Martin Luther between the Middle Ages and the Modern Times

Abstract

In the history of the early bourgeois German Revolution rise the colossal figures of Martin Luther (1483-1546) and Thomas Munzer (1490- 1525), the leaders of the two main trends in the profound social conflict that shook Europe - the moderate-bourgeois, and the revolutionary-peasant-tribal. Connected to one degree or another with the development of the mass anti-feudal movement in sixteenth-century Germany, the two Reform Tories shared a number of features characteristic of fighters against the dominant social order, as well as some unique peculiarities. If Luther with the act of 31. X. 1517 marked the beginning of the pan-Germanic reformation movement, Munzer is associated with the greatest sweep of the revolution, which found its climax in the Great Peasant War (1524-1525). This means that their activity, though different in its ideological charge, flowed into the general unified stream of the early bourgeois revolution, which began with the Reformation and ended with the epic of the peasant-tribal masses rising up to struggle for the destruction of the dominant feudal regime, for the construction of a new social order. The one took the lead of the movement, but when he saw its irrepressible revolutionary sweep, frightened by the unknowns of social upheaval, he went over to the side of the princes; the other continued the struggle to its heights, bravely led the detachments of the urban plebs and the rural poor, and finally gave his life for the sake of his utopian-communist ideas. The one denounces the revolution, the other becomes its tireless, ardent defender and ideologue. Unlike Munzer, who overcame the limits of his century and in his ideological conceptions anticipated and profiled the future communist days, Luther remained within the framework of the momentous transitional time in which he lived, unable to go beyond the limits of his epoch. Herein lies one of the reasons for his historical narrowness.