What follows is a short summary – suitable for undergraduates – on Martin Luther and his place at the close of Christendom. Luther was aided in his call for reform by his great intellectual talent – his genius can hardly be denied, and the novel support of a Saxon aristocracy that was chafing under the taxation of Rome. Luther’s reformation became a revolution that decisively ended the political dominance of the Church in Western Europe and produced yet another schism in Christianity. Luther’s theological insistence on doing the good for the sake of the good alone arguably bore Enlightenment philosophical fruit in the form of Kant’s Categorical Imperative. But that is another story.
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