Divine Ideas and the Liberal Arts: Jerome of Prague’s Rejoinder to the “Croaking of Frogs and Toads in Medieval Swamps”

Medieval Europe was not generally a period when theology and philosophy were discrete disciplines. By the fourteenth century the two had drifted apart as university development, movements of reform, and outbreaks of heresy increasingly altered the Western Church. The fourteenth-century prelate Richard FitzRalph characterized late medieval intellectual debates as the croaking of frogs and toads in swamps. The merits of that claim are contestable. FitzRalph suggested these exchanges too often demonstrated the grasping of something merely for the sake of possessing knowledge without particular or useful applicability. Implicated in this fourteenth-century tumult was the Oxford thinker John Wyclif. Deeply influenced by Wyclif, the life and thought of the Czech intellectual Jerome of Prague reveals important linkages between ideas and practice as well as heresy and reform. In his work, the assertion that philosophy is validated by relevance and reform emerges. This article examines the porous boundary between philosophy and theology and suggests one area wherein conflict produced animosity and separation. This is achieved by considering the understudied role of Jerome of Prague as a figure who courted controversy when he aggravated conflicting philosophical and theological ideas. Pertinent questions include: Why did these conflicts attract accusations of heresy? Could accusations of heresy protect accusers from similar charges? How did faith and reason contribute to religious reform?