Foundations of the Anglican Church XXI

The Church in England in the fourteenth century was rife for trouble and John Wycliffe was just the man to stir the hornet’s nest.  We have seen the anti-papal legislation of the Statutes of Provisors and of Praemunire that tried to limit papal power in England and, even more important, to stem the flow of English gold to Rome.  Geoffrey Chaucer would chronicle the amusing idiosyncrasies and corresponding dispiriting decay of the English religious scene at the end of the fourteenth century in the Canterbury Tales.  This was Wycliffe’s world.
John Wycliffe was born c 1323 in the Yorkshire village of Hipswell and after local primary school found himself at Oxford, probably about the age of fifteen as was then usual.  Though he would accept a number of Church appointments, Oxford would always remain the center of his life.  His career seems to have begun at Baliol, and he studied natural science, mathematics, philosophy, and theology.  Advancement to degrees was not the fairly straightforward things it is today and it took him over thirty years before he attained the doctorate in theology.  In the meantime he had served as the Master at Baliol and later as the head of Canterbury Hall—a residence for men preparing for the secular priesthood.  Wycliffe himself was a secular priest.  After only a few years at Canterbury Hall, the new Archbishop—Simon Langham—replaced Wycliffe as head of the Hall with a monk.  Wycliffe appealed his deprivation to Rome but without satisfaction.  Wycliffe seems to have turned against the monastic and religious clergy from this point. 
There was another event at this time that poisoned the feelings of many English towards the papacy.  If you remember our entry on King John, I mentioned that John had been forced to cede England to the Pope and receive it back as a feudal holding.  This was, as I said, largely symbolic but it did involve the paying of an annual tribute of one thousand silver marks.  This was at the time equivalent to about  £ 660; today it would be several million dollars.  In any event, over the years the tribute had ceased being paid to the pope and no one noticed.  Then in 1365 Pope Urban V demanded the tax once again.  Parliament—remembering the Statutes of Provisors and Praemunire—reacted strongly and declared that King John and, indeed no king or other person, had the authority to cede the sovereignty of England and no tribute would be paid.    The pope backed down but anti-papal feeling was running high in England.  And remember at this time the popes were living in Avignon where they were very much disposed politically in favor of the French, the enemies of England. 
As a theologian, Wycliffe was particularly interested in the scriptures and espoused the older patristic approach of doing theology based in the scriptures rather than the new scholastic approach which saw theological principles in the light of Aristotelian logic.  His study of the scriptures gave him a desire that they should be available to the common people—at this time there was no English translation and the scriptures were available only in Latin.  Granted, more people knew Latin in the fourteenth century—any educated man (and the relatively few educated women) knew Latin—but that still was only a handful of the population.  Wycliffe had been “given the rectory” of Lutterworth—that is, appointed the rector (we would say pastor) of Lutterworth parish in Leicestershire and while he continued his work at Oxford he spent considerable time in the parish and it was there he made the first English translation of the scriptures in an attempt to make them accessible to the common person. 
Wycliffe’s reading of the scriptures soured him on the wealth and power of the institutional Church.  The Gospels, in particular, can do that. The extravagance of the papal court at Avignon was a scandal to him and the greed with which churchmen accumulated salaries and appointments in order to have more luxurious lives stood in sharp contrast with the poverty of Christ and his apostles.  Wycliffe saw the religious orders to be no better. The monasteries held vast wealth in lands and Church ornaments.  Orders such as the various mendicant groups—Franciscans, Carmelites, Augustinians—once founded in poverty had become known for good food and drink, comfortable life, and immoral behavior.  Wycliffe saw the hope for renewal of the Church in secular priests who would live poor lives among the people teaching and preaching the scriptures.   
Wycliffe believed that the true Church of Christ was a pure and poor Church, very different from the Institutional Church of the hierarchy and monks.  He spoke of an “invisible Church of the elect”—an idea that would surface two centuries later with John Calvin.  This “invisible Church” was comprised of those holy souls whom God had predestined to salvation.  No one knew with certainty who were among these forechosen.   You could look at a Sunday congregation or a pilgrimage assembled at Canterbury or the throngs of faithful gathered to see the Pope and only God knew who belonged to him and who did not.  Such a view made not only the hierarchy but the clergy themselves irrelevant to the plan of salvation and it is not surprising that the Church’s axe fell on the priest of Lutterworth.  Gregory XI dispatched to England five copies of a bull condemning Wycliffe in May 1377.  But Wycliffe had a protector in John of Gaunt, the uncle of Richard II and, during Richard’s minority, his regent.  Joan of Kent, the King’s mother, as well as Henry Percy, the Lord Marshal of England also supported him.  It was a question of England vs. the foreigner—always a flash point for the English. Many of the nobility supported Wycliffe because they were jealous of the land that the Church had accumulated and wanted to seize it; the London mob was also pro-Wycliffe as they too resented the wealth and power of the Church while they lived with struggle and hard work and had little to show for it. But in the end it was his Englishness that saved Wycliffe.  Wycliffe was one of them and represented England; the Pope was a foreign prince and they resented a foreign prince claiming authority in England.  Perhaps the bishops and even the Crown had eventually caved in to the papacy but in the hearts of many English, they still wanted independence. 
Wycliffe was indicted several times in episcopal courts and had to defend his doctrines but he never was convicted of heresy nor was he deprived of his living.  On December 28^th 1384, the feast of the Holy Innocents, while saying Mass in his parish church, he suffered a stroke and three days later he died.  He was buried beneath the floor of his church. 
Wycliffe’s ideas spread through the universities of Europe and in Prague they were taken up by an energetic and evangelical young chaplain, Jan Hus.  Hus was not so fortunate as Wycliffe.  He was charged with heresy and when he came to the Council of Constance to defend himself, the Emperor broke faith with the safe conduct he had been guaranteed and Hus was burned at the stake as a heretic.  The same council posthumously declared Wycliffe a heretic and at the orders of Pope Martin V, his body was exhumed some  31 years after his death, burned, and his ashes thrown into a local river.  But Wycliffe’s influence survived where his ashes did not.   

just an advisory--I will be travelling and at meetings the next week or so and my posts may be somewhat sporadic --hope not, but no promises.

The Roots of the Reformation III: Long before Luther

Howden Minster, an English
pre-Reformation Chuch

John Wycliffe is another proto-Protestant—one of those religious leaders who anticipated Luther in calling for a reform of the Church and whose preaching and teaching led to the formation, not of an alternative Church or community of believers, as with Peter Waldo and his Waldensians, but of groups of followers who existed as a dissenting movement that technically remained within the Catholic Church but without subscribing to many of its doctrines. 

Wycliffe, born 1328, was a Yorkshire man from the North of England which always had a different religious tradition than London and the southern counties, a tradition that looked less to Rome for leadership and a stronger sense of both Englishness and of the distinctive “Ecclesia Anglicana” heritage.  He was a scholar at Baliol College, Oxford where he studied mathematics, natural philosophy (the physical sciences), English and Roman Law, English history, theology and Philosophy.   This was an amazing spectrum of studies and he could well be called a Renaissance man although there was as yet no Renaissance, at least in England. Philosophically, he was a disciple of Ockham and the Nominalists and as such he was what we would call today, a deconstructionist.   He rejected “realism” and thus such doctrines as “transubstantion” did not sit easy with him.  Indeed, the one source of authority he recognized was The Bible—to which he had great devotion and which he managed to have translated in its entirety to English (from the Latin Vulgate) so as to be accessible to the common people.  His study of scripture convinced him that many of the doctrines of the Church—such as papal supremacy—were unsubstantiated by Scripture or even contrary to it.  Moreover, he differed from Catholic orthodoxy on several other points.  Influenced by the ancient Donatist doctrines, for example, he believed that the efficacy of the sacraments depended on the worthiness of the minister.

Despite his lack of strict religious orthodoxy, he was recognized for his academic brilliance and Archbishop Simon Islip appointed him head of Canterbury Hall—an Oxford foundation which was meant to provide education for twelve priests or candidates for priesthood from the Archdiocese of Canterbury.  Islip’s successor, Simon Langham, replaced Wycliffe with a monk, however, and while Wycliffe appealed his case to the papal court the appeal was unsuccessful.  This may account in part for Wycliffe’s turning against both monasticism and the papacy.  

Like many of the Oxbridge dons, Wycliffe was supported by being given “a living” or “a rectory” which meant he was pastor of a parish which paid a handsome salary—handsome enough both to support him in his academic work and to pay for a “vicar” to actually live in the parish and tend to its pastoral needs.  Wycliffe held a number of rectories in his life but probably actually ministered only in the last two-- Ludgershall, Buckinghamshire and Lutterworth in Leistershire.  But from these rectories, when he was no longer teaching at Oxford, he issued a series of pamphlets and other materials that attacked corruption in the Church.  His Donatism shown through in his affirming that the “real” Church was not the represented  by the hierarchy and the visible society of baptized believers, but the association of those believers, known only to God, who were to be saved.  This naturally led him to a doctrine of predestination in which God not only knew but determined who would  be saved and who was to be lost.

Wycliffe not only undermined traditional Catholic Doctrines, but he directly assailed the papacy.  Remember that through most of this time the papacy was located at Avignon, just across the Rhone River from the realms of the King of France but very much under his influence.  The popes were mostly French at this time, as were the majority of the cardinals.  And the French were the enemies of the English.  This was not only the time of the Avignon papacy but of the Hundred Years War between France and England.  Wycliffe’s anti-papal polemics found a patriotic ear among the English. Wycliffe assailed the papacy for its wealth and claimed that various practices such as annates were simply simony.  Annates were the practice by which a man elevated to an ecclesiastical post—bishop, Archbishop, Abbot, even a canon or somewhat minor official—paid the pope the first year’s revenues of his new position.  We will hear much about them in this series.  Simony is the crime/sin of buying and selling Church office.   

As much as Wycliffe hated the papacy he hated monasticism even more.  He was a secular priest and he resented to claims to holiness that the monks made when often they were not only no better than himself and other parish priests, but when in fact they led lives far more indolent.  Initially supported by the Mendicant Orders—who themselves were often in mutual hatred with the Monastic Orders—Wycliffe soon turned on them too for their lack of holiness.  Read the medieval literature, Chaucer, Boccacio and others, and you will see that monks were seen to be lazy gluttonous characters more given to sleep and drink than to prayer, and friars (the mendicants) were womanizers and cheats.  These caricatures did not come out of thin air.  Not all monks were lazy and not all friars were lechers, but there was a need—a serious need—for reform in the clergy. 

The English Church, like the Church most place sin Europe, had great wealth in the centuries before the Reformation.  Bishops and Abbots, by virtue of their office, were great landowners and peers of the Realm.  Generations of bequests, donations, endowments, and monastic dowries—all usually made in grants of income-producing land and properties—made abbeys, cathedrals, and even parish churches very wealthy.  Great Lords and simple yeoman farmers alike were constrained in giving a tenth of the produce of their fields and orchards to the clergy in tithes.  The clergy had other customary charges that brought them revenue—the burial cloths and candles from funerals, wedding and christening fees, stipends for the blessing of fields and vineyards and orchards, and mass offerings.  While parish vicars were often underpaid, rectors of churches—often absentee—could usually count on a handsome income and as for canons, bishops, and other prelates, want was not at their doors.  Wycliffe—himself the holder of comfortable benefices—proposed the sending out of “poor priests” who would preach the gospel to the poor and evangelize the ordinary English man or woman. It would have been a brave step because the Church was losing its credibility fast among the middling sort of folk.   

Wycliffe’s rants were popular for a variety of reasons.  The popes were unpopular due to their alliances with England’s enemies; the Church did control great wealth and vast lands in a society where many were, or perceived themselves to be, on the margins of survival; the clergy needed reform; the English bible nourished people spiritually and rendered the ministrations of the clergy somewhat superficial.    Wycliffe also had a protector in the King’s uncle John of Gaunt who was extremely influential, especially during King Richard’s minority. 

Wycliffe’s ideas were condemned by a synod of English bishops in 1382 but he was not deprived of his living and no action was taken against him in his life time.  He suffered a stroke while attending mass on the Feast of the Holy Innocents in 1384 and died three days later.  But that is not the end of the story. 

We will see that many of his themes—especially the authority of scripture,  popular religion and the role of the Bible, and the wealth of the Church,  will continue to surface and threaten the hegemony of the hierarchical Church.  The failure of the Church to heed the calls to Reform will eventually lead to the struggle of the Reformation.  Hus’ doctrinal ideas on the Eucharist, on the nature of the Church as a “spiritual reality,” on the need for ministers to be men of integrity in order to minister effectively, on scripture alone, and on predestination will survive and later even return with a vengeance.  We will see what happens when the Church fails to “read the signs of the Times” as John XXIII called it to do when he called a Council in our own times.