The Rest Is History - 435. Luther: The Battle Against Satan (Part 3)

Episode Date: March 31, 2024

Three years on from Martin Luther’s publication of the Ninety-Five Theses - a shocking attack on the corruption of the Catholic Church and the selling of indulgences - his radical new ideas and brilliant use of the printing press had unleashed chaos in Christendom. Still in Wittenberg under the Protection of Frederick III, Luther’s increasingly radical beliefs founded in his readings of Christian scripture, now sought to undermine the entire fabric of the Catholic Church and the theology that has shaped the Latin West for centuries. This culminated in his famous Reformation Moment, which saw his love affair with God raised to new heights of exultation. All the while, support for his outrageous ideas was swelling and Luther’s own celebrity growing. With it, the very real danger in which he placed himself, and the looming threat of excommunication. At last, in August 1518 Luther was summoned to Augsburg to meet with Cardinal Thomas Cajetan and have his beliefs examined…would he survive the reckoning to come? Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss the raging fires of Luther’s radical revolution, his seminal Reformation Moment, and the great debate in Augsburg which would see his fervour put to the test.  *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. 60 days the papacy had given Martin Luther to recant, or else be damned as a heretic. Now, on the 10th of December, the time was up. That morning at nine o'clock, Luther walked through one of the three town gates to where a carrion pit lay. A large crowd had gathered there. One of Luther's colleagues from the university, a theologian named Johann Agricola, lit a fire. The spot was where the clothes of those who had died in the nearby hospital were burned.

But Agricola, rather than rags, used books as fuel. All that morning he and Luther had been ransacking libraries for collections of canon lore. Had the two men been able to find a volume of Aquinas, they would have burned that as well. Their kindling, though, proved sufficient. The fire began to blaze. Agricola continued to feed books into the flames. Then Luther stepped out from the crowd. He was trembling. He held up the papal decree that had condemned his teachings. Because you have confounded the truth of God, he said in a ringing voice, today the Lord confounds you into the fire with you. He dropped the decree into the flames.

The parchment blackened and curled and turned to smoke. As Luther turned and walked back through the city gate, ashes skittered and swirled on the winter breeze. So that was Dan Brown. That was Tom Holland. So that was Dan Brown. That was Tom Holland. So rude. In Dominion, which is your magisterial book about the history of Christianity and how it has shaped the Western world, and indeed the entire world, Tom,

I think it's fair to say. And this is an amazing set piece moment. So we are now in episode three of this series about the human being who in the last five to 600 years has arguably shaped the Western world as much as any other, maybe more than any other. Martin Luther. He is burning a papal bull, a papal decree that was targeted at him. So this is open war with the papacy, Tom. It is. So this is ex surge domine, rise up, O Lord. And the Pope had issued it on the 15th of June, 1520, and had given Luther 60 days to recant or be excommunicated. And the 60 days are up.

And Luther's response to this deadline is as written in that magisterial praise beautiful and uh the bull is specifically censoring 41 propositions that luther has put forward and one of those propositions dominic is that it's wrong to burn heretics and so the danger of death yeah the fact that Luther, by directly taking on the papacy like this, you know, I mean, it's an exceedingly dangerous thing to do. This is life and death. Yes. And this is happening in Wittenberg, the capital of Frederick, the Elector of Saxony.

And Luther is a professor at the university. So Frederick has every stake in kind of backing him. And three years have passed since that great and celebrated act of defiance that we ended episode two with. Hammering the theses or not on the walls of the church or churches. Yes, onto the doors of the church. And in those three years, Luther has precipitated a crisis on a scale that Latin Christendom has never witnessed before, at least not since the 11th century. And the features of the crisis, they're kind of threefold really. So it's about the church essentially asserting its authority, the medieval church, the Roman church, whatever you want to call it. So back in 1517, the whole reason why these indulgences are being issued is because the church is manifesting its assumption that Christians can earn their way out of purgatory through buying them or through a whole host doing good works, pilgrimages, whatever.

This idea that there is a kind of spiritual capital that Christians can draw on to get themselves out of purgatory and get to heaven sooner. And of course, in 1520, the assumption is that the church has the right to eradicate heresy. This is why the Pope has issued the bull. Can I ask a quick question, Tom? Yeah. Lots of people will be thinking this. Why is it called a bull? It's called a bull, which is obviously a papal bull. That's very Protestant. But it's a bullalla it's a kind of a seal that stamps the the text of it okay fine i've always wondered and uh you know and the church has been doing this for a long time so one of the phrases that is used in this papal bull that's targeting luther is the same phrase that people who listen to our episode on the albigensian crusades may

remember yeah the phrase about the little foxes seeking to destroy the vineyard, exactly the same phrase. And Tom, just to remind people, Luther hammered up these theses or nailed them up or didn't, depending on your view, because he was outraged because a bloke was going around, a kind of carnival-esque monk, was going around selling indulgences to raise money for the rebuilding of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. And Luther just thought this was disgraceful. Yeah. And it turns out to be even worse because actually loads of the money is going to a bank that has given money to an underage bishop who wanted to become archbishop. So it's all fabulously corrupt. So that's one aspect of it. The church basically

trying to put the lid on this kind of bubbling rebellion. And the second thread, of course, is Luther defying really fundamental teachings of the church. So in 1517, when he's attacking indulgences, he is also attacking the entire dogma that sinners can basically earn their way out of purgatory, that sinners have agency in getting rid of the penalty for their own sins. And that then leads him on to question the leading royal claim by the papacy and indeed, actually, the entire clergy. So he's starting to move towards a position that the clergy have no particular status. And so much of this comes from Luther saying he's been the professor of Bible studies

at the university in Wittenberg. And so much of this is him saying, actually, do you know what? None of this is in the Bible. And if everything is meant to come from the Bible, this is all just tosh that has been dreamed up subsequently. Yeah. And so it's partly from his reading of the Bible and it's partly from his tugging on a thread and the whole carpet falls to pieces. So if you question a fundamental dogma, then you start to question the role of the papacy. Then you start to question the role of the clergy. And essentially Luther is coming to a much more democratic understanding of what it is to be a Christian, one in which

the division between the clergy and the laity is being erased. He says, every true Christian, whether living or dead, has a part in all the blessings of Christ and the church. Is he thinking he's getting back to the early Christians? Yes. Like the Acts of the Apostles kind of Christians? Yeah. He's starting to construct an understanding of Christian history, which is radically opposed to the traditional one. So he is essentially saying that you have the early church and then it all goes wrong.

And he is moving towards a position in which the papacy is the whore of Babylon, as described in the book of Revelation. And therefore, you know, a thousand years and more, it's been corrupting and polluting the pure teachings of Christ, which is obviously a very radical revision. It's not going to go down well with the Pope. It's not going to go down well, as we see, because he issues his bull. But the third aspect of what is making this a crisis is that Luther is an absolute master of self-promotion. And this is really unexpected. I mean, he's a professor in an obscure university, but he just kind of lights the touch paper.

And his mastery, particularly of printing, which we talked about in the previous episode, I mean, printing has been around for about a century, but he turns out to be absolutely suited to a kind of social media revolution. I mean, so Alec Ryrie, the great historian of Protestantism, he says he turns out to have a kind of raw Trumpian brilliance at German language polemic. And I think that people have been buying printed matter, but Luther makes it exciting. And so they get into the habit of buying it and perhaps kind of reading it out to people who can't read and so on. And so it's Luther really who generates the market for buying printed matter in a way that no one had done previously.

And you know your Trumpian analogy. There's a kind of populist side to Luther's rhetoric, he's brilliant at describing things in very aggressive, scatological, sometimes funny, raw, kind of earthy terms in a way that maybe virtually no other theologians can do. So he can reach people who other people can't reach? Yes, absolutely. And the other thing that he does is that he's very, very good at staging a public event. So the burning of the bull in 1520, it's a deliberately dramatic thing. This is not what heretics do. Heretics who are condemned, they hide. They don't publicly defy the Pope because that would be mad. But Luther can do it because Frederick is guarding

his back. But he's staging a kind of festival of defiance. And in the wake of the burning of the bull, he has got all his students behind him. The students are rallying to him. The day after the burning of the bull in Wittenberg, students build an enormous float and they festoon it with parodies of papal bulls and decrees and so on. They drive it around the town and then they burn the whole lot. One of them has dressed up as a pope in the papal tiara and he then toss one of them has dressed up as a Pope in a kind of, you know, the papal tiara, and he then tosses his tiara into the fire. So this is a kind of great festival of defiance and it's fun. Okay. So why are people doing that? Because

what Luther is saying is very scandalous. So there are two possibilities there that either the students kind of are converted to Luther's way of thinking, maybe because he's such a brilliant teacher, or maybe because there was always a latent audience for that message, or are they just doing it because it's fun? I think both. Okay. And I think that, I mean, I guess we are so prone to not thinking that statements on Christian doctrine are exciting. Yeah. I mean, it's not the kind of thing that enthuses people by and large today, but back then it is the most thrilling thing you can do. And I mean, you just have to look at the sense of excitement that powers, I don't know, the pushing of doctrines that are offensive to conservatives today, say on social media. Yeah, of course.

I mean, people love it. They do. And likewise, conservatives quite enjoy kind of punching back. Exactly. Do you know what I was thinking about? I was thinking about 2020, the surge in people like attacking statues and stuff after the death of George Floyd. Yes, exactly. Some people are there because they really believe in the cause.

Some people are there because it's a laugh. They want to get out. The carnival-esque side of protest, the intoxication of it. Yeah, and I think that that is exactly right, because in the long run, statues will be toppled. Icons will be toppled in due course. And for reasons that are exactly analogous to the toppling of statues of slavers or whatever, that they are seen to be sinful. And a public display of your godliness is as exciting in the 21st century as it was in the 16th century. So it all goes back to Luther, basically. So today I think we should

look at how we get from Luther banging up the theses, if that's what he does, to him being excommunicated. And what happens in the wake of the 95 theses going up is that he has them printed in German as well as Latin and these start to hit the bookstalls in the new year of 1518 and they are produced by presses across the entire empire so the whole of what is now Germany and indeed Switzerland and in what will be the Netherlands as well. And because the theses are sharp, they're understandable, they're often quite witty, people can understand them. And they kind of really enjoy reading up. It kind of gives them a frisson, you know, almost a kind of the shiver of blasphemy about them. And to remind people, an important point,

the empire is a very strange, fragmented patchwork. So the imperial authority to deal with this necessarily is limited and depends upon local rulers, doesn't it? And that will be really important in Luther's story. Right. And in particular, the emperor is quite ill. And that means very likely there's going to be an imperial election very soon. And that, of course, gives an enormous power to Frederick, Luther's protector. It's one of only seven electors. Yeah, exactly. But even so, the church has no option but to respond to Luther's challenge. And this is partly because it seems that the sale of indulgences really starts to fall off in the wake of Luther's attack. But it's also because Luther has sent a copy to Albrecht,

the Archbishop of Mainz, who is the guy, basically, who's caused the whole problem. Yeah, extraordinary that he sent it to the very person. Yeah, yes. It's like someone tagging you into a social media thing, exposing you or something, right? Yeah. And so Albrecht then sends it to Rome to get a kind of ruling, you know, in the centre of things. And the tradition is that the Pope doesn't recognize, you know, that it's a crisis at all. He just thinks it's a load of monks squabbling.

And it's kind of, you know, the lordly tone of a politician in 2010 turning his nose up at Twitter. Right. Saying it doesn't matter. It's unimportant. Nothing on this matters. Yeah. Meanwhile, back in Germany,

they definitely have a sense of crisis so the dominicans give tetzel the guy who's been flogging the indulgences an honorary doctorate so that he can take on luther as an equal because of course luther has a doctorate he's a doctor yeah and tetzel is boasting that within three weeks of his getting his doctorate he will have luther in the flames and there's no question that Luther is in danger, but because he has the backing of Frederick, basically he's safe. And he also has the backing of, you know, we talked about the students, the students are already rallying behind him. They get hold of Tetzel's repudiation of Luther and burn it. So this is happening very, very early on. And it's interesting that book burning will be a feature of the Reformation.

It actually begins with the reformers. It's not the papacy that is the first to burn books. Yeah, that is interesting. And it's interesting that it's students burning books. I mean, remember when we did the Nazi series and we talked about how Nazi book burnings are driven by students and their lecturers, not by people against the students' wishes. Well, and again, I mean, I think that you just have to look at the world today to realise that students quite enjoy, if not burning books, then having them banned. There is a kind of,

you know, an excitement in it, tearing down traditional structures and so on. And he also has the backing of growing numbers of the faculty in Wittenberg. So two particular will play key roles in his story. So one is the professor of theology, who's also the chancellor of the university. He's a guy called Andreas von Karlstadt. Yeah. And he had actually given Luther his doctorate, even though he's actually three years younger than Luther. And there's a much younger scholar who's the professor of Greek, Philip Melanchthon, who's only 21 so quite

enoch powell he is like enoch powell does he speak like enoch powell no are you gonna do him in your birmingham accent no i'm not i'm not he'd renamed himself he did his name is actually schwarzer which means black earth and black earth has been translated into greek yeah and this is this is very much the kind of jape that professors at Wittenberg like to get up to. Does that count as a jape? Is that not just a terrible affectation? So Luther does it as well. So Luther's name is actually Luder.

But he thinks this isn't good enough. So he calls himself Eleutherius, which in Greek means the freed one. Oh, come on. And he then makes more accessible as Luther. I think less of him now, Tom, knowing that. So Luther also is a kind of, it's a classicist's joke. Right. Great banter. Great banter. But Luther is making a serious point because he's saying he's freed, the freed one. So

what exactly has he been freed from? So he thinks presumably he's been freed from superstition, obscurantism, error, the darkness of not knowing the love of God. Is that it basically? Yes. So he gets summoned to a chapter meeting of the Augustinians. He's an Augustinian monk in April, 1518, and it's held in Heidelberg. So it's quite a long way. Again, we see his mastery of publicity he walks there right right so you know that that's really drawing attention to himself and he's treated as an absolute celebrity everywhere he goes he's kind of cheered and he gets to heidelberg and the local prince shows off you know his chapel and his castle and invites luther to dine with him so it's all tremendous

so tom is there a slight j slight Jordan Peterson side to all this? Yes, a little bit, I think. A celebrity professor who has said the unsayable, and who has suddenly... Do you remember how people first reported when Jordan Peterson was doing rallies and stuff? People would say, it's amazing that somebody who's basically talking about, what is it, some lobsters?

Jungian philosophy and stuff. Yeah, and Jungian philosophy. It's inspiring young people. What a remarkable thing. And it's the same... Exactly. If you think that he is saying things that in universities for a long time have been unsayable, Luther is doing something similar at Heidelberg. So he is now directly attacking the foundations of the theology that has prevailed in the Latin West for centuries and centuries. So as opposed to the idea that reason, as mediated through Aristotle, enables you to understand God, Luther says that reason is actually a whore. He says that philosophy is a delusion, that the only true Christian is a fool.

He says out front, I believe it is impossible for the church to be reformed unless church law, so that's canon law, with its rules and decrees, scholastic theology, philosophy and logic, as they are now taught, are eradicated and replaced by other studies. Daily, I ask the Lord that the pure study of the Bible and the church fathers might be summoned back as soon as possible. So that is a bit like Jordan Peterson saying, gender studies, it's all woo-woo, post-colonial studies, all nonsense. Let's get rid of it all. Let's go back to studying Shakespeare or whatever. Or it's like people on the other side of that particular debate attacking their own disciplines. Yes. Isn't it? I mean, that's very popular and that's sort of

on the left as it were, the political spectrum is saying our whole discipline is colonial. It is tainted by prejudice. Let's get rid of it. Decolonize Anglo-Saxon studies or whatever. And people find that intoxicating. Right. And Luther is the wellspring of both those traditions. And that's what makes him so fascinating and important. So Luther is genuinely the place from which both those impulses come. Of course, he is in turn drawing on Augustine

and ultimately on the Bible. But the framing of it is new. This is what is so thrilling and intoxicating. And it's also very brave because he is also questioning the authority of the papacy. And he has a colleague at Wittenberg who's the professor of law, a guy called Hieronymus Scherf, brilliant name. And Scherf says to Luther, you know, the papacy is not going to stand for this

and Luther doesn't care. So why does Luther not care? I think it is a sense of intellectual excitement, but I think it is also something much, much more really, really profound that is so important and so transformative on the history of Christianity that the moment when he supposedly first experiences it has been called the Reformation moment. And just to put that into context, Tom, the difference between him and the people we're talking about in the modern world is he will die if he gets this wrong. And if he misjudges, he's in real danger for his life. Right. Yes. So I think you have to have an absolute certitude to display that kind of courage.

And it's this reformation moment, I think, that gives Luther that certitude. But whether it is a moment or whether it is a continuous process is much debated. But essentially, we saw in the first episode how Luther becomes a monk and he lives in dread of God's judgment. He says that he hates God. Yeah. You know, God is going to condemn him and there's nothing he can do about it. And so this is why he's, you know, starving himself and praying and confessing for hours on end and all that kind of thing.

And then he gets to study the Bible as a professor and to reflect on what it is saying. And the more he does this, so the more he comes to see all his attempt to earn liberation from God's condemnation as wasted effort. And the key figure in this is St. Paul. In the New Testament, there are a number of his letters. They're the earliest texts that we have written by a Christian. And for people who don't know who St. Paul is, Tom, he's a bloke who was persecuting the Christians and then converts on the road to Damascus. Right. So initially, Paul is a Pharisee. So he's very, very learned in the scriptural teachings, in the law, the law that's been given to Moses. But it turns out that this is not what redeems him. What redeems him is this kind of blinding

moment that is summed up in the phrase, the road to Damascus. He has a vision of the risen Christ and is blinded by the descent on him of the spirit. And this marks him out as one of the elect. And Luther, when he is reading Paul, he gets overwhelmed by a similar consciousness of divine grace that God has chosen and loves him. And Luther says of this moment, this feeling of being washed in the love of God, I felt I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. That thing of being born again, so influential. Is Luther the first person to use that particular phrase, being born again? Or is he the person who popularizes it, I should say?

I think he popularizes it. I mean, the idea of being born again is in the Bible. Right. That is what baptism gives you. But I think the idea that you can have this moment and be sure of it. So this is what's new. So Alec Ryrie, who is brilliant on this, on what it is that makes this reformation moment so important. He says that Luther's theology was not a doctrine. It was a love affair. So it's not about drawing abstract theological principles. Right.

It's about articulating a feeling, a kind of an intensity of love. So all the time that Luther had kind of been dreading that he was unworthy of God's love, that he would be condemned by God's justice, that God hates him. This realization suddenly that God loves him and that God loves him in a way that transcends rubrics of you've done this and therefore you have to pay this penalty and you'll be in purgatory this long. That's not what it's about at all. It's total, it's kind of intoxicating, it's beyond reason. And it comes to Luther, I think, partly through kind of psychological impulses, a kind of yearning for this love in the face of all the unhappiness that he's been feeling in trying to kind of justify himself to God. But as I say, it also comes from reading Paul and particularly one line.

So there's a line in the letter that Paul writes to the Christians in the church, the letter to the Romans, the righteous shall live through faith. And Luther understands this to mean the faith specifically that God loves you and that it doesn't matter if you're lost to sin. Everyone is lost to sin. Humanity is so sinful that they can't through their own agency obtain the forgiveness of God, but it doesn't matter because if God loves you, then you exist in a state of grace. And the state of grace is the feeling that you have that Christ is present in you, in your secret most heart. And the certainty of that grace in turn gives you what Luther calls the peace of conscience. That all your anxiety about whether you're going to be redeemed or not is gone. And so you can have a kind of deep, profound, spiritual joy and sense of certitude that essentially cuts the Gordian knot of all the

purgatory stuff, all the confession stuff, all the, am I going to go to heaven or not? And it's an incredibly, I mean, it's a really, really kind of profound moment because it provides both a theological, but more importantly, I think an emotional justification for getting rid of all the purgatory and clergy and pilgrimage and all that kind of stuff. And it's not just that that stuff is wrong, it's positively sinful because it's blocking off a proper understanding to the Christian people of God's love. And so this is why Luther emphasizes the loneliness of the individual Christian before God. It is you alone with scripture, with faith. You don't need anything else.

Okay, so two things, Tom. Number one, if this is the case, why isn't this just a massive get out for, you know, you don't have to feel bad about your sins and stuff because God loves you. Everyone's sinful. You know what? Everybody is sinful. The world is sinful. And the thing is, all that matters is that God loves you. So crack on, you know, fill your boots. This is the great debate. And this is the great criticism of that kind of Protestant sense of election. I mean, you put your finger on it immediately. Secondly, what I would say, thinking about the 2020s, a criticism that some people would have of the capital E enthusiasm find so obnoxious. Is Luther not conscious that other

people will find his moral certainty, his sense of being saved? Oh, look at me. God loves me. Isn't that brilliant? No, he doesn't because he's in a love affair. Right. Yeah. He's in a love affair. And when you're in a love affair, you don't care what other people think. You only care about the person you're in love with. I mean, I think that that is it. Yeah. Because of course the institutional criticism would be, it's all about you, isn't it? Right. This is very narcissistic. Well, it is, but it also, I mean, again, I think this is why it matters because it does feed into all kinds of intellectual trends that will emerge over the course of the centuries that follow. So again, to quote Ryrie, the idea's initial impact was like that of Darwinism or Marxism in their own times. It was a concept that no one had thought of in quite those terms before,

but that seemed to many people once they had grasped it to be self-evidently true. So it's not just Luther. I mean, it's other people as well. Once they have this, then they can share in the love. But of course, it kind of turns on its head, the notion that everyone in Christendom is a Christian. Because what Luther is saying basically is that you have to have this feeling that God loves you, that you've been born again, that you've entered the gates of paradise, or you're not really a Christian. So the implication in turn of that is that only a

tiny elect really are going to be saved. And although Luther does believe that the knowledge of God is imprinted on the soul of every human being, I mean, what he would call belief is the idea that you have an absolute conviction that your salvation has been granted to you. And this, of course, is a much rarer bloom. And so he basically, Luther, ends up saying that maybe only one in a thousand people rank as a Christian, a true Christian. Do you know what he should say that the other people are, Tom?

I'm very pleased with this. It's very Liz Truss-like behavior. He should call them chinos, Christians in name only. Very good. I do like that. Yeah, excellent. And of course, the implication in turn of that is that, say you live in a Protestant country, you know, a Protestant community, you can't just coast. I mean, you have to work out what you believe. The job of believing becomes something that is personal to you. You can't just leave it to the professional Christians.

Yeah. It's about your truth, right? It's about living your truth. Yes, living your truth. This is where the idea of living your truth comes from. And of course, the reason why this breeds, in the long run, atheism and unbelief, as well as belief in God, is that you may just feel the strain is too great. You know, you try to believe and you don't. So again, I think this is why Luther stands at the head of the atheism that emerges in the West. But partly because the atheism is all about

you again. It's like, what do you think? Exactly. It's ignoring tradition and all that stuff. And so that's why humanists are patently the descendants of Luther. Their truth is that they don't believe, but they don't believe in a very Lutheran way. So that's why I think it really matters. Basically, belief in the sense that we today understand belief is being born here. And because we're so habituated to it, we don't recognize how profound a change it is. Yeah, we don't see it. I mean, the word I would use is individualism. You're basically saying, are you not, that pre-Luther, the idea of religious belief was collective, that you really ought to

believe and most people what they personally thought didn't occur to them most people because they just assumed you would go along with what everybody else said to most yeah and it's luther who invents the idea or popularizes the idea that your relationship with the world of religion must be a personal one. And so when people say, well, I don't know whether I believe in God, but I have a personal spirituality or whatever. That's Lutheran because before him, no one would have ever thought to say that. Is that right? Yeah. I mean, to go back to the COVID analogy where we were saying that in the pandemic, most people were content to rely on the epidemiologists to basically kind of tell them what to do. Yeah.

They had no reason to doubt it, to unbelieve what they were saying. Now it's as though, say during COVID, the vaccines will only work on those who absolutely and unshakably believe that they will work. I mean, that's the shift, the change. But also, I guess the idea that if you met with a group of friends, each of them would say, well, I have my own very personal beliefs about COVID. I mean, no one would say that. It'd be a mad thing to say. And so this in the long run is the problem, but Luther doesn't recognise it at this point because he thinks that there is only one way of understanding it. And he frames it, I think, as a single blinding moment, a reformation moment, because in a way that does make it more personal. It does imply that rather than something that he's worked out over a long period of time, it's a single blinding moment of revelation that enables him properly to understand God.

And then people call it his tower experience, like he was shut up in a tower thinking about it or something. Yeah. So he gives a range of accounts of how he came by this moment later in life so one of them he's he's in the cloaca so the shitter uh and so you know we've talked about this in the previous episode tom if i had a flipping pound for every time you so he's on the toilet right and what he's doing there is that he is appropriating the dimension of the devil i.e excrement and and filth to god okay you know later in life he will say and again you know apologies to people listening but when he avows his faith in christ he says if that is not enough for you you devil addressing satan i have also shat and pissed wipe your mouth on that and take a hearty bite of it you don't hear that from any theologians these days, do you?

No. But essentially what he's saying is that even the dimension of Satan, Christ is to be found there. Christ can purify everything. But you're right. The other famous account he gives is that he's in a tower in the monastery at Wittenberg. And do you think he means that metaphorically? It's so debated.

I don't think we'll ever know. Okay. And I mean, again, he also gives various accounts as to when it happened. So he specifically gives the date of 1519. So that's two years after the 95 theses have gone up. So Richard Rex in his book, I think very convincingly argues that it happened early in 1518. So just after he's put it up. And I think that this is what gives him the courage to do what he does to defy the papacy. Because in summer of 1518 Rome concludes that they are heretical and on the 7th of August news reaches Luther in Wittenberg that he is summoned to Rome and he knows that this is a summons that is likely to end up with him being burnt at the

stake. Luther is facing certain death or is he? Return after the break to find out what happens to him. 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. That's therestisentertainment.com. The papacy, sent the 95 theses by the local archbishop, had pondered them for eight months before finally pronouncing, in August 1518, that they were indeed heretical.

The author had been summoned to Rome, yet this, far from settling the matter, served only to stoke the flames further. Already in Wittenberg, writings by the local inquisitor had been ceremonially burnt in the market square. Cayetan, tracking events from his residence in Augsburg, fretted that the bushfires of controversy were increasingly out of control. As papal legate, it was his urgent responsibility to stamp them out. The best and most Christian way to do this, he decided, was to summon the troublesome author of the 95 Theses to Augsburg and persuade him in person to recant. Austere, learned and devout, Cayetan was a man whom even those normally suspicious of inquisitors knew that they could trust. His invitation was duly accepted. On the 7th of October 15 1518 martin luther arrived in augsburg so this is the moment tom from dan brown

or tom holland's book dominion your own book when luther a man whose writings have been condemned as heretical comes face to face with a prince of the church, an inquisitor. And a cardinal. Yeah. Who has the power over him, does he not? I mean, Luther's life hangs in the balance here. Is that too strong? Yeah.

Oh, Tom. Because basically Luther has been given safe passage. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, in the long run, absolutely. I mean, this is incredibly high stakes. And particularly because Cajetan, in so many ways, is the embodiment of everything that Luther is rejecting. So he is someone who's devoted his life to the study of all kind of the philosophy and the medieval understanding of God that Luther is rejecting. But he is absolutely, I mean, he's a very impressive man, very serious,

very moral. He's actually head of the Dominicans. And although we've been framing the Dominicans as the baddies in this story, you know, Tetzel is a Dominican. Of course, the Dominicans elsewhere are behaving very well. So we think a friend of the show, Bartolome de las Casas, the Dominican in the new world, who is standing up for the rights of the Indians, as he would call them, out there. And Cayetan is appalled by what he's being told about how the Spanish are behaving in the New World. And he actually meets the Spaniard and he says to him, do you not doubt that your king is in hell?

So he's a morally impressive man. He's not one of your corrupt cardinals. He's not a sinister evil cardinal, the kind that poisons a nunnery. And he's an Italian, right? He's from Gaeta, hence the name. Yeah, so hence his name. So his real name is Tommaso de Vio, and he names himself Tommaso after Thomas Aquinas, who is the greatest of the medieval theologians, devotee of Aristotle. And the guy that Luther hates. And the person who Luther particularly hates, absolutely. But as well as being a churchman,

he's also a very, very skilful diplomat, despite the fact that he goes around insulting the Spanish king. And so he's been sent to Augsburg, not specifically to meet Luther, but to try and coordinate a crusade against the Turks who were starting to really move into the Balkans at this point.

So this is fascinating, isn't it? So we talked last time, didn't we? Or a couple of episodes ago about how the Ottomans had captured Constantinople in 1453, an absolutely unbelievably shocking moment for Christendom. So they take Algiers in 1516, they're sort of spreading through the Mediterranean, but they're going to capture Belgrade in 1521.

Yeah, so they're preparing for a big campaign against Belgrade this very summer. Then they're preparing for a big campaign against Belgrade this very summer. Then they crush Hungary five years later. Yeah. And then by the end of the 1520s, they are going to be at the gates of Vienna. So really within striking distance of Germany. Yeah. And remember that we talked about Johann Hilton, the monk in Eisenberg, where Luther was at school, who, you know, he supposedly wrote

prophecies in his own blood. And he had prophesied that Germany would be conquered by the Turks and that this would herald the coming of the apocalypse. Now, Cayetano is absolutely against this. The papacy is not in favor of the idea that the apocalypse is threatening. And in fact, in 1513, a council in the Lateran palace in Rome had specifically prohibited preaching the immanence of the Antichrist. But of course, Luther is all over this, not least because Hilton, this prophetic monk, had foretold that a great prophet would emerge in 1516, which is close enough to 1517 for Luther to think that it might actually be him.

Just on that apocalyptic thing, Tom, you and I know, and everyone listening to this knows, that the Ottomans didn't get into Central and Western Europe. Well, they didn't get beyond Hungary. They didn't take Vienna. They didn't get into Germany. But nobody knows that then. I mean, the whole Luther story surely only makes sense if you think that this is a society that thinks it is facing imminent invasion, occupation, the stamping out of Christianity, whatever. There's this incredible sense of existential dread that hangs over the whole story. Yeah. And this really ties Cahiton's hands in dealing with Luther, because we mentioned that the emperor Maximilian is fading and he wants to ensure that his grandson Charles will

succeed him as Emperor and this obviously gives enormous power to Frederick, Luther's defender and protector as an elector. Yeah, because it's not a done deal that a Habsburg will succeed it could be somebody else. No, it's not a done deal. I think the

key thing is that Charles wants to be elected unanimously and Frederick is keeping his cards close to his chest and not saying who he is going to vote for. And so that means that Cahitan, if he's to get a kind of united front against the Turks, he can't afford to alienate Frederick. And this is why Frederick is able to persuade Cahitan to meet Luther in Augsburg rather than have him sent to Rome. Again, Luther is very, very lucky about this. So he's lucky, but of course he also has this incredible ability to seize the limelight. And so again, he goes to Augsburg on foot, kind of playing the humble man of God, as opposed to the splendor and pomp of Cahitan as a kind of

prince of the church. Ketan welcomes him very gently. He's kind of playing the part of a father speaking to a son, trying to persuade him of the error of his ways. But they have three meetings, and over the course of the meetings, Ketan loses it more and more. He gets more and more cross. His voice goes up higher and higher, because he realizes very, very quickly that what's at stake is not the details of the 95 Theses. It's about essentially who has authority in the Christian world. And to Kertan, it seems self-evident who does. It's the church. It's the Catholic church. It always has done. It always will. I mean, to question that is just unspeakable. But Luther is questioning that. He's questioning

the papacy. He's questioning canon law. He's questioning the papacy. He's questioning canon law. He's questioning all the philosophy derived from Aristotle, all of it. And Luther is arguing that all that really matters is the Bible, sola scriptura, scripture alone. And he says to Cahitan, the Pope is not above, but under the word of God. And Cahitan can't believe it. He can't believe that he is arguing with this obscure monk who is making this case and refusing to accept the majesty of the teachings of the church so to use an analogy that you've used previously in the podcast in the series it is the equivalent of an incredibly distinguished scientist you know one of the

world's great scientists, suddenly finding that he's got to have a debate with somebody who not merely doesn't come anywhere near him in eminence, but says, I don't really believe in your science, and is kind of ripping it down to the foundations and saying he doesn't accept everything that the scientist and his colleagues take for granted. But I suppose the difference would be that this person who's opposing the professor would have a basic grounding that would enable him to argue

his case because Luther is saying, you know, disprove me, go to the Bible and prove to me that the Pope should have this and that Aristotle is right on that or whatever. Yeah. And that's a problem for him, right? That is a problem. And Cayetan comes back and says, yes, but this is the majesty of the church. This is tradition. I embody it. And Luther says, my conscience is more important to me than what you're saying. And here he is making the plea for conscience, which again is so important to the way that I think people in the modern West understand the basis for what they do, their moral underpinnings. But again, it is Luther who is taking this step and foregrounding conscience as something

that is more important than anything else, really. And so you can see why Cato completely loses his rag and tells Luther to go away. And so, you know, only come back if you're prepared to recant and Luther isn't. And so what happens is that Staupitz, who is the head of the Augustinians in Germany, the guy who'd originally made Luther a professor at Wittenberg, he releases Luther from his vows. And so that means he's no longer part of the Augustinians.

And so Luther is now, you know, he feels he's alone, but to be alone for Luther is liberating. It brings you closer to God. And so he displays his love of God by writing two unbelievably rude letters, one that he sends to Cairtown, one to the Pope. And then he clambers over the city walls of Augsburg, and he scarpers back to Wittenberg. So he's been kicked out of the Augustinians.

Is that effectively what's happened? I think it's been a mutually agreed separation. Right. Because Staupitz thinks, I don't need this hassle. You know, this is embarrassing. Yeah, he doesn't want his order and himself personally to be dragged down into the kind of the magic mix of all this stuff that's going on.

Right. I think it would be best for the reputation of the order, Martin. But, you know, already, this kind of concern with what institutions will think is starting to look very retro because Luther, again, is broadcasting his perspective.

Right. And because it's more interesting, it gets far more attention. So he gets back to Wittenberg and he writes up an account of his encounter with Cayetan. And he says, it has pleased heaven that I should become the talk of the people. Which is tremendous, humble bragging. And of course, Cayetan, he's not going to broadcast an account of what he did. So Luther is like someone who has masses of

social media accounts. And Cayetan is like someone who doesn't even have an email address. And it means that Luther can dominate the terms of the debate. But you compared Luther to Jordan Peterson. Of course, Jordan Peterson provokes massive counter-reaction. I mean, he doesn't have it all his own way. He's endlessly being abused. And so the same thing starts to happen to Luther, that Luther is not the only person who is able to use the printing press. There are other people as well. There are other people with a sense of occasion. And one of them is a former colleague, a friend of Luther's, a man called Johann Eck. And Eck is appalled by where Luther is going and challenges him to a debate. And again, this is very 21st century, isn't it? Yeah, that is what happened now. Richard Dawkins meeting with a bishop or

appearing on the Joe Rogan show or something like that. Yeah, absolutely. It's that kind of thing. And Eck challenges Luther to a debate. Luther agrees and he'll go with Karlstadt, the chancellor of Wittenberg University, who's kind of rallying behind Luther. And actually ends up being more radical than Luther, doesn't he? He gets so excited by Luther's message. Yeah, he does. He does. We'll come to that. And Luther accepts the invitation to go to Leipzig, but this turns out to be a bad mistake. So rather like if you're invited on Joe Rogan as an epidemiologist to debate someone who is skeptical of faxes. Yeah. You know, you're on a hiding to nothing because the venue will be against you.

And Leipzig is the other Saxony, isn't it? Duke or Saxony, not electoral. So it genuinely is rival territory. Yes. And the Duke Georg is very devoutly Catholic and very hostile to Luther. Yeah. So it's unfriendly territory for Luther. And Luther gets there and he's furious because the people of Leipzig have given Eck a very

fancy coat and gown and they haven't given him one. So he's in an enormous strop about this. And Eck is a very good debater and very good at publicising himself. He is able to get Luther publicly to confess to a whole staggering array of heresies. He gets Luther to go publicly on record as saying that the authority of the Pope does not have the sanction of scripture, that purgatory doesn't, that Jan Hus, the Prague heretic who had been burnt at the stake in 1414 had been right on all kinds of issues. Yeah, that's massive, isn't it? Scott Hendricks, I think, in his book on Luther says, Luther actually says, many of Hus' beliefs were completely Christian. And that's like saying,

Enoch was right. You know, isn't it? I mean, it's sort of, it's tainting yourself in the eyes of the Orthodox beyond redemption. Yeah. And it is the eyes of the orthodox beyond redemption. Yeah. And it is the kind of thing that can happen, say, on a Twitter spat, that people can get so cross that they end up saying things that they really come to regret. Yes. So Karlstadt actually, he compares good works, so giving alms or whatever, to menstrual filth. Yeah, that's very strong which again is you know that's not the kind of thing that you want to have on your twitter feed and on a good works

we can't massively get bogged down on that right away because that's a very big issue but that is a huge part of kind of everyday piety isn't it that that you are expected to do a whole range of like give a bit of money here, endow a chantry there. You know, to a lot of people, that is the essence of their religious life. It's like being kind publicly, but with money, basically. Isn't it? Well, just giving money to a beggar and you're being told, well, this is menstrual filth. Yeah, okay, Tom.

When you put it like that, I'd be offended, put it that way. So this is basically why it's generally accepted that Luther and Karlstadt have lost. Right. But in the long run, this doesn't matter because it's not what's actually said in the debate that counts, but how it is presented. And although Eck is very good at debating, and although he does understand the importance of self-publicity you know he's nowhere compared to luther and basically i mean x reputation gets annihilated by luther and by

his followers so he gets satirized as a lecture as a drunkard kind of satires on him are published that show him flying on a goat that then gets showered in shit he's shown as employing a witch he ends up being castrated He ends up being castrated. He ends up being castrated, exactly. Come on, Tom, I knew it was coming. They issue cartoons showing him as a pig and he just becomes a kind of public object of ritual in the way that someone being monstered

on social media might be today. And Eck is really the, you know, he's the first victim of modern social media, you might say. Right. And Linda Roper says of his victory that it ultimately doesn't matter because it was not interesting. Whereas Luther's campaign was interesting and caught people's attention. Well, it is thrilling because again, he's now going full tilt and week after week,

he's coming out with ever more brilliant kind of heresies, shocking, thrilling heresies. And he can do this basically because now he's no longer a monk. He's not bound to the monastic routine. So he can just spend his whole time on the equivalent of a computer, firing out kind of messages and things. And actually, like someone waking up, going on Twitter, abusing people, replying to abuse, he spends a lot of his time replying to people who are sending him abuse. And so he's very kind of Trumpian. He invents nicknames for his enemies. So Eck is that fool,

the Pope, that wolf. But he's also writing a series of brilliant treatises. And I think he's feeling, you know, I might as well hang for a sheep as a lamb. I'm going full in. And so by this point, he's thinking that it's not enough just to reform the church. The whole thing has just got to be pulled down. And he starts to broadcast this message and he is dominating the discourse in a way that no one had ever done before. So Alec Ryrie gives this incredible statistic that over the course of the 1520s, Luther was responsible for over a fifth of the entire output of pamphlets by German presses. And at this point in 1519, it's even more because other people aren't catching up with him.

So it's basically saturation bombing of his opponents. And by the time that Luther gets that bull, that papal bull of excommunication on the 10th of December, 1520, there is very little about the Catholic church that he has not gone for. So he has attacked priestly celibacy because there's no scriptural sanction for it. And he says the Pope has little power to command this as he has to forbid eating, drinking, growing fat, or the natural movement of the bowels. Bowels again. Tom, both of you and Martin Luther are obsessed with this issue. I'm only obsessed by and Martin Luther are obsessed with this issue. I'm only obsessed by them because Luther is, to be fair. He attacks the cult of the saints.

He attacks pilgrimages. He attacks masses for the dead. He writes a treatise on the Babylonian captivity of the church that openly identifies the Pope with Antichrist. An opponent of his, a guy called Thomas Myrna, is so appalled by this that he decides to translate it directly into German before Luther can and put it out thinking that Luther will be condemned in his own words. And everyone just goes, brilliant. It's fantastic. And Luther inevitably gives Merner an abusive name. So Mer in German is meow, so like a cat. And Ner is idiot. That's very Trumpian, isn't it?

Yeah, so he calls him meow idiot. And he goes on to reject this foundational idea of the 11th century Reformation, the idea that clergy and laity are separate. And he says, no, not at all. So he phrases it very memorably. Christian man is a perfectly free lord of all and subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all. And that is to dissolve the traditional boundaries between clergy and laity. He's basically stripping everything away and saying it's just got to be what's in the Bible about Jesus.

So just to quote, rosaries, pilgrimages, the worship of saints, masses, monkery. There was nothing here about Christ. People should trust in nothing but Jesus Christ alone. So in other words, the whole paraphernalia. The whole shebang. There's one other aspect to this, Tom. So one of the things he writes, he writes three big works, doesn't he, that year. One of them is the Babylonian captivity, but another one is the address to the Christian ability of the German nation. And that later on is seen as a key text in the development of German nationalism, even though the concept makes no sense for somebody in Luther's day.

Do you think there is a very, very early kind of proto-nationalism, a sort of resentment of the foreign prelate over the Alps in Italy with all his cardinals and we honest Germans have been kicked around for too long? Is there a bit of that? Definitely. Luther really feels his German-ness and it's part of what he dislikes about the papacy. Okay. And there is a hostility towards Italians. It's a bit like hostility to the EU in Britain.

Right. It's that kind of thing. Brussels bureaucrats, foreigners, who cares what they say. Vatican bureaucrats pushing us around yeah that kind of thing yeah because that was there a little bit with jan hus writing in czech in bohemia wasn't it there's a sort of very early sensibility and so again i mean this is intoxicating so this is also part of the mix that is fueling support for luther right you know the opportunity to dislike foreigners is always splendid you know love it it's always kind of fun for people to enjoy that. And so I think that that's why when, you know, it's not just in Wittenberg that the papal bull is treated with contempt.

So even in Leipzig where, you know, that debate had happened and Luther hadn't covered himself in glory, the bull is ripped to shreds and smeared with, let's call it excrement. Okay. You know, the Reformation is very, very excremental. I wondered if you were going to go there again, but you actually, you held back, very unlike you. And Eck goes out and tries to post it, and a whole gang of children just pull it down. Right.

And they all follow Eck around, singing abusive songs about him. And a gang of 50 students comes from Wittenberg and they chase him and abuse him. It's a kind of literal monstering. The whole of Germany is on fire with this, but Luther is not out of the woods at all. If Germany's on fire, the risk is that Luther himself may soon literally be on fire yes very good because on the 3rd of january 1521 he is formally excommunicated and the question now is what does that mean and all eyes now turn to the figure of the emperor who is no longer maximilian because

by this point he is dead and his grandson who's a rather gawky teenager called Charles, has indeed succeeded him. So he's now ruling as Charles V. And the question now is, what will Charles V do? Crikey. What a cliffhanger. And that is what we will look at in our next episode. So what a cliffhanger.

Charles V, the new emperor, who goes on to become one of the most spectacular figures in European history with a vast empire, the like of which had not been seen since the days of the Romans. I mean, even bigger than the Romans, because he's got the new world now as well. Got South America. Yeah.

So Charles V, he has to decide what to do with Luther. The stage is set for this unbelievable confrontation, which we know as the Diet of Worms, a name that has always delighted generations of schoolchildren. So people would be disappointed not to hear me say that if you're a member of our own order of friars, the Restless History Club, say that if you're a member of our own order of friars um the rest is history club you can actually hear about the diet of firms right away it's a diet of our own actually isn't it because a diet is a kind of it's a talking shop which is basically what the rest is history club is in a really

lovely way yeah you get loads of benefits one of them is to listen to tom talk about martin luther for hours and hours on end if you you're not a member, bad luck. You'll just have to wait till the next episode drop, as the producers call it. I wouldn't, but they do. And on that bombshell, Tom, so interesting. Thank you very much. Goodbye, everybody.

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 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