Wycliffe, John

Wycliffe, John (c.1330–84), philosopher, theologian, and reformer. He was Master of Balliol (c.1360–1) and Warden of Canterbury Hall, Oxford (1365–7). He was also rector of Fillingham (1361–8), of Ludgershall (1368–84), and of Lutterworth (1374–84), but until 1381 he lived mainly in Oxford. He was in the service of the Black Prince and of John of Gaunt after 1371, and so protected against ecclesiastical censures.

Wycliffe's early reputation was as a philosopher. He reacted against the prevalent Oxford scepticism, which divorced the spheres of natural and supernatural knowledge; in his Summa de Ente he argued that individual beings derived from God through a hierarchy of universals and were therefore in essence changeless and indestructible. His repugnance at the religious institutions of his time led him to elaborate a concept of the Church which distinguished its eternal, ideal reality from the visible, ‘material’ Church, and denied to the latter any authority which did not derive from the former. In his De Civili Dominio he argued that secular and ecclesiastical authority depended on grace and that therefore the clergy, if not in a state of grace, could lawfully be deprived of their endowments by the civil power. He later maintained that the Bible was the sole criterion of doctrine, that the authority of the Pope was ill-founded in Scripture, and that the monastic life had no biblical foundation. He attacked the doctrine of transubstantiation as philosophically unsound and as encouraging a superstitious attitude to the Eucharist.

Wycliffe gradually lost support in Oxford. His Eucharistic teaching was condemned by the University in 1381, and in 1382 Abp. W. Courtenay condemned a wide range of his doctrines and the persons of his followers, though not Wycliffe himself. Wycliffe retired to Lutterworth. After his death his doctrines were again condemned in 1388, 1397, and at the Council of Constance in 1415. The extent of his influence in England is unclear, but from c.1380 his philosophical and theological writings exercised a major influence on Czech scholars, notably J. Huss. The 16th-cent. Reformers appealed to Wycliffe, but his preoccupations were largely different from theirs. Feast day in CW, 31 Dec.