Resolutio lutheriana super propositione deci(m)a tertia: de potestate pape: per autore(m) locupletata

Leipzig: Melchior Lotter, 1519. One of five editions printed in the year of the first. Hardcover. Fine. Bound in modern wrappers. With a title border by Hans Cranach. A fine copy -title a trifle dusty and with abrasions in the gutter (not affecting the border). Duplicate stamp of Nuremberg Public Library on blank verso of final leaf. “By 1519, the Luther affair had shifted from a concern with indulgences to the papal plenitude of power, on which contemporary indulgence theory was based. Luther’s own position on this was at first analogous to that which he adopted in relation to scholastic theology.

“At the beginning of his Resolution on Proposition 13, he explained that his quarrel was not over whether Roman primacy exists now—it clearly does, he admits—but about its origins, its basis. If it had not always existed, it was not the faith of the Church. But towards the end of the treatise, his focus shifts from the past tense to the present: ‘The Roman Church, though above many churches, is not and never has been above all the churches of the whole world; for it was never above the Greek, African, and Asian churches.’

“Luther’s claim that there was a Christian Church beyond Rome’s orbit became the focus of much discussion. Of course, the Empire had on its doorstep an example of non-Catholic Christianity in the Kingdom of Bohemia. But it was questionable whether the Bohemians counted as part of the church, and they could be fairly easily dismissed. The Greek Church was another matter. While the Bohemians had never produced any universally recognized saints, martyrs, or doctors of the Church, the Greek church had had all of these in abundance. Whatever its current state under Muslim occupation, it could not easily be dismissed.

“Various strategies were adopted to counter Luther’s appeal. One was to turn the Greek church’s reputation for sanctity and learning into a sort of ecclesiastical Greek tragedy, the old story of hubris and nemesis: the church had become so puffed up in pride in its undoubted achievements, declaimed Eck in the course of the Leipzig Disputation, that it began to think itself equal to the Roman Church, and as a result was divinely punished by falling into numerous heresies and finally succumbing to the rule of infidels."(Bagchi, "Old questions, new answers? Luther and the problem of catholicity", in Reformation 17 (2012), 161-76). (Inventory #: 4924)