John Wyclif

Wyclif, John (c.1330–84)

John Wyclif was a logician, theologian and religious reformer. A Yorkshireman educated at Oxford, he was first prominent as a logician; he developed some technical notions of the Oxford Calculators, but reacted against their logic of terms to embrace with fervour the idea of the real existence of universal ideas. He expounded his view as a theologian, rejecting the notion of the annihilation of substance (including the eucharistic elements) and treating time as merely contingent. The proper understanding of universals became his touchstone of moral progress; treating scripture as a universal idea, he measured the value of human institutions, including the Church and its temporal property, by their conformity with its absolute truth. These views, though temporarily favoured by King Edward III, were condemned by Pope Gregory XI in 1377 and by the English ecclesiastical hierarchy in 1382, forcing him into retirement but leaving him the inspirer of a clandestine group of scholarly reformers, the Lollards.

 

1 Life

John Wyclif was born to a Richmondshire (Yorkshire) family about 1330 and ordained in 1351. He made his reputation as a logician and natural philosopher at Oxford. Though his earliest logical works and De actibus animae (The Actions of the Soul) were unremarkable, his distinctive ideas emerged from theological study, in the several tracts of his Summa de ente (Summa on Being) and especially in De universalibus (On Universals), where he developed his distinctive theory of universals in logical terms, though not without theological opposition. Seeing the Bible as one such eternal idea in the mind of God and therefore an unchanging moral yardstick, he contrasted the ephemeral institutions of the Church with the absolute values instilled by scripture in the individual conscience, in De civili dominio (On Civil Dominion) and De ecclesia (On the Church). These opinions made him numerous ecclesiastical enemies, while gaining him the temporary patronage of government and the lasting loyalty of a group of scholars. He went on to dismiss the doctrine of transubstantiation on logical grounds, an unorthodox view which forced him to leave Oxford for his Leicestershire living. In retirement, he produced a mass of repetitive controversial pamphlets and summaries. He inspired the Lollard scholars and preachers who supported him in translating the scriptures into English and in disseminating his ideas throughout England.

 

2 Contribution to logic

Wyclif’s philosophical ideas were those of an accomplished logician inspired by a Platonizing religious vision. His contribution to logic is primarily found in the tracts published as De logica (On Logic), written for theologians with a defective logical training. He expounded the logic of the Oxford Calculators, of whom Thomas Bradwardine, William Heytesbury and Richard Billingham were the most influential (see Oxford Calculators). Billingham in particular, whose lectures Wyclif may have attended in the 1350s, provided the basis for Wyclif’s ideas of possible proofs of propositions. Wyclif proposed a fourfold division of proof: a priori, a posteriori, proof by reduction and proof ab aequo, that is, by definition and exposition or resolution of terms. This division was adopted and refined by later Oxford logicians (see Logic, medieval).

Wyclif also made a contribution to the understanding of insoluble propositions which approached the modern notion of semantic groundedness. Furthermore, he rejected the nearly unanimous view of contemporary logicians that there were real continua, such as time, maintaining instead that these consisted of discrete instants, points and so on (see Natural philosophy, medieval). He saw such abstract concepts, or universals, as real entities, indestructible ideas in the mind of God, rejecting the linguistic thinking of contemporary logicians, whom he came to dismiss in later works as ‘sign-doctors’ (see Language, medieval theories of).

 

3 Philosophical ideas

Wyclif took a distinct view in his most important philosophical work, De universalibus, on the real existence of universals, to which his approach was again that of a logician. He set out his view primarily as an analysis of predication: how could Socrates be a man, and how could man be a species? Predication involved the notions of identity and distinction; besides the traditional ‘essential’ distinctions of genus and species, he posited the ‘real’ distinction of entities with the same essence, like the persons of the Trinity, and the ‘formal’ distinction between the matter and substantial form of an individual, such as between God the Father and the divine nature. An individual ‘participated’ in a number of universals, being the end of a chain of inherence. The predication of a universal could presuppose a real and not merely a linguistic relation: as smoke signifies fire, and fire is thus predicated of smoke, so a real universal could be predicated of an individual (see Universals).

It followed that if a real universal outside the accidents of time and space inhered in all substances, no substance could be destructible: God ‘could not annihilate a creature without annihilating the whole created universe’ (De universalibus 307), as such destruction would include the destruction of eternal intelligible being, a universal in which it inhered. Creatures subject to change and confined in place and time, being also ideas, must equally exist outside time, in the state Wyclif called duratio. Wyclif resolved the question of what distinguished two individuals in which the same universal inhered by positing a distinction in their different positions in time.

Wyclif’s understanding of real universals seemed to him to resolve in an original way a great question of the schools, the relation of human free will (which he acknowledged like his contemporaries) to the perfection of divine foreknowledge. Though all human actions follow upon the will of God, still the unchanging will of God as to future contingent events may be determined by human volition at any moment. Since God’s will is outside time, operating at once in the past and the future, events now may constitute causes determining God’s will from the beginning of time. Human merit, therefore, may temporally, but not in principle, be prior to divine grace; grace must be necessary and eternal as it proceeded from God, and only contingent as it inhered in essences (see Eternity; Free will; Grace).

Some further, unorthodox theological consequences of real universals were more difficult to adopt, and Wyclif hesitated before embracing them. One clear consequence of his belief that substances could not be annihilated touched the eucharist. The doctrine of transubstantiation required that the elements, bread and wine, were annihilated and replaced by the body of Christ. Eventually, after attempting to reconcile orthodox doctrine with real universals, Wyclif rejected transubstantiation, maintaining that the sacramental elements remained in the consecrated host. This was a principal reason for the condemnation of his theology.

His view of universals, albeit couched in contemporary logical language, was at root a religious conviction formed under the Platonizing influence of Robert Grosseteste. Wyclif considered a proper understanding of universals the firm ground of moral progress, a prophylactic against moral relativism. Awareness of this marked a quantum leap (gradus percipuus) up the ladder of wisdom: ‘error about universals is the cause of all the sin that reigns in the world’ De universalibus 175–7). His convictions gave him the strength to pursue their moral and political implications.

 

4 Scripture and human dominion

From about 1374, while Wyclif worked out what he saw as the moral and practical consequences of his ideas, he propagated them in countless lectures, pamphlets and sermons, and gathered disciples who carried out a scheme for an English text of the scriptures. He had already identified the Bible as a real universal. Faced with the problem of a corrupt text, he explained that ‘intellection in the mind is more truly scripture than lines on a membrane’ (De veritate sacrae scripturae (1377–8), i. 189). Scripture was a moral absolute, but operated internally as a guide, allowing for no earthly authority to interpret it.

On this basis, he approached the currently discussed question of divine and human dominion. The latter was merely contingent and relative, depending on its conformity with God’s will in each individual case; there was no independent right of dominion on the part of ecclesiastical or secular authorities. Lordship was merely stewardship, and depended upon the state of grace of its wielder. Wyclif strongly emphasized the implications for the temporal possessions of the clergy; the consequences for civil government were only gradually recognized. His subjective political philosophy thus attracted some superficial support from the English government, but was explicitly condemned by successive church authorities. Together with his views on transubstantiation, it ensured his removal from Oxford and confinement to his role as the inspirer of a body of evangelizers.

5 Influence

As the inspirer of the Wycliffite English bible and of a programme of disendowment and purification of devotion, Wyclif had great influence in England, in Bohemia through the Hussite reformers (see Hus, J.) and throughout Protestant Europe in the sixteenth century. His logic circulated with that of other Oxford logicians in fifteenth-century Italy, as a set of texts for instruction. His more general philosophical works were much read in England up to the mid-fifteenth century, and played a subordinate role in the corpus of his writings copied in Bohemia; but they were forgotten in the general disfavour which the logic of the schools attracted after 1500, and when Wyclif’s works began to be republished in the late nineteenth century, their importance and originality was not recognized. Substantial sections are still unpublished, including the important tract De tempore. However the significance of their contents was appreciated by several scholars, beginning with M.H. Dziewicki and S. Harrison Thomson (1931), who each edited some of his philosophical works, and by J.A. Robson (1961), Anthony Kenny (1985, 1986) and Paul V. Spade (1975), who all noted original features of his thought. Further study and editions of the remaining philosophical works are still required.