WYCLIF, JOHN. - English heresiarch, born, it seems, in the castle of Wycliffe-on-Tees, in Yorkshire, a property of the family, probably in 1324 (Herbert B. Workman, his latest biographer, moves the birth to 1328), died at Lutterworth on 31 Dec. 1384.
I. LIFE
He had all the characteristics of an inhabitant of Yorkshire: a proud and punctilious spirit.
His family and his village have remained Catholic down to our own days. W. soon left the ancestral land to become and remain always a "man of Oxford," that is, an intellectual infatuated with his own learning and his own ideas. He probably arrived at Oxford around 1345; but from 1349 to 1353 he had to interrupt his studies because of the Black Death. In 1353 he became a fellow of Balliol College and rector or curate of Fillingham. When he was ordained a priest is not known. In 1363 he charged a vicar to replace him and returned to Oxford. Already the preceding year he had obtained another benefice; he thus practiced the "accumulation" of benefices as well as "absenteeism," abuses characteristic of that time, which he was later to criticize so vigorously. His studies of theology, begun in 1363, were crowned by the degree in the autumn of 1372. In 1368 he had exchanged the parish of Fillingham for that of Ludgershall. As early as 1370, as a simple bachelor, he had begun to teach, commenting on the Sentences of P. Lombard. His De benedicta Incarnatione dates from 1370; in 1375 he entered the service of the crown of England, as peculiaris regis clericus. This was to be of great importance for him. The Apostolic See was then at Avignon, where all the French popes succeeded one another. France was at war with England; this increased in the English their distrust of the Holy See. W. soon made himself the head of an anti-papal movement in England, posing as a religious reformer and a reformist theologian.
II. WORKS
From 1374 onward W. devoted himself to intense theological activity. He had obtained from the Crown a very lucrative parish at Lutterworth (south of Leicester), renouncing the benefice of Ludgershall. Later, by installing a substitute here as well, he was able to return to Oxford, after having taken part in a diplomatic mission to Bruges. He then published, one after another, the following works, which form a kind of theological summa: De dominio divino (1375); De civili dominio (1375);
De veritate Scripturae (1378); De Ecclesia (1378), which was later extensively used by G. Huss; De Ordine christiano (1379); De apostasia (1379); De Eucharistia (1379); Confessio (May 1381); De blasphemia (March 1382); Trialogus (autumn 1382), and this last is considered one of the most important; Opus evangelicum and De citationibus frivolis (1383-84); De quator sectis novellis (Aug. 1384). He also published tracts, occasional writings, and promoted a new English translation of the Bible. He then placed himself at the head of that reform of the Church that everyone had insistently called for since the Council of Vienne. He gathered around himself popular preachers and sent them, on his own initiative, throughout the country under the name of "poor priests" (poor priesters), a name that soon changed in the mouths of the people into that of Lollards (from lollen or lullen, to sing a song of praise).
III. CONDEMNATION
To answer for these novelties he was cited, in February 1377, by Bishop William of Courtenay to St. Paul's in London. But W. was under the high protection of the Court. Pope Gregory X condemned him and cited him to appear before his tribunal. This citation, however, was regarded as an attack on English liberties, and W. responded with a Protestatio and with certain Conclusiones in which he identified the Pope with the Antichrist. W. soon found himself embroiled in all the social movements of his troubled age. Having fallen out with the Court, he sided with the rebellious peasants in 1381. William of Courtenay, having become archbishop-primate of Canterbury on 9 September 1381, held a Synod from 17 to 21 May 1382: all of W.'s doctrines were condemned there. Two other Synods struck at his friends at Oxford. After this W. was forced to abandon the University and retire to his parish of Lutterworth. Stricken with paralysis in November 1382, he recovered, returned to work, and these were the years of his most intense activity. On 28 December 1384, while he was assisting at Mass in his parish church, a new attack carried him to the grave three days later. He was given a religious funeral, because he had not been expressly excommunicated. The Council of Constance condemned his writings on 4 May 1415 and ordered the exhumation of his body. The bishop of Lincoln, on whom Lutterworth depended, had been a disciple of W. and did not carry out the order; but on 9 December Pope Martin V renewed the sentence of the Council, and Bishop Fleming had the remains of W.'s body exhumed and burned, and his ashes were thrown into the Swift (spring of 1428).
IV. DOCTRINE
The doctrines of W., condensed into 45 propositions, were condemned at the Council of Constance (May 4, 1415), then in two bulls of Martin V of 1418. They correspond to the 24 propositions already proscribed by the Synod convened by William of Courtenay in May 1382. W. attributes dominium or sovereignty to God alone, distinguishing it from potestas, from possessio and from usus. Sovereignty or dominion belongs only to God and, under God, to the temporal sovereign. W. therefore excludes the "eminent dominion of the papacy" over civil goods; he rejects both the direct and the indirect power of the pope in the civil sphere. But, even for legitimate temporal sovereigns, W. subordinates the exercise of their power to the state of grace. No one is a temporal sovereign if he is in a state of rebellion against the eternal sovereign. The man who is in a state of mortal sin can hold neither sovereignty nor property (prop. 15, condemned at Constance; Denz-U, 595). On the contrary, "every man in a state of grace has a real sovereignty over the whole universe," a proposition that implies the communism of the elect. In reality, however, since only God knows the elect, W.'s propositions reduced themselves to revolutionary ideas, without any practical result.
W. admitted two principles in biblical matters. The Bible contains the whole of Revelation, and is distinguished by itself from any profane writing. No text of the Fathers or of the popes or of the councils has value except in the proportion in which it rests on the Bible. The Bible is the law of God, the single and complete Code of faith and of human morals. All the evils of the Church come from ignorance of the Bible. Knowledge of the Bible is a condition of salvation, at least as regards the New Testament; the Bible is, according to W., accessible to any intelligence, even the least ready.
It is above all in ecclesiological matters that W. erred, giving rise to the heresy of John Hus. The majority of W.'s 45 propositions condemned at Constance belong to the doctrine of the Church. According to W., the Church comprises three parts: the Church triumphant in heaven, the Church militant on earth, the Church "sleeping" in purgatory. This last expression seems to indicate that W. does admit purgatory, but a purgatory without any punishment, since the souls there are "sleeping." W. speaks above all of the Church militant and defines it as: the totality of the predestined: universitas praedestinatorum. True members of the Church therefore are only the elect, the only ones known to God; one may find oneself in the Church, be, perhaps, even a head of the Church, priest, bishop, Pope, without nevertheless really belonging to the Church, if one is not predestined. The visible Church is not the invisible Church. The predestined form the Body of Christ, but the praesciti (or reprobate) form the body of the Antichrist. The struggle between the City of God and the City of the devil is the whole of human history. The propositions condemned at the Council of Constance concern above all the denial of the right of property in ecclesiastics (props. 10, 32, 33, 36, 39), and since the whole medieval ecclesiastical system was founded on "benefices," the whole Church of that time was radically condemned. The religious Orders that possessed property were no less attacked than the benefited clerics (props. 44, 45, 20-24, 31-36). The mendicant Orders, which had dared to censure W. regarding his eucharistic doctrine, were not spared by him. The 24th proposition, in fact, said: "The friars are bound to earn their living by manual labor and not by going about questing." One can therefore affirm that W. condemned the whole ecclesiastical system then existing and considered valueless all the possible censures that the Church might have issued against him. After the condemnation inflicted on him by the Pope, W. became the declared enemy of the papacy: "the Pope," he said, "is not the head, the life or the root except, perhaps, of those who act evilly within the Church."
W. also globally rejected what the Church taught on indulgences (prop. 42). As for the Eucharist, W. professed realism in philosophy in the most absolute and intransigent manner, that is, the transcendent reality of universals. Everything that exists is as necessary as God and everything happens according to an absolute necessity (prop. 27); consequently, nothing can be annihilated; the bread and the wine therefore can be neither annihilated nor transubstantiated. The substance of the bread and of the wine remains together with the substance of the Body and Blood of Christ. The dogma of transubstantiation is a heresy that goes back no further than Innocent III. He professed consubstantiation, which Luther was later to adopt. Of Penance he retained only contrition, judging Confession superfluous and useless (prop. 7); he affirmed that the Sacrament of Order is not necessary for consecrating the Eucharist nor for confessing and absolving.
The errors of W. had a great influence in England, where they were spread by the Lollards. His posthumous action relates above all to the heresy of John Hus and of the Hussites. As regards Luther, it is certain that he knew Hus, and through Hus W., only when he had already professed all his own particular errors; one cannot therefore maintain that he underwent their direct influence.