ones,” communitas praedestinatorum7. This was a difficult concept when it came to organizing and governing the church, because the fate of each individual in it—whether it be eternal salvation or damnation—was known to God alone. This in turn meant that individuals who saw themselves as being a part of the church, even members of the high hierarchy including the pope, might not in actuality be among the saved. This introduced tremendous instability and vagueness into church affairs. Is this priest really a part of the communitas praedestinatorum? And this bishop? Or the pope? In this conception, it was not entirely clear who in the contemporary hierarchy was actually a member of the church. Some of the more scrupulous among the ordinary faithful began to have doubts about their own status in the church, wondering if they were among the saved or destined for eternal torment. To the troubled ordinary faithful, Hus advised that they trust that their faith, nurtured by acts of charity, would suffice.8 When it came to judging the salvation of others, matters became more complicated. Of course, ideally, one did not need to and ought not to judge. New Testament epistles seemed to support this view. But, in the life of an institution such as the church, ambiguity is not always workable. Not knowing who was really a member of the church made it impossible to know whose dictates were to be obeyed and whose were not.
With self-serving cleverness, which has gone unacknowledged as such by Hus’s biographers, Hus offered a solution to the ambiguity that he himself had created, repeating Jesus’s words “By their fruits you shall know them” (Matthew 7:16), in effect inviting the ordinary faithful to judge those tasked to lead them.9 In so doing, the behavior of clerical elites became open to judgment by the ordinary faithful. He invited the laity to decide for themselves whose authority was legitimate and whose was not, but also insisted that they listen to and obey him. Or in theory he did. Although his sermons and later writings were peppered with exhortations that the faithful do just that, the reality was somewhat messier: Hus put himself into the role of the new arbiter, the one passing judgment on his colleagues, deciding which cleric was credible (and to be obeyed) and which was not. In this way, Hus offered a solution and a way out of instability and confusion in the church ranks, which he had himself created through his writing and preaching in various contexts.10
In the course of his career, Hus transitioned from the the archbishop’s favorite preacher to a rabble-rouser who rejected all temporal authority. What set Hus apart from other difficult clerics was the fact that, at every crisis moment, he turned to the laity with a direct and deliberate message. He advised, exhorted, and cajoled, eventually creating a kind of parallel church structure, an invisible church defined by the believers’ loyalty to himself.
Bethlehem Chapel: The Perfect Venue for Hus’s Subversive Message
Knowing how his life would end predisposes us to see Jan Hus as a tragic figure, grossly distorting our understanding of Hus’s day-to-day life. In fact, many of his contemporaries might have thought him a lucky man, someone whose sense of his own vocation in life combined perfectly with the needs and possibilities of his professional situation.
Hus was dedicated to working with the laity and the office of preaching in particular. Conveniently, there was a demand for preaching in Bohemia, encouraged by two generations of pro-reform clerics in Prague starting in 1360s or so.11 Preaching campaigns by preachers, such as Conrad Waldhauser and Jan Milíč of Kroměříž, who were not attached to regular parishes or monastic orders, that were aimed at spiritual renewal of the laity were a frequent occurrence, sometimes even annoying local clerical establishment.12 The question of Hus’s reform “forerunners” has been debated extensively and lies outside of the scope of this book.13 Primarily Czech-speaking scholars have argued that Hus’s reform trajectory was native in origin. Other scholars pointed to the influence of Wyclif as formative and decisive in propelling Hus on the reform path.14 The truth lies somewhere in the middle. Wyclif’s ideas certainly made an impression on Hus and his circle of colleagues, as will become evident in later chapters. But Hus was also, and perhaps originally, shaped by the reform ideals that had arisen among reform-minded masters at Prague University, emphasizing frequent Eucharistic communion and moral life. Hus certainly learned from clerics often described as his “forerunners,” such as Conrad Waldhauser, Jan Milíč of Kroměříž, Matthew of Janov, as well as John Wyclif.15 This is, of course, not to say that the outcome of Hus’s career was in any way preordained, but it does explain how Hus’s affinity for reform ideals shaped his sense of his own vocation: all of his role models saw preaching as extremely important. Preaching was an “essential duty of the cleric and the fulfillment of his role in the order of salvation,” and it marked the community of preachers as living in harmony with Christ’s law.16 In other words, preaching was at the heart of the reform and served as a marker of a pro-reform cleric. As for what marked pro-reform laity, this was less clear. But Hus would eventually create a marker: for the laity to be pro-reform would mean supporting him.
Bethlehem Chapel: A Reformed Place
In a rare confluence of passion and opportunity, Jan Hus saw preaching as his life’s vocation, and he was given the perfect space for it. Bethlehem Chapel was founded solely to provide space for preaching in the Czech vernacular, quite a novelty for a chapel that was neither parochial nor attached to a monastic order.17 The incentive came from the upper echelons of the Prague society: John of Milheim, who served as confidential adviser to King Wenceslas IV, went to great lengths to secure the foundation. He obtained the archbishop’s consent as well as royal protection for the chapel with the king himself authorizing the charter. The chapel was founded in 1391 and consecrated three years later, in 1394. It was a large structure measuring 798 square meters that could hold about three thousand faithful, which made it one of the largest structures for that purpose in Prague. The chapel still stands in Prague’s Old Town, not far from the well-known astronomical clock in the Old Town Square.18
The difficulty of carving out the necessary physical space for the new chapel illustrates how crowded the urban landscape had become by the end of the fourteenth century. When the project was first conceived, it proved impossible to find a new building site anywhere; the chapel was literally squeezed into the urban landscape.19 It was impossible to build an entirely new building, so walls and pillars from surrounding structures were used in the construction. The new chapel was built over the garden of another building, on top of a graveyard belonging to the neighboring church, and even over the local well. Before the construction could begin, multiple financial and legal claims needed to be settled. It was necessary to ensure public access to the well, which ended up on the inside of the chapel’s building, and to compensate the priest in the adjacent church for his losses of income with an annual donation.20 The chapel must have done well financially in its early years: when in 1403 the priest in the adjacent church died and the compensation agreement was renegotiated, his successor’s annual compensation was doubled.21
The chapel’s founders made preaching in the Czech vernacular central to Bethlehem’s mission.22 In the charter, issued on May 24, 1391, they explained that “no center could be found in which preaching would be the main part of the service” and that “clerics desiring to preach in Czech struggled with enormous difficulties and have to be satisfied with private homes or obscure places.”23 The charter stipulated that there would be two sermons on all feast days, in the morning and after lunch, but during Advent and Lent only one (in the morning) so that the faithful could attend services in their own parishes.24 The charter allowed for masses to be celebrated but did not specify their number or frequency. Those were left to the priest’s discretion, confirming that mass was not considered central to the mission of Bethlehem Chapel in the same way as preaching in the vernacular was.
Although the emphasis on vernacular preaching is often cited as the most defining feature of the chapel, the founders were aiming even higher: their intention was to create not so much a place for reform but a reformed place, not only a place from which reform would be announced but a place that had already enacted it. The chapel’s financial arrangements stipulated by the
