# John Huss: his life, teachings and death, after five hundred years/Chapter 1

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JOHN HUSS
CHAPTER I
THE AGE IN WHICH HUSS LIVED
Summa philosophia est Christus, deus noster, quem sequendo et discendo sumus plilosophi.—Wyclif, de Ver. Scrip., I: 32.
The supreme philosophy is Christ, our God, and in following him and learning from him we are philosophers.
In John Huss, Bohemia has made its one notable and permanent contribution to the progress of Western culture and religious thought. Other names the general student associates with its people are Jerome of Prague, Charles IV and the blind King John. Jerome’s name is linked with the name of Huss. Charles IV acted an important part in the history of his time through the university which he founded and his patronage of letters, which made Prague a centre of study. The blind king of Bohemia, John of Luxemburg, occupies a place in the romance of English history. He fell in the thick of the fight at Crécy, 1346, and furnished to the coat of arms of the Prince of Wales the motto, Ich dien, I serve, which the Black Prince appropriated.
Strange to say, the honor so freely accorded to Huss in Protestant circles is still denied him by the vast majority of his own countrymen. Not two per cent of the population of Bohemia is Protestant. Outside of that small and respectable circle a change has been taking place in the last few years in the feelings of Bohemia toward its eminent citizen. Once the idol of his people, his memory was for centuries obscured by religious prejudice. Every memorial of him, where possible, ​was destroyed and the Bohemian people were taught to believe that he, “whose heart beat so warmly for his own nation and for God’s law,” was its worst enemy, an emissary of evil, not of good. This change has been going on since 1848, when religious liberty was granted by the Austrian government. Huss has come to be looked upon in everwidening circles as the chief of Bohemian patriots, and his patriotism is celebrated with bonfires in Southern Bohemia yearly on July 6, the supposed date of his birth. This is in spite of the unbroken attachment which prevails in that section to the Roman Catholic Church. There is also a group of free-thinking persons in Prague, not closely bound to Catholic institutions, who go further in honoring his memory. They have been foremost in making preparations to commemorate the five-hundredth anniversary of Huss’s birth by the erection of a monument on the public square of Prague, with which Huss’s own cause and the career of his followers are so closely identified. This fifth centenary, occurring in 1915, will serve to call attention afresh to the debt which the religious institutions of the West and the cause of religious toleration owe to the Bohemian reformer. It is doubtful, if we except the sufferings and death of Jesus Christ, whether the forward movement of religious enlightenment and human freedom have been advanced as much by the sufferings and death of any single man as by the death of Huss. Augustine, Bernard, Luther—to speak only of religious characters—exercised their influence by their lives and writings; Huss chiefly by his sufferings in prison and the flames. Paul’s death was an incident in his career. In dying, Huss accomplished more than he did by living.
Huss’s career belongs to a movement which was going on during the two centuries separating the productive period of ​the Middle Ages and the period of the Reformation. During these two hundred years—1300 to 1500, or from the reign of Boniface VIII to Luther’s theses, 1517—a forward impulse of thought manifested and maintained itself leading away from the compulsory authority of the church and the hierarchy of the Middle Ages, and pushing toward the intellectual and religious freedom of modern times. The mind of Europe was striving to get rid of the sacramental fetters with which it had become bound by the papal decrees and the speculations of the Schoolmen and to find its way to the assertion of the right-of the individual to immediate communion with God and individual sovereignty in matters of conscience. The dissatisfaction with the old mediæval order found isolated but strong expression from individuals here and there, and at the same time gleams of the new order about to be introduced in the sixteenth century shot forth suddenly like Northern lights, though they as suddenly disappeared.
By the year 1300 the faculty for governmental construction and the theological ingenuity of the mediæval mind had exhausted themselves. For two hundred years before that date the Crusades had been actively prosecuted from the conquest of Jerusalem, 1099, to the abandonment of the last foot of soil possessed by the Crusaders in the Holy Land, 1391, a period which witnessed the complete development of the mediaæval papacy and church. During the next two hundred years, up to the time of the Reformation, single individuals from Italy to England protested against these constructions. In the end they succeeded, while the armies of the Crusades failed. The former two hundred years, the period of the Crusades, saw the rise of the great Mendicant orders, the full bloom of the scholastic theology, the establishment of the papal inquisition, and the perfection of the sacramental system which was regarded as being as essential to salvation as fire is to heat a cold body or medicine to cure sickness. The latter period of two hundred years heard protests against ​the existing order which were based on Scripture, reason and history—a new tribunal. These were stifled one after the other till the voice was heard as from another Nazareth, the voice from the North, a region from which little good was expected to come. John Huss was one of those who joined this protest against the mediæval order, who helped to discredit the infallible authority of the papal monarchy and to advance the cause of individual rights in matters of belief and practice.
The three mighty constructions of medieval thought, if we omit the universities and the cathedrals, were the absolute papacy, the sacramental church and the inquisition. The famous bull, Unam sanctam, issued by Boniface VIII, 1302, constitutes an epoch in the history of papal dominion and the coercive jurisdiction claimed for the church. It gave final expression to the theory of the jurisdiction of the papacy. Intended to break down the opposition of Philip IV of France, who was asserting the independent rights of kings, it set forth in unambiguous terms the pope’s claim to supreme authority in all mundane affairs and made salvation to depend upon personal submission to him. Boniface was giving expression to no new assumption. In compact statement he gathered up the claims which his predecessors had been constantly making for more than two centuries. The strongest champions of these claims had been Gregory VII and Innocent III. These pontiffs affirmed that the papal office founded in Peter combined supreme authority in the church and also over princes. They compared the ecclesiastical and the civil powers—sacerdolium and imperium—to the sun and gold on the one hand, and to the moon and lead on the other hand. Gregory, 1073–1085, solemnly announced that the state had its origin in evil—greed and ambition, cruelty, plunder, and murder. The church is an institution of divine appointment established when Christ said to Peter: “Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build my church,” Matt. 16: 18. This ​masterful ruler found the pope’s right to set up and depose kings authorized in the Old Testament, quoting with peculiar delight the words of the prophet Jeremiah, 1: 10: “See, I have this day set thee over the nation and over the kingdom, to pluck up and to break down, and to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.” In his conflict with the emperor Henry IV, he not only deposed that monarch, the heir of Charlemagne, but released his subjects from allegiance and had a rival emperor elected to take his place. Gregory died in exile, not defeated and not a victor.
Innocent III, 1198–1216, who died in the full possession of his power, declared that, as Peter alone went to Jesus on the water, so the pope has the unique privilege of ruling over the nations of the earth. As the moon gets its light from the superior orb, the sun, so the emperor and princes get their authority from Christ’s vicegerent on earth. The pope judges all and is judged by no man. To the tribunal of God alone is he responsible. Innocent’s bull, per Venerabilem, claiming for the pope the plenitude of power—plenitudo potestatis—was quoted in later times as the authoritative statement of papal rule over both realms. This principle was well expressed by Thomas à Becket addressing the clergy of England: “Who presumes to doubt that the priests of God are the fathers and masters of kings, princes, and all the faithful?” About the same time the monk Cæsar of Heisterbach gave voice to the popular opinion when he compared the church to the firmament, the pope to the sun, the emperor to the moon, the clergy to the day, bishops and abbots to the stars and the laity to the night. Innocent’s favorite figure for illustrating the relation of church and state was taken from the head and the body. As the head contains all the faculties that control the body so the papacy possesses all prerogatives necessary to rule the church.
The supremacy over both realms, which the papacy cov​eted, it got. If Gregory VII’s conflict with Henry IV ended in a drawn battle, the conflicts of subsequent pontiffs with secular princes had a better issue. The house of Hohenstaufen fought in vain against their supreme jurisdiction and so did John of England. The valiant Frederick Barbarossa was brought to terms by Alexander III at the Peace of Venice, 1177. The painting in the doge’s palace and another in the Vatican, depicting this event on large canvases, represent Alexander sitting on a throne with his feet on Barbarossa’s right shoulder as the emperor lies prostrate. The Venetian picture contains the words: “Thou shalt tread upon the lion and the adder,” Psalm 91: 13. The able Frederick II, excommunicated again and again by two popes, and by the decree of Innocent IV deprived of the allegiance of his subjects, died without an army and with his empire in revolt. John of England, forced by the interdict and the rebellion of his nobles, yielded his crown as a fief to Innocent III, and for the pledge of a yearly tribute to be paid by himself and his successors received the crown back again.
Boniface VIII’s bull of 1302 exceeded in its arrogant language the edicts of his predecessors, but not the extravagance of their claim for the apostolic office. It was issued at a time when the fresh atmosphere of a new age was beginning to be felt. It was a brave retort that the king of France made when he bade Boniface remember that the church was made up of laymen as well as clerics. The Catholic historian, Cardinal Hergenröther, accurately presents the case when he says that Boniface did not deviate from the paths of his predecessors nor overstep the legal conceptions of the Middle Ages. The Unam sanctam declared that in the power of the church lay the two swords, the spiritual and the material; the spiritual to be used by the church, the material for the church and at its nod. The temporal power, if it deviate from the right ​path, is judged by the spiritual, whose executive is the pope. He is subject alone to the judgment of God. Going beyond this assertion of jurisdiction over princes, Boniface declared that for the salvation of every human creature it is altogether necessary that each be subject to the Roman pontiff.
The prerogatives asserted by the popes were buttressed with theological arguments by the corypheus of the Schoolmen, Thomas Aquinas, d. 1274. He took the position that as to Christ himself, so all princes and kings are subject to his vicar, the Roman pontiff, and it is necessary to salvation to yield submission to the pope. The language used by Boniface was simply other terminology for what the great theologian had advocated.
This bull was a battle-ground of discussion for the next two centuries and its twofold assertion the bomb which helped to shatter the medieval theory of authority. Wyclif, Huss and other writers referred to it again and again to contest its truth and condemn its audacity.
If the absolutism of the papacy was doubted and discredited after 1300, likewise was the theory of the church as elaborated by the Schoolmen. According to them, the church is a visible institution for dispensing salvation. Its boundaries are the boundaries of the kingdom of heaven on earth and are as distinctly marked as were the boundaries of the republic of Venice. The sacraments, which it is in the power of the church to administer, have an efficiency in themselves and, like drugs and food, impart to the sinner spiritual life and continue to maintain him in life. They introduce him into the kingdom of the faithful, nourish him during his earthly pilgrimage, and with the viaticum and the cleansing of the oil of extreme unction send him on the way to the other country. This sacramental efficiency is dependent upon the ​dispensation of a sacerdotal order receiving its authority and its grace by ordination, so that, no matter how immoral the priest may be, his words accomplish the transubstantiation of the bread and wine and render the other sacraments dispensed by his act efficient in the recipient.
This imposing construction of the church reared by dexterous scholastic reasoning, which ignored entirely or misinterpreted a large body of apostolic teaching, was subjected to rational doubt and free Scriptural inquiry after the death of Boniface VIII and the last of the greater Schoolmen, Duns Scotus, d. 1308. The Schoolmen subjected the reason to church authority. They applied to the Scriptures no independent investigation. They knew no Hebrew or Greek. They presented the opinions of the Fathers, collecting them into an iron-clad body of dogmas. Their theological sophistry threatened to bury the Scriptures in the tomb of doctrinal tradition, but men here and there again began to study the sacred text and to measure ecclesiastical dogmas by its plain teaching and common sense. This is what Wyclif, Huss and others did.
Next to the papacy and the church the third great elaboration of the period of the Schoolmen was the inquisition, the machinery for the abolition of ecclesiastical dissent. Heretical depravity it was called, for heresy was not an intellectual opinion only; it was depravity. This inquisition followed from the definition of the prerogatives of the papal office and the functions of the church. Here the great Schoolmen and the great popes again speak. To both alike, heresy—that is, dissent from the dogmatic teachings issued by the church and disobedience to the rule of the hierarchy—was a crime. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa of Theology was in full accord with the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council presided over by Innocent III, 1215. A heretic, having no rights in the church, has also no rights whatever on earth—not even the right to live.
​The church acquired rights over the individual by baptism and these rights extended to the deprivation of life. Innocent likened heretics to Joel’s locusts and to the foxes which spoil the vines. Like clippers of coin, they are to be burned, affirmed Thomas Aquinas. To quote this theologian: “They are not only to be separated from the church by excommunication but also excluded from the world by death.” The spiritual authority might consign heretics to perpetual imprisonment, and, as it was forbidden to execute the death penalty, it turned them over to the civil tribunal with the full understanding that they were to be punished, if necessary, unto death. This penalty it made sure by threatening with extreme church punishments civil tribunals which failed to administer it. The codes of Frederick II and the law of Louis IX of France enacted that heretics condemned by the church should be executed out of the world.
These three institutions—papal absolutism, the church as an organization dispensing life and the absolute right to dispose of heretics by death, inherited from the age of the great popes and the great Schoolmen—controlled the official thought of Western Europe until attacked by Luther. Six months before he nailed up his theses, Leo X solemnly reaffirmed the pretensions of Boniface VIII’s famous bull. But in the meantime these three institutions were questioned or openly assailed by individuals who may be grouped in five different groups. To one of these groups John Huss belonged, and he represented the attack against all these three institutions, the papal monarchy, the church, and the inquisition. In this opposition there was a movement running in the direction of the recognition of the supreme authority of Scripture and the rights of conscience, for both of which Huss stood.
The first of these groups was the group of pamphleteers ​who flourished in the first half of the fourteenth century and assailed first the temporal claims of the papacy and then its spiritual claims. Its most eminent representative was Dante, d. 1321, who in his tract entitled Monarchy, and in other writings, wrote in favor of the independent authority of the empire and the supremacy of its jurisdiction within the civil sphere. He accepted the accuracy of the tradition that Constantine, in reward for his baptism by Sylvester and his recovery from leprosy by that pope’s cure, bestowed upon the pope the government of Rome and all the regions of the West. This falsehood was distributed through Europe about 850 by the spurious Isidorian Decretals and was for centuries believed to be as true as the Gospels themselves. It was not until the close of the fifteenth century that Laurentius Valla proved the whole story a fraud. Dante went no further than to pronounce Constantine incompetent to bestow such power upon a pope. That right belonged to God alone, who had made the two spheres distinct. He rejected the figure comparing the two powers respectively to the sun and the moon. His famous lines might well have been quoted by Huss in his Trealise on the Church, where he emphasized the ills which had come to it through Constantine’s fictitious gift.
“Oh! Constantine, how much ill was cause Not thy conversion, but those rich domains Which the first wealthy pope received of thee.”
—Inferno, 19: 115.
Dante freely put popes in hell, including the simoniac Boniface VIII.
In France, moved by the controversy which Philip IV was having with Boniface, the Dominican John of Paris, d. 1306, and jurisconsults like Peter Dubois, d. after 1321, struck the same note. These publicists insisted the church should keep itself clear of “Herod’s old error” and follow ​Christ who, in his earthly career, disclaimed worldly authority. John refuted forty-two reasons given for the pope’s omnipotence in temporal affairs. The pope is the representative of the church, not its lord, appointed to be the moral teacher of mankind and the overseer of men’s spiritual concerns. The contrary view, the view of Innocent III, was represented by other publicists who were concerned to defend Boniface’s bull and memory. Amongst those who went farthest were Alexander Triumphus and Alvarus Pelayo, who ascribed infallibility to the pope and extended his jurisdiction beyond the confines of Christendom and over the heathen. Along the line of this contention was the action of the council of Vienne, 1312, which forbade sovereigns to allow their Mohammedan subjects to exercise the ritual of their religion. Hergenröther and Pastor complain that Alexander Triumphus carried matters beyond the limits of truth, making the pope a semi-god, the absolute ruler of the world.
The attack upon the theocratic pretensions of the papacy was followed by an assault upon the supreme spiritual functions claimed for it and the priesthood. This group of pamphleteers had its chief representatives in Marsiglius of Padua and John of Jandun. In part Ockam also agreed with them. These all supported the claims of Lewis the Bavarian in his conflict with John XXII and John’s two successors. Marsiglius has been called by eminent Catholic historians, Döllinger, Pastor and Funk, a forerunner of Luther and Calvin. With great clearness he asserted some of the essentials of the Protestant Reformation, and in some respects he went beyond the Reformers, as when he declared that the people themselves are the source of authority and select their own rulers. His tract Defensor pacis—Defender of the Peace—is a bold manifesto against the hierarchical organization of the church. The pope’s claim of plenitude of power contradicts the true nature and idea of the church. The highest earthly tribunal ​in church matters is the general council. Laymen have the right to sit in it as well as clerics. The orders of bishop, priest and deacon are of human origin. The function of binding and loosing is declarative, not judicial. The right to inflict penalties lies with the Christian congregation, the body of Christian believers. The Scriptures are the ultimate seat of authority. John XXII, 1327, condemned the tract as contrary to apostolic truth and declared its reputed joint authors, Marsiglius and John of Jandun, sons of perdition, sons of Belial, pestiferous men, beasts from the abyss. Marsiglius was equal to the pope in finding forcible epithets and denounced John as the great dragon, the old serpent. It is remarkable how short a time had elapsed between Thomas Aquinas, the great architect of the mediæval system of the church and papacy, and these violent democratic assaults.
The second group, the German mystics, disparaged the mediæval system by their habits of picty rather than by their writings. They breathed a different atmosphere from the Schoolmen and lived apart from the conflict over worldly authority. This remarkable body of men, preaching and spreading by example the precepts of practical Christianity, did not openly attack a single dogma of the church. They had nothing to say about its outward constitution or the sacraments. Nevertheless, in the person of Meister Eckart, they brought upon themselves condemnation from the pope himself, and, in the persons of Hugo de Groote and other leaders of the movement from the Lowlands, they called forth suspicion and attacks from the Franciscan order. The movement was in the interest of personal piety and every-day Christianity. These men walked in secluded paths of spiritual devotion. They preached in the vernacular tongue. They taught schools. They wrote tracts on the immediate communion of the soul with Christ. They copied manuscripts. Their teachings were opposed to the dogmatic method of ​the Schoolmen. The little book called The German Theology and also Tauler’s sermons influenced Luther. Godliness is more than a doctrine, more than a ritual. It is a state of the soul, a habit of daily conduct. In the soul religion is to be sought, not in outward sacramental conformities. The word conversion—Kehr—was coined anew, and the thing it represented was in fact, though not professedly, opposed to sacramentarianism. They insisted upon separation from the world in contrast to separation from society, upon the sonship of believers, upon love and simple faith, upon walking with God. “Wisdom,” said Tauler, “is not studied in Paris but in the sufferings of the Lord. The great masters of Paris read large books and that is well; but people who dwell in the inner kingdom of the soul read the true book of life. A pure heart is the throne of the supreme judge, a lamp bearing eternal light, the sanctuary of the only-begotten Son.” Glorifying all honest daily occupations, he says: “One can spin, another make shoes, and all these are the gifts of the Holy Ghost. I tell you, if I were not a priest, I should esteem it a great gift to be able to mend shoes, and I would try to make them well so as to be a pattern to all.” It was better, one of them said, to have simple faith than to pry into the secrets of God. Whittier makes known their spirit in the lines:
“God has sent the man Long sought, to teach me, by his simple faith Wisdom the weary Schoolmen never knew.”
As Loofs has well said: “German mysticism emphasized above all dogmas and external acts the necessity of the new birth.” Their names have no place in the records of councils, but the soil on which they labored and built their schools was the soil on which German Protestantism sprang up.
A third group of men, who flourished in this period of two hundred years, were the Humanists. In Italy first they broke ​a new path for intellectual culture and freedom. The classic literature of Greece and Rome, the church, following the ban of St. Jerome, had taught for nearly a thousand years, was an unclean thing. All Christians were to keep away from the infection. Under the impulse of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio other studies than the study of theology came into vogue. Scholars turned with delight to the artistic and literary treasures of the Old World, to its mythology and history. They discovered again the wonders and beauties of the earth around them. They made the Italian the avenue of their thought and prepared the way for the breaking up of the monopoly of ecclesiastical Latin. Nicholas V and other popes joined with the Medicis of Florence and other noble families in patronizing the new culture and collecting libraries and treasures of art. The North, learning from Italy, added some new elements, and Reuchlin and Erasmus started Hebrew and Greck scholarship on its modern paths and engaged in the study of the Bible, as the Southern Humanists had not.
A fourth group of men, produced in the latter half of the fourteenth century, included the ecclesiastical and disciplinary reformers. They are associated with the great Reformatory councils, Pisa, Constance and Basel, 1409–1449. With the aid of discipline and law they sought to correct abuses which prevailed in the church. In incisive pamphlets they set forth the ills of Christendom and agreed upon a general council as the means for curing them. The principle that such council, representing the whole church, is above the pope, advocated by Ockam, was taken up and presented with conciseness and clearness by Konrad of Gelnhausen. He was followed in the same path by such men as Henry of Langenstein, Gerson, d’Ailly and Nieheim. The discussion centred in the university of Paris, which became the influential sponsor of the supremacy of councils. With this group of ecclesiastical reformers the question was one of the adminis​tration of the church. For fifty years Europe was turned into a parliament which listened to the arguments of famous teachers on the questions of disciplinary reform.
With the names of the men of these four groups and the principles for which they stood Huss must have been well acquainted. The subjects of their tracts were the primary issues of their times. Huss probably read a large number of them, written from the date of Boniface’s death down to his own day. Although he repeatedly cites Boniface’s bull and comments upon it, it may seem strange to us that he did not quote some of these writers by name. But in neglecting to do so, he was following the custom of the fifteenth century in regard to quotations.
The fifth group were the reformers before the Reformation, men whose paths led far away from the principles of the mediæval church. They urged the principles of the pamphleteers who assailed the papacy. They insisted on personal piety. They urged church reforms. But more, they were dogmatic innovators. They were widely separated in time and their spheres of activity—Wyclif in England, Huss in Bohemia, Savonarola in Italy, and Goch, Wesel and Wessel in Northwestern Germany—yet they agreed in essential particulars, if we except Savonarola, whose demands for reform were political and moral. Nevertheless, by resisting the pope’s authority and appealing to the decision of a general council, and by holding forth the Scriptures prominently in the pulpit, Savonarola has a place in this group. He was burned as a heretic, 1498, after being officially separated from the church. The artist who constructed the monument of the Reformation at Worms did not go astray in placing him at the side of Wyclif, Huss and Peter Waldo at the feet of Martin Luther.
Wyclif and Huss, however, were the arch-heretics of this period who opposed the three mediæval constructions—the papacy, the church and the inquisition. Relying upon Augustine’s definition that the church is the body of the elect, ​they contested the proposition that what the visible church teaches must be believed because the church teaches it. They turned away from an infallible pope and an infallible visible church to the living Christ, who rules personally in the hearts of believers and in the Scriptures. They questioned or denied the church’s right to punish heretics and schismatics with physical punishments.
During the narrower period of Huss’s life two movements of unusual importance were going on in the history of Latin Christendom, the Avignon exile and the papal schism. Both threatened the continuation of the papacy and the unity of the Western church. Huss was born during the Avignon exile, and he lived through the entire period of the papal schism, 1377–1417. Two years after the death of Boniface VIII, 1303, the transfer of the papacy from Rome to Avignon was accomplished. The bitter conflict between Boniface and Philip the Fair, a conflict which Philip continued to wage against Boniface’s memory after the pope’s death, was the occasion of the removal of the papal residence to the banks of the Rhône. During the seventy years that the papacy continued there, the popes were all Frenchmen and little more than French court-bishops. Frenchmen constituted the large majority in the sacred college. The venality that was practised in the papal household at Avignon and the moral corruption of the place won for it from contemporaries the name of the third Babylon. Church offices were set for sale and lucrative livings were filled before their incumbents were dead, two or even three ecclesiastics paying for the right of succession and standing, as it were, in line until the living incumbent died and the others, one by one, filled out their turns. These provisions and reservations, as they were called, and the constant appeal of all sorts of cases from every quarter to the apostolic see made the Avignon court the scene of constant intrigue and bribery. The turbulent state of Italy and the fear that papal territory might be lost to ​the patrimony of St. Peter, even more than the appeals of Petrarch and the prophetic voices of Brigitta of Sweden and Catherine of Siena, induced the last Avignon pope, Gregory XI, to visit Rome. Gregory, the pope whom Wyclif called “a terrible devil,” died unwillingly at Rome and while he was contemplating a return to France.
The papal schism, which followed upon Gregory’s death, was a far greater misfortune than the Avignon exile. Following the rule that the papal election take place where the pope dies, and overawed by the threats of the Roman populace, which demanded an Italian pope, the curia elected the archbishop of Bari, known as Urban VI. Of the twenty cardinals at that time in Rome sixteen were Frenchmen and only four Italians. Urban was incapable of rising to his great opportunity, and by his self-will and disregard of every dictate of prudence, he himself became a refugee and exile. The French cardinals, refusing to acquiesce in his election, chose the notorious Robert of Geneva, who assumed the name of Clement VII and continued the papal court at Avignon. The two popes—one on the Tiber and one on the Rhône—hurled the anathema one at the other, and Western Europe for forty years witnessed the scandal of two earthly heads of the church and was divided between two “obediences.” As a result many dioceses were divided in their allegiance and had rival bishops, as was the case with Mainz, Liége, Basel, Constance, Chur, and other dioceses. Pastor has said: “The papal schism was the greatest misfortune which could have befallen the church.” The best talent of the age, as already intimated, was devoted to the discussion of methods for the abolition of the schism and the reunion of Christendom. Bohemia, to which Huss belonged, was true to the Roman line, but an element of uncertainty in its religious affairs resulted from the constant efforts of the Avignon popes to attract the allegiance of its king to themselves. With the example of the universities of Paris and Oxford before it, the new university of Prague was ​compelled to investigate the foundations of the papal office and the place which the supreme pontiff occupied in the church.
During this most critical period of the papal schism Huss was a student at the university and an active participant in the church affairs of his people. With the propositions which came from the university of Paris and from individuals intended to heal the schism he must have been thoroughly familiar. The Reformatory council of Pisa, summoned, 1409, to accomplish this result, was held when he was in the full tide of his activity and its debates he must have followed with intense interest. In the presence of the second Reformatory council, the council of Constance, which brought about the deposition of three popes and elected a fourth, he himself stood; however, as a prisoner under trial for his life.
* ↑ Flajshans, Expositio Decalogi, p. 11. Lützow, Life of Hus, p. 63, says: “Hus was the idol of the Bohemian people, whose greatest representative in the world’s story he remains.”
* ↑ Mirbt, 138 sq.
* ↑ Kirchengesch., 2: 597. Schaff, V, 2: 25–29, gives the Latin text of the bull with English translation.
* ↑ Quod subesse Romano pontifici sit de necessitate salutis.—Schaff, V, 1: 674, 777. Döllinger says that Thomas was the first theologian to discuss the theory of papal infallibility as an integral part of systems of theology.
* ↑ Döllinger-Reusch, Card. Bellarmin, says that at the demand of Gregory IX the Roman senator took an oath to seize heretics pointed out by the inquisition and to put them to death within eight days of their ecclesiastical sentence.
* ↑ Scholz, Publizistik, etc., p. 315.
* ↑ Schaff, V, 1: 519.
* ↑ For John’s bull, see Mirbt, 166.
* ↑ Dogmengeschichte, p. 631.