Reginald Lane-Poole and Walter Alison Phillips

“ So then all human lordship is derived from the supreme overlordship of God and is inseparable from it, since whatever God gives to his servants is part of himself, from the first gift, which is the esse intelligibile, i.e. really the divine essence, down to those special gifts which flow from the communication of his Holy Spirit; so that in him we live and move and have our being. But, in giving, God does not part with the lordship of the thing given; his gifts are of the nature of fiefs, and whatever lordship the creature may possess is held subject to due service to the supreme overlord. ”

“ The Trialogus is as it were his summa summarum theologiae, a summing up of his arguments and conclusions on philosophy and doctrine, cast in the form of a discussion between three persons, Alithia, representing “solid theology,” Phronesis, representing “subtle and mature theology,” and Pseustis, representing “captious infidelity” whose function is to bring out the truth by arguing and demonstrating against it. The Trialogus was the best known and most influential of all Wycliffe's works, and was the first to be printed (1525) , a fact which gave it a still greater vogue. ”

“ Thus, as in feudalism, lordship is distinguished from possession. Lordship is not properly proprietary, and property is the result of sin; Christ and his apostles had none. [6] The service, however, by which lordship is held of God is righteousness and its works; it follows that the unrighteous forfeit their right to exercise it, and may be deprived of their possessions by competent authority.
The question, of course, follows as to what this authority is, and this Wycliffe sets out to answer in the Determinatio quaedam de dominio and, more elaborately, in the De civili dominio. ”

“ There is one ens, the ens analogum, which includes in itself and comprehends all other entia—all universals and all the individual parts of the universe (De dom. div. pp. 58 sq.) . The process by which the primary ens is specificated, or by which a higher and more general class passes into sensible existence, is that it receives the addition of substantial form whereby it is rendered capable of acquiring qualities and other accidents (ibid. pp. 48 sq.) . To Wycliffe the doctrine of arbitrary divine decrees was anathema. ”

“ But the confession of a condemned man can seldom be accepted without reserve; and we have not only the precise and repeated testimony of Knyghton that he was a “precursor” of Wycliffe, but also documentary evidence that he was excommunicated as early as 1366, long before Wycliffe exposed himself to ecclesiastical censure. Wycliffe in truth was always careful to state his communistic views in a theoretical way; they are confined to his Latin scholastic writings, and thus could not reach the people from him directly. ”

“ God does not will sin, for he only wills that which has being, and sin is the negation of being; he necessitates men to perform actions which are in themselves neither right nor wrong; they become right or wrong through man's free agency. ↑ See R. L. Poole's preface to his edition of the De dominio divino, where Wycliffe's indebtedness to Richard Fitz Ralph, archbishop of Armagh, for his views on lordship and property is shown at some length (pp. xxxiv sq.) ”

“ But he had come to recognize that all organized societies within the church, “sects” as he called them, were liable to the same corruption, while he objected fundamentally to the principle which had established a special standard of morality for the “religious.” On the other hand, Wycliffe's itinerant preachers were not necessarily intended to work as rivals to the beneficed clergy. ”

“ These questions, even that of the wardenship of Canterbury, are, however, essentially unimportant, unless we are prepared with Woodford to impute mean motives to a great man. What is certain is that long before Wycliffe had become a power outside Oxford his fame was established in the university. ”

“ The negotiations at Bruges had doubtless strengthened the sympathy which he already felt for the anti-curial tendencies in English politics from Edward I.'s time onwards, and a final impulse was given by the attitude of the “Good Parliament” in 1376; in the autumn of that year he was reading his treatise on civil lordship (De civili dominio) to his students at Oxford. Of its propositions some, according to Loserth, were taken bodily from the 140 titles of the bill dealing with ecclesiastical abuses introduced in the parliament ”

“ The De officio regis is practically a declaration of war against the papal monarchy, an anticipation of the theocratic conception of national kingship as established later by the Reformation. The king is God's vicar, to be regarded with a spiritual fear second only to that due to God, and resistance to him for personal wrong suffered is wicked. ”

“ Dr Rashdall, on the other hand, following Shirley, brings evidence to show that the Wycliffe of Canterbury Hall could not have been the reformer, but was the same person as the fellow of Merton, this being the strongest argument against the identification of the latter with the reformer. The confusion is increased by the appearance of yet another “John Wyclif” or “Wiclif” on the books of Queen's College, as paying rent for rooms as a “pensioner” or “commoner” for the years 1371-1372, 1374-1375 and 1380-1381. ”

“ At the parliament held at Gloucester in October, in the presence of the legates of Pope Urban VI., Wycliffe read an apology for the duke's action at Westminster, pleading that the men were killed in resisting legal arrest. The paper, which forms part of the De ecclesia, lays down the permissible limits of the right of asylum, and maintains the right of the civil power to invade the sanctuary in order to bring escaped prisoners to justice. ”

“ The reply of the chancellor was to deny the archbishop's jurisdiction within the university, and to allow Philip Repington, another of Wycliffe's disciples, to preach on Corpus Christi day before the university. Chancellor and preacher were guarded by armed men, and Stokes wrote that his life was not safe at Oxford. ”

“ He was buried at Lutterworth; but by a decree of the council of Constance, May 4, 1415, his remains were ordered to be dug up and burned, an order which was carried out, at the command of Pope Martin V., by Bishop Fleming in 1428.
A sober study of Wycliffe's life and works justifies a conviction of his complete sincerity and earnest striving after what he believed to be right. ”

“ When he divorces the idea of the Church from any connexion with its official or formal constitution, and conceives it as consisting exclusively of the righteous, he may seem to have gone the whole length of the most radical reformers of the 16th century. ”

“ G. V. Lechler (Leipzig, 1863) and the Trialogus, ed. Lechler (Oxford, 1869) . The pious hope expressed by the learned editor of the Trialogus in his preface, that English scholars might be moved to publish all Wycliffe's Latin works, began to be realized in 1882 with the foundation at Oxford of the Wyclif Society, under the auspices of which the following have been published:—Polemical Tracts, ed. R. Buddensieg, (2 vols., 1883) ; De civili dominio, vol. i. ed. R. L. Poole, vols. ii.-iv., ed. J. Loserth (1885-1905) ; De composicione hominis, ed. R. Beer (1884) ; De Ecclesia, ed. Loserth (1886) ”

“ Miscellanea philosophica, ed. Dziewicki (2 vols., 1905) (vol. i. has an introduction on Wycliffe's philosophy) ; De potestate papae, ed. Loserth (1907) .
For Wycliffe's English works see Select English Works, ed. T. Arnold (3 vols., 1869-1871) , and English Works hitherto unprinted, ed. F. D. Matthew (1880) , chiefly sermons and short tracts, of many of which the authenticity is uncertain. The Wicket (Nuremberg, 1546; reprinted at Oxford, 1828) is not included in either of these collections. (R. L. P.; W. A. P.)
↑ A note is necessary as to the spelling of Wycliffe's name. ”

“ See the interesting case of the heretic priest Ralph of Tremur in the Register of John de Grandison, Bishop of Exeter, edited by F. C. Hingeston-Randolph (London and Exeter, 1894) , pp. 1147 and 1179. ↑ 1381 (corrected by the editor from 1380) is the date given in Shirley's edition of the Fasciculi Zizaniorum. F. D. Matthew, in the Eng. Hist. Rev. for April 1890 (v. 328) , proves that the date must have been 1379 or 1380. ↑ Trialogus, lib. iv., cap. 22; De Euch. p. 249. ”