Ep. 244: The Leipzig Disputation – Free at Last

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans, Ep. 244: The Leipzig Disputation – Free at Last

“The long awaited debate with Johannes Eck, which had been brewing since the spring of 1518 was finally arranged for June 1519 at Leipzig, in the territory of duke Georg of Saxony. The meeting was another of the dramatic intellectual set pieces which pushed the Reformation forward, and was a decisive step in the movement reaching a wider public beyond an academic audience. But while it saw the emergence of a pro-Luther party, it also gave rise to the beginnings of a coalition against him. Moreover, it marked yet a further radicalization of Luther’s theology; indeed the older Luther would date his Reformation breakthrough to around this time. For Luther, there was no going back after Leipzig.”

This was Lyndal Roper summarising the first and only open debate between the Reformer and a champion of the established church, a debate the church itself did its best to prevent. How it came about, how Luther fared and why there was no going back from it is what we will discuss today.   

But before we start, can I come round with my begging bowl once again. I know you know that this show is advertising free. But what you may not know is that this does not only affect income but also my ability to promote the show. I am talking about podcast networks. Networks help podcasts to grow for example by cross-posting adverts for their member shows. Being a show without advertising, I am not welcome in these networks.

Which means I have to go down the content mines of social media to find new listeners. That costs time and drains the soul. Sometimes I hire people to help me with this, which I can only do because some of you are kind enough to make a contribution at historyofthegermans.com/support, generous souls like: CHARLES W., Craig S T., Roger P W., Tim N., Jerrod K., Connor M., Matthew E B., Atgeirr R., SN D., Peter K., Kristof T. and Samuel W. Thank you all so much!

And with that, back to the show.

The Aftermath of the Interview with Cajetan

Last time we ended on what could have easily been Martin Luther’s last supper. He had barely escaped arrest in Augsburg, and his prince, the Elector of Saxony had been instructed in no uncertain terms by the papal legate to at a minimum exile the heretic friar.

And if Frederick the Wise had ordered Luther to leave Wittenberg, he would most likely have either perished, been captured and sent to Rome or would have died in obscurity in Paris. But at the very last minute, as Luther was holding a farewell dinner with friends, Frederick the Wise requested him to stay. From this moment on, Luther was a de facto prisoner in the electorate of Saxony. The only way he could travel anywhere was under a safe conduct, ideally one issued by the emperor.

These travel restrictions were however not exactly forefront of his mind. He had come back from his meeting with the papal legate Cardinal Cajetan in Augsburg totally shaken. Friends had shown him the instructions Cajetan had received from Rome. Pope Leo X had insisted that under no circumstances was Luther to be given a fair hearing. Without engaging with his underlying arguments, the Curia had decided that Luther was a notorious heretic. The only question was, would he recant and promise to stay quiet from now on, or would he be sent to Rome in chains to be burned. What made this such a betrayal was that Luther had risked his life coming to Augsburg where he had been promised a fatherly hearing. As it turned out, it had been a trap to lure him into the hands of the pope. An organization that could deploy such underhand methods, what else was it capable of? Indeed what kind of an organization was it, was it from God or was it a vehicle of the devil?

He asked himself the question his father had posed to him all these years back when he had been celebrating his first mass. Was it God who had sent the thunderstorm that made you take monastic vows, or had it been a deception sent by the devil?

The first thing Luther did was to publish the instructions Cajetan had received, together with recollections from their discussion. That was in and of itself an unprecedented event. Never before had a heretic published the proceedings of his case to the public. These records had previously been kept amongst a small circle of participants and senior clergy, occasionally the temporal authorities. But now anyone with half a Groschen to spare could get a glimpse at the inner workings of the most powerful legal machinery in Christendom.

And Luther made sure they did not like what they got to see. He showed us a condescending Italian cardinal who insisted on applicants prostrating themselves before him; a pettifogger who tried to trap a straightforward and honest German with sophisticated rhetoric, quote: “with this self-assurance of his he made me look like a beaten man, especially as the Italians and the rest of his household smirked and, after their fashion, cackled with laughter…. But when I brought forward Scripture on my side, the fellow, still playing the father, began to make up glosses for me out of his own head.” End quote.

Cajetan, true to type, did not feel the need to respond to an uncouth German’s attacks and possibly distortions. He left the field of public opinion to Luther, so it is his version of events that stuck, and his version that shows up in contemporary and 19^th century depictions of the event.

Johannes Eck, Luther’s nemesis

But not everyone in the papal camp was unconcerned about Luther’s stranglehold on public opinion.

Enter stage left: Johannes Eck, Luther’s nemesis. Eck was no perfumed Italian, no old-fashioned scholastic. He was in terms of background and career very similar to Luther. He came from modest stock, in his case he was a true peasant; he had gone to university aged 12, studied theology and philosophy. He had not only Latin and Greek, but unusually, also a good grasp of Hebrew. A humanist, trying to get back to the sources.  After gaining his doctorate, he entered the faculty of the University of Ingolstadt, another one of these new universities founded by territorial princes.  He was a man of prodigious learning, immense memory and a highly skilled debater.

He however differed considerably from Martin Luther in his focus. During the years Luther struggled with his harsh God Monster over the way to salvation, Eck gained an international reputation as an expert on the ban on usury. Jakob Fugger had asked him for a theological opinion on the taking of interest and Eck argued that an interest rate of 5%  was acceptable under scripture, and even debated it at the world famous university of Bologna.

And as we heard last time, Eck was not impressed with Luther’s 95 theses, and had argued sharply against them in his Obelisci.

Amongst many, many other things, Eck had also studied the cases of previous heretics, in particular the Englishman John Wycliffe and the Czech reformer Jan Hus. (episodes 170 and 174 as well as David Crowther’s guest episode on John Wycliffe if you are interested). Eck’s main conclusion was that it was not enough to make Luther go away, his dangerous ideas needed to be crushed too. Denouncing John Wycliffe had not got rid of the Lollards and burning Jan Hus had triggered decades of war that ended in the toleration of a mild form of Hussitism.

Therefore the only way to solve this crisis once and for all was by publicly disproving Luther’s arguments. And Eck, a man unimpaired by modesty, decided he would be the knight champion of the church in this intellectual tournament. And maybe in the very back of his mind he dreamt of the immense rewards his success could yield, a bishopric at least, maybe even a cardinal’s hat. Well worth entering the lists for.

Eck’s Plan to get Luther to a Debate

Much to his confusion though, the authorities in Rome were not very enthusiastic about this second line of defence. They still hoped they could shut all this down quietly. Pope Leo X had sent his chamberlain, Karl von Miltitz, to Saxony. Miltitz was of Saxon noble stock and knew the elector from way back when. He worked intensely on the Elector Frederick the Wise, trying to achieve two things. One was to resolve the matter of the Augustinian friar, the other was the imperial election that went into the final straight when Maximilian I died in January 1519.

As long as the election was on, the pope could not risk alienating Frederick the Wise. Frederick was one of the seven electors, and as the most credible of the seven, held the decision whether it would be François of France or Charles of Spain who got the imperial crown.

Miltitz kept swinging back and forth, threatening excommunication one day and offering the Golden Rose, even support for Frederick’s own candidacy the next. In early January 1519 he met Luther at Altenburg and got a promise out of him: Luther would keep shtum as long as his opponents kept quiet too. Which they did not, and nor did he stop publishing.

This was what Eck’s plan to crush Luther in an open contest was up against. He had no support from the senior church leadership, in practice, the church tried to actively prevent giving Luther a platform, his prey was sitting safe and sound in Wittenberg where he could not be touched and every week that passed the stream of publications coming from Wittenberg swelled into a river threatening to wash away everything in its way.

To break Luther out of his shell, Eck went after one of his associates.

You may remember the Obelisci, Eck’s rejection of Luther’s 95 theses, written for private circulation and promptly leaked. Luther had responded with the Asterisci but then let the matter rest. But Eck kept pushing against Luther in humanist circles, which compelled Luther’s colleague and friend, Andreas Karlstadt, to get himself involved.

Karlstadt produced a rebuttal of Eck’s paper that stretched to a staggering 406 theses. These meandered well beyond the pedestrian world of indulgences. He asked whether scripture stands above all other authorities, including the opinion of the whole church. Whether papal decretals should be interpreted in light of scripture, rather than the other way, if free will exists, whether good works can gain salvation and lots more. Again, 406 theses in all.

Eck responded with a brief set of 12 theses. And here is the thing: though addressed to Karlstadt, almost all of them went after positions held by Luther. And the last one went well beyond indulgences. It defended the claim that the pope’s supremacy came from Christ himself. Luther concluded that Eck had broken the truce of Altenburg and felt free to answer with 13 counter-theses of his own.

Karlstadt then upped the ante by asking Cranach to produce  a giant satirical cartoon showing Eck driving a wagon into the jaws of hell. Unfortunately this was not the greatest piece of propaganda, as the verbose Karlstadt put so many speech bubbles onto the image, one can barely make out what is going on. This mess became known as Karlstadt’s wagon. Being told that he was hard to understand, Karlstadt responded by publishing a further 55 page treatise containing a mix of theological arguments and below the belt insults.

That was exactly what Eck needed. If he asked to face him in an open debate, Karlstadt could not refuse – and actually Karlstadt was gagging for it. And though he boasted, he would leave his opponent a “dead lion”, it was also obvious that Karlstadt with his wobbly wagon and his wordy waffle could not possibly hold out against the wily wit and weighty wisdom of Dr. Eck. Karlstadt needed help and Eck knew that this help could only come from his ultimate quarry, the man at the centre of the whole affair, Martin Luther. Luther could not afford to let his close collaborator go down in flames, as his ideas would go down with him.

The Build-up to the Leipzig Disputation

The only question that remained open was, where to hold the debate. Eck could have invited his opponent to come to Ingolstadt or any other university or venue in the empire. Karlstadt wasn’t indicted as a heretic. Hence he could travel anywhere. But Luther could not. Cajetan had ordered all the German princes and bishops to immediately apprehend Luther upon threat of excommunication and interdict. And given few princes had the political standing and backbone of Frederick the Wise, most would have complied with the demand from Rome.

What Eck needed was a location for his disputation that Luther could get to without being arrested. And there were very few, if any places that fit. It could be done in Wittenberg, but that would be giving Karlstadt and Luther the home advantage. Erfurt could just about work, but the university wasn’t keen and after all, Erfurt’s overlord was the archbishop of Mainz. Frankfurt an der Oder was Tetzel’s home turf and far too hostile for the Wittenbergers.

But there was Leipzig, one of the oldest universities in the empire,  and located within the lands of duke George of Saxony, the cousin of Frederick the Wise. Their lands were still deeply intertwined, meaning Luther could easily pass from Electoral Saxony to Ducal Saxony without having to cross third party territory.  

And George was keen. At this time he was still very much Luther-curious and kept his distance from the papacy. Like Frederick the Wise, George had blocked the sale of the St. Peter’s indulgences in his lands. He was in the middle of a reform of the Saxon church and was also a pious man seeking a way to salvation. So, when he heard of Eck’s proposal of a debate, he volunteered his university at Leipzig.

The professors there weren’t keen and the local bishop explicitly prohibited it. But George told the bishop quote:  “Disputations have been allowed from ancient times, even concerning the Holy Trinity. What good is a soldier if he is not allowed to fight, a sheep dog if he may not bark, and a theologian if he may not debate? Better spend money to support old women who can knit than theologians who cannot discuss.” End quote.

Karlstadt and the Wittenberg professors were all fired up by the idea of going to Leipzig. Leipzig was large, ancient by German standards and hugely prestigious. Many of the initial professors in Wittenberg had come from Leipzig. There was a friendly rivalry between the storied old place and the upcoming new university at Wittenberg. Ever since Luther’s 95 theses, student numbers there had gone through the roof. Melanchthon’s appointment had further boosted the reputation and very much to everyone’s astonishment, they had drawn level with their celebrated neighbour.

Luther was a bit more sceptical. After his experience in Augsburg he no longer believed the church was playing fair. In a letter to Spalatin he even asked, probably still in jest, whether the papacy wasn’t the antichrist after all. So he prepared. For months he buried himself in canon law and church history, trying to work out where exactly the pope’s authority came from. And there was one more snag: duke George had invited Karlstadt, not Luther. Luther would travel to Leipzig without knowing whether he would be allowed to speak at all. But the Wittenbergers could not refuse to appear and Luther could not leave Karlstadt to his own devices.

And with that, the debate was on.

The Stage is Set

If I describe this much like a football derby, it is because that is what it was. These intellectual tussles, like the one that Eck competed in at Bologna in 1515 defending usury, brought in huge crowds, were discussed widely amongst the intellectual elite, and in abbreviated form amongst the common folk too. And it wasn’t just the lack of alternative entertainment. These were life and death, or more precisely afterlife and death questions. Nothing to be taken lightly.

Like knightly tournaments, the two sides were supposed to wrangle with each other, score points not just for the quality of their arguments and sincerity of conviction, but also for wit, learning and the Ciceronian polish of their Latin.

The Wittenbergers came to Leipzig in full force. The professors, Karlstadt of course and Luther, but also Melanchthon and Nikolaus von Amsdorf. The honorary rector of the university, the 17 year-old duke Barnim of Pomerania added some high aristocratic shine to the procession. They brought a whole cart full of books guarded by 200 students, armed with axes and swords. Not that the entrance went entirely to plan. Right in front of the assembled crowd Karlstadt’s wagon broke down and the great man landed in the mud.

Johannes Eck had arrived a few days earlier, on his own. He did not need a cart full of books, because he had all the knowledge in his head. There were no assistants and colleagues with him, because he was ready to stand on his own, nor did he need 200 students to cheer him on.

Where Eck’s entrance oozed self-confidence, the Wittenbergers suddenly looked like jumped-up, insecure newcomers. And not very welcome ones either. Whilst Eck was feted around town and stayed with the mayor, the Wittenbergers were barely allowed in, received the sparsest of welcomes and lodged with the printer Melchior Lotter. The once friendly relationship between the universities had clearly soured as the students went across and the town had no truck with radical new ideas.

But apart from the hostility of the locals, the event still looked as if it might become a huge success for the Reformers. This is what Luther had demanded again and again from the church; the right to present his theology to a wider audience, a chance to test his theses and maybe convince the church to return to scripture. This now was that audience.

People had come from far and wide to see the showdown between the old and the new. Abbots, counts, knights of the golden fleece, merchants and humanists, learned and unlearned, everybody tried to find a space in the halls of the university. It was soon clear that this would not suffice and Duke George opened up the great hall of his castle for the event.

This grand banqueting hall was laid out as a stage for combat. Two pulpits were set up on opposite sides of the room, one decorated with an image of St. Martin, to honour Martin Luther. The other displayed a great tapestry of St. George, who may not be Eck’s namesake, but most apt for a man who had come to slay the dragon of heresy.

Eck did not need his appearance boosted by some fancy needlework. Roland Bainton describes him as follows:

“Despite his butcher’s face and bull’s voice he was a man of prodigious memory, torrential fluency, and uncanny acumen – a professional disputant who would post to Vienna or Bologna to debate the works of the Trinity, the substance of angels, or the contract of usury. Particularly exasperating was his propensity for clothing the opprobrious with plausibility and driving an opponent to incriminating conclusions.”

The Wittenbergers were a less impressive lot. Luther himself did not yet look anything like the statues. One eyewitness, the Leipzig humanist Petrus Mosellanus, described him as “thin of body, so exhausted from the cares and study that if you look closely, you can almost count all his bones.” Karlstadt, too did not look one bit like the immensely flattering portrait Cranach produced. He is described as “shorter, his face dark and burned, his voice thick and unpleasant, his memory weaker and his anger more prompt”. To round it out you had Melanchthon, as Luther described him, a skinny shrimp.

Karlstadt’s Feeble Defence

If this motley crew had an uphill struggle in the looks department, they quickly found themselves outpaced intellectually. Because this was set up as a disputation between Eck and Karlstadt, Eck started with him. The 406 theses, incomprehensible wagon cartoons and the 55 pages of treatise offered a smorgasbord of options. Eck zoomed in on the question whether there is such a thing as free will. Karlstadt said no, Eck said yes. It was a perfect angle, because this question would ultimately put a wedge between Luther and the humanists, specifically Erasmus.

As expected, Karlstadt could not measure up to the seasoned debater Eck. Eck had insisted that no books could be brought into the chamber, which left Karlstadt with his inferior memory constantly on the back foot. During the extended lunch breaks, the Wittenbergers maniacally ploughed through their extensive travel library seeking to turn around arguments they had already lost hours before. Meanwhile Eck would go on leisurely walks in his beloved woods, a perfect display of confidence and competence.

It took a full week of this torture before it was finally Luther’s turn. Duke George had at last given his permission, and on the 4th of July Luther stepped up to the pulpit to relieve Karlstadt. Eck had him where he wanted him.

Luther and Eck debate the Power of the Papacy

You might have expected Eck to have a go at Luther’s theses on indulgences. After all, that was what had led to the break in their relationship and that was what he had written about in his Obelisci. Plus now that the doctrine had been firmly established in the decretal Cum Postquam, it should have been a walk in the park for Eck. But Eck was in no hurry to get to indulgences, and when they finally did, he agreed with Luther on several points.

Instead he went straight for the power of the pope, kicking off with Matthew 16:18 “And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”

That was straight from scripture, not the church fathers, not some papal doctrine. The real thing. The section of the New Testament that had served as the justification for the supremacy of the papacy for centuries. If you go to St. Peter’s in Rome today, it is written in 2 metre tall letters around the base of the great dome, right above the tomb of the Apostle.

Luther responded by offering a different interpretation of this text, one he could trace back to St. Augustine; the “rock” he said did not refer to Peter, even if Peter actually means rock in Greek, not The Rock, just rock. According to Luther, the fact that Jesus says “thou art Peter” and then goes on talking about rocks and churches, meant he could not have meant the person Peter, but instead Christ himself, and the faith in Christ that Peter had just confessed on behalf of all the apostles. The church was hence to be built on the faith of the whole community, not on an individual person and his successors.

Luther then pointed out that the bishop of Rome had not always been the head of the church, that there were patriarchs in Constantinople and Alexandria that were at least his equal. And the Greek church, he added, had never accepted the supremacy of Rome at all.

Anyway, that was pretty much a full-on assault on the successor of St. Peter and went far beyond what was in the 95 theses. If he was right, then the papacy had no divinely ordained authority. All it could rely on was the convention that the bishop of Rome led the church.  

Eck pushed back with what was certainly not the first debate about pronouns, but one of the more consequential ones. He also dug up some first century documents declaring the primacy of Rome, that Luther denounced as forgeries, which they were, but that was far from accepted at the time.

This was not looking good for Luther. On the face of it Eck seemed the one arguing scripture, whilst Luther was rolling out sophistry and 3^rd century literature nobody had ever heard about.

Luther Endorses Jan Hus

Luther was already far down a very slippery slope, when Eck gave him one last push. He pointed out to him that his concept of the community sounded suspiciously like something Jan Hus had said. If you want to dig deeper into Jan Hus’s beliefs, check out episodes 170 and 174. But briefly, Jan Hus had joined the infinitely large and perennial chorus of complaints about the worldliness of the clergy, he had condemned indulgences as money peddling and had exposed pilgrimage sites as frauds.

Hus believed that the church was the community of the faithful. The problem was then, who was in and who was out of that community of the faithful. Hus did not think it was a question of membership cards. He described the world as a field where wheat and weeds grow together. But only the wheat, the good parts, the men and women who followed Christ belonged to the actual church. The weeds, the unrepentant sinners, the fornicating bishops and greedy benefice chasers, they were not part of the community of the faithful, even if they carried mighty titles and held positions in the church hierarchy. And that led to the conclusion that if the church as an institution, and specifically the pope was unable to pull out these weeds, then it would fall to the king to do it. And if the king too was unwilling or unable to do it, well then it would be down to the laity to pick up the weed knife.

And since most of the weeds, the corruption in the church, stemmed from their immense property portfolio, that had to go too.

Sounds familiar? Well, it was unfamiliar to Luther at that very moment. He used the lunch break to go to the university library and read up on what exactly the Council of Constance had condemned. When the session resumed in the afternoon, Luther declared that some of Jan Hus’ theses were Christian and evangelical.

You can almost feel the intake of breath across the room. Of all the possible things he could have said, nothing could beat this for shock value.

Let’s go through it one by one:

Jan Hus had been convicted as a heretic, not by a single inquisitor, not by the pope, but by the Council of Constance, the greatest, most comprehensive gathering of the church in the Middle Ages. By saying that Hus had been right, if even only partially, Luther had declared that even a church council, formally called and constituted, could be in error. If that was so, then there was no authority that could guide the church. It had become a free for all. And that could mean only one thing – schisms. The Western schism had ended a hundred years earlier but the trauma persisted. And with good reason; only a few years earlier emperor Maximilian and Louis XII of France had threatened the pope with a rival council.

Secondly, Luther had disappointed the conciliarists, those in Germany who demanded a church council to curb the power of the pope and reform the church. If he said a council could err, what was the point of it, and how could it achieve the reforms?

Third point, you may remember that the university of Leipzig had been founded by German speaking professors fleeing the university of Prague and specifically the changes Hus had brought in there. They did not like Hus and anyone who identified with him.

Then there were the locals, not just in Leipzig, but all over Saxony. After Jan Hus had been burned as a heretic in Constance in 1415, Bohemia had erupted in revolt, which turned into the Hussite wars that devastated not only Bohemia itself, but also the surrounding regions of Bavaria, Thuringia and Saxony. The Hussite armies made up of peasant soldiers had shown little mercy, and many a town had gone up in flames. People here had grown up with stories of the unimaginable cruelty of the Hussite raiders. Many who were sympathetic to Luther drew the line at Hussitism.

And last, but not least, there was the host of the proceedings, duke George of Saxony. He heard Luther praise Hus and shouted “the plague”, as in the Bohemian plague. His ancestors had taken on responsibility for the Hussite wars from emperor Sigismund and had suffered terrible defeats. And it was personal too: George’s own grandfather was George of Podiebrad, the Hussite king of Bohemia, a source of shame for the duke. Duke George went from being open to the new set of ideas to Luther’s implacable foe.

In the hall, this debate that Luther had hoped would bring his fellow academics to line up behind him and energise the common people for his new theology had turned into an unmitigated disaster. That same evening Melanchthon begged him to revoke the statement, at least take back the notion that a church council could err. Which Luther did the next day, but that made it worse. He now looked not only like a Hussite, but also insincere.

Eck’s Triumph

Eck had triumphed in a way he could not even have hoped for in his wildest dreams. Luther had implicated himself beyond any shadow of a doubt. He had endorsed the heresies of Jan Hus, which had been condemned by the unimpeachable authority of the Council of Constance. He was a heretic, no ifs no buts. That game was over.

And even better, his wobbling about the power of the council, his poor debating skills, his motley crew hiding behind 200 armed students, his refusal to acknowledge scripture in Matthew 16:18, and his siding with the dreadful Hussites, all made Luther look, at least to the audience in Leipzig, unserious, badly educated and just simply wrong.

The debates kept going for another ten days, moving on to purgatory, indulgences and penance, and Karlstadt even got a second outing. Then duke George needed his castle back to entertain the margrave of Brandenburg, and so he called an end to the debate. Luther and his colleagues returned to Wittenberg with their tails between their legs.

Luther’s Recovery

Once again, Luther tried to pull victory from the jaws of defeat by getting his side of the story to the printers before anyone could react. But Johannes Eck was no Roman Cardinal. He was a German, he had been on the same career path as Luther, he had seen the power of his pamphlets and booklets. He would not cede the court of public opinion without a fight. He did publish his take on events at the same time as Luther. And he should have succeeded. After all, the official accounts showed Luther up as a poor debater, who resorted to personal attacks and unable to shine in oral, extempore debate.[1]

Still, within a year Luther was back on the front foot. To some extent, this was Luther’s own doing. His accounts and writings were simply better, sharper in tone, clearer and wittier. Luther’s skill as a writer vastly outpaced his skill as an orator.

Luther spoke the language of the people, aka German. But not any German. He wrote in the language of the Saxon Chancery. As you probably know, Germany is a country of very distinctive dialects. By 1500 this was even more extreme. Not only were the individual dialects more distinct from one place to the next, there were effectively two languages, Low German, spoken in the north of the country and all across the Baltic, and High German, spoken in the centre and the south. The difference lay initially in the sound used for the consonants, and over time words and grammar shifted too.

But there was a transition zone in Thuringia and Saxony, where the shift in the consonants was less pronounced. The rulers of these lands, the Wettin Dukes and Margraves, ancestors of Frederick the Wise, developed a chancery language as you would. And because this style of German sat in the middle between north and south, it became a very popular tool to make yourself understood across the whole country. In another of these great coincidences that made the Reformation come about, Luther was born and lived in this transitional region, and was familiar with the linguistic device of the Saxon Chancery, and could mould it into an incredibly lively and immediate language. Like Shakespeare he was extraordinarily creative with words and phrases. Like the English often use expressions from his plays, Germans, even Catholics, quote works by Luther all the time, without realising. 

There are some economic considerations too. Luther’s texts were comparatively short, usually 8 pages. And that made them exceedingly attractive for the printers.

Andrew Pettegree explains this brilliantly in his book Brand Luther. The major cost item in bookmaking was paper. And that meant producing a large book required a huge amount of upfront investment. Paper needed to be bought, printed and only once the entire book was finished could it be sold. And that could be risky, as we have seen with Gutenberg who lost his workshop and most of his bibles because his creditors pulled the rug from under his feet at the very last minute (episode 187). Producing a short pamphlet carried far less risk. It could be produced quickly and hence sales came in quickly too, reducing the cash flow risk.

And then there was Luther’s unbelievable productivity. He published 45 books, sermons and pamphlets in 1519 alone. Heinz Schilling calculates that Luther produced 1,800 pages of print a year, that is five pages a day. He wrote so fast and so much that the ink was often still wet when he brought his works to the printer. By 1523, 40% of all titles published in German were works by Luther. This constant flow of writings had created huge demand.

People were keen to hear “what has he done now”.  And not only Luther’s supporters, but his opponents too, needed to know. Whilst Eck’s reiteration of the existing doctrine was lengthy, ponderous in style and simply not news. So, nobody bought it, printers did not want to print it on their own account. Eck, and the church, tried to put their thumb on the scales by paying printers to put their works on the shelves.

The other impact of this constant stream of new writings was that individual papers and even events, like his failure at Leipzig, were quickly superseded by new controversies.

Luther’s friends go viral

Luther was never standing still, never backing down, always pushing forward.

And this constant motion made it not just exciting, it also allowed public opinion to follow. If Luther had shown up with his evangelical theology already fully formed, it would have been so radical, the vast majority of his audience would have rejected it. But by developing his ideas through public debate, out in the open, he took his readers from one conclusion to the next, until they found themselves in a place they would never have believed they could be comfortable with.

But the true coup de grace that blew up Johannes Eck’s great victory came in the form of – comedy. Humanists mocked Eck for his gladiatorial style, insinuating that the great event had been all about his own glory and career advancement, and had nothing to do with truth or salvation. An anonymous satire took it one step further, inventing a witch called Canidia who ran errands for him, and a flying, farting goat for the journey back. But what really cut through was what went for humanist wit. That seems to have involved a lot of excrement related puns[2], jokes about the name Eck, which in German means corner, sadistic medical procedures and a solid dose of antisemitism.[3] I did not find it funny, but apparently it “would have made Aristophanes proud”[4]. What it definitely did, was demote Eck and thereby neutralise the defeat in Leipzig.

The author of this grand work of subtle humour was most probably none other than the great humanist  Willibald Pirckheimer in Nürnberg. He and his circle formed one of the first groups of outspoken supporters beyond Luther’s Wittenberg colleagues.

I do not want to push the comparison too far, but what was going on was that Luther’s works and ideas were going viral, replicating every time they hit a printing shop. Meanwhile Eck and his colleagues had to push their content through paid marketing. The latter could have worked, but would have required a huge amount of money, which was not forthcoming, because the Roman Curia did not care.

Meanwhile in Rome…

For them the case was now very simple and very clear. Eck had proven that Luther was a heretic. His ideas were at odds with doctrine, including being at odds with the explicit decision of the Council of Constance. Unless he recanted everything, he would burn.

Johannes Eck travelled to Rome. He, together with Prierias and Cajetan, Luther’s previous opponents, wrote up the Bull Exsurge Domine that threatened Luther with excommunication, unless he recanted within 60 days. That bull was issued in Rome on June 15^th, 1520, almost a year after the Leipzig debate. The reason for the delay had nothing to do with the complexity of the case, but was solely down to the imperial election and the ongoing efforts at diplomacy at the court of Frederick the Wise.

The bull Exsurge Domine, like all previous official documents in this matter did not bother to set out in detail why Luther was wrong. There was no need; 41 of Luther’s statements were obviously heretical. Legally he was done for.

But as far as Luther was concerned, and as far as more and more people across the empire were concerned, canon law was not binding, at least not when it lacked grounding in scripture. Urged on by this stream of pamphlets and sermons, they asked themselves the following: sure, Luther was a heretic under paragraph XYZ of papal decretal bla and council decision blub, but in what way will that be relevant when you are standing at the doors to paradise?

When public opinion about the papacy was so low, retreating to legalese, and only legalese was not going to work. All that was left of Eck’s efforts to discredit Luther was finally undone by the church itself.

Leipzig set Luther Free

And what about Luther’s reaction?

My grandfather used to say: “Ist der Ruf erst einmal ruiniert, lebt sich gänzlich ungeniert” which translates roughly as “When your reputation’s shot, / you can do a lot.”

Being certain of conviction weirdly freed Luther to go much further in his thinking. He wrote much later in his brief autobiography of 1545, quote:  ‘by my own customary way of thinking, [] I conceded that the pope was head of the church by human right. However, if that right is not supported by divine authority, then it is a lie and comes from the devil.” And that made the pope into antichrist, or more specifically, the institution of the papacy. The individual pope might still be a good man, but the institution was Satan’s work.

In the same text, Luther reflects on the reasons his attack on the indulgences turned into such a major crisis. He explains it based on a conversation he had with Karl von Miltitz, the papal envoy whose job it had been to keep Frederick on side and calm everything down. Luther says, quote: “People thought Miltitz and his line of action were useless, but it seems to me that if the man at Mainz [i.e., Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz] had followed Miltitz’s course from the beginning when I had reprimanded him, and if the pope had followed it before he condemned me without a hearing and raged with his bulls, and if they had suppressed Tetzel’s fury, the affair wouldn’t have resulted in such an uproar.” 

Basically, what Luther says is that if the church had been more sensible, had suppressed the worst of the indulgences and had given him a fair hearing, he would never have gone as far as claiming the pope was antichrist. He would have remained within the constraints of his customary way of thinking.

Amongst historians it is I think Volker Leppin who made the point most forcefully, that it was the handling of Luther’s case in Rome that pushed Luther down the route of the Reformation.

It started with Prierias’ response to the 95 theses. Instead of debating the efficacy of indulgences, he turned the debate to the authority and infallibility of the pope. That was not at the heart of Luther’s thinking, but now he had to deal with it.

Then there was the meeting with Cajetan, where he lost his belief that the church would play fair. And as a consequence he dug into the question where papal authority actually came from.

At Leipzig Eck pushed him into embracing Jan Hus and denying the infallibility of a church council.

And finally Exsurge Domine condemned his statements without even trying to refute them from scripture, which must have meant the papacy was so full of sin, it could only be antichrist. And that a faithful man, armed with scripture could and should overturn this institution and its centuries of doctrine.

That was of course radical, but it still only put Luther into a long line of reformers who believed the church had fundamentally lost its way, required urgent reform and was organisationally unable to do it by itself. That is a tradition that starts almost as soon as the Christian church becomes a recognised institution in the edict of Milan and includes such luminaries as Peter Waldo, St. Francis, William of Ockham, Marsilius of Padua, Wycliffe, Hus and Erasmus of Rotterdam.

Which means, denouncing the power of the pope alone could not have been enough, because if all that needed to happen was a man – or woman – condemning the pope, well then the Roman church would have broken up dozens of times already.

Which is where this whole other unique strain of Luther’s thinking comes in. You remember episode 240, when we talked about what really preoccupied Luther. Indulgences and papal authority were still and had always been complete sideshows in Luther’s mind.

What he cared about intensely was the relationship of the sinner to God, specifically his own connection with the divine. Where would he be sent on the day of the Last Judgement? What was expected of him, or was anything expected at all.

It is no coincidence that Luther dates the moment when he contemplates Paul’s letter to the Romans in his tower and has his theological epiphany to 1519, the very year of the Leipzig disputation. There may well be a bit of post-rationalisation here, and much of what he says came to him in a sudden rush had been in previous letters, sermons and lectures. But it is the moment when he is certain of excommunication, when there is no way back that he can make the link.

If it was that salvation came from God’s grace alone, not from good works, as he now believed, what did that mean in practice? Was there anything beyond scripture that can guide a Christian?  What Sacraments were therefore needed? What was the role of a priest then? What were saints? Did purgatory exist? And, and, and…

That is where the difference lies between Luther and all those earlier reformers. In Luther two struggles come together: a struggle with the real life papacy that he pushes to the maximum conclusion, and a struggle with the idea of a just but unforgiving god, which he also drives further and further, until they both meet and turn into a fundamental rethinking of both the institution and the belief.

But that is a matter too weighty and too complex to work through today. I hope you will join us again next time when we will discuss the three most consequential of Luther’s writings, “To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation”, “The Babylonian Captivity of the Church” and “The Freedom of a Christian.”

And if you want to refresh your memory of Jan Hus and the Hussites, they are in episodes 170 about his life and ideas, 174 about his trial, and then 175 to 183 about the Hussite Wars.

And of course there is always the option to support the show by going to historyofthegermans.com/support and receive eternal, sincere and heartfelt gratitude.

[1] Roper, p. 139

[2] https://laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.com/2015/06/thin-soup.html

[3] https://cdn2.psychologytoday.com/assets/the_blunting_of_eck_translation.pdf

[4] Roper p. 139

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