Jan Hus Quotes

Blessed also be God Almighty, who ordains that His militant church shall have such life that, when a pope is dead, she is not on that account without a head or dead! Because not upon the pope but upon the head, Christ, does her life depend.

Blessed also be the Lord, the one living head of the church, who preserves her so effectually in unity that, even now, while there are three so-called papal heads, she remains the one spouse of the Lord Jesus Christ!

if ever a pope should command me to play on the flute, build towers, to mend or weave garments, and to stuff sausages, ought not my reason to judge that the pope was foolish in so commanding?

Veritas Omnia Vincit

Further, it is evident that if pope or other superior command the priest not to preach, who is disposed to do so (as has been said), or the rich not to give alms, the inferior ought not to obey. Wherefore, depending on this command of the Lord, I have not obeyed Pope Alexander's command in regard to not preaching and hence will humbly bear excommunication,1 confident that I will secure to myself the benediction of my God.

Blessed also be Christ, the chief Roman pontiff, who has given grace to his faithful ones that, when there is no Roman pontiff for a given time, they may, under Christ as thenleader, arrive in the heavenly country!

Therefore, blessed be God and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has hidden the way of truth from the wise and prudent and revealed it unto simple laymen and little priests who choose rather to obey God than men, who in acts generically good and acts neutral have the life of Christ before their eyes and obey prelates so far as these acts, modified by circumstances, can be reasonably put into practice for edification through the imitation of Christ.

Jan Hus. Kepler was part of the funeral

Přesto pražské události, které inspirovaly i husity v několika dalších městech, naznačily, že husitský převrat neproběhne poklidně, nýbrž přeroste v krvavé revoluční dění. Byl to paradox. Jan Hus a Jakoubek ze Stříbra snili o tom, že k nápravě církve a společnosti dojde poklidně, vnitřním přerodem věřících, kteří se pod vlivem soustavného kazatelského působení ztotožní s reformním výměrem božího zákona. Na to již nebyl čas. Nedostávalo se ho ani na slavnostní pohřeb krále Václava, jemuž husitství vděčilo za svůj rozmach.

Another reformer before Luther was the Bohemian Jan Hus, who was born in 1369 and became a theologian at Prague University. Hus was greatly influenced by Wycliffe and spoke strongly against indulgences and the papacy, specifically criticizing the pope for his use of military power, holding that the church could not wield the sword. Hus was condemned as a heretic at the Council of Constance and suffered burning at the stake in 1415. But his followers, known as Hussites, continued the movement long after his death.

Another of the characters who must now come into our story is the theologian Johannes Eck, whom Luther considered a friend until the unfortunate months of early 1518. The two had been introduced by the leading Humanist Christopher Scheurl when Scheurl was the rector at Wittenberg, but when Eck read Luther’s theses that January, he promptly let it be known that he desperately wished to debate Luther. In fact, he said he would gladly walk ten miles to do so. Eck then wrote and published a rebuttal of Luther’s theses, titled Obelisks. The typographic term “obelisk”—which referred to the four-sided monolithic stone monuments that taper upward and date back to ancient Egypt—denoted the small daggers that were even then used in the margins of manuscripts, indicating that the text nearby was perhaps of spurious origin. So Eck’s title must have seemed to Luther like the very thing itself, a poniard in the back of a friend. That a friend Luther considered a reasonable and educated man would attack him like this was certainly deeply hurtful. Nor was the attack measured, but vicious. In it Eck hurled boulders of invective Lutherward, calling him simpleminded, impudent, and Bohemian (which is to say, a heretic deserving of death, like the Bohemian Jan Hus) and a despiser of the pope, among other things. To Luther, it was a cruel betrayal. What might have sparked Eck’s emotion is hard to say, but surely part of it had to do with the fact that Luther was accusing the indulgence sellers of being greedy, and thereby somehow undermining the authority of the church itself. Even if there was truth to this, or if there was error to be reported, it seems Eck took greatest offense at Luther’s naked appeal to the anticlericalism so rampant at that time, which served only to make matters worse by undermining the church’s authority. In any case, Luther was wounded and disinclined to reply, but his friends insisted that he must. So he wrote Asterisks. Thus touché. The word “asterisk” is from the Greek for “little star,” and so asterisks were those marks in the margins of manuscripts that were the precise opposite of the pejorative downward-facing daggers.10 Asterisks were put next to text that was considered particularly valuable. So only six decades after the invention of movable type, Luther and Eck treated the world to its first typographic battle, waged with pre-Zapf dingbats.