[lbo-talk] papal logic

[C. G. Estabrook]

Heiko Oberman, probably the world's leading historian of the Reformation at the 
time of his death in 2001 (on this day, as it happens), used to say that he 
wanted to write a book entitled "A Late-Medieval Doctor [in the sense of 
university professor]" and have it be about Luther, without naming him, to show 
how much his thought was part of the intellectual fabric of his time.

Erasmus, the man who saw the era as clearly as anyone, once observed to Luther's 

  sovereign that Luther had sinned in two things: "he has touched the crown of 
the pope and the bellies of the monks."  But Luther thought he was doing theology.

Chris Doss wrote:
> Martin Luther's father was a miner, wasn't he?
> 
> --- On Tue, 4/21/09, C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu> wrote:
> 
>> From: C. G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] papal
>> logic To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Date: Tuesday, April 21, 2009, 11:24 PM 
>> You're quite right that clerical office couldn't be inherited.  That was
>> the church's way out of the family and pseudo-family alliances that were 
>> the basis of feudal polity. But that didn't mean that clerical office
>> necessarily went to the aristocracy.  Quite the contrary -- it was the
>> route for men (and even women) of talent to rise, throughout the Middle
>> Ages.  Thomas Becket (whose father was a cloth merchant) and Thomas Wolsey
>> (whose father was a butcher) are well-known English examples.
>> 
>> And in fact it was the monasteries, not the episcopate, that were the major
>> landowners (as, e.g., Henry VIII's button-man, Thomas Cromwell, well
>> understood).
>> 
>> Eliding the Reformation and the Great Revolution is at best a bit Whiggish,
>> but in fact the Reformation was inter alia a feudal movement.  The new
>> absolutist states of the 16th century -- state feudalisms, as Perry
>> Anderson explains in "Lineages of the Absolutist State" (!974) -- seized
>> control of the church apparatus throughout Europe.  That's why areas where
>> the state already controlled the church ca. 1500 (e.g. France) remained
>> Catholic, while areas where it didn't (e.g. England) became Protestant.
>> --CGE
>> 
>> 
> 
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