Heresy
John Wyclif and the Eucharist
The Eucharist is the celebration of the Last Supper, in which Jesus said that the bread the Apostles ate was his body and the wine they drank was his blood. It was one of the oldest of Christian rituals, seen to be observed as far back as we have documentation. It was one of those external, public acts that declared one's Christianity before one's fellow believers.
What should be made of Jesus' words, though? All through the Middle Ages, the statement was taken pretty much at face value: that the bread was miraculously transformed into the flesh of Christ and the wine was likewise transformed. People were not stupid, though. The bread still appeared to be bread: it tasted like bread, looked like bread. So the appearance was not changed.
The Church taught that it was the substance that had changed, an explanation that was not formally set out until the twelfth century and involved some rather sophisticated philosophical interpretations. The word describing this change in substance but not appearance is transubstantiation and it was of vital importance to Wyclif as well as to later reformers.
In this course you will read a little bit about two schools of thought in the late Middle Ages, realism and nominalism. They have to do with the nature of the reality of the things we see and think. In particular, the realists supported the Church's view of transubstantiation while the nominalists tended to be critical (more usually, they just ignored it). Any guess which Wyclif was?
His strongly nominalist position led Wyclif to deny transubstantiation. But if the bread was just bread and the wine merely wine, then did the Eucharist have any significance at all? As one of the oldest and most important of Christian rituals, the Eucharist proved to be difficult for Wyclif to set aside. We can see in his writings how he tried to retain its importance without undermining his philosophical position. But in May 1381 he published a work that explicitly denied the reality of transubstantiation. Already under attack as a heretic, this move lost Wyclif the support of his protectors.