4 - The Diseased Ecclesia from Jan Hus’s Exile to the Council of Basel

Summary

In the high and late Middle Ages, the structure of the Church was theorised according to an organological model in which it was depicted as a living human body.1 While the clergy served as its members, the pope directed and controlled the Church as its head. However, the body became monstrously deformed during the Great Western Schism, where there were two and at one point three competing heads. Dissidents and Church officials alike treated the Schism as a crisis that had broad implications for every Christian. Wycliffites and Hussites argued that the competing popes led to a lack of accountability among the clergy, who exploited the situation for their own benefit. The exploitative priests and friars that they described caused spiritual wounds and illnesses in the body of the Church that only Christ's faithful preachers could treat. Church officials, by contrast, felt that dissident groups sought to spread their pernicious heresies at a time when the Church and its congregations were most vulnerable.

Issues of direction and control were addressed at the councils of Constance and Basel, which attempted to end the Schism and stop the spread of heresy. At these councils, the Church faced significant opposition from Hussites who questioned the authority and legitimacy of the papacy. In fact, certain Hussites, especially after Hus's death, believed the papacy to be the seat of the Antichrist. This suggestion went far beyond the anticlerical criticisms of other theologians and pushed the council fathers to act against them. Hussite preachers attacked the structure of the Church, characterising the once healthy body of the ecclesia as rife with disease and in urgent need of purgation. Their treatments sought to turn the Church from its present state, a multi-headed beast that was full of corruption, back into a body that had Christ as its singular head.

One of the most pervasive images of the Hussite organological conception of the Church was that corrupt clergymen were waste or excess humours that destabilised the balanced complexion of the body. Drawing on the apocalyptic theology of John Wyclif, Jan Milič of Kroměřiž and Matěj of Janov,2 Hussite theologians argued that the papacy had been infiltrated (or would soon be infiltrated) by the Antichrist.