Dan Snow's History Hit - Martin Luther: Scourge of the Papacy

Episode Date: May 23, 2021

Martin Luther is one of the most extraordinary and consequential men of the last 500 years but was also a man keenly aware of his image and went to considerable efforts to craft how the world saw him. This affected how he was viewed both in his own life and centuries later in ours. Dan is joined by Oxford University's Regius Professor of History Lyndal Roper; she is one of the world's foremost experts on Luther and has recently published Living I Was Your Plague: Martin Luther's World and Legacy which explores this aspect of the man who shook Western Christendom to its very core. 

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We've been building up to this because today we have Oxford University's

Regis Professor of History on the pod. Professor Lyndall Roper. She is as engaging as she is brilliant. She is the world's greatest expert on Martin Luther, and she was lauded for her giant book on Luther a couple of years ago. She's written a follow-up to that huge biography of Luther called Living I Was Your Plague, about how Martin Luther crafted his own image and how he was portrayed in his own time and how we continue to see him now. He's one of the most extraordinary men in the last 500 years of European history and probably most consequential. So enjoy this pod. If you want to watch programs about the 16th century, the place to do that, I can tell you, is at historyhit.tv.

You head over there. It's like Netflix for history. You sign up like tens of thousands of other people have been doing. We're so grateful because we're out there making better and better programs all the time because of you guys subscribing. You sign up historyhit.tv and you get access to the world's best history channel. So thank you. Thank you for everyone doing that. In the meantime, please enjoy this conversation with Lyndall Roper.

Lyndall, this is very exciting having you on the podcast. Thank you for coming on. Thank you for asking me. I'm delighted to be here. You shot to global fame with your enormous biography of Martin Luther a few years ago, and you've been working on him ever since. We've moved away from great man theories of history. Does he count as like an example of actually great men that did move the needle? I think he does. Yes, I think he is someone who had quite extraordinary courage. And it's interesting, actually, because we're in the month that is the 500th anniversary of his appearance at the Diet of Worms. And I think really, that is the thing that really made Luther famous and is the most extraordinary thing to have done. Because in front of the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire,

and in front of the assembled estates of that empire, he was asked to recant and he refused. And it's this wonderful dramatic scene where he first asks for time to think about it. So huge anticlimax because Luther won't say one way or the other. They all go back. Then they reassemble the next day and he says, no, these are the books I wrote and I can't go against the word of God. And he says, or so it's claimed, here I stand, I can do

no other, may God help me, amen. And I think it's not even just the theology, but the resonance of the courage of being able to do that, of risking your life and insisting on what you believe in the face of all the greatest authorities in the land. Well, this is my undergraduate question here coming up. So there had been movements, countless heresies, so-called, in Western Christianity, Catholicism over the centuries. You've got the Lollards here in England. So was something like this kind of inevitable? Or was it just because when Luther was at university and everyone was whoring and drinking beer and he just saw the kind of hypocrisy, the whole thing, if everyone

hadn't been whoring and drinking beer, might he have never have left that monastery, a good Augustinian monk? Well, how do we know? I think certainly he's someone who's tortured by his conscious, by his wanting to be as good a monk as possible. But he didn't do all of this on his own. And I think the thing that's funny about Luther is the thing that's funny about Luther is he's also someone who sets things up very carefully and he takes a great risk and he is very courageous but it just so happens that his best friend is Georg Spalatin who is the key guy at the court of the elector Frederick the Wise. And so Spallatin is in a position to get the elector to protect Luther, and Luther knows this, and they're corresponding very carefully throughout this time. So it isn't something that was just his act. It involved a lot of friendships, a lot of very careful positioning. And you can also see how Luther is creating his own image very early on.

Let's do some of the chronology. What's the key phase we need to be thinking about in Luther's career? Is it when he has a sort of, would you call it a midlife crisis? I don't know. He goes into that monastery in Erfurt and it looks like he's almost retreating from the world. And this story is going to peter out. Is this the key phase or is it what comes next? It's what comes next. That's certainly very important in his understanding of his own life, because it also is a moment of huge disobedience to his father's wishes. And I understand Luther. The key thing

about him is he comes from a mining background. So he's grown up in this really very rough world in Mansfeld, where his father is a mine owner. which isn't like most of the cities, the elegant cities, Renaissance cities that we think about in the early 16th century in Germany. This is somewhere quite different where you would have been well aware of the smells of the wood, all the wagons bringing in the fuel. You would have been aware of mining and the mess that it leaves, the slag heaps, the way that you use slag to actually wash and to heat your home. So he's growing up in a really rough world where his father is boss over many men who are doing the mining work. So it's also a world where you really have to defend yourself with your fists if necessary and where there's no security. There's no definite ownership of the mine.

It all depends on the will of the local ruler and where what keeps it together are family networks and marriage strategies. networks and marriage strategies. So when Luther says, hey, I'm going to be a monk, it's not just, hey, I've had this huge personal experience where I've been saved and so I've got to fulfill my vow and go into this monastery. It's saying, I'm not going to be part of this family strategy. I'm not going to be the son with legal experience who you need to continue this mining operation, and I'm not going to marry into this tiny elite of mine-owning families in this little area. His father was very disappointed by that, wasn't he?

Very, very much. And he says, well, how do you know it was a divine vision? How do you know it wasn't the devil? And of course, that's deeply disturbing and very undermining thing to say to your son, especially when this seems to be a sort of semi-miracle. So he goes to the monastery. Why does he burst out? That's a great question. And it's one that I found most difficult to wrestle with when I was writing about him. And that's partly because we don't really have much directly from him. But it's as he starts thinking about theology, as he starts thinking about indulgences,

and about what salvation is, that he starts to formulate these ideas. And he's not the only person thinking along these lines. And one of the wonderful things about the 95 Theses is when they're printed, there's still a lot of mystery over that printing, because we have three surviving copies. One of them, you look through, and it's got the wrong number. It's got the wrong number because the person renumbered several of the theses. So if you look at it, you'd think it's some other number of theses, not 95. Another one numbers them in batches of 20, so it never says 95. And so it's really interesting how it was that it comes to be known as the 95 Theses. And it's one of those wonderful historical episodes where we don't have the clear copy.

And these were clearly pasted up everywhere and flew from hand to hand. And it's one of those things that we'll never fully know. What's your best guess? Is it connection? As you said before, he comes out because he's asked to teach. He's obviously a very brilliant man. They want to harness him as a teacher and a thinker outside just this narrow monastic world. Luther's great gift, I think, is knowing how to use print, but also he's someone who knows how to simplify. And that gift of being able to simplify, I think we often undervalue. But if you know how to put a name on something and how to explain a complex theological idea in a way that is immediately gripping, I think that gives you huge intellectual power.

I think that's what characterizes his intelligence rather than a sort of rather recondite, highly subtle form of argument. Luther knows how to go for the jugular, and he also knows how to stage something. And I think you can see that too in the whole series of things he does after the 95 Theses, the way he holds a sort of carnival when he's getting excommunicated and burns the bull, and then the students have a parade and procession and have lots of beer and celebrate the burning of the papal bull and the rejection of papal authority. And he also knows how to resist at the Diet of Worms and how to set it up so that he'll be safe. Well, Lyndall Roper, you're talking to the simplifier-in-chief over here, so I'm very glad that you think it's at all intellectual. I'm

pleasantly surprised. So did he have a plan? Did he see himself as a man of destiny? Did he think, I'm going to break with Rome? I'm going to start a whole new thing here? Or, of course, is this just one of those incremental processes? Initially, he saw himself as a reformer within one united apostolic church. Yes, I'm sure he did. And in many ways, Luther is extremely conservative, much more conservative, perhaps, than we think. I certainly don't think he set out to set up a new church. And he's not an institutions man, really. He's a bit of an anarchist. He doesn't like setting up huge, complex, elaborate legal systems. He had to be pushed and pushed and pushed on marriage law and how exactly that should work. He's not a rules guy. He's someone who very much

thinks in terms of an individual's pastoral position. So I think he certainly wasn't aiming to set up a rival church, but these things happen gradually. And I think he still thinks that there is a possibility for reconciliation, or as he would see it, change on the side of the Catholic Church until about 1530, when I think he does start to change. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We've got Lyndall Roper on the pod talking Martin Luther. More after this. Dol Roper on the pod talking Martin Luther. More after this. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War.

You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. We talked about his ability to simplify. He published 95 theses, but what's the big message? Is it corruption? Is it money and corruption in the Catholic Church as it was constituted? What is the big, simple idea that he lights upon that just energizes great swathes of Europe? I think it's this idea that salvation comes through faith alone. It's a gift of God. It's not something that you can earn. And why that's so explosive is that once you say that,

then you undermine the system of indulgences and the idea that you can have property in the church or that you can earn salvation by paying money or by doing certain sorts of good works. It's not that he's opposed to good works. It's not that he thinks Christians shouldn't do anything for other people, quite the opposite. But it's this idea that you can't earn salvation through doing a series of things and paying a series of fees. You can't do it yourself as an individual. It's a gift that God gives to you. So that part I was familiar with, and that's certainly what I find in Luther's writing. What I wasn't expecting is that equally important to Luther is the idea that Christ is really present in communion,

in the elements of bread and wine, that Christ really is in the bread and wine. And I just hadn't realized how important that was to Luther. I would say most of his writing is about that. to Luther, I would say most of his writing is about that. It's not about salvation by faith alone. And that's what splits the Reformation, because the followers of Huldrych Zwingli, which eventually become Calvinists, which eventually feed into the Church of England, all those people don't say that Christ is really present in the elements of bread and wine. They think that's papist nonsense. But it's really important to Luther. Wow. I did not know that he was a transubstantiation guy. He's not a transubstantiationist. He's a consubstantiationist. He says,

it's a miracle. Both things are true at the same time. And he rejects transubstantiationist. He says it's a miracle both things are true at the same time. And he rejects transubstantiation because he thinks that's a philosophical position that he doesn't accept because it makes a distinction between accidents, that is the accidental appearance of something, its sensory qualities and its essence. And that's an Aristotelian idea which he doesn't buy. He comes from a different philosophical tradition on this one. And so he would never take that line. What he says is that it's like red hot iron, just as a red hot poker is both fire and iron at one and the same time, that's what's going on here. And it's not something that we can understand rationally. It's both bread and the body of Christ. It's both wine and it's the blood of Christ. And that's absolutely essential

to faith in his view. Isn't it interesting that the things we remember Luther for now or find Luther's teachings inspiring are not necessarily the ones that he thought was most important in the 16th century. So that, for example, I would suggest Lidl is not one that's travelled particularly well over the centuries, whereas decrying the kind of glittering superstructure, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church with its towering Basilica of St. Peter, that is something that has continued to fire people up and, of course, remains part of our discourse today, whether we're talking about politicians and, in fact, today, as I'm talking to you, we're all still talking about Boris Johnson fixing up Downing Street at great expense and then not using this facility for the purpose

that was intended. That core message really continues to energize, doesn't it? Well, that's also one of the things that I was quite shocked about as I was working on this book. I've called it Living I Was Your Plague. Dead I Will Be Your Death, O Pope, is the other half of that. What that is is a curse that Luther makes against against the pope and he says this is my testament so he wants this to be what people remember and it's actually written around many of the sort of metal shaped depictions of luther so there's one in the church in Halle and right around this little circle is written

living I was your plague, dead I will be your death. There it is in the church. There are oil paintings showing Luther on his deathbed and you can see the words living I was your plague and I didn't see them because I found them so disturbing and offensive that I couldn't see them. Sometimes they actually are painted out so that they're invisible to the viewer today and it's only when you do infrared research on these paintings often from the Lucas Kranach workshop it's only then that you can see that those words are there. And that aggression, that hatred of the Pope, it's almost magical, isn't it? Saying, living I was your plague, dead I will be your death. It's like saying, my death will kill you. And that kind of magical thinking and that hatred really remained very central in quite a troubling way to the early way that Luther projected himself and his followers.

When you say troubling, the 16th century and particularly the 17th century was a time of monumental religious strife, although Europeans had never needed too much of an incentive to fight each other at any given interval. Do you think he saw that coming and almost welcomed that violence? No, I don't think he deliberately welcomed violence. And I think he did try to stop it. And he did not want to resist the emperor. It took a long, long time before he reached the point where he was willing to support the formation of a Protestant League. But, and it's interesting, you mentioning the news, I was thinking a lot as I was writing the book, it was the era of Trump and the era of Me Too. And when I first worked on Luther,

I'd really relished this sort of rambunctious masculinity that Luther has, his willingness to really engage with his opponents, his kind of four square masculinity, his insistence on defining a new kind of clerical manhood, a married clerical manhood, one that's not celibate. One of the first things he does is to grow a beard and a moustache once he's no longer a monk and grow out his tonsure. I found that affirmation of being a man great fun. But as I began to see other sides of this kind of aggressive masculinity, I think that Luther's willingness to be a really pugnacious polemicist, his willingness to take on and insult even people with political power. Like he really lays in to someone like Duke George of Saxony, who he sees as an opponent and who's a Catholic.

There's no whole Baal's polemic. It's very aggressive and rude. And I think there is something in Luther which is, he's a grand hater, and he does raise the temperature of debate to the point that people's anger and aggression is stirred up by these religious issues. What about politics? Because in the 17th century, I'm minded of people, evangelicals, McCulloch would call them but we might call them kind of ultra protestants and their opposition to the stewart monarchy in england for example or in scotland and no bishops no kings this assault on hierarchy across religion and politics is that something luther encouraged was writing about, thinking about, or was he narrowly interested in religion? Very early on, Luther decides that the right position is to say that secular authority must always be obeyed.

So whereas in Calvinism, you do have a tradition of resistance to unjust authority, in Lutheranism, you don't. And in 1524-25, what happens in Germany is you get this massive peasant war. You get thousands and thousands of peasants rising up against their masters. And they win. For about three months, they're in control. And it's so interesting because mostly I think we've forgotten about the German Peasants' War. I don't know whether you remember it.

I certainly don't. Isn't that interesting? Because I would say it's the biggest peasant revolt in Western Europe before the French Revolution. And yet it's fallen out of modern memory. And it's going to come back because I think it's really important to understand it. So experiencing the peasants' war is a huge thing for Luther. And it takes him from being someone who can be seen as a man of the people, a pro-peasant hero, someone who tilts against authority, someone who stands up against the empire and against the emperor and says what they think. It takes him from being that figure to being

someone who supports the princes and who is against the common man and against the peasants and insists that they should be slain like mad dogs, as he put it. And he even goes as far as to say, if you kill a peasant who is revolting, you are doing a godly work. So interesting that you mentioned the French Revolution there. It just makes me think, weirdly, lots of the peasant uprisings, particularly in the West of France during the French Revolution, were actually inspired by an assault on Catholicism by secularists or part of the French revolutionaries. Are you kind of suggesting the Peasants' Revolt, this explosion,

was due with the energy that Luther himself had given the discourse around toppling traditional elites, around new ideas in religion? I think it is new ideas in religion because what's absolutely explosive is saying that it's the priests who've withheld from you the bread and the wine in communion. They've kept the wine from you, but it's with Christ's precious blood that he bought our freedom. So if you say that in the context of serfdom, that is hugely explosive. So I think that that is very much what's going on, plus Luther's example of resisting authority. So he will go on to condemn it all, but I think it's a moment in which suddenly all the power of monasteries and convents.

And if you think of the German landscape, they stick up. They've got these towers. It's clear where the money is. They've got these gigantic barns where they're taking in all the tithes. You can see the wealth that they have and how your tithes are contributing to it. And what happens is a huge explosion of anti-monastic feeling after Luther has already undermined what it is to be a monk by saying you're not going to earn salvation by being a monk and fasting and having a tonsure. And it's the convents and monasteries that peasants go for. They burn them all down. And then once they've done that, they turn their

attention to the castles and they start attacking and burning down the castles. Hundreds of them. How interesting. And that's why you get this strange phenomenon. I've never really put two and two together. You get the strange phenomenon of this Westphalian idea in the next century, but this idea that the princes themselves should determine the religious nature of their polity. That's right. And that comes out of the defeat of the peasants in the Peasants' War. And of course, that tradition within Lutheranism, that secular authority should be obeyed, has a very, very long term and significant legacy within German politics. There are, of course, people within the Lutheran Church who don't take that line, but it is a strong tradition within the church. And it means that much of the church made accommodations with Nazism,

Nazism and also with the East German regime. It's a very deep-rooted idea and the idea that the realm of the world and politics and the realm of God are separate. I mean, I've taken too much of your time. I could talk to you all day about this because I've always found the religious settlement of the 16th and 17th centuries impossible to understand. But now I have one of the great communicators teaching me privately in a one-on-one session. But I will let you go, but I want to ask Luther, what was his attitude towards schism? So like Anabaptists and things, having schismed, was he then reluctant to let other people schism? How did that work? Well, he's a bit of a ditherer on that one. He does think that people should not be punished for heresy. And so he doesn't think that Anabaptists should be punished. But then other Lutherans think that they should be and eventually Luther finds himself sort of being pushed into this position where he sort of accepts

it. And one of the really sad things that happened is that in the Wartburg, where Luther was himself imprisoned for his own good, his own protection, after the Diet of Worms, so that he couldn't be assassinated, in that very place, there is a dungeon where an Anabaptist was held in the 1540s in the dark. And I always think of that guy and what a terrible fate that would be. Let's just finish off with legacy, apart from the Protestant churches, which are obviously gigantically important, enduringly so. Is he more important than any crowned head from this period? Well, one of the things is that he's one of the only people whose face is universally recognisable and still is today.

And that happens because he happens to live next door to the painter Lucas Carnach. And very early on, they set about creating an absolutely recognisable image of Luther. image of Luther. And so he is literally a poster boy whose face is really known like nobody else's. And I think he has remained a real titan in German history. He I think as a monument, he looks down at you in a host of these town squares, because there are those 19th century statues of Luther erected everywhere. He really is buried very deep in the German psyche for good and for ill. And that's why the 500th celebration of the posting of the 95 Theses was also an occasion for Germans to ask themselves what German-ness is in a reunited Germany. And also, I imagine, an increasingly secular Germany as well. Absolutely. Guess what the proportion of the population now is in

Wittenberg who are Lutheran? It's about 12%. Amazing. Professor, I'm very glad to say that you are writing a history of the German Peasants' War. So please come on and talk to me about it when it's all completed. I certainly will, because it's the worst bit of my biography of Luther. Thanks a lot, Dan. Thank you so much. I feel we have the history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished.

Hi, everyone. Thanks for reaching the end of this podcast. Most of you are probably asleep, so I'm talking to your snoring forms, but anyone who's awake, it would be great if you could do me a quick favour, head over to wherever you get your podcasts and rate it five stars, and then leave a nice glowing review. It makes a huge difference for some reason to how these podcasts do. Madness, I know, but them's the rules.

Then we go further up the charts, more people listen to us, and everything will be awesome. So thank you so much. Now sleep well. shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.