Martin Luther at Wittenberg, Oct. 31, 1517
[This is a presentation I gave to a gathering of the Iowa Lakes Unitarian Universalists in mid-2011]
For centuries, historians have told us that the Protestant Reformation began when Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of Wittenberg chapel in 1517. But Luther’s ideas were hardly the first challenge to organized Christianity in Europe, which at the time meant Catholicism — period.
statue of Roman emperor Constantine (AD 272-337), York, England
In fact, dissent against Christianity is practically as old as Christianity itself. When Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in 312 AD, many leading members of the Roman Senate remained pagans. One of them, Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, an eminent orator and man of letters, wrote in 384: “It is not by one way alone that we can arrive at so sublime a mystery.” This resounding phrase has had a long life, recurring, for example, in the Second Vatican Council of 1965 as part of an official declaration on non-Christian religions. Symmachus has since been depicted by historians — not altogether accurately — as a champion of the perpetual struggle against religious intolerance and fundamentalism of every stripe.
ivory panel honoring Quintus Aurelius Symmachus (AD 345-402), British Museum, London
Holy Roman Empire, ca. 1378
Ten centuries later in 1419, one hundred years before Luther, a rebellion with both religious and nationalist elements took place in what today is the Czech Republic, then known as the Kingdom of Bohemia.
It came to be known as the Hussite Revolution, and its defining figure was a priest, Jan Hus, who gave it its name. Born to well-to-do peasants in a small farming community in southern Bohemia, Hus showed intellectual brilliance at an early age. After being accepted into Prague’s prestigious Charles University and completing advanced theological studies, Hus was ordained to the priesthood, named dean and then university rector. He also became curate of Bethlehem Chapel, built and endowed by zealous Prague citizens to foster preaching in the Bohemian tongue versus Latin as was then practiced.
Jan Hus (1372-1415)
Hus drew heavily from the ideas of the English religious reformer John Wycliffe, known as “The Morning Star of the Reformation.” Both Hus and Wycliffe espoused translating the Bible into the vernacular and asserted its final authority. Both proclaimed the Pope’s fallibility and endorsed limiting Rome’s temporal power and clerical wealth — themes later picked up by Martin Luther. Wycliffe and Hus originally received protection from their respective kings owing to power struggles with the Pope. Considered useful — temporarily — for political reasons, both fell out of favor when they became too controversial. Both had their views denounced and were condemned to burning at the stake, in Wycliffe’s case forty-six years after his death!
John Wycliffe (1325-1384)
Hus has since come to be viewed by many as the middle link in a direct line of Protestant reformism from Wycliffe to Luther. Luther himself expressed astonishment at finding so many points of agreement between Hus and himself, exclaiming “We are all Hussites without knowing it!” Now here, in the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I went to Catholic school for 11 years. My schoolmates and I weren’t taught by the nuns about the Protestant Reformation; we were taught about the Protestant Rebellion. What’s in a word? In this case, plenty.
burning of Jan Hus at the stake, Constance, July 6, 1415
Space here permits only a brief summary of the Hussite Revolution, essential background to an obscure religious dissenter named Peter Chelčický, upon whom I hope to shed some light. Hus was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1415, and the following year his colleague Jerome, another popular Prague cleric, met an identical fate. This further inflamed long-simmering passions in the Bohemian kingdoms that finally exploded into open rebellion. These executions, combined with the turmoil created by the Papal Schism whereby Europe for a time had three popes, fomented a revolt among Bohemia’s leading citizens which grew into open rebellion against the royal government in 1419.
Defenestration of Prague, July 30, 1419
The radical wing of the Hussites was centered in the southern Bohemian city of Tábor (after which the city of Tabor, Iowa, located thirty miles southeast of Council Bluffs, is named). In Prague, the Taborites, as they came to be known, were led by yet another charismatic preacher named Jan Želivský, who instigated a street rebellion that came to be known as the “Defenestration of Prague.” When Americans, fed up with incumbent politicians, talk about “throwing the bums out,” we’re speaking figuratively. Not so with the Bohemians. They literally threw them out the windows; those not killed by the fall were finished off with spears and pitchforks in the street below.
Wenceslaus IV (1361-1419)
This incident so enraged Bohemia’s King Wenceslaus IV that he incurred two strokes, the second fatal, and the Bohemian crown passed to his half-brother, Sigismund, King of Hungary and Holy Roman Emperor. This King Wenceslaus, incidentally, is NOT to be confused with the benign fellow known from the popular Christmas carol for trudging through the snow to give gifts to the poor. That figure, the patron saint of Bohemia, was Wenceslaus I, who briefly ruled the Czechs during the tenth century before being assassinated by his brother.
Jan Zizka (1360-1424)
Jan Žižka, a former mercenary soldier who had served in Wenceslaus’ court as the queen’s bodyguard, emerged as military leader of the Taborites. His duties had included accompanying the queen, Sophia of Bavaria, to church where he had heard Hus preach and become an ardent admirer of him. After Pope Martin V proclaimed a crusade against the Hussites, Žižka’s troops, against overwhelming odds, successfully defended Prague from attack by the imperial forces of Sigismund and the Holy Roman Empire. Žižka went on to beat back three subsequent crusades against the Hussites, brilliantly leading an outnumbered peasant army to victory after victory against Empire’s far better equipped armored knights before succumbing to the bubonic plague in 1424.
His peasant soldiers took their cue from the Hussites’ leading theologians, who argued that war could be just, citing Wycliffe. However, as the Hussite Wars progressed, General Žižka’s stunning successes were not greeted with unanimous approval from his countrymen; a few objected on principle.
No member of this tiny minority voiced his objections more stridently than Peter Chelčický, whose first major work, “On Spiritual Warfare,” was written in 1421. In this work, he sharply criticized the Taborites, whom he felt had been deceived by the Devil. He also denounced their bible-thumping preachers, whom he felt were manipulating their followers by instilling fear and unrealistic hopes. Chelčický pointedly noted that after the Taborites adopted violence, they abolished their common treasury, rolled back much of the democratic nature of their political structures, and re-imposed rents and taxes on the peasants.
Czech artist Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939) is best known to Americans for his distinctive Art Noveau-style paintings of glamorous young women. He also did more serious works as well, including “The Slav Epic,” a series of twenty huge murals depicting major events, mythical and historical, in the grand sweep of the the Czech and Slavic peoples from pre-history to the present day.
"Peter Chelcicky at Vodnany: 'Do not repay evil with evil'" (ca. 1918)
The twelfth painting in the series focuses not on the glory and grandeur of war, but rather on its very bitter consequences, appropriate to its focal figure — Chelčický. It depicts the residents of Vodnany, a small town caught in the crossfire between the Hussites and the Germanic forces. These war refugees, after fleeing their homes, were met by Chelčický, who had come to their assistance. They are seen here laying down exhausted and dying, consumed by anger and grief, their homes burning in the background. Chelčický moves among them with a Bible, offering comfort and support, asking that they not seek vengeance.
relief of Peter Chelcický, Vodnany Museum, Czech Republic
Hus and Žižka were the “pen and sword,” so to speak, of the Hussite Revolution, and both are revered today by the Czechs as founding fathers. Nonetheless, a widely held consensus holds that the most significant thinker and writer of the Hussite era was Chelčický, a prolific writer whose disciples were deeply influenced by his thought when they established the Unity of the Brethren, the Unitas Fratrum. Leading Czech historians have declared that Chelčický’s works “rank among the most precious manifestations of the Czech spirit,” calling him a figure who was “… from certain points of view … more important, certainly more original, than … Hus,” and the most distinctive thinker in all of Hussite Bohemia.
René Wellek (1903-1995)
Chelčický was the first pacifist writer of the Renaissance, predating better-known writers like Erasmus by a century. An uncompromising pacifist, his was the most prominent Hussite voice raised against the sword. His ideas had great influence on later pacifist religious movements, notably the Anabaptists, Quakers, and Baptists. Noted Czech American literary critic René Wellek, among others, has dubbed Chelčický the spiritual father of the Unity of the Bohemian Brethren — albeit an absent father whose legacy is today virtually nonexistent in the church he helped establish.
Attending Catholic school may well have fostered in me a particular interest during my schoolboy years in the idea of clergymen holding positions of secular power. More recently, in the course of researching my book on Žižka, I was struck anew by the vast power, wealth and influence held by the clergy in Europe during the medieval period. In any substantive history of the Hussites, the cast of characters will necessarily include a lengthy list of important clerics.
Henry D. Thoreau (1817-1862)
None of these Hussite-era clerics presents a more compelling body of written work, or a more intriguingly vague biography than Chelčický. When I first encountered him, he immediately struck me as a Bohemian precursor to one of America’s most prominent dissenters, Henry David Thoreau, an impression crystallized by the words of his fellow Unitarian Ralph Waldo Emerson. In his eulogy to Thoreau, Emerson described him as “a protestant a outrance [a French term meaning 'to the limit'].” “Few lives contained so many renunciations,” added Emerson, who referred to Thoreau throughout his eulogy in terms readily transferable (in my view) to Chelčický.
Ralph W. Emerson (1803-1882)
While neither Chelčický nor Thoreau ever deigned to vote in an election, neither of these two cerebral hermits countenanced injustice, either in his own life or elsewhere. Nobody, they both felt with a shared conviction, had the right to earn an easier living on the backs of the oppressed and disadvantaged. Beyond that, the most significant common thread between these two men was an unequivocal conscientious objection to any and all forms of human violence, including capital punishment and even purely defensive wars. Given my own academic background in American literature, it is perhaps understandable that I would see Chelčický, a fascinating and somewhat enigmatic figure, through the prism of Walden Pond.
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
This literary perspective was further reinforced when I learned of Leo Tolstoy’s ringing endorsement of Chelčický’s moral philosophy in an 1893 essay titled “The Kingdom of God is Within You.” Tolstoy, arguably Russia’s most prominent religious dissenter, was greatly influenced by Adin Ballou, a comparatively obscure American Unitarian minister who dissented from mainstream Unitarianism and lost his pulpit as a result. (This name may ring a bell for some: his cousin Hosea Ballou was a fairly prominent Unitarian minister). In 1890, the final year of his life, Adin Ballou corresponded with Tolstoy, who had some of Ballou’s works translated into Russian. In his essay three years later, Tolstoy wrote that “one would have thought Ballou’s work would have been well known, and the ideas expressed by him would have been either accepted or refuted; but such has not been the case.” He thought there was “a kind of tacit but steadfast conspiracy of silence about all such efforts.” Through Tolstoy, the pacifist ideas of Americans such as Ballou were transmitted to the 20th century’s two most prominent religious dissenters, Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Adin Ballou (1803-1890)
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
One other literary note: in 1842, Ballou founded a utopian commune named the Hopedale Community, which was only partially successful and disbanded sixteen years later. This may well have inspired the title of Nathaniel Hawthorne‘s 1852 novel “The Blithedale Romance,” a scathing satire on the New England Transcendentalists. The book itself was based on Hawthorne’s recollections of Brook Farm, an even shorter-lived utopian commune where he lived for seven months in 1841 with Emerson and Margaret Fuller, another prominent Unitarian intellectual. Hawthorne decided he had no use for Emerson’s philosophy after this brief experience, which only confirmed his deep skepticism of all self-declared social reformers.
As a consequence of wholesale destruction of Hussite-era records by Austrian Jesuits during the Catholic Counter-Reformation of the sixteenth century, virtually every significant aspect of Chelčický’s biography is murky. The date of his birth and death, class status, profession, educational attainments, exact movements, and even his identity are all matters of debate. What seems reasonably certain is that Chelčický, who was born sometime around 1380, had socio-economic advantages which not only gave him a high degree of literacy (including a working knowledge of Latin), but also the means to live in Prague for a short time before the outbreak of the revolution, after which he retired to his native village of Chelčice in southern Bohemia. There, he spent the rest of his life, which ended sometime around 1460, writing and proselytizing. The very fact that he had the time and leisure to produce such a large body of theological writing reinforces the generally accepted theory that despite his adoption of a simple peasant lifestyle, he nonetheless possessed some sort of independent means whereby he was able to devote himself to contemplation, scholarship and philosophical discourse.
statue of Peter Chelcicky, Chelcice, Czech Republic
While our biographical database on Chelčický is scant, what we do have is a very sizable body of his written work. He authored no fewer than fifty-six tracts, some quite lengthy, most of which are unpublished and inaccessible except in the original manuscripts. “If Chelčický had been born a German, a Frenchman, or an Englishman,” one historian has declared, he undoubtedly would have exercised an important cultural influence on legal and social history in Europe, as well as many other areas of religious, cultural, and political life throughout the Western world in the modern era. Hence, Chelčický has come to be seen as a forgotten prophet in the English-speaking world, buried in the ethnic ghetto of Czech religious history and literature, and confined to the scholarly conferences of a few academics outside the Czech Republic — like me.
Today in the Czech Republic, if not here on this side of the Atlantic, he has been increasingly recognized as an important seminal thinker who stood on the threshold of the modern age and anticipated concerns and movements which appeared much later in Western society. Given American historical memories of the Vietnam War — and the voices raised against it — Chelčický’s modernity will be striking for many contemporary readers, particularly those of us known as “Baby Boomers.” “What If they Gave a War … and Nobody Came?” asked one poster frequently seen in college dormitory rooms during the late 1960’s. Chelčický posed essentially the same question in Bohemia five centuries earlier, declaring that the nobility sent the peasantry out to fight and die in wars that had nothing to do with them and from which they received no benefit. If the peasants simply refused to do the nobles’ dirty work, said Chelčický, there’d be no more war.
Herman Melville (1819-1891)
Another prominent name in nineteenth century American literature, Herman Melville, may come to mind for Americans encountering Chelčický’s work, centered as it is on a magnum opus employing the whale as a defining image of self-righteous malevolence.
title page from "Net of Faith," 1521 edition
In his book “The Net of Faith,” Chelčický took Christ’s injunction to his disciples to be fishers of men, further developing this metaphor to condemn what he regarded as a devil’s bargain between Pope Sylvester I and Roman Emperor Constantine during the fourth century. “Christ, by means of his disciples, would have caught all the world in his net of faith,” Chelčický wrote, “but the greater fishes broke the net and escaped out of it, and all the rest have slipped through the holes made by the greater fishes, so that the net has remained quite empty. The greater fishes who broke the net are the rulers …who … instead of true Christianity have put on what is simply a mask of it.” First and worst among these fish, in Chelčický’s estimation, were two whales: the pope and the emperor.
"On the Triple Division of Society," first page of manuscript
Like the first Christians, Chelčický and his followers espoused egalitarian principles and separatist politics that are truly radical by any standards. In his book “On the Triple Division of Society,” Chelčický criticized the nobility, clergy, and the middle class, believing that only the poor were genuine Christians. The clergy, he claimed, consider themselves better members of the body of Christ than the common people whom they subject and ride as if they were beasts. True Christians, in his view, should relinquish all property and wealth and share it equally in a common treasury. In contrast to latter-day communists, however, Chelčický insisted that participation in his ideal socialist communities should be absolutely voluntary, with no coercion or state compulsion.
Parable of the Wheat & the Tares, Matthew 13:24-30
In his view, Christians had only the right to expel miscreants from their communities, and nothing more; he cited Matthew’s parable of the wheat and the tares to support this view. Moreover, Chelčický believed that social inequality was an inevitable result of any political state that enforces its laws by judicial force. He took this belief to its logical extreme, declaring that Christians should not accept government office, or even appeal to its authority, as all such institutions are inevitably and hopelessly antithetical to God’s laws. In addition, he held that true believers should refuse military service because he considered soldiers, regardless of the cause for which they fought, as nothing more than state-sanctioned murderers.
Chelčický’s socialism was stringent as his pacifism. He was adamantly opposed to any profit-making occupation or trade, as well as lending money at interest or even keeping inns, insisting that these were all means by which men acquired dominion over others. Only farming and animal husbandry, he felt, were compatible with genuine Christianity.
George of Podebrady (1420-1471)
These tenets were incorporated as core principles when the Unity of Brethren was founded in 1467 by the remnants of the Taborites, after their semi-autonomous fortress city was overthrown in 1453 by King George of Podĕbrady, Bohemia’s only Hussite king, who sympathized with the moderate wing of the Hussites. Some have suggested that George nursed ambitions of being crowned Holy Roman Emperor, for which he needed the pope’s backing, and hence he suppressed the Brethren in order to curry favor with the Vatican.
Led by Chelčický’s most prominent adherent, Gregory, they re-formed in the village of Kunvald. However, George continued his persecution, imprisoning Gregory and scattering the Kunvald community into bands of refugees throughout the countryside, including caves (which led to them becoming commonly known as “jamnici” (cave-dwellers). Even so, Chelčický’s ideas still endured for a time, as the Brethren were able to obtain protection in towns controlled by sympathetic nobles as well as neighboring countries, enabling them to achieve stability and even prosperity. Eventually, however, just as the Hussites had split into hard-line and moderate factions, so too did the Bohemian Brethren.
It might be said that the Brethren’s religious principles were the victim of their socio-economic success. Small-scale capitalism emerged and began to chafe against Chelčický’s puritanical socialism. With prosperity came the impulse to invest, along with conflicts over property. This, in turn, led to lawsuits and made necessary a legal system with police and judges when envy of the more affluent Brethren inevitably bred theft, fraud and arson — human nature being what it is.
As a result, a moderate wing of the Brethren took shape, and by the late 1470s a serious rift had developed. A key turning point occurred in 1480, when a prominent citizen named Lukas, an educated savant — a type despised by the hard-liners — was admitted to the Brethren over their objections, followed by others of the same ilk. In 1491, a synod determined that persons of wealth and high social standing could be admitted without giving up their wealth and rank. Although the hard-liners, who came to be known as the “Minor Party,” temporarily reversed this decision, by 1496 it became evident that their cause was effectively lost. The moderates, or “Major Party,” accelerated their consolidation of dominance, which culminated with the burning at the stake of several key members of the Minor Party in Prague in 1527.
John Amos Komensky (1592-1670)
The Major Party, bolstered by a rapid influx of wealth and powerful individuals, rapidly grew in prosperity. By 1550 they already possessed two hundred churches, and by the sixteenth century the Brethren, whose ranks in 1575 included seventeen barons and one-hundred and forty-one knights, had attained significant political and economic influence. However, over time this sect, which became known as the Moravian Church, was forced underground by persistent Catholic persecution and eventually dispersed across Northern Europe as far as the Low Countries, where John Amos Komenský, the Brethren’s last bishop, a much-traveled educator and controversial religious dissenter, attempted to direct a resurgence with limited success.
Karl Marx (1818-1883)
Along with Austrian inquisitors, there is another reason for Chelčický’s historical obscurity, one for which the Czechs themselves are directly responsible. Having been a subject nation over the past three centuries, first to the Austrians, followed by the Nazis and then the Soviets, their history is like a blackboard which has been repeatedly erased and re-written to suit the dictates of whoever happened to rule them. Today, understandably enough, many Czechs have a tendency to continue this practice on their own: since the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, Czech scholars and historians have had to struggle against a widespread popular impulse in their country to simply pretend that the communist era never happened.
Vladimir Lenin (1870-1927)
When I speak of Czechs embarrassed by their previous communist associations and keen to hide them, no doubt most Americans will automatically assume that I’m referring to modern-day individuals in the Czech Republic. Not necessarily. Chelčický, like many of the first Hussites, was a communist long before Marx and Lenin. Theirs was a primitive (in Marx’s view, “premature”) proto-communism, modeled after the very first Christian communities. But after the eradication of the Minor Party, the Brethren, ashamed of their communistic origin, endeavored to conceal it in every possible way. All traces of it disappeared, and these traditions were carefully deleted from their literature.
In 1982, Murray Wagner, an American scholar blessed with the time and resources to learn the Czech language in mid-life, published an excellent monograph on Chelčický, which is nonetheless only an introduction. While the three decades since this work first appeared have witnessed sweeping changes in the Czech Republic and its political and economic relations with the U.S., scholarly exchange between the two countries remains comparatively constrained — and much of Chelčický’s work still remains untranslated into English.
Chelčický’s continuing obscurity involves a larger, overarching factor. The ghettoization of Czech religious history and literature in general which I mentioned previously is also self-inflicted to a large degree. There is a palpable lack of enthusiasm on the part of Czech scholars for translating historical archives and other scholarly materials into English for the benefit of interested Americans.
biblioclasm or libricide: the practice of destroying, often ceremoniously, books or other written material and media, usually carried out in public.
There are compelling reasons for this prevailing attitude, the first and foremost being the near-extinction of the Czech language under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which forcibly attempted to “Germanize” the Czechs during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Prior to that, during the Counter-Reformation of the sixteenth century, the wrath of Catholics was aimed not only against Protestants but anything Czech: books and publications written in Czech were burned by the Jesuits, who considered them to be heresy and jealously destroyed entire libraries. The Czech language was gradually reduced to an oral language of the peasants, who were often illiterate. A second contributing reason is a lingering Cold War hangover from the days of police states and closed societies; many Americans, myself included, have experienced first-hand this residual lack of openness and cooperation with foreigners while traveling in the former East Bloc.
The result is best summed up as a feeling on the part of many, if not most, Czechs that Americans wishing to learn about their history can bloody-well start by learning their language first. However, even leaving aside the fact that Czech is, by all accounts, one of the world’s most difficult languages to master, this is simply not feasible for most of us. Outside of a few cities with large Czech American populations like Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Lincoln, Nebraska, Czech isn’t even offered as a foreign language course in high schools, colleges, and universities! So, while this Czech attitude is understandable, it is not helpful and will do nothing to address their complaints about Americans’ ignorance of such noteworthy figures as Hus, Žižka and Chelčický. Bottom line: without readily accessible English translations of his work and scholarly studies related to it, Chelčický will remain more-or-less unknown in the U.S.
However, it is my hope that as a younger generation of Czech scholars emerges, a new sense of openness and cooperation will begin to remedy this obscurity. One reason for my optimism, and perhaps a sign of things to come in the Brave New Cyber-world, is the fact that there is actually a Facebook page devoted to Chelčický and a blog, both aimed at English readers. Both, coincidentally, were created by young men in the Czech Republic named Ivan. Ivan Capek, who lives in Chelčice, is responsible for the Facebook page. Note one of the two friends on the left, Ivan Zahrádka
Zahrádka is the one who created the Chelčický blog; here’s his introduction, partially shown here at left (I’ve taken the liberty of smoothing out his English a little bit):
“I am a Christian born and living in The Czech Republic. I graduated from Charles University in 1992 at age 26, writing my thesis in Non-linear Partial Differential Equations. I am a member of the Evangelical Methodist Church. I maintain this blog to give thanks to, and to remember Petr Chelčický. I understand Petr’s work is still largely inaccessible to English readers.”
I think maybe young Ivan, or someone like him, just might do something about Chelčický‘s inaccessibility to us “Amerikys” down the road.
Winston Churchill once said “The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you can see.” For my part, I’m convinced that by studying seemingly remote figures like Chelčický, we Americans stand to gain a deal of insight into our own contentious culture wars, which continually pit fundamentalist orthodoxy against free-thinking dissent, and are central to the perpetual struggle over the appropriate roles of Church and State in this country.
