SOURCE: Leff, Gordon. “The Place of Metaphysics in Wyclif's Theology.” In From Ockham to Wyclif, edited by Anne Hudson and Michael Wilks, pp. 217-32. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell, 1987.

In the following essay, Leff emphasizes the continuity of Wyclif's metaphysical and theological thought throughout his major works, with the exception of some of his writings on civil society.

Wyclif's theological doctrines are reasonably familiar¹ and I do not intend to dwell upon them unduly here. They had their focus in his concepts of the Church, the Bible and the eucharist; and they were the outcome of a singular combination of a metaphysics of realism—the belief in the reality of universal essences or natures, such as genera and species, and including being itself as the most universal essence of all—and an apostolic or evangelical view of Christian life, modeled on the life of Christ and his disciples, as...