Germany, 1483. A time of desolation and disease. Where the plague could wipe out entire towns in days. And a quarter of all children died before they were five.
In this world, there was one great consolation. The Church, and its promise of heaven. This promise had made the Church the most powerful institution on earth.
Rich beyond counting. Mightier than kings, but also corrupt and tyrannical. An empire that would be overturned by one man, Martin Luther.
This is the story of a man swept from devotion to rebellion. Of a quest that would set old Europe afire. Spread revolution across nations.
And unleash a voice of freedom that still resounds through the modern world. I think it's impossible to write the history of modern Western culture without talking about Luther. The idea that we should stand up for the things that we believe in. The idea that every person is precious in the sight of God. These are things that we take for granted, but they were things that Luther had to fight for.
Luther has to be ranked with the great emancipators of human history through the emphasis on the individual, the courage of the individual, and the willingness of the individual to undergo death for his beliefs. He took on the Catholic Church, this immense and enduring... Institution and said, you are wrong, let us now come to the right.
There are very few cases where you have one individual standing literally before the arrayed might of the world and saying, nope, I won't back down. I hold that there has been nobody in a thousand years whom the world hated as much as me. May our Lord God come soon and quickly take me away.
I shall gladly stretch out my neck so he can strike me to the ground with a thunderclap. Amen. Martin Luther, the man who would one day challenge the supremacy of the Catholic Church, came from the most humble of origins.
He grew up in a tiny town called Mansfeld in northern Germany, a hard-working community where the Church reigned supreme. The most important thing to remember about late medieval religion is Christianity, that in a way it's the only game in town. It's the only major story that is allowed to be told, and that is told systematically. Embedded in institutions everywhere you go.
The church stood at the center of Luther's childhood world. Its churches, monasteries and convents lay scattered across an empire that stretched from the far west of Ireland to the southern tip of Sicily. The church's power lay in the one great comfort it promised. If you followed its rules and performed its rituals, you would escape the horrors of this world and find eternal happiness in heaven. But the church exerted as much control over life on earth as it did in heaven.
Its rules and laws permeated every aspect of daily life. The Church declared whose birth was legitimate, it declared whose marriages were lawful, it declared whose wills were valid, and in that way it actually inserted itself and its legal system into the lives of ordinary people at every point, not just its own members but all the rest of the community. Like so many around him, the young Luther embraced the church. He served as an altar boy, sang in the choir, for here was a vision of harmony and peace, while life at home seems to have caused only pain and anguish.
Luther's father, Hans, was a copper smelter, one of a new and growing class of businessmen, who had broken free from the old feudal system and set up on their own. Hans held fierce ambitions for his son. He was determined for him to climb even higher up the social ladder and become a lawyer.
But Luther's was not a happy home. Luther provides us with many memories of his child, and those memories are not entirely positive. They are memories of failure, memories of being punished by his father for his failures or for his disobedience. And I think the impression we get is that of someone with a sense of low self-esteem, someone who believes that he will not live up to the expectations that others have concerning him. Hans Luther was a fierce judge of his son.
My father once whipped me so hard I ran away. I hated him until he finally managed to win me back. Luther's mother seems to have been little more sympathetic. For the sake of stealing a nut, my mother once beat me until the blood flowed. The fear of punishment and of failing would resound in Luther for the rest of his life.
Although it would drive him not to fulfill his father's ambitions, but to spectacular rebellion. At first, Luther followed the path laid out for him. He was sent to the best schools in the area.
And then, at the age of 18, he enrolled at the University of Erfurt. Compared to Luther's hometown, Erfurt was a bustling metropolis. It offered everything that might appeal to a young student.
Countless taverns and bars. In a time without clean drinking water, beer and wine were a stable drink. The city even had its own municipal brothel, run by the city council.
But Erfurt was also unique in more elevated ways. It wasn't a great center of manufacturing or politics, but it was a great center of the church and the church's activities. They reckoned that there were 14 different religious orders represented within it, that there were 25 parish churches. In fact, Erfurt had the name at the time of being the Rome of Thuringia, the Rome of that region of Saxony, because it had such a concentration of ecclesiastical talent in it. At Erfurt, Luther blossomed.
He became a keen musician and he forged a number of close friendships with his fellow students. Luther had really moved at around the age of 14, 15 to this context of learning, away from family, amongst peers, very, very demanding. So the connections between the young men there could be very, very strong, terrific.
sort of bonding, they became family to each other. So friends are at that stage in life I think, for everything you had. Luther stuck firmly to his studies.
He gained his Bachelor of Arts and then his Master's degrees. All that remained was to take his final course in law and he would be everything his father wished. But suddenly all the certainties of Luther's life were shattered.
In the year 1505, plague struck Erfurt. Disease ran amok through the city's narrow streets. leaving death and anguish in its wake.
The thing about the Black Death that most frightened people was that it came upon people without warning. Some people were struck down, others were spared. Some towns were devastated by it, while others quite close might be left alone.
So it was impossible to explain. Nobody knew how you caught it at the time. Nobody knew why you caught it, except that they had a general sense that God was punishing them for their sins. It was a terrible, visible sign of punishment. The Black Death had killed almost a half of Europe's population in the previous hundred years.
But the epidemic would now touch Luther directly. Three of his friends were killed by the disease. And this glimpse of man's mortality and the fear of God's wrath would lead to the first great turning point in Luther's life. Luther, now 23, was returning to Erfurt after a visit to his family.
When suddenly, he was caught in a massive thunderstorm. No one knows exactly what happened to Luther that night, but it struck him to his very soul. Suddenly surrounded by the terror and agony of death, I felt constrained to vow myself to God. With three friends already lost to the plague, now faced with death himself, Luther struck a bargain with God.
He vowed to become a monk. The close experience to death itself really makes you think, what state is my soul in? You know, what is the balance here?
You know, we're talking almost a sort of spiritual accountancy. Where am I situated? What is the balance?
Had I died just now, had my invocation not worked, where would I have ended up? In sin. In hell. Thunderbolt, in effect, marked out two paths. He could go down the path his father wanted him to go down, or he could go down a path which, in his own unconscious reflections, he was beginning to feel that he ought to go down.
It was a moment when he took charge of his own life. He stopped doing what his father wanted him to do, and from that moment on he was free to devote himself to the life of the Spirit, to search the universe for the answers that he... Urgently required. He was obviously a person of spiritual sensibilities. Ah, how my father raged when he found his son would be no lawyer.
He went insane, acted like a fool. How was he to know that one monk in the family would bring him more fame and shame than a thousand ermine-clad advocates? E ultrame mineris iniquitatis, Ecceci vita sancti, Facta est deserta, Zion deserta facta est, Jerusalem desolata est.
The monasteries and convents of Europe were a society in themselves. For the faithful, they offered a life devoted to prayer, meditation and the search for salvation. The monastic life was dominated by the rhythm of the seven hours of the liturgical day, which meant that seven times in the day monks had to be there in choir, singing and saying parts of the service, and that included getting up in the middle of the night. When you weren't taking part in liturgical services, your life was also rigorously regulated. In many monasteries, speaking was only allowed in certain places and at certain times.
All privacy was removed from them. Their food was supposed to be very simple. Monks'clothing was also very hard, harsh and uncomfortable.
Why wear these clothes that made you so uncomfortable? Why go to all these services? Why eat such poor food?
And the answer seems to be that it was by the renunciation of everything that the world regards as comfortable. valuable and so on, that salvation was to be achieved. And Luther clearly believed that the only way of achieving salvation was by completely renouncing the world and immersing himself in a community which cut him off from it.
Two weeks after the night in the forest, Luther joined one of the most severe monastic orders in Germany, the Eremite Augustinians of strict observance. His hair was cut, he was clothed in the white robes of the novice monk, and he prostrated himself before the abbot. He had been welcomed into the very heart of the Catholic Church. It was not the kind of order that you would choose if you wanted a comfortable or easy life. It wasn't that kind of religious house at all.
It was, however, I think, a good order for someone to join who was also quite spiritually and mentally gifted. But Luther's new home was as much a business as a spiritual retreat. The abbot was running a thriving trade in dying cloth.
The monks had a brewery, distilling a rather popular beer. While the monastery owned land across the neighborhood, making a tidy income from rent and tithes. All diligently accounted for in the monastery's extensive business records. The church would It wouldn't have pleaded for support from its people.
It would have demanded it and required it. It had the power to levy tithes, which were not a voluntary contribution. They were a form of tax, which if you did not pay, you could be hauled up in court and made to pay. And people on the whole were willing to pay those fees because they were taught so firmly right from their earliest childhood that if they did not have the services of the church, their souls would be in peril.
This profiteering of the church would ultimately outrage and disgust Luther. But for now, he was concerned only with his soul. He threw himself into the isolated, ascetic life of the church's devoted followers. He soon graduated from the white robe of the novitiate to the black of the confirmed monk.
The only piece of clothing he now owned. He tells us that he wasn't in there for fun or to muck about or to have a good time. That for example means, well just to pick up one feature, it means fasting, it means recurrent fasting, it means really bodily, physical self-denial. The monks'strict routine of prayer and study was accompanied by a regime of persecution of the flesh. Initiates were encouraged to sleep without coverings or blankets, even to whip themselves.
One of the things they're trying to do is to imitate the sufferings of Christ, to be what is called an ascetic, to believe that by dominating your fleshly desires, by no longer... needing food, sexual companionship, the comforts of life. You are identifying yourself with Christ in the wilderness, that you are battling with the forces of evil in yourself by battling with your own lower nature.
Luther threw himself into this regime with fervor, sleeping out in the snow without blankets until his fellow monks dragged him in half dead. In later years, he would complain that these years in the monastery had permanently ruined his health. If ever a monk should have got to heaven by his monkery, then it was I. If I'd kept on any longer, then I would have killed myself with vigils, prayers, reading, and other work. Everything that Luther did throughout his life, Luther did to the brim.
Luther did everything, 100%, 110%. And when Luther was in the mood to be a monk, he gives it his all. He gives it his every shot. Good monk. But Luther's devotion now began to exceed anything expected by his fellow monks.
He was increasingly concerned that he might never please God, that he would never make it to heaven, that he had swapped one unforgiving father for one even more impossible to satisfy. Luther talked vividly of a mounting feeling of hopelessness, calling it anfechtung, a sense that he would never achieve salvation. God's word is too high and too hard for anyone to fulfill it. And this is proved not merely by our Lord's word, but by my own experience and feeling.
The greater his sense of despair, the more Luther threw himself into the rituals of the church. Luther was different from other monks in that he dearly cared about being reconciled to the Heavenly Father and doing what God willed him to do. And we can see his quest, his agonizing, his deep seriousness.
We hope that he's going to find some resolution, otherwise he's going to lead a tormented life. For five years, Luther labored without relief. Then in 1510, he was offered an escape from his cloistered life. He was sent by his order on a mission to Rome, one of the church's greatest pilgrimages.
Going to Rome was a very special pilgrimage because this was the capital of the Roman Catholic Church. And indeed, from the Western perspective, it is the capital of Christendom, period. Luther immediately decided he would make the best spiritual use of this trip that he could. Rome was a treasure trove of holiness, the home of St. Peter's, the Pope, and the remains of countless saints and martyrs.
Tens of thousands of pilgrims flock to Rome every year, all hoping the journey would bring them closer to God. You dress differently, you take a stick, you walk, you live very modestly. There are little hostels along the routes for pilgrims, so that when you get to the place of pilgrimage, in a way you're in a state of such penance and deservedness that encountering the saint's tomb, which is at the end of the pilgrimage, you'll be worthy to partake in the grace of encountering it. It took a full two months for Luther and his companion to make the long journey south. And then, in October of 1510, they finally arrived at the Eternal City.
Luther arrived in Rome just as the Renaissance was reaching its height. Michelangelo was painting the ceilings of the Sistine Chapel. Raphael was hard at work decorating the Pope's private apartments. To the young monk, the city was a revelation. Luther was a very northern provincial boy.
He had lived in, by then, what, three towns in his whole life. So he hadn't seen very much. And to come to the city and to see the retinues of the cardinals and the great palaces and all of this basking in a totally different weather and different foods and smells must have been a terrific shock to the system.
When Luther first approached Rome and entered into the city, he seems to have been absolutely overwhelmed by the idea that here he was in the holy city, here he was in the presence of so many martyrs at the center of the church. And it probably took a little while for the gloss to wear off, although wear off it did. Among the palaces and great churches, Luther would now discover a very earthly institution. For this city was as much about money as religion. The papacy as an institution for gathering in cash is really a kind of huge sink for sucking in money from throughout Europe.
The Church may have taught that money is at the root of all evil, and to lend it at interest, for example, is a mortal sin, but in reality, of course, the Church dealt in millions of ducats. Luther had entered the headquarters of a Europe-wide corporation, supported on the profits of monasteries such as his own, on the donations of the faithful, and fees that were charged for everything from a wedding license to a cardinalship. The most important thing to remember about the papacy in the early 16th century, that it has been for... A few hundreds of years already, it has been basically a state, a state with all the characteristics of a state.
It has a bureaucracy, it has palaces, it has magnificent buildings, it has everything that a great renaissance. Prince has. The papacy even wielded military power. Towering over the city stood the Castel Sant'Angelo, the Pope's private fort, bristling with cannons.
Although Pope Julius II was rarely there. Preferring to spend his time campaigning across Europe at the head of the people army. The kind of people who floated to the top in the church tended to be people who would be pretty rough cut businessmen. And the need to have these sort of powerful managers and politicians explains why Rome was a spiritual place full of a lot of unspiritual people.
In Rome, Luther discovered a cynicism that shocked him to the core. He reported that when he timidly tried to preach a mass in one of the city's magnificent churches, the priest next to him said, Just get on with it. And that as he held up the bread he believed had been transformed into the body of Christ, another priest muttered, Bread thou art, and bread thou wilt remain.
The disappointment in Rome must have been just absolutely devastating. Here was something which I think he was still open to find as a sort of elevating experience, to go to the pinnacle of the institution that in different ways he has become a servant of, and yet finding that in a way nobody speaks his language, and in more ways than one. Luther also discovered that the church was happy to profit from its pilgrims. For a fee, he was allowed to enter the crypt of the church of Santa Calliste.
Here, he could view the remains of 46,000 Christian martyrs. This would earn him what was called an indulgence, releasing him from time and purgatory after death. Purgatory was where Christians would have their sins burned out of them for what could be thousands of years before they were finally allowed to enter heaven. The chance to buy time off from purgatory was an extremely attractive offer for the faithful.
and very profitable for the church. But as Luther trekked from one pilgrimage site to another, desperate to find salvation, he was overtaken by a steadily mounting fear. Could all this really bring him closer to God? Until finally it is said that Luther collapsed, questioning, for the first time, the teachings of the church to which he had vowed his life.
Who knows if it is really so? Luther was clearly very disillusioned by Rome, not simply by the spiritual superficiality, but also by the way in which he felt that Rome simply did not reflect Christianity as he understood it. Luther had a sense of the answer having eluded him.
He did not have a feeling of God's loving him any better. Thus, he had to find an answer in some other way. Luther's trip to Rome had brought only disillusion and doubt.
And life in the monastery now offered even less consolation than before. Still desperate to ensure his salvation, Luther spent his life in endless confession, laying bare his soul up to four times a day for as long as six hours at a time, spending the rest of his days in penance. There is something about Luther who feels that he never can quite do it and yet he has to do it. He would confess and would be absolved and that's the way the church was supposed to deal with that issue and most monks that would be enough.
He said you're forgiven. But that little voice back there said, you're not really sorry. And so he had to go and confess again and be absolved again.
And the little voice said, no, you didn't really mean that. And so monasticism was a hell for him. Here he was doing the most important, the best thing you can do that his society said, and it gave him no relief.
Clearly his mind was racing and with it his sensibility and he was not getting the answers and then the extraordinary guilt. Why? Monasticism has worked for tens and hundreds of thousands of men throughout Christian centuries. What's wrong with me?
However irreproachably I lived as a monk, I could feel myself only as a sinner with a conscience full of guilt. Nor could I believe that I pleased God with my labor. Indeed, I hated this God. And so I raged against myself with a fierce and troubled conscience.
It would take the labor and insight of another to help Luther escape this prison of his own anguish and unwittingly set him on the path to revolution. In 1511, his order sent him to a smaller monastery in the town of Wittenberg. Compared with Erfurt, Wittenberg was tiny, home to little more than a couple of churches and a newly founded university.
But here, the monk Johann von Staupitz took Luther under his wing. Staupitz was a leading member of Luther's order, and he was determined to release the younger monk from his cycle of despair. Staupitz announced to Luther that he had decided to make him professor of Bible studies at Wittenberg's new university, forcing him to look after the spiritual needs of others, rather than simply raging against himself. Luther stammered out 15 reasons why he could not possibly take the job. Not least, that so much work would kill him.
Staupitz's wry response still survives. Quite all right. God has plenty of work.
for clever men in heaven. I think Staupitz knew very well how to handle Luther with a combination of sympathy, gentle mockery, gentle mockery, and above all, I think, by seeing his gifts, seeing his... his brilliance and his capacity for an academic career.
Staupitz, I think, is saying, we've got to get him to that state where at night, instead of going through the dark night of the soul, he's so shattered from preparing lectures that he just collapses and sleeps soundly like a baby for eight hours. Staupitz's instincts would prove astonishingly accurate. Faced with a class of students to whom he had to explain the Bible, Luther now had to engage with the world, rather than just blame himself for his failings. He has to get up in a classroom and say what's what. It's no longer thinking in the cell.
It's no longer discussion with brother monks. It is actually pronouncing with authority. He threw himself into his work, studying not only the standard Latin texts of the church, but also reading them in new Greek and Hebrew editions. And as he pondered, noted and reasoned his way through his faith, Luther was struck by a building revelation.
A revelation that questioned everything he had been taught about his church. Luther had been brought up to believe that the person who was saved is the person who went out and achieved salvation. He now began to realize that to receive salvation, you simply put out your empty, open hands and receive this gift which God wanted you to receive.
So what Luther is saying is that you don't need the institution of the church. You don't need the intercession of priests. You don't need these great papal ceremonies to get to heaven. This whole thing is not about you and the church.
It's about you and God. It was a revolutionary moment. For his whole life, Luther had believed that it was through the rituals of the church that he would achieve salvation. But now he realized that salvation could only take place directly between God and the individual.
No earthly institution could believe for you, atone for you, or stand between you and your God. With this, I felt myself to have been born again, and to have entered through open gates into heaven already. But no one, least of all Luther himself, could have anticipated the blaze of turmoil and revolt he was about to ignite. Seven years had passed since Luther's visit to Rome. In that time, Pope Julius II had died.
He was succeeded by Leo X, and Leo was a man devoted to the pleasures of the flesh. At his dinner parties, he would regularly serve a great cake from which would leap little naked boys. Within two years of sumptuous festivals and wild boar hunts, Leo had emptied the papal treasuries.
He was forced to halt work on the church's greatest extravagance yet, the glorious Basilica of St. Peter's. One of the greatest building schemes in European history and all the great artists and sculptors and architects of the Italian Renaissance without exception took part in this scheme. It just sucked in money, as building projects do suck in money.
Leo was unconcerned. To refill his treasuries, he turned to one of the church's most proven methods for raising money. Selling indulgences. Charging the faithful for entry into heaven. This indulgence was basically a piece of paper sold for a very appropriate sum of money, incidentally adjusted to your means, which promised to pay the bearer on demand forgiveness of sins.
Leo's indulgence had a number of unique benefits. You could buy one not just for yourself, but also for your dead relatives. And it pardoned an astonishing array of sins. It was said that it would even forgive sexual intercourse with the Virgin Mary, had that been possible.
Here was salvation in exchange for a sum. The sums of money trying to be raised in the 1517 indulgence are very, very large, and we're talking tens of thousands of gulden. We're talking, in modern money, many millions. Leo made careful preparations for the issuing of his new indulgence.
He brought in a Dominican friar called Johann Tetzel to handle the sales and PR. He had chosen well. Tetzel was a marvellous advertising executive.
who had a wonderful line in promotional jingles and slogans. He almost invented the advertising jingle, you see. He would say, when the coin in his coffer rings, then the soul. heavenward wings.
You can actually see the soul escalating to heaven from purgatory. Leo waited for his empty coffers to fill with the donations of the faithful. Tetzel's main market for selling the new indulgence was Germany.
And the people of Wittenberg quickly heard about the bargain deal that the church was offering on redemption. Luther found that many of his congregation had turned away from his sermons and were rushing to spend their hard-earned money on Tetzel's offer. But for Luther, his moment of revelation had left him with one simple message. Salvation was a gift from God, a gift received through faith. And that meant the church had no right to sell redemption.
This is a pastoral issue for him. His own parishioners are bringing to him letters saying that because they purchased an indulgence, they do not have to confess to him. And that they are showing assurance that they're saved, which Luther thinks is totally an illusion and that they're likely to be damned as a result of this.
And so for him, this is a very serious matter. He's angry because this really counts. People's lives are at stake.
If they get this wrong, they can go to hell. This monk, who had once been the church's most devoted servant, now turned on the institution to which he had vowed his life. On the evening of the 31st of October, 1517, Luther sat down and penned a furious litany of criticism. Ninety-five stinging bullet points, or theses, that lashed into the Pope and the trade in the church.
indulgences. Then he nailed them to the door of Wittenberg's castle church. It was a blistering attack on the greatest power of the day. God's blessing is freely available without the keys of the Pope. Indulgences are truly pernicious.
They induce complacency and imperil salvation. The Pope is richer than Croesus. He would do better to sell St. Peter's and give the money to the poor people.
In sum, what the 95 Theses are saying is where are the limits of papal power. The first one, I think, opens the agenda very well indeed, because it says that the route to repentance, to forgiveness, is much more arduous. than the one sketched out in indulgences.
Indulgences say easy peasy, lemon squeezy. Indulgences say that forgiveness is facile. What Christ says, and Luther quotes him, is that repentance, forgiveness lies in repentance.
Forgiveness lies in repentance. It's more difficult. So they are really calling into question, I think, papal power.
This is an issue at the heart of faith. It has to be brought out into the open. Yet he's summoning other minds and those who would dare defend these practices or abuses to come out and to show their proof.
Of course, for him, Scripture is the basis for discussion. Scripture and clear reason. There is still much discussion of how much trouble Luther actually wanted to cause.
It was standard practice to pin texts for academic discussion to the church door. They weren't intended to be published. They're in Latin. They're technical.
They're difficult to understand in places. But at the same time, it's just a little bit difficult reading the style of the 95 Theses and the fact that Luther is thinking so hard and feeling so strongly to imagine that he just wanted this to be nothing more than a private conversation with an ecclesiastical high-up. It's hard not to think that he had the, at least the threat of going public in his mind. In the end, other people did it for him.
Luther was about to become one of the first top-selling authors in history. Less than 70 years before, another German, Gutenberg, had perfected the world's first printing press. Already printers were running off countless books and pamphlets, even Leo's indulgences.
And now Luther's outspoken work was copied down and set for printing. The theses would spread like wildfire across Germany. Setting Luther and all Europe on a path no one could have anticipated.
Not very hidden within them is the potential to undo the authority of the Pope. The Pope himself was a sponsor of indulgences, including their sale. This was not done without his approval.
And what right had some upstart friar to call them into question? Luther really didn't anticipate the consternation that this would arouse. But it was not for nothing that the Catholic Church had held power for over a thousand years. It had a name for people like Luther.
They were heretics. And the penalty for heresy was death. The stage had been set for the church's greatest conflict in its history.
A battle between the most powerful institution on earth and one solitary monk. All Hallows Eve, 1517. The Castle Church, Wittenberg, Northern Germany. Martin Luther has nailed one document to its door. 95 theses, 95 stinging attacks on the mighty Catholic Church, and its head, the Pope. Luther has no idea that with this one gesture he has unleashed a hurricane.
A storm of violence that will rage across Europe. Change the face of Western civilization forever. And sweep him towards an epic confrontation with the greatest powers of the day.
God knows I never thought of going so far as I did. I would never have thought that such a storm would rise from Rome over one simple scrap of paper. Luther had never intended for his 95 theses to create the tumult they did.
But in Rome, the headquarters of the Catholic Church, they caused outrage and horror. Not just because they criticized the Pope, but also because they were massively popular. Theses touch a nerve for several reasons.
Issues of moment to a large number of people at the time about the church and its relationship in the economy, what is salvation, what do people have to do to be saved. And it's that combination, in a time when people were really resenting the way in which the church was taking advantage of that desire to be saved, all that came together and made these something that people talked about. But the church had a name for works like this.
They were heresy. And heresy called for a swift response. The first victims were Luther's books. And the next would be Luther himself.
The ultimate punishment for a heretic was that they could be cut off from the church and handed over to lay justice, which would sentence them to death in a rather hypocritical phrase that they used, without the shedding of blood, which usually meant burning or drowning. Only a hundred years before, a man named Hus had criticized the church for much the same reasons as Luther. Hus was promised a safe hearing, only to then be roasted alive. The papacy can crush, there's no two ways about it. It's an amazingly efficient machine for detection of error through the Inquisition, for example, and through the elimination of individuals.
We have to say that Luther has entered an arena of extremely high gladiatorial risk with a strong possibility of execution. For Martin Luther, the mounting fury of the Catholic Church would inspire not doubt and fear, but an extraordinary courage that would only grow stronger with every attack he faced. There's no doubt that Luther is frightened by some of the threats that are made against him.
But alongside this is this very strong idea that if the Christian life is being lived authentically, then you must expect to suffer. Luther sees the criticism of him almost as a confirmation of his vocation as a reformer. Martin Luther continues right on because he's a man of both high idealism resolve and naivete.
One has to admire that kind of single-minded pursuit of an ideal. Luther squared up to the church with a style of opposition it had never encountered before. He was utterly dismissive of its threats. The Pope demanded that Luther disown the 95 Theses. Luther refused.
The Pope sent a cardinal to interrogate him. Luther was unimpressed. He is no more fitted to handle the case than an ass to play on a harp.
And then Luther was charged with heresy. He remained defiant. I demand they show me absolutely, not respectively, distinctly and not confusedly, certainly and not probably, just what is heretical. I think the difficulty the church faced was this. The more it tried to silence Luther, the greater Luther became convinced that he had a vocation which needed to be seen through.
I desired to believe freely and to be a slave to the authority of no one, whether council, university or pope. And I was bound not only to assert the truth, but to defend it with my blood and death. In Rome, Luther's writings were causing mounting fury. Pope Leo X now turned to the mightiest weapon in his arsenal.
Excommunication. With this, Leo could condemn Luther to an eternity of hell in the next world, and to make him an outcast in this. To the average Christian, papal excommunication meant that if you died without being reconciled to the church, you spent eternity in hellish torment.
The document was drafted at Leo's magnificent hunting lodge outside Rome, and the text reflected the pontiff's favorite leisure pursuit, the stalking of wild boar. Arise, O Lord. Protect yourself. For a wild boar of the forest is seeking to destroy your vineyard. We must proceed against this Martin Luther to his condemnation and damnation as one whose faith is notoriously suspect and is in fact a true heretic.
Sealed with the great papal emblem of the crossed keys of Saint Peter, this document should have sealed Luther's fate, not least because it could place him open to arrest by any secular or church authority. But as Leo was raising the stakes in Rome... Luther was discovering that he had a new and powerful weapon on his side.
For movements to spread, their ideas need to spread. And for Luther, it was providential that a means of disseminating these ideas had suddenly become available through the printing press. I think in our own day and age we're very much aware of how much things have been changed by the internet.
What the internet is to our day, printing was to Luther's day. It meant the ideas could travel, they could not be stopped. Luther had watched as the printers had spread his 95 theses across Germany. And he had realized that their presses could offer him a vast new audience.
Martin Luther is said to have been the first person, the first propagandist, the first person to really exploit this new medium. He perceived that he could gain an audience that was far larger than he could have done without it. Luther penned a new text, an address to the Christian nobility of the German nation. With this little pamphlet, Luther would strike a devastating blow at both Pope and Church. His masterstroke was to direct it not at the clerics and clergy, but at the secular rulers of Germany.
This address to the German nobility suggests that Luther is beginning to see political reality. He's understood that if he's to purify the church, he really has to have the cooperation of those who are in power. In Luther's time, Germany was a patchwork of tiny provinces. Each province was governed by its own local ruler.
But they were also held under the overall dominion of the Holy Roman Empire. And individually, these fragmented states did not have the strength to stand up to Rome's ever-increasing financial demands. There was growing resentment inside Germany and this treatise really sets out to say to those in power in Germany, look this has got to stop. Luther painted a vivid picture of the financial drain that was Rome. German money in violation of nature flies over the Alps.
He talks about the self-indulgence of the papacy, the numbers of secretaries, thousands of secretaries that the Pope has, the way in which the Pope rides around the city with a veritable train of attendants. And all of this is to suggest that that is what German money is being used for. Luther, in no uncertain terms, was now arguing that the powers of Germany should stand up to Rome and the Pope. It seems to me that the only remedy remaining is for the Emperor, the kings and princes, to gird themselves with force of arms to attack these pests of the world, and fight them, not with words, but with steel. It was a truly radical agenda.
Luther was arguing that not just the clergy, but every German had a stake in their church. One of the great themes of this appeal to German nobility is that it is ordinary people, ordinary Christians, not the priests, ordinary Christians who have a God-given role to play in the running of the church. If we were to use modern ways of speaking, we're talking here about the democratization of religion.
But Luther's revolutionary work would have a far more immediate consequence. It would now save him from being handed over to the church for trial and execution. The region of Saxony where Luther lived was ruled by a man named Frederick the Wise. It was Frederick who had founded the University of Wittenberg where Luther now taught. Frederick began to quietly protect this loudmouthed theologian that lay under his rule, refusing to simply hand him over to the agents of the Pope.
The motives of Frederick the Wise are something of a mystery. Partly, I think there is a sort of pride about Frederick of Saxony over Luther. He is proud of his learned, famous theologian, the man who is attracting people to his new little university in Wittenberg.
Luther's bringing a lot of status and recognition. It may not be quite the kind of recognition he's comfortable with, but he is making Wittenberg to be taken seriously. Frederick had also quickly recognized the implications of Luther's latest work.
Frederick and his immediate antecedents had been trying to limit the power of the church. Now Frederick could hear the message of the address to the German nobility and say, this is right, there's a higher principle involved here. I'm not just trying to restrict the funds that are flowing out to Germany because I'm a greedy man.
There are higher ideals involved here. But the address to the Christian nobility was attracting attention in even higher circles. In 1520, Frederick received a visit from the most powerful man in Europe, the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Charles had only just come to power, but he was already finding Luther a concern. Charles is a devout Catholic. He really intends to preserve the Catholic faith.
He is a champion in some sense of the papacy, but he's only 19 years old. At the time he's elected Holy Roman Emperor, he's really in over his head and he wants to keep the Luther issue from spinning out of control. Frederick pulled off a diplomatic coup.
He convinced Charles that Luther should not be simply handed over to the agents of the church. Instead, he should be allowed to argue his case before Charles himself, at his next parliament, or Diet, in the German city of Worms. It was a crucial moment.
Frederick had won Luther the chance to present his case at one of the most influential gatherings in Europe. And Luther would not waste this opportunity. I was not trying to gain praise and fame with my writings and little books.
For almost everyone I knew condemned my harsh and stinging tone. But I thought that even if the present age condemned me, maybe the judgment of future generations would be better. Leo X's great bull of excommunication was being slowly carried north by a papal emissary. He had been instructed to display it in every town he came to as a warning to anyone who felt sympathy with Luther and his writings. But the further north he traveled, the less support he found.
Erfurt, where Luther had once studied, the emissary had hundreds of copies of the bull printed. But the university students'response was to throw every copy into the city's river, sarcastically renaming the bull a balloon and saying they wanted to see it float. And all the while, Luther's writings were gathering an ever larger audience. He wrote very well.
In fact, he wrote very wittily. In fact, he wrote very rudely. And many people find themselves, you know, fascinated by this man who would use such crude language when arguing with the Pope and with the Church. The Pope should stand up like the stinking sinner he is. If Rome is not a brothel above all brothels one can imagine, then I do not know what brothel means.
He's very, very savvy. He's grown up from a very young age amongst books and writing and bookishness. And he's terrifically good at instinctively sensing what will work for whom. There is such a swarm of vermin yonder in Rome that there was nothing like it in Babylon.
The Pope should restrain himself and get his fingers out of the pie. He is an incredible writer. He uses earthy, ordinary language.
He's just fun to read out loud. He's sarcastic. He's witty.
He's profound. He is a great comforter. If you get attacked by Luther, you're just torn up one side and down the other. Printed along with Luther's texts, for those who could not read, were visual parallels.
Graphic woodcuts showing the Pope luxuriating and corruption. Even the Pope, a servant of Satan. For Luther and his followers were beginning to see the struggle with Rome as an epic battle with the devil himself.
Luther is definitely not a modern man. Luther... He comes out of the medieval world.
He understands the world through the lens of the Bible. He is absolutely convinced that he's dealing with the Antichrist. This is not just Martin Luther versus some politicians.
This was an apocalyptic struggle. Luther now had only a few months until his great showdown before Charles at the Diet of Worms, and Leo's bull of excommunication would reach him before then. He had one further goal, to set down in detail a whole new system of faith. And it was this work that turned Luther from a voice of reform into one of outright revolution. It would be named on the Babylonian captivity of the church.
If you're going to build, you sometimes have to demolish, and this is a work of considerable destructive harshness. Babylon is the city of evil, and the church has been really kidnapped. The church has been taken into Babylon. It's been, it's been, it's really been heisted. The church has been taken over, you see, by the crooks.
So it's in captivity, and it's got to be let out. The church has got to be liberated. Luther now attacked the very heart of the church's power, the system of sacraments.
According to the Catholic Church, it was only through these special rituals that a man could hope to achieve salvation and get to heaven. And every one of these seven sacraments, ranging from baptism at birth to the last rites of death, was administered by the Church's army of priests. But when Luther turned to Scripture, the actual words of the Bible, he could find only two sacraments.
Luther argues in the Babylonian captivity of the church that there are really only two sacraments. There's the Lord's Supper and there's baptism. Baptism introduces you into the people of God, and the Lord's Supper is a tangible way in which God assures you of faith.
This is my body given for you. This is my blood shed for you. Luther argued that the remaining sacraments were inventions of the church, and they must be cast aside.
In one stroke, Luther cut away centuries of ritual and ceremony and liberated man's relationship with God. The seven sacraments could be seen and were presented as mechanisms by which we rely on clergy to intermediate between us and the divine. And what Luther is saying all along is that that relationship must be one to one, unmediated and direct.
You know, we can repent, no one can repent for us. And so the reductionism on the face of it negative has this positive feature that it says really, it's, from now on baby, it's down to you. I say that neither Pope nor Bishop nor any ordained man, has the right to impose one syllable of law upon the Christian man.
For all of the faithful are God's priests. It redefines the relationship between an individual and God in profound ways because it takes the middleman out. It's like they control the pipes that bring water into your house and suddenly you can drill your own well.
You're no longer dependent upon the waterworks of the church. In the winter of 1520, Luther finally received the bull of excommunication from Rome. But it was already too late. With his words, Luther had unleashed a hurricane.
You could say that these works are a revolutionary manifesto, not simply for the church, but also for society as well. Luther is saying that... Ordinary Christians can make a difference, and once people start believing that, then the world can never be the same again. For Luther, the centuries-old power of the Pope now meant nothing. He hurled the bull of excommunication into a bonfire.
Because you have corrupted God's truth, may God destroy you in this fire. I am not afraid, and I rejoice to suffer in so noble a cause. In burning the bull of excommunication, he is in fact saying, I will not give in. I am right, you are wrong, come and get me.
Luther now braced himself for one final showdown with the powers of the Holy Roman Empire at the Diet of Worms. 25 years ago now, I set out on that journey to Worms. sure that that would be my last day. For, as I declared, if the Emperor was inviting me in order for me to recant, then I would never go.
But, if he was inviting me to my death, then I would gladly come. On April the 2nd, 1521, Luther set out from Wittenberg on the two-week journey to Wund. In front rode his escort, Charles V's Imperial Herald, a guarantee of safe conduct.
Luther's friends had done all they could to dissuade him from going. convinced he would never return alive. But as he traveled across Germany, Luther now began to glimpse the vast popularity of his cause and works. In Erfurt, the city elders threw a huge party for the passing traveler.
In Frankfurt, he was showered with gifts by the city's publishers. He was, after all, one of Europe's most successful authors. The awareness of his popularity might have given him some courage as he proceeded on to warmth, but I do not see in Luther the kind of big head that celebrities often get today. He was more devoted to that principle. He's still a single-minded idealist.
I think as Luther approaches worms, he finds himself torn between two emotions. He is genuinely frightened. What is going to happen? Am I going to be safe? And on the other hand, he's realizing that people like him, that he's started something that seems to be snowballing.
On the 16th of April, Luther finally approached the city of Worms. The memory would burn in him until his dying days. On that day, I was greeted by a multitude. The whole city thronged the streets.
An escort of knights saw me through the city gates. A priest ran towards me, touched me, as if I was a saint. Luther arrived, that crowds came out to gawk and cheer, and one of the papal representatives reported back to Rome that nine out of ten people were yelling, long live Luther.
And lest the Pope take any satisfaction, the tenth was yelling, death to the Pope. To his last day and beyond, Luther's appearance before the Diet would stand as the pinnacle of his life. The day was hot, but the sun had sunk into a red glow.
In that one room were gathered the greatest powers of Europe, the princes of Germany, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles, and the Papal Nuncio, Johannes Meyer von Eck. These were the men in whom God now entrusted my life. The only person in the room that Luther knew was his own prince, Frederick the Wise. But he knew that it was the votes of everyone here that would decide his fate.
The Pope's ambassador had only one demand, that Luther recount every one of his writings. But Luther would remain true to his principles and to his words. We must realize how very frightening this must have been for Luther.
A raid against him are the forces of church and the forces of the state. And it's clear that they are placing him under huge pressure simply to stand back, to say, no, I shouldn't have done this, I shouldn't have said that. He was shown a pile of his books and asked if they were all his. Indeed, all the books are mine, and I have written more if you want to read them. He would refuse to recant, in terms both clear and simple.
I do not accept the authority of popes and councils, for they have all contradicted each other. My conscience is captive only to the word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything.
For to go against my conscience is neither right nor safe. Legend tells us that Luther closed his address with one of history's greatest declarations of exhausted defiance. Here I stand.
I can do no other. God help me. Luther's statement really marks the dawn of a new era, the era of the ordinary person standing up against authority and saying, I'm sorry, this is what I believe, my conscience tells me this, I cannot do anything else.
That, I think, is a defining moment in the emergence of our modern understanding of personal and institutional freedom. This moment in Worms is very powerful. It's a time when a man stood up and spoke the truth, and spoke for the truth, and spoke for liberty of conscience. And we see him, therefore, as a monument to liberty of conscience. It's one of these grand gestures where an individual stands for something much larger than himself.
Luther had been allowed to return to his lodgings after the hearing. He was told he would receive the verdict on the following day. He was sure that he would be handed over to the agents of Rome to face inquisition and trial for heresy.
But then he received an extraordinary message. Judges had been unable to come to the unanimous verdict that the rules of the Diet required. One of those abstaining was Luther's old protector Frederick the Wise. He has perceived the usefulness of Martin Luther. He doesn't want him to die.
He wants to go on using him as a kind of weapon against the papacy in the church. And I think he's also very attracted to Luther's teachings, and he genuinely wants Luther to continue his work. Luther was granted safe passage back to Wittenberg from Worms.
But the threat of arrest by the powers of the church still hung over him. Frederick now took drastic action. He had Luther snatched on his way back from Worms and hidden away in a remote and isolated castle called the Wartburg, where the agents of the Pope would never find him.
Luther goes from the incredible drama and intense experience of the Diet of Worms to a solitary existence hidden away in the Warburg. He goes from great elation and energy to depression. Luther now found himself sinking into the despair and anguish that had plagued him throughout his early years.
A depression that was accompanied by a vivid sense that the devil was haunting him. It may be that in his leisure in the Wartburg, he had more opportunities to confront the devil personally. And when you visit the Wartburg, you are shown the desk where Luther threw ink at the devil.
His conviction is that the devil is to be encountered every day. There is now a period of undoubted regression, introspection, melancholy, accompanied by physical symptoms of which Luther was distressingly frank, the return of constipation and heavens knows what. And I think the way that he gets out of this is to use the Prozac that had worked in the past to work.
Luther threw himself into one of his greatest enterprises yet. A translation of the Bible into German, making the Word of God accessible to the common man. But even as Luther languished in isolation, the story of his stand at Worms was spreading like wildfire. He was now a hero, the figurehead of a revolution.
Gradually, what started with one man is picked up and repeated, multiplied over and over as more and more individuals become involved. And for them, the Diet of Worms is of symbolic importance and in many ways galvanizes them to act. Suddenly the world shifts.
It's like you've taken the pieces and rearranged them and you can't see the world the way it was before. It was in Wittenberg that the first sparks of revolution were lit. Monks and nuns began to leave their monasteries and convents. Priests abandoned church law to get married and live the lives of their congregation.
This is a beginning not merely of a religious movement, it's a social, economic, political revolution. There are images of the saints in the churches. The very same people who paid for those images are the ones that tear them down and off the walls.
It was an unstoppable rebellion, spreading from the grassroots up. The first steps of what would become the Reformation. Luther was finally able to return to Wittenberg in the spring of 1522. By now, the Pope had far greater problems than just one rebellious monk.
And Luther was about to discover how much of a revolution his words had inspired. Because the church was so wrapped up in the social conditions of life and the organization of society, The overturning of the status of the church could not fail to have important consequences for society. Communities are able completely to reorganise themselves without reference to these big international structures of the church. And communities across Germany and then across the rest of Europe take hold of issues like social discipline, like the relief of the poor, like public education, and they decide, no, hang on, we don't need to take...
We're not going to take a lot of other people on board with us. We're just going to decide this at local level and establish local rules for this. Luther's followers had turned Wittenberg upside down.
They had seized control of the town's administration, confiscated church funds to set up a new welfare system, and taken over the schools that were once run by the church. When Luther returns to Wittenberg from his captivity in the Wartburg, he sees the quite radical changes that others have made in his absence. And they were clearly very enthusiastic about these. They believed that this is what Luther wanted to be done. They believed this was the logical outcome of what Luther was saying.
But Luther was horrified. Luther's ideas turned out to be much more radical than he realized. Luther had never envisaged change with such speed and such violence. I opposed indulgences and all the papists, but never with force.
I simply taught, preached, and wrote God's Word. Luther climbed the pulpit and told the congregation that they must pull back from their social revolution. They should be concerning themselves only with their souls and God. Luther is clearly not in control of the ideas out there in the public domain, but that doesn't mean he doesn't try to call back the genie into the bottle. He's savvy enough to understand that if his ideas become associated with destruction, destruction of property, then the very secular rulers who were the hope, not only for his personal safety, but also for the reformed world he had in view, would of course turn against it.
But for all his appeals to the people of Wittenberg, the spirit of revolution only gathered strength elsewhere. He starts something that then, like a snowball rolling downhill, picks up momentum, bounces over obstacles, goes in a direction that he would not have liked, and just pulverizes the medieval society out of which it came. A series of peasant uprisings flared up across the country. These were inspired by Luther's calls for freedom of faith, but were now seeking social freedom for Germany's peasants. When Luther says you should be free and not subject to the authority of human beings on the matters of faith, it was very easy to see that as an argument that you should be free from your Lord if you were serfs.
Luther rightly could say he didn't teach that. But history showed that he could be read and understood that way, and he was. Luther rounded on the rebels with some of his most vicious prose.
As to the common people, one has to be hard with them and see that under the threat of the sword, they comply with the law, just as you chain up wild beasts. The Princes of Germany matched Luther's words with deeds. They slaughtered more than 100,000 of the rebels.
Luther's prose is so extreme, smite, stab, slay, the person who kills a peasant in revolt is the right person to do the deed. He's so extreme that even the elites who are doing the smiting and the stabbing and the slaying are shocked. In Luther's medieval mind, the peasants were as much agents of the devil as the Pope.
When he dealt with the peasants, he identified them as part of the satanic division. They were not merely human beings. They were minions of Satan. They were doing demonic work. And as such, he as a representative of the Church of Christ had to attack them with all the vigor at his command.
Luther would always hold to this vision of apocalyptic, biblical conflict, lashing out at anyone who threatened his idea of the road to salvation. After the peasants, one of his most infamous targets would be Judaism. Be on your guard against the Jews, knowing that wherever they have their synagogues, nothing is found but a den of devils in which sheer self-glory, conceit, lies, blasphemy, and defaming of God are practiced.
You never get half pints, you always get caught jugs with Luther. You know, when he's warm, he is wonderfully warm. When he's hateful, he is very hateful indeed.
The torrent of reform that Luther had unleashed remained unstoppable. This movement, known as Protestantism, swept across Germany and then on to France, the Netherlands, Belgium. But in every place, it took a different form.
In Geneva, John Calvin founded a community where everyone had to live by rules based on the strictest of religious ideals. Citizens would be fined even for missing a sermon. In England, it would take a bloody civil war before Cromwell could establish his vision of a Protestant state. And then, in the newly discovered territories of America, the Pilgrim Fathers would found a nation on Luther's principles of religious freedom. Luther's ideas in the specific historic moment when they emerged in the reception they received meant an extraordinary change for the conception of what Europe is.
It's no longer one Christian Europe. Moreover, it becomes a global story. It becomes a story that affects Asia and later Africa and the Americas and so on. It's absolutely part of the heritage of the European, Western, I would say, of the whole world. But Luther would never again leave his own province of Germany.
He did find some peace. He married an ex-nun named Catherine, and they had a large family together. And always, Luther continued to write. Luther's story just reminds us of the power of individual charisma.
Charisma, both the person standing up and talking, but even charisma that can travel on the page, on the written page. You never can sort of just like the guy. Luther is this elementary force, embodied in language, offering a vision of salvation which is liberating, which resonates, which seems real to so many people. And almost once you see it that way, you can't see the world differently.
Luther is irrepressible. He's outrageous. He's witty.
He's very funny. But he remains in our imaginations as someone who is highly relevant for insisting on being devoted to principle and to speaking out. The emphasis on the individual, the courage of the individual, and the willingness of the individual to undergo death for his profession, for his beliefs.
And in this way, Luther has to be ranked with the great emancipators of human history. Luther would finally die in the year 1546, seized by a crippling heart attack, after a harsh winter journey to the town of his birth, Eisleben. He had held on to his sense of rage, and his ear for a good phrase, until the very end.
When I die, I want to be a ghost. So I can continue to pester the bishops, priests, and godless monks until they have more trouble with a dead Luther than they could have had before with a thousand living ones. BELL RINGS