If anyone is old enough to remember the late 1990s, there was a great buzz around the Y2K bug—a great worry that computers around the world were going to cause havoc due to a dating quirk in program code which would lead to miscalculations and shutdowns of entire financial systems. There was much fear and consternation. Major preparations were made for the coming possible cataclysm which, if the doomsayers were to be believed, could result in a reversion to hunter-gatherer societies.
Fear reigned supreme.
And then, as everyone awoke on January 1, 2000, to discover televisions still worked, bank accounts were accessible and remained unchanged, and civil society largely hadn’t changed one bit, people began to question why they had allowed the hysteria to grip them as much as it had.
This modern experience of apocalyptic anticipation followed by quiet disappointment mirrors a far more consequential historical moment—one that would unknowingly reshape the entire landscape of Western civilization.
As many would know, Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of a Catholic Church at the beginning of the 16th century. This was an agency-driven challenge, based on personal moral conviction, aimed at taking a swipe at positive moral authority, and thus the power, of the existing Catholic structure. While the Catholic Church was known to invite constructive criticism, what made this time different was the invention and popularization of the printing press in the mid to late 15th century. This technological innovation allowed Luther’s message to spread with lightning speed.
But technology alone doesn’t explain the extraordinary reception of Luther’s ideas. What had changed was the theological climate among the population—it was ripe for revolt and revolution against the existing papal regime. People had grown tired of an increasingly irrelevant power structure that the papacy represented.
Why?
The answer lies some 500 years earlier, in a profound crisis of legitimacy that began with a failed apocalypse. If we take the Bible and its scriptures to be doctrinal propaganda for the papal power structure, in the years after Christ’s death, much emphasis was placed on Revelations 20:4:
“He threw him into the Abyss, and locked and sealed it over him, to keep him from deceiving the nations anymore until the thousand years were ended. After that, he must be set free for a short time.”
1000 AD had been prophesied to be the end of ‘current times.’ A great change was afoot. The return of Christ was near! The church benefited much from this scriptural interpretation—as the year 1000 drew nearer, the more the fear grew, and the more the huddled masses and peasantry flocked to the existential safety and security of the church and its clergy.
However, as January 1, 1000 rolled around, those same huddled masses and peasantry awoke to see the skies still blue and full of sunshine and clouds, without a demon or son of god to be seen. This realization took time to settle in—far longer than it did with Y2K, where the results were immediately apparent. Gradually, the common folk began to indulge in their own personal moral judgments: maybe the church didn’t really know what it was talking about?
This crisis of confidence reverberated through all levels of society, even reaching the papacy itself. The fundamental question became: “If the 1000-year deadline was wrong—what else could be wrong?” Furthermore, if the rapture wasn’t coming as predicted… just how long were they here for?
The first visible crack in the ecclesiastical facade appeared with Petrarch. By today’s standards, his work seems benign enough: he wrote poetry celebrating worldly, non-divine delights like love and romance, and the beauty of non-religious written works. But prior to Petrarch, the written word and all cultural and literary works were expected to be geared towards veneration of the Heavenly Father and all things ecclesiastic. Petrarch became the founding father for the celebration of the human—of the “here and now,” rather than the “ever after”, the Great Beyond, life after death.
Remarkably, he was among the first to not be chastised, rebuked, excommunicated, or otherwise persecuted by the church.
Petrarch’s works went on to influence many artisans who became “artists,” who themselves became part of the great cultural movement we know as the Renaissance today, so transforming the entirety of western civilization. His work laid the groundwork for our understanding of the world today—hence why we tend not to think of it as remarkable now. But at the time, it was quite revolutionary. And, as it happened, was largely accepted by an increasingly disconnected and inwardly focused papacy.
This acceptance wasn’t arbitrary. The idea that “we may be here on earth for a while longer than we originally decreed or anticipated” had started to take hold, even among church leadership. The community was ready to receive works celebrating the present moment, the human experience, the here and now. This, in turn, set the stage for subsequent revolutionary thinkers, writers, and artists of the Renaissance, who in turn created the intellectual climate that would so readily receive Luther’s message.
This can’t be taken to be the ONLY reason Lutheranism took hold and represented a departure from Catholic hegemony. There were a multitude of other, unrelated and independent events that had an impact. But this destruction of ecclesiastical legitimacy is likely to be a significant contributor. In this view, the Catholic Church likely sowed the seeds of its own destruction. As it happened; the only power brokers powerful enough to bring down the monolithic power of the Catholic Church were the power brokers within the Catholic Church itself.
A valuable lesson for anyone who enjoys absolute power—you may become your own worst enemy.
Photographer and cULTURE VULTure 
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