# John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers/Chapter 4

Published by G. P. Putnam's Sons, in New York.
CHAPTER IV.
WYCLIF AND THE SCHOOLMEN.
E have already encountered, amongst the pioneers of religious reform in England, members of two mutually supporting bodies, advancing in parallel directions towards a common object. On the one hand we see the men of action, monarchs and statesmen, with their allies and instruments, who in the temporal domain successively resisted and attacked the assumptions of the Roman Church; and on the other hand there were the men of thought, of accurate logic and awakened conscience, who in the spiritual domain required that Christian practice should conform to the root-principles of Christianity, and refused to accept the papal superstructure as of equal authority with the foundation which it hid from sight.
​One of the most interesting facts in connection with the life of John Wyclif, which has contributed as much as anything else to fix him in the popular imagination, and to place him permanently on the roll of English heroes, is that he elected to play the part of a politician as well as of a theologian, and that, being a priest and a Schoolman, he joined hands with the statesmen of his age, in order to secure what could not be obtained without their aid. No institution was ever reformed in the absence of co-operation from within; and reformers within the Church have always commanded a lively sympathy in England. Wyclif was the first conspicuous English clergyman who combined his aspirations for reform with a frank admission of the right (and corresponding duty) of laymen to interpose in matters of faith and discipline. We shall hereafter be in a position to judge as to the nature of his relations with King and Parliament, with princes and with peasants. It was through these relations that he became a popular Englishman, and that his name has stood out for five centuries like a patch of warm colour from the neutral tints of the later Middle Ages.
Now it is above all things important to remember that Wyclif took this significant stand as the direct heir of the Schoolmen—as a Schoolman himself, interpreting and giving effect to their views, wedding action to thought, not only by his individual energy and initiative, but in obedience to national character and scholastic training. Some injustice has been done to the Schoolmen by constantly speaking of them as though they were men of disquisition only, ​chop-logics in a narrow groove, industrious tillers of a barren soil. This has at any rate been the popular notion of their quality, and the vast majority of readers have been led to dismiss them from their minds with a shudder at their repelling dryness and ineffective ingenuity. It is only since yesterday that something like justice has been done to their intellectual and theological position, to their attitude as men of action and not merely as writers, and especially to their character as leaders in religious reform. Hallam remarks that the discovery of truth by means of scholastic discussions "was rendered hopeless by two insurmountable obstacles, the authority of Aristotle and that of the Church." The great historian, from whose judgments so few of his successors are competent to dissent, regarded the Schoolmen as writers only. He does not mention Marsiglio, nor deal with Wyclif as a Schoolman. He expresses disappointment with what he had read of Ockham; but he had not directed his attention to the political association of Marsiglio, Ockham, and Michael of Cesena with Ludwig of Bavaria, nor to that of Wyclif with the English court. Indeed it is only in the present generation that full light has been cast on the innovating and revolutionary spirit of the later Schoolmen. We must be content to sacrifice the representative character of the story of angels dancing on the point of a needle in return for the more just appreciation of scholastic aims and methods which we owe to modern German and English research.
Enough, perhaps, has been said of the political ​usurpation of Rome, and of the conflict excited by it up to the beginning of the fourteenth century; but it will be interesting to ascertain the exact position of Wyclif in the intellectual revolt against the obscurantism of the mediaeval Church. It would be useless to ask ourselves when and where this revolt actually began. The mind and the heart of man appear to have acted on virtually identical principles in all ages, and no doubt the first religious Reformers were contemporaneous with the first obscurers of truth and usurpers of authority. But from the eleventh century, to take no earlier date, the ever extending claims of the Papacy are associated with the protests of active and inquiring minds. It is clear that the worst errors of Rome corresponded in time with the feudal supremacies in the States, as their refutation corresponded with the establishment of schools and universities.
The schools of Charles the Great, Alfred, and Edward the Confessor were largely developed and frequented under Norman rule. They were, to begin with, under the patronage of the monarchs rather than of the Church; they taught not only theology but also law and medicine, as well as the trivium and quadrivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric; music, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy); and they constituted at once a nursery and a refuge of minds which sought intellectual and moral freedom. Already in the twelfth century we find Oxford attracting her three thousand students, and Paris divided into her four nations of France, Picardy, Normandy, and England; whilst in the next century ​contemporary writers number the scholars of Oxford, Paris, and Bologna by tens of thousands. Close in their wake came the foundations of Padua, Naples, Toulouse, Montpelier, Cambridge, Salamanca, and Prague.
In this fertile soil were sown the seeds of independence, inquiry, and moral courage. Here learning grew, and the revolt against the suppression of truth was prepared. The path which Wyclif was to tread had been worn by Abelard of Paris and his pupil Arnold of Brescia, by John of Salisbury, Pierre Dubois, and Berengar; by Bishop Grosteste, Bracton, Archbishop Bradwardine, and Ockham of Oxford; by Marsiglio of Padua and Paris, Fitzralph of Oxford, Lupoid of Bebenburg, and many others who owed their training and hardihood to the schools.
Each particular age has its available and appropriate refuges for the thought of man, in its reaction and revolt against spiritual tyranny; yet, age for age, the refuge is substantially the same in each. The human mind which refuses to dwell with the moles and bats must grope and struggle for the light by such avenues as may be open to it. Before the period of the general Renascence of liberal studies there were few avenues, and those narrow and difficult, which led to any sort of illumination save that which shone from the chair of St. Peter. The seven sciences supposed to be included in the trivium and quadriviiim—a fifth-or sixth-century classification—were little better than titles for the students in the ecclesiastical schools. Ingulfus, Abbot of Croyland in the eleventh century, a Westminster and ​Oxford man by his own account, was able to study Aristotle and the first two books of Tully's rhetoric, evidently a giddy height of profane knowledge for the days in which he lived. The Latin poets as known to the zealous Alcuin were forbidden to his pupils, and exceedingly little is heard of them in the succeeding centuries. Law meant the decretals of the popes, with a subsequent tinge of Justinian. Medicine was but a smattering of empirical dogmas and rules, fallacious when not directly injurious and homicidal. Of liberal, still less of literary studies, in the worthier sense of the terms, we have barely a trace before the fourteenth century; and even then they were so rare that we are astonished when a man of high culture like Chaucer reveals his knowledge of the contemporary Italian poets, or when a Franciscan friar like Roger Bacon displays what looks like a genuine spirit of exact scientific inquiry. So long as for the majority of eager students the science of astronomy culminated in the arrangement of the calendar, and the science of music in a cathedral chant, whilst Virgil smelt of magic and Ovid was under a jealous ban, the learning of scholars could but bring them back to the point from which they had started, often with an eager craving for relief—to the religious dogma of their day.
Hence the men of intellectual energy, who in other ages might have been effective as philosophical inquirers, were condemned to feed upon the mere husks of knowledge, to beat the air and walk the vicious circle, mumbling inconclusive dialogues on universal ideas, on nominalism and realism, on grace ​and predestination and free-will, bound down meanwhile to the orthodox theology of Rome, with no better alternative and outlet than the logic and metaphysics of Aristotle, the comments of Averroes, and the subtleties of the Angelic Doctor. Even these were dangerous guides in the opinion of many. Aquinas held his ground, but Aristotle and Averroes were condemned by the same authority which tabooed the civil law.
Such were the studies of the Schoolmen, both of those who strongly maintained the supremacy of Rome in matters of faith and also of those who denied it. There was not much intellectual breadth in this scholastic arena, but it was quite broad enough to admit the bandying to and fro of charges of heresy. In days when authority demanded absolute conformity, the mere spirit of inquiry and research was sufficient to lay a man open to suspicion and condemnation. The substance of the average scholastic disquisitions was so meagre and trivial that it must have been exceedingly difficult even for an Inquisitor to discover the heretical tendencies of any particular discourse; and possibly for that very reason the accusation was frequently brought.
It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that there was no value in the method by which these subjects were discussed. It was in fact the new dialectic itself which attracted, and to some extent satisfied the frequenters of the schools; and certainly it was an instrument of mental discipline which, in the absence of a better, served to train the ​western mind to think, discriminate, and judge. If it was for the time applied to mere phantoms of theology and philosophy, and produced vacant chaff in place of grain, still the training had been given, and the instrument remained bright and keen for future use.
The codification of the canon law, which within certain limits confirmed the authority of the Church whilst it seemed to open up a new field of intellectual activity, had a further and unforeseen effect in strengthening the opposition to papal supremacy. The sentences of the Fathers, the canons and decretals of the Popes, were compiled and re-issued many times in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The decretals were essentially aggressive against the civil power, for they included various decrees of deposition and excommunication of monarchs, and repeated declarations of the right of the Pope to dispense subjects from their allegiance to their rulers. One effect of the publication of the canon law in this form was to add to the army of the clergy and the army of the monks (soon to be reinforced by the army of the friars) yet another army of lawyers, warmly devoted to the interests of the Church.
It is remarkable that just at this time the study of the Pandects, Code, and Institutes of Justinian—the system of Roman law compiled and maintained in Byzantium—was revived after long neglect. Was it a mere coincidence? Or may it not be that the magistrates and lawyers, the teachers and students in the schools, reverted to Justinian out of sheer necessity for relief from the narrow absolutism of the ​canon law—and that the Church, without venturing or attempting to confine legal studies to her own decretals, still looked with suspicion on every other kind of law? Indeed this is no mere supposition; the study of civil law was long forbidden in the University of Paris, and even at Oxford the clerical authorities resisted it when it was introduced by Vacarius from Bologna in the reign of Stephen. However it may have been with the civil law, it is certain that the common law of England and the national customs and precedents of other countries were held up as correctives of the ex cathedra deliverances of the Papacy, and that their study was encouraged by perspicacious men in order to counteract the teachings of Rome in the interests of the State. The jurisprudents of Paris, as distinct from the canonists, were very serviceable to Philip the Fair in his quarrel with Boniface; and so it was with the independent lawyers in other countries. The very infatuation of the Roman usurpers helped to prepare their own defeat.
For our present purpose, however, the main thing is to observe that the most liberal-minded clerics of the eleventh and three following centuries, regulars as well as seculars, who were found principally in the schools and universities, take their place in the ranks of the Schoolmen, and link hand to hand across the later Middle Ages. They carry us forward from Roscelin, the leader of the Nominalists, through Anselm, Abelard, Peter Lombard, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Michael of Cesena and other Franciscans, Marsiglio, Bradwardine, and William of Ockham, to ​John Wyclif—who in his turn joins hands with John Huss and Jerome of Prague, from whom the torch was passed onward to the German and English Reformers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
It has already been said that Wyclif was a Schoolman by intellectual descent and training. At Oxford he imbibed the spirit and ideas of Bradwardine and Ockham, who were both fellows of Merton when he was studying for his degrees, and by whose writings, if not by their personal teaching, he must have largely profited. Bradwardine, who became Archbishop of Canterbury, and died of the plague in 1349, on the morrow of his admission to the temporalities of that province, was anything but a mere Schoolman, being not only a popular teacher at the university, but also a king's chaplain and a travelled man. He wrote scientific treatises on Proportion, on The Quadrature of the Circle, on Speculative Arithmetic, and Speculative Geometry, and on The Art of Memory. He collected his lectures (in Latin) under the title of The Cause of God against Pelagius, and concerning Causes in General, and dedicated the book to his friends at Merton.
JOHN DUNS SCOTUS—"DOCTOR SUBTILIS." BY J. FABER, FROM THE OXFORD PORTRAIT.
​taught that human nature, on the other hand, is impotent for good, that the best deeds of men are unmeritorious, that everything worthy comes of the free grace and with the absolute foreknowledge of God. His teaching commended itself not a little to the men of his day, and Wyclif was deeply imbued with it. Chaucer re-echoes his fame, for he makes the Nun's Priest confess, on this capital distinction between predestination and free-will,
   . "Ine cannot boult it to the bran,
   As can the holy doctor, saint Austyn,
   Or Boëce, or the bishop Bradwardyn."
There is clearly a sense in which Bradwardine was a forerunner of the Calvinists, or rather of the earlier English predestinarians. A familiar passage in Paradise Lost describes the occupations of the fallen angels:
   " Others apart sat on a hill retired,
   In thoughts more elevate, and reasoned high
   Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate,
   Fixed fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute,
   And found no end, in wandering mazes lost."
Of course Milton need not have been indebted to Bradwardine for any of his ideas, and yet it is possible enough that he had sat at the feet of the Schoolman. Sir Henry Savile printed the treatise against. Pelagianism early in the seventeenth century, and the omnivorous student was not at all unlikely to have seen this book.
William of Ockham died in 1357, the year in which Wyclif, according to some accounts, was made ​a fellow of Merton, though there is reason to doubt the last-mentioned statement. Ockham was a Franciscan friar, and some of the ablest men of the Order in the fourteenth century were his professed followers. He had sat under Duns Scotus, who had also been a fellow of Merton and a Franciscan; but in several respects the views of master and pupil were in sharp contrast. Duns was a Realist, a "Scotist," a believer in the immaculate conception of the Virgin, a defender of the current orthodoxy of Rome. Ockham was a Nominalist, a champion of the Fraticelli, not to say a Fraticello himself, who wrote a cogent Defence of Poverty. He opposed the extreme political claims of the Papacy, denied the final authority of the decretal or canon law, and held that logic was essentially distinct from and independent of theology—which, according to his enemies, was the same thing as to declare it of superior authority. Though he was far less dogmatically assertive in regard to the spiritual assumptions of Rome than some of his friends, yet his personal courage, and the sacrifices which he made for his belief, were unquestionable; and he was finally excommunicated. He went so far as to denounce John XXII. as a heretic; and, in the quarrel between that Pope and Ludwig of Bavaria, he ranged himself on the side of the Emperor, and of the Antipope Nicolas.
Ockham, like many English scholars of his day, took advantage of the privilege accorded to those who wished to study at the University of Paris. Whilst there, he formed a close friendship with ​Marsiglio of Padua (called also Mainardini, and Menandrinus), an ardent sympathiser with the Emperor Ludwig, and a distinct progenitor of Wyclif in his ideas of political government. Mr. R. L. Poole has clearly summarised the arguments of Marsiglio in his Wycliffe and Movements for Reform, a volume which must be consulted by any reader who wishes to trace in detail the descent of ideas, and especially of political ideas, through Marsiglio and Ockham to Wyclif. Marsiglio worked out his conception of the harmony which should exist between the civil and the spiritual dominion in his Defensor Pacis, produced whilst he was living at Paris in 1324, which was probably a few years after the date of Wyclif's birth, This work, with the Dialogus and De Ecclesiastica et Politica Potestate of Ockham, was widely read by his contemporaries and successors; and the literature to which these works belong did much to create or reconstruct the model on which our actual theories of Church and State have been formed.
No doubt for the original ideas we should have to go back at least as far as the political philosophers of Greece and Rome, to whom Marsiglio must have been more or less directly indebted for them. Prescience and divination alone could scarcely have enabled a Schoolman to evolve from surrounding chaos the main political principles of the eighteenth century; but, whether this could have been or not, the more salient of these principles had been stated ​many centuries before, and only needed to be revived. The mere revival is infinitely to the credit of the Italian and English scholastic philosophers. To re-establish such ideas under such conditions and circumstances was to display all the character and effective force of originality. There is indeed a conceivable suggestion that the Moors of Spain, who gave to Europe from Arabic sources more than one work of Greek philosophy and science, had furnished Marsiglio in the same manner with the elements of his constitutional treatise.
The central and most striking of Marsiglio's political—ideas from which, indeed, his other political ideas are seen to radiate—is that of the sovereignty of the people. The people, he maintains, must be ultimate lawgiver and ultimate judge; the State must have a supreme executive, selected and authorised by itself. "The king's power is limited in every possible direction. He has the eye of the people or its representatives on all his actions. He may be restrained or even deposed if he overpass his prescribed bounds; and, even though his conduct be not amenable to the letter of the law, he is still subject to the final judgment of the national will. On no side is there any room for despotism; in no point is he absolute." And Ockham, in the third part of his Dialogus, goes over the same ground and arrives at the same conclusions. It is indeed arguable whether Marsiglio or Ockham was the more original writer of the two. Pope Clement, in a bull condemning the writings of Marsiglio, declared them to ​have been derived from Ockham; and, so far as religious and merely anti-papal views are concerned, this may well have been the case.
The evolution of these ideas in the age of the Schoolmen, where evolution can be recognised before the time of Marsiglio, was a gradual and tardy process, limited for the most part the antagonism between Rome and the secular governments, or exhibiting little more than a variety of paraphrases from Aristotle, Albertus Magnus, and Aquinas. Pierre Dubois and John of Paris had begun to emphasise the distinctions between the authority of the Church and that of the State. This was before the time of the Emperor Ludwig; and it was Ludwig's vigorous conflict with Rome, during the "Babylonian Captivity" at Avignon, which set the seal of actuality on what had hitherto been a somewhat abstract disquisition. Several of the earlier Schoolmen had provided arguments against the encroachments of the Papacy; it was for Marsiglio and Ockham to erect an independent system without exclusive reference to the papal claims.
Lupoid von Bebenburg, who wrote the first theoretical work on German jurisprudence, went a step further. Having formulated the rights of the Emperor, he maintains that even the homage and submissions of emperors to popes cannot wholly commit the subordinate princes and the people. As a tributary prince is permitted, when his overlord chooses to submit himself to another overlord, to refuse the new vassalage for his own part, so, if a vassal of a church-vassal declines to become a ​church-vassal himself, he cannot be compelled thereto.
In the ecclesiastical domain we find the same ideas taken henceforth as the true basis of Church government. The Church is not the priestly order and hierarchy alone, but the whole body of Christians. The priests have their functions, but outside those functions they are members of the general community—subject to the State in their secular relations and to the Church in their spiritual relations. Marsiglio found no warrant for a hierarchy in the New Testament, nor for a human arbiter of orthodoxy, nor for any temporal visitation of pains and penalties on the ground of errors in opinion. In brief the Christian priesthood ought to be in plain truth a Christian ministry, serving and not enslaving the Church.
Evidently Marsiglio was a fourteenth-century protestant of the most uncompromising order. It may be supposed that he went too far for his friend Ockham, and too far for Wyclif—at any rate in Wyclifs earlier and more moderate phases. No doubt this must always be a matter of opinion; but it will scarcely be denied that if the Archbishops Sudbury and Courtenay had resisted the pressure brought to bear upon them by the monks and friars, and treated Wyclif with judicious coolness and patience, he might have stopped short of some of his later paradoxes and logical extremes. Wyclif, who had secured the confidence of his Oxford friends not only by his saintly life but also as a man of sense and an able administrator, was in many respects ​naturally predisposed to compromise. Is it not reasonable to suppose that the Oxford scholar with his secular sympathies, the man of affairs living and working amongst his own countrymen, the patriot and man of letters, would have been well satisfied to advance step by step—so that the advance was indisputable,—leading and not outrunning the spirit of his times?
An English clergyman before everything else, John Wyclif inherited the ideas of Marsiglio and Ockham without claiming the whole of his inheritance. Deeply sympathetic for his unfortunate fellow-countrymen, as modest and simple in spirit as he was, intellectually eager and ambitious, he aimed at being an orderly, a progressive, and yet an effectual Reformer. It was only after the defiance and exasperation of his enemies that he was forced into the attitude of an open heretic.
* ↑ See also John Wiclif and his English Precursors, by Prof. G. V. Lechler; Lorimer's translation.
* ↑ R. L. Poole, as above, p. 31.
* ↑ Every Schoolman who made his mark must have studied the mathematics and science of his day. Wyclif, for instance, is pretty sure to have read the works of Roger Bacon, and to have cleared his mind by straining it through the scientific sieve. There is a sentence in the De Civili Dominio which showed him, as the late Prof. Thorold Rogers pointed out, to be well acquainted with the principle of the telescope:—"Sicut enim, juxta perspectives, contingit per specula vel media diversarum dyafanitatum, quantumlibet parvum per quantamcunque magnam distanciam apparere ex elargicione anguli piramidis radialis: ita contingit fide videre ea quae sunt in principio mundi et die judicii ex fideli narracione fidelium sibi succedencium tarn disparium fidei speculorum."