217. How to Tear the West Apart

A miner’s son, decided one day, to nail 95 thesis to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg in the year of our lord 1517.  It seems unlikely he intended to split his church, the Catholic, universal church, into a bewildering multiplicity of new religions and sects.

And yet, trained in the Devotio Moderna’s way of taking action and responsibility, for his own salvation, he ran into problems.  

What Luther did with the 95 theses, or 95 propositions if you prefer, was a common garden variety way of opening an argument and inviting the university to participate.  Some even say the nailing to the door part is just dramatic enhancement, never happened, he just circulated some hand written stuff around campus, in the conventional way.  This episode is about dramatic enhancement, so anyway.   Well he had copies made and sent them around to friends, who apparently copied them some more and sent them around some  more until “Soon, Luther had the uneasy surprise of receiving them back from Southern Germany, PRINTED.” 

Transcript

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Welcome back to Hanging with History. This is season two. Exploring the causes of that miracle that happened. That one time. Knight Rider set up a YouTube channel for Hanging with History. If you'd be willing to do me a favor, please go over there and give the channel a follow. Even if you would never listen to the podcast on YouTube. I'm told a number of good things will happen if people do that. Thank you. This is season two, number three, episode two hundred and seventeen. How to tear the West Apart. A minor's son decided one day to nail ninety-five theses to the door of the All Saints Church in Wittenberg in the year of our Lord 1517. It seems unlikely he intended to split his church, the Catholic Universal Church, into a bewildering multiplicity of new religions and sects. And yet, trained in the Devotio Moderna's way of taking action and responsibility for his own salvation, for his purpose and life, he ran into some problems. Jacques Barzun, in his book From Dawn to Decadence, a useful cultural history from 1500 to the year 2000, points out that Shakespeare's Hamlet was educated at Wittenberg. So was his friend Horatio, and by implication, school friends Rosenkrantz and Gildenstern also. And of course, that is where Hamlet wants to go back to, where his uncle King Claudius does not want to let him go, that brother killing uncle of Hamlet's. Hamlet gets this intellectual philosophical veneer from having gone to Wittenberg. It helps explain who he is, and also adds pleasing ambiguity. When his father's ghost is in purgatory, which is absolutely forbidden in Protestant theology, it's just superstition. But then what is a ghost? Ghosts are just superstition. But again, as metaphors, ghosts are arresting and immediately real. We understand ghosts from childhood. We understand ghosts. Back to Luther, and remember last episode, what Luther did with ninety-five theses or ninety-five propositions, if you prefer was a common garden variety way of opening an argument and inviting the university to participate. Some even say the nailing to the door part is just dramatic enhancement, never happened. He just circulated some handwritten stuff around campus in the conventional way. And this episode is about dramatic enhancement, so anyway, keep that in mind. Well, he had copies made and sent them around to friends, who apparently copied them some more, and sent them around to s and sent them around some more until, quote, soon Luther had the uneasy surprise of receiving them back from southern Germany printed. In other words, Luther's words, whatever his intentions were, slipped out of his control and spread everywhere. It's like the virus escaping Wuhan. Quote, Luther's hope of reform might have foundered like many others of the previous two hundred years, had it not been for the invention of printing. Gutenberg's movable type, already in use some forty years, was the physical instrument that tore the West asunder. I hope you heard the last episode. This is classic Reformation history. You've heard it before, without perhaps the emphasis on tearing the West asunder, but we know that Luther's reform ideas and the printing press share the same root. Gruta, I'm Gerhard Gruta. We know that Chinese technology, Mongol militarism, inspired by Genghis' spiritual sky god to rule the world, making use of the cultural institution of slavery, combined with a popular preacher who wrote a book everybody wanted but could not have, to create a literate society that demanded reading material like no other place that it ever existed, and with just in time newly arrived technology that could be developed and iterated until it could satisfy that demand. And the existence of that supply revealed hitherto unsuspected demand for writing which could be supplied by literate miners' sons, like Luther supplied by Gruta. So now you so you see how cause and effect when it comes to cultural change is so tangled. Wherever you start the story seems like an origin point. We started it with Groot, but first told you an earlier story about the origins of European civilization from Anatolia. Now we have the key to modern history, the Reformation, a cause like no other. But also it does not stand uncaused. Aristotle? Is that you? Back to history. In a cool development, woodcuts could be used to illustrate ideas that were written down in words. Cranick, Durer, and other great artists lent their hands to illustrating the early propaganda. After all, in central Germany, most were still illiterate. Grote's impact was further west. Then of course, Luther originally wrote in Latin, but soon the ideas passed into the vernacular, illustrated, printed cheaply, and boom bang, there you go, the popularization of ideas through mass media. It's not even fifty twenty yet, and some very heady ideas are escaping out into the public. Usually this story is one of ideas, originating in Wycliffe, in Oxford, England, passing to John Huss in Bohemia, then to Luther in Saxony. I told the story myself that way five years ago, but last episode we added the common root of the Reformation and printing and even humanism, the Devotio Moderna. I will point out that Wycliffe and Gruta were both operating at the same time, making quite similar accusations against the church, both in response to the Black Death, which seemed like God's response to the sinfulness of the church. Wycliffe was more intellectual, Gruda was more popular and emphasizing the personal interiority of religious experience with which Luther was so blessed or afflicted. But in particular, it was Wycliffe's ideas that Luther would take and run with, informed or contextualized with Gruda's interiority. Barzin expands this idea still further. He points out that Christians desiring to go back to simpler times to live according to the gospel has a long history, and that predates the Devotio Moderna, a cultural theme he calls primitivism. As discussed in the first few episodes of the podcast, this is the stuff that was in the words, from the beginning, the manifest content of the gospels. The Albigensians tried something like this, they were exterminated. The Low Countries had the begines from the twelfth century as urbanization began to really take off. The begines were buildings designed for women living lives devoted to the service of the poor or the sick, but not wanting to take vows. They lived together in communal housing but kept their private property, and they had the option of leaving any time, and did often to marry. They were also often accused of heresy. The occasional burning was the price they paid for freedom and independence. Living the simple life would be great if it weren't for all the judgmental types around. Many of these households adapted and joined the sisters of the common life later. They lived under a very similar rule, although they had to give up the private property to join the common life. Ostensibly, Luther's questions were about the role of money, human money in salvation, and the operations of heaven. This was really brilliant because it was so solid logically. Every thinking person had to agree with him as far as his initial argument went. The sale of indulgences was a big public issue at the time. The reformed areas of the church didn't sell indulgences. The idea was too stupid for Italians, for example, but Germans and Scandinavians could be squeezed like suckers. Of all the problems of the church, leaving this large, unreformed geographical region was probably the biggest. It left too much temptation for the unscrupulous to commit obvious frauds. The idea was that the Pope could draw on the merits of the saints in heaven, you could give money to the Pope, and he would let you a couple weeks off purgatory. The sales of indulgence was farmed out in many regions, leading to the scummy, scammy marketing practices that so many were appalled by. Two weeks off purgatory for the price of one, act now, get your grandmother one year off purgatory, all for the price of six months for your grandfather. Dead infant, act now, for one silver penny, one week out of purgatory, but by before Lent, get six weeks out of purgatory and into heaven. When we covered this in season one, Cammy had a good laugh over these tactics, but Luther took them seriously. It's truly a horror to see people's love and grief exploited this way by the church that is supposed to be their shepherd. I'm not trying to relitigate the case here, but if you can feel the emotional force at stake here, you might understand why Luther was suddenly successful when all the other reformers had failed previously. He tapped into something they didn't understand. Luther wanted to know whether God accepted money instead of true remorse. What is the sacrament of penance? Is it my interior experience of feeling? Can it happen external to the penitent? He asked his archbishop. So now he's getting pushy and in dangerous territory. The Archbishop got a one third cut of the sale of indulgences. Getting no answer, Luther pushed further and sent the ninety five These to Rome. It's not just indulgences, right? When you die you can pay priests and even monks to pray for your soul and push you out of purgatory somehow without ever repenting. God receives you. This seemed absurd to anyone taking the idea seriously. The ninety five These had this part about indulgences. An indulgent can never remit guilt. The Pope himself cannot do such a thing. God has kept his own hand. It can have no efficacy for souls in purgatory. Penalties imposed by the church can only refer to the living. What the Pope can do for souls in purgatory is by prayer. The Christian who has true repentance, that's the interior experience, has already received pardon from God, altogether apart from indulgence, and so does not need one. I read you that not to argue the church, at least in Germany and Scandinavia, was venal and cultivated superstition. I did it to show that even within the universities the active agency of the Christian was the core idea, an early type of individualism. And yeah, these isms like primitivism and individualism are going to be discussed in a cultural context later. Because then Luther had another experience and this, with his words, was amplified broadly and it made the individual interior experience central to faith. It was this, a long paragraph from Barzan. Understand that for Luther and contemporaries, this experience was a big deal, but for the generations to come, it became central. It was number one thing. This is right after sending the letter to the Pope. Now, thirty four years old, he was not a young hothead. For seven years he'd lived in anguish, often in despair about the state of his soul. He had fought the urgings of the flesh, not only desire, but also hatred and envy. As an aside, people often think urgings of the flesh is code for sexual desire, but really they would mean any unworthy thought or feeling, you know, desire to cheat, to deceive, a flash of anger, moment of gluttony. Back to the quote. And he had always lost this battle. How could he hope to be saved? Then one day, when a brother monk was reciting the creed, the words I believe in the forgiveness of sins struck him as a revelation. I felt as if I were born anew. Faith had suddenly descended upon him without his doing anything to deserve it. His divided self or sick soul, as William James called the typical state, was mysteriously healed. The mystery was God's bestowal of grace. Lacking it, the sinner cannot have grace and walk in the path of salvation. Such is the substance, not merely of the Protestant idea, but of the Protestant experience. The argument is that centering the experience is a cultural change that accelerates the use of reason and centers empiricism for the evaluation of lived experience. I think this is the basic core difference between the English Enlightenment and the French Enlightenment, as in between Hume on one side and Diderot Rousseau on the other, all great thinkers, great reasoners, you know, great users of that tool, but Hume limits himself to facts and Diderot elevates key social attitudes to the status of fact, leaving him not reason with a capital R as a tool, but motivated reason as a tool. A key error we see repeated down through subsequent generations. All right, back to history. Luther wrote about his experience and was quickly deluged with reports of similar experiences from people in every walk of life, every humble and exalted station. Luther ran with the idea and came up with a powerful simplification that exalted man, in an interesting parallel to which the humanists exalted man. It's happening at the same time for different motivations. We'll get into humanism in more detail later. It was the idea that every man is a priest. It is not every man is another Christ, as the Catholic ordination of priests puts it, which is to make a reference for England, you know, Reginald Poole believed in predestination also, according to McCullough, but that the church hierarchy would all be saved. Luther, by contrast, is now at the stage where he realizes he does not need the church hierarchy at all, because he has direct access to God, as do we all. That top heavy apparatus, a burden throughout the West, is useless. To make the proposition absolute, he added the principle called Christian liberty. A Christian man is a perfectly free lord, subject to none. People now, and then took this principle the wrong way. Liberty, in a world governed by the laws of physics, is only possible with responsibility, so it came with the counterpart a Christian man is a perfectly dutiful servant, subject to all. But still, Luther's formula was broadcast far and wide in the vernacular, so that the common people would hear it. Every man a priest, a free lord, and no church. This could only mean a new way of life. The Pope took three years to respond, and during that time Luther had run very far. Basically he created an incipient revolution with a defined enemy, the Pope, his employees, and their hocus pocus magic. The church was in a very vulnerable state. Its leadership was just awful. Leo X was Pope. He was a Medici, given a cardinal's cap at the age of thirteen. What that means is he was promoted not for any merit of his own, but for who his father was, Lorenzo Medici the Magnificent, this sort of thing, giving people jobs based on who their parents were, is a great way to promote weak candidates. It's a key ancient concept, weakened during the Christian period, but still very strong. It gets recycled from time to time. It's had quite a resurrection in the Anglophone institutions just recently, quite surprisingly, it throws up weak kings in history, it throws up weak kings and popes at critical moments, like 1517, 1641, 1789, and 1917. It denies human competence in favor of a sort of non-empirical magical belief. And in Rome, there was Leo X, a Medici Pope. The popes had a bad reputation at the time, there'd just been the Borgia popes, and Leo's immediate predecessor, Julius II, was the warrior pope, fighting war after war at least twice, leading from the front, like Julius Caesar, fighting for Roman power and territory against Borgia territories, then against Venice, and then against France. This was all terrible for the reputation of the papacy, which had had a pretty bad couple hundred years. Institutionally, it mainly served to protect the interests of wealthy cardinals and their families, which was the wrong thing for a Christianity facing the growing Ottoman threat after 1453. Don't get me wrong about the weaknesses of the church. In Iberia and France it was largely run by the crown and was reasonably well governed. It functioned well in Italy and England as well, for different reasons, okay? Julius II is the one who started the rebuilding of St. Peter's Basilica, got Michelangelo to design that magnificent tomb for him. Leo X carried on with patronage of the arts, as, as I've said, the popes had forgotten to think much about theology and religion. Julius II with his wars had emptied the treasury and got the papacy into debt. The indulgences were intended to help with that. They would milk the rubes in Germany and Scandinavia. This couldn't possibly spark a backlash. Leo X was already selling off church assets and borrowing ever larger sums. He too fought expensive wars, for the glory of the church, to hold back the Saracens. Or was it for putting his nephew Lorenzo on the throne of the Duchy of Urbino?

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Hmm.

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Leo X has his defenders, you know, good taste in art, commissioning Raphael and Michelangelo, expanding the Vatican Library, but but he was just the wrong man at the wrong time. He didn't last long and was succeeded by Adrian VI, the Dutchman, the first Dutch pope, a real Northern European Renaissance intellectual, who came into office as a compromise candidate. He was a reformer, saw the need for reform as clearly as Luther and Erasmus, so the Italian cardinals hated him and undermined him at every opportunity. He didn't get to accomplish much, had little support inside the curia, in effect tilting at windmills, trying to save money, reduce the cardinal spending, but he only lasted twenty months, replaced by Clement VII, who was Leo X's cousin, Giulio Medici, who lasted ten years, another wrong man for the job, but who checked the right boxes and protected the privileges of the Italian cardinals. He was the Pope who lost England. Germany left because the church overexploited it, England, for a different reason, stay tuned, though you could make the argument and I'm about to that papal exploitation was common to both England and Germany. Well, Leo condemned forty one of Luther's ninety five Theses and then excommunicated him the next year. But before he did that, he strengthened Frederick of Saxony, Luther's defender, to gain support in the fifteen nineteen imperial election. That gave Luther a grand opportunity. He made a thunderous speech and looking for all the world like an Old Testament prophet, he burned the papal bull, and a few other bad books for good measure, and this was all to the delight of the students, and the news of it travelled far and wide. Long quote from Barzin How a revolution erupts from a commonplace event, a tidal wave from a ripple is cause for endless astonishment. Neither Luther in fifteen seventeen, nor the men who gathered at Versailles in seventeen eighty nine intended at first what they produced at last. Even less did the Russian liberals who made the revolution of nineteen seventeen foresee what followed. All were as ignorant as everybody else about how much was to be destroyed, nor could they guess what feverish feelings, what strange behavior ensue when revolution, great or short lived, is in the air. Erasmus in fifteen seventeen Immortal God, what a century do I see beginning? If only it were possible to be young again or Wordsworth on the French Revolution, we've heard this one before. Bliss was it in the dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven. These strong feelings run headfirst into reality and the varied interests of the powerful and those who wish to become powerful. New ideologies, by their nature, not having faced the test of time and never experienced modifying and conforming to the real world, drive the revolutionaries into irrational stances. It's just unavoidable. There is betrayal, real and imagined, friendships are broken, even families are. But none of this holds back the transfer of power and property which is the mark of revolution, which in the end establishes the idea. To the outside observer, the course of events is a rushing flood. To those inside, it is a whirlpool. More or less that, the feel of revolutions. The events vary in detail. There's more or less blood, more or less persuasion, but all the human motives are there. It's greed and the love of destruction, hatred of order, fanatic fervor, heroic devotion, fear, ambition, and the hope for something better. Pandora, are you there? You, Pandora. But there's also a weird chance. Consider Henry VIII, and there he is with his illegitimate, incestuous marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Cursed by God with no male heir as a consequence, he goes to the Pope. A Medici. Surrounded with the power of Charles V, protecting him from Francis I, or simply holding him captive. Well, Catherine is the Emperor's auntie, so the Emperor tells the Pope to answer no. We spent quite a lot of time on the details of what happened back in year two. But there is a lot of chance here. This is all drama, soap opera, simply operatic drama. It's happening as Luther is prizing Germany and Scandinavia away from the Pope. It all leads Henry to pull England out of the Roman Catholic Church to found a church headed by a king, not a cleric. And in the end, with a short exception as you know Philip II and Mary and Poole rule in England for just a short time, the separation from Rome is permanent. And so we see Henry's actions and its acceptance by the people as part of the Reformation, what Barzan sees as a religious revolution. But it is also an action asserting the power of the king, with future consequences for the next cultural revolution, the one that saw monarchs concentrating power in the seventeenth century. Was a European wide phenomenon, but leading leading another king, Charles I into a position as head of the church to stick his nose into the whirring buzzsaw of the Scottish Kirk. The English Reformation has a dramatic arc worthy of a screenwriter, and so does Luther's arc. As history, that's kind of coincidence, and we have to concede coincidence is real, but for cultural development, the dramatic stories matter to our social monkey brains. Let's discuss the dramas. Henry is a noble prince, a flawless, athletic, noble body, the mind of an impressive scholar, a reluctant king, only in the role by chance, thrust forward by the death of his beloved brother Arthur. He marries his sister in law, because his father and Catherine's parents, Ferdinand and Isabella, you might have heard of them, and their world historical importance, want him to. Seems incestuous, sure, but the Pope says it's okay. The fix is in. Put aside your doubts. Put aside your doubts. Put aside your doubts. But maybe the Pope is not really in charge. Because Henry is cursed. Catherine can make babies, but the boys just die. Henry can make babies. The boys live. But only with women not Catherine. It appears the Pope doesn't have the power everyone says. The institution of the papacy is still the place to go to get a divorce. It is the only game in town for now, but the emperor forbids it. My auntie and all the immense bribes Woolsey and his agents deliver to the curia are for naught. Henry pulls the Anglican Church out of the grip of Rome, then corrupted by greed and lust, he begins the fraudulent process of disestablishing the monasteries and seizing other church lands he needs to rely on ideological Protestants to carry through the slow process of taking the monasteries. Referring to Thomas Cromwell, he also loves one Anne Boleyn. England becomes increasingly Protestant. Protestants are everywhere. They run the show. They even sleep in the king's bed. Although Henry doesn't change his personal religion much at all. And then Henry beheads his love Anne, who provides him with a girl child, Elizabeth, who will become the greatest monarch of all time, or something like that, adding yet more incest to the story, at least in the accusations against Anne, which no one believes. Cromwell himself is beheaded four years later, and then comes the bewildering pattern of marriage and beheadings. But at the end, there is Edward, a new king, God's judgment on Henry's curse. He must have been right to leave the church and behead those women. The young boy king accomplishes much but dies tragically. God calls his own to him. The plot next season is centered on a reversion to evil. Bloody Mary steps forward. The flames lick. Crackle, crackle, crackle. While Spanish clerics hold Archbishop Cramner at the window. They burn one of England's greatest writers, Hugh Latimer, he was a bishop also, with another bishop, Nicholas Ridley, a supporter of Jane Gray. So, with Cramner watching, they burn two young men whom Cramner loved. All their efforts against Cramner fail. There's a McCullough sourced episode on Cramner, episode twenty-eight, which is really good. Cramner is made into a grand propaganda victory over the Spanish Catholics, which is ironic since they worked so hard to win a propaganda victory using him. Cramner is like Gandalf. They burned him in the end. But he foxed them, and his heart was unburnt. By the way, Mary's story often gets told as if she were not a Spanish Habsburg, subordinating her realm to that of Spain and the church. Often the leading Spanish clerics and their religious policy are not even mentioned in tales of her reign. And before I get any shouty emails, I'm not saying she deliberately sold out her kingdom or anything like that. It was just her natural, medieval, kinship, intensive behavior. But anyway, she married her cousin Philip II. Her grandparents, Ferdinand and Isabella, were his great grandparents, again, his great grandparents. She's marrying a first cousin once removed, and she recreates her father's curse. She dies barren. God is telling the English people something, they refuse to listen. Her papal dispensation came from Julius III, a pope who, well, got his lover made into a cardinal despite his age of fourteen and illiteracy. Of course God cursed her. Mary ignores the message of the Gospel of Mark, just as people are beginning to read the Gospels for themselves in their own languages. So Mary dies as she lived, a tragic heroine. A medieval woman in a world modernizing, fitfully. But she's succeeded by Gloriana, the great Virgin Queen, who beards the Spaniards and steals their silver and gold, and Jehovah defends her. Ignoring Catholic fleets which sail to Scotland and Ireland, God's finger falls upon every Catholic fleet sent against England from that day to this. As a sign of God's favor to God's true church and God's true children, God's only true children. That's the drama. We'll get into a lot of the cultural history there in the near future. More immediately for us is Luther. He also has a story a screenwriter could only dream of. To close out the episode, I'll just tell the drama, it will set us up for a satirist, Erasmus of Rotterdam for next episode. Luther has asked his questions about money. Give the church money, they get you out of purgatory, leave money to a chantry, a priest will pray for your soul or anyone you specify in the bequest every day. Money not only makes the world go round, it makes the afterlife go round. And by the way, a chantry is just about everywhere in the Catholic world of the time. You pay for a priest to pray, the Benedictines and others did this too. But I have the impression they mostly prayed for the souls of their fellow brothers. If you have some knowledge of this, send me a non-shouty email to hanging with history podcast at gmail.com. But the indulgences, while not forbidden, were basically not tolerated in parts of the church that were already relatively reformed, i. e. outside Germany and Scandinavia. People at the time also saw them indulgences as too stupid to be believed. The Canter Reformation banned them, although refused to concede that they were ineffective doctrinally. Back to the drama. The answer Luther got was a papal bull and excommunication. The Pope got Charles V to put Luther on trial at the Diet of Worms, and there, confronted by a furious attack from the church in front of the assembled great men of the Empire, including the Emperor himself, in the second act, Luther hesitated, doubted himself. They asked him, wasn't it possible that he was wrong? He admitted he might be. But then he came back in the third act, full of confidence and defiance of power. God is with me, so why should I fear man? Here I stand. I can do no other. Then upon leaving the town of Worms, where the emperor had promised his safety, but outside, the Archbishop could take him and welcome him warmly for a hot minute. But out of nowhere a band of armed men scattered the friends who surround him, toss Luther into a cart and ride off into the distance. Who took him? Where? Is Luther still alive? And then came a stream of brilliant writings out of nowhere. We know it was the Warsburg, but they didn't. As if divinely inspired. There was a defense of justification by faith. There was the idea that monastic vows were not binding. There was his critique of the mass, more attacks on indulgences, encouragement for priests to marry. It was like this time in hiding was magical because during that time he wrote a German version of the New Testament, guaranteeing that Luther would be deep in the affections of Germans. And then a year later he started composing German language hymns. He emphasized music in worship. And then the first war inspired by Luther broke out. The first. But these were rebellions by filthy peasants who were revolting, and Luther explained they were really inspired by the devil, who threw an inkwell at him. He then smuggled a nun out of a convent in a herring barrel, after outwitting the guards. These are not the barrels you are looking for, as he subtly waved his hands. And then he married her. He was fond of pickled herring, but just yesterday my father was telling me that fresh herring was more popular in the villages of North Norway back in the nineteen forties and fifties. Then there was a scene where he was again attacked by the devil and like Marx Christ, felt abandoned by God. Struck down by a vision, he picked himself from the floor, brushed off the debris, spit out a tooth, wiped off the blood, and stood tall, inspired to compose a mighty fortress is our God. But then he was challenged by radical politics. New sects and creeds proliferated and split and then split again. He tried to bring Zwingli back to the faith. Go listen to the Drown the Anabaptists episode. But there were now irreconcilable differences within Protestantism. Then he heard the news of Munster and the crazed anabaptists, their primitive communism, their polygamy, their making bread from the paving stones of the streets. He felt it like a personal blow. Why God, do we have to turn to this crazed enthusiasm instead of the orderly society you so love? Why do the hungry first kill the bakers? As the HBO series came to a finale, he cried out to God again, full of grief as a second daughter was taken from him. Why did you give us such love only to twist it into misery? He dwells on this fate we earthborn creatures have. His mind takes a darker turn, becoming a Jew hater as the world narrowed around him, with ever darker edges. And if we put the drama aside, the arc of human life, we look at a world, well, the Christian world, which had some failures that people were quite sensitive to. I'll quote Jacques Barzon. The priest, instead of being a teacher, was ignorant. The monk, instead of trying to save the world with piety, was an idle profiteer. The bishop, instead of supervising the care of souls, was a politician and a businessman. And one of them, here or there, might be pious and a scholar. He shows that goodness is possible, but too often the bishop was a boy of twelve, his influential family having provided for his future happiness. The system was rotten, and this was something everybody already knew. And yet somehow nothing could be done to change these abuses. And so we have a sort of cultural turning point, a kind of culturally creative point. When people accept the absurd, when they accept futility, the society is decadent and ripe for change. Decadent sounds like a slur, but according to Barzun, it is a technical term, that's how you define it. You can creatively imagine and change cultural forms. Typically not for the better, but if there is some sort of effective feedback mechanism, the initial changes can keep iterating until something good arises. We'll have an art coming up on poverty illustrating this. But this is pretty important. If Barzin is right, a culture becomes decadent and then is far more able to make cultural change. Anyway, the early sixteenth century had one of the greatest satirists and scholars to ever live, Erasmus. You'll hear more about him and his wisdom in in first his embrace of and then rejection of Lutheran's reform next episode. But before we close out today's episode, let's listen to a couple of minutes of the Reformers' Resistance song about Martin Luther. And this has a serious purpose. It is the combination of rationalism with an emotional component which is a little dark. If you can hear the combination, it will help as we move through the cultural change caused by the Reformation. I think music might be a better medium for trying to show combinations like this. I'm introducing some ideas that will be covered in the next ten episodes or so. To be clear, there's no evil here, no embrace of evil, either direct or surreptitious, but there is a bit of acceptance of the void here. It sort of surprised me, but I've been told there's always a Jungian shadow side of any complex set of ideas or attitudes, and Lutheranism is surely that. What we have with Lutheranism is a ground that will always produce a certain kind of extremist, uh very similar to Pietism in practically every generation going forward. Thus this is what Alexander embraced in eighteen twelve to eighteen fifteen, you know, that we covered in all those post eighteen twelve episodes. You probably did not hear those. There's so little overlap between the listeners interested in the philosophical religious episodes versus those listening for the diplomacy and military history. But in reality, they're all telling the same human story, a rational machine packed into a social monkey body. The humanists basically deny the Lutheran idea that what we find in the Gospels is everything, that when we accept what's in the Gospels, we should angrily reject all else. Christ won the battle once and for all, nothing else is needed. This angle of it is a bit nihilist. That's the opening to the void. And this is how in part culture change works. Ideologies and religions don't produce similar results for every person as we go through time. They're all a little different. We are all a little different. The initial conditions are unique for us all. Every generation has a slightly different set of conditions, but we step forward from a similar place, and we'll cover how culture emerges from within our own minds through a process of learning that appears like it comes from inside us rather than imposed from the outside world. And Calvin will establish a slightly different Protestantism with less emotional content, the back turned away from the void. A super rationalist Anglicanism, a Presbyterianism of that flavor, much congregationalism was like that. Still, of course, emotion could drift in like a fog in many of the Puritan traditions. The whole thing has to work for the social monkeys as well, as the rational machines. Along with Puritanism, America will be defined by Quakerism, and that combination of Puritan and Quaker values will become the universal culture of the modern world for good or ill. They both step out of the same ideological and emotional source. That's enough of that. Let's go more deeply into humanism, the wisdom literature of the sixteenth century. Folly, it is you I praise. Okay, here's the promise music. I hope it speaks to you. If you don't, please tell an enemy. If you're on Twitter X, go find me and give me a free. Thank you for listening. You can reach out to me. Or you can send a text through the link in the show notes.