Wyclif, John
WYCLIF, JOHN
WYCLIF, JOHN (1330?–1384), English scholastic theologian, trenchant critic of abuses in the church, and promoter of a vernacular translation of the Bible. Wyclif was the most learned man of his generation in England. The rigor of his scholastic logic and, in his last years, his appeal to scripture as the sole authority for the church's life, led him into heresies. During his time and to this day, he has had both sympathetic admirers and caustic critics. Nonetheless, the real, human Wyclif remains an enigma. We know little about him except that he led an austere life marked by tireless study, lecturing, and writing.
Nothing certain is known about Wyclif's family or its resources. John Wyclif (or Wycliffe) was born near Richmond in North Riding, Yorkshire. At an early age he entered Balliol College, Oxford, and then served as its regent master from 1360 to 1361. The date of his ordination is unrecorded. Later he resided at Queen's College, where he studied for and received his bachelor of divinity degree (1369) and his doctor of divinity degree (1372). Early connections with Merton College and Canterbury Hall are disputed.
University scholars without means of their own were dependent upon "provisions to livings" of parishes or prebends and canonries in collegiate churches or cathedrals. From this income they were expected to pay vicars for service during their absence. Wyclif was no exception. In 1361 Balliol gave him its choicest living at Fillingham, Lincolnshire. The following year he received from Pope Urban V a prebend at Aust in the collegiate church of Westbury-on-Trym near Bristol, but he neither resided there nor ever provided a vicar. In 1368 Wyclif exchanged Fillingham for Ludgershall, a less lucrative living in Buckinghamshire, because it was nearer to Oxford. He left this in 1374 for a royal provision at Lutterworth, Leicestershire. There he spent the last three years of his life. He died on December 31, 1384, after a massive paralytic stroke.
In philosophy Wyclif was a realist and in theology an advocate of Augustine's doctrines of predestination and grace. Only in the mid-1370s did he come into prominence outside Oxford for his views on dominium (lordship and ownership). Between 1376 and 1379 he published successively On Divine Lordship, On Civil Lordship, On the Duty of the King, and On the Church. In these treatises Wyclif argues that only God is the true Lord and owner of his whole creation. Whatever authority and property human beings possess they have from God, to whom they owe faithful service. Only the predestined have any right to them, but, like Augustine, Wyclif believed that no one could know who was and who was not among the elect. Hence one should suffer patiently under unjust and greedy masters until they repent or are removed and dispossessed.
Both estates of the realm, civil and ecclesiastical, should be under the authority of the king in all temporal matters. The ecclesiastical estate (including theologians) is of greater dignity because it is called to serve in spiritual teaching and guidance. It should be stripped of all temporal possessions, except what was necessary for food, clothing, and lodging, and no clergy should hold any civil office. The king should remove all unworthy clergy. All ecclesiastics, from the pope on down, should live in poverty as Peter and the other apostles did.
Although Wyclif's views were largely theoretical and not altogether unprecedented, they were noticed by Edward, Prince of Wales (the "Black Prince," 1330–1376), and his younger brother John of Gaunt (1340–1399), who became duke of Lancaster in 1362. The two virtually ruled England during the declining years of Edward III (1312–1377) and probably saw in Wyclif a front for their aim to plunder the church's wealth. In February 1377, Wyclif was summoned before the bishops at Saint Paul's, London, to answer for his views. He arrived accompanied by four friar doctors of theology and by John of Gaunt with some of his supporters. At once a bitter altercation broke out between Gaunt and Bishop William Courtenay of London, and the duke's party with Wyclif left before Wyclif could be heard or condemned.
In May, Gregory XI sent bulls to England denouncing nineteen propositions from Wyclif's writings and asking for a thorough investigation and Wyclif's arrest. Before the bulls arrived, however, ten-year-old Richard II had become king, and nothing became of the pope's directives. The archbishop of Canterbury, Simon of Sudbury, asked the faculty at Oxford to give an opinion on the propositions. They were unanimous in stating that some of them "sounded ill" but that they "were all the same true." In March, Wyclif appeared before Sudbury and Courtenay at Lambeth, just as a message arrived from the king's mother forbidding them to pass judgment on Wyclif. A mob broke into the meeting, and the bishops concluded the meeting by merely enjoining Wyclif from publicly disputing and preaching about his controverted views.
If Wyclif's mouth was shut for a time, his pen was not stilled. In 1378 he wrote On the Truth of Holy Scripture, in which he affirms that the Bible taken literally is the sole law of the church and that a translation without interpretation is needed so that the humblest person can learn from it. The treatise On the Eucharist (1379) cost him much support. In it he denies the dogma of transubstantiation: it is unscriptural, unknown in the church before the twelfth century, idolatrous, and contrary to his realist position that no substance can be changed into another substance. Yet he affirms the real presence of Christ's body and blood sacramentally in bread and wine. His last major work, the Trialogus (1382), gives a summary of his views.
Wyclif's enemies blamed him for the Peasants' Revolt in 1381, but there is no evidence to support the connection. After Archbishop Sudbury's murder during the rebellion, Courtenay succeeded to the primacy (1382–1396), determined to root out Wyclif's teachings at Oxford. In May 1382 he presented twenty-four propositions from Wyclif's writings to a council of bishops and theologians in London. Ten were voted heretical, the others erroneous. Leading Oxford supporters of Wyclif were summoned to appear and persuaded to recant. In November, Courtenay held the Convocation of Canterbury at Oxford, where all doctors, masters, and bachelors made their submission.
Yet Courtenay never moved against Wyclif personally. Wyclif had retired to Lutterworth in 1381 and suffered his first stroke in 1382. In his last years Wyclif may have supervised the translation of the Latin Vulgate Bible and the training of "poor preachers," cleric and lay (the Lollards), to spread the gospel, but his personal involvement has been disputed. The translation has come down in two principal versions, a literal version and a later, more idiomatic English version.
The marriage of Richard II to Anne of Bohemia (1382) brought several leaders of the Czech reform movement to England who took many of Wyclif's writings back home. Jan Hus, the principal champion of that movement, admired Wyclif and quoted extensively from his writings, but he used them with care, especially those on the Eucharist. The Council of Constance in 1415 burned Hus as a "Wycliffite" heretic and ordered that Wyclif's remains be exhumed and burned. Bishop Richard Fleming of Lincoln did this in 1428 and cast the ashes into the Swift River.
The extent of Wyclif's influence on the sixteenth-century Reformation is open to debate. Luther knew of him through Hus's writings. In England, Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury (1533–1556), owned a copy of the Trialogus printed at Basel in 1525. Yet references to Wyclif, always with approval, are scanty in his writings. Cranmer's views on the Eucharist were similar to Wyclif's, and he too worked for an English translation of the Bible. He would have supported the reform of the church by the king, but not its disendowment and reduction to apostolic poverty.
After Elizabeth I's settlement of the church in 1559, Wyclif became a hero and a martyr to those who dissented from it. Yet even they, contrary to Wyclif, would have had the church the dominant power in the kingdom. Wyclif's importance lies partly in his influence on Jan Hus, but even more in his propagation of reformed principles.
See Also
Bibliography
The numerous Latin writings of Wyclif have not been completely edited in modern editions. Most of them have been published by the Wyclif Society of London since 1884. A complete listing of Wyclif's Latin works, based on notes of S. Harrison Thomson, has been completed by his son, Williell R. Thomson, in The Latin Writings of John Wyclyf: An Annotated Catalog (Toronto, 1983). It notes all manuscripts and editions, with commentary on them. The authenticity of many, if not all, of Wyclif's English works is disputed. The best selection is Herbert E. Winn's Wyclif: Select English Writings (Oxford, 1929). A comprehensive bibliography is that of C. C. Scott in Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 7 (Cambridge and New York, 1932), which goes with Bernard L. Manning's chapter "Wyclif" in the same volume, pp. 486–507. Translations of Wyclif's Latin writings are few, but see the excerpts from On the Pastoral Office and On the Eucharist in Advocates of Reform from Wyclif to Erasmus, edited by Matthew Spinka, "The Library of Christian Classics," vol. 14 (Philadelphia, 1953), pp. 32–88.
The standard biography is Herbert B. Workman's John Wyclif: A Study of the English Medieval Church, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1926). Less sympathetic to Wyclif is K. B. McFarlane's John Wycliffe and the Beginnings of English Nonconformity (London, 1952), reprinted under the title The Origins of Religious Dissent in England (New York, 1966). McFarlane gives good background material about Oxford and church-state relations in Wyclif's time and, based on original research, carries the story through the Lollard movement until 1417, when it is driven underground. John Stacey's John Wyclif and Reform (Philadelphia, 1964) is informative and well balanced.
The influence of Wyclif on the Bohemian reformers is carefully researched by Matthew Spinka in John Hus and the Czech Reform (1941; Hamden, Conn., 1966). On the English version of the Bible associated with Wyclif, see Henry Hargreaves's "The Wycliffite Versions," in The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 2, The West from the Fathers to the Reformation (Cambridge, 1970), edited by G. W. H. Lampe, pp. 387–415, with bibliography, pp. 527–528.
Massey H. Shepherd, Jr. (1987)