Marilynne Robinson - The Givenness of Things

Even if they arose among Oxford scholars and were influential in the universities, dissident movements in England tend to be dismissed by historians and critics, including our contemporaries, on the basis of polemical associations with the lower orders, peasants in the case of the Lollards, shopkeepers in the case of that important group history has taught us to call Puritans. Of course it is very much to the credit of both Lollards and Puritans that there were a great many peasants and shopkeepers among them, as well as scholars and aristocrats. But these associations with the lower orders tend to obscure the fact that in both cases the impetus they gave to the culture was literary and intellectual. Worse, these conventional views of Lollards and Puritans are effectively dismissive on grounds that should themselves have been discredited long since, because they enlist the historical enterprise in a hermeneutics of snobbery, neither more nor less. In 1394 twelve “Lollard Conclusions” were anonymously posted on the door of Westminster. They were objections to the special spiritual status claimed for the Catholic priesthood, to priestly celibacy, to the doctrine of transubstantiation and the veneration of the host, to exorcisms, to the holding of clerical and secular offices simultaneously, to prayers for the dead that give preference to those who have left money for this purpose, to icons as encouraging practices amounting to idolatry, to auricular confession, to manslaughter in war or through judicial process, to celibacy of women religious, to the costly material elaboration of the churches. The leading humanists of the Reformation, men of great learning, raised objections very similar to these more than a century later. In other words, we know enough about this sect, despite all efforts to suppress and destroy it, to see that it was intellectual as well as popular, neither of these excluding the other.

From the thirteenth century until the eighteenth century, Western civilization expended enormous wealth and energy in suppressing ideas that were considered by religious and political authorities to be disruptive or heretical. Lollardy, the movement associated with Wycliffe, which continued and grew after his death, moved Henry IV and his parliament to pass De Haeretico Comburendo, a law whose object was to destroy this sect utterly. The law required that their books be surrendered, that their preaching and teaching cease, and that those who persisted in this heresy should be burned. Words meant to stigmatize do have this very potent effect over centuries, “Lollard” and “heretic” being two excellent examples. The extraordinary severity of the punishments suffered for heresy, defined by its prosecutors as the entertaining of questions, and of opinions different from those taught by the church, has caused heretics to be thought of as egregious misanthropes and fanatics. But the beliefs of the Lollards or Wycliffites are so unobjectionable, at least to those who consider it no crime to read a Bible in English or to doubt certain doctrines and practices of medieval Catholicism, that allusions to them stand little chance of being noticed by modern readers. Lollards believed that the image of God in any human being, themselves included, is properly the basis for all Christian life and worship, as well as charity and personal integrity. Charity should go directly to the needy poor, confession should be made directly to whomever one has wronged. This made them regard themselves as sufficient to the requirements of Christianity, and capable of its joys, with minimal dependency on the rites of the church, including even for the sacraments of marriage and baptism. Their piety centered on the Ten Commandments, enlarging on them to make them the core of a strongly articulated ethics and ecclesiology.

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Suppression tends to obscure evidence of its own failures, since fear is as likely to inspire ingenuity and stealth as it is compliance. Lollardy persisted in England until it merged with the Reformation. The Protestant writer John Bale, in his preface to The Examinations of Anne Askew, written in 1546, the year of the young woman’s death at the stake, says, “Great slaughter and burning hath been here in England for John Wycliffe’s books, ever since the year of our Lord 1382. Yet have not one of them thoroughly perished. I have at this hour the titles of one hundred and forty-three of them, which are many more in number.”

In England, literature in the vernacular at least from the time of John Wycliffe is associated with religious dissent. For this reason, I propose, the concerns and the loyalties of the movement crossed the lines of class and economic status. To challenge the dominance of Latin was to diminish the potency of a great distinction among social strata. “Benefit of clergy,” that is, some acquaintance with Latin, could save one from hanging. To challenge it was also to broaden access to knowledge and understanding of the texts that were said to provide the theological basis of the existing order. Again, though the word “Lollard” was derisive, suggesting the speech of the uneducated, Wycliffe, an Oxford professor, was supported by Oxford faculty and members of the gentry and nobility, including John of Gaunt, the father of King Henry IV. Geoffrey Chaucer was associated with figures called the “Lollard knights,” or “hooded knights,” adherents and protectors of the sect’s preachers. Some of these knights were also close to Richard II, a fact that sheds interesting light on Henry IV’s attempts at suppression. Certainly it demonstrates that the sect’s having adherents in the highest ranks of society did nothing to secure its safety or its acceptance. Though the emphasis of the critique offered by the movement fell largely on evil in the form of the impoverishment of the lower classes by an abusive established order, civil and religious, nevertheless some who enjoyed the privileges of that order seem to have seen beyond their own worldly interests. Despite whatever wisdom is contained in our darkest hermeneutics, this does happen. Many of the surviving Wycliffe Bibles are beautiful and would have been costly, the property of wealthy people. Yet the movement was much broader than its learned and aristocratic expressions. The Piers Ploughman tradition arose at this time and flourished for generations, until the boy who followed the plow could serve as William Tyndale’s ideal reader.

The English vernacular movement had its great resurgence in the Renaissance, which was simultaneous with the Reformation and hardly to be distinguished from it. This time the forbidden Bible in English translation was Tyndale’s New Testament, and when it arrived, the Geneva Bible as well. Under Mary Tudor the De Haeretico Comburendo, in relative abeyance under Henry VIII and Edward VI, was again enforced. People in those days were of course inured to horrors. There were always plenty of decapitated heads on London Bridge. English monarchs were never at a loss for means to terrorize and execute, and suppression and extermination of sects as government policy was hardly novel in England or Europe. So this return to the burning of heretics might not have had the impact it did if it had not called up an earlier era, extraordinary for the literature it left and inspired, a rich religious and secular literature written in the popular tongue. The second-largest-selling book of the sixteenth century in England was Foxe’s Book of Martyrs . This continuously larger, beautifully printed and illustrated compendium of accounts of the suffering and death of the heroes of dissent made an unbroken narrative of executions of fourteenth-century Lollards and sixteenth-century Protestants. The exhumation and burning of the remains of John Wycliffe are as vividly realized as the famous sixteenth-century torture and burning of the young gentlewoman Anne Askew.