[John Wycliffe was born sixteen
years after Petrarca, but, in my book, chronology here breaks down, to allow
Petrarca to feature in direct sequence with Bruni Aretino. Perhaps, I ought to
have foregone the chronology with Dante too, allowing him to join the Italian
club as its leading member, but this possibility still exists in future
considerations.]
***
Before Martin Luther, there was John
Wycliffe (1320-1384). He is mostly known to the cultural erudites as the
author-translator of the English Bible, but the question is seldom asked about
his connection to Martin Luther with his own translation of the Bible into
vernacular German. In fact, the two great Church Reformers have much in common,
but Luther receives all the distinction, in spite of the fact that nearly two
centuries separate the German from his English precursor.
Before he went on the radically heretical
warpath, Wycliffe was a distinguished and authoritative professor of theology
at Oxford, a scholastic orthodox, whom we would have certainly neglected to
mention, because orthodoxy in the late Dark Ages would be of little interest to
us, as everything of interest had already been said before. As Bertrand Russell
notes, unlike the earlier schoolmen, he
was a secular priest, not a monk or friar. Yet, until he was fifty-something
years of age, he was conventional and uninspiring. In Russell’s take on him,
this fairly mediocre existence disagreed with Wycliffe, and he suddenly threw
off all the guards, to be interesting to… himself.
“He seems to have been driven into heresy by
the strength of his moral feeling: his sympathy with the poor, and his horror
of rich worldly ecclesiastics. At first, his attack on papacy was only political
and moral, not doctrinal; it was only gradually that he was driven into wider
revolt.
Wycliffe’s departure from orthodoxy began in
1376 (when he was already 56!) with a course of
lectures at Oxford ‘On Civil Dominion.’ He advanced the theory that
righteousness alone gives the title to dominion and property; that unrighteous
clergy have no such title… He taught, further, that property is the result of
sin; Christ and the Apostles had no property, and the clergy ought to have
none…”
Here is a very interesting
development: Wycliffe the Christian communist; but at the same time a precursor
of Luther’s experience. The English royalty and nobility was just as happy with
his doctrine as the German royalty and nobility would later be with Luther’s.
It is mostly because of their support that Wycliffe stayed out of trouble
throughout his life. However, the world in his time was not ready for a Luther,
and, after his death, Wycliffe was declared a heretic by the Catholic Church,
and his bones were famously, or rather infamously, burned in an “act of faith,” symbolizing what would
have happened to him in person, had he been alive…
As I noted before, Wycliffe’s
translation of the Bible into English shows just how much in common he had with
Luther, all the more remarkable. considering the substantial time span between
his and Luther’s age. It is, in my view, the most outstanding significance of
Wycliffe, who has thus been terribly underrated by the subsequent generations.
Ironically, having rolled down
his high hillock against the enemy, in a righteous offensive for Christ, good
old Wycliffe could not stop halfway, but kept rolling on into the forbidden
theological territory. Like Luther later, but going farther than Luther, he
attacked transubstantiation as a deceitful and blasphemous folly. His point, in
my opinion, was that the ritual of the Eucharist had no mystical quality, but
only a purely symbolic value (just like the Baptists view it today). Thus there
could be no rationale for the Lutheran compromise consubstantiation, although, as I
suspect, Luther himself was quite disingenuous about it, unwilling to deny any "substantiation"
altogether, for fear of being anathemized by his own people…
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