Protestants: The Radicals Who Made the Modern World. Alec Ryrie

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СКАЧАТЬ a knack for unforgettable images and analogies and a sense of paradox that made his arguments seem almost irrefutable. He could do it in Latin, like a good scholar, but he could also do it wonderfully in German, seizing his readers by the throat and pulling them into the debate.

      The new technology of print had found its first master. Printing with movable type was over sixty years old by this time. The industry seemed fairly mature, mostly producing hefty legal, medical, or liturgical texts for which there were steady, predictable markets. Luther stumbled into a new literary form, the mass-market pamphlet – short, cheap, quickly produced in large numbers. A pamphlet cost roughly the same as a hen in sixteenth-century Germany and could offer more lasting and spicier nourishment. These tiny books could reach a mass audience in a completely unprecedented way. Printers who caught the wave made fortunes. Luther’s books changed the rules of religious debate, which was meant to be a game for educated elites, played in universities in the decent obscurity of Latin. Luther flung open the gates. Now anyone who could read German, or who knew someone who could read German, could join in. Already, Protestantism was breaking down walls.

      Luther’s literary achievement has no parallels in the whole of human history. If that seems an extravagant claim, consider the figures. During his thirty-year public career, Luther produced 544 separate books, pamphlets, or articles, slightly more than one every three weeks. At his peak, in 1523, he managed 55. That year, 390 separate editions of his books, new and old, were published. Luther alone was responsible for over a fifth of the entire output of pamphlets by German presses during the 1520s. One scholar has totted up the totals for his rivals and supporters and concluded that the top seventeen pro-Luther pamphleteers produced 807 editions between them during the years 1518–25, whereas Luther alone produced 1,465, nearly twice as many as all the rest put together.⁴ No revolutionary leader in modern history has, without the aid of censorship or state backing, towered over a mass movement to the extent Martin Luther did.

      Luther’s opponents were left gasping. “Every day it rains Luther books,” wrote one horrified churchman in 1521. “Nothing else sells.” During those same seven years, barely 300 editions of anti-Luther works were published in Germany. The printers of these books complained that they “cannot even be given away”. More than half were in Latin, not even trying to reach a mass audience (only a fifth of Luther’s editions were in Latin). Orthodoxy’s defenders were entirely unprepared for the storm of print that had engulfed them. Who can blame them? No one had ever seen anything like this before. In some ways, no one ever would again.⁵

      Even so, it should have blown over. The Church had absorbed and co-opted mass movements before. If so many Christians found Luther’s ideas appealing, surely, with a little house-training, they could be welcomed into the fold?

      For decades afterwards, plenty of Catholic Christians hoped and worked for reconciliation. From a modern perspective, it remains a tantalizing what-if. Was the whole thing just a ghastly misunderstanding? For myself, I suspect not. Luther’s ideas were so radical that a Catholic Church that conceded them would have turned itself inside out. And Luther himself was never amenable to being house-trained. But he could, perhaps, have been outflanked and isolated, if his opponents had been wily and farsighted enough to poach some of his ideas.

      Instead, they tried to face him down. He had launched his protest in October 1517 with a short set of “theses”: bullet-point statements summarizing his views. It was a standard way of starting an academic debate, and Luther had done it many times before on different subjects. In this case, there were ninety-five theses, and the subject was the sale of indulgences: documents in which the Church promised to bestow God’s grace in recognition of a charitable gift. A great many thoughtful Christians reckoned that the indulgence trade stank, so much so that sales were dropping and the indulgence sellers were forced to redouble their efforts and coarsen their rhetoric. Luther had been preaching against indulgences since the start of the year. His October theses might or might not, as legend has it, have been nailed to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg.⁶ More to the point, he sent a copy to Archbishop Albrecht, the sponsor and one of the chief beneficiaries of the current indulgence campaign.

      It was a challenge that could not be ignored, and because Luther refused to back down, the argument steadily escalated. A series of set-piece debates between Luther and increasingly formidable theological opponents took place during 1518 and 1519. They settled nothing. Luther, in fact, found them intensely frustrating. He wanted to talk about God’s grace, true repentance, and how nitpicking legalism was rendered meaningless by Christ’s astonishing gift of salvation. But his opponents would not let him. From the beginning, they accused him of questioning superiors to whom he ought instead to submit. There were crude financial considerations at work; by attacking indulgences, Luther was threatening a major income stream. There were also institutional rivalries: the Dominican friars, watchdogs of orthodoxy, distrusted Luther’s modish Augustinian order. After the first debate, in 1518, Luther was summoned to Rome to answer charges of heresy. He did not go. After the second, the pope required Luther, as a matter of obedience, to accept the official line on indulgences. Again Luther refused, insisting that the pope needed to produce arguments, not commands. The establishment had decided that this was a matter for lawyers, not theologians. But if there was one thing Luther’s theology opposed, it was law.⁷

      Most of us, in Luther’s place, would have crumbled. Perhaps from prudence: a charge of heresy is not a game. Or from conscience: when the Church, Christ’s representative on earth, commands us to be silent, who are we to disagree? But Luther rejoiced in rejecting prudence, and his conscience was marching to a different beat. During 1518 and 1519, he discovered in himself an epochal, adamantine stubbornness. The more he was assaulted, the more firmly he took root.

      At the third debate, a full-scale scholarly disputation at Leipzig in 1519, he faced the ablest theological opponent of his life, Johann Eck of Ingolstadt. Eck, who had no real hope that Luther would concede, aimed to unmask him as a heretic. He pursued the apparent points of agreement between Luther and the Czech theologian Jan Hus, who had been executed for heresy in 1415. Eventually, he forced Luther to concede and indeed to trumpet that he, too, held the beliefs for which Hus had been condemned.

      Still Luther did not budge. If what he believed was incompatible with what the Church had decreed, then, he insisted, the Church must be wrong. To his opponents, this was almost comically grotesque. Luther was choosing his own frail opinion over the collective weight of the whole Church, guided through the ages by the Holy Spirit. It was a textbook example of heresy: wilful disobedience. But to Luther, it was a liberation. If the Church’s most authoritative decrees could be wrong, there was no longer anything that could separate him from the love of God. Only now did he realize how far he must go. Eck had succeeded in pushing Luther out of the Church, but the result was not quite what he had intended. If 1517 was the beginning of the Luther scandal, 1519 was the real birth of Protestantism.

      Luther, now outed as a plain heretic, should have been arrested and dealt with. He was saved by politics. Rome had more pressing concerns than this squabble between German friars. The Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian I, had been dying for years and doing so unconscionably slowly. Since 1514, he had taken a coffin with him everywhere he travelled. Long before he finally died in January 1519, plans were being laid for the contest to follow. For the imperial title was not hereditary; it was elected, chosen by seven senior German princes and bishops. Since 1440, the electors had chosen members of Austria’s Habsburg dynasty, but there was nothing to stop them from choosing someone else, and this time there was a good reason to do so: the Habsburg candidate, the eighteen-year-old Charles, was also king of Spain and of the Netherlands. The prospect of one man’s controlling such a vast set of territories was alarming, not least to the pope. The king of France was a realistic rival. Even Henry VIII of England was considered. The looming election overshadowed everything.

      It just so happened that one of the seven electors was Frederick of Saxony, Luther’s local prince and the founder of the University of Wittenberg. Frederick’s relationship with Luther was an odd one. The two men СКАЧАТЬ