Ep 18: Growing to 800k IG Followers, Algorithm Updates, & Going Live with Caroline Flett

Very naturally, he, Martin Luther, is a controversial figure. The multitudinous portrayals followed a certain broad types already delineated in his own generation. His followers held him as the prophet of the Lord and the deliverer of Germany. His opponents on the Catholic side called him the son of perdition, and the demolisher of Christendom. The agrarian agitators branded him as the sickle fan of the princes, and their radical sectarians compared him to Moses, who left the children of Israel out of Egypt and left him to perish in the wilderness. But such judgments belong to an epilogue, rather than a prologue. The first endeavour must be to understand the man. Now one will not move far in this direction unless one recognizes at the outset that Luther was above all else a man of religion. The great outward crises of his life which bedazzled the eyes of dramatic biographers were to look at himself trivial in comparison with the inner upheavals of his questing after God. Now these are the opening words of Ronald H. Bainton's "Here I stand a life of Martin Luther, and who am I to disregard the advice of one of the most revered biographers of the great reformer?" And with that, hello and welcome to the history of the Germans, Episode 240, Martin Luther's unfechdomen. Now this episode will look at the first 35 years of Martin Luther's life, from his birth in 1483 to a moment while somewhere between 1512 and 1519, when he achieved his great theological breakthrough. So this is a crucial period in the history of the Reformation, a time in Luther's struggle with what he called his unfechdomen. The unfechdomen is one of these untranslatable German words like "sharden Freude" and "Gemütlichkeit". It is something more than a trial or tribulation. More often existential assault on faith itself, and overwhelming, often visceral, experience of doubt, terror, despair before God, in which a synophias utterly exposed to divine judgment and abandoned by grace. That sounds quite painful. Now it was these unfechdomen that brought about the cornerstone of his creed that salvation is to be obtained through faith alone. It is the story how Protestantism is born in the head of just one man. And this story is usually told around three, sometimes four pivotal events. A thunderstorm in 1505 that frightened young Luther so much, he vowed to join a monastery. Then the day in 1507, when he celebrated his first mass and the subsequent challenge to his choices by his father. Then his visit to Renaissance Rome in 1510 or 1511, and finally the Tower Experience, where Luther is supposed to have had his intellectual breakthrough whilst sitting on the loo. We know about all these events, not from a diary or contemporaneous letters, but from documents drawn up much, much later. One main source, are the so-called table-talks. These were records of what Martin Luther said at casual dinners in his home in Wittenberg in the 1530s and 1540s, and these records were taken down by his student lodgers. The other key sources, his brief autobiography, that he published as a foreword to an edition of his complete works in 1545, so that was very much towards the end of his life. I guess you can see where I'm heading with this. We have a historical figure that is still today, extraordinarily controversial. We have a time period that sits at the heart of a seismic shift in the religious, cultural and political landscape of Europe and arguably of the world. And we have primary sources drawn up 30 years later. Those cigars, for guessing what follows. Forests upon forests have been felt to debate the veracity, the sequence and the significance of these events. Your humble podcaster now finds himself in the middle of a paper storm. Please, do not shoot me. As always, I will give you the version of the story that I find most plausible, and that may well be a version that goes against what some of you believe. But given the above, here I stand, and can do no other. If you want to dig deeper into the competing views, I recommend the biographies of Ronald H. Peynton, Lindel Roper, Heinz Schilling and Richard Friedenthal, and of course, Damon McCulloch's Reformation. But before we start, let me thank you all for your feedback on the changes to the show. Seems that you find me just about funny enough, which is in a way reassuring and then also not. The other point you were making was that you do not mind the absurd length creep, but that you are somewhat saddened about the step from weekly to biweekly. They'll take both of these feedback pieces on board. The form was quite easily implemented, and just keep droning on. For us for the letter, I'll see whether there's any way I can return to weekly, though, from where I'm standing now, I can't see how. Talking about promises, I'm so astonished and so flattered that you all stayed all as patrons during this long podcast drought. I had expected some serious attrition, but no, you guys are truly special. If there are still some of you willing to join this group of very special people and get priority booking for the next history of the Germans tour, oh yes. The good ship Iris will be back, provided somebody can refill the rine. So sign our bad history of the Germans.com/support and receive the announcement early and get a better chance to join us. And with that, back to the show. So let me start with a controversial statement. I do not think there's anything particularly unusual about Martin Lotus Life before it turned 21, arguably even before he turned 35. I know this flies in the face of almost any biography of Red after all. He was an earth shattering figure and hence he must have been exceptional right from the beginning. Well, let's have a look. Martin Lotus was born into a family that was on the way up. His father Hans Luder came from a well-to-do peasant family, but due to local law, the non-inherited farm. Instead he was given a cash payout, which together with the dowry and the family connections of his wife Margarita formed the basis of his business success. Hans Luder moved his family to Mansfeld in the hearts mountains, that's in modern-day Saxon unhalled, when Martin was just one year old. Mansfeld was a small town with a rapidly developing copper mining industry, and one of Margarita's inventors was the Berggraf, the administrator of the mining rights in the county of Mansfeld, which must have made it easier for Hans Luder to acquire rights to operate mines and smelters in the county. Mining was, as we have mentioned several times, the leading industrial technology in Europe at the time, and German miners as well as the bankers who funded them were at the forefront of this technology. It had developed a ziger process whereby silver could be separated from the copper ore, dramatically improving the economics of the industry. It was a fiercely competitive industry that had no guilds protecting incumbent operators. And it was an industry where expertise, risk appetite and self-confidence were key success factors. Hans Luder had all of this in abundance, plus a futuristic streak that seemed to run in the family, he once knocked out a man with a beer-stein and his younger brother ended up dead after a brawl in the pub. Martin Luder would later make a big deal of his modest roots, claiming his father went down the mines, and that his mother had to bring the firewood in from the forest on her back. Now, this may have been tales from the early days in Mansfeld when it had been all hands on deck and the money was tied up in the investments. But excavations near the home of Hans Luder had discovered remains of a prosperous household where meat was eaten regularly and resurvenced it most of the domestic chores. At one point, Hans Luder owned several mines and smelters and had become a member of the city council, so it was really no poor peasant or minor after all. Several biographers then elaborate add-lengths on the corporal punishments that young Martin experienced during his youth. The story of him being so afraid of his father he hit in the forest for a day, then an incident where his mother beat him bloody for stealing a nut. Then the ropa in particular makes the case that Hans Luder was an overbearing, sometimes terrifying presence in Luder's early life, which may explain his belief that God himself was an unyielding, terrifying judge of the sinners. We do have a picture of both parents towards the end of their lives, and I must say in particular Hans Luder looks like a man you do not want to get in an argument with, or whether that alone explains what happened to Friar Martin during his life as a monk, he was a bit far-fetched. He should not compare parenting styles in the 16th century with our modern standards, and let us not forget that these standards we have today are very modern. I mean, I had teachers in school who reminisced about the good old days when they could cane students from minor vocabulary infringements. After all, most children were beaten at the time, even beaten as hard as Lutter had been, but only one of them caused the reformation. Given what Lutter achieved in terms of theology, language and music, there is little doubt that he was exceptionally gifted. However, he was only a good student, not an exceptional one. His Latin, which was the main focus of the curriculum, was never more than decent. He went to the local school in Mansfeld until he was 14, then he went to Magdeburg, where he spent a year in the school of the brethren of the common life. It's quite surprising that he barely mentioned this institution. The brethren were a community of laypeople who tried to live in the footsteps of the Apostles, and one of their convictions was that quote, "It is not learned a discourse, but the life of virtue that brings you close to God." And they embraced the idea of "love thy neighbor" and "do not think of yourself as better than others. However, obviously wicked they may seem." Their spiritual preceptor was Thomas at campus, who spoke the imitation of Christ, features in the top ten of the eternal bestseller list. His preferred place was apparently in Huxkins and de Vuxkins, meaning in a nook with the book. That is a man after my heart, though seemingly not one after Martin Lutters. From Magdeburg, he went to Izenach, where he completed his schooling whilst living with relatives of his mother. Izenach lies below the Wartburg, the mighty castle of the land graphs of Thuringia, and the place where he would later spend a few years as Junko Yörk, translating the Bible into German. Now, during these school days in Izenach, he heard rumors of a monk, called Johann Hilton, who had been imprisoned by his own order for predicting the end of all monastic life for the year 1516. That's eerily close to 1517, and something that was later woven into the Protestant narrative. How much of that he actually related to himself at the time is unknown, but my best guess is nothing at all. He entered the University of Airford and Spring 1501. Airford was by far the largest city he had yet lived in, then would ever live in. It was prosperous, for two reasons it lay on the crossroads of the Via Regia from Eastern Europe to Frankfurt, and the road connecting Nürnberg and Northern Europe. It was the major producer of boat, an indigo blue dye much sought after in the textile industry. With about 10,000 citizens, it was five times the size of months failed and its university was one of the oldest in the empire. So over the subsequent four years, Young Martin diligently passed his exams until he got his master of arts in January 1505. Again, he did all right, not exactly the very top of the list. According to his father, Young Martin was now to study law. Law was by then the springboard of ambitious young men. The open positions galore in the emerging administrations of the imperial principalities. Lawyers were sold in the expanding system of law courts, including the two imperial courts. The Reichskammergericht and the Reichshoffrad, we discussed in episode 225. Then even the church stuffed full of lawyers. Arguably at this point, the church was the most advanced bureaucracy in Europe. Many, if not the majority of the popes of that period, had been lawyers, including the friend of the podcast, Silvio Ineas Picolomini, aka Pope Pius II. In other words, having a son moving into the legal profession was a dream come true for an upwardly mobile family like the Looders. Consluder despite his troll-like appearance was a modern man who believed in progress in meritocracy and a world where ambitions could be rewarded with aristocratic titles and permanent social uplift. So in his excitement about his son's achievements, he splashed out on a complete copy of the corpus euro-civilis, including all its commentaries, for his son, a considerable expense. However, Hans Looders dream hit the buffers just six months later. What happened then? Has been recounted a thousand times. No need for me to devise my own version. So he is Roland Bainton telling it, quote, "As he returned to school, after a visit with his parents, suddenly lightning struck him to earth. In that single flash, he saw the dino more of the drama of existence. There was God, the old terrible, Christ, the inexorable, and all the leering fiends, springing from their lurking places in Pontonwood, that with sadonic calculations, they might seize his shock of curly hair and bolt him into hell." So no wonder that he cried out to his father, "Saint, patroness of miners, Saint Anne, help me, I will become a monk," end, quote. That was that. Two weeks later Martin Luther presented himself at the door of the Augustinian monastery in Airford, demanded to be admitted as a novice monk, setting in motion a sequence of events that would end in the collapse of the unity of Christendom. What drama? There's a young student of law, Laddida, walking home, thinking of nothing in particular, and then the heavens opened thunderstruck and bang, the great reformer is born. It does remind one of soul falling from his horse and turning it to Saint Paul. Supposed to properly in 1917, a lady from Airford had a stone erected on that very spot with the inscription, "Hallowed Earth, the watershed of the Reformation." My problem is not so much but the veracity of this event, though there are some who doubt the whole story on the grounds of being just that little bit too neat. Whereas struggle is, whether this was an exceptional event, and whether this was indeed the crucial moment when Luther's life took a new turn. Situations were men and women vowed to become monks or nuns in the middle of existential and sometimes even non-existential fear, but actually commoners muck in the Middle Ages, even as late as the 1500s. As far back as the sixth century when Saint Benedict devised the rule of monasticism, there was already the need for a safeguard against such vows made and haste, and that safeguard still exists today, it's called the novice. So to become a monk, you have to live under the monastic rule for a year and a day before you can be admitted. And in that year, the novice and the monastery can figure out whether there's a real vocation here or just a panicked commitment. Both novice and monastery can end the novice yet at any time and for any reason. Novices who return to secular life are explicitly released from their vows, so experiencing no repercussions neither here nor in the afterlife. So therefore the crucial moment was not the thunderstorm or the moment he requested entrance to the monastery, the crucial moment was when he asked to take his vows of poverty, chastity and obedience a year later. And about that moment we have no information, no primary or secondhand information, nothing. In some scholars of our good that looked at no interest in the law, whether it's in build ambiguity, nor did he have an appetite for the career path, or did he have an interest in money and titles. Hence he saw entering a monastery as a way to get out of a university degree he had been forced into, and it also offered an opportunity to spite his overbearing father to boot. Well, that'd be going quite far for run of the mill father-son conflict. As I have mentioned I think several times before, life under the monastic rule was hard to the point of being unbearable, praying eight times a day, never a full night's sleep, poverty, aka having just one pool he made habit and sleeping in a tiny bare cell. Chastity, total obedience to the abbot, all that is quite rough. Now, on all monastic communities lived like that contemporary literature is full of lazy monks who granted themselves exceptions from prayer, who allowed luxury goods, including great food, come into the monastery. Just take a look around the great Baroque abbies in Austria and Bavaria with their luxurious chapter houses and apartments. But Martin Luther did not choose any one of those. He went hardcore, he joined the observant Augustinians. Now these guys did take their vows seriously, and they did live by their rule. A Luther made his life even harder by even more praying fasting and religious exercises than his colleagues. Nobody can tell me that it was just to annoy his father who, by the way, doesn't strike me quite as awful as that anyway. The other argument is that, indeed, he had been terrified to die right there on that July evening near Statenheim. That confrontation with mortality opened up his lingering fears of the final judgment, a terrifying god and a rainbow pointing towards eternal damnation with his sword. And this argument can be further supported by the death of two law professors and a student friend during the renewed outbreak of the plague in Airford in 1505. And finally, Lutter had recently suffered a self-inflicted injury where he nearly cut an artery with his leg with a sword or dagger. So yes, yes, he was afraid of death. Everybody in that period was afraid of death and death meant first perigotry and then the final judgment with a chance of ending an eternal hellfire. There were dozens and dozens and dozens of depictions of the horrors that awaited the sinner in the churches of Mansfield, of Mark the Book, of Eisner, of Airford. Many of them in the rapidly spreading technique of oil painting that made them even more realistic and even more terrifying. No wonder that many young men and women sincerely committed to the monastic life. After all, life expectancy for those who had survived early childhood were maybe another 40 to 50 years, while its perigotry stretched for millennia and paradise was forever. So just erhythmically, the life of an observant monk, hard as it was, had a better long-term payout than that of a successful lawyer. So Lutter's fear of death may well have been real and very much justified and may well have been the reason he joined the monastery for good. But that still does not make him exceptional. After all, the church was the largest organization in Europe by a wide margin. And scale only comparable to the public sector in today's world. It was financed and staffed to a large extent through that fear of the afterlife. In a place like Airford the church employed in maybe a thousand people, maybe even more, and the monks themselves counted a couple of hundred. Lutter was just one of them. This first year at the monastery was one that Lutter described as fairly happy. The devil was unusually quiet, as he wrote later, and no wonder. Here joined a religious order, and the observant branch of that order that took its mouth seriously. So if his motivation had been to escape Hellfire, by the prevailing wisdom of the time he was doing everything right. In fact, he was already going above and beyond his calling, adding prayers and fast days to improve his chances. When he had been 14 years old, he heard seen Prince Wilhelm von Unhalt, quote, "who went in a friar's cow on the highways to beg bread." And that prince had turned into a corpse of mere skin and bones. That died young. Though Lutter mentioned him years later as an example of why monasticism, even heroic aesthetic exercises didn't all work, he still admitted that no one could look upon him without feeling ashamed of his own life. So he was clearly impressed by this athlete of Christ who has taken the gates of paradise by storm and tried to emulate him. The Augustinian Order was a mendicant order like the Franciscans and the Dominicans. There were based in cities, there were active in the ministry, there were preachers, teachers, and they were looking after the sick. So there weren't monks who lived in Abbey, secluded from the rest of society, when Martin Lutter entered the convent, it was decided that he should first join the priesthood. It does not seem that Lutter was unduly perturbed by this task, even though he was more than aware of its significance. Mass was the focal point of the church's means of grace. On the altar the bread and the wine become the flesh and blood of God, and the sacrifice of Calvary is reenacted, and only a priest can perform this miracle. He has the power that goes beyond that of kings and empress, even angels cannot do this. And to perform it, everything has to be present and correct. The vestments, the state of the priest's soul, his performance of the right, the strength of his voice in soul, and so on. Disgusting any of these conditions most, as Lutter said, seen as worse than any of the seven deadly sins, even though any such transgression would not invalidate the act as long as a celebrant intended to perform it correctly. So in 1507 he had completed his training and a date was set for his first mass. The celebration of the liturgy by a new priest was of course a grand occasion, so Lutter was allowed to invite friends and family, including his parents. He had joined the convent without telling his mother and father beforehand, which caused massive frustration in particular for his father, but their relationship seemed to have mend it. His father came to air for it in magnificent style, accompanied by twenty riders, and then he made an extremely generous donation of twenty golden to the monastery, which is probably equivalent to Martin's inheritance. So it should have been a joyous celebration of a major milestone in brother Martin's life as a friar. And it started well. Lutter confessed, put on his gear the right way around, went through the actions he was about to perform in his head, and approached the altar. All went well, until he came to the point in the right where he said, "We offer unto thee the living, the true, the eternal God." He later related that, "At these words I was utterly stupified and terror-stricken. I thought to myself, with what tongue shall I address such majesty, seeing that all men ought to tremble in the presence of even an earthly prince. Who am I that I should lift up my eyes or rise my hands to the divine majesty? The angels surround him, at his not the earth trembles. And shall I am miserable, little pig me 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, to the eternal and the true God." He turned round to the senior priest who always accompanied the newbies on these occasions and said, "I need to go, I cannot do it." But the older man pushed him back onto the altar, and Lutha, in anguish and terror, went through the rest of the motions. Afterwards, there was a celebrity dinner, for the brothers and for Lutha's guests, including his mother and father. A given all the trauma earlier in the day, Lutha now needed his father to fully reconcile with him and approve of his choices. And so he asked him, why he had been so against him becoming a monk, did he not see how quiet and how godly this life no was? And that was, when father Hans lost it. In front of all the monks and the doctors of the church he turned on his son, had he not heard of the fifth commandment, you should honour your father and mother. Now you leave your aged parents all alone to fend for themselves. And when Martin responded saying, "Well, that he'd been terrified to death by a thunderstorm and that God had called him to join the monastery," Hans Luther answered, "God grant, it was not an apparition of the devil." And that is, when Lutha's famous unfaithing had begun from real, his father sank the seed of doubt in his mind. What if Satan had lured him to the monastery while God had intended that he obeyed his father and mother? And now he was not just touching the holy, but performing the act that turned mere bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. He, a worthless sinner, just dust and ash, a man who had gone against God's commandment. And in his worldview, there was no way to recover from the sin. God of his imagination was surrounded by angels and at his not, the earth trembles. Lutha utterly stupified and terror-stricken. What he would do for the next decade was to seek out any which way he could appease this God-Monster, this primed nuclear-bombed judgment that lived in his head. The Church, that built up this image of the righteous God who judges his sinners, also often means to appease the deity. And one of these were good works. Good works for a monk were prayers and vigils and fasting and mortification of the flesh, obedience and poverty. So, Lutha, when the extra-mind and some, more pray, fasting three days straight, throwing away the blanket he was allowed during the night so that he nearly froze to death, more fasting, more praying. He would later relate that if he had continued with this, he would have found his way to an early grave. He was a perfect monk, but somehow he never felt he had done enough. Could he not have done more prayer, more painful exercises? Some have argued that Lutha must have been a great sinner, if he needed then many good works to balance the box. But that's a misunderstanding. Lutha wanted to be absolutely sure that what he did was enough. It did not matter to him that he was the most devoted, most ardent worshipper in the already very devoted and very ardent community of the Observe and Augustinians, what he was looking for was a sign from God, that he was chosen, that he had done enough and no such sign appeared. Now, everyone's own efforts weren't enough. There was the option of pleading with the virgin or the saints to step in on one's behalf. The idea was that the saints and the virgin had amassed so much merit through their good works and exemplary lives that had much to spare. This treasure of merit was administered by the church and specifically by the pope. He could allocate this spiritual relief to individual sinners thereby shortening their time and purgatory. A one way to gain access to this treasure was by praying to the saints and most effectively by praying before the remains of the saints, i.e. before their relics. The greatest storehouse of such relics was Rome. In just one of the catacombs sent Calisters, you find the remains of nine early popes and thousands of martyrs. There are the graves, the St. Peter and of St. Paul, the major and minor basilicas, filled to the brim with the remains of early saints, et cetera, et cetera. While then determined to Rome in 1510 or 1511, it was not primarily in pilgrimage but a diplomatic mission. In total conflict had broken out within the Augustinian order in Germany and a lot of us chosen as an emissary to the general of the order and was based in Rome to plead their case. While Rome needed de-obligatory circuit of the seven major basilicas, as well as the Skala Santa, the stairs of the palace of Pontius Pilate, where Jesus had been presented to the people, and that had been transferred to Rome by angels. Laming these on your knees, saying a paternoster in every step and kissing each, gave you the right to release one soul from purgatory. Martin Luther chose his grandfather, and regretted that his parents were still alive and hence could not benefit from this blessing. Now, did that alleviate his unfaithfulness, his perennial terror of God as Judd, who may send him down to hell for eternity? No, they're not. Though he did not arrive at the top of the stairs, declaring that the just should live by faith, as some Protestant propaganda once claimed, but the whole process only added to the doubts as to the effectiveness of all these exercises. And what may have contributed to the disillusionment was the way the Roman prayer factories operate. For a man who had been terrified of making the slightest mistake in the celebration of his first mass, the carelessness with which the Roman clergy ran through the prescribed motions shocked him. This is not yet the moment he dismissed the papacy in its entirety, as is often said, he saw the corruption that he knew these were serious people. But as long as the church administered the treasure of the merit, even if done badly, she still remained a source of grace. The most promising tool, the reconciler's sinner to the Almighty God, was the sacrament of confession. The terror strike and overpowered litter was naturally heading for a gold medal in confessing. He would confess daily, sometimes several times a day, on one occasion for six hours straight, such as Sidious confessing should have cleared all major and even most minor transgressions, and should have brought him solace. But again, it did not. Every time he left the confession box, his mind immediately turned to search for any misdeed he might have forgotten or was committing right at that moment. He was almost as impressive as his endurance in investigating and recounting every minutiae of his failings was the patience of his confessor. And this confessor, Johann von Staupitz, is one of the most sympathetic figures in this entire tale. He was a nobleman, a childhood friend of the elect of Saxony, frantic, the wise, a doctor of theology, and the vicar general of the Observe and Augustinians in the Holy Roman Empire. Effectively, Martin Lutters superior. Staupitz had a soft spot for this earnest and industrious monk. As an experienced ecclesiastical leader, he was used to the religious fervor and the doubts his younger colleague displayed. He listened patiently to the endless litany of minor infringements that so perturbed Lutters. But even a man of Staupitz character and stamina can hit the buffers. After one of these grueling sessions, he sighed at his charge, quote, "If you expect Christ to forgive you, come in with something to forgive." Parry sighed, blasphemy, adultery, instead of all these picket-dillows. Staupitz had a point, but he completely missed Lutters' point. Lutters' problem wasn't that he thought his trifling contraventions were major sins. He was questioning the effectiveness of confession itself. Conventional, to more accurately, the sacrament of penitence is a three-step process. First the sinner must repent his or her offense, then they need to confess this offense to their priest and finally the priest determines a form of religious penance to be undertaken, a prayer, fasting pilgrimage, something like that. So that sounds pretty straightforward and, I would say, pretty effective. But for Martin Lutters, there was a massive logical flaw. This is where we see the first limbs that he might be really different. His most of us, including myself, go through life using an 80/20 approach. If I get 80% of what I do right then things will turn out fine. Probably even quite a bit better than fine. Lutters wasn't 80/20. He was 100 or nothing. And if you want to confess 100% of your sins, you need to know 100% of the times you breached whatever even minor rule. And that he concluded was impossible. The human memory was simply not accurate enough to record every single failure, in particular when you did not realize that there was a rule that could be broken. And since penance required the sinner to repent, it did not work for sins that had stripped one's mind. He pointed to Jonah, who slept soundly, and would never have repented, had he not been made aware of his sins by the storm that God had sent. As far as Lutters was concerned, no recollection meant no confession and no confession meant no forgiveness and no forgiveness meant eternal damnation. But I can see why he got so agitated, since frankly I can barely remember what I did last week, let alone what unforgivable sins I might have committed in my 20s. And again because Lutters was 100 or nothing man, he took the thought one further. Now if God could set up a system that left a sinner without a chance to gain forgiveness, was God actually just? Maybe he wasn't. According to the latest scholastic theories, God was absolute above any law even the ones he had given himself. In fact, God could do what God wanted. God could be capricious. God could be cruel. 30 years later, Lutters described his state of mind at that time as follows. But I blamed this monk that I was, felt that before God I was a sinner with an extremely troubled conscience. I couldn't be sure that God was appeased by my satisfaction. I did not love, no rather, I hated the just God who punishes sinners. In silence, if I did not blaspheme, then certainly I grumbled vehemently and got angry at God. I said, "Isn't it enough that be miserable sinners, lost for all eternity because of the original sin, are oppressed by every kind of calamity through the Ten Commandments? Why does God heap sorrow upon sorrow through the gospel and through the gospel threatens us with the justice and his wrath?" This was how I was raging with wild and disturbed conscience. End quote. Now as Stoppitz saw his charge spiraling out of control, he concluded that what Lutters needed was a distraction. So he asked him to resume his studies and gain a doctorate in theology. He involved him in senior positions in the administration of the Order, and Milutta had gained his license to teach, made him professor of Bible studies at the University of Wittenberg. The University of Wittenberg was brand brand new. The elect of Saxony Frederick the Moise that decided to make Wittenberg one of his main residences. He rebuilt the ancient castle in the new Italian Renaissance style. He erected a new church adjacent to it, and he founded an Augustinian friary. By the jewel in the crown was his University, just first opened at 1502. Johann von Staupitz as an eminent theologian, a senior member of a religious order, as well as the childhood friend of the elector, had been instrumental in the setting up of this new university. The Wittenberg came about during a period that saw dozens of universities spring up in the Holy Roman Empire, mainly designed to satisfy the gigantic appetite for lawyers and administrators in the consolidating principalities. Theology wasn't necessarily a focus more for Bourbon, so Staupitz was given almost free reign in the design of the curriculum, as long as it would add to the reputation of the university. Nor which doubt it, was not only stringent in his ideas about the observance of monastic rules, he was also somewhat outside the mainstream. Bible studies, as such, was not part of the classic curriculum in the early 16th century. Theologians spend most of their time with secondary tax, though church fathers, papal bulls, decisions of the church councils, canon law etc etc. Many had never even read the Bible, so a dedicated course on the Bible itself was a novelty, and exactly the sort of thing that would attract ambitious students. And it was also exactly what Luther needed. As you know, I'm not a theologian, in fact, I may seriously lapsed Catholic, but over the last few years, thanks to the podcast, I've read quite a bit of the New Testament. As far as I can make out, Jesus is a lot more about forgiveness, love thy neighbor, and turning the other cheek than about judgment and sending people to hell. Unsurprisingly, as Luther dived deep into the original text, he found the answer to his unfaithing and his anguish, his terrors. A rather than trying to say it in my words, here is the man himself, quote. Meanwhile, in that same year 1519, I had begun interpreting the Psalms once again. I felt confident that there was now more experience since I had dealt in university courses with St. Paul's letter to the Romans, to their Galatians, and the letter to the Hebrews. I had conceived a burning desire to understand what Paul meant in his letter to the Romans, and thus far, there had stood in my way, not the cold blood around my heart, but that one word, which is in chapter 1, the justice of God is revealed in it. I hated that word, justice of God, which by the use and custom of all my teachers, I had been taught to understand philosophically, as referring to formal or active justice as they called it, I.e. that justice by which God is just and by which he punishes sinners and the unjust. I am meditated, night and day on these words. Until at last, by the mercy of God, I paid attention to their context. The justice of God is revealed in it, as it is written. The just person lives by faith. I began to understand that in this verse, the justice of God is that by which the just person lives by a gift of God, that is by faith. I began to understand that this verse means that the justice of God is revealed through the gospel, but that it is passive justice. I.e. that by which the merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written, the just person lives by faith. All at once, I felt that I had been born again and entered into paradise itself through open gates. Immediately, I saw the whole of Scripture in a different light, I ran through the Scriptures for memory and found that other terms had analogous meanings, EG, the work of God, that is what God works in us, the power of God by which he makes us powerful, the wisdom of God, by which he makes us wise, the strength of God, the salvation of God, the glory of God, I exalted this sweetness word of mine, the justice of God. With as much love as before, I had hated it with hate. This phrase of Paul was for me the very gate to paradise. Afterwards, I read Augustines on the Spirit and the letter in which I found what I had not dared hope for. I discovered that he too interpreted the justice of God in a similar way, namely, as that with which God clothed us when he justifies us. Although Augustine had said it imperfectly and did not explain in detail how God imputes justice to us, still it pleased me that he taught the justice of God by which we are justified. End quote. Now, that is the great breakthrough. That is the evangelical experience, the tower experience, or as me Catholics like the latrine experiences in some telling he may have had this revelation on the Lou. Where he had it does not matter. What he had found was a way to banish his terrors. He had slain the God monster. He had defused the nuclear bomb of judgment on his head. The impact was not just psychological. It was also physical. That emaciated monk weakened by his eternal fasting and perennial confessions, gradually turned into the well-padded, solid imposing figure that you see in Kranak's paintings and every lotus statue of warms to Washington. He apologized to his father for his disobedience and they were finally fully reconciled. But what is the view of salvation really that unprecedented? Well, as he said himself, Augustine had the same idea a thousand years before him, he and whose and his followers were on a very similar trajectory. And I am sure better read listeners can point out dozens of predecessors of the idea of salvation through faith. So once again, Martin Luther was not that exceptional. But, and this is number own hypothesis. One of the reasons he was so successful was the fact that he wasn't the man of his stoning religious experiences like San Francis. Nor a fountain of truly unheard of incredible learned ideas like Masilius of Padua. He wasn't the first man to join a monastery out of fear of death. He wasn't the first to overdo his religious exercise. He certainly wasn't the first to go on pilgrimage to Rome. Arguably his pilgrimage was more of a business trip with religious sightseeing. And he wasn't the first to draw a confessor around the bend. He was a modern monk, but he did not destroy his bowels with fasting like Bernard of Clevo. He had not gone on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, nor had he bricked himself into a cell like Julian of Norwich. He sure made the deans listed monk school, but he wasn't a full-blown saint. But what he was was extremely relatable to his fellow monks. He had tried for salvation doing all the things required and some, and then he stood up and said, "Guys, this didn't work." And there were dozens, and as we will see hundreds and thousands of monks, nuns and clerics, who felt that same desperation, that their efforts had gone nowhere, that they had not found that reassurance they had hoped for. And he was a guy who had gone further than they had, still had failed, and now said out loud what they were all being thinking. And he had a solution, a solution backed up by arguments in scripture, a solution that was novel and complex, but not totally new and not terribly complex. Then having generated this not from dry scholastic argument, but out of his serious inner struggle, he was, as we would say today, authentic. So in a way, the fact that Lutha wasn't really that exceptional was the most exceptional thing about him. Now, as I said, this is my reader things. There are tons and tons of other ways people have looked at these events, people with humongous scholarship, and far more time than I had. Take this is nothing more than another little voice in that grand chorus of opinions. We go to my website history of the terms.com and follow the links to the transcripts of this episode. You will find further links to various books and sources that give you these different texts. And of course, this is where you can sign up as a patron under the support tab. Now, next time we'll dive into that other sequence of events that developed almost in parallel to the interior developments in Martyn Lutha's head. It's talking about the spread of indulgences and the reformous response. As Bainton said in the beginning, these dramatic events bedazzle all the armies of the dramatic biographies or were to Lutha himself trivial in comparison with the inner upheavals of his questing after God. Still, might be time to get bedazzled. See you next time. [Music]