Jan Hus is especially well-known as a preacher and theologian whose activities anticipated the European protestant reformation and the hussite movement. It should not be forgotten, however, that Hus worked for many years as a teacher at the Faculty of Liberal Arts. He was therefore also a philosopher reflecting on contemporary subjects, among which was the reception of the philosophical thought of John Wyclif at Prague University, and the discussion of the reality of universals connected with it. The study maps Hus’s realist conception of universals on the basis of an analysis of the dispersed fragments of his pronouncements on universals from his quaestiones and from his Sentences commentary. The author divides this mapping into four different contexts: (1) God’s nature and the Trinity of Persons; (2) the ideas in God’s mind; (3) being as an analogical quasi-universal; and (4) the very conception of universals, that is of genera and species. In these different thematical areas, the study shows that Hus’s realism played an important role in his philosophico-theological thought of constituting its philosophical grounding. It could be said that although Hus’s realistic attitudes were influenced to a great extent by the thought of John Wyclif, Hus rejected or softened Wyclif’s heterodox opinions and the demands stemming from realism. Hus’s metaphysical standpoint, in the writings in question, also do not show a direct connection with his thoughts on church reform.
This study, published posthumously, deals with the question of ideas in God’s mind in the treatise De ideis of John Wyclif, who had a significant influence on Jan Hus and other masters of the Bohemian nation at the Prague University. In the first part the text focuses on the question of the publication of an edition of the hitherto unpublished Wyclif’s treatise; in the second part, on the basis of this text, is presented Wyclif’s conception of ideas. The article displays both Wyclif’s arguments and the authorities which Wyclif drew upon. Finally, in the last part, the article looks at the criticism of Wyclif’s teaching about ideas on the part of John Cunningham, Thomas of Walden and Jean Gerson, who, on this basis, imputed to Wyclif a heretical pantheist doctrine.
This study determines, from a doctrinal view, the date of the origin of Hus’s Quaestio de testimonio fidei christianae as, at the earliest, in the year 1408, and it displays in particular detail Hus’s teaching and its sources in this regard. Among these sources belong on the one hand the texts of Hus’s teacher Stanislav of Znojmo, on the other hand the texts of John Wyclif. It is the tracts of these two that allow one to reconstruct the doctrine of Hus’s standpoint. It is shown that Hus, like Stanislav and Wyclif, was a proponent of the dual creation of universals, that is by a pure act of God and by a pure potential in the sense of first matter. Hus addressed this quaestio in a theological context, or more exactly in the context of Christian faith, although his vocabulary preserves the semblance of philosophical language. Hus clearly sought, in this quaestio, to say that human reason is not capable of knowing universals, but that universals were revealed in scripture (Gen 1,21-25), and therefore every Christian must recognise their existence on the basis of faith.