This system had worked for centuries. But in 1517, when that professor, Martin Luther, challenged Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, his challenge instead kindled a series of increasingly uncontrollable wildfires that swept away many of the Catholic Church’s ancient structures and its walls. We call this firestorm the Reformation and the new form, or forms, of Christianity that emerged from it, Protestantism.
This was not what Luther had intended. When he voiced his local protest, he was not trying to start a fire. He was working out the implications of his own recent spiritual breakthrough and trying to start an argument about it. It turned out that those implications reached much further than either he or his opponents initially imagined. Once the smoke began to clear, they were forced to realize that they were in a new world.
With hindsight, we can see that Luther’s fire caught because fuel had been quietly building up for some time. The principal fuel was desire for reform of the Church.
Churches always need reform. They are staffed by human beings, some of whom will inevitably be fools, knaves, or merely incompetents. The Church of the later Middle Ages was no more “corrupt” than usual, and in many ways much less so. Yet three problems converged to make it appear worse than it was: money, power, and high principle.
The Western Church was very rich. It had to be; it was responsible for a continental network of parish priests, church buildings, and monastic houses, supported by an international bureaucracy of unparalleled sophistication, and these things do not come cheap. It had to preserve its political independence in a dangerous world, which meant choosing leaders of royal and noble stock. These were men – and some women, the great abbesses – whose dignity and effectiveness in their offices depended on maintaining the high courtly style to which they had been born.
Yet this was also an age that actively valued poverty, lauding it as a positive virtue like no Christian society before or since. The ideal late medieval cleric was a friar, who was forbidden even to touch money and who was supposed not even to own the rough clothes on his back. The contrast between that ideal and the Church’s corporate wealth was disturbing. Surely all that money must be corrupting? Once, as a rueful proverb had it, golden priests had served from wooden chalices; now wooden priests served from golden chalices. Every time the Church extracted rents, tithes, or other payments from its flock, it fed a resentment that went beyond ordinary taxpayers’ grumbles. And when there were real or perceived financial abuses, the gap between high ideals and sordid reality yawned dangerously wide. Martin Luther was a friar as well as a professor. When a man in his position accused the Church of moneygrubbing, people were ready to listen.
Then there was power. Back in the eleventh century, the popes had wriggled free from political control and established a vigilantly guarded independence. By the fifteenth century, they had quietly dropped some of their more startling claims. In theory, they were lords of Christendom, able to depose kings and demand universal obedience, but they knew not to push their luck. They had never really recovered from the ghastly schism of 1378–1417, when Europe was split between first two and then three rival popes. The schism was ended by a great reforming Church council, which seemed to promise an era of renewal – a hope that slowly evaporated over the following decades, leaving a residue of bitterness. By 1500, virtually all Western Christians acknowledged the papacy, but they were not proud of it. Eye-popping tales were told about Pope Alexander VI (1492–1503), Rodrigo Borgia, who in 1501 supposedly held an orgy in the papal apartments for his son, to which he invited fifty chosen prostitutes and select senior clerics. True or not, it was widely believed.
Inadequate leadership and financial corruption make a dangerous mix. All the more so in “Germany”, the vast, north-central European territories that fell loosely under the so-called Holy Roman Emperor. The rivalry between popes and emperors was ancient, and as the papal court became dominated almost exclusively by Italians after the schism, it seemed increasingly foreign north of the Alps. National stereotypes came into play. Germans were, in their own minds, bluff, honest, easily duped, but firm in the defence of the right. Italians, by contrast, were scheming, malevolent, effeminate, avaricious, and cowardly. So when a German friar accused Italians of extortion and tyranny, German ears were ready to hear him.
There was also a matter of principle at stake. As well as some memorable popes, the Renaissance gave Western Christendom a slogan: ad fontes, “to the sources”, an urge to return to the ancient, and therefore pure, founts of truth. By 1500, this fashion for antiquity was sweeping into every field of knowledge. Renaissance linguists tried to recover the glories of Cicero. Renaissance generals tried, with dubious success, to remodel their armies as Roman legions. The problem with the ancient world was that it happened a long time ago, and reconstructing it involved guesswork. But late medieval Europeans never doubted that it had been a world of pristine perfection. They measured their own age against that imagined ideal. Inevitably, it fell short. And so the most devastating critiques of the late medieval Church came not from the discontented or marginalized but from within: from powerful establishment figures who believed in an ideal Church and who would not hide their disappointment with the reality. They wanted to renew the Church, not destroy it.
Leading these critics was the age’s intellectual colossus, Erasmus of Rotterdam, a brilliant, sharp-tongued, penny-pinching, peripatetic monk who combined a deliberately simple piety, an acid wit and a finely judged sense of when and with whom to pick a fight. The wit was displayed in his satire The Praise of Folly (1509), which told his readers that almost every aspect of the world they lived in was ridiculous. The piety and shrewdness were seen in his pathbreaking 1516 Latin translation of the New Testament from the original Greek. Its preface recommended that the Bible be made available in all languages so that it could be read even by those on the very extremes of Christian civilization: the wild Scots, the Irish, even – he strained himself – women. Characteristically, he wrote that dangerous preface in Latin. He knew what he could get away with. He also knew that the content of his New Testament mattered less than the fact of its existence. He was offering the chance to use the Bible to judge the Church.1
The Church’s old guard was duly provoked. Erasmus himself always stayed on the right side of trouble, but others were less careful and more vulnerable. The great cause célèbre of early sixteenth-century Germany was Johannes Reuchlin, a pioneer of Christian Hebrew scholarship. Unfortunately, the only people who could teach Christians Hebrew were Jews, and late medieval Christians generally hated and despised Jews. Reuchlin, however, both was openly friendly with certain Jews and acknowledged his debt to Jewish biblical scholarship. Inevitably, he was denounced for crypto-Judaism, which the Church regarded as heresy. His denouncer, with grim irony, was a Jewish convert to Christianity. German Renaissance scholars rallied to his defence, viciously mocking his opponents as self-serving obscurantists. For them, this was a war between fearless, cutting-edge German scholarship and corrupt, ignorant Italian power politics. The court case dragged on until 1516, and even then it was merely suspended; Reuchlin was never formally cleared. In the court of public opinion, however, the new scholarship was triumphantly vindicated, and the brethren sharpened their pens in readiness for the next skirmish. Enter Martin Luther.
Martin Luther was the Reformation’s indispensable firestarter. Would there have been a Reformation if young Martin had followed his father’s wishes and become a lawyer? Who knows, but the Reformation as it actually happened is unimaginable without him.
Luther does not fit the stereotype of a great Christian revolutionary. He never held high office, and he remained professor of theology at the University of Wittenberg to the end of his life, squeezing his revolution in between his regular lectures. He was not a man of heroic virtues. He was grouchy, obstinate, and an unabashed sensualist, from his boisterous, flirtatious, and deeply affectionate marriage to his well-documented fondness for Saxon beer. In later life, he was frankly fat, and for most of his life he struggled with constipation. Fittingly enough, his religion was a matter less of the mind than of the heart and the gut. Spiritually