The Papal Bull: Exsurge Domine
1520 AD
On the 15th of June 1520, more than two and a half years after Luther had published his 95 Theses, the Pope, aided by a panel of experts, issued a 41 point Papal bull of denouncement against Luther. The Bull, titled Exsurge Domine (Arise O Lord) was meant to condemn Luther in sweeping terms and place him firmly in the category of a dangerous heretic.
As a heretic, Luther was given 60 days following the issuance of Exsurge Domine to respond by renouncing his heresies. During this period of probation Luther's books were to be burned by order of the Pope. He was invited to recant either in an openly published document which had to be notarized by two bishops or alternately he had the option of arriving in Rome within 120 days of the Bull's issuance in order to recant in person. If Luther failed to do either of these things he would be excommunicated.
The prescribed time limits were untenable since it took more than 60 days for the Bull to even reach Luther. It finally got to Wittenberg in October of 1520, in the hands of a smug and somewhat triumphant Dr. Eck and Jerome Aleander, an up-and-coming Catholic scholar and director of the Palatine Library.
When the Papal Bull of ex-communication arrived on the 10th of October Luther read it with growing agitation, mostly because he recognized it for what it was; a turning point. Throughout 1520 Luther had been engaged in a prodigious amount of writing. Among his work, and possibly the most strident in its denunciations of the church and its teachings was The Babylonian Captivity of the Church in which he denounced the Pope as the Anti-Christ and seriously challenged Papal and ecclesiastical authority.
When the Bull reached him Luther knew that the time had come to take a stand. On the 10th of December 1520, Luther, Melancthon, and a small contingent of students marched to the Elster Gate in Wittenberg. The gate was located in the eastern part of the town not far from the Black Cloister where Luther lived. There, under a tree Luther publicly burned his copy of Exsurge Domine.
The act was particularly significant because Luther burned the Bull on the very spot where townspeople burned the linens and bedclothes of those who had died from communicable diseases like the plague. When the fire began to peter out, the growing crowd gathered up copies of canon law and fed the thick books to the flame, possibly in response to the Papal decree that Luther's books suffer the same fate.
Writing to his friend George Spalatin five days later Luthe stated "the Papacy, until now seemingly invincible may even be rooted out beyond all hope." It seemed that, in burning the bull, Luther had calculated exactly what kind of fallout would follow and had irrevocably charted his course.
Though scholars generally point to the publishing of the 95 Theses as the beginning of the Reformation, the day that Luther burned the Papal Bull could be put forward as an alternate date, perhaps because, unlike when he published his theses when Luther burned the bull, he knew exactly what the costs would be.
