February 2015

The Devil in Luther's Dreams, Part 4

Here is our fourth discussion on the Roman Catholic Church and the humanists of Martin Luther's Germany. This is really a sub-topic in a broader discussion which we hope to continue throughout the coming year, which we have titled Martin Luther in Life and Death. In our first presentation in this endeavor, we discussed aspects of Luther's own life, and we saw that he himself was a humanist, one of the so-called “poets”, who upon having had an epiphany, suddenly turning to Christianity and joined a monastery.

From there we have been presenting a series which we have subtitled The Devil in Luther's Dream, where we have hoped to illustrate the nature of the Roman Catholic Church that the humanist-turned-priest Martin Luther had later sought to reform, and when he found that he could not reform it, he sought to liberate himself and his German Catholic Church from its clutches. What we call the Reformation should in that essence have instead been called the Liberation. It would eventually result in the 30 Years' War and the destruction of much of Medieval Germany.

We have been following something called The Reuchlin Controversy, and that is because the historian that we chose to follow for this series, Johannes Janssen, had wisely chosen this controversy as the centerpiece in order to describe the turmoil which was rising in Germany at the time. There were many Germans, as well as Italians, who sought to destroy the books and the writings of the Jews. As this issue was once again surfacing in Germany, the lawyer, Cabalist and humanist philosopher Johann Reuchlin came to the defense of the Jewish writings in published booklets of his own. As Reuchlin was opposed by the Theologians of the University at Cologne, which was Germany's largest university, the case came to be heard in the courts of bishops, the emperor, and then the pope. It not only became a defining case in the struggle between Christianity and the survival of Judaism in Europe in Luther's time, but we have also seen that the greater number of Germany's humanists and young pagans, whose new philosophy was the direct result of humanism, were rallying to Reuchlin's side of the debate.

The Roman Catholic Persecution of the Early British Christian Churches

Some of the notes used for the program, the excerpts from Bede's Eccleiastical History and the Chronicles of Ireland, follow below.

The Devil in Luther's Dreams, Part 3

This is our third presentation of what we have loosely titled The Devil of Martin Luther's Dreams, invoking the myth that Luther had thrown his inkwell at the devil literally, when indeed he threw his inkwell at the devil by spilling it out onto hundreds of pages of paper in his writings against both the Roman Church and the Jews. The purpose of these presentations is to describe the devil which Luther was railing against, a Roman Catholic Church fully infiltrated by humanists who scoffed at religion, except as a device by which to fleece the common people of Europe, and especially of Germany.

We have been discussing the humanists in the educational institutions and monasteries of Germany, and also of Italy, in the 15th and 16th centuries. There are some things taken for granted which we had presumed that people would understand. Among those, is that before the Reformation, for Christian Europeans there was no advanced education outside of the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. The universities and monasteries were the educational system, and they all operated somewhere within the Roman Church structure. Therefore humanists within the church were not really a force which was contrary to the Church itself, although many of them despised the papal authority, but rather if they continued to prevail they would change the entire Church theology to something other than Christianity, and if the Roman Catholic Church continued to dominate European government, religion and education, then the people would have no choice but to submit to the whims of the humanists. In the background was the Jew, playing an influential role in all of this while avoiding any of the blame.

The Devil in Luther's Dreams, Part 2

The purpose of this series of presentations, entitled The Devil of Luther's Dream, is to show the condition of the Catholic faith in Germany at the time of Martin Luther, the character of the Roman Catholic Church, and the extant struggle which Christians such as Luther were having with both Jews and Humanists, many of whom who were basically Catholics-turned-pagan, and a great number of them were monks and priests. Understanding these things, we may better understand the causes of the Reformation, and why Martin Luther and many others believed that it was necessary.

In our last program, we exhibited the fact that the celebrated Catholic priest, Erasmus, was actually a humanist and not at all a Christian. In turn, Erasmus had fostered the development of an entire collection of fellow humanists inside the Catholic church organization in Germany. However we also were able to see in the words of Albert III of Pio, the Prince of Carpi, and from his own correspondence with Erasmus, that humanism had already become prominent within the structure of the Catholic church in Italy, and that many more conservative Italian Catholics were dissatisfied with that development, himself included. Carpi had spent much of his time over several decades challenging and feuding with Erasmus, until he was left bereft of his principality by Charles V of Germany, the Holy Roman emperor.

What follows below are all of the extant quotes from the Classics concerning the Druids which I [WRF] am aware of. Of course, there may be others. These are interspersed with some of my own notes. [Click here to read.]