489 - The Perilous Vision of John Wyclif

The Perilous Vision of John Wyclif
By Louis Brewer Hall
Chicago, Nelson-Hall, 1983. 277 pp. $23.95.

This is a well-told, popular-level account of the life and times of a maverick theologian who is still more widely than well known. Hall, an expert in medieval English poetry and drama, has grappled with the difficulties in Wyclif biography and has chosen to harmonize his sketchy and discrepant sources in a way that seems somewhat more straightfor-

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ward and circumstantial than the hard data actually quite allow. In such a task, be has had scant help from Wyclif himself; in his huge volume of writings, there is little that is really self-revealing. Professor Hall is an ardent admirer, and presents Wyclif as a hero--stopping short, however, of a probing analysis of the philosophical and theological issues at stake in all those unending disputes between the radical reformer and the defenders of the standing order.

What we have here is an interesting and readable "introduction" to a remarkable figure in church history, whose career is the more outstanding because in it the prophet stood so nearly alone. Hall has gathered up the rough consensus that exists among scholars as to Wyclif's intentions and achievements (even as their widely differing evaluations of them are usually ignored). For example, he is vividly portrayed as an apostle of evangelical poverty in the succession of St. Francis (and, more directly, of Richard FitzRalph in De Pauperie Salvatoris). We see Wyclif as a righteous prophet of wrath against monastic endowments and ecclesiastical privilege and as ally of the "secular" opposition to church encroachments in civil affairs. The total situation of the fourteenth century church is not deeply probed. For example, the consequences of the claims of Boniface VIII in Unam Sanctam are suggested but not analyzed; the Black Death is described dramatically, but its shattering of traditional images of Mother Church as a reliable "Protectress" goes unemphasized. The facts of Wyclif's rejections of transubstantiation are presented with an obvious Protestant bias but with little analysis of his attempted alternative (which looks strangely like an early version of what is nowadays spoken of as "transignification"). Wyclif's "perilous vision" is seen chiefly as perilous to himself and his followers; the fact that it was perilous to both church and state in the fourteenth century is not much considered:

John Wyclif wanted the church to return to an age of innocence, purity and simplicity…. This vision of a lost age of innocence and purity is one of the most fundamental and recurring of man's dreams (p. 72).

One of the ironies here is the fact that such dreamers had to turn to violent men like John of Gaunt for their protection. Our most brilliant historian of Wyclif's century has put the crucial issues in a more trenchant way:

By logical progression and in harsh polemic, [Wyclif's] theories were soon to lead him to the radical proposition that the priesthood should be disestablished as the necessary mediator between God and man. (Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, p. 288).

This stark challenge to the church as custodian of the means of grace was what Wyclif's clerical enemies reacted against so savagely, although Wyclif himself died "in bed," in the rectory of his parish church in Lutterworth (after having suffered a stroke at the holy moment of elevation in the Mass). But visions of apostolic renewal cannot be stifled by repression. They persist and they never fail to stir at

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least some Christian hearts and minds in each new generation to renewed commitments.

This, then, is not a book for experts. They will already know McFarlane, Perroy, Richardson--and the primary source materials; and they should also be aware of the pitfalls of conjecture and bias in this area of studies. Neither is it a book for nitpickers: the agglomerate noun for sheep is not "band" (pp. 17, 18, 165); "Oxfordians" is not what Oxonians call themselves (pp. 31, 51); Bury St., Edmunds is not "north" of London, but northeast (p. 181); "the slaughter of the innocents" was not in Nazareth (p. 204); Cambridge was not a "major city" (p. 237).

Even so, we can welcome this as a useful addition to the Wyclif literature. It should be recommended especially to those who are mulling over their discontents with the churches they know and who are hungering for something better. If the reading of this narrative introduction to an exciting chapter in church history were to prompt further study and reflection on the paradoxes of church renewal (in our own times and those that loom ahead) that would be clear gain. What, for instance, if current liberation theologians were to discover in Wyclif a significant forerunner, from whose failures and success there is still much to learn?

Albert C. Outler
Dallas, Texas