John Wyclif (Great Medieval Thinkers)
Stephen E. Lahey
Language: English
Pages: 305
ISBN: B01K0UH746
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
John Wyclif (d. 1384) has too frequently been described as "Morning Star of the Reformation" and only recently begun to be studied as a fourteenth-century English philosopher and theologian. This work draws on recent scholarship situating Wyclif in his fourteenth-century milieu to present a survey of his thought and writings as a coherent theological position arising from Oxford's "Golden Age" of theology.
though; John of Gaunt, his associate Henry Percy, and various other nobles of the duke’s retinue accompanied him to the arraignment, much to the interest of the gathering crowd of Londoners. The proceedings resembled a stereotypical press conference before a championship bout. John of Gaunt’s appearance guaranteed that little of substance would occur, given his well-known energetic antipathy for England’s ecclesiastical establishment, and little did occur beyond some name calling, grumbled
entitled Logice continuacio and Tractatus Tercius, are filled with chapters that begin with formal logical issues, but quickly seem to bog down in frustratingly detailed semantic minutiae. Logice continuacio appears to be two treatises, the first dealing with simple, categorical propositions, while the second deals with propositions involving exceptive terms like “but” or “except.” Tractatus Tercius, by far the most extensive, is devoted to hypothetical propositions. The chapter containing Wyclif
that A is true. “And it is clear that A, when it is understood, does not name its subject [i.e., a member of the set ‘every man’] to be not-understanding, but to be understanding.” If A did designate a man to be not-understanding, it would designate every man to be not-understanding and would be contradicted by the fact that there is somebody who is understanding A. Now, if ideas are things distinct from the mind and per se substantial beings, then some would exist as true and some as false. It
instants.”43 Simply, if God could ensure motion across time defined by indivisibles, why hold onto the idea of an infinitely divisible temporal continuum? Wyclif concludes that Aquinas gave in to the laws of man here and bent his theory of time to suit the desires of his ecclesiastical superiors: “Who would believe this of such a man?” It looks very much as if Wyclif is hinting that Aquinas would have been more favorably inclined toward atomism than his followers had wanted him to be. Wyclif is
theology of preaching was a departure from the norms of his day, and helps to resolve our focus on his theology of preaching. All that we have of Wyclif ’s sermons are academic sermons, in Latin, preached to or written for an educated audience. The large body of English sermons that were collected and edited by Thomas Arnold cannot be linked to his hand, and are now known as the English Wycliffite sermons.46 So, to get a sense of Wyclif the preacher, we must turn to a body of sermons many of which