The paper deals with two texts by Mařík Rvačka, a participant in the Council of Constance, whose new copies were found in the Vatican Palatine Library and in the Library of St. James Church in the Municipal archive in Brno. The author of these texts, the prior of the Cyriac order and one of the leading critics of the Czech reformation, refers in them to the contemporary bad state of the Church. His words were aimed especially against the expansion of simony. In the second tract, he critically opposes the communion under both kinds by laymen that was widespread in Bohemia in the second decade of the 15th century.
The study is devoted to the philosophical bequest of the Czech philo¬sopher Robert Kalivoda (1923–1089). Author fist evaluates his contribu¬tion to understanding a key period of Czech history, the Hussite move¬ment. By analysing economic and ideological conditions in the 14th and 15th centuries Kalivoda shows, that the Hussite movement was the first European early bourgeois revolution, bringing about fundamental changes in the structure of feudal society by paralysing the economic and philosophic potential of the Church as a fundamental component of the social order. Philosophically the movement created, out of elements of mediaeval philosophic realism and of the views of various heretical groups, an ideology of emancipation, anticipating ideas of later revolu¬tionary movements.
The second part of the study develops Kalivoda’s conception of the aesthetic function, starting from the conceptions of Jan Mukařovský, and thinks through its consequences for the humanisation of humans and society. Subsequently, the study analyses Kalivoda’s view of the so-called anthropological constant as the deepest layer of human existence and of its makeup. Kalivoda starts from Marx’s conception of a dialectical relation between hunger and sex and from their influence on the functioning of society. The author takes issue with Sigmund Freud’s conception according to which the sublimation of sexual instinct into the sphere of the “Higher I” (“Über-ich”) has solely an aggressive and repressive character and shows, that it involves non-aggressive sublimation as well, which – especially in the form of revolutionary activities – has a positive influence on social development.
This paper deals with the conception of physical fight in postils by Jacob of Mies († 1429). A short tract De bellis included in the second redaction of gospel postil from years 1413 to 1414 is edited in the appendix. Jacob used subjects of this text based on ideas of John Wycliffe in his postils until the twenties of the 15th century.