But the Pope’s victory was short lived. He died the following year and the Catholic Church was rocked by a revolution at its very heart. The Papal Schism, as it has become known, led to the creation of a rival papacy. A second Pope, known to his enemies as the ‘anti-pope’, established his court in Avignon. The Church was in crisis, its reputation and authority had never been so low. John Wycliffe and his social conscience were no longer its most pressing topics.
Even so, the schism in the Church did not make things that much easier for Wycliffe in England. The country had its own problems. In 1381 the Peasant’s Revolt broke out. Sparked by the king’s attempt to impose a poll tax on the people, it rapidly turned into a popular uprising against the two forces that made the lives of the poor a misery: the institution of serfdom and the power of the Church. Among the key movers of the revolt were the Lollard preachers, Wycliffe’s followers. And even though the nobility shared the rebels’ dislike of the Church, and despite John of Gaunt still being Wycliffe’s most powerful supporter, nevertheless the hapless Duke of Lancaster, son of the hated king, found himself one of the chief targets for the revolutionaries’ ire.
The rebels’ dislike of John of Gaunt put Wycliffe in an invidious position. His anti-papal rhetoric reflected the religious mood of the nation. By rights he should have supported the uprising. But he felt duty-bound to support his patron and ally and to come out against the revolt. Torn, and unable to commit to either party, Wycliffe was left with only one choice. He retreated to his books and his writings. He turned his attention to the Bible.
A cornerstone of Wycliffe’s theology, enthusiastically supported by the Lollards, was that scripture should be accessible to everyone. The Bible was the foundation of Christian belief and should not be the esoteric property of the clerics. But although parts of the Bible had previously been rendered into English there was still no complete translation. Ordinary people, who neither spoke Latin nor were able to read, only knew what they knew from the mouths of the clergy. Much of what they thought they knew, powerful convictions such as the fires of hell and the travails of purgatory, were not even part of Scripture. The Bible had become the property of the priests and monks; the decree issued by the Council of Toulouse in 1229 had played no small part in removing it from public scrutiny.
Wycliffe believed that the Bible was the path to salvation. He regarded the policy of withholding it from the masses to be an unpardonable sin. He was convinced that by reading an English Bible, or at least having it read to them, the laity would find grace. If nobody else would make an English version available to them, then he would. No earthly power would prevent him from carrying out what he considered to be his religious duty. A full translation of the Bible became an imperative for Wycliffe. It was to the accomplishment of this that he turned, following the Peasant’s Revolt, when he knew that his remaining days on this earth were numbered.
But for all his determination, Wycliffe was no Jerome. Despite his theological erudition, he did not know Hebrew and he is unlikely to have known Greek. Like everyone else, the Bible he knew was the Latin Vulgate, and it was this that he and his assistants made use of for the first English translation. As with so many who had gone before him, Wycliffe’s translation of the Bible was actually a translation of a translation.
Wycliffe lived long before the introduction of printing into Europe. His Bible could only be composed and reproduced in manuscript. Producing a hand-written copy of a work as lengthy as the Bible may be an endeavour of love but it is time consuming and laborious. Anyone wishing to buy one of Wycliffe’s manuscripts would have had to shell out a lot of money. This didn’t seem to dent their popularity though. Today, more than six hundred years after the translation was made, it is believed that up to two hundred copies still exist.25 Once, there would have been many more.
It goes without saying that Wycliffe’s translated Bible provoked the wrath of the Church. Henry Knighton, a canon of St Mary’s Abbey in Leicester, wrote that Wycliffe ‘translated from Latin into the language not of angels but of Englishmen, so that he made . . . common and open to the laity, and to women who were able to read, [that] which used to be for literate and perceptive clerks, and spread the Evangelists’ pearls to be trampled by swine’.26
Although Knighton appears not to have held a very high opinion of his congregants, his comments about the English language need to be seen in context. During the fourteenth century, English was only just beginning to recover from centuries of neglect. The Norman invasion, led by William the Conqueror in 1066, had installed French as the lingua franca of the nobility and educated classes. Latin was the language of religion and French the language spoken in the upper echelons of society. English was the old language, which only peasants spoke. It wasn’t really until the fifteenth century, with the emergence of English nationalism, that the language came to be accepted by all classes. By that time some of the phrases that Wycliffe had coined from the New Testament, such as ‘the wages of sin are death’, had entered the vernacular as proverbs.27
Chaucer and Wycliffe dug the foundations for English as a literary language; two hundred years later Shakespeare and Tyndale would gild its spires. Knighton, who wrote in Latin, doesn’t mention Chaucer; perhaps he had never heard of him. When he disparaged those who read English as swine it wasn’t only class prejudice. It was just as much a case of disdain for a language he never came to appreciate.
The assumption that English was the speech of illiterates, below the refined talents of the nobility, reinforced the opposition to Wycliffe’s translation. One only had to look, so the argument went, at the Lollards to see what could happen when the peasants got ideas of their own. Giving them access to the Bible, which they were obviously incapable of fully understanding, could only result in disaster. Knighton was in no doubt about this. Citing the conservative French theologian William of Saint Amour; he wrote, ‘We are probably close to the end, and therefore we are closer to the perils of the latest times, which are to come before the coming of Antichrist.’28
Opposition to Wycliffe’s Bible became institutionalized within the ruling classes. Seven years after his death, in 1391, a bill was laid before Parliament to outlaw English Bible versions and to imprison anyone in possession of a copy. It was obvious that Wycliffe’s work, which was now circulating freely, was the principal target. The bill was thrown out due to the intervention of Wycliffe’s old friend, the Duke of Lancaster.
The Church then tried a different tack. In 1408 a synod in Oxford declared that no person, under pain of excommunication, was to translate the Bible into English. Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, wrote to the Pope denouncing Wycliffe as ‘that pestilent wretch, of damnable memory, yea, the forerunner and disciple of antichrist who, as the complement of his wickedness, invented a new translation of the scriptures into his mother-tongue’.29 No matter that Wycliffe was long dead by now; when it came to the medieval art of abuse, the memory of Wycliffe was as good a stone as any on which to whet the arrows of contumely.
But words alone are never enough. In 1427 Pope Martin issued an order for Wycliffe’s remains, now forty years into their decomposition, to be exhumed and burned. The ashes were to be cast into a river, hoping no doubt that this act might arrest the currents of change that Wycliffe had anticipated, currents which were already undermining the nature of clerical authority.
John Wycliffe sowed the seeds, but it took a full two hundred years for his spiritual heirs to reap the fruits. It wasn’t until the dawn of the sixteenth century, when the Renaissance was changing the way that people understood the world, when the Protestant Reformation was gathering pace, that his legacy began to crystallize.
Wycliffe predated the Reformation by two centuries. But he is often considered to have been its herald. He is sometimes referred to as the Morning Star of the Reformation. It has been suggested that it was he whom Chaucer had in mind when he created the character of the exemplary, virtuous parson in the Canterbury Tales.30 Chaucer was a friend,
and eventually the brother-in-law, of John of Gaunt, so this suggestion is not unrealistic. Wycliffe’s ideas and the impact he had on society were enough to subject him to vitriol and condemnation while he was alive. But it was his translation of the Bible that ensured that the abuse would endure long after his death.
A Czech Heretic
To his persecutors in England, Wycliffe was more than merely a troublemaker whose obsession with church reform threatened their easy lives. The Peasants’ Revolt had driven home to them the fragility of English society; as the luminary of the Lollard movement Wycliffe represented an ongoing threat to the nation’s stability. But there was another side to Wycliffe. His English opponents probably never knew, and they almost certainly didn’t care, that his name and influence was having an impact in places so alien they couldn’t even begin to know where they were. The Bohemian city of Prague was far beyond their ken; even as recently as 1938 a British Prime Minister described it as a ‘faraway place’ populated by ‘people of whom we know nothing’.31 But one man in Prague had heard of John Wycliffe, and he was destined to pay with his life for what he knew.
Jan Michalóv of Husinec was burned at the stake in 1415 in the German city of Constance. Before he died he was stripped of his priesthood and his soul formally handed over to the devil. One of his disciples claimed that, as the flames licked his charred and blistered body, he died singing. A local chronicler, much more realistically, claimed that he died screaming.32 How could he not?
Jan Michalóv is better known as Jan Hus. Fifty years younger than Wycliffe, Hus was born into a society that was teetering on the edge of social upheaval. As in so much of Europe, there was a growing sense of resentment about the wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a priesthood who were widely seen as corrupt. And, as elsewhere, matters were exacerbated by the presence of a small, over-privileged, secular class. In the case of Bohemia this privilege lay in the hands of a prosperous, socially dominant, German-speaking minority. By the time Hus came on the scene, stirrings of Czech nationalism were already in the air. All that was lacking was an inspirational figurehead.
Hus started out as a philosophy lecturer in Prague’s university. There was little remarkable about his early academic career; he lived the life of a good and observant Catholic, he is even on record at one point as buying an indulgence for the remission of his sins. But it was around this time that he began to read Wycliffe’s books, and to recognize the similarities between the English theologian’s world and his own.
Hus’s growing awareness of the problems in Czech society, and his desire to do something about them, led him to seek ordination. In 1402 he was appointed to a pulpit in one of Prague’s private chapels. His sermons, which grew more radical as he became more confident, began to attract attention. And although he was an independent thinker, whose thoughts were shaped by the social conditions surrounding him, the extent of Wycliffe’s influence can be gauged by the archbishop’s reaction once Hus’s anti-corruption message began to hit home. Appointed just a few months after Hus took up his pulpit, Archbishop Zbynĕk, who had paid 2,800 gulden to get the job, initially supported Hus and his early calls for change. But once Hus’s calls for clerical reform grew too vigorous, the archbishop ordered the confiscation and burning of Wycliffe’s books. In the archbishop’s mind at least, it was Wycliffe who was responsible for Hus’s sedition. The destruction of Wycliffe’s books was the first step in a process which would ultimately lead to Hus’s death.
Central to Hus’s reform agenda was to cement a sense of national identity through the development of the Czech language. Just as had happened in England, the peasant classes were emerging from centuries of ignorance and repression. They were identified as much by their language as by their poverty. Elevating the language was the obvious way to ameliorate their status. But old Czech was hardly a literary language; its orthography was complex and uncertain. In his treatise, de orthographia bohemica, Jan Hus set out a simplified system of pronunciation for the Czech alphabet. Although it has been modified somewhat since Hus first devised it, the system of signs and symbols above and below the letters which he introduced eventually became the basis for all Slavic languages that use the Latin alphabet.
Top of Hus’s agenda was to provide the Czechs with a Bible they could read in their own language. It is not clear whether Hus himself takes the credit for translating the Bible into Czech, or whether he appointed a team of scholars working under his direction. But the Czech Bible that emerged in 1406, with a revision in 1414, is generally regarded as Hus’s accomplishment; one of several theological innovations that led to his eventual arrest for heresy. To appreciate Hus’s passion, and the Church’s violent reaction to his translation, we need look no further than his assertion that the ‘disciples of antichrist’33 were keeping people away from the Bible.
Before he was finally murdered for his alleged heresy, Jan Hus was subjected to one of the most spectacular trials in history. Thomas Fudge describes how nearly every VIP in Europe travelled to the German city of Constance to watch the proceedings. One archbishop arrived with 600 horses; 700 prostitutes paraded through the streets, 500 people tragically drowned in the lake, two committed suicide and one was murdered. The Pope fell off his carriage into a snowdrift.34 The carnival was so exhilarating that Hus’s eventual conviction and barbaric execution must have seemed an anti-climax. But the violence didn’t end there.
Hus’s supporters of course foresaw the outcome of the trial. But that didn’t imply they were resigned to it, or that they would take his execution lightly. When news of his death reached Bohemia, country-wide riots broke out. Churches and priests were attacked. The authorities retaliated in kind. Within a few short years the country was embroiled in a civil war. After King Wenceslas died in 1419 his successor Sigismund, egged on by the Pope, raised a foreign army and launched an attack against the Hussites, as they were now known. The fighting raged until 1436 and spread from Bohemia into neighbouring provinces. It wasn’t until the Hussite camp became riven with its own internal arguments and disagreements that a path was cleared for a peace agreement. In the interim, thousands had died.
The Hussite wars marked one of the first great revolutions which would ultimately culminate in the Protestant Reformation and Europe’s unhappy age of religious wars. But the Czech Bible lived on.
A Question of Language
Wycliffe’s complaints against the Church were sparked by the corruption and venality in which the ecclesiastical hierarchy was steeped. As Henry VIII’s archbishop, Thomas Cranmer, put it: ‘the ungraciousness of damnable ambition, never-satisfied avarice, and the horrible enormity of vices had corrupted and taken the see of Rome’.35 The Roman Church had grown lax and complacent; it had lost touch with its roots. Spirituality had been replaced by temporality; the nurturing of souls by the accumulation of wealth.
But greedy, over-stuffed friars and privilege-toting bishops were merely the visible manifestation of a deeper malaise, one which failed to appreciate, indeed tried its hardest to resist, the immense cultural upheaval taking place in Europe. The Renaissance was gathering pace. Nearly every field in which the human imagination could be exercised had its own giant, reshaping it, bringing it into the new, nearly modern world. A world that Christopher Columbus was busy making quite a lot bigger.
In Italy, Leonardo da Vinci was exercising his phenomenal intellect, fusing mathematics, art, anatomy and science to conjure up technically flawless, artistically immaculate blueprints of hitherto unimaginable contraptions, including a flying machine, a helicopter and an armoured vehicle.36 In the same city, in Florence, his younger contemporary, Michelangelo, was demonstrating an artistic creativity and versatility that arguably has never been surpassed. In the same city Pico della Mirandola fused all the great philosophies of antiquity into one single, quasi-heretical theological system. To the north-east, in Poland, Nicolaus Copernicus was receiving his education. His astronomical proofs that the world did not stand at the centre of the univers
e would lay to rest the ancient, Greek understanding of nature and launch what became known as the scientific revolution.
It was matters of the intellect that would most challenge the Church. The long-established traditions of scholasticism; a method of religious enquiry beloved of the monks, with its roots in Aristotle and Augustine, had become distorted by theological nit-picking and specious casuistry. Fourteenth-century Italy saw the emergence of a new approach to thought and education: an intellectual torrent, unleashed principally by Francesco Petrarch’s innovations in the study of classical literature, a new way of thinking rapidly spread throughout Europe. Known as Humanism, it laid the intellectual groundwork for the period we now call the Renaissance. Humanism extolled the virtues of mortal endeavour, attaching particular importance to the study of the classics. Humanist thinkers investigated language, history and culture, finding new ways of understanding people and society. In Jonathan Arnold’s words, humanism was a movement to achieve ‘eloquent expression of wisdom’.37 Translation figured prominently in its armoury.
Even though Renaissance writers like Boccaccio, Machiavelli and Erasmus satirized and ridiculed the monks, the Church itself was not inimical to humanism as a discipline. Indeed some of the popes were among its most enthusiastic supporters. Nicholas V, who became pope in 1447, scoured Europe for rare copies of the great classics, employing teams of scholars to translate and transcribe them. A generation later Pope Sixtus IV summed up the humanist project when he wrote that ‘nothing more excellent or more useful had been given by the Creator to mankind than classical studies which not only lead to the ornament and guidance of human life, but are applicable and useful to every particular situation’.38
The Murderous History of Bible Translations Page 10
