## 1. Wyclif's Later Works




Government and the relation of divine justice to human law, both
secular and ecclesiastical, figure as occasional themes throughout the
treatises of the *Summa de Ente*. After receiving his doctorate
in theology in 1373, his attention began to focus more completely on
these topics, and his realism continued to undergird his thought at
least through 1381, during which period he wrote the treatises that
make up the second of his great *Summae*, the *Summa
Theologie*. In late 1373, he began *De Dominio Divino*,
which serves as bridge from the later, formal theological treatises of
the *Summa de Ente* to the political, social, and
ecclesiological subject matter of the *Summa Theologie*. He
began royal service during this period, participating in an embassy to
Bruges for negotiations with papal envoys in 1374. Wyclif remained in
the service of John of Gaunt for the rest of his life; the Duke
protected him from the formal prosecution prompted by five bulls of
papal condemnation in 1377. After being condemned for his views on the
Eucharist at Oxford in 1381, Wyclif withdrew to Lutterworth, where he
remained until his death in December 1384. Though still protected by
John of Gaunt, he was no longer in active service after 1379. During
these tumultuous years, Wyclif wrote the ten treatises of the
*Summa Theologie*: four on just human government, two on the
structure and government of the church, one on scriptural
hermeneutics, and three on specific problems afflicting the
Church. Our interest lies in *De Mandatis Divinis* (1375-76),
*De Statu Innocencie* (1376), and *De Civili
Dominio* (1375-76), where he provides the theological foundation
for the radical transformation of the church he prescribes in *De
Ecclesia* (1378-79) *De Potestate Pape* (1379), and *De
Officio Regis* (1379). Towards the end of his life, Wyclif
summarized his entire theological vision in *Trialogus*
(1382-83), reiterating the connections between his earlier
philosophical works and later political treatises in a three-way
dialogue written in language that would appeal to members of the royal
court. 


## 2. *Dominium* in Political Thought Before Wyclif



*Dominium* and its generally accepted translation, 'lordship',
suggest the sovereignty exercised by one individual over another, but
Roman law allowed for complexity in distinguishing between property
ownership, its primary referent, and jurisdiction, governance, and
political power. When twelfth-century canon lawyers resurrected Roman
law as the foundation for the ascendant papal monarchy, it was common
to distinguish between jurisdictive authority, secular power, and the
use and possession of private
 property.[1]
 By the beginning of the fourteenth century, *dominium* largely
connoted property ownership, though this usually entailed jurisdictive
authority. Most political theorists agreed with Thomas Aquinas in saying that a civil lord who
supposed that his jurisdictive authority arose from property ownership
rather than from a constitution would be a tyrant (*Summa
Theologiae* IaIIae, Q.56, a.5; Q.58, a.2). Given that the legal
use of *dominium* referred to property ownership and not to the
authority to govern, it seems odd that Wyclif used the term to do so
much more. The reason may be found in the connection of Augustinian
theology to theories of the justice of property ownership. As the
papal monarchy developed, its theorists, such as
 Giles of Rome,
 found it useful to identify all earthly justice, including just
property ownership, with the source of justice in creation.


### 2.1 Augustine



Augustine's
*De Civitate Dei* was the basis for relating property
ownership and secular justice to divine authority. Here the division
between two classes of men is clear: some are members of the City of
Man, motivated by love of self, while others are motivated by the love
of God and a contempt for self, placing them in the City of
 God.[2]
 There is really only one true Lord in creation. Mastery of one man
over another is the result of Original Sin and is therefore unnatural
except in the case of paternity, which is founded on parental love for
a child. Among members of the City of God, the relation of prince and
subject is not political and does not entail the sort of mastery we
see in the City of Man, but rather involves service and sacrifice, as
exemplified by the parent/child relationship.




Property ownership has been united to mastery in the City of Man
because of Original Sin, whereby man turned away from God in the
mistaken belief that he could make claims of exclusive ownership on
created beings. This is not to say that Augustine thought that all
private property relations are wrong; indeed, he is famous for having
argued that all things belong to the just (*De Civitate Dei*
14, ch. 28). But people who own things are not *de facto*
just. Those for whom ownership is not an end in itself but a means by
which to do God's will are freed from the bondage of selfishness
imposed by the Fall. They easily recognize the truth of the dictum
that one should abstain from the possession of private things, or if
one cannot do so, then at least from the love of property
(*Enarratio in Psalmam* 132, ch.4).




Augustine's thought on the relation of ownership to political
authority is open to interpretation. One can easily read him as
arguing that the Church, as the Body of Christ and earthly
instantiation of the City of God, can best exemplify loving
lord/subject relations through its ecclesiastical structure, thereby
justifying a top-down papal monarchy. Likewise, one can read him as
having so separated secular political authority from the rule of love
as to make political and ecclesiastical jurisdictive authority utterly
distinct. Again, one could interpret Augustine's 'all things belong to
the just' as meaning that the Church is the arbiter of all property
ownership in virtue of being the Body of Christ and seat of all
created justice, or one could argue that the Church should abandon all
claims to property ownership, just as the Apostles abstained from the
possession of private property. This ambiguity in interpretation was
the source of some of the competing theories that influenced Wyclif's
position.


### 2.2 Giles of Rome




During the conflict between Philip IV of France and Pope Boniface VIII
in 1301, Giles of Rome wrote *De Ecclesiastica Potestate*,
establishing the absolute secular superiority of the papacy. Giles'
master Boniface VIII was responsible for the two famous Bulls,
*Clericos laicos* (1296), which forbade clergy to give up
property without papal approval, and *Unam sanctam* (1302),
which declared that secular power is in the service of, and subject
to, papal authority. *De Ecclesiastica Potestate* is an
articulation of the concept of power underlying these two Bulls and
arising from one of the two interpretations of Augustine described
above. In it, Giles describes all power "spiritual and secular" as
rooted in the papacy, likening its structure to a papal river from
which smaller, secular streams branch out. The source of this river,
he continues, is the sea, which is God: "God is a kind of font and a
kind of sea of force and power, from which sea all forces and all
powers are derived like
 streams."[3]
 Not only is secular power reliant on papal authority; all property
ownership, insofar as it is just, is similarly dependent on an
ecclesiastical foundation. The key element in just secular power and
property ownership, he continues, is grace: without God's will
directly moving in creation through the sacraments of the Church,
power and ownership are empty claims, devoid of justice. Although
Giles did not explicitly call the combination of ownership and
temporal power *dominium*, his uniting the two in a consistent,
Augustinian fashion was sufficient for the next generation of
Augustinian theorists.


### 2.3 The Franciscans and Their Opponents




Thirty years earlier, in Bonaventure's
*Apologia pauperum* of 1269, the Franciscans had defined any
property ownership, communal or individual, as inimical to the ideals
of their Order. The Fall from paradise and the introduction of
selfishness to human nature makes property ownership of any type,
private or communal, an abberation. For the Franciscans, "all things
belong to the just" only in the sense that "belonging" entails
non-exclusive sharing (*usus pauper*), not ownership. Within
three decades, the Franciscans were divided on this issue: one party,
the Spirituals, demanded that the friars adopt *usus pauper* as
their ideal of spiritual perfection, while the other, the Conventuals,
argued for a more lenient interpretation of the Rule. The Spirituals,
under the guidance of the philosopher
 John Peter Olivi
 and his follower Ubertino de Casale, outnumbered the Conventuals by
century's end, and had become sufficiently vocal to attract the
attention of the
 pope.[4]
 John XXII was deeply suspicious of the Spiritual Franciscans'
arguments, perhaps fearing a reappearance of the communitarian
Waldensian heresy. Private ownership, John argued, was not the result
of Original Sin, but a gift from God that Adam enjoyed in Paradise and
which the blessed still can enjoy, secure in the knowledge that their
ownership is sanctioned by God's *dominium*. This argument was
to have notable consequences. John's eventual controversy with the
Spiritual's champion,
 William Ockham,
 led to the first important use of the concept of natural right. But
for our analysis, the important thing is that *iurisdictio* and
*proprietas* were united in the concept of
*dominium*. Wyclif would make use of the Franciscans' arguments
for apostolic poverty, as well as of John XXII's idea that divine
*dominium* provides the basis for all human *dominium*,
though in a way that would certainly have displeased both
 parties.[5]




By the 1350s, opponents of the Franciscans had broadened their range
of criticism to question the legitimacy of the Order itself. Richard
Fitzralph, (d. 1360) wrote *De Pauperie Salvatoris*, a
sustained examination of the Franciscans' claim to function without
supervision by diocesan bishop in which he argues that if the friars
rely on the justice of the owners of what they use, they are bound by
the same laws that bind the owners. Thus, if the owners of what the
friars use are ecclesiastical, it follows that the friars must obey
ecclesiastical
 authority.[6]
 Fitzralph's position is important here because it argues that grace
alone is the justification for any instance of *dominium* in
creation, and that all just *dominium* ultimately relies on
God's *dominium*. Both serve as cornerstones of Wyclif's
position. God's *dominium* is a natural consequence of the act
of creating, and with it comes divine governance and conservation of
created being. The rational beings in creation, angels and human
beings, enjoy the loan of elements of God's created universe, but this
is not a divine abdication of ultimate authority since everything is
still directly subject to divine *dominium*. 




When the nature of the *dominium* lent to Adam changed with the
Fall, the love defining our natural *dominium* was affected,
but not eradicated. Men devised political *dominium* to
regulate property relations, and although sin keeps them from
recognizing the borrowed nature of any *dominium*, it does not
preclude there being grace-justified property ownership. In some
cases, God infuses the artificial property-relations that we call
*dominium* with sufficient grace to make them generally
equivalent to prelapsarian *dominium*. These grace-favored
cases of human dominium do not replicate the authority of God's
*dominium*, but can exhibit the love that characterizes
it. Fitzralph's expression of the Augustinian papal position makes
grace the deciding factor in ownership relations and ultimately in
political authority, both of which had become nested in the term
*dominium*. Wyclif's interpretation of the Augustinian position
would stretch past arguments about papal authority and the friars,
even past arguments between popes and kings, to stir the very nature
of the church as Christ's earthly body. All of this begins, he would
argue, with an understanding of God's *dominium* as the causal
exemplar of created lordship. 


## 3. Divine *Dominium*: Creating, Lending, and Grace




The relation of universal to particular defines Wyclif's conception of
how God's *dominium* causes all instances of *dominium*
in creation. Divine *dominium* is "the standard prior to and
presupposition of all other *dominium*; if a creature has
*dominium* over anything, God already has *dominium*
over it, so any created dominium follows upon divine
*dominium*" (*De Dominio Divino* I, ch. 3,
p.16.18-22). This relation exceeds mere exemplarity, where human
*dominium* only imitates God's *dominium* without divine
causal determination. God's *dominium* has causal efficacy over
all instances of human mastery such that no true created
*dominium* is possible without direct participation in and
constant reliance upon God's *dominium*. The instrument through
which divine *dominium* moves is grace, which instills in human
rulers an essential love defining their every ruling action. Thus,
every case of just human *dominium* entails a constant reliance
upon grace as the hallmark of its being an instantiation of God's
universal *dominium*. 




God's *dominium* has six aspects, three identifiable with
lordship's ruling element (creation, sustenance, and governance), and
three that define lordship's proprietary nature (giving, receiving,
and lending) (*De Dominio Divino* III, ch. 1,
 p.198.9).7
 The necessary precondition for an act of *dominium* is
creation, of which no created being is capable. This makes God's
*dominium* the only true instance of *dominium* and the
source of all created instances of *dominium*. Because the
Divine Ideas and their created correlates, the universals, are
ontologically prior to particular created beings, God's
*dominium* over universals is prior to His *dominium*
over particulars. This means that God creates, sustains, and governs
the human species prior to ruling over -- and knowing --
individual people. This led to questions about determinism that served
as a starting point for many refutations of Wyclif's theology. 




The second set of acts that define *dominium* -- giving,
receiving, and lending -- provides the foundation for Wyclif's
argument that all created *dominium* necessarily requires
grace. God's giving of the divine essence in creating is the truest
form of giving because God is giving of Himself through Himself, which
no created being can do. Nor can any created being receive as God
receives; God truly receives only from Himself through His giving. God
gives up nothing in His giving, and acquires nothing in His receiving;
creation is God's self-expression, an act in which the divine essence
is neither decreased nor increased. The crucial act from the created
standpoint is God's lending, for here there is real interaction
between Lord and subjects. What human beings as conscious participants
in God's lending relation can claim as their own is lent to them by
divine authority, which they enjoy through grace. 




It is easy to confuse giving with lending because a lord who has only
been "lent" a gift of God for use during his lifetime appears to have
been "given" that gift. God's giving is communicative, not
translative. For us, most giving is translative in that it involves
the giver's surrender of every connection to the gift, making it
natural for us to suppose that God renounces His authority over what
He gives us. In fact, God's giving is communicative, which does not
involve surrender of the gift. Because all that God gives to creation
will ultimately return to Him, it makes more sense to speak of God's
giving as lending.


 With any instance of lending, Wyclif explains, the lender seeks
assurance that the borrower truly deserves what is to be lent. Human
desert of the *dominium* they are lent is a matter of some
complexity involving examination of the theological concept of grace.
When a temporal lord lends his subject according to the subject's
worthiness, the subject's merit is commensurable with the lord's, and
the mutual agreement defining the loan can be made according to the
respective merit of each party. The merit that allows the subject
desert of consideration for the loan is "*condigna*", i.e.,
grounded in the *dignitas* shared by lender and
subject. Condign merit implies that the meritorious truly deserve the
reward, requiring the giver to give it to the merited as something
due, as when an olympic athelete earns a gold medal by besting all her
opponents. Such a loan is impossible between Creator and creature,
because there is no way of placing a creature's merit on the same
scale as God's perfect nature; all the creature has, including its
worth, is from God, whereas God's perfection is per se. There is no
way in which a creature can be considered to deserve anything from God
in such a relation. Congruent merit obtains when the meritorious does
not have the power to require anything of the giver. In instances of
congruent merit, the goodness of the act does not require the giver to
reward the agent, though it does provide sufficient cause for the
reward to be given, as when one receives an Academy Award: although
many of the audience members may deserve an Oscar, the winner receives
it because something about her performance is somehow pleasing to the
Academy. Still, Wyclif holds that "It is the invariable law of God
that nobody is awarded blessedness unless they first deserve it"
(*De Dominio Divino* III, ch. 4, p.229.18). We can move our
wills to the good, and from this, Wyclif says, grace may -- but need
not -- follow. Thus, we merit congruently thanks to God's generosity
towards a will in accord with His own. In effect, God lends merit.




Wyclif's theology of grace is the key to understanding how his theory
of human *dominium* relates to divine *dominium*, its
causal paradigm. Man's lordship is at once ownership and jurisdictive
mastery, but when a human lord governs, or gives, or receives, or
lends, these acts are only just insofar as the lord recognizes that
his authority is that of a steward: "Any rational creature is only
improperly called a lord, and is rather a minister or steward of the
supreme Lord, and whatever he has to distribute, he has purely by
grace" ([*De Dominio Divino* III, ch. 6, p.250.25-29). The
essential characteristic of every instance of human *dominium*
is the grace God lends to the individual lord, which itself is
grounded in the grace of the Holy Spirit. The human lord appears to
have proprietary and juristictive authority by virtue of his own
excellence, but this is really only an instantiation of divine
*dominium*, a grace-realized agent of God's lordship. This
makes the human lord both master and servant; from the divine
perspective, the lord is God's servant, but from the viewpoint of the
subject, he is master. Wyclif is tireless in his emphasis on the
illusory nature of this mastery; grace allows the human lord to
recognize that he is, in fact, the servant of his subjects,
ministering to them as a nurturing steward, not lording over them as
would a powerful sovereign. 


### 3.1 Natural *Dominium*



*De Civili Dominio* begins with the motto, "Civil justice
presupposes divine justice; civil *dominium* presupposes
natural *dominium*." Man's *dominium* is threefold --
natural, civil, and evangelical -- but comprehensible as an
instantiation of the justice of God's *dominium*. As he moved
into his general analysis of human *dominium*, Wyclif's
thoughts turned to the most fundamental instance of God's loving
governance, the Scriptural commandments. The foundation of all that is
right (*ius*) in creation, he explains, is divine justice
(*iustitia*), so we cannot begin to understand right and wrong
in creation without understanding God's uncreated right. This was a
significant departure from the Aristotelian position that unaided
human reason is capable of justice, and Wyclif explicitly rejects any
conception of justice that does not rely on uncreated
 right.[8]
 The laws of Scripture are the purest expression of uncreated right
available to human eyes, he explains, and are most clearly expressed
in the Ten Commandments of Exodus 20, and again in the two greatest
commandments of Matthew 22: 37-40. Wyclif's analysis of Christ's law
of love and of the Ten Commandments proceeds directly from his
disquisition on the relation of earthly justice to eternal right in
*De Mandatis Divinis*. That Wyclif uses the same title
 Robert Grosseteste
 had used in his analysis of the decalogue is no accident; Wyclif's
debt to Grosseteste's conceptions of sin, love of God, idolatry, and
the substance of true faith is obvious throughout the treatise. In
*De Statu Innocencie*, the innocence into which we were created
before the Fall, he says, is the optimal condition for any rational
being. In our prelapsarian state, our wills would have been in perfect
concord with the divine will, so that all human action would be just,
effortlessly aligned with the natural order of creation. In this
condition, there would be no need for civil or criminal law, since we
understood what is right naturally.




This denial of the need for human law is of special import, for Wyclif
later argues that the evangelical lord, or priest, as heir of Christ's
restoration of the possibility of natural *dominium*, should
never be concerned with such matters. In such a state, private
property ownership was unknown. The natural *dominium*
described in Genesis 1:26 is characterized by lack of selfishness,
ownership, or any distinction between 'mine' and 'thine'. The true
sense of Augustine's "All things belong to the just" is most fully
apparent in the prelapsarian natural disposition to share in the use
of creation while acting as faithful steward to its perfect lord. The
Fall was brought about by the first sin, which Wyclif characterizes as
a privation of God's right in man's soul. We are left with wills prone
to value the physical, material world above spiritual concerns, and
the unavoidable result is private property ownership. We no longer
understand a given created good as a gift on loan from God, but can
only see it in terms of our own self-interest, and the unfortunate
result is civil *dominium*, an enslavement to material goods.



## 4. Types of Human *Dominium*




Wyclif's definition of civil *dominium* as "proprietary
lordship in a *viator* over the goods of fortune fully
according to human law" is centered not on legislative authority, but
on the private property ownership enjoyed by the *viator*, or
wayfarer, along life's path (*De Civili Dominio* III ch. 11,
 p.178.9-17).[9]
 This is because all civil *dominium* is based on the use of
goods owned, which is the basis for all postlapsarian conceptions of
justice (recall that for Wyclif, only God truly owns created things
because creating a thing is necessary for owning it; hence, human
beings are only lent created things and can use them justly, or
unjustly in case they appropriate them for themselves). Before the
Fall, our use of created goods was communal, unencumbered by the
complexity that follows upon selfishness. But now, Wyclif explains,
there are three types of use: that directly consequent upon civil
ownership, civil use without ownership, and evangelical use. The first
two are natural results of the Fall, and the third is the result of
Christ's Incarnation. Before the Incarnation, civil ownership and
civil use were grounded in man-made laws designed primarily to
regulate property ownership. These legal systems tended to have two
general structures: they were either monarchies, as in most cases, or
else they were aristocratic polities. The harmony of the aristocratic
polity is certainly preferable because it most resembles the state
enjoyed before the Fall; the benevolent aristocracy, as evidenced in
the time of the Biblical judges, would foster the contemplative life,
communalism, and an absence of corruptible governmental apparatus.





The most common species of civil *dominium* is monarchy, in
which a chief executive power holds ultimate legislative
authority. This centralized authority in one man is necessary to
implement order; there is no real possibility that the many are
capable of ruling on behalf of the many, given the prevalence of
sin. The point of civil *dominium* is not, as with
 Aristotle,
 the sustenance of individual virtuous activity. Civil
*dominium* is a phenomenon based on Original Sin, and is
therefore unlikely to produce justice per se. If the government of
Caesar is occasionally just, it is because it has accidentally
realized divine justice. But if civil *dominium* that is not
grounded directly in divine *dominium* is incapable of
sustained just governance, and if natural *dominium* is the
instantiation of divine *dominium* for which man was created,
how can any talk of just civil *dominium* be possible? To
return to the opening dictum of *De Civili Dominio*, if natural
*dominium* is free from private property ownership, how can
civil *dominium* rely upon it in any way? 




Before resolving this problem, we will need to address evangelical
*dominium* as yet another factor in Wyclif's conception of
man's postlapsarian state. 


### 4.1 Evangelical *Dominium*




Christ restores the possibility of gaining our lost natural
*dominium* both through His apostolic poverty and His
redemptive sacrifice as described in Holy Scripture. Because of
Christ's sinless nature, He was the first man since Adam capable of
exhibiting the purity of natural *dominium*. This Christ shared
with His disciples, who were able to renounce all exclusive claims to
created goods in a recreation of the communal *caritas* lost in
the Fall (*De Civili Dominio* III, 4, p. 51.17-24). This
poverty is not simply the state of not owning things; one can live
sinfully as easily in squalor as one can in luxury. The apostolic
poverty of the early Church is a spiritual state, not an economic
rejection of civil *dominium*. The similarity between Wyclif's
conception of spiritual poverty as the ideal state for Christians and
the Franciscan ideal is noteworthy. Wyclif seems to make a case
similar to the Spiritual Franciscans: Christ's life was exemplary for
all Christians and Christ lived in apostolic poverty; therefore, all
Christians ought follow His example, or at the least have that option
open to them. Wyclif's consonance with the Franciscan tradition is
also suggested in his use of
 Bonaventure's
 definition of apostolic poverty in the third book of *De Civili
Dominio*, but Wyclif's motives are distinctly different from the
Friars' (*De Civili Dominio* III, 8, pp. 119-120). While the
Franciscans argued that their rule allowed them to regain the
ownership-free purity enjoyed by the early Apostolic church, Wyclif
contended that Christ's redemptive sacrifice enabled all Christians to
regain natural *dominium* itself, not just its purity. This
suggested that the Franciscan life was a pale imitation of true
Christianity, which Wyclif's Franciscan colleagues were quick to point
out. One of the first critics of Wyclif's *dominium* thought
was William Woodford, O.F.M., who argued that Wyclif had gone too far
in equating apostolic, spiritual poverty with prelapsarian purity. The
extensive third book of *De Civili Dominio* is Wyclif's
response to Franciscan critics like Woodford, and in which lie the
seeds of the antifraternalism that would characterize his later
writings. 




Wyclif describes apostolic poverty as a mode of having with love,
comprehensible in terms of the individual's use of a thing for the
greatest spiritual benefit. God alone can bring about the love
instantiating divine *dominium*, making grace necessary for
apostolic poverty. Because the church is founded not on the
materially-based laws of man, but on the spiritually-grounded *lex
Christi*, it must be absolutely free of property ownership, the
better to realize the spiritual purity required by apostolic
poverty. Any material riches that the church comes upon as "goods of
fortune" must be distributed as alms for the poor, following the
practice of Christ and the disciples, and the apostolic church. This
is the ideal to which the Church must aspire through the example of
Christ, and some of the harshest invective in Wyclif's prose is
directed against the Church's refusal to return to this apostolic
state. The turning point in Church history was the Donation of
Constantine, on the basis of which the Church claimed to have the
civil *dominium* of a Caesar. Wyclif was vigorous in his
condemnation of the Donation, and would likely have been pleased had
he lived into the early fifteenth century, when
 Nicholas of Cusa
 argued persuasively that the document was a ninth-century forgery.



### 4.2 Civil *Dominium*




Given the deleterious influence civil *dominium* has had on the
evangelical *dominium* of Christ's law, it is difficult to
imagine how Wyclif would set aside some civil lords as capable of
instantiating divine justice. But apostolic poverty is not identical
with an absence of property ownership; it is having with love. While
the clergy as spiritual lords ought to follow Christ's example of
material poverty, it does not follow that all ownership precludes
love. God can certainly bestow grace on those whom He wills to be
stewards of created goods. Wyclif envisions the just civil lord or
king as the means by which the Church is relieved of its accumulated
burden of property ownership. So long as the Church exists in
postlapsarian society, it must be protected from thieves, heresy, and
infidels. Certainly no evangelical lord ought to be concerned with
such matters, given their higher responsibility for the welfare of
Christian souls. As a result, the Church needs a guardian to ward off
enemies while caring for its own weel-being and administering alms to
the poor. This allows Wyclif to describe just, grace-favored civil
*dominium* as different in kind from the civil lordship
predicated on materialistic human concerns: "It is right for God to
have two vicars in His church, namely a king in temporal affairs, and
a priest in spiritual. The king should strongly check rebellion, as
did God in the Old Testament, while priests ought minister the
precepts mildly, as did Christ, who was at once priest and king." When
he raises conventional topics in political thought, like the
particulars of just rule, the responsibilities of royal councillors to
their king, the nature of just war, and royal jurisdiction in
commerce, his advice is priestly: "[A] lord ought not treat his
subjects in a way other than he would rationally wish to be treated in
similar circumstances; the Christian lord should not desire subjects
for love of dominating, but for the correction and spiritual
improvement of his subjects, and so to the efficacy of the church"
(*De Officio Regis* ch. 1, p. 13.4-8). The king ought provide
few and just laws wisely and accurately administered, and live subject
to these laws, since just law is more necessary for the community than
the king. Also, the king should strive to protect the lower classes'
claims on temporal goods in the interests of social order, for
"nothing is more destructive in a kingdom in its political life than
immoderately to deprive the lower classes of the goods of fortune"
(*De Officio Regis* ch. 5, p.
 96.9-27).[10]
 On occasion he discusses the king's need of reliable councillors,
generally when discussing the king's need for sacerdotal advice in
directing church reform, but he never mentions Parliament as a
significant aspect of civil rule. 




The most immediate concern of a civil lord living in an age when the
Church is being poisoned by avarice should be the radical divestment
of all ecclesiastical ownership. Wyclif is tireless in arguing for the
king's right to take all land and goods, and indeed, even the
buildings themselves, away from the Church. Should the clergy protest
against royal divestment, threatening the king with excommunication or
interdict, the king should proceed as a physician applies his lancet
to an infected boil. No grace-favored civil lord will be disposed to
save up the divested goods of the Church for his own enrichment,
despite the obvious temptation. He will distribute the Church's
ill-gotten lands and goods to the people. This, Wyclif explains, will
be his continued responsibility even after the Church has been purged,
for he is the Church's custodian as well as its protector. 




The hereditary succession by which civil lordship passes from father
to son is a problem for Wyclif. People cannot inherit the grace needed
to ensure just ownership and jurisdiction. Primogeniture imperils
grace-founded civil lordship, making lords prone to rule on behalf of
their own familial interests rather than in the interests of their
subjects. The only means by which Wyclif can envision hereditary
succession operating is through spiritual filiation, in which a civil
lord instructs a worthy successor. He suggests adoption as the basis
for the spiritual primogeniture by which lordship is passed on, which
would be preferable to general election, for Wyclif is clear about the
impossibility of widespread recognition of grace in a potential civil
lord: "It does not follow, if all the people want Peter to be their
civil lord, that therefore it is just" (*De Civili Dominio* I,
18, p. 130.6). Central to his ecclesiology is the impossibility of
determining the presence of grace in another's soul, which militates
against identifying members of the elect with certainty, and therefore
against excommunicating any of them from the Church, as well as ruling
out popular election as a means of instituting just civil
*dominium*. Grants in perpetuity, commonly employed by civil
lords to guarantee the ongoing obligation of subjects in return for a
gift of land or political authority, are as impossible as hereditary
inheritance. A lord might reward someone with a grant while acting as
God's steward, but he certainly cannot thereby make his subject's
progeny *deserve* the gift. 


### 4.3 Tyranny




History is rich with examples of kings who, wittingly or unwittingly,
lose sight of their ministerial position and wield secular authority
in their own interests, cruelly using the land and church for their
own gain. Such tyrants cause Wyclif some problems, for in many cases
it is difficult for the subjects to determine whether their lord is
acting viciously as a crowned brigand, or sternly, as a physician
purging a patient. For the same reason that Wyclif denies the
suitability of popular elections, he is cautious regarding tyranny: it
is impossible for human minds to gauge the absence of grace in
another. What may look like cruel persecution of a subject may in fact
be just punishment, while what may appear to be benign, permissive
rule may in fact be the lassitude of misrule. Certainly no priest is
in a position to assess the justice of a civil lord, given his
dedication to apostolic ideals foreign to civil *dominium*. In
some cases, Wyclif advises that one must suffer tyrannical rule as a
divine punishment, particularly when a king deprives His subjects of
material wealth. In other cases, especially when a civil lord fosters
ecclesiastical decay by not persecuting heretics or regulating the
Church's goods, Wyclif suggests that resistance to tyranny may be
justifiable: better to focus on the greater danger of priestly
tyranny; after all, a tyrannical civil lord can only do damage to
one's material well-being, but a tyrannical priest can endanger one's
eternal soul. The guardian against priestly tyranny must be the civil
lord, whose responsibility to the Church requires him to monitor the
clergy's execution of its spiritual duties. Those who argue that a
civil lord has no business interfering with spiritual concerns
overlook the fundamental relation holding between just civil law and
divine law: because the civil lord's responsibility is to God, his
first concern must be to ensure that nothing will impede obedience to
divine law. The canon law that has built up over the centuries like
barnacles on a ship's hull is held up as the means by which the Church
regulates spiritual affairs, but this, Wyclif explains, is a
superfluous creation of priests, ultimately hindering the Church by
introducing material structure to what should be a purely spiritual
enterprise. 




The king uses bishops, an office justly instituted by the early
church, to monitor the spiritual offices of priests to counteract
problems like simony, pluralism, absenteeism, and heresy. These
bishops ought also to act as royal theological advisors, helping the
civil lord to understand how Christ's law is best implemented in his
own legislation. Just as a civil lord is God's steward and a servant
to his subjects, a bishop is not superior to the laity or the priests,
but a steward whose responsibility is to God and the divine law, which
ordains subservience to the grace-favored civil lord. Wyclif continued
to argue for the centrality of episcopal office throughout his life,
despite his own troubles with the Bishop of London and the Archbishop
of Canterbury.