Da conciliação possível à ruptura: uma análise dos documentos de 1520 de Martinho Lutero

Abstract

This Thesis focuses on the major treatises written by Martin Luther in 1520, of which the most important are: On the Babylonian captivity of the Church; On the freedom of the Christian and the Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation concerning the improvement of the Christian Estate. These documents may be taken as the “program of the Reformation”, as they established new theological basis and postulates, and founded a new ecclesiastical structure. Thus, what is intended to state is that the Reformation effectively happened in 1520, and not in 1517. Written shortly before his excommunication and being, at last, the ultimate reasons for it, such treatises point to an irreconcilable rupture with Rome. The work presents explanations on how these writings were read by the Roman Church and by the German nobility and people, pointing the repercussions in such estates. Introduction will present the general questions which guided the research, outdrawing the main plan of the Thesis. Chapter I will show Martin Luther’s human and intellectual path towards the writing of the studied treatises. Chapter II will describe the situation of the Roman Catholic Church and that of the Christendom from the West Schism (1378-1418) to the eve of the Reformation, focusing particularly on the crisis of auctoritas and potestas, showing the crisis of the hierocratic project, and the question of the indulgences. This Chapter will introduce the situation of the Holy Roman Empire at the moment of the death of Maximilian I and the election of his grandson Charles V, in 1519. Chapter III will present the treatises and their repercussions on the different estates of the German society and of the Roman Church. Conclusion will retake and deepen the questions presented in the Introduction, after all exposed in the three previous Chapters.