University Place

The Story of the Reformation

Welcome to University Place Presents. I’m Norman Gilliland. By some accounts it all began with a letter, and it ended decades later after 30 years of war. Whether you call it the Protestant Reformation or just the Reformation, there’s no doubt that we continue to live in its very long shadow. What sparked that Reformation, and how far did it go? We’ll find out from my guest, Lee Wandel. She’s a professor of history at the UW-Madison and author of the book “The Reformation: Towards a New History.” Welcome to University Place Presents.
– I’m delighted to be here.
– Reformation, if we think about the Reformation, we think about, inevitably first, Martin Luther.
– Right.
– Is that where it began?
– Well, it’s one way of telling the story. And one of the things that I talk about in that book is choices about how we tell the story. Certainly, Luther and those who looked to him for leadership saw himself in the key role. And towards the end of his life, he would come to see himself not only as God’s vessel filled with divine intent, but also the person who had recovered true Christianity. And he had a number of different– Well, he used visual polemics. He used verbal polemics which supported that sense. But, as a historian, I would argue there are other ways to understand it.
– Really?
– Yes.
– Well, Martin Luther had the advantage of, and maybe we’ll dwell on this a little more later, he had the advantage of multimedia.
– Yes he did.
– Mass media.
– And he used it brilliantly. He had a close friendship. They were godfathers to each other’s children, with Lucas Cranach. And Cranach and Luther, Cranach is the one who did the illustrations for Luther’s German Bible, ultimately. And Cranach deployed print, woodcuts foremost. He deployed it to create ways of thinking about Luther. Luther as inspired by the Holy Spirit. Luther as the German Hercules, slaughtering the– – I think we have an image here of that.
– Yes we do. Yes we do.

– If you look at the right-hand side of this image–
– Yes. Yes.
– You’ll see the Lutheran Hercules there on the right in just a second.
– And you can see him standing larger than everyone else in this image. And he is victorious over medieval theologians and over Aristotle, and he’s powerful and he is this leader of a new church.
– So much easier in this, let’s say, post-Gutenberg era of image-making.
– Yes.
– Making things very simple for a lot of people to understand.
– Yes. Yes.
– Even people who are illiterate…
– Yes. Yes.
– …could get the images.
– These images could go anywhere, and I think their meaning, multiple layers of meaning, but they were accessible to everyone in some way.
– And before we get into the various things that Luther was taking issue with in church practice, also he could create the image of what would be called true religion versus the false practice of religion.
– Cranach designed, as did a number of other artists in this period. They would design these stark opposites, bipolar images, true faith, false faith, true religion, false religion, true preaching, false preaching. And in each case, what they would show is their church is that which was true, and there would be people who were obviously attentive and devout. And then the false usually was marked by a grotesque overeating and greed and money.

– I think we’re seeing it here.
– Yes.
– Again, these contrasting images…
– Yes.
– …that we see of true church and false church, and you see the overindulged.
– And this is Cranach, and you can see Luther is at the receiving end of divine revelation. There’s an arc of light across half of this image, and in the other, there are these clusters. It’s a very sort of messy group of people clustered around things, yes.

– Before we go any farther, Luther did come out of the church, though. I mean, he was very much integrated with the Roman Catholic church in the early years of the 16th century.
– Yes. One of my friends, David Steinmetz, used to say, used to teach, he taught at Duke, and he said, “All reformers were born Catholics.” [laughter]
– And a lot of other people who, what shall we say, took issue in one way or the other.
– Yes, yes. And that sense, it helps us to understand why Luther does not abandon some things. I mean, the principle of scripture alone ultimately cannot explain the Lutheran liturgy, for instance. It cannot explain choices Luther made to keep old and familiar and beloved parts of the medieval practice.
– And the universe at this time was perceived how? We have the, we’re coming out of the Middle Ages into what we would later call the Renaissance.
– Yes.
– And that overlaps that transition with the Reformation.
– Yes. Yes.
– Ptolemy would have been the, what shall we say, the mainstay for the cosmology leading up to this time.

– Well, he has a very interesting history, and he plays into, for me, in my argument about how do we think about this story we want to tell. In the middle of the 15th century, the Ottoman Empire takes Constantinople, and among the texts that scatter into the west is Ptolemy’s work. And that work had been known previously, but there’s this kind of burst of interest in Ptolemy’s, in particular, his cartography, his geography. And there is this proliferation of these quite beautiful maps based on Ptolemaic principles, the Ptolemaic system of projection, and they’re also, for us, a kind of wonderful reminder of what late medieval Europeans thought the world looked like. So that Ptolemy’s beautiful maps show us a world which is roughly two-thirds of the world, actually much less of that. It’s part of Africa, much of Asia, and Europe. No knowledge whatsoever of the western hemisphere. No knowledge of the southern hemisphere to speak of. And that these beautiful maps, which are produced in all of the great printing centers, allow us, then, to resituate the Reformation not in the globe which would, of course, be its site by the end of the century, but instead in a Europe which was still thought of itself as dominating the surface of the Earth.

– So we’ve gone from, like, a Copernican system where the Earth is the center of the universe, and in that way of thinking, Europe is the center of the Earth.
– And I think that it’s certainly usually separated from, the story of the Reformation is usually separated from the story of the encounter. And part of what I tried to do in my book was to bring those two stories together and to suggest the ways in which finding out that everything they thought they knew was in fact not true. In 1492 or 1500, as Europeans began to come to terms with, Columbus himself continues to believe he’s landed in Asia.
– Sure.
– But later, largely humanists and also cartographers, 1507, Waldseemller acknowledges that this has never been acknowledged before. This is a piece of land that nobody knew existed. And so by 1507, Europeans are grappling with everything that comes to them from the classical world. The Christian literature and all classical knowledge, none of it knew about the western hemisphere.

– Which implies, then, a flaw in all this.
– Yes. Yes.
– Pat anchored classical knowledge.
– Yes.
– And that would imply something of a religious nature too then.

– Yes, the unknown world was larger than the known world. If I just put it as simply as I possibly can and think about what that means to discover after believing for a very long time that you had the body of human knowledge and there was more and it was to be found in Asia. But that you basically knew the shape of the Earth and you knew how much land there was and you knew how much water there was and to find that none of this was true. And, quite the contrary, that what wasn’t known was enormous. By the end of the 16th century, people such as Mercator have begun to work out systems to integrate this influx of new knowledge.

– It’s a very different map from the one we just saw, isn’t it?
– Yes. Yes.
– This Mercator projection map.
– Yes. Yes. And Mercator claims that, and in particular in the map that we’re looking at, the 1569 world map, he claims there to have corrected Ptolemy. But he’s done something more. He’s created a grid where every new discovery has a location so that you can actually situate all this new knowledge. And for the 85 years between the Ptolemaic map we were just looking at and this, Europeans are taking in all kinds of new information with no place to put it.
– Does this then, this– I had a professor years ago who called it the blowing of the mind.
– Yes. [laughter]
– Does this blowing of the mind then create a situation that’s more, what shall I say, conducive to the doubts that Luther is bringing out?

– One of my questions, and it’s been a biting question for me, is the degree to which when 16th century Europeans latch on to the Bible, I mean this is the great puzzle for Reformation historians. The Bible was there. It was available. It was available in vernacular by the end of the 14th century. It was something that people could have had, but it wasn’t wildly popular. And it certainly wasn’t held to be the locus for devotion. And so one of the questions that I had been puzzling over for my teaching career teaching the Reformation is why, then? Why the 16th century? I think that part of the answer lies in this explosion of unknown. Another part of the answer, to move to the eastern end of the Mediterranean and another beautiful Mercator map, is this, 1453 the Ottoman expansion, which takes over Constantinople and sets in motion Greek scholars.

– They’re fleeing the Ottoman Empire.
– They are fleeing the Ottoman Empire. They flee to Florence and Rome primarily, Venice, and they take with them Greek texts. And this is, in the west, again, it’s new knowledge. And it’s another explosion. It’s another, this exhilarating discovery, the Corpus of Aristotle’s writings, the Corpus of Plato’s writings. Plato was hardly known in the medieval west, and then, with these scholars, European scholars are now, they have access to Plato’s “Republic.” And this is transformative.
– The Renaissance.
– The Renaissance. The Renaissance. And the sense that there is another classical language, the sense that this classical language has, opens out possibilities and, in particular for the concerns of the Reformation, Erasmus, the great humanist who was this magnificent Greek scholar, begins a project of collecting Greek manuscripts. Masters Greek at a level which is certainly distinctive. I’d say one of the great Greek scholars of the 16th century. And he collates, it’s not many. It’s like seven separate manuscripts, and we have an image of one of those older medieval manuscripts, a fragment of a Greek, a part of the Greek New Testament. And he collates them and he publishes with Froben in Basel in 1516 a Greek New Testament.
– It hadn’t been done before. I mean, these manuscripts hadn’t even really been collected into book form.

– No. In the west, with Jerome’s translation in the 4th century of the entire text of the Bible into Latin, the Latin Bible had been the Bible for study and for liturgy in the west. And Erasmus’ Greek New Testament is the first edition of the Greek New Testament. And it is, in and of itself, electrifying. One of my favorite stories from this period is Zwingli sitting in Zurich in 1519 talks about his exhilaration waiting for this to come off the press, to have this Greek text, which he held and Erasmus argued, got the scholars closer to what Jesus actually said. There was no longer this mediation of a translation into a language that Jesus himself did not speak. There was a text which they thought they could hear Jesus’ own voice. And so, this notion first to Greek coming into the west, exploding the sense of the possibilities of the Christian canon, also raising possibilities if there is a sacred language which opens out, there’s, of course, church fathers in Greek and there’s proliferation of additions in the 16th century of the Greek church fathers changing understandings of the nature of Christ. All of this, I mean, can be traced back to this exodus of these Greek scholars in the mid-15th century.
– So does that, in a sense, undercut the authority of those who had been teaching the Latin Bible and weren’t familiar with Greek?

– One of the things that Erasmus does, and it’s an example I love sharing with students, he goes back to Jerome’s Latin, which he thinks is dreadful, and a kind of telling moment in that act of revising this sacred text, which has been a canonical, I mean Jerome was the one who sets the canon of the Bible and has been canonical and to go back and reconsider what are these words, and then the example I give the students, Erasmus chooses for the Greek word “logos” he chooses not “verbum,” so a written word.

– In the beginning was the word.
– In the beginning was the word, but Erasmus chooses the word “sermo.” So the spoken word. In the beginning was the spoken word. This is transformative.
– It would be. Yes.
– It’s transformative, so the Bible comes alive in the 16th century, and I would argue that Erasmus and his approach to language as something which is historical and which gives us access to the historical Jesus, that opens a way of thinking about the Bible.
– And does this concept of utopia then enter in at this point?
– Yes it does. And so the image that we have here is of Erasmus’ beloved friend, Thomas More’s “Utopia.” And I chose that image because it does a number of quite wonderful things. First of all, you see More’s own alphabet on the one side, and More designs that alphabet, it’s evocative of Greek. It’s not evocative of the Roman alphabet. It’s actually evocative of Greek. It’s to posit another language, I mean, again, that sense that here’s another language, but also more posits, and this is what, again, I think is an explosive moment and this bestseller also appears in 1516. More posits the possibility that people who are on these islands in the Atlantic which are just being discovered, who are not baptized Christians are nonetheless more Christian than European Christians.
– And because?
– Because they are, they adhere to Christian ethics, because they love their neighbor, because they’re peace-loving, because they share all their goods.
– Which was, I think, mostly the experience, wasn’t it?
– Yes.
– Of, say, Columbus. And even these parts farther north.
– Yes.
– That these people welcomed them and shared what they had.

– More had read these accounts and he really, he poses the speculation, and “Utopia” was taken to be an authentic account by his contemporaries, and he raises this, that being Christian isn’t something that a ritual does. Being Christian is something which is an ethical position, and, therefore, these people who Columbus is describing and then Cortes and all of these accounts, yes, they are more Christian than the people who go to church or have been baptized, insofar as they are warmongering or they are greedy or they are self-interested.
– Was there any sense of, tracing back, where did these rituals come from? The only ones that Christ actually talks about are, you know, the Last Supper, you know, the Eucharist.
– Yes.
– And that kind of a thing.
– Yes, yes.
– And so somebody is saying at this point, 1500, 1520, 1530, wait a minute, Christ didn’t mention any of this in the Bible, what do we need it for? In fact, it’s an albatross.
– One of my teachers was a Renaissance humanist, a scholar of Renaissance humanism, and, in fact, right now Tony Grafton at Princeton, this is one of the questions he’s pursuing in his own research are these humanists who are tracing the origins of Christian rituals. But that humanist sensibility, that human actions have histories and that they change over time, is absolutely brought to bear on the practice of Christianity. And this Greek New Testament provides a new generation of devout European Christians with a text they then seek to locate the beginnings of Christian practice in that text.

– Greek, so far as we know, I mean, that was the original language that the apostles wrote in.
– Yes.
– The letters of the Corinthians and so on and so forth.
– Yes.
– So they would not expect to get any closer.
– Right.
– To the original words of Christ.
– Right. Right. Yes. Yes. So there was that sense of the immediacy of being able to hear Christ speaking.
– So this discovery of the new world and these more Christian than Christian Native Americans…
– Yes. Yes. …starts to create this kind of rift between Christian practice in Europe and sort of a more fundamental way of looking at Christianity.
– There are a lot of different threads which come together in the 16th century. The lay Christians, and it’s important at this point to set out how the medieval church and the Fourth Lateran in 1215 makes this explicit. Priests are to be a separate caste. The sacrament of ordination changes their nature, and they are different from the rest of Christians in Europe.
– And this came about when?
– 1215.

– So pretty late in the game?
– Yes. And there’s been wonderful work done on the early church in the sense of apostolic succession which might also involve the priesthood. But up until the 12th century, there’s evidence that women could be priests, for instance. And with Innocent III, there are a series of decisions taken, one of which critically is this notion that the priest is created through ordination, and second, the priest administers the sacrament of communion. And, increasingly, there is a separation between the clergy and what then is very clearly designated as the laity, that is the people who are not clergy, and the laity are the great majority of Europeans. And they are increasingly, we have this evidence of the desire to live pious lives. “The Imitation of Christ” is a bestseller, and it’s published in lots of different languages.
– This is a book.
– Yes.

– And what is it saying?
– It is offering lay Christians a model for living a Christ-like life. “The Imitation of Christ,” Thomas Kempis posits this kind of, it’s a mystical, it’s a set of exercises for the mind, but it is also a way of moving forward in living a life that is more and more both mentally informed but also modeled on the life of Christ.
– Does it address at all the place of ritual in this life?
– It’s not concerned with ritual.
– It’s simply stripping it right down to the individual’s conduct.
– Living as a pious individual.
– And it was a bestseller.
– It is still the bestselling book in the western Christian tradition. The Bible is in competition with it, but it had a head start. And also, we also have evidence of these books of ours done for more prosperous laypeople, and in them, they often would have Bible readings. So there was this desire to read the Bible but not as itself a codex, as something which is closer to a liturgical sense that you have collects. You have different parts of the Bible that you read in relationship to different moments of prayer or attending mass or…

– Well, okay, it’s one thing to get the Bible, to get the writings of the apostles–
– Yes.
– Back into the original Greek.
– Yes.
– Courtesy of these Greek scholars fleeing the Ottoman Empire into Europe.
– Yes.
– What about when you start, I mean, translating into languages that we call the vulgar languages, the popular languages?
– Yes, yes.
– German, in Luther’s case. Doesn’t that arguably then put that layer back in that the Latin Bible had, that layer between you and the original?
– Well, it’s an interesting question. And, again, there are these great debates among Reformation historians because certainly a number have pointed towards Luther translating the Bible into German. Medievalists protest again and again the Bible was available in German, and there was something like 90 separate editions of the Bible in German prior to the 16th century. There was, Wycliffe translated the Bible into English.
– Back in the 14th.

– Yes, 14th century. So we have ample evidence that the Bible is available to medieval Christians. So we return to this puzzle, why, in the 16th century, does it become the book for lay devotion? And I think there are a number of different parts of this story. Another piece of it arguably is the structure of late medieval Christianity. To go back to that division of clergy and laity, that the clergy administer all of the sacraments but one. Marriage is the only sacrament that the laity can themselves enact. So they are actually agents in that sacrament. And that sense of powerlessness is a part of late medieval resentment about the role of the clergy. I’d also put into our collection of images, I’d put up the floor plan of Notre Dame to give a sense, a spatial sense that the laity were not to approach the apse, the choir, of the church, so that the nave was the ship of the church and the laity stay in the nave and that sense of being kept at a distance, we also have evidence– I didn’t bring in any images of choir screens– but another part of that separation of the laity is the actual installation of obstructions so that they can’t see the altar in a sight line from where they must sit in the church. That this also angers them and gives them, and they vocalize. I mean, we have lots of grievances in the archives. The sense of not having access. And then you have these books in the 16th century. You have Erasmus’ New Testament. This extraordinary sense that you could hold in your hand the Words, and, again, both Erasmus and Luther, they talk about the Word of God.

And when we think about the Word of God, it’s become a clich. It’s become so familiar. But for 16th century Christians, this sense of the materiality that you hold it and if you learn how to read, and many of these young theologians will learn Greek in order to read Erasmus’ New Testament, to read the Greek church fathers, they will want access to those texts, and that sense of immediacy and the intimacy that a codex, I mean, a codex, a book, is an extraordinarily intimate experience. And although they’d had the same thing with books of ours and they’d had the same thing with “The Imitation of Christ,” for reasons that I think still escape us, that experience of holding the Bible and reading becomes an act of the most intense devotion.

– So there’s a real difference here between these layers that are put, literally, between the clergy the laity.
– Yes, yes.
– There’s a real conflict, contrast between that and this sense of not only can I hold the book, my own book, my own Bible–
– Yes.
– But, literally, in my hands, I can read the words of Jesus Christ.
– Yes, yes.
– As relayed by the apostles.

– And the puzzle at some level remains, because I have a very good friend who works on 15th century Bible reading, and he will tell you that late medieval European Christians were reading the Bible, but there is, in the 16th century, this intense sense, one of my favorite images is the god Lemuel, and this sense that Erasmus has really taken the gospels themselves, these four apostles and their words and he’s made them accessible and then Luther’s turned around and handed it in the vernacular to German merchants, miners, artisans of various kinds. I mean, the story of Luther’s Bible is a wonderful story of him going out and listening in the marketplace. How are people speaking? And turning this text into spoken, again, spoken language.
– So it really is, in a literal sense, a vulgar, meaning a common person’s language.
– Yes.
– It’s not standard German.
– Yes.
– It’s street German.

– Well, and here’s one of the wonderful historical ironies is Luther’s German Bible becomes the foundation for modern German. With the publication of Bibles in the 16th century, the King of France establishes the French language through French Bibles. There are no dictionaries. There are Bibles and these establish what will be the conventions of the language. So Luther going out and listening in the marketplace as he’s working in his study on this text, he is fixing a dialect, ultimately, which will become the dominant dialect in Germany. But that, again, that intensity of the text itself and the ways in which people will cherish it, even when they can’t read it, they’ll have it in their homes.
– So there’s a power struggle going on here.
– Yes. Yes. Yes.
– Because there are people who, no pun intended, have this vested interest…

– Yes. Yes. Yes.
– …in maintaining this distance between the laity and God.
– Well, it’s, again, another ironic twist. Luther wants to put Bibles in the hands of everyone when he does his translation. That’s the purpose. And yet what he discovers, and Catholics who were his contemporaries point this out. What he discovers that if you put any text in the hands of lots of different people, they’re not all going to read it the same.
– The same way, yes. And so you get, what? A very quick splintering of interpretation.

– Yes. Yes. And one of the things that emerges in the Council of Trent, which is the Catholic coming to terms with what happens, this terrible fragmentation, is to establish that the Bible cannot be read by one person, even if that person is the Pope. The Bible is read through generations, and the truth of the Bible therefore cannot be known in the immediacy that Luther’s positing. It is within a tradition of many readers, including the church fathers and including medieval theologians, Thomas Aquinas and Augustine are both authorized readers of the Bible, and if you put them side by side, you will find that they don’t read it exactly the same way. So part of the story of the 16th century is an affirmation of a hierarchy of reading. Luther begins by saying that there is a priesthood of all believers, but he quickly abandons that. By 1525, he’s abandoned it because it unleashes chaos. The abyss. I mean, for Luther it’s the abyss. This privatized reading unleashes visions of Christianity that he finds horrifying.

– Suddenly you would have millions of churches.
– Yes. Yes, you would have, for every Bible you could have a church. And he witnesses a range of different possibilities. I mean, think about all of the possibilities that are right there in the canonical scriptures. There’s the possibility of incest. There’s the possibility of fratricide. There’s the possibility of polygamy, which Luther toys with temporarily.
– That’s true. Certainly throughout the Old Testament.
– Yes. Yes. And some of the churches which see their authority in that selfsame scripture find authorization because it’s there for adult baptism. The Anabaptists will say you can’t be baptized until you know what’s happening to you. That’s what happens in the life of Christ. So baptizing children is wrong, and it turns out this is one of the areas where Luther just says no. [laughter] And it is so striking that there is no scriptural authorization for infant baptism.

– Right. That’s right because John the Baptist baptizing Jesus as an adult, as you say.
– Right. Right. Right. So there’s no authorization for this, and Luther, again, remains, as does Calvin, vehemently in support of infant baptism as that which introduces a human being into the Christian community. And there, again, this is not by area of work, but the scholars who’ve worked on this question of baptism suggest that part of the reason why is that this is reassuring to parents that their children within, canonically it’s three days of birth, their children within three days of birth will be protected.
– Right because we know there was high infant mortality.
– Yes. Yes.
– And you want to know that your child has died a Christian if that comes to pass.
– Yes. Yes. So there is this powerful both pastoral and emotional reason which has no scriptural foundation
– But it had such an emotional component to it that people were not willing to give it up.
– Yes. Yes.

– Which is a theme that runs throughout religion anyway.
– Yes. Yes.
– It’s logic versus emotion.
– Yes. Yes. So that scriptural text, for him, is… it is powerful, but there are these moments when his own contemporaries are baffled because if scripture alone, if scripture is the sole authority, if scripture is God’s express command, how can you possibly deviate from it?
– Well, again, it’s the interpretation.
– Yes.
– Whose interpretation are you going to believe?

– Yes. Yes. And to come back to that question of clerical, that kind of clerical status, Luther rejects that, but, ultimately, both he and Calvin move to a hierarchy of biblical knowledge so that it’s the pastors who are trained in biblical languages and who will go through formal training in scriptural scholarship who are to lead congregations. They’re not clergy in that medieval sense. They’ve not been ordained. They have not been transformed by a sacrament. But their learning gives them an authority.
– I have to ask a practical question here. How do these people, Luther and some of his adherents, avoid getting burned at the stake? As we know, this was done both before and after Luther’s time by prominent theologians who took issue.

– Well, Luther himself saw himself as a vessel of God. That’s his language, and his contemporaries, Melanchthon and a number of chroniclers who also saw Luther as God’s instrument, as a kind of second revelation, they simply saw that God protected Luther. More secular historians, which would be those historians of the post-war years, have argued that he also had very powerful political patrons. That the Electorate of Saxony was himself one of the most powerful German princes, and when he moves to protect Luther, he is, if not entirely able to do so, he is sufficiently able to do so. That Luther survives papal condemnation, being labeled a criminal by the Holy Roman Emperor, arguably also, I mean another part of the kind of argument that modern historians have made is that the Holy Roman Emperor, who is Luther’s secular lord, is distracted. There’s the Ottoman Empire at his doorstep. 1529 they’re at Vienna. And then there is also that he is, of course, the King of Spain, which is grappling with this western hemisphere and a large process of not only expanding Spanish political control but expanding the Catholic church into the western hemisphere, the Philippines. I mean, arguably Charles wins that war, though few historians ever give him that credit.

– So, in effect, he could not afford to fragment his support?
– Right. Right.
– Any further by taking extreme issue with these, shall we call them Protestants yet?

– Well, he, you know, and this is this wonderful hindsight. 20th century, 21st century, we look back and we see Luther starting a church. Charles sees this obnoxious monk who seems to have a following, but Charles, I think, I mean, to think of it, 1500 years of western Christendom, to imagine a split of the magnitude of the split between the eastern church and the western church I think lay beyond most people in the 16th century. Luther was understood and he was labeled as schismatic and heretic. The assumption was that he would be dealt with, that these, they called themselves evangelicals, but the Catholics called them heretics, that they would be eliminated and that it takes hold in this way. I mean, there again, how do we tell the story? Another way of thinking about it is that you have, by the 16th century, something that subsequent scholars would call a middle class. There are lots of people living in cities, lots of people who don’t fit into a traditional futile world, and they are looking for a piety which more completely fulfills their desires than that medieval church which they find, again, constrictive, hierarchical, denies them access in ways that they resent.

– I wonder if the relative enjoyment of life on Earth didn’t have part of that effect too. I mean, this middle class is, you know, we don’t want to defer everything to a righteous afterlife. We are having some fun here.
– There’s, in fact this is a beloved argument in the 19th and early 20th century, Max Weber scoots out a notion that Protestants are capitalists. But the problem with it, ultimately, is that Calvin wants to turn all Christians into monks. I mean, the aestheticism that Calvin teaches. Luther no. Luther loves beer. He loves siting with his friends.
– And the pictures show that, don’t’ they?
– Yes. Yes.
– He’s, what shall we say, fleshy.
– Yes.
– In the pictures.
– And he is, but he is this gregarious person. I mean, the table talks are hanging out with his friends and talking theology. And for him, this is life. Theology is life. And life doesn’t need to be separated from worship. And I think he and Calvin absolutely have that in common. That life and worship should be completely overlapping. They should be, occupy entirely the same space in a person’s life. And we’ll get in a minute into the reduction of the number of sacraments that Luther got into.
– Yes. Yes.
– But in the meantime, speaking of the combination of the, well, theological and the earthbound, this wonderful picture of Luther preaching.

– Yes. Yes.
– With the crucified Christ in between in and the laity there.
– Preaching the cross. Preaching the cross. And one of the things that Lutheran scholars talk about, Luther’s understanding of the cross, that this is something one lives with. And how does one live with it? Well, among other things, it’s right at the center. That image is the predella of the altarpiece that we’ll see in its full version in a few minutes. And it sits on the altar. It is a reminder to all those who worship in the Wittenberg church that Christ made this sacrifice for all humankind. It is an act of love. It is an act of mercy. And Luther’s preaching points towards that, as Cranach’s image makes so explicit. We also have, as those who were devoutly looking on of course, laity.
– And another aspect, it seems to me, that makes this such a crucible of change as early 16th century, the Lutheran years, art was getting so much more sophisticated.
– Yes. Yes.
– And so we have these wonderful images that go with this change in thinking.

– Yes. Yes. It’s– Luther, this has been what I’ve been working on this year. Luther calls for the mass to be exclusively the words of institution. And in so doing, he cuts art from its liturgical life. Vestments, chalices, altarpieces, even arguably the altar itself, none of this matters as far as Luther’s concerned. And insofar as it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t need to be destroyed. I’ll come in a moment to how other people take that up. But for Luther it doesn’t need to be destroyed because it has no importance. It has no significance. It’s empty. It’s mere stuff. And he then actually sets in motion ways of thinking about art that I think are with us to this day, that we see it as hanging on a wall. We see it in museums. Museums, arguably, are one of the many consequences of severing the world of made things from liturgy, from worship, from a sense of Christ’s presence. Luther’s severing unleashes, and it’s interesting because some of the earliest acts of iconoclasm, which I’ve worked on, the earliest acts predate when Luther says this. So people starting to read the Bible, they read in the Old Testament that you’re not supposed to have any images.

– No graven images.
– No graven images. And so they begin destroying images in the fifteen-teens, 1520s. In Zurich, there is massive iconoclasm because Zwingli, unlike Luther, thinks that images are powerful and seductive and they need to be removed from places of worship because otherwise they will lead people to false conceptions of the nature of God.
– There is something chilling about this image, though, of burning the icons.
– Yes. Yes.
– It’s sort of a prescient of burning books, in the same part of the world.
– And all of these churches which, and I will say all of the churches, burn. I mean, they burn persons and they burn various objects. Luther’s books will be burnt by Catholic priests. Calvin’s books by Catholic priests. But the burning of these images which art historians have decried is itself this testimony to their power in the late medieval church. That these were ways of contemplating, I think the best ways of contemplating of nature of the incarnation. And Luther gets rid of it. He says no. The only way to contemplate the incarnation is the text of scripture.

– Now, about these sacraments.
– Yes.
– He’s getting rid of some of those too. Most of them, in fact.
– Yes. Yes.
– As practiced by the Catholic church.
– And this is something that I learned when I was working on catechisms, not the reduction, which I’d known about, but actually for Catholics the sacraments are deeply interconnected, so the Rogier van der Weyden, which we have up, that beautiful image also shows, within the space of this one church, most Christians would, in the course of their lives, see normally six of the seven sacraments. The last rites, the extreme unction would be performed at home. The priest would go to a person in his or her deathbed. But the others would be celebrated within the space of the church. So these were spatially all, they occurred in the same place. But they were also linked, and you can see that in some of the other, I didn’t bring those images in, but there are these quite wonderful images showing that the blood of Christ, that crucifixion at the center, again, of this altarpiece of the seven sacraments is itself, it flows through all these sacraments. And they remained for the Catholic church, it is affirmed as defining the Catholic church at Trent that there will be seven sacraments. And those sacraments mark the stages of a life, baptism, confirmation, either marriage or ordination, last rites, there are ongoing acts of penance and then of communion.

– Well–
– Ordination, yes, okay, so there are five which are once and then two which are repeated. Yes. Yes.
– But reduced by Luther to three.
– To three. Luther goes back and forth on the question of penance. And Lutherans, to this day I gather, are divided. Some hold penance to be a sacrament. For Luther, penance, although it has no scriptural, again no scriptural foundation, penance is a medieval sacrament. It’s not an originating sacrament. But that sense of being penitential, again Luther continues in his sense of a sacramental life. Otherwise he follows all evangelicals that there are only two acts that Christ authorizes: baptism, which initiates a person into a church, and then communion, which is the only sacrament that is to be repeated.
– Now, penance. Do indulgences come out of penance?
– Well, he rejects indulgences pretty vehemently. And this year–
– Even Wycliffe had before him, back in the 14th century.
– 2017 is an absolute institutionalization of his reaction to indulgences.
– The fact, the supposition that you could buy forgiveness.
– Yes.
– Literally buy it.

– Yes. Yes. And I continued to try to restore to us some sense of that late medieval world in which penance is, the image I love to bring forward is Dante and that three parts of the “Divine Comedy.” And Dante’s notion of those who are eternally damned and the horrors of hell and that these are graphically represented in lots of different churches. And that penance for Luther I think is inseparable from that sense of the horrors of damnation, and that Dante separates out a process by which Christians, none of whom are perfect, can continue to try to make it towards that perfection. And I think Luther protects that. He protects a sense that human beings will continue to want to seek perfection. Calvin, the last of the major churches for which we have images, we don’t really have images for Anabaptists, but the major churches for which we have images reduces it to baptism and communion. He absolutely supports this notion that all Christians should be penitential. He rejects the notion that it’s a sacrament. And so in this, the reformed tradition and the Lutheran tradition really divide. That, for Luther, sacrament remains, I’m sorry, penance remains a sacrament. Whereas, for Calvin, it is a state of being. One ought to remain there in a sense of self-examination and of self-criticism, but the practice of communion is to help strengthen one’s sense of God’s mercy, God’s forgiveness.

– So by the time we get toward–
– Mid-century.
– Yeah, the end of Luther’s life, Christian Europe is just all over the place.
– It’s torn apart. It’s torn apart. And, again, how do we tell the story? One of the oldest is Lutheran triumphalism and the recovery of the true church. But any map that we put up shows a world that’s been torn apart. Arguably, it had been torn apart much earlier. Arguably, the expulsions of Jews, beginning in England and France, culminating in Spain, throughout the Holy Roman Empire, Austria, these are all places that have sought a homogeneous Christianity at the expense of religious minorities who were living within their lands. But in 1492, the Spanish crown really thought that they had finally created a Christian kingdom. And within 60 years of that, you have a shattered Europe, and you have a Europe that will go into war for the next 80 years. And horrific stories, I mean the stories that come out of France are probably the worst, of Protestants who are cut open by Catholics and their hearts are ripped out and eaten. And the worst story that I can recall in the moment is a Protestant mother, pregnant, who is killed and her child is ripped out of her belly and baptized in her blood as a Catholic and given to a Catholic family. It tears apart Europe because each of these churches is claiming to be true Christianity, and each one is also saying, going back to that image that we begin with, the polarized, the polemical, the bipolar. That this is, there’s a true Christian and there’s a false Christian, and the false Christian should be destroyed.
– Yeah, which is not a very Christian concept, is it?
– No, no it’s not.
– That’s the problem with so many of these conflicts.

– Erasmus, Thomas More, More is a more problematic figure in some ways, but Erasmus is devastated. I mean, he is profoundly a pacifist. He dies in 1536, and arguably he dies of a broken heart. We come back to that question, though, whether this, you know, this story of the bloodshed, is that where we end the story? And one of the interesting things in thinking about how often, and when I think about the way the Reformation, the story was told when I was an undergraduate. Luther, largely triumphalist, heading towards the modern world. We stop in 1555, Peace of Augsburg, a religious coexistence, which is not finally truly achieved until 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia. But that sort of privileges one of the churches. And one of the interesting things that has happened in my lifetime is a return to thinking about the Catholic church and the story of the Reformation then that we tell. How do we tell it? And when I teach it, I talk about the globalization of Christianity. And I would say that, again one of those ironies of history, that without the horrific fragmentation in Europe we would not have global Christianity. We would not have Christians getting on ships, which, after all, that was a dangerous venture, and going elsewhere in order to save souls.

– Yeah, well, even save their own souls.
– Yes. Yes.
– Think about the Plymouth Rock experience.
– Yes. Yes.
– Why did they come over? Because they were persecuted in England.
– Yes. Yes. And we have both Christians leaving Europe because they are unwelcome in various places. Catholics fleeing Protestant countries; Protestants fleeing Catholic countries. But we also have the very first order which is instituted to spread Catholicism worldwide.
– All the way to–
– China. China.
– Look at this.
– China, yes. Yes. And… taking to China a notion of Christianity deeply rooted in Europe. But in an effort to convert the Chinese, Christianity is, of course, transformed.
– By its contact with these other cultures?

– Yes. Yes. Also by the persons, I mean the Jesuits are a fascinating order. They have been the subject of intensive study. We have this wonderful map entirely in Chinese. It’s Jesuit knowledge translated into Chinese for the use of the Chinese, but in an effort to bring these two worlds together to think about, first of all, the globe. A Jesuit map, and if we go back and we think about Ptolemy, this map is about a hundred years later, a little later than that, but a hundred years, in a hundred years we have, we moved from a conception, a European conception of the world as being restricted to Europe and North Africa to a conception of the world as encompassing all these continents and thinking of that as potentially Catholic. And, in an effort to make it Catholic, not remaining in Italian or Latin–
– But universal.
– But turning to these other languages and translating sacred texts into languages which are completely removed. One of my favorite objects, there are a number of different things I show students for instance, there are psalms in Gaelic. So reaching into the highlands of Scotland, we have these Presbyterian texts heading into the highlands and the Scots in the highlands singing their psalms, the psalms of David, in Gaelic. Or catechisms in [inaudible] or Algonquin. Languages which are not only not European languages but which lead their native speakers to try to make these acts of translation, to carry them forward, these acts of translation, into entirely different systems of thought.

– Well, Lee Wandel, thank you for taking us on a rapid-fire tour of the Reformation, the spread, splintering let’s say, and spread of Christianity from 15th, 16th century for 500 years.
– This has been terrific. Thank you.
– A pleasure for me too. I’m Norman Gilliland, I hope you can join us next time around for University Place Presents.