Jan Hus in the Medieval Ecclesiastical Courts

Abstract

When the church perceives a threat, the principles of morality are suspended. With unity as the goal, everything to that end becomes sanctified: simony, duplicity, betrayal, imprisonment and death. Since order serves the community the individual must be sacrificed for the common good. The trial of Jan Hus was political. The trial of Hus was neither unfair nor illegal. In the early fifteenth century, the medieval church perceived a threat posed by Jan Hus, a priest in Prague. It has also been suggested that what followed was a teleological suspension of the ethical and moral principles, which were jettisoned in the effort to eliminate the perceived threat. We can find in the Hus case evidence of duplicity, betrayal, imprisonment, and death. Men intimately involved in the Hus case were convinced that the individual had to be sacrificed for the common good of the Christian community. The question remains: what was legal and what was political in the medieval ecclesiastical courts of Prague, Bologna, Rome, and Constance in the matter of Jan Hus? The distinction is crucial.