The Rest Is History - 433. Luther: The Man Who Changed the World (Part 1)

Episode Date: March 25, 2024

The Reformation, launched in 1517, stands as one of the most convulsive and transformative events of all time, shattering Christendom and dividing Europe for centuries. Its outcome determined the fates of Kings and Emperors, and saw the souls of millions consigned to the fiery pit of heresy. The man behind it all was Martin Luther, a humble monk of obscure origins. Bold, intellectually arrogant, and a master of spin, the assault he unleashed on the medieval Church had him excommunicated by the Pope. But what was it about Luther’s humble upbringing in Saxony and his strained relationship with his intimidating father that led him down a path of insolence? And was the religious revolution that he sparked inevitable? Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss the early life of Martin Luther, the apocalyptic environment from which he and his radical ideas emerged, and the Catholic Church he would come to take on… *The Rest Is History LIVE in 2024* Tom and Dominic are back onstage this summer, at Hampton Court Palace in London! Buy your tickets here: therestishistory.com Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor 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. That is therestishistory.com. On the 31st of October 1517, Halloween, the eve or vigil of the Feast of All Saints, a young German friar purposefully made his way to the castle church in the Saxon university town of Wittenberg and nailed to the door one of the most famous protests of all time, the 95 Theses. Within weeks, Martin Luther and his bold challenge to the authority of the Catholic Church were the talk of Germany, before long the talk of Europe. The 95 theses themselves, 95 pointed and often witty barbs,

poked into the religious practice of the indulgence, were originally composed in Latin as the basis of a formal public disputation or debate at the university, but they were soon translated into German and put into print, the medium that enabled them to spread like wildfire. So that's the first paragraph of the book, The Making of Martin Luther by the great scholar Richard Rex. And that captures, doesn't it, Tom, some of the excitement, the incendiary nature, the danger, the extraordinary celebrity, all of these things that attend the story of Martin Luther, one of the individuals. Well, actually, I argued in an essay when I was 12, the individual who had shaped world history more than any other. And how do you feel about that proposition now?

He's top five, isn't he, Tom? Yeah. To me, he's bigger than Marx. Oh, for sure. Bigger than Darwin, maybe as big as Darwin. Yeah. Up there with the very greatest religious leaders who shape the way we think about the world. I mean, he is absolutely titanic, isn't he, Martin Luther? He is. And he stands at the head of this movement called the Reformation, which I think you could also argue is the most convulsive and transformative process in the past thousand years, with I think the exception of the Industrial Revolution. So it is an absolutely massive story. And Luther is a massive figure. And he has this quality of legend, because as we will find out, that

account that Richard Rex gave us there, it's not entirely accurate and Richard Rex is making play with it. But it is this totemic scene, isn't it? Because Luther at this point is a monk, so he's very thin, bright, blazing eyes, a little bit mad, the mad monk, going and supposedly nailing up these theses. And this is the point that traditionally is seen as beginning the Reformation. So 31st of October, the date that this happens, it's been celebrated since the beginning of the 18th century as a Reformation day. And Luther himself as its founding father. And it kind of sums up everything that makes him the totemic figure that he is. He's challenging the authority of the Catholic Church.

He's incredibly bold, amazing eye for PR. He's harnessing print, you know, the internet of the Middle Ages. So it's all kind of coming together and it's bundled in that single image, which I think is why, as we will find out, there's quite a lot of myth about it, but it's why it has that kind of mythic quality. And the other thing about that image is it captures, because it's so dramatic, it's very Hollywood, you know, the lone monk who faced with the great power of the Catholic church goes down and he nails his protest to the door. That's the stereotypical image.

And actually that captures something that is often missing, I think, from our sense of the Reformation. And it would be understandable that people would say the reformation gosh that sounds quite dry but the thing is it's actually not this is a story in which it's not just the effervescence of ideas it is the fact that individuals lives are at stake you know kingdoms empires are being torn apart by this it determines the political map of Europe for centuries. And actually, at stake for everyone involved in it, it's not just your life, are you going to end up literally on the stake or whatever, but are you going to burn in hell for millions upon millions of years? For eternity. Yeah.

So it's a very dangerous and exciting story, isn't it? So I asked Sadie, my wife, what did she think of when I said Luther? And she said, against corruption, but also just wanted to stop people having fun. There's an element of truth to the first of those propositions. The second one is more complicated. Yeah. Luther is quite good fun, isn't he? Well, the first half of his life, he doesn't have much fun, and the second half he does, for reasons that we'll come to. But yeah, I completely agree. So let I mean, let's just look at why the Reformation matters before we get into the life of Luther himself. So as you said, it's this convulsive moment in the history of what had

been Christendom, this kind of united union of all the Latin Christian states. And it sunders it completely so that people by the end of this process, are unable to talk about Christendom anymore. It's kind of so shattered. And you think about some of the episodes we've done where it's been fundamental to the story. So Lady Jane Grey, or the ones we've done on Cromwell and his time, or even the American War of Independence. But also just thinking about some of the ones that we've done recently that really don't seem to have Protestantism or the Reformation at its heart. The Nazis. So, the Lutheran character of Nazi support is quite important.

1974, the sectarian divide in Northern Ireland, and even the Titanic, where it's Protestants who are building the Titanic. So, it is part of the absolute backdrop of certainly modern British and American history. So that's very important. But also, Tom, just to jump in, Luther matters massively in Germany, doesn't he? Hugely, yeah. So 2016, we went on holiday to Germany, and that was the year before it was going to be the 500th anniversary of the 95 Theses, which was 2017.

And they were already gearing up in Germany. And we were in Catholic Bavaria. But you could still buy, they were everywhere, Playmobil figures of Martin Luther. Yeah. Because the Martin Luther industry was absolutely firing on all cylinders, ready for this 500th anniversary. And the sense you had that, you know, he was a figure with the status in Germany that Shakespeare has, more divisive, of course, but with that sort of colossal transcendent reputation. Yeah, no, absolutely.

So that Quinceantinary, so Rex's book came out, loads of other books came out. It's been an absolute kind of spike in the study of Luther, which, you know, absolutely drawing on for this episode, a lot of what came out then. But just to emphasize how significant the Reformation is, it's not like it is history, just history. I mean, it is still blazing away. Something between an eighth and a tenth of the population of the world would count themselves as Protestant.

It's spreading like, well, like wildfire. The spirit, the flame, the Pentecostal flame through Catholic Brazil, through Africa, Korea, China. So it's still absolutely a vital phenomenon shaping life in the 21st century. But also it has an influence that is manifest, I think, way beyond institutional Christianity. The fact that, say, Britain has been Protestant for half a millennium, that America was founded as a Protestant country, the fact that English-speaking colonists in America went there as Protestants, this still has a kind of enduring influence, even if people in those countries are not

professing Protestants. They are still, in their kind of cultural influence, even if people in those countries are not professing Protestants. They are still in their kind of cultural makeup, deeply Protestant. So Luther's rebellion against the authority of the medieval church, it kind of introduces into the bloodstream of Western culture some very potent and some very kind of paradoxical concepts. So Luther is about free inquiry, but there is also this kind of tendency towards moral absolutism. I guess that's what Sadie was thinking of when she thought of people in those kind of black hats. The idea of Puritanism. Yeah, telling people not to have fun. I think one of the legacies of Protestantism is individualism,

but you also have this kind of consciousness of belonging to an elect. You are part of a community. Luther puts conscience at the heart of his understanding of what the good life should be. But there is also a deep Protestant impatience with those who spurn the light, who spurn the word. And of course, Luther is all about belief.

So Alec Ryrie, author of a wonderful book called Protestants, says about Protestants that a love affair with God has been at the heart of their faith. But the other side of Protestantism is a kind of scorn for superstition, overthrowing of idols, all that kind of thing. So the indulgences that were mentioned right at the beginning will come to those pieces of paper that can get you out of purgatory. That kind of thing is what Lutherans set their heart against, isn't it? A lot of the trappings of religion, the physical trappings, they're very scornful of, aren't they? Well, there's lots of things that people prior to Luther had regarded as being

profoundly holy that Luther comes to condemn as mere superstition. And this has a kind of impact, I think, not just on Protestants, but on the much broader world. So Catholics, for instance, we talk about the Catholic church as something that Luther is attacking. But really, I think what we mean by the Catholic church is a product of the Reformation. So before that, it's just the church. Yeah, you don't have to think about what it means. It becomes defined as the Catholic church by the process of having to define itself against Protestantism.

Just all those things that you listed, the free inquiry versus moral absolutism, the individualism, their sense of being an elect, impatience with people who spurn the light. I mean, I think it will have already have occurred to many of our listeners that those are things that are very, very palpable in Anglo-American, English-speaking culture right now in the early 2020s, aren't they? It feels like a very Protestant moment. Yeah, I completely agree. One of the logical endpoints of Protestantism is a kind of atheism, because if you were

overthrowing superstition, then you could end up banishing God. Yeah. Like a Church of England vicar, Tom. Well, as Luther does, he lays a massive emphasis. So he has this doctrine, sola scriptura, only scripture. This is the foundation of his teaching, that all the other stuff that the Catholic Church has been teaching, so indulgences will be part of it, we'll come to that, but all the other kind of panoply of doctrine, that this is irrelevant because it's not in the Bible. But you could end up following that logic through, get rid of the Bible itself, which I think is where we are. A kind of, say, progressive morality is a kind of post-believing Protestantism.

So secularists and humanists or whatever, I and humanists have a very, very evangelical tone. Yeah, of course. They're very into overthrowing idols and stuff. I would say that that evangelical quality of Protestantism does remain absolutely vivid in the 21st century because America, which is the most, certainly on the Anglophone world and even beyond the Anglophone world, such a profound moral influence. That moral progressivism, which is basically a kind of godless Protestantism, you can see it converting countries that previously were kind of defined by the Catholicism. So I'm thinking about Ireland. I mean, Ireland in my lifetime has basically gone from being a Catholic country to being a country where the ruling

ideology is a kind of godless Protestantism. The irony of that is obviously incredibly intense. So I really think that this is a massive theme and so much begins with Luther. It really is about Luther initially. So Richard Rex in his book, No Luther, No Reformation. Great key. Not all scholars would agree with that though, would they, Tom? No, they wouldn't. But I think that there is absolutely a case to be made for that. And that's the case that I would want to make in these episodes that we're going to be doing.

Right. That he's a genuinely transformative individual. Yeah. I mean, all the ingredients are there, all the elements for rustling up the stew, but it's Luther who's the cook. Okay. We love a metaphor, don't we? So we've gone from the wildfires to now weling up the stew. But it's Luther who's the cook. We love a metaphor, don't we? So we've gone from the wildfires to now we're in the kitchen.

Yes. It's Luther who enables the ship of the medieval church to hit the iceberg of the Reformation. Right. Very good. But also the other thing about Luther is that he's a most unexpected person to have launched a great religious convulsion. Okay. Because he, I mean, he's not from one of the great powerhouses of medieval thought. So the universities of Bologna or Paris or Oxford, these previously are where religious

philosophers and thinkers and theologians who have had a measurable impact on the fabric of the medieval church have tended to come from. But he comes from one of Christendom's more marginal areas, which is Saxony, right on the eastern flank of not just Christendom, but of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, which is this kind of weird melange of princedoms, cities, all kinds of bits stitched together, ruled over by an emperor. And this emperor is elected, and the Prince of Saxony is one of the seven electors. So Saxony is marginal, but it is also important. Yeah. So we're in Saxony in Germany. So that's sort of, as you look at the map today, that's Southeastern Germany and Luther is born in November, 1483. So to put that into a wider context, Richard III has seized the throne of England and probably made away with the princess in their tower. The Battle of Bosworth is two years away. Catherine of Aragon is going to be born in two years. Hernán Cortés has been born in Spain. Columbus is going around trying to rustle up investors for his great enterprise. And actually, Luther is born. So the place where he's

born is a fringe, isn't it? It's a fringe of Europe. It's kind of German, slightly Slavic. It's a backwater. Yeah. So the elector German, slightly Slavic. It's a backwater. Yeah. So the elector, when Luther was born, he's a guy called Ernst. And he rules a chunk of Saxony and he also rules a chunk of Thuringia, which is the kind of the region next to it. And his capital is a place called Wittenberg, which originally had been founded as a kind of colonial settlement by German Christians planting it amid the pagan Slavs, people called the Wens, who were in the habit of talking to horses. They had a talking horse that would kind of reveal the future to them, supposedly.

They got on well with Virginia Woolf. Yeah, very good. And even in Luther's time, it still has a slightly colonial quality. So Slavs, for instance, are not allowed to become citizens of Wittenberg. And Wittenberg itself, it means the White Mountain, but basically there are no hills at all. It's all very flat, very featureless. And Wittenberg is pretty small by the standards of places further west. So it's about two and a,500 inhabitants, about 400 houses. It's pretty much, from the

point of view of Latin Christendom, at the fringes of nowhere. But the thing is that Luther is even more provincial, because he's not even born in Wittenberg. He is born in a place called Eisleben, which is a mining town. I was kind of thinking when I was reading some of the biographies for this series, that actually he's quite like a figure from a 1950s or 1960s kitchen sink drama. So he's the son of a miner who gets a posh education and then the father and the son kind of have bust-ups. Lots of people think that's the key to Luther, don't they? That he's this sort of Dennis Potter, Alan Silito dynamic where he's rebelled against his father, he's gone off to become an educated man, and his relationship with his father ends up becoming his relationship with the church or with God or whatever.

Well, John Osborne, the great playwright of the 50s and 60s, in 61, he writes a play about Luther, Albert Finney, as the young Luther. Albert Finney. So Luther is born into this kind of mining community and he's descended from peasants. And he says actually that his father's a peasant. I mean, I think that's not quite true. So his father is not Luther at this point. It's Luder, so Hans Luder. His family seems to have owned a copper smelting plant. So that makes him kind of certainly upper working class.

Yeah. And definitely his mother, Marguerite, she's from a kind of trading background. So Hans Luder has done well to marry her. And Hans Luder was painted late in life. And Kenneth Clark, as in civilization. Yeah. He describes him as looking like an old troll king. But in fact, if you look at him, he looks like Barry Humphreys.

Isn't he the great goblin in The Hobbit? Yeah, it all kind of fits together. Wow. That's the person in all human culture you'd least want to be compared with, isn't it? He looks like Sir Les Patterson. Crikey, for Australian listeners. So haven't archaeologists dug up their house and found that actually they had loads of stuff and loads of toys and things that basically show that they were pretty well off? Is that right? Yes, because Hans is very successful. And having begun with not Luther grows up. And he's, I mean, he is a kind of, you know, Yorkshire capitalist. Right. Well, there's milk, there's brass.

Well, there's milk, there's brass, all that kind of stuff. And I think pretty pugilistic. So there's a story that a fight breaks out in the pub and he pours beer over the two people who are fighting and then he whacks them on the head with the beer jug. So this is the kind of man he is. And he's clearly physically very intimidating as a father. So Luther later in life records how Hans whipped him so severely that the young luther actually ran away and also his mother again luther remembers how he'd stolen a nut and she beats him until his his blood flows and away a nut that seems so harsh then you're not selling the looters to me tom i've written the words in my notes just listening to you neil warnock i don't know if that's about right yeah possibly yeah neil warnock of course

is a football manager rather than a smelter, but he could be a smelter. Anyway, sorry, continue. So they're clearly also very pious. So they named Martin after Saint Martin of Tor, because the day after he's born is the feast day of Saint Martin. So that's where his name comes from. And they are particularly devoted to the mother of the Virgin Mary, Saint Anne, who is enshrined as the patron saint of minors.

And she will play an important role in Luther's life, as we will see later on. Is she not somebody who Protestants will go on to claim doesn't exist? We're not getting into all that. Okay. I'm just going to throw that out there. I think they'd accept that she exists, just that you can't necessarily pray to her. Okay. So Hans is very upwardly mobile mobile and Martin is his eldest surviving son. And so he decides that he's going to invest in his education, which again, we were saying, is very, very familiar to any drama involving upwardly mobile minors. And he wants to do this, I think, because he wants Martin to grow

up and become a lawyer. And as a lawyer, he will then be able to help this, I think, because he wants Martin to grow up and become a lawyer. And as a lawyer, he will then be able to help Hans with his contracts, with his business, and so on. Yeah, makes total sense. So the young Luther is sent to a school in a place called Eisenach in Thuringia. And one of the reasons that he's sent there is that this is where his mother comes from. And Eisenach is a place that is dominated by a huge castle on a great precipice called the Wartburg. And again, this will feature strongly in Luther's story. And it is famous when Luther arrives there as the home of a Franciscan monk called Johann Hilton, who will die at the

end of the century, save the kind of the turn from the 1400s to the 1500s, confined to a cell in the monastery and supposedly writing in his own blood before he dies. And the thing that's exciting about him is that he is an apocalyptic prophet. And he is foretelling the ruin of the papacy, Dominic. Yeah. And the ruin of monasticism and the coming of a great reformer. No way. Who will change the world in the year 1516. Oh, he's just a year out. Well, I mean, the coming in the year 1516.

I mean, Luther must be gearing up to it in 1516. So just on the apocalyptic thing, I think that's really interesting that he's there and this guy is there because Luther must have known about him. He must have been a well-known figure in the town. Yes, I'm sure. I mean, if you're writing things in blood. Yes. So Luther is now, this is the late 1490s. So Luther is in his mid to late teens, very formative time. And actually, if we zoom out, as as it were pull the camera back you can see why apocalyptic prophets are very very much in vogue in the 1490s and so on aren't they because there's a sort of apocalyptic tone to european life more generally because you know we think the headlines are terrible now but they're pretty dreadful at the end of the 15th century so the huge thing that has happened is that the french have launched

this massive invasion of italy in 1494 which ends up kicking off half a century of sort of chaos and carnage syphilis is spreading through the french troops first time it's been known in europe and this is all going to culminate in the sack of rome in 1527 which is this absolutely dreadful moment but even more than that the whole business with the ottomans is kicked off in their balkans so the ottomans have expanded under mehmet and selim and then of course solomon the magnificent and the most famous thing which would have happened you know it must be in luther's mind as it's in the mind of every single person in christendom, is that Constantinople had fallen in 1453. Well, and not just Constantinople, Dominic, because in 1480,

actually an Italian city, Otranto, for a year has been seized and occupied by the Ottomans. And so I think it's not surprising that Hilton, in his prophecies, says that the Turks are going to end up conquering Germany and Italy. But people genuinely think that though, don't they? They do, yeah. For the first time in centuries, they genuinely think these are the end times. You know, Christendom is going to be rolled up. Yeah. Islam is coming.

So in his book on the Reformation, Dierman McCulloch says, you cannot understand the Reformation at all. You cannot understand what's going on in Luther's mind or anybody's mind at the time without realizing that as they see it, they are living in the end of days for Christian civilization in the world. That sort of darkness is coming. It's personified by the Ottoman Empire. And that's why when you look across the scene in the end of the 15th century, there are apocalyptic prophecies.

There's talk of kind of monstrous births. There's all that kind of stuff. And Luther must be absorbing that when he's in this town where this bloke is locked up. Of course. And saying that there's going to be this reformer who's going to emerge in 1516, that the papacy is going to be destroyed, that the Turks are going to conquer Germany, and that the world is going to end in the 1650s. 1650s.

That's very precise. Very precise. So this is all to end in the 1650s. 1650s, that's very precise. Very precise. So this is all the kind of the background for Luther's childhood. But against that, there is also this sense that the future is bright, that the world is being reborn, if you want, that there is a renaissance. Because Luther will go on from Eisenach to go to university in Erfurt, which is the capital of Thuringia. It's the oldest university in Germany. And although he seems to be quite an average student if his marks are to be gauged, he only kind of finishes about halfway, but he will graduate in 150 he is a brilliant scholar of Latin and particularly Greek. So he will translate the Bible directly from Greek into German for the first time. And it is in that sense that Luther, as well as being a product of this kind of apocalyptic environment, is also a product of the kind of humanist renaissance, which is very much happening

at the same time. So this, for people who don't know, this is obviously not humanism in your kind of Protestantism without God sense of today, like having a humanist wedding ceremony. No. So humanism is about the classical heritage and it's about a fascination, I guess, with books and words and stuff like that, is it? Is that fair? Yeah. And looking at texts kind of very closely. Right. So for instance, throughout the Middle Ages, the translation of the Bible,

the Vulgate, had been in Latin. But humanist scholars are going to the Greek and indeed the Hebrew for the Old Testament. They're looking at the original texts and sources. This is a project that Luther will definitely buy into. This also is an influence on him. But when he graduates in 1505, it would look as though this isn't his future. He's not going to be focusing, say, on biblical scholarship because he's going to become a lawyer. This is what it's all about. So at this point, when he graduates, there is nothing really about him to suggest the detonation that he's going to end up setting off. Yes. Tom, let's just take a break and we'll be back after the break for more Martin Luther. I'm Marina Hyde.

And I'm Richard Osman. 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. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. Tom, Martin Luther.

Yeah. He's a bright kid, right? Because he wouldn't go to university if he wasn't. And he wouldn't be doing all this. He's a bright person. But do we know anything about his personality at this point? So is he... For people who think Luther is a bit dry, he's absolutely not. He's very disputatious, hot-tempered.

He's obsessed with the body. Impulsive, yeah. He's obsessed with sexuality, all these kinds of things. Well, actually, you say he's obsessed with sexuality. I'm not sure he is obsessed with sexuality, actually. That's one of the things that doesn't obsess him. But he does have lots of other obsessions, you're right. Scatological obsessions, I guess. Certainly scatological obsessions. We'll come to them. No, I don't think there's anything

particularly at this point that would mark him out as anything exceptional. And again, what makes it all the more improbable is that I think that there is a sense, particularly if you grow up, I think, in a kind of culturally Protestant country like Britain, you assume that it's just waiting for someone like Luther to come along and poke at the rotten oak of the medieval church and it will all just collapse. Fat monks, corruption, people having feasts while the peasants are starving, fake relics. Tom, I hate to tell you, but I think for about the first 30 years of my life, that's pretty much what I thought. I mean, I kind of still deep down think was the story with the Catholic church, but you are now going to tell me that's not right at all. Well, so I think that assumption is hardwired into the very phrase,

the Reformation with a capital R, because of course, that's a very, very Protestant perspective. And in fact, right the way up until the end of the 19th century, it's only Protestants who ever use it. Because I think Catholics would point out that Reformation, which comes from the Latin word reformatio, remaking, is actually not specific to Protestantism. It is something that has been continuous throughout the entire history of the church. And the truth is that the medieval church that the Protestant Reformation overthrows is itself the product of a reformatio, is itself a kind of revolutionary institution. Because the first reformation, and this is important background to understand what Luther is about because the first reformation

happens not in the 16th century, but in the 11th century. And it matters because the second reformation is, you know, it's a reaction to it, but it's also bread of it. So I think we should just give a portrait of this reformation because it is what Luther is going to be reacting against. So the key features of this revolutionary institution that is the medieval church, it divides the world into two in a way that had never happened before in any kind of culture in the world. You have a dimension of the cyclum, which is the earthly mortal dimension,

and will give us the word secular. And then you have the dimension of the church, which is radiant and pure and constitutes the link or the religio in Latin to heaven. So there you have what will become the key dividing line, which we still have to this day between the secular and the religious. And the clergy, who are called the religiosi, these are the people who guard the dimension of the religio, the bond joining humans to heaven. So these are, dare I say, professional Christians, which is quite unusual anywhere in the world to have a class who take up, in some places, 10% of the population. Their job is just to be Christians. Yes. And they are marked by chastity, which again is very distinctive and which really

only is introduced in the 11th century. And by their use of Latin, which is again a kind of marker of the fact that they belong to a universal timeless church. They have a very complex hierarchy, obviously with the Pope at the head of it. And beneath him, there are all kinds of different clergy. So there are what are called secular clergy, clergy who are operating out in the dimension of the cyclum with the laity. These are your friars and whatnot. So these are the archbishops, the bishops, right the way down to the parish priests, the friars, the monks, the nuns, these are called regular clergy. So these are people who are taking the narrow path to heaven, but the surest path

to heaven. And they, in a way, are storing up benefits for the vast mass of the Christian people. Because like all revolutionary institutions, the church gets its validity from offering people the promise of a better life. So you have justice on this world, in the mortal world, and this justice is provided for people as a result of a kind of entire framework of law that derives from the church fathers, from church councils, from decrees of the popes. And these are collectively known as canons. So the framework of church law is called the canon law. And this is seen as expressive of God's justice.

And there's always a tension isn't there between that, the canon law and the separate hierarchy that the church has and its own practices, its institutions and all that stuff. There's always a tension between that and the local king, Henry II, Henry VIII, whoever, who thinks they're kind of invading my privileges. That doesn't start with Henry VIII wanting a son. No, no, it doesn't. That's been there for centuries. Canon law begins to be constructed in the 12th century and by the 16th century,

by the time of Luther, it's this vast edifice, as also is the edifice of the spiritual economy that the church is presiding over. Because of course, what it ultimately is promising is the promise of heaven, of salvation. But what will prevent you from getting to heaven is sin. And sin, if you're not going to go to hell, you have to pay it down. You have to get rid of it. And this is where indulgences come in. So indulgences, they can wipe your sin completely clean. But Tom, you're not going to hell straight away, are you? Well, so effectively, if you were sinless in this life, which is almost impossible, so even saints, you might go straight to heaven. But the vast

mass of people are going to have to work off their debt of sin in a place called purgatory. So that's like a waiting room, is that right? It's not hell. A waiting room with fire. So it's like a lesser hell? Yes. It's like hell with a time limit. So you've been a terrible man. You're Himmler. You're going to hell. You're just a commoner, garden offender like you and I. We're ordinary, sinful people.

We might go to purgatory for a thousand years. Who knows? I think in your case, Dominic, slightly longer. Thanks. Compare me with Himmler. But you could work this down. So you could make prayers to the saints and the virgin who will intervene with god yeah or you could you know charitable donations good works you could go on a

pilgrimage and above all there are there are masses and the mass it's the celebration of the sacrifice of christ on the cross and it's made vivid and real in the bread and wine christ is literally present there and this is a way for the christian people to kind of experience a sense of common identity and commune with the mystery of their faith so this is why churches are set aside as sacred places so you have images you have icons you have incense you have all the kind of stuff that I'm sure would rouse your Protestant suspicions. I actually like icon stuff. I love an icon. Good, good.

I love the kind of the Orthodox Church. Big fan of the Orthodox Church. But the role that masses play in the spiritual economy is that they are kind of believed to transcend place and time and to link all Christians to the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. And therefore, they have an incredible efficacy in burning away the sins of the dead in purgatory. And so by the 15th century, the idea of wealthy people paying monks or whoever to perform masses for the dead has become a crucial part of Christian piety. So Tom, two points about masses. So one is, in a weird way actually, I never thought I'd say this to you on this of all subjects. I think you're almost slightly underselling what a massive deal, literally a massive deal, the mass is.

Because most people would only go and take communion once a year, is that right? And they would get the bread, but not the wine. The wine is reserved for the priest. But this is a moment of extraordinary power in your life, right? Yeah, it's almost as though you were approaching the heart of a nuclear reactor or something. The mass is the reactor that is powering everything. And it's so potent that only priests can approach it. And even then, only with extreme care. And for the laity, it's too dangerous to approach. Right. It's the bit, the Raiders of the Lost Ark, when they take

the lid off the Ark of the Covenant and all the stuff is flying out. Yes. That's the moment in your life, isn't it? Where, I mean, God is literally there. Yeah. Literally there. Literally in the bread and wine. Yes. The bread and the wine are the body and blood. I mean, God is literally present. But also the other thing I was going to say, that thing about saying masses for the dead to get you out of purgatory. But am I not right in saying that that industry, because it is an industry, is more developed in Germany than in any other part of Christendom? So somebody like Luther growing up, it looms, again, massively large in a way that it wouldn't if he was in Italy or Spain or somewhere where the mass industry is not quite as developed. So that explains why he ends up kicking against it and why it becomes so incredibly controversial in Germany and Switzerland

and the kind of Baltic and Scandinavia and so on. But again, I mean, it takes some time to take the dramatic step of kicking against it. Because I think to begin with that, you know, he's a schoolboy or he's a student. He's not really thinking about it because for most people who are not kind of professional Christians in McCulloch's formulation, it's not something you necessarily believe in,

in the way that we believe or don't believe in things, because this is part of the course of modernity that Luther is going to set Europe on. So I think for most people, it's just kind of part of the air that they breathe in. And I think it's one of the aspects of the pre-Reformation culture that is hardest for us to get our heads around, because I think that the way that the Reformation changes our relationship to belief is one of the profoundest aspects of what makes it revolutionary. So for us, what do you believe in or what don't you believe in? It's a crucial marker of our identity, but it's really, I think, different, say, in 15th century Latin Christendom. So say when Christians call Jews or Muslims unbelievers, they're not really defining them in terms of the fact that what Jews or Muslims believe is wrong. It's just that they don't believe in the stuff that everyone in Latin Europe is taking for granted. So Tom, I loved this section in your notes because it really, I mean, sometimes I'm very hard on you and the rest is history, but I think here I just thought, wow, this is so interesting

because like many people, you know, I'd often thought, did people really believe this? Did they really believe that the body and blood turned into all that stuff? Relics, indulgences, how could they believe it? But I think what you're I know, for example, that human beings need oxygen to survive or that the universe was born in the Big Bang. But we only know that because everyone we know thinks it. We've been told it and we take it on trust and we just take it completely for granted. And that's how they thought about the devil, indulgences, purgatory, all that stuff. They didn't sit up at late at night debating whether or not it was true. No. Because it obviously was true to them. Well, I think a really fascinating parallel would be with, say, people's attitudes to epidemiology during the COVID lockdowns.

Most people accepted what they were told by the epidemiologists, because why wouldn't they? It's the epidemiologists who know. And so the theologians are the kind of the medieval equivalent of epidemiologists. And you may wonder, well, how do they know? How do they get their certainty? And they get it because they have revelation in the form of scripture, but also they have what is called by intellectuals in the universities, scientia, so science, but it's not science in our sense. It's the knowledge that can be deduced from revelation via kind of deduction, via rigorous study. And so this is how purgatory comes to be deduced. Purgatory is not mentioned in scripture, but you can deduce it from various

conclusions that can be drawn from scripture. The whole edifice of this framework of belief is like a kind of enormous cathedral. You don't have to go into the cathedral to be aware of it. It is looming up over you. You know, because they're the experts. Exactly. And only a madman, you know, in 2024, somebody who said, well, I don't believe the world is round, actually. You know, you would be like, it's just eccentric for the sake of it. What's the point in going against what everybody knows to be true? Well, let's pursue that COVID analogy. Of course, during COVID, there are sceptics. I mean, there are people who kick back against what the medical establishment are telling them. And so likewise in the Middle

Ages, of course, you do have people who are kicking back against what the church authorities are telling them. And these are people who, of course, are called heretics. And if they're inveterate as heretics and they refuse to recant, then they're burned. And in the 1590s, the guy called Savonarola in Florence, who becomes the leader of the city. But the guy you're going to be talking about is the real precursor to Luther. That's Jan Hus, right? So Jan Hus, he is from Prague. He's a scholar there at the university, immensely charismatic, intellectually brilliant, huge personal integrity, very influenced by Wycliffe. And Wycliffe is questioning the authority of the papacy, questioning all kinds of

aspects of church teaching. Huss is influenced by him. And so Huss, following Wycliffe's example, is teaching that the Bible is the ultimate source of authority and that the traditions of the church are kind of irrelevant compared to the sanctity of the Bible. That the clergy are so corrupt that maybe the entire fabric of the church is corrupt. And again, he is scorning the claim of the papacy to have a primacy that's been given by God. And aren't there two other things that are interesting about Huss? One of them is that he says, you are being denied the wine at mass. You should have both bread and wine. And basically the priests are hogging all the wine for themselves. That everyone should have it.

Yeah. And because this is, you know, it's not just a little glass of wine. No. This is the blood of Christ sharing in the radiant power of God. Right. And the second thing is that there's a linguistic nationalism to Hearst, isn't there? So he wants lots of stuff to be in the Czech language, a bit like Wycliffe with the English language, and that that will play a part in the later Reformation.

Well, that's more complicated because actually, so Wycliffe translates the Bible into English, but it's condemned not because he's translated it into English, but because it's associated with him and his heretical followers. So it's over the course of the 15th century that an association on the part of the church authorities is starting to develop with heresy and with the Bible in vernacular languages, so not in Latin. But it's not been absolutely solidified at this point. But there's a hint of it, right? Yeah, there is a hint. It really only gets kind of bedded down in the 16th century as a reaction to the Reformation. But yeah, that is a part of it as well. So Hus is seen as a troublemaker. He gets invited to a church council in 1414 that is being held

in the Swiss city of Constance. He is given a safe conduct there by the imperial authorities, by the guy who will go on to become the emperor. And so he arrives there in November 1414. Three weeks later, he is arrested. He's put on trial. He's told to recant. He doesn't. He's burnt at the stake and his ashes are dumped in the Rhine. Oh, that's harsh and so that i mean that's a kind of a chilling example of what can happen if you you push the church too far right but i think it is important to emphasize that not everyone who says that the church is corrupt or that it needs reform or that improvements can be made is seen as a heretic.

This is something that is part of the fabric of the traditions of the medieval church. So you can go too far and end up burnt, but equally you can make these arguments and absolutely stay within the fabric of the church. And doesn't that reflect the fact that the church is not static, that Christianity is not a fixed thing and that there are always arguments going on like should the pope have power or should it be councils of clergymen what is the exact relationship between church and state as it were so the pope's always falling out with secular rulers isn't he yeah this is constantly being negotiated so just to go back to the thing that we began this with, so indulgences. I mean, this is what Chaucer's pardoner is selling, the most loathsome figure

in the Canterbury Tales we talked about in our episode. I mean, he's terrible. But Chaucer is not condemned as a heretic. He ends up buried in Westminster Abbey. You can criticise aspects of this spiritual economy, if you want to call it that, and be a completely devout Catholic Christian. So I think it's in that sense that there is nothing inevitable about the Reformation. You can criticise the church, but you don't have to pull the whole fabric down. So again, the question is, why does it end up kicking off in 1517, this kind of indulgence, his bust up that we began this episode with? And equally, why does it end up kicking off with this guy who we left? He's just graduated from university. His father wants him to go and

be a lawyer. There's nothing about him that suggests he's going to precipitate this globally significant transformation in the way that Christians in Latin Europe think about themselves. What is it that happens? All right. Well, Tom, this was meant to be like the first 10 minutes or so of the episode, but it's become the whole episode, which is great because I find it such a rich and interesting subject. So for those of you who are members of our very own little sect, the Rest is History Club, you can, of course, hear the rest of the episodes right now.

So you can find out what turned Luther against the church, all the crazy stuff that happened. There's lots of sort of blood and thunder to come. So you can dig into that right away. For those of you who are still loyal to the old ways of listening to an episode every, you know, when it comes out, that's great. You know, we like you too. We don't condemn you. Yeah.

You'll have to wait until the official release. Either way, we'll be back with more Martin Luther excitement next time. Tom, thank you very much and goodbye. Bye-bye. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman 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

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