Even if we set aside the movements spawned by the proto-Protestants, we find that different parts of Europe embraced markedly different visions of Christianity during the later Middle Ages and Renaissance. As one traveled northward from the sun-kissed Mediterranean coast, the tone of the religion darkened and grew more austere in rhythm with the landscape and the weather.
In central and northern Europe, where the climate was harsher, the skies cloudier, and the winter nights longer and colder, the apocalyptic urgency of a character like Girolamo Savonarola was actually less of an anomaly than in bucolic Italy. Here the artistic spirit of the turn of the sixteenth century was not to be found in the optimistic humanism of Michelangelo or Raphael but in the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, who seemed almost to derive a sadomasochistic thrill from showing humanity as the hapless plaything of God.
While Martin Luther never saw The Last Judgment , he was every inch a creature of the religious atmosphere which gave birth to it. Christianity in his part of Germany did not have the wink-wink quality that it so often did in Italy β the sense that, sure, we pay homage to God in Heaven, but we also want to have a good time here on Earth. For Luther, grace and sin, salvation and damnation were existential concerns that filled β or ought to fill β every moment of every day.
Five years later, after he had received his master of arts and was two months into his study of the law proper, he had his Road to Damascus β or rather Road to Erfurt β moment. One day while he was returning to university following a visit to his family back home, he was caught out in a frightful thunderstorm; a bolt of lightning felled a tree just a few feet away from him. The storm passed, and Luther made good on his promise.
Much to the displeasure of his father, who had invested a goodly sum of money in his education, he entered a monastery right there in Erfurt. He told Hans Luther that the stakes were too high for him to do anything else β an argument, it must be admitted, that was more than logical given his worldview. For if one truly believes, as Luther did, that our mortal existence is the merest down payment on an eternity of either rapture or torment, why on earth would one do anything other than devote that paltry span of years absolutely and comprehensively to God?
