moral action, and of prayer. That those formed a self-contained unit is evident from the first chapter of the first of these three treatises, where Hus stated that there were “three duties of a Christian: to believe, fulfill God’s commandments, and pray to God,” which correspond to the three works, on the creed, on the Ten Commandments, and on the Lord’s Prayer.39 His Exposition of the Faith focused on key concepts of the Christian faith: sin, forgiveness, and salvation, while the Exposition of the Lord’s Prayer explained each of the lines of the Lord’s Prayer. The middle work in the trilogy, the Exposition of the Decalogue, is the largest and the most comprehensive of the three, taking up not only the Ten Commandments, strictly defined, but addressing different kinds of sins as well as different life situations (for clerics, nobles, and ordinary faithful) and various questions that might arise. The breadth of potential scenarios is so vast that the Exposition of the Decalogue can be seen more like a comprehensive guidebook to life than a mere commentary on ten Old Testament prohibitions. Combined, the three Expositions go much beyond any discussion of the three duties of a Christian, but offer spiritual and practical advice for both clerics and laity in all walks of life.
Hus’s Vernacular Postil
The fourth work considered here is Hus’s Postil, a cycle of vernacular sermons for every Sunday in the liturgical year with a few extras, completed on October 27, 1413. It was a dedicated attempt to deepen the audience’s knowledge of the Bible, most likely composed as a continuous text rather than a report of actual sermons.40 Its inner logic unfolds over the course of the entire work, which may be why it was (to our knowledge) so seldom excerpted from, circulating instead as a whole set.41 In the Postil, Hus translated the relevant biblical pericope into the vernacular and followed it with additional explanations of the passage. As he explained in the Postil’s introduction: “And because they do not generally have [biblical] readings written in Czech, and interpretation is accepted without a foundation, that is why I wish first to give the reading and then my interpretation, so that the word of our Savior would sound the loudest and be given to the faithful for salvation.”42 In making the Postil available in the vernacular, he deliberately went against clerics who would rather have kept biblical knowledge to themselves. They did so, Hus explained, so that the laity would be unable to compare them to the biblical models and criticize and punish them, that they would not lose esteem in the eyes of the laity, and that the laity would be less likely to discern bad preaching.43 Clearly, Hus considered the struggle over the Bible to be one of the key struggles in the ongoing war against bad clerics.
On Simony
Hus wrote his treatise On Simony “so that the faithful would avoid it and so that some simoniacs would repent.”44 Hus defines simony as the “selling and buying of holy things” and develops a comprehensive understanding of what is involved in such transactions.45 Hus takes up every rank in the church in turn and shows the different ways in which the people occupying it could theoretically be involved in simony, concluding that nearly all clergy are involved in the practice unless they specifically exclude themselves. Hus had a junior priest, who wished to avoid being implicated in simony but who served under a more senior cleric, ask how he could avoid simony. The advice coming from Hus is uncompromising: “stand up to it and refuse to participate in it” even it means risking jail, for “it is blessed to suffer for the truth … and even if he were to die in jail, what better fate can one meet in the world than holy martyrdom?”46 Hus’s discussion of simony leads to many an excursus about the nature of the church, which is distinctly Wycliffite.
Conceptualizing the church as an invisible communitas praedestinatorum allows Hus to question and undermine the authority of those authority figures who live immoral and corrupt lives, stating, for example, that popes and bishops who do not follow Christ lack authority in the church.47 Of all of Hus’s post-1412 vernacular treatises, On Simony is addressed largely—though by no means exclusively—to a clerical audience, which is why he relied on venerated church authorities (Pope Innocent, Pope Gregory, St. Augustine, and St. Bernard) to support his arguments as much as on his more usual resource, the Bible. All five works, the Expositions, the Postil, and On Simony are works of spiritual instruction, but they also contain a lot of information about Hus’s life, as well as criticism, much of it quite severe, of contemporary clergy.48
Regarding the spiritual advice contained therein, none of the five treatises is entirely original, but rather each repeats ideas expressed elsewhere. The treatise On Simony is a translation and adaptation of his earlier Latin work De simonia.49 And whereas in the Expositions Hus reworked Wyclif’s Latin work Decalogus seu de mandatis divinis,50 the vernacular Postil is a reworking of Hus’s Latin Postil, written between 1410 and 1411, the so-called Sermones in Bethlehem.51 In the reworking, Hus eliminated church authorities in favor of scriptural quotations and added more contemporary context at the expense of scholastic commentaries.52 What was new is the sheer number of comments about Hus’s own life and about the state of the contemporary church, either justifying his conduct or lambasting bad priests and corrupt authorities.
It is clear that Hus’s interpretation of his life, his struggle against injustice and persecution, indelibly influenced his view of the spiritual life, what was at stake, and how it could best be lived, which he communicated through his vernacular writings. Thus the treatises also show a bitter critic of clerical shortcomings and of the clerical culture in general, a disappointed man whose spiritual advice instilled rejection of contemporary religious customs, division, and partisanship. Hus lambasted immoral priests (whom he sometimes identified by name), complained about the blindness and outright corruption of the church’s higher-ups, and stressed the importance of choosing the right side in the ongoing spiritual struggle against the forces of the Antichrist.
Hus’s spirituality has been the subject of a number of scholarly investigations and much ground has already been covered. A very helpful overview of Hus’s spirituality has recently been offered by Thomas Fudge.53 After considering Hus’s vernacular works written mostly after 1412, he synthesized a number of principles that governed Hus’s spiritual outlook, contextualizing them within late medieval culture and showing that Hus’s spirituality followed rather traditional lines. His spirituality focused on love, nurtured by mystical, or quasi-mystical, experiences of Christ, shunning or even rejecting outward forms of religion should they interfere with the inner.54 To put it in the words of another biographer, “Hus combats the external, mechanical piety of the time by opposing it to the piety of the heart and the spirit.”55 Prayer was central in this life, and it was to be humble and social,56 the latter emphasis on community being perhaps a surprising aspect of spirituality in someone as committed to the inner life of a mystic. Perhaps this insistence on communality in prayer and in spiritual pursuits in general is a sign that Hus was fundamentally thinking about communities and groups and not necessarily individuals, which, in turn, helps us understand his focus on creating a community of faithful followers. Importantly, Hus wrote works of pastoral care even from his prison cell at Constance, dedicating them, somewhat poignantly, to his jailers.57 This detail alone looms large: what Hus chose to do in the last weeks of his life shows clearly where his priorities lay, not with theological argumentation but with works of pastoral care.
The persistent theme, a thread woven through all of Hus’s writing from the last three years of his life, is one of contemptus mundi: the idea that temporal life ought to be shunned as unimportant and even potentially deleterious to spiritual ambitions.58 And while holding to this principle is nothing out of the ordinary for a spiritual writer, Hus elevated his rejection of the world to a new level, a level at which it actually became quite problematic. In addition to shunning worldly temptations, Hus’s rejection of the world encompassed also a rejection of worldly authorities (those with whom he disagreed, that is), even including the courts. More than a principle of internal introspection, contemptus mundi thus in Hus’s hands became
