John Wyclif: Selected Latin works in translation 9781526121837

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SELECTED LATIN WORl(S IN TRANSLATION

Translated and edited by Stephen Penn

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John Wyclif

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John Wyclif Selected Latin works in translation

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Translated and edited by Stephen Penn

Manchester University Press

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Copyright © Stephen Penn 2019 The right of Stephen Penn to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN  978 0 7190 6764 8  hardback First published 2019 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover design: riverdesignbooks.com

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For my mother and to the memory of my father

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements page ix Note on translations xi Editions of Wyclif ’s Latin works xii Abbreviations xiv Introduction 1 I: Logic and metaphysics   1 The reality of universals   2 A typology of universals   3 All future contingents are necessary   4 Why divine foreknowledge does not compromise human freedom   5 The relationship between time and tense in scriptural language   6 Why annihilation is impossible

34 36 37 38 39 41 45

53 II: Scripture and truth   7 The nature of the scriptural text and its four senses 55   8 Scripture has its own grammar and logic 58   9 Figurative and equivocal language in holy scripture 59 76 10 Why no scriptural passage can literally be false 11 The representation of time in scripture 82 12 Reading, understanding and teaching scripture 89 13 How the devil’s children deviate from scripture and obstruct its teaching 101 III: Sacramental questions 106 14 On the nature and necessity of baptism 110 15 The foreknown do not properly receive the sacrament of baptism, but may still enjoy baptismal grace 111 16 The three traditional elements of the sacrament of penance 112 117 17 Why annual confession to a priest is not sacramentally necessary 18 Holy orders: the three senses of the term order 128 19 A bad priest is still a priest, and may still minister the sacraments 135 20 Defining the sacrament of marriage 136 21 Why the votive utterance should be in the future tense 140 IV: The eucharist 145 22 The body and blood of Christ are not physically present in the eucharist 148

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Contents

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23 How the substances of the bread and wine remain after consecration 155 24 The meaning of the sacramental words 157 25 Why the bread and wine cannot be accidents without substantive subjects 162 26 Wyclif ’s letter to the Bishop of Lincoln, John of Buckingham 168 V: The church and the Christian life 170 27 Defining the church 172 28 Why the pope is not the true head of the church 198 29 The problem of the virtuous heathen 204 30 The condition of the contemporary church: a spiritual reading of Lamentations 4:9–22 205 31 The errors of the fraternal orders 208 32 Wyclif ’s ‘Letter’ to Pope Urban VI, summarising his principal beliefs 219 33 The papal schism and the Despenser Crusade of 1383 221 225 VI: Wyclif ’s political theory 34 Lordship: divine and human 227 234 35 The nature of civil lordship 36 The role of the king 241 254 37 The relationship between priest and monarch 38 Why the church should not be exempt from taxation by the monarch 263 39 The collection of unpaid taxes and the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 265 268 40 Wyclif ’s letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury VII: Shorter texts and polemical tracts 272 41 On the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit 272 42 On the Loosing of Satan 287 43 The Noonday Devil 294 Appendix: Condemnation of Wyclif ’s teaching 44 Gregory XI’s Bull to the University of Oxford, condemning Wyclif ’s teaching (1376) 45 Condemnation of two of Wyclif ’s doctrines by William Barton, Chancellor of the University of Oxford (1380) 46 The Blackfriars Council (1382)

300

Glossary of terms Select bibliography of secondary sources Index

311 321 327

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300 302 305

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is a great pleasure to acknowledge the help and advice I have received during the long preparation of this volume. My interest in Wyclif ’s Latin works began at an early stage of my doctoral work at the University of York. I owe my greatest academic debt of gratitude to my supervisor, Alastair Minnis, who first suggested I should look at Wyclif ’s Latin writings. His friendship, advice and encouragement over the years have been invaluable, and continue to be so. I would like to thank a number of scholars who have given their assistance with particular matters. Stephen Lahey, reader for Manchester University Press, examined the entire manuscript in draft and offered valuable suggestions as to how it might be enhanced and improved. I should also like to thank the anonymous reviewer who examined the final manuscript for the press, whose comments and recommendations have certainly made this a better book. Alessandro Conti readily provided assistance when Wyclif ’s philosophical language seemed impenetrable. I should also like to thank Ann Hudson and Ian Levy for their help with particular queries, and Rita Copeland for her enthusiastic interest in my work. Any shortcomings that remain are naturally my own responsibility. At the University of Stirling I have benefited from the knowledge of my friend, colleague and fellow medievalist Brian Murdoch and my doctoral student Kirsten Pfeiffer, together with a diverse range of enthusiastic students undertaking master’s degrees and undergraduate medievalists. Students and staff at the university have provided a friendly and supportive environment in which to work, and I would particularly like to record my gratitude to my dear friend and colleague Dale Townshend and the two heads of faculty who have offered their support throughout the completion of this project at Stirling, Douglas Brodie and Richard Oram. At Manchester University Press I have been fortunate to benefit from the wisdom and forbearance of my editors, Meredith Carroll and Emma Brennan, who must surely be as glad as I am to see this book finally in print. Sarah Wilson expertly prepared the index, and I would like to express my gratitude to her. Luigi Campi’s welcome edition of Wyclif ’s De Scientia Dei (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) sadly appeared too late for me to make

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x

Acknowledgements

use of it in this project, and I must therefore stress that the absence of translations from this text is an effect of pressure of time rather than of wilful exclusion. Indeed, Campi’s edition of this text was originally to be published with an accompanying English translation, but this proved impracticable in the event. He informs me that an English translation may be forthcoming in the future, nevertheless. I would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Board (now the Arts and Humanities Research Council) for the award of a Research Leave grant, which enabled me to complete a significant amount of work for this project. I would also like to thank the British Academy for a small grant that allowed me to consult manuscripts at the Czech National Library in Prague. The greatest debt that I owe is to my mother and my late father, and it is to them that the book is dedicated.

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NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS

All biblical quotations follow the Douay-Rheims translation of the Latin Vulgate Bible. Occasionally, I have departed from Douay-Rheims translation to reflect Wyclif ’s own (probably unconscious) alterations to the text of the Vulgate. Note that the Vulgate and the Douay translation include the deuterocanonical books of the Old Testament (books that appear in the Greek Septuagint but not in the Hebrew Scriptures): Tobias, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch and 1 and 2 Maccabees. Note that the Vulgate and Douay translations number 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings as 1–2 Kings and 3–4 Kings, respectively. 1 and 2 Chronicles take the Greek title 1 and 2 Paralipomenon (denoting things omitted from the book of Kings), and the books of Ezra and Nehemiah are called 1 and 2 Esdras, respectively. Numbering of biblical verses is here generally provided in square brackets, as such numbering was introduced only after the medieval period. Quotations from the Lauda Sion Salvatorem sequence in Wyclif ’s text follow the classic English rendering that appears in The Sarum Missal done into English, by A. Harford Pearson (London: The Church Printing Company, 1884). All translations from Wyclif and all other translations from sources other than Wyclif are my own. Where alternative translations of Wyclif ’s texts translated here exist, I have identified these alongside the Latin edition I have used.

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EDITIONS OF WYCLIF   ’S LATIN WORKS CONSULTED IN THE PREPARATION OF THIS VOLUME De Apostasia, ed. M.H. Dziewicki (London: WS, 1889) De Benedicta Incarnatione, ed. E. Harris (London: WS, 1886) De Blasphemia, ed. M.H. Dziewicki (London: WS, 1893) De Civili Dominio, vol. i, ed. R.L. Poole (London: WS, 1884) De Civili Dominio, vol. ii – vol. iv, ed. J. Loserth (London: WS, 1900–4) De Compositione Hominis, ed. R. Beer (London: WS, 1884) De Dominio Divino Libri Tres, ed. R.L. Poole (London: WS, 1890) De Ecclesia, ed. J. Loserth (London: WS, 1885) De Ente Librorum Duorum Excerpta, ed. M.H. Dziewicki (London: WS, 1909) De Ente Praedicamentali, ed. R. Beer (London: WS, 1891) De Logica, ed. M.H. Dziewicki (London: WS, 1884–89) De Mandatis Divinis, ed. J. Loserth and F.D. Matthew (London: WS, 1922) De Officio Pastorali, ed. G. Lechler (Leipzig: A. Edelmann, 1853) De Officio Regis, ed. A.W. Pollard and C. Sayle (London: WS, 1887) De Potestate Papae, ed. J. Loserth (London: WS, 1907) De Scientia Dei, ed. Luigi Campi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) De Simonia, ed. H. Fränkel and M.H. Dziewicki (London: WS, 1898) De Universalibus, ed. I. Mueller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) De Veritate Sacrae Scripturae, 3 vols, ed. R. Buddensieg (London: WS, 1905–7) Dialogus vel Speculum Ecclesie Militantis, ed. A.W. Pollard (London: WS, 1886) Fasciculi Zizaniorum Magistri Johannis Wyclif cum Tritico, ed. W.W. Shirley (London: Longman, 1858) Miscellanea Philosophica, ed. M.H. Dziewicki (London: WS, 1902–5) Opera Minora, ed. J. Loserth (London: WS, 1910–11) Opus Evangelicum, 2 vols, ed. J. Loserth (London: WS, 1885–86) Polemical Works, 2 vols, ed. R. Buddensieg (London: WS, 1882–83) Sermones, 3 vols, ed. J Loserth (London: WS, 1887–90)

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Editions of Wyclif   ’s Latin works

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Summa de Ente Libri Primi Tractatus Primus et Secundus, ed. S.H. Thomson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1930) Trialogus cum Supplemento Trialogi, ed. G.V. Lechler (Oxford: Clarendon: 1869) Wyclifs Bibelkommentar, ed. G.A. Benrath (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1966)

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ABBREVIATIONS

Anonimalle Chronicle The Anonimalle Chronicle, 1333–1381, ed. V.H. Galbraith (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1970) BRUO A Biographical Register of the University of Oxford to A.D. 1500, ed. A.B. Emden, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1957–59) Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis CCCM (Turnhout: Brepols, 1966–) CCSL Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina (Turnhout: Brepols, 1953–) Chronica Maiora The St Albans Chronicle, Volume 1: 1376–1394, ed. John Taylor, Wendy R. Childs and Leslie Watkiss (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003) CICaPP Corpus Iuris Canonici, Pars Prior: Decretum Magistri Gratiani, ed. Aemelius Friedberg (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1879) Corpus Iuris Canonici, Pars Secunda: Decretalium CICaPS Collectiones, ed. Aemelius Friedberg (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1879) CICi Corpus Iuris Civilis, ed. Paul Krueger and Theodor Mommsen (Berlin: Weidmann, 1828–) CSEL Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1866–) Decrees Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman Tanner et al., 2 vols (London: Sheed and Ward, 1990) DMA Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. Michael Strayer, 13 vols (New York: Scribner, 1982–89) EETS Early English Text Society FZ Fasciculi Zizaniorum Magistri Johannis Wyclif cum Tritico, ed. W.W. Shirley (London: Longman, 1858) GL Grammatici Latini, ed. Martin Hertz, Heinrich Keil, Theodor Mommsen and Hermann Hagen (Leipzig: Teubner, 1857–70)

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Abbreviations

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Historia

Historia Vitae et Regni Ricardi Secundi, ed. George B. Stow, Jr (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977) John Wyclif Herbert Workman, John Wyclif: A Study of the English Medieval Church, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926) JWCI Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes Knighton’s Chronicle, 1337–1396, ed. and trans. Knighton G.H. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995) Latin Writings Latin Writings of John Wyclyf, ed. Williel R. Thomson (Toronto Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1983) n.s. new series ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography original series o.s. Oxford Schools J.A. Robson, Wyclif and the Oxford Schools: The Relation of the ‘Summa de Ente’ to Scholastic Debates in the Later Fourteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961) PG Patrologiae cursus completus, series Graeca, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne (Paris: Garnier, 1857–66) PL Patrologiae cursus completus, series Latina, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne (Paris: Garnier, 1844–64) RS Rolls Series SChH Studies in Church History Select English Works Select English Works of John Wyclif, ed. Thomas Arnold, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1869–71) Summa Theologiae Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 60 vols (London: Blackfriars, 1964–75) Westminster Chronicle The Westminster Chronicle, 1381–1394, ed. and trans. L.C. Hector and Barbara F. Harvey (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982) WS Wyclif Society Wycliffite Bible The Holy Bible containing the Old and New Testaments with the Apocryphal Books, in the Earliest English Versions made from the Latin Vulgate by John Wycliffe and his Followers, ed. Josiah Forshall and Frederic Madden, 4 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1850)

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INTRODUCTION

The Englishman John Wyclif, the greatest theologian of his time, held the magisterial chair (as they call it) at Oxford for a great many years. Alongside the truly apostolic life that he led, he far surpassed all of his fellow Christians in England in his genius, eloquence and manifold erudition. In the year 1360 after the birth of our saviour, the eternal Father roused him in his spirit so that he could stand for his truth in the midst of a cloud of impious locusts, as Christ’s brave champion, and become the most unconquerable organ of his age against Antichrists. He was the most powerful Elias of his times in his rectification of all distortions. He was as one and the first after the loosing of Satan, who in the darkness of that time bore the light of truth, who dared to acknowledge Christ, and to reveal the supreme infamy of the great antichrist. He shone out like the morning star in the middle of a cloud, and remained for many days as a faithful witness in the church.1

These are the words of the Protestant historian and polemicist John Bale (d. 1563), whose exuberant assessment of Wyclif ’s campaign for church reform in the late fourteenth century did much to secure his reputation among Protestant intellectuals in Reformation and post-Reformation England and Europe. Bishop Bale, who himself became a religious exile after the institution of the Act of the Six Articles in 1539, and then again under the punitive regime of Mary Tudor, clearly felt that Wyclif had prophetically anticipated the course of church history in his own day.2 For him, the Oxford scholar was like the ‘the morning star’ shining out in the darkness of his times, an expression that did much to influence scholarly perceptions of Wyclif in the twentieth century, which were dominated by the image of the heresiarch as ‘the morning star of the Reformation’.3 In spite of the  1 Illustrium maioris Britanniae scriptorium, hoc est, Angliae, Cambriae ac Scotiae Summarium (Ipswich: P. van der Straten, 1548), fo. 154v (my translation).   2 Though introduced under Henry VIII, the Act of the Six Articles endorsed and prescribed six fundamental aspects of Catholic teaching, and remained in force until the king’s death in 1547. Bale, together with many other reformers, left England for Europe after the act had been passed by Parliament.   3 See the classic studies by A.G. Dickens, Lollards and Protestants in the Diocese of York (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959) and The English Reformation, second edition (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989). See also Margaret Aston’s more cautious and nuanced interpretation of the relationship between

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John Wyclif: selected Latin works in translation

heroic status that Wyclif enjoyed posthumously among prominent Protestants like Bale and the martyrologist John Foxe, a good number of more recent scholars have sought to downplay the significance of Wyclif and the Lollards in the history of the Reformation itself. K.B. McFarlane offered a famously cynical assessment of Wyclif ’s influence on Reformation culture in his study of Wyclif and religious nonconformity, suggesting that ‘he did little or nothing to inspire and in effect everything possible to delay [the Reformation]’.4 The more recent studies of J.J. Scarisbrick, Eamon Duffy and Richard Rex offer, in their different ways, comparable assessments of the post-medieval influence of Wyclif and the Lollards.5 Whatever its significance in relation to Wyclif, the Reformation can also be seen, and has increasingly been seen recently, as a potentially distorting lens, which may result in him and other medieval religious dissenters becoming ‘a kind of historiographical football, less important in their own right than for the contributions they made, or did not make, to later events’.6 This new collection of translations in part seeks to demonstrate that understanding Wyclif solely in relation to his desire for ecclesiastical Wyclif ’s followers and Reformation thought in ‘Lollardy and the Reformation: Survival or Revival?’, History, 49 (1964), 149–70, and ‘John Wycliffe’s Reformation Reputation’, Past and Present, 30 (1965), 23–51. Both essays are reproduced in her Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Medieval Religion (London: Hambledon Press, 1984), pp. 219–42 and pp. 243–72. Ann Hudson’s The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) has done more than any comparable volume to offer a fully historicised study of the activity of Wyclif and his followers. Hudson argues that an accurate understanding of Wyclif ’s status as a reformer must begin in his own time, rather than in the Reformation (p. 62). See also the more recent study by G.R. Evans, The Roots of the Reformation: Tradition, Emergence and Rupture, second edition (Westmont, IL: IVP Academic, 2012), pp. 214–25.  4 John Wycliffe and the Beginnings of English Non-conformity (London: English Universities Press, 1952), p. 186.  5 Scarisbrick is most vehemently dismissive, suggesting that ‘[Lollardy] scarcely threatened the old order. It lacked political “clout” ’, The Reformation of the English Church (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), p. 46. Duffy argues that the influence of the Lollards has been ‘overestimated’, and Rex maintains that their anticipation of certain aspects of Reformation doctrine does not entail that ‘they somehow paved the way for the Reformation’. See Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 6; Richard Rex, The Lollards (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2002), p. 115. A recent study that offers a more sympathetic and wide-ranging account of Wyclif ’s place in the history of the Reformation is Peter Marshall’s superb monograph, Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017), pp. 100–3.   6 J. Patrick Hornbeck II, What Is a Lollard? Dissent and Belief in Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 18.

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Introduction

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reform, whether in relation to the culture of the English Reformation or not, is potentially to underestimate the work that secured his reputation as a leading talent in the Oxford schools (and, indeed, throughout Europe), and to risk obscuring the close interconnectedness of his philosophical, theological and political ideas.7 Indeed, it is worth noting that John Bale, who was himself in possession of many of Wyclif ’s most erudite philosophical and theological works, was careful to acknowledge his enviable skills as a scholar and theologian.8 His disciple John Foxe, in the 1570 edition of his Actes and Monuments (popularly known today as the Book of Martyrs), described him as ‘a great clerke, a deepe scholeman, and no lesse experte in all kinde of Philosophie’.9 Until his contentious views on the eucharist became known, even Wyclif ’s academic opponents spoke highly of him. One prominent academic adversary, borrowing an epithet usually reserved for Thomas Bradwardine, was happy to describe Wyclif as a ‘profound clerk’, even as he expressed his desire that the doctor should make better efforts to defend his controversial or eccentric philosophical positions.10 Even Thomas Walsingham (d. ca. 1422), a chronicler who had nothing good to say about John ‘Wikkebeleue’ (Weakbelief), as he called him, found it difficult to disguise the fact that Wyclif was an influential and popular figure who enjoyed the support of some of the most powerful people in the land.11 But after a papal bull condemning his teaching had been issued to the university’s chancellor in 1376, and following his dismissal from Oxford in 1380, his reputation within the academy abruptly declined.12 The decision of one commentator, generally assumed to be Adam Stockton, an Austin friar and Cambridge scholar, to scratch  7 Wyclif ’s status as a scholar has received welcome recognition in a number of recent studies. See Anthony Kenny, Wyclif (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); Stephen Lahey, John Wyclif (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Ian Levy, John Wyclif: Scriptural Logic, Real Presence and the Parameters of Orthodoxy (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2003); Ian Levy (ed.), A Companion to John Wyclif (Leiden: Brill, 2006). See also Levy’s John Wyclif ’s Theology of the Eucharist: Scriptural Logic, Real Presence and the Parameters of Orthodoxy (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2014), a revised and expanded version of his earlier volume.   8 For the list of works known to Bale (which includes some that were erroneously ascribed to Wyclif), see Scriptorum Illustrium maioris Britanniae, quam nunc Angliam et Scotiam vocant, Catalogus (Basel: J. Oporinus, 1557–59), vol. 1, pp. 451–5; vol. 2, p. 163.  9 Actes and Monuments of these latter and perilous dayes, touching matters of the church (London: John Day, 1583), p. 448. 10 This was the Carmelite friar John Kenningham, who engaged with Wyclif ’s ideas in a number of academic determinations. See FZ, p. 12. 11 For references to John Weakbelief, see Knighton, pp. 402–3 and pp. 406–7. 12 See the more detailed discussion in the following section.

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John Wyclif: selected Latin works in translation

out the marginal label ‘venerable teacher’ from a manuscript of his containing the text of Wyclif ’s On the Power of the Pope, and replace it, within a matter of months, with the defamatory ‘accursed deceiver’ is a vivid indication of how suddenly scholarly opinion shifted.13 But it would seem that condemnation and academic estrangement, whilst dealing Wyclif a difficult blow, did not entirely overshadow the perception of his earlier brilliance or his later sacrifices. The contemporary Augustinian chronicler Henry Knighton (d. ca. 1396), before carefully enumerating Wyclif ’s heretical opinions, chose to describe him as ‘the most eminent doctor of theology in his days’, who was ‘reputed second to none in philosophy’, and ‘incomparable’ across the different fields of philosophical learning.14 Though Knighton was undoubtedly hostile to Wyclif ’s beliefs (albeit not as outspokenly hostile as Walsingham), he chose to characterise him (perhaps with unwitting admiration) as a man who ‘wished and was ready’ to face imprisonment or even death in their defence.15 Today, outside the academy, relatively little is said about the ­fourteenth-century scholar and reformer; he certainly enjoys nothing of the prominence of Martin Luther or John Calvin in the popular ­imagination, and all but a small number of his Latin works are unavailable in translation; others are only now being edited.16 Even within the academy, the English Wycliffites or Lollards continue to attract rather more attention than Wyclif himself, especially those who communicated their ideas in the vernacular. The Middle English tracts and sermons that have been ascribed to him are most probably the products of his followers (none of them can be attributed to him verifiably), and offer a subtly different and rather less abstract version of his ­theology and political beliefs from the one we find in his Latin texts.17 The 13 Trinity College Dublin, MS 115, p. 179 (this manuscript is paginated rather than foliated). 14 Knighton, p. 42. 15 Knighton, p. 250. 16 To date, only On Universals, On the Truth of Holy Scripture, On Simony and the Trialogue have been translated (the second of these only in an abbreviated form), together with a selection of shorter treatises. Luigi Campi has recently edited De Scientia Dei (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Ivan Mueller is in the process of completing an edition of De Ideis (with Vilém Herold), and is also editing De Intellectione Dei and De Volutione Dei. Mark Thakkar is working on a new edition and translation of Wyclif ’s logical writings. 17 See, for example, the texts included in Select English Works; in The English Works of Wyclif, ed. F.D. Matthew, revised edition (EETS: o.s. 74, 1902), and in Selections from English Wycliffite Writings, ed. Anne Hudson, new edition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997).

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Introduction

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text with which he is most popularly associated, the Wycliffite Bible, though it tangibly emerged in the wake of ideas that Wyclif had originally promulgated in his scriptural writings, sermons and commentaries, is almost certainly principally the work of other translators. Mary Dove, in her magisterial study of the Wycliffite Bible, argues that Henry Knighton and Archbishop Thomas Arundel, both opponents of vernacular translation in general and of the Wycliffite Bible in particular, were keen to associate Wyclif with its production. Knighton was certainly explicit in his claim that its translation was Wyclif ’s personal responsibility. Such a gesture may have been governed by politics as much as by facts, but on the basis of surviving contemporary evidence Dove concludes that it is likely that ‘at the least [Wyclif] initiated the [translation] project and actively supervised it’.18 This remains fully consistent with the likelihood that Wyclif was not directly involved in the production of the translated text of the Middle English Wycliffite Bible.19

Wyclif ’s life Estimates vary in respect of Wyclif ’s date of birth, though it is generally agreed that he must have been born between 1325 and 1335, depending upon the age at which he matriculated as a student in Oxford. His family probably lived in the village bearing their name in Richmondshire, North Yorkshire, though little more is known of his early life. He was probably one of the two John Wyclifs ordained 18 Mary Dove, The First English Bible: The Text and Context of the First Wycliffite Versions, p. 81. For a brief survey of the context of the translation and its relation to Wyclif ’s exegetical approach, see Jeremy Catto, ‘The Wycliffite Bible: The Historical Context’, in The Wycliffite Bible: Origin, History and Interpretation, ed. Elizabeth Solopova (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 11–26. For texts relevant to the Bible translation debate, please consult Dove’s later volume, Earliest Advocates of the English Bible: The Texts of the Medieval Debate (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010). 19 See The Holy Bible containing the Old and New Testaments with the Apocryphal Books, in the Earliest English Versions made from the Latin Vulgate by John Wycliffe and his Followers, ed. Josiah Forshall and Frederic Madden, 4 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1850). The text of Forshall and Madden’s edition is now more than 150 years old, and the need for a new edition that takes account of subsequent manuscript discoveries and advances in research and in textual scholarship has recently been expressed by Ann Hudson and Elizabeth Solopova. They are currently working on preliminary research towards such an edition. See Elizabeth Solopova, ‘Introduction’, in The Wycliffite Bible: Origin, History and Interpretation, ed. Elizabeth Solopova (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 1–8 (p. 5).

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as priests in 1351, and became a Bachelor of Arts at Oxford some time before 1356, when he is recorded as a probationary fellow of Merton College. The Old Catalogue (Catalogus Vetus) of Merton Fellows contains an entry for Wyclif that has attracted significant scholarly attention. The catalogue, which was prepared by Thomas Robert retrospectively before his own fellowship came to an end in 1422, contains a note under the name Wyklyf suggesting that he had neither been a fellow there nor remained in college throughout the whole of his probationary year.20 If he had indeed not been a fellow at Merton there would be no reason to include his name in the catalogue, but it is clear that the note indicates a troubled relationship with the college. Wyclif became master of Balliol by 1360, but there is no clear evidence that he studied there as an undergraduate, though many scholars have gestured towards the college’s strong Northern associations as a possible reason for his matriculating there.21 It has been rightly observed, nevertheless, that moving from Balliol, via Merton, back to Balliol would have marked rather an eccentric pattern of decisions on Wyclif ’s part.22 This might arguably make Merton into a more likely candidate.23 It is at this point in his career that he would have become a regent, or teacher, but records of the existence of two other contemporary John Wyclifs at Oxford have inevitably frustrated efforts to supply a definitive narrative of Wyclif ’s early life. Workman’s claim that on entering Oxford as a young undergraduate Wyclif was moving to the location where he would spend ‘all but a few years’ of his life is not inaccurate, 20 Merton Record 3690, fo. 64v. The text of the note has been read in contradictory ways. In his early transcription, George Brodrick reads it thus: ‘[Wyclif] was first a fellow of this house, [and] kept one year of probation entirely within it’. J.A. Robson corrects Brodrick’s text so that it has the opposite sense: ‘[Wyclif] was neither a fellow of this house nor kept one year of probation fully within it’. The correction would seem to derive from the transcription that appears in P.S. Allen and H.W. Garrod (eds), Merton Muniments (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928), p. 37 (and ­facing-page facsimile). Robson fails to acknowledge that Brodrick recognised that the text could be transcribed in either way. See George C. Brodrick, Memorials of Merton College with Biographical Notices of the Wardens and Fellows (Oxford: Clarendon, 1885), p. 215; Oxford Schools, pp. 10–11. 21 J.I. Catto, ‘Wyclif and Wycliffism at Oxford, 1356–1430’, in The History of the University of Oxford II: Late Medieval Oxford, ed. Jeremy Catto and T.A.R. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 175–261 (p. 187). 22 Andrew Larsen, ‘John Wyclif (c. 1331–84)’, in A Companion to John Wyclif, ed. Ian Levy (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 1–65 (p. 13). 23 See, for example, Ian Levy (trans.), John Wyclif: On the Truth of Holy Scripture (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2001), p. 4. Workman discusses Wyclif ’s relation to the various colleges in detail, but favours Balliol (John Wyclif, i. pp. 63ff). Hudson and Kenny are not explicit about the identity of his undergraduate college. See ‘Wyclif, John (d. 1384)’, ODNB.

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but his academic career was not unbroken by other commitments.24 He resigned from his position as master of Balliol to take up a living in Fillingham, Lincolnshire, in 1361. Wyclif ’s living provided him with a source of income, but he soon felt the need to return to academic study, thus requiring episcopal approval for a period of leave from his parochial duties. On receipt of a licence of non-residence from John Buckingham, Bishop of Lincoln, in 1363, he was able to return to Oxford, when he is known to have resided first at Queen’s College (then known as Queen’s Hall).25 Shortly afterwards, in 1365, Archbishop Simon Islip made him warden of Canterbury College, a mixed college of monks and secular scholars. After Islip’s death a year later, the college became a purely monastic establishment at the hands of the incoming Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon Langham, rendering Wyclif ’s position as a secular master untenable. He did not formally depart from the college until early in the next decade, but in the meantime acquired a more convenient living at Ludgershall, Buckinghamshire, with a licence of absence for academic study for two years from 1368. Wyclif ’s early academic career, like those of all secular scholars, progressed from early writings on logic (1360–65), which are mostly unexceptional, to more expansive and original philosophical treatises on metaphysics and epistemology (known collectively as the Summa de Ente, written between ca. 1365 and 1372). On Logic, the first academic treatise that Wyclif produced, is dated to around 1360, the year in which he became a Master of Arts. The process of becoming a Master of Arts involved a ceremonial ‘inception’ or beginning, which had to be licensed in advance by the university chancellor, and which typically involved a candidate’s tutor swearing on oath that he had attained the requisite academic standard for the award of the Master’s degree.26 Wyclif ’s more original Continuation of Logic and Third Treatise on Logic (a simple continuation of the preceding volume) were produced over the next few years, the latter probably having been completed before 1363.27 24 John Wyclif, i, p. 59. 25 Payments were made to the college in Wyclif ’s name for the years 1363–64 and 1365–66. See John R. Magrath, The Queen’s College (Oxford: Clarendon, 1921), p. 112. 26 See J.M. Fletcher, ‘The Faculty of Arts’, in The History of the University of Oxford: The Early Oxford Schools, ed. J.I. Catto (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 369–400 (p. 388). 27 Latin Writings, p. 4. On Wyclif ’s logical writings, see E.J. Ashworth and P.V. Spade, ‘Logic in Medieval Oxford’, in The History of the University of Oxford II: Late Medieval Oxford, ed. Jeremy Catto and T.A.R. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992),

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The Summa de Ente is divided into two books, the first of which reveals the core components of Wyclif ’s metaphysical system. Here we find material on the nature of being, truth, universals, time, and the predicaments (or categories) of Aristotelian logic. This first book supplies the foundation of much that is most distinctive and controversial about Wyclif ’s philosophical system. It is here that he defines himself as a philosophical realist. The second book applies the metaphysical insights and methods of the first book to the analysis of God: divine knowledge and understanding, divine will, the nature of the Trinity, and divine ideas. Much of what he says in these texts, particularly those of the first book, can be linked to his later theological and political ideas with little difficulty. From the position of Regent Master, a Master of Arts who had some responsibility for teaching, Wyclif progressed to his Doctor of Theology at some point in 1371 or 1372. The crowning achievement of this part of his academic career is his series of postils, or expository notes, on selected passages from the text of Scripture (now known as the Postilla super Totam Bibliam). These together constitute perhaps the most important commentary of its kind since the influential literal postils of the Jewish convert and gifted Hebraist Nicholas of Lyra (d. 1349), now normally known as the Postilla Literalis.28 As is perhaps to be expected of a scholar steeped in Jewish learning, Lyra had chosen to privilege the literal sense throughout his postils, as Wyclif was himself to do. It was not to Judaism, however, that either owed his conception of the literal sense, but to Thomas Aquinas, whose definitive contribution to fourteenth-century exegetical literalism will be explored below. Wyclif ’s postils were introduced by a principium (12i), a kind of inaugural lecture delivered by an incepting Doctor of Theology. They would have been delivered as a series of lectures within the university. I pp. 35–64 (pp. 54–6). Note that Ashworth and Spade choose to follow Ivan Mueller in dating Wyclif ’s Continuation of Logic and Third Treatise to 1371–74. See John Wyclif, Tractatus de Universalibus, ed. Ivan J. Mueller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. xxxvii–xxxviii. This latter range of dates would certainly explain the philosophical sophistication of these two texts, but it would seem unlikely that Wyclif would have chosen to produce a second logical treatise so long after the publication of On Logic. 28 On Lyra see Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval AntiJudaism (Cornell University Press, 1984), pp. 170–95; Nicholas of Lyra: The Senses of Scripture, ed. Philip D.W. Krey and Leslie Smith (Leiden: Brill, 2000); Nicholas de Lyre, franciscain du XIVe siècle, exégète et théologien, ed. Gilbert Dahan (Turnhout: Beropols, 2011).

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have included here all of the most relevant parts of the commentary that have been edited by Gustav Benrath and Beryl Smalley. Though these together do not represent anything like the full lecture series, they still offer a valuable insight into Wyclif ’s work as an experienced exegete. In the material from Wyclif ’s postils translated in the first section, he deals with the interpretation of figurative language (9ii and iii), the impossibility of literal falsehood in Scripture (10), and the expression of time in scripture (11ii and 11iii), topics that are clearly informed by his desire to explain the sometimes elusive truthfulness of the text. Roughly contemporary with the Postilla are Wyclif ’s academic exchanges with his senior contemporary at Oxford, the Carmelite John Kenningham. These took place between 1372 and 1374, and are recorded as a series of determinations, academic debates which would normally involve an oral response to a question articulated by another scholar. Maarten Hoenen has suggested that there is probably a connection here to the magisterial determination, at which a master (Wyclif) would respond to a question posed by a doctor (Kenningham). This determination was in some ways unusual, he argues, as Wyclif and Kenningham appeal to written documents in order to determine their opponent’s position, rather than relying exclusively upon what he had said. This may suggest that neither was present when the other delivered his response.29 The series is not preserved in its entirety, but survives as six fairly substantial texts, of which four are Kenningham’s and two Wyclif ’s.30 The substance of the debate is concerned with scriptural exegesis, and Wyclif defends an approach informed by r­ ealist metaphysics against Kenningham’s objections. The works for which Wyclif is best known, the majority of which form part of his massive Summa Theologiae, emerged between 1375 and his death in 1384. It is here that we find his important views on the constitution of the church, his controversial theory of lordship by grace (and attendant views on the respective roles of secular monarch and pope), scriptural truth and (most importantly) the nature, administration and function of the sacraments. These were to be challenging times 29 Maarten J.F.M. Hoenen, ‘Theology and Metaphysics: The Debate between John Wyclif and John Kenningham on the Principles of Reading the Scriptures’, in John Wyclif: Logica, Politica, Teologia, ed. Mariateresa Fumagalli Beonio Brocchieri and Stefano Simonetta (Florence: Sismel, 2003), pp. 23–55 (pp. 28–9). 30 For Kenningham’s opening determination (Ingressus), see FZ, pp. 4–13. His Acts and second and third determinations appear in FZ, pp. 14–42, 43–72 and 73–103, respectively. For Wyclif ’s two surviving determinations against Kenningham, see FZ, pp. 453–76 and pp. 477–80.

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for Wyclif, both academically and politically. His entry into the service of the Crown probably began shortly after his teaching about lordship became known. The publication of On Divine Lordship in 1373 or early in 1374 was followed by the gift of Lutterworth priory, Leicestershire, from the king in April of that year (in exchange for Ludgershall), suggesting that Wyclif may already have been involved with the Crown by this time. His account of the proceedings of the Parliament of 1371 in the second book of On Civil Lordship (37), together with a gift of tithes from the king in that year, have prompted speculation that he had actively been involved in royal service even earlier.31 On 26 July 1374, Wyclif was commissioned to travel to Bruges with six others for the purpose of discussing papal taxation of the clergy. This was his first known public engagement on the Crown’s behalf. The mission achieved little, and Wyclif ’s contribution to the debate is undocumented; he was not included on a second, similar mission the following year. His opposition to papal taxation became apparent only a few years later when he appeared before the king’s council in 1376 at the request of the Duke of Lancaster, John of Gaunt. In response to questioning, Wyclif argued robustly that the king was legally entitled to withhold papal taxation of the clergy. His association with Gaunt, which continued subsequently, made him visible as a potentially dangerous ally of the Crown, and the church responded accordingly. A summons to St Paul’s to appear before Archbishop Simon Sudbury and a panel of bishops followed shortly afterwards. Wyclif was accompanied by John of Gaunt, Lord Henry Percy and four friars (one from each of the four orders), but the proceedings became heated from the beginning.32 Lord Percy asked Wyclif to be seated, a gesture that infuriated the Bishop of London, William Courtenay. An argument ensued between John of Gaunt and the bishop, and the proceedings dissolved before meaningful discussion could take place. The anger escalated into a riot among the crowds assembled outside the next day, from which Gaunt and Lord Percy fled. On 22 May 1377, Gregory XI condemned nineteen propositions attributed to Wyclif in five bulls; the condemned propositions were taken from the first book of his massive On Civil Lordship, and related principally, though by no means exclusively, to questions of lordship 31 G.R. Evans, John Wyclif: Myth and Reality (Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2005), p. 142. 32 Chronica Maiora, pp. 80–5; Anonimalle Chronicle, pp. 103–4. Joseph Dahmus, The Prosecution of John Wyclif (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), pp. 7–34; Hudson, Premature Reformation, pp. 65–6.

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and ecclesiastical property.33 Early the following year, in response to instructions from Archbishop Sudbury and the Bishop of London, William Courtenay, Wyclif was summoned to appear at Lambeth Palace, where he was tried by a council of bishops. He was able to argue that his conclusions were orthodox, however, and was dismissed only with the request that he should not to discuss the condemned conclusions within the schools or publicly.34 The leniency of the inquisitors at Lambeth may owe something to the earlier disruption of the proceedings by Sir Lewis Clifford, emissary of Joan of Kent, the king’s mother, who demanded that they should not pass a formal sentence on Wyclif.35 Between the winter of 1377 and the spring of 1378, Wyclif began work on his exegetical magnum opus, On the Truth of Holy Scripture, which builds on the literalistic method of his earlier scriptural postils. This is the most systematic and comprehensive exposition of Wyclif ’s exegetical practice (see 7i, 7ii, 8, 9iii). It was clearly influential in England: almost half of the manuscripts in which it survives were copied by English scribes.36 It is here that we find the clearest indication of the place that Scripture occupied in Wyclif ’s religious regime. Though it acted as the embodiment of divine truths, he did not entirely lay aside patristic and scholastic authorities in his scholarship and teaching. A brief perusal of the material translated in this volume will reveal that the Doctor Evangelicus did not quite advocate a sola Scriptura theology.37 With Gregory’s death in March 1378, the pressures of papal persecution receded for Wyclif. Shortly afterwards, he must have begun work on his major ecclesiological treatise, On the Church. It is here that he presents his conviction that the true church is represented by the community of the predestinate (27i and 27ii). The following year, he wrote two tracts on related topics, On the Office of the King and On the Power of the Pope. What unites these treatises, all of which rely on the theory of lordship by grace that Wyclif presented in detail in On Civil Lordship, is the conviction that regal power should be exercised in secular affairs (including secular affairs of the church), and sacerdotal power in spiritual matters (37i and 37ii). In On the Power of the Pope, he 33 The text of the first bull is translated in the Appendix (44). For a list of the propositions in English translation, see Chronica Maiora, pp. 192–7. 34 Dahmus, The Prosecution of John Wyclif, pp. 69–70. 35 Dahmus, The Prosecution of John Wyclif, p. 68. 36 Latin Writings, p. 55. 37 But see Michael Hurley, ‘“Scriptura Sola”: John Wyclif and His Critics’, Traditio, 16 (1960), 275–352.

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challenges the pope’s position as head of the church, claiming that only Christ can truly be such (28). He also insists that the pope cannot truly be Christ’s vicar until he renounces his substantial endowments, which were for Wyclif the main cause of the manifest corruption within the contemporary church. Since it was the king’s duty to ‘repress the rebel’ (36), as Wyclif suggests, it was also technically his duty to reform the church. Between 1380 and 1381, Wyclif produced a trilogy of texts devoted to religious error: On Simony, On Apostasy and On Blasphemy. These texts together represent Wyclif ’s most vitriolic attack on ecclesiastical abuses, and it is here that we find a focus for his growing anti-­ fraternalism. The four orders of friars, the Franciscans, the Augustinians (or Austin Friars), the Dominicans (or Black Friars) and the Carmelites, originated relatively late in the history of the Christian church. All date from the thirteenth century, but it was not the recency of their establishment that offended Wyclif. Indeed, he would earlier have counted them among his allies, committed as their orders were meant to be to the ideal of the propertyless life. Rather, it was the perceived abandonment by many friars of precisely this foundational ideal that frustrated Wyclif. He generally refers to the friars as ‘private’ religions, by which he seems to mean that these religions were funded by income generated privately, rather than through taxation. Though the friars were not the only problem, and not all of them were strictly a problem for Wyclif at all, they become a regular irritant for him at around this time. The two avaricious daughters of the horseleech of Proverbs 30:15 are frequently alluded to by him at this time in his criticism of the excesses of the contemporary church (28). In the clergy, he suggests in the fourth chapter of On Blasphemy, there are no fewer than twelve such daughters: ‘the pope, his cardinals, bishops, archdeacons, officials, deacons, rectors, presbyters, monarchs, friars, door-keepers and pardoners’.38 Elsewhere, the friars are included within the ‘four sects’ introduced into the church by Satan: the secular clergy, the canons, the monks and the friars. At the feet of the friars are laid some of the most egregious errors of the church by Wyclif from this point in his life onwards (see 13, 20, 26, 27ii, 31, 33). Later in 1381, with the publication of On the Eucharist, new issues presented themselves. Since as early as 1372, Wyclif had been wrestling with the metaphysical implications of transubstantiation. Whilst he accepted that Christ’s body and blood were really present in the 38 De Blasphemia, p. 54.

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bread and the wine of the consecrated eucharist, his philosophical realism prevented him from accepting that the substance of the bread and wine themselves ceased to be, as the canon law decrees of Pope Innocent III had insisted. Wyclif ’s understanding of eucharistic change therefore required that the substances of the bread and the wine should coexist with the body and the blood of Christ (thus anticipating the Reformation doctrine of consubstantiation). Though Wyclif had certainly denied that annihilation of substances was possible in his Fragment on Annihilation (part of On the Externally Productive Powers of God, his last properly philosophical work (6)), and had even applied this insight explicitly to the metaphysics of the Eucharist in this same text, it was not until the publication of his lengthy dedicated treatise, On the Eucharist, in 1380 that his ideas met with official censure. A committee of twelve scholars was assembled by the Chancellor of the University of Oxford, William Barton, in 1380 to consider Wyclif ’s teaching. It included six friars, two monks and four seculars.39 The council found two conclusions to be particularly worthy of censure, among others that Wyclif and his followers had advanced within and outside the university: First, that the sacrament of the altar, the substance of the material bread and wine, which were there prior to consecration, really remain after consecration. Second, which is more execrable to hear, that in that venerable sacrament, the body and the blood of Christ are not there either essentially or substantially, or even corporally, but only figuratively or tropically; ­therefore, Christ is not truly present in his own, physical person.40

Wyclif was supposedly present as his teaching was condemned, but refused to accept that he was in error. He called upon the king for protection, but, when John of Gaunt arrived in Oxford, he demanded only that Wyclif should say nothing more on the subject.41 In response, the following year, Wyclif published his Confession, which summarised his eucharistic doctrine, making no concessions either to Barton and his committee or to Gaunt.42 In June of that same year, there was political upheaval in the shape of the Peasants’ Revolt, which resulted in the murder of Archbishop Simon Sudbury and others. The chaplain and radical preacher John 39 See the list in FZ, pp. 112–13 (45). 40 FZ, p. 110 (45). 41 FZ, pp. 113–14 (45). 42 A full translation of Wyclif ’s Confession is available in Lahey, John Wyclif, pp. 226–43.

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Ball, among the leaders of the revolt, was in contemporary and slightly later accounts represented as one of Wyclif ’s disciples.43 The chronicler Henry Knighton regarded Ball as the ‘precursor of [Wyclif ’s] pestiferous contrivings’.44 Ball had certainly done much to challenge hierarchies and encourage social equality, but whether he knew Wyclif personally remains unclear. Wyclif later observed in On Blasphemy that the protesters were ‘motivated by good impulses’, even though the murder of the archbishop had been regrettable and wholly unnecessary (39). Indeed, if Wyclif sought to distance himself from the revolt in this treatise, it is not difficult to understand why some of his contemporaries felt that his teaching did much to encourage it.45 The appointment of William Courtenay as Sudbury’s successor brought with it further condemnation the following year when he assembled the Blackfriars Council on 17 and 21 May to consider Wyclif ’s published conclusions. The council became known as the Earthquake Council because of the violent earth tremor that ran through it (recorded in Wyclif ’s On the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit (41)). On 21 May, it published a total of twenty-four conclusions that it deemed worthy of condemnation, of which the first ten were said to be heretical (46). Wyclif ’s removal from Oxford to his living in Lutterworth did nothing to silence him, nor to stem the flow of inflammatory publications. Here he produced the Trialogue, which offers a kind of conspectus of his main ideas, broadly following Peter Lombard’s Sentences in its structure. It takes the form of a series of fictional debates between the characters Alithia, Phronesis and Pseustis, whose Greek names identify them respectively as truthful, wise and mendacious speakers. Alongside this and the Evangelical Opus, which was unfinished at his death, he produced a number of provocative letters and pamphlets, including two that explore the state of the papacy after Gregory XI’s death in 1378 (during which time Wyclif would have been at work on his massive exegetical treatise, On the Truth of Holy Scripture, and On the Church). In his last years, Gregory had restored the papacy to Rome from Avignon, and the papal conclave of predominantly French cardinals that had assembled on his death had been compelled by 43 See R.B. Dobson, The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, second edition (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1983), pp. 373–8, for translations of the relevant texts. 44 Knighton, p. 277. See p. 276 for the Latin text. 45 See Hudson, Premature Reformation, p. 68. Hudson looks especially at William Rymington’s XLV Conclusiones, which suggest that Wyclif ’s teaching was the cause of the uprising. See Oxford MS Bodley 158, fo. 202r.

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increasingly riotous crowds to elect a Roman successor. Bartolomeo Prignano, Archbishop of Bari, became the new pope, adopting the name Urban VI. Though he had answered the need for an Italian, if not a Roman, pope, Urban had been restless and bent on reform from the outset. He went about it brutally, insisting that his cardinals should renounce benefices and gratuities, and that the curia should be cleansed of its accumulated luxuries and endowments. Predictably, Wyclif welcomed this change, as the pleasantries with which he greets the pontiff in his ‘letter’ of 1384 seem to suggest (32), but it was not long before Urban’s French cardinals grew tired of his intemperate manner, and, within months, his controversial election was declared invalid. That autumn, having fled from Rome, the French cardinals elected Robert of Geneva as a rival pope, who took the name Clement VII and established his curia in Avignon. This marked the beginning of a schism that extinguished any brief hope that Wyclif seemed to have had for the papacy,46 and seemed only to confirm his belief that he was living in the last days, as he clearly states in his short condemnatory tract, On the Schism (33). The rivalry between the two popes perhaps articulated itself most violently in the abortive crusade against Clementists in France led by Henry Despenser, Bishop of Norwich (d. 1406), that began on 17 May 1383, and which gained momentum from existing Anglo-French tensions.47 Indeed, from this point onwards until September of the same year, the ongoing war with France, as Michael Wilks eloquently observed, briefly became a holy war.48 Despenser’s crusade (usually known as the Norwich Crusade or the Despenser Crusade) was supported, and possibly even initiated by, Urban VI, who offered plenary remission to all who would agree to participate in the military effort. Plenary indulgences of this kind, which could be administered uniquely by the pope, offered remission of all temporal punishment for sins committed (and which had been absolved through the confessional), which meant that purgatorial punishment 46 For a concise account of the events leading up to the schism, see Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes, third edition (London: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 168–9. 47 Most notably, the conflict between the two nations that dated back to 1337 (the so-called ‘Hundred Years’ War’), and the revolt of the Flemish weavers against the Clementist Louis de Male, Count of Flanders, in 1382, which Henry’s crusade had in part been intended to support. 48 ‘Roman Candle or Damned Squib? The English Crusade of 1383’, an inaugural lecture delivered in 1980 at Birkbeck, University of London, and reproduced in Wyclif: Political Ideas and Practice, selected and introduced by Anne Hudson (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2000), pp. 253–72.

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could effectively be avoided. They had been used since the time of the first crusade (1096–99), and their exploitation by the church during military campaigns attracted justified criticism. Wyclif condemns the Despenser Crusade openly in several of his last Latin writings (two of which are translated here: 33 and 42), as well as in his ‘letter’ to Archbishop Courtenay (40). Wyclif ’s last years saw his health degenerate; he suffered a stroke in 1382, which was clearly debilitating (it possibly lay behind his inability to answer the citation of Urban VI, for which he apologises to the pontiff in 32). His second stroke, late in December 1384, left him with only days to live; he died on the last day of that month. After his death, Archbishop Arundel condemned eighteen items taken from his Trialogue, and then in 1407, in the first version of a notoriously draconian document known as the Constitutions, he forbade the reading of Wyclif ’s works or the ownership of English translations of the scriptures.49 It was not until the Council of Constance, which concluded in 1418, that many of Wyclif ’s ideas were condemned as heretical. The council recommended that his body should be exhumed. It was not until 1428, however, that his remains were dug up and burned, and thereafter removed from holy ground.

Wyclif ’s metaphysics At the core of Christian philosophical systems in late medieval Europe were theories about the nature of being, which served as the foundation for questions about God and the created universe. Being is the unifying theme of Wyclif ’s early philosophical works, those metaphysical texts comprising his Summa de Ente, which were composed ca. 1365–75, following his earlier work on logic.50 Though the generic title Summa 49 See Nicholas Watson’s influential analysis of the effects of the Constitutions on English vernacular writing, ‘Censorship and Cultural Change in Late-Medieval England: Vernacular Theology, the Oxford Translation Debate and Arundel’s Constitutions of 1409’, Speculum, 70 (1995), 822–64. See also Vincent Gillesprieste, ‘Vernacular Theology’, in Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 401–20, and Kirsty Campbell, ‘Vernacular Auctoritas in Late Medieval England: Writing after the Constitutions’, in Author, Reader, Book: Medieval Authorship in Theory and Practice, ed. Stephen Partridge and Erik Kwakkel (London: University of Toronto Press, 2012), pp. 178–97. 50 For a detailed discussion of Wyclif ’s metaphysical system, see Alessandro Conti, ‘Wyclif ’s Logic and Metaphysics’, in A Companion to John Wyclif, ed. Ian Levy (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 67–125.

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de Ente is not one that Wyclif is known to have used himself, it is clear that these texts were intended to form a whole or a summa of sorts. By comparison with his later writings, these texts were slow to attract editorial interest, and the lack of easy availability of all extant copies of a single text further hampered early efforts. Indeed, it was only with the publication of Ivan Müller’s De Universalibus in 1985 that scholarly curiosity about Wyclif ’s philosophy was adequately rekindled, and the task of editing the unedited texts addressed. This has resulted in the recent appearance of Luigi Campi’s edition of On Divine Knowledge, and editorial work on the remaining texts of the Summa de Ente is now well under way. Agreement about the structure of Wyclif ’s Summa de Ente has emerged only gradually, and it seems that the arrangement of texts he finally decided upon had been preceded by rather different plans.51 It is now generally accepted nevertheless that the final version of the summa must have been divided into two books of seven and six ­volumes, which respectively address issues of a philosophical and ­theological nature. This is evident from their titles: Book 1 Book 2 On Being in General On Divine Intellection On Primary Being in General On Divine Knowledge Eradicating Errors Concerning Truths in General On Divine Volition Eradicating Errors Concerning Universals in On the Trinity  General On Ideas On Universals On the Externally On Time   Productive Power of On Predicamental Being   God 52

In the first five, as their titles generally suggest, he began recording his convictions about the reality of universals systematically, presenting 51 On the ordering of the contents of the Summa de Ente, see the pioneering study of S.H. Thomson, ‘The Order of Writings of Wyclif ’s Philosophical Works’, in Cˇeskou minulostí: Essays Presented to V. Novotny (Prague: Jan Laichter, 1929), pp. 146–66. Luigi Campi has recently argued that a reference to ‘Tractaus 13’ in the two extant copies of Wyclif ’s On Divine Knowledge, which was classified by Thomson as identifying a chapter of On Time, is actually a reference to the internal structure of On Predicamental Being, which, he contends, must therefore have existed as discrete treatises before being combined in a single volume. Each of these would have dealt with a separate category. See ‘Yet Another “Lost” Chapter of Wyclif ’s “Summa de Ente”: Notes on Some Puzzling References to “Tractatus 13” ’, Vivarium, 49:4 (2011), 353–67 (p. 355). 52 An accurate overview of the structure of the Summa de Ente and the themes of its constituent texts is provided by Williel R. Thomson in Latin Writings, pp. 14–17; see also Lahey, John Wyclif, pp. 7–15.

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his most detailed account of their nature and significance in the fifth, On Universals (1368–69). To believe in universals as Wyclif did was to maintain that the act of identifying a dog as a dog or a man as a man was to identify a particular with its real universal nature. Such a nature was as real as any particular dogs or men, but was necessarily anterior to them. Unlike them, however, it was not subject to degeneration or decay. Indeed, if all particular dogs and men were to cease to exist, their universal natures would remain. Quite how these natures were shared, and exactly how they were to be defined, was much debated among realists, but none doubted that universals were as real as ­particulars, in range of different ways. As a realist, Wyclif opposed the teaching of philosophical nominalists, whose position on universals he emphatically rejected. Nominalist thinkers, both contemporary and historical, maintained that a proposition such as ‘John is a man’, far from identifying a particular man with a universal essence, simply identified him with a universal label, man, or a universal concept in the mind (defenders of the latter view are generally known as conceptualists).53 In Eradicating Errors Concerning Universals, he presents knowledge of universals as a moral imperative, equating the origins of all modern sin with a failure to understand or believe in universal natures (1). In the second chapter of his definitive On Universals, which was probably written shortly after Eradicating Errors and shares much common ground with it, Wyclif offers his elaborate scheme of five kinds of universal, in part of an extended refutation of contemporary claims that Aristotle had rejected universals (2). Here, he draws on Robert Grosseteste’s commentary on the Posterior Analytics, offering a typology of universals that descends from the supreme universal as an idea or exemplar in the mind of God to written or conceptual signs that might be applied to a given class of entities in the world. In order to stress the lack of significance of the latter, he is careful to suggest that Grosseteste had felt that they were of such negligible value as to be irrelevant to philosophical enquiry. The references to ideas at the two highest levels of Wyclif ’s fivefold scheme anticipate his later comments in this treatise about Aristotle’s response to Plato, which suggest that, far from rejecting universals outright, Aristotle had only questioned the possibility of Platonic ideas. Such 53 For an accessible introduction to debates about the nature and reality of universals, accompanied by a selection of philosophical texts in translation, see Five Texts on the Medieval Problem of Universals, ed. and trans. Paul Vincent Spade (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994).

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ideas were problematic for Wyclif because Plato represented them as being self-subsistent, unlike his own divine ideas, which were sustained by the mind of God or the superior causes. Though Grosseteste certainly influenced Wyclif ’s metaphysical ideas profoundly, the most notable source for his views on the nature of universals was the earlier Merton scholar Walter Burley (d. ca. 1344), who had famously engaged in academic disputes with the English Franciscan philosopher William of Ockham (d. 1347), perhaps the most famous exponent of nominalist logic and metaphysics in Oxford in the first half of the fourteenth century. Wyclif mentions Ockham by name only once in On Universals, and speaks of him respectfully, even as he rejects his teaching. Throughout the Summa de Ente and his later writings on theology and politics, nominalist scholars are repeatedly dismissed as victims of meaningless fantasies or modern philosophical fashion. Burley wrote extensively on the topic of universals, and, like Wyclif, produced a dedicated treatise on the topic.54 His beliefs about the reality of universals became gradually more extreme as his career progressed. The fact that Wyclif believed in universals at all might tempt us to regard his metaphysical system as a largely conservative one, a consequence, perhaps, of his broadly Augustinian theology. His regular complaints about the threats presented by contemporary philosophical fashions certainly seem to appeal to the cherished philosophical standards of a former age. Nominalism had been at the height of its influence in Oxford and Paris in the first half of the century, however, so nominalist ideas were not the exclusive province of Wyclif ’s fashionable contemporaries in the schools. Indeed, complaints about the errors of the ‘moderns’ were common in scholastic debate, and the Latin label modernus was a convenient term of abuse for an academic adversary. Wyclif was himself identified as ‘a certain teacher of modern errors and heresies’ by William Rymington, a contemporary opponent who criticised him principally in relation to his teaching on the church.55 The final philosophical idea that informs Wyclif ’s later teaching, and which had the most controversial consequences, is his insistence that annihilation is metaphysically impossible. He first presents his arguments against annihilation in the Fragment on Annihilation, part of his On the Productive Power of God. I have included the whole of the 54 Walter Burley, Tractatus de universalibus, ed. with German translation by HansUlrich Wöhler (Leipzig: Verlag der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1999). 55 See Rymington’s rejoinder to the Wyclif ’s Responsiones ad Conclusiones XLV, Oxford, MS Bodley 158, fo. 188r (my translation).

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first section of the Fragment on Annihilation in the first chapter (6). It is a highly technical text (though I have included explanations of unfamiliar scholastic terms in the Glossary at the end of the volume), and its central claim about the impossibility of annihilation, if unusual and  potentially controversial metaphysically, was not in itself offensive, and certainly not heretical. It was only when it was applied to the Eucharist in order to deny the possibility of the substance of the bread and wine being destroyed that it became a dangerous and heretical idea.

Freedom, necessity and divine omnipotence Necessity, Wyclif claims repeatedly throughout his philosophical and theological works, lies behind all that happens in the created universe. There was an important sense in which this belief could not be untrue: if God was truly omniscient, as the Christian community believed, then all moments of time had to exist in the divine mind eternally, which meant that he had to know about future events in the world before they actually happened. Such a belief, in its simplest form, is ostensibly a deterministic one, since God’s knowledge of something happening in the future cannot not entail that it will come to pass at a given time. It would therefore seem that Wyclif ’s position was necessarily inconsistent with any meaningful understanding of human free will (or, by extension, of merit, righteousness and sin). Yet his writings indicate that his views about the workings of necessity were subtler than this. Whilst they certainly contain elements that could be classified as deterministic, they were far from incompatible with a Christian belief in human free will. In the first chapter of On Divine Volition, he insists that God must necessarily know about all instants of time, including future instants. Such knowledge, he argues here, is eternally present to God, and all that God wishes must be (3). He goes on to explain in chapter 7 of the same treatise, however, following Richard Fitzralph, that human will must be causally prior to divine will when a human chooses to do something, even though God necessarily knows about it (4). This explanation of the compatibility between divine foreknowledge and human freedom is more accessible than what is said by Wyclif on the topic elsewhere, though it remains seemingly paradoxical: what is done by a person in the world is rendered necessary by God’s knowledge of it (and his will that it should happen), yet God’s knowledge of what that person does does not act as a causal antecedent to their doing it. Wyclif ’s beliefs about necessity impacted on significant aspects of

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his theology and ecclesiology, including his views on free will, merit and salvation. His exegetical method also explicitly recognises the need to acknowledge divine omniscience and the infallibility of divine foreknowledge. It was in response to this that he developed his idiosyncratic theory of temporal ampliation, which he used to explain apparent linguistic anomalies in the text of Scripture, and hence to uphold his belief that all scriptural propositions were literally true. This theory, and the conception of time, eternity and necessity that underpinned it, were vociferously opposed by John Kenningham in his determinations against Wyclif, and will be considered in more detail in the following section.

Scripture and the nature of scriptural truth Wyclif was dignified with the title ‘Evangelical Doctor’ in recognition of his belief in the supreme authority of the scriptural text, a belief that informed all parts of his teaching. His biblical postils and On the Truth of Holy Scripture together represent his attempt to offer a systematic account of the nature of the holy text, as well as to illustrate his exegetical method in practice. For him, the text of scripture was nothing less than God’s word, present eternally in the divine mind and mediated by his grace through the prophets of the Old Testament and the apostles of the New. Since the divine author was incapable of falsehood, the text had to be true in all of its parts, as he goes to great lengths to demonstrate in his exegetical and homiletic writings. If contemporary scholars found what they believed to be errors or inconsistencies in Scripture, this probably meant that they were naively reading it as an ordinary book. In its truest reality, by the profoundest of contrasts, Scripture was the Book of Life inscribed in the divine mind, as Wyclif famously maintains in On the Truth of Holy Scripture. The physical codices into which its text was copied were merely imperfect images of this eternal document. This conception of the scriptural text is so manifestly informed by Wyclif ’s Christian realist ontology and epistemology that it would be difficult not to notice it. This would be true even if we were to ignore the strikingly close correspondence between the five ‘levels’ of holy scripture delineated in the sixth chapter of that treatise (7i) and his fivefold typology of universals recorded earlier in On Universals (2). His enduring conviction that we should look beyond the scribal inscriptions on the manuscript page, which he felt were only the text of scripture in an equivocal way, lies behind all of his exegetical observations. Medieval exegetes adopted the Alexandrine division of scriptural

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meaning into four senses: the literal, the allegorical, the moral (or tropological) and the anagogic. The literal sense had been regarded as the least noble of the four in patristic exegesis, as throughout much of the early medieval period. Only within the Jewish exegetical tradition was it accorded supreme value.56 In the West, its relation to the other three senses had for long been held to be comparable to that of the body to the soul: the literal sense concealed the spiritual senses as the body hid the soul. To this extent, Christian exegetes could claim to perceive truths that had always been invisible to Jewish readers, however reliable their knowledge of the literal sense of the text may have been. The classic mnemonic about the nature of the four scriptural senses is cited several times in Wyclif ’s writing (7ii, 9ii): The letter teaches history What to believe is allegory The moral teaches what to do The anagogic, our end to pursue.

The literal sense was the domain of the human author, and pertained to deeds and events in human history, whereas the spiritual senses were the products of divine authorship. The first of these was the allegorical sense, which was used in order to interpret things, people and events in the Old Testament as prefigurations of those in the New, and hence to reconcile differences or inconsistencies between their respective narratives. The moral or tropological sense conveyed meanings about righteous behaviour, and the anagogic about the next life. The twelfth century witnessed a revival of interest in the literal sense, which was aided by the rediscovery of the remaining logical works of Aristotle. A new form of academic prologue, now generally described as the Aristotelian prologue, began to be used as a preface to scriptural commentaries. The new prologue considered the scriptural text in relation to the four Aristotelian causes (the material, formal, efficient and final cause), and accorded new priority to the efficient cause of the text, its author or authors.57 Thomas Aquinas, the most celebrated of Aristotelian scholars, defines the literal sense in two 56 Alastair Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, second edition with a new preface by the author (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), pp. 85–7. 57 The material cause of the text was its substance, the formal cause its layout or structure, and the final cause, its purpose. The most exhaustive study of the Aristotelian prologue, in secular as well as scriptural commentaries, remains Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship. The prologue is introduced on pp. 28–9, and its application in scriptural exegesis is examined in detail on pp. 75–7, 82–4, 92–3 and 146–7.

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ways. He is careful to acknowledge the properly literal nature of the historical sense, the most immediate sense that the letter (litera) has, but he also defines literalism in a more radical way. The literal sense of the holy text was necessarily also the meaning that its divine author intended, which potentially contained all three of the spiritual senses, as well as their historical foundation. Unlike the human author, who used words to signify things, the divine author could also use things to signify other things, thus giving rise to the spiritual senses.58 Aquinas was careful to observe that the spiritual senses were founded on the historical literal sense, an observation which accorded a new dignity to the most humble of scriptural meanings.59 As we have suggested, Wyclif ’s literalism was influenced conspicuously by the version of Thomistic literalism found in Nicholas of Lyra, but he was also indebted to the Irish scholar Richard Fitzralph. Both, like Aquinas, understood the literal sense to be of two different kinds. Unlike Aquinas, however, they used the phrase twofold literal sense to explain this dual phenomenon. They did not invent this expression, but their writings certainly gave it currency, and though Wyclif himself did not use this term he was conspicuously influenced by it.60 Indeed, it provided him with the necessary hermeneutic model to defend his controversial claim that all scriptural statements were literally true. To describe the intended sense of the divine author of scripture, Wyclif borrowed an expression from contemporary logic, suggesting that all scriptural statements were true de virtute sermonis (by the force of the sentence). To say that something was true ‘by the force of the sentence’ was originally, in the language of the logicians, to claim that something was true in a direct, non-figurative sense. Wyclif had himself used it in this way many times in his own logical works. However, there emerged in the early fourteenth century a tendency to use ‘by the force of the sentence’ as a way of characterising the intended sense of scriptural propositions.61 Using the expression in this way, Wyclif could ­maintain that all passages in scripture were literally true (since, 58 Summa Theologiae, Ia q. 1, a. 10. 59 Summa Theologiae, Ia q. 1, a. 10. 60 See the classic study by A.J. Minnis, ‘“Authorial Intention” and “Literal Sense” in the Exegetical Theories of Richard Fitzralph and John Wyclif ’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, lxxv, section C, i (1975), 1–31, and his Medieval Theory of Authorship, pp. 73–117. For a more recent analysis of scholarly discussions of the literal sense, which places Wyclif, Lyra and Fitzralph in a broader historical context, see Ian Levy, ‘The Literal Sense of Scripture and the Search for Truth in the Late Middle Ages’, Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique, 104:3/4 (2009), 783–827. 61 See William Courtenay’s detailed analysis of the use of this term in the schools,

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as he recognised, the divine author could not lie). The logicians against whom Wyclif complains so regularly in his discussion of scriptural exegesis, those who refused to look beyond the material text to truths inscribed in the eternal Book of Life, could not help but find inconsistencies and untruths within Scripture, since they understood ‘by the force of the sentence’ to mean ‘according to the literal sense of the words on the page’. Passages that were in any way oblique (such as any of the three spiritual senses), therefore, would unavoidably have given rise to such problems. On Wyclif ’s interpretation, however, the three spiritual senses (the allegorical, the tropological and the anagogic) were part of the literal sense, as all were brought about by divine intention (‘by the force of the sentence’). When Wyclif uses the term literalis (literal), he normally refers to the historical sense. In my translated extract from chapter 6, below, I have generally rendered de virtute sermonis simply as literal, except in contexts when this might prove confusing. When Wyclif refers to the historical sense, I have indicated this by including the Latin adjective in parentheses. Wyclif ’s conception of the supreme reality of Scripture as a divine idea meant that the nature of its very being was different from, if analogous to, the being of copies of scripture in the world. What God, the ‘immediate’ author of Scripture, understood of its text, therefore, was the intelligible being of it words.62 Its ‘proximate’ authors, as Wyclif called the human authors who contributed to the vast text, were divinely inspired, so that the text that they produced, though it existed only in the world, coincided as closely as possible with the intelligible being of the divine text. Its community of readers, Wyclif insisted, required the gift of God’s grace to apprehend the intended meaning of its immediate author. In doing so, they effectively had access to the text in all of the purity of its intelligible being. In the absence of God’s grace, however, readers of scripture were falling foul of precisely those exegetical errors that Wyclif attributes to the sophists and the doctors of signs. He is frustratingly vague about the identity of such readers, a tendency that has tempted some to speculate that they were probably figments of the Evangelical Doctor’s imagination. There is one reader, nevertheless, whose exegetical methods and metaphysical beliefs seem to suggest that he may have been an oblique target of Wyclif ’s ‘Force of Words and Figures of Speech: The Crisis over Virtus Sermonis in the Fourteenth Century’, Franciscan Studies, 44 (1988 for 1984), 107–28. 62 Wyclif uses notion of intelligible being to describe the ontological status of things in the divine mind. The idea derives from Henry of Ghent, but Wyclif uses it in a distinctive way.

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complaints: John Kenningham. One of the areas to which Kenningham devoted particular attention in his determinations with Wyclif was the representation of time in scripture, and Wyclif ’s theory of temporal ampliation.63 Because all instants of time were visible to the divine author, Wyclif felt that words pertaining to time could be expected to signify in subtly different ways from the ways in which they would conventionally signify. In scriptural language, he suggested, the temporal reference of verbs could therefore be ‘ampliated’ or extended to include more than their grammatical tense suggested.64 Ampliation was itself an uncontroversial part of the late medieval science of logical terms, but Wyclif uses it in a subtly subversive way. For him, as a metaphysical realist, ampliation is as much a theory about metaphysics as it is about properties of terms. He introduces his own interpretation of ampliation in his Third Treatise on Logic, and applies it in a less technical way in his scriptural postils to maintain that all parts of Scripture must be literally true (see 5, for example).

Lordship, the king and the church Wyclif ’s theory of lordship was outlined in two complementary treatises, On Divine Lordship and the massive On Civil Lordship, which was completed in 1376. The distinction between these two kinds of lordship had been described in detail in the principal source on which Wyclif relied, Richard Fitzralph’s On the Poverty of the Saviour (1356).65 He inherited from Fitzralph not only a theory of lordship but also a deep scepticism towards the teaching of the friars. Fitzralph became notably hostile towards the friars quite abruptly after he became Archbishop of Armagh in 1347, though it is clear that he had earlier had friends and colleagues within the mendicant orders, as Wyclif had done himself.66 His earliest expression of dissatisfaction with the mendicants came in 1350, with the delivery of his Proposition before Clement VI in 1350.67 It was not until On the Poverty of the Saviour, however, in which his 63 FZ, pp. 43–72. 64 For an accessible discussion of Wyclif ’s ideas about scriptural time, see Beryl Smalley, ‘The Bible and Eternity: John Wyclif ’s Dilemma’, JWCI, 27 (1964), 73–89. 65 The first four books of Fitzralph’s De Pauperie Savatoris are edited by Reginald Poole in an appendix to his edition of Wyclif ’s De Divino Dominio (London: WS, 1890), pp. 273–476. 66 Katherine Walsh, A Fourteenth-century Scholar and Primate: Richard Fitzralph at Oxford, Avignon and Armagh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981) pp. 349–50. 67 For an edition of the Proposition, see L.L. Hammerich, The Beginning of the Strife

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antifraternalism reached its fullest expression, that he presented in detail the theory of lordship on which Wyclif would rely. This text, like his later treatise On the Armenian Questions, took the form of a dialogue between the characters Richard and John, the former representing the views of the author.68 Wyclif cites Fitzralph frequently, and undoubtedly admired him as a scholar and theologian.69 The influence of the latter is conspicuous in Wyclif ’s distinctive exegetical theory, but it is also evident in his nuanced conception of divine foreknowledge (3, 4).70 The dialogic style of Fitzralph’s two most widely read treatises may even have influenced Wyclif ’s experimentation with scholastic literary dialogue in the Dialogue and the Trialogue. On Divine Lordship marked the beginning of Wyclif ’s career as a theologian, and represented a reworking of his lectures on the fourth book of Peter Lombard’s Sentences, a prescribed text in the schools. The works that followed it, including On Civil Lordship, together constituted Wyclif ’s Summa Theologiae, an eight-year undertaking to which this early theological text acted as a preface. The decision to devote a separate treatise to the respective forms of lordship was a very natural one for Wyclif, since divine and civil lordship corresponded respectively to universal, eternal lordship and particular, transient forms of lordship. The relationship between universal and particular here is neither accidental nor artificial; the latter kind of lordship was seen by Wyclif to be causally bound to, and therefore conditional upon, the former.71 Divine lordship, on Wyclif ’s interpretation, was lordship of the truest kind, existing from the time of creation to be exercised by God over his subjects. Civil lordship, by contrast, was necessarily in God’s gift (as Fitzralph had argued earlier), and was available only to rational creatures in receipt of his grace. This meant that any kind of civil lordship, including ownership of lands or goods of any kind, was available only to the predestined, the only assured recipients of God’s grace. Even the predestined could commit mortal sin, however, which between Richard Fitzralph and the Mendicants (Copenhagen: Levin and Munksgaard, 1938), pp. 53–80. 68 Summa de Quaestionibus Armenorm, ed. J. Sudoris (Paris: 1511). 69 On the relationship between Fitzralph, Wyclif and his followers, see Stephen Lahey, ‘Richard Fitzralph and John Wyclif: Untangling Armachanus from the Wycliffites’, in Richard Fitzralph: His Life, Times and Thought, ed. Michael W. Dunne and Simon Nolan, O.Carm. (Scarborough: Four Courts Press, 2013), pp. 159–85. 70 On the former, see the important essay by Minnis, ‘“Authorial Intention” and “Literal Sense” in the Exegetical Theories of Richard Fitzralph and John Wyclif ’. 71 See Stephen E. Lahey, Philosophy and Politics in the Thought of John Wyclif (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 95.

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meant that lordship could still be withheld until their sin had been absolved. Anyone who enjoys the gift of lordship, Wyclif suggests, has ownership not merely of his or her own lands and goods, but common ownership (shared by all members of the elect and righteous members of the church militant) of all of the lands and goods in the universe (35). The gift of lordship crucially required not only that its recipients should be righteous but also that they should exercise their lordship in a righteous way. The most obvious difficulty with the premise that true lordship was conditional on God’s grace was that the bestowal of this gift was imperceptible to its recipients. Nobody could presume to be entitled to God’s grace, just as no one could presume to be in receipt of it. Yet signs of mortal sin were not invisible, and were clearly evident within the ecclesiastical hierarchy itself. The very endowments that had been enjoyed by the church since the Donation of Constantine, a decree that purportedly recorded Constantine’s gift of Rome and most of the Western Roman Empire to Pope Sylvester I and his successors, and which was held to be authentic throughout the medieval period, seemed to nullify any righteous claim that either the pontiff or his i­nferiors could have to be heads of any part of the church. Wyclif ’s understanding of the church bears all the hallmarks of his realist conception of the universe. There is only one true church, he suggests in the first chapter of On the Church, which is the ‘the congregation of everyone who is predestined to salvation’, the community of all the elect (27i). This church may coincide with members of particular churches, but such churches were in no way equivalent to the one true church. It is at once the bride of Christ and the spiritual body of Christ. At its head is Christ himself, and all parts of his body are united to him through charity. As a corollary to his pronouncements on lordship, Wyclif declares that no member of the church, including the pope, may assume that he is the head of the church, or indeed even to be a member of the church. Throughout his theological work, Wyclif observes the conventional distinction between the church militant (or the sojourning church), those members of the church on earth who resist the enemies of the soul (the world, the flesh and the devil), and the church triumphant in heaven. But there is also a third part of the church, representing its members in purgatory. This was generally known as the church expectant or the church penitent, though Wyclif identifies it consistently as the church dormant. Wyclif ’s understanding of lordship thus conveniently rendered the process of papal election, or any form of ecclesiastical election,

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effectively meaningless, as he went on to argue in On the Power of the Pope (28). St Peter, after all, whom Wyclif regarded as a true pope and vicar of Christ, was not formally elected. Popes could have no prospect of being true heads of the Christian church unless they strove to ­imitate Christ and St Peter in their manner of living, hence renouncing all property and benefices. Their principal concern, and that of their bishops and priests, he believed, should be with the spiritual welfare of the Christian community. Many of the problems with the contemporary church, on Wyclif ’s interpretation, had originated with the Donation of Constantine, a document in which the Roman emperor Constantine the Great (d. 337) bestowed rich privileges and endowments, as well as significant administrative power, on Pope Sylvester I (d. 335) and his successors.72 The document was exposed as a forgery in the fifteenth century by the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla (d. 1457), who demonstrated through stylistic analysis of its Latin that it must have been produced in the eighth or ninth century.73 Throughout Wyclif ’s period, however, it was believed to be genuine and was treated accordingly. The king had responsibility for the secular welfare of his nation. In On the Office of the King, Wyclif presents a theoretical outline of the monarch’s status and duties, but also further develops some of what he had said earlier in On Civil Lordship. Wyclif ’s belief was that the king is God’s vicar, among whose principal secular duties is to regulate the church (30). Just as the pope should act as Christ’s vicar, so the king, Wyclif believed, should be God’s vicar. Though the priest’s authority was seen by Wyclif as the more dignified of the two, the king’s authority permitted him to intervene in the secular affairs of the church. As Wyclif suggests, the priest was required to uphold Christ’s image, and to renounce personal property or financial endowment.

The eucharist and the other sacraments The publication of Wyclif ’s ideas on the nature of Eucharistic change met with unequivocal censure: they ran contrary to Catholic dogma and the established liturgical beliefs that had been enshrined in medieval 72 For the text of the Donation, see CICaPP part 1, dist. 96, chs 13–14 (cols 342–5). 73 The Treatise of Lorenzo Valla on the Donation of Constantine: Text and Translation into English, ed. and trans. Christopher B. Coleman (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).

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canon law centuries earlier. What the process of change involved, according to Catholic teaching, was the removal of the substances of the bread and wine at consecration and their replacement with the substance of Christ’s body and blood. This was the essence of transubstantiation. The claim that Wyclif was making about this process, however, was an ostensibly simple one, based on a reasonable realist metaphysical premise: substance a cannot be annihilated and replaced by substance b. This idea is rehearsed by Wyclif countless times, but it is supported by another argument about the appearance of the bread and wine. When the host is consecrated by the priest, the appearance of the bread and wine does not change. If the substances of the bread and wine have been annihilated, then their appearance should not remain. To suggest that they did was to believe that accidents, such as colour, form, smell and taste, could remain after the annihilation of their subject. If Wyclif is to be believed, many theologians were suggesting that the accidents of the bread did indeed remain in the absence of its substantive subject. This view of the eucharist informed the words of two important records of Catholic eucharistic theology: Innocent III’s letter to the Archbishop of Lyons of 1202, known by its incipit Cum marthae circa, and the first constitution of the Fourth Lateran Council, known by its incipit Firmiter.74 The fact that an idea was enshrined in canon law was for Wyclif, of course, no guarantee of its accuracy. The alternative that he was suggesting, however, did not amount to a denial of the real presence of Christ’s body and blood (22).75 It was simply a denial of the possibility of the annihilation of the substances of the bread and wine and of their appearances being sustained without such substances. Wyclif certainly discusses the presence of the body and the blood in the host in detail, but he never denies it. In the first chapter of On the Eucharist, Wyclif explains that the body of Christ, though really present in the consecrated host, is present not physically but spiritually. Hence, we do not eat Christ’s body or drink his blood in a physical way, as we would consume food or drink, nor is his body or his blood perceptible to the bodily senses. If it were, as Wyclif goes on to suggest, then the results would be truly terrifying. Yet he insists that the fact that we taste the bread and the wine cannot 74 Decretales D. Gregoriani IX, lib. III, tit. 41, ch. 6, cum marthae, CICaPS vol. 2, cols 636–9. 75 Some, however, have assumed that Wyclif was indeed denying real presence. See, for example, McFarlane, John Wyclif and the Beginnings of English Non-conformity, p. 94.

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be accounted for according to traditional doctrinal explanations, either. If the substance of the bread and the wine had indeed been annihilated, then their physical accidents would have nothing in which to inhere. Those who sought to explain this by arguing that the accidents of taste, colour, texture and smell inhered in another accident had to be mistaken. For Wyclif, no accident could be sustained in the absence of a substantial subject. Wyclif ’s discussion of the other sacraments was often subtly provocative, though it did not attract formal condemnation of a comparable kind. The only exception to this relates to penance. Wyclif felt that confession should essentially be between the confessing subject and God (17).76 His interpretation of marriage was provocative, since he maintained that the priest played no necessary role in the procedure, but it was not heretical according to the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council (20). His belief that the matrimonial vows should be spoken in the future tense (but without requiring coital consummation) was also potentially controversial, but rendered less so by the fact that he insisted that spoken vows were strictly subordinate to the mental vows that necessarily preceded them (21). Indeed, the articulation of spoken vows was not an essential part of the legal binding of spouses for Wyclif, since only God could effect such a conjunction.

Biographical studies A number of scholarly article-length biographies of John Wyclif exist, together with longer studies of his life and career in the Oxford Schools. Andrew Larsen’s ‘John Wyclif (c. 1331–84)’ is the most comprehensive recent short survey, but the entry by Anthony Kenny and Anne Hudson in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography remains an indispensable overview of Wyclif ’s life, and contains a convenient bibliography of primary and secondary sources.77 See also Hudson’s entry in the Dictionary of the Middle Ages, vol. 12, pp. 706–11, which also has an extensive bibliography. Probably the earliest scholarly biography that should be mentioned here is John Lewis’s The History of the Life and Sufferings of the Reverend 76 For details, see the introduction to Chapter 2. 77 Anne Hudson and Anthony Kenny, ‘Wyclif, John (d. 1384)’, ODNB, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, September 2010 [www.oxforddnb.com.ezproxy. stir.ac.uk/view/article/30122, accessed 19 October 2014].

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and Learned John Wicliffe, D.D., which was first published in 1720.78 Though an early account, this biography, as its title indicates, offers a sympathetic description of Wyclif ’s life and teachings that still has some value today. Lewis Sergeant’s John Wyclif: Last of the Schoolmen and First of the English Reformers, which was published in the Heroes of the Nations series in 1893, also remains an accessible introductory study.79 The classic and most extensive modern book-length biography of John Wyclif was written by Herbert Workman and published in two volumes in 1926 (and subsequently in a single-volume edition). Though some of Workman’s conclusions may now appear questionable, this remains the most detailed study, and contains a wealth of valuable information. These classic biographies have recently been joined by a number of more recent studies of his life and thought. G.R. Evans’s John Wyclif: Myth and Reality (Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2005) is the most exhaustive and the most recent, but mention must also be made of Anthony Kenny’s concise but authoritative biographical account of Wyclif ’s thought in the Oxford Past Masters series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). This latter text is the first biographical account of Wyclif ’s philosophical system since J.A. Robson’s foundational study, Wyclif and the Oxford Schools (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), but has recently been joined by Stephen Lahey’s more detailed introduction, John Wyclif, which appears in the Oxford Great Medieval Thinkers series (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), and Alessandro Conti’s intellectual biography of Wyclif in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.80 Joseph H. Dahmus’s The Prosecution of John Wyclif (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952) also contains extended biographical sections.

The selection of texts Wyclif was a prodigious writer, and it would have been impossible to include more than a representative sample of his Latin works in 78 The History of the Life and Sufferings of the Reverend and Learned John Wicliffe, D.D. (London: Printed for Robert Knaplock and Richard Wilkin, 1720). 79 John Wyclif: Last of the Schoolmen and First of the English Reformers (London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1893). 80 Alessandro Conti, ‘John Wyclif ’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2011 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2011/ entries/wyclif/.

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a single volume of this kind. Because of the length of the majority of these, I have generally included extracts of one or more chapters from the major and most extensive works, though I have also included some shorter excerpts. Some sermons, pamphlets and polemical tracts have been included in their entirety. Though my intention at the outset had been to prioritise hitherto untranslated material in this volume, it has nevertheless been necessary to include some material that has been translated elsewhere. A translation of the whole of the Trialogus has been published recently by Stephen Lahey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). I have therefore included translations of only a few short extracts from this text. Other modern translations include Anthony Kenny’s On Universals, which forms a companion volume to the Latin De Universalibus, edited by Ivan Mueller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, both 1985). Because of the availability of Kenny’s translation, I have included only one very short extract from it in the Appendix. I have also included translations of some material from Wyclif ’s De Veritate Sacrae Scripturae because of the significance of this text in the development of his exegetical method. There is therefore some overlap with Ian Levy’s carefully abridged translation of De Veritate Sacrae Scripturae, published as John Wyclif: On the Truth of Holy Scripture (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2001). Selected chapters from De Civili Dominio appear in The Cambridge Translations of Medieval Philosophical Texts, including the first, which I have translated here. Again, the justification for this duplication lies in the importance of Wyclif ’s theory of civil lordship, which is concisely outlined in this initial chapter. Much of the material that appears in the Appendix has been translated elsewhere, but these documents are included because of their value as records of official responses to Wyclif ’s teaching.

Language and written style In the introduction to his indispensable Latin Writings of John Wyclif: An Annotated Catalog, an itemised register of works attributed to Wyclif that had originated in the labours of his late father, S. Harrison Thompson, Williel R. Thompson remarked that the intellectual issues explored by Wyclif often seemed to his modern readers ‘arcane, abstruse and even unintelligible’.81 This is not untrue, but we should expect some degree of abstruseness and opacity from a scholastic theologian, and Wyclif is 81 Latin Writings, p. xxi.

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no worse than many of his contemporaries in this respect. What makes him especially challenging, however, is the nature of his Latin, which is uniformly dense and rather eccentric, and his written style, which often appears tangled, repetitive and highly digressive. Reginald Poole, editor of Wyclif ’s magisterial On Civil Lordship for the Wyclif Society, found his Latin to be ubiquitously ‘base’, but also commented perceptively that Wyclif was clearly part of a new generation of English scholastic writers who thought in their native language as they wrote in Latin.82 This is certainly borne out by some of the most characteristic aspects of Wyclif ’s syntax, which often adheres broadly to the predominant subject-verb-object declarative paradigm of fourteenth-century English. This may explain in part why many scholars have found his Latin to be so degenerate. Most linguists today would hesitate to characterise a departure from the Classical Latin subject-object-verb syntax as a deficiency, and it might more usefully be characterised as a medieval variation on the classical standard inherited from the ancients. Another reason why Wyclif ’s Latin has been found wanting, however, is its tortuosity; whilst at the level of the clause it is often relatively straightforward, Wyclif had a tendency to conjoin large numbers of clauses, often in complex, embedded patterns of dependency. These account for the dense, periphrastic flavour of his prose, and an often tangled and protracted expository style, which creates its own problems for the translator. To imitate Wyclif ’s syntax slavishly would be to render any translation potentially as opaque as the original Latin texts; to resort to broad paraphrase, on the other hand, would be to sacrifice an important quality of those texts. As a compromise, I have sought to offer a reasonably literal translation of the text where the Latin allows, and to offer a close paraphrase where it does not. A final word should be said about Wyclif ’s use of technical terminology, which he scatters liberally throughout his writings. Such terminology is common in scholastic writing, but many words and phrases can seem disorienting or simply opaque when they are first encountered. I have therefore included at the end of the volume a glossary of those terms that Wyclif uses frequently. Words and expressions that are used infrequently, or whose context contributes significantly towards their meaning, are explained in the footnotes.

82 De Civili Dominio, p. xviii.

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I: LOGIC AND METAPHYSICS

For the student at any university in late medieval Europe, logic and metaphysics were the necessary preliminaries to any serious engagement with theological questions. Wyclif ’s distinctive and controversial theological system relied upon an equally distinctive and impressively intricate philosophical system. His three logical treatises and his Summa de Ente (a modern title) are only now beginning to receive the attention they deserve from scholars, but only one of them (On Universals) is available in English translation. I have here selected texts that deal with a range of issues that were to become crucial to Wyclif ’s later thought. All are clearly informed by his developing philosophical realism, and represent his desire to gesture away from the material particulars of the world, towards the universal entities that Wyclif felt were the proper objects of philosophical knowledge. The Summa de Ente was produced between ca. 1360 and 1372, and represents some of Wyclif ’s earliest and most original philosophical work. It is here that his philosophical realism finds its earliest and its most powerful expression. In Eradicating Errors Concerning Universals in General, he offers a defence of his metaphysical system and answers common objections to his stance on universals (1). It was not until he composed his definitive treatise on the topic shortly afterwards, however, that he offered a formal typology of universals (2). Despite its apparent simplicity, this five-part scheme would prove to play a fundamental role in Wyclif ’s metaphysical system, and is also partially replicated in his fivefold conception of Scripture (7i). The two extracts, which are taken from On Divine Volition, deal with contingency and necessity. In the first chapter of this treatise, his perspective appears strongly predestinarian. All future contingents, he argues, are necessary by virtue of being known by God (3). In a later chapter, however, he illustrates how this form of necessity subtly accommodates and indeed gives priority to human free will. The most contingent events, he argues, are conditionally necessary by virtue of God’s knowledge of them, but such necessity is not necessary in the same way as a donkey’s capacity to bray is necessary. God’s knowledge of an event still allows its antecedent cause to be contingent (4). Such a

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paradox is typical of the problems of reconciling conditional necessity with human freedom. It is consistent both with the necessity of the divine mind knowing about it but also with the possibility that it may not happen.1 Wyclif ’s Fragment on Annihilation is one of his more challenging philosophical texts, but also one that needs to be read if we are to understand the philosophical origins of his denial of the possibility of annihilation (6). Such a denial was not heretical in itself, but it certainly became a vehicle for heresy when deployed in order to justify a corresponding denial of transubstantiation (as it is here and elsewhere). The fact that this fragment appears in an ostensibly innocuous philosophical treatise must surely have protected Wyclif from controversy or formal condemnation at this point. The text is dated by Thomson to 1371/2, making it a relatively late philosophical text.2 It nevertheless reveals that Wyclif ’s notorious convictions about impossibility of transubstantiation had their origins at a relatively early point in his scholarly career, probably some time earlier than the composition of this text. Wyclif presents a range of robust arguments against annihilation in turn. He begins with the simple claim that annihilation cannot be caused by God. But he offers some more philosophically subtle claims. Annihilation of anything entails destruction not just of the thing itself but of its genus. Since the ultimate reality of genera and species was in the mind of God, the annihilation of anything would have obscene consequences: both God and his universe would be brought to nothing! Yet Wyclif also suggests that it is absurd for the appearance of the bread and wine (their accidents) to remain when their subject has been destroyed, since the essence of a thing was for him far more closely bound to its subject than its accidents. For the accidents alone to remain therefore seemed anomalous. Some of the other details of this philosophical treatise are relatively difficult to grasp in their entirety, but the connection between the key claims here and Wyclif ’s later ideas on the eucharist is not difficult to perceive.

 1 See the section on contingency and necessity in the Introduction for a fuller discussion.  2 Latin Writings, p. 34.

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1 The reality of universals

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Eradicating Errors Concerning Universals, ch. 1 (extract). Latin text: De Ente Librorum Duorum Excerpta, pp. 30–1. The short treatise from which this first passage has been taken was prepared as a spirited rejoinder to the many arguments against the reality of universals that Wyclif had encountered in the Schools at the beginning of his Oxford career. As Thomson has suggested, it may have been assembled as a record of ad hoc responses, but it seems that Wyclif had also hoped to refute in a more focused and systematic manner some of the most typical objections that had confronted him.3 Many are dismantled at greater length in his longer treatise dedicated to this topic, On Universals.

It is clear that all envy or sin arises from a lack of love for universals, as Augustine deduces in his twenty-second epistle.4 This can be shown in the following way: every great good that God loves should be loved by us all the more, but every universal is a great good, and God consequently loves it more than any singular that derives from it. It should therefore be loved by us all the more. The minor premise is evident from the fact that a universal is prior in nature to its singular. Let the envious therefore attend to singulars, which they elevate to such a level that they do not care who is exalted to a particular office, whether it should be that of a prelate or some other dignitary, provided they know him or he is local, or provided there is some other material individuating condition. They should rather look beyond this a little, by seeking such pre-eminence in their species without reference to the individual person, and this will nevertheless be for the greater good. Errors of perception and perspective relating to universals are undoubtedly the cause of all the sin that prevails in the world! It is sufficient in such matters for someone to be of an agreeable nature and to be suitable to a particular office. If it is objected that many who deny the existence of universals work charitably, I say that it is impossible for anyone to work charitably  3 Latin Writings, p. 20.  4 CSEL 34, pp. 54–62; Works of St Augustine: Letters 1–99 (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2001), pp. 58–62. Augustine does not mention universals explicitly here, but his argument progresses from the general to the particular in a way that seems to have impressed Wyclif. He urges Aurelius, Bishop of Carthage (d. ca. 430), to prevent feasting and drunkenness in cemeteries in honour of martyrs, and expresses the hope that such a public gesture will lead to improvements in the private practices of individuals. The surviving text contains several lacunae.

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unless he understands the reality of universals, even if he says otherwise, for there is an innate knowledge of universals in every stock of people. Legists, who are very subtle philosophers, acknowledge the reality of universals, as is evident from the description of natural law, judicial law, the law of lordship and obligation and of others. They treat these civil laws as spiritual, incorporeal and imperceptible things, however much they may involve an obligation pertaining to corporeal things, such as a pecuniary debt, and however little that may strictly be due. This principle is evident from the Digests, in relation to the division of things, the first law, and in many places in the body of laws and more generally in all areas of knowledge.5 Modern scholars contradict the ancients about the existence of universals, some because their rational mind has been numbed by perceptible things, and some because of the tangled language that they use against those who postulate that universals exist. Many, in the manner of sophists, wish not only to know but to see, not only to avoid inconsistency, but also apparent inconsistency. Others, because of arrogance that leads them to want to separate themselves from others and pompously uphold whatever views they defend, and some on account of lack of information and fear of potential criticism. But all men share our view in reality; indeed, even beasts recognise universals through accidents, as I have said elsewhere.

2 A typology of universals On Universals, ch. 2 (extract). Latin text: De Universalibus, p. 59; cf. On Universals, trans. Anthony Kenny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 13. In this brief extract from the beginning of Wyclif ’s major study of universals he presents a simple typology of five parts, extending from the most perfect universals in the divine mind to the transitory mental signs and spoken or written words that are used in the created world. The latter were for him universals only in a superficial sense, a point that he repeatedly stresses elsewhere in his work. This ostensibly simple scheme influenced many of his later ideas, and exerted perhaps its most conspicuous influence on his conception of Scripture, which he divided into a strikingly similar quinary hierarchy (7i). In broader terms, it is present in his conception of divine ideas, the nature of time, divine and civil lordship, and the nature of the church. Wyclif is keen to stress the influence of Robert Grosseteste here, among the most distinguished  5 Digesta I.8; CICi vol. 2, pp. 11–12.

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of thirteenth-century scholastics, who had been Bishop of Lincoln from 1235 until his death in 1253 (hence Wyclif ’s use of the name Lincolniensis).

There are five kinds of universal, as Lincolniensis suggests in chapter 7 of his commentary on the first book of the Posterior Analytics.6 The first and supreme kind is a concept or idea, an eternal exemplar in the mind of God. The second kind is a common created idea that exists in the superior causes, such as the intelligences or the celestial spheres. The third kind of universal is the common form rooted in its individuals, and that, says Lincolniensis, is the genera and species of which Aristotle speaks. The fourth kind is the common form existing in its accidents, which is a universal apprehended by the lowest intellect. But the fifth kind of universal, represented by signs or acts of the intellect, Lincolniensis dismisses as irrelevant to him.

3 All future contingents are necessary On Divine Voliltion, ch. 1 (extract). Latin text: De Ente Librorum Duorum Excerpta, pp. 117–18. In this extract from On Divine Volition, Wyclif explains how his understanding of the relationship between time and eternity requires that all instants of time, including future contingents, must be necessary in some sense. God’s eternal perspective on time means that he necessarily sees all that has happened, all that happens at the present moment, and all that will or can happen in the future. This position seems to presuppose a form of determinism, yet he is quite insistent in a later chapter of this same treatise that both contingency and human free will are preserved in his system (4). During his lifetime, he was never condemned formally for holding deterministic views.

All moments are present in eternal time, whether they will be or they have been. If God desires something, he wants it eternally by virtue of his primary truth, and if he wants anything, then that thing is. The consequences of this conclusion emerge thus. Some assume that if a will be or has been, it is not. The contrary is nevertheless true: if a will be or has been, God wills a, and given the antecedent, he also wills it to be in the future and the past. And if God wills a, then a is. From the first, therefore, if a was or will be, then it is. Otherwise, God would  6 Robert Grosseteste, Commentarius in Posteriorum Analyticorum Libros, ed. Pietro Rossi (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1981), pp. 139–42. Grosseteste argues here that only incorruptible universals are worthy of attention.

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have the most incomplete volition, wishing for any number of things in the past which could not be, and imperfectly desiring future things that are not. He would therefore languish because of the impossibility of fulfilling wishes about past times, or of bringing wishes for the future promptly into effect. All things past and future, therefore, are present to God, so that he may have willed any one of them to have been in the past or to be in the future, but he also wishes each to be. God’s wishes are distinguished according to his subjects, even if one or other of them cannot be. In respect of his eternity, God’s desire and love are not distinguished, since he always has everything that he desires to have. It therefore does not follow from God’s now owning something that it is therefore now owned anew by God.

4 Why divine foreknowledge does not compromise human freedom On Divine Volition, ch. 7 (extract). Latin text: De Ente Librorum Duorum Excerpta, pp. 188–90. Here in a later chapter of On Divine Volition, Wyclif embraces the simple precept of Richard Fitzralph (Ardmachan) that human will must be prior to divine will if human freedom is meaningfully to be preserved and dignified. As Wyclif explains here, this means that divine foreknowledge cannot have any kind of causal influence over human activity, so that God cannot have knowledge of the outcome of an act of human free will until that act has taken place. Wyclif identifies such knowledge here as relative knowledge, which is necessarily contingent upon events in the world. As Anthony Kenny and Luigi Campi have illustrated, however, Wyclif addressed the question of the relationship between contingent events, free will and divine knowledge of those events in subtly different ways elsewhere, even modifying his metaphysical system in order to accommodate this.7

When we speak of future contingents in God, we must grant that the will of any human individual is prior to his own will. That is why God acts in accordance with the beliefs, understanding and activity of such a causal agent. We must therefore accept each of the conclusions that   7 Kenny focuses on Wyclif ’s use of the principle of hypothetical necessity in the fourteenth chapter of On Universals. See ‘Realism and Determinism in the Early Wyclif ’, SChH, Subsidia, 5, pp. 165–77. Campi looks at a form of being that Wyclif identifies as intentional being, which accommodates the contingency of human free will. See ‘Was the Early Wyclif a Determinist? Concerning an Unnoticed Level within His Taxonomy of Being’, Vivarium, 52 (2014), 102–46.

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follows from this, as Lord Ardmachan says eloquently in book 16 of On the Armenian Questions. He says first, in his fifth chapter, that any future thing exists before God’s foreknowledge of it in the causal sequence, and as such God’s foreknowledge is not in any way the cause of the that event, but is rather the correspondence between God’s knowing and a thing of which he has knowledge.8 In question 19 of the first part of his Summa [Theologiae], St Thomas calls it the disposition of our knowing God towards a knowable thing, and the Subtle Doctor calls it a rational relation.9 I call it relative knowledge, because it is contingent knowledge together with its respective, and nothing more should posited in God in formal terms. We must now examine the contingent will of God more specifically. After chapters 11 and 12, [Ardmachan] shows that the volition of God does not impose necessity on contingent future events, but that any additional cause, and its realisation or omission, can be the reason why God eternally wished for a given voluble, or indeed did not wish for it. Fitzralph’s first example relates to the heavens. He chooses this because the philosophers teach that they are eternal, and necessarily cause all the acts of men. Now, suppose that Peter’s future actions were entirely free, but that he could claim that the heavens were eternally the remote cause of what he did. Anything that he did not do, he would say, did not presuppose such a causal relationship. Now, suppose that God were taken to be the cause of human activity in this scenario, rather than the heavens. Could not a man then contrive to make God the eternal cause of his activities, and claim that God desired them to be carried out? His second example concerns a man who orders his servant to provide him with certain dishes at the table much later in the day. The servant prepares these voluntarily in his own time, but it seems that the will of the man who gives the order is the cause of this preparation. The order came at an earlier time, and at a level of volition beyond that of the servant. Nevertheless, only this later will can make the lord’s will the cause of that preparation, or indeed not the cause of that preparation. His third example concerns Christ, who made God reveal more than twelve legions of angels through a prayer, as is said in Matthew  8 De Quaestionibus Armenorum, fos 130–1.  9 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Ia q. 19, a. 3, ad 6; Duns Scotus, Quaestiones subtilissimae super libros Metaphysicorum Aristotelis, book 5, q. 11 (question beginning ‘quid realiter est relatio rationis?’), in Opera Omnia, ed. Luke Wadding (Lyons: Durand, 1639), vol. 7, p. 272.

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26[:53]. That prayer had been made in the world, yet God’s will was simply eternal. It therefore seems certain to that doctor that the human will can be the cause of God’s desire for a certain course of events. ‘This does not mean,’ says the doctor, ‘that [human will] is the cause of the power of volition in God, but rather of the relationship between or the interdependency of divine power and caused power’. In order to confirm this he alludes to the fact that God wished to damn Lucifer because he sinned. It is certain that this was temporal sin and eternal volition. Since the devil, before his fall, could potentially not have sinned, it follows that the devil could have caused God never to have wished to damn him.

5 The relationship between time and tense in scriptural language Third Treatise on Logic, ch. 10 (extracts). Latin text: De Logica, vol. 3, pp. 167–70. Wyclif ’s Third Treatise on Logic (composed some time before 1363) is his most sophisticated and original logical work, and serves as a sequel to his Continuation of Logic, which was written shortly before. Though an early text, the Third Treatise contains the germs of ideas that would be exploited later in his philosophical and theological career. The most significant and distinctive idea that is presented in this extract concerns the topology of time. Wyclif regarded time as a sequence of indivisibly small instants or temporal atoms, rather than as an infinitely divisible continuum, as Aristotle had conceived of it in the fourth book of the Physics.10 This view separated him from the majority of his contemporaries and his sources, including, perhaps most notably, Thomas Bradwardine, whose views on divine foreknowledge and determinism influenced Wyclif very conspicuously. Wyclif ’s atomistic conception of time had its origins in his Logic (ca. 1360), and was explored systematically in his later treatise On Time (1368), which formed part of his Summa de Ente. As Wyclif suggests in this extract from the Third Treatise, if temporal progression and priority are to be adequately explained, then each instant must in some sense coexist with the others, leading him to his controversial conclusion that all things that will be or have been, are. By this he does not mean, of course, that those things exist in the present moment, but that those things that do not exist in the present instant are all uniquely and eternally present to God. It is this conception of time that informs his beliefs about scriptural signification and the extension (or ampliation) of temporal reference, to which 10 Physics 217b29–224a17. See, in particular, 220a25, in which time is represented as a continuous entity that serves as the ‘number’ or measure of motion.

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he would return in his Postils on the Whole of Scripture and On the Truth of Sacred Scripture. The extract begins following Wyclif ’s rejection of two ‘erroneous’ views on time, the first of which treats it as a substance and the second as something that has no existence in the present, but only in the future and the past.

Philosophers and theologians have a way of speaking that describes time not in the narrow way [of our contemporaries] but more extensively, as we see in part 88 of Averroes’ commentary on the fourth book of the Physics, and the same is done throughout books 4 and 5 of the Metaphysics.11 In book 8 of the Metaphysics and the fifth part of Averroes’ commentary, it is said that dinner and breakfast differ in respect of their positions in time, and this same principle is invoked in books 9 and 14, and also in book 12.12 And all of the sciences speak in this way. It was as a consequence of this that I first felt moved to extend my own conception of time, for I did not see how philosophers and theologians could deny that successive instants existed together. My intellect cannot conceive of continua unless they are composed out of co-existing parts, for just as the middle instant of an hour joins all of its constituent parts in turn, so they are brought together, causing time, continuity, priority, corruption and knowledge, as philosophers truly proclaim. Otherwise, no instant or anything else could be temporally superior or inferior to another. An instant therefore initiates, joins and unites parts of time that exist at their respective moments. Any instant thus relates to the other parts of time as something essentially intrinsic to them, as one of their parts, and also as something extrinsic to itself, as it stands next to its preceding instant. And I do not see how sacramental words, words pronounced in making a promise, or political propositions through which a contract is made, could otherwise be true. No sound or murmur, or any discursive act of the mind, could exist. Now, if we were to assume that nothing existed outside the present instant then any other part of time would be absent during that same instant. But suppose that the expression be absent could be used in an extended sense, either to signify a subject that is absent from a place 11 Aristotelis de Physico Auditu cum Auerrois Cordubensis Commentariis, in Aristotelis Opera cum Averrois Commentariis, vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Minerva, G.m.b.H., repr. 1962), pp. 173–4. 12 Metaphysics 1042b21; cf. Octavum Volumen: Aristotelis Metaphysicorum Libri XIIII cum Averrois Cordubensis in eosdem Commentariis et Epitome (Venice: editio Juntina, 1562), pp. 211–12 (including commentary).

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or a role that it could occupy in the future, just as things are absent from us when they are located at a distance, even though we still have possession of them; or second, to signify a thing that could exist at a future instant or time, when it is actually absent now. In this same way, our future perfection and our past vanities are absent from us. It is clear from this that [if nothing existed outside the present] then at the middle instant of an hour each half of that hour would be entirely absent, and in that same way all time, and therefore no time, would be in that instant, because the whole would then be missing from it. Consequently, since nothing would be except what was in that instant, as is falsely suggested, then no time would be; or otherwise, if anything existed then it would always be! According to this argument, it would not then be possible for God always to be, because anything else could exist only for an infinitely long period, and nothing can exist for longer than always.13 And many other points that I have recounted elsewhere work in the same way: in speaking of divine knowledge, determination and the possibility of things, there remain any number of insoluble problems concerning contrary lines of reasoning that are fallible if we pursue them. For example, if God knows something then that thing is, but of necessity he knows all things that will be or were, and therefore it is necessary that all things that will be or were, are, in their own time, though not now. Yet there are many saints’ sayings and arguments upholding the immutability of divine knowledge. Otherwise, it would be of a less permanent kind than the knowledge of a creature. Paradoxically, therefore, divine knowledge does not continuously vary in accordance with its object’s variation. So, if God determines that something is going to happen, he knows with certainty that he has determined that he will bring it about, just as he knows when I have determined that I will do something. But on account of that [first] determination the second is necessary, namely, that I have determined that I will do something; therefore, the first also [applies]. Therefore, just as everything that is true is necessary either in absolute terms or on the basis of some presupposition, so everything that is absolutely necessary is contingent on either of these two. In respect of the freest kind of divine causation, it is equally possible for something not to be or to be. Yet this idea cannot be sustained unless 13 God must be eternal, but if any part of the universe were itself eternal, Wyclif is suggesting here, then its creator would paradoxically need to be more eternal than that.

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we assume that God is, before that instant of time, and that he is equally able not to cause a given effect of which he is capable at any time. And through this there clearly emerges a solution to the ancient sophism concerning Christ seeing anyone in the Word, or truly claiming that the Day of Judgement had arrived.14 Just as it is necessary that Christ saw and spoke in this way, so it is equally necessary that these things were so. And similarly, just as it was once possible that these things would not be so, so it was then possible that he did not see or speak in this way.15 And herein, uniquely, lies the true solution to the problem, after all inferior routes have been explored. In no other way do I see how the meaning of scripture may be logically upheld and defended, when it says that we are all sons of Adam, and that Christ is the son of David and the son of Abraham, alongside the rest of his offspring. Whenever one of us is unsure of the particulars of the genealogy that underlies such a generation of people, we should finally concede that the named patriarchs in the fullness of time mediately generated those sons. Consequently, if anyone is the son of such a father, then he has that father, and the father has that son. From this it follows that relatives have a reciprocal relationship across time.16 Elsewhere I have presented the following case to my opponents: Peter, Paul and Linus are the only men in existence, and Peter, who is predestinate, is the natural father of each of the other two men, who are foreknown. Linus is the spiritual father of Peter and Paul, and Paul is the natural father of Linus. With this established, it seems that the son of any of these men will be damned. Nevertheless, not every son of every man will be damned. This is because not every son of man will be damned, since Peter, who is the son of Adam, of Abraham, and of any of the patriarchs who no longer exist, will not be damned. However, no Catholic would deny that, just as Christ was the son of David and of Abraham in a good sense, so too are all of the later Jews, as the blessed virgin said; and, indeed, as the apostle said, we, together with those following our [Christian] customs, are sons and imitators 14 A sophism is a proposition that may be true in one sense but not in another. The sophism about Christ seeing anyone in the Word relies on his being privy to divine knowledge. By his human faculties alone, he could not have perceived his own presence in the Word prior to the Word being made flesh. 15 Wyclif is here attempting to reconcile divine determinism with free choice. Because God determined that Christ would see someone in the Word, or claim truly that the Day of Judgement had arrived, then those things necessarily happened, yet this does not compromise the possibility that they might not have. 16 Reciprocal in the sense that if P is the father of Q, then Q is the son of P, and vice versa.

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of Abraham, and we are all natural sons of Adam. But I do not see how those who speak of time in a more restricted way can express any of these ideas truly, since, according to them, Adam did not beget any one of us, and none of us descended from him. Likewise Adam did not, in his earliest instant, or before or after, descend from those men who descended from Adam. And through the same argument, one who was begotten of a man who died before he was ensouled does not have a father, since he would barely be the son of a woman, and not of a man. And the same applies in the case of the death of a man, of the causation of health, of the existence of an utterance, of the succession of a generation and of a subject aggregated out of its different successors, all of which would be impossible to solve in that way, simply by following the common, vernacular rules of speech. So, the blessed notion that all things that were or will be are, with each thing in its own time, as both philosophers and scripture say, is now understood, and it is easy to respond to objections. For authors, as well as speakers, are sometimes looser and sometimes stricter in their interpretation of this principle, and in these cases, an appropriate concession or denial will remove appearance of inconsistencies.

6 Why annihilation is impossible On the Externally Productive Power of God, chapter 12: Fragment on Annihilation (1). Latin text: ‘Fragmentum de Annihilatione, ex tractu de Potencia productiva Dei ad extra excerptum’, in De Ente Librorum Duorum Excerpta, ed. Michael Henry Dziewicki (London: WS, 1909), pp. 287–93. This chapter is taken from what is probably Wyclif ’s last purely philosophical work, and also represents the first of three chapters which together represent is earliest detailed exploration of the problem of annihilation (the so-called Fragment on Annihilation). It is remarkable that this text, a passionate and emphatic philosophical rejection of annihilation, did not attract condemnation, since Wyclif does nothing to hide the consequences of this rejection for his theory of eucharistic change (which had not attracted academic or public attention at this point). It was perhaps little more than his desire to articulate his position in the form of so dense and opaque a philosophical argument, which was itself surrounded by similarly abstruse technical musings, that ­concealed it from closer scholarly or ecclesiastical scrutiny.

We have established that God is creative, but it remains for us to determine whether he can annihilate. And it seems to many that he should

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be able to do both, since there is an equally strong justification for each, and they are equal in extremity: God de facto created the world, so he should therefore be capable of annihilation. This argument has been confirmed in the following way: it is easier to destroy than to create, and because God can do the greater of these two things, so he should be able to do the lesser. It can be ratified in a second way, because without the capacity to annihilate divine power would be diminished, as is evident from the fact that denials of the possibility of annihilation have been so widely condemned, and from the shared testimony of modern thinkers, who say unanimously that God would not be adequate to govern his creation unless he could also destroy it.17 Indeed, to deny God the capacity to annihilate would be to divest him of his omnipotence. The argument has been confirmed in a third way de facto, because many believe that prime matter, divided into atoms, is annihilated when it receives a particular substantial form. And this can be shown with the example of light, or of species in medio.18 And it is further evident from grace in the corrupted soul after the coming of sin. For grace, since it is an absolute thing that has the power to exist by itself, does not remain behind in anything it touches, nor does it decay into the impotence of matter, since it is not produced out of material potency but is nevertheless created; out of its place, therefore, only absence follows, namely, sin or the penalty of damnation.19 Many such proofs have been contrived, and on account of these many believe that God may indeed annihilate. But against this I argue thus: it is impossible for any being or truth to exist unless it is either God himself or something caused by him, either directly or indirectly. This assumption has been demonstrated in observations about truth and sin, neither of which could be permitted by God unless they were caused by God or by one of his creatures. But annihilation can neither be God nor be caused by him, and so it cannot be. This minor premise is evident from our postulation that if it existed, annihilation would have to be distinct from God, because otherwise the 17 Arguments on each side of this debate were numerous, as Wyclif intimates here. Arguments in favour of a divine capacity for annihilation were not de facto ­controversial, however. 18 Species in medio were species as they existed in a particular medium in the world (most commonly, the air). They were held to be necessarily inferior to species in their purest state. 19 This absence could be accounted for by invoking annihilation, according to some theologians.

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annihilation of anything would be as good, as permanent, and as simple as God is himself, and indeed otherwise a given thing would be annihilated in the same way as God had being. Nevertheless, there are many theories of annihilation, such as instantaneous, temporal, penal and other forms, that seem effectively to distinguish God from annihilation.20 Given, therefore, that annihilation is not God, it is hereby shown that it cannot be regarded as a creature, or the non-existence of a creature, because every creature is a positive predicable being, and these properties are not compatible with annihilation; therefore, annihilation is not a creature, either. If it were a creature, then God could not annihilate by his absolute power unless a universe of annihilation were to succeed the created universe, which we here take to be the multitude of created things and creatures. Therefore, he could not annihilate the universe unless he could create, a priori, another, opposite universe. Now, annihilation is neither a privation nor a negation, because every privation presupposes a subject in which it may inhere, yet annihilation cannot inhere in a subject, and therefore no annihilation can be a form of privation.21 The minor premise can be shown thus: if something is annihilated then, as an index of its annihilation, that thing is no longer. Now, if it is annihilated in successive stages, then for as long as any part remained it would not act as a subject for annihilation. Therefore, because annihilation would then be everlasting, and would succeed the disintegration of an entity without presupposing a subject, it cannot thereby be envisaged as an aggregate of such disintegrations, since that kind of privation has no philosophical foundation.22 Augustine touches on this argument in the twentieth chapter of On the Nature of the Good, in which he shows that pain is better than corruption because pain, and not corruption, was in the body of Christ 20 The point here is that even if we discard the argument about the absurdity of annihilation being identical with God, and hence perfect, there are nevertheless many conceivable imperfect annihilative processes that are sufficient to establish that annihilation is not God. Any form or degree of annihilation, in other words, is necessarily ungodly. 21 For the scholastics, privation and annihilation were very different things. Whereas annihilation, if it were possible, would bring about a state of pure absence, privation simply marked the absence of ‘positive’ being. What this meant was that the privation inhering in a subject, unlike annihilation, which could not thus inhere, had the potential to be reversed. 22 This rather tangled concluding sentence is simply reiterating Wyclif ’s distinction between annihilation, which could not for him be an accident inhering in a subject (since the subject itself would no longer have any form of being), and privation, namely, the condition of being made to lack a property or attribute, which necessarily presupposes a subject.

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according to Psalm [15:20]: ‘Thou wilt not give thy holy one to see corruption’. But neither pain nor corruption can be, unless it has its foundation in a good nature. Hence, Augustine proceeds in the following way: The process of physical decay, if there is anything good that it may suitably consume, thrives in the world as corruption. But if corruption has consumed it, so that no good remains, then no nature will remain. And then, the corruption that corrupts will not have a nature, and so physical decay itself, wherever it might be, will not be.23

See how Augustine wants all corruption to exist at certain moments in time, and to have its foundation in the nature of the good! And that argument led philosophers, through reason, to discover prime matter, because otherwise, there would not be an antecedent subject for generation and corruption. Prime matter, therefore, undergoes a process of generation to make fire, and of corruption to make water, and therefore, it is the subject of fieriness after wateriness.24 Annihilation, therefore, since it is a form, requires a subject that it characterises formally, since it is the accident corresponding to the annihilating agent. But it is certain that it cannot characterise God, and nor can it characterise a whole creature. Therefore, it cannot be either divisible or indivisible when it belongs to a subject, as should be true of creation, for which creatures act as positive subjects. Now, God could not annihilate any substance unless he annihilated the whole of the created universe, but he could not annihilate that and therefore he cannot annihilate anything completely. The major premise is proved because to annihilate any substance requires the literal annihilation of each of its parts. But the quidditative part of any singular substance is the genus of that substance, just as is the case with all other genera and species, and therefore the annihilation of any singular substance would entail the annihilation of its genus. After this, nothing would exist in any singular of that genus, and the whole genus of that substance would therefore be destroyed, which would lead to the annihilation of whatever substance it was. This may be confirmed a fortiori: the substance of the bread in the Eucharist is not annihilated because its accidents remain, even though its whole form has ceased to be. Yet the connection of a quidditative 23 See PL 42, col. 557; The Manichean Debate, vol. 1, trans. Boniface Ramsay (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2006), p. 330. 24 If fire is corrupted to make water, water must undergo a process of generation to make fire. Hence, technically, it precedes fire as a subject of prime matter.

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part to its subjective part is stronger than that of any absolute accident to its subject. To how much greater an extent is it therefore true that a subject has not been wholly annihilated when it has been corrupted in each of its integral accidental parts, but with its quidditative part preserved. As I have said, this argument has weight because a quidditative part is closer to its individual than is any accident to its subject, for any quidditative part of an individual is essentially the same as that individual, and is caused by it materially, quidditatively and finally, but also causes it subjectively and intrinsically by nature. An accident, by contrast, is a nature that is entirely separate from its subject, but is nevertheless caused by it accidentally. Therefore, I accept that a subject that has been completely corrupted could not have been annihilated because of the essential remanence of that nature in its entirety, from which it is separate but by which it is accidentally caused. But how much more impossible would its annihilation be if that thing were preserved in its genus, which is its essential cause, identical in essence with the subject itself? Indeed, at the same time as the individual substance was produced and had a certain kind of being, it also derived being from its originary causes, as I have stated above. So there remains in the subject a certain latent being in its originary causes, because otherwise any destruction, especially of accidents, would be annihilation. Moreover, it seems that in order to posit simple annihilation the destruction of ideas would be required, which is identical essentially with their existing cause; and since such an idea is essentially God, to whom every creature adheres to a greater degree than an accident to its subject, it seems that the annihilation of any creature would require the annihilation of its subject. Annihilation literally means that corruption is itself corrupted, both in itself, and in each of its parts, and because of this certain people say that a thing could not be annihilated unless God, as much as its ideal nature, should cease to be. For each of them is essentially the same as the other, at least in terms of intelligible being. And from this, philosophers draw evidence that God, who is pure being, cannot be contrary to this, and cannot cause destruction, except perhaps accidentally, for the sake of a better purpose. And this view is expressed by Augustine, in the first chapter of On the Ways of the Manichees, where he says that God has the highest being because he has presence in the same way always, and can never be destroyed or changed.25 And if you should seek to discover the opposite it cannot be found anywhere, for being has no opposite except non-being. And 25 PL 32, col. 1345; The Manichean Debate, vol. 1, p. 41.

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since everything that is destroyed is destroyed by its opposite, it seems that the foundation of nature can be destroyed by nothingness, because it can be opposed to this. And in response to this consideration a certain doctor says that God could not, by his absolute power, exalt a thing more highly than by annihilating it, because in this way he would identify it with himself in simple terms. Likewise, he could not devalue it further than by creating it, because in this way it would be made different from him. But there are ugly disagreements in respect of this, because a thing cannot be identified with God according to its intelligible being. Nevertheless, those who speak in this way know that a thing cannot be annihilated unless its primary cause, with which it is identified transcendentally, at least, is annihilated together with it. And therefore the connection of God to a substance is greater than that of a substance to an accident. Consequently, just as an accident cannot be annihilated without its substance having been annihilated, so a substance cannot be annihilated unless it is annihilated in God, since he identifies himself with every creature, and does not have the capacity to destroy without cause. And this is confirmed in three ways. First, because all that has been or will be of a thing presupposes its being as a natural antecedent. But God cannot annihilate past being or future being, and therefore he cannot annihilate being, either. And we know the minor premise thus: God cannot cause the pastness of time to be annihilated by his absolute power, since annihilation is formally the desition of the thing annihilated. And futurity would be annihilated in the same way if it ceased to be, and therefore any creature could annihilate. It therefore follows to the contrary that no futurity can be annihilated. I believe that God has bequeathed these indestructible truths to us openly, so that we know from his goodness to reject the annihilation of anything. Indeed, if a posterior truth in nature cannot be annihilated, by how much more can a prior truth that acts as its end not be annihilated? And together with this, from statements concerning the extension of time, it follows that if a creature was or will be then that creature is, but the contrary is not true. Therefore, anyone who could annihilate the consequent could also annihilate the antecedent below. Whoever could annihilate a genus, or any per se cause of a thing caused, could therefore also annihilate that thing. But the being of a thing is per se the cause of its pastness or futurity. Therefore, etc. Similarly, every instance of the word creation, properly used, describes the production of a thing, from pure intelligible being to actual existence. Therefore, in the same way, every application of the

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word annihilation describes the corruption of a thing from the state of actual existence to that of pure intelligible being. And the consequence is apparent because motions and their opposites correspond in the same way as their terms correspond, as is true of generation and corruption. Otherwise, it could be that whenever anything were corrupted, so it would be that no quantitative part of it would remain, and then it would be annihilated. But then, some people, who use words equivocally, say [that this is not so].26 To annul the said equivocation, therefore, I assume that the meaning given is the nominal definition of the term.27 And then it is proved that God cannot annihilate anything, because when something has been annihilated, there remains its pastness, together with its intelligible being. There also remains its active or passive potential in its secondary causes. Therefore, it is not corrupted in respect of its pure intelligible being. And if it is objected that it follows on this interpretation that God creates nothing that a secondary cause can occasion in its original causes, then should he not rather be said to create matter through form than through a secondary cause, unless he should do so by means of a prior agent in nature, by which he would produce an original, material or universal material cause? God cannot communicate such agency to a creature; therefore, he cannot communicate the capacity to create, either, as has been said. God’s divisible action, therefore, first makes him create a creature whose production he communicates to another creature: material forms are of such a kind. Indeed, God creates intelligence, soul and matter in his own image, but there are still degrees in these. And although God alone can do any of these things, nevertheless divisible material requires the communication of its parts, and the soul of a man predetermines the disposition of his offspring. And for this reason these things are not so properly created as atoms of matter or an angel. Now, just as it would constitute a contradiction for God to cause anything not to have been when it actually was, since he cannot make such a negation, so it constitutes a formal contradiction for God to annihilate anything, because then, after its existence, he would relinquish the pure intelligible being of the thing that had been annihilated. Moreover, if God could annihilate the world, then he could also annihilate any of its accidental properties, since, with a cause destroyed per 26 Dziewicki assumes that there is a lacuna here (which makes obvious sense), though the text of the manuscript is continuous, suggesting that the scribe had skipped from one part of the text to another. I have supplied a very broad conjectural link to indicate the likely direction of the missing text. 27 The quid nominis of the term.

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se, in whatever way, its effect is also destroyed. But God cannot annihilate any accident of the world; therefore he cannot annihilate the world, either. The minor premise is apparent from motion, time and similar things, which God, by his absolute power, cannot destroy before they are naturally broken down, since time can neither be accelerated nor retarded. And this is clear from my treatise On Time. And there is no doubt that if one such thing were annihilated, no such thing could be broken down other than by annihilation. For since it is always broken down uniformly, so it cannot be broken down otherwise. Indeed, from the example of eternal time it is clear that it cannot cease to be in accordance with God’s absolute power; therefore, by a much greater degree it cannot be annihilated. And this assumption can be illustrated in the following way. If it were to cease to be, then it would have an end at either extreme, and then would not be the same time that in the beginning was eternal time, or its part. Since therefore a part cannot be identified with its whole, it appears that that time, which cannot be eternal being, cannot be destroyed, but only its part naturally broken down. Since therefore time is a creature of God, as is shown in my treatise On Time, and cannot itself be annihilated, by how much more cannot its subject be to a more permanent degree. I believe that there are many assumptions in these arguments that the greater part of the academy would deny today. But because they are declared and admitted above, a man should not always return to his principles in order to reinforce them. Therefore, proceeding in this way, he is obliged to accept their consequences. For he who says one thing implicitly accepts all of its implications. Therefore, etc.

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II: SCRIPTURE AND TRUTH

Wyclif devoted many years of his life to the intensive study of Scripture, beginning formally with exegetical lectures that survive as a sequence of postils (probably written between 1371 and 1376), now collectively known as Postils on the Whole of the Bible, a unique and extensive commentary that won Wyclif considerable respect as an exegete.1 In these, we witness his meticulous defence of the authority of scripture, and of the literal veracity of all of its parts. This is developed further in On the Truth of Holy Scripture (1377–78), Wyclif ’s definitive guide to the interpretation of the Bible. It is in the first book of this latter treatise that he argues that scripture is metaphysically the Book of Life of which we read in St John’s Apocalypse. This book and the truths inscribed within it, he suggests here, are scripture in the truest sense (7i), unlike the material codices that are so often taken to be the scriptural text by contemporary scholars. This conception of the scripture served Wyclif well in his famous claim that no part of scripture could literally be false (10). It enabled him to challenge the linguistic sophistry which he felt inevitably arose when the nature of the scriptural text was narrowly equated with inscriptions on ­manuscript pages. ­ nderstood, Since the divine author could not lie, his words, properly u could contain neither falsehoods nor infelicities. Yet interpreting the sacred text required recognition from the exegete that the traditional disciplines of grammar and logic were not in themselves sufficient to furnish him with an adequate reading of the text. Indeed, scripture operated according to its own grammar and logic, which it behoved him to learn (8, 9i). To bring the grammatical insights of the schoolboy to the interpretation of scripture would inevitably lead to error. Indeed, such a naive approach inevitably obstructed the exegete, preventing him from ascending from the pages of his manuscript codex to the truths of the Book of Life. To such a reader, the truths intended by the divine author would be forever inaccessible.   1 The title of his postils is not Wyclif ’s own, but is taken from the so-called ‘Vienna Catalogues’, which list his own Latin writings and others of a comparable nature. They survive in manuscript from the early fifteenth century.

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In order to demonstrate that the Book of Life was true in each of its parts, Wyclif had necessarily to engage with the four distinct senses of scripture that had been recognised by the fathers.2 In On the Truth of Holy Scripture, he is careful to argue that each of the four traditional exegetical senses (the historical, the allegorical, the tropological and the anagogic) could itself be identical with the literal sense intended by the divine author (7ii). Yet he is keen to maintain the traditional distinction between the literal (historical) sense and the three spiritual senses (9iii), in which the former works as the foundation of the latter. In spite of this, however, he argues that spiritual senses represent the most literal meanings (9i). Contradictory as this may appear, it is clear that Wyclif is seeking to preserve something of the authority of the spiritual senses that the fathers had bestowed upon them. Though a human author could be responsible for the sense of an historical passage, only the divine author, by virtue of his unique status as author of things as well as words, could give meaning to the spiritual senses. As Wyclif knew from experience, perceived ambiguities in the text of scripture could be a source of debate among scholars, but he felt they should not be obstacle to the exegete. The reader had to know why the Palestinians were described as salt in Ezechiel (9ii), yet this inevitably entailed examining the literal signification of the words themselves, and then considering the significant qualities of salt that were being transferred to the Palestianians. The same was true of the superficially puzzling text of Proverbs 18:21: ‘Death and life are in the hands of the tongue’. In attempting to interpret this passage, he argues, we should follow the example of Augustine: we see the hands of the tongue when our tongues produce speech; the hands of the tongue are the powers of the tongue (9iii). He offers many examples of this kind in order to show that equivocal meanings in scripture are neither false nor contradictory. Another important area in which the truth of scripture could be misconstrued for Wyclif was in relation to the signification of time. For him, time had to be understood as the divine author perceived it, rather than as it was experienced in the world. All instants of time had therefore to be conceptualised as though they were simultaneously present. It is only in this way, he argues, that we can apprehend successive instants, since none of them is in existence for more than a moment (11i). If we do not understand time in this extended sense, he goes on to argue, we can make no sense of the biblical description   2 For a discussion of these, consult the relevant section of the Introduction.

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of Christ as son of David, or of comparable genealogies. Wyclif offers more detailed examples in his postils. When Amos said to Amazias that he was not a prophet but a herdsman, he had to have been ampliating time beyond the present instant, since he was not a herdsman at that time, and he had spoken prophetically at an earlier time (as he would do again subsequently).

7 The nature of the scriptural text and its four senses On the Truth of Holy Scripture, vol. 1, ch. 6 (extract). i) Latin text: De Veritate Sacrae Scripturae, vol. i (London: WS, 1905), pp. 107–9; cf. On the Truth of Holy Scripture, trans. Ian Levy (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2001), pp. 97–8. Here, Wyclif considers the five different ways in which he felt that scripture should be apprehended, from its supreme reality as the Book of Life to its material status as a codex. These correspond closely to his description of the five kinds of universals in the second chapter of On Universals (2). As elsewhere in his work, Wyclif is careful to privilege the eternal, incorruptible truths that are inscribed within the Book of Life above the material signs of the multiple manuscript copies of the text. The latter, he felt, could be regarded as scripture only in a derivative way, and could easily lead the unwary exegete astray. If Wyclif is to be believed, the majority of his contemporaries in Oxford were caught up in a kind of early linguistic turn, devoting undue attention to the properties of terms, generally at the expense of any engagement with the truths underpinning them.

Some people maintain that there is nothing anomalous about holy scripture being false. Indeed, if scripture is nothing more than the codices of human scribes, and those scribes happened to have been more untruthful than usual [when they were writing], then it is no wonder that their work should have been rendered correspondingly false. In discussing of the law of God elsewhere, I have shown that there is a truth that is inscribed beyond the physical books or signs that are visible to the senses, and this, rather than those books, is holy scripture. I therefore habitually describe holy scripture as the sacred truth that is recorded in this way, which either reveals other truths or is itself a revealed truth. I have therefore generally assumed that there are five levels of holy scripture. The first is the Book of Life, about which we read in Apocalypse 20[:12] and 21[:27]. The second consists in the truths inscribed into the Book of Life according to their intelligible

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being, and either of those scriptures is completely necessary, not differing in essential terms but only in respect of the workings of reason, as is said in my tract On Ideas.3 Third, scripture is taken to be the truths that must be believed according to their genus, which are inscribed into the Book of Life according to their existence and effect. Fourth, it is held to be the truth to be believed that is inscribed in the book of natural man as his soul, and certain people call this scripture the aggregate of acts and truths articulated in the third way, which is an intellective disposition, and others say that it is an intention or species. But in the fifth way, holy scripture is taken to be the codices, words and other artificial devices that are signs used for the recollection of that prior truth, just as Augustine suggests in his thirty-ninth epistle to Paulina, On Seeing God.4 ii) On the Truth of Holy Scripture, vol. 1, ch. 6 (extract). Latin text: De Veritate Sacrae Scripturae, vol. i (London: WS, 1905), pp. 119–20; cf. On the Truth of Holy Scripture, trans. Ian Levy (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2001), pp. 104–5. Wyclif here explains the fourfold mnemonic that had been passed down to medieval exegetes from antiquity. Like others before him, he interpreted it in a personal way, rendering it compatible with his own brand of Thomistic literalism. It is therefore here interpreted as the sense intended by the Holy Spirit, and might therefore be identified with any of the traditional senses expounded succinctly in each of the four lines. Such senses, Wyclif is careful to observe, are not contradictory or oppositional, but complementary, and each is confirmed by the supreme authority of the divine author.

Holy scripture has a fourfold sense in its different parts; that is to say, it has literal, allegorical, tropological and anagogic meanings, as in this verse: The letter teaches history What to believe is allegory The moral teaches what to do The anagogic, our end to pursue.   3 This is one of the constituent texts of the second book of Wyclif ’s Summa de Ente, in which he discusses the ultimate reality of universals as ideas in the mind of God.   4 Letter 147. CSEL 44, pp. 274–331; Works of Saint Augustine: Letters 100–155, trans. John E. Rotelle (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2001), pp. 317–49. Augustine’s friendship with Armentarius and his wife Paulina is well documented. This lengthy letter to Paulina, written in 413 or 414, was a detailed response to her regular questions about how to perceive the divine. Augustine later renamed his letter On Seeing God, and it was influential throughout the medieval period.

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Although any sense that the letter [litera] has can suitably be called ‘literal’ according to the proper signification of that word, it is nevertheless true that scholars generally identify the literal sense as the sense of scripture that the Holy Spirit principally imparted, enabling the faithful soul to ascend into God. And it is now historical, as is clear from the deeds of Christ and the fathers in each of the testaments; but now it is moral or tropological, as is known from the sapiential parts of scripture, such as the passage in Deuteronomy 6[:5] and Matthew 22[:37]: ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart’.5 But now it is allegorical, as is evident from the words of the apostle in 1 Corinthians 10[:2]: ‘And all in Moses were baptized’. Now, though, it is truly anagogic, as is seen our Saviour’s pronouncement in Matthew 22[:30] and Luke 20[:35]: ‘in the heavens neither shall they marry nor be married’.6 Although those four senses are distinguished according to their genera, therefore, they are nevertheless not distinguished as opposites, like a man and an ass. This is because those genera are not equally identical, but have different definitions and identify different things. Now, our reason distinguishes the literal sense from the others because the letter [litera] teaches the truth first. It is distinguished from the allegorical sense because in the latter, scripture goes beyond the history that it elsewhere canonises literally. It consequently teaches what is to be believed by the church militant, as in this passage from Galatians 4[:22/24]: ‘it is written that Abraham had two sons: … these are the two testaments’. See how Abraham, who is interpreted as the father of many peoples, signifies God the Father, and how his two sons, with their respective attributes, signify the two testaments, Ishmael the Old and Isaac, the New. The correspondences in each case are notable. He who reads scripture in the first sense whilst avoiding the second has only the historical meaning. He who adds the second sense to the first, however, has the allegorical sense from that same letter.

  5 This passage also occurs in Mark 12:30; cf. also Luke 10:27, in which Christ’s words are reported in a slightly different way.   6 The passage in Matthew reads: ‘[I]n the resurrection they shall neither marry nor be married, but shall be as the angels of God in heaven’. In Luke, the text reads as follows: ‘[O]f the resurrection from the dead, [they] shall neither be married, nor take wives’.

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8 Scripture has its own grammar and logic On the Truth of Holy Scripture, vol. 1, ch. 3 (extract). Latin text: De Veritate Sacrae Scripturae, vol. i, pp. 42–4; cf. On the Truth of Holy Scripture, trans. Ian Levy (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2001), pp. 65–6, which includes a translation of only part of the text translated here. Just as Wyclif believed that the true substance of scripture was something different from the impressions of ink on parchment, so he also held that the faithful reader of its text needed to look beyond books of Latin grammar and embrace a new grammar of scripture in order to apprehend its meaning. He says virtually nothing about the nature of this new grammar, but it is clear that his conception of such a grammar, some kind of über-grammar existing on a higher metaphysical level, must have been consistent with his central belief that only a reader in receipt of God’s grace could perceive its true meaning.

It behoves us to learn a new grammar or logic when we interpret or explicate scripture, as St Gregory and other saints suggest when they set forth new meanings for scriptural terms using the authority of scripture itself, and these nowhere derive from books of grammar. Where else, I ask, except in scriptural doctrine, do we discover that the earth is infernal, a young woman, God, and then an element, the heavenly life, flesh, a primordial entity, an engine of the world, and other singular figures that signify ambiguously, now in the literal and now in the mystical sense? When interpreting holy scripture, we should therefore abandon our childish understanding and accept the sense that God teaches, according to the passage in 1 Corinthians 13[:11]: ‘When I was a child, I understood as a child, I spoke as a child, and I thought as a child. But when I became a man, I put away all of my child’s things.’ St Dionysius therefore speaks perceptively in Chapter 4 of On the Divine Names: ‘It is irrational and foolish, in my estimation, not to attend to the force of intention, but rather to the words themselves, which is not to understand the divine things that belong to their proper meanings, but the bare sounds of the words that carry them.’7 Commenting on the twelfth part [of that same chapter] of On the Divine Names, Lincolniensis gives the following example:  7 See PG 3, col. 355, for the relevant part of the Greek text. For an English translation of this section of On the Divine Names, see Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (London: Paulist Press, 1987), p. 80. Wyclif himself would have consulted a Latin translation of On the Divine Names here, such as the ones

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[I]n eloquent language, the noun love and the verb [to be affectionate] are found, and are used to designate divine and chaste love, which is fitting in the context of such love, just as it would be inappropriate in the context of a base kind of love. Hence, people hearing the noun love used in eloquent discourse, and understanding by it the vehemence of dishonourable love, are attending only to the sense that is generally taken from that word, which is foolish and unreasonable. For it is customary in common speech not look to a word’s force of intention, as it is used in eloquent holy language.8

The ancient theologians strove to understand the meaning of scripture, and to cast aside childish senses or the interpretations of infidels. Now, consider how a child first learns the alphabet, then how to spell, third how to read and fourth how to understand, and at each of those stages they acquire their own meaning, which they compare to what they learned first; later, to avoid confusion, they discard that initial sense. In a comparable way the theologian, after learning the principles of grammar, learns second the grammar of Scripture, which is applied to the sense after that earlier grammar has been discarded. After the sensible signs [on the page] have been cast aside, he attends to the meaning of the author at the third stage, until fourth, he will see the Book of Life unveiled.

9 Figurative and equivocal language in Holy Scripture i) From Postils on the Whole of Scripture (Matthew 5:13). Latin text: Wyclifs Bibelkommentar, pp. 352–4. Here, Wyclif offers a practical interpretation of Christ’s words from the Sermon on the Mount, in which he tells the blessed, ‘you are the salt of the earth’. The exercise serves to illustrate how the exegete should proceed when he encounters a word that is used figuratively in scripture. It begins with an examination of the nature of salt, before the symbolic properties of the mineral are considered. Wyclif then considers the consequences of any departure from produced by John Scotus Eriugena or Robert Grosseteste. This explains why he does not follow the text of On the Divine Names to the letter here. See PL 122, col. 1134D, for this section of John Scotus Eriugena’s text.   8 This is a reference to Grossteste’s Commentary on the Divine Names. What is offered in that commentary is really a paraphrase of what Pseudo-Dionysius says in the twelfth part of his chapter, in which he considers the meaning of the Greek nouns eros (love) and agape (being affectionate), the second of which derives from the corresponding verb. See Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, p. 81. As yet, Grosseteste’s commentary, which is preserved in ten manuscripts, has not been edited. See S. Harrison Thomson, The Writings of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), p. 57.

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the state of blessedness that the salt signifies, and which Christ identified earlier in the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3–11). Predictably, such departures are associated with senior members of the contemporary church, whose sinful conduct is said to allow the devil’s reign to continue. Towards the end of his exposition, Wyclif examines the medicinal properties of salt.

You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt lose its savour, wherewith [shall it be salted? It is good for nothing any more but to be cast out, and to be trodden on by men] (Matthew 5[:13]). The Palestinians are signified by these figurative expressions, because immediately after the persecution of the prophets is mentioned, they are compared to salt, a light, a city and a lamp.9 As it is used in Ezechiel 47[:11], the word salt signifies many things, the most obvious of which I can explain by considering the nature of salt and its properties. In his commentary on this passage from Matthew 5[:13], Bede says that salt is composed out of sand and water combined with the heat of the sun or of fire, and with the breath of the wind.10 Consequently, it is dissolved by cold and wet matter, in accordance with the rule presented in the fourth book of Aristotle’s Meteorology.11 It therefore signifies symbolically the good prelates who were once unstable sand, as described in the parable of the house built on sand in Matthew 7[:26–7]. These prelates were nourished by the water of baptism, the warmth of holy fire and the breath of the Holy Spirit, and were washed clean of the stain of sin in the snow. The aqueous nature that was incorporated within them signifies the uncreated wisdom that Bede says is signified mystically in 4 Kings 2.12 Hence, ‘the waters were healed’ through the pouring of water into a vessel at the waters’ outlet (4 Kings 2[:22]). The salt is Christ’s divinity, the vessel his humanity, and the introduction of the salt the incarnation of Christ. This final pouring of the water is the end of tribulation, and the cleansing power of the water the sanctification of the people. Because the water of devotion is required for washing, together with the warmth of charity, it is therefore taught in Leviticus 2[:13] that salt should be offered with every sacrifice.13 And   9 A reference to Matthew 5:12: ‘Be glad and rejoice, for your reward is very great in heaven. For so they persecuted the prophets that were before you’. 10 PL 92, cols 25D–26A. Wyclif ’s summary of Bede’s gloss is not very accurate. 11 382b28–383b17. 12 Possibly a reference to Bede’s lost commentary on 1–4 Kings. 13 Leviticus 2:13: ‘Whatsoever sacrifice thou offerest, thou shalt season it with salt, neither shalt thou take away the salt of the covenant of thy God from thy sacrifice’.

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because all human knowledge should be governed by wisdom, so the apostle teaches that ‘our speech is seasoned with salt’.14 Salt has many properties. If it is mixed with earth it makes the earth sterile, it seasons foodstuffs, and it frees meats of putrefaction and odour and preserves them from worms. When salt is mixed with earth they are thus tightly bound together, so that the earth, which signifies the covetous people of the earth, make the earth grow sterile because of their secular desires. According to the text of Titus 2[:11], these desires are eaten away at their root by the salt of heavenly desires: ‘mercy appeared’.15 This also eradicates the useless weeds of Jeremiah [1:10]: ‘Lo, I have set thee this day over the nations, [and over the kingdoms, to root up, and pull down, and to waste, and to destroy, and to build, and to plant].’ Through hope of the prince of heaven it restores every wise doctrine in which there is spiritual food, as we learn from Psalm 18[:9]: ‘The justices of the Lord are right, rejoicing hearts’. According to Matthew 19[:12], it holds the flesh back from the lubricity of luxury: ‘there are eunuchs, who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom [of heaven]’. It thus preserves those subjects in whom the light of wisdom shines out from the putrefaction of sin, from the stench of defamation and from the gnawing worm, and such wisdom does not perish, but serves them in due measure. ‘But if the salt lose its flavour’ by softening in the cold earth of cupidity, then accordingly ‘the charity of many shall grow cold’ in the moisture of carnal lubricity (Matthew 24[:12]), which obstructs the vision of wisdom described in Hebrews 12:[14]: ‘Follow peace with all men, and holiness: without which no man shall see [God]’. The salt will then lose its nature and become useless for its purpose. Likewise, according to Jerome, the prelate will flow like water through cupidity, and will be brought down by fear of losing his worldly goods. Because of this error, by the grace of God’s law, he will cast the salt out. If this happens, wherewith will become redundant when combined with the impersonal expression shall it be salted, since the sins of the bad subject accumulate within the salt, and neither the prelates themselves nor their subjects can withstand the reproof of Ecclesiasticus 13: ‘Who will pity an enchanter struck by the serpent?’ The root cause of the devil’s reign, therefore, is the sin of the higher 14 Colossians 4:6: ‘Let your speech be always in grace seasoned with salt: that you may know how you ought to answer every man’. 15 The exact words of the Epistle to Titus are ‘the grace of God our Saviour hath appeared to all men’.

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members of the church, because the mediator between God and the people, the informer of the ignorant, and the one who sanctifies in proportion to the sin of the people, is failing, since typically, no layperson will be more caught up in worldly things than his priest. I maintain here that salt that is deprived of its flavour because of a backward glance towards worldly things is made into a statue of salt, which is not truly salt of the earth or of stone, but rather a trivial imitation, as is clear from the story of Genesis 19.16 And the truth recalls this, saying, ‘Remember Lot’s wife’ (Luke 17[:32]). Now, other people are moved towards the bitter abyss of carnal sinners because ecclesiastics, who were once a wooded valley on account of the fructification and verdure of their virtuous work, are now salt of the sea, according to Genesis 14[:3]: ‘All these came together into the woodland vale, which now is the salt sea’. Because of the sin of the flesh and the world, therefore, salt softens, losing its flavour and becoming useless in respect of its primary purpose. But since simply being deceitful in nature is not being another thing entirely, it seems that salt that has lost its flavour in this way is good for something in another way, since God does not allow sin to exist unless by gracious ordination he gives it a beneficial purpose. Likewise, but to a far greater extent, his subjects have a purpose through their own sin. When deprived of its flavour, therefore, salt is notoriously good for two things: ‘to be cast out, and to be trodden on by men’ (Matthew 5[:13]). Indeed, the meritorious should drive our prelates away from the privilege of worldly things so that, having been made spiritual, they may respect the law of God. It is therefore said in Hosea 4[:6]: ‘because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will reject thee, that thou shalt not do the office of priesthood to me’. And in the last book of Apocalypse: ‘Without are dogs, sorcerers’, etc. (Apocalypse 22[:15]). For in Hosea 4[:1], ‘there is no knowledge, and there is no truth, and there is no mercy of God in the land’, which is to say that wisdom is blinded by the worldly mind. 17 It is good therefore for those who follow the divine justice of either the pope or the king to throw salt that has thus lost its flavour outside. And this has value as a reproof to him, as a caution to his followers, and as a correction to those subjects by whom he has been wronged. The second benefit is that the salt should be trampled underfoot by men. But it is trampled in 16 Lot’s wife is turned into a pillar of salt when she looks back to Sodom and Gomorrah, cities known for their debauchery, as he and his family flee from them (Genesis 19:26). They had been instructed by angels earlier not to look back towards these cities (19:17). 17 The order of these virtues in the biblical text is truth, mercy and knowledge.

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a twofold manner, both physically and spiritually. It is trampled physically when sin is charitably tortured by detestable injuries. For there will come a time, if God should wish it, when the passage in Isaiah 10[:6] will be made true: ‘I will send him to a deceitful nation, and I will give him a charge against the people of my wrath, to take away the spoils, and lay hold of [the prey], etc.’ But the spiritual trampling is done here in this life when confederates of ecclesiastics, who seem to be liked by them, speak of them by association with worldly things, in accordance with the text of Isaiah 10[:6]: ‘to tread them down like the mire in the street’. And ‘[I will give him a charge] to tread them down like the mire of the streets’, because, undoubtedly, however much someone has prospered, he is very troubled if he experiences punishment in the world, and that is nothing less than a guarantee of his being trampled in judgement and tortured by demons in hell. And this all contributes to the glory of God, and to the pleasure and usefulness of the just. All such people are the most wronged in the church, since according to Isidore in book 16, chapter 2 [of the Etymologies], salt is most necessary as a condiment for food, to the extent that it prompts birds and animals together to eat food, and consequently, to become fat, and hence pigeons aspire to get salt stone in their dovecote, since warmth and dryness is pleasing to the stomach and facilitates digestion.18 It is of a warm and dry nature and according to Avicenna it is therefore able to dissolve, to cleanse and to consume, and it is hence effective against wind, against extraneous humours in its softening of the stomach, and hence against poisonous humours, and it thus makes wounds and ulcers healthy. [When mixed] with honey or with rosaceous water and camphor it removes blemishes from the face. And it should do the same, proportionally, for the prelates of the community. Why, therefore, since there is a wilful neglect of these goods that thus does an injury to God himself and to people in general, should not the world, together with God, fight to avenge these evils? We pour forth like water, through the inconstancy by which we retreat from God, sustained by a different purpose whilst devoting ourselves to the flesh. We therefore live at times against the commandment of God, on account of our own sins and those of our people.

18 Isidori Hispaliensis Episcopi Etymologiarum sive Originum Libri XX, ed. W.M. Lindsay (Oxford: Clarendon, 1911), pp. 185–6; The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans. Stephen A. Barney, W.J. Lewis, J.A. Beach and Oliver Berghof (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 318.

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ii) From the Postils on the Whole of Scripture (Galatians 4:24). Latin text: Wyclifs Bibelkommentar, pp. 371–3. For most medieval readers, the allegorical sense was interpreted according to the methods of the Alexandrian scholars Origen and Philo. They themselves had used it exegetically to reconcile the narratives of the two testaments, to bring the Old Law into harmony with the New. Literally, therefore, as Wyclif suggests here, Jerusalem is a city in Judea, but allegorically it signifies the church militant. Medieval exegetes hence regarded allegory as more than simply a narrative that signified more than it said, as the influential definition of the Roman grammarian Aelius Donatus (fl. fourth century ce) had indicated.19 It certainly was this, but it was also something that worked in a very specific way in relation to the narratives of the two testaments. Wyclif here defines it in both ways, proceeding from the general definition found in grammatical textbooks to the more nuanced sense of the term that was shared by patristic and medieval scriptural commentators.

Which things are said by an allegory. For these are the two testaments (Galatians 4[:24]). Allegory is a figurative sense that occurs when something further is signified by what is represented literally. Note that scripture has a literal sense, which is what the author intends principally and primarily in his spoken words or his writing, and a mystical sense, which takes its name from the Greek mystos, meaning ‘hidden’. The mystical sense is threefold, namely, moral, when guidance relating to what should be done is given; allegorical, when what should be believed is designated, and anagogic, when what is to be hoped for in heaven is signified. For example, Jerusalem signifies [literally] the mother city of Judea, which morally signifies the faithful soul, allegorically the church militant, and anagogically the church triumphant. Hence, we have the following rhyme: The letter teaches history What to believe is allegory The moral teaches what to do The anagogic, our end to pursue.

Now, since the literal sense is the foundation of the house of God, and the three other senses together are the walls and the roof, it is clear how necessary it is to make the foundation stable, for when the upper 19 Ars Grammatica 3:6, 26 in GL 4, p. 401; Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory, ad 300–475, ed. Rita Copeland and Ineke Sluiter (Oxford: Oxford University, 2009), p. 98.

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parts of a house come away from the foundation it is destined for ruin. And according to Augustine in a letter to Vincent the Donatist, only the literal sense of scripture is effective in proving the truth.20 And hence, it must be the case that this same scripture has a manifold literal sense, as in the case of the words ‘I will be a father to him’ in 2 Kings 7[:14] and 1 Paralipomenon 22[:10].21 This was said literally of Christ and Solomon, with Solomon signifying Christ figuratively. Otherwise, the apostle would lack the authority to prove that Christ is more excellent than the angels in the first chapter of his Epistle to the Hebrews.22 And what is understood of Solomon is shown in 3 Kings 5, where Solomon explains it of himself. Any authorial sense that the letter engenders can therefore be called literal.23 Hence, if an author were as authoritative as the author of scripture, he would know any meaning that its principal author intended, and any mystical sense would be as authoritative as the literal sense. But because we disregard these latter senses on the whole, and because those who rely upon guesswork do not elicit the mystical senses in an authoritative way, those senses are therefore no more authoritative to us than bare words, and that is what Augustine means after proving this conclusion through reason. Extracting the mystical sense from scripture is a most excellent thing, but when the apostle or another author elicits a sense of this kind from Scripture, then that sense is as authoritative as any literal sense, since scriptural meaning does not have different degrees of authority. The apostle, therefore, knowing the full meaning of the Old Testament as authoritatively as Moses, Solomon or any author short of God himself, is as authoritative in any interpretation that he has offered as any other authoritative figure would be when interpreting the literal sense. From this it seems that reason surpasses authority, because it is closer to a first principle. It cannot be proved, after all, that this was the authority of Christ, of the apostle, or of another celebrated person, 20 Letter 93; CSEL 34, p. 468; Works of Saint Augustine: Letters 1–99, trans. Ronald Teske (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2001), p. 391. 21 The principle of the manifold literal sense (multiplex sensus literalis) was of central importance in Wyclif ’s exegesis. It rendered conveniently explicit his conviction that all scriptural senses, as equivalent products of divine intention, were necessarily endowed with equal authority. 22 Having described Christ as being better than the angels, St Paul says, ‘For to which of the angels hath he said at any time, “Thou art my Son, today have I begotten thee?” And again, “I will be to him a Father, and he shall be to me a Son?” ’ (1:5). 23 This understanding of the literal sense as the sense intended by the author has its origins in Thomas Aquinas, who suggests in the Summa Theologiae that, since God is the author of things as well as words, the spiritual senses, in which things signify, must therefore be subsumed within the literal. See Summa Theologiae, Ia q. 1, a. 10.

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except by appealing to faith alone. Nor can we know that Christ was incarnated hypostatically in the womb, or that the apostle or anyone else was inspired. It is therefore clear that, unless we apply faith to these narratives, we should not rely upon reason. Yet in some instances, reason is clearly superior to authority, as is clear from Matthew 26. It seems to me that the [scriptural] senses are not strictly divided as opposites, since every sense that the letter originally gives rise to can properly be called a literal sense. Hence, in relation to that same scripture, four men might happen to arrive at four distinct senses, one of which is literal, the second twofold, the third threefold and the fourth fourfold, and it is given that the first understands grammatically the grammatical sense, the second adds the allegorical sense, and so on.24 And hence it follows that not every literal sense is a historical sense. The term history is derived from the Greek histrion, which means sequence, or from histeron, which is the act of gesturing, or from historin, which is to see or to know, because once, only those who saw in such a way were called historians.25 And allegory takes its name from alleos, which is ‘other’, and goge, which is ‘leading’, so that the sense is that of leading to another meaning from the original literal sense.26 And there are six ways in which allegory works: the first is through a person, as through David we are led to Christ; the second, through a beast and not a person, as in Genesis 22, where the flesh of Christ is signified by the ram; the third, through a time or season, as the present age is signified by the winter in Canticles 2; fourth, through an [inanimate thing], as the church is signified by a mountain in Isaiah 2; fifth, through a deed, as the victory of David over Goliath signifies the conquering of the devil by Christ. And it seems to me that any number of other kinds of things can lead us towards knowledge of what we should believe.27 The moral sense derives its name from the Latin mores, morals, and this sense is also called tropological, from the Greek tropos, which is conversion, and logos, which is speech, because it converts 24 In each case, Wyclif seems to be suggesting here, it is the sense that is added to the preceding sense that causes it to become ‘twofold’, ‘threefold’ and ‘fourfold’. By the grammatical sense, Wyclif means the literal sense, the sense that is yielded by applying the principles of grammar to the text. 25 History in fact derives from historía, which in Greek is literally ‘discovery through enquiry’ and, by extension, an account of the findings of such enquiries. 26 Wyclif is closer to the truth here. The Greek etymology is ’állos (other) combined with ’agoreúein (to speak). 27 Wyclif fails to identify a sixth way in which allegory works, and this concluding remark hardly qualifies as a plausible candidate.

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sinners.28 And anagogy takes its name from ana, which is upwards, and goge, which is leading, because it leads to a higher meaning.29 And for this reason, this sense is also called supracelestial. According to the grammarians, allegory can be pronounced simply, with the first syllable short, or doubly, with the first syllable long. It must therefore be sufficient to say that these senses are not synonymous, since it is certain that they are distinguished as opposites, but not in any absolute sense. According to the Master, who distinguishes these terms as opposites using descriptive labels, it is evident that the first sense is clearer, the second sharper, the third sweeter, and the fourth higher.30 Just as a fruit, lying hidden in its rind, is more valuable than its appearance suggests, so the mystical sense surpasses the literal. For the literal sense corresponds to the wisdom that every theologian should have, even before faith; allegory corresponds to faith, tropology to charity and the anagogic sense to hope. When they have been acquired, the spiritual house of the soul is constructed from these necessary virtues.31 iii) On the Truth of Holy Scripture, vol. 1, ch. 1. Latin text: De Veritate Sacrae Scripturae, vol. i, pp. 1–16. Cf. John Wyclif: On the Truth of Holy Scripture (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2001), pp. 41–51. Here Wyclif challenges the claims of those who seek to discover literal falsehood in the figurative language of Scripture, arguing that the exegete must look beyond traditional grammar of the kind that would be learned by a novice in deciphering the complexities of the Latin language, and acquire the grammar of Scripture in order to interpret its text adequately. Here, he or she must learn that the figurative senses of Scripture are subsumed within the literal as part of the divine author’s infallibly true intention. This grammar of Scripture, he insists, must be learned carefully if the exegete is to avoid the many linguistic pitfalls that can lead him or her astray.

It remains for us to discuss briefly those errors and agreed opinions surrounding the meaning of scripture that have proliferated more than usual recently. And this is not just because the salvation of the faithful depends on it, but also because scripture is the foundation of orthodox belief, as well as the model and mirror by which any error or heretical 28 Trópos is strictly ‘direction’, ‘route’ or ‘manner’, but Wyclif offers a creative interpretation of the word here. 29 This is almost right: the second part of anagogy derives from the verb ágein, ‘to lead’. 30 This is a reference to Peter Lombard. 31 Faith, hope and charity are known as the ‘theological’ virtues.

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failure should be extinguished. Just a small error in respect of this could lead to the death of the church. First, some challenge the truthfulness of scripture and the implications of what it says in multiple ways. In response to these, I have often said that scripture is literally true in each of its parts, and that students of holy scripture should follow its way of speaking, its rhetoric and its logic, above any foreign text of heathens. The first argument against this position is taken from book 4, chapter 8 of St Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine, where he seems to say that we should not imitate the authors of holy scripture in the form of our speech.32 In respect of this, I take it for granted that a passage from the writings of Augustine on logic, metaphysics or any truth that needs verifying is more valid than a passage from the work of Aristotle or any other heathen to whom the light of our faith was unknown. I say then that Augustine intimated in that chapter that the authors of holy scripture had two ways of speaking, namely, obscurely and plainly. Now, in respect of those two ways of speaking he presents two conclusions: first, that the interpreters of holy scripture, whether explaining Scripture itself or expressing a meaning of their own from outside the text of Scripture, should not imitate the said authors by speaking thus obscurely. And Augustine identifies six causes of obscurity in its language that would be foreign to our way of speaking.33 This is what he says: We should never assume that there are passages we should imitate among those that the authors of scripture have articulated with a useful and healthy obscurity. These exercise and elevate the minds of eager readers and put an end to boredom, or they make the appetite stronger among those wishing to learn, but their sense is concealed either so that the minds of the impious are converted to piety, or so that they are kept from their mysteries.34 32 Book 4, 8.22; CCSL 32, pp. 131–2; Translating Christianity (De Doctrina Christiana), trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1996), pp. 219–20. 33 This is probably a reference to the forms of obscurity listed in the Book of Rules, a guide to scriptural interpretation produced by the African Donatist theologian Tyconius in the fourth century. Augustine discusses Tyconius’s rules in detail in De Doctrina Christiana, book 3, 30–7. Though there were seven of them in total, he points out in book 3, 37.56 that all but one of them (the one discussed in 33.46) pertain to figurative language. Each of the six relevant rules explains a ‘cause’ of scriptural obscurity, as Wyclif is suggesting here. For a critical edition of the Latin text of the Rules, see The Book of Rules of Tyconius, ed. F.C. Burkitt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1894). This has recently been reproduced with an English translation of the text by W.S. Babcock (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 1989). 34 De Doctrina Christiana, book 4, 8.22. Wyclif cites Augustine with varying degrees of fidelity in the next three passages. See CCSL 32, p. 135; Translating Christianity, pp. 219–20.

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See how we lack the authority to speak with obscurity for the very six reasons these authors themselves spoke with obscurity! In explaining them we should therefore speak more clearly than they do, because other­wise we would not be expositors but simply reciters. In Augustine’s text: ‘They spoke in this way so that those who would later understand and explain them correctly would find another grace in the church of God, a different one from their own but one that would nevertheless be similar.’35 Augustine’s second conclusion, from On the Plain Language of the Authors of Scripture, is this: ‘Although by speaking like them we may embrace examples of logic or rhetoric from the writing of the authors of scripture, we should imitate them as their humble disciples, and not as their equals in authority.’36 The first part is suggested in chapters 7 and 8 of Luke, and the second part is expressed by Augustine in the following words: ‘Their expositors should not speak as though they themselves have similar authority in explaining passages that require exposition.’37 We note from these things, third of all, that although we should not seek to be equal to the authors of scripture by using obscure language when we explain theirs, nor seek to equal them in authority as we explain their plain speech, this does not mean that we should not imitate them in logic or eloquence. Augustine, after all, says that we should do this. Indeed, we have grace not only preveniently but also subsequently, like disciples.38 The church and the holy doctors agree, therefore, in expounding the meaning of scripture, that Christ is most truly and literally a sheep, a lamb, a calf, a ram, a snake, a lion and a worm. But this is in the mystical sense, which is literal to the highest degree. Nor should Augustine’s words in the sixth chapter of the fourth book of On Christian Doctrine disturb us, where he says that ‘no other eloquence is right for them, nor theirs for others’.39 This is true to the word, since every rhetorician has his own form of eloquence, but the sense here is that this particular 35 De Doctrina Christiana, book 4, 8.22; CCSL 32, p. 131; Translating Christianity, p. 220. 36 I have been unable to find this passage in Augustine or elsewhere. 37 De Doctrina Christiana, book 4, 8.22; CCSL 32, p. 131; Translating Christianity, p. 220. 38 Prevenient grace is grace that is bestowed upon us unconditionally as a gift of God; subsequent grace is grace that is achieved through co-operation with God (it is therefore also identified as co-operative grace). Aquinas suggests that the one is attributed to the mover (God), and the other both to the mover and the thing moved (God and the human soul). See Summa Theologiae, Ia–IIæ q. 111, a. 2. 39 De Doctrina Christiana, book 4, 6.9; CCSL 32, p. 122; Translating Christianity, pp. 211–12.

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eloquence should not be used by others as if it were their own, but only imitatively, like students, as is said in 1 Peter 4[:11]: ‘If any man speak, let him speak, as the words of God’. Otherwise, the church would not say in its service, in conformity with scripture, that the Lamb of God will lend us his ear. For the most part, therefore, ecclesiastical services are extracted and learned from the text of scripture in this way, through the holy doctors. If this were not so, then the holy doctors would not follow the logic of scripture in their own writings, having abandoned other kinds of logic. And otherwise, we would not learn the Lord’s Prayer or the Creed, since the rhetoric and logic of scripture is introduced into each, and would have been placed there for nothing unless we were allowed to learn it and then to use it. Confirmation of this is provided by the holy doctors, who actually teach the contrary most effectively, and Augustine, in particular, is invoked in order to defend this contrary position. But in practice, which is more credible than words, the doctors followed scripture in the strictest way, not only in the practical philosophy by which they lived, as he teaches, but also in their philosophy of preaching, as will be shown below. Who would say, then, that they did not wish us to follow them in logic, when in fact they taught the opposite? We are not, of course, equipped to have logic or eloquence as perfect as that of scripture, but merely to have one that humbly derives from it, and this is the more perfect the more it conforms to that logic. And it is for this reason that Augustine says that we have grace consequently. It should not trouble us that lords speak in one way and their servants in another, since such diversity is better dealt with in relation to the matter that is spoken, rather than how it is spoken or in what form. Indeed, Christ says, ‘I am the first and the last’ (Apocalypse 22[:13]), but any Christian saying this of himself would be a blasphemer because of the matter of what he said. We therefore need to have the form of scriptural locution adapted to suit our own spoken matter. Hence, just as Christ identifies his own father individually, as is shown in John [10:30],40 so we should identify our fathers and mothers in the same way, as Christ teaches us in Matthew 6[:9–13] in the Lord’s Prayer. And let us not follow the pompous verbal displays of secular lords, since the Christian religion is being crippled by such fatuous language. Scripture’s form of speech, therefore, is the exemplar that must inform every other laudable way of speaking. 40 ‘I and the Father are one’.

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Second, an argument is drawn from the testimony of Augustine in his forty-seventh homily on John, in which he says: Many things are called Christ through analogies and other figures, but these would take a long time to recollect. However, if you discuss the properties of these things as you normally see them, then he is clearly not hard like a rock, since he is not without feeling; nor is he a door, because he was not made by a craftsman; nor is he a cornerstone, because he was not created by a sculptor; nor is he a shepherd, because he is not a protector of four-legged sheep; nor is he a lion, because he is not a wild animal; nor is he a lamb, because he is not a sheep. All of these things are therefore said by means of analogy.41

Now, in respect of that claim I assume that those arguing from Augustine’s testimony accept what he says without any disagreement. But I ask how I can inspire faith by quoting from Augustine if I only cite him when our views concur, but I abandon him when he holds a different opinion from mine? In this way, two people holding contradictory opinions could superfluously use him in support of their respective claims. Indeed, he says a little earlier in that same forty-seventh homily: Behold, therefore, how our Lord Christ is both a door and a shepherd. He is a door because he opens himself up, and he becomes a shepherd by entering through it, but because he is a shepherd he also gives to his flock. Now, both Peter and Paul and all of the other apostles are shepherds, as well as all of the good bishops. But nobody truly calls himself a door, for only [Christ] himself held this title properly.42

Christ therefore properly called himself a door, just as he is a foundation, as Augustine demonstrates from 1 Corinthians 1 and 3. Hence, it follows in Augustine’s text: ‘He never became the cornerstone of two flocks, but rather of two walls, and therefore he is both a door and a cornerstone.’43 See how, if anyone reasoning in this way had considered Augustine’s logic and his words, he would hold that Christ is a door and that he is not a door, and so it goes in similar cases. Hence, by the evidence of Augustine’s words, Christ is not a door; therefore, he is not a door. But by better evidence, from the words of that same Augustine, Christ is indeed a door, and the same is said in Scripture, thus authenticating Augustine; therefore, he is a door. Augustine expressly presents 41 Homily 47:6; CCSL 36, p. 407; Homilies on the Gospel of John, 41–124, trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, forthcoming). 42 Homily 47:3; CCSL 36, p. 406; Homilies on the Gospel of John, 41–124. 43 Homily 47:5; CCSL, 36, p. 407; Homilies on the Gospel of John, 41–124.

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each possibility and our faith responds affirmatively, since the truth, which cannot lie, says in John 10[:9], ‘I am the door’. But two things must be said here: the first is a plea for Augustine, lest it should be assumed that so subtle a teacher erred in what he said because of an ignorance of logic. The second concerns the meaning of scripture in such cases, and how it should be understood. Augustine based his logic on the authority of scripture, and on a celebrated logical principle: in equivocal senses, there is no contradiction, since any such contradiction would involve not merely a name, but a thing and a name. For Christ says to his brothers in John 7[:8]: ‘Go you up to this festival day, but I go not up to this festival day’. But then it follows in the text: ‘[T]hen he also went up to the feast, not openly, but, as it were, in secret’ (7[:10]). We must not believe that the truth in the one passage or the other is a lie, or has been asserted falsely. Again, in Luke 19[:26] the same truth speaks: ‘from him that hath not, even that which he hath, shall be taken from him’. And in Proverbs 13[:4], his father Solomon was taught by him that ‘the sluggard willeth and willeth not’. God forbid that any Christian should believe that those three examples from scripture, and any that resemble them, are asserted in such a way that they smack of falsehood or are without notable mystery. It is therefore a general exemplary principle that the humble Christian should not shy away from accepting that such passages have an equivocal sense, which seems contradictory to arrogant sophists and others who understand them imperfectly. Though there are many instances that support that principle, I cite here the threefold testimony of St Augustine. In discussing Psalm 121 and explaining a passage in Proverbs 18[:21] (‘Death and life are in the hands of the tongue’), he says, We are familiar with tongues: certain pieces of flesh are moved in the mouth, and by striking the palate and the teeth they distinguish the sounds by which we speak. The hands of my tongue are thereby shown to me. The tongue, therefore, does not have hands, and yet has hands. What are the hands of the tongue? [They are] the powers of the tongue. Therefore, death and life are in the hands of the tongue, and ‘through your mouth you will be justified, and through your mouth, condemned’ (Matthew 12[:37]).44

There are many sayings of this kind in scripture, in which we may observe an equivocation of terms. I have therefore often said that he 44 Enarrationes in Psalmos, 120: 11; CCSL 40, p. 1796; Expositions of the Psalms, 99–120, trans. Maria Boulding (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2004). Here, Wyclif substitutes mouth for the words of the Vulgate text.

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who does not know how to understand the grammar of a given part of scripture, beyond what he has learned as a child, will be the more ignorant of the mysteries of the scriptures, and will entangle himself excessively in great inconsistencies. Yet the Lord teaches a logic and a grammar in these very sentences that have been discarded by the faithless. How, I ask, would a grammarian know that hand is equivocal in respect of its signification now of a bodily organ, and now of a power that is a source of work, either created or uncreated, unless he had drawn that equivocation from scripture? Augustine proves from the various parts of scriptures that the hand of the Lord is a power. He proceeds thus: ‘Listen more carefully, my brother, lest perhaps you should perceive through your bodily senses that God has distinct physical limbs. Hear clearly how a power is here called a hand.’45 The second testimony of Augustine comes from his second sermon on Psalm 2[6], in which, as he addresses the question as to whether the words of that Psalm are our words or the words of the Spirit of God, he argues in relation to its parts: If those words were not our words, because they are words of sighing and of tears, which are nothing but the words of poor labourers in the Psalm under discussion, then we would be lying. It is inconsistent that they should belong to him, since he should be venerated, so that we would not then speak the truth in our own utterances.46

Afterwards, he explains this in these words: The merciful Lord, in speaking to the poor, appropriately uses the voice of the poor in us; and so, either is true: it is our voice and not our voice, the voice of the Spirit of God and not his voice. The Spirit of God is a voice, because without his inspiration we could not learn from it. But it is not his, for he is not poor and does not labour; on the contrary, they are our words, because they are words indicating our misery. But again, they are not ours, because by his gift we are capable of such complaint.47

That saint is a humble yet subtle logician: see how sophists could not deter him from accepting conclusions founded on the authority of scripture, even if they seemed contradictory to foolish people who had no understanding of the nature of equivocation. He therefore means to 45 Enarrationes in Psalmos, 120: 11; CCSL 40, p. 1796; Expositions of the Psalms, 99–120, p. 520. 46 Enarrationes in Psalmos, 26: 2; CCSL 38, p. 154; Expositions of the Psalms, 99–120, p. 270. Wyclif has modified Augustine’s text here. 47 Enarrationes in Psalmos, 26: 2; CCSL 38, p. 154; Expositions of the Psalms, 99–120, p. 270.

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say that these are not our words, but principally Christ’s, even while they are not Christ’s words, but ours personally. So that we may understand this, we should note first that Augustine says very frequently that the church is one man, whose head is Christ and whose limbs are the faithful predestinate. In his commentary on Psalm 141, therefore, he says that just as the head speaks on behalf of the other limbs in our body, so Christ speaks on behalf of the limbs of his mystical body, both in Acts 9[:4] (‘Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?’) and in Matthew 25[:40]: ‘as long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me’. The voice of the Lord therefore speaks now principally on behalf of his limbs, and now in the person of the head, as is known from Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine and often from his commentary on the Book of Psalms. The third example is Augustine’s remark in homily 47 on John, in which he shows how Christ died not in respect of his deity or his soul, but in respect of his body.48 He proceeds thus: ‘I do not know whether my soul does not die’. If it was not killed by you then it does not die.49 ‘How’, you ask, ‘can I kill my own soul?’ I will say nothing concerning other sins, but ‘The mouth that belieth, killeth the soul’ (Wisdom 1[:11]). ‘How’, you ask, ‘can I be certain that it is not dead?’ Listen to the Lord himself, giving assurance to his servant: ‘Be not afraid of them who kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do (Luke 12[:5]). Rather, ‘fear him that can destroy both body and soul in hell’ (Matthew 10[:28]). See how the soul dies, but see how it does not die! For just as your flesh dying is your flesh losing its life, so dying in your soul is your soul losing its life, which is God. The soul, therefore, is certainly immortal, but it is nevertheless dead in the same way as an indulgent widow, as the apostle says.50

Now, just as the widow here can thus be called living and dead, so can the soul whilst it is widowed from God, as [Augustine] explains in his commentary on Psalm 131[:15]: ‘Blessing, I will bless her widow’.51 See what conclusions that saint elicits from scripture, and the form of words that he uses! Together with others who accept such conclusions 48 In Iohannis Evangelium Tractatus, 47: 8; CCSL 36, p. 408; Homilies on the Gospel of John, 41–124 (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, forthcoming). Wyclif modifies the text again here, but also abbreviates it. 49 The text proceeds as a dialogue between Augustine and a student. 50 ‘But she that is a widow indeed, and desolate, let her trust in God, and continue in supplications and prayers night and day. For she that liveth in pleasures is dead while she is living’ (1 Timothy 5:5–6). 51 Enarrationes in Psalmos, 131, part 23; CCSL 40, p. 1922; Expositions of the Psalms, 121–150, trans. Maria Boulding (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2005), p. 170.

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on the basis of scriptural authority, he makes many comparable sayings, as is evident, for example, from the three points [cited above], which he rehearses in a way that is not at all fruitless, since as well as teaching grammar and logic they explain the meaning of scripture. I conclude from these things that Augustine’s authority does not militate against those who interpret the figurative expressions of scripture in a simple way, since he himself does this. Nor can we refute him because of any ignorance of logic, as certain people attempt to do. Indeed, those critics are themselves ignorant of the logic of Aristotle and the mystical ambiguities of scripture! It now remains for us to consider in what sense we should understand such figurative expressions in scripture. I have often said that they should be apprehended in the mystical sense, which is the spiritual, symbolic and proportional sense, as saints who have written commentaries on Scripture frequently say. When things are signified in a proposition of mystical theology, at one extreme of which the name of a creature is attributed to God, we should note how properties are designated by analogy with the kind of the creature whose name is used. We should filter out whatever is perfect in the analogy, and, noting the elements that are imperfect in the creature’s genus, should attribute the predicate to God in an equivocal sense. We should do likewise with names of a creature of one genus that are attributed proportionately to a creature of a different nature, whether for the sake of commendation or vituperation. It is properly the philosopher’s role to elicit that sense, as I have shown in chapter 27 of the third book of On Civil Lordship, by the authority of Augustine in the second book of Against Simplician.52 For example, according to crude grammarians the word lion signifies a four-legged roaring beast, but according to theologians it also signifies Christ in one place and the devil in another, as Gregory shows in chapters 4, 17 and 18 of the third book of the Morals, deducing this from scripture.53 Now, Apocalypse 5[:5] reads, ‘behold the lion of the tribe of Juda, the root of David, hath prevailed to open the book, and to loose the seven seals thereof ’. In 1 Peter 5[:8]: ‘your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, goeth about seeking whom he may devour’. 54 One prophet therefore says that Christ is a lion, and another that the devil is 52 See De Civili Dominio, vol. i, pp. 196–7; cf. De Diversis Quaestionibus ad Simplicianum, book 2, q. 2, ch. 3; CCSL 44, pp. 77–9; Responses to Miscellaneous Questions, trans. Boniface Ramsey (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2008), pp. 218–22. 53 PL 75, col. 601 (chapter 4) and col. 161 (chapters 17 and 18). 54 For Gregory’s interpretation of these passages (from Apocalypse and 1 Peter, respectively), see book 5, ch. 21 of the Morals, PL 75, col. 701B. For an English

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like a lion, and these examples illustrate the ambiguity of the meaning of this word. The same is true in respect of other terms in scripture.

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10 Why no scriptural passage can literally be false From Postils on the Whole of Scripture (Luke 9:3). Latin text: Wyclifs Bibelkommentar, pp. 362–5. This passage from Wyclif ’s Postils represents an early expression of his belief in the literal veracity of all parts of the scriptural text. This was to be explored most fully and systematically in On the Truth of Holy Scripture, but in the Postils he is already adopting an approach to which he would return repeatedly in his later work. He writes as though he is surrounded by exegetical sophists, whose primary objective is to demonstrate that scriptural passages can indeed be shown to be literally false or anomalous. One of the areas in which this might predictably occur is in the interpretation of figurative or superficially contradictory language. Wyclif resorts here to a verbal formula that he would repeat many times: ‘in ambiguity there is no contradiction’. What is perhaps most remarkable about this section from the Postils is how loosely the commentary relates to the scriptural passage it is designed to elucidate.

And he said to them: Take nothing for your journey; neither staff, nor scrip, nor bread, nor money; neither have two coats (Luke 9[:3]). Certain people insist that some scriptural statements are literally false, including countless figurative or mystical propositions, and particularly negative propositions whose corresponding affirmatives must contradictorily be accepted as true. Examples of the latter are John 7[:16], ‘My doctrine is not mine’, and John 14[:24], ‘the word which you have heard is not mine’, and John 7[:8], ‘Go you up to [this festival day, but I go not up to this festival day]’. It seems that contradictory statements are accepted as true here, since it is said afterwards that Christ went up to this day, and likewise with several similar examples. But note that it was frequently said above, in chapter 3 [of this postil on Luke], that any part of scripture is literally true, and that if any written sign in scripture is false then it is not false in respect of its literal sense. Hence, from their initial assumption that the author of scripture uses no language in which there is not a mystery to be found, the saints arrived at the most secret truths hidden in scripture. Thus, translation, see Gregory the Great, Morals on the Book of Job, trans. John Henry Parker, vol. 1 (London: J.G.F. and J. Rivington, 1844), p. 251.

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it is noted from those passages in John 7 and 14, above, that Christ is of a twofold nature, according to one of which he gave reverence to his father by saying that his doctrine or language was not his own, but that of his father who sent him: he conveys this in an original and authoritative way. He interprets any number of sayings from scripture in the same way, as well as the language spoken by ordinary people. He does this, for example, when a deed is attributed to the Lord, but the Lord’s subject gives it meaning, as in Matthew 10[:20]: ‘It is not you that speak, but the spirit of your father’, etc. No disciple of Christ, however, believed that his master spoke falsely, or uttered a lie for the sake of reverence or devotion. When Christ speaks, his assertion is formally followed by an act of God. Hence, statements that signify in this way do not signify badly, except to those who understand them badly. Indeed, Christ’s doctrine was not his, nor did he say that it was, except in the sense that has been explained here. And likewise, Christ did not say that he would not go up to the festival day, but said, rather, that he would not go up in public together with those people, which is true, and is pertinent to the question asked of him. And to someone who asks me whether I have celebrated, I respond to what I assume is in the questioner’s mind, and say ‘no’. But I do not say in that statement that I have never celebrated; I say, rather, that I have not celebrated today, which is what those words signify to me. Similarly, we can apply a healthy meaning to any part of scripture, so that according to this meaning that part of the text is true. In ambiguity there is no contradiction, because Christ’s proposition, ‘But I do not go up’, does not contradict the fact that Christ went up alone in the sense expounded here, and hence we have two conjunctions of four notable doctrines through our saviour’s logic: first, that Christ is of two natures, namely, God and man; second, that we, the devoted, are inwardly educated according to the said necessary teaching so that we honour God with the reverence of worship, preferring to honour God than to honour ourselves, since the man that was assumed [by the Word of God] did this;55 third, we are taught theoretically that in ambiguity there is no contradiction, as is known from the [Sophistical] Refutations; and fourth, we are morally bound not to accept a contradiction merely by looking at its appearance, as a sophist would, rather than by apprehending its meaning. Nor should we value the verbal novelty of which we learn in 1 Timothy 6, 55 The expression homo assumptus (man assumed/received) is used of Christ throughout the medieval period. I have added ‘by the Word of God’ to clarify the meaning here.

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rather than imitating philosophical or scriptural logic by saying that this old logic will pass into abuse.56 But our saviour, the subtlest of logicians, was not ashamed to use words plainly, yet some people, understanding him poorly because of sin, would perceive contradiction in them, just as we do if we ignore the literal sense of scripture. Hence, after experiencing the empty circumlocutions and novel traditions invented today, the thorough logician will undoubtedly find the subtlest, the most concise and the most easily comprehensible logic in scripture, which also conforms to the logic of the philosophers. Now, theological disputation should seek chiefly to honour truth, and should be dedicated to the study of a wholesome truth that was unknown before, and not to ostentatious displays of logical subtlety or repetitious argumentation before other people, or to anything comparably excessive. And we should no longer desire anything from signs or the language of debate except God’s honour, the further instruction of the mind in truth unknown, and the charitable moulding of our disposition that arises out of loving the Lord of truth and all his creation. In the second book of On Christian Doctrine, chapter 31, Augustine therefore reaches the following conclusion: The discipline of disputation is of the greatest value in penetrating and explaining all kinds of logical problems in holy writings, where the desire to squabble must be avoided, as must that sort of childish ostentation that arises out of outwitting an adversary, for there are many that deceive the less attentive and diligent.57

And he gives the example of a certain artful sophist deceiving a simple man who was ignorant of the threefold identity of genus, species and number: ‘You are not’, he said, ‘what I am’. This is true in part, says Augustine, since the sophist and the other man were singular entities, and hence the man accepted the proposition. Then the sophist added, ‘I am a man’, which the man also accepted, but finally the sophist concluded, ‘therefore, you are not a man’.58 The solution to this sophism, according to Augustine, lies in the fact that neither man was the same personally or morally as the other, but each was of the same specific nature as the other. And this is also clear from his 107th and 109th homilies on John, from the fourth chapter of the seventh book of his treatise On the Trinity, and from the [second] book of his Against 56 See 1 Timothy 6:1–5 (particularly verse 3). 57 Book 2, ch. 31; CCSL 32, p. 65; Teaching Christianity: De Doctrina Christiana, trans. Edmund Hill, p. 163. 58 Book 2, ch. 31; CCSL 32, p. 65; Teaching Christianity, p. 163.

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Maximinus, chapter 22, in which it is illustrated through the notion of the threefold unity.59 Indeed, the same idea emerges everywhere that he speaks of universals. And in Ecclesiasticus 37[:23], scripture abhors this kind of specious conclusion: ‘He that speaketh sophistically is hateful’. Not only is this kind of captious language hateful, but also language that exploits verbal ornamentation more than is appropriate to the weight of the topic. But if it is objected that the theologian should therefore not discuss sophisms, or that sophisms should not be learned, then it is answered that this does not follow. Aristotle teaches the following in his tract On the Apple: just as the flesh of a scorpion can help to destroy another poison by contributing to the composition of its antidote, so it suits the philosopher’s character to be refreshed by the science of sophisms, so that he may not be taken in by the verbal art of sophists.60 Likewise, the theologian should know sophisms so that he is not confounded by infidels. Indeed, there are many metaphysical points concerning the quiddity of things that are judged to be sophisms of absences, but which are nevertheless the most beautiful difficulties, an ignorance of which led heretics into the most absurd fallacies, as appears from the Manichaeans’ conception of an evil God, Pelagius’s understanding of grace as power existing in its own right, and so on.61 When a 59 In Iohannis Evangelium Tractatus XXIV, 107, 109; CCSL 36, pp. 613–14; 618–20; De Trinitate, book 7, ch. 4; CCSL, 50, pp. 255–7; The Trinity, trans. Edmund Hill, second edition (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1991), pp. 234–6; Contra Maximinum Haereticum, PL, cols. 792–6. 60 On the Apple (De Pomo) is fashioned as a dialogue between Aristotle and his disciples on his deathbed, in which the philosopher is sustained by the scent of an apple. It was translated from Hebrew into Latin in the thirteenth century. It is thought that the Hebrew text was itself a translation of an Arabic treatise of this name. See Peri tou Mêlou ê peri tês Aristotelous Teleutês (Liber de Pomo sive de Morte Aristotilis). Seira: Philosophia 12,  ed. Paraskeue Kotzia (Thessalonika: Ekdoseis Thyrathen, 2007), p. 56; Liber de Pomo: The Apple, or Aristotle’s Death, translated by Mary F. Rousseau (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1968), p. 59. 61 Manichaeism, which originated with the Persian Gnostic theologian Mani in the second half of the third century ce, posited two Gods, one good and the other evil. Mani’s ideas influenced Augustine, who wrote in some detail about them before finally rejecting them. Pelagianism, named after the British or possibly Irish theologian Pelagius (fl. early fifth century ce), established the principle that any individual could make progress towards salvation (initially, at least) without the grace of God. This explains the reference to grace as a self-sufficient entity, independent from the creator. Augustine opposed Pelagianism vociferously. For an authoritative introduction to Manichaeism in English, see Samuel N.C. Lieu, Manichaeism in the Later Roman Empire and Medieval China (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985). On Pelagius and his teaching, consult B.R. Rees, Pelagius: Life and Letters (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998), pp. 1–124.

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t­ heologian persists in such sophistry because of the empty glory that may so easily be gained from it, therefore, he is undoubtedly achieving little. Indeed, pride steals upon perfect men when other vices have been abandoned. The theologian should therefore guard carefully against such things when discussing scripture and interpreting its meaning. He should not seek great praise from men, nor fear unduly if he seems to be rejected by the ignorant, provided that he values the sense of the words, which is the real scripture, above the harmony of [written] signs or the resonance of human praise. But there is a threefold objection against [my claim that all parts of scripture are literally true]. First, it is said that in this way, any scriptural proposition would have to be accepted, however sinfully spoken or even if uttered by an infidel. To this I say that I agree to this conclusion, since to agree to something is to accept that it exists, just as to believe, to know or to assume something is to acknowledge that that thing exists. But it does not follow that it should be conceded that Christ had a devil or that Christ did not go up to Jerusalem. Any such passage is nevertheless true, though, because it signifies principally and primarily the being of God, as does any creature, and by ascription it signifies that the Pharisees or other such infidels made such an assertion. Hence, just as in affirming that there is no God but our God, one does not say that there is a God other than ours, so the author of scripture does not say that Christ had a devil, but that the Pharisees said this.62 Second, it is objected that anyone arguing in this way would have to presume to know all of scripture, because there are many statements scattered throughout scripture that seem to contradict each other, and there are many scriptural authorities whose meaning I do not myself know, and which I would therefore deny, since to me they would be false propositions. I respond here that this conclusion must be accepted, for it would be extremely beneficial to know more of scripture than we know now. It is nevertheless the errors of those who judge wrongly that are responsible for the appearance of contradictions in scripture. Hence, when a scriptural proposition is cited without being confirmed as true, scripture is not damaged in respect of its letter or its sense, even if the suggested meaning is said to be false. This is because we respond principally to the truth that is understood, rather than to the sign. And this response makes people devote more attention to the 62 It is suggested by the Jews that Christ had a devil on three occasions, as reported in John 7:20, John 8:48 and John 8:52.

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sense [of scripture], and less, in the manner of children, to the artificial sign. Third, we are urged to respond according to the grammar and logic that the theologian learns from outside theology itself, because the same criteria that we apply to the meaning of mystical or figurative expressions in scripture would otherwise need to be applied in ordinary speech. But uncertainty would then plague our speech, and academic debate would consequently become fragile and unproductive. To this I say that the student of theology should have more than grammar and logic, in that he should know the intentional force [virtus] of theological language. But [grammar and logic] are of use as ancillary rudiments, and the theologian may speak safely in accordance with them if they are regulated by theological wisdom. It therefore follows that the theologian should learn these auxiliary sciences in a new way, since theology makes all of these right for their purpose, and all other disciplines should therefore work in obedience to it, so that they may be nourished by its meaning. Our argument is finally rejected on the basis of comparisons that have been drawn [with other texts]. If only those who pursue this line of reasoning would accept that scriptural authority is far superior! They would not then say that any part of scripture is inconsistent or literally [de vi vocis] impossible. Nor would they find as many parts of scripture to be in need of correction in respect of their sense, since anyone who could be likened to the author of Scripture by such a process of comparison, or have the same degree of correctness in his speech, would everywhere speak in conformity with scripture to the highest degree. But ‘who is he, and we will praise him?’ (Ecclesiasticus 31[:9]) Indeed, any sophistical departure from the old logic in the way people use language was perhaps brought about by the pride that seeks to give authority to these linguistic novelties.63 We therefore avoid

63 The old logic to which Wyclif refers here was the logical system used in medieval universities before the availability of Aristotle’s Prior and Posterior Analytics, Topics and Sophistical Refutations in Latin translation from the twelfth century onwards. The sophistry about which Wyclif complains here, however, was a symptom of an even later development: modernist logic (the logica modernorum). Modernist logicians made language (that is, the proposition) very explicitly the focus of their enquiries. This may seem unexceptional, but Wyclif ’s metaphysical system was premised on the assumption that truths existed in the world, prior to being formalised linguistically. On modernist logic (or terminist logic, as it is often called), see the classic study of L.M. de Rijk, Logica Modernorum: A Contribution to the History of Early Terminist Logic, 3 vols (Assen: van Gorcum, 1962).

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any of the methods of such sophistical refutation. See our prologue to Isaiah.64

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11 The representation of time in scripture i  From the Postils on the Whole of Scripture (Amos 7:14). Latin text: Beryl Smalley, ‘Wyclif ’s Postilla on the Old Testament and His Principium’, in Oxford Studies Presented to Daniel Callus, ed. R.W. Southern (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), pp. 253–96 (pp. 284–6). This section from Wyclif ’s postil on the book of Amos focuses on a passage that appears contradictory. Though his prophetic abilities are amply demonstrated throughout his text, Amos denies to the King of Judah that he is a prophet. Wyclif uses the passage to demonstrate that the prophet’s words, though spoken in the present tense in the Vulgate translation of the Hebrew text, clearly refer to times outside the present moment. The Hebrew text not only lacks tense but also elides the verb to be altogether in this passage. Beryl Smalley, in an influential essay on Wyclif ’s theory of time, suggested that, had Wyclif known that Hebrew lacked grammatical tense, then his problems with apparent inconsistencies in the tenses of the Old Testament would have been greatly alleviated.65 Whether or not we accept Smalley’s claim that Biblical Hebrew is tenseless (a claim that is frequently made about the language), the Hebrew text of the passage Wyclif is scrutinising actually elides the verb to be altogether here. Even so, it is not without temporal reference, any more than a tenseless language is without temporal reference, so the problem that Wyclif identifies in the Vulgate translation also exists in the original Hebrew, albeit in a rather different form. To solve the problem with the Vulgate text, Wyclif argues that Amos must have been alluding to the past when he claimed to be a herdsman, since he was obviously not then working in that role. When he denied that he was a prophet, on the other hand, he was extending the signification of his words to suggest that he was not intrinsically or professionally a prophet, but a prophet by the gift of God. This latter interpretation, if less transparent than the first in respect of its technicalities, is one that is consistent with the view that Amos did not regard himself as a prophet by profession. Wyclif ’s belief that scriptural tenses could be extended in this way served principally to reconcile, if not always entirely convincingly, the realm of finite, historical time as represented in the scriptures and the eternal and atemporal perspective of their divine author. Smalley observed similarities in his thought with the Neoplatonist 64 This is a reference to another part of Wyclif ’s Postilla, in which scriptural rhetoric is defended against a range of erroneous charges. 65 ‘The Bible and Eternity: John Wyclif ’s Dilemma’, JWCI, 27 (1964), 73–89 (p. 88). This essay is reproduced in Beryl Smalley, Studies in Medieval Thought and Learning (London: The Hambledon Press, 1981), pp. 319–415 (p. 414).

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Plotinus and, to a less obvious extent, the Christian Platonist Augustine. The metaphor with which she concludes her comparison is an insightful one: Plotinus, she argues, ‘killed Father Time’, whereas Augustine merely ‘fettered him’. Wyclif, she suggests, though manifesting similar ambitions to those of Plotinus, was less expert a murderer, failing, as she put it, ‘to get rid of the corpse’.66 This analogy captures nicely the frustrations that plagued Wyclif in his attempt to read the tensed Vulgate translation of scripture as ‘a mirror of eternal truths’.67

And Amos answered, and said to Amazias: ‘I am not a prophet, nor am I the son of a prophet: but I am a herdsman plucking wild figs’ (Amos 7[:14]). The prophet has here extended the signification of his words beyond the present time, as is clear from what he says: ‘I am a herdsman plucking wild figs’. He was not a herdsman when he spoke with Amazias, nor was he plucking wild figs, but he had been devoted to prophecy at an earlier time, as [Nicholas of] Lyra tells us.68 He therefore adds beneath, appropriately, ‘Thou sayest, “thou shalt not prophesy” ’ (7[:16]). Here, in addressing Amazias, he certainly did not speak as a prophet. He did, nevertheless, speak earlier as a prophet, and in chapter 8: ‘The end is come upon my people, Israel’, and afterwards, ‘“See the days coming,” says the Lord’ (8[:2] and 8[:11]). And the same is true of many other passages of this kind. Some say that Amos did not have the spirit of prophecy at that time, and that for this reason he spoke in the negative: ‘I am not a prophet’. But this seems to be false, because immediately afterwards he prophesied what he said that the Lord had preached to him about Israel.69 But if he was not a prophet by definition, then to a much lesser extent would he have been a herdsman, unless he were actually watching over cattle. Therefore, he extended the signification of the word beyond the present in the manner of the prophets, saying that he was not intrinsically a prophet by his specific nature, nor was he generically a prophet, but, rather, he was a prophet by the special inspiration of God. Therefore, he could not be true to himself by acting against the justice of God. But against this some argue, following the Glossa Ordinaria, that Amos did not say at that time that he had the spirit of prophecy, and this seems to be taken from Gregory’s Morals, 2[:56], which reads thus: ‘If 66 ‘The Bible and Eternity’, p. 85 (p. 411). 67 ‘The Bible and Eternity’, p. 89 (p. 415). 68 Biblia Sacra cum Glossa Ordinaria, vol. 4, PL, cols 1889–90. 69 Amos 7:16–17.

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the prophet’s spirit of prophecy was always present, then the prophet Amos would not have said, “I am not a prophet”.’70 How, Gregory asks, could he not be a prophet when he foretold the events of the future entirely truthfully? But equally, how could he be a prophet when he denied truths about himself at that moment? And then Gregory gives his interpretation: ‘Because at the same hour at which it was required, Amos sensed that the spirit of prophecy was lacking in him, he testified truly for himself when he said, “I am not a prophet.” ’71 It should be noted that the spirit of prophecy and the act of prophesying are rigorously distinguished here, and hence Gregory’s interpretation is that [Amos] was truly a prophet [when he spoke these words], but did not feel that he had the spirit of prophecy truly within him, or, rather, in his very denial of the act of prophesying he sensed that the prophetic spirit was lacking from him. But this is very far from conceding that he did, in fact, lack the prophetic spirit, since that spirit is a light that can possibly be elicited without an act being performed. Hence, it should be noted that according to Thomas [Aquinas], a prophet is, as it were, a medium between the apprehender and the viator, having a supernatural prophetic light relating to the way in which things will happen.72 And hence, the disposition according to which someone is identified as a prophet is like a passion, since now it comes and then it goes away, in a way that enables a master to inform his unlearned disciples, who always require further instruction, as is signified figuratively in Exodus 33[:22]: ‘When my glory shall pass’.73 The same is figured of Elias in 3 Kings 19[:11]: ‘behold the Lord passeth’, and is also evident of Eliseus in 4 Kings 3, who calls a minstrel to him.74 This saint’s meaning, therefore, is that whoever has the prophetic light, even while he does not actually perform an act of prophecy, is properly a prophet by virtue of that fact. In that way he occupies a middle way between the state and the passion by which one is formally a prophet. And if at 70 PL 75, col. 597D. See Gregory the Great, Morals on the Book of Job, vol. 1, pp. 119–20. 71 PL 75, col. 598A; Morals on the Book of Job, vol. 1, pp. 119–20. 72 The term apprehender appears to follow Paul’s usage of the verb comprhendere (translating the Greek katalabo, rendered in the Douay-Rheims translation as apprehend) in Philippians 3:12: ‘Not as though I had already attained, or were already perfect; but I follow after, if I may by any means apprehend, wherein I am also apprehended by Christ Jesus’. See Summa Theologiae IIIa q. 8, a. 8. 73 In his Categories, Aristotle identifies a passion as a process or a state that a subject undergoes for a period of time, but which does not remain permanently. Wyclif hence identifies the prophetic state as a passion. 74 4 Kings 3:11–17. Elisius asks for a minstrel when a servant of Josaphat, King of Judaea, identifies him as a prophet.

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any time he had the goodness or the disposition required for prophetic illumination, and was almost ready to receive the light but there was no cause, then he is a prophet only improperly and loosely speaking. These are the words of the doctor: Just as in physical things in which a passion is lacking there remains a certain aptitude, so that they may receive that passion again, in the same way as wood, once made flammable, more easily ignites, so in the mind of the prophet that lacks actual illumination there remains a certain aptitude, so that he might more easily be illumined again. Likewise, the mind, when first summoned to devotion, is more easily recalled to devotion later, on account of which Augustine, in his book On Praying to God, says that many acts of prayer are required to prevent the idea of devotion from being entirely extinguished. It may nevertheless be said that a person is still called a prophet by divine assignment, even when prophetic illumination is absent, according to the text of Jeremiah 1: ‘I have given you as a prophet unto the nations’.75

From this pronouncement of the doctor, together with Scripture and the nimble use of reason, it is clear to every attentive [student] that someone is most strictly a prophet when he has the prophetic light, even if he does not at that moment perform the act of prophesying. But it remains the case that a man is a prophet, loosely speaking, when he lacks such a light. This happens when his capacity for prophecy, or his inclination towards [prophetic activity], has forsaken him. Scripture speaks of prophets in this way, as is clear in relation to Elijah and Elisha, together with many others who did not cease to be prophets when the prophetic light had left them. And it seems that it would be an idle, sleepy conjecture to suggest that Amos did not have the spirit of prophecy at all when he made his denial, unless, perhaps, he was about to be prophetically illuminated, which was indeed the case. Nevertheless, it is granted that he had the prophetic act given to him, supernaturally, precisely because of the humility of this denial, whose meaning has been explored above. ii From the Postils on the Whole of Scripture (Lamentations 5:7 and 5:22). Latin text: Beryl Smalley, ‘Wyclif ’s Postilla on the Old Testament and His Principium’, in Oxford Studies Presented to Daniel Callus, ed. R.W. Southern (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), pp. 253–96 (pp. 283–4); Wyclifs Bibelkommentar, pp. 62–3 n. 144. 75 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae IIa–IIæ q. 171, a. 2, ad 2.

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The book of Lamentations describes the aftermath of the siege of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 587 bce, and is thought to have been composed shortly after the fall of the city. Its traditional ascription to Jeremiah, whom Wyclif here identifies simply as the prophet, is now generally rejected. Chapter 5 is the last in the book, and takes the form of a final mournful prayer. The two passages on which Wyclif concentrates here are used to illustrate how his extended conception of time could be used in a practical exegetical context. Here, as elsewhere, his argument rests on the assumption that the signification of verbs in scripture could be subtly extended when necessary, to encompass not merely time as experienced by mortals on earth but also the whole of time and eternity, as perceived by the divine author of scripture.

Our fathers sinned, and are not; and we have borne their iniquities (Lamentations, 5[:7]). You are exceedingly angry against us (Lamentations, 5[:22]). Against us. That is, having our failings and our punishments in your eternal present, according to the law. And it does not matter that the prophet said earlier, Our fathers sinned … we have borne, which ostensibly fails to extend the signification of the words beyond the present, since formally, the opposite follows. Indeed, he is not saying that their fathers simply do not exist, but rather that they do not share in their punishment of captivity, as they did when they participated in sin. It therefore follows from this that their fathers were, but not that their  fathers are at any point in time. Rather, their fathers are, but in eternity. The servants of David and Solomon are thus buying them into servitude, and not at a time when they deserved the Jews’ [labour].76 Nor did the Jews bear the iniquities that were their fathers’ in their time of captivity, but at a time that encompassed the lives of both the fathers and the sons. Otherwise, those men could not truly be called their fathers, because at no point in their lives were they the fathers of people existing at that time, but fathers of people existing much later, just as we are all sons of Adam, and the Jews are bodily the sons of Abraham. Likewise, we are their spiritual sons or their followers in faith, as the saviour testifies in John 8[:33]. Here, when the Jews said, ‘We are the seed of Abraham, and we have never been slaves to anyone’, the saviour responded by approving the true part of their copulative proposition: ‘I know’, he said, and ‘you are the children 76 This is a reference to Lamentations 5:8: ‘Servants have ruled over us: there was none to redeem us out of their hand’.

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of Abraham’.77 And he added a truth in response to the second part of their proposition, by which he could prove that he was God, since he said, ‘You seek to kill me’ (8[:37]), thus revealing their thoughts. And such is the case with any scriptural statements that express truths literally, because to God, all things that were or will be are present. And this is particularly evident from the way in which the prophets speak, and the saviour in St John’s Gospel. And thus it is clear that, just as Adam was our father at the beginning of the world, so the prime matter at the beginning of the world was my matter, not because I was a son then, or even in a state of physical being, but because I was later, in my own time. This is how Abraham had those sons: he was not a father to those sons at the time when they existed, when they clearly were not his sons, but only much later. It is said in Job 24[:28] that God ‘beholdeth the ends of the world’; he therefore has honour and glory for the whole of time. Amen. iii  From the Commentary on Jerome’s Prologue on Jeremiah. Latin text: Beryl Smalley, ‘Wyclif ’s Postilla on the Old Testament and His Principium’, in Oxford Studies Presented to Daniel Callus, ed. R.W. Southern (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), pp. 287–8. Jerome’s commentary on Jeremiah, like any scriptural commentary of the patristic or medieval periods, was introduced by a short prologue.78 In the commentaries of the fathers, such prologues typically supplied details of the  nature of the text to be analysed, its genre, theme and author, though they generally lacked the structural uniformity of the later scholastic accessus. Jerome’s prologue is addressed to his loyal friend and fellow scholar, Eusebius of Cremona (d. 423). It explains briefly how the text of Jeremiah is to be defined and circumscribed, before addressing and then dismissing the comments of his critics, including his famous adversaries Pelagius and Jovinian. Wyclif ’s commentary, though it does not constitute an obvious response to Jerome’s text, provides a concise rehearsal of his ideas about the nature of time, citing Aquinas in support of his belief that all instants of time are eternally present to God. Though he does not seek to explain how this principle may be applied in the service of his own literalist exegesis, it is clear from the fact that is mentioned in a commentary on one of Jerome’s exegetical prologues that scriptural interpretation was not far from his thoughts.

77 A copulative proposition is one in which a subject and predicate are linked by a copula (usually, the verb to be). Hence, ‘we are the seed of Abraham’ is copulative, as is ‘we have never been slaves to anyone’. 78 CSEL 59, pp. 3–5; Jerome: Commentary on Jeremiah, trans. Michael Graves and ed. Christopher Hall (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2011), pp. 1–2.

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Here ends the postil on the prophet Isaiah, and here begins a question on Jerome’s prologue about the coextension of time:

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The prophet Jeremiah, for whom this prologue was written, … was a priest among priests, who was sanctified in his mother’s womb. Note that in the first book of his Summa contra Gentiles, chapter 66, St Thomas says that God has knowledge of things that do not exist (or have being in actuality, as he puts it in the first part of his Summa Theologiae, question 14, article [9]). Three things emerge clearly from these words. The first is that the doctor’s intention is to say that all past or future things have existence in themselves in their own time. The second is that the doctor clearly perceived this to be the case from the intended meaning of scripture. The third is that he seemingly sensed that it cannot be the case that God intuits anything unless it has existence in its own measure, nor that he even knows anything unless it has being in proportion [to that knowledge]. Hence, we have a response to the Subtle Doctor’s argument against St Thomas, which says that God knows all future events determinately, since eternity coexists with every future instant. Against this, the doctor says that eternity does not coexist with anything that is not. Many future things are not, however, so eternity does not coexist with any part of the future. But an abbreviator of St Thomas responds by denying the minor premise here, ‘because each future thing exists in its own time’. Consequently, God coexists with it. Hence, the Subtle Doctor, knowing St Thomas’s response here, does not labour to repeat it, although there would seem to be reason to believe that this [problem] is insoluble. I therefore say, with the wise man of Ecclesiasticus 34[:12–13], ‘I have seen many things by travelling, and many customs of things / … and I have been delivered by the grace of God’. I will not engage any further with differences in words for times, but like Gregory in the Morals I say that speaking of any truth in relation to God’s knowledge of it is superfluous, as it makes that truth finite. Indeed, a wise man writes of God in Ecclesiasticus 39[:25]: ‘He seeth from eternity to eternity’. He therefore says later, after he has praised the famous men that were dead at that time, ‘All these have gained glory in their generations, and were praised in their days’ (44[:7]). And he says these things in conformity with the scriptures, both the New and the Old Testaments. This is how the apostle spoke in [1] Timothy 6[:14–16]: ‘thou keep the commandment without spot … / […] Who only hath immortality, and

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inhabiteth light inaccessible’. See more about the extension of time in the speech of Jeremiah.

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12 Reading, understanding and teaching scripture i Wyclif ’s Principium. Latin text: Wyclifs Bibelkommentar, pp. 338–46; Beryl Smalley, ‘Wyclif ’s Postilla on the Old Testament and His Principium’, in Oxford Studies Presented to Daniel Callus, ed. R.W. Southern (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), pp. 253–96 (pp. 288–96). This is a preface to one of Wyclif ’s two postils devoted to the Canticle. As a principium, which would have been delivered by Wyclif as an incepting Doctor of Divinity, it had special status, however. It was clearly intended as a preface to his tropological interpretation of the Song of Songs (the other postil on the Canticle offered an allegorical reading), but it also served, as its incipit suggests, as a prefatory lecture on the nature of scriptural interpretation more generally. Beryl Smalley has suggested that Wyclif ’s new status as a Doctor of Divinity was reflected in the nature of the postils that followed his principium. They were more comprehensive and less derivative in nature, she suggests, and their author was more inclined to express his own opinions to his audience.79 The principium therefore has an obviously symbolic status in Wyclif ’s academic career, marking the emergence of the subtle and often original exegete that is familiar from many of the postils translated in this volume, from On the Truth of Holy Scripture, and from a good number of his sermons.

Here begins the introductory preface to the interpretation of the Song of Songs, or rather, the whole of Scripture. There are three things given in abundance to those of a pure heart who desire to arrive at an adequate knowledge of the scriptures. The first is a moral disposition that informs their mood, keeping out the threefold lustful appetite of which we learn in 1 John 2[:16]: ‘For all that is in the world, is the concupiscence of the flesh, and the concupiscence of the eyes, and the pride of life’. All sins are built upon this nefarious trinity. The second is a worthy mode of understanding that is brought to our threefold philosophy, namely, the sermonic, the natural and the moral. The whole speculative disposition is rooted in this trinity, in the service of this wisdom. The third is a virtuous way of working, which produces an effect according to the habits of mind mentioned above. 79 ‘Wyclif ’s Postilla on the Old Testament’, p. 255.

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If it inheres in the mind, this trinity fully prepares us temperamentally for true wisdom or for an understanding of theological truth. It does this by antecedent necessity, because when our temperament is completely prepared, the maker of things cannot cease from enlightening us.80 And this is known principally from rational arguments, authorities and examples. Now, since the mind is of such finite capacity, and since the worldly foundations of the three forms of concupiscence mentioned earlier, on the one hand, and the eternal things that are knowable through theological understanding, on the other, are rendered utterly separate because of their opposite statuses, it seems that the pull of the mind towards one drags it away from the other, and vice versa. Indeed, these corruptible worldly things are thus deceptive and transitory temporal entities, and therefore, from the perspective of the soul, perpetually disorderly things that are perceptible to the senses. Hence, they are entangled with errors relating to sensual knowledge. Opposed to the truths that may be learned through that kind of knowledge are the eternal and therefore optimal truths, which therefore endure interminably in themselves. Hence, as immovable entities, they serve as the focus of the soul’s comprehension and desire; they are apprehended by the mind directly, preserving it salubriously from errors. Our saviour speaks about this distinctly and truly in relation to all things in Matthew 24[:35]: ‘Heaven and earth shall pass, but my words shall not pass’. Indeed, his words are not the perceptible speech sounds that pass through the wind, but the truths that he pronounces that are designated by such sounds. And the wise man gives proof to the meaning of this principle, which he learned entirely through experience. He speaks thus in Wisdom 1[:4]: ‘wisdom will not enter into a malicious soul, nor dwell in a body subject to sins’. Now, this can be demonstrated through a threefold analogy. First, the mind responds to knowable things in the same way as a solid behaves in relation to light or colour, which it receives through a chaotic medium. But just as that medium, when saturated with colour from the outside, only allows a body placed within it to be illuminated by certain confused influences, so undoubtedly our mental powers only 80 Antecedent necessity was a principle first used by St Anselm in Why God Became Man, and Wyclif follows that interpretation here. The moral trinity he mentions here is the antecedent necessity that equips the mind for the enlightenment that follows as a consequent necessity. See Cur Deus Homo II.17; S. Anselmi Cantuariensis Archiepiscopi Opera Omnia, vol. 2, ed. F.S. Schmitt (Rome, 1840), pp. 125–6; Anselm of Canterbury, The Major Works, trans. Brian Davies and G.R. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998; reprint 2008), p. 346.

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allow the mind to receive rays of light in a partially confused way. This is because of the dispositions or qualities of worldly things informing them. Hence, our saviour speaks truly in Matthew 5[:8]: ‘Blessed are the clean of heart: for they shall see God’. And this is why the unwise person, thus experiencing sapiential truths, either does not recognise them at all, or judges them only erroneously or without taste, like a hysterical person perceiving colour, one with tinnitus hearing sound, or a feverite judging flavour.81 My third analogy is rooted in the disturbance that arises when physical masses are brought together in an unnatural way. Now, when fire and air are exhaled from the earth, having opened up pores within it and penetrated through them, they become slippery with fluid, and come to the surface of the earth congested with cinder. They shake the edges of the muddy earth as they move, and they leave the earth frequently, causing ruptures and earthquakes. In this same way, the temptations of worldly things violently occupy the spaces of the mind, penetrating like smoke through the pores of the senses, and emerging in the lubricity of carnal sins. On account of the said unnaturalness, they are never peaceful or satiated, but rather they persistently infest and appropriate the mind. And undoubtedly, the torment that is caused to the spirit when attached to these worldly things is a sign that the said attachment is unnatural, detaining the soul and holding it back from its natural end. Ecclesiasticus 23[:6] speaks explicitly to this end in these words: ‘Take from me the greediness of the belly, and let not the lusts of the flesh take hold of me’. In brief, it may be said that daily experience teaches us adequately that, the more one is surrounded by worldly people, the more one is distracted from the wise. The apostle therefore writes meaningfully and truly in [1] Timothy 6[:9]: ‘They that will become rich, fall into temptation’. And only a sufficiently moral disposition inclines our mood towards knowledge! But here, the natural philosopher would ask how the mood’s disposition can precede that of the mind in seeking theological knowledge, since the intellect precedes the will in the order of knowing. But to this I reply that right order demands that the mood should be appropriately disposed before [the mind] is directed towards this knowledge, as has been said.82 This is so because an appropriate disposition of the mood is needed whatever the viator’s state, but it is especially necessary 81 This latter comparison serves as Wyclif ’s second analogy. 82 The notion of ‘right’ order (ordo rectus) was used by the scholastics to characterise the most appropriate or fitting order of things. It was opposed to ‘inverted’ order (ordo praeposterus).

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when he is seeking knowledge of this kind, since this knowledge is better acquired externally than from human study. Second, it is so because many theological truths can be fully known without the mind being influenced by knowledge acquired from human [study], but not without the necessary disposition of the mood. Hence, although an infidel, a heretic or someone ensnared in mortal sin may assume that he is fit to know the wisdom of the scriptures, he nevertheless fails because he does not perceive the requisite flavour [of the scriptural senses]. This is because of the disorderly power of his will. Indeed, theological truth is called sapientia (wisdom) antonomastically in Latin, since it is wise (sapida) knowledge (scientia). And third, it is so for the following reason. Since the will is the greatest power and the defining capacity of the mind, its necessary virtue, which is righteousness, is needed before all other things. It is consequently even more necessary to the act of acquiring such knowledge, but also to any act or task might be considered, and still more to our learning from the Book of Life, whose author is the Holy Spirit, to which the will personally corresponds. The natural philosopher who considers the part instead of the whole, therefore, is mistaken when he prioritises the intellect over the will, since righteousness of the will is a disposition that precedes any act that the will elicits.83 If this is missing, all that follows is corrupted. Among all things that that will benefit the student of this kind of knowledge, the first is that he should become good morally, because this pertains more directly to it than any activity of the speculative intellect. The second thing that will help him is familiarity with the threefold philosophy mentioned above. It is well known that verbal philosophy, which comprises grammar, dialectic and rhetoric, is of the greatest use here. Grammar teaches the names of terms relating to the  literal sense, and figures of syntax and tropes in sentences in the mystical sense, such as the allegorical, tropological and anagogical senses, which must be learned.84 Anyone who could understand all of these perfectly would be a happy man, but he would happier if he knew how to trace a Latin word to the original Greek or Hebrew, by understanding the properties of a given thing and the reason why its 83 A distinction was drawn in scholastic philosophy between an elicited act of the will (an actus elicitus), which was an act that the will performed or elicited of itself, and an act that the will demanded should be carried out (an actus imperatus). 84 A figure of syntax is a figure of speech that pertains to the syntax of a sentence. An example would be zeugma, in which a verb takes two unrelated objects: ‘He took his coat and his leave’. Such figures were listed systematically by ancient and medieval grammarians.

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name was chosen. He would be happiest, though, who could understand dialectic perfectly, since dialectic, or the art of the syllogism, is at least as useful. It reveals truths hidden in the bowels of nature, explains unperceived universal natures to the common people, and extends the presence of successive instants. It thereby extends the presence of those permanent things beyond instants, so that we may avoid forcing all existing things into one indivisible instant of time.85 And if I am not mistaken, beyond these [three] there are no other logical points that contribute further to our unlocking of scripture, to our solution of debates concerning the presence of God or the necessity of future contingents, or to our speaking succinctly and freely in conformity with scripture, away from the realm of the sophists. Hence, the ancient doctors agreed harmoniously in respect of these three things, and through them, together with others, they were guided in their understanding of the Trinity and other mysteries of the Christian faith. Rhetoric is known to be a servant of this [theological] wisdom from the fourth book of On Christian Doctrine, since it teaches the church to be eloquent, so that it may delight, teach and direct.86 Now, the three kinds of eloquence mentioned in the fourth book of this same On Christian Doctrine of St Augustine, the distinguished doctor, is known by ecclesiastics to be appropriate to time and place. The first of these is grand eloquence, according to which a man speaks deeply, sharply and harshly so that he is heard more obediently, and thus it is spoken to an audience that is hardened by vices. The second is a moderate eloquence, in which beautiful and ornate words of praise are used to urge the audience more freely. It is therefore spoken to an audience that is moderately good or bad. The third kind of eloquence is gentle, in which good observations about the customs of life or blessings of the country are offered, so that the eloquent speaker is heard more intelligibly. And the ecclesiastic speaks in this way to simple, contemplative people, much less to teach than to delight. We learn from these things that we should not sustain a florid or grand kind of speech for too long, but should read, dispute or even preach by turns, as the need dictates. The universal purpose of all Christian rhetoric is to be heard more obediently, willingly and intelligibly in respect of those things that are necessary in life. All florid speech is faulty when it obscures meaning, all grand speech when it is tiring, and all gentle speech when it retards 85 Wyclif makes this same point in his discussion of the nature of time in the Third Treatise on Logic, above (5). 86 Book 4, ch. 3; CCSL 32, p. 118; Teaching Christianity, p. 209.

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comprehension. The best way of speaking is to articulate a beneficial truth plainly, impressing it powerfully [on the mind]. No other eloquence of any kind should be sought. Whilst discussing good personal qualities, Augustine therefore says in the fourth book of On Christian Doctrine, chapter 11, that it is a sign of great intelligence for one to love the truth within words, but not the words themselves: ‘What is the use of a golden key if it cannot open what we want it to? Or what harm is a wooden one which can, when we want nothing except to open what is closed?’87 If it leads to things that help, then, there is no concern over how crudely or irregularly something is spoken. Likewise, it should be more lamentable that a body is beautiful and a soul ugly than the other way around, just as it is more abominable to speak false things eloquently than true things in an ugly way. Now, natural philosophy has three parts, the first of which considers simple natural movables.88 The second part examines mixed bodies, such as impressions of the elements, stones and metals, whereas the third deals with mixed animates, such as plants, sensible things and people, with their natural attributes. Knowledge of these things contributes significantly to our understanding of scripture, as theologians knew who studied mystical and parabolic expositions of the scriptures. In fact, there is not any property of a natural body that is not observed expressly or obliquely somewhere in scripture. Augustine therefore speaks the truth in the second book of On Christian Doctrine when he says that anything that a man has learned from outside Scripture is condemned there if it is harmful, and is found there if it is useful.89 Likewise, ‘although a man will find all things [in Scripture] that he has learned usefully elsewhere, he will find things much more abundantly there that he will find nowhere else. Only in the Scriptures are such things learned with wonderful sublimity and humility.’90 And there is no doubt that knowledge of natural philosophy has to have been acquired first in order to find those philosophical truths in scripture. And this is clearly evident from an example provided by Augustine, thus: humility that is founded on charity is signified by hyssop, both in Exodus 12 and Psalm 10.91 Hyssop is a humble herb in respect of its size, but it is fastened into rock by strong, conjoined roots, and here 87 De Doctrina Christiana, book 4, ch. 11; CCSL 32, p. 134; Teaching Christianity, p. 222. 88 Movable things are said to be simple when they are composed of only one substance. 89 On Christian Doctrine, book 2, ch. 42; CCSL 32, p. 76; Teaching Christianity, pp. 172–3. 90 On Christian Doctrine, book 2, ch. 42; CCSL 32, p. 76; Teaching Christianity, p. 173. 91 On Christian Doctrine, book 2, ch. 16; CCSL 32, p. 50; Teaching Christianity, p. 148.

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it signifies humility in faith, rooted in rock through righteousness. Dioscorides observes that it is hot in the third degree, from which it is noted that the truly humble man subjects himself not only to his superior or his equal, but also, through the ardour of his charity, to a lesser man. He thereby properly fulfils all justice, emulating the righteousness of the saviour in Matthew 3[:15].92 Third, it powerfully destroys sticky catarrh and phlegm that come down from the head, and its sap clears hoarseness of the voice, coughs and lung complaints. In this same way, in fact, the sap of humility, if ingested in sufficiently large quantities, obstructs the noxious humour of pleasure before it flows down from the faculty of reason or the mind into the vital organs. Likewise, it blocks lubricous consent before it runs from the nostrils of discretion, and it prevents any erratic loss of confidence in God, silencing hoarse murmurs against him before they emerge from the throat of human memory.93 Fourth, hyssop offers itself as a special cure against wind, swelling of the spleen and other internal organs, but not against dropsy. Thus, in fact, humility of the heart drives out all inflated pride and all fears of arrogance, since humility is the mother of all other virtues, and is a dedicated antidote against all forms of pride. Indeed, the perception that causes anyone to believe that he is good when he is not, having been praised by himself or another, [and] to delight in his own things more than in words of praise for God, is called blind pride. The apostle’s words in [1] Corinthians 4[:7] teach us that humility destroys each of these and its parts: ‘[W]hat hast thou that thou hast not received? And if thou hast received, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it?’ In short, we must sprinkle the same number of drops of humility as there are blisters of ostentation, hypocrisy or vainglory. These will undoubtedly consume this material and suppress the pompous swelling, washing the skin of conscience clean. The psalmist, wisely contemplating this idea, speaks thus in Psalm 50[:9]: ‘Thou shalt sprinkle me with hyssop, and I shall be cleansed: thou shalt wash me, and I shall be made whiter than snow.’ According 92 Dioscorides (fl. first century ce) was a Greek authority on pharmacological questions. His On the Subject of Medicine became the principal resource on these issues in the medieval period. It was known through an anonymous Latin translation (De Materia Medica). Beryl Smalley suggests that Wyclif ’s knowledge of hyssop probably derived from Bartholomeus Anglicus’s On the Properties of Things (De Proprietatibus Rerum), which is certainly more likely than his being directly familiar with Dioscorides. See ‘Wyclif ’s Postilla on the Old Testament’, p. 292 (n. 4). 93 Smalley suggests that something has perhaps been omitted here, which seems quite likely. See ‘Wyclif ’s Postilla on the Old Testament’, p. 293.

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to Dioscorides, hyssop cleans malice from the body and brings the best colour to the face. In the same way, humility drives envy from the mind and makes our own happiness extend truly to the others with whom we live. Like a colour dispersing, therefore, it expands the tents of charity. Ultimately, hyssop softens pain in the teeth and the inside of bones, calms ringing in the ears, kills worms, and expels demons of the night. Indeed, its digestive liquid cleanses and banishes the source of superfluous fluids. Thus, in fact, when drunk humbly, following the exemplar of the saviour’s works and the holes of his wounds, this sap alleviates and removes all grating of the teeth and sickness of worldly tribulations by means of the hope of future glory. It does this through the healthy tinklings of the world or the tickling of hearts, so that the mind may become free to hear whatever the Lord speaks about peace, harmony and love. It does not allow the worm of conscience to nibble at anything good that it has seen, for it is subjected to the Lord’s will. It powerfully drives out fears of the fourfold demon, and, whilst favouring the humble, it moistens itself with the treacle of humility against the poison of diabolical arrogance. But not until the water of redemption, decocted by the ardour of charity in the saviour’s body, has been fully injected into the viator’s memory, in which the new man is born, will the mind be cleansed of thoughts of things of the world, and the old filth of sin removed by the warm water of contrition born out of humility.94 As Pliny mentions, the herb hyssop was considered to be effective in this way among the ancients, who believed that, without its being sprinkled, their temples could not be cleansed.95 We must not neglect to mention that, according to Platearius, the efficacy of hyssop is more evident in its flowers and leaves than in its stem and roots, through which it is taught that humility is more beneficial to us when it is shown externally.96 Its usefulness is not perceived for a large part 94 In patristic and medieval Christian writing, the new man was someone reborn into a state of spiritual perfection and cleanliness. 95 The reference here is to Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (Naturalis Historia), in which the medicinal properties of hyssop are considered in detail. The herb is introduced in book 25, ch. 87, and is mentioned regularly throughout book 26. See C. Plini Secundi Naturalis Historiae Libri XXXVII, vol. 4, ed. Karl Mayhoff (Leipzig: Teubner, 1897), p. 160; pp. 175–230 passim, and John Bostock and H.T. Riley, The Natural History of Pliny, vol. 5 (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1861), pp. 133–4, for a reliable English translation. 96 Matthaeus Platearius (d. 1161) was an influential physician from the medical school at Salerno in Italy, which became the most important institution of its kind in Western Europe. His most significant work, an alphabetical catalogue of pharmaceutical remedies, is generally known by its Latin incipit, Circa instans. Matthaeus draws heavily on Dioscorides, whom Wyclif mentions earlier in his Principium.

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of its life, but when its flower of the field has appeared, signifying the counsel of hearts, it will receive the fruit of honour and honesty for its flowers. Moreover, ‘his leaf shall not fall off’ (Psalm 1[:3]), because it is safely promised by the master of humility that ‘he that shall humble himself shall be exalted’ (Matthew 23[:12]). Hence, our trusted guardian John boldly asserts in 1 John 3[:2]: ‘it hath not yet appeared what we shall be, but we know that when he shall appear, we shall be like to him’. I linger painstakingly over this explanation for three reasons: first, lest we should think that the sprinkling of hyssop was done casually or indiscriminately in the Old Testament. According to the apostle in 1 Corinthians 10[:11], ‘all these things happened to them in figure’, so there is no doubt that this sprinkling and some other things are fully mysterious. Second, so that we believe that just as the author of scripture intends the properties of hyssop to be hidden in the bowels of nature, together with countless other things, so he undoubtedly also intends the properties of any creature scripture mentions, and as many as the author of nature intended. Hence, scripture is compared meaningfully in the imagination to an infinite abyss or field, since any intelligent person will find as much as he could wish for in either of those places, where he might dig up treasure more precious than all riches, and gather the healthiest, unfading fruits of beautiful truths. Third, so that I may set out to follow those who seek to make humility a fitting foundation on which to plant the saplings of other virtues. Those who have the roots of their intentions planted more deeply in the soil of humility are not moved easily by the wind of ostentation or worldly mutability. It is established from these things that moral philosophy is of great value to the art [of exegesis], as much in a speculative as in a practical sense. This is because holy scripture is itself a theology replete with moral philosophy, yet no theologian needs to study it until the meaning of his philosophical books has been understood. Likewise, practice of this philosophy is necessarily a requisite for the theologian, as has been touched upon partly above and will be revealed more fully here. Who, I ask, would necessarily know the four cardinal virtues, namely, prudence, temperance, fortitude and righteousness, as well as their difference from the three theological virtues, namely, faith, hope and charity, together with the attributes of each, if he had no knowledge of the moral philosophers’ teachings in this area? Or who could know, like a teacher of this material, the ten moral virtues, which are only dealt with sparingly in the Ethics, if he was unfamiliar with Aristotle’s

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teaching?97 Now, these are the ten moral virtues: courage, temperance, generosity, magnificence, [magnanimity,] gentleness, friendliness, truthfulness in speech, wittiness and righteousness.98 Our scripture frequently mentions those ten and their twenty opposing vices, either tacitly or explicitly.99 In the Ethics, our philosopher reveals the most beautiful and useful truths about equity, continence, friendship and other associated things that lead to human happiness or blessedness. Proclaiming these to the ignorant, however, barely [enables them to] penetrate the outer rind of holy scripture. No single statement is sufficient to capture all of the things from books of philosophy that have been mentioned above, since one captures more and another less, in accordance with the way in which God distributed his gifts. Any ecclesiastic, therefore, and especially a prelate, must labour over the sacred letters in accordance with Jerome’s counsel, since Jerome taught secular sciences only with restraint. These [sacred letters] are the mirror from which eternal truths shine out, the route by which the viator is guided to a healthy end, and the consoler through which the souls of the weak are enlivened. Individual men, and especially those of a more mature age, therefore pursue that knowledge by natural inclination, as the ultimate delightful knowable.100 Now, because every disposition is inclined towards actuality, and dispositions are created, fortified and even perfected when their corresponding actualities are realised, the theologian is aware of the need of a third requisite here, which is virtuous work that produces an effect according to the dispositions mentioned above.101 The philosopher presents the greatest human perfection, which is called felicity  97 Aristotle wrote two ethical treatises, which are now known as the Eudemian Ethics and the Nicomachean Ethics. The latter treatise is the one to which Wyclif refers here. Its modern title, which neither Aristotle nor his medieval readers would have used, takes its name from Aristotle’s son, Nicomachus, who edited the text. The Eudemian Ethics are named after his friend Eudemus, who edited this second ethical treatise. Contrary to what Wyclif claims here, Aristotle discusses each of the ten virtues he lists here in some detail in books 3 and 4 of the Nicomachean Ethics, and devotes the whole of book 5 to righteousness.  98 Wyclif here omits the Aristotelian virtue of magnanimity. I have supplied it in order to complete the list.  99 There are twenty vices because each virtue occupies a middle position between a deficiency (the first vice) and an excess (the second vice). 100 Aristotle states that a man who is youthful by temperament (whether young or older) is ill-suited to the study of philosophy. See Nicomachean Ethics 1.3; ‘Wyclif ’s Postilla on the Old Testament’, p. 295 n. 4. 101 See ‘Potentiality (or potency) and actuality’ in the Glossary.

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or blessedness, not as a disposition but as an actuality, and our God as a pure actuality without a disposition, eternally delighted in himself and producing singular acts in their own times according to his most actual will. We know from this that any disposition, as an unfulfilled means [to an end], is inclined towards actuality. Since the order of nature is in essence a divine order, therefore, we know how gravely anyone sins by subverting this divine order, concealing the disposition of virtue under a bushel by not working in proportion to it according to time and place.102 Now, if a man who hides his lord’s money should be condemned eternally because of his avarice, how much more patently should that man be punished, and how much more severely, when he conceals a pearl of knowledge or virtue from the Lord of lords, given to him on condition that he should commit it to usury!103 Indeed, the severity of his punishment should increase to the same degree as virtue exceeds property in value, and the soul exceeds the body. No ecclesiastic in receipt of the gift of knowledge can therefore be excused: he is obliged by virtue of his office to enlighten, perfect and purify. He must enlighten according to holy preaching and scholarly instruction, or at least according to honest intercourse, not by entering into such acts importunately and seeking his own glory, but with modesty, according to the capacity given to him to praise God. One such person works in the schools, and another in the church. In accordance with this, one person works in the world, and another in the cloister of virtues. One works in high contemplation with Mary, praying for the health of the people, and another in honest conversation with Martha, supplying worldly goods according to the needs of the faculties. Thus, we move forward as viators, as ‘members one of another’ (Romans 12[:5]), without disagreement pulling us down, not deprived of rewards but principally making for the unity and perfection of the mystical body of Christ, ‘[u]ntil we all meet … unto a perfect man’ (Ephesians 4[:13]), having been taught ‘all truth’ (John 16[:13]), knowing Holy Scripture fully, and contemplating the Book of Life without fail, in proportion to our meritorious acts and dispositions. Here ends the preface and here begins the tropological explanation of the Song of Songs. 102 The suggestion that no man lights a candle only to place it under a bushel is found in Matthew 5:15, Mark 4:21 and Luke 11:33. 103 That is, that he should have exploited his knowledge appropriately, to its best effect. This is an allusion to the parable of the talents in Matthew 25:14–30; cf. Luke 19:12–27. Cf. Smalley, ‘Wyclif ’s Postilla on the Old Testament’, p. 296 n. 3.

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ii) Preface to Wyclif ’s Dominical Sermons. Latin text: Johannis Wyclif Sermones, vol. 1, ed. Johann Loserth (WS, 1886), pp. 4–5. This short preface to Wyclif ’s many dominical sermons was written some time after he had made the decision to collect and preserve them. It clearly becomes autobiographical in the second sentence of the first paragraph, and grows progressively more obviously so, passing from the abstract third person at the beginning to the first-person plural at the end of the sentence, and then finally to the first-person singular in the following sentence. Wyclif ’s reference to ‘the end of our days’ confirms that he is thinking in autobiographical terms. These sermons were written around 1382–83, only a year or two before his death. They represent a relatively small sample of all of the homiletic material that he produced during his lifetime, some of which was not obviously identified as such, but nevertheless dealt in a sustained way with a biblical topic. See, for example, The Noonday Devil (43).

Since God utterly despises vacuity, and since he abhors idleness in any rational creature, it seems that the faithful man should devote himself earnestly and carefully to his work with the ability bestowed upon him, in proportion to that said ability and the time that the Lord has given him for this purpose. And therefore, so that God’s meaning is clearer and his worthless servant the more excusable, it seems that in that leisure during which we are idle from study, and for the sake of the edification of the church at the end of our days, we are urged that these crude sermons should be gathered together for the benefit of the people, so that those who are readily receptive to the teaching of Christ may be noted, and those who turn away from orthodox truth cast aside. And to this end I speak plainly, together with all other Catholics. And so that this fragment of sermons that I have gathered together may be more easily commented upon (if God should wish it), I have arranged [the sermons] according to individual Sundays of the yearly cycle. Now, those Sundays can correspondingly be divided into six, which is the first perfect circular number, over the course of the year.104 The first part [of the six] is the fourth Sunday of the Lord’s Advent. The second part is the fifth Sunday from the first Sunday after the octave of Epiphany, up until the first Sunday of Septuagesima. The third part extends from that Sunday until Easter Sunday, exclusively, and 104 A perfect number is one that is equal to the sum of its lesser integral divisors. Hence, 6 = 1 + 2 + 3 (= 1 x 2 x 3). A circular number is one which, raised to any power, appears at the end of the resulting number. Hence, 62 = 36; 67 = 279936. As the lowest perfect circular number, 6 was accorded great philosophical significance by medieval thinkers.

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comprises nine Sundays. The fourth part runs inclusively from Easter Sunday until Ascension Day, and contains six Sundays. But the fifth part, which is different, extends inclusively from the first Sunday after the feast of Ascension until Trinity Sunday, and contains, regularly but in a different way, three Sundays. The sixth and final part is the first Sunday after the feast of the Holy Trinity until the Lord’s Advent, and contains more than twenty-five Sundays. And hence, the cycle contains fifty-two Sundays in total, as there is the same number of sevens in the year. But because in the middle of the time of the birth of Christ and elsewhere, many Sundays are occupied with solemn services of saints, so anyone who has the need from God could add a number of sermons beyond this number, which are found in the gospels of any of the saints, and thus Sundays could be adapted more fittingly to the praise of God and the exemplification of the gospel. But first, assuming that the literal sense is known, I strive in the Lord’s sermons to explain the mystical sense concisely, and second, in the manner of Augustine, I attend to any questionable interpretations that might be gleaned from the gospel.105

13 How the devil’s children deviate from scripture and obstruct its teaching Evangelical Opus, book 3, chapter 10. Latin text: Opus Evangelicum III.IV, pp. 36–9. This brief extract from Wyclif ’s final Latin work, which bears the subtitle On Antichrist, illustrates the consequences of failing to live by scriptural precepts, but also rehearses some of his earlier ideas about the nature of the scriptural text itself. The text captures nicely Wyclif ’s perception of the power relation between those with the capacity to interpret the Latin text for themselves and those who require mediation of the text through glossators and translators. The glossators of the four sects, by distorting or concealing its message, Wyclif suggests here, threaten to close off the kingdom of heaven from those who are unable to read it for themselves. They also discourage close scrutiny of the text by those who are able to read and understand it. It is here that Wyclif makes a rare reference to the potential dangers of a Bible being made available in English, an achievement he would later be remembered for (even if he almost certainly had no direct role in the production of the Wycliffite Bible). This extract gives perhaps the most vivid expression of Wyclif ’s frustration with the way in which scriptural teaching was being distorted and obstructed 105 When Wyclif refers to the literal sense here, he means the historical sense.

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by those with the power and the resources to understand it. His words echo the urgency of those of the author of the Prologue to the Wycliffite Bible, John Purvey, who urged that ‘a translatour hath greet nede to studie wel the sentence’ of the scriptural words he is translating.106

It remains for us to illustrate further how the scribes and Pharisees of our own day close off the kingdom of heaven to the very people they are said to guide and introduce to blessedness, since it is obvious that they correspond to the scribes and the Pharisees of the Old Law. Now, just as the latter did not want to reveal Christ to the people because of their greed, for fear that their wealth from sacrifices and oblations should be diminished, so the modern prelates of the four sects do not want Christ’s law to be made known to the public, lest the people, perceiving Christ’s poverty, should take terrestrial riches and worldly glory from them. 107 And just as Chrysostom says, since holy scripture is the kingdom of heaven, they strive to close it, lest the people – and those with power, in particular – should understand it. Holy scripture, and especially the gospel, can be understood in three ways: first, it is understood personally and fundamentally as the first truth itself, which, according to John 10[:35], is the Lord Jesus Christ: ‘The scripture cannot be broken, whom the father hath sanctified and sent into the world’. Second, it is understood as eternal truths, or truths that are necessary in some other way, as in the text of Luke 21[:33]: ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away’. Third, holy scripture is understood least strictly as physical books, which are pages, ink and binding materials.108 And that kind of holy scripture can be burned or immersed in liquid, by contrast with the first and the second kind, in which the faith of viators finds its resting place, just as the clear vision of the blessed will settle in heaven. But we still need to establish how the said scribes and Pharisees close that kingdom to the faithful. First, they do it by obstruction, so that the gospel is not preached to the faithful. Today, they dread the gospel being translated into English or being preached in this way to the people, as is clear from the bishops, the friars and their associates. And thus, they close off the kingdom of heaven in the sense that has 106 Wycliffite Bible, vol. 1, p. 60. 107 The four sects are not the four fraternal orders, but rather the secular clergy, the monks, canons and friars. See Wyclif ’s discussion in On Christ and His Adversary, Antichrist (27ii). 108 This three-part scheme is a simplification of the five-part hierarchy presented in chapter 6 of On the Truth of Holy Scripture (7).

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been explained. They do it in a second way by stopping priests from scrutinising the gospel, since the pope regards the trained theologian, who might either earn dignity in the church militant or receive a papal stipend to labour over the sacred page, as an unwieldy character. Bishops and the associates of these prelates are seen to do the same, which means that the holy page is largely abandoned. And to that end they fashion the decrees and decretals that are the papal laws. In his treatise On Avarice Parisiensis summarises this sentiment in a familiar way, using the following words: Men are kept from studying the decretals by love of divine law and the contradictory nature of the decretals themselves. Of love of the law Gregory says, ‘whoever loves the king, loves his law’. In Psalm [10:5, we are told]: ‘his eyelids examine the sons of men’. But his eyelids are sometimes closed, and sometimes open. The eyelids signify holy scripture, which is obscure to some and open to others. They examine the sons of men to determine whether they love God, since a sign of love of the divine is that one works freely in the study of Holy Scripture. Holy scripture is much scorned because of knowledge of the decretals. Hence, we may say what Sarai said to Abraham in Genesis 16[:5]: ‘Thou dost unjustly with me: I gave my handmaid into thy bosom, and she perceiving herself to be with child, despiseth me’. The handmaid of holy scripture is knowledge of the decretals, who despises holy scripture because of the fruit of monetary reward that follows from her. And in Genesis 21[:10], the oppression that lucrative knowledge of holy scripture causes is signified by the game by which Isaac oppressed Ishmael. Hence, just as the Lord teaches ‘Cast out this bondwoman, and her son’, so perhaps it is necessary for that knowledge to be excluded in large part from the church. But not only is holy scripture scorned by that teaching. God himself, who is lawgiver, is reviled within it. And this seems to be demonstrated figuratively in Leviticus 24[:10], where we read that ‘the son of a woman of Israel, whom she had of an Egyptian man, fell at words in the camp with a man of Israel’, and blasphemed against the God of Israel. Thus, students of the decretals, who are Israelites in respect of the part of knowledge that they received from the law of God, and Egyptians in respect of the part that they had by way of worldly wisdom, are blaspheming against the God of Israel for as long as they call the law that he gave useless, like chaff. In Isaiah 48[:17] we read the following: ‘I am the Lord thy God that teach thee profitable things’. The chaff, rather, are those things of which we read in Matthew 3[:12]: ‘the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire’. Likewise, [we are told] in Augustine, ‘If you follow chaff, you will be made into chaff’.109 109 This is a quotation from William Peraldus (d. 1271), a Dominican theologian who studied in Paris. His On Avarice was part of his massive Summa on the Vices. See Summa Virtutum ac Vitiorum, vol. 2 (Lyon: Guillaume Rouillé, 1585), pp. 163–4. A

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And Parisiensis concludes that ‘knowledge of the decretals is changeable, worldly, turbulent, inflatable and without remedy’. And it proclaims its adherents. Third, it seems that modern satraps close this kingdom of heaven principally by striving after the sense of scripture and tormenting its professors, since they now say in the schools that holy scripture is false to the highest degree. But the meaning of scripture should be assembled in accordance with its own logic. [When it is not], the authority of holy scripture diminishes, especially where it concerns the quiddity of the consecrated host. Hence, they place greater trust in John of God, who heretically claimed that nothing is signified by the pronoun this in ‘This is my body’.110 Likewise, whenever Scripture says that the host is ‘bread’, as in Luke’s ‘daily bread’ and the Apostle’s ‘bread that we break’ (1 Corinthians 10[:16]), the heretic’s gloss suggests that this is an accident without a substance, which cannot be bread. And many heretical glosses of this kind are imposed on scriptural doctrine, as is apparent to any student of the laws of Antichrist. Yet it is not these laws alone that infect Scripture, but also civil laws, the laws of kingdoms, logic and the mathematical sciences. When these are abused, they are not directed towards honouring the Lord. And the friars, who are the tail to this head, disparage those faithful people who adhere to the doctrine of this kingdom by calling them heretics. They therefore attack those professors [of scripture] in many different ways, with trifling citations and other treacherous acts of persecution sufficient to achieve their purpose. Now, there is neither sufficient language nor sufficient time to describe the heresies that grew out of these sects, as they each honour their own sect and its writings far beyond the scriptural sect of the Lord Jesus Christ. Whoever is the focus of their prayers or their absolution, he will enter into the kingdom of heaven without the pains of purgatory. And thus, they themselves will not enter into the kingdom of heaven, nor do they allow others to enter. Yet it is a Catholic precept, if anyone should dare to publish it, that new edition and translation of this text is in preparation by a team led by Richard G. Newhauser of Arizona State University. Note that the final quotation from Augustine would appear to be nothing more than a concise summary of one of his ideas. 110 John of God (Johannes de Deo, d. 1267) was a Portuguese author of introductory material on canon law, whose writings were influential throughout the later medieval period. He should not be confused with the later figure of the same name (1495–1550), who founded the Brothers Hospitallers.

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there should be no other law than the law of the Lord Jesus Christ. The other customs of the world should be accepted only in as far as they are regulated by this law of the Lord. Otherwise, as James says, they are ‘earthly, sensual and devilish’ wisdom (3[:15]). The church should therefore make its way to heaven directly by following the route that Christ teaches, in words as in deeds. But alas, today the people that are called the church of Antichrist are seeking to supplant it, and hence the kingdom of heaven is closed and the mouth of the inferno (as the prophets predict) is opened. And it is therefore evident, in part, how the first of eight woes is occasioned by Antichrist and his disciples.

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III: SACRAMENTAL QUESTIONS

Wyclif ’s views on sacramental theology are difficult to summarise collectively, but much of what he said on the topic was generally concerned with removing a particular sacrament from its ceremonial or accidental trappings, rather than questioning its necessity. The only sacrament about which he expressed some doubt is confirmation, but, even here, it would seem to be its administration at the hands of bishops that is the true target of the doubts he expresses. His beliefs about the process of sacramental change in the eucharist represent a more radical and controversial departure from orthodox teaching, but, once again, the need of this sacrament is never questioned. Because of the complexity of Wyclif ’s ideas about the eucharist, and of the metaphysical principles that inform it, as well as the volume of writing dedicated to this topic, it will be covered separately in Chapter IV. Augustine had famously argued that sacraments were signs of holy things, and this broad principle informed sacramental theology throughout the medieval period.1 Peter Lombard, acknowledging Augustine’s influence, offers a more formal definition in the fourth book of the Sentences, which, like the corresponding book of Wyclif ’s Trialogue, was devoted to sacramental questions. A sacrament, he suggests there, is ‘a visible sign of an invisible grace’.2 It acted as the principal ritualised means of grace for the medieval Christian community. The seven sacraments were conceptualised by the scholastics in a precise way. A distinction was drawn between the perceptible sacrament itself (the sign of the holy thing) and the invisible and insensible sacramental thing (res sacramenti). From the thirteenth century, Atistotelian hylemorphism had a profound influence on the description of the sacraments, which were henceforth generally analysed according to their matter (Greek hyle) and their form (morphé). Wyclif adopted this distinction throughout most of his sacramental writings. Theologians were not always in agreement as to what constituted the matter and  1 Epistula 138; CSEL 44, p. 131; Works of St Augustine: Letters 100–155, p. 228.  2 Sententiae in IV libris distinctae, vol. 2, ed. Ignatius Brady, third edition (Rome: Editiones Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas, 1981), 4, dist. 1, ch. 2; Peter Lombard, The Sentences, Book 4: On the Doctrine of Signs, trans. Giulio Silano (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2010), p. 3.

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the form of a given sacrament, and Wyclif occasionally departs quite markedly from dominant tendencies. After the eucharist, it was the sacrament of penance to which Wyclif devoted most of his attention. This sacrament traditionally and doctrinally consisted in three things, as formalised in Canon 21 of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215: contrition of the heart, confession of the mouth and satisfaction (or completion) of works. Alithia and Phronesis identify these at the beginning of their debate with Pseustis in the Trialogue (16). The first and second require little explanation. Contrition was required in the subject prior to his or her confessing to the priest by mouth, but, after hearing the confession, the priest’s absolution served to eliminate the guilt (culpa) arising from the mortal sin and the eternal punishment (poena) associated with it. The sin had still been committed, however, and the process of absolution necessarily entailed that the sinner, having confessed, still had to make amends for, or expiate, his or her sin through the process of satisfaction. This was regarded as a duty owed to God, through whose mercy the sinner’s guilt and eternal punishment had been annulled. The process typically involved prayers and devotional actions prescribed by the confessor. By the later medieval period, it was construed as a means of avoiding temporal punishment in purgatory. Wyclif ’s concern with the sacrament of penance lay predictably with the role of the priest as confessor, and his comments on auricular confession are directed against the need for sacerdotal intercession rather than against the sacrament itself. The authority of Canon 21 of the Fourth Lateran Council (the famous Omnis utriusque sexus decree), which required that all members of the Christian community should confess to their parish priest at least once per year, is questioned systematically in On the Eucharist and Penance, a late treatise which, in spite of its title, is devoted almost entirely to the second of these sacraments (17). It is suggested here that popes have no right, and indeed no need, to make sacramental prescriptions of the kind enshrined in Canon 21, since penance has scriptural authority. For the medieval church, however, the priest’s duty to hear confession and, as God’s minister, to absolve sin, did have biblical authority, according to Catholic interpretation. Peter was told by Christ in Matthew 16:18–19 that he was the rock on which Christ would build his church, and that he had the keys to the kingdom of heaven: And I say to thee: That thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give to

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thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose upon earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven.

Peter’s status here as the rock (Greek petra) on which Christ will build his church had long been interpreted as an indication that his successors, as Christ’s vicars, would enjoy comparable privileges. Like Peter, they would possess the keys to the kingdom of heaven, and would have the power to bind and loose, which the medieval church interpreted as a sign that its ministers had the power to forgive sin (that is, to loose penitent sinners from the bonds of punishment). For Wyclif, however, very few priests could truly be Peter’s (and by extension, Christ’s) vicars, which necessarily meant that only a very small proportion of them had the power of the keys and the capacity to absolve sin. Peter made no claim to be Christ’s vicar, so neither should contemporary priests and bishops claim to be Peter’s, unless they are able to live in a condition of fitting humility and poverty (17). Though Wyclif clearly felt that confessors could have some role in the church if they were to live by St Peter’s example, it is clear that he had little hope of this happening in any meaningful way. As he makes clear in the Trialogue, however, contrition of the heart is what he perceived penance formally to be. The other parts were merely accidental parts of the sacrament. Peter, after all, did not insist that we should confess to a priest (17). As Wyclif argues in On Blasphemy, the Latin verb confiteri (to confess) simply means ‘to acknowledge error freely’, which hardly suggests that the priest must necessarily be present.3 Wyclif says little about satisfaction, though it is clear that, like auricular confession to a priest, he did not perceive it to be an essential part of the sacrament, but merely an accident that might adhere to it. Wyclif ’s interpretation of the sacrament of marriage resembles in one important detail his conception of penance. Just as contrition of the heart served as the essential element of the sacrament of penance, so the marriage vows had their truest reality for him in the minds of the contracting partners and the mind of God (20). Though this is not an original position (Gratian, the father of medieval canon law, made the same claim), it is one that is clearly very characteristic. His description of the quiddity of marriage is similarly conventional. His characterisation of the quiddity or essence of marriage as ‘the  3 De Blasphemia, p. 143.

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legal joining of partners by which, according to the law of God, it is permitted for them to beget children without offence’ goes back to Augustine, who famously regarded the begetting of children as one of the three good things (bona) that marriage could bring about.4 Like Wyclif, he believed nevertheless that chastity was a more desirable state, and both felt that chastity in marriage was far preferable to procreation. What is arguably the most striking aspect of Wyclif ’s understanding of marriage is what he says about the nature of the vows. Though he insists that they need only exist in the mind during the votive process, he devotes an entire chapter of the Trialogue to how they should be articulated if they are spoken aloud. Alithia opens the discussion by suggesting that it is generally accepted that the vows of consent should be spoken in the present tense, but that legists suggest that consent in the future tense with subsequent carnal consummation is equally valid. These different conceptions of the matrimonial vows of consent originated respectively with the theologian Peter Lombard (d. 1164), author of the Sentences, and the Italian legal scholar Gratian (fl. twelfth century). Pope Alexander III (d. 1181) gave ecclesiastical recognition to each in a decree entitled Veniens ad Nos, which stated that consent should be given in the present tense unless later ratified by sexual consummation.5 Phronesis here subtly subverts both the Lombard’s and Gratian’s pronouncements on consent, arguing that vows should be spoken in the future tense, but without the need for sexual consummation. Wyclif ’s choice of the future tense is a purely logical one, since only a future vow, as Phronesis argues, can be ‘compossible’ with marriage. This interpretation of the votive process is an original and provocative one, though it is, of course, arguably undermined by Wyclif ’s entirely orthodox belief that spoken vows are entirely unnecessary. The remaining four sacraments (baptism, confirmation, holy orders and extreme unction) are each examined in detail by Wyclif in the Trialogue, but since his treatment of these sacraments is less obviously controversial, and since these extracts have already been translated elsewhere, I do not include that material here.

 4 De Nuptiis et Concupiscentia, i.15, 17. See CSEL 42, pp. 229–30.  5 CICPS IV.13.2, cols 696–7.

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On Civil Dominion, book 3, ch. 25. Latin text: De Civili Dominio, vol. iv, pp. 567–8. Wyclif discusses the first of the seven sacraments in a variety of documents, and also offers a definition in a dedicated chapter of the final book of the Trialogus. In this short extract from the fourth volume of On Civil Lordship, he provides a concise explanation of baptism by water and by wind (baptism through the Holy spirit, generally known as baptism of fire), and an account of its necessary remedial function for humankind in the wake of the fall. In the Trialogus, he considers baptism of water and wind alongside baptism of blood, the last of which pertains only to the death of martyrs, which is also mentioned briefly here. Wyclif does not make an explicit distinction between the matter and the form of baptism here or in the Trialogus, but the scholastics generally held that the form of the baptism was the words spoken by the priest, and the matter the washing or imbrication of the subject undergoing the baptismal process. Only when combined with the priest’s words did the washing or sprinkling properly become a sacrament.6

We know that all sons of Adam contract original sin from their parents when they are born by the common reproductive process. Because of their parents’ sin there is a deficiency in their own righteousness, for which they would be damned forever if it were not made good by Christ. And this is the apostle’s understanding in Romans 5[:18]: ‘[A]s by the offence of one, unto all men to condemnation; so also by the justice of one, unto all men to justification of life.’ It would be contrary to divine justice if a man who lacked the righteousness that he owed to his God had to make amends for his sin alone, on pain of eternal punishment. Because he always owes a debt of further servitude in order to do enough, a sinner cannot compensate sufficiently in and of himself for the sin that has been committed. Nobody, therefore, can be saved unless he is baptised by the baptism of wind. And given the law of God and the fall of man, it is necessary for everyone who is subject to original sin and who wishes to be saved to be baptised by water and by the blood issuing from the side of the crucified Christ. As a sign of this, it should be the case that after the publication of the gospel man should be baptised in his own baptismal water, unless there is an excuse that has been accepted by God, as happens in the case of one who is gloriously martyred or who dies in a charitable act, so that he or she is not  6 Sententiae 4, dist. 3, cap. 1–2.

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consigned to damnation because he or she has not been baptised with baptism of water. And it is clear that it is impossible for original sin to inhere in the human race when it is not actually in a human soul, because nothing is subject to original sin except a man, and he is not a man unless he has an intellective soul. His matter does not sin any more than the branch or the trunk of a tree. Original sin is nothing but a culpable defect in moral righteousness, which dates from the origin of the human race. All original sin therefore presupposes the person of a man as its subject. It seems that the examples that we humans devour to sustain our belief in original sin are the cause of many errors. The mystical sense therefore teaches that the human genus, in its succession from the first man of this genus up until the newest-born, is a tree, held upright by its roots. And just as when the roots of a tree become infected they infect the rest of the tree that sprouts from them, so it is with the human race. The second example concerns a contaminated spring, by whose contaminant streams are infected. Examples such as these can be easily understood. Construing original sin as a positive entity, however, which inheres in the human race across the course of a generation, is a source of error.7 The third example concerns human laws in which a father offends against his king, causing his whole generation to be worthy of disinheritance. How much more is this so if one offends against the king of kings! Just as a generation shares in the merit of its father, so it should also share in his demerit.

15 The foreknown do not properly receive the sacrament of baptism, but may still enjoy baptismal grace On the Church, ch. 19 (extract). Latin text: De Ecclesia, pp. 467–8. Wyclif here qualifies the definitions of baptism that he offers elsewhere by arguing that the foreknown do not receive baptism, even though they may receive the sacramental words from a priest and be washed in water, since they carry the burden or defect of original sin perpetually. He mentions here that their acts of righteousness in the world may suspend their sinful state by God’s grace, but he is careful to explain that this does not remove but merely mitigates their eternal punishment.   7 Here, Wyclif reiterates his earlier point that original sin requires an intellective subject in which to inhere. His suggestion that it is erroneous to construe original sin as a positive thing is consistent with scholastic conceptions of sin as a privation, or lack.

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It seems that the foreknown do not properly receive the sacrament of baptism, and that their original sin is thus not wholly washed away. This is clear from what Augustine of Ireland says in the fifth chapter of [the first] book of [On the Wonders of Scripture].8 Anyone who is foreknown remains perpetually lacking in final perseverance, which is the gravest of sins and is completely indelible. Consequently, baptism does not completely remove it. Just as the grace by which men are predestined is one thing and the grace by which they are righteous at a given moment is another, so the sin of the foreknown or of final impenitence is one thing and the sin of their present unrighteousness another.9 Because these terms seem foreign to many, and mean more than they appear to, I have explained them elsewhere, showing how those different kinds of grace and sin are described in equivocal ways, and how they are mutually opposed. All of the foreknown bear the defect [of original sin] perpetually, but their wickedness may be suspended for a time by a form of grace such as baptismal grace on account of their present righteousness. If I should be asked why any of the foreknown should deserve to exist in grace according to their present righteousness, I would say that according to those who speak correctly and without equivocation they never merit blessedness, because they are never worthy of blessedness, but they may deserve for their eternal punishment to be mitigated, just as they may deserve certain worldly goods. God therefore redeems the foreknown not to a state of blessedness but to a milder form of eternal punishment, and all of the damned are redeemed in this same way. The foreknown are correspondingly absolved of sin not so that they are entirely free of eternal punishment, but so that their eternal punishment is less severe. As Lincolniensis tells us, it is therefore not an act but a defect that redeems sins, whose wickedness is suspended by temporal grace.

16 The three traditional elements of the sacrament of penance Trialogue, book 4, ch. 23, ‘On the Sacrament of Penance and its Parts’. Latin text: Johannis Wyclif Trialogus et Supplementum Trialogi, ed. Gotthard Lechler (Oxford: Clarendon, 1869), pp. 326–9. Cf. Wyclif:  8 PL 35, cols 2195–6.   9 Wyclif discusses this fundamental distinction in detail in book 3, chapter 7 of the Trialogue. See Trialogus, pp. 150–4; John Wyclif: Trialogus, trans. Stephen Lahey, pp. 129–32.

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Trialogus, trans. Stephen E. Lahey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 259–62. In this chapter from the Trialogue, Wyclif provides a concise philosophical definition of the sacrament of penance. Alithia begins by considering the three elements identified by Aquinas as the matter of the sacrament: confession, contrition and absolution. Its form was generally held to be the words of absolution uttered by the minister. Phronesis identifies the three instead as the form by which confession is made, later dismissing them as mere accidents. This marks a significant departure not merely from Thomistic thinking but from contemporary sacramental teaching more generally. It reduces the defining constituents of penance to little more than decorative accessories. Indeed, they are not strictly parts of the sacrament at all, since they are identified with neither its matter nor its form but merely with the form by which repentance is realised. From this point onwards, Phronesis dispenses with the Aristotelian distinction, declaring simply that, for him, the sacrament of penance properly exists in the heart. He goes on to explain how auricular confession to a priest, though it may be genuinely beneficial to some, is strictly redundant in sacramental terms. Like other theologians, Wyclif used the Latin noun poenitentia to designate the sacrament of penance, but the term could also identify the works of penance or satisfaction, or even the penitential state or condition. As is to be expected, Alithia and Phronesis are most often using the word in the first sense, and I have accordingly chosen to render it as penance in such cases. Where poenitentia identifies works of penance, I have translated it accordingly in order to avoid confusion. Though the sacrament was often called penitence in the vernacular in fourteenth-century England (Chaucer’s Parson uses penitence in this sense), the latter term is more obviously ambiguous than penance is, and has therefore been avoided here.10

Alithia. I see that the human institutions that we call the laws of marriage are not greatly pleasing to you, so I ask you to give your interpretation of the sacrament of penance. I find it difficult to describe because of our carping opponents, but it is generally said nevertheless that penance, like a harp, has three parts, which are contrition of the heart, confession of the mouth and satisfaction of work. I find it hard to assign a genus to penance, however, since these three parts are each themselves of a different genus. Phronesis. Do not imagine that those parts are the quantitative, qualitative or quidditative parts of penance, as your reasoning suggests. I construe them instead as the form by which the contrite person is said to 10 Stephen Lahey uses penance and penitence interchangeably as labels for the sacrament in his translation of this text. See Wyclif: Trialogus, pp. 259–62.

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repent, and it would therefore seem to me that penance properly exists in the heart. Those other things, which are called the parts of penance, are its accidents, which are complementary to it. According to the text of Psalm [70:22], they are signified by the physical parts of that instrument: ‘I confess to you, my God, with the harp’. The main part of the instrument, on which the nails are impressed, denotes contrition of the heart, whereas the large, curved part, which causes the sound, signifies confession by the mouth. The third part, which connects these two to each other, signifies satisfaction of work. Lyres are therefore like particular expressions of the sin that a man has committed, which is alleviated by the fingers of priests. And thus the penitential whole is a combination of many things. The first, by which the contrite person confesses to the Lord, is insensible, and solely in the heart. Although we give it little thought, it is nevertheless of the greatest strength, and without it the others would be worth nothing. The second is the penitential aggregate of that penance and the spoken expression made uniquely to God, and both the fathers of the Old Law and the fathers of the New Testament confessed in this way. But the third is penance made up of the two preceding kinds and the private declaration made secretly to the priest. We devote excessive attention to this because of our desire for monetary reward, yet there is disagreement among many as to whether this third kind of penance is valuable of necessity, or merely by virtue of an accepted authority. But we should share the belief of John of God in this matter, who, in the Glossa Ordinaria on the Decretals, after refuting many opinions, says that Innocent III invented this [form of penance], and drew up the law All [the faithful] of either sex, which is expressed in the fifth decretal.11 But it seems to me, as I have explained [elsewhere] at greater length, that it would be of greater use to the church if it were content simply with the first and second forms of penance. The third harms many people and pours wickedness on to each [of the others], but it nevertheless brings much good to the church. Since it could work well, therefore, it seems to me that it is necessary by supposition, and, thus, to those who are predestined by God to confess in this way it is simply necessary. Many, out of shame, confess their sins before God and then complete the prescribed penitential works, but, since they fear having to confess that same 11 On John of God, see Chapter II, n. 110. The law that concerns Phronesis here is the twenty-first Canon of Innocent III at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), as described in the Introduction, above. For the text of the twenty-first canon and a lucid English translation, see Decrees, vol. 1, p. 245.

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sin again, they generally preserve themselves from sin by confessing regularly.12 But nobody should believe that without such auricular confession a man is not made truly contrite and is not truly saved, for Peter demands general penance, as is known from Acts 2, and it is sufficient.13 Otherwise, all of the dead from the time of the ascension of Christ until the time of Innocent III would have been damned, which we would be wrong to believe, since we think that more are damned due to that particular papal law and its observation than would have been damned without it. Similarly, nobody granting absolution generally knows the gravity of the sin confessed, just as he does not know if the person confessing is contrite, but he knows very well that if he or she is not then the sin is not erased. How, then, can he act so deceptively before Christ as to offer absolution and prescribe penitential works when he is ignorant of their proportional relation to the sin? Similarly, it is not lawful to weigh the church down with new traditions, and especially questionable ones, when the older traditions are sufficient. The laws concerning confessions that are provided in Scripture were adequate for a thousand years and more. How, therefore, was the third law of penance so unwarrantably introduced? It seems to me that observation of this papal law should be admitted precisely to the extent that the discretion of the person confessing judges it to be of benefit to him. Alithia. I see, brother, that you have given too little consideration to this papal law, and it seems to me that you will examine the confessions heard by the confessors who are bound by it only superficially. Likewise, you neglect absolution from punishment and guilt, and the plenary remissions granted by the pope, and you also say nothing of the gravity of the sin that prelates often commit by threatening major excommunication. And this decree of the Roman Curia would thus simply be undone in such cases. Phronesis. I see that you make many true claims, since scriptural teaching tells us enough about how we should live, without novel additions from the Roman Curia. When such teaching has been observed, a man should thus be worthy of salvation at the end of his life. Every kind 12 Completion of penitential works (often simply called completion of penance) refers to the process of satisfaction. 13 Acts 2:38: ‘But Peter said to them: Do penance, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ, for the remission of your sins: and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost’.

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of fiction has therefore been proclaimed to maintain subjection and a misguided obedience to the pope, and blasphemous greed is the damnable root of this. Let us therefore look into the law of perfect liberty at what the Lord has taught and commanded, accomplish that and abstain from what is forbidden, without considering those laws that have been newly instituted, and that is enough.14 Whatever goes beyond this is much less a result of evil than it is evil itself, and generally blinds many people. And in respect of all vows, promises and other private observances, the faithful individual should consider the omnipotence of our Lord Jesus, and direct his soul’s whole intention towards living more perfectly in the future, for the good of the church. He must show repentance for his past, sinful life, confirming in himself his resolve not to sin further in this way. And it seems to me that this suffices for the removal of guilt and for salvation, however much those in higher places oppose this idea. In all of these matters, though, the faithful should take care not to use sophistry with God. Christ says [to Peter] in Matthew 16[:19], ‘whatsoever thou shalt bind, etc.’. Let the faithful man therefore ask the false bishop, who appeals to these words of the Lord, if he is a true vicar of Peter by virtue of the sanctity of his life, which should be like the life of Peter. And if this presumptuous hypocrite should shamelessly answer in the affirmative, then he would be wise to seek to live like Peter, especially in respect of performing miracles and [living in] humble poverty. Peter himself never presumed to have such power, so by what token does this hypocrite make such a claim, when such a contentious assertion itself contradicts him? And since he neither proves nor can prove that he is a true vicar of Peter or even a member of the church, what is it to him that God delivered such power to St Peter? Now, if he is not thus foolishly claiming or supposing that he is Peter’s vicar, under what pretence does he presume that he is above Peter? It does not seem that [Christ’s] statement suggests a power greater than Peter’s, but rather that anything that will be bound or loosed on the earth, in accordance with the judgement of Christ and the church triumphant, will thus be loosed in heaven. What if he errs in loosing or binding his subjects? What then does he share with the said Peter? What if these contradictions lead him to excommunicate, or damn or consign to flames 14 The opening words of this sentence deliberately echo the beginning of James 1:25: ‘But he that hath looked into the perfect law of liberty, and hath continued therein, not becoming a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work; this man shall be blessed in his deed’.

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someone speaking in this way, as though they were a heretical infidel? Who would doubt that this would be a blind assertion of Antichrist? It is not the teaching of the church that he should be Peter’s true vicar, nor that he should be saved. Nor does it follow, if he were to end this antichristian presumption, that the keys and benefits of the church would die. Rather, with all such ostentation and all such Caesarean absolution and excommunication ceasing, the church would exist in the people confessing to Christ, but unknown to us.15 What could be a greater heresy than for such people, living in this way, to make a pact to become vicars of St Peter, but through simoniacal agreement? God can reveal such heretical pomp to the faithful antiphrastically, and destroy it when he wishes. Let us therefore live in accordance with the creed of the son of God, that is, according to the law of the Scripture of the Lord Jesus Christ. Let us live in conformity with him, and condemn such presumptuous ostentation of Antichrist, and God will provide for his faithful subjects and lead them from treachery. We believe the glorious martyrs suffered the terror of the night, the arrow that flies in the day, and the business that walks about in the dark (Psalm 90[:5–6]). Why, then, should they not also have suffered invasion and the Noonday Devil (Psalm [90:6]), which is the fourth and greatest danger to our mother that God permits in the most manifest way in Antichrist? Such disciples of Antichrist have the keys of hell and not of heaven, since the keys of the kingdom of heaven are the powers of binding and loosing in humility and in the other virtues, and these are founded on the teaching of scripture, and preserved from the blight of Antichrist.

17 Why annual confession to a priest is not sacramentally necessary On the Eucharist and Penance, or On Confession. Latin text: Iohannis Wyclif De Eucharistia Tractatus Maior, Accedit Tractatus de Eucharistia et Poenitentia sive De Confessione, ed. Johann Loserth (WS, 1892), pp. 329–43. This short treatise is devoted principally to penance, but it begins with a very brief reiteration of Wyclif ’s views on eucharistic theology. The treatise was probably produced at Lutterworth, and probably represents some of his last words and thoughts on the topic. Thomson regards it as a commentary 15 This is a reiteration of the principle that the elect are known to God alone.

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on the omnis utriusque sexus decree of the Fourth Lateran Council, and argues that here Wyclif ‘breaks new ground’ in the discussion and analysis of the sacrament of penance.16 Wyclif is here careful to stress that annual confession to a priest is neither necessary nor intrinsically helpful, and that practice of confession has itself become degenerate and commercialised. Nevertheless, he acknowledges that there are instances of such confession that have been beneficial, and insists that these have happened of necessity (once again reciting his familiar formula, ‘all that happens, happens by necessity itself ’).

Chapter 1 There are two principal sacraments about which the church is deceived, namely the sacrament of the Eucharist and the sacrament of penance. In respect of the first, Antichrist has led it astray so gradually that it has become ignorant of the quiddity of the perceptible sacrament. He has even made it overlook the fact that any priest, however unworthy a confessor he has been, regularly does more than the infinite miracles that the fathers of the Old Testament or the apostles did. His miracle, though, is imperceptible and implausible. It is imperceptible because our senses tell us that the consecrated sacrament is bread, as it had been before, and it is implausible because the confection of the bread is erroneously held to lead to its annihilation, or rather, to the dissolution of prime matter. Because prime matter is the foundation of nature, God would need either to have created excess matter at the beginning of the world or to have brought prime matter into being solely so that the sacerdotal disciples of Antichrist could blasphemously and unlawfully consecrate the body of Christ from it, before miraculously destroying it without cause. These are such infinitely ridiculous claims, which the faithful dismiss by saying that this sacrament is naturally bread and sacramentally the body of Christ. [Our opponents] can find no good reason why God should wish to destroy the very foundation of nature, just as [none] believe that Christ’s body could naturally have more matter and be denser or larger than it had been before. Unless they entertain the erroneous fantasy that it is converted into nothing, however, they cannot see into what that matter might be converted. Even though conversion had been invoked earlier by the church, the matter of the host could not be changed into the matter of Christ’s body through this process, or into Christ’s body or any part thereof, since such a conversion seems untenable [to them]. We habitually speak, nevertheless, about the bread being converted into the body of Christ, and say that 16 Latin Writings, p. 76.

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at an earlier time an unrighteous man was converted into the son of God, but all such conversion entails a certain process of change, so that the thing converted becomes a thing, or a kind of thing, that it had not been before. [Our opponents] cannot imagine the matter [of the host] being converted in this way, and are therefore compelled to say that is has been annihilated by virtue of such a miracle. The faithful distance themselves from this madness. The children of Antichrist fall into impossible errors in respect of penance, since they do not know how the new version of penance that the pope introduced can be established.17 They do not know on what evidence to build doctrine, nor do they perceive the evidence of Scripture itself. They do not even know whether a penitent person is contrite or if his sin has been removed by God, just as they do not know the nature or the scale of the works of penance that must be imposed. Generally, the quiddity of this penance is determined by what is revealed to the priest, with contrition preceding this and the penitent’s satisfaction of work following consequently. And thus, as certain people say, the sacrament of penance is of a variety of kinds, and it is not possible for its three parts, namely contrition of the heart, confession of the mouth and satisfaction of work, to occur simultaneously in time. Having highlighted the inadequacy of such an irregular definition of penance, we must now consider the sacrament itself in greater detail. We should note first the popular observation that nobody worthy of blessedness would be denied salvation simply because, having reached the age of discretion, he had not confessed his every sin to a priest. Many saints were saved before that law was published, by virtue of both the Old Law and the law of grace. This would seem to suggest that the Holy Spirit paid little attention to so necessary a sacrament. We read in Acts 2 that Peter, Paul and the other apostles converted many thousands of the population, but I do not recollect any of those converts accepting the new sacrament from his priest. Neither Christ nor the Baptist nor any apostle used the penitential sacrament that we know. John of God, doctor of the decretals, says that the sacrament had its origin with a certain act of papal institution, which some people say was performed by Innocent III.18 And confirmation is given by On Acts of Repentance and Remission, in the chapter entitled ‘Every Person of Either Sex’.19 That claim is challenged in many ways elsewhere. 17 This is another reference to canon 21 of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). 18 See Chapter II n. 110. 19 Decretal. Gregor. IX, lib. V, tit. XXXVIII, De Poenitentiis, etc., CICaPS cols 887–8.

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Chapter 2 Discussion of this material is fraught with risk because of the antiquated traditions and customs that surround it, and because it is revered by the many and the great. Indeed, it is as though nobody would be worthy of salvation without it! I will therefore proceed more safely by considering what claims can justifiably be made of this sacrament, invented as it was by human tradition. It seems from the beginning that penance may be a spiritual restraint against sins, both those that have been committed and must be erased and those that may be committed, of which it makes us wary. Many people experience sorrow and shame as they confess, and therefore guard against sinning in the same way again, having had to reveal their sin to their own priest. And thus it seems that this sacrament may be a remedy against a sin that needs to be washed away, whether committed by a man or a woman, but it is also a special preservative medicine that protects us against falling into the same sin again. And if that sacrament were not effective, it seems that Christ would have given his apostles and their sacerdotal successors the power of the keys redundantly. I ask you why Christ gave his apostles the power of binding and loosing, unless revealing sins to a priest who binds or looses should make those sins known? And who could doubt that nobody has absolved anyone of a sin he did not know about? On these questions we have the words of Augustine, especially in On Visiting the Sick, and the writings of many other doctors, together with countless papal pronouncements.20 How could anyone confess the sins he had committed to his own priest except by ear, hidden away from him, with only those two knowing? This is what the Decretal ‘Every Person of Either Sex’ teaches. And how could a sin be wiped away unless satisfaction were made for that same sin through the prescribed works of penance? Much evidence of this kind is presented by eager but ignorant people, who rely on the freedom of the law of the Lord to oppose us. I respond to these points thus: the penitent sinner whose sins may be washed away must have contrition in his heart, but it is not equally necessary for him to confess verbally to a priest. I acknowledge that such confession is necessary when the priest is already in dialogue The Latin text is reproduced with a modern English translation in Decrees, vol. 1, p. 245. 20 For the text of On Visiting the Sick, which was often mistakenly attributed to Augustine, see PL 40, col. 1147.

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with the sinner, but it is not absolutely necessary to anyone. Many martyrs were not in the presence of a priest or did not have access to one [before they died]. And many times under the Old Law and the New Law alike, people were saved in their own land without such confession. But since all that happens, happens by necessity, and since such verbal confession is beneficial to many people, it seems that these people must necessarily confess their sins. And again, when they feel the need thus to avail themselves of this auricular form of sacramental confession that was instituted by men, they should necessarily confess to their own parish priests. I do not believe, of course, that this should be done by every viator once a year, since the Baptist and many other saints were saved when they had never confessed in this way. Now, the sacrament of penance itself does not lie within the power of men. God freed his church so that by his grace and the contrition of the hearts of the faithful they could be saved without this kind of penitential confession, as is evident in respect of Peter, Paul, Mary Magdalene and many others. Those three were saved by the faith of Scripture, though it is not said that they had been cleansed by holy confession. It seems certain that Christ would have been negligent towards his church if such confession had indeed been necessary, and yet would not be revealed until the time of the loosing of Satan. Indeed, it would seem to be blasphemous to declare that the saints, before the publication of the decretal, had sinned by omitting this kind of penance. And again, it seems certain that, if the publication of this law had been so reasonable in the time of Innocent III, it would have seemed reasonable earlier, and men would therefore have sinned by omitting this form of penance before that time. Chapter 3 We must now investigate who has the power to establish such laws in greater depth. It is widely assumed that it is probably God alone, the Lord of time, because only he has power over the duration of the world, over the implementation of law and over the kind of people who are guilty of sin. The pope does not himself have the power to make such a law, since God did not intend him to make it, and even allowed humankind the freedom to resist such penance. One pope or another could still exhort us to be penitent in such a way, but he does not have the power to require everyone who has reached the age of discretion to confess all of his sins to his own priest once a year, under pain of damnation. The pope can neither damn nor save a man, though the

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devil’s children and God’s children are respectively the cause of many people’s damnation and salvation. The pope does not have the capacity to ensure that there are such suitable and qualified priests forever, nor does he have the power to argue rationally that once a year is sufficient in itself, rather than once every two years or any less frequently. Indeed, for the many who are preserved by the grace of God, it is not necessary at any time.21 Some say, therefore, that the apostle’s claim in 2 Thessalonians 2:4, that ‘[Antichrist] opposeth and is lifted up above all that is called God’ is borne out in respect of this decree, because Christ could not have ordained this law, even if he had wished to. In the oft-mentioned four private religions, therefore, the freedom that the Lord ordained endures always, even though some of those religions prescribe their own rules. It is not right for us to feel obliged to follow such traditions as though they were God’s law, and the same should be understood of the tradition [of annual confession] established by the pope, who is patron of the first sect.22 Let the faithful therefore observe this freedom to confess what they confess to a priest, but only in so far as it is beneficial to them and to the church. Such freedom was granted to them by the Lord, which the pope may neither give nor take away. An explanation is thus provided of what is said by Augustine and other similar saints, namely, that a man should confess to a presbyter when God moves him humbly to confess the sins that he has committed; then, he should confess in such a way. Now, many people think that general, public confession is better than this private confession. Either is good, but in the Old Law and the law of grace the first is more fundamental than the second. And that confession should not be made solely to priests, but to individual men as well as women, and wholly to our God. And it seems that James speaks of this general confession when he says, ‘Confess your sins to one another’ (5[:16]). If this were not so, the ecclesiastical convention whereby a priest confesses his sins to men and women at the beginning of his masses would have been introduced wrongly.23 And thus, some people speak sophistically about papal law, saying that they have 21 It is within God’s gift to preserve anyone, regardless of the penitential process. 22 That is, of the secular clergy. 23 The reference here is to the Confiteor (I confess), a generic confession of sins made by the priest at the beginning of the mass. The Confiteor was a liturgical convention, but did not have penitential value. The medieval priest’s Confiteor was a confession of sin on behalf of the congregation, as well as an acknowledgement of personal sin, which may explain the reference to the ‘sophistical’ claims of certain recipients here. Note that the twenty-first canon of the Fourth Lateran Council required yearly private confession to a priest.

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confessed all of their sins to their priest by listening to his solitary confession at masses. But most people reject such sophistry on the assumption that this kind of confession is inadequate, believing that many need to show their sins to an individual priest. In this way, they receive counsel about how they should make satisfaction for past sins and be on their guard against future sins. Many priests worked in this way in the time of Augustine, and I therefore accept Augustine’s suggestion that a man should be compelled to confess his sins in accordance with a formula designated by God. I am not suggesting, of course, that it is rational for every man to confess all of his sins to his own priest once a year, but it is certainly healthy for him to listen to the word of God at the appropriate time, just as it is physically healthy him to eat solid food. It would be madness, after all, for anyone to establish a comparable convention whereby a man must thus listen to or deliver a sermon, on pain of death. God gave humankind free will, and gave many a special instinct about thus [listening to the word of God when necessary]. Abundant extolment of Christ should therefore generally preserve such a law. Chapter 4 It remains for us to address other objections that seem to proclaim that sacramental penance is necessary. Having conceded that this sacrament helps as many different people as it hinders, we must consider the keys that Christ gave to Peter and the other apostles and their successors. I have shown at length elsewhere that these are not spiritual powers that are given specifically to our priests to enable them to take men’s sins away, because this capacity properly belongs only to the Lamb. Rather, those keys are the powers and the skills that help those who are deviating from divine will to conform to it, according to the judgement of the law of God. And there is no doubt that if a priest strays from the keys of the church triumphant he has erred so that he may neither bind nor loose spiritually, but by following the keys he has bound and loosed according to the church triumphant. But what has this to do with the sacrament of penance that has been introduced? Often, someone’s public sins are better known to the priest who perceives them than to the sinner himself, who confesses his own sins in accordance with the law. Likewise, in Acts 13[:10] Paul knew by revelation the sins of the magician who was called [Bar-Jesus] or Elymas better than he had himself done. Moreover, neither the pope nor any priest is equipped to know the gravity of a sin that was revealed by a sinner to his confessor,

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according to his last recollection. How would either of them know how that sin should be qualified in respect of its concomitant penalty or grace, since this is known to viators only by special revelation? Consequently, no such priest knows how much penitence, or of what kind, would be appropriate on a given occasion. The things that are written and practised in respect of penance are therefore widely contradictory. God would certainly not wish his priest to prescribe penance unless he had revealed its quality or quantity to him. Since priests who give absolution generally do not know this, or even whether a given act of penance is available to the person confessing or is contrary to the will of God, it seems that God does not generally give his approval to such penance being prescribed in this way. Indeed, Christ commanded the adulterer, ‘sin no more’ in John 8[:11], but Paul prescribed penance for the magician [Bar-Jesus], so that at that time he became physically blind. There is no evidence that this particular practice was established by God or has his approval, so it therefore seems that this blindness should be presumed to have been imposed beyond the law. It is known from many testimonies of Augustine that the words of the doctors, including the papal doctors, are not valid unless they are founded upon reason or the law of God. Not all writings of the doctors concerning acts of penance and absolution should therefore be believed as the gospel. Here, the faithful person should believe that if someone does wrong before God, he may nevertheless have remission and removal of his sin when he humbly confesses to God. And the individual priest can promote this in a prudent way. General confession, as in the Old Law, would thus often lead to greater repentance and shame than special confession. And it is not known to the faithful, either from the pope’s words or from experience, whether the new version of penance that was introduced into the church has brought good or done harm to the human race. And none of our confessors knows what satisfaction is required, since that is known only to God, and is delimited by him alone. Chapter 5 We should now look a little more closely at the evils that can easily be promoted by the kind of confession that is currently practised, introduced as it was by men. One wrong towards which the devil often leads the church is the assumption that people need not believe in God [and] Jesus Christ, and thus they err in the faith by which they would believe in the Holy Spirit, since they believe that remission of sins rests

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regularly in the judgement of the foreknown.24 And thus, anyone who confesses in this way is ‘cursed that [he] trusteth in man’ (Jeremiah 17[:5]), often having the audacity not to fear such sins. He does not fear God, nor is he afraid to commit an offence against his neighbour. He finds preaching and exhortation through Christ and his apostles tiresome, since the pope believes that remission of sins lies with him alone, and can even exploit this for financial gain in his dealings with men. His own confessors wish to do likewise, having been limited specifically by him. They can overturn the major and the minor orders and introduce servitude of the devil, gradually excluding the freedom of Christ. And thus, the friars themselves engage in such simoniacal commerce, weakening the observation of God’s commandments both within themselves and those who confess to them. They might meet nuns and other women under the seal of confession and lead them into sexual activity, because in the enclosed space required formally for confession the exchange of physical scent between a man and a woman leads to sin with the devil’s prompting. Hence, Job ‘made a covenant with [his] eyes, that [he] would not so much as think upon a virgin’ (Job 31[:1]). It would be much more difficult not to smell or touch her when alone thus in a hidden place. The devil’s trickery and the confessional medium are conducive to all kinds of crimes, and to devilish sins such as pride, envy and anger. This is because, after the confession, the confessor does not dare to make the fault that has been confessed known, nor indeed what he has himself confessed, either privately or publicly, to direct him to the opposite virtue. It is therefore necessary to agree to avoid the offence, according to the law of the Lord in Matthew 18[:15]: ‘But if thy brother shall offend against thee [go, and rebuke him between thee and him alone]’. It seems to me that this is a demonic way of bringing about the carnal sins of gluttony and wantonness, not only in confessors and those who confess to them but in other people, through tricks that the devil contrives. And in respect of sins of the world, or lust, it seems that this sacrament is full of lust, since such confessors are too ready to accept monetary payment from those who confess to them, but they now have secret ways of receiving this, or its equivalent. A new trick is practised by the devil and Englishmen more recently, whereby absolution of a crime that is known to the papal Curia is reserved, and bulls 24 That is, in the pope or his priests who acts as confessors, who do not have the capacity or the knowledge (as Wyclif argues here) to offer remission of sins; this lies uniquely with the Holy Spirit.

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are sent so that men can be absolved at home. They can faithfully calculate how much they would have spent going from their home to Rome and back again, and then give that payment to mediators who would take it to the confessors themselves. This gracious commerce is justified by the fact that work that could have remained in the Curia is thus charitably given to sinners. This immense indulgence is nevertheless made available because of the pope’s abundant power, yet a man with only one eye would be fully aware that this unfounded concentration of absolution in the Curia is contrary to the rules of charity. Moreover, we all know that the commercial activity that accompanies such absolution is replete with avarice and pride, since it is the same as saying to someone who has confessed, ‘just give me money and I will ensure that you are absolved by God’. Now, there is as much ignorance in respect of the Eucharist as there is in respect of penance, but avarice is more expressly associated with the latter. The faithful of Christ’s church should therefore wipe away such infidelity, whilst remaining open to its detection and punishment. Chapter 6 Some people still embrace confession as it is currently practised, using meagre arguments that would not worthy of recollection if the devil had not introduced such folly in the first place. So that the church may guard against such intoxicating stupidity more carefully, those arguments should be greeted with a commandment, if only for the sake of the ignorant. In the said gospel concerning the ten lepers Christ says, ‘Go, shew yourselves to the priests’ (Luke 17[:14]). Since Christ had said all such things figuratively, it seems that in these words he said figuratively that the lepers should confess to the priests. And thus, sacramental confession is introduced by the authority of the gospel. But in order to understand what is said about the sacrament here we should recognise that there is a fourfold sense in Scripture, namely the literal, the allegorical, the tropological and the anagogic. According to Augustine’s principles, the literal sense has the greatest authority, and the other senses have authority only in so far as they are they are founded on this primary sense, or on the evidence of reason. Otherwise, anyone could moralise or bring the authority of Scripture to a sense that he wished to find, just as a certain friar had supposedly proclaimed that evangelical truth was any truth that would guide the community in a healthy way. And thus, since any truth is such a truth, any truth would thus be an evangelical truth! But it seems that we should speak

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in a more restricted way here, by preserving the boundaries that define the scriptural text. The evangelical story that was mentioned above should thus be accepted, but we cannot faithfully infer from it that men should confess in this way in the time of grace. We should probably conclude here that just as lepers had to show themselves to priests in the Old Law, as is known from Luke 17, so Christ, the author of both laws, approved that Old Law for his own time. This act of showing to priests should have ceased by the time of the New Law, however, in anticipation of Christ’s own healing of our souls. And that is revealed figuratively by the return of the Samaritan, who went back to Christ unlike the nine Jews who were healed in the same way. This has the power to signify figuratively that the lepers should run to the priests under the law of grace, and that they should guide the unclean spiritually towards healthy contrition of the heart and hatred of sin using the words of the gospel, at least before they should naturally be purified by the grace of God. And just as we do not infer from the gospel that a man who must confess should carry a penny in his hand to offer to his priest, so it does not follow from that story that a faithful man should confess according to those men’s practices. Second, an argument is made about the raising of Lazarus from the dead in the text of John 11, where, after he was tied up with winding bands, and after he had been raised from the sepulchre, Jesus ordered his apostles to release him from the bands. It seems that Christ taught figuratively by this that his priests have the power to release the dead spiritually, in a form approved by our own customs. But those who argue in this way, drawing an implausible analogy, should first notice how Jesus brought Lazarus to life earlier and made him rise from his stinking sepulchre, and stand. Now, faithful priests should loose  the bands of habitual sin through holy preaching; after the removal of the sin by God, these will then be untied. But priests today neglect the need to reduce or undo that habitual behaviour, since they teach the people neither by healthy exhortations nor by holy examples. And this is the  time when such habitual sin needs to be reduced because of the danger it represents. Apostolic men should acquaint the people with this faithful principle, and not bind them with indissoluble bands, such as certain apparent hypocrisies. But now they bind and render themselves unfit to be of use to them, since they commit themselves to the devil because of a perception of power and wealth, and they do not respectfully give glory to their God. Through those words similar subtleties that the devil has introduced

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can quickly be solved. Yet we know that it is normal for the hypocrites in the new orders to speak out against this principle. But the truth of reason prevails over all things. We are thus only committed to this principle, which we believe to be orthodox, on the understanding that if we learn the contrary to be true we will humbly abandon it and embrace the contrary with greater certainty.

18 Holy orders: the three senses of the term order On the Church, ch. 21 (extract). Latin text: De Ecclesia, pp. 509–17. In this passage from On the Church, Wyclif discusses the sacrament of holy orders, beginning very characteristically with a definition of the term order itself, which he divides between divine ordination, the clerical orders and the sacrament of holy orders itself. Throughout his exposition, he adheres closely to the teaching of Peter Lombard in the Sentences, defining the clergy as those elected by God to administer the sacraments. The seven orders Wyclif lists correspond to the canonical seven presented by the Lombard: ostiary, candle-bearer, lector, exorcist, sub-deacon, deacon and priest.25 Wyclif does not here appeal to the distinction between matter and form, but in respect of the sacramental thing he suggests that this exists insensibly in the soul, and implicitly identifies it with the character or characters of the sacrament. The concept of character as a sacramental effect was introduced in the thirteenth century, and was generally applied only to a number of sacraments: baptism, confirmation and holy orders.26 Wyclif is careful to mention that there may be several different characters depending on the order, and that every order shares the characters of those beneath him in the clerical hierarchy. Unlike the Lombard, he is careful to observe that character may be suspended under certain circumstances, so that the powers of an individual to minister would likewise be suspended (he speaks of the ‘quiescent’ nature of the order in a corrupt bishop, for example). He also insists that any ordinand should have been shriven of his sins prior to ordination, and that that he should have been examined by the bishop prior to the initiation of the process in order to prevent ‘discoloration’ of the church. Whilst the latter two points simply follow convention, it is certainly no exaggeration to state that Wyclif is more obviously alert to the potential for abuses of the sacraments than the majority

25 Sententiae in IV libris distinctae, 4, dist. xxiv, chs 1–3; The Sentences, Book 4: On the Doctrine of Signs, trans. Giulio Silano (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2010), pp. 138–9. 26 Joseph P. Wawrykow, ‘The Sacraments in the Thirteenth Century’, in The Oxford Handbook of Sacramental Theology, ed. Hans Boersma and Matthew Levering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 218–34 (p. 221).

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of his sources were. Likewise, he is careful to privilege the inner reality over the external trappings of the seven orders.

It seems to me that the term order may be used in three ways, fully equivocally: First, it may be used in an analogical way to describe the disposition of anything that God creates in order to beautify the universe. Any individual thing therefore has its own order in so far as it necessarily has being. Sinners, because they destroy the established order to which they are assigned by primary institution, suffer the order of punishment. Therefore, as it seems to many, sin has the nature of an order just as good does, but in respect of punishment, since order and good, in respect of their consequences, are equivalent. Hence, congregations of men whose union is more orderly are called orders according to a certain exemplary excellence over their inferiors (as I have said elsewhere). Second, order is taken to be a position given to a designated cleric by God for ministering sacramentally, in different ways. And thus there are seven orders, namely, ostiary, candle-bearer, reader, exorcist, sub-deacon, deacon and priest (of which I have spoken earlier). But those orders are sometimes defined in a more restricted way according to the characteristics of the subject in the soul, and sometimes in respect of distinct sensible signs externally, like shaving of the head and of the beard, instituted in accordance with human nature. But those sensible characteristics are not the clerical order itself, because they vary continuously, thus increasing or decreasing, or otherwise varying through their external signs, and [if these signs were equivalent to orders], then a barber or some other layperson would frequently confer orders, which would be absurd! We must therefore assume that orders exist in the soul, and it is therefore evident that the soul is the persona that is ordained, such as a deacon or a priest. This order is therefore quiescent in the soul of a corrupt bishop. But in the third way, order is held to mean the perceptible sacrament by which a candidate is ordained to the holy office of ministering to the laity by a bishop. The hidden sacramental thing that underlies the perceptible sacrament is an order or character existing insensibly in the soul, but the perceptible work practised by that bishop is also an order. This might consist in the pronouncement of sacramental words, in the completion of a ritual, in touching or anointment and in external circumcision. All of this would be done in the presence of the ordinand and with the permission of his superiors, and it is generally said that

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in the regular celebration of holy orders God is graciously present in giving his grace when the rite has been performed. And a sinner who is about to be ordained must necessarily be shriven of his sins. In giving someone the power to minister, God actually gives his grace to carry out this office, unless the unfitness of the person ordained obstructs this. Hence, in baptism and any other sacrament we might mention, the help that Christ offers in giving his grace, which is the sacramental thing, is withdrawn when a person is unfit to receive the sacrament. Nevertheless, after the consecration of a bishop God often makes such a man bring his order to mind, for God himself properly gives the sacramental thing, and thus often makes orders unknown to us. Hence, it seems to pointless to ask when, how and with what words God ordained the apostles or St Paul or the other disciples, but we should nevertheless ensure that pseudo-clerics do not assume that they have been thus ordained by God into such a clerical office. And to this end, the ordinand must be examined and the bishop must then celebrate his ordination with perceptible signs that are invested with figurative significance. Any potential discoloration of the church is thus held to be avoided, though such an outcome is often wholly illusory on either side. As I have often said, therefore, we may have faith in this principle only to the extent that the ordained carry out their work in the proper way. The first conclusion to emerge from what has been said above seems to be this: an order construed in the third way is an aggregate of many perceptible signs that are celebrated gradually, at different and non-contingent times. Similarly, an order in the second sense is an aggregate of diverse characters or signs that God properly dispenses either simultaneously or at separate times. Its quantitative parts are not like a mass but like a power, so that someone receives as many characters from God as actions he is obliged to perform. Character is extinguished when someone retires from his ecclesiastical office, but, so that a subject may not doubt the power of his superior, God also bestows a greater character upon him. This delimits what is necessary to a given type of office, and such a character cannot leave anyone who has been ordained, as long as the power to minister through sensible signs remains within him. But it can be suspended by a superior on the grounds of reasonable cause, so that the ordained cannot then put this character into effect. If anyone should ask why so many characters are necessary, we say that their diversity is inevitable when the meaning of the term itself is

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considered, and when the different graces that are freely given to men of an particular office by divine ordination is taken into account. Hence, to substantiate this principle we should first appeal to the teaching of Scripture, in 1 Corinthians 12[:4–7]: Now there are diversities of graces, but the same Spirit; and there are diversities of ministries, but the same Lord; and there are diversities of operations, but the same God, who worketh all in all. And the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man unto profit.

And afterwards, the nine divisions of the body of the church are explained. According to Canon Law it is not lawful to reject such a system and overlook the body of the church or its ministers, so we should note the threefold division of the apostle’s text. Now, God gives certain things to the predestined that he calls graces, which are gifts of the Holy Spirit, because, for the predestined who love God, ‘all things work together unto good’ (Romans 8[:28]). Because mortal sin continues even as those gifts are dispensed, they are called graces given freely to the predestined out of the benevolence of the Spirit. Now, any rational creature who is predestined or foreknown has ministries [or duties], and he should serve the Lord freely or with support from others. And so the apostle adds the second member to the Lord. But third, every created nature has its own duty to work in relation to its creator. He therefore notes this third general point under the nature of God the creator. It is clear from these assumptions that every cleric has the boundaries of his ministerial duty delimited by God, according to his rank. I identify this as his character, which will admit every faithful person to a particular part of the church. It is of no great significance that some interpret the term more strictly and others more freely, since it is used by scholars, but we should nevertheless use it in our speech so that more speak in conformity with scripture and reason. And here we see that any character disappears when an office comes to an end, and is divided in proportion to its office. And that is called actual character. But in another sense, character denotes the power to minister, whether or not it should happen. It does not depend on a deed but on the sufficiency of the deed to a particular kind of end, and that way of speaking seems easier. Furthermore, we know that there are seven orders that are characterised in the second way. They are distinct in species, but none of them is itself a sensible sacrament, but rather its thing or its fruit. Nevertheless, the sacrament of orders that the priest celebrates is a single thing to a certain extent, which acquires subjects in its greater

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part as he ordains. The end from which it takes its unity is the whole priesthood of the church, which includes every priest. I do not deny that there are different orders of different species, both as sacraments and sacramental things, but all of those orders are still one order, and thus the seven sacraments are one sacrament, as Chrysostom says in his first homily concerning the seven churches. First, we see that when a man is ordained immediately into the priesthood he is empowered ministerially through the sacramental sign, which shows that he has seven orders or characters. From this we know that he is thus limited to the sevenfold power that is his order. He would not be a priest univocally unless he had the power to serve any kind of spiritual ministry that a lower graduate cleric could serve, and a graduate has the power to occupy as many kinds of office as there are orders or characters. But all of these are one order, whose constituent parts can be called parts in proportion to their power, just as the sixth part common to any unity can be called its primary part, and the part common to any binary or ternary is called its second or its third part, out of which things the sixth is equally composed. Hence, if God, through an impossible act, were to give a cleric the power to confess but not to absolve, that cleric would not then be a priest, or only equivocally so. Second, we know that like the sacramental thing of ordination, the things of the different sacraments coincide with them essentially. For the recipient of ordination should earlier have been baptised by the baptism of wind, just as he should have been confirmed through some degree of divine confirmation, and be wedded to the head of the church, have the fruit of penance, the union of the eucharist and the unction of perfect grace. Nevertheless, there is an accidental order in our perceptible sacraments, instituted by the church, to which we devote more of our attention and our appraisal than to the thing or fruit of the sensible sacrament. We think that this irregularity, by which we attend more to the leaves than to the fruit, cheapens our sacraments in the eyes of God. This was the case when laws were removed and replaced with rituals introduced by humans. Now, a way emerges of solving the problem that arises when we question whether a deacon, receiving the power of absolution from a bishop, but not the power of confession, or vice versa – on account of the death or infirmity of the bishop, or some other cause – is fully a priest. It is said generally that sacerdotal character is not imprinted before the completion of the sacramental words, but the truth is that we do not know when and how God imprints sacerdotal character, nor

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do [we] have any evidence from the laws of the church, and I can only draw relevant material from Scripture with difficulty (as is evident elsewhere). Third, we may deduce from these points how the celebration of the sacrament of ordination can occur either well or badly. In the primitive church, Christ made his apostles directly into his priests, that is, his bishops, and after his ascension at the time of the apostles they appointed deacons, and I have not read that those pillars of the church celebrated other orders of clerics. And God knows whether that practice would be more religious, easier or more useful to Christ’s church today. But all things that clerics of a minor order do, our clerics can do through the force of sacerdotal power, and probably more efficiently and humbly than happens now.27 Indeed, Christ, the highest priest, performed all of these duties (as I have explained elsewhere). It therefore seems that it would unburden the church at a leap not to have so many sacramental conventions and so many laws concerning ordained clerics, since this change could be brought about very effectively and very quickly. On the other hand, it might be that bishops, because of their love of the rewards of their high rank and their need to control the church with a clear and simple eye, would think that this should be carried out only gradually. We can leave aside their pride in the excellence of their order. In this way, the examination would be more discriminating, the assignment of the examined to a tested way of living would be safer, and the recruitment of fit people to help the church after the expulsion of unfit persons easier. And the elected superiors have that power of ordaining in accordance with the apostle’s words in Romans 14[:19]: ‘[let us] keep the things that are of edification one towards another’. And we must take it for granted that those superiors have the requisite discretion in these matters, and should consequently accept their acts of ordination, unless there should be a strong suspicion to the contrary. Fourth, we may infer from what has been said above that the noun cleric imparts a propertyless way of living to an order’s character. Those who marry hold minor orders, and those who have dealings in secular affairs are laypeople, but they enjoy privilege through the good will of our kingdom.28 These seculars are consequently not s­imultaneously 27 The minor orders were the ranks of ministry below those of bishops, priests and deacons (the major orders). 28 Members of the minor clerical orders could lawfully marry, but technically forfeited benefices.

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clerics, since the [two] states are distinguished by opposition (as Hugh [of St Victor] teaches in On the Sacraments [of the Christian Faith], book 2, part 7). Confirmation is provided in St Jerome’s decretal 12, q. 1, under the heading Cleric, and below, and in 1, q. 2, If Whoever and Priest, and in many similar laws. And the testimony of St Bernard in his book to Pope Eugenius is of value in the same respect, as are the testimonies of saints frequently cited elsewhere. But the most efficacious, it seems to me, is the fourfold testimony on clerics from the Old Testament, cited in chapter 13 of the present book.29 And it is not right to assume that the laws of the Old Testament do not place us under any obligation in the New. First, because [Christ] came not to dissolve the law, but to fulfil it, and his deed is the best interpretation of how the Old Testament should be understood and observed. He showed how he, his apostles and their vicars should live the poor life, free of property. This lasted for three hundred years or more, until the granting of that poisonous imperial donation, in proportion to whose growth the propertied church has degenerated in virtue.30 Second, this is confirmed by the fact that all moral principles of the judicial or ceremonial regulations of the Old Law are to be observed at the time of the law of grace. Since the poor and propertyless way of life is a moral way of life, therefore, it seems that it should be observed after the time of Christ the pauper by his clerics; for just as mother church is older, so she should more pious in her clergy especially, and consequently, in forsaking the world, closer to her bridegroom. Third, this is confirmed by reductio ad absurdum or analogy; for we accept tithes and those things that seem to contribute to the wealth of the clergy not by the express authority of the New Law, but by that of the Old. Since we have embraced the religion of the Old Law less, it seems that we should either observe this religion as a whole all the more, or resist forsaking it thus because of the dictates of reason. It is not right for us to cherish what is pleasing from either testament, like heathens, and abandon what seems harsh. Christ’s religion should therefore be observed as a key, especially when the world threatens us through the sin of avarice! 29 In this chapter, Wyclif argues that the clergy of the Old Testament received little from God when they failed to live chastely. 30 This is the Donation of Constantine, a document in which Constantine the Great apparently endowed Pope Sylvester I and the Roman church with generous gifts and privileges. If the document were genuine, it would date from the early fourth century (hence the reference to three hundred years or more), but is now known to be a much later forgery. Its genuineness was never disputed in the medieval period, and Wyclif uses it here and in the Trialogue as a convenient symbol for the origin of corrupt ecclesiastical endowments.

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In this way the nefarious sect of Muhammad was introduced through the counsel of Sergius, the monk.31

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19 A bad priest is still a priest, and may still minister the sacraments On the Church, ch. 19 (extract). Latin text: De Ecclesia, p. 448. This brief passage is simply an affirmation of Wyclif ’s belief that a priest who is foreknown may still minister the sacraments. Such a belief was entirely orthodox, and yet one of the twenty-four doctrines for which Wyclif was condemned at Blackfriars in 1382 was an alleged reiteration of the heretical Donatist conviction that a bishop or a priest in mortal sin could neither baptise, consecrate nor ordain.32 Wyclif certainly believed that the sacerdotal order could be suspended from a priest in the event of his committing a mortal sin (as we are told in 18, above), but this was far from denying that such a priest had the capacity to minister the sacraments, or that his ministry was valid and its effects sustained after he had committed an abhorrent sin. Indeed, Wyclif believed only that such practices were necessarily harmful to any priest that carried them out.

It seems to me that someone who is foreknown and in actual mortal sin still ministers the sacraments to his faithful subjects in a way that is beneficial to them, even though it has a damnable effect on him. Balaam and Caiaphas delivered prophecies in this way in Numbers 23 and John 11, respectively, and people often claimed in Christ’s presence to have cast out devils through him from persons whom they had besieged. And the Saviour articulated this principle in Matthew 7[:22]:‘Many will say to me in that day: Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name, and cast out devils in thy name, and done many miracles in thy name? And then will I profess unto them: I never knew you.’ This is known from Mark 9 and Luke 9, in which the apostles rebuked someone because he performed miracles and did not follow them. Christ gave his approval to the substance of miracles, provided that they were not used as signs to distinguish between the son of God and the son of the devil. Bad priests harm themselves in this way, but they do no harm to the 31 Bahira, known as Sergius the Monk to medieval Christian writers, was a Christian held to have recognised the gift of prophesy in the young Muhammad. 32 For details of the origins of the Donatist heresy in fourth-century Africa, and of its ‘resurrection’ at the hands of later theologians in the ancient church, see W.H.C. Frend, The Donatist Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951).

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pious faithful by ministering the ecclesiastical sacraments to them, as is known from decretal 1, q. 1, If he was, through Augustine’s testimony,33 and decretal 15, last question, last chapter,34 as well as the third book of [Gregory IX’s] Decretum, [under title 2], On the Cohabitation of Clerics and Women, [in the chapter] Your.35

20 Defining the sacrament of marriage Trialogue, 4.20, ‘Marriage: what it is in itself ’. Latin text: Johannis Wyclif Trialogus cum Supplemento Trialogi, ed. Gotthard Lechler (Oxford: Clarendon, 1869), pp. 315–18; cf. John Wyclif: Trialogus, trans. Stephen Lahey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 250–3. The definition of marriage that Phronesis presents here is ostensibly quite unexceptional. Marriage, he argues, is the legal joining of marital partners that permits them to beget children without offence in the eyes of God. The three objections raised by Pseustis are typical of the kind of sophistry that Wyclif generally attributes to his scholarly opponents. The first seeks to argue that two husbands, each married to his own wife, are by virtue of the marriage sacrament each married to the other husband. Wyclif draws upon the proper vows and procedures underlying a successful marital conjunction to answer this objection, as well as appealing to the gender of the marital partners (since homosexual marriages were impossible in fourteenth-century England). The second objection relates to marital partnerships in which no childbirth takes place, which Wyclif answers initially by declaring that people who are unable to procreate are married unlawfully. He then goes on to offer a more subtle and sympathetic interpretation of such a scenario, before speaking of adultery and divorce. The third and final objection concerns Pseustis’s claim that there are two marriages rather than one, which Wyclif accepts in principle, though without accepting that procreation equally belongs to the female. He also concedes that the good things of marriage are accidental, rather than essential, to it. None of the propositions that are put forward by Phronesis in this short discussion of the nature of marriage is controversial or heretical. His discussion of marital vows that immediately follows this in the Trialogue, by contrast, runs self-consciously contrary to the conventions formalised in the decretals of Pope Alexander III (21).

Phronesis. Let us return to the topic of the sacrament of marriage, 33 Decret. 2 pars, causa 1, q. 1, c. 30, CICaPP col. 371. 34 Decret. 2 pars, causa 15, q. 8, c. 5, CICaPP cols 760–1. 35 Decret. Greg. IX, lib. III, tit. II., c. VII, CICaPS cols 455–6.

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which you touched on earlier. It seems to me, as I have said before, that it is necessary to establish what marriage is, so that when we have considered its quiddity we may proceed safely to its attributes. It may be said that marriage is the legal joining of partners, by which, according to the law of God, it is permitted for them to beget children without offence. God ordained that Adam and Eve and any other two marital partners should be united in bodily procreation in this way. Hence, in Matthew 19[:3] Christ used this argument against the scribes and the Pharisees, who asked him, ‘Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife?’ To this he replied: ‘what God hath joined together, let no man put asunder’ (19[:6]). The authenticity of this venerable sacrament is thus demonstrated in these words of the gospel, and since it was established by God at the beginning of the world and in Paradise it is generally said that marriage exceeds the other sacraments by virtue of a manifold privilege. Since nature provided the means for procreation in husband and wife, there is no doubt that after the completion of the legal contract they can legally procreate. And again, it is certain that Christ intended married people to be one flesh, with the body united by charity as much as by the agreement to legitimately create children. Each couple is clearly and unassailably one flesh, contrary to the claims of Pseustis. When Christ articulated the negative [‘let no man put asunder’], he excluded those bound together matrimonially from a life apart. It is therefore generally said that marriage has three good things, namely, faithfulness, offspring and the sacrament, following Augustine’s suggestion. The rationality of this sacrament is evident from the fact that procreation in humans is natural and has been ordained by God, but, since many do not wish to respect marital fidelity because of a propensity to sin, it is reasonable that marital partners should be compelled to be faithful. Indeed, if anyone capable of producing offspring were to procreate with anyone else he pleased, there would be confusion in respect of consanguinity, a destruction of paternal heredity, a dishonouring of parents, and disagreement or even murder between men, together with many other inappropriate things that philosophers believe emerge from nature. The law of nature and the deed of God therefore teach the church that marital partners that are united legitimately will be married eternally, and it is completely right and necessary that each marital partner should remain faithful to the other, since they are joined by virtue of marriage at the beginning. They are thus one flesh, and if one of them should forsake the other due to misadventure whilst both were alive, then matrimonial infidelity

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would follow, together with the problems that have been dealt with above. Pseustis. It seems to me that you speak falsely and disputably here. Since a woman is a marital partner just like a man, the union of either would appear to be marriage. Two men would thus become married when they were affectionately united to their wives as spouses, and the same is true of their wives. Similarly, nothing is lawful unless it is possible, but many are married very lawfully who cannot create children; therefore, your description of marriage lacks validity. Likewise, procreation is not the concern of the male alone, and often the marriage continues without it. It therefore seems not only that there are two marriages rather than just the one through procreation, but that the goods of matrimony inhere to a great extent in its accidental qualities. Phronesis. You inveigh against me very deceptively, but you know for certain that you are losing the argument. I reply to your first point by agreeing that the conjugal joining of two people is marriage, but that it does not follow that ‘A is the marital partner of C, and B is the marital partner of D; therefore, A and B are marital partners’. In order for two people to be marital partners, it is necessary for them to be of different sexes, and for the one to be coupled with the other for the purpose of marriage. It therefore does not follow that the dog that is the father of a puppy, if it is yours, is therefore your father! Marital partners, therefore, when they have a relationship based on mutual faith, are not called marital partners according to the logic of relatives unless one is the partner of the other, and vice versa. Nevertheless, I concede to you that partner describes a union in more general terms than social friendship or carnal or matrimonial union when it is the case that two such people are united by private agreement. To your second point, it seems probable to me that such people as cannot procreate carnally are married unlawfully. Hence, the ancients who were mutually joined together, whether because of a lust for temporalities, hope of mutual help or because of the need to relieve desire when they had no prospect of offspring, were not truly joined matrimonially, and young people at the time who were unsuitably united in sin were deficient in that venerable sacrament for a very good reason. Now, there are many that are united suitably who would have produced children but are unable to do this, and therefore the rule of God is not absent from their union, unless because of an earlier sin. But whether the base acts of the adulterer exist falsely under the cloak of matrimony

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I leave others to consider. Speaking with certainty, however, a marriage is not legitimate unless God unites the married couple with his approval, since Christ determinedly stated, ‘what God hath joined together, let no man put asunder’ (Matthew 19[:6]). Because we are uncertain about God’s approval of this union, many men in such marriages are uncertain whether they are living in a meritorious way. The conversion of virgins without such a union must therefore be blessed! Since people who are unsuited to marriage in God’s judgement are often brought together matrimonially before the church, we see how often a sin is committed in such a union, especially when divorce is carried out. False friars, capitular clerics and other greedy men often bring about a divorce between people whom God had united with his approval.36 Woe betide them! I take no delight in the multiplication of grounds for divorce, since many are put in place by human agency without foundation, as is seen especially in cases of kinship. Indeed, at the time of the first man brothers and sisters married in such a way by divine ordination, and at the time of the patriarchs, such as Abraham, Isaac and the like, near family married also. And there is no reason why this should not be lawful today, except for the human proscription that says that love between people is forbidden not only by kinship but also by affinity, but this claim is very weak. To your third argument I say that procreation is either actively or passively within the female. I do not see why the act of begetting is common to both man and woman, except to the extent that procreation is common, since each partner combines with the other to produce offspring. It is not inconsistent that there should be two marriages, by mutual consequence, just as there are two shared natures, if there is one. Nevertheless, each marriage is principally in the man, and therefore the woman should honour the man more attentively than [he her], as a sign of which the woman is made out of the man, and not the man out of the woman, as is known from Genesis 3. But between them there should be mutual social affection, since the woman is not made out of the head or the foot of the man, but from his rib, to denote that she should not be a servant to the man, nor his mistress, but his equal friend. And thus, I concede to you that the good things of marriage are accidental to it. But you know that it is enough for a child to be born at some point in time, even if the marriage does not remain in 36 A capitular cleric was an adviser to the bishop in a cathedral chapter. Elsewhere in Wyclif, the term capitular simply identifies someone or something related to a ­cathedral chapter.

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place continuously. Likewise, it is not necessary for a man always to pay his marital debt, but it is sufficient for him to do this at a suitable time. I pass over other difficulties concerning human laws, believing that many people are joined in marriage out of undue affection, just as many are needlessly separated. The first is evident from Tobias 6, for seven men were killed by the devil Asmodeus, together with the bond of the daughter of Raguel Sarae. Hence, in the sixth chapter we read: ‘the angel Raphael said to him: Hear me, and I will shew thee who they are, over whom the devil can prevail’, etc. (6[:16]).

21 Why the votive utterance should be in the future tense Trialogue, 4.22, ‘Through what words marriage is contracted’. Latin text: Johannis Wyclif Trialogus cum Supplemento Trialogi, ed. Gotthard Lechler (Oxford: Clarendon, 1869), pp. 322–5. Cf. Stephen E. Lahey, Wyclif: Trialogus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 256–9. When it came to discussing marital vows in the Trialogue, Wyclif broke conspicuously with convention, combining elements from the teaching of two scholars who dominated discussion of the sacrament in the later medieval period: the legist and theologian Gratian and Peter Lombard. Gratian had taught that marriage could be rendered indissoluble through vows uttered in the future tense, on condition that they would be followed by sexual consummation. The Lombard, by contrast, had suggested that this could be achieved only through vows uttered in the present tense, without any need for coital consummation. The issue had been decided in the twelfth century by Alexander III, who declared in a decretal that vows should be uttered in the present tense unless ratified by sexual consummation. This effectively gives precedence to the Lombard’s teaching, and by the late twelfth century his consensual interpretation of the marital bond. As Phronesis’s words here demonstrate, Wyclif shared the Lombard’s belief that the marriage became indissoluble without any need for consummation, but felt that vows must be spoken in the future tense, as Gratian had claimed. What we have in Wyclif ’s theology, then, is a unique combination of distinct elements from Gratian and the Lombard. Wyclif had gone further, however, since Phronesis insists that words of the mind are ‘weightier’ than words of the mouth. Indeed, words of the mind were held by Wyclif to be adequate in themselves, even in the absence of an attendant priest (contrary to Alexander’s decretal, which states that words uttered should take precedence over their speakers’ intentions). This chapter of Wyclif ’s Trialogue, then, challenges published ecclesiastical laws not merely in respect of spoken vows but also in respect of the need to speak vows at all. It also renders the

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priest and his own words effectively superfluous, a provocative addition to an already challenging document.37

Alithia. I am pleased, brother, that you have unlocked such an authoritative passage from Scripture.38 But I ask you to tell me with what words or signs marriage should be celebrated. It is commonly said that it should be with words in the present, and not with words in the past or the future. Indeed, if agreement has been expressed with reference to the future, as in ‘I shall take you to be my wife’, and afterwards another person expresses the words ‘I take you to be my wife’ in relation to the present, the statement relating to the present eliminates the words that were said earlier, since it signifies more expressly and efficaciously. Nevertheless, it is said by legists that a contract expressed through words in the future tense, with subsequent carnal bonding, is as valid as if the contracting words were expressed in the present. But since deaf people and others can make a contract, it seems that other signs, beyond words, may be sufficient. Phronesis. It brings me no delight to labour over this material at any length, especially since it is instituted by humans, often without foundation. But the truth seems to me to be that if all sensible signs were removed, there would be enough with the marital partners’ consent and the Lord’s approval. Indeed, the law of the Lord’s consciousness and consent in living well would regulate such a contract most properly. In words put together externally in some way, after all, there can be deception: when ‘I take you to be my wife’ is said in the present, it could be that the mind says the opposite on account of the need to satisfy desire. Since the word of the mind is therefore weightier than the word of the mouth, and since consent is required for true marriage, it seems that there is no marriage when such words are spoken in the present. Judges who judge in favour of marriage on the basis of mere words, therefore, judge against the judgement of God’s law. But let any such law be damned, by which a judge restricts the obligations of people through his contrived criticisms, so that they act contrary to the law of God. Similarly, it seems that all such words in the present are false, and thus a contract is false to which, like the words, God does 37 On Wyclif ’s teaching on marital vows and consummation, see Stephen Penn, ‘Matrimonium quid proprie sit: John Wyclif on Marriage, Consent and Consummation’, in Archa Verbi, Subsidia, 15, ed. Pavel Blazek (2018), 399–411. 38 Here, Alithia is responding to Phronesis’s explication of a passage in Matthew 5 in the preceding chapter of the Trialogue, which relates to divorce.

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not give his approval. It is false, at any rate, that ‘I take you to be my wife’ now, because, in this way, marriage would be abruptly completed, and would not require any subsequent fulfilment, which contradicts the legists and the common practice of the church. If marriage arises through those words in the present, so that when they are pronounced formally marriage first happens, then a contradiction arises, because if a spoken word no longer is when it ceases to be, then those words in the present do not make marriage, nor are they compossible with it. How, then, does marriage arise through them? There is no doubt that those words do not constitute consent, but only an impulse that moves the mind towards consent, nor do they provide any proof, so that from them alone consent may be judged, unless perhaps by that judge Antichrist, who does not fear judging falsely against God. How, then, does such a judge observe the Catholic rule that ‘nobody should resist the will of the Lord’, as commonly happens through this blind judgement? Similarly, the expressions ‘I take you to be my wife’ and ‘I shall take you to be my wife’ are interchangeable, as we assume here. Since, therefore, the second is more certain and less disputable, it seems that it is the more eligible of the two to unite two people matrimonially. If ‘I take you to be my wife’, then it is true at an earlier moment of time that ‘I shall take you to be my wife’. If it is true that ‘I shall take you to be my wife’, then it is true at the moment of its utterance that ‘I take you to be my wife’. Since, therefore, consent is compossible with words in the future tense, and those words are true and are moreover ordained in the Lord, how can it be right to frustrate those words by following them with words in the present that are not so efficacious? A capitular judge therefore contradicts divine judgement if he believes that this should be so. And in the same way, it seems remarkable to me that carnal copulation, which is commonly held to be a sin, should confirm or bring about marriage, since God would not think it fitting to have such help in completing his work. This is especially true because consent is in the mind, and, according to philosophers, material and immaterial principles do not interact with each other. And by this rule, would not the same marriage be twice completed, first in the contract made between partners, and second, in the solemn rite celebrated publicly by the priest, with nugatory and false words, at the church door? Alithia. It seems to me that you adopt the role of Pseustis here, and do not accept the capitular laws of the church. It is unwise for any man to do this!

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Phronesis. I stressed at the outset that you should not expect me to provide a foundation or a rational justification for these laws. But it pleases me that from fact and from sufficiently reliable deductions I know the subtleties and infidelities within them, so that I may guard against them more carefully, and teach the faithful to guard against them likewise. And I do not see how the devil introduced these subtleties, except so that he could obstruct the prelate’s holy advice and preaching, which would help the law of conscience. Therefore, having put aside this whole capitular law, we should now note how Christ is betrothed to his church. The church is commonly understood through the way in which it is solemnised by many prelates, and I do not approve of that sense or way of speaking. It is truly said that the church is the mystical body of Christ, which by the eternal words of predestination is united with Christ, the bridegroom of the church. And such a church is threefold, namely, militant, dormant and triumphant. The church militant is the body of all of the predestinate here, as they make their pilgrimage to heaven; the predestinate waiting in purgatory are the church dormant; and the blessed resting in heaven make up the church triumphant. Now, one great church arises out of all of these on the Day of Judgement. And it is not inconsistent but is fully appropriate that the holy angels are part of this church. From what has been said here it seems that we generally ignore not only the size of the church but also its quiddity. Yet this is beneficial, as it guards against any rash assessment of the kind of people in the church militant. Just as nobody among us now knows whether anyone else is a predestinate child of the church or is foreknown, so we should not judge anyone to be a member of the church, or damn, excommunicate or otherwise declaim against him, except perhaps if this has been revealed to him. Nevertheless, we should consider those who live with us righteously to be children of holy mother church, and those living in a contrary manner to be children of Satan’s synagogue. And since nobody would go against his conscience by nourishing the devil’s children, it seems that no one should give worldly goods to prelates or others dwelling amongst criminals, who are clearly ensnared by malicious deeds. This rule would destroy the prelacies, so that priests would simply study how they could be of use to holy mother church, as the apostles did at the time of the ancient church. Second, they could shake off the laws of men, and especially the prevailing Caesarean condemnations. Indeed, as is clear from what has been said about the quiddity of the church, judges commonly err in those affairs, whether

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they make judgements about predestinates or devils. And third, the law of Scripture should thus stand sufficient in itself, and should be made ready. Unholy extraneous laws that are a burden and a disturbance to the church should be thoroughly rooted out. Oh, if only in life we may see that end, for I am certain that in another age we may know it! Indeed, we know that the marriage of men finds its model in the ­marriage of Christ and the church.

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IV: THE EUCHARIST

The doctrine of transubstantiation was presented formally in Canon 1 of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, which was presided over by Innocent III.1 Transubstantiation, as explained explicitly in the canon, involved the replacement or transformation of one substance (the bread or the wine) by another (the body or the blood of Christ). This formal record of ‘orthodox’ eucharistic doctrine was the implicit target of much of Wyclif ’s criticism of contemporary conceptions of material change in the host. It entailed necessarily for him that the substances of the bread and the wine had to have been annihilated, and that their accidents had therefore to exist without subjects. Many theologians had published versions of this theory, including Thomas Aquinas, but Wyclif ’s metaphysical system could admit neither the possibility of annihilation nor the possibility of accidents existing without substantive subjects. He outlined his position in a late philosophical treatise, On the Externally Productive Power of God (1371/2), but its controversial potential ostensibly went unnoticed (6). Wyclif ’s reputation as a heretic was sealed with the publication of his lengthy dedicated theological treatise, On the Eucharist, in 1380. This was composed some time prior to his shorter ‘confession’ that was written in 1381 in response to his condemnation late in 1380 by a committee of twelve theologians appointed by the chancellor of the University of Oxford, William Barton.2 His ideas were further developed after his retreat to Lutterworth, and receive extensive treatment in the fourth chapter of his monumental Trialogue (1382/3). His philosophical convictions about the impossibility of annihilation and the illogicality of free-standing accidental properties meant that he could not accept that the substances of the bread and wine ceased to be at the point of consecration. It is important to be aware that Wyclif was not denying that these substances could degenerate or be transformed, since these processes were witnessed constantly in nature (as when wood was reduced to ashes in a fire, for example). What he was denying, rather, was that substances could be reduced to nothing (the  1 See Decrees, vol. 1, p. 230, for the Latin text and an English translation.   2 For a translation of the ‘Confession’ see Lahey, John Wyclif, pp. 226–43.

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literal meaning of the verb annihilate). Though he did not wish to challenge the doctrine of real presence (Christ, he believed, was certainly present in the host), the process of transubstantiation represented for him a metaphysical impossibility; he resolutely defended his position on Eucharistic change until his death in 1384. His ideas anticipate those over a century later of Martin Luther, with whom the introduction of the doctrine of consubstantiation is generally associated. The fact that no annihilation could occur for Wyclif meant necessarily that the substances of the bread and wine had to remain in the host after consecration (23). This was the reason why, he would have claimed, the bread felt, smelled and tasted like bread and the wine smelled and tasted like wine. These were not merely accidents without substances, as many theologians had claimed (and were continuing to claim). Such claims were absurd, because it was metaphysically untenable, Wyclif thought, for the tangible and tasteable accidents of the bread and wine to exist without a substantive subject (22, 23, 24, 25). He was equally critical of the supposition that divine power enabled the accidents to be sustained by another, ‘absolute’ accident, such as quantity or quality (as Aquinas and Duns Scotus had argued, respectively). This had to mean that the word this in the sacramental propositions signified the bread and the wine, respectively (24), and not an aggregate of accidents. Another problem with existing accounts of the Eucharist related to the issue of multiplication. Wyclif ’s position in respect of this, as he suggests in a tangled and probably corrupt chapter of On Apostasy, is that the body of Christ is in one place in respect of his nature, but virtually in many others. The two competing views, which he dismisses, are that Christ is dimensionally in several places at once, and that he is in one place dimensionally, and in others virtually, but according to his nature.3 Because of the problematic nature of the text of this chapter, I have not included it here. The argument that he presents there, nevertheless, is clearly consistent with his belief that Christ is present in the Eucharist sacramentally (22), but not dimensionally or physically. Stephen Lahey has argued compellingly that Wyclif ’s rejection of dimensional multiplication challenges the teaching of John Duns Scotus and Aquinas together, and rests on his own beliefs about the indivisibility of space and time (as formulated in the Summa de Ente).4  3 De Apostasia, pp. 92–102.  4 Wyclif believed that both space and time, rather than being continua, could be

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Predictably, Wyclif was keen to associate errors in Eucharistic doctrine with the friars, who by this point in his career were old enemies. In the Trialogue, he is careful to point out that friars were present at Blackfriars, and that they had predictably insisted that the sacrament was indeed an accident without a substance, and that this position was fully consistent with orthodox ecclesiastical teaching.5 It could be no coincidence, he must have thought, that the second of his conclusions condemned as heresy there was precisely that an accident could not remain without a substance in the consecrated host (46). This text also provides one of the clearest articulations of Wyclif ’s own position in respect of the Eucharist. Both the bread and the body of Christ are present in the host, he argues here, but the former is present naturally and the latter sacramentally. In May 1381, Wyclif published a document in response to the condemnations of his teaching on the Eucharist that were made by Barton’s committee of twelve. This Confession offers a concise summary of the material presented in On the Eucharist the preceding year.6 Here, he presents the conclusion that, although Christ’s body is present at every point of the host, it is nevertheless not there dimensionally or corporeally. Rather, he suggests, it exists there virtually, sacramentally and spiritually, by the grace of God. Wyclif is very clear that such a claim does not amount to a denial of real presence; the body and the blood of Christ are present in the Eucharist in real terms, but not in the crude, physical terms that his contemporaries seem to demand. They are not present at all, as he is careful to point out, to a priest who consecrates in a state of mortal sin. Wyclif ’s refusal to retract his conclusions on Eucharistic change in response to Barton’s committee and the plea of John of Gaunt put an end to his career as an Oxford theologian. The publication of the Confession in 1381 stands as testimony to the tenacity with which his views were held.

broken down into indivisible atomic constituents. See John Wyclif, pp. 128–31; on Wyclif ’s temporal atomism, see 5.  5 Trialogus, p. 338. See Wyclif: Trialogus, trans. Stephen E. Lahey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 269.  6 Wyclif ’s Confession has been translated by Stephen Lahey in an appendix to his John Wyclif, pp. 226–43.

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22 The body and blood of Christ are not physically present in the eucharist

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On the Eucharist, ch. 1 (extract). Latin text: De Eucharistia, pp. 11–21. This extract from On the Eucharist offers an emphatic expression of Wyclif ’s commitment to the orthodox principle of real presence. Though he maintains that Christ’s body and blood are really present in the eucharist, rather than being present in some oblique or symbolic way, Wyclif stresses that his presence is nevertheless not a physical presence, but a presence akin to that of the soul in the body. Wyclif proves his point by examining the absurd consequences that would follow from Christ being physically present in the host, and the idolatrous practices that might arise as a consequence. The consumption of the bare, consecrated sacrament is certainly a physical process, as Wyclif is keen to point out here, but Christ’s body and blood are ingested by the congregation spiritually or, to borrow Wyclif ’s own term, sacramentally.

In considering the eucharist we should initially look at some of the more familiar issues, and first, whether the sacrament of the altar is really Christ’s body. On this matter, I have often said to the people that in the sacrament of the altar there are three things that ought to be considered, namely, the bare sacrament and not the sacramental thing, which is the consecrated host; second, the sacrament and the sacramental thing, namely, the true body and blood of Christ; and third, the sacramental thing and not the sacrament, namely, the union of Christ with his mystical body, which is the church. Now, this last is nowhere perceptible, and consequently, the sacrament is not actually present anywhere. The objections of pagans are annihilated with this conviction, for they argue that a sow, a dog or a mouse can eat our God, because [the host] is the body of Christ, which is God. According to this same conviction, we say to them that they make a false assumption faithlessly, since such animals can indeed eat the consecrated host, which is the bare sacrament, but not the body or the blood of Christ. Rather, just as a lion eating a man’s body does not eat his soul, even though it is present at every point of his body, so we should think of Christ’s body in the sacrament of the altar. His whole body is sacramentally, spiritually or virtually present at every point of the consecrated host, as the soul is present in the body. Second, they object that our priests break the body of Christ, and thus his head, arms, and each of his individual limbs, which would be the most terrifying thing to do to our God. But we respond

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according to the preceding conviction that they faithlessly make a false assumption, since we break the sacrament or the consecrated host, but not Christ’s body. These things are distinct from each other, just as we do not break a ray from the sun when we break glass or a crystalline stone. And here we perceive the meaning of the church’s song: Nor a single doubt retain, When they break the Host in twain, But that in each part remains What was in the whole before.

We therefore cannot deny that the sacrament is broken, since this is what the practice of the church teaches, and interpretations would otherwise deceptively follow sophistical conceptions of truth, since the body of Christ itself is not broken. It is clear that it is the sacrament that is broken, not Christ’s body. Otherwise, in response to someone asking what is broken, it would only have been less true to say that it was the body of Christ when that person had been asking about the substance of the thing itself. Third, they object that unless the consecrated host were the body of Christ, we would not see Christ’s body and would not eat it, just as we would not crush it with our teeth, and in the same way we could not receive it, which would be inconsistent for Christians. But here we respond by making a distinction, which is that there are two ways of seeing, two ways of eating and two ways of receiving, namely bodily and spiritual. And thus, we agree that we see Christ’s body in the sacrament not with our bodily eye but with the eye of our mind, namely, through a glass mysteriously. And just as the image is whole at every point of the glass, so that it can be seen in part or in its whole by any bodily eye, wherever it is, so we should think of the body of Christ in the consecrated host, as in a mirror. And in the same way, it is said that we do not touch or take Christ’s body through corporeal touch, just as we do not eat it corporeally. And that is the sense of the church song in which it is said: Doth it pass thy comprehending? Faith, the law of sight transcending Leaps to things not understood.

Nor do we grind Christ’s body with our teeth, but we receive the whole spiritually. And this is how we understand the song in which we say:

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Since the simple sign alone Suffers change in state or form: The signified remaining one And the same for evermore.

But here certain of our friends object that these things should not be said to the laity, who neither understand nor observe them, and because of them they would lose their earlier faith. But nothing is more outrageous than this objection! Too many people, both clerics and laypeople, are so much like infidels in this matter that they believe that the consecrated host is their God, as pagans would! Undoubtedly, they would then conclude the said arguments as pagans would. He who does not misunderstand these things would therefore understand the doctrine of the trinity and the incarnation. The aforementioned lay belief [in the physical presence of Christ’s body in the Eucharist] is not a belief that would please the Lord of truth, but is the worst kind of faithlessness, because it is a form of idolatry by which a contemptible creature is faithlessly worshipped as God. And according to that same stupid belief, no error of faith could ever be taught or argued, as an impressionable Christian would then become sullied in faithlessness. Yet if it were then said that there was a thorn in someone’s foot, a sword in his flesh or any poisonous cause of illness in his body, it would be held that it should not be removed in case it became worse! It is therefore the role of bishops to destroy these heresies, because otherwise they will themselves become heretics simply by accepting them. Second, they object that, if this were made known to the laity, then the people’s devotion to this venerable sacrament would become debased or would even diminish. But that fiction is sustained beneath the same treachery, for the Apostle says in Romans 3[:8], ‘let us not do evil, that there may come good’. So much the more, therefore, should the faithful person say, ‘let us not commit idolatry and lead the people further astray by false and faithless devotion’, as we would obviously not believe from the people that the chalice in which the blood of Christ is contained and the wood from which the crucifix is made from are really our God. We come forward in such worship when the chalice has been seen, as we do when the consecrated host has been seen, not on account of the chalice itself, which has been consecrated by the priest, but on account of the excellent sacrament concealed within it. Thus, having seen the host, we should believe not that it is Christ’s body but that Christ’s body is sacramentally concealed within it. And that sense of the church is what we sing:

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Here beneath these signs are hidden Priceless things, to sense forbidden, Signs, not things, are all we see.

It is clear that, with that idolatrous error destroyed, God could be worshipped more fully and more purely than he is worshipped now, because we must believe that Christ is present and hidden in those sacraments. Why, then, would we not worship Christ in the visible host and in the visible chalice, just as the faithful more devoutly worship divine majesty in any creature they see? When this idea has been assimilated, worship would be true and would have to be pleasing to God; indeed, worship of the lie is abhorrent to the true God. That is a true principle, though it may displease priests of idols. Third, they object that thus sacerdotal power would be debased, since the priest would not have the power to consecrate or to make the body or the blood of Christ. Indeed, it seems that just as through his faith a layman sees the deity when he sees any creature, which is more than the body of Christ, so through sufficient faith he takes the body of Chris when he sees any creature. But who would then hear mass, and who would earnestly assemble the celebrants or accept the sacrament in the manner of the church? I say here that the first point does not follow. Indeed, with the error of blasphemy eradicated sacerdotal power would be preserved and respected within its boundaries. Nothing is more terrifying than the idea of a celebrating priest making or consecrating Christ’s body daily, since neither our God nor his body could be made afresh: it is holy and eternal to the highest degree. It is therefore made newly only in a sacramental sense, but our priests make and bless the consecrated host, which is not the dominical body but its effective sign. That blessing is greater than the blessing of the chalice or of some other ornament that is strictly reserved for the bishop, for a reason known to God. The priest therefore has sufficient honour and power to bless, consecrate and effect the sacrament, which is the consecrated host and not Christ’s body. It is its sign or integument. Hence, because the priest does not have the power to make the sacrament, except in a ministerial way through God, its principal maker, he is therefore said to make not Christ’s body but only the bare sacrament. He should therefore be praised not because of that, but by virtue of the sanctity of his life. Thus, we should listen more faithfully to the mass of a devout priest, and flee from the mass of the known sinner. We do not buy priests with financial suffrage, but in the absence of any civil agreement we

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repay them with the necessities of life, just as the apostle teaches us to do with preachers in 1 Corinthians 9. Nevertheless, just as we bless God and the Lord in a laudatory rather than an effectual way, so we bless Christ’s body and blood not by making him blessed or holy but by praising and making public the sanctity and blessedness that God established in his body, and thus we sacrifice Christ and offer him to God the Father. Note, moreover, that our spiritual acceptance of Christ’s body does not consist in a physical acceptance, which is the chewing or touching of the host, but in the sustenance of the soul through the fruits of our faith, according to which our spirit is nourished in the Lord. And on account of ignorance about this chewing of the body of Christ and the drinking of his blood, many disciples turned back, as we see in John 6[:61]: ‘This saying is hard,’ they said, ‘and who can hear it?’ Indeed, there is nothing more horrible than necessarily having to eat the body and blood of a man carnally, as Christ’s companions thought. He therefore told those of his apostles who had been worthy of understanding the life-giving sense, excluding those that had unworthily turned back, that the carnal sense of those words was of no use. Rather, [as he said], ‘it is the spirit,’ that is, the spiritual sense, ‘that quickeneth’ (John 6[:63]). When an opportunity is badly taken that other sense causes us to stumble. We should therefore believe the faithful man [who says] that whatever nourishes the soul is spiritual, and is food of the soul. And thus, Christ’s flesh and blood should inspire love in our spirits for troubled sinners, which are food for the soul that enables us to happily make recompense. And this is what truth understands of the eating and drinking in the spiritual, which must be present in all of those who will be saved. Hence, Augustine says the following in his [twenty-sixth] homily [on John]: To eat that food and drink that drink is to dwell in Christ and to have him dwelling mutually in us. And through this [we know that] whoever does not dwell in Christ and in whom Christ does not himself dwell, without doubt does not eat his flesh spiritually, although he physically and visibly crushes the sacraments of the body and blood of Christ [with his teeth]; rather, he eats and drinks the sacrament of so great a thing in his own judgement.7

And thus, three things should be noted from the words of Christ and his disciple Augustine: first, that the flesh and blood of Christ are eaten  7 CCSL 36, p. 268; Homilies on the Gospel of John 1–40, trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2009), p. 464.

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only spiritually; for God ordained eternally that ‘thy holy one will not see corruption’ in any of his limbs (Psalm 15[:10]). Second, it is clear that neither an animal nor any of the foreknown can eat the body of Christ in this way, even though they physically eat the sacrament. Third, we appreciate the wonderful subtlety of the doctor’s words when he says not that the unworthy man crushes Christ’s body visibly with his teeth, but rather that he crushes the sacrament of Christ’s body and the blood visibly with his teeth. The sacrament is distinguished from the body of Christ, which is the sacramental thing. Hence, we should note the distinction that Augustine makes between bodily eating and spiritual eating. Now, in bodily eating, the thing that is eaten provides nourishment for the eater, since it is absorbed into his limbs. In spiritual eating the opposite happens, since anyone who eats the body of Christ spiritually is thus incorporated into the limbs of the church, and thus into Christ. Spiritual eating therefore extends beyond the eater. The fallacies and sleepy fictions that are rehearsed against this argument are of no value. Some people say that if one man perceives another when he sees his clothes, simply because of the movement of the body concealed within them, so likewise he perceives Christ’s body when he sees the sacrament, by virtue of its movement. But by that same fallacy, it could be said in an analogous way that a man sees God and the soul when he perceives a subject through any of the vital that are movements concealed within it. The same could be said in respect of any of the five senses. I would therefore concede that we perceive a subject through its accidents in the way that has been said, but common sense or any internal sense perceives a subject from the movement of its perceptible accidents. No human sense at all, however, perceives Christ’s body, but only the pure understanding of faith. This is known from the fact that when the consecrated host is put with others, a man cannot distinguish it from them any better than an animal if his faith’s understanding disappears. Just as an animal is not equipped to apprehend the sacramental thing beneath its outer appearance, so neither are the human senses. Second, some say that there were many saints who maintained that they had perceived Christ’s body by sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch in the consecrated host, and therefore believe this. Just as we see the king of kings in the sacrament of the Eucharist, they say, so we hear him in the breaking of the host, smell him in the scent of the form of the bread and wine, taste him when swallow down the venerable

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sacrament, and touch him when, whilst holding the host, we pull or handle the sacrament intimately with our fingers. It seems that this is mere fabrication, just as miracles are often fabricated, and just as people often believe false things about true miracles, on account of common ignorance. I have heard, for example, a certain individual tell how the host gradually descended from the altar to the central part of the church and entered the heart of a certain sick man, who devoutly and publicly proclaimed this, saying: ‘You knew, God, that I would reverentially consume you, and that my sickness would be taken away. It is not sickness of mind that afflicts me here, but only sickness of the body.’ The host stole into the chamber of his heart through the cleft in his breast, and thus the sick man was suddenly restored to full health. Afterwards, the narrator was commended by a certain close friend on account of his story and the people’s devotion, but then confessed that this had been a disgraceful lie: ‘His mouth,’ he said, ‘contrived this beautiful lie!’ I think, nevertheless, that miracles do occur around the consecrated host (as St Gregory tells us), but it would be very strange for anyone who knew what the consequences would be to infer that the body of the Lord actually was the consecrated host. Correspondingly, I say that if this sleepy individual knew that the sick man who believed that he had sensed the dominical body in the way described was trustworthy, which cannot be proved experimentally or through Scripture, then he was not then therefore a saint, but, like too many people, a manifest idolater from Antichrist’s cult of signs. The people could actually be led astray so that they worshipped moles and bats, and creatures still more abominable, as God. In respect of the aforementioned five senses, it seems that more recent doctors deny [that Christ is physically present in the eucharist] by appealing to vision. When the eye sees, they say, it follows the shape of a triangle, whose cone is in the eye and whose base is in the thing that is seen. But since the Lord’s body is multiplied across each point of the host, such a base does not terminate. Therefore, according to the true principles of perspective, it is thus not seen by the bodily eye. Indeed, the saints held that neither the eye of a glorified body nor even the eye of Christ himself could physically see his body and blood in the consecrated host. Now, we should ask those storytellers who see Christ’s body physically in the sacrament whether he is standing or sitting there, for Stephen thus saw Jesus ‘standing on the right hand of God’ (Acts 7[:55]). And they do not know whether to say this or to say [that he

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is sitting]. Just as in an examination of witnesses, they should be convicted of lying.

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23 How the substances of the bread and wine remain after consecration Postils on the Whole of Scripture: 1 Corinthians 10:16. Latin text: Wyclifs Bibelkommentar, pp. 369–70. Thomson recognises this postil as ‘an important early statement on the Eucharist’.8 Wyclif here presents a summary of his beliefs and teaching on the sacrament, beginning with the meaning of Christ’s words as recited by the priest in the canon of the mass: ‘This is my body’ and ‘this is the cup of my blood of the New and Everlasting Testament’.9 Wyclif is careful to stress that these beliefs are predicated upon the assumption that the bread and wine remain after consecration. All of the claims that are made in this brief postil run contrary to orthodox teaching, but, as Wyclif insists here and elsewhere, they also satisfy his own metaphysical convictions about the impossibility of annihilation.

The cup of blessing, which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? And the bread, which we break, is it not the partaking of the body of the Lord? (1 Corinthians 10[:16]). This is contained in the chalice that we call the cup of blessing, which is consecrated through God’s blessing, and those worthily receiving God’s blessing are blessed with the gift of grace. First, it is said that we priests bless and consecrate the chalice by offering these words as ministers in the person of Christ, since he works with us through them, by authoritatively performing the consecration. But the sacrament of the eucharist is offered to a person in the form of bread and wine, as a sign that it nourishes both of his natures.10 Just as this sacrament is a symbol of the body that is there, and receives the sensible body within itself so that it encapsulates it, so unlike other kinds of food it is not assimilated into the recipient, but rather assimilates the recipient into Christ, whose body and blood it is, spiritually. It is the same to have communion with the bread and wine, thus consecrated in the chalice, as to have  8 Latin Writings, p. 207, catalogue number 350 n. 1.  9 See, for example, The Sarum Missal, Edited from Three Early Manuscripts, ed. J. Wickham Legg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1916; reprinted 1969), p. 222. 10 That is, both his spiritual nature and his earthly nature.

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communion with the flesh and the blood. And certain people call the sensible properties of the sacrament, which the apostle called bread and wine, accidents, but they are certainly not univocally accidents, like the philosophers’ quantity and quality. This is the error of modern philosophers, all of whom say that quantity, which is a mathematical entity, acts as a subject for quantities and other accidents.11 And certain of them say that qualities capable of being rarefied act as subjects for quality. Indeed, some say that the eucharist is an aggregate of quality and quantity, and that this cannot be avoided. But if it would please the satraps, I might just as well say that the bread and wine remain and that any particular part of the body of Christ is multiplied sacramentally to each of their points. This is not incompatible with God, because according to other perspectives the sensible body is multiplied across all distances to the places where it is perceived. Therefore, the body of Christ has a certain kind of being beneath the sacrament, but not dimensional being, and it is not sensibly present in quantitative or qualitative terms; it is not without quantity, but it has no quantity there. And there is no reason for the mind to exist wherever it has sense, or for a perceptible thing to be wherever it is seen in its nature or activity, unless in the same way the body of Christ exists wherever it works sacramentally, and so by transubstantiation and conversion the process by which the substance of the bread and wine becomes a secondary body, as a sign of the body of Christ, can be understood. Hence, some saints say that the bread is the body of Christ, or rather, it is the body of Christ in the same way as a sign receives predication of what it signifies, which is the way in which the apostle says here that Christ was a rock.12 Here, therefore, this sign differs from others in that it is always prior to what it signifies, which insensibly but virtually lies within it. Therefore, just as a green circle is not perceived as a sign of wine unless it leads to knowledge of the wine that is inside [a tavern],13 the same is to be understood in respect of the remnants of the bread and wine. Just as idolatry would not be committed nor hunger removed through the worshipping or chewing of the accidents that the moderns propose, so the trained individual should duly honour this sacrament, and to see if the substance of the bread and wine should remain, see the next chapter.14 11 Wyclif identifies this elsewhere as a Thomistic position. It is clearly articulated in the Summa Theologiae IIIa q. 77, a. 2, ad 3. 12 1 Corinthians 10:4. 13 That is, when the green circle identifies an inn. 14 The reference is to a section of Wyclif ’s Postils that does not survive.

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According to the spiritual simulation by which this sacrament creates a likeness of us in Christ, by making us his mystical body through a movement into unity, the apostle says that ‘we, being many, are one bread’ (1 Corinthians 10[:16]), which is called the body of Christ according to the way of speaking above. And through this sign it receives a predication of what it signifies, as an image of Hercules is called Hercules and the bread the body of Christ. Hence, this sacrament is ordained as a sign that we are incorporated into God through the unity of charity, under those things that move from multitude to unity, just as bread is made from many grains, and wine flows from many grapes.

24 The meaning of the sacramental words On the Eucharist, ch. 9 (extract). Latin text: De Eucharistia, pp. 291–7. Wyclif here insists that removing annihilation of the substances of the bread and wine as an effect of the eucharistic blessing does not in any way compromise the truth of the words that are spoken by the priest in the person of Christ. The presence of Christ’s body in the host would be every bit as real as Christians held it to be if such a calamitous metaphysical event did not take place. Wyclif defends his argument by appealing to the Church Fathers and the usual scholastic authorities, together with Gratian and Richard Fitzralph, alongside a less familiar earlier medieval authority, the Frankish theologian Hraban Maur.

In respect of the truth of the sacramental words, it seems that they are most true, since they are the constant and wholesome sentence of the Lord’s truth. And since the bread or the wine are shown everywhere, neither transubstantiation nor identification nor impanation can exist unless the meaning of the words is tropical, that is, unless it figuratively represents the body of Christ sacramentally.15 That the bread or the wine is shown is suggested by the fourfold gospel (as I have often said), and the holy doctors, namely Ambrose, Jerome and 15 Wyclif would here seem to be considering the three options that were consistent with the assumption that Christ’s body was really present in the host: transubstantiation (the belief that one substance was annihilated and replaced with another, which he emphatically rejected), identification (consubstantiation, which perhaps comes closest to his own position) and impanation (the belief that Christ’s presence was mediated through the bread, meaning that his body became the bread, in a way that was seen to be comparable to the word becoming flesh).

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especially Augustine, are in agreement about this, as are others who follow them, together with the customs and laws of the church and those who write commentaries upon them, such as [H]raban [Maur] in On the Sacrament of the Altar, and others, who all say that the bread that they take can be, will be and is the body of Christ, and it is so.16 But that would be the most stupid thing unless the force of the sacramental words made this happen, and unless reference were made to the bread through the words of consecration, and consequently it is necessary to assign the aforementioned sense to Christ’s words. Hence, not only the new doctors but also the community of human arts proclaim that the bread itself becomes Christ’s by the omnipotence of God’s word. Hence, the Doctor Communis, commenting on distinction 11, question 3 of the Sentences, seems to say that such a change is itself different from others, since it involves a corruption of the substance of the bread, or a transformation of that subject, and in no sense a generation of substance.17 And since the verb is denotes a certain substantive change, since it would not otherwise be connected with the consecration of the sacrament, Aquinas seems to say that according to Lincolniensis the body of Christ is signified through the word this, just as the Doctor Subtilis, commenting on distinction 8,18 seems to say that an analogous being is signified under those accidents, under a certain contraction.19 The [ordinary] gloss on Gratian’s Decretum, under distinction 2 [of part 3], On Consecration, in the chapter entitled 16 Almost certainly a reference to Hraban’s On the Universe. The discussion of the Eucharist appears in book V, Chapter 11, which bears the title ‘On the Holy Sacraments’. Here Hraban argues, ‘because the bread confirms the body, it is congruently called the body of Christ’. See PL 111, cols 9–614b (col. 136a). I am grateful to Brian Murdoch for directing me towards Hraban’s On the Universe here. 17 The Sentences of Peter Lombard (d. 1160–64), which had become a standard theological text in the schools by the thirteenth century. The text is divided into distinctions, which were introduced by Alexander of Hales, and subdivided in most commentaries into questions and then articles. For a detailed study of this text and its medieval readers, see Philipp Rosemann, The Story of a Great Medieval Book: Peter Lombard’s Sentences (Plymouth: Broadview, 2007). The section of Aquinas’s commentary to which Wyclif would appear to be referring is bk 4, dist. 11, q.1, a. 3, in which the nature of Eucharistic change is discussed. 18 The reference is to Duns Scotus’s commentary on distinction 8 of book 4 of the Sentences. 19 Scotus did not claim that real presence was a matter of analogy, nor that the body of Christ existed in a contracted form. Rather, as Marilyn McCord-Adams argues, for Scotus ‘[the body of Christ] is really present but lacks situational or categorical presence’, Some Later Medieval Theories of the Eucharist: Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, Duns Scotus and William Ockham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 119. For an accessible account of Scotus’s understanding of Eucharistic change, see Richard Cross, Duns Scotus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 139–45.

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‘Fear’, says that ‘nothing is represented because the proposition itself is interpreted materially’, since it would otherwise be false.20 But St Richard, Ardmacan, and other saints say with the gospel that it refers to the bread, since otherwise those words would be irrelevant. If we accept that the bread is signified in the transformative statement ‘this is my body’, it manifestly follows if its truth is taken for granted that the bread remains after consecration. Indeed, after consecration it is true that the bread is the body of Christ, and if thus the bread is bread, then after consecration it remains the case that the bread is bread. This is confirmed by the fact that Christ, immediately before, blessed the bread, which he said should be eaten by the apostles. This is a sign not of the destruction of the bread but of its enrichment. If the blessed bread were annihilated in its entirety, the blessing would be crueller and more terrible than the curse by which Christ cursed the fig-tree in Matthew 21[:19], since after the cursing of the fig, its dry substance remained.21 Here, however, nothing is said of the substance of the bread remaining, and the conversion contributes nothing to the goodness of the bread or its essence. We have no doubt that Christ only commanded his people to eat after the consecration [of the bread]. Truth, which so despised duplicitous sophistry, consequently wanted the bread that would be eaten to remain after the consecration and the breaking by the apostles. Those who respect the truth of Scripture and who prize it as the faith itself are stirred by the Catholic sense of this principle. It seems to me that accepting the notion of identification or impanation rather than the said transubstantiation is much further from the truth of scripture. The latter is closer to the logic of the saints, whom we should not offend by claiming that they have no knowledge of logic and that they spread heretical words. They speak in a way which is most faithful to scripture, and they do not know how to fashion a falsified gloss. With regard to the third word, it seems that my opponents mendaciously destroy the devotional work of the people, since they say that what is perceived in the hands of the priest cannot be the body 20 The Decree of Gratian, produced in the twelfth century by a Comaldolite monk of that name, was a collection of decrees that dealt with a range of issues in canon law. It was divided into parts and distinctions. The third part was devoted to sacramental and related questions. The Glossa Ordinaria became a standard authoritative commentary. 21 ‘And in the morning, returning into the city, he was hungry. And seeing a certain fig tree by the way side, he came to it, and found nothing on it but leaves only, and he saith to it: May no fruit grow on thee henceforward for ever’ (Matthew 21:18–19).

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of Christ or any part thereof, since it is an unknown accident, which they neither perceive nor dare to reveal.22 Sophists argue that there cannot be a third dimension here, because the breadth of the eucharist would be of a different species, indefinitely greater than its length, and its depth would be of a different species than the preceding kind, indefinitely greater than the length of the host, greater in a full cup, and lesser in a less full vessel. The people’s devotion would be greater if they embraced the truthful principle that says that the sacred bread remains, having truly, at its every point, the proper body of the Lord within it, than if they imagined that all that remains there is a holy yet unperceived accident that cannot be the body of the Lord or any part thereof. Indeed, that fiction would seem suspicious to the general populace. But those making use of these clamorous fictions should note how in scripture, Acts 19[:24], A certain Demetrius, making temples for Diana, moved the people against Paul. He said, ‘You know that our gain is by this trade, and you see that this Paul by persuasion has drawn away a great multitude, saying, “They are not gods which are made by hands.” So that not only this our craft is in danger to be set at nought, but also the temple of great Diana shall be reputed for nothing, and her majesty will begin to be destroyed, whom all Asia and the world worships. And when these things had been said, they cried out: “Great is Diana of the Ephesians.” ’

Not only do they worship Christ in a silver image or a rotten trunk, but they forge temples of accidents mendaciously and make the people believe that these are Christ. And they worship them as God in the belief that this is needed. And when anyone searches for the truth of the faith in this matter he drives the people against him. They worship the sacrament so much that they neither know nor understand what kind of accident it is, nor what is signified by the sacramental words. And truly, there is no strength in Thomas’s gloss on distinction 8, question 1 of book 4 of the Sentences, [which suggests] that the body of Christ is signified beneath these accidents: first, because the meaning would then be false from the time of the articulation of the pronoun up until the end of the sentence. Second, because Christ did not think that his body would be contained separately beneath the accidents of your bread or mine, such that the meaning of his words would have been too drawn out and inexplicable for the disciples of Christ. Yet Scotus’s argument that the pronoun signifies confusedly every accident and every bodily 22 The third word is body in Latin: ‘Hoc est corpus meum’.

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and spiritual substance is now given credence.23 But the meaning of Christ’s expression would be too confused [if this were true]. And third, because that particular interpretation of the teaching of scripture escaped major saints like Augustine, Ambrose, Jerome and others like them, for a thousand years and more. To say that they were heretics on the basis of an interpretation contrary to their own would be extremely difficult. Indeed, there were many saints who worked according to the authority of the meaning of scripture completely, who never thought that Christ understood his body to exist beneath those accidents. I have no doubt that it is heretical to interpret the meaning of such a text in a different way from that which the Holy Spirit demands, as Jerome’s decretal says in question 3 of case 29, entitled ‘Heresy’.24 Scholars should therefore consider the meaning of that part of Scripture carefully before they argue blindly that, if the bread were to remain, then ‘This is my body’ would not be said, but ‘Here is my body’. The text could more usefully be emended with the words ‘that which is contained beneath those accidents is my body’, since it would otherwise be possible for a layman to test this!25 It seems that we should therefore conclude that what is represented and signified principally by that statement is the bread that Christ offered as his body, as the text of the gospel teaches. In accordance with this sense the priest, in the person of Christ, speaks truly: ‘This is my body’. The priest’s words also work in a secondary way, signifying that the bread that he has in his hands is the body of Christ. Indeed, the scripture of the Lord would be wanting unless such an alternative sense could arise. The root of disagreement in this matter therefore rests with our understanding of the sacramental proposition. As I suggest in my fifth chapter, it seems that bread is signified because Christ said of the bread: ‘Eat from this, all of you’. To direct [his disciples] to the reward of this eating he added, appropriately: ‘This is my body’. Otherwise, Ambrose and other saints would have said that the bread will be the body of Christ very much without reason. Our interpretation makes the words less metaphorical than the opposite explanation, which posits that the accidents of the bread become a figure of the body of Christ. This unwarrantably makes every part of the statement metaphorical. We do otherwise, as does the Holy 23 Something signifies confusedly when it does not have a discrete referent, but an indeterminate number of referents (hence the reference to ‘every accident’, etc.). 24 This actually appears in pt 2, c. 24, q. 3, ch. 27. See CICaPS p. 997. 25 In a rare move, Wyclif takes suggestions about changes to the consecratory words to their logical conclusion, highlighting their absurdity.

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Spirit with the same sacrament in Paul, when he says in 1 Corinthians 11[:25]: ‘This chalice is the new testament in my blood’. Here, it appears that Paul interprets the predicate metaphorically, at a point [in the sentence] beyond the sacrament and the thing, and he adds that the sign does not signify the nature of the blood but the nature of the wine, because he adds ‘in my blood’ in an oblique way. I do not believe that our opponents will find any foundation for a more compendious tropical interpretation of his words. Indeed, I know that our adversary would unfaithfully interpret the whole history of scripture tropically, so that it would be possible to interpret all the deeds of Christ metaphorically, such that he did not do those things personally, but accidentally. Augustine mentions something similar in his booklet On Heresies.26 Indeed, I know that we who impiously argue about worldly goods and signs of our own invention are mistaken and blinded into the pains of sin, in the sense that the primitive church has according to the prophecy of the old man Simeon in Luke 2[:34]: ‘he is set as a sign which will be contradicted’. For just as in conversation we contradict the deeds of Christ, so in thought we contradict the real words of Christ. For this reason, in relation to these matters, I am prepared to stand by the holy decree of mother church.

25 Why the bread and wine cannot be accidents without substantive subjects On Apostasy, chs 4–5 (extracts). Latin text: De Apostasia, pp. 59–65. In each of these chapters, Wyclif repudiates the notion that the appearance, taste, smell and texture of the sacramental bread and wine (their accidents) can be sustained without a subject (their respective substances). In chapter 4, he considers the philosophical reasons why accidents cannot exist without a subject. In chapter 5, he examines the views of Robert Grosseteste, who held that sacramental accidents can indeed exist without a subject. Other authorities are drawn upon here (Ambrose and Augustine), but Wyclif is reluctant to conclude that they themselves believed that accidents could exist independently 26 Possibly a reference to ch. 14, in which a certain Mark denies the physical suffering of Christ. See CCSL 46, p. 296; Arianism and Other Heresies, trans. Roland J. Teske (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1995), p. 36.

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of subjects. Rather, he argues that Grosseteste wilfully misinterprets these authorities in relation to the question of real presence: both affirm that Christ’s body and blood are present in the sacrament after the consecration, but they say nothing about the bread and the wine. Wyclif is suggesting that this omission is regarded by Grosseteste and others as a tacit endorsement of the belief that accidents can subsist without subjects. Chapter 4 The widespread fiction that says that the sacrament of the eucharist is an accident without a subject is a great heresy. Indeed, I have shown elsewhere that this sacrament is not an accident and it is evidently not without a subject: first, because it would then be without any subject, and consequently it would not then have God or the humanity of Christ at its every point. But both are necessarily its subject: divinity through a rational relation, and Christ’s humanity beneath every accident of whatever kind.27 … This claim [that the Eucharist is an accident without a subject] does not have scriptural authority, and therefore cannot be accepted and interpreted by faith. Indeed, the sacrament is itself the subject of those accidents, as is any part thereof; therefore, it is not without a subject in any of its parts. And the same is known from the fact that the sacrament is a perceptible quality, as is evident from its definition. That quality, they argue, is not without a subject because it takes quantity as its subject. But quantity is not itself the sacrament, because no quantity can itself be qualified by accidents in this way, in the same way as the host is qualified. This is because the same quantity cannot be made greater or smaller when we see the host transformed. Now, if the sacrament were without a subject, then it would also be without anything that is subjected to it, and since it is the true body of Christ, it would follow that no Christian would be subject to the body of Christ, and, hence, to Christ. The conclusion is impossible, at least for the blessed of this land. And since the sacrament must be entirely as it should be, it would follow that it would exist without anything subjected to it, and consequently no Christian should be subject to it. Against this blasphemy, St Peter commanded: ‘Be ye subject therefore 27 A rational relation is established mentally between one thing and another. Though the humanity of Christ exists in a real relation to the accidents of the bread and wine, his divinity, Wyclif suggests here, is related to them only in conceptual terms.

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to every human creature for God’s sake!’ (1 Peter 2[:13]). I say that if we should be subject to every human creature, and the body of Christ is the foremost human creature because it is Christ, it follows that we should be subject to it. It is not therefore orthodox to pronounce that nobody should be subject to the eucharist, because although very few may be subject to it properly after the dissemination of this heresy, all Christians should nevertheless be its subjects. And if it should be said that we equivocate with regard to the meaning of the Lord’s ‘subject’, I ask his church to witness that St Peter’s subject should be more familiar to the faithful than Porphyry’s subject, or that of some other heathen.28 Speaking as they do themselves, any singular is a subject of predication; any consecrated host is the subject of change, since it can be carried from place to place; in itself, it can even be degraded and can putrefy, and can be transformed by beating, stretching, extension and turning. It does not seem, therefore, that the new fiction about the quiddity of the host is valid, except in leading the church into the pains of sin, though it is of use, purely accidentally, in revealing the treacherous fallacies of the disciples of the leech. Now, there are two daughters of the leech, namely, simoniacal heretics and traitors against truth and their kingdom, who, steadfast in their avarice, say, ‘Bring, bring!’ For details of the simoniacal behaviour of heretics, see chapter 1 and others of my treatise On Simony. There is no doubt for the faithful man that it is impossible for our kingdom to be stable and peaceful unless it is cleansed of those heretics. […] Chapter 5 But lord Lincolniensis raises objections against these arguments in chapter 3 of his commentary on the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy,29 where he speaks thus: When they receive the many divided parts perceptibly, the participants in communion would not truly benefit unless those many parts were 28 Porphyry (d. ca. 305 ce) was a Phoenician philosopher who studied under Plotinus and Longinus. Boethius’s Latin translation of his Isagogue (Greek ‘Introduction’) served as an influential introduction to logic throughout the medieval period. Here, he serves as a conveniently familiar example of heathenness. 29 This text remains unedited. See S. Harrison Thomson, The Writings of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), pp. 56–7 (details of extant manuscripts) and p. 79 (brief description of the text).

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themselves united in something. But those many parts into which the consecrated bread is divided are united in the unity of the true body of Christ, and those many parts into which the chalice is divided are united in the unity of his blood. [The participants] might themselves perhaps assume that those many parts, which are distributed to them perceptibly, exist or come to be within them. For those sensible forms do not then have other subsistences30 supporting them in being; for there is not, under the form of the bread or the wine at that moment, a material substance of bread or wine.31 Those sensible forms, nevertheless, do not inhere in the body and the blood of Christ as they would in subjects that are given form by them.

And the same interpretation is given consistently by Hugh of St Victor, Peter Lombard and other modern doctors.32 I have often said that it would be rashly presumptuous to suggest that those doctors are proposing the impossible, as they should evidently be interpreted in another way. I have therefore often said that it is likely that they understand absolute accidents to be in the imaginations of the faithful, while the quiddity of the bread and the wine is not considered. The philosophers themselves speak of things which seem to be in this same way, thus: ‘time, both universal and sensible, does not have being in actuality, but only in the mind’.33 Through the mind’s contemplation, time is known as the way in which motion is measured, both after and before, in the act of movement. A universal, likewise, is known through its being communicated to its many supposits, and the perceptible thing, according to the way in which it is reducible to an act of knowing. So it is in relation to the sacrament, which is known as a sign; for the quiddity of the bread or the wine is here disregarded, and the notion of absolute perceptible accidents prompts the mind to consider the sacrament as a sign in actuality. But just as a perceptible universal and time do not have natural being to any lesser extent than they have conceptual being, it is nevertheless possible for something to be known according to the idea that sustains it; in a certain way, this is true of the eucharist. Hence, Lincolniensis’s interpretation is supported 30 A subsistence is an entity that exists independently of a subject. All subjects are hence subsistences, and the two terms are often used interchangeably. 31 In other words, there is no subject beneath the accidents of the bread and the wine; they are self-sustaining, absolute accidents. 32 This is a reference to pt 8, ch. 11 of Hugh’s On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith and to the fourth book of the Lombard’s Sentences. For the former, see PL 176, cols 469b–470a, and Hugh of St Victor on the Sacraments of the Christian Faith, trans. Roy J. Deferrari (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1951), p. 312. The relevant part of the Lombard’s text can be found in Sententiae in IV libris distinctae, vol. 2, 4, dist. 8.; Peter Lombard, The Sentences, Book 4: On the Doctrine of Signs, pp. 41–6. 33 Here, Wyclif paraphrases what he takes to be received philosophical wisdom.

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through the first text of St Dionysius, on which he provides a gloss.34 Dionysius regularly calls the sacrament bread, just as the apostles do, with whom this saint lived as a contemporary, and never accident.35 He therefore calls on Timothy, for whom he wrote that book when Timothy was a child.36 Second, it is important that the other doctor [Lincolniensis] regularly calls the sacrament bread, just like the author he glosses. It should not therefore be presumed that such subtle logic is self-contradictory. Nor is it relevant that he speaks of the sacrament not in terms of the nature or the substance of the bread, but simply as bread, because our community of the faithful call our saviour Jesus, and do not describe him with the name of the substance or the nature of man, and the faithful person nevertheless believes that Christ truly is the substance and nature of man, and not a vision of accidents, as infidels argue here. Third, it is significant that the doctor rehearses the first argument of chapter 3 of St Dionysius with approval, which states that the sacrament itself is the flesh of Christ. ‘The Eucharist’, he says, ‘according to St Ignatius, is the flesh of our saviour Jesus Christ, who suffered for our sins, of which the weak partake with infirmity’.37 He therefore calls the sacrament the consecrated bread and the body of Christ, and not an accident. So that we may share fruitfully in this sensible sacrament, we should be reduced to a unity in three ways. First, we the many should become one body of Christ, that is, one limb of the bride of Christ, as the apostle says in 1 Corinthians 10[:17].38 Second, it should be true that the multitude of hosts is reduced to one body of Christ, so that however many hosts there are, or into however many parts they are divided, all are the same body of Christ. Third, if we look beyond the quiddity of their underlying substance, we see that all those perceptible sacraments are reduced to the single body of Christ, into which all are converted through the contemplation and worship of the faithful. 34 This text is the Divine Names, on which Lincolniensis produced a commentary. See Thomson, Writings of Robert Grosseteste, p. 79. 35 The figure identified as Dionysius the Areopagite throughout the medieval period (hence Wyclif ’s assumption that he was contemporary with the apostles) was in fact an early sixth-century mystic, and is now therefore usually identified as Pseudo-Dionysius. 36 Pseudo-Dionysius claims to have written the Divine Names for Timothy, as an exposition on the Elements of Theology of Theoseus. Nothing is known of Timothy, who is almost certainly a fiction. 37 Again, this would appear to be from Grosseteste’s lost commentary on the Divine Names. 38 ‘For we, being many, are one bread, one body, all that partake of one bread’.

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Perhaps because this happens, Lincolniensis says: ‘Perhaps those sensible forms are said to be united in this way because they do not have other substances which then sustain them in being’. Supply here, ‘in the mind of the faithful’. And it is not easy to imagine why this doctor would insert the adverb perhaps for any other purpose than this. And St Ambrose’s claim about consecration, cited in distinction 2 [of Gratian’s Decretum], in the chapter entitled All possible things, may be understood in this same way. Here, he says that after consecration the bread and the wine should be believed to be nothing other than the body and the blood of Christ, because then no other quiddity should be thought of.39 Augustine’s words are also understood in this way in his discussion of the Lord’s words in sermon 28: ‘I have said to you all that before the words of Christ what is offered may be called bread; but after his words have been uttered it is not called bread, but is rather called the body of Christ.’40 And the body of Christ is undoubtedly understood, as is evident from sermon 53: ‘The sacrament’, he says, ‘is called the body of Christ by almost all’.41 The same emerges from other similar statements of the saints, and the same idea is referred to in the negative conclusion of Lincolniensis, in which he says that ‘it is not then the material substance of the bread or wine’.42 Supply: ‘in the mind of the faithful’. He undoubtedly speaks of sensible qualities, which should be founded in corporeal quantity according to moderns and ancients alike; consequently, they could not exist by themselves. We should nevertheless note that, before the words of consecration and after, it is lawful and meritorious to remember how the nature of 39 In his Decretum, pt 3, dist. 2, ch. 74, Gratian cites Ambrose under the heading ‘After the consecration, though the appearance of the bread and wine remains, nothing is there except the body and blood of Christ’. See CICaPP col. 1343. 40 The sermon from which this quotation is taken was almost certainly not written by Augustine, but rather forms part of Ambrose’s On the Sacraments, bk 5, ch. 4, which would originally have been delivered as a sermon. The Latin text is edited twice by Migne, once under Augustine (as part of a sermon) and once under Ambrose. For the relevant part of Ambrose’s De Sacramentis, see PL 16, col. 471; for an accurate English translation, see St Ambrose, Theological and Dogmatic Works, trans. Roy J. Deferrari (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1963), pp. 302–3. 41 This is Sermon 354 in the seventeenth-century Maurist (Benedictine) edition of Augustine’s works, which formed the basis of those works included in Migne’s Patrologia Latina. See PL 39, col. 1563; Sermons 341–400, trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1995), pp. 156–64. 42 Possibly a reference to Grosseteste’s Diffinicio Eucharistie col. 520, line 3, in which he uses similar but not identical words to the ones Wyclif attributes to him here. See Kevin M. Purday, ‘The Diffinicio Eucharistie of Robert Grosseteste’, Journal of Theological Studies, n.s. 27:2 (1976), 381–90 (p. 389).

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the bread is reduced to one wholeness according to its degree of union, as St Augustine often makes clear, especially in chapter 7 of the third book of On the Trinity.43 And in sermon 55 from his book of sermons he says, ‘one is the sacrament, and the other the force of the sacrament’.44 The sacrament is taken in through the mouth, by the force of the sacrament; the inner man is therefore satisfied, because the bread strengthens the body of the man. For this reason, it is called the body of Christ consistently. The wine, because it brings blood into the flesh, is therefore called the blood of Christ. And we can therefore interpret as specious the numerous doctors who seem to say that the sacrament is an accident without a subject. But after the adulterous generation of sign-seekers has multiplied its lies, the blasphemous claim that the eucharist is an accident without a subject has nevertheless become widely known.

26 Wyclif ’s letter to the Bishop of Lincoln, John of Buckingham Letter Sent to the Bishop of Lincoln. Latin text: Opera Minora, pp. 6–7. In this short missive, Wyclif requests that the Bishop of Lincoln, in whose diocese the University of Oxford then lay, should exhort the friars to declare their belief in respect of eucharistic presence under their general seal, and should then either confirm its orthodoxy or condemn it as heresy. The date of the composition of this letter is not known with any degree of precision, but Thomson argues that it could plausibly be as early as 1382 or as late as 1384.45

Christ’s humble and devout servant and obedientiary in Christ seeks the spiritual support of his father and lord the venerable Bishop John of Lincoln in Christ’s cause, as he is accused of heresy relating to the consecrated host by the friars, and because he wishes to defend to the death the view that after the priest has consecrated it, the white, round host is truly the body of Christ in the form of the bread, just as orthodox people believed before the pseudo-friars had been introduced. The aforementioned servant of Christ asks, I say, that the friars should 43 See CCSL 50, pp. 146–7; The Trinity, trans. Edmund Hill, second edition (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1991), pp. 139–40. 44 PL 35, col. 1611; Homilies on the Gospel of John 1:1–40, trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2009), p. 464. 45 Latin Writings, p. 246.

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proclaim their own belief in that article under their general seal, so that Catholic truth begins to shine more abundantly, and intoxicating heresy in your diocese may be destroyed to a greater extent. The aforementioned servant of Christ asks the said father, moreover, that if the said sentence is heresy then it should be condemned, and, if it is orthodox, then it should be confirmed under his seal and testimony.

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V: THE CHURCH AND THE CHRISTIAN LIFE

Wyclif ’s views on the church and the papacy were recorded systematically in two roughly contemporary treatises, On the Church (1378–79) and On the Power of the Pope (late 1379). His conception of the church, like his understanding of the nature of Scripture, was underpinned quite conspicuously by his philosophical realism, which privileged the eternal over the finite and ephemeral. In the first chapter of On the Church, in response to his initial desire to describe the quiddity of the church, he therefore claims simply that the church is ‘the congregation of all of those predestined to salvation’ (27i). This definition, he suggests, underlies many of the diverse conceptions of the church that are found in scripture. It is this church, he goes on to suggest, that we should properly identify as the bride of Christ. The head of the church, we are told, is uniquely Christ himself, and its members are his limbs. Nobody can know for certain that he or she is among the predestinate, or even the foreknown (that is, those predestined to damnation), which meant that, for Wyclif, nobody could be sure that he or she was truly a member of the church, except by ‘special revelation’ (27i). The community of the predestinate is often described by Wyclif as the ‘universal’ church. This designation is well-chosen, since, as he points out in On the Church, philosophers say that a universal is ‘a certain whole and perfect thing, from which nothing lacks’ (27i). Wyclif introduces some additional definitions to describe the different states of the church, many of which were quite conventional. The universal church representing the community of the elect in heaven was the church triumphant. The elect on earth, by contrast, constituted the church militant, which Wyclif often described as that part of the church containing those sojourning on earth. Those in purgatory, traditionally described as the church penitent or the church expectant, were what he called the church dormant (27i and ii). It was possible, as Wyclif recognised, for members of the predestinate to be in a state of sin, and hence not to be righteous and in receipt of God’s grace at some stages of their lives, but this did not compromise God’s eternal certitude that they had a place among the elect. Likewise, he suggests, it is possible for those who are foreknown to damnation to be righteous during their

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lives. Augustine, he points out, had identified these as members of the simulated church (27i), rather than the true church. Wyclif ’s conception of the church, as he readily admits in On the Power of the Pope, meant not only that no elected pontiff could properly presume to be head of the church but that he could not even identify himself as one of its members with any degree of confidence. Neither Peter nor any of the other apostles had claimed to be Christ’s vicars, he argues, so much less could any pope or cardinal (28). Wyclif went to great lengths to challenge the pope’s right to be identified as the head of the church in one of his later, polemical treatises, On Christ and his Adversary, Antichrist (27ii). Here, he concludes not merely that the pope is not the head of the church but that he lives a life far removed from those of Peter and the apostles, and should more appropriately be regarded as Antichrist. Abuses within the church led Wyclif to the problem of those who had led virtuous lives outside it, such as pre-Christian pagans. Like many theologians, he considers the case of the virtuous heathen Trajan, and concludes that the emperor died ‘with the grace of predestination’ thanks to St Gregory’s prayer (29). Much of what Wyclif felt to be wrong with the contemporary church, from the pope and his cardinals downwards, related to a failure to live according to the example of Christ, Peter and the other apostles. In an allegorical reading of Lamentations 4[:9–22], he likens the contemporary church to Babylon following the siege, brought to ruin by the avarice of its own clerics (30). Throughout his work, he made much of the virtues and the necessity of the apostolic, propertyless life. Such a life, he naturally believed, should be embraced by the pastor, who should follow Christ in his teaching and his behaviour. He should even be willing to sacrifice his life for Christ’s truth. As Wyclif discovers, however, it is precisely in those religions that professed to live according to the ‘propertyless’ ideal that mortal sin, and hence apostasy (according to Wyclif ’s definition), regularly occur (31). Such sin, he suggests, though it is always odious to God, is the more so in respect of members of these religions. His criticism is directed at each of the four ‘sects’ of which he frequently speaks (the secular clergy, the friars, the monks and the canons), but principally the friars. The late fourteenth century witnessed a monumental event in the history of the Christian church: the Western Schism. After sixty-seven years in Avignon, where seven French popes presided in succession, the papal court returned to Rome in 1377 under Gregory XI. Following Gregory’s death in 1378, Urban VI, an Italian, was elected, and Wyclif had initially held out great hope for him, as his ‘letter’ to

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Urban suggests (32). Within months of his election, however, he had abused and alienated his cardinals, the majority of whom were French. After fleeing to Anagni, the French cardinals elected a second pope to continue the Avignon line, Robert of Geneva, who became Clement VII. Unsurprisingly, Wyclif felt that it was precisely those materialistic traits in the church (the desire for property, power and lordship) that had brought about this catastrophic division (33). The schism lasted into the following century, and was brought to an end only by the Council of Constance, with the election of a new pope in 1417. In the face of the schism, Wyclif insisted that neither pope could claim a right to his position, except by virtue of his observation of scriptural doctrine.

27 Defining the church On the Church, ch. 1 (extract). Latin text: De Ecclesia, pp. 1–19. The definitions of the quiddity of the church that Wyclif provides here are reiterated many times elsewhere in his work. He recognises here that scripture ‘refers to the church in multiple ways’, but intimates that his own conception of the church as the community of the elect is seen to lie at the foundation of all of them. This powerful and controversial conception of the church is being presented here as a kind of convenient shorthand.

Because some people disagree about the quiddity of the church, particularly those who seem to be something, and because our religion is the church, which should be one with all Christians, it is right that Christians should know their mother.1 How, I ask, could anyone honour this primeval mother, as a Christian is held to do under pain of damnation by the first commandment of the second table, unless he knew her?2 And how could he know her perfectly, unless he knew her quiddity, and knew how to differentiate and to discern her from the other   1 The expression ‘seem to be something’ echoes Galatians 2:6. It is usually taken to mean that these were people of significance or status, as is indicated more explicitly in a number of recent translations (such as the English Standard Version).   2 The reference here is to the second table on which the Ten Commandments were received by Moses on Mount Sinai. The reference to tables of stone occurs in Exodus 24:12: ‘And the Lord said to Moses: Come up to me into the mount, and be there: and I will give thee tables of stone, and the law, and the commandments which I have written: that thou mayst teach them’. Though it is not indicated which commandments were written on which table, Wyclif seemingly assumes that the first

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women? Hence, among all the metaphysical systems under the orbit of the sun, none is held to be more necessary than the Christian one, nor more useful to the observation of the Christian religion or to the interpretation of holy scripture. Indeed, Christ is our father as a matter of faith, and the said church, his bride, is our mother par excellence. We should honour those parents before all others, because in our necessary recognition of them we should call upon their instruction, their correction and their approval. Indeed, in honouring them we serve the Christian religion fully, and when we fail to honour them we fail to obey our teachers, since a Christian can only do wrong by not honouring or serving those parents adequately. And that is why this is taught in the first commandment of the second table, as the measure and rule of all others. What would become of any Catholic who ignored part of the symbol in which the faith of his or her mother was inscribed? Indeed, the words ‘I believe in the Catholic church’ represent a symbol everywhere! I do not think that the lord bishops are displeased by the fact that the Christian faith is drawn from the quiddity of the church, because they are obliged to teach that faith to the people, and most particularly because they speak about liberty and prosperity, about edification and destruction, and about the privileges and defences of the church against heretics. But whoever speaks in this way speaks as a magpie by considering such accidents and ignoring their subject! At the beginning of the second book of the Posterior Analytics it is truly said that ‘One should answer the question “What is it?” about a subject before we know its accident’.3 And an error in this order of knowing makes many err in respect of the faith of the church. How, I ask, should I know in what the prosperity and the edification of the church are found, unless I knew the church in advance, since it follows, ‘I know that it exists prosperously, therefore I know it to be’? Let us therefore apply diligence, so that we know our mother properly. But although Scripture refers to the church in multiple ways, I suggest that it is thus subsumed under a more familiar notion, namely, that of the congregation of everyone who is predestined to salvation. And that is the bride of Christ, of whom there is mention in the Song of Songs, and about which scripture speaks in Isaiah 61[:10]: ‘As a bridegroom [he hath] decked [me] with a crown’. For this is the ‘valiant woman’ of whom [we learn] in Proverbs 31:10, and the mystical ‘body five are written on the first, and the second five on the second. The commandment in question here, therefore, is ‘Honour thy father and thy mother’ (Exodus 20:12).  3 Posterior Analytics 90a14–15.

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of Christ’, of which [we are told] in 1 Corinthians 12. And this is Jerusalem, our mother, our Lord’s temple, the kingdom of the heavens and the city of the great king, ‘whose whole’, says Augustine in chapter 46 of the Enchiridion, is taken not only to be that part which sojourns on the earth from the east to the west of the sun’s light, praising the Lord’s name, and after the attainment of great age singing a new song, but truly also that part which in the heavens has always been in harmony with God, through whom it was made, nor has it experienced any evil. For this blessed thing endures in the holy angels, and gives help to its sojourning part, as it should, because either one will be a fellowship of eternity, and is now one through the bond of charity.4

This is the holy Catholic church that Christians come to know immediately after their faith in the Holy Spirit, for three reasons. First, because according to Augustine it is the greatest creation, for it is placed immediately after the uncreated trinity. Second, because it is conjoined with Christ in perpetual matrimony through the love of the Holy Spirit. And third, because through the said trinity it should have a temple or a house in which it lives. And I say should simply because this is appropriate to any kind of supposition. In respect of its sojourning part, this church does not have any of the foreknown within it, just as its triumphant part does not have any of the wretched or any kind of blemished thing within it whilst it is such, as Augustine shows in book 3, chapter 32, of On Christian Doctrine, in which, after illustrating that ‘the body of Christ and the head of the church, Christ, are one person’, he speaks against the second rule of Tyconius, in which he calls the church the bipartite body of the Lord. ‘We should not’, he says, ‘describe him thus. For indeed, what does not remain with him eternally is not the Lord’s body’.5 He therefore calls those who are faithful in their time but foreknown to be damned the ‘simulated church’, which is made up of hypocrites. That argument can be demonstrated from John 6[:54], where Jesus says to the Jews and similarly to any viator, ‘Except you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you’. But nobody can be a limb of the body of Christ unless he or she is a living limb. Therefore, nobody can be of that body unless he or she has eaten the body of  4 Augustine’s Enchiridion (Greek: Handbook) is a short summary of the principles of the Christian faith. It is one of a range of texts of that name. This passage occurs in the fifteenth chapter.  5 CCSL 32, p. 104; Teaching Christianity: De Doctrina Christiana, trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1996), p. 198.

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Christ. I ask how anyone can be joined with the sinews of the head unless he or she has believed in that head through informed faith? And this is the same as to eat it, as Augustine explains in his twenty-fifth homily. But unlike corporeal foods, that food is compatible with being eaten in accordance with the four digestions of which [we learn] in Romans 8[:3], namely predestination, vocation, justification and glorification. Though a person who eats in this way will die temporally, he will nevertheless not die eternally, since ‘Christ, the resurrection and the life, in the last judgement makes all of his members live’,6 because the roaring lion rouses his church. But charity ‘never falleth away’ and is the chain that binds together the limbs of that body.7 It would go against reason either for the bridegroom himself to tear apart his bride through eternal division, or for another to do it on his behalf. Indeed, this leads to a contradiction if it is examined carefully. For in Jeremiah 31[:3] it is said to her: ‘In perpetual charity I have esteemed you’. She is therefore our mother, revealing her head throughout the orb of lands, and not the stones [of church buildings]. How, I ask, could so potent, so skilful and so well-intentioned a thing as the uncreated Trinity choose a wife for itself whom it would finally reject? It is clear, therefore, by faith and the signification of the nominal expression Catholic church that it is all of the present, past and future predestinates.8 From these points a number of conclusions follow. First, that no vicar of Christ should presume to name himself as the head of the holy Catholic church. Indeed, unless he has a special revelation he should not even claim to be one of its members. We know from this that the leader of this church would be above all of the blessed angels, since they are members of this church, and that through Christ alone can one be counted among all the predestinate, as is known from Hebrews 1[:4]. We are told in Romans 1[:4], ‘Christ is predestinated’. And thus, the church is merely the number of the predestinates. Just as a man without special revelation would not assert without terror that he himself was predestinate, so he would claim neither to be a member of, nor consequently the head of, that church. Hence Augustine, writing on Psalm 131, had shown afterwards that God grants eternal life to no one outside his own house: ‘He who is joined to charity by living stones’, he says, ‘belongs to the house of God. But he who will not have charity, through his perseverance, finally makes ruin. But the house stands.’   6 Paraphrase of John 11:25.   7 1 Corinthians 13:8.   8 This is what Wyclif identifies as the quid nominis of Catholic church.

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And later, he teaches that no- one should parade themselves pompously out of the vicarious pretence to power, or pretend that the status of the church rests on them, just as the Jews did on the basis of the relationship to, and the merit of, Abraham, because heredity is promised to sons on the basis of the imitation of virtues, and not to those sons who are degenerating through the flesh. And the same applies, undoubtedly, to the vicars of Christ. ‘Therefore’, says Augustine, in them is the house of God; he predetermines and foresees those who are to endure, in respect of whom it was said where his throne stood. And those who do not endure are not themselves in the church, and they do not belong now in the tabernacle and then in the house [of God];9 but [the house of God] is only in those who persevere until the end.

Hence, just as ‘God swore to David that by the fruit of his womb’ (namely, Christ, who was born of the womb of the Virgin, and in consequence, of that man David himself, who was strong of hand) ‘he would place him on his throne’, so he swore to his sons, under the condition, nevertheless, ‘that they observe the testament and the testimony’ of Christ. ‘Lest anyone’, says Augustine, ‘should threaten the promises of God, and should put forward in his own capacity what God promised, so that it would come to pass, he hath sworn’ (Psalm 131[:11]), connecting the condition, lest you should boast in respect of those promises, and neglect to watch over yourself. If you have watched over yourself, then you will be a son of David, but if not, then you will not be a son of David. For God has made a promise to the sons of David. Do not say, ‘I am a son of David’ if you become degenerate; only a widow shall sit in the blessed church. The whole church is a widow, whose members are the satiated poor. For they were deserted in this age, which they do not betroth by inheritance but abandon; they do not look for wealth, esteem, or friends, but if they have them, they despise them by trusting in the Lord.10

What, therefore, is the value of saying that only those who are in Rome are the church, or the head of the church? For such people are burned by the moon throughout the night, as Augustine explains in his Commentary on Psalm 120. He says, Whoever would posit that the church exists in one part and would not know that it is spread across the whole globe of countries, would believe those who say, ‘Look, here is Christ’, and ‘look, there’, just as the gospel   9 From Augustine’s Commentary on Psalm 131. 10 Much of this passage is taken from Augustine’s Commentary on Psalm 131.

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says in Matthew 24[:23].11 [Christ] deserves the whole globe of countries as the value of his reward, and that man is scandalized in his neighbour and burned by the moon.

Should we therefore argue about the head of the church in response to this? ‘That flesh of Christ’, says Augustine, ‘is the head of the church’, that is, the humanity according to which Christ is predestinate, as the word of Scripture says in Ephesians 1, 4 and 5, and, more expressly, in Colossians 1[:18] it says that ‘Christ is the head of the whole church’. And the said supplementary decretal of Boniface VIII declares this conclusion well, which begins thus: ‘One holy [thing]. Therefore’, he says, ‘one body of a single church, one head, not two heads, as a monster’. The second conclusion, which proceeds from [our conception of] the quiddity of mother church, is that there is only one, and thus that there are not many Catholic churches. This is demonstrated thus: by virtue of the fact that it is the universal or Catholic church, it contains within itself all of the predestinate. And it is not possible that there is anything other than one such [church]; therefore, it is not possible that there is anything other than one universal church. According to the philosophers, ‘a universal is a certain whole and perfect [thing], from which nothing lacks’. Hence, just as Aristotle, in the first book of On the Heavens, states that ‘we consider all things [in the universe] in relation to three’, so we do not describe the Catholic church except that within it, it contains those three things: the part triumphant in heaven, the part dormant in purgatory, and the militant part, on the Earth.12 And the doctors say that the host or the sacrament, in its symbolisation, is divided into three parts: the first part, immersed in the sacramental liquid, signifies, they say, the church triumphant, which is absorbed and saturated by the intuition of the divine essence, as the head of the church says in the Song of Songs 5[:1], delighting his citizens and housemates. ‘You have eaten’, he says, ‘most beloved’. But the two other parts in the hand of the Lord and the merit of the church must be explained distinctly by those two parts that the priest holds in his hands: the major part signifies the church militant, and the minor, dependent part signifies the church expectant in purgatory. The latter depends upon the collective approval of the church militant. And for these two parts we bring prayers to the Lamb, who is the head of the church, so that he is pitied by us. But for the third part, to whose place and rest we aspire, we ask that the same lamb of threefold nature should 11 ‘Then if any man shall say to you: Lo here is Christ, or there, do not believe him’. 12 William of Moerbeke (trans.), De Caelo, bk 1, ch. 1 (268a).

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finally give peace to us. And here (as I have shown elsewhere), the said bridegroom visited the three places of the church in his humanity, namely, Judaea, the centre of our habitable world, [in which he spent] thirty-three years converting Jerusalem. Then, the Limbo in which our fathers were cleansed when the morsel of his church that was held in their souls was extracted. But thirdly, ascending finally into heaven he overcame captivity after victory crowned him by placing him on God’s right-hand side. This, therefore, is the threefold structure of the unitary universal or Catholic church. Nevertheless, the particulars of the church may be of any number, because that is how many people are predestinate. And hence, I believe that in the symbol of the church we allow ourselves to believe one holy, Catholic and apostolic church. For the apostles are now in heaven, in the same character by which they lived on earth, and they are now the parts of that same mother church, fully cleansed, by whose authority its vicars guide the young girl who now seeks the bridegroom of the church. And thus speaks decretal 24, q. 1, [chapter 5]: ‘Peter’s privilege’, says Pope Leo, ‘remains wherever justice is done through his equity’. He resides in the heavens, seeing and maintaining what God unites and dissolves. Hence, the above-mentioned decretal proceeds thus: ‘We are compelled to believe in and remain constant to the one holy Catholic church by the urging of faith’.13 From there, it proves the unity of that church from a multiplicity of writings; first, from the passage in the Song of Songs, 6[:8]: ‘One is my dove, my perfect one [is but one]; she is the only one of her mother, the chosen of her that bore her’. That dove, according to the united opinion of the saints, is mother church, [Peter’s] mother, because she is the creator of the trinity or the divine essence, whose mother and strength is the wisdom of the Father, and the virgin mother and bride of the humanity of Christ, its head. From those parents, and consequently, through virginal begetting, those sons of the church are spiritually born, in accordance with which the apostle speaks in 2 Corinthians 11[:2]: ‘I have espoused you to one husband that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ’. Since, therefore, not even a single syllable is used in scripture without meaning, what the attached word ‘one’ signifies most pertinently in the wisest book of Solomon does not need to be determined unless it is the unity of the Catholic church, excluding all plurality. Hence, the Holy Spirit in David, the father of Solomon, speaks thus in Christ in Psalm 21[:21]: ‘Deliver, O God, my soul from 13 Decret. 2 pars, causa 24, q. 1, cap. 5, CICaPP col. 968.

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the sword: my only one from the hand of the dog’. Augustine explains this passage through the said decretal in his second discussion of the same psalm: he says, The sword is a broadsword, and through this he wanted death to be understood. He called the church his only one. Dogs are those who bark in an aimless manner and do not understand against whom; even when nothing happens to them, they bark at passers-by, even though they should wish to be of use to them.

Would that our endowed clergy were not inclined to conspire against orthodox people in respect of their power and pride, offering surrender of worldly goods as the only remedy. Now, Christ knew his church would be persecuted bitterly by antichristian hypocrites in its offerings of peace. The third testimony of scripture concerns the ‘unity of the ark’, which we read in Genesis 6[:16] ‘was finished in a cubit’ at the time of the flood. In the mystical sense this signifies holy mother church, which is conserved in the branch of the Lord and in the unique purpose of his commandments, which is charity. The fourth testimony is the statement of the apostle in Ephesians 4[:5], which asserts that there is ‘one God [and] one faith’. From this unity it follows that there is correspondingly one law, one kingdom or family that is undoubtedly the universal church. The fifth testimony concerns one ‘seamless coat’, which without mystery had remained undivided according to John 19[:23].14 Correspondingly, there should be a unique church of Christ connected by the unbreakable bonds of love according to the apostle in Romans 8[:35]: ‘Who then shall separate us from the love of God?’ The sixth testimony is that of John 10[:16]: ‘there shall be one fold and one shepherd’. This fold should profess this same mother church. How many arguments are there in scripture that teach this same idea? Just as Adam had one wife carnally without bigamy, so according to him it is necessarily possible to have one wife spiritually without bigamy. And the apostle put forward that idea about Christ and his church from Genesis 2[:24] in Ephesians 5[:31]. 15 Hence, an argument can be taken from the text of the apostle in 1 Timothy 3[:2] and the Epistle to Titus 1[:6], in which from that 14 ‘The soldiers therefore, when they had crucified him, took his garments (and they made four parts, to every soldier a part,) and also his coat. Now the coat was without seam, woven from the top throughout.’ 15 ‘It behoveth therefore a bishop to be blameless, the husband of one wife, sober, prudent, of good behaviour, chaste, given to hospitality, a teacher.’

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foundation he gives the law that a bishop and a deacon should be a man of one wife.16 Indeed, Christ’s cleric should follow his head in monogamy. Hence, I believe with the decretal of the faith that I shall not be moved to doubt that it would be heretical to deny tenaciously that Christ is the groom of the church, which he is deemed worthy to call his bride, and is monogamous by virtue of the unity of his bride the church. And hence, the second conclusion is known. The third conclusion is that outside holy church there is no salvation or remission of sins. This is the conclusion of the aforementioned decretal, in whose terms I consider the sense to be concerning the eternal life after this life, and concerning the remission of a sin committed when spiritual life has been given through grace. And then the next conclusion is noted: because nobody can have such salvation except Christ or any member of his, he is also, by that very fact, beneath the aforementioned church. Therefore, the conclusion; and to this end, examples follow. Just as the whole inheritance of the human race was virtually and materially in the first carnal union initially, so the whole inheritance of Christians is virtually in Christ and the church, and consequently, in the first spiritual marriage. For to those born of God he thus gave the power to become the sons of God, and consequently, according to this argument, heirs of the apostle. Again, just as outside Noah’s ark there did not remain any beast saved from the flood, so outside the ark of the church there does not remain a man who is to be saved after the spiritual shipwreck. And again, just as a limb cut from the body does not live, so human nature does not [live] when cut from the head through reprobation.17 And in respect of this there are several laws, such as decretal 23, question 7, which, under the authority of Augustine’s words to Vincentius, speaks thus: ‘if a limb is cut from the living body of a man in any way, it cannot possess the spirit of life. Likewise, a man who is cut from the just body of Christ cannot in any way possess the spirit of righteousness’.18 And that whole principle emerges in decretal 24, question 1, throughout many chapters. Hence, one decretal speaks thus, from the sayings of Bede: ‘Whichever people separate themselves 16 ‘If any be without crime, the husband of one wife, having faithful children, not accused of riot, or unruly. For a bishop must be without crime, as the steward of God’ (Titus 1:6–7); ‘For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be two in one flesh’ (1 Timothy 3:2). 17 Here, ‘reprobation’ identifies rejection by God, as well as a process of judicial condemnation. 18 Decret. 2 pars, causa 23, q. 7, c. 4, CICaPP, col. 952.

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from the unity of the faith or the fellowship of Peter are neither set free from the bonds of sinners, nor can they enter the gate of the celestial kingdom.’19 Likewise, another decretal taken from a statement of Bede on the first canon of John: ‘anyone who withdraws and does not remain in the doctrine of Christ does not have God; he who remains in this doctrine thus has a son and a father’.20 From such sayings of the saints and through the decree of the head of the church, following the philosophy of scripture, the whole of the aforementioned principle is evident, and what is especially frightening is that no Christian, and especially not a vicar of Christ, is a member of the church unless he has followed Christ in deeds and doctrine. The fourth conclusion of the same decretal is that within the aforementioned church there is either a sword or a power, namely bodily or temporal and spiritual, either of which should belong to the head of the church and his vicar. It is evident from this that the said body, since it is sufficient in itself, has within it a plenitude of power. Since, therefore, each power is necessary to mother church, the conclusion is clear. And this is expressed figuratively in Luke 22[:38], when, after the apostles responded, ‘Lord, behold here are two swords’, Christ spoke not excessively or in an abbreviated manner, but said, ‘It is enough’. Hence, to specify that each sword belonged to Peter, Christ consequently said to Peter, who had struck a servant of the high priest, ‘Put up thy sword into the scabbard’ (John 18[:11]). From this, there is a gesture towards the mystical sense that ‘either sword is in the power of the church, the material one on behalf of the church’, but employed through the laity, and the spiritual one for sins to be punished, exercised through the bishop. And thus, although ‘the material sword is in the hands of kings and soldiers, this nevertheless will be put into motion by the priest, in accordance with his discretion. The material sword should be beneath the other’, just as the military order is beneath the priesthood. And that is the explanation of St Bernard in his second book to Eugenius, and many doctors and decrees speak in conformity with that sense. Hence, in decretal 23, question 5, Princes, under the authority of the third book of St Isidore’s On the Greatest Good, chapter 53, the canon says that ‘within the church, secular princes have power so that they can strengthen ecclesiastical discipline’.21 From this conclusion it is evident, first, that the said princes should be part of the said church, 19 Decret. 2 pars, causa 24, q. 1, c. 27, CICaPP, col. 977. 20 Decret. 2 pars, causa 24, q. 1, c. 24, CICaPP, col. 975. 21 Decret. 2 pars, causa 23, q. 5, c. 20, CICaPP, col. 936.

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since otherwise they would not be within the church in this proposition. Second, it is evident that it is their duty to control rebels of the church wherever coercive power is required by civil authority. Hence, John of God notes eight contexts in which an ecclesiastic is subject to secular judgement or correction: the first is when a cleric is incorrig­ ible; the second is when a cleric, even a pope, is driven by ambition to become a usurper; the third, when he wishes to subvert the faith; the fourth, when he is false; the fifth, when he brings about a schism; the sixth, when he defies excommunication; the seventh, when the church’s power is lacking, and the eighth when secular princes demand a tribute from the church.22 He establishes those [cases] through multiple laws. Since, therefore, in none of those cases should the secular make corrections except in conformity with scripture, and, consequently, through the authority of the highest pontiff, the above-mentioned conclusion is clear. The fifth conclusion is this: ‘subjection to the Roman pontiff is a necessity for the salvation of the whole of human nature’. It is clear from this that nobody can be saved unless he subjects himself meritoriously to Christ; but he is himself the Roman pontiff, just as he is the universal head of any particular church. Therefore, the conclusion. Now, the viator is said to be the dove, because she is a part: therefore, in the same way, she is the Roman church, because she is a part.23 And in the same way, she inhabits Rome, England or any other place of faith. For if wherever the pope is, the Roman church is – because the same church that was built in Rome by the apostles emerges out of any community of faithful people – in the same way the Roman church is thus in England, or wherever a faithful Christian is, because that is the holy Catholic church. But this cannot be restricted in its whole to Rome or the assembly of the pope and his cardinals. Rather, it extends to three holy places, namely, heaven, the place of earthly sojourning, and purgatory. Hence, those people who think that wherever the pope has been is Rome speak very erroneously; for they equivocate pointlessly over the name of the city, just as children call the small mount Beaumont, in Oxford, Rome.24 Nevertheless, the Roman church is wherever our lord the Pope has been, just as it was in Jerusalem in the time of Christ, in Constantinople in the time of the synod (as is clear from decretal 22, in 22 On John of God, see Chapter II, n. 110. 23 The dove here represents the church. 24 Beaumont palace, built for Henry I outside Oxford’s North Gate. It was donated to the Carmelite friars in the early fourteenth century, and dismantled during the Reformation.

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the distinction entitled The Sacrasanct [Roman and Apostolic Church]), in Antioch in the time of the enthronement of St Peter, and later, in Rome, at the time of the preaching and passion of Peter and Paul.25 And in this way the words of Luke 11[:20] are understood to be directed to the pope: ‘doubtless the kingdom of God is come upon you’. Likewise, the passage in Luke 17[:21]: ‘the kingdom of God is within you; wheresoever the body shall be, thither will the eagles also be gathered together’.26 Although the church was begun in Judaea, and Christ, the head of the church, was martyred in Jerusalem, nevertheless it [the Roman church] is rationally called the church of Christ in accordance with a certain pre-eminence, for three reasons: first, because Christ knew the people within the Roman Empire in the place of the Jews, as ‘unbelievers are to be grafted in’, as the apostle said in Romans 11[:23].27 The second reason is that a greater multitude of martyrs triumphed there than in the other city; for thus, where a man is born from the womb and triumphs gloriously, he achieves a name thereafter. Since, therefore, the universal person of the church, according to its many parts, was born there, out of the womb of the synagogue, and triumphed there, thriving among men, it was fitting that it should take a name from the metropolitan city that is Rome. The third reason is that it must be known that neither place nor antiquity but faith, as cultivated, makes the church of Christ. Now, in respect of person and as well as time, the church of Christ was in an earlier place, and in this sense it is said in 2 Maccabees 5[:19] that ‘the place does not sanctify the people, but the people the place’.28 And hence, I believe that it is legitimate to call the church of Christ by the name of whichever place the faithful inhabit, just as Christ was called Nazarene on account of his conception, and is called David of Bethlehem on account of his nativity, and likewise in respect of other cities which can be called his because of a notable deed or experience. Nevertheless, we should note that calling any church by the name of a place can be understood in two ways: either strictly, when the building is in that particular place, or more broadly when the name refers to one of its parts, and here there is a multitude of degrees that 25 Decret. 1 pars, dist. 22, c. 2, CICaPP, cols 73–5. 26 The second part of this passage is from Luke 17:37, and also appears in Matthew 24:28. 27 ‘And they also, if they abide not still in unbelief, shall be grafted in: for God is able to graft them in again.’ 28 A paraphrase of the biblical text: ‘But God did not choose the people for the place’s sake, but the place for the people’s sake’.

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relate to the size of those different parts of the church. Now, there is no good cause to call our mother the Roman church in order to satisfy the pride of the emperor who provided that church, nor to win his approval, nor in order to exalt our lord pope, whose pomp resonates around the part of the empire in which he enjoys primacy or lordship, nor, third, so that every Christian believes he or she should have recourse to [the pope] and recognise him as head for the sake of good health, but only because of the general reasons mentioned above. Since ‘Roman church’ is an expression established without any foundation in holy scripture, we have to settle for what seems the most appropriate reason for that name, always guarding against being led perfidiously astray. Our [sixth] conclusion emerges from what we have said above: because Christ alone is the head of the whole church, which is not part of any other according to our first conclusion, we should thus accept that no Christian should presume that he is the head of the universal church, but also should not, without fear and without a special revelation, assert that he is the head of any particular church. The first part is known from the first conclusion; for if he were the head of such a universal church, then he would be ‘made better than angels’ or indeed, than every blessed created spirit, of which Christ alone is capable according to the apostle in Hebrews 1[:4].29 He should be the firstborn of many brothers and consequently the chief, by virtue of the value of the law of primogeniture. Hence, if any Christian were to be the head of the universal church alongside him, it would nevertheless be necessary to concede that Christ was still the head, since the church cannot be a monster with two equal heads, as said in the second conclusion, and Christ could hardly be his inferior and humble member. Therefore, the apostles confessed unanimously that they were servants of that head and humble ministers of the church, his bride, but never did any one of the apostles presume to assert that he was himself the head or the bridegroom of the church, because this would be to commit adultery in an antichristian way with the queen of heaven and make the Lord Jesus Christ jealous. This would be very serious, for in Exodus 20[:5] it is truly said that he is ‘mighty, jealous’. And the second part emerges from the fact that head is the name of a dignitary or the office of a dignitary with respect to the eternal predestination by which Christ ordained that leaders (who existed earlier, 29 (Of Christ) ‘Being made so much better than the angels, as he hath inherited a more excellent name than they’.

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according to his law, in the church militant) should have higher dwelling-places by reason of his rule in the church triumphant, because if these leaders in any way decline from the duty of giving the sense of scripture to their subjects, and the instigation to follow the head of the church, then they are not a head in the city of God but in the city of the devil, a head that must be destroyed. For in Wisdom 6[:6] it is truly said that ‘a severe judgement shall be on them who bear rule’. Since we wretched people therefore do not know whether we are predestined to the heavenly Jerusalem (which, nevertheless, the saints will have known by special revelation), it seems that it would be too great a presumption for us to assert that we are heads of any particular church, which would be part of holy mother church, because it is noted from the concordant testimony of the saints that nobody foreknown is a member of that church. How, therefore, could any one of us presume to declare that he is a head, since it is truly said in Ecclesiastes 9[:1] that ‘man knoweth not whether he be worthy of love, or hatred’ in respect of predestination or reprobation. Besides, if we consider the sense and the instigation that we give to our subjects and, on the other side, the mirror of Scripture according to which we should govern our lives, we would choose rather to call ourselves servants or ministers of the church than heads, since we know that if we do not perform the role of head then we are not heads, because according to Augustine in his booklet On the Ten Strings [of the Harp], a wrongful husband is not the head of his wife; how much less is a leader of the church truly a head if he had such a privilege from God and then turned away from Christ?30 Hence, Augustine shows later [in that text] that ‘a true Christian woman should lament’ the fornication of a man, ‘not on account of the flesh but because of charity’ and the chastity owed to Christ the man.31 He says consequently that ‘Christ speaks in the hearts of good women, where the man does not hear’, saying, ‘lament the injuries of your man, but do not imitate them; rather, let him imitate you in the good. For do not consider him that does evil your head, but me, your God’.32 And he proves that this should happen. He says, If the head is in him that does evil, and the body is to follow its head, they both go into a headlong fall. But so that the Christian does not follow his wicked head, he holds himself to Christ, the head of the church, to whom 30 This is chapter 11 of sermon 9; see CCSL 41, p. 129; Sermons 1 (1–19), trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2009), p. 269. 31 CCSL 41, p. 129; Sermons 1 (1–19), p. 269. 32 CCSL 41, p. 129; Sermons 1 (1–19), p. 269.

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he owes his chastity, to whom he brings his honour; let the private man be absent and the man wedded to mother church be present.33

It is therefore clear that, just as we should give infinitely greater honour to our spiritual father the Lord Jesus Christ and his spouse the church, who is ‘the queen, standing at [his] right hand’ (as is said in Psalm 44[:10]), than to any parent through our flesh, so nobody is a parent or a child of this celestial marriage unless he makes the assumption that one is deputed to that office through divine predestination. For to be the head of, or a member of, holy mother church is insepar­ ably the name of that office. From these things it follows, seventh, that if the lord pope is predestinate and carries out his pastoral duty, then he is the head of as much of the church militant as he rules over, so that if he rules as head according to the law of Christ over the whole church militant, then he is head of that particular church under the arch-headship of our Lord Jesus Christ. We should maintain this assumption about the Roman lord pontiff unless his behaviour should teach the opposite, since the sojourning clergy has agreed that he is leader. Nevertheless, it is not in the power of any Christian by way of constitution, election or acceptance to determine that the lord pope is head or even a member of holy mother church. This consists only in the predestination and grace of our God. ii) On Christ and His Adversary, Antichrist, chs 1–7. Latin text: Polemical Works, vol. 2, pp. 653–65. The polemical pamphlet from which these seven chapters have been taken was written a year after Wyclif ’s being exiled to Lutterworth and less than two years before his death. Though it develops into an impassioned late attack on the papacy and the Donation of Constantine, it begins with a presentation of Wyclif ’s conception of the church and its foundation in Christ. Before attacking the papacy (an attack which becomes most virulent in chapters not here translated), he addresses those who fail to apprehend the church in the same way as he does.

Chapter 1 According to the orthodox, the church is the domain of the predestinate. It is therefore threefold in nature, namely, the church of the triumphant, in heaven, the church of the militant, here in this world, 33 CCSL 41, p. 129; Sermons 1 (1–19), p. 269.

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and the church of the dormant, in purgatory.34 Now, the church of the militant, by Christ’s express approval, is often itself said to be tripartite, consisting first in the church of the clerics, who should be closest to the church triumphant and should help the rest of the church militant to follow Christ, who is the head of the whole church, to the closest degree. ‘[Christ]’, says Paul in the first chapter of Ephesians, ‘hath made himself head over all the church, which is his body’.35 The second part of the church militant is said to consist of warriors, so that just as the first part of that church is said to consist of educators, so the second part is said to be its bodily defenders. The third part of [that] church is said to consist of the common people and the workers. And in this harmonious arrangement of three parts, which imitates the uncreated trinity, consists the good health of the body of the church militant itself.36 Now, there should be peace and unity in that church and in each of its parts, since all parts should support each other mutually, since spatial distance does not obstruct spiritual marriage. And thus the church militant should fashion itself after the church triumphant, and ultimately seek a unity like that of the trinity. And some people elicit this doctrine from the word of the Lord, spoken to Moses in Exodus 25[:40], taken in its mystical sense: ‘do all things according to the pattern that was shown thee in the mount’.37 Yet if God were to teach the church militant mystically to imitate the church triumphant in its conduct, in accordance with its knowledge and its grace, it is certain that it could not err. The extent to which that exemplar should be imitated will be shown below. And the apostle seems to teach about that unity in Ephesians 4[:5–6], when he speaks thus: ‘One Lord, one faith, one baptism. One God and Father of all.’ But that fourfold unity would teach the church militant to serve unity by God’s grace.38 So, we should reflect on how our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the king of kings and head 34 This threefold classification was often invoked in medieval discussions of the church, though Wyclif interprets aspects of it in a distinctive way. 35 Ephesians 1:22–3. 36 The tripartite nature of the church militant clearly has a close parallel in the medieval social hierarchy of the three estates, which respectively pray (priests), fight (knights) and work (commoners) for the realm. For an accessible introduction to late medieval society, see Maurice Keen, English Society in the Later Middle Ages (London: Penguin, 1990). 37 Exodus 25:40. Wyclif modifies the text of the Vulgate here, and I have attempted to reflect this in the translation. (Cf. the Douay-Reims translation: ‘Look and make it according to the pattern, that was shewn thee in the mount’.) 38 The point here is that members of the church militant should not require God’s grace in order to behave in accordance with this unity.

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of the entire church, desires unity. Hence, the gentile leaders, although they persisted in an error of faith, strove to reduce their divisions into a unity of faith, as is clear from the distinguished [king] Antiochus39 in 1 Maccabees 1,40 and from Alexander the Great,41 the first ruler of Greece, of whom it is said that he translated the entire law of God from the Hebrew language into Greek. Through this, by the grace of God, he extended his monarchy further than any other. The third sign that calls us forth to unity is baptismal unity. For we should know, as a principle of faith, that spiritual baptism is a stream flowing into us out of the grace of the greatest God. And this reminds us of the uncreated unity in God, and shows us, as a fourth sign, how the church is to be finally united in him; and it naturally signifies a desire for unity. Chapter 2 Certain people extrapolate from these points the idea that there should be a single order of the Lord Jesus Christ in the church militant, and that, consequently, the four sects that were introduced by the devil after Christ’s order should cease to be, by the grace and unity of the church militant. Those four sects, as is often said, are the secular clergy, the monks, the canons and the friars. The secular clergy is the multitude of priests who are given temporal lordship, whose transient leader is said to be the pope, and whose rule the papal law. The second sect is said to be that of the bipartite monastic order, whose patron is said to be Benedict, and whose rule is that which St Gregory compiled from Benedict’s teaching. The third sect is said to be that of the canons, whose patron is held to be Augustine. And it is said that he gave an easy law to the associated priests themselves, which was consistent with the law of God. The fourth and final sect is called the friars, who in their customs and observances are divided in many ways. And such division was undoubtedly brought stealthily into the church militant, and just as it throws the unity of the order of the Lord Jesus Christ into disorder, so it disrupts the religiousness of the Christian order. For as 39 The reference here is to Antiochus Epiphanes, King of Syria from 175 bce, against whom the Maccabees eventually revolted. 40 1 Maccabees 1:43–5: ‘And King Antiochus wrote to all his kingdom, that all the people should be one: and every one should leave his own law. And all nations consented according to the word of King Antiochus. And many of Israel consented to his service, and they sacrificed to idols, and profaned the sabbath.’ 41 Alexander III of Macedon (356–323 bce).

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is often said, the whole church militant works for the sake of the unity of the Lord’s order, since the heathen leader Alexander of Macedon worked laudably with regard to this. Because they are ashamed of their division from the Lord’s order, those sects say that they are not different from the order of the Lord Jesus Christ, because, if they were, they would undoubtedly be Christians only in an equivocal sense. But I would add to this that without dispute, as is said elsewhere, the unity of an order requires unity of rule and of patron, and, since those four sects, in respect of both patron and rule, are different from Christ’s order, it is evident that those sects are disparate in nature, as are their various orders, by their own confession. And it is not legitimate to say that Christ’s order is a genus and has within it many species, because unity by individual rule and patron is sufficient to the unity of that individual sect. But Christ and evangelical law are individuals, and therefore the whole of Christ’s order, together with its church, should be restored to individual unity. When Christ’s order was originally a simple indivisible it prospered, but thereafter, when it had falsely been made into a genus, and its specific parts had been introduced without Christ’s authority or his licence, then it waned. And it has been established by logicians that an indivisible cannot grow into a genus or a species; therefore, it cannot truly be said that those four sects are species contained within the genus of the order of Christ. Indeed, since numeric diversity marks a retreat from unity, and Christ’s order, as is clear from its principles, is the best order possible, it seems manifest that to retreat thus from the indivisible order of Christ is irreligious folly. And those sects cannot hide unless they have already fled from the indivisible order of the Lord. But what process has made them so afraid that they would turn from the unity of the Lord’s order? Chapter 3 But against this idea, and contrary to what the apostle says in Ephesians 1[:22–3], which is that the visible church is one body, of which the head is the Lord, the devil’s sophists argue in the following way: ‘Every body is a single continuum, because otherwise the body of the world would be a substance that is separated into indivisible parts.’42 They 42 Wyclif had argued in his logical writings that bodies were indeed composed out of indivisible parts. As such, he could be described as an indivisibilist or an atomist. Such scholars were innovative thinkers, challenging Aristotelian physical principles that had prevailed for centuries, though they would have represented a minority in

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accept this as a first principle on the basis of faith alone. Since the church is the bride of Christ and a strong woman, as Solomon says, it must necessarily be a body, as the apostle says here, but the faithful are certain that Christ sees the church not as something that is built out of hard and cold stones, with timbers and other associated materials.43 Rather, the church, the bride of Christ, is made up of angels and men. They therefore say that the church is a single continuum because it is one body according to its corporeal parts, just as the whole world is one massive body, which [they insist] cannot be divided into indivisible parts. The continuity and combination of its parts are not the source of its corporeal nature, [they say,] since they are accidents, and the whole genus of accident is caused by the whole genus of substance. Second, they argue as follows: ‘Since angels are parts of the church and the church is itself one continuous body, it follows that a continuum is composed out of non-quanta, through Aristotle demonstrates the opposite in many places.’ Here, the conclusion should be accepted, as it is known from many different kinds of evidence. Now, all the parts of this body are either purely divisible, purely indivisible, or mixedly divisible or indivisible. If all were divisible, then we could never determine how many parts it actually had, since any number that we might attribute to it could always be further divided into halves and quarters and so on, so that no number would ever be all of them. Nor can it be said that all its parts are indivisible, because then no part of the continuum could be composite. Therefore, the third possibility remains, according to which all parts are neither divisible nor indivisible, but there is rather a mixture of the two. And so it is in respect of the parts of the body of the church: some of its parts are divisible, like the body of the blessed, others indivisible, such as the spirit of the blessed, and others mixedly divisible and indivisible, like the parts of the body of the church as a whole, which are composed out of those parts. But third, it is argued through this mathematical principle that every Wyclif ’s Oxford. For Wyclif ’s position on indivisibles, see Iohannis Wyclif Tractatus de Logica, vol. 3, ed. M.H. Dziewicki (London: WS, 1899), p. 40. For an accessible discussion of Wyclif ’s indivisibilism and its consequences, see Norman Kretzmann, ‘Continua, Indivisibiles and Change in Wyclif ’s Logic of Scripture’, in Wyclif in His Times, ed. Anthony Kenny (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), pp. 31–65. For the philosophical context of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century indivisibilism, see The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. N. Kretzmann, A. Kenny and J. Pinborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 575–91. 43 The apostle’s words to which Wyclif appeals here appear in Ephesians 1:22–3: ‘And he hath subjected all things under his feet, and hath made him head over all the church, Which is his body, and the fullness of him who is filled all in all’.

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whole is greater than its quantitative part. But the whole body of the church is not greater than the body of blessed people, and therefore the body of the visible church is not composed of angels as well as people. It is said here that this mathematical principle is understood in relation to quantity, which is a principle of a particular branch of knowledge. Discrete quantity, for example, is a principle of arithmetic, and continuous quantity is a principle of geometry. I therefore say that this same principle is understood of the quantitative parts of such subjects. And that is true even if a whole exceeds its maximal part through an indivisible, which is as evident of continuous quantity as it is of discrete quantity. And one body being greater than another can thus be understood in a twofold manner, namely, continuously or discretely. When a body exceeds any one of its numeric parts it is understood continuously, but when one body exceeds another by indivisible parts, which are not numeric parts or parts that are geometrically proportional to its whole, then it is understood discretely. And in respect of this ­ambiguity ­scholars labour fruitlessly in confusion! Chapter 4 But I raise an objection against the following principle, which is taken on faith: any quantitative part of a body is that body. Now, the three celestial hierarchies are quantitative parts of the body of the church, and therefore any one of them is that same body. But this must consequently mean that spirits, which have neither position nor spatial continuity, themselves constitute one body! What could be more impossible? Here, orthodox people say that any part of a body is twofold according to philosophers, so that there is a quantitative part and a qualitative part. And since every man is a body and his mind is part of that body, they have no doubt that no part of a body, and no qualitative part of a man, is itself his body. But theologians work more subtly in this matter, because they consider an indivisible part of that body, which provides a solution. And thus, when they speak of the quantitative part of the body of the church they talk of it in more general terms than philosophers. They speak of numeric parts, and hence they deny that any quantitative part of a body is that body, since the indivisible spirit, considered as a mass, is a quantitative part of the body of the church, although it does not have spatial extension, as is evident of the celestial hierarchy and of spirits, which are parts of men. But the difficulty is whether any celestial hierarchy or any aggregate of the spirits of men is a body. And certain people say

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that it is, because it is a mystical body, and therefore anything is a body which is not divisible as a mass. And it seems that the legists speak in this way when they call the indivisible multitude of their laws the body of law. And thus, any one of three indivisible parts which do not together constitute a whole is a body. And those same people say that any multitude of three blessed spirits or more is the body of the church, but a mystical body. I do not disagree with this. But if these ideas are founded in the manifest doctrine of scripture, it is objected secondly that, if Christ is the head of the church, then he is part of the church, because otherwise the church would be a leaderless church. But the consequence seems false, because Christ is a deity, and a deity cannot be part of a created thing, since in this way the created thing would be more perfect than its creator! Here, orthodox people say that Christ is undoubtedly the head of the church, as is clear from the first chapter of Ephesians, and he can thus be called the most dignified and the supreme part of the church, but according to his humanity.44 In his book of Reconsiderations Augustine wished to call Christ a man of the Lord if he had scriptural authority. We wish to speak likewise, and are satisfied with the sayings of Scripture.45 And so it seems that before the Incarnation the Church was not headless, since it had an external deity, not an internal head. But it received from Christ’s incarnation an inestimable perfection nevertheless, since it was then headed internally. And it seems that the apostle speaks of that head according to his humanity in his [Epistle] to the Hebrews (1[:4]), when he says that Christ ‘is made so much better than angels, and has inherited a more excellent name than they’. But this name seems to represent a man hypostatically united with the deity, and because of this name the angels rejoiced in the time of the Old Testament. But third, the argument that men and angels are the body of the church is brought into question. It seems that the church is a very heterogeneous body, and thus it seems fitting that the church militant should have orders of disparate natures. Here, the orthodox say that the essence of the body of the church is not a mathematical continuum, but is a predestination according to which the church is united in God. And therefore, in respect of that, the church exists in accordance with each 44 Ephesians 1:22. 45 Augustine’s Reconsiderations, a late tract in which he re-examines important topics from his theological works. It is often rather misleadingly translated as Retractions. The reference here is to book 1, ch. 19 of that text. See CCSL 57, pp. 59–60; Revisions (Retratactiones), trans. Boniface Ramsay (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2010), p. 84.

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part of its unified nature, since Christ is as predestinate as an angel, as is evident from Romans 1[:4].46 Therefore, since his order is spiritual, like predestination and union in God, it is concordant with reason that this is the sole order of Christ. And hence it is conceded that for a different reason, Christ is the head and the groom of the church. But I do not hear other difficulties broached, such as the fact that, before the incarnation, the church was headless, even though it was betrothed to the deity, but I leave such things, all [of which are] worthy of careful study, to posterity, just as I leave to the sophists the question of how the same body can be however small and simultaneously at the zenith at its highest point, but also at the nadir and the poles! Chapter 5 Leaving aside abstract matters, it remains for me to examine more fully the sensible church militant. And beginning from the beginning, it should be a matter of faith that Christ is the head of that church, as the apostle often suggests. But among the moderns there is disagreement concerning the first of the apostles. First, we should see whether it can be established from scripture that Peter was the head of the church. And it seems that it cannot, because according to the definition of head, it should confer motion and sense upon all of the members of the body. But Peter neither did nor could confer motion and sense on all of the members of the body of his church, and therefore Peter was not the head of his church. But no meaning is pertinent to what has been proposed unless it proceeds according to the wisdom of law of God. And that meaning God maintains as proper to himself, although on occasion he may impress his doctrine on any creature from among the faithful doctors. And in respect of motion, it is clear that it is not appropriate unless it represents a stimulation of volitional power to serve God voluntarily, which is itself proper to God, and which flows into the human mind. And as a sign of this, the apostle who became the chosen vessel of the treasure of divine wisdom often called Christ the head of the church, and nowhere else in scriptural doctrine is any Christian called the head of the church. And in respect of the three names of Peter, it is evident on the strength of Jerome’s interpretation that they do not suggest that Peter is the head of the church. Now, Peter is called knowing or discalceate,47 46 ‘Who was predestinated the Son of God in power, according to the spirit of sanctification, by the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead.’ 47 The latter is an Anglicisation of the Latin term discalceatus (barefoot).

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but Simon is called obedient, calmer of sadness or listener to grief; Cephas48 is the third name that Christ gave to him, as is known from John 1[:42], and that word is interpreted as ‘powerful’ or ‘firmness’, and it is a Syriac rather than Hebrew name. But I ask: what does an interpretation of any of those names suggest in order that Peter is the head of the church? And if Augustine was afraid to call Christ the Lord’s man because this sense is not immediately clear from Scripture, how much more should we be afraid of calling any Christian the head of the church, lest perchance we blaspheme against Christ, for whom this name is reserved most properly by the council of the trinity? It seems that the modern philo-captives49 emerge shamelessly out of heretical blindness, because they assume that Peter and popes generally, some of whom are akin to devils, are the head of the whole church militant. And they do this by proclaiming that the angels are the head of the church triumphant. Nevertheless, the friars declare publicly that he is a heretic who proclaims that any damned person is a devil, as Christ called Judas Iscariot [a devil]. And very many people have fallen into such error, like certain men who say expressly that it is impossible that Christ descended into hell, since nothing of Christ except his spirit went down into the underworld, and that it is impossible for that same spirit to be Christ. And they suggest, moreover, that the article of faith according to which that spirit is the Lord Jesus Christ is heretical! And thus, they mumble falsely that Christ would not then be a true and whole man, but would be many things from which the opposite of any article of the Christian faith follows. But having accepted the opposite of these nonsensical claims, it seems to be correct according to Catholic doctrine not to concede that Peter or any other Christian is the head of any church, but rather to reserve this designation more properly for the Lord. There is disagreement among many regarding which of the apostles was leader or most beloved captain, but Peter seems to have pre-eminence in respect of humility, poverty and voluntary exercise of authority, just as he seems to have had a certain primacy when conversing with Christ, in questioning, responding and working, and, if this should be a sign, then Peter will have a certain supremacy in the government of the church militant according to the law of the Lord. But this in no way indicates 48 This is a Greek rendering of the Aramaic term kefa, stone. 49 A compound coined by Wyclif to describe scholars who, in his opinion, had fallen victim to fashionable philosophical trends that could only hamper their pursuit of knowledge.

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that Peter was the head of the church, but simply that he was humbler, poorer, and more willing to serve, since Christ said that one from amongst the apostles should be noticed for his greatness, as is evident from Matthew 20[:26–7], Mark 10[:43–4], and Luke 22[:26–7]. It seems to many from the teaching of Scripture, therefore, that the devil will never extinguish this error, unless it should be pleasing to men and satisfy the pride of the prelates. Chapter 6 It remains for us to see whether Peter was properly Christ’s vicar on earth, having appropriate power over the rest of the apostles.50 And it seems that he was, because in Matthew 16[:19] Christ said separately to Peter: ‘And whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose upon earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven.’ And the same is said to St Peter prerogatively: ‘And I say to thee: That thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 16[:18])’ And the beliefs and the customs of the church resound with that sentence. But before we proceed further, it seems that we should consider what should actually be believed about this notion. Now, it seems likely that Christ gave all his apostles an abundance of power to bind and to loose, and to do any necessary duty in the church militant, as is clearly said in Matthew 22[:18] and John 20[:23]. Otherwise, he would not have had the foresight to send those apostles to govern separate provinces by themselves. As if papal power emanated from St Peter, none of the rest of the apostles in those provinces would dare advise him. Paul said signally, however, that those that seemed to be something and to be pillars of the church added nothing for him, as appears in Galatians 2:[6–14]: God accepteth not the person of man, for to me they that seemed to be something added nothing. But contrariwise, when they had seen that to me was committed the gospel of the uncircumcision, as to Peter was that of the circumcision. (For he who wrought in Peter to the apostleship of the circumcision, wrought in me also among the gentiles.) And when they had known the grace that was given to me, James and Cephas and John, who seemed to be pillars, gave to me and Barnabas the right hands of fellowship: 50 Peter is treated as Prince of the Apostles, and on the strength of his descriptions in the New Testament is regarded as pre-eminent among them.

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that we should go unto the gentiles, and they unto the circumcision: Only that we should be mindful of the poor: which same thing also I was careful to do. But when Cephas was come to Antioch, I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed. For before that some came from James, he did eat with the gentiles: but when they were come, he withdrew and separated himself, fearing them who were of the circumcision. And to his dissimulation the rest of the Jews consented, so that Barnabas also was led by them into that dissimulation. But when I saw that they walked not uprightly unto the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all: If thou, being a Jew, livest after the manner of the gentiles, and not as the Jews do, how dost thou compel the gentiles to live as do the Jews?

The Holy Spirit placed that blessed historic faith in Paul’s gospel in such a way as to confound the pride and heresy of prelates that would follow. We know from this gospel first that God does not favour individual men in any way.51 Heretics are therefore ashamed, saying that Peter had a more excellent power than the other apostles because he was Bishop of the Romans. It is known second that those three leading apostles did not add meaning or movement to the gospel of St Paul, but that James, who was bishop in Jerusalem, where Christ was bishop, was preferred by God in Simon’s gospel. It is known third that worldly honours and the name of the calling of the holiest father did not shine out among the apostles, since they confessed that Paul and Barnabas were their friends, not lord prelates or masters. It is known fourth how Paul stayed behind out of love for Peter, since it had been certain that he sinned to leave an example to others, so that they would behave similarly afterwards, without accepting any persons. Fifth, it is known how much Paul observed evangelical freedom against Peter out of passion and fear of harming the church. If only that doctrine were practised today! Then, the legal customs introduced by those four sects would end. To return, then, to my first point: it is known to logicians that Peter had prerogative over the rest of the apostles in some respects, but the other apostles contrarily exceeded Peter in others, since we notice that Christ’s word, said to Peter alone, was the exemplar and doctrine of the church militant that followed. But if Peter alone had excellence over the others, this was by God’s grace and according to the merit of his humility, which flowed in a more excellent way in Peter. Now, Peter is said to have been strong in his faith in some ways, but we note from Christ’s words that that faith arose fundamentally by virtue of the grace of Jesus Christ. It is therefore vain of us to place Peter before 51 This is the sense of ‘God accepteth not the person of man’ (Galatians 2:6).

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the others simply on the basis of those words, but let us live humbly in untroubled faith and put ambiguity away from us.

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Chapter 7 We have seen how Peter and the rest of the apostles accompanied Christ in order to serve the church, but it remains to be seen how the Roman pontiff, or pope, has Peter’s power to assume the role of vicar. And it is established first by faith how the power that the pope exercises was derived from imperial power, and does not have any foundation in the teaching of Scripture, except, as I say ironically, in Luke 22[:25–6]: ‘The kings of the gentiles lord it over them … But you are not so’. Since there may be no power that is not from God, it is clear that any greater power that is falsely proclaimed must be a counterfeit power, which is thus exercised diabolically. We should nevertheless determine first whether a vicar of Christ and Peter should preside at the head of the church militant in order to maintain governance over it. And it seems that he should not, because after his ascension into heaven Christ governed his church with the utmost prudence, through the wisdom of the Lord presiding over it and even through the strength of the church militant itself. But that does not then leave anyone to preside in such a way, and therefore there is no way in which anyone should thus preside, and as a sign of this Paul truly called Peter his friend. He confessed truly that Peter added nothing for him, and that in his deceptive error Peter went against his church. How, then, could there be a greater sin than to introduce this gentile novelty without the requisite foundation in God’s law? Although Caesar wished in his stupidity to allow such a privilege, these men would nevertheless be apostles, and refused him. He who strives to excuse Sylvester or another from sin in this actually strives to accuse Christ and condemn his law.52 But Christ entrusted this office and law to his disciples, who were suited to such things and would be fully occupied with them. Who could give them an extraneous power that inhibited them or detracted from that office, and seduced them into a secular office that Christ had prohibited? And if it is said that saying these things imposes calumny on St Sylvester and Caesar, we certainly apportion blame for lesser reasons, as the faith of the gospel imposed on St Peter. It may be assumed, nevertheless, that St Sylvester 52 This is a reference to the Donation of Constantine, which conferred rich benefices on Pope Sylvester (d. 335) and his successors. See the discussion in the Introduction.

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repented of his crime shortly afterwards. This, nevertheless, is said in accordance with the faith by which it is believed that Peter, after his multiple errors, repented more profitably. The sin of subsequent popes is evident from these things. They mendaciously closed off their papal rule from the life of Peter, and it is clear that these popes have sinned gravely by continuing with this form of rule, since nobody should lie in order to secure the world’s salvation. And some say here that they were driven by a malign spirit to build the Roman Curia in the profanest place, in which the blood of many martyrs was spilt. It is clear how by continuing their worldly way of living and their luciferian pride they continued in error against Christ. Wise and faithful people would therefore speak out against the Roman pontiff in this. If Peter sinned against the freedom of the gospel by secluding himself from the gentiles at the meal, how much more does someone sin against Christ by wishing to preside over every household, without serving Christ in the way that he indicated? Such a person obstructs others, such as those who wish to spread the gospel and carry out other apostolic work, through his contrived and unwarrantable jurisdiction, and through the unwarrantable power of the king of pride, lest God’s word should travel freely. On account of servile fear, therefore, there are none or very few who dare to publish that sentence of the gospel. I protest that nobody saying these things, if he was taught or if any viator knew how to teach, that that sentence is contrary to the faith of scripture or to reason, would wish humbly to revoke it. He evidently believes that it is taken from the law of God that he should publish that sentence, because by neglecting to do so he would sin against Christ and his church, since it seems likely to many that the pope is the principal Antichrist leading the devil’s army against Christ, and nevertheless, in the devil’s way he pretends to have greater power to pardon sins and to grant indulgences and other privileges, beyond what Christ or any of the apostles did. Therefore, it is likely to many that that fiction, imitating the devil, is established.

28 Why the pope is not the true head of the church On the Power of the Pope, ch. 9 (extract). Latin text: De Potestate Pape, pp. 195–8; 215–18. Wyclif ’s treatise on papal power was probably written late in 1379, after On the Church (1378–79) and On the Office of the King (mid-1379). The themes of all of the three are closely interconnected, and there are multiple cross-references

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between the later texts and the earlier ones. Wyclif ’s argument in this extract from On the Power of the Pope is simple: the true head of the church must be elected by Christ or by God. Since the principles of papal election are defective and are not supported by Scripture, the pope cannot be deemed to be the true head of the church. Moreover, as Wyclif goes on to argue, the retreat from apostolic poverty that is witnessed within the papacy further affirms that the pope is not the true head of the church.

It seems to many people that the practice of electing a pope, which was introduced only in modern times, is scandalous to the church, principally because it has no basis in scripture. Christ, to whose human power his apostles could not be made equal, elected those apostles and one leader from among them. Yet neither Peter nor any of the other apostles presumed or dared to elect an apostle himself, as is known in respect of Matthias in the first chapter of Acts.53 To a much lesser extent, therefore, do cardinals, who were themselves introduced unwarrantably, have the power to elect a head of the universal church, which exceeds that of all apostles except Peter. Now, I suggest that they were introduced unwarrantably because unless I am mistaken, neither their institution nor their name can be established from either testament. Hence, someone said that cardinal is formed from the Latin cardo (hinge), because through them the doors of hell are opened. I say that they are the two daughters of the horseleech, of which we learn in Proverbs 30[:15]: ‘The horseleech hath two daughters that say: Bring, bring’. They do not take the place of the apostles, since all of the apostles were bishops. Many of [those cardinals], though, are not priests. But they seem inferior to the one of which we are told in Mark 9:[37]: ‘Master, we saw one casting out devils in thy name, who followeth us not’. As is clear from Christ’s response, he was not contrary to Christ, and was therefore disproved less from the gospel than those cardinals. For they do not seem to come in the name of Christ, but like a second Gehazi they collect ecclesiastical benefices and accumulate money for their sale,54 either personally or through their people, and thus they also accept goods from the poor and proudly swallow them down. But they do not perform miracles, nor do they preach or pray, and thus, with the scale of their hypocrisy and their deeds taken into account,

53 The apostles pray to God to show them whether Joseph or Matthias is the chosen apostle, before drawing lots. See Acts 1:24–6. 54 Gehazi was Elisha’s servant, who, after Elisha cured Naaman of leprosy, accepted his reward illegitimately after Elisha had declined to take it.

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neither Gehazi nor Simon55 is even worthy to be called their minister in the service of Antichrist. If this is indeed so, woe to them and to their progenitors, and woe to all who agree to their crime! Nor do they take the role of the deacons that the apostles established, as is known from Acts 6, because they neither perform their duties nor live their lives. And it is not worth searching among the rites of the Old Testament because there is neither cause nor licence beneath its surface. Indeed, when theologians were living in Jerusalem, as is said to have been the case at the time of Christ, they had squandered God’s law. Therefore, unless the Lord destroys the counsel of Achitophel, such monsters could thrive in the church in species, number and spoliation without end. Hence, since such monsters are unnamed in Scripture, the power to establish the head of the church is not mentioned, since it is not the work of a man to make a member of the church. They could, on the other hand, elect a leader over them, however unworthy, and name him the equivalent of pope, but they could not establish a head of the  church. If in such a case, however, God elected a pope and they agreed with his instinct, they could let the people know. But beyond the apostles, where is there God’s authority in such people to elect the head of the church? Second, it is argued on this same point that it is not lawful for the church to retreat from the apostolic observances that Christ taught. Before the endowment of the church, Christ’s priests were companions, without lordship, and ruled the church by common counsel according to the law of God, as is known from things that have been said. It is therefore unlawful to retreat from those limits to the rites of the gentiles. Therefore, it is not lawful to withdraw from these pathways into the customs of heathens. The major premise is known from the fact that human rules, such as the gospel, are observed, so it is much more evident that God’s religious customs must be respected. For it was not permissible, without grave offence, for the sons of Israel to attack their king, but, with the king given to them by the Lord, they are punished gravely on account of their offence, as is evident from 1 Kings 8 and below; and Christians who place themselves above the king and nominate a pope without the Lord’s licence, contrary to the gospel, are 55 Simon Magus gained a reputation as a magician in Samaria, but converted to Christianity in response to the teaching of Philip. Witnessing the laying on of hands and receipt of the Holy Ghost in fellow Christians, Simon was impressed, and offered money to be thus empowered as a sacramental administrator. His sacrilegious offer was rejected by Peter, who condemned his belief that gifts of God might be bought and sold. See Acts 8:9–25. The practice of simony was thus named after him.

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punished so much the more. This explains the damage to the church, which continuously grows larger, and chronicles that deal with this material confirm that same principle: for the Chester monk, in chapter 86 of his book, tells how [F]rom then the Roman church began to become so much wealthier, and was made very unstable, fit more for anxiety and subjection than for spiritual matters of devotion, overtaken more by external pomposity than inner happiness, I believe. Consequently, because of the public endowments given by Constantine to the churches, the old enemy cried out, ‘Today poison is poured on the church!’ In the Lives of the Fathers, Jerome therefore wrote, ‘The Church declines in respect of its virtues as it thrives in respect of possessions.’56

[...] [N]obody is a pope unless he is a son of Christ and of Peter by imitating them in their behaviour, but, just as it is not within the power of human choice to do this, so the appointment of the pope is not within human power. But if the name of ‘pope’ is to be bestowed upon whomever the Western church elects to decide the priorities of the church, to preach to the faithful blasphemously and without foundation for the sake of gaining money and worldly honours, then this is an abuse of that unwarrantable term. And in accordance with this, we should finally concede – as should even the most ignorant man or woman – that the pope is the greatest heretic and Antichrist, but is also like the most inexperienced layman or like a young girl, and that the observed doctrine or religion of the head of the church should die. We should note from the aforementioned chronicles how papal dignity has established itself.57 In book 7, chapter 24 of On the Armenian Questions Lord Ardmacan tells how, around the year of our Lord 301, 56 Ranulf Higden (d. 1364), author of the Polychronicon, a universal chronicle in seven books, is the Chester monk in question. His chronicle was enormously popular in medieval England, and survives in more than one hundred manuscripts dating from the fourteenth century and later. He was known by the Latin epithet Cestrensis (‘of Chester’). For the text of the Polychronicon with John Trevisa’s Middle English translation, see C. Babington and J.R. Lumby, Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden Monarchi Cestrensis together with the English Translations of John Trevisa and of an Unknown Writer of the Fifteenth Century, RS 41, 9 vols (1865–86), vol. 6, p. 130. For a modern English translation of the Polychronicon, see A. Gransden, Historical Writing in England, 2 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 43–57. 57 Wyclif refers to the numerous historical sources invoked at the beginning of this chapter. The term chronicle is used loosely here for any document containing relevant historical material.

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the Emperor Constantine decreed and taught that his bishop should be called ‘pope’ by all others.58 And the Emperor Phocas, around the year of our Lord 600, did the same thing at the insistence of the clergy, for we read in his annals how this worldly emperor danced on the highest sacrament of the church that he so irreligiously founded. As he said, ‘If the emperor of Tartary, converted to Christianity, declared the church of Cambalek or of Cathay the head of all other churches, the centrality of the Roman church would perish, other things being equal!’59 The foundation of a church by a secular leader in this way is horrible and necessarily defective. Should we believe that human election, in itself, is of greater authority than that of Christ? Christ’s election is not in itself sufficient to establish any part of the church, since this requires eternal predestination with attendant grace. I therefore believe that he who does nothing through indifference leaves us an example that only makes us accept my observation, by virtue of the fact that he himself has chosen a devil. In John 6[:71] it is said, ‘Have I not chosen you twelve, and one of you is a devil?’ Third, the same principle is taught in the decretal of St Jerome, case 24, question 1, ‘Since the old man is rising’, where, in saying many commendable things about the Roman church mystically, he adds a condition as a subtext, which we should understand in respect of the church.60 He says, ‘The ill feeling at the head of the Roman [church] has become tired; ambition has receded. With the successor of the fisherman and the disciple of Christ I say, “There it ends”. Whoever does not gather together with you, scatters; that is, he who is not Christ, is Antichrist.’61 Three things are to be noted in this law: first, that the Roman church is wherever the whole group of faithful viators dwells. If there were not another Roman Christian, then those faithful thus far converted by any apostle may be called the Roman church, because they are disciples of Peter and of Paul, who were Romans. Such, indeed, was the harmonious friendship of Christ and his apostles that when a Christian followed one of them in his ways, so he followed every one of them as his disciple, in his degree. That is enough, for it should be the case generally that a 58 Summa Domini Armacani in Quaestionibus Armenorum noviter Impressa (Paris: Jean Petit, 1512), fo. liv (col. 2). 59 Flavius Phocas, Byzantine emperor, 602–10. Cf. Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden Monachi Cestrensis, together with the English Translation of John Trevisa, vol. 5, ed. Joseph Rawson Lumby (London: Longman, 1874), p. 416. 60 Decret. 2 pars, causa 24, q. 1, c. 25, CICaPP cols 975–6. The ‘old man’ here is Satan. 61 Decret. 2 pars, causa 24, q. 1, c. 25, CICaPP cols 975–6. Jerome here paraphrases a clause from Matthew 12:30 and Luke 11:23: ‘he that gathereth not with me, scattereth’.

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Christian should be a disciple of Christ, and St Jerome’s explanation, mentioned at the end, is supported when it is said: ‘Whoever does not gather with the Roman pontiff, scatters; that is, he who is not of Christ, is of Antichrist’. It is not the case, nevertheless, that the Roman church is generally assumed to be any particular pope and his cardinals, wherever or however they live, though that sense is extorted and certainly impedes the church. Second, we should note from what St Jerome says that anyone who sets himself against Christ is Antichrist. The proud are of this kind, and especially the priests of Caesar, hostile as they are to the law of Christ. According to St Gregory, nobody in the church does more harm, as he mentions in the second chapter of the first book of On Pastoral Care, and consequently nobody is a more worthless Antichrist. And the decretal about Antichrist speaks in this same way under the authority of Gregory, 16, question 7, ‘It comes to our attention’, where the following is said: ‘Certain bishops squander the goods of the poor in three ways: first, on troops and other laypeople who support them and keep them in worldly glory; second, on their unnatural family; and third, which is more serious, on their kindred.’62 By this saint’s definition, we should hardly regard such a bishop as the least of the greatest heretics and Antichrists. Perhaps if all bishops in England today, with their religious and their secular supporters, were marked on their foreheads with the sign of the beast, it would be clear that there would be many more infidels than Catholics in Christ’s party, because in reality heretics are also Antichrists. And all the holy doctors speak thus about Antichrists and heretics, drawing on the law of the church and of scripture. But elsewhere nonsensical tokens of approval are given, as heretics and Antichrists hide away in greater secrecy. Third, we should note that all laws that pertain to papal authority and the obedience owed to the Roman church must be accepted only on condition that that church offer provision in accordance with the name of excellence in its ministry. Otherwise, St Peter would not be leader among the apostles, as is clear from what he says, and St Jerome would contradict himself in his fortieth distinction, commissioned by the archdeacon; and otherwise it would be necessary in the worst case to agree with Antichrist merely by reason of status or name.63 Just as God cannot make a man white without whiteness, so he cannot make a

62 Decret. 2 pars, causa xvi, q. 7, c.3, CICaPP col. 801. 63 Decret. 1 pars, dist. XL, c. 2, CICaPP col. 145.

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man a pope or a member of the church without evidence of the requisite quality, to which status and human election are irrelevant.

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29 The problem of the virtuous heathen On the Church, ch. 22 (extract). Latin text: De Ecclesia, pp. 533–4. Questions of pagan virtue and salvation found a prominent place in high and late medieval scholarship and debate. The Roman emperor Trajan was renowned for his philanthropy and wise leadership, and he presided over significant expansions of the Roman territories. He was mentioned frequently in medieval discussions of exemplary pagans who led virtuous lives but whose position in history placed them beyond the revealed Christian faith. Wyclif ’s own somewhat unusual response finds its place alongside those of a distinguished array of theologians ranging from Peter Abelard to Thomas Aquinas.

Neither St Gregory nor God himself thought that Trajan was destined for eternal damnation, since God predestined him eternally to glory. Just as he ordained that he would suffer the pains of purgatory, so he ordained eternally that he would be saved through the intercession of St Gregory, because we must believe that neither St Gregory nor any of the blessed in heaven can change a divine decision through their entreaties, or change or influence what he has proposed. It is clear that Trajan died with the grace of predestination, nor have I heard any claim that he did not die in a state of grace according to present righteousness. Many outside Judaism had lived in an orthodox way (as is known of Job, Nebuchadnezzar and others like them), and the same is true of many we discern to be outside our faith because of the solemnity of its rituals. In our hearts we believe this leads to righteousness, and anyone dying in such righteousness is truly a child of the church and has received the baptism of wind. I do not think that St Gregory sinned in doing as he did, since God’s allowing it shows that it was fair and had his blessing. If this holy pope had sinned in praying for Trajan, it is taken to be because of a failure in his approach, as he occupied himself with a singular impulse, turning aside more pressing concerns of the church, or in similar circumstances, according to which, to his merit, he was punished.

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30 The condition of the contemporary church: a spiritual reading of Lamentations 4:9–22

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From Postils on the Whole of Scripture (Lamentations 4: 9-22). Latin text: Wyclifs Bibelkommentar, pp. 349–51. Here Wyclif offers an interpretation of the penultimate chapter of Lamentations, in which the condition of Jerusalem after the Babylonian siege is likened to that of the contemporary church in the wake of contemporary abuses within it. The fire that brought down the first temple is found to be analogous to the avarice of the ecclesiastics within the church, which is also found to deprive the poor of their goods. Other details of the aftermath of the sacking are enumerated systematically in order to present a powerful critique of the contemporary church.

It was better with them that were slain by the sword (Lamentations 4[:9–22]). Proof of these words can be taken from the condition of the church, which is lamenting its own corruption. Hence, literally, it was ‘better’ with the Jews that ‘were slain’ than for those who lived in expectation caused by a ‘hunger’ so powerful that they ‘pined away’ (4[:9]). That is, they were forsaken in misery on account of the ‘want of fruits’ caused by war, so it is worse for the confessors in the peace of embitterment than it was for the martyrs that were killed earlier. This is because hunger for the word of God grows. ‘The hands of the pitiful women have sodden their own children’ (4[:10]), and just as the ‘women’, who were seen to be ‘pitiful’ for their ‘children’, had ‘sodden’ them, so the zeal of the house of God, that is, of the ecclesiastics, devours the poor by taking away their goods, through the oppression that occurs in affairs that are called ‘ecclesiastic’. ‘The Lord hath accomplished his wrath’ (4[:11]). The Lord finally avenged himself on the inhabitants of the temple, and ‘poured out’ his punishment fully in Jerusalem when Nabuzaradan ‘kindled a fire’ in the temple, the royal house built ‘in Syon’, and throughout the whole city (4[:11]). Likewise, through the litigation of the ecclesiastics, whose womb is God, the church is burned by the fire of avarice. And this greed ‘hath devoured’ the prelates who should be the ‘foundations’ of the church (4[:11]). The Lord, in his punishment of sin, punished the church and the royal house in Jerusalem beyond the estimation of Solomon and the preceding kings who built it, and likewise, the church is now spiritually destroyed beyond any

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estimation that the columns that had earlier governed the church could have had. ‘For the sins of her prophets’, etc. (4[:13]). Just as those things happened to the Jews ‘for the sins of her prophets’, and the innocents ‘were killed’ for [the sins] of the priests that advised them, as is evident in the time of the Manasses in 4 Kings 24, so the malice of the church happens because of the doctors and prelates encouraging war and other things that kill innocent people. ‘They have wandered as blind men in the streets’ (4:14). And just as priests and prophets ‘wander as blind men’ in respect of the intention of the law, so our ecclesiastics who wander morally are as blind men in respect of their allegiance to Scripture. And ‘when they cannot’ enter the state of the church by virtue of their fitness, they ‘hold up the skirts’ of the former prelates, because worldly goods, such as money and signs of the clerical crown, which were valued only minimally by the earlier pastors, like the hems of clothes, are now the means of gaining the status of cleric simoniacally (4[:14]). ‘Depart, you that are defiled’ (4[:15]). The people ‘cried out’ against the priests’ worthlessness by natural instinct, and against the wrongness of their malice, and ‘they quarrelled, and were removed’ (4[:15]). The people were against them, saying to the priests, ‘depart, you that are defiled’, go, and do not touch holy things. Today, other sects speak in this way to our priests, saying that our God ‘hath divided us’ through internal wars and other conflicts. ‘The face of the Lord hath divided them’, etc. (4[:16]). They will not respect us because the priests have not been ashamed to sin, and ‘had no pity’ on the poor or the weak. ‘While we were yet standing’ (4[:17]). And just as the Jews were captured because they confided in a man, Pharaoh, the King of Egypt, neglecting to seek ‘help’ against the Chaldeans,64 so the ecclesiastics, ‘while they were left standing’ in honest poverty, placed their hope in promoting the quest for temporalities, and their heart’s ‘eyes failed’ as they venerated the idle temporalities ‘that were not able to save’ them (4[:17]). ‘Our steps have slipped’ (4[:18]). And just as the Egyptians were expected to save the Chaldeans, and they made the roads of the Jews slippery by making them finally die in the presence of their enemies, so worldly goods make the ecclesiastics slippery, walking without stability on the road of the Lord. By the grace of God, therefore, there will be an end to this trust in riches. ‘Our persecutors were swifter’ (4[:19]). Just as the Chaldeans ‘pursued’ the Jews ‘upon the mountains and … in the wilderness’, where they were 64 That is, they neglected to seek help elsewhere against the Babylonian invaders of the city.

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plundered to the greatest degree, so the devil pursues the ecclesiastics with Simon Magus, not only the lower orders, but also the bishops and high prelates, in the mountains, and also the religious, who live, as it were, in the wilderness. ‘For from the least of them even to the greatest, all are given to covetousness: and from the prophet even to the priest, all are guilty of deceit’ (Jeremiah 6[:13]). ‘The breath of our mouth, Christ the Lord, is taken in our sins’ (4[:20]). And just as Josiah was killed by the Egyptians, about which [we learn] in 4 Kings 23 and 2 Paralipomenon 35, [and] Zedekiah was captured by the Chaldeans in the desert of Jericho whilst he was trying to flee, first because he acted contrary to the word of the prophet, as is known from 2 Esdras 1, and second, because he went against the counsel of Jeremiah, by breaking the oath by which he had been bound, so, if it is lawful to say, our holiest father the pope, who is, as it were, the air cooling us, and the one anointed by the Lord, is ‘taken in our sins’, namely, avarice and simony, since ‘we shall live’ securely among the other sects under the pretext of his sanctity. Others explain this as an entire chapter dealing with Christ our God, who died for our sins, and the others mentioned were imprisoned by their own sins. Hence, in Hebrew, for the name ‘Lord’ we have the tetragrammaton, which is rightly consistent with God alone.65 But since it is indeclinable, it can be used or said obliquely of any of Christ’s priests, but ‘Christ’ is the ‘spirit’, breathing and also causing Christians to be reborn where he wishes, in whose ‘shadow’ any of the faithful Jews ‘live’ in the faith of the church with the ‘gentiles’, incredulous that they are allowed to live among Christians, so that they would finally be converted to Christ, and so that Christ would be remembered more vividly, and Jeremiah is said to have perceived all of this. ‘Rejoice, and be glad, O daughter of Edom, that dwellest in the land of Hus’ (4[:21]). Finally, Jeremiah speaks ironically of the neighbouring people that were killed, when they ‘shall be made drunk’ by the cup of the Lord’s vengeance on account of their sins, so that ‘Edom’, who is called by another name, Esau, in Genesis 25, suffered inordinate ‘rejoicing’ which he had from Israel. And all of this can be understood of the Saracens and other infidels who were destroyed because of their iniquities, which they practised against Christians who are the 65 The tetragrammaton is the four consonants of God’s name in Hebrew, which may be transcribed YHWH. The name was considered sacred, and was not pronounced by early Jewish readers of the text, who generally substituted Adonai (Lord). Observant Jews continue to substitute Adonai for this name. It is thus generally rendered as Dominus (Lord) in the Vulgate and as Lord in the Douay-Rheims translation.

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spiritual children of Israel. ‘Thy iniquity is accomplished, O daughter of Sion’ (4[:22]). And after the iniquity of the Christian ecclesiastics has been sown, Christendom will be torn by Antichrist who will follow, and when he is dead, all people will be converted to the faith of Christ, both Jews and Saracens. And then, the Jews’ ‘iniquity is accomplished’, and the idolatry of the infidels will be stripped away, when the Christians, overthrown, will be reduced to their original state, with excessive desire for worldly goods abandoned by ecclesiastics, who strive for the spiritual life and the rule of the primitive church. This will be the antecedent to the conversion of the rest of the Christian, Jewish and Saracen population. But now, our ecclesiastics are inclined to turn our order and rule of living perversely towards the times of Antichrist.

31 The errors of the fraternal orders On the Ordination of Friars. Latin text: ‘Iohannis Wiclif De Ordinacione Fratrum’, in Polemical Works in Latin, vol. 1, pp. 88–106. This late tract, which is known by a variety of titles, typifies Wyclif ’s late antagonism towards the fraternal orders. The guiding argument here is simply that the different orders of friars receive no mention in scripture and therefore do not enjoy divine sanction. Wyclif draws on a wide range of antifraternal authorities, including Grosseteste, Bonaventure, Fitzralph and, more unusually, William of St Amour. In the second chapter, as in the slightly later On the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit, he mentions an assassination attempt against John of Gaunt that was reportedly instigated by the Carmelite friar John Latimer, who reported to Richard during the Salisbury Parliament of April 1384 that Gaunt was plotting his death. Though the king reacted with rash anger initially, he was eventually persuaded to consider the grounds for Latimer’s claim more carefully, and the friar was imprisoned. He later died after being brutally tortured and interrogated at the hands of John Holland, the king’s half-brother, and a group of men associated with Gaunt.66 The motive of his allegation remains unclear, though it was made at a time when the duke was a frequent target of jealous suspicion. See the Introduction for a full discussion of the development of Wyclif ’s antifraternalism.

66 Westminster Chronicle, pp. 68–75. See Nigel Saul, Richard II (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 131–2; Gerald Harriss, Shaping the Nation: England 1360–1461 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005), p. 455.

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Chapter 1 Many think that since Christ is first and last and his works are perfect, he wanted those new orders to be introduced in the most recent times in accordance with the recentness of his own birth, so that his church could be the queen standing on their right-hand side, surrounded by a variety of others. We know that accusations have been made by certain people who inveigh against these new sects, but the sects exist stably through the firm authority of the Lord, with the permission of the wise and the holy people of the church, who lived in as appropriate a way as they learned daily from their mother, with the resources of the church. Who, then, by the subtlety of their intellect or by a gift of God would say anything anew against these new orders, which were established so long ago and are so thoroughly bound by the useful aids of the church, and by robust motives? Many people are prompted to suppose that the said opprobrium does not seem charitable, or even reasonable. We therefore begin by making the steadfast assumption that Christ is a true God and a true man, and thus it should be that he has perfect works, especially those concerning the government of his church in both testaments. However, we must repeatedly guard against anything that we perceive to be unsuitable in this, unless it is founded in the law of the Lord. Since Christ did not teach that these sects were introduced for the edification of the church, but rather foresaw their sly act of subversion, the faithful of the church should firmly inveigh specifically against them, since they do not have their foundation in the Lord Jesus Christ, as is clear from one particular tract concerning the friars.67 And thus we return to a threefold proof relating to this matter, for Christ taught in John 10[:1] that he is the door, and that if anyone does not enter the church through this door he is a thief and a plunderer. If these four sects and especially the friars knew how, therefore, they would have said how they entered holy church by the authority of this door. But since they do not know how, it is clear from the truth of the gospel how they are suspected of theft and robbery. Christ, who is omnipotent, omniscient and omnivolent, would hardly overlook such an asset to the church as these persistent friars claim to be. The second piece of evidence supporting this argument is taken from the words of the Lord in Luke 5[:36]: ‘[Let] no man put a piece from 67 The reference here is to Wyclif ’s On the Foundation of Sects, which serves to confirm the late composition of the present text. See Polemical Works, vol. 1, p. 89n.

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a new garment upon an old garment; otherwise he both rendeth the new, and the piece taken from the new agreeth not with the old.’ The faithful understand by this that Christ does not wish his new law of grace to be burdened with human traditions, but to change freely and thus more meritoriously through such works, as should be the case. Because of this he excused his apostles from fasting like the Pharisees and the disciples of John at that time.68 And many words of scriptural doctrine confirm that sentence. Since the four sects that have been mentioned, and especially that of the friars, burden the church in the time of the law of grace with new, unfounded laws, which they mix with the laws of Christ, it seems that the faithful should oppose them and turn against those who would mix laws in this way. These sects mix heresies together, contrary to the freedom that Christ gave to his church for its own benefit. Third, it is confirmed by the first common synod of the apostles after the mission of the Holy Spirit, of which [we learn] in Acts 15[:4ff], in which Peter and James, Bishop of Jerusalem, decided that all faithful gentiles and Jews should be liberated from such Jewish ceremonies and, more particularly, from newly introduced perceptible traditions. Good people are not the only ones to benefit from what they do, just as the church as a whole is damaged by instances of demonic temptation. And thus, in short, all of the new traditions of those four sects greatly harm the church, and by throwing it into disorder they prolong its earthly pilgrimage, even though certain predestinates magnify its glory by resisting those innovations. Chapter 2 The objectives on which these sects rely remain to be explored more fully. First, we must assume that the hypocritical trickery by which the devil works is equipped deviously to conceal the church’s sin for a very long time. [This sin] was introduced through his own act of trickery, as a consequence of original sin, which inevitably followed the birth of the human race (although Sergius and other heretics were striving to conceal that sin).69 And more noticeably, the same judgement is made about Saracen sects and many other sects of more ancient friars ­introduced by the devil. We are not the first to inveigh against these people. Recently St 68 See Matthew 9:14–15; Mark 2:18; Luke 5:33. 69 This is a second reference to Sergius the monk. See Chapter III, n. 31.

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Richard, Bishop Ardmacan, laboured to purge the church of the crimes newly introduced by the fraternal sects. And likewise Ockham, with many other faithful friars, also worked towards the purgation of his brothers who denied the first rule. William of St Amour did the same, together with many others, after the establishment of the friars.70 Indeed, Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln and a man of subtle character, inveighed very sharply against those orders as he approached his death, when he was more mature in his ways. But we honour evil if by exploring their labours we only add to them by renewing the friars’ sin. We could alternatively begin by criticising the culpable novelties that they have recently introduced, for, if we adhere to the Catholic faith and to the truth of the Christian rule, guilt hangs over those sects that are sinning afresh, and not over others who inveigh against the crimes they have committed. Just as God therefore moved these earlier fathers towards this more meritorious work, so he also moves later fathers who campaign more openly against [the friars] on graver issues.71 Indeed, a sin of the devil affects many imperceptibly at first, but it is vividly apparent even to the stupid now that it has become so old. Let our opponent therefore inveigh against arguments that I have made and excuse these sects if he knows how, because their work attracts praise as well as blame. May the sect of friars respect the rationale and the boundaries of the law of Christ, and may no faithful man challenge them unless they indulge in culpable novelties. Now, when the poor disciples of Christ were travelling in an evangelical manner through different countries rather than living a cloistered life, there were many burdensome members of the church whom they turned towards the Christian God through the teaching of Scripture. Will as many friars, through their attachment to rotten customs and sumptuous edifices and other, infinitely more culpable novelties that they introduce into the church, be of any benefit to that church? Or will they be diffused with the Holy Spirit? The practice of their mischief and the deterioration of their members teaches expressly the opposite. Let them turn away from these culpable novelties and embrace the law of the gospel, spreading it by authority and reason as far as they know how, and others will help them. What faithful person would not 70 Most medieval fraternal orders were established in the late twelfth or thirteenth centuries (see General Introduction). William of St Amour (d. ca. 1273), a French theologian who lived in Paris, opposed the mendicants throughout his life. 71 Wyclif here distinguishes between the work of the ‘earlier’ scholars mentioned above, such as Richard Fitzralph, William of Ockham, William of St Amour and Robert Grosseteste, and those of his own time.

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inveigh against them if they did not do this, but subscribed instead to these culpable and unfounded novelties that are entering into the church? Indeed, they have consented to such crime and heresy that those introduced into the church are said to be fit for destruction! The endowment of the clergy has led through Caesar’s foolishness to a great wrong in the church, but the friars were supposedly brought into it to resist such culpable tyranny. The friars have hitherto observed a poor and propertyless way of life through the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ, albeit in a superficial way. Ockham, Bonaventure and many other friars have perceived this, by the glory of the Lord. But although friars are today confessors and advisers to kings, leaders, lords and ladies, they nevertheless agree to the opposite of the faith and criticise the poor priests who say that manifest heretics have come into the Catholic faith and must be eliminated.72 Why, then, should we believe the friars who agree to this sin, against the doctrine of scripture and against their own way of life, even as they remain silent to avoid being manifest heretics? They cannot excuse themselves from this irrational insolence without being murderers of other faithful priests. In 1 John 3[:15] the Lord says, ‘whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer’. Not only are those friars who conspired mendaciously to kill our lord the Duke of Lancaster most pernicious, therefore, but also all other friars who conspire against faithful priests who show in their life and work that they are soldiers of the law of God.73 The friars follow contradictory principles in the same way as the devil and sinners. They say verbally and in their work that the faithful should believe that all Christ’s clerics who are not priests of Caesar or Baal should live in poverty like Christ and his apostles, who taught this in their deeds as in their word. They do the opposite, however, and this is accepted by many. Since it is written in Psalm 118[:21] that ‘they are cursed who decline from thy commandments’, it is therefore evident to many faithful people that they are cursed by God, and the friars cannot themselves be excused from this treacherous conspiracy. Although the friars are therefore now hostile to Ockham and others who have taught that sentence, having turned away from their company, nevertheless they cannot deny the doctrine of scripture that they learn on that topic. And that foolish heresy is the principal sin against the friars, since 72 Wyclif seldom describes his followers as poor priests in his Latin writings, but the expression gained wide currency in the vernacular. 73 This is a reference to the Latimer affair.

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the friars say, in their deeds to prelates and lords: agree, all of you, to my heresy, and please me; and let me consent to your heresy concerning secular lordship and war.

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Chapter 3 It is clear from what has been said above that the argument that emerges from a rejection of novelty is wrong in terms of both matter and form: in terms of the first, because the means of seduction by which the friars presumed to invent their own, better law of the Lord was created by many of them without foundation, together with their frivolous and hypocritical liberal tradition. And there is no doubt that this makes much evil on either side. Evil, indeed, besets the newly-­ converted faithful who, having left behind a much better law, choose one that is worse because they abandon the free Christian order, which is good in itself, and choose an empty order founded by imbecilic sinners. Now, Christ, Lord of the universe and of time, knew how to establish a law that placed a limit of freedom upon the universe of men, which their patrons had ignored. It is credible therefore that many enter the new orders and corrupt them, resulting in mutual deterioration. And there is no doubt that this presumptuous nonsense is to be blamed on the supporters of the new orders. In Matthew 9[:16], therefore, Christ says, ‘And nobody putteth a piece of raw cloth unto an old garment. For it taketh away the fullness thereof from the garment, and there is made a greater rent’. But the newness of those orders obstructs the fullness of the observance of Christ’s law, since many have entered these new orders that are unsuited to their crude form of religious observance. And thus they devote as much attention to this empty tradition as to any law of Jesus Christ. We believe this is the reason why in preaching they mix lies with sport, and do not preach the word of God sincerely. In Matthew 9[:17], Christ says: ‘Neither do they put new wine into old bottles. Otherwise the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish. But new wine they put into new bottles: and both are preserved.’ Many entered these false orders and were confined to the empty mendicancy and comparable frivolities of the limiter involuntarily, and consequently, without merit.74 Although they had the wine of wisdom that should be shared by the faithful, that wine was nevertheless spilled after a jarring rupture, and the art of deceiving and of 74 A limiter was a mendicant friar who was licensed to operate within a restricted area.

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begging was introduced through empty traditions because the art of binding together, which is proper to Christ, was lacking in them. In respect of this we read the following in Psalm 44[:10]: ‘The church is the queen standing on the right-hand side of Christ, surrounded with variety’. That religion evidently lacks the slyness of gluttonous people! Christ, bridegroom of the church, ordained in his wisdom such variety in his three members, but the devil spread Christ’s faithful people apart through the sins of their patrons, and introduced excessive variety into those orders. This was why Paul and the other apostles did not dare to spread apart the sections of the Christian order that Christ had set up as a free whole. And thus, the wisdom of those founders that unwarrantably extended beyond the apostles is foolishness according to God, because, in general, it is freer and more perfect to abandon folly and remove imperfection. And all these new orders are involved in this folly, since we know by faith that the order of Christ exceeds all of them in terms of its rule and its patron. As regards liberty, there is no doubt that Christ’s sect is far freer than these, and thus they seem to be outside Christ’s sect because their stultified people often compel them to unite with the devil and with practices that are not fit for them according to the parameters of Christ’s law. Their patrons are thus entangled in heresies as much as their disciples, so that their status and their life seem more perfect [to them] than those of the apostles or martyrs, because sanctity seems good to certain people entering their orders. Status in perceptible signs, moreover, seduces many through hypocrisy, contrary to the law of Christ. Although many saints have tolerated those sins, there is no evidence that they are actually good, since Christ tolerated greater crimes in the priests of the scribes and the Pharisees and others. But when their noxious lie is known more clearly to the people, the faithful should work harder towards the perfection of their order, which Christ instituted to be restored to such a state. And thus we assume, from their art of lying and necromancy, that the claim that such orders exist through God or that they live in sanctity with their hypocritical signs is unfounded. Who could rationally rebuke this invective against the new sects, which seeks to have their people restored to a better and freer order of the Lord? That would be the same as presuming and suggesting that Antichrist is exalted above Christ! And thus, although certain people may be uncharitable in their reprobation, nevertheless the charity of Christ’s law necessitates some charitable invective against those sects in order to restore the people to greater unity and

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concord. We know that this can result in good, albeit in a painful way. We therefore charitably believe with mature deliberation that these sects need to be broken apart and introduced into the pure sect of the Lord. The faithful know that this is generally found to be contrary neither to reason or nor charity. But since an immeasurable truth lies at its foundation, and the intention of its builder should be right, it seems that there is merit in rehearsing this sentence frequently. We should therefore set them on the route towards the required form with human skills and careful daily labours, since neither the stones nor the metals of Baal received their final form with a single beating. Who knows whether God wants these extraneous orders to be introduced to the unity of his church? We do not ask money of them or desire revenge; we seek only that they should be integrated into the better and freer sect of the Lord Jesus Christ, which we believe that we ourselves serve. We therefore wish them to have the advantage that we enjoy, yet they could easily bring us injury. Chapter 4 Just as the apostle wanted all men to be like him, if not in every way, so charity compels Christians to want the friars to be of the pure sect of Christ, and nevertheless not any of them is entirely like any other, since the principle of individuation requires that one should be a virgin, another in chains, and another in the state that God ordained for the edification of the body of the church.75 Just as Christ is the head of the church, so he wished that all of its members should similarly be Christians. And third, it seems that Christ’s parable in Luke 14[:23] teaches that the Lord wants his servant to be sent into the highways and the hedges to compel men to enter into his church through the secular branch, because it seems that now that the clergy are turning away from Christ’s teaching, as they did at the time of his Passion, Christ wants to give the Holy Spirit to the seculars, to a clergy that should be compelled by modesty.76 In Luke 19[:40], Christ says, ‘if these shall hold their peace, the stones will cry out’. That is to say, if the clergy grow dumb in showing the secular branch in word as in deed that the way is hard, then like the stones they will shout out, harshly 75 Acts 26:29: ‘And Paul said: I would to God, that both in a little and in much, not only thou, but also all that hear me, this day, should become such as I also am, except these chains’ (my emphasis). 76 ‘And the Lord said to the servant: Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled’.

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and with a certain austerity, that Christ is God and man, who should be imitated in his order by all of the faithful. And thus, Christ made up his church out of three parts.77 He wanted the first, which is the clergy, to be priests, and for them to be associates of deacons and be integrated with them. The achievement of that integration would lead to the perfection of the state of the clergy, since a bishop and a priest were once the same according to Jerome.78 I do not recollect that there is any mention in scripture of the pope or of cardinals, monks, canons and friars. Nevertheless, I concede that God wishes there to be an order of clerics, because he wants one priest to be superior to the rest and to be a bishop, but he does not want that superiority to lie in worldly greatness or secular riches, but rather for it to be the greatness that attends the rank of humble minister, in accordance with the law that Christ taught. Out of respect of these offices, therefore, we believe that it is expedient to the church, and especially to the friars, that there should not be any such sects. It seems to be concordant with the gospel to make priests truly and consistently equal to the law of Christ, in accordance with the sword of the secular branch, and to take from them all excessive lordship, which should be restored to the perfect part of the church from which it was unduly taken. The false weeds that grow up that did not enter through the door should be denied salvation or occupation of temporal positions. According to the testament of truth, they are the rogues and mercenaries of the church.79 Having prudently followed this twofold pathway to the righteousness of truth, I now leave it to the faithful to draw humbly on that truth in what they desire.80 It seems to them, nevertheless, that this must  be done wisely and with a degree of discipline, in accordance with the prudence of the gospel, and that it should begin with the pope. They believe that he should look to extend his own obedience no further afield than that of Christ and Peter (who should be his own vicars), in accordance with the law of the Lord. With this gushing fount 77 That is, clerics, soldiers and commoners. 78 See Letter 146, to Evangelus, which is devoted to this question. PL 22, col. 1192; for a reliable English translation, see Jerome: Select Letters and Works, Nicene and PostNicene Fathers, series 2, vol. 6 (1893), pp. 679–81. 79 Cf. John 10:1: ‘Amen, amen, I say to you: He that entreth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up another way, the same is a thief and a robber’. 80 This twofold pathway would seem to correspond broadly to the secular and the ordained life. This would be consistent with Wyclif ’s earlier comment about the threefold nature of the church, which may be divided more broadly into secular and ordained members.

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suppressed it should be possible to destroy the heresies that arise out of departure from the Lord’s law in the provinces. It therefore seems that according to the sense of the gospel too many Saracens, Jews and other infidel sects are in the broad road leading to hell, outside the city of the church, but the secular branch should prudently compel these outer parts of the human race and those private orders lurking in the hedges to enter the house and the heavenly company of the Lord Jesus Christ. This compulsion of the will ought therefore to be prudent and guide them towards the entrance. I say that the private orders dwell in a hedge in the earth for two reasons: first, they are hardly elevated by their false reputation and hypocrisy towards the blessedness they should seek, and therefore they make the pastures of the field go to ruin, yet by the law of the Lord these pastures are the common land of many human beings.81 And among these orders, who are only superficially of the Lord’s sect, it often happens that putrid water is poured out, and through that water, each part of the human race is defiled. Therefore, those living hypocritically in the hedges are often held back from the fulfilment of the Lord’s law by thorn bushes and thistles. Removing the thorn bushes of human traditions so that these people can stand prudently in the clear road of the Lord would therefore be medicinal. To this end, compulsion by the sword is required, which Christ gave to the church. Certain people therefore mutter that, if the friars are bound by the laws of the earth’s kings, they should be compelled more easily by the laws of men. But others treating this question suppose that the friars in England are not friends like the wandering apostles had been in disseminating the habitable word of God, and are strangers to the place they inhabit. This is clear from their own lavish dwelling place and from the [limited] effect of the monarchy in the populated province in which they live. It then seems that the friars are not men of the law of the kings of the earth because they hold their position from those kings neither indirectly nor immediately. Not indirectly because, as they themselves proclaim, they are directly beneath the pope, and not beneath a bishop or any other temporal lord. No temporal lord or bishop pays homage to the king on these friars’ behalf in general. We cannot assume that they hold land indirectly from the king by virtue of holding land indirectly from another lord. They are not direct tenants of the king either, because they do not pay homage to the king in person, since they are 81 Common land was land granted to tenants by a landlord. Individual tenants would hold a plot of land, which was used most frequently as pasture.

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immediately beneath the pope, as they say. And, as they suggest, the pope is not subject to any other secular lord. Now, since the friars take more from the kingdom of England than Christ and all his apostles took from Judaea, and they do not pay a drachma to the king or to any secular ruler, as Christ had done in Matthew 17:24–5, it seems that they are more exempt from worldly duties than the Lord! It therefore seems difficult to many people for the friars to be liegemen of the kings of the land. However, if they were to pay the king of the land or his tenants ten marks, plus or minus the annuity of the particular area of the kingdom that they occupied and the income of the kingdom that they inhabited, then they could faithfully claim that they were liegemen of the king of the land. Many grumble about this observation, describing liegemen rather as men who inhabit a kingdom as subjects of the laws of its king, and use the same language. It seems to them first that it is not necessary that they should be born in the kingdoms of the kings of whom they are liegemen, since kings still rule lawfully over kingdoms when they are born and brought up according the law of a lord outside those kingdoms. Indeed, dukes, counts and other secular inferiors of a lord can have been begotten and born legally outside kingdoms when they are liegemen of them. Likewise, men can become liegemen of the kings of that land in a mature state, after they had been liegemen only of a foreign kingdom. It seems, moreover, that nativity, language and residency are not adequate in themselves, since it is possible for an Englishman, by birth and language, to become a robber in other kingdoms, and on returning to England to become a destructive robber of a different kingdom. It should be the case that a liegeman of a given kingdom brings benefits to that kingdom through his body, but especially through his soul, living according to the law of God. And in another way, Christ was Caesar’s liegeman, and the apostles were also liegemen of kings of the land. But it is not adequate for men to be subjected to the laws of the kings of the land against their will, since a robber could satisfy this criterion; rather, it should be that they are subjected voluntarily and by merit to the laws of the kings of the land, in so far as these are consistent with the law of God. And this is the reason why kings are not kings, but tyrants of the devil’s congregation, and kingdoms are not kingdoms, but assemblies of Antichrist, unless, as a whole, or according to their parts, they live in conformity with the law of God. And this is the reason why kings reign through Christ, and through him there are kingdoms on the earth, and all of the dwelling places of men, viators,

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are subject to the sovereignty of the king of kings. And thus, if friars or other sects are not founded in the Lord then they are not liegemen of the kings of the land, who do not in themselves have lordship of any other nature over them. And this is why Saul, in holy scripture, is said to reign for two years, when, broadly speaking, he reigned for twenty years or more, as is clear from 1 Kings 13[:1].82 This, therefore, would be sufficient reason, and one that is beneficial to the kingdoms of the land, why kings should not permit any sects to live in their kingdoms, except sects that they know to be founded on the law of God. And on this principle is founded the recommendation of priests that friars may not inhabit our kingdom by begging and by robbing its poor, without having also taught that Christ begged in such a way; for the kingdom of the devil has this practice for itself, properly, because it is founded on a lie. Here ends the treatise on the ordination of friars, compiled by Master John Wyclif, Professor of the Sacred Page.

32 Wyclif ’s ‘Letter’ to Pope Urban VI, summarising his principal beliefs Letter to Pope Urban VI (1384). Latin text: Opera Minora, pp. 1–2; FZ, pp. 341–2. This ‘letter’ is fashioned as a response to a summons to Rome issued by Pope Urban VI. Its date has long been debated among Wyclif ’s editors, but it seems likely to have been composed at some point in 1384. The letter was probably not a letter at all, but ‘a kind of circular, designed to lay before interested parties in England Wyclif ’s cardinal tenets of faith’.83 It seems likely, nevertheless, as Thomson suggests, that Wyclif would have intended it to have been received by Urban ultimately.

Copy of a certain letter of Master John Wyclif sent to Pope Urban VI to excuse himself for not visiting him in response to his citation, A.D. MCCCLXXXIV. 82 The book of Samuel was labelled 1 and 2 Kings in the Latin Vulgate, which explains the reference to Kings here; the book of Kings was itself called 3 and 4 Kings. This follows the combination of these four books in the Septuagint under the heading ‘Kingdoms’. See Gwilym H. Jones, ‘1 and 2 Samuel’, in The Oxford Bible Commentary, ed. John Barton and John Muddiman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 196–231 (p. 196). 83 Latin Writings, p. 260.

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I am delighted to reveal the nature of my faith to any man, but especially the Roman pontiff. I assume that if it should be orthodox he will confirm that faith, and if it should be erroneous he will correct it. But I also think that Christ’s gospel is the heart of the body of God’s law, and I believe that Christ, who has given that gospel directly, is truly God and man, and in that respect the law of the gospel exceeds all other parts of scripture. But again, I assume that, since he is Christ’s greatest vicar on earth, the Roman pontiff is held to that law of the gospel more than any other viator. Indeed, greatness among Christ’s disciples is measured not by their greatness in the world but by their imitation of his deeds. Again, from the heart of God’s law I ascertain clearly that Christ was the poorest of men throughout his life on earth, renouncing all worldly lordship, and this is evident from the teaching of the gospel in Matthew 8[:20] and 2 Corinthians 8[:9]. I generally infer from these things that the pope or the saints should be imitated only in so far as he or they have themselves imitated the Lord Jesus Christ. Indeed, Peter, Paul and the sons of Zebedee did wrong in desiring worldly dignity above this, and must not therefore be followed in those errors. I take as counsel from these things that the pope should give temporal lordship over to the secular branch and exhort his clergy effectively to do the same, for Christ did this expressly through his apostles. Now, if I have erred in these claims I humbly wish to be corrected, even by death, if that should be necessary. If I could labour to make a wish for my own part, I would wish humbly to visit the presence of the Roman pontiff. But God has compelled me to do the opposite, and has consequently taught me to obey God more than to obey men.84 Since God gave our pope righteous evangelical instincts, we must ask that those instincts should remain unextinguished by sly counsel, and that the pope or his cardinals make no move to do anything against God’s law. We therefore ask the Lord of all creatures that he should thus urge our Pope Urban VI to imitate the ways of the Lord Jesus Christ with his clergy, as he had begun to do, so that in effect they teach people to imitate them faithfully in so doing. We ask in particular that our pope should be preserved from malign counsel, because we know for certain that ‘a man’s enemies shall be they of his own household’ (Matthew 84 Thomson suggests that Wyclif ’s inability to honour the summons may have been a consequence of his first stroke (which occurred shortly after he moved to Lutterworth in 1381), which would certainly make 1384 a more plausible date than 1378, which had been suggested earlier by J. Loserth and H. Workman. See Latin Writings, p. 260.

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10[:36]) and that ‘God will not suffer you to be tempted above that which you are able’ (1 Corinthians 10[:13]); to a much a greater extent, God requires of no creature that he should do what he cannot do, since that is patently a condition of Antichrist.

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33 The papal schism and the Despenser Crusade of 1383 On the Schism (On the Division of the Popes). Latin text: Polemical Works in Latin, vol. 2, pp. 570–6. In the explicits of two of its surviving manuscripts (though not in the earliest), this text is identified as a ‘letter’ sent to the Bishop of Norwich, Henry Despenser. The letter articulates a plea to Henry to call off his planned military campaign against the Clementists in Flanders, but Thomson (following Buddensieg) concludes that it is unlikely to have been a letter at all.85 More broadly, this brief treatise is obviously a clear complaint about the evils consequent upon the Papal Schism, which included, of course, the Despenser Crusade itself. A much longer version of this document was composed in English, and offers a loose translation of the text presented here.86

The monstrous division between the popes seems to signify the perilous times that the apostle says will come in our last days. According to the words of Christ’s prophecy in Matthew 24, these days seem clearly to be here, and it therefore seems that I must add a specific sense to the general sense of this prophecy that I have described elsewhere, proceeding thus from the general to the particular.87 First, it seems we must assume that this disagreement probably arises on account of desire for papal honour in the world and the material goods that accompany it. Assuming that the pope received a pure gift from Christ as Peter did, it seems that this should not be percep­ tible above the goodness of virtues and of grace, unless it should consist in work and concern for the state of the poor. If this were so, then such 85 See the Introduction for details of the Despenser Crusade and the schism. On the assumption that Wyclif probably never communicated directly with Henry Despenser, see Latin Writings, p. 273; Polemical Works, vol. 2, p. 567. 86 Select English Works, vol. 3, pp. 242–66. 87 The reference here is probably to Wyclif ’s extended sermon on Matthew 24, which Thomson dates to 1383. This polemical commentary, which is heavily anti-papal in tone, makes frequent allusions to the Despenser Crusade and the consequences of the schism. For the Latin text, see Johannis Wyclif Opera Minora, ed. J. Loserth (London: WS, 1913). If On the Schism was produced in 1382, as Thomson suggests, then this creates a glaring inconsistency. See Polemical Works, vol. 2, p. 517; Latin Writings, p. 274.

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a division would not have occurred. It therefore remains true that this division has arisen because of the worldly honours and secular powers that are attached to the papacy. Now, since the efficient cause of that division is those very things, and when they are taken away this effect is removed, it seems that the dispute would be settled with the removal of the covetousness of secular lordship and honour. The emperor and other kings who foolishly endowed the church against the law of the Lord, therefore, should prudently to take away this source of conflict. It was because of this, after all, that they fell into disagreement, and it would therefore benefit them if their goods, which were given by God, were forcibly restored to the secular branch of society. In this way this luciferian division in the church would be calmed, and the law of God would be defended on either side, with the heretical presumption of Antichrist destroyed. Third, it seems that any pope or prelate of the church who departs from this process of restitution is a manifest heretic to the law of Christ and is opposed to the charity of the church. He is therefore a disruptor of the peace of the church, who should be rejected by the faithful. And this turns secular lordship and honours against the law of God more than it augments charity in the church or promotes its health, which would be a clear state of the Noonday Devil.88 Far from harming the church, therefore, liberation from such a demon would benefit it to the highest degree. The church should therefore work assiduously in the  cause of God towards its destruction. Fourth, it seems that any community that works to restore either of its popes to the higher dignity of a king works for the devil’s cause against Christ. Indeed, Christ gave a manifold law to his priests which they do not administer in this way, and for the defence of this law and of others he advised his faithful to work under the cloak of blessedness, and he underwent the harshest of sufferings at the hands of infidels. Who, then, would presume to encourage this poison in the church, against its peace, in the name of the ministry of Antichrist? Fifth, it seems likely from such things that it is a clear lie and an abomination to claim that Christ would grant indulgences from punishment and from guilt [a poena et a culpa], or grant any other spiritual aid to anyone in the devil’s cause that worked so assiduously against him. Christ would then be contrary to himself, would be the greatest sinner and would be maximally disruptive to the peace of the church! 88 Psalm 90:6: ‘Of the arrow that flieth in the day, of the business that walketh about in the dark: of invasion, or of the noonday devil’.

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But these things are manifest blasphemies, and not without the agreement and authority of the church triumphant does such nominated suffrage have any value. And since in John 5[:19], [Christ] says of himself that the Son cannot do anything but what he sees the Father doing, it is clear how true it is that it is not in the substance of the faith that such an absolution or indulgence should be granted by head of the church triumphant.89 And since this whole militant multitude is divided into the sons of God, who are from God, and the sons of the devil, who are of his part (though the division between them is concealed), a clear judgement may be derived as to who are servants of Christ and who are his servants in the execution of his ministry, since it seems manifest that those who perpetrate this elevation of the cross against the rule of charity are servants of the devil in their activities, their work and their thought.90 And since we may assume that our Pope Urban91 does not authorise this action,92 even though he may be led astray by the pseudo-friars, it seems likely that the friars, promoting this cause in their preaching and robbing the church through their false collections, are the principal enemies of the church and should restore to it those things so fraudulently taken away before God lays down his charge, or before the church can receive them as faithful people. And it seems that the same can be said against the pseudo-cardinals, or of our countrymen in the Curia, who rob our kingdom without any obvious justification, in many ways. It can be neither credible nor probable that these suspicious ecclesiastical leaders do not err in faith in this respect, because in the deed itself they err so notably against faith, hope and charity.93 Eighth, any faithful person can conclude from these points that just as Satan, by throwing in a single poisoned bone, intoxicates the clergy and the people and drives irascible members of society towards war and discord, so by presenting a lie from his treasury of fiction (which he uses in absolutions and indulgences), he tears the whole church apart.94 89 ‘Then Jesus answered, and said to them: Amen, amen, I say unto you, the Son cannot do anything of himself, but what he seeth the father doing: for what things soever he doth, these the Son also doth in like manner.’ 90 It is to the erection of the Christian crucifix that the term ‘crusade’ (Lat. cruciata from crux, cross) literally refers. Cf. 40. 91 Wyclif seems to retain a degree of affection for Urban VI here, which the desire to blame the friars seems to confirm. See Latin Writings, p. 274. 92 That is, the 1383 crusade in Flanders. 93 The three Pauline virtues, discussed in 1 Corinthians 13. 94 The reference to the poisoned bone is a culinary analogy, suggesting that the addition of even a small amount of poison is sufficient to affect all who consume the food.

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Its vicar does not know how to choose between what he should believe and hope. The faithful man should of course have hope that after the pain of his guilt he will be contrite, and after the minister’s absolution he will be absolved by the Lord. But neither the pope nor the sinner should believe that he will be absolved directly, just as he should not believe that he is among the predestinate or that he is foreknown to eternal damnation. Rather, he should have hope first and foremost, because unless a man hopes that he will be saved his anticipation of merit will perish, as will, in short, any of the viator’s virtues. The snare of the devil will spread in the whole of the sojourning church, freely causing sin. It seems that Satan suggests that God’s decision to ordain only a limited number of men as clergymen had to cease,95 and that the poisoned bone, which is the endowment of the clergy, should be defended under the pretext of absolution from punishment and guilt.96 Thus, in the same way as Satan tempted Christ in Matthew 4[:8–9], so he promises his vicar, mendaciously through feigned absolution, all the kingdoms of the world. It would be easy, indeed, to send lies to any kingdoms under the guise of faith and, with the opportunity this would create, to move his children to mendacious perfidy. If he were to excommunicate anyone obstructing him in that erection of the cross,97 his children could easily remove people and money from the kingdom of England, and thus to acquire any kingdoms from the possession of the world’s leaders by disguising lies as faith. Here ends the letter sent to the Bishop of Norwich concerning the crusade

The treasury of fiction identified here is an ironic allusion to the treasury of grace on which the church drew in dispensing indulgences. 95 Namely, clergymen who live in accordance with the principles of apostolic poverty. 96 Revenue from the sale of indulgences served as one of the principal means of financing the crusade in Flanders. 97 Again, when Wyclif is speaking of the erection of the cross, he is referring to a crusade.

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VI: WYCLIF   ’S POLITICAL THEORY

Wyclif ’s political theory was defined by a basic concept, a theory of lordship (dominio) that began in God’s perfect governance of the created world and ended in his creatures’ just lordship over each other. This relationship between the divine and the human is introduced in On Divine Lordship (34ii), Wyclif ’s first extended treatment of this topic, and he provides an extended analysis of lordship in the created world in its massive sequel, On Civil Lordship (35). He suggests there that civil lordship (such as that enjoyed by a monarch) presupposes natural lordship, which could exist only in a lord who was in receipt of God’s grace (35). The gift of grace, of course, was something of which its recipient could hardly be aware, but the likelihood of grace being bestowed upon a corrupt or unrighteous individual seemed less than negligible, which meant for Wyclif that neither popes nor ecclesiastics could wield authority with any certitude. Wyclif believed that the sinful nature of papal endowments effectively rendered the papacy ineligible to receive God’s grace, an idea that became prominent in his later writings. The duties of priest and king are carefully defined and their respective roles described in Wyclif ’s On the Office of the King. As Christ’s vicar, the priest had a duty to care for the religious community in his parish, whereas the king, as God’s vicar, had the authority to regulate and punish (36). The king’s office was superior to the priest’s or the pope’s in secular affairs, just as the priest’s was superior in affairs of the spirit, and Wyclif generally privileged the former over the latter in his writings (37i and 37ii); indeed, their lack of proper power in secular affairs effectively excluded church officials from any meaningful engagement with affairs of state. Wyclif is careful to point out in the sixth chapter of On the Office of the King that, of the two, the king’s office was superior (37i). The king was quite at liberty to exercise his authority over ecclesiastical administration, especially in relation to perceived errors of the church, but any such intervention had properly to relate to secular, rather than spiritual, affairs of the church. In practice, of course, the distinction between secular and spiritual was a difficult one to maintain with any degree of exactitude, as Wyclif ’s writing reveals.

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Wyclif was intervening in a debate that had been effectively settled by Pope Gregory VII (d. 1085) and his followers in a series of ecclesiastical reforms dating from the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Gregory had succeeded in establishing that ecclesiastical or papal power had supremacy over secular and regal power, but this was only a provisional solution to the problem. The debate erupted again with the Investiture Controversy (1076–1122), which emerged largely as a consequence of European monarchs participating in the ecclesiastical appointment of bishops (thus undermining the supremacy of ecclesiastical power established through the Gregorian Reform). The usual practice had been for monarchs to confer upon elected bishops the spiritual symbols of their office (a ring and a crozier). This practice was challenged through the Pactum Callixtinum, generally known as the Concordat of Worms, on 23 September 1122. This concordat, the first of its kind, was made between Pope Calixtus II and Henry V of Germany. It drew boundaries between secular and spiritual duties in a clearly defined way, insisting that spiritual investiture was the responsibility of the church alone. Lay investiture was from this time forward condemned as simony.1 Wyclif ’s understanding of the relationship between church and monarch clearly ran contrary to that of Gregory VII, and his position on the Investiture Controversy was subtly provocative Wyclif ’s detailed abstract characterisations of the respective roles of priest and king must certainly have informed his belief that taxes could be withheld from the papacy in times of particular need, which was made public when he and six others met with a papal delegation in Bruges.2 His position is made clear in the fable of the birds, related in On Civil Lordship (38). Taxation of the population by the papacy and the clergy was seen by Wyclif to lie behind the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. England’s Chancellor, Archbishop Simon Sudbury, was held responsible for the introduction of the poll tax in 1377. It was levied subsequently in 1379 and 1381, the year of the uprising. Though Wyclif felt that Sudbury’s murder was wholly unjustified and represented a heinous sin, it is clear from his account of the events that he felt that they could have been avoided (39). Quite apart from anything else, Wyclif felt that an archbishop should not have been placed in the service of the king, since his duties were properly of a religious nature.  1 On the Investiture Controversy see Uta-Renata Blumenthal, The Investiture Controversy: Church and Monarchy from the Ninth to the Twelfth Century, new edition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991).  2 The proceedings are undocumented, but Wyclif ’s advice to the government in respect of papal taxation is recorded in FZ, pp. 258–71.

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The appointment of his old enemy William Courtenay as Sudbury’s successor cannot have been good news for Wyclif. As Bishop of London he had worked to suppress the development and circulation of Wyclif ’s ideas (most notably by joining with Sudbury to summon him to St Paul’s), but as Archbishop of Canterbury his campaign gained momentum, culminating in the Blackfriars Council of 1382, at which ­twenty-four of Wyclif ’s conclusions were condemned (46).

34 Lordship: divine and human i) On Divine Lordship, book 1, ch. 1. Latin text: Iohannis Wycliffe De Dominio Divino Libri Tres, ed. R.L. Poole (London: Trübner and Co., 1890), pp. 2–8. The topic of dominium or lordship occupied Wyclif for many years. His first substantial treatise on the topic, On Divine Lordship, was probably begun in 1373 but was seemingly never fully completed, surviving incomplete in all eight of its extant manuscripts.3 This lengthy treatise probably constitutes the inaugural volume of his Summa Theologiae, representing, in spite of its imperfections, perhaps his most ambitious and theologically nuanced work to date. In the extracts included here, Wyclif considers the nature of lordship as a logical and a political entity (34i), before examining its exclusive relationship to God and to humans (34ii). He draws a fundamental distinction here between positive lordship, such as lordship over subjects in a kingdom, and privative lordship, which sin and death exert over their subjects. As he is careful to indicate, sin may itself be subjected to dominion, just as for those baptised in the name of Christ, death necessarily entails resurrection. Wyclif ultimately defines lordship as a habit and a relation of a rational nature. Later in the document he defines service in a corresponding way. He is careful to stress here in the first extract that freedom of use (licentia usu¯s) need not necessarily coincide with lordship. Freedom of use, also popularly known as poor use (usus pauper), was introduced by the Spiritual Franciscans under the influence of Peter John Olivi, who argued that the Franciscan vow of poverty reduced ownership and use of goods to a shared activity in which only the just participated. Though it shared identical premises to Wyclif ’s conception of lordship, just ownership and use was clearly not the same as just lordship.4 Wyclif ’s more distinctive analysis of lordship as a metaphysical relationship shared by God, his angels and human beings is introduced in the third chapter of this treatise, and is discussed in the preamble to 32ii.  3 Latin Writings, pp. 39–40.   4 For a simple definition of usus pauper and an explanation of its development, see David Burr, ‘The Correctorium Controversy and the Origins of the Usus Pauper Controversy’, Speculum, 60:2 (1985), 331–42.

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… Philosophers say that anything that causes or brings its patient into a state of subjection must be said to have lordship over that patient. Indeed, natural philosophers suggest that any physical agent is in a relation of lordship to its patient. And according to the words of our saviour, sin has lordship over its subject: ‘Whosoever commiteth sin’, he says, ‘is a servant of sin’ (John 8[:34]). In the opposite sense, a man may have relative lordship over sin, as is evident from Psalm 118[:33]: ‘Let no iniquity have lordship over me’. But contrary laws apply in respect of a privative dominator, on the one hand, and a positive dominator, on the other. An agent that dominates privatively, such as death or sin, is effected and conserved continuously by its servant, and therefore any kind of privative lordship is unnatural. By contrast, a positive dominator continuously conserves or governs its servant, or, at least, governs anything positive that the servant has, as will become evident later. Privation has the character of a dominator, though, because it subjects the inner man to what must be suffered by way of punishment, as the apostle affirms in the sixth chapter of his Epistle to the Romans: ‘Our old man’, he says, ‘is crucified with him, so that the body of sin may be destroyed, to the end that we may serve sin no longer’ (6[:6]). And he concludes, ‘Let no sin therefore reign in your mortal body’ (6[:12]) and, after a few words, ‘for sin shall not have dominion over you’ (6[:14]). But such negatives would not be pertinent unless sin could not only itself be dominated but also reign over the sinner. Sin subjects a person to servitude most atrociously, and leads him like its captive into sin against his deliberative will, as the apostle suggests in the seventh chapter of his Epistle to the Romans, and finally into perpetual imprisonment. Nevertheless, it never gives anyone occasion to do anything except suffer as he must. It is therefore said to exercise dominion tyrannically, improperly and equivocally. Death, however, which seems natural, does not in itself have any obvious association with the punishment of guilt, although guilt implicitly precedes it in any instance. Indeed, Christ suffered a single death and would die no further, and that should signify that our own twofold death will be enough and that we should not fall further into death of the soul.5 Hence, just as he was washed with the water of tribulation or of suffering up until the point of his death, and was later resurrected in glory, not further to be on the point of death, so ‘all we who are   5 Christ died without sin and therefore died only in the body, and not in the soul. Such a death is not possible in the post-lapsarian world, but through Christ both body and soul may enjoy resurrection.

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baptized in Jesus Christ are baptized in his death’ (Romans 6[:3]), to be resurrected into the newness of spiritual life, not further to sin, as the apostle says in his Epistle to the Romans. And this is one of the reasons why baptism, but not the death of Christ, is repeatable. Such figures should be observed by us effectually as viators, and as people seeing visibly the good things of heaven, for we may see more clearly and more properly than the fathers of the Old Testament. There emerges a way of speaking, therefore, that is founded upon privative lordship. ‘Christ’, says the apostle, ‘rising again from the dead, dieth now no more; death shall no more have lordship over him’ (Romans 6[:9]). Correspondingly, those who died in Christ are to be resurrected into eternal life, as is demonstrated in 1 Corinthians 15. Hence, after he has said that ‘the enemy death shall be destroyed last’, he taunts death at the Day of Judgement with these words: ‘O death, where is thy victory? O death, where is thy sting?’ (1 Corinthians 15[:55]) And that, in the opinion of the theologian, is the proper meaning of this statement according to scriptural signification. For in his Epistle to the Romans the apostle writes, ‘Know you not, that to whom you yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants you are?’ (6[:16]). And he therefore calls ‘servants of righteousness’ or ‘servants of sin’ all of those who actively serve one or other of these, and he calls sinners who free themselves from actively serving righteousness ‘free of righteousness’. And in a corresponding sense, he calls the just man ‘free of sin’, since such a person has no obligation to sin, but nevertheless would have been able to act as its servant. In a stricter sense, however, and more pertinently as far as the political mind is concerned, he who leads his subject, and is his lord, is called a rational nature. Lordship, therefore, can be described in the following way: lordship is a habit of a rational nature according to which it is said to have mastery over its servant. First, in respect of the genus of lordship, it can be seen that it is a relation, and consequently a habit: for a lord and his servant (as suggested in the Categories and the fifth book of the Metaphysics) are so-called regardless of the context, and in consequence, that by which they are formally identified as such is a relation. And because only a being with a rational nature (such as God, an angel and a person) is able to exercise lordship in the given sense, it follows that lordship thus understood refers pre-eminently to the free acts of rulers, and is not used of anything inferior to a rational nature. Hence, the Latin word for lord, dominus, takes its name from domus, the word for a house, for it is the duty of a lord to govern his house, just as God governs created things (of which it is said, in Baruch 3[:24], ‘O Israel,

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how great is the house of God’). Alternatively, as others suggest, domus is derived etymologically from do (I give) and minas (coins).6 In either case, it seems that the term properly pertains to a rational nature, as in the case also of the verbs give, bestow, buy, sell, and words that refer to other free acts of lordship. Therefore it does not follow that non-­ rational beings, in their use of things and foodstuffs, have lordship over those things. And the text of the first chapter of Genesis, in which God speaks to our earliest ancestors, seems to show this to us: [And God said,] ‘I have given you every herb bearing seed upon the earth, and all trees that have in themselves seed of their own kind, to be your meat: And to all beasts of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to all that move upon the earth, and wherein there is life, that they may have to feed upon’. (1[:29–30])

Note here that God is saying, ‘I have given you the beasts and things born of the earth’, and not, ‘I have given such things to the living things of the earth’. This is to show that man and not the beasts has lordship over such things, as is clear from the phrase, ‘gift of God’. And this is made manifest in the first chapter of Genesis: ‘Let us make man to our image and likeness: and let him have lordship over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air’, etc. Notice first that man is constituted as the image and likeness of God, according to which he has the capacity for lordship. And second, the dominative supremacy of mankind over his sublunary inferiors is very obvious. Third, there is a clear denial of dominative supremacy in natures inferior to mankind in Scripture, and this denial would not be made if such natures had lordship. Therefore, not all freedom of use is lordship.7 Moreover, I use the phrase according to above to connote the circumstances of the formal cause, and supremacy to describe the order of superiority that attaches to the accidental quality associated with lordship. In the third place I use servant neutrally, to signify someone doing what they must for their superior. And this is the whole picture. For any creature necessarily serves God continuously. Hence, we sing to him thus in church: ‘They serve you   6 This second etymology is incorrect, though the first, in which dominus is said to derive from domus, is entirely accurate.   7 Freedom of use was related to the notion of usus pauper, poor use, in which things were understood to be used without being owned (without being subject to any kind of lordship). The latter principle was devised by Peter John Olivi and was associated principally with the Spiritual Franciscans. See Willem Marie Speelman, ‘The Franciscan usus pauper as the Gateway towards an Aesthetic Economy’, Franciscan Studies, 74 (2016), 185–205.

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all, whom you have created’.8 This is because in Esther 13[:11], ‘Thou art Lord of all’, in so far as it would be contradictory for any creature to exist by means of the force of divine lordship unless that creature were subservient to it, either by suffering as he ought, as in the case of the sinner, or by doing what he should, as in the case of other creatures, each in his own degree. And hence, in Latin the word servant takes the masculine gender not because such a servant is equal to his lord, for any creature that is the servant of another, whether of the feminine or of the neuter sex, is called a servant of God in the masculine because that person is a servant brought into being by God, and is therefore said to be a servant relative to his lord. And we do not construe the verb to serve as narrowly as do those who speak childishly about political affairs. Whenever one serves by working, resting or serving in whatever other circumstance he or she might find themselves in, he or she does what is required of them, and serves a particular lord. And therefore, the second question, concerning the quiddity of lordship, is answered. Now, we should not here be troubled by the opinions of those who seek to prove that there is no absolute category of lordship, since nobody can do this. Nor should we even entertain the laboured reasoning of slick logicians in relation to this question. We should not believe either that such lordship can be understood as a thing in itself, or even that it can actually be a an entity in itself, since lordship is a truth that is expressible through the following complex construction: a rational nature has lordship over that which serves it. I know, nevertheless, that lordship is sometimes construed formally, as is clear from the description of lordship provided above, and sometimes causally or materially, through the subject, foundation or term to which it is formally lordship, as when the common man calls a thing he possesses his lordship, saying that the his estates and other possessions are the lordship of their owner. But our intention is to speak of lordship as formally understood, and through this same distinction the arguments of those who speak about the quiddity of lordship are eliminated. Now, those who speak of lordship generally assume that it is one of four things, namely, a relation, a subject that has lordship, a law by which lordship is established, or something that is possessed. And although they may not say quite the same things, those who think in accordance with sound principles are at least conceptually at one with each other.   8 This is an extract from a medieval hymn sung at the feast of the Holy Trinity, ‘O Holy Father, gentle and good’ (‘O Pater sancte, mitis atque pie’), the earliest ­manuscript copy of which survives from the eleventh century.

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And from these points we can arrive at a description of service, which corresponds to lordship by reciprocal opposition (according to Porphyry), and we must therefore consider the one part of this opposition when we speak of the other. Service is the habit of a creature according to which it is said to be formally subjected to that which has lordship over it. We may therefore distinguish between service and servitude, and thus a servant and a slave. The term slave is restricted to a servant who is coactively bound to his lord. And the apostle uses the term in this way in 1 Corinthians 7[:21]: ‘Are you called a slave? Care not for it.’ And servitude is a condition of violence, which bears the mark of sin, whereas service is not, since it is proper to Christ and the blessed. If a servant were thus contracted into servitude, he would not be opposed in reciprocal terms to his lord, but would be used like a common slave. And likewise poverty, which describes the lack of material wealth of good people, is not reciprocally but privatively opposed to temporal lordship. Hence, in order to indicate that servitude is the condition of sinners, Noah first made use of the word servant [to denote a slave] in Genesis 9:25, after the act of irreverence shown to him by Cham:9 ‘Cursed be Canaan’, reads scripture, ‘he will be servant of servants to his brethren’. And Augustine makes note of this in book 19 of the City of God, chapter 15, with the following words: God did not want a rational spirit that was made in his image to have lordship over anything but irrational beings; not man over man but man over beasts. The first just people were therefore stationed as shepherds of beasts rather than kings of men, and thus God made known what the order of creation postulated and what sinners deserved. The condition of servitude is therefore understood to have been imposed on the sinner. We therefore never read the word servant before Noah punished his son’s sin with this word.10

I know nevertheless that servant in scripture is more often used to denote a minister, as is clear from the apostles’ letters, which were written after they had become freer from sin. In this way, Christ and the saints of heaven became servants of God in a stronger way, as becomes clear later. A servant thus named is therefore what I will identify as a servant by ministry; the other kind is a servant by servitude, such as the devil and his servants, who are servants to the greatest   9 Cham is the Vulgate and Douay-Rheims rendering of this name. Ham is used in the King James Version. 10 CCSL 48, p. 682; The City of God: Books 11–22, trans. William Babcock (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2013), p. 372.

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degree. And the lordship that corresponds to the voluntary ministering for the edification of the mystical body of Christ I call charitable or vicarious lordship. And ecclesiastics have this to a greater degree, just as they have service to a greater degree the more perfect they are in this act of ministry. The other kind of lordship is coactive lordship which, to the extent that it accords with its earliest use, is forbidden to ecclesiastics, as will be explained in more detail later. And it is clear that a rational creature would not be satisfied unless he were both free and a servant in respect of different habits and in different ways. If he is a rational creature he must at the very least serve God, and as a rational creature he must also have free will; and hence, he would be free to minister in respect of an intrinsic act. And this is so in that if he is a rational nature then he is volitional, and since nothing can force the will it is clear that it is free because of volitional potential. And this is confirmed by a statement of Augustine, mentioned above: for, if any creature is a rational creature, he is just or unjust. If he is just, then he serves righteousness and is free of sin; if he is unjust, then he is free of righteousness and serves sin. But it must not be held to be possible that the sinner is exempt from this law, so that in not suffering he serves justice. To whatever degree he attains freedom from servitude, he retains no bond with righteousness and therefore cannot be an active servant of righteousness. But that will be mentioned later in this tract. ii) On Divine Lordship, book 1, ch. 3 (extract). Latin text: Iohannis Wycliffe De Dominio Divino Libri Tres, ed. R.L. Poole (London: Trübner and Co., 1890), pp. 15–16. Here  Wyclif proposes to consider the divisions of lordship among rational entities. He argues that lordship finds its origin and its perfection in God, such that lordship of his rational creatures necessarily presupposes it and participates within it. The latter, as Wyclif explains in On Civil Lordship, is necessarily conditional on God’s grace. The relationship between the different kinds of lordship that Wyclif lists here, then, is a transitive one: any creature that has lordship over anyone or anything presupposes God’s own lordship over that creature.

In the light of what I have said, I now wish to explain the divisions of lordship. Since lordship takes its existence, and consequently its species and differentiating qualities, from its subject, its foundation, and its object, it seems that it must itself be divided into species and other subjective parts in accordance with these three. Hence, since

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there are three kinds of rational nature, it seems that there are three corresponding kinds of lordship: one is lordship of divine natures, one of angels, and the other of humans. This latter kind of lordship alone is held to be capably of inhering subjectively. Again, species of lordship vary according to their foundations, especially in humans: just as one is a natural right, another an evangelical one, and the last a human one, so correspondingly one is natural lordship, another evangelical (as lordship is charitable or vicarious when lordship is taken from another in the name of Christ), and the last, coactive or political, as I have mentioned before, which varies according to the laws and rights of those who act as its foundations. Now, it varies by virtue of its object and its subject: one kind of political lordship pertains to the individual, another to a city, and the last to a state. Individual lordship pertains to a house or a family, civil lordship to a community greater than a family, and regal lordship to a kingdom or an empire. Aristotle, therefore, divides lordship according to these principles in the third chapter of first book of the Politics, and on the basis of these divisions postulates yet further ones. Since divine lordship is the pre-eminent form of lordship, being the measure, origin, and most basic foundation of all others, the natural order demands from it what it principally needs. Now, because divine lordship itself, although distinguished in many ways in accordance with its vast multitude of servants, is not itself distinguished according to subject and foundation (since every right that God possesses is really God himself), no further communion is required for its completion beyond what is governed and this kind of lordship itself, since nothing is governable unless God is lord by virtue of it. From this it follows that God’s lordship is the standard, being prior to and presupposed by all others: if any creature has lordship over anything, God has prior lordship over that same creature. It therefore follows that the lordship of any creature entails divine lordship, but not vice versa. How, then, could a creature have lordship unless that creature were created a servant? If that creature has lordship over another, God first has lordship over each of them.

35 The nature of civil lordship On Civil Lordship, book 1, ch. 1. Latin text: De Civili Dominio, vol. i, pp. 1–8; cf. The Cambridge Translations of Medieval Philosophical Texts, Volume 2: Ethics and Political Philosophy,

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ed. Arthur Stephen McGrade, John Kilcullen and Matthew Kempshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 591–610. In the first chapter of his massive On Civil Lordship, Wyclif enters forcefully into the province of political debate with a robust exposition of his theory of lordship by grace. Though he had taken great pains to stress the metaphysical dependency of human lordship on the divine in On Divine Lordship, the subtleties of metaphysics soon became forgotten amid the political unrest following the publication of On Civil Dominion. Its exclusion of sinners from the realms of civil lordship naturally proved contentious from the outset. His careful circumscription of the exercise of civil power had implications not simply for lordship itself but also for the ownership and use of goods and property. Wyclif regarded many of the most egregious sinners of his time, of course, as the very people who occupied the most senior positions in the church. Divine law is presupposed by civil law Natural lordship is presupposed by civil lordship

In discussing the civil lordship of man, which is superadded to his natural lordship, we should initially see whether civil lordship presupposes natural lordship founded on grace, just as civil authority presupposes divine authority as its essential exemplary cause. I therefore propose to illustrate two truths, which I use as guiding principles for what I will explain: the first is that nobody in a state of mortal sin has righteousness as a gift of God, and the second, that anyone living in a state of grace finally has this gratifying privilege in abundance, but in reality has all of God’s gifts.11 But lest my explanation should be obscured at the outset by equivocation or ignorance of terms, I make the assumption that no one may be said to have the simple right to anything good unless he holds or possesses it in an entirely righteous way. It therefore seems by that same principle that if someone takes possession of something un-righteously for any length of time, he does not have that thing in a purely righteous way. With this established, I shall proceed logically through three of its consequences with their justifications, to prove the question presented above. First, thus: every human law causally presupposes a divine law, as is evident from things that were said earlier, in the third chapter of the first tract.12 Therefore, every instance of righteous lordship in respect of men presupposes righteous lordship in respect of God. Anyone 11 The gratifying privilege is what is accorded to the righteous at the point of death, as a reward for their many years of righteous living. It would be regarded by Wyclif as entry into the kingdom of heaven, and hence the church triumphant. 12 This is a reference to the third chapter of On the Divine Commandments (the first tract of the Summa Theologiae). See 34ii, above.

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living in a state of mortal sin thus lacks righteous lordship in respect of God, and therefore lacks righteous lordship in simple terms. Now, just as in relatives a consequence that pertains in respect of a given thing also applies in simple terms, so something is simply righteous if it is righteous in respect of God, since this first principle cannot fail. But a sinner truly lacks lordship in respect of God, since anyone living in a state of mortal sin lacks lordship in respect of God in this way. And this may be demonstrated thus: such a person possesses unrighteously every good thing that he has, and therefore he lacks the lordship of anyone who would be eligible to possess it. The antecedent is proved thus: the sinner has possession of anything only according to the way in which he lives, but in whatever way he lives he is unrighteous, and therefore in whatever way he possesses something he possesses it unrighteously. The major premise is known from the fact that mortal sin, since it poisons nature, much more evidently poisons every aspect or accident of the same nature. Hence, if a man’s life is unrighteous so that he lives unrighteously, then each of his actions is unrighteous, since he cannot act other than in the way in which he lives. And since living is being for those who live (according to the second book of Aristotle’s On the Soul),13 it seems that when a man exists and lives unrighteously, he is also a lord unrighteously, and is unrighteously subject to any accident. If this argument should seem like sophistry to many, it should represent complete authority for any metaphysician, since it is a conclusion of the foremost philosopher: in Matthew 6[:22– 3], [Christ] says, ‘If thy eye be single, thy whole body shall be lightsome. But if thy eye be evil thy whole body shall be darksome.’14 The saints know that Truth understands these organs to signify the things they elicit, so that this is the meaning: if the intention is righteous, the whole multitude of works that are consequent upon it will be just; and if the intention diverges from righteousness, the whole multitude of its works, even good ones, is generically unrighteous. Now, righteousness, according to Aristotle in the fifth book of the Nicomachean Ethics, is the most radiant of the virtues, shining out among the others like Hesperus among the heavenly bodies.15 And Christ seems to allude to this sense when he calls the whole multitude of just works lightsome and the whole multitude of unjust works darksome. Now, if it should be inferred from this that the sinner has a body and a soul unjustly, or 13 On the Soul, 415b8. 14 These words form part of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7). 15 Nicomachean Ethics 1129b1.

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physical organs or anything else naturally good, it seems that this is well concluded. It is clear, therefore, that a person unjustly has a soul, and thus a life, if such a person lives unrighteously. Otherwise, truth, which cannot lie, would not so frequently say that ‘he who loves his life’ by seeking to love voluptuously against righteousness, ‘kills it’, as is said in John 12[:25]. Nobody loses what he has unless his righteousness is wanting. Therefore, etc. And among other things, Augustine, in his first homily on John, suggests that ‘sin is nothing, and when they sin, men become nothing’.16 Nobody who mortally sins has then either a body or a soul, nor does he have good fortune, except in an equivocal sense; for since he exists by virtue of pure grace, through which existence he is compelled by the law of nature to continue in grace, when he squanders the rule of righteousness he does not remain a creature, nor does he possess anything, except in an equivocal sense. Second, someone might argue thus, principally: if an unrighteous person could have lordship over properties in a wholly righteous way, then an unrighteous person could similarly use properties over which he had wholly righteous lordship in a purely righteous way. The consequence of this would be that nobody to whom usufruct could rightly be denied would have free and pure righteous lordship.17 Any righteous owner is therefore permitted to use his properties in a legitimate way. But against the given consequence some argue thus: if the unrighteous Peter, having taken possession of worldly goods, were to draw on them in giving alms to the needy in any circumstance you might wish, he would nevertheless himself remain continuously unrighteous. Now, it is clear that if an unrighteous person’s use of his worldly possessions were not unrighteous, this would most strongly be the case, especially if the work were of a good nature, which nothing would corrupt except his own unrighteousness. Distributing alms in mortal sin, however, he would nevertheless distribute them unrighteously, as would be the case in respect of any other good act he might carry out. If this is accepted, however, then Peter would corrupt any other good work because unrighteousness would be committed in any such act of giving, even whilst the action itself was good. It may therefore be concluded

16 This is the thirteenth chapter of the first homily. See In Iohannis Evangelium Tractatus, ed. R. Willems, CCSL 36 (1954), p. 7. Cf. Homilies on the Gospel of John, 1–40, trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2009), pp. 48–9. 17 Usufruct: the right to own and make use of a building or buildings belonging to another for a period of time, especially when associated with a particular office (such as that of king, bishop or pope).

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that the unrighteous Peter does not give alms in an unrighteous way, but purely and righteously. Against this, it might be said that no external work is naturally righteous unless it proceeds from the virtue of righteousness, but this virtue is lacking from Peter’s distribution of alms because he is repugnantly unrighteousness, so it is not righteous in any simple sense. Indeed, since righteousness encompasses every virtue (according to the fifth [book] of the [Nicomachean] Ethics), any righteous distribution of alms by Peter is also a virtuous one, and he is consequently a virtuous worker who works pleasingly and meritoriously in relation to God.18 This consequence, however, goes against every pronouncement of the philosophers and theologians, who say that he carries out work that is generically good whilst living in mortal sin, but not well. Similarly, God requires of him, as of any viator, that he should not work unless in a state of grace. But he carries out this deed without grace, since he is in mortal sin; therefore, he works in a way other than he should. And that otherness of his manner of working does not demand that he work differently under just any penalty, but under the penalty of deadly sin. It emerges from this that if Peter is unrighteous, whatever he has done, whether sleeping or eating or doing good work, he continues to sin mortally. And no theologian who knows how the inner man, when infected with sin, infects the whole of the rest of his corporeal nature and his individual acts, would question this. But whoever is unrighteous in his life, is unrighteous in his lordship over anything. If you seek scriptural testimony for this principle, look at the conclusion of the apostle’s conversion in 1 Corinthians 13[:3]: ‘[I]f I should distribute all my goods to feed the poor, and if I should deliver my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.’ And everyone with a knowledge of terms knows that unrighteousness and charity are exact opposites, so that should one inhere in a man alongside the other, then the first would cease to inhere, and vice versa. And again, we note that if it is impossible for an unrighteous man to use anything without using it unrighteously (or rather, abusing it), it is likewise impossible for the unrighteous man to have lordship over anyone unless he has lordship unrighteously (or rather, commits tyranny), since he unrighteously obtains by force and takes possession of foreign territories. But if you seek the testimony of the holy doctors, look at the words of the great 18 Nicomachean Ethics 1129b1: ‘in justice is every excellence comprehended’.

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Augustine in epistle 37 to Macedonius, on tyrants, which clearly teach this principle: Therefore, if we have read what is written carefully, ‘the whole world is full of riches to the faithful man, but to the unfaithful there is not a penny’ (Proverbs 17[:6]). Are we not found guilty of possessing foreign things, as all people who seem to delight lawfully in those things they sought to own, but know not how to use them? For what is lawfully possessed is certainly not foreign, and that which is owned lawfully is owned rightly, and what is held rightly is held well. All that is possessed wrongly, therefore, is foreign: but he possesses it wrongly who uses it wrongly. Nobody has righteousness wrongly, and he who does not prize it does not have it. Wealth that accrues from wicked things is held wrongly, and wealth that accumulates from good things is held better the less it is loved.19

Thus argues Augustine. I make my third point to the same end: the civil lordships of men who have lordship over worldly goods are many, but in respect of such lordship we cannot assume that a man worthy of exercising lordship and a subject worthy of being thus governed exist at the same time. The foundations of lordship must therefore be posited separately in respect of each of these, but nothing is more pertinent to this than the righteousness of the one who has lordship. In respect of civil lordship, we must therefore presuppose a disposition of virtue through righteousness in anyone who has lordship in this way. From this, the minor premise emerges: every man, by virtue of his existence, would in that case have civil lordship at all times of the world. Now, it is evident that lordship is not a relation that accompanies particular categories essentially, as equality and inequality accompany quantities, as is seen in the second chapter of the fifth book of the Metaphysics.20 No creature is therefore intrinsically the lord of anything, because then he would not be able to acquire or lose lordship as an accident. It clearly follows, then, that beyond particular categories we should posit a mediating disposition in any lord that pertains to civil lordship. But all who speak correctly acknowledge this, saying together that every such lord should have the right to the thing that he has civil lordship over, as by 19 Epistle 153, CSEL 44, p. 426; Letters, vol. 2, trans. Roland Teske, S.J. (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2003), p. 404. 20 Metaphysics V.15, 1021b6–8. A relation or relative term in Aristotle is something that accompanies (or pertains to) another thing. In the example given here, quality and inequality are said to accompany quantities (as relatives), in that any quantity is necessarily equal or unequal to another quantity. Lordship does not behave in this way; it need not necessarily accompany any creature (and hence, any category).

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hereditary right, by right of purchase or by right of donation, and that no right is created except by extraction from the first law (as is clear from general discussions concerning rights).21 But it clearly follows that nobody has a right or lordship over anything unless he has the good will of his God in respect of this. And this is confirmed thus: every created right is a right because it is pleasing to God, since it cannot be such a right if it does not proceed from his good will. Similarly, either a judge will have decreed or a law will have legitimated the lordship of an individual according to any of the three causes mentioned above, which makes it thus, because it is right and reasonable for it to be so. Consequently, it is more naturally right for a man to have lordship than for a created law or a judge to unerringly approve it, and consequently, the principal title of righteousness of any civil lordship comes from God. No orthodox Christian would doubt this, since by virtue of his omnipotence and the efficacy of his volition our great Lord has whatever he wants within his kingdom, and has nothing that he does not want. And the Lord should evidently give his authorisation, ratification and confirmation to every righteous civil occupation, since nothing he does not authorise is righteous. We should not be troubled by this, since it is said that all things exist through him in John 1[:3], Colossians 1[:16] and James 1[:17], in conformity with the philosophers.22 If a creature has lordship, therefore, it exists in origin through the approval of God himself. And the law of terrestrial monarchy is extracted from that greatest rule of nature’s law, for it is not legitimate for an inferior lord to remove an immovable possession, especially one held in mortmain, without the permission of the chief lord. This is because in all those things that lord [alone] has the right to escheat, and exchange of anything between men without his consent is obviously unrighteous. It is also clear that men who have exchanged a lord’s goods by emendation, sale, donation or judgement have performed an unrighteous exchange, unless he has agreed to this. It is thus proved, therefore, that God does not give his approval to anyone unrighteous having lordship, as

21 That is, God’s law. 22 ‘All things were made by him: and without him was made nothing that was made’ (John 1:3); ‘For in him were all things created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones, or dominations, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him and in him’ (Colossians 1:16); ‘Every best gift, and every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no change, nor shadow of alteration’ (James 1:17).

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is known in respect of the unrighteous Peter.23 On the other hand, if God were to approve of that lordship, he would give his approval to its use, and to all those things that pertain to it in the same way; and since every such person abuses the goods of the Lord (as is shown in the second argument), it follows that he would give his approval to this abuse. Indeed, since any deed of such an unrighteous person is a sin, it follows that God would be the author and sanctioner of this sin not only in respect of secondary being, but also in respect of primary being.24 For if God wanted that man to have lordship, and he had lordship only through tyranny, it would follow that God wished him to tyrannise and, consequently, to sin, which is blasphemous to say! And this may be confirmed through Scripture, for in Hosea 8[:4] God speaks prophetically of tyrants: ‘They have reigned, but not by me’. But tyrants is used equivocally of people who reign in pretence, as I stated, in my discussion of simple rights and rights through pretence in chapter 3, above.25 And we know that since the unrighteous may not have lordship from God, they do not then have lordship in simple terms.

36 The role of the king On the Office of the King, ch. 1 (extract). Latin text: Iohannis Wyclif Tractatus De Officio Regis, ed. Alfred Pollard and Charles Sayle (London: WS, 1887), pp. 1–14. Wyclif here suggests that regal and sacerdotal powers should work in complementary ways, given the respective responsibilities of king and priest, though it soon becomes obvious that the king’s right to manage ecclesiastical land, buildings and property, as well as to rein in excesses of any kind, places him in a more powerful position on a practical level. As elsewhere in Wyclif ’s writing, the monarch is likened to God and the priest to Christ: in worldly honour, Wyclif proclaims, the king should surpass all others. His sovereignty in secular affairs gives him supremacy across the realm, both in political affairs and in government of the nation and churches across the land.

23 The reference is to Peter’s repeated denial of having any acquaintance with Christ (Mark 14:66–72). 24 The distinction between primary and secondary being corresponds to that between divine being and the being of creatures. Thus, if a creature who enjoys lordship were to sin, God’s authorship of that sin would extend, it is suggested here, not just to the being of the sinner but also to his own being. 25 This is seemingly a reference to Wyclif ’s earlier treatise On the Divine Commandments, in which he discusses this distinction. See De Mandatis Divinis, p. 18.

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After the clerical order, it remains for us to consider the military order, because we argue in our discussion of the privileges of the church that a man is bound by law to be subject to his king to an equivalent or even greater degree than a monk is bound to be subject to an abbot.26 But this also enhances our understanding of the Scriptures, and our observation of the Christian religion. In accordance with my earlier declaration, I should now describe the office of the king in accordance with the doctrine of scripture and the testimony of the holy doctors, and according to this harmony regal power and sacerdotal power are consistent with each other. Indeed, these powers are understood as a closely knit cloak which our wool-working mother makes for herself, as I have mentioned above in the second chapter.27 We should therefore assume in particular that the power of kings and armies is authorised by the doctrine of Scripture, and is approved in multiple ways by the testimony of the holy doctors. The head of the church personally gave a double drachma to Caesar in Matthew 17[:23–5], and ordered those things that were his to be returned to him in Matthew 22[:18–21]. Thus, he wished to be adored by the three kings in his early days in Matthew 2[:1–11], and to be buried by the military order in Matthew 27[:57–60]. Indeed, the prince of the apostles teaches his converts how they should maintain obedience and patience among people in 1 Peter 2[:13]. ‘Be ye subject’, he says, ‘to every human creature for God’s sake’. He does not say this in a worldly sense or because of the prospect of financial reward, and afterwards, explaining the order of subjection across the community of the human species, he adds: ‘whether it be to the king as excelling; Or to governors as sent by him for the punishment of evildoers, and for the praise of the good’ (1 Peter 2[:13–14]). Nor should we listen to those fools who suppose that the adverb of similitude suggests apparent and not real excellence, because then the vicar of Christ would be teaching, by the rule of religion, how Christians are subjected to men according to a false, fantastic and fallacious reason.28 But in the first chapter of the 26 This reference to Wyclif’s study of the clerical order is to the preceding treatise in the Summa Theologiae, On the Church. For his comparison between a monk’s obligations to his abbot and those of a man to his king, see also De Ecclesia, p. 146. 27 Again, the reference here is probably to On the Church, but it is difficult to trace. The metaphor of the wool-working woman (matrona lanifica) is not used in that text until chapter 20. See De Ecclesia, p. 482. The metaphor itself is an ancient one. Such a matriarch was idealised in late antiquity, and had charge not merely of the household (familia) but also of slaves. See Kyles Harper, Slavery in the Late Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 133. Here in On the Office of the King, she is clearly understood as embodying the Christian household of the universal church. 28 The adverb of similitude he identifies here is as (translating the Latin quasi).

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Book of Wisdom it is said that ‘the Holy Spirit of discipline will flee from the deceitful’ (1[:5]). It would therefore be blasphemy to believe that the Holy Spirit made such a duplicitous fiction at the beginning of his rule. Again, the evidence is consistent in the second part of the rule, in which it is said, ‘or to governors as sent by him’ (1 Peter 2[:14]), where the adverb as would connote not a true reason for subjection but a false duplicity of compulsion. Since, nevertheless, it is noted from the content of this text, with the help of reason, that he intended that Christians should be subjected to kings, to the governors and ministers of kings, not only by virtue of their own dignity, but because the [governors] who were sent assume royal power, the syncategorematic term as sometimes conveys a sense of remote similitude or appearance in Scripture, and sometimes that of a real thing, according to which the modified sense should truly be dispensed with. An example of the first is Job [14:2]: ‘A man cometh forth as a flower, and is destroyed’. And in Psalm 2[:9]: ‘thou shalt break them in pieces like a potter’s vessel’. And often elsewhere in scripture [they are found] where there is a mystical sense. The two adverbs here connote close or remote similitude, as is appropriate for the expressed meaning. An example of the second is that of John 1[:14]: ‘and we saw his glory, the glory as it were of the only begotten of the Father’. This is the glory which the apostles perceived in Christ. For he had the true quality of the natural son of God, for other adoptive sons of God [had] this glory, both properly[ and in their native land, but according to an infinitely inferior and different reason. And Psalm 18[:6] is to be understood in this way: ‘And he as a bridegroom coming out of his bride-chamber’. Indeed, he had the truth and the most necessary quality of the bridegroom of the church. Not that he was not, before his emergence from the womb of the Virgin, the head of the church, since he was this eternally before [his emergence], by virtue of his deity, and temporally by virtue of his humanity. For this reason he had the nature of a bridegroom coming out of his bride-chamber, since the body of the Virgin was the single house which Christ inhabited according to the intermediate plenitude of grace, by which, as it is believed, the wife could not have had a better [husband]. Just as Christ had a plenitude of the grace of union than which there could be none greater in human nature, so his mother had a plenitude of the grace of spiritual knowledge than which there could be none greater in the female sex. But Stephen had a plenitude of the grace of predestination, as is clear from John 1, Luke 1 and Acts 6. The first grace is said to have plenitude in the highest degree, according to its pre-eminence; the second is said to have plenitude in a comparative

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degree, according to its superabundance. But the third grace is said to have plenitude in a positive degree, according to its sufficiency. This degree of grace, although it belonged to all the predestined in a certain way, shone out in Stephen according to the privilege of charity. Over and above this, it should thus be noted that all of these three degrees of grace belong to the predestined alone, and from the first instant of a subject’s generation they remain continuously until the state of blessedness. And so, any such grace exists continuously, and it is impossible for a greater grace to belong to a subject than that. Moreover, just as it finally achieves its ultimate capacity in the Father, so it continuously forms a society or disposition as it is acquired here, in this life. But Christ was clearly a man according to the first grace, and a perfect man from the first moment of his conception. Indeed, Mary, long after the conception in the union of soul and body, received him as a man. But each saint came out of the womb, whereas Christ came out as an inhabitant of the whole Church. To return to the topic, it is clear that the apostle’s sense means to proclaim that a king should surpass all others in worldly honour. He therefore adds as a second point in that same chapter, ‘Honour all men, love the brotherhood, fear God, honour the king’ (1 Peter 2[:17]). Here, we are enjoined to be charitable towards individuals: ‘Honour all men’. Since every man is of two natures, of which the first is made ‘to the image and likeness of God’ (Genesis 1[:26]), it is no wonder that every man should honour any other man in his body, but also in respect of his soul. Second, we are instructed to show a relation of humility to our nearest: ‘Love the brotherhood’ (1 Peter 2[:17]). Nothing could unite our nearest more closely in humble love of the brotherhood than devout consideration of how all of us proceed in our flesh from the same first parents, and how, according to spiritual generation, we are born of Christ and the Church, his holy mother; for this is true brotherhood. But third, our attention is turned finally to the linkage of these two commands, ‘fear God’ and ‘the fear of the Lord [is] the beginning of wisdom’ (Proverbs 1[:7]). If Christ our Lord commands these two things and teaches them through his actions, how can one who fears him as the Lord and loves him as a father not be observing these commands? In Malachi 1[:6], it is written: ‘If I be a master, where is my fear? If I be a father, where is my love?’29 And in John 14[:23], we 29 Wyclif modifies the text of the Vulgate slightly: ‘The son honoureth the father, and the servant his master: if then I be a father, where is my honour? and if I be a master, where is my fear? saith the Lord of hosts’.

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are taught in what that love effectually consists: ‘If any one love me’, [Christ] says, ‘he will keep my word’. Fourth, the sequence of these three commands is concluded with ‘Honour the king’ (1 Peter 2[:17]), which we must observe, for although we should honour all and love the brotherhood, in accordance with the first command, there should nevertheless be an order in each, since in the Song of Songs 2[:4] it is said that the church ‘set in order charity in me’. Hence, to show us the excellence of the honour and reverence that should be given to kings, it is said that we should ‘honour the king’. Indeed, the king is God’s vicar and it is said that he should be feared. It is therefore necessary that he be honoured in his role as vicar, and consequently, though he is our brother, for him to be honoured differently from other brothers. And I believe that the holy pope distinguishes this effectual supremacy of honour through the verb ‘honour!’ In John 5[:23] it is said that ‘he that honoureth not the Son honoureth not the Father’. To make honourable is to honour effectually, according to a certain excellence. Fifth, the most blessed pope Peter speaks later in the same chapter about general obedience to a secular lord. ‘Servants’, he says, ‘be subject to your masters with all fear, not only to the good and the gentle, but also to the froward’ (1 Peter 2[:18]). Here we should note first that in the scriptural way of speaking one is said to be a servant in an ambiguous sense, namely, a servant by condition and a servant by ministration, a distinction that is also drawn by St Isidore in the third book of his Etymologies.30 A servant by condition is as in Philemon [1:16]: ‘You will receive Onesimus again, not as a servant, but as a most dear brother’. But a servant by ministration is what each of the apostles is called, as is anyone who responds as a Catholic towards God, as is known from the sayings of the apostles’ letters. Indeed, in this sense any Christian should be a servant to any other, but the vicar of Peter, especially, should be the servant of the Lord’s servants. And this is the way in which scripture speaks in [2] Kings 5[:6]: ‘Know that I have sent to you Naaman, my servant’. Nevertheless, it is clear from Scripture that he was a great lord. And thus, not only the recipients of the king’s alms but also his ministers and all of his lieges can rationally be called his servants. Through service likewise dukes and barons are masters of their subjects. From these premises, this holiest pope’s second general 30 This distinction is not drawn by Isidore in the third book of the Etymologies, which is devoted to the heavens. The chapter reference is omitted from the two manuscripts that Pollard and Sayle consulted in the preparation of their edition for the Wyclif Society.

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precept is known to every servant of a secular lord. Through bodily fear, as much as through spiritual fear, which together represent every kind of fear, they should be subjected to [their masters]: through bodily fear, which is the fear arising from the good things of nature and of fortune that are within regal power; and through spiritual fear of the first eternal, arising from the vicarious merit of the subjection of Christ the king. Indeed, through spiritual fear a subject should be subjected to the king, just as a more senior individual should be subject to God, and to him as to the person in whom majesty of the highest regal power shines forth. But finally, to exclude all sophistical objections by which it might be said that a given king, as a churlish sinner, should not be obeyed because he drives apart the school of Christ, so it is said that a subject should obey ‘even stubborn people’, not because they are stubborn, but because they possess the regal likeness of God. Subjection therefore consists in suffering injuries from them, if necessary, in performing servile tasks for them, in reproaching them modestly, and in punishing their wicked traits. This is the leading principle of obedience to such a leader, as is said elsewhere. The holiest pope’s commendation, which was made to the excellence of kings and secular lords, did not proceed from any pretence of adulation, or from a state of dotage, but out of a sincere delight, and from the inspiration of the Lord who teaches us. Hence, certain people suppose that, from the time of the endowment of the Church, the Catholic faith was crushed and the magnification of the other secular branch was introduced, because they wanted to govern not only through the title of alms but also through the highest form of civil endowment. The third testimony is from the vessel of election31 in Romans 13[:1–4], who says: Let every soul be subject to higher powers: for there is no power but from God: and those that are, are ordained of God. Therefore he that resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God. And they that resist, purchase to themselves damnation. For princes are not a terror to the good work, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? Do that which is good: and thou shalt have praise from the same. For he is God’s minister to thee, for good. But if thou do that which is evil, fear: for he beareth not the sword in vain.

31 This term identifies Paul, author of the Epistle to the Romans. Paul is described as by God as a ‘vessel of election’ in Acts 9:15.

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In this statement it is clear that the apostle speaks of the secular arm.32 First, because the text continues, ‘For he is God’s minister: an avenger to execute wrath upon him that does evil’ (Romans 13[:4]). We should understand this to refer to militants, as is clear from the seventeenth chapter of book 4.33 When the spiritual arm is insufficient, the resolute should act, because the secular arm urges them. Hence, because such scandals will necessarily come, the apostle adds, ‘Wherefore be subject of necessity: not only for wrath, but also for conscience’s sake’ (Romans 13[:5]). We should be subject to these powers not merely through bodily fear, on account of the anger which works within us and our people, but through the spiritual fear of losing heaven, as I have just explained. Hence, in the apostle’s text it follows: ‘For therefore also you pay tribute. For they are the ministers of God, serving unto this purpose’ (Romans 13[:6]). And I have explained this above, in chapter 17 of book 4,34 using the deeds of Christ and the testimony of the saints. Hence, it follows in the apostle’s text: ‘Render therefore to all men their dues. Tribute, to whom tribute is due: custom, to whom custom: fear, to whom fear: honour, to whom honour (Romans 13[:7]).’ This text cannot reasonably be applied to anyone except the secular lords. It is supported, secondly, by the aforementioned pronouncement of St Peter, who, speaking from the same spirit, applied this same principle to secular lords. In Matthew 8[:9], in this same way, the captain says that he is ‘a man subject to authority’, by assuming that ‘authority’ means secular political power. And it is confirmed, thirdly, from the testimony of the holy doctors, who explain the [text] in a way which is consistent [with this interpretation], speaking of the secular branch. Likewise, the Glossa Ordinaria reads: ‘Every soul is said because every man should serve the secular powers, both bodily and through his will: I say powers meaning both good and bad powers, namely kings, princes, tribunes, centurions and other such people.’35 And this is proved by reason, as I have explained [elsewhere].36 Nor does any sophist argue that then any secular lord would be subject to any other, because just as every man should help every other man, so he should serve them, by attending to them in a different way. Nor does a confusion of 32 The secular and spiritual arms correspond to civil and ecclesiastical powers, respectively. 33 This would appear to be a reference to chapter 17 of book 2 of Wyclif ’s On Civil Lordship. 34 Again, the reference is to book 2 of On Civil Lordship. 35 See PL 114, cols 12b–13a for the relevant section of the Glossa Ordinaria. 36 Chapter and book references are missing here.

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dignitaries follow from this, because secular dignitaries are not, in their kind, reciprocally subject to themselves. But ecclesiastical dignitaries are subject to themselves, and, to the extent that one is more subjected by serving with greater humility, he will be greater in God’s estimation, as is clear from Luke 22. He who ignores that sentence is quite ill-disposed to know the perfection of Christ’s religion, as I have said in a certain chapter of the fifth book.37 Hence, it is said in Philippians 2[:3–4]: ‘Let nothing be done through contention, nothing by vain glory. But in humility, let each esteem others better than themselves, each one not considering the things that are his own, but those that are other men’s.’ These rules would suffice to enable us to serve Christ’s religion. To resist a command of God is unlawful, but every power of the secular arm is ordained by God, either as a punishment or a reward, and it is therefore unlawful to resist it. Now, many assume power for themselves or manipulate it in subtle ways, yet this is not power but love of doing harm. Hence, the fact that the power of perverse people exists only by virtue of God is known from Job 2[:11], in which the devil, before he could take anything from the blessed Job, said to the Lord, ‘Give your hand’, which is to say, ‘give power’. And truth impresses that idea upon Pilate, speaking in John 19[:11] thus: ‘Thou shouldst not have any power against me, unless it were given thee from above’.38 But according to a [particular] gloss, since this leader committed abuse through his power, a distinction should be drawn in the following way: An injury is done either to our own cause, or to the cause of God alone. In the first case, after the prompting of the gospel, patience is the best remedy. If it is against the cause of God alone, the Christian should, after reproaching him through the gospel, resist his leader confidently and obediently, to the point of death if necessary. And thus, this principle must be relied upon patiently in either case, by humbly committing the responsibility of punishing the injury to God.39 37 The reference to the fifth book here is problematic. None of the treatises Wyclif produced before On the Office of the King contains this many books, yet all three extant manuscripts mention this. For the reference in the third manuscript, which Pollard and Sayle did not consult in the preparation of their edition, see Národní Knihovna Cˇeské Republiky MS X.D.11, fo. 132r. 38 These words are Christ’s reply to Pilate’s question in John 19:10: ‘Speakest thou not to me? Knowest thou not that I have power to crucify thee, and I have power to release thee?’ Pilate supported Jesus, finding no case against him, but ultimately conceded to the Jews’ demands for his crucifixion because of the possible consequences of releasing Christ and hence defying those loyal to the Emperor Tiberius. 39 Wyclif ’s reference is ambiguous, but the text is certainly not from the Glossa Ordinaria.

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And whoever breaks this rule opposes damnably both God’s power and what he has ordained, as do those in particular who revolt in the hope of personal reward in this world. They disregard the better thing that God has ordained and rashly observe something worse. Now, God ordained that the pursuit of tyrants should be an exercise for his martyrs, and a means of crowning them. Hence, the Glossa Communis speaks thus: ‘Be gold, and illuminate the world as a goldsmith’s furnace’.40 And that law would itself suffice to enable any Christian to follow his own law healthily, and to ensure peace in the church. Haters of divine law and hence of the Lord therefore throw the church into confusion in this matter, with worldly laws and the devil’s deceit. Whereas Christ, his apostles and the martyrs of either testament magnified and restored his glorious church by ordaining that tyrants should be pursued and through the suffering of his saints, the moderns, now that this law and divine ordination have been rejected, rely upon human laws and upon the wisdom of punishing their own crimes, notwithstanding the fact that the value of contrary ways of proceeding clearly reveals their quality. But there are very many, even in the clergy, who hide a law that is contrary to God’s ordaining among other sophistical lies, claiming that the prosecution of this law and following this way of life were once approved by the saints and holy fathers, and that the manifold fruit of justice was everywhere increased. But first, by arguing in this way they fail to attend to how the holiest fathers employed and fostered an approach that ran contrary to this! Second, they focus their minds on the excessive profit of the church that has arisen from this. And third, they attend to the shape of the devil’s lies, which suggest that it is permissible for clerics to do this because it is exemplary behaviour. There is no expressible sin so great that good ought not emerge from it after it has been committed, since otherwise the fruit of sin would be more powerful than God. He who does not believe that he could better enact religious rituals than those transmitting and perfectly observing the rule of God’s law therefore sins in his faith. Indeed, Christ, Peter and other fathers edified the church in this way. We conclude from these observations that he who resists the royal power of leaders through force or deception sins gravely, because in Proverbs 8[:15] the ordainer of all says, ‘by me kings reign’. And in

40 Note that Glossa Communis is another name for the Glossa Ordinaria. It here echoes Augustine’s sixty-second sermon. See PL 38, col. 420.

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Deuteronomy 17, the Lord gives the law to the king,41 and we know from the Old Testament that he ordains that it should be venerated in many ways. As a sign of this the apostle appealed to Caesar in Acts 25, both because of his faith and in order to protect his body.42 And a second conclusion of the apostle emerges: a tribute should be given voluntarily to kings by their subjects, and especially by the clergy that are in receipt of their alms. And the apostle speaks clearly to kings, because according to the gloss they repay [their tribute] now by fighting for their country, now by acting lawfully and now by delivering great rewards.43 It is thus not impossible that in the last analysis they justify the principle of their election, even with interest, to the glory of their subjects, as they themselves prosper. There is therefore great security in an outstanding [monarch], who, by maintaining a good mind, should not fear that he will be excluded from the burden of worldly goods, exempt from the battles and entanglements that arise in life, and should ultimately be rewarded with a payment that entirely satisfies his desire. And third, from things that have been said, together with the current state of the church, it is concluded truly that  the ­irreligious conduct of a clergy so disobedient in its principles is the chief cause of the deterioration of, and disruption within, the church militant. Although scriptural doctrine authoritatively and very expressly indicates that obedience is owed to the secular lord, some weaken the sense of scripture through strange glosses, some pass over them silently and deceitfully encourage others to do the same, and others multiply human traditions through their study and teaching of them. They manipulate the clergy so that its worldly greatness may be seen in [these traditions], and so that secular power over the world’s wisdom becomes quiescent. Nevertheless, since there is every truth and instruction to which we should give our full attention in holy scripture, it seems to anyone who examines the scriptures that neither 41 ‘But after he is raised to the throne of his kingdom, he shall copy out to himself the Deuteronomy of this law in a volume, taking the copy of the priests of the Levitical tribe. And he shall have it with him, and shall read it all the days of his life, that he may learn to fear the Lord his God, and keep his words and ceremonies, that are commanded in the law’. Deuteronomy 17:18–19. 42 ‘Then Paul said: I stand at Caesar’s judgment seat, where I ought to be judged. To the Jews I have done no injury, as thou very well knowest. For if I have injured them, or have committed any thing worthy of death, I refuse not to die. But if there be none of these things whereof they accuse me, no man may deliver me to them: I appeal to Caesar’. Acts 25:10–11. 43 Biblia Sacra cum Glossa Ordinaria, vol. 6, col. 1231.

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scripture nor the truth of scripture is contrary to this [third] observation, but nor is the worldliness of the greater part of the clergy generally explained through God in authoritative writings or by reason. Therefore, it seems more necessary today to explain regal power in accordance with the teaching of Scripture, so that perhaps we will in this way apprehend more clearly how sacerdotal power and regal power should be of use to each other through the harmony of the body of the church. But lest I should seem to be inventing that observation, I simply offer the sense that the Holy Spirit placed in scripture. Behold the magnificent authority of the great Augustine in his Questions on the Old and New Laws, chapter [3]5:44 David was not unaware of the divine tradition in the office of the regal order; Saul, who was in that same tradition, honoured this position lest he should have been seen to do injury to God, who assigned honour to those orders. For a king has God’s image, as does the bishop Christ’s. To the extent that he is in that tradition, therefore, he is to be honoured, if not on his own account, then on that of his order. Hence, the apostle said: ‘Let every soul be subject to higher powers: for there is no power but from God: and those that are, are ordained of God’ (Romans 13[:1]).

We know from these words that regal power, which is an order in the church, exists in mortals, even in the foreknown. This is known from the order of Saul, who was foreknown, as Augustine [of Ireland] says in chapter 10 of the second book of On the Wonders of Scripture.45 Second, we know how David honoured Saul through the same religion that Christ and his apostles had taught, even though he knew that he was a perverse and difficult man. This is evident from 1 Kings 24 and 25 and 2 Kings 1. In fact, it remains the case that one man should honour another according to nature, order and custom, and likewise in respect of contempt. Third, we truly see from the words of this holy 44 Pollard and Sayle correctly identify this as chapter 35 of Augustine’s Questions from the Old Testament. See De Officio Regis, p. 10. For the relevant part of Augustine’s text, see Quaestiones ex Veteri Testamento, PL 35, col. 2234. 45 Augustine of Ireland (or the Irish Augustine), a seventh-century Hiberno-Latin writer, was long confused with Augustine of Hippo. For the passage to which Wyclif refers, see PL 35, cols 2178–9. A recent study of this remarkable work of exegesis, which seeks to interpret miracles as naturalistic phenomena, is provided by Thomas Duddy in A History of Irish Thought (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 1–17, and by Gerard MacGinty in ‘The Irish Augustine: De Mirabilibus Sacrae Scripturae’, in Ireland und die Christenheit / Ireland and Christendom. Bibelstudien und Mission / The Bible and the Missions, ed. Próinséas Ní Chatháin and Michael Richter (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1987), pp. 70–83.

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doctor that the statement of the apostle in Romans 13 should be understood in relation to the sublimity of secular power, and not merely in relation to the possession of spiritual glory, as the corruptors of scriptural meaning falsely assume. And thus St Peter understands that the kings of men, even when troublesome, should be honoured. Hence, in the text mentioned above Augustine declares the following: ‘Even a gentile in a position of power should be honoured, though he may be unworthy, and though he does service to the devil whilst holding God’s order.’46 I say that even an unworthy man should be honoured because of his strength, with the abiding dignity that arises out of his power. As evidence of this, God shows future events to the kings of the gentiles, by reason of their dignity in the care of their government, as is known in respect of Pharaoh in Genesis 41 and Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 2. ‘He exercises power’, says Augustine, because he deserves honour. A dream of future famine was therefore revealed to Pharaoh, and Nebuchadnezzar (Genesis 41[:1–37]). Together with others standing with him, he saw in the fire of a flame the only son of God, not by virtue of his power, but by virtue of his regal order (Daniel 3[:92]).47

The holy doctors paid great attention to, and greatly honoured the sense of Scripture, to which all other laws should make concession, since it is required in order to regulate the whole church. Hence, visions had been made corresponding to the dignity of the foreknown Pharaoh and the predestinate Nebuchadnezzar, but proportional interpretations are reserved for prophets of the Lord like Joseph and Daniel. Our opponent will ask, if he can, why God ordained regal honours for them, and visions of such a different nature, unless they specially figure divine majesty and teach vicariously the pre-eminence of his religion. Hence, Augustine says the following in chapter 20 of his Questions on the Old and New Law: ‘A king is to be worshipped as God’s vicar’.48 And in chapter 106, explaining the words of Genesis 1[:26] (‘Let us make man to our image and likeness’), he says this: ‘God’s image is in man, so that one is made, as it were, like the Lord, from which the rest follows: that he has the sovereignty of God as his vicar, because every king has God’s image. And therefore, the woman is not made in God’s image.’49 The apostle speaks thus in 2 Corinthians 11, for 46 Quaestiones ex Veteri Testamento, PL 35, col. 2234. 47 Quaestiones ex Veteri Testamento, PL 35, col. 2234. 48 Quaestiones ex Veteri Testamento, PL 35, col. 2284. 49 Quaestiones ex Veteri Testamento, PL 35, col. 2244.

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although a woman’s spirit is threefold, in the image of the Trinity, and thus in God’s image, her whole nature does not vicariously bear the royal attributes of God as the whole nature of a man does. Just as a son descends from his father but does not have that person in his nature, so woman descends from man and does not have him in her nature. Now, in such a figure there is diversity, given that a woman is made from a singular, distinct nature by a superior nature. The divine Word is nevertheless begotten and not made from its source, which is entirely the same nature and cannot be a superior nature. The apostle therefore introduced a rule into the Christian religion on account of this sacrament, saying that a man should not cover his head because it is the image and the glory of God, but that a woman should cover hers because it is not the image and the glory of God.50 Now, the fiction by which some say that that saint did not say that a king was God’s vicar but only seemingly God’s vicar has no value because, as I said above, the adverb seemingly connotes the true idea of a vicar, because otherwise the adoration that the Holy Spirit teaches us to give to the king would be false and a fiction, as would consequently the Christian religion! Also, as I have said above, Augustine, in his thirty-fifth chapter, said simply that ‘the king has God’s image, just as the priest has Christ’s’.51 We should therefore either deny that a bishop is a true vicar of Christ or, by the same authority, simply concede that the king is the true vicar of God. Likewise, Doctor de Lyra writes in the following way in his commentary on 1 Paralipomenon 13[:1]: ‘After David’s anointment has been recounted, the nature of his leadership is here described, which is in fact best when it begins from divine things, because when a king, who is God’s vicar in temporal affairs, is good towards God, God guides him in his actions.’52 God should therefore have two vicars in his church, namely, the king, in temporal affairs, and the priest, in spiritual matters. But the king should repress the rebel severely, as did the deity in the Old Testament. But the priest should deliver his command in a mild manner to the lowly in the time of the law of grace, just as did the humanity of Christ, who was king and priest together. Augustine says in respect of this that the king has God’s image, but the priest Christ’s image, in accordance with their respective offices. But this office should 50 Wyclif would appear to be using the term sacrament in an Augustinian sense here. Augustine had argued that a sacrament is ‘a sign of a holy thing’ (Epistula 138, CSEL 44, p. 131). If man is made in God’s image, then by this definition he is also a sacrament. 51 Quaestiones ex Veteri Testamento, PL 35, col. 2234. 52 Biblia Sacra cum Glossa Ordinaria, vol. 2, col. 1077.

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not be conceived out of this verbal distinction unless it is said that the king bears the image of the divinity of Christ, just as the bishop bears the image of his humanity. And the apostolic rule concerning levels of honour to be bestowed upon members of the church, in 1 Corinthians 11[:3], depends on that principle: ‘I would have you know’, it says, ‘that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God’. From which things it seems that Christ’s vicar, because he is notionally Christ by virtue of being Christ’s vicar, should be governed capitally under the one that is notionally God.

37 The relationship between priest and monarch i) On the Office of the King, ch. 6 (extract). Latin text: De Officio Regis, pp. 137–44. Wyclif here offers a focused examination of the relationship between regal and ecclesiastical power. In what is presented as a response to a hypothetical objection raised against him, he challenges the opinion, articulated in the second and the third parts of the objection, that the secular power of the monarch is simply inferior to the priestly, and stresses that it owes no obedience to the sacerdotal in secular affairs. As in the first chapter of this treatise (19), the king is likened to God and the priest to Christ, and this serves as the basis of Wyclif ’s discussion of the two.

Against what I have said [on the monarchy and the church],53 some argue that: First, I have not clearly taught which judicial authority should take precedence. Second, the two are not equal, but we should not assume that the secular power, which is less dignified and was established more recently, is the greater. Third, temporal power should therefore only be exercised at the prompting and the command of the governing sacerdotal power. Here I say that these two judicial authorities are essentially independent of one another, since it is generally held that either can operate without the other. The difficulty lies in determining which of the two authorities is the more perfect in itself, even though a more perfect 53 Wyclif is here referring to the preceding five chapters of On the Office of the King, and possibly also On the Church (the former was written immediately after the latter).

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status need not be incompatible with a lesser authority. It would seem difficult to argue that papal authority is more perfect than the authority of a ruler simply because its status is more perfect; on this interpretation, any priest’s authority would be more perfect than that of the king to whom he was subject. It seems likely to me that royal authority surpasses priestly authority according to a manifold argument. First, because the king bears a vicarious likeness to the deity, and thus he has the power to punish; a priest, by contrast, bears a vicarious likeness to the humanity of Christ, and therefore has reason to suffer injury. Hence, Christ did certain things as emperor, as when he drove away those who were buying and selling in the temple by beating [them].54 He did certain things as a priest, [as suggested] in the Decretum, c. 1. q. 3, ‘Throughout many [ages]’,55 when he sacrificed himself on the cross. Since the first of these two powers has the right of agency, even against priests, and the secondary power has the capacity to suffer, even at the hands of those priests, it seems, according to the natural principle of agency surpassing suffering, that regal power surpasses the power of the priest. And here, the Decretum, c. 28, q. 3, says: ‘anyone who, without the authority of the king, kills by the sword, will die by the sword’.56 St Gregory said to the Queen of France that he would surrender his position if she were to give the order. Leo IV swore obedience to Caesar, as is clear from the tenth distinction, ‘On Chapters’, which I have cited widely above.57 Indeed, the power to order or command is more excellent than the power that is bound humanly to obey. Yet episcopal power is bound humanly to submit to the king’s power, but not vice versa. Therefore, royal power is primary in this respect, for a king, when he gives a bishop his copious stipend to carry out his official duty, seems to have the power to demand the fulfilment of that duty.58 Since a bishop, as liege subject of the king, is obliged to provide service to that king, therefore, it seems that nobody could serve more fittingly than in contributing to the king’s achievement and to the office of his kingdom, and it is for this that he has such a stipend. The fact that a priest is senior to a king in hearing confessions 54 John 2:14ff. 55 CICaPP 2 pars, c. 1, q. 3, c. 9 (col. 415). 56 CICaPP, 2 pars, c. 23, q. 8 (col. 953). 57 CICaPP, 1 pars, d. 10, c. 9 (col. 22). 58 The archbishop here retains the power of investiture, but the king is here seen to have the right to intervene if he does not fulfil his duties. This is arguably a rather provocative interpretation of the principles agreed at the Concordat of Worms (1122).

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and in the administration of the ecclesiastical sacraments is of no consequence, because to order a person to hear confessions requires an authority of greater power than actually hearing confessions. Thus the deity enables Christ to hear confessions as a man, and nevertheless the deity himself could not do this, just as he could not die. And this is reinforced in three ways: first, in the Decretum, c. 28, q. 5, ‘All things’, which prioritises royal authority in the regulation of church matters that pertain to divine confession. Similarly, the Decretum, c. 2, q. 7, ‘We, if improperly …’, [says]: ‘There are the two people by whom the world is ruled, namely, the regal and priestly’.59 And it is not right to say that such a law is ordained in these words without mystery, for Peter is thus proclaimed to be head of the church by the very signification of a noun. Similarly, the pope prioritises the name of emperor in writing a letter to him in the book On the Supreme Trinity and the Catholic Faith, at the beginning of his letter entitled ‘Enclosures’: ‘To the most glorious and gentle Justinian’, he says, ‘John, Bishop of the town of Rome [sends greetings]’, and the letter of the emperor to the pope takes the same form.60 ‘Note’, says the gloss, ‘that he places [the name of] the emperor first, which he would not do today’ (though possibly the reason emerges later [in the text]).61 Indeed, either those powers should be regarded as equal, or one should be subordinated to the other. If neither were subordinated to the other according to human laws, however, then this would lead to the undoing of the church! We know that there are many reasons why the church does not have supreme power over our secular duties. First, because the goods of the church are brought together charitably within it by secular leaders, as is clear from Augustine, Bernard and the majority of the decretals. Second, because otherwise it would be legitimate to appeal to the pope in secular affairs, which [Pope] Alexander [III] forbade, saying that those affairs were not within his jurisdiction, as is reported in the second [book] of Decretals, [title 28], ‘On Appeals’, in the chapter beginning ‘If two people’.62 Hence, Pope Paul appealed to Caesar in Acts 25. And the same argument is found in the fourth [book] of Decretals, [title 17], ‘Which sons are legitimate’, in the chapter beginning ‘Cause’.63 59 CICaPP, 2 pars, c. 2, q. 7, c. 41 (col. 496). 60 Codex Iustinianus, CICi, vol. 2, pp. 10–11. 61 This is a reference to the standard gloss (the so-called Glossa Ordinaria or Glossa Communis) on Justinian’s Codex (and the other parts of his Copus Iuris Civilis), which was prepared by Accursius (d. 1263). 62 CICaPS, book 2, tit. 28, ch. 7 (col. 412). 63 CICaPS, book 4, tit. 17, ch. 7 (col. 712).

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And third, because churches give tributes to the emperor: hence, in the Decretum, 11, q. 1, St Ambrose says, ‘If the emperor requests a tribute, we must not deny him: let the territories of the church pay the tribute. If the emperor desires territories, he has the power to buy them. And he may dispense with them if it should please him.’64 And proof of this statement follows it: Great indeed is the spiritual lesson by which true Christians are taught that they should be subjected to higher powers, lest anyone assume that the accession of a secular king is dissoluble. If the son of God paid a tax, who are you to suppose that it should not be paid? Indeed, the apostle says, in Romans 13[:1], ‘Let every soul be subject to higher powers’. Indeed, the apostle Peter will write to all of the faithful generally: ‘Be subjects to your Lords or, as it were, to the most excellent king or the leaders sent by him’.65

On account of such considerations it is generally said that a king has greater power in temporal matters and a bishop in spiritual affairs, but this does not tell us which of these authorities is greater in absolute terms. If the king is greater, we must merely accept the consequence; if the bishop is greater, likewise. Similarly, if one of them were mighty in secular matters, it would seem that this greater power should have the greater authority, and hence spiritual lordship and spiritual power would then be inferior to the corporeal, but this goes against the Decretum, distinction 10, in the chapter beginning ‘Do you [not] acknowledge?’, where Pope Gregory speaks in the following way to Caesar: ‘God has given power to us, too, and he has given us far more perfect supremacy than your leaders’.66 And that, undoubtedly, is the principal power of which [we learn] in Matthew 16[:9]: ‘I give to you the keys of the kingdom of the heavens’. It would be blindness, though, to argue that this is secular power! It seems that secular power is principally the domain of the king, because he has superiority in relation to the people, the privileges and the goods of the church. That he has superiority in respect of the people of the church is shown in distinction 18 [of the Decretum], where the text cited teaches that even the election of a pope should be withheld 64 CICaPP, 2 pars, c. 11, q. 1, ch. 27 (col. 634). 65 CICaPP, 2 pars, c. 11, q. 1, ch. 28 (col. 634). 66 CICaPP, 1 pars, d. 10, c. 6 (col. 20). Wyclif misquotes the text here. It should read ‘he has given us far more perfect supremacy than your supremacies’. For an English translation, see Gratian: The Treatise on the Laws (Decretum DD. 1–20), translated by Augustine Thompson, O.P., with The Ordinary Gloss translated by James Gordley and an Introduction by Katherine Christiansen (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1993), p. 35.

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if a king demands the opposite.67 We know he is superior in respect of human privileges, because were granted from the beginning. Hence, it is written in the Code [of Justinian], under the title ‘On Bishops and Clerics’, in the section beginning ‘No’: ‘No Bishop who has been invited to serve a civil or military duty, for whatever purpose, may be brought into service or made known unless the monarch so decrees.’68 And this is also true in respect of worldly goods, as is shown in the Code under the title ‘On Things Sacrosanct’, in the laws ‘We Decree’ and ‘Nobody with Laws or Tolls’,69 and also in the Decretum, xi, q. 1, under St Ambrose, ‘If [an emperor demands] a tribute’.70 It is not lawful, either, to attribute such negligence and leniency to the pope that he might be said to have permitted those nests of errors, given that heretics knew that they resided so openly in the law already. Here, I will articulate my thoughts in conformity with scripture. We should note here for explanatory purposes that power or authority is said to be great in three ways. [First,] it may be great in absolute terms, in respect of the magnitude of something powerful by reason of itself. The eternal power of God is thus infinite, greater in an equivocal way than any created power.71 Alternatively, if power is said to be communicated to a creature in a participatory way, we can say it is great in two different ways, either in simple terms or in respect of a particular office.72 In the first, the power of a created spirit or even the devil surpasses the power of any corporeal nature, according to the text of Job 40[:24]: ‘There is no power upon earth that can be compared with him’.73 Human power, on the other hand, is simply either secular, ecclesiastical or spiritual, and hence it is a power in respect of which there is a bipartite division, which is to say that it relates either to temporal or spiritual things, and each of these branches is subdivided according to a manifold division. The king’s transcendent power is great in the first way, because he is the vicar of God. The priest’s power should be preeminent in the second way, because he should enjoy 67 This distinction does not appear to address this issue in any explicit way. See CICaPP, 1, pt 1, d. 10, c. 18 (cols 53–8). For an English translation, see Gratian: The Treatise on Laws (Decretum DD. 1–20), pp. 70–6. 68 Book 1, title 3. See CICi, vol. 2, pp. 19ff. 69 Book 1, title 2, ch. 10 and 11. See CICi, vol. 2, pp. 12ff. 70 CICaPP, 2 pars, c. 11, q. 1, c. 26 (col. 634). 71 Greatness can be predicated of God and creatures only in an equivocal way, and thus God’s power can only equivocally be said to be greater than that of a creature. 72 Wyclif counts these as the second and the third way, respectively. 73 This is said of the sea-monster Leviathan, often interpreted symbolically as the devil.

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a superior grace by maintaining a greater perfection within himself, living his life in closer conformity with Christ. But as Christ indicates, the greatness of such power varies from one of his vicars to the next. We should not question such a way of speaking, since Christ says in Matthew 11[:11], ‘there hath not risen among them that are born of women a greater than John the Baptist’, where it is clear that he does not speak of a greatness of size, or of a greatness of worldly authority, but of a supremacy of virtue. Just as a man is greater before the Lord in proportion to any increase in his virtue, therefore, so his authority is greater as his virtue increases. It is to this very principle that priests should devote their attention. A priest’s authority, therefore, could not be more greatly disrupted, diminished or destroyed than if he were to assume both of these powers. Hence, in the tenth distinction [of the Decretum], ‘Since the same’, [Cyprian] says the following to Julian:74 The mediator between God and men, Christ Jesus, divides the offices of either power in respect of their own actions and their own particular worthiness, desiring the church to be exalted through its curative humility in either, and not to be overwhelmed by human pride in inferior things. Hence, Christian emperors need pontiffs for the sake of eternal life, and pontiffs use imperial laws for the direction of worldly goods alone, since spiritual activity is different from physical incursions, and ‘No man, being a soldier to God, entangleth himself with secular businesses’ (2 Timothy 2[:4]). In turn, it would not seem that the person who presides over holy things should be the same as the one who is involved in secular matters.75

Here, it is clear that the pope thinks that these two offices are completely separate, so that in affairs of the world any cleric is beneath our degree of authority, just as any creature is beneath our degree of authority first and foremost; otherwise, the cleric would not be beneath our degree of secular lordship. Now, the spiritual power to battle with the devil, as the son of God does, is called authority by certain people, and some have this to a greater degree and others to a lesser. But among viators, any adoptive son and heir to the kingdom [of heaven] has the greatest power.76 But whilst he is the devil’s limb neither pope 74 The text appears in a letter from Pope Nicholas I to Emperor Michael III. As James Gordley has suggested, the assumption in the text of this part of the Decretum that this epistle is addressed by St Cyprian of Carthage (d. 258) to the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate (332–63), is historically anomalous. See Gratian: The Treatise on Laws (DD. 1–20), p. 94 n. 131. 75 CICaPP, 1 pars, d. 10, c. 8 (col. 21). For an English translation, see Gratian: The Treatise on Laws (DD. 1–20), pp. 35–6. 76 The expression adoptive son (filius adoptionis or filius adoptatus) here refers to any member of the predestinate. Cf. Alexander of Hales, who uses the expression in

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nor emperor may have more power or authority from God than the heir of the kingdom of heaven, who will give blessedness to those who follow him, as is said in Luke 6. In respect of power to rule a republic, he to whom God has given the capacity to govern people effectually and in accordance with his law has the greater share; but in respect of power founded on legal actions, compulsions, or human laws, it seems to me that the king should surpass all others. The priest nevertheless has another kind of power that is greater still in the mind of God. The priest should therefore be supreme in respect of authority and power to those who work in harmony with their positions in society, but only provided he preserve his humility and does not strive for greatness. Secular power is forbidden to him, and only spiritual power remains. Secular power extends throughout the world, and thus God has ordained that the head of the clergy should excel in his sacerdotal office through humility, and curb secular pride. And thus, with each helping the other in its own capacity, the sacerdotal office, whilst it is free from worldliness in its priestly position, surpasses the other in its sanctity. Otherwise, according to the Decretum, it is of the meanest status. And this is the reason why lordship is repeatedly prohibited in sacerdotal law. This poison, which arises out of an unnatural mixture in a member of the clergy, corrupts and throws into disorder too great a part of the institution of the church. And it is for this reason that I have said that it would be improper for a good cleric to be placed in a position of civil lordship. Hence, we should note that the pope moderates his tone in checking a king’s pride, and does not deny that the priesthood needs royal authority, not only in the administration of worldly goods but in spiritual judgement. Now, if a priest had an excess of pride it would be a secular necessity to speak in the very opposite way. It therefore seems that regal power is thus implicitly greater in respect of temporal affairs than priestly power, which is of a very different kind. Nevertheless, in respect of the spiritual, priestly power is greater, just as a line is said to be greater than a point; that is, the one is great and the other is not. Many comparative statements are understood negatively in this way in Scripture, and therefore what is said here must be construed by appealing to its opposite. But if either power existed by itself alone, without the augmentative influence of this same sense in his Summa Theologica: ‘the natural Son of God is the son of man, and any one of the predestinate, by participating in his superabundant grace, is his adoptive son’. Summa Theologica, lib. 3, pars 1, tract. 1, q. 3, cap. 5, no. 28. See Summa Fratris Alexandri siue Summa Universae Theologiae, ed. Bernard Klumper (Quaracchi: Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1948), vol. IV, p. 47, col. 2.

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grace, regal power would be weaker and priestly power baser. When it exists in a mortal, either has the potential to be of service to the church, but in a different way than it does, and thus the substance of the work of the predestinate remains effective in either case. And it is clear from what has been said that asking which power or authority in the viator is the greater, in simple terms and without qualification, would be like asking an ignorant man, prior to its revelation, who knew that the Baptist was the greatest, apart from Christ? It pleases certain laypeople to grant that one king is simply greater than another bishop, and vice versa, because qualities of greatness are conferred equivocally, so that a king is greater than a priest, yet the priest is not inferior to the king! And [in the section by] St Ambrose [in c. 1, q. 1], ‘With Scripture’, the Decretum speaks in this way of the supremacy of the king and the sublimity of his power over priests.77 But I will not discuss this issue here, just as I will not consider the supremacy of the pope over other priests. But one thing I proclaim boldly is that neither the shouts of our clergy nor Scripture itself make the pope greater than the king, either to the world or to God. Ministering the sacraments is not a task of authority but one of vicarious servitude, but so too is recruiting and teaching people thus to minister. And the power of ministering thus is not called authority in Scripture; that term, rather, is wrested from the books of the gentiles. But if it were an authority, it is nevertheless a greater authority to rule politically, since mastery of temporal affairs derives directly from God, and it is not the priest’s role to make himself greater, but rather to minister more humbly and to be in fear on account of his damnable inadequacy. But there is doubt as to which of the two powers is older and more necessary to the church, in respect of which question, according to some, there is much empty debate. It is certain, nevertheless, that each office proceeds from God, who was always emperor and priest, though he had been emperor first. ii) On Civil Lordship, book 1, ch. 11. Latin text: De Civili Dominio Liber Primus, pp. 73–4. In this short extract from On Civil Lordship, Wyclif offers an earlier examination of the relationship between civil and spiritual lordship. Civil lordship, with all the conditions it entailed, was for him a properly secular matter, pertaining to government of a territory or a kingdom (or even of the secular affairs of the church), whereas the duties of ecclesiastics had to be confined to the welfare of the soul. He is keen to emphasise that the two different kinds 77 CICaPP 2 pars, d. 1, c. 83 (col. 387).

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of lordship should draw their respective authorities from two different documents: kings must draw on the civil laws of the land and priests from the precepts of Scripture. The latter, Wyclif concludes forcefully, should have no part in civil government of a land and its people, which was introduced as a penalty for sin.

Here we should return to a distinction I made in the third chapter of the first tract of On Divine Lordship, which proclaims that divine lordship is one kind of lordship, angelic lordship another, and human lordship is still another.78 This last kind is itself subdivided, since one kind of human lordship is active in a civil context and the other governs in the church. No ecclesiastic should have lordship in the first way, but any Christian may govern as he chooses in the second.79 Hence, the prophets had been kings of those over whom God had given them command, and prelates in the time of the law of grace are their kings who have charge over them spiritually, and more truly than secular kings do they carry out the duty of governing in the soul. Others are concerned with temporal government; I know, though, that citizens of the world and the common people call only the king a power, principally and physically the ruler of people, in the secular community. But there is a great diversity of practice here: in Ireland, any leader of any generation is called its king; in England and elsewhere, only he who rules a province or a kingdom principally and politically is called king. And corresponding to kings or rulers of bodies there should be kings of our souls, who are those who have holy orders. Just as the kings of men use civil laws in their government, so spiritual kings should use the rule of the Gospel unadulterated. And this is how Scripture should be understood whenever it attributed the title of ruler or the name of king to Christ, as is evident below in chapter 16. We should note, nevertheless, that in this kind of rule, Christ, the natural Son of God, is called king by way of antonomasia, and equivocally by comparison with his other, adoptive sons. He is identified as king first and foremost, since he is the head of the church, whereas others, such as bailiffs, are only kings ministerially. They are therefore often called Christ’s ministers in the orthodox Scriptures, and they are commanded in Mark 6[:8] to take not a sceptre but a staff in exercising their duty of preaching. This shows that they are the Lord’s bailiffs, having the power to rule beneath him, taking up as much food and clothing as they demand of 78 See 34ii, above. 79 According to the second of the subdivisions Wyclif mentions, that is.

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their subjects, but they should not be burdened with civil sovereignty, parading needlessly with their sceptres. Hence, in Matthew 10[:10] and Luke 9[:3], such grand staffs are forbidden, as Augustine explains in Chapter [3]0 of The Harmony of the Evangelists.80 I conclude from these things that Holy Scripture, Origen and Augustine and many others have denied that ecclesiastics should have lordship or should reign, by which they are understood to mean [that they should not exercise] civil lordship, which was introduced as a penalty for sin, and is forbidden to people of the church on account of its imperfection.

38 Why the church should not be exempt from taxation by the monarch On Civil Lordship, book 2, ch. 1 (extract). Latin text: Iohannis Wyclif De Civili Dominio, vol. 2., ed. J. Loserth (London: WS, 1900), pp. 5–7. At the beginning of this chapter, Wyclif explains that he is responding here to a Benedictine monk in Oxford who attacked his claim that temporal lords may remove property from churchmen who abuse it in some way. This principle played a defining role in Wyclif ’s late political thought. Throughout the chapter, he addresses the monk as ‘my brother’.

[In defending his position on sacerdotal exemption from taxation,] my brother alludes to the story of Genesis 47[:22], in which the pagan priests of Egypt, when the land was barren and famine was impending, ‘were not forced to sell their possessions, but a certain allowance of food was given out of the public stores’. Christian priests should therefore be free and exempt from royal taxation to a much greater extent, and should not be made to suffer through the removal of worldly goods. In order to solve this argument, which is based on analogy, we should notice first that those Egyptian priests had been philosophers who had been led by astronomy to be content with only those possessions that were necessary for life, in the manner of philosophers. Aristotle mentions these things in the prologue to the first book of the Metaphysics. Now, those people who give sacred doctrine to the people are held in great reverence due to the necessity of their office and the piety of their frugal way of living, and like the evangelists, they are sustained by public goods, as both the text of Genesis and expositors 80 De Consensu Evangelistarum ii.xxx, 71–4; CSEL 43, pp. 175–80.

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of Aristotle’s text acknowledge. Second, I ask that those who argue thus from analogy to their proof should juxtapose their own argument: the Egyptian tax collectors spared their priests in times of peace in response to Joseph’s counsel because of the necessity of their office and their thrifty governance; therefore, seculars in the kingdom of England should not demand anything from beneficed priests, even if they should take possession of more than a third of the kingdom, however much they turn against Christ’s law, and however great the need might be to oppose enemies! We must therefore learn to bring sufficient similarity to whatever supports an argument based on analogy. Just as the gentile priests, in practising their duty, were restricted to the necessities of life by the public good, so Christian priests, whose religious duty should be to renounce worldly goods in the manner of Christ, should be nourished in public goods in order to provide them with the necessities of life. And this conclusion is reached from the text both by analogy and by proceeding from the greater to the lesser. But we should note from these statements that it seems that the conclusion that my brother impresses upon us should simply be accepted, namely that: Christian priests should be free from and untroubled by any taxation, and should not be disturbed by the removal of worldly goods because they should be content in themselves, having nothing and without food and clothing, and should suffer theft of their goods with pleasure.

In fact Caiaphas, since he was high priest, prophesied not of himself. But a different meaning seems to arise from other words of my brother. For it seems that he wishes to say that no religious are exempt from tax of a tenth, a fifteenth or any kind of payment, however much they have consumed in worldly goods, and however much they have endured for the king’s cause. But no orthodox person believes that such exemption could be legitimate, since it contains contradictions. I have heard religious possessioners in a certain parliament in London demand [exemption], and one lord, more experienced than the rest, replied according to a certain fable: Once, I heard a gathering of birds, and an owl was present among them, but without any feathers. Pretending that she was frail and cold, shivering, she asked to be given feathers from the other birds. The birds, each moved by pity, gave feathers to the owl, until she was covered unbeautifully with foreign feathers. As soon as this had been done, a hawk appeared, seeking to take what he could from them, but the birds, in order to avoid the incursion by defence or by fleeing from the attacking hawk, demanded their own

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feathers back from the owl. When she refused, each bird violently seized its own feathers, and thus they escaped danger whilst the owl remained featherless and even sadder than before. Hence, if a war should be waged against us, we should take back worldly goods from endowed clerics as though they were goods common to us and our kingdom, and thus defend the kingdom wisely with our own goods, as they greatly exceed our needs.

Nobody should wonder why I speak so diffusely in this matter, relating things so specifically and in a way that is so sharply reproachful. Indeed, I am diffuse so that it becomes clear that the arguments of my brother do not have a shred of evidence in their favour if they are followed as they should be. I speak so specifically so that I conform with the friend who undoubtedly supplied the material requiring explanation.

39 The collection of unpaid taxes and the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 On Blasphemy, ch. 13 (extract). Latin text: De Blasphemia, pp. 190–2. In a chapter that ostensibly addresses the faults of the monastic and fraternal orders, Wyclif offers a sympathetic account of the uprising of 1381. Though he clearly felt that any loss of life was regrettable in this campaign, he lays the blame for the uprising squarely with the church. The financial burden of the ongoing war with France was borne by the population of England through a punitive system of poll taxes levied in 1377, 1379 and 1381, each of which led to growing dissatisfaction. Attempts to collect unpaid taxes ultimately prompted violence, and the revolt spread rapidly once it had been kindled on the last day of May in 1381. Wyclif felt that redistribution of ecclesiastical excesses, either through secular seizure of goods and property or through Crown taxation of the clergy would have provided a fairer solution to the problem, whilst also sustaining those who had been hit hardest by the new system of taxation: the poor. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon Sudbury, was ultimately targeted by the rebels, not as Archbishop but as Chancellor of England. As such, Sudbury was formally responsible for the introduction of the poll tax. He was executed with the nation’s Treasurer, Sir Robert Hales, and others, on Tower Hill on 14 June 1381.

All things that are not the Lord’s will must come to a pitiable end, as became evident to us, the English, during that lamentable rebellion of the people in which our former archbishop and many others were cruelly killed. And the faithful man can be in no doubt that the sin of the people was its cause, since every penalty comes by reason of sin.

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And since it would be no more fitting for the said clergy to be punished according to any of the five causes of man’s own punishment than for it to be punished on account of its own sin or a sin of its kind, it seems that its said kind of sin makes it deserving of proportionate pains of punishment.81 The clergy have not been punished, as Christ was, for the sins of others and not their own, nor for the simple sake of merit or the confirmation of glory. Therefore, justice is not sufficient unless a member of the clergy can be punished as a penalty for his own sin or a sin of that kind. There is no doubt that such evil [as the rebellion entailed] was caused solely by deception, since the clergy deserved infinitely more.82 Yet there is no doubt that these avenging crowds, though they were motivated by good impulses, did not behave entirely lawfully. Some say that secular lords can take away worldly goods from an erring church, which would be more tolerable than common people taking away the bodily life of the head of that erring church. It has been suggested by kings and archbishops alike, moreover, that priests and curates should not generally be placed in the domestic and secular service of a king. The common people therefore sought to disgrace these curates. It is said that abbots and other propertied members of the church should transfer seized goods to relieve the poor of the community.83 The common people say that the prelates are the cause of these goods being greedily retained, and that they should therefore be killed, but this seems to me to be too cruel a punishment. Now, there is no doubt that moderate and prudent seizure of these worldly goods could easily extinguish all this evil. Indeed, it is generally felt that the manifest cause of this [rebellion] is the extraction of money and goods from the common people, who are helpless to resist. 81 The five causes of man’s punishment correspond to the five wounds of Original Sin, and to the Five Sacred Wounds of Christ, who suffered and died because of them. The five wounds of Original Sin are those that are inflicted on the human race as a consequence of Original Sin. They are weakness, ignorance, malice, concupiscence and death. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Ia–IIæ q. 85, a. 3 and a. 5. 82 That is, in order to be proportionate to their own numerous acts of deception. Here, though Wyclif is speaking of the whole of the clergy, including the friars and the monks, papal taxation and the collection of tithes are the principal targets of his criticism. The poor, he would have felt, were deriving no benefit from either. 83 Possibly a reference to tithing, and to the failure of the church to use income derived from tithing to relieve the poor. Though tithing was practised in both testaments, Christ was critical of the scribes and Pharisees who collected tithes but neglected judgement, mercy and faith: ‘Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites; because you tithe mint, and anise, and cummin, and have left the weightier things of the law; judgment, and mercy, and faith. These things you ought to have done, and not to leave those undone’ (Matthew 23:23).

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If, therefore, the propertied clergy, that repository of the goods of the poor, had paid their own tax to the king, then what would be the use of such a rebellion, causing such harm?84 How glorious the exchange of common goods would be if the clergy were kept to the level of mere sufficiency in their food and clothing and the common people were furnished with their remaining belongings! Indeed, anyone who defends a contrary view is a disciple of Iscariot, who betrayed the Lord through his greed. To the clergy, however, a superfluity of worldly goods is dearer than all the deaths and troubles of men! And undoubtedly, they do not have righteous ownership even of what they seem to have. How, I ask, can anyone who has a free supply of so many foodstuffs and yet makes himself die of hunger be called a possessor of those foodstuffs? Yet he is all the more damnable who, under the name of procurator in the church, takes possession of the money of the church so that he can make himself and the needy into friends of riches, and nevertheless makes himself and others perish in body and soul through sloth. Such a person is unworthy of being used by the priesthood or the procurator’s office, since he is a friend neither to himself nor to others. And such a prelate necessarily leads those beneath him precipitously into ruin. Let no hypocrite imagine that a surrender of a crucified inheritance for the people could occur too late, nor that it is right to feed our secular princes with this patrimony.85 In respect of the first point, it is certain that it would happen so late only because of the blindness of the prelate. In fact, according to the prophecy of Ezechiel, the prelate should be the watchman for those beneath him, and be alert to their needs by guarding against danger.86 And in respect of the second point, the church judges whether those worldly goods should be gathered together dishonestly in order thus to feed the disciples of Antichrist, or at an opportune moment should be collected for the protection of the poor, with their leaders guarding over them tyrannously. Likewise, it seems to be noted that the source of this discord is the waging of wars against foreign peoples. Yet the focus and the resolution of this rebellion are the clerics and the priests; hence, all of the consequent malice. For if they would refrain from attacking those from foreign lands, our kingdom would not be divested of its wealth and people; it is therefore inevitable that the poor man should have to steal from his own 84 Wyclif believed that Crown taxation of the clergy would have been preferable to papal taxation. 85 A further suggestion that Crown taxation would be preferable to papal taxation of the clergy. 86 The duties of the watchman are detailed in Ezechiel 3 and 33.

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people. And this is because as long as the treasury of the warmongers is deficient, it is necessary that it should plunder the destitute. For it has no notion of the deaths or the labour involved in this kind of war, so that, coming into the kingdom itself it is insulated from its injuries and injustices, even those of a close neighbour; for one bad custom begets another. For no robbers merit so much in such a clerical career as would render more people dead. As the spirit says in Isaiah 33[:1], ‘Woe to thee that spoilest, shalt not thou thyself also be spoiled?’ The remedy should be for these robbers to satisfy the material needs of the destitute, and to exhort them with due care to live faithfully from what is theirs. But now it is said that the clergy seek payment from such people, and this in return for a need that is cheaper than the forum at which they make their decrees. As for evangelical exhortation or the nourishment of bodies, it is clear that the clergy are much more silent about this. Through their ways and methods they provoke the warmongers to do wicked things, and, although prelates should pray, advise and urge ‘for things that are for the peace of Jerusalem’ (Psalm 121[:6]), it is said that as instigators of war they pray for physical violence. With them acting like leaders of the council, the parliament is ruled even in minor affairs, for as long as they care about them, since they present themselves as the leading spiritual part of the council of our kingdom. And so it seems that they desire that the Lord’s leaders, by whom, for better or for worse, their will is restricted, should be suppressed. For the presence of these people is the atom through which their will is impeded, but in respect of future dangers and harm to the realm it is not respected. Therefore, it is necessary for these prelates, here and elsewhere or everywhere, to pay. And in respect of the friars, it seems that they are not blameless in respect of this occurrence; for they should protest openly in public through their preaching, and in private encourage peace and concord, if it can be achieved, in every man. But they either fall silent or they protest to the contrary. They are therefore a part of this crime, either by their counsel or by their consent.

40 Wyclif ’s letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury Letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Courtenay (1383). Latin text: Opera Minora, pp. 3–6. In this late letter, Wyclif introduces himself as a ‘poor and humble priest’ and proceeds throughout (with a few exceptions) in the third person, generally

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identifying himself as ‘that same priest’ or ‘the said priest’. He advances in summary some of his most important and controversial ideas, as well as an appeal against the Despenser Crusade. It may be the case that this short document was never actually a letter sent to Archbishop Courtenay (who was by now an established enemy), but simply an affirmation of those ideas that Courtenay had repeatedly sought to condemn. If this is indeed the case, then Wyclif is addressing this affirmation to Courtenay in a purely provocative way.

Venerable father in Christ and the Lord, your poor and humble priest confides in your reverence through the sacrifice of his heart in the hope of paternal aid, knowing that he who can make things better, and does not, undoubtedly shows, causes and allows himself to be a partner in the wrongdoing. But the aforementioned priest has also often said and indeed shown that all priests could easily do without temporal lordship and tithes and gifts, which is part of what satisfies the Lord; for the Lord says this in Numbers 18, Deuteronomy 18 and Ezechiel 44. Faithful glosses fail to silence what heretics preach in respect of this. This same priest says secondly that bulls, charters and letters cannot be fully legalised in the absence of the ruler’s agreement. Since God’s law lasts eternally, it is not believed that God gives his agreement to this.87 The same priest said thirdly that it can probably be assumed, in memory of the death of those earlier saints who accepted such a donation, that they were contrite in respect of all of their past sins through God’s mercy. But however probable that assumption may seem to many people, it should nevertheless be accepted only as a belief. That same priest has said and maintained that neither the pope nor an angel from heaven does or says anything worthy of praise except in so far as it is well-grounded in scripture. It is clear from this that truth alone is worthy of praise, and the said scripture contains all truths. Second, the same priest has said and maintained correspondingly that any viator living among us might easily stray into error, and especially the pope, due to his hostile retinue and devils jealously taunting. For Peter, after the sending of the Holy Spirit, sinned, as is shown in Galatians 2[:11–14], on account of which he was reprehended by Paul, as should have been the case. Nevertheless, the said Peter exceeded many popes in his sanctity as in his wisdom. The same priest has said and maintained thirdly that he does not find in scripture that the erection of the cross for the defence of the papal cause is lawful, or that it proceeded with the approval of the Lord 87 That is, priests’ receipt of endowments and the capacity for lordship, as well as to the legalisation of bulls, charters and letters in the absence of the monarch’s approval.

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Jesus Christ.88 For it is evident that only the work of a man that has been carried out with charity has the approval of the Lord. But it is likely that neither the killing of people nor the impoverishment of countries proceeds from the charity of the Lord Jesus Christ, especially since it is not our belief that the pope is either the head or even a member of the holy mother church militant. And thus it seems that this is not a firm justification for martyrdom and the impoverishment of people and of workers as though they were troublesome or harmful. Nevertheless, that same priest is prepared, if he learns that any deed relating to that matter is orthodox, to approve that same deed to his people, and revoke his ill-considered point. But he has said these difficult things lest he should be proved wrong, like the Lord’s false witness, who has not learned from the teaching of scripture to think of such a crusade as a good thing, and as a charitable or meritorious enterprise.89 Secondly, that same priest said chiefly that the consecrated host is truly and really the body of Christ. And it is known from this that Christ, who cannot lie, said of that host, ‘This is my body’. For just as Christ took the bread into his hands, blessed it, broke it and gave it to his disciples to eat and made them all eat from it, saying, ‘This is my body’, so through this pronoun he identifies the same bread that he had earlier shown directly to them. And Jerome, that diligent investigator of holy scripture, testifies to this: ‘We hear’, he says, ‘that the bread that the Lord broke and gave to his disciples to eat is the body of our Lord and saviour, saying this: “This is my body.” ’ It is known from these things, correspondingly, that the said consecrated host is not an accident without a subject and is not an accidental category or thing else. It is clear that the host really is the body of Christ, and thus far not any heretic has dared to propose that the body of the Lord is any such thing. It is inferred from these things secondly that the high officials of kingdoms should gather their religious parties in respect of such a matter so as to express their belief. But it is not right to persuade the common people that the body of the Lord is there, because we know by faith that the trinity, rather than the body, is everywhere. Thirdly, it seems that it should be added, correspondingly, that neither a person nor a group should challenge anyone in this matter before they have 88 Here, as elsewhere, when Wyclif refers to the erection of the cross he is speaking of the calling of a crusade. Cf. 35. In this passage, he is referring to the failed crusade against the Antipope Clement VII during the early years of the papal schism. It was led by the Bishop of Norwich, Henry Despenser, from 17 May 1383. It is usually known as the Despenser Crusade. 89 The reference here is again to the Despenser Crusade.

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learned the true faith in respect of it. For certain people offended the Roman Curia by announcing to it heretically that the host is an accident without a subject. But it is also known from the teaching of the gospel that no angel from Heaven can utter that dogma to men. But under Nicholas II, as is shown in ‘On Consecration’, distinction 2, under the chapter entitled ‘I, Berengar’,90 our sense is taught. But the meritorious work of the primate of the land in the governing articles of faith should make it necessary for religious groups and people under their regime to write down clearly what they understand by the said consecrated host, and reveal it by the temperate truth of faith throughout their province or kingdom. For a prelate acting negligently in this matter is the author of a crime by consent. The said priest has been freely declaring his belief in this matter and all others in accordance with his power and knowledge, and, if he is ignorant in respect of a question he humbly confesses his ignorance, and in that matter as in others he protests his belief publicly that humbly he wants to subject himself to the Catholic doctrine of the prelates, especially if there is a doctrine that is shown to be confirmed through the authority of Scripture. I am certain by my faith that a heretic or a damnable person may be discerned only through holy scripture, since heresy is false dogma, defended tenaciously against scriptural teaching; accordingly, God can neither reward nor damn anyone, except by this law. It would be bizarre indeed if anyone were to raise himself up above all that is called God and become a foreign legislator in matters of the faith!

90 CICPP iii, d. 2, ch. 42.

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VII: SHORTER TEXTS AND POLEMICAL TRACTS This chapter contains translations of a selection of shorter documents that were edited by Rudolf Buddensieg for the Wyclif Society in Polemical Works (vols 1 and 2, 1882–83). On the Noonday Devil is generally held to be the earliest of these, and is normally dated within a short period of the death of Edward III’s eldest son, the Black Prince, on 8 June 1376, which is mentioned in this text. The king himself died only a little over a year later. The other two texts, On the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit and On the Loosing of Satan, whose polemic ranges far beyond the very limited scope of On the Noonday Devil, are generally held to have been written towards the end of Wyclif ’s life.

41 On the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit On the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit. Latin text: Polemical Works in Latin, vol. 1, pp. 208–30. This treatise shares its name and its structure with a tract by the ­thirteenth-century Franciscan St Bonaventure, Collations on the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit (Collationes de Septem Donis Spiritus Sancti).1 It is an analysis of the seven gifts listed in Isaiah 11[:2–3]: the spirit of wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, godliness and the fear of the Lord. As a theologian who lived around a century after him, Wyclif did not share Bonaventure’s concerns about threats posed by the Latin translations of Aristotle’s works that emerged in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (newer metaphysical and logical threats had succeeded them), but he did share his anxieties about abuses of the faith. Wyclif explains systematically here how the modern sects (the secular clergy, the monks, the canons and the friars) have failed to make good use of each of these gifts. He also makes several more explicit references to the friars, most notably in chapters 5 and 8, in which they are said to have attempted to kill the Duke of Lancaster through slanderous accusations, and even to have poisoned a king.

 1 For the text of Bradwardine’s treatise, see Bonauentura: Opera Omnia, vol. 5, ed. members of the College of St Bonaventure (New Foundland, CA: Press of the College of St Bonaventure, 1891), pp. 457–503.

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Chapter 1 Since the Holy Spirit is the third person of the trinity and the works of the trinity are indivisible externally, it is clear that the whole trinity impresses the knowledge that guides it into the minds of the human species, and ends in its final purpose. Therefore, just as the soul is better than any knowledge of worldly things, and because the clemency of the trinity is shown in its desire to teach viators in this way, likewise that knowledge, which has seven parts, is called the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, which arise out of the clemency of the deity, through which it seeks not merely to create and govern the human species, but also to teach it in a salubrious way. In Isaiah 11[:2–3], this is rendered thus: ‘And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him: the spirit of wisdom, and of understanding, the spirit of counsel, and of fortitude, the spirit of knowledge, and of godliness. And he shall be filled with the spirit of fear [of the Lord].’ For just as Christ was filled with this sevenfold gift as a man, so the whole trinity decreed that through his humanity, as its direct mouthpiece, that sevenfold gift would be prophesied. And since that excellent master is more like us and more familiar to us, and therefore better placed to convey this knowledge to the human race, the whole trinity ordained that he should be incarnated as its son, and speak with men at the gravest times. Therefore, each of those seven gifts is revealed to the faithful proportionately, as the blessed rinity thought that knowledge should be imparted to them. It is taken as a principle of faith, first of all, that these seven gifts, like certain universals, are sufficient to satisfy the whole of the soul, to an end that is agreeable to the viator. Whatever a man has learnt beyond those seven, therefore, is less superfluous than injurious. And thus the error of the human race is known in the diligent learning of human traditions, in curious mechanical arts and other arts that are of practical use to men but are regulated without divine influence. Chapter 2 The first of these seven gifts is therefore called sapientia (wisdom) in Latin, which the name-givers say is like sapida scientia (savoury knowledge), and the philosophers say is the knowledge that a person acquires of God here. This knowledge should therefore be the foundation upon which any other kind of knowledge should be built. From this it may be determined how far the sects of the human race have deteriorated. Forsaking the course of teaching of the trinity that was set out for

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humankind, they maintain as dogmatists useless aspects of human tradition and other sciences because of their pride or greed, and some, who are called ‘religious’ antonomastically, observe papal traditions, but mixed together with many errors, and clearly dismiss salubrious knowledge of the trinity.2 Yet although any one of us will only have had a poor, indistinct knowledge of the trinity in this life, that spark of knowledge nevertheless stands before all kinds of knowledge that may be gleaned from human traditions. And the Lord complains bitterly about this sin in the second chapter of the book of Jeremiah: ‘For my people have done two evils. They have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and have digged to themselves cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water. (2[:13])’ But since we should prize God above all things in accordance with our supreme faith, and since, as a general principle, nothing may be loved unless it is known, we see how necessary it is for us to know God and also to know about those empty traditions that obstruct that knowledge, in order to warn against them. And those who thus become degenerate in their philosophy blaspheme against God implicitly, and against the first commandment of the decalogue, as when they make God the subject of their frivolous art. For knowledge and love should be mutually consequential. And it is clear to the faithful, with regard to Jeremiah’s words, how God is the font of the water of life in a mystical sense, and how human traditions are dispersed from a cistern. Because of their inconstancy and falsity, sapiential knowledge cannot be established through these traditions, and this is the reason why the human race is so prone to love worldly goods. The supreme power of the intellect should be inclined towards love, and should move the body towards a subject from which there is more [love], for there are many scriptural testimonies and faithful arguments that move people to love and to testify to the excellence of this gift. Chapter 3 The second gift of the Spirit is called understanding. Now, according to the philosophers, the thing called understanding is what proceeds immediately from wisdom, and this conclusion is demonstrated by, and according to, the truth. And these two forms of knowledge should first make full the supreme and primary intellective power of a person,  2 See Glossary of terms for a definition of antonomasia. Wyclif often uses this word antonomastically.

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since there is no faith without these habits. And therefore, in Hebrews 11[:16] the apostle says, ‘he that cometh to God, must believe that he is, and is a rewarder of the good’.3 For just as we believe God through the gift of wisdom, so we believe that each creature has proceeded out of his goodness, and consequently, that that goodness brings with it a good end, consistent with each creature. And as a consequence, since man is a creature made in the image of an incorruptible God, we believe that he rewards the person who serves him faithfully through ­everlasting blessedness. And since our fault is known through that infallible daily sign that man had sinned, and from the human sense of loss and our fruitful servitude to God, we know that the blessedness that will be restored to man remains available (even though the immensity of the sin committed against God requires satisfaction from the spirit of that same understanding, according to divine justice), we conclude safely that it is necessary for divine wisdom to be made incarnate for the said crime to be made good. And from this same teaching spirit we conclude that whatever work Christ did in his humanity, since he is God and man, was done without defect. And from this, the same spirit teaches, sixth, that Christ’s method is to be observed, in its entirety, by the faithful. And from these points it follows, seventh, that it is a grave sin to offend against any single gift of such an understanding. All such gifts proceed, in their place, from the wisdom of our God. And it is clear how far those that are called ‘orders’ sin, who monstrously add the conclusions of men to the law of God, in order to return, through them, as spiritual sojourners, to the heavenly fatherland. And therefore they blaspheme against God both implicitly and expressly, and it is no wonder if the sin of those new orders, drawn from the mine of hidden sin, grows stronger. And for this reason, Augustine says in his letter to the people of Hippo that through the God that he had begun to serve he found no worse men than those who had fallen under monastic rule.4 So, we should cease to study the doctrinal conclusions of men and study instead such understanding as is given by the Spirit, since that is faith. And we should forsake so much the more those practical conclusions that have arisen out of the gainful traditions of men, since in those there is the greatest number of false   3 The final clause in the Vulgate text translates as ‘and is a rewarder to them that seek him’.  4 Letter 78;  CSEL  34, pp. 344–5;  Letters: 1–99  (Hyde Park, NY:  New City Press, 2001), pp. 309–10. 

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fictions. For in the first chapter of the Book of Wisdom it is written: ‘the Holy Spirit of discipline will flee from the deceitful’ (1[:5]). And the error of understanding that lies in that deceit, though it may seem modest to the everyday person, is nevertheless the medium through which the devil plunges men into worldly things, and thereby into hell. For according to prophecy, the water of divine wisdom is clear, and the water of human tradition muddy. For those who forsake this clear wisdom, and readily drink instead unhealthy, muddy and earthy water, sin in no small way against divine goodness. Chapter 4 The third gift of God is called the spirit of counsel. And this spirit is united with the other gifts to show that it is necessary for them to proceed from the Holy Spirit. And those two gifts are united with the preceding speculative gifts to show that the viator should not remain quiet in speculation here, but should also prudently seek activity. But divine counsel is required in respect of different kinds of act or work, for, according to the apostle in Romans 8[:14], ‘whosoever are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God’. But if he gives to man a treasury of wisdom and understanding so that in his work he can be of benefit to the church militant, it is clear how far man quashes his promise to his God if he abandons this work. But since the mercy of the Holy Spirit is great, sowing thus the word of God in those born of earth, it is clear that those people who are idle in their work oppose the mercy of their God. And the cause of this cannot be imagined, unless it is the devil’s curiosity or pride or the idleness, by which man, like the devil, seeks to be at rest in himself, as is God. And because of this, James says, in his second chapter, ‘even as the body without the spirit is dead; so also faith without works is dead’ (2[:26]). But it is clear how far those who are following the Holy Spirit forsake him, and observe instead the counsel of the malign spirit. For many children of the devil act in accordance with the counsel of someone seeking knowledge for the sake of curiosity, or in accordance with the counsel of the world, pursuing the prosperity of a stimulating age, or according to the counsel of the flesh, which drives us towards carnal pleasures. And there is no doubt that these spirits are malign. But how does such a person remain faithful to the Lord when he abandons the counsel of the Holy Spirit in this way, and follows instead the spirit of darkness? The gift of the Holy Spirit says that although his counsel is especially difficult and arduous to follow in practice, it is

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nevertheless ultimately sweet and useful. And the contrary applies to the work that the devil incites us to do. In fact, it is hard to stand up for orthodox truth because many are the children of the devil who persecute such orthodox people. Those, nevertheless, who are led by the Holy Spirit do not give up on account of such persecution, but rather, they are animated on account of the difficulty of their work, according to the statement in Acts 5[:41]: And [the apostles] went from the presence of the council, rejoicing that they were accounted worthy to suffer reproach for the name of Jesus.’ And according to John 14[:27], Christ gave to his disciples a peace that is constant tranquillity of the mind: ‘my peace I give unto you’. Hence, Antichrist muttered about these words in the following way: ‘Since Christ’s apostles and disciples were persecuted many times in this world, how therefore do they have the peace of the Lord given to them?’ But they knew how there is a twofold peace corresponding to the twofold nature in man, namely, bodily and spiritual peace. Peace of the body is the quiet possession of a virtuous body, in the same way as kingdoms are said to have peace when neighbouring kingdoms bring war to an end. And that peace, although it is good, is nevertheless far inferior to the second, because, just as the soul is superior to the body, so peace of the soul is better than peace that is confined to the body. That second kind of peace, therefore, which is constant tranquillity of the mind, decorated by the gift of the virtue of patience and of faith, was held excellently by the apostles. And here the religious moderns grow embarrassed and say that in this respect they differ from us because they observe all of Christ’s counsels, but we observe only the bare precepts. But in fact, if they served the counsels of Christ perfectly they would let go of the monstrous assemblies and devilish prelates to whom they are bound, and wisely submit themselves completely to the agreeable law of God. For such [corrupt] counsel does not proceed from the Holy Spirit, since he protects the interests of Christ’s apostles on habitable ground without such infamous traditions, by proceeding two by two, as the perfect apostles did,5 to cover every part for the edification of the church. And from this same spirit emerges the disproval of Antichrist’s fictions. For Antichrist says that those precepts of the Lord are nothing but counsels by which only the poor are bound, or no men whatsoever. But if that principle seems to you to be one of God’s counsels, then you sin gravely, contrary to the will of the Holy Spirit. Indeed, if as a powerful and wise man of the community you recommended something and then freely did it, but without faith   5 See Mark 6:7 and Luke 10:1.

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you held the supreme counsel of God to be of little value, then likewise, you would sin. And it is evident from careful scrutiny that the counsel of the Holy Spirit is a command, and contempt of that counsel is not without the penalty of a grave sin, since anyone having such contempt sins gravely and loses all of the benefit that would follow from the observation of such counsel. Chapter 5 But since the Holy Spirit does not direct us towards secular prosperity or applause from men of the world, but entirely towards the opposite, it is clear that anyone following this fourth recommendation of the Holy Spirit exposes himself to dangerous acts of bodily persecution. The fourth gift of the Holy Spirit is therefore necessary, namely, strength of mind. Although God brought into being all the bodily strength of man, it is nevertheless pertinent to what has been argued to speak here of the strength of mind that operates in the upholding of the law of God. Philosophers have spoken about that strength, suggesting that it is one of the cardinal virtues, which they say are justice, strength, prudence and temperance. And we understand in this way that the apostles were strong in war, together with other soldiers fighting against the ancient serpent. And in this sense Christ understood John the Baptist to be strong in Matthew 11[:7–9], when he said that the Baptist was not a reed, shaken in the wind, or a man clothed in soft garments, but a prophet describing the constancy of strength that would later be assumed by the faithful. For a defect in faith makes that strength waver, just as a reed that is secured weakly wavers easily with any motion of the wind. In respect of those things, the devil’s children can be distinguished from the children of God through the constancy of their strength in their leaders’ cause. For soldiers of the world are not as strong in their souls as in their bodies, exposing themselves to great danger for the sake of secular glory, or personal fame that is so much sought after, but foolishly retreating from the cause of God. Likewise, clerics expose themselves to the dangers of land and sea for the sake of acquiring a benefice in the Roman Curia, but do not dare to speak the faith of Christ the Lord to insulting adversaries, or make one of Belial’s footsoldiers known to men. And thus the friars dare to slander dukes and princes almost to the point of death for the sake of their observance of their rotten order,6  6 This is seemingly an allusion to the attempt by the Irish Carmelite friar John Latimer early in 1384 to convince Richard II that Gaunt was plotting to kill him.

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whilst in the cause of God by which, according to their ordination into Christ’s poverty, the church should be ruled, they do not dare to say a word, because they fear losing secular favour and satraps’ gifts. And to speak briefly, the foolishness of priests in the cause of God and their constancy in the cause of the devil shows how vain their religion is, and how they are manifestly traitors to God and crusaders for the devil, the strongest fighters for his cause. The Holy Spirit arms his soldiers with the weapons of patience and the promise of future merit, and not with a sword or with physical strength, and in Acts 2[:2], in a threefold image in which the Holy Spirit appeared, we read that ‘[S]uddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a mighty wind coming, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting.’ There is no doubt that here, the force of the wind that thus fills [the house] figuratively signifies spiritual fortitude, driving away all culpable folly and generally rousing a spiritual strength of purpose in everyone. But the second figure of fiery tongues is not included here,7 because strength of divine love has now been destroyed, and the fading torch in worldly hearts that lean figuratively towards the inferno is made ready by the devil; thus, thirdly, mildness of judgement is suspended, and the dogma of the greedy and inconstant is displayed to the children of the devil. And thus the gifts of the Holy Spirit, together with his work and his brotherhood of viators, are subverted, and therefore those people of the world who should be people of the spirit are brought down into their oppressive bodies, as is shown in Luke 11[:24–6],8 and the strength of the Holy Spirit that should belong to spiritual viators is turned into Richard initially reacted angrily, and ordered Gaunt to be killed, but afterwards conceded that this would be a rash course of action. The friar was later brutally tortured by the duke’s retainers as he was led to imprisonment. It is quite possible that the friar’s hostility towards Gaunt was motivated by the duke’s support for Wyclif (see note below), but there is nothing in the sources to suggest this. If Wyclif is indeed alluding to Latimer’s accusation against Gaunt, then Thomson’s suggestion that this text was written late in 1383 must be rejected. See Westminster Chronicle, pp. 68–80, for a contemporary account of this event, or The Reign of Richard II, ed. Alison K. McHardy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), p. 116. See also Latin Writings, p. 86 for the dating of this text.   7 This is the second part of the ‘threefold’ image mentioned by Wyclif earlier. After the ‘sound from heaven’, the biblical text reports that ‘there appeared to them parted tongues as it were of fire, and it sat upon every one of them’.   8 ‘When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through places without water, seeking rest; and not finding, he saith: I will return into my house whence I came out. And when he is come, he findeth it swept and garnished. Then he goeth and taketh with him seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and entering in they dwell there. And the last state of that man becomes worse than the first.’

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bodily strength, and consequently the fight against the devil, which should be a spiritual one, is turned into the most atrocious of physical battles, because it is not only people of the world who fight in this way, but also bishops, who should be the mildest of people. And so, those who should have patience in their souls in accordance with the teaching of the gospel achieve their worldly victories in brutality, and those who should be humbler and simpler in poverty are prouder and more superficial through their exaltation of worldly things. And those who should speak the truth of the gospel speak falsehoods like liars. And last of all, those who should preserve their strength through humility and patience call on their physical strength in militarised battles and in similar corporeal scurrility. And now that Jordan has thus been turned backwards, one day the children of God will be transformed into the devil’s children.9 Chapter 6 The fifth gift of the Holy Spirit is the gift of knowledge. Since knowledge, according to philosophers, is the apprehension of conclusions deduced from the principles of wisdom and understanding, whether speculative or practical, it is clear that the Holy Spirit would be failing its church unless it provided such knowledge. But the faithful person should know by which of his skills he might charitably help his neighbour, and that part of the gift of knowledge that is the practical outcome of working is essential to the viator. In fact, through our faith we understand that the whole of our momentary viatical journey on earth exists for the sake of the blessedness that we seek. It is therefore necessary for us to make good our short time here and learn more of such conclusions as a means to blessedness, in accordance with this gift of the Holy Spirit. And this is to know how we, and our nearest, can become rich in God’s affection. It is obvious how far these new orders are lacking in this gift of knowledge, since they are devoted chiefly to activities through which they become rich in endowments and other worldly goods, just as monks in the human arts are said to be devoted to civil and canon   9 The children of Israel passed across the Jordan (whose waters had dried up miraculously) into the Promised Land (Joshua 3:16–17), and Christ was among the people baptised by John there (Mark 1:9). Baptism is the sacramental rite of entry into the Christian church, as well as a ritualised process of spiritual purification. The turning backwards of the Jordan would appear to symbolise for Wyclif the ostensible abandonment of Christian spiritual values in the contemporary church.

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law, both publicly and in private. The cause of this seems to be that this is lucrative knowledge, and the desire for worldly goods demands it through a consequent malice. The more of this is consumed, the more the devil rouses [them], so that a multitude of worldly goods are ardently grasped. The straying viator, because of his persistent wandering, necessarily moves ever further away from righteousness in his journey. The prudent viator should therefore consider how the provision of endowments and the possession of worldly goods constitute a departure from the state of innocence, and from the condition that Christ had celebrated, along with his apostles. It is therefore inevitable that those religions, immersed in worldly goods, will desire to have more, the more they have consumed. The reason for this, according to philosophers, is that the human soul, naturally seeking blessedness and therefore God, does not have within its possession a simple likeness of the good. Therefore, since it lacks goodness of the soul, it naturally seeks a greater goodness, and because it is confused by its desire for worldly goods, it seeks to become satisfied through those worldly goods, which is impossible. If, through the impossible, therefore, an infinite number of worlds could be acquired, it would desire still more good things, because the highest good, in which alone the soul is disposed to be at peace, would be lacking from it. And the psalmist seems to sense this in Psalm 16[:15]: ‘But as for me, I will appear before thy sight in justice: I shall be satisfied when thy glory shall appear’. St Augustine [speaks] likewise in the Confessions: ‘You have made us, Lord, for yourself, and our soul is unquiet until it finds rest with you’.10 And in that inconstancy of human traditions the new orders deviate from the religion of our Lord Jesus Christ. Hence, the friars are said to desire an infinite number of friends and worldly goods, through which their party is sustained. And they are said therefore to sell their paltry sermons, the writings of their brotherhood, their prayers and other such things, with which the devil teaches them to do commerce with the faithful.11 And there is no doubt that just as they have the skills to adorn themselves according to their orders, so they have the said skills of seeking worldly goods from the community of the destitute faithful. Undoubtedly, however, that knowledge is not a habit that is instilled by the Holy Spirit. For just as the Trinity laid out all of its works by 10 CCSL 27, p. 24; The Confessions, trans. Maria Boulding, second edition (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2014), p. 39. 11 Friars are known to have been accomplished scribes and copyists; some devoted considerable time to producing books for sale, contrary to the regulations of their order.

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measure, number and weight, so it lays out all of the knowledge that it graciously gives to the viator. Of what benefit, therefore, could such knowledge [as the friars possess] have been to the ancient fathers in the first church? And the same is seen in respect of the meanderings in grammar, logic, metaphysics and other branches of learning in which the moderns deviate from the road to blessedness, even though this blessedness would be the end which all pathways leading to it would measure. And the gift of knowledge, because of sins and other human interests, is seldom acquired. And this is a plain sign that the Holy Spirit rarely enters into viators. What, I ask, is the necessity of spending time and human ingenuity so that a man may know how to gird a friar, and decorate himself and his friends with other images that those empty new religions have discovered?12 Actually, just as bodies are dirtied through such traditions, so minds are corrupted through those so-called sciences. And from that error, sorcery, philosophical ­divination and other diabolical arts will emerge. Chapter 7 The sixth gift of the Holy Spirit is called piety, which is subdivided into theosebia and eusebia.13 Theosebia is said to be the gift of the Holy Spirit by which man charitably bestows reverence upon God, whereas eusebia is said to be the act of compliance by which man charitably respects his kin as he should. And that gift of piety notably follows the gift of knowledge, since knowledge should be measured by such piety. And a person should learn or attend to no knowledge unless it will be beneficial to the acquisition of piety. We should therefore disregard or suspend our interest in those empty pieces of knowledge that we learned at an earlier point in time. The gift of piety moves others to strive to restore the orders of those new sects to the pure sect of the Lord Jesus Christ, because that piety would resonate with their own love and that of the faithful, whom those orders torment. But just as the order of gifts of the Holy Spirit is transformed according to the 12 Each of these things, from the knotting of the friar’s girdle (the three knots stood for the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience) to his personal decoration with images, is perceived by Wyclif as an unnecessary material accessory and a potential distraction from a devout way of life. 13 These two Greek terms are almost synonymous. They may each be translated as ‘piety’ or ‘fear of / reverence for God’. Here, eusebia is given a slightly more nuanced meaning by Wyclif.

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above statements, so is the gift of piety, since impiety is now called piety and vice versa! Nowadays, ‘piety’ is invoked to bestow worldly goods upon a guest, even though they are harmful to him and to the church militant, just as if it were said that supplying a sharp sword to a madman and a warm drink to a feverish individual were a great piety. And the friars labour in that ‘piety’, since they want their order, in which they fall away from Christ’s religion, to expand. Therefore, whatever a member of one of these orders has done, they attribute it to the whole order if it brings about glory and personal wealth, yet if it seems to attract criticism, the opposite occurs. Hence, it has often been doubted that anything can be salvaged from what has been described here. Certain people say that just as God, principally, should receive praise for any praiseworthy deed of an individual person, likewise, for any culpable deed of an individual within their orders the entire order is blameworthy, especially if that order should happen to be the cause of, or have given consent to, the perpetrated deed. But against this certain people argue that, by the same token, if a person has sinned then the whole Christian religion should be punished. But how very unjust, when God, who is the very principle of righteousness, contradicts it by making any particular person bear his own burden, because otherwise the righteous would be punished on the devil’s account! Here, other people say that those orders, which are not founded in the Lord, should inform the church of the fault of even one person, since the whole church should strive to restore the whole order to the pure religion of Christ. For Christ’s religion teaches that good should make amends for evil. Therefore, when the whole order gives consent to an individual deed, since the error of sin is communicated to the whole order, Christ’s religion drives it out by means of piety to God and the whole church, and the error of that whole new order is corrected. Therefore, just as a man who strikes a member of his close family with his fist should not only be punished in his fist by the Lord’s piety, but the good pain of justice should be extended to the whole man, so the same is seen in respect of the badness of those orders. And it is said that those new orders are participating in error in a way that is utterly contrary to reason! But it is different in respect of those who are predestined to glory and those who are foreknown to torment. On each side, nevertheless, piety should be employed because unless piety were in those new orders, I would have to concede that their whole community would be dissolved through the fault of one person. Yet that dissolution would be beneficial to any person of that order, and to the whole of the church militant. Nevertheless, I will not concede this

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unless I should receive a divine revelation that any one of them should perish. But a trustworthy catholic must devote himself to what appears as though it will be beneficial to any of those people and to the whole church.

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Chapter 8 The seventh and final gift of the Holy Spirit is fear of the Lord, which is the foundation of all of the others. For he who fears the Lord as he should can preserves himself from all badness, as far as is possible. Augustine therefore suggests that just as hair creates the thread in hard leather, so fear of the Lord gives rise to other virtues that follow through time or in a hidden sequence. And it seems that the Holy Spirit here speaks of filial fear, since natural fear has no relevance to virtues or vices, as Christ was naturally afraid, and servile fear has the flavour of sin through its inherent senselessness. Filial fear is called holy fear, enduring forever, and is that fear or suffering which brings about blessedness, since it terminates with God in accordance with the scale of his lordship, and includes the terror induced by a person’s own sin and the love of the divine person, on account of which he personally shrinks away from sin. And few or no viators possess that fear of the Lord, since they have greater fear of their temporal lord than their Lord God, and shrink more from the burden of a temporal offence than from the burden of guilt, on account of which man is damnable through divine justice. All would therefore be well for the man who had that fear of the Lord, together with the six gifts that precede it, perfectly. And here, the faithful note how those new orders and each of the four sects will have been afraid where there was no fear, because they love their predatory sect more than they love the Christian sect or order, and they fear the loss of temporal payment more than the loss of a good home, on account of the sin welling up against the Holy Spirit. And to this end the devil deceives them with such a fallacy as this: their order is better than any person within it, but they are to be zealous for a greater good; therefore, they are to be more zealous for the salvation of their order than for any person within it, or for any member of the church militant. And that fallacy is said to have moved the friars to poison a king through the consecrated host,14 and other friars of our 14 The reference here is frustratingly imprecise. Lechler suggests either Henry VII of Germany, who became Roman Emperor in 1313, or Günther of Schwarzburg (d. 1349). Henry reportedly died after receiving communion from a Dominican friar. See Polemical Works, vol. 1, p. 227, note b.

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own time to kill our lord the Duke of Lancaster15 because he did not wish faithful priests to give punishment; they wished to do this to defend their order.16 And the introduction of those orders has the danger concealed within it that the devil can deceive them so that they would plan the death of the king, of kings or princes, or of communities, on account of the inordinate desire that they have to conserve such an injurious order. But the truth is that it would be useful and healthy for the faithful church to observe that such orders should cease to be when they do not have a foundation in the Lord. For the authority of the gospel says in John 10[:1]: ‘He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up another way, the same is a thief and a robber.’ But all of those new orders did not enter into the church through the door – Jesus Christ – but stealthily over the roof of the church using the devil’s trickery. It is certain, therefore, that those who enter by stealth through the devil are thieves and bandits, who steal, kill and squander. But if they would enter through the door, any one of them could discover where, when and how they could enter by the Lord’s authority. But since they do not know this, those orders are mistrusted by the circumspect faithful on account of their theft and banditry. But in answer to the devil’s sophistry, it is to be conceded that these orders should be more greatly loved materially in respect of the creatures that are said to be within them, than is any person among them. Nevertheless, their people and their virtues are loved more by the Lord than a thousand such orders formally construed, even though the false implication remains that such orders are worthy of love when construed in such a way. We should therefore love people and despise their collective dispositions. Then, neither a friar nor any person from within these new orders would be deceived by the devil’s sophistry into killing his imprisoned brother, or any magnate or community, since the natural life of a person is stronger than a group of this kind that has been established 15 This is probably another allusion to Latimer’s accusation against Gaunt, and the king’s initial desire to have him put to death. See Chapter 7 n. 6. 16 The reference to John of Gaunt’s reluctance to administer punishment appear to be to Wyclif ’s being summoned to St Paul’s in February 1377 to answer charges brought by Archbishop Sudbury. He appeared with John of Gaunt and four friars, but the proceedings descended into chaos before they had meaningfully begun. The friars were brought to lend assistance to Wyclif, who had not publicly criticised them at this point (and would appear to have favoured them). On the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit is a late tract, and it is clear that Wyclif is retrospectively interpreting the event in an anti-fraternal light.

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by the devil. By scattering such orders of nature and works of God into those orders, therefore, they may be saved; yet moral virtues are infinitely better than those orders. A man should therefore be ready to die in suffering for those virtues.

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Chapter 9 But against this, Antichrist objects that according to this evidence, craft societies, guilds, towns, and countries would not love themselves reciprocally, since battles and wars that destroy many people could arise from within them. It does not therefore follow from what has been said above that that the many evils that could arise should therefore be destroyed by the people, since many evils can arise from any individual creature and indeed, as it seems to certain people, from God himself. Here it is said that the faithful man cannot not remain quiet about this response, but must rather [proceed as follows]: Christ, our omnipotent, omniscient and omnivolent Lord, was most perfect and benevolent in his law and ordination, and in no way blameworthy or defective in relation to God or any creature. But nowhere in the whole body of the law did he teach, explicitly or implicitly, that such sects should come into being in order to rule the church. The orthodox individual should be measuredly peaceful according to the ordination of his [Lord] Jesus Christ. The major premise is clear as a matter of faith, and the minor is known from the fact that Christ’s most beneficial sect is sufficient in itself; it would therefore be superfluous to add new sects. For the created universe tends towards God’s likeness as far as reason allows, as does any part of it. The church of Christ, therefore, on account of the unity of its patron and the unity of the rule of Christ’s sect, craves unity, and when, after a thousand years, Satan is loosed and the newest sect of friars has been introduced, then it has disappeared. Certain people take proof from the fact that both Christ and reason seek such unity according to the teaching of the apostle in Ephesians 4[:3–6].17 And a third explanation lies in the fact that Christ could arrange his church into such unity more harmoniously according to reason. And neither reason nor authority challenges that, but each is consonant with it; it should therefore be righteously maintained. If any members of these sects, such as the friars or others, should imagine 17 ‘Careful to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. One body and one Spirit; as you are called in one hope of your calling. One Lord, one faith, one baptism. One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in us all.’

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that Christ indistinctly or specifically gave his approval to that sect, let them therefore say where that was, and by what means. And may a Catholic engage wisely with their way of responding. And may the faithful man note how Christ spoke the truth most secretly or explicitly, whether through words, deeds or taciturnity, in accordance with what was useful to his church. Let the friars say, then, where he gave his approval to those sects, if they know. And it therefore seems that Christ did not concern himself with those sects approvingly or explicitly, but, as appears elsewhere in On the Foundation of the Friars, he prophesied their sin in a multiplicity of ways.18 Here ends the Treatise on the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit

42 On the Loosing of Satan On the Loosing of Satan. Latin text: Polemical Works, vol. 2, pp. 391–400. This treatise focuses on a short passage in the Book of Apocalypse in which Satan in bound and cast into an abyss for one thousand years. Wyclif argues that from the time of Christ’s ascension until the present day Satan has been loosed from the abyss in a range of different ways. He finds aspects of this loosing in the activity of the ‘four false sects’ and of the friars in particular. Indeed, the strong degree of antifraternalism here is very characteristic of Wyclif ’s late writings (the treatise is thought to have been written within a year of his death).19 And I saw an angel coming down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit, and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the dragon the old serpent, which is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years. Apocalypse 20[:1–2].

Chapter 1 In response to the friars’ claim that Scripture is not well understood in relation to the loosing of Satan after a thousand years, of which we read in the Book of Apocalypse, Gregory, in Book 18 of the Morals, on the text ‘And I saw an angel coming down from heaven … and he bound Satan for a thousand years’, suggests that a period of time should 18 The reference here is to On the Foundation of the Sects, which certainly represents his most extensive and vitriolic attack on the friars. It was composed late in 1381. See De Fundatione Sectarum in Polemical Works, vol. 1, pp. 13–80. 19 Latin Writings, p. 301.

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not be signified by the number one thousand, but rather the period during which he reigned over the whole church.20 Hence, the friars say that Satan was loosed to a greater degree in the first millennium, on account of his persecution of the church in Christ and his followers, than in the second, in which, as we see, the friars say that the church is not troubled, except by poor heretics. And in respect of the friars’ importunate suggestion, I reply that St Gregory’s statement about the degree to which the faith of scripture is consonant with reason should be accepted first. For neither Augustine nor any other Catholic saints wanted to be believed on the basis of reason alone, without the authors of Scripture. It is therefore conceded that there are many Antichrists and thus many Satans, for in 1 John 2[:18] it is said, ‘even now there are become many Antichrists’, and thus, from the time of the Ascension of our Lord until this present day, the devil is loosed through many channels. And this prophetic statement [in Apocalypse 20] should not be understood to mean that this malign spirit is bound by his many limbs with rope or iron chain in the underworld, since his spirit is free in every way from those limbs. Rather, through the binding of Satan it is understood that after the ascension of the Lord the temptation of his wickedness was suspended, though he would tempt afterwards. But since the efficacy of his acts of temptation lies in his wicked instruments, such as those wicked men who are his limbs, and consequently the church militant proceeds to deteriorate, the Holy Spirit understood by a thousand years not a precise period of time, as St Gregory seems to say, but the time until which his evil ministers are notably admitted into the church, which undoubtedly happens in those times during which the four false sects stealthily enter. And it occupied a thousand years because the Spirit knew that time to be something notable, and thus, in the first millennium Satan was often loosed to some degree. But in the second millennium, when those mendacious sects rose up to spread hypocrisy, then he was loosed more fully, because in those false friars he had instruments with which to lead the church astray more skilfully. For it is with nothing but lies and hypocrisy that he adorns his crafty instruments, and thus, when the friars, who are excellently adorned with falsehood and hypocrisy, have entered the church, he is more notably loosed by those very instruments through which the church 20 Book 18.67. See CCSL 143A, pp. 932–3; Gregory the Great, Morals on the Book of Job, trans. John Henry Parker, vol. 2 (London: J.G.F. and J. Rivington, 1844), pp. 349–50.

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is led astray. And the friars would speak in confirmation of this if they knew that by Christ’s authority or licence they could slip in. But since they do not know this, and the doctrine of scripture states in John 10[:1] that ‘he that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up another way, the same is a thief and a robber’, it is clear that all of those four sects, together with their respective parts, are plunderers, especially because they are the principal instruments by which Satan leads astray humble church members. The Holy Spirit, therefore, in John’s prophecy, wished for Satan to be partially bound for a thousand years, and to be loosed in the second infamous millennium, so that through his instruments, which he cleverly brings into the church in greater numbers, simple people, wavering in their faith, are led astray through lies and hypocrisy. And St Gregory does not himself rely on this sense, but neither could he probably deny it. And seeing that Christ’s ordination was sufficient for the establishment of the church and its members, by what frivolous fictions were those sects introduced? And since priests, according to the principle that the apostle often articulates, should not be burdens to the church, by what excuse are perverse and erroneous priests allowed to proceed, or new ones introduced as a burden to the church, in accordance with the great mass of hypocrisy relating to signs, which this adulterous generation, seducers of the people, seeks? And thus, St Gregory maintains that the prophecy of John is not to be understood in respect of a period of time, a millennium, but rather that Satan will be further loosed in the second millennium, when he will prepare his instruments in a more subtle way. And this is one reason why the Holy Spirit makes reference to one thousand years. For in Apocalypse 20[:1–3], the text reads: And I saw an angel coming down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit, and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the dragon the old serpent, which is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years. And he cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should no more seduce the nations, till the thousand years be finished. And after that, he must be loosed a little time.

Let the friars reject that gloss, if they know how to, or offer an alternative. Hence, in the text of Apocalypse the passage continues thus: And when the thousand years shall be finished, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, and shall go forth, and seduce the nations, which are over the four quarters of the earth, Gog, and Magog, and shall gather them together to battle, the number of whom is as the sand of the sea. (Apocalypse 20[:7])

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But it seems that by better judgement this text can thus be understood very well as stating that after one thousand years, or from the ascension of the Lord, or from the time of John’s vision, Satan, that is, the chief devil, will be loosed from his prison. That is to say, due to the growth of his servants, he will not have endured the whole of his punishment. But since he is the foremost subject of jealousy, he is locked in prison whenever he sees Christians proceeding according to the law of Christ. And when the wickedness of the inhabitants of Gomorrah21 is done, that is, when the sins of those who turn from Christ have been committed, which will literally be after one thousand years after the Lord’s ascension, then Satan will be loosed more fully to the people, which is to say that he has power to lead the people astray through the collective sin within his organs. But Satan, as the chief devil, leads astray principally the people of the West, who live in Europe. But those people reside on the four corners of the world, because the four sects, namely, the secular clergy, the monks, the canons and the friars, are of the earth because they are brought together temporally, and according to the principles of the geometers a corner is the meeting of two lines in turn. But those who are at peace with the laws of those four sects across the circumference of the world reside at the four corners of the earth and are the disciples of Antichrist, but they reside expressly because in having more prosperity in worldly goods, they are not troubled by the devil and his members, as these four members of the devil, with their accomplices, may be called Gog and Magog.22 For Gog, who is interpreted as a house or a shed, is seen to signify the pope, who is the most outstanding Antichrist to us Westerners. Magog, on the other hand, who is interpreted as being from the house or the shed, is seen to signify his disciples, as are the three accompanying sects. And these sects give temporal obedience to Gog himself, and instruct others to do the same. These people can clearly be said to be of the shelter or the shed. Of the shelter, because they conceal the association of the humanity of Christ with his other virtues, as far as they need to, and they are proud of the 21 In Genesis 18:20, God reveals to Abraham that he will destroy the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah because of the sinfulness of their people. Lot and his wife and children were saved when they were warned by angels to leave. The destruction of the cities is described in Genesis 19:24–5. Lot’s wife was turned to a statue of salt because she looked back at the cities, contrary to the angels’ advice (Genesis 19:26). 22 ‘And when the thousand years shall be finished, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, and shall go forth, and seduce the nations, which are over the four quarters of the earth, Gog, and Magog, and shall gather them together to battle, the number of whom is as the sand of the sea’ (Apocalypse 20:7).

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excellence of their status, in so far as they dwell within the shelter. For inside, the humility of Christ having been forsaken, they are exalted in their condition of poverty, and thus the pope is especially identified with the shelter, because he is sheltered by the lies, hypocrisy and other feigned fallacies of Magog.

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Chapter 2 And since this tumescent pride does not lead to peace, it is necessary to assemble agreeable people for the battle, that is, make them fight together on account of this defect in the faith. For thus through Gog and Magog, the English invading Flanders fought,23 and so it is with other wars which Christ prophesied to happen at the end of time. Therefore, that prophet says that a large number of them are like the seashore, since, as is shown in Matthew 7[:26], their house is built on treachery,24 and they are great in number because the path that leads to Tartarus is wide and many pass over it, Christ says, as is evident from Matthew 7[:13].25 But in Psalm 36[:20] it is said: ‘[T]he enemies of the Lord, presently after they shall be honoured and exalted, shall come to nothing and vanish like smoke.’ And the prophet says this wisely: [Satan] will be loosed in a little time after these things, because a little before the Day of Judgement the people will be seduced by the trickery of Antichrist, and the time taken for the people to be led astray by the trickery of Antichrist before the Day of Judgement will be brief. For in comparison to the time from the beginning of the world until then, and in comparison to the time from the Day of Judgement until the perpetuity of ages after that day, the time in which Antichrist will reign will be brief. Nevertheless, the degree of danger in that time will be great, because as is said in Matthew 24[:21–2]:‘For there shall be then great tribulation, such as hath not been from the beginning of the world until now, neither shall be. And unless those days had been shortened, no flesh should be saved.’26 And therefore the procurator of the sect of Gog spoke the truth, in part, when he said that in the second millennium soldiers would live prosperously alongside poor heretics, 23 A reference to the Despenser Crusade of 1383. 24 Christ’s words spoken at the end of the Sermon on the Mount: ‘And every one that heareth these my words, and doth them not, shall be like a foolish man that built his house upon the sand’. 25 ‘Enter ye in at the narrow gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there are who go in thereat.’ 26 The last part of verse 22 has here been omitted.

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who will molest Antichrist, who is the church of the malignant ones. For just as Christ was said to be a blasphemer, which is the worst part of heresy, so the faithful poor, who today remain in the truth of the law of the Lord, are called heretics by the opposing party of Antichrist. And since many of the elect are called poor, it is true that the poor are nominally heretics, who then retain that position. And since the adulterous generation of sign-seekers attends more to things perceptible to the senses than to solid truth, it introduces a small lie into the sayings of Christ, [which states] that in the time of the emperors, during which it was corporally persecuted, the church was in a state of greater danger than it is now, when it is persecuted by heretical sects. But the truth, which perceives persecution or evil of the mind more than that of the body, says that the danger of men within the church, who at that time would have been damned to Tartarus, is now at its greatest. And thus, at that time heretics were very much crowded together,27 [but] because the four aforementioned sects are manifest heretics, if it is lawful to say such a thing, no man could find united heretics in such sects, even at the earliest times.28 For all those four sects deny the ways of Christ verbally and in their work, since they desire worldly prosperity and flee from persecution by means of evangelical truth. By his grace, God makes those sects look foolish, because Western heretics either do not know or do not dare to reveal to the faithful what the consecrated host is. But one says that it is quantity without a subject, another that it is quality without a subject, a third that it is an accident without a subject, and a fourth that it is an aggregate of accidents or nothing. And none of these heretics dares to state to the faithful in their mother tongue what the consecrated host is. And many of the faithful are not so much blinded by this treachery, but rather recognise within it the perfidious dogma of Antichrist, because Christ says in his gospel how he took the bread in his hands, blessed it, broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying: ‘take and eat of this, all of you; this is my body’. Here, through the demonstrative pronoun he had undoubtedly meant the bread,29 and the consecrated host is naturally true bread and figurally, by the force of the Lord’s words, his body. But the friars and the other sects do not dare to reveal among the common people their belief with an adequate testimony, as under their common seal, which 27 That is, at the time of the ancient church. 28 Such sects as the secular clergy, the canons, the monks and the friars are so heretical, Wyclif seems to be suggesting, that they must necessarily scatter themselves widely to avoid detection. 29 The demonstrative pronoun this in ‘this is my body’.

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is the clearest sign of their manifest heresy. For since there should be one faith of the church, which neither Antichrist nor any creature can weaken, it is clear that a faithful person should publish that faith to listeners, boldly and in an orthodox manner, to the death. For in John 18[:20] the Lord says: ‘I have spoken openly to the world: I have always taught in the synagogue, and in the temple, whither all the Jews resort; and in secret I have spoken nothing.’ But Magog does not make his faith known, except in the private schools in which they and their confederates congregate, but they do not reveal their faith openly to the Christian community. Similarly, Christ teaches in Matthew 5[:16]: ‘So let your light shine before men, that they may see your good works’. For as he says, ‘[Nobody] lights a candle and puts it under a bushel, but upon a candlestick, that it may shine to all that are in the house. (Matthew 5[:15]).’ Since, therefore, the candle or light of that lamp should be the faith of the church, it is clear that it should be boldly published to the faithful and the unfaithful alike. Those heretics, therefore, could not be under greater suspicion of heresy than to conceal their treachery in this matter thus. Similarly, Christ says in Matthew 10[:27]: ‘That which I tell you in the dark, speak ye in the light: and that which you hear in the ear, preach ye upon the housetops.’ But it is clear that those private sects, since they are of the opposite disposition in respect of faith, are disciples of Antichrist, who is afraid to reveal openly to his faithful disciples the very falsity that he propagates, lest perchance his lie should be recognised. Since, therefore, the kingdom of England annually spends so many thousands of marks,30 stolen through anti-Christian madness to which Westerners are blinded, one should carefully seek to discover what it might be that they so sumptuously consecrate in their kingdom. Therefore, kings, dukes, counts and other secular lords and ladies should pursue this matter faithfully. For just as a single drop of liquid does not hollow out a stone, but only a multitude of large and small drops, which, by very gradually and often falling, cut into that stone, so the presence of many and great faithful people should extinguish Antichrist in that treachery. And it does not seem that those people who are of no use in the repression of that heresy are faithful people in respect of the Lord Jesus Christ. For although Magog, that is, the one from the shelter, concealed his heresies and hypocrisies for a short time, it is necessary nevertheless that all things, both truths and falsehoods, 30 A mark was not a unit of currency but a financial metric, equivalent to 13s 4d (160d, or 67 new pence).

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finally become clear in the light. Come, Christ’s soldiers, as sons of the light, walk, as the apostle commands; by withdrawing communication and temporal approval from Magog, at least make known the true light of orthodox faith until he has appreciated the truth of that faith. Here ends the treatise On the Loosing of Satan, concerning the new contraventions of the Commandments.31

43 The Noonday Devil The Noonday Devil.32 Latin text: Polemical Works 2, pp. 417–25. The Noonday Devil is a personification of a state of listlessness and inattention that afflicts its victims during the middle of the day, a condition that Wyclif finds to be prevalent among the clergy, who are also found to be incapable of resisting it. The expression is found uniquely in the Vulgate Bible and its derivatives, such as the Douay-Rheims English translation that is followed throughout this volume. The treatise is structured loosely around the trinity, and the sins of the clergy against it. Each of its constituent chapters is devoted to a separate person of the trinity, beginning with the Father. Wyclif makes numerous references to the threat of the Noonday Devil elsewhere in his work.

Chapter 1 The harlot’s countenance was raised to the people in accordance with an ancient evil, for there was no dignity in our kingdom. Therefore the lord Prince Edward,33 who was properly devoted to the trinity, defended the faith of the trinity in our kingdom. Indeed, the aforesaid threefold name of foolishness, falsity and theft, made in the devil’s cause, shrinks from him, but the threefold word made eternally in the cause of God has no fear of losing him. But we should first believe that God is so omnipotent that it is impossible for any creature to fail in him, unless the harm of his offence should be directed against one of God’s subjects. Second, corresponding 31 This explicit is presented cryptographically in those manuscripts in which it appears. 32 This expression is of biblical origin: ‘Of the arrow that flieth in the day, of the business that walketh about in the dark: of invasion, or of the noonday devil’ (Psalm 90:6). 33 Edward of Woodstock (1330–76), eldest son of Edward III. He became Prince of Wales and of Aquitaine, and is popularly remembered as the ‘Black Prince’. Edward was an accomplished military leader throughout his adult life, and seemingly a genuinely pious man.

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to the Son, I believe that no kingdom can be ruled wisely by a person according to the number of the word of God, unless it has been regulated from the outset by the law of that same word. Third, corresponding to the Holy Spirit, I believe that the clergy and temporal lords stand accused in those three treacheries specifically, unless they should give charitable work to this creed of the Trinity, which must be carried out faithfully. The aforementioned lord Edward, now dead, is believed to have perfected this creed faithfully for the benefit of the kingdom, unless sin prevented him. Yet we are at the principal stage of infidelity in respect of the omnipotence of the Father, and have become blind, because in our imagination we believe that we prevail against the law of the Lord. And although we thereby defy the law of the Lord, we believe of the clergy, both internally and externally, that although it errs in its multitude against the Lord, it prospers. The kingdom of England is blind to such worldly prosperity and love of the name of the world. But the faithful people of our kingdom who are now rebelling against God, in acts of disgraceful treachery, know that unless the enrichment of its clergy is controlled according to the law of God, it will sin in monstrous numbers, both in the faithful service and the fruitful ministry that should repay our kingdom. The measure, however, which God balances between the clergy and the two other parts of our kingdom is lacking because of surplus lordship, with an unwarrantably overloaded clergy. And since the clergy is thus displaced against the law of the Lord in its monstrous lordship, it is necessary that the office of the clergy be diminished. And in respect of the fruit of the clergy that is later to produce a seed, it will necessarily be satanic pomp that is a burden to the whole kingdom of England. The way to cure this disease among members of the clergy would be the state of living that Christ established to reduce them. To this end, the poor priests would work by teaching at the risk of death, not according to the dogma of the sophists or the teaching of Zenzelin,34 but how, and how often, does the Lord say these things in his twofold testament? And when the execution of the law of God has become sluggish because of the worldly causes that increasingly occupy people, the cause of diabolic law is confirmed as a cost to the whole kingdom. And since it is certain by faith, unless God in his greatness defers 34 Zenzelinus de Cassanis (d. 1334) produced an influential commentary on the ‘Extravagantes’ (a collection of decretals that did not belong to the established canon, but which were recognised legal authorities) of Pope John XXII.

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his penalty, that our kingdom will be undone, our crime of omission against the omnipotence of God will be condemned forever. The people of the kingdom therefore guard ingeniously against this sin and others leading to it, and eradicate the root or cause of the sin wisely, since we should believe profitably that God is omnipotent and is able to punish the disobedience of its king. Chapter 2 This disloyalty prevails not only against the power of God the Father, but also against the wisdom of the Word of God. But the Word of God, eternally born, eternally produces one law, and at a suitable time of the Old Law he published it in a consistent way, and in confirmation of it he became incarnate in the fullness of time, and he taught through his deeds and his words how he wanted his clergy to be governed according to the law that he first uttered. How, therefore, could the tranquillity of the kingdom be maintained if it so manifestly obviates the law of Christ? In good faith we accept that God did all things according to measure, number and weight. But this trinity is markedly distorted among the English clergy. For there is no number to their ownership or their desire. Therefore, however much they find themselves deficient on account of that binary, it is necessary that in the weight of balancing, God and his creatures desert them in every way. And this community of our kingdom is oppressed so much by way of punishment, since the ancient internal clergy drain off oblations and tithings through excommunications, incarcerations and other diabolic means that have been newly contrived, but proclamations of the gospel and other services to be carried out are allowed to pass by in return for the devil’s time, because the prelates do not correct that defect, since whatever is the father, so is the son, and the leaders of the world are devoted to the continuation of that omission. And nor is the devil quiet in that primeval sin of afflicting the common people, but led the threeness of the sects, beyond the Lord’s ordination, such as the monks, the canons and the friars, who are undoubtedly contributing to the burden of the poor of our kingdom by burdening the people. For powerful people, such as princes and secular lords, require from them returns and services, just as at the beginning, with the levying of the people by the clergy, they did not require such returns, and to show the vain magnificence of the kingdom and of the secular lords, the eternal dogs of the Roman Curia are urged to spoil the paupers of the kingdom of England, since the cardinals and rectors are not the sole prebendaries,

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but the archdeacons of the kingdom of England are confirmed through the king and his council, and since the common people, in its support of such burdens, is only of finite power, it is necessary to deprive it through the aforementioned threefold internal and threefold external means. And since the common people constitute the base of the prop of kingdoms, it is necessary that the kingdom of England, on account of the failure of its common people, be lacking in respect of clergy and terrestrial lords. But Christ, eternally God, lived a poor life for the relief of the common people, and did not burden them in the pillaging of worldly goods, but rather brought relief in a multiplicity of ways in his assistance of such good and spiritual people. And since Christ the king should be our judge at the Last Judgement, it is necessary at that time, or before then, that that sin should be punished most severely, alongside other punishments that it defies, and should manifestly reveal the dissolution of the kingdoms, since their foundation rests most powerfully in the wise protection of the poor people. For it would be the same to bring about the ruin of the foundation of the poor man, and to stupidly contrive the ruin of the kingdom through a defect in its foundation. Nor is that sin free from calumny with respect to God, since among sins towards God the oppression of the poor through unjust claims inclines the Lord’s judgement more towards avenging their injury. And hence, many infidels give rise to the sin committed against the wisdom of the Word of God, which threatens in a short time to ruin our kingdom. Chapter 3 But since clemency is proper to the Holy Spirit, it is clear that impiety is the cause of the continuation of that wicked infidelity. If the aforesaid clergy were entirely to reconsider, from their own way of life and from the law of the Lord, and the lords of the world were to recognise, how [the clergy] oppresses the common poor and their children, who do not have enough worldly goods, beyond what they can endure, which should be incomprehensible in the wealth of the world; and second, how, as they play in the world in the breeze and peace of prosperity, and with other events bringing success, the secular branch demand as much as the people can tolerate, then no man of God would support this oppression of the common people. And as a matter of faith, it seems certain that a continuation of this crime, such that it becomes sin against the Holy Spirit, pronounces the final destruction of the

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kingdom, since that sin cannot be granted a pardon in this age or in the future. And this threefold faith that emerges from the trinity should be adhered to all the more attentively the more easily it can be defended by reason, the more vividly against all opponents, and the more healthily in respect of God and man, both personally and in relation to the kingdom as a whole. But that kingdom would be quite powerless if it were to attack, by plundering, the cunning of Antichrist, nor is anything else sought than that the kingdom should not proffer its goods except according to the rationale of the law of the Lord Jesus Christ, and that, whatever the kingdom bestows in respect of alms, it bestows purely according to the reason which resonates with charity. May our kingdom arm itself generally with the assurance that censures made by following Christ’s creed flow towards threatening opponents. And if anyone comes to the kingdom and does not bring forwards this doctrine of Christ, no dweller in that kingdom will say to him, ‘hail!’ And since kindness is proper to the Holy Spirit, our kingdom would serve charity internally and externally, and would everywhere serve peace, with external properties, with revenues, which indeed are held in mortmain, by defending the boundaries of [the kingdom] lest it be led astray by the false potency and impossible signs of Antichrist. For faith teaches men that no prelate has power except in the edification of the church, but the power is not edificatory unless it is completely free and from God. For if a man could buy indulgences and spiritual privileges, through which a person could gain heaven, then all hope would reside in the riches of the world, and with the poor there would be only despair of ever acquiring blessedness. It is therefore a medicinal principle not to believe every spirit in respect of this, except in so far as it takes its foundation from reason or from Scripture. And according to this principle, nobody should have any faith in either the pope or any other prelate in respect of privileges or other spiritual intercessions, or excommunications or other acts of censure, except in so far as they resonate with the judgement of Jesus Christ. The kingdom of England should therefore dread that they become, heretically, treacherously and malignantly, the devil’s agent, since it is very much the case that, against the law of the Lord, they will endow Antichrist with their worldly goods. It is, besides, a greater deed, that on the death of a prelate the kingdom consents anew to, and confirms, a prior deed, and it is entirely deplorable that those with faith in the Lord should be prevented, through incarceration, privation and other forms of censorship, from proclaiming the law of Christ to the people. For

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the false friar preaching clear heresy will be licensed by the bishop and defended by the secular branch [of the clergy], but the faithful priest wishing to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ will be prevented immediately from preaching in this diocese. And thus, the fruit of plentiful endowment of prelates is superfluous in our kingdom, with the devil in conquest, since the prelates neither preach the faith to the people nor allow that the faith be preached freely And thus, the sin committed against the third person [of the Trinity] prevents charity from growing in England. Here ends what had to be said generally to the clergy and to the Lord’s people of our kingdom.35

35 This explicit is written cryptographically in the text.

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APPENDIX: CONDEMNATION OF WYCLIF’S TEACHING 44 Gregory XI’s Bull to the University of Oxford condemning Wyclif ’s teaching (1376) Latin text: FZ, pp. 242–4; the bull is recorded by Walsingham. Cf. Chronica Maiora, pp. 176–9. This bull was issued against Wyclif in 1376, and is recorded (with some very minor differences) by the chronicler Thomas Walsingham. Gregory says little that is specific about the nature of the ideas that he is condemning, except to indicate that Wyclif draws upon the teaching of Marsilius of Padua and John of Jandun.

Copy of the Bull of the Lord Pope Gregory to the University of Oxford, against Master John Wyclif, Doctor of Theology, but heretic Bishop Gregory, servant of the servants of God, sends greetings and an apostolic blessing to his beloved children, the chancellor and the University of Oxford in the Lincoln diocese. Because of the grace and privilege dispensed by the apostolic see to your university in Oxford, and because of your knowledge of the Scriptures, you should be like happy oarsmen in their seas, fighting as champions of the Catholic faith, without which our souls cannot prosper. We are assembled to wonder at and lament the fact that you, through a certain idleness, have allowed tares to sprout between the pure wheat in the fields of your glorious institution. And, what is more pernicious, you have even rewarded this. As we have learned recently, you have not laboured to uproot these tares, or not without concealing your name.1 You have endangered your souls, have shown contempt for the Church of Rome, and have caused harm to our celebrated faith. What torments us more bitterly is that the growth of these tares was perceived in Rome sooner than in England, where it began, and where remedial uprooting is needed.   1 What is meant by this is that there is no evidence that the chancellor made any attempt to remove the tares.

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Many dignified yet distressed informers have made it known to our ears that John Wyclif, rector of the church of Lutterworth in the diocese of Lincoln and professor of the sacred page, has descended into a state of detestable lunacy. Would that he were not such a master of errors! He has put forward erroneous and false propositions and conclusions, together with perversely philosophical heresies that seek to subvert and weaken the state of the whole church, and even the secular administration. Some of these, though with certain changes in terminology, seem to follow the perverse opinions and ignorant doctrine of Marsilius of Padua and John of Jandun, of accursed memory, whose book was rejected and condemned by Pope John XXII, our predecessor.2 In the kingdom of England, made glorious by its power and abundant wealth, but still more glorious by the gleaming piety of its faith and the brilliance of the sacred page, there are produced enlightened men with a true knowledge of the Holy Scriptures. They have the dignity of mature manners, are distinguished by their devotion, and as defenders of the orthodox faith they teach and preach publicly. Here, however, [Wyclif] is unafraid to spew [heresy] from the poisonous enclosure of his breast, staining some of Christ’s faithful with what he disperses, and leading them away from the right path of the aforementioned faith into the ruin of perdition. If such a deadly plague is not stopped in its early stages and torn out by its roots, then the remedy will have been prepared too late, and more will be poisoned through contamination; we do not wish, nor should we wish this to occur with our approval We issue this apostolic epistle to your university with the strict injunction that you do not allow the said opinions, conclusions and propositions to be asserted or propounded. They resonate badly in an environment of healthy practices, even when their proponents seek defend them under the guise of certain words or terms. We do this on pain of removal of all favours, indulgences and privileges that have been given to you and your university by the same see, in anticipation of your holy obedience. You must seize the said John on our authority, or demand that he be taken, and entrust him to our venerable brothers   2 Marsilius presented his most controversial ideas in his Defender of the Peace (Defensor Pacis). John of Jandun was a close associate of Marsilius, and may have influenced him, but the Defender of the Peace was uniquely Marsilius’s work. See Marsilius of Padua, Defensor Pacis, ed. C.W. Previté-Orton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928). For an English translation of the complete text, see Marsilius of Padua, Defensor Pacis, trans. Alan Gewirth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956 and 2001).

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the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London, or either one of them, under secure custody. Should those who are subject to your jurisdiction at this same university speak out against you, and should they have been stained, God forbid, by such errors, then if they persist stubbornly and repeatedly in this you should proceed keenly and solicitously to arrest them and hand them over, whilst doing whatever else it is appropriate for you to do. Take care that you make good the negligence that you have committed here, and you will attain our own blessing and that of the said see, not to mention the reward and merit of divine repayment. Given in Rome at the Basilica of St Maria Maggiore on 22 May, in the seventh year of our pontificate.

45 Condemnation of two of Wyclif ’s doctrines by William Barton, Chancellor of the University of Oxford (1380) Condemnation of two of Wyclif ’s doctrines. Latin text: FZ, pp. 110–14. The Sentence of William, Chancellor of Oxford, against John Wyclif, ­currently occupier of a [doctor’s] chair. William of Barton, Chancellor of the University of Oxford, sends greetings to all sons of the said university to whom our present mandate has come, trusting that you submit steadfastly to our instructions. The inventors, defenders or supporters of all heresies should be damnably ensnared, together with their pernicious doctrines, in a ­sentence of major excommunication by the holy canons, and should then be avoided by the whole of the orthodox population. News has nevertheless reached us, and not without great displeasure, that, by the counsel of some malign spirit, a mind led into insanity, certain heresies that were once solemnly condemned by the church are now returning, and are striving to tear the tunic of the Lord and his workers. Indeed, they threaten to disrupt the very unity of holy mother church. These heretics spread their dogma within and outside the university, proclaiming, among other things, two of their deadly doctrines: The first is that in the sacrament of the altar the substance of the material bread and wine, which were present prior to consecration, really remains in place after consecration. The second, which is more

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execrable to hear, is that in that venerable sacrament, the body and the blood of Christ are not present either essentially or substantially, or even corporally, but only figuratively or tropically; therefore, Christ is not truly present in his own, physical person. These doctrines place the Catholic faith in danger, threatening the people’s devotion to God and maligning the university, our mother, in no small way. We believe that such claims will be more damaging in their effect should we turn blind eyes to them and tolerate them any longer, and we have therefore called a meeting of many doctors of sacred theology and professors of canon law, whom we believe to be the most highly skilled. The premises of those claims have now been carefully expounded in their presence and painstakingly discussed, and it was finally concluded and stated that in their judgement they were erroneous and repugnant to the determinations of the church, as well as being contradictory to orthodox truths. Following the sayings of the saints and the determinations of the church, they declared that through the sacramental words pronounced ritually by the priest, the bread and the wine are transubstantiated, or substantially converted into the true body and blood of Christ on the altar. After the consecration, therefore, the material bread and wine that were there initially do not remain in the venerable sacrament. They are present according to their substances or natures, but only the species of these, under which species the body and blood of Christ are really contained, not only figuratively or tropically, but essentially, substantially and corporally. Hence, Christ is there truly in his own bodily presence: this must be believed, taught and defended strenuously against all who say the opposite. We therefore exhort you in the Lord, and in our authority we will offer a warning on the occasion of your first, second and third transgressions, and then we will restrain you more forcibly. We assign one day for the first warning, another for the second and one further day for the third, canonical and final warning. Lest anyone else should emerge, of whatever degree, status or condition, and publicly maintain, teach or defend these two erroneous conclusions, or either one of them, within or outside the schools of this university, there will be a penalty of imprisonment and suspension from all scholarly activity, as well as major excommunication. We urge that this should happen in respect of each and every rebel that does not obey our warnings after the passage of those three days, each assigned as a canonical warning for the hindrance, the blame and the offence that preceded them, in accordance with the circumstances. I hereby institute [this law] in these written

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words. We and our successors expressly retain the power of absolution, and indeed the right to absolve all of these [offences], except in respect of a sentence of death. So that men may be held back from such illicit teachings and their erroneous opinions may be extinguished (and not because of fear of this sentence or because they have not heard about them), we warn them a first, a second and third time, and then we restrain them with greater force, by the same authority mentioned above. We do this lest anyone else should hear or overhear someone publicly teaching, maintaining or defending the two erroneous proclamations that have been made, or either one of them, within or outside the schools in this university. If this happens he should flee them as if they were a pernicious venomous serpent, and withdraw immediately. Each and every person contravening these laws does this on pain of the threat of major excommunication, which would not be unmerited, in addition to the other penalties mentioned above. The names of those doctors who assembled the present decree, and unanimously agreed upon it, are these: Master John Laundreyne, professor of the sacred page and secular Master Henry Crump, abbot and monk Master John Chessham, of the order of Preachers3 Master William Bruscombe, of the same order Master John Shipton, of the Augustinian order Master John Tyssington, of the order of Minors4 Master John Lovey, of the order of Carmelites Master John Wells, monk of Ramsey Master John Wolverton, of the order of Preachers Master Robert Rygge, professor of the sacred page and secular Master John Mowbray, doctor in both areas of law5 Master John Gascoigne, doctor in the decretals After full consideration had been given to all of the premises at an assembly of the doctors named above, we decreed with unanimous purpose and the agreement of us all that the present mandate should be made known. In testimony of each and every one of these things I have had the seal of our office affixed to these pages.   3 The Dominican order of friars.   4 The Franciscans.   5 Namely, canon law and civil law.

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The aforementioned condemnation was made known publicly in the Augustinian schools with Master John himself sitting in cathedra and determining against it. Having heard the condemnation, he was confused, but nevertheless said that neither the chancellor nor any of his associates had been able to weaken his argument, thus showing that he was a tenacious heretic. But afterwards, as a greater demonstration of his heresy, and as an illustration of his stubbornness, he appealed publicly not to the pope, nor to a bishop, nor to any ordinary ecclesiastic, but, as a heretic adhering to secular power in defence of his error and heresy, he appealed to King Richard, hoping thus to protect himself through regal power, so that he would not be punished or corrected by the ecclesiastical powers. After this appeal, our noble Lord the illustrious Duke of Lancaster arrived, together with a restless army and a wise adviser of the duke, a faithful son of Holy Church. He instructed the aforementioned Master John that he should say no more on this matter. Yielding neither to his ordinary chancellor nor to so active a lord, [Wyclif] began to prepare a certain confession, in which each of his earlier errors was contained, but under a variegated canopy of words, in which he declared his purpose and pressed forward to prove his doctrine. But just like a stubborn heretic, he refuted all doctors of the second millennium in the matter of the sacrament of the altar, and said that all of them were mistaken, except for Berengar, whose opinion was condemned in the second distinction of I, Bergengar, entitled ‘On Consecration’. And he and his confederates declared in public that Satan had been loosed, and had power over the Master of Sentences and others who preached the true faith. That Master’s confession follows these words.

46 The Blackfriars Council (1382) The Blackfriars Council. Latin text: FZ, pp. 493–7 and pp. 286–8; cf. The Prosecution of John Wyclif, ed. Joseph H. Dahmus (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951), pp. 93–5. Dahmus translates only the listed conclusions, without the surrounding text or the list of attendees. The conclusions condemned at Blackfriars on 21 May 1382 were divided into those that were considered heretical (the first ten) and those that were merely regarded as erroneous. Dahmus observes that these conclusions illustrate ‘how far Wyclif had drifted since Gregory had sent his schedule of 19 theses to England in 1377’, and that none of those that were deemed ‘heretical’ had

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appeared in Gregory’s list.6 Wyclif is himself nowhere named in the document, though he clearly perceived that it was directed against many of his own ideas. He did not accept, nevertheless, that all of these conclusions were his own. Unfortunately, he was not explicit about those that he rejected (though it is not difficult to identify those that clearly originated with him).7 The first three relate to Wyclif ’s teaching on the Eucharist, beginning with an affirmation of the principle of remanence, which follows logically from his denial of the possibility of annihilation. His complementary philosophical conviction that accidents had to be sustained by a substantial subject is listed next, followed by his insistence that the body of Christ, though really present in the host, was present sacramentally, rather than physically. The next six heretical conclusions relate broadly to the church. The first of these, which suggests that mortal sin renders a bishop incapable of ordaining, consecrating or baptising, is not found in Wyclif ’s work. It is certainly heretical, deriving from the teaching of the Donatists in the fourth century, but Wyclif had little time for such an idea.8 Indeed, only a matter of years earlier, in On the Church, he had insisted that members of the foreknown in a state of mortal sin could administer the sacraments effectively, with detriment only to themselves.9 The fifth clearly alludes to Wyclif ’s belief that auricular or ‘external’ confession was generally unnecessary (as he had forcefully argued in On the Eucharist and Penance (10)). The eighth and ninth reflect his continuing hostility towards the papacy, and his belief that a sinful pope, who may be foreknown to damnation, can have no ecclesiastical power over the faithful (28). Wyclif ’s enduring belief that church ministers should be committed to a life of apostolic poverty, a recurring theme in his work, is condemned as the final ‘heretical’ conclusion. The first four of the conclusions judged to be erroneous echo Wyclif ’s commitment to the belief that membership of God’s church exists by his grace, and that excommunication is properly his to perform (11–14). Conclusion 16 articulates his controversial belief about lordship by grace, and conclusions 17 and 18 pertain to his conviction that temporal goods may be removed from, just as alms may be withheld from, churchmen who are known or expected to abuse them. The last four conclusions accurately reflect Wyclif ’s hostility towards the fraternal orders and other ‘private’ religions. Note that this document records the  contempt of Wyclif’s  arch-­ enemy William Courtenay, the Archbishop of Canterbury, for the conclusions that had been condemned at Blackfriars in 1382 (see FZ, 277-82 for the original condemnation). It is therefore dated to 1384,  and is presented from his own perspective.  The substance of the two records is almost identical, though

 6 The Prosecution of John Wyclif, p. 95.  7 FZ, p. 283.  8 The Donatists had refused to recognise Caecilian as Bishop of Carthage on the grounds that he had been consecrated by a traditor. The latter term was applied to anyone who had surrendered his copy of the Scriptures under Diocletian’s persecutory regime to suppress Christianity in the Empire.  9 De Ecclesia, p. 448.

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Courtenay is more visibly vitriolic in his presentation of the findings of the Blackfriars Council here.

I, William, Archbishop of Canterbury, the highest primate of England and legate of the apostolic see, send my greeting with divine permission to all of the children of holy mother church to whom the present letters have come. Your university knows that we have condemned the following articles with the counsel and assent of our friars and other doctors in sacred theology, canon law and civil law, and many other experts, in the form that follows:   1) That the material substance of the bread and wine remains in the sacrament of the altar after consecration.   2) That accidents do not remain without a subject in that same sacrament after consecration.   3) That Christ is not in the sacrament of the altar identically, truly and really in his own corporal person.   4) That if a bishop or priest should be in a state of mortal sin, he may not then ordain, consecrate or baptise.   5) That if a man has been duly contrite, all external confession is superfluous and of no use to him.   6) That it is not established in the gospel that Christ ordained mass.   7) That God should obey the devil.   8) That if the pope is foreknown and a bad man, and consequently is a member of the devil, then power is not given to him over Christ’s faithful by any man, except perhaps by Caesar.   9) That after Urban VI, nobody should be received into the papacy, but should live in the manner of the Greeks, under his own laws. 10) That it is contrary to Holy Scripture that men of the church should have worldly goods. 11) That no prelate should excommunicate anyone unless he has foreknowledge of his excommunication from God. 12) That anyone excommunicating [without such foreknowledge] should himself become a heretic and be excommunicated. 13) That a prelate who excommunicates a cleric who has appealed to the king and a council of the realm is a traitor against God, the king and the realm. 14) Those who fail to preach or to hear the word of God or the gospel, on account of their excommunicating men, are excommunicated, and will be held to be traitors on the Day of Judgement.

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15) That it is allowable for anyone, even a deacon or a priest, to preach the word of God, or other things consistent with it, without the authority of the apostolic see, or an orthodox bishop. 16) That nobody is a civil lord, or a bishop or a prelate, whilst he is in a state of mortal sin. 17) That secular lords can, at their will, take worldly goods from men of the church who do wrong; or that the people can correct failing lords at their will. 18) That tithes are merely charitable gifts, and that parishioners can, on account of the sins of their curates, hold them back, and give them to others at will. 19) That special prayers used to bring people together by prelates or members of religious orders, are no more beneficial to a particular person than general prayers are to him, other things being equal. 20) That anyone entering any one of the private religions becomes less able and more unfit at observing the commandments of God. 21) That holy people establishing private religions, whether beneficed or mendicant, sin in that very act. 22) That religious people living in private religions do not belong to the Christian religion. 23) That the friars should be compelled to acquire their victuals by the work of their own hands, and not by mendicancy. 24) That anyone conferring alms on the friars or receiving them from a preaching friar should be excommunicated. We assumed that the tares that were sown by that inimical man and his supporters had been cut out of the Lord’s field with the scythe of our condemnation, but lest they should regrow we instruct and exhort each and every subject of our province of Canterbury in the Lord, and we prohibit those same people by the force of sacred obedience. Those who resist will be excommunicated after the passage of six days from the time at which they publish [these articles], or from the point at which it becomes known by those present here today.10 Of these six days there will be two for the first, two for the second and the remaining two for the third and decisive term, and by canonical admonition we assign this to one and each of them. We demonstrate by these words that we shall prevent anyone from teaching the aforesaid articles or preaching any of the same in public, or any part thereof, and we refuse to offer our counsel, help or favour to anyone who does so. 10 Those present at Blackfriars, that is.

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In testimony of these things our seal is attached to the present document.

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Given in our palace of Lambeth on the thirtieth day of December in the year of our Lord 1384, and in the fourth year of our translation [to this see].11 Names of the bishops present and consenting to the condemnation of the twenty-four conclusions issued in advance: William, Archbishop of Canterbury, doctor of canon law, Oxford Robert, Bishop of London, called to incept in civil law, Oxford Thomas of Rochester, doctor of decrees, Oxford Ralph of Salisbury, doctor of laws, Oxford William Nanatensis, doctor of theology, Cambridge John of Hereford, bachelor of theology, Cambridge John of Lincoln William of Winchester Thomas of Exeter John of Durham Number of bishops: ten. Names of doctors of theology: Carmelite Friars Robert Glamville and Walter Dysse, Cambridge John Kenningham and John Lovey, Oxford Friars of the Order of Preachers William Sywarde and John Langley, Oxford John Paris, Cambridge Augustinian Friars Thomas Ashburn and Thomas Baukin of London, Oxford John Hormenton, Cambridge Robert Waldeby, Toulouse Friars Minor Hugo Carlisle and Thomas Barnwell, Oxford William Foley and Roger Frysby, Cambridge Lord John Wells, monk of Ramsey, Oxford 11 William Courtenay became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1381, after the murder of Archbishop Simon Sudbury.

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Number of doctors of theology, including Bishop Nantensis, seventeen. Names of doctors of canon and civil law: John Appleby Thomas Bacton Ralph Tregrisiou William Rockham John Welburn John Blanchard John Waltham Nicholas Chaddeston Thomas Stowe John Lydford William Flamborough Number of doctors of canon and civil law, with bishops of Salisbury, Canterbury and Rochester, fourteen.   Names of Bachelors of Theology Master John Bloxham, warden of Merton Hall, Oxford   Friars of the Order of Preachers Robert Humbleton, John Pickworth and John Lindlow, of Oxford   Carmelite Friars John Cheseldine, of Oxford, and John Thomston   Friors Minor Ralph Wyche Number of bachelors of theology, with the bishop of Hertford, eight.   Names of Bachelors of Laws Thomas Brandon and Adam Mattram.  Number: two.   These were all congregated, with others, at the first assembly made for the condemnation of the aforementioned conclusions, in the year of the Lord 1382, on the twentieth day of the month of May, in the house of the friars of the Order of Preachers, London.

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GLOSSARY OF TERMS

Absolute accident An absolute accident was an accident (q.v.) that some philosophers believed could act as a subject for other accidents, in the same way as a substance normally did. Wyclif was heavily critical of philosophers and theologians who spoke of such things, and was especially cynical about claims that the consecrated host was itself an absolute accident, an assumption which itself relied on the more dubious premise (for Wyclif, at least) that the substances of the bread and wine were annihilated at the point of consecration. Absolute and ordained powers of God The distinction between the absolute and ordained powers of God was introduced in the twelfth century in order to negotiate questions relating to divine freedom and omnipotence. Though the distinction was formulated in a variety of subtly different ways (often with different terms for the respective powers), it was generally accepted that God’s absolute power (that is, his absolute omnipotence) enabled him to do anything that did not contravene the laws of logic. In principle, he could therefore do anything that did not entail a contradiction. When he created the universe, however, God foreclosed many of the potentialities that would have been available to him in respect of his absolute power. Those that remained available to him constituted his ordained power. In broad terms, this was the theory inherited by late fourteenth-­ century scholars from the earlier Oxford luminaries John Duns Scotus, William of Ockham and Robert Holkot. It is important to stress that none of these scholars, nor indeed Wyclif and his contemporaries, considered these two powers to be distinct entities in real terms; divine power was necessarily one thing. The distinction, however, allowed scholastics to consider divine power from two different perspectives: God’s power was infinite in respect of his own nature, but it necessarily operated within the laws he had himself ordained. His absolute power, many insisted, would necessarily permit him, nevertheless, to re-­ordain or even suspend his own laws, should he wish.

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Accident Accidents are properties that a thing or a person may have, but which are not part of its essence or quiddity. An accident can therefore change the formal properties of a thing (such as its colour) without changing its essence. The nine kinds of accident listed by Aristotle in Chapter 4 of the Categories are quantity, quality, relation, place, time, state (or habit), posture, action and passion. Wyclif discussed the accidents at length in On Predicamental Being, attaching primary significance to quantity (like most other scholastics), but without regarding it as an absolute accident (De Ente Praedicamentali, pp. 48–54). See also Absolute accident. Actuality and potentiality (or potency) See Potentiality (or potency) and actuality Agent In a proposition, the agent (from Latin agere, to act) is the person or creature that is responsible for the process described. In ‘Wyclif wrote a sermon’, the agent is Wyclif. The term was used in opposition to patient (q.v.). Analogy (adj. analogical) Wyclif often suggests that God may be described in a particular way analogically, but without further elaboration. What he is identifying is a form of comparison that would have been familiar to most scholastics, but which is rather alien to readers of today. Analogy represented a particular form of description that was used on the assumption that human terms could not be used of God in the same way as they were used of human beings (or of the created world). God, after all, is perfect, but human beings and the created world are not. For a medieval theologian to say that God was good, therefore, was to understand the quality of goodness in relation to God only in so far as the word could be applied or understood in relation to the created world; the sense of the adjective good in either case was therefore different but analogical. What this meant is that human goodness was properly proportionate to divine goodness in analogical terms, but nevertheless still different. Human conceptions of goodness could only ever be approximate to divine goodness, but since the two were properly similar, since humanity was created in God’s image, they could be said to be properly ­proportionate to each other.

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Antonomasia (adjective antonomastic) Antonomasia is the substitution of an epithet or the name of a position or office for a person’s proper name, as in the king or the subtle doctor. This term is derived from the Greek antí (instead) combined with onomázein (to name). Categorematic and syncategorematic terms In the first chapter of On Predicamental Being, Wyclif offers a standard distinction between categorematic terms (categoremata) and syncategorematic terms (syncategoremata). The former, he argues, can stand by themselves in a proposition (either as subject or predicate), whereas the latter can be used only in combination with categorematic terms. Categorematic terms are terms that signify things or concepts, and include nouns, personal pronouns and verbs. Syncategorematic terms are predominantly grammatical words, and include conjunctions, prepositions and adverbs. Some terms, such as adjectives and demonstrative pronouns, can be used either categorematically or syncategorematically. In the proposition omnes senescent (all will grow old), for example, the adjective omnes (all) stands alone as the subject of the proposition. In the proposition homines omnes senescent (all men will grow old), by contrast, it is used in conjunction with the noun homines (men), on which it is dependent. Category The ten categories introduced in chapter 4 of Aristotle’s Categories cover what the scholastics would classify as substances and accidents. They are substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, state (or habit), posture, action and passion. Consequent A consequent is something that occurs as a consequence of something else. The term is often used in scholastic to consider the consequence of a particular premise or assumption. Essence The essence of something is what makes it what it is. Hence, the essence of a stone is its stoniness, but does not include its accidental properties (colour, texture, etc.). Because of his belief in universals, Wyclif believed that the essence of a thing preceded its existence in the world. The term was normally used interchangeably with quiddity (q.v).

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Evangelist This term is generally used in Wyclif ’s writings to identify the writers of the gospels, rather than preachers of Christian doctrine more generally.

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Extreme An extreme is either the subject or the predicate of a proposition. Genus (pl. genera) The genus (Greek génos) of a thing was listed among Aristotle’s five predicables (q.v.) in book 1 of the Topics. Aristotle used genus to define the essence of a group of related things in broad terms. The genus animal thus identifies, and is thus predicable of, a wide range of living organisms, including humans and cats. These latter organisms, though sharing the same genus, however, belong to different species (q.v.). As a philosophical realist, Wyclif believed that genera and species represented more than predicables, which acted only as taxonomic labels or concepts. For him, they were real universal categories, which metaphysically defined their particulars (rather than simply describing them). Indulgence An indulgence was remission of punishment in purgatory for a particular sin; a plenary indulgence offered remission of penalties for all sins in purgatory at the point of death. Indulgences were granted by the church on condition that the individual concerned was contrite and had already confessed (and had hence obtained remission from guilt). They were widely abused in medieval England and in Europe. Mercy Medieval theologians recognised two basic kinds of mercy: corporal mercy and spiritual mercy. An act of corporal mercy would include any merciful action that brings physical benefits to the recipient, such as feeding the hungry or tending to the sick. Such mercy, though itself realised in a physical action of some king, could be motivated by spiritual concerns (such as pity for an individual). An act of spiritual mercy is a merciful action that has spiritual benefits, such as praying for someone in need or forgiving an offence. Ordained power of God See Absolute and ordained powers of God.

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Paralogism An argument that was based on false premises, and which was therefore necessarily erroneous, was identified by medieval logicians as a paralogism. Wyclif uses the term frequently, identifying many of his opponents’ arguments as paralogisms. Patient In medieval logic, a patient is a creature or thing that is subjected to a process (from Latin patior, to suffer/undergo). Hence, in the sentence ‘John Wyclif wrote a sermon’, the sermon that is mentioned is the patient. The term was normally used in opposition to agent (q.v.). The agent here is John Wyclif. Potentiality (or potency) and actuality The distinction between dýnamis (potentiality) and enteléxeia or enérgeia (actuality) was described in detail by Aristotle in book theta of the Metaphysics, which was known in Latin from the thirteenth century. Aristotle argued that there were two ways in which potentiality could exist: it could either inhere in a subject, as when something covered in oil has the potential to catch fire, or in an agent, as when architectural potentiality resides in a builder (1046a). Though the basic principles of this distinction were accepted by most medieval philosophers, there was periodic disagreement about whether a given thing should be regarded as potential or actual. A related Aristotelian concept was that of disposition. This was an acquired state that presupposed a certain skill or quality, and hence certain potentialities. The Aristotelian virtue of courage, for example, would have been classified as a disposition, but did not represent an actuality until it was realised in courageous acts of some kind. Predicable The ‘predicables’ introduced by Aristotle in the first book of the Topics (chapters 4, 5 and 8) identify the ways in which a predicate can relate to its subject in a proposition. They do this by broadly classifying the kinds of things that may be predicated of that subject. These are the five Aristotelian predicables: definition (or species), property, genus, difference and accident. Predicament (adjective predicamental) The term predicament was an alternative name for an Aristotelian

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category. Wyclif ’s On Predicamental Being was an introductory treatise on the ten Aristotelian categories. Predication Wyclif uses this term in an extended sense to cover two different processes. The first is linguistic predication (the normal focus of logic in medieval universities), in which a predicable (q.v.) is be predicated of a subject in a proposition. The second is real predication, in which a genus and a species are metaphysically predicated of a real subject. An example of linguistic predication would be ‘James is human’, in which the species human is predicated of the subject James. Real predication is the corresponding process in the world. Hence, the individual James has the species human, a universal, predicated of him by virtue of the fact that he is human. As the subject of a real proposition, James (and all other members of the human species) is connected to this universal by his essence (the real correlate of the linguistic copula, to be). Prime matter Prime matter is an Aristotelian concept, and represents matter in its purest state. Aquinas, commenting on Aristotle, suggested that it must therefore be regarded as pure potentiality (q.v.). When matter assumed a particular form (such as that of a tree or a stone), it was therefore no longer primary in this original sense. The addition of form could hence be seen to have entailed a necessary deficit, which some scholastics interpreted as a kind of annihilation. Quality (adjective qualitative) A quality is an attribute of a thing, such as its colour or texture. Quantity Wyclif preserves the Aristotelian distinction between continuous and discrete quantities. Continuous quantity: a continuous quantity is one that is not bound by extremes. Discrete quantity: a discrete quantity is one that is finite, and hence bound by extremes. Quiddity (adjective quidditative) The quiddity of something is literally its ‘whatness’ (from Lat. quid, what). In scholasticism, this is normally a thing’s essence (q.v.).

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Secret prayer (or Secret) A prayer made by the celebrant at the liturgy of the Eucharist. The prayers were not secrets in the modern sense, but were so called because they were said by the priest inwardly and silently. Sects Wyclif speaks frequently of the damage to the church caused by the four sects, by which he means not the four orders of friars but the secular clergy, monks, canons and friars. See the discussion in the Introduction, under Wyclif ’s Life. Species Species was the Latin term for the first of the five Aristotelian predic­ ables (q.v.), which was used to identify the essence of a thing in a specific way. Aristotle had himself used the word hóros (definition) in his description of this predicable in Book 4 of the Topics. The definition or species of a group of things was arrived at by considering their genus (q.v.) and the properties that differentiated them from other members of that genus. These differentiating properties occupied a separate predicable category called diáphora in Aristotle (differentia in Latin). It was in the Latin translation of Porphyry’s Isagoge produced by Boethius in the sixth century (which gradually displaced the earlier Latin translation of Marius Victorinus), that definition was first labelled species. Wyclif regarded species, like genera, as more than linguistic or logical predicables. For him, they were real universals that were metaphysically predicated of all of the individuals belonging to a given species. Hence, all humans, by virtue of being such animals, have human predicated of them in real terms. Subject In a logical context, the subject of a proposition is the word or phrase of which something is said or predicated (such as John in ‘John is human’). For Wyclif and philosophers of the realist tradition such as Walter Burley, however, a subject could also be a thing in the world, which could be part of a real proposition. In the case of any given man, Wyclif would have said that such an individual had the species human predicated of him by virtue of the fact that he was a human being. His essence would have been seen to connect the subject John to the predicate human (and hence to act as the real correlate of the linguistic copula to be).

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Substance Substance (from Latin substantia) was the first of Aristotle’s categories (which was known by a variety of terms in Greek). Aristotle drew a distinction between primary substances, which were individual things, and secondary substances, which were species or genera (qq.v.). Only primary substances could stand by themselves. At the end of the first chapter of On Predicamental Being, a treatise dedicated to the Aristotelian categories, Wyclif tacitly acknowledges this point when he argues that all of the nine ‘accidental predicates’ can be ‘traced back’ to a substance, which is necessary to sustain them (De Ente Praedicamentali, p. 14). In his later writings, he defends this traditional position vehemently, rejecting the popular philosophical claim that the accidents of the Eucharist could in some way be sustained by another, ‘absolute’ accident. It is worth pointing out here that there was never complete consensus among medieval philosophers about what a substance was. Supposit A supposit is the thing that a term stands for in a proposition. In ‘men are human’ the supposit of the term men would be all men; in ‘some men are greedy’, it would be only a portion of the adult male population. Supposition The logic of supposition was used to describe the behaviour of linguistic terms in a proposition. It characterised precisely what a given term referred to, or ‘supposited’ for. There were three kinds of ‘proper’ (that is, literal) supposition: material, simple and personal. The last of these is arguably the most straightforward, and occurs when a term supposits literally for something in the world. Hence, in the proposition ‘men are human’, the term men supposits for all men in the world. Simple supposition occurs when a term supposits for a genus or a species, rather than for a thing or things, as in the proposition ‘animal is a universal’. Material supposition occurs when a term supposits for a term in a proposition, as in ‘man is a word’. Supposition was not strictly the same as signification. In the first example, the word men signifies in a conventional way before it is used in a proposition, by virtue of belonging to the English lexicon. It supposits for all men, however, when it is used in the proposition ‘men are human’. It clearly supposits in a different way in the proposition ‘some men are greedy’. Improper supposition occurrs when a term is used figuratively in a proposition, as in ‘Peter is a monster’. The distinction between signification and

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supposition was drawn in a variety of ways, and was not always clearly observed. In his Logic, for example, Wyclif regards supposition as a particular kind of signification, defining it as ‘the signification of one categorematic term, which is one extreme of a proposition, in relation to the other extreme’ (De Logica, vol. 1, p. 39). Syllogism Aristotle’s theory of the syllogism was central to the development of logic is the later medieval period. It was developed in the Prior Analytics, available in Latin translation from the twelfth century. Here, the syllogism was represented as a form of induction (24b17), which contained three categorical propositions. Two of these were premises (the major and the minor premise, respectively) and the third was a conclusion that was inferred from them. Syllogisms therefore took the following form: All A are B (the major premise) Some A are C (the minor premise) Some B are C (conclusion)

A, B and C are variables here, for which terms may be substituted. Hence, A could be humans, whilst B could be bipeds and C philosophers. The conclusion here would therefore be that some bipeds are philosophers. The form of the propositions in a syllogism therefore contains a subject, a copula (the verb to be) and a predicate. Most propositions also contained quantifiers, such as the ones used here (all and some). Propositions could be either affirmative or negative (the latter taking the form Some A are not C), and could be universal (like the major premise here), particular (like the minor premise here), or indefinite, in cases when no quantifier was used. An example of Wyclif ’s use of the syllogism can be found in his discussion of the Eucharist (20), in which he argues that Christ’s body is certainly eaten by the faithful (the major premise), but it is not eaten by them substantially (the minor premise). He concludes from this that Christ is not present in the Eucharist substantially, but sacramentally. Trope (adjective tropical) Wyclif uses this term generically to describe figurative language of any kind. Its adjectival form should not be confused with tropological, which has a more specific meaning in medieval exegesis.

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Viator A viator is literally a wayfarer (from Latin via, way, journey), but in medieval Christian literature it is typically a spiritual pilgrim on earth, whose desired destination is the heavenly city. Worldly goods I have used this phrase to translate the Latin temporales, which Wyclif generally used to identify worldly things. As a truly apostolic individual, he generally regarded such possessions as worthless encumbrances to a truly spiritual life.

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SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SECONDARY SOURCES Adams, Marilyn McCord, ‘Universals in the Early Fourteenth Century’, in Kretzmann, Kenny and Pinborg (eds), pp. 411–39. ––– William Ockham, 2 vols (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1987). ––– and P.V. Spade, ‘Logic in Late Medieval Oxford’, in Catto and Evans (eds), pp. 35–64. ––– Some Later Medieval Theories of the Eucharist: Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, and William Ockham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Blumenthal, Uta-Renate, The Investiture Controversy: Church and Monarchy from the Ninth to the Twelfth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991). Boehner, Philotheus, ‘The Metaphysics of William Ockham’, Review of Metaphysics, 1.4 (1947–48), 59–86. ––– ‘The Realistic Conceptualism of William Ockham’, Traditio, 4 (1946), 307–35. Boitani, Piero and Anna Torti (eds), Interpretation: Medieval and Modern (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1993). Breck, Allen du Pont, ‘John Wyclyf on Time’, in Yourgrau and Breck (eds), pp. 211–17. Brown, Stephen F., ‘Medieval Supposition Theory in Its Theological Context’, Medieval Philosophy and Theology, 3 (1993), 121–57. Callus, Daniel Angelo Philip (ed.), Robert Grosseteste, Scholar and Bishop: Essays in Commemoration of the Seventh Centenary of His Death (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955). Campi, Luigi, ‘Yet Another “Lost” Chapter of Wyclif ’s “Summa de Ente”: Notes on Some Puzzling References to “Tractatus 13” ’, Vivarium, 49:4 (2011), 353–67. ––– ‘Was the Early Wyclif a Determinist? Concerning an Unnoticed Level within His Taxonomy of Being’, Vivarium, 52 (2011), 102–46. Catto, Jeremy, ‘John Wyclif and the Cult of the Eucharist’, SChH, Subsidia, 4 (1985), 269–86. ––– ‘Some English Manuscripts of Wyclif ’s Latin Works’, SChH, Subsidia, 5 (1987), 353–61. ––– ‘Wyclif and Wycliffism at Oxford 1356–1430’, in Catto and Evans (eds), pp. 175–261. Catto, Jeremy and T.A.R. Evans (eds), The History of the University of Oxford II: Late Medieval Oxford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Cesalli, L., Le Réalisme Propositionnel: Sémantique et Ontologie des Propositions

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chez Jean Duns Scot, Gauthier Burley, Richard Brinkley et Jean Wyclif (Paris: J. Vrin, 2007). Colish, Marcia, The Mirror of Language: A Study in the Medieval Theory of Knowledge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968). ––– Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 400–1400 (London: Yale University Press, 1997). ––– Peter Lombard, 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 1994). Copeland, Rita, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). ––– ‘Rhetoric and the Politics of the Literal Sense in Medieval Literary Theory’, in Boitani and Torti (eds), pp. 1–23. Courtenay, William, ‘Antiqui and Moderni in Late Medieval Thought’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 48:1 (1987), 3–10, 107–28. ––– ‘Force of Words and Figures of Speech: The Crisis over Virtus Sermonis in the Fourteenth Century’, Franciscan Studies, 44 (1988 for 1984), ––– ‘Late-medieval Nominalism Revisited: 1972–1982’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 44:1 (1983), 159–64. ––– ‘Nominalism and Late-medieval Thought: A Bibliographical Essay’, Theological Studies, 33 (1972), 716–34. ––– ‘Nominalism in Late Medieval Religion’, in Trinkaus and Oberman (eds), 1974. ––– ‘The Reception of Ockham’s Thought in Fourteenth-century England’, SChH, Subsidia, 5 (1987), 89–109. ––– Schools and Scholars in Fourteenth-century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). ––– ‘Theology and Theologians from Ockham to Wyclif ’, in Catto and Evans (eds), pp. 1–34. Crompton, James, ‘Fasciculi Zizaniorum’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 12 (1961), 35–45, 155–66. Dahan, Gilbert, L’exégèse chrétienne de la Bible en occident médiéval: XIIe–XIVe siècle (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2008). Deansley, Margaret, The Lollard Bible and Other Medieval Versions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920). Dove, Mary, Earliest Advocates of the English Bible: The Texts of the Medieval Debate (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010). ––– The First English Bible: The Text and Context of the Wycliffite Versions (Cambridge: Cambride University Press, 2011). Dunne, Michael W. and Simon Nolan, O.Carm. (eds), Richard Fitzralph: His Life, Times and Thought (Scarborough: Four Courts Press, 2013). Evans, G.R. (ed.) Christian Authority: Essays in Honour of Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). ––– John Wyclif: Myth and Reality (Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2005). ––– The Language and Logic of the Bible: The Earlier Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). ––– The Language and Logic of the Bible: The Road to Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

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–––  ‘Wyclif on Literal and Metaphorical’, SChH, Subsidia, 5 (1987), 259–67. ––– ‘Wyclif ’s Logic and Wyclif ’s Exegesis: The Context’, SChH, Subsidia, 4 (1985), 287–301. Fletcher, J.M., ‘Developments in the Faculty of Arts, 1370–1520’, in Catto and Evans (eds), pp. 315–45. Gerrish, B.A. (ed.), Reformers in Profile (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1967). Ghosh, Kantik, The Wycliffite Heresy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Gwynn, Aubrey O., The English Austin Friars in the Time of Wyclif (London: Oxford University Press, 1940). Hammerich, L.L., The Beginning of the Strife between Richard Fitzralph and the Mendicants (Copenhagen: Levin and Munksgaard, 1938). Haren, Michael, Medieval Thought: The Western Intellectual Tradition from Antiquity to the Thirteenth Century, second edition (London: Macmillan, 1992). Herold, Vilém, ‘Wyclifs Polemik gegen Ockhams Auffassung der platonischen Ideen und ihr Nachlang in der tschechischen hussitischen Philosophie’, SChH, Subsidia, 5 (1987), 185–216. Hornbeck, Patrick, What Is a Lollard? Dissent and Belief in Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Hudson, Anne, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). ––– ‘Wyclif ’, DMA, vol. 12, pp. 706–11. ––– ‘Wyclif and the English Language’, in Kenny (ed.), pp. 85–103. ––– ‘Wycliffism in Oxford 1381–1411’, in Kenny (ed.), pp. 67–84. Hurley, Michael, ‘“Scriptura Sola”: Wyclif and His Critics’, Traditio: Studies in Ancient and Medieval History, Thought and Religion, 16 (1960), 275–352. Kalivoda, Robert, ‘Johannes Wyclifs Metaphysic des Extremen Realismus und Ihre Bedeutung im Endstadium der Mittelalterlichen Philosophie’, Miscellanea Mediaevalia, 2 (1963), 716–23. Keen, Maurice, ‘Wyclif, the Bible, and Transubstantiation’, in Kenny (ed.), pp. 1–16. Kenny, Anthony, ‘Realism and Determinism in the Early Wyclif ’, SChH, Subsidia, 5 (1987), pp. 165–77. ––– ‘The Realism of the De Universalibus’, in Kenny (ed.), pp. 17–31. ––– Wyclif (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). ––– (ed.), Wyclif in His Times (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). Kretzmann, Norman, ‘Continua, Indivisibles and Change in Wyclif ’s Logic of Scripture’, in Kenny (ed.), pp. 31–65. Kretzmann, Norman, Anthony Kenny and Jan Pinborg (eds), The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Krey, Philip D.W. and Lesley Smith (eds), Nicholas of Lyra: The Senses of Scripture (Leiden: Brill, 2000). Lahey, Stephen, John Wyclif (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

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Lambert, Malcolm, Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation, third edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). Lampe, G.W.H. (ed.), The Cambridge History of the Bible, II: The West from the Fathers to the Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). Leff, Gordon, Heresy in the Middle Ages, 2 vols (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967). ––– ‘John Wyclif: The Path to Dissent’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 52 (1966), 143–80. ––– ‘The Place of Metaphysics in Wyclif ’s Theology’, SChH, Subsidia, 5 (1987), 217–33. ––– Richard Fitzralph, Commentator on the Sentences (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1963). ––– William of Ockham: The Metamorphosis of Scholastic Discourse (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974). Levy, Ian Christopher (ed.), A Companion to John Wyclif (Leiden: Brill, 2006). ––– John Wyclif: Sacriptural Logic, Real Presence, and the Parameters of Orthodoxy (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2003). ––– ‘The Literal Sense of Scripture and the Search for Truth in the Late Middle Ages’, Revue d’Histoire Ecclésiastique, 104:3–4 (2009), 783–827. Lubac, Henri de, Histoire et Esprit: L’intelligence de l’Écriture d’après Origène (Paris: Aubier, 1950). ––– Exégèse médiévale, 4 vols (Paris: Aubier, 1959). Luscombe, David, Medieval Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). ––– ‘Wyclif and Hierarchy’, SChH, Subsidia, 5 (1987), 233–45. Macy, Gary, The Banquet’s Wisdom: A Short History of the Theologies of the Lord’s Supper, second edition (Ashland City, TN: OSL Publications, 2005). ––– ‘The Dogma of Transubstantiation in the Middle Ages’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 45:1 (1994). Mallard, William, ‘John Wyclif and the Tradition of Biblical Authority’, Church History, 30 (1961), 50–60. Marenbon, John, Early Medieval Philosophy, 480‑1150: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1984). ––– Later Medieval Philosophy 1150–1350: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1987). ––– Medieval Philosophy: An Historical and Philosophical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2007). Martin, C.J.F., An Introduction to Medieval Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996). ––– The Philosophy of Robert Grosseteste (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). McFarlane, K.B., John Wyclif and the Beginnings of English Non-conformity (London: English Universities Press, 1952). Minnis, A. J. ‘“Authorial Intention” and “Literal Sense” in the Exegetical Theories of Richard Fitzralph and John Wyclif ’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, lxxv, section C, i (1975), 1–31. ––– ‘Exegesis, Latin’, in DMA, vol. 4, pp. 542–5. ––– ‘Exegesis, Middle English’, in DMA, vol. 4, pp. 545–8

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––– Medieval Theory of Authorship, second edition with a new preface by the author (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). ––– and A.B. Scott (eds), Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c. 1100–c. 1375: The Commentary Tradition, revised edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Müller, Ivan J., ‘A “Lost” Summa of John Wyclif ’, SChH, Subsidia, 5 (1987), 179–85. Normore, Calvin, ‘The Tradition of Medieval Nominalism’, in Wippel (ed.), pp. 201–17. Oberman, Heiko A., Forerunners of the Reformation (Lutterworth: Lutterworth Press, 1967). ––– The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism, third edition (Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press, 1983). ––– ‘Some Notes on the Theology of Nominalism, with Attention to Its Relation to the Renaissance’, Harvard Theological Review, 53 (1960), 47–76. Pantin, W.A., The English Church in the Fourteenth Century (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1962). Pasnau, Robert, with Christina van Dyke (eds), The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Penn, Stephen, ‘Matrimonium quid proprie sit: John Wyclif on Marriage, Consent and Consummation’, in Archa Verbi, Subsidia, 15 (2018), ed. Pavel Blazek, pp. 399–411. ––– ‘Wyclif and the Sacraments’, in Levy (ed.), pp. 241–92. Rijk, L.M. de, Logica Modernorum: A Contribution to the History of Early Terminist Logic (Assen: H.J. & H.M.G. Prakke, 1962–67). Robson, J.A. Wyclif and the Oxford Schools: The Relation of the Summa de Ente to Scholastic Debates in Fourteenth-century Oxford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961). Saul, Nigel, Richard II (London: Yale University Press, 1997). Smalley, Beryl, ‘The Bible and Eternity: John Wyclif ’s Dilemma’, JWCI, 27 (1964), 73–89. ––– ‘John Wyclif ’s Postilla super Totam Bibliam’, Bodleian Library Record, 4 (1953), 186–204. ––– The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, third edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983). Southern, R.W., Robert Grosseteste: The Growth of an English Mind in Medieval Europe, second edition (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986). Synave, P. ‘La Doctrine de Saint Thomas d’Aquin sur le Sens Littéral des Écritures’, Revue Biblique, 35 (1926), 40–65. Thomson, S.H. ‘John Wyclyf ’ in Gerrish (ed.), pp. 12–39. ––– ‘The Order of Writing of Wyclif ’s Philosophical Works’, in Cˇeskou Minulostí práce, ve˘nované professoru Karlovy university Václavu Novotnému, ed. O. Odložilík, J. Prokeš and R. Urbánek (Prague: J. Laichter, 1929), pp. 146–66. ––– ‘The Philosophical Basis of Wyclif ’s Theology’, Journal of Religion, 11 (1931), 86–116.

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––– The Writings of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln 1235–1253 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940). Thomson, Williell R., The Latin Writings of John Wyclif: An Annotated Catalog (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1983). ––– ‘Manuscripta Wyclifiana Desiderata: The Potential Contribution of Missing Latin Texts to Our Image of Wyclif ’s Life and Works’, SChH, Subsidia, 5 (1987), 343–53. Trinkaus, Charles, with Heiko A. Oberman (eds), The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion (Leiden: Brill, 1972). Walsh, Katherine, A Fourteenth-century Scholar and Primate: Richard Fitzralph at Oxford, Avignon and Armagh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). Wilks, M.J., ‘The Early Oxford Wyclif: Papalist or Nominalist?’, SChH, 5 (1969), 69–98. ––– ‘Roman Candle or Damned Squib? The English Crusade of 1383’, an inaugural lecture delivered in 1980 at Birkbeck, University of London, and reproduced in Wyclif: Political Ideas and Practice, selected and introduced by Anne Hudson (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2000), pp. 253–72. Workman, Herbert. John Wyclif: A Study in the English Medieval Church, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926). Yourgrau, Wolfgang and Allen D. Breck (eds), Cosmology, History and Theology (New York: Plenum Press, 1977).

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INDEX

Note: References to notes are given as page number followed by note number e.g. 65 n.23 is note 23 on page 65. Wyclif ’s works are indexed by their full title in alphabetical order, with the entry in italics. Other authors’ works are indexed under the author’s name. absolution 107–8, 113–15 accidents 29–30, 35, 49, 160–4 actuality 98–9 Adam 44, 45, 86, 87, 110, 179 Adam and Eve 137 Alexander III 109, 256 Alexandrine division (of scriptural meaning) 21–2 allegorical sense (of scripture) 22, 24, 56–7, 64 allegory 66 ambiguity 77 Ambrose 167, 257 Amos 83–4, 85 anagogic sense (of scripture) 22, 24, 56–7, 64 anagogy 67 analogy 71–4, 75–6 angelic natures 234 angels 40, 51, 57, 62, 65, 140, 143, 174, 175, 184, 190, 192, 194, 227, 229, 234, 262, 269, 271, 287, 289, 290 annihilation 19–20, 29–30, 35, 51, 145, 155–7 in eucharistic change 48–9 impossibility of 45–52 theories of 47 Antichrist 117, 118, 119, 276–7 antifraternalism 12, 25–6, 208, 288–9, 308 Apostolic Church 119, 143 apostolic poverty 307 Aquinas, Thomas 8, 22–3, 40

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on grace 69 n.38 on the literal sense of scripture 65 n.23 on prophets 84–5 on time 87 Aristotelian hylemorphism 106 Aristotelian logic 22 Aristotle 18, 38, 41 n.10, 60, 68, 79, 234 Arundel, Thomas 5, 16 Augustine of Hippo 65 on analogy 71–4 on church headship 185–6 on disputation 78–9 on eucharistic elements 152–3, 167 on God, as eternal 49–50 on grace 70 on lordship 232, 251 On the Nature of the Good 47–8 on preaching 93–4 on predestinates 175–6 on sacraments 106, 109 on scripture 68–9 on universals 36 n.4 on unrighteousness 236 Augustine of Ireland 251 Augustinians 12 auricular confession 107–8, 113, 115–17, 120–1 avarice 205 Averroes 42 Avicenna 63

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328 Bale, John 1, 3 Ball, John 13–14 Balliol College, Oxford 6 baptism 110, 112, 229 Barton, William 13, 302 Bede, the Venerable 60 being, nature of 16 Benrath, Gustav 9 Berengar 305 Bible as Book of Life 53–4 in the vernacular 101–2 see also scripture bishops 203, 216 Blackfriars Council (1382) 14, 305–6 Black Prince 294 n.33 Bonaventure 208, 212, 272 Book of Life 53–4 Bradwardine, Thomas 41 Bruges 10 Buckingham, John 7 Burley, Walter 19 Calixtus II 226 Campi, Luigi 39 candle-bearers 128 canon law 29, 104 canons 12, 188 Canterbury College, Oxford 7 cardinals 199–200 cardinal virtues 97–8 Carmelites 12 celestial hierarchies 191–2 celestial spheres 38 charitable lordship 233 charity 67, 298–9 chastity 109 Christ 296–7 as head of church 184–6, 192 presence in host 148–51, 153–5 church as body of Christ 189–91 body parts 191–3 constitution of 9

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Index head of 184–6 quiddity 172–5 as salvation 180–1 secular power and 256–7 taxation and 263–5 Wyclif ’s understanding of 27–8, 170–1, 205–8 church calendar 100–1 church dormant 27, 143, 170, 177–9 church expectant see church dormant church militant 27, 143, 170, 177–9, 187–8 Christ as head 193–5 disparate natures 192–3 church penitent see church dormant church triumphant 27, 123, 143, 170, 177–9 circumcision 129, 195–6 civil law 104 civil lordship 26–7, 225, 234 authorised by God 240–1, 250–1 by grace 235 resistance to 249–50 see also divine lordship; lordship Clement VII 15, 172 clergy 12 behaviour 307 equated to salt 62–3 living worldly lives 62, 267, 295–6 punishment for sin 266 seven orders 128, 131–2 temporal lordship and 269 see also clerics; ecclesiastics clerical orders 129 clerical poverty 134 clerics definition 133–5 order of 216 secular power and 259–60 see also clergy; ecclesiastics Clifford, Lewis 11 coactive lordship 233 common people, oppression 297–8 Concordat of Worms (1122) 226

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Index

confession annual (to a priest) 118, 121 of the mouth 107, 113–15 private and public 122–3 see also penance Confession (Wyclif) 13, 305 confirmation 106 Confiteor 122 n.23, 123 Constantine the Great 27, 28, 202 consubstantiation 13, 146 Conti, Alessandro 31 contingency 34–5, 40 contingents 38 Continuation of Logic 7 contradictions, in scripture 77 contrition of the heart 107, 113–15, 120–1 see also confession; penance corruption 48, 49 Council of Constance (1418) 16,172 counsel, spirit of 276–8 Courtenay, William 10, 11, 14, 227, 269, 306 creation 48, 50–1 Cum marthae circa 29 curia, Roman 115, 126, 198, 223, 271, 278, 296 Dahmus, Joseph H. 31 deacons 128 death 228–9 Decree of Gratian 159 n.20 decretals, papal 103–4, 114, 119, 136, 256, 295 Despenser, Henry 15, 221 Despenser Crusade 15–16, 221, 223–4, 269–70 determinism 38–9 Dioscorides, Pedanius 95, 96 divine foreknowledge 20, 38–9 divine ideas 19, 37, 49, 56 n.3 divine lordship 26–7, 234 see also civil lordship; lordship divine natures 234

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divine omnipotence 20–1 divine ordination 129 divine volition 38–9, 40–1 divine will 20 Dominicans 12 Donation of Constantine 27, 28,197–8 Donatism 135 Donatists 306 n.8 Dove, Mary 5 Duffy, Eamon 2 ecclesiastical abuses 12 ecclesiastical property 11 ecclesiastical reform 2–3 ecclesiastical services, scriptural 70 ecclesiastics corruption 205 forbidden civil lordship 262–3 penance and 116–17, 125–6 see also clergy; clerics Edward of Woodstock 294 n.33 English use in scripture 101–2 Wyclif ’s use of 33 Eradicating Errors Concerning Universals 18, 34 eternity 38–9 eucharist 3, 28–30, 152–5 eucharistic change 12–13, 45, 106, 118–19, 270–1, 292–3, 302–3,307 faith and 153 kept secret from laity 150–1 eucharistic elements 148, 152–3, 167 see also host, consecrated eusebia 282 Evangelical Opus 14 Evans, G.R. 31 excommunication 180, 303, 304 exegesis 8–9, 11 exegetes authority of 69 moral trinity 89–90 role of 67 exorcists 128

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Index

fable of the birds 226, 264–5 faith 67 defect in 278 eucharistic change and 153 fear of the Lord, spirit of 284–6 filial fear 284 Fillingham, Lincolnshire 7 Firmiter 29 Fitzralph, Richard 20, 23, 39, 40, 157 influence on Wyclif 25–6 On the Poverty of the Saviour 25 foreknown 112, 135–6, 170, 174–5 form 106, 110 fortitude, spirit of 278–80 ‘four (false) sects’ 12, 102, 171, 188 duty to teach 292–3 leading Christ-like lives 296–7 Fourth Lateran Council 29, 30 Foxe, John, Actes and Monuments 3 Fragment on Annihilation 19, 35, 45 Franciscans 12, 227, 230 n.7 fraternal orders, not scriptural 209–10 see also antifraternalism; friars freedom of use (licentia usu-s) 227, 230 n.7 free will 20, 34–5, 39, 214 friars 12, 171, 188 authorising Despenser Crusade 223 corruption of orders 213–15 criticism of 210–13 eucharistic doctrine and 147 as instruments of Satan 288–9 as liegemen to the King 218–19 obligation to preach faith 278–9 plot to murder John of Gaunt 212 secular leadership 217–18 worldly goods and 281 genus, annihilation of 48 glossators 101 glosses, heretical 104 God absolute power of 47, 50, 52 as eternal 42–3, 49–50

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as Father, omnipotent 295–6 as Holy Spirit 297–8 as Son 296–7 Gomorrah, 62, 290 grace 26–7, 79, 122, 225, 273 as an absolute 46 enhances all lordship 261 gift for interpretation of Scripture 24, 58–9 prevenient 69 n.38 subsequent 69 n.38, 70 grammar, scriptural 53, 58–9, 67, 73, 86–7, 92 Gratian 109, 140, 157, 158–9 Gregory, Saint 58, 83–4, 204 Gregory VII 226 Gregory XI 10–11, 14, 171, 300 Grossetetste, Robert 18–19, 37–8, 59, 211 on sacramental accidents 162–3, 164–8 guilt 107 habitual sin 127 Henry V (Germany) 226 heretics 302–4 Higden, Ranulf 201 n.56 historiography (of Wyclif) 1–2 Hoenen, Maarten 9 holy orders church, corruption within 285–6 liberty in 214 sacrament of 129–30 seven levels 128 sin and 275–6, 283–4 Holy Spirit 297–8 gifts 131, 273 remission of sins 124–5 hope 67 host, consecrated 148–51, 292–3 Hudson, Anne 30 Hugh of St Victor 134, 165 human freedom 20 human natures 234

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Kenningham, John 9, 21, 25 Kenny, Anthony 30, 31, 32, 39 keys of the church (triumphant) 123 king see monarch kings, divine right of 242, 244–8 Knighton, Henry 4, 5, 14 knowledge, spirit of 280–2

Latimer, John 278 n.6 Latin use in scripture 101–2 Wyclif ’s use of 33 Lazarus, raising of 127 lectors 128 Levy, Ian 32 Lewis, John 30–1 liberty, in holy orders 214 liegemen 218–19 literal sense (of scripture) 22, 23, 56–7 twofold, 23 as virtus sermonis, 23-24 logic modernist 81 n.63 scriptural 53, 70 Lollards 2, 4–5 Lombard, Peter 67 n.30, 128 on marriage 109 on marriage vows 140 on sacramental words 158 on sacraments 106 lordship 10, 25–8 charitable 233 coactive 233 enhanced by grace 261 etymology 229–30 by grace 9, 11, 225, 307 as habit 229 as rational state 230–1 theory of 225–7, 229–31 see also civil lordship; divine lordship Lot’s wife 62 Ludgershall, Buckinghamshire 7 Luther, Martin 146 Lutterworth Priory, Leicestershire 10, 14

Lahey, Stephen 31, 32 Langham, Simon 7 language, figurative 59–63, 67, 68 n.33, 75, 76 Larsen, Andrew 30

Manichaeism 79 n.61 marriage, sacrament of 30, 108–9, 136 Christ and the church 143–4 consummation of 140–2 equality within 139–40

human will 20 humility (virtue) 94–6 hypothetical necessity 39 n.7

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identification 157, 159 impanation 157, 159 individual lordship 234 indulgences 15–16, 125–6, 222–4, 293, 298 Innocent III 13, 29, 114 intentional being 39 n.7 ‘inverted’ order 91 n.82 Investiture Controversy (1076–1122) 226 Isidore of Seville 63 Islip, Simon 7 Jerome, Saint 61, 87 Jerusalem Babylonian siege of 86-7, 205-8 heavenly 185 scriptural signification of 64 Joan of Kent 11 John XXII 301 John of Gaunt 10, 13, 212, 278 n.6, 305 John of God 104 n.110, 114, 119, 182 John of Jandun 301 judgement, day of 143, 291 just lordship 227 just ownership 227

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332 marriage, sacrament (cont.) fidelity in 137 God’s approval 138–9 partners, nature of 138 procreation in 137, 138–9 marriage vows 108, 109, 140–2 Marsilius of Padua 301 martyrs, act of confession 121 matter 106, 110 Maur, Hraban 157, 158 McFarlane, K.B. 2 merit 21 Merton College, Oxford 6 Minnis, A.J. 22 n. 56, 23 n.60, 57 monarch as God’s vicar 245 honour due 244–5 role of 28, 225–6 subjection of subjects 245–6 superiority 241, 255–8 monarchy 9 monastic orders 188, 286–7 monks 12 moral philosophy 97–8 moral sense (of scripture) 22, 64, 66 mortal sin 26–7 priests and 135–6 righteousness and 235, 236–7 Müller, Ivan 17, 32 multiplication (in eucharist) 146, 156 mystical sense (of scripture) 75, 76 natural philosophy 94–7 necessity 20–1, 34–5, 38–9, 40, 90 Nicholas of Lyra 8, 23 nominalism 18, 19 obscurity, in scripture 68–70 Olivi, Peter John 227, 230 n.7 omnipotence 46, 295–6 On Apostasy 12 On Baptism 14 On Blasphemy 12

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Index On Civil Lordship 10, 11, 25, 28, 225 fable of the birds 226, 264–5 On Divine Lordship 10, 25, 26, 225, 227 On Divine Volition 20, 34, 38–41 On Logic 7 On Simony 12 On the Church 11 On the Eucharist 12–13, 29–30 On the Office of the King 11, 28, 225 On the Power of the Pope 11–12, 28 On the Productive Power of God 19 On the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit 14 On the Truth of Holy Scripture 11, 53, 54 On Time 52 On Universals 18, 19 ordained, character of 130–3 order definition 129 ‘inverted’ 91 n.82 ‘right’ 91 n.82 ordination, celebration of 133 Origen 64 original sin 110, 111 ostiaries 128 pagans, virtuous 204 papacy 9, 307 authority 11–12 imperial power 197 power of 121–2, 171–2, 175–7, 269 secular powers and 222 state of 14–15 worldly honours and 222 papal election 27–8 papal endowments 225 papal schism 15–16, 171, 182–4, 221–4 papal taxation 10, 226, 266 peace, of the soul 277–8 Peasants’ Revolt 13–14, 226, 265–6 Pelagianism 79 n.61 penance 30, 107–8 Apostolic church and 119 in the heart 113–14 human tradition 120

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matter and form 113–17 power of priests 127 remedy against sin 120 scriptural basis 126–7 see also confession; contrition of the heart Peraldus, William 103 Percy, Lord Henry 10 Peter, Saint Christ’s vicar 195–7 head of church 193–5 Philo 64 philosophical realism 8, 34 Phocas 202 physical decay 48 piety, spirit of 282–4 Platearius, Matthaeus 96 n.96 Plato 19 Pliny the Elder 96 poenitentia, translation of 113 poll taxes 265–6 see also taxation Poole, Reginald 33 poor priests 212, 295 poor use (usus pauper) 227, 230 n.7 popes appointment of 202 duty to imitate Christ 216–17, 220–1 election of 199–201 lifestyle 198 origins of name 201–2 role of 27–8 Postils on the Whole Bible 8–9, 53 potentiality 98–9 poverty 232, 307 in clergy 134 predestinates 170, 173–5 predestination 26, 114–15 priests 128 as confessor 107–8 duties 225–6 power to absolve 123–4 prime matter 46, 48, 87, 118

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privation 47 procreation 137, 138–9 property-less life 171 Pseudo-Dionysius 58, 166 punishment, eternal 107 purgatory 107, 143 Purvey, John 102 Queen’s College, Oxford 7 rational nature 234 real presence (doctrine of) 146, 148 see also eucharistic change reason, surpasses authority 65–6 Reformation, Wyclif anticipation of 1–2 regal lordship 234 sacerdotal lordship and 242, 251–4 temporal superiority 258–9, 260 women and 252–3 relationships 44–5 relative knowledge 40 remission of sins, by Holy Spirit 124–5 Rex, Richard 2 Richard II 278 n.6, 305 ‘right’ order 91 n.82 righteousness 92, 238 Robson, J.A. 31 Roman church 182–4 Roman pontiff, authority 182–3, 186 see also papacy; popes Rymington, William 19 sacerdotal law 260 sacerdotal lordship 242, 251–4 sacerdotal office 260 sacerdotal power 151–2 sacramental accidents 162–3 sacramental theology 106–9, 307 sacramental words 157–62 sacraments 9, 30 foreknown and 135–6 see also baptism; eucharist; marriage, sacrament of; penance

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334 ‘salt’ 60–1 salvation 21 Satan 287–9 satisfaction of works 107, 108 Scarisbrick, J.J. 2 scriptural meaning, four senses of 22, 24, 54, 56–7 scriptural truth 9, 21–5, 80–2 scripture authority of 21, 81–2 five levels of 55–6 grammar and logic 53, 70, 81 interpretation, gift from God 24 literally false 76 sacred truth 55–6 teaching of 93–4 time in 25 translation into English 102 secular clergy 12, 188 teaching by example 215–16 secular judgement 182 secular lordship ecclesiastical affairs and 253–4 obedience to as scriptural 245, 248 spiritual leadership and 225–7 secular power (in the church) 181–2 Sergeant, Lewis 31 servant by ministry 232 by servitude 232–3 relation to slave 232 servile fear 284 simony 200, 206, 207 ‘simulated church’ 174–5 sin 62–3, 107 atonement for 275–6 habitual 127 in holy orders 275–6 lordship over the sinner 228–9 relationship to universals 36 remission of by Holy Spirit 124–5 repeated 114–15 wisdom and 90–1

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Index Smalley, Beryl 9 sola Scriptura theology 11 sophisms 79–80 species in medio 46 Spiritual Franciscans 230 n.7 spiritual gifts 273 spiritual leadership, secular lordship and 225–7 spiritual privileges 298 Stockton, Adam 3–4 sub-deacons 128 subjects 35, 49 see also accidents Sudbury, Simon 10, 11, 13, 226, 265 syllogisms 93 Summa de Ente 8, 16–20, 34 Summa Theologiae 9, 26 Sylvester I 27, 28, 197–8 syntax, scriptural 92 taxation 263–5, 267, 297 teaching scripture 93–4, 99 in sermons 100–1 temporal ampliation 25 temporal goods 281, 307 theological virtues 67, 97–8 theosebia 282 Third Treatise on Logic 7, 25 Thomistic literalism 56 Thomson, Williel R. 32, 36 time 38–9, 52 in annihilation 50 atomisitic conception of 41 as eternal 42–3 extension of 88–9 in scripture 54–5, 82–3 topology of 41–2 tithes, use of 266 n.83, 268 Trajan 204 translation 33 translators 101 transubstantiation 12–13, 28–30, 145–7, 157, 159, 303 Trialogue 14, 16, 32

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trinity 295–8 tropological sense (of scripture) 22, 24, 56–7, 64, 66 twenty first Canon, Fourth Lateran Council 107, 114–15, 118, 122 n.23 Tyconius 68 n.33 understanding, spirit of 274–6 unity, in church 187–8, 189, 213–15, 286–7 universal church 170, 179–80 universals 17–19, 34, 36–8 unrighteousness 237–9 Urban VI 15, 171, 219–21, 223, 307 usufruct 237 Valla, Lorenzo 28 vernacular, published works in 4–5 vices 98 Vincent the Donatist 65 Virgin Mary 44,176, 178, 243 virtues 67, 97–8 Walsingham, Thomas 3, 300 war (on foreign soil) 267–8

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Western schism 15–16, 171, 182–4, 221–4 will (of the mind) 92 William of Ockham 19 wisdom 90–1 wisdom, spirit of 273–4 women, not made in God’s image 252–3 Word of God 296–7 Workman, Herbert 31 works of faith 280 Wycliffite Bible, authorship 5 Wyclif, John academic ability 3–4 biographical studies 30–1 call for arrest 301–2 condemnation 10–11, 305 declared lunatic 301 English, use of 33 as heretic 145, 168–9 heretical views 306–8 historical views 1–2 Latin, use of 33 trials for heresy 10, 11 working for the Crown 10 written style 33

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