Martin Luther, Both King Lear and Malvolio, and the Ironies of History

Martin Luther, the King Lear of the Reformation

That, or the Reformation's Malvolio

Yes, you heard it here first: no other review of Luther would compare him to either King Lear or Malvolio, let alone both!

(This is the first part of a two part essay on Martin Luther. Click here for Part II.)

The verb 'commemorate' means "recall and show respect for (someone or something)" according to the Internet; that, and of course a"wreath-laying ceremony to commemorate the war dead", and in general to "mark or celebrate (an event or person) by doing or producing something" (anything from a statue to a medal to a book to a play).

In that sense of "showing respect", or to "celebrate", we cannot commemorate Martin Luther. We definitely need to remember him, of course, and in particular his place in history, and in our own religious stories (if any) but "celebrate" or "show respect for"? Conversely, we don't need to demonize him, either. He's actually, I think, mainly a tragic figure, like Lear, and in no small part, a fool, like Malvolio.

Below I'll list some reasons to deny that respect and to resist demonizing him, and defend my literary comparisons. Please go here for the Introduction to my series on the Irreconcilable Differences between Catholicism and Protestantism. (It has links to the rest of the series that's currently published.)

Part I

First Point: Martin didn't start the Reformation, Albert did.

History is full of ironies. Let's look at a big one: Luther and the Reformation are indelibly linked. Joined at the hip. Siamese Twins. But Luther, a "man of the people", didn't start the Reformation. A high prince from a fated German princely family did. 

In1513 a 23-year-old German princeling of the Hohenzollern dynasty (which eventually gave us Kaiser Bill, who went up the hill to take a look at France, and who came down the hill with bullets in his pants) found himself newly minted as Archbishop of Magdeburg. Well, perhaps being a something of the narcissist (like his later kinsman, Wilhelm) he wanted to be consecrated Archbishop of Mainz also. He wanted both archbishoprics, at the same time. While a bishop in those days might well, through simony or politics, end up a bishop of multiple dioceses, there had never been an archbishop with two archbishoprics (in those days, an archbishop was a big enchilada, as opposed to now, where he might as well be a subdeacon, since the national bishop conferences control everything: faceless bureaucracy rules in the Catholic Church, to a large extent: if you think Uncle Jorge Bergoglio rules, just check out the German bishops' conference). Another fly in this ointment was that the Archbishop of Mainz was an Elector, one of the high princes who helped elect the Holy Roman Emperor.

This young Hohenzollern's name was Albert (Albrecht). And he started the Reformation. At 23. Inadvertently. Yes, of course. But he cut the Gordian Knot, or more apropos, Albrecht von Hohenzollern is the Gavrilo Princip of the Reformation. (Princip himself was 19 when he assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand.) For to get this dignity of Mainz, Albert had negotiated with Pope Leo X to pay the latter a huge fee, and to raise the money, Albert permitted the selling of indulgences in Germany (they'd split the take; Leo needed the money to pay for the new St. Peter's). And that was the spark. Four years after 1513, a youngish professor a bit more than a week short of his 33rd birthday nailed 95 theses on the door of a church in Wittenberg. And his name happened to be Martin Luther (1483-1546).

Second point: Luther Was Lucky

Professor Martin was lucky to start his chaos when he did, for the times were right for it.

• After all, the "Morningstar of the Reformation", John Wycliffe, (1320 to 1384) was a failure, and then in the next generation... 
• Jan Hus (1369 to 1415) was too, though far more "successful" than Wycliffe. 
• One hundred years later, Luther hit the gong at the right moment. 
• Actually, the Church in both Spain and France had been "reformed" in the century before Luther, in the sense that the state had taken control of it, appointing its bishops (more or less) and telling it what to do. The French and Spanish states didn't really bother with the theology, of course; they were used to that theology and saw no reason to change it. Their control of the Church was not predicated on a theological quibble, in other words, so they didn't need that excuse. Theirs was an exercise in power. Just raw state power. Machiavelli (1469-1527) no doubt approved.

And that's one reason why the English bishops were willing to put up with Fat 'Arry the Eighth: 

• A: They saw the "signs of the times" in France and Spain, with whom they were in close touch, more or less. 
• So they — or most of them, St. John Fisher being an exception — resigned themselves to eating what looked to be on the menu, something they couldn't avoid dining on: guano pie. 
• B: That and English history itself, wherein various kings fought at times with the Church and so on — so they gambled that this, too, would blow over, as those earlier dust ups did. It didn't. That's because...
• The larger Reformation on the Continent meant their new Protestant rulers, Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Elizabeth Tudor1, then James VI of Scotland (from 1603 Doing Business As) James I of England, had to ally with Protestant Continentals in order to keep the Catholic Church from reclaiming England, and also throwing them out on their ears. The times were different than they had been in the old medieval days, in other words. And thus, like so many before and after them, the English bishops were fighting a war with the last war's tactics, and they lost.
• The English bishops, like marchers in a parade, couldn't see "the big picture" (or most didn't) and so they tossed the dice and "go with the flow" rolled up. They lost. Perhaps even their own salvation. 
• It wasn't an "unreasonable" gamble. Just Faithless. 
• Actually, when one looks at it like this, they were a lot like the bishops who came home from Vatican II to find out a "brave new world" they didn't vote for was aborning in their local churches. "Going with the flow" doesn't seem to work with God, apparently.

On the Continent, the various German princes chaffed under the Hapsburgs, chaffed off against each other, too, and in general boiled in angst, a great German word. As so often happens with Germans, of whom Winston Churchill once said, "The Hun is either at your throat or at your feet," they weren't happy with themselves and they looked down upon (and I mean seriously down upon) Italians. Let me explain all this a bit more:

Third Point: Luther Was German

The Germans were the key. There's a reason the French and Spanish were content to control the Church the way they did. There's a reason the whole shebang went supernova in "Mitteleuropa".

The Germans of Luther's day had a sort of super-state, the Holy Roman Empire (which Voltaire joked was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.) And many of the local German princes decided to support Luther because it allowed them to get out from under the ruler of that empire, Charles V, the stupor mundi, ruler of Spain and the New World and parts of Italy, as well as Mitteleuropa, including what's now The Netherlands and Belgium. In general, the Germans wanted rid of the foreign influence in general and the Italians in particular. For some time before the Reformation, the Empire's emperors were from the Hapsburg dynasty, and it had close ties to Italy and the papacy, and long before them, various German rulers also had deep Italian connections, such as with the Hohenstaufen dynasty and its famous (or infamous) Emperor Frederick II. (Frederick was born in Italy and raised — in part — in Sicily, for example.)

• As the various Churchmen involved mishandled Luther (see subsequent Part II section), these princes saw an opportunity to rid themselves of Italians completely. 
• Luther was lucky in that he was their guy, their dour German monk/friar who would free them from Rome and its age-old yoke. 

Something else, something hard to delineate clearly but equally clearly, long-existing: there was also a deep Northern gloom, a natural dourness, to the Germanic peoples that Southern and Western Europeans have noted since Roman times. That's just a loose generalization, of course. But there is some basis to the idea, as everyone knows who has either visited Germany or Scandinavia for any length of time, or has German family and friends, or is Germanic oneself. Now, in certain circumstances, these traits argue well for survival in colder, darker lands, of course, and they mark a "frontier people" — just think of the stoic, hard-edged American pioneers. These traits play well for soldiery, too: one might think of the achievements of the German soldiers in two World Wars, but also consider: the best troops in the Union Army in the American Civil War were in the "Iron Brigade", which was made up of volunteers from Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. So there is much to commend in every national character, but also things to be wary of. At the very least, fully cognizant of.

Now, to whatever extent the above is true, to whatever place such a natural dourness really has in the German psyche (and if it exists, it's traditionally seen to be stronger in Northern Germans than Southern, and stronger in Scandinavians than in Germans, and perhaps strongest of all in the Swiss!), by the late 1400s, the Germans had also become used to Late Medieval Catholicism.

That's crucially important because:|

• Late Medieval Catholicism was quite different from the High Middle Ages Catholicism. Late Medieval Catholicism was extremely bleak, truly saturnine. 
• That's because after the high point of the glorious High Middle Ages and the 13th century (St. Thoma Aquinas died in 1274) things got very gloomy indeed. 
• In philosophy, the Englishman William of Ockham (born in 1285, a decade after Aquinas died) began, or developed further, a dark strain of Christian philosophy called Medieval Nominalism, which saw God as remote, unknowable, and capricious, in fact, very much like Islam's Allah. (And Luther would later call Ockham his "magister" or major influence.) 
• Ockham's exact contemporary, Marsilius of Padua (1275-1342; Ockham died in 1347) attempted to refute the idea of the papacy's political power, and helped set the stage for state control of church.
• Even in the atmosphere, in the planet's weather. The Little Ice Age began in the 14th century, and the Black Death ravaged Europe then too, with subsequent outbreaks of that plague and others. One-third at least of Europe's population died horribly. The survivors naturally staggered about the unkempt landscape in shock and despair. The God that allowed all that had to be a cruel one, indeed.
• On top of that, the on-again, off-again Hundred Years War threw France, and finally England itself, into chaos and civil war.
• Then the Turks invaded Europe, too, taking that bastion of Christianity, Constantinople, in 1453.
• Food was short, peasants to grow it few, and as the Turks cemented their rule of Islam, the Mediterranean, which had never really anything but mortally dangerous since the first rise of Islam, became once again closed to trade. 
• (Thus the urge to find a way around Africa by the Portuguese, or Columbus' idea to sail West clear around the globe.)

Then in Italy a Renaissance began. Light, life, color began to return to Europe for the first time since beginning of the 14th century. Scholars and books that escape the ruin of Constantinople help fire it, and a new confidence grew, a never-say-die quality of the human spirit in the face of true catastrophe, reared up in Italy. And the papacy was a major player in the whole business, funding artists and scholars of all sorts (vying with the banker Medici family in Florence, a Renaissance center). In a sense, the High Middle Ages never died out in Italy: and they began to spread through Europe once again in the Italian-inspired Renaissance. The Renaissance was more "this-worldly", of course, with a high-dose of "humanism" and so on, but still, it was a "lightening up" of the heavy Late Medieval load on the soul. Spain, too, developed a high culture once it threw out the last of Islam, and funded it with American gold and silver. France raced to embrace the Renaissance too.


✔None of that pleased the Germans.2

• They wanted their "Old-Time Religion" of gloom and doom. 
• And THAT'S why the Protestant Churches that evolved from the Reformation were, by and large, very dour religions indeed. (The Puritans of New England, for example, wouldn't allow the celebration of Christmas until the later 18th century.)
• I'll write about Protestant theology later, and also as part of my series on Protestantism, but here I'll just point out the Puritan Rebellion that eventually deposed and behead Charles I. The Puritans were a dour, gloomy, weighted-with-predestination crowd. VERY unlike the average English of the famous Medieval "Merry England".
• THAT'S the sort of religion Protestantism produced, and what most people don't realize, that sort of religion — in attitude, outlook, spirit — was pretty much Late Medieval Catholicism. 

And that religion fitted the German soul. The Reformation was perhaps best embodied not by Luther, but Zwingli, a Swiss, and later Calvin, a Frenchman who removed himself to Geneva. Perhaps. Perhaps that's just a shallow impression, but then it makes perfect sense: it's something that has a lot of insightful truth to it. Along side it,however, there's another reason Germany was the birthplace and haven and champion of Protestantism: nationalism was growing, and growing fast. And Germany was by far the largest national group in Europe without a nation per se.

Point Four: Luther Wrote in German

Europe had been a haven for languages and local peoples.

• Since the triumph of the Western Church after the fall of the powerful successor states to the Roman Empire (Merovingian Gaul, Visigothic Spain, etc., which fell because Islam had cut off their lucrative trade with the Mediterranean basin), Europe had developed into a polyglot continent, and outside of Africa (and the subcontinent of India) today, it's the most polyglot continent on Earth. 
• The Welsh are an example: they survived being next to, and (more or less) ruled by Mama England, but kept their own language and identity. 
• The Reformation changed that: There's an old sardonic joke that before the Reformation, the Welsh spoke Latin in Church and Welsh everywhere else; but after the Reformation, they spoke Welsh in Church and English everywhere else.
• The same thing happened after Vatican II in Ireland, in the Gaeltachtaí, the Irish-speaking districts: for the first time in history, Latin disappeared from the Mass in these areas, and was replaced by — you guessed it: English.

The "Latin Church" had presided over — indeed, gave birth to — Christendom. This word refers to a continent-wide culture of an over-arching religious vision and fraternity that embodies many, many peoples, languages, and local cultures. They could all speak together, and indeed, self-identify as closely related peoples, because their elites had a common language (Latin) and a common religion (Catholicism, the Western Orthodoxy).

The Reformation ended all that. It created, or allowed to happen what was already in the works; i.e., nation states, to come to full force. France, for example, could have been seven different countries today, easily. Or as we see in Spain with Catalonia, a nation-state does its best to stamp down on, indeed, stomp down on, local peoples and autonomy. We owe that in large part to the Reformation, for it did three basic things:

1. It turned the priest around to face the people.
2. It dumped the ancient hieratic language.
3. It de-stressed, sometimes extremely, the whole idea and teaching of the Holy Eucharist (Calvinism, for example, far more than Lutheranism).

• It also fostered a fourth thing, too, something that once gutted the Eastern Church: iconoclasm. 

If these sound familiar to post-Vatican II Catholics, yes, you are right. Vatican II — or more specifically the "Spirit of Vatican II" — was horrifically iconoclastic, and it too (remember the actual Vatican II Council said nothing of this) turned the priest around, dumped Latin, and shunted the Holy Eucharist off to a side chapel. (By that I mean both literally and figuratively in that the modern Mass is much more "preachy", like a Protestant service is, than "Eucharisticy", as is an Orthodox liturgy.)

• So today we have the specter of the "Latin Church" turning into a simulacrum of Orthodoxy: a series of nation-based Churches that loathe each other. (Look at what happened to the Orthodox Great Council.) 
• The German Catholic Church is already a force of its own: it pays the Vatican's rent and its mavens give Pope Francis his ideas, if not his marching orders. 
• The Polish Church (and others) are completely opposed to the German agenda. 
• The Church in Latin America is fast going its own way, too. Oblivion, mostly. Pentecostalism has gutted it and what's left seems to be lost in the morass of "Liberation Theology". 
• The Anglo-Church is a mess, too; in the U.S. it is closing parishes as fast as ever it can, in Australia and the U.S. it is awash in sex scandals (almost as bad as those in the Vatican itself) and in England, well, just read The Catholic Herald. 

The Power of the Vernacular
One would think the "brights" who rule from the heights of the Church would know their history, how the Greeks split off from the Latins in the first place primarily because of language (an Orthodox will tell you to this day how abominable the filoque is, but the real issue was language). Same with the Syrians and the Copts who broke off from the Greeks long before 1054.

So Vatican II, or its "Spirit" has doomed the Western Church unless, somehow, the Traditionalist Movement within the Western Church turns the Barque of Peter around.

And thus Luther was lucky. (As was said of Jefferson Davis when inaugurated: "The man and the hour have met!") Luther's a cog in the gears that have been turning since before his days. We'll examine more about him in subsequent essays, and how the tides of his revolution passed him by, isolated him, and let him rant like King Lear, and how the princes played him for a Malvolio.

An Préachán

1. Elizabeth Tudor (she probably wasn't the actual daughter of Henry VIII, but of Anne Boleyn and her dancing instructor) I know is styled now "Elizabeth I" and George VI Windsor's (his father, George V, changed the family name to "Windsor" during WWI from "Saxe-Coburg-Gotha", at which his cousin, Kaiser Bill, cleverly joked that he couldn't wait to attend the play "The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha!") daughter as "Queen Elizabeth II". But Elizabeth Tudor was Queen of England and Ireland (theoretically both otherwise independent countries) and our present-day Elizabeth is Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, a quite different entity.

2. I say "None of that pleased the Germans" but speak of the holier-than-thou sourpusses. Anyone who knows Germans know they love to actually go to France and Italy, and vacation in even sunnier places. I've personally known Germans who were up tight and stressed in Germany, but once we crossed the border into France, they'd relax and open up and actually enjoy life. I said to them, "Now I know why you-all keep invading France!"

An P