All the way back in Horse 1122, I declared that I hate Halloween. My stance hasn't really changed since in the thirteen years since I wrote that piece, this diabetes inducing festival of kiddies roaming the streets and demanding sweeties has only gotten worse. However this year, instead of complaining about Halloween like a misanthrope, I am going to complain about Halloween like a clergyman.
The universe is bonkers. The tragedy of history is that although it follows a logical series of events, the actors who create history, or at least the big events which change everyone else's lives, are frequently stupid, obnoxious, and daft. Scratch the surface of just about any objectively bad event in human history, then what you will find at the centre is not religion as many people will want to blame, but the more base motivation of people's selfishness. The universe is so bonkers that the idea that the bidding process for a building renovation got so wildly out of hand that it accidentally split the church into fragments and created Protestantism, is a viable explanation of the truth.
In or about 1506, Pope Julius II set up the Vatican Museum systems, organised the Swiss Guard for his own personal protection and then promptly used that Guard for the invasion of Romagna, defeating the local lords. However this tale of papal madness, came when Julius wanted to rebuild the Old St Peter's Basilica, because twelve hundred years of use had left in in a less than stellar state. This very much looks like Pope Julius II was an egomaniac weirdo who wanted something to outlive him after he'd gone and he had the means to achieve it with other peoples' money.
Seemingly with the same sorts of power of a king, Pope Julius II ordered that the Old St Peter's Basilica be restored, as this would be a shining beacon to all of Christendom. This was all find and dandy until you realise that things cost money and not even the Pope in Rome can command money to just appear out of thin air. Nevertheless, he ordered that a report be made for the estimates of cost, which the intent on exacting taxation from the various states and kingdoms which paid homage, fealty, tribute, scutage, sackage and increasing amounts of umbrage to the church.
At first Julius II was pretty gung-ho about the affair until the reports came back with regards fixing the existing buildings and at that point, the whole project was doomed to economic irrelevancy. That Jesus bloke in the book which they were supposed to have read, once told a parable of everyone laughing at a chap because he set out of build a tower and ran out of money during the build.
Pope Julius II upon receiving the estimates of cost, decided against fixing the building and instead decided that it would be cheaper to knock down the whole thing and rebuild. It likely wasn't economical or possible to keep the façade of the existing buildings, however from what I have read, some of the pre-sixteenth century basilica, such as some ornamentation and some parts of the ancient crypt are still there.
In an ever increasing act of massively expensive hubris, Pope Julius II committed the church to demolishing the Old St. Peter's, which was a major controversy in all of Christendom, because this was probably a twelve-hundred year-old building at this point. Supposedly the building had been commissioned by Constantine the Great, on the site of where the early church in Rome had been. There are many many flaws to this; including the fact that the early church was seen as just another cult and it is highly unlikely that a first century cult would have anything preserved but don't let truth get in the way of hubris, right?
Pope Julius II also convinced the City of Rome that the Flavian Amphitheatre (aka the Colosseum) to be demolished, to provide some and masonry for the new church. Thankfully, owing to good old fashioned Roman arguing, they didn't get very far with that, and ended up just taking chunks off of the top. I suppose that the rationale was that these were a loaf of old Roman ruins, and given that these were erected in some respect as a state homage to the Roman gods, then nobody had the right to complain if they were used as one giant quarry. Interestingly, four hundred years later when Benito Mussolini was fascista-ing his was to power, he came up with the idea to abandon the ancient city of Rome and built an entirely new capital.
The difficult part about Pope Julius II's plan was that being a member of the clergy and being driven by the fumes of his own hubris, he had no idea how he was going to finance the new fancy church complex. The answer which was finally decided up was that the church in a brand new wave of hedonistic hubris, decided that it was going to sell an unholy amount of Indulgences. Just think through the logic of this. The church, which is supposed to be the agent and ambassador for God, has decided that it could sell favours with God, and sell what basically amounts to exemptions for sin, in order to fund the building of the largest church the world will see for five hundred years.
However, the church isn't exactly equipped to organise sales of goods and services because it isn't and arguably shouldn't ostensibly be a business. So then, in order to finance the New St. Peter's Church, they send out various clergy across the Holy Roman Empire; including one friar who gets the job of visiting the town that Martin Luther was in, to sell all these Indulgences.
Martin Luther, who was already known for being somewhat of a rabble rouser, got really really angry about this. When Martin Luther gets mad, he does what every Teutonic clergyman does and wrote a strongly worded letter to his bishop and let's be honest about this, in polite society, that is what one should do when one is angry, one should write to one's local official.
Luther was of course probably thought of by the local bishop as some letter-writing crank and promptly ignored. Not being content with being ignored, Luther republished his strongly worded letter as a general circular and this letter became known as the "Dispution of Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences."
Rather, Luther's dispution was actually mostly a list of 95 things that he thought was wrong with Indulgences and the church in general. Supposedly he then nailed his dispution to the All Saints Church in Wittenberg. The story that he nailed the 95 Theses to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg may or may not be real. The truth is that we really do no know and have no way of verifying if this tale is true or not. At any rate, the nailing of the 95 Theses to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg supposedly happened on October 31st, 1517. Take that spooky little kiddies. TRICK OR TREAT? Yes, have a pamphlet.
As for Martin Luther himself, he wrote a number of works which were critical to the Reformation of the Church, and since the printing press had just been invented, these works started circulating very quickly throughout the German states. This was taken badly by the church and sparked a pamphlet war with the indulgence preacher Johann Tetzel, which merely spread Luther's fame even further. As the beef escalated to more than just a quarter pounder with cheese, to a full-on five-stacker bacononater deluxe, Luther's ecclesiastical superiors had him tried for heresy, which culminated in his excommunication in 1521.
Luther became a Doctor of Theology and through a lot of critical study of the Bible, he came up with the concept of "sola fide", which is salvation by faith alone; which is enough for the church in Rome to excommunicate him and basically yell all kinds of nasty popery at him; to which he did not care. Yay, building renovations which caused Protestantism - who'da thunk it?
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