By the beginning of the sixteenth century the salvation of the soul had, in the eyes of many, turned into a thing that could be bought. The Church sold indulgences — certificates of the remission of sins for money, and the trade went briskly, with an almost commercial price list: so much for such a sin, so much for the soul of a deceased kinsman, who could supposedly be ransomed out of purgatory with a coin. Forgiveness, which in the Gospel is given freely and through repentance, became a commodity with a price. The idol became this very substitution: a living bond between man and God was reduced to a monetary transaction, and the mercy of God to a line in an account.
In 1517 the Augustinian monk Martin Luther rose up against this trade, circulating his ninety-five theses — first by letter, and by tradition nailing them to the doors of the church in Wittenberg. He struck the very heart of the matter: if forgiveness is sold for money, then what is left of faith and repentance? The spark fell into the dry tinder of accumulated discontent, and the flame spread across all of Germany and then Europe. Latin Christianity was split. Anger stirred the lower orders as well: in 1524–1525 the Peasants' War broke out, in which the rebels demanded earthly justice too — and it was drowned in blood. And in 1555 the Peace of Augsburg sealed the rupture with the formula "whose realm, his religion": from then on a subject was obliged to profess the faith of his prince.
So one captivity was replaced by another. Before, conscience had been surrendered to a Church that trafficked in forgiveness — now it was surrendered to the sovereign. Europe locked itself into confessional camps: Catholic lands and Protestant ones, and a person was born into a faith not by the choice of the heart but by the domain in which he lived. The freedom of faith for which the protest had seemingly stood turned into a new unfreedom — the right of the prince to decide what his people believed. The rupture of the one Church laid the foundation for the future wars of religion, which would drench France in blood and, in the Thirty Years' War, lay Germany waste.
And yet through this schism a genuine return broke through. Luther translated the Bible into living German — and the Word, once locked away in Latin and in the hands of intermediaries, spoke for the first time directly to the ordinary person. Behind this stood a thought that would outlive all the wars of the age: salvation and faith are a matter of personal conscience and personal responsibility before God, and therefore each person must be able to read for himself. The traffic in forgiveness gave rise to catastrophe; but out of the catastrophe was born the idea of the individual standing before God personally — and with it a craving for literacy, without which the whole modern world is unthinkable.