Fatal Discord

Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind

De: Michael Massing

Narrado por: Tom Parks

A New York Times Notable Book

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.

“A masterly work. Massing manages to juggle the complicated biographies and life work of both Erasmus and Luther while giving the reader a well-written, comprehensive background of pre-Reformation theology.”— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

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 sixteenth 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.

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.