The Rest Is History - 437. Luther: A World Torn Apart (Part 5)

Episode Date: April 3, 2024

“I think there is not a devil left in hell, they have all gone into the peasants… smite, stab and slay all”.  Following on from Martin Luther’s dramatic abduction by his powerful protector, Frederick III, he had been secretly kept safe at Wartburg. There, he abandoned his priestly garments for good, and violently wrestled against the devil, in unorthodox ways…Meanwhile, the religious revolution that he had ignited was sweeping through Europe, and setting everything aflame. A sense of apocalyptic flux saw waves of destructive violence unleashed upon all the old customs and idols, as rebellions erupted throughout Christendom. Luther’s reformation had taken on a terrifying new form of zealotry, which saw him transformed from radical to reactionary. His determination to destroy the new reformers enraged and infuriated many of his old followers. None more so than Andreas Karlstadt - the former chancellor of Wittenberg university against whom Luther unleashed a savage smear campaign - and Thomas Müntzer; an apocalyptic prophet who sought to discredit Luther’s reputation. Then, in May 1524, there exploded an uprising in Germany that would change everything, as militant evangelical peasants came up against their Catholic overlords. A religious war had broken out at last… Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss the radical turn of Luther’s religious revolution and his efforts to quash it, the groundbreaking Peasants’ War, his unexpected marriage, and the colossal legacy of Luther's ideas, and the Reformation. *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. Dr Liar, Dr Mockery, the sycophantic scoundrel, the over-educated wretch, the arch-wretch, the clever snake, the cunning fox, the rabid fox, the malicious black raven, the arrogant, puffed up, spiteful dragon, a godless mound of flesh, the arch heathen, the arch devil, a crook, a flatterer, an atheist, a pope, a monk. So, Tom, those are just some of the things that people on Twitter have called you. I don't think it's me, Dominic. You knew that was coming.

The godless mound of flesh. So, yeah, the monk, though. Yeah, maybe. All of that stuff, yeah. Overeducated wretch. Listen, these are words, Tom, that were used to describe Martin Luther, who we've been talking about on the rest of this history, a man who changed the way that Europeans thought about themselves, their place in the universe,

their relationship to God and to each other. An arrow from a pamphlet that was published in November 1524, and it was called A Highly Provoked Defense and Answer to the Spiritless Soft Living Flesh at Wittenberg, who has most lamentably befouled pitiable Christianity in a perverted way by his theft of holy scripture. Punchy title. Very punchy. So we are in episode five now of this epic series about the life and times of Martin Luther.

And we've got up to 1524, which is when this pamphlet is published. So to give people a sense, he's hammered his theses to the wall of the church, or not, depending on what you believe. He's been summoned to a series of interrogations. He's gone to the Diet of Worms

to plead his case before the emperor. He's been declared a heretic. He's been kidnapped and stored in this tower where he's murdered a dog. And now we're in 1524. He's a hate figure to the Catholics of Europe. But the man who's written this is not a Catholic, actually.

He's a man who thinks that Luther is a backslider and an appeaser of potpourri. So tell us about the guy who's written this. So the guy who's written this, he's a guy called Thomas Munzer. He was a follower of Luther. He'd met with Luther in 1519. Luther had actually recommended him for a job as a preacher. And you might think that the two men have a lot in common because like Luther, Munzer thinks that a true Christian must be born again.

So he writes that each person must receive the Holy Spirit in a sevenfold way. Otherwise, he neither hears nor understands the living God. Like Luther, he believes in a division between those who have been born again, a kind of elect, and those Christians who you brilliantly called Chinos, Christians in names only. Yeah, Very good. And like Luther, as you could see from the title of that pamphlet, where he's describing befouling, pitiful Christianity. In a perverted way.

Yes. He loves to abuse Catholics, traditional theologians, so he calls them donkey farts. Nice. Diarrhea makers. And he describes them as being scrotum like what is it with germans in the 16th century and their bowels i don't know what does this say about their daily experience that they you know the most enlightened men men who spend all their time thinking about the Holy Spirit, reach so readily, Tom, for the scatological comparison? Well, I think that, I mean, it's something to do with the violence of what they're doing,

I think. Right. They are kind of tearing down, they're launching attacks on this mighty edifice, and perhaps they just need to kind of rev themselves up. You know, it's a kind of linguistic dose of Red Bull or something. Right. I don't know, but I think that the violence of what they're doing is replicated in the violence of their language. Because Munzer, like Luther, is a man who is ready to take on those in authority.

And in 1524, that same year that Munzer has launched this attack against Luther, an uprising is happening that is going to convulse the whole of Germany. So it begins on the 30th of May, 1524, when the tenants of an abbey in the Black Forest, so that's in southern Germany, refuse to pay their landlord. And people who listened to our episode on the Peasants' Revolt may remember that similar things were happening and that it precipitated a general uprising because this resentment of predatory monasteries and abbeys, it was a feature in 14th century England and it's a feature of 16th century Germany. Yeah. So just on that, Tom, I suppose Dearman McCulloch in his great book on the Reformation makes the point that that Peasants' War, which is actually much bigger than the Peasants' Revolt, isn't it?

I mean, it's much more convulsive than the Peasants' Revolt in England. Yeah. That it partly comes out of that thing we were talking about in an earlier episode, which is this extraordinary apocalyptic mood in the early 16th century, and particularly the 1520s. So people are terrified about the Ottomans, that they're going to kind of sweep up through Central Europe and wipe Christendom from the map. But also, obviously, since Luther's come along, that sense of kind of apocalyptic chaos and flux has become even more intense. So people are questioning everything.

And McCulloch in his book says there's been loads of kind of copycat destructive violence. So this goes back to the comparison that you made in the previous episode with the 2020s, where there have been people smashing up relics and smashing up images. There's a famous example in Riga, also in 1524, where people take this big statue of a witch. Sorry, they don't take a big statue of a witch. Such a Protestant. They take a big statue of the Virgin Mary. That's the most Protestant sentence that's ever been said. Same difference.

Well, that's what they say. They say it's a statue of a witch. They throw it in the river and it doesn't sink. So they then take it out the river and they set it on fire and they burn it. And there's this sort of sense, he calls them the years of carnival. There's this sense of, you know, all bets are are off all the shackles have been released completely and as you said the peasants thing it's actually quite similar to the peasants revolt because some of the leaders of it are kind of respectable aspirational people yeah who don't as you said they're sick of being bossed

around by the landlords who are monks or kind of collegiate churches. And those tensions which were always there have become supercharged by the apocalyptic atmosphere of the day. Yeah, absolutely. But Dominic, not only by the apocalyptic atmosphere, also very specifically by Luther's theology, because he is talking about Christian freedom, the idea that every Christian can be free. And of course, that provides a ready battle cry for the rebels. And what is more, his insistence on sola scriptura, the idea that nothing is necessary unless it is specifically mentioned in scripture, provides them with all kinds of sanctions for rebelling, say, against serfdom, which is not mentioned in the Bible. So they publish a

manifesto in the early spring of 1525, and they are, as Luther had done, repeatedly appealing to the Bible as a source of legitimacy for what they're doing. And this is the key demand, the demand that serfdom be abolished, as true and just Christians release us in a spirit of joy from our servitude, or else show us from the gospel that we should be serfs. So that's exactly Luther's strategy. And of course, there's nothing in the gospels that says they should be serfs. And so this inspires, I mean, certainly helps to inspire this massive movement because I guess the difference between England is that you have London is the focus. So if you move on London, then that's all there is. But in Germany, as we've said,

it's this patchwork of different states, different cities, and so on. And so you are having eruptions of rebellion across the entire fabric of the empire. And by the spring of 1525, it has reached Saxony and Thuringia, which of course is Wittenberg, where Luther is based, is in Saxony, but it's also where Munzer is based. So he is in a town called Mulhausen, which is in Thuringia. And Munzer, I mean, he's all in. So he forms his own armed militia, which he modestly calls the Eternal League of God. That's a great name for a militia, to be fair. He does what I would certainly do if I were leading a rebellion. I would arrange for a huge white flag to serve as its banner and put a rainbow on it. Oh my word. That's very 2020s. Very 2024, isn't it? Yeah, it is. But it also has the very Lutheran slogan on it, may the word of God endure forever.

Yeah. So, Munster has this huge great flag. It's got a rainbow. He's got a tremendous name for his army. And on the 11th of May, 1525, he and his troops rendezvous with another great squadron of rebels outside a place called Frankenhausen. And there they meet with an army. And at the head of that army is the brother of Frederick the Wise, the protector of Luther, but who is a Catholic, Duke George of Saxony. And so this is a confrontation between very radical evangelicals, very radical people who are rejecting the Church of Rome and Catholics. And I guess from the point of view of the evangelicals, this is a confrontation with the forces of Antichrist that is threatening more violence. It's more direct than even Luther's confrontation with the emperor at Worms.

And this is the first time, right, Tom, that the emerging splits, people would not have used these words in 1524 between Catholics and Protestants. This is the first time that it's become a religious war. I mean, genuinely a battle. Yeah, a military confrontation. So if we think about Luther, where does he stand on this? He does not approve of it at all. And the reason that Munzer is lambasting Luther with all those abusive words and phrases that you were quoting at the beginning is that he views Luther as dragging his feet. A puffed up spiteful dragon, Tom. Yeah. He hasn't gone far enough. The thing about this, of course, I mean, it's a very, very familiar trend that someone can take a revolutionary position, a radical position, and then find themselves outflanked by people who

are going further and further and further. So we're very familiar with that today. Luther, for five years, from the moment where he had nailed the theses to the door in Wittenberg, basically up to his return to Wittenberg from the Wartburg. He has been a kind of lightning rod for rebellion beyond anything that Christendom had ever seen. But now the revolution has overtaken him. And essentially, with his return to Wittenberg from the Wartburg, where he'd been kept by Frederick the Wise, he goes from being celebrated as a revolutionary to being damned by many of his followers as a reactionary. And this conflict is really focused on two figures. So,

Munzer is one of them, and we'll come to the precise relationship between Luther and Munzer. But before that, people may remember in our previous episode that the guy who is leading the Reformation in Wittenberg while Luther is away in the Wartburg is a guy called Andreas Karlstadt. So he was the guy who was like the vice-chancellor of the university or something. He was the chancellor and he'd been the chancellor since he was 25. So he's a brilliant, brilliant man. And he'd married a four-year-old or something. No, not quite. He'd married a nun. But yes, so he has pushed things to the extreme and Luther is appalled. And Luther is appalled by this, I think, for kind of personal reasons. It's resentment of a man who he'd always seen as his follower. There's anxiety that all the chaos and the rioting that Karlstadt moves to kind of smash up images and all that kind of thing has precipitated that this will alienate Frederick, the Elector of Saxony, who's Luther's great patron.

And as Luther sees it, the patron and defender of the Reformation itself. So Luther is actually, funnily enough, for somebody who's not a politician, he's playing the sensible, pragmatic practitioner of politics saying, listen, we can't afford to alienate our powerful patron. Right. He does not want to defund the police, I think would be the way of saying, he recognises that you need someone to back you up, to maintain law and order. And inevitably also there are big theological arguments. And the biggest one is around transubstantiation. Luther argues that

Christ is literally in the bread and wine given at the Eucharist, and Karl Schacht argues that Christ is literally in the bread and wine given at the Eucharist, and Karl Schacht argues that it isn't. And people may think, well, why are they arguing about whether something can change into something else? But I mean, you just have to look at, is a trans woman a woman? I mean, these are debates that are massively polarizing. People get terribly angry and upset about it on both sides. I mean, we use almost exactly the same metaphors, the same language, the same degree of intensity

to the debate, don't we? I mean, I think there are kind of intriguing parallels there. But of course, the debate here is about the destiny of your mortal soul. So in a sense, the stakes are even higher, quantitatively higher. So when Luther comes back to Wittenberg from the Wartburg, I mean, he's determined to smash this upstart rebellion. So as we have explored throughout this series, I mean, he's brilliant at invective. So he targets Karlstadt personally, who had been one of his closest friends and supporters. Luther says of Karlstadt, he is a treacherous secret devil who sneaks around in corners until he has done his damage and spread his poison.

Inevitably, there is excrement-based abuse. So he accused Karlstadt of flinging excrement around. And Karlstadt, understandably, feels humiliated, but also very angry. Did he think Luther was going to back him up? Is he surprised by this? I think he did, yes, because Luther initially had said, brilliant, go for it, and then had swung against him when he realised it had gone too far. So Karlstadt basically gives up university life. He feels that his calling is no longer to be a scholar. But a full-time activist and practitioner of kindness. Well, so he gives up all his doctoral titles. Oh, God. And Luther then continues to misclass him, I guess you could say, by very ostentatiously calling him Dr. Karlstadt, which he does for the rest of his life.

He calls himself Brother Andreas. I mean, this is so... Yeah, it's all very familiar. It's unbelievable how current it feels. Right. And those parallels are not tendentious because the ideals and the impulses that are being born in this period are absolutely what feed through into the universities of Protestant Britain and America as they were. So by 1523, Karlstadt has had enough of Wittenberg and Luther. So he takes up a post as a humble village priest in a town in Thuringia, about 100 miles southwest of Wittenberg. It's a place called Ullermunde.

And here he institutes the reforms that Luther had abolished in Wittenberg. So Eucharist is given. There's no physical presence of Christ in it, no images, no music. So this is something Karlstadt is very big on. No music. Yeah, so Luther loves music. Luther is a great hymn writer. His hymns are key ways in which he spreads the Reformation. Karlstadt sees this as Babylonian practices, can't have that. And Luther continues to persecute him. So he amazingly, considering all the battle against censorship that

Luther had been involved in, he tries to get Karlstadt censored. And Karlstadt had been the second most published reformer after Luther. So it's a big deal. However, Karlstadt can still be published in Switzerland because that's outside the power. But essentially, Luther is invoking the power of the emperor to stop his erstwhile lieutenant from being published. It's just unbelievable. I can't get over the parallels. You know, we're not actually practicing cancel culture. We're the victims of cancel culture. I mean, this is basically what Luther and Karlstadt are saying to each other, right? Absolutely. And Luther just plays very, very hard and very, very dirty in the way that people embroiled in today's culture wars do. But I mean, Luther has the advantage that he has an elector,

an imperial elector on his side. So he is able to persuade Frederick to banish Karlstadt from Saxony altogether. And poor Karlstadt, I mean, his wife has just given birth. He's kind of wandering around with this newborn baby. I mean, kind of absolutely terrible time. But I guess rather like St. Francis perhaps, or earlier Catholic saints, he discovers God's purpose in his poverty. And he comes to identify the Reformation with a reaction not just against the Pope, but against the feudal order, against those who are rich. And he repents of his own role. Again, this is very familiar. He repents of his own role in exploitation, in frameworks of oppression. So he says, I have eaten from the labours of the poor

while giving them nothing in return in his role as chancellor of the university. And there's someone who had been able to get tithes from the poor. And so he starts wearing the grey of a peasant. He starts saying, I wish I'd been born a peasant. And he briefly lives as one. He becomes a farmer. And Luther finds this hilarious and mocks him viciously, rather in the way that people have mocked academics who pretend to be Native Americans or black people or whatever in America, white people doing that. Yeah. So Luther says of Karlstadt, he's opted for humility and civility, behavior which God does not remotely command, and all because he wants to be seen and praised and is an exceptional kind of Christian. And I think that that idea that you get closer to God by casting aside your

privilege and becoming an ally, this is the wellsprings of all that. And people today may not define themselves as Protestants, may not be doing it in the framework of a kind of understanding of God, but the sociological and cultural DNA is still absolutely there. It's unbelievable, Tom. I mean, you're literally talking about a man who is in a high status, respectable, incredibly respectable job job has given up his university degrees said i'm going to devote myself to full-time activism yeah and live like an ally with the poor and then his old mate is basically writing editorials for the daily express saying yeah look at this hypocrites look at this terrible man like because luther by this point of course

has given up his cassock and has started developing a real taste for fine robes right brilliant so the two men do meet up again there's a famous meeting between them in a pub called the black bear inn in jena right so um carlstadt is there in his peasant gray and luther turns up you know swanking around in his robes. And they have a big debate, which is kind of inconclusive. And then during the peasants' war, Karlstadt is in real danger from both sides because the nobility obviously view him as a traitor. The peasants are suspicious of him as someone from a well-educated background. And so he ends up amazingly taking refuge with Luther.

Oh my word. And Luther takes him in, but predictably does not squander the opportunity to completely humiliate him. So he makes Karlstadt write a full recantation of his views on the Eucharist. In exchange for his dinner or something. Exactly.

Yeah, well, for shelter, you know, to keep him safe. And Luther persuades Frederick to revoke the order of banishment that Luther himself had encouraged Frederick initially to issue, but demands that Karlstadt live outside Wittenberg, which in turn means that Karlstadt doesn't have any kind of means of sustenance. So he has to live as a farmer again. He occasionally works as a peddler, and he's not allowed either to publish or to preach. In the end, he has enough of this. In 1529, he leaves Wittenberg. He goes to Switzerland, where the Reformation is fully ablaze, taking paths that are far distant from Luther and his influence. In Switzerland, he seems a marginal and broken figure. He he dies in 1541 of the plague.

And there is much gloating about this in Lutheran circles. And they tell a terrible story that a strange, tall, thin man had appeared to Karlsdott's son three days before saying that he was the devil and he was coming to get Karlsdott. And sure enough, three days later, this tall, thin man is seen leading Karlschnatt away. I'm sure that definitely happened. By the hand. Right. So you might think he's a broken marginal figure who most people haven't heard of. Does he really matter? Okay. But I think for the reasons that we've been discussing, he does, because I think he establishes trends that are with us to this day. And we may not be aware of where they come from,

but at least in part, it's coming from this nexus between Luther and Karlstadt. So Karlstadt had always admired Luther. And I think that this is why he goes back to him in the Peasants' War. He's like a kind of moth being drawn to the flame. But he is willing to follow the implications of Luther's Reformation to extremes that Luther himself does not want to go. He doesn't want to go there. The key thing, I think, for the development of the Netherlands, Britain, and America is that Karlstadt is a big influence on the Swiss Reformation that via Calvin and so on will influence all of those Protestant powers right the way into the modern day. And the key thing that Karlstadt argues,

which Luther rejects, is the idea that God's law matters more than earthly law, and that therefore Christians have a duty to rebel against earthly lords who do not acknowledge that and to repudiate laws that seem to repudiate the law of God. So Karlstadt writes, where Christians rule, there they should consider no government, but rather freely on their own, hew down and throw down what is contrary to God. So Karlstadt is more similar to, let's say, what a Muslim theologian of the same period, an Islamic theologian of the 16th century would have said, which is, why would you distinguish between the world of the state and the world of the spirit, as it were? I mean, obviously, if you believe a religion, then you think it should influence

everything and you shouldn't sort of erect an artificial boundary between the religious and the secular. Well, the difference between Latin Christendom and the world of Islam is that Latin Christendom has this concept of there being rival dimensions of what will become religion and the secular. And the process by which religion and the secular come to be enshrined is absolutely influenced by this period. And Luther, again, plays a key role in it. So Luther is forced by Karl Schlatt's arguments to kind of try and refine and work out exactly what he thinks. And so he says that there is Christian freedom, but it exists purely in the spiritual dimension. So in the dimension of what is coming to be called religion. So against the backdrop of the Peasants' War, he says that there

are two kingdoms, one the kingdom of God, the other the kingdom of the world. And this really is where our notion of religion as something that is simultaneously private and personal to an individual, and secondly, something that you choose. So I think that is kind of hardwired into the meaning of religion in English. You say, what religion are you? What kind of confessional group do you belong to? And what do you personally believe? And that's an understanding of it that had not existed before. And so that's why I think the understanding of religion in English and in the languages

of other Protestant European countries, it's a very Protestant understanding, and it is born from this period. This doesn't mean that Luther admires the princes. Basically, he's saying, a Christian has freedom in his soul. It doesn't therefore matter what the secular powers are doing. He despises princes. He says that they're generally the biggest fools or the worst scoundrels on earth. But he says, frogs need stalks. Right. But that is something that maybe a lot of people even listening to this right now in the 2020s would object to. They would say, no, if you believe in something, you should change the world. I mean, schools tell their kids, go and change the world.

If you believe in a cause, then you don't just say, well, the world is as it is, you know, secular rulers are as they are. Right. But again, people will say religion shouldn't interfere. You know, Muslims shouldn't try and impose their beliefs on society as a whole, that they should treat it as something private or indeed Christians. Church and state should be separate. Church and state should be separate. And this has very, very deep roots in the entire history of Latin Christendom, but it's one that is sharpened and refined, say in Britain or America or the kind of English speaking world by this process. But I think that this is less clear to us in the English speaking world because of course we do not get it directly from Luther. So the idea that essentially you can kick out the Pope and as a prince take responsibility for

the whole fabric of the place that you're ruling obviously has great appeal, particularly for princes in Germany. So the most significant of these is the ruler of Hesse, Philip. He'd met and been inspired by Luther at Worms and he'd been fully converted by Melanchthon in 1525. And over the course of the 1530s, Lutheranism starts to bed down, particularly in Scandinavia and in the Baltic. And it remains the dominant form of Christianity in Scandinavia to this day. But as I said, the Reformation that comes to England and Scotland and from there to America comes from Switzerland and is influenced by Karlstadt. And there's this brilliant comment on this by Carlos Eyre in his book Reformations.

When King Charles I of England mounted the scaffold on the 30th of January 1649 to be beheaded by Puritan revolutionaries, he probably did not know that the spirit of Karlstadt guided his executioner's hand. Right. So just on the Swiss angle, so the Swiss have been having their own kind of parallel reformation, haven't they, in the 1520s?

A guy called Huldrych Zwingli. There's some sort of business with them interfering with sausages. Yeah, they interfere with sausages. And anyway, Switzerland, I guess it happens in Switzerland, like in Germany, in the Holy Roman Empire,

because Switzerland is very fragmented, all its independent canthons. And so in that world where people are kind of already self-governing, you can see why heretical ideas, ideas of independence, of you in personal communion with God, why they would prosper. And of course, in Switzerland, central authority is even weaker than in Germany. So the Reformation can go even further. And these are people, so Zurich by 1524, it's banned music in churches, it's banned images, which is very Kallstadt. They banned the mass in 1525. And so Tom, funnily enough, given that we think of the Church of England as a kind of middle way between Catholic and Protestant, but the Church of England, for enough, given that we think of the Church of England as a kind of middle way between Catholic and Protestant, but the Church of England, for example, Protestantism in England, you're saying is more Swiss than Lutheran. Yes, absolutely. And it's in this period that any prospect of kind of reconciliation between the Lutheran and let's call them the Swiss forms of Protestantism are rejected.

Chiefly by Luther, it has to be said, because, of course, this is the great point that you pointed to in the previous episode. The fact that actually scripture and the illumination of scripture is not self-evident and this is the problem. And it opens up all kinds of potential roads that evangelicals, reformers can go down that Luther thinks is terrible. And Karlstadt has gone down one, but of course, the other person who takes a road that Luther thinks is terrible. And Karlstadt has gone down one. But of course, the other person who takes a road that Luther does not want to tread is the guy that we began this episode with, Thomas Munzer. And I think we should take a break now. And when we come back, look at what happens to him. Okay, very good. I liked Luther, Tom, when he was behaving badly,

when he was becoming more conservative and he was being really horrible to Karlstadt. But then he reminded me of his stupidity on this question of the interpretation of scripture and he's gone down in my estimation once again. Return after the second half to see if Luther can recover, but more excitingly, this extraordinary man Munzer and what he gets up to. 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 Ah, but how splendid it is when the Spirit of God teaches us and more, helps us understand first this passage, then that one. God be praised, revealing to me the real authentic light shining forth. That was an archive recording of Argula von Grumbach, who is a Bavarian noblewoman. And she'd read Luther's translation of the New Testament. And she had been awakened, Tom.

She had been enlightened by that light shining forth. So he ended the first half by talking about this apparent contradiction or this slight hole in his argument, which is he basically says, it's all in the Bible. You just look in the Bible and everything is absolutely clear. You will receive the enlightenment that you seek. And obviously lots of his followers think, oh, brilliant. We'll read his translation of the New Testament and then we will be enlightened. But Tom, by the mid 1520s, there are lots of people on there who used to be great fans of Martin Luther and now think, actually, you know, I'm not enlightened at all from his stuff. He's actually taken a terrible wrong turn. Yeah. And they're saying, you know, this is a guy who's preached freedom.

So why is he dragging his feet over the freedom of peasants? Why shouldn't they be freed from serfdom? He's opposed the Pope. He's opposed the emperor. Why is he not opposing the princes? And why, when you have a rebellion of the poor and the oppressed, is he siding with the rich? And these are questions that Karlstadt, who we talked about in the first half, had been figure, and indeed an even more radical figure, and that, Dominic, is Thomas Munzer. You began the episode by reading out the long list of insults that he had been directing at Luther, and who in 1524 and 1525 absolutely takes the side of the peasants in a way that Luther is not. So his background, he's a youthful admirer of Luther. He'd actually spent time at Wittenberg at around the time that

Luther is posting his theses. And this inspires him. And by 1520, very modestly, he is describing himself as he who fights for truth in the world. Oh, he's a be kind person. That would absolutely be his hashtag, I think. And he's also into the idea that you read the Bible and it provides a blueprint for what you should do. So he argues that the early church had held all things in common. So therefore, there should be communism. That God had slain idolaters, so he cites the example of the priests of Baal who had been slain by Elijah. Therefore, all Catholic priests and monks should be put to the sword. And you talked about the apocalyptic

mood. Munzer loves the book of Revelation, which describes the four horsemen of the apocalypse, coming of Christ and all that kind of thing. And so Munzer says, well, this is approaching, therefore all earthly authorities must be overthrown. And like Karlstadt, he argues that you can only properly understand scripture if the Spirit has come upon you. And Munzer proclaims not only that the Spirit has come upon him, but that he is a God-appointed prophet and that it is his duty to proclaim to the Christian people the end of days. And so he sums this up in kind of very cheery tones. The elect must clash with the damned, he writes, and the power of the damned must yield before that of the elect. The time of the harvest is at hand.

I have made my sickle sharp. So, Tom, the sickle, that's a lovely link because actually in the German Democratic Republic in East Germany, in schools, they would really big up Munzer as a sort of proto-Bolshevik. They would say Munzer is a Marxist avant la lettre. He's a spokesman for the downtrodden proletariat. All of his stuff really is just... He's like a Lenin. Yeah. He appears on the bank notes of the East German Republic. Yeah. I'm guessing you're going to say they have misappropriated Munzer. No, not at all.

Oh, you don't think that? No, I think absolutely. That kind of apocalyptic sense that the rich are being cast down and that the poor are being raised up. I mean, I think, you know, as you know, I completely think that's Christian. It's just, it's been so secularized that all traces of God in the Bible have gone, but it's clear where it derives from. And in a sense, Luther's horror at it is a kind of foretaste of the horror of people who don't want to be part of a communist order. And so again, in his reaction, as in his revolutionary qualities, he is the great primal figure in modern European history. Yeah, exactly. My revolution, but not your revolution. The revolution should stop now. Absolutely. Yeah. So he's very agitated about this. So July 1524, by which point the Peasants' War is spreading very fast across Germany, he writes a pamphlet,

which he calls Letter to the Princes of Saxony Concerning the Rebellious Spirit. And he doesn't name either Karlstadt or Munzer, but he brackets them together and urges the princes to take action against them and against their followers. And this is a very well-timed appeal because at the same time it comes out, Frederick the Elector of Saxony, his younger brother and heir presumptive, John, he's called, who is a very, very committed admirer of Luther, finds himself in the place where Munzer has his church. And Munzer comes and preaches. And it's fair to say that the homily he gives the

sermon is kind of ill-advised yeah this guy carlos air describes it as one of the most inappropriate and impolitic homilies of all time yeah so munzer announces to the to the duke and the duke has his son with him as well that he's a prophet urges the du Duke and his son to slaughter the godless, warns them that if they do not, then God will take their swords from them, and inevitably engages in some excrement-based ranting. Rejoice, you true friends of God, that the enemies of the cross have beshat their courage into their trousers. What is it with these guys? What's going on with them? So this doesn't go down well. The Saxon princes expel Munzer from his holding. Munzer blames Luther for this. And this is why he is writing the abusive pamphlet in November, in which he calls Luther soft living flesh. Because by this point, Luther has really become quite fat.

So that very thin and scrawny monk. Yeah. Fine dining, courtesy of Frederick as protector, right? luther has really become quite fat so that very thin and scrawny monk yeah fine dining courtesy of uh frederick is protector right capons quails yeah but also it's an expression of his theology if we're all damned yeah let's crack on no point dieting crack on yeah you know i'm elect i can eat what i like munster thinks this is terrible i I mean, it's kind of interesting. Munster, despite being radical in so many ways, does see Luther's bulk as embodying a kind of moral turpitude. And so he has all these weird, sinister fantasies about slow cooking Luther. What? He's going to eat Luther? No, he's going to serve him to the devil.

Oh, right. And says that Luther's so fat that he'd have to cook him for hours and hours in an oven. I mean, very, very weird. Luther has become Chris Christie, the erstwhile Republican presidential hopeful. Yeah. He's certainly bulking out in that way. Yeah. And he's saying not only has Luther become fat, but he's become everything that he'd previously hated, that he's become a Pope. We've said that he calls him a monk, calls him ambassador of the devil, and very, very painfully for Luther, accuses him of misunderstanding scripture. Says that he's a man who has made a mockery and an utterly useless babble out of the divine word, which of course is the precise opposite of what Luther thinks.

And Munzer basically is casting Wittenberg as a kind of parallel of Rome. What is it? Two cheeks of the same arse is the phrase. Right. I mean, it's not what that depicts, but we can go with that phrase if you like. But it's very, very Munzer friendly, isn't it? I mean, I can absolutely imagine that he would have said that. It's very Munzer friendly. Yeah. And so it's because of this, the fact that you have now Rome and Wittenberg,

and both of them are Babylon, that this is why he thinks that the end times are approaching. And it's why once he's been expelled by the Dukes of Saxony, he goes to Mulhausen. and both of them are Babylon, that this is why he thinks that the end times are approaching. And it's why once he's been expelled by the Dukes of Saxony, he goes to Mulhausen and he kind of says, you know, you are the elect. This is why he does his great white flag with his rainbow and recruits his devout Christians to follow him. And it's a holy war. And how he comes in May 1525 to be marching against the local princes towards the town of Frankenhausen. So Tom, I was just thinking, how could they have let this get to this crazy situation where this bloke, you know, ranting and raving, has raised an army? And actually you said he goes to Mühlhausen in February 1525.

And there's an obvious reason why it's got to this point, because the emperor in February 1525 is off in Italy fighting a gigantic battle against the French, the Battle of Pavia, where he captures the French king. So the emperor, Charles V, is completely distracted. Right. He's off fighting this titanic war against the French. And in his backyard, you know, it's just all completely falling apart. Right. And that's why Luther is still alive. If Charles had been undistracted by all his other responsibilities as king of Spain and invading Italy and worrying about the Turks and so on, then he could have launched a campaign,

invaded Wittenberg, killed Luther, wiped the Reformation out. But he doesn't because he has so many distractions. And that means that it's down to the local princes to sort it out. And when Munzer hears who is leading the princely armies against him, it confirms him in all his contempt and hatred for the princes as representatives of Antichrist, because we mentioned how one of the princes is the Catholic brother of Frederick, the Elector of Saxony. George. Georg. Yeah. But the other one, Dominic, is Philip of Hesse, who has recently been converted by Philip Melanchthon to Lutheranism. So there they are. It's a Catholic and a Lutheran prince facing him. of the battle. Munzer goes all in. His men are angels of light. The enemies are the devil. He rides around the camp, telling them to trust in God, promising them that the shot of their

enemies will have no power to harm them. And Dominic, this does not turn out to be the case. I mean, he's got a big army, Tom. 8,000 people or so. I mean, this is not a punch up in a back alley kind of thing. But it kind of is, because the word of God does not really help them because they've only got bill hooks and whatever. And they're against trained men who have been raised to fight and kill. They just get slaughtered. And pretty much all of the people in Frankhausen are either slaughtered or taken prisoner. And when some of the women go to the princes after the battle, I mean, calling it a battle is excessive, after the massacre and say, you know, could we have our men who are captive back? The princes say, okay, you can, provided that you put to death two of the rebel priests who we've captured. It's your responsibility to kill them. And I think it's a

measure of the kind of the horror and the madness of the times that the women reach for cudgels and start smacking the priests, smashing their bones, cracking their skulls. And it is said that they keep smashing and beating them for half an hour after they've died. Oh, my word. So they're just a kind of bloody pulp. So, Tom, do you want a brilliant fact about the Battle of Frankenhausen? Yeah, please. Great. So the Battle of Frankenhausen is the subject of the world's largest painting is it and this was commissioned by our old friends

the leaders of east germany in the late 1970s it is in bad frankenhausen in the panorama museum and it shows the battle of frankenhaus, but can you guess what they would call it? The Rising of the Proletariat against the evil capitalists or something. Pretty good. It's actually called the Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany. Brilliant. And I'll tell you how big it is.

It is 46 feet by 404 feet. Wow, that is big. So it's a bloody big painting. And is it kind of like Where's Wally? Can you see where Munster is? Because Munster is found hiding in an attic after the battle. It's got 3,000 people. So it must have Munster.

Yeah, he must be there somewhere. Yeah. So he gets found hiding in an attic. He gets dragged out. He says he's had nothing to do with it. He's completely innocent. And then they look through his bag and they find basically, I am Thomas Munster, you know, all over it.. He gets dragged in front of Duke George of Saxony.

Munster is unapologetic. He uses the incorrectly respectful form of you to George. Oh, he misuses him. He misclasses him again. He justifies the war. He's endlessly quoting the Bible. The Duke puts him to torture. There are stories that he recounts his views, but there's no evidence for this whatsoever in his public statements after this. He remains completely defiant. And he's handed over to the Count of Mansfeld. And Mansfeld, Dominic, you may remember, is the place where Luther had grown up. And the Count of Mansfeld takes Munzer back to Mühlhausen, where he had proclaimed that he was the prophet of the end times. He's beheaded outside its walls,

and his head is put on a spike, and his body is put on public display to serve as a warning and a terror. So that thing about serving as a warning and a terror, there are some historians, aren't there, who say that effectively, Munster was not as important as we now think, and that Luther and Luther's allies inflated him. They deliberately exaggerated his importance because they wanted to create a bogeyman and to frighten people away from radicalism and back towards conservatism. In other words, they were doing exactly the same as what people did in 1650s England with, let's say, the ranters, who maybe didn't even exist, and that actually

Munster was a more marginal and bonkers figure. Munster is definitely a marginal figure. I mean, the Peasants' War does not happen because of Munster. Munster is piggybacking onto the Peasants' Rebellion. But I think he does matter because he is a foretaste of the radicalism that you're talking about. So the belief that you can only understand scripture if you are possessed by the Spirit. I mean, this is fundamental to Baptists and Quakers and Anabaptists and all these kind of people who will be emerging from this forging ground. So in terms of the war itself, Munzer is not important. But as a kind of portent of what will come, I think he is important. And you're right, that Luther does focus on him. And just as Munzer had seen the hand of the devil in the victory of

the princes, Luther sees the hand of the devil in the entire conflict. It's not just the destruction. You have 100,000 people slaughtered, terrible bloodletting. It's also that Luther is being blamed for this bloodshed by lots of his enemies. Here is Johan Cocleus, the guy who had argued with him at Worms and the subject of all those very abusive pictures. Cocleus wrote, there were many peasants slain in the uprising, many fanatics banished, many false prophets hanged, burned, drowned, or beheaded, who perhaps would still live as good, obedient Christians had he never written. And I think it's a mark of how unsettling this charge is to Luther, as well as of his complete egocentrism,

that he sees the peasants' war as a direct attempt by the devil to destroy him. It's all about me. It really is all about Luther. So his response to this is twofold. The first is very personal. The second is much more public. So the first thing he does, Munzer has been accusing him of being a monk, of being a Pope and so on. So he responds to this in the most provocative way that he can. So on the 13th of June, 1525, a month after the death of Munzer, Luther marries a nun. And this is a woman called Katharina von Bora, who is 26. So he's not doing a Karlstadt. How old is he?

He's in his early forties by this point. Okay. So he's done well for himself, but he hasn't completely embarrassed himself. Exactly. Hasn't gone the full Leo. So he'd actually played a part in helping her to escape from her convent. She'd read him and become an evangelical, wanted to leave the nunnery that she'd been in. And Luther arranges for her to escape in a wagon carrying barrels of herring. And she seems great. You know, she's kind of funny, smart, good for Luther, I think. Right.

And Luther claimed that he had married her to please his father, annoy the Pope, amuse the angels and make the devil weep. But he is happy with her. Obviously, I mean, he's a massive patriarch. He's in no way a feminist dad, I think it would be fair to say. But they get on well. She gives him six children. She helps to fatten him up even more. Right.

And I think he's quite a fun father. So he says to his infant son, become a lawyer and I'll hang you. I've said that to my son. I think that's good paternal advice, isn't it? Yeah. Never be alone, act foolish and play, drink a lot. It would even be a good idea to commit a sin, but not a gross one. That's how he advises his children to avoid depression. Yeah. That's good advice. Yeah. Have a bit of fun, but don't go too far. Yeah, exactly. And I think that all of this is kind of an expression of what we were talking about before, how because Luther sees all humans as irredeemably steeped in sin, well, irredeemably, unless God, of course, does choose to redeem them,

to allow them to be born again. In a sense, it doesn't really matter. You're not going to get closer to heaven by being a killjoy, celibate all your life. Yeah. Tom, he's gone back up on my estimation because that seems like a very sane and healthy view. We're all damned, unless God, of course, redeems us. We're all weak and feeble. Don't beat yourself up about having a night on the town. That's basically his attitude, is it? Not exactly. But I think he thinks that certainly when it comes to marrying, you might as well. I mean, you know, you're not going to get any closer to heaven by not marrying. Right.

Right. So that's put Luther in good light, perhaps, by your standards. But now we come to the more splenetic ways in which Luther responds to the Peasants' Revolt. So the couple of months before the Battle of Frankenhausen, when the war is at its most vicious in Saxony and Thuringia, Luther goes on a tour of Thuringia, preaching to all the rebellious peasants, all the rebellious miners, and is very, very unsettled by it. In May, he publishes a pamphlet that to this day remains very controversial, absolutely ensured that he

would not feature on East German banknotes. This is a pamphlet called Against the Robbing and the Murdering Hordes of Peasants, which is a very Daily Telegraph headline. I was just thinking the Daily Telegraph would love that. So he'd actually published an earlier pamphlet in which he'd been more ambivalent, kind of basically saying the peasants and princes are both awful, just stop it. But now he gives the rebels both barrels. So, I think there is not a devil left in hell, he writes. They have all gone into the peasants. And then he urges in this very, very notorious phrase, stab, smite, slay whoever you can. And that is directed at the princes.

And many, many of his admirers are appalled. But Luther never repents it. He never regrets it. I mean, he does condemn atrocities against the peasants. So Munster's wife is raped after the Battle of Frankenhausen, and he condemns that very, very firmly. He condemns the blinding of 60 peasants who supposedly had failed to look at a Lutheran lord in a respectful manner. But despite these atrocities, he continues to feel that divine justice has prevailed. And that is expressive of this inner dread of the devil that has been with him all the way through and of his hatred for the agents of the devil. And we talked about the relish he has for violence

in his language. I think there is a relish for violence when it is targeted against people who he sees as the devil's agents. And is this, Tom, psychologically? Because ultimately, Luther is quite conservative. Yeah, he is. I mean, he's from a fairly upwardly mobile, respectable background. Although he likes going against the authority of the institutions that he's in, the university, the church, whatever. Ultimately, he doesn't want to see the social order turned upside down. He doesn't want to live in a millenarian paradise.

I think he, I mean, he's owed everything to the elector, the figure of the elector, Frederick. Of course, yeah. And there's no reason why he would regard the overthrow of that regime as being something that God would want. I think it's different, say, if you are being raised in a Swiss city. Because as you said, then the scope for envisaging a different social order is much greater. But I think it's also expressive of a dread that disorder is the devil's way of trying to overthrow everything that Luther is doing. And I think that's sharpened by probably, I don't want to over-psychologize it, but the fact that Luther himself has precipitated this great ruction perhaps means that he is, you know,

there's a bit of displacement going on. It's certainly that sense that people who resemble him, who are the particular targets of his hatred. And actually the most notorious example of this isn't the peasants, but the Jews. And even more notorious in the pamphlet he writes against the peasants is a pamphlet he writes just three years before his death in 1546. So it comes out in 1543 called On the Jews and Their Lies. Yeah, I wondered if we could answer this. Right. So, I mean, we can't talk about Luther and not discuss this because in the episode we did on the Nuremberg rallies, we talked about how at the 1934 Nuremberg rally,

a copy of this pamphlet was on display. And the language is terrible. So you have all his customary cloacal obsessions. So he says of the Jews, and by this point, I think people who've made it this far will recognize the authentic Lutheran touch in this. The devil stuffs and squirts the Jews so full that it overflows and swims out of every place. Pure devil's filth. Yes, it tastes so good to their hearts and they guzzle it like sows. So that's shocking enough. But what's really shocking are the things that Luther demands should be done to the Jews. I mean, Luther is writing, of course, before the Holocaust, but even so. When you read the pamphlet and you read Luther's demands that the jews be rounded up that they all be housed in one place beneath a single roof that they be put to hard labor that the talmud their scriptures their

synagogues should be burnt and that then to quote luther whatever will not burn should be buried and covered with dirt so that no man will ever again see so much as a stone or cinder of them i mean it is chilling yeah and the nazis loved this right the nazis embraced luther as one of their own yeah of course and i think it's it's doubly disturbing for admirers of luther both because i mean this is this is shocking even by the standards of the time as with the peasants people who admire Luther are really appalled to read this. They kind of think he's really gone too far with this. And the other thing that's disturbing about it is that it's not just a rehashing of

antisemitism. So basically what precipitates this is Luther's feeling that it is those who have been granted rebirth by God. So we could probably call them Protestants now without risk of anachronism, because that word is starting to be used by the time Luther writes this pamphlet, that they are God's chosen people, and that therefore the Jews claiming to be God's chosen people, that it's cast by Luther as stupidity and folly and arrogance. So that idea of we have been chosen and they are our antithesis because they rejected the word. I mean, that you could, if you were being harsh to

Luther, you could say, well, doesn't that very clearly anticipate the Nazi idea that you talked about when you did that brilliant episode about Nazi ideology? The idea that they have been chosen by nature to be the supermen. They are the enlightened ones. They are the representatives of nobility and the human spirit and all that is best. And the Nazis believe that the Jews were their complete sort of bestial antithesis. That's kind of what Luther is saying right now. Okay, he's not talking about nature, he's talking about God, but he thinks Protestants are the elect and that the Jews are the opposite. But that's really important. He's not condem about nature, he's talking about God, but he thinks Protestants are the elect and the Jews are the opposite. But that's really important. He's not condemning the Jews as a race. So that's what the Nazis are doing.

He's condemning them as pretenders to the title that belonged to, as he sees it, God's elect, which is people like him. So it is theologically based rather than racially based. I mean, I'm sure that's not much comfort to Jewish listeners. But Tom, the idea of a dichotomy, the idea of this kind of us and them, that the Jews are the supreme villains. They're not the supreme villains. So he doesn't think they're the supreme villains. Well, you know, they're to be condemned together with, you know, Catholics or whatever. Okay. So they're one villain among many. Yeah. Or Munzer's followers. Okay. So they're one villain among many. Yeah. Or Munster's followers. It's fair to say that Luther is a good hater. He expresses his

opinions very robustly. And so that's what enables him to precipitate the Reformation. And it occasionally leads him to shocking extremes. He's not a saint. But then against that, I suppose, theologically speaking, Luther never claimed to be a saint. I mean, his whole point is that humanity has fallen. So inevitably he's a sinner. That's the whole point of it. So that's why I think it's possible to admire Luther's courage, his insights, while the fact that he wrote what he wrote about the peasants and wrote what he wrote about the Jews doesn't disqualify the quality of his insights. Because from Luther's point of view, he's fallen. He's part of humanity. All of humanity has fallen.

But that's quite convenient, isn't it, Tom? I'm a bad man, but I'm fallen. No, I think he has struggled with this all his life. It's not like it's been easy for him. I mean, he has risked his life to make this case. But he would say, I suppose that his relationship with God has been this kind of great love affair, but that God is God, he is fallen and human. And so he is capable of sin in a way obviously that god is not i guess would be his perspective if you were summing luther up so thinking about sort of i mean it's a silly way of doing it debits and credits but luther is obviously an immensely brave man and he's

intellectually formidable and he has a charisma because otherwise he wouldn't have inspired all these people against that i suppose you would say, he's an unbelievably, I mean, you use the word egocentrism. He can be very narcissistic, I would say, thinking that the peasants' war has been set by the devil. His estimation of himself is, I mean, it's even higher, Tom, than our estimation of ourselves

on the rest is history. And he's incredibly ungenerous, isn't he? He's an ungenerous man to his opponents. To his enemies, for sure. Yeah. There's a violence in him, which is not necessarily there in other people with courage and intellect and all of those things. Would you not agree with that? Yeah. I think the strain of violence in his language is very evident. I mean, against that, from the beginning, for instance, he is against the idea that, say, heretics should be burned. I mean, he never actually kills anyone.

He doesn't take up arms. He writes abusive pamphlets. Yeah. But, you know, if you write abusive editorials in newspapers and that's going to send you to hell, Dominic, then… Don't go there, Tom. Don't go there. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

Yeah, that's not a parallel I'm keen to explore. Yeah. Listen, before we get onto Luther's legacy, just one quick thing. I know you'll find this absolutely impossible, which is why I'm asking you to do it. But you said we could use the word Protestants and Protestantism by this stage. So very, very briefly, is the story effectively that by the end of the 1520s it has just gone too far so that by the time the authorities think let's try and put a lid on this that ship has sailed yeah yeah so by the time he dies in 1546 yeah protestantism has now become entrenched in large parts of germany

it has spread to the baltic it spread to Scandinavia. It's obviously the ideas have spread to England through Anne Boleyn and through all these sort of people importing books and things. And is that effectively what's happened? And is Luther happy with that? Does he think, great, brilliant, this is what I wanted? Or does he think this has gone completely out of control? I think he, I mean, he's very happy that there are Lutheran regimes in princely states in Germany and in Scandinavia and the Baltic. I think he's more conflicted about the Protestantism of Switzerland and definitely in England. I mean, he thinks Henry VIII is mad. But I mean, whatever form Protestantism takes, he'd rather that than what had existed before. Really? Yeah. And do you think he almost self-radicalized? So he never goes back and thinks, well, maybe I was a bit too harsh on the Pope. No, he never does that. No. I mean,

he has self-radicalized. The first five years of the Reformation essentially are down to Luther self-radicalizing. And we've compared him to Elvis at various points over this. He's the king. He is kind of setting rock and roll on its path. Then he gets drafted. Then he comes back and he does his films. And then he kind of ends up fat eating burgers on the toilet. And so most of this series has been very much focused on that kind of central five-year period where he changes the world. And there is a sense of him, a slight kind of vagus quality to his final decades. I mean, we've barely discussed them.

I mean, things are still going on, but they're less dramatic and he's not at the head of the Reformation by this point. And the world that he creates, Tom, in your notes, you've used these three isms, atheism, secularism, individualism. So the idea of thinking for yourself, not being told that your personal truth, your conscience. Atheism because he's thinking- Because his great argument is that sola scriptura, if it's not in the Bible, get rid of it. And so expressive of a kind of profound scepticism towards the inheritance of a religious tradition. So it gets rid of all kinds of dogmas from the medieval church. But the logical implication of that is that, you know,

why only scripture? Why not get rid of scripture as well? And essentially that is the kind of the end point that Protestant countries can arrive at. The whole process that gets initiated with Karlstadt and then with Munster and so on, that you overthrow traditional expressions of piety in the form of icons and so on, that these are idols, that they have to be toppled, all superstition. Again, you get rid of all that, you end up getting rid of everything. The process of reformation, I think, logically ends with atheism, which is why so many prominent atheists and humanists sound so Protestant. They are evangelical. Richard Dawkins, yeah. Yeah. Get rid of it and you'll gain enlightenment. You will gain the truth. You will feel in your

heart that you're a better person. I mean, this is pure Luther, but without God. And secularism, for the reasons that we were talking about earlier, the idea that it refines the idea of what religion is and counterpoints it to something called the secular. And again, I mean, Luther would have been appalled to imagine that he had a role to play in the emergence of any of those trends, but it doesn't stop him from playing that role. And just one last question before we wrap up what has been. I mean, I found this one of the most intellectually fascinating subjects that we've ever done on the rest is history, to be honest.

What if Luther had never lived or he'd been carried off by smallpox in the 1510s or something? So is there an argument that all of these things, the rise of individualism, the rise of the idea of the secular, people challenging the authority

of inherited traditions and dogmas, indeed institutions like the Catholic Church, and the fact that people are thinking of this in Switzerland at the same time, for example. Could you be a skeptic and say, listen, Luther is actually just surface froth, and the underlying shifts would have happened anyway with the arrival of the printing press and the fragmentation of authority in Central Europe and so on and so forth? Or would you say, no, he's a genius and he does change history and individuals do matter? I mean, a seeming parallel might be Darwinism. Would the theory of evolution have been found without Darwin? Probably it would. But I think actually the thing about Luther is that it's a

personal experience of God. The intellectual materials for Darwin to construct his theory are there, which is why Wallace is also coming up with it at the same time. For Luther, it's that individual sense of God that you can experience grace in the way that Luther experiences it. Then when he describes it, loads of other people across Christendom discover that they can have the same experience too. It's that personal experience combined with Luther's exceptional ability to promote his understanding of God's purposes, which of course is dependent on the printing press, absolutely. But to exploit a medium, you need to have the ability to do that. So it's that combination of Luther's personal experience of God and his command of language and ability to promote his takes, I think, that makes him so decisive. And I think that you would have had bushfires of heresy blazing out. I mean, they've been happening forever, but not in the seismic way that it does in the early 16th century. So I really do think that Luther makes a difference.

Okay, brilliant. Well, after five episodes, I mean, you've got to say that. Well, not necessarily. The Titanic, I think we spent six episodes, didn't we? And we said, oh, it was just an accident. Yeah, it means nothing. I think that's the conclusion yeah i know this has been rich in meaning tom and in uh extraordinary color i've really enjoyed doing it and for those of you i can't believe there's anybody who's tired of

reformation theology but if you are tired of it and you're craving something different then next week we will be walking on the moon with a special guest we will be in the discos of new york city in the 1970s and then after that we will be going to greece to the ottoman empire and to the um to the very limits of human hedonism tom i think it's fair to say with lord byron the first international celebrity. Is that your claim? Yeah. So we've got Lord Byron to come.

We have space. We have discos. In the future, we will be doing all kinds of things from Native Americans and the Trojan War to Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Normandy landings. So loads of interesting things to come. And we will see you next time. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.

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