Martin Luther
German theologian and Augustinian friar (1483–1546), born in Eisleben, professor of biblical theology at the University of Wittenberg, and the figure who set off the Protestant Reformation, the event that permanently fractured the religious unity of Western Europe. Tormented by deep spiritual anguish over his own salvation, he arrived, through study of St Paul's letter to the Romans, at the doctrine that would define his entire theology: justification by faith alone (sola fide), according to which human beings are saved not by their own merits or works but solely by the grace of God, received through faith. This conviction led him in 1517 to draft the Ninety-Five Theses, an academic document denouncing the sale of indulgences — payment of money in exchange for remission of penalties for sin — as a theological and pastoral abuse, which, rapidly spread thanks to the printing press, triggered a crisis the Roman Church could not contain. Excommunicated in 1521 and declared an outlaw by Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms, where he uttered the famous 'Here I stand, I can do no other', he took refuge under the protection of the Elector of Saxony, where he translated the New Testament into German in record time, contributing decisively to fixing modern standard German. In On the Freedom of a Christian (1520) he set out the central paradox of his ethics: the Christian is a free lord over all things, subject to none, through faith, yet at the same time a dutiful servant of all things, subject to everyone, through love. His final years were also marked by a notoriously anti-Jewish treatise, On the Jews and Their Lies (1543), a text of extreme rhetorical virulence later instrumentalised by Nazism, which constitutes the darkest stain on his legacy.