How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

by Alan Jacobs

Thomas More’s attacks on Martin Luther and his followers, and Luther’s attacks on Catholicism (and especially the papacy), make most of today’s online insult fests seem tame. More wrote to Luther about “your shitty mouth, truly the shit-pool of all shit, all the muck and shit which your damnable rottenness has vomited up,” and said of Luther’s followers that they “bespatter the most holy image of Christ crucified with the most foul excrement of their bodies”—bodies “destined to be burned.” Luther, for his part, referred to the “dear little ass-pope” who licks the Devil’s anus, and said of all the popes, “You are desperate, thorough arch-rascals, murderers, traitors, liars, the very scum of all the most evil people on earth. You are full of all the worst devils in hell—full, full, and so full that you can do nothing but vomit, throw, and blow out devils!”