 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Morning Star of the Reformation, John Wycliffe. Among 14th century scholastics, you'd be hard pressed to name two such dissimilar men as John Buridan and John Wycliffe. Where Buridan was a prominent nominalist, Wycliffe stated that all envy or actual sin is caused by the lack of an ordered love of universals. Where the eternal artsmaster Buridan steered clear of theological issues, Wycliffe made daring pronouncements on such subjects as the sacraments and divine predestination, but the two do have one thing in common apart from their given name. Both are famous above all for something they never actually did. Just as Buridan did not in fact devise the thought experiment of a donkey choosing between two bales of hay, so Wycliffe did not translate the Bible into English. In 1396, the chronicler Henry Knighton gave him credit for doing so, or rather the blame. He wrote, Because of him, the content of Scripture has become more common and more open to laymen and women who can read than it customarily is to quite learned clerks of good intelligence, and thus the pearl of the Gospel is scattered abroad and trodden underfoot by swine. But, though Wycliffe may have inspired and helped guide the effort that produced the so-called Wycliffe Bible, scholars are agreed that it was in fact the work of many hands. The association of Wycliffe's name with the English Bible did it no favors, and helps to explain the banning of this version of Scripture in England in 1409. For Wycliffe became notorious as no other Englishman of the time. He was hated by the Church for his relentless attack on ecclesiastical wealth. He was associated with the Peasants Revolt of 1381, which involved the murder of an archbishop and rioting in London, perhaps unfairly, given that the revolt was less an expression of his ideas than an angry backlash against tax policies and attempts to keep wages artificially low as the workforce shrank in the wake of the Black Death. Wycliffe was also condemned for his unorthodox teachings numerous times, most memorably at a 1382 council which was interrupted by an earthquake, something his accusers hastily explained as a sign of Wycliffe's hatefulness to God. But Wycliffe had his supporters too. Called Lawlards, the term was probably a derogatory reference to their senseless speech, these were preachers inspired if not actually organized by Wycliffe and they spread his teachings around England. His ideas were also influential in the east of Europe, as we'll see in the next episode. But in England, a Lawlard uprising centered around the nobleman John Oldcastle failed in 1414 and the threat posed by Wycliffe's sympathizers receded. In the end, it was less an earthquake than a tremor. Yet it was one that anticipated the earth-shattering events of the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther, famous above all for nailing 92 theses to the door of a church, which he didn't really do either, would have more success in championing an ideology that had much in common with Wycliffe's. For this reason, the Protestant John Bayle called Wycliffe the morning star of the Reformation, while David Hume remarked in his History of England that Wycliffe had been the first person in Europe that publicly called in question those principles which had universally passed for certain and undisputed during so many ages. But to repeat a cliché, Wycliffe was simultaneously the evening star of medieval thought. He took up many of the themes we have been pursuing throughout our look at the Middle Ages, including the reality of universals, the value of poverty, freedom and predestination, the nature of legitimate political power, the relation of body and soul and philosophical attempts to explain the Eucharist. You might see his career as divided into two parts, first evening star of scholasticism and then morning star of reform. The early Wycliffe was a technically brilliant schoolman who was trained at Oxford and achieved his doctorate in theology in 1372. But his works became increasingly contentious and political. He entered into the service of John of Gaunt, an unpopular son of the king, and for those keeping track that's three Johns so far in this episode. In this capacity, Wycliffe went on a diplomatic mission to Bruges in 1374 representing the crown. But as would soon become obvious, he was anything but diplomatic. We've seen other writers of the period, like Langland, critiquing the church for its overweening temporal power and wealth. That was not enough for Wycliffe. He went so far as to declare that the church should own no property at all. That got him and John of Gaunt, as the protector of this apparent heretic, hauled before a church tribunal in 1377, an event that ended in chaos and acrimony. Papal condemnation followed. Despite the controversy, Wycliffe managed to retain sufficient political protection to avoid imprisonment or execution, and he managed to die of natural causes in 1384. Let's take our cue from Wycliffe himself and consider his views on universals, given his warning that error on this topic is the root of all envy and actual sin. The main thing to note here is that according to him, universals are real. As with other realists, his main rationale here is that our thought evidently gets hold of common or general features of the world. Thus, we would be subject to pervasive falsehood if universals were only fictions of the mind. Sometimes, Wycliffe has been depicted as a kind of ultra-realist, but this is not how he saw himself. Rather, he claimed to occupy a middle ground between nominalists like Ockham and Burredon and realists like Walter Burley. While agreeing with Burley that the universals are real, he stopped short of saying that they exist as realities separate from particulars. Instead, the universal just is the individual, considered in terms of its common nature and application of Scotus's formal distinction. A nice illustration of this is an example in which I promise to give you one of the two coins in my hand. I am offering you something shared in common by both of them, namely a coin in my hand, without promising either coin in particular. So in this case, the general can be distinguished from the individual, yet I obviously cannot fulfill my general promise without handing you a particular coin. Wycliffe's position on universals is, then, more or less what we've seen from other 14th century realists. Less familiar to us will be his realism about entire propositions, which for him are just identical with things in the world. A coin in my hand is in itself just a proposition in which the predicate coin belongs to a subject, namely the individual coin. This shows just how serious he is about making the world out there correspond to our minds. True thoughts are bits of mental language that perfectly mirror external things in structure and content. Of course, our minds are posterior to those things. I don't make that thing in my hand to be a coin by thinking about it. Rather, the coins being a coin produces my thought of it as a coin. By contrast, God's mind is causally prior to things in the world. Indeed, all universals are grounded in God's ideas, which are universals or common natures that serve as the principles of created things. Here we may begin to understand Wycliffe's dramatic claim that sin is caused by failure to love universals. In the passage where he says that, he goes on to add that sin consists in a will preferring a lesser good to a greater good, whereas, in general, the more universal goods are better. In keeping with this, he routinely invokes his theory of universals in theological disputes, as when he says that we need to concede the reality of the common nature of humanity if we are to understand the Incarnation, or if we are to grasp how the sin of the particular human, Adam, can have plunged the whole human race into a fallen state. Wycliffe retained his realist commitments when he started to write about overtly political topics. We can see this by turning to his views on political authority, or as he would put it, dominion. Here, he takes inspiration from another scholastic named Richard Fitz-Ralph, who should first of all be congratulated for not being named John. Also, he came up with a new idea in the bitter contest between the papacy and secular rulers. Rather than granting either of these authorities supreme power in any given sphere, Fitz-Ralph suggested that all true dominion is granted, or really only loaned, to humans by God. Thus, power is exercised justly only when it is an expression of divine grace. Wycliffe takes over and radicalizes this doctrine. Echoing Augustine's contrast between the city of God and the city here on earth, he proposes that the true Christian community is simply that group of people who have been given grace. They are God's instruments for good in the world and are predestined to be saved. A king wields authority justly only when his actions are motivated by charity when he is a selfless channel for God's providential benevolence to make itself manifest. According to Wycliffe, the king has one particularly important function, namely the defense of the community that enjoys grace. That would mean protecting the church, but not exactly the church as it exists in Wycliffe's day, and certainly not the temporal property owned by that church. To the contrary, Wycliffe encourages secular monarchs to do the church a favor by taking away all of its possessions, since concern with wealth distracts the clergy from their proper spiritual tasks. In a state of grace before original sin, there was no private property, and Christ's restoration of human nature offers us the chance to live again with all things shared in common, something embraced by the apostles, who led lives of poverty. The church of Wycliffe's own day was obviously failing rather spectacularly to follow suit. He traces the perilous state of affairs to the donation of Constantine, in which land was, supposedly, granted to the papacy by the emperor. Within a few generations, this will be shown to have been based on a forgery, which would have delighted Wycliffe no end, had he lived to see it. Wycliffe's theory was a double assault on the church. He offered an intellectual rationale for depriving the church of its assets, and more subtly, he distinguished between the church as an institution and the true Christian community. That community consists simply of those who are given grace. And in another striking anticipation of ideas we usually associate with the Reformation, Wycliffe asserted that we have no way of identifying those who are among the predestined. We cannot know, for example, whether the pope himself is sanctified, and thus whether he is a member of the true church. So, in addition to arguing that the church should be deprived of their nice things, he was questioning the spiritual position of the clergy all the way to the top. In place of their religious authority, Wycliffe instructed his readers to take instruction from the one source they could certainly trust. It could be no human source but the Word of God himself. So, you can see why he would have thought it important for more people to have access to the Bible. When you aren't sure whether you can rely on the church, you have to be your own theologian. Unsurprisingly, all this caused outrage among the clergy, who responded in an equally unsurprising way. They accused him of heresy. One charge leveled at Wycliffe was that he was falling into the teaching of Donatism, refuted in antiquity by Augustine. This heresy maintained that priests in a state of sin cannot administer the sacraments effectively. In fact, Wycliffe was careful not to say this, but he was less cautious in putting forth his ideas on another dangerous topic, namely the Eucharist. As we saw in a previous episode, no ingenuity or scholastic subtlety was spared in trying to explain how the host becomes Christ's body in this ritual. Yet, Wycliffe was unsatisfied with the resulting consensus. He found it preposterous to say, as Pope Innocent III had declared, and as had been reasserted by many scholastics, that accidental features like the color, shape, and taste of bread can remain when the substance of the bread is no longer present. Instead, Wycliffe thought it obvious that the bread should remain and be present together with the body of Christ in one and the same place. Again, this connects to his cherished teaching on universals, and for several reasons. Most obviously, we have Christ's nature being somehow present in common to many particular pieces of bread upon different altars. But also, there is an argument Wycliffe gives against those who assert transubstantiation. The nature of bread cannot actually be destroyed and replaced by Christ's body, since God never annihilates anything. He cannot, because the reality of all things is grounded in Him, in divine ideas that are divine, eternal, and indestructible. This incidentally gives us an insight into how Wycliffe would respond to an argument used against realism by Occam, namely that if the common nature of humanity were present in Socrates, it would absurdly be destroyed if God were to annihilate Socrates. Wycliffe would agree that this consequence is absurd, but not in the way Occam is thinking. The mistake here is not admitting that humanity is real, but supposing that God would, or indeed could, annihilate Socrates or anything else. And this is precisely because Socrates is in some sense identical to the common nature of humanity that is present in God Himself as one of His ideas. If you're wondering how Wycliffe can say that the body of Christ and the substance of bread can be in the same place, you aren't alone. His opponents certainly didn't think he offered a satisfactory account of this, and about the best he came up with was the insistence that Christ is sacramentally present to each point within the bread. That may be theologically unsatisfying, but it's philosophically exciting because of the reference to points, which takes us to another aspect of his thought, his atomism. Wycliffe maintained the standard Aristotelian doctrine that each thing is made of matter and form, but thought that the most fundamental constituents of things are atoms in which an elemental form is predicated of an unextended bit of prime matter. These elemental atoms are then composed into homogeneous materials like flesh or bone, which are then further combined to make up complex substances like the human body. An obvious implication is that each human must have many forms at different levels. Against defenders of the unity of substantial form, like Aquinas, Wycliffe held that all these forms are really present. This is evident from the fact that decomposing bodies break down into elemental constituents, which shows that the elements were there right along. Furthermore, the form that animates the human body needs to be distinguished from the immaterial rational soul, a mind that is connected to the animate body only through divine will and that can, of course, survive bodily death. This is about as far from Aquinas' teaching on the human person as one can get, at least in a medieval context, but apart from the atomism, it is not that far from what other form pluralists had been saying since Aquinas' day. In conclusion, it might be worth comparing Wycliffe to another great scholastic, his younger contemporary, Jean Guéson. He was a far less radical thinker, of course, and was staunch in his criticism of Wycliffe and the movements that Wycliffe inspired, but on at least one topic, the two were perhaps not so far apart. This was the aforementioned issue of predestination and grace. Both of them worked in the wake of Bradwardine's thunderous condemnation of scholastics who came too close to a Pelagian view of grace by admitting that we need divine help to merit salvation, but then suggesting that God will help those who make a sincere effort to be good. Bradwardine goes in the other direction, effectively making God responsible for every step in the process of salvation. Guéson and Wycliffe sought to split the difference. With his typical emphasis on personal spirituality, Guéson proposed that even if the sinner can do nothing to merit salvation, he can commit himself to complete humility in obedient and patient hope of being redeemed. Hence Guéson's stress in his pastoral works on the idea of the penitent Christian seeking God's grace while knowing he or she is unworthy of it. As for Wycliffe, he insisted that human freedom is just as real as, say, universals or propositions. God foreknows what we will choose, yet our choices remain contingent, since they could always have been different, and the making of these choices causes God to know them. This is, of course, just a version of the standard solution to the problem of divine foreknowledge developed earlier in the 14th century. Also traditional is his asymmetrical treatment of sin and merit. Humans can be wicked on their own, but need God's help to be good. For once, Wycliffe was not particularly radical on this score. His view became distinctive and dangerous only once he stressed the unknowability of grace and the consequences of that fact for human society. Both Guéson and Wycliffe, in their own ways, were pushing Christendom towards a more individual approach to spirituality in which confidence that the church and its sacraments will offer a heavenly reward is replaced by humble uncertainty. They offered hope of predestined salvation, but it was a hope not far from despair because of the fear that one has already been chosen to be among the damned. From this it may seem that we are ready to move on to the Protestant Reformation, or even that we have unexpectedly already arrived. But in fact, we still have some work to do before we can understand developments in the coming centuries. We'll continue setting the stage in the next episode as we examine the spread of scholasticism across Europe and see how the dangerous ideas of Wycliffe arrived in Prague. So put it on your checklist to listen to the next episode of The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.