Editor’s Note: This article is part of an October 2017 series of posts on the Reformation and Protestantism written by O&H authors and guest writers marking the 500th anniversary of the nailing of Martin Luther’s 95 theses to the church door at Wittenberg on October 31, 1517. Articles are written by Orthodox Christians and discuss not just the Reformation as a historical event but also the spiritual heritage that descended from it.

John Wyclif, Jan Hus, and Savonarola; Erasmus, Thomas à Kempis, and Peter Waldo; each was paraded before our gleeful eyes at my austere and decidedly anti-Roman Catholic Bible college. Oh, how these men showed us that the Reformers stood in a great tradition, and that these were Protestants before Protestantism. Beginning with that Morning Star of the Reformation, John Wyclif (though of course, preceded by Peter Waldo, an unlettered enthusiast, though his followers proved their merit), we were regaled with stories how these heroes stood up against papal tyranny and how some of them paid the supreme price to keep faith alive.

Sadly, reality does not match enthusiasm. I will leave the Waldensians aside, as well as Erasmus, who famously ran afoul of Luther on the doctrines of freewill and grace, and ended his life in full communion with the Catholic church, whose doctrines he had never questioned in any substantial way (even if he was full of criticisms for what he took as the obscurantism of the theology faculties at Paris, Cologne, Louvain). This leaves us Wyclif, Hus, Savonarola, and Thomas à Kempis, and I shall treat them in reverse order.

Thomas à Kempis

Thomas (1380-1471) was part of the devotio moderna and was a canon at the convent of Windensheim at Mt. St. Agnes (canons were priests who lived in communities and worked among the people, thus were not cloistered). The devotio moderna, which had a wide influence, sought to simplify religious observance, and this is best seen in Thomas’s classic, The Imitation of Christ (this book had a vast influence on Erasmus’s own philosophia Christi).

The devotio moderna had deep roots throughout the Rhineland, and especially in the low countries, though it also enjoyed patronage from some of the most critical and brilliant thinkers of the fifteenth century. Were one to read the chapter “Religious Thought Crystallizing into Images” in Johan Huizenga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages, we meet a society saturated in religious sensibility (e.g., Henirich Suso would drink his wine in five draughts, one each for the five wounds of Christ), and one that had taken imitatio to an extreme.

It was this that Thomas addresses in simple, direct language aimed at the laity, enjoining them not to take up such voluptuous pieties, but rather encouraged them to self-examination, solitude, contrition, purpose of amendment, and self-renunciation. All of this is capped by the book’s last section (why wait, at last! this must be the evangelical chapter. . . ) on properly receiving Christ. Of course what Thomas meant by receiving Christ was the reception of our Lord in the Eucharist. And culminating in this reception, all of the great evangelical counsel he had already given finds its resolution: that we approach Christ our God in bread and wine, and that there we shall meet him as surely and certainly as we shall on the great and fearful day of judgment.

Thomas’s world was one of monasteries and convents, religious obligation and pious confraternities (one of the chief aspects of the devotio moderna was the confraternity of the Brothers and Sisters of the Common Life, which existed for aid to the poor and the education of children), and he was burdening the laity of his day to take up the piety and duties one would associate with life in a monastery. Perhaps such fervor is not supposed to exist in such a wretchedly institutional world as fifteenth-century Catholicism, but Thomas tells us otherwise. Further, faith in Thomas is a virtue, one exercised for the purpose of acquiring Christ; a far cry form Luther’s empty resignation that leans upon Christ solely in passive acceptance.

Girolamo Savonarola

Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican friar in Florence, was also laid before our eager, anti-papal eyes. Once looked at more closely, he is a sorry vision. Far more the apocalyptic preacher and denouncer of corruption (especially of the Borgia pope, Alexander VI), the content of his preaching aimed at both moral and ecclesiastical renovatio, seasoned with apocalyptic enthusiasm, and an exaltation of Charles VIII of France as the savior of Florence and the Church.

Eventually he alienated both Florentine society (many of whom had seen him first as a moderate voice) and the larger ecclesiastical hierarchy (specifically Alexander VI), not only from himself, but also from his beloved convent of San Marco. Savonarola’s conventional beginnings in Florence came with the good will of Lorenzo de Medici, who brought the friar to Florence at the behest of Platonist philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Lorenzo’s death in 1492 and the subsequent Medici expulsion from Florence in 1494 left a vacuum that Savonarola’s charismatic ministry quickly filled.

Savonarola’s prophetic utterances, linked by his contemporaries, both friend and foe, with those of Joachim of Fiore, mapped onto extreme republican elements within Florence, and in this regard became part of anti-Medici programs. The friar was a vibrant preacher most especially concerned with the moral character of Florence. Closely associated with this is his part in the Bonfire of the Vanities, at which patrons of the arts set fire to a number of pieces the Dominican had convinced them were offensive. It was not nudity per se that Savonarola railed against, but rather the practice of some artists to use their mistresses as models for the saints, including of Our Lady. The episode was supported, moreover, by such notables as Botticelli.

By 1498, Florence faced declining fortunes in both economy and politics, and Savonarola became an easy scapegoat. Even before then, the city had become increasingly divided, with many thinking Savonarola no less a tyrant then the exiled Medici. Many of his followers faded away following a papal excommunication, though the Dominicans stood by him.

Eventually Savonarola found himself at the end of a rope, though only after a night of fighting in which the Dominicans tried to defend him at the San Marco convent. He himself put an end to the fighting by giving himself up. Later Protestants, i.e., Martin Luther and Martin Bucer, saw him as an innocent slaughtered by the avarice and corruption of Rome (perhaps fair enough), but Luther even wanted to see the seeds of sola fide in his works, though Savonarola held doggedly that, like Thomas, faith as exercised was a virtue, something Luther denounced.

Attempts were made at Savonarola’s rehabilitation, as saints numbered among its adherents and champions (e.g., St. Philip Neri, St. Caterina de Ricci), but this proved fruitless. Clement VIII’s sympathies, even though pope, were never enough to overcome the friar’s reputation. And while his works were generally removed from the Index (they were alternately on and off throughout the sixteenth century), such favor was never anything more than recognition that his writings were not either materially or formally heretical.

John Wyclif

John Wyclif, an Oxford Master (c. 1330 – 1384) was noted more in his day for his philosophy, though as with all university Masters, this had a deep impact on his theology. Wyclif took exception to the prevailing philosophical school of nominalism, that what unites similar things, say roses, is not the universal reality of roseness, but merely the convention that these similar things have similar properties which constitute “rosiness.” Rosiness is just an abstraction, a word, a name we give to similar things like flowers, and thus nominalism, from the Latin nomen, name.

To the contrary, Wyclif posited that all universals had an eternal existence in the mind and being of God, and all particulars shared in the existence of the universal. His idiom arose from his assertion that particulars were therefore as necessary as universals, and once realized in space and time their temporal successor, e.g., the earthly rose, could never be substantially destroyed or modified without harming the archetype in heaven.

This view affected Wyclif’s other doctrines. One doctrine necessary to consider, affected greatly by this realism, is that of the Eucharist, for he denied transubstantiation (that the bread and wine of the sacrament when consecrated by the priest, appear to remain as bread and wine, but the substance itself is changed {transubstantiated} into the body and blood of Christ). For Wyclif, if the substance of the bread and wine are annihilated, then also the universal bread and wine should be annihilated. There can be no true accident without a subject. Therefore, since the objects of bread and wine cannot be separated from their subject, the archetype, they must remain in the sacrament, with Christ’s body and blood present as well, a view dubbed “remanence.”

Another doctrine influenced by Wyclif’s realism is dominium. (There is no exact English translation for the word dominium, for though dominion and lordship are close, it has to do with “rights” and prerogatives.) Wyclif posited a definite link between the presence of grace in a man and his right and ability to exercise lordship, sovereignty, or freedom.

Wyclif believed strongly in predestination, but the weight of his realism modified this doctrine: since reality has its precursors in the mind of God, how men align themselves with the reality of the mind of God is necessary for salvation. The elect (the Church to Wyclif) can never be fully known in this life. Wyclif therefore did not identify the Church with an outward institution. Priests who lived in sin had manifestly forfeited grace (dominium was based on grace), and could not be considered among the elect, and thus had forfeited their priestly office. This translated into the visible Church being an illusion, and for all intents and purposes is Donatism.

Though in conflict with the Church, Wyclif never contradicted that Christ had given the keys of the kingdom of Heaven to the priesthood, and he certainly never denied either mediated grace, or the real presence of Christ in the sacrifice of the Mass. He also always maintained a sacerdotal priesthood. Further, nowhere in his works can one find justification by faith alone (though certainly justification by faith). For all the heartburn he caused the church of his day, Wyclif’s greatest claim to fame was how he influenced the reform movement in Bohemia and Jan Hus, for the question of how closely Hus followed Wyclif was important to the Bohemian reform movement, and indeed, became the reason for Hus’s final condemnation.

Jan Hus

Jan Hus came to a Prague in 1390, a city experiencing a reform movement that dated back decades and had enjoyed the support of the Holy Roman Emperors (Prague was the capital of the empire). Reform centered on several items: moral rejuvenation of the city’s laity, a preaching and hymnody in the vernacular, a frequent reception of communion, and all centered on the Bethlehem Chapel.

Hus came late to the program, but soon made up for his youth: by 1394 he was a lecturer in the university, in 1401 dean of the faculty, probably ordained and appointed preacher at Bethlehem Chapel by that year as well, and in 1409 became rector of the university. The University from its founding was envisioned as a rival to Paris and Louvain. To attract teachers, Charles IV gave to German Masters virtual control of the university. Like most university faculty in Europe at the time, the German masters were nominalists. But since 1382, owing to a marriage alliance, many Czechs had sought their education in Oxford, and thus came back to Prague armed against their German rivals with Wyclif.

The eventual trouble sucked Hus in. But while many of his Czech brethren openly espoused Wyclif—especially on remanence, his doctrines of grace and dominium, and his blatant Donatism—Hus never did. Largely Hus was damned by association, in the most blatant way possible. By 1412 the leaders of the reform movement had either gone over to the conservatives in Prague, or had been convinced of the errors of their ways while imprisoned. The latter was the fate of one Stefan Palec, who had been imprisoned by the cardinal archbishop of Bologna, Baldassare Cossa, who would later be the anti-pope John XXIII.

When Hus came to Constance in 1414 he walked into a trap. Essentially Palec, and from afar Jean Gerson the rector of the University of Paris, who was working off of information sent to him, and apparently not off of Hus’s writings themselves, listed multiple errors that he held, and Hus was accused of deriving them from Wyclif.

For example, Palec had preached remanence, and accused Hus of holding the same, but all of Hus’s writings on the Eucharist were explicitly Catholic, both a sermon he delivered on Corpus Christi and a subsequent tract on the same topic. He repudiated Wyclif. But Palec, who had been a reformer and now the faithful son of the Catholic church, asserted otherwise. Gerson also accused Hus of holding Wycliffite doctrines, including that of Donatism. Hus had copied much of Wyclif’s work on simony into his own, but where Wyclif had written that a sinful priest invalidly offers the mass, Hus had written that he unworthily does so. At his hearing, the great cardinal Pierre d’Ailly tried to accuse Hus of holding to remanence because he was a realist. Hus responded that he was a realist because St. Anselm was a realist.

When is a Reformer Not a Reformer?

There are all sorts of coincident items and verisimilitudes between these four reformers and later Protestantism. Both Wyclif and Hus wanted sermons and scripture in the vernacular and both wrote in the vernacular, but this was not something unknown in the middle ages, and it certainly is the case that this is de rigeur among the Orthodox, but no one would think the Orthodox the heralds of the Protestant dawn.

Wyclif’s doctrines arose from his philosophical realism, and not from some doctrine of unmediated grace. Hus was in almost every way Catholic. He was burned for his refusal to admit that he was in error, and that he held the doctrines that Palec said he did. He never maintained Wycliffite doctrines, even though he admitted he did not believe they had been properly refuted. Savonarola was certainly a preacher of reform, but a faithful Dominican—it was moral and not doctrinal reform he was after. The same is the case for Thomas à Kempis.

Ironically, Pierre d’Ailly, Hus’s chief prosecutor and main interlocutor at Constance, did not hold to transubstantiation, but was the source of Luther’s own later teaching on the Eucharist (cf., Luther’s discussion of d’Ailly in The Babylonian Captivity of the Church).

Odd how d’Ailly is never numbered among the forerunners of the Reformation.