| Abstract: | The paper focuses on the historical and textual circumstances surrounding the most important work of the Czech theologian Jan Hus – the Latin treatise De Ecclesia (1413). This comprehensive work, comprising 23 chapters (about 240 typed pages), was not only the medium that brought Hus’s name to the church dignitaries gathered at the Council of Constance but also proved to be fatal for the author himself. For the bill of indictment and finally the sentence on the Czech theologian presented before the Council was mainly composed on the basis of what he articulated in De Ecclesia. Another factor contributing to the fame of this text was certainly the slogan created at this Church Council that Hus’s critical thinking on the Church “demolishes the papacy just as much as Christianity demolishes the Koran”, while up to the time of the first textual criticism research into Hus’s writings at the end of the 19th century, De Ecclesia was considered the most important and most original of his works. It was essentially influenced by at least two treatises by the English theologian, Biblical scholar and university professor John Wycliffe (1331–1384), namely De Ecclesia (1378) and De potestate papae (1378), while noticeable textually genealogical links with Wycliffe’s other writings – De civili dominio, De blasphemia, De fide catholica, De paupertate Christi, Ad argumenta aemuli – and with his sermons have been established. Such a textual genealogy on the level of Wycliffe-Hus theology about the Church and its structure, indulgences and papal power signalizes the reproductive reception of Wycliffism and thus through the semantic and operative fields of resistance against the supreme authority of the papal throne reveals the intellectual historical link between Wycliffe, Hus and his Bohemian and German historical successors – the Lutheran Reformation of the 16th century. Like Hus in his treatise De Ecclesia, Martin Luther in his Resolutiones disputationum de indulgentiarum virtute (1518), in comparable historical conditions, also primarily based his intellectual arguments on the discussion concerning indulgences and on criticism of the shameless brokering with the power of the keys. For like Václav Tiem and his commissioners with the indulgences of Pope John XXIII, a hundred years later Tetzel and the Fuggers right at the beginning gave the indulgences of Pope Leon X (or rather Archbishop Albrecht of Brandenburg) a bad reputation – and gave Luther grounds for thinking not only about indulgences but also such fundamental matters as the “extreme conditions” for God’s grace and salvation (by faith alone). |
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