Collection
De Ecclesia (The Church)
Written in 1413 from exile in the Bohemian countryside, this treatise defines the church as the totality of the predestined, with Christ alone as its head, and denies that the pope and cardinals can be identified with it by virtue of office. The argument proceeds through careful scholastic distinctions — between the church universal and its nominal members, between rightful authority and its usurpation, between obedience owed to Christ and obedience demanded by prelates — and turns each distinction against the claims of the Roman curia that had summoned its author to answer for his preaching. Drawing openly on Wyclif while adapting his ecclesiology to the pastoral crisis of the Bohemian reform, Hus writes with the deliberateness of a man who knows his pages will be used as evidence. Within two years they were, and he was burned at Constance for refusing to recant them.