SOURCE: Keen, Maurice. “Wyclif, the Bible, and Transubstantiation.” In Wyclif in His Times, edited by Anthony Kenny, pp. 1-16. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1986.

[In the following essay, Keen outlines the development of Wyclif's thought regarding the Eucharist, which culminated in his heretical objection to transubstantiation in 1379.]

In this paper I shall attempt to trace the stages in the development of Wyclif's thought that turned him from a radical critic of his contemporary church, into what he is remembered as, a heresiarch. The formal turning-point in that development is quite clear; it is the moment at which he began to maintain in the schools views concerning the Eucharist which were directly at variance with the orthodox doctrine of the Church of his day. It is equally clear that his decision to determine on this topic, and his refusal to retract his opinions or to keep silent in the face of condemnation, were individual decisions; that his heresy, that is to say, has to be explained in terms of his personal circumstances and convictions. For that reason I must start with a brief review of what we know about his life and the general development of his ideas—in order to provide a context for what I want to say about this central moment in his life and thought.

Wyclif's life was not one fraught with drama. His career was as a don, who was never formally anything greater than a don. We do not know precisely when he was born, but it must have been about 1330. A Yorkshire man, he was probably supported in his early days at Oxford by a local patron; when he is first heard of, in 1356, he was a fellow of Merton.¹ By then he had incepted in the Faculty of Arts. He was elected Master of Balliol in 1360, an office that he filled only briefly;² later he became Warden of Canterbury Hall, an office which involved him, a secular, in wrangles with the regulars (the masters and students belonging to regular religious orders), which culminated in his losing the post, an experience that probably left its mark.³ He held a minuscule series of livings, being presented ultimately, in 1374, to the crown living of Lutterworth in Leicestershire. But he was never, until his very last years, resident in any of his livings, and after leaving Canterbury Hall he had rooms in Queen's College (a foundation with Yorkshire connections). At the university he seems to have waited longer than the average—among scholars of distinction at any rate—before proceeding from the Faculty of Arts to that of theology: he probably incepted as a BD in 1368/9 and as a Doctor of Theology in 1372/3.⁴ Though the bulk of his time was spent in Oxford, he was, on a number of occasions between 1372 and 1378, employed by the government and by men in high places as a polemist whose criticisms of contemporary ecclesiastical privileges could be made useful for political purposes.⁵ The last occasion on which we know that he was so employed was in the Gloucester Parliament of 1378, where he spoke to justify the right of the royal officers to enter the Westminster sanctuary in order to arrest two squires who were crown debtors. That was just a year before he began to defend in Oxford those views of his on the Eucharist which were to be condemned as heretical. As a result of their initial condemnation by a university commission he left Oxford in 1381 and took up residence at his rectory at Lutterworth. About the same time he seems to have suffered from a stroke; and at Lutterworth he died, of another stroke that paralysed his body and his tongue, in the last days of December 1384.

To complete the introductory picture, I must say a little about the professional academic works that Wyclif produced in his career as a don. First I need to say a word of his philosophic works, commenced while he was an artist and completed, almost certainly, before he incepted as a Doctor of Theology—about the tracts that, gathered together, are known as his Summa de Ente.⁶ These reveal him as an uncompromising opponent, in philosophy, of the dominant school of his day—that of the moderni, the nominalist disciples of William of Ockham. Ockham taught that all human knowledge was, ultimately, experientially acquired, as a result of acquaintance (essentially through sense data) with singular objects. For him and his school, abstract concepts had no demonstrable existence outside the mind. This philosophic approach had implications for theology, it should be noted. We cannot see or touch or taste God; so our knowledge of him, and of his eternal verities, is not knowledge in the ordinary sense, nor are he and his truths susceptible of logical discussion: the eye of faith may discern or know them, but not the eye of reason. Wyclif was one who reacted against this fashionable teaching. In his views on cognition he was avowedly Platonist. We know things, he taught, not because we touch or see them, but because they are, because of something about them and in them that renders their being intelligible. Abstract concepts, being intelligible, have reality—otherwise the mind would not be able to grasp them. This approach to cognition, equally with Ockham's, had implications for theology. On this view by peering behind the surface of things to the reality underlying them—to what makes them what they are—we can peer forward towards an understanding of God, who makes all things and whose universal knowledge of all things makes knowledge of some things in a degree accessible to men who are made in his image. This is a teaching which, obviously and explicitly, allows significant room for human speculation in the field of theology. Its truths are not ‘unknowable’; if they were, nothing would be knowable.

Wyclif's philosophical views—his realist or Platonist metaphysics—are in consequence the key to much of his theological work. In particular they are the key to his views on a number of subjects which have—or rather had—very practical applications: lordship, the Church, the papacy, the office of kingship, and above all the authority of the Bible. These topics are the themes of a series of works which date, in the form in which we have them, from the years 1374-9. I will not attempt to do more than summarize, very succinctly, some of the central views that they relay. Wyclif's belief that all human knowledge depended on God's eternal foreknowledge naturally made him a radical predestinarian. This coloured his view of the nature of the Church.⁷ None but those with a standing in grace were in a true sense members of the Church: hence the Church was the body of the elect, among whom the pope and his clergy might, or might not, be numbered. It coloured also his view of lordship, or possession.⁸ Following and adapting the opinions of Giles of Rome and Fitzralph of Armagh, he argued that lordship depended on grace and that therefore righteousness was the only genuinely valid title to lordship. All lordship depends on God: therefore, only those whom he justifies can be said to have a valid right to lordship: those in sin forfeit their right, since right cannot be justified by a merely human instrument, by a foundation charter or papal decree, but only by that justification which declares that the righteous possess all things. This enabled him to embark on a radical critique of ecclesiastical endowments. But above all his philosophical stance coloured his view of Scripture. In scholastic terms, he believed that the divine truth articulated in it had of itself intelligible being: in Robson's words it was ‘an emanation of the supreme being, transposed into writing’.⁹ The Bible, said Wyclif, was God's book, a summary of truth in a more important sense than a mere matter of words on a page: it was the testament of the Father,¹⁰ a ‘charter written by God’, ‘the mirror of eternal truth’.¹¹ As such, it was the key to human understanding of truth, and the ‘logic of Holy Scripture’, as Wyclif called it,¹² was superior to all human logic. It was the key to human understanding of the divine, because it came direct from the source of that understanding; and the key also both to Christian doctrine and to Christian living—the full and perfect guide, that is to say, to human social and political association. What could not find foundation in Holy Scripture had no real foundation (the word ‘pope’ was not used therein, Wyclif pointed out).¹³ The whole law, the truth, the life were to be found there, and any addition thereto could only detract from its perfection, never enhance it. True, its understanding required the exegesis of the scholar, to bring truth within range of the unlettered and to clarify obscurities of language: and for ordinary men it must be translated—by scholars. But its truths, he claimed, were not beyond their understanding, and the obscurities in it were only apparent, not real. There could not, ultimately, be obscurity in the source of light itself. This was the trend of the views that Wyclif expounded in extenso in the De Veritate Sacre Scripture, the last major work that he completed before he began to tackle the question of the mass.

It was in the summer, probably, of the year 1377 that Wyclif first began to determine—to give his view in public lectures—on the Eucharist. In doing so, he entered a new area of debate. He had already, it is true, gone very far in the statement of a radical position on ecclesiastical endowments, on papal power, on the right of the secular authority to reform ecclesiastical discipline; and he had in consequence attracted hostile attention both from the English bishops and the curia of Gregory XI.¹⁴ But the questions that he had raised to date were mainly concerning authority and administration in the Church, on which matters the fourteenth century was used to hearing radical opinions. He still had, apparently, numerous academic disciples and sympathizers, and among regulars as well as seculars, especially among the friars—those mendicants whom a little later, in his De Apostasia, he called ‘my most dear sons among the mendicant orders, who are not among the apostates’.¹⁵ We still have the notebook in which one of them, Adam Stocton, copied ‘twelve points to show the Pope is anti-Christ’ from Wyclif's De Potestate Pape, with the approving comment, ‘hec venerabilis doctor magister JW in quadem sua determinatione, anno 1379’. Probably within the year, perhaps only a few months later, Stocton crossed out the words venerabilis doctor and substituted execrabilis seductor.¹⁶ Those who had followed Wyclif as long as he was talking of the nature of the Church, of the authority of the pope, and of the evangelical path to perfection, could not follow him any longer when he rounded upon a central Christian doctrine, and they sheered away. For a little while some, apparently, hoped he would withdraw from his new extreme position. ‘I do not call him a heretic’, wrote the Oxford friar Dr Thomas Winterton ‘seeing with tearful eyes the many errors and heresies of the famous doctor John Wyclif, since I do not know whether he has the intention of obstinately defending his errors, or is ready to be corrected … submitting as is his duty, to ecclesiastical authority.’¹⁷ Wyclif, however, was not ready to submit to that authority, whose claims he had already torn to pieces in works which men like Stocton, and perhaps Winterton, had seen no cause to quarrel with. Winterton's hopes for him proved empty: he stood by his Eucharistic teaching, and that put him beyond the pale of orthodoxy and in 1381 drove him from Oxford. That for Wyclif was the final turning point, and the turning point for those who cared to follow him too. Henceforward they would be heretics, not just the sympathizers with a radical anticlericalism they had been able to call themselves hitherto.

The question is, therefore, what it was that turned Wyclif decisively at this particular point. What was it that led him, over the years 1379-81, to call in question the teaching of the Church on the central sacrament of the Eucharist, to flout authority, and to devote himself in the remaining years of his life to reiterating, with increasing vehemence, his denunciation of that teaching, in the works that he penned from his rectory at Lutterworth? In order to attempt an answer to this question, it is clearly necessary to say a little bit more of what the debate was about and just what teaching it was that Wyclif rejected.

Transubstantiation, the doctrine with which Wyclif quarrelled, had been given the stamp of orthodoxy by a decretal of Innocent III in 1215.¹⁸ It is a doctrine whose medieval philosophic implications are not easy to understand—at any rate for one, like myself, who is untrained in scholasticism. It claims that, at the mass, there is a change of substance in the consecrated host, and to understand that, one must understand also what substance technically means. For the medieval philosophers, following Aristotle, substance was what differentiated things or stuff of one kind from things or stuff of another kind. Substance was thus something to be differentiated from accidents in descriptive statements. Socrates is a man, he is white, he is clever, he is old. ‘White’, ‘clever’, ‘old’ are predicates about accidents—the whiteness and cleverness and age of Socrates; his humanity, however, is not accidental but substantial. It tells you what kind of thing Socrates is and that he is not another kind of thing that might also be white, clever, and old—say, a horse. At the Eucharist, according to the scholastic interpretation of transubstantiation, it is the substance of the consecrated host that changes, not the accidents; the whiteness and roundness of the host remain, but the substance is not bread any more—it has changed from that kind of stuff into stuff of a quite different kind.

This explanation of the mass is one which poses a number of problems. There is for instance the one that others had raised and that Wyclif crowed over: if a mouse eats the consecrated host, do we say that it has eaten—substantially—the body of Christ?’¹⁹ Or again, and less flippantly, are we to say that at the mass the priest breaks what is in substance the body of Christ? But the most important and obvious difficulty, which logically precedes these, is this: what are we to say about the accidents of what was once bread, which most certainly have not changed? Changes of substance posed no problem for the scholastic: Aristotle had explained such change in terms of the components of substance, matter, and form, and substantial change was, observably, common enough. What was milk becomes butter; a dead body decomposes, and becomes carrion, then clay. But when these changes occur, not only does the substance change, but the accidents also—or enough of them to register the alteration. In contrast, in the case of the consecrated host there is nothing to register the change; and an ugly philosophical problem arises. We have a small, round, white object and we are told that its smallness, roundness, and whiteness (its accidents) are not the roundness and whiteness of bread as they seem to be. We also know that they cannot be the roundness and whiteness and size of Christ's body—if we say that Christ's body is round and white and two inches across we shall patently be blaspheming, as Wyclif triumphantly pointed out.²⁰ But if the accidents are not the accidents of bread and are not the accidents of Christ's body either, what are they? An accident is a quality of something else, of a substance: accidents without substance are a contradiction in terms. Surely we do not say that the host that we see elevated at the mass is a contradiction in terms?

Two explanations of what happened at the mass were offered by scholastics of earlier generations than Wyclif's. Aquinas suggested that the substance of the bread was changed and that the accidents that remained were upheld by what he called ‘quantity’. This is not an easy argument to follow. Dziewicki explains it thus:

Quantity is not a mere substance, not a mere mode of being; it is different from extension for it is what makes extension, and may be defined as a force that extends material substance. Thus, after the words of the consecration, the substance of bread is no longer there, but quantity takes its place naturally, being itself upheld by God's supernatural power: and therefore whatever the bread could do, even to feeding the body, is now performed by the quantity that remains.²¹

I am not sure that this is a very clear explanation, but it has been quoted by historians more learned than I as the best they can offer. Actually, I think St Thomas's suggestion is perhaps a better one than he himself could have realized. Take two statements which appear at first sight parallel: ‘Socrates is white’ and ‘the sky is blue’. Socrates is a substance all right and whiteness is an accident of that substance: but is the sky a substance? Surely it is not, and to describe it we shall have to say something like that it is ‘the appearance of depth in space’—in other words we shall arrive at saying that its blueness is an accident of a phenomenon that we have to describe in quantitative terms. Aquinas, dependent on an Aristotelian cosmology, could not of course have quoted this example, and nor could Wyclif—but it is a good reminder that what Aquinas said was not by any means absurd, or a quibble, as one might at first be tempted to think.

The other scholastic explanation of what happened at the mass, and which was much more widely adopted in Wyclif's day, was that of Scotus, in which the majority of the moderni (the followers of Ockham) concurred. Scotus, in order to explain a problem that seemed insoluble, fell back upon the omnipotence of God's will. He held that the substance of bread was not changed at the consecration of the host, but ‘annihilated’—that it simply ceased to be. In the place where it had been there was now the body of Christ: there was not substantial change, but substantial substitution. The accidents of the bread remained, Duns taught, as what he called ‘verities without substance’, maintained by the unlimited and unlimitable power of God. Thus, as Workman put it ‘the eucharist is the constant repetition of a stupendous miracle’.²² The Ockhamite explanation of what happened at the mass was, as I have said, substantially the same as Duns's. To this school, this explanation posed no philosophical problems. Christ's body, after his Ascension, was not something that we can see or touch: the ordinary rules of logic therefore did not apply to statements about it. The will of God, Ockham's disciples taught, is a potentia absoluta,²³ a power unconditioned by the rules of reason (or any other rules). He can annihilate substance and uphold accidents at his will, because he can do anything. Men cannot fully understand what has happened; but the accidents are, according to this teaching, no longer the accidents of bread, in consequence of a great miracle whose working is not susceptible of logical explanation, but whose verity we accept on the basis of faith.

This Scotist explanation of the mass was, however, quite irreconcilable with Wyclif's teaching. All knowledge, he believed, was of God; we perceive things only because he has made them intelligible. Wyclif must almost certainly at some point have come across the famous passage in Ockham's Summa Totius Logicae in which he rejects the Platonist view of universals. If one believes that a universal is something that really exists in singulars, Ockham says, ‘it would follow that God cannot annihilate one singular of a given substance without annihilating all the others; for if he annihilated the singular thing he would annihilate that which is the essence of the singular in question, and consequently would annihilate the universal that is in it and in other singulars of the same substance, and so they would not remain either.’²⁴ Ockham's logic was, as usual, flawless. If, as Wyclif believed, the substance of bread had intelligible being which was imparted to every singular piece of bread, then if the substance of bread was annihilated in one piece of bread it would be annihilated in all pieces of bread. He had therefore to deny the premiss that God could annihilate substance. There was a common-sense strength in this argument, even though it did pose some theological difficulties, for annihilation, as he pointed out, made nonsense of sense data. The host which we see consecrated and receive at the mass becomes, on that view, the appearance of nothing. To accept that would undermine the basis of any theory of cognition, realist or nominalist, and religiously it meant the adoration of the absurd. That was what the notion of ‘verities without substance’ would lead to—an extreme of blasphemy.

Wyclif's philosophic arguments against both the Thomists and the Scotists take up many pages of the De Eucharistia and the De Apostasia, his two last Oxford works, and of the Trialogus, the best of his Lutterworth writings. His objections to both were essentially the same, that if the consecrated host had accidents which had no substance, then it was nothing; and the central Christian sacrament was nothing; men venerated a nothing in the elevated host, and so blasphemed. These objections are clearly based in the system of metaphysics that he had elaborated as an artist, and which he had set out as a system in the Summa de Ente. For this reason, it has been usual to accept that Wyclif's reasons for attacking the doctrine of transubstantiation were intellectual; that his essentially academic speculation carried him ‘ineluctably’ into his central heresy, rather than the evangelical zeal which gives its ring of strong personal conviction to the De Veritate Sacre Scripture and that inspired his vision of Biblical communism in the De Civili Dominio. ‘His final position grew directly out of his metaphysics’, writes G. Leff; ‘it could have been reached at any time within the previous fifteen or more years.’²⁵ ‘He approached the eucharist from the point of view not of abuses, but of a metaphysical system,’ says Workman.²⁶ Robson is clear that the decisive moment in the development of Wyclif's Eucharistic thought must have been quite early, in the years 1370-2, when he was first applying his metaphysic to theological issues, quoting on this behalf the friar William Woodford, who was long a close friend, and later, like so many other friars, a distinguished opponent. ‘When the said Master John was first lecturing on the Sentences [that would be in 1371 or 2]’, so Woodford says ‘he asserted that though the sacramental accidents had a subject, yet the bread ceased to exist at consecration. And being much pressed as to what the subject of those accidents was, he replied that it was a mathematical body. Afterwards, when this position had been much argued against, he answered that he did not know what the subject of the accidents was, yet he asserted clearly that they had a subject. Now [Woodford was writing in 1381] he lays down expressly that the bread remains after consecration and is the subject of the accidents.’²⁷ Here we seem to have a clear history of the evolution of Wyclif's view, through puzzlement via Thomism to his own individual standpoint, which was reached through the course of parry and thrust in pure academic argument.

Nevertheless, and in spite of Woodford, I must say that I am not happy with this account as the whole story of Wyclif's developing thought on the Eucharist. First, it seems to me to impose an uncomfortably long gap between Wyclif's first attempt to grapple with the question and what Leff has called the ineluctable conclusion.²⁸ Here in parenthesis it is perhaps worth noting that though Wyclif's Eucharistic teaching was condemned at Oxford in 1381 and by the Canterbury convocation in 1382, his philosophical teaching, which supposedly gave rise to that ineluctable conclusion, was not: his metaphysics continued to stir interest in Oxford through the 1380s and 90s, which was why they influenced Czech realist thought at an early stage, when Czech scholars were as yet ignorant of his teaching on the Eucharist. Apparently his contemporaries did not see his metaphysics as being quite so perilous as their ‘ineluctable conclusion’ ought to have made them. But there is a more important point than this. Though Wyclif denied transubstantiation, he was never entirely clear as to what he wished to put in its place. If he was still uncertain in 1379 of what the true explanation was, why did he not continue to confess his ignorance, as on Woodford's evidence he had done for some time past: ‘afterwards … he answered that he did not know what the subject of the accidents was, yet he asserted clearly that they had a subject.’²⁹ And lastly, if all that was in issue was a point in metaphysics, why is it that in all Wyclif's works on the subject—even in the first, the De Eucharistia—his attack on transubstantiation appears to be linked in his mind with the abuses in the Church that he had been concentrating on in earlier but more recent works, in the De Ecclesia and the De Potestate Pape, for example? This makes me very unhappy about Workman's statement in particular, that Wyclif attacked the current Eucharistic teaching ‘not from the point of view of abuses, but of a metaphysical system’.

The true story of the development of his thought is, I believe, somewhat different from that usually accepted explanation. What has given that explanation its currency, I think, is the fact (which is undoubted) that Wyclif concentrated so much on the negative side of the argument; whence the natural conclusion, that that was what was really important to him. But I do not believe that is really why he did concentrate on it; this was rather because he believed that on this one point of accidents without substance he could make those whom he regarded as the pillars of abuse, the followers of Antichrist or ‘western Mahomets’ as he made them out to be,³⁰ look ridiculous and fraudulent (as he believed they really were). In other words, I believe almost the opposite of Workman's view, that Wyclif attacked transubstantiation rather from the point of view of abuse than of a metaphysical system, and further, that the positive side of his discussion of the mass—which is often somewhat neglected—supports this interpretation.

The central positive point in Wyclif's conclusions on the Eucharist was that bread and wine remained after consecration. To prove this affirmatively, he did not rely on metaphysic. What he relied on was Scripture and the teaching of the early Church, and to this end in the De Apostasia he attempted a remarkable and impressive survey of the history of the doctrine of the mass, in which he paid particular attention to the wording of the Bible and the Fathers.³¹ When they spoke of the mass, he pointed out, they invariably mentioned bread. When Christ said ‘This is my body’ (hoc est corpus meum) he did not mean hoc corpus est corpus meum—an absurd tautology—but hic panis est corpus meum: and as he then stood bodily before his disciples, he can only have been speaking ‘in a figure’,³² just as he was when he said ‘upon this rock will I build my church’. Turning to Augustine, he found that he supported his reading. ‘What we see’, says the great Father ‘is the bread and the chalice that the eyes announce: and faith receives that the bread is the body and that in the chalice is the blood of our Lord. These are sacraments, since one thing is seen, another understood.’³³ Faith, not the senses, thouched the body of Christ, according to Wyclif's gloss on the African. The belief of the Church was still true to Christ and Scripture in the eleventh century, Wyclif thought, quoting Berengar's confession: ‘I believe that the bread and wine which are placed upon the altar after consecration are not only a sacrament but the true body and blood of Jesus Christ’—but still bread and wine too according to the letter, Wyclif points out.³⁴ Actually, I think that he was at this point misreading the decretal of Nicholas II that embodies Berengar's confession, and giving the opposite of its intended sense—but that is not germane: he believed he had got it right, and in any case, Scripture and the teaching of the early Church was the real basis of his authority.

This seems to me to tell its own story. Wyclif put forward his teaching on the Eucharist in the year 1379, the year after he had completed the De Veritate Sacre Scripture and probably not more than eighteen months after concluding the monumental task that he had set himself back in 1371 (or thereabout), of making a commentary on the whole of Scripture—what is now called his Postilla Super Totam Bibliam.³⁵ What settled his conviction about the remanence of the bread was not realist metaphysic, at least not directly, but what he called the logic of Holy Scripture. It was that same logic—and the history of the early Church—that had already convinced him that the pope's powers had no sacred foundation, and that his decretals were for the most part an imperfect addition to the all-sufficient teaching of Scripture; and that pope and decretals alike were leading the Church out of the evangelical way. Now he had found a still more startling way in which what he called the carnal as opposed to the true Church was leading Christians astray to damnation. It had made its own fresh account of the central sacrament, a fudged teaching of its own that it had tacked on to what Christ enjoined upon his faithful for all time. The carnal Church was claiming that its priests—many of them men of unholy life, preknown to hell—could make Christ's own body, the Truth itself: and was enjoining silence upon all questioning, knowing that the detection of its fraud could knock the keystone out of the arch of priestly power.

Let me be clear about what I am suggesting. It is that Wyclif had long been worried by contemporary teaching on the Eucharist, but that what finally convinced him that it was wrong were his scriptural studies of the year 1372-9. Once he had come to the conclusion that this doctrine of transubstantiation was unsupported by Scripture and fraudulent, he had no option but to speak out, and speak out he did. If this is the right account of the way in which Wyclif's Eucharistic thought developed, there are consequences for a view of his personality. He appears as something more than a don in a difficulty, rather as one moved at the crucial crossroad of his life not by the rigidity of his own intellectual system, as Workman would have it, but by evangelical religious conviction. It is the passion of that conviction, I believe, that makes his late writing often seem so wrathful, not disappointed ambition, as McFarlane suspected.³⁶ He really was angry. When, in the first two chapters of his De Apostasia, he opened his great attack on the friars, he had three main charges against them. One was that they followed what he called ‘private religions’, in other words that the rules of the mendicant orders were a superfluous addition to the fully sufficient rule of Scripture and of necessity, as human additions to it, less perfect than the original. The second was that they were the chief agents in purveying the merely human means and instruments through which the clergy—and the pope above all—sought to raise money on the basis of their claim to cause God's acts, through absolutions (which only God can give) and indulgences. Thirdly and above all, they were the chief preachers among the people of the modern heresy concerning the miracle of the mass. In this he suspected them of deliberate fraud. ‘They say among themselves, truths on such matters are not for preaching among the people, lest their devotion be shaken; and thus they consent to idolatry’,³⁷ says Wyclif, taking up the same point in the De Blasphemia—so they preach lies instead.

There is a common thread running through all these charges, which illuminates, I think, the real basis of Wyclif's passionate anger. The friars live by a rule which is a human addition to Scripture: they sell absolutions and indulgences which are given by man, not by the Truth which speaks through Scripture: and they preach a doctrine of the mass which claims that man can make the body of God and which has no foundation in Scripture. The matter is always connected with putting the human above the divine, the cardinal sin and the error that is carnal by definition. What horrified Wyclif most of all about the doctrine of transubstantiation was just this, its carnality. The priests who followed that teaching sold the host, which the eye can perceive is bread, as the corporeal body of God: they taught men to bow before what was material and corruptible, the very essence of idolatry; and they taught men to believe that they bit the body of Christ and were nourished bodily thereby, which was blasphemy. A shoddy claim for physical, sacerdotal magic, that was what Wyclif thought of transubstantiation; and a claim moreover that would not and could not stand the test of scriptural authority through which alone God's scheme of salvation for man could be understood, a claim therefore that fell into the same category as Mahomet's twisting of the Holy Book to his own fell purposes.

Wyclif did not deny the importance of the mass, or the real presence of Christ at his Eucharist. The sacrament was founded solidly in Christ's scriptural injunction—‘do this’—and nothing could have persuaded him to challenge that. Reality he could admit too, because his definition of reality was not that of the Ockhamites: according to his metaphysical system it did not have to be corporeal. Christ's presence was sacramental and spiritual;³⁸ none the less real, but real in the same sense as when he said ‘I am with you always’, not in the sense as when he hung upon the Cross bodily. Hence for Wyclif the significance of the mass was different from what it was to most of his contemporaries. The words of the priest were not what mattered: as he pointed out, in Scripture the words of consecration were given differently in different places,³⁹ so it was not the words that counted but the Word, Christ himself. The miracle of the mass was the repetition of the miracle of the Incarnation, two substances present in the same moment,⁴⁰ the spiritual body of Christ and the physical substance of bread, and it was God who brought this to pass in accordance with his promise, not the priest by his liturgy. He saw no reason why the mass of a devout layman should not be as effective as that of a priest;⁴¹ and he was certain that the foreknown—the damned—could not partake of spiritual sustenance at it, for God does not know them and they cannot be nourished by him in their hearts. What mattered to him about the mass was not what he called the false miracle following on consecration, but Christ's spiritual presence and the communion of the faithful in Christ: ‘they ought rather to procure that all Christians and secular men, being one bread, may all eat of one bread, as members of one and the same Church, so that they may despise worldly honours and thus come to the supper of the Lord. When they have perfectly learned this doctrine of the sacrament of the altar, then they will begin to approach the end for which it was instituted, and will as sons of peace celebrate the mass in truth.’⁴² The significance of the mass for Wyclif is the spritual union of the faithful in Christ's real and sacramental presence, with all human distinctions as of priest and layman and all thoughts of earthly honour laid aside. This is an attitude with strongly protestant overtones, with the priest cast in the role of the minister of the tight little group of God's elect, as he was one day to be in the high days of presbytery.

Wyclif's own views on the Eucharist were, I believe, incomplete and still developing when he died. There was no room for development, it is true, in his negative denial of transubstantiation, but its only importance, for him, was to highlight the mendacity and carnality of his opponents. But the further implications of his repeated calls for a doctrine based on the authority of Scripture were wide indeed. One begins to see a glimpse of the shape of these implications in the four articles of Prague, with their demand for no law that is not based in Scripture and for communion in both kinds for both laity and priesthood, a claim that the Hussites, following Wyclif in spirit, based on Scripture and the practice of the early Church; one sees their shape more clearly in the astonishment of the fathers of Basle when they witnessed in the mass of the Taborites a rite which they could barely recognize, but which a seventeenth century Protestant would have recognized at once as “coming to the Lord's table.”⁴³

Incomplete as they were, however, Wyclif's views on the mass were central to his later thinking, and help us to identify that for what it was. It was something genuinely new and radical. Wyclif lived in an age when the call for reform of the Church was sounding all around Christendom and that is why his denunciation of abuses in the contemporary Church long seemed no more remarkable than the denunciations of other radicals, as Marsilius, Ockham, and Dietrich of Niem. But with these authors the overriding concern was with the Church polity and especially with papal power and the abuse of endowments by means of provision; and the tide of criticism of papal monarchy in which they were carried along reached its flood level in the great conciliar experiment of the early fifteenth century. Their teaching was often, like Wycif's, Erastian in tendency, because, like him, they saw in secular authority a bastion against ecclesiastical tyranny. But Wyclif, in contrast, was in the long run concerned not so much with the government of the Church as with the evangelical religious revival. The long term implication of his teaching on lordship was not Erastian but scriptural and communistic. The long term implications of his teaching of the Eucharist were scriptural and—if one may so put it—puritan and socialistic, the union of the faithful in Christ without distinction of persons. The true preparation for that union was the evangelical life, open to all. His mass was for the saints, nourished in biblical teaching and conscious union with one another more important and more real than any human association. That is why the publication, by Wyclif, of his views upon the mass was a crucial turning-point (and not for him only but for any who cared to follow him), one that anticipated the rise of a sect.

Notes

1. J. A. Robson, Wyclif and the Oxford Schools (Cambridge, 1961), 10.

2. Ibid., 13.

3. Ibid., 15-16. Robson quotes Woodford's belief that Wyclif was marked by the experience.

4. H. B. Workman, John Wyclif (Oxford, 1926), i. 201 n. 1, 203.

5. On Wyclif's political employments, see K. B. McFarlane, John Wyclif and the beginnings of English nonconformity (London, 1952), chapter 3.

6. On the Summa de Ente, and on Wyclif's own part in putting together the tracts that are included in it, see Robson (above, n. 1), chapter 5, ‘The Structure of the Summa de Ente’.

7. On Wyclif's views on the Church see for a summary Workman (above, n. 4), ii. 6-20; and G. Leff, Heresy in the Later Middle Ages (Manchester, 1967), ii. 516-46.

8. For Wyclif's views on lordship and Church endowments, see for a summary Workman (above, n. 4), i. 217-30, 257-66: and Leff (above, n. 7), ii. 546-9.

9. Robson (above, n. 1), 146.

10. De Veritate Sacre Scripture, i. 100.

11. B. Smalley, ‘The Bible and Eternity: John Wyclif's dilemma’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, 27 (1964), 81, quoting from Wyclif's sermon at his inception as DD.

12. De Veritate Sacre Scripture, i. 29, 50, 53, 195.

13. De Potestate Pape, 165.

14. See Workman (above, n. 4), i. 284-8, 293-9.

15. De Apostasia, 44.

16. A. Gwynn, English Austin Friars in the Time of Wyclif (Oxford, 1940), 238-9.

17. Introduction to Winterton's Absolutio, printed in Fasciculi Zizaniorum, ed. W. W. Shirley (Rolls Series, 1858), 182 (henceforward quoted as FZ).

18. 4th Lateran Council, Decree I, De Fide Catholica.

19. Anselm had discussed this problem; see Wyclif's De Eucharistia, 130, and references there cited.

20. FZ lx; 120-1, 129 (Wyclif's Confessio): compare De Apostasia, 57; De Blasphemia, 20-5.

21. M. H. Dziewicki, in his introduction to the De Apostasia, xv.

22. Workman (above, n. 4), ii, 33. I have followed Dr Workman's summary of the Scotist view.

23. See on this matter G. Leff, ‘The Changing Patterns of Thought in the Earlier Fourteenth Century’, Bull. John Rylands' Library, 43 (1961), especially 356-64; and his Richard FitzRalph: Commentator of the Sentences (Manchester, 1963), 5-7.

24. Ockham, Summa Totius Logicae, i. 15; quoted by W. and M. Kneale, The Development of Logic (Oxford, 1962), 265.

25. Leff (above, n. 7), ii. 499, 550.

26. Workman (above, n. 4), ii. 30.

27. Fasciculi Zizaniorum (FZ), ed. W. W. Shirley (Rolls Series, London, 1858), xv n. 4: and see Robson (above, n. 1), 192-3.

28. Woodford says that Wyclif first considered the matter when he was a ‘responding bachelor’, i.e. before 1373.

29. Above, n. 27.

30. Polemical Works, i. 30, 80; ii. 597-8.

31. De Apostasia, chapters 15 and 16.

32. De Eucharistia, 34, 37, 38.

33. Ibid., 125; quoting from Decret. iii, ‘De Consacr.’, Dist. II, ch. 108.

34. De Eucharistia, 25-7; De Apostasia, 68, 79, and Dziewicki's introduction to De Apostasia, xxxv.

35. B. Smalley, ‘John Wyclif's Postilla super totam Bibliam’, Bodleian Library Quarterly, 4 (1953), 186-205.

36. McFarlane (above, n. 5), 66-8, 85.

37. De Blasphemia, 21: compare Trialogus, 260, 263.

38. FZ, 115-17.

39. De Eucharistia, 90-1.

40. FZ 122.

41. Trialogus, 280; De Eucharistia, 99, 101, and see Loserth's introduction, xxi.

42. De Eucharistia, 325.

43. E. F. Jacob, ‘The Bohemians at the Council of Basel.’, Prague Essays, ed. R. Seton Watson (London, 1949), 87. Dr. Jacob evoked this point much more vividly in an Oxford lecture, but I have been unable to recover the reference to the authority that he quoted, which I failed to note.