Fatal Discord

Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind

By: Michael Massing

Narrated by: Tom Parks

A deeply textured dual biography and fascinating intellectual history that examines two of the greatest minds of European history - Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther - whose heated rivalry gave rise to two enduring, fundamental, and often colliding traditions of philosophical and religious thought.

Erasmus of Rotterdam was the leading figure of the Northern Renaissance. At a time when Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael were revolutionizing Western art and culture, Erasmus was helping to transform Europe's intellectual and religious life, developing a new design for living for a continent rebelling against the hierarchical constraints of the Roman Church. When in 1516 he came out with a revised edition of the New Testament based on the original Greek, he was hailed as the prophet of a new enlightened age. Today, however, Erasmus is largely forgotten, and the reason can be summed up in two words: Martin Luther. As a young friar in remote Wittenberg, Luther was initially a great admirer of Erasmus and his critique of the Catholic Church, but while Erasmus sought to reform that institution from within, Luther wanted a more radical transformation. Eventually, the differences between them flared into a bitter rivalry, with each trying to win over Europe to his vision.

In Fatal Discord, Michael Massing seeks to restore Erasmus to his proper place in the Western tradition. The conflict between him and Luther, he argues, forms a fault line in Western thinking - the moment when two enduring schools of thought, Christian humanism and evangelical Christianity, took shape. A seasoned journalist who has reported from many countries, Massing here travels back to the early 16th century to recover a long-neglected chapter of Western intellectual life, in which the introduction of new ways of reading the Bible set loose social and cultural forces that helped shatter the millennial unity of Christendom and whose echoes can still be heard today. Massing concludes that Europe has adopted a form of Erasmian humanism while America has been shaped by Luther-inspired individualism.

©2018 Michael Massing (P)2018 HarperCollins Publishers

The American Protestant divide

Explains how Erasmus and Luther’s ideas are the roots of the Protestant religious divide in America today.

I would’ve preferred the Reader’s Digest version, but the last two chapters are worth their weight in gold!

Great!

Especially great if youre interested in the roots of our modern ideas, or to learn about all the people and deas that you vaguely remember from school.

Utterly fascinating

In order to understand religion today one needs to start at the very least with the Reformation.
Fatal Discord takes one back to the origin of Christianity and the bible, and the schism that rent it in the 16th century.

Sadly, the narrator cannot properly pronounce the many European places and words, and when he refers to
'thesis' it sounds like feces.
Someone familiar with European languages and their pronunciations would have been a better choice than
Tom Parks who has a very American accent with no ability to navigate un English words

Printing and Printers: The Reformation Letters, Essays and Bibles

Printing technology was only 7 decades old when Luther hung his treatise on the door. That act triggered an onslaught of publications that comprise the history of the Reformation. The number of Bibles that were printed and sold is remarkable considering how primitive the technology. It was the printed word that allowed the theologians to debate in public the great questions of sin, salvation and redemption. The treatises and letters together with the competing Bibles provided the curriculum that eventually educated the western world. The author relies on these public and private printed conversations to give us a delightful, and at times frightening, look into the lives of these reformists.

best political & religious history of the west I’ve read

Deep dive into personalities of Luthet and Erasmus,
sensative portrait of convictions and struggles of both.
 Accurate on their stories and impact on the modern
World. All book cheracters are sympathetically put into
Their historical context, This is a gteat blend of storytelling, Personalities and disputes that put
Them on history’s central stage. I thoight I knew
This story, but after this book my insights doubled.

Amazing!

This book should be standard reading for everyone, christians included, but not exclusively christians either. It is very long but it is well worth the effort.

Eye opening

Call at the beginning had to stop came back to it and so glad I did. The last 3/4 of the book are revealing thought-provoking and may be question a lot of things I think about wonderful read.

Excellent treatment of the subject

Well-researched, well-written, and well-read. Thoroughly enjoyed the audio book. May buy and read the print book. Highly recommended.

When ossified human institutions meet transformative information technology

This was amazing! My less-than-amateur understanding of the Reformation placed Luther against the Catholic Church, which is an almost meaningless story to my human mind. Place him against the Popes of the time and he MUST seem a hero. The author found the perfect foil for Luther in Erasmus, and we get to see a conflict of individual men: their ideas, the exigencies of their daily existence that channeled those ideas, and the formative circumstances that ground the lenses that were their consciousnesses. At times I thought the author was going far afield in addressing the historical circumstances, but I was ALWAYS WRONG. This looks s an opus. It took two generations after the invention of the printing press for the technology to establish itself ubiquitously and for literacy rates to reach a point of critical mass. Once that happened…
How could I read this and NOT see today reflected in the struggle. Too, how could I miss the recurring Platonic / Aristotelian dialectic clash? Thank you for resolving my cognitive dissonance on Luther’s character and intent. Thank you also for showing so clearly how consequences bear little resemblance to intentions of those most able to shake the foundations of established order. All new thoughts and ideas about the period for me. Thank you, gentle author, for the journey.

History of debate between Erasmus and Luther

Synopsis:
This book is technically a dual biography of Martin Luther and Erasmus. As a biography of Luther, it is far better than Eric Metaxas's bio (also on Audible). It gets more details correct, goes into greater detail (especially with respect to the later years of Luther's life), and is much less hagiographical. I don't know of any other biography of Erasmus on Audible, so this is probably the best one. It is fairly short on detail on both authors' early lives and focuses on their intellectual developments. While the author clearly favors Erasmus over Luther, he portrays both figures in a sympathetic light and is willing to criticize both.

Both Erasmus and Luther come across as flawed people. Erasmus is portrayed as a high minded genius, cynical towards anything supernatural. He is portrayed as effectively reducing religion to morality and to social progress (which the author seems to think is a good thing). On the other hand, he is also portrayed as hypocritical, self-serving, duplicitous, and comfort-loving. Luther is portrayed as having good intentions to begin with, but with being a mediocre and spontaneous scholar, who, driven by a mix of ego and self-loathing, made up his theology on the fly and became increasingly hateful as he aged.

The amount of territory covered by this book is enormous. Besides the obvious topics, it also covers: The letters of Paul, the debate between Augustine and Jerome, the Reuchlin affair, Luther's views of Islam, the sack of Rome by the Holy Roman Empire's army, the full history of protestantism in Germany and America, the beginnings of protestantism in Switzerland, France, and the low countries.

Epilogue / Thesis:
The book ends with a long, surprisingly detailed epilogue concerning the influence of Luther's thought and Erasmus's thought from their deaths to the election of Trump. This epilogue essentially constitutes the thesis of the book. Two aspects of this epilogue are praiseworthy: First, whereas many authors present the history of protestantism as a series of static nodes on a family tree, Massing presents the different denominations as dynamic realities, each shifting back and forth between the sway of the Lutheran emphasis on faith over works and the Erasmian tendency to reduce religion to morality and social progress. So, for instance, at the start Methodists may have been more influenced by Lutheran tendencies, but now they are more Erasmian. Second, although the author clearly sympathizes with Erasmus and the secular, liberal order more than Luther and the American evangelicals he sees as Luther's descendants, he does not come across as polemical or condescending when describing those, like Kim Davis, who a lesser author would have mocked.

Criticisms:
The author does not speak much about Catholic theology or the details of Catholic criticisms of Erasmus. Where he does, however, what he says is often wrong or superficial. For instance, he repeatedly says that Catholics "worship" Mary, and even that the Council of Trent approved "worshipping" Mary. In modern English, "worship" means "latria." The Council of Trent absolutely did not approve latria for Mary, and to think that it did is absurd. More substantively, the author only cites criticisms of Erasmus's New Testament to the effect that, if you say X, then Catholic belief Y will be undermined. He doesn't cite in any detail any criticisms in which the authors showed on historical-critical grounds that Erasmus's scholarship was flawed. The result is that the Catholic perspective is treated as a straw man. Similarly, Massing just takes for granted that Luther interprets Augustine correctly and doesn't acknowledge that his reconstruction of the life of St. Paul is a highly controversial guess, not a matter about which there is consensus. For instance, he claims that Paul broke with Peter and started his own Church, but doesn't draw attention to the fact that almost no scholars until very recently would have accepted that account of events.

The reader is clear and easy to listen to, but mispronounces a lot of words.