about someone, and believing someone.70 In the fourth section, Hus argued against the notion that the clergy, the prelates, or even the pope ought to be obeyed without question. Hus’s fifth argument was that a condemnation could only be considered valid if it was in accord with God’s law. Finally, Hus argued against simony, the purchase or sale of spiritual things. He viewed this as a pernicious vice, spreading through the body of the church, as he put it, like leprosy.
In order to make his criticism more authoritative and scathing, it consisted entirely of quotations from the Bible and the church fathers and was inscribed in this way on the southern and northern walls of Bethlehem Chapel. Because the inscriptions could hardly be deciphered by those present, being written above the audience’s head and in Latin, their significance was largely symbolic. They were there and Hus could point to them if he liked.71 In this way, it was as if Jesus, the apostle Paul, Augustine, and Gregory the Great were themselves directly criticizing the errors in the contemporary church, with Hus merely serving as their messenger. The quotations later appeared together with his commentary as a book (discussed later in this chapter), but only the direct quotations were inscribed on the walls in Bethlehem.
It is possible that Hus expanded upon the quotations in his sermons, but his choice to display texts by esteemed and unshakable authorities of the ancient church rather than his own words of commentary is of great importance. By posting them publicly, Hus was, in effect, claiming that he (and the ideals that he stood for) had the authority of the early church behind him. With the church fathers figuratively by his side, Hus channeled the authority of the Scriptures as well as of revered figures such as Augustine, Gregory the Great, and Jerome, in support of his preaching and reform agenda. The small site of his preaching, the Bethlehem Chapel, was thus transformed into a repository of apostolic truth. A space intended to meet the spiritual needs of the Czech population in Prague became the headquarters of a movement calling for disobedience to papal authority. The decoration of Bethlehem Chapel bears witness to the shift: whereas the two original texts, the confession of faith and the Ten Commandments, could not be found objectionable by any ecclesiastical authority, the quotations had highly polemical implications. Whereas the two original texts served as instructions in obedience to the teaching of the church, the later text served as a moral justification for disobedience.
Hus’s public criticism of clerical privilege and immorality was not unusual among pro-reform preachers. But Hus disseminated his opinions publicly, encouraging the laity to identify and speak against clerical immorality, in effect telling them that they could decide what was right and moral. But this was no invitation to follow one’s personal truth: Hus used a number of strategies to persuade the laity to follow his own judgment on what was right and moral. His implied leadership was apparent everywhere, even in the choice of wall inscriptions. The excerpts from the church fathers were left in Latin, unlike the Ten Commandments and the confession of faith. By leaving these quotations untranslated, Hus put himself in the position of a leader and interpreter, necessary to explicate the meaning of an otherwise unintelligible text to his audience.72 Again, the shift is apparent. Now, the walls are intended to speak not only to the Czech inhabitants of Prague, but to all of Christendom. And we can assume that—in light of Hus’s exile from Prague—the walls bearing his inscriptions assumed a memorial as well as catechetical function.
Hus’s On the Six Errors: Educating the Faithful About Clerical Abuses
From this time on, educating the laity about corruption and wrongdoing in the church was an indelible part of this public campaign.
Hus’s decision to write and circulate a vernacular treatise On the Six Errors coincided with his exile in October 1412.73 The treatise included vernacular translations of the wall inscriptions and added Hus’s interpretation of them.74 Given Hus’s impending departure from his pulpit, it is likely that the treatise was created to replace Hus’s physical presence at Bethlehem, by providing the necessary explanation and contextualization of the wall writings that he would have offered in person when present. The purpose of the treatise was educational: by instructing the laity directly, it taught them to distinguish between proper and improper use of clerical powers and, implicitly, between legitimate and illegitimate use of authority by clerics. This kind of education, Hus thought, would enable the laity easily to recognize and resist clerical abuses. In that sense, Hus offered an education that was potentially quite subversive. Hus’s discussion of the six errors not only undermined the authority of morally corrupt clergy, it gave the laity permission to decide which clerics could be deemed “in error” and therefore not worthy of obedience. This opened the door to lay disobedience of authority figures based on criteria that Hus himself thought important. However, Hus did not frame this discussion in terms of disobedience or even dissent. Rather, he spoke in positive terms, of reforming the church. For laity, to participate in the reform movement meant, according to Hus, to decide which clerics are corrupt (or maybe to take Hus’s word for it) and ignore their dictates.
But as mentioned above, Hus also had personal reasons for selecting these particular six articles. All of them grew out of Hus’s personal experience with contemporary clergy. Taken together, they build the justification for Hus’s recent disobedience of curial mandates, by using church-sanctioned theological teachings to defend his position. The treatise, circulating in both Latin and the vernacular, was a declaration of what was wrong with the clerical elite and why they ought not to be obeyed. The fact that he translated it into the vernacular implies his desire to convince both the clerics and the laity to support him instead of his persecutors.
In the fall of 1412, Hus was already forming a faction of supporters by expanding his core audience at Bethlehem, the same people who shouted their agreement with Hus’s appeal against the papal bull that banned preaching in private places. After reading the bull from the pulpit at Bethlehem on June 25, 1410,75 Hus encouraged his listeners by saying, “If you wish to side with me, do not fear excommunication, because you have appealed alongside me according to the rules and order of the church.”76 His treatise O šesti bludiech (On the Six Errors) and others that followed aimed to influence the laity to take a stand against church authorities.
In his criticism of ecclesiastical errors, Hus might have chosen any number of erroneous practices and aberrations, but he focused on those that most affected him personally. In the first error, Hus criticized “foolish priests” (blázniví kněžie), who boasted to be creators of their Creator and able to create him as many times as they pleased. This declaration put the priests above Christ himself, a scandalous aspiration. Hus drew on Augustine’s complicated distinction between four different ways of creating something, but the underlying message was simple: priests did not have the power to make something out of nothing. The celebration (and making) of the Eucharist did not make the priest a creator, but rather a servant of God. Hus admonished boastful clerics: “You cannot create the body of Christ, but God does so through you. Try to offer the sacrifice with due honor.”77 Hus referred to the priests with honor and deference due to a priest, while teaching the laity to see the clergy as instruments of God, who channel but do not control God’s power.
The second error addressed belief in the saints and the pope, but it was really a meditation on the fallibility of humanity, coupled with a warning not to believe any one person unconditionally. Drawing again on Augustine, Hus drew a distinction between three ways of holding a belief: to believe in something, to hold a belief about something, and to believe something.78 As an example, Hus used the apostle Paul. Hus insisted that the faithful ought to believe that the Holy Spirit spoke through Paul, but despite Paul’s privileged status in the church, the faithful were not to believe him if he had lied or swore mendacious oaths. This comment suggests that Hus thought that the faithful needed to scrutinize Paul’s sayings carefully. If given a chance to converse with him face-to-face, they should not automatically believe all of his statements because of his elevated status in the church. As for other saints—popes included—he urged the faithful to believe them only when they spoke the truth, again implying that the faithful needed to be on their guard and actively sift through the saints’
