Magis ... Pro Nostra Sentencia
"Magis ... Pro Nostra Sentencia": John Wyclif, his mediaeval Predecessors and reformed Successors, and a pseudo-Augustinian Eucharistic Decretal Augustiniana [Institutum Historicum Augustianum Lovanii], 45, fasc. 3-4 (1995), 213-245. John Wyclif had not a high regard for Lanfranc. There were general grounds: though he lived three hundred years earlier, Lanfranc was on the wrong side of the great millennial divide. For the first one thousand years after the ascension of Christ, Satan, the father of lies had been bound, as the Apocalypse says. Consequently, in that time, there had been a succession of truthful teachers, "correctly logical, philosophers conformed to the faith of Scripture".1 Ambrose, Augustine and Jerome were the principal of these, and "any of them is one thousand times more valuable than a dozen subsequent doctors and popes, when the enemy of truth is free and sowing lies contrary to the school of Christ".2 There were, moreover, particular grounds which moved Wyclif to go far beyond despising Lanfranc's authority. He both made him an object of invective, and also directed reason, as well as, scriptural and patristic authority against him. There was the manner of Lanfranc's attack on Berengarius, to whom Wyclif had a most ambiguous relation. He was strongly enthusiastic for the decretal "Ego Berengarius" which recorded the confession of Berengar. But this was, after all, an enforced retraction!3 They were, in Wyclif's view, fellow soldiers in the army of truth. Like the Berengar of the decretal, Wyclif held both that the sacrament of the altar was truly, even, "substantially", the body of Christ, and also that the identity of the sacrament and Christ's body was figurative.
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