popular among rightist Catholics, there is a straight line from Luther to the French Revolution, Marx, and Lenin; the other one, enthusiastically affirmed by many Reformed Christians, claims that Luther and Calvin are responsible for democracy, republicanism, freedom, Enlightenment, progress, individualism, and perhaps also socialized medicine, psychoanalysis, "freelove" and the Manchester School of Economics. These concepts are not so different because mutually the one is the caricature of the other.[3]
In my younger years I met fellow Catholics who saw Luther's Reformation in a way which I am tempted to satirize thus: There were the wonderful, wonderful Middle Ages, the "Ages of Faith," but then, after the fall of Constantinople, came these …show more content…
Petrarch and Boccaccio (who died in the odor of sanctity) were early Renaissance men. Yet in Northern Europe the Middle Ages continued longer than in the South: there Humanism[4] was a purely literary, not a general cultural, phenomenon. When, therefore, Martin Luther, Doctor of Theology and priest of the Order of the Augustinian Hermits, came to Rome late in 1510, he was for the first time in his life confronted with the Renaissance—and this gave him a decisive trauma. He was not (as a pious legend likes to have it) shocked by profligacy and promiscuity, since the Middle Ages put very little emphasis on carnal vices: temperentia was, according to St. Thomas, the lowliest virtue. The German scene, moreover, was in this respect no better than the Italian. What really gave this truly pious monk a jolt was the revival of Antiquity—financed, abetted, and fostered by the Papacy. Of paganism Luther had until his dying days a real profound horror. After three days of hotly debating with Martin Luther in Marburg the nature of the Eucharist, Huldreich Zwingli, the Swiss Reformer, gripped Luther's hands and said: "Here we're fighting. Doctor Martinus, but, thank God, one nice day we both will be dead and then in Heaven we shall know the Truth, walking with the great sages, …show more content…
Luther's critique of the Church was primarily based on her anthropocentric this-worldliness, her rationalistic intellectualism, her being drunk with art and beauty, her veneration of Saints and contempt for secular power. Luther's religiosity, after all, came from the great German mystics, but he was also a young professor in a brand-new, small university on the very confines of Germanic civilization: from the walls of Wittenberg one could see the thatched roofs of the Wendic peasants huts—and nobody in Wittenberg who had a Slav grandparent could be a member of the guilds. The Germans there were
In my younger years I met fellow Catholics who saw Luther's Reformation in a way which I am tempted to satirize thus: There were the wonderful, wonderful Middle Ages, the "Ages of Faith," but then, after the fall of Constantinople, came these …show more content…
Petrarch and Boccaccio (who died in the odor of sanctity) were early Renaissance men. Yet in Northern Europe the Middle Ages continued longer than in the South: there Humanism[4] was a purely literary, not a general cultural, phenomenon. When, therefore, Martin Luther, Doctor of Theology and priest of the Order of the Augustinian Hermits, came to Rome late in 1510, he was for the first time in his life confronted with the Renaissance—and this gave him a decisive trauma. He was not (as a pious legend likes to have it) shocked by profligacy and promiscuity, since the Middle Ages put very little emphasis on carnal vices: temperentia was, according to St. Thomas, the lowliest virtue. The German scene, moreover, was in this respect no better than the Italian. What really gave this truly pious monk a jolt was the revival of Antiquity—financed, abetted, and fostered by the Papacy. Of paganism Luther had until his dying days a real profound horror. After three days of hotly debating with Martin Luther in Marburg the nature of the Eucharist, Huldreich Zwingli, the Swiss Reformer, gripped Luther's hands and said: "Here we're fighting. Doctor Martinus, but, thank God, one nice day we both will be dead and then in Heaven we shall know the Truth, walking with the great sages, …show more content…
Luther's critique of the Church was primarily based on her anthropocentric this-worldliness, her rationalistic intellectualism, her being drunk with art and beauty, her veneration of Saints and contempt for secular power. Luther's religiosity, after all, came from the great German mystics, but he was also a young professor in a brand-new, small university on the very confines of Germanic civilization: from the walls of Wittenberg one could see the thatched roofs of the Wendic peasants huts—and nobody in Wittenberg who had a Slav grandparent could be a member of the guilds. The Germans there were