Texts for a Poor Church: John Wyclif and the Decretals

Abstract

The great, and sadly late, Wyclif scholar Michael Wilks remarked that while John Wyclif approved by and large of Gratian's twelfth-century Decretum as solidly based upon Scripture and the Fathers, "It was the insane novelties of the Decretales, full of papal decrees which were to be branded as lies seeking to falsify Scripture itself." 1 There is much to what Wilks says, but (as so often with Wyclif) it is not quite that simple. Wyclif did not summarily dismiss the contents of those thirteenth- and fourteenth-century collections of papal letters which began with Gregory IX's 1234 Liber Extra. In fact, he thought certain texts were quite sound, and he conceded that the pope does have the right to pass laws for the good of the Church, providing that such statutes are in keeping with Holy Scripture. What really did upset him, however, was the notion that these statutes might aspire to equal authority with the Gospel simply by virtue of their papal sanction. 2 It was the larger theory behind such collections that he bristled at: the principle that a pope could render theological judgments that would assume the force of law, dissent from which was labeled heresy. And for Wyclif this all hinged upon the question of authorship and its attendant authority. Every part of Holy Scripture must be of infinitely greater authority than a decretal, he argues, seeing that every decretal is merely the creation of some pope and his subordinates, while every part of Scripture is directly authorized by God. 3 While it is true that some decretals may be valuable and binding, they are so only insofar as they promote the truth of Holy Scripture. For in that case their authoritative content derives ultimately from God, even if promulgated by the pope.