in effect from among Hus’s colleagues, suggests that the case against him grew out of local conflict. The accusers found Hus’s sermons to be inciting the people against the ecclesiastical hierarchy and subverting clerical reputations. The complaints show us how Hus irritated his colleagues and superiors, which in turn helps us understand his popular appeal.

The document against Hus contained three articles.

The first article alleged that Hus had spoken against simony, the purchase or sale of spiritual things.³⁹ The article was not attacking simony, which clerics continued to practice. The doctrinal issue was that not ceasing the practice after being warned produced mortal sin and made those clerics unfit for office. What Hus’s accusers objected to most vigorously was the fact that Hus preached against persistent simony “before a large number of people of both sexes,” even advising them against attending the churches of persistent sinners. Hus’s accusers alleged that these sermons contradicted the teaching of the holy church, damaging and scandalizing both clergy and laity.⁴⁰

The second article alleged that Hus berated a well-known and wealthy priest and master, Peter Všerub. This must have been a phenomenal moment: Hus is reported as having said that he would not accept the entire world if it meant he would die while in possession of so many and so large benefices as Master Peter had held. This might not have been so bad, if Hus had not chosen to make this statement at Peter’s funeral. Instead of praising the deceased, which was expected then as it is now, Hus turned the dead cleric into a figure of what was wrong with the church. This was typical of the kind of rhetorical performance that must have irritated his colleagues and his superiors. But Hus had clearly gone beyond being merely an irritant. His accusers feared that such preaching would not edify the people but would only incite them to turn against the clergy.⁴¹

The third and final article alleged that Hus, in a public sermon, berated the clergy of Prague. In so doing, he was allegedly in violation of synodal decrees, which ruled that all priests were prohibited from preaching excessively against the priestly rank. The accusers argued that Hus used his sermons to turn people against all clergy and to incite hatred against them.⁴² They also alleged that Hus’s sermons damaged devoted minds, extinguished charity, and rendered the clergy unpleasant to the people, leaving his audiences agitated and discontent.⁴³

From the perspective of the authorities, these accusations were a part of a larger problem that was brewing in the capital in the first decade of the fifteenth century: Wyclif’s ideas.⁴⁴ Wyclif’s works first arrived in Prague in the 1380s, reaching a critical mass in the 1390s, and the reception was a complicated and strife-ridden affair. The scholarly exchange was, in part, the result of a newfound closeness between England and Bohemia. The two countries had been enjoying a period of rich cultural and religious cross-pollination that started with the outbreak of the Great Schism in 1378, which diverted Czech students from Paris (obedient to the Avignon popes) to England (which, like Bohemia, remained loyal to the popes in Rome). This new affinity intensified in the wake of Richard II’s marriage to Anne of Bohemia in 1382. The universities in Prague and Oxford benefited from this new connection, with numerous academic exchanges of students, as well as books, and with a new scholarship for Czech students studying at Oxford.⁴⁵ Brought back from England by Jerome of Prague, Wyclif’s tractates, such as Dialogus, Trialogus, and two unspecified Eucharistic tractates (possibly De Eucharistia and De Apostasia), began to circulate around the university, launching a serious study and discussion of Wyclif’s ideas there, especially of his teaching about the nature of the church.⁴⁶ Wyclif’s teachings, in particular his philosophy of extreme realism, found an eager and accepting audience among the Czech masters at the university in Prague.⁴⁷ Since then, it not only gave a unifying program to the pro-reform masters at the university (answering many of their questions that were already in the air but that had stumped the Czech-speaking reformers), but also became intertwined with the Czech-German antagonism at the university, giving a distinct voice to the Czech minority there over and against the prevailing philosophy of nominalism among their German colleagues.⁴⁸

Wyclif’s teachings found ardent supporters at the university, but the church authorities tended to view this support as suspect. In 1403, the first set of forty-five articles (which would be cited again at the Council of Constance) was condemned in Prague, to the great chagrin of many university masters there. Between 1406 and 1408, the synods in the city took up the problem of Wyclif’s remanence, banning all teaching of Wyclif’s treatises. This escalated in the archbishop’s order that all of Wyclif’s books be handed over in 1409 and culminated in the public burning of Wyclif’s books in 1410.

Hus was drawn into this general nervousness about Wyclif’s influence in Prague. In 1408, a group of parish priests from Prague filed a host of accusations against Hus, arguing that he criticized other clerics from his pulpit and insulted their reputation, even claiming that Hus had preached Wyclif’s Eucharistic doctrine of remanence. The synod’s interference reveals how nervous the authorities felt about Hus’s influence on the ordinary faithful. In fact, Hus spent most of his time in the pulpit proclaiming the need for a personal, inner conversion of every individual. Occasionally, he preached on the subject of priestly immorality, arguing that it put an obstacle in the path of the lay faithful if the priests did not serve as moral exemplars and guides on the path to salvation.

In accusations against Hus, the problem was one of context. Although Hus delivered sermons critical of the clergy at synods as well as on the university soil, he attracted the suspicion of the archbishop only after saying the same things in Bethlehem Chapel before the laity.⁴⁹ The rules for castigating clerical immorality were different at synods or on the university soil, where only clerics were present. In those situations, his fellow priests welcomed his harshness and even sought it out. The archbishop of Prague invited Hus to preach at the local synod, not once but twice, in 1405 and again in 1407. The invitations stopped after the first set of accusations in 1408. But before Hus was enmeshed in legal action, he was chosen to be a kind of ecclesiastical keynote speaker at both synods, setting the tone for the entire gathering. On both occasions, Hus delivered a searing critique of simony, clerical laziness, and immorality evident in the two extant synodal sermons. In the first meeting on October 19, 1405, Hus chose to preach on a verse from the Gospel of Matthew (22:37), “Diliges Dominum Deum tuum.” In his sermon, he speaks about the church as the bride of Christ, lambasting those clerics who had turned away from God’s love and from following Christ. In the meeting two years later, on October 18, 1407, Hus preached on a verse from Ephesians (6:14), “State succincti lumbos,” and criticized clerics who lived with concubines, calling them heretics.⁵⁰

Hus’s sermons at the university, six of which are extant, were no different. In Hus’s sermon delivered at the university on December 5, 1404, he especially railed against hypocrisy among the clergy, which was directly related to their negligence of clerical duties and, of course, greed and simony.⁵¹ Greed was, in Hus’s view, the root of all evil in the church, and he especially despised those who strove after ecclesiastical honors and appointments, and those who possessed multiple benefices. He continually reminded his audience of the church’s own rulings against multiple benefices and simony. He also reminded his listeners that the general synod itself banned payments to priests for holy services, including baptisms, funerals, and holy communion. Hus lamented the fact that this rule had been consistently disobeyed, and complained that very few priests did not receive money in exchange for spiritual services. It bears repeating that Bethlehem’s charter was set up in order to counter these very customs that were rife among the clergy.

Hus’s high view of the priestly vocation is evident from his insistence that those who did not live up to a strict—and somewhat radical—standard of behavior ought to be removed from the preaching office and from the church. Citing the words of Jesus to his disciples, Hus admonished his fellow clergy in unequivocal terms: “you are the salt of the people,” he told them, “by your exemplary life and illumination through your salubrious teaching.”⁵² The priest who failed to live well also failed to show the path of salvation to the faithful entrusted to his care and therefore was no longer effective. The sermons delivered before the clergy were as critical as those before the people. Hus did not flatter the clergy to their faces and complain about them behind their backs; if anything, he spoke with even greater candor and indignation to his colleagues.

Hus’s case shows that complaints against clerical greed and immorality were an accepted (and applauded) part of life in the clerical circles, but were not tolerated when raised before the laity. And Hus used the pulpit in Bethlehem to air complaints about the clergy in Prague, addressing criticisms of fellow clerics to the laity. This simply was not done. The clerics believed that the laity should not be dragged into what was, they thought, the church’s internal business. One was supposed to reserve such criticisms for gatherings of the clergy, in the same way that present-day political parties try to deal with internal issues internally, and frown upon their members leaking internal disputes to the public. Hus transgressed this boundary, a decision that was the first sign of the movement that took his name: addressing internal clerical business to the laity. But it is clear that the laity enjoyed listening to Hus speaking on these topics and berating fellow clerics. This created the kind of intimacy that arises between two parties when they unite in criticizing a third, and it won Hus a sizeable following of like-minded clerics and laity.

In 1409, Hus was confronted with another set of accusations. This time, he was accused by the inquisitor of Prague, Jan Protiva. The inquisitor accused Hus of preaching excessively against the clergy and of inciting the people against them. He argued that Hus’s preaching damaged the reputation of priests and discouraged lay obedience. The inquisitor also accused Hus of urging the faithful to leave their parish and come to Bethlehem Chapel instead, even exhorting the faithful to disobey those prelates and priests who lived in sin. Finally, the inquisitor accused Hus of preaching that priests in mortal sin could not celebrate a valid mass or any other sacrament.⁵³ As before, Hus answered all complaints against him, arguing that he had not violated any decrees. But the archbishop would not be placated. In his view, Hus’s preaching posed a threat, and Bethlehem Chapel came to be seen by the ecclesiastical hierarchy as a font of error and sedition. The nature of the accusations is significant: if Hus even hinted that the faithful who were dissatisfied with their parish priests—or whose priests were judged to live in sin—ought to leave their parish and come to Bethlehem instead, then this is evidence that he began to see his chapel as an alternative place of worship and that he was beginning to see his supporters and sympathizers among the faithful as a kind of para-church organization. Telling the faithful to disobey sinful prelates—or those Hus described as sinful—and leave their parishes may have made sense in light of Hus’s Wycliffite ecclesiology, but it amounted to a piece of advice that was both disruptive and subversive.

This was no longer merely a local trouble. Soon after, the archbishop turned to the curia. And in response, in December 1409, Pope Alexander V issued a bull authorizing the archbishop to prosecute error. This was the bull that legitimized the collection (and later destruction) of Wyclif’s books in Prague mentioned above. It also banned preaching in places other than the cathedral, collegiate, parish, or monastic churches, a decision that was clearly aimed against the Bethlehem Chapel, though neither Hus nor Bethlehem was mentioned by name. The authorities may not have wished to add fuel to the fire by singling out Hus specifically, but the intent of the ban was clear. This ban also confirms that the authorities had identified Bethlehem as a source of trouble, well aware of the kind of dangers that Hus’s growing organization posed to the hierarchical church.

Hus’s Later Sermons: Evidence of Radicalization

As a direct result of the charges, Hus’s message intensified, and he began speaking out against clerical corruption and immorality with the kind of harsh candor that he had previously reserved for addressing the clerics directly. The tenor of his sermons shifted noticeably: the collection of sermons preached in the Bethlehem Chapel between 1410 and 1412⁵⁴ shows a different kind of a preacher from the one in 1403. Salvation of the faithful remained the cornerstone of Hus’s preaching efforts, but that subject was now intertwined with a critique of the inefficacy of his fellow clergy in a way that was absent in earlier sermons. This development signaled a shift in Hus’s thinking: a radicalization of Hus’s stances and opinions. Hus did not hesitate to criticize the clerical rank to the point of separating himself from all morally corrupt clerics. In doing so, he adopted what has been described as an extraclerical position, that is to say, using his position as a member of the elite clerical establishment to criticize the behavior of other clergy for failing to live out the ideals that they espoused.⁵⁵ It accomplished two goals. It allowed him to distance himself from the institutional clergy that he criticized and to appeal to the laity, letting them know that he was a viable alternative.

It seems clear that Hus used the chapel as a venue for voicing his dissent. After he was banned by the papal bull from preaching, Hus spoke publicly against the decree and about his intent not to comply. The pulpit in Bethlehem proved the perfect venue, and the audience he had cultivated for the past eight years were the perfect recipients for his message of public dissent. In a spectacular sermon delivered on June 25, 1410, Hus announced his disobedience of the papal bull and read from his appeal. Then he turned to his audience, asking those gathered if they supported him in this decision, and they shouted out that they would. This event signaled that the laity gathered at Bethlehem was willing to defy authorities in order to stand with Hus. In effect, he took his appeal to the laity and presented them with the choice of obeying the church authorities or obeying him, a move that would have serious and lasting implications for religious life in Bohemia.⁵⁶ This was the beginning of his open campaign of disobedience, one of the first moments in which Hus can be seen as deliberately creating a party of followers loyal to him as opposed to the official authorities.

In a number of subsequent sermons Hus then declared that he did not wish to obey the prelates or even the archbishop in this matter.⁵⁷ He then exhorted the faithful to disobey the counsel of those in authority (parents, both natural and spiritual) if, in their view, the judgments of these authorities went against God’s commandments.⁵⁸ “Let us not obey the king himself or a prelate should they order us to do something which defies the example of Christ, because by disobeying the mortal’s erroneous command we are obeying Christ.”⁵⁹ This is an invitation with serious and lasting consequences. Hus says that it is at times possible to obey Christ by disobeying the church hierarchy, in other words, he presents a divide between Christ and the church. In light of Hus’s ecclesiology, this makes perfect sense.

As of 1410, Hus distanced himself from ecclesiastical authorities and began styling himself not so much their reformer but their alternative. One of the strategies that Hus employed to present himself as a reformed alternative to the corrupt authorities was to speak about the church as already divided, as composed of “us” and “them,” two camps, one containing himself and his followers, the other his opponents. To underscore the depth of the chasm, Hus equated his opponents with the party of Judas, explaining that, like Judas, they followed Christ solely for the sake of alms. Hus equated this with serving as priests for the sake of benefices and taking holy orders so as to have an easy life.⁶⁰ The “us versus them” mentality is evident throughout these later sermons. In one example, Hus illustrated the division between the two parties by saying that, whereas Christ said, go preach God’s word, they (meaning Christ’s and, fittingly, Hus’s opponents) say do not preach, do not offer God’s word gratis. Whereas Christ said not to bring gold or silver with you, they say the opposite, and whereas Christ said, we do not want to be served, the corrupt clergy claim the opposite. At the end of the sermon, Hus appealed directly to his listeners: “let us not act like this [meaning like Christ’s and Hus’s opponents], but let us compare our lives with the life of Christ, so that with him we could enter the eternal kingdom.”⁶¹ In order to underscore the differences between the two camps, Hus described the pope and prelates as the enemies of God and the Scriptures. In a direct allusion to the papal ban on preaching, Hus argued that because the pope and prelates ignored God’s command that his word be preached in the whole world, they showed themselves as “enemies of the Scriptures … and false witnesses.” Such enemies of the Scriptures ought to be condemned, Hus insisted, by all who love God and also by God. Hus styled himself and his followers as the party of God, of the Scriptures and of such authorities as the apostles, and also Augustine, Gregory, Pope Leo, Bede, John Chrysostom, and Anacletus, with whom Hus agreed that “one should not obey [another man] in evil.”⁶²

As a way of discovering who belonged to which party, Hus invited his faithful to test the lives of those around them. In one memorable sermon, he advised them: “When you see any Christian, immediately think whether his life agrees with the Scriptures. If you think that it does”—Hus here emphasized each person’s responsibility for his own discernment—“then he is a true Christian, if he does not act the way that Christ had ordered he is false.”⁶³ This invitation illustrates Hus’s conviction about the importance of the Scriptures in the life of the laity. However, it is a deeply unsettling proposition. In effect, Hus gave the laity the license to judge the clergy’s spiritual mandate and to decide for themselves whether they would recognize (and obey) it or not.

Hus’s status as a reformer is unassailable. His preaching marks him (and others in his generation) as a pro-reform cleric. But laity existed as a kind of afterthought in this pro-reform world. What kind of action or behavior marked them as being in favor of reform? Hus was the first to stir the laity into (what he considered) reform action by giving them a discernible identity: attendance at Bethlehem, willingness to ditch clerics seen as corrupt or immoral, disobedience of commands seen as unjust, and loyalty to himself. This was a way of being and of doing that distinguished them from those who were less committed to the goals of reform. The following sections will explore the ways in which Hus used different vernacular media to persuade the laity to take his side over that of the authorities.

The Speaking Walls of Bethlehem: Exhorting the Laity to Dissent

The pulpit in Bethlehem Chapel was crucial to Hus’s work as a preacher.⁶⁴ But the chapel’s physical space had another function: its decoration and configuration underscored the message contained in the daily sermons, first of compliance and later of dissent.⁶⁵ Probably the most surprising feature of the chapel’s interior design is that three texts, rather than images, served as the main focus of the chapel’s decorative program.⁶⁶ It is possible that images also adorned Bethlehem’s walls but this is not entirely clear.⁶⁷ All three of the texts now appear on the walls of the reconstructed chapel. What is important for our analysis, and what is not immediately clear from the modern appearance of the chapel, is the order in which each of these texts was put up. From contemporary letters and chance remarks in other documents, it appears that the three texts were not all introduced at the same time. The vernacular confession of faith and the Ten Commandments came first, sometime in 1411 and were followed by Hus’s own treatise On the Six Errors (De sex erroribus), dealing with errors that Hus perceived as rampant in the church, a little over a year later.⁶⁸

The timing and selection of the particular texts that would be inscribed on the walls of Bethlehem Chapel illustrate the increasing radicalization of John Hus’s reform initiative. The gradual rollout of these texts suggests that the chapel space reflected and responded to the unfolding historical events: whenever external developments forced the Hussites further into opposition, a new treatise was added to one of the walls inside the chapel. Furthermore, each successive message that was put up was more radical than the previous one, confirming the evidence gleaned elsewhere. As the ecclesiastical sanctions against him tightened, Hus responded by posting more polemical texts.

The shift in tone and message between the first set of texts, inscribed sometime in 1411, and the polemical treatise, inscribed contemporaneously or shortly after Hus’s exile in October 1412, bespeaks a massive change in strategy. The Ten Commandments and the confession of faith were inscribed in the vernacular and do not depart from the contemporary standard of orthodoxy. Their display served as a reminder of the essentials of the faith, fully in keeping with the chapel’s mission to advance the goals of lay catechesis, serve the spiritual needs of the Czech speakers in Prague, and promote interior conversion to Christ. The Ten Commandments, especially, were being increasingly displayed on tablets or walls in churches around Europe.

The confession of faith (credo) was not in any way controversial. It was said during the Latin celebration of the mass, but Hus wrote it out in the vernacular, to remind his followers what they held as most important. For an added effect, Hus changed the grammar in the credo, from the usual first person singular to a singular imperative, to convey the impression that he was addressing each of the individuals directly. Thus, the walls admonished those present to “believe,” as a command, “in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, and the communion of saints,” instead of the usual “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, and the communion of saints.” The entire confession of faith was retold in this way, commanding faith according to the belief of the church. Along with the Ten Commandments, also in the grammatical form of a singular imperative, the walls featured an unimpeachably orthodox exhortation to faith and set the rules of observance for the community of Czech faithful at Bethlehem. The writings on the walls served not as much as a reminder but rather as a command.

The remarkable thing about the writings that Hus commissioned to be put on the walls of his chapel, in addition to the fact that he selected textual ornamentation, is the fact that both texts appeared in the vernacular. This decision was a conscious, premeditated move, in keeping with the chapel’s mission, which was to serve the spiritual needs of the Czech-speaking population of Prague. This use of the vernacular would send a powerful message to all who came to hear Jan Hus preach. But the fact that the two texts were displayed in the Czech vernacular was important for other reasons as well. It signaled a tacit exclusion of those for whom the preaching space was not intended: the Germans. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, Prague had a sizable German community. Many Germans were associated with the royal court, others came by way of ecclesiastical and other appointments. Still others were descendants of German colonists, who had settled there back in the thirteenth century. The two linguistic groups generally coexisted peacefully, but resentment was at times felt toward the Germans, who despite being relative newcomers occupied many of the highest positions of authority in the state and the city. Many if not most citizens of Prague were probably functionally bilingual—business was conducted in both Czech and German—but even if the Germans were able to read the texts on the Bethlehem walls, the language would have signaled exclusion to them.

Although by 1411 Jan Hus was already calling for the reform of clerical life, the space where he preached did not contain any physical displays of his reform agenda. It was not until his excommunication and exile in October of 1412, which followed the pope’s ban on preaching in Bethlehem Chapel, that Hus added a polemical treatise, written in Latin, to the wall decorations. In comparison with the earlier inscriptions, this later one, made in Latin, was highly polemical. It is this move from the uncontroversial to the polemical that signaled a shift in Hus’s view of his reforming mission to the laity.

And indeed, much had changed since 1411. One of the most important domestic developments had been the king’s decision to support Pope John XXIII’s policy of selling indulgences in order to finance a crusading expedition against a political adversary. King Wenceslas, who for reasons of his own needed to maintain his alliance with John XXIII, allowed the collection of indulgences to begin in his territory. In response, Jan Hus and his followers spoke up sharply and repeatedly against this decision. Ultimately, Hus’s opposition to the king would amount to political suicide, but that would not become clear until a few years later when Hus’s falling out with the king deprived him of a patron who could have protected him from condemnation at the Council of Constance in 1415. However, back in the year 1412, Jan Hus was not to be deterred by the loss of his most powerful ally. In fact, he attempted to compensate for it by recruiting an entirely new constituency, the people of Prague.

After October 1412, Hus began deliberately to mobilize the laity in support of his interpretation of what was wrong with the church and commissioned his treatise On the Six Errors to be inscribed on the walls of Bethlehem Chapel. The new inscription was a declaration of war on corrupt clerics and the church that shielded them, but also a veiled declaration of his own innocence in the curia’s continuing lawsuit against him. The treatise, written and displayed in Latin (though a vernacular version did circulate), was entirely composed of quotations from patristic authors addressing six errant practices that Hus saw plaguing the contemporary church.⁶⁹ In the treatise, Hus refuted the claims that priests could create God (that is, in the sacrament of the Eucharist) and forgive sins against others. He also warned against holding belief in the Virgin Mary, the saints, and the popes in the same sense as in God. Here he drew on Augustine’s distinction between different kinds of belief: believing in someone, believing about someone, and believing someone.⁷⁰ In the fourth section, Hus argued against the notion that the clergy, the prelates, or even the pope ought to be obeyed without question. Hus’s fifth argument was that a condemnation could only be considered valid if it was in accord with God’s law. Finally, Hus argued against simony, the purchase or sale of spiritual things. He viewed this as a pernicious vice, spreading through the body of the church, as he put it, like leprosy.

In order to make his criticism more authoritative and scathing, it consisted entirely of quotations from the Bible and the church fathers and was inscribed in this way on the southern and northern walls of Bethlehem Chapel. Because the inscriptions could hardly be deciphered by those present, being written above the audience’s head and in Latin, their significance was largely symbolic. They were there and Hus could point to them if he liked.⁷¹ In this way, it was as if Jesus, the apostle Paul, Augustine, and Gregory the Great were themselves directly criticizing the errors in the contemporary church, with Hus merely serving as their messenger. The quotations later appeared together with his commentary as a book (discussed later in this chapter), but only the direct quotations were inscribed on the walls in Bethlehem.

It is possible that Hus expanded upon the quotations in his sermons, but his choice to display texts by esteemed and unshakable authorities of the ancient church rather than his own words of commentary is of great importance. By posting them publicly, Hus was, in effect, claiming that he (and the ideals that he stood for) had the authority of the early church behind him. With the church fathers figuratively by his side, Hus channeled the authority of the Scriptures as well as of revered figures such as Augustine, Gregory the Great, and Jerome, in support of his preaching and reform agenda. The small site of his preaching, the Bethlehem Chapel, was thus transformed into a repository of apostolic truth. A space intended to meet the spiritual needs of the Czech population in Prague became the headquarters of a movement calling for disobedience to papal authority. The decoration of Bethlehem Chapel bears witness to the shift: whereas the two original texts, the confession of faith and the Ten Commandments, could not be found objectionable by any ecclesiastical authority, the quotations had highly polemical implications. Whereas the two original texts served as instructions in obedience to the teaching of the church, the later text served as a moral justification for disobedience.

Hus’s public criticism of clerical privilege and immorality was not unusual among pro-reform preachers. But Hus disseminated his opinions publicly, encouraging the laity to identify and speak against clerical immorality, in effect telling them that they could decide what was right and moral. But this was no invitation to follow one’s personal truth: Hus used a number of strategies to persuade the laity to follow his own judgment on what was right and moral. His implied leadership was apparent everywhere, even in the choice of wall inscriptions. The excerpts from the church fathers were left in Latin, unlike the Ten Commandments and the confession of faith. By leaving these quotations untranslated, Hus put himself in the position of a leader and interpreter, necessary to explicate the meaning of an otherwise unintelligible text to his audience.⁷² Again, the shift is apparent. Now, the walls are intended to speak not only to the Czech inhabitants of Prague, but to all of Christendom. And we can assume that—in light of Hus’s exile from Prague—the walls bearing his inscriptions assumed a memorial as well as catechetical function.

Hus’s On the Six Errors: Educating the Faithful About Clerical Abuses

From this time on, educating the laity about corruption and wrongdoing in the church was an indelible part of this public campaign.

Hus’s decision to write and circulate a vernacular treatise On the Six Errors coincided with his exile in October 1412.⁷³ The treatise included vernacular translations of the wall inscriptions and added Hus’s interpretation of them.⁷⁴ Given Hus’s impending departure from his pulpit, it is likely that the treatise was created to replace Hus’s physical presence at Bethlehem, by providing the necessary explanation and contextualization of the wall writings that he would have offered in person when present. The purpose of the treatise was educational: by instructing the laity directly, it taught them to distinguish between proper and improper use of clerical powers and, implicitly, between legitimate and illegitimate use of authority by clerics. This kind of education, Hus thought, would enable the laity easily to recognize and resist clerical abuses. In that sense, Hus offered an education that was potentially quite subversive. Hus’s discussion of the six errors not only undermined the authority of morally corrupt clergy, it gave the laity permission to decide which clerics could be deemed “in error” and therefore not worthy of obedience. This opened the door to lay disobedience of authority figures based on criteria that Hus himself thought important. However, Hus did not frame this discussion in terms of disobedience or even dissent. Rather, he spoke in positive terms, of reforming the church. For laity, to participate in the reform movement meant, according to Hus, to decide which clerics are corrupt (or maybe to take Hus’s word for it) and ignore their dictates.

But as mentioned above, Hus also had personal reasons for selecting these particular six articles. All of them grew out of Hus’s personal experience with contemporary clergy. Taken together, they build the justification for Hus’s recent disobedience of curial mandates, by using church-sanctioned theological teachings to defend his position. The treatise, circulating in both Latin and the vernacular, was a declaration of what was wrong with the clerical elite and why they ought not to be obeyed. The fact that he translated it into the vernacular implies his desire to convince both the clerics and the laity to support him instead of his persecutors.

In the fall of 1412, Hus was already forming a faction of supporters by expanding his core audience at Bethlehem, the same people who shouted their agreement with Hus’s appeal against the papal bull that banned preaching in private places. After reading the bull from the pulpit at Bethlehem on June 25, 1410,⁷⁵ Hus encouraged his listeners by saying, “If you wish to side with me, do not fear excommunication, because you have appealed alongside me according to the rules and order of the church.”⁷⁶ His treatise O šesti bludiech (On the Six Errors) and others that followed aimed to influence the laity to take a stand against church authorities.

In his criticism of ecclesiastical errors, Hus might have chosen any number of erroneous practices and aberrations, but he focused on those that most affected him personally. In the first error, Hus criticized “foolish priests” (blázniví kněžie), who boasted to be creators of their Creator and able to create him as many times as they pleased. This declaration put the priests above Christ himself, a scandalous aspiration. Hus drew on Augustine’s complicated distinction between four different ways of creating something, but the underlying message was simple: priests did not have the power to make something out of nothing. The celebration (and making) of the Eucharist did not make the priest a creator, but rather a servant of God. Hus admonished boastful clerics: “You cannot create the body of Christ, but God does so through you. Try to offer the sacrifice with due honor.”⁷⁷ Hus referred to the priests with honor and deference due to a priest, while teaching the laity to see the clergy as instruments of God, who channel but do not control God’s power.

The second error addressed belief in the saints and the pope, but it was really a meditation on the fallibility of humanity, coupled with a warning not to believe any one person unconditionally. Drawing again on Augustine, Hus drew a distinction between three ways of holding a belief: to believe in something, to hold a belief about something, and to believe something.⁷⁸ As an example, Hus used the apostle Paul. Hus insisted that the faithful ought to believe that the Holy Spirit spoke through Paul, but despite Paul’s privileged status in the church, the faithful were not to believe him if he had lied or swore mendacious oaths. This comment suggests that Hus thought that the faithful needed to scrutinize Paul’s sayings carefully. If given a chance to converse with him face-to-face, they should not automatically believe all of his statements because of his elevated status in the church. As for other saints—popes included—he urged the faithful to believe them only when they spoke the truth, again implying that the faithful needed to be on their guard and actively sift through the saints’ pronouncements. When the saints spoke falsely, they should neither be believed nor obeyed. The fact that Hus included the pope among the saints was no coincidence: he was alluding to the recent papal bull banning preaching in private places. Throughout the treatise, Hus repeatedly reminded the reader of the ultimate fallibility of the ecclesiastical authorities, especially those with whom he was in conflict.⁷⁹

After exhorting the laity to question even the most exalted of church authorities, Hus disputed the clerical power to forgive sins and the control that this allowed the priests to exert over the laity. Evidently, Hus had encountered priests who argued that they held the power to decide which sins God would forgive, an opinion that Hus was eager to refute. Hus explained that “forgiveness depended on the will and power of God and Christ and on the penitence or hardness of heart of each man in his soul, if anyone suffers grief on account of his sins and is sorry that he angered God, then God forgives his sins through Christ.” For forgiveness to take place, the collaboration of only two parties was needed: God and the penitent. Hus expressed ideas that would surface again during the sixteenth-century Reformation, with the priest’s role as a conduit of God’s power contributing very little to the act of forgiveness itself. He was clear on this point: “And so it is written on the walls of the Bethlehem chapel so that people would be forewarned and know that priests do not have the power to forgive sins.”⁸⁰ Priests possessed no power of their own to grant forgiveness and could do nothing to prevent it from taking place. Hus concluded with a sharp criticism of those clerics who exaggerated their powers of forgiveness or, even worse, used them for profit or control. He implored the faithful not to be manipulated by clerics who refuse them absolution.

Given his recent track record with the papal curia, Hus was personally most affected by the fourth error, the idea that all faithful—including himself—owed unconditional obedience to all authorities. Hus listed bishops, lords, and fathers as examples of such authorities but his main target was the papacy.⁸¹ Drawing on his own recent experience in the ecclesiastical courts, Hus argued that unconditional obedience was owed to no one human or institution. In fact, all needed to obey God even if it meant defying ecclesiastical authorities. He used Saints Catherine and Dorothy as examples, to make the point that God is to be obeyed over any other authority. Hus praised the two women, who both refused to take a husband, insisting that they had been called by the Holy Spirit to pursue a life of virginity. He argued that they were right to persevere in their calling, despite the protests of their mothers and fathers, adding that they would have been right to persevere even if the pope himself had tried to dissuade them. This was a hypothetical scenario; of course the pope did not interfere with Catherine’s and Dorothy’s decision to take the veil. But this scenario introduced the possibility that the pope could be mistaken and oppose something unquestionably good and authentic, in this case a saintly life of virginity.

Hus then transitioned to a more controversial example: the pope’s recent ban on preaching in the capital, which Hus understood to be a personal attack. He argued that this ban was not to be obeyed, as it countered the judgment, will, and glory of God: “And so it is written in Bethlehem that people ought not to obey their prelates unless they command what is right to do.”⁸² He wrote: “the pope also bans priests from preaching God’s word in chapels, he bans priests from celebrating mass, priests who preach well and whose heart is in the right place. In that case, the priests ought to disobey the pope’s order, because it is contrary to God’s commandments. And so it is sometimes beneficial to disobey prelates and one’s superiors.”⁸³ Hus insisted that no ban on preaching (or on celebrating the mass), regardless of the authority behind it, should ever be obeyed. This was a highly polemical move. Unauthorized preaching had been a thorn in the church’s side since the times of Peter Valdes in the twelfth century, and never quite went away in spite of repeated legislation and persecution against offenders. Hus’s hypothetical example of a pope who opposed the saintly life of virginity established a conjectural possibility that even the pope might err in judgment. Thus, Hus could suggest that the pope made an error in his ban on preaching. In a court of law, a vague suggestion is worth very little. But in the court of public opinion, it was enough to sow doubt and dissatisfaction among Hus’s lay supporters.

In the fifth error, Hus took up a discussion of ecclesiastical condemnation. Once again, this was in direct response to his recent experiences with the curia and served to undermine, however implicitly, the authority of ecclesiastical authorities.

Hus allowed that sometimes condemnation was an appropriate punishment but argued that a distinction needed to be made between just and unjust condemnation, depending on whether or not it was issued in accordance with God’s commandment of love. Hus did not address the question of how to determine this or who could do so. He simply implied that the decisions of clerical authorities are not automatically valid or trustworthy; one has to review and judge them for oneself. Hus presented a hypothetical scenario: if a man, innocent of mortal sin, was punished with unjust condemnation, yet continued to stand firm and endured the shame humbly, he would not be harmed by the condemnation. Quite the opposite: his soul would profit. Of course, this situation was hardly hypothetical. Hus was, of course, this man. The legal case against him, beginning with his appeal against the burning of Wyclif’s books, dragged on with new and stricter injunctions.⁸⁴ Hus wrote: “And, for this reason, false condemnation abounds and it is clear that such condemnation harms those who issue it rather than those who suffer it. Because if one is innocent of mortal sin and if they use said condemnation in order to separate him from God’s truth and if he stands firm suffering in humility, the condemnation does not harm him but instead benefits his soul.”⁸⁵ Hus’s voice resounded clearly here, insisting that he had been unjustly condemned, yet incurred no spiritual harm from it, and even encouraging the faithful not to shy away from contact with him as they would have been instructed to do.

But Hus openly stated that if he was not guilty of wrongdoing, his accusers were. With this statement he moved the discussion away from the question of his own guilt or innocence and toward the use of condemnation and excommunication by those in authority in the church. Hus insisted that ecclesiastical excommunication and condemnation ought to be used to ensure the overall health of the body of the church, by amputating diseased members rather than punishing or crushing opposition: “Condemnation and excommunication ought to be like medicine, which can heal rather than destroy a person.”⁸⁶ Condemnation had become a weapon in contemporary church disputes, and it was also widely used for a variety of nonspiritual purposes, even to punish secular offenses or to extract debts. Accusations of heresy had been bandied about for the same reasons.⁸⁷ But Hus quickly zeroed in on the problem closest to his own heart, moving on the offensive and putting the church authorities on trial. He wrote, “Whoever condemns [another] except in the case of mortal sin, condemns himself, the same holds true for when he condemns for his own vengeance or out of greed or anger or pride.”⁸⁸ In other words, ecclesiastical condemnation issued out of any sort of personal reasons, private vendettas, or attempts to squelch or control opposition, according to Hus, not only is invalid but also condemns the person issuing it. And since Hus was very vocal about his belief that he had been condemned unjustly, his discussion of the fifth error turns into an open accusation of his accusers. It is no wonder that both the king and the archbishop, who had previously supported and even admired Hus, began to regard the Bethlehem preacher as a disruptive troublemaker.

Hus ended his treatise about clerical malfeasance and corruption by addressing the problem of simony as the sixth error,⁸⁹ but the discussion seems more like an afterthought. His treatment is very brief as Hus directs his readers to his earlier treatise, entirely dedicated to the subject.⁹⁰ Hus explains the rudiments of simony, insisting that “no spiritual goods were to be exchanged for temporal rewards, money, or services”⁹¹ and that “everyone who wished to trade a material thing, such as money, service, gifts, in exchange for ordination as a priest or bishop was guilty of simony.”⁹² However, it would have been difficult to find anyone who had received an ecclesiastical office without greasing a hand or two. Also, payments for weddings, baptisms, funerals, and other services abounded, so it is not clear whether Hus really meant to indict the entire clergy or only a select few. (His views on the subject would become more pronounced in his vernacular Expositions, discussed below.) However, this general critique eventually turned into a rant about his hypocritical contemporaries, who did not suspend their services even when they knew Hus was in town, in direct violation of the interdict: “And Prague clergy along with the archbishop, knowing that I am here and that others have seen me, they did not interrupt God’s services despite the pope’s commandment that they do so. And so, themselves disobedient, they are cursed and profani, and they have lost their priesthood.”⁹³ It seems strange that Hus would complain that his visit to the city did not reactivate the terms of the interdict, which would only have been inconvenient to himself. But the double standard, the fact that the clerics disobeyed the very same papal order that they punished Hus for disobeying, is at the heart of his final complaint.

Hus’s vernacular treatise On the Six Errors educated the laity about the proper extent of clerical privilege. Hus brought important theological distinctions to the people, teaching them about the true nature of divine authority and the very real limits of clerical powers. This is where he sailed into forbidden and quite polemical territory. Hus insisted that the priests held no authority over an individual’s eventual salvation or damnation. And if the priests behaved badly, they held no authority at all. He exhorted the laity to evaluate for themselves the edicts and pronouncements of ecclesiastical leaders, including the pope. Thus, On the Six Errors is both an attempt to help the laity understand the religious matters of their day and a theological justification of Hus’s own defiant disobedience of the papal curia. Between the lines, we hear Hus quietly assuring his followers that those in accordance with God’s law would be claimed as God’s own, regardless of the ritual or legal prohibitions of the church. By insisting that the church hierarchy had no authority over his eternal fate, Hus inserted an element of individualism: the power to decide for oneself whether one lived in accordance with God’s law. Divorcing the dictates of one’s conscience from the prescriptions of the church was among the first steps in building his own faction of supporters. This was also one of the long-lasting effects of Hus’s theological education, teaching his followers not to fear the clergy on account of their powers, but rather to examine their actions and test them against their conscience. As an education, this was a highly polemical and divisive one. Hus’s decision to display this polemical treatise says much about Hus’s intention to shape an antiestablishment faction under his own direction.

Hus Appeals to Christ

Hus’s legal troubles culminated in the fourth excommunication, announced on October 18, 1412, at the meeting of the Prague synod. Since the curia did not give him justice, Hus turned to a court that would, the court of public opinion. Instead of appealing the verdict through appropriate legal channels within the twenty-three days allotted to him, Hus published what came to be known as his “Appeal to Christ.” This document was addressed to “all faithful Christians” and explained the failures of due process. Hus argued that the present interdict, as well as the excommunication imposed upon him, was unjust and resulted from an abuse of the law.⁹⁴

In a deliberate act of public theater, Hus announced his appeal to Christ from Bethlehem’s pulpit and concurrently had a translated version nailed to the gate of Mostecká tower in Prague’s Malá Strana as “broadsheet.”⁹⁵ Hus’s long-time lawyer John of Jesenice may have advised against bringing the case before the laity.⁹⁶ But John was momentarily away from Prague, and Hus acted in a way that maximized his public exposure even if it meant opting out of the legal system.⁹⁷ The appeal was unprecedented in the history of medieval canon law and, in effect, illegal: “From the perspective of the papal court and its officers, the appeal was a deliberate breach of legal procedure, an effort to obfuscate canon law, and an act of defiance against the jurisdictional authority of the church.”⁹⁸ There was some legal precedent, but no one before Hus had only appealed to Christ (all others also directed their appeal to some earthly institution). Moreover, Hus was the first to appeal a legal decision made by a court.⁹⁹ Hus’s appeal was perhaps legally unwise, but it ultimately proved a public relations coup. Because 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 before a large audience of clerics and laity.

The “Appeal to Christ” consists of two parts, incongruent in their content but well suited to rally Hus’s supporters and demonstrate his innocence. The first part uses Old Testament language to frame Hus’s experience at the hands of the curia, depicting Hus as an innocent, unjustly persecuted victim of evildoers. There is no mention of canon law in the first section of the document; Hus relies solely on biblical allusions to victimhood and persecution.¹⁰⁰

The document opens with a powerful invocation of God. Hus referred to Psalms 144 and 145 in calling on God the Father, the defender of those who suffer wrong, who is near to those who call upon him in truth, who frees those in fetters, fulfills the wishes of those who fear him, who preserves those who love him and crushes unrepentant sinners. Not coincidentally, Hus underscored the role of God as a helper to the oppressed, that is, in this case, himself. Hus turned next to Christ, who was unjustly hounded by prelates, masters, and Pharisees, priests, corrupt judges, and witnesses. The parallel between Christ’s and Hus’s lives was unmistakable. He couched his appeal in the language of the Psalms and the prophets, calling on Christ to be his helper and protector. His enemies were plotting against him and wished to cut him off from the land of the living (Jeremiah 11:18–20). Hus pleaded that Christ deliver him from his enemies (Psalm 58:2) and begged God to see and consider him (Lamentations 1:11). He complained that the enemies who afflicted him had multiplied (Psalm 3:2) and consulted together, that they were free to pursue and capture him (Psalm 70:10–11). Convinced that God had forsaken him, Hus continued to plead with Christ to look upon him, for many dogs had surrounded him and the council of the evildoers had besieged him. They had spoken against him with deceitful tongues, assaulted him with words of hatred and fought against him without cause. They denigrated him (Psalm 108:3–4) and repaid him with evil for good, and hatred for his love (Psalm 108:5).

However, the tone and content shift abruptly as Hus begins refuting the legal charges brought against him by the curia.¹⁰¹ Hus’s failure to appeal before the pope was the core of his legal troubles and also of his appeal. Hus used precise legal terminology to explain that he failed to appear before the judge (contumacia) not out of pride (contemptus), as he had been accused.¹⁰² Hus reasoned that it would have been too dangerous for him to undertake the trip to Rome back in 1410 when summoned. Two of his university colleagues, Stanislav of Znojmo and Stephen of Páleč, did try to appear before the curia in Rome two years previously, in order to clear themselves of charges of Wycliffite heresy. But they made it only as far as Bologna, where they were robbed, imprisoned, and generally mistreated as if they were the “worst of criminals.”¹⁰³ Given what had happened to these two masters, Hus judged that he would have been in danger as well. Hus also argued that the trip had become unnecessary, because he and the archbishop had long ago officially reconciled. Hus was telling the truth, although he did not mention that the king had coerced the archbishop into the reconciliation, in order to claim that his realm was free of heretics. Overall, Hus argued, the legal case against him was riddled with holes, and the proper legal procedure had not been observed: the court denied him impartial judges and witnesses and chose a location for the proceedings that was inaccessible.¹⁰⁴

The real reason behind his persecution was, Hus argued, a personal vendetta by Michael de Causis, a compatriot and one of his longtime enemies, who was leading the prosecution again him. Hus describes himself as oppressed by unjust excommunication (“per excomunicacionem pretensam oppresso”), instigated by his enemy and accuser Michael de Causis (“per instigatorem et adversarium meum”). Not only had he not received a fair hearing, the court, taking advice from de Causis, had also rejected any testimony of extenuating circumstances. They refused the notarized and sealed testimonies of university representatives.¹⁰⁵ De Causis delayed the proceedings when it suited the prosecution and refused to hear Hus’s witnesses. In Hus’s view, the charges brought against him were based on personal hatred rather than proper legal procedure, an allegation that fits with his self-presentation as an innocent victim, akin to Christ.

The document has been interpreted in various ways: Václav Flajšhans has argued that the document served the purpose of announcing Hus’s rejection of ecclesiastical authorities in favor of secular courts, a revolutionary act in itself. More recently, Thomas Fudge has tempered this view by suggesting that Hus’s act “makes sense and is not an act of radicalism or revolutionary intent” but rather an expression of Hus’s commitment to imitate Christ whereas Pavel Soukup has drawn attention to the public aspect of the act.¹⁰⁶ All three have their basis. Although God was ostensibly the intended recipient of the appeal, Hus clearly planned to be overheard by a human audience—there is no other reason why he would have devoted so much space to explanations of the curia’s legal proceedings. Hus wished everyone else to know how he had been mistreated, by whom, and why and planned to use any resulting sympathies toward assembling his own opposition party.

The document addresses the lords of the realm directly, in the same order that their names would appear on official documents and charters, which infused the document with a semblance of legitimacy.¹⁰⁷ Hus must have hoped that the lords would be sympathetic to his plea and able to offer an alternative jurisdiction, in the High Court. A precedent did exist. In the previous year, the king appointed a high-ranking committee to study and resolve a standing conflict between the archbishop and Hus regarding the ban on preaching.¹⁰⁸ And it seems that a royally sponsored resolution was within Hus’s reach again. Within two months, on January 3, 1413, the king ordered the clergy to meet “in order that the pestiferous dissension among the clergy of our realm … be removed and completely extirpated.”¹⁰⁹ It appears that the king promised to support Hus over the pope if the preacher stopped his incendiary preaching. This, however, was not the kind of resolution that Hus had in mind, and the meeting eventually came to nothing.

Hus’s identification with Christ and the self-portrayal as the innocent victim in his “Appeal to Christ” endowed him with an aura of moral authority, which he continued to exploit in order to make a compelling case in his favor.

Conclusion

Jan Hus, Bethlehem’s most famous preacher, went from the archbishop’s golden boy to a persona non grata within only a few years. His downfall illustrates the concerns of ecclesiastical authorities as well as their desperate efforts to remain in control over what was preached in Bohemia’s capital. While they welcomed his reforming efforts within the close circle of the clerics, they were suspicious of his taking the same message to the laity. This is understandable. In Hus’s hands, the message of reform gained a distinctly subversive tint when—instead of catechesis—Hus began teaching the laity about the limitations of clerical authority and telling them to leave their parish if it happened to be led by an immoral or corrupt priest. In this view, lay reform consisted of passing a judgment about their clergy and deciding to act on that judgment by disobeying them and even leaving their assigned parish church. This was in keeping with Hus’s Wycliffite ecclesiology. If the communitas praedestinatorum is distinct from the visible church, then it makes sense to take precautions to ensure that one is not ensnared by clerics who are not, in fact, part of God’s church.

However, the archbishop thought differently and accused Hus of inciting the common people to sedition and rebellion against the pope, and the curia launched legal proceedings against him in an effort to ban him from Bethlehem Chapel. In the fall of 1412, the archbishop would succeed and Hus would be exiled from Prague.

Hus’s repeated run-ins with the archbishop and later with the curia show the profound unease of the authorities with Hus’s ability to reach thousands and with his potential to rouse the masses against the authorities. Hus did not back off, however, and by early 1412 he used the pulpit in Bethlehem to point out what he regarded as his opponents’ erroneous ways, their disrespect for the gospel, for God, and for the salvation of the faithful. As the complaints against him grew, Hus’s interactions with the laity became increasingly deliberate. From his pulpit at Bethlehem, Hus communicated to the laity that although he may have fought a losing battle with the curia, the moral victory was his and that he, rather than corrupt officials, held authority in the church. In voicing his disagreements publicly, he began cultivating a faction of supporters, who relied on him, and not on the clerical establishment, to supply the correct understanding of God’s law and of salvation. The following chapter will turn to Hus’s increasingly radicalized activities after his exile from the capital in the fall of 1412, analyzing his strategies for faction formation and exploring their implications for Hus’s career and Bohemia’s religious landscape.