The Rest Is History - 12 Days: Martin Luther and J.R.R. Tolkien

Episode Date: January 3, 2022

Luther's excommunication from the Catholic church and the birth of the author of Lord of the Rings happened on this day. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. It is the 3rd of January. It is the latest in our series on the 12 days of Christmas, or 13 days, which is what we're doing. And we're doing anniversaries every day. Tom chooses one, I choose one. And Tom, you're going to go first today, aren't you, with a man who I think is very close to your heart. Yes. Well, featured in one of the very earliest episodes that we did on the idea of social media echoing the way that printing and the new media had been used in the Reformation. And of course, the absolute master of that was Martin Luther, the man who is often seen as the father of the record of the

reformation um and yesterday dominic we had um the uh the fateful year that saw the the conquest of granada uh columbus the expulsion of the jews from spain one of the kind of key dates as you said for you know this is the end point of the middle ages yeah and another obvious um date would be um the early 1520s when martin luther really gets the reformation going and possibly the key moment in that the moment that marks the kind of the point where the schism is formalized is when luther gets exicated, officially excommunicated, cast out from the Catholic church by the Pope. And that happened on the 3rd of January, 1521. So Tom set the scene for us. So I think it's 1517, isn't it? That Martin Luther famously nails,

or in fact, probably doesn't nail his 95 theses to the door of that church in Wittenberg. And that's the moment that's commonly seen as sort of kickstarting the Protestant Reformation. So this is four years after that. And what's been happening in that kind of, I mean, what's the backstory to all this? Well, so essentially, Luther has all kinds of issues that are theological and doctrinal, and they increasingly strike at the very heart of the great kind of edifice of doctrine that the Catholic Church and specifically the papacy kind of exists to uphold. And the question is, that has always confronted the Catholic Church throughout the Middle Ages, whenever confronted by, you know, heretical movements, is what do you do with them?

Do you try and kind of integrate them into the fabric of the church? Or do you kind of expel them and try and extirpate them? And there are kind of various strategies that are adopted in the years that immediately follow Luther's kind of, you know, pronouncement, his nailing of the theses. So there's a cardinal, Cardinal Catterhan, who comes and attempts to negotiate with Luther directly, but Luther isn't really having any of it. And when Luther turns his back on Catterhan, goes back to Wittenberg, which is under the rule of the elector Friedrich of Saxony, who is very proud of Luther. You know, Luther's made himself the most famous person in Europe. Wittenberg has become this kind of great center of, you know, it's the focus of attention across Christendom. So in a sense, Luther is kind of safe there, out beyond the reach of the papacy.

Basically, Luther has decided that, you know, it's beyond the point of no return. It's on the 15th of June in 1520 that the Pope, who is Leo X, he issues a pap papal bull which protestants always find a very amusing yeah but you know it's an official papal announcement um in which he warns luther that you know he is going to be excommunicated unless he retracts all kinds of um heretical statements um you know excommunication is is absolutely happening um and this bull is called Ex Sergei Domine, Arise, O Lord. It gets issued in the summer of 1520. On the 10th of December, Luther has a copy of it, and he very, very publicly, very symbolically burns it.

Yeah, doesn't he? It's this great public spectacle, isn't it? He puts it in the fire he's not shouting about antichrist or something there's always a lot of shouting about antichrist he he goes to one of the three city gates of wittenberg and there's it's a kind of carrion pit it's where um people burn uh kind of old clothing it's it's a place where you get rid of rubbish right it's like basically the municipal tip it's a municipal tip yes exactly and um he's got he's gone he's gone rushing around all the libraries of wittenberg uh trying to get out uh books of canon law which is the uh you know the law that

specifically applies um to to the church and he piles them up and he chucks them on the fire and he chucks ex-sergey domine this papal bull that's threatening him with excommunication, on the fire as well. And yeah, there's a lot of, you know, he calls the Pope Antichrist, all that kind of stuff. You know, he's courting excommunication. He wants it. And sure enough, that's what he gets. And that's what he gets on this day. But Tom, I know this is a colossal topic.

What's his motive? He thinks he's doing God's will. Right. And what has converted him prior to 1517? Oh, Dominic. Are you able to answer that in one sentence? I suppose the kind of the bedrock of the Reformation, the central challenge to the authority of the Catholic Church is Luther's idea.

You don't need the superstructure of the church to provide you with salvation, that that is God's gift. And that therefore it's your personal relationship with God. It's your personal relationship with the spirit. It's your personal relationship with scripture that should, that should determine your behavior as a Christian. And that all, so this is why he burns the books of, of canon law is that he comes to see the claims of the,

the Catholic church to embody, you know, that there is no salvation except through um through through the catholic church underpinned by the papacy and that's why he comes to see the catholic church as a kind of monstrous distortion of christian teaching and it's why he sees the figure of the pope so not the individual popes but the you know the papacy as essentially antichrist um and you know there is no question that by the standards of the catholic church luther entirely merits excommunication um so i there's there's there's kind of you know there's there's absolute you know

tens 20 30 40 50 you can just kind of so separation of justification from sanctification extrinsic forensic imputed justification for deutery faith private judgment over against ecclesiastical infallibility the rejection of the seven deuterocanonical books the denial of venial sin the denial of merit sola scriptura so you know only only scripture not the kind of the canons of the catholic church radically private judgment if we're all priests why should we not also have the power to test and judge what is right or wrong in matters of faith denial that the pope has the right to counsel only justified men can do good works i mean these are so i won't go through them

all i'm sure listeners will be relieved to hear. But essentially, these are systematic attacks on everything that the Catholic Church has constructed, not just over the course of the Middle Ages, but in many cases over the period of late antiquity as well. And so this is why it is so seismic. And it's generated this profound schism that endures to this day. And, you know, it's one that Christians continue to dream of healing. That's not going to happen, though, is it? Well, so two years ago, in 2020, there was a group of theologians who belonged to something called the Altenburg Ecumenical Roundtable, which'd been founded back i think 1999 something like that um and they they knew that the uh the anniversary was coming up yeah so um they they said uh what about kind of quid pro quo so that the pope would essentially withdraw this communication and the lutheran world federation would kind of quid pro quo so that the pope would essentially withdraw this communication and the lutheran world federation would kind of agree that the pope wasn't the antichrist

and wow you know wouldn't this be wouldn't this be a kind of you know a good quid pro quo that's a big concession from the lutherans right i mean well i i gather um that that the lutheran world federation doesn't have the right to speak for lutherans in this way Of course, they're all Protestants, so that's all, you know. Yeah, so you're all using your individual judgment. Yeah, use your own individual judgment, exactly. So that's kind of the problem. But that obviously hasn't happened. No.

I mean, I think there is kind of talk about it. We went to Germany on holiday in 2016, so the year before the anniversary of the nailing or the non-nailing of the theses in in wittenberg and they were selling and we bought a playmobil figure of martin yes i think the best-selling playmobil figure in germany of all really i think so something extraordinary like that so playmobil is quite a big deal in germany because it is german so there was a playmobil park outside nuremberg, which we've been to. And we bought Martin Luther and Albrecht Durer,

who also is a Playmobil figure. Well, I know that the Martin Luther Playmobil character sold incredibly well. He's a great figure. We used to use him in battles. I used to arrange battles with my son's Playmobil and Lego figures in which Martin Luther would be leading a huge army of Protestants with sort of Daleks in it and Star Wars

Stormtroopers. Did he have a Pope? Against the armies of the Pope, yeah. I'd get the Emperor from Star Wars to be the Pope. Well, Dominic. It was quite loaded.

It was quite a Protestant game. It's quite loaded. Yeah. It's a very patriotic game. That's a very Middle English thing to be doing. Yeah, exactly. I think most of the listeners will think that completely reasonable,

and probably they've got similar stories to tell them. And probably we lose all our Catholic listeners. I apologise for that. Well, we've got a great bit of Catholicism coming up, haven't we? We do have a great, we've got a great Catholic, haven't we? We have. A great Catholic writer. A top Catholic.

A top Catholic. Who you wrote about in Unheard. And I deliberately did not mention his Catholicism at all. And was I cross? Just out of propagandism. You were cross. Yeah, you were cross. Well, you were cross, but I think you were a little bit amused at the same time.

Well, I think... Yes. So I think that Tolkien, born on this day yeah dominic's choice uh and counterbalances the the lutheran tone of the first half of this so we should come to talking let's come to talking after the break i'm marina hyde and i'm richard osmond and together we host the rest is entertainment it's your weekly fix of entertainment news reviews splash of showbiz gossip and on our q a we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club.

If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Hello, welcome back to our Protestant Catholic themed special today. We've had Luther being excommunicated in the first half. And in the second half, Dominic, it's J.R.R. Tolkien's birthday. J.R.R. Tolkien being born. So it's his birthday. It's the 3rd of January, 1892. You know where Tolkien is born, Tom?

I do. Bloemfontein. Yeah, Bloemfontein, in the Orange Free State, as it then was. So he's the Tolkien family. For a very English writer, he's got quite a sort of exotic. He's German, weren't they? Yeah, they're Germans. They're from, apparently, they originally.

Full of a toque. So the kind of the toque. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So do you know where they're from? They're from East Prussia. I did know that, yeah. So they wouldn't be German now.

They would be kind of living in a Russian enclave. That's astonishing, isn't it? So they come from what's now Kaliningrad, but what was then Königsberg. Oh, yeah, home of Kant. And it's sort of... So his earliest known ancestor is somebody called Michel Tolkien, born around 1620.

And they were, well, they moved to sort of to England in the early modern period at some point. And they made clocks, watches, and pianos in London and Birmingham. Anyway, Arthur Tolkien, who is Tolkien's father, he was born in 1857. He was a bank manager, rather. Unexcitingly. Yes, the sword of fate.

The ring of doom. Yeah. The bank statement of destiny. Exactly. Well, you would. I mean, that's what would fill your mind with all this stuff. It's kind of sending a bank statement, you know, a checkbook to Galadriel. So he's a bank manager and he is posted with his wife mabel to which is again a very i mean it's not so they're posted to bloom fontaine uh by the bank

and he goes off to work in the bank and um tolkien is born in the on the 3rd of January 1892 and his brother, do you know what his brother's name was? No. Hilary. Hilary? Hilary. What did he become? I don't know, maybe he became a back manager as well. He didn't write a series of fantasy novels,

so I think we can forget about poor old Hilary. He was born in 1894 and basically when Tolkienlkien gerar was three um they basically decided to go back to england for a big visit so his mum gets on the boat with him and his brother and off they go and his father has got some work to do so he's going to follow them later and he gets rheumatic fever i don't actually know what that is, but it's bad. It's bad. And he dies before he even gets on the boat to join them. So Tolkien never remembered his father.

So never remembered his father. So they're in England visiting his mother's family, and they basically have to stay forever. So they end up staying in Birmingham, and they stay in a place. Well, initially, they live with her parents. And in 1896, when Tolkien is four they move to this village of Serhol and then

it was a village in North Worcestershire now it's basically in suburban Birmingham and you can visit the I have visited the mill which is the inspiration for the mill there's a mill and there's a bog and they're the inspiration for some of the sort of the landscapes of the Lord of the Rings.

Is it the Shire? Exactly. It is the Shire. And then when Birmingham kind of moves in, it's the harrowing of the Shire. Exactly. Birmingham swallows it up at exactly the moment when Tolkien is kind of a boy and then a teenager.

The sort of tentacles of suburbia. Mordor. Edwardian. Yeah. Edwardian developers are swallowing it all up. But when Tolkien is 12, so he's lost his father in South Africa. And then when he is 12, his mother dies. She's a diabetic. And in those days,

diabetics with her particular kind of diabetes didn't generally live beyond their mid-30s and she doesn't so she dies a priest there's a catholic priest who's very close to the family because of course they're catholics it's very close to the family he arranges for the two tolkien boys to go and live with an aunt in the center of birmingham basically so if anyone's been in from the centerire to the middle of the door they live very close in edge baston very close to what is now if you've ever driven through birmingham this big roundabout called the five ways roundabout cricket ground of course yeah well i don't think tolkien was a great cricketer he's a rugby man actually he's a rugby player um so they go and live there and

they look out and he looks out of his window and there's factories and there's warehouses and shops and stuff and you can absolutely see where the nostalgia comes from where the sense of a sort of lost paradise where the sort of horror at industry and urbanism and modernity all of that is woven into the story of this kind of boy well because when i read lord of the rings as a you know when i was young i all of none of, none of this, I missed it all, but now you read it and you completely see that it's one of the great novels. It's one of the great anti-urban novels. It's one of the, it's,

it's, it's, it's, it's a very green novel. It is. And that, that's a theme that I think people never, never noticed until probably the seventies. It's one of the great portrayals of the impacts of industrialization.

It is. Absolutely. It is. Absolutely. It is. Absolutely it is. Absolutely it is. And it's not Mordor is industrial, isn't it? And then, of course, the scouring of the Shire scene at the end of the Lord of the Rings. But Saruman is the key figure. He is, yeah, because he's fascinated by it. He's ingenious, isn't he? He's always creating

machines. Engines and fire and machines. Absolutely. And I know there were some people... Eugenics and all kinds of... There were some people listening to this who hate Tolkien and hate the lord of the rings and hate the fantasy genre and that i think is completely fair enough i think there's no reason why you should like it but even if you don't like it it does still matter because it is a brilliant mirror to the concerns of the 20th century and the fact that so many millions of people did like it tells you something about its power. But also, I would say, a mirror held up to the concerns of Catholics and Christians more generally in the 12th century. Tell us a ton.

Go on. I'll give you a little bit of leeway. All I would say. So I wrote about Tolkien. By the way, just so the listeners know, as he's saying all I would say, he's kind of gearing up. I get the sense of this cross on which paper he's him he's going to start reading no no no i'm i'm not but the justification that i had so i i included him in a chapter that was basically about the first world war the rise of fascism and yes i remember it very good and i thought can you know it's lord

of the rings sufficient to bear the weight that it's it you know i'm going to impose on its shoulders i think it is for kind of complex reasons to do with Tolkien's attitude to to the Jews, to to the Nazis, to the fire bombings that the RAF carried out in in Germany. Actually, you know, Tolkien said Lord of the Rings is not an allegory. And so people have always been slightly nervous about weaving it into the events of the 20th century. But he'd fought in the in the trenches at the Somme. His son flew planes over occupied Germany. So he was very, very intimately involved in that. argue that actually Lord of the Rings far more than 1984 actually is the great novel written about the horrors of the 20th century. And the reason that I say that is that even more

than 1984, it's a colossal popular success. It's the best-selling novel of the 20th century. And I would argue that one of the, I think a key reason for its popularity is that it gives a people, you know, people who are suspicion of Christian orthodoxy, suspicious of Christian scripture, suspicious of Christian belief, a chance to experience what it is about Christianity that has made it so successful and so appealing and so powerful. Because in a sense, Lord of the Rings is the last great popular Christian work. Because of the distrust of power, of strength, because of the celebration of smallness, and all of those kinds of things. And also, Tom, there was this key moment. So for people who do know Lord of the Rings,

if you hate the Lord of the Rings, you've probably switched off already, let's be honest. But if you know the Lord of the Rings, you will know that at the end of the book, Frodo does not destroy the ring he claims it for his own he's weak he is human and fallible and then there's this kind of moment that tolkien himself basically says in his letters is the kind of intervention of divine grace because he has forgiven he is they have should be merciful to golem and they could have killed Gollum but they didn't they were merciful to Gollum and of course that's the moment that Gollum he sort of leaps up

and he bites Frodo's ring off and then he falls in. Spoiler alert. Well I mean no one's going to be listening to it. Then he falls in and it's through, what is it fate? I mean I think there's some line that Gandalf says maybe it was meant to happen. So you know, all this.

So you know the date on which that happens? Oh, I do know. I've forgotten what it is. It's got some significance. It does. So it's the 25th of March, which is traditionally the date of both the crucifixion and the incarnation. Oh, right.

Very good. And so you're talking about a profoundly significant date. And in general, the overt Christian illusions are minimal. You know, there are no gods at all in Lord of the Rings. But at this point, he does bring it in. And I think it's, you know, it's incredibly significant. Anyway, we mustn't, I don't think that we should, we should talk much more about this because we're saving up an episode on Tolkien.

We've got lots to talk about. Episodes, we're saving up an episode on Tolkien. We've got lots to talk about. Episodes, plural, lined up on Tolkien later on. So that will woo the Catholics back. Yeah, we've got the Catholics back. We've still got the Protestants on side. Tomorrow we're going to make a bid for the existentialists and the abolitionists, I think, aren't we? Yes, yes, yes.

So we're basically appealing to every part of the community so an existentialist abolitionist themed uh special tomorrow we will see you then bye bye thanks for listening to the rest is history. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.