A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

sinners. So God was a just and angry God - admirable, but hardly lovable. He wanted to be able to
drop his defences, to experience emotional catharsis, a sense of reconciliation. And one day, as he
wrestled with this problem of the justice of God, it came. ‘I grasped that the justice of God is that
righteousness by which through grace and sheer mercy, God justifies us through faith.’ The
significant words here are ‘through grace and sheer mercy’. Luther had succeeded in breaking
through the psychological barriers of fear and mistrust, into a perception of an all-loving God.
‘Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise.’
As with Wycliffe, the historical accident of being born far from Rome prevented Luther from using
his new insight for the good of the Church. If he had been born an Italian, he might, like St Francis,
have appealed to the pope to allow him to form a movement to carry his message directly to the
people. There was nothing in it that was contrary to the teachings of the Church. He wanted to
assure people that they were not damned, that this medieval world of devils and demons was a lie,
or at least, only a half-truth. It was the other half that mattered: the grace and mercy of God. Faith
itself was enough to ensure salvation. This was the message Luther poured into his sermons of
1515 and 1516.
Unfortunately, it contained the germ of a disagreement with the present policies of the Church. In
1513, Julius the warrior-pope had been replaced by Leo X, the son of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Leo
shared with Rodrigo Borgia the feeling that life was intended for enjoyment, and spent so much
time in his hunting boots that pilgrims found it hard to kiss his feet. He ate well, drank well, kept
court jesters, and spent enormous sums of money on art and entertainment - for example, on the
newly invented entertainment called opera. Leo was the pope of whom it was said that he spent
three papal treasuries - his predecessor’s, his own and his successors’. Inevitably, he needed
money, and since he could not proclaim a Holy Year for another ten years or so, he encouraged the
sale of indulgences. These were bits of paper, handed out by a priest that stated that the recipient
was, for the time being, freed of all his sins. Since everyone believed literally in the picture of the
afterlife described in Dante, with each minor sin costing, perhaps, a century in Purgatory, most
people felt that indulgences were a good bargain. But they were, of course, expensive - a prince
could expect to pay twenty-five gold pieces, and even a commoner was expected to find one gold
piece - perhaps a year’s income.
If Luther was correct about faith, then these highly profitable indulgences were useless, or at least,
irrelevant. A piece of paper was no substitute for faith. Besides, religious experience demanded
suffering - Luther knew this from personal experience. ‘God works by contraries, so that a man
feels himself to be lost at the very moment when he is on the point of being saved... Man must first
cry out that there is no health in him. He must be consumed with horror. This is the pain of
Purgatory.’ Luther was not saying anything with which the desert fathers would not have agreed
wholeheartedly. But for the pope and the German princes, it was being said at the worst possible
moment.
For example, Prince Albert of Brandenburg was already a bishop of two cities, and when the
archbishop of Mainz died, he recognised that this appointment would be a valuable addition to his
income. The problem was that three archbishops had died within ten years, and the parish could not
afford the vast fee demanded by Rome to install a new one - ten thousand ducats. Albert borrowed
this from the German banking house of Fugger. Their interest rates were enormous, and he had to
repay the debt as quickly as possible. The answer lay in the sale of indulgences. The pope would
grant the right to sell indulgences in Brandenburg if Albert would agree to pay over half his
proceeds to the Church...