Sublime

Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531), the priest and humanist scholar who, as early as 1516, began preaching against clerical abuses, and whose sermons ‘from true, divine scripture’, starting in 1520, inaugurated a popular movement in Switzerland against such practices as priestly celibacy and the keeping of fasts.

Martin Luther, for instance, opposed relics not because they were inauthentic tourist kitsch but because they offered an encounter with a transcendent reality contrary to the one presented in the Bible (and particularly the Pauline Epistles).