Proceedings Colloquium on World History - Waldorf Research Institute

Jan Hus
A Vignette
Eric Philpott
I am going to talk about Jan Hus. I don’t know if anybody has heard
of him. We are dealing with his life span from 1370 to 1415. To put that in
perspective we have at that time the collapse of the feudal system and the
burden of the crusades. The feudal system was not really designed to support
that kind of extracurricular activity. We have the plague that has just
absolutely shaken the core faith of Europe. People believed that they were
preparing for the end of the world where the good would be separated from
the wicked. When the plague came along and did not seem to care who was
good or wicked, this created all sorts of unease – unease is not a strong
enough word – panic. The plague is the greatest single calamity to have
happened in Western Europe and in other parts of the world. One in three
people died.
Then we also had an extremely destructive war going on – we are
more or less in the middle of the Hundred Years War between England and
France which is changing the knight and the soldier from the protector to
the destroyer of regular people’s lives. Economically these shifts mean that
because of the plague there were not enough laborers. Now for the first
time in Medieval Europe the laborers traveled and they would have a pick of
where to work, and all of a sudden the wages went way up – actually even
paying a wage as opposed to being a serf. Hot meals became a standard part
of pay, for example, around this time. There is a whole shift is people’s
roles. People are traveling around. The towns are rising in significance.
We have also mentioned the universities that are becoming a very
important part of the world then. In the Church in Hus’ lifetime a great
schism takes place. That very strongly marks people’s relationship to the
church. The church now descends into a certain amount of squabbling.
Each bishop is sort of on the side of one or the other pope, and, of course,
for the regular people this is very unsettling and creates a certain amount of
uncertainty where you stand in religious matters. This is the world that Jan
Hus is born in.
We are looking for the beginning of the consciousness soul in the
modern age. We are looking for the beginning of really recognizing good
and evil, for example. This is the beginning of meeting the ego through
meeting the other and connecting through thought. The intellectual soul is
able to grasp the world through thought, and the consciousness soul takes
that a step further and in a certain sense makes a personal connection to that
world. So these are the themes that we would be looking for in the beginning
of the modern age. We also know that Steiner says that the consciousness
soul age begins in 1413. Sometimes that seems to be qualified with
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