Wessel Gansfort

Wessel Harmensz Gansfort (1419 – 4 October 1489) was a theologian and early humanist of the northern Low Countries. Many variations of his last name are seen and he is sometimes incorrectly called Johan Wessel.

Gansfort has been called one of the reformers before the Reformation. He protested against a perceived paganizing of the papacy, superstitious and magical uses of the sacraments, the authority of ecclesiastical tradition, and the tendency in later scholastic theology to lay greater stress, in a doctrine of justification, upon the instrumentality of the human will than on the work of Christ for man's salvation. Some of Gansfort's teachings foreshadowed the Protestant reformation.

Early life and education Gansfort was born at Groningen. After initial schooling at the local Latin school of St Martin's, he was educated at the municipal school of Zwolle, which was closely connected to the Brethren of the Common Life in whose house the young student lived. He developed close ties with the monastery of Mount St. Agnes not far from Zwolle, and became close friends with Thomas a Kempis.

His sixteenth-century biographer Albertus Hardenberg, who knew Gansfort's one-time famulus Goswinus van Halen, writes that Gansfort left Zwolle directly for Cologne, perhaps as late as 1449. At Cologne he stayed in the Bursa Laurentiana, where he soon became a teacher. He was granted the degree magister artium in 1452, and remembers with great gratitude that it was here that he first studied Plato. He learned Greek from monks who had been driven out of Greece, and Hebrew from some Jews.

Reputation and influence The founders of the Protestant University of Groningen in 1614 considered Wessel Gansfort one of their intellectual predecessors, together with Rudolph Agricola (1444–85) and Regnerus Praedinius (1510–59). Early editions of works by Gansfort (e.g. Zwolle 1522, Basel 1523, Groningen 1614, Marburg 1617) on their title page call him the learned light of the world (Lux mundi).

Theological views Wessel Gansfort rejected the view of transubstantiation and indulgences. The sacramental views of Wessel Gansfort anticipated those of Ulrich Zwingli.

Works Individual works Gansfort's major works are: De oratione et modo orandi Scala meditationis De causis incarnationis De dignitate et potestate ecclesiastica

There are also: De providentia De causis et effectibus incarnationis et passionis De sacramente, poenitentiae Quae sit vera communio sanctorum De purgatorio De sacramento Eucharistiæ et audienda missa

Several of his letters survive. Some his works are said to have been burned by his friends shortly after his death for fear of ecclesiastical inquisition.

Collections Farrago rerum theologicarum is the title of a collection of his writings published at Zwolle, probably in 1521 (reprinted at Wittenberg, 1522, and Basel, 1522, which last contains a preface by Luther). Martin Luther in 1521 published a collection of Wessel's writings which had been preserved as relics by his friends, and said that if he (Luther) had written nothing before he read them, people might well have thought that he had stolen all his ideas from them. McClintock and Strong's Cyclopedia describes Gansfort as "the most important among men of German extraction who helped prepare the way for the Reformation." The Sum of Christianity is an anonymous English translation of the Farrago.

A complete edition of his works appeared at Groningen in 1614, including a biography by the Protestant preacher Albert Hardenberg.