Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
Travel is all about choosing your own adventure. With your Chase Sapphire Reserve Card, sometimes that means a ski trip at a luxury lodge in the Swiss Alps.
with a few of your closest friends. And other times, it means a resort on a private beach with no one else in sight. Wherever you decide to go, find the detail that moves you with unique benefits at hand-selected hotels from Sapphire Reserve. Chase, make more of what's yours. Learn more at chase.com slash sapphire reserve. Cards issued by JPMorgan Chase Bank and a member FDIC. Subject to credit approval.
This episode is brought to you by Heineken Silver. When you discover something you love, like a new podcast or beer, you have to tell everyone about it. So when you try new Heineken Silver, a world-class light beer with only 2.9 carbs and 95 calories, you'll want to tell the world how great it is. New Heineken Silver, the world-class light beer with all the taste, no bitter endings. Available at your local Heineken retailer or for delivery at Heineken.com slash silver. Must be 21 plus to purchase. Enjoy Heineken responsibly.
Martin Luther's life was about to change forever. Three incidents from his time in Erfurt stand out, hinting at some of the anguish this young man, apparently destined for a successful career, was suffering. First, a fellow student and friend fell ill and died. His death affected Luther deeply and appears to have plunged him into melancholy.
Then, while travelling home to Mansfeld, about half a mile out of Erfurt, he somehow managed to injure himself with his sword, severing an artery at the top of his leg. He pressed his finger on the wound to stop the bleeding, but the leg began to swell up massively. Luther could easily have bled to death. Seized with terror, he prayed, Oh Mary, help!
A doctor was summoned who treated the wound. But that evening, while Luther was lying in bed, the wound burst. And again, he called on Mary to save him. It looked as if his prayers were answered, for the wound healed. So Tom Holland, that comes from Lyndall Roper's book, Martin Luther, Renegade and Prophet.
I guess one question that could hang over this podcast, this episode and this whole series is, had he bled to death, how different would the history, A, of what we call the Reformation be?
but B, the world since the year 1500, how different would it have been? And you would probably say it would be incalculably different because you think Luther really, he's a change maker. He really matters. It's not just the context and the conditions, but it's this one individual that genuinely changes the course of history. I do, Dominic. I think he is like a lightning bolt. Right. Striking and...
You've got all the ingredients for life waiting in that kind of little pond, but it takes the lightning bolt to generate life. And I think you could say the same about Luther. And on the topic of lightning, Dominic, attentive listeners to that passage, Linda Roper mentioned three episodes. She did. I noticed that. Yeah. Where's the third? So people may be wondering what the third is. Well, the third involves lightning and thunder and a thunderstorm because lightning
Shortly after that accident with the sword, the young Luther, and just to recap, we left him in part one. He was a student who's just graduated and his father is intending him to go and train to be a lawyer so that he can go back to the mining town and help sort out his smelting and all that kind of thing. So to paint the picture, we are in Saxony in the southeastern corner of modern day Germany.
in roughly, what are we, he's born in 1483, so in the very early 1500s. June 1505. And so...
He rides from Erfurt, where he has been studying, to Mansfeld, where his parents live and where his father is busy making brass out of muck. He's riding back from Mansfeld to Erfurt when suddenly there is this terrifying thunderstorm. It's so terrifying that Luther raises up a prayer. He prays to St. Anne, who we mentioned in the
The first part is the patron saint of minors and the mother of Mary. Oh, yes, of course. Yeah. And he cries out, help me, Saint Anne. And if you do, I will become a monk. So it's quite a vow to make. Must have been one hell of a thunderstorm, Tom. So there's clearly a sense that there is something out of the ordinary about it, a kind of supernatural quality to it. And in time, people will debate, well, you know, was this, was it a thunderstorm sent by God or by the devil?
And so what Martin is doing, though, is actually, you know, by the standards of piety of the age, nothing unusual. So he's invoking a celestial patron, in this case, Saint Anne, and he is promising in exchange for her help. He's making a promise. And what he is doing is promising that he will become a monk. But this is typical of the spiritual economy that we were talking about in the first half, this idea that
You have to make down payments, whether to get the help of heaven or to clear your sins or whatever. And Martin is instinctively buying into that. And he's offering himself up as a monk, partly because by doing that, he's consecrating himself to God in a way that he wouldn't be doing as a lawyer. But also, I think, because there is clearly something in Luther's psyche that is drawing him
Right.
you can perfect yourself. You can become closer to God. You can cleanse yourself of sin and thereby be that much closer to heaven. So a couple of things that strike me. Number one is when he makes that decision to become a monk, what many listeners, the thing that would have struck them is,
You're basically swearing yourself to a life of celibacy. Yeah. So that's part of it, right? Yes, absolutely. And at that point, as far as we know, he's had no dealings with women. He hasn't got a girlfriend or whatever. We don't know. Secondly...
Most people would not do that. I mean, most people don't become monks. You know, the young Henry VIII caught in a thunderstorm. There's no circumstance in which he would say, you know what, I'm going to become a monk. I mean, that's just not going to happen. Luther, there must be some psychological thing already there. It must have occurred to him.
that he could become a monk, don't you think? Well, you might say, I'll go on a pilgrimage, or I'll do this, or I'll do that. I'll say so many Hail Marys, or light candles, or whatever. So you might do that. But I agree. Right, exactly. So Lyndall Roper's biography, which is one of a multitude that came out in 2017 to mark the 500th anniversary of the supposed start of the Reformation, she's very interested in the psychology of Luther, and kind of argues that Luther...
is intimidated by his own father, that he is a brooding, menacing presence. And that now that he's completed his studies, he's going to have to become a lawyer, then he's going to go back and he's going to kind of join the family firm. Right, yeah. If we want to pursue the idea that this is something that's happening in a 1950s kitchen sink drama,
This is like the guy who's gone off to grammar school in university and now he doesn't want to go back home. He wants to go off and become a poet or something. Yeah. Or go to Paris and write a play or something. You'll come back here, son. Exactly. I've got a job for you at the firm, solicitors at the firm. I've got a lot of legal business for you to do in Bradford. You know, that kind of thing. Father, I want to write poetry. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.
And she also makes that by becoming a monk, you are committing yourself to God the Father. So you were looking for the love of another father. And
I think that there's a very convincing case, which Linda Roper makes with all the immense learning that she has and scholarship, that something like this is going on. That Luther wouldn't put it exactly in those terms, but that he is turning from an earthly father to a heavenly father. And that by becoming a monk, you are dramatizing that in the most flamboyant way. And it has to be said that dramatizing things in flamboyant ways will be a feature of Luther's behavior.
from now on. I know that there have been other scholars, haven't there, written about the young Luther, and this is very controversial, but that point seems to me totally psychologically plausible, that this is a way of wriggling out of going back with his dad and actually trying
It's a slight slap in the face to his dad, but it's also a way of finding a new kind of community for himself and a new, I guess, father figure or whatever. But I think that it is a very dramatic way of behaving. So you were saying most people don't do this. I mean, Luther has an absolute genius for the action that reverberates. And effectively at this point, his audience is his parents.
But he will have a genius for drawing attention to himself and will end up the star of, you know, the whole of Europe will be watching him. So I think that this is a kind of the first example we get from his biography of that particular talent. And he joins the Augustinian order in Erfurt. And the Augustinians are highly intellectual, highly severe, and they are also known as defenders of orthodoxy.
So, the high altar of the monastery at Erfurt, there's a tomb of a very distinguished theologian called Andreas Zacharias. And again, Lyndall Roper draws attention to this. He is a theologian who had played a key role in the condemnation of Jan Hus, the Bohemian heretic who ends up being burnt by the imperial authorities, despite the fact that the emperor-to-be had given him a safe conduct. So, Luther would have been very aware of this.
You know, going to that monastery, the role played by this man, Zacharias, the monastery would have been proud of it.
So he becomes a monk. The top of his head is tonsured, as it's called. It's shaved and he gets the black cowl and everything. And he's already got his academic gown and ring as a student. You know, this is the marker of the man who was going to become the lawyer. He sends this back to daddy. Oh, that's a bit of a slap in the face, isn't it? And daddy is furious. So anyone who's seen the John Osborne play, I mean, this is kind of the heart of the action at the beginning of the play. And
A feast is held to celebrate Luther's first Mass. And Luther's father, he pays for it with a kind of extravagant grant of cash, but he still clearly has not forgiven his son. And after the Mass, Luther asks his father, you know, well, I hope that you accept my decision. I hope that, you know, no hard feelings about this. And Hans Luder stands up and in front of all
Luther's fellow monks, he says, remember the fourth commandment, obey your father and your mother. And then he says, you know, and you were saying it must have been a dramatic storm. He says, what if it was an evil spirit who conjured up this storm? I know. And that's an incredibly unsettling thing for him to say to his son, because essentially what he's saying is that you've been tricked by the devil.
And I wonder, Hamlet will become a student at Wittenberg where Luther will go on to become a professor. And this question of whether things are conjured up by the devil or whether they are authentic, it's something that hangs over Hamlet as well. So the question of whether it's divine or diabolical, I mean, his father brings it up at this primal moment where he's just celebrated his first mass.
And Tom, I know we'll come back to this later on in the episode, but this character, very much not a friend of the rest of his history, the devil. Yes. So when his father says that, an evil spirit, the devil, they are living in a world where
Rather like we talked about last time about belief, the nature of belief and taking things for granted. Yes. They're living in a world where it would be totally taken for granted that the devil exists and that there are evil spirits and that you can be corrupted in this way. Absolutely. And I think that, again, a thing that characterizes Luther's distinctive spirituality is evil.
that the devil is vividly real for him. And yeah, later on, we'll have a look at the distinctive way in which Luther understands the devil. Because I think the dread of the devil is the counterpoint of his yearning for God. And as a monk, you know, he is set on the path that will lead him to heaven, but he struggles to feel God's love. And I think that this is a cause of immense trauma for him. So later in his life, he talks about this.
Though I lived as a monk without reproach, he says, I felt that I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience. I could not believe that he was placated by my satisfactions. I did not love. Yes, I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners and secretly, if not blasphemously, certainly murmuring greatly. I was angry with God. I raged with a fierce and troubled conscience. So this is what he's saying shortly before his death. That idea that he hates God. I mean, he still believes in God, but he hates him.
Because he feels that he cannot possibly live up to, be good enough. He can't be good enough. He can't purge away his sin. And so therefore God, who is righteous, will sit in judgment on him. And this causes him enormous dread. And that thing about, you said he struggled to find God's love. Is there a sense in which he joined the monastery, he thought he would get this wonderful glow, you know, of living in God's love and stuff. And the glow doesn't come.
And so he's raging because later on he uses the phrase, doesn't he? He's really struck by the phrase from St. Paul about being born again.
So is he somebody who's almost yearning to be born again at this point, but hasn't been born again, basically? Well, he doesn't know that. What he wants is to feel God's love, but he feels unworthy of God's love. And so this sets him as a monk on a course of extreme asceticism. I was wondering whether there's a bit of self-loathing going on through all this. Oh, for sure. But I think it's also competitive. He wants to be the holiest.
Luther all his life is very competitive. But I think also it's driven by consciousness of his own sinfulness and the anxiety that he can never do enough to win salvation, that this is what is driving him. And so no amount of, you know, saying prayers or kind of expiatory works or prayers to saints to intercede for him with God, none of this can help.
This sense, therefore, that despite the fact that you have this enormous supernatural framework that the medieval church has constructed to facilitate the sense people have that they're coming to God, that actually Luther just feels that he's completely alone. As a monk, he says, "I was always sweating." I imagine a lot of BO, sweaty, he's skinny.
Right. Glaring eyes. I mean, a kind of unsettling figure. Yeah, really selling him, Tom. Right. But the thing is that monasteries are actually used to people like Luther. Right. Monasteries have been going for a long, long time, over a thousand years. And the heads of monasteries are used to monks who get this kind of anxiety that they're not holy enough. And Luther is very lucky that the head of the Augustinian order in Germany, a man called Johann von Staupitz,
He's actually very sympathetic and kind of admires Luther and wants to help him in his spiritual crisis. So he becomes Luther's confessor. So Luther can confess his sins and be absolved by snow pits, and Luther goes all in. So he is confessing for three, four, five, six hours at a time. And Tom, here's a slightly banal question. What on earth is he confessing to? So he's probably confessing to, I hate some of the other monks. I feel lust for women.
Well, interestingly, it doesn't seem to have been lust. Okay. So celibacy doesn't seem to have particularly tortured him. There are obviously lots of monks who really are tortured by that, but it doesn't seem to have been something that Luther particularly worried about. I think it's this feeling of inadequacy before God. Right. This feeling that God is judging him, is finding that he's come short and therefore...
Luther hates and fears God as a result, and that simply compounds his feelings of dread. Because if you hate God, then who's to say that you're not on the side of the devil? Six hours of listening to that, though, Tom. And so Staupitz, unsurprisingly, kind of thinks, well, this is too much. I mean, he's just obsessing. So he needs to basically get out and do something else.
And so he says, you should go and study for a doctorate in theology. They'll find a load of really miserable, negative people. Yeah, go join a university. That'll cheer you up.
So he gets in 1508 to 9, he leaves Erfurt and the monastery and he goes to Wittenberg, which is the place where the Elector of Saxony has his capital. And by this point, the Elector of Saxony is no longer Ernst, who was Elector when Luther was born, but a man called Frederick, who had become Elector in 1486, so only when Luther was only three.
after Ernst had fallen off his horse at Dominic, Kolditz. Kolditz, I saw that, yeah. So the place where all the British prisoners of war tried to escape. Yeah, very good board game. Yeah. So he gets to be called Frederick the Wise. So he is the Elector of Saxony, one of the seven electors who elect the Emperor.
And he is very ambitious for Wittenberg. So when Luther arrives there, the whole place is an absolute building site. You've got a castle at one end where the elector has his base. You have the monastery, Augustinian monastery, which is where Luther's going and the university at the other. And it's a building site because Frederick is extending the castle.
And he is building the university from scratch. Right. And also, just for good measure, he's building an enormous town hall. Yeah. That will take decades and decades to complete. And just, can I say something about Frederick? Yeah. And Saxony, because I think it's really important. So two things. One, Saxony had been divided between two branches of the family, hadn't it? So there's Ducal Saxony and Electoral Saxony. Yes. So Saxony...
Saxon is part of this mad patchwork of the Holy Roman Empire. If you want to make your eyes ache, you look at a map of all the free cities and stuff like that. So it's a little tiny bit like Northern Italy. It's very competitive, and all the different rulers are trying to accumulate status symbols. So this new university is massively important to Frederick, and that will be very important in Luther's story. Hugely. But there's also something hugely important about Frederick.
Because Frederick is the Elector of Saxony, he is one of only seven people who get to choose the next Holy Roman Emperor. Which means that even though he's not that powerful in European terms, other powerful people
cannot afford to alienate him because that vote, one of only seven, is absolutely crucial. Yeah, absolutely. And will be very important in events that are to come. Yeah. But in the meanwhile, you're right, he is desperate to put Wittenberg on the map. And he's able to do this because he's actually very rich, because he has lots of silver mines under his control. And so building the university, I suppose it's kind of like
I don't know, a Midwest town in the early 20th century wanting to put itself on the map by founding a university, that kind of thing. Or, I don't know, a capital in the Gulf building a massive art gallery or something like that. It's kind of developing cultural capital. But the other way in which Frederick puts Wittenberg on the map, as well as building a university, is that he's a massive collector of relics.
So, this is another way that you can get to heaven, is that you can go and pay your respects to a collection of relics and get time knocked off purgatory. So, Frederick has an enormous collection. So, he has 19,013 fragments of saints' bones. He has a thorn from the crown of thorns that Christ wears on the cross. Bonkers. He has a twig from the burning bush seen by Moses. Yeah.
He has the swaddling clothes that the baby Jesus was wrapped up in in the manger. He has a lock of the Virgin's hair. And I think most impressively of all, he has the entire corpse of one of the innocent babies of Bethlehem massacred by Herod's troops. And Dominic is looking more and more Protestant by the minute as I read that list out. It makes Wittenberg an enormous focus of pilgrimage. Because if you go and...
and reverence these relics as a pilgrim on days that are specially ordained by papal decree, then you can reduce your stay in purgatory by 1,902,202 years and 270 days. You're not going to turn down that as a bargain, are you? I mean, you're not.
And people do go to look at things that they know are obviously fake right now. Yeah, but I don't think they do think that. You don't think they do think that? They don't think it's fake because otherwise you wouldn't go, would you? Yeah, you would. People do go to see tourist attractions that are wacky. No, you're not going to travel miles and miles and miles, very arduous and grueling, if you don't believe you're going to benefit from it. But my point is, first of all, I'm not sure about that. And secondly, because I think people, the chance of an expedition...
is always going to be very exciting to people. But secondly, so we were talking about the nature of belief and there's always this, people often do, you know, people from the Protestant tradition do laugh at all this stuff, don't they? And say, what complete mugs, all this kind of thing.
But these are the subject of argument at the time, aren't they? There are a lot of people who regard themselves as orthodox, in inverted commas, Catholic theologians or writers or whatever, who get very cross about this and say you're taking the mickey out of something that is serious. That some of these relics are real and they have power, but some of them are patently frauds. And actually people will sometimes reject some relics, won't they?
They will, but again, to go back to Chaucer's portrayal of the partner in The Canterbury Tales, who's a loathsome figure who is basically scamming people, who is fleeting people, extorting money so that they can reverence fragments of sheep bone and pretending that it's the bone of saints or whatever. But the reason that Chaucer is condemning him, the reason he's such a loathsome figure isn't because relics per se are fraudulent. Exactly. It's that it's exploiting what is a genuine source of heresy.
hope for people. So Chaucer doesn't discount that relics have this power, but he is condemning people who exploit it. But Tom, the twig from the burning bush? I mean, I cannot be alone in thinking that there must have been an awful lot of people, even in Wittenberg, who thought, come on, a twig from the burning bush? I mean, how's that got here? How
How's that been preserved over the thousands of years? Well, the fact that you think that, I think, is due to... Lack of imagination on my part. The hero of this episode. Right. Okay, fine. But at this point, he's gone to Wittenberg, and in 1512, he gets his doctorate, and he becomes the professor of the Bible in the university. Right. And...
There is lots of scope here for him to really make a name for himself because Frederick wants celebrity professors. If Luther can make a name for himself as professor of the Bible, then Frederick will really back him. We will see in the second part of this episode, because I think we should take a break at this point, how Luther does as professor of the Bible at Wittenberg University because, well, he's going to have quite a seismic impact.
So we will see you in a few minutes. Very good. Travel is all about choosing your own adventure. With your Chase Sapphire Reserve card, sometimes that means a ski trip at a luxury lodge in the Swiss Alps.
with a few of your closest friends. And other times, it means a resort on a private beach with no one else in sight. Wherever you decide to go, find the detail that moves you with unique benefits at hand-selected hotels from Sapphire Reserve. Chase, make more of what's yours. Learn more at chase.com slash sapphire reserve. Cards issued by JPMorgan Chase Bank and a member FDIC. Subject to credit approval.
Hey, we're invited to the Johnson Summer Pool Party this Saturday. Oh, Saturday? But that's when the Blinds guys come in to give us a quote. Oh, I already found everything we need at Blinds.com. They're totally online, so we don't have to wait around all day just to get a quote. And they're sending us free samples. Well, Blinds.com sounds like a no-brainer.
Shop Blinds.com now for summer savings up to 45% off. Save up to 45% at Blinds.com. Blinds.com. Rules and restrictions may apply. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. Now, Martin Luther, having gone through this extraordinary experience in a thunderstorm, has become a professor at a new university in Wittenberg, home of some very exciting relics, in which Tom believes implicitly.
And Tom, he's got his doctorate. He's professor of the Bible in Wittenberg. And I mean, this will lead us on to the question of books, which we'll come to in a minute. But what does professor of the Bible actually mean? So what's he doing? So he's lecturing on various books in the Bible. And so it means that he is looking very, very closely at scripture. So he's
Between 1513 and 1515, he is teaching the Psalms. From 1515 to 1517, he's teaching the letters of St. Paul. It's kind of deep dives into key biblical texts. But what's interesting about this is that right from the beginning, Luther seems to have seen this as an opportunity to engage not with what his predecessors have said about the Bible. So
all the various commentaries and analysis and so on, but what he personally thinks about it. So there's this sense that he, Martin Luther, is engaging one-on-one with this great body of Scripture. Tom, that's quite a humanist thing, isn't it? Get back to the sources, don't worry about the weight of tradition, just get back to the original stuff. Yeah, but even so, even humanist scholars would have, say,
the scholarly apparatus that might enable you to look at the original Greek or whatever. But Luther makes a point of going to the university printer and asking him to print a kind of a naked text, one without any glosses, any commentaries at all, just the raw text itself. And this is really unusual. So it suggests already that something
distinctive about Luther's relationship to the body of the Bible is kicking in. And Tom, that gives us an opportunity to talk about something massive that we haven't talked about at all yet, which actually lies at the very centre of Luther's life and this whole period.
And that's obviously printing. Because you could argue, couldn't you, the Reformation would not have happened as it did. I'm sure you pretty much would argue that, wouldn't you? That it doesn't happen in the way it does. It's absolutely, completely fundamental. So the printing story is a really interesting one because Damon McCulloch in his book on the Reformation makes the point that up until quite recently in this period, so up to 1450 or whatever,
People had always assumed that all great wisdom and advances had been made in the past, and the story of human history was a story of decay since then, and nothing had ever improved or changed or got better, other than it only changed and deteriorating. But clearly, there is one way in which life has got better, and that's through information technology. So first of all, they've had paper replacing parchment, which is about the 13th century onwards.
And then in 1450, Gutenberg's Bible, movable type. And Timmerman McCulloch in his book, he says, of course, there had been previous movements very critical of papal authority or kind of church orthodoxy. So we mentioned John Wycliffe and the Lollards, but they didn't have the printing press. They weren't able to easily disseminate their message.
And there is an argument, isn't there? John Calvin's prog for Bernard Cotteray, if that's how you pronounce his name, I'm assuming he's a Frenchman or Swiss or something. He says it's the increase in Bibles, the increase in printed Bibles that creates the reformation.
not the other way around. Do you think that's true? I mean, if you look at what Luther is doing, that he is going to the university printer and ordering this Bible without glosses, I mean, that absolutely kind of illustrates it, because he would not have been able to do that previously. If he'd wanted that, he would have had to go to a scriptorium, would have spent years and years writing out about it. It just wouldn't be possible to do it. But now it is. And isn't there also an argument that the nature of
Thinking changes with printing. So again, in McCulloch's book, he says, if you're a scholar in the 12th century or the 13th century, you work out what you do with your time in the day. You copy out books. I mean, that's how you spend your time. You don't have time to think about them. You are preserving the wisdom of the ancients in a world where it will deteriorate, where the parchment will rot or become destroyed in a fire or whatever. So it's really important. Right.
Yeah, so it's becoming more accessible in exactly the way that the internet has made texts more accessible. And the parallel is one that has often been made. In fact, we made it, I think, in our fourth or fifth episode we ever did, the parallel between the impact of the printing press on Reformation Europe and the impact of the internet on today's world. But you can see, I think, just that thing of Luther with his Bible.
As you say, he doesn't have to spend lots of time getting it written out. He can just have it. And also the fact that although he's still a monk, but now he's a university professor, he has the time to really focus in on it. I mean, this is what enables him to get to grips with scripture, with the text, in a way that wouldn't have been possible if he'd become a monk, say, a century before. It just wouldn't have been possible. And isn't he also, isn't the other thing about printing and reading and the book is
You experience that. It's just you in the book, right? It's not a collective thing. It's not mediated by an institution. Well, it can be in a monastery because the monk would read out from the Bible while people are dining or whatever. But at a university, yes, absolutely. Yeah, it doesn't have to be that way. And all the people who are going to be the audience of Protestantism, lawyers, merchants, the gentry, people who can read,
And perhaps own books or aspire to own books. So to have that private experience with the word of God, it means by definition, you have a more individualistic ethos. You have a sense of religion, learning, the world of the mind,
being just you and the text, not somebody else telling you what to make of a text that you perhaps don't even get to access yourself. And so it's a classic example of the interface between technology and culture. And I mean, just so Luther talking about his experience, teaching the Bible with this text, being able, as you said, to have a kind of personal relationship with it,
Much later in his life, he said, if you picture the Bible to be a mighty tree and every word a little branch, I have shaken every one of these branches because I wanted to know what it was and what it meant. And the consequence of this is that increasingly he is establishing his own understanding of what scripture says. And because he doesn't have all those glosses, because he doesn't have the commentaries, it is something that is very distinctive to him.
And by 1517, which is the year in which he will publish the 95 Theses on Indulgences, so he publishes the 95 Theses in the autumn, but that summer he writes up 97 Theses in which
He is coming to some very, very radical conclusions. In fact, more radical than the more famous 95 Theses. So in these Theses, he is essentially rejecting the entire structure of medieval theology, particularly Aristotle, the great philosopher, whose philosophy in the 13th century had begun to be interwoven by scholars. Yeah, because Aristotle is living in the age of Alexander the Great. He's not a Christian.
Right. But he gets integrated with the fabric of medieval theology. And Luther comes to think that this is mad. And so he says, you know, one of his propositions is that no one can become a theologian unless he becomes one without Aristotle. And he, all his life, will hate Aristotle, a damned, arrogant, roguish, heathen, author of the worst books ever written. Wow. So, great review. That's worse than some of my reviews.
And so what he is emphasizing is you don't need Aristotle. You don't need all this philosophy. You don't need all this massive great structure that the medieval church has been erecting. What you need is in Latin, sola scriptura, the Bible alone. That's all you need. It's you.
and the Bible, and that's all you need. And Tom, is that because he also distrusts the stuff about Aristotle? You know, Aristotle integrating that with Christianity and Greek thoughts and stuff. It's all like,
Let's spend, you know, decades with these very complicated kind of intellectual puzzles, working out all definitions of things and exploring the ramifications of them. And he distrusts that because he thinks human reason is necessarily corrupt and sinful and evil. He does. And he thinks that, again, very, very profoundly.
So, another of his 97 theses published that summer of 1517, "The truth is that the human being corrupted to the root can neither desire nor perform anything but evil." And so this is an explanation for why Luther has been unable to win the love of God by doing good works or whatever.
But effectively, what he's saying is that that entire doctrine is nonsense, that there's no way that you can do it, that humans are so shot through with sin that you cannot win salvation for yourself. Tom, is that not what St. Augustine thought about original sin and all that kind of thing, that we were wicked and no amount of, you know, only God could make us good. It wasn't in our own power, the power of our own puny minds to make us good. Is that all right?
Well, there are various interpretations of what Augustine taught, but that is certainly one interpretation. Of course, Luther is an Augustinian, so he's very aware of that. He would have been focusing absolutely on what Augustine is teaching. Also, Augustine is writing in the context of what St. Paul wrote. All of this is bubbling away in Luther's mind, this sense that he cannot reach God because humans are completely sinful, which in turn means that the devil
is all the more terrifying. Oh, yeah, because he's obsessed with the devil, right? Does he think the devil is Lucifer, the fallen angel? Is that what he thinks? Yeah. And he thinks the devil is literally everywhere. He's in your cup of tea. He's lurking behind the furniture. He's in everything. He permeates the world. Is that right? Yeah. And particularly that the devil inhabits
I mean, you could call it a dimension of shit. I use the word advisedly. People who think that Luther is a theologian and therefore very abstract, in some senses he is, but in other senses he is unbelievably earthy. His understanding of theology is very, very rooted in the physical. His understanding, say, of the devil, the devil
is to be imagined as inhabiting the dimension of shit. Tom, you love that phrase. And back in 1515, Luther had been appointed by Staupitz to give a ceremonial sermon before all the monks in his monastery. And he focuses in on the theme of backbiting.
And Luther says, a slanderer does nothing but ruminate the filth of others with his own teeth and wallow like a pig with his nose in the dirt. This is also why his shit stinks most, surpassed only by the devils. And though man drops his shit in private, the slanderer does not respect this privacy. He gluts on the pleasure of wallowing in it, and he does not deserve better according to God's righteous judgment. Okay. Well, you've really doubled down on that word. Yeah. Yeah.
And Heiko Obermann, a Dutch scholar who wrote a brilliant book translated as Luther, Man Between God and the Devil. He has a brilliant section on this, talking about how the deliberate earthiness, I mean, you might almost say kind of scatological quality of Luther's language, that what he's doing there, and to quote Obermann, it's expressive of the painful battle fought over.
body and soul against the adversary who threatens both flesh and spirit. So Theo is asking a question I would ask, which is, you've used that word multiple times. Is that the word that Luther would have used? He wouldn't have said excrement? Well, he's doing it in Latin, but it's a form of Latin that is best translated in a kind of colloquial. It's not kind of, ooh, stools or excrement. Right.
He has picked a very vulgar word. He's deliberately picked it. And he's preaching this as in a sermon before all his fellow monks. So it's not like he's anything particularly exceptional there. But I think actually in his obsession with the scatological, as we will see in due course, he is. And so he has this very, very...
vivid, earthy sense of the danger that sin represents, kind of founded in latrines and- Toilets, yeah. Excrement and toilets and all kinds of things. But also, he is starting to develop a sense that perhaps there is a way of getting beyond this, of reaching beyond all the kind of paraphernalia of the medieval church and
And having a kind of more personal relationship with God. But as yet, I think it's not entirely formed. But a thing then happens that focuses these inchoate feelings. It changes everything. It changes everything. And this is the moment that we began this series with, which is his opposition to indulgences. Yeah. And it's triggered by something that happens that autumn.
which is that an entire indulgence-selling roadshow comes rolling into Saxony. It's led by a friar, so a Dominican, so not an Augustinian. Instinctively, there's a great rivalry between Dominicans and Augustinians. This friar is called Johann Tetzel. It's a great show. He's accompanied by officials. He's got people to carry the papal coat of arms on a cross.
He's got all these indulgences that have been issued by the Pope and they're kind of laid out on a velvet cushion and
And he comes in and the reason that he wants to make a show is he wants to draw a crowd. And the moment the crowd is there, he launches into a sermon. And it's an absolutely shameless hard sell. You know, he's saying, buy this indulgence or all your relatives, your parents or whoever, your loved ones will be writhing in the flames. Love it. He notoriously claims that his indulgences are so effective that even if someone had raped the Virgin Mary, he would be assured complete remission of purgatory. That's superb.
And even though indulgences are not supposed to be sold, so it's not like, you know, get out of purgatory and pay me whatever. You make the offering, you know, as you might do a good work or go on a pilgrimage or whatever. But Tetzel basically is so blatant about it that a notorious jingle is attributed to him. It never actually appears in the record of his sermons, but it is important.
in all the sources attributed to him. As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs. We would never behave like that in the rest of history, would we? We would never advertise products so seamlessly. We would never, never hard sell. No, we'd never do that.
So it's pretty nakedly corrupt. And you have to wonder, well, why is the church tolerating it? And the reason for that is that basically everyone is benefiting from it. So this money that is being raised by Tetzel is supposedly going to Rome to pay for the rebuilding of St. Peter's. Well, that's a really important thing, Tom, because the Pope wants to rebuild St. Peter's because the Pope previously, decades ago, was out of Rome and Rome fell into total dereliction.
And all monarchs, the Pope included, are really kind of tooling up, aren't they? At the beginning of the 16th century, they've got a bit more power. They want greater display. They want more grandiose statements, like Henry VIII. So the Pope wants in on that too. And he wants to rebuild St. Peter's as an earthly statement, as well as a sort of spiritual one, of his new power and his confidence. Is that right? So it's expensive. Yes.
But it's beneficial. You know, it's the Holy Father. So it's perfectly legitimate that the money raised from this might go to it. But in fact, only half of it is going to the Pope because the rest of it is going to a family of bankers in Augsburg called the Fuggers. Yeah. Well, they're huge names in the early 16th century, the Fuggers. They're the great banking dynasty, aren't they? Yeah. So they're the ones who published the newspaper that report the conquest of the Aztecs. Exactly. We mentioned in our series. Yeah. Yeah.
And the reason that the money is going to them is because basically the Archbishop of Mainz, so
So big cheese in Germany. He's the youngest son of a princely family in the Holy Roman Emperor, a man called Albrecht. And he owes the Fuggers 21,000 ducats. And the reason that he owes them 21,000 ducats is because he has agreed to pay that sum to the Pope as a donation to the building of St. Peter's. And the reason he's agreed to do that is because he is effectively bribing the Pope because he's a very young man. He's only 27. He's already the bishop of two ducats.
bishoprics, two cities, and now the Archbishopric of Mainz has come free. He wants that as well. And to get the Pope to agree to this, this is why he's paying him all this money. And one more thing, Tom. He wants to become the Archbishop of Mainz because...
It's one of the seven electors of the Holy Roman Empire. So it really matters to him to get it, and he will do whatever it takes financially to get his hands on that post for his family, for his dynasty. And so everything kind of connects, the politics, banking, the church. It does.
And everyone is benefiting. Yeah. The Fuggers get rich. Albrecht gets his Archbishopric. The Pope gets lots of money to build St. Peter's. Yeah. And all the faithful get to get out of purgatory. Brilliant. Everyone wins. Actually, not everyone wins because Frederick doesn't win because he doesn't want Tetzel coming and distracting from his relic collection. So Tetzel is not actually allowed into Wittenberg. Because you're not going to go to see a relic if you can buy an indulgence instead. No. So.
So Tetzel bases himself about 20 miles northeast of Wittenberg. But obviously news of his activities reaches Wittenberg and it reaches Luther. And Luther absolutely explodes because it's expressive of everything that he is coming to doubt. You know, he regards all this kind of indulgent stuff as a scam. And that sense would definitely be sharpened if he'd known what Albrecht was up to. So he doesn't know that Albrecht is a direct beneficiary of these indulgences.
But it doesn't stop him from launching, you know, in his thesis that he writes up, he launches a very, very direct attack on the archbishop. Luther writes, on no occasion has Christ ordered that indulgences should be preached. What a horror, what a danger for a bishop to permit the loud noise of indulgences among his people while the gospel is silenced and to be more concerned with the sale of indulgences than with the gospel. So very, very forthright. And, you know,
This is one of the 95 theses that he will promulgate on the 31st of October, which is All Hallows' Eve. And Wittenberg is full of pilgrims because they've all come to mark the festival on the 1st of November to go to Frederick's relic collection. They're coming to look at the burning bush and the corpse of the person killed by King Herod.
All of that. Now, at the beginning of this series, we read from Richard Rex's book on Luther. Yeah. An account. Nailing their theses to the door, Tom.
But as Rex in his book goes to point out, and he's absolutely not alone in doing this, it almost certainly didn't happen. What? Luther never actually mentions it. After two hours, you let us down like this. But just wait. So the earliest appearance of the story isn't until 1546. And the truth is, actually, that if it had happened, as the tradition says, it wouldn't have had much impact. Because actually...
professors going and pasting things on doors or nailing them on doors. This is par for the course. There's nothing particularly exceptional about it. What Luther actually does is much more radical. He has his theses printed. And again, this goes back to what you were saying about the importance of the printing press.
If he'd just written them up and put them on the doors of a church in an obscure university town, it wouldn't have had the impact. But he prints them off, and so they can be sent out across the empire. And specifically, he sends them to his superiors in the Augustinian order, to various movers and shakers across Germany, and to the archbishop himself, to Albrecht in Mainz. And of course, this is a very modern strategy.
using new technology to promote your message. They can't go viral. Yeah, it's not an analog approach, Dominic. It's a digital approach. Right. And they do indeed go viral with huge consequences. One might say that the storm clouds of reformation are gathering over Christendom, Dominic. Oh, my word. With the shamelessness of Johann Tetzel. There we go. Well, actually, talking of the shamelessness of Johann Tetzel, this is an amazing cliffhanger. Yeah.
So Luther has detonated this bomb, his truth bomb. Right, which is going to completely revolutionize European politics, culture, and thought. And actually, if you want to find out what happened next, you just have to sign up to the Restless History Club. Remember, as soon as the coin and the coffer rings, the episode from Theo's basement springs. Sings. Yes.
So, yeah, I mean, why would you want to risk your immortal soul? Join up to the Restless History Club now and you can hear all the rest. And on that bombshell, Tom, thank you very much and we'll see you next time. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.
