violent shift - “from citizen to citizen as equals”? The Church was merely one of many institutions that had sat massively, reliably, comfortably (and greedily) between people and power.
Luther, it later emerged, was not alone. An era of awkward answers had begun. The Prussian astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, for instance, had preceded Luther by a couple of decades with his own questioning of the unquestionable. “Those who know that the consensus of many centuries has sanctioned the idea that the earth remains at rest while the heavens move around it would regard it as an insane pronouncement if I said the opposite,” he wrote. Machiavelli, Galileo, Erasmus, a growing list of great, transformative names - they were all working away in this same questioning spirit. Their insane pronouncements, when proven true, opened the way to still further insights. The Enlightenment had begun. The old power centers acted almost as if nothing had changed; maybe they believed nothing would ever need to. “What was, still is,” the Catholic Church pronounced confidently (and absurdly) at the Council of Trent in response to Luther’s Reformation. But there was no turning back. As the German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote, the motto of the era could best be summarized as: Dare to know! “The Enlightenment,” he explained, “requires nothing but freedom.”
This, it emerged, was a hell of an expensive requirement. 4.
In the years after Luther’s 95 Theses, Europe was torn apart. The continent’s longstanding image of power - balled up, concentrated, unquestioned - was ripped away. Another picture emerged. The idea of personal access to God, a kind of “one man, one prayer” approach to religion, which opened in turn other fundamental struggles. The credibility of nearly every sacred body that had once depended on controlling people and limiting their choices - the Church, those kings, feudalism, myths - faced a creeping erosion. “Human knowledge and human power come to the same thing,” the English philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon observed in the midst of this shift in his artillery shell of a book The New Organum. Human knowledge, he means, is human power. You can imagine the energy, the promise of the book as it was passed in Latin copy to Kepler in his study in Linz (then Lintz), to Gallileo in Venice a decade before his imprisonment. It was this same human power to question even the most sacred ideas that the masses of Enlightenment Europe would use, gleefully at times, to claw apart most of the old structures.?? Luther's heresy led initially to the Wars of the Reformation, battles that pulled every European royal family into a struggle between church and state, and then between each other. The bloodletting of The Thirty Years War, the first truly pan-European
92 “The Enlightenment”: Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” Kant: Political Writings, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) p. 54
93 “Human knowledge”: Francis Bacon, The New Organon. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 32
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