It was the year 1517, and a Roman Catholic theologian named Martin Luther was experiencing a crisis of faith. Luther had grown up within the Roman Catholic church of the 15th century, and he experienced many of the growing tensions that characterized late Medieval Roman Catholicism. He was very much a child of his age. He was a priest, a monk, and a theologian. And he saw around him a great sense of discomfort about the character of Christianity in Western Christendom. In the new Christendom that had emerged out of the Great Schism of 1054 and had redefined itself around Roman Catholicism and many of the features of that faith.

Martin Luther was one of many in that church by the late 1400’s and early 1500’s, that felt an acute need for what was called in Latin Reformatio, or in English, Reformation. The word was increasingly used by members of the Roman Catholic West, and it had a long heritage within traditional Christianity itself. After all, the Gospel spoke about transformation, about the need for change within the lives of every believer. And as I noted within the very first reflection of this podcast, traditional Christian cosmology possessed within it what I called a “transformational imperative”, taken from the Gospel¹. And that transformational imperative urged members of the church always to seek the Kingdom of Heaven that is not of this world, that is beyond this world, in Paradise. However, there were two broad tendencies in the East and the West of Christendom in the earliest centuries that began to distinguish themselves in applying this transformational imperative.

One of those tendencies in the east was that articulated by Eusebius, who in the early 4th century welcomed the conversion of Emperor Constantine and celebrated the triumph of Christianity within the now Christian state of the Roman Empire, later to be known as the Byzantine empire². Within the west a more pessimistic, a less triumphalist, approach to the cosmology of the church began to appear in the writings of St Augustine.

Augustine, a century after Eusebius, experienced something less optimistic than the east. Living in the west, he was subject to the spectacle of the collapse of the Roman Empire there. And in fact, in 410 the city of Rome had been sacked itself. And Augustine, writing The City of God, his greatest theological masterpiece, reflected in a much more reserved way about the character of the church and her place in the world, the cosmos ³. And therefore his work was in many ways a statement of traditional Christian cosmology in its Western form.

For Augustine, the church was always pure and perfected, however, she experienced many trials and difficulties within the world, and that she always would. Whereas Eusebius, grateful, and even joyful, that the Roman state recently persecuting Christians for centuries had through Constantine in the early 4th century converted to Christianity. Whereas Eusebius in the east had seen the triumph of Christianity and had been inclined to regard the Christian state as the fulfillment of the cosmology of the Gospel to see the whole World transformed by Christianity, Augustine writing in the west a century later had a more pessimistic view. His view was that which later would be inherited by many in the Roman Catholic west and developed there. People such as Martin Luther.

Before going any further with this, let me quote a biography of Martin Luther by Heiko Oberman, which talks about the Augustinian legacy about The City of God and its view of the need for continual “reformation” of the church in the west. And Oberman writes:

As has so often been the case in the history of the Western Church, it was the work of Augustine that proved to be of decisive help in this age of growing tension about reformation. This time, his most mature work, The City of God was what helped people like Luther deal with the question of reformation.

Oberman continues:

Augustine’s only uncertainty concerned the exact nature of the final battle between Satan and God. Would the anti-christ emerge from within the church, or would he found an anti-church? There was however no doubt that the City of God would be shaken to its very foundation. This is St. Augustine’s Christian utopia.

Those are the words of Oberman, trying to characterize the very uncertain and restless character of the late middle ages in the new Christendom of the Roman Catholic west, a new Christendom which I have discussed in an earlier reflection within this podcast.⁴

Here I would like to remind the reader that within that new Christendom almost from the beginning (in fact it played a very important role in leading to the Great Schism of 1054) there was a great role played by the papacy and especially by papal supremacy. The papacy had been seen in the 10th and 11th centuries as an agent for reform and improvement and correction. And the papacy played a very important and beneficial role in raising the spiritual standards of a western Christendom which had been devastated by Viking invasions and various other calamities over the course of a couple centuries. However, by the middle of the 11th century, the papacy was so committed and so self-confident about its role in this reformation, that it even challenged the ancient status of the eastern Christians in relationship to western Christianity and ultimately issued a direct challenge to the Patriarch of Constantinople in what became a Bull of Excommunication delivered by Cardinal Humbert in 1054.

The 11th century papal reformation was not the only reformation that had occurred in the west since the Great Schism, but there was also now an important movement among the monastics of the west, something I also discussed in my reflection in this podcast about the new Christendom.⁵ The Mendicant monks, the Franciscans and Dominicans, were very much now involved in trying to improve and correct, often in the case of the Dominicans to eradicate heresy, within Western Christendom. And unlike early Christian monks, they left the monasteries and circulated within society and engaged society, bringing as they believed to society a higher level, a more spiritual standard of Christianity to society. The Mendicants of course also were known for their involvement in the Crusades where they actually formed orders that fought in battles. They were military orders. Again, I talked about this in an earlier reflection called The New Christendom. But even more recently theologians, the product of the sophisticated and brilliant school system of universities dating from the 11th century and expanding within the high medieval Latin west, the theologians more and more began to appear as agents of reform by the time of Martin Luther.

And many theologians began to assume the mantle of prophets within western Christendom, calling that civilization to account according their understanding, often gained through theological study, of true and correct Christianity. An important example of such a theologian was Jan Hus, who a century before Luther, challenged the Roman Catholic Church with a program or vision of Reformation (Latin, reformatio). Martin Luther had a place then within a long tradition of reformation. A tradition that goes all the way back to the 1st century principal of transformation found as an imperative within the Gospel, but which had had a rather different application east and west in the centuries that had followed. And in the west, one that was far more suspicious of the existing order of Christendom than in the east, first in Byzantium and then later in Russia, even as late as the Third Rome, by which Russia was known, which I discussed in yet another reflection preceding this one.⁶

So, what was Luther’s situation? What was it like for him to grow up in the Roman Catholic west, and to reach a point where he became the founder or father of Protestant Christianity there? Well, we can talk about the making of a Protestant in the life of Martin Luther. His early life as a Roman Catholic was in some ways very typical but in other ways quite extraordinary because of his great intellect (he was brilliant), his great passion for reform and church leadership, and his very unique personality characteristics. He was a university student at Erfurt, where he came under the influence of Nominalism, which was a late form of scholasticism, something which I’ve discussed already in this podcast. He studied Occam, the premier Nominalist of the late middle ages.

As a very faithful Roman Catholic, when he found himself in a terrifying thunderstorm, in the year 1505, he experienced a sense of imminent death and punishment that would come about because he was unprepared to die. He made a strong oath that he would become a monk through the intercessions of St Anne. he was delivered from the violence of this thunderstorm. He did indeed become a monk. He was true to his word, always a man of very strong principal, and he became a monk within the order of Augustinians. Seeing as their founder St Augustine himself. St Augustine became a very important kind of force or influence within the intellectual development of Martin Luther, who often found himself brooding over his sins. And his sense of imperfection and his sense of unworthiness, rather perhaps like Augustine himself, who described his own unworthiness for salvation in his Confessions, so many centuries earlier.⁷

An interesting event in Martin Luther’s early life as a Roman Catholic was his first mass after he was ordained a priest. He was set to celebrate his first mass, the eucharistic assembly, and had nearly what could be described as a nervous breakdown during it. This happened in the year 1507 and is often commented on in biographies of Martin Luther. I can give an account of Luther’s own way of describing what happened to him. We can see a man who is very intense and very inclined toward a sense of unworthiness, a sense of wretchedness in his sins. Now ordained a priest, it was his time to stand and preside at the altar, but he felt so unworthy of this that he nearly had a nervous breakdown, and had to be assisted by the other clergy on hand. This is what he said in his own account later after the initial invocation. He wrote:

At these words I was utterly stupefied and terror-stricken. I thought to myself, “With what tongue shall I address such majesty as God, seeing that all men ought to tremble in the presence of even an earthly prince? Who am I that I should lift up mine eyes or raise my hands to the divine majesty? The angels surround Him. At His nod the earth trembles. And shall I, a miserable little pygmy, say ‘I want this. I ask for that’? For I am dust and ashes, and full of sin, and I am speaking to the living and eternal, and the True God.”

So, this was his experience at the first mass, which led him almost to collapse on the spot, unable to go forward with it.

A little bit later in his life, several years passed, he decides to make a pilgrimage to the center of the Roman Catholic church: Rome itself. Pilgrimages to Rome were the ultimate pilgrimage to make within the Roman Catholic west, whose ecclesiology, as I recounted in The New Christendom reflection I’ve referred to, was now centered upon the papacy. As a matter of fact, we can now speak of a “Papal Ecclesiology” of the Roman Catholic church of this new Christendom. And so, Luther goes to Rome. But what he finds there is not the highest example of priestly faith and ascetical purity, but rather a Renaissance prince. The popes of the 1400’s and early 1500’s were known as worldly rulers, interested in building palaces, holding tremendous feasts, and celebrating worldly things. They would go on hunting parties together with their assistants. And Luther is exposed to this image of the papacy, I’ll say more about it later, and he’s disgusted and scandalized by it, and returns to his native Germany, doubting seriously that the papacy is the most exalted office within the Roman Catholic church. He went on to earn a doctorate in theology in 1512 and he was assigned as professor at a newly established university in the German town of Wittenberg, which was within the kingdom of Saxony. And there he becomes a professor of scripture, and he turns to certain books of scripture to help him understand his deep sense of unworthiness and worthlessness before the majesty of God.

He turns especially to the epistles of Paul to the Galatians and to the Romans. And as he does so he brings his very deep and long-term penitential agony into that study. Luther his whole life had recurring battles with depression. He was frequently overcome with depression throughout his life. In fact, during these depressions he would sometimes try to alleviate them either by speaking to God or sometimes actually to the devil. And his notebooks are full of references to how he would have conversations with the devil in an effort to battle against the depression that he felt within himself. With God he often found himself confronting a God of wrath, a God of divine punishment that threatened Luther and every other human being, even within the church. This was a time in the history of Christendom in the west when images of death and eternal punishment were rampant.

The woodcut was a newly introduced technology that enabled books to be published, and books of course now with the Guttenberg press are being published in the west. Woodcuts allowed for the dissemination of images in a way that icons and stained-glass windows never had before in the history of Christendom. And many of the woodcuts we have from this period feature images of death and judgement and divine punishment in hell. And Luther was dealing with these kinds of questions of being threatened by a God of punishment. So intense was his reaction to this that he even came in some cases to feel anger at God, wrath at God Himself; even as he put it “hatred” of God. This is one reflection that he made about his experience during this time.

Is it not against all natural reason that God out of His mere whim deserts man, hardens them, damns them, as if He delighted in sins and in such torments of the wretched for eternity, He who is said to be of such mercy, goodness? This appears iniquitous, cruel and intolerable in God, by which very many have been offended in all ages. And who would not be? I was myself more than once driven to the very abyss of despair so that I wished I had never been created. Love God? I hated Him.

That’s how Luther put his own agony as a sinner in the face of a wrathful and judging, punishing God.

But it was out of the crucible of this despair, this agony of unworthiness, that Luther finally came to what could be called the Reformation breakthrough: the justification by faith alone (Latin, sola fide). “Faith alone” became the catchword of the Protestant Reformation, the core doctrine among many other doctrines, that man is not justified by works, but is justified by faith alone. Of course he gained this with his encounter with Paul’s epistles, not that Paul ever used the expression “faith alone”. Paul did speak in Galatians and Romans about man being “justified by faith”, it was Luther who added “faith alone”, and one can observe that it was rather a contradiction for the professor of the Bible and the one who celebrated the authority of scripture above all authorities to advance a principal or doctrine like sola fide when that phrase is actually never used in the Bible. But so it was, and this is what he said about his gradual discovery of this new approach to the question of penance, to the question of his agony in the face of a punishing God, this is what he wrote:

I greatly longed to understand Paul’s epistle to the Romans, and nothing stood in the way but that one expression “the justice of God”. Because I took it to mean that justice whereby God is just and deals justly in punishing the unjust. My situation was that although an impeccable monk, I stood before God as a sinner, troubled in conscience, and I had no confidence that my merit would assuage Him. Therefore, I did not love a just and angry God, but rather hated and murmured against Him. Yet I clung to the dear Paul and had a great yearning to know what he meant. Night and day, I pondered until I saw the connection between the justice of God and the statement that “the just shall live by his faith”. Then I grasped that the justice of God is that righteousness by which through grace and shear mercy, God justifies us through faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise.

That is Luther’s account of his reformation breakthrough with his engagement with the epistle of Paul to the Romans and the role of faith within it.

Now the problem was that Luther lived within a faith tradition, Roman Catholicism, in which works, known as “good works”, were very important in the understanding of salvation. Traditional Christianity, which Roman Catholic participated largely in, had a couple of books within the Bible itself that emphasized the importance of works. James was known in his epistle to say that “faith without works is dead”, and the book of Revelation stated that “at the end they shall be judged according to their works”. Roman Catholicism had always emphasized the importance of good works, as had Orthodoxy (traditional Christianity generally did), but within Roman Catholicism a new approach to good works and penance had emerged, at least since the Great Schism, in this new Christendom. And in a certain sense, the birth of Protestantism, if it grew out of Luther’s reformation breakthrough that I just recounted, can be seen as a kind of distorted recovery of traditional Christian repentance.

Repentance as a word in Greek, metanoia, means a “change of heart”, as any good Orthodox Christian knows. Repentance is not necessarily punishment, it’s certainly not self-loathing and hatred. It’s basically a change of heart. Perhaps the greatest image of it is the prodigal son having a change of heart in the pig-pen, and returning to his father’s house and being welcomed into the banquet that awaits him there through his repentance. This of course is a theme within the Orthodox tradition preparing for us for Great Lent, which we are now reaching the end of. Mary of Egypt would be another example of repentance. Those of us who attended services last weekend heard the Great Canon of Andrew read, also heard the Life of Mary of Egypt, where she died at the end of her life facing East, facing paradise, awaiting that eternal communion with Christ. So, it was always the joy of communing with God that was at the core of repentance. And a change of heart meant a change from the broken ways of this world (Gr, cosmos), to the kingdom of Heaven, or Paradise. Repentance in its authentic form always possessed within it a strong experience of Paradise. John of the Ladder, commemorated a couple of weeks ago in our Orthodox trad, called repentance “joymaking mourning”, “joymaking contrition”. But in the new Christendom of the middle ages in the west, repentance comes to be understood more and more (not exclusively, it continued to contain many of these tradition elements within it), but it began to exhibit a growing sense of legalism.

That repentance was really about confessing in a formal way to a priest one’s sins, every single one of them, and then undergoing some form of punishment for those sins. Either through penance, which they could undertake in the form of pilgrimages is this life, or prayers or if necessary, to await punishment beyond this life in purgatory, which now had also become a key doctrine within the Roman Catholic west. Purgatory whereby punishment would continue until one was completely free of the need to be punished. These developments had reshaped the tradition of penance, or repentance, in the west before Luther’s time.

And so, by the time he came to his reformation breakthrough, he was himself in a very great state of fear in making his own confessions that he might overlook something in that legalistic approach to penance. I can quote here again a statement made by one of Luther’s biographers who is trying to characterize how Luther dealt with all of this, and this is what he said:

Luther had arrived at a valid impasse. Sins to be forgiven must be confessed. To be confessed they must be recognized and remembered. If they cannot be recognized and remembered, they cannot be confessed. If they are not confessed, they cannot be forgiven. The only way out is to deny the premise.

And so, Luther was in quite a state by the point he had reached his reformation breakthrough about justification by faith. And his resolution to that problem was what brought about the Protestant Reformation. It all occurred in the year 1517.

The previous year, 1516, had seen Luther begin to apply his new understanding of salvation, of justification, of forgiveness through penance, to the practice of indulgences, which by now in the Roman Catholic church went with the doctrine of purgatory. Indulgences relieved one of time spent in purgatory whereby they would be punished. And by many accounts the punishment of purgatory was just as great the punishment of hell itself. It was an agony. The only difference was those in purgatory did not suffer despair. They knew they were on their way to heaven. But it was an interminable agony that every pious Christian sought to avoid. And now indulgences had begun to become widespread. They had originated with Pope Urban II during the first crusade, but now they were so widespread that Luther had in 1516 issued a few sermons in Wittenberg against them. But he held back until, in the following year, a more publicly sold indulgence became a scandal to him.

What happened was, the papacy decided to rebuild St Peter’s basilica in Rome. The famous church established by Constantine was to be totally rebuilt according to the new style of architecture of the Italian Renaissance.  The popes wanted to use St Peter’s basilica now as a monument to their authority and place within the life of the church. So vast amounts of marble were to be shipped in, and Michelangelo himself was ultimately called on to design the central dome of the new church. This grandiose project required a huge amount of money to finance. And what is more, the pope of the time allowed a German prince named Albert Habsburg to convince him that selling an indulgence would be an excellent opportunity not only to raise money for the reconstruction project, but also to help Albert himself buy an Archbishopric in Germany itself in the town of Mainz. And so, in collusion with this powerful Habsburg Prince Albert, who was seeking to buy church office, which is of course extremely dubious to begin with, the pope, who himself came from the Medici family, Pope Leo X, decided to issue an indulgence.

And so it unfolded that an indulgence would be sold in Germany. And I can quote here a very lively, interesting, and almost amusing account of how it all unfolded. And here I’m quoting the biography of Luther by Roland Bainton, a very old biography published in 1950 actually, but still a classic account of Martin Luther and the early Protestant Reformation. So, this is what Roland Bainton writes in his biography of Martin Luther (the biography, by the way is called Here I Stand):

Albert was confident that money would speak because the pope needed it so badly. The Pontiff at the moment was Leo X, of the house of Medici, as elegant and as indolent as a Persian cat. (a really brilliant way of writing Bainton has here, author). His chief preeminence lay in his ability to squander the resources of the Holy See on carnivals, war, gambling, and the chase. The duties of his holy office were seldom suffered to interfere with sport. He wore long hunting boots, which impeded the kissing of his toe. The resources of the three papacies were dissipated by his profligacy; the goods of his predecessors himself, and his successor. Leo at the moment was particularly in need of funds to complete a project commenced by his predecessor: the building of the new St Peter’s. The old wooden basilica, constructed in the age of Constantine, had been condemned, and the titanic Pope Julius II had overawed the consistory into approving the grandiose scheme of throwing a dome as large as the Pantheon over the remains of the Apostles Peter and Paul. The piers were laid; Julius died; the work lagged; weeds sprouted from the pillars; Leo took over; he needed money.⁸

And so, he went forward with the plan to sell an indulgence to help rebuild St Peter’s basilica, claiming that this would be a good work on the part of pious Christians in Germany, and elsewhere in western Christendom, to contribute to the building of this important church.

They recruited a local Dominican Mendicant monk named Tetzel, who became a vendor of the indulgence. Tetzel was no small businessman. He was really very effective at bringing the money in. As a matter of fact, as a salesman he even was effective in advertising and promoting the sale of these indulgences, the purchase of them. He actually coined a little rhyme to try to win people over, kind of the way in the modern world we have television advertisements that often use rhymes and melodies and poetry to try and bring people in. This was Tetzel’s, referring to the collection box where the money would be collected for the indulgences:

As soon as your coin into the collection box rings, a soul from purgatory springs.

The original German actually sounds almost exactly like that, it rhymes too. So, this is a particularly vulgar, perhaps, example of the sale indulgences.

And I want to say right now, this is not in any way normative Roman Catholicism, even at that difficult, crisis-filled age. And certainly, since these events happened, the practice of indulgences have been very much reformed and clarified and so forth within the Roman Catholic church. So, I don’t mean here to make it sound like a parody of Roman Catholic Christian practice. What I’m saying here, I think most Roman Catholic, historians for instance, are of one mind that this really was a difficult time, a scandalous time within the Roman Catholic church. Quite unusually so.

But this is what is happening, and Luther you can only imagine his indignation in hearing about this from credulous parishioners who come to him saying they just bought an indulgence from Tetzel, from this vendor of indulgences. So he decided, Martin Luther did in 1517, on the Eve of All Saints Day, (which would be October 31st) to issue a protest against the sale of indulgences in the form of 95 arguments (95 theses), nailing them dramatically and publicly to the door of the castle church in central Wittenberg for all of the pilgrims to see when they arrived the following day, on All Saints Day in the Latin calendar, to celebrate that feast at the church, and also to have access to a collection of relics that were kept by the elector, or King, of Saxony at that time, Frederick the Wise. So Martin Luther dramatically nails his 95 these to the church door of Wittenberg on October 31st, 1517. And that event of course marks the beginning of the Protestant Reformation.

In future episodes within this reflection I will talk about the events that led to this dramatic outcome. I will talk much more about the crisis of late medieval Roman Catholic leading up to the Protestant Reformation, but here let me just close by observing that what was going to happen here, growing out of this reform of penance, which was a large feature of Martin Luther’s protest against indulgences, what we can start to perceive here is a desacramentalization, to use a fancy word, of Paradise. The central theme of the first half of this podcast being: the experience in this life of the kingdom of heaven that is beyond this life, beyond this world, what I’m calling paradise. Which was kept alive so well in the early church and continued, in my understanding of things, very much in the Orthodox east, but had begun to be weakened in the Roman Catholic west after the Great Schism. And this reflection is a contribution to that argument and approach, to try to understand why not only the Protestant Reformation happened, but the Renaissance, and many other secularizing tendencies of modern Christendom. But that’s the 2nd half of my podcast.

Here we end the historical anecdote of episode 1 of this reflection, reflection 19. I note that there is a tendency, growing out of Martin Luther’s protest, to take away the sacramental character of paradise because of the way in which repentance was now understood. Martin Luther had rediscovered repentance, and opposed it to the legalistic application of indulgences of his time. However, he distorted repentance in the process. It’s interesting that Thesis 1 of the famous 95 Theses, reads,

When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said “Repent!”, he called for the entire life of believers to be one of penance.

Well, here Martin Luther is talking about the entire life of believers rather than a formalistic, perhaps legalistic, approach to managing their afterlife in purgatory. Something that everyone would agree, including Roman Catholics would agree is a very healthy thing to do.

But his approach to this centers upon Matthew 4:17, when Jesus, having been tempted, launches his ministry by saying, “Repent! For the Kingdom of Heaven has drawn near”. Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven, or Paradise, has entered into this world, drawn near to it, and spiritually transformed it. That is the life of the Christian within the church. But here Martin Luther ignores the Kingdom of Heaven part, the Paradise part, and only focuses upon the repentance part, and for him, the life of repentance is not one of spiritual transformation, or the experience of Paradise, but one of, as he puts it, “penance” of undergoing satisfaction for the sins one has committed. That at least is the content of Thesis 1, whatever Martin Luther would have said later in his theological writings. And I can end this by quoting another biographer of Luther, Heiko Oberman, the way put all of this was that:

Luther horizontalized Christian ethics. He transferred its goal from Heaven to Earth.

Join me next time when I begin to explore the character of Roman Catholic Christendom in this age of crisis, the medieval crisis of Western Christendom.

¹Strickland, Fr. John, Paradise and Utopia, First Reflection, www.ancientfaith.com

²Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History

³Augustine, City of God

⁴Oberman, Heiko, Luther: Man Between God and the Devil, translated by Eileen Walliser-Schwartzbart. London: Harper Collins. 1993

⁵Strickland, Fr. John, Paradise and Utopia, The New Christendom, www.ancientfaith.com

⁶Strickland, Fr. John, Paradise and Utopia, The Third Rome, www.ancientfaith.com

⁷Augustine, Confessions

⁸Bainton, Roland Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther. Nashville: Abrington. September 1991