Living in the Prophetic Present: Jan Hus and the Response to the Antichrist's Advent

While imprisoned in Constance and awaiting his eventual trial and condemnation, the Bohemian priest and preacher Jan Hus (d. 1415) received and wrote a number of letters to his followers in Prague. Many of these letters have survived, but four in particular captured the attention of Hus’s disciples. Written less than a month before his execution, and filled with certainty about his impending martyrdom, these four letters were collected and printed no fewer than eight times in the 140 years after Hus’s death in Czech, Latin, and German. This correspondence, which was saturated with apocalyptic images, laid out the appropriate Christian response to the appearance of Antichrist, his subversion of the institutional Church, and the imminent end of time. The contours of salvation history delineated in these letters provide a unique window into the temporal understanding of this most spectacular medieval heretic and his followers, in which a faithful Christian remnant was understood to be locked into a paradoxical struggle with the false Church that was both eternal and approaching its end in the eschaton. The experience of persecution, the persistence of God’s truth, and the presence of God’s people in Bohemia all signaled to Hus and his audience that they were caught at the end of history, a moment that the scholar Stephen O’Leary has called the “prophetic present.” The primary goal of this paper is to use the collection of Hus’s four prison letters and their successive publications as a means of assessing the applicability and resonance of an overtly apocalyptic understanding of history during the Bohemian and German reformations in order to assert the persistence of medieval apocalyptic thought in the early modern period and the role that sacred history and the eschatological future played in understanding a conflicted and dangerous present.