Part Two: Commemorating Martin Luther and 500 years of Reformation

Part Two:  Commemorating Martin Luther and 500 years of Reformation

Martin Luther was born during a time of great tension and conflict, now recognized as the transitional period between the Middle Ages and the Modern Ages. During this old habits were dying hard while innovations continually pushed into daily life.

This time of upheaval is characterized by new discoveries and the emergence of a new view of the world.

In order to better understand the Reformation and its leaders, Luther and Melanchthon, it is important to know about the influence of humanism. Humanism is an attitude of thought which gives primary importance to human beings. Its outstanding historical example was Renaissance humanism from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, which developed from the rediscovery by European scholars of classical Latin and Greek texts. As a reaction against the religious authoritarianism of Medieval Catholicism, it emphasized human dignity, beauty, and potential, and affected every aspect of culture in Europe, including philosophy, music, and the arts. This humanist emphasis on the value and importance of the individual influenced the Protestant Reformation, and brought about social and political change in Europe.

The reformation would never have become an important movement if it weren't for the political climate of the time.

The Estrangement of Eastern and Western Christendom

The Reformation was not the first division in the Church.  One of the earlier and largest was the schism between East and West.

One summer afternoon in the year 1054, as worship was about to begin in the Church of the Holy Wisdom' (Hagia Sophia) in Constantinople, Cardinal Humbert and two other legates of the Pope entered the building and made their way up to the sanctuary. They had not come to pray. Based on Liturgical, linguistic, and political divisions, they placed a Bull of Excommunication against the Patriarch Michael I. Cerularius, upon the altar, turned and marched out. As he passed through the western door, the Cardinal shook the dust from his feet with the words: 'Let God look and judge.' A deacon ran out after him in great distress and begged him to take back the Bull.  Humbert refused; and it was literally dropped in the street.  The legates left for Rome two days later, leaving behind a city near riots.

This incident has been conventionally taken to mark the beginning of the great schism between the Orthodox east and the Latin (Roman) west. It was a schism that came about gradually, as the result of a long and complicated process, starting well before the eleventh century and not completed until some time after.

As with the Reformation, in this long and complicated process, many different influences were at work. The schism was conditioned by cultural, political, and economic factors; yet its fundamental cause was not secular but theological. In the last resort it was over matters of doctrine that east and west quarreled - two matters in particular: the Papal claims and the Filioque. But before we look more closely at these two major differences, and before we consider the actual course of the schism, something must be said about the wider background. Long before there was an open and formal schism between east and west, the two sides had become strangers to one another.

When Paul and the other Apostles travelled around the Mediterranean world, they moved within a close knit political and cultural unity: the Roman Empire. This Empire embraced many different national groups, often with languages and dialects of their own, but all groups were governed by the same Emperor. There was a broad Greco-Roman civilization which educated people throughout the Empire shared. Either Greek or Latin was understood almost everywhere in the Empire, and many could speak both languages. These facts greatly assisted the early Church in its missionary work.

Years later Charles I united much of Europe in a similar way after he was crowned Emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day at Old St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. His goal was a unified culture, thus he campaigned against rivals, including the Saxons to his east (loosely, Germany), Christianizing them under penalty of death.

It was an ominous but significant precedent that the cultural renaissance in Charlemagne's Court should have been marked at its outset by a strong anti-Greek prejudice. In fourth-century Europe there had been one Christian civilization, in thirteenth century Europe there were two. Perhaps it is in the reign of Charlemagne that the schism of civilizations first becomes clearly apparent. The Byzantines for their part remained enclosed in their own world of ideas, and did little to meet the west half way. Alike in the ninth and in later centuries they usually failed to take western learning as seriously as it deserved. They dismissed all Franks (nominally, both Germans and French) as barbarians and nothing more.

The division between Eastern and Western Christianity is still suffered today but the excommunications that initiated the theological part of the rift were not lifted until 1965, when Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras, following their historic meeting in Jerusalem in 1964, presided over simultaneous ceremonies that revoked the excommunication decrees.