Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City (31 page)
Read Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City Online
Authors: Peter Demetz
BOOK: Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City
5.73Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
This Bethlehem chapel was a large, stern lecture hall, possibly with a low ceiling crossed by strong wooden beams, and a modest pulpit to be entered from the priest’s apartment on the upper floor of an adjacent building. Contemporary reports suggest that three thousand listeners flocked to the services, but the number may be hyperbolic. The chapel was certainly built in deliberate contrast with Prague’s rich parish churches; its present form, a mid-twentieth-century reconstruction impressively combining architectural erudition and historical imagination (only a few remnants of the original walls, hidden in nineteenth-century
apartment houses, could be used), suggests the noble simplicity and the aesthetic space of the original; the reconstructed gables curiously resemble those of the Old New Synagogue in the Jewish Town.
apartment houses, could be used), suggests the noble simplicity and the aesthetic space of the original; the reconstructed gables curiously resemble those of the Old New Synagogue in the Jewish Town.
Legally and administratively the affairs of the Bethlehem chapel were far from simple; it was built within the parish district of St. Philip and St. James, and the resident priest, Nicholas Zeiselmeister (later to reappear among the ardent enemies of Jan Hus), had to be compensated for possible loss of fees by a yearly payment; there were to be no festive masses celebrated in the chapel. Two preachers were appointed, one paid by Mühlheim’s endowment and the other one by K
íž; these two priests actually received a comfortable living, and if they accrued or earned additional monies, they had to account strictly for the funds and use them solely for the upkeep of the chapel. The number of (frequent) sermons was precisely specified, and to guard against the easy absenteeism so rampant elsewhere, the rules insisted that preachers be in residence and that the archbishop himself approve even a temporary absence.
íž; these two priests actually received a comfortable living, and if they accrued or earned additional monies, they had to account strictly for the funds and use them solely for the upkeep of the chapel. The number of (frequent) sermons was precisely specified, and to guard against the easy absenteeism so rampant elsewhere, the rules insisted that preachers be in residence and that the archbishop himself approve even a temporary absence.The Bethlehem chapel was founded by people trying to push Christian reform, and they clearly had the full collaboration of the archbishop, who laid the foundation stone himself. It is also clear that they had close links to the university masters of the Bohemian “nation” (possibly, at that time, a label for Czech intellectuals), for the patrons of the chapel agreed that the masters would recommend clerics for appointment. Jan Protiva, the first preacher at Bethlehem (later to turn against reform), was appointed by the noble patron Johannes of Mühlheim, but the university masters recommended, as Protiva’s successor, Št
pán of Kolín, a dean of the faculty of arts. The K
íž appointee, a Cistercian named Jan Štêkna, was also a master and, besides, court chaplain to Queen Jadwiga of Poland ; he must have been an effective preacher, for Jan Hus called him a “fiery trumpet” (
trouba zvu
ná)
or, in another reading, a rather noisy fool.
pán of Kolín, a dean of the faculty of arts. The Kíž appointee, a Cistercian named Jan Štêkna, was also a master and, besides, court chaplain to Queen Jadwiga of Poland ; he must have been an effective preacher, for Jan Hus called him a “fiery trumpet” (trouba zvu
ná)or, in another reading, a rather noisy fool.
The middle-class patrons of the chapel took great care to strengthen the institution in the Mili
ian way: K
íž endowed twelve places for poor students of the Bohemian “nation,” probably all Czech, to live and eat at Bethlehem (another adjacent building, called Nazareth, was opened for them), and, through the good offices of Jan Št
kna and K
íž, the Polish queen made plans to endow a college of Lithuanians to study in Prague. She died before the first of them arrived, but fortunately, the legal documents had made provisions for admitting other young men, and now Czech students were invited. Bethlehem and Nazareth became overcrowded, and the Cistercians agreed to house the overflow in a nearby building that had once actually belonged to Mili
’s New Jerusalem. On
March 14, 1402, another master of the university, thirty-year-old Jan Hus, was appointed preacher and administrator of the Bethlehem chapel. From that moment, the chapel was to be at the heart of Czech history for many years to come.
ian way: Kíž endowed twelve places for poor students of the Bohemian “nation,” probably all Czech, to live and eat at Bethlehem (another adjacent building, called Nazareth, was opened for them), and, through the good offices of Jan Štkna and Kíž, the Polish queen made plans to endow a college of Lithuanians to study in Prague. She died before the first of them arrived, but fortunately, the legal documents had made provisions for admitting other young men, and now Czech students were invited. Bethlehem and Nazareth became overcrowded, and the Cistercians agreed to house the overflow in a nearby building that had once actually belonged to Mili’s New Jerusalem. OnMarch 14, 1402, another master of the university, thirty-year-old Jan Hus, was appointed preacher and administrator of the Bethlehem chapel. From that moment, the chapel was to be at the heart of Czech history for many years to come.
Very little is known about the childhood and the early years of Jan Hus, and all the chroniclers usually repeat the same anecdotes, invented a hundred years later—about the piety of his mother and the goose (
husa
) which she wanted to present to his schoolteacher. Hus was born around 1372 at Husinec, a small village in southern Bohemia; his father was a farmer or village artisan, and his mother wanted Jan to study and to become a priest. Hus received his first education, mostly in reading Latin, in the elementary school in nearby Prachatice, a lively if not rich town run by well-to-do German merchants involved in the transport of goods from Austria and Bavaria to Prague. In 1390, the budding scholar and choirboy arrived in Prague, matriculated at the university as Jan of Husinec, and busied himself with the prescribed philosophical courses, receiving his B.A. (as sixth among twenty-two) in 1393 and his M.A. three years later; by 1400, or shortly thereafter, he was ordained a deacon and a priest. He was serious, averse to wasting time, unlike many of his more relaxed fellow students, and often went hungry and was in ill health (he once made himself a spoon of bread to eat peas, he wrote later, and came to eat the spoon as well). He was happy to be appointed servant at the Carolinum, tidying the rooms of the resident professors and helping in the kitchen in return for a bed and free meals; he must have enjoyed being so close to the famous professors of the Bohemian “nation.”
husa
) which she wanted to present to his schoolteacher. Hus was born around 1372 at Husinec, a small village in southern Bohemia; his father was a farmer or village artisan, and his mother wanted Jan to study and to become a priest. Hus received his first education, mostly in reading Latin, in the elementary school in nearby Prachatice, a lively if not rich town run by well-to-do German merchants involved in the transport of goods from Austria and Bavaria to Prague. In 1390, the budding scholar and choirboy arrived in Prague, matriculated at the university as Jan of Husinec, and busied himself with the prescribed philosophical courses, receiving his B.A. (as sixth among twenty-two) in 1393 and his M.A. three years later; by 1400, or shortly thereafter, he was ordained a deacon and a priest. He was serious, averse to wasting time, unlike many of his more relaxed fellow students, and often went hungry and was in ill health (he once made himself a spoon of bread to eat peas, he wrote later, and came to eat the spoon as well). He was happy to be appointed servant at the Carolinum, tidying the rooms of the resident professors and helping in the kitchen in return for a bed and free meals; he must have enjoyed being so close to the famous professors of the Bohemian “nation.”
His academic career, at least in the beginning, proceeded with nearly clockwork precision: after the B.A. and M.A., he taught a watered-down version of Aristotle’s natural science, then after some time the Liber
Sententiarum
by Petrus Lombardus, required reading in the study of theology; ultimately, he entered the long and difficult course for a doctorate in theology (doctors of theology were the only ones paid for their teaching, their income being derived from the profits earned on a farm in the countryside owned by the university). Word must have spread easily that Hus was eager, loyal, efficient if somewhat plodding as a teacher, not a firebrand in any way. He had good contacts at court (he may have been in the king’s retinue on a trip to Germany, where he marveled at the women
wearing wigs) and in the Czech business community and among friends of Mili
and Mat
j; and the young archbishop, Zbyn
k, later his enemy, looked upon him with noticeable favor.
Sententiarum
by Petrus Lombardus, required reading in the study of theology; ultimately, he entered the long and difficult course for a doctorate in theology (doctors of theology were the only ones paid for their teaching, their income being derived from the profits earned on a farm in the countryside owned by the university). Word must have spread easily that Hus was eager, loyal, efficient if somewhat plodding as a teacher, not a firebrand in any way. He had good contacts at court (he may have been in the king’s retinue on a trip to Germany, where he marveled at the women
wearing wigs) and in the Czech business community and among friends of Mili
and Matj; and the young archbishop, Zbynk, later his enemy, looked upon him with noticeable favor.Hus never hesitated to engage himself, together with his Czech colleagues, in the discussions and conflicts troubling the Prague faculty at the time. He refrained from challenging authority directly and moved with innate and deliberate caution, but after being appointed to the Bethlehem chapel, he found himself with the leaders of a movement in which the older ideas of Mili
and Mat
j were more and more combined with the radical new teachings of John Wyclif of Oxford University. The situation was complicated by the diversity of philosophical orientations and nascent national feeling at Prague University. The German masters of the Polish, Saxon, and Bavarian “nations” and a few of their conservative Czech allies were nominalists, believing that things preceded ideas, thus allowing a pragmatic opening to the advances of science and reserving to faith a central role in religious life. This way of thinking had been much domesticated, though, since the time when William of Ockham, its fountainhead, had lived and worked in Munich. Most of the Bohemian (or, rather, Czech) masters, Jan Hus among them, preferred the older traditions of philosophical realism in the tradition of Plato and St. Augustine, which presumed that ideas preceded things, and, above all, John Wyclif’s philosophical writings, imported to Prague by Czech students studying in Oxford. (Hus busily copied out Wyclif for himself, and in the margins expressed wonder and astonishment at the new thought.) The German masters and their allies recognized the inherent danger when the older way of thought came newly to life in the minds of their restive Czech contemporaries, and they counteracted it by invoking Wyclif’s theology, which an English synod had declared heretical in 1382, against the defenders of his philosophy. The Silesian master Johann Hübner compiled a catalogue of Wyclif’s forty-five doctrinal errors and submitted it to the offices of the archbishop, who promptly returned it to the university for an expert opinion. The university meeting of May 28, 1403, the nominalists in the overwhelming majority, easily declared the forty-five articles to be erroneous, false, and heretical; the Czech masters had little choice left but dramatic gestures and the claim that the compilation was partial or incomplete or both.
and Matj were more and more combined with the radical new teachings of John Wyclif of Oxford University. The situation was complicated by the diversity of philosophical orientations and nascent national feeling at Prague University. The German masters of the Polish, Saxon, and Bavarian “nations” and a few of their conservative Czech allies were nominalists, believing that things preceded ideas, thus allowing a pragmatic opening to the advances of science and reserving to faith a central role in religious life. This way of thinking had been much domesticated, though, since the time when William of Ockham, its fountainhead, had lived and worked in Munich. Most of the Bohemian (or, rather, Czech) masters, Jan Hus among them, preferred the older traditions of philosophical realism in the tradition of Plato and St. Augustine, which presumed that ideas preceded things, and, above all, John Wyclif’s philosophical writings, imported to Prague by Czech students studying in Oxford. (Hus busily copied out Wyclif for himself, and in the margins expressed wonder and astonishment at the new thought.) The German masters and their allies recognized the inherent danger when the older way of thought came newly to life in the minds of their restive Czech contemporaries, and they counteracted it by invoking Wyclif’s theology, which an English synod had declared heretical in 1382, against the defenders of his philosophy. The Silesian master Johann Hübner compiled a catalogue of Wyclif’s forty-five doctrinal errors and submitted it to the offices of the archbishop, who promptly returned it to the university for an expert opinion. The university meeting of May 28, 1403, the nominalists in the overwhelming majority, easily declared the forty-five articles to be erroneous, false, and heretical; the Czech masters had little choice left but dramatic gestures and the claim that the compilation was partial or incomplete or both.It was certainly not a matter of mere academic disputation to be accused of Wyclifism or of doctrinal alliance with the famous master of Balliol College at Oxford; though Wyclif had long been protected by Parliament and the powerful duke of Lancaster, the situation in England had
changed when the peasants revolted in 1381 and he was forced to retire to his parish of Lutterworth, where he died three years later. (He may have died peacefully, but in 1427 his bones were disinterred and burned, and the ashes thrown into the river Swist.) Wyclif was far more politically minded than Jan Hus; for many years he had been engaged in England’s resistance against the French and against the Avignon Curia, he greatly admired the secular power of Kings Edward I and Edward III, and he provided much of the theoretical arguments against the English crown’s making payments to the pope. He was a learned theologian in the Augustinian tradition and, through Augustine, closer to Plato than to Aristotle, but his first religious, doctrinal, and social law was the Bible, part of which he rendered into English so that it could be understood by the unlettered; he declared in no uncertain terms that whatever ecclesiastical hierarchies, rites, orders, institutions, and sacraments were not found in Scripture were alien to Christian life. Christ, not the pope (at least not the historical pope, of his time), was the head of the invisible church, and there should be no difference between bishops and priests, who were to roam the countryside in pairs, preaching everywhere. Few of the sacraments were justified by the Bible, he thought, least of all extreme unction, and even in the Eucharist, bread and wine remained mere bread and wine, even after being consecrated, and Christ was received not bodily but “spiritually” by the faithful. Defining his idea of “remanence,” Wyclif opposed the orthodox belief in the act of transubstantiation by which the bread and wine, though retaining their accidental forms, were believed to become the true body and true blood of Christ. With increasing fervor, Wyclif demanded that the true church—those predestined for salvation—return to the poverty and pristine virtues of the early days: if the church misused ecclesiastical property, it was the task of the secular powers to right the situation, and the king neglected his duties if he did not intervene.
changed when the peasants revolted in 1381 and he was forced to retire to his parish of Lutterworth, where he died three years later. (He may have died peacefully, but in 1427 his bones were disinterred and burned, and the ashes thrown into the river Swist.) Wyclif was far more politically minded than Jan Hus; for many years he had been engaged in England’s resistance against the French and against the Avignon Curia, he greatly admired the secular power of Kings Edward I and Edward III, and he provided much of the theoretical arguments against the English crown’s making payments to the pope. He was a learned theologian in the Augustinian tradition and, through Augustine, closer to Plato than to Aristotle, but his first religious, doctrinal, and social law was the Bible, part of which he rendered into English so that it could be understood by the unlettered; he declared in no uncertain terms that whatever ecclesiastical hierarchies, rites, orders, institutions, and sacraments were not found in Scripture were alien to Christian life. Christ, not the pope (at least not the historical pope, of his time), was the head of the invisible church, and there should be no difference between bishops and priests, who were to roam the countryside in pairs, preaching everywhere. Few of the sacraments were justified by the Bible, he thought, least of all extreme unction, and even in the Eucharist, bread and wine remained mere bread and wine, even after being consecrated, and Christ was received not bodily but “spiritually” by the faithful. Defining his idea of “remanence,” Wyclif opposed the orthodox belief in the act of transubstantiation by which the bread and wine, though retaining their accidental forms, were believed to become the true body and true blood of Christ. With increasing fervor, Wyclif demanded that the true church—those predestined for salvation—return to the poverty and pristine virtues of the early days: if the church misused ecclesiastical property, it was the task of the secular powers to right the situation, and the king neglected his duties if he did not intervene.
It has always been difficult to show precisely when and how Jan Hus emerged in the religious life of Prague, where many had long favored him as a loyal if reform-minded son of the church, to defend heresy, as his adversaries insisted on calling it, to claim the essential privilege of all Christians to appeal for ultimate justification to Christ himself, the true head of the church. He was surely a man of quiet decisions, and he was far from being a belligerent radical, even though he looked like one to many. He grew with the events, in which schismatic popes, legitimate and illegitimate kings, comfortable prelates enjoying many benefices and ascetic theologians, the church’s legal establishment
and the resolution to live in the truth of Jesus Christ, conservative Bohemian patriots and early defenders of the idea of a nation based on language rather than territory—all these were chaotically pitted against each other. Jan Hus had been distinctly reticent at the university discussion about the theological errors of Wyclif in 1403, and Zbyn
k of Hasenburk, the archbishop of Prague, wanted earnest Hus to speak to the Bohemian clergy at Prague synods.
and the resolution to live in the truth of Jesus Christ, conservative Bohemian patriots and early defenders of the idea of a nation based on language rather than territory—all these were chaotically pitted against each other. Jan Hus had been distinctly reticent at the university discussion about the theological errors of Wyclif in 1403, and Zbyn
k of Hasenburk, the archbishop of Prague, wanted earnest Hus to speak to the Bohemian clergy at Prague synods.Jan Hus may have become aware of his life’s truth not in a sudden thrust of inspiration but step by step, feeling after feeling and thought after thought; by 1408, at the latest, he was emerging as a figure of European stature, investigated by papal councils, jeered at and admired at home, and forced to a deeper understanding of himself in his confrontation with the power of the church and the world. The decisions that shaped his life and death were all made within a few years, roughly between 1408 and 1412; when the archbishop, fully supported by the pope, in 1409 appointed a commission to examine Wyclif’s teachings and demanded that all copies of his writings be delivered to his office, Hus immediately wrote a short treatise about the study of texts that readers might consider heretical (they do not have to share the author’s opinions, after all) and protested to the Curia in a document formulated by his legal adviser, Jan of Jesenice; when, on July 16, 1414, Archbishop Zbyn
k, nervous and ill advised, gave the order to burn the collected books, and demonstrating students roamed through the Prague streets singing a ditty about “Bishop Zbyn
k ABC / burns books though he / knew not what they contained,” Hus, together with five other university masters, organized a learned conference about Wyclif’s writing, and coolly ignored the excommunication decreed against him by Zbyn
k, who had escaped to his castle at Roudnice, fearing the worst. King Václav IV, however, wrote to the pope to defend Hus, his “faithfully devoted chaplain,” and Wyclif’s English disciples collected books to send to Prague.
k, nervous and ill advised, gave the order to burn the collected books, and demonstrating students roamed through the Prague streets singing a ditty about “Bishop Zbynk ABC / burns books though he / knew not what they contained,” Hus, together with five other university masters, organized a learned conference about Wyclif’s writing, and coolly ignored the excommunication decreed against him by Zbynk, who had escaped to his castle at Roudnice, fearing the worst. King Václav IV, however, wrote to the pope to defend Hus, his “faithfully devoted chaplain,” and Wyclif’s English disciples collected books to send to Prague.Other books
Lizzie! by Maxine Kumin
Flotsam and Jetsam by Keith Moray
Shadow Creek by Joy Fielding
Kiss of Frost by Jennifer Estep
Unmasqued: An Erotic Novel of The Phantom of The Opera by Colette Gale
Dearly Beloved by Jackie Ivie
McNally's Trial by Lawrence Sanders
The Gardens of Nibiru (The Ember War Saga Book 5) by Richard Fox
River Road by Jayne Ann Krentz
