The Bull and the Sixty Days
On June 15, 1520, Leo X issued a bull condemning forty-one propositions drawn from Luther's writings and called on the people to burn writings that contained the views of Hus. In the same bull he asked Luther to confess his errors and return to the flock of Christ's faithful. He set a deadline of sixty days: if Luther refused to come to Rome and retract, he would be cut off from the Church and from Christianity, all the faithful should shun him, the religious communities of any land where he stayed would be placed under ban, and rulers and officials should expel him from their territories or hand him over to Rome.
Luther answered the deadline with one of three treatises that together made up the program of the religious revolution in Germany.
Address to the Christian Nobility
Until now Luther had published his ideas in Latin for the educated class. Now, as a German patriot, he wrote in German an open letter To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate. Among those he appealed to was the "young noble" who had become emperor the year before as Charles V; Luther wrote that God had made him lord over us to awaken high hopes in many hearts. He also attacked the "three walls" the papacy had built around itself: the distinction between clergy and laity, the pope's sole right to interpret Scripture for Christians, and his unquestioned right to call general councils. Luther held that all three walls must be torn down.
First, he argued, there is no real distinction between clergy and laity, because every Christian becomes a priest at baptism. Rulers and magistrates should therefore use their power without regard to whether it clashes with pope, bishops or priests, and any teaching that contradicts this comes from Roman invention. Second, since every Christian is a priest, each has the right to interpret Scripture by his own judgment. Third, Scripture is the sole authority and standard of faith and conduct, and it nowhere reserves the calling of a council to the pope. If the pope used the weapon of excommunication to block a council, Luther said, he should be treated like a madman and put in his place, with God's help, by force. A council was urgently needed to deal with the "horrifying" excesses of a pope who kept a court more magnificent than any king's. It should stop Italian clergy from plundering German church revenues and cut by ninety-nine percent the number of those "vermin" who held church offices in Rome and lived on German labor.
He cited an estimate that more than 300,000 silver coins went from Germany to Italy each year (the book's figure and unit). Why, he asked, should Germans let their earnings flow into the pope's purse by robbery, when they hang thieves and behead highwaymen? Why should the German Church pay tribute to a foreign power? German clergy should free themselves from Rome and, under the archbishop of Mainz, form a national church. The number of mendicant orders should be reduced, priests should be allowed to marry, and no one should take monastic vows before thirty. Interdicts, pilgrimages, requiem masses and holidays other than Sundays should be abolished. The German Church should be reconciled with the Hussites of Bohemia, because the Church had shamelessly broken the emperor's safe-conduct by burning Hus. "We must overcome the opponents of religion with books, not with fire." All laws made by the Roman Church should be annulled, and clergy and laity placed under the same laws.
Above all, the papal legates, who sold "powers" at high prices, justified their greed, broke oaths and vows, and cited the pope's authority to excuse their baseness, should be driven out of Germany. Luther went on in a strong tone to address the pope himself in prayer and in warning. (The book's closing lines, which curse the pope in vehement terms, are abridged here.)
This direct assault on the man who ruled western Europe stirred the German people deeply. The more cautious thought Luther's attacks on the pope harsh and reckless, but to most Germans the work he had begun seemed one of the boldest events in their history. The first printing sold out and all the Wittenberg presses reprinted it. Germany, like England, was ready for nationalism. Although no land called Germany yet appeared on the map, the Germans had become aware of their national existence. As Hus had leaned on Bohemian nationalism, and as Henry VIII removed not Catholic doctrine but papal power from England, so Luther raised the flag of revolt not in theology but in the fertile soil of German national feeling. Wherever the Protestant movement triumphed, the banner of nationality was unfurled.
The Babylonian Captivity of the Church
In September 1520 Eck and Girolamo Aleander published the bull of excommunication in Germany. Luther answered with a second manifesto, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (October 6). Written first in Latin for theologians and scholars, it was soon turned into German and changed the religious beliefs of the German people as much as the open letter had affected Germany's church and politics. Luther argues that, as the Jews were long captive in Babylon, so the Church founded by Christ and described in the New Testament had for over a thousand years been imprisoned by the popes of Rome, and in that time faith, morals and Christian rites had decayed.
Since Christ gave his disciples both bread and wine at the Last Supper, the Hussites are right, and the sacrament may be given in both kinds as Christians wish. The priest does not change bread and wine into the real body and blood of Christ, and no priest can perform such a miracle. Christ is spiritually present in the sacrament and reaches the hearts of believers by his own will and power, not through a miraculous change of substance by the priest. Luther rejected as a horrifying belief the Church's official view that at mass the priest offers Christ as a sacrifice for the sins of mankind to the Father, though he had no objection to the idea that God allowed man to crucify him for the forgiveness of man's sins.
Along with these theological matters Luther raised some moral questions. Marriage, he said, is not a sacrament, since in Christ's words there is nothing to link marriage with God's grace. Marriages of ancient times were no less holy than ours, and there is no distinction between our marriage and that of unbelievers. Hence a Christian may marry a non-Christian. He went on to advance views on divorce and the permissibility of a second spouse that were extraordinary for the time. (The book's wording is omitted here, and these views should be read in their context, since Luther later retreated from them.) He then mocked the bull: he had heard that the pope had issued bulls to make him repent and retract, and if so he wished this book to be counted part of his penance.
These stinging words should have made Miltitz despair of mediating, but he did not give up. He visited Luther again (October 11, 1520) and asked him to write to Leo, saying he had no intent to attack the pope's person, and to moderate his views on reform. In return Miltitz promised to persuade the pope to withdraw his bull. But the thirty-seven-year-old Luther, who proudly called himself a "peasant, son of peasants," wrote to the forty-five-year-old pope, heir of Peter and of the Medici, not in penitence but as a father advising a child. He spoke well of Leo personally and condemned the papal system for its corruption past and present. Leo's good name and clean life, he said, were known to all and beyond reproach, but neither the pope nor anyone else could deny that his court was more corrupt than Babylon and Sodom, and the Roman Church had become the foulest den of thieves and a realm of sin, death and hell. (The book's harsher phrases are abridged.) He was sorry that Leo sat on the papal seat in such an age, for he deserved to lead the Church in a better one. He warned him not to heed flatterers who would put him in God's place and to remember that he was "servant of servants," whose office was more dangerous and pitiable than any other. Those who say the pope is above councils and the sole interpreter of Scripture are deceivers, who want to cloak their wicked deeds in the Church.
On the Freedom of a Christian
With the letter Luther sent the pope his third manifesto, On the Freedom of a Christian (November 1520), of which he wrote that, if he was not mistaken, it was a summary of the whole of Christian life. He states his central belief firmly: faith alone, not good works, makes a person a Christian and saves him from hell, because good works spring from faith. "Fruit comes from the tree, not the tree from the fruit." (The book reverses the saying in its wording, which seems a slip.) Whoever has firm faith in God and in the saving sacrifice of Christ enjoys complete freedom: freedom from his animal nature, from base desires, from condemnation to eternal punishment, and even from the law, since a man whose moral virtues arise from such faith needs no command to act rightly. Yet this free man must be servant to all, for if he does not strive with all his power for the salvation of others and himself he will not know peace. By faith he is joined to God, by love to his neighbor. Every believing Christian is a priest and a servant of God and of the people.
The Reception of the Bull
While Luther was writing these historic works, Eck and Aleander met the first waves of the revolution. They proclaimed the bull in Meissen, Merseburg and Brandenburg. In Nuremberg they forced Pirckheimer and Spengler to submit. At Mainz the archbishop, Albrecht, after a brief tolerance of the revolutionaries, expelled Hutten from his court and imprisoned the publishers of his books. At Ingolstadt Luther's books were banned and seized, and at Mainz, Louvain and Cologne they were burned. At Leipzig, Torgau and a place the book calls Dublin (probably garbled) the public tore the bull from walls and doors, defaced and tore it. At Erfurt many professors and clergy together condemned it and students threw the copies in the river. In the end Eck fled from the town where he had won his victory the year before.
In sharp tracts Luther condemned the bull, and in one he declared his support for the views of Hus. On August 31, 1520, as a "poor creature who has dared to address the King of kings," he sought help from the emperor Charles, and on November 17 he formally appealed to a free church council against the pope's judgment. When he learned that the pope's agents were burning his books, he resolved to answer in kind. He invited the "pious and zealous youths" of Wittenberg to gather outside the Elster Gate on December 10. At that gathering Luther threw the papal bull into the fire with his own hands, together with other church decrees and the books of the scholastic theologians. By this act he rose at one stroke against church law, the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, and church authority. The students gathered similar books, threw them in, and kept the fire going until evening.
On December 11 Luther declared that salvation was possible only for those who defied the rule of the pope. The German monk had excommunicated the pope.