Jan Hus, Hus also spelled Huss (born c. 1370, Husinec, Bohemia [now in Czech Republic]—died July 6, 1415, Konstanz [Germany]), the most important 15th-century Czech religious Reformer, whose work was transitional between the medieval and the Reformation periods and anticipated the Lutheran Reformation by a full century. He was embroiled in the bitter controversy of the Western Schism (1378–1417) for his entire career, and he was convicted of heresy at the Council of Constance and burned at the stake.
Early life and teaching career
Hus was born of poor parents in Husinec in southern Bohemia, from which he took his name. About 1390 he enrolled in the University of Prague, and two years after his graduation in 1394 he received a master’s degree and began teaching at the university. He became dean of the philosophical faculty there in 1401.
At this time the University of Prague was undergoing a period of struggle against foreign, chiefly German, influence as well as an intense rivalry between, on the one hand, German masters who upheld nominalism and were regarded as enemies of church reform and, on the other, the strongly nationalistic Czech masters, who were inclined to realist philosophy and were enthusiastic readers of the philosophical writings of John Wycliffe, a bitter critic of nominalism. Hus studied Wycliffe’s works and later his theological writings, which were brought into Prague in 1401. Hus was influenced by Wycliffe’s underlying principles, though he never accepted their extreme implications, and was particularly impressed by Wycliffe’s proposals for reform of the Roman Catholic clergy. The clerical estate owned about one-half of all the land in Bohemia, and the great wealth and simoniacal practices of the higher clergy aroused jealousy and resentment among the poor priests. The Bohemian peasantry, too, resented the church as one of the heaviest land taxers. There was thus a large potential base of support for any church reform movement at a time when the authority of the papacy itself was discredited by the Western Schism. Attempts at reform had been made by the Bohemian king Charles IV, and Wycliffe’s works were the chosen weapon of the national reform movement founded by Jan Milíč of Kroměříž (d. 1374).
Leader of Czech reform movement
In 1391 Milíč’s pupils founded the Bethlehem Chapel in Prague, where public sermons were preached in Czech (rather than in Latin) in the spirit of Milíc̆’s teaching. From 1402 Hus was in charge of the chapel, which had become the centre of the growing national reform movement in Bohemia. He became increasingly absorbed in public preaching and eventually emerged as the popular leader of the movement. Despite his extensive duties at the Bethlehem Chapel, Hus continued to teach in the university faculty of arts and became a candidate for the doctor’s degree in theology. Hus also became the adviser to the young nobleman Zbyněk Zajíc of Hazmburk when Zbyněk was named archbishop of Prague in 1403, a move that helped to give the reform movement a firmer foundation.
In 1403 a German university master, Johann Hübner, drew up a list of 45 articles, presumably selected from Wycliffe’s writings, and had them condemned as heretical. Because the German masters had three votes and the Czech masters only one, the Germans easily outvoted the Czechs, and the 45 articles were henceforth regarded as a test of orthodoxy. The principal charge against Wycliffe’s teaching was his tenet of remanence—i.e., that the bread and wine in the Eucharist retain their material substance. Wycliffe also declared the Scriptures to be the sole source of Christian doctrine. Hus did not share all of Wycliffe’s radical views, such as that on remanence, but several members of the reform party did, among them Hus’s teacher, Stanislav of Znojmo, and his fellow student, Štěpán Páleč.
During the first five years of Zbyněk’s reign as archbishop of Prague, his attitude toward the “evangelical party” radically changed. The opponents of reform won him over to their side and, in 1407, succeeded in charging Stanislav and Páleč with heresy, and they were cited to the Roman Curia for examination. The two men returned completely changed in their theological views and became the principal opponents of the Reformers. Thus, just when Hus had emerged at the forefront of the reform movement, he came into conflict with his former friends.