60 days the papacy had given Martin Luther to recant, or else be damned as a heretic. Now on the 10th of December, the time was up. That morning at 9 o'clock, Luther walked through one of the three town gates to wear a karian pit lay. A large crowd had gathered there.
One of Luther's colleagues from the University, a theologian named Johann Agrigula, Lit of Fire. The spot was where the clothes of those who had died in the nearby hospital were burned, but Agrigula, rather than rags, used books as fuel. All that morning he and Luther had been ransacking libraries for collections of canon law. Had the two men been able to find a volume of Aquinas, they would have burned that as well.
Their kindling though proved sufficient. The fire began to blaze. A Grigula continued to feed books into the flames. Then Luther stepped out from the crowd.
He was trembling. He held up the papal decree that had condemned his teachings. "'Because you have confounded the truth of God,' he said in a ringing voice. "'Today the Lord confounds you into the fire with you.'" He dropped the decree into the flames.
The parchment blackened and curled and turned to smoke as Luther turned and walked back through the city gate. Ashes skidded and swirled on the winter breeze. So that was Dan Brown. That was Tom Holland.
So rude in Dominion, which is your magisterial book about the history of Christianity and how it has shaped the Western world, indeed the entire world, Tom, I think it's fair to say. This is an amazing set piece moment. We are now in episode three of this series about the human being who in the last five to six hundred years has arguably shaped the Western world as much as any other maybe more than any other Martin Luther. He is burning a papal bull, a papal decree that was targeted at him.
So this is open war with the papacy, Tom. It is. So this is ex-surge dominant rise up, oh Lord, and the pope had issued it on the 15th of June, 1520, and had given Luther 60 days to recant or be excommunicated. And the 60 days are up and Luther's response to this deadline is as written in that magisterial praise.
Beautiful. And the bull is specifically censoring 41 propositions that Luther has put forward. One of those propositions, Dominic, is the term is wrong to burn heretics. And so the danger of death, the fact that Luther, by directly taking on the papacy like this, you know, I mean, it's an exceedingly dangerous thing to do.
This is life and death. Yes. And this is happening in Vittenberg, the capital of Frederick, the electro of Saxony. Yeah.
And Luther is a professor at the university, so Frederick has every taken kind of backing him. And three years have passed since that great and celebrated act of defiance that we ended episode two with hammering the theses or not on the walls of the church or churches. Yes. And in those three years, Luther has precipitated a crisis on a scale that Latin Christendom has never witnessed before, at least not since the 11th century.
And the features of the crisis, they're kind of threefold really. So it's about the church essentially asserting its authority, the medieval church, the Roman church, whatever you want to call it. So back in 1517, the whole reason why these indulgences are being issued is because the church is manifesting its assumption that Christians can earn their way out of purgatory through buying them or, you know, all through a whole host doing good works, pilgrimages, whatever. This idea that there is a kind of spiritual capital that Christians can draw on to get themselves out of purgatory and get to heaven sooner.
And of course in 1520, the assumption is that the church has the right to eradicate heresy. This is why the pope has issued the bull. Can I ask a quick question, Tom? Yeah.
Lots of people will be thinking this. Why is it called a bull? It's called bull, which is obviously a people bull that sounds very Protestant. But a bull, it's a kind of a seal that stamps the text of it.
Okay. Fine. I've always wondered. And the church has been doing this for a long time.
So one of the phrases that is used in this people that's targeting Luther is the same phrase that people who listen to our episode on the Albergets and Crusades may remember. The phrase about little foxes seeking to destroy the vineyard, exactly the same phrase. Tom, just to remind people, Luther hammered up these these or nailed them up or didn't depending on your view because he was outraged because a bloke was going round a kind of a less monk was going round selling indulgences to raise money for the rebuilding of St Peter's Basilica in Rome and Luther just thought this was disgraceful. Yeah.
And it turns out to be even worse because actually loads of money is going to a bank that has given money to an underage bishop who wanted to become much bishop. So it's all fabulously corrupt. Yeah. So that's one aspect of it.
The church basically trying to put the lid on this kind of bobbling rebellion. Yeah. And the second thread, of course, is Luther defying really fundamental teachings of the church. So in 1517, when he's attacking indulgences, he is also attacking the entire dogma that sinners can basically own their way out of purgatory, but sinners have agency getting rid of the penalty for their own sins.
Yeah. And that then leads him on to question the leading role claimed by the papacy and indeed actually the entire clergy. So he's starting to move towards a position that the clergy have no particular status. And so much of this comes from Luther saying he's been the professor of Bible studies at the University in Bittenberg.
And so much of this is him saying, actually, you know, none of this is in the Bible. And if everything's meant to come from the Bible, this is all just tossed that has been dreamed up subsequently. Yeah. And so it's partly from his reading the Bible and it's partly from his tucking on a thread.
The whole carpet falls to pieces. Yeah. So if you question a fundamental dogma, then you start to question the role of the papacy, then you start to question the role of the clergy. And essentially, Luther is coming to a much more democratic understanding of what it is to be Christian, one in which the division between the clergy and the laity is being erased.
So he says every true Christian, whether living or dead has a part in all the blessings of Christ and the church. Is he thinking he's getting back to the early Christians? Yes, like the actual apostles kind of Christians. Yeah.
And so he's starting to construct an understanding of Christian history, which is radically opposed to the traditional one. So he is essentially saying that you have the early church and then it all goes wrong. Yeah. And so that's the first position in which the papacy is the Hall of Babylon as described in the book of Revelation, and therefore, a thousand years and more, it's been corrupting and polluting the pure teachings of Christ, which is obviously a very radical revision.
Yeah. It's not going to be that well, as we see, because the issue is bull. But the third aspect of what is making this a crisis is that Luther is an absolute master of self-promotion. And this is really unexpected.
I mean, he's a professor in a obscure university, but he just kind of likes the touch paper and his mastery of particularly of printing, which we talked about in the previous episode. I mean, printing has been around for about a century, but he turns out to be absolutely suited to a kind of social media revolution. I mean, so I'm right, we've got his story in the Protestantism. He says he turns out to have a kind of raw, Trumpian brilliance at German language, polemic, German Trump.
And I think that, you know, people have been buying printed matter, but Luther makes it exciting. And so they get into the habit of buying it and perhaps kind of reading it out to people who can't read and so on. And so it's Luther really who generates the market for buying printed matter in a way that no one had done previously. And you know your Trumpian analogy, there's a kind of popular site, Luther's rhetoric, isn't it?
Describing things and very aggressive, scatological, sometimes funny, raw kind of earthy terms in a way that maybe virtually no other theologians can do. So he can reach people who other people can't reach. Yes, absolutely. And the other thing that he does is that he's very, very good at staging a public event.
So the burning of the bull in 1520, it's a deliberately dramatic thing. This is not what heuristics do. Heuristics are condemned kind of, you know, they hide. They don't publicly defy the pope because that would be mad.
But Luther can do it because he has Frederick is kind of guarding his back. But you know, he's staging a kind of festival of defiance. And in the wake of the burning of the bull, he has got all his students behind him. So the students are rallying to him.
So the day after the burning of the bull in Wittenberg, students build an enormous float and they kind of festoon it with parodies of papal bulls and decrees and so on. And they drive it around the town and then they burn the whole lot. And one of them has dressed up as a pope in a kind of the papal tiara and he then tosses his tiara into the fire. So this is a kind of great festival of defiance.
And it's fun. Okay, so why people doing that? Because what Luther is saying is very scandalous. So there are two possibilities there.
Either the students kind of converted to Luther's way of thinking maybe because he's a brilliant teacher or maybe because there was always a latent audience for that message. Or are they just doing it because it's fun? I think both. Okay.
And I think that, I mean, I guess we are so prone to not thinking that statements on Christian doctrine are exciting. Yeah. I mean, it's not the kind of thing that that infuses people by and large today. But back then, it is the most thrilling thing you can do.
And you just have to look at the sense of excitement that powers, I don't know, the pushing of doctrines that are offensive to conservatives today, say on social media. Yeah, of course. I mean, people love it. They do.
And likewise, conservatives quite enjoy kind of punching back. Exactly. So it's 2020, the surgeon people like attacking statues and stuff after the death of George Floyd. Yes, exactly.
Some people are there because they really believe in the cause. Some people are there because it's a laugh. They want to get out kind of a less excited protest, the intoxication of it. Yeah.
And I think that that is exactly right. Because in the long run, statues will be toppled. I can say will be toppled in due course. And for reasons that are exactly analogous to the toppling of statues of slaves or whatever, that they seem to be sinful.
And a public display of, you know, your godliness is as exciting in the 21st century as it was in the 16th century. So it all goes back to Luther, basically. So today, I think we should look at how we get from Luther banging up the feces, if that's what he does, to him being excommunicated. And what happens in the wake of the 95 theses going up is that he hasn't printed in German as well as Latin.
And these start to hit the books in the New Year of 1518. And they are produced by presses across the entire empire. So the whole of what is now Germany and indeed Switzerland and in what will be the Netherlands as well. And because the theses are sharp, they're understandable, they're often quite witty.
People can understand them. They kind of really enjoy reading up. It kind of gives them a free song, you know, almost kind of the shiver of blasphemy about them. And to remind people in an important point, the empire is a very strange, fragmented patchwork.
So the imperial authority to deal with this necessarily is limited and depends upon local rulers, doesn't it? And that will be really important to Luther's story. Right. And in particular, the emperor is quite ill.
And that means very likely there's going to be an imperial election very soon. And that of course gives an enormous power to Frederick Luther's protector. It's one of only seven Alexis. Yeah, exactly.
But even so, the church has no option but to respond to Luther's challenge. It's partly because it seems that the sale of indulgences really starts to fall off in the wake of Luther's attack. But it's also because Luther has sent a copy to Albrecht, the Archbishop of Maine, who is the guy basically who's called the opera. Yeah, extraordinary.
They sent it to the very person. Yeah. It's like someone tagging you into a social media thing, exposing you or something, right? Yeah.
And so Albrecht then sends it to Rome to get a kind of ruling in the center of things. And the tradition is that the pope doesn't recognize that it's a crisis at all. He just thinks it's a little bit more squabbling. And it's kind of the lordly tone of a politician in 2010 turning his nose up at Twitter.
Saying it doesn't matter. It's unimportant. Nothing on this matters. Meanwhile, back in Germany, they definitely have a sense of crisis.
So the Dominicans give Tetsil the guy who's been flogging the indulgences and honorary doctorates so that he can take on Luther as an equal because of course, Luther has a doctorate. He's a doctor. Yeah. And Tetsil is boasting that within three weeks of his getting his doctorate, he will have Luther in the flames.
And there's no question Luther is in danger. But because he has the backing of Frederick, basically he's safe. And he also has the backing of, you know, we talked about the students. The students already rallying behind him.
They get hold of Tetsil's repudiation of Luther and burn it. Right. And it's interesting that book burning will be a feature of the Reformation. It actually begins with the Reformance.
It's not the papacy that is the first of Burnbooks. Yeah, that is interesting. And it's interesting that a student's burning books. I mean, remember when we did the Nazi series and we talked about how Nazi book burnings are driven by students and lecturers, not by people against the students' wishes.
Well, and again, I think that you just have to look at the world today to realise that students quite enjoy. Yeah. If not burning books, then having them ban. Yeah, did they do?
You know, there is a kind of excitement in it tearing down traditional structures and so on. And he also has the backing of growing numbers of the faculty in Wittenberg. So two particular will play key roles in his story. So one is the Professor of Theology, who's also the Chancellor of the University.
He's a guy called Andreas von Káljat. And he had actually given Luther his doctorate, even though he's actually three years younger than Luther. And there's a much younger scholar who's the Professor of Greek, Philip Melanthon, who's only 21. So quite, you know what, Powell?
He's not about that. Does he speak like you know what, Powell? No. Are you going to do him in your Birmingham accent?
No, I'm not. He'd renamed himself. He did. His name is actually Schvartzert, which means Black Earth and Black Earth has been translated into Greek.
Yeah. And this is very much the kind of Jape that professors at Wittenberg like to get back to. That kind of a Jape? Is that not just a terrible affectation?
So Luther does it as well. Right. So Luther's name is actually Luda. Right.
But he thinks this is good enough. So he calls himself El etherius, which in Greek means the freed one. Oh, come on. And he then makes more accessible as Luther.
I think Lesson in there, though. So Luther also is a kind of, it's a classicist joke. Right. Great banter.
But Luther is making serious points because he's saying he's freed one. So what exactly has he been freed from? So he thinks presumably he's been freed from superstition, obscurantism, error, the darkness of not knowing the love of God. Is that it, basically?
Yes. So he's summoned to a chapter meeting of the Augustinian, season Augustinian monk in April 1518 and it's held in Heidelberg. So it's quite a long way. Again we see his mastery of publicity.
He walks there. Right. So, you know, that's really during attention to himself. And he's treated as an absolute celebrity everywhere he goes.
He's kind of cheered and he gets to Heidelberg and the local prince shows off, you know, his chapel and his castle and invites Luther to die with him. So it's all tremendous. So Thomas, there's like Jordan Piedson, besides all this? Yes, a little bit, I think.
The celebrity professor who has said the unsayable and who is suddenly, you know, do you remember how people were first reported when Jordan Piedson was doing rallies and stuff. People say it's amazing that somebody who's basically talking about what is said to him lobsters. Jungian philosophy and stuff. Yeah, and Jungian philosophy is inspiring young people, you know, what a remarkable thing.
And it's the same. Exactly. If you think that he is saying things that in universities for a long time have been unsayable, Luther is doing something similar at Heidelberg. So he is now directly attacking the foundations of the theology that has prevailed in the Latin West for centuries and centuries.
So as opposed to the idea that reason as mediated through Aristotle enables you to understand God, Luther says that reason is actually a whore. Right. So the philosophy is a delusion that the only true Christian is a fool. He says out front, I believe it is impossible for the church to be reformed in this church law.
So that's kind of law with its rules and decrees, scholastic theology, philosophy and logic, as they are now taught, are eradicated and replaced by other studies. Daily I asked the law that the pure study of the Bible and the church fathers might be summoned back as soon as possible. So that is a bit like Jordan Peterson saying gender studies, it's all woo woo. Right.
They post-colonial studies, all nonsense. Let's get rid of it all. Let's go back to studying Shakespeare or whatever. Or it's like people on the other side of that particular debate attacking their own disciplines.
Yes. Isn't it? I mean, that's very popular on the left of the political spectrum is saying our whole discipline is colonial. It is tainted by prejudice.
Let's get rid of it. Decolonize Anglo-Saxon studies or whatever. Yes. And people find that intoxicating.
Right. And Luther is the wellspring of both those traditions. And that's what makes him so fascinating and important. So Luther is genuinely the place from which both those impulses come.
Of course, he is in turn drawing on Augustine and ultimately on the Bible. But the framing of it is new. This is what is so thrilling and intoxicating. Yeah.
And it's also very brave because he is also questioning the authority of the papacy. He has a colleague at Vittenberg, he's the professor of law, a guy called Hieronymus Schurf, brilliant name. And he says to Luther, the papacy is not going to stand for this. And Luther doesn't care.
So why does Luther not care? I think it is a sense of intellectual excitement, but I think it is also something much, much more really, really profound that is so important and so transformative on the history of Christianity. But the moment when he supposedly first experiences it has been called the Reformation moment. And just to put that in context on the difference between him and the people with the modern modus, he will die if he gets this wrong.
And if he misjudges, he's in real danger of his life. Right. Yes. So I think you have to have an absolute certitude to display that kind of courage.
And it's this Reformation moment, I think, that gives Luther that certitude. But whether it is a moment or whether it is a continuous process is much debated. But essentially we saw in the first episode how Luther becomes a monk and he lives in dread a God's judgment. He says that he hates God.
You know, God is going to condemn him and there's nothing he can do about it. And so this is why he's starving himself and praying and confessing for hours on end and all that kind of thing. And then he gets to study the Bible as a professor and to reflect on what it is saying. And the more he does this, so the more he comes to see all his attempt to earn liberation from God's condemnation as wasted effort.
And the key figure in this is Saint Paul in the New Testament. There are a number of his letters there, the earliest texts that we have written by a Christian. And for people who don't know who Saint Paul is, Tom, he's a baker who was persecuting the Christians and then converts on the road to Damascus. Right.
So initially Paul is a Pharisee. So he's very, very learned in the scriptural teachings, in the law, the law that has been given to Moses. Yeah. But it turns out that this is not what redeems him.
What redeems him is this kind of blinding moment that is summed up in the phrase, the road to Damascus. He has a vision of the risen Christ and is blinded by the descent on him of the spirit. And this marks him out as one of the elect. And Luther, when he is reading Paul, he gets overwhelmed by a similar consciousness of divine grace that God has chosen and loves him.
And Luther says off this moment, this feeling of being washed in the love of God, I felt I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. That thing of being born again, so influential is Luther the first person to use that particular phrase being born again. Well, see the person who popularises it, I should say. I think he popularises it.
I mean, the idea of being born again is in the Bible. That is what baptism gives you. But I think the idea that you can have this moment and be sure of it. So this is what's new.
So Alec Rirey, who is brilliant on this, on what it is that makes this a reformation moment so important. So it says that Luther's theology was not a doctrine. It was a love affair. So it's not about drawing abstract theological principles.
It's about articulating a feeling, an intensity of love. So all the time that Luther had dreading that he was unworthy of God's love, that he would be condemned by God's justice, that God hates him. This realization suddenly that God loves him and that God loves him in a way that transcends rubrics of you've done this and therefore you have to pay this penalty and you'll be in purgatory this stuff. That's not what it's about at all.
It's total. It's kind of intoxicating. It's beyond reason. And it comes to Luther, I think, partly through psychological impulses, kind of yearning for this love in the face of all the unhappiness that he's been feeling in trying to justify himself to God.
But as I say, it also comes from reading Paul and particularly one line. So there's a line in the letter that Paul writes to the Christians in the Church, the letter to the Romans. The righteous shall live through faith. And Luther understands this to mean the faith specifically that God loves you and that it doesn't matter if you're lost in.
Everyone is lost in. Humanity is so sinful that they can't through their own agency obtain the forgiveness of God. But it doesn't matter because if God loves you, then you exist in a state of grace. And the state of grace is the feeling that Christ is present in you, in your secret most heart.
And the certainty of that grace in turn gives you what Luther calls the peace of conscience. That all your anxiety about whether you're going to be redeemed or not is gone. And so you can have a kind of deep, profound spiritual joy and sense of certitude that essentially cuts the gaudia not of all the purgatory stuff, all the confession stuff, all the, am I going to go to heaven or not? And it's an incredible, I mean, it's a really, really kind of profound moment because it provides both a theological but more importantly, I think an emotional justification for getting rid of all the purgatory and clergy and pilgrimage and all that kind of stuff.
And it's not just that that stuff is wrong. It's positively sinful because it's blocking off a proper understanding to the Christian people of God's love. And so this is why Luther emphasizes the loneliness of the individual Christian before God. It is you alone with scripture, with faith.
You don't need anything else. Okay, so two things, Tom. Number one, if this is the case, why isn't this just a massive get out for, you know, you don't have to feel bad about your sins and stuff because God loves you. Everyone's sinful.
You know what? Everybody is sinful. The world is sinful. You crack on, you know, Philly boots.
This is the great debate and this is the great criticism of that kind of Protestant sense of election. Yeah, I mean, you put your finger up immediately. Secondly, what I would say thinking about the 2020s, a criticism that some people would have of the capital E enthusiasm of some activists, no matter what side they're on, is the tremendous sense of being puffed up with their own righteousness. You know, the certainty that some of us more skeptical find so obnoxious.
It's new for not conscious that other people will find his moral certainty, his sense of being saved. Oh, look at me. God loves me. Isn't that brilliant?
I mean, I love affair. Right. He's in a love affair. And when you're in a love affair, you don't care what other people think.
You only care about the person you're in love with. I mean, I think that that is it. Yeah, because of course the institutional criticism would be it's all about you, isn't it? Right.
This is very narcissistic. Well, it is, but it also, I mean, again, I think this is why it matters because it does feed into all kinds of intellectual trends that will emerge over the course of the centuries that follow. So again, to quote Rauri, the idea's initial impact was like that of Darwinism and Marxism in their own times. It was a concept that no one had thought of in quite those terms before, but it seemed to many people once they had grasped it to be self-evidently true.
So it's not just Luther. I mean, it's other people as well. Once they have this, then they can share in the love. But of course, it kind of turns on its head to the notion that everyone in Christendom is a Christian because what Luther is saying basically is that you have to have this feeling that God loves you, that you've been born again, that you've entered the gates of paradise, or you're not really a Christian.
Yeah. So the implication to turn of that is that only a tiny elect really are going to be saved. And although Luther does believe that the knowledge of God is imprinted on the soul of every human being, I mean, what he would call belief is the idea that you have an absolute conviction that your salvation has been granted to you. And this, of course, is a much, you know, it's a much rarer of bloom.
And so he basically, Luther ends up saying that maybe anyone in a thousand people rank as a Christian, a true Christian. Do you know, I should say that the other people are not. I'm very pleased with this. It's very little stress like maybe he should call them Chinos, Christians in name only.
Very good. I do like that. Yeah. Excellent.
And of course, the implication in turn of that is that say you live in a Protestant community, you can't just coast. I mean, you have to, you have to work out what you believe, the job of believing becomes something that is personal to you. You can't just leave it to the professional Christians. Yeah.
It's about your truth, right? Your truth. Yes. Living your truth.
This is where the idea of living your truth comes from. And of course, the reason why this breeds in the long run atheism and unbelief, as well as belief in God, is that you may just feel the sprains too great. You know, you try to believe and you don't. So again, I think this is why Luther stands at the head of the atheism that emerges in the West.
But partly because the atheism is all about you again, it's like, what do you think? Exactly. It's ignoring tradition and all that stuff. And so that's why humanists are patently the descendants of Luther.
Their truth is that they don't believe, but they don't believe in a very Lutheran way. Right. Yeah. And so that's what matters, that basically belief in that the sense that we today understand belief is being born here.
And because we're so habituated to it, we don't recognize how profound change is. Yeah, we don't see it. I mean, the word I would use is individualism. You're basically saying, are you not?
That pre-Luther, the idea of religious belief was collective, that you really ought to believe, and most people, what they personally thought didn't occur to them, most people, because they just assumed you would go along with what everybody else said to most. Yeah. And it's Luther who invents the idea or popularizes the idea that your relationship with the world of religion must be a personal one. So when people say, well, I don't know whether I believe in God, but I have a personal spirituality or whatever, that's Lutheran, because before him, no one would have ever thought to say that.
Is that right? Yeah. I mean, to go back to the COVID analogy where we're saying that in the pandemic, most people would content to rely on the epidemiologists to basically kind of tell them what to do. They had no reason to doubt it, to unbelief what they were saying.
Now it's as though, say during COVID, the vaccines will only work on those who absolutely and unshakeably believe that they will work. I mean, that's the shift, the change. But also, I guess, the idea that if you met with a group of friends, each of them would say, well, I have my own very personal beliefs about COVID. I mean, no one would say that.
I'd be mad to say. And so this in the long run is the problem, but Luther doesn't recognize it at this point, but he thinks that there is only one way of understanding it. Right. And he frames it, I think, as a single blinding moment, a reformation moment, because in a way, that does make it more personal.
It does imply that rather than something that he's worked out over a long period of time, it's a single blinding moment of revelation that enables him properly to understand God. And then people call his tower experience, like he was shut up in a tower thinking about something. Yeah. So he gives a range of accounts of how he came by this moment later in life.
So one of them, he's in the Clowaker, so the Shitter. And so, you know, we've talked about this in the previous episode. Tom, if I had a flipping pound for every time, you, you know, so he's on the toilet. Right.
And what he's doing there is that he is appropriating the dimension of the devil, i.e. Exquinent and filth, to God. OK. You know, later in life, he will say, and again, you know, apologies to people listening, but when he avows his faith in Christ, he says, if that is not enough for you, you devil addressing Satan.
I have also shattered and pissed, wipe your mouth on that and take a hearty bite of it. You don't hear that from any theologians these days, do you? But essentially what he's saying is that even the dimension of Satan Christ is to be found there. Christ can purify everything.
But you're right. The other famous account he gives is that he's in a tower in the monastery at Vittenberg. And do you think he means that metaphorically? It's so debated.
I don't think we'll ever know. OK. And I mean, again, he also gives various accounts as to when it happens. So he specifically gives the data 1519.
So that's two years after the 95 thesis of God. So Richard Rex and his book, I think very convincingly argues that it happened early in 1518. So just after he's put it up. And I think that this is what gives him the courage to do what he does to defy the papacy.
Because in the summer of 1518, Rome concludes that they are heretical. And on the 7th of August, news reaches Luther in Vittenberg that he is summoned to Rome. And he knows that this is a summons that is likely to end up with him being burnt at the stage. Oh, Luther is facing certain death or is he?
Return after the break to find out what happens to him. The papacy sent the 95 theses by the local Archbishop had pondered them for eight months before finally pronouncing in August 1518 that they were indeed heretical. The author had been summoned to Rome. Yet this far from settling the matter served only to stoke the flames further already in Vittenberg.
Writings by the local Inquisitor had been ceremonially burned in the market square. Kiatan, tracking events from his residence in Hausberg, fretted the bushfires of controversy were increasingly out of control. As papal legged, it was his urgent responsibility to stamp them out. The best and most Christian way to do this, he decided, was to summon the troublesome author of the 95 theses to Hausberg and persuade him in person to recant.
Osteer, learned and devout. Kiatan was a man who even those normally suspicious of inquisitors knew that they could trust. His invitation was duly accepted. On the 7th of October, 1518, Martin Luther arrived in Augsburg.
So this is the moment, Tom from Dan Brown or Tom Hollens book Dominion, your own book, when Luther, a man whose writings have been condemned as heretical comes face to face with a prince of the church and inquisitor, the cardinal. Yeah, who has the power over him. Does he not? I mean, Luther's life hangs in the balance here.
Is that too strong? Yeah. Not Tom because basically Luther has been given a safe passage. Yeah.
But yeah, I mean, in the long run, absolutely. I mean, this is incredibly high stakes. And particularly because Hirtan in so many ways has been bodyman to everything that Luther is rejecting. So he is someone who's devoted his life to the study of all kind of the philosophy and the medieval understanding of God that Luther is rejecting.
But he is absolutely, I mean, he's a very impressive man, very serious, very moral. He's actually head of the Dominicans. And although we've been framing Dominicans as the baddies in the story, you know, Tetsul is a Dominican. Right.
Of course, the Dominicans elsewhere are behaving very well. So we think of friends that show Bartolomay de Las Casas, the Dominican in the new world, who is standing up for the rights of the Indians, as he would call them out there. Yeah. And Kaitan is appalled by what he's being told about how the Spanish are behaving in the new world.
And he actually meets the Spaniard and he says to him, do you not doubt that your king is in hell? Correct. So he is a morally impressive man. He's not one of your corrupt gardeners.
He's not a sinister evil. The kind that poisons an unery. And he's an Italian, right? He's from Geita.
Hence the name. Yeah. So hence his name. So his real name is Tomasso de Vio.
And he names his after-master, after Thomas Aquinas, who is the greatest of the medieval theologians. Yeah. Devotee of Aristotle. And the guy that Luther hates.
And the person who Luther particularly hates, absolutely. But as well as being a churchman, he's also a very, very skillful diplomat. Despite the fact that he gets read, it's something that's Spanish king. And so he's been sent to Axberg not specifically to meet Luther, but to try and coordinate crusade against the Turks, who were starting to really move into the Balkans at this point.
So this is fascinating, isn't it? So we talked last time, didn't we? A couple of episodes ago about how the Ottomans had captured Constanza in open in 1453. And absolutely unbelievably shocking moments for Christendom.
So they take Algiers in 1516, they're sort of spreading through the Mediterranean. But they're going to capture Belgrade in 1521. Yeah. So they're preparing for a big campaign against Belgrade this very summer.
Then they crush Hungary five years later. Yeah. And then by the end of the 1520s, they are going to be at the gates of Vienna. So really, within striking distance of Germany.
Yes, I mean, yeah. And remember that we talked about Johann Hilton, the monk in Eisenberg, where Luther was at school, who, you know, he supposedly wrote prophecy in his own blood. And he had prophesied that Germany would be conquered by the Turks and that this would herald the coming of the apocalypse. Now, Kaitan is absolutely against this.
The papacy is not in favor of the idea that the apocalypse is threatening. And in fact, in 1513, a council in the latter in palace in Rome had specifically prohibited preaching the imminence of the Antichrist. But of course, Luther is all over this, not least because Hilton, this prophetic monk, had foretold that a great prophet would emerge in 1516, which is close enough to 1517. Believer to think that it might actually be him.
And just on that apocalyptic thing, Tom, you and I know, and everyone listening to this, knows that the Ottomans didn't get into central and western Europe. Well, they didn't get beyond Hungary. They didn't take Vienna. They didn't get into Germany.
But nobody knows that then. I mean, the whole Luther story surely only makes sense if you think that this is a society that thinks it is facing imminent invasion, occupation, for stamping out of Christianity, whatever, that there's this incredible sense of existential dreads that hangs over the whole story. Yeah. And this really ties Captain's hands in dealing with Luther because we mentioned that the Emperor Maximilian is fading and he wants to ensure that his grandson, Charles, will succeed him as Emperor.
And this obviously gives an honest part of Frederick. Luther's defender and protector as an elector. Yeah. Because it's not a done deal that a Habsburg will succeed.
It could be somebody else. No, it's not a done deal. I think the key thing is that Charles wants to be elected unanimously. Right.
And Frederick is keeping his cards close to his chest and not saying who he is going to vote for. And so that means that, care time if he's to get a kind of united front against the Turks, he can't afford to alienate Frederick. And this is why Frederick is able to persuade Kirtan to meet Luther in Axburg rather than have him sent to Rome. Right.
Again, Luther is very, very lucky about this. So he's lucky, but of course he also has this incredible ability to seize the limelight. And so again, he goes to Axburg on foot, kind of playing the humble man of God as opposed to the splendor and pomp of Kirtan as a kind of prince of the church. Kirtan welcomes him very gently.
He's kind of playing the part of a father speaking to a son trying to persuade him of the error of his ways. But they have three meetings and everyone's in the meetings. Kirtan loses it more and more. He gets more and more cross.
His voice goes up higher and higher. Because he realizes very, very quickly that what's at stake is not the details of the 95 theses. It's about essentially who has authority in the Christian world. And to Kirtan, it seems so evident who does.
It's the church, it's the Catholic church. It always has done. It always will. I mean, to question that is just unspeakable.
But Luther is questioning that. He's questioning the papacy. He's questioning. Can in law, he's questioning.
You know, all the philosophy derived from Aristotle, all of it. And Luther is arguing that all that really matters is the Bible, solar scriptura, scripture alone. Yeah. And he says to Kirtan, the pope is not above, but under the word of God.
And Kirtan can't believe it. He can't believe that he is arguing with this obscure monk who is making this case and refusing to accept the majesty of the teachings of the church. So to use an analogy that you've used previously in the podcast and the series, it is the equivalent of an incredibly distinguished scientist. You know, one of the world's great scientists suddenly finding that he's got to have a debate with somebody who not merely doesn't come anywhere near him in eminence, but says, I don't really believe in your science and is kind of ripping it down to the foundations and saying he doesn't accept everything that scientists and his colleagues hate for granted.
But I suppose the difference would be that this person who's opposing the professor would have a basic grounding that would enable him to argue his case because Luther is saying, you know, disprove me, go to the Bible and prove to me that the pope should have this and that Aristotle is right on that or whatever. Yeah. And that's a problem for him, right? That is a problem.
And Kirtan comes back and says, yes, but this is, you know, this is the majesty of the church, this is tradition, I embody it. And Luther says, you know, my conscience is more important to me than what you're saying. Yeah. And here he is making the plea for conscience, which again, is so important to the way that I think people in the modern West understand the basis for what they do, you know, their moral underpinnings.
But again, it is Luther who is taking the step and foregrounding conscience as something that is more important than anything else really. And so you can see why Kirt completely loses his rag and tells Luther to go away. And so, you know, only come back if you, if you're prepared to recant and Luther isn't. And so what happens is that Staupitz, who is the head of the Augustinians in Germany, the guy who'd originally made Luther professor at Vittenberg, he releases Luther from his vows.
And so that means he's no longer part of the Augustinians. And so Luther is now, you know, he feels he's alone, but to be alone for Luther is liberating. It brings you closer to God. And so he, he displays his love of God by writing two unbelievably rude letters, one that he sends the care down one to the Pope.
And then he clambers over the city walls of Axburg and he scars back to Vittenberg. So he's been kicked out of the Augustinians, has that affected what's happened? I think it's been a mutually agreed separation. Right.
Because Staupitz thinks, I don't need this hassle. You know, this is embarrassing. Yeah, he doesn't want his order and himself personally to be dragged down into the kind of the magic mix of all this stuff that's going on. Right.
I think it would be best for the reputation of the order, Marta. But, you know, already, this kind of concern with what institutions will think is starting to look very retro because Luther again is broadcasting his perspective. Right. And because it's more interesting, it gets far more attention.
So he gets back to Vittenberg and he writes up an account of his encounter with K-A-tan. And he says, please heaven that I should become the talk of the people. Nice. Which is tremendous humble bragging.
Yeah. And of course K-A-tan, he's not going to broadcast an account of what he did. So Luther is like someone who has masses of social media accounts. And K-A-tan is like someone who doesn't even have an email address.
And it means that Luther can dominate the terms of the debate. But you compared Luther to Jordan Peterson. Of course, Jordan Peterson provokes massive counter-reaction. Yeah.
I mean, he doesn't have it all his own way. You know, he's endlessly being abused. No. And so the same thing starts to happen to Luther.
But Luther is not the only person who is able to use the printing press. There are other people as well. There are other people with a sense of occasion. And one of them is a former colleague, a friend of Luther's, a man called Johann Eck.
And Eck is appalled by where Luther is going and challenges him to a debate. And again, this is very 21st century, isn't it? Yeah. That is what happened now.
Richard Dawkins meeting with the bishop, appearing on the Joe Rogan show or something like that. Yeah, absolutely. It's that kind of thing. And Eck challenges Luther to a debate.
Luther agrees and he'll go with Carl Schnatt, the chancellor of Edinburgh University, who's kind of rallying behind Luther. And actually ends up being more radical than Luther, doesn't he? He gets so excited by Luther's message. Yeah, he does.
He does. He'll come to that. And Luther accepts the invitation to go to Leipzig. But this turns out to be a bad mistake.
So rather like if you're an invite on Joe Rogan as an epidemiologist to debate someone who is skeptical of faxes. Yeah. You know, you're not hiding to nothing because the venue will be against you. And Leipzig is the other Saxony, isn't it?
Duke or Saxony, not electoral. So it's genuine. He is rival territory. Yes.
And the Duke, Georg is buried in the Vatican very hostile to Luther. Yeah. So it's unfriendly territory for Luther. And Leipzig gets there and he's furious because the people of Leipzig have given Eck a very fancy coat gown and they haven't given him one.
So he's in an almost drop about this. Right. And Eck is a very good debater and very good at publicizing himself. And he is able to get Luther publicly to confess to a whole staggering array of heresy.
So he gets Luther to go publicly on record as saying that the authority of the Pope does not have the sanction of Scripture, that poetry doesn't, that Jan Hus, the Prague heretic who had been burned to the stake in 1414 had been right on all kinds of issues. Yeah, that's massive. It's got Hendrix, I think, in his book on Luther says, Luther actually says, many of Hus's beliefs were completely Christian. And that's like saying Enoch was right.
You know, isn't it? I mean, it's sort of, it's tainting yourself in the eyes of the Orthodox beyond redemption. Yeah. And it's the kind of thing that can happen, say, on a Twitter spat that, you know, people can get so crossed that they end up saying things that they really come to regret.
Yes. So Karlstadt actually, he compares good works, so giving arms or whatever. Yeah. To menstrual filth.
Yeah, that's very strong. Which again, that's not the kind of thing that you want to have on your Twitter feed. And on good works, we can't massively get bogged down on that right away because that's a very big issue. But that is a huge part of kind of everyday piety, isn't it?
That you're expected to do a whole range of like, give a bit of money here and down a chantry there. You know, to a lot of people, that is the essence of their religious life. It's like being kind publicly, but with money, basically, isn't it? Well, just giving money to a beggar and you're being told, well, this is menstrual filth.
Yeah. Yeah. Can't. Oh, maybe put it like that.
Yeah. I'd be offended to put it that way. So this is basically why it's generally accepted that Luther and Karlstadt had lost. Right.
So it's not a real run. This doesn't matter because it's not what's actually said in the debate that counts, but how it is presented. And although, he's very good at debating and although he does understand the importance of self publicity, you know, he's nowhere compared to Luther. And basically, I mean, ex reputation gets annihilated by Luther and by his followers.
So he gets satirized as a lecher, as a drunkard kind of satas on him, a publisher that show him flying on a goat that then gets showered and shit. He's shown his employment, which he ends up being castrated. He ends up being castrated. Exactly.
Come on, Simon, it's coming. The issue, cartoon showing him as a pig. And he just becomes a kind of public object of ritual in the way that someone being once stood on social media might be today. And he's really the first victim of modern social media, you might say.
And Linda Raper says of his victory that it ultimately doesn't matter because it was not interesting. Whereas Luther's campaign was interesting in court people's attention. Well, it is thrilling because again, he's now going full tilt. And week after week, he's coming out with ever more brilliant kind of heresies, shocking, thrilling heresies.
And he can do this basically because now he's no longer a monk, he's not bound to a nasty routine. So he can just spend his whole time on the equivalent of computer firing out, got a mess of this and things. And actually, like someone waking up going on Twitter abusing people, replying to abuse, he spends a lot of his time replying to people who were sending him abuse. And so he's very kind of Trumpy and he invents nicknames for his enemies.
So Eck is that fool, the pope, that wolf. But he's also writing a series of brilliant treatises. And I think he's feeling, you know, I might as well hang for sheep as a lamb. I'm going full in.
And so by this point, he's thinking that it's not enough just to reform the church, the whole thing has just got to be pulled down. And he starts to broadcast this message and he is dominating the discourse in a way that no one had ever done before. So Alec Riber gives this incredible statistic that over the course of the 1520s, Luther was responsible for over a fifth of the entire output of pamphlets by German presses. Yeah.
And at this point in 1519, it's even more because other people aren't catching up with him. So it's basically saturation bombing of his opponents. And by the time that Luther gets that bull, that papable of excommunication on the 10th of December, 1520, there is very little about the Catholic church that he has not gone for. So he has attacked priestly celibacy because there's no scriptural sanction for it.
And he says the pope has little power to command this as he has to forbid, eating, drinking, growing fat or the natural movement of the bowels. Bowels again. So both of you and Martin Luther obsessed with this issue. I'm only obsessed by them because Luther is to be fair.
OK. He attacks the cult of the saints. He attacks pilgrimages. He attacks masses for the dead.
He writes traitees on the Babylonian captivity of the church that openly identifies the pope with anti-Christ. An opponent of his, a guy called Thomas Murna, is so appalled by this that he decides to translate it directly into German before Luther can and put it out thinking that Luther will be condemned in his own words. Oh no. And everyone just goes brilliant.
Yeah. That's fantastic. And Luther inevitably gives Murna an abusive name. So Murna in German is meow.
So like cat and is idiot. That's very Trumpian, isn't it's. Yeah, it's because he calls him meow idiot. And he goes on to reject, you know, this foundational idea of the 11th century reformation.
The idea that clergy and laity are separate. And he says, no, not at all. So he phrases it very memorably. Christian man is a perfectly free Lord of all and subject to none.
A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all. And that is to dissolve the traditional boundaries between clergy and laity. He's basically stripping everything away and saying it's just got to be what's in the Bible about Jesus. So just to quote, Rosa is pilgrimages, the worship of saints, masses, monkery.
There was nothing here about Christ. People should trust in nothing but Jesus Christ alone. So in other words, the whole paraphernalia. The whole shebang.
There's one other aspect to this one. So one of the things he writes, he writes three big works doesn't he that year. One of them is the Babylonian captivity, but another one is the address to the Christian ability of the German nation. And that later on is seen as a key text in the development of German nationalism, even though the concept makes no sense for somebody in Luther's day.
Do you think there is a very, very early kind of proto nationalism, the sort of resentment of the foreign pro let over the Alps in Italy with all his gardenals and we, honest Germans, have been kicked around for too long. Is there a bit of that? Definitely. Luther really feels his Germanness and it's part of what he dislikes about the papacy.
Okay. So it's a very important ability towards Italians. It's a bit like hostility to the EU in Britain. Right.
It's that kind of thing. Russell's bureaucrats, foreigners, who cares what they say. That's a can be a crats pushing us around. Yeah, that kind of thing.
Yeah. Because that was there a little bit with Jan Huss writing in Czech in Baimia, wasn't it? There's a sort of very early sensibility. And so again, I mean, this is intoxicating.
So this is also part of the mix that is fueling support for Luther. The opportunity to dislike foreigners is always, love it. It's always kind of fun because people enjoy that. And so I think that's why when it's not just in Wittenberg that the papal ball is treated with contempt, so even in Leipzig where that beta tapened and Luther hadn't covered himself in glory, the bull is ripped to shreds and smeared with let's call it excrement.
Okay. You know, the reformation is very, very excremental. I wanted to go there again, but you actually you held back very unlike you. And that goes out and tries to post it and a whole gang of children just pull it down.
And they all follow echorathans singing abusive songs about him. And a gang of 50 students comes from Wittenberg and they kind of, you know, they chase him and abuse him. So I mean, it's a kind of literal monstering. Right.
So the whole of Germany is on fire with this. But you know, I mean, Luther is not out of the woods at all because if Germany is on fire, the risk is that Luther himself may soon literally be on fire. Yes. Very good.
Because on the 3rd of January, 1521, he is formally excommunicated. And the question now is, what does that mean? And all eyes now turn to the figure of the emperor who is no longer Maximilian because by this point he is dead and his grandson, who's a rather gorgi teenager called Charles has indeed succeeded him. Yeah.