JAN HUS
In Prague there are two statues that have served, repeatedly, as rallying-points for the Czech nation: in Wenceslas Square, the statue of Václav, to give him his Czech name, the patron saint of the country; and in the Old Town Square, the statue of Jan Hus, the Father of the Reformation. The first of these depicts the saint as a mounted warrior protecting his people, and on the plinth an inscription reads, “St Wenceslas, our peer, / Prince of the Czech land, / Suffer us not to perish, / Or our offspring”; and below the statue, in 1989, half a million citizens gathered to protest against, and to overthrow, the dictatorship that had for a long time undermined national sovereignty. The following year, as the dictatorship was replaced by a reformist democracy, the same citizens gathered in the Old Town Square, below the statue of Hus, to hear the Prague Philharmonic perform Smetana’s “Ma Vlast” (“My Country”), the masterpiece in which he enshrined his compatriots’ sense of themselves, their love of the land, and the stubborn heft of their national aspirations.
It was especially fitting that that performance should take place in the open air, after so many years when freedom could only be mentioned in whispers behind closed doors, and that it should take place under the aegis, so to speak, of Jan Hus. For when Hus, in the early fifteenth century, led a radical movement aimed at reforming corruption in the Church, he became a target of papal denunciation; and when that led to his arrest, rigged trial, and execution, he became a national martyr: an outraged people rallied to the cause he had died for; with defiant courage and brilliant tactics, they repelled invasion by papal forces, and set up their own national and independent Church. It prospered for many years, and when the Counter-Reformation eventually prevailed, it survived underground with ineradicable fidelity. They, these Hussites, were the first and foremost pioneers of religious reform in Europe. A hundred years afterwards, that famous zealot, Martin Luther, in an uncharacteristic moment of humility, acknowledged that “If the truth be known, we are all in fact Hussites”.
Such a history confirms the place of honour that must be accorded to the Czech people in the arena of religious reform. That alone would suffice to give this small nation significant standing in the record of international affairs. But the extraordinary thing is that the Czechs must also be given credit for outstanding achievement in the parallel areas of social reform and political reform. When Tomáš Masaryk founded the republic of Czechoslovakia in 1918, he instituted an egalitarian system that went far to remedy the injustices suffered under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with its stratified structure of privilege and disadvantage; the result was an enlightened parliamentary democracy, that stubbornly insisted on its emancipations, when much of Europe was falling prey to tyrannies of the extreme right or left. Again, when Dubček tried to reform Communism from within in 1968, and when Havel in 1989 re-instituted parliamentary democracy, the Czechs were at the forfront of a widespread political revolution that swept the Soviet Union into the dustbin of history: much of the credit for initiating that change is often given to Mikhail Gorbachev; what is less often recognized is that Gorbachev’s reforms were closely modelled on the blueprint of Dubček’s Prague Spring.
What is still less often recognized, except by Czechs themselves, is that this progressive climate of change, in modern times, owed much to the values embedded in the Czech character centuries earlier in the Hussite period: values of equality, justice, and simplicity of life that Has embodied in his own person and urged upon others, harking back to the ideals and practices of the primitive Church before Christendom became both worldly and triumphalist, and looking forward to a day when the message of the Beatitudes not only might rescue the Church from its slough of decadence, but also might effectively transform the face of secular society, blunting its sharper cruelties and redressing its inequities.
Hus himself was of humble birth, the son of peasants, and never lost his fellow-feeling for the humbler members of society. His brilliant intellect made him one of the leading theologians of his time: he was still in his late twenties when appointed Rector of the Charles University in Prague, and resident preacher in the Bethlehem Chapel there. He used the latter post to denounce corruption in the clergy, to insist that the gospel be preached in the mother tongue and the services be conducted likewise, to demand that communion in both kinds be administered to the laity and not just to priests, and to assert that the Holy Bible, rather than papal pronouncements, must be the arbiter in all matters of conscience. For these views, and especially because they won massive popular support at home, he was viciously attacked by Rome. A General Council of the Church summoned him to Constance, in Switzerland, to answer charges of heresy. He felt it his duty to go, and naively trusted a safe-conduct guarantee, there and back, issued by the King of Bohemia, Sigismund, who had no intention of keeping his word. In Constance he faced an antagonistic court, was shouted down when he tried to defend himself, and was finally sentenced to death and burnt at the stake. Afterwards, his ashes were collected and dumped in the river, lest any of them find their way to Prague and be preserved as sacred relics. This attempt at suppressing what he had stood for completely backfired: it unified the Czech people in unbending opposition to his murderers; and in the subsequent Hussite Wars, Czech soldiers, self-styled the Warriors of God, routed the invading armies sent in on a papal crusade against then.
In one of Hus’s farewell messages sent to his compatriots while under sentence of death, he wrote: “Seek the truth, listen to the truth, teach the truth, abide by the truth; defend the truth unto death”. He himself, if need be, was willing to lay down his life for the truth. And after him, over the years, many other Czechs did the same: under the Counter-Reformation, under the Austrian hegemony, under the Nazi occupation, and under the Communist take-over. Throughout those times, they held fast to the aphorism of their great compatriot, Comenius, “The truth shall prevail”, which Masaryk later took as his personal motto. Later still it found an echo in Havel’s phrase, “Living in the truth”, which summed up his defiant response to a regime of bullies and liars.
When Czechs in modern times espouse the cause of truth like that, they follow in the footsteps of their ancestors who found in Hus’s martyrdom the inspiration to stand by their ideals, whatever the cost.
