A collection of reformist preaching from the Bohemian Reformation’s central figure
What the Work Is
Sermons is a collection of homiletic writings by Jan Hus, the Czech theologian and church reformer whose teachings helped spark the Bohemian Reformation and anticipated key elements of Protestantism. First published in 1958, the collection brings together sermons that reflect Hus’s dual role as a university-trained scholar and a popular preacher committed to reaching ordinary Christians. The work stands within the broader tradition of medieval preaching while marking a distinct turn toward reformist themes that would ultimately prove controversial enough to cost Hus his life.
What the Book Is About
The sermons gathered in this volume represent Hus’s efforts to address the moral and spiritual condition of the Church in early fifteenth-century Bohemia. At the heart of his preaching was a conviction that the institutional Church had drifted from its biblical foundations, particularly in its tolerance of clerical corruption, its sale of indulgences, and its accumulation of worldly power. Hus preached not as a detached academic but as a pastor deeply concerned with the practical faith of laypeople, and his sermons reflect that pastoral urgency. The collection shows a preacher working to communicate theological ideas in accessible language while simultaneously challenging the religious authorities of his day.
Key Ideas and Themes
A central theme running through Hus’s sermons is the moral reform of the clergy. He denounced the ethical failings of priests, bishops, and even the papacy from his pulpit at the Bethlehem Chapel in Prague, where he was appointed preacher in 1402. His criticism was not merely rhetorical; it was grounded in a vision of what the Church should be. Hus’s understanding of the Church itself became one of his most distinctive and controversial positions. Rather than identifying the Church with the clerical hierarchy, he taught that the true Church consists of the entire body of those predestined for salvation, with Christ—not the pope—as its head. This ecclesiology carried radical implications: if the Church is defined by divine election rather than institutional office, then obedience to the pope cannot be required for salvation, and church offices and dignities offer no guarantee that their holders belong to the true Church.
The sermons also engage with the practical abuses that Hus saw around him. He was particularly critical of the sale of indulgences, which he opposed on the grounds that forgiveness of sins comes through genuine repentance rather than the payment of money. His preaching on this subject brought him into direct conflict with church authorities, especially after Antipope John XXIII authorized indulgences to fund a crusade against the King of Naples in 1411. Hus’s stance was shaped by the writings of John Wycliffe, the English theologian whose works had circulated in Prague and whose influence on Hus’s thinking is evident throughout his career. Hus translated Wycliffe’s Trialogus into Czech and helped distribute his works, even after church authorities banned many of them in 1403.
Another significant dimension of the sermons is their relationship to the Czech language and its development. Hus wrote many of his later texts in Czech, particularly after leaving Prague for the countryside, where he encountered priests whose knowledge of Latin was poor and laypeople who had no Latin at all. His decision to preach and write in the vernacular reflected his conviction that Christian teaching should be accessible to ordinary believers. This commitment to the Czech language had lasting cultural consequences, as Hus’s works contributed to reforms in Czech orthography, including the introduction of diacritical marks that remain in use today.
Structure and Approach
The sermons in this collection reflect Hus’s method of combining biblical exposition with pointed moral application. His preaching drew on the sayings and positions of the church fathers and doctors, a practice he explicitly invoked when defending himself at the Council of Constance. At the same time, his sermons were not academic exercises; they were delivered to a congregation and aimed at changing lives. The collection also reveals the range of Hus’s homiletic activity, from formal university contexts to popular preaching in the Bethlehem Chapel and, later, in the Bohemian countryside where he continued to preach and write after being exiled from Prague.
Significance and Influence
The significance of Hus’s preaching extends far beyond the immediate context of early fifteenth-century Bohemia. His sermons helped shape a movement that survived his execution and became a major force in European religious history. After Hus was burned at the stake in 1415, his followers—known as Hussites—refused to submit to papal authority and successfully defended themselves against five consecutive crusades between 1420 and 1431. The Hussite movement remained dominant in Bohemia and Moravia for two centuries, and its influence reached into Poland, Hungary, Croatia, and Austria during Hus’s own lifetime.
The collection also matters for understanding the intellectual lineage of the Protestant Reformation. Hus’s teachings, particularly his ecclesiology and his insistence on Scripture as the standard of truth, anticipated themes that Martin Luther would develop a century later. Luther himself recognized this connection, and later Protestant writers saw in Hus’s prophecy about a swan that would follow the goose—a play on his Czech name—a prediction of Luther’s own reforming work. The sermons gathered in this 1958 edition thus preserve not only the voice of a significant medieval preacher but also a crucial link in the chain of reform that reshaped Western Christianity.
The sermons included in this collection were not isolated works but emerged from a life of intense academic and pastoral activity. Hus began teaching at the University of Prague in 1398 and was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1400. His academic career progressed rapidly: he became dean of the philosophy department in 1401 and rector of the university a year later. His appointment as preacher at the Bethlehem Chapel came in 1402, the same year he became rector. This dual role—university official and popular preacher—shaped the character of his homiletic output, which combined scholarly rigor with a pastor’s concern for lay audiences.
Hus’s public career was marked by escalating conflict with church authorities over the writings of John Wycliffe. In 1399, he first publicly defended propositions of Wycliffe. Although church authorities banned many of Wycliffe’s works in 1403, Hus translated Wycliffe’s Trialogus into Czech and helped distribute it. In 1406, two Bohemian students brought a document bearing the seal of the University of Oxford that praised Wycliffe, and Hus proudly read it from his pulpit. By 1408, Pope Gregory XII had warned the archbishop about Wycliffe’s heresies and the sympathies of King Wenceslaus IV for nonconformists, leading the king and university to order all of Wycliffe’s writings surrendered for correction—a demand Hus obeyed while declaring he condemned the errors in those writings.
The Context of Papal Schism and Conflict
The sermons must be understood against the backdrop of the Western Schism, which divided the university and the kingdom. In 1408, the Charles University was split between supporters of Gregory XII in Rome and Benedict XIII in Avignon. King Wenceslaus IV denounced Gregory and ordered the clergy to observe strict neutrality, while Archbishop Zajíc remained faithful to Gregory. Hus led the Bohemian “nation” at the university in vowing neutrality. In January 1409, Wenceslaus summoned representatives of the four university nations to Kutná Hora, and the resulting decree gave the Czech nation three votes in university affairs while the German nation received one. By May 1409, the German dean and rector were deposed and replaced by Czechs, leading over one thousand students and masters to leave Prague and spread accusations of Bohemian heresy.
The Council of Pisa in 1409 elected Alexander V as pope, and Hus, his followers, and Wenceslaus IV transferred their allegiance to him. On 20 December 1409, Alexander V issued a papal bull empowering the archbishop to proceed against Wycliffism in Prague, requiring all copies of Wycliffe’s writings to be surrendered and free preaching discontinued. After the bull was published in 1410, Hus appealed to Alexander V in vain. The Wycliffe books and valuable manuscripts were burned, and Hus and his adherents were excommunicated.
Indulgences and the Crusade Against Naples
Alexander V died in 1410 and was succeeded by John XXIII, who in 1411 proclaimed a crusade against King Ladislaus of Naples and authorized indulgences to raise money for the war. Priests urged people to give offerings, and they crowded into churches. Hus spoke out against these indulgences, delivering his address Quaestio magistri Johannis Hus de indulgentiis in 1412, which was taken from the last chapter of Wycliffe’s De ecclesia and his treatise De absolutione a pena et culpa. Hus asserted that no pope or bishop had the right to take up the sword in the name of the Church, that man obtains forgiveness of sins by true repentance rather than money, and that the Church should pray for its enemies. Some of Hus’s followers burned the papal bulls, and three men from the lower classes who called the indulgences a fraud were beheaded—later considered the first martyrs of the Hussite Church.
The theological faculty condemned the forty-five articles of Wycliffe and added several theses deemed heretical that had originated with Hus. The king forbade the teaching of these articles, but neither Hus nor the university complied, requesting that the articles first be proven unscriptural. Attempts at reconciliation failed. At a synod held in the archbishop’s palace in Prague in 1412, Hus declared that Bohemia should have the same freedom regarding ecclesiastical affairs as other countries, and that approbation and condemnation should be announced only with the permission of state power—a view he took from Wycliffe’s Sermones. The doctors of the university demanded that Hus approve their conception of the Church, with the pope as head and the cardinals as the body, but Hus protested vigorously.
Exile and Appeal to Christ
By 1412, Hus’s ideas had become widely accepted in Bohemia, and there was broad resentment against the Church hierarchy. An interdict was pronounced against Prague, and to protect the city, Hus left for the countryside, where he continued to preach and write. Before leaving, on 18 October 1412, he appealed to Jesus Christ as the supreme judge, bypassing the laws and structures of the medieval Church—a step considered as significant for the Bohemian Reformation as the Ninety-five Theses posted by Martin Luther in 1517.
After leaving Prague, Hus realized the gulf between university education and the life of uneducated country priests and laypeople, and he began writing many texts in Czech, including basics of the Christian faith and preachings intended mainly for priests with poor Latin. His writings on the Church, entitled De Ecclesia, were written in 1413 at Kozí Hrádek and sent to Prague, where they were publicly read in the Bethlehem Chapel. The first ten chapters were an epitome of Wycliffe’s work of the same title, and the following chapters were an abstract of Wycliffe’s De potentate papae. Bohemian Wycliffism was carried into Poland, Hungary, Croatia, and Austria during this period.
The Council of Constance and Aftermath
Hus agreed to attend the Council of Constance under Sigismund’s promise of safe-conduct, arriving on 3 November 1414. He was imprisoned on 28 November 1414, and after the downfall of John XXIII, he was delivered to the bishop of Constance and brought to his castle at Gottlieben, where he remained for 73 days, chained day and night, poorly fed, and ill. At his trial, extracts from his works were read, and he refused all formulae of submission but declared himself willing to recant if his errors could be proven from the Bible. At the last trial on 8 June 1415, thirty-nine sentences were read to him—twenty-six from his book on the Church, seven from his treatise against Páleč, and six from his treatise against Stanislav ze Znojma. He was condemned on 6 July 1415 and burned at the stake.
After Hus’s execution, outrage spread among Bohemian nobles and doctors. On 2 September 1415, a document called the Bohemian Protest was signed by 100 notable people from Bohemia and Moravia, declaring that Hus was “a good, just and catholic man” who “consistently detested all error and heresies.” Rome pronounced a crusade against the Hussites on 1 March 1420, and under the leadership of Jan Žižka and later Prokop the Great, the Hussites defeated the crusade and three others that followed between 1419 and 1434. Fighting ended after a compromise between the Utraquist Hussites and the Catholic Council of Basel in 1436, resulting in the Basel Compacts, in which the Catholic Church officially allowed Bohemia to practice its own version of Christianity. A century later, as much as ninety percent of the inhabitants of the Czech Crown lands still followed Hussite teachings.
Hus’s Legacy in Language and Later Recognition
Hus’s works incorporate reforms to medieval Czech orthography, including the “hook” (háček) diacritic used to form the graphemes ⟨č⟩, ⟨ě⟩, ⟨š⟩, ⟨ř⟩ and ⟨ž⟩, replacing digraphs like ⟨cz⟩, ⟨ie⟩, ⟨sch⟩, ⟨rz⟩ and ⟨zs⟩, as well as the acute accent to mark long vowels ⟨á⟩, ⟨é⟩, ⟨í⟩, ⟨ó⟩, and ⟨ú⟩, in order to represent each phoneme by a single symbol. Some sources mention documented use of these special symbols in Bible translations from 1462, the Schaffhausen Bible, and handwritten notes in the Bible. The book Orthographia Bohemica (1406) was attributed to Hus by František Palacký.
Nearly six centuries after his death, in 1999, Pope John Paul II expressed “deep regret for the cruel death inflicted” on Hus and added “deep sorrow” for his death, praising his “moral courage.” Cardinal Miloslav Vlk of the Czech Republic was instrumental in crafting this statement. Members of the Moravian Church believe that it remains for God to judge those who were involved in Hus’s death.
