This book consists of the brilliant and beautifully written biographies of Martin Luther and Erasmus as well as the world they lived in. It’s long but engrossing. It’s also dense and I had to take breaks  sometimes for air and other times for reading other material.  I must have started this about a month ago.   

Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther,
and the Fight for the Western Mind  
by Michael Massing 
2018 – 992 pages
Read by Tom Parks, 34h 52m
Rating: 10 /  history and ideas of Christianity

Yup -this is about Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther, but the story goes back to Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and St Augustine among others.  Erasmus and Luther were very different men with very different ideas. They were both concerned with the direction the Catholic Church had taken and what it was doing, but where Luther was vocal in his opposition, demanding it change to the point of excommunication for his efforts,  Erasmus continued to work more quietly toward reform from the inside. They were allies at first but that came apart and they became hostile toward each other and the ideas.  

Michael Massing is an award-winning journalist of economics and Executive Editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. His story is a case of “What’s a nice Jewish boy like you writing a book like this?”
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/martin-luther-and-me
(The link goes to a super article about Massing, Martin
Luther and the Jews. It’s in Tablet magazine .) 

I was born and raised Lutheran – very Lutheran, “Faith of Our Fathers” and “Rock of Ages” Lutheran.  We were taught a wee bit of what is in this book  at church activities, but Martin Luther is tough to teach children and young people. Yes, he said rude things and told bawdy jokes and in his later years he was ugly in his anti-semitism. But there was a lot more to him than that and he was venerated in his lifetime. We used (and memorized) the Small Lutheran Catechism in mandatory Confirmation classes.  In his later years my dad was a part-time minister and his father wrote religious tracts about Transubstantiation, among other things. (Me? Today I believe there is a God but I don’t know about going much further, religion-wise.)

On the other hand, I learned very little about Erasmus but what little I got in school fascinated me. He never broke from the church, but had his own ideas and was hugely beneficial to the Catholic Reformation. He lived at the same time as Luther but was a bit older and not inclined to work in the parishes. 

Prior to reading Fatal Discord I’d read several books about the Reformation and to me it seemed the various events happened years and years apart but from this book it got well under way in short order in large part due to the printing press which allowed educated and powerful people to read and get stirred up.   

So the book was very, very interesting to me – not a thriller, but almost a page-turner. Massing covers a lot of material in a nicely organized and coherent way. These two theologians, as well as many others, thoroughly lambasted each other and the Church about ideas which had been around for almost 1500 years  

Now looking mostly at the events of Germany and other Northern locations, that’s not quite so although the Wars of Reformation went on for well over a century. . Luther posted his 95 Theses at Wittenberg on October 31, 1517.  Due to the newly available printing press they were disseminated quickly and the Reformation was up and going leading many to martyrdom for their beliefs. 

Luther, an Augustinian monk by firm choice, was at the center of the conflict between various “Protestant” (for protest) sects and the Catholic Church because the sects sprang up very quickly and argued and warred against each other feeling their very lives and immortal souls to be hanging in the balance. The Catholic church persecuted and prosecuted them and sometimes burned them at the stake. Many of the local authorities (not all) set upon them starting with the tragic Peasant’s War. Luther was frequently ill and sometimes in hiding. After being excommunicated he married (an ex-nun) and became quite important in Protestant circles. He translated the Bible into German more than one time and it’s still used in Germany today. He was absolutely adamant that his interpretation of the Bible, particularly Jesus Christ and the New Testament, was correct  

Erasmus, a Catholic priest by circumstance but of the humanist tradition. tried to reform the Church from the inside through his scholarly writings and other exchanges. He had admirers and detractors.  Erasmus valued the simpler, humbler things about the New Testament and  the teachings of Jesus. 

But although these two held the same views of the corrupt and powerful Catholic Church, they were at opposite ends of what Christianity should look like in 16th century Europe.  How did the two come to their conclusions? How did they spread their ideas?  

The book winds up with some excellent “Aftermath” chapters on Erasmus and Luther which take us to the 21st century.  Tom Parks does a splendid job with the narration.