Luther's Influence On Hierarchies

Every society, past and present, has unspoken things that keep it running smoothly. Formerly among these are nested hierarchies. These hierarchies, for lack of a better phrase, were a sort of world view; they were ways of thinking that are held by the majority of the society. They dictated the order of things and how things are to be done. This was particularly prevalent in medieval Europe; the hierarchies were almost like seams to the fabric of that society as a whole. Which poses a question: what happens when these seams start to change and fall apart? Well, that’s exactly what happened. They all became obsolete thanks to the work of forward thinkers, particularly the religious, cosmic, and scientific hierarchies. The religious hierarchy
refers to the flow of power through the religious ranks of the Catholic church. It was rather straight forward; at the top was God, followed by the Pope, Cardinal, Archbishop, and Bishop. Below them were the Clergy, an, at the bottom, were the believers or parishioners. As a part of this hierarchy, only priests and those of higher holy levels were thought to be able to communicate with God on the behalf of the believers. As such, they were in a position of power which, as it seems in human nature to do, they abused it. These members of the upper levels had the believers so terrified of being confined to purgatory that they would do anything to shorten their time there. That is where the ‘selling’ of indulgences came in. While indulgences where technically donations given to the church meant to cancel out previous sins and shorten one’s time in purgatory, they were often ‘sold’ to the public with a sort of sales pitch like the one included in the slides: ‘“as soon as a coin in the cofer rings/ the soul from purgatory springs.”’ Not everyone, however, was fond of the idea of indulgences and the notion of the separation between the less holy men and God. Martin Luther, born in 1483 in the Holy Roman Empire to what would now be considered a middle-class family in the Holy Roman Empire. He studied for a time at the Univerity of Erfurt, studying theology and philosophy, but it did not make him happy. Much to his father’s displeasure, he eventually made the decision to leave school and become a monk. He had been very concerned about salvation, going so far as to have incredibly frequent confessions, as depicted here: particularly when it came to impure thoughts and dreams about women. Luther disliked the notion of indulgences, along with a few other secular notions, and on October 31, 1517, he decided to make he decided to make those feeling s known. He nailed 95 theses to the front door of the local church at Wittenberg. While neither the documents nor the action were particularly revolutionary in and of themselves, they challenged one source of revenue of the religions and secular higher ups. Luther’s concern with salvation and the church did not end there, however.
It led him to enter the Leipzig Dispute, originally a debate between Johann Eck, who defended the Catholic church and doctrine, and Andreas Karlstadt, a Christian cleric. It did not end particularly well for Luther; his ideas were thought to be heretical. A similar situation occurred in 1518, in Augsburg, when he had an interview with Cardinal Cajetan; it turned into a full blown theological debate. It seems that Luther was quite argumentative and steadfast in his teachings. They even garnered a papal response from the pope at that time, Exsurge Domine, which declared Luther’s teaching heretical on June 15, 1519. Luther burned it and was excommunicated in January of 1521. Later, he was officially declared a heretic, but his actions catalyzed the formation of the Lutheran church, which practiced the “priesthood of all believers,” meaning that there was no formal separation between the common people and
clergy. The scientific hierarchy refers to the general thought as to how things worked, though it does not seem much like a traditional hierarchy.
As always, according to the thought pattern of the time, God, or other supernatural forces, were the cause of pretty much everything. That concept puts God at the top of the ‘hierarchy.’ However, the scientific hierarchy is more like a tree and its branches. The three main branches were the Natural, or things that were easy to explain, Supernatural, usually thought of to be divine miracles—otherwise known as “examples of God’s might”— celestial events like comets, and monsters, and Preternatural, things that were not easily explain, though not always concerning, like
medicine. One of the things that was usually considered to be in the ‘Natural’ category happened to be the notion, basted in Aristotelian physics, that things gravitated toward what they were most similar to. The slides give the example that air rises to the surface of water because of its ‘air-ness’ and a stone would fall because of its ‘stone-ness.’ By that logic, humans would remain on Earth because of their similarity to either the Earth itself or Satan, which, as stated later, was thought to have existed in the middle of Earth. This concept was challenged by Isaac Newton.
Newton studied at Cambridge University at a time when the ideas of Galileo and Copernicus were already being taught and was incredibly religious, despite his interest in the occult. Part of his interest had to do with Alchemy, or the sort of pre-science that lead to the more refined notion of science that the modern world is more familiar with. While religion and science are often thought of as separate entities in modern times, such was not so in the mid to late 1600’s. Newton, in his twenties, came up with his laws of motion that completely destroyed Aristotelian physics. He also partially invented calculus, which the world probably could have done without, to analyze the altering speed of bodies in motion. The cosmic hierarchy refers to how people at the time thought things worked on the universal level; it seems to have been a sort of hybrid of the religious and scientific hierarchies since it had to do with how things occurred while still having God at the top of the metaphorical universe dome. At the center there was Earth, with Hell and Satan in the middle, followed by the planets, the angels, and, finally, as previously stated, God, at the apex. It focused, at least in part, on a geocentric view of the universe, with most of the planets in the same order, excluding the sun, as depicted here: Everything was thought to have revolved around Earth, with God above able to observe and control everything. This belief, as most other beliefs of the time, was based around the bible. This idea came was challenged by the Polish clergyman and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus who studied at bologna and Padua in Italy. As far as anyone at the time was concerned, he came up with the notion of the heliocentric universe. Anyone with the vaguest knowledge of how seriously religion was taken in the 1500’s would expect that this notion was not well liked. It was, in fact, attacked by protestants for not keeping to the literal interpretation of the bible. After all, the Old Testament, when looked at and taken literally, supported the notion of a geocentric universe. It likely did not help that all of this, both the shaking of the cosmic and scientific hierarchies, was happening at the same times as the shaking of the religious hierarchy that had led to religious turmoil. Over all, the nested hierarchies, when faced with change and opposition, fell apart between 1500 and 1800. The hierarchies themselves where not able to adapt to the growing information, and the people who tried to maintain them were not efficient enough in their positions to do so. However, it is for the best and allowed for Europe to grow and mature as a country. If the hierarchies had stayed intact, there is not way of telling what could have happened when Europe had to face the unrest and tragedies, both civil and international, that have occurred since.