THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
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Il. Wyclif’s Doctrines: It was long ago remarked that the philosophical-theological system of Wyclif would be understood in its fulness only when his chief Latin works were published, but that upon the basis of those already known the view was un-
sound which had long been current to
1. His the effect that from his entrance into System a public life Wyclif was in possession of Develop- a practically completed system of
ment. thought. Wyclif’s first encounter with
the official Church of his time was prompted by his zeal in the interests of the State, his first tracts and greater works of ecclesiastical-political content defended the privileges of the State, and from these sources there developed a strife out of which the next phases, let alone the ultimate purposes, could hardly be determined. One who studies these books in the order of their production with reference to their inner content finds therein a direct development with a strong reformatory tendency. This was not originally doctrinal but had to do with the excrescences of the hierarchical system; and when it later took up matters of dogma, as in the teaching concerning transubstantiation, the purpose in mind was the dissipation of the powers of the hierarchy and return to the original simplicity in the government of the Church. To the question whether there were in Wyclif’s academical writings and disputations (none of them are extant) erroneous declarations, one may rather answer with a negative than an affirmative, in spite of the statement of Netter (His Earliest Heresies, 2). For it would have been against the diplomatic practise of the time to have sent to the peace congress at Bruges, in which the Curia had an essential part, a participant who had become known at home by heretical teaching. One may quote here the words of a man most intimately acquainted with Wyclif’s works, Waddington Shirley:
“As it is in the light of subsequent events that we see the greatness of Wyclif as a reformer, so it is from the later growth of the language that we best learn to appreciate the beauty of his writing. But it was less the reformer, or the master of English prose, than the great schoolman that inspired the respect of his contemporaries; and, next to the deep influence of personal holiness and the attractive greatness of his moral character, it was to his supreme command of the weapons of scholastic discussion that he owed his astonishing influence ’’ (in his ed. of the Fasciculi zizaniorum, p. xlvii.).
Wyclif must have earned his great repute as a philosopher even at an early date, since this was willingly or unwillingly conceded by his ecclesiastical opponents. A contemporary historian—for Henry Knighton may be designated as such—says of him that in philosophy he was reputed second to none, and in scholastic discipline incomparable. If this pronouncement seems hardly justified now that Wyclif’s writings are in print, it must be borne in mind that not all his philosophical works are extant and that Knighton had not so much these in thought as the learned disputations. If Wyclif was in philosophy the superior of his contemporaries and if he had no equal in scholastic discipline, he belongs with the series of great scholastic philosophers and theologians in which England in the Middle Ages was so rich—with Alexander of Hales, Roger Bacon Duns Scotus, William Occam, and Bradwardine
(qq.v.). There was a period in his life when he devoted himself exclusively to scholastic philosophy: “when I was still a logician,” he used later to say as he looked back upon that period. The first “heresy ’”’ which “he cast forth into the world ” rests as much upon philosophical as upon theological grounds. But there will be considered here only how he was related to the early philosophers. In Plato, the knowledge of whom came to him through Augustine, he thought he saw traces of a knowledge of the Trinity, and he championed the doctrine of ideas as against Aristotle. The latter Wyclif did not highly esteem, and he said once that Democritus, Plato, Augustine, and 2. Basal Grosseteste far outranked Aristotle. Positions in In Aristotle he missed the provision for Philosophy. the immortality of the soul, and in his ethics the tendency toward the eternal. He was himself a close follower of Augustine, so much so that, as Netter reports, he was called “ John of Augustine ’’ by his pupils. In some of his teachings, as in De annthilatione, the influence of Thomas Aquinas is to be detected. So far as his relations to the philosophers of the Middle Ages are concerned, he held to realism as opposed to the nominalism which was newly advanced by Occam, although in questions that had to do with ecclesiastical politics he stood related to Occam and indeed went beyond him. His views therefore are based upon the conviction of the reality of the universal, and he employed realism in order to avoid dogmatic difficulties. The uni-divine existence in the Trinity is the real universal of the three Persons, and in the Hucharist the ever-real presence of Christ justifies the deliverance that complete reality is compatible with the spatial division of the existence. The center of Wyclif’s:philosophical system is formed by the doctrine of the prior existence in the thought of God of all things and events. This involves the definiteness of things and especially their number, so that neither their infinity, infinite extension, nor infinite divisibility can be assumed. Space consists of a number of points of space determined from eternity, and time of exactly such a number of moments, and the number of these is known only to the divine spirit. Geometrical figures consist of arranged series of points, and enlargement or diminution of these figures rests upon the addition or subtraction of points. Because the existence of these points of space as such, that is, as truly indivisible unities, has its basis in the fact that the points are one with the bodies that fill them; because, therefore, all possible space is coincident with the physical world (as in Wyclif’s system, in general, reality and possibility correspond), there can as little be a vacuum as bounding surfaces that are common to different bodies. The assumption of such surfaces impinges, according to Wyclif, upon the contradictory principle as does the conception of a truly continuous transition of one condition into another. Wyclif’s doctrine of atoms connects itself, therefore, with the doctrine of the composition of time from real moments, but is distinguished by the denial of interspaces as assumed in other systems. From the identity of space and the physical world on the one side, and the circular motion of the, heavens on the other, Wyclif deduces the spherical