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lived in the former Augustinian
Another reformer before Luther was the Bohemian Jan Hus, who was born in 1369 and became a theologian at Prague University.
During Luther’s years as a teenage student at Eisenach, the pope in Rome was Alexander VI, perhaps the most depraved of all the many depraved pontiffs
In his years as a cardinal, the virile pope-to-be fathered seven children, all of whom were understandably considered illegitimate.
his mistress one Giulia Farnese, forty-three years his junior, who already at the age of sixteen
Scholasticism. Its principal figures were Duns Scotus, William of Ockham—of eponymous “razor” fame—and Thomas Aquinas. Today most regard Scholasticism as a fussy, over-formalized way of instruction that was fatally removed from practical life issues. The idea of ivory-tower academics wrangling and perspiring over outré philosophical riddles—as the marauding Turks lay siege to Constantinople and Christendom—is memorably summed up in the classic question “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”
it was the 1453 fall of Constantinople to the Muslim aggressors that spawned what came to be the definitive response to Scholasticism. Innumerable Byzantine Greek scholars fled the region to settle in Europe, and as a result Greek and Latin studies enjoyed a great revival, leading to what we now call Renaissance Humanism, whose great cry was ad fontes! Back to the sources!
Erasmus of Rotterdam would play the central role in restoring the New Testament to its original Greek,
Most notable among those eager to delve into these long hidden depths was Luther himself, who would use Erasmus’s own restored Greek New Testament when he translated the New Testament into German many years later.
academic distinction in one of the finest universities in the world.
twenty-one-year-old
“I will become a monk!” He
Precisely why he chose the Augustinian order, and not the Dominicans or the Franciscans or the Benedictines, we do not know.
he would have let him stay in the monastery’s guesthouse, which still stands in Erfurt today.*
Luther would in time follow in the footsteps of this famous martyr, advocating for almost precisely the same things that Hus did, so his prostration for holy orders only a few feet away from the hallowed bones of the man who had kindled the fire to burn Hus was a strange beginning to his life as a monk.
the great seven storey mountain
With them, he was awakened by a bell at 2:00 a.m., making the sign of the cross and then quickly putting on his white robe and scapular* before hustling out of his cell to the chapel, where he prayed at the high altar and took his place in the choir stalls to sing and pray Matins, the first of the seven “hours” prayed in monasteries throughout the world.
Salve Regina (Latin for “Save us, O Queen”)
Part of the difficulty that Luther would find as he trod this well-worn path was that God the Father and Jesus the Son were both principally thought of as fierce judges. So the role of comforter fell to Mary, the human one who understood us and our trials, the soft mother full of grace who could protect her beloved child from harsh and unyielding men.
she could appeal to her harsh and perhaps indifferent son as only a dear mother could.
the Bible per se was simply unheard of in his early years as a monk.
there were no Bibles in pews and average laymen had almost no idea whatever of what it contained, nor even that it was a book.
They heard bits and pieces of it read aloud in Latin during the masses they attended, but the idea that there was a book containing all of these things was foreign to them, even in the decades after Gutenberg published his celebrated first Bibles. This did not mean that monks were unacquainted with much of what the Bible taught and said, but even for them biblical material was filtered by and parsed via the institution of the church, so o...
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Strangely enough, once a novice actually became a monk, he was no longer allowed to keep his Bible.
Surely a sixteen-hundred-mile round-trip journey on foot to Rome and back would be helpful in distracting young Martin from his excruciating confessional navel-gazing. Luther’s journey to Rome commenced in November 1510.
the monumental Ulm Minster, whose 530-foot steeple made it the tallest church in the world. Five hundred years later, it still holds the title. The interior of the church is 400 feet long and 160 feet wide, and the central nave soars to a height of 136 feet, making it something incomprehensibly vast for that time.
able to accommodate twenty thousand people.
Luther felt that the impressiveness of the structure sacrificed the spiritual lives of the people who would come there.
From Milan they continued to Bologna, home to the world’s oldest university, founded more than four centuries earlier, in 1088, and there in this extremely cold December they encountered what one rarely finds in that venerable city: snow.
It has been said that Luther went right through Italy in the middle of the Renaissance but somehow missed it.
Nathin, in particular, became his lifelong enemy
A number of the German cities—the so-called imperial free cities—were so powerful that they were able to flout the authority of any nearby prince and be truly independent. Among these were Augsburg, Nuremberg, Hamburg, Cologne, Strasbourg, and Basel.
The church’s tower rose nearly three hundred feet and can still be seen for many miles.
Staupitz had come from an upper-class family as well, as one may surmise from the “von” in his name.
The relic bug first bit Frederick in 1493, when he made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and there found himself mesmerized by all manner of ancient and pious objects.
It was because Frederick would spare no expense in his rivalry with his uncle Albert the Brave—and then, on his uncle’s death in 1500, with his first cousin Duke George the Bearded, who would become a dedicated foe of Luther’s—that he sought to decorate Wittenberg in the spectacular style befitting the capital city of an electoral territory.
the later shockingly vulgar woodcuts featuring demons and defecating popes and cardinals, which were of course created in concert with his future literary collaborator Martin Luther.
which he also remodeled extensively. By the time the mansion was finished in 1518, it boasted a staggering eighty-four rooms—all with heating capacity, which was itself remarkable
Reuchlin was a brilliant and feted Humanist scholar of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin whose famous grandnephew Melanchthon will leap into our story shortly. In 1478, Reuchlin produced a Latin dictionary, but it was his affinity with and devotion to Hebrew texts that drew him into a great controversy that finally led to his appearance before the Inquisition at Rome.
Kabbalah, which promoted not a typically biblical view of the Old Testament but a kind of Jewish mysticism bordering on the occultic practices forbidden by the God of the Old Testament.
the paper they purchased meant nothing if they were not genuinely contrite for any sins they had committed. And if they were genuinely contrite, the paper still meant nothing, because God forgave their sins anyway.
As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, The soul from purgatory springs.*
Staupitz spoke against indulgences in a sermon series that he preached at Nuremberg in 1516. And these sermons were published early in 1517 in both Latin and German.
A contemporary of Luther’s named Myconius recounted the following hilarious incident regarding Tetzel: After Tetzel had received a substantial amount of money at Leipzig, a nobleman asked him if it were possible to receive a letter of indulgence for a future sin. Tetzel quickly answered in the affirmative, insisting, however, that the payment had to be made at once. This the nobleman did, receiving thereupon letter and seal from Tetzel. When Tetzel left Leipzig the nobleman attacked him along the way, gave him a thorough beating, and sent him back empty-handed
handed to Leipzig with the comment that this was the future sin which he had in mind. Duke George at first was quite furious about this incident, but when he heard the whole story he let it go without punishing the nobleman.
THE DATE ALWAYS given as the beginning of the Reformation is October 31, 1517,
because the Castle Church was very much at the center of life in the community of Wittenberg, the huge wooden doors through which everyone entered the church were the best place to post anything of any community interest, making them the all-purpose bulletin board for the small city. Innumerable other things were posted there of which history has taken no notice, but once we realize that Luther’s theses were posted in that context, we see their posting in a very different light. They were simply put on the bulletin board of that day, as anything posted must be.
He felt that he was doing something good, something that the pope and others would surely recognize as such.
on the day he posted his letter and on the day he posted his theses, he had no idea what dark forces he would rouse from their slumbers.
This dirty secret was about as dirty as the business of indulgences could get. It therefore seems fitting that this particular excess would be the last straw that broke the back of medieval Christendom. That the humble faithful would hurl their coins into an iron coffer believing they really would pay for their sins—and simultaneously build St. Peter’s—was bad enough. But that half of what they paid was actually going to pay an exorbitant debt so that a papal rule might be ignored—and the ambitious archbishop could collect a second impressive bishopric—took the cake. And ate it too.
