Someone I Admire

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John Wycliffe, a 14th century English preacher, had an inestimable effect on Western civilization.

The Roman empire held the known world in its thrall for centuries. Even after it finally crumbled in the fifth century, Rome was still the seat of power of Europe for almost a millennium. Large institutions fail slowly — and the Roman Catholic church tried to fill Rome's shoes.

Whatever your theological views, it's hard to defend some of the abuses of the theocracy in the middle ages. By some accounts, English taxpayers paid five times as much to the Church as they did to the king. The Pope held near-ultimate power, with the ability to make and replace rulers, apppoint supporters to prime positions, and threaten excommunication and damnation to his enemies. For example, in the early thirteetn century, King John of England had to pay a yearly tribute to the Pope to retain his position after losing a fight over the right to appoint the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The Protestent Reformation would come a few centuries later, with famous names such as Calvin and Luther attracting followers and starting movements that persist to this day. However, the seeds of that revolution go further back to John Wycliffe.

In 1365, Pope Urban tried to reinstitute the idea of the king's tribute to Rome. The nation had chafed under the practice under King John and liked it even less under Edward. Wycliffe already had tremendous influence from his post at Oxford and helped to convince Parliament that the issue was the sovereignty of the king. Either Edward or Urban would rule England.

Perhaps even more importantly than nurturing a growing backlash against Continental theocracy, Wycliffe's later work made the world fertile for the printing press and widespread literacy.

Whether the practice came out of the desire to maintain control of the common man or whether it merely helped those aims, the Roman church forbid distribution of the Bible in the vernacular. Translating the Bible — or even practicing priestly duties — was the sole domain of the Rome and its agents and they forbade everything except for Jerome's fourth-century Latin translation of the New Testament.

(As a digression into Wycliffe's theology, one of the issues on which he opposed Rome was the idea of mediation. That is, Wycliffe believed that man needed no intermediary to reach God. The Roman church believed that only a representative of the church could even read the Bible. If Wycliffe were correct and the pious could approrach God directly, this would attack the Church's apparent spiritual reason for existing and lead more people to question its power and authority in other realms. I don't want to cast aspersions on everyone involved in the church at this time period; there were plenty of devout men and women on both sides of this issue. It's important to see Wycliffe's views as a threat to two power bases though.)

To live out his belief that individuals did not need the Roman church to mediate in their behalf, Wycliffe began the first complete translation of the New Testament into English. (For the curious, he used Jerome's Latin Vulgate — the Latin root is vulgus, meaning the common people.)

Because the printing press was still most of a century away, Wycliffe and his assistants had to copy the translations by hand to publish sufficiently. Of course, Gutenberg still published the Latin Bible.

Wycliffe completed his translation at the end of his life. He had also established a group of itinerant preachers eventually known as the Lollards. They spread Wycliffe's translation throughout England and neighboring countries, incurring the wrath of the Roman church and burnings — not just of the books but even of people who dared to read them. Though it's easy to understand why Rome considered these people and ideas a threat, it's impossible to justify their persecution.

Wycliffe's work spread, though. Many of the words and phrases of his translation (of which there are perhaps a couple of hundred manuscripts extant) appear in the later English translation undertaken under James in 1611.

I admire Wycliffe for his dedication and sincerity in opposing a huge and powerful structure that had controlled Europe in one form or another for around eight hundred years. If it weren't for his condemnation of the indefensible practices of Rome, would Calvin or Luther have had the opportunity to speak out against the abuses in their day? If it weren't for the idea that non-priests could even own a Bible, would Gutenberg have created and popularized printing in Europe? If it weren't for pushing England to reject Papal authority over the state, would the Cromwell's revolution would have happened? Would the Protestant Reformation have occurred when it did? Would political and religous thinkers have argued so strongly for personal religious liberty and against state churches?

Maybe. It's hard to pin down any one person or point in history when everything changed. However, it's easy to see that John Wycliffe set many events in bloody, tumultuous motion toward the cause of freedom and against an authority prone to abuses.

For that, I admire him.