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