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’ pronouncements. When the saints spoke falsely, they should neither be believed nor obeyed. The fact that Hus included the pope among the saints was no coincidence: he was alluding to the recent papal bull banning preaching in private places. Throughout the treatise, Hus repeatedly reminded the reader of the ultimate fallibility of the ecclesiastical authorities, especially those with whom he was in conflict.79
After exhorting the laity to question even the most exalted of church authorities, Hus disputed the clerical power to forgive sins and the control that this allowed the priests to exert over the laity. Evidently, Hus had encountered priests who argued that they held the power to decide which sins God would forgive, an opinion that Hus was eager to refute. Hus explained that “forgiveness depended on the will and power of God and Christ and on the penitence or hardness of heart of each man in his soul, if anyone suffers grief on account of his sins and is sorry that he angered God, then God forgives his sins through Christ.” For forgiveness to take place, the collaboration of only two parties was needed: God and the penitent. Hus expressed ideas that would surface again during the sixteenth-century Reformation, with the priest’s role as a conduit of God’s power contributing very little to the act of forgiveness itself. He was clear on this point: “And so it is written on the walls of the Bethlehem chapel so that people would be forewarned and know that priests do not have the power to forgive sins.”80 Priests possessed no power of their own to grant forgiveness and could do nothing to prevent it from taking place. Hus concluded with a sharp criticism of those clerics who exaggerated their powers of forgiveness or, even worse, used them for profit or control. He implored the faithful not to be manipulated by clerics who refuse them absolution.
Given his recent track record with the papal curia, Hus was personally most affected by the fourth error, the idea that all faithful—including himself—owed unconditional obedience to all authorities. Hus listed bishops, lords, and fathers as examples of such authorities but his main target was the papacy.81 Drawing on his own recent experience in the ecclesiastical courts, Hus argued that unconditional obedience was owed to no one human or institution. In fact, all needed to obey God even if it meant defying ecclesiastical authorities. He used Saints Catherine and Dorothy as examples, to make the point that God is to be obeyed over any other authority. Hus praised the two women, who both refused to take a husband, insisting that they had been called by the Holy Spirit to pursue a life of virginity. He argued that they were right to persevere in their calling, despite the protests of their mothers and fathers, adding that they would have been right to persevere even if the pope himself had tried to dissuade them. This was a hypothetical scenario; of course the pope did not interfere with Catherine’s and Dorothy’s decision to take the veil. But this scenario introduced the possibility that the pope could be mistaken and oppose something unquestionably good and authentic, in this case a saintly life of virginity.
Hus then transitioned to a more controversial example: the pope’s recent ban on preaching in the capital, which Hus understood to be a personal attack. He argued that this ban was not to be obeyed, as it countered the judgment, will, and glory