Hus’s vernacular letters describe his predicament using the language of the Bible. Hus depicts himself as a hero of biblical proportions: an unjustly persecuted fighter for the truth who must battle the Antichrist himself. In a telling example of Hus’s use of the Scriptures, Hus applied Jesus’s words that his elect were “those who hear my word and obey it, and who suffer with me.”30 This kind of rhetoric was instrumental to how Hus managed to create such a tight-knit group around himself, a veritable faction. Not only did Hus keep tabs on who did and did not belong among his followers, he insinuated that this state of belonging had eternal consequences. Remaining faithful to Christ’s law (as taught and proclaimed by Hus) now served as the litmus test for determining eternal reward or punishment. The followers’ willingness to suffer for the sake of truth marked them, in Hus’s view, as the chosen ones of God. At the final judgment, Christ’s apostles would show special recognition to the apostles of Hus.31 In this way, Hus’s own partisan interpretation of the Scriptures became for his followers synonymous with the law of Christ. It is likely that the laity was unaware that Hus was presenting them with highly polemical interpretations. The Bible became a weapon that Hus used for his own end.
Hus’s Vernacular Catechesis: Spiritual Call to Practical Action
Since his exile in October 1412, Hus also wrote vernacular treatises, in fact, most of his vernacular works date from this period of exile.32 These “exilic” treatises are seldom subject of scholarly inquiry, although there has been interest in them as evidence regarding the development of Hus’s spirituality. Thomas Fudge offered an analysis of them in his discussion of Hus’s spirituality, with useful summaries of the different works not addressed in this chapter.33 Antonín Váhala offered another reading of these treatises, suggesting that we take them as a testament to Hus’s “calling to holy orders and the cure of souls.”34 This latter view paints a recent view of Hus as the pastor of souls and contains an entirely unexamined assumption that these pastoral treatises are not polemical, not written against someone or something. The analysis here assumes the opposite. Having been banished from the capital, Hus smarts from punishments that he views as unjust and wishes to inculcate the faithful with the kind of learning that would eventually vindicate him.
These vernacular treatises mostly addressed the common people and aimed to inculcate Hus’s particular vision of a healthy spiritual and moral life. Like his letters, these works have often been ignored until recently, seen as secondary to Hus’s life work, mostly because they were thought to contain little in the way of theological or spiritual novelty, and much of the content appeared elsewhere in Latin either in Hus’s own works or in Wyclif’s.35 This section will consider his five principal vernacular works, Hus’s trilogy of Expositions (of Faith [that is, of the Apostle’s Creed], of the Decalogue, and of the Lord’s Prayer),36 his vernacular Postil,37 and his work On Simony.38 Through his vernacular works, Hus tried to teach his listeners what he considered a productive spiritual life, giving them advice for how to deal with enemies both spiritual and worldly. However, much of his advice consisted of lambasting corrupt clerics and general criticisms of the state of the church and as such was deeply divisive. To live a good spiritual life, according to Hus, necessitated standing up to corrupt authorities, much as he did.
The Expositions Trilogy
The Expositions were a trilogy, intended to teach the laity the fundamentals of belief, of 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