Christianity and the Division of Men

The Christian writer Peter Chelčický wrote in the fifteenth century a work called The Net of Faith, exposing the church. In this work Chelčický explains the decline of the Christian faith by the fact that the Emperor and the Pope, in recognizing themselves as Christians, perverted true Christianity. And he compares this perversion of the true faith to the tearing of a fishing net by large fish. Just as all the caught fish escaped through the holes made by the large fish, so all the people caught in Christ’s net lost their faith as a result of its perversion by popes and emperors.

Below we present Chelčický’s own words.

Those caught by the apostles were long held in a whole, undamaged net, but when after them, in the course of time, people, feeling themselves safe, fell asleep, the enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and the tares multiplied so greatly that they overpowered the wheat and weakened it. Christians were overcome by heavy sleep at the time when the Emperor endowed the high priest with property and power; senseless from heavy sleep, they dared to reject the poverty in which they had dwelt in Christ’s name and to exchange it for imperial dominion and honor, and even more than imperial. At first they hid in pits, caves, and forests, and then, lo and behold, the emperor himself was driving the priest through Rome, having seated him on a white mare. By this the purity and innocence of the apostolic calling was violated. Therefore Peter’s net was greatly torn when these two great whales entered it—that is, the high priest with royal dominion and honor exceeding the emperor’s, and the emperor, who crawled under the skin of faith with pagan power and offices. When both these whales turned in the net, it was so torn that little of it remains whole now. From these two whales were born many false estates which, in their turn, tear the net of faith: first, monks of various cuts and colors, then learned men—schoolmen, university men—then parish priests; then from the unlearned: various noble families, adorned with coats of arms, then the estates of townspeople. Each of these assemblies and estates strives to dominate, acquiring lands for itself either by cunning, or by violence, or by purchase, or by inheritance. Some of them are spiritual authorities, others secular.

The Roman Church has divided into three parts: secular lords, kings, and princes fight and defend the church; the clergy prays; and the third part is composed of the laboring people, who must provide for the bodily needs of the first two parts. What inequality results from such a division! Two sides have it good; they are idle, they eat much, they think nothing of spending money or lying upon the third side, having tucked it under themselves, while this third side suffers as it bears the luxury of those two gluttons. Such a division is contrary to the teaching of Christ, according to which the whole world should constitute one multitude, one heart, and one spirit.

Most of all the net of faith has been torn and continues to be torn by two powerful whales: the chief spiritual lord and the chief temporal lord. The spiritual lord—the Pope—violates Christ’s law in that, having rejected poverty, labor, preaching, and other pastoral duties, he has acquired temporal power and honor and demands that people bow before him to the ground as before a god. He has multiplied his laws, contrary to God’s law and faith, so much that because of these laws people have forgotten God’s law and faith and think that faith is nothing other than the laws of the great priest. In all their sacred activities, the clergy are guided by these laws: they know no other way to pray than to mumble the hours established by laws and specially composed, with which thick books are filled. It is considered prayer when in church one priest tosses words and verses back and forth with another for all to hear. The ignorant people, without thinking, accept all this as the Christian faith, and no wonder, because about faith they have only heard that God can be seen in church and that on Sundays one must not plow.

The other whale that tumbled into the net of faith and tore it is the emperor with pagan government, pagan institutions, pagan rights and laws. Before Constantine’s acceptance of Christianity, Christians were guided by Christ’s law alone without any admixture of papal and imperial decrees, had no king from among themselves, and only had to pay tribute and fulfill other obligations as subjects of pagans. But when Emperor Constantine was accepted into the faith with his pagan government and pagan laws, then the innocence and purity of Christians was violated. It is impossible to enumerate all the pagan peculiarities by which the true faith and worship of God have been defiled; let us speak of some that have relation to the emperor. Wishing to rule over Christians, Constantine and his successors should have shown an example of the highest piety, but meanwhile they live among Christians, departing from the faith and performing the most God-opposing deeds. And their servants and retinue also lead the most unworthy life, so that they appear in Christian society as carrion which infects everyone with its stench. And the clergy and magistrates still justify them as the third side of the satanic church and say: “This befits their rank; courtiers should be merry, free, and unrestrained.”

The emperor uses his pagan power arbitrarily, with proud satisfaction and boldness, never thinking that he is a Christian and rules over Christians. Not so important are the bodily oppressions which the emperor inflicts on his subjects, taxing them with tributes and so forth: by this, harm is done to property, and people are burdened with heavy work, but the conscience does not suffer from this, if only all these constraints are borne patiently. Far more important is that the secular power does not consider it a sin to kill people and to commit all kinds of violence, and forces Christians to go to war against each other, and thus to transgress the commandment of Christ.

The condition of the first church, when pagans had nothing in common with Christians, was the most favorable for Christians and could have existed until the present time if, through the machinations of Satan and through the blindness of two persons, Sylvester and Constantine, poison had not been poured into Christianity—that is, papal and imperial power. What happened to Christ’s church was similar to what happened to the Jews. Having arrived in the promised land, they lived there for more than four hundred years without any earthly rulers over them, being only under the protection of God and his law; but then, having rejected God, they began to ask Samuel for a king. Their desire was fulfilled, but as a testimony to the great sin they had committed, God sent a sign: thunder and rain. Something similar happened with the Christians, with only the difference that the Jews desired to have a king out of attachment to the earthly, hoping that their earthly affairs would go better under an earthly king than under a heavenly king; Christians, however, did not reject God and did not desire to have a king with pagan government, but this came about under the guise of benefit for the church, which they expected from the emperor’s acceptance of the Christian faith. The consequences turned out to be the opposite: what the emperor formerly could not introduce among Christians by subjecting them to torments, he introduced under the guise of friendship toward them and, having united with them in faith, drew them into pagan unbelief. Guilty of this evil are Sylvester and Constantine, but no less guilty are those subsequent Christians who, considering themselves the most perfect and wisest in understanding the faith, prove the necessity of secular power for the good of the church.

In the course of time, to the multitude of fish caught by the apostles, or in other words, to the multitude of believers, were added many fish, or rabbles of people, who have torn the net of faith. These rabbles do not want to abide in faith or follow it, but drag faith after them, and, having each their own peculiarities contrary to faith, want them to be recognized as faith. First of all let us speak of the rabbles and generations adorned with coats of arms.

These many-varied generations, adorned with coats of arms, lead a life contrary to God’s commandments and surpass other people in reviling the Son of God. These generations are doubly born in sin: (1) in Adam’s sin, like all people, and (2) with a sinful consciousness of the nobility of their origin. By virtue of this nobility, they strive to distinguish themselves before other people in every way possible: by names, by manner of bearing themselves, by dress, by food, by the construction of their dwellings, by rights, and by treatment. In their whole way of life, customs, and speech, vanity is expressed. They strive to possess all the goods of the body and of the world in order to enjoy honor and glory, and they avoid everything unpleasant that people must endure for their sins. Hard labor, patience, persecution, simplicity, humiliation, helpfulness are unbecoming to them: they need a free, idle, easy life, surfeit of earthly goods, cleanliness, beauty, clothing of special elaborate and elegant cuts; they must give luxurious feasts to the amazement of all, like gods and goddesses; they need clean and soft beds, speech sweet and insinuating, full of flattery, with the expression: “Is it not pleasing to your grace?” Nobility makes them resort to frequent and disgusting ablutions with the help of servants, reaching the point of abomination; nobility makes them whiten themselves; finally, nobility demands pagan dominion, and indeed this generation, adorned with coats of arms, has seized the land and acquired power over other people. By the sufferings and sweat of serfs and “thickheaded fools” they can prove their nobility, and one need only have the serf stop working for all this nobility to fade and become equal to a shepherd’s.

Nobility of birth is based on the pagan custom of obtaining coats of arms from emperors and kings. Some acquire them through service in reward for some heroic deeds; others buy them for honor—for example, a gate, a wolf’s or dog’s head, a ladder, half a horse, a pipe, knives, a pig sausage, and so forth. On these coats of arms rests all nobility, and all its worth is the same as that of the coats of arms. Were there no money for its support, hunger would make them throw away the coats of arms and take up plows. Not in coats of arms but in money lies the main strength of nobility, and when there is no money, the lord becomes equal to the serf, and, ashamed to take up work, has no bread for dinner.

The double birth of the noble estate—in Adam’s sin and in the consciousness of their nobility based on coats of arms—entails new and numerous sins. The consciousness of nobility breeds vanity, the absence of humility and patience. If anyone calls a lord base or a serf, he will immediately drag him to court to clear himself of serfdom and baseness. Other sins flowing from the same source are idleness, striving for luxury, pagan dominion, cruelty, violence. And the clergy indulges these sins and says to the lords: “There is no harm in this, this is proper or this befits your rank.” With such and similar speeches it, as it were, moistens these sins so that they may grow faster, and turns them into virtues.

These sins pass from parents to children, whom they raise in the same delusions in which they themselves abide, and thus God’s creation is taken from God. By the nobility of their birth, the lords consider it necessary to send their children to courts in German lands, so that they may learn there various boasts and other abominations, proprieties, polite poses with bows, and may drink that poison which is offered at courts. All this comes from vanity: they love worldly greatness too much, and since at home it is difficult for them to achieve this, they send their children to great people, so as to attain some honor through them, so that the elders may have something to boast about—that, they say, your son was a chamberlain at the king’s court, and your daughter arranges or carries the queen’s train. To such a degree have these coat-of-arms generations multiplied that the land is becoming too small for them. All want to rule in wealth, but some have nothing to do so with: many are pressed by poverty, but they do not want to work, they are ashamed of work, yet all have big throats. Some run up debts without end, wheedling money with flattering speeches and various promises, but they will not work on any account, so as not to disgrace their noble origin by labor. The most extensive and best lands have been seized by these lords, and these lands have turned into deserts with wolves running through them, while they themselves rise, sit, and spend all their time in endless conversations about various news in the courtly manner. In Holy Scripture there is no indication anywhere that some people are of better birth than others. Solomon himself acknowledged his own nothingness, and if in the Old and New Testament the word “noble” is encountered, it means nobility based on virtues and wisdom. As vile is the life of these noble people, so vile is the clothing worn by men and women. In general, neither pagans nor Jews defiled Christ’s faith to such a degree as these generations founded on coats of arms, who have wrongly mixed themselves into the faith. They are not pleasing to God and are harmful and burdensome to people. The laboring people bear on themselves the burden of their nobility, while they are ready to swallow them, and everything good that exists on earth they try to seize and swallow. Great harm comes to all people from the fact that they clothe everyone in themselves and infect others with themselves, like a corpse with a putrid stench that kills people. First of all, they clothe their children and servants in themselves, teaching them vanity and all courtly behaviors, and then the townspeople’s estate also adopts their way of life from them.

All this is written so that in these coat-of-arms rabbles may be recognized that Antichrist of whom the apostle Paul speaks, calling him the man of lawlessness and the son of perdition.

---

Translator’s Notes:

• Peter Chelčický (c. 1390–c. 1460) was a Czech Christian philosopher and writer who advocated radical nonviolence and the separation of church and state. His critique of the Constantinian settlement (the fourth-century alliance of Christianity with Roman imperial power) anticipates modern critiques by six centuries.
• The “Net of Faith” (Síť víry) was Chelčický’s major work, written around 1440. The fishing net metaphor refers to Christ’s calling of his disciples as “fishers of men” (Matthew 4:19). Chelčický argues that when the “big fish” (Pope and Emperor) entered this net, they tore it apart.
• The reference to Pope Sylvester I (314–335) and Emperor Constantine I (306–337) concerns the legendary “Donation of Constantine,” by which Constantine supposedly gave Pope Sylvester temporal authority over Rome. Though the document was proven a forgery in the fifteenth century, the symbolism of church-state alliance remained potent.
• The division of society into three orders—those who fight (nobility), those who pray (clergy), and those who work (peasants)—was a standard medieval social theory. Chelčický’s critique is that this division is fundamentally un-Christian and serves only to exploit the laboring class.
• The critique of the nobility’s coats of arms as symbols of sin and pride reflects Chelčický’s radical egalitarianism. His examples of absurd heraldic symbols (wolf’s head, half a horse, pig sausage) mock the pretensions of aristocratic lineage.
• The identification of the heraldic nobility with the “Antichrist” and “man of lawlessness” (2 Thessalonians 2:3) represents Chelčický’s apocalyptic understanding of social injustice as demonic.
• Tolstoy saw in Chelčický a precursor to his own religious anarchism—the belief that true Christianity is incompatible with both church hierarchy and state power. This excerpt demonstrates why Tolstoy devoted an entire Weekly Reading (#45) to introducing Chelčický to Russian readers.