MEANWHILE IN EUROPE 207Wycliffe went further. He suggested that clerics should all be poor, like
the apostles, and that land should be taken away from churches and monas-
teries and put to secular uses, which offended the church deeply. Wycliffe
had powerful political protectors, so he managed to live out his natural life
span, but four decades after his death, a pope had his bones dug up, crushed
into powder, and scattered over a river: the rage, it seemed, persisted.
It persisted in part because Wycliffe's ideas would not die out. In the
generation after his, for example, the Bohemian priest Johann Huss em-
braced Wycliffe's idea that all people had a right to a Bible in their own
language. He commenced a great translation project. When church offi-
cials quoted canon law at him to show that his actions were wrong, he
quoted scripture back at them and declared that the Bible trumped church
councils. This was too much. The church arrested Huss and burnt him at
the stake in a fire fueled with copies of the vulgate Bibles he had been pro-
moting. In short, Christianity did to its first reformers what Islam had
done to the proto-Sufi Hallaj.
Killing reformers, however, could not kill the hunger for reform.
Wycliffe, Huss, and others of their ilk had scratched through to something
smoldering dangerously among the people: an unrequited desire for real
religious experience.
The bureaucratization of religion had made the church powerful and
given Europe cultural unity, but the religious bureaucracy eventually
couldn't deliver the core experience that was its raison d' etre. German the-
ology professor Martin Luther put his finger most precisely on the dys-
function. Luther was a man tormented by guilt. No matter what he did, he
felt like a sinner headed for hell. The Christian rites were supposed to alle-
viate this guilt by washing him clean of sin, but for Luther the rites weren't
working. He tried everything-fasting, self-flagellation, daily communion,
endless penances, but at the end of it all, when the priest told him he was
pure now, Luther didn't believe him. He had only to look into his heart to
see that he was still impure. He knew because he still felt the guilt.
Then one day, a great insight hit Luther. He could not have salvation
until he believed himself saved. If he lacked this belief, it didn't matter
what the priest said or did. If he had this belief, it didn't matter what the
priest said or did. Which raised a big, big question: of what use was the
priest? Why was he even in the mix?