Peter Stanford on Martin Luther, whose tenacity changed world religion

Martin Luther had no expectation of fame – or notoriety – when in October 1517 he issued his 95 Theses (or debating points). They were an effort to prompt late medieval Catholicism into reform of practices Luther regarded as corrupt, corrupting and ungodly.

Some say he nailed them to the door of a church. It is a shame to spoil a good story, but it is much more likely that he sent them to his archbishop, who in turn forwarded them to the Pope.

This clever, serious-minded 33-year-old friar his protest in Wittenberg, a small town in Germany, with an obscure newly-founded university where he worked. It was all light years away from the splendours of Renaissance Rome, seat of a Catholic Church that had for 1000 years been the greatest power in Europe.

Within just four years, Luther’s was the name on everyone’s lips; his act of defiance had brought the papacy to its knees

Initially it airily dismissed Luther’s arguments as the work of a “petty monk”. He was, in the withering words of Pope Leo X, “a drunken German [who] will feel different when he is sober.” Yet, within just four years, Luther’s was the name on everyone’s lips, and his act of defiance had brought the papacy to its knees. Which is why this year, across the continent, there are to be celebrations of the 500th anniversary of the start of the Protestant Reformation.

Luther gave voice to widespread discontent with the Church’s habit of flogging “indulgences” (the promise of a place in heaven for the buyer or their dead relatives) to fund yet more gilded basilicas in Rome, and also with a clerical-dominated system that seemed to have no interest at all about their economic well-being.

He struck a chord, first within Wittenberg, then just weeks later throughout Germany, and eventually all over the whole of Europe. His private protest went viral. Such twenty-first century language may sound misplaced, but one aspect of Luther’s crusade crucial to its success was his close working relationship with printers.

A fellow German, Johannes Gutenberg had invited the printing press some 75 years earlier, but it was Luther who was the first truly to exploit it as a means of rapid, mass communication, giving rise to a populist, anti-establishment movement. Just as today’s politicians use Twitter and social media.

The 95 Theses, and subsequent Luther texts, tearing into the cherished notions of Catholicism, circulated freely in German (the language of the streets, rather than Church Latin) in crudely-produced pamphlets, some with woodcut illustrations to assist those whose reading skills were limited. Thousands were sold every week.

Luther was the man of the moment. And remained so for four years, despite Catholic efforts to silence him. The reforms he advocated were not new, but all who had made similar complaints in the past had paid with their lives. Yet in 1521, at the Diet of Worms (an assembly of the rulers of the jigsaw of small states that then made up Germany, with clergy and their nominal ruler, the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V), Luther refused to budge, even on pain of death.

However much the Catholic authorities wanted him burnt alive, they couldn’t get their own way

He was, he insisted, being directed by God – like a horse in blinkers is directed round a racetrack by its rider. “Here I stand,” he told the Diet in a phrase that resonates down the ages as the epitome of principle, “I can do no other”.

And he lived to tell the tale. However much the Catholic authorities wanted him burnt alive, they couldn’t get their own way because Luther had the people behind him, as well as some of the German princes, who thought he had made a valid point.

Thus was the Reformation started by one man’s extraordinary courage. In the 25 years that followed Worms until his death in 1546, Luther’s reputation ebbed and flowed – as, for example, when he sided with the princes against an uprising in the Peasants’ War of 1524-25 by the same people who had seen Luther as their champion.

And fluctuated every since. Though Catholicism has belatedly realised Luther’s worth – the Vatican and the Lutherans are jointly hosting the 500th anniversary celebrations – in the wider world he is seen in today’s secular, sceptical times as at best irrelevant, a dusty figure from history, and at worst as an anti-Semite, based on vile comments he made about Jews late in life (though in his earlier years he had been unusually enlightened for times when Jews were widely abused).

But in Luther’s greatest reform, surely, lies his claim to be one of the makers of modern Europe. He broke the stranglehold of Catholicism over Europe, told his followers to read the Word of God for themselves and listen to their conscience, rather than blindly do what they were told by their priests and princes. And so, the historians of the eighteenth century concur, Martin Luther sowed the seeds of the ideas of individual liberty, freedom of conscience, and the rights of man that characterised the Enlightenment. They continue to shape all our lives to this day.

Peter Stanford’s Martin Luther: Catholic Dissident (Hodder and Stoughton, £20) is out now