Jan Hus

• 1. Introduction

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  Jan Hus, a Czech priest and philosopher born to peasant parents, was voted the greatest hero of the Czech nation in a 2015 survey by Czech Radio. That is a striking honor for a man the Catholic Church burned at the stake as a heretic. He spent his working life in Prague, preaching, teaching and writing, and he never led an army or held high office. Yet his name still marks a public holiday, a church tradition and a whole century of Bohemian history. How did a village boy rise to the top of Prague's university? What did he say that frightened popes, archbishops and a council of the Church? Why did a promise of safe passage fail to protect him? And what did his followers do once he was gone?

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• 2. A Village Called Goose

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  The village of Husinec in southern Bohemia gave Jan Hus his name. His birth year is disputed. Some scholars say around 1369, others place it between 1373 and 1375, and more recent research favors 1372. The tradition that he was born on the 6th of July, the same day he died, has no factual basis.

  Nobody knows why he took his name from the village rather than from his father, who was called Michael. Some suggest he never knew his father, and others say it was simply the custom of the time. His mother's name is unknown. We know he had a brother only because, while awaiting execution, Hus voiced concern for his nephew.

  In Bohemian, now called Czech, the word hus means goose. A century after his death, the name surfaced again in a dream reported by Frederick, the Elector of Saxony, which featured a Bohemian goose.

  At about the age of ten, Hus was sent to a monastery. The reasons are uncertain. Some accounts say his father had died, and others say he was drawn by devotion. His teachers were impressed and recommended that he move to Prague, then one of the largest cities in Bohemia. There he found work to support himself, which also gave him access to the Prague library.

  He entered the university three years later. He was not an exceptional student, but he studied with fierce determination, and he sang as a choir boy to add to his income. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1393 and a master's degree in 1396. Many of his professors held strongly anti-papal views, and those views likely shaped what he later wrote. In 1398 he began teaching there himself, and a stranger from across the sea was about to enter his reading.

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• 3. Wycliffe and the University

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  In 1399, Hus publicly defended certain propositions of the English theologian John Wycliffe for the first time. The following year he was ordained a Catholic priest. In 1401 his students and fellow faculty promoted him to dean of the philosophy department. In 1402 he was appointed preacher at the Bethlehem Chapel, the pulpit from which he would speak for years.

  The Church banned many of Wycliffe's works in 1403. Hus responded by translating Wycliffe's Trialogus into Czech and helping to spread it. From the pulpit he denounced the moral failings of the clergy, the bishops and even the papacy. Archbishop Zbyněk Zajíc tolerated this and even named Hus preacher at the clergy's twice-yearly synod.

  Pressure arrived from Rome on the 24th of June 1405, when Pope Innocent VII told the archbishop to counter Wycliffe's teachings, especially his idea of impanation in the Eucharist. The archbishop issued a decree against Wycliffe and forbade further attacks on the clergy. In 1406 two Bohemian students brought home a document bearing the seal of the University of Oxford and praising Wycliffe. Hus read it aloud from his pulpit with pride.

  In 1408 Pope Gregory XII warned Zajíc that Rome had heard of Wycliffe's heresies and of King Wenceslaus IV's sympathy for nonconformists. The king and the university ordered all of Wycliffe's writings handed to the archdiocese for correction. Hus complied, saying he condemned the errors in them.

  That same year the Western Schism, in which Gregory XII in Rome and Benedict XIII in Avignon both claimed to be pope, split the university. Wenceslaus feared Gregory might spoil his plan to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor, so he ordered strict neutrality. The archbishop stayed loyal to Gregory. Among the scholars, only the Bohemian nation, one of four governing sections, followed Hus in vowing neutrality.

  In January 1409 the king summoned the four nations to Kutná Hora to demand declarations of loyalty. The Czechs agreed and the other three refused. The king then decreed that the Czech nation would hold three votes, while the German nation, made up of the former Bavarian, Saxon and Polish nations, would hold one in total. By May, the German dean and rector had been deposed and replaced by Czechs. The Palatine Elector called the Germans to his University of Heidelberg, and the Margrave of Meissen founded a new university in Leipzig. An estimated one thousand or more students and masters left Prague, spreading accusations of Bohemian heresy as they went.

  The Council of Pisa tried to end the schism in 1409 by electing Alexander V as pope. Hus, his followers and the king switched their allegiance to him, and the archbishop followed under royal pressure. Zajíc then accused the Wycliffites in Prague of causing ecclesiastical disturbances. On the 20th of December 1409, Alexander V issued a bull empowering the archbishop to act. All of Wycliffe's writings were to be surrendered and free preaching was to stop. Hus appealed in vain. Wycliffe's books and valuable manuscripts were burned, and Hus and his supporters were excommunicated. The Council of Constance later declared Alexander an antipope, in 1418.

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• 4. Indulgences and Exile

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  Alexander V died in 1410, and his successor, John XXIII, proclaimed a crusade in 1411 against King Ladislaus of Naples, protector of the rival pope Gregory XII. John XXIII also authorized indulgences to pay for the war. Prague's priests urged the faithful on, and crowds filled the churches with offerings. Hus saw this trade as proof of a Church in need of repair.

  Archbishop Zajíc died in 1411, and the dispute moved into a new phase. In 1412 Hus delivered a university address on indulgences, titled Quaestio magistri Johannis Hus de indulgentiis. It borrowed heavily from Wycliffe's De ecclesia and his treatise De absolutione a pena et culpa. Hus argued that no pope or bishop had the right to take up the sword in the name of the Church. He said forgiveness comes through true repentance, not money. The university's theologians answered him, without success.

  A few days later, followers led by Vok Voksa z Valdštejna burned the papal bulls. In response, three men from the lower classes who had openly called the indulgences a fraud were beheaded. They were later regarded as the first martyrs of the Hussite Church. The faculty also condemned forty-five articles of Wycliffe, along with several theses that originated with Hus. The king banned teaching them, but Hus and the university refused to comply. They asked that the articles first be proven unscriptural.

  The king tried to reconcile the sides. A synod was planned for the 2nd of February 1412 at Český Brod, but it was held in the archbishop's palace in Prague instead, so that Hus could be shut out. Hus wrote at the time, "Even if I should stand before the stake which has been prepared for me, I would never accept the recommendation of the theological faculty." The university doctors demanded that he accept their view that the pope is the head of the Church and the cardinals its body. Hus protested vigorously. His party offered a compromise, adding only the phrase "so far as every pious Christian is bound" to the article on obeying Rome. Stanislav ze Znojma and Štěpán Páleč objected and walked out. The king exiled them along with two others.

  By then riots had broken out in parts of Bohemia over the attack on Hus. Prague's churches were placed under a ban and the city under interdict. To protect the city, Hus withdrew to the countryside, where he went on preaching and writing. Before he left, on the 18th of October 1412, he appealed to Jesus Christ as supreme judge. That step bypassed the structures and laws of the medieval Church. For the Bohemian Reformation it was as significant as Martin Luther's Ninety-five Theses in Wittenberg in 1517.

  In the countryside Hus saw how far university theology was from the lives of poorly educated village priests and their flocks. He began writing many texts in Czech, including basic statements of the faith and sermons, aimed mainly at priests whose Latin was weak. His written Czech also mattered in its own right. His works adopted orthographic reforms, among them the hook accent called the háček, which replaced awkward letter pairs with single symbols. An acute accent marked long vowels, so that each sound had one symbol. A book called Orthographia Bohemica, dated 1406, was attributed to him by František Palacký, but another author at Charles University may have compiled it.

  In 1413 Hus wrote De Ecclesia at Kozí Hrádek, the castle of one of his protectors, and sent it to Prague, where it was read aloud in the Bethlehem Chapel. Its first ten chapters condensed Wycliffe's book of the same name. The following chapters summarized Wycliffe's work on papal power. Stanislav ze Znojma and Štěpán Páleč answered with treatises of the same title. In January 1413 a council in Rome condemned Wycliffe's writings and ordered them burned.

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• 5. Constance

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  A council was set to open at Konstanz, known in English as Constance, on the 1st of November 1414. King Sigismund of Hungary, brother of King Wenceslaus and heir to the Bohemian crown, arranged it to end the papal schism and take up long-desired reform. It became the 16th ecumenical council recognized by the Catholic Church. Hus agreed to attend on Sigismund's promise of safe-conduct.

  It is not known whether Hus sensed his fate, but he made his will before leaving. He set out on the 11th of October 1414 and reached Constance on the 3rd of November. The next day, notices on the church doors announced that Michal z Německého Brodu would argue against him. At first he lived freely in a widow's house. He kept celebrating Mass and preaching, against Church restrictions.

  On the 28th of November 1414, his opponents had him imprisoned on the strength of a rumor that he planned to flee. He was held first in a canon's residence and, from the 6th of December, in the prison of the Dominican monastery. Sigismund, as guarantor of his safety, was furious and threatened the prelates with dismissal. They persuaded him that a promise to a heretic could not bind him.

  On the 4th of December 1414, John XXIII appointed a committee of three bishops to investigate. Prosecution witnesses were heard, as was usual, but Hus was denied an advocate. His situation worsened when John XXIII fled Constance rather than abdicate. Hus was handed to the bishop of Constance and taken to Gottlieben castle on the Rhine. There he spent 73 days, chained day and night, poorly fed and ill, cut off from his friends.

  His first trial came on the 5th of June 1415, after which he was moved to a Franciscan monastery for his final weeks. Extracts from his works were read and witnesses heard. He refused every formula of submission but said he would recant if the Bible proved him wrong. He admitted honoring Wycliffe and wished his own soul might one day reach where Wycliffe's was. But he denied defending Wycliffe's view of the Lord's Supper or the forty-five articles, saying he had only opposed their blanket condemnation. Sigismund urged him to surrender to the council's mercy, since he did not wish to shield a heretic.

  At the final hearing on the 8th of June, thirty-nine sentences were read to him. Twenty-six came from De ecclesia, seven from his treatise against Páleč and six from his treatise against Stanislav ze Znojma. The council explained to Sigismund how dangerous some of these ideas were to worldly power, to turn him against Hus. Hus again offered to submit if shown his errors, but this was taken as unconditional surrender. He was asked to confess that he had erred, renounce his theses, recant them and declare the opposite. He asked to be spared from recanting teachings he had never taught. Others he would not revoke, because it would violate his conscience.

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• 6. The Stake

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  On the 6th of July 1415, the council gathered in the cathedral at Constance for the condemnation of Jan Hus. After High Mass he was led in. The Bishop of Lodi, then Giacomo Balardi Arrigoni, gave a speech on the duty of rooting out heresy. Theses of Hus and Wycliffe were read, along with a report of the trial.

  An Italian prelate pronounced sentence on Hus and his writings. Hus protested that even now he wanted only to be convinced from Scripture. He knelt and quietly asked God to forgive his enemies. Next came his degradation from the priesthood. He was dressed in priestly vestments and asked once more to recant. He refused again. Amid curses, his ornaments were stripped away and his tonsure destroyed.

  The synod then declared that the Church had nothing more it could do and handed him to the secular court. A tall paper hat inscribed "Haeresiarcha," meaning leader of a heretical movement, was allegedly placed on his head. Armed guards marched him to the stake.

  Before his execution, Hus is said to have declared, "You may kill a weak goose, but more powerful birds, eagles and falcons, will come after me." Martin Luther reshaped the line, reporting that Hus said they might roast a goose but in a hundred years a swan would sing, and they would be forced to listen. In 1546 Johannes Bugenhagen, in his funeral sermon for Luther, changed it again: "You may burn a goose, but in a hundred years will come a swan you will not be able to burn." In 1566 Johannes Mathesius, Luther's first biographer, took the prophecy as evidence that Luther was divinely inspired.

  At the place of execution, Hus knelt, spread his hands and prayed aloud. The executioner stripped him and bound his hands behind his back. A chain fastened his neck to the stake, and wood and straw were piled up to his neck. At the last moment the imperial marshal, von Pappenheim, in the presence of the Count Palatine, urged him to recant and save his life. Hus declined. He said, "God is my witness that the things charged against me I never preached. In the same truth of the Gospel which I have written, taught, and preached, drawing upon the sayings and positions of the holy doctors, I am ready to die today."

  His friend and devoted follower Jerome of Prague shared his fate, and was burned at Konstanz on the 30th of May 1416.

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• 7. The Hussite Wars

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  On the 2nd of September 1415, a hundred notable men from Bohemia and Moravia signed a document and attached their wax seals to protest the burning of Hus. Evidence suggests four such documents were made, but only this one survives, and it is held at the University of Edinburgh. It calls Hus "a good, just and catholic man" who "consistently detested all error and heresies," and it brands anyone who claimed heresy was growing in Bohemia or Moravia as "the worst of traitors."

  Bohemians turned even faster away from papal teaching. King Wenceslaus IV died in August 1419. His brother Sigismund could not set up a working government in Bohemia because of the Hussite revolt. On the 1st of March 1420, Pope Martin V issued a bull proclaiming a crusade and authorizing the killing of all supporters of Hus and Wycliffe.

  The Hussites included most of the Czech population of the Kingdom of Bohemia. Under two excellent commanders, Jan Žižka, who lived from about 1360 to 1424, and later Prokop the Great, who lived from about 1380 to 1434, they defeated that crusade and the three that followed. Fighting ended in 1436 with a compromise between the Utraquist Hussites and the Catholic Council of Basel. The resulting Basel Compacts officially allowed Bohemia to practice its own version of Christianity. A century later, as much as ninety percent of the people in the Czech Crown lands still followed Hussite teachings.

  After Hus died, his followers split into several groups, including the Utraquists, the Taborites and the Orphans. The Taborites seized on Wycliffe's view of the Lord's Supper, which may have reached Prague as early as 1399 through students returning from England. In their book, the true Church was not the clerical hierarchy but the whole body of those predestined for salvation, with Christ as its head. Obeying the pope was no article of faith, and no office guaranteed anyone a place in the true Church.

  Hus himself had aimed chiefly to clear the Church of ethical abuses. He once described the burden on ordinary Bohemians: "One pays for confession, for Mass, for the sacrament, for indulgences, for churching a woman, for a blessing, for burials, for funeral services and prayers. The very last penny that an old woman has hidden in her bundle for fear of thieves or robbery will not be saved. The villainous priest will grab it."

  The Hussite majority lasted until the 1620s. The Protestant defeat at the Battle of the White Mountain then placed the Lands of the Bohemian Crown under Habsburg rule for the next 300 years, with an intense campaign of forced conversion to Catholicism.

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• 8. Afterlives

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  In 1999, nearly six centuries after the burning, Pope John Paul II expressed deep regret for the cruel death inflicted on Hus and praised his moral courage. Cardinal Miloslav Vlk of the Czech Republic helped shape the statement. Members of the Moravian Church hold that it is for God to judge those involved in Hus's death.

  The composer Antonín Dvořák drew on melodies used by Hussite soldiers in his Hussite Overture of 1883, which the German conductor Hans von Bülow often performed. On the 6th of July 1915, in a speech at Geneva University, Professor Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk invoked Hus's name in defense against Austria. In July 1917 he used the name again for the first corps of his legions in Russia.

  The 6th of July, the anniversary of the burning, is Jan Hus Day, a public holiday in the Czech Republic. The Jan Hus Memorial stands on the Old Town Square in Prague, with many smaller memorials in other Czech towns. Czech immigrants raised a statue of Hus in 1893 at the Union Cemetery in Bohemia, New York, on Long Island. In New York City, a Moravian church in Brooklyn and a church and a theatre in Manhattan carry his name.

  His religious standing remains contested. Some Eastern Orthodox Christians argue that his theology was closer to their tradition than to Protestantism. Several Orthodox churches, including those of Greece and Cyprus, consider him a saint. The Lutheran Church in America commemorates him as a martyr, and the Czechoslovak Hussite Church claims descent from him.

  His best-known follower in education was John Amos Comenius, who lived from 1592 to 1670. He was the last bishop of the Unitas Fratrum before its renewal as the Moravian Church, and an early champion of universal education in a person's own mother tongue. The Moravian Church remains the modern home of Hus's followers.

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