why wouldn't he recant? because recanting was not so simple then as it is now. back then, to recant was to throw away your name and your reputation, and without a reputation luther, an aristocratic nobleman whose ideas supported the Divine Right theory, would have been nothing. he could not recant because it would have ruined him.
luther was not an aristocratic nobleman.
from wikipedia - "His father owned a copper mine in nearby Mansfeld. Having risen from the peasantry, his father was determined to see his son ascend to civil service and bring further honor to the family. To that end, Hans sent young Martin to schools in Mansfeld, Magdeburg and Eisenach."
more like a lower middle class merchant whose family had no hereditary title or high society standing.
luther didnt recant because the political climate in which he found himself in was (to his utter surprise) far more receptive than he thought it would be. he was allowed to maintain his position because he was offered protection from the church's possible retaliation by people who were in a position to offer it (namely a couple of european princes). whether they offered it out of political expediency in trying to disrupt the power of the church in their own lands or because they were intellectually sympathetic to luther depends on what account you read i think. by all estimations, luther nailed the theses to the door of the church intending to start little more than a theological debate among educated people within the church. if it hadnt been for the printing press allowing for copies of the list to be made and disseminated widely, luther would remain virtually unknown to this day i suspect. he was a relatively insignificant personality within the church heirarchy before this, even by his own standards he was not a great monk, or especially educated.
Luther was the first dissenter in the entirety of Church history. this is why his ideas could spread so far--nobody opposed them because they were unused to it. by the time the Church could stop him he had already established a foothold.
thats not really true at all. Arius was a great dissenter. the entire eastern orthodox wing of the church constitutes dissenters from the roman catholic norm. there were plenty of dissenters from day one of the church. there in truth is little difference between heretics and church dissenters at many points in history because the church was such a pervasive force in europe that to oppose it or any of its doctrines openly at all, whether you were a christian or not resulted in your persecution and treatment as a heretic. dissent was heresy. the theses were opposed bitterly, and luther was excommunicated which is considered one of the worst things that the catholic church can do to you, and usually resulted in your being instantly ostracized from society. however, the complaints that luther had about the church made sense and people wanted some answers, so the church just couldnt write it off completely once the ideas were out there in a public forum. the other part of it is that there was a wide gap between the ruling positions of the church and the average priest or monk, and the excesses of bishops, archbishops, popes...etc. did not go unnoticed by the lower ranks of the clergy, they too were revolted by some of these practices, and for the church to openly oppose luther and admit that they engaged in this kind of blatant hypocrisy and debauchery would be to risk alienating the people who actually comprised the real substance of the church and perpetuated their ability to even ever reach such levels of wealth and power in the first place. so they chose to deny luther in part, address some of the greivances in at least a minor way, and be more careful not to flaunt their blatant abuses of power and disregard for the rules of their own religion in the future.
