Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to The History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at Kings College London and the LMU in Munich.

Online at historyofphilosophy.net.

Today's episode, European Disunion, Introduction to the Reformation.

The history of philosophy, like God, moves in mysterious ways.

Actions and arguments may lead to the emergence of ideas that would surprise even horrify the people who first set things in motion.

Every historical period offers examples.

From the medieval era, a nice illustration would be how a theory of economic rights resulted from the insistence of religious mendicants that they should be allowed to embrace strict, voluntary poverty.

But for unintended consequences, you can't do much better than the Protestant Reformation.

Consider what Luther, Calvin, and Svingley would have said upon learning that their movement would indirectly give rise to theories of religious toleration, the strict separation of church and state, and arguably even the widespread secularization of European political and cultural life.

As if that weren't enough, they could also be informed that thanks to their Reformation, Europe would soon be engulfed in decades of warfare.

It's enough to make you think twice next time you nail a list of complaints to a door.

Of course, the Reformation had its own prehistory.

It was the culmination of developments in religious life that had been going on for generations.

In the 14th and early 15th centuries, the lawlords in England and the Hussites in Bohemia already anticipated several items on the agenda of the 16th century reformers.

These included doubts about the transformation of bread into the body of Christ in the Eucharist, dissemination of the scriptures in vernacular translation, and criticism of hypocrisy and corruption in the church.

The right of lay persons to engage actively with religious issues, encapsulated in Luther's famous teaching that all believers are priests, was defended as far back as the 12th century by Peter Valdez or Valdezius of Lyon.

He and his followers, the Valdezians, claimed the right to preach publicly without church authorization.

They were met with violent repression, as were Jan Huss and Jerome of Prague, Bohemian reformers who were executed for their ideas.

John Wickliffe, the central figure of the lawlord movement, avoided that fate but his books were burnt.

These events were premonitions of what was to come, as the 16th century was marked by a suppression of ideas and executions for heresy, and on both sides of the religious divide.

Given this history, everyone should have expected the Spanish Inquisition.

The 95 D.C.'s Luther, nailed on a church door in Wittenberg in 1517, concerned the question of indulgences, payments made to the church to reduce the time one would have to spend in purgatory, after death, before ascending to heaven.

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