Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University

P ROTE S TA N T T H E O LO G Y A N D T H E M A K I N G OF THE MODERN GERMAN UNIVERSITY

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Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University T H O M A S A L B E RT H OWA R D

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With oYces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York ß Thomas Albert Howard 2006 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Howard, Thomas A. (Thomas Albert), 1967Protestant theology and the making of the modern German university / Thomas Albert Howard. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and Index. ISBN-13: 978-0-19-926685-2 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-19-926685-9 (alk. paper) 1. Universities and colleges–Germany–History. 2. Protestant churches–Germany–Doctrines–History. 3. Theology, Doctrinal– Germany–History. 4. Church and college–Germany–History. I. Title. LA727.H69 2006 378.43’09–dc22 2005030158 Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn ISBN 0-19-926685-9

978- 0-19-926685-2

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To my parents, Tommy and Pat Howard

Acknowledgements ‘If I were not a king,’ James I of England once said, ‘I would be a university man.’ While there are certainly unsavory aspects of academic life, my experience in writing this book makes me appreciate King James’ sentiment. And even if it falls short of the splendors of regal life, work on this project has brought me into contact with people and places, institutions and ideas, to whom and for which I am deeply thankful. This book began to take shape while I was in residence (1997–9) at Valparaiso University as a postdoctoral fellow in the Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts. I am especially grateful for the leaders of this program, Mark R. Schwehn and Arlin G. Meyer. Their example of a sapiens et eloquens pietas and their support of my academic vocation has had a deeper impact on me than they probably suspect. I am also thankful to the Pew Scholars Program, which generously supported this project during the academic year 2000–1. A travel/study grant from the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst (DAAD) allowed me to pursue my research in Berlin during a particularly cold German winter. I am grateful to the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, which supported this project in the spring of 2003. The director of this Wne institute, James Davison Hunter, has been especially encouraging of my intellectual pursuits over the years. I am equally grateful to the Erasmus Institute at the University of Notre Dame, where as a visiting Carey Fellow (2003–4), I was able, at long last, to bring this project to completion. I thank the Erasmus Institute’s leadership and staV, particularly Terri O’Bryan, Dianne Phillips, Kathleen Sobieralski, Robert E. Sullivan, and James C. Turner, for their support and assistance. For their commentary on my work, I would also like to thank my co-fellows or ‘‘Erasmians’’, including John Howe, Darcia Narvaez, Haien Park, Morgan Powell, Neslihan Senocak, Bradford Whitener, and Falk Wunderlich. At Notre Dame, I also beneWted from the feedback of George Marsden and Robert Norton. I owe a debt to the German Historical Institute in Washington DC, especially to two of its fellows, Philipp Lo¨ser and Christoph Strupp, who kindly invited me to a workshop in the spring of 2001. Here I was able to present portions of my work, subsequently published as ‘German Academic Theology in America: The Case of Edward Robinson and Philip SchaV ’ in History of Universities, volume 18 (January 2003): 102–23. A German translation of this article has since appeared in Philipp Lo¨ser and Christoph Strupp (eds.), Universita¨t der Gelehrten—Universita¨t der Experten: Adaptionen

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deutscher Wissenschaft in den USA des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005), 31–52. I thank the editors of History of Universities and the Franz Steiner Verlag for allowing me to reprint some of this material here. My home institution, Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts, deserves special recognition. It has oVered me an environment of thoughtful colleagues and students, where faith seeks understanding and often Wnds it. My colleagues in the history department have been patient and understanding as we together have laboured to balance the demands of teaching, research, and myriad other institutional responsibilities. I am particularly grateful to count the Provost of the College, Mark Sargent, and the Chair of the History Department, Jennifer Hevelone-Harper, among my most unstinting supporters. Then there is Martha Crain, who, among other obligations, handles the interlibrary loan requests for the College. Her eVorts and skills (which include Xuent German and keen historical interests) have contributed immeasurably to the success of the project. I hope she too takes pride, and relief, in its completion. Across the Atlantic, I am grateful for the conversations and encouragement of several scholars. Professor Kurt-Victor Selge, Emeritus Professor of the Humboldt University of Berlin and member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Akademie der Wissenschaften, took an early interest in this project and steered my wandering curiosity in productive directions. Professor Hartmut Lehmann of the Max Planck Institut fu¨r Geschichte in Go¨ttingen listened patiently to a number of naive questions and made suggestive pointers; I hope this work exhibits, at least to a degree, his call for more serious work in transatlantic comparative religious history. I am thankful too for the correspondence of Walter Ru¨egg, formerly rector of the University of Frankfurt am Main and a masterful historian of European universities. He graciously sent me material now published in Walter Ru¨egg (ed.), A History of the University in Europe, iii. Universities in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century, 1800–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2004). Finally, I owe gratitude to the Bologna-based fondazione per le scienze religiose Giovanni XXIII, particularly to its directors Massimo Faggioli and Alberto Melloni. They invited me to a conference in Assisi, Italy, where I was able to present aspects of my research on the theologian and church historian Adolf von Harnack. A revised version of my presentation was subsequently published in Massimo Faggioli and Alberto Melloni (eds.), Religious Studies in the Twentieth Century: A Survey on Disciplines, Cultures and Questions (Mu¨nster: LIT Verlag, 2006). I am thankful to be granted permission to reprint some of this material here.

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Spending time in excellent libraries and archives has been a particularly rewarding aspect of this project. These include the Niedersa¨chische Staatsund Universita¨ts-Bibliothek in Go¨ttingen, Go¨ttingen’s Universita¨tsarchiv, the Humboldt-Universita¨t Bibliothek, the Humboldt Universita¨tsarchiv, the Humboldt-Universita¨t Zweigbibliothek in theology, Berlin’s Frei Universita¨t Bibliothek, the library of the Friedrich Meinecke Institut, the Stadtsbibliothek zu Berlin Preussischer Kulturbesitz, the Geheim Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz in Dahlem, Oxford’s Bodleian Library, Harvard’s Widener Library, the Andover-Harvard Theological Library, and Boston University’s Mugar Memorial Library. For the helpful and patient staV at all of these Wne institutions, I am deeply grateful. Oxford University Press is a model of professionalism and excellence. The various editors that I have worked with, as well as the anonymous readers procured by the Press, deserve many words of gratitude. They have made this a better book. I claim responsibility for any lingering oversights or general wrongheadedness. Daniel Smith served as an invaluable research assistant, one who—quite literally—went the extra mile. I therefore thank him and also Sarah CarlsonLier, who provided help in the Wnal stages of preparing the manuscript. Other individuals who have oVered helpful criticism or an encouraging word along the way include Stephen G. Alter, Nicholas Brooks, Eric Carlsson, Richard Crouter, David J. Diephouse, D. G. Hart, Kirsten L. Heacock, Harold Heie, David H. Kelsey, Allan Megill, Gilbert Meilaender, H. C. Erik Midelfort, Richard Weikart, and George S. Williamson. A hearty thanks to all. Insofar as this book is now part of the fabric of my life, my smart and cherished wife, Agnes, and our children, Elizabeth, Hannah and Benjamin should be mentioned too. It is good that they are. It is good to have a family. This book is dedicated to my parents, Tommy and Pat Howard. T.A.H. Wenham, Massachusetts 22 December 2005

Contents Abbreviations

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1. Introduction 1. Theology, Modernity, and the German University 2. On the State and Modern Science ‘in the German Sense’ 3. Plan of Study 4. Broader Considerations, or ‘the Pathos of Modern Theology’

1 1 13 35 38

2. Sacra Facultas and the Coming of German Modernity 1. Introduction 2. The Medieval Legacy 3. Humanism, the Reformation, and the Universities 4. The Eighteenth Century: Decline and Critique 5. The Way Forward: Halle and Go¨ttingen 6. ‘Torchbearer or Trainbearer’?: The Faculties and Immanuel Kant

45 45 48 60 80 87

3. Theology, Wissenschaft, and the Founding of the University of Berlin 1. Introduction 2. Revolutionary Times and the Ascendancy of Wissenschaft 3. ‘A New Creation’ 4. Theology and the Idea of the New University 5. Early Operations: Berlin’s Theological Faculty, 1810–1819 6. ‘Renewing Protestantism’: Schleiermacher and the Challenge of Modern Theological Education 4. An Erastian Modernity? Church, State, and Education in Early Nineteenth-Century Prussia 1. Introduction 2. Church and State before 1806 3. The Great Transition: Church and State after 1806 4. ‘A Realm of the Intelligence’: Minister Altenstein and his Legacy 5. Theologia between Science and the State 1. Introduction 2. General Trends and Developments, 1810–1918

121 130 130 134 142 155 178 197 212 212 215 222 239 267 267 273

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Contents 3. The Rise and Fall of ‘Theological Encyclopedia’ 4. History, Commemoration, and the University 5. ‘The Age of German Footnotes’: Visitors from Abroad, Admirers from Afar 6. ‘The Crisis of the Theological Faculty’: Lagarde, Overbeck, and Harnack

303 324 348 378

6. Conclusion: Janus Gazing

403

Select Bibliography Index

419 457

Abbreviations Used in Notes and Bibliography Reference Works, Books, and Collected Editions

ADB EKL ELC EP ESL HPG HUE KGA LTK MCT NDB OCCT ODCC RGG TRE

Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie Evangelisches Kirchenlexikon: Kirchlich-theologisches Handwo¨rterbuch Encyclopedia of the Lutheran Church Encyclopedia of Philosophy Evangelisches Staatslexicon Handbuch der preussischen Geschichte, 3 vols., ed. Otto Bu¨sch et al. A History of the University in Europe, 4 vols., ed. Hilde de RidderSymoens et al. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Hermann Fischer et al. Lexikon fu¨r Theologie und Kirche, 3rd edn. The Blackwell Dictionary of Modern Christian Thought Neue Deutsche Biographie The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd edn. Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 3rd edn. Theologische Realenzyklopa¨die Journals

AHR AJT ARG CEH CH CW EKZ ER ESR FBPG GH HEQ

American Historical Review American Journal of Theology Archiv fu¨r Reformationsgeschichte Central European History Church History Christliche Welt Evangelische Kirchenzeitung Educational Review European Studies Review Forschungen zur brandenburgischen und preussischen Geschichte German History History of Education Quarterly

xii HJ HJB HTR HU HZ JAAR JBK JCH JCS JHI JMH JR JRH JSH JUG PJ SJT TZ ZEK ZGNK ZKG ZNTG ZP ZRG ZTK ZWT

Abbreviations Used in Notes and Bibliography Heythrop Journal Historische Jahrbuch Harvard Theological Review History of Universities Historische Zeitschrift Journal of the American Academy of Religion Jahrbuch fu¨r brandenburgische Kirchengeschichte Journal of Contemporary History Journal of Church and State Journal of the History of Ideas Journal of Modern History Journal of Religion Journal of Religious History Journal of Social History Jahrbuch fu¨r Universita¨tsgeschichte Preussische Jahrbu¨cher Scottish Journal of Theology Theologische Zeitschrift Zeitschrift fu¨r evangelisches Kirchenrecht Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft fu¨r niedersa¨chsische Kirchengeschichte Zeitschrift fu¨r Kirchengeschichte Zeitschrift fu¨r neuere Theologiegeschichte Zeitschrift fu¨r Pa¨dagogik Zeitschrift fu¨r Religions- und Geistesgeschichte Zeitschrift fu¨r Theologie und Kirche Zeitschrift fu¨r wissenschaftliche Theologie Libraries and Archives

BTFG GStA PK HUA HUB NStUBG UAG

Bibliothek der theologischen Fakulta¨t Go¨ttingen Geheim Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz Humboldt Universita¨tsarchiv Humboldt Universita¨tsbibliothek Niedersa¨chsiche Staats- und Universita¨tsbibliothek Go¨ttingen Universita¨tsarchiv Go¨ttingen

. . . philosophy, jurisprudence, medicine—and, alas, theology too. Goethe, Faust, part one

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1 Introduction Our universities . . . are our churches. Hegel

1 . TH E O LO G Y, M O D E R N I T Y, AN D T H E GERMAN UNIVERSITY In September of 1793, the year Louis XVI met the guillotine, universities throughout France were suppressed by government decree, their endowments, treated as ecclesiastical properties, having already been nationalized the previous March.1 As the armies of the French Revolution spread social upheaval and uncertainty abroad in the following years, universities across Europe, alongside the aristocracy and the church, fell on hard times. Wherever the French went, university endowments were taken over by the state, curricula drastically altered, and faltering universities shut down or turned into professional and technical schools. The process resulted in the closing of several of Europe’s most prestigious universities: Louvain in 1797, Luther’s Wittenberg some years later, and Halle, Prussia’s educational Xagship, in 1807. Between 1789 and 1815, sixteen universities went under in the lands of the Holy Roman Empire alone.2 To champions of the Enlightenment, the shake-up of universities was generally a good thing. In the eyes of many late eighteenth-century intellectuals, universities had come to be regarded as antiquated hold-overs from the Middle Ages, confessionally rigid, pedagogically retrograde, socially useless, 1 R. R. Palmer, The Improvement of Humanity: Education and the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 105 V., and Paul Gerbod, La Condition universitaire en France au XIXe sie`cle (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1965), 27 V. 2 In 1789 Europe had 143 universities; in 1815 there were only 83. See HUE iii. 3 V., and L. W. B. Brockliss, ‘The European University in the Age of Revolution, 1789–1850’, in M. G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys (eds.), The History of the University of Oxford, vi p. I (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 89–104. Halle and Wittenberg were later combined and a university was reconstituted in 1817 as the Vereinten Friedrichs-Universita¨t Halle-Wittenberg. It was located in Halle. See RGG vi. 1783.

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Introduction

and Wercely protective of their ancient corporate privileges.3 Not surprisingly, prior to 1789, a number of progressive thinkers and statesmen across Europe had begun to call for the wholesale reform of higher education, and many, anticipating the example of France in 1793, thought that the way forward started with the abolition of the extant institution.4 During the 1790s, proponents of educational reform in France, such as Charles Maurice de Talleyrand and the Marquis de Condorcet, hardly bothered using the term university, assuming that the exigencies of the day called for an altogether diVerent type of institution, one reXective of the ideals of the Revolution and more receptive to the ‘New Science’ that had taken root largely outside universities in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.5 If universities were regarded as backward institutions, their theological faculties were seen as especially benighted. Seedbeds of obscurantism, continuing the Wars of Religion in their uncompromising polemics, these age-old Wxtures of the university—in the eyes of a Voltaire, d’Holbach, or Lessing— were obstinate repositories of darker times, yawning sinkholes in the path of progress. In an educational reform programme penned for Empress Catherine the Great of Russia, the philosophe Denis Diderot wrote that since theological faculties promote ‘controversy’ and ‘fanaticism’, their graduates were ‘the most useless, intractable and dangerous subjects of the state’.6 The ‘science’ of theology, wrote d’Holbach scoYngly, ‘is a continual insult to human reason’.7 Goethe, Lessing, and other non-university German literati denounced the ‘guild theology’ (Zunfttheologie) of the universities for retarding nobler religious and humanitarian sentiments.8 When Napoleon eVected educational reforms in his satellite states, theological faculties were often lopped like useless limbs from the universities.9 In the German-speaking lands of central Europe, where a handful of Protestant 3 The Scottish universities, seats of the Scottish Enlightenment, represent an important exception to this general rule. See Roger L. Emerson, ‘Scottish Universities in the Eighteenth Century, 1690–1800’, in James A. Leith (ed.), Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 167 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1977), 453–74. 4 R. Steven Turner, ‘University Reformers and Professorial Scholarship in Germany, 1760– 1806’, in Laurence Stone (ed.), The University in Society, ii (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 501–3. 5 Condorcet’s Memoires sur l’instruction publique (1790) and Talleyrand’s Rapport sur l’instruction publique (1791) were the two most important, if unimplemented, educational reform proposals of the early Revolution. See Robert M. Stamp, ‘Educational Thought and Practice during the Years of the French Revolution’, HEQ 6 (1966): 35–49. 6 Denis Diderot, ‘Plan d’une universite´ pour le gouvernement de Russie’, in Œvres comple`tes, ed. J. Asse`zat (Paris, 1875), iii. 438. 7 Baron d’Holbach, Le Bon Sens, ou Ide´es naturelles oppose´es aux ide´es surnaturelles (1772) (Paris: E´ditions rationalistes, 1971), 9. 8 Carl Schwarz, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing als Theologe (Halle, 1854), 63. 9 Brockliss, ‘The European University in the Age of Revolution’, 125.

Introduction

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universities had begun to open up to the Enlightenment, numerous calls were heard for the abolition and/or reform of theological faculties.10 In his Streit der Fakulta¨ten (1798), Immanuel Kant heaped scorn on the so-called ‘queen of the sciences’ (regina scientiarum), suggesting that theology could neither serve society nor true religion unless it Wrst conformed to the universal dictates of reason, which, in Kant’s view, were best embodied in the traditionally ‘lower’ philosophical faculty—or what in the English-speaking world we understand today as ‘the arts and sciences’.11 The Berlin physician Johann Benjamin Erhard (1766–1827) argued that the theological faculty’s primacy in the university was increasingly ‘ceremonial’, and that since it did not conform to modern reason, it should simply be excised.12 The idealist philosopher J. G. Fichte, made a similar argument prior to the founding of the University of Berlin (1810), contending that unless theology ‘cast oV its former nature entirely’, it should have no place in the new institution.13 Even Friedrich Schleiermacher, the celebrated father of modern liberal Protestantism, admitted that in modern times the traditional notion that philosophy served as the mere handmaid of theology (ancilla theologiae) gave the universities an unacceptable ‘grotesque appearance’.14 In short, as the nineteenth century dawned, universities and theological faculties were subjected to a stream of hostility and criticism unparalleled in their history. The Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the tumult of the Napoleonic wars had brought a spirit of ‘creative destruction’ to the educational status quo. From the standpoint of contemporaries, no one quite knew what the future would hold, although it was taken for granted that many once cherished ideals and institutions had reached the end of the 10 Anton Schindling, ‘Die protestantischen Universita¨ten im Heiligen Ro¨mischen Reich deutscher Nation im Zeitalter der Aufkla¨rung’, in Notker Hammerstein (ed.), Universita¨ten und Aufkla¨rung (Go¨ttingen: Wallstein, 1995), 9–19. 11 Immanuel Kant, Der Streit der Fakulta¨ten (1798), ed. and Eng. trans. by Mary J. Gregor (New York: Abaris Books, 1979). The division of the faculties into the ‘lower’ or preparatory faculty of philosophy and the three ‘higher’ faculties of theology, law, and medicine is of medieval derivation. On the history of this fourfold division of the faculties, see Friedrich Paulsen, The German Universities and University Study, trans. Frank Thilly and William W. Elwang (New York, 1906), 37 V. ¨ ber die Einrichtung und den Zweck der ho¨hern Lehranstalten 12 Johann Benjamin Erhard, U (Berlin, 1802). 13 J. G. Fichte, ‘Deduzierter Plan einer zu Berlin zu errichtenden ho¨hern Lehranstalt’, in Ernst Anrich (ed.), Die Idee der deutschen Universita¨t: Die fu¨nf Grundschriften aus der Zeit ihrer Neubegru¨ndung durch klassischen Idealismus und romantischen Realismus (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1964), 161–2. 14 Following Kant, Schleiermacher too promoted the primacy of the philosophical faculty. See Friedrich Schleiermacher, ‘Gelegentliche Gedanken u¨ber Universita¨ten in deutschem Sinn. Nebst einem Anhang u¨ber eine neu zu Errichtende’, in Anrich, Die Idee der deutschen Universita¨t, 257–8.

4

Introduction

line. Hegel spoke for a generation when in 1807 he wrote that ‘our time is a time of birth and transition to a new period. The spirit has broken with what was hitherto . . . and is about to submerge all this in the past; it is at work giving itself a new form.’15 With the beneWt of hindsight we know that across Europe both universities and, if to a much lesser degree, theological faculties weathered the revolutionary/Napoleonic onslaught. In France, Napoleon himself oversaw the creation of a new national system of higher education—the so-called universite´ imperiale (1808).16 To varying degrees, other nations followed suit. The Restoration of 1815 ushered in a period of stability conducive to the rehabilitation of the university as an enduring institution. Even so, tremendous forces of change accompanied its transition through the turbulent 1789–1815 period. Indeed, it was during this period that the ailing, premodern institution most conspicuously began its metamorphosis into the secularized research university that we recognize today. It did so however not by discarding premodern conventions and forms but by adapting them to accommodate novel historical conditions and a distinctly modern scholarly ethos that had deep roots in the previous century. The story of the birth of the ‘modern university’ is intimately connected to the development of German—particularly Prussian, Protestant—institutions. Granting the complex antecedents behind all historical beginnings, few would nonetheless gainsay that it was most notably in post-revolutionary Prussia, beginning with the dramatic founding of the University of Berlin in 1810, that the modern university Wrst appeared on the historical stage.17 In the course of 15 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind; quoted in Maurice Mandelbaum, History, Man, and Reason: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 4. 16 Palmer, The Improvement of Humanity, 306–15. Admittedly, the ‘university’ system established by Napoleon in 1808 hardly resembled that of the Old Regime. It was rather a centralized, state-dominated series of professional schools and their feeder institutions at lower levels. 17 Walter Ru¨egg, ‘The Upturn of the University in the Nineteenth Century’, unpublished paper, 8. Cf. Thomas Ellwein, Die deutsche Universita¨t vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Wiesbaden: Fourier, 1997), 109 V. As is well established, the universities of Halle and Go¨ttingen were especially important harbingers of the University of Berlin; accordingly, it is not without justiWcation that these institutions are often characterized as ‘modern’. I shall treat these institutions in ch. 2. In recent years, revisionist scholars have sought to downplay the centrality of the University of Berlin in shaping the modern university, suggesting that the ‘myth’ of Berlin was largely a creation of the late imperial period. While such arguments have brought about fruitful debate, I am sceptical for two reasons. First, there is enormous evidence prior to the Kaiserreich, both among German and non-German institutions of higher education, which suggests high regard for and the tremendous inXuence of Berlin. Second, such revisionist arguments often make a questionable distinction between the ‘idea’ and the ‘reality’ of the University of Berlin, contending that only the former triumphed in university rhetoric but not the latter in actual administration. The point is well taken, but still begs the question of why the ‘idea’ proved so powerful and why it was repeatedly invoked. Additionally, it is perhaps more

Introduction

5

the nineteenth century, what came to be called the ‘Prussian model’ or ‘German model’ university would be admired and imitated throughout the Continent,18 and eventually would cross the English Channel and the Atlantic to have a tremendous impact on higher education and scholarship in the Anglo-American world.19 ‘There is no people’, wrote the British scholar and statesman James Bryce in 1885, summing up a widely shared sentiment among foreign educators, ‘which has given so much thought and pains to the development of its university system as the Germans have done . . . none where they play so large a part in national life.’20 A genuine university did not exist in America, Abraham Flexner opined in 1930, until the founding of Johns Hopkins (1876) according to the model of the University of Berlin.21 In short, German universities rose to become ‘the global standard in the nineteenth century’, as Nicholas Boyle has put it, winning the envy and emulation of scholars and educational leaders throughout the world.22 How a medieval creation, deemed by many an antiquated relic in the Age of Reason, managed to pull oV this feat and become by the late nineteenth century one of the leading organs of intellectual modernity, and today a truly worldwide institution, is among the most fascinating and consequential developments in modern European history. Unlike the course of development in many countries, where historical forces often pushed theology outside the university to seminaries and other than a coincidence that many of these revisionist works have been produced by scholars of the imperial period. See Ru¨diger vom Bruch, ‘A Slow Farewell to Humboldt? Stages in the History of German Universities, 1810–1945’, in Mitchell G. Ash (ed.), German Universities: Past and Future (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1997), 3–27, and Sylvia Paletschek, ‘The Invention of Humboldt and the Impact of National Socialism: The German University Idea in the First Half of the Twentieth Century’, in Margit Szo¨llo¨si-Janze (ed.), Science in the Third Reich (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 37–58. 18 See Gert Schubring (ed.), ‘Einsamkeit und Freiheit’ neu besichtigt: Universita¨tsreformen und Disziplinenbildung in Preussen als Modell fu¨r Wissenschaftspolitik im Europas des 19.Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1991) and Rainer Christoph Schwinges (ed.), Humboldt International: Der Export des deutschen Universita¨tsmodells im 19. und 20.Jahrhundert (Basle: Schwabe, 2001). Among the Wrst early popularizers of Prussian higher education on the Continent was the French philosopher, Victor Cousin, who published De l’instruction publique dans quelques pays de l’Allemagne, et particulie`rement en Prusse, 2 vols. (Paris, 1832). 19 Hermann Ro¨hrs, The Classical German Concept of the University and its InXuence on Higher Education in the United States (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1995) and George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 101–12. 20 Quoted in John Theodore Merz, A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century, i (New York: Dover Publications, 1965; repr. of 1904 edn.), 159. 21 Abraham Flexner, Universities: American, English, German (New York, 1930), 42. 22 Nicholas Boyle, ‘ ‘‘Art,’’ Literature, Theology: Learning from Germany’, in Robert E. Sullivan (ed.), Higher Learning and Catholic Traditions (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 89.

6

Introduction

private institutions, nineteenth-century Prussian and other central European universities retained theological faculties as an integral, if reduced, part of the state’s educational system.23 Like other university faculties, theological faculties were therefore ‘institutions of the state’ (Veranstaltungen des Staates) as the Prussian Civil Code (Allgemeines Landrecht) of 1794 put it.24 What is more, the nineteenth-century German university largely kept intact the traditional four-faculty structure that had its origins in the Middle Ages. In this system, theology, jurisprudence, and medicine were considered the professional or higher faculties, whereas philosophy, the erstwhile arts faculty (facultas artium or Artistenfaculta¨t), with its many subsidiary branches (history, philology, mathematics, et cetera) was seen as the preparatory ‘lower faculty’. The retention of this model owed much to the eVorts of Friedrich Schleiermacher, who, during the founding of the University of Berlin, defended the traditional divisions, while raising the status of philosophy to one of autonomy and regarding theology as a ‘scientiWc’ (wissenschaftlich) enterprise, which best served the church by fostering close relations with other branches of knowledge. Admittedly, as the nineteenth-century research university gained momentum in Prussia and elsewhere, theology became greatly overshadowed by more secular, dynamic Welds of knowledge. It wholly ceased to be regarded as the ‘queen of the sciences’, a development well underway in the eighteenth century. Nonetheless, the theological faculty, the seat of a new putatively ‘scientiWc theology’ (wissenschaftliche Theologie), maintained a respectable—or at least tolerated—niche in the state’s higher educational system, a niche that, interestingly and despite persistent voices of opposition, has endured until the present.25 The tale of this adaptive, controversial, often beleaguered niche is of a piece with that of the meteoric rise of the German university in the nineteenth century. This study pursues the overlapping goals of understanding the evolution of the modern German university from the vantage point of theology and the evolution of modern theology from the vantage point of the university. Its 23 There is no detailed, general study of the European-wide demise of university-seated theological faculties in the nineteenth century. See F. Scaduto, L’abolizione delle facolta` di teologia in Italia (Turin, 1886), which contains some information on non-Italian developments as well. 24 Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Koch (ed.), Die preussischen Universita¨ten. Eine Sammlung der Verordnungen, welche die Verfassung und Verwaltung dieser Anstalten betreVen, i (Berlin, 1840), 6. 25 For debates about theology’s justiWcation in the university in more recent times, see Martin Heckel, Die theologischen Fakulta¨ten im weltlichen Verfassungsstaat (Tu¨bingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1986); Ernst-Lu¨der Solte, Theologie an der Universita¨t: Staats- und kirchenrechtlichen Probleme der theologischen Fakulta¨t (Munich: Claudius, 1971); Rudolf Weth (ed.), Theologie an staatlichen Universita¨ten (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1972); and Hans-Georg Babke, Theologie in der Universita¨t: aus rechtlicher, theologischer und wissenschafts-theoretischer Perspektive (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2000).

Introduction

7

temporal frame falls largely within what German scholars sometimes call the Sattelzeit, the ‘bridge period’ between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which witnessed a fundamental transformation in the European political, social, and intellectual order. In the ensuing chapters I thus chart the growth of the university from a residually medieval institution in the eighteenth century, through the all-important 1789–1815 period of crisis and rejuvenation, to its status as an exemplary and widely emulated engine of modern research by the eve of the First World War. While not altogether bypassing Catholic theology, I concentrate largely on Protestant theology, in part because the study substantially involves Prussia, a Protestant state, but also because of the diVerent historical dynamics aVecting Catholic and Protestant theology during this era.26 One should keep in mind, moreover, that an ingrained anti-Catholic prejudice was part and parcel of Protestant theological self-understanding throughout the nineteenth century, which one scholar has provocatively described as ‘a second confessional era’.27 More speciWcally, I focus on the development of Protestant university theology from an apologetic, praxis-oriented, confessional enterprise in the post-Reformation period to one increasingly ‘liberal’, expressive of the ethos of modern critical knowledge, or Wissenschaft. Relatedly, I examine theology’s structural transformation within the university, from its status as the symbolic centrepiece of the medieval and early modern university to its modern status as a minor and often disparaged area of academic commitment, albeit one, paradoxically, deeply inXuential in the realms of religious and theological scholarship throughout the Western world. This Janus-faced reality, the simultaneous institutional diminution and inXuential acclaim of German academic theology, is in fact a recurring subtheme of the book. But, again, why theology? Was not theology, after all, the supreme loser in the rise of the modern university? In treating Protestant theology and university development together, I aim to remedy a scholarly oversight and suggest ways in which debates about both phenomena might be fruitfully reconsidered. Historians interested in the rise of the modern German 26 To be sure, if one had world enough and time, the inclusion of Catholic academic theology and Catholic universities would make for a fuller comparative study. However, I believe that the progressive, dynamic, science-embracing character of Protestant theology and its profound inXuence on modern religious thought generally, including modern Catholicism, justiWes the more limited scope of this study. Furthermore, the legal position of Catholic theological faculties, as shall be made clear, in the German states of central Europe diVered signiWcantly from that of Protestant ones. On nineteenth-century Catholic theology generally in Germany, see Heinrich Fries and Georg Schwaiger (eds.), Katholische Theologen Deutschlands im 19.Jahrhundert, 3 vols. (Munich: Ka¨sel, 1975) and Gerald A. McCool, Catholic Theology in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Seabury, 1977). 27 Olaf Blaschke, ‘Das 19.Jahrhundert: Ein zweites konfessionelles Zeitalter?’ Geschichte und Gesellschaft 26 (2000): 38–75.

8

Introduction

university have not been terribly concerned with the fate of theological enquiry, except perhaps, in an often oVhand manner, to suggest its swift obsolescence in contrast to more institutionally vigorous, forward-looking humanistic and natural scientiWc Welds of enquiry.28 Often such scholars—implicitly perhaps more than explicitly—subscribe to a theory of secularization, a theory that posits rising institutional and intellectual irreligiosity as a necessary consequence of modernizing forces.29 While I do not dispute the eclipse of theology by the rapid diVerentiation and institutionalization of other areas of enquiry in the nineteenth century, in what follows I do not assume this eclipse from the outset; rather, I treat it as a problem and probe it carefully, calling attention to the manifold complexities, contingencies, and ironies involved in the momentous displacement of the erstwhile queen of the sciences. Furthermore, I am persuaded that viewing university development through the lenses of theology helps one see certain otherwise occluded continuities in the making of the nineteenth-century university. Exclusive focus on dynamic and expanding Welds such as philology, history, chemistry, physics, and medicine tends, by virtue of the choice of subject matter, to give histories of the modern German university a storyline of distorted discontinuity. Focus on theology, by contrast, restores an element of ‘the persistence of the Old Regime’ to university history. For while theology lost its former preminence, it insistently justiWed a continuing existence and occupied a vital role in academic life throughout the nineteenth century. Its inXuence abroad was considerable as well, not least in my own country, the United States.30 What is more, we should not lose sight of the remarkable fact that a theologian, 28 For examples of and bibliographic guides to more studies on the modern German university, see William Erman and Ewald Horn (eds), Bibliographie der deutschen Universita¨ten: Systematisch geordnetes Verzeichnis der bis Ende 1899 gedruckten Bu¨cher und Aufsa¨tze u¨ber das deutsche Universita¨tswesen (Leipzig, 1904–5); Charles E. McCelland, State, Society, and University in Germany, 1700–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Thomas Ellwein, Die deutsche Universita¨t: vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Wiesbaden: Fourier, 1997); Konrad H. Jarausch, Students, Society, and Politics in Imperial Germany: The Rise of Academic Illiberalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); and Daniel Fallon, The German University: A Heroic Ideal in ConXict with the Modern World (Boulder, Colo.: Colorado Associated University Press, 1980). 29 Admittedly, the terms ‘secularization’ and ‘modernization’ merit greater elaboration than I oVer here. See my previous discussion in Thomas Albert Howard, Religion and the Rise of Historicism: W. M. L. de Wette, Jacob Burckhardt, and the Theological Origins of NineteenthCentury Historical Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 17–22. Cf. Steve Bruce (ed.), Religion and Modernization: Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularization Thesis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), and Owen Chadwick’s classic, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). In short, I am persuaded that a priori notions of secularization have created great historigraphical lacunae, although the term itself is useful in a limited, heuristic sense, particularly when applied to cultural realities in Western Europe since the Enlightenment. 30 Charles Franklin Thwing, The American and German University (New York, 1928), 184 V.

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9

Friedrich Schleiermacher, served as the principal intellectual architect of the modern German university, whose arguably most renowned and accomplished representative at century’s end was yet another theologian, Adolf von Harnack.31 Professors at Berlin both, these individuals Wgure prominently in my study. Throughout the nineteenth century, moreover, still other, less well-known theologians occupied positions of prestige and inXuence within the university system. Their writings, actions, and decisions, paradoxically enough, carved out a secure place for theology while contributing— often unwittingly—to an academic environment famously described by Max Weber as one ‘characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘‘disenchantment of the world’’ ’.32 On a broader note, I hope that this study encourages historians of modern Europe and modern Germany to take theology more seriously as a subject for historical analysis. While recent years have witnessed a laudable new concern for religion as a social and cultural force in post-1789 Europe,33 theology in large part remains terra incognita for historians. However, as two historians have recently argued, ‘theology is eminently worthy of historical treatment, since from the perspective of the historian the conscious or unconscious task of the theologian is to accommodate sacred doctrine to historical conditions and circumstances’.34 Put diVerently, because of its venerable pedigree in European culture, theological reXection and its locus in the social Weld provide an excellent barometer for mapping cultural change and continuity in the modern era, in so far as theological reXection seeks to come to grips with, understand, and/or resist modern realities. Leaving theology unscrutinized as a putative anachronism betrays a Whiggish secularism that serious historical scholarship should expose and question. In contrast to historians, theologians and scholars of modern religious thought have long been attentive to the far-reaching signiWcance of nineteenth-century German Protestant theology and thought. To make this point clear, one need only mention a few classic titles—Ferdinand Kattenbusch’s Die deutsche evangelische Theologie seit Schleiermacher (1924), Karl Barth’s Die 31 On the signiWcance of Schleiermacher and Harnack for the German university system as a whole, see the essays by Rudolf Vierhaus (on Schleiermacher) and Lothar Burchardt (on Harnack) in Wolfgang Treue and Karlfried Gru¨nder (eds.), Wissenschaftspolitik in Berlin: Minister, Beamte, Ratgeber (Berlin: Colloquium, 1987), 77–88, 215–34. 32 Max Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’, in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 155. 33 See e.g. the Wne collection of essays in Helmut Walser Smith (ed.), Protestants, Catholics, and Jews in Germany, 1800–1914 (Oxford: Berg, 2001). Cf. Thomas Albert Howard, ‘A ‘‘Religious Turn’’ in Modern European Historiography’, Historically Speaking 4 (June 2003): 24–6. 34 Susan Rosa and Dale Van Kley, ‘Religion and the Historical Discipline: A Reply to Mack Holt and Henry Heller’, French Historical Studies 21 (Autumn 1998): 611–29.

10

Introduction

protestantische Theologie im 19.Jahrhundert (1946), Hans Frei’s The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (1974), and Claude Welch’s two-volume Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century (1972, 1985). In his bibliographic survey, Welch in fact was struck by ‘the apparent identiWcation of nineteenth-century Protestant theology with German theology’—something he in turn considerably attests to in his own treatment of the century.35 However, if theology is often shortchanged by historians of the modern university, it is also true that theologians—by virtue of a penchant to treat ideas and texts rather ahistorically—have often failed to provide richly contextualized accounts of the social, intellectual, and institutional conditions in which modern academic theology in Germany took root. We are left therefore not only with modern university histories short on theology, but also with stories of modern theology short on the history of the university. The view that the two profoundly hang together is the foundational thesis of the present study. The story of modern German university theology presented here, however, is admittedly a curious one. It is an interpretative survey in some respects, but one that does not strive to be exhaustive. I confess that I make no mention of some of the century’s seminal theological works, and I omit a host of crucial Wgures and debates altogether. Nowhere, moreover, will one Wnd lengthy discussions of theologians’ views on the Trinity, the Atonement, the Incarnation, or other important doctrines and ideas; and this is to say nothing of the truly voluminous literature of biblical exegesis and church history. Rather, my focus is largely external—on theology’s institutional legitimation and position. I concentrate on theology in so far as it occupied, defended, and successfully maintained a limited position within a rapidly modernizing university. In other words, I focus largely on the fortunes of the theological faculty (theologische Fakulta¨t) as a component of the university, not on theology per se. How does the locus of the theological faculty change as the university changes, I persistently ask, and what does this shifting locus tell us about both theology and the university? More broadly, how do changes in the university and theology reXect broader patterns and trends in German, particularly Prussian, history in an age marked by nationalism and state-building? (The blurry boundary between ‘Prussia’ and ‘Germany’ in the nineteenth century is an important topic in its own right, but one I shall happily leave to other scholars, noting only that the two should not be conXated nor can they be entirely separated.) There is also a more limited internal dimension to the study. In the context of the modernizing university, how did the four traditional subdivisions of 35 Claude Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, i (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 8 V.

Introduction

11

theology—exegetical theology, historical theology, systematic theology, and practical theology—develop and relate to one another and to the university as a whole?36 How did the increasing scientization (Verwissenschaftlichung), deconfessionalization (Entkonfessionalisierung), and professionalization (Professionalisierung) of academic life, moreover, aVect both the pedagogical and scholarly modus operandi of the various divisions of theology and their interrelationships?37 Finally, how was this traditional fourfold pattern challenged and sometimes modiWed in the course of the nineteenth century in the light of the emergence of new theological Welds, including the science of missions (Missionswissenschaft) and the science of religion (Religionswissenschaft). Proponents of the latter sometimes questioned the legitimacy of an exclusively Christian theology altogether.38 By privileging here the institutional position and internal organization of theology over the actual content of theology, I do not desire to minimize the intrinsic importance of the latter; I simply aim to accentuate insights derived from isolating the former for historical analysis. Yet in this regard, it is instructive to heed Hayden White’s admonition to the historical profession that academic forms, conventions, and modes of organization quite often aVect both the nature and reception of content.39 We should perhaps then not be too eager to distinguish categorically between form and content. Both the internal and external foci of the study have drawn me towards speciWc types of historical sources and documents, which one might classify as discipline-reXexive and institution-speciWc. By ‘discipline-reXexive’ I mean sources by theologians, university personnel, clergymen, and others concerned with evaluating the very rhyme and reason of academic theology as it confronted the various and multifaceted quandaries of modernity: what is the purpose of theology within the modern university? What sort of knowledge does it purport to foster? Can theology justify itself as a science? How does it Wt in with other branches of human knowledge? And how, in the context of the German university, does it relate to the other two ‘higher’ faculties—law and medicine—and to the ‘lower’ philosophical faculty? 36 The fourfold division of theology is generally held to have originated with Andreas Hyperius’s De Theologo seu de ratione studii theologici (Basle, 1572). For an informative discussion on the internal organization of theology and its history, see Wolfhart Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science, trans. Francis McDonagh (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976), 346–440. 37 See Charles E. McClelland, The German Experience of Professionalization: Modern Learned Professions and their Organization from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Hitler Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 38 See the entries ‘Missionswissenschaft’, RGG iv. 1013–15 and ‘Religionswissenschaft’, RGG v. 1038–42. 39 Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).

12

Introduction

A typical title in this regard was the rectorial address (Rektoratsrede) of Georg Heinrici at the University of Marburg in 1884: ‘On the Character and Purpose of Protestant Theological Faculties’.40 Addresses of this type proliferated in the mid- and late nineteenth century, often grappling with what some perceived as a crisis of the theological faculty.41 By ‘institution-speciWc’ sources I refer to the copious literature on particular German universities and their faculties. While I draw from a number of these works, it will be clear that only a few institutions truly command my attention. In Ch. 2, I concentrate on developments at the universities of Halle (1694), and Go¨ttingen (1737), and to a lesser extent Wittenberg (1502), Helmstedt (1558), and Jena (1576)—all key educational and theological centres in the early modern period. In Ch. 3 I narrow my focus to the Prussian University of Berlin (1810). This new Xagship of a rising Prussia and German nation-state, described once as the ‘spiritual center of a national world power’, then occupies the lion’s share of the rest of the book.42 While I readily admit that Berlin does not constitute the Wnal word on German academic theology, I am also persuaded that rarely in European history has a single university so served as a symbol of the age and set the pace for its sister institutions. One would have to go back to the University of Paris in the thirteenth century perhaps to Wnd an institution that compared in inXuence and prestige to what Hegel called the ‘Universita¨t des Mittelpunktes’.43 ‘The University of Berlin’, Philip SchaV wrote in 1857, ‘occupies the Wrst rank of all similar institutions in Germany not only, but in the world.’44 ‘The Berlin university’, an American visitor reported, ‘[is] the Wrst great school of the world for science, philosophy, and letters.’45 One might certainly correct for some hyperbole in these statements, but not before considering what occasioned it in the Wrst place. To be more speciWc with respect to sources, I have drawn from treatises on university organization and reform; general university statutes as well as 40 Georg Heinrici, Von Wesen und Aufgabe der evangelisch-theologischen Faculta¨ten (Marburg, ¨ ber die Theologie als Universita¨tswissenschaft (Berlin, 1875). 1885). Cf. August Dillmann, U 41 As Ernst Troeltsch put it in 1907: ‘Wer die in den letzten Jahren von Theologen gehaltenen Rektoratsreden u¨berblickt, wird hier sehr ha¨uWg die Fragen wiederkehren sehen: ‘‘Ist die Theologie eine Wissenschaft, und ist sie berechtigt innerhalb des Rahmens der Universita¨t?’’ Ernst Troeltsch, Die Trennung von Staat und Kirche, der staatliche Religionsunterricht und die theologischen Fakulta¨ten (Tu¨bingen, 1907), 3. Cf. E. H. Haenssler, Die Krisis der theologischen Fakulta¨ten (Leipzig, 1929). 42 Berlin in Bildern, 1810–1910 (Berlin, 1910), HUB Ay46214. 43 Hegel, ‘Berliner Antrittsrede’, in Gesammelte Werke, xviii, ed. Walter Jaeschke (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1968), 13. The comparison between Berlin and Paris was sometimes made in the nineteenth century. See Gerhard von Zezschwitz, Der Entwicklungsgang der Theologie als Wissenschaft inbesondere der Praktischen (Leipzig, 1867), 4–5. 44 Philip SchaV, Germany; its Universities, Theology, and Religion (Edinburgh, 1857), 63. 45 John W. Burgess, Reminiscences of an American Scholar (New York, 1934), 122.

Introduction

13

statutes of particular theological faculties; university histories; guidebooks for students beginning theology; relevant government memoranda; theological journals and reference books; rectorial, inaugural, and other ceremonial university orations; introductory theological textbooks or ‘theological encyclopedia’ (theologische Encyklopa¨die) as they were called in the nineteenth century; not to mention relevant letters from professors, students, clergymen, and government oYcials. Although I do not neglect statistical evidence in this study, my primary concern, as should be clear from the foregoing, is with words, written and (once) spoken, and in their complex relationship to historical development. Understanding the dialectic between language as a cultural mirror and language as an agent of cultural change forms the principal theoretical impulse behind my analysis. More fully, I aim to show why and how a variety of individuals, institutions, and relevant ‘communities of discourse’ brought to expression particular descriptions of the purpose and place of academic theology in a period that witnessed prodigious changes in the general university landscape—changes that contributed not only to the scientiWc or liberal reconstitution of theology, but also to theology’s steady institutional decline.

2. ON THE STAT E AND MODERN SCIENCE ‘IN THE GERMAN SENSE’ Besides the obvious categories of ‘university’ and ‘theology’, the categories of ‘the state’ (Staat) and ‘science’ (Wissenschaft)—science, that is, ‘in the German sense’46—are also signiWcant for this study. With respect to the former, I refer in particular to the modernizing, bureaucratizing Prussian state in the early nineteenth century, after the defeat by Napoleon in 1806, but also—and to a degree by extension—to the imperial German state established in 1871 under Prussian hegemony. Throughout I contend that the workings of universities in general and theological faculties in particular were not autonomous and independent, as their representatives championed or at least strove for, but more often than not reXected developments in the broader social, political, and intellectual Welds. During the period treated in this study—which, again, concentrates heavily on the early nineteenth century but reaches back into the 46 In addition to appearing in the title of Schleiermacher’s 1808 book on the university (discussed in Part III), the phrase ‘in the German sense’ was a qualiWer sometimes added to the word Wissenschaft by those trying to impress on non-Germans the particular associations and meanings of this word. See Howard, Religion and the Rise of Historicism, 123.

14

Introduction

early modern (and even medieval) period and pushes forward into the Wrst decades of the twentieth century—far-reaching changes took place in the realm of European and German statecraft and in the aims and practices of modern science and scholarship. What is more, both the political authority of the state and the social authority of science underwent processes of extensive social magniWcation during this period—processes regularly captured in the useful, if cumbersome, German terms Verstaatlichung and Verwissenschaftlichung.47 Not surprisingly, nineteenth-century German academic theology, with other domains of culture, often reXected the magniWed authority of the state and science. By the late nineteenth century, in fact, Protestant theologians, like much of the rest of the university professoriate, understood themselves as dutiful servants of the new national state and avant-garde practitioners of modern science who should be taken seriously by their peers in more secular Welds.48 To be sure, such an understanding of the social role of the theologian was not entirely without precedent in German history. Protestant scholastic theologians, one might point out, in the post-Reformation period often regarded their work as an exercise in scientia even as they saw themselves as servants of their particular sovereign within the Holy Roman Empire. However, the nature of the nineteenth-century state (an increasingly centralizing, industrializing, imperial leviathan) and the nature of science (a progressive, dynamic, and functionally secular enterprise) made late nineteenth-century conditions qualitatively diVerent from those of previous epochs, when the political landscape was extremely fragmented and when science was regarded more often in traditional Aristotelian terms.49 I Wnd it, therefore, unsatisfying to understand the position of nineteenth-century theologians vis-a`-vis the state and science simply in terms of longterm continuity with the postReformation, confessional era, as some studies have suggested.50 What is particularly noteworthy about the nineteenth century, especially its latter half, is the degree to which theologians sought to legitimize their roles in society, not by appeal to church authorities or the sapiential, credal traditions of Christianity, but from the political community of the nation-state and the academic community of science.51 Of course, churchly connections and 47 These terms are diYcult to bring into English, but might be rendered as ‘becoming an aspect of the state’ and ‘becoming an aspect of science’. 48 See Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), 127. 49 Peter Peterson, Geschichte der aristotelischen Philosophie im protestantischen Deutschland (Leipzig, 1921). 50 Paulsen, German Universities, 34 V., 137 V. 51 Hermann Mulert, Evangelische Kirchen und theologischen Fakulta¨ten (Tu¨bingen, 1930), 37.

Introduction

15

concerns were thick and numerous among theologians throughout the century, but, increasingly, signiWcant and inXuential numbers identiWed their loyalties more with Staat and Wissenschaft than with the faith communities they putatively served. The theologian Richard Rothe (1799–1867), for instance, went so far as to contend that in the modern world churches were becoming superXuous entities because the state and its institutions were better suited to transmit the ethical teachings of Christianity to society. ‘The moral community, the modern state,’ Rothe reasoned, ‘has done more to bring man to a condition beWtting the will of Christ than all the churches of Jerusalem or Rome or Wittenberg or Geneva.’52 While Rothe is an exceptional case, his words nonetheless bear witness to altogether new theological possibilities, which in turn attest to fundamentally altered historical conditions. In a rectorial address of 1875, ‘On Theology as a University Science’, the Old Testament scholar August Dillmann (1823–94) of the University of Berlin called attention to a ‘contradiction between traditional doctrine and modern knowledge’. ‘Only in an atmosphere of science,’ he concluded, could this contradiction be resolved: ‘[I]t is not a matter left to [church] synods or majorities, but rather to theological science.’53 Adolf von Harnack (1851– 1930) even argued that theology conducted under ecclesiastical auspices was positively injurious to true Wissenschaft; such a theology, he believed, could never match university theology in its ability ‘[to] contribute to the ediWce of modern German science and culture’. Thus the state had an abiding interest in protecting theology against excessive ecclesiastical meddling.54 Similarly, Berlin’s Friedrich Paulsen aYrmed that despite their obligation to train future ministers ‘professors of theology are state oYcials just as much as those of other faculties’. For Paulsen this was a salutary arrangement: ‘a Protestant theology based . . . upon the authority of the church would have no value at all’.55 As one might well imagine, more than a few pastors, particularly those of pietist or confessional leanings, evinced displeasure at this climate of opinion. Many, such as Friedrich Bodelschwingh (1831–1910), complained that academic theology, held captive by ‘state institutions’ and the ‘scientiWc method’, had become a thorn in the side of the church. ‘My son’s faith was shipwrecked at the university,’ he reported hearing from many parents, and proposed as the solution the establishment of theological faculties more congenial to the 52 Quoted in Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, trans. John Bowden (London: SCM, 1972), 604. ¨ ber die Theologie als Universita¨tswissenschaft, 15. 53 Dillmann, U ¨ ber die Bedeutung der theologischen Fakulta¨ten,’ PJ 175 (March 54 Adolf von Harnack, ‘U 1919): 362–74. 55 Paulsen, German Universities, 137, 139.

16

Introduction

needs of the church.56 In 1895, a Prussian church conference convened to discuss what for many had become the ‘most serious question’ of the day: ‘the unholy alienation between theology and church’ resulting from the scientiWc, statist character of the theological faculties. If the church did not regain inXuence over theological education, one Philipp Zorn complained to his fellow churchmen, then she risked presiding over her own ‘self-destruction as a church’.57 What worried many in 1895 was recognized by a few much earlier. ‘Theology students do not have it easy,’ a pastor opined in 1829, ‘because learning (Wissenshaft) and faith (Glaube) are so far apart from one another. In the interior of the student, this must eventually lead to an internal contradiction, which can endanger their spiritual lives.’58 Sizing up the shape of academic theology in the mid-nineteenth century, Søren Kierkegaard, who had studied at the University of Berlin, lamented that ‘Christianity has completely merged with [modern] science—that is, Christianity no longer exists.’59 Examining the emergence of such an academic milieu—extolled by the likes of Rothe, Dillmann, Harnack, and Paulsen, and deplored by many pious pastors and the iconoclastic Kierkegaard—constitutes a signiWcant element of this study.60 Furthermore, I suggest that such a milieu appears actually quite remarkable when taken outside the purview of modern German intellectual history and viewed from the broader perspective of the history of Christian thought. To dramatize this point, it might be instructive to consider the fathers of the Western Church. It was, after all, no less an authority than Augustine, who, during the infancy of Christian theology, sought to relativize the powers of the civitas terrena in the light of the civitas dei, comparing the former to ‘the fragile splendor of a glass which one fears may shatter at any moment’.61 With Clement of Alexandria, Augustine argued that theological reXection, 56 Friedrich Bodelschwingh, ‘Eine kirchliche theologische Fakulta¨t’ (1895), GStA PK VI NL AlthoV AI Nr. 35. Cf. Martin von Nathius, Wissenschaft und Kirche im Streit um die theologischen Fakulta¨ten (Heilbronn, 1886). 57 Philipp Zorn, ‘Der Staat und die theologischen Fakulta¨ten, Vortrag fu¨r die landeskirchliche Versammlung zu Berlin am 8.Mai 1895’ (Berlin, 1895) and ‘Die theologische Fakulta¨ten und die preußische Landeskirche,’ National Zeitung (16 May 1985), GStA PK VI NL AlthoV AI Nr. 34. 58 Peter Dietz (ed.), ‘Briefe des Antistes Jakob Burckhardt an seinen Freund Johann Jakob Frei’, Baseler Zeitschrift fu¨r Geschichte und Altertumskunde 53 (1954): 124. 59 Søren Kierkegaard, Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1975), iv. 463. 60 With justiWcation F. W. Graf speaks of an intra-Protestant Kulturkampf that pitted ‘liberal’ Protestants against ‘positive’ ones. In this conXict, the theological faculties became a major bone of contention. See the introduction to F. W. Graf and Hans Martin Mu¨ller (eds.), Der deutsche Protestantismus um 1900 (Gu¨tersloh: Gu¨tersloher Verlagshaus, 1996), 10. 61 Augustine, City of God; quoted in Oliver O’Donnovan, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 7.

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17

while it might freely borrow from pagan storehouses of knowledge, was ultimately a matter of sapientia, divine wisdom, not scientia, knowledge derived from human sources alone. SigniWcantly, it was Clement who Wrst gave full expression to the notion that human knowledge served well when it served as the handmaid of theology. In accord with practically all Church Fathers and numerous subsequent theologians, moreover, both Augustine and Clement aYrmed the ecclesial framework of theology and argued that theological knowledge and scriptural interpretation, on which theology was necessarily based, were matters dependent on the spiritual well-being of the individual scholar’s soul. ‘The spiritual eye must be very clear from sin,’ echoed the 1389 statutes of Vienna’s theological faculty, ‘in order to discern the lofty themes of theology. . . . The schools of theology must be not merely schools of science, but still more, schools of virtue and good morals.’62 In other words, from the vantage point of premodern Christianity, or at least inXuential strands thereof, normative theology was regarded as essentially suprascientiWc, wary of worldly political powers, and integrally tied to the doctrinal, spiritual, and practical concerns of the church, the ecclesia.63 By contrast, numerous nineteenth-century German theologians, mirroring Harnack, Dillmann, and others, wound up holding an almost fundamentally opposite view: to avoid succumbing to ecclesiastical obscurantism, theology, in step with secular academic disciplines, should be rigorously scientiWc, intentionally aloof from church direction, and capable of thriving in a statesupported university environment.64 The liberal theologian Martin Rade, for example, deWned theology as a strictly ‘historical-cultural science’ whose subject matter happened to be Christianity.65 Keeping theological faculties under a ‘state educational ministry’, Hermann Mulert averred, was an expression of Protestantism itself, allowing for the development of free science and preventing conservative ecclesiastical inXuences from eVecting ‘a devolution of the Protestant spirit [back] into a Catholic one’.66 62 Quoted in Karl von Raumer, German Universities (New York, 1859), 25. 63 Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science, 8–10. In addition to Pannenberg, my reading of Augustine and the Early Church on political and scientiWc matters is indebted to Jean Bethke Elshtain, Augustine and the Limits of Politics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995); Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Rudolf Lorenz, ‘Die Wissenschaftslehre Augustins,’ 67 ZKG (1955–6): 29 V.; John Neville Figgis, The Political Aspects of S. Augustine’s ‘City of God’ (London, 1921); and David C. Lindberg, ‘Science and the Early Church’, in David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (eds.), God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 19–48. 64 e.g. see Carl Albrecht Bernoulli, Die wissenschaftliche und die kirchliche Methode in der Theologie: Ein encyklopa¨discher Versuch (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1897). 65 Noted in Graf and Mu¨ller (eds.), Der deutsche Protestantismus um 1900, 10. 66 Hermann Mulert, Evangelische Kirchen und theologische Fakulta¨ten (Tu¨bingen, 1930), 36–7.

18

Introduction

Summing up the situation of Protestant academic theology in 1908, Ernst Troeltsch could thus observe that theological faculties in Germany had grown ‘indiVerent to the problems of the church’ even as they had adopted for themselves ‘the normal scientiWc methods of [their] sister faculties’. What is more, Troeltsch noted that theological faculties operated in ‘an educational system that was fully under the state and centralized’.67 For such reasons, Troeltsch concluded that a ‘frightful gulf ’ had developed between the life of the church and university theological faculties.68 A representative at a Prussian church synod conference in 1903 similarly worried that a ‘tension’ in society threatened to become a ‘rift’, in which ‘on one side stood science, represented by theology, [and] on the other side the unscientiWc belief of the congregation[s]’.69 How had such a situation come about? And what does it tell us about the conXuence of German academic realities and the development of Protestant thought in the nineteenth century? Admittedly, the foregoing considerations cry out for more precise deWnitions of how I understand ‘the state’ and ‘science’ in the nineteenth-century Prussian/German context. To keep the reader from having to guess, I shall brieXy lay out conceptions on these subjects that inform this work. Thereafter I outline the principal parts of the book and highlight a few key arguments before oVering some closing introductory considerations. The broad political background for this book is what R. R. Palmer famously called ‘the Age of Democratic Revolution’, that epochal period in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries which witnessed a fundamental reorienation of political authority across the Western world. In this reorientation, societies based on hierarchical order and religious tradition gradually—and in some cases explosively—gave way to ones expressing liberal, nationalistic, and individualistic principles. Institutions once sanctioned by age-old custom and divine mandate increasingly fell under the direction of human agency, deliberate amendment, and the expanded administrative ambitions and capacities of the state.70 Although it has often been posited that German-speaking lands did not experience political modernity fully, or else only ‘peculiarly’, notably failing to produce a liberal polity that measured up to that of France, Great Britain, or 67 Troeltsch, Die Trennung von Staat und Kirche, 41. 68 Ernst Troeltsch, ‘Ru¨ckblick auf ein halbes Jahrhundert der theologischen Wissenschaft’, ZWT 51 (1908): 97 V. 69 Verhandlungen der fu¨nften ordentlichen Generalsynode der evangelischen Landeskirchen Preuâens, 15.Oktober 1903–4.November 1903 (Berlin, 1904), i. 645–6. 70 R. R. Palmer, The Age of Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), i. 5–13.

Introduction

19

the United States, it is also recognized that the sweep of events by no means bypassed Germany, but left an indelible mark on German institutions, educational and ecclesiastical no less than political. The spirit of the French Revolution transmitted by the Napoleonic wars coloured nearly every aspect of German life in the early nineteenth century, especially after 1806 when the French army routed Prussian forces at the battle of Jena. Of particular signiWcance for the future of Germany were the ensuing reforms in Prussia, eVected by progressive statesmen such as Karl Friedrich Freiherr von Stein (1757–1831), Karl August von Hardenberg (1759–1822), and Karl Sigmund Franz von Altenstein (1770–1840). It was under such men and at this time, Thomas Nipperdey has remarked, ‘that the foundations of the modern state . . . in Germany were laid’.71 But what kind of state was established at this time and how did its make-up and evolution aVect the university and the church, the two institutions most relevant for understanding the social position of academic theology? To be sure, there has been no dearth of commentary on the rise of the modern German state in general and the so-called Prussian Reform Era (1807–15) in particular. Here I do not intend to review this impressive body of scholarship, but three points from it merit mention. First, it is important to underscore the signiWcance of the ability (as a consequence of the Napoleonic upheaval) of the state bureaucracy to establish itself in a position of power apart from the wishes of the monarch as under eighteenth-century ‘enlightened despotism’. Indeed, Prussia’s bureaucratic elite demonstrated extraordinary skills after 1806 to wrest powers from the monarch and achieve major social and political reforms. Otto Hintze has famously characterized the post-1806 reforms as the replacement of ‘absolute monarchy’ by ‘bureaucratic monarchy’.72 Similar scenarios played out in other German states. The reforming civil servants of this era served as the vanguard of the emerging educated middle class (Bildungsbu¨rgertum), a historically important social group, which, though numerically small, dominated key positions in government, university, and church throughout the nineteenth century.73 The progressive, rationalizing, meritocratic, and statist social vision they brought to these institutions informs the entire sweep of nineteenth-century history.

71 Thomas Nipperdey, Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck, 1800–1866, trans. Daniel Nolan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 19. 72 Otto Hintze, ‘Das preussische Staatsministerium im 19.Jahrhundert,’ in Gesammelte Abhandlungen, 2nd edn. (Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1967), iii. 530 V. 73 R. Steven Turner, ‘The Bildungsbu¨rgertum and the Learned Professions in Prussia, 1770– 1830: The Origins of a Class’, Historie Social-Social History 13 (May 1980): 105–35.

20

Introduction

Second, in the early nineteenth century, Prussia’s new bureaucratic brain trust worked towards the establishment of a particular kind of state, one often described as a culture state (Kulturstaat) or tutelary state (Erziehungsstaat), a state that numbered among its paternalistic duties the goal of inspiring and educating its people to become ‘appropriate citizens’, ones who understood that their aspirations should coincide with the high and morally serious purposes of the emergent nation-state. Rooted in the ethos of German idealist philosophy, this new political ideology, Matthew Levinger has witten in a provocative study, sought ‘to foster the moral and intellectual development of its people. . . . This tutelary ideal became central to Prussian political discourse largely because many intellectual and political leaders believed that it was vitally necessary to harmonize the desires of the people with the will of the state.’74 Such an understanding of the state received consummate expression in J. G. Fichte’s well-known Reden an die deutsche Nation (1808), which called for a new ‘national education’ (Nationalerziehung) superintended by the state and removed from all corporative and ecclesiastical inXuence.75 Third, although the post-1806 reforms liberalized many quarters of Prussian society, the same reforms were accompanied by an unprecedented degree of state centralization. On the one hand, this can be seen as a continuation of eighteenth-century absolutist tendencies. Yet the reforms also represent a distinctly modern, post-revolutionary phenomenon in several respects. OYcials had the ability to draw concrete examples from the Napoleonic reforms; France served simultaneously as a model, a driving force, and a catalyst, as well as an opposing pole for a variety of state-centralizing measures. What is more, the political situation in central Europe created by the French imperium provided oYcials with altogether new powers and opportunities against forces of feudalism and particularism—powers that far superseded those available to eighteenth-century statesmen. Finally, the new ethos of German idealism conferred on the state a ‘philosophically revolutionary’ character as the appropriate vehicle to realize modernity’s universal aims against the particularist forces of the Old Regime.76 To quote Nipperdey again, the Prussian reforms, ‘deeply inXuenced by philosophy’, would ‘concentrate and intensify the power and eVectiveness of the state; it would make it more rational and eVective against all forms of feudal and particularist rule, and it would establish for the Wrst time its sovereign power within its own borders, right down to the last inhabitant’.77 74 Matthew Levinger, Enlightened Nationalism: The Transformation of Prussian Political Culture, 1806–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 37. 75 J. G. Fichte, Reden an die deutsche Nation (Berlin, 1808). 76 Hajo Holborn, ‘German Idealism in the Light of Social History’, in Germany and Europe: Historical Essays by Hajo Holborn (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1971), 2. 77 Nipperdey, Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck, 20–1.

Introduction

21

Both universities and churches were regarded by bureaucratic reformers as bastions of guild-like particularism par excellence, and thus as potential impediments to state-fostered modernity. Not surprisingly, these institutions were often selected for extensive reform and heightened government involvement, the result of which was a veritable sea change in the relationship of government to the educational and religious spheres of society.78 Although I shall discuss the impact of these reforms in greater detail subsequently, something now should be said about the church–state relationship because of its crucial bearing on academic theology. For comparative purposes, it is illuminating to contrast the Prussian evolution of church–state relations in the early nineteenth century with that of the United States, my own country. Doing so presents a stark contrast. In the United States, the period from the ratiWcation of the Constitution (1787) to the middle decades of the nineteenth century witnessed what Nathan O. Hatch has called ‘the democratization of American Christianity’, an extraordinary upsurge of religious activity fuelled by populist preachers, increased denominationalism, and a diVuse egalitarian sentiment stemming from the American Revolution itself. The absence of a European-style national church, moreover, compounded by the radical separation of church and state in the Constitution’s First Amendment, provided the legal and political framework for the spirit of religious voluntarism and the renewal of piety generally referred to by historians as ‘the Second Great Awakening’.79 Alexis de Tocqueville encountered this reality in the 1830s, and, though troubled by aspects of it, oVered a generally positive evaluation. ‘Religion in America takes no direct part in the government of society,’ Tocqueville wrote, ‘but nevertheless it must be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions of that country; for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of free institutions.’80 As numerous commentators have noted, the religious voluntarism identiWed by Tocqueville and others, whatever its liabilities, laid a powerful groundwork for the development of private social activism, philanthropy, and independent moral judgement. The French neo-Thomist thinker Jacques Maritain has regarded such religious voluntarism as vital to shape ‘a tradition of initiative and critical judgment’ apart from ‘the things that are Caesar’s’.81 78 Winfried Speitkampf, ‘Educational Reforms in Germany between Revolution and Restoration’, GH 10 (1992): 1–23. 79 Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). Cf. Mark Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 161 V. 80 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), 287 V. 81 Jacques Maritain, Christianisme et de´mocratie (New York, 1943), 59. Cf. Norman A. Graebner, ‘Christianity and Democracy: Tocqueville’s Views of Religion in America’, JR 56

22

Introduction

By contrast, Prussia in the early nineteenth century (owing both to bureaucratic reforms after 1806 and the political and legal legacy of eighteenthcentury absolutism) entered upon what I term an Erastian modernity,82 a process whereby the churches were virtually annexed to the modernizing state and subjected to major government oversight and regulation, which extended down to theological education and parish life—and at times even to liturgy and doctrine.83 To be sure, such development would not have been possible without historical antecedents in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.84 Further, the Prussian Civil Code of 1794 had already made it clear that all ‘ ‘‘church societies’’ [were] subject to state authority’.85 However, the extent of state centralization arrived at after 1806 brought with it a virtual cessation of any vestige of ecclesiastical autonomy in Prussia. Church aVairs were handed over to the the newly established Department of Ecclesiastical AVairs and Public Education (die Sektion des Kultus und des o¨Ventlichen Unterrichts), a division of the Ministry of the Interior, elevated in 1817 to a self-standing ministry (the so-called Kultusministerium or, imprecisely translated, Ministry of Culture).86 Among its Wrst tasks were the abolition of traditional church governing bodies or consistories (Konsistorien), the secularization of church

(1976): 263–73. Despite his contempt for many aspects of American culture, even Max Weber believed that the American religious system ‘encouraged individual initiative and eYciency and was a source of self-respect’. See Wolfgang J. Mommsen, ‘Max Weber in America’, American Scholar 69 (2000): 106. Cf. Philip SchaV, Church and State in the United States or the American Idea of Religious Liberty and its Practical EVects (New York, 1888) and Milton B. Powell (ed.), The Voluntary Church: American Religious Life, 1740–1860, Seen Through the Eyes of European Visitors (New York: Macmillan 1967). 82 ‘Erastianism’ refers to the ascendency of the state over the church in ecclesiastical aVairs. The term derives from the sixteenth-century Swiss doctor and theologian Thomas Erastus (1524–83). His works, especially in their English translations, spread the notion that spiritual and religious aVairs must be subordinated to the civil laws of the state. See RGG ii. 538. In this study I use the term rather loosely to refer to state intrusion in ecclesiastical and theological matters and/or to the belief that the church’s submission to the directives of the state and the state’s authority is a salutary social arrangement. 83 See Hartmut Lehmann, ‘The Role of Religion in Germany and America in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, in Elizabeth Glaser and Hermann Wellenreuther (eds.), Bridging the Atlantic: The Question of American Exceptionalism in Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 69–81. 84 See Heinz Schilling, ‘The Reformation and the Rise of the Early Modern State’, in James D. Tracy, (ed.), Luther and the Modern State in Germany (Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1986). 85 Rudolf von Thadden, Prussia: The History of a Lost State, trans. Angi Rutter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 98. 86 Ernst Mu¨sebeck, Das preussische Kultusministerium vor hundert Jahren (Stuttgart, 1918), 44 V. For the sake of convenience, I shall often refer to this ministry as the Ministry of Culture, although admittedly ‘culture’ is an imprecise translation of ‘Kultus’, which has more speciWcally religious connotations.

Introduction

23

properties, and the development of a more centralized educational system at all levels. The Erastian measures of the early nineteenth century were tied to a novel supraconfessional conception of Christianity prevalent among key sectors of Prussian oYcialdom. This conception had two sources. On the one hand, it grew out of longstanding, practical political needs. Ever since the conversion of Johann Sigismund (1572–1619), Elector of Brandenburg, to Calvinism in 1613, the House of Brandenburg had faced the problem of how best to govern a confessionally mixed population, whose majority religion (Lutheranism) diVered from that of the ruling house (Calvinism).87 This problem had often led ministers to pursue policies of harmony between the major Protestant confessions, while promoting a policy of guarded toleration towards Catholics, Jews, and Nonconformists. Elements of this sensibility were driven to their logical conclusion under Friedrich Wilhelm III (r. 1797–1840) in his 1817 state-orchestrated merger of the Lutheran and Calvinist churches into one Protestant Union Church (Unionskirche). With the acquisition of more Catholic territories along the Rhine after the Congress of Vienna (1815), the confessional dilemma thickened. This led to additional measures by oYcials to achieve ‘parity’ between Catholics and Protestants with respect to their relationship to the state—even if the former were still widely regarded as culturally inferior.88 The politics of confessional harmony (among Protestants) and parity (with Catholics) was augmented in the early nineteenth century by a new intellectual tendency, growing out of idealist philosophy, that sought simultaneously to validate the state as a positive moral force and to deWne religion not in particular credal terms but in terms that emphasized religion’s thought- and morality-inducing qualities and its social value for Nationalerziehung. The particular creeds and inWghting among actual churches, by contrast, were viewed as wanting when judged by this more philosophically reWned, socially instrumental conception of religion. Many of the major Prussian ministers, and especially Karl von Altenstein, a devotee of Fichte and Hegel and the powerful Kultusminister from 1817 to 1840, had been inXuenced by this aspect of German idealism and did not hesitate to use the authority of the state to promote it.89 Accordingly, in marked contrast to the anticlericalism of the 87 Robert M. Bigler, The Politics of German Protestantism: The Rise of the Prussian Church Elite in Prussia, 1815–1848 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 6. 88 Troeltsch, Die Trennung von Staat und Kirche, 41 V., and Solte, Theologie an der Universita¨t, 92–6. See ‘Parita¨t’ in ESL 1471. 89 See Eduard Spranger, ‘Altensteins Denkschrift von 1807 und ihre Beziehung zur Philosophie’, FBPG 18 (1906): 107–58 and Frank Schuurmans, ‘Economic Liberalization, Honour, and Perfectibility: Karl Sigmund Altenstein and the Spritualization of Liberalism’, GH 16 (1998): 165–84.

24

Introduction

French Revolution and the religious free-for-all of the young United States, Prussia embarked on a modernizing course that not only blurred the boundaries between state and church, but actually assigned to the state the task of harnessing religion to serve its own progressive, tutelary ends. A consequence of this view, however, was that the church’s relevance as a concrete, historical force and as an intermediary institution between the individual and the state was greatly attenuated. Religion was spiritualized, made immanent in the general experience of humanity, divorced from the necessity of particularist, ecclesiastical manifestations. Since in idealist thought ‘the state was the realization not only of law but also of morality’, notes Hajo Holborn, then ‘the church loses any vital role it had in history’.90 Admittedly, few idealist thinkers, minister-reformers, or the Prussian king would have put it quite like this, and none went as far as Richard Rothe who, as we have seen, came to view churches as superXuous to the realization of religious values on earth. Nonetheless, the steady (occasionally aggressive) Verstaatlichung of the church through the agency of the Ministry of Culture bears witness to the greatly diminished importance of ecclesiastical and doctrinal realities in the eyes of the new reform-minded bureaucratic class. In a word, churches represented both the dogmatic excesses and particularist intransigence of the Old Regime. As such, they became the objects of a stateorchestrated ‘revolution’ in their polity, through which the government sought to remake them and press them into the service of its own progressive, bureaucratic, and, indeed, very religious ideals.91 The implications of such a religious policy for this study are threefold. First, since clergymen, society’s future religious leaders, were required to pass through theological faculties before seeking ordination, the state in the early nineteenth century began to take a much more active interest in the operations of these venerable university bodies. In order to blunt confessional distinctions, the state deliberately encouraged a theology—and an academic ethos generally—more latitudinarian and scientiWc than apologetic or confessional in orientation. The University of Berlin was founded, for example, to ‘completely repudiate’ the confessional character of the older territorial universities.92 One sees this policy, furthermore, in the eVorts by Johannes Schulze, the key aide of Altenstein in the Ministry of Culture, to establish theological seminars intended to foster historical and philological criticism (Kritik) as the foundation of theological excellence. One observes the same tendency in the ubiquitous state examinations (Staatsexamen) required for 90 Holborn, ‘German Idealism in the Light of Social History’, in Germany and Europe, 1–32. 91 John Groh, Nineteenth-Century German Protestantism: The Church as Social Model (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982), 1–25. 92 Paulsen, German Universities, 54.

Introduction

25

parish candidates, recent graduates of theological faculties. Increasingly, standardized exams, which served simultaneously as accrediting mechanisms, agents of professionalization, and means of state oversight, came to emphasize scholarly exertion over practical, doctrinal, or apologetic considerations.93 Second, the sanctioning of a less confessional, more scholarly theology allowed the state to adopt a more sanguine view of academic freedom than had hitherto been the case. To be sure, theologians, like other faculty who promoted potentially subversive political views, were rarely left alone. Still, those whose academic pursuits led them beyond the boundaries of strict orthodoxy often continued to receive state support and patronage, even after the repressive Karlsbad Decrees (1819), which ushered in a period of political and religious reaction. A case in point is the oYcial support oVered by the Ministry of Culture in 1830 to the rationalist theologians Friedrich Gesenius and J. A. Wegscheider at Halle against the pleas of their orthodox and pietist critics.94 Thus, despite the well-documented conservatism of the Vorma¨rz period (1815–48), the ideal of freedom of enquiry continued to gain saliency (if furtively at times) and eventually it received a legal guarantee in Prussia’s 1850 Constitution—‘Die Wissenschaft und ihre Lehre ist frei’ (§20)—and this became the foundation of subsequent constitutional measures in Germany.95 However, throughout the nineteenth century Prussia’s much-vaunted academic freedom coexisted uneasily with the state’s extensive control of higher education.96 Finally, the government became more involved in the actual composition of theological faculties through the process of hiring. Throughout the nineteenth century, churches and church bodies had little genuine power over the candidates who received university appointments in theology. Professors too had little say in picking their future colleagues, except the right to make suggestions (Vorschlagsrecht) to the Ministry of Culture; but these were often only perfunctorily considered or outright denied.97 Instead of basing 93 While such state examinations go back to the eighteenth century, they were greatly overhauled at the beginning of the nineteenth century. On the Staatsexamen in Prussia, see the article on ‘Pfarrervorbildung’ in RGG v. 293–300. Cf. Edward Robinson, ‘Theological Education in Germany. Part III: Examinations, Ministerial Standing, etc.’, Biblical Repository 3 (July 1831): 414 V. and Paulsen, German Universities, 384 V. 94 Mu¨sebeck, Das preussische Kultusministerium, 211–20. This episode will be treated in Ch. 4. 95 Solte, Theologie an der Universita¨t, 10. 96 E. R. Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1957), i. 265. 97 On this score, a major diVerence between Protestant and Catholic faculties existed. The Catholic Church secured the right for bishops to reject a theology professor ‘because of serious doubts concerning his orthodoxy or his conduct’. This separate legal arrangement often inspired liberals all the more to charge that Catholic theological faculties were unworthy of university status. See Mulert, Evangelischen Kirchen und theologischen Fakulta¨ten, 1–9.

26

Introduction

appointments on doctrinal or collegiate considerations, the Ministry of Culture increasingly turned to disciplinary and scholarly criteria in making their decisions. Not surprisingly, this tended to raise the rigors of scholarship at the expense of doctrine as the more important determinant for both receiving a position and gaining preferment. While doctrinal criteria by no means vanished (state oYcials in fact often extolled a policy of parity in hiring and promoting rival theological outlooks), an overall heightened emphasis on scholarly aptitude represented a major shift away from the confessional rigidities of the premodern university; and if this is not the only factor, it is at least a highly signiWcant one for explaining the ‘singular burst’ of theological scholarship in nineteenth-century Germany.98 In sum, throughout this work I contend that the Prussian state in general and its policies towards the church and university in particular were of great consequence for the operations of theological faculties and the shaping of Protestant academic theology. By promoting confessional harmony, emphasizing critical scholarship over apologetics, standardizing and mandating state-run accrediting procedures, and maintaining a Wrm grip on hiring procedures, the state managed to exercise tremendous inXuence over the religious sphere in society in general. While certain social groups— ultramontane Catholics and Jews obviously, so-called Old Lutherans (who resisted the Church Union of 1817), a minority of free church advocates, and some disgruntled pietists—fell outside the scope of this policy or ran foul of it, mainstream Protestant academic theology as a whole was integrated remarkably well into the Kulturstaat ideal. This outcome contributed signiWcantly, by the post-1871 imperial period, to an ascendant ‘Kulturprotestantismus’ or ‘Bildungsprotestantismus’, which in turn, in the words of F. W. Graf, functioned as the ‘civil-religious foundation’ of the German Empire.99 While I contrasted these ‘Erastian’ tendencies in Prussia with the situation in the United States, where near religious anarchy prevailed in the young republic, I should make clear that I do not intend to suggest that the PrussianErastian model was necessarily a peculiarly German development—a church– state ‘special path’ or Sonderweg, so to speak. While the magnitude and consequence of the Prussian measures stand out and should be noted as such, one observes family resemblances in other European state-church systems; and one could Wnd variant ‘civil religions’ in many modern political cultures—not least in the United States. 98 Claude Welch, ‘The Problem of a History of Nineteenth-Century Theology’, JR 52 (1972): 9. 99 See Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, ‘Protestantische Theologie in der Gesellschaft des Kaiserreichs’, in Graf (ed.), ProWle des neuzeitlichen Protestantismus: Kaiserreich (Gu¨tersloh: Gu¨tersloher Verlagshaus, 1992), ii. 16.

Introduction

27

What is more, the reach of the Prussian state over churches and universities resembles the actions of many modernizing, reforming states in another, more general respect. In his wide-ranging work on modern statecraft, James C. Scott has argued that a recurring pattern in bureaucracy-driven, modern states, whether in Europe or elsewhere, has been a tendency to place a premium on ‘an imperial or hegemonic planning mentality’ that disparages the historic role of local, practical, and traditional knowledge—knowledge presumably often anchored in religious communities. Such a tendency is amply borne out by the actions of the Prussian Ministry of Culture toward the religious sphere throughout much of the nineteenth century. From the aforementioned policies of Altenstein and Schulze in the early nineteenth century to the heavy-handed actions of Adalbert Falk (1827–1900) and Friedrich AlthoV (1839–1908), among the more important cultural bureaucrats of the late nineteenth century, this Ministry actively, if not invariably, sought to encourage theology’s scientization and modernization. Using the parlance of Scott, the Ministry undertook eVorts to ‘simplify’ academic theology, transforming it from a residually apologetic and sometimes obscurantist enterprise, potentially disruptive to the Kulturstaat ideal, ‘into a legible and administratively more convenient format’, one more in step with the high-minded Protestant and scientiWc directions of the state.100 Again, it carried out such measures through minimizing confessionalism (at least among Protestants), pursuing parity among church factions, standardizing and implementing examination procedures, limiting the inXuence of church bodies in theological hiring and education, and sanctioning a critical-scholarly understanding of the theological vocation, one that drew its criteria of excellence and evaluation largely from wissenschaftlich standards shared by non-theological disciplines. The result was a theology truly remarkable in the history of Christian thought for its detachment from credal and ecclesial interests, for its many-layered connections to a modern state, and for its critical rigour and scientiWc aspirations. Science was central to the Kulturstaat. One even Wnds the terms Kulturstaat and Wissenschaftsstaat used interchangeably. How then are we to understand science, or Wissenschaft, during the period covered by this study? As is regularly noted, the German word Wissenschaft does not lend itself to easy translation into English: while ‘science’ might be appropriate in some cases, ‘enquiry’ or ‘knowledge’ or other cognate terms might be more suitable in others. Unlike the English ‘science’, moreover, Wissenschaft never carried the strong connotation of natural or physical science, but always 100 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 6 V.

28

Introduction

included the cultural or human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) as well. In short, rigorous, systematic enquiry into whatever subject might be considered wissenschaftlich.101 As I shall elaborate more fully in Ch. 3, the term Wrst gained its distinctly modern currency among idealist thinkers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. At this time, Wissenschaft came to convey a monistic, totalizing, even Promethean attitude to human knowledge, something that both provided a comprehensive worldview and allowed enquiry into the transcendental principles justifying all systematic method and explanation. In this sense, Fichte wrote with unXagging exuberance on ‘the science of knowing’, Wissenschaftslehre.102 A wissenschaftlich cast of mind, Friedrich Schleiermacher wrote in 1808, allowed one ‘to lay open the whole body of learning and expound both the principles and the foundations of all knowledge’.103 The theme of organic wholeness, suggested here by Schleiermacher, was widely expressed by idealist thinkers—hence the recurring phrase ‘totality of science’ (Ganzheit der Wissenschaft) in the literature on the subject. The preoccupation with unity is also seen in the numerous ‘encyclopedias’ produced in the nineteenth century. An eighteenth-century genre invigorated by idealism, these encyclopedias were regarded as comprehensive accounts of individual disciplines and knowledge in general—a genre that arguably received consummate expression in Hegel’s famous Encyklopa¨die (1817, 1827). With justiWcation, R. Steven Turner has characterized early nineteenthcentury idealist conceptions of Wissenschaft not so much as science per se but as a set of beliefs or an ideology about science (Wissenschaftsideologie), a devout faith in the mind’s duty and capacity to enquire into and represent the basic essence of things, and through such activities to improve human character (Bildung).104 This conception of Wissenschaft was prevalent at the time of the establishment of the University of Berlin, extolled in many of the 101 For the sake of convenience, I shall often translate Wissenschaft simply as ‘science’ or leave it untranslated. 102 Among his most important works, the Wissenschaftslehre of Fichte was Wrst published in 1794. See Rolf-Peter Horstmann, ‘The Early Philosophy of Fichte and Schelling’, in Karl Ameriks (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 118–27. 103 Schleiermacher, ‘Gelegentliche Gedanken u¨ber Universita¨ten in deutschem Sinn, nebst einem Anhang u¨ber eine neu zu errichtende (1808)’, in Eduard Spranger (ed.), Fichte, Schleiermacher, SteVens u¨ber das Wesen der Universita¨t (Leipzig, 1910), 126 V. Schleiermacher elaborated on his conception of science and human knowing in various lectures on ‘dialectics’ oVered in Berlin’s philosophical faculty. See Schleiermacher, Dialektik (1811), ed. Andreas Arndt (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1986). 104 See R. Steven Turner, ‘The Growth of Professorial Research in Prussia, 1818–1848— Causes and Context’, in Russell McCormmach (ed.), Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences (Philadelphia, 1971), iii. 137–82.

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29

treatises occasioned by this institution’s founding. Its importance for shaping the modern academic enterprise, while subject to exaggeration, has been considerable. As Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard has written, this conception of science served as ‘the philosophy that legitimated the foundation of the University of Berlin and was meant to be the motor both of its development and the development of contemporary knowledge’.105 Ascendent during the heyday of German idealism, the new Wissenschaftsideologie was shaped and altered by yet newer intellectual currents as idealism declined in the university shortly before mid-century. Scholars therefore often distinguish between early (roughly 1790s–1830s) and later (post-1830s) understandings of Wissenschaft.106 At the beginning of the century, the idealist conceptions held true: usages of Wissenschaft reXected typically idealist monistic, synthetic, and encyclopedic tendencies. However, as the nineteenthcentury wore on and under the inXuence of positivism, the growth of the natural sciences, disciplinary specialization, and the exigencies of industrialization and technology, Wissenschaft gradually lost its grand, idealist associations and took on a more limited deWnition with reference to particular academic Welds, empirical rigour, and the putative ideological neutrality of the scholar.107 This idea of neutrality—or Voraussetzungslosigkeit (literally ‘presuppositionlessness’)—as a characteristic of Wissenschaft became especially pronounced towards the end of the nineteenth century; it was often trumpeted by secular and progressive Protestant scholars to criticize those, notably Roman Catholics, believed to be incapable of producing true science because of their adherence to confessional oaths.108 Quite often, this criterion of science was invoked to suggest that all theology, Protestant as well as Catholic, represented an ‘alien substance’ (Fremdko¨rper) within the modern scientiWc university.109 In a widely discussed address, ‘Changes in the University over the Last 100 Years’ (1913), Eduard Spranger summed up the transformations of science in 105 Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. GeoV Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979), 34. 106 Joseph Ben-David, The Scientist’s Role in Society: A Comparative Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 108–9. 107 On this inXuence of positivism in Germany in the nineteenth century, see W. M. Simon, European Positivism in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963), 238–63. 108 Theodor Mommsen claimed that the ‘Lebensnerv’ of the modern university was ‘die voraussetzungslose Forschung’. See Theodor Mommsen, ‘Universita¨tsunterricht und Konfession’, in Reden und Aufsa¨tze, 2nd edn. (Berlin, 1905), 432 V. See also Otto Baumgarten, Die Voraussetzungslosigkeit der protestantischen Theologie (Kiel, 1903) and Ju¨rgen von Kempski,‘ ‘‘Voraussetzungslosigkeit,’’ eine Studie zur Geschichte eines Wortes’, Archiv fu¨r Philosophie 4 (1952): 157–74. 109 Solte, Theologie an der Universita¨t, 14 V.

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the nineteenth century, to which I have alluded. Striking a culturally pessimistic tone, Spranger argued that the idealist notion of ‘the unity of science’, dominant since the founding of the University of Berlin, had gradually given way to a situation of intellectual fragmentation precipitated by specialized research and the spread of positivist thought. In Spranger’s formulation: We have reached the point at which the current conception of science (Wissenschaft) fundamentally diVers from that of German idealistic philosophy. Present-day science does not worry about the whole; it thus no longer strives after a worldview and the capacity for a worldview. Rather, it works on its individual problems and regards the highest acclaim in solving special problems through the most reWned methods and the most careful individual research. In other words, present-day science stands under the decisive inXuence of positivism . . . an almost anarchic form of positivism, which knows only limitless scientiWc activity.110

A similar, if more sanguine, assessment of the transformed meaning of Wissenschaft appeared in a rectorial address by the acclaimed pathologist and Prussian statesman Rudolf Virchow. Writing near century’s end, Virchow summed up the nineteenth century as a ‘transition from the philosophic to the scientiWc age’. The former he associated with the reign of Friedrich Wilhelm III (1797–1840) and the speculative philosophies of Hegel and Schelling. The passing of these Wgures ended a ‘magic spell’, paving the way for a ‘more . . . empirical observation of nature’, one conducive to the development of veriWable science and science-promoting institutions within the university such as laboratories, seminars, clinics, and institutes.111 The locus classicus of post-idealist German scholarly self-understanding, however, remains Max Weber’s famous address, ‘Science as a Vocation’. Delivered Wrst to an academic audience at the University of Munich in 1917, the address made the point that university science, undergoing ‘a phase of specialization previously unknown’, had developed in such a manner as to preclude from its purview not only the quest for an encompassing intellectual unity, but also all normative moral and religious concerns. Eschewing value judgements about the Wnal purposes of knowledge as well as pronouncements about the meaning of human life, modern researchers, in Weber’s interpretation, simply proliferate facts ad inWnitum and attempt to relate them to one another. In Weber’s own words: Science today is . . . organized in special disciplines in the service of self-clariWcation and knowledge of interrelated facts. It is not the gift of grace of seers and prophets dispensing sacred values and revelations, nor does it partake of the contemplation of 110 Eduard Spranger, Wandlungen im Wesen der Universita¨t seit 100 Jahren (Leipzig, 1913), 23. 111 Rudolf Virchow, Die Gru¨ndung der Berliner Universita¨t und der Uebergang aus dem philosophischen in das naturwissenschaftliche Zeitalter (Berlin, 1893).

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sages and philosophers about the meaning of the universe. This, to be sure, is the inescapable condition of our historical situation.112

With minor variations, Spranger, Virchow, and Weber’s accounts of and/or assumptions about the trajectory of nineteenth-century Wissenschaft have since been echoed and elaborated upon by numerous scholars.113 Even if one were to doubt certain aspects of their formulations—such as the validity of Virchow’s epic categories, the ‘philosophic’ and ‘scientiWc’ ages—one could hardly contend that the concept and practice of Wissenschaft remained static throughout the nineteenth century. Accordingly, I shall try to be sensitive to Wissenschaft’s evolving meanings, purposes, and institutional manifestations. Yet I shall concurrently argue that two important continuities in the early (‘idealist’) and later (‘positivist’) nineteenth-century understandings of Wissenschaft should be noted. First, while idealist thought is known mainly for its preoccupation with formulating the organic unity of knowledge, it was also, in a lesser key, attuned to the progressive and dynamic character of professorial scholarship, the taproot of later innovative research and disciplinary specialization.114 Already in the 1790s, for example, Fichte had deWned the task of the scholar as follows: ‘One should never rest, and never believe that one has done one’s duty until one has succeeded in advancing one’s discipline. As long as one lives one can always work toward the advancement of one’s discipline.’115 Similarly, Wilhelm von Humboldt famously argued the new university in Berlin was based on the principle that Wissenschaft implied ‘a never completely solved problem’ and therefore one was ‘never done with investigation and research’.116 While expressed at the height of German idealism’s inXuence, Fichte and Humboldt’s words reveal an impulse that would continue to be crucial for the endeavour of modern research. Once transposed from its idealist context, this impulse would transform the nature of professorial scholarship, changing its emphasis from an insistence on unity and encyclopedic comprehensiveness to a self-justifying, open-ended quest for intellectual discovery, radical innovation, and the perpetual expansion of 112 Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’, Gerth and Mills (eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, 134, 152. 113 See e.g. the very rich collection of essays in Kathryn M. Oslesko (eds.), Science in Germany: The Intersection of Institutional and Intellectual Issues. Osiris 5 (1989). 114 Theodore Ziolkowski has helpfully characterized this view of knowledge among idealist thinkers as ‘a diachronic organic process’. See Ziolkowski, German Romanticism and its Institutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 251. 115 J. G. Fichte, The Purpose of Higher Education, trans. Jorn K. Bramann (Mt. Savage, Md.: Nightsun, 1988), 56. ¨ ber die innere und a¨uâere Organisation der ho¨heren wissenschaftlichen 116 Humboldt, ‘U Anstalten in Berlin,’ in Anrich (ed.), Die Idee der deutschen Universita¨t, 377.

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Introduction

knowledge—still the hallmarks of the contemporary research university. But again, this latter emphasis represents not so much a fundamental break from the idealist heritage, as it is sometimes portrayed, but rather the development of tendencies latent within idealist thought itself.117 A second element of continuity suggests itself by the fact that while the quest for organic unity was superseded by increasingly specialized scholarly endeavours, unity itself was by no means extinguished as a normative academic ideal. It just became harder to aYrm in the light of proliferating Welds and subWelds. It receded into the background, but it did not vanish. One sees its continuing vitality, for example, in the numerous ‘encyclopedias’ produced in the mid- and late nineteenth century, which, still in the spirit of Hegel, purported oVering a comprehensive orientation to the various domains of human knowledge. The genre of theological encyclopedia, which we shall examine, Wts this category; it too illustrates, in an age of specialization, the powerful inertia of idealism’s totalizing impulse. In some instances, increasing specialization prompted sophisticated rearticulations of the unitary ideal. In 1874 the renowned historian Heinrich von Sybel (1817–95) likened the contemporary expansion of knowledge to trees joined at the root, whose rapidly multiplying branches by no means compromised an essential, organic unity. In the depths of ancient forests you frequently Wnd groups of trees, four or Wve powerful stems close together, whose tops spread their branches far and wide in all directions, but when you come to examine them more closely you Wnd that they all grow from one single root. Thus it is with the diVerent branches of science; they stretch out in many diVerent directions, but he who digs deep below the surface Wnds the common root.118

To be sure, such an overture to unity has a deWnite ring of nostalgia, articulated, as it was, in an academic milieu characterized by unprecedented 117 In making this argument, I should be clear that I do not intend to overvalue the causal importance of German idealism. Past scholarship, notably the work of Paulsen, has often come close to this view. Under the inXuence of idealism, Paulsen wrote, ‘the German universities . . . have developed into what they are today: the workshops and the forges of the intellectual life of our people’. But such a view overestimates purely intellectual causes, while neglecting developments in politics, academic organization, and the changing socioeconomic order. I make eVorts to give non-intellectual factors their due, while still noting the importance of intellectual factors, which I too believe are crucial. The causal nexus of the ‘modern university’ is multifaceted. See Paulsen, Die deutschen Universita¨ten und das Universita¨tsstudium (Berlin, 1902), 205. For an interpretation of the growth of research in the university that privileges socioeconomic factors, see Helmuth Plessner, ‘Zur Soziologie der modernen Forschung und ihrer Organisation in der deutschen Universita¨t—Tradition und Ideologie’, in Plessner, Diesseits der Utopie: Ausgewa¨hlte Beitra¨ge zur Kultursoziologie (Hamburg: Diederichs, 1966), 121–43. 118 Heinrich von Sybel, Die deutschen Universita¨ten, ihre Leistungen und Bedu¨rfnisse (Bonn, 1874), 19–20.

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expansion and diversiWcation. Thus, while unity was never fully eclipsed as a worthwhile ideal, as I maintain, it undeniably came to be overshadowed by the imperative for greater individual scholarly expertise and specialization. ‘It is an essential point in German university education,’ Sybel wrote, giving expression to this imperative in the same address as his nostalgic paean to unity, that the student gain a clear consciousness of the aim of science and the operations by which science reaches this aim. It is necessary for the student to go himself through these operations with regard to one subject . . . to follow up some problems to their last consequences—up to the point where he can say that there is nobody in this world who, on this point and on this subject, can teach him any more; a point where he can say here he stands safe and Wrm on his own feet, and decides entirely by his own judgment.119

It was, Wnally, this imperative—an institutionalized mandate to produce novel insights and develop individual expertise—that became the signature feature of the ‘German university’ by the late nineteenth century. Its bearing on theological faculties was considerable. Quite obviously, the relationship of Wissenschaft to theology in the nineteenth century is a fundamental concern of this study. It would be remiss, however, to assume this relationship to be one of absolute conXict, a struggle between the ‘progressive’ forces of science and the ‘reactionary’ forces of religion. Regrettably, this overwrought dualism, classically expressed in such Anglo-American, Victorian-era works as J. W. Draper’s History of the ConXict between Science and Religion (1875) and Andrew Dickson White’s The Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1876), has had a long and lamentable inXuence on general conceptions of modern European intellectual history. Yet it is among the least insightful approaches to the dynamics of Wissenschaft and theology in the context of the nineteenth-century German university. In the Wrst place, the dualism suggests an oversimpliWed, ahistorical understanding of the line dividing the protagonists of modern science and their detractors: booster on one side, naysayers on the other. In reality, this line was jagged, changing, and unclear; and it often cut through the minds of particular indivduals. Equally important, the dualism cannot account for the eagerness with which many theologians embraced Wissenschaft, seeing in its explanatory and systematizing power a means to rejuvenate Christianity under the cultural conditions of modernity. This is not to say that the ‘scientization’ of academic life in the nineteenth century was devoid of secularizing consequences. It is to say that many leading theological voices did not construe Wissenschaft—whether in its idealist or positivist guise—as a necessary threat 119 Ibid. 18.

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to theological verities. In fact, liberal Protestant theologians often interpreted the critical rigours of modern enquiry as the logical, historical fruit of the Reformation, which had challenged the dogmatic rigidities of Catholicism.120 To reject Wissenschaft therefore was tantamount to vitiating the purest and most progressive form of human religious consciousness: modern Protestantism.121 Turning away from the spirit of Wissenschaft, as one theologian put it, amounted to ‘a defection from the essence of Protestantism’.122 Wissenschaft itself, moreover, came to be invested with certain religious qualities. Anyone reading the paeans to Wissenschaft penned by Fichte and Schelling, and numerous other nineteenth-century scholars, cannot help but be struck by the quasi-religious character of their words. In his rectorial address at the University of Berlin, for example, Fichte proclaimed that the new university qua citadel of Wissenschaft was ‘the most holy thing which the human race possesses’ and that the transmission of knowledge from generation to generation amounted to ‘the visible representation of the immortality of our race’.123 It is perhaps no wonder then that conservative clergymen and theologians sometime complained about the idolatrous character of modern critical science, believing that it had become for many people ‘a surrogate for religion’.124 Ersatz-religion or no, the importance of Wissenschaft for understanding the theological enterprise in the nineteenth century is hardly a matter of dispute. Whether one rejected, applauded, questioned, or compromised with it, the exigencies of modern scholarly enquiry and their relationship to the age-old tasks of theology commanded the attention of practically all theologians, irrespective of confession, background, or intellectual skill.125 ‘The right of theology to exist alongside other Wissenschaften’, as Claude Welch has noted, became one of the ‘major preoccupations’ of the century.126 It was a preoccupation played out in lecture halls, journals, books, correspondences, and 120 See e.g. Adolf von Harnack’s 1917 address, Martin Luther und die Grundlegung der Reformation (Berlin, 1917). 121 The association of Wissenschaft and Protestantism could produce bitter anti-Catholic sentiments, evidenced by the number of leading liberal theologians who became members of the anti-Catholic ‘Evangelischen Bund zur Wahrung der deutsch-protestantischen Interessen’. See Graf, ‘Protestantische Theologie in der Gesellschaft des Kaiserreichs’, in Graf (ed.), ProWle des neutzeitlichen Protestantismus, ii. 17, 44 V. 122 Adolf Hilgenfeld, ‘Die wissenschaftliche Theologie und ihre gegenwa¨rtige Aufgabe’, ZWT 1 (Jena 1858): 2. 123 Fichte, Ueber die einzig mo¨gliche Sto¨rung der akademischen Freiheit (Berlin, 1812), 5–6, NStUB 8 H lit. part. II 1350. 124 These are the words of E. W. Hengstenberg in the EKZ 62 (27 August 1828): 545. 125 This is true for even those theological faculties, such as Rostock, Erlangen, and Greifswald, that maintained stronger confessional identities. See Franz Schnabel, Deutsche Geschichte im neunzehnten Jahrhundert: Die religio¨se Kra¨fte (Freiburg: Verlag Herder, 1951), iv. 527–9. 126 Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, i. 4–5.

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faculty meetings. The ‘burning . . . question of the day,’ as one theologian typically expressed the matter, ‘[is] whether an unscientiWc or scientiWc spirit (Unwissenschaftlichkeit oder Wissenschaftlichkeit) reigns in theology, whether the German people should have a clergy . . . hostile to intellectual life or a clergy friendly to science and thoroughly educated.’127

3 . P L A N O F S T U DY My principal aim in this study is to interpret the evolution of the modern German university and Protestant academic theology as interrelated phenomena. As I have indicated, this also requires underscoring the inXuences of the political order and science, Staat and Wissenschaft, over both academic organization and theological enquiry. A number of subsidiary and supplementary lines of enquiry contribute to my general purpose. In Chapter 2, I oVer several background considerations to help the reader place the subsequent sections in a broader and deeper historical context. Since the nineteenth-century university broke from and/or developed out of practices and assumptions of the medieval and early modern university, I believe it necessary to consider, if brieXy, exactly what these practices and assumptions were, especially as they pertain to theological education and the place of theology among other academic disciplines. All too often treatments of the modern university begin with the watershed of the Enlightenment and the early nineteenth century and move headlong towards the present. In beginning earlier, I implicitly question this approach, suggesting instead that premodern antecedents are vitally important for contextualizing and understanding the topics of this study. Chapter 2 Wnds its centre of gravity, however, in a discussion of the eighteenth-century university and the forces of inertia and novelty, stagnation and innovation, that characterized it. For a variety of reasons, German universities were in major decline in the eighteenth century, intellectually ossifying and beset by myriad administrative and Wnancial diYculties. At the same time, the century witnessed several important, new university foundings—particularly the University of Halle (1694) in Prussia and the University of Go¨ttingen (1737) in Hanover—that introduced vigorous new impulses to higher education. These ‘reform universities’ are examined for their incipiently modernizing characteristics. I also underscore the statutory, curricular, and scholarly contributions made to them by theologians, foremost August 127 Hilgenfeld, ‘Die wissenschaftliche Theologie’, ZWT 21.

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Introduction

Hermann Francke (1663–1727) at Halle and Johann Lorenz von Mosheim (1694–1755) at Go¨ttingen. Finally, in Ch. 2 I examine what Immanuel Kant famously called ‘the conXict of the faculties’. While I focus considerable attention on Kant’s own work, Der Streit der Fakulta¨ten (1798), I indicate that its criticisms of the status quo in the universities were not isolated phenomena, but reXected a developed body of criticism among eighteenth-century progressive thinkers. Like Kant, others too wanted to eVect a spirit of change in the ordering of the faculties. Principally, this meant diminishing the authority of the theological faculty in favour of the philosophical faculty, which Kant, in a letter to his friend Carl Friedrich Sta¨udlin of Go¨ttingen, revealingly called ‘the opposition bench against the theological faculty’.128 Examining Kant’s work and the late eighteenth-century ideas informing it, in turn, helps set the scene for the founding of the University of Berlin—an event profoundly shadowed by the legacy of the Ko¨nigsberg philosopher himself. Chapter 3 then focuses attention on the establishment of the University of Berlin (1810), its early years of operation, and this institution’s implications for the future of theological instruction and scholarship. One feature that distinguishes Berlin’s founding from those of older universities was the energetic outpouring of theoretical treatises on higher education that preceded the actual event. Together, these writings provide a remarkable window onto a variety of intellectual trends and cultural realities of the time; they also bear witness to an acute sense of modernity, an idealist and post-revolutionary sense that ‘the human spirit’ possessed an entirely new range of individual and institutional possibilities. My analysis of these documents concentrates on the question of what role the theological faculty was to play in the new university. Should it be drastically reduced or even eliminated, as some suggested, or should it be given a new academic lease so long as it could demonstrate an ability to adapt to the post-1789 world order and the new scholarly demands of Wissenschaft? Ultimately, the strategy of adaptation proved to be the case—a position successfully advocated by Friedrich Schleiermacher. Not surprisingly, this historically pivotal theologian and polymath, the founder and Wrst dean of Berlin’s theological faculty and later the rector of the University, occupies a prominent role in chapter 3. Focusing particular attention on his Gelegentliche Gedanken u¨ber Universita¨ten in deutschem Sinn (1808), his Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums (1811), and several noteworthy memoranda from his pen, I argue that Schleiermacher deserves much more 128 Letter of 4 December 1794; Immanuel Kant, Briefwechsel, ed. Otto Scho¨ndo¨rVer (Leipzig, 1924), ii. 688.

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credit than is normally given as the founder of the University of Berlin—a tag regularly applied to his contemporary, Wilhelm von Humboldt.129 But Schleiermacher was by no means the only bright light on Berlin’s initial theological faculty. The colleagues he helped assemble assisted in rapidly transforming Berlin into arguably Europe’s foremost centre of Protestant theology. A pioneer of historical-critical biblical exegesis, Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette (1780–1848) came to the Prussian capital in 1810 from Heidelberg to teach the Old Testament among other Welds. His colleague at Heidelberg, Philipp Konrad Marheineke (1780–1846) also heeded a call to Berlin, where he became a leading theological interpreter of Hegelian thought. In 1814 August Neander (1789–1850) joined the faculty, soon winning international acclaim as Germany’s foremost church historian. When Hegel joined the philosophical faculty in 1818, Wlling a chair vacated by Fichte, Berlin’s theological faculty took on yet new signiWcance as a seat to reckon (not always favourably) with the far-reaching theological implications of Hegel’s thought.130 In the Vorma¨rz period between 1815 and 1848, moreover, the faculty became host to numerous, diversely talented minds, such as E. W. Hengstenberg, August Twesten, Friedrich Lu¨cke, Karl Immanuel Nitzsch, F. A. G. Tholuck, Wilhelm Vatke, David Friedrich Strauss, and Bruno Bauer, among others.131 Not without reason, Hans Frei has called ‘the case of the University of Berlin [to be] . . . the most interesting in the history of modern academic theology’.132 But theology, like intellectual life in general, does not take place in an academic ether removed from historical forces. For this reason, in ch. 4, I shift my focus from theology and its immediate institutional setting, the university, and place it instead on reconWgurations in Prussian politics, bureaucracy, educational policy, and church–state relations underway in the early nineteenth century. Besides further exploring the rhetoric and realities of Prussia qua Kulturstaat, I examine in more detail the establishment of the Ministry of Culture (Kultusministerium) during the Prussian Reform Era and the farreaching, Erastian authority this ministry exercised over church aVairs, academic life, and theology throughout the nineteenth century. It was largely through the agency of this Ministry, the nationalist historian Heinrich von ¨ ber die Bedeutung der theologischen Fakulta¨ten’, PJ 175 (March 129 Adolf von Harnack, ‘U 1919): 362–74. 130 On Hegel and Berlin’s theological faculty, see Richard Crouter, ‘Hegel and Schleiermacher at Berlin: A Many-Sided Debate’, JAAR 48 (1980): 19–43. 131 Short biographies of the theological faculty’s members may be found in Walter Elliger, 150 Jahre Theologische Fakulta¨t Berlin (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1960), 11 V. 132 Hans Frei, Types of Christian Theology, ed. George Hunsinger and William C. Placher (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 102.

38

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Treitschke once wrote, that the church in Prussia was kept ‘under the benevolent tutelage of the state’.133 In the last part of the book, I widen my purview to encompass aspects of the entire nineteenth century, ranging from the Napoleonic era to the turmoil of the early Weimar Republic. While keeping a focus largely on Prussia and the University of Berlin—albeit with lingering side glances at other key universities such as Bonn, Halle, Tu¨bingen, Go¨ttingen, Breslau, and Ko¨nigsberg—I puzzle speciWcally over the conXicted renown of German academic theology in the nineteenth century. Why did some champion the dominant liberalizing, scientizing directions of theology as a bold example of intellectual and religious progress, while others questioned them, either as misguided thinking or as the unwitting vitiation of timeless Christian verities? In broaching such a question, one is necessarily led to many others. How did various distinctive nineteenth-century forces—whether political, intellectual, or economic in nature—impinge on university development and the role of theology therein? What was actually taught in theological faculties, particularly as revealed by the ubiquitous theological encyclopedias, the introductory textbooks of their day? How did university histories and various commemorative occasions portray the position (and plight) of theology in the modernizing university system? How did foreign visitors and educators, often awestruck by the ‘German university’, size up the direction and meaning of German academic theology in the mid- and late nineteenth century? Why did many German professors feel toward century’s end that a ‘crisis of the theological faculty’ was taking place, and how did theologians respond to and/or perhaps contribute to this crisis? Finally, how did the theological faculty actually persist in the university system in the early twentieth-century despite strong pleas to abolish it on account of its alleged scientiWc illegitimacy and its violation of the modern doctrine of church–state separation? Additional questions present themselves, but this should give one some sense of the road ahead.

4. BROADER CONSIDERATIONS, OR ‘ THE PAT H OS OF M ODER N THE OLOGY’ ‘[W]e can never rid ourselves entirely of the views of our own time and personality,’ wrote the great Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, ‘and here 133 Heinrich von Treitschke, History of Germany in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (New York: AMS, 1968), ii. 509–10.

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perhaps is the worst enemy of knowledge. The clearest proof of it is this: as soon as history approaches our century and our worthy selves we Wnd everything more ‘‘interesting’’; in actual fact it is we who are more ‘‘interested’’. ’134 In conceiving and carrying out a study like the present one, Burckhardt’s words generally ring true: my own interests and commitments as well as the social and cultural worlds in which I Wnd myself have necessarily shaped the present work. However, at the risk of quibbling with a Wrst-order historical mind, I am less inclined to see these things as the worst enemy of knowledge than as the thorny ground from which knowledge, historical or otherwise, must necessarily arise. I would even suggest that posing questions and following intuitions that correlate strongly with one’s intellectual commitments and interests is a vital precondition for the production of meaningful, provocative, and, alas, accurate knowledge.135 It is only fair then to lay out to the reader here a few Wnal, more general considerations of my own that have informed this study since its inception. Readers may then decide, by their own lights, whether these have borne fruit in historical insight suYciently compelling to warrant assent by those who might not share my commitments. (Readers uninterested in such considerations may proWtably skip ahead to ch. 2.) As someone who takes seriously the ongoing relevance of Christian intellectual traditions, I have quite simply an abiding interest in Christian theological reXection, its history, and its place in the academic landscape and in the broader social and cultural Welds. Thus, while this work is at one level an exercise in intellectual history, framed by a particular nation-state, it is, at another, an interpretative foray into the history of Christian thought, an attempt to shed light on and raise questions about a set of institutional and intellectual developments of abiding signiWcance for understanding the place, predicament, and promise of Christian theology today in the vast and churning ocean of contemporary culture. As an American scholar, I am not immune to the charge of being an innocent abroad. This is fair enough, but I have also tried to make a virtue of a natural liability: distance from the other shore, which certainly occasions naivety and ignorance, but may also lend perspective. 134 Jacob Burckhardt, ReXections on History, trans. M. D. Hottinger (Indianapolis: Liberty, 1979), 41. 135 In more theoretical language, I would call this approach ‘dialectical objectivity’, meaning that the interests and insights of the investigating subject, not his or her avowed ‘neutrality’, are necessary and even constitutive for an understanding of the object at hand. Here I borrow from Allan Megill, ‘Four Senses of Objectivity’, in Megill (ed.), Rethinking Objectivity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 7–10. Cf. Thomas L. Haskell, Objectivity is not Neutrality: Explanatory Schemes in History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 145–73.

40

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An interest in theology inclines my scholarship to what some sociologists have called ‘plausibility structures’—the complex tapestry of ideas and institutions operative in a given society that shape worldviews and give credence to particular deWnitions of reality.136 At the risk of overgeneralization, I think it fair to say that the contribution of universities, especially GermaninXuenced research universities, to modern plausibility structures has been incalculable, and deeply ambivalent with respect to traditional Christian assumptions about the world, knowledge, and human nature. This has been true in German universities and equally so in American higher education, which, we must remember, has absorbed the impact of nineteenth-century German university development to an extent that rivals or exceeds the German universities themselves.137 At the same time, the modern university, founded on the dynamic premise of Wissenschaft, has placed in theology’s hands tools of criticism and methodological rigour unprecedented in the history of Christian thought; theological faculties and individual theologians who mastered these tools thereby gained a new academic lease. But again, the university since the nineteenth century has cultivated, intentionally or not, an institutional atmosphere of scepticism to forms of theology operating in accordance to more traditionalist, credal, or sapiential understandings of theology’s task. Thus, theology, if it sought continuance as an academic enterprise, was compelled to come up with strategies to validate the plausibility structures of the modern university. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as Hans Frei has written, ‘Christian theology was . . . [put] in the position of having to demonstrate that it was truly wissenschaftlich and had a right to citizenship in [the] university.’138 Many debates among theologians of the later nineteenth and early twentieth century, as I have already hinted, were accordingly animated by the question of whether or not such accommodation to modernity was in fact desirable or even possible. While this debate still simmers today, what is of particular interest to many contemporary thinkers, whether avowedly religious or not, is no longer the question of accommodation to modernity, but whether modernity itself— and its supporting plausibility structures, the university foremost—has swooned under the weight of its own ambitions and given rise to an antior postmodern period, or at least one that evinces a deeply chastened attitude 136 See Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969). 137 Ru¨diger vom Bruch has argued that many of the ideals of the modern German university ‘may be today better preserved in the North American than the German system of higher education’. See Ru¨diger vom Bruch, ‘A Slow Farewell to Humboldt? Stages in the History of German Universities, 1810–1945,’ in Ash (ed.), German Universities: Past and Future, 27. 138 Frei, Types of Christian Theology, 98–9.

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toward the universalist ideals of the Enlightenment, the cradle of modernity. A sign of the unravelling of modernity, it is often claimed, is found in the moral and epistemological incoherence of contemporary universities, especially in what we today call ‘the humanities’, or Geisteswissenschaften, the very domain of education that the founders of the University of Berlin, following Kant, sought to establish as the rejuvenating centre of the modern university. Predicated on Kantian notions of autonomous reason and an idealist belief in the unity of science, this centre today, critics argue, displays methodological confusion, epistemological disarray, and a susceptibility to political whim that vitiates its own modern raison d’eˆtre. Theology too, in so far as it has exchanged its traditional attire for the mantle of Wissenschaftlichkeit, has replicated the disarray present in the academy at large, or so its critics charge. Thus the Anglican theologian John Milbank speaks of ‘the pathos of modern theology’ resulting from theology having long been ‘ ‘‘positioned’’ by secular reason.’139 In recent years, the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has emerged as one of the most inXuential critics of the faltering modern university ideal. In his interpretation, the promise of the modern university was never realized due to a theoretical inadequacy of one of its central pillars: namely the belief that ‘an autonomous rationality’, unmoored from the sustenance provided by moral traditions, speciWcally religious ones, was a suYcient ground to legitimize the post-Enlightenment academic enterprise. As Kant put it, genuine enquiry in the university (particularly in the philosophical faculty) was to stand ‘only under the authority of reason’ (nur unter der Gesetzgebung der Vernunft).140 If the university remained true to this vision, the implication ran, its members, labouring in their respective Welds, would converge on a universally accepted body of knowledge and a common moral and epistemological vocabulary. In MacIntyre’s formulation: ‘[F]reed from constraints and most notably the constraints imposed by religious and moral tests, it [the university] . . . [was to] produce not only progress in enquiry but also agreement among all rational persons as to what the rationally justiWed conclusions of such enquiry are.’141 Such was the inspiration behind the great number of ‘encyclopedias’ produced in nineteenth-century Germany, some of which I 139 John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 1–6. Cf. Edward Farley, Theologia: The Fragmentation and Unity of Theological Education (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983) and David Kelsey, Between Athens and Berlin: The Theological Education Debate (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1993), 19, 49 V. 140 Kant, Streit der Fakulta¨ten, 42–3. 141 Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Forms of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 225. Admittedly, in this work MacIntyre is concerned more with British universities; still, his observations are quite relevant to German and American university development as well.

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shall discuss. It was also the dominant impulse, according to MacIntyre’s analysis, behind the famous ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica—of and to which Berlin’s Adolf von Harnack, incidentally, was an avid supporter and contributor.142 However, by many present-day accounts—by no means MacIntyre’s alone—the cunning of history has produced something quite like the opposite of the modern university’s original, unitary aspirations. Instead of unity and a rational, encyclopedic ‘metalanguage’, confusion and fragmentation reign, along with a general sense of crisis, frustration, and a seemingly Sisyphean search for new purpose and revised legitimation.143 Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard perhaps most inXuentially set the parameters for current conversations about the troubles of higher education in his widely discussed Postmodern Condition (1979), the subtitle of which, ‘A Report on Knowledge,’ merits keeping in mind. Attributing massive signiWcance to the nineteenth-century German university system, and to the University of Berlin in particular, as a blueprint for and an inspiration behind systems of higher education throughout the developed world, Lyotard concluded that the centre had not held: contemporary knowledge appeared in a state of ‘crisis’, showing signs of ‘internal erosion’ and ‘splintering’: ‘There is erosion at work . . . and by loosening the encyclopedic net in which each science was to Wnd its place, it eventually sets them free.’144 While Lyotard ultimately aYrmed the ‘postmodern’ possibilities that the crisis in higher education allowed, his assessment of the fate of the modern university’s original unitary goals suggests something far short of a success story. Among the more provocative historians of American higher education and religion, George Marsden has recently presented an equally pessimistic account of the university in the United States, asserting that the contemporary university is awash in contradictions and displays a worrisome inability to foster meaningful conversation across ideological and disciplinary lines.145 While I need not rehearse the details of Marsden’s argument, his general 142 MacIntyre, Three Rival Forms of Moral Enquiry, 44. 143 Among numerous thoughtful critiques and eVorts to re-envision universities and the university ideal, see Andrea Sterk (ed.), Religion, Scholarship, and Higher Education: Perspectives, Models, and Future Prospects (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002); Mark Schwehn, Exiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); Jaroslav Pelikan, The Idea of the University: A Reexamination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Michael Daxner, Ist die Uni noch zu retten? Zehn Vorschla¨ge und eine Vision (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1996); and Peter Glotz, Im Kern verrottet? Fu¨nf vor Zwo¨lf an Deutschlands Universita¨ten (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1996). 144 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 39. 145 See esp. George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 429 V.

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assessment bears considering, as it, like Lyotard’s, suggests the quandary of the modern university ideal. Contemporary university culture is hollow at its core. . . . Knowledge today is oriented increasingly toward the practical; at the same time, in most Welds the vast increases in information render our expertise more fragmentary and detached from the larger issues of life. Although the university research ideal [read: Wissenschaft in the more positivist mode] apparently works well enough in the sciences and technology, it is not at all clear why the same principles should be normative for the study of human society and behavior. Even the liberal arts are havens for fads that often obscure what was originally attractive about their subjects. ‘Wisdom’ is hardly a term one thinks of in connection with such studies, nor with our system of higher education as a whole.146

Harvard’s former president, Derek Bok, shares similar ground with Marsden in challenging the American elite professoriate, long socialized to transmit expertise, facts, and method, to reconsider what it means ‘to provide a sound moral education’.147 Questions of wisdom and moral education return us to MacIntyre, who insists that a strong relationship exists, or should exist, between one’s assumptions about knowledge and one’s ability to carry forward sound moral reasoning. Unfortunately, in his view, the contemporary university provides neither a compelling basis for epistemology nor a coherent way for its members to discuss and resolve moral dilemmas. The university has become a place, writes MacIntyre, where ‘all debate is inconclusive’, for there exists no commonly shared body of Wrst principles that would allow discussants to resolve disagreements. Oddly then, like the confessional theologians of the seventeenth century, scholars in the humanities and social sciences today, when enquiry transcends questions of technical expertise, retrench into often predictable ideological and epistemological orthodoxies and shrilly question the legitimacy of their opponents’ views. ‘It is ironic’, concludes MacIntyre, ‘that the wholly secular humanistic disciplines of the late twentieth century should thus reproduce that very same condition [interminable polemics] which led their nineteenth-century secularizing predecessors to dismiss the claim of theology to be worthy of the status of an academic discipline.’148 However, if that which once sought to dismiss theology (critical science, autonomous reason, and the belief in ‘presuppositionless’ enquiry) are now found wanting, what is the status of theological reXection after the 146 George M. Marsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 3. 147 Derek Bok, Universities and the Future of America (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990), 62. 148 MacIntyre, Three Rival Forms of Moral Enquiry, 7.

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much-discussed ‘failure of the Enlightenment project’? Further, what is the status of those modern theologies that wholeheartedly embraced the Kantianidealist hopes of universality and rationality and/or the positivist hopes for neutrality? What is the relationship of any contemporary academic theology to the credal, ecclesial theologies of the era prior to the advent of the modern university? What should one make of recent post-critical and post-liberal theologies, which, as the common preWx suggests, bear stronger witness to an exhausted project rather than herald a new one?149 In short, what might the ancient enterprise of Wdes quaerens intellectum mean today for a university that often appears, in the lines of Matthew Arnold, ‘wandering between two worlds j one dead, the other powerless to be born’? Recognizably, these are broad questions, ones that a historian probably has no business trying to pose, much less answer. Most are best left to theologians themselves. In what follows, I’ll try to practise more modesty then, attempting the ‘handmaid’s’ work of providing needful historical background, to help frame these questions and perhaps provoke other ones as well. 149 See John Webster and George P. Schner (eds.), Theology after Liberalism: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).

2 Sacra Facultas and the Coming of German Modernity But the purpose of this science [theology] . . . is eternal beatitude, to which as to an ultimate end the ends of all the practical sciences are directed. Hence it is clear that from every standpoint it is nobler than other sciences. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae The theological faculty is no longer necessary. ¨ ber die Einrichtung und den Zweck der J. B. Erhard, U ho¨hern Lehranstalten (1802)

1. INTRODUCTION On the morning of 17 September 1737, to the sound of ringing church bells, an academic procession wound its way through the narrow streets of Go¨ttingen headed for St Paul’s Church, formerly a Dominican monastery. The occasion marked the inauguration of the University of Go¨ttingen, oYcially founded this year in the Hanoverian state of George II. Students led the procession, followed by several nobles, town dignitaries, and deputies from the crown. Near the end of the procession came the professors, bedecked in academic gowns and marching in rank of importance. The philosophical faculty led the way, signifying its traditional subordinate position as the ‘lower’ faculty. It was followed by the ‘higher’ faculties of medicine and law. Lastly came the theologians, the august ‘Wrst faculty’, bearers of divine knowledge inaccessible to human reason alone.1 1 Ulrich Hunger, ‘Die Georgia Augusta als hannoversche Landesuniversita¨t. Von ihrer Gru¨ndung bis zum Ende des Ko¨nigreichs’, in Ernst Bo¨hme and Rudolf Vierhaus (eds.), Go¨ttingen: Geschichte einer Universita¨tsstadt (Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002), ii. 150, and Reinhard Wittram, Die Universita¨t und ihre Fakulta¨ten (Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1962), 1.

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Although across Europe the Enlightenment was ascendant, Go¨ttingen’s procession and the priority it gave to theology bore witness to the powerful inertia of the medieval world.2 Go¨ttingen was not exceptional. Other German universities too acknowledged the theological faculty’s queenly dignity in a variety of symbolic and substantive ways. Not only did theologians receive places of honour in academic processions and ceremonies, but they often made up the largest of the higher faculties, received the highest remuneration, and were looked to for ensuring the religious conformity of the university as a whole.3 Their very existence attested to an academic enterprise that continued to see itself in profoundly religious terms. Oaths of confessional Wdelity were the rule of the day; ecclesiastical connections among the professoriate were thick and numerous.4 While not as narrowly confessional as other universities, Go¨ttingen was still established as a ‘Protestant university’ in a ‘Protestant state’, as George II put it in 1733.5 Its statutes made clear that any member who espoused ‘godless’ views—such as denying the immortality of the soul or the doctrine of the Trinity—would not remain long in the academic community.6 But the theological faculty’s pre-eminent position faced formidable challenges in the eighteenth century, at Go¨ttingen and elsewhere. Politically, the demands of absolutist state-building placed a premium on competent statesmen and lawyers, boosting the prestige and importance of the faculty of law, often at the expense of theology.7 Intellectually, currents of the French Enlightenment and English Deism had made their presence felt in German academic life. Between 1741 and 1782, over twenty works of Deism were translated into German.8 The writings of Samuel Pufendorf, Christian 2 See Frank Rexroth, ‘Ritual and the Creation of Social Knowledge: The Opening Celebrations of Medieval German Universities’, in William Courtney and Ju¨rgen Miethke (eds.), Universities and Schooling in Medieval Society (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 71–2. 3 Friedrich Paulsen, German Universities and University Study, trans. William W. Elwang (New York, 1906), 38, and R. Steven Turner, ‘The Prussian Universities and the Research Imperative, 1806–1848’, Ph.D. diss. (Princeton University, 1972), 31. 4 Friedrich Paulsen, Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts auf den deutschen Schulen und Universita¨ten vom Ausgang des Mittelalters bis zur Gegenwart (Leipzig, 1919), i. 258. A typical oath from Jena (a Lutheran university) of 1679 required that professors have nothing to do with ‘Papists or Calvinists or any other false doctrine’. Noted in F. A. Tholuck, Das akademische Leben des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts mit besonderer Beziehung auf die protestantisch-theologischen Fakulta¨ten Deutschlands (Halle, 1853), i. 67. 5 Wittram, Die Universita¨t und ihre Fakulta¨ten, 5–7. 6 Wilhelm Ebel, Die Privilegien und a¨ltesten Statuten der Georg-August-Universita¨t zu Go¨ttingen (Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1961), 40–3. 7 Notker Hammerstein, Universita¨t und Aufkla¨rung (Go¨ttingen: Wallstein, 1995). 8 A. O. Doyson, ‘Theological Legacies of the Enlightenment: England and Germany’, in S. W. Sykes (ed.), England and Germany: Studies in Theological Diplomacy (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1982), 55 V.

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Thomasius, and Christian WolV, furthermore, emphasized the autonomous role of reason in human understanding, attenuating the authority of Christian theology.9 Combined, these intellectual currents gave new prestige to the philosophical faculty, long considered the mere handmaid of the higher professional faculties. As the century progressed, the philosophical faculty’s expanding scope and distinction increasingly posed a threat to the status of theology. The nature of this threat was brought into clear relief near the century’s end by Immanuel Kant’s Streit der Fakulta¨ten (1798). Yet the theological faculty’s problems were deeper still. For not only did it face an internal threat from neighbouring faculties, but the shape of the university itself was coming under sharp attack from progressive critics. In part, the universities themselves were to blame for this state of aVairs. Their problems in the eighteenth century were legion and included Wnancial mismanagement, curricular stagnation, professorial pedantry, a decline in matriculation numbers, and a notoriously coarse and unruly student subculture that venerated drinking and duelling. Not surprisingly, the eighteenth century is regularly depicted in general histories as a nadir for universities—not only in central Europe but in much of the rest of Europe as well. After mid-century, some critics even called for the complete abolition of universities and the establishment of diVerent forms of higher education, modelled on the scientiWc academies that had arisen in London (1662), Paris (1666), and Berlin (1700) in the wake of the ScientiWc Revolution. But the extent of criticism should not obscure another important reality of eighteenth-century academic life: eVorts of reform within the existing university structures. Thus, it is perhaps most accurate to characterize university aVairs during this period in a twofold manner. On the one hand, universities were in major, some would say terminal, decline. But just as this situation elicited criticism, it also prompted pleas for improvement. Numerous treatises voiced hopeful, progressive calls for change—not for the abolition of universities but for their refortiWcation and amendment. The universities of Halle (1694) and Go¨ttingen (1737), though traditional in many respects, were founded with explicit reform agendas in mind, and their examples were not lost on other universities. In many respects, the University of Berlin (1810) brought to full expression ideas and practices that had Wrst taken root, often quite extensively, in the eighteenth century. In this section, I address several questions alluded to above. What were the causes of general university decline in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and how, speciWcally, did the decline manifest itself? Who were the critics of the universities and what motivated them? How did the theological 9 Paulsen, Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts, 540–1.

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faculty Wgure into their criticisms? Finally, how was the philosophical faculty expanding and growing during the eighteenth century and in what ways did this challenge and aVect theological study?10 The above questions will be pursued in due course. A crucial prior task is to consider the nature of university development and the locus and function of theological study prior to the German Enlightenment. Without suYcient historical background, it is impossible to evaluate eighteenth-century university decline and subsequent modernization. While still ‘medieval’ in some respects, even during the Aufkla¨rung, universities had witnessed signiWcant transformations in the preceding centuries. The religious crises and tumults of the sixteenth century, in particular, had given birth to powerful forces of change: scholarly humanist currents, new theological convictions, and freshly acquired powers by local German princes had brought sweeping reforms to universities and theological faculties. Extending themselves into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these changes petriWed into self-satisWed orthodoxies and, along with other factors, provided new grounds for diVerent, distinctly modern criticisms and reforms.

2. THE MEDIEVAL L EGACY Although younger than their counterparts in France, Italy, Spain, and England, German universities can claim a venerable ancestry. Modelled extensively on the University of Paris, the jewel of the medieval university system and the most important in matters theological, German universities trace their beginnings to the fourteenth century. Prague and Vienna were founded Wrst, respectively in 1348 and 1365 by the royal houses of Luxemburg and Hapsburg. These were followed by universities in Heidelberg (1385), Erfurt (1379), Cologne (1388), and Wu¨rzburg (1402).11 The last of the ‘medieval’ 10 The condition of the ‘philosophical faculty’ in the eighteenth century has been the subject of considerable debate. Friedrich Paulsen has argued that ‘the rise of the German universities in the eighteenth century was primarily due to the rise of the philosophical faculty from servitude to leadership’. Other scholarship, notably that of R. Steven Turner, has depicted the condition of the philosophical faculty in decidedly bleaker terms. I am of the opinion that while this faculty was in a state of stagnation—or ‘decay’ as Turner suggests—for much of the century, especially the Wrst half, it undeniably witnessed new birth, especially after the founding of the University of Go¨ttingen. This new birth in turn paved the way for the Xourishing of the faculty in the nineteenth century. See Paulsen German Universities, 42, 408 V., and R. Steven Turner, ‘University Reformers and Professorial Scholarship in Germany, 1760–1806’, in Lawrence Stone (ed.), The University in Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 499. 11 HUE i. 63–4. On the founding of the medieval German universities, see Hastings Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages [A new edition in three volumes, ed. F. M. Powicke

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German universities were founded at Leipzig (1409) and Rostock (1419). These trace their origins to the Hussite disturbances in Bohemia, which resulted in the exile of many German-speaking scholars from Prague.12 A second foundation period coincided with the rise of Renaissance humanism in central Europe. It witnessed the establishment of no less than nine universities: Greifswald (1456), Trier (1454), Freiburg im Breisgau (1457), Ingolstadt (1459), Basle (1460), Tu¨bingen (1477), Mainz (1476), Wittenberg (1502), and Frankfurt an der Oder (1506).13 The period after the Reformation, the so-called Confessional Age, witnessed another spate of university foundings. These were sponsored in large measure by German princes, Protestant and Catholic, who through the Reformation and its conXicts had gained considerable autonomy within the weakened structures of the Holy Roman Empire. Since few wanted to do without a university to bolster the prestige of their land, central Europe became a virtual hatchery of universities. These included Marburg (1527), Ko¨nigsberg (1544), Dillingen (1553), Jena (1558), Helmstedt (1576), Altdorf (1578), Olmu¨tz (1581), Graz (1586), Giessen (1607), Paderborn (1614), Rinteln (1620), Salzburg (1620), Osnabru¨ck (1629), Linz (1636), Bamberg (1648), Duisburg (1654), Kiel (1665), and Innsbruck (1668).14 The organization and administration of the oldest German universities, or studia generalia as they were designated, reXected the inXuence of the University of Paris, the academic home of the men who Wrst wrote their statutes and taught in them. These institutions in turn served as models for later university foundations, leading to a general uniformity in academic structure and practice throughout German-speaking Europe.15 Like Paris, German universities were largely autonomous legal corporations: their broad powers of self-government included the right to establish their own statutes and punish transgressors thereof, to run daily aVairs without excessive outside interference, to obtain exemptions from certain local taxes, and to operate with juridical immunity from civil courts. The rights of the founding prince or municipal government often did not extend much beyond the right to approve or disapprove of changes in the statutes. Thus, for the most part, and A. B. Emden] (Oxford: Clarendon, 1936), ii. 211–63. See also Heinrich DeniXe, Die Entstehung der Universita¨ten des Mittelalter bis 1400 (Berlin, 1885), Friedrich Paulsen, Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts i. 7–172, and A. B. Cobban, The Medieval Universities: Their Development and Organization (London: Methuen, 1975). 12 C. Ho¨Xer, Johannes Hus und der Abzug der deutschen Professoren und Studenten aus Prag, 1409 (Prague, 1864). 13 HUE i. 64–5. 14 Ibid. ii. 87–8. 15 James H. OverWeld, Humanism and Scholasticism in Late Medieval Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 13.

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once founded with the necessary papal and/or imperial charters, German universities became quite literally a law unto themselves.16 To be sure, confessional religious passions and the imperatives of absolutist state-building from the sixteenth century on eventually worked to limit the autonomy of universities. Still, well into the eighteenth century, universities could lay claim to a measure of their original freedoms.17 The social location of the earliest universities—the fact that they were neither entirely of the ecclesial realm (sacerdotium) nor of the political realm (imperium) but represented a new realm (studium)—has been the subject of considerable scholarly discussion.18 Both Georg Kaufmann and Friedrich Paulsen have stressed the secular or proto-modern character of the medieval German universities. Paulsen notes, for instance, that because princes and municipal governments, instead of the church, often played leading roles in establishing universities, which were then granted considerable freedom through legally recognized incorporation, the medieval studia generalia introduced ‘the subjective secularization of knowledge’ which ‘prepared the way for that great emancipation of subjective reason which occurred during the Renaissance and Reformation’. Yet it is equally true, and Paulsen admits as much, that a more nuanced view suggests that while the universities were secularly endowed they had religious missions. On this score, one should remember that practically all faculty members were also members of religious orders or had received some form of clerical training in monasteries or cathedral schools. University routines and rituals were, in large measure, modelled after life in the cloister. Papal bulls recognizing universities assumed that knowledge was the business of the church. It is thus most accurate to regard the earliest German universities, although no longer ecclesial in the strictest sense, as religious institutions in the broadest sense and therefore as key agents of cultural unity in the world of medieval Christendom.19

16 At Wrst only a papal charter was required. The Bull Parens scientiarum (‘the mother of sciences’) of 1231 is considered the magna carta of the University of Paris. It set the precedent for later university foundings. The University of Freiburg im Breisgau was the Wrst university that also included a charter from the emperor and thereafter this became customary for universities within the Holy Roman Empire. See Paulsen, German Universities, 16. Cf. Pearl Kibre, Scholarly Privileges in the Middle Ages: the Rights, Privileges, and Immunities of Scholars and Universities at Bologna, Padua, Paris, and Oxford (Cambridge, Mass.: Medieval Academy of America, 1962). 17 See HUE i. 35–7 and Alexander Kluge, Die Universita¨ts-Selbstverwaltung: Ihre Geschichte und gegenwa¨rtige Rechtsform (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1958), 53 V. 18 HUE i. 77 V. 19 Paulsen, German Universities, 26–8 and Georg Kaufmann, Geschichte der deutschen Universita¨ten (Stuttgart, 1896), ii. 91 V.

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One of the important ‘Parisian’ features of the earliest German universities was their wholeness. That is, they each possessed all four of the traditional university faculties—the lower arts faculty (facultas artium), which later came to be called the philosophical faculty, and the three higher faculties of theology, law, and medicine. This was in contrast to most universities established in Italy, provincial France, and Spain, where legal studies traditionally took precedence over theology. In fact, before the Great Schism, popes had regularly denied theological faculties to many newly created universities in order to preserve the dominance of established theological centres such as Paris and Oxford. Emperor Charles IV, however, gained papal approval for a theological faculty at Prague (in no small measure perhaps because, prior to assuming the Holy OYce, Pope Clement VI had been his tutor while the young prince had resided in Paris).20 Although Vienna did not possess a theological faculty at Wrst, it too was granted one by Urban VI in 1384. Thereafter, it became a precedent for German universities to receive provision for all four faculties, including theology.21 As the Elector Ruprecht of the Palatinate emphatically put it upon the founding the University of Heidelberg in 1386: ‘[The university] shall be ruled, disposed, and regulated according to the modes and matters accustomed to be observed in the University of Paris. . . . [I]t shall imitate Paris in every way possible, so that there shall be four faculties.’22 The etymological history of the word faculty (facultas) is sketchy, but its meaning in an academic context harks back to the inXuential Latin usage of Cicero, who employed the word frequently to mean the ability to do something, often of an intellectual nature, such as the ability to speak well, oratoriae facultas. This usage continued in the Middle Ages, notably in the works of Boethius. The employment of facultas to refer to speciWc divisions of knowledge, including theologia, appears to begin with Bishop Gilbert of Porree´ (d. 1154) and his disciples. Shortly after the death of Porree´, Giraldus Cambrensis, in a celebrated description of Oxford in 1184, wrote of ‘doctores diversarum facultatum,’ suggesting the dual meaning of a discipline and those who profess it.23 However, the status of facultas as a standard item of academic terminology and the traditional fourfold division is connected, above all, with the development and inXuence of the University of Paris in the thirteenth century. The Wrst actual usage of the term in this context 20 Kaufmann, Geschichte der deutschen Universita¨ten, ii. 17, 68 V. 21 Rostock too was at Wrst denied a theological faculty by Martin V, but later it received one. See ibid. ii. 17, and Rashdall, Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, iii. 261. 22 Eduard Winkelmann (ed.), Urkundenbuch der Universita¨t Heidelberg (Heidelberg, 1887), 5. 23 See Bernhard Geyer ‘Facultas theologica: Eine bedeutungsgeschichtliche Untersuchung’, ZKG 75 (1964): 133–45.

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appeared in a bull by Pope Honorius III addressed to scholars in Paris in 1219. Interestingly, in the bull the pope forbade the study of civil law, a ‘subaltern science’ and one of ‘vain beauty’, and extolled the virtues of theology, which ‘exalts the soul’ and provides ‘the Catholic faith with an unconquerable wall of warriors’.24 From around this time, masters and scholars became conscious of their high calling and intellectual authority; one Wnds the expression ‘the four rivers of paradise’ in reference to the faculties. Bonaventure likened the arts faculty to the foundation of a building, law and medicine to its walls, and theology to its crowning roof and summit.25 Only with the rise of universities during the thirteenth century did theologia itself became a widely accepted term. Previously, scholars rarely used the word to describe Christian learning, preferring instead terms such as sacra eruditio, sacrum studium, sacra pagina, and sacra doctrina.26 Even for Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, the phrase sacra doctrina still came more naturally to mind, although theologia by this time would have been more accepted.27 When employed prior to the twelfth century, theology, more often than not, referred to pagan authors and pagan cosmologies—a usage going back to antiquity. Boethius had employed the term frequently, but in his scheme of knowledge, theology was a subcategory, alongside physics and mathematics, under the general rubric of speculative philosophy. The transition from this Boethian usage to one that emphasized theology’s speciWc treatment of Christian doctrine and revealed truths—truths superior to and inaccessible to unaided reason—took place only gradually and with much terminological imprecision. Scholars generally credit Peter Abelard (1079–1143) for paving the way for its modern usage by employing the term in successive versions of his major works. But, again, only with the growth of universities in the thirteenth century did theologia gain common currency as a discrete academic enterprise. A convenient date to mark this transformation is perhaps 1252, when the theological faculty at Paris became the Wrst faculty to establish its own statutes. Therewith, the notion of a theological faculty—a community of enquiry devoted to sacred knowledge separate from and indeed higher than the other secular faculties—became an

24 Portions of this bull are found in Helene Wieruszowski, The Medieval University: Masters, Students, Learning (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 144–5. While the pope denied the study of civil law at Paris, the university did possess a faculty of canon law. 25 HUE i. 111–12. 26 G. R. Evans, Old Arts and New Theology: The Beginnings of Theology as an Academic Discipline (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), 29, and Jean LeClercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. Catharine Misrahi (New York: Fordham University Press, 1961), 2. 27 J. Revie`re, ‘Theologia’, Revue des sciences re´ligeuses 16 (1936): 47.

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enduring feature of northern European universities.28 As Bernhard Geyer has noted, ‘The word theologia Wrst became established in general use in association with the university term facultas theologica.’29 In Paris and across northern Europe, faculties rapidly evolved into the fundamental organizing structure of the universities.30 Generally, each faculty was administered by an elected oYcer, the dean (decanus), and a council made up of all or some of the faculty’s teaching masters (magistri). Each faculty maintained its own seal and matriculation book, controlled property, disciplined students and faculty members, and settled internal disputes. A faculty could also make changes in its statutes, although a university senate (with representatives from other faculties) usually had to approve. However, the most signiWcant role of each faculty lay in the academic sphere: selecting lectures (lectiones), planning disputations (disputationes), administering examinations, and, most importantly, awarding degrees.31 In short, faculties functioned as semi-autonomous academic guilds, serving as gatekeepers to the prestige and authority of the world of education and the learned professions. Before the intellectual convulsions caused by humanism and the Reformation, the nature of instruction and the process of obtaining degrees in the earliest German universities, once again, reXected the inXuence of Paris.32 In the lower or arts faculty, a degree was relatively easy to obtain, for matriculation in this faculty was generally seen as a stepping stone to the higher faculties. Among the higher faculties, however, only theology habitually required that its candidates Wrst obtain an arts degree—a trend destined to create a close connection and persistent conXict between the two faculties.33 Hardly in their teens, young men took roughly a year and half to two years to 28 Anders Piltz, The World of Medieval Learning (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble 1981), 137. 29 Bernhard Geyer ‘Facultas theologica: Eine bedeutungsgeschichtliche Untersuchung’, ZKG 75 (1964): 143. See also Ferdinand Kattenbusch, ‘Die Entstehung einer christlichen Theologie (zu Geschichte der Ausdru¨cke theologia, theologein, theologos)’, ZTK 11 (1930): 161–205; M. D. Chenu, ‘La The´ologie comme science au XIIIe sie`cle’, Archive d’Histoire doctrinale et litte´raire du Moyen Age 2 (1927): 31–71; and Wolfhart Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science, trans. Francis McDonagh (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976), 7–9. 30 Besides faculties, ‘nations’ (nationes), organizations of students based on geographical identity, were also an important organizational feature of some early universities, notably Bologna and Padua. However, faculties were more common in northern Europe and have proved more historically inXuential generally. On the meaning and early history of ‘nations’, see Wieruszowski, The Medieval University, 36–7, 69 V., and HUE i. 114–16. 31 Kaufmann, Geschichte der deutschen Universita¨ten, ii. 76–7. For other organizational features of the Wrst universities, see Wieruszowski, The Medieval University, 27–118. 32 In what follows, I oVer an ‘ideal-typical’ overview of the curriculum and process of obtaining degrees in two faculties: arts and theology. For a short but insightful treatment of the study of law and medicine in medieval universities, see Piltz, The World of Medieval Learning, 65–77, 138–42, 150–8. 33 HUE i. 308.

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earn the Wrst degree, the bachelor of arts or the baccalarius. Several additional years of study (with successful examinations) and the student could gain a master of arts (magister artium). The content of the arts curriculum reXected the course of study prescribed by the ancient artes liberales, divided into its familiar two parts: the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music). But not all the liberal arts were accorded equal value: scholasticism had raised the importance of dialectic or logic over other areas of enquiry. Consequently, by the late Middle Ages, instruction in the art of logic, particularly Aristotle’s treatises on the subject, had come to dominate a student’s early university studies. As James H. OverWeld has written, ‘Enormous energy came to be devoted to the subject [logic]; syllogism, disputation, careful deWnition of terms, and the orderly collection of arguments became intoxicating pursuits that pervaded every discipline and aVected every intellectual endeavor.’34 Beginning students would study and hear lectures on the texts of the ‘old logic’. These included Aristotle’s Categories and On Interpretation; Porphyry’s Isagoge, a third-century commentary on the Categories; and various short works on logic by Boethius, mostly derived from Aristotle. Students in pursuit of bachelor degrees were also instructed in the ‘new logic’, which comprised four ‘new’ texts by Aristotle that had become available in western Europe in the twelfth century. These included the Prior Analytics (which discussed the all-important syllogism), the Sophistical Refutations, the Topics, and the Posterior Analytics. Besides Aristotle, young German students studied a variety of manuals and compendia by medieval authors—what we might call secondary works. Of particular importance was the Summulae logicales by Peter of Spain, a thirteenth-century scholar and churchman, who became Pope John XXI in 1276 only to die a year later when the roof of his study collapsed. For two hundred and Wfty years this text was among the most studied and taught of all scholastic writings. (Later it became among the most reviled by Renaissance humanists.) Universities throughout German-speaking Europe required it and it went through numerous editions before the Reformation. Thousands of young men were introduced to scholasticism’s faith in logic upon reading its famous Wrst lines: ‘logic is the art of arts and the science of sciences (scientia scientiarum), possessing the way to the principles of all curriculum subjects . . . and thus logic must be the Wrst science to be acquired’.35 34 OverWeld, Humanism and Scholasticism, 27. 35 Quoted ibid. 30. Cf. Joseph Mullally (ed. and trans.), The Summulae Logicales of Peter of Spain (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1945). Grammar and, to a lesser degree, rhetoric were of course also present in the medieval German university, but due to the dominance of scholasticism, they were deemed less important than logic.

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After initial immersion in logic, more Aristotle awaited the bachelor or master’s student. Texts which appear, though with greatly varying frequency, in the curricula of German universities of the late Middle Ages include Aristotle’s De anima, De generatione et corruptione, De caelo et mundo, De metorica, along with his better known Politics, Ethics, and Metaphysics. Besides advanced studies in Aristotle, students received some instruction in the quadrivium. Euclid’s Geometry was almost universally assigned. Also popular were two textbooks by Englishmen, John of Peacham’s Perspectiva communis and John of Holywood’s De sphaera. Yet on the whole, the quadrivium received the least attention in the arts curriculum and paled in importance to logic.36 The emphasis on logic oVers signiWcant insight into the nature of the premodern German universities and suggests a strong contrast between them and their modern counterparts. In particular, one should draw a distinction between late medieval notions of knowledge, or scientia, and the post-Enlightenment practice of Wissenschaft. Scholastic-Aristotelian logic presupposed the existence of a single correct method of thinking, a method which properly utilized—through syllogistic reasoning, disputation, deWnition of terms, reWned distinctions, careful attention to language, and the methodical ordering of arguments—could be applied to any academic subject. Put diVerently, diverse subjects did not require diVerent methods, for all were apprehended through right reason (recta ratio) developed through the study of logic. Consequently, the exploration of various Welds of enquiry took a back seat to instruction that helped students acquire general reason; scholars in good conscience could thus dispense with much of the artes liberales, such as rhetoric and parts of the quadrivium. Properly understood and applied, logic could be utilized to resolve apparent contradictions and ambiguities in all areas of knowledge. Furthermore, since the domain of possible knowledge itself was assumed to be Wnite, no goad existed to expand knowledge, the hallmark of the postEnlightenment university. Aristotle himself had noted that true science (scientia) can only begin with knowledge that already exists. Admittedly, the subject of study in diVerent disciplines varied, but they all shared a number of common axioms.37 Anders Piltz has thus summed up that ‘[medieval learning] set itself goals which are diVerent from those of modern scientiWc research. There was no question of exploring new areas by adding 36 OverWeld, Humanism and Scholasticism, 29–44. See also Kaufmann, Geschichte der deutschen Universita¨ten, ii. 300 V. For a speciWc list of books required for the arts degree at the University of Leipzig, see Ellwood Cubberley (ed.), Readings in the History of Education (Boston, 1920), 169–70. 37 Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, trans. Jonathan Barnes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 1 V.

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information previously unknown to the existing storehouse of knowledge. The aim was to Wnd the eternal cause, the reason why everything was as it was and must necessarily remain so.’38 Knowledge was considered static, in short, apprehensible through logic, not dynamic and subject to multiple methodologies of knowing. If logic equipped one to think properly, the most noble area in which do to this was theology; hence philosophy, the scientia scientiarum in one sense, was, in another, portrayed as the humble ‘handmaid of theology’ (ancilla theologiae).39 University theological faculties regularly recognized this in their statutes by requiring all candidates in theology Wrst to obtain a master of arts. Only then could they begin the arduous process of becoming a doctor of theology, the ‘pinnacle of medieval academic achievement’.40 A common artistic motif from the period depicts theology—represented by the theologian Peter Lombard (more about him later)—sitting alone atop a multi-tiered tower. In the lower, more crowded tiers sit the authors of the common arts texts: Aristotle, Euclid, Boethius, and others. The clear implication is that the summit of learning, theology, is accessible only to one who had diligently mastered the requisite skills at lower levels.41 In other words, theology was not considered the ‘queen’ of the sciences because its methods substantially diVered from those of other sciences, but rather because it could be approached only by one who had Wrst obtained the universally accepted logical and reasoning skills.42 Muddled thinking for the schoolmen was a wrong in itself, but a grave wrong in the sacred faculty. At the same time, it was incumbent upon one to keep advancing towards the summit, employing the skills of the handmaid without becoming seduced by her.43 The process of obtaining a doctorate in theology was not for the impatient. Paris set the benchmark by establishing a curriculum that lasted sixteen years 38 Piltz, The World of Medieval Learning, 104. 39 As already mentioned, Clement of Alexandria originated the notion of philosophy as the handmaid of theology. This idea was given classic expression in De Divina omnipotentia by Peter Damian (1007–72), which provided an allegorical interpretation of Deuteronomy 21:10–14, a text that relates the conditions whereby an Israelite might marry a captive female from an enemy nation. The implication, of course, is that philosophy represented a captive from pagan, classical culture, but one that had the potential to learn to serve Israel. See Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science, 10, and ODCC 1265. 40 OverWeld, Humanism and Scholasticism, 46. 41 Little work has been done on the history of the visual representation and personiWcation of theology. See ‘theologia’ in Engelbert Kirschbaum et al. (eds.), Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie (Rome: Herder, 1972), ii. 300. 42 Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform, 1250–1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 43. Cf. James A. Weisheipl, ‘ClassiWcation of the Sciences in Medieval Thought’, Medieval Studies 27 (1965): 54–90. 43 G. R. Evans, Philosophy and Theology in the Midle Ages (London: Routledge, 1993), 10–16.

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and required that a new master be at least 35 years old.44 This tended to hold true for German universities as well, although minor diVerences existed.45 After a student completed an arts degree, he spent the next Wve or six years as an auditor, attending lectures and disputations on the two cardinal texts of the theological faculty, the Bible and Peter Lombard’s all-important Liber sententiarum or Sentences. Lombard had served as the bishop of Paris (d. 1164); under the inXuence Peter Abelard’s critical reasoning, he wrote what became the standard textbook of scholastic theology. A compilation of opinions from a wide variety of medieval and ancient authorities, his Sentences is divided into four parts: God as Unity and Trinity, Creation and Sin, the Incarnation and the Virtues, and the Sacraments and Last Things. It is hard to overstate the signiWcance of this book for late-medieval theological education.46 Josef Pieper has dubbed it the most successful textbook in European history.47 After completing his time as auditor, the student became eligible for the bachelor of theology degree. Generally, no formal test or disputation was required at this stage. Instead a master recommended the student to the rest of the faculty, which then made the formal decision to award the degree or not. If successful, the new bachelor entered the second phase of his studies, during which he was known as a cursor or biblicus. Customarily, this period lasted two years; he continued attending lectures by doctors but he was also allowed to give ‘cursory’ lectures on parts of the Bible selected by senior faculty. Upon completion of his biblical lectures, the student then devoted a year to intensive study of Lombard’s Sentences. Thereafter, with faculty approval, he became a so-called sententiarius and was allowed to lecture on the Sentences for two years, during which time he was expected to deal with all four sections of Lombard’s work.48 In order to cover so much ground, sententiarii were regularly reminded, as documents from the University of Cologne, for instance, make clear, ‘to read the text faithfully and not . . . propound suspect doctrines’. At Erfurt, sententiarii were instructed to cover the text ‘word for word’ and expound ‘only when the passage was diYcult’.49 Once this phase of training was complete, two more years were required to 44 Rashdall, The Universities of Europe, i. 472. 45 Generally, the minimum age for the doctorate became 30 years in the German universities. Kaufmann, Geschichte der deutschen Universita¨ten, ii. 280. 46 On Lombard, see M. L. Colish, Peter Lombard, 2 vols. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994). 47 Josef Pieper, Scholasticism: Personalities and Problems of Medieval Philosophy, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960), 97. 48 Kaufmann, Geschichte der deutschen Universita¨ten, ii. 277 V. If the candidate stopped after completing only part of the Sentences, he was considered baccalarius in theologia pro magisterio formatus or simply formatus. This was an honourable title but, according to Kaufmann, ‘keine Gradabstufung’. 49 Franz Josef von Bianco, Die alte Universita¨t Ko¨ln (Cologne, 1956), appendix 39, and OverWeld, Humanism and Scholasticism, 46.

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prepare for the licentiate degree. The student continued to attend lectures and took part in disputations, and perhaps delivered several sermons. At the end of this stage, an examination was often required.50 After the granting of the licentiate, more study followed, concluding with a number of ceremonial disputations, attended with great pomp and solemnity. The Wrst was the vesperiae, which took place on the afternoon before the formal granting of the doctoral degree. Besides several oaths and prayers, the principal event was a disputation among faculty members, students, and the presiding master. The master and his peers posed several theses to bachelor students, who then entered into debate. Afterwards, the doctoral candidate was called upon to analyse fallacies among the younger students’ assumptions and conclusions. Here the candidate’s mastery of dialectic was expected as well as his ability to cite patristic and scholastic authorities. Thereafter, faculty members were given the opportunity to challenge him on his own positions. The session concluded with Wnal remarks from the candidate and an invitation for all participants to attend the actual conferral of the degree on the following day.51 The degree ceremony itself was an impressive aVair known at the aulatio, which took place in a church and was modelled upon the ritual for consecrating a bishop.52 Under the watchful eyes of the entire faculty, the candidate, kneeling, made several oaths of Wdelity to the Holy See, the university, and the theological faculty. Thereafter, the presiding master presented the candidate with the insignia doctorale—usually a ring and the coveted doctor’s cap (birettum doctorale).53 The newly minted doctor then mounted the highest cathedra (from which he formerly would have been excluded) and, as his Wrst act in his new estate, gave a brief homily in praise of Holy Scripture and theology, the queen of the sciences. As in the vespariae, a disputation might follow involving bachelor students and other masters. The ceremony ended with a speech of thanks by the new doctor and celebration with lavish food and drink. Often classmates would carry the new doctor on their shoulders through the streets like a modern sports hero.54 Having completed all these rigours, the by-now middle-aged man possessed the highest intellectual credential in Christen-

50 Kaufmann, Geschichte der deutschen Universita¨ten, ii. 278–9. For example, examinations were required at Ingolstadt, Vienna, and Erfurt, but not at Cologne, Leipzig, Tu¨bingen, and Heidelberg. 51 Ibid. ii. 280 V., and Ernst-Georg Schwiebert, ‘The Reformation and Theological Education at Wittenberg’, SpringWelder 28 (1964): 12–13. 52 Piltz, The World of Medieval Learning, 127. 53 On university insignia, see HUE i. 139–42. 54 Ernst-Georg Schwiebert, ‘The Reformation and Theological Education at Wittenberg’, SpringWelder 28 (1964): 14.

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dom.55 Because of the legal principle of ius ubique docendi (‘the right to teach anywhere’) he was entitled, in principle if not always in practice, to have his authority recognized at any university in Europe.56 Ceremonial grandeur notwithstanding, late medieval university scholasticism received an avalanche of criticism from humanists and reformers in the late Wfteenth and sixeenth centuries. While we should guard against accepting such criticism completely at face value (for humanists and reformers had their own agendas), evidence suggests that much of it was justiWed, at least from the perspective of humanists’ criteria of evaluation, which tended to esteem Scripture and apostolic Christianity over later authorities. As many studies have shown, under scholasticism biblical studies by the Wfteenth century were in major decline, despite seemingly rigorous requirements.57 Among masters, for example, there was a clear preference to lecture on Lombard’s Sentences instead of the Bible. When masters did treat Scripture, it often served as an excuse to lecture on their pet interests, which could be quite irrelevant to the text at hand. Egregious and humorous examples of this abound from latemedieval Germany. One Heinrich of Langenstein, for instance, used biblical lectures as an excuse for lecturing on astronomy. Consequently, in thirteen years of teaching he managed to complete only the Wrst few chapters of Genesis. Pope Pius II (d. 1464) claimed to have known one scholar at Vienna who spent twenty-two years lecturing on Isaiah and had still not completed the Wrst chapter. Extraneous commentary was not the only reason for theological decline; infrequency of lecturing by doctors was another. Doctors of theology often had myriad committements—to the government, the city, their religious order—that required them to be away from the university. In 1497, disgruntled reformers at Ingolstadt, to give one example, became so frustrated that they requested that absentee doctors lose a portion of their pay. At the University of Leipzig in the early 1500s students bitterly complained about the dearth of theological lectures. Theology, complained one student, grew in Leipzig ‘like grass in winter’. Another claimed that lectures were so rare that he needed the years of Methuselah to complete his degree requirements.58 55 Rashdall, The Universities of Europe, i. 484–6. 56 Ius ubique docendi was granted to masters by the Holy See in an eVort to make the universities a unifying factor in Christendom. However, this eVort was often undermined by diVerent forms of local patriotism. See Piltz, The World of Medieval Learning, 136–7. 57 I here only scratch the surface of an important and rich literature on scholasticism and university life on the eve of the Reformation. For more guidance, see Ozment, The Age of Reform, 1250–1550, 22–222, and Gerhard Ritter’s classic work, Via antiqua und Via moderna auf den deutschen Unversita¨ten des xv. Jahrhunderts (Heidelberg, 1922). 58 For these and other examples of decline in university scholasticism in late medieval Germany, I am indebted to OverWeld, Humanism and Scholasticism, 46 V.

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Such shortcomings in the universities were not lost on humanists and, later, Protestant reformers. Their criticisms of the status quo and eVorts of amendment contributed to religious and social changes in sixteenth-century Germany that had far-reaching consequences for the development of university education in general and theological study in particular. While not without signiWcant continuities, as I emphasize below, sixteenth-century reforms, in turn, formed the basis of the university system that prevailed until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, at which time new generations, in the name of new ideals, criticized and departed from the status quo.

3. HUMANISM, THE REFORMATION, AND THE UNIVERSITIES It is hardly too much to say that the existence of universities . . . made the Reformation possible. Hastings Rashdall59

Historians of a liberal temper have tended to view sixteenth-century educational reforms, like the Reformation itself, as a salutary but incomplete step in the emancipation of modern understanding. The universities that embraced Protestantism, as one scholar put it, promoted a ‘spirit of freedom and independence of thought’ which allowed ‘the Protestant half of Germany [to gain] . . . the ascendancy over Catholicism in the realm of education and culture’.60 Such evaluations, however, place the Reformation and its historical complexity on the Procrustean bed of modernity’s (or at least modern liberal Protestantism’s) self-understanding. In questioning this view while still allowing for the transformative nature of sixteenth-century reforms, I shall underscore the conservative and statist aspects of university and theological change in the sixteenth century, emphasizing two points in particular. First, while Renaissance humanism and new religious convictions wrought great change in university curricula, the medieval structure of the university was largely retained. It is perhaps helpful, if not entirely satisfactory, to posit that the Reformation signiWes an alteration in university content but not form. The four-faculties system continued as it had before. Although some scholastics saw humanism as a threat to the primacy of theology, the Wrst faculty held its position and even gained strength in Protestant universities. Second, the subservient role of the arts faculty (more often called the philosophical faculty 59 Rashdall, Universities of Europe, ii. 233.

60 Paulsen, German Universities, 33.

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from this time) was reinforced, even as reformers refashioned it to accommodate the new studia humanitatis. In fact, under medieval scholasticism, allimportant logic, though nominally the servant, regularly dictated the terms of theological study. Because of the Reformation, however, the imperatives of doctrinal purity (deWned for Lutherans by the Augsburg Confession of 1530) and the practical exigencies of making the Reformation a social success (through the training of committed clergymen) reinforced the notion that time spent in the philosophical faculty was a mere prelude to serious theological study. In the decades prior to 1517, humanism had made some inroads into German universities, transforming them from strongholds of scholasticism to seats of an uneasy tension between scholastic traditionalists and humanist reformers. As an abundance of satirical literature from the early 1500s makes clear, humanists and later their Protestant sympathizers were troubled by the state of university education, especially by the grip that scholasticism exercised over the youth. Although he was oVered university professorships on several occasions, Erasmus refused to accept one, preferring to a keep a distance and ridicule scholasticism from afar. As he put it in The Praise of Folly, ‘The methods that our scholastics follow only render more subtle the subtlest of subtleties; for you will more easily escape from a labyrinth than from the snares of Realists, Nominalists, Thomists, Albertists, Occamists, and Scotists.’61 Erasmus’s contemporary, the humanist Conrad Celtis, identiWed university study with ‘incorporeal concepts, monstrous abstractions, and inane Chimeras’.62 Philip Melanchthon once said of his studies at Heidelberg that nothing was taught there but ‘garrulous logic’ and ‘parts of physics’.63 In his Address to the German Nobility, Martin Luther, not one to mince words, made clear that religious reform was of a piece with university reform: The universities need a sound and thorough reformation. I must say so no matter who takes oVense. . . . For Christian youth and those of our upper classes, with whom abides the future of Christianity, will be taught and trained in the universities. In my view, no work more worthy of the pope and emperor could be carried out than a true reformation of the universities. On the other hand, nothing could be more 61 John P. Dolan (trans. and ed.), The Essential Erasmus (New York: New American Library, 1964), 144. 62 Quoted in Terrence Heath, ‘Logical Grammar, Grammatical Logic, and Humanism in Three German Universities’, Studies in the Renaissance 18 (1971): 41. 63 Quoted in Joon-Chul Park, ‘Philip Melanchthon’s Reform of German Universities and its SigniWcance: A Study on the Relationship between Renaissance Humanism and the Reformation’, Ph.D. diss. (Ohio State University, 1995), 81. For the ensuing discussion of Melanchton’s reforms, I recognize a special debt to Park’s excellent dissertation.

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wicked, or serve the devil better, than unreformed universities. . . . I greatly fear that the universities are but wide-open gates leading to hell.64

One should bear in mind that the signal event that actually launched the Reformation, the posting of the 95 theses for debate in 1517, was, among other things, an academic event in the context of a university. As Lewis Spitz has summed up, ‘The magisterial Reformation was born in the university . . . [and] triumphed with the help of universities.’65 Thus while humanism was making its presence felt in the early sixteenth century, it took the Reformation to catalyse signiWcant educational changes. When this happened, the new evangelical theology, espoused by Luther, and the new humanist learning, typiWed by Erasmus, Johann Reuchlin, and others, entered into a powerful, if sometimes uneasy, alliance to eVect lasting educational change, especially in the philosophical and theological faculties.66 While these reforms would be unthinkable without Luther himself, the pivotal educational reformer was actually Luther’s friend and ally, Philip Melanchthon, whose eVorts on the behalf of university reform earned him the title Praeceptor Germaniae, ‘the teacher of Germany’. Incidentally, nineteenth-century Protestant theologians had a particular fondness for Melanchthon. As Richard Rothe proclaimed in 1860 in a speech commemorating the anniversary of Melanchthon’s death: ‘It is not too much to say that the university in all its departments, throughout Protestant Germany, is his creation.’67 This creation began at Wittenberg, whose small university, founded only in 1502, appeared poised for insigniWcance.68 Unlike Luther, Melanchthon never possessed a doctorate in theology. He had received arts degrees from Heidelberg and Tu¨bingen, although much of his humanist training was pursued independently. It was not until he met Luther and embraced the Protestant cause that his mind turned seriously to 64 John Dillenberger (ed.), Martin Luther: Selections from his Writings (New York: Doubleday, 1961), 470–1. 65 Lewis Spitz, ‘The Importance of the Reformation for Universities: Culture and Confession in the Critical Years’, in James Kittelson and Pamela J. Transue (eds.), Rebirth, Reform, and Resilience: Universities in Transition, 1300–1700 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1984), 42. 66 Of course, the faculty of law was also greatly aVected, as the reformers jettisoned canon law in favour of civil law. See John Witte Jr., Law and Protestantism: The Legal Teachings of the Lutheran Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 67 Richard Rothe, ‘Rothe’s Address on Philip Melanchthon’ (trans. by Erskine N. White) American Theological Review 3 (1861): 277. 68 Gustav Adolf Benrath, ‘Die deutsche evangelische Universita¨t der Reformationszeit’, in Hellmuth Ro¨ssler and Gu¨nther Franz (eds.), Universita¨t und Gelehrtenstand, 1400–1800 (Limburgh an der Lahn: C. A. Starke, 1970). On the early history of Wittenberg, see Heinz Scheible, ‘Gru¨ndung und Ausbau der Universita¨t Wittenberg’, in Peter Baumgarten and Notker Hammerstein (eds.), Beitra¨ge zu Problemen deutscher Universita¨tsgru¨ndungen der fru¨hen Neuzeit (Nendeln, Liechtenstein: KTO, 1978), 131–48.

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theology and theological education. He came to Wittenberg in 1518 (on the recommendation of his great uncle, the Hebraist Johann Reuchlin) to occupy the newly created professorship of Greek—the very existence of which attests to the marginal penetration of humanism at Wittenberg prior to the Reformation. Even before casting his lot with Luther, Melanchthon had educational reform on his mind. In his inaugural speech, ‘On Improving the Studies of Youth’, he lamented the decline of the universities, deplored the ‘barbarous methods’ of scholasticism, and called for curricular change to accommodate the new studia humanitatis. In particular, he recommenced that rhetoric, poetry, history, and the study of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew receive prominent places in the philosophical faculty. He believed that the humanist principle of ad fontes, ‘return to the sources’, could revitalize Christian piety: ‘And when we direct our soul to the [scriptural] source, we begin to know Christ, His commands become clear to us, and we are drenched with that fertile nectar of divine wisdom.’ Melanchthon concluded the address by stating that ‘whoever wants to undertake anything distinguished, either in sacred matters or public aVairs, will accomplish little unless he has previously exercised his mind prudently and suYciently in humane disciplines (humanis disciplinis).’69 Several days afterward the speech, Luther, initially unimpressed with Melanchthon, praised the new professor in a letter to Georg Spalatin. Melanchthon, Luther wrote, ‘delivered a most learned and chaste oration to the delight and admiration of all. . . . I desire no other Greek teacher so long as we have him.’70 Backed by Luther and persuaded new theological convictions, Melanchthon began to labour intensively for educational reform.71 Visitations by 69 See De corrigendis adolescentiae studiis in Robert Stupperich (ed.), Melanchthons Werke in Auswahl, iii. 29–42. An abridged English version translated by Lewis Spitz is found in Robert Kingdon (ed.), Transition and Revolution: Problems and Issues of European Renaissance and Reformation (Minneapolis: Burgess, 1974), 167–71. 70 Quoted in Park, ‘Philip Melanchthon’s Reform of German Universities’, 86. 71 I should make clear, however, that before Melanchthon’s arrival at Wittenberg a modicum of humanist reforms had taken place. A reform plan advocated by Luther and implemented in 1518 began to undermine the dominance of scholasticism: the Summulae Logicales of Peter of Spain was eliminated; lectures on Cicero and Quintilian entered the curriculum; the importance of Aristotle’s logic was weakened; new emphasis was given to the Bible and to Augustine; and new professorships, such as Melanchthon’s Greek chair, were called for. The presence of Melanchthon on the faculty after 1518 and Luther’s own Wery anti-scholasticism proved a further impetus for reform. On humanism and the early reforms at Wittenberg, see Max Steinmetz, ‘Die Universita¨t Wittenberg und die Humanismus (1502–1521)’, in Leo Stern (ed.), 450 Jahre Martin-Luther-Universita¨t Halle-Wittenberg (Halle: Martin-Luther-Universita¨t, 1952), i. 125–7; Ernest Schwiebert, ‘New Groups and Ideas at the University of Wittenberg’, ARG 49 (1958): 67–72; and Jens-Martin Kruse, Universita¨tstheologie und Kirchenreform: Die Anfa¨nge der Reformation in Wittenberg, 1516–1522 (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2002).

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Wittenberg reformers in the 1520s throughout the countryside in Saxony and Thuringia had conWrmed their suspicion of the poorly educated state of the clergy. For Reformation ideas to succeed, education at all levels had to receive top priority.72 This new practical imperative, coupled with the pre-existing humanist concerns, led to a complete overhaul of the university curriculum at Wittenberg. At Wrst this took place incrementally and in an ad hoc fashion; changes were formalized, however, in a series of new university statutes issued in 1533 and 1536.73 The statutes of 1533, drafted by Melanchthon under the auspices of the Elector Johann Friedrich, reorganized the theological faculty. The humanist emphasis of ad fontes blended with the Reformation principle of sola scriptura to produce a reform plan for clerical training that focused on learning the Bible thoroughly (in the original languages) for the sake of purity of doctrine as deWned by the Augsburg Confession (1530)—a document, incidentally, that was also the handiwork of Melanchthon. The Wrst sentence of the new university statutes makes clear the new direction in learning: ‘[I]n the university . . . we want pure doctrine of the Gospel in accordance with the Confession which we presented to Emperor Charles in August 1530; we certainly state that its doctrine is the true and eternal consensus of the universal church of God and it should be piously and faithfully oVered, maintained, and propagated.’74 The theological faculty was to consist of four professors. The Bible was the central text of theological instruction. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, the Gospel of John, the Psalms, Genesis, and Isaiah were designated as books of particular theological importance. The only extrabiblical text mentioned was St Augustine’s On the Spirit and the Letter, which was to be taught only ‘now and then’. The statutes also enjoined professors to avoid unnecessary logical and semantic wrangling and instead ‘explain the simple truth clearly and correctly’ focusing on ‘the principal topics of Christian doctrine’.75

72 On these visitations, see Gerald Strauss, Luther’s House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the German Reformation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 73 Before the statutes of 1533, Melanchthon had acted for change. In 1520 he submitted a reform proposal that expanded the position of humanism in the curriculum. Limited Wnancial means prevented the full implementation of his plan at this time, but its aims were realized in later reforms. In 1523, Melanchthon did succeed in replacing the scholastic disputatio with grammar declamations to improve students’ abilities in speaking. But for the remainder of the 1520s, due in large part to the upheavals of the Reformation, no major curricular changes took place. Melanchthon’s 1520 reform proposal is found in Karl Hartfelder, Philip Melanchthon als Praeceptor Germaniae (Berlin, 1889). 74 See ‘Statuta collegii facultatis theologicae in academia Wittebergensi scripta anno 1533’, in Walter Friendensburg (ed.), Urkundenbuch der Universita¨t Wittenberg (Magdeburg, 1926), i. 154. 75 Ibid. i. 155.

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The statutes of 1533 reinstated the formal degrees necessary for obtaining a doctorate in theology; these had lapsed in the 1520s due to the intensity and confusion of the Reformation during this decade.76 The biblicus still had to attend lectures and master the Bible, especially the books of Romans and John. Curiously, the designation sententiarius remained even though Lombard’s Sentences had been eliminated from the curriculum; the ‘Protestant sententiarius’ instead had to master the Pauline epistles, portions of the Psalms, and Prophets, and be able to explain their meaning in front of the theological faculty. A public disputation allowed one to move from sententiarius to formatus, the penultimate stage. The licentiate degree is not mentioned in the statutes, although it resurfaced later as a common designation for advanced students. The precise requirements for obtaining the doctorate are not spelled out, but it was made clear that no one could receive it unless he had studied diligently for at least six years. Furthermore, the statutes stipulated that the dean of the faculty was to examine the industry of each student twice annually and take particular note of the best and brightest.77 In 1536 a more thoroughgoing curricular reform took place at Wittenberg, aVecting all four faculties. Bearing the stamp of Melanchthon, the so-called Fundationsurkunde was issued by the Elector on 5 May 1536. The arts faculty received extensive reconstruction to conform to the studia humanitatis; chairs were added in ancient languages, rhetoric, poetry, and moral philosophy. ReXecting continuity with medieval structure, however, the reform made clear that the arts faculty remained the ‘origin’, ‘stem’, and ‘beginning’ of the higher faculties. The parts of the 1536 statutes pertaining to the theological faculty continued the anti-scholastic directions of the 1533 reforms, particularly in their emphasis on Scripture. Professorships for Wve faculty members were now stipulated and their speciWc duties outlined. One professor was to cover the New Testament, especially Romans, Galatians, and John. Another was to teach the Old Testament and Augustine’s On the Spirit and the Letter, but the latter only ‘sometimes’ and for the limited purpose of helping students grasp the Pauline understanding of grace. The third professorship was devoted to the New Testament, covering the minor letters of Paul and the letters of Peter and John; its occupant was also to preach twice per week in the Castle Church. 76 In 1523, under the inXuence of Carlstadt (1483–1541) academic degrees were temporarily abolished at Wittenberg. He based his reasoning on Matthew 23: 8: ‘But you are not to be called rabbi [teacher] for you have one teacher and you are all students’ (New Oxford Bible). See Benrath, ‘Die deutsche evangelische Universita¨t der Reformationszeit’, in Ro¨ssler and Franz (eds.), Universita¨t und Gelehrtenstand, 1400–1800, 71. 77 Friendensburg (ed.), Urkundenbuch der Universita¨t Wittenberg, i. 156–8. Cf. Park, ‘Philip Melanchthon’s Reform of German Universities’, 126–7 and Schiebert, ‘The Reformation and Theological Education at Wittenberg’, 30.

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The fourth professor was to lecture twice weekly on the Gospel of Matthew, Deuteronomy, and sometimes on the minor prophets.78 A Wfth post— designed especially for Justas Jonas, the prior of the Castle Church and also a trained lawyer—was to lecture on marriage and other moral matters; he was also to issue decisions on legal questions when so requested by the Saxon Court.79 A Wnal wave of reform came ten years later, codiWed in Melanchthon’s Leges Academiae Witenbergensis de studiis et moribus auditorum (1546). What is signiWcant about this document is the degree to which it ties the purpose of the philosophical faculty to the Reformation agenda. This suggests that for Melanchthon, as for many Christian humanists, humanism was not an end in itself, but rather a good that, Wnally, should be subordinated to purity of doctrine and theology. ‘Since this philosophical faculty is also part of God’s church,’ he wrote, ‘we wish that all who are admitted . . . embrace the pure teaching of the gospel, which our church declares in one spirit and with one voice.’ The 1546 reform plan also contained further regulations for the theological faculty, which continued the spirit of the 1533 and 1536 reforms. Theologians were reminded to base all lectures strictly on the Bible and were forbidden to part on any point from the Augsburg Confession. Interestingly, for the Wrst time in the brief history of the University of Wittenberg, allowance was made for language instruction by members of the theological faculty. This fact, again, suggests the close connection between the humanist-philological principle of ad fontes and the theological one of sola scriptura. As Melanchthon put it, ‘God granted the gift of language to the Church for the sake of the ministry of the Gospel.’80 From Wittenberg (condemned as a ‘nest of vipers’ by the theological faculty at Paris) Melanchthon’s reforms spread quickly to other universities which had embraced the Reformation. In 1539 Prince Henry of Albertine Saxony, a convert to Protestantism, sought Melanchthon’s advice to reform the University of Leipzig. Melanchthon recommended the expulsion of many old-guard 78 See ‘Ku¨rfurst Johann Friedrichs von Sachsen Fundationsurkunde fu¨r die Universita¨t Wittenberg’, in Friendensburg (ed.), Urkundenbuch der Universita¨t Wittenberg, i. 172–84. 79 Prior to the Reformation, Justas Jonas (1493–1555) had been a professor of canon law. Since the Reformation dealt a fatal blow to canon law, he was moved to the theological faculty, from which he wrote a new Landeskirchenrecht of great inXuence. 80 See ‘Leges Academiae Witenbergensis de studiis et moribus auditorum’, in K. G. Bretscheider and E. Bindseil (eds.), Corpus Reformatorum. Philippi Melanchthonis Opera (Halle, 1834– 60), x. 992–1024. Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann has noted that because of the Protestant emphasis on the texts of Scripture, theology was destined to ‘become institutionally penetrated by philology’. This would have far-reaching consequences, especially with respect to the beginnings of historical criticism of the Bible in eighteenth-century Protestant universities. See HUE ii. 503.

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scholastics, the installation of new evangelical-humanist ones, and the institution of various curricular reforms based on those at Wittenberg. These changes were realized in Leipzig’s new statutes of 1543, which bear striking resemblance to the 1533 and 1536 statutes at Wittenberg. The universities of Tu¨bingen and Heidelberg followed suit. Duke Ulrich of Wu¨rttemberg invited Melanchthon to visit Tu¨bingen, which he did in 1536. In conjunction with like-minded professors there, Melanchthon encouraged humanist-evangelical reforms, made eVective by Tu¨bingen’s new statutes of 3 November 1536. Towards the end of his life, Melanchthon visited the University of Heidelberg at the invitation of the Elector Otto Heinrich. A new ordinance there, bearing Melanchthon’s inXuence, went into eVect on 19 December 1558.81 Other Protestant universities, such as Basle, Greifswald, and Frankfurt an der Oder, also emulated the reforms of Wittenberg. Still others, including Marburg, Ko¨nigsberg, and Jena, were founded to realize MelanchthonianProtestant ideals.82 Such inXuence has led one scholar to remark that ‘when Melanchthon died there was probably not a city in Protestant Germany in which some grateful student did not mourn the loss of the Praeceptor Germaniae’.83 But as inXuential and transformative as Melanchthon’s reforms were, I should again stress the remarkable continuity of internal form that often accompanied them. While the new principles of ad fontes and sola scriptura greatly altered university curricula, the role of the faculties, the pre-eminence of theology, the subservience of philosophy, and the process of obtaining degrees—not to mention the positions of such key university actors as the rector and dean—persisted in their medieval forms: new wine was eVectively poured into old wineskins.84 What is more, the reforms, not unlike the medieval scholastic enterprise, were motivated by explicitly doctrinal concerns; the studia humanitatis and the Augsburg Confession became an inseparable package, in which the former displaced scholasticism, not to revel in its independent existence, but to serve and conWrm the truth of the latter. Indeed, one should guard against regarding sixteenth-century university 81 For fuller treatments of the reforms at Leipzig, Tu¨bingen, and Heidelberg, see Park, ‘Philip Melanchthon’s Reform of German Universities’, 137–90; Herbert Helbing, Die Reformation der Universita¨t Leipzig im 16.Jahrhundert (Gu¨tersloh: C. Bertelsmann, 1953); Heiko Oberman, Masters of the Reformation, trans. Dennis Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Richard L. Harrison, ‘Melanchthon’s Role in the Reformation of the University of Tu¨bingen’, CH 47 (1978): 270–8; and Johannes Hautz, Geschichte der Universita¨t Heidelberg, 2 vols. (Mannheim, 1862). 82 Marburg was the Wrst German university established after the Reformation. Envisioned as a bastion of Protestantism, it was founded by Prince Philipp of Hesse and Wnanced by funds from recently secularized monasteries. See H. Hermelink and S. A. Kaehler, Die PhilippsUniversita¨t zu Marburg, 1527–1927 (Marburg, 1927). 83 Paulsen, German Universities, 33. 84 Paulsen, Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts, 256 V.

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reforms exclusively in terms of proto-modernization or proto-secularization. As Melanchthon saw it, university reform should allow education to bear witness to the truth of the ‘one holy catholic and apostolic church’. This emphasis on purity of doctrine, an issue I shall return to shortly, helps explain the origins of ‘Protestant scholasticism’, which dominated Protestant theological education until the eighteenth century. As Steven Ozment has perceptively observed, ‘As a theological movement, Protestantism continued the scholastic enterprise of deWning true doctrine. It was peculiar in that it streamlined this undertaking with the studia humanitatis.’85 Undeniably, however, sixteenth-century upheavals altered the external situation of universities: their position in the broader social and political matrix changed drastically as a consequence of the Reformation. This is not because of the inXuence of any single individual, but because of the speciWc political circumstances of the Reformation in the context of the Holy Roman Empire. The transition can best be described as a shift from the religious, universal idea of the university during the medieval period (symbolized by the ius ubique docendi) to one increasingly dominated and deWned by the particularistic interests of emerging territorial-confessional states. While such particularism had been developing in the Empire prior to the sixteenth century, the events of the Reformation and subsequent religious warfare, culminating in the Peace of Westphalia (1648), greatly hastened this development, eVectively yoking the religious Wssuring of Christendom to the political Wssuring of the Empire. If one will allow some simpliWcation, territorialism superseded political unity; ‘Confessionalism’ supplanted ‘Christendom’. As previously indicated, Melanchthon and other educational reformers acted by virtue of the authority of local political authorities within the Holy Roman Empire—be they Elector Johann Friedrich, Prince Heinrich of Albertine Saxony, Philipp of Hesse, Duke Ulrich of Wu¨rttemberg, Elector Otto Heinrich of the Palatinate, or others. Melanchthon and Luther went so far as to call these princes ‘emergency bishops’ (Notbischo¨fe) invested with authority from God ‘for removing and forbidding incorrect teaching and errant service to God’.86 This ad hoc execution of spiritual and educational authority by the princes became normative with the establishment of the principle of cuius regio, eius religio. Thereafter, princes regularly came to be regarded as the summus episcopus, the acting head bishop of their particular territorial church 85 Ozment, The Age of Reform, 1250–1550, 316. 86 Thus Melanchthon legitimized his advice to Prince Henry to remove scholastics from the theological faculty at Leipzig. See Bretschneider and Bindseil (eds.), Corpus Reformatorum. Philippi Melanchthonis Opera, iii. 712–13. Cf. Lewis Spitz, ‘Luther’s Ecclesiology and his Concept of the Prince as Notbischof ’, CH 22 (1953): 113–41.

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(Landeskirche). Though sometimes challenged, this arrangement persisted until the measures of church–state separation in the Weimar Constitution (1919). The territorialism manifested by the state-dominated Landeskirchen had implications for the universities as well. From this time, central European universities increasingly became creatures of the territorial states—Landesuniversita¨ten—designated to provide the state with teachers, bureaucrats, doctors, lawyers, and pastors. Many secular rulers felt that it was their religious duty to found universities, equipped with theological faculties, to serve as intellectual garrisons of the Protestant cause. As Melanchthon himself exhorted in 1537: ‘Pious princes must not only establish schools, but they must choose the kind of teaching, as if it were a nursery garden that is approved of a certain and strong authority, and pay attention that the nursery be not corrupted.’87 In addition to pious motivations, princes quickly realized that universities oVered Wnancial advantages and prestige for their state. Since few princes wanted to sacriWce money and talent by having their young men seeking education in neighbouring states, a competition of university foundings and refortiWcations emerged in central Europe in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. All together, over twenty universities came into existence during this period. In all cases, Wnances came under the aegis of the state: as church lands were secularized, university salaries dependent on ecclesiastical prebends vanished completely in Protestant areas. One scholar has aptly described the post-Reformation university scene as one of ‘academic mercantilism’, in which political authorities competed for resources, students, professors, and prestige to strengthen their own positions in central Europe.88 What is more, princes often extended their power over the management of internal academic aVairs by founding speciWc chairs and lectureships; by retaining authority to approve of faculty appointments and changes in the statutes; and by appointing special commissions or a standing deputy (Kurator) to inspect and oversee universities.89 In short, while the corporative status of universities persisted at this time, the freedoms that this status entailed were increasingly eroded by new political dynamics set in motion by the Reformation. The social and symbolic importance of theological faculties only grew during this period. To preserve doctrinal purity, both Protestant and Catholic faculties had to be training centres for sending out educated clerics able to refute the religious competition. Theological faculties thus became the 87 Philip Melanchthon, Orations on Philosophy and Education, trans. Christine F. Salazar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 186. 88 Turner, ‘Prussian Universities’, 23. 89 Paulsen, Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts, i. 256 V.

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guardians of the orthodoxy of the state which founded and supported them; ‘kleinstaatliche Theologie’ emerged, as one scholar has written.90 As one might surmise, this quasi-political task attenuated the ecclesial associations of theological faculties and began a process that would transform theologians and clergymen alike, in the words of G. A. Benrath, into ‘weltliche Staatsbeamte’.91 As we shall see, this process continued in various forms and in distinctly ‘modern’ guises well into the nineteenth century. Finally, since Protestant theology emphasized expounding Scripture over liturgical tasks, clerical education for Protestant leaders became an especially signiWcant concern. Unlike in Catholic areas, where extra-university seminaries increased in signiWcance after the Council of Trent, university training became a requirement in Protestant lands for obtaining an ecclesiastical post. As Friedrich Paulsen has summarized, At the head of the several faculties [in the post-Reformation period] stood the theological faculty; since theological interests still controlled the entire trend of knowledge, it also controlled instruction in the universities. And as a rule this faculty was also the largest because, since the second half of the [sixteenth] century, under the Reformation inXuence, the demand for theological education for all the clergy had gradually won the day. This was the result of the Protestant principle, which accentuated the idea of doctrine and its purity, and placed the emphasis upon preaching instead of liturgy and worship.92

But exactly what was a Protestant clergyman supposed to know? The practical necessity of confuting the errors of the ‘papists’, on the one hand, and those of the ‘enthusiasts’ or Anabaptists, on the other, intensiWed the need for a welldeWned programme of Protestant theological education. Especially in the light of the growing presence of Anabaptists by the 1530s, it became increasingly clear to reformers that the principle of sola scriptura in itself was a poor defence against the caprice and vagaries of human judgement in theological matters.93 More fully expressed: in the absence of older pedagogical certainties 90 Notker Hammerstein, ‘Die deutschen Universita¨ten im Zeitalter der Aufkla¨rung’, in Hammerstein, Res publica litteraria: Ausgewa¨hlte Aufsa¨tze zu fru¨hneuzeitlichen Bildungs-, Wissenschafts- und Universita¨tsgeschichte, ed. Ulrich Muhlack and Gerrit Walter (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2000), 13. For an exhaustive study of one theological faculty during this period, see Thomas Kaufmann, Universita¨t und lutherische Konfessionalisierung: Die Rostocker Theologieprofessoren und ihr Beitrag zur theologischen Bildung und kirchlichen Gestaltung im Herzogtum Mecklenburg zwischen 1550 und 1675 (Gu¨tersloh: Gu¨tersloher Verlagshaus, 1997). 91 Benrath, ‘Die deutsche evangelische Universita¨t der Reformationszeit’, in Ro¨ssler and Franz (eds.), Universita¨t und Gelehrtenstand, 1400–1800, 75. 92 Paulsen, German Universities, 38 (translation modiWed). 93 The Anabaptists represented in the eyes of reformers the dangers of being ‘self-educated’ (autodidaktoi) in biblical and theological matters. On this important theme and its bearing on the shaping of university instruction, see J. S. Oyer, Lutheran Reformers against Anabaptists (The Hague: M. NijhoV, 1964).

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and confronted with the excesses of freedom typiWed by the Anabaptists’ subjectivist approach to Scripture—not to mention the later Lutheran– Calvinist split among mainstream reformers—the necessity of a sound, doctrinally orthodox programme of theological study in the universities became a paramount concern. Consequently, over and beyond the aforementioned statutory and curricular changes in theological faculties, the post-Reformation period witnessed the production of a voluminous literature of ‘theological prolegomena’, or basic theological textbooks (often based on university lectures), which sought to deWne the nature, foundation, and rationale of theological study. While the vast majority of these works have fallen into obscurity, derided as so many examples of ‘Protestant scholasticism’, their inXuence on theological education well into the modern era was extensive.94 What is more, these works are the forerunners of the genre of theological encyclopedia produced in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Some awareness of this literature is therefore helpful to make sense of the shape of theological study on the eve of the German Enlightenment. Although the literature of Lutheran theological prolegomena did not come into its own until the mid-sixteenth century, Erasmus, Luther, and particularly Melanchthon may be considered its early pioneers. Despite his personal refusal to break with Rome, Erasmus arguably inaugurated it in his Ratio seu methodus compendio perveniendi ad veram theologiam (1518), in which he argued that philosophy (read scholasticism) was an insuYcient preparation for biblical study, for it failed to prepare the student’s heart. His was a pious, irenic approach to theology, which encouraged intellectual modesty, devotion, and wisdom. Although a learned humanist, Erasmus believed that the goal of theological study was the production not of a scholarly pedant, but of a humble, faithful person willing to serve others and the church. As one might expect, Erasmus commended the study of biblical languages, so that the student would not be dependent on questionable translations, such as the Vulgate. Although Erasmus is better known for his irenicism in dogmatic matters, he nonetheless adumbrated an inXuential programme for what later would be called dogmatic or systematic theology: ‘My feeling in this matter is that our young beginner should be oVered teachings (dogmata) which have been brought together into a summary or compendium, and that this compendium be drawn primarily from the Gospel fountains and from the letters

94 A succinct overview of post-Reformation Lutheran theological education is found in Rudolf Mau, ‘Programme und Praxis des Theologiestudiums im 17. und 18.Jahrhundert’, Theologische Versuche 9 (1979): 71–91. Cf. Chi-Won Kang, Fro¨mmigkeit und Gelehrsamkeit: Die Reform des Theologiestudiums im lutheranischen Pietismus des 17. und 18.Jahrhunderts (Basle: Brunnen, 2001), 71–140.

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of the Apostles, so that the beginner might have deWnite objectives to which he correlates those things that he reads.’95 Luther too contributed to the literature of theological prolegomena in a short hortatory work, in which he advanced three inXuential rules for ‘the correct way of studying theology’: prayer, meditation, and spiritual testing (oratio, meditatio, and tentatio). One must Wrst pray, Luther argued in a jibe against scholasticism, because only God, not human reason, illumines Scripture. In fact, one should ‘straightway despair of your own reason and understanding. With them you will not attain eternal life, but, on the contrary, your presumptuousness will plunge you and others with you out of heaven (as happened to Lucifer) into the abyss of hell.’ Second, one must meditate on Scripture, ‘reading and rereading . . . with diligent attention and reXection’ without ever thinking ‘that you have done enough’. Finally, one must pass through spiritual testing—tentatio or, in German, Anfechtung. Luther saw this as central to theological study, because without adversity one had mere knowledge and not the personal experience of God’s goodness and mercy. Luther indicated that any student faithfully immersed in Scripture would eventually experience Anfechtung: For as soon as God’s Word takes root and grows in you, the devil will harry you, and will make a real doctor of you, and by his assaults will teach you to seek and love God’s Word. I myself am deeply indebted to the papists that through the devil’s raging they have beaten, oppressed, and distressed me so much. That is to say, they have made a fairly good theologian of me.96

Yet more so than Erasmus and Luther, and in contrast to both, Melanchthon proved most inXuential in shaping the genre of theological prolegomena and in pointing university theology in the direction of Protestant scholasticism. This might seem surprising, given Melanchthon’s humanist proclivities, but several features of his thought nonetheless laid the basis for a new scholasticism that came to mirror medieval scholasticism in many respects. One feature has been alluded to already: Melanchthon’s insistence on the priority of dogma as deWned by the Augsburg Confession. As important as philological-humanistic insight was for Melanchthon, purity of doctrine, in the Wnal analysis, provided not only the allowable scope of biblical exegesis but it also helped deWne the purpose of the university. (This much was true for Luther too, of course.)

95 Quoted in Robert D. Preus, The Theology of Post-Reformation Lutheranism: A Study of Theological Prolegomena (St Louis: Concordia, 1970), 76. 96 Robert R. Heitner, ed. and trans., Luther’s Works, vol. 34 (St. Louis: Concordia, 1960), 285–8.

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Second, and quite unlike Luther, Melanchthon moderated his views on Aristotle, ‘the philosopher’ for medieval schoolmen. Although in the 1520s Melanchthon sympathized with Luther’s view of Aristotle as a ‘damnable, arrogant, pagan rascal’ pernicious to theology, he later came to reject this position and make considerable allowances for the teaching of Aristotle, particularly in the philosophical faculty. To be sure, Melanchthon’s conception of Aristotle was not that of the schoolmen, but one tempered by humanist inXuences, especially by the Ciceronian natural law and rhetorical tradition.97 In practice, this turn to Aristotle prevented Melanchthon from regarding theology as an exclusively hortatory and biblical enterprise, but also as endeavour that welcomed the eYcacy of human reason, at least to some degree. Despairing of one’s own reason, in other words, should not be the theologian’s Wrst step, as Luther had recommended. Melanchthon’s Loci communes of 1521, widely considered the Wrst systematic Protestant theology, is an especially signiWcant work because it and its many successor editions became models for later introductory theological texts: its ‘loci method’ was widely imitated by Lutheran theologians prior to the Enlightenment.98 Melanchthon derived this method from classical sources, especially from Aristotle and Cicero, albeit through the mediation of Rudolf Agricola’s De inventione dialectica (1515), a textbook in logic that sought to convey to students the ‘essentials’ or ‘basics’ of argumentation in a simple and understandable way, covering all principal themes or loci (which might also be translated at ‘topics’ or ‘commonplaces’).99 The basic assumption of the loci method, according to Melanchthon, was that every subject of human knowledge, theology included, contained ‘certain fundamentals in which the main substance is comprised and which are considered to be the scope toward which we direct all studies’.100 As he put it in the 1555 edition, ‘whoever wishes proWtably to teach himself or intelligently to instruct others must Wrst comprehend from beginning to end the principal pieces in a thing, and carefully note how each piece follows the one preceding 97 Of special signiWcance is Melanchthon’s Declamatio de Aristotele (1536), in which he wrote that Aristotle’s philosophy should be ‘most esteemed and aspired to’ and that Aristotle himself was ‘the one and only master of method’. See Melanchthon, Orations on Philosophy and Education, 205, 211. On Aristotle generally in post-Reformation Germany, see Peter Peterson, Geschichte der aristotelischen Philosophie im protestantishen Deutschland (Leipzig, 1921). 98 On its inXuence, see Robert Kolb, ‘Teaching the Text: The Commonplace Method in Sixteenth-Century Lutheran Biblical Commentary’, Bibliothe`que d’Humanisme et Renaissance 49 (1987): 571–85. 99 Quirinus Breen, ‘The Terms ‘‘Loci’’ and ‘‘Loci Communes’’ in Melanchthon’, CH 16 (1947): 197–209, and Paul Joachimsen, ‘Loci Communes: Eine Untersuchung zu Geistesgeschichte des Humanismus und der Reformation’, Luther-Jahrbuch 8 (1926): 27–97. 100 Quoted in Park, ‘Philip Melanchthon’s Reform of German Universities’, 102.

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[it]’.101 In theology, Melanchthon considered these ‘pieces’, or loci, to be historic Christian doctrines—God, the Trinity, Creation, the Fall, Grace, Law—understood from an Augustinian-Lutheran frame of reference. Accordingly, his Loci communes provide short, expository writings of each ‘commonplace,’ supported by relevant biblical texts and occasional quotations from patristic sources, Augustine in particular. While the 1521 Loci expressed Melanchthon’s early anti-scholasticism and anti-Aristotelianism, later, more inXuential, editions did not. This ‘shaking change’ took place in the 1530s, when Melanchthon moderated his views on the noetic eVects of human fallenness under the inXuence of Cicero.102 That the human mind possessed at least a modicum of ‘natural light’ (naturalis lux) seemed to Melanchthon a more salutary basis for theological enquiry than simply appealing to the Holy Spirit’s elucidation of Scripture. Again, the example of the Anabaptists—and maverick prophets such as Thomas Mu¨nzer, leader of the 1525 Peasant’s Revolt—suggested to Melanchthon that untutored biblicism was a theological dead end. This shift towards a more sanguine view of human reason allowed Melanchthon to esteem positively many scholastic-Aristotelian principles of logic held contemptuously by other reformers. While he recognized that one cannot demonstrate revelation, one still cannot renounce organized, methodical thought; for this is what gave theology its intellectual character, without which it would become inerudita theologia, ‘in which’, Melanchthon wrote, ‘important things will not be developed in an orderly manner, in which things which should be separated will be mixed, and things that should . . . be combined will be separated, in which conXicting things will often be said, the immediate seen as truth. . . . Nothing will hang together in it. One will perceive neither the point nor departure nor the steps of progress nor the conclusion.’103 By maintaining simultaneous commitments to Lutheran dogma and a form of learning that esteemed human rationality, one that admitted Aristotle to a considerable degree, Melanchthon laid the groundwork and set the intellectual agenda that preoccupied Lutheran university theology for the next two centuries.104 Nowhere is his inXuence more evident than in the

101 Clyde L. Manschrek (trans. and ed.), Melanchthon on Christian Doctrine: Loci Communes 1555 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. xlvi. 102 See Paul Schwarzenau, Der Wandel im theologischen Ansatz bei Melanchthon von 1525– 1535 (Gu¨tersloh: C. Bertelsmann, 1956). 103 Quoted in Manschrek (trans. and ed.), Melanchthon on Christian Doctrine, p. xxxii. 104 A. C. McGiVert, Protestant Thought before Kant (New York, 1929), 141. Cf. Peterson, Geschichte der aristotelischen Philosophie im protestantishen Deutschland, 19 V.

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post-Reformation literature of theological prolegomena produced by orthodox Lutheran theologians.105 Although far from household names today, the representatives of ‘Protestant scholasticism’ or ‘Lutheran orthodoxy’ were legion and important in their day; their writings and activities dominated the theological scene in German Lutheran universities from the mid-sixteenth until the eighteenth century.106 Some of the more accomplished Wgures include Andreas Gerhard Hyperius (1511–64), Jacob Heerbrand (1521–1600), Martin Chemnitz (1522–86), Nikolaus Selnecker (1530–92), Leonard Hutter (1563–1616), Johann Gerhard (1582–1637), Georg Calixtus (1586–1656), Balthasar Meisner (1587–1626), Abraham Calovius (1612–86), Johann Andreas Quenstedt (1617–88), and David Hollaz (1648–1713), among others. Wittenberg, Tu¨bingen, Strasbourg, Leipzig, and Jena emerged as their principal seats of learning. To a man, they sought to deWne and defend true Lutheran doctrine as set down in Luther’s Catechisms, the Augsburg Confession, and the Book of Concord (1580).107 For present purposes, these scholars are signiWcant in two respects. First, they continued the task of theological prolegomena—the Lutheran-Melanchthonian project of deWning true doctrine, and the scope and purpose of theology, including its relationship to other modes of knowing, especially philosophy. This is often what motivated many late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century publications bearing in their (often very long Latinate) titles the words medulla, compendium, isagoge, methodus, apparatus, syntagma, and, of course, loci.108 While these works exhibit continuity with the Reformation on many 105 In the brief treatment of introductory theological texts which follows, I am mainly concerned with Lutheran developments. Necessary restrictions do not allow me to deal with Calvinist university and theological developments, which mirrored Lutheran ones in many, if not all, respects. For more on the Reformed side, see Karen Maag, Seminary or University? The Genevan Academy and Reformed Higher Education, 1560–1620 (BrookWeld, Vt. Ashgate, 1995). On Reformed theological prolegomena, see Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1987). 106 For a still useful guide to the university context of seventeenth-century Lutheran theology, see F. A. Tholuck, Das akademische Leben des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts mit besonderer Beziehung auf die protestantisch-theologischen Fakulta¨ten Deutschlands, 2 vols. (Halle, 1853–4). Cf. M. Gottlieb Stolle, Anleitung zur Historie der theologischen Gelahrheit (Jena, 1739), NStUBG, H, lit. uni III 728. 107 The Book of Concord (1580), which draws from the Formula of Concord (1577), was the last major statement of classical Lutheran doctrine of the post-Reformation period. It was written to clear up many controversies that had developed among Lutherans, especially those pertaining to free will and human sinfulness, the relationship of law and Gospel, the person of Christ, and adiaphora (or ‘things non-essential’). The Book also represents a deWnitive collection of the principal confessional documents of Lutheranism—a collection which assigned a privileged place to the Augsburg Confession and Luther’s Shorter Catechism. See G. F. Bente, Historical Introduction to the Book of Concord (St Louis: Concordia, 1965). 108 Edward Farley, Theologia: The Fragmentation and Unity of Theological Education (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983), 51.

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counts, they are not without certain innovations, and they by no means represent a homogenous body of literature even if they shared many common features.109 Second, it is instructive to keep in mind that the scholarly and pedagogical modus operandi of post-Reformation orthodox theologians, in the eyes of eighteenth-century critics, came to symbolize much that was wrong with the premodern university. Their insistence that Christianity be deWned in strict doctrinal and neoscholastic terms and that theology remain supreme over the other faculties came into sharp conXict with latitudinarian and secular currents of the Enlightenment and with the emerging, dynamic conception of Wissenschaft. Two Wgures warrant brief mention because of their impact on the development of university theology: Andreas Hyperius and Johann Gerhard. Claimed by both Lutherans and Calvinists, Hyperius wrote arguably the most inXuential introduction to the study of theology of the mid-sixteenth century. Published in Basle in 1556, De Theologo, seu ratione studii theologici reXects Melanchthon’s inXuence in methodology: Hyperius argued that without handling the loci method properly ‘[one] will never gain certainty concerning the questions posed in theology’. At the same time, he struck a hortatory tone similar to Luther’s (as did practically all Protestant scholastics), reminding aspiring theologians that they would make no headway in their studies ‘unless God Wrst of all sets [their] heart ablaze with the earnest desire of knowing Christian teachings’.110 Importantly, Hyperius’s work was the Wrst to anticipate the classic fourfold division of theology into biblical exegesis, dogmatics, church history, and practical theology.111 The latter two divisions—church history and practical theology—are especially relevant to future developments. The establishment of a historical component within the theological faculty, something largely foreign to medieval scholasticism, helped establish an ‘institutional space’ for the further historicization of Protestant theology in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century under the inXuence of such Wgures as J. L. von Mosheim and J. S. Semler. Practical theology was the branch that dealt with equipping ministers for the care of souls, homiletics, catechesis, and other parish work. As I shall subsequently show, Friedrich Schleiermacher called practical theology the ‘crown’ of theology, for it provided the point of connection between university instruction 109 Johannes Wallmann, Der TheologiebegriV bei Johann Gerhard und Georg Calixt (Tu¨bingen: Mohr, 1961), 1. Wallmann helpfully reminds us that there was no ‘single old-Protestant conception of theology’. 110 Quoted in Preus, Theology of Post-Reformation Lutheranism, 82. 111 For further commentary on Hyperius’s work, see Preus, Theology of Post-Reformation Lutheranism, 82–8; Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science, 17, 353, 391; and Farley, Theologia, 24, 50–1, 67.

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and service to church, state, and society and thereby, in his inXuential view, helped legitimize theology as a valid and useful ‘science’ in a public university setting.112 Johann Gerhard was among the most pre-eminent Protestant theologians of the early seventeenth century, ‘the rock’ upon which later Lutheran theology was based.113 Educated at Wittenberg, he taught at both Marburg and Jena, where he Wnished his career, turning down no fewer than twenty-four calls to teach elsewhere.114 Gerhard authored numerous books in almost every theological Weld, but he is best known for two works: his Loci theologici (1609–22), a nineteen-volume work and one of the most extensive Lutheran dogmatics ever written, and his Methodus studii theologici (1620), a basic theological textbook that became standard fare in German Protestant universities. Gerhard drew from many accomplished predecessors, but he also advanced original views. He was the Wrst major Lutheran theologian, for example, to address himself extensively to the subject of the nature of theology. That is, he did not simply supply the appropriate content of theology as had been done before or organize it according to biblical loci; rather, his works are characterized by lengthy theoretical and historical musings on the very deWnition of theology. In short, while he denied that theology was a science (scientia), a position he associated with Thomism and Tridentine Catholic theology, he nonetheless held that theology was a profoundly intellectual matter (notitia). Yet his preferred term for theology—and one regularly accepted by others after him—was aptitude or skill (habitus).115 ‘Theology’, he wrote in a compressed deWnition, is an aptitude (habitus) given by God, conferred upon man by the Holy Spirit through the Word. By this theology a person is prepared by his knowledge of the divine mysteries through the illumination of his mind to apply those things that he understands to the disposition of his heart and to the carrying out of good works. By theology a person is also given the skill and ability to inform others about these divine mysteries and the way of salvation and to defend the heavenly doctrine from the corruption of those who oppose it, to the end that men, shining with true faith and good works, may be brought to the kingdom of heaven.116

To Gerhard also belongs the distinction of zealously bringing Aristotelian categories to the defence of Lutheran dogmatics. This pursuit (much stronger 112 Hyperius has been called ‘the father of practical theology’. Farley, Theologia, 67. 113 HUE ii. 596. 114 On Gerhard’s life and scholarship, see ELC 905–6, and Wallmann, Der TheologiebegriV bei Johann Gerhard und Georg Calixt, 5–84. 115 For an elaboration of Gerhard’s use of habitus, see Wallmann, Der TheologiebegriV bei Johann Gerhard und Georg Calixt, 62–75. 116 Quoted in Preus, Theology of Post-Reformation Lutheranism, 117–18.

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than Melanchthon’s limited defence of Aristotle) came to be emulated by successors, aVecting Lutheran theology well into the eighteenth century. Gerhard was, moreover, a dogged polemicist (no doubt a dubious distinction in an era of religious warfare). In his Confessio catholica (1634–7), he oVered a comprehensive defence of the catholicity of Lutheranism and at the same time, according to one critic, ‘the most penetrating polemic . . . [against the] Jesuit form of Roman Catholicism ever written’.117 SigniWcantly, Gerhard oVered an inXuential formulation of the relationship between theology and philosophy, providing an apparent solution to a conXicted legacy left by Luther and Melanchthon. Since the Reformation, many Lutheran theologians had been divided over whether human reason was truly trustworthy in theological enquiry as Melanchthon had intimated, or should theologians’ Wrst act be to ‘despair of [their] own reason’ as Luther had argued. Gerhard arduously and extensively dealt with this issue, ultimately coming down on the side of Melanchthon while never disagreeing with Luther outright. Reasoning not unlike medieval scholastics, Gerhard believed that the tension between the two views was only an apparent one, which could be overcome through the use of careful distinctions. He thus sought to deWne two separate modes of knowing: philosophy, which stemmed from reason and experience, and theology, which stemmed from Scripture and grace. Luther was right in so far as philosophy alone could not correctly apprehend revelation and divine things, but Melanchthon was justiWed in admitting philosophy into the precincts of sacred knowledge so long as it recognized itself as a subordinate and a helper. At root, this position did not diVer substantially from, say, Thomas Aquinas, even if Gerhard was quick to heap scorn on Catholic theology for allowing philosophy to suVocate theology. Nonetheless, in summing up his position on the matter in his Methodus studii theologici, he freely quoted a medieval scholastic work, De consolatione theologiae by Jean Gerson: As grace is superior to nature, as a mistress is over her handmaid, as a teacher is above his disciple, as eternity is greater than time, as understanding is to be desired above mere thinking, as those things that are not seen are more excellent than the things that are visible, so theology reigns far above philosophy, although it does not reject philosophy, but holds it in obedience.118

Philosophy, Gerhard wrote elsewhere, should be allowed ‘only a ministering, not a ruling, function’. Such formulations (ones with direct relevance to institutional organization) were echoed to the point of banality by theology 117 ELC, 906. 118 Quoted in Preus, Theology of Post-Reformation Lutheranism, 120. On Gerson, see ODCC 669–70.

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professors and students alike throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, later provoking powerful reactions from thinkers such as Christian WolV and Immanuel Kant. The story of Lutheran orthodoxy in the universities after Gerhard is one mostly of declension: theology became overly intellectualized, pedantic, and closed oV from broader cultural and social currents. At the same time, the era is not without a few notable luminaries who commanded signiWcant followings. Georg Calixtus of the University of Helmstedt, for instance, presents a peculiar case.119 A committed Lutheran, he nonetheless developed a highly unusual ecumenical and irenic theology—expressed in works such as Apparatus theologicus (1628) and Epitome theologiae (1634)—that made the unity of the Christian Church a central theological concern.120 His humanist predilections, furthermore, set him apart from much of the confessional-scholastic currents of the time. According to Wallmann, Calixtus eVected a ‘humanization of theology’ that tended to turn theology into a form of scholarship owing much to ‘human industry’.121 His inXuence at the University of Helmstedt, an oasis of humanist sensibilities in a neoscholastic age, lived on subsequently in J. L. von Mosheim, whose irenic and scholarly theology, as we shall see, exerted considerable inXuence on the theological faculty at the University of Go¨ttingen (1737).122 Calixtus met a worthy opponent in the late seventeenth-century theologian Abraham Calovius, who taught at both Ko¨nigsberg and Wittenberg. Calovius accused Calixtus of abandoning the basic tenets of Lutheranism in his idealistic pursuit of ecumenism—or what Calovius and others regarded as a muddle-headed ‘syncretism’.123 Besides feuding with Calixtus, Calovius was a formidable theologian in his own right, the most proliWc and inXuential since Gerhard. Calovius too was committed to Aristotelian categories, employing them in the predictable cause of defending Lutheran orthodoxy. Moreover, in works such as Isagoges theologicae (1652) Calovius went to great lengths in deWning theology not as a human skill, but as a particular Godgiven habitus or aptitude, a mode of reXection unlike any other, for it alone

119 On Calixtus and the University of Helmstedt, see E. L. T. Henke, Georg Calixtus und seine Zeit, 2 vols. (Halle, 1853, 1860) and W. A. Kelly, The Theological Faculty at Helmstedt (East Linton: Cat’s Whiskers, 1996), 8 V. 120 It was the sincere belief of Calixtus that a genuine church unity could be achieved by a careful, objective comparison of the doctrines and practices of the various branches of the extant church with those of the early church. See Kelly, The Theological Faculty at Helmstedt, 11. 121 Wallmann, Der TheologiebegriV bei Johann Gerhard und Georg Calixt, 113. 122 Kelly, The Theological Faculty at Helmstedt, 26 V. 123 On the conXicts about syncretism of the seventeenth century, see Heinrich Schmidt, Geschichte der synkretischen Streitigkeiten (Erlangen, 1846).

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illumined the path to eternal felicity. As Calovius expressed it, summing up the sentiment of an entire academic era: Theology proceeds from God. . . . Only theology is the light of our mind, the healing remedy of our will, the antidote against sin, and the most eVective stimulant for true piety. Only theology unites us with God and God with us. It is the stairway from earth to heaven. By it we ascend to heaven, and God descends to us and overwhelms us with heavenly gifts of every description. . . . In theology we who are on earth teach those things the knowledge of which continues even in heaven.124

Calovius’s eloquence notwithstanding, the late seventeenth century witnessed the continued decline of Lutheran orthodoxy into sterile routine and self-satisfaction. Endlessly proliferating internal feuds kept theologians polemicizing against one another and thus disengaged from the broader culture and the particular challenges of the day—in particular from the dawning forces of pietism and Enlightenment rationalism. Philipp Jacob Spener became so dissatisWed with university theology and its internecine bickering that he made the reform of theological study a principal concern of his Pia desideria (1675), the founding document of modern pietism. ‘[G]reat care,’ he wrote, ‘should be exercised to keep controversy within bounds. Unnecessary argumentation should rather be reduced than extended, and the whole of theology brought back to apostolic simplicity.’125 Commenting on the scholastic theology of his youth, Herder once lamented that ‘every leaf of the tree of life was so dissected that the dryads wept for mercy’.126

4 . T H E EI G H T E E N T H CE N T U RY: D E C L I N E A N D C R I T I Q U E If Protestant scholasticism had become a sterile enterprise by the early eighteenth century, as its critics charged, the universities as a whole seemed not far behind. By almost every index, German universities were in poor shape as the ‘century of light’ dawned, beset with myriad internal problems, wedded to Aristotelian science, committed to outmoded pedagogy, and often unreceptive or even oblivious to the momentous intellectual ferment associated with such names as Rene´ Descartes, Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, Voltaire, and Diderot. ‘[M]ost German universities’, as Roy Porter has written, 124 Quoted in Preus, Theology of Post-Reformation Lutheranism, 217. On Calovius, see ODCC 266. 125 Philipp Jacob Spener, Pia Desideria, trans. Theodore G. Tappert (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1964), 110. 126 Quoted in Gerald Cragg, The Church and the Age of Reason, 1648–1789 (New York: Penguin, 1970), 100.

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‘remained too small, and still too embroiled in the theological aftermath of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, to take much interest in [the new] science.’127 One clear sign of the universities’ stagnation was the fact that a culture of intellectual elites independent of and often antagonistic to universities began to take shape by the early decades of the eighteenth century. Epitomized by a Wgure such as Leibniz, this new elite heaped scorn on univerisites for failing to understand and adapt to the changing times. Indeed, vociferous criticisms accusing universities of backwardness represent a hallmark of eighteenthcentury intellectual life; such criticisms regularly became more intense and strident towards century’s end. At the same time, the eighteenth century witnessed marked attempts at university reform. Above all, the founding of universities at Halle (1694) and Go¨ttingen (1737) represent signiWcant new departures in university history. The relative success and modernity of these institutions had a catalytic eVect on other universities and on educated opinion at large. The ascent of the philosophical faculty constitutes another consequential development of the era. Whereas previously this faculty had been regarded largely as preparatory, it increasingly—if slowly and only at a few universities— became a semi-autonomous enterprise, the harbinger of a new type of enquiry that sought not simply to prepare students for further studies and professional skills, but to increase the domain of knowledge through research and publication and to instruct students how to do the same. This scholarly ideal—more closely associated with the nineteenth century—took shape steadily within the parameters of the philosophical faculty, and to a lesser degree the law faculty, during the eighteenth century.128 Though not alone, the universities of Halle and Go¨ttingen played a pivotal role in this evolution. For many contemporaries, however, the seeds of change were obscured by the reality of stagnation. Indeed, the century preceding the founding of the University of Berlin was no golden age for German universities. By the middle decades of the eighteenth century universities were confronted by a profound and persistent crisis. The literature from the period attests to this with remarkable consistency. One fundamental problem was a steep decline in student enrolment brought about in part by the growing number of the wealthy who decided to educate their children in newly established academies (Ritterakademien), schools for the nobility that emphasized a more practical and fashionable curriculum (modern languages, politics, Wnancial sciences, 127 HUE ii. 556. 128 Notker Hammerstein, Jus und Historie: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des historischen Denkens an deutschen Universita¨ten im spa¨ten 17. und im 18.Jahrhundert (Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1972).

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history, heraldry, horse-riding, and fencing) than the universities.129 From the Reformation era until the Thirty Years War (1618–48), student matriculation had climbed steadily from 2,000 yearly to about 4,700 on the eve of the war. The war proved disastrous for the universities, as it did for society as a whole.130 Afterwards, some improvement took place, but from around the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, matriculation plummeted: 4,400 new students entered in 1720; 4,000 in 1745; only 3,400 in 1770; and only 2,925 in 1800.131 Smaller schools such as Erfurt, Herborn, and Rostock suVered crippling losses; many professors found themselves in severe Wnancial straits, forced to work outside the university to earn a living.132 The situation might not have been so dire were it not for the chronic overabundance of universities: there were thirty German universities in 1701, more than in any other part of Europe.133 This was a direct consequence of the territorialconfessional principle, whereby each German state, regardless of size, had sought to have its own university. Thus, even before enrolments began to drop, the number of students was already divided among an excessive number of institutions. In his Raisonnement u¨ber die protestantischen Universita¨ten in Deutschland (1768), J. D. Michaelis, one of Go¨ttingen’s highly decorated professors, devoted an entire chapter to the ‘great evil’ of overabundance. ‘The number of students is so divided’, he wrote, ‘that the number can be only moderate at any university, and then the best and most erudite professor must be satisWed if he can Wll . . . his few basic courses.’134 Michaelis contrasted the situation in Germany with that of England, which boasted only two prominent institutions: Oxford and Cambridge.135 For the German universities, overabundance and a declining number of students meant constantly diminishing funds with which to attract accomplished professors, improve facilities, and modernize the curriculum. Compounding the problems was the fact that territorial princes often hesitated to sink more state funds into already feeble institutions. In Prussia, typical in this regard, the state outlay for universities remained constant under Friedrich Wilhelm I (1713–40) and Friedrich the Great (1740–87); only after the 129 Most Ritterakademien date from the late seventeenth century. Some of the more famous ones were located at Kolberg (1653), Halle (1680), and Wolfenbu¨ttel (1687). See Nobert Conrad, Ritterakademien der fru¨hen Neuzeit: Bildung als Standsprivileg im 16. und 17.Jahrhundert (Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982). 130 R. J. W. Evans, ‘German Universities after the Thirty Years War’, HU 1 (1981): 169–90. 131 Turner, ‘Prussian Universities’, 27, and Franz Eulenberg, Die Frequenz der deutschen Universita¨ten von ihrer Gru¨ndung bis zur Gegenwart (Leipzig, 1904), 132. 132 Eulenberg, Die Frequenz der deutschen Universita¨ten, 134. 133 Turner, ‘Prussian Universities’, 27–8. 134 Michaelis, Raisonnement u¨ber die protestantischen Universita¨ten in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main, 1768), i. 209, 247 V. 135 Ibid. iv. 248.

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accession of Friedrich Wilhelm II to the throne in 1787 did the state allot an extra 10,000 thaler yearly for its universities. In accordance with the policy that Prussia had pursued since the late seventeenth century, Halle received the lion’s share, some 7,000 thaler. Ko¨nigsberg received 2,000 thaler; Frankfurt an der Oder, 1,000; and feeble Duisburg, with less than one hundred students, nothing at all. The extra funding thus tended to reinforce the inequalities between the universities and it did not relieve the overall Wnancial burdens on the Prussian schools. Furthermore, it brought the annual government expenditure on universities to only 43,000 thaler, while it had been 26,000 almost a century before in 1697.136 Along with widespread impecunity, nepotism among the faculty and the existence of a violent and bawdy student subculture were two other widely recognized signs of university stagnation and decline. Academic inbreeding was the norm during the eighteenth century, not the exception. In some cases, single families comprised a virtual academic dynasty, transmitting professorial chairs down the family tree for generations. German students, moreover, conjured up for most Europeans an image of a dissolute young man, drinking, whoring, and duelling during his university years. In his novel about academic life, Carl von Carlsberg oder u¨ber die menschliche Elend, Christian Gotthilf Salzmann called universities ‘dens of baseness and depravity’.137 ‘The best young people,’ another critic mused, ‘are, if not completely destroyed, made wild at universities and return from them weakened in body and soul and are lost to themselves and the world.’138 One of the most popular satirical works of the century, Die Jobsiade (1784) by Carl Arnold Kortum, chronicled the dissipated and hypocritical life of one ‘Hieronimus Jobs, Candidate in Theology’, who squandered his time at an unnamed university before Xunking his examination for ordination, unable to identify Christ’s apostles and having never heard of St Augustine.139 The woeful state of universities became a pet topic of discussion among the German literati inXuenced by the ScientiWc Revolution and the Western Enlightenment. Deeming themselves a new intellectual vanguard, they 136 See Turner, ‘Prussian Universities’, 32–3, and Conrad Bornhak, Geschichte der preussischen Universita¨tsverwaltung bis 1810 (Berlin, 1900), 164–70. 137 Christian Gotthilf Salzmann, Carl von Carlsberg oder u¨ber die menschliche Elend (Karlsruhe, 1784–8), i. 155–6. 138 The critic was J. H. Campe; quoted in Charles E. McClelland, State, Society, and University in Germany, 1700–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 78–9. 139 Carl Arnold Kortum, Die Jobsiade (Stuttgart: Philipp Reklam, 1986), esp. chs. 13, 18. Some sample lines from this work: ‘Hieronimus, dem’s Studiren zuwider j Mengte sich bald unter die lustigen Bru¨der j Und betrug sich in kurzer Zeit schon so, j Als wa¨re er la¨ngstens gewesen do j Denn so gut als der beste Akademikus j Lebte er ta¨glich in Floribus j Und es wurde manche liebe Nacht j In Sausen und Brausen zugebracht.’

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recognized and discussed many of the aforementioned failings of universities, and identiWed others. Few actually held a post at a university, preferring instead court patronage, scholarly independence, or a position at one of the newly estabished academies of science. Again, Leibniz holds a pre-eminent place in this regard. Dismissing universities for promoting ‘monk-like’, tendencies, he was the Wrst major intellectual to reject outright a university position (oVered to him by Altdorf), thereby setting a precedent among many eighteenth-century scholars of disdaining university life and pursuing the life of the mind elsewhere.140 SigniWcantly, Leibniz played the leading role in founding the Wrst major German academy of science in 1700: Berlin’s Royal Academy of Science, Societas Regia Scientiarum.141 Although neglected during the reign of Friedrich Wilhelm I (r. 1713–40), the academy was revived under Friedrich the Great (r. 1740–86), rechristened (in the fashionable French of the day) the Acade´mie royale des sciences et belles-lettres de Prusse. Its mission included promoting ‘freedom of thought’ and ‘destroying the barbarism of gothic times and superstition in all its forms’.142 Customarily denying theologians membership, this largely secular, cosmopolitan institution provided inspiration for the establishment of similar academies in Go¨ttingen (1751), Munich (1759), Mannheim (1765), and Erfurt (1756), all of which, like the Ritterakademien before them, served as more than able competitors in attracting money and talent away from the universities. By the later eighteenth century, scientiWc academies had not only become the undisputed leaders in promulgating the ideas of the Enlightenment, they had also far surpassed universities as the seats of practical and progressive Welds such as engineering, history, natural science, and mathematics.143 140 In particular, see Leibniz’s discussion of the ‘Verbe ßerung des Schulwesens und der Universita¨ten’, in Leibniz, ‘Ermahnung an die Teutsche, ihren Verstand und Sprache besser zu u¨ben’ (1679), in Hans Heinz Holz (ed.), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Politische Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Europa¨ische Verlagsanstalt, 1966), 804 f. 141 Hans Posner, ‘Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’, in Wolfgang Treue and Karlfried Gru¨nder (eds.), Wissenschaftspolitik in Berlin (Berlin: Colloquium, 1987), 1–16. 142 Adolf Harnack, Geschichte der ko¨niglich preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin (Berlin, 1901), i. 230. 143 Turner, ‘Prussian Universities’, 37–8. Friedrich the Great placed his hopes for scientiWc progress on academies, not universities. While this reXects the well-known inXuence of the Enlightenment on him, it perhaps also reXects a disdain for universities inherited from his father, Friedrich Wilhelm I. The latter, a lover of crude jokes, once visited Frankfurt an der Oder, one of the more decrepit Prussian universities, and forced all professors to attend a mock pedantic disputation staged by his court fool Morgenstein. See Reinhold Koser, ‘Friedrich der Grosse und die preussischen Universita¨ten,’ FBPG 17 (1904): 95–155. For a broader treatment of scientiWc academies in the eighteenth century, see James E. McClellan, Science Reorganized: ScientiWc Societies in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). While most advances in the natural sciences occurred in academies and not universities, this was not always the case. Karl Hubauer reminds us that eighteenth-century universities were not com-

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Recurring criticisms of universities made by the elite intelligentsia often focused on their ‘medieval’ nature, meaning the predominance of theology, special corporative privileges, and a guildlike wariness of change. Universities were ‘ossiWed in a guildlike mentality’ (die im Zunftwesen erstarrte Universita¨t) according to one common expression.144 In his novel, Carl von Carlsberg, C. G. Salzmann gave voice to the refrain that theological faculties amounted to bastions of superstition and dogmatic squabbling.145 He noted, furthermore, that ‘the universities would also like to be useful today. But now they make as sorry a Wgure as a fortress built during the crusades in a war which men use bombs and cannons.’146 In a short plea for reform in theological instruction, the rationalist thinker Carl Friedrich Bahrdt (1741–92) argued that universities led students down ‘a completely false path’ and that much of the curriculum was useless to the actual needs of the time.147 Finally, in Allgemeine Revision des gesamten Schul- und Erziegungswesens, a multivolume work devoted to pedagogical reform throughout German lands, Johann Heinrich Campe, the tutor of Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, arrived at an extreme solution but one shared by a number of like-minded critics: ‘In short, the evil is . . . beyond remedy (unheilbar). It lies in the essential form of the universities and cannot be eliminated but with the elimination of the universities. All former remedies . . . are so many palliatives which hide the evil for a time but can never eradicate it at its root.’148 The criticisms of Salzmann, Barhdt, and Campe were echoed by many renowned Wgures of the German literary establishment, like Goethe, Mendelssohn, Klopstock, and Lessing, whose oVhand critical comments about universities add up to a strong indictment of them. Alternatively, the fact that these pioneers of a new national literature took such little notice of the universities and their ‘medieval’ traditions, turning instead to classical antiquity for inspiration, amounts to a critique by indiVerence. Wilhelm A. Teller of Berlin noted in 1795 that a group of writers had emerged in the late eighteenth century who had ‘applause and success as no university scholar of the time could equal’. When these men found themselves attacked by university professors, Teller noted, ‘they conclude in unison: ‘‘what do we need with pletely devoid of instruction in natural science. See his The Formation of the German Chemical Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 46 V. 144 Noted in Daniel Fallon, The German University (Boulder: Colorado Associated University Press, 1980), 6. 145 Salzmann, Carl von Carlsberg, i. 339 V. 146 Ibid. 341. 147 Carl Friedrich Bahrdt, Ueber das theologische Studium auf Universita¨ten (Berlin, 1785), 5. 148 J. H. Campe, Allgemeine Revision des gesammten Schul- und Erziehungswesen (Vienna, 1792), xvi. 164 V.

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universities any longer?’’ ’149 Of all the literary Wgures of the German Enlightenment, Lessing and Goethe are perhaps best known for their unremitting contempt for university customs and practices. Lessing despised the pretensions of professorial scholarship and expressed his views forthrightly in a number of heated exchanges with professors. His Wrst play, Der junge Gelehrte (1748), lampooned the pedantic ‘Gelehrsamkeit’ of the universities.150 Goethe began Faust, part one, with a jibe at the professorial career that would have resonated with many of his contemporaries: I have studied philosophy, the law as well as medicine— and, alas, theology too; studied them well with ardent zeal, yet here I am a wretched fool, no wiser than I was before. They call me Master, even Doctor, and for some years now I’ve led my students by the nose, up and down, across, and in circles.151

The international renown and progressive outlooks of Lessing, Goethe, and other literary luminaries starkly contrasted with the guarded, traditionalist stance adopted by many universities. This fact continued to undermine the authority and prestige of the universities in the eighteenth century. Toward century’s end, Johann Heinrich Campe expressed a sentiment held widely by the new culturati: Perhaps many think that the universities have educated great men and that thus living and teaching at a university is the condition of becoming great. But how many great men lived outside universities! One thinks of Leibniz, Remairus, Voltaire, Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn . . . [and others]—all men who had and still have decisive inXuence on the culture of learning and art and on the ennoblement of mankind. It is therefore not easy to see how the universities are to form such great teachers and models for mankind. Aids to the development of the mind exist abundantly outside the universities; and contact with [university] scholars might well contribute little to this development.152 149 Quoted in Adolf Sto¨zel, ‘Die Berliner Mittwochsgesellschaft u¨ber die Aufhebung oder Reform der Universita¨ten (1795)’, FBPG 2 (1889): 209. 150 Turner, ‘Prussian Universities’, 50 V. 151 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, part I, trans. Peter Salm (New York: Bantam Books, 1985), 25 (trans. modiWed). I should also note, however, that Goethe was also very active in the reform and modernization of the University of Jena in the 1790s. For his role in this endeavour, see Theodore Ziolowski, German Romanticism and its Institutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 230–7. 152 Campe, Allgemeine Revision des gesammten Schul- und Erziehungswesen, xvi. 218.

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As the nineteenth century loomed on the horizon, one might reasonably think that universities would not survive the onslaught of social and political upheavals that befell them after 1789. Often supporters of the French Revolution in Germany regarded universities, like kings and guilds, as obsolete entities, obstacles to change whose time had passed. In France, revolutionaries actually shut down the universities in the 1790s.153 Across the Rhine, many thought it was simply a matter of time before something similar happened in Germany. Anticipating major educational change, in 1795 Berlin’s august Mittwochsgesellschaft, a secret society of notable intellectuals and statesmen, debated with great earnestness the question of whether the Prussian universities should be reformed or simply abolished. The proceedings of this debate are noteworthy because the various members, irrespective of how they ultimately answered the question, shared a rather uniform critique of the status quo. The majority held that the corporative status of universities, which guaranteed university members immunity from civil courts, impeded justice; they regarded as archaic the Latin lecture and disputation method; they deplored the hierarchical ordering of the faculties; they advocated that more useful subjects be taught and that professors have more freedom of enquiry; and they recommended a greater role for the state to achieve educational reform. J. B. Gebhard, a liberal cleric, who initiated the debate, put the matter bluntly: ‘In our day, universities are dispensable, in part because their goals can be accomplished in diVerent and better ways and also because they promote more evil than good.’154

¨ T TI N GEN 5 . T H E WAY F ORWA RD : HA L L E A ND GO Despite such sentiments as Gebhard’s, the opinion that the universities required nothing short of abolition was, in the Wnal analysis, an extremist one and held only by a vocal minority of eighteenth-century savants. Most critics of the universities recognized that practical demands and the inertia of the past recommended that the remedy lay with reform, not abolition. While oVering similar critiques of the universities, most members of the Mittwochsgesellschaft, therefore, refused to take Gebhard’s position of abolition. This outlook of reform had deep roots in the eighteenth century. Indeed, voices of reform and speciWc examples of university renewal and improvement, many 153 R. R. Palmer, The Improvement of Humanity: Education and the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 105 V. 154 Quoted in Adolf Sto¨zel, ‘Die Berliner Mittwochsgesellschaft u¨ber die Aufhebung oder Reform der Universita¨ten (1795)’, FBPG 2 (1889): 204.

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anticipating those of the early nineteenth century, constitute another dimension of eighteenth-century university history. Although reformers’ diagnoses and suggested remedies varied considerably, most drew inspiration from the success of two relatively new institutions: Halle and Go¨ttingen, respectively founded in 1694 and 1737.155 I do not intend to oVer a detailed analysis of these institutions.156 But for shaping the modern university enterprise and the role of theology therein, their examples are of particular signiWcance and must be considered. Go¨ttingen in particular served as an important model for the University of Berlin; many of the latter’s founders, including Wilhelm von Humboldt, had studied at the former. One is even tempted to quip that Go¨ttingen laid the egg that Berlin hatched.157 Yet prior to chicken and egg stands Halle, Prussia’s Xagship university in the eighteenth century and a major catalyst for educational reform from its inception in 1694.158 While it is probably a stretch to call Halle ‘the Wrst modern university’, as numerous commentators have, Halle does represent a noteworthy departure from the past. Halle’s character is attributable to several factors, among the most important of which was its status as the Wrst university of signiWcance founded by the modernizing, absolutist Hohenzollern dynasty, holders of the Prussian crown after 1700. This accounts for the fact that by the mid-eighteenth century Halle had achieved a reputation, reXecting its eVorts to accommodate the state’s needs, for oVering the most practically oriented course of studies in statecraft, economics, and public administration (Kameralismus) to be found in Germany, while allowing professors greater autonomy in instruction and methods.159 The prestige 155 Founded in 1743, the University of Erlangen was another reform institution. However, it was largely overshadowed by the examples of Halle and Go¨ttingen. On the founding and early history of Erlangen, see J. G. V. Engelhardt, Die Universita¨t Erlangen von 1743 bis 1843 (Erlangen, 1843). 156 For more detailed treatment of these universities, see Wilhelm Schrader, Geschichte der Friedrichs-Universita¨t zu Halle, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1894), and Go¨tz von Selle, Die Georg-August Universita¨t zu Go¨ttingen, 1737–1937 (Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1937). Cf. Paulsen, Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts, i. 534 V.; ii. 9 V.; McClelland’s State, Society, and University in Germany, 34–57; and Otto Bu¨sch et al. (eds.), Handbuch der preussischen Geschichte (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1992), i. 623 V. 157 On Humboldt’s studies at Go¨ttingen, see Christiana M. Sauter, Wilhelm von Humboldt und die deutsche Aufkla¨rung (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1989), 124–73. 158 Go¨ttingen, in fact, was sometimes referred to as ‘the daughter of Halle’. For the discussion of Halle that follows, I am especially indebted to an excellent dissertation by John Robert Holloran: ‘Professors of the Enlightenment at the University of Halle’, Ph.D. diss. (University of Virginia, 2000). 159 Halle’s course oVerings and ‘spirit’ also bear witness to the fact that it was founded in association with a Ritterakademie that had been established in Halle in the 1680s. The university absorbed the academy’s spirit into its own in an attempt to attract children of the nobility. This, too, reXected the interests of the state. At Halle, for example, besides studying in the traditional

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and scope of legal studies increased at Halle too, reXecting the political exigencies of the age.160 Halle also bore witness to its pedigree as the oVspring of an absolutist state in its religious policy. The Hohenzollern dynasty, ever since Elector Johann Sigismund converted to Calvinism in 1613, had faced the dilemma of how best, as a monarchy of Reformed faith, to govern a mostly Lutheran population. The solution often adopted was the pursuit of a policy of reconciliation (Verso¨hnungspolitik) between the two great continental strands of Protestantism—a policy that later helped pave the way for the Prussian Protestant Church Union of 1817. This policy aVected universities because the crown did not have the same interest as many central European leaders in perpetuating the strictly confessional character of universities. In fact, the confessional strictures of Prussia’s other universities, Frankfurt an der Oder, Ko¨nigsberg, and Duisburg (all founded before the emergence of Brandenburg-Prussia as a powerful state and, in the case of the Wrst two, before the conversion of the Elector) had caused the monarchy diYculties on a number of occasions.161 The idea therefore to found a university that would soften religious polemics became quite appealing by the time of Elector Friedrich III (r. 1688– 1713), who had already furthered the dynasty’s ‘spirit of toleration’ by the Potsdam Edict of 1685, which had allowed Huguenots Xeeing the France of Louis XIV to take up residence in Brandenburg-Prussia.162 In 1691, the Elector personally visited Halle, surveying the city, which until 1680 (when it passed into Hohenzollern hands) belonged to the Lutheran Duchy of Magdeburg. By the time of the Elector’s visit, Halle had already become home to a number of progressive intellectuals desirous of establishing a new educational institution that would diVer from the neighbouring Saxon universities of Leipzig and Wittenberg. Both of these were combatively Lutheran and, to the Elector’s consternation, drew many promising students away from Brandenburg.163 The intellectual ‘progressives’ who had wound up in Halle included Christian Thomasius (1655–1728) and August Hermann Francke (1663–1727), faculties, one could learn the gentlemanly arts of fencing, horse riding, dancing, and speaking French. See Turner, ‘Prussian Universities’, 92; Schrader, Geschichte der Friedrichs-Universita¨t zu Halle, i. 47 V; and Bornhak, Geschichte der preussischen Universita¨tsverwaltung, 54 V. 160 On legal studies at Halle, see Hammerstein, Jus und Historie. 161 See Tholuck, Das akademische Leben des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts (Halle, 1854), i. 260 V. 162 See Adolf Harnack, ‘Das geistige und wissenschaftliche Leben in Brandenburg-Preußen um das Jahr 1700’, Hohenzollern-Jahrbuch 4 (1900): 170 V. On the Edict of Potsdam, see Christiane Eifert, Als die Hugenotten kamen: Das Potsdamer Edikt des Grossen Kurfu¨rsten (Berlin: Presse- und Informationsamt des Landes Berlin, 1985). 163 A. H. Niemeyer, Die Universita¨t Halle nach ihrem EinXuß auf gelehrte und praktische Theologie (Halle, 1817), p. xxvi.

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both of whom earlier had fallen foul of authorities at Leipzig. As one of Thomasius’s Wrst acts in his new city, he had given a public speech in praise of the Elector’s tolerant religious policies, extolling interconfessional harmony between Lutherans and Calvinists. This endeared him to the court in Berlin and to the crown’s regional oYcials in Magdeburg, while it provoked opposition from the Lutheran church and the city authorities, who accused Thomasius of ‘syncretism’ and ‘indiVerentism’. But ecclesiastical and local interests would be no match for an absolutist state. The king and his advisers recognized that their own policies shared common cause with Thomasius’s views on tolerance and also with the pietist religiosity of Francke, which, however devout, soft-pedalled strict confessional allegiances.164 For their part, Thomasius and Francke welcomed powerful allies in Berlin.165 Out of this recognition of mutual interests the idea of a university took shape. In 1692, Paul von Fuchs, the Elector’s minister for religious and academic aVairs and a convert to the Reformed faith, proposed that a university be formally erected in Halle with all traditional legal privileges and autonomy. Through these privileges, Fuchs reasoned, the university could gain a measure of independence from the rigidly Lutheran local authorities in Halle and also counteract the inXuence of nearby Leipzig and Wittenberg.166 Oddly then, Fuchs recognized that in order to achieve ‘modern’ university reforms, the crown must invoke the age-old medieval privileges of the university and set them against the entrenched local forces of Lutheran orthodoxy.167 The state, in other words, had to creatively marshal one form of tradition against another in order to achieve its own (moderately) progressive aims. 164 Holloran, ‘Professors of Enlightenment’, 90 V. 165 Located in Berlin at the time were two strong advocates of the new university: the pietist Philipp Jakob Spener (1635–1705) and the political and legal theorist Samuel Pufendorf (1632– 94). Both men had the ear of the Elector. Francke’s mentor Spener served at Berlin’s Church of St Nikolaus. Thomasius’s ally Pufendorf served from 1688 as court historian, court secretary, judicial council, and privy councilor. The behind-the-scenes actions of these men played no small role in the establishment of the University of Halle. For more, see Holloran, ‘Professors of Enlightenment’, 30–89, 100–5. 166 During the time of Halle’s founding, the Duchy of Magdeburg was perhaps the most confessionally Lutheran area of Prussia. Confessional rivalries were heating up in the late seventeenth century, moreover, as a consequence of the inXux of Reformed Huguenots after 1685. 167 An ‘ad hoc university’ had been functioning largely through Thomasius’s eVorts since 1690. Impressed by the students Thomasius was able to attract, the Elector voiced support for a university as early as June of 1691. It was Fuchs’s desire to gain greater legal security for these measures. To do so, he had the weight of local precedence on his side. In 1531, Kurfu¨rst and Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg, who served as the archbishop of Magdeburg, had intended to found a university in Halle to check support of the Reformation at the neighboring universities of Leipzig and Wittenberg. He had even sought papal and imperial charters. However, because of a shortage of funds his eVorts came to naught at this time. See Holloran, ‘Professors of Enlightenment’, 90 V.

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From the time of Fuchs’s proposal in 1692, the existence of a new university depended only on working out the details and procuring funding. In June of the same year, the crown issued three edicts: the Wrst granting the university the use of two buildings in Halle, the second increasing its annual budget, and the third laying out a number of rights and privileges accorded to members of the incipient academic community. This latter edict created a legal arrangement that freed professors and staV alike from a number of local taxes, duties, and regulations, and placed the community directly under the authority of the crown and its appointed curators of the university. In this way, the crown had eVectively created a ‘space’ of enlightened religious policy (and centralized political power) that would serve as a counterweight to the region’s confessionalism. Future civil servants and pastors educated at Halle, the crown reasoned, would now have an opportunity to spread enlightenment and further diminish confessional passions. With such idealistic and selfserving hopes, the university was formally inaugurated on 12 July 1694, the Elector’s birthday.168 To drive home the message of confessional tolerance (and the union of state and university, might and mind) a medallion of Mars and Minerva shaking hands was minted for the occasion.169 State patronage was not forgotten some seventeen years later when the Elector, now holding the title of the Prussian king, returned to the city. For the occasion, the then rector, Nicholas Gundling, gave a memorable address, ‘De libertate Fridericianae’, praising the king for esteeming and protecting ‘Lehrfreiheit’ and ‘Lernfreiheit’.170 SigniWcantly, the political circumstances of Halle’s founding were not lost on supporters of the Kulturstaat ideal during Germany’s post1871 Empire; Halle’s establishment, one imperial-era scholar wrote, ‘symbolized the alliance of the Prussian state with the powers of intellectual progress—an alliance which was contracted with a clear consciousness of its general signiWcance.’171 Because divisive bickering often plagued universities, Halle’s initial statutes were drawn up to promote tolerance and lessen polemics—those of the confessional variety, but also those that characterized interactions across the faculties.172 Indeed, the very Wrst statute of the university explicitly called for 168 Prior to this, in October of 1693, an imperial charter for the university had been obtained from Kaiser Leopold I. 169 Holloran, ‘Professors of Enlightenment’, 123. 170 The title of the address, which helped establish Halle’s reputation as a source of modern academic freedom, was ‘De libertate Fridericianae: die Friedrichsuniversita¨t das atrium libertatis. Was ist die Aufgabe der Universita¨t?’ The address was given on 12 July 1711. Noted in Fallon, The German University, 112. 171 Paulsen, German Education Past and Present, trans. T. Lorenz (London, 1908), 120. 172 The general statutes and those of the individual faculties at Halle are found in Schrader, Geschichte der Friedrichs-Universita¨t zu Halle, ii. Anlage 9.

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the four faculties to live in harmony with one another and stipulated that no faculty attempt to suppress another.173 Each faculty was supposed to concern itself only with matters appropriate to it; therefore, a law professor should not venture into theology or vice versa.174 Yet within the individual faculties, the statutes granted more teaching freedom, allowing the professor to teach in any area of his faculty, so long as he not neglect courses pertaining to his particular competency.175 At Halle, the theological faculty was still regarded as the ‘Wrst’ faculty, but this was largely a titular designation. The dean of the theological faculty could still inhibit the publication of books with questionable religious content, but otherwise his power and that of the faculty as a whole were diminished.176 Theologians were admonished not to polemicize openly against their colleagues. All complaints concerning doctrine were supposed to be directed, in person, through the appropriate, oYcial channels: respectively to the prorector of the university, to the university senate, to the curators of the university, and, Wnally, to the Elector himself. Religious controversies were to be handled similarly: theologians were not given the right to take matters into their own hands.177 While an oath of confessional loyalty was still required, as at all German universities, Halle’s was comparatively mild. Members of the theological faculty had to be Lutheran and subscribe to the Bible and the Augsburg Confession.178 Other faculties had to agree not to teach against these documents, and they could therefore in principle have a non-Lutheran background.179 Moreover, as Notker Hammerstein has observed, the wording and tone of Halle’s statutes placed a premium on ethical and exemplary behaviour above overtly doctrinal concerns.180 Overall, then, it is fair to generalize that the statutes of Halle were written with the goal of establishing a state-serving, less confessional, if still recognizably Lutheran university.181 173 Halle’s General Statutes § 1. 174 Ibid. § 5. 175 Holloran, ‘Professors of Enlightenment’, 129–30. 176 Halle’s General Statutes § 5. 177 Holloran, ‘Professors of Enlightenment’, 131–2. 178 See ‘Statuta Facultatis Theologicae’, in Schrader, Geschichte der Universita¨t Halle, ii. 399 V. The theological statutes were drawn up under the supervision of J. J. Breithaupt (1638–1732). On Breithaupt, who came from Erfurt on the recommendation of Spener, see Heinrich Doering, Die gelehrten Theologen Deutschlands im achzehnten und neunzehnten Jahrhundert: nach ihrem Leben und Wirken dargestellt (Neutstadt, 1833), i. 159–60. 179 It is important to keep in mind that a primary reason for Halle’s Lutheran character was to create an incentive for Lutheran students in Brandenburg not to attend Leipzig or Wittenberg. 180 Hammerstein, Jus und Historie, 160–1. 181 Holloran nicely sums up: ‘At virtually every point, the framers of the university sought to institutionalize cooperation and good behavior. The oYcial university policy was to keep

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The appointment of Halle’s initial professors also reXects the reconciliation politics of the crown: many of the leading professors deliberately distanced themselves from the reigning confessionalism and scholasticism of the day (if often for diVerent reasons) and, ipso facto, from the academic climate prevalent throughout Germany.182 This point is important because it was perhaps the intellectual proclivities of (and, alas, conXicts among) the ‘star’ faculty, more so than innovations in the statutes, that account for Halle’s incipient modernity.183 The leading light in the theological faculty became the inXuential pietist theologian A. H. Francke, who came to Halle after clashing with authorities at the University of Leipzig and at the Saxon court in Dresden. Appointed at Halle in the early 1690s, Francke laboured with his colleagues, Paul Anton and Joachim Justus Breithaupt, to make the theological faculty a centre for the supraconfessional, practically oriented spirit of pietism in contrast to what he perceived as the sterile and polemical nature of Lutheran orthodoxy, epitomized by the theological faculties at Leipzig and Wittenberg.184 In several works of theological pedagogy—such as his Idea studiosi theologiae (1712) and Methodus studii theologici (1723), which grew out of classroom lectures— Francke sought to transform theological education from past confessionalscholastic emphases to ones that accentuated the cultivation of personal piety (Fro¨mmigkeit) and righteousness (Gottseligkeit), bearing fruit in purposeful Christian action. In Francke’s view, right theology began with the heart, not the head: ‘In a student of theology, one seeks Wrst and above all else someone who has an upright heart before God.’185 To achieve this upright heart among theological students, Francke emphasized Luther’s more existential, hortatory conception of theology as a matter of oratio, meditatio, and tentatio.186 For Francke, genuine theological study opposing sides in their separate corners as far as possible. The hope was that if they redesigned the statutes they could eVectively eliminate familiar avenues of controversy and thereby educate a new generation of students in an atmosphere less marred by polemics.’ See Holloran, ‘Professors of Enlightenment’, 133. 182 Schrader, Geschichte der Friedrichs-Universita¨t zu Halle, i. 19. 183 Bornhak, Geschichte der preussischen Universita¨tsverwaltung, 60. 184 Francke’s initial appointment was to teach Greek and Hebrew in the philosophical faculty; he switched in 1699 to theology. From Berlin, Spener played a decisive role in the make-up of the theological faculty. See Niemeyer, Die Universita¨t Halle nach ihrem EinXuß auf gelehrte und praktische Theologie, p. xxvii. 185 Idea studiosi Theologiae (1712), in A. H. Francke, Werke in Auswahl, ed. Erhard Peschke (Witten-Ruhr: Luther, 1970), 172. Francke’s views on theological education are extensively treated in Kang, Fro¨mmigkeit und Gelehrsamkeit, 330–424. 186 Erhard Peschke, Studien zur Theologie August Hermann Franckes (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1966), ii. 135. I should qualify this statement, however, by noting that many seventeenth-century representatives of Lutheran orthodoxy also invoked Luther’s formula for

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was thus not ‘only the outward knowledge of theology . . . [but] the cultivation of the heart’: prayer, Bible reading, heartfelt repentance, and daily introspection were the true foundations of theology, not intellectual sophistication and doctrinal wrangling.187 Furthermore, piety was not something obtained in isolation; rather, its pursuit should motivate one to love one’s neighbour and thereby improve society through practical acts of charity. Therefore, like P. J. Spener, a favourite of the Hohenzollern crown and the author of the inXuential Pia desideria (1675), Francke emphasized practical theology— pastoral care, catechesis, homiletics, missions—often at the expense of other branches of theology.188 One would be hard pressed to accuse Francke of not practising what he preached: he founded at Halle a range of practical institutions: an orphanage, a poor-school, a ‘Paedagogium’ or secondary school, a publishing house, and a dispensary. These institutions—or the ‘Franckesche Stiftungen’ as they came collectively to be called—combined with Francke’s own activity as professor of theology made Halle into the leading bastion of German pietism in the early eighteenth century, drawing theology students from across central Europe. From Halle, pietism’s ‘supraconfessional element’ and ‘ecumenical tendency’ precipitated a more general ‘weakening of confessional consciousness’.189 Francke’s inXuence at Halle was, paradoxically, both abetted and mitigated by two other brilliant and industrious professors of a decidedly less pious cast of mind: the aforementioned Christian Thomasius and his younger, wellknown colleague, Christian WolV (1679–1754). Admonished in Leipzig for insisting on lecturing in German instead of Latin, Thomasius wound up in theological study. This has led some to downplay what others regard as the revolutionary character of Francke’s approach to theological study. See Kang, Fro¨mmigkeit und Gelehrsamkeit, 71 V. 187 Peschke, Studien zur Theologie August Hermann Franckes, ii. 130, 150. In his Methodus studii theologici (1723), Francke deWned theology straightforwardly: ‘Studium Theologicum est cultura animi’, theological study is the nurturing of the heart or spirit. It would be wrong, however, to judge Francke as anti-intellectual. He thought ignorance a tool of the devil and he insisted that students immerse themselves in learning Greek and Hebrew. Still, his emphasis on inner piety and charitable practice tended to promote, in the words of Peschke, a ‘grundlegende Unterscheidung zwischen der Fro¨mmigkeit und der Wissenschaft’ and often an ‘Abwertung des Wissens’. See Peschke, Studien zur Theologie August Hermann Franckes, ii. 135–7. To achieve pious introspection, Francke had his students keep a daily journal to mark their spiritual progress. See ibid. 179–80. 188 Ibid. 162 V., 206–18. 189 Ibid. 162 V., 222–3. On Francke and pietism more generally, see Carl Hinrichs, Preussentum und Pietismus (Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971), and Richard Gawthrop, Pietism and the Making of Eighteenth-Century Prussia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). On the historical signiWcance of pietist religiosity as an agent of modernization, see Hajo Holborn, A History of Modern Germany: 1648–1840 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), i. 142–4.

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Halle in the early 1690s and became, even more so than Francke, the intellectual cornerstone of the new university. Pugnacious, urbane, and witty, a lover of French courtly life, he set as his goal ‘to advance the worldly practical purposes of men for the beneWt of society’.190 By challenging established university customs and popular beliefs such as witchcraft, he gained a large and enthusiastic student following. He lampooned many claims of Lutheran orthodoxy and the practices of scholasticism, and in their place championed an enlightened doctrine of natural law, mediated to him through the legal and political works of Samuel Pufendorf and Hugo Grotius. He consequently instigated a shift in the teaching of jurisprudence that would be felt for years to come and inXuence countless members of Prussia’s future civil service.191 For his clarity and wit, often exhibited in provocative vernacular titles, he was dubbed by his students the ‘oppressor of pedantry’. Because his viewpoints and student following came to diVer so sharply from those of Francke, Halle quickly gained the reputation of having a divided character; secular in some respects, deeply religious in others, oscillating between two of the major currents of the eighteenth century—Aufkla¨rung (Thomasius) and Pietismus (Francke). This reality is nicely captured in a popular student saying from the period: ‘Halam tendis? aut pietista aut atheista reversurus!’ (‘So you’re going to Halle? You’ll return either a pietist or an atheist!’).192 In point of fact, however, it is just as likely that the ‘atheist’ in this epigram might call to some students’ minds the teachings of Christian WolV, whose career at Halle oVers a revealing window into eighteenth-century university aVairs, especially on the shifting fortunes of the theological and philosophical faculties. The dramatic story of WolV is fairly well known. He studied mathematics and theology at Jena, before teaching at Leipzig as a lecturer. He came to Halle in 1706 to teach mathematics largely because of a recommendation from Leibniz, with whom he had established a correspondence. At Halle he embarked on an ambitious teaching and publishing career; like Melanchthon before him, he widened his purview to cover practically every topic within the philosophical faculty. His copious publications, especially on natural scientiWc and mathematical matters, greatly stimulated what later 190 Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), 17. 191 Schrader, Geschichte der Friedrichs-Universita¨t zu Halle, i. 146 V. For a later eighteenthcentury attestation of the acclaim of legal studies at Halle, see Michaelis, Raisonnement u¨ber die protestantischen Universita¨ten in Deutschland, i. 87. 192 Paulsen, Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts, i. 537–9. See also the discussion of Thomasius in Hammerstein, Jus und Historie, 43–147. Relations between Thomasius and Francke were at Wrst quite cordial; they were drawn together by the fact that they both had been persecuted by authorities at Leipzig. However, theological and personal diVerences eventually drove a wedge between them in the years following the founding of Halle.

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would be distinguished as the Naturwissenschaften. Simultaneously, he worked out the so-called ‘WolYan system’, a comprehensive, critical philosophy that systematized the views of Leibniz and demonstrated great conWdence in human beings’ rational capacities to arrive at truth and ethical judgement apart from revelation and deference to customary authorities. Eventually, this system would have a considerable impact on the content of university instruction throughout Germany, inXuencing numerous eighteenth-century students, not the least of whom was Immanuel Kant.193 But for WolV, infamy came before fame. Because he appealed to human reason functioning independent of traditional authorities and rejected the lingering medieval conception of philosophy as propaedeutic, he found himself in heated conXict with pietists, such as Francke, and more traditional Lutherans, who accused him of ‘fatalism’ and ‘determinism’. Convinced that WolV’s philosophy posed a threat to Halle’s theology students, Francke and his circle petitioned Friedrich Wilhelm I to expel WolV from Halle. The king complied and in 1723 WolV was told that because his lectures ‘contradicted revealed religion’ he had ‘forty-eight hours notice to leave the city of Halle . . . or face the punishment of the halter’.194 What is more, his teachings were banned throughout Prussia and his most devoted followers were regularly monitored and interrogated; several even lost their teachings posts. Fortunately for WolV, the University of Marburg in Hesse, which at this time had achieved a measure of openness, took in this troublemaker from Prussia. WolV’s expulsion caused Francke to rejoice, believing that his prayers had been answered, the ‘great power of darkness’ overcome. Several theological faculties throughout Germany voiced their approval of the king’s action. The faculty at Tu¨bingen, for example, produced a memorandum, making clear that the principles of WolYan philosophy were fundamentally incompatible with theology. Jena’s faculty penned a similar document, which, in twenty-nine points, sought to refute WolYanism and castigated young lecturers for sympathizing with this ‘notorious’ and ‘injurious’ philosophy.195 But in the long run, the commotion over WolV’s expulsion probably only contributed to his inXuence and renown. Not only was he able to continue and extend his sphere of inXuence while teaching at Marburg, but in 1740 the ‘enlightened despot’ Friedrich the Great, having just acceded to the Prussian 193 On WolYan philosophy generally, see the helpful essays in Werner Schneiders (ed.), Christian WolV, 1679–1754: Interpretationen zu seiner Philosophie und deren Wirkung mit einer Bibliographie der WolV-Literatur (Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1983). 194 The letter of the king is appended in Schrader, Geschichte der Friedrichs-Universita¨t zu Halle, ii. 459. 195 Paulsen, Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts, i. 540 V., and Niemeyer, Die Universita¨t Halle nach ihrem EinXuß auf gelehrte und praktische Theologie, pp. lx V.

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throne, asked WolV to return to Halle. WolV obliged and was greeted with great fanfare upon his return by his admirers, who had grown in number and who hailed his return as a victory for freedom of enquiry and tolerance over religious dogma, and a step in the establishment of this enlightened principle for all German universities. Many commentators have tended to reXect the judgement of WolV’s admirers, interpreting the WolV aVair and what it meant for the University of Halle as a dramatic stand-oV between the forces of ‘tradition’ and those of ‘modernity’, in which the former triumphed brieXy only to lose out to the inexorable forces of the latter. Paulsen has written, for example, that the episode was ultimately about ‘the conXict between two principles: the principle of authority, which up until this point dominated all university instruction, and the principle of free inquiry’.196 While many considerations might suggest this interpretation, one should guard against reading too much into the WolV aVair. One should keep in mind that neither WolV nor, more generally, the trajectory of the University of Halle after his readmission, fundamentally altered the constitution of universities; dire criticism of the outmoded, ‘medieval’ shape of universities, including Halle, persisted throughout the century.197 Furthermore, while theological authority was arguably diluted because of WolV’s readmission, this was certainly not an event that took place in the absence of any ‘principle of authority’, to use Paulsen’s phrase. In a fact, a very powerful political authority in the person of Friedrich the Great exercised extensive authority in allowing WolV to return to Halle. A bipolar conXict between authority and free enquiry, therefore, is rather overdrawn. Even so, one must admit that the WolV aVair, like the more famous Galileo aVair a century earlier, became, in the minds of supporters of the Enlightenment, a cause ce´le`bre and a metaphor of the changing times. It is also diYcult to deny that the gradual inXuence of the WolYan system—which in Prussia coincided with the enlightened religious policies of Friedrich the Great—did confer more prestige on the philosophical faculty throughout German universities; for WolV insistently rejected the dependence of philosophy upon theology, arguing instead that the intellectual currency of the philosophical faculty, human reason (Vernunft), must be that of the higher faculties as well. He also contributed to a developing discourse on academic freedom, writing a short essay on the subject while at Marburg. SigniWcantly though, he made clear in this essay that ‘the sovereign’ (Oberherr) had the right to curtail academic freedom in the name of law and order. Professors themselves (and 196 Paulsen, Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts, i. 528. 197 Notker Hammerstein, ‘Christian WolV und die Universita¨ten: Zur Wirkungsgeschichte des WolYanismus im 18.Jahrhundert’, in Schneiders (ed.), Christian WolV, 267–8.

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one presumes he had theological faculties particularly in mind) should under no condition devise arbitrary restrictions. ‘Professors do damage to academic freedom’, he wrote, ‘when they presume in their own power to restrict academic freedom without receiving the authority to do so from the court (ohne daß sie vom Hofe dazu bevollma¨chtiget sind).’198 The parameters of academic freedom, in other words, should be deWned by the state, not by the traditional corporative privileges of the faculties. Whatever the actual state of these privileges at mid-century, the winds of change were also apparent. If philosophy previously stood under the dogmatic surveillance of theology, from roughly 1740 onwards theology—or at least inXuential and progressive quarters of it—began to reXect the shifting moods of the philosophical environment—whether it be WolYan or, in the future, Kantian and Hegelian.199 Improbably, Halle’s own theological faculty, Wrmly pietist in the Wrst half of the eighteenth century, led the way and became a leading centre of what was often labelled ‘rationalism’ (Rationalismus) or ‘neology’ (Neologie) in the late eighteenth century.200 A number of factors account for this unexpected turn of events: the ebbing of Francke’s inXuence after his death in 1727; the royal legitimation of WolYan philosophy after 1740; the general religious climate in Prussia under Friedrich the Great and his liberal minister, K. A. Freiherr von Zedlitz;201 the ‘enlightened’ tendency within pietism itself to validate subjective religious experience over traditional authorities; and, as consequence of the foregoing, the drift of individual faculty members towards latitudinarian and even deistic religious sensibilities, and a concomitant more critical approach to Scripture and church doctrine. Interestingly, theologians at Halle (and this is true for many late eighteenth-century, non-orthodox theologians) often based progressive inclinations on a rather conservative-sounding argument: they claimed that they were only carrying forward the torch of the Reformation, which had employed critical enquiry against an accretion of misguided scriptural interpretations. Halle’s pedagogical seminar, which functioned in conjunction with the theological faculty, became a seat of the new criticism. 198 WolV, ‘Von der rechten Erka¨nntniß der academischen Freyheit’, in Gesammelte Werke, ser. I, vol. 22, ed. J. Ecole, H. W. Arndt, et al. (Hildesheim: Olms, 1983), 456–70. 199 Paulsen, Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts, i. 542. 200 Although these labels, rationalism and neology, were often used in a vague and polemical manner, they generally designated a shift from a confessional orientation in theology to (a) greater conWdence in human reason in theological understanding, (b) more attention to the historical contexts and construction of canonical biblical texts, and/or (c) greater willingness to apply discriminating critical thought to conventional religious practices and popular beliefs such as demon possession and witchcraft. 201 On Zedlitz, who admired WolV greatly, see Peter Baumgart, ‘Karl Abraham Freiherr von Zedlitz’, in Treue and Gru¨nder (eds.), Wissenschaftspolitik in Berlin, 33–46.

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Founded under the auspices of Francke to train pastors and teachers in Hebrew and Greek, the seminar experienced a shift in its ethos from one of devotional pietism to one of more free-ranging philological enquiry. This seminar in turn served as a prototype of seminars founded later at Go¨ttingen and Berlin, and propagated ardently at other universities by educational ministers and faculty in the nineteenth century under a more decidedly wissenschaftlich intellectual environment.202 In Halle’s theological faculty, one sees the drift toward rationalism and a freer biblical criticism in the career of Sigmund Jacob Baumgarten (1706–57), an important though often overlooked juste-milieu Wgure, who managed to bridge theological conservatism, characteristic of Lutheranism and pietism, with an incipient rationalism. InXuenced by both the philosophy of WolV, English Deism, and the French Enlightenment, Baumgarten argued that truths in theology could not be contradicted by natural or philosophical knowledge (quicquid verum est in philosophia, verum etiam est in theologia). In biblical exegesis, he also adumbrated a consequential distinction between the literal word and the general subject matter of Scripture and identiWed God’s revelation with the latter not the former. His lectures, which prioritized the critical over the edifying, were attended by hundreds of students, including many of the important late eighteenth-century Wgures associated with ‘rationalism’ and ‘neology’.203 Baumgarten’s best-known pupil, the biblical critic and church historian J. S. Semler (1725–91), remained and taught at Halle from 1753 to 1791.204 More so than those of his mentor, Semler’s scholarship, teaching, and inXuence earned Halle its reputation as the leading centre of ‘rationalism’—even if Semler himself did not appreciate the label as he held traditional supernaturalist views on a number of key doctrines. Nonetheless, Semler brought an Enlightenment-derived view of reason to bear on the practice of biblical 202 On Halle’s seminar, see Adolf Wuttke, Zur Geschichte des theologischen Seminars der Universita¨t Halle. Aus den Acten des Faculta¨tsarchivs (Halle, 1869). On the history of the university seminar in general, see Wilhelm Erben, ‘Die Entstehung der Universita¨ts-Seminare’, Internationale Monatsschrift fu¨r Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik, 7 (1913): 1248–64, and William Clark, ‘On the Dialectical Origins of the Research Seminar’, History of Science 17 (1989): 113–54. 203 Hans Frei identiWes Baumgarten as the ‘harbinger of a new day’ in German theology and biblical hermeneutics. See Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 88 V. See also Emmanuel Hirsch, Geschichte der neuern evangelischen Theologie (Gu¨tersloh: C. Bertelsmann, 1951), ii. 370–88, and Schrader, Geschichte der Friedrichs-Universita¨t zu Halle, i. 291 V. The best single study of Baumgarten is Martin Schloemann, Sigmund Jacob Baumgarten: System und ¨ berganges zum Neuprotestantismus (Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Geschichte der Theologie des U Ruprecht, 1974). 204 Actually, Semler taught at the small Franconian university of Altdorf between 1750 and 1753 before returning to Halle. Details on Baumgarten’s inXuence on Semler are found in Semler’s autobiography. See J. S. Semler, Lebensbeschreibung, 2 vols. (Halle, 1781–2).

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interpretation, and became the Wrst major German critic to apply historicalcritical methods to the study of the biblical canon—most notably in his Abhandlung von freier Untersuchung des Kanons (Halle, 1771–5)—and thereby he laid the basis for the priority of historical exegesis over dogma, the hallmark of later, nineteenth-century historicist biblical interpretation.205 Semler also challenged many popular beliefs, castigating, for example, belief in demon possession and the rite of exorcism in his De daemonicis quoroum in Evangeliis fuit mentio (1760).206 Finally, Semler left his mark on theological pedagogy: his Versuch einer na¨hern Anleitung zu nu¨tzlichem Fleisse in der ganzen Gottesgelehrsamkeit fu¨r angehende Studiosos Theologiae (1757) presented a programme of theological study that starkly contrasted with that of his pietist predecessors and colleagues. Emphasizing mastery of ancient languages above all else, he saw ‘the task of academic theology not in religious ediWcation or instruction in piety, but in the scholarly education of future teachers and pastors’.207 By century’s end, hundreds of the some 6,000 clerical posts in Prussia were staVed by men who had sat in the ‘enlightened’ lecture halls of Semler.208 Liberal theologians of the nineteenth century regularly singled out Semler as the transitional Wgure from the ‘Old Protestantism’ to the ‘New Protestantism’ of the post-Enlightenment age.209 Semler taught with and was succeeded by two lesser-known but nonetheless signiWcant theologians: J. A. No¨sselt (1734–1807) and A. H. Niemeyer (1754–1828). Of the two, No¨sselt’s star shone more brightly. A student of Baumgarten and Semler and one familiar with many writings of the Enlightenment, No¨sselt bordered on a purely moral interpretation of Christianity—a position not unlike that of his contemporary Immanuel Kant. His erudition won him invitations to teach at numerous universities, all of which he turned all down, because, revealingly, he felt that only in Halle could he ‘teach my views and conscience in full freedom’.210 No¨sselt’s three-volume Anweisung 205 Frei, Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, 111 V. 206 This work was occasioned by an actual episode when a young woman in Kemberg, a town near Halle, claimed to be possessed by the devil. See Schrader, Geschichte der FriedrichsUniversita¨t zu Halle, i. 295–6. 207 Gottfried Hornig, ‘Johann Salomo Semler’, in Martin Greschat (ed.), Gestalten der Kirchengeschichte (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1983), viii. 272–3. 208 Halle came to draw more theology students than all the other Prussian universities combined. See Henri Brunschwig, Enlightenment and Romanticism in Eighteenth-Century Prussia, trans. Frank Jellinek (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 169–70. For further reXections on both Baumgarten and Semler and their importance at Halle, see Niemeyer, Die Universita¨t Halle nach ihrem EinXuß auf gelehrte und praktische Theologie, pp. lxx V. I should also note a dissertation in progress by Eric Carlsson, ‘Johann Salomo Semler, the German Enlightenment, and Protestant Theology’s Historical Turn’ (University of Wisconsin-Madison). ¨ ber Religion und Theologie (Berlin, 1815), 118 V. 209 e.g. see W. M. L. de Wette, U 210 Quoted in Ernest Barnikol, ‘Johann August No¨sselt 1734–1807’, in 250 Jahre Universita¨t Halle: Streifzu¨ge durch ihre Geschichte in Forschung und Lehre (Halle, 1944).

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zur Bildung angehender Theologen (1786–9) is especially noteworthy for our purposes.211 In one sense, this pedagogical work is a descendent of Melanchthon’s Loci communes, a straightforward overview of theology for the beginning student. But in another sense, it bears witness, even more so than Semler’s aforementioned Anleitung, to an ever-widening gulf between the eighteenth-century concerns and Melanchthon’s world. Following Baumgarten and Semler, No¨sselt set out with the premise that valid theological knowledge accorded with knowledge derived from nature. He praised the great strides that had been made in ‘wissenschaftliche Philosophie’, calling philosophy the ‘Grundwissenschaft’.212 For him, the aim of theology was not primarily Gottseligkeit, as it was for Spener and Francke, nor the articulation and defence of doctrinal verities (i.e. Lutheran scholasticism). Rather, No¨sselt deWned theology as the ‘scholarly knowledge of religion’ and divided it into various ‘theological sciences’. In doing so, No¨sselt too represents an important transitional Wgure in theological education. His Anweisung became among the most widely used introductory texts of the late eighteenth century; it anticipates the ‘theological encyclopedia’ of the post-Schleiermacher period, which shall be discussed at a later point.213 The cumulative inXuence of Baumgarten, Semler, No¨sselt, Niemeyer, and other lesser lights secured Halle’s reputation as having one of the most Enlightenment-inXuenced theological faculties in Germany—a reputation it would carry well into the nineteenth century.214 Perhaps nothing bears witness to this more evidently than a conXict that erupted at century’s end between the theological faculty and the new Prussian minister, Johann Christoph Wo¨llner (1732–1800). In 1788, a year after the accession to the throne of Friedrich Wilhelm II, Wo¨llner, a member of the Rosicrucian order and himself a former theology student at Halle, was made Minister of Justice, a position which involved supervision of the state’s Department of Religious AVairs.215 On 9 July 1788, he issued his infamous Religionsedikt, an edict which eVectively dismantled the permissive religious policies of Friedrich II and his minister Zedlitz in favour of a state-sponsored eVort to bolster the Christian faith ‘in its original purity . . . and to protect it from all 211 J. A. No¨sselt, Anweisung zur Bildung angehender Theologen, 3 vols. (Halle, 1786–9). 212 Quoted in Schrader, Geschichte der Friedrichs-Universita¨t zu Halle, i. 483. 213 Farley, Theologia, 56 V. No¨sselt also published a comprehensive and widely consulted guide to theological literature entitled Anweisung zur Kenntniss der besten allgemeinen Bu¨cher in allen Theilen der Theologie (Halle, 1790). 214 In 1817, on the occasion of the tricentennial of the Reformation, Niemeyer compared Halle to Wittenberg, suggesting that both had given birth to ‘a new order of things’ in matters theological. Niemeyer, Die Universita¨t Halle nach ihrem EinXuß auf gelehrte und praktische Theologie, p. v. 215 On Wo¨llner, see ADB xliv. 148–59.

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falsehoods’.216 He followed this with a censorship edict, promulgated on 19 December 1788, requiring that all books on God, the state, or morality receive approval from government censors. To enforce these measures and to oversee the implementation of a new orthodox Landeskatechismus issued in 1792, Wo¨llner established an examination and visitation commission to survey all Prussian parishes and educational institutions, including universities.217 Perturbed that his alma mater had become a ‘seedbed of irreligious clergymen’, he turned a critical eye toward Halle’s theological faculty and ordered that the faculty produce a manual on dogma, demonstrating their orthodoxy and repudiating the religious novelties of the day (Neologie). He castigated No¨sselt and Niemeyer in particular for heterodox tendencies. The two took oVence; Niemeyer even travelled to Berlin to try to discuss the matter with Wo¨llner, but was denied a hearing.218 A few years passed before Wo¨llner—whose reactionary impulses had been strengthened by the anticlerical turn of the French Revolution—expressed dissatisfaction with the weak response of Halle’s theological faculty to his charges. On 3 April 1794, basing his action on reports of the faculty’s persistent ‘irreligiosity and radicalism’, he issued a blunt letter to No¨sselt and Niemeyer, asking them to desist from heresy, noting that radical (neologische) principles are still being expressed in your dogmatic lectures, because of which your listeners and colleagues are being confused and led astray from knowledge of the true Christian doctrine of faith. So hereby consider yourselves seriously admonished to turn [from your former practices] and adopt a diVerent manner of teaching, one in which young theologians and future instructors of the people (ku¨nftige Volkslehrer) can learn pure dogmatic teaching according to the Bible and the revealed Word of God. If you fail to do this, you have yourselves to blame, when . . . you Wnd yourselves facing . . . proceedings of dismissal.219

In a subsequent letter, Wo¨llner warned that the king would no longer tolerate the theologians’ ‘wrongheadedness’ (Unwesen) and he even oVered corrective pointers in biblical exegesis, forbidding them, for example, from regarding demon possessions in the New Testament as mere instances of epilepsy.220 In the summer of 1794 Wo¨llner followed up his letters by sending delegates from the examination and visitation commission (J. T. Hermes and G. F. 216 For the relevant pargraphs of the Edikt, see Schrader, Geschichte der Friedrichs-Universita¨t zu Halle, i. 532–3, n. 53. 217 Johann Karl Bullman, Denkwu¨rdige Zeitperioden der Universita¨t Halle (Halle, 1833), 45–6. 218 Schrader, Geschichte der Friedrichs-Universita¨t zu Halle, i. 519. 219 The letter from Wo¨llner is provided in A. H. Niemeyer, Leben und Charakter und Verdienste Johann August No¨sselts nebst einer Sammlung einiger zum Theil ungedruckten Aufsa¨tze, Briefe und Fragmente (Halle, 1809). 220 Schrader, Geschichte der Friedrichs-Universita¨t zu Halle, ii. 481–5.

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Hillmer) to Halle to assess matters Wrst-hand. Upon their arrival, however, they were accosted and harassed by masked students sympathetic to No¨sselt and Niemeyer. Shaken by the incident, they aborted their trip, returned to Berlin, and reported the matter to Wo¨llner, who became predictably enraged, suspecting that No¨sselt or Niemeyer or some other faculty member had put the students up to their action or at least had condoned it. A formal investigation to determine the instigator was launched, but this proved inconclusive—and had the unfortunate eVect of preventing the university from celebrating its Wrst centennial in 1794. At this point there followed a series of harsh letters from Wo¨llner and the commission, reprimanding the professors for deWance. These letters were met with replies from the theological faculty, denying the charges, pleading for academic freedom, and requesting a more impartial judge. In the end, little came of the whole ordeal, and no professor was dismissed as Wo¨llner had threatened. In large measure, this was because the king had responded favourably, at the height of the meˆle´e, to a letter sent him by Niemeyer, in which the theologian had explained his views. It appears that the king’s response, although no endorsement of Niemeyer, nonetheless tempered Wo¨llner’s inquisitorial actions. Still, tensions remained high between the government and Halle’s theological faculty for some time. Only the death of the king in 1797 and the subsequent dismissal of Wo¨llner in 1798 by the new royal power, Friedrich Wilhelm III (r. 1797–1840), brought an end to the conXict. Although deeply religious, the new king did not share Wo¨llner’s suspicions of Halle and was unwilling to continue his coercive methods.221 Among other things, this episode illustrates the threat that Halle’s theological faculty, despite its pietist beginnings, posed to the conservative religious imagination in the late eighteenth century. Warnings against ‘Hallesche Rationalismus’ became a refrain from many conservative clergymen during this period. Not surprisingly, Wo¨llner’s actions had the general eVect of dampening student interest in theology: matriculation rates in theology, at Halle and other Prussian universities, fell precipitously in the 1790s as students took stock of the politically perilous implications of this career path.222 What is more, the ordeal made clear Wo¨llner’s indelicacy in handling the matter—a trait of his which manifested itself in his treatment of other perceived ‘neologists’ as well. On a broader historical note, some of the most forward-looking and inXuential religious writings of the German Enlightenment—writings consequential, both directly and indirectly, for the future of university 221 Bullman, Denkwu¨rdige Zeitperioden der Universita¨t Halle, 48. 222 On this topic, see Brunschwig, Enlightenment and Romanticism in Eighteenth-Century Prussia, 169–70.

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development—should be interpreted as reactions to Wo¨llner’s 1788 edict and the repressive religious climate it fostered. These writings include a short essay by Wilhelm von Humboldt on religion and its elaboration in his Ideen zu einem Versuch die Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staates zu bestimmen (1792), a remarkably liberal book, later relished by John Stuart Mill, which argued against state involvement in religious and cultural matters. Immanuel Kant’s two most important works on religion, Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft (1793) and Der Streit der Fakulta¨ten (1798) also stem from this period, the latter, examined below, being largely a critique of the theological faculty.223 Given the immediate inXuence and continued signiWcance of these works, one might well argue, in ‘Hegelian’ terms, that the cunning of history employed Wo¨llner for ends quite opposite from his intentions. Roughly a half century before Wo¨llner’s conXict with Halle’s theologians, another university was founded: the Hanoverian University in Go¨ttingen or simply the Georgia Augusta, named after its royal patron, George II. This upstart institution soon rivalled Halle as the most forward-looking, acclaimed, and emulated university in Germany. Indeed, Go¨ttingen emerged as central Europe’s premie`re reform university, the model that many looked to when championing university reform in general. Go¨ttingen’s modernity is attributable to the circumstances of its founding, its statutes, and the progressive scholarly views of its professors, many of whom had previously studied at Halle. While the theological faculty was still symbolically regarded as the Wrst of the higher faculties, its traditional primacy was greatly attenuated at Go¨ttingen, just as the confessional rationale for the university gave way here, more deliberately than had been the case at Halle, to purely secular and statist justiWcations. The law faculty rose greatly in importance, reXecting the administrative and legal needs of an absolutist state.224 Of greater consequence for the future, not least for theology, the philosophical faculty at Go¨ttingen became a much more extensive and multifarious enterprise, anticipating, especially in such Welds as modern history and classical philology, the rapid expansion and specialization that came to aVect nearly all universities in the nineteenth century. What is more, Go¨ttingen’s philosophical faculty openly broke from tradition in the noteworthy respect that many of 223 On the broader political implications of the religious climate in the 1790s, see Frederick C. Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German Political Thought, 1790–1800 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 48–9, 78, 128–30, passim. 224 Wilhelm Ebel, Zur Geschichte der Juristenfakulta¨t und Rechtsstudiums an der Georgia Augusta (Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1960), 9 V., and Hammerstein, Jus und Historie, 315, 331.

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its members habitually lectured on subjects that were hitherto considered the exclusive domain of theology—even on dogmatic theology. From J. D. Michaelis and J. G. Eichhorn, who began this trend in the eighteenth century, to the Old Testament scholar Julius Wellhausen in the nineteenth century, some of Go¨ttingen’s leading theological minds were not institutionally situated in the theological faculty, preferring the critical ethos of the philosophical faculty instead.225 The Georgia Augusta was born from a mixture of envy, ambition, and the practical needs of a modernizing bureaucratic state. The house of Hanover had long been a rival to the Hohenzollerns, but unlike the latter could not boast of quality educational institutions. Its young men regularly went abroad to study, often to the nearby Brunswick-Lu¨neburg university at Helmstedt. In 1732 the privy councilor Johann Daniel Gruber argued that making its best and brightest have to study abroad did not serve the state’s interests, and therefore urged that a Wrst-rate university be founded at home. The king agreed and handed the matter over to Minister Gerlach Adolf von Mu¨nchhausen (1688–1770), the pivotal Wgure in the university’s founding period. Prussian by birth, Mu¨nchhausen had studied law at Halle, Jena, and the Dutch university of Utrecht. In 1727 he had become a member of Hanover’s Privy Council and placed in charge of educational and religious aVairs.226 In founding a university, Mu¨nchhausen faced formidable obstacles. In eVect, he sought to establish an institution that many felt outdated in an age of enlightenment. At Halle, however, Mu¨nchhausen had learned Wrsthand that a university could survive and even thrive if it could provide a more progressive type of education, one attractive to foreign students and one that would lure sons of the nobility from the popular academies (Ritterakademien). Because nobles and the wealthy paid more than poorer local students, Mu¨nchhausen judged it necessary, if the university were to succeed, to attract as many socially distinguished students and foreigners as possible, both to defray the state’s expenses and to increase the prestige of the university. To accomplish this aim, Mu¨nchhausen and his circle of advisers set out to achieve speciWc statutory and curricular reforms to make the new university as appealing as possible to the desired clientele. Oddly then, Go¨ttingen was a modern university because it strove to be an aristocratic university; progressive, 225 To be sure, earlier one can Wnd many individual examples of non-theologians lecturing on theological topics, but at Go¨ttingen this became something of an institutional norm. See Philipp Meyer, ‘Geschichte der Go¨ttinger theologischen Fakulta¨t’, ZGNK 42 (1937): 9 and Rudolf Smend, ‘Johann David Michaelis und Johann Gottfried Eichhorn—zwei Orientalisten am Rande der Theologie,’ in Bernd Moeller (ed.), Theologie in Go¨ttingen (Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984), 58–81. 226 On Mu¨nchhausen’s life, see Walter BuV, Gerlach Adolph Freiherr von Mu¨nchhausen als Gru¨nder der Universita¨t Go¨ttingen (Go¨ttingen, 1937).

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paradoxically, because it sought to woo a class largely associated with political and social reaction. Optimistic that the new university could surmount the challenges of the day, Mu¨nchhausen secured the imperial charter from Charles VI in 1733. The Wrst lectures began in 1734. The university as a whole, ceremoniously inaugurated, began full operations in the fall of 1737, with the king himself assuming the title rector magniWcentissimus.227 From the start, Mu¨nchhausen knew that the role of the theological faculty in the university was a delicate and important matter. Traditionally, theology students came from more impecunious backgrounds than those who matriculated in other faculties. For this reason, theology was not Mu¨nchhausen’s foremost concern, given his aim of creating a wealthy, cosmopolitan university.228 In another sense, however, Mu¨nchhausen knew that because of its traditional clout and its bearing on broader religious and social matters, the ‘Wrst faculty’ had to be given thoughtful consideration. He was quite familiar with the WolV aVair at Halle and the role of the theological faculty therein; and this was something he surely wanted to avoid. He was also well aware of the many acrimonious disputes among theologians and between theologians and members of other faculties; and this too he sought to do without. As early as 1733, Mu¨nchhausen had therefore warned against any extreme or modish concepts in theology, arguing that men should not be hired ‘whose teaching leads to atheism or naturalism . . . or [religious] enthusiasm’. He also rejected those, even if orthodox subscribers to the Augsburg Confession, who promoted ‘unnecessary discord’ and ‘inner turmoil’.229 But he was no secularist. Like most contemporaries, he believed that an educated clergy presiding over a well-functioning church was an immensely desirable good for state and society. What he sought, Wnally, was an orthodox-Lutheran but highly irenic theological faculty and one that played a relatively quiet, unassuming role within the university. These objectives came to be reXected in hiring practices and in the university’s statutes. At the same time, Mu¨nchhausen did not want to settle for mediocre scholars, in theology or any other Weld, simply because they Wt his bill of religious moderation. This high-minded pursuit of the best and brightest, be they local or foreign scholars, was another signature feature of Go¨ttingen and one that helps account for the calibre of the faculty and its progressive 227 I am indebted here to McClelland, State, Society, and University in Germany, 35–9. 228 On the social backgrounds of eighteenth-century theology students, see Anthony La Vopa, Grace, Talent, and Merit: Poor Students, Clerical Careers, and Professional Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 229 See ‘Nachtra¨gliches Votum Mu¨nchhausens u¨ber die Einrichtung der Universita¨t in der Sitzung des geheimen Raths-Collegium’, in Emil Franz Ro¨ssler (ed.), Die Gru¨ndung der Universita¨t Go¨ttingen (Go¨ttingen, 1855), 33–4.

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conception of scholarship and learning. Shortly before the university was founded, Mu¨nchhausen had written in a memorandum: ‘It is necessary that if the new academy should excel, its chairs must be entrusted only to the most famous and qualiWed men. Such men, however, are usually well provided for and can be convinced to come to Go¨ttingen only with great diYculty and if they are granted considerable honour and pay.’230 In order to ensure that the right men came and that they were suYciently compensated, Mu¨nchhausen and his advisers embarked on a major and consequential innovation: they denied the faculties the traditional corporate right to nominate and name their own members; rather all faculty appointments were controlled by the state. What is more, once hired, professors were digniWed with the title of privy councilor (Geheimrat) to the king, further aligning their interests with those of the government. This policy served two goals according to Mu¨nchhausen. First, it blunted the internecine debates that often divided faculty over a new hire, as each ideological faction struggled to secure its choice—a pervasive problem but especially so among theological hires, where not only scholarly methods but the eternal felicity of students’ souls were often held to be at stake. Second, a state monopoly on hiring would assure a higher quality of faculty, since the faculties themselves, in Mu¨nchhausen’s judgement, often seemed all too willing to base their decisions on nepotism or favoritism instead of academic merit.231 To achieve this dual goal of religious moderation and academic excellence, Mu¨nchhausen turned to Johann Lorenz von Mosheim (1694–1755), neighbouring Helmstedt’s most accomplished and renowned theologiancum-church historian, a scholar whose irenic and academic qualities— following in the tradition of Helmstedt’s famous Georg Calixtus—have led some to dub him the ‘Erasmus of the eighteenth century’.232 Mu¨nchhausen actually had sought to bring Mosheim himself to Go¨ttingen as early as 1733,233 but various complications prevented this from happening. Eventually, he did come in 1747 and taught at Go¨ttingen until his death in 1755. But long before his arrival at Go¨ttingen, Mosheim exerted formidable inXuence on the university and especially on the theological faculty through his position as Mu¨nchhausen’s

230 Ibid. 33, 37, and Ernst Gundelach, Die Verfassung der Go¨ttinger Universita¨t in drei Jahrhunderten (Go¨ttingen: O. Schwartz, 1955), 10. 231 McClelland, State, Society, and University, 40. 232 Bernd Moeller, ‘Johann Lorenz von Mosheim und die Gru¨ndung der Go¨ttinger Universita¨t’, in Moeller (ed.), Theologie in Go¨ttingen, 18. In his ‘Nachtra¨gliches Votum . . .’, Mu¨nchhausen upheld the moderate spirit of Helmstedt as an example for Go¨ttingen to follow. See Ro¨ssler (ed.), Gru¨ndung, 34. Cf. Kelly, The Theological Faculty at Helmstedt, 26 V. 233 Ro¨ssler (ed.), Gru¨ndung, 34. On Mosheim in general, see RGG iv. 1158.

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most trusted adviser. As one commentator has noted, ‘In his thoughts, Mosheim sketched the city [i.e. the university] that Mu¨nchhausen later built.’234 Two years before the inauguration of the university and the formal codiWcation of the statutes, Mosheim produced for Mu¨nchhausen several memoranda on the soon-to-be-established university. One memorandum proposed statutes for the theological faculty; another concentrated on the university as a whole.235 These proposals from Mosheim and the lively correspondence between the two men make up an unoYcial intellectual charter of the new university. While many of Mosheim’s points did not make their way, verbatim, into the Wnal statutes, their spirit thoroughly permeated the new institution. Mosheim’s proposed statutes for the theological faculty are especially noteworthy. The document is replete with edifying language typical of similar documents. With every opportunity, Mosheim noted, theology professors should demonstrate ‘fatherly faithfulness, gentleness, compassion, friendliness, [and] geniality’; those students ‘who have dedicated themselves to God’, should be treated ‘like sons’ and, accordingly, be admonished and rebuked on occasion, but never with force. Theology, he made clear, is not found ‘in knowledge and disputation alone, but rather, primarily, in a lively faith and active piety’. To foster the latter, Mosheim placed great emphasis on instruction in practical theology, both in the lecture hall and in the character of the professor’s personal life, for not only should the student aspire to be ‘learned’ (gelehrt) but also ‘skilled’ (geschickt), someone capable of bringing the fruit of scholarly training to bear on homiletics, catechesis, and the daily life of a parish.236 However, alongside edifying and practical emphases, Mosheim’s statutesproposal anticipate several important developments in academic theology. SpeciWcally, they suggest the necessity of increased scholarly rigour, the ebbing of confessionalism, and the dawning of greater academic freedom; they also point to the diminished institutional authority of the theological faculty. Despite allowing that piety ultimately trumped erudition as the point of theological training, Mosheim emphasized that no theological student should shirk the pursuit of thorough learning and scholarly competence—a ‘gru¨ndliche Gelehrsamkeit und Wissenschaft’ as he put it.237 With respect to ebbing confessionalism, Mosheim stressed seeking out a peace-loving faculty, warning against men of ‘argumentative, divisive, and oVensive spirits’.238 Prudently outWtting the theological faculty, he wrote elsewhere, was of utmost importance: ‘if the theologians are quarrelsome and heretical, this misfortune will 234 BuV, Mu¨nchhausen als Gru¨nder der Universita¨t Go¨ttingen, 77. 235 See Ro¨ssler (ed.), Gru¨ndung, 20–7, 270–97. 236 Ibid. 282, 290–3. 237 Ibid. 293. 238 Ibid. 271.

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redound to the other professors, and [thus] the foundation for perpetual discord (immerwa¨hrenden Unruhe) is established’.239 In their teaching, publishing, and interaction with one another, faculty were enjoined to demonstrate ‘brotherly unity,’ a phrase he repeatedly invoked. Additionally, he commended ‘gentleness and humility . . . [as] the greatest virtues of a teacher.’240 Of capital importance, Mosheim proposed that the traditional controlfunction or right of censorship (Censurrecht) of the theological faculty be done away with or at least severely limited; theologians should no longer have the prerogative to censor the opinions and publications of their colleagues in other faculties: ‘[T]he faculty is not allowed to censure the oral lectures or written publications of their colleagues in the legal, medical, and philosophical faculties; neither should they, in public or in private, denounce or attack their colleagues as heretical and erring.’ Whoever persisted in such activity, Mosheim added, should be regarded unfavourably as a ‘disturber of the peace’ (Friedens-Sto¨hrer). What is more, theologians should not act as judges when controversial religious issues arose in the city; they should keep their distance and let the appropriate church and state authorities decide the matter. At the same time, they should have the freedom to express their own opinions in the lecture hall. A peace-loving faculty, in Mosheim’s view, should also be an orthodox one; he insisted that the faculty give evidence of correct belief (Rechtgla¨ubigkeit). But even on this vital issue one observes in Mosheim’s language a new spirit of openness. For example, while he indicated that theology professors should swear allegiance to the Bible, the Augsburg Confession, and Luther’s Longer and Shorter Catechisms, he also added that in matters not directly and clearly addressed by these documents, each theologian should have ‘complete freedom (vollkommene Freyheit) to assert, with modesty and love, what his knowledge and conscience tell him is right and true’. And even in weightier matters of doctrine that had given rise to diVering interpretations, Mosheim warned against acrimonious wrangling and forbade the coercion of conscience (kein Gewissens-Zwang)—a principle of freedom, he argued, derivative from the Reformation itself. Instead, he proposed that when dealing with contested theological points, a professor should present various sides of the issue as clearly as possible and then modestly state his own viewpoint.241 Although not all of Mosheim’s points made it into the actual statutes, these nonetheless still bear witness to Mosheim’s inXuence.242 For example, 239 Quoted in the introduction, Ibid. 27. 240 Ibid. 289. 241 Ibid. 276–82. 242 The actual statutes were largely the work of professors C. A. Heumann (1681–1764), Joachim Oporinus (1694–1751), and Magnus Cruse (1697–1751), although Mu¨nchhausen himself was actively involved in their drafting.

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evidence of rigorous scholarship was made a requirement for the faculty; professors were enjoined to avoid acrimony at all costs; and ‘freedom of teaching and conviction’ (docendi sentiendique libertate) was guaranteed, so long as one did not deliberately work to undermine religion, the state, and morality.243 Additionally, while members of the theological and philosophical faculties were required to take a fairly traditional confessional oath, other faculty members, as the general university statutes made clear, simply had to agree not to teach anything that contradicted ‘the truth of the evangelical religion’—a rather minimalist oath by the standards of the day.244 What is more, in accordance with Mosheim’s suggestion, Go¨ttingen became the Wrst German university to restrict the theological faculty’s traditional ‘right of censorship’, eVectively preventing denunciations of teachers for ‘heretical’ opinions. It is hard to overstate the historical importance of this measure, even if its signiWcance lies largely in what it betokened for the future. By thus restricting the theological faculty, Rudolf Vierhaus has commented, ‘the confessional age ended for the universities.’245 Go¨tz von Selle interpreted this measure as ‘the pivot for the great turn in German life, which moved its centre of gravity from religion to the state’.246 Mosheim’s inXuence on the university was magniWed when in 1747 he decided to join the faculty himself, reversing his earlier decision to stay at Helmstedt.247 To lure him to the Georgia Augusta, a special position was established just for him: he became the ‘chancellor’ of the university. This allowed him to teach outside the theological faculty, which at this time included J. W. Feuerlein (1689–1766), Joachim Oporinus (1694–1751), and Magnus Cruse (1697–1751)—all respectable scholars but none as noteworthy as Mosheim.248 Mosheim’s coming to Go¨ttingen, therefore, greatly enlivened 243 Ebel (ed.), Die Privilegien und a¨ltesten Statuten, 181. 244 Ibid. 56 f., 106 f., 189 f. 245 Rudolf Vierhaus, ‘1737—Europa zur Zeit der Universita¨tsgru¨ndung’, in Bernd Moeller (ed.), Stationen der Go¨ttinger Universita¨tsgeschichte (Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988), 21. 246 Selle, Die Georg-August Universita¨t zu Go¨ttingen, 41. Cf. Inge Mager, ‘Die theologische Lehrfreiheit in Go¨ttingen und ihre Grenze: Der AbendmahlskonXikt um Christoph August Heumann’, in Moeller (ed.), Theologie in Go¨ttingen, 43–4 and McClelland, State, Society, and University, 39. A further major source of Go¨ttingen’s academic freedom stemmed from the Royal Privilege of 7 December 1736. Here one Wnds: ‘Professores . . . zu ewigen Zeit vollkommene unbeschra¨nckte Freyheit, Befugniß und Recht haben sollen, o¨Ventlich und besonders zu lehren, respective Collegia publica und privata zu halten . . .’ Ebel (ed.), Die Privilegien und a¨ltesten Statuten, 29 (emphasis added). 247 Moeller, ‘Johann Lorenz von Mosheim und die Gru¨ndung der Go¨ttinger Universita¨t’, in Moeller (ed.), Theologie in Go¨ttingen, 35. 248 Meyer, ‘Geschichte der Go¨ttinger theologischen Fakulta¨t’, ZGNK 42 (1937): 13 V. On the make-up of the initial theological faculty at Go¨ttingen, see Jo¨rg Bauer, ‘Die Anfa¨nge der Theologie an der ‘‘wohl angeordneten evangelischen Universita¨t’’ Go¨ttingen’, in Ju¨rgen von

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the faculty and accorded it newfound signiWcance. (More broadly, one should not fail to note that his arrival in Go¨ttingen came just seven years after WolV’s return to Halle and Wve years before Semler’s career began there. The presence of these three men, though of diVerent characters and intellectual agendas, at such progressive institutions had an abiding impact on the German theological climate in the mid- and late eighteenth century—one that unsettled its allegiance to the past and set it on a course of deliberate, if uncertain, modernization.)249 Characteristically enough, Mosheim’s inaugural address, De odio theologico (1747) sounded a plea for a theology of moderation, scholarship, and peaceseeking: a ‘theology of controversy’, he contended, served neither the Gospel nor the human good.250 In 1749 he submitted a noteworthy memorandum to the theological faculty that presaged future developments away from rigid confessionalism. When asked his opinion of whether a ‘reformed’ student from England visiting Go¨ttingen might receive a doctoral degree in theology, he opined that under certain conditions a doctorate could be considered not so much a sign of doctrinal purity but rather ‘simply as a testimony of theological learning’ (ein bloßes testimonium eruditionis theologicae).251 In theological method and pedagogy, Mosheim made a lasting contribution through his lectures on the subjects, publishing posthumously Kurze Anweisung, die Gottesgelahrtheit vernu¨nftig zu erlernen (1756). This work reXects many of the ideas put forth in his earlier statutes-proposal, and, viewed historically, is of signiWcance in shaping theological study as a wissenschaftlich enterprise. In it, Mosheim drew a sharp distinction between ‘theological method’ and ‘pastoral theology,’ noting that the former was particularly at home in the university, for it brought the ‘proWciency of reason’ to bear on theological studies and helped the student approach his work in ‘a rational manner’. Mosheim also made clear that theology, viewed as a human and historical enterprise, must adapt to the changing times. In an age of enlightenment, this meant curtailing a narrow polemical theology (theologia polemica), the hallmark of the confessional age, and developing a more urbane, intellectually sophisticated outlook. ‘In our times, at least in the Christian Stackelberg (ed.), Zur geistigen Situation der Zeit der Go¨ttinger Universita¨tsgru¨ndung 1737 (Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988), 9–56. 249 See Karl Aner’s overview of ‘die theologische Situation um 1740’ in Die Theologie der Lessingszeit (Halle, 1929), 14 V. 250 Moeller, ‘Mosheim und die Anfa¨nge der Universita¨t Go¨ttingen’, in Moeller (ed.), Theologie in Go¨ttingen, 17. Writes Moeller of this address: ‘It was the opening of a new age in the history of theology.’ 251 UAG, Theol. SA 0004. Cf. Paul Tschackert (ed.), Johann Lorenz von Mosheims Gutachten u¨ber den theologischen Doktorat vom 9. August 1749 (Leipzig, 1905), NStUBG, H. lit. part. IV 164/2.

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West,’ Mosheim wrote, ‘human beings are more civilized, intelligent, [and] enlightened. [A clergyman] must therefore interact with them diVerently and himself be more educated.’252 With respect to his scholarly work, Mosheim continued at Go¨ttingen studies in church history, his signature Weld, publishing numerous works, articles, and reviews, and bringing to completion in the year of his death his magisterial Institutionum historiae ecclesiasticae antiqua et recentioris (4 vols.; 1755). For this and other pioneering works, Mosheim has been widely hailed as ‘the father of modern church history’, the Wrst to emphasize the importance of independent historical criteria, instead of strictly theological ones, to understand and write the history of Christianity. As F. C. Baur, Mosheim’s nineteenth-century heir, once commented, Mosheim was the Wrst ‘expressly [to] posit as the most important principle of church historiography an independence from everything subjective that can have an inXuence on historical comprehension’. For this reason, Baur added, Mosheim ‘brought church history out of the polemical and pietistic conWnes to which it still clung into the vantage point of a freer and broader circle of vision’.253 During his time at Go¨ttingen, Mosheim witnessed the blossoming of the university into an eminent institution. As Mu¨nchhausen’s close ally and university chancellor, Mosheim himself played no small role in this process, proudly witnessing the realization of several ideas that he had either proposed or approvingly discussed with Mu¨nchhausen in the 1730s and 1740s.254 One of these was the establishment of a scientiWc society, the Ko¨niglich Societa¨t der Wissenschaften zu Go¨ttingen, later simply called the Akademie der Wissenschaften. This was founded in 1751 largely through the eVorts of Albrecht von Haller (1708–77), a professor of anatomy and natural science, who, with Mosheim, became among Go¨ttingen’s most celebrated and internationally renowned professors.255 Modelled in part on the esteemed societies of science in London, Paris, and Berlin, Go¨ttingen’s academy came to function alongside the university, concentrating especially in the physical, mathematical, and historical sciences. Proponents of the academy held that university professors would beneWt from its work, which, according to one contemporary, was to produce ‘new discoveries’ of ‘general use to humanity’—a task diVerent from but complementary to that of the university professor, who was charged to 252 Mosheim, Kurze Anweisung, die Gottesgelahrtheit vernu¨nftig zu erlernen (Go¨ttingen, 1756), 1 V., 7. 253 F. C. Baur, Ferdinand Christian Baur on the Writing of Church History, ed. and trans. Peter C. Hodgson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 142 V. Cf. Karl Heussi, Johann Lorenz von Mosheim. Ein Beitrag zur Kirchengeschichte des achzehnten Jahrhunderts (Tu¨bingen, 1906). 254 BuV, Mu¨nchhausen, 77–8. 255 On Haller, see ADB x. 420–9.

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oVer ‘complete and thorough instruction in all areas of knowledge’.256 The symbiotic relationship between the two institutions, academy and university, was the Wrst of its kind in Germany; it would later serve as a model when the decision was made to found a new university in Berlin in conjunction with Prussia’s pre-existing Royal Academy of Science.257 Already in the 1730s Mosheim had recommended that Go¨ttingen become the seat of a leading scholarly journal.258 This came to pass quickly with the creation of the Go¨ttinger gelehrten Zeitung in 1739. Although the journal struggled at Wrst, it was taken over by Albrecht von Haller, renamed the Go¨ttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen, and enjoyed an illustrious period of operation under the auspices of the Academy of Science. Its numerous articles, reviews, and prizes (awarded for scientiWc excellence) became important catalysts for scholarship in Hanover and beyond. In the late eighteenth century, under the editorships of J. D. Michaelis and C. G. Heyne, this journal emerged as arguably Germany’s leading organ of scholarly enquiry, and a model for other scientiWc journals, spanning myriad Welds. In the Wnal analysis, the close relationship between a pre-eminent scholarly journal, a leading university, and a scientiWc society associated Go¨ttingen for the remainder of the century with the most forward-looking ideas of the day.259 ‘Extra Go¨ttingam non est vita,’ as one contended scholar summed up his lot in the small university town. During Mosheim’s tenure, another development took place, which, though not attributable to Mosheim, would have accorded well with his ecumenical temperament. Catholic students were allowed to attend their own private worship services for the Wrst time. The fact that signiWcant numbers of Catholic students were at Go¨ttingen in the Wrst place was an unusual, if not unique, phenomenon. Mu¨nchhausen had earlier commented on the poor state of Catholic universities, and held out the hope that with suYcient quality at Go¨ttingen ‘their best people will come to us’.260 The fact that they did come, along with non-Lutheran Protestant students, necessitated in turn certain religious concessions by both town and gown. Thus, in 1747, Catholics were allowed to hold their own worship services in a private home—so long as the priest agreed not to wear his vestments outside! Concurrently, students and professors (including Albrecht von Haller) of a Reformed 256 Johann Stephan Pu¨tter, Versuch einer academischen Gelehrten-Geschichte von der GeorgAugust-Universita¨t zu Go¨ttingen (Go¨ttingen, 1765), 250. Cf. Gundelach, Die Verfassung der Go¨ttinger Universita¨t, 46–8. 257 On the general impact of scientiWc societies on universities in early modern Europe, see HUE ii. 480 V. 258 Ro¨ssler (ed.), Gru¨ndung, 266–9. 259 McClellan, Science Reorganized, 114–16. 260 Ro¨ssler, Gru¨ndung, 248.

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background were granted more freedoms and opportunities; in 1753 Go¨ttingen witnessed the establishment of its Wrst Reformed church.261 The slackening of confessional barriers signiWed by these developments betokened the possibility of more extensive future deconfessionalization.262 Finally, no discussion of Go¨ttingen’s modernity would be complete without further mention of the university’s philosophical faculty, the acclaim, dynamism, and institutional clout of which brought it into conXict with the theological faculty on a number of occasions. To a large degree, Mu¨nchhausen himself should get credit for the strength of this faculty by his insistence that its professors be mature and reliable scholars, instead of local secondary teachers or those awaiting appointments in the higher faculties, as was often the case in other German universities. More broadly, the faculty’s strength might be regarded as the portentous realization of a view prevalent among many progressive thinkers, which held that the future of universities depended on transforming this faculty from a seat of preparation to one of institutional leadership and intellectual progress. This direction is already hinted at in the statutes of 1737, which enjoined members of this faculty ‘to discover new truths and promote the progress of science’ (ad novas veritates eruendas et promovenda incrementa scientiarum).263 By the later decades of the eighteenth century—as renowned professors occupied its chairs and its matriculation rates outpaced those of other universities—the philosophical faculty at Go¨ttingen came to play an unprecedentedly prominent role, not only within the Georgia Augusta but within German academic life as a whole.264 As Ernst Brandes wrote in 1802, ‘But what remains of inWnite importance for the welfare of the university is the 261 Prior to 1753, Reformed students attended services in private homes. The Wrst postReformation Catholic church, St Michaeliskirche, was dedicated in 1789. See Pu¨tter, Versuch einer academischen Gelehrten-Geschichte von der Georg-August-Universita¨t zu Go¨ttingen, 225 V. 262 On religious requirements for student admission and graduation (and on how they ebbed in the post-Reformation period), see HUE ii. 285 V. I should add that the ebbing of confessionalism should not be exaggerated: there were setbacks along the way. At Go¨ttingen, for example, the Reformed pastor Gerhard von Hemessen (1722–83) sought to oVer lectures on Reformed theology in the 1750s only to incur the protestations of the theological faculty and a government ban against non-Lutheran theology in 1755. Indeed, the reality of a joint Reformed–Lutheran theological faculty was a slow process, only fully realized (not surprisingly) in Prussia, at Halle and then Berlin. See Bornhak, Geschichte der preussischen Universita¨tsverwaltung, 109 f. Despite Go¨ttingen’s progressive character, Herder once called it ‘a Lutheran Rome.’ See Meyer, ‘Geschichte der Go¨ttinger theologischen Fakulta¨t’, ZGNK 42 (1937): 34. It was not until 1921 that an honorary professorship for Reformed theology was established in Go¨ttingen’s theological faculty; its Wrst occupant was none other than Karl Barth. See UAG, Theol. SA 0214. 263 Ebel (ed.), Die Privilegien und a¨ltesten Statuten, 183. 264 The strength of Go¨ttingen’s philosophical faculty is all the more impressive if one keeps in mind that philosophical faculties generally were in a state of deterioration and neglect in the early eighteenth century. Thus, while I have suggested that the century witnessed notable advances in this faculty, we should remember that this progress should be measured against

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particular care taken for the prosperity of the philosophical faculty. This faculty contains the salt of the earth which all the other faculties require. . . . A major reason for the fame of Go¨ttingen has always been the care . . . lavished on maintaining the Xourishing condition of the philosophical faculty.’265 And Xourish it did. The faculty roster from the mid- and late eighteenth century amounts to a virtual who’s-who list of distinguished German scholars. Such Wgures as J. D. Ko¨hler (1684–1755), J. J. Schmauss (1690– 1757), Johann Gesner (1691–1761), J. C. Gatterer (1729–99), J. D. Michaelis (1717–91), C. G. Heyne (1729–1812), and A. L. Schlo¨zer (1735–1809), among others, graced the philosophical faculty and together constituted the foremost body of university scholars in Germany. ‘I always had Go¨ttingen in view,’ Goethe once reXected, disappointed that his father had sent him to Leipzig. ‘Men like Heyne, Michaelis, and so many others commanded my complete trust. My deepest longing was to sit at their feet and take in their teaching.’266 In quantity and quality, Go¨ttingen’s publications exerted inXuence throughout central Europe and abroad. By the 1790s textbooks written by Go¨ttingen’s distinguished professors were used in practically every German university.267 Students throughout central Europe, and eventually those from as far away as the United States and Russia, Xocked to Go¨ttingen’s lecture halls, and through their experiences took back the latest fruit of German academic life to their native lands. Because of its Hanoverian origins, English and American students often preferred Go¨ttingen—a trend that continued well into the nineteenth century despite strong competition from Prussian universities, Berlin in particular.268 At Go¨ttingen, like at Halle beforehand, a widening of the customary sphere of the philosophical faculty took place. In addition to the faculty’s traditional fare, Go¨ttingen began to oVer lectures in empirical psychology, natural law, politics, modern physics, mathematics, modern history, geography, an initial condition of disrepair and neglect, as indicated by poor professorial salaries, paltry matriculation rates, and little overall prestige. In 1721 at Frankfurt an der Oder, for example, salaries in the philosophical faculty ranged from 100 to 175 thaler annually, while those in theology and law respectively ranged from 338–500 and 200–500 thaler. See Bornhak, Geschichte der preussischen Universita¨tsverwaltung, 113, and Turner, ‘University Reformers and Professorial Scholarship’, in Stone (ed.), University in Society, ii. 499. 265 Ernst Brandes, Ueber den gegenwa¨rtigen Zustand der Universita¨t Go¨ttingen (Go¨ttingen, 1802), 143–4. Cf. Heyne’s high esteem of the philosophical faculty in Heyne, ‘Festrede zur Fu¨nfzigjahrfeier der Georgia Augusta’, in Wilhelm Ebel (ed.), Go¨ttinger Universita¨tsreden aus zwei Jahrhunderten (Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978), 140. 266 Goethe, Aus Meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit (Paderborn: F. Scho¨ningh, 1956), 241. 267 Turner, ‘Prussian Universities’, 117. 268 Carl Diehl, Americans and German Scholarship, 1770–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press), 155 V. In 1766 Benjamin Franklin was the Wrst prominent American to visit the University of Go¨ttingen.

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diplomacy, and modern languages. Here, the knowledge typically pursued within the new scientiWc academies became customary in the university as well—a consequence, no doubt, of the close ties between the two institutions at Go¨ttingen. In the process, entirely new disciplines were formed, and old Welds were refashioned, updated, and popularized. For the purpose of understanding the shifting fortunes of the philosophical and theological faculties, three areas of curricular innovation are of particular importance: history, classical philology, and the study of antiquity or Altertumswissenschaft. At Go¨ttingen, these subjects began a metamorphosis, whereby they ceased to be minor, subordinate (and often neglected) Welds of study and began to take shape as autonomous ‘disciplines’ in their own right. As one might expect, this process often led to conXict between the two faculties, since the study of history and language had traditionally been regarded as auxiliary to theological study. At Go¨ttingen, Wilhelm Dilthey once opined, ‘the worldly sciences freed themselves from theological considerations.’269 While it only fully came into its own under the direction of Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) in the nineteenth century, modern professional historiography—history as an autonomous university discipline and not the occasional work of a dilettante or polymath—owes its birth to the eighteenth century within the parameters of Go¨ttingen’s philosophical faculty. At root, history’s rise reXected the university’s eVort to attract aristocrats and foreigners by oVering practical and rewarding subjects; and history, especially modern history, was regarded as eminently practical if one planned to make a career as a diplomat or minister in an absolutist state. The fortunes of historical study were enhanced at Go¨ttingen by the careers of Johann Christoph Gatterer (1727–99) and August Ludwig von Schlo¨zer (1735–1809), among the Wrst men in Germany to receive university chairs speciWcally designated for history. Their eVorts hastened a disassociation of historical enquiry from biblical chronology and eschatology, which had been closely linked ever since Melanchthon Wrst lectured on ‘world history’ after the Reformation.270 In the formulation of one commentator, Gatterer and Schlo¨zer began a ‘melting down’ of historia sacra into secular world history, despite the fact that both were devout Protestants.271 By the 1760s, history had become so popular at Go¨ttingen that J. D. Michaelis called it ‘the favourite science of our time’.272 269 Wilhelm Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften (Leipzig: Teubner, 1962), iii. 261. 270 Hammerstein, Jus und Historie, 20 V. 271 John Stroup, ‘Protestant Church Historians and the German Enlightenment’, in Hans Erich Bo¨deker et al. (eds.), Aufkla¨rung und Geschichte: Studien zur deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft im 18.Jahrhundert (Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986), 171. 272 See the long discussion of history in Michaelis, Raisonnement i. 192 V. For treatments of the birth of modern historical scholarship at Go¨ttingen, see Georg Iggers, ‘The University of

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But history’s success often caused consternation among members of the theological faculty, especially when the question arose, as it inevitably did, of which faculty had the right to teach church history. Should this important topic remain within the purview of the theological faculty or should those in the philosophical faculty—i.e. historians operating presumably with less edifying concerns—be allowed to teach it too? Skirmishes along this intellectual ‘border’ were frequent at Go¨ttingen in the late eighteenth century. An episode from the 1790s is especially revealing. In 1793, the theological faculty attempted to forbid a recent Privatdozent in the philosophical faculty the right to teach church history, claiming that the university statutes indicated that the subject required the exclusive permission of the theological faculty. When word of this reached the historian Schlo¨zer, then dean of the philosophical faculty, he demanded that the theological faculty withdraw its objection. His colleague Gatterer sided with him, writing that ‘church history has nothing in itself to do with theology. In its essence it is a part of history and has [therefore] common form and material with all parts of history. It has facts as its subject matter and must prove them from original sources.’ The dean of the theological faculty, J. F. Schleusner (1759–1831), sought to rebut this view, appealing again to the university’s statutes and claiming that church history handled improperly might be injurious to orthodox doctrine. Eventually the dispute became so acrimonious that the government intervened, deciding in favour of the philosophical faculty, but making it clear that the faculty would be held responsible if any of its members fostered heresy.273 Besides history, classical philology witnessed a dramatic rise at the University of Go¨ttingen, and soon it and its sister discipline—Altertumswissenschaft—became the German sciences par excellence, and ones with farreaching ramiWcations for scholarship and the university system as a whole. In the early eighteenth century, language study in German universities still rested on the Melanchthonian-humanist reforms of the sixteenth century. In practice, this meant that while Latin was still the basis of education, both in the preparatory Latin schools and in the universities, it was not taught in an inspiring manner. Latin instruction stressed grammar and style above all else; the goal of the student was, through rote memorization and tedious drills, to improve his own Latin writing skills. Students rarely read the classics in their entirety, but rather only in a variety of anthologies and textbooks. Greek too had fallen on hard times; it was mainly taught, like Hebrew, as a ‘helping Go¨ttingen and the Transformation of Historical Scholarship, 1760–1800’, Storia della StoriograWa 2 (1982): 11–37; Josef Engels, ‘Die deutschen Universita¨ten und die Geschichtswissenschaft’, HZ 189 (1959): 223–378; and Herbert ButterWeld, Man on his Past: The Study of the History of Historical Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955). 273 Wittram, Die Universita¨t und ihre Fakulta¨ten, 13 V.

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discipline’ to allow theology students to read the Bible. General courses on Greek and Roman history and civilization were practically non-existent.274 This changed as a consequence of Go¨ttingen’s inXuence. The catalyst came from Johann Matthias Gesner (1691–1761) of the philosophical faculty, who launched a thoroughgoing critique of the status quo and sought to implement various ‘neohumanist’ reforms.275 As the founder of a philological-pedagogical seminar at Go¨ttingen in 1737 and as the supervisor for the Braunschweig and Lu¨neburg schools, Gesner occupied a powerful and strategic position to realize his ideas. Attacking the sterility of the current classical education, he advocated that beginning students, before being confronted with the diYculties of writing, must be thoroughly immersed in the life and culture of antiquity by reading the classics. This would enable them, he felt, to draw broad intellectual nourishment from the aesthetic, moral, and cultural sensibilities present in Greek and Roman literature. The professor—or Latin schoolteacher—must accordingly de-emphasize grammar and elevate the reading and appreciation of classical texts to the centre of instruction. To accomplish his goals, Gesner was able to use his high-ranking status to expand the classical curriculum in schools and universities.276 Gesner’s ideas gained a wider saliency. His successor at Go¨ttingen, Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729–1812), proved especially receptive to Gesner’s views and similar ones afoot in Germany’s thriving extra-university literary culture. Although at Wrst relatively unknown, Heyne made a truly meteoric career at Go¨ttingen. Not only did he execute his teaching oYce with great vigour, but he became a leading Wgure in the Academy, the director of the university library and the philological seminar, a favourite of the king, and the author of numerous inXuential books. Picking up where Gesner left oV, Heyne taught that scholars must give up their preoccupation with grammar, metric, and textual criticism in the narrow sense and study the classics with the aim of recapturing and appropriating in their own lives the creative spirit of classical antiquity as a whole. This approach must be more than simply literary; scholars must evaluate the classics for what they reveal about culture,

274 Turner, ‘Prussian Universities’, 112 V. 275 The central idea of neohumanism (Neuhumanismus) was the full development (or Bildung) of the entire human personality accomplished through study of ancient (especially Greek) sources. On the historical background to neohumanism and on its social and intellectual underpinnings, see Ralph Fiedler, Die klassische deutsche Bildungsidee: Ihre soziologischen Wurzeln und pa¨dagogischen Folgen (Weinheim: Beltz, 1972). 276 Turner, ‘Prussian Universities’, 112–13. Gesner’s contemporary at Leipzig, Johann Augusti Ernesti (1707–81) also implemented similar reforms. Thus, while it is fair to say that Go¨ttingen led the way in classical philology, one should bear in mind that there were like-minded professors at other universities.

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civic life, religion, mythology, and the like. Above all, Greek antiquity, hitherto neglected, must become a central area of investigation.277 The pedagogical emphases of Gesner and Heyne forged a tie between the neohumanism of the universities and the explicit Hellenism of the new, literary culture outside them, pioneered by writers such as Klopstock and Goethe and by independent scholars such as J. G. Herder and J. J. Winckelmann. For example, shortly after the publication of Winckelmann’s famous Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (1764), Heyne incorporated its contents into his lectures at Go¨ttingen. Through his friendship with Herder, moreover, Heyne developed many inXuential ideas about mythology and folk poetry that also found their way into Go¨ttingen’s curriculum.278 Such developments allowed Go¨ttingen by the end of the century to be regarded as the leading centre of the new Altertumswissenschaft and—along with ‘Goethe’s Weimar’ and the University of Jena, which had witnessed new intellectual vitality in the 1780s and 1790s—one of the foremost transmitters of the neohumanist philosophy.279 What is more, numerous leading nineteenth-century intellectuals and reformers passed through Go¨ttingen in the late eighteenth century, rubbing shoulders with Gesner, Heyne, and others. These included F. A. Wolf, who implemented Heyne’s ideas at Halle and then Berlin with a critical and methodological rigour unparalleled in the history of philology; the Schlegel brothers, who became the future leaders of German Romanticism; and Wilhelm von Humboldt, an admirer and close friend of Heyne, whose eVorts to establish the University of Berlin were, as is well known, deeply imbued with neohumanist sensibilities.280 The new spirit of classical philology had enormous implications for instruction and scholarship in theology, especially in the areas of biblical criticism and Old Testament history. As early as 1769, for example, the attraction of Heyne’s outlook on theological students was evident. ‘What a comprehensive mind!’ exclaimed one young theology student, after observing Heyne’s ability ‘to conjure up before his large audiences the entire cultural world of antiquity’. The same student had learned from J. D. Michaelis that any worthy theologian should possess both philosophical and philological 277 Ibid. 112 V. 278 In 1775 eVorts were made to bring Herder to Go¨ttingen, but these failed and Herder became the superintendent of education in Weimar. See Meyer, ‘Geschichte der Go¨ttinger theologischen Fakulta¨t’, ZGNK 42 (1937): 33–4. For material related to Herder’s ‘Berufung’, see UAG, Kur. 4 II b. 279 On the revitalization of Jena in the late eighteenth century, which stemmed partly from the inXuence of Halle and Go¨ttingen and partly from the local inXuence of Goethe at Weimar, see Theodore Ziolkowski, German Romanticism and its Institutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 230–8. 280 Turner, ‘Prussian Universities’, 114–16.

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acumen.281 Yet, as was the case with church history, developments in classical philology often led to border disputes and the blurring of boundaries between the theological and philosophical faculties. It is signiWcant that not only Heyne but also his contemporaries J. D. Michaelis and J. G. Eichhorn, all of whom accomplished major work in biblical scholarship, operated from the philosophical faculty (particularly the philological seminar) where they were not subject to the statutory requirements of theology.282 The application by these scholars of innovative philological techniques to biblical texts proved extremely inXuential, particularly in the development of ‘myth criticism’, the exegetical eVort to separate the historical from the mythical in the Bible.283 By the nineteenth century, this form of criticism was carried forward more freely, increasingly from within theological faculties, by such critics as Wilhelm Gesenius, W. M. L. de Wette, F. C. Baur, and David Friedrich Strauss, among others.284 One is even tempted to generalize that the shape of nineteenth-century German historical criticism of the Bible—and the concomitant critical theology that prioritized historical exegesis over dogma—bears witness to a revolution in philology, which, although by no means exclusive to Go¨ttingen, found its early centre of gravity in the Georgia Augusta’s philosophical faculty. Finally, it is noteworthy that Go¨ttingen’s philosophical faculty was among the Wrst to remove explicitly Christian language from the oath required of its graduates and faculty members. By doing this, the faculty anticipated developments that would eventually sweep most German universities, indeed practically all major universities in the Western world. J. D. Michaelis insisted on the change in the oath. From his perch as frequent dean of the philosophical faculty and through his many publications, Michaelis called into question the pointedly dogmatic language of the traditional oath, which required adherence to ‘the doctrines of the catholic, Christian, and apostolic religion as given in the Old and New Testament’.285 In his Raisonnement u¨ber die protestantischen Universita¨ten in Deutschland, Michaelis noted with exasperation that because of Go¨ttingen’s oath not even Socrates, the ‘father of 281 Victor Sallentien, Ein Go¨ttinger Student der Theologie in der Zeit von 1768–1771 (Hanover, 1912), 49–50. 282 See Rudolf Smend, ‘Johann David Michaelis und Johann Gottfried Eichhorn—zwei Orientalisten am Rande der Theologie’, in Moeller (ed.), Theologie in Go¨ttingen, 58–81. 283 e.g. see J. G. Eichhorn, Einleitung ins Alte Testament, 3 vols. (Leipzig, 1780–3). 284 See C. Hartlich and W. Sachs, Der Ursprung des MythosbegriVes in der modernen Bibelwissenschaft (Tu¨bingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1952); R. E. Clements, ‘The Study of the Old Testament’, in Ninian Smart et al., Nineteenth-Century Religious Thought in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), iii. 109–42; and John Rogerson, Myth in Old Testament Interpretation (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1974). 285 Ebel (ed.), Die Privilegien und Statuten, 189.

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philosophy’, or a renowned Jewish thinker such as Moses Mendelsohn would be allowed to teach in Go¨ttingen’s philosophical faculty. Since history, he elaborated, showed that ‘vera philosophia’ was something that one always strove towards, never fully attaining, how was it possible that a university felt compelled to prescribe truth in an oath?286 His eVorts garnered enough support so that in 1778 Go¨ttingen’s oath in the philosophical faculty was emptied of speciWcally confessional language; the new oath stipulated that teachers would strive after the truth and agree to uphold belief in ‘God and religion’. No attempt was made to invest these words with particular dogmatic content.287

6. ‘ TORCHBEARER OR TRAINBEARER’?: THE FAC ULTIES AND IMMANUEL KANT The reforms at Halle and Go¨ttingen (and similar but less eye-catching ones at a handful of other universities) demonstrated to intellectuals and statesmen that universities were not incapable of productive change; this held true despite the fact that numerous smaller institutions continued to be plagued by Wnancial diYculties, low student enrolment, and curricular stagnation. Yet on their own merits the examples of Halle and Go¨ttingen did not stem the hefty tide of criticism directed against universities in general. In fact, evidence suggests that towards century’s end, criticism of universities was on the rise. I have already examined, for example, the discussions of Berlin’s Mittwochsgesellschaft in the 1790s over whether universities should be reformed or simply abolished. The opinions voiced by this society were not without supporters elsewhere, in Prussia and throughout central Europe. Among the universities’ critics, a refrain from this time focused attention on ‘the division of the faculties’ (Einteilung der Fakulta¨ten) and the relationship of the faculties to one another. Even loyal defenders of universities believed that for further progress to take place a fundamental restructuring of the faculties must be eVected. Or, at the very least, the philosophical faculty must assume, as it had begun to at Halle and Go¨ttingen, a more extensive and independent role within the university and one partially imitative of the type of learning associated with scientiWc academies and societies.288 286 Michaelis, Raisonnement, iv. 145 V. 287 Wittram, Die Universita¨t und ihre Fakulta¨ten, 18–19. 288 On eighteenth-century discussions of the faculties in general, see Regina Meyer, ‘Das Licht der Philosophie. Reformgedanken zur Fakulta¨tenhierarchie im 18.Jahrhundert von Christian WolV bis Immanuel Kant’, in Hammerstein (ed.), Universita¨ten und Aufkla¨rung, 97–124.

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Not surprisingly, professors at Halle and Go¨ttingen were among the foremost critics of the hierarchical ordering of the faculties. Already in the early eighteenth century, Christian Thomasius of Halle had argued that the division of the faculties guaranteeing the supremacy of theology was traceable to the medieval papacy’s intention of achieving clerical dominance over society.289 Christian WolV sought to dispense with the propaedeutic status of the philosophical faculty and make it an equal of the other faculties. ‘The philosophical faculty,’ he wrote, ‘has hitherto been regarded merely as that which prepares young people for the other faculties of theology, law, and medicine. . . . [I]t is called the lower faculty and the others the higher faculties. But this prejudice must be done away with, and one must regard the philosophical faculty not merely as a lower one, but also as a higher one’ (sondern auch als eine Obere Faculta¨t).290 Similarly, Go¨ttingen’s Mosheim had recommended that ‘philosophy be regarded as equal to the higher faculties and that the papal relic of the diVerences among the faculties be completely abolished’.291 In his Raisonnement of 1768, J. D. Michaelis claimed that the vitality of the philosophical faculty was signiWcantly more important than that of the theological faculty for the health of a university.292 Such sentiments were echoed by others and spread throughout the century. In 1795 W. A. Teller, a principal Wgure in the Mittwochsgesellschaft, wrote that ‘the monastic division into faculties, in which philosophy walks behind like a handmaid, must cease; everyone should be able to lecture on whatever he wants.’ Revealingly, Teller, who supported the continuance of universities, shared this view with J. G. Gebhard, an ardent abolitionist, who ridiculed universities for their ‘scholastic division into faculties.’293 At the century’s turn, Christoph Meiners of Go¨ttingen discussed the faculty-system at some length in his Ueber die Verfassung und Verwaltung deutscher Universita¨ten (1801–2). Like earlier critics, Meiners lamented the status quo and puzzled over whether theology should or could still be considered ‘the Wrst science’. In typical fashion, he invoked the growth of the philosophical faculty as a promising sign of the changing times: ‘The disciplines of human knowledge, which in the universities one understands to be within the parameters of the philosophical faculty, have been powerfully 289 See the material attributed to Thomasius in the entry on ‘Faculta¨t’ in Johann Georg Walch, Philosophischen Lexicon (Leipzig, 1726), 381. 290 WolV, ‘Unma¨ßgebliche Gedanken von Einrichtung einer Universita¨t in Deutschland’, in WolV, Gesammelte Schriften, ser. I, vol. 22, 59. 291 Quoted in Moeller, ‘ ‘‘Mosheim und die Anfa¨nge der Universita¨t Go¨ttingen’, in Moeller (ed.), Theologie in Go¨ttingen, 32. 292 Michaelis, Raisonnement, i. 193 V. 293 Sto¨lzel, ‘Die Berliner Mittwochsgesellschaft u¨ber die Aufhebung oder Reform der Universita¨ten (1795)’, FBPG 2 (1889): 204–6.

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enhanced during our [the eighteenth] century, and will, so it seems, continue to be so.’ One day, he added, philosophy might even be considered ‘the queen of the sciences, the Wrst among her sister faculties’. Meiners also commented admiringly on the growth and prestige of scientiWc academies in the eighteenth century, noting that they have a ‘completely diVerent criterion of human knowledge’ than that of the universities, hinting that the latter should follow suit. Meiners proposed that one possible remedy would be to subdivide the philosophical faculty—a proposal that would have a long, mostly unrealized life in the nineteenth century—and allow its various areas of enquiry, or at least related clusters of them, to serve as autonomous faculties. This would have the eVect, he reasoned, of enlarging the domain of genuinely scientiWc knowledge within the university. A realist, however, he recognized that this proposal would probably create other problems: the higher faculties would object to their loss of power, and funding would be dispersed too thinly among the newly created faculties.294 Published just nine years before the founding of the University of Berlin, Meiners’s book was not without inXuence on educated opinion. However, it stood in the shadow of a more widely discussed series of essays published by Immanuel Kant in 1798 under the title Streit der Fakulta¨ten, in which the Ko¨nigsberg philosopher also wrestled with the widely perceived problem of the division of the faculties. Often passed over by Kant scholars in favour of his three major critiques, Streit der Fakulta¨ten is a work of rich signiWcance. Not only does it shed light on Kant’s personal religious views, but the work also eVectively summed up, while adding trenchant commentary to, the growing concern many had about the division of the faculties. What is more, the work inXuenced many future directions of German university development; practically every major Wgure involved in the founding of the University of Berlin would have known its contents and the circumstances of its writing quite well.295 The circumstances are worth noting. Like many scholars sympathetic to the Enlightenment, Kant had grown accustomed to the mild religious policy of Friedrich the Great and his liberal minister Zedlitz, to whom Kant incidentally had dedicated his Kritik der reinen Vernunft. The death of Friedrich the Great in 1786, therefore, and the replacement of Zedlitz with Wo¨llner by the new monarch, Friedrich Wilhelm II, left Kant and those with similar views exposed to charges of inWdelity by the new conservative regime. Indeed, only a few years after the proclamation of Wo¨llner’s religious edict on 9 July 1788, 294 See the section entitled ‘Ueber Faculta¨ten’ in Christoph Meiners, Ueber die Verfassung und Verwaltung deutscher Universita¨ten (Go¨ttingen, 1801), i. 325 V. 295 Gu¨nther Bien, ‘Kants Theorie der Universita¨t und ihr geschichtlicher Ort’, HZ 219 (1971): 134–60.

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Kant, like No¨sselt and Niemeyer at Halle, felt the coercive arm of the government. Wo¨llner and his agents of censorship were particularly troubled by Kant’s strictly moral interpretation of Christianity presented in his Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft. Initially, Kant had planned to publish this work in instalments in the Berlinische Monatsschrift, a chief organ of the Enlightenment in Prussia. The second instalment, however, did not pass the oYcial censors. Undeterred, Kant procured support from the faculty of (non-Prussian) Jena and decided to risk publishing the book in its entirety in 1793. Shortly thereafter, he received a cabinet order, dated 1 October 1794, from Wo¨llner, in which he was instructed that the king was ‘greatly displeased to observe how you misuse your philosophy to undermine and destroy many of the most important and fundamental doctrines of the Holy Scripture and Christianity’. He was further asked to desist from writing or lecturing on religion altogether or else to expect ‘unpleasant measures’. To make sure Kant got the point, Wo¨llner issued an order to the university senate at Ko¨nigsberg, forbidding any professor from lecturing on Kant’s philosophy of religion.296 Distraught, Kant submitted a letter in defence of his Religion, claiming that he did not slander Christianity, but, even so, he should have the scholarly right to express his views freely, so long as he focused on the ‘philosophical’ aspects of religion. But in the end the ageing philosopher deemed it prudent ‘hereby as his Majesty’s faithful servant, to declare solemnly that I will entirely refrain in the future from all public addresses on religion, both natural and revealed, either in lectures or in writings’.297 This promise (and presumably the fear of ‘unpleasant measures’) prevented Kant from publishing the Wrst part of Streit der Fakulta¨ten, written in the summer of 1794 and originally intended for publication in the Go¨ttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen, then edited by the liberal theologian, C. F. Sta¨udlin (1761–1826).298 After the dismissal of Wo¨llner and the lapsing of his edict, Kant decided, in 1798, to publish it as a book instead, dedicating it to Sta¨udlin as a sign of apology perhaps for not publishing it earlier in his journal. Kant entitled the Wrst and lengthiest section of the book straightforwardly, 296 Immanuel Kant, Der Streit der Fakulta¨ten, with an English trans. and introd. by Mary J. Gregor (New York: Abaris Books, 1979), p. xi. 297 Friedrich Paulsen recounts the encounter between Kant and the government well in Immanuel Kant: His Life and Doctrine, trans. J. E. Creighton and Albert Lefevre (New York: F. Unger, 1963), 48–50. Paulsen argues that the action against Kant probably originated with the king himself and not Wo¨llner. In a letter to Wo¨llner, dated 30 March 1794, the king referred to the ‘disgraceful writings of Kant’. Cf. Otto Schoendorfer, ‘Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des ‘‘Streit der Fakulta¨ten’’ ’, Kantstudien 24 (1920): 389 V. Cf. Go¨tz von Selle, Geschichte der AlbertusUniversita¨t zu Ko¨nigsberg in Preußen, 2nd edn. (Wu¨rzburg: Holzner, 1956), 186 f. 298 On Sta¨udlin, see Meyer, ‘Geschichte der Go¨ttinger theologischen Fakulta¨t’, ZGNK 42 (1937): 40–1, 103.

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‘The ConXict of the Philosophy Faculty with the Theology Faculty’.299 He included in the preface the entire correspondence between him and the government over the earlier publication of his Religion. Kant had addressed the issue of university faculties in private correspondence as early as 1793, and he broached it again in the introduction to his Religion.300 From these sources, one gathers that Kant held it as anachronistic and wrong that the government should stand in agreement with conservative theologians—‘biblical theologians’ as he called them—to deny a professor the right to express his opinions on matters of intellectual importance. The Streit should be read therefore in the light of the aforementioned dissatisfaction with the ‘monkly’ and ‘scholastic’ division of the faculties that had developed among progressive intellectuals in the eighteenth century. The actions of the Wo¨llner regime, in other words, while posing a personal threat to Kant, focused his mind on what he (and others) already perceived as a defect in the structure of higher education. Kant’s principal argument in Der Streit der Fakulta¨ten rested on the Enlightenment formula, which, in the words of Alasdair MacIntyre, held ‘rationality, like truth, [as] independent of time, place, and historical circumstance’301—a formula to which Kant himself had contributed in his three major critiques and in his famous essay, ‘What is Enlightenment?’ In the latter, he famously deWned Enlightenment as freedom from all external, tutelary authority in forming one’s own judgements. In his Streit, Kant in turn sought to apply such conceptions of freedom and rationality to the speciWc educational and political arrangements of late eighteenth-century Prussia. In practical terms, this amounted to an unabashed defence of the philosophical faculty as the bearer of Enlightenment rationality and a vindication of its right to freedom of expression, the right to have its members’ rational arguments answered by rational arguments rather than by coercion or appeals to religious authority. Kant recognized that the current division of the faculties was not without legitimacy as a means of dividing labour; he did not, in other words, attempt to uproot the entire system. Rather, he sought to defend and strengthen the philosophical faculty, redeWning its role as an autonomous, self-conWdent dispenser of liberal, rational enquiry within the university. ‘It is absolutely essential,’ he wrote, ‘that the learned community at 299 This was the section that Kant had written in 1794. He later added two more sections, one on the conXict of philosophy with law and one on the conXict of philosophy with medicine. The Wrst section though is the only one that truly deals with an actual conXict in the universities. It is generally recognized that the three parts do not fuse together very well into an integral whole. Kant himself seemed to admit this when he wrote in the preface that these three essays were written ‘for diVerent purposes and diVerent times’. See Kant, Streit, 20–1. 300 See translator’s introduction in Kant, Streit, pp. vii-viii. 301 Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Forms of Moral Inquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 65.

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the university also contain a faculty that is independent . . . one that, having no commands, is free to evaluate everything, and concerns itself with the interests of science (Wissenschaft), that is, with truth: one in which reason (Vernunft) is authorized to speak out publicly’.302 The distinction between the higher faculties and philosophy, according to Kant, was that the latter had no master but ‘the free play of reason’, whereas the former were bound by certain ‘external legislators’, such as, in the case of theology, the Bible and credal formulations like the Augsburg Confession. These legislators all had discernible historical origins in contrast to ‘reason’, which, in Kant’s view, transcended human diversity and historical particularities. Moreover, the higher faculties shared a utilitarian purpose with respect to the government. Graduates of these faculties—‘tools of the government’ as Kant called them—functioned to maintain the social order, from which the government’s legitimacy was derived in the eyes of the people: the lawyer and judge established security for persons and property, the doctor attended to the health of the body, and the clergy provided spiritual comfort in this world and guidance towards the world to come. By contrast, philosophy had no utilitarian function; it was a free spirit whose only task was to tend the Xame of rationality by looking after ‘the interests of science’. In performing this task, no domain of knowledge should be oV-limits: the reach of the philosophical faculty, Kant maintained, ‘extends to all parts of knowledge,’ including to ‘the teachings of the higher faculties’.303 In Kant’s ideal view, the relevant parties—the higher faculties, the philosophical faculty, and the government—would recognize that great social importance inhered in the relationship of philosophy to the higher faculties. The position of philosophy in this relationship was no longer to be one of subservience, no longer a handmaid. Rather, from its vantage point of freedom and reason, the philosophical faculty should perform a watchdog function over the other faculties, criticizing and thus improving them when they failed to comply with the universal canons of rationality. Indeed, philosophy, not theology, should exercise the Wnal control function within the university, albeit it should execute this function through argumentation and critique, not coercion. In Kant’s formulation: [A] university must have a faculty of philosophy. Its function in relation to the three higher faculties is to monitor (controlliren) them and, in this way, be useful to them, since truth (the essential and Wrst condition of learning in general) is the main thing, whereas the utility the higher faculties promise the government is of secondary importance.

302 Kant, Streit, 23–9.

303 Ibid. 32–45.

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Kant recognized his claim amounted to a direct challenge to the age-old primacy of theology. Diplomatically, he therefore suggested that ‘we can also grant the theological faculty’s proud claim that the philosophical faculty is its handmaid provided [that] it [philosophy] is not driven away or silenced’. But he wryly added: ‘the question remains whether the servant is the mistress’s torchbearer or trainbearer?’304 As the remainder of the work makes clear, Kant assumed the former: in religious matters, theology should follow philosophy’s skills in illuminating the path towards truth and reason. And for Kant, this meant regarding Christianity in moral not doctrinal terms. Accordingly, extending lines of enquiry pursued in his earlier Religion, Kant sought to demonstrate how the doctrines of the Trinity, the Resurrection, and the Ascension were devoid of rational (read: strictly moral) religious content and, from the standpoint of philosophy, dispensable.305 Revealingly, however, when discussing the social rationale of the philosophical faculty, Kant strikes an ambiguous note. On the one hand, as indicated already, he maintained that philosophy was completely disinterested and impartial: ‘free and subject to laws only given by reason’. However, he also subtly indicated that a modern state (one might read here Kulturstaat), if it recognized its high calling to encourage rationality and progress, would Wnd philosophy a useful ally: ‘The philosophical faculty can lay claim to any teaching in order to test its truth . . . [and] the government cannot forbid it to do so without acting against its own proper and essential purpose,’ which Kant indeed regarded as cultivating greater reason, knowledge, and freedom while never relinquishing its own absolute claim to sovereignty.306 Kant made this idea more explicit, suggesting at one point that a disinterested, truthseeking faculty within the university was necessary to help the government ‘[be] adequately informed about what could be to its own advantage or detriment’ and, therefore, it could ‘lead [state] oYcials more and more into the way of truth’.307 If the government were to esteem philosophy appropriately, then the philosophical faculty might one day triumph over the higher faculties. In words subtly alluding to Christ’s in the New Testament, Kant therefore summed up: ‘In this way, it could well happen that the last would some day be Wrst (the lower faculty would be the higher). . . . For the government may Wnd the freedom of the philosophical faculty, and the increased insight gained from this freedom, a better means of achieving its end than its own absolute authority.’308 304 Ibid. 44–5. 305 Ibid. 65 V. 306 Ibid. 42–5. On the complex relationship between Kant’s views of freedom, knowledge, and the state, see Leonard Krieger’s discussion in The German Idea of Freedom (Boston: Beacon, 1957), 86–125. 307 Kant, Streit, 46–7. 308 Ibid. 58–9.

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With Kant’s words and their historical context in mind, I shall comment, in conclusion, on a relevant passage from Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard’s much-discussed Postmodern Condition. Modern Western states since the Enlightenment, Lyotard notes, have had a vested interest in ‘enabl[ing] science to pass itself oV as an epic: the State’s own credibility is based on that epic, which it uses to obtain the public consent its decision makers need’.309 Put diVerently, without older religious-confessional or ‘divine rights’ forms of political legitimation, the modern state must derive it from other secular sources. Indeed, the transition from religiously sanctioned states to non-religious ones is a deWning aspect of Western modernity. Admittedly, in modern society, political legitimation comes at some level from ‘the people’, the ‘general will’; but in order to obtain and maintain credibility, Lyotard rightly observes, political authority must convincingly demonstrate that its oYcials and policies are in line with, or at least not wilfully contradicting, the latest in scientiWc scholarship, i.e. the authority of the university broadly understood. Government must therefore stand arm in arm with further advances in knowledge for the betterment of society. Der Streit der Fakulta¨ten and the body of progressive, late eighteenthcentury academic concerns that it embodies stands at the threshold of this new understanding of political legitimation. While on a theoretical level, Kant sought to maintain that the philosophical faculty (deWned as the locus and curator of rationality within the university and society) was free from all prejudice and connections to external authority, he also, on a practical level, dangled before the government a powerful new carrot of legitimation and one that implied entwining the interests of science and the state quite closely. The carrot was simply that science itself oVered a promising new ‘epic’, not the old ‘biblical narrative’ or ‘story of salvation’ (historia sacra or Heilsgeschichte), but a new Enlightenment story of overcoming the obscurantist past through rational critique and the expansion of knowledge.310 Concurrently popularized in the French Enlightenment by such writers as the Marquis de Condorcet, this story, Kant suggested, should be wholeheartedly embraced by the Prussian government and, by extension, all modern governments. Furthermore, if the theological faculty was the seat of intellectual authority, the Wnal 309 Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. GeoV Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979), 28. 310 As a relevant, interesting aside, Kant’s own actions at the University of Ko¨nigsberg often illustrated his desire for the diminution of religious authority in academic (and by extension social and political) aVairs. He regularly participated in academic processions, for example, but once the procession reached the church for the customary university worship service, he ostentatiously stepped aside from the procession and made his way home instead. Noted in Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background and History, trans. Brian Cozens and John Bowden (London: SCM, 1972), 267.

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arbiter of valid and socially justiWable knowledge, in a confessional age, then the philosophical faculty could provide a similar function, for both secular and religious knowledge, in the modern era. In Kant’s judgement, the state therefore had a vested and historically pivotal interest in seeing that the hitherto queen of the sciences was unseated. In order to accomplish this, the state must shift its loyalties from ‘theological’ verities to ‘philosophical’ ones, beneWting from the latter’s ‘epic’, while agreeing to recognize the philosophical faculty’s claim of accepting no master but reason itself—reason ‘independent of time, place, and historical circumstance’. That reason might Wnd it hard going to transcend time, place, and historical circumstance—and indeed that it could function as a mere expression of them while insisting otherwise—was not a thought that Kant and his intellectual progeny, including many founders of the University of Berlin, entertained as seriously as one might have wished.

3 Theology, Wissenschaft, and the Founding of the University of Berlin The founding of the University of Berlin is in point of fact one of the most important movements in the history of modern Germany. Heinrich SteVens, Was ich erlebte (1842) Historically, then, the new theology is a child of almost pure German blood. If its birthplace . . . must be Wxed we may, not without good reason, name Berlin. Francis G. Peabody, Unitarian Review (1879)

1 . IN T RO DU C TI O N In the entry on ‘universities’ for the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1875–89), the author marvelled at how the University of Berlin, founded only in 1810, had quickly risen to hold ‘a foremost place among universities of Europe’. A notable and inXuential characteristic of the new university, the author continued admiringly, ‘was its entire repudiation of attachment to any particular creed. . . . [I]t professed subservience only to the interests of science and learning.’1 While credal strictures, as I have indicated, were loosening at universities in the eighteenth century, it is fair to say that the University of Berlin was the Wrst German university, at least in the formulations of its founders if not entirely in actual practice, to sever the centuries-old tie between confessionally deWned Christianity and university education.2 It was the Wrst European university founded under purely national, secular auspices, bearing the imprimatur of neither emperor nor pope. 1 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th edn., xxiii. 848. 2 Friedrich Paulsen, The German Universities and University Study, trans. Frank Thilly and William W. Elwang (New York, 1906), 54. This point should be qualiWed by noting that the decline of confessionalism applied Wrst to students and only gradually to the general faculty, which was preponderantly Protestant throughout the nineteenth century. The theological

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In retrospect, this has proved a momentous development, pivotal for German universities, and for Western higher education generally. By the early twentieth century the ‘German University’ led and typiWed by Berlin had risen to the pinnacle of world esteem, the standard-bearer for numerous educational institutions committed to science, research, and academic freedom. The cofounder of Cornell University, Andrew Dickson White, spoke for many when he called the University of Berlin ‘my ideal of a university not only realized— but extended and gloriWed’.3 In the new university, the theological faculty managed to maintain a respectable niche, even if some university founders saw it as anachronistic. In point of fact, the medieval four-faculties system, demonstrating surprising adaptability, persisted at Berlin, despite numerous calls to eliminate it in favour of other forms of organization. Nonetheless, theology wholly ceased to hold a position of pre-eminence except in symbolic and ceremonial matters. InXuenced by the Enlightenment, Kantian idealist philosophy, and the ethos of neohumanism, the university founders put forward secular or only vestigially religious ideals to guide the university—ideals in many respects antithetical to the lingering confessionalism that had justiWed theology’s institutional centrality in the post-Reformation period. As is well known, these new ideals articulated by Humboldt, Fichte, Schleiermacher, and others rested on two pillars in particular: scholarly inquiry (Wissenschaft) and the reWnement of individual character (Bildung). In turn, Wissenschaft and Bildung were to be nourished in an atmosphere of teaching and learning freedom (Lehr- und Lernfreiheit). The formulations of most founders on these points implied that no predetermined conception of truth should interfere with the pursuit of science and learning per se; scholars and students alike should be freed of confessional constraints and utilitarian considerations to lead the untrammelled life of the mind, conWdent that freedom itself was a suYcient condition to advance reason, the unity of knowledge, and the steady progress of humankind. As Humboldt famously put it, one should simply ‘live for science’ (der Wissenschaft leben) at the new university. Finally, as the examples of Go¨ttingen and Kant’s writings had anticipated, the philosophical faculty should be the seat of this new academic vision, the nerve centre of the institution, as it were, where reason obeyed no master but reason itself. Such was the ‘rhetorical environment’ in which the erstwhile queen of the sciences found itself circa 1810. If theology were to continue as a valid academic enterprise (again, some doubted that it should or could, at least faculty was ‘Protestant’, but only in the most generic sense; from Berlin’s inception distinctions between ‘Lutheran’ and ‘Reformed’ played less important roles than at other Prussian universities. 3 Andrew Dickson White, Autobiography (New York, 1907), i. 291.

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in a university setting), it would have to adapt to these new ideals in a creative and convincing manner.4 But theology had more than new ideals to negotiate. The realities of the University of Berlin in its early stages, and long after, were much more complicated than simply the translation of its founders’ ideals into practice. One does well to question this view, even if much adulatory historiography on the German university tends to reinforce it. Instead, one should bear in mind that the university was born during the Prussian Reform Era (1807–15), a time of great social change and reform that resulted in unprecedented state centralization.5 Prussian oYcials, through the power of the purse strings, a virtual monopoly over academic appointments, the right to administer obligatory state examinations to university graduates, and various other supervisory and regulatory means granted to the newly created Department of Ecclesiastical AVairs and Public Education, came to wield heretofore unknown power over the universities. The notion of the university as a quasi-feudal corporative enterprise, attenuated in the eighteenth century, began to dissolve entirely in the nineteenth. Accordingly, one should take the founders’ rhetoric of academic freedom with a rather large lump of salt. Doing so helps one observe that theology faced not only an intra-university discourse of academic freedom and scientiWc inquiry, but also an extrauniversity reality of magniWed state authority. The fortunes of German academic theology from 1810 onward, I thus venture, became closely bound with the evolution of the modern Prussian state and the rise of modern conceptions of Wissenschaft, among the two most consequential historical forces afoot in the early nineteenth century. In what follows, I consider what challenges and opportunities Berlin’s theological faculty faced during the university’s founding era. Not surprisingly, the circumstances of Berlin’s founding have attracted considerable scholarly interest. Yet few historians have evinced serious and sustained interest in the fate of theology. From a contemporary standpoint, this appears perhaps understandable. As the entry from Britannica suggests, Berlin supposedly inaugurated a new era, one open to freedom of inquiry and research; it was only a matter of course—so the implication runs—that the unbridled pursuit of knowledge would soon undermine theology’s institutional signiWcance. However, accepting this view uncritically obscures important realities, as it ties historical insight to a particular teleological judgment about the (secular) nature of modernity. Theology, in fact, proved 4 Leopold Zscharnack states that theology faced an ‘Existenzfrage’ during the founding of the University of Berlin. See Zscharnack, ‘Das erste Jahrhundert der theologischen Fakulta¨t Berlin’, Chronik der christlichen Welt 20 (1910): 470. 5 E. R. Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789, 2nd. edn. (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1990), i. 264 V.

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quite resilient in the new intellectual and political climate, even if it undeniably came to be overshadowed by other forms of inquiry as the nineteenth century progressed. Theology’s fate, in other words, had a double mien, a Janus-face. Focus on theology during Berlin’s early years leads one necessarily to Friedrich Schleiermacher. It is a remarkable fact that a theologian proved to be among the most inXuential Wgures in founding a university best known for its scientizing and secularizing inXuences. While Schleiermacher has been treated extensively by theologians, most accounts only cursorily examine his speciWc institutional and political context, focusing instead on his seminal works of theology and their inXuence.6 My account casts Schleiermacher in a diVerent light: as a Prussian academic bureaucrat, an intellectual architect of the University of Berlin, a theological educator, and the Wrst dean and enduring cornerstone of Berlin’s Wrst theological faculty. I accordingly treat his historical context quite thickly, regarding his activities and writings against the backdrop of the heady, conXict-ridden days of Prussia under Napoleonic domination. Several shorter writings are more relevant for my purposes; in addition to various memoranda, these include his Gelegentliche Gedanken u¨ber Universita¨ten in deutschem Sinn (1808), arguably the charter of the new university; and his Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums (1811), a short treatise on theological pedagogy. To consider these texts properly, one must see Schleiermacher as simultaneously expressing and resisting intellectual and political currents in the early nineteenth century. The texts express the near religious regard among the intellectual classes for Wissenschaft and for the primacy of the philosophical faculty, while they seek to resist the encroachments of the Prussian state into ecclesiastical life and theological education. On the Wrst count, Schleiermacher’s eVorts proved inXuential: his models of university and theology helped establish the institutional conditions for the renewed legitimation and ‘scientization’ (Verwissenschaftlichung) of theology in the nineteenth century— though this process provoked strong reactions from those less sanguine about the marriage of theology and science. His eVorts to resist the state, a sign of his political liberalism, were less eVective: theological education, along with universities and churches, increasingly came under the ambit of the state at this time.

6 On Schleiermacher’s general theological signiWcance, see MCT 588–92 and RGG v. 1422–35. On Scheleiermacher’s life, see Martin Redeker, Schleiermacher: Life and Thought, trans. John Wallhausser (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1973), and Kurt Nowak, Schleiermacher: Leben, Werk und Wirkung (Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001).

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Theology, Wissenschaft, and Berlin 2 . R EVO LU T I O NA RY TI M E S A N D T H E ASCENDANCY OF WISSENSCHAFT

The period from the onset of the French Revolution in 1789 to Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815 was one of dizzying change, a political and social watershed for both Germany and Europe as a whole. As James J. Sheehan has summarized, ‘Every German government had to discover ways to deal with the expansion of French power, to fulWll its demands, and to withstand its destructive impact. . . . [P]olitical survival would require more than the ability to endure. To exist in a revolutionary age demanded mastering the revolution itself, acquiring the revolution’s power but turning to one’s own uses the forces it had unleashed.’7 As I more fully show in Ch. 4, this ‘time of birth and transition to a new period’ (Hegel) had major implications for church–state relations in Prussia and elsewhere, and for the relationship of academic theology to both ecclesiastical and political power. The period also had a tremendous impact on German universities throughout the Holy Roman Empire—a feeble political entity dissolved by Napoleon in 1806. In this climate of upheaval, many struggling universities went under, often because they lost their political and economic base of support during Napoleon’s rapid territorial reorganization of the German states. Still other universities were reconstituted or forced to consolidate with neighbouring institutions to share scarce resources and students. All together, of the some thirty-two German institutions in existence prior to 1789, roughly half had disappeared thirty years later. Those that survived and new foundations, such as Berlin, were indelibly impressed by the revolutionary milieu: they expired as autonomous corporations in a hierarchical, semi-feudal society of privilege and tradition and were reborn as bearers of a new, albeit still ill-deWned identity, in an era to be dominated by the modern state, bourgeois society, scientiWc inquiry, and ideologies ranging from nationalism and liberalism to idealism and positivism. Hardest hit were the Catholic universities, nine of which were disbanded during this period. Cologne was the Wrst to go in 1794, then the universities of Mainz and Trier in 1798, Bamberg in 1803, Dillingen in 1804, Paderborn in 1808, Fulda in 1809, Breslau in 1811 (though it was soon reconstituted), and Mu¨nster in 1818. The Bavarian University of Ingolstadt was Wrst moved to Landeshut in 1802 and then to Munich in 1826; it underwent wide-ranging changes as a consequence of the reforms that swept Bavaria under the 7 James J. Sheehan, German History, 1770–1866 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 251–2.

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direction of Count Maximilian von Montgelas.8 These reforms paved the way for Munich to become ‘the intellectual center of German Catholicism’ by the mid-nineteenth century.9 While a number of Catholic theological faculties survived the revolutionary onslaught, often proving to be fruitful centres of inquiry and dialogue with their Protestant counterparts, seminaries directed by bishops and religious orders, often tilting toward ultramontanism, began to play a more prominent role in Catholic theology at this time.10 Protestant universities fared little better; seven of them closed their doors: Altdorf in 1807, Rinteln in 1809, Calixtus’ and Mosheim’s Helmstedt in 1809, Frankfurt an der Oder in 1811, Erfurt in 1816, and Wittenberg in 1817. (Subsequently, the resources and personnel of Wittenberg and Frankfurt an der Oder were merged, respectively, with Halle and Breslau.) The universities that managed to survive—such as Marburg, Tu¨bingen, Heidelberg, and Go¨ttingen—did so mainly because of better Wnancial proWles and because they had the good fortune to receive support from the newly expanded territorial states set up by Napoleon.11 Like Munich, many of these universities were the targets of their states’ reforming zeal and, as such, witnessed considerable restructuring.12 As a result of Napoleon’s victories, French politics and culture shadowed all Germany at this time. Not surprisingly, the French example of educational reform exerted a powerful inXuence over the surviving German institutions— an inXuence keenly felt by the founders of the University of Berlin, although they were more often critical than accepting of it. In 1793, revolutionaries in Paris had abolished the French universities and their faculties, proWting from their endowments while regarding them as yet another ‘inutile’ aspect of the Old Regime. Philosophes and revolutionaries alike especially deplored the tight grip that the Catholic Church in France had exercised over university studies.

8 See Laetetia Boehm and Johannes Spo¨rl (eds.), Ludwig-Maximilians-Universita¨t, Ingolstadt, Landshut, Mu¨nchen, 1472–1972 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1972), 177–250. 9 Thomas Nipperdey, Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck, 1800–1866, trans. Daniel Nolan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 361. 10 M. Braubach, ‘Die katholischen Universita¨ten Deutschlands und die franzo¨sische Revolution’, HJB 49 (1929): 263–303. Prussia, notably, founded two Catholic theological faculties during this era: Breslau in 1811 and Bonn in 1818. See RGG i. 1357–60, 1404–9. 11 H. George Anderson, ‘Challenge and Change within German Protestant Theological Education during the Nineteenth Century’, CH 39 (March 1970): 36–48. 12 Indeed, it is worth pointing out that the founding of the University of Berlin was no isolated phenomenon, but part (albeit the most conspicuous and consequential part) of a general reforming impulse in higher education catalysed by Napoleon. On reforms in nonPrussian areas during this period, see James Dennis Cobb, ‘The Forgotten Reforms: NonPrussian Universities, 1797–1817’, Ph.D. diss. (University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1980).

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Almost a decade of educational experimentation followed in France after 1793, during which time secular and state-dominated schemes of education supplanted traditional ones. It was not until the imperial period of Napoleon’s reign that a comprehensive, ‘national’ system of higher education—under the direction of the newly created Ministry of National Education—replaced the older system that the Revolution had destroyed. The Napoleonic system sundered the tasks of research and teaching, assigning the former to a number of extra-university institutions rejuvenated during the Revolution, such as the Colle`ge de France, and to newly established scientiWc and professional training centres such as the E´cole polytechnique and the E´cole normale supe´rieure. The task of teaching was handed over to a new university apparatus, the Universite´ impe´riale, established by Napoleon in 1808. State-dominated, utilitarian in focus, and having virtually no resemblance to the pre-revolutionary university, the new educational structure was designed to prepare reliable teachers, oYcials, and other professionals for imperial service.13 In this system, versions of the medical and legal faculties were reconstituted because of their patent usefulness to the state. The old arts/philosophical faculty was divided into the ‘natural sciences’ (faculte´ des sciences) and the ‘humanities’ (faculte´ des lettres). As indicated earlier, the Revolution had closed down all theological faculties in France, including Paris’s Sorbonne, once synonmous with theological learning of the highest order.14 Although a handful of Catholic theological faculties were reopened under Napoleon, the church regularly refused to recognize their legitimacy, faulting their connections with the state, with the result that their degrees carried little value and they produced few graduates. The Concordat of 1801 had allowed for independent seminaries, however. Consequently, most Catholic theology in France developed in the context of seminaries, not universities—a major contrast with the predominantly Protestant situation east of the Rhine, where theology developed largely in universities controlled and administered by the various German states.15 13 Napoleon’s Imperial University ‘was not a university at all in the traditional sense of the word,’ writes L. W. B. Brockliss, ‘but a state department of education that controlled a series of separate professional schools and their feeder institutions: these had no corporate identity, no Wscal independence and little curricular freedom.’ See Brockliss, ‘The European University in the Age of Revolution, 1789–1850’, in M. G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys (eds.), The History of the University of Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), vi. pt. 1.98. Cf. Robert B. Holtmann, The Napoleonic Revolution (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1967), 139–62. 14 The Sorbonne was forsaken by the Revolution and Napoleon alike; its building was not reoccupied until 1821 and then for entirely secular purposes. See R. R. Palmer, The Improvement of Humanity: Education and the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 105 V. 15 Besides Catholic theological faculties, a Protestant faculty was established at Montauban in 1808 and later one at Strasbourg in 1818. On theological education in France during the nineteenth century, see Bruno Nevo, ‘L’E´glise, l’e´tat et l’universite´: les faculte´s de theologie

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Concurrent with educational reforms in France and the reshuZing of central Europe’s political map and university landscape, a re-envisioned conception of the academic vocation and scholarship, a new ‘Wissenschaftsideologie’, began to take shape and gain wide currency among inXuential segments of Germany’s elite, educated classes. The new academic vision, elaborated in several inXuential treatises occasioned by the founding of the university in Berlin,16 was destined to have a lasting impact on nineteenth-century German intellectual life through its near total institutional success in the broader university network. A process well underway by the 1820s and 1830s, it played a preparatory role in establishing the institutional conditions for the emergence of the modern research imperative: the scholarly mandate to discover new knowledge, not master and synthesize old knowledge.17 The new scholarly ideal—‘Wissenschaftlichkeit’ as it often appears in the literature of the era—exerted, not surprisingly, tremendous inXuence on theological study and learning. As indicated in the introduction, throughout the nineteenth century, theology found itself in an intellectual atmosphere where the claims of Wissenschaft reigned sovereign. Pietist and orthodox theologians often demurred, regarding the new Wissenschaftsideologie as an idolatrous alternative to the praxis-centred, sapiential theology articulated in the past by Luther, Spener, Francke, and others. Nonetheless, in the post-revolutionary academic milieu, few options presented themselves except that of accommodation to Wissenschaft. The charge that one’s outlook was unwissenschaftlich (a term of derision increasingly applied to reactionary theologians by their critics) amounted to an accusation of having no credible stake in the modern university. The intellectual origins of Wissenschaft as an academic ideology in the early nineteenth century are fairly complex, although four main sources are identiWable. These merit brief mentioning. First, the new academic ideal was partially bound up with the intellectual and aesthetic movement of late eighteenth-century neohumanism, which, as we have seen, found expression in Go¨ttingen’s philosophical faculty and in the works of Goethe, Winckelmann, Herder, and others. Neohumanism imbued the incipient ethos of Wissenschaft with an elevated view of classical studies catholique en France au XIXe siecle’, in Nigel Aston (ed.), Religious Change in Europe: Essays for John McManners (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 325–44. 16 Important treatises by Humboldt, Fichte, Schleiermacher, Schelling, and SteVens are found in Ernst Anrich (ed.), Die Idee der deutschen Universita¨t. Die fu¨nf Grundschriften aus der Zeit ihrer Neubegru¨ndung durch klassischen Idealismus und romantischen Realismus (Darmstadt: H. Gentner, 1956). I shall return to these treatises below. 17 R. Steven Turner, ‘The Prussian Universities and the Concept of Research’, Internationales Archiv fu¨r Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 5 (1980): 68–93.

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and classical philology and it accented the importance of individual character development (Bildung). Scholarly immersion in the classics and other humane studies, neohumanists argued, would counter the torpor of the eighteenth-century university and the general unruliness of student culture, thereby allowing for the freer, fuller, and more harmonious development of human personality. At its core, neohumanism was anti-utilitarian; it therefore placed emphasis on the regeneration of the philosophical faculty and held the professionalism of the higher faculties in partial contempt. Helmut Schelsky has summed up the neohumanist vision as ‘Bildung durch Wissenschaft’.18 This idea proved to be a major component not only of Prussian university reform but also of the reform of the Prussian Gymnasium, which was refashioned in the early nineteenth century under the direction of Wilhelm von Humboldt to reXect neohumanist principles.19 A second strand of Wissenschaftsideologie stemmed from educational theories espoused by inXuential non-German thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Heinrich Pestalozzi. Their ideas gained broad currency among German scholars and writers in the late eighteenth century, especially through such works as Rousseau’s E´mile (1762) and Pestalozzi’s Meine Nachforschungen u¨ber den Gang der Natur in der Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts (1797). As is well known, these giants of modern educational theory disputed that the teacher’s primary task was imparting a uniform body of knowledge to students. Rather, to help students conform to ‘nature’, teachers should recognize the uniqueness of each individual and help students cultivate their own creative and scholarly potential. In many respects, such views dovetailed with the neohumanist stress on Bildung, in that both held the free development of the human intellect and personality as objectives beyond the pale of criticism.20 18 Helmut Schelsky, Einsamkeit und Freiheit: Idee und Gestalt der deutschen Universita¨t und ihrer Reformen (Du¨sseldorf: Bertelsmann, 1971), 63. 19 On the reforms of the Prussian Gymnasium under Humboldt, see Clemen Menze, Die Bildungsreform Wilhelm von Humboldts (Hanover: Schroedel, 1975), and Paul R. Sweet, Wilhelm von Humboldt: A Biography (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1980), ii. 40–43. On the idea of Bildung generally, see W. H. Bruford, The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation: Bildung from Humboldt to Thomas Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); David Sorkin, ‘Wilhelm von Humboldt: The Theory and Practice of Self-Formation (Bildung), 1791–1810’, JHI 44 (1983): 55–73; and Rudolf Vierhaus, ‘Bildung’, in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (eds.), Geschichtliche GrundbegriVe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland (Stuttgart: E. Klett, 1972), i. 508–51. 20 On the wave of enthusiasm for Pestalozzi that swept over Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see Renate Hinz, Pestalozzi und Preussen. Zur Rezeption der Pestalozzischen Pa¨dagogik in der preussischen Reformzeit (Frankfurt am Main: Haag & Herchen, 1991), and Fritz-Peter Hager and Daniel Tro¨hler (eds.), Studien zur Pestalozzi-Rezeption im Deutschland des fru¨hen 19.Jahrhunderts (Berne: P. Haupt, 1995).

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Thirdly, and crucially, the new conception of Wissenschaft grew out of (Kantian and post-Kantian) idealist philosophy, especially the variety that had found an institutional stronghold at the University of Jena in the last decade of the eighteenth century. It was expressed there by scholars such as Fichte, particularly in his famous Wissenschaftslehre (1794), and by his younger colleagues, F. W. J. Schelling and G. W. F. Hegel, both of whom, like Fichte, eventually taught at the University of Berlin.21 Idealist thinkers implied with their usage of Wissenschaft a particular and rather lofty metaphysical claim about the nature of knowledge and human intellectual capabilities. In Schelling’s view, for example, Wissenschaft amounted to knowledge of the essential unity existing between ‘the Real and the Ideal’. The more wissenschaftlich knowledge human beings attained, the closer their collective mind approximated the mind of ‘the Absolute’, Schelling’s term for God (more or less). In Schelling’s formulation: [A]lthough primordial knowledge is originally present only in the Absolute itself, it is also present in ourselves in the idea of the essence of ourselves; and our total system of knowledge can be only a copy of that eternal knowledge. . . . Only knowledge in its totality can be a perfect reXection of the archetypal knowledge, but each single insight and every individual science are organic parts of the whole.22

Following Schelling, other idealist thinkers deWned Wissenschaft as something residing ‘in ourselves,’ which must be ‘awakened’ and cannot simply be implanted through memorization and rote drills—the assumption of past pedagogy. The phrase ‘awakening the idea of Wissenschaft’ among students, in fact, recurs with mantra-like regularity in idealist literature on the subject of the university.23 Furthermore, for Schelling and others, knowledge possessed an organic unity, a fundamental interrelatedness and complementarity. This theme too was echoed by a wide spectrum of turn-of-the century thinkers and, as I have indicated earlier, contributed to the rage for producing encyclopedias, concrete manifestations of the putative unity of all knowledge. While human knowledge aspired to be a ‘copy of that eternal knowledge’, according to Schelling, it was necessarily in a state of becoming, or emergence, moving toward perfection without ever fully realizing it. For this reason, idealists and their nineteenth-century successors frequently depicted Wissenschaft in evolutionary or developmental terms—growing, unfolding, 21 On the importance of Jena as a bastion of the new discourse on Wissenschaft in the late eighteenth century, see Theodore Ziolkowski, German Romanticism and its Institutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 228 V. 22 Friedrich Schelling, On University Studies, trans. E. S. Morgan, ed. Norbert Guterman (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1966), 10. 23 R. Steven Turner, ‘The Prussian Universities and the Research Imperative, 1806–1848,’ Ph.D diss. (Princeton University, 1972), 259.

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maturing towards ever-fuller actualization. In Hegel, the last and grandest of the idealist system-builders, this evolutionary accent took centre stage and came to permeate various academic discourses through his disciples and epigoni. The emphasis on perpetual development lent Wissenschaft its dynamic and progressive qualities, making it a compelling and fertile vision of the academic vocation. It reshaped the scholar’s self-understanding, investing ‘research’ with a morally obligatory character, and situated the individual act of inquiry in an epic narrative of human striving and achievement. According to R. Steven Turner, the growing usage of the word Wissenschaft circa 1800 already suggests an incipient but distinctly modern ‘research imperative’. In the seventeenth and well into the eighteenth century, the word Wissenschaft actually occurred rather infrequently; the preferred terms for a professor’s knowledge was Gelahrtheit or Gelehrsamkeit, which are closer to the English ‘erudition’, and the professor himself was a Gelehrte, a ‘scholar.’ Gelehrsamkeit connoted an extensive, not intensive, approach to knowledge, one that found scholarly expression in such genres as compendia and textbooks. By the early and mid-nineteenth century, however, Gelehrsamkeit gradually gave way to Wissenschaft, Gelehrte to Wissenschaftler. Increasingly, the professor’s identity was conceptualized as a ‘researcher’ or a ‘scientiWc scholar’, someone committed to investigating the unknown, expanding the frontiers of knowledge, publishing Wndings, and keeping up with the publications of others. Relatedly, the professor’s identity ceased to be deWned primarily in collegial and pedagogical terms—that is, in his association with his colleagues and teaching tasks at a particular university—and came to be deWned more in disciplinary terms, in the professor’s contribution to his scholarly Weld and interaction with colleagues at other universities and academies investigating and publishing on similar topics.24 The new ideology did not sever the tasks of scholarship and teaching; in fact, in the context of the university (as opposed to a scientiWc academy) it sought to unify them: the scholar should be able to bring the fruit of research to the lecture hall or seminar and thereby inspire students with the same ideal 24 See R. Steven Turner, ‘University Reformers and Professorial Scholarship in Germany, 1760–1806’, in Lawrence Stone (ed.), The University in Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), ii. 495–532. On the modern evolution of the term ‘Wissenschaft’, see its entry in Deutsches Wo¨rterbuch von Jacob und Wilhelm von Grimm (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1960), xxx. 782–93. I admit that the dichotomy between Gelahrtheit or Gelehrsamkeit and Wissenschaft is perhaps a bit too tidy, for one often sees the terms used interchangeably during the period. Still, it is revealing that champions of Wissenschaft were often at pains to distinguish the two understandings. For example, the theologian K. R. Hagenbach wrote: ‘Vor allem mu¨ssen wir die falschen Vorstellungen aussonderen, die man ha¨uWg mit den Worte Wissenschaftlichkeit verbindet. Oft verwechselt ¨ ber den BegriV man die Wissenschaftlichkeit mit der bloâen Gelahrtheit . . .’ See Hagenbach, U and die Bedeutung der Wissenschaftlichkeit im Gebiete der Theologie (Basle, 1830), 7.

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of Wissenschaft that animated his own life.25 More fully, the professor should do more than simply impart a given body of knowledge, the hallmark of the premodern university; instead, by unabashedly exhibiting his own inquiring cast of mind, he should awaken in his students a lasting, soul-enriching curiosity about the world, a love of learning and investigation that would inspire students to pursue Wissenschaft by their own lights. Once awakened to the satisfactions of independent intellectual discovery, a crucial process of character formation was to follow. Wissenschaft, in short, should give rise to Bildung: hard-won knowledge should enrich and deepen the student’s interior life and reWne his character. Finally, alongside its neohumanist, Rousseau-Pestalozzian, and idealist sources, the new Wissenschaftsideologie carried a distinctly nationalist dimension, as it was often linked to the ‘imagined community’ of emerging German nationhood and Prussia’s dominant position therein.26 Since the ideology came into its own during Napoleon’s imperium and the concomitant collapse of Holy Roman Empire and the old German university system, proponents of the new academic vision often expressed that it bore the capacity to eVect a patriotic rejuvenation of Prussian/German intellectual life and political culture. Most famously, Fichte in his Reden an die deutsche Nation, delivered during the French occupation of Berlin in 1807–8, linked the cause of educational reform based on Wissenschaft with the goal of national unity and moral regeneration—what he called ‘Nationalerziehung’. ‘[The] sole means of preserving the existence of the German nation’ , he proclaimed, was through ‘a total change of the existing system of education’. The old system of ‘impotence and futility’ must give way to a ‘new world’ of education that seeks to develop the whole character, intellect, and will of the student, teaching not just individual parts of knowledge through memorization, but ‘knowledge of the laws which condition all possible mental activity’.27 Schleiermacher and the natural philosopher Heinrich SteVens elaborated similar patriotic themes in their works, speaking frequently of wissenchaftlich education ‘in the German sense’ to make sure that they were understood as critics of the French, ‘utilitarian’ model of higher education. Likewise, in a 25 In the context of a scientiWc academy, an even stronger accent was placed on ‘pure research’. Article One of the updated statutes of the Academy of Science in Berlin from 1812 proclaims: ‘Der Zweck der Akademie ist auf keine Weise Vortrag betreits bekannten und als Wissenschaft geltenden, sondern Pru¨fung des vohandenen und weitere Forschung im Gebiet der Wissenschaft’. Statuten der ko¨niglichen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin (Berlin, 1812), NStUBG, H. lit. part. VIII 116/8. 26 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: ReXections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn. (London: Verso, 1991). 27 J. G. Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, trans. R. F. Jones and G. H. Turnbull (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 1 V.

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¨ ber das Wesen deutscher Wissenschaft’, Schelling concluded short essay, ‘U that promotion of the ‘highest kind of knowledge’ was the pressing and historically epochal task of ‘the German mind’.28 Indeed, numerous theorists of education implied that Wissenschaft, and a university based upon it, represented something distinctly German; the intellectually penetrating, character-formative, and ennobling aspects of Wissenschaft—so the argument went—served as an indigenous defence against and criticism of the ‘shallow’ utilitarianism characteristic of the Western Enlightenment in general, and the recent educational reforms of Napoleon in particular.29 Not surprisingly then, once the University of Berlin was founded it was quickly heralded not only as a bastion of the new learning, but as a focal point of Prussian-political and German-national pride. The new university’s ‘Wrst eVect’, the scientist Rudolf Virchow stated in an 1893 rectorial address, ‘was to stimulate most powerfully the sense of national identity’.30

3. ‘A NEW CREATION’ How then did a university—what Fichte called ‘a new creation’31—come to be founded in Berlin? Few events in the history of education can boast of more self-conscious deliberation, more dramatic historical conditions, and more long-term inXuence than the founding of this single institution. Indeed, the University of Berlin has obtained a near mythic status in the history of modern higher education, representing an abrupt break with the past and a harbinger of the present. Yet, while recognizing discontinuities, I am principally concerned ¨ ber das Wesen deutscher Wissenschaft’ (1811), in Schellings Werke (Munich, 28 Schelling, ‘U 1927), iv. 377–94. 29 On the origins of this German criticism of the Enlightenment, which gave birth to a strong and lasting sense among German intellectuals of their separateness from the West, see Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), 81–90. The metaphors of shallowness and depth were sometimes employed to distinguish German Wissenschaft (deep) from other, putatively shallow (often French or Anglo-American) forms of inquiry. As Hagenbach put it: ‘Tief aus der Erde Schacht wird das Gold ans Tageslicht gefo¨rdert und der Taucher holt die Perle aus des Meeres dunkeln Gru¨nden herauf. So auch muâ in die Tiefe graben und keine Mu¨he ¨ ber den BegriV and die Bedeutung der scheuen der a¨chte Wissenschaft.’ See Hagenbach, U Wissenschaftlichkeit im Gebiete der Theologie, 9. 30 See Rudolf Virchow, Die Gru¨ndung der Berliner Universita¨t und der Uebergang aus dem philosophischen in das naturwissenschaftliche Zeitalter (Berlin, 1893). 31 ‘A new creation’ were Fichte’s words about the new university; see his letter to J. J. Griesbach of 4 October 1810 in Fichte, Gesamtausgabe (Briefwechsel, 1806–1810), part III, vol. vi, ed., Reinhard Lauth, Hans Glitwitzy, et al. (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1997), 339.

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here with an institutional continuity: how did the theological faculty, deemed a medieval relic by many contemporaries, continue at the university and become a leading seat of ‘wissenschaftliche Theologie’? Pursuit of this question leads us to the circumstances of Berlin’s founding. For our purposes, the role of the state in this process is particularly noteworthy. Indeed, despite the rhetoric of science and academic autonomy espoused by Humboldt and other educational reformers, the powers of the state (Erziehungsstaat or Kulturstaat) were greatly increased over higher education during this time, just as they were increased over society as a whole.32 Berlin’s founders, many of whom served as public oYcials in some capacity, welcomed, or at least accepted, the state as the only force powerful enough to overcome the corporative character of the universities and establish the cherished principles of academic freedom and scientiWc inquiry. For national and educational regeneration, Fichte had written, ‘it is to the state therefore to which we shall Wrst of all have to turn our expectant gaze’.33 For his part, King Friedrich Wilhelm III recognized that the Prussian state, recently humbled by the loss to Napoleon in 1806, would beneWt immensely from a grand, new institution dedicated to higher learning in the nation’s capital; a Wrst-order university promised to inspire patriotic feelings and produce loyal, intelligent civil servants—two pressing needs during a time of political crisis and uncertainty. In the Wnal analysis, a political calculus, not just the promulgation of academic ideals (important though they were), went into the founding of the new university. As Lord Acton once commented, Humboldt and other founders managed to forge ‘[a] link between science and [political] force by organizing a university in Berlin.’34 The initial impulse to found a new ‘institution of higher learning’—few reformers, revealingly, felt comfortable using the term ‘university’ because of its medieval associations—in the Prussian capital originated shortly before 1800. Upon coming to power in 1797, Friedrich Wilhelm III made clear that education at all levels would be a high priority. In a letter to minister Julius Eberhard Wilhelm Ernst von Massow (1750–1816), who had been selected in 1798 to replace Wo¨llner as the head of the Geistliche Departement and director of the Oberkuratorium (the agency responsible for the universities),35 the king 32 Nipperdey, Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck, 19 V. 33 Fichte, Addresses, 160. 34 Lord Acton, ‘German Schools of History’, in Essays in the Study and Writing of History (Indianapolis: Liberty, 1986), 346. 35 On Massow, see ADB xx. 573. The Oberkuratorium or Oberschulkollegium was only established in 1787; it was charged to direct ‘the entire school service’. See Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, i. 278.

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made clear ‘that [he] regarded the condition of education in [his] entire lands as a subject matter worthy of utmost attention and concern’.36 Massow too recognized that educational reform was a timely issue—a fact made clear to him by the persistent and myriad criticisms levelled against the status quo.37 A career civil servant largely untouched by currents of idealism and neohumanism, and an admirer of the statist educational reforms of Joseph II in Austria, Massow placed a premium on educational policies that would be eYcient and useful to the government.38 He disparaged the current state of higher education and openly sympathized with those who preferred the elimination of the university as an institution. In his view, the nation would be better served by scientiWc and vocation-oriented academies, similar to those later established by Napoleon. The universities, he reasoned, were trying to get by on their outworn ancient constitutions, which ‘[neither] met the moral, scientiWc, and practical educational needs . . . of civic life . . . in its private and public dimensions, nor produced useful citizens’.39 A realist however, Massow recognized that formidable obstacles to change existed and that a scarcity of funds would not allow for anything too ambitious to take place. He also feared that the ‘caste’ of university professors would resist reforms that threatened their customary privileges.40 Nonetheless, the impulse for reform remained strong at the beginning of the century. Massow was charged at the start of his oYce to reorganize the entire Prussian educational system, which he promptly set out to accomplish guided by the Enlightenment criterion of usefulness to state and society.41 Although most of his eVorts concentrated on secondary schools, he did contribute to reforms at the University of Ko¨nigsberg, bringing about there 36 Quoted in Rudolf Ko¨pke, Die Gru¨ndung der ko¨niglichen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universita¨t zu Berlin (Berlin, 1860), 11. 37 Ibid. 13. 38 Max Lenz called Massow a ‘Fanatiker der Nu¨tzlichkeit’. See Max Lenz, Geschichte der ko¨niglichen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Unversita¨t zu Berlin (Halle, 1910), i. 38. In the late eighteenth century, under the direction of Joseph II, the University of Vienna had been secularized and placed under rigid state control. According to Rudolf Kink, the purposes of the reforms in Vienna were threefold: ‘To set up institutions of study without exception as purely secular organizations by removing all remnants of ecclesiastical tendencies; to declare them . . . primarily and ever more exclusively to be serving the purposes of the state and the civil service; and to use the school as a means of inculcating reforms throughout the territory of the state, in opposition to the church . . .’ See Rudolf Kink, Geschichte der kaiserlichen Universita¨t zu Wien (Vienna, 1854), i. 486. 39 Quoted in Ko¨pke, Die Gru¨ndung, 14. 40 Ibid. General scarcity of funds in Prussia stemmed from the fact that Friedrich Wilhelm II had saddled Prussia with 55 million thaler of debt. See H. W. Koch, A History of Prussia (London: Longman, 1978), 156. 41 On Massow’s reforms of secondary schools, see Alfred Heubaum, ‘Die Reformbestrebungen unter Jul. v. Massow . . .’, Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft fu¨r deutsche Erziehungs- und Schulgeschichte 14 (1904): 186–226.

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moderate improvements, especially in medical and natural scientiWc instruction.42 Yet Massow’s reform agenda was soon overshadowed by the movement to found a new educational institution in Berlin. The catalyst of this movement was another high-ranking Prussian oYcial, Karl Friedrich Beyme (1765–1832), who had been appointed chief of the king’s civil cabinet in 1800.43 An accomplished jurist with liberal views, Beyme felt Berlin oVered a favourable location for a new educational establishment. With others, he found it unbecoming that Berlin, unlike Copenhagen, Prague, or Vienna, could not boast of a major university. He also thought that the number of smaller institutions devoted to cultural and intellectual activity already in the city—the Academy of Science, the collegium medico-chirurgicum (a college for surgical training), a veterinarian training school, the botanical gardens, the opera, various military schools, a plethora of museums and libraries, and several well-known Gymnasien—made Berlin a logical choice for a new university; personnel and resources from these establishments could be rendered useful to a new institution in relatively inexpensive ways.44 Finally, as a populous, increasingly cosmopolitan capital city, Berlin was already home to a Xourishing literary culture, the energies of which might help invigorate a new institution. In the eighteenth century, Berlin’s salons, public lectures, publishing houses, and book trade had served as a magnet for progressive, freethinking intellectuals throughout Germany and thus it had become one of the leading centres of the German Enlightenment.45 The attractions for intellectuals continued in the early nineteenth century, drawing to the city a number of inXuential writers and thinkers, such as A. W. Schlegel and Fichte. Encouraged thus by seemingly favourable conditions and acutely aware of Prussian universities’ shortcomings, Beyme thought a propitious historical moment was at hand to found in Berlin a new ‘allgemeine Lehranstalt’, as he phrased it, avoiding the term ‘university’. The idea appears to have occurred to him around the turn of the century, coinciding with Massow’s utilitarian reforms.46 But Beyme was no Massow; he had much more in mind for Berlin 42 Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, i. 38. On the reforms at Ko¨nigsberg, see Go¨tz von Selle, Geschichte der Albertus-Universita¨t zu Ko¨nigsberg in Preußen, 2nd edn. (Wu¨rzburg: Holzner, 1956), 213 V. 43 On Beyme, see NDB ii. 208. 44 Charles E. McClelland, State, Society, and University in Germany, 1700–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 104. On the various institutions in Berlin predating the University, see Norman Balk, Die Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universita¨t zu Berlin. Mit einer Darstellung der Berliner Bildungswesen bis 1810 (Berlin, 1926), 1–67. 45 Alexandra Richie, Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998), 81. Two of the leading journals of the German Enlightenment—Friedrich Nicolai’s Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek and J. E. Biester’s Berlinische Monatsschrift—were seated in Berlin. 46 Ko¨pke, Die Gru¨ndung, 17.

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than purely utilitarian goals; he wanted to create something altogether new, idealistic, and inXuential—something in the ‘spirit’ of, but even better than, the Hanoverian University of Go¨ttingen, as he later put it.47 To this end, he initiated a correspondence about the matter and solicited ideas from several conWdants and peers most of whom were respected public Wgures inXuenced by the movements of neohumanism and idealism. These included the philosopher and Gymnasium teacher J. J. Engel (1741–1802), who had instructed Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt; the doctor J. C. Reil (1759–1824); the Halle law professor T. A. H. Schmalz (1760–1831), who would later be appointed as the Wrst rector of the new university; the director of the surgical college, C. W. Hufeland (1762–1836); the philologist F. A. Wolf; and, not least, the philosopher. Fichte. Later this list would grow, as others expressed interest in the new opportunity. Unsolicited voices also made signiWcant contributions: Friedrich Schelling’s inXuential lectures at Jena, published as Vorlesungen u¨ber die Methode des akademischen Studiums (1803), for example, were not lost on the eVorts of Beyme and others. SigniWcantly, with the important exception of Friedrich Schleiermacher, who only later joined the conversation, few of Beyme’s interlocutors were theologically educated or possessed strong ecclesiastical ties. Max Lenz has even speculated that Beyme originally intended to omit a theological faculty from the new institution altogether.48 As one might expect, the letters, reports, and memoranda sent to Beyme by this august group bear witness to a wide range of assumptions and viewpoints. Still, a number of common opinions are evident. To a man, they heaped scorn on the traditional university, regarding it as an anachronistic ‘guild’ (Zunft). Following Beyme, few used the disreputable term ‘university’, preferring instead Lehranstalt, Lehrinstitut, Bildungsanstalt, or something similar. With several exceptions, the theorists believed that the new institution should not focus exclusively on vocational training, a position directly contrary to that of minister Massow.49 Rather, in accord with Friedrich Schiller’s famous 1789 inaugural lecture at Jena, ‘Was heißt und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte?’, most believed that the function of higher education was to produce serious thinkers not clever 47 Unfortunately, Beyme himself never systematically presented his own ideas on the new institution. A marginal note by Beyme on a proposal submitted by F. A. Wolf, though, does contain the following revealing comment: ‘Die Go¨ttingsche Einrichtung, oder vielmehr der Geist derselben, ohne die eingeschlichenen Miâbra¨uche, hat mir schon vor Jahren, als ich den ersten Gedanken an eine von allem Zunftzwang befreite allgemeine wissenschaftliche Bildungsanstalt in der Residenz faâte, vorgeschwebt.’ Quoted in Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, i. 68. 48 See Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, i. 68, 106, and Ko¨pke, Die Gru¨ndung, 45. Schmalz had limited theological training before switching to the study of law. Fichte too had started out in theology before taking up philosophical pursuits. 49 Schelsky, Einsamkeit und Freiheit, 42–3.

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careerists.50 The new institution should serve only a ‘very few choice souls’, as F. A. Wolf put it.51 Or, in Schiller’s well-known parlance, it should serve ‘philosophische Ko¨pfe’ not ‘Brotstudenten’. Accordingly, most of Beyme’s interlocutors subscribed to a rather lofty view of Wissenschaft, although some were more conscious than others of the idealist and neohumanist currents informing their view. Practically all wanted to end the special legal privileges of the university: students and professors alike should submit to the same state and local laws as everyone else; this seemed the best way to curtail the chronic problem of student misconduct.52 Finally, while their views on the relationship of the new institution to the state diVered, most nonetheless admitted that a new high-proWle institution in the nation’s capital, even if it was not vocationally oriented, would greatly beneWt the Prussian government. As J. J. Engel put it in his memorandum of 1802, ‘Concerning the beneWts that will directly redound to the state if it can put forth knowledgeable, enlightened, skilled servants in all disciplines, I have nothing to say. They simply leap before one’s eyes.’53 Predictably, many of Beyme’s discussants voiced familiar criticisms of the ‘faculties’ whenever they discussed the ‘inner organization’ of a new institution. Some were in favour of abolishing them altogether, for the faculties, they argued, were the main culprits of the university’s lamentable ‘Zunftwesen’. Schmalz lambasted traditional universities in this vein and warned against reestablishing a ‘guild under the name faculty’. In the place of faculties, he recommended that the university be divided into seven ‘classes’ (Classen), three of which corresponded to the old professional faculties of theology, law, and medicine, while the other four represented a widening of the philosophical faculty.54 Wolf too disparaged faculties as forms of ‘barbarism’ and organized Welds of knowledge around eight sections (Sectionen), Wve of which represented an expansion of the philosophical faculty: philosophy proper, natural history, mathematics, philology, and history.55 Hufeland reasoned similarly, voicing concern that anachronistic forms of organization should not impede what he saw as the new institution’s ‘leading principle’: ‘to 50 See Friedrich Schiller, ‘Was heiât und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte?’ in Sa¨mtliche Werke, ed., Otto Gu¨nter and Georg Witkowski (Leipzig, 1911), xvi. 51 Quoted in Schelsky, Einsamkeit und Freiheit, 45. 52 For example, J. J. Engel noted that the universities’ ‘eigene Gerichtbarkeit’ had led to all kinds of ‘Unheil’. See his ‘Denkschrift u¨ber die Begru¨ndung einer grossen Lehranstalt in Berlin’ (3 March 1802) in Ko¨pke, Die Gru¨ndung, 152. 53 Ibid. 149. 54 See T. A. H. Heinrich Schmalz, ‘Denkschrift u¨ber die Errichtung einer Universita¨t in Berlin. 22. 8. 1807’, in Wilhelm Weischedel (ed.), Idee und Wirklichkeit einer Universita¨t: Dokumente zur Geschichte der Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universita¨t zu Berlin (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1960), i. 11–15. 55 See Ko¨pke, Die Gru¨ndung, 45, and Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, i. 108.

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provide the greatest possible liberality and freedom (Liberalita¨t und Freiheit) for intellectual activity and inXuence.’56 Still others retained organization by faculties, although, in Kantian fashion, they often voiced approval for the expanded scope and prestige of the traditionally ‘lower’ faculty. J. J. Engel, for example, did not criticize faculties per se, although he did voice doubts about the theological faculty and deplored its penchant for ‘unholy polemicizing’.57 Although he was not in Beyme’s inner circle, the Berlin physician J. B. Erhard went a step further, making the argument that theological faculties, long out of step with modern reason, should be completely banned from the university.58 The intellectual energy unleashed by Beyme’s initiative was remarkable, even if at Wrst it amounted to more talk and expended ink than actions. Practical concerns over lack of funding, scepticism of his ideas among other government ministers, and outright opposition from some professors at other universities and scholars at Berlin’s Academy of Science prevented immediate action. The situation changed dramatically in 1806. In October of this year, Prussia abandoned its policy of neutrality, carefully maintained since the Peace of Basle (1795), and re-entered the fray against Napoleon, but only to suVer humiliating losses on the battleWeld at Jena and Auersta¨dt. The Peace of Tilsit that followed in the summer of 1807 heaped insult upon injury: Napoleon saddled the Prussian government with a war indemnity of 120 million francs and stripped it of all its holdings west of the Elbe river—roughly half of its territority.59 In these holdings, many of which had only been acquired after 1803, were a number of universities: Duisburg, Halle, Paderborn, Erlangen, Erfurt, Mu¨nster, and Go¨ttingen.60 What is more, Napoleon soon forced the closing of Halle, Prussia’s Xagship university, located after 1807 in the Kingdom of Westphalia, a French satellite 56 C. W. Hufeland, ‘Ideen u¨ber die neu zu errichtende Universita¨t zu Berlin und ihre Verbindung mit der Akademie der Wissenschaften und anderen Instituten’, in Weischedel (ed.), Idee und Wirklichkeit, i. 16–27. 57 Ko¨pke, Die Gru¨ndung, 22, 152. ¨ ber die Einrichtung und den Zweck der ho¨heren Lehranstalten (Berlin, 1802). 58 J. B. Erhard, U This work amounts to a relentless assault on the theological faculty. 59 HPG ii. 16–18. 60 In 1792 Erlangen came into Prussian hands through the acquisition of the Frankish principality in which this university existed. Because of the reorganization of central Europe by Napoleon in 1803, Prussia gained many territories; these contained the universities of Erfurt, Mu¨nster, and Paderborn, all of which, in the words of Conrad Bornhak, were ‘hovering between life and death’. Finally, Go¨ttingen came brieXy under Prussian control in 1806. For further details, see Conrad Bornhak, Geschichte der preussischen Universita¨tsverwaltung bis 1810 (Berlin, 1900), 189–94. Again, all of these universities, including historically Prussian ones such as Halle, were lost because of the events of 1806–7. Afterwards, just before the founding of the University of Berlin, Prussia possessed only two universities: Ko¨nigsberg and Frankfurt an der Oder.

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state placed under the rule of Napoleon’s brother, Jerome. This was a painful experience for Halle’s professors, many of whom, including Schmalz, Wolf, Schleiermacher and the philosopher Heinrich SteVens, were thrown into near ruinous Wnancial diYculties.61 From this desperation, however, the idea to found a university in Berlin received new life. F. A. Wolf immediately suggested to Beyme that the loss of Halle aVorded the opportunity to push ahead in establishing a new institution in Berlin.62 Professor Schmalz of Halle’s law faculty went one step further: he organized a delegation from Halle and travelled to speak directly to the king, whose residence was then in Memel in East Prussia.63 A meeting between the two parties was arranged on 10 August 1807, shortly after the Peace of Tilsit. Here, in front of the king, Schmalz argued that the University of Halle, by the letter of its privileges, was still a Prussian ‘Landes-Universita¨t’ and could not justiWably be dissolved and reconstituted in the Kingdom of Westphalia. Therefore, as Schmalz later recalled, ‘We requested that the king . . . remove the university over the Elbe, where no more appropriate place for this purpose exists than Berlin.’64 To this, the king allegedly responded: ‘That is right, that is good! The state must replace with intellectual strength what it has lost in material resources.’65 Once the king’s word circulated, Prussia’s intellectual classes were abuzz about the possibility that Halle, ‘the crown of German universities’ according to Schleiermacher, might be relocated in Berlin. Beyme was delighted by the turn of events, although he was less interested in faithfully transplanting Halle to Berlin than in using the situation to implement his more ambitious plans for an ‘allgemeine Lehranstalt’. In a cabinet order of 4 September 1807 the king entrusted the entire matter to Beyme: ‘I have therefore resolved,’ wrote the king, echoing Beyme’s own words, ‘to establish one such general educational institution (allgemeine Lehranstalt) in Berlin in suitable connection with the Academy of Science. The establishment [of this institution] I hand to you, who fully understands my intention.’66 Invested with new authority, Beyme began sending out queries, delegating tasks, and soliciting advice on matters ranging from Wnances to curricular organization to possible faculty appointments. He especially relied on the advice of Fichte and F. A. Wolf.67 To Fichte, Beyme wrote enthusiastically on 5 61 Nowak, Schleiermacher, 178–82. 62 See Wolf ’s letter to Beyme of 3 August 1807 in Ko¨pke, Die Gru¨ndung, 153. 63 As Napoleon’s troops approached, the king Xed Berlin, relocating Wrst in Ko¨nigsberg and then in Memel in East Prussia. 64 Ko¨pke, Die Gru¨ndung, 37. 65 ‘Das ist recht, das ist brav! Der Staat muss durch geistige Kra¨fte ersetzen, was er an physischen verloren hat.’ See ibid. 37. 66 Quotations from Ko¨pke, ibid. 36–8. 67 Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, i. 83.

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September 1807 that the opportunity to realize his ‘most cherished idea’ was now at hand. Concurrently, he began fruitful exchanges with Wolf, who had relocated from Halle to Berlin after Napoleon had closed Halle’s university.68 Prospective faculty were also considered at this time. Beyme tapped J. W. H. Nolte (1767–1832), who served as councillor on the Lutheran Church’s High Consistory (Oberkonsistorium) to consider which theologians might be suitable for the new university.69 Nolte, it appears, was among the Wrst to recruit Schleiermacher, who also had moved from Halle to Berlin. Excited about the possibility of teaching in Berlin, Schleiermacher, who was never personally close to Beyme, penned his Gelegentliche Gedanken u¨ber Universita¨ten in deutschem Sinn in October of 1807 and published it anonymously in 1808. From this point on, Schleiermacher began to play an increasingly active role in shaping the emerging university. In fact, along with several others, including Schmalz, Fichte, and Wolf, Schleiermacher was soon granted permission to hold lectures, even before the oYcial opening of the university. Among the very Wrst lectures, then, were Schleiermacher’s on ‘ethics’, ‘the history of ancient philosophy’, and ‘theological encyclopedia’. Simultaneously, Schmalz lectured on ‘Roman, German, and Canon law’; Wolf discoursed on ‘philosophical encyclopedia’, Homer, and Tacitus; and, in this context, Fichte gave his famous Reden an die deutsche Nation.70 The period from the summer of 1807 well into 1808 bristled with excitement for those involved. The spirit of the moment combined an eager expectation of intellectual and moral renewal (many had interpreted the loss to Napoleon’s as a sign of Prussia’s spiritual bankruptcy) and a German nationalist sentiment born from resentment of the French occupation. EVorts to found a new university ‘in the German sense’ were thus gleefully regarded as a form of subtle, spiritual retaliation against the French imperium. Heinrich SteVens, among those deprived of a post at Halle, expressed well the atmosphere of the times in his autobiography, Was ich erlebte. It is worth quoting him at some length. And yet, just at the time when the country seemed half-ruined, when all resources seemed cut oV, when one of the richest provinces was in the hands of the enemy, and a sorrowful future seemed to await the whole land, an eVort was put forth that even after ten years of perfect peace would seem incredible. And how was the grand accomplishment brought about? By the conviction that Prussia was called at this time of her humiliation to establish a central point of inXuence which should be felt through all parts of life and service in Germany. 68 Ko¨pke, Die Gru¨ndung, 38–40. 69 Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, i. 81. The Oberkonsistorium was the highest Lutheran church body in Prussia. Nolte had studied theology at Halle under No¨sselt and Niemeyer. 70 For a complete list of the preliminary lectures, see Ko¨pke, Die Gru¨ndung, 141.

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In fact, the tone of feeling in Berlin during this sad time was wonderful. The capital was occupied by hostile troops, the king held himself near the Russian frontier [in Memel]. Yet, while the city and the land were outwardly conquered, only a fragment of the people felt subdued in spirit. The enemy had taken the fortresses . . . but there were forces rallying unseen by our foes . . . At that critical moment Fichte stepped forward, and with wonderful courage uttered words of freedom under the very eyes of our conquerors. Schleiermacher, too, gave strength to the growing German feeling. . . . Both of these men spoke to the heart of the nation. It will always be hard to win Germans over to any superWcial scheme which looks only to the present moment. The French are diVerent. The Frenchman undertakes the work of the hour without any harassing doubts. He has no concern with past or future. . . . [But] the German cannot look at matters in this way. . . . His whole life is penetrated with speculation, reaching out backwards and forwards, and uniting all circumstances in cause and eVect. . . . So Germany was called to lead the Reformation, and so this war of freedom from the French was made by penetrating German minds in the [intent] of giving our nation a character which will unfold itself for generations to come. All hope resting upon Prussian [military] prowess had disappeared. Every one looked with conWdence to the founding of the new university at Berlin. That city had by no means been a central light before. . . . And yet this city, little thought of by Germans, possessed by enemies—this wasted city was suddenly to be transformed into the centre of the brightest hopes for Germany. The founding of the university was a grand event.71

SteVens was more than just a casual observer of events. Hopeful that he might ¨ ber die Idee der Universita¨t, receive a post at Berlin,72 he published in 1809 U which has been regarded as one of the principal theoretical texts of the university, standing alongside two others produced during this period: Fichte’s Deduzierter Plan einer zu Berlin zu errichtenden ho¨heren Lehranstalt (1807) and Schleiermacher’s Gelegentliche Gedanken (1808). Together, these three texts linked up with Schelling’s earlier, widely read Vorlesungen and ¨ ber die innere und a¨ußere Wilhelm von Humboldt’s short memorandum, ‘U Organisation der ho¨heren wissenchaftlichen Anstalten zu Berlin’ (c.1809–10), to comprise an impressive philosophical foundation for the new university. In fact, in the history of European universities, one is hard-pressed to Wnd such a wide-ranging theoretical discussion about the nature and purpose of universities to compare with that which took place at this time. Although he had hardly resumed planning the new university, Beyme was soon pushed aside by political events. Shortly after the Peace of Tilsit, Napoleon put pressure on the Prussian king to recall the liberal minister Karl Freiherr von Stein (1757–1831) to a leading government post, intending 71 SteVens, Was ich erlebte (Breslau, 1842), vi. 298 V. 72 SteVens did not receive a post at Berlin until 1832.

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that Stein pursue major social and political reforms in Prussia. A reluctant but weakened king complied, even though only several months beforehand he had dismissed Stein for his ‘insolence’. As a condition of returning to government, however, Stein made it clear that he would not share power with Beyme, whom Stein disliked and disagreed with on a number of key issues. A potential conXict was averted when the king moved Beyme from the cabinet and made him Grosskanzler, the supreme judicial administrator. Beyme was embittered by the action, but with the urging of the queen he accepted the new post with good grace, even if it meant the end of his direct inXuence on university planning. Stein returned to oYce on 4 October 1807 and remained there for roughly one year—a year of momentous decisions that were to inXuence the course of German history.73 During Stein’s tenure, university planning hung in the lurch. On the one hand, the level of expectation and excitement remained quite high, as witnessed in numerous lively correspondences about the matter and in the production of some of the aforementioned theoretical treatises. Yet since Stein took as his task reforming Prussia at all levels, not just higher education, he did not bring particular passion to what had been Beyme’s pet project. Soon, rumours began to circulate that the project had run out of steam. Former Halle professors who had gathered in Berlin hoping to obtain a new post began to leave the city, accepting oVers from other institutions.74 Several German newspapers and weeklies reported that plans for a new university in Berlin had been sacriWced by Stein to the more pressing goal of getting Prussia back on her feet Wnancially.75 But the idea was never extinguished. For his part, Stein believed that national education was a crucial concern if Prussia desired to have a better future. Thus, in his thoroughgoing reorganization of the government in 1808, Stein made allowances for educational reforms and greater state centralization in order to carry them out eVectively. A new department within the Ministry of the Interior, the ‘Department of Ecclesiastical AVairs and Public Education’, was charged to bring the embryonic university into full being. In the autumn of 1808 Wilhelm von Humboldt was called to serve as head of the new department. Already well known in political and intellectual circles, Humboldt received the call in large part because Stein had recommended him for the post.76 The new Minister of the Interior, Alexander von Dohna, had also 73 Koch, History of Prussia, 167; Ko¨pke, Die Gru¨ndung, 49; and Marion Gray, Prussia in Transition: Society and Politics under the Stein Reform Ministry of 1808, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 76 (Philadelphia, 1986), 47. 74 Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, i. 140 V. 75 Ko¨pke, Die Gru¨ndung, 52–3. 76 Daniel Fallon, The German University (Boulder: Colorado Associated University Press, 1980), 12.

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known Humboldt for some twenty-three years and had great conWdence in him. At Wrst Humboldt was reluctant to give up his diplomatic post in Rome, but eventually acquiesced to oYcial pressures and accepted the position. He arrived in Berlin in January 1809, just a month after French troops had vacated the city.77 On 20 February 1809 he assumed his post, one he would hold for just sixteen months. But during this time, the founding of the University of Berlin was oYcially begun and he would receive much of the credit—even if he was at Wrst sceptical that a city such as Berlin, which he personally disliked, deserved a Wrst-order educational institution.78 In the spring of 1809, Humboldt was brought up to speed on the planning process. He was already familiar with some of the ideas of Wolf, Schleiermacher, and Fichte, and he had previously approvingly read the works of Schiller and Schelling on university education. What is more, by virtue of the fact that he had studied at Go¨ttingen he was already well versed in what Beyme had previously upheld as a desirable ‘spirit’ for the new university. In a memorandum of 25 March 1809, Humboldt noted that ‘a great part of the fatherland’ already expected a new scientiWc and cultural system to be developed that would have the university as its centrepiece; furthermore, it was expected that such a new institution would ‘exert a signiWcant inXuence on all [of] Germany.’79 To the end of making this goal a reality, Humboldt began to make the necessary preparations. In July of 1809, Humboldt sent an oYcial request to the king, asking for permission to found the university without further delay. In the request, he expressed admiration that the king had made ‘national education’ a priority in such ‘unsettled conditions’ and he recalled to the king his earlier mandate given to Beyme to establish an ‘allgemeine Lehranstalt’. The king would not be sorry, Humboldt reassured, for such an institution promised to stimulate the ‘rebirth of his state’ and exercise immense inXuence over its borders. Indeed, the new university would be a beacon of ‘German Wissenschaft’ for all Europe to behold, thus compensating for Prussia’s meagre political circumstances. Importantly, Humboldt reasoned that the new institution should use ‘the old, established name of a university’, because a newfangled one might only prove confusing. He was quick to add, though, that the new establishment would be ‘cleansed of all old abuses’ regularly associated with universities. Finally, as 77 On Humboldt’s impressions of Berlin see his copious letters to his wife Caroline from this period: Anna von Sydow (ed.), Wilhelm und Caroline von Humboldt in ihren Briefen (Berlin, 1909), iii. 69 V. 78 For an overview of Humboldt’s ministerial tenure, see Rudolf Vierhaus, ‘Wilhelm von Humboldt’, in Wolfgang Treue and Karlfried Gru¨nder (eds.), Wissenschaftspolitik in Berlin: Minister, Beamte, Ratgeber (Berlin: Colloquium, 1987), 63–76. 79 Wilhelm von Humboldt, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Bruno Gebhardt (Berlin, 1903), x. 31–2.

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Beyme and others had envisioned, Humboldt stipulated that the new university would function in conjunction with other cultural and learning centres in Berlin, each possessing ‘an appropriate independence’ but they should all ‘work together toward the [same] general purpose’ and thus, like knowledge itself, form ‘an organic whole’.80 The king granted Humboldt’s wishes in a cabinet order of 16 August 1809, noting that the university would enhance ‘intellectual development (Geistesbildung) in the state and over the state’s borders’. He echoed Humboldt’s sentiment, moreover, that the new institution would indeed do well to stick with ‘the old, established name of a university’.81 His intentions royally sanctioned, Humboldt intensiWed his eVorts of faculty recruitment and appointment, negotiating with and oVering many positions in the following months to former Halle professors, members of the Academy of Science, and other scholars, hoping for nothing less than what he called ‘the most important men in Germany’.82 He also set about getting the Wnances of the university in order. Although Humboldt believed that education was a duty of the state, he originally suggested that the king establish a permanent endowment for the university, in order to assure that the institution have at least some measure of protection from Wnancial uncertainty and the potential abuse of power. At Wrst, the king voiced approval of this idea, but eventually, under the inXuence of Humboldt’s successor, Friedrich Schuckmann, the idea was abandoned for fear that it would make the university too independent of the state. Instead, the university came to be funded by periodic subsidies from the government This was a development of great consequence, eVectively preventing the idea of private higher education and forging a close and necessary Wnancial link between state and university that would continue for years to come.83 By the following year, 1810, things were falling into place. The king had granted a lavish site for the university, the palace built for Prince Heinrich, the brother of Friedrich the Great. It was located on Berlin’s stately boulevard Unter den Linden in close proximity to the royal library and the opera house.84 In the autumn of 1810, Theodor Schmalz, formerly of Halle, was appointed to

80 Wilhelm von Humboldt, ‘Antrag auf Errichtung der Universita¨t Berlin von 24.7.1809’, in Weischedel (ed.), Idee und Wirklichkeit, i. 210–12. 81 Weischedel, ibid. 212–13. 82 Letter to the king of 6 February 1809 in Humboldt, Gesammelte Schriften, x. 21. 83 See Weischedel (ed.), Idee und Wirklichkeit, i. p. xix; Sweet, Humboldt, ii. 63–4; and Fallon, The German University, 23–4. 84 Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, i. 290 V. On the architecture and history of the university building, see Klaus-Dietrich Gandert, Vom Prinzenpalais zur Humboldt-Universita¨t (Berlin: Henschen, 1985).

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serve as the Wrst rector.85 On 6 October 1810 students began attending lectures. The Wrst university senate meeting was held at four o’clock on 10 October 1810.86 A new era in the history of the university had begun.

4. THEOLO GY AND THE IDEA OF THE NEW UNIVERSITY The opening of the University of Berlin, as I have indicated, was preceded by an energetic outpouring of writings by leading minds, each seeking to rethink the organization of knowledge, the purpose of the university, and the university’s relationship to state and society.87 To varying degrees, each of these so-called ‘Grundschriften’ or founding treatises—penned by Schelling, Fichte, Schleiermacher, Humboldt, and SteVens—touched upon the question of the faculties and theology, and other issues relevant to the position of theology in the new institution. Fichte’s Deduzierter Plan einer zu Berlin zu errichtenden ho¨hern Lehranstalt (1808) and Schleiermacher’s Gelegentliche Gedanken u¨ber Universita¨ten in deutschem Sinn (1808) are particularly noteworthy, although they diVered in many points, not least in their conception of theological study.88 Not surprisingly, Schleiermacher oVered the most constructive vision of the theological faculty, traditionalist in some respects, but also intimately tied to the new ethos of Wissenschaft and to a regard of the philosophical faculty similar to Kant’s. Furthermore, Schleiermacher’s work most closely approximated the actual university that came into existence in 1810; Humboldt favoured his traditional conception of a university and its faculties over more innovative proposals.

85 Because of various conXicts with the government, Schmalz soon resigned from his post and the position of rector was later assumed by Fichte as a result of a faculty senate vote. Thus, Fichte was the Wrst elected rector. Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, i. 327 V., 397–402. 86 Weischedel (ed.), Idee und Wirklichkeit, i. p. xxiv. At Wrst the university was called simply the University of Berlin. In 1828, by royal decree, it became the Friedrich-Wilhelm University of Berlin. During the GDR period, it was renamed the Humboldt University and this was retained after reuniWcation in 1990. On the name changes and their political meanings, see Ru¨diger vom Bruch, ‘The Foundation of the University of Berlin’, in The Prussian Yearbook: An Almanac (Berlin, 2001), 100–3. 87 A thoughtful, if terse, overview of these writings is found in Elinor S. ShaVer, ‘Romantic Philosophy and the Organization of the Disciplines: The Founding of the Humboldt University of Berlin’, in Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine (eds.), Romanticism and the Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 38–54. 88 Although they were penned in the same year, the authors did not read each other’s texts until after the university was founded. Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, i. 124.

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But traditional forms can be deceptive. One of the persistently curious features of university history in the modern era is how old forms and customs have been able to accommodate and even foster innovative intellectual agendas. Schleiermacher’s ideas, therefore, while couched in a comparatively conservative idiom of university organization, expressed at root, in the words of Max Lenz, something distinctly ‘modern’.89 This ‘modernity,’ once institutionally seated in the Prussian capital with its wide sphere of inXuence, helped pave the way for the transformation of German universities and theological faculties in the nineteenth century. Despite the fact that many ideas in the founding texts were never realized, they have enjoyed a long life in German intellectual and educational history. I emphasize this point because recent historiography has tended to distinguish between the ‘ideas’ of the new university and the ‘reality’, focusing on the latter and dismissing the former as often unrealizable, even utopian, musings. This line of reasoning is salutary in so far as it corrects an older (often nationalist) historiography that exaggerated the role of these texts on the actual constitution of the university.90 But the revisionist literature sometimes overcorrects and, willy-nilly, dismisses the role of ideas in shaping institutional norms. I would therefore advocate a via media, recognizing that the actual university, quite complexly as it turned out, embodied, transcended, contradicted, and fell short of these illustrious Grundschriften. But whatever the case, it cannot be understood apart from them. The fact that these texts were (and still are) reverently invoked at academic ceremonies should make us reXect on their peculiar power and lasting, elusive, but certainly not negligible, inXuence. Although it was not speciWcally prepared with the University of Berlin in mind, Friedrich Schelling’s Vorlesungen u¨ber die Methode des akademischen Studiums (based on a series of lectures given at Jena in 1802 and published in 1803) exerted weighty inXuence on the general discussion of university organization and reform in this era—an honour shared with Kant’s previously discussed Streit der Fakulta¨ten.91 Viewed as a whole, the fourteen lectures that make up Schelling’s book provide a conception of academic life and university organization, a ‘Wissenssystem’, based on the author’s idealist philosophy, which in turn owed much to the ideas of Kant, Schiller, and Fichte. But Schelling was no mere disciple of his illustrious predecessors; his concept of ‘absolute Wissenschaft’ and his dogged insistence on the primacy of speculative thought over all forms of naturalism and empiricism 89 Although they were penned in the same year, the authors did not read each other’s texts until after the university was founded. Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, 130. 90 The works of both Paulsen and Lenz apply here. 91 Humboldt, for example, read Schelling’s work with ‘admiring approval’. See Sweet, Humboldt, i. 56.

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(an insistence that helped give rise to his works on Naturphilosophie) grant him his own place in the pantheon of German idealism and in the general Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century.92 At the heart of Schelling’s educational philosophy lies the conviction that ‘all true science’ forms an ‘organic whole’.93 A telltale characteristic of the new Wissenschaftsideologie generally, as earlier indicated, this conviction received virtuoso expression by Schelling. According to Schelling, before proceeding to specialized tasks of knowledge, the student, who comes to the university ‘without compass or guiding star’, must Wrst orient himself by accepting this basic conviction. To philosophy falls the crucial task of making sure that all members of the university do not lose sight of ‘the whole’ and in fact conduct their individual work in a manner that recognizes and participates in the ‘organic unity’ of knowledge: ‘This vision [of the whole] can be found only in the science of all science (Wissenschaft aller Wissenschaft), in philosophy, and it is only the philosopher who can communicate it to us, for his own special Weld is the absolutely universal science.’94 Not surprisingly then, Schelling viewed theology from the standpoint of philosophy. He regarded the sacred faculty, along with law and medicine, as seats of ‘positive science’ (positive Wissenschaft), a mode of understanding and a set of intellectual skills resulting in a speciWc practical function for society. The ‘positive sciences’ roughly correspond to the higher faculties, which, unlike philosophy, were not devoted to the pursuit of truth as such, but to the pursuit of the natural ends of human beings: to enjoy felicity after death (theology), to live securely in one’s person and property (law), and to enjoy bodily health in the here and now (medicine).95 While these natural ends were important, they cannot compare to the disinterested pursuit of truth as such, the task of philosophy, which Schelling exalted with a true believer’s devotion. But like Kant before him, Schelling recognized that the state had a legitimate interest in the ‘positive sciences’ because the common good depended on ‘instruments of the state’—pastors, lawyers, and doctors—performing their tasks well. He reasoned therefore that for the common good to be truly served, a scientiWc understanding freed from all forms of coercion must inform the positive sciences: ‘The usual view of the universities is that they should produce servants of the state, perfect instruments for its purposes. But 92 On Naturphilosophie and on the contrast between Schelling and Kant’s views of science and education, see Frederick Gregory, ‘Kant, Schelling, and the Administration of Science in the Romantic Era’, Osiris 5 (1989): 17–35. For the intellectual context in which Schelling’s lectures were written, see Ziolkowski, German Romanticism and its Institutions, 237–68. 93 Schelling, ‘Vorlesungen,’ in Anrich (ed.), Die Idee der deutschen Universita¨t, 3–6. 94 Ibid. 6. 95 Ibid. 62 V.

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surely such instruments should be formed by science. Thus, to achieve such an aim through education, science is required. But science ceases to be science the moment it is degraded to a mere means, rather than furthered for its own sake.’96 SigniWcantly, Schelling did not question the premise that universities should function to produce ‘perfect instruments’ for the state; he simply claimed that the perfection of these ‘instruments’ rested on the opportunity for students to acquire genuine Wissenschaft during their university days. With Kant, Schelling held that true science must be divorced from utilitarian concerns; if the state promoted such disinterested knowledge, it would, paradoxically, gain the most useful ally of all: science. The legitimate modern state, in the Wnal analysis, should be a scientiWc state, a Wissenschaftsstaat. In his ninth lecture, ‘On the Study of Theology’, Schelling turned his attention directly to the ‘positive science’ of theology, and attempted to present a picture of what theological study informed by science might look like.97 He did not concern himself with details of the theological faculty’s organization or curriculum. Rather, writing in broad generalities, he charged theology to overcome its lamentable, unwissenschaftlich state and embrace the spirit of philosophy, for ‘philosophy . . . is the true organ of theology as science’ (wahre Organ der Theologie als Wissenschaft).98 But it must be the right kind of philosophy; Schelling was far more concerned with deWning what philosophy should inform theology than deWning the substance of theology per se. Above all, philosophy should not be identiWed with an empiricism because this will lead theology down a confused path involving endless wrangling over causality and factual detail based on the scant historical evidence provided by the Bible, the principal source of theology’s authority. Although Schelling did not mention individuals by name, it is likely that he had in mind various ‘rationalist’ biblical critics, such as G. L. Bauer and J. P. Gabler, who tried to account for miraculous elements in the Bible by seeking natural causes and substituting them for supernatural ones.99 For Schelling, such endeavours were only slightly less futile than the penchant of orthodox theologians to ‘prove’ miracles on the basis of the same empiricist epistemology. Instead, Schelling argued for a more genuinely philosophical theology, one based on the ‘idea’ of theology. Such an approach would give theology more latitude to engage in and beneWt from philosophical speculation, and it would allow theology to express itself more in step with what he called ‘the spirit of the modern age’.100 96 Schelling, ‘Vorlesungen,’ in Anrich (ed.), Die Idee der deutschen Universita¨t, 17. ¨ ber die historische Konstruk97 Schelling also touched on theology in the eighth lecture, ‘U tion des Christentums.’ See ibid. 65–72. 98 Ibid. 75. 99 See RGG i. 924–5 and ii. 1185. 100 Schelling, ‘Vorlesungen,’ in Anrich (ed.), Die Idee der deutschen Universita¨t, 77–8.

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This plea to modernize theology recurs in Schelling’s ninth lecture. By making this point, he appears not far removed from the later positions of Schleiermacher and Hegel, which, mutatis mutandis, granted the historical development of religious forms a greater place in Christian theology than had traditionally been the case. Such a historically progressive or developmental position also implicitly distanced Schelling from Kant, whom Schelling in fact criticized for reducing Christianity to ‘a pure religion of reason’ only concerned with religion’s ‘subjective eVects on morality’.101 By contrast, Schelling contended that theology, if guided by a speculative philosophy that admitted historical development, could be liberated (from empiricism, from Kant’s rational-moral interpretation, and, not least, from older orthodox formulations) to express itself in new, speculative, and aesthetically creative forms: [T]he spirit of the modern world has suYciently revealed its intention, which is to bring forth the inWnite in eternally new forms. It has no less clearly demonstrated that it wills Christianity not as an individual empirical phenomenon, but as the eternal Idea itself. The intended purposes (Bestimmungen) of Christianity, not restricted to the past but extending over an immeasurable time, can be clearly recognized in poetry and philosophy.102

Similar to Schelling’s work in form and content, Heinrich SteVens’s Vorlesung u¨ber die Idee der Universita¨t appeared in 1809, having grown out of a series of lectures the author had given at Halle in 1808–9, shortly after the university had been reestablished under the Kingdom of Westphalia. Because of its late appearance, this work exerted the least inXuence on the University of Berlin, but its contents are nonetheless signiWcant and indicative of the spirit of the times. Following Kant and Schelling, SteVens unreservedly sang praises to philosophy, calling the philosophical faculty the true Wrst faculty because only in its precincts do students learn ‘to cultivate the general scientiWc sense’ and only in a university suVused with its spirit can ‘free enquiry reign unhindered’. The theological faculty, along with the faculties of law and medicine, have particular professions useful to the state as their objective and therefore they cannot single-mindedly serve the purposes of Wissenschaft. At the same time, SteVens reasoned that it was much better for the state if the courses in these faculties were penetrated with the ethos of Wissenschaft, for in its pursuit ‘truth and morality, knowing and being, permeate each other in a higher life’. Because of its publication after Napoleon’s victory over Prussia, SteVens often struck a patriotic note. Identifying universities as the ‘caretakers of the national spirit’ and ‘the stimulators of inner freedom’, SteVens’s work 101 Ibid. 75–6.

102 Ibid. 80–1.

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bears witness to Prussia’s beleaguered political situation and, as such, it resonates with Fichte’s Reden an die deutsche Nation.103 More relevant to the founding of the University of Berlin were the musings of J. G. Fichte himself, whom SteVens considered ‘the most powerful concentration of the era’s self-awareness’.104 As the conWdant of Beyme, a close friend of other high-ranking Prussian ministers, and the leading philosopher of the new university, as well as its Wrst elected rector, Fichte wielded powerful inXuence both in the planning stages and in the early years of operation.105 Shortly after the Peace of Tilsit, Beyme had asked Fichte to draw up a proposal for the new institution, suggesting to Fichte in a letter than he produce ‘a complete whole’, expressive of his ‘own spirit’, and not bound by past forms of university organization.106 Without delay, an exhilarated Fichte wrote Deduzierter Plan and sent a copy to Beyme. Although Beyme was pleased with the work, the political situation and Beyme’s removal from oYce prevented immediate implementation. Later Humboldt would consider Fichte’s ideas, sympathizing with many of them, even if Wnding others impractical. Fichte’s treatise is at once an expression of the philosopher’s idealism, his pedagogical convictions, and his experience of the world-historical events taking place in his lifetime. As is well known, Fichte enthusiastically championed the French Revolution and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, both of which, he thought, bore witness to a distinctly modern conception of human freedom. Fichte met the Ko¨nigsberg philosopher in 1791 and the next year published his well-known Versuch einer Kritik aller OVenbarung, a work that revealed considerable agreement with Kant’s philosophical and religious outlook. Its success established Fichte’s reputation and helped land him a teaching position at Jena in 1794. In the 1790s, diYculties with wayward students at Jena focused Fichte’s mind on the need for fundamental educational reform. This became one of his pet passions, greatly quickened by the inXuence of Heinrich Pestalozzi, whom he had met in Switzerland in 1793. Fichte’s educational views took shape in several lectures and publications on the vocation of the scholar and, later, in a plan to reorganize the University of Erlangen, where he taught brieXy in 1805, having earlier been dismissed from Jena on the grounds of alleged atheism.107 However, it was not until the 103 See SteVens, ‘Vorlesungen u¨ber die Idee der Universita¨t’, ibid. 307 V. 104 From SteVens’s Was ich erlebte as quoted in Sheehan, German History, 345. 105 Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, i. 81 f., 111–22, passim. 106 Letter of 5 September 1807 in Weischedel (ed.), Idee und Wirklichkeit, ii. 28. 107 On Fichte and the so-called ‘atheism conXict’ in Jena, see Georg Biedermann, Die Philosophie von Johann Gottlieb Fichte: sein BegriV der moralischen Weltordnung und die Atheismus-Streit 1798/1799 (Neustadt am Ru¨benberge: Angelika Lenz, 1999). On Fichte’s famous encounter with Kant, see Karl Vorla¨nder, Immanuel Kant: Der Mann und das Werk (Leipzig, 1924), ii. 261 V. Cf. Anthony J. La Vopa, Fichte: The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762–1799

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tumultuous events of 1806–7 that Fichte and his educational philosophy were thrust into the dominant currents of German history, and then mainly through his Deduzierter Plan and of course his Reden an die deutsche Nation, which itself amounts to an educational manifesto of sorts.108 These two works were in fact produced at roughly the same time and in response to the same set of historical circumstances; both therefore evince similar qualities: a prophetic sense of urgency, patriotic zeal, an extreme statism, and an insistent belief in the therapeutic powers of education to promote the onward-andupward course of human history. Of all the founding treatises Fichte’s was the most discontinuous with the past: ‘if we stick to what is old’, he wrote, ‘the result will be bad’.109 Accordingly, he desired to create a ‘higher educational institution’ nowhere seen before, charged to produce ‘scientiWc men . . . whose outlook transcended time and place’.110 The problem with most extant universities, Fichte reasoned, was quite simply that they had come into existence before ‘the scientiWc system of the modern world’ had arisen.111 They lived in a bygone, church-dominated era, as revealed in their outdated teaching methods of rote learning and mechanical repetition, which resulted in lack of student enthusiasm and discipline. A new ‘scientiWc institution’ or ‘philosophical academy’ (Fichte too eschewed the term ‘university’) should be based instead on distinctly modern principles: reason, freedom, progress, and, not least, Wissenschaft. In the institution sketched in Deduzierter Plan, the professorial monologue should give way to a dialogue. Teachers and students would enter into a ‘mutual relationship’ for the purpose of ‘continuous conversation’ conducted in a ‘deliberate’ and ‘Socratic’ manner.112 In this relationship, the professor, whom Fichte called a ‘free artist’ in the use of science, should not be overly preoccupied with having a student master a particular body of knowledge; instead he should demonstrate to the students, through his own scientiWc habits of thinking, the allure and high calling of Wissenschaft. Fichte was thus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). For more on the ‘Erlangen Plan’, which was never implemented because of the events of 1806–7, see Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, i. 112–14. 108 Of the Reden, see especially lectures 2, 3, and 9–11. 109 Fichte, ‘Deduzierter Plan’, in Anrich (ed.), Die Idee der deutschen Universita¨t, 145. My translations of Fichte’s work owe a debt to those provided in G. H. Turnbull, The Educational Theory of J. G. Fichte (London, 1926), 170–259. 110 Fichte, ‘Deduzierter Plan’, in Anrich (ed.), Die Idee der deutschen Universita¨t, 189 111 Ibid. 127. 112 Ibid. 130 V. Furthermore, Fichte believed that for educational growth to occur the student should be completely cut oV from the inXuences of the larger society beyond the academy. In quasi-monastic fashion students should enjoy ‘complete isolation’ from the distractions of daily life, Wnancial anxiety, family life, and the like. See ibid. 135–40.

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a strong proponent of the essential unity of research and teaching. If this unity was realized, Berlin would become, in his oft-repeated formulation, ‘a school of the art of using the understanding scientiWcally’ (eine Schule der Kunst des wissenschaftlichen Verstandesgebrauches).113 Not surprisingly, Fichte designated philosophy as the spiritual nerve centre of the new institution: ‘the philosophical spirit and the art of philosophizing’ were to be ‘developed’ and ‘spread . . . over the whole’.114 As with his contemporaries, Fichte invoked typically idealist phrases of the wholeness and organic unity of knowledge—something only philosophy could reveal.115 The means to bear witness to this unity among the students, according to Fichte, was through the production and use of encyclopedias, which in systematic fashion would demonstrate the relationship between every conceivable branch of knowledge. Such encyclopedic knowledge acquired by the beginning student should have the additional eVect of stimulating him to add knowledge ‘that no one before him has known so fully as he’.116 If philosophy was paramount in Fichte’s scheme, he regarded theology and the other higher faculties warily.117 Like Kant before him, Fichte conceded their legitimacy and social utility, but unless they were rendered more wissenschaftlich, they did not belong in his ‘philosophical academy’. Unlike the disciplines within the philosophical faculty, the higher faculties ‘have a part which does not belong to the scientiWc art but to the very diVerent practical art of application in life’. For this reason, he proposed that the ‘scientiWc art’ and the ‘practical art’ be separated: the former belonged in his philosophical academy and should ‘separate itself as completely as possible and concentrate upon itself ’; the latter should be removed from the academy to ‘other selfcontained institutions’.118

113 Fichte, ‘Deduzierter Plan’, in Anrich (ed.), Die Idee der deutschen Universita¨t, 131. 114 Ibid. 150. 115 Interestingly and rather hubristically given his likely intention, Fichte argued that in the early stages of the new institution a single philosopher (presumably himself) in possession of a single philosophical system (presumably his) should guide and direct the spirit of the university in its eVorts to approximate the organic whole of knowledge. ‘When the institution begins,’ he wrote, ‘this philosophical artist must be a single person and no one else will have any inXuence on the pupil’s development in philosophising.’ See ibid. 148 V. 116 See Weischedel (ed.), Idee und Wircklichkeit, ii. 56. Further implications of this notion for theology will be spelled out in Ch. 5 when I discuss theological encyclopedias in the nineteenth century. 117 Lenz writes: ‘Mit einem Wort—die philosophische Fakulta¨t umschließt alles, was in die Fichtesche Universita¨t geho¨rt. . . . [D]ie Prinzipien der Philosophie . . . bilden den Maßstab, an dem jede Disziplin sich messen lassen muß.’ Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, i. 119. 118 Fichte, ‘Deduzierter Plan,’ in Anrich (ed.), Die Idee der deutschen Universita¨t, 155.

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Fichte came down particularly hard on the theological faculty. Indeed, in the literature on the University of Berlin’s founding, Fichte was unmatched in his contempt of traditional, confessional theology and in his zeal to give theological scholarship a new scientiWc legitimacy. While his eVorts were not as immediately inXuential as Schleiermacher’s in the actual constitution of Berlin’s theological faculty, he articulated ideas that nonetheless represent important harbingers of future developments in academic theology. Especially noteworthy was his eVort to exclude the categories of ‘revelation’ and ‘mystery’ from the purview of academic theology, thus redeWning theology as a largely historical and philological enterprise. Traditional theologies that traYcked in ‘revelation’ and ‘mystery’, Fichte reasoned, were essentially irrational and thus contradicted the purpose of his new academy. In his own formulation: A school for the scientiWc use of understanding assumes that what it deals with can be understood. . . . [C]onsequently whatever did not allow the use of reason and set itself up from the very beginning as an incomprehensible secret (unbegreiXiches Geheimnis) would be excluded from it [the new academy] by its very nature. A school for the use of the understanding could not concern itself with theology if the latter were still to insist that there is a God who wills something without reason, that no one understands the content of that will, but God must communicate it to him directly by a special ambassador, that such communication has taken place and can be found in certain obscurely written holy books, which one must understand correctly in order to achieve salvation. [Theology] must give up this claim to the sole knowledge of secrets and charms, frankly explaining and openly acknowledging that the will of God can be known without any special revelation (ohne alle besondere OVenbarung) and those books are not sources of knowledge but only a vehicle of popular instruction. . . . It is only on this condition that the material which theology has hitherto possessed can be admitted to our [new] institution.119

In short, theology might have a place in the new university, but it must, to use a Kantian phrase, agree to recognize the limits of reason alone. Fichte was well aware that the demands he placed on theology (and the other higher faculties) were revolutionary. But he felt justiWed because the previous ordering of the faculties, in his view, rested on erroneous and outdated assumptions about the nature of human knowledge. The higher faculties had inXated their importance, distorted the ‘organic whole,’ and failed to heed the universal dictates of philosophical reasoning. ‘The three socalled higher faculties would have done well previously if they had clearly recognized their true place in the whole context of knowledge, [and] had not . . . set themselves up as separate and more distinguished. Rather, they 119 Ibid. 154–5.

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should have subordinated themselves to that context [of philosophy] and acknowledged their dependence with due humility’. To show contrition for past arrogance and gain admission into Fichte’s ‘scientiWc academy’, ‘modesty of them is expected as soon they enter its sphere’.120 Practically speaking, such ‘modesty’ for the theological faculty required nothing less than a transformation of its character through the division of its former tasks: ‘a separation of its practical and scientiWc parts’. Theology’s practical side—that is, the training of pastors and other ‘Volkslehrer’ (teachers of the people)—did not belong in Fichte’s ‘scientiWc academy’, but should be reassigned to other institutions. While Fichte did not fully elaborate on the nature of these institutions (presumably he meant seminaries),121 he did remark that the criteria for admission should not necessarily be based on ‘glittering talents or extensive knowledge’ (presumably the criteria for admission to scientiWc institutions), but rather pastoral ability, popularity, and a general love of mankind. He also suggested that prospective Volkslehrer should possess skills of dissimulation, for science should be only carefully and selectively mediated to ‘das Volk’. In teaching the Bible, for example, Volkslehrer should focus exclusively on ‘pure religion and morals’; thornier questions of interpretation and the application of scientiWc methods to sacred doctrines should be ‘kept carefully from the people’, lest their disturbed ignorance give rise to reactionary religious zeal.122 The rest of theology—what Fichte called its ‘scientiWc part’—can gain admission into his institution, but it must obey the new imperatives of philosophical and scientiWc understanding. ‘In the academy, the scientiWc remainder of theology, which had perished as a priestly intermediary between God and man, would cast oV its former nature entirely (seine ganz bisherige Natur ausziehen) and don a new one as a result of the change.’ The new theology would have two principal components: one philological, the other historical. Philologically understood, theology would focus on the scientiWc study of ancient languages of the Bible. The scholar must abandon interpretation based on ‘a theological principle’, which was ‘very dishonest’ and provoked ‘never-ending strife’, and adopt instead a human and scientiWc principle, ‘which will honestly confess what it does not understand’. Viewed in this light, the Bible has little to tell us about God’s ways to man; rather, like the works of Aeschylus or Plato, it instructs us about earlier stages in ‘the development of the human spirit’.123 120 Fichte, ‘Deduzierter Plan,’ in Anrich (ed.), Die Idee der deutschen Universita¨t, 157. 121 Fichte suggested that a committee of ‘expert theologians and preachers’ be formed to establish ‘a special institution for the training of future Volkslehrer’. Ibid. 157. 122 Ibid. 162–3. 123 Ibid. 161–2.

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Fichte’s conception of historical theology, on the other hand, entailed a thorough historicization of Christianity, anticipating the challenge to theology posed by the comparative study of religion (Religionswissenschaft)—a Weld that, while never supplanting theology as such, grew considerably in the late nineteenth century.124 Implying that theology’s approach to history had been too limited to Western church history, Fichte proposed that its new task should be broadened to include ‘the history of the development of religious conceptions among [all] peoples’. ‘It follows from this’, he continued ‘that [this] task is more comprehensive (umfassender) than theology has understood it, since one must consider the religious ideas of the so-called heathen, and the scientiWc academy will understand it in this comprehensive form.’ Furthermore, even standard church history, in Fichte’s view, would never be the same once it fully embraced modern scientiWc criteria. Freed from theological assumptions and committed to ‘honest love of truth’, church history ‘will take on a completely diVerent form (eine ganz andere Gestalt), and we shall come nearer to the solutions of several problems . . . or know exactly what can and cannot be ascertained in this sphere’. As examples, Fichte opined that exhaustive research will determine conclusively the identity of biblical authors and an objective history of the biblical canon can be written.125 What is Wnally noteworthy about Fichte’s conception of theology (if we may in fact call it theology) is that, when viewed in the light of his entire treatise, theology’s position appears rather precarious, even questionable. Since he handed over its traditional, practical tasks to extra-university institutions, theology’s remaining ‘scientiWc parts’ appear to fall entirely within the purview and competence of the philosophical faculty, philology and history in particular. While Fichte certainly believed that the study of religious sentiment was of great value in ascertaining human intellectual development, this does not in itself seem to provide suYcient warrant for an independent division within the university; Fichte himself even suggested that the scientiWc aspect of theology could ‘fall within the province of history’, thus eliminating the need for separate theological faculties. Consequently, one should regard Fichte as among the Wrst German scholars to lay the theoretical groundwork for an entirely diVerent form of academic inquiry, one in which ‘religion’, historically understood, threatened to displace ‘theology’ as a leading intellectual category. His argument in favour of ‘religion’, it should be clear, does not draw its strength from Christian theological reasoning per se, but from a post-Enlightenment humanist sentiment and an idealist historical teleology that placed unprecedented value on ‘the development of the human spirit’. 124 I shall return to this issue in Ch. 5.

125 Ibid. 162.

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Taken up by others, Fichte’s line of reasoning faced challenges in the nineteenth century, but eventually its day would come in the movement of comparative religion and religious history, and in theology’s own tilt towards the historical and philological at the expense of the credal and apologetic.126 Shortly after Fichte had written Deduzierter Plan, Friedrich Schleiermacher penned and anonymously published his Gelegentliche Gedanken u¨ber Universita¨ten in deutschem Sinn (1808).127 The impact of this work has been considerable, if surprisingly often unrecognized, not only on the University of Berlin but on the development of the modern German university generally. Friedrich Paulsen dubbed it the ‘intellectual charter’ of the University of Berlin.128 ‘Schleiermacher’s model university structure’, another scholar has written, ‘became the basic organizational pattern for all German universities up to the present time.’129 Like much of Schleiermacher’s life and thought, the work is distinguished by a thoughtful complexity and a tendency towards intellectual mediation: it evinces a simultaneous adherence to a variety of academic norms, old and new, traditional and progressive. Indeed, it bears witness to Wilhelm Dilthey’s claim that Schleiermacher ‘embraced all the greatest impulses of his time.’130 In contrast to Fichte, one is especially struck by Schleiermacher’s measured and moderate outlook, his willingness to tolerate and even esteem old university forms, even if he intended them to serve purposes quite at odds with the confessional and practical aims of the premodern university. Neither the name ‘university’ nor its division into faculties should be done away with, in Schleiermacher’s view; rather, discriminating between what was ‘essential or accidental’ in the history of universities, the new university should ‘breath new life into their gothic forms’.131 His repeated usage of the phrase ‘in the German sense’, moreover, indicates a patriotic sentiment: he regarded university reform heedless of the German past as an intellectual capitulation to France, whose 1808 educational reforms under Napoleon he objected to on 126 Claude Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, 1870–1914, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), ii. 146 V., 266 V. 127 On the early publishing history, see KGA I. vi. pp. xv–xviii, and Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, i. 122 V. 128 Paulsen, German Universities, 50. 129 Fallon, German University, 36. 130 Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Writings, ed. and trans. H. P. Rickman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 42. 131 Friedrich Schleiermacher, ‘Gelegentliche Gedanken u¨ber Universita¨ten in deutschem Sinn. Nebst einem Anhang u¨ber eine neu zu Errichtende’, in Anrich (ed.), Die Idee der deutschen Universita¨t, 222, 293. English translations of this work closely follow those by Terrence N. Tice and Edwina Lawler in Schleiermacher, Occasional Thoughts on Universities in the German Sense. With an Appendix Regarding a University soon to be Established (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1991).

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the basis of their emphasis on technical expertise.132 Advocates of the French way, Schleiermacher held, simply did not understand the conditions necessary for authentic ‘German’ science to Xourish.133 But Schleiermacher was no reactionary. Like others before him, he was an enthusiastic booster of the new Wissenschaftsideologie and he desired to see its realization at the University of Berlin. Furthermore, although a theologian himself, he desired to have nothing to do with the trappings of the confessional university, which had assured the theological faculty a privileged position. With Kant, he believed that the revitalization of the university depended on the enhanced clout of the philosophical faculty, which he even called the ‘lord’ of the other faculties, the only one committed to Wissenschaft for its own sake and not subject to the practical and professional interests of the higher faculties. Throughout Gelegentliche Gedanken, Schleiermacher elaborated his conception of the university in relation to the state and to the tripartite scheme of higher learning already existing in Prussia, which included schools or Gymnasien, universities, and scientiWc academies. For Schleiermacher, the university was neither a purely teaching institution, like schools, nor a purely research institution, like academies, but rather something in-between, a teaching and research institution, whose primary purpose was to demonstrate to students the unitary nature of knowledge in the hope that they too might devote themselves to ‘the supreme dignity of Wissenschaft’. But even if students chose a practical professional course, and Schleiermacher accepted that most would, their university years would at least have taught them to learn to learn (das Lernen des Lernens),134 and this would serve them in their vocations and redound to state and society.135 ‘Herein lies the essence of the university,’ Schleiermacher wrote, 132 In a letter of 1 March 1808 to Karl Gustav Brinckmann, Schleiermacher wrote of his work: ‘Meine Hauptabsicht indess was nur den Gegensatz zwischen den deutschen Universita¨ten und den franzoischen Spezialschulen recht anschaulich, und den Werth unserer einheimischen Form einleuchtend zu machen, ohne eben gegen die andere direct zu polemisiren.’ See Schleiermacher, Aus Schleiermachers Leben in Briefen, ed. Wilhelm Dilthey and Ludwig Jonas (Berlin, 1863), iv. 149. 133 Schleiermacher also held out the hope that a single, new university, founded in a time of crisis and uncertainty could demonstrate the ‘innere Einheit’ of the German nation to the divided German peoples. See Schleiermacher, ‘Gelegentliche Gedanken’, in Anrich (ed.), Die Idee der deutschen Universita¨t, 228. 134 KGA I. vi. 35. 135 On this point, Schleiermacher diVered substantially from Fichte, who believed that students desirous of practical careers should be excluded from the university and sent to vocational schools instead. Schleiermacher wrote that besides being a bastion of Wissenschaft ‘the state must see to it that the universities are at the same time advanced schools for specialists (ho¨here Spezialschulen), dealing with all that information useful in its service which above all else cohere with actual scientiWc culture’. Schleiermacher, ‘Gelegentliche Gedanken’, in Anrich (ed.), Die Idee der deutschen Universita¨t, 248.

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[b]reeding and education (Erzeugung und Erziehung) is its charge, whereby it forms a ¨ bergangspunkt) between the time when the young are Wrst point of transition (U inXuenced for science through a grounding in basic information [through the schools] and the time when as adults in the mature power and fullness of the scientiWc life they seek out on their own how to expand and improve the domain of knowledge.136

The charge to ‘expand’ knowledge recurs in the work, but Schleiermacher made clear that the central function of the university was not necessarily research, but for professors and students alike to keep alive ‘the idea of the whole’. While knowledge should expand, it did so in accordance with an underlying directive, an ‘invisible hand’ if one will, towards unity and integration. Thus, Schleiermacher asserted that although students in their university years should be trained to extend the frontiers of knowledge in particular areas, the ‘most necessary thing’ was what he called ‘the general overview of the scope and cohesive structure of each area [of knowledge]’; this should be the ‘foundation of all instruction’ for through it students come to grasp ‘the unity and interconnectedness of all knowledge’.137 The inXuence of Kant manifested itself in the primary role that Schleiermacher assigned to the philosophical faculty, the seat of true, disinterested Wissenschaft, the very ‘centrepoint of knowledge’.138 ‘Everything begins . . . with philosophy, with pure speculation.’ With the imminent establishment of the new university in mind, Schleiermacher therefore argued (in a section entitled ‘On the Faculties’) that ‘if a university ever arises through a free uniting of scholars, then what is now conjoined in the philosophical faculty will naturally Wnd Wrst place (die erste Stelle), and the institutions that state and church will wish to join to the philosophical faculty [theology, law, medicine] will take places subordinate to it.’139 In contrast to many of his contemporaries, however, Schleiermacher was not terribly upset by the historic understanding of philosophy as the lower faculty. For it was precisely because of its customary propaedeutic function, he reasoned, that philosophy possessed the capability for a new and expanded valuation: [W]hat consequence is the ranking? It [the philosophical faculty] is still the Wrst . . . and in fact the lord (Herrin) of all the others because all members of the university must be grounded in it, no matter to which faculty they belong.

136 Schleiermacher, ‘Gelegentliche Gedanken’, in Anrich (ed.), Die Idee der deutschen Universita¨t, 238. 137 Ibid. 234–45. 138 Ibid. 259. Cf. Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, i. 127. 139 Schleiermacher, ‘Gelegentliche Gedanken’, in Anrich (ed.), Die Idee der deutschen Universita¨t, 259–60.

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This right it exercises almost everywhere upon students as soon as they come into a university; that is, it is the Wrst to examine and receive them all, and this is a very laudable and important custom. Only it appears that the custom has to be expanded if its signiWcance is to be entirely realized. . . . Everyone must Wrst of all be a student of philosophy.140

But if philosophy was the new lord, what then of theology? Unlike more radical voices who wanted to exclude or diminish theology, Schleiermacher vigorously defended the right of theology to exist in the university. However, he recognized that under the new conditions of modernity its character would be signiWcantly altered. Therefore, despite the nominal deference he gave to the customary ranking of faculties, he admitted that the prevailing ordering of the faculties gave the university a ‘grotesque appearance’ (groteskes Ansehn) and it should be reconceptualized. Of the traditional place of theology, he wrote: The theological faculty has been formed in the church in order to maintain the wisdom of the fathers, to separate truth from error in what has gone before so that earlier truths are not lost for the future, and to provide an historical basis, a deWnite, secure direction and common spirit, for further development of doctrine and of the church. What is more, as the state came to be bound more and more closely with the church, it had also to sanction these institutions and place them under its care.141

Schleiermacher recognized that this traditional deWnition would no longer hold; in order to adapt to modern times, theology must shift its orientation from tradition and the church to ‘the spirit of Wissenschaft’. Importantly though, Schleiermacher never suggested that theology divorce itself from the church. On the contrary, theology must combine ecclesial concerns and scientiWc ones. An enlightened church would welcome Wissenschaft, and only a theology informed by Wissenschaft could adequately lead the church and foster appropriate ‘development of doctrine’. This latter point became one of the leading insights in his Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums (1811), which shall be discussed below.142

140 Ibid. 260 (emphasis added). 141 Ibid. 257–8. 142 As is often noted, Schleiermacher sought to demonstrate in his own person simultaneous commitments to church and university by serving as the lead pastor of Trinity Church in Berlin, even as he maintained a full professorship at the University of Berlin and membership in the Academy of Science. Nearly every Sunday for forty years, Berliners could hear Schleiermacher from Trinity’s pulpit. On Schleiermacher’s various church commitments, see Redeker, Scheleiermacher, 5, 187–208. Cf. B. A. Gerrish, A Prince of the Church: Schleiermacher and the Beginnings of Modern Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984). For a description of Schleiermacher’s manner in the pulpit, see SteVens, Was ich erlebte (Breslau, 1842), vi. 271 V.

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One way for theologians to acquire the skills and outlook of Wissenschaft, in Schleiermacher’s view, would be for them to spend time actually teaching in the philosophical faculty (which Schleiermacher regularly and enthusiastically did). In fact, Schleiermacher thought it advisable that all professors in the higher faculties teach occasionally in the philosophical faculty. This would give them a ‘vital linkage’ to ‘the doctrines of true science’. He deemed such cross-pollination especially necessary for theologians, whose habits of mind otherwise might ‘gradually and increasingly approach a mechanical tradition or perish in an entirely unscientiWc superWciality’. Further still, he proposed that any teacher of theology ‘surely deserves to be derided and excluded from the university who would feel no inner power and desire to accomplish something of one’s own in the sphere of Wissenschaft’.143 At some level then, in his university a theologian must be a Wissenschaftler.144 In addition to his reXections on the faculties, Schleiermacher oVered a nuanced understanding of the relationship between the state and university, one that testiWed to his own patriotic and politically liberal sensibilities awakened by the events of 1806–7.145 With his peers and fellow reformers, he recognized that the state had a legitimate interest in universities and that its ‘protection and patronage’ was essential to their Xourishing. But he also saw—more clearly, I believe, than his contemporaries—how potentially hazardous the state’s involvement could become. Foremost, he feared that the modern state, once fully aware of the usefulness of institutions of learning, would ‘gradually appropriate and absorb them’ into itself ‘so that subsequently one can no longer decide whether they have arisen freely and for their own purposes or by administrative Wat’. In his view, the state was inclined to act in this manner because it required the information and knowledge made available at institutions of learning for its own administrative and legal operations, indeed its own legitimacy. But this self-serving approach to knowledge violated a key criterion of true Wissenschaft—namely disinterestedness. The state naturally and necessarily [judges] . . . that it must be grounded in science and that only through science can it be correctly propagated and improved upon. Therefore it seeks to enter into a vital connection with all eVorts that lead to such improvement and fulWlment. . . . However, the state works only for itself; historically

143 Schleiermacher, ‘Gelegentliche Gedanken’, in Anrich (ed.), Die Idee der deutschen Universita¨t, 257 V. 144 Schleiermacher developed a more elaborate theory of knowledge or Wissenschaft in various lectures he gave under the title ‘Dialektik’. See Schleiermacher, Dialektik (1811), ed. Andreas Arndt (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1986). 145 On Schleiermacher’s politics, see Redeker, Schleiermacher, 87 V.

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it is completely self-seeking; thus is tends not to oVer support to science except on its own terms.

Eager to burnish its authority through an association with science, the state easily fails to grasp the true nature of the scientiWc enterprise: ‘the state customarily has quite a diVerent view from that of scholars regarding the way scientiWc institutions must be ordered and led, since scholars enter into closer association for the sake of science itself ’, whereas presumably the state does not. Attributing the best of intentions to the academic classes, Schleiermacher elaborated that true scholars are not content with mere information unless they can treat it scientiWcally, which involved striving to see the ‘the whole in every particular and every particular only in the whole’. Handled in this manner, the ‘inner unity’ of all knowledge can be demonstrated. Otherwise the accumulation of particular information would amount only to ‘an unsteady groping about’.146 But such reasoning, Schleiermacher concluded, is lost on the state, which all too easily fails to recognize the worth of this eVort [of true Wissenschaft]. As for speculation (Spekulation)—a term that we would always use for scientiWc activities that preponderantly relate to the unity and common form of knowing—the more clearly it is brought to notice the more the state tends to restrict it and use all its inXuence . . . to promote only concrete information (realen Kenntnisse), piles of material that have been dug up, without regard to whether it has the imprimatur of science on it or not; and the state makes this to appear as the sole genuine result of all striving for knowledge.147

Scholars concerned about true Wissenschaft must ‘oppose this course’ and ‘strive as much as they can to work toward independence from the state’. Still, Schleiermacher recognized that necessity often required academics to cooperate with the state in educational endeavours—such as the founding of the University of Berlin itself. But, in doing so, they should try to inXuence the state, so that it might esteem, and not merely utilize, scientiWc knowledge. However, this prospect too was fraught with diYculties, for in the service of government even ‘the scientiWcally cultured may get entangled in the state’. When this takes place, ‘science is overcome by politics and does not come clearly to consciousness. The more this occurs the sooner will they [scholars] comply with such interference from the state’. And then the university is on a slippery slope of becoming ‘a mere contrivance of the state’.148 146 Schleiermacher, ‘Gelegentliche Gedanken’, in Anrich (ed.), Die Idee der deutschen Universita¨t, 225–30. 147 Ibid. 231. Schleiermacher carefully distinguished between mere information (Kenntnisse) and true science (Wissenschaft). The state, left to its own devices, naturally settles for the former, which it can more easily manipulate for its purposes. 148 Ibid. 230 V.

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While it might be an exaggeration to claim that precisely this scenario befell Schleiermacher and his esteemed colleague, Wilhelm von Humboldt, employees of the government both after 1809–10, it is nonetheless undeniable that their theoretical scepticism of the state (more on Humboldt’s below) was often compromised, or at least pushed into the background, during the actual launching of the new university.149 What is more, Schleiermacher’s warnings against the potential abuse of state power were generally not heeded. In the years after he wrote Gelegentliche Gedanken, the university, like society as a whole, found itself caught up in the state centralizing measures of the Prussian reform movement. Ironically, many oYcials, like Schleiermacher himself, who condemned French state centralization in education, replicated some of the tendencies they sought to disavow on practical if not theoretical grounds. In the heady, reforming climate of the time, as Winfried Speitkampf has put it, ‘the educational sector was viewed not as an isolated area of state activity, but . . . as the building-block in the modernization scheme, always related to the overall design of renewal. . . . [T]he eYciency of administrative control was a major factor and one which of itself demanded that the newly rationalized administration be extended to embrace the education system.’ This particularly applied to university reforms and new foundations, of which Berlin was the most pre-eminent.150 In short, to invoke Lord Acton’s sentiment again, the ideal of free science and the reality of government interests were fused together upon the founding of the University of Berlin. Compared to the more elaborate treatises of Fichte and Schleiermacher, ¨ ber die innere und a¨ußere Humboldt’s short memorandum of circa 1809, ‘U Organisation der ho¨heren wissenschaftlichen Anstalten in Berlin’, is neither original nor comprehensive, nor does it directly address the place of theology and the other higher faculties.151 Its genius lay rather in Humboldt’s ability to sift through various intellectual currents and focus them on the task at hand. 149 Besides his oYcials posts at the university and the Academy of Science, Schleiermacher served for a period as the leading member of the ScientiWc Deputation (Wissenschaftliche Deputation), an arm of the Department of Ecclesiastical AVairs and Public Education, which was designed to implement and oversee educational reform at various levels. See Franz Kade, Schleiermachers Anteil an der Entwicklung des preussischen Bildungswesen, 1808–1818 (Leipzig, 1925). On the speciWc tasks of this deputation see Humboldt, ‘Ideen zur einer Instruktion fu¨r die wissenschaftliche Deputation bei der Sektion des o¨Ventlichen Unterrichts’, in Humboldt, Gesammelte Schriften, x (II). 179–86. 150 Winfried Speitkampf, ‘Educational Reforms in Germany between Revolution and Restoration’, GH 10 (1992): 7 (emphasis added). 151 The memorandum was probably part of a longer document written by Humboldt in either 1809 or 1810. Never published, the memorandum, or fragment thereof, was only discovered in the late nineteenth century among Humboldt’s private papers by Bruno Gebhardt, who published it in his 1896 biography of Humboldt. See Bruno Gebhardt, Wilhelm von Humboldt als Staatsmann, 2 vols. (Stuttgart, 1896, 1899). Cf. Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, i. 179–80.

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He eloquently restated the intellectual purpose of the new institution—the ‘pure idea of Wissenschaft’ as he called it.152 He also articulated a model of state–university relations that has proven simultaneously inXuential and problematic, and one at considerable odds with his own earlier views of the role of the state in educational aVairs.153 Like Schleiermacher, Humboldt sought to distinguish the role of the emerging university from that of secondary schools and scientiWc academies, particularly from Berlin’s Academy of Science. Like other reformers, Humboldt did not assign research to academies and teaching to universities, but instead adovocated the unity of research and teaching: scholarship invigorated teaching and vice versa. ‘If one limits the university to instruction . . . and the academy to research,’ he wrote, ‘one obviously does the university an injustice. Surely all the disciplines have been extended as much by university professors as by members of scientiWc academies, and [the former] made progress in their studies precisely because they also occupied teaching positions. For free oral expression before listeners, a signiWcant number of whom are also thinking heads (mitdenkender Ko¨pfe), surely inspires a man.’154 Although oppropriately inspired by bright students, professors should resist making students per se their primary focus. They should keep their sights resolutely on Wissenschaft alone, for in doing so, students would learn to do so as well, and this lesson would become the sine qua non of their university education. In famous words presaging the ‘research imperative’ of the later nineteenth century, Humboldt elaborated: It is a further characteristic of higher institutions of learning that they treat all Wissenschaft as a not yet wholly solved problem and are therefore never done with research (immer im Forschen bleiben). This is in contrast to the schools, which take as their subject only the complete and agreed-upon results of knowledge and teach these. This diVerence completely changes the relationship between teacher and student. . . . [T]he teacher no longer exists for the sake of the student; both exist for the sake of Wissenschaft.155 ¨ ber die innere und a¨ußere Organisation’, in Anrich (ed.), Die Idee der 152 Humboldt, ‘U deutschen Universita¨t, 377. 153 I refer to Humboldt’s 1792 work, Ideen zu einem Versuch die Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staates zu bestimmen. This work of the young Humboldt, a central document of German liberalism, was Wrst published in its entirety in 1854 by his brother, Alexander von Humboldt. Portions were earlier published by Humboldt himself in the journals Neue Thalia and Berlinische Monatsschrift. On the genesis and inXuence of this work, see the Wne introduction by J. W. Burrow to Wilhelm von Humboldt, The Limits of State Action, trans. Joseph Coulthard (Indianapolis: Liberty, 1969), xvii–lviii. ¨ ber die innere und a¨ußere Organisation’, in Anrich (ed.), Die Idee der 154 Humboldt, ‘U deutschen Universita¨t, 382–3. 155 Ibid. 377–8.

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Students nonetheless would beneWt from this arrangement, Humboldt reasoned, because once the student too embarked on a life of critical inquiry and intellectual exploration, a vital process of inner development (Bildung) would take place156 But the correct understanding of Wissenschaft necessarily preceded Bildung. Indeed, Humboldt regarded achieving this understanding as absolutely critical to the new institution’s success, opining that ‘everything depends on the preservation of the principle that Wissenschaft is to be regarded as something not wholly found and never wholly able to be found, but as something always to be searched for.’ ‘As soon as one stops searching for Wissenschaft,’ he continued, ‘everything is irrevocably and forever lost.’157 Thus, Wissenschaft, although ultimately an integral whole (as the idealists would have it) possessed an intensely dynamic quality in Humboldt’s formulation. Humboldt’s understanding of the proper relationship of the state to the new university warrants consideration. In wrestling with the ‘state question,’ Humboldt found himself confronted by a delicate and much-discussed matter (as we have seen with Schleiermacher), complicated by his own ambivalent attitude towards the state. In his younger years, in reaction to the Wo¨llner Edict of 1788, he criticized the state’s overreaching proclivities, arguing that government had no business in moral, religious, and educational matters, but should restrict itself to the protection of its citizens, guaranteeing property rights, and national defence.158 However, by accepting the leading post in the Department of Ecclesiastical AVairs and Public Education, Humboldt implicitly endorsed the state’s tutelary involvement in educational matters.159 One might reasonably conjecture that Humboldt felt far more comfortable deWning the state’s power broadly during the more liberal, post-1806 period than he did during the prior, conservative days of Minister Wo¨llner and Friedrich Wilhelm II. Yet Humboldt never completely abandoned his earlier view of the state—even an enlightened state—as a potentially obstructive, even destructive, force when it entered too actively into the realms of culture and education. This personal ambivalence resulted in a theoretical ambivalence, evident in both his memorandum and in his activities as an educational

156 See Bruford, The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation, 1 V. ¨ ber die innere und a¨ußere Organisation,’ in Anrich (ed.), Die Idee der 157 Humboldt, ‘U deutschen Universita¨t, 379. 158 Sweet, Humboldt, i. 103–13, and Beiser, Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism, 111–37. 159 E. R. Huber has called Humboldt’s ‘Wendung zum Staat’ one of the ‘greatest ironies in German political and intellectual history’. See Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, i. 274–6. Humboldt’s views on the state are systematically laid out in Siegfried A. Kaehler, Wilhelm von Humboldt und der Staat (Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1963), esp. 211–49.

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minister.160 On the one hand, Humboldt insisted that the university embody an unprecedented academic freedom while, on the other, he recognized that pragmatic considerations necessitated greater state involvement in higher education. More speciWcally: the post-1789 world of waning confessionalism, feudal corporatism, and churchly inXuence (the hitherto environment of the university) required that the modern state pick up the slack, so to speak, and provide higher learning with order and direction. For a historical analogy, one might consider Martin Luther who placed his hope of the Protestant churches’ freedom in the hands of Germany’s secular princes. Similarly, Humboldt turn to the modern state as the necessary, albeit problematic, protector of academic freedom against confessionalism and corporative privilege.161 In his memorandum, Humboldt thus argued—echoing Kant, Fichte, and Schleiermacher—that true Wissenschaft emanated from human freedom apart from all coercion and utilitarian concerns: ‘[It is] nothing other than the spiritual life of those human beings who are moved by external leisure or internal pressure toward learning and research.’162 Ideally, all that scholars required to realize their intellectual aims were ‘solitude and freedom’ (Einsamkeit und Freiheit), which Humboldt called the ‘principles’ that should govern the administration of institutions of higher education.163 But since reality did not generously dispense these conditions, Humboldt admitted that it was the paternal duty of the state, understanding its calling as an Erziehungsstaat, to help create these conditions for an elect few. But such action was fraught with potential problems, and Humboldt came close to calling it a necessary evil, realizing that the state might demand compensation for the freedom it allowed. ‘[T]he government,’ he therefore wrote, ‘must always remain conscious that it really neither brings about such results [free science] . . . nor can it bring them about.’ Indeed, its intervention on behalf of science is ‘invariably an obstruction’ and, in an ideal world, ‘everything would proceed inWnitely better without its help’. But in the real 160 I note again in this regard Humboldt’s (failed) eVort to secure a permanent endowment for the university in order to give it greater independence from the state. See Sweet, Humboldt, ii. 64. 161 Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, i. 187. Humboldt did, however, move closer to his earlier view, i.e. that the state should exercise greater restraint in educational matters, when the political atmosphere turned reactionary after 1819. In frustration, he retired from public life at this time. See Sweet, Humboldt, ii. 69. 162 Compare with his statement from 1792: ‘Der wahre Zweck des Menschen . . . ist die ho¨chste und proportionerlichste Bildung seiner Kra¨fte zu einem Ganzen. Zu dieser Bildung ist Freiheit die erste und unerla¨ßiche Bedingung.’ See Humboldt, Ideen zu einem Versuch die Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staates zu bestimmen (1792), in Humboldt, Gesammelte Schriften, i. 158. ¨ ber die innere und a¨ußere Organisation’, in Anrich (ed.), Die Idee der 163 Humboldt, ‘U deutschen Universita¨t, 377–8.

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world, in the incipient modern era, the state must intervene because, without its help, institutions of science would lack ‘external forms and means’ for their noble activities or, worse, revert to their medieval ways. The state thus should provide the basic infrastructure for universities—buildings, funding, protection, et cetera—but then assume a hands-oV policy, allowing Wissenschaft to proceed according to its own internal rhyme and reason. Nonetheless, Humboldt observed, in a line of reasoning strikingly similar to that of Kant’s in Der Streit der Fakulta¨ten that the state need not act from pure altruism and disinterestedness, because, in the Wnal analysis, it too would reap the beneWts of free science: ‘[the state] must hold fast to the inner conviction that if the higher institutions [of learning] reach their own aim, its aim, too, will be thereby fulWlled, and from a much loftier point of view than any that could have been arranged directly by the state itself ’. Put more fully: for its support of ‘Humboldtian’ ideals, the modern state might expect to garner legitimacy for itself (especially through the consent of the educated classes to its power) while enhancing the calibre of its operations (by providing an environment where future civil servants, imbued with Wissenschaft and Bildung, could develop).164 In one crucial area, Humboldt conceded to the state a tremendous power: the hiring of faculty. ‘The appointment of university professors,’ he opined, ‘must be exclusively reserved to the state, and it is surely not good to permit the various faculties more inXuence in this matter than an understanding and fair-minded administrative body will do of its own accord.’ He based his reasoning on the view that petty jealousies and academic vendettas might prevent faculty members from exercising prudence in their selection of new faculty, and this might ‘distort completely their point of view as to what is good for the whole.’ Government ministers, he presumed, acting paternally and in a fair-minded and farsighted way, would, somehow, rise above the ideological fray that dominated the professors’ world.165 The subsequent history of the university did not vindicate Humboldt’s view: the state, through the Department of Ecclesiastical AVairs and Public ¨ ber die innere und a¨ußere Organisation’, in Anrich (ed.), Die Idee der 164 Humboldt, ‘U deutschen Universita¨t, 381. 165 Humboldt’s harsh opinion of professors appears inconsistent with his high-minded view of science and scientiWc progress, since presumably professors were the ones who were supposed to advance science. Nonetheless, Humboldt’s regard of professors as a class was quite low. In a letter to his wife Caroline, he noted, ‘You have no idea with how much diYculty I have to contend with the scholars—the most unruly and hardest to please of all classes of people. They besiege me with their eternally self-thwarting interests, their jealousy, their envy, their passion to govern, their one-sided opinions, in which each believes that his discipline alone has earned support and encouragement.’ Quoted in Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, i. 210.

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Education, and later through the Ministry of Culture (Kultusministerium), often acted from patently ideological and political motives. While these motives varied according to the political winds, the powers of hiring and Wring, alongside other factors, contributed to a state monopoly in the educational system.166 What is more, not just hiring, but all forms of career advancement, as will be spelled out later, came to depend on the all-powerful imprimatur of the Minister of Culture. In the Wnal analysis, Humboldt’s vision, while earnestly expressing faith in the therapeutic potential of science, individual development, and academic freedom, admitted state control and supervision of higher education to an extensive degree. Given the circumstances of his writing during the Prussian reform movement, this should not come as a great surprise. On the one hand, the era marked by crisis and change called for new ideals: a new conception of education and a forward-looking intelligentsia outside the church to compensate for the faltering structures of the Old Regime. At the same time, in the absence of older authorities, the modern state took on a magniWed role as the dominant agent of eVective reform and modernization. This of course applied to the educational system as well, including theological education, which had hitherto been largely tied to churches and church bodies—entities which, not surprisingly, emerged greatly weakened from this era of revolution and reform. Given these realities, we should not put Humboldt’s (and other reformers’) ideas on a pedestal and lament the failure of their implementation due to the reactionary climate after 1819, the customary terminus of the liberal reform period. This simpliWes matters too neatly. Instead, we should recognize that the reformers’ vision itself—arguably with the singular exception of Schleiermacher—possessed a profoundly statist character. Ironically though, this watered down and in some cases even worked against the very liberal reforms sought, fostering a mandate for a ‘scientiWc state’ more than for free science operating independently of the state. In the Prussian university reforms, as Thomas Nipperdey has perceptively summed up, ‘the state served education and in the Wnal reckoning, education served the true, free, and rational state. These were, of course, idealistic assumptions in which the realities of power were obscured.’167

166 Speitkampf, ‘Educational Reform in Germany’, GH 10 (1992): 6. Speitkampf is astute in his observation that the instruments of bureaucratic supervision and surveillance, utilized for reactionary ends after the Karlsbad Decrees (1819) were, ironically, put in place during the post1806 liberal reforms. 167 Nipperdey, Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck, 48. I shall return to this theme in Ch. 4.

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Theology, Wissenschaft, and Berlin 5. EARLY OPERATIONS: BERLIN’S T H E O LO G I C A L FAC U LTY, 1 8 1 0 – 1 8 1 9

SpeciWcally, how did theology Wt into the actual structure and workings of the new university? Obviously this is a large question, requiring several angles of approach. I examine, Wrst, the university’s general statutes and those of the theological faculty. OYcially promulgated only after operations had begun, both documents bear witness to Schleiermacher’s inXuence. Second, I call attention to the outlooks and activities of the theological faculty’s initial professors, ‘the nineteenth century’s greatest department of theology’ according to one critic, and certainly among its most innovative and productive.168 SigniWcantly, the initial theological professoriate—which besides Schleiermacher came to include Philipp Konrad Marheineke, W. M. L. de Wette, and August Neander— were relatively young and ambitious; their activities at Berlin lend credence to Thomas S. Kuhn’s observation that intellectual innovation strongly correlates with fresh blood in the Weld.169 Third, I consider the shape of theological education at Berlin, focusing particular attention on Schleiermacher’s Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums (1811). Finally, I turn my attention to the general position and inXuence of the theological faculty in relation to other faculties and to the university as a whole. To what extent was its position after 1810 continuous with eighteenth-century patterns, and to what extent did it reXect contemporary realities and mark new departures? By the spring of 1810, the movement to establish the university was at full throttle. Theoretical discussions about ‘the idea of a university’ had given way to practical ones about getting this university up and running in an expeditious and impressive, if also cost-eVective, manner. Among the most pressing items was drafting and ratiWcation of the statutes, a task which proved timeconsuming and contentious, lasting from 1810 until their oYcial promulgation in 1817.170 In June of 1810, shortly before his departure from service, Humboldt appointed a ‘start-up commission’ (Einrichtungskommission) to 168 Terrence N. Tice, ‘Schleiermacher and the ScientiWc Study of Religion’, in Herbert Richardson (ed.), Friedrich Schleiermacher and the Founding of the University of Berlin: The Study of Religion as a ScientiWc Discipline (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1991), 46. 169 Writes Kuhn: ‘Almost always the men who achieve . . . fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have been either very young or new to the Weld whose paradigm they change . . . [T]he men who, being little committed by prior practice to the traditional rules of normal science, are particularly likely to see that those rules no longer deWne a playable game and to conceive another set that can replace them.’ See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of ScientiWc Revolutions, 2nd edn. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 90. In the year that Berlin opened its doors, Schleiermacher was the senior member at 42; de Wette and Marheineke were both 30; Neander joined the faculty in 1813 at the age of 24. 170 Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, i. 222 V.

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discuss and draft the statutes and handle a variety of other matters. The commission appointees included two high-ranking civil servants, Wilhelm Uhden and J. H. Su¨vern, and Friedrich Schleiermacher; the law professor F. K. Von Savigny also contributed. The various members wrote preparatory notes and submitted them on 25 July to Schleiermacher, who drafted so-called ‘provisional guidelines’ for the new institution. The university began operations on the basis of this document, permanent statutes still pending. Despite their provisional character, these guidelines are not without importance. To a signiWcant degree, they reXect Schleiermacher’s personal conception of the university as sketched in Gelegentliche Gedanken. They esteem past university structures—such as the four faculties, faculty deans, the rector, and the faculty senate—over more radical organizational schemes, such as those proposed earlier by Fichte. At the same time, they bear witness to the milieu of German idealism: the university was to make up an ‘an organic whole’ (ein organisches Ganzes), working in conjunction with pre-existing institutions in Berlin, the Academy of Science in particular. The provisional guidelines also contain elements of striking modernity: no mention was made of the university’s confessional identity, for example, and professors, including theologians, were to be ‘liberated from all censorship’ (von aller Censur befreit).171 Under these guidelines, the new university opened its doors to students in October of 1810. A festive inaugural ceremony was originally intended, but the matter of having only provisional statutes and attention to other pressing details, like Wlling out the faculty, prevented the necessary preparations. A ceremony was therefore postponed, as it turned out, permanently. Festive medallions were nonetheless minted,172 and several poems and songs by Berlin’s literary luminaries were composed to mark the occasion.173 One poem by the Romantic writer Achim von Arnim (1781–1831) proclaimed the university a ‘fortress of heroes’ for scholarship and science. Incoming students in the poem were motivated by a ‘pious desire for science’ (fromme Lust j nach Wissenschaft). Wissenschaft itself was extolled for its power to unite all the world: ‘. . . Wissenschaft, j Die aller Welt Verbindung schaVt.’174 A cantata, ‘Universitati Litterariae’, composed by Clemens Brentano (1778– 1842) is noteworthy for its blending of religious, neohumanist, patriotic, and modern wissenschaftlich sensibilities. Declaring the University of Berlin ‘a 171 See especially §§1, 3, and 23 of ‘Vorla¨uWges Reglement fu¨r die Universita¨t zu Berlin’. HUA, Med. Fak.- Dekanats-S. 1. Allgemeine Universita¨tsangelegenheiten 1810–1818, Signatur: A 1. A printed version is found in Helmut Klein (ed.), Humboldt-Universita¨t zu Berlin. Dokumente 1810–1945 (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaft, 1985), 10 V. 172 The transcription on the largest medallion reads ‘sigillum universitatis litterariae berolinensis’ with the subscript: ‘fridericus guilelmus iii rex.’ See Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, i. 284. 173 Ibid. 283 f. 174 Arnim’s poem is found in Erich Schmidt (ed.), Jahrhundertfeier der Ko¨niglichen FriedrichWilhelms-Universita¨t zu Berlin 10–12. Oktober 1910 (Berlin, 1911), HUB, Ay 46226.

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mountain for the German muses’ (ein deutscher Musenberg) and a seat of ‘intellectual freedom’ (Wissensfreiheit), Brentano invoked, All-knowing God, We follow the traces of your understanding, And what we too understand and what we always teach is at root only your Being. The king has established a house of Wissenschaft, [And] we men stand bound under his grace and strength. God, bless our desires, Let us fulWll the promise . . . to teach the truth faithfully.

The cantata also made allusive reference to the four faculties, personifying them as ‘four wise, digniWed women’ strolling through the university palace’s open gate. Honouring university tradition, theology entered Wrst, arrayed in violet, her face veiled but turned heavenward, with an opened Bible in hand. SigniWcantly, the Kulturstaat ideal is on prominent display in this cantata: a chorus reminds professors of the state’s patronage and expectations. Teachers must teach faithfully, because ‘that is what the state so desires from you, j the state that supports you, j the state that learns from you and honours you highly, j the state that protects your lofty freedom’.175 However, several months before this cantata was composed, Humboldt shook things up by vacating his post. His reasons were varied, but at root they had to do with disagreements with colleagues in the government about the organization of his department.176 Humboldt’s responsibilities and the fate of the university’s statutes fell then into the lap of his successor, Friedrich Schuckmann (1755–1834), a more conventional civil servant and one whose intellectual horizons compared poorly to those of his illustrious predecessor.177 Among his Wrst actions, Schuckmann declared that the provisional statutes could not serve very long and permanent ones should be drawn up. He assigned Uhden the task of preparing a revised draft. Uhden, however, made only minor changes to Schleiermacher’s original work. In 1812 Schuckmann then appointed a four-person commission to oVer Wnal advice and conclude the task. This commission consisted of professors August Boeckh, K. A. Rudolphi, K. F. Von Savigny, and, again, Schleiermacher. At this point, a 175 ‘Und Meister lehre treu, j Das ist, was ernst der Staat von euch begehrt, j Der Staat, der euch erna¨hrt, j Der Staat, der von euch lernend, hoch euch ehrt, j Der Staat, der hohe Freiheit euch gewa¨hrt.’ See Clemens Brentano, ‘Universitati Litterariae, Kantate auf den 15ten October 1810’ (Berlin, 1810), HUB, Yt 16383: F8. 176 Details are provided in Sweet, Humboldt, ii. 76 V. and Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, i. 211 V. 177 On Schuckmann’s tenure in oYce, see Lenz, ibid. i. 305 V.

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conXict arose between faculty members and the government over the composition of the faculty senate. The professors wanted to keep a senate composed of all full professors (Ordinarien). Fearful that such a large body would prove diYcult to manage, Schuckmann proposed a representative senate, made up of only Wfteen professors. He also stipulated that the government’s administrative and Wnancial representative—called the Syndikus (later the Kurator or Kanzler)—could attend all senate sessions and bring his secretary. Ultimately, the plan of the government was dictated to the faculty, insuring an abiding presence of the state in the inner sanctum of university’s aVairs.178 In 1813 deliberations over the statutes were interrupted by the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon and by the ensuing Congress of Vienna (1814– 15). Once these epochal events had passed, the matter was taken up again. In March of 1816, the second draft of the statutes was Wnally, for some begrudgingly, approved by the faculty senate. A year later, on 26 April 1817, the king gave his oYcial stamp of approval. SigniWcantly, the Wnal version corresponded considerably with the initial, provisional statutes drafted in 1810 by Schleiermacher, who during this protracted process emerged as the most involved and industrious Wgure. In the main then, the university’s statutes bear witness to Schleiermacher’s Gelegentliche Gedanken, albeit one notices exceptions that suggest the strong, often countervailing sway of the government’s interests. The general statutes thus combine a recognizably ‘modern’ spirit with ‘medieval’ forms, all placed under the guardianship of the bureaucratic apparatus of the state. The Wrst paragraph, for example, made clear that the purpose of the institution was ‘scientiWc education’ (wissenschaftliche Bildung) of the youth, but it also linked this purpose quite closely with state control, noting that the university ‘in all its departments is under the direct supervision of the Ministry of the Interior’.179 Furthermore, while the new institution enjoyed ‘the essential rights of a university’, these rights were inseparable from the ‘‘Landesva¨terlichen Schutze’’ of the state as laid out in the Prussian Civil Code of 1794, which stipulated that all Prussian schools and universities were ‘Veranstaltungen des Staats’.180 Not surprisingly, the four faculties were given their traditional form ‘as at other German universities’. Out of deference to custom, theology was mentioned Wrst, but this fact was mitigated by the insistence that each of the faculties made up an ‘independent whole’, the primary duties of which were to 178 Fallon, German University, 35–6. For further details, see Lenz, ibid. i. 433 V. 179 See Paul Daude (ed.), Die ko¨nigl. Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universita¨t zu Berlin: Systematische Zusammenstellung der fu¨r dieselbe bestehenden gesetzlichen, statutarischen und regelmentarischen Bestimmungen (Berlin, 1887), I§1. 180 Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Koch (ed.), Die preussischen Universita¨ten. Eine Sammlung der Verordungen, welche die Verfassung und Verwaltung dieser Anstalten betreVen (Berlin, 1839), i. 6.

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oversee the granting of degrees and to ‘provide complete instruction in their respective areas’. Perhaps as a nod to those critical of the traditional hierarchy of the faculties, the various subWelds of the philosophical faculty were spelled out individually: mathematics, natural science, history, the sciences of statecraft, and so forth.181 Regarded as bodies of teaching and learning, faculties consisted of ordinary and extraordinary professors, lecturers or Privatdozenten, and students. As a governing body within the university, however, only the ordinary professors enjoyed full rights and were eligible for selection to the senate or to the position of dean or rector. Following custom, the rector, elected by the senate, was the university’s highest authority, even if he, as the Prussian Civil Code directed, had to answer to relevant government oYcials.182 One of the more delicate matters handled in the general statutes, and one quite relevant to theology, concerned academic freedom. As noted above, the provisional statutes drafted by Schleiermacher granted extensive liberties to the faculties—‘unbeschra¨nkte Zensurfreiheit’ according to Lenz.183 However, when the statutes were reviewed and reworked during the ministry of Schuckmann, government oYcials came to the conclusion this was too permissive. Accordingly, alterations were made before the oYcial statutes of 1817 were promulgated. While the oYcial version still used the phrase ‘freedom from censorship,’ certain limitations were stipulated: professors could freely publish ‘writings that concerned scientiWc matters, but not ones on current political circumstances.’ Furthermore, faculty were pointedly reminded not to publish anything that contradicted the laws of the land.184 In short, as Lenz has noted, ‘a far-reaching limitation on freedom of speech’ took place between the provisional statutes (1810) and the oYcial ones (1817).185 As is well known, further limitations came after 1819 as a consequence of the Karlsbad Decrees. These called for the close monitoring of all universities throughout the newly created German Confederation (1815), so that no teacher misused his authority ‘by spreading harmful ideas which would subvert public peace and order and undermine the foundations of the existing states’.186 It should be clear from the foregoing, however, that for Prussia the Karlsbad Decrees did not represent an abrupt abrogation of academic freedom, but rather a powerful supplement to restrictive tendencies afoot beforehand. Moreover, it 181 Daude (ed.), Statuten 9–11; I§§4, 5, II§6. 182 Ibid. 9 V; I§6, III, and Koch (ed.), Die preussischen Universita¨ten, i. 6 V. 183 Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, i. 331. 184 Daude (ed.), Statuten 9–10, I§7. See also Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, i. 331–3. 185 Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, i. 331 186 The complete texts of the Karlsbad Decrees relevant to the universities are printed in E. R. Huber, Dokumente zur deutschen Verfassungsgeschichte (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1961), i. 100 V.

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is noteworthy that the limitations placed on academic freedom, both in the university’s oYcial statutes and in the Karlsbad Decrees, focused more on political utterances than religious ones—a fact that distinguishes this era from the confessional past. The post-revolutionary, politicized climate, in other words, not to mention the reality of Prussia as a confessionally pluralistic state (much more so after the Congress of Vienna) resulted in the dimunition of religious orthodoxy as a major concern of censorship, even if it admittedly persisted as a minor one.187 The statutes of the theological faculty were not issued until the 1830s. Although Schleiermacher had died by this time, these statutes nonetheless bear his imprint. Besides the obvious inXuence of his Gelegentliche Gedanken, they resonate strongly with ideas he set forth in a short memorandum ‘On the Establishment of the Theological Faculty’, submitted on 24 May 1810. This document in fact is the earliest blueprint for Berlin’s theological faculty and, as such, is of considerable signiWcance for understanding modern academic theology generally. In it Schleiermacher defended theology as a legitimate university enterprise and sought to provide new directions for theology’s response to contemporary realities.188 He dismissed the arguments of those who suggested that some theological Welds (e.g. church history and biblical exegesis) be relocated to the philosophical faculty, for theology, he reasoned, made up its own ‘whole’ and this justiWed its abiding place within the larger whole of the university.189 He accepted the customary division of theology into four subWelds—biblical exegesis, church history, dogmatics, and practical theology. He did not request a speciWc chair in practical theology, however, 187 Prussia’s pluralism increased signiWcantly after 1815 because of the acquisition of the Rhine provinces, the home to numerous Catholics. To be sure, after 1819 some circles of the government, especially those touched by the so-called pietistic ‘awakening’ or Erweckungsbewegung, remained deeply concerned about religious orthodoxy. But as a strictly legal matter pertaining to freedom of speech and instruction, those deemed politically subversive were regarded as more threatening than those whose religious views fell outside the boundaries of strict orthodoxy. Admittedly, for conservatives in the Vorma¨rz era, political and religious spheres were not neatly separated, as those deemed heterodox were also often regarded as politically dangerous. Still, increasingly, it was the perceived political danger, not the content of religious belief qua religious belief, that prompted and justiWed coercive government action. Accordingly, the conservatism of the post-1819 era should be understood as a distinctly modern political phenomenon, and not simply as a throwback to the confessional past. See Robert M. Bigler’s chapter, ‘The Awakening of Political Consciousness and the Beginning of Political Activity’, in The Politics of German Protestantism: The Rise of the Protestant Church Elite in Prussia, 1815–1848 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 3–50. 188 Walter Elliger, 150 Jahre Theologische Fakulta¨t Berlin: Eine Darstellung ihrer Geschichte von 1810 bis 1960 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1960), 6 V. 189 Schleiermacher dismissed critics of theology as ‘speaking surely in jest’ and opined that theological disciplines treated in other faculties would appear as ‘incongruous aberrations’. See Schleiermacher, ‘25.Mai 1810 Professor Schleiermacher u¨ber die Einrichtung der theologischen Faculta¨t’, in Ko¨pke, Die Gru¨ndung, 211.

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because he believed this function should be shared by all professors or supported by area pastors in Berlin.190 The principle of freedom should govern the theological faculty; no single faculty member should therefore exercise a ‘monopoly’ over a particular discipline, for ‘diVerent ways of teaching these disciplines’ would redound positively to both students and faculty.191 To launch the faculty, Schleiermacher requested three full professors (drei ordentlichen Lehren), each of whom would be responsible for at least two Welds. Ideally, the Wrst would cover exegesis and dogma; the second, exegesis and church history; and the third, church history and dogma. ConWgured in this manner, each would be responsible for overlapping Welds and hence expose students to a greater diversity of viewpoints and forms of inquiry. Moreover, this would foster ‘competition’ and thereby introduce ‘a stimulating spirit of rivalry among the teaching staV.’ Schleiermacher justiWed this arrangement by appealing to past precedents, singling out practices at the universities of Halle and Go¨ttingen in particular—a line of argument that indicates the authority that these two reform universities exercised over him and, by inference, over Humboldt, to whom the memorandum was principally addressed.192 Although Schleiermacher clearly indicated that Berlin was to be a ‘Protestant university’, he sought to relax confessional diVerences between Reformed and Lutheran camps. He himself would later endorse and vigorously promote the Church Union of 1817, fostered by Friedrich Wilhelm III, which sought to establish a uniWed Protestant church in Prussia. But well beforehand he saw the new university in general and its theological faculty in particular as a vehicle for overcoming confessional hostilities and promoting a more open, intellectual Protestantism. By adopting this point of view, he believed that Berlin could embrace and even direct the spirit of the times, for already, he noted, some German universities were no longer regarding confessional distinctions as a major issue. ‘The diVerence of confession in the theological faculties’, he therefore wrote, ‘should no longer be regarded’—a sentence of no slight historical signiWcance.193 190 Redeker, Schleiermacher, 98. 191 Defending his colleague de Wette against government actions against him in 1819, Schleiermacher argued that ‘unlimited freedom to teach in theology’ should be guaranteed in the university. See the letter, drafted by Schleiermacher, and presented to the government on de Wette’s behalf; reprinted in Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, iv. 366. 192 Schleiermacher, ‘25.Mai 1810 Professor Schleiermacher u¨ber die Einrichtung der theologischen Faculta¨t’, in Ko¨pke, Die Gru¨ndung, 211–12. 193 Ibid. 212. He supported his case by noting that an (unnamed) leading Reformed minister had allowed his sons to study at Go¨ttingen, a Lutheran university. Schleiermacher himself had been the Wrst Reformed theologian to teach at Halle, so he had direct experience of

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Furthermore, Schleiermacher reasoned that many scholarly tasks, especially writing church history and biblical exegesis, should and could rise above confessional polemics. It was enough if theological faculties simply elucidated the most important creeds of both major Protestant confessions and let students judge their validity.194 Relevant church bodies then could determine whether a particular candidate for ministry Wtted their theological criteria. The underlying message of Schleiermacher’s memorandum on this point is clear: the theological faculty at Berlin, and all German theological faculties ideally, should cease serving the interests of a particular confession. This was an anachronistic practice that only compromised commitment to academic freedom and disinterested scholarship. Instead, by acquainting students with diVerent points of view and by insisting on intellectual rigour, Berlin’s faculty could become not only a centre for scholarly excellence but also a seat of theological rapprochement (at least among Protestants; Catholics remained beyond the pale). Three further issues raised by Schleiermacher’s proposal for a theological faculty warrant mentioning: the founding of a special theological seminar, the granting of degrees, and the establishment of a university worship service. (The latter was actually proposed in a separate memorandum.) While he stopped short of calling for its immediate creation, Schleiermacher argued that an advanced theological seminar (Seminarium fu¨r gelehrten Theologie) should be established as soon as possible. In his view, this ‘excellent institution’ should be connected to but nonetheless distinct from the theological faculty. It should not be mistaken for a homiletic seminar or ‘Predigerseminarium’, which ‘obviously has no place at a university.’ Rather, the sole task of this projected institute was to promote Wrst-order theological scholarship, using grants and prizes as suitable incentives. As a model, he suggested similar seminars for ‘Alterthumswissenschaft’, which had risen to distinction under Heyne at Go¨ttingen and Wolf at Halle.195 interconfessional cooperation; indeed, Schleiermacher’s appointment at the University of Halle made its theological faculty technically the Wrst oYcially integrated one in Prussia. See Redeker, Schleiermacher, 76. 194 Schleiermacher, ‘25.Mai 1810 Professor Schleiermacher u¨ber die Einrichtung der theologischen Faculta¨t’, in Ko¨pke, Die Gru¨ndung, 212. 195 The origin of the ‘seminar’ is an important topic, for it was the cell out of which the methods of modern research institutions grew. While its roots are traceable to the early modern period, at which time it was largely a practical institution for the training of future pastors and teachers, it underwent a metamorphosis in the eighteenth century, whereby it became a more theoretical, scientiWc institution. This process began at Halle with the pedagogical, theological, and philological seminars established there after 1694. It was the seminarium philologicum at Go¨ttingen, however, that became the template for subsequent development. This seminar was begun by Johann Mathias Gesner in the 1730s and continued by Heyne after his call to Go¨ttingen in 1763. See Wilhelm Erben, ‘Die Entstehung der Universita¨ts-Seminare’, Internationale Monatsschrift fu¨r Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik 7 (July 1913): 1247–64.

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In 1812 Schleiermacher’s wish became a reality and a theological seminar was established at Berlin. Made up of philological and historical sections, and directed by Schleiermacher with the help of his colleagues, the seminar was commissioned ‘to lead excellent theological students to their own learned research and work in the area of theological studies’.196 In the course of the nineteenth century, other seminars and subsidiary institutions developed in connection with Berlin’s theological faculty: in 1849 a museum for Christian archeology and art,197 in 1875 a seminar for practical theology, in 1883 a seminar for post-biblical Judaism, and in 1917 an institute for the history of missions, later designated as an institute for general religious history and the science of missions (Institut fu¨r allgemeine Religionsgeschichte und Missionswissenschaft).198 These types of institutions, as shall be explored in more detail later, are crucial for understanding the shaping of nineteenth-century theology. In his 1810 memorandum, Schleiermacher suggested that the theological faculty recognize two levels of academic rank: the doctorate and the licentiate. The latter, gained through an examination and the production of a scholarly work, should be the minimal requirement to teach as a private lecturer, pursue the doctorate, or hold high church oYce. The doctorate, on the other hand, should be ‘held in honour’ as the summit of theological learning, awarded only after the completion of colloquia, a disputation, and the writing of a major theological work. Schleiermacher evinced worry that this academic rank had become watered down through granting it to undeserving candidates. He therefore vigorously opposed those who wanted to establish two versions of the doctorate: one for theology proper and another for Holy Scripture, granted to outstanding clergymen. Instead, he opined that it was not the task of a ‘learned body’ (i.e. the theological faculty) to evaluate practical work (i.e. the homiletic skills of a clergyman). There should then be just one doctorate, earned at the university through intensive wissenschaftlich endeavour. If the theological faculty ever decided to award an honorary doctorate outside the university, he conceded, this decision should still be based on whether the candidate under consideration had produced ‘a learned theological work of recognized merit’.199

196 The seminar’s ‘regulations’ are found in Ko¨pke, Die Gru¨ndung, 239–40. 197 Ferdinand Piper, Das christliche Museum der Universita¨t zu Berlin (Gotha, 1874). 198 See HUA, Theol. Fak. 43. There is also an informative description of the development of theological seminars in the catalogue of the ‘Theologische Fakulta¨t Dekanat’ in the university archive. 199 Schleiermacher, ‘25.Mai 1810 Professor Schleiermacher u¨ber die Einrichtung der theologischen Faculta¨t’, in Ko¨pke, Die Gru¨ndung, 213–14.

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Alongside his memorandum for a theological faculty, Schleiermacher proposed the establishment of university worship service (Universita¨tsgottesdienst), a favourite idea that he regarded as indispensable to the success of the university.200 Although his ideas on this matter were not immediately taken up and never embraced to the extent that Schleiermacher had hoped, this proposal is nonetheless revealing, not only of his ideas on university matters, but of his larger theological vision.201 At root, the proposal gives evidence of his abiding desire to eVect ‘the uniWcation of the scientiWc spirit with the religious sense’ (die Vereinigung des wissenschaftlichen Geistes mit dem religio¨sen Sinn) and thereby, as he had sought to do in his earlier Reden (1799), redress the decline of religion among the educated classes, the so-called ‘despisers’ of religion. While he indicated that a general dearth of religiosity was prevalent throughout society, he deemed this an acute problem among ‘the learned class’, for its members would shape the future and inXuence the church as well. He thus judged it particularly necessary ‘to rekindle’ (wieder zu beleben) the religious sense in this class by uprooting the ‘apparent conXict’ between religion and Wissenschaft. To accomplish such an important task, one must improve the religious experiences among students during their university years, for ‘what a young person adopts during these years, he appropriates to himself in freedom, and it surely passes over into his own [mature] character.’ The most eVective means of going about this, Schleiermacher held, ‘is through a well-established university worship service’. The worship service he advocated would mirror the activities of any other church, although its preaching, music, and liturgy would take on added meaning because of its academic context within what one contemporary called ‘Minerva’s new temple’.202 SigniWcantly, Schleiermacher proposed that the Eucharist (to be oVered at least four times per year) should be an ‘open communion’, one in which ‘everyone can participate, no matter to which Protestant confession they belong’. It should also be oVered in a liturgical environment designed to oVend neither confession. As such, the Eucharist service should foster Protestant unity and point to the centrality of worship, even at the heart of a predominantly scientiWc institution. If it fulWlled these 200 Previously, Schleiermacher had led the university worship service at Halle and this experience served in part as the model for his Berlin proposal. See Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, i. 221. Cf. Paul Keyser, ‘Der akademische Gottesdienst’, in 250 Jahre der Universita¨t Halle (Halle, 1944), 115 V. 201 Schleiermacher had hoped to use the French Reformed church on Berlin’s famous Gendarmenmarkt for the university church, but its members rejected his proposal. Other options were pursued, but more complications arose and this pet idea was eventually shelved. See Ko¨pke, Die Gru¨ndung, 86. 202 Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, i. 288.

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purposes, Schleiermacher concluded, the university church in general and its Eucharist service in particular would serve as ‘the point of uniWcation for the entire university’ (Vereinigungspunkt fu¨r die ganze Universita¨t)—a fascinating and noteworthy claim given the association of Berlin as the prototype of the modern secular, research university.203 Schleiermacher’s house of worship would brook no ‘parochial coercion’ (kein Parochialzwang). Rather, the university chaplain—a professor of theology, Schleiermacher recommended—should be allowed to work in ‘appropriate freedom’. For this to happen, the chaplain should not be placed under ecclesiastical supervision like other clergymen; rather he should be ‘exclusively subordinate to the Department of Ecclesiastical AVairs and Public Education’.204 SigniWcantly then, Schleiermacher judged the state as the ablest protector of academic freedom and progress in religion in the important sphere of university worship. Indeed, despite his many otherwise sceptical remarks about the state, Schleiermacher here clearly enlisted it, against ecclesiastical inXuence, as the necessary agent to further what he presumably regarded as the church’s own highest interest: the uniWcation of the scientiWc spirit and religion, which could best be accomplished in a university setting.205 In the light of Schleiermacher’s previously indicated wariness of state control, this recommendation appears anomalous, even if it expressed a tutelary understanding of the state widely held by many of his contemporaries. However revealing of his personal views, Schleiermacher’s proposal for a university church, in the end, went unrealized, and for some three decades after its founding Berlin had no oYcial university worship service and no oYcial chaplain. Although the faculty petitioned the government again for one in 1830, they were not successful. It was not until 1847 that a university worship service was Wnally established. Seated in Berlin’s Dorotheensta¨dtische Kirche, its Wrst pastor was the famous ‘mediating theologian’, Karl Immanuel Nitzsch (1787–1868).206 203 Schleiermacher, ‘25.Mai 1810 Desselben Entwurf zur Errichtung eines Universita¨tsgottesdienstes in Berlin’, in Ko¨pke, Die Gru¨ndung, 214–16. 204 Ibid. 215. 205 Ibid. 214–16. 206 Ko¨pke, Die Gru¨ndung, 291–2. On Nitzsch, see ODCC 1157. The Wrst service took place on the third Sunday of Advent, 1847. The oYce of university chaplain lasted until 1870, at which time it and all religious services were suspended. In 1916 they resumed, located in the KaiserWilhelms-Geda¨chtnis Kirche, but with no designated chaplain. In 1938, under the National Socialist government, services were suspended again. See the brief overview of the Gottesdienst in the catalogue to the ‘Theologische Fakulta¨t Dekanat’, HUA. For the government’s involvement, see ‘Die kirchlichen Angelegenheiten der Universita¨t zu Berlin und die Einrichtung eine besonderen Universita¨tskirche,’ GStA PK, HA Rep. 76 Kultusministerium Va Sekt. 2, Tit. 1, Nr. 8. On the broader history of university churches in Germany, see Konrad Hammann’s recent

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The statutes of Berlin’s theological faculty set forth rules and practices that would govern this faculty’s development and the position it would occupy in the new university.207 Although wording of the statutes granted theology customary ‘Wrst place’ at university ceremonies, they also made clear that theology existed on an equal legal footing with the other faculties (Rechtsgleichheit aller Fakulta¨ten).208 Viewing the statutes as a whole, one is struck by overtures to traditional university forms even as they prescribe a decidedly modern and liberal theological programme. Put diVerently, the statutes bear witness to theology’s attempt to validate itself, not as a confessional or pietistic enterprise, but as a rigorous academic undertaking, as a Wissenschaft in good standing with other Wissenschaften. As Walter Elliger has put it, Berlin’s theological faculty sought after ‘a new conception of the theological discipline’, one no longer yoked to the ‘complex order of a confessional doctrinal system [but to] . . . the limitless freedom of the scientiWc spirit in lively interaction with the intellectual and religious forces of the past and present’.209 While emphasizing theology’s wissenschaftlich character, the statutes convey neither indiVerence to the needs of the church nor criticism of the theological faculty’s customary role as supplier of church leaders. Indeed, the statutes resonated with Schleiermacher’s lifelong insistence that conciliation between science and religion should beneWt ecclesial life. The statutes’ Wrst paragraph accordingly aYrmed the faculty’s link with the church: ‘The theological faculty has the vocation of proceeding according to the teaching of the Protestant church so as not only to propagate the theological sciences in general, but also especially to make competent by means of lectures and other academic exercises the young men who dedicate themselves to the service of the church.’210 The faculty served the church best, however, by producing graduates capable of scholarly rigour. Attenuating confessional or pietistic emphases, therefore, Berlin’s statutes endorsed a theological programme focused on lifting the intellectual credentials of its graduates and enhancing the faculty’s overall scientiWc standing within the university.211 This focus is study, Universita¨tsgottesdienst und Aufkla¨rungspredigt: Die Go¨ttinger Universita¨tskirche im 18.Jahrhundert und ihr Ort in der Geschichte des Universita¨tsgottesdienstes im deutschen Protestantismus (Tu¨bingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2000). 207 These statutes were not oYcially issued until 1838. They represent a collaborative eVort between the theological faculty and the Prussian Kultusministerium. With the other statutes, they bore the oYcial signature of Karl von Altenstein, then Minister of Culture. GStA PK I HA Rep. 76 Kultusministerium Va Sekt. 2 Tit. 1 Nr. 6 Bd. 3. 208 Daude (ed.), ‘Die Statuten der theologischen Fakulta¨t’, 47, I§4. 209 Elliger, 150 Jahre Theologische Fakulta¨t Berlin, 7. 210 Daude (ed.), ‘Die Statuten der theologischen Fakulta¨t’, 46, I§1. 211 Elliger, 150 Jahre Theologische Fakulta¨t Berlin, 1 V.

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attested to by the statutes’ insistence on deep and wide coverage of all relevant theological Welds and by the demanding requirements set for professors, lecturers, and degree recipients. In a section on teaching duties, the statutes outlined Welds that professors should cover, indicating that every Weld was to be covered at least twice during a three-year period. The Welds mentioned included the encyclopedia and methodology of theology; introduction to the Old and New Testaments; biblical criticism and hermeneutics; the history of the Old Testament and biblical archaeology; biblical interpretation; church history and the history of dogma; dogmatics, moral theology, practical theology, and symbolics (Symbolik).212 Besides covering these Welds in their lectures, professors were also enjoined to supervise students’ work in the theological seminar that had been established in 1812.213 To uphold rigorous standards, the statutes placed teaching duties preponderantly in the hands of the more experienced ordinary and extraordinary professors, from whom a doctorate was expected along with evidence of further scholarly achievement.214 However, following university custom, the statutes also allowed for unpaid lectures by Privatdozenten. Since this post usually represented the crucial Wrst step of a young scholar into the academic profession, the drafters of the statutes saw Wt to make its attainment quite diYcult; no fewer than thirteen paragraphs were devoted to the requirements necessary for attaining the ‘permission to teach’ (venia legendi or Habilitation). To apply in the Wrst place, a prospective candidate Wrst had to possess a theological degree (either a licentiate or doctorate) from the University of Berlin or another recognized university. Furthermore, at least three years must have elapsed, spent in a ‘scientiWc manner’, since the end of one’s university studies before one was considered fully eligible for Habilitation.215 If eligible, the applicant would then submit to the faculty a curriculum vitae and a learned theological treatise. If these passed muster, he would be allowed to give a ‘trial lecture’ (Probevorlesung) and afterwards hold a colloquium on the same topic in the presence of the faculty. Once all these requirements had been approved by an absolute majority of the faculty—who were enjoined to make their evaluations based on the moral integrity, preparedness to teach, 212 Daude (ed.), ‘Die Statuten der theologischen Fakulta¨t’, 56; III§39. Symbolics or Symbolik refers to the comparative study and interpretation of church creeds and confessions. See ‘Symbolik’, in LTK 1162. 213 Daude (ed.), ‘Die Statuten der theologischen Fakulta¨t’, 60–1; III§54. 214 Ibid. 48; II§7. 215 Ibid. 61; III§55. The Habilitation requirements for theology were not unique to this faculty but harked back to the general statutes of the university. See Alexander Busch, Die Geschichte des Privatdozenten (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1959), 21 V.

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and ‘scientiWc capability’ (wissenschaftliche Tu¨chtigkeit) of the candidate—the aspiring Privatdozent could be admitted to the Wrst rung of the academic profession.216 Such rigorous requirements became increasingly standard at Prussian universities in the early nineteenth century. Far from discouraging young men, they had the eVect of transforming the position of Privatdozent from a relatively unsung and menial position to a prestigious and coveted one. In all faculties, the number of Privatdozenten rose steadily during the Vorma¨rz period, creating a much more competitive academic environment and one in which one’s reputation and institutional preferment depended largely on scholarly accomplishment.217 Students seeking degrees in the theological faculty also faced demanding standards. Two degrees in theology were possible: the licentiate and the doctorate. To be considered for the former, at least three years of university instruction were required. Afterwards, the candidate could submit to the theological faculty application materials, which included a curriculum vitae and a treatise on ‘a self-selected subject from the theological disciplines, on which the candidate especially desired to dedicate his eVorts’. If successful, the candidate could proceed to an oral examination, during which he was expected to demonstrate ‘comparable development in all the major theological disciplines and a certain virtuosity in a single discipline’. Anyone found wanting in a particular area or who did not seem to evince a ‘superior capability’ should not be admitted to the examination stage.218 The statutes spelled out in detail the rather comprehensive knowledge expected of the candidate for examination. In the area of church history, for example, the statutes required knowledge of important historical documents and aids for their investigation, a thorough ability to account for past epochs and facts, and, not least, a ‘scientiWc overview of the whole’. In biblical exegesis, the candidate must demonstrate ‘thorough knowledge of the original languages, knowledge of the correct hermeneutical principles, and ability and skill in their application’. In dogmatic and moral theology, the candidate was expected to show ‘a scientiWc knowledge of the distinctive character of the Christian faith and the laws of Christian life derived therefrom, as well as knowledge of the systematic connection of both disciplines and their reciprocal relationship to one another, so that [the candidate] might give evidence of a scientiWc comprehension in the treatment of individual important subjects of both disciplines’. Furthermore, the candidate should 216 Daude (ed.), ‘Die Statuten der theologischen Fakulta¨t’, 62–3; III§§56, 57, 58. 217 Turner, ‘Prussian Universities’, 362 ff. 218 Daude (ed.), ‘Die Statuten der theologischen Fakulta¨t’, 73–5; III§§89–94.

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demonstrate ‘familiarity with the various, contemporary dogmatic schools of thought and the points of conXict between them’.219 If the candidate was judged in possession of such extensive knowledge, he could be admitted to the oral examination held in the presence of the faculty. His success here depended on making clear his verbal command of the knowledge.220 If successful, the candidate could proceed to a formal, public disputation and promotion ceremony, oYciated by the dean of the faculty. At this event, reXecting medieval custom, the candidate was expected to defend one or several theses, which were printed and circulated beforehand to the members of the theological faculty, other professors, and relevant public oYcials. Upon completion of this Wnal step, the candidate gave a short speech of gratitude and received his diploma of licentiate, which bore the signature of the dean and the oYcial seal of the theological faculty.221 The most prestigious theological degree was, of course, the doctorate, a measure of accomplishment reserved for those select few who had demonstrated exceptional skills and promise. While the statutes indicated that under some circumstances ecclesiastical service and other practical work could be taken into consideration in awarding this degree, the emphasis rests on scholarly accomplishment—over and beyond the requirements for the licentiate. Foremost, it was expected of all aspiring doctors to produce a major work that gave evidence of ‘extending the breadth of science’ (Bereicherung der Wissenschaft). As the statutes ampliWed, the candidate must ‘demonstrate a special virtuosity or a high degree of profundity and breadth in scholarly understanding’.222 Once the candidate’s work had met these high standards and gained the stamp of the faculty, a formal degree-granting ceremony took place, which, like the licentiate ceremony, strongly echoed medieval practice. The candidate gave a short speech and afterwards was invested with the insignia of his new status: a diploma, a ring, and a Bible.223 Importantly, a doctoral oath (Doktoreid) was also taken by the candidate upon completion of his studies. However, this ritual was no longer a pointedly confessional event, as it would have been in the seventeenth century. Formulated during an era when the royal house was committed to the Protestant

219 Daude (ed.), ‘Die Statuten der theologischen Fakulta¨t’, 75; III§95. 220 Ibid. 76; III§§96–9. 221 Ibid. 77–8; III§105. The theological faculty’s seal bore the Latin inscription ‘facultatis theologiae’ with an image of a veiled female Wgure, a symbol of theology, holding a cross and chalice. Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, i. 284. 222 Daude (ed.), ‘Die Statuten der theologischen Fakulta¨t’, 79; III§109. 223 Ibid. 79; III§110. The statutes also make allowance for the granting of honorary doctoral degrees. While extraordinary church service might be the basis for such a degree, the predominate criterion remained ‘[an] exceptional contribution to science’. Ibid. 79–80; III§§111–14.

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Church Union of 1817, Berlin’s oath had a somewhat generic, even pro forma quality. Candidates were expected not to teach anything contrary to Holy Scripture, ecumenical creeds, and the Augsburg Confession, but strict distinctions between Lutheran and Reformed camps were elided. Indeed, the oath suggests that the notion of the theological faculty as the keeper of a particular orthodoxy, challenged already in the eighteenth century, had now begun to reach the end of its line. Theology, instead, sought a new scholarly validation.224 Besides the progressive direction of the university’s statutes, Berlin’s initial professoriate greatly contributed to the university’s modernizing ethos and prestigious reputation. In his memorandum of 1809, Humboldt had made clear that the ‘intellectual power’ of the new institution depended largely upon the correct choice of scholars.225 That Humboldt’s words were well heeded is borne out in the extraordinary pool of talent that the University of Berlin acquired and, in large measure, maintained throughout most of the nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, the industrious Schleiermacher took the initiative in 1809 of putting together a Wrst-order theological faculty, convinced too that good hiring was the cornerstone of future success.226 Above all, he wanted to assemble a faculty whose scholarship and teaching demonstrated to religion’s ‘cultured despisers’ the contemporary relevance and intellectual credibility of theology. He desired neither old-style confessionalists nor doctrinaire rationalists, but scholars able to transcend hackneyed eighteenth-century debates and thereby put Protestant theology on a new and Wrmer footing. Indeed, his hiring principles seem to correspond with his overall theological aim, which, as he put it in one famous formulation, sought ‘to create an eternal covenant between the living Christian faith and an independent and freely working science, a covenant by the terms of which science is not hindered and faith not excluded’.227 224 The actual oath is found in Hermann Mulert, Die LehrverpXichtung in der evangelischen Kirche Deutschlands (Tu¨bingen, 1906), 81–2. Cf. Elliger, 150 Jahre Theologische Fakulta¨t Berlin, 7. ¨ ber die innere und a¨ußere Organisation’, in Anrich (ed.), Die Idee der 225 Humboldt, ‘U deutschen Universita¨t, 380. 226 See the correspondence between Humboldt and Schleiermacher concerning hiring matters. Schleiermacher, Aus Schleiermachers Leben in Briefen, iv. 169–71. Humboldt had a high regard for and conWdence in Schleiermacher, referring to him once as ‘einer der vorzu¨glichsten jetzt so seltenen theologischen Universita¨ts-Lehrer also auch einer der besten und beliebsten Kanzelredner in Berlin und ein Mann von durchaus unbescholtenem Charakter.’ See ‘Antrag fu¨r Schleiermacher 5. Juli 1809’, in Humboldt, Gesammelte Schriften, x. 80. 227 He regarded this as the goal of the Protestant Reformation and still relevant in his time. See Schleiermacher, Sendschreiben an Dr. Lu¨cke (Giessen, 1908), 40. Friedrich Lu¨cke (1791– 1855) was a student and Privatdozent in Berlin from 1816 to 1818. A devotee of Schleiermacher, he later became one the principal champions of so-called ‘mediating theology’ (Vermittlungstheologie). See Alf Christophersen, Friedrich Lu¨cke (1791–1855), 2 vols. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999).

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In the spring of 1810 members of the start-up commission turned their attention to Wlling out the faculties, theology and others. A number of names for theology were proposed and several queries sent out. Schleiermacher felt it his competence to teach New Testament studies and dogmatics. He was therefore particularly eager to hire for Old Testament and church history. Among the early candidates for consideration were J. E. C. Schmidt of Giessen, J. G. Planck of Go¨ttingen, C. F. von Ammon of Erlangen, and J. F. Schleusner of Wittenberg. However, in pursuing these men, many of whom were quite well known, complications arose and the start-up commission was forced to look elsewhere.228 Its members eventually settled on a couple of younger, up-and-coming theologians teaching at the University of Heidelberg: W. M. L. de Wette in Old Testament and Philipp Konrad Marheineke in church history. Once oVered positions, both accepted; de Wette came for the Wrst autumn term in 1810; Marheineke came the following spring. Later joined by another historian, August Neander, Berlin’s theological faculty, like the university itself, soon began to rise in signiWcance.229 A scholar of prodigious energy and range, de Wette proved an especially valuable acquisition. Were it not for Schleiermacher’s large shadow and de Wette’s own political misfortune (more about this later), one could even imagine identifying de Wette as the father of modern liberal theology.230 The son of a Lutheran clergyman, de Wette received his earliest education Wrst at Weimar, partly under the school superintendent J. G. Herder, and then at the University of Jena. At Jena he had imbibed the philosophy of Kant and rubbed shoulders with some of the greatest luminaries of the time, including the rationalist theologians and biblical scholars J. P. Gabler, H. E. G. Paulus, and J. J. Griesbach and, in the philosophical faculty, Fichte, Reinhold, Schiller, Schelling, and especially J. F. Fries, a devout Kantian and Wery political liberal,

228 Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, i. 224 V. 229 De Wette received a call on 11 July 1810, Marheineke on 10 August 1810. See ibid. and Ko¨pke, Die Gru¨ndung, 77. The letter of invitation to de Wette from the Department of Ecclesiastical AVairs and Public Education is reprinted in Ernst Staehelin (ed.), Dewettiana: Forschungen und Texte zu Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wettes Leben und Werk (Basle: Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1956), 67–8. Besides Schleiermacher, de Wette, Marheineke, and Neander, another instructor, Johann Joachim Bellermann (1754–1851), taught in the theological faculty during the university’s earliest years; however, he was never given full status. See Elliger, 150 Jahre theologische Fakulta¨t Berlin, 36. There was not a professor of practical theology until the hiring of Gerhard Friedrich Abraham Strauss (1786–1863) in 1822. Strauss also served as Domprediger in Berlin and as rector of the university in 1833–4. See Friedrich Herneck and Oskar Tyzko (eds.), Die Rektoren der Humboldt-Universita¨t zu Berlin (Halle: Niemeyer, 1966), 44. 230 See Thomas Albert Howard, Religion and the Rise of Historicism: W. M. L. de Wette, Jacob Burckhardt, and the Theological Origins of Nineteenth-Century Historical Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 23–77.

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with whom de Wette maintained a lifelong friendship. The result of contact with such varied and scintillating minds meant that de Wette was no run-ofthe-mill biblical critic, but one alive with practically every major intellectual current of the time. Besides biblical scholarship, he published in dogmatic theology and Christian ethics, and distinguished himself as a novelist as well.231 Called to Berlin at the age of 30 (having taught at Heidelberg only since 1807), de Wette had already authored a number of signiWcant works: two provocative essays, Eine Idee u¨ber das Studium der Theologie (1801) and AuVorderung zum Studium der hebra¨ischen Sprache und Literatur (1805) and two major pieces of scholarship, a groundbreaking dissertation on the Book of Deuteronomy (1805) and an equally important two-volume Beitra¨ge zur Einleitung in das Alte Testament (1806–7). The latter two works had begun to distinguish de Wette as one of the most original and incisive Old Testament scholars of his day. In them, he reWned the concept of ‘myth’ as a category of biblical exegesis and thereby laid the groundwork for its widespread use in nineteenth-century biblical interpretation, inXuencing such critics as the controversial David Friedrich Strauss and the Old Testament scholar Julius Wellhausen.232 For his pioneering criticism, de Wette’s inXuence lives on today; one scholar has recently even called him ‘the founder of modern biblical criticism’.233 Of less distinction but noteworthy nonetheless, de Wette’s colleague at Heidelberg, Marheineke, arrived in Berlin in the spring of 1811. Born in 1780, Marheineke had studied theology at the University of Go¨ttingen. In 1803 he left Go¨ttingen for the University of Erlangen, where, in 1805, he was appointed extraordinary professor of church history and assistant university preacher. While at Erlangen he read Schleiermacher’s Reden and later credited

231 De Wette’s best known ‘theological novel’ was his Theodor, oder des ZweiXers Weihe: Bildungsgeschichte eines evangelischen Geistlichen, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1822; 2nd edn., 1828), which, drawing heavily from autobiographical material, sketches the educational experiences of a theological student confronted by the various intellectual currents of the day. The work was translated into English by James F. Clark and published in Boston in 1843 as Theodore; or, the Skeptic’s Conversion. 232 On de Wette and myth, see C. Hartlich and W. Sachs, Der Ursprung des MythosbegriVes in der modernen Bibelwissenschaft (Tu¨bingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1952). 233 See John Rogerson, W. M. L. de Wette: Founder of Modern Biblical Criticism: An Intellectual Biography (SheYeld: JSOT, 1992) and Rudolf Smend, Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wettes Arbeit am Alten und am Neuen Testament (Basle: Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1958). On de Wette and the teaching of the Old Testament at Berlin, see Ru¨diger Liwak, ‘Das Alte Testament und die theologische Fakulta¨t in der Gru¨ndungszeit der Friedrich-Wilhelms Universita¨t’, in Gerhard Beiser and Christof Gestrich (eds.), 450 Jahre Evangelische Theologie in Berlin (Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989), 163–82.

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it with re-enlivening his own faith. From Erlangen he moved on to Heidelberg in 1807, the same year that he rose to scholarly acclaim through two publications, Universalkirchenhistorie des Christentums and a lengthy study of the history of canon law and church polity in the Middle Ages. Largely on the strength of these works, he received the call to Berlin, despite fears that he was an uninspiring lecturer—fears later conWrmed!234 In the Prussian capital, Marheineke covered a wide range of courses and became the second pastor at Trinity Church, where Schleiermacher held the position of Wrst pastor. During his Wrst decade, Marheineke’s scholarly interests turned increasingly from history to philosophy and speculative theology, and to the thought of Schelling and Hegel. When Hegel actually joined the philosophical faculty in 1818 to assume the chair vacated by Fichte, Marheineke soon became an avid follower. He was convinced that the Hegelian system had in fact, as Hegel claimed, reconciled the seemingly disparate claims of traditional Christianity, expressed in primitive ‘representations’ (Vorstellungen) and modern philosophical consciousness, capable of expression in mature ‘concepts’ (BegriVe).235 Indeed, in Hegelian parlance, Marheineke came to call himself a ‘theologian of the concept’ (BegriVstheologe) and he became a vocal apologist for Hegelian thought in the classroom and in a variety of publications, such as his Vorlesungen u¨ber die Bedeutung der hegelschen Philosophie in der christlichen Theologie (1842). Marheineke’s wholesale conversion to Hegelianism caused no small rupture in his relationship with Schleiermacher, who doubted the relevance of Hegelian philosophy for theology and generally disliked Hegel himself.236 In 1813 the theological faculty added another member, someone capable of covering early church history, as Marheineke’s historical interests were largely in the post-Reformation period. Born in 1789 of Jewish descent as David Mendel, the new professor had changed his name to Johann August Wilhelm Neander upon converting to Christianity in 1806. As a student of law at the University of Halle, he had heard Schleiermacher lecture on church history and had read his Reden; these experiences contributed to his decision to forsake law for theology. With the closing of Halle by Napoleon in 1807,

234 Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, i. 613. 235 On Hegelian philosophy and Christianity generally, see Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, i. 86–107. 236 On Marheineke, see Friedrich Wilhelm Graf ’s entry in Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (Herzberg: T. Bautz, 1994), v. 805–12. On Marheineke’s appropriation of Hegelian philosophy, see John E. Toews, Hegelianism: The Path toward Dialectical Humanism, 1805–1841 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 147–9. On the conXict between Schleiermacher and Hegel/Hegelians at Berlin, see Richard Crouter, ‘Hegel and Schleiermacher at Berlin: A Many-Sided Debate’, JAAR 48 (1980): 19–43.

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Neander moved on to Go¨ttingen, where he taught as a lecturer for several years. In 1809 he returned to Hamburg, the city of his youth, and was examined for the ministry. But judging himself more Wt for the lectern than the pulpit, he accepted in 1811 a call to the University of Heidelberg, where he produced an acclaimed study of Julian the Apostate and was made an extraordinary professor in 1812. The following year, at the age of 24, he heeded the call from his former mentor at Halle and joined the faculty at Berlin, where he established a reputation as Germany’s foremost church historian. His voluminous publications touched on many subjects, although he became best known for his widely translated multivolume Allgemeine Geschichte der christlichen Religion und Kirche (Hamburg, 1825–54).237 Always a favourite among Berlin’s students and more inclined to traditional orthodoxy than his colleagues, Neander taught at Berlin until his death in 1850. ‘Schleiermacher was admired and feared,’ Philip SchaV once opined, while ‘Neander was esteemed and beloved.’238

6. ‘RENEWING PROTESTANTISM’: SCHLEIERMACHER AND THE CHALLENGE OF MODERN THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION Schleiermacher was above all a university man. August Twesten

The labours of Schleiermacher, de Wette, Marheineke, and Neander after 1810 were impressive, and rather quickly Berlin assumed a leading position among German theological faculties. Despite their relative youth, the combined experiences of these scholars at other intellectually vibrant institutions—such as Halle, Go¨ttingen, Jena, and even ancient Heidelberg (which had witnessed major renovation as part of the expanded state of Baden after 1803) meant that Berlin’s theologians were in touch with some of the most forward-looking academic currents of their day. That some of their most productive years coincided with the launching of a major, new university redounded both to their scholarship and to the reputation of the university as well. What is more, 237 See Kurt-Victor Selge, ‘August Neander—ein getaufter Hamburger Jude der Emanzipations- und Restaurationszeit als erster Berliner Kirchenhistoriker’, in Beiser and Gestrich (eds.), 450 Jahre Evangelische Theologie in Berlin, 233–76. 238 Philip SchaV, Saint Augustin, Melanchthon, Neander: Three Biographies (New York, 1886), 135.

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the reform-saturated milieu of the university’s founding contributed to the ethos of the theological faculty. Sandwiched between two eras of reaction (the earlier Wo¨llner years and the post-1819 Vorma¨rz era) and in the train of the deWning political revolution of modernity, the university’s infancy allowed for a remarkable degree of intellectual experimentation and innovation. The German nation must respond to a ‘new age’, Fichte had said, for ‘time is taking giant strides with us more than with any other age since the history of the world began’—hyperbolic words no doubt, but suggestive of a mood felt by many.239 To be sure, the reality of a new age was also not lost on other German theological faculties, but the University of Berlin, founded in this era of upheaval and transition, could claim the spirit of modernity as its own patrimony. Further, since theology, in the eyes of its critics, properly belonged to a vanishing world, Berlin’s theologians were all the more determined to confer upon their discipline new legitimacy. Each would have felt acutely a sentiment expressed well by Claude Welch: ‘At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the theological problem was, simply, ‘‘how is theology possible?’’ This was a question of both rationale and method, and included, at least implicitly, the question of whether theology is possible at all.’240 Consequently, much theological work from the period reXects a concern with what one might call foundational disciplinary issues (what is the distinctive nature of theology?), which took into account the widespread conviction of novel circumstances (how does theology proceed in this postEnlightenment, post-revolutionary era?). Responses to these questions varied among Berlin’s four founding theologians, but they were taken up by each. ReXecting the new historical consciousness of the times, Neander turned to historical inquiry as a means for opening up theology’s future; only through comprehensive historical knowledge of the Christian past could academic theology and the church acquire a Wrmer footing to respond to present and future challenges. To varying degrees, his colleagues too embraced greater appreciation for historical research and historical development in matters theological. But history was only one possible avenue of renewal. Philosophy was another. And Berlin’s theological faculty—Schleiermacher, Marheineke, and de Wette in particular—were keen on opening up theology to philosophical inXuences—be they Kantian, Hegelian, or other. Schleiermacher regularly taught philosophical subjects at the university,241 he devoted

239 Fichte, Addresses to the German People, 2–3. 240 Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, i. 59. 241 An index of all of Schleiermacher’s lectures, philosophical and theological, is found in ‘Index lectionum quae auspiciis Regis Augustissimi Friderici Guilelmi in Universitate Litteraria Berolinia constituta 1810–1832’, NStUB, H. lit. part. III 38/1.

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years to a translation of Plato’s dialogues, and he served in the philosophical section of Berlin’s Academy of Science, also acting as the Academy’s secretary.242 Marheineke came to embrace Hegelian philosophy to such an extent that he was regularly accused of selling theology’s birthright to philosophy, siding with ‘Athens’, his critics charged, against ‘Jerusalem’. De Wette too was conversant in the leading philosophical currents of the day; his own theology and biblical criticism were grounded in a meticulously worked-out philosophical system, which contained elements of the thought of Herder, Schelling, Kant, and especially J. F. Fries.243 Often the varying philosophical currents among Berlin’s theological faculty resulted in discord. The relationship between Schleiermacher and Marheineke grew particularly sour, as I have suggested, because of their contrasting evaluations of Hegel’s philosophy. De Wette and Schleiermacher too often came into conXict. De Wette once conWded to a friend that the epistemological basis of Schleiermacher’s theology led to a ‘lax mysticism’ and ‘esotericism’. Conversely, Schleiermacher worried that de Wette’s historical criticism of the Bible was at times ‘too radical’.244 Despite their diVerences, Schleiermacher, de Wette, Marheineke, and Neander recognized that the revolutionary epoch in which they lived called for a new theological programme—a programme neither rigidly confessional nor rationalist nor neologist in the eighteenth-century sense, a programme in which modernity in its broadest scope, especially the new imperative of Wissenschaft, was taken into consideration, but nonetheless a programme faithful to the deeper currents of the Christian faith. What is more, the programme should give expression to the particular genius of the German people, who three centuries earlier had given the world Martin Luther, the Protestant Reformation, and hence—so the argument went—new avenues of truth-seeking and emancipation.245 Perhaps de Wette expressed this sense of historical transition ¨ ber Religion und and new theological undertaking best when he wrote in his U Theologie (1815) that ‘everyone [nowadays] searches and strives for a new, higher religious life. But clarity of consciousness has not arrived yet, and the conXicting views and eVorts are well known. Many want to return wholly to

242 Redeker, Schleiermacher, 151 V., and Harnack, Geschichte der ko¨niglich preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin (Berlin, 1901), i. 848 V. 243 Rudolf Smend, ‘De Wette und das Verha¨ltnis zwischen historischer Bibelkritik und philosophischem System im 19.Jahrhundert’, TZ 14 (1957): 107–19. 244 See material in Staehelin (ed.), Dewettiana, 72, 77, 81. ¨ ber Religion und Theologie (Berlin, 1815) that the Reforma245 e.g. de Wette argued in his U tion represented ‘the third great moment in the history of the freeing of the religious spirit’—the other two being Mosaic monotheism and apostolic Christianity. See p. 107.

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the old, others want to create something new. A solidly formed, agreed-upon theology eludes us.’246 Despite the industrious eVorts of his colleagues at Berlin and contemporaries elsewhere, it was Schleiermacher, above all, who transformed Protestant theology in the early nineteenth century and gave shape to something known as liberal or cultural Protestantism, which has had immeasurable inXuence not only on academic theology but on the general religious sensibilities of the modern world. As his colleague and no less a historical mind than Neander put it upon Schleiermacher’s death: ‘From him a new period in the history of the church will one day take its origin.’ Or, as Karl Barth, Schleiermacher’s greatest adversary and admirer, famously expressed it: ‘The Wrst place in the history of the theology of the most recent times belongs and will always belong to Schleiermacher, and he has no rival’—an exaggeration perhaps but not an altogether groundless one.247 To a large degree, Schleiermacher’s renown rests on his Reden (1799) and his well-known Der christliche Glaube (1821; 2nd edn., 1830), his most comprehensive and systematic work. But for shaping the liberal theological enterprise in German Protestant universities throughout the nineteenth century and beyond, his slender Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums (1811, 2nd edn.; 1830) stands out as the more signiWcant work.248 This is the case for at least three reasons. First, Kurze Darstellung was intended as a pedagogical work, derived from Schleiermacher’s lectures on ‘theologische Encyklopa¨die’, his introductory course taken by beginning students. Initially

¨ ber Religion und Theologie (Berlin, 1815), 123. 246 De Wette, U 247 Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background and History, trans. John Bowden (London: SCM, 1972), 425; the quote from Neander is also taken from Barth. 248 The full title of the Wrst edition was Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums zum Behuf einleitender Vorlesungen entworfen von F. Schleiermacher (Berlin, 1811); the second edition: Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums zum Behuf einleitender Vorlesungen. Entworfen von F. Schleiermacher. Zweite umgearbeitete Ausgabe (Berlin, 1830). My citations are from the second edition (which, though expanded and reworked, does not substantively deviate from the Wrst), although they are made in consultation with the Wrst edition and with the published notes to Schleiermacher’s course on the topic made by David Friedrich Strauss. See Strauss, Theologische Enzyklopa¨die (1831/32) Nachschrift David Friedrich Strauss, ed. Walter Sachs (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1987). Strauss’s notes were based on Schleiermacher’s Wnal course on theological encyclopedia given at the University of Berlin. The 1830 edition of Schleiermacher’s work was Wrst translated into English by William Farrer in 1850. Terrence Tice produced another English translation in 1966. See Schleiermacher, Brief Outline of the Study of Theology, Drawn up to Serve as the Basis for Introductory Lectures, trans. William Farrer (Edinburgh, 1850), and Schleiermacher, Brief Outline on the Study of Theology, trans. Terrence Tice (Richmond, Va.: John Knox, 1966). I have relied heavily on these translations, particularly the latter.

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oVered by Schleiermacher while at Halle, he would teach the subject eleven times altogether, instructing some 600 students, making it among his most frequently oVered and best-attended courses.249 Schleiermacher himself placed great importance on this course: the success of theological rejuvenation in the modern era, he held, depended on the ability to transmit theology eVectively and clearly to a new generation of clergymen and professors in the universities; and this could only take place once beginning students obtained ‘a solid and thorough view of the entire Weld of theology’.250 During the time of Berlin’s founding, therefore, publishing an introductory book on theological encyclopedia became one of Schleiermacher’s abiding concerns. To his bride, Henriette von Willich, he expressed a desire to publish ‘a small academic handbook’, noting elsewhere that his new post at Berlin would provide him the occasion ‘to set down in writing [his] complete theological viewpoint in his own instructional manuals’ and thereby ‘found a theological school for building up and renewing Protestantism, which can no longer continue as it is’.251 Second, Kurze Darstellung oVered an intellectual rationale for university theology. The nature of the encyclopedia genre was not, as we might assume, the alphabetic organization of various bits of knowledge; rather, reXecting the original meaning of the term ‘encyclopedia’ (the circle of knowledge), the genre sought to justify and delineate a particular branch of knowledge in relation to the whole.252 Schleiermacher thus oVered much more than an introduction to theology for beginning students. Indeed, at an important juncture in the evolution of the modern German university, he responded to 249 A chronological listing of Schleiermacher’s courses on the subject, including the number of students registered, is found in Dirk Schmid’s ‘historical introduction’ to Schleiermacher, KGA I. vi. pp. xxxvi–xxxviii. Before publishing his own book, Schleiermacher relied on two widely used eighteenth-century texts that I have mentioned previously: J. A. No¨sselt’s Anweisung zur Bildung angehender Theologen, 2 vols., 2nd edn. (Halle, 1791) and G. J. Planck’s Einleitung in die theologischen Wissenschaften, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1794–5). 250 This was how August Twesten, Schleiermacher’s pupil and eventual successor, described his mentor’s course. Georg Heinrici (ed.), D. August Twesten nach Tagebu¨chern und Briefen (Berlin, 1889), 51. 251 See the letter of 28 March 1809 in Schleiermacher, Aus Schleiermachers Leben in Briefen, ii. 235, and the letter of 17 December 1809 (to Carl Gustav von Brinckmann) in Schleiermacher, Aus Schleiermachers Leben in Briefen, iv. 172. In the letter to Brinckman, Schleiermacher tied renewing Protestantism to overcoming confessional divisions: ‘In einem solchen Zeitraum wu¨rde ich im Stande sein . . . meine ganze theologische Ansicht in einigen kurzen Lehrbu¨chern niederzulegen und wie ich hoVe dadurch eine theologische Schule zu gru¨nden, die den Protestantismus wie er jetzt sein muß ausbildet und neu belebt, und zugleich den Weg zu einer ku¨nftigen Aufhebung des Gegensatzes beider Kirchen frei la¨ßt und vielleicht bahn’ (emphasis added). 252 See EKL 1097 V. A fuller discussion of this academic genre and its importance in the nineteenth-century German university context will be given in ch. 5.

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theology’s critics by seeking to legitimize theology within the totality of the Wissenschaften, making the case that theology both qualiWed as a Wissenschaft and possessed a certain internal unity and purpose that justiWed having its own university faculty. In other words, academic theology should not simply be subsumed under history and philology, as some university reformers, such as Fichte, had suggested. Finally, the signiWcance of Schleiermacher’s Kurze Darstellung is attested to by its inXuence. Although it never became a popularly used textbook itself,253 it left a profound mark on the eVorts of others, notably those of Karl Rudolf Hagenbach (1801–74), who produced the most popular Protestant theological encyclopedia in the nineteenth century. It also aVected Catholic thought, especially its more liberal branches. In particular, the Catholic theologian Johann Sebastian Drey (1777–1853), the father of the so-called ‘Catholic Tu¨bingen School’, was quite taken by Schleiermacher’s volume and employed its ideas in his own inXuential works.254 Subsequent theological encyclopedias and textbooks, a few Catholic but mainly Protestant, almost universally paid tribute to Schleiermacher’s slender encyclopedia, portraying it often as a turning point in modern theological education. The work itself is divided into three sections: philosophical theology, historical theology, and practical theology. As such, it is somewhat idiosyncratic, breaking with the more typical fourfold pattern of exegesis, dogmatics, history, and practical theology.255 Stylistically, the work is notoriously diYcult, written in a highly compressed, suggestive form, which in part helps account for the fact that it was rarely used in courses. Several reviewers complained of its ‘incomprenhensibility’, one even suggested that it was better suited for students completing, not beginning, their theological studies.256 253 The only scholar who appears to have used the text in his courses was Schleiermacher’s friend J. C. Gaß at Breslau, who claimed that from Schleiermacher’s work ‘a new school of theology should be established’. See letter of 16 November 1822 in W. Gaß (ed.), Fr. Schleiermacher’s Briefwechsel mit J. Chr. Gaß (Berlin, 1852), 195. 254 Hagenbach’s work will be treated in Ch. 5. On Drey and the ‘Catholic Tu¨bingen School’ (the label is sometimes contested), see Drey, Brief Introduction to the Study of Theology with Reference to the ScientiWc Standpoint and the Catholic System, trans. and with an introd. by Michael J. Himes (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994). Cf. J. T. Burtchaell, ‘Drey, Mo¨hler and the Catholic School at Tu¨bingen’, in Ninian Smart et al. (eds.), Nineteenth Century Religious Thought in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), ii. 111– 39. The Catholic Tu¨bingen School was undoubtedly one of the most important intellectual movements in nineteenth-century Catholicism, widely recognized as anticipating twentiethcentury developments, not least the Second Vatican Council. 255 Edward Farley, Theologia: The Fragmentation and Unity of Theological Education (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983), 84. 256 For the reviews and reception of Kurze Darstellung, see KGA I. vi. pp. xlvii–lxiii, lxix– lxxvii.

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Nonetheless, Kurze Darstellung stands at the threshold of modern academic theology and modern university development. Schleiermacher oVered a pregnant deWnition of theology at the outset of the work: ‘Theology is a positive science (positive Wissenschaft) . . . whose parts join into a whole only through their common relation to a particular mode of faith, a particular way of being conscious of God. Thus, the various parts of Christian theology belong together only by virtue of their relation to Christianity.’257 The term ‘positive science’ is a revealing one, which Schleiermacher had borrowed from Schelling. As we have seen, Schelling used the term in reference to the higher faculties, which found their legitimacy in the university because they fostered knowledge that addressed practical human and social needs.258 By contrast, the philosophical faculty derived its legitimacy from ‘primal knowledge’ alone, the pure idea and pursuit of Wissenschaft, which both Schelling and Schleiermacher held as an intrinsic good apart from practical considerations.259 Criticized, however, for not making clear what he meant by ‘positive science’ in the Wrst edition of his work, Schleiermacher assayed his own deWnition in the second: ‘a positive science is a gathering of scientiWc components which belong together not because they form a constituent part of the organization of the sciences, as though by some necessity arising out of the idea of science itself, but only insofar as they are necessary for carrying out a practical task’.260 In eVect, Schleiermacher conceded that theology had no academic legitimacy apart from its ‘practical’ function. Without a relation to ecclesiastical life, he elaborated, the same knowledge ‘ceases to be theological and devolves to those sciences to which it belongs according to its varied content’.261 The study of the New Testament, for example, if undertaken oblivious to the current needs and state of the church, might as well fall within the 257 KGA I. vi. 325. 258 The term, though, had antecedents before Schelling. See Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science, 248 V. 259 Schleiermacher had written a critical review Schelling’s Vorlesungen u¨ber die Methode des akademischen Studiums for the Jenaische Literaturzeitung in 1804. Nonetheless, his understanding of the term ‘positive science’ and the role of the ‘higher faculties’ appears to be largely derivative from Schelling. Already in his work on the university of 1808 he had written: ‘The positive faculties each arose from the need to establish an indispensable praxis securely on theory and the tradition of knowledge.’ Schleiermacher, ‘Gelegentliche Gedanken’, in Anrich (ed.), Die Idee der deutschen Universita¨t, 282. On Schleiermacher’s debt to Schelling, see Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science, 249. 260 KGA I. vi. 325–6 (emphasis added). Twesten summed up Schleiermacher’s understanding of university theology as follows: ‘Die Theologie geho¨rt nach Schleiermacher zu denjenigen Wissenschaften, deren Einheit und Gliederung in der Beziehung auf einen gewissen Beruf gegru¨ndet ist; sie ist ihm der InbegriV von Kenntnissen, welche den Theologen zu einer fruchtbaren Tha¨tigkeit im Dienste der Kirche befa¨higen sollen.’ August Twesten, Zur Errinnerung an Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (Berlin, 1869), 25–6. 261 KGA I. vi. 328.

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purview of secular history, philology, ethics, linguistics, or something else. Thus theology qua university science was intimately tied to the church or, more speciWcally, to church leadership (Kirchenleitung). Such a concession prompted Schleiermacher to attribute special signiWcance to practical theology, the third in his tripartite scheme. In the 1811 edition he referred to practical theology as the ‘crown’ of theological study.262 A true student of theology should recognize that everything he accomplished during his university years, all the knowledge acquired, should be animated by a certain ‘ecclesial interest’, which regarded the ediWcation and mission of the church as its rightful end. If this ‘ecclesial interest’ was somehow lost or never present in the Wrst place, one still might be considered a Wissenschaftler in religious matters, but no longer a theologian in the proper sense of the word. In the Wnal analysis, Schleiermacher deWned theology in relation to the purpose of the knowledge, not the content; if theology lost sight of this purpose, its various disciplines, again, might as well be taken up within the philosophical faculty, as Fichte and others had intimated. However, while a Wissenschaftler engaged in traditionally theological subjects might not classify as an actual theologian, according to Schleiermacher, a theologian must, at some level, be a Wissenschaftler, especially if he sought an academic vocation. A professor of theology, he had written in Gelegentliche Gedanken, did not deserve to be part of the university unless he was capable of high-level scientiWc distinction.263 Thus, the true theologian should gracefully combine ecclesial and scientiWc interests; the individual who could achieve such a balance deserved the highest praise and emulation by others. As Schleiermacher expressed it, ‘If one should imagine both a religious interest and a scientiWc spirit united in the highest degree and with the Wnest balance for the purpose of theoretical and practical activity alike, that would the idea of a ‘‘prince of the church’’ ’ (Kirchenfu¨rsten).264 But what exactly did Schleiermacher have in mind by the graceful combination of the ecclesial and the scientiWc? At Wrst glance, it would appear that by privileging practical theology, Schleiermacher desired a predominantly clerical or church-directed theology. In fact, some of the Wrst reviewers of his work faulted Schleiermacher for precisely this reason, for appearing too reactionary, threatening the development of free science and ‘clericalizing’ theology.265 This is of course a misjudgement, but one that reveals the opacity often rendered by Schleiermacher in his eVorts to build bridges between 262 ‘Die praktische Theologie ist die Krone des theologischen Studiums.’ KGA I. vi. 253. 263 Schleiermacher, ‘Gelegentliche Gedanken’, in Anrich (ed.), Die Idee der deutschen Universita¨t, 257 V. 264 KGA I. vi. 328. 265 Noted ibid. p. lvi.

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traditional Christianity and modern culture. Further reXection suggests that the relationship between the scientiWc and the ecclesial was in fact no simple matter. What does appear evident, however, is that Schleiermacher invested science with a predominantly active role and the church with a passive one: the church was presented as the needy recipient of scientiWc tutelage, whereas science appears as autonomous and self-justifying. Further insight into this matter is found in the other two sections of the work, the more explicitly scientiWc sections on philosophical and historical theology. In these, Schleiermacher introduced concepts and patterns of thinking of immense importance, for theological education in particular and liberal Protestant thought in general.266 According to Schleiermacher, deWning the ‘distinctive nature of Christianity’ constituted the special task of philosophical theology. To do this properly, the theologian must adopt a ‘critical’ attitude, one that somehow stood ‘above Christianity’ but, paradoxically, remained rooted ‘in the general concept of [a] religious community of fellowship of faith’.267 The critical theologian should survey the vast array of religious communities and compare them to the ‘idea’ of Christianity, which Schleiermacher in quasi-Platonic fashion believed apprehensible to the tutored Christian mind even if no pure examples existed in reality. (This is not unlike Adolf von Harnack’s famous eVort to deWne the ‘essence’ (Wesen) of Christianity in the early twentieth century.)268 The goal of the theologian then, through critical inquiry and reXection, was to identify ‘diseased’ forms of Christianity while steering the church toward greater approximation of the pure idea of Christianity. Schleiermacher indicated that this conception of philosophical theology stood in a close proximity to historical theology, which he labelled the ‘true body of theology’.269 In fact, philosophical theology could accomplish its own aim only after obtaining a mature ‘historical perspective on Christianity’. Otherwise, the tasks of practical theology and church leadership were also impossible.270 Historical theology, I would then submit, provides the linchpin to the entire text and helps clarify Schleiermacher’s understanding of the relationship between scientiWc understanding and ecclesial practice.271 Indeed, 266 Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, i. 69 V. 267 In the 1811 edition he speaks simply of the ‘idea of religion.’ KGA I. vi. 256. 268 Adolf von Harnack, Das Wesen des Christentums (Gu¨tersloh: Gu¨tersloher Verlagshaus, 1999). 269 KGA I. vi. 336. 270 Ibid. 342–52. 271 In the 1811 edition Schleiermacher wrote that ‘historical theology is the actual body of the whole of theological study and in its own way contains within it both other parts,’ i.e. philosophical and practical theology. ibid. 254.

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Schleiermacher elevated the historical dimension of theology to a level of importance previously unknown in the history of theological education. Historical knowledge was ‘Wrst and foremost, the indispensable condition of all intelligent eVort towards the further cultivation of Christianity’. Schleiermacher’s placed under historical theology not only church history, but Old and New Testament exegesis, hermeneutics, linguistic study, and even church statistics. SigniWcantly and quite radically, he also identiWed dogmatics as a component of historical theology. Dogma was no longer a timeless phenomenon expressed in historical creeds and based on the Bible and revelation, but, for the critical theologian, a developing, dialectical enterprise that admitted science as major arbiter of its essence: ‘the development of doctrine (Entwicklung der Lehre) is determined by the entire state of science and especially by prevailing philosophical views’.272 It was this aspect of Schleiermacher’s course on theological encyclopedia that had disturbed but nonetheless made sense to the young August Twesten, Schleiermacher’s future successor at Berlin. ‘In his encyclopedia’, Twesten wrote in his diary for 21 January 1811, Schleiermacher places dogmatics under the historical sciences and comprehends it under . . . the knowledge of the present doctrinal condition of Christianity. At Wrst this seems strange, but it’s right, because suppose someone wanted to stick solely with the Bible and build a [theological] system from it, but wouldn’t this system also be a product of his current education, and thus the time in which he lived?273

Or, as Karl Barth—commenting on the section on historical theology in the Kurze Darstellung—later expressed it: ‘theological historicism is [here] . . . established Wrmly and solidly and deWnitively’.274 In large measure then Schleiermacher associated scientiWc with historical understanding, and intimated that valid doctrinal development must take modern historical consciousness into consideration. He no longer regarded dogma as an absolute phenomenon, which emphasized timeless verities, but as a dialectical one, which emphasized process and development—‘the dialectical element in doctrine’ as he phrased it.275 For this reason, future religious leaders must possess an extensive and wissenschaftlich historical awareness. ‘[T]he historical knowledge of the present moment of history stands in direct relation to church leadership, since it is that out of which 272 Schleiermacher, ‘Gelegentliche Gedanken’, in Anrich (ed.), Die Idee der deutschen Universita¨t, 385 f. 273 Heinrici, D. August Twesten nach Tagebu¨chern und Briefen, 118. 274 Karl Barth, The Theology of Schleiermacher: Lectures at Go¨ttingen, Winter Semester 1923/ 24, ed. Dietrich Ritschl, trans. GeoVrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), 152. 275 KGA I. vi. 402.

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future movements are to be derived.’276 Without history, the student of theology ‘will not be able to exercise his own discretion in church leadership’.277 In sum, an impetus toward greater historical consciousness and criticism, as an expression of scientiWc awareness generally, constitutes a major legacy of Kurze Darstellung for Protestant theological education. The theological faculty, to be sure, should maintain an orientation towards the church; this in fact secured its legitimacy as a positive science and a university enterprise. Yet Schleiermacher’s conception of ‘the church’ was rather general, insuYciently attentive perhaps to the actual state church existing in Prussia at this time. And thus by connecting theology to the church, Pannenberg has noted, ‘Schleiermacher forgot that it was not the church that gave theology a place in the university. Theology would continue as a university faculty only if . . . the state also had reasons for wanting to keep it there. This would have meant a connection between church and state which Schleiermacher [otherwise] opposed.’278 Moreover, the primary purpose of theology’s ecclesial orientation was to ensure that the church maintained a ‘vital linkage’ to historical understanding and scientiWc progress, without which it risked drifting into obscurantism, irrelevance, and confessional rigidity. Whether or not the church possessed any indigenous intellectual resources relevant to assessing the claims and purview of modern Wissenschaft was not a question that Schleiermacher extensively took up. That he did not should tell us something both about Schleiermacher’s general historical situation and his particular preoccupations, which had great consequence for the modern theological enterprise as the nineteenth century progressed. ‘His inXuence did not decrease, it increased as time went on, and his views established themselves more and more.’279 If one then understands Schleiermacher’s Kurze Darstellung as a pedagogical manifesto of sorts to transform and reanimate Protestantism with the needed assistance of modern scientiWc and historical consciousness, Schleiermacher’s colleagues, despite their diVerences and conXicts, would largely stand in agreement with his general aims. At least they too would hold that Christian theology stood in need of re-envisioning as a response to the cultural conditions of modernity. To this end, all members of Berlin’s 276 KGA I. vi. 357. 277 Ibid. 364. For a thoughtful analysis of Schleiermacher’s views on history and doctrinal development, see John E. Thiel, ‘Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy in Schleiermacher’s Theological Encyclopedia: Doctrinal Development and Theological Creativity’, HJ 25 (1984): 142–57. 278 Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science, 251. 279 Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 425.

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theological faculty laboured with great intensity and productivity during the early years of the new university. Besides his Kurze Darstellung, Schleiermacher taught and published in hermeneutics, New Testament studies, dogmatics, Christian ethics, practical theology, and homiletics—all this in addition to teaching philosophical courses, preaching at Berlin’s Trinity Church, and serving as a member and secretary of Berlin’s Academy of Science. In 1821 he capped oV a decade of labour by publishing Der christliche Glaube, which ever since has assured him a place in the pantheon of modern Christian thought. Meanwhile, de Wette undertook Old and New Testaments studies, Christian ethics, dogmatics, hermeneutics, Jewish biblical history, and biblical archaeology. Marheineke taught church history, the history of dogma, homiletics, practical theology and liturgy, theological encyclopedia, and symbolics; whereas Neander covered church history, the history of dogma, and patristics, among other subjects.280 As records indicate, these four theologians could boast over 1,220 students enrolled in their courses between 1810 and 1820—roughly 15 per cent of all matriculated students.281 Included among the faculty’s early and midnineteenth-century students were some of the leading lights (and leading troublemakers) of future German theology, including August Twesten, Friedrich Lu¨cke, Wilhelm Vatke, Philip SchaV, Karl Rudolph Hagenbach, Alois Emmanuel Biedermann, Richard Rothe, David Friedrich Strauss, and Bruno Bauer, among others. The attraction of Berlin for Germany’s top theological students was borne out in Karl Schwarz’s Zur Geschichte der neuesten Theologie (1869). ‘In the 1820s and 1830s,’ Schwarz wrote, streamed the elite of the young theologians [to Berlin] in order to receive . . . the consecration of science (Weihe der Wissenschaft), a stimulus for one’s whole life. And not just those who wanted to take their Wnal theological examination . . . but older men in large numbers, those already ordained in the ministry, curates from Baden, from Switzerland, from Wu¨rttemberg, tutors and those with doctorates from Tu¨bingen; men who had laboured in their academic pursuits with zeal and distinction, full of respect before the names of Schleiermacher, Neander, Hegel, Marheineke, made their pilgrimage to Berlin in order to return to their native land with a richer knowledge. . . . It was, at that time, the golden age of our theology.282

280 On the course listings, see ‘Index lectionum quae auspiciis Regis Augustissimi Friderici Guilelmi in Universitate Litteraria Berolinia constituta 1810–1832’, NStUB, H. lit. part. III 38/1. 281 The percentage of students in the theological faculty rose during the Vorma¨rz period to a high of 31.8% in the early 1830s before beginning a steady decline throughout the rest of the century. On student matriculation in the theological faculty, see Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, v. 517. 282 Karl Schwarz, Zur Geschichte der neuesten Theologie, 4th edn. (Leipzig, 1869), 56.

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In addition to heavy teaching assignments, church duties, and administrative obligations,283 Berlin’s theologians produced a steady stream of signiWcant scholarship. Leaving Schleiermacher’s indefatigable industry aside, de Wette published Beytrag u¨ber die Psalmen (1811), Commentatio Morte Jesu Christi expiatoria (1813), Lehrbuch der christliche Dogmatik (1813), Die neue ¨ ber Religion und TheoKirche oder Verstand und Glaube im Bunde (1815), U logie (1815), and Lehrbuch der historisch-kritischen Einleitung in die Bibel (1817). Marheineke produced Grundlegung der Homiletik (1811), Christliche Symbolik (1813), and his acclaimed Geschichte der deutschen Reformation (1816). Neander too authored several important works, including Bernhard von Clairvaux (1813) and Die Gnosis (1818); he also broke ground with his magisterial multivolume Allgemeine Geschichte der christlichen Religion, the Wrst volume of which appeared in 1825. Despite manifold diVerences, which the content of the above works would amply bear out, important collaborative work regularly took place among the faculty. The theological seminar, established in 1812, was one example; it became a seedbed for critical theological scholarship throughout the rest of the century, regularly serving as a model for similar institutions at other universities. Another example was a theological journal, the Theologische Zeitschrift, founded in 1819 by Schleiermacher, de Wette, and the young Privatdozent, Friedrich Lu¨cke. Its inaugural volume included a charge from the founders that Wttingly sums up the ethos of the new faculty: ‘We insist only on seriousness, profundity, clarity, and liveliness—in a word Wissenschaftlichkeit; and we promise to take great pains to accomplish the highest possible impartiality and versatility, although each [scholar] in his own work will remain tenaciously faithful to his own presuppositions and convictions.’ Eschewing confessional rigidity, the journal sought to unite young, learned theologians around ‘the higher purposes of Wissenschaft ’.284 Such lofty sentiments notwithstanding, it would be remiss to portray the activity of Berlin’s initial theological faculty in exclusively positive terms. Early on, troubling signs about the practical workability of theology’s new pact with ‘Wissenschaftlichkeit’ were evident. In his 1813 Commentatio morte Jesu Christi expiatoria, for example, de Wette appeared to deny the traditional doctrine of the Atonement on the basis of historical-critical evidence. This 283 Both Schleiermacher and Marheineke were honoured by election to serve as rector of the university: Schleiermacher in 1815–16, Marheineke in 1817–18 and again in 1831–2. See Herneck and Tyzko (eds.), Die Rektoren der Humboldt-Universita¨t zu Berlin, 18, 22. 284 Theologische Zeitschrift 1 (1819): 1, NStUBG 8 TH Misc. 216/34. While this journal was short-lived (1819–22), its spirit lived on in the journal Theologische Studien und Kritiken, cofounded by Lu¨cke at Bonn in 1828; this became one of the most important theological journals of the century. See Christophersen, Friedrich Lu¨cke, i. 138–46, 179–91.

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book raised a storm of protest from Prussia’s more conservative political and religious elites, disquieted by the faith-threatening implications of modern critical inquiry. Eventually, the book would play a role in de Wette’s dismissal from Berlin in 1819, a victim of the new conservative Restoration politics.285 What is more, in part because of de Wette’s association with the Theologsiche Zeitschrift, the journal never realized its goals and ceased publication in 1822. Although generally sanguine about the future relationship of science and theology, Schleiermacher too gave voice to subtle signs of warning. ‘In the study of church history, the ecclesial and scientiWc interest must not be allowed to fall into contradiction with each other (in Widerspru¨ch mit einander gerathen),’ he wrote in his Kurze Darstellung, admitting the latent potentiality for just such a development.286 In the section on practical theology, this fear was even more apparent: ‘Since the academic instructor, in dealing with youth who are especially motivated by religious interest, has to bring . . . the scientiWc spirit to their awareness for the Wrst time, the method is thus to be speciWed by which this spirit may be quickened in them without weakening their religious interest.’ Then Schleiermacher added: ‘How little we are as yet in possession of such a method may be learned from experience, of a sort which happens only too often’—presumably the quickening of the scientiWc spirit at the expense of the religious.287 Indeed, deWning the relationship of the new spirit of Wissenschaft to theology became one of the most worrisome, controversial, celebrated, and extensively discussed issues of the times. Throughout Germany, in university addresses, lectures, sermons, and popular literature, debates and discussions on the topic took place. Addresses, such as Hagenbach’s ‘Ueber den BegriV and die Bedeutung der Wissenschaftlichkeit im Gebiete der Theologie’ (1830), proliferated from lecturn and pulpit alike. In 1828 the conservative Evangelische Kirchenzeitung charged that the new ‘Wissenschafts-Enthusiasmus in Deutschland’ had become a ‘Surrogat fu¨r Religion’.288 The fears of theological conservatives seemed realized in 1835 when David Friedrich Strauss, a devotee of Hegel and one of Schleiermacher’s last pupils at Berlin, sought to expose the ‘mythic’ nature of Christianity in his Das Leben Jesu, basing his claims on a putatively ‘presuppositionless’ Wissenschaft. As is well known, this book ignited heated controversy and debate, which extended far beyond Germany’s borders and outside the boundaries of academic theology. 285 Bigler, The Politics of German Protestantism, 44–5. I shall return to the topic of the post1819 conservative milieu and the University of Berlin in chs. 4 and 5. 286 KGA I. vi. 392. 287 Ibid. 443. 288 EKZ 62 (27 August 1828): 545 V. This journal was edited by E. W. Hengstenberg, a proponent of confessional orthodoxy, who was hired to replace de Wette at Berlin.

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To some, the book betokened the end of Christianity as a viable system of belief. To others, it conWrmed the apostate spirit lurking in the heart of modern scientiWc consciousness.289 However, more than science presented a dilemma for theology in the early nineteenth century: the expanded power and tutelary reach of the state posed another. The centralizing government directions of the Reform Era after 1806, the statist measures of the reactionary political milieu after 1815–19, and the state-orchestrated Prussian Church Union of 1817—albeit very diVerent historical phenomena—all nonetheless had the eVect of increasing the power of the state over church, education, and society alike. As a result, German academic theology became inextricably and problematically yoked to what one clever observer called the ‘the cold step-motherly arm of the nominally Christian state’.290 To be sure, the state’s reach into religious matters had characterized German Protestant political life since the Reformation. However, historical forces in the early nineteenth century, as I shall elaborate in ch. 4, contributed signiWcant new dimensions to this venerable, questionable arrangement. 289 Horton Harris, David Friedrich Strauss and his Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 41 V. 290 Philip SchaV, Germany; its Universities, Theology, and Religion (Edinburgh, 1857), 70.

4 An Erastian Modernity? Church, State, and Education in Early Nineteenth-Century Prussia If the state recognizes the idea of guiding humanity to its highest joy as its leading principle, then it will view the promotion of religiosity as the highest goal and from [this] lofty standpoint . . . esteem the true worth of religion. Karl von Altenstein ‘Riga Memorandum’ (1807) In Germany we have the peculiar condition that the servants of the church receive their education in state institutions from state oYcials. Friedrich Paulsen, Die deutschen Universita¨ten und das Universita¨tsstudium (1902)

1 . IN T RO DU C TI O N In a short guide for theology students published in 1905, the theologian Heinrich Bassermann commented on the ‘double character’ of Germany’s theological faculties. On the one hand, they ‘consisted of a churchly character’, responsible for supplying society with future clergymen. On the other hand ‘they are, as a part of the state university, purely state institutions (reine Staatsanstalten); the state hires and pays their professors’.1 Broaching this same reality, Ernst Troeltsch remarked in 1907 that ‘the justiWcation of theology within [state] universities has everything to do with the relationship between church and state’. Calling attention to developments in the United States and France, Troeltsch noted the increasingly anomalous case of the German system, which allowed for avowedly church-related theological faculties in state-funded institutions of higher learning. He called this a ‘special 1 Heinrich Bassermann, Wie studiert man evangelische Theologie? (Stuttgart, 1905), 27–8.

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German tradition’ which traced its modern roots to the early nineteenth century.2 Following Troeltsch’s lead, I focus attention in what follows on the early nineteenth century, in particular on the Prussian Reform Era and the early Vorma¨rz period, which, as I have previously indicated, witnessed the emergence of a new conception of the state as a tutelary agent in religious and cultural matters (i.e. Erziehungsstaat or Kulturstaat).3 As the logical extension of the state’s transformation, church–state relations underwent many changes. The epochal events after 1806, Troeltsch remarked, ‘necessitated a new legal construction of the church and a new formula for church–state relations’.4 I characterize these developments here as an Erastian modernity because of the extensive powers the state acquired over religious and cultural matters. This new situation had implications for ecclesiastical life and theological faculties, not to mention for the general relationship between religion and public life. To underscore the signiWcance of these developments, it is helpful to relate the church–state conWgurations of the post-1806 period to those of earlier eras, to the eighteenth century in particular. My argument is best clariWed by reference to a classic work, Erich Foerster’s Die Entstehung der preußischen Landeskirche unter der Regierung Ko¨nig Friedrich Wilhelms des Dritten (1905). Foerster contended that the creation of a state church (Staatskirchentum) by Prussian ministers in the early nineteenth century represented ‘an overcoming of the Enlightenment idea of the state’ and a return to an earlier ‘Reformation-Lutheran’ pattern.5 Other scholars too have viewed the establishment of Prussia’s Protestant state church in the early nineteenth century either as a relapse to less enlightened times or else as the culmination of the ecclesiastical policies of eighteenth-century absolutism, which sought to harness religion for the state’s utilitarian purposes.6 In both cases, continuity with the past is 2 Ernst Troeltsch, Die Trennung von Staat und Kirche, der staatliche Religionsunterricht und die theologischen Fakulta¨ten (Tu¨bingen, 1907), 4, 41 f. 3 While I concentrate primarily on Prussia in what follows, many of my points—because of parallel developments elsewhere and because of Prussia’s inXuence—could be made of other German states as well. Admittedly though, when dealing with the early nineteenth century, one must be careful about applying generalizations about Prussia to other German states. See Matthew Levinger, Enlightened Nationalism: The Transformation of Prussian Political Culture, 1806–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 41–70. 4 Troeltsch, Die Trennung von Staat und Kirche, 41. 5 Erich Foerster, Die Entstehung der preußischen Landeskirche unter der Regierung Ko¨nig Friedrich Wilhelms des Dritten (Tu¨bingen, 1905), i. 126. Foerster himself was a strong apologist of the Prussian territorial church. 6 Besides Foerster, see Nicholas Hope, German and Scandinavian Protestantism, 1700–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 336 V.; Otto Hintze, ‘Die Epochen des evangelischen Kirchenregiments in Preußen’, HZ 97 (1906): 67–118; and Rudolf von Thadden, Prussia: The History of a Lost State, trans. Angi Rutter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 86–117.

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emphasized, whether in an immediate sense or else as a reversion to previous patterns. However, by interpreting the ecclesiastical aspect of the reform period as a matter of continuity (or atavism), one obscures the novelty, the striking modernity, of the changes that took place after 1806, minimizing crucial diVerences that distinguish the reconstruction of the Prussian territorial church (Landeskirche) in the early nineteenth century from that of preceding eras. Above all, the conception of the state held by the leading Prussian reformers—Stein, Hardenburg, Altenstein, Ludwig Nicolovius, Johann Wilhelm Su¨vern, and Alexander von Dohna, among others—diVered markedly from that of their early modern and absolutist forebears. It was derived in part from the revolutionary-Bonapartist example, but it also grew from the native soil of German idealist philosophy, whose key exponents and delineators, though often deeply religious, depreciated the moral and pedagogic value of the church (as a concrete, historical institution) in favour of that of the state, upon which they (most prominently Fichte and Hegel) conferred the grand purpose of morally and intellectually enlightening Prussia’s citizens—and, in turn, all modern peoples.7 This, at root, constituted the Kulturstaat ideal. Giving practical expression to currents of German idealism, Prussian ministers eagerly sought to deploy the powers of the state to rejuvenate the German Volk and modernize Prussia after the humiliating loss of 1806. Mostly pious, Protestant men, they believed that ‘religiosity’, as it was often generally expressed, should play a vital role in this process, in what Fichte had called ‘national education’. But in subordinating the Protestant ecclesiastical polity to Prussia’s nationalist raison d’e´tat and bureaucratic apparatus, they hampered the church capacity to develop independent moral and political judgment—judgment apart from ‘the things that are Caesar’s’.8 The interests of the City of God and the City of Man were conXated. As Philipp Konrad Marheineke later expressed it: ‘the church is the truth of the state and the state is the reality of the church’.9 While much of the rhetoric that allowed for this arrangement seemingly harked back to early modern ecclesiastical territorialism and the absolutist regimes of the eighteenth century, the progressive, culture-minded state, with its tight grip on the churches, that arose after 1806 bespeaks, more tellingly, the modern inXuence of German idealism and the 7 Hajo Holborn, ‘German Idealism in the Light of Social History’, in Germany and Europe: Historical Essays by Hajo Holborn (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1971), 1–32. 8 Jacques Maritain, The Things that are not Caesar’s, trans. J. F. Scanlan (New York, 1931). 9 ‘Die Kirche ist die Wahrheit des Staats, der Staat ist die Wirklichkeit der Kirche.’ See Marheineke, Einleitungen in die o¨Ventlichen Vorlesungen u¨ber die Bedeutung der hegelschen Philosophie in der christliche Theologie (Berlin, 1842), 16.

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powerful example of Bonapartist statecraft: an impetus for cultural renewal connected to the reality of state centralization. Because of their ‘double character’ (state institutions serving the church), theological faculties were, willy-nilly, caught up in these epochal changes. Like churches, theological faculties too came under the magniWed purview of the state. The government organ aVecting them most directly was the Prussian Ministry of Culture (Kultusministerium), a section of the Ministry of the Interior after 1808 before becoming a self-standing ministry in 1817. Initially under the leadership of Wilhelm von Humboldt and Ludwig Nicolovius, this ministry not only worked to revise church–state relations but helped foster a wissenschaftlich ethos in universities and theological faculties. Under the ministerial leadership of Karl von Altenstein and Johannes Schulze after 1817, the modernizing trends of the reform era continued during the Vorma¨rz period, even if this era is better known for its reactionary tendencies. To understand Prussia’s ‘Erastian modernity’, developments in church– state relations before and after the pivotal year of 1806 must be examined more closely. We must also attend to the establishment of the Kultusministerium and consider how, during the reform period and early Vorma¨rz, this ministry worked to curtail confessionalism and particularism, expand the powers of the state over ecclesiastical and educational institutions, and encourage, in a period of reaction, a more scientiWc, less ecclesial theology. All these developments left a powerful legacy in German academic theology, which fostered a growing understanding of the university as a state-protected sanctuary, where theology could commingle with the spirit of modern Wissenschaft at a cool distance from confessional strictures and ecclesiastical structures.10 Yet the emergent symbiosis of Wissenschaft and Staat of the early nineteenth century also contributed to a dilemma, more acutely perceived and openly discussed in the mid- and late nineteenth century: were the churches and academic theology on the same track or had they begun to pursue interests incommensurate, even hostile, to one another?

2 . C H U RC H A N D S TAT E B E F O R E 1 8 0 6 The forms of church government that developed in Protestant, German lands in the wake of the Reformation reXected the tensions and uncertainties 10 See Hermann Mulert, Evangelische Kirchen und theologischen Fakulta¨ten (Tu¨bingen, 1930), and Friedrich Paulsen, The German Universities and University Study, trans. Frank Thilly and William W. Elwang (New York, 1906), 137 V.

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inherent in this period of crisis and transition. Luther and his allies had questioned the church–state union of the Middle Ages and had sought to establish stricter boundaries between temporal and spiritual authority. The church should be an exclusively spiritual community (ecclesia spiritualis), as the Augsburg Confession expressed it, unencumbered by the things of this world.11 However, without the Roman ecclesiastical hierarchy, Protestant princes began, often in an ad hoc fashion, to exercise the temporal power and administrative authority formerly wielded by representatives of the mother church. Encouraged by Luther, Prince Johann of Saxony was the Wrst to improvise a new ecclesiastical polity in 1527. He came to assume the title of summus episcopus (highest bishop), appointed a consistory to supervise church aVairs, and nominated various superintendents to administer the dioceses recently shorn of bishops. With numerous regional variations, this model soon caught on. The Mark Brandenburg embraced the Reformation in the 1530s; the Elector of Brandenburg (later king of Prussia) held the title summus episcopus until the November Revolution of 1918.12 The consequential principle of cuius regio, eius religio, set down in the Peace of Augsburg (1555) and in the Peace of Westphalia (1648), more or less upheld the measures that Protestant princes had adopted. The secular powers were allowed to determine the confession of their respective states and regularly held the oYce of supreme ecclesiastical prelate. This situation aVected all church communities, not to mention institutions of education, which were regularly regarded as appendages of the territorial church. Such an arrangement, according to numerous commentators, is of great signiWcance for understanding the development of church–state relations in Germanspeaking Europe, in particular for understanding the temporal supremacy of the state over the church. But a word of caution is in order. For what looks like extensive statedomination, or Erastianism, during the post-Reformation period is, upon closer inspection, considerably less so. From the mid-sixteenth to the eighteenth century, the power that princes actually exercised over ecclesiastical aVairs was mitigated by many particularist forces in a feudal ‘society of 11 The Augsburg Confession in article VII reads: ‘The Church is the congregation of saints, in which the Gospel is rightly taught and the sacraments are rightly administered.’ Quoted in Martin Heckel, ‘Zur Entwicklung des deutschen Staatskirchenrechts von der Reformation bis zur Schwelle der Weimarer Verfassung,’ ZEK 12 (1966): 3–4. 12 Andrew L. Drummond, ‘Church and State in Protestant Germany before 1918’, CH 13 (1944): 211. On consistories, see Rudolf Smend, ‘Die Konsistorien in Geschichte und heutiger Bewertung’, ZEK 10 (1963–4): 134–43. On superintendents, see Oskar Foellner, Geschichte des Amtes der Generalsuperintendenten in den altpreussischen Provinzen (Gu¨tersloh, 1931). The term ‘superintendent’ was taken over from the later scholastics who had used it as a translation of episcopus.

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estates’ (Sta¨ndegesellschaft). Unlike the situation after 1806, states possessed neither the intellectual justiWcation nor the centralizing capacities to exercise full control over the churches. One should thus not attribute the state’s ascendency over the church in Germany solely to the post-Reformation settlement and its long-term consequences; for in a number of respects such a generalization is not supportable.13 First, quite often the prince qua summus episcopus did not meddle in matters of faith and doctrine, which were left for churchmen with theological competence to determine; the prince restricted himself to the external features of church government (the so-called jus circa sacra in legal parlance) as opposed to more delicate internal features (jus in sacra). Second, the consistories set up in the various German La¨nder regularly comprised both lay and ecclesiastical persons. They remained semi-state agencies, to be sure, dependent on the government and not on the churches, but since important churchmen were always appointed to consistories, it cannot be assumed that the church was entirely under the thumb of the government. ‘Very often’, notes Ernst Helmreich, ‘the consistories protected the rights of the church against the prince.’14 Furthermore, in addition to consistories, synods and presbyteries in Calvinist areas gave Reformed communities a signiWcant degree of autonomy and self-administration.15 Third, an important practice of the medieval church continued, in both the Protestant and Catholic churches after the Reformation, that tended to check the power of governments. Beginning in the early Middle Ages, wealthy aristocrats who assisted in building a church or who had donated it lands were recognized to have certain patronage rights (Patronatsrechte) over that church. These often included the right to name pastors, be mentioned honoriWcally in prayers, and receive choice pews and cemetery plots for family members. These rights entailed duties, which usually included Wnancial support for pastors and the responsibility to maintain church buildings and properties. Patrons occupied an important intermediary position of power between the state and individual churches.16 As the state assumed more power 13 The literature on the eVects of the Reformation on German political attitudes and behaviour is quite large. On the view that Lutheranism promoted political quietism and docility, see Fritz Fischer, ‘Der deutsche Protestantismus und die Politik im 19.Jahrhundert’, HZ 171 (1951): 473–518. For a contrary view, see Peter Blickle, Obedient Germans? A Rebuttal: A New View of German History, trans. Thomas A. Brady (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997). 14 Ernst Helmreich, The German Churches under Hitler: Background, Struggle, and Epilogue (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979), 18. 15 On the spread of Calvinism within the Holy Roman Empire, see Hajo Holborn, A History of Modern Germany: The Reformation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), i. 187 V., 258 V. 16 This is, of course, not to say that patrons were never intrusive and authoritarian in their own right. See ‘Patronat’ in RGG v. 156–9.

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from the sixteenth century on, it usually permitted traditional patronage rights to remain intact, for they relieved the state (and congregations) of onerous Wnancial burdens. In fact, princes were often more concerned with getting patrons to live up to their responsibilities than in having the state assume them.17 Patronage rights continued apace in Prussia until the early nineteenth century, at which time they were considerably restricted and in some cases eliminated. Concurrently, many church properties were secularized by the state, triggering a massive reorganization of ecclesiastical assets.18 Fourth, the sheer political complexity and fragmentation of central Europe in the early modern period makes it diYcult to generalize about church–state relations, and thus about the powers exercised by the state over the church. Naturally, some princes acted heavy-handedly in their relations with the church, whether for political or pious reasons. But many were more relaxed, allowing churchmen and consistories considerable autonomy so long as the social peace was kept. In the sixteenth century alone, no less than 172 separate ecclesiastical constitutions came into existence.19 In addition to a host of imperial cities, the Holy Roman Empire comprised some 300 states— Catholic, Protestant, and Reformed—before its abolition in 1806 and the subsequent reduction of German states to thirty-nine in 1815. This situation of Kleinstaaterei, extreme political fragmentation, and overlapping jurisdiction between individual states and empire, placed practical limitations on the designs of princes, whether in the ecclesiastical sphere or in other social domains.20 Finally, the workings of the Holy Roman Empire itself tended to provide both Protestant and Catholic communities with a ‘multilateral’ voice that reigned in the powers of individual states. When Lutheranism received oYcial recognition at the Peace of Augsburg, the problem of building Protestantism into the constitutional structure of the Empire became acute, and gradually thereafter Protestants became a tacitly recognized body at Reichstag meetings. This corpus evangelicorum, as it came to be known, often held separate deliberations to discuss issues of particular concern to Protestant areas. At Wrst resistant to this Protestant innovation, Catholic estates later formed their own corpus catholicorum. The Peace of Westphalia gave legitimacy to the two bodies, for in speciWc terms article 52 stated that when religious matters were under discussion they should not be decided by majority vote but by ‘friendly reconciliation’ between the two confessional bodies.21 By the early eighteenth 17 18 19 20 21

Helmreich, German Churches, 20. Foerster, Die Entstehung der preussischen Landeskirche, i. 52, 193. See A. L. Richter, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen des 16.Jahrhunderts (Weimar, 1846). James J. Sheehan, German History, 1770–1866 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 14 V. F. A. Six (ed.), Die westfa¨lische Frieden von 1648 (Berlin, 1942), 60.

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century the corpora had become Wxtures of the Empire. The disappearance of the Empire in 1806 and with it these bodies left Protestant churches in Germany with no united voice that transcended national boundaries. Such a voice did not exist in Germany until the formation of the German Evangelical Church Conference (Deutsche evangelische Kirchenkonferenz) in 1852.22 Thus, for the better part of the nineteenth century, individual Protestant churches (Landeskirchen) were isolated and at the mercy of their respective states’ modernizing actions. It was during this time that many states, Prussia arguably foremost, pursued aggressive policies of centralization, the secularization of church properties, and Erastianism in ecclesiastical aVairs generally. Institutions such as church consistories and universities, hitherto in possession of at least a modicum of corporative autonomy, found themselves at this time caught up in the identity struggle of the modern nation-state. As is well known, Brandenburg-Prussia evolved from a modest-sized duchy in the Empire to a European ‘great power’ in the course of the eighteenth century, due in large measure to the successful military exploits of Friedrich the Great, the ‘enlightened despot’ par excellence, who built on the achievements of his predecessors, Friedrich I and Friedrich Wilhelm I. During Friedrich the Great’s reign, Prussia continued a tradition of religious openness that earlier had found expression in allowing asylum to exiled Huguenots from France. An admirer of philosophes such as Voltaire and D’Alembert, ‘the Wrst servant of the state’ oVered complete freedom to sects barely tolerated elsehwere—Mennonites, Moravians, and Socinians, among others. ‘All religions are equally good,’ Friedrich famously remarked, ‘if only the people who profess them are honest; and if Turks and heathen came and were willing to populate the land, we would build mosques and temples.’23 While this unusual tolerance was brieXy suspended under his successor, Friedrich Wilhelm II, with the repressive Wo¨llner Edict of 1788, it received legal codiWcation in the Allgemeines Landrecht (Prussian Civil Code) of 1794—a legal system that exercised tremendous inXuence in Prussia and in other German states for more than a century after its promulgation. The work of Friedrich the Great’s legal advisers, the Civil Code reXected the enlightened despot’s sympathies for the Western Enlightenment, especially his predilection for the ideal of toleration.24 ‘Every inhabitant of the state must be 22 Helmreich, German Churches, 20–1. 23 Quoted in Alexander Drummond, German Protestantism since Luther (London, 1951), 214. 24 The Civil Code was commissioned by a cabinet order of 14 April 1780 that Friedrich the Great issued to his Grosskanzler, Heinrich Casmir von Carmer (1721–1801). Carmer along with assistants—especially Carl Gottlieb Svarez (1746–98) and Ernst Ferdinand Klein (1744– 1810)—worked on the Civil Code for fourteen years before its promulgation. The Wnal version contained 19,000 paragraphs organized in two parts under a total of forty-three sections and covering some 2,500 printed pages. German legal scholars generally regard it as a major step in

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granted complete freedom of faith and conscience’ (vollkommene Glaubensund Gewissensfreyheit), it radically asserted in the section dealing with the rights and obligations of churches.25 Moreover, it made clear that ‘no one on account of their religious opinions should be called to account, disturbed, slandered, or persecuted’.26 Nonetheless, the Civil Code gave priority to the three main historic confessions of central Europe—Lutheran, Reformed, and Catholic. All three existed in Prussia because of the state’s past expansionist policies and legacy of toleration. In calling for legal parity between them, the Civil Code represents an evolution away from a confessional state of religious conformity (which had never completely been the case with Prussia) to what some have called a ‘parity state’ (Parita¨tsstaat), a system in which the three major confessions were, in principle at least, granted the same legal rights and privileges in the eyes of the government. SigniWcantly, at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, a similar legal evolution became valid for all states in the newly created German Confederation.27 For all its overtures to religious openness, the Prussian Civil Code nonetheless reXected the realities of an absolutist regime and hence the importance of homage to Caesar. Thus, while promoting general religious toleration and parity between the established confessions, the Civil Code also made clear that all ‘church societies’ were subject to state authority and that ‘faithfulness to the state’ was obligatory.28 In practical terms, this meant that all churches, their rights and privileges notwithstanding, were required to submit to the oversight and authority of Prussia’s Department of Ecclesiastical AVairs or the Geistliche Departement, the forerunner of the Kultusministerium of the nineteenth century. A symbol of absolutism in ecclesiastical matters, the Geistliche Departement had been established in 1736 and located within the Ministry of Justice. During the reign of Friedrich the Great, the Minister of Justice simultaneously served as the head of the Geistliche Departement. This was true of all late transforming Prussia from an Obrigkeitsstaat (a state based on authority) to a Rechtsstaat (a state based on law). See Klaus Epstein, The Genesis of German Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 372–86, and Hermann Conrad, ‘Das Allgemeine Landrecht von 1794 als Grundgesetz des fridizianischen Staates’, in Otto Bu¨sch and Wolfgang Neugebauer (eds.), Moderne Preußische Geschichte, 1648–1947 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1981), ii. 598–621. 25 Quoted in Holborn, A History of Modern Germany ii. 274. 26 See E. R. Huber and Wolfgang Huber (eds.), Staat und Kirche im 19. und 20.Jahrhundert: Dokumente zur Geschichte des Staatskirchenrecht (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1973), i. 3 V. 27 Huber and Huber (eds.), Staat und Kirche, i. 115. According to Article 16 of the Deutsche Bundesakte of 8 June 1815: ‘Die Verschiedenheit der christlichen Religions-Partheyen kann in den La¨ndern und Gebiethen des deutschen Bundes keinen Unterschied in dem Genusse der bu¨rgerlichen und politischen Rechte begru¨nden.’ 28 Ibid. 4.

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eighteenth-century ministers before the great transition after 1806, including Karl Abraham Freiherr von Zedlitz (1771–88), Johann Christoph von Wo¨llner (1788–98), and Julius von Massow (1798–1807).29 This ministerial oYce, and the organ of the government it represented, became, in eVect, ‘the highest ecclesiastical authority’ in Prussia, even if it patently served the interests of the state and not churches.30 It rarely failed to recognize the social usefulness of the churches and regarded them as a necessary channel for promoting decent behaviour, social welfare, and obedience to the state. For this reason, the department has been widely interpreted as an agent of absolutism that sought to reduce the church to a bureaucratic appendage of the state. This interpretation holds true in a number of respects. However, even under absolutism the church had recourse to spheres of independence unavailable after the reorganization of the state during the Napoleonic period. Such relative autonomy came from two directions. On the one hand, the Civil Code itself, as suggested, promoted certain progressive elements that tended to foster governmental indiVerence to religion, especially in doctrinal and liturgical matters, so long as religious divisions did not disturb the social peace. Foerster has rightly noted that the Civil Code was the Wrst of its kind in central Europe ‘to recognize in a large way the ecclesiastical freedom of congregations and individuals’.31 On the other hand, the persistence of local, provincial, and corporate privileges—despite the centralizing elements of absolutism—amounted to checks on state power in ecclesiastical matters. Synods among Reformed communities carried on as they had since the postReformation period. Patronage rights persisted for all confessions. Lutheran consistories also continued to exist. In fact, a Lutheran High Consistory (Oberkonsistorium) was established in 1750, comprised of high-ranking clergymen and theologians. While it functioned as a subsidiary to the Geistliche Departement in many respects, it nonetheless gave Lutheran churches in Prussia a collective voice. Moreover, it conducted much church business without direct government oversight, and its members could disagree with the state’s directives. Such a disagreement took place, for instance, after 1788 when several members of the High Consistory took issue with the Wo¨llner Edict, complaining that the government was ‘intervening in aVairs

29 On the establishment of the Geistliche Departement, see Otto Hintze, ‘Die Epochen des evangelischen Kirchenregiments in Preußen’, HZ 97 (1906): 96 V. OYcial documents are found in Gustav von Schmoller (ed.), Acta Borussica: Die Beho¨rdenorganisation und die allgemeine Staatsverwaltung Preussens im 18.Jahrhundert (Berlin: P. Parey, 1982), xvi. 30 Von Thadden, Prussia, 94. 31 Quoted in Andrew L. Drummond, ‘Church and State in Protestant Germany before 1918,’ CH 13 (1944): 215–16.

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which . . . were the concern of the church and as such, ought certainly to be settled without any outside interference’.32 Admittedly, patterns of continuity existed between the Erastian measures of eighteenth-century absolutism and those of the nineteenth century: the operations of the Geistliche Departement preWgured those of the Kultusministerium in many respects. The state’s ascendency over the church after 1806, in other words, would be unthinkable without the legacy of church–state relations under royal absolutism. Nonetheless, the extreme Erastian measures of the Prussian Reform Era cannot be accounted for predominantly in terms of continuity with the past. One must turn to novel historical forces from the 1789–1815 period, particularly new political exigencies set in motion by the French Revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte, and a new doctrine of the state as an ethical-cultural force fostered by German idealism. These two modern forces contributed greatly to Prussia’s statist ecclesiastical polity of the early nineteenth century. They also provided justiWcation for heightened state involvement in higher education and theology, which along with church aVairs fell under the administrative jurisdiction of the Kultusministerium.

3 . THE G R EAT TR ANSITIO N: C H U RC H A N D S TAT E A F T E R 18 0 6 At that time the religious aVairs of Protestantism were made wholly a matter of the state. Willibald Beyschlag, 189133

Few years are more important than 1806 in understanding modern Germany’s social and political evolution. Prussia’s defeat by Napoleon in this year hastened an epochal transformation of central Europe, begining with the Reichdeputationshauptschluß of 1803, which secularized ecclesiastical properties and paved the way for the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire three years later.34 The Napoleonic victory and subsequent occupation set in motion impulses for major reform. The reforms in Prussia are sometimes referred to as the Stein-Hardenberg reforms because of the central role played by the ministers Karl von Stein (1757–1831) and Karl August von 32 von Thadden, Prussia, 96. 33 Willibald Beyschlag, ‘Welche Entwicklung hat das Verha¨ltniß von Staat und Kirche in Preußen im 19.Jahrhundert genommen . . .’ (Halle, 1891), BTFG, 7263/110. 34 On secularization measures in central Europe during this time, see Owen Chadwick, The Popes and European Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), 494–504.

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Hardenberg (1759–1822).35 With the crown’s role curtailed by Napoleon’s European hegemony, these progressive ministers and other kindred spirits sought to modernize the Prussian state and society in partial emulation and reaction to the ideals of the Enlightenment and French Revolution. Indeed, because of the long shadow cast by Napoleon, princes and ministers alike were forced to recognize that their states’ viability in the modern era depended on making concessions to the uneasy but ostensibly workable combination of revolutionary ideals and Bonapartist statecraft. ‘The power of these [revolutionary] principles is so great, so universally recognized and widespread,’ Hardenberg observed in his Riga Memorandum of 1807, ‘that a state that does not recognize them must face either their forcible imposition or its own extinction.’36 Yet for Stein and Hardenberg the desired reforms were more than concessions; they earnestly desired to create a great modern state, one rivalling France in organization, eYciency, and national spirit.37 Educated at the progressive university of Go¨ttingen and inXuenced by German idealist philosophy, both men were convinced that the old feudal system of estates and privileges, considerably retained in the 1794 Civil Code, had at last reached the end of its line.38 However, Stein and Hardenberg, along with fellow reformers, were often unwilling to embrace the democratic and egalitarian implications of the French Revolution outright and instead adopted ambivalent positions, advocating the desirability of freedom and greater meritocracy, on the one hand, but simultaneously looking not to the people but to a powerful, centralized state (staVed by enlightened, progressive civil servants) as the appropriate 35 Stein was appointed chief minister on 4 October 1807 and served in this capacity, overseeing a number of important reforms, for over a year. The king dismissed him on 24 November 1808, having received pressure from Napoleon to do so because a letter of Stein’s, intercepted by Napoleon’s agents, referred to the likelihood of war against France. After the short-lived ministry of Karl von Altenstein and Alexander von Dohna (November 1808 – June 1810), Hardenberg was then appointed chancellor (a position created explicitly for him) and he undertook a number of equally important reforms. On Stein’s dismissal and the appointment of Hardenberg, see Reinhart Koselleck, Preußen zwischen Reform und Revolution (Stuttgart: Klett, 1967), 163–216. 36 Quoted from Hardenberg’s Riga Memorandum of 1807, in George Winter (ed.), Die Reorganisation des Preussischen Staats unter Stein und Hardenberg (Leipzig, 1931), i. 305–6. 37 Important distinctions characterize Stein’s and Hardenberg’s reforms. At the risk of oversimpliWcation, Stein favoured a more egalitarian approach to the reform process whereas Hardenberg favoured what he called ‘democratic principles in a monarchical government’. See Friedrich Meinecke, The Age of German Liberation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 44–101. 38 On their educational experiences at Go¨ttingen, see Go¨tz von Selle, ‘Stein und Hardenberg als Go¨ttinger Studenten’, Go¨ttinger Nebenstunden 5 (1927): 47 V. For the inXuence of Kant on Stein, see ‘Der Reichherr Karl vom Stein und Immanuel Kant’, in Bu¨sch and Neugebauer (eds.), Moderne Preußische Geschichte, iii. 1328–45, and Karl von Raumer, Die Kantische Geist in der Erhebung von 1807/1813 (Rede zur Kantfeier der Universita¨t 1940) (Ko¨nigsberg, 1940).

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vehicle for realizing modernity. Freedom for them was not necessarily the freedom of the individual from the state and feudal-corporative powers, the liberty to develop one’s own individuality (the concept more characteristic of the Western Enlightenment). Rather, to have freedom was to have a share in the modern state; it meant the ability as a citizen to participate in building a rational, liberal, and strong state, and one active in religious and cultural aVairs. To be sure, reformers believed that their post-feudal state had a universal mission to beneWt all citizens; still, no popular movement coincided with the changes advocated ‘from above’. Theirs was a project for the bureaucracy. To achieve the enlightened, centralized state envisioned by Stein, Hardenberg, and others, government oYcials found it necessary, following the example of France, to eliminate or restrict the autonomy of various intermediary institutions or ‘mediating structures’—feudal relations, guild privileges, provincial governments, churches, consistories, and the local rights of institutions of education—that might oVer resistance by refusing to recognize the state as the appropriate ‘school for building the character of man’, as Heinrich von Sybel once characterized Stein’s conception of the state.39 This necessity had momentous consequences for church–state relations, universities, and theological education in Prussia. In marked contrast to the anticlericalism of revolutionaries in France or the religious volunteerism of the United States, the reformers in Prussia saw their task as a religious one and wanted to see a society and a state founded in the bosom of a robust ethical, modern Protestantism. The promotion of this conception of religion was not left up to society; rather it was understood as the responsibility of the state—indeed as one of the state’s most necessary undertakings. Ministers Stein, Hardenberg, Dohna, and Altenstein, among others, shared this view, which had been derived, both directly and indirectly, from prevalent currents of German idealism.40 Among idealist intellectuals, for example, Fichte in his programme of Nationalerziehung called for revitalizing religion—a task he charged to the state, not the church.41 Later, Hegel took the statist implications of Fichte’s reasoning to extreme lengths, arguing that all citizens, including clergymen, should identify their interests closely with the state because ‘all the value that human beings possess, all their spiritual reality, they have through the state alone. . . . The state is the divine Idea as it exists on earth.’42 Due to the inXuence of idealism, Foerster has 39 Quoted in Meinecke, The Age of German Liberation, 50. 40 The direct relationship is especially clear in the case of Altenstein. See Eduard Springer, ‘Altensteins Denkschrift von 1807 und ihre Beziehung zur Philosophie’, FBPG 18 (1906): 107–58. 41 Fichte, Reden an die deutsche Nation (Leipzig, 1871). 42 G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. Leo Rauch (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1988), 41–2.

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described the state’s role after 1806 as the ‘shaper and teacher of the nation’ (Bildner und Erzieher der Nation), a role that entailed hands-on upkeep of religious and intellectual aVairs (ReligionspXege and WissenschaftspXege).43 Such sentiments among leading Prussian ministers tended to promote Erastian inclinations in church–state matters. What is more, these sentiments bespeak a general tendency of German idealist philosophy in the early nineteenth century. As Maurice Mandelbaum has noted, religion was of utmost importance for idealist thinkers, yet their understanding of religion was ‘not dependent on revelation to apprehend the truth’; rather ‘man’s own spiritual nature was taken as basic in reality’.44 This view—which, mutatis mutandis, is evident in Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, and in many lesser lights—resulted in the denigration of revelation- and confession-based traditional churches, for their attachment to past doctrines and creeds only prevented recognition of humankind’s general ‘spiritual’ essence, which idealists took to be religion’s most fundamental impulse. The state should take the utmost interest in religion, but it should understand religion in ‘spiritual’ terms—terms that did not tie it to past institutional structures, but allowed it to march ‘hand in hand’ with the spirit of modern philosophy, as Altenstein averred in 1807.45 A consequence of this view (what Ernst Mu¨sebeck has called idealism’s ‘Verinnerlichung der Religion’) was that the church’s relevance as a concrete, institutional-historical force and as an independent morality-generating agency within society was signiWcantly attenuated.46 ‘[T]he church . . . only obstructs all good education,’ wrote Fichte, ‘and must be dispensed with.’47 Indeed, religion was spiritualized, made immanent in the general experience of humanity, divorced from the necessity of particular ecclesiastical and credal manifestations. According to Hajo Holborn, this tendency within German idealism, combined with its rejection of natural law, proved consequential (both for German ecclesiastical life and political culture), separating Germany from some of the most dominant currents of Western liberalism. In the light of past discussions of a German Sonderweg, a special path to modernity, one should be cautious of reading too much into this development. Nonetheless, by weakening the this-worldly moral relevance of churches, German idealism, in eVect, magniWed the state as a cultural and ethical force (the guiding notion 43 Foerster, Die Entstehung der Preußischen Landeskirche, i. 126 V. On the intellectual exchange between German idealism and Prussian oYcialdom, see Hermann Beck, ‘The Social Policies of Prussian OYcials: The Bureaucracy in a New Light,’ JMH 64 (June 1992): 263–98. 44 Maurice Mandelbaum, History, Man, and Reason: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 6. 45 See Altenstein,‘Riga Memorandum’ (1807), in Ernst Mu¨sebeck, Das preussische Kultusministerium vor hundert Jahren (Stuttgart, 1918), 254. 46 Mu¨sebeck, Das preussische Kultusministerium, 184. 47 Fichte, Reden an die deutsche Nation, 137.

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of the Kulturstaat or Erziehungsstaat ideal) and subordinated the church to the state’s own quasi-sacral purposes. In Holborn’s provocative formulation: German idealism . . . [in the] early nineteenth century represented a passionate attempt to realize a new ‘religious’ meaning in life. But at the same time . . . [it] simply disregarded essential tenets of the historical faith, such as the concepts of a personalistic God and consciousness of sin. At the same time, German idealism changed the sphere of ethical and spiritual action in human history. Despite his uniqueness, Hegel is a typical example. For Hegel the state was the realization not only of law, but also of morality. If this is the case, the church loses any vital role it had in history. . . . German idealism did not have any great place for the church in its intellectual house.48

By way of contrast, Alexis de Tocqueville had suggested that in a democratic age religion had the potential to serve as a pillar of liberalism by providing society with resources of moral initiative, independent judgment, philanthropy, and social volunteerism apart from (and often in critical opposition to) the modern state.49 German idealism’s religious outlook, however, contributed to rendering this a negligible factor in the evolution of modern German religious and political culture. The state itself became a dominant agency of morality, and the church’s social role was interpreted ‘as a duty it would perform on the state’s behalf ’.50 Revealingly, contemporaries and epigoni of idealists often wound up holding even more extreme positions than Fichte or Hegel—a fact that bears witness to an intellectual landscape conducive to the triumph of Erastian principles. A particularly revealing example is the theologian Richard Rothe (1799–1867), a pupil of Schleiermacher and Hegel at Berlin. Carrying forward the church–state logic of idealism, Rothe came to the conclusion that ‘the church’ was becoming superannuated in the modern age. The state therefore possessed a historical mandate to subsume the church and its moral function for society. In Rothe’s view, the goal of Christianity was not a church perpetually embattled against ‘the world’ (contra mundum as the church of antiquity had understood itself), but a progressively Christianized modern world. To this end, Rothe reasoned that the modern state, ‘the absolute form of the ethical community’, was better historically situated than the church to

48 Hajo Holborn, ‘German Idealism in the Light of Social History’, in Germany and Europe: Historical Essays by Hajo Holborn, 14 V. Similarly, Paul Lakeland notes that, for Hegel, ‘religion lies in the anthropological structures of human beings much more crucially and genuinely than in churches’. See Paul Lakeland, The Politics of Salvation: The Hegelian Idea of the State (Albany: State University of New York, 1984), 93. 49 See Norman A. Graebner, ‘Christianity and Democracy: Tocqueville’s Views of Religion in America’, JR 56 (1973): 263 V. 50 Nipperdey, Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck, 42.

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realize Christianity’s own aims. Once this fact was realized, the church would necessarily ‘vanish’.51 So-called Left Hegelians such as D. F. Strauss and Bruno Bauer went further still. Strauss argued that the evolution of modern consciousness mandated that the traditional moral tasks of the church be appropriated by the secular state: ‘No peace will be found until eternity is fully absorbed into time, piety has been completely taken up in morality, and the church has been absorbed into the state.’52 Similarly, Bruno Bauer argued that the modern state represented ‘that form of spiritual life in which the form of the visible church had been dissolved’. The state was ‘the only form in which . . . Reason and Freedom, the highest goods of the human spirit, exist in reality’. Accordingly, the church had become historically superXuous, a mere empty form or ‘ghost’ (Gespenst), which nonetheless anachronistically haunted the state.53 The Prussian reform era coincided with the Xowering of German idealism; idealism was ‘the rock on which the reform program was built’.54 While most Prussian ministers after 1806 were, to be sure, a far cry from the politically radical and anti-Christian views of the Hegelian Left, one could not say that they were overly concerned about maintaining the church as an independent social and moral force apart from the state’s own identity and mission. To the contrary: while convinced of the truth and necessity of ‘the Christian religion’, they too, in a manner not unlike idealist thinkers and, later, Left Hegelians, sought to absorb the ethical capacities of the church into the machinery of the modern state.55 In Stein’s view, for example, religion was primarily an ‘inner source of life’, something basic to the human spirit and standing above all confessions, ‘from whose strength arises all obligations of man and citizen’.56 51 Rothe’s views on church and state are expressed, inter alia, in his Theologische Ethik (Wittenberg, 1845), i. 423 V., ii. 120–56. In this work, he writes: ‘Denn wenn die allgemeine menschliche Gemeinschaft [the state] als religio¨s-sittliche vollsta¨ndig herstellt, so fa¨llt das Bedu¨rfniß einer lediglich religio¨sen Gemeinschaft neben der religio¨s-sittlichen hinweg, welches ja nur darauf beruhte, daß der Umfang der lediglich religio¨sen Gemeinschaft (der religio¨sen Gemeinschafte rein als solcher) weiter reichte als der der religio¨s-sittlichen. In diesem Punkte der Entwicklung verschwindet also die Kirche.’ See Theologische Ethik, i. 424 V. On Rothe generally, see RGG v. 1197–99. 52 D. F. Strauss, Die christliche Glaubenslehre in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung und im Kampfe mit der modernen Wissenschaft (Tu¨bingen, 1841), ii. 618. 53 Bruno Bauer, Die evangelische Landeskirche Preußens und die Wissenschaft (Leipzig, 1840), 65, 104. Also see the discussion of Strauss’s and Bauer’s views on church and state in John Toews, Hegelianism: The Path toward Dialectical Humanism, 1805–1841 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 255 V. 54 Nipperdey, Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck, 22. 55 Bauer in fact later argued that the early nineteenth-century Prussian reforms had accomplished precisely this: destroyed the church as an independent force and absorbed its functions into the state. See Bauer, Die evangelische Landeskirche Preußens, 135 V. 56 Quoted in Hafter, Der Freiherr vom Stein in seinem Verha¨ltnis zu Religion und Kirche (Berlin, 1932), 35–6.

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For Prussia’s political health, he felt that ‘the religious feeling of the nation must be enlivened again’ and that ‘the government must take seriously this important task’.57 Similarly, Hardenberg, who tended to regard religion as ‘a special form of general human education,’ noted in his Riga Memorandum of 1807 that ‘the state, which has the great moral purpose . . . of ennobling humankind, has the duty doubly laid on it to encourage religiosity and thereby to lead its subjects towards the highest good’. ‘That the present moment,’ he added, ‘is favourable for the Prussian state to improve religion is incontrovertible.’58 Or, in the words of Minister Altenstein: ‘If the state recognizes the idea of guiding humanity to its highest joy as its leading principle, then it will view the promotion of religiosity as the highest goal and from [this] lofty standpoint . . . esteem the true worth of religion.’59 Friedrich Wilhelm III’s views resonated with those of his ministers. While the king was no student of idealist philosophy, his conception of religion, for both pious, personal, and pragmatic reasons, nonetheless mirrored that of idealism in certain respects. Above all, he shared idealism’s anti- or supraconfessional bent, preferring to focus instead on Christianity’s general truths and social beneWts. Furthermore, the king was greatly disturbed by the encroachments of rationalism and liberalism in the eighteenth century, as well as by the explicit dechristianization witnessed during the French Revolution. He thus generally supported what he perceived to be the religiously restorative policies of his ministers.60 Borne then by an idealistic conception of the state as a moral and pedagogic force, and thus by its legitimately heavy-handed involvement in ecclesiastical aVairs, the situation in the eighteenth century of relative religious freedom and continued corporative privileges changed dramatically during the Prussian Reform Era. However, for a brief period at the beginning of Stein’s ministry (October 1807), it appeared as if the future of Prussia’s Protestant ecclesiastical polity was up for grabs. Stein himself gave consideration to more congregational autonomy in church aVairs, soliciting proposals for change from a number of leading clergymen and theologians. At Stein’s request, for example, Schleiermacher penned an outline for church reform, in which he, 57 Both quotes are from Foerster, Die Entstehung der preussischen Landeskirche, i. 129. 58 See statements from Riga Memorandum in Winter (ed.), Die Reorganisation des Preussischen Staates unter Stein und Hardenberg, i. 353–4. See also Karl-Heinz Manegold, ‘Das ‘Ministerium des Geistes’: Zur Organisation des ehemaligen preußischen Kultusministeriums’, Die deutsche Berufs- und Fachschule 63 (1967): 512–24. 59 Altenstein, ‘Riga Memorandum’ (1807), in Mu¨sebeck, Das preussische Kultusministerium, 251. 60 On the king’s religious views, see Walter Wendland, Die Religiosita¨t und die kirchenpolitischen Grundsa¨tze Friedrich Wilhelms des Dritten in ihrer Bedeutung fu¨r die Geschichte der kirchlichen Restauration (Gießen, 1905).

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quite radically, called for the complete independence of the church from the state, criticizing the status quo for allowing the church to function as ‘a mere instrument of the state’.61 However, the tide of the reform movement ran in a contrary direction, away from Schleiermacher’s liberal sentiment towards even greater state control of the churches.62 The key reforms that altered church–state relations began in the autumn of 1808. These reforms, in the words of John Groh, represented ‘a state-imposed revolution in church polity’ whereby ‘the church practically ceased to be an independent organism’.63 Fritz Fischer has described the process as ‘the absorption of the church by the state’ (Verstaatlichung des Kirchenwesens).64 The reforms in ecclesiastical polity were facilitated by a transformation in the upper ranks of the Prussian ministry eVected by Stein. Hitherto, ministers had operated in three main ministerial departments—foreign aVairs, war, and justice (the latter housed the aforementioned Geistliche Departement). While this system had achieved a degree of centralization in the course of the eighteenth century, much political power still remained in Prussia’s ten regional provinces. Provincial governors, city mayors, and feudal lords wielded considerable authority, while a measure of ecclesiastical control resided in consistories, patrons, and (among Reformed communities) in synods and individual congregations. The 1808 reforms abrogated the older absolutist cabinet government and diminished provincial and feudal powers by establishing a centralized state bureaucracy modelled in part on that of Napoleonic France.65 An order of 16 December 1808, drafted largely by Stein, but also bearing the stamp of Hardenberg and Altenstein, called into existence Wve departmental ministries—of the interior, foreign aVairs, Wnance, justice, and war. The former bureaucratic organs responsible for churches, along with those responsible for education66—both previously part of the Ministry of Justice’s portfolio— were dissolved and reconstituted as a single subdepartment under the new Ministry of the Interior, which was to be directed by Stein’s appointee, Alexander von Dohna.67 The new subdepartment was called straightforwardly 61 Schleiermacher, ‘Vorschlag zu einer neuen Verfaßung der protestantischen Kirche fu¨r den preußischen Staat’ (1808), in KGA I. ix. 3–18. Schleiermacher would maintain these views, often to the consternation of state oYcials. 62 Beyschlag, ‘Welche Entwicklung hat das Verha¨ltniß von Staat und Kirche in Preußen im 19.Jahrhundert genommen . . .’ (Halle, 1891), BTFG, 7263/110. 63 John Groh, Nineteenth-Century German Protestantism: The Church as Social Model (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982), 2, 16–17. 64 Fritz Fischer, Ludwig Nicolovius: Rokoko, Reform, Restauration (Stuttgart, 1939), 307, 309. 65 Meinecke, The Age of German Liberation, 72. 66 On the rather complicated Staatsverwaltung of universities in pre-1806 Prussia, see Conrad Bornhak, Geschichte der preussischen Universita¨tsverwaltung bis 1810 (Berlin, 1900), 174–89. 67 On von Dohna, see ADB v. 299–302.

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the Department of Ecclesiastical AVairs and Public Education (Sektion des Kultus und des o¨Ventlichen Unterrichts). As indicated earlier, Wilhelm von Humboldt received a call from his diplomatic post in Rome to head this new department, helping found the University of Berlin during his short tenure (1809–10). Humboldt received assistance from Johann Wilhelm Su¨vern (1775–1829), formerly a classics professor at the University of Ko¨nigberg and a devotee of Fichte, and from Ludwig Nicolovius (1767–1839), a bureaucrat from East Prussia who had been inXuenced by the idealism of Kant, the religious thought of J. G. Hamann, and the educational philosophy of Pestalozzi.68 While Humboldt, Nicolovius, and Su¨vern diVered in many respects, they shared a high-minded view of their role as educators of the nation and a belief that their new bureaucratic apparatus had the potential to reinvigorate Prussia’s religious and intellectual life, so long as the parochial and anachronistic elements of the Old Regime were suYciently curtailed. After Humboldt’s departure from the Ministry in 1810, Nicolovius and Su¨vern continued the reform process under the direction of Friedrich Schuckmann, who was in turn replaced by Altenstein in 1817, the year the department was elevated to its own governmental ministry. The Erastian reforms eVected through this department, shortly after 1808, were carried out with the sincere faith that religion (understood in supraconfessional, idealist terms) would gain a more prominent and inXuential role in the state and among a people dispirited by the Napoleonic yoke. Yet the putative gains for religion simultaneously entailed the state acquiring extensive powers over the administration of churches. The transformation did not happen overnight, but in the course of a decade after the administrative reorganization churches were subordinated to the Prussian government. The new arrangements would have a long legacy in the nineteenth century. They were made possible by the abolition of traditional church consistories, the establishment of new government organs of ecclesiastical oversight, the secularization of church properties, the curtailment of patronage rights, and the state’s assumption of the upkeep of clergymen and parishes.69 In the Protestant Church Union of 1817 and the subsequent ‘rites controversy’ (Agendenstreit), the state’s powers were even extended to worship and liturgical matters, the jus in sacra. With respect to theology, 68 For the order that established the Department of Ecclesiastical AVairs and Public Education, see Huber and Huber (eds.), Staat und Kirche i. 54–5. For a fuller description of the administrative reforms of 1808, see Gerhard Ritter, Stein: eine politische Biographie (Stuttgart, 1931), i. 316 V.; Mu¨sebeck, Das preussische Kultusministerium, 31 V.; and Eduard Spranger, Wilhelm von Humboldt und die Reform des Bildungswesen (Tu¨bingen: M. Niemeyer, 1960), 78–80. 69 Gwendolyn E. Jensen, ‘A Comparative Study of Prussian and Anglican Church-State Reform in the Nineteenth Century’, JCS 23 (1981): 445–63.

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the state’s inXuence was felt through active measures to diminish confessionalism, greater centralized control of universities, and more regulation and supervision of theology students en route to acquiring their own parishes as ministers. Among the Wrst tasks pursued by the Department of Ecclesiastical AVairs and Public Education was the dissolution of the long-established consistories of the three main Protestant bodies in Prussia—the Lutheran, the German Reformed, and the French Reformed churches. This process started in late December of 1808. In the place of self-regulating, confessionally deWned consistories, Stein’s reforms created state-appointed provincial boards of religion and education (Geistliche und Schuldeputationen) to oversee local activities and, as an order of 26 December 1808 put it, ‘to promote religiosity and morality, fortitude, harmony between the various confessions, civic spirit, participation in public aVairs, and devotion to the fatherland’.70 These boards were placed under the direct supervision of a general superintendent, who in turn answered to the leadership in the Department of Ecclesiastical AVairs and Public Education. Although the term ‘consistory’ later reappeared in an edict of 30 April 1815, it was applied to new provincial consistories, which were a far cry from the old consistories that had been organized along confessional, not provincial, lines. Replacing the provincial boards of religion and education, the new consistories were also wholly state authorities with no trace of any independence for the church in running its aVairs.71 What is more, the general superintendents, who became the directors of these new consistories, were required to answer to the Prussian provincial governors (Oberpra¨sidenten), the highest regional political oYcer after the administrative reconWgurations occasioned by the Congress of Vienna (1815). As the superintendents regularly reported clerical and consistorial activities to higher echelons, they earned Schleiermacher’s memorable description of them as the ‘spiritual prefects’ (geistliche Pra¨fecten) of the government.72 From its inception the Erastian system that arose at this time incurred criticism, especially from the older confessional consistories, which did not go under without a show of disapproval. After the changes of 1808 were mandated, consistory councillors protested what they perceived to be the state’s illegitimate encroachment in church aVairs. French-speaking Reformed clergymen, for example, pleaded for the continuance of their cherished consistoire supe´rieur. The government Xatly rejected their request, but agreed to respect 70 Huber and Huber (eds.), Staat und Kirche, i. 57. 71 Ibid. 118–19. 72 W. Gaß (ed.), Schleiermachers Briefwechsel mit J. Chr. Gaß (Berlin, 1852), 137. Cf. Foerster, Die Entstehung der preussischen Landeskirche, i. 226 V.

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local presbyteries so long as outright deWance of the state was not encouraged. More vociferous complaints were voiced by members of the Lutheran High Consistory whose council members in Berlin had been summarily dismissed by the government. On 13 April 1809 councillor Gottfried Hanstein complained to the king that the new subordination of churchly aVairs to the state appeared ‘more harmful than helpful to religion’. ‘We are not convinced’, he opined, ‘that religion, especially in the eyes of the people and the church, comes out ahead.’ He thus asked the king to listen to his ‘urgent request’ and allow the direction of the church to be placed in the hands of ‘an independent high consistory and independent provincial consistories’. Other council members voiced similar misgivings, but while some concessions were made (such as the agreement to employ a number of dismissed council members in the new ministry), no substantive structural changes took place. In a cabinet order of 6 May 1809, which sought to reassure the dissolved consistory of the government’s good intentions, the king, following the advice of Humboldt and von Dohna, responded that ‘the establishment of the new authority and the dissolution of the former ones was done by myself . . . [and] no one can regard religion and religiosity as more valuable than myself ’. Still distraught by the new arrangement, the president of the dissolved High Consistory issued a Wnal complaint in a letter of 8 June 1809. This time he received the curt reply from von Dohna, Minister of the Interior, that his standpoint was simply mistaken and that the task of the former High Consistory, ‘promoting true religiosity’, had not ended, but was being continued as part of the government.73 During the reform period, the traditional rights of patrons (Patronatsrechte) were curtailed as the state gained greater control over ecclesiastical aVairs.74 Already in May of 1808 Stein had made clear in a letter to a fellow minister his negative view of patronage rights. ‘Patronage rights,’ he wrote, ‘amount to the same reproachable anomaly as patrimonial jurisdiction [in political aVairs]; in no case are they to be allowed to spread, but are to co-opted by the proper, future purposes of the Ministry of Ecclesiastical AVairs.’75 In practice, this occurred in two ways. First, regulations for the training and qualiWcation of clergymen were standardized in all Prussian provinces, making it clear that from the standpoint of the centralized administration only the 73 See the exchanges between consistory councillors and the government excerpted in Foerster, Die Entstehung der preussischen Landeskirche, i. 143 V. 74 I emphasize the word ‘curtailed’, because patronage rights were not legally abolished in Prussia until after the November Revolution of 1918. 75 Quoted in Foerster, Die Entstehung der preussischen Landeskirche i. 147. Stein also desired that congregations gain greater say-so in their aVairs, but the bureaucratizing, centralizing imperatives of the reform era worked against this sentiment.

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passing of examinations allowed one to become an eligible (wahlfa¨hig) candidate for an ecclesiastical appointment. To this end, the Department of Ecclesiastical AVairs and Public Education set up an examination commission (Examenskommission) to implement a rigorous examination system for clergymen, mandating that all future pastors pass two examinations (an examen pro facultate concionandi and an examen pro ministerio) after completing their university studies.76 Promulgated through an order of 15 August 1810, this measure restricted the privileges of aristocratic patrons, who in the past exerted considerable inXuence over the appointment of local clergymen. Patrons could still make suggestions from a pool of successfully examined candidates, but the state reserved the right of making Wnal appointments.77 In this new system, the traditional religious ceremony of ordination came to appear to some as ‘a supplement to the scientiWc examinations’ (ein Anhang wissenschaftlichen Examina).78 The new regulations also increased the growing sense among sceptics that the clergy was simply another arm of the government bureaucracy. Furthermore, since the nature of the required examinations regularly placed emphasis on scholarly, not doctrinal or pastoral, criteria, these measures contributed to the new meritocratic-scientiWc ethos of theological faculties, typiWed by the recently founded university in Berlin.79 The state’s assumption of greater responsibility for clergymen’s salaries and for the upkeep of parishes also curtailed patronage rights. The initiative to provide clerical salaries coincided with a general Prussian Wnancial crisis, brought on by the burden of indemnity payments to France after 1806. Hardenberg, chancellor during the most acute phases of the crisis, concluded 76 Ludwig von Ro¨nne (ed.), Die Verfassung und Verwaltung des preußischen Staates: Das Unterrichtswesen des preußischen Staates, pt. 8 (Berlin, 1855), i. 260. State examinations for clergy did not originate during the Prussian reform era; they have earlier roots. The system of examinations mandated at this time was based on reforms in 1799 that had overturned the exams implemented under the conservative regime of minister Wo¨llner. See Fischer, Nicolovius, 322–33, 356–8. The exams in Prussia had the reputation of being among the most demanding. See Paul Drews, Der evangelische Geistliche in der deutschen Vergangenheit (Jena, 1905), 135–6. Max Weber lists ‘a system of special examinations’ to ensure ‘trained expertise’ as a key component of the modern state apparatus and ‘indispensable for modern bureaucracy’. See H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 198–204, 240–4. 77 Foerster, Die Entstehung der preussischen Landeskirche, i. 180 and Fischer, Nicolovius, 358. 78 Fischer, Nicolovius, 320. 79 The new examination system also ceased to make distinctions between Reformed and Lutheran candidates, foreshadowing the Church Union of 1817. See Fischer, Nicolovius, 328, 356 V. Cf. Robert M. Bigler, ‘The Rise of Political Protestantism in Nineteenth-Century Germany’, CH 34 (1965): 436 V. For an outsider’s criticism of the examination system in Prussia, see Edward Robinson, ‘Theological Education in Germany. Part III. Examinations. Ministerial Standing, etc.’, Biblical Repository 3 (July 1831): 416.

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that the practical solution would be to secularize church properties in Prussia, extending the logic of the Reichdeputationshauptschluß (1803). The state’s increased means would be used not only to pay France, but to provide sinecures for clergymen and maintain religious and cultural institutions.80 While some clergymen complained that the state was simply robbing the church of her properties, many others, fearful of the prospect of penury, welcomed the state’s Wnancial assistance.81 Foerster rightly notes, however, that during this era the government’s new powers over the clergy’s purse strings signiWed ‘a fundamentally altered position of the state in relation to the church’.82 Through dissolving the traditional consistories, reconstituting the ecclesiastical polity,83 curtailing patronage rights, secularizing church properties, and assuming greater Wnancial responsibility for the clergy, the Prussian government, indeed, stood in an altered relationship to the church. The extent of the state’s expanded authority was made particularly clear in an edict of 23 October 1817, outlining the responsibilities of the new provincial consistories. The consistories were broadly charged to care for ‘the general direction of the Protestant church and educational matters in the provinces’. More speciWcally, they were to provide ‘oversight of worship services in general, especially in dogmatic and liturgical matters, so that they are maintained in purity and dignity’; to provide ‘oversight of the moral and oYcial conduct of the clergy’; ‘to censor writings pertaining to the church,’ and ‘to regulate church ceremonies . . . according to the stipulations of the ministry of ecclesiastical aVairs and public education’. In addition, consistories had the mandate to test candidates preparing for the ministry, discipline wayward clergymen, and attend to all matters pertaining to education in the provinces—with the exception of the universities, which, notably, 80 See the secularization edict of 30 October 1810 in Huber and Huber (eds.), Staat und Kirche, i. 57–8. 81 Foerster, Die Entstehung der preussischen Landeskirche, i. 192 V. 82 Ibid. 148. 83 In addition to aforementioned measures, the king allowed for the establishment of synods through an edict of 27 May 1816. These local provincial synods amounted to little more, however, than pastors’ conferences without genuine authority over the Protestant ecclesiastical polity. Actual authority resided in the consistories, superintendents, and the Department of Ecclesiastical AVairs and Public Education. Later, in an edict of 31 December 1825, consistories were divided into two sections, one overseeing church aVairs, the other educational aVairs. It was this latter section, the so-called Provinzial Schulkollegium, that administered exams to prospective clergymen. See von Ro¨nne (ed.), Die Verfassung und Verwaltung des preußischen Staates, pt. 8 (Berlin, 1855), i. 259; Huber and Huber (eds.), Staat und Kirche, i. 125–6, 574–6; and von Thadden, Prussia, 100–1. On the Catholic church polity in Prussia at this time, see Huber and Huber (eds.), Staat und Kirche, i. 199 V. The bull De salute animarum (16 July 1821) came to regulate aVairs between Prussia and Rome in the post-Napoleonic era.

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were to be ‘directly subject to the Ministry of Ecclesiastical AVairs and Public Education’.84 These measures provide important context for the landmark step in 1817 to unite Lutheran and Reformed congregations into one Prussian united Evangelical Church or Unionskirche.85 In part, the drive towards union arose from king’s personal, religious motivations. In the years preceding the union, Friedrich Wilhelm III had taken an interest in the episcopal structure of the Church of England and in the liturgies of the Orthodox and Catholic churches. In comparison, his churches in Prussia seemed poorly organized and liturgically too variegated. What is more, the Reformed king had married a Lutheran wife from Mecklenburg, and he found it frustrating that they could not share communion together. Yet the decision for union did not emanate from the king’s whims alone; other intellectual and political exigencies come into play. To a number of ministers, the Church Union represented a welcome opportunity to overcome confessionalism and thus achieve a more progressive understanding of religion, one more in line with the outlook of German idealism. Furthermore, the union was recognized as a matter of raison d’e´tat, of bringing religion ‘into harmony with the direction of the state’, as Altenstein put it. It would help achieve national unity after the Treaty of Vienna (1815), which had greatly increased Prussia’s size, population, and religious diversity. In particular, government oYcials thought that a centrally administered, confessionally united state church would foster greater understanding between Prussia’s eastern Lutheran provinces and the newly acquired provinces of the Rhineland and Westphalia, which contained numerous Reformed communities.86 In turn, a single Protestant church organically connected to the state would present a ‘united front’ against the sizeable Catholic minority. The dual goals of diminishing intra-Protestant confessionalism and consolidating national unity nourished Erastian tendencies already afoot. The process of church union got fully underway in September of 1817. In anticipation of the tercentenary celebration of the Reformation in October, the king issued a proclamation, in which he deplored Protestant divisions, argued that only externals still divided the two churches, and commended reuniWcation as an act of deep Christian signiWcance.87 The king made clear that the Reformed did not have to become Lutheran, nor Lutheran Reformed, but that from 84 Huber and Huber (eds.), Staat und Kirche, i. 120–4 (emphasis added). 85 For an overview, see ‘Union’ in RGG vi. 1138 V., and Walter Elliger, Die evangelische Kirche der Union. Ihre Vorgeschichte und Geschichte (Witten: Luther, 1967). 86 Bigler, ‘The Rise of Political Protestantism in Nineteenth-Century Germany’, CH 34 (1965): 435. 87 Foerster Die Entstehung der preussischen Landeskirche, i. 267 V.

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their separate identities a new ‘evangelical’ church would develop. The king then set an example for his subjects: on 31 October he celebrated the Reformation by attending a service that combined Lutheran and Reformed elements. During the communion, he received the bread from the Reformed court preacher, the cup from a Lutheran pastor. Shortly afterwards the king issued a medal to commemorate the event: Luther and Calvin graced one side, and on the other a symbol of Mother Church appeared clutching her two sons to her bosom. In the following months, despite some opposition, other churches in Prussia followed suit and soon the drive towards union spread beyond Prussia’s borders, receiving support from important Wgures in church, state, and education—including Schleiermacher.88 Yet the movement began to sputter in the early 1820s, triggered by the king’s decision, in 1821, to publish a new, uniform liturgical book (Agende), which he encouraged every Protestant church in Prussia to adopt. In 1822 the new liturgical book was made mandatory for all institutions connected directly to the state—in court, prison, military, and hospital services. The new liturgical book’s introduction stated that its purpose was to unite all citizens by promoting ‘Christian fear of God, true virtue, and love of the fatherland’.89 By 1825 roughly two-thirds of Prussia’s Protestant churches had adopted the new service book.90 The king hoped that the remaining congregations would adopt it of their own free will and thus achieve a state-sanctioned, standardized liturgy throughout Protestant Prussia. This did not happen. Pressure to use the new service book aroused a storm of controversy from some quarters, leading to the ‘rites controversy’ (Agendenstreit). The controversy played itself out in the 1820s and 1830s, resulting in several church secessionist movements. Reformed churches in the western provinces and some orthodox Lutherans and pietists in Silesia oVered the strongest opposition, arguing that the new liturgy overlooked crucial theological diVerences and that its forced imposition violated the Protestant principle of freedom of conscience. Many clergymen, moreover, made the legal argument that the state only had rights over external ecclesiastical aVairs and not over internal ones, jus circa sacra not jus in sacra. But the king and his ministers refused to listen. In fact, in a demonstration of direct political power, the government resorted to coercion. In 1830 Altenstein, who had become Minister of Culture in 1817, advised the king 88 The most outspoken early critic of the union was the Lutheran pastor, Claus Harms, who published 95 theses against the union on 31 October 1817. See RGG iii. 76. 89 Quoted in Groh, Nineteenth-Century German Protestantism, 38. 90 Elliger, Die evangelische Kirche der Union, 48–53.

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that a propitious moment had arrived to step up measures of achieving the union. The king heeded his advice and between 1830 and 1834 many critics of the Agende were either suspended from their duties or imprisoned; the army even occupied some of the most recalcitrant churches! In 1834 the king announced that the book of services was compulsory for all Protestant churches.91 This precipitated more defections and opposition, which in turn led to more coercive measures. In Silesia a number of congregations rallied around Johannes G. Scheibel (1783–1843) from Breslau, who emerged as the leader of the Old Lutherans, a group that rejected the union in favour of more traditional Lutheranism. Altenstein persecuted this group with great energy, imprisoning some pastors and enforcing union services in the presence of government troops. By the late 1830s Old Lutherans and other religious malcontents began to see their situation as hopeless and many resorted to emigration—to Australia, Canada, and the United States.92 The rites controvery left a lasting impact on Prussian church life and society. Through it, the king, although desirous of promoting religion, ironically ended up alienating some of nation’s most pious elements. For our purposes, what is particularly important is the extent to which the government used coercion to realize a religious agenda. The attempted state-imposed liturgy of the 1820s and 1830s, one scholar has written, represents ‘the culmination of statism and the authority of the state over the church’.93 Such Erastian measures would have been unlikely, however, apart from the Prussian reforms after 1806, which gave centralized government organs expanded powers over religious matters. Furthermore, it is important to underscore that the policies of the king were strongly ratiWed by leading ministers, even if they did not exactly share the king’s own pious motivations. The idealist view that ‘religion’ extracted from confessional-institutional particularities was necessary for Nationalerziehung in the Fichtean sense appears to have been a decisive factor motivating such Wgures as Nicolovius and Altenstein in the Ministry of Culture. It followed that those ecclesiastical bodies that obstructed the realization of this greater religious good administered by the state were appropriately regarded as ‘dangerous sectarians’ in need of correction and punishment.94 91 At this time, the king also made clear that the union was to be a confederation of evangelical churches, in which individual congregations could maintain Reformed or Lutheran accents if they so desired. This was more moderate than the initial union proposal of 1817. See Huber and Huber (eds.), Staat und Kirche, i. 578 V. 92 On the Old Lutheran emigration, see Wilhelm Iwan, Die altlutherische Auswanderung um die Mitte des 19.Jahrhundert, 2 vols. (Ludwigsburg, 1943). 93 Nipperdey, Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck, 382. 94 Werner Vogel, ‘Altenstein’, in Wolfgang Treue and Karlfried Gru¨nder (eds.), Wissenschaftspolitik in Berlin: Minister, Beamte, Ratgeber (Berlin: Colloquium, 1987), 104.

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The historian Friedrich Meinecke observed in 1905 that the Prussian reform period ‘nurtured all of Prussian-German history in the nineteenth century. In this creative epoch originated the institutions and impulses which today still have living consequences.’95 While certainly not valid in every respect, Meinecke’s words ring true for Prussian ecclesiastical aVairs and church–state relations. The arrangements set down during the reform era, although continually modiWed throughout the century, persisted until the Weimar Republic. Indeed, the extensive subordination of the church to the state and the concomitant weakening of independent church government are among the most important facts of Prussian/German history in the nineteenth century. While greater independence of the churches was gained later in the nineteenth century—largely through the organization of church councils and synods—Protestant churches did not gain full independence from the state.96 To be sure, many deplored this situation. As one pastor put it at the Wrst Prussian nationwide general synod in 1846, ‘Our church, as is now stands, cannot be called an institution; we have only spiritual aVairs (Kultus) but no church (Kirche). . . . Our church is constructed like a police establishment and cannot come to life.’97 Although this synod called for church independence, the king and the bureaucracy largely ignored its wishes. Prussia would not gain synods at the national level until the 1870s, but even these were only 95 Meinecke, The Age of German Liberation, 70 (trans. modiWed). 96 For accessible summaries of church–state developments in the mid- and late nineteenth century, see Groh, Nineteenth-Century German Protestantism, 171 V. and Daniel R. Borg, The Old-Prussian Church and the Weimar Republic (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1984). Degrees of ecclesiastical independence were achieved through a national synod meeting of 1846, through the organization of the Evangelischer Oberkirchenrat (1850), and through a statewide synodical system brought about by ordinances in 1873 and 1876. (Although voices of church–state separation were present during the revolutionary events of 1848–9, the failure of this revolution greatly hampered this cause.) The system that emerged in the later nineteenth century has sometimes been described as an ecclesiastical dyarchy, a system in which power is divested in two structures of authority. On the one hand, consistorial organs derived their authority from the summus episcopus and organized from the Evangelischer Oberkirchenrat downwards. On the other hand, the synods, the organs of self-administration, organized upwards–from the congregational level to a territorial or general synod. Yet a balance of power did not exist between the two structures; the preponderance of authority resided in the bureaucratic apparatus of the state—in the king qua summus episcopus, the Kultusministerium, superintendents, and consistories. It is also relevant to this discussion that the Prussian Constitution of 1850 brought greater civil rights to all confessions of faith. Still, it upheld the state’s support of established Christian institutions, including theological faculties. As Article 14 expressed it: ‘Die christliche Religion wird bei denjenigen Einrichtungen des Staats, welche mit der Religionsu¨bungen im Zusammenhange stehen, unbeschadet, der im Art. 12 gewa¨hrleisteten Religionsfreiheit, zum Grunde gelegt.’ See Huber and Huber (eds.), Staat und Kirche, ii. 34 V., 314 V., 929 V. 97 The pastor was Adolf Sydow of Berlin. Quoted in Verhandlungen der evangelischen General-Synode zu Berlin vom. 2.Juni bis zum 19.August 1846 (Berlin, 1846), 414.

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relatively independent and still allowed the state considerable powers. The Erastian past weighed heavily on the present. As John Groh has summed up: ‘The Prussian reform movement . . . deprived the churches of the initiative of self-government, and made them a department of the state. Their relations with the state determined their role in society, since the state imposed on them an administrative structure that regulated church–state relations.’98 Rudolf von Thadden has similarly remarked that the main legacy of the Prussian Reform Era was ‘the absence of any independent . . . element within the structure of the church.’99 Hajo Holborn reached a similar conclusion: Enlightened despotism had tended to treat the schools and churches as mere institutions of the state. The reforms brought about after 1806 perfected this policy. There are no examples of replacing the state governments of the churches by popular ecclesiastical constitutions. It is astounding that what occurred was the expansion of the government controlled [ecclesiastical organization]. . . . Almost everywhere, autonomous ecclesiastical authorities disappeared as the churches became organs of the state bureaucracy. . . . The introduction of councils and synods in the second half of the century was a case of too little, too late.100

My own analysis follows a similar line. However, the post-1806 reforms did not simply ‘perfect’ the policies of enlightened despotism, as Holborn claims, nor, as I have indicated earlier, was the Prussian state-church of the nineteenth century a return to the Reformation model, as Erich Foerster has suggested. Rather, the more recent historical forces of state centralization, inspired by Napoleon, and the political implications of idealist philosophy contributed to a new doctrine of the state in Prussia, the state as a pedagogic-moral force, a Erziehungsstaat or Kulturstaat.101 This new doctrine helped justify direct, often extensive government control over ecclesiastical aVairs in Prussia. And what was true of churches, as we shall see by proWling Minister of Culture Altenstein, was also true of educational aVairs, universities in particular.

4. ‘A REALM OF THE INTELLIGENCE’: MINISTER A LTEN S T E I N A ND HI S L E G AC Y On 3 November 1817 Prussia’s highest bureaucracy underwent another major reorganization. The Department of Ecclesiastical AVairs and Public Education, 98 Groh, Nineteenth-Century German Protestantism, 22. 99 von Thadden, Prussia, 100. 100 Holborn, ‘German Idealism in the Light of Social History’, in Germany and Europe: Historical Essays by Hajo Holborn, 17–18. 101 Levinger, Enlightened Nationalism, 37.

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established in 1808, joined with a Section of Medical AVairs, became an independent ministry, no longer a subsection of the Ministry of the Interior. Often referred to simply as the Kultusministerium, the new Ministry bore the lengthier oYcial title of the Ministerium der geistlichen, Unterrichts- und Medizinalangelegenheiten (the Ministry of Ecclesiastical, Educational, and Medical AVairs). Friedrich Schuckmann, who had replaced Humboldt in 1810, was passed over to become the director of the Ministry. Instead, Chancellor Hardenberg turned to his old friend and ally, Karl Sigmund Franz von Altenstein. Holding the powerful oYce of Prussian Kultusminister from 1817 until his death in 1840, Altenstein provided important leadership during a time of great signiWcance for German academic and ecclesiastical life.102 Stepping into a magniWed state apparatus and personally committed to an ideology of pedagogic nationalism, Altenstein possessed both a clear sense of purpose and the administrative prudence necessary for his new role. SigniWcantly, he was among the few leading lights of the reform period to survive the political reaction that set in after the Wartburg Festival (1817) and the Karlsbad Decrees (1819). Although he faced conservative opposition from a number of quarters and liberal opposition from others, he commanded the diplomatic and rhetorical skills necessary to operate in unfavourable circumstances and thereby realize many of his objectives, in church aVairs and education.103 ‘He took a lofty view of his new oYce,’ Heinrich von Treitschke once remarked, ‘and laid before himself the task of transforming the Prussian state in Hegel’s sense, in order to make it a realm of the intelligence’ (Reich der BegriVe). Under Altenstein’s leadership, churches were moved away from the ‘realm of the imagination’, Treitschke continued ‘[and] . . . subordinated to the state, the realm of the intelligence. . . . [He] manipulated his system warily in the honorable intention of ensuring that the church should herself feel contented under the benevolent tutelage of the state, and [he] did in fact succeed in circumstances of exceptional diYculty.’104 Whether or not one agrees with Treitschke’s Hegelian interpretation of Altenstein’s leadership, the fact that Altenstein steadily sought to extend the logic of the Kulturstaat in the spheres of education and religion is hard to 102 On the bureaucratic reorganization and Altenstein’s call to become Kultusminister, see Mu¨sebeck, Das preussische Kultusministerium, 33 V., 55 V., 153 V., and Max Lenz, Geschichte der ko¨niglichen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Unversita¨t zu Berlin (Halle, 1910), ii(1). 3–34. 103 Curiously, there is no major biography on Altenstein. Instead, see Mu¨sebeck, Das preussische Kultusministerium, 153 V.; Ella Kuhl, Der erste Kultusminister Karl von Altenstein und seine Leistungen auf den Gebiete der Sozialpa¨dagogik (Cologne, 1924); Werner Vogel, ‘Altenstein’, in Treue and Gru¨nder (eds.), Wissenschaftspolitik in Berlin, 89–105; ADB xxxv. 652 V.; and RGG i. 291–2. 104 Heinrich von Treitschke, Germany in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (New York: AMS, 1969), ii. 509–10.

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deny. Arguably more than any other political Wgure in Vorma¨rz Prussia, Altenstein continued the spirit of the reform period, albeit working closely with his staV, particularly Nicolovius and Su¨vern, who between 1810 and 1817 had quietly kept alive Humboldt’s ethos under the less inspiring leadership of Friedrich Schuckmann. These ministers were joined in 1817 by another kindred spirit, Johannes Schulze (1786–1870), who brought to his oYce a determination and scholarly spirit beWtting the company he had joined.105 Although working in a politically constrained environment after 1817–19, these men helped carry forward the steady scientization and professionalization of Prussian universities, while simultaneously pursuing Erastian measures in church–state relations. Not surprisingly, therefore, the inXuence of the new Kultusministerium on academic theology was considerable.106 During Altenstein’s tenure in oYce several trends became apparent that would only grow as the nineteenth century progressed. First, in fostering scientiWc and professional criteria of excellence in higher education, in lieu of older confessional and collegial ones, the new Ministry assisting in transforming universities into instruments of research and specialization—a development of great consequence for theology in so far as it too sought to be considered a modern university science. Second, the basis for a new relationship between academic theology and the state was adumbrated at this time. To a degree, this basis resembled the symbiosis between university theologians and territorial princes during the early modern era, when the former beneWted from the latter’s support and protection, and the latter from the former’s articulation of the confessional line. However, the new basis, while certainly Protestant, was not rigidly confessional, but rather that of a general intellectualized Protestantism (Kulturprotestantismus as its critics would call it). This became particularly apparent after the founding of the German Empire in 1871 in the ‘public theologies’ of such Wgures as Albrecht Ritschl, Martin Rade, and Adolf von Harnack. The new basis also served as a bulwark of statist interests against various forms of perceived obscurantism (reactionary Lutherans, Catholics, Jews) and irreligious radicals (Social Democrats and Communists).107 Finally, 105 Schulze had studied philosophy and philology at the University of Halle. He had particularly been captivated by F. A. Wolf while attending this scholar’s famous philological seminar. After 1806, Schulze, like many others, became committed to German nationalism under Prussian leadership. On Schulze generally, see Conrad Varrentrapp, Johannes Schulze und das ho¨here preussische Unterrichtswesen in seiner Zeit (Leipzig, 1889), and Rudolf Ko¨pke, ‘Zum Andenken an Dr. J. Schulze’, Zeitschrift fu¨r das Gymnasialwesen 23 (Berlin 1869): 245–56. 106 H. George Anderson, ‘Challenge and Change within German Theological Education in the Nineteenth Century’, CH 39 (March 1970): 44. 107 On this theme, see Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, ‘Protestantische Theologie in der Gesellschaft des Kaiserreich’, in Graf (ed.), ProWle des neuzeitlichen Protestantismus (Gu¨tersloh: Gu¨tersloher Verlagshaus, 1992), ii. 12–117.

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Altenstein’s tenure witnessed signs of a widening rift between (liberal) academic theology and (conservative) ecclesiastical concerns. Although during the so-called Demagogenverfolgung after 1819, Altenstein often acted, of political necessity, on behalf of clerical-conservative interests (as was the case in the dismissal of the theologian de Wette from Berlin in 1819), he nonetheless contributed in his university policies to some of the dynamics that produced tension and mutual suspicion between churchmen and theology professors.108 Partly obscured by the conservative ascendency during Altenstein’s lifetime, this stand-oV between ‘wissenschaftliche Theologie’ and ‘kirchliche Theologie’, as it was often expressed, hardened in the mid- and late-nineteenth century, summed up in Ernst Troelstsch’s remark that a ‘frightful gulf ’ had developed between theological faculties and churches in the course of the nineteenth century.109 Descended from a noble family in Ansbach, Altenstein had studied law and philosophy at the universities of Erlangen, Go¨ttingen, and Jena.110 At the request of Hardenberg, he entered the Prussian ministry and in 1799 moved to Berlin, where he laboured in various oYcial capacities. While in Berlin he met the philosopher Fichte and became an enthusiastic supporter of his philosophy, inspired by Fichte’s high-minded views of the scholarly vocation and its role in national education and also by Fichte’s assertion that human religious advancement was not dependent on the mediation of prescriptive doctrinal formulas or established institutions.111 The political crisis of 1806 provided an opportunity for Altenstein to move to the center of the political stage, bringing with him an idealist vision of a Kulturstaat as the vehicle for German national rejuvenation and Prussia’s political and intellectual modernization. Altenstein expressed this vision in his Riga Memorandum of 1807, a document noteworthy for its grand style imitative of idealism as well as its substance.112 In the memorandum, Altenstein called for the wholesale trans108 The Demagogenverfolgung or ‘persecution of demagogues’ refers to an intense period of political witch-hunts against proponents of liberalism; it began as a reaction to the murder of the playwright August von Kotzebue by the young theology student, Karl Sand. See Nipperdey, Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck, 246 V. On de Wette’s dismissal, see Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, ii (1). 61–100. 109 Ernst Troeltsch, ‘Ru¨ckblick auf ein halbes Jahrhundert der theologischen Wissenschaft’, ZWT 51 (1908): 97. 110 Ansbach became integrated into Prussia only in 1791. 111 Frank Schuurmans, ‘Economic Liberalization, Honour, and Perfectibility: Karl Sigmund Altenstein and the Spiritualization of Liberalism’, GH 16 (1998): 177. On Fichte’s early circle of ¨ ber Fichtes Lehrta¨tigkeit in Berlin von Mitte 1799 bis inXuence in Berlin, see Reinhard Lauth, ‘U Anfang 1805 und seine Zuho¨rerschaft’, Hegel Studien 15 (1980): 9–50. 112 The memorandum is partially reprinted in Mu¨sebeck, Das preussische Kultusministerium, 241–63. On the inXuence of idealist philosophy in general and Fichte in particular on Altenstein, see Eduard Spranger, ‘Altensteins Denkschrift von 1807 und ihre Beziehung zur Philosophie’,

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formation of the state on the basis of the government’s robust promotion of science, art, education, and religion. Among the noblest expressions of humankind, he averred, was ‘genuine science’ (echte Wissenschaft), which along with pure religion should be recognized as ‘the highest idea of the state’. The state should therefore not shrink from its duties of embracing true science and true religion. It could accomplish this by removing obstacles to their expression; in the universities this involved establishing conditions conducive to academic freedom (Lehrfreiheit). In the religious sphere, it meant not prescribing ‘positive’ or ‘literal’ views of religion, but rather emphasizing what he called ‘the essential nature of religion’ (das Wesentliche der Religion). With respect to academic theology, which straddled the educational and religious domains, the principle of freedom also applied: ‘The state must limit the teacher of religion, whether in doctrine or instruction, as little as possible.’ Instead, the religious spirit should be allowed to mix with the modern age, for ‘everything that promotes the progress of spirit (Geist), more or less, leads to the promotion of religion’.113 A paradox lies at the heart of Altenstein’s memorandum, albeit one that helps illumine the Kulturstaat notion and its attempted execution in the early nineteenth century. On the one hand, Altenstein sought to deWne the state as a passive force, meaning that the state should simply place itself in accord with true science and true religion while not interfering with their free expression. On the other hand, the state, conWdent of its powers as a positive moral force, should also directly and actively champion true science and true religion. As Altenstein expressed the matter concerning religion: ‘If the state is assured that its direction is salutary, then it should not fear harm to itself from spreading genuine religiosity; rather, it should be convinced that its own purpose is one with this goal.’ To achieve harmony between the state, science, and religion, Altenstein held, following Fichte, that the state must possess thorough supervisory, regulatory, and Wnancial control over all institutions of education and religion. Furthermore, the state should attend with great care to the selection of government oYcials, university personnel, and clergymen, because these individuals represented the future ‘rudders of the state’. Those who possess skills in and love of Wissenschaft should be eagerly sought out and, once appointed, encouraged through awards, honours, salaries, prestige, and other forms of government-devised incentives, including elevation to nobility (as was the case later with Adolf von Harnack). Religious leaders, Altenstein indicated, were especially vital to the state, but science should FBPG 18 (1906): 107–58. Altenstein memorandum was penned in Riga as a response to the political collapse of Prussia at the hands of Napoleon in 1806. 113 Altenstein, ‘Riga Memorandum’, in Mu¨sebeck, Das preussische Kultusministerium, 242–3, 250–7.

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never be sacriWced for piety: ‘a religious man with an accomplished scientiWc education’ (ein religio¨ser Mann mit vollendeter wissenschaftlicher Bildung) was therefore the ideal choice as a future civil servant.114 In order to nuture future ‘rudders of the state’, education at all levels was of capital importance. What is more, attentiveness to education by the government promised to ameliorate problems caused by those social elements deemed prone to divisive and obscurantist passions (i.e. Catholics, Jews, and sectarian Protestants). While Altenstein supported freedom of conscience and civil rights, he made clear that increased exposure to scientiWc education by such groups would discourage unenlightened religious views and encourage their identiWcation with the state. Altenstein’s reasoning about the Jews on this matter oVers more general insight into his understanding of the relationship between education, religion, and the state: A completely important undertaking is the instruction and education of the Jews. All eVorts to make them less of a liability to the state are worthless if the state refuses to support a considerable aspect of their instruction and education. If the Jew is uneducated, then all arrangements to make him a useful citizen of the state are for naught. . . . The only way to eVect a reform is through the establishment of educational institutions, in which the Jew is so occupied that he cannot corrupt his education through [study of] the Talmud.115

Likewise, he wrote, ‘the most important means of securing the power of the state over the Catholic church is through the improved education of the clergy’.116 A similar reasoning applied to Protestants who insisted too rigidly on doctrinal particularism and/or who pitted the church against the state. A case in point here was that of the Old Lutherans, whom Altenstein accused of promoting a sectarian spirit inimical to the integrity of Prussia as a ‘Protestant State’. While he promoted coercive measures against such ‘sects’ in a number of cases, he felt that education ultimately provided the key to establishing his goal for Protestantism: a ‘uniWed ecclesiastical organism’ under the protection and direction of the state.117 Not surprisingly, Altenstein regarded universities as indispensable for Prussia’s intellectual and religious strength.118 ‘Promoting and developing 114 Altenstein, ‘Riga Memorandum’, in Mu¨sebeck, Das preussische Kultusministerium, 245–57 (emphasis added). Cf. Altenstein’s memorandum of 1837, ‘Den Entwurf eines Regulatives u¨ber die Befa¨higung zu den ho¨heren Aemter der Verwaltung betreVend’, repr. in Hans Joachim Schoeps, ‘Ein Gutachten des Kultusministers Altenstein’, ZP 12 (1966): 259–68. 115 Altenstein, ‘Riga Memorandum,’ in Mu¨sebeck, Das preussische Kultusministerium, 246. 116 Ibid. 284. He wrote of Catholicism in Prussia: ‘The Prussian state is a Protestant state [but] one-third of its subjects are Catholic. The relationship is diYcult’ (281). 117 Mu¨sebeck, Das preussische Kultusministerium, 184. 118 ibid. 177.

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scientiWc life in the universities and through them in the Prussian state and throughout Germany’, wrote his colleague Johannes Schulze, was one of Altenstein’s highest priorities.119 For ‘the actualization of science’ and for more general ‘intellectual development’, Altenstein reasoned, ‘the universities require a thorough reform,’ a task to which the state should apply its utmost energies.120 Altenstein of course shared this view with many others after the crisis of 1806; although it was undoubtedly Fichte who had inXuenced him the most. Indeed, the university stood at the centre of the Kulturstaat idea in the early nineteenth century: the intellectual excellence of a nation was held to Wnd its supreme expression in universities. The state therefore must serve and support its universities, symbols of national unity and intellectual accomplishment, defending the universal imperatives of science and academic freedom against forces of particularism and obscurantism. In return for state protection and succour, universities must fulWl their obligation to honour the state and provide it with scientiWcally trained civil servants. Expressed in the writings occasioned by the founding of the University of Berlin, and also in Altenstein’s memorandum of 1807, this understanding of state–university symbiosis functioned as a social contract of sorts between the university professoriate and the Prussian state through much of the nineteenth century.121 Because of the course of events after 1807, Altenstein did not gain immediate inXuence over educational or religious aVairs, even if some of his ideas were taken up by others.122 Instead, he was asked by Hardenberg in 1808 to serve as the Prussian Wnance minister. The Wnancial crisis of the Prussian state at the time proved to be too much for him to master and he was forced from oYce in 1810, thereafter becoming a provincial governor in Silesia and later a diplomat in post-Napoleonic Paris. The establishment of the Kultusministerium in 1817 and his selection to serve as its chief provided Altenstein with a new window of opportunity to pursue his educational and religious policies on a grand national scale. Forced to operate in a milieu inhospitable to his liberal (if not his statist) proclivities, Altenstein nonetheless used his new post to continue the transformation of the Prussian universities begun under Humboldt’s leadership. The nature of Altenstein’s decisions and actions, by necessity, aVected both theological faculties and the general direction of 119 Johannes Schulze, ‘Beitra¨ge zur Geschichte des Ministeriums der Unterrichtsangelegenheiten von 1818 bis 1840 und zur Charakteristik des verewigten Ministers Freiherrn v. Altenstein’, ibid. 301–2. 120 Altenstein, ‘Riga Memorandum’, ibid. 243–7. 121 R. Steven Turner, ‘The Prussian Universities and the Research Imperative, 1806–1848’, Ph.D diss. (Princeton University, 1972), 429–30. 122 Altenstein, for example, was perhaps the Wrst to suggest that Wilhelm von Humboldt oversee educational reform in Prussia. See Mu¨sebeck, Das preussische Kultusministerium, 51.

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theology in Prussia and, because of Prussia’s inXuence, in other German universities as well. Among his most important concerns, Mu¨sebeck has noted, was ensuring ‘the thorough, theological-scientiWc education of the Protestant clergy’.123 As Altenstein himself expressed it in a memorandum of 1819: The most important thing is the [state’s] care for competent clergy. To this end, one must provide a proWcient education not merely [to produce] a pastor but a theologian (nicht bloß als Seelsorger, sondern als Theologe). A learned education is deeply embedded in the character of Protestantism. It is the surest means of maintaining an able clergyman; only serious intellectual activity keeps one vital and protects against indolence. It is inestimable in promoting the general education of the nation (Volksbildung), important as well in the Wght against Catholicism and the sectarian spirit. It is the surest means against a regrettable development in the Zeitgeist. . . . The modern age has paved the way for this education, although much, much more remains to be done.124

While myriad tasks occupied Altenstein while in oYce, the objective of improving and raising the scholarly standards of theological education never remained far from his sights. Among the Wrst undertakings of the reorganized Kultusministerium under Altenstein’s leadership was the founding of the University of Bonn (1818) in the recently annexed Rhineland. Intended as a westward extension of the spirit of the University of Berlin, the University of Bonn also represented a forceful assertion of Prussian power in a heavily populated and predominantly Catholic region. Schuckmann, Nicolovius, Su¨vern, before Altenstein, had all nurtured high hopes that such an institution would serve as a counterweight to Cologne, a stronghold of Catholic clericalism and antiPrussian sentiment, and as compensation for a number of regional institutions of learning closed during Napoleon’s hegemony. To temper Catholic opinion, Bonn was to be a ‘parity university’ and therefore, like the University of Breslau in Silesia, include both Protestant and Catholic theological faculties. In Wlling out the new faculties with professors, Altenstein pushed the powers of his oYce to their limits, often provoking the criticism of heavyhandedness.125 In outWtting the Catholic theological faculty, he faced considerable diYculty and opposition from the church hierarchy. Nonetheless, due in large part to the acquisition of Georg Hermes (1775–1831), a Catholic dogmatician inXuenced by Kant and Fichte, Bonn showed promise as a centre 123 Mu¨sebeck, Das preussische Kultusministerium, 183. 124 Altenstein, ‘Denkschrift u¨ber den Zusammenhang des Kultusministeriums mit der gesamten Staatsverwaltung’ (May 1819), repr. ibid. 282. 125 Friedrich von Bezold, Geschichte der rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universita¨t von der Gru¨ndung bis zum Jahr 1870 (Bonn, 1920), i. 92–3.

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of liberal Catholic thought—until the untimely death of Hermes in 1831 and the papal condemnation of what had come to be known as ‘Hermesianism’, the attempted marriage of Catholic doctrine and idealist philosophy.126 Appointing to the Protestant theological faculty had its own challenges. Many candidates did not want to move to the Rhineland because of the politically precarious situation there. But eventually Altenstein succeeded in putting together a body of theologians that delicately balanced his own intellectual predilections and the demands of the times, exemplifying robust Wissenschaftlichkeit on the one hand, but also a spirit of moderation and a commitment to the new Protestant Church Union. These latter qualities were especially needful given the rising reactionary political mood occasioned by liberal student agitation among university-based student fraternities (Burschenschaften).127 Among Altenstein’s initial appointments at Bonn, two theologians, Friedrich Lu¨cke (1791–1855) and Karl Immanuel Nitzsch (1787–1868), deserve particular credit for rapidly advancing Bonn’s reputation in the theological world. Born near the city of Magdeburg, Lu¨cke had studied at Go¨ttingen and Halle before coming to Berlin to complete his studies and teach as a Privatdozent. During his time in Berlin, Lu¨cke had developed close friendships with Neander, de Wette, and Schleiermacher, helping the latter two found the short-lived Theologische Zeitschrift around the time of his departure to Bonn in 1818. At Bonn Lu¨cke taught primarily in the Welds of New Testament and church history. In 1819 he helped found a theological seminar at Bonn, modelled on Berlin’s, for ‘the nurture and promotion of theological science’. In 1828, he participated in the founding of another journal, Theologische Studien und Kritiken, which quickly emerged as the leading organ of ‘mediating theology’ (Vermittlungstheologie), a theological school that sought ‘a true living middle ground’, preserving the legacy of traditional Protestantism while embracing scientiWc and historical criticism.128 Descending from a long line of theologians and pastors in Wittenberg, Karl Immanuel Nitzsch was persuaded by Altenstein to join Bonn’s faculty in 1822. 126 The papal bull Dum acerbissimas (26 September 1835) condemned Hermesianism and placed Hermes’s works on the Index. On the career of Hermes and on ‘Hermesianism’, see RGG iii. 262–4, and ODCC 761. Hermes received his theological doctorate from the Prussian university of Breslau. 127 On the student movement and the volatile political climate around the time of the founding of the University of Bonn, see George S. Williamson, ‘What Killed August von Kotzebue?: The Temptations of Virtue and the Political Theology of German Nationalism, 1789–1819’, JMH 72 (December 2000): 890–943. 128 Alf Christophersen, Friedrich Lu¨cke (1791–1855) (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999), i. 121 V., 159 V. In 1827 Lu¨cke accepted an oVer from the University of Go¨ttingen, where he Wnished his career.

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Nitzsch had studied and brieXy taught at the University of Wittenberg before its closure in 1813; he received his doctorate in theology from Berlin. After the reopening of Wittenberg as a seminary in 1817,129 he taught and pastored there until receiving the call to Bonn, where Altenstein asked him to teach dogmatics and practical theology and to lead the academic worship services. Similar to Lu¨cke in some respects, Nitzsch became a key supporter and activist on behalf of the Prussian Church Union and a leading representative of Vermittlungstheologie, writing one of its deWnitive theological expressions in his System der christlichen Lehre (1829).130 Because of his general outlook and theological emphases, he became known to many as ‘the Schleiermacher of the Rhineland’. He would return to teach at Berlin in 1847.131 Joining Lu¨cke and Nitzsch on the theological faculty were three others: Johann Christian Wilhelm Augusti, formerly of the University of Breslau; Karl Ludwig Gieseler, once a pupil at Halle; and Karl Heinrich Sack, an erstwhile student at Go¨ttingen and another devotee of Schleiermacher. Together these men made up an impressive new faculty, combining Lutheran and Reformed, conservative and liberal elements into a moderate but intellectually vibrant mix. With the exception of Augusti, it was a relatively young group. The majority had been inXuenced by Berlin’s theological faculty, by Schleiermacher in particular. The reputation of Bonn’s Protestant theological faculty by the 1830s as a bastion of theological mediation, critical inquiry, and commitment to the Prussian Church Union bears witness to Altenstein’s savvy ‘Berufungspolitik’, his ability to employ the power and purse-strings of his oYce in calling professors.132 Bonn’s faculty, one scholar has summed up, ‘reXected the wish of the government to have men of a conciliatory and cooperative spirit in the Rhineland and Westphalia and thus facilitate the incorporation of those areas into the Prussian state after 1815’.133 Filling out Bonn’s faculty was of course not all that occupied Altenstein after 1817. An eVort to bring the philosopher Hegel to Berlin to assume Fichte’s former chair was another major and, in hindsight, consequential endeavour. The success of this eVort, one hardly need underscore, carried enormous implications for the theological and intellectual worlds in Germany and far beyond, for a prestigious chair in the Prussian capital provided Hegel with a position of academic authority with few rivals throughout Europe. 129 On the transition of Wittenberg from university to seminary, see Otto Debelius, Das ko¨nigliche Predigerseminar zu Wittenberg, 1817–1917 (Berlin, 1917). 130 RGG iv. 1499–500. 131 See Willibald Beyschlag, Carl Immanuel Nitzsch: Eine Lichtgestalt der neueren deutschevangelichen Kirchengeschichte, 2nd edn. (Berlin, 1882), 182 V. 132 Even so, there were many contingencies involved in the early stages of selection. For details, see von Bezold, Geschichte der rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universita¨t, i. 93–117. 133 Bigler, The Politics of German Protestantism, 122.

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Hegel’s inXuence on the Tu¨bingen School in biblical criticism of the midnineteenth century, and on Left Hegelianism, which attracted the attention of the young Karl Marx, are but two well-known examples of Hegel’s farreaching intellectual potency. Since 1814, Fichte’s chair at Berlin had remained conspicuously vacant. Shortly after assuming oYce, Altenstein informed the king of the negative implications of this state of aVairs. ‘Because every scientiWc education, to some degree, requires a Wrm philosophical basis,’ he wrote, ‘the occupation of this academic chair is not only highly important for the entire university, but also of decisive inXuence for its reputation both in the nation and abroad.’134 With the king’s approval, on 26 December 1817, Altenstein wrote to Hegel, who had only recently accepted a position at the University of Heidelberg. OVering to double his present salary, Altenstein sought to persuade Hegel that only a chair in the Prussian capital would truly accord with his intellectual signiWcance. ‘You yourself have still greater responsibilities for Wissenschaft, for which a more comprehensive and more important sphere of inXuence opens itself here. In this regard, you know what Berlin can provide for you.’135 In January of 1818 Hegel accepted the oVer and his legendary tenure at Berlin began, during which students from across Germany and Europe came with quasi-religious enthusiasm to hear lectures from ‘the Master’.136 Whether Hegel can be regarded as ‘the Prussian state philosopher’, as some have suggested, during this time is a matter of uncertainty that still invites debate.137 What is perhaps more certain is the fact that Altenstein saw in Hegel the intellectual embodiment of at least some of his own aspirations for the Prussian state as he had expressed them in his 1807 Riga Memorandum. For Altenstein and no less for his colleague Johannes Schulze, Hegel represented a Fichte redivivus, a living intellectual titan, educating the nation by reconciling Christianity with modern scientiWc consciousness and balancing political liberalism with the obligations of power—something Prussia felt acutely after 1815. In this light, it is perhaps less important to consider how Hegel understood his own philosophy vis-a`-vis the Prussian state than how the state understood his philosophy, which for Altenstein and Schulze amounted to an intellectual magisterium of the highest order, carrying implications for the entirety of human knowledge, not least for theological study and scholarship. 134 See Altenstein’s letter to the king in Lenz, Unversita¨t Berlin, iv. 334. 135 Quoted ibid. 333. 136 See Gu¨nther Nicolin (ed.), Hegel in Berichten seiner Zeitgenossen (Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1970). 137 See Horst Althaus, Hegel: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Michael Tarsh (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 155–66.

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This fact was not lost on Schleiermacher, who often worried that Altenstein had accorded an importance to the ‘Hegelian Party,’ as he derogatively put it, that would ultimately prove deleterious for theology. Schleiermacher’s view was based on Altenstein’s warm support of his colleague Marheineke, an enthusiast for Hegel, and by the support given to the young Hegelian upstart, Bruno Bauer, who had matriculated in Berlin’s theological faculty in 1828.138 What is more, it would have certainly galled Schleiermacher had he known that upon his death Altenstein and Schulze attempted to Wll his chair with the Tu¨bingen theologian and biblical critic Ferdinand Christian Baur because the ministers perceived Baur a worthy legatee not of Schleiermacher, but of Hegel!139 Schleiermacher was not alone in worrying about Altenstein’s fondness for Hegel; like-minded liberals, such as the jurist Friedrich Karl von Savigny, worried too, while conservatives (with good reason) doubted Hegel’s religious orthodoxy. In the Wnal analysis, Altenstein seems to have interpreted Hegel’s thought—at least what he understood of it—as an elevated expression of his own sentiment from the reform era, a non-credal Protestant moral and intellectual progressivism, nourishing the state and nourished by it. Perhaps Goethe divined the matter accurately, when, upon hearing of Hegel’s appointment, laconically averred: ‘Minister Altenstein would seem to want to provide himself with a learned bodyguard.’140 Although of considerable importance, Hegel’s appointment to Berlin did not constitute Altenstein’s most far-reaching contribution to Prussia’s university system. Rather, this contribution came in the form of his deliberate eVorts, spearheaded in close collaboration with Johannes Schulze, to expand opportunities and incentives for scholars to develop individual scientiWc expertise, the sine qua non of the modern research university. While the lion’s share of Altenstein and Schulze’s attention in this respect focused on the philosophical faculty, which witnessed increased growth and specialization at this time, their eVorts had implications for the higher faculties as well. Working cautiously in a politically reactionary period, Altenstein and Schulze managed to lay the institutional groundwork for a research ethos and a dynamic conception of professorial scholarship, which established the conditions of possibility that, in the course of the nineteenth century, helped the German university system rise to the heights of international recognition. 138 Schleiermacher regularly conWded to his friend J. C. Gaß in Breslau his misgivings about Hegel and Altenstein. ‘Ich bin mit Altenstein’, Schleiermacher wrote, ‘in gar keiner Verbindung. Er sucht mich nicht auf, und ich werde mich gewiß nicht an ihn andra¨ngen.’ See W. Gaß (ed.), Schleiermachers Briefwechsel mit J. Chr. Gaß, 150, 209. 139 Eventually the appointment of Baur did not work out and the theologian August Twesten was selected instead. See Walter Elliger, 150 Jahre Theologische Fakulta¨t Berlin (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1960), 29 V. 140 Goethe’s letter of 1 May 1818 to Sulpiz Boissere´e; quoted in Althaus, Hegel, 148.

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Increased funding for higher education, if modest, served as the backbone of the Kultusministerium’s eVorts. ‘A state like Prussia ought not and cannot lack the means to this purpose of expanding higher education,’ Altenstein wrote his superior Hardenberg in 1818, requesting a budget of 300,000 thaler for his Ministry. ‘A rigorous [Wnancial] eVort will be rewarded more than in any other area. The intellectual [sphere] cannot be too highly valued. It is the basis of all that on which the strength of the state can eternally rest.’141 Statistical Wgures from the next few decades indicate that Altenstein’s plea was heard, even if Altenstein himself often complained that his Ministry did not receive enough support. In 1820 Prussia’s total government outlay for universities stood at 396,019 thaler. By 1835 the amount had risen to 451,175, and by 1853 to 580,345 thaler. For the University of Berlin, the budget stood at 80,011 thaler in 1820. This increased by 24.6 per cent to 99,721 thaler by the end of Altenstein’s administration in 1840. By 1850 it had grown to 171,460 thaler or 114 per cent. Although growth was often unsteady, declining for a period in the 1830s and not aVecting all universities equally, the broader patterns suggest a sustained commitment by the Prussian government to the upkeep and expansion of its university system. Indices of growth became more pronounced in the late nineteenth century, reXecting the government’s response to the dynamics of population growth, industrialization, and the pace of scientiWc and technological developments. Perhaps more important though was how the money was spent. Altenstein and Schulze concentrated their eVorts on expanding the professoriate, which grew in Prussia by 147 per cent between 1800 and 1834, or from 195 to 482 professors. Although growth tapered oV in the 1830s, it still grew at a rate of 10 per cent, from a teaching staV of 482 in 1834 to one of 531 in 1853. This growth is all the more impressive when one considers that student enrolment declined by almost 20 per cent during the same period. Between 1800 and 1853, 131 new full professorships (Ordinarien) were created. Since many of these posts indicated the government’s recognition of a new academic Weld, this may be taken as a harbinger of disciplinary diVerentiation and specialization that became more pronounced after 1850.142 Equally revealing is the fact that the preponderance of growth relative to student enrolment occurred in the philosophical and medical faculties. Following Kant, Fichte, and others, Altenstein believed that the philosophical faculty represented the true nerve centre of the modern university, and with the faculty of medicine it constituted the logical arena of expansion for the ‘natural sciences,’ which began to 141 Quoted in Varrentrapp, Johannes Schulze und das ho¨here preussische Unterrichtswesen in seiner Zeit, 279. 142 The Wgures are taken from Turner, ‘Prussian Universities’, 442 V.

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gain ground on humanistic studies by the 1830s.143 At the University of Berlin, for example, the number of full professorships in the philosophical and medical faculties grew by 187 per cent and 50 per cent respectively between 1820 and 1840, far exceeding the increase in student enrolment in these faculties (113% and 21.5% respectively). Exactly the opposite took place in the faculties of theology and law, where student increases between 1820 and 1840 grew by 146 per cent and 81 per cent while the number of full professorships grew by 66 per cent in theology and remained static in law.144 Since the philosophical and medical faculties witnessed more specialization, these Wgures suggest that the development of the discipline and the promise of scientiWc progress that these Welds oVered were becoming important criteria of faculty expansion. In other words, the Prussian state willingly Wnanced specializing, progressive Welds, irrespective of actual student demand. This trend too would continue in the latter half of the nineteenth century as disciplines such as philology, history, physics, chemistry, and various theoretical and clinical branches of medicine underwent the greatest enlargement and diVerentiation, even as their student enrolment increases were smaller in relative terms.145 One hardly need underscore that these trends contributed greatly to theological faculty’s diminished clout within the overall structure of the university. Enabled by increased state expenditure on higher education, Altenstein and Schulze sought to appoint and promote ‘star’ scholars, while increasing the pressures on the entire professoriate to publish serious scholarly works. Consistent with his belief that appropriate appointments provided the key to a university’s success, and uninhibitedly using his appointive powers, Altenstein brought the best and brightest to Prussian universities, regularly seeking them out beyond Prussia’s borders. Schulze opined that professorial appointments ‘are the Wrst and most diYcult task in the German university’.146 Besides Hegel, the historian Leopold von Ranke, the jurist F. K. von Savigny, the physiologist Johannes Mu¨ller, among many other luminaries, were lured to teach in Prussia’s universities.147 Altenstein and Schulze dimin143 It is relevant to note that Altenstein had a semi-professional interest in botany and even published material in scientiWc journals. 144 Turner, ‘Prussian Universities’, 444–5 and Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, iii. 493–7. 145 See Christian von Ferber, Die Entwicklung des Lehrko¨rpers der deutschen Universita¨ten und Hochschulen, 1864–1954 (Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1956), 57–60. 146 Quoted inVarrentrapp, Johannes Schulze und das ho¨here preussische Unterrichtswesen in seiner Zeit, 486. 147 See the list of prominent professorial appointments provided in Schulze, ‘Beitra¨ge zur Geschichte des Ministeriums der Unterrichtsangelegenheiten von 1818 bis 1840 und zur Charakteristik des verewigten Ministers Freiherrn v. Altenstein’, in Mu¨sebeck, Das preussische Kultusministerium, 302 f.

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ished the importance of fraternal or collegial concerns (how well an individual would Wt with his colleagues or with a particular university’s ethos) and turned instead to disciplinary criteria in making decisions about whom to appoint. In part, this was the natural consequence of the centralization of higher education during the reform era. Unlike local faculties or curators in the premodern university, the Kultusministerium had little reason to attach great importance to collegial values that locally determined appointments had stressed. Instead, the Ministry resorted to the publications and scholarly reputation of a given professor or the promise of a newcomer based on peer evaluation. In emphasizing scholarly renown and academic plaudits, however, the Ministry gave precedence to purely wissenschaftlich criteria in making academic appointments and it strengthened the role of disciplinary over collegial values in determining the merit of a particular candidate.148 This approach to making appointments gained ground in theological faculties too. However, in the reactionary and politically volatile climate after 1819 theological appointments often generated greater controversy than those in other Welds. Openings in theological faculties were therefore closely monitored and candidates heavily scrutinized. Such scrutiny had many sources from academic and ecclesiastical ranks, but it was particularly acute from a group of powerful pietist aristocrats who came to exert inXuence over the royal court in the 1820s and 1830s, a period often referred to as the ‘Awakening’ or Erweckungsbewegung because it witnessed a resurgence of pietist religiosity.149 Thus despite the powers of his oYce, Altenstein did not have a completely free hand in appointing theologians. Even so, with great circumspection, he and his colleagues worked to elevate the role of scientiWc and disciplinary criteria in appointing and promoting theology professors, downplaying if not eliminating collegial and doctrinal considerations.150 As indicated earlier, Altenstein gave warm support to Hegelian theologians, including Philipp Marheineke, Wilhelm Vatke, Ferdinand Benary, and Bruno Bauer, despite criticisms from both liberal and conservative camps that Hegelianism only obfuscated and/or vitiated Christian theology. When pressed by Neander about his apparent predilection for Hegelians, Altenstein 148 Turner, ‘Prussian Universities’, 446 V., and Timothy Lenoir, ‘Revolution from Above: The Role of the State in Creating the German Research System, 1810–1910’, American Economic Review 88 (1998): 22–3. 149 On the Erweckungsbewegung in Prussia, see RGG ii. 621–9. The inXuence of pietist aristocrats at this time is spelled out clearly in Bigler, The Politics of German Protestantism, 125–55. Cf. Graf, ‘Protestantische Theologie und die Formierung der bu¨rgerlichen Gesellschaft’, in Graf (ed.), ProWle des neuzeitlichen Protestantismus, i. 11 V. 150 Schulze, ‘Beitra¨ge zur Geschichte des Ministeriums der Unterrichtsangelegenheiten von 1818 bis 1840 und zur Charakteristik des verewigten Ministers Freiherrn v. Altenstein’, in Mu¨sebeck, Das preussische Kultusministerium, 301–2.

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oVered what amounted to a philosophy of appointing to theology, noting that his responsibility was not to promote a particular point of view but to provide ‘support for a genuine scientiWc freedom within the foundations on which the Protestant church in the state is based’. Johannes Schulze added that the Ministry oVered ‘equal support’ for ‘all genuinely pious and scientiWc views’.151 To a considerable degree, Altenstein’s record of selection bears out this claim; he supported ‘a parity of theological directions’, according to one scholar, even if scientiWc accomplishment remained the guiding principle. As indicated, he placed a number of Schleiermacher’s disciples—Lu¨cke, Nitzsch, Sack—on Bonn’s new theological faculty after 1818. He supported pietists too, so long as they demonstrated suYcient scholarly rigour, promoting, for example, the career of F. A. G. Tholuck, who emerged as Germany’s leading pietist theologian during the mid-nineteenth century. A lecturer at Berlin since 1823, Tholuck was transferred to Halle by Altenstein in 1826 to take the edge oV the rationalist ethos there, represented by the theologians J. A. Wegscheider and F. W. Gesenius, both of whom loudly but unsuccessfully protested Tholuck’s appointment—a view seconded by the university’s rector, the ageing theologian A. H. Niemeyer.152 Altenstein’s greatest frustrations involved dealing with candidates backed by those powerful conservative aristocrats inXuenced by the resurgent pietism.153 He lobbied the king unsuccessfully, for example, against the appointment of the conservative August Hahn to the University of Ko¨nigsberg. He questioned the appointment of Otto von Gerlach as a lecturer at Berlin in 1829 on the grounds that piety alone should not qualify a man for an academic position and that the university should uphold the highest scholarly standards. Prior to Gerlach’s appointment, Altenstein suVered a major setback with the appointment of E. W. Hengstenberg to Wll de Wette’s former chair on Berlin’s theological faculty. Again, this was a case of behind-thescences support by inXuential pietist aristocrats and their allies, who saw in the young Hengstenberg a gifted champion of the conservative cause. While Altenstein consented to the appointment, he long considered Hengstenberg a source of grief for his outspoken political views and ‘unwissenschaftlich’ tendencies.154 When Hengstenberg founded the conservative Evangelische 151 For the quotations and the context of this exchange, see Varrentrapp, Johannes Schulze und das ho¨here preussische Unterrichtswesen in seiner Zeit, 474–5, and Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, ii (1). 348 V. (emphasis added). 152 Bigler, The Politics of German Protestantism, 100. See Niemeyer’s letter of protest in Leopold Witte, Das Leben D. Friedrich August Gotttreu Tholucks (Bielefeld, 1884), i. 419–23. 153 Robert M. Berdahl, The Politics of the Prussian Nobility: The Development of a Conservative Ideology, 1770–1848 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 249. 154 See Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, ii (1). 313 V.

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Kirchenzeitung in 1827, Altenstein admonished him, requesting that the new journal resist engaging in personal polemics and promote ‘a spirit of judicious scholarship’.155 The tercentennial celebration of the Augsburg Confession in 1830 occasioned one of the most revealing episodes in Altenstein’s career vis-a`-vis his relationship to Prussia’s theological faculties. In that year Hengstenberg’s Evangelische Kirchenzeitung, contrary to Altenstein’s wishes, did in fact engage in personal polemics. Several articles penned by the conservative jurist, Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach (1795–1877), condemned and requested the dismissal of Halle’s rationalist theologians Wegscheider and Gesenius on the grounds that their lectures contradicted the Augsburg Confession. As Gerlach put it, these men teach ‘as erroneous what the Protestant church in her confessional texts recognizes as truth’ and thereby they commit ‘decisive inWdelity to the fundamental doctrines and to the miracles in Scripture’. Hengstenberg and Gerlach found it scandalous, moreover, that Halle, the former seat of August Hermann Franke, was promoting rationalist doctrines to what then constituted the largest body of theological students in Germany.156 The condemnation by the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung caused an immediate sensation that became the talk of clergy and professors throughout Germany. It brought to a head the crucial issue of how one should deWne the relationship between academic freedom and acceptable doctrine, as well as how the state should act in monitoring theological positions within the universities. When the matter was brought before the king, he pointedly asked ‘whether for theologians [there are] no limits to their academic freedom?’ In a reply, Altenstein equivocated: he recognized the king’s legitimate concern about university theology, especially given its inXuence on church life, but he nonetheless defended the right of Wegscheider and Gesenius to express their views. ‘A suitable mixture of diVerent theological directions’ at the universities, Altenstein opined, was not necessarily a bad thing, because it allowed young men to arrive at ‘independent judgment’ based on ‘thorough and complete knowledge’.157 In a memorandum of 10 August 1830 he elaborated his point, expressing the view that the state should not prematurely intervene in dogmatic discussions, but rather allow open debate to be carried out among theologians; for this was the very purpose of ‘the scientiWc 155 Varrentrapp, Johannes Schulze und das ho¨here preussische Unterrichtswesen in seiner Zeit, 476. 156 GStA PK Rep. 76 va. Sekt. 8 Tit. 7 Nr. 6. The 1830 EKZ article, ‘Rationalismus auf der Universita¨t Halle’, is repr. in Johannes Bachmann, Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg. Sein Leben und Wirken nach gedruckten und ungedruckten Quellen (Berlin, 1880), ii. 183 V. 157 Varrentrapp, Johannes Schulze und das ho¨here preussische Unterrichtswesen in seiner Zeit, 477.

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treatment of theology within the universities’, as he phrased it. Furthermore, in words reminiscent of Schleiermacher’s, Altenstein made clear that ‘it cannot be an issue of whether students are provided with the Christian faith for the Wrst time at the university. That is not the purpose of the university. Rather, it is a matter of them obtaining there a scientiWc, theological education, which service to the church demands.’158 While the king did not fully accept Altenstein’s reasoning and even had a memorandum issued requiring that in the future theology professors were expected to adhere to the Augsburg Confession, Altenstein did in fact persuade the king not to dismiss Wegscheider and Gesenius, as the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung had called for.159 Although this might appear only a minor victory for Altenstein, it holds signiWcance for at least two reasons. First, in an era of reaction, and speaking from the highest echelons of the government, Altenstein successfully articulated the principle that academic freedom applied to theologians as well as other members of the university. This position quietly gained strength in the years to come, gaining the protection of law in Prussia’s constitution of 1850: ‘Die Wissenschaft und ihre Lehre ist frei’ (§20). Second, and equally signiWcant, Altenstein drew a sharp distinction between the vocation of the university and that of the church, contending that the former had a mandate to handle articles of belief ‘purely as a matter of scientiWc inquiry’ (bloß als wissenschaftliche Aufgabe) and not as an ‘ascertainment of dogma in the church’ (Feststellung des Dogma in der Kirche).160 With these words, Altenstein gave expression to an emerging reality in academic life and made clear the contours of a debate that would preoccupy the academic and ecclesiastical communities in the decades to come.161 His

158 See Altenstein, ‘Einige Betrachtungen u¨ber den Zustand der evang. Kirche in dem Preuß. Staate, in Beziehung auf Rechtgla¨ubigkeit der Geistlichen und vorzu¨glich u¨ber die wegen der Bildung dieser Geistlichen auf den Universita¨ten angeregten Bedenklichkeiten (10 August 1830)’, repr. (with the king’s marginal notes) in Foerster, Die Entstehung der preussischen Landeskirche, ii. 491, 495–6. The original document is located at GStA PK VI NL Altenstein A VIa Nr. 18. 159 On the king’s response to Altenstein, see the memoranda reprinted in Bachmann, Hengstenberg (Gu¨tersloh, 1880), ii. 230 V. Cf. Huber and Huber (eds.), Kirche und Staat, i. 583–5. 160 Altenstein, ‘Einige Betrachtungen. . . .’, in Foerster, Die Entstehung der preussischen Landeskirche, ii. 487–8. 161 It was not just Altenstein that sought to defend Wegscheider and Gesenius; several rationalist theologians also came to their aid; e.g. see Daniel von Coelln and David Schulze, ¨ ber die theologische Lehrfreiheit auf den evangelischen Universita¨ten und deren Beschra¨nkung U durch symbolische Bu¨cher (Breslau, 1830). Coelln and Schulze, who taught at Breslau, made the interesting case that after the Church Union of 1817 it was unclear what confessional documents were still binding on university theologians. Without such clarity, the principle of academic freedom should hold sway and theologians’ views should not be restricted.

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more conservative successor, Minister Friedrich Eichhorn (1779–1856), paid indirect tribute to Altenstein’s inXuence, when in 1847 he circulated a memorandum to leading Prussian theologians, reminding them of their obligations to the church. ‘Many teachers of theology’, Eichhorn wrote, ‘now seem . . . to hold the opinion that it is their task to engage in theological science without consideration of the interests of the church.’162 The eVorts of Altenstein and Schulze to improve the quality and quantity of scholarly production in the universities shaped institutional structures and incentives for intellectual exertion that impacted the development of academic theology. Put diVerently, the Prussian Kultusministerium in the 1820s and 1830s successfully promoted policies that fostered among professors (of all faculties) what Max Weber later referred to as an ‘inward calling for science’ that attached importance to a ‘progress that goes on ad inWnitum’.163 To these ends, the Ministry recognized the importance of competition, especially among young, ambitious scholars. Thus, they allowed for a degree of intentional overcrowding at the junior professorial level—that is, among the lecturers (Privatdozenten) and extraordinary professors (Extraordinarien)—in the hope that this would give rise to a competitive, meritocratic ethos conducive to the production of Wrst-rate scholarship. Faced with a large pool of peers eager for advancement and promotion to the rank of full professorship (Ordinarien), young scholars were compelled to demonstrate scholarly excellence, originality, and productivity. From the state’s standpoint, this policy also made Wnancial sense, for the pay scale at the junior level was far below that for full professorships. The rank of Privatdozenten in fact entailed no salary whatsoever since these instructors were normally remunerated exclusively from fees by students who attended their courses. Statistical evidence from the early nineteenth century attests to the Ministry’s tactic. An incremental rise took place in the number of Privatdozenten and extraordinary professorships, measured both in absolute numbers and in the ratio of those at the junior rank to full professorships. Prussia led the way in this shift, but it was mirrored in other German states as well. Thus, for example, while in 1796 the ratio of ordinary to extraordinary professors was 100 to 37, it had shifted to 100 to 90 by 1864: extraordinary professors, in short, were coming close to overtaking full professorships in terms of absolute numbers. The growth of Privatdozenten as a percentage of all university faculty rivalled that of extraordinary professors; by 1864 this rank of lecturer 162 Memorandum of 8 April 1847; GStA PK I Rep. 76 Sekt. 1 Tit. 3 Nr. 7 Bd. I. On Eichhorn, see Reinhard Lu¨dicke, Die preußischen Kultusminister und ihre Beamten im ersten Jahrhundert des Ministeriums, 1817–1917 (Stuttgart, 1918), 4–5. 163 Max Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’, in Gerth and Mills (eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, 129 V.

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constituted roughly 20 per cent of a university’s teaching staV, having arisen from negligible Wgures earlier in the century.164 The University of Berlin’s theological faculty between 1820 and 1840 conWrms more general trends. After de Wette’s dismissal from the faculty in 1819, there were three full professorships in a teaching staV of Wve. In 1840 the staV had grown to eleven with Wve full professorships, thus a 120 per cent increase at the junior level, compared to 66 per cent at the level of full professorship.165 Prussia’s faculty policy entailed two consequential side eVects: greater specialization and the raising of standards for promotion. In attracting students, junior professors were forced to compete directly with more established seniors, who often commanded large student followings and who monopolized many of the introductory and standard courses. Thus, to attract students, extraordinary professors and lecturers often turned to less conventional, advanced, or more narrowly focused topics. In turn, senior faculty were forced to match the wits of ambitious junior faculty or else face an exodus of students.166 This highly competitive climate often prompted pedagogical diVerentiation, which emerged, alongside scholarly specialization, as one of the deWning characteristics of the research-oriented university.167 Because of the growing inXux of eager, young scholars in the 1820s and 1830s, senior faculty often complained to the government that certain limits should be set on their admission. Friction between scholars of diVerent generations, in turn, led to a tug-of-war between the faculties and the state over policies governing the entrance of younger faculty. SigniWcantly, Altenstein’s ministry resisted eVorts by the faculty to set limits arbitrarily, judging such requests anachronistic guild-like behaviour that worked against competition and academic freedom. For example, when Berlin’s philosophical faculty requested in 1829 that a limitation be placed on the number Privatdozenten at the university, Schulze replied that the Ministry cannot agree with the proposal of the faculty to limit the number of Privatdozenten. . . . The aim sought by the faculty . . . can be more Wttingly realized if the faculty raises in an appropriate manner the requirements placed on those who

164 See Alexander Busch, Geschichte des Privatdozenten (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1959), 75 V.; Charles E. McClelland, State, Society, and University in Germany, 1700–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 166–8; and Turner, ‘Prussian Universities’, 461–70. On the broader demographic context and on the political and social ramiWcations of Prussia’s policies toward its university faculty, see Lenore O’Boyle, ‘The Problem of an Excess of Educated Men in Western Europe, 1815–1850’, JMH 42 (1970): 471–95. 165 Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, iii. 490. 166 A classic, if unsuccessful, case of a junior lecturer challenging a senior faculty occurred when the young Arthur Schopenhauer scheduled his lectures at the same hour as Hegel’s. 167 Turner, ‘Prussian Universities’, 466.

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announce themselves for Habilitation, and admits no one as a Privatdozent who has not completely satisWed those requirements in an outstanding manner.168

A similar edict was sent to Berlin’s medical faculty in 1833 and to the University of Bonn in 1838, making clear the government’s intention of linking the reduction of Privatdozenten to the raising of overall faculty standards, especially regarding scholarship. While the inXux of Privatdozenten did not decrease as signiWcantly as some senior faculty would have liked, the requirements for Habilitation became increasingly demanding from roughly the 1820s onward, as Altenstein and Schulze enforced and extended the stringent requirements for the venia legendi (the oYcial right to teach) laid down in Berlin’s statutes of 1817.169 One index for this was the incremental rise in the age of Habilitation and the widening gap between the year of entering the university as a student and that of entering the faculty as a lecturer.170 During Altenstein’s tenure it was not uncommon for an aspiring scholar to receive the venia legendi only in his thirties, and even at this late age a secure academic appointment was by no means guaranteed. The strong emphasis on producing ‘an independent scholarly accomplishment’ for Habilitation became expected in practically every Prussian university by the middle of the nineteenth century. While at Wrst the dissertation often served as evidence of one’s scholarly potential, the necessity of a second work—later called a Habilitationsschrift—gradually assumed greater importance. The statutes of Berlin’s theological faculty from 1838, for example, indicate that the dissertation alone was insuYcient evidence of scholarly production; an additional learned treatise was required. In a decree of 1845 the Kultusministerium made such a treatise obligatory for all who desired to teach and obtain advancement in the theological faculty.171 These developments occurred too in other faculties, earlier in the case of the philosophical faculty. In sum, the process of Habilitation was transformed into a kind of second academic degree, raising overall scholarly standards and socializing the aspiring professor into a lifelong pattern of intense and

168 Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Koch (ed.), Die preussischen Universita¨ten. Eine Sammlung der Verordnungen, welche die Verfassung und Verwaltung dieser Anstalten betreVen (Berlin, 1840), iii. 9–10; quoted in Turner, ‘Prussian Universities’, 462 (trans. modiWed). 169 On the requirements of Habilitation in Berlin’s statutes, see Koch (ed.), Die preussischen Universita¨ten, iii. 41 V. On the pivotal importance of Berlin’s statutes for transforming the requirements of the venia legendi and hence the role of Privatdozenten in the universities, see Busch, Geschichte des Privatdozenten, 20–3. 170 McClelland, State, Society, and University, 168. 171 See ‘Die Statuten der theologischen Fakulta¨t’, in D. Daude (ed.), Die ko¨nigl. FriedrichWilhelms-Universita¨t zu Berlin: Systematische Zusammenstellung der fu¨r dieselbe bestehenden gesetzlichen, statutarischen und regelmentarischen Bestimmungen (Berlin, 1887), 62.

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sustained wissenschaftlich activity—behaviour in his maturity he came to expect from his younger colleagues. Altenstein and Schulze took particular pride in appointing and advancing topnotch scholars. No one shall be made professor, Schulze was fond of saying, ‘[until] he has written a solid book, a work which one can display and reap honour from, a work one can stand on’.172 Once a professor was appointed, a semi-oYcial policy of state favouritism came into play: Wnancial support, awards, and honours were regularly meted out to those cultivating high scholarly proWles and engaged in ambitious research projects. While Altenstein was more personally inclined to support work in humanistic and natural scientiWc Welds, the Ministry also supported scholarship by theologians. A noteworthy case in point was the Corpus Reformatorum, a large collection of the works of Philip Melanchthon, edited by the theologian Karl Gottlieb Bretschneider (1776–1848).173 Presumably, the choice of Melanchthon was not incidental, as this sixteeenth-century university reformer, the ‘teacher of Germany’, symbolized the scholarly ethos and spirit of theological moderation that the Ministry hoped to encourage. Of course, not everyone was pleased with Altenstein and Schulze’s approach to theology and their criteria for making appointments in theological faculties. Those attentive to more traditionalist dimensions of Christianity felt that the Ministry’s high regard for Wissenschaft was a mixed blessing for theology, bringing gains in some respects, losses in others. A pious visitor to Prussia in the 1830s noted with some alarm that ‘a [scholarly] diligence which can know neither remission nor rest’ resulted from ‘the direct power of the government over all places of honor [in the universities]’.174 A number of pietist aristocrats also voiced concerns that Altenstein’s university policies lacked suYcient regard for the piety and orthodoxy of candidates; on these grounds, some even sought Altenstein’s expulsion from his oYce, albeit unsuccessfully.175 After Altenstein’s death, an article on him by the pietist theologian Tholuck appeared in J. J. Herzog’s Realencyclopa¨die, in which Tholuck opined that all that mattered for Altenstein was ‘scientiWc excellence irrespective of theological colour or party’.176 172 Quoted in Varrentrapp, Johannes Schulze und das ho¨here preussische Unterrichtswesen in seiner Zeit, 488. 173 A brief list of some of the major scholarly undertakings supported by Altenstein’s Ministry appears in Schulze, ‘Beitra¨ge zur Geschichte des Ministeriums der Unterrichtsangelegenheiten von 1818 bis 1840 und zur Charakteristik des verewigten Ministers Freiherrn v. Altenstein’, in Mu¨sebeck, Das preussische Kultusministerium, 305. 174 Edward Robinson, ‘Theological Education in Germany’, Biblical Repository 1 (January 1831): 45. 175 Bigler, The Politics of German Protestantism, 76 V. 176 Tholuck, ‘Altenstein’, in Realencylopa¨die fu¨r protestantische Theologie und Kirche, i. (1868): 318.

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To see that Prussia acquired its share of scientiWcally prominent scholars, Altenstein’s Ministry placed special signiWcance on the founding and funding of seminars and institutes. Designed to encourage focused, methodologically rigorous research on various topics, these institutions (spanning various Welds) became one of the signature features of Altenstein’s tenure and the special project of his aide, Schulze, who himself had studied in F. A. Wolf ’s famous philological seminar at Halle. Abbetted by Schulze’s inXuence, the critical, philological method associated with Wolf became the intellectual cornerstone of many of these institutions, at least for those operating in humanistic Welds of inquiry. Upon Altenstein assuming oYce in 1817, several well-established philological seminars already existed, notably at Halle and Berlin. The Kultusministerium oversaw several additions: Bonn in 1818, Ko¨nigsberg and Greifswald in 1822, and Mu¨nster in 1824. Halle’s famous seminar was reorganized in 1829 to raise scholarly standards and ban from participation all but those who expected to pursue a professional career in philology.177 History seminars too were supported by the Ministry, with Leopold von Ranke’s seminar at Berlin, established in 1833, soon leading the way. ‘The seminar system’, an American visitor would write in 1891, ‘has been carried to greater perfection in Germany than in any other land.’178 While philology in particular and the philosophical faculty in general witnessed much of Altenstein and Schulze’s attention, the Ministry also strove to place the higher faculties on a Wrmer scientiWc and professional basis through the agency of seminars. In Altenstein’s view theological seminars (ten of which arose in Prussia between 1812 and 1838) were particularly salutary because by encouraging wissenschaftlich habits of mind among future clergymen and scholars they thwarted sectarian and obscurantist forces, which only detracted from the vitality and the Kulturstaat ideal. Diminishing these forces in turn contributed to the unity of the Prussian state church and to the more general reform-era goal of ‘national education’. In Altenstein’s own vocabulary, theological seminars helped produce theologians (Theologen) and not merely pastors (Seelsorger).179 177 See Wilhelm Erben, ‘Die Entstehung der Universita¨ts-Seminare’, Internationale Monatsschrift fu¨r Wissenschaft, Kunst, und Technik 7 (1913), 1247 V.; Varrentrapp, Johannes Schulze und das ho¨here preussische Unterrichtswesen in seiner Zeit, 392 f., 500 f.; and Turner, ‘Prussian Universities’, 438. 178 Mattoon M. Curtis, ‘The Present Condition of German Universities’, ER 2 (1891): 38. 179 Memorandum of May 1819, in Mu¨sebeck, Das preussische Kultusministerium, 282. On this point, Altenstein and Schleiermacher were of one mind. Schleiermacher once argued that ‘a homiletic or preacher-seminar obviously has no place at the university’; quoted in Leopold Zscharnack, ‘Das erste Jahrhundert der theologischen Fakulta¨t Berlin’, Chronik der christlichen Welt 20 (October 1910): 413. Nonetheless, in the course of the nineteenth century homiletic seminars did take their place alongside more scholarly oriented seminars. The University of Heidelberg established one in 1838; Berlin’s was not established until 1876. See

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The seminar established in Berlin (1812) under Schleiermacher’s leadership, already discussed in Ch. 3, became the inspiration and model for later institutions. While pastoral concerns were not completely abandoned, the government-approved regulations for seminars stressed scientiWc rigour, especially as deWned by the philological and historical sciences. In fact, most theological seminars were regularly divided into two branches, a philological branch that dealt with critical studies of Hebrew, Greek, and other ancient languages; and a historical branch that focused on the history of the church, theology, and doctrine. Only the brightest students gained admission to the seminars and entrance requirements could be demanding. To enter Bonn’s theological seminar, for example, the regulations from 1819 indicate that, among other things, a student ‘must demonstrate speciWc approval from the relevant professors in the philosophical faculty that he possesses the necessary philological and historical preparatory knowledge.’180 Almost invariably, the seminar’s main goal was for students, under the direction of an accomplished professor, to deepen their scholarly aptitude by producing a work of individual expertise. Because of the philologicalhistorical slant of the seminars, students were discouraged from pursuing topics in dogmatics and ethics. Since the 1837 regulations for the theological seminar at the University of Ko¨nigsberg were fairly typical of others, their Wrst two articles merit generous quotation: 1. The theological seminar at the University of Ko¨nigsberg has the goal of providing the opportunity and support for those theology students who distinguish themselves above others through a particular ability in their disposition of mind and in their scholarly eVorts, so that they can produce their own scholarly work. . . . Through such eVorts and research, they will be aVorded guidance in obtaining a deeper and more thorough theological education . . . 2. Since this institute in regard to its scientiWc objective is intended to encourage and disseminate a thorough theological learnedness, its activities are not directed to the subjects of Christian dogmatics and ethics, where learned enquiry must recede in favour of speculation. Rather, the focus of this institute is on the philological and historical (exegetical-critical) aspects of theological study. Dogmatics and ethics are considered only in so far as these disciplines also require or admit a philological or historical treatment.181

Additionally, the regulations for Berlin’s theological seminar, which were revised in 1828, stated as the seminar’s goal the ‘lead[ing of] outstanding ‘Predigerseminar’ in RGG v. 514–16. Homiletic seminars within universities should not be confused with actual seminaries, such as the one established at Wittenberg in 1817. Cf. the entry on ‘Pfarrervorbildung’ in RGG v. 293–301. 180 Koch (ed.), Die preussischen Universita¨ten: Eine Sammlung der Verordnungen, iii. 618. 181 Ibid. 843 (emphasis added).

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theological students into their own learned work and research’ for the purpose of ‘disseminating theological knowledge’, while Bonn’s regulations indicated the aim of furthering the ‘scientiWc education’ of students by allowing them to produce ‘their own learned works and inquiries’.182 Again, in nearly every case, strong accent was placed on the philological and historical aspects of theology, presumably because these, unlike dogmatics, ethics, or practical theology, could be rendered more demonstrably wissenschaftlich. While the theological seminars stood under the direction of the theological faculties, faculties were regularly expected to submit an annual report to the Kultusministerium. As the regulations for Berlin’s seminar indicated: The theological faculty is to submit an annual report to the Ministry. . . . This annual report is to contain from each division of the seminar two examples of the participants’ most successful work. The Ministry expects from the seminar, acting as a seedbed of theological learnedness (PXanzschule theologischer Gelehrsamkeit), the best fruit for church and science. . . . In the hope that this is fulWlled, [the Ministry] regards the seminar as the object of its most urgent concern.183

Ample evidence suggests that Altenstein took this requirement quite seriously, personally reading and even make corrections on some of the seminar papers submitted to his oYce!184 The regulations of the Prussian theological seminars obviously point to a peculiarly close relationship between academic theology and the state; state support played an essential role in the maintenance and Xourishing of these institutions.185 In accord with Altenstein and Schulze’s wishes, the Prussian seminar system proved quite eVective at assisting gifted students to commence a life of scientiWc, professional study. The Prussian example was often imitated, albeit with variations, at numerous other universities in the course of the nineteenth century.186 Practically every major German theologian, biblical critic, and church historian of the nineteenth century cut his scholarly 182 Ibid. 555, 618. 183 Ibid. 559. 184 See Otto Ritschl, Die evangelisch-theologische Fakulta¨t Bonn in dem ersten Jahrhundert ihrer Geschichte (Bonn, 1919), 41. Clark writes the following about seminar reports sent to government oYcials: ‘In Prussia the format of reporting eventually become regulated and standardized. Through these techniques of regular reporting, the bureaucratic mentality, so essential for the transformation of academic labor into ‘‘research science’’, would slowly take shape in and through the seminar directors.’ See William Clark, ‘The Dialectical Origins of the Research Seminar’, History of Science 27 (1989): 120. 185 Erben, ‘Die Entstehung der Universita¨ts-Seminare’, 1260. 186 Clark, ‘The Dialectical Origins of the Research Seminar’, 120 V. The ‘German seminar’, albeit with modiWcations, proved inXuential in the United States as well. See Hugh Hawkins, Pioneer: A History of the Johns Hopkins University, 1874–1889 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1960), 224–34.

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teeth in these institutions; they served as the institutional locus, the social space, where ‘science as vocation’ was initiated and nourished, where a student’s specimen of original research was produced. Given the historicalcritical, scientiWc orientation of most theological seminars, it is all the more noteworthy that they emerged during the Vorma¨rz period. This should make us think twice, however, about interpretations of this era that focus predominantly on its conservative aspects. In theology, the 1815–48 period was not simply one of reaction, the era of Hengstenberg, Tholuck, and the Erweckungsbewegung, as some scholars have suggested. It was rather a profoundly conXicted and Xuid era, one that admitted a diversity of theological viewpoints and directions, and indeed one that allowed liberal-minded ministers, such as Altenstein and Schulze, to support institutional structures that fostered the scientization and professionalization of academic theology and the continuing modernization of the university system. The policies of the Kultusministerium in selection, preferment, and funding, alongside its enthusiastic support for the seminar method, would tend to support this claim. Furthermore, Altenstein’s championing of ‘Theologie als Wissenschaft’ sheds more general light on Prussia’s Erastian modernity. This was an Erastianism with decidedly progressive aspects, one that sought to use the powerful leverage of the state to diminish confessionalism, as evidenced by the support given to the Prussian Union Church and its theologians. Altenstein also sought to promote a general academic freedom applicable to theology, despite the repressive measures of the Karlsbad Decrees after 1819. In this regard, he represents a continuation of reform-era goals, albeit in a less reform-inclined era. A pronounced and conWdent statism, however, links Altenstein to both epochs; he did not believe that academic freedom had autonomous value apart from the political aims of ‘national education’ and the revitalization of the state. It was presumed rather that scientiWc inquiry and freedom coincided with, and even expressed, the state’s moral and rational mission.187 On this point, as Joseph Ben-David has trenchantly written, the Prussian state’s support of science ‘was not tantamount to the acceptance of free inquiry as an independent and socially valuable function. Rather, there was a presumption of preestablished harmony between the new [scientiWc] philosophy and the interests of the state, somewhat in the same manner as there had been an assumption of such harmony between the church and the state.’188 Similarly, R. Steven Turner has spoken of the ‘state187 In one memorandum, Altenstein wrote that university-educated clergymen should exhibit ‘harmony with the direction of the state’ (Einklang mit dem Gang des Staates). See Schoeps, ‘Ein Gutachten des Kultusministers Altenstein’, ZP 12 (1966): 265. 188 Joseph Ben-David, The Scientist’s Role in Society: A Comparative Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 117.

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imposed principle of Lehrfreiheit’ pursued by the Altenstein ministry.189 In the same vein, the German constitutional historian E. R. Huber’s reXections on higher education generally in the nineteenth century are particularly incisive when applied to Altenstein’s ministerial tenure and legacy: It is an apparent paradox that precisely the century which achieved freedom of education, research and doctrine created at the same time the greatest extreme in state direction and administration of school organization. But one can note the identical duality of nineteenth-century institutions in almost all areas; the epoch of the individual’s highest freedom from the state was simultaneously the epoch of statism’s greatest eYciency.190

This paradoxical reality profoundly moulded academic theology in the nineteenth century: between Staat and Wissenschaft theology took shape. Yet theology’s proximity to these dual forces of modernity, in the eyes of many, did not necessarily represent a net gain for theology. I have already mentioned the well-known controversy over Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu (1835), which brought to expression a growing uneasiness among traditionalists about the scientiWc direction of theological faculties. Both the uneasiness and scientiWc direction continued apace throughout the century. ‘It is a question of the character of the theological faculties’, as one pastor wrote, disquieted that in these institutions, given to ‘purely scientiWc considerations’, the future clergymen of Germany must be educated.191 The Jena theologian Heinrich Weinel recognized that ‘the diYculties arising for the Church from the study of theology at our universities [have become] the most felt and the most discussed’; he aYrmed as well the validity of a point often made by churchmen: ‘the university is not a home of pure science, separated from all human interests, but is a school, and above all a State school’.192 Indeed, it was more than Wissenschaft that elicited worry and criticism; the state’s powerful position over church and theology, extended during and after the reform era, also gave rise to controversy. As we have seen, Schleiermacher had grave concerns about the Prussian-Erastian system that emerged in the 189 R. Steven Turner, ‘The Growth of Professorial Research in Prussia, 1818–1848—Causes and Context’, in Russell McCormmach (ed.), Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, (Philadelphia, 1971), iii. 181. 190 E. R. Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte seit 1789 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1957), i. 265. 191 Martin von Nathusius, Wissenschaft und Kirche im Streit um die theologischen Fakulta¨ten (Heilbronn, 1886), 6–9. 192 Heinrich Weinel, ‘Theological Study and the Church’, from the Report of the Fifth Universal Congress for Free Christianity and Religious Progress, Berlin 1910 (Berlin-Scho¨nberg, 1911) (emphasis added). On clerical dissent to the liberalizing and scientizing direction of theological faculties in the late nineteenth century, see Oliver Janz, Bu¨rger besonderer Art: evangelische Pfarrer in Preussen 1850–1914 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1994).

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early nineteenth century, even if, against pietists and traditionalists, he endorsed a rigorously scientiWc approach to theology. Others wondered if a state-salaried Minister of Culture could or should eVectively exercise ‘the rights of a bishop’ over theological education.193 Still others pointedly considered whether the pursuit of scientiWc theology in the institutions of a modern state would ultimately prove injurious to the age-old relationship of theology to piety and ecclesial praxis. As a scientiWc-oriented theology within the universities gained momentum in the course of the nineteenth century, this concern became acute among numerous churchmen, producing champions of ‘church theology’ against purely ‘scientiWc theology’.194 An issue that created rival factions, it also led to internal conXicts for many theologians, as they sought to make sense of their multiple loyalties to science, the state, and the church. The Swiss-born theologian Philip SchaV, who had studied at Prussian universities at the height of Altenstein’s inXuence, is an apt case in point, and someone astute in sizing up the nature of his dilemma. While he cherished the scholarly theological education he had gained in Prussia, calling the University of Berlin the foremost university in the world, he also harboured some doubts, which he candidly expressed in a letter towards the end of his life: In the German university a theological professor is appointed by the state . . . and expected to teach and promote science. The state looks only at theoretical qualiWcations, and cares little or nothing about the orthodoxy and piety of the candidate. The church, as such, has nothing to say in the matter. The result is that a professor may teach doctrines which are utterly subversive to the church, and disqualify the student for his future work. This is an unnatural state of things. It may be favorable to the freest development of theological science and speculation, but very dangerous to the healthful and vigorous development of church life.195 193 Nathusius, Wissenschaft und Kirche, 6. 194 See Graf, ‘Protestantische Theologie in der Gesellschaft des Kaiserreich’, in Graf (ed.), ProWle des neuzeitlichen Protestantismus, ii. 69 V. 195 Quoted in David SchaV, The Life of Philip SchaV (New York, 1897), 471.

5 Theologia between Science and the State Like all other sciences, [theology] has concrete, comprehensible material . . . as the objects of its investigation and representation. The unseen God is not the direct reason for [theologians’] activity, but rather the idea of God present among men, . . . [which] even the critical empiricist cannot deny. Thus, it is not a religious science in speciWc contrast to a profane one, not an ecclesiastical science in contrast to a non-ecclesiastical one. It is rather the particular science of religion and church; as such, in manner and method, it is an aspect of science in general. Martin Rade, 1900 [Theology] has tried too hard, especially in the nineteenth century, to secure for itself at least a small but honorable place in the throne room of general science. This attempt at self-justiWcation has been no help to its own work. The fact is that it has . . . earned theology no more respect for its achievements than a very modest tip of the hat. Karl Barth, 1963

1. INTRODUCTION From the period of Altenstein’s Ministry until the outbreak of the First World War, immense changes took place in Prussia and other German lands. Historians regularly account for these changes as long-term consequences of the ‘double revolution’: the French Revolution, the importance of which has already been made clear, but equally important, the Industrial Revolution, which unleashed heretofore unknown forces of social and economic change. The story of the German response to these new realities in the mid- and late nineteenth century is fairly well known, even if interpretations vary widely. Politically, the story focuses on the previously discussed Vorma¨rz period (1815–48), the unsuccessful liberal revolution of 1848, Prussia’s defeat of Austria in 1866, and the consolidation of the Second German Empire in 1871 under the leadership of Otto von Bismarck’s Prussia. Economically, the story

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stresses the ‘founding era’ (Gru¨nderzeit) after 1871, for only at this time did industrialization fully take oV—a process that by century’s end transformed a largely rural Germany into a highly industrialized, populous, and increasingly urban nation.1 Not surprisingly, Germany’s development in the nineteenth century, and the central role of Prussia in this process, carried implications for the operations of universities and hence for the role and social location of academic theology. Unlike Chs. 3 and 4, which concentrated heavily on the early nineteenth century, here I widen the lens to encompass the whole century, even if I must necessarily sacriWce depth for breadth. The analyses that follow, however, are premised on the view that the era of Humboldt, Schleiermacher, and Altenstein bears witness to the more creative reforming forces in higher education; these were consolidated and extended later in the century, even as they were often taken in unexpected directions and confronted with new realities such as the growth of positivistic and empirical science, the exigencies of industrialization, and the centrifugal forces of greater academic specialization.2 SigniWcantly, after the establishment of the Prussian University of Bonn in 1818 no new university foundations occurred in Germany until the re-establishment of the Alsatian University of Strasbourg (1872), a direct consequence of the Franco-Prussian war and German uniWcation.3 While the founding of the second German Reich brought about some changes for university norms and conditions, its principal eVect was to extend Prussia’s already considerable inXuence over other universities, either directly, as in the case of newly acquired universities by Prussia (such as Go¨ttingen, Marburg, and Kiel), or indirectly, through the widespread emulation of Prussian universities, which prior to 1871 were already widely regarded as Germany’s foremost institutions of higher learning.4 At the same time, new post-1871 dynamics of industrialization and population growth, the rise of social democracy, and 1 David Blackbourn, The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany, 1780–1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 1 V. 2 There were, however, many criticisms of the academic status quo and calls for reform in the mid-nineteenth century. Most signiWcantly, see F. A. W. Diesterweg, Ueber das Verderben auf die deutschen Universita¨ten (Essen, 1836), which among other things might be regarded as an early critique of the ‘publish-or-perish’ mentality. 3 See John Craig, Scholarship and Nation Building: The Universities of Strasbourg and Alsatian Society, 1870–1939 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Strasbourg’s case is exceptional; it was considered a Reich university, administered under the auspices of the new national government, not the governments of the states, even if in practice this meant considerable control by the Prussian Kultusministerium. 4 After the founding of the Reich, Prussia directly controlled half of all German universities. In addition, Prussia exercised inXuence over German higher education by example and by organizing many ministerial and university conferences to coordinate university policy in Germany. For further details see Charles E. McClelland, State, Society, and University in Germany 1700–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 235–6.

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the massive growth of the natural sciences and industry-driven applied disciplines relentlessly made their presence felt in higher education. As the university system expanded to accommodate new realities, the presence and prestige of theology continued to be eroded. The statistical evidence on this point is clear. Although the theological faculty, still regarded by many as the ‘Wrst’ faculty, was never eliminated in the university, as occurred in many other European countries, it became a shadow of its former glory. By century’s end, Friedrich Paulsen could note that ‘theology is now scarcely mentioned in the same breath with the sciences. . . . Numerous advocates of a scientiWc radicalism are inclined to exclude it all together, or to relegate it to the past.’5 After the collapse of the Empire in 1918, various political and academic voices sought to expel theology from the university altogether, arguing that its presence in state-funded higher education deWed both the demands of positivistic science and the liberal-democratic principle of church–state separation. As shall be shown, this eVort proved surprisingly unsuccessful, and theological faculties, if diminished, have persisted in German universities until the present. Paradoxically, some of the same forces that contributed to theology’s decline in the university also assured its renown, both within Germany and internationally. The scientiWc research impulse, for example, promoted by Altenstein, Schulze, and others, impacted all disciplines, and invigorated many branches of theology, particularly those closely connected to philological and historical study. Accordingly, by the late nineteenth century German academic theology had acquired a reputation of excellence and rigour without national rival. Names such as Albrecht Ritschl, Otto PXeiderer, Martin Rade, Wilhelm Hermann, Julius Wellhausen, Adolf von Harnack, Ernst Troelstch, and others set the terms for theological discussions far beyond Germany’s borders. All modern theology, Harvard’s Francis G. Peabody wrote in 1879, expressing a view common among American Unitarians, ‘is a child of almost pure German blood’.6 The British theologian Lawrence Pearsall Jacks noted in 1915 that the period before the Great War would go down as ‘the age of German footnotes’.7 To be sure, the lustre of German academic theology during the Second Empire had its sceptical detractors, among them some strange bedfellows. Representatives of confessional theology and pietism, as I have already indicated, regularly excoriated the scientizing, modernizing tendencies of what 5 Friedrich Paulsen, The German Universities and University Study, trans. Frank Thilly and William W. Elwang (New York, 1906), 384. 6 Francis G. Peabody, ‘The New Theology’, Unitarian Review 11 (April 1879): 352. 7 Noted in William R. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), 228.

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some branded ‘cultural Protestantism’ (Kulturprotestantismus).8 Pietists and confessionalists, however, could be joined by such extreme secularists as Friedrich Nietzsche, who scoVed at the very possibility of ‘wissenschaftliche Theologie’—a position later echoed by many ‘dialectical’ or ‘crisis’ theologians, Karl Barth foremost. SigniWcantly then, a pietist divine in rural Wu¨rttemberg and Nietzsche circa 1875 could issue similar critiques of liberal-scientiWc theology, each arguing (albeit for diVerent reasons) that its headlong quest for cultural accommodation and academic legitimacy had compromised the ecclesial and eschatological nature of Christianity. Nietzsche put the matter straightforwardly when he opined that modern liberal theology had not only failed to reconcile Christianity with modern science, but had ‘resolved [Christianity] into pure knowledge of Christianity, [which] ceases to live when it is dissected completely and lives a painful and moribund life when one begins to practice historical dissection upon it.’9 In the remainder of the book, I puzzle over the conXicted renown of nineteenth-century German academic theology, even as I chart the theological faculty’s steady diminution as a component of the overall university system. Five principal lines of inquiry contribute to this broader task. First, I call attention to how dominant intellectual, political, and social trends of the mid- and late nineteenth century aVected university development. What implications for theology, for example, came with the extension of the ideal of Wissenschaft from a few innovative universities, Berlin most prominently, to become the leading principle of nearly all German universities? Relatedly, how did the continuing ascendency and expansion of the philosophical faculty—both in its humanistic, historical-philological aspects and its positivistic, natural scientiWc ones—aVect university theology and its relations to other branches of knowledge, the political order, and ecclesiastical life? Second, in an eVort to penetrate the internal dynamics of university theology, I turn my attention to Protestant theological education, that is, to what young theology students actually were supposed to learn during their university years. Here I draw from a rich and largely untapped source in the genre of theological encyclopedia (theologische Enzyklopa¨die), a subject I have already broached in the discussion of Schleiermacher. The most widely used encyclopedia of the century was written by the now neglected Swiss-German theologian and church historian, Karl Rudolf Hagenbach (1801–74), who in 8 F. W. Graf, ‘Kulturprotestantismus. Zur BegriVsgeschichte einer theologischen ChiVre’, Archiv fu¨r BegriVsgeschichte 28 (1984): 214–68. 9 Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 96–7.

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the 1820s had studied at Berlin.10 His Encyklopa¨die und Methodologie der theologischen Wissenschaften, Wrst published in 1833, went through no less than twelve editions by 1889 and was translated into several foreign languages. While not neglecting other examples of the genre, I single out Hagenbach’s work and its inXuence for particular consideration. Third, since the nineteenth century was, after all, an age of ‘historicism’, a century of increasing belief in the historically constructed nature of human ideas and institutions, it should come as no surprise that this new historical sense was often applied to understanding the evolution of the university in the modern period.11 I thus examine a number of histories of universities written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, along with various documents from university commemorative celebrations and from international exhibitions on German higher education. These types of source, rich in historical consciousness, provide valuable insight into the place, possibilities, and problems of academic theology as it encountered various modernizing forces. An age of historicism, the nineteenth century was also one of increased travel and cross-cultural academic exchange. I examine then, fourthly, the reactions of a number of foreigners to German universities, broaching also the broader international inXuence of German theology. While responses to university theology ranged from accusations of ‘inWdelity’ and ‘rationalism’ to gushing praise, few visitors—whether students, scholars, or simply curious travellers—failed to note the degree of its intellectual rigour and the context of academic freedom and state patronage in which it took place. In fact numerous visitors attributed the intellectualizing tendencies of German theology to its university environment, and the two were regularly commented on together. What is more, no small number of foreign theologians and religious leaders came to the conclusion that contemporary Protestant theology led by Germany represented something of a watershed in the history of Christianity: it was either pioneering brave new possibilities for the progress of Christian thought or else it was leading the faithful down a destructive path of restless innovation and hubristic erudition. At issue, various parties felt, was nothing less that the future of the Christian faith. Finally, I focus my attention on several issues that precipitated a crisis of identity for theology in the late nineteenth century. The genesis of the crisis is complex, but it is traceable to at least three overlapping issues. The Wrst was an increasingly strident insistence by proponents of positivistic science that the 10 On Hagenbach, see Andreas Staehelin, Professoren der Universita¨t Basel aus fu¨nf Jahrhunderten (Basle: F. Reinhardt, 1960), 132–3. 11 On ‘historicism’ generally in the nineteenth century, see Georg Iggers, ‘Historicism: The History and Meaning of the Term’, JHI 56 (Spring 1995): 129–52.

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theological faculty was simply illegitimate, an alien body (Fremdko¨rper) in the modern university. Second, the emergence in the 1860s and 1870s, at Wrst largely outside Germany, of what was alternately called ‘the history of religions’, ‘the comparative study of religion’, or the ‘science of religion’ (Religionswissenschaft) led many to censure theology, despite its scientiWc aspirations, for its preoccupation with Christianity at the expense of other world religions. Third, the growing presence of liberal and social democratic political forces in the late nineteenth century led to more open criticism of church–state relations in Germany and Prussia; part of this criticism faulted theological faculties in publicly funded universities for violating the liberal doctrine, championed at Frankfurt 1848, of the separation of church and state.12 Such issues confronted academic theology with altogether new challenges. Not only shall I explore the sources of these challenges in greater depth, I shall also examine how several leading theologians contributed and/or responded to them, focusing in particular on three Wgures. Two were outspoken critics of contemporary theology: Paul Anton de Lagarde of Go¨ttingen and Franz Overbeck of Basle. The latter, a close friend and kindred spirit of Friedrich Nietzsche, arrived at the subversive view that ‘wissenschaftliche Theologie’ far from making faith relevant to the modern world, had in fact undermined the Christian faith and, as a consequence, the viability of his own profession. However, Protestant university theology gained arguably its greatest modern champion in Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930), Schleiermacher’s truest, late nineteenth-century heir at Berlin. Harnack’s eVorts to defend theology’s wissenschaftlich ambitions against a host of sceptical critics, political and intellectual, reactionary and progressive, helped secure for theology a new dispensation within the hallowed universitas litterarum—in fact, explicit legal protection as expressed in the Weimar Constitution (1919). Ironically, however, Harnack’s defence, successful and inXuential though it was, corresponded to a period—inaugurated by the Great War, the ominous chaos of the early Weimar Republic, and the beginnings of Barthian ‘dialectical theology’—that witnessed the breakdown of the optimistic, progressive world that Harnack embodied and in which theology had so earnestly sought acknowledgement as a modern scientiWc enterprise.

12 The sources of theology’s crisis are succinctly presented in August Dillmann’s 1875 ¨ ber die Theologie als Universita¨tswissenschaft (Berlin, 1875). Cf. E. rectorial address at Berlin, U H. Haenssler, Die Krisis der theologischen Fakulta¨ten (Leipzig, 1929).

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2. GENERAL TRENDS AND D EV E LOP MENTS, 1810–1918 Those were the days in which the familiar type of German scholar was generated . . . the man who spent thirty years on one volume, the man who wrote on Homer in 1806 and who still wrote on Homer in 1870. Lord Acton Confessionalism is the mortal enemy of the university. Theodor Mommsen

The ideals articulated at the founding of the University of Berlin enjoyed a long, fruitful life after 1810, helping establish a fairly homogenous rhetorical environment within the system of German higher education.13 The words of Fichte, Schleiermacher, and Humboldt, the language of Bildung, Wissenschaft, and Lehrfreiheit, were invoked ritualistically in academic addresses and ceremonies during the century as German universities steadily scaled the heights of international esteem.14 But although the founders’ words were far from mere rhetoric, they should not be taken as mirrors of the actual functioning of universities in the mid- and late nineteenth century. The ideal of Wissenschaft, as is often noted, became increasingly disassociated from the pedagogy of Bildung and from the synthetic and monistic tendencies of idealism. Instead, it became closely tied to growing positivist assumptions, empirical research, and the seemingly inexorable forces of academic specialization, diVerentiation, and professionalization. Already during the time of Altenstein, as we have already glimpsed, Max Weber’s conception of academic work as the unremitting accretion of value-neutral scientiWc knowledge had begun to make its reality felt.15 As one might conjecture, a number of theologians 13 In the survey section that follows I recognize debts to Peter Baumgart (ed.), Bildungspolitik in Preußen zur Zeit des Kaiserreichs (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1980); R. Steven Turner, ‘Prussian Universities and the Research Imperative, 1806–1848’, Ph.D. diss. (Princeton University, 1972); Rudolf Stichweh, Zur Entstehung des modernen Systems wissenschaftlicher Disziplinen: Physik in Deutschland 1746–1890 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984); Charles E. McClelland, State, Society, and University in Germany, 1700–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); and Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969). 14 Typical in this regard were the words of Heinrich von Sybel from 1874: ‘The essential characteristics of our universities, as they were deWned at the beginning of this century by Schleiermacher, Friedrich August Wolf, von Su¨vern, Fichte, Wilhelm Humboldt, and Altenstein, have in their main points been preserved until the present.’ See Heinrich von Sybel, Die deutschen Universita¨ten (Bonn, 1874), 22. Cf. the rectorial address by Emil du Bois-Reymond, ¨ ber Universita¨ts-Einrichtungen (Berlin, 1869). U 15 R. Steven Turner, ‘The Great Transition and the Social Patterns of German Science’, Minerva 25 (1987): 56–76. On professionalization and the university, see Charles E. McClelland,

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and clergymen demurred, doubtful that the age-old sapiential, dogmatic tasks of theology could be reconciled with a research ethic that placed a premium on critical rigour and interminable innovation. Nonetheless, by mid-century, this ethic permeated theological faculties as well, precipitating numerous debates about the advantages and disadvantages of ‘scientiWc theology’. Pinpointing exactly when and why this shift in Wissenschaft took place is hard to say. Clearly, in Prussia, the role of the state Wgured importantly, especially with respect to policies of appointment, preferment, and the founding of seminars and other specialized institutes. The ethos of idealism too, as earlier suggested, possessed not only a unitary but a dynamic understanding of knowledge, conducive to establishing a drive towards scholarly innovation and individual expertise. However, with respect to speciWc academic disciplines, two Welds in particular led the way in the early nineteenth century: classical philology and history—Welds traditionally considered ‘helping sciences’ (Hilfswissenschaften or Vorbereitungswissenschaften) for the higher faculties.16 While already gaining signiWcant momentum during the eighteenth century, as previously indicated, these disciplines witnessed explosive growth and heightened prestige in the nineteenth century, largely because of their ability to develop seemingly certain critical methods and procedures and in turn hold these up as the regulative models for all respectable professional scholarship. The philologist Friedrich August Wolf—who ‘freed his profession from the bonds of theology’ according to Nietzsche17—is deservedly recognized as one of the most inXuential scholars of the era, even if his genius resided less in orginality than in an ability to express systematically key ideas of pioneering eighteenth-century savants.18 His philological seminar at Halle (founded in 1787) achieved a formidable reputation of rigour and professionalism. SigniWcantly, he refused to admit theology students into its ranks, insisting on a clear separation between those training to be teachers and scholars (Schulstand) and future pastors (Predigerstand).19 In his seminar, Wolf raised up a number of disciples, including August Boeckh, Immanuel Bekker, Karl

The German Experience of Professionalization: Modern Learned Professions from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Hitler Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 16 See the discussion of the relationship of philology and history to theology in G. J. Planck, Einleitung in die theologische Wissenschaften (Leipzig, 1794), 149 V. 17 Quoted in Carl Diehl, Americans and German Scholarship, 1770–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 28. 18 Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 214–43. 19 Noted in Wilhelm Erben, ‘Die Entstehung der Universita¨ts-Seminare’, Internationale Monatsschrift fu¨r Wissenschaft, Kunst, und Technik 7 (1913): 1255.

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Lachmann, Theodor Mommsen, and, not least, Altenstein’s future aide in the Kultusministerium, Johannes Schulze. The work of these scholars improved upon Wolf ’s own and spread its rigorous methodology to other German universities. Diligence, thoroughness, precision, and, above all, criticism (Kritik) sum up the ethos of the new philology, an ethos that found virtuoso expression in Wolf ’s own Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795). In this work, Wolf argued that philologists, in carrying out the critical recension of ancient texts, had a professional, indeed ethical, obligation to consult every known manuscript and meticulously compare them line by line, from beginning to end. This precept, Wolf held, was the only certain philological method, and the Prolegomena served as an applied example. Although the work itself contained a number of questionable conclusions, its methodological aspirations laid the basis for the professionalization of the discipline.20 Given the signiWcance of philology for shaping academic theology, it is important to consider that WolWan Kritik, in tandem with the publishing incentives advanced by Altenstein and Schulze, produced the curious situation whereby a scholar could best establish his reputation by rejecting the authenticity of parts or all of a given manuscript. As various commentators have noted, this new critical imperative often contradicted the goals of neohumanism, in so far as neohumanism as a movement sought to draw broad moral inspiration from antiquity. Criticism began to ride roughshod over inspiration. When applied to sacred texts, however, the results were often more alarming. ‘It is not inaccurate to describe [the new philology]’, Anthony Grafton has summed up, ‘as a preference for error over truth’, for the detection of error legitimized the social role of the philologist. ‘[E]ntering on the path of historical [criticism] proved to be like entering on a Weld of quicksand. Once one began to detect errors and inconsistencies in one text, they appeared in all texts. Any manuscript could be eliminated or restored to favor, any work shown to be genuine or forged, any event revealed to be mythical or proved to be historical.’21 Despite such occupational hazards, historians were quick to take up the methods and standards of the philologists. Already in 1811, the historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr, then busy on his acclaimed Ro¨mische Geschichte, wrote a letter to Minister Schuckmann, Humboldt’s successor, in which he expressed that ‘in Germany during recent times philological studies have taken on a dynamism which the most famous philologists and schools of 20 See F. A Wolf, Prolegomena to Homer, 1795, trans. with an intro. by Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and James E. G. Zetzel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Anthony Grafton, ‘Polyhistor into Philolog: Notes on the Transformation of German Classical Scholarship, 1780–1850’, HU 3 (1983): 159–92; and Turner, ‘Prussian Universities’, 294–5. 21 Grafton, ‘Polyhistor into Philolog’, 181–3.

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earlier times never experienced. Rigorous interpretation [and] precise grammatical analysis link up with exploratory research into collective scientiWc knowledge and opinions, as with the history and institutions of antiquity.’ Niebuhr also remarked that the University of Berlin was uniquely suited to cultivate the new critical scholarship.22 While Niebuhr was no second-rate scholar, it was his colleague and successor at Berlin, Leopold von Ranke, who became for historical studies the prophetic fulWlment of Niebuhr’s words. Preoccupied mainly with philology and theology during his student years at Leipzig, Ranke later turned his attention to history, in part because of the impression made on him by Niebuhr’s work on Roman history. On the strength of Ranke’s Wrst major book, Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Vo¨lker von 1494 bis 1535 (1824), minister Schulze invited Ranke to accept a position at Berlin, where he taught and wrote with great energy for the better part of the century. Establishing a historical seminar in the Prussian capital in 1833, Ranke elevated disciplinary standards by emphasizing the importance of constructing the past not on the basis of a priori principles but on that of Wrst-hand accounts and rigorous archival research conducted in original languages. Only this constituted history ‘as it actually was’ (wie es eigentlich gewesen) in his famous phrase; all else fell short of bone Wde professional historiography. Ranke’s students went on to occupy practically every important chair in history throughout Germany, thus guaranteeing Rankean methodology as the profession’s standard.23 The achievements of Wolf and his disciples, Niebuhr, Ranke, and others in philology and history would have been impressive enough even if achieved in isolation. But what made them truly consequential was that through their demonstrable thoroughness, critical rigour, and the oYcial support given by the Prussian Ministry of Culture, they laid down methods of scholarly legitimacy that soon became normative throughout German universities, cutting across disciplinary boundaries. Accomplished mainly through voluminous productions, the institutional authority of Berlin, and the work of their loyal if dutifully critical students, these scholars emerged as a new high priesthood of disciplinary standards. Scholars who failed to measure up began to hear accusations of ‘Dilettantismus’ or, worse, ‘Unwissenschaftlichkeit’.

22 Georg Barthold Niebuhr, Briefe, ed. Dietrich Gerhard and William Norvin (Berlin, 1926), ii. 205. 23 See Georg Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present, rev. edn. (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1983), 665–89, and Georg Iggers and George Powell (eds.), Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990).

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Accordingly, the desire for peer recognition and the fear of mediocrity proved powerful incentives for Wrst-order scholarly accomplishment. The new critical scholarship of the early and mid-nineteenth century tended to narrow the expected readership. Unlike the scholarship of prior generations, often geared to a broad educated audience, the new scholarship measured its worth by its specialized and elitist nature. Already with Wolf one may observe an ambivalence towards a large public readership. In a letter to Heyne at Go¨ttingen, Wolf admitted that with ‘which one calls the public I have nothing to do. It is too genteel, too spacious, too vast. . . . It was always my wish to be accompanied merely by quiet, scholarly researchers.’24 Writing for a self-conscious, elite group—a ‘disciplinary community’—placed a high premium on critical originality and on a progressive and collaborative, if nonetheless competitive, understanding of scholarship. To gain acceptance in the inner sanctum of one’s Weld, one had to demonstrate that one’s work had both mastered previous scholarship and superseded it—a skill that the seminar system exquisitely fostered. This logic accelerated tendencies of specialization. ‘Due to the enormous expansion of Wissenschaft ’, wrote the young Jacob Burckhardt in 1840 while a student of Ranke’s in Berlin, ‘one is obliged to limit oneself to some deWnite subject and pursue it single-mindedly.’25 Similarly, Wolf ’s student August Boeckh noted in 1850 that ‘this division and splintering [of scholarship] has incontestably taken a decisive upper hand in our age, in which the celebrated principle of the division of labour has come into widespread currency in learning. This has given birth to a mass, indeed a Xood, of monographic treatises . . . which have certainly contributed very much to the extension of our knowledge.’26 Besides narrowly focused monographs, increasingly specialized journals and professional societies cropped up throughout the century, becoming a deWning feature of the academic landscape. Between 1830 and 1870, roughly 600 German-language periodicals came into existence dedicated to theological and religious topics.27 By 1880 the Berlin chemistry professor A. W. Hofmann could describe the German scholarly ethos as follows: ‘The investigator of the present seeks his salvation, as a rule, in devotion to one science, nay, often to only a part of one science. He looks neither to the right nor to the left, so that what is going on in his neighbor’s Weld may not prevent him from burying himself in his 24 Quoted in Turner, ‘Prussian Universities’, 313. 25 Jacob Burckhardt, Briefe, ed. Max Burckhardt (Basle: Benno Schwabe, 1949), i. 233–4. 26 August Boeckh, ‘Von der Philologie besonders der klassischen in Beziehung zur morgenla¨ndischen, zum Unterricht und zur Gegenwart’, in Gesammelte kleine Schriften (Leipzig, 1859), ii. 190–1. 27 To be sure, the majority of these were not dedicated to academic theology as such. See Joachim Kirchner, Bibliographie der Zeitschriften des deutschen Sprachgebietes bis 1900 (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1977), ii. 88–127.

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specialty to his heart’s content.’28 Some years later, Adolf Harnack would famously write of the ‘large-scale industry of science’ (Groabetrieb der Wissenschaft), resulting from the specialization of knowledge.29 The tendency toward specialization compromised the organic, unitary ideal of Wissenschaft, as postulated by German idealist philosophy. Gradually, this led to the ideal’s reformulation, but a reformulation nonetheless consistent with its original meaning. At the time of the founding of the University of Berlin, as we have seen, theorists articulated a conception of knowledge that aspired to unity and synthesis; some, like Fichte, even held that one individual might embody this unity in his own person. Specialization of course greatly complicated this vision, but it did not lead to its wholesale rejection, for even among the earlier theorists of Wissenschaft one Wnds an acknowledgement of the striving, progressing, or unfolding character of knowledge. Later practitioners of the new critical research tended to emphasize this aspect of Wissenschaft, relocating the idea of unity from the individual scholar to the scholarly community and from the actual present to a hypothetical, inWnite future; perpetual striving for unity came to matter most, not unity itself, which receded as quickly as scholars approached it. As August Boeckh put it in 1855: ‘So is our philology an inWnite task whose completion we can only approach. . . . For this [reason] it will never founder and stop, because it can never be exhausted and closed. Obviously, therefore, it cannot be completed in one individual mind in its full expanse. . . . [I]t is realized only ideally, in the totality of its followers.’30 As the foregoing suggests, the relationship between specialized research and idealist philosophy is a complicated matter. It is sometimes argued that the synthetic and monistic qualities of idealism, typiWed by Hegel, actually impeded the development of a research ethic and specialization. This claim is not entirely without merit. The well-known hostility, for example, between the so-called Historical School at Berlin (represented by Savigny, Boeckh, and Ranke) and Hegel and his followers lends credence to this view. In broad strokes, one in fact might characterize the 1820s–1840s, in the German human sciences, as one of intellectual warfare between seemingly incommensurate modes of historical thought—the Rankean pursuit of the particular, on the one hand, versus the Hegelian search for the a priori and the synthetic, on the other.31 In so far as these broad intellectual currents impinged upon theology, however, one should guard against overemphasizing incommensurability, 28 A. W. Hofmann, ‘The Question of the Division of the Philosophical Faculty’, trans. John Williams White (Boston, 1883), 22. 29 Adolf Harnack, ‘Vom Großbetrieb der Wissenschaft’, PJ 119 (1905): 193–201. 30 Quoted in Turner, ‘Prussian Universities’, 339–40. 31 Iggers, The German Conception of History, 65 V.

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recognizing instead (as is perhaps true of many academic debates) that heated preoccupation with particular diVerences easily obscures deeper commonalties. The facility with which such high-proWle theologians and biblical scholars as F. C. Baur and D. F. Strauss blended detailed historical-critical research with idealist philosophical assumptions points towards this conclusion.32 Indeed, precisely such a blending constituted the heart of the Protestant Tu¨bingen School, among the most important mid-century movements of biblical interpretation and church history.33 Thus, one need not read Hegelian thought as an obstacle to the emerging research imperative; both in fact, albeit in diVerent ways, embodied the historicizing, progressive ethos of the early nineteenth century and hence proved conducive to the establishment of a research ethic in the universities and in theological scholarship. It is the category of history, especially, where one observes a link between the emerging research ethic and Hegelian-idealist thought. As is well known, Hegel’s attentiveness to the historical process was far more capacious and developed than his idealist predecessors. His intellectual system admitted elements of ‘Xux’ and ‘development’ unprecedented in the history of philosophy. These elements reXected but also contributed to an academic milieu allowing for the redeWnition of scholarship as an inWnite progression towards an ever-receding goal of unity. One of Hegel’s signature ideas, ‘sublation’ (Aufhebung), in fact, resonated remarkably well with the actual, workaday process of scholarly discovery and writing: researchers constantly superseding one another in critical, original scholarship while still incorporating the insights of their predecessors. Furthermore, the Hegelian conviction that intellectual development was not capricious but advanced in a discernible teleological direction was often expressed by practitioners of the new critical research and adopted by many theologians as well. In 1858, for example, the philologist Boeckh wrote, Even when [scholarly discoveries] appear to have been made by accident one can claim that this accident would not have been able to occur had not learning advanced to the point it had reached at the time this accident took place. In this manner chance ceases to be chance because it is conditioned by that which has gone before it. . . . By such views we do not wish to impugn the merit of the discoverer. It is a great thing . . . to be the tool of collective humanity in the production of a new truth.34 32 This point is elaborated in Franz Schnabel, Deutsche Geschichte im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Freiburg: Verlag Herder, 1951), iv. 508 V. 33 The hallmark of this school was an eVort to apply Hegelian conceptions of development to the interpretation of primitive Christianity. The intellectual organ of this school was the Tu¨bingener Theologische Jahrbu¨cher, published from 1842 to 1857 by Eduard Zeller. See RGG vi. 1064–71, and Horton Harris, The Tu¨bingen School (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975). 34 Quoted in Turner, ‘Prussian Universities’, 321–2 (emphasis added).

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Perhaps the mid-nineteenth-century theologian who best typiWes a dual commitment to the new critical scholarship and to Hegelian sensibilities was F. C. Baur, the leading Wgure in the Tu¨bingen School.35 This commitment is evident not only in his groundbreaking works in New Testament scholarship and early church history, but also in his general understanding of the relationship between modern Wissenschaft and the Christian faith. He regarded this relationship neither as one of antagonism nor harmony, but of fruitful conXict, whereby the thesis of Christianity beneWted from the antithesis of science, resulting in an intellectually puriWed and ever more consistently ‘Protestant’ conception of the faith. Accordingly, Christianity should not recoil from but rather embrace modern critical scholarship, even when it appeared to threaten Christianity itself. ‘The chief endeavors of the present age in the higher realms of science’, Baur wrote, ‘are critical and historical. Everything which is to have value for the present is asked for its historical justiWcation; everything found existing is examined down to the roots of its existence.’36 This form of inquiry, he elaborated, was no arbitrary development but ‘the necessary spiritual process’ of human knowledge in the present age. ‘No matter how inimical science appears to position itself with respect to faith, . . . [it brings] the greatest service to faith. For the question is not how much one believes but only what and how one believes. . . . True faith is satisWed with a little, so long as what it has remains Wrm and a certain possession.’37 And such certainty was not obtainable apart from close union with the advancing spirit of modern Wissenschaft.38 Baur and like-minded critical theologians faced a grave challenge after the publication of Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu (1835), a book that many read as nothing short of a full-scale assault on Christianity’s central beliefs. A former mentor of Strauss and a kindred spirit in many respects, Baur himself came under close scrutiny. As indicated, his candidacy for Schleiermacher’s chair at Berlin was scuttled by Altenstein and Schulze, as opposition mounted against Baur on account of his relation to Strauss.39 Baur’s own response to the crisis,

35 On the inXuence of Hegelian thought on Baur, see Harris, The Tu¨bingen School, 25–7, 155–8. 36 From Baur’s Paulus, der Apostel Jesu Christi (1842); quoted in Hodges, The Formation of Historical Theology: A Study of Ferdinand Christian Baur (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 86–7. 37 Quoted in Hodges, The Formation of Historical Theology, 180. 38 For more on Baur’s conception of the relationship between Christian faith and ‘new developments in the realm of Wissenschaft’, see his letter of 1835 to the Evangelisches Verein in Tu¨bingen. F. C. Baur, Die fru¨hen Briefe (1814–1835), ed. Carl E. Hester (Sigmaringen: J. Thorbecke, 1993), 129–44. 39 Hodges, The Formation of Historical Theology, 17.

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however, is quite revealing for the light it sheds on the peaceful coexistence of idealist philosophy and critical scholarship in Baur’s own mind, as well as on the liberal theological mood in the middle decades of the century. To a friend, Baur oVered mild esteem of Strauss’s work, despite its excessive ‘negative criticism’. But he added in overtly Hegelian language that ‘[Strauss’s] result does not strike me as so revolutionary as it will seem to you. In my view all history can be regarded only as . . . the development of Spirit, as the external but necessary impulse to bring to the Spirit’s consciousness the eternal truths which lie within it. For this reason the whole history of development ever aims . . . to tear the Spirit free from external and given things, from the letter and from tradition.’ Strauss’s book and its historical-critical methodology had—so runs Baur’s implication—only aided ‘Spirit’ in emancipating itself from ecclesiastical traditionalism and biblical literalism. Such acts of emancipation accomplished through criticism were for Baur the necessary theological programme of the future: only through ‘the critical conception of history . . . does one ever learn to separate correctly the essential and less essential elements of Christianity and religion’.40 This method, Baur noted elsewhere, represented the ‘highest principle of Protestantism’ and the only sure defence against ‘the authority principle of Catholicism’.41 The association of Protestant principles with advances in critical scholarship, and the invoked foil of Catholicism, served as a common trope among progressive Protestant theologians throughout the century. The growth of a research ethic, the methodological achievements in philology and history, the spread of seminars, and the climate of Hegelian thought left an imprint on theological faculties throughout Germany. These same forces also invigorated an already ascendant philosophical faculty, which by midcentury had long ceased to be regarded as theology’s handmaid. Indeed, the dynamism and continued growth of the erstwhile facultas artium throughout the nineteenth century, its accelerated diversiWcation and transformation from subordination to institutional leadership, ranks as a hallmark development of the era and a key factor in understanding theology’s diminished prestige and institutional clout. Besides advances in philology and history, the growth of the natural or empirical sciences, which only fully took oV in the 1830s and 1840s, constituted another major source of the philosophical faculty’s lustre. Prior to this time, inquiry into the natural world in Germany had been largely, if not exclusively, dominated by the philosophical, a priori concerns of Naturphilosophie, a highly speculative approach to nature closely associated with the 40 Quoted in Harris, David Friedrich Strauss and his Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 88. 41 Baur, Die fru¨hen Briefe, 134.

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writings of Goethe, Schelling, and Heinrich SteVens.42 But mounting criticism of this philosophy within Germany and the successes of more empirically oriented, experimental sciences in France and Great Britain diminished the inXuence of Naturphilosophie, creating space for the emergence of the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) or what some called the ‘exact sciences’ (exacte Wissenschaften). In his rectorial address at Berlin in 1893 the renowned pathologist Rudolf Virchow claimed that the return of the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), the brother of Wilhelm, from his researches in Paris to Berlin in 1828 ‘deWnitely marked the transition to the time of the natural sciences’. It was a period, Virchow elaborated, ‘in which philosophic systems were pushed into the background [and] sober observation and common sense asserted themselves’.43 While a transition of this magnitude cannot be reduced to one person or one date, Virchow’s claim does not entirely miss the mark; for roughly from this time German universities witnessed an explosion of activity in empirical Welds such as physics, astronomy, biology, chemistry, pathology, and zoology, as well as a similar growth of supporting institutions: laboratories, observatories, museums, collections, clinics, institutes, and more.44 Leading scientists, such as the chemist Justus Liebig (1803–73) at Gießen and the physiologist Johannes Mu¨ller (1801–58) at Berlin, began to assume more prominent and inXuential social roles. Natural scientists eagerly embraced the same demanding, progressive research ethic that earlier had characterized the activity of philologists and historians.45 Publications in specialized scientiWc journals skyrocketed in the middle decades of the century.46 Looking back over nearly a century of scientiWc endeavour, Virchow could thus charge his colleagues: ‘Surely the retrospect upon the career of our university [Berlin], viewed from the height of the present stage of development, is elevating—we may tell ourselves that 42 Thomas Nipperdey, Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck, 1800–1866, trans. Daniel Nolan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 430. 43 See Rudolf Virchow, Die Gru¨ndung der Berliner Universita¨t und der Uebergang aus dem philosophischen in das naturwissenschaftliche Zeitalter (Berlin, 1893). 44 See J. H. Mertz, A History of European ScientiWc Thought in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1965, repr. of 1904 edn.), i. 157–225. Medicine also beneWted from the rise of natural science. See Edwald Harndt, ‘Die Stellung der medizinischen Fakulta¨t an der preussischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universita¨t zu Berlin als Beispiel fu¨r den Wandel des Geisteslebens im 19.Jahrhundert’, Jahrbuch fu¨r die Geistesleben Mittel- und Ostdeutschlands 20 (1971): 134–60. 45 This point merits underscoring because it is often assumed that the humanistic sciences looked to the natural sciences for inspiration and methodological rigour; but countervailing evidence suggests the priority of the philological-historical disciplines in many, if not all, respects. This point is nicely made by James Turner, ‘Philology and the Generation of New Disciplines, 1825–1900’ (unpublished paper). 46 For speciWc data see the tables of scientiWc publications in R. Steven Turner, ‘The Great Transition’, 472 V.

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eighty years is enough to produce a complete revolution in science and instruction. He who has contributed even a mite to this consummation may look back upon his work with deep satisfaction. But it would be folly to believe that we have nothing more to investigate.’47 Natural science had come a long way, in other words, but the goal, as the demands of research stipulated, lay in the inWnite future, and only a restless, perpetually self-critical community of scholars—a new ‘priesthood’ as Virchow phrased it—was worthy of pursuing it.48 Yet another reason for the staggering growth of the philosophical faculty in the nineteenth century, especially when measured in terms of the quality and quantity of its students, can be attributed to actions of the Prussian state: the reorganization of the relationship of the Gymnasium or secondary school to the university. The Wrst stage of this process goes back to Humboldt’s activity at the Department of Ecclesiastical AVairs and Public Education. When he assumed oYce, a wide variety of standards and types existed among secondary schools, reXected in the various names for these institutions: Gymnasium, Lyceum, Pa¨dagogium, Collegium, and Lateinische Schule. Because the philosophical faculty had not yet attained a high status at this time, teachers at these schools, if they had university training, were regularly drawn from the higher faculties, especially from theology graduates waiting for their own parishes or else from pastors seeking supplemental income. Before the nineteenth century, in other words, one could not say that the position of secondary schoolteacher (Gymnasial-Lehrer) had become a self-standing profession with standardized criteria of merit and recognized social status.49 During Humboldt’s tenure this was changed in two important respects. First, state certiWcation by comprehensive examination of all secondary schoolteachers became mandatory, a measure that assured that only persons who had studied at a university would be permitted to teach at these institutions. This eVectively eliminated large numbers of poorly qualiWed teachers and greatly boosted the status and prestige of an instructor at a Gymnasium— a term which became more or less universally adopted at this time. Second, Humboldt’s Ministry expanded and placed under state control the Wnal examination upon completion of the Gymnasium: the Abitur. Every student who successfully completed this examination gained the unequivocal right to 47 Virchow, Die Gru¨ndung der Berliner Universita¨t. 48 It is of course beyond my intention to oVer a full account of the development of natural science in German universities. See Joseph Ben-David, The Scientist’s Role in Society: A Comparative Study (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 108–38. On theologians’ reactions to advances in natural science, see Frederick Gregory’s excellent study, Nature Lost? Natural Science and the German Theological Traditions of the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). 49 McClelland, The German Experience of Professionalization, 45–7.

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study at a Prussian university.50 For several decades, the Abitur coexisted with several other university-administered tests and application processes that could also allow one entrance into a university. However, in 1834, under the leadership of Altenstein, the Prussian government abolished all separate university tests; thereafter, passing the state-administered Abitur became the exclusive path into a university.51 This action completed a symbiotic development of the two institutions—Gymnasium and university—by tying them unconditionally to one another. It also expanded the state’s control of higher education. By boosting the prestige of secondary schoolteachers through certiWcation, Prussia assured itself a continual supply of well-motivated instructors. This accentuated the importance of the philosophical faculty, transforming it, despite its persistent rhetoric of pure learning, into something of a professional faculty as well, the purpose of which was to produce teachers. With stable careers obtainable with a degree from the philosophical faculty, the career-minded student was no longer bound to matriculate in one of the higher faculties. As one might imagine, this development diminished the allure of the theological faculty for many students, especially since its graduates had hitherto predominated as teachers in the secondary school system. As one scholar has noted, ‘Many a youth who would formerly have followed a theological course of studies now heeded the call of science and humanities.’52 The phenomenal growth of the philosophical faculty in the nineteenth century did not occur without certain problems and dilemmas. Increases in student matriculation, the diversiWcation of scholarship, and expansion of the curriculum prompted the question of whether the faculty should be subdivided. Already a much-discussed topic by mid-century, in 1880 it became the subject of a noted rectorial address, ‘The Question of the Division of the Philosophical Faculty’, delivered by the chemist A. W. Hofmann at the University of Berlin. Hofmann recognized that the ‘exceptional position’ of the philosophical faculty with its ‘daily increasing membership’ had made the question of the faculty’s subdivision a pressing issue, ‘awaken[ing] a certain commotion in academic circles’. The commotion speciWcally centered on the question of whether the natural sciences, distinguished by their methodology 50 Eduard Spranger, Wilhelm von Humboldt und die Reform des Bildungswesen (Tu¨bingen: M. Niemeyer, 1960), 226–40. On Schleiermacher’s role in the reform of secondary education at this time, see Kurt Nowak, Schleiermacher: Leben, Werk und Wirkung (Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001), 215–20. 51 See the ‘Abiturientenpru¨fung. Regelment von 4 Juni 1834’, in Ludwig von Ro¨nne (ed.), Das Unterrichtswesen des preussichen Staates (Berlin, 1855), ii. 257. 52 McClelland, State, Society, and University in Germany, 156. Cf. Anthony J. La Vopa, Prussian Schoolteachers. Profession and OYce, 1763–1848 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 14 V.

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and accelerated growth, should be given a faculty of their own. Although a chemist, Hofmann came down against division, arguing that the humanistic and natural-scientiWc sides of the philosophical faculty complemented one another and should not be sundered. Such a conservative stance (which harked back to the idealist notion of the unity of all knowledge) by and large became the rule in the nineteenth century, especially at Prussian universities. However, most universities came to recognize various academic branches, even if from the standpoint of university administration they were lumped under the general rubric of ‘philosophical faculty’. Still, exceptions took place. In 1863 Tu¨bingen created a separate faculty for its natural scientists, followed by Strasbourg (1872), Munich (1873), Heidelberg (1890), and Freiburg (1909).53 The controversy over this issue, one should note, provides important institutional context for understanding the spirited theoretical debates of the late nineteenth century concerning the methodologies of the Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften.54 The contrasting fortunes of the philosophical and theological faculties are made especially clear by statistical information from the nineteenth century. Pointing out this contrast amounted to a virtual refrain in the work of the Halle political scientist Johannes Conrad, who published a major statistical survey of German universities in 1884.55 ‘If the theological faculty has in course of time lost in importance the philosophical faculty has correspondingly gained.’ According to Conrad’s Wgures, in 1830–1 students and professors in the Protestant theological faculties accounted for 26.8 per cent of the entire population of German universities. By 1881–2, this Wgure had dropped to 12.5 per cent. The Catholic theological faculties witnessed a proportional drop, from 11.4 per cent in 1830–1 to 3.1 per cent Wfty years later.56 In the 1870s the paucity of students matriculating in theology became so alarming that a series of church conferences was held on ‘the decline of the study of theology’. ‘The number of students is so insuYcient’, one distressed observer noted with telling hyperbole, ‘that the clergy will shortly become extinct and most posts remain vacant if a change for the better does not 53 A. W. Hofmann, ‘The Question of the Division of the Philosophical Faculty’, trans. John Williams White (Boston, 1883), 10–14, and Frank R. Pfetsch, Zur Entwicklung der Wissenschaftspolitik in Deutschland, 1750–1914 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1974), 177. 54 The locus classicus on this issue was Wilhelm Dilthey’s Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, Versuch einer Grundlegung fu¨r das Studium der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte (Leipzig, 1883). 55 Johannes Conrad, Das Universita¨tsstudium in Deutschland wa¨hrend der letzten 50 Jahre (Jena, 1884). This work was translated into English and became a major source of information on German universities in the Anglo-American world. See Johannes Conrad, The German Universities for the Last Fifty Years, trans. John Hutchison (Glasgow, 1885). 56 Conrad, Universita¨tsstudium in Deutschland, 60 V.

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occur soon.’57 By contrast, the philosophical faculty witnessed ‘an enormous increase, not only absolutely, but even relatively to the other faculties.’ As a percentage of the entire university system, members of the philosophical faculty increased from 17.7 per cent in 1830–1 to 40.3 per cent, in 1881–2, more than doubling the size of the faculty in Wfty years.58 The University of Berlin was more or less typical of broader patterns. Students in its philosophical faculty averaged 20.6 per cent of the whole student body between 1810 and 1815, whereas between 1905 and 1910 they averaged 51.08 per cent. During the same period, theology students dropped from 19.7 per cent (1810–15) to just over 4 per cent (1905–10). In absolute numbers, 283 students matriculated in the theological faculty at Berlin between 1810 and 1815, rising to 2,974 between 1905 and 1910. Students matriculating in the philosophical faculty, by sharp contrast, grew from 296 (1810–15) to 37,507 (1905–10).59 Alongside the growth of the philosophical faculty and the rise of specialized research, external political forces made their reality felt in mid-nineteenthcentury German universities. In some cases, these forces boosted the academic and social proWle of theologians, but they also introduced currents of change that ultimately diminished the prominence of the theological faculty. Although the heady days of revolutionary and reforming zeal of the early nineteenth century were ended by the reactionary climate after 1815–19, awakened political consciousness proved to be a lingering consequence of this era, something acutely felt by many intellectual elites in society, theologians and clergymen included. The exhilarating and conXict-ridden experience of 1789–1815 could not simply be wiped from memory: the ideologies of liberalism and nationalism, although putatively suppressed by the Congress of Vienna and the Karlsbad Decrees, became potent, irrepressible forces in German university life. Consequently, the Vorma¨rz period, while oYcially repressive, witnessed an increasing politicization of academic life throughout 57 Quoted in Harmut Titze, ‘Enrollment Expansion and Academic Overcrowding in Germany’, in Konrad Jaraush (ed.), The Transformation of Higher Learning, 1860–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 75. There were also several books published to address the ¨ ber die Abnahme des Studiums der Theologie (Leipzig, 1873) situation, including G. Schlosser, U ¨ ber die Abnahme der Theologie-Studierenden (Stuttgart, 1875). In the 1880s and and L. Ernesti, U 1890s the number of theological students recovered enough to diminish the sense of crisis. Nonetheless, the ratio of theology students to the German population as a whole declined steadily throughout the century. According to Conrad, there were 15.6 Protestant theology students for every 100,000 Protestants between 1830 and 1836, whereas during 1881–2 there were only 10.4. See Conrad, Universita¨tsstudium in Deutschland, 67. 58 Ibid. 60. 59 Max Lenz, Geschichte der ko¨niglichen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Unversita¨t zu Berlin (Halle, 1910), v. 517.

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Germany and a new awareness of the relationship between political and theological points of view.60 An often overlooked fact, Schleiermacher proved to be the prototype of a new, politicized theologian and clergyman. The founder of Berlin’s theological faculty represents a signiWcant departure from past norms in his outspoken embrace of political liberalism and pan-German nationalism and in his attacks on hereditary priveleges. His Wery sermons and publications against Napoleon and against Prussia’s alliance with France after the 1812 Russian campaign bespeaks a novum in Prussian-German religious history. ‘By using the pulpit and the press as forums to inXuence ‘‘public opinion,’’ and even as instruments to bring political pressure on the government, Schleiermacher created an important precedent for the future.’61 But the risks involved by such actions soon became clear once political reaction set in. Despite his high proWle as professor and pastor, in the1820s Schleiermacher became suspect to reactionary elements in the government. His dismissal from the university was even considered on the basis of the discovery of several letters he had written, in which he had questioned the government’s post-1819 repressive measures. Only the timely diplomatic manœuvering of Minister Altenstein prevented this from happening. Even so, oYcial surveillance of Schleiermacher continued for several years before his name was Wnally cleared, allowing for a more conciliatory relationship with the government in his later years.62 Although Schleiermacher was ultimately spared political humiliation, such good fortune eluded other Vorma¨rz theologians who veered too far from what the government regarded as religiously or politically acceptable behaviour. Among the most sensational episodes of the era concerned that of Schleiermacher’s colleague, de Wette. After the murder of the reactionary playwright August von Kotzebue in 1819 by the politically liberal theology student Karl Sand, universities throughout the newly created German Confederation were placed under tight surveillance and supervision. De Wette made the mistake of writing a letter of consolation to Sand’s mother, not condoning her son’s act but expressing the view that he felt the young man acted from pure motives and that his liberal views, which de Wette shared, could be read as a ‘beautiful sign of the times’.63 Unfortunately for de Wette, Prussian censors 60 F. W. Graf, ‘Protestantische Theologie und die Formierung der bu¨rgerlichen Gesellschaft’, in Graf (ed.), ProWle des neutzeitlichen Protestantismus (Gu¨tersloh: Gu¨tersloher Verlagshaus, 1990), i. 11–44. 61 Robert M. Bigler, The Politics of German Protestantism: The Rise of the Protestant Church Elite in Prussia, 1815–1848 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), 31–2. 62 On this episode, see Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, ii (1). 84 V. and Nowak, Schleiermacher, 378–85. 63 Letter of 31 March 1819 in Ernst Staehelin (ed.), Dewettiana: Forschungen und Texte zu Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wettes Leben und Werke (Basle: Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1956), 86.

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intercepted his letter and revealed its contents to higher oYcials. Despite his pleas for clemency, seconded by members of Berlin’s faculty, de Wette was dismissed from his teaching post and banned from teaching at any other Prussian university. Bereft of a position for several years, de Wette eventually accepted a call from the Swiss University of Basle in 1822. To add insult to injury, the Prussian government issued a decree in 1824 forbidding its students from studying at Basle, characterizing its university as a refuge for demagogues.64 If de Wette’s case reveals the limits of freedom of expression in the Vorma¨rz era, the case of the theologian Bruno Bauer (1809–82) suggests the steady acceptance of the related ideal of academic freedom among theological faculties, even if it too attests to the abiding power of the state over university aVairs. What is more, Bauer’s intellectual development bears witness to how forces unleashed by the new Wissenschaftsideologie could be enlisted in intellectually and politically radical causes. As Bauer came to see things, modern Wissenschaft and traditional theology, indeed all theology, were on an inexorable collision course; yet only the former was true and justiWed, and the honest theologian should simply accept this fact. ‘Wissenschaft’, he told his friend and intellectual ally Arnold Ruge, ‘must make sure that its categories and evolution are kept free of any infection from earlier representations. The break must be clean and absolute.’65 Bauer arrived at such a position only gradually however. In 1828 he matriculated in Berlin’s theological faculty, gaining the right to instruct as a Privatdozent in 1834. Due to his considerable native talent and Hegelian sympathies, Marheinecke hailed him as among Berlin’s most promising young theologians. Minister Altenstein was also impressed and oVered generous support and encouragement to the talented upstart. However, Bauer’s increasing association with left-leaning ‘Young Hegelians’ at Berlin began to exert a powerful inXuence on his thinking. By the late 1830s it had become clear that he had moved in a radical direction, theologically and politically. This shift in his thought was made clear by increasingly vituperative attacks against the state-church system in Prussia and against the theological conservatism of colleagues such as Hengstenberg. When a position on Bonn’s theological faculty opened in 1839, Altenstein decided that the bright, potential troublemaker be removed from Berlin, placing him in the new Rhineland university, despite strong protests from its 64 De Wette was allowed to publish all documents and memoranda pertaining to his dismissal in an eVort to help clear his name. See de Wette, Aktensammlung u¨ber die Entlassung des Professors D. de Wette vom theologischen Lehramt zu Berlin: Zur Berichtigung des o¨Ventlichen Urteils von ihm selbst herausgegeben (Leipzig, 1820). 65 Quoted in James Sheehan, German History, 1770–1866 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 565.

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theological faculty. At Bonn, the young ‘Robespierre of theology’, as some dubbed him, accelerated his radical course, eventually mounting a relentless assault on all forms of ‘apologetic’ theology, whether pietist, confessional, or Hegelian. In an anonymously published essay, Die evangelische Landeskirche Preussens und die Wissenschaft (1840), Bauer held out the hope that Prussia would recapture the enlightened spirit of Friedrich the Great and the Stein reforms, transforming the state into a progressive vanguard of modern rationality and scientiWc progress against theological forces of backwardness. He also opined that a decisive confrontation was at hand between ‘theological consciousness’ and ‘scientiWc consciousness’ and that the state had better side with the latter. Interestingly, Bauer never considered abandoning his theological vocation for a secular career. He came to feel that the dissolution of theology at the hands of a practising theologian—transforming theology into critical philosophy, faith into Wissenschaft—constituted a historically necessary and urgent task. Theology was simply the hell through which he had to pass, he once wrote, before he could enjoy the pure heavenly air of Wissenschaft.66 In 1841–2 Bauer published a three-volume study of the Gospels, Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker, a work in the spirit of D. F. Strauss that contradicted traditional church doctrine at almost every point and proved an important milestone in Bauer’s developing anti-Christian humanism and outspoken revolutionary politics. Alarmed after the publication of volume one, minister Friedrich Eichhorn, Altenstein’s more conservative successor, asked Bonn’s theological faculty, and then the rest of Prussia’s Protestant theological faculties, to submit their opinion about Bauer’s controversial book. Eichhorn posed two questions: (1) ‘What standpoint does the author take towards Christianity in this book?’ and (2) ‘Can [Bauer] still be permitted to teach according to the regulations of our universities and especially our theological faculties?’ Practically all twenty-seven theologians who responded believed that Bauer’s views were in conXict with accepted doctrine. Quite revealingly though, a marked majority (sixteen to eleven) believed that such a conXict was not necessarily grounds for dismissal; many cited the principles of ‘Lehrfreiheit’ to back up their position. The universities, one theologian responded, should be protected by the state as a sphere for ‘free inquiry in the area of scientiWc theology’.67 66 Bruno Bauer, Briefwechsel zwischen Bruno Bauer und Edgar Bauer wa¨hrend der Jahre 1839 bis 1842 (Leipzig, 1844), 37, and John E. Toews, Hegelianism: The Path toward Dialectical Humanism, 1805–1841 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 310 f. 67 See Otto Ritschl, Die evangelisch-theologische Fakulta¨t zu Bonn in dem ersten Jahrhundert ihrer Geschichte, 1818–1919 (Bonn, 1919), 23–9. The theologians’ opinions and other relevant documents concerning Bauer were collected and published as Gutachten der evangelisch-theologischen Faculta¨ten der ko¨niglich Preussischen Universita¨ten u¨ber den Licentiaten Bruno Bauer in Beziehung auf dessen Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker (Berlin, 1842).

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Exercising the prerogative of his oYce, however, Eichhorn placed more emphasis on the response to the Wrst question and decided in 1842 to revoke Bauer’s venia legendi. Nonetheless, the episode testiWes to the growing ascendency of academic freedom over apologetic or doctrinal concerns as a principle for teaching in theological faculties. At the same time, Eichhorn’s Wnal decision exhibited the power of the state to intervene in university matters. But this power in diVerent hands could be utilized, as we shall see, for nonconservative causes as well. In so far as he sought to protect the status quo, Eichhorn’s actions against Bauer reXected prudential judgement. Bauer represented both an aVront to orthodox Christianity and a challenge to the Vorma¨rz political order, to what the new king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV (r. 1840–61), championed as a ‘Christian state’. But the 1840s would witness not only the intensiWcation of Bauer’s wellknown political radicalism but also to that of a more general liberal spirit and climate of discontent in Prussian and German universities, a factor that contributed signiWcantly to the revolutionary tide of 1848 and 1849. Waxing liberalism among the professoriate and university-educated classes, as one scholar has noted, ‘was perhaps the most important ingredient in the general sentiment that eventually led to the Revolution’.68 Here is not the place to discuss the proverbial ‘complexity of 1848’, but it merits bearing in mind the considerable role that academically trained individuals and professors played in the events culminating in the Frankfurt Assembly of 1848, which resulted in Germany’s near uniWcation and in its Wrst drafted, if unimplemented, national constitution. Of the deputies that gathered in Frankfurt, roughly 80 per cent held university degrees. Almost 20 per cent were professors, scholars, or secondary schoolteachers, while 13 per cent were theologians or clergymen.69 In other words, the commonplace quip that the Frankfurt Assembly was a ‘parliament of professors’ is by no means beside the point. However, from the standpoint of the later nineteenth century, the liberal political agitation of the professoriate of the late 1840s stands out as atypical academic behaviour. This is especially true when the revolutionary upheaval of the 1840s is compared to the more conservative milieu of the 1850s and 1860s and to the post-1871 national period, which witnessed a greater coincidence between the interests of the university and those of the state. In fact, the principal lesson of the ‘failed revolution’ for many educated elites was an increased disdain of the unruly forces of popular democracy, which during the Revolution had often conXicted with the more moderate goals of national uniWcation and establishing a constitutional 68 Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, 125. 69 Ibid. 44, and Sheehan, German History, 676–8.

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system.70 For many in the learned classes, as Heinrich HeVter has written, ‘the experiences of the unsuccessful revolution spurred the reaction against radicalism and, despite all opposition against a reactionary government, increased the inclination to compromise with the monarchic-bureaucratic powers’.71 The Bismarckian promise of law, order, and nationhood, Fritz Ringer has noted, moved the ‘mandarin’ university elites, despite holding progressive views in the scientiWc realm, ‘toward an ever more unquestioning support of the existing regime. Before the end of the century, the German academic community as a whole had fallen into the role of . . . [a] decidedly oYcial establishment.’72 Yet despite the manifold failures of the Revolution, those who met at Paulskirche in Frankfurt in 1848 did advance the standing of certain ideas and intellectual currents that would aVect the future development of universities and academic theology. For example, an attempted eVort to separate church and state following the Western constitutional model (and the related issue of decreasing clerical inXuence in state education) proved an inXuential, if unrealized, article of politics after 1848. It was kept alive during the imperial period especially by the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Such a separation only became a reality, however, with the Weimar Constitution in 1919, at which time the fate of theological faculties in state-funded universities, as we shall see, became a subject of heated controversy and debate. Furthermore, the ‘spirit of 1848’ helped advance the rights of those such as Bauer who held unorthodox viewpoints. Academic freedom enjoyed clear support in the constitution drafted in Frankfurt: ‘Die Wissenschaft and ihre Lehre ist frei’ (VI§152). The same article made its way into the Prussian Constitution of 1850, eVectively undermining the legal basis for confessionalism in the universities.73 This point is particularly relevant for theological faculties, whose members were still regularly required to swear a doctrinal oath. Some of these oaths, such as Berlin’s, could be quite broad and ecumenical, while others remained pointedly confessional in the seventeenthcentury sense. The 1850 provision of academic freedom watered down the 70 The universities and the Revolution of 1848 is a large and important topic in its own right. For starters, see Erich J. Hahn, ‘The Junior Faculty in ‘‘Revolt’’: Reform Plans for Berlin University in 1848’, AHR 82 (1977): 875–95, and Karl Griewank, Deutsche Studenten und Universita¨ten in der Revolution von 1848 (Weimar, 1949). 71 Heinrich HeVter, Die deutsche Selbstverwaltung im 19.Jahrhundert: Geschichte der Ideen und Institutionen (Stuttgart: K. F. Ko¨hler, 1950), 351–2. 72 Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, 127. 73 E. R. Huber and W. Huber (eds.), Staat und Kirche im 19. und 20.Jahrhundert: Dokumente zur Geschichte des Staatskirchenrecht (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1976), ii. 32–8. Cf. Georg Kaufmann, Die Lehrfreiheit an den deutschen Universita¨ten im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Leipzig, 1898).

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signiWcance of the oath, creating an ambiguous legal environment conducive to greater Xexibility in theological teaching and scholarship. Already though, many theologians regarded these oaths as historically conditioned phenomena, relics of Protestantism from an earlier stage of development.74 The world-historical events of 1866–71 that ushered into being the Second German Empire were not without consequences for universities and theological faculties. With few exceptions, Protestant theologians passed judgment on these events favourably, as did most of the professoriate. Even theologians inclined to political liberalism, once hostile to Bismarck for his antiparliamentary actions, came to regard him as a national hero after 1866, as a defender of progressive German-Protestant principles.75 The wars against Catholic Austria and France were regarded as ‘just wars’ by the majority of Protestant theologians and Prussia’s victories leading to the Reich founding were interpreted in providential, triumphalist, and often highly emotional terms.76 As one young theologian wrote in 1870 from his remote post in Berne, Switzerland: ‘[What] irreparable loss of not being able to live in the great Xood, the ocean of enthusiasm and of the deepest stirring of all the noblest human feelings that presently Xow toward Germany.’77 In a letter to Austria’s only Protestant theological faculty (founded in 1821 at the University of Vienna) on the occasion of its Wftieth anniversary, members of Kiel’s theological faculty equated Prussia’s recent successes with the triumph of ‘Protestant Wissenschaft’ over the intellectually regressive inXuence of Catholicism.78 74 Gu¨nther Holstein, ‘Theologische Fakulta¨ten und Lehrversprechen (formula sponsionis)’, in Festschrift fu¨r Max Pappenheim zum 50.Jahrestag seiner Doktorpromotion (Breslau, 1930), 190–7. 75 On the establishment of the Prussian parliament and Bismarck’s relations to it, see Blackbourn, The Long Nineteenth Century, 225 V. 76 Graf, ‘Protestantische Theologie in der Gesellschaft des Kaiserreichs’, in Graf (ed.), ProWle des neutzeitlichen Protestantismus, ii. 12–22, and Thomas Nipperdey, Religion im Umbruch: Deutschland, 1870–1918 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988), 92 V. 77 Letter of Carl Holstein to Franz Overbeck, 12 September 1870, in Ernst Staehelin (ed.), ¨ bersicht u¨ber den Franz-Overbeck Nachlaß der Universita¨tsbibliothek Basel (Basle: Overbeckiana: U Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1962), i. 93. 78 Not only Kiel but many northern German Protestant theological faculties sent letters of congratulations and encouragement to the faculty in Vienna. SigniWcant insight into the attitudes of German Protestant theologians towards Bismarck’s actions can be inferred from these letters. For example, Berlin’s faculty wrote: ‘Halten Sie fest im Kampfe. Hu¨ten sie treu das anvertraute Kleinoid evangelischer Wahrheit! Die Kraft des Protestantismus muß sich noch weiter bewa¨hren.’ And from Go¨ttingen: ‘[Vienna’s Protestant faculty is] eine Leuchte der evangelisch-theologischen Wissenschaft in dem weiten Umkreis der unter Oesterreichs Sceptor vereinigten La¨nder . . .’ These letters are gathered as ‘Beilagen’ in Albrecht Vogel, Die semisaecularfeier der K. K. evangelisch-theologischen Faculta¨t in Wien (Vienna, 1872), 37 V., HUA Theol. Fak. 83. Vienna’s Protestant faculty actually began as a separate school of theology in 1821, only gaining faculty status in 1850. Today, it is the only Protestant theological faculty in Austria. See RGG vi. 1703–7.

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What is more, the Bismarckian Empire of the 1870s and 1880s, in making concessions to the German middle class, eliminated many causes of friction between university and government that had characterized earlier periods. In return, the universities developed a more conciliatory relationship with the state. The oppositional tendencies of professors and students, with some exceptions, diminished considerably. By the late nineteenth century, university professors across all faculties were at the forefront of beating the national drum.79 The student body grew enormously during the late nineteenth century, boosted by rapid population growth, improved literacy and secondary education, and by the fact that universities had become increasingly attractive to sons of the middle classes as avenues of social mobility. Between 1830 and 1860, the number of students at all German universities had Xuctuated in a range between 12,000 and 13,000. By 1870 it had reached 14,000, and it continued to grow at an astonishing pace until the First World War. By 1900 total enrolment stood at 34,000; in 1914 it had crested 61,000.80 That many of these students were bright, ambitious foreigners and that a number of foreign countries—such as the United States, Great Britain, and Japan— had begun to emulate German universities during this period only added to a sense of national pride and accomplishment felt by professors and government oYcials alike. In 1905 Adolf Harnack boasted that 1,150 of Berlin’s 7,700 students were foreigners eager for tutelage in German Wissenschaft.81 In sum, the post-1871 period was characterized by general satisfaction and rapid expansion of the university system, not by criticism and innovation, as was the case in the 1789–1815 period. Once a potential victim of modernity, the university in the imperial era emerged, astoundingly, as one of modernity’s quintessential expressions. But all was not smooth sailing. The swift industrialization, urbanization, and population growth that characterized the period confronted the universities with new pressures and problems. As the industrial-economic bloc grew in strength in society, it increasingly made its interests known in the political arena, and there was relatively little done to achieve a clear separation of economic and political power. In turn, economically motivated political interests often put pressures on the universities and helped promote and fund various industry-friendly forms of research and 79 McClelland, State, Society, and University, 234, and Blackbourn, The Long Nineteenth Century, 426–37. 80 Franz Eulenberg, ‘Die Frequenz der deutschen Universita¨ten von ihrer Gru¨ndung bis zur Gegenwart’, in Abhandlung der philologisch-historischen Klasse der ko¨niglich sa¨chsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften 24 (Leipzig, 1906), 255. 81 Harnack, ‘Vom Großbetrieb der Wissenschaft’, PJ 119 (1905): 197.

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teaching.82 Not surprisingly, the areas that beneWted most from these pressures were the philosophical faculties (especially in the natural sciences) and also the medical faculties. In 1840 the entire professoriate (Ordinarien, Extraordinarien, and Privatdozenten) in German philosophical faculties stood at 536, rising to 1491 in 1905, with most growth in the later decades of the century—a rate of growth approaching 200 per cent. Similarly impressive, medical faculties’ teaching staV jumped from 316 in 1840 to 971 in 1905. By contrast, the professoriate in Protestant theological faculties in Germany witnessed a growth from 146 in 1840 to only 196 in 1905.83 One observes a similar trend with respect to the types of seminars, institutes, and other auxiliary institutions founded in the late nineteenth century. After 1871 Prussia developed an extraordinarily rapid pace of founding seminars and institutes, particularly under the leadership of Friedrich AlthoV (1839–1908), the strong-willed, inXuential chief of higher education within the Kultusministerium from 1882 to 1907. During his time in oYce, AlthoV helped found in Prussia no less than eighty-six medical institutes, laboratories, and clinics and seventy-seven institutes and seminars in the philosophical faculties. By contrast, just four theological seminars arose in the same period.84 A 1914 guide to the University of Berlin for foreign students, likewise, showcased three institutions (Anstalten) in the theological faculty, three in law, but thirty-two in medicine and thirty-one in philosophy.85 While the existence of many such ‘Anstalten’ can be interpreted as a response to the imperatives of industrialization and the burgeoning of the empirical sciences in the late nineteenth century, other considerations are also important. Usually funded directly by the government, and often designed to address speciWc social, medical, or technological needs, these institutions often existed outside the statutory mandate of the universities, even as they thrived on university aYliation. The directors were selected because they represented the most accomplished scholars in their Weld, and they were regularly enticed to accept appointments by the promise of gaining their own seminar or institute. In eVect then, the granting of such an institution to a professor regularly functioned as a form of government patronage, and it

82 McClelland, State, Society, and University, 300–1. 83 Less impressive growth was true of Catholic theological faculties as well as of law faculties. Following trends witnessed during the era of Altenstein, the most explosive growth in medical and philosophical faculties was at the rank of junior faculty (Extraordinarien and Privatdozenten). See McClelland, State, Society, and University, 259–60. 84 A list of AlthoV ’s ‘umfangreiche Scho¨pfungen’ is found in Arnold Sachse, Friedrich AlthoV und sein Werk (Berlin, 1928), 237–44. 85 Berlin und seine Universita¨t: ein Fu¨hrer fu¨r Studierende mit besonderer Beru¨cksichtigung der Ausla¨nder (Berlin, 1914), HUB, Ay46248.

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customarily established a loyal and symbiotic bond between the elite professoriate and the state.86 These institutions often abetted forces of specialization. Practically speaking, institutes, seminars, clinics, and research laboratories necessitated space, oYces, and often new buildings, and their establishment, in a literal physical sense, separated colleagues who hitherto might have worked in relatively close proximity. Their founding thus expedited already strong trends towards intellectual diVerentiation and specialization: collegial interaction with a diversely skilled faculty increasingly gave way to more exclusive association with those who shared one’s particular expertise and research interests. As the state aggressively funded seminars and institutes, their buildings and oYces became ‘mute representatives of the walls between disciplines, even within the same faculty’.87 Besides seminars and institutes, another set of institutions, also friendly to the demands of modern science and industry, emerged in the late nineteenth century, challenging the primacy of the Gymnasium-university system established during the time of Humboldt and Schleiermacher. I refer here to the growth of practical high schools or Realschulen as alternatives to the Gymnasien and technical universities or Technische Hochschulen as alternatives to the universities. While many of these more practically oriented schools traced their origins to the Wrst half of the nineteenth century, or earlier in some cases, they only became well-funded, well-attended, and more distinguished ‘practical’ alternatives to the ‘theoretical’ Gymnasium and university after midcentury, borne as they were by the social forces of rapid industrialization. Although one could not say that these institutions directly challenged the primacy and prestige of the universities, on account of their diVering approach to instruction and scholarship, many university-seated professors regarded them with contempt, looking down on their utilitarian emphases. One result of all this was a prolonged public debate that often had the eVect of calling attention to the shortcomings of the traditional universities in the modernizing, industrializing world of Wilhelmine Germany.88 86 Sachse, Friedrich AlthoV und seine Werke, 173 V., and McClelland, State, Society, and University, 280 V. A classic case of this symbiosis is seen in the career of the physicist Hermann von Helmholz. During his lifetime, he directed no fewer than four major scientiWc institutes, in Ko¨nigsberg, Bonn, Heidelberg, and Berlin. He also helped plan and direct the inXuential Physikalisch-Technische Reichanstalt in Berlin. See David Cahan, An Institute for an Empire: the Physikalisch-Technische Reichanstalt in Berlin, 1871–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 87 McClelland, State, Society, and University, 79. 88 Ibid. 236–7. On the founding of Technische Hochschulen and their inXuence on education and society, see Karl-Heinz Manegold, Universita¨t, Technische Hochschule und Industrie (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1970). All together, there were nine major Technische Hochschulen in

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The debate sometimes gave birth to speciWc changes. In Prussia in 1870, to oVer one revealing example, the government decided to allow students of the Realschulen to qualify for university admittance along with their peers in the classical, humanistic Gymnasien.89 The Kultusministerium preceded this decree in 1869 by circulating a letter to the philosophical faculties of Prussia, asking for their opinion on the matter. Interestingly, the faculties (including professors in the natural-scientiWc Welds) largely regarded the government’s measure as inappropriate, for only the classical Gymnasien, they argued, could provide the ‘liberal and many-sided culture’ necessary for success at the university, whereas the Realschulen should stick with the more practical task of preparing its students to serve ‘the great commercial houses and industrial institutions’.90 Exercising its prerogative, however, the government decided to stand by its original intention: by a decree of 7 December 1870 the right of matriculating at a university was granted to any student who had completed the full course of study at a Realschule, and thus ‘a new element was introduced into the universities’.91 Besides Prussia, other states acted similarly or followed suit.92 The government’s heavy-handed action to admit students from Realschulen to the universities despite faculty opposition calls attention to another important trend of the late nineteenth century: continued activism of the state in university aVairs. Indeed, the legacy of Altenstein and Schulze came home to roost during this period as any lingering medieval sense of the university as an autonomous, privileged corporation was eVectively eroded (in practice if not in rhetoric). Universities became creatures of the state par excellence.93 This was mainly achieved not through confrontational measures, as had often been the case, for instance, under the earlier Karlsbad Decrees, but rather through a gradual Xow of decision-making authority from universities into the hands of central state educational bureaucracies—a process though in which professors

Germany in the late nineteenth century. They were located at Berlin-Charlottenberg, Hanover, Aachen, Brunswick, Dresden, Darmstadt, Karlsruhe, Stuttgart, and Munich. In contrast to the universities, these institutions focused on Welds such as agriculture, civil engineering, mechanical engineering, chemistry, geology, metallurgy, and architecture. With the universities, these institutions also witnessed rapid numerical growth of students and faculty in the late nineteenth century. See Paulsen, German Universities, 112. 89 On the contrasting curricula of Realschulen and Gymnasien, see Conrad, The German Universities, 324. Generally, the former gave more attention to modern languages than classical ones and provided more instruction in mathematics and natural science. 90 The letter of Berlin’s philosophical faculty is printed in A. W. Hofmann, ‘The Question of the Division of the Philosophical Faculty’, 39–43. 91 Ibid. p. iv, passim. Some limitations often applied to students of Realschulen. 92 McClelland, State, Society, and University, 249. 93 See Brocke, ‘Hochschule- und Wissenschaftspolitik in Preußen’, 46.

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were often accepting and uncritical. So intertwined appeared the interests of the state and university by 1914 that the professor Emil du Bois-Reymond once remarked that the Prussian professoriate had become the ‘spiritual bodyguard’ (geistige Leibregiment) of the Hohenzollern house—an exaggerated claim certainly but one that is quite revealing.94 Of all the German ministries, the Prussian Kultusministerium remained the most crucial in educational matters by virtue of the scope of its power and inXuence after 1871. The key occupants of its highest oYces in the late nineteenth century—such as Adalbert Falk (1872–9), Gustav von Gossler (1881–91), Friedrich AlthoV (1882–1907), J. R. Bosse (1892–9), and Konrad von Studt (1899–1907), among others—eVectively determined the relationship between the state and university in Prussia and set the agenda for this relationship throughout other German states as well.95 The non-Prussian educational bureaucracies, Max Weber once wrote, often appeared as ‘vassals of the Prussian university administration’.96 For our purposes, several things in particular are noteworthy about late nineteenth-century ministers. First, they no longer presided over a cash-strapped, recently defeated power, as was Prussia after 1806, but rather over a rapidly industrializing political heavyweight that possessed considerably more funds to spend on its intellectual and cultural well-being. Overall, spending on universities in Prussia, for instance, increased from 2 million marks in 1866 to 27 million (36 million counting Technische Hochschulen) in 1914, with the lion’s share going to technical, medical, and natural-scientiWc development.97 Second, as legatees of Altenstein and Schulze, ministers in various capacities sought to carry forward the Kulturstaat ideal, eager to distinguish Prussia, and Germany, by its scientiWc and scholarly accomplishments and by the international renown of its university system. The German Empire, as some phrased it, sought to become a ‘Wissenschaftsstaat’, in which science both expressed national vigour and provided a symbolic language of international intellectual cooperation.98 With respect to religious matters, late nineteenthcentury ministers were inclined to deWne Protestantism not in a rigid doctrinal or pietistic manner; rather, Protestantism was associated with the 94 S. D. Stirk, German Universities through English Eyes (London, 1946), 18, and McClelland, State, Society, and University, 235, 289. 95 Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, iv. 869. This ministry underwent several reorganizations in the mid- and late nineteenth century. On these and on various oYce holders, see Reinhard Lu¨dicke, Die preußischen Kultusminister und ihre Beamten im ersten Jahrhundert des Ministeriums, 1817–1917 (Stuttgart, 1918). 96 Max Weber, ‘The Power of the State and the Dignity of the Academic Calling: The Writings of Max Weber on University Problems’, Minerva 4 (1973): 596. 97 Pfetsch, Zur Entwicklung der Wissenschaftspolitik in Deutschland, 71–2. 98 See Brocke, ‘Hochschule- und Wissenschaftspolitik in Preußen’, 15, 30 V.

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very principles of the modern world: freedom, progress, and scientiWc inquiry—principles regularly contrasted to the ‘medieval’ and ‘authoritarian’ character of Roman Catholicism. Progressive elements of the German professoriate increasingly came to assume such an association as a matter of course; it dovetailed with and supported the legitimacy of their own scholarly enterprise. And if the Ministry of Culture appeared to waZe, it might well receive a pointed reminder from the faculty. Such was the case with the celebrated ‘Spahn aVair’, among the most extensively discussed university conXicts of the Wilhelmine era. In 1901 Minister AlthoV decided to allow for a speciWcally Catholic chair on the University of Strasbourg’s philosophical faculty, oVering it to the Catholic historian Martin Spahn (1875–1945). Such an action, AlthoV reasoned, would help win more support for the University of Strasbourg as a ‘mission for German learning’ from the predominantly Catholic population in Alsace, still uneasy about its recent annexation to Germany. What AlthoV did not anticipate was the Werce opposition he encountered from both secular and liberal-Protestant scholars, spearheaded by the distinguished historian Theodor Mommsen. In a widely discussed article in the Mu¨nchener Neuesten Nachrichten, Mommsen argued that making adherence to dogma (Konfessionsgebundenheit) the prerequisite of a professorial chair in the philosophical faculty contradicted the principles of unbiased research and academic freedom. ‘Confessionalism is the mortal enemy of the university,’ as he summed up. Mommsen’s viewpoint was echoed by Adolf Harnack, who, in a letter to the National Zeitung, praised AlthoV ’s many accomplishments, but, invoking the Kulturstaat ideal, also gently reminded the government of its obligation to serve as ‘caretaker’ of intellectual inquiry, ‘protect[ing] the sanctuary of scholarship from the disturbing encroachment of confessional and related forces’.99 In the end, Spahn held his appointment, but government-supported confessional appointments proved a limited undertaking.100 What is more, government appointments in the late nineteenth century could as easily work against confessional interests. Either way, the government’s role in making appointments was extensive. What Max Lenz wrote of the University of Berlin in the mid-nineteenth 99 Mommsen’s article originally appeared in the Mu¨nchener Neuesten Nachrichten (15 November 1901). Harnack’s letter appeared in the National Zeitung (28 November 1901). The quotations from these sources are taken from Craig, Scholarship and Nation Building, 154–5. Cf. Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, iv. 960 V. 100 The Spahn case is treated extensively in Christoph Weber, Der ‘Fall Spahn’ (1901): Ein Beitrag zur Wissenschafts- und Kulturdiskussion im ausgehenden 19.Jahrhundert (Rome: Herder, 1980).

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century, while far from universally valid, points to a more general reality: ‘The faculties had hardly anything to say about appointments, [for] very few instructors were appointed with their consultation. Most were procured directly by the minister. . . . The minister alone became the source of all grace; whoever desired advancement was forced to turn to him.’101 Although faculties across Germany possessed the right to nominate candidates for vacant positions (Vorschlagsrecht), state educational ministries retained the right to make Wnal appointments (Oktroyierungsrecht), and it was a right frequently exercised. An enterprising article by the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung published a set of Wgures in December 1901, which indicated in the years between 1817 and 1900 a signiWcantly large number of professors in Prussia had received positions in disregard to the proposals of the faculties. In the medical faculty, the government went against the faculties’ choices 134 times out of a total of 612 appointments. In law, 86 government appointments were made out of 436 altogether. Finally, theology had the highest percentage of government appointments; of 311, 102 were made by the government against faculty recommendations—thus roughly one-third of all theology appointments during this period.102 Between 1882 and 1912, to provide an example, the University of Marburg (Prussian only after national uniWcation) witnessed seven new appointments. Of the seven, four went against the wishes of the faculty, one of which took place even without its consultation. Some members of Marburg’s faculty felt frustrated enough by the situation to complain that their ability to function as a faculty had been ‘incapacitated’ by the government.103 Earlier, in 1875, to oVer another example, Minister Adalbert Falk, a committed liberal and key prosecutor of the Kulturkampf against Catholics, appointed the Kantian and critically minded theologian Otto PXeiderer (1839–1908) to Berlin’s theological faculty without eliciting a single vote from PXeiderer’s future colleagues. In so acting, Falk eVectively contravened conservative-confessional interests and helped paved the way for Berlin to emerge from lingering Vorma¨rz reaction to become a centre point of liberal Protestantism in the late nineteenth century.104 In 1888 Minister AlthoV accelerated this trend by bringing the talented young Adolf Harnack from Marburg to Berlin. Although faculty opposition 101 Lenz, Universita¨t Berlin, ii. (1). 407. 102 Noted in Brocke, ‘Hochschule- und Wissenschaftspolitik in Preußen’, 89–90. 103 Adolf Ju¨licher, Die Entmu¨ndigung einer preußischen theologischen Fakulta¨t in zeitgeschichtlichem Zusammenhange (Tu¨bingen, 1913). 104 On PXeiderer’s appointment, see Walter Elliger, 150 Jahre theologische Fakulta¨t Berlin: Eine Darstellung ihrer Geschichte von 1810 bis 1960 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1960), 65–7. On PXeiderer’s general theological outlook, see his ‘Die Aufgabe der wissenschaftlichen Theologie fu¨r die Kirche der Gegenwart’, in Reden und Aufsa¨tze (Munich, 1909), 202–16.

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proved negligible in this case, worries over Harnack’s orthodoxy elicited cries of protest against his appointment from several leading clergymen and from members of Prussia’s highest Protestant church authority, the Evangelische Oberkirchenrat. Since 1855 this body alongside relevant faculties possessed the right to make suggestions and voice concerns about theological positions in the universities of Prussia’s ‘old provinces’, those under the Prussian crown prior to the nineteenth century.105 Unsuccessfully, however, church leaders advocated that Harnack’s candidacy be dismissed, complaining that his Lerhrbuch der Dogmengeschichte (1886–7) fundamentally contradicted acceptable evangelical doctrine.106 Impressed by Harnack’s scholarly reputation, however, AlthoV won over to his side both Chancellor Bismarck and the new Kaiser, Wilhelm II. In an artful letter to Bismarck, AlthoV made the case that clerical opposition to Harnack signiWed a much broader issue: whether the state or conservative elements in the church would determine the future of Prussian universities. If clerical powers prevailed, AlthoV averred, then ‘the freedom of scientiWc inquiry would be undermined and the standing of theological faculties diminished’. To the Kaiser, he similarly argued that freedom of theological inquiry would be damaged if the clergymen’s opinions won the day.107 Knowing he had the government to thank, in 1888 Harnack accepted his new post and moved to Berlin, where he developed a tremendous sphere of inXuence, not only as a theologian and church historian, but also as one of Prussia’s leading public intellectuals. His coming to Berlin, according to one critic, Wnally put to rest the lingering notion that doctrine was as important as Wissenschaft, and the church as relevant as the state, in making appointments to the theological faculty.108 But for conservative churchmen Harnack’s case remained a source of great dismay, which surfaced again 1892 in a rancorous 105 On the 1855 cabinet order making this provision, see Hermann Mulert, Evangelische Kirchen und theologische Fakulta¨ten (Tu¨bingen, 1930), 10–11. 106 In particular, three charges were levelled against Harnack: (1) that he questioned the canonical authority of several New Testament books, (2) that he doubted the validity of important miracles in the Gospels, and (3) that he did not believe that Jesus instituted the sacrament of Baptism. See Agnes von Zahn-Harnack, Adolf von Harnack (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1951), 119. 107 AlthoV’s letter to Bismarck and other key documents concerning Harnack’s appointment to Berlin are reprinted in Zahn-Harnack, Harnack, 121 V. To appease conservative opposition, the government did decide later to appoint a so-called Gegenprofessor, one more sympathetic to traditional orthodoxy. This appointment fell to Adolf Schlatter (1852–1938), called to Berlin in 1893. See Werner Neuer, Adolf Schlatter, trans. Robert W. Yarbrough (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1995), 95–106. 108 Huber, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte, iv. 870. Bismarck was awarded an honorary doctorate in theology from the University of Gießen for his support of Harnack and heralded by the theological faculty there as ‘the friend of all German universities’. See Zahn-Harnack, Harnack, 127.

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debate—known as the Apostolikumstreit—over Harnack’s incredulity toward certain doctrinal formulations in the Apostle’s Creed.109 It was cases such as Harnack’s that inspired a special Prussian church conference in 1895 to discuss ‘the unholy alienation between theology and church’. Throughout Germany, conservative clergy discussed this issue, often laying blame on the heavy-handed role of the state and the ethos of scientiWc criticism at the universities. ‘Theological faculties’, one pastor wrote, ‘undermine the authority of God’s word because they portray the doctrine of inspiration as untenable.’110 In his history of the German university, Friedrich Paulsen summarized a view prevalent among conservative churchmen, writing: ‘The evil to be removed is that the state is altogether too liberal in the matter of doctrine. [Government oYcials] . . . are too much inclined to overlook aberrations of doctrine [in making appointments] if they are promulgated by men of recognized scientiWc standing.’111 The increased involvement of the state in university aVairs, the close personal ties between the elite faculty and the government, the growth of specialized seminars and institutes, and the tremendous funding of industryfriendly and often politically motivated initiatives were characteristics of what came to be known as the ‘AlthoV System’, a system associated with a man who, according to one commentator, was simultaneously ‘the most enlightened but also the most dictatorial Minister of Education Prussia has ever had’.112 Under his leadership, the Kulturstaat of Fichte, Hegel, and Altenstein was indeed pushed in the direction of a Wissenschaftsstaat, a state that eagerly looked to the epic of modern science as a rich source of national legitimation and purpose. But the ‘system’ was not without its critics. Max Weber, for example, was a formidable voice of opposition, valuing science, to be sure, but charging that AlthoV ’s approach to state patronage weakened ‘the proud tradition of academic solidarity and independence’, and he feared that this would ultimately render the faculties incapable of oVering any resistance to the directives of the government.113 After the Second World War, the archaeologist Ludwig 109 On this episode and on Harnack’s general relationship to the church, see Karl H. Neufeld, Adolf Harnacks KonXikt mit der Kirche (Innsbruck: Tyrolia, 1979), 114 V. Cf. Heinz-Dietrich Wendland, ‘Die Berufung Adolf Harnacks nach Berlin im Jahre 1888’, JBK 29 (1934): 103 V. 110 ‘Die theologische Fakulta¨ten und die preußische Landeskirche’, National Zeitung (16 May 1895), GStA PK VI NL AlthoV AI Nr. 34. The topic of theological professorial appointments, as an instance of ‘the tension between theological science and the church’, was a fairly frequent one at synodal meetings in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For example, see the discussions in Verhandlungen der fu¨nften ordentlichen Generalsynode der evangelischen Landeskirchen Preußens, 15.Oktober 1903–4.November 1903 (Berlin, 1904), i. 97–122, 629 V. 111 Paulsen, German Universities, 138–9. 112 William H. Dawson, The German Empire, 1867–1914, and the Unity Movement (London, 1919), ii. 393. 113 Weber, ‘The Power of the State’, 575 V.

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Curtius went a step further, even attributing the weak opposition to National Socialism among academic classes to a pervasive political docility fostered earlier in the century by AlthoV.114 Although AlthoV was undoubtedly an exceptional and inXuential personality, Curtius’s charge does not ring entirely true. One should bear in mind that AlthoV stepped into a ministerial apparatus that already gave the state extensive powers over higher education. As Weber opined, ‘The powers which were available to the Prussian Ministry of Education were the most thorough imaginable.’115 Knowledge then of the establishment of this Ministry during the Prussian Reform Era; the pioneering role of past ministers like Altenstein, Schulze, Falk, and others; as well as the steady erosion of the university’s priveleged, corporative status—i.e. its Verstaatlichung—throughout the nineteenth century, should forestall laying such exclusive blame on AlthoV.116 Perhaps more to the point was Werner Sombart’s charge that the ‘AlthoV system’ was ‘not a cause, but an eVect’ of the state bureaucracy’s prior evolution. AlthoV ’s Wissenschaftspolitik, in other words, magniWed trends already underway as he fully exploited pre-existing institutional arrangements and possibilities.117 What is more, blaming AlthoV for the servility to the state among academic elites in the twentieth century does not adequately take into account the welldocumented support of the German Empire among the professoriate in the late nineteenth century—before AlthoV came to power. Such widespread loyalty could only come about in a gradual and voluntary fashion, the causes for which should be sought in systemic changes in the nineteenth century. In particular, emphasis here should be placed on the Bismarckian solution to the question of German nation and statehood, which endeared many scientiWc elites to the state despite its residually illiberal characteristics. Precisely this pre-existing upholding of the status quo helps one understand the overwhelming support among German professors, including theological faculties, for Germany’s war aims in 1914. Indeed, it was a common assumption among the academic classes, as Fritz Ringer has persuasively argued, that Germany was Wghting for nothing less than the sacred energies of German civilization (Kultur), which had received magisterial expression in the German university system.118 This interpretation of the war informed the 114 Brocke, ‘Hochschule- und Wissenschaftspolitik in Preußen’, 15. 115 Weber, ‘The Power of the State’, 597. 116 On the legacy of statism in educational matters from the early nineteenth, see esp. Winfried Speitkamp, ‘Educational Reforms in Germany between Revolution and Restoration’, GH 10 (1992): 1–23. 117 Brocke, ‘Hochschule- und Wissenschaftspolitik in Preußen’, 14. 118 Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, 190–9.

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Christmas letter sent in 1915 by Berlin’s theological faculty to its student soldiers in the Weld. The letter included a picture of the artist Arthur Kampf ’s painting, ‘Fichte als Redner an die deutsche Nation’, which depicted an idealized Fichte standing on a large rock in Berlin with the Brandenburg Gate in the background. In the painting, he is delivering his well-known address of 1807 to an assembly that included Friedrich Schleiermacher and other founders of the University of Berlin. The letter included passages from Fichte’s address, suggesting to the students that they were defending ‘the spirit that . . . was realized in the founding of our University of Berlin’. The implication was straightforward: the young men in the trenches, in the eyes of Berlin’s theological faculty, including Harnack, were defending and dying for the German spirit embodied in the university system, which had been identiWed with the war aims and political ambitions of the German Kaiserreich under Wilhelm II.119

3. THE RISE AND FALL OF ‘ T H E O LO G I C A L E N C YC LO P E D I A’ The First World War has come to signify the abrupt and Wery terminus for many nineteenth-century intellectual assumptions and forms of thought, especially those that had conWdently invested human knowledge with a progressive and unitary character. In Protestant thought, the experience of the Great War, along with the early writings of Karl Barth and his ‘neoorthodox’ associates, is generally regarded as a transition from the reign of liberal Protestantism to a new period of ‘crisis’, characterized by an eschatological accent in theology and a neo-Augustinian pessimism towards human knowledge and history.120 In theological education, the war also coincided with the waning of an important pedagogical literature that had Xourished in German-speaking universities from roughly the late eighteenth century. 119 ‘Zweiter Weihnachtsgruß der Berliner theologischen Universita¨tslehrer an ihre Studenten im Feld’ (Berlin, 1915), HUB, Ay46250. Of course, there were exceptions to theologians’ support of the war. As is well known, the Swiss-German Karl Barth was aghast to discover the degree of support among German theologians. As a result, Barth began to doubt ‘the teaching of all my theological masters in Germany. To me they seemed to have been hopelessly compromised by what I regarded as their failure in the face of the ideology of war.’ From Barth’s ‘Lebenslauf ’ as quoted in Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975), 81. 120 F. W. Graf, ‘Die antihistorischen Revolution in der protestantischen Theologie der zwanziger Jahre’, in Jan Rohls and Gunther Wenz (eds.), Vernunft des Glaubens: wissenschaftliche Theologie und kirchliche Lehre (Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988), 377–405.

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I make reference here to the copious literature of theological encyclopedia, already brieXy encountered in the previous discussion of Schleiermacher’s Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums (1811). Although Schleiermacher’s work was among the more important examples of the genre, it did not stand alone but was preceded by a handful of other signiWcant works and succeeded by the age of theological encyclopedia par excellence.121 In this age, no work proved more popular than the Encyklopa¨die und Methodologie der theologischen Wissenschaften by Karl Rudolf Hagenbach, a one-time student of Schleiermacher at Berlin and professor of theology and church history at the Swiss-German University of Basle from 1823 to 1874. Although not a work of original theologizing, it was among the most widely read theological books of the nineteenth century and it thus makes for an invaluable source in the history of theological pedagogy.122 The genre of theological encyclopedia should not be confused with reference, alphabetically arranged encyclopedias, which, coincidentally, also came into their own during the nineteenth century.123 Rather, theological encyclopedias were encyclopedic to the degree that they deWned the nature and scope of theology, schematized the interrelations of its various subdisciplines, and outlined the practical implications of theoretical positions. In other words, theological encyclopedias were largely exercises in methodology and organization, which not only identiWed and explored the branches of theology but also provided an integrative perspective on theology’s unity. Their principal use was pedagogical, to familiarize beginning students with the discipline of theology; they were regularly derived from and used in conjunction with a Wrst-year course designated variously as ‘theological encyclopedia’, ‘encyclopedia of the theological sciences’, or simply ‘introduction to theology’. Students were regularly advised to begin with this course before moving on to advanced topics. As an 1825 guidebook for theology students at Halle recommended: ‘A complete overview [of theology] including the concept, content, extent, and purpose of each individual discipline and their interrelationship is to be had in the theological encyclopedia. . . . Everyone should begin his studies with this.’124 In addition, they often served as bibliographic resources 121 On the background to the nineteenth-century theological encyclopedia, see Leonhard Hell, Entstehung und Entfaltung der theologischen Enzyklopa¨die (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1999). 122 Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science, 17. 123 On the history of encyclopedias generally, see ‘Philosophical Dictionaries and Encyclopedias’, in EP 170–99. 124 Anweisung fu¨r angehende Theologen zur Uebersicht ihres Studiums . . . auf der ko¨nigl. preußischen vereinigten Halle- und Wittenbergischen Friedrichsuniversita¨t (Halle, 1825), 6, GStA PK I Rep. 76 Va Sek. 8 Tit. 7 Nr. 4. A Study Plan at the University of Jena from 1860 described the purpose of introductory encyclopedias thus: ‘Die Encyklopa¨die einer Wissenschaft verha¨lt sich

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to direct both beginning and advanced students in their research, as well as review guides for students preparing for their state examinations. The Xourishing of this genre in the nineteenth century, as well as its decline in the early twentieth century, has much to tell us about modern German academic theology, especially its relationship to evolving university norms and broader intellectual and cultural currents. The very existence of this literature, for a start, bears witness to the dominance of the historical-critical and scientiWc orientation of theological pedagogy. With few exceptions, authors of this genre, theological encyclopedists, sought to convey to a rising generation of students the necessity of a highly intellectualized, highly systematized approach to theology—a theology worthy of being ranked among other university Wissenschaften. Toward century’s end, divines and theologians in other countries, many of whom had studied in Germany, regularly came to the conclusion that the distinctively high calibre of German theology resided in this pedagogical commitment. Unlike in Germany, a group of American clergymen lamented in 1844, ‘we have no treatise, which can serve as the purpose of an encyclopedia, or general introduction to the science of theology; no comprehensive outline of the science’.125 Not surprisingly, therefore, a number of translations were undertaken, as well as attempts to produce indigenous theological encyclopedia based on German models.126 zu den einzelnen Zweigen derselben wie eine geographische Generalcharte zu den Specialcharten. Sie ero¨Vnet daher passenderweise das Studium der einzelnen Zweige einer Wissenschaft insofern, als sie die Orientirung im ganzen Gebiete derselben erleichtert.’ Akademische StudienPla¨ne (Jena, 1860), 3, NStUBG, H. lit. part. II 9465. 125 See Bibliotheca sacra 1 (1844): 739. 126 Schleiermacher’s encyclopedia (the 1830 edition) was translated into English as Brief Outline of the Study of Theology in 1850 by William Farrer; Hagenbach’s was translated in 1884 by George Richard Crooks and John F. Hurst. J. F. Raebiger’s Encyklopa¨die der Theologie (1880) came into English in 1884. Portions of August Tholuck’s lectures on theological encyclopedia were translated into English and appeared in the journal Bibliotheca sacra (1844) under the title ‘Theological Encyclopedia and Methodology’. In their preface to the 1894 revised edition of Hagenbach’s work, translators Crooks and Hurst claimed that American and English theology had been ‘singularly destitute’ of the type of encyclopedic orientation provided in German universities. This sentiment was widespread among many elite, non-German theologians. On the European continent, the most important Dutch encyclopedia was produced in 1894 by Abraham Kuyper, Encyklopedie der heilige godgeleerdheit, 3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1894), although it had been preceded by several others in the nineteenth century. The Wrst volume of Kuyper’s work contains a thorough history of the development of theological encyclopedias. In France, the theological encyclopedia tradition was carried on by H. G. Kienel, Encyclope´die . . . de la theologie chre´tienne (Strasbourg, 1845), and E. Martin, Introduction a` l’e´tude de la the´ologie protestante (Geneva, 1883). Two important English examples were James Drummond’s Introduction to the Study of Theology (London, 1884) and Alfred Cave’s An Introduction to Theology, its Principles, its Branches, its Results, and its Literature (Edinburgh, 1896). The most important American encyclopedia in the nineteenth century was Philip SchaV ’s Theological Propaedeutic, a General Introduction to the Study of Theology (New York, 1893). See Georg Heinrici,

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Despite their success and inXuence, German examples often presented theology as anxiously obeisant before the new Wissenschaftsideologie, a posture betrayed by the overweening earnestness with which encyclopedists sought to convince students, and presumably sceptical faculty as well, of the scientiWc credentials of theology.127 Finally, the literature demonstrates the impact of increasing specialization on theology, which since the early nineteenth century had been informed by the idealist belief in the unity of knowledge. But as the century progressed, paeans to this unity, frequently found in theological encyclopedias, began to ring increasingly hollow as theology’s various branches developed scholarly agendas and modes of inquiry apart from any coordinating sense of what constituted theology per se. With other factors, this dispersion of ‘theologia’ into specialized and discrete Welds and subWelds contributed to the gradual demise of the literature of theological encyclopedia in the early twentieth century.128 While Schleiermacher’s short work of 1811 represents a turning point in the literature, it did not originate sui generis; rather, it assumed a place in a distinguished line of previous eVorts. Nineteenth-century encyclopedists often included a short overview of the history of the genre, Wnding early harbingers of their eVorts in ancient times. To distinguish their work from alphabetic encyclopedias, authors regularly discoursed on the original Greek meaning of ‘enkyklios paideia’ or the ‘circle of learning’, which had the more speciWc meaning, since the time of Aristotle, of describing the necessary course of studies a young man had to pass through before taking up specialized study or entering public life.129 After the Greeks, the genealogy of encyclopedia was traced back to the Church Fathers, then up through the Middle Ages and Reformation, ending in discussions of works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Works frequently mentioned in these prefatory histories included Augustine’s De doctrina christiana; Nicholas of Clemange’s De studio theologico; Erasmus’s Ratio seu methodus compendio perveniendi ad veram theologiam; Melanchthon’s Brevis ratio discendae theologiae, and the works of several post-Reformation Protestant scholastics, particularly Andreas Hyperius and Johann Gerhard. Additionally, works of German pietism were frequently mentioned, including Spener’s well-known Pia desideria and several of A. H. Francke’s short works on the study of theology.130 ‘Encyclopedia, Theological’, New SchaV-Herzog Encyclopedia (New York, 1909), iv. 125–8, and Gert Hummel, ‘Enzyklopa¨die, theologische’, in TRE ix. 716–42. 127 J. F. Raebiger, Zur theologischen Encyklopa¨die: Kritische Betrachtungen (Breslau, 1882), 82. 128 Farley, Theologia, 105. 129 Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science, 15. 130 See e.g. J. T. L. Danz, Encyklopa¨die und Methodologie der theologischen Wissenschaften (Weimar, 1832), 127 V.

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As important as these and other works might have been as forerunners of the genre, the shape of the nineteenth-century encyclopedia did not begin to emerge until the German Enlightenment was in full swing, shortly after the founding of the University of Halle. The little-known Halle professor Samuel Mursinna, in his Primae lineae encyclopediae theologicae of 1764 (2nd edn., 1784), is believed to be the Wrst theologian to have used the actual term ‘encyclopedia’ in his title—something he borrowed from legal and medical textbooks of his day.131 In substance and organization, Mursinna’s work, however, compared poorly to other texts, which, while not including ‘encyclopedia’ in the title, were nonetheless more inXuential, and regularly recognized as such by nineteenth-century encyclopedists. Among these, particular signiWcance should be accorded to N. H. Gundling’s Die Geschichte der u¨brigen Wissenschaften, fu¨rnehmlich der Gottesgelahrtheit (1742); J. G. Walch’s Einleitung in die theologischen Wissenschaften (1753); J. S. Semler’s Versuch einer na¨hern Anleitung zu nu¨tzlichem Fleisse in der ganzen Gottesgelehrsamkeit (1757); J. L. von Mosheim’s Kurze Anweisung die Gottesgelahrtheit, vernu¨nftig zu erlernen (1763); J. G. Herder’s Briefe das Studium der Theologie betreVend (1780);132 J. A. No¨sselt’s Anweisung zur Bildung angehender Theologen (1786); and G. J. Planck’s Einleitung in die theologischen Wissenschaften (1794). (The works of No¨sselt and Planck, as mentioned in Ch. 3, were used by Schleiermacher in his course on theological encyclopedia at Halle before he published his own work on the subject.)133 Although the eighteenth-century literature exhibits great heterogeneity, certain common themes are apparent. Above all, one notes a decisive, if gradual, movement away from a sapiential, hortatory understanding of theological education, which in the post-Reformation era had privileged ediWcation, piety, salvation, and glorifying God as central components of theological 131 Before Mursinna, the Catholic theologian Martin Gerbert had entitled one chapter of his Apparatus ad eruditionem theologicam (1754) ‘theological encyclopedia’. Farley, Theologia, 69 n. 18. 132 This short work of Herder’s was especially inXuential in the early nineteenth century. In particular, young theologians followed Herder’s suggestion to pay attention to the ‘human’ and ‘cultural’ dimensions of Scripture, such as language and history, and not just to the supernatural elements. As the Wrst line in the book expressed it: ‘Daß man die Bibel menschlich lesen mu¨sse, als ein Buch von menschliche Schrift und Sprache.’ See Johann Gottfried Herder, Sa¨mtliche Werke (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1967), x. 5, passim. For a clear example of Herder’s inXuence, see the youthful essay of W. M. L. de Wette, Eine Idee u¨ber das Studium der Theologie (Leipzig, 1850). 133 Besides these works, another important literature of the eighteenth century was that of theological bibliographies, typiWed by J. A. No¨sselt’s Anweisung zur Kenntniß der besten allgemeinern Bu¨cher in allen Theilen der Theologie (Leipzig, 1779). For a list of other important bibliographical guidebooks, see Danz’s chapter on ‘Bu¨chererkenntniß beim Studium der Theologie’, in Encyklopa¨die und Methodologie der theologischen Wissenschaften, 137–43.

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study. While these elements were by no means eliminated, and they even gained new life in pietist literature, one nonetheless observes a marked shift in the direction of a more scientiWc, critical theological pedagogy. Both No¨sselt and Planck, for instance, regarded theology as ‘the scholarly knowledge of religion’ (gelehrte Erkenntniß der Religion) and divided this knowledge into various ‘sciences’ (Wissenschaften).134 Anticipating nineteenth-century encyclopedias, these ‘sciences’ were often organized into a recognizably fourfold schema of biblical exegesis, historical theology, systematic theology, and practical theology.135 The causes of theology’s incipient scientization are impossible to grasp apart from the broader currents of the German Enlightenment, which had introduced, particularly at forward-looking universities such as Halle and Go¨ttingen, a new emphasis on reason in religion and historical understanding in biblical interpretation. Writers committed to the new rationalism and historical-critical outlook, such as Semler, Ernesti, Griesbach, and Michaelis, as well as the towering Wgures of Lessing and Kant, began to assume increasing importance in theological education, if not directly in the curriculum, then at least in students’ general knowledge and in the ‘intellectual gossip’ of the time. Hagenbach’s later evaluation of Semler thus applies more generally to the theological climate of the mid- and late eighteenth century: ‘[He] introduced a new element, the critical, into theological science, and . . . thereby put new life into [the theological] encyclopedia, which might otherwise have become a dead aggregate of bibliographical knowledge.’136 In his encyclopedia of 1794, Planck expressed a similar idea, noting that ‘the transformation of Wissenschaft has also made necessary the transformation of the manner and method of [theological] study’.137 A consequence of eighteenth-century rationalism and the historical method, however, as Edward Farley more critically assesses, was the nascence of ‘a hermeneutics of destruction, a de-supernaturalizing of canon, authority, and Scripture’, which displaced a unitative, praxis-oriented theology with one devoted to ‘discrete eVorts of inquiry and scholarship, each applying rational and historical principles’.138 In fact, one could argue that the dispersion of 134 No¨sselt, Anweisung zur Bildung angehender Theologen, 3, and Planck, Einleitung in die theologische Wissenschaften, 1 V., 22, 31. 135 e.g. see No¨sselt, Anweisung zur Bildung angehender Theologen, ii. 82 V. 136 Hagenbach, Theological Encyclopedia and Methodology, trans. George R. Crooks and John F. Hust (New York, 1894), 129. For Wrst-hand insight into some of the experiences of a late eighteenth-century theology student, see W. M. L. de Wette’s novel, Theodor, oder das ZweiXers Weihe: Bildungsgeschichte eines evangelischen Geistlichen, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1822). 137 Planck, Einleitung in die theologische Wissenschaften, 3. 138 Farley, Theologia, 65. Cf. Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 51–65.

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theology by specialization into a complex of Welds and subWelds, the hallmark of the nineteenth century, was already a looming reality in the late eighteenth century. Yet at Wrst this only strengthened the call for encyclopedic presentation and understanding; for without older certainties, two pressing, related questions arose: (1) how does one provide a synoptic overview for the student of the nature and purpose of theology in its relations to other sciences, and (2) how does one conceive of the internal unity and interrelationships of the various theological sciences? Writers and instructors of theological encyclopedia vigorously tackled both questions.139 The epochal historical events of the late eighteenth century, particularly the French Revolution, along with the rise of German idealism and the new Wissenschaftsideologie, proved decisive for the development not only of theological encyclopedias but of the encyclopedic genre generally. ‘A new epoch . . . has dawned in the realm of science just as it has in politics,’ wrote Hegel in the early nineteenth century, and he and contemporaries were quick to attempt to Wll in the content and form of this new epoch with ‘encyclopedic’ and ‘systematic’ presentations of human knowledge. Hegel’s own Encyklopa¨die der philosophischen Wissenschaften (1817) set the benchmark for philosophical encyclopedias throughout the nineteenth century. In his view, the new epoch demanded that knowledge be given comprehensive, ‘objective’ treatment, which he distinguished from knowledge arising from ‘personal moods’ or ‘caprice’. ‘Philosophy’, he wrote in the introduction to his Encylopa¨die, ‘is essentially encyclopedic, that is encompassing or encircling. In distinguishing as well as connecting its own self-distinctions, the whole is both the necessity of its parts as well as its own freedom. The Truth can only exist as such a totality systematically developed; only the whole is the truth.’ Knowledge incapable of holistic, ordered presentation, he elaborated, cannot be deemed scientiWc, but only ‘accidental and contingent’.140 Prior to Hegel’s Encylopa¨die, both Schelling and Fichte, as I have previously indicated, had discoursed on the appropriateness of encyclopedic comprehension for the new post-revolutionary, scientiWc era. In his Vorlesungen u¨ber die Methode des akademischen Studiums, Schelling had argued that only a student who had gained insight into the total scope and order of human knowledge was capable of pursuing speciWc studies: ‘The recognition of the organic whole of the sciences must precede the deWnite pursuit of a specialty. The scholar who devotes himself to a particular 139 Farley, Theologia, 65–6. 140 Hegel, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, trans. Gustav Emil Mueller (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), 54–72. Cf. Terry Pinkard, Hegel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 374–7.

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study must become acquainted with the position that it occupies in relation to the whole.’141 Even more emphatically, Fichte in his Deduzierter Plan had advocated that an encyclopedic approach to pedagogy should characterize ‘the new academy to be established in Berlin’. ‘In the Academy,’ he wrote, ‘all scientiWc material must be comprehended in its organic unity and interpreted in [a] philosophical spirit.’ The content of all human knowledge could be conceptualized under what he called ‘the general encyclopedia’, a task best left to a philosopher such as himself. But this still left room aplenty for subject-speciWc encyclopedias. Instruction in all branches of learning, he wrote, ‘must begin with the encyclopedia of that subject, which must be the Wrst lecture of every teacher appointed by us and which must be the Wrst lecture attended by every student’. Any scholar incapable of giving his subject encyclopedic expression posed a problem: ‘He who cannot or will not give such an encyclopedia of his subject is not only useless to us but even destructive, because his inXuence destroys the spirit of our institution at the very beginning.’142 Immediately thereafter Fichte expressed his doubts about the scientiWc merits of theology! Schleiermacher, however, accepted Fichte’s challenge. His Kurze Darstellung (1811), as indicated in Ch. 3, was the Wrst of its genre fully to embrace the new Wissenschaftsideologie, providing theology with an encyclopedia that approximated Fichte’s own standards.143 Although idiosyncratic in several respects, Schleiermacher’s work nonetheless proved inXuential, as I shall recapitulate here, for at least four reasons. First it made the idealist conception of a unitary, progressive Wissenschaft central to theology’s self-understanding; apart from a vital connection to the ‘scientiWc spirit’, no modern theologian or clergyman could responsibly fulWl his calling.144 Second, although Schleiermacher conceded that theology did not constitute a pure science such as, say, philology, he held that it was nonetheless a ‘positive science’, one based on a given historical reality (the Christian faith) and necessary for practical activity and the social good; most nineteenth-century encyclopedists followed him on this point.145 Third, because of theology’s stature as a positive science, Schleiermacher placed great weight on practical theology; without the goal of shaping future church leaders, Schleiermacher admitted that theological 141 Schelling, ‘Vorlesungen u¨ber die Methode des akademischen Studiums’ in Ernst Anrich (ed.), Die Idee der deutschen Universita¨t. Die fu¨nf Grundschriften aus der Zeit ihrer Neubegru¨ndung durch klassischen Idealismus und romantischen Realismus (Darmstadt: Gentner, 1956), 4. 142 Fichte, The Educational Theory of J. G. Fichte, trans. G. H. Turnbull (London, 1926), 194– 8 (trans. modiWed). 143 Admittedly, one can Wnd works prior to Schleiermacher’s, notably Planck’s Einleitung in der theologische Wissenschaften (1794), which contain elements of the new Wissenschaftideologie. 144 KGA I. vi. 329–30. 145 Raebiger, Zur theologischen Encyklopa¨die, 42.

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knowledge could readily be subsumed under disciplines in the philosophical faculty. Finally, because of the importance he attributed to ‘historical theology’, ‘the actual body of theology’ as he called it, Schleiermacher encouraged the historicization of theology and theological education. Schleiermacher’s encyclopedia, as John E. Thiel has summed up, ‘elevated the historical dimension of theology to a level of importance previously unknown in the history of this discipline’.146 Despite the important content of Kurze Darstellung, Schleiermacher’s condensed style and his idiosyncratic threefold organization147 prevented the work from becoming a popular pedagogical tool in universities. Still, it was widely read and cited in practically every major encyclopedia produced in the nineteenth century. What is more, its inXuence reached beyond Protestant to Catholic circles as well. Most notably, it made a considerable impact on the Catholic theologian Johann Sebastian Drey (1777–1853) of Tu¨bingen, whose own encyclopedia—Kurze Einleitung in das Studium der Theologie mit Ru¨cksicht auf den wissenschaftlichen Standpunkt und das katholische System (1819)—still stands out as a landmark of modern Catholic thought. Philip SchaV perhaps summed up the legacy of Schleiermacher’s Kurze Darstellung best when he wrote that ‘the whole scheme is wrong; but, nevertheless, the book is full of stimulating suggestions. Schleiermacher [is] the Origen of German Protestantism, neither orthodox nor heretical, but independent, original, emancipating, and stimulating in diVerent directions.’148 In Protestant theological education, the inXuence of Schleiermacher lived on most prominently in Hagenbach’s Encyklopa¨die und Methodologie der theologischen Wissenschaft. First published in 1833, it went through twelve editions until 1889 and was translated into several foreign languages. Wolfhart Pannenberg has judged it to be perhaps the most widely read theological text of the nineteenth century.149 Georg Heinrici, who published his own encyclopedia in 1893, referred to Hagenbach’s text simply as ‘the work which long remained the standard’.150 In terms of pedagogical success, one is tempted to compare it to Peter Lombard’s Sentences of the Middle Ages. That Hagenbach would emerge as a leading theological preceptor to generations of German students would, at Wrst glance, seem unlikely. He hailed not from Germany proper, but from the provincial German-speaking Swiss 146 John E. Thiel, ‘Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy in Schleiermacher’s Theological Encyclopedia: Doctrinal Development and Theological Creativity’, HJ 25 (1984): 146. 147 As mentioned earlier, Schleiermacher’s work was divided into historical, philosophical, and practical theology. This diVered from the standard fourfold pattern of exegetical, historical, systematic, and practical theology. 148 SchaV, Theological Propaedeutic, 13. 149 Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science, 17, 250. 150 Heinrici, ‘Encyclopedia, Theological’, in The New SchaV-Herzog Encyclopedia, 127.

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university town of Basle. Although once a great centre of humanism and printing in the sixteenth century, early nineteenth-century Basle could boast of only a modest intellectual life. Culturally German but politically isolated from the great forces of nationalism and state-building, it was dubbed by Heinrich von Treitschke as the ‘sulking corner’ of Europe. Born in Basle 1801, the son of a medical doctor, Hagenbach undertook his preparatory studies in his hometown before completing his studies at Berlin and Bonn. At these leading Prussian universities, he was smitten by the rigours of German Wissenschaft and by the theological outlooks of his principal professors, who included Schleiermacher, Neander, Nitzsch, and Friedrich Lu¨cke. Not surprisingly, he came to regard his own theology as ‘scientiWc’ and soon described his life’s purpose as bringing the eternal truths of Christianity into harmony with a modern, humanistic education.151 Hagenbach accepted a call back to Basle in 1823 by Schleiermacher’s former colleague W. M. L. de Wette, who, as previously recounted, had taken a position at Basle after his dismissal from Berlin in 1819. Hagenbach was elevated to the rank of extraordinary professor in 1824 and ‘full professor of the history of the church and dogma’ in 1829. Alongside de Wette, Hagenbach laboured until his death in 1874 to transform the University of Basle, Switzerland’s oldest university but in major decline at the beginning of the century, into one of Europe’s premier universities, whose future luminaries would include Jacob Burckhardt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Overbeck, Wilhelm Dilthey, Karl Barth, and Karl Jaspers, among others.152 A short work of Hagenbach’s on the history of Basle’s theological faculty reveals that he did not regard the University of Basle in possession of ‘Wissenschaft in the German sense of the word and method’ until the acquisition of de Wette (and presumably himself too) in the 1820s.153 Another short address of 1830, ‘Ueber den BegriV und Bedeutung der Wissenschaftlichkeit im Gebiete der Theologie’, conWrms Hagenbach’s profound commitment to the new Wissenschaftsideologie emanating from Prussian universities and to the necessity of importing it into theology, despite admitted diYculties and opposition from local conservative clergymen in Basle.154 151 Andreas Staehelin (ed.), Professoren der Universita¨t Basel aus fu¨nf Jahrhunderten (Basle: F. Reinhardt, 1960), 132–3. Cf. C. F. Eppler, Karl Rudolf Hagenbach: eine Friedensgestalt aus der streitenden Kirche der Gegenwart (Gu¨tersloh, 1875). 152 On Basle’s nineteenth-century intellectual life generally, see Lionel Gossman’s impressive Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). On the university and theological faculty reforms eVected by de Wette and Hagenbach, see Andreas Staehelin, Geschichte der Universita¨t Basel, 1818–1835 (Basle: Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1959). 153 Hagenbach, Die theologische Schule Basels und ihre Lehrer von Stiftung bis zu de Wettes Tod 1849 (Basle, 1860), 56. 154 Hagenbach, Ueber den BegriV und Bedeutung der Wissenschaftlichkeit im Gebiete der Theologie (Basle, 1830).

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Hagenbach began lecturing on theological encyclopedia in the late 1820s; the Wrst edition of his own encyclopedia was published in 1833. Dedicated to de Wette and Schleiermacher, the work particularly attests to the inXuence of the latter’s Kurze Darstellung, which Hagenbach characterized as ‘the key to Schleiermacher’s entire theology’ and the Wrst work of its kind to show conclusively that theology possessed ‘scientiWc autonomy’ (wissenschaftliche Selbststa¨ndigkeit). At the same time, Hagenbach charged that Schleiermacher’s work was at times too ‘epigrammatic’ and ‘enigmatic’, and he found himself having to ‘guess and intuit’ Schleiermacher’s true meaning instead of knowing it plainly. For this reason, a more straightforward, comprehensive encyclopedia was called for, one more geared to the needs and concerns of ‘beginning students of theology’.155 Based on the success of Hagenbach’s work, one can retrospectively judge that he achieved this goal. Indeed, it was neither the originality nor the brilliance of Hagenbach’s work that accounted for its signiWcance, but rather the fact that ‘it oVered the beginner a pedagogically oriented introduction to the study of theology and the contemporary stage of discussion in individual branches of theology’.156 This is true of all editions of the work, which changed little in general shape throughout the century, even if Hagenbach continually modiWed them to accommodate new theological currents and growing bibliographies in increasingly specialized Welds. Three components of Hagenbach’s work are relevant for present concerns. First, his encyclopedia reveals a tension between the idealist quest for the unity of knowledge, pronounced at the beginning of the century, and the research-driven reality of specialization and fragmentation, which, as successive editions of Hagenbach’s work attest, became apparent toward the end of the century. Second, diverging from Schleiermacher’s threefold scheme, Hagenbach helped establish the supremacy of the fourfold division in theological education—exegetical theology, historical theology, systematic theology, and practical theology—which became ‘virtually universal for Protestant schools throughout the nineteenth century and for theological education in Europe and America’.157 Third, although by no means an extreme historical critic (Hagenbach is generally regarded as a minor representative of Vermittlungstheologie or ‘mediating theology’), Hagenbach’s work reinforced a broader trend towards the thoroughgoing historicization of theology—a trend that subsequent encyclopedias would take much further than Hagenbach’s. 155 Hagenbach, Encyklopa¨die und Methodologie der theologischen Wissenschaften (Basle, 1833), 1 V. 156 Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science, 17. 157 Farley, Theologia, 101.

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In his introduction, Hagenbach oVered a straightforward deWnition of theological encyclopedia, one that echoed the idealist ‘organic and comprehensive’ view of knowledge promoted, mutatis mutandis, by Schleiermacher, Hegel, and Fichte, all of whom Hagenbach cited in his footnotes. Theological encyclopedia is a part of the general encyclopedia. . . . Its goal is not to unite within itself the substance of all that deserves to be known, but rather to comprehend the further development of the science as conditioned by its historical character. . . . While the theological encyclopedia represents and introduces one to the organism of the theological sciences, it itself has no position with this organism; it stands either outside or above it. But again, theological encyclopedia is a member of the great general organism of science and as such forms a bridge to encyclopedia in general.158

Following Schleiermacher, Hagenbach regarded theology not as a pure science, such as philology or physics, but as a ‘positive science’, whose scientiWc character was not determined by anything within itself, but by an existent and historically conditioned fact, namely the Christian faith and its manifestations over time. Practical service to the church then, Hagenbach elaborated quoting Schleiermacher quite liberally, was what gave theology its purpose and place in the university.159 Emphasis on the integrated character of theology as a component of an integrated and unitary science informed each edition of Hagenbach’s work. But one also notices a countervailing emphasis on the progressive or developmental character of both theological science and science generally. Put diVerently, one notes a tension between the static and the dynamic, between the avowed completeness and universality of science on the one hand and the recognition of perpetual development on the other. Thus, the task of the theological encyclopedia was not only to acquaint the student with a ‘complete’ view of theology, but also to ‘keep pace with science’, taking into account the latest research, discoveries, and schools of thought.160 What is more, students were enjoined not just to know about the latest scholarly developments, but to contribute to them as well. The painstaking eVort of individual scholarship, Hagenbach reasoned, best prepared the mind to fathom the totality of human knowledge. In his own words: [E]very student should subject himself . . . [to] the thorough investigation of some specialty, [even] if his aim is to prepare for the simplest duties in the Church rather than for the work of theological scholarship. They who have themselves untied knots 158 Hagenbach, Encyklopa¨die, 1. Unless otherwise stated, my quotations are from the 1874 edition (published in Leipzig by S. Hirzel), the last to appear before Hagenbach’s death. 159 Ibid. 50 V. 160 Ibid. 4.

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are alone able to appeciate the labours of others, and only they who have the patience and the courage to go to the bottom of the individual . . . can attain the power to comprehend the universal.161

Precisely this tension between the individual and the universal threads all Hagenbach’s editions, as well as other encyclopedias of the era. However, the mushrooming bibliographies of the late nineteenth-century editions (as well as the steadily increasing space devoted to discussing developments in more specialized subWelds) attest to the strength of the ‘individual,’ the growth of which often came at the expense of comprehending the ‘universal’ character of theology. Put diVerently, whether the pursuit of the individual actually qualiWed one to grasp the universal, as Hagenbach believed, became an increasingly questionable proposition by the end of the nineteenth century. Hagenbach himself never forsook this view, but the sheer weight of specialized research gradually called into question the rationale of theological encyclopedias as agents of intellectual unity and coherence.162 While the fourfold division of theology did not originate with Hagenbach, he popularized it throughout the century, breaking down theology into the categories of exegesis, historical theology, systematic theology, and practical theology. He felt that this division was expressive of the very ‘nature’ of theology. It followed that the order in which each discipline should be taken up was not arbitrary, but demonstrated a certain logic, with which students should comply. As he formulated this logic, [Theology] must be found in the documents relating to . . . revelation [Exegesis]. Starting from the sources, it traces the progress of historical development down to our own time and then combines into a mental picture of the present what history has furnished [Historical Theology]. It obtains by this process a clear idea of the coherence running through the whole [Systematic Theology], and thus deduces the necessary principles for converting theory into practice [Practical Theology].163

Like Schleiermacher, Hagenbach placed great emphasis on practical theology, which he regarded as the Wnal aim of theological knowledge, and therefore it should be the discipline taken up last during one’s university studies. Quoting Schleiermacher directly, he called practical theology the ‘crown’ of theological education, because in it theory was translated into practice—in homilies, catechesis, liturgy, pastoral counselling, and church administration— for the ediWcation of the church. Nonetheless, only an individual Wrst trained in the other three more scientiWc branches qualiWed to engage in the tasks of 161 Ibid. 46 (emphasis added). 162 Farley, Theologia, 105. Cf. H. G. Anderson, ‘Challenge and Change within German Protestant Theological Education in the Nineteenth Century’, CH 39 (March 1970): 38. 163 Hagenbach, Encycklopa¨die, 111–12.

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practical theology: ‘Only that theologian who has passed through a preliminary scientiWc training . . . is qualiWed to dispose of and utilize the possession he has acquired.’164 This scientiWc training should begin with exegesis: study of the Old and New Testament in the original languages, biblical archaeology, biblical criticism, hermeneutics, and the history of the formation of the canon, among other subWelds. That theology should start with the biblical texts seemed only appropriate to Hagenbach, as to most Protestant theologians, on the basis of the doctrine of sola scriptura: ‘But the Protestant Church justly insists that as a primary qualiWcation every theologian shall be thoroughly familiar with the Bible.’165 Along with the course on theological encyclopedia, students across Germany were therefore advised to begin their studies with courses in the Old and New Testaments.166 If the logical starting point of theology was biblical exegesis and the logical ending point practical theology, ‘the only question that remains concerns the relative positions of systematic and historical theology’. For Hagenbach these were the two most scientiWc branches of theology and their placement mattered greatly for the entire modern theological enterprise.167 In arguing that history should come Wrst, Hagenbach took sides in an important nineteenth-century debate, one which pitted theologians, such as Hagenbach, inclined to historical scholarship and inquiry, against speculative (often Hegelian) theologians and those with pronounced confessional sensibilities. The latter asserted the priority of dogmatics, whether established from human ratiocination or historical creeds, over historical criticism. By contrast, in coming down strongly in favour of history before dogmatics, Hagenbach both reXected and contributed to a more dominant trend towards theological historicism—a trend that regarded historical criticism as prior to dogma and the latter based on its independent Wndings. As Hagenbach put it, Not until the mind has developed its powers by historical studies . . . will it be Wtted to attempt the study of dogmatics, which demands a robust intellect. The mind that, on the contrary, begins the study of theology with dogmatics, may be likened to the bird which tries to Xy before its wings have grown or the architect who attempts the erection of a building before its foundations have been laid.168

164 Hagenbach, Encycklopa¨die, 363–4. 165 Ibid. 114. 166 See e.g. ‘Studien-Plan fu¨r die Studierenden der Theologie’, Akademische Studien-Pla¨ne (Jena, 1860), 3, NStUBG, H. lit. part. II 9465. 167 Hagenbach called exegesis and practical theology ‘mixed sciences’ because they were ‘related not only to learning, but also to practical skills’. Hagenbach, Encyklopa¨die, 114. 168 Ibid. 116.

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The surest foundation of theological study then was history. For Hagenbach, this claim in no way minimized the importance of systematic theology, for dogmatics, he held, contained ‘the very centre of the theological sanctuary and the heart of theological life’. But an appropriate formulation of dogma must derive from historical-critical methods and a detailed understanding of church history. Dogmatics, in other words, was rooted in ‘the soil of history’ and therefore must be ‘brought into the light of objective history’.169 To softpedal history and associate theology primarily with dogmatics would be to ‘plant theology on its head’.170 As a theologian sensitive to ‘mediation’, however, Hagenbach realized that the historicizing impulse could be taken too far with destructive results— results typiWed in D. F. Strauss’s assertion that ‘the true criticism of dogma is its history’ (die wahre Kritik des Dogmas ist seine Geschichte).171 Eager to distance himself from this position, Hagenbach argued that dogmatics, while it must ‘grow out of a living apprehension of history’ must also result from ‘[the] intellectual mediation between the past and present’. In elaborating this point, Hagenbach quoted Schleiermacher extensively, in a highly nuanced eVort to convey the simultaneous necessity and potential peril of historical study as a prerequisite for the formulation of dogma.172 A further issue Hagenbach broached in his discussion of the organization of theology concerned the proper relationship between historical theology and exegesis. The boundary between these two disciplines presented a problem for most nineteenth-century encyclopedists, in signiWcant measure because Schleiermacher’s inXuential text, as we have seen, collapsed the boundary between the two by simply placing exegesis under the general category of historical theology.173 By insisting on a fourfold organizational scheme, Hagenbach obviously resisted Schleiermacher’s inXuence on this point, arguing that exegesis, like practical theology, was a ‘mixed science’, oriented in part towards the interests of science and in part towards the interests of ecclesiastical life and practice. Holy Scriptures merit their own branch, he opined, because they ‘are not of historical importance to us in the same way as the other monuments of Christianity. As the deeds of our foundation, the deeds of revelation, they make quite a diVerent claim on our study than other historical sources.’ Nonetheless, Hagenbach conceded that any exegesis performed without the appropriate historical sense and 169 Ibid. 300 V. 170 Ibid. 116. 171 Strauss, Die christliche Glaubenslehre, in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung und im Kampfe mit der modernen Wissenschaft (Tu¨bingen, 1840), 71. 172 Hagenbach, Encyklopa¨die, 304 V. 173 Schleiermacher, KGA I. 6. 365 V.

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methodology amounted to an unscientiWc enterprise. ‘It cannot be denied’, he wrote, ‘that in the broad sense exegetical theology may be properly included under historical theology, inasmuch as it is the work of exegesis to determine conditions essentially historical, and even to elucidate the primitive history of Christianity itself.’174 In sum, Hagenbach, in a manner not unlike Schleiermacher and with persistent eVorts to avoid slipping into an overly historicized, and hence negative, theology, oVered the beginning student an overview of theology that gave tremendous authority to historical understanding. While not conXating historical theology and exegesis, Hagenbach admitted the crucial and extensive role historical modes of knowing played in the elucidation and interpretation of biblical texts. Historical theology also necessarily preceded dogmatics, in his view, and hence formed the intellectual backbone of both systematic and practical theology. In the Wrst edition of his encyclopedia (1833), Hagenbach had praised the emergence of ‘the historical’ (das Geschichtliche) in contemporary understanding, noting that ‘we can only really know something, when we know how it has developed’.175 This sentence, in the Wnal analysis, resonated over all subsequent editions of his encyclopedia, marking them as documents reXective of the emergence of theological historicism, a hallmark of nineteenthcentury German Protestant thought. While among the most widely used and consulted encyclopedias of the nineteenth century, Hagenbach’s work did not stand alone, but occupied a prominent position in a crowded pedagogical Weld. At roughly the time of the Wrst edition’s publication, two other noteworthy encyclopedias appeared. J. T. L. Danz’s Encyklopa¨die und Methodologie der theologischen Wissenschaften was published in 1832, proving moderately popular. A year earlier, Karl Rosenkranz published his Encyklopa¨die der theologischen Wissenschaften, perhaps the most prominent theological encyclopedia of the century written from an explicitly Hegelian perspective. In sharp contrast to Hagenbach, Rosenkranz sought to demonstrate the primacy of systematic theology—or ‘speculative theology’—over historical theology. Only through speculative reasoning, Rosenkranz asserted, can the ‘rational character’ of Christianity be demonstrated and ‘the reconciliation of Christian theology and philosophy’ take place. ‘The totality of world history remains shut oV from understanding without the key of a fully developed world view, which history is unable to produce by its own means.’ This Hegelian-speculative tendency was continued, most notably, later in the century by Richard Rothe in his 174 Hagenbach, Encyklopa¨die, 111 V. Cf. Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science, 374–5. 175 Hagenbach, Encyklopa¨die (1833), 5.

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Encyklopa¨die der Theologie (1880), a work that also bears evidence of the extensive inXuence of Schleiermacher.176 Theological encyclopedias were not the exclusive project of speculative, liberal, or critically minded theologians. G. C. Adolf von Harless (1806–79) produced perhaps the most important confessionalist encyclopedia of the century: Theologische Encyklopa¨die und Methodologie vom Standpunkte der protestantischen Kirche (1837). Harless had studied under the pietist Tholuck at Halle, where he underwent a conversion that led him to forsake idealist philosophy in favour of the Bible and the traditional creeds and confessions of the Reformation. He came to Erlangen in 1833, hitherto an outpost of theological rationalism, and become a leading voice of a sophisticated, combative conservative school of theology generally known as ‘Erlangen Theology’.177 In his encyclopedia, Harless followed Schleiermacher’s emphasis on the importance of practical theology, but he understood this not so much as theology’s attentiveness to the present needs and purposes of the church, but its submission to ecclesiastical authority and to historic creeds and confessions—hence a theology, as the subtitle has it, ‘from the standpoint of the Protestant church’. Against the ‘so-called objective Wissenschaftlichkeit ’ of other encyclopedias, Harless opined, it was time that someone ‘met the needs of the Protestant church’ using the tools of Wissenschaft as well.178 Harless was succeeded at Erlangen by another devout confessionalist, J. C. K. von Hofmann, whose Theologische Encyklopa¨die of 1879 also enjoyed a strong following in conservative theological circles.179 While by no means isolated voices, Harless and Hofmann generally represent exceptions among encyclopedists in their explicit confessionalist stances. Most encyclopedias were produced by what we might call centre-left theologians, motivated by a desire to reconcile theology with modern forms of consciousness, whether speculative, historical, or scientiWc. In fact, the genre itself is best understood as a means of accomplishing this function: demonstrating to critics and students alike that theology was a tried-and-true modern Wissenschaft with its own methods, skills, and internal organization—and hence deserving of ongoing university membership. 176 Karl Rosenkranz, Encyklopa¨die der theologischen Wissenschaften (Halle, 1831; 2nd edn., 1841), and Richard Rothe, Theologische Encyklopa¨die (Wittenberg, 1880). I quote from the 2nd edn. of Rosenkranz, 10–11. 177 On ‘Erlangen Theology’, which sought to formulate a theological agenda on the basis of experience, Scripture, and historic confessions, see F. W. Katzenbach, Die Erlanger Theologie, Grundlinien ihrer Entwicklung im Rahmen der Geschichte der theologischen Fakulta¨t, 1743–1877 (Munich: Evangelische Pressverband, 1960), 179 V. and Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, i. 218–27. 178 Harless, Theologische Encyklopa¨die und Methodologie (Nuremberg, 1837), pp. xi–xii. 179 On Hofmann, see Raebiger, Zur theologischen Encyklopa¨die, 6–41.

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But as the century wore on, mounting problems complicated this basic objective. Coping with increasing specialization, as I have suggested, was certainly one of them. But two other issues confronted encyclopedists with equal gravity. The Wrst had to do with clarifying the relationship of academic theology to the church (broadly understood) and to particular ecclesiastical bodies. In the eyes of numerous critics, the trend of theology in universities, far from realizing Schleiermacher’s ideal of achieving harmony between the tasks of science and church service, suggested that the goals of theological scholarship and pastoral work were growing apart. The literature on this issue in the late nineteenth century is legion.180 The second problem facing encyclopedists involved deWning the diVerence between Christian theological knowledge proper and a more general philosophical and historical understanding of ‘religion.’ This problem took on particular importance in the late nineteenth century as a consequence of the growth of a new discipline, ‘the science of religion’ or Religionswissenschaft.181 (I shall treat this issue in more detail at a later point.) The scope of these problems, to be sure, extended well beyond the literature of theological encyclopedia, but they assumed acute signiWcance in it because of the crucial role played by encyclopedias in forming the opinions of future clergymen and theologians. To address these problems, encyclopedists increasingly adopted a sharp distinction between the theoretical or scientiWc aspects of theology, on the one hand, and the practical or ecclesiastical aspects on the other. The former components, it was argued, should be indistinguishable from any other form of scientiWc inquiry. Church history undertaken in the theological faculty, for instance, must unreservedly submit to the same canons of evidence and causality that guided professional historians in the philosophical faculty. In this situation, the more practical or churchly components of theology, while still valued, became gradually isolated from the more demonstrably wissenschaftlich components. By the end of the century in fact, one could even argue that practical theology did not appear so much as the ‘crown’ of theology, to use Schleiermacher’s term, but as theology’s Wfth wheel—more Wtting in a seminary, critics argued, than a university. The Theologische Encyklopa¨die (1893) of Georg Heinrici, a student of Albrecht Ritschl’s inXuential school of theology, illustrates well the problem.182 While Heinrici recognized that its ‘historically-given relationship to 180 Graf, ‘Protestantische Theologie in der Gesellschaft des Kaiserreichs’, in Graf (ed.), ProWle des neutzeitlichen Protestantismus, ii. 69 V. 181 Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, ii. 123 V. On the growth of the study of the ‘science of religion’ or ‘comparative religion’ in the nineteenth century, see Louis H. Jordon, Comparative Religion: Its Genesis and Growth (New York, 1905), 580–604. 182 On Ritschl and his ‘school’, see Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, ii. 1–30.

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the church’ had traditionally provided theology with academic justiWcation, he argued that under modern conditions theology should be understood by and large as a purely historical and scientiWc enterprise. In his view, theology still served the church, but its service was chieXy that of a detached scientiWc watchdog, useful mainly to help guard churchmen against ‘intellectual atrophy’ (intellektuelle Verku¨mmerung). Under no circumstance should theology allow its agenda to be set by the church, for this would compromise theology’s scientiWc character. ‘The only authority’ that theology should recognize was ‘the historical and inner truth’ (die geschichtliche und die innere Wahrheit). Towards this end alone, theology should ‘direct its critical, historical, interpretative, and meticulous research and inquiry’.183 Heinrici’s emphasis on history led him—returning to Schleiermacher’s threefold scheme—to abolish exegetical theology altogether as an independent subWeld and lump it instead under historical theology.184 No special period or text of the past should be privileged and exempted from historical-critical inquiry, he claimed, because ‘history itself is the content of theology’.185 Accordingly, the nature of a theological encyclopedia, in Heinrici’s view, was essentially historical or what he called ‘genetic’. Likening the genre to a geological map, he claimed that its principal aim was to describe not necessarily how things are or how they should be, but how they became what they are: ‘it must explain the becoming of things in order to understand their being’.186 A knowledgeable student of church history, Heinrici was well aware of how far this distinctly historicist deWnition of theology was from traditional deWnitions, which had privileged matters of credal Wdelity, salvation, personal piety, and the like. Indeed, Heinrici’s contention that theology should scientiWcally censure, instead of emanate from, the church would have profoundly puzzled an Augustine, Luther, or Francke. Nevertheless, Heinrici believed that theology’s contemporary vocation was primarily in the sphere of Wissenschaft and the ‘tension’ (Spannung) that this created between theology and the church was both unavoidable and salutary. Thus understood, theology’s task was not ‘to manufacture piety’, as he opined, but rather ‘to research what Christianity is and how [it] . . . operates. One becomes a Christian [by contrast] through experience and struggle, through conviction and action. The question ‘‘What is your only comfort in life and in death?’’ is not answered by Wissenschaft.’187 183 Georg Heinrici, Theologische Encyklopa¨die (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1893), 6 V. 184 Heinrici placed exegesis and church history under ‘historical theology’. He placed systematic and practical theology under what he called ‘normative theology’. 185 Heinrici, Theologische Encyklopa¨die, 10. 186 ‘Sie hat das Werden der Dinge zu erkla¨ren, um ihr Sein versta¨ndlich zu machen’. Ibid. 23. 187 Ibid. 9–10. Heinrici refers here to the Wrst question from the Heidelberg Confession.

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A similar cleft between academic theology and the tasks of the church appeared in C. A. Bernoulli’s Die wissenschaftliche und die kirchliche Methode in der Theologie (1897). Unlike Heinrici, Bernoulli kept Hagenbach’s fourfold division of theology, but he made an exceedingly sharp distinction between exegetical and historical theology, on the one hand, and dogmatic and practical theology, on the other. The Wrst two were essentially historical and thus based on surer scientiWc principles; it was expected of them to speak ‘the language of Wissenschaft ’ and attempt nothing more than the ‘objective investigation of religion’ (sachliche Erforschung der Religion).188 The dogmatic and practical branches of theology, by contrast, were ‘ecclesial’ in nature and hence inherently unscientiWc. ‘The purpose of Bernoulli’s distinction,’ one scholar has noted, ‘was to free theology from all practical connection with the interests of the Church by giving it a new basis as a science investigating the history of religion.’189 By the time that Bernoulli had taught his last course on theological encyclopedia in 1933, however, the grand era of the genre had essentially expired.190 While lecture rosters in German universities continued to list the course for some time, no major encyclopedia was published after 1918. In their place, other forms of pedagogical and introductory literature appeared, as well as summaries of and symposium-style collections of essays on developments in individual Welds. Few of these reXected the idealist assumptions of system, synthesis, and foundational explanation characteristic of the nineteenth-century genre.191 Explaining precisely why the genre declined when it did is a diYcult task. The increasing specialization and fragmentation of theology—a phenomenon extensively and often worrisomely commented on by encyclopedists themselves—certainly played a role, as did the aforementioned conXicts between academic and ecclesiastical theology. More generally, one might point to the Wssuring of idealist and progressivist assumptions about science, the very ecology of the genre, brought about by sceptical currents in late nineteenthcentury thought and by the experience of the First World War. Finally, one should take into consideration the emergence of dialectical theology and the sea change it brought to German academic theology in the 1920s. Revealingly, in his Einfu¨hrung in die evangelische Theologie, a short work of his later years, Karl Barth scoVed at the expression ‘theological encyclopedia’, arguing that

188 Bernoulli, Die wissenschaftliche und die kirchliche Methode in der Theologie (1897), pp. v V. 189 Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science, 18. 190 Bernoulli, Theologie und Wissenschaft: Schlussvortrag einer Vorlesung u¨ber ‘Theologische Enzyklopa¨die’ (Basle, 1933). 191 Farley, Theologia, 109.

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theology was no normal science in need of legitimation ‘but a very special science, whose task is to apprehend, understand and speak of ‘‘God’’ ’.192 He then elaborated with characteristic forcefulness: What concerns us here is not the place, right, and possibility of theology within the domain and limits of general culture; especially not with the boundaries of the universitas litterarum, or what is otherwise known as general humanistic studies! Ever since the fading of its illusory splendor as a leading academic power in the Middle Ages, theology has taken too many pains to justify its own existence. It has tried too hard, especially in the nineteenth century, to secure for itself at least a small but honorable place in the throne room of general science. This attempt at selfjustiWcation has been no help to its own work. The fact is that it has made theology, to a great extent, hesitant and halfhearted; moreover, this uncertainty has earned theology no more respect for its achievements than a very modest tip of the hat. . . . Theology had Wrst to renounce all apologetics or external guarantees of its position within the environment of other sciences, for it will always stand on the Wrmest ground when it simply acts according to the law of its own being. . . . [T]heology has by no means done this vigorously and untiringly enough. On the other hand, what are ‘culture’ and ‘general science,’ after all? Have these concepts not become strangely unstable within the last Wfty years?193

Additionally, already in the Wrst volume of his Church Dogmatics, Barth had questioned the encyclopedists’ concern to demonstrate theology’s scientiWc status. While not rejecting the association of theology with ‘science’ out of hand, he made it clear that theology, whatever else, was ‘a function of the church’. Explaining theology therefore exclusively in terms of modern scientiWc inquiry and university norms, in Barth’s view, was simply a misguided enterprise: Against the attempts of scientiWc encyclopedia to include theology as a science, as they have ever and anon been made since the time of Schleiermacher, the general objection may be raised that the abnormality of the peculiar status of theology is thereby overlooked and something fundamentally impossible undertaken. The actual result of all such attempts was and will be the disturbing, in fact destructive, surrender of theology to the general concept of science, and the mild inattention with which non-theological science—possibly with a better nose for actualities than theologians who thirst for synthesis—is wont to reply to this particular mode of justifying theology.194

192 Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction, trans. Grover Foley (New York: Holt, Rhinehart, & Winston, 1963), 3 V. 193 Ibid. 15–16. 194 See the section entitled ‘The Church, Theology, and Science’, in Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, i. 1, trans. G. T. Thomson (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1969), 1–11.

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4. HISTO RY, COMMEMORATION, AND THE UNIVERSITY If students of modern German intellectual history could agree on the importance of any single theme, it might well be that the nineteenth century was an age of ‘historicism’, a term I have already frequently employed. Admittedly, the term has attracted no universally accepted deWnition, but most scholars could at least agree with Jacob Burckhardt’s remark from the late nineteenth century that ‘history and the historical observation of the world and time has generally began to penetrate our entire education and culture’.195 How this phenomenon aVected theological encyclopedias, as just shown, is then but one example of a larger reality. It is also borne out in the diverse range of historical inquiries undertaken during the century and by numerous eVorts to commemorate past events, individuals, and institutions. As David Lowenthal has pointed out, the nineteenth century was an age of ‘retrospection’ and ‘heritage’ par excellence.196 Not surprisingly, universities, leading seats of historical scholarship, became themselves the subjects of historical inquiry and the objects of frequent commemoration. Until the late eighteenth century, no established body of historiography existed, in Germany or elsewhere, on the development of universities. This began to change around the time of the French Revolution. Between 1802 and 1805, Go¨ttingen’s Christoph Meiners published his fourvolume Geschichte der Entstehung und Entwicklung der hohen Schulen unsers Erdtheils, not only an epochal undertaking in its own right but one that almost single-handedly inaugurated modern university historiography.197 Meiners’s eVort preceded a trickle and then a Xood of histories of universities. Although some were general and wide ranging, the majority focused on individual institutions or those within a speciWc region or state. The century’s end witnessed the publication of several monumental and still useful histories, including Georg Kaufmann’s two-volume Die Geschichte der deutschen Universita¨ten (1888, 1896), Friedrich Paulsen’s Die deutschen Universita¨ten und das Universita¨tsstudium (1902), and Max Lenz’s massive, multivolume history of the University of Berlin (1910).198 195 From Burckhardt’s Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen; quoted in John R. Hinde, Jacob Burckhardt and the Crisis of Modernity (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000), 142. 196 David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 96 V. 197 HUE, i. pp. xxii–xxiii. See also Meiners, Kurze Darstellung der Entwicklung der hohen Schulen des protestantischen Deutschlandes, besonders der hohen Schule zu Go¨ttingen (Go¨ttingen, 1808). A noteworthy harbinger to Meiners’s work was J. D. Michaelis, Raisonnement u¨ber die protestantischen Universita¨ten in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main, 1768). 198 Also, shortly after the turn of the century, the Prussian Ministry of Culture commissioned an extensive bibliographic survey of German universities, past and present. See Wilhelm Erman

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While not uncommon prior to the nineteenth century, memorial and anniversary ceremonies (Jubelfeier, Jahrhundertfeier) of universities became signature features of the century. The impetus to commemorate stemmed from at least three sources. The Wrst owed to a fresh sense of historical mission gripping those universities that had successfully weathered the revolutionaryNapoleonic upheaval. The achievements and expansion of universities throughout the century, as well as their growing international esteem, added reason to mark one’s progress. Finally, the pervasive inXuence of nationalism played a role: universities, Prussian ones arguably foremost, emerged as powerful symbols of national unity and purpose, inviting lavish, public commemoration. Commemorative celebrations followed a similar pattern. Regularly marking the centennial or semi-centennial of a university’s founding, these events involved processions; solemn chapel services; addresses by distinguished faculty, government oYcials, and guests; banquets and toasts; the publication of a previously commissioned university history; and the awarding of honorary degrees and titles. For our purposes, the University of Berlin’s semicentennial and centennial celebrations of 1860 and 1910 are particularly noteworthy. Because of Berlin’s symbolic role as Prussia’s Xagship university, these ceremonies amounted to overtly nationalistic celebrations, exuberant expressions of the Kulturstaat ideal.199 In addition to the 1860 and 1910 celebrations, in what follows I shall also comment on two relevant international events: the Chicago and St Louis world fairs of 1893 and 1904. Both included exhibitions on German universities, Wnanced by the government, designed to communicate to an international audience the development and recent scientiWc achievements of the German university system. While admittedly these exhibitions functioned more as exercises in public presentation than commemoration, they, too, bespeak an eVort to narrate the university’s recent past and thereby they disclose revealing assumptions about it. What then do university histories, commemorative events, and the two world fairs tell us about the state of theological study and the theological faculty in Germany in the mid- and late nineteenth century? The picture is Janus-faced. On the one hand, theological faculties, particularly (but not exclusively) Protestant ones, were often depicted as dynamic, scientiWc enterprises, increasingly in step with progressive intellectual forces, casting aside and Ewald Horn (eds.), Bibliographie der deutschen Universita¨ten: systematisch geordnetes Verzeichnis der bis Ende 1899 gedruckten Bu¨cher und Aufsa¨tze u¨ber das deutsche Universita¨tswesen (Leipzig, 1904–5). 199 Konrad H. Jarausch, ‘Gebrochene Traditionen: Wandlungen des Selbstversta¨ndisses der Berliner Universita¨t’, JUG 2 (1999): 121–35.

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older confessional and dogmatic tendencies. On the other hand, theology was often viewed, especially in more critical histories, as beleaguered and diminished, overshadowed by the very forces otherwise held to have fostered its modernization. Only rarely does one Wnd the charge of outright illegitimacy, that theology no longer belonged in the modern university. More often, scholars commented on the somewhat peculiar status that theological faculties occupied in research-intensive, publicly funded institutions, but few questioned the arrangement outright, accepting it as a distinctive feature of German academic culture. A particularly insightful short history of universities, Die Universita¨ten sonst und jetzt, was published in 1867 by Munich’s renowned historian J. J. Ignaz von Do¨llinger; it was based on an address he had given in 1866, the fateful year of Prussia’s defeat of Austria.200 A formidable historical mind and a Catholic with liberal sympathies, Do¨llinger oVers evidence of a more widespread (non-Prussian, non-Protestant) enthusiasm for recent university developments. He was especially struck by the rapidity with which German universities, widely criticized at the beginning of the century, had become invigorating forces in German intellectual life: Now if we contrast [the eighteenth-century university] with . . . the honorable position held by the German universities at present, if we consider that they are the places where all the better and higher movements of German intellectual life often originate . . . and then remember how short the time has been—roughly Wfty years—in which this transformation has taken place, in which this astounding fertility in all Welds of knowledge has developed—we must confess that there is scarcely a parallel to be found in the whole course of world history.201

Do¨llinger identiWed what he called the ‘German historical sense’ as the key to the university’s modern transformation. He associated this sense with ‘restless eVort’ and ‘unwearied research’ that did not content itself with superWcial, secondary knowledge of the past, but plumbed ‘the very core and bottom of things’ to achieve ‘independent and original research’.202 The fact that such a mentality had increasingly found a home in theological faculties, Do¨llinger noted, had given Germany an international edge in theological scholarship. ‘[T]he German historical sense Wnds rich nourishment in theology, which, as Christianity is a fact, a history, possesses a preeminently historical character, and accordingly requires to be investigated. . . . Hence, 200 Do¨llinger, Die Universita¨ten sonst und jetzt (Munich, 1867). Cf. his ‘Festrede zur 400 jahrigen stiftungsfeier der k. Ludwig-Maximilians-universitat Munchen gehalten am 1. August 1872’. On Do¨llinger’s life, see ODCC 496. 201 Do¨llinger, Die Universita¨ten sonst und jetzt, 25. 202 Ibid. 37 V.

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too, Germany has become the classical land of theology, from whose treasures the eVorts of other countries, like England and America, derive strength and sustenance.’203 However, Do¨llinger also recognized that the relationship between theology and modern critical scholarship could be complex: the exigencies of Wissenschaft presented new challenges, opportunities, and perils to theological students. Do¨llinger thus concluded his work with a ‘word to the students of theology’, in which he made several noteworthy observations. On the one hand, he was convinced, like Schleiermacher and most liberal Protestant theologians, that the future of theology depended on its ability to interact robustly and creatively with scientiWc developments in non-theological Welds. Theology, he insisted, must ‘make use of the sister sciences’ and ‘pluck the best fruits from all branches of the tree of knowledge’. ‘Her very existence,’ he elaborated, ‘depends on the steady maintenance, by teacher and pupil alike, of the ‘‘historical sense’’ in its greatest purity. . . . [I]t depends upon the estimation of new truths in other Welds of knowledge at their just value. The question is one of life or death.’204 But Do¨llinger also maintained that theology, were it to maintain a vestige of its ‘queenly dignity’, must somehow rise above and master developments in other Welds. It could not simply gape in uncritical awe as the spectacle of modern scientiWc progress unfolded; for theology, he noted, in language more at home in an earlier era, is ‘the foundation, the keystone of all others’.205 But mastering the dynamism, growth, and specialization of modern science was no simple task. Do¨llinger thus made an appeal to antiquity, noting how the Church Fathers, wrestling with a similar issue, neither ignored nor rejected but sought to understand and judiciously appropriate Greek philosophy and science. Nonetheless, the contemporary situation presented for Do¨llinger an even more formidable challenge. In his own formulation: Our task is more diYcult, because the material with which we deal is immeasurable and daily increasing (Uns freilich ist eine noch viel schwierigere Aufgabe bei dem unermeßlichen und noch ta¨glich sich mehrenden Material gestellt). The whole history of humankind in all its departments—philology, antiquities, anthropology, the comparative history of religions, the science of law, philosophy, and the history of 203 Ibid. 44. See also Do¨llinger’s 1863 address, ‘Die Vergangenheit und Gegenwart der katholischen Theologie’, in which he called ‘the German nation’ the ‘leading bearer and curator of the theological disciplines’. The address is reprinted in Heinrich Fries and Johann Finsterho¨lzl (eds.), Ignaz von Do¨llinger: Wegbereiter heutiger Theologie (Graz: Styria, 1969), 227–63. Cf. in the same volume his ‘Fu¨r theologische Fakulta¨ten—gegen bischo¨Xiche Seminare’, a robost defence of the place of theological faculties in German universities against ultramontane sceptics. 204 Do¨llinger, Die Universita¨ten sonst und jetzt, 53. 205 Cf. John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 25–40.

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philosophy—all these come before us with the demand that we should subdue (bewa¨ltigen) them with the power of thought.

Do¨llinger acknowledged that no theologian could accomplish this task singlehandedly. He thus appealed to the power of pooled labour, suggesting that it ‘may be approximately possible . . . [with] the eVorts of many men with a single purpose’.206 Developing a theological perspective on the enterprise of modern Wissenschaft was, in the Wnal analysis, achievable, albeit only if undertaken collectively and deliberately with a sober understanding of the risks and rewards involved. A less sanguine picture of theology’s late nineteenth-century fortunes was oVered by the political scientist Johannes Conrad, whose work, Das Universita¨tsstudium in Deutschland wa¨hrend der letzten 50 Jahren (1884), I have already referred to. Whereas Do¨llinger’s insights derived from personal experience and his liberal-theological proclivities, Conrad wrote as a social scientist, attempting a historical and comparative statistical survey of German universities since the 1830s. In much of his work, Conrad presented and analysed empirical data on a wide array of matters, ranging from students’ social and religious backgrounds to the Wnancial proWles of various institutions to professorial salaries. However, he also regularly commented on the decline of the theological faculty and the rise of the philosophical faculty. As a reality made clear to him by the respective downward and upward numerical shifts in students, graduates, and professors in these two faculties, he held this as one of the most consequential trends of the century.207 To account for this ‘extraordinary’ turn of events, Conrad identiWed both material and intellectual causes. With respect to the former, he pointed to a decrease in salaries for clergymen; diminished funds to support theology students (especially when compared to that which had become available for students in natural scientiWc and medical Welds); and greater employment opportunities, especially in secondary education, for those who matriculated in the philosophical faculty. These factors stimulated the growth of the philosophical faculty at the expense of the theological: Last century the theological faculty was unquestionably the premier faculty, not only by precedence, but also by reason of the number and the higher salaries of its professors. It was reckoned a special honour to belong to this faculty, and even those who had no intention of working in a parish . . . entered the theological faculty. . . . Almost all the great names in philosophy were originally, it should be remembered, theological students. All this has been changed during the last Wve decades to the disadvantage of theology. For the oYce of teacher now requires a purely 206 Do¨llinger, Die Universita¨ten sonst und jetzt, 54 V. 207 Conrad, Universita¨tsstudium in Deutschland, 60 V.

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philosophical training. . . . There is no denying the fact . . . that students no longer regard it as an advantage to belong to the theological faculty. From this cause alone the number of theological students was bound to go down in the course of the [last] Wfty years as members of the philosophical faculty increased.208

Intellectual factors for Conrad were perhaps even more important in explaining theology’s dwindled status. Chief among these, he held, was ‘the generally diminished interest in church aVairs’ brought about by the ‘sceptical Zeitgeist ’. He traced these secularizing forces, in language anticipating Max Weber’s on ‘disenchantment’, to the dynamism and popularization of modern scientiWc research: ‘It is undeniable that the rapid development of science has done much to bring about this state of things. Its results appeared irreconcilable to many with Christian dogma, and dazzled the people. The eVect of this was heightened by the deprecatory attacks which were repeatedly made by the leaders of science upon the church, and these . . . reached deep down among the people.’209 In his Die deutschen Universita¨ten und das Universita¨tsstudium (1902), Berlin’s Friedrich Paulsen oVered a general history and overview of the German university system, justifying his eVort on the basis of ‘the widespread interest in our universities’. What distinguished German universities from their counterparts elsewhere, Paulsen argued (freely blurring the boundary between ideals and actual practices), was an anti-utilitarian commitment to scientiWc investigation. The German professor embodied a dual role: a teacher, but more importantly, someone engaged in original research; and only this latter role gave him his credentials as a worthy teacher. The important thing for students was not their ‘practical calling, but [their] introduction into scientiWc knowledge and research’, which fostered in young minds ‘[a] spirit which rejoices in knowledge for the sake of knowledge’. These ideals, Paulsen opined, had shaped the academic culture of the nation and attracted to Germany ‘young disciples of science from all over the world’, just as German scholars in the Middle Ages once journeyed to Paris and Italy for their studies.210 In Paulsen’s interpretation, the distinctly ‘modern’ German university came into its own in the early nineteenth century. Historical events after 1806, the rise of the University of Berlin in particular, were of decisive importance: ‘the fate of the German university was decided in those days’. But Paulsen noted an intriguing similarity between the medieval and the modern institution: 208 Conrad, Universita¨tsstudium in Deutschland, 80–1. 209 Ibid. 97–8. 210 Paulsen, German Universities, 3–8. I cite from the 1906 English translation by Frank Thilly and William W. Elwang.

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[T]he German universities of the nineteenth century have again achieved something of the old universal characteristic of the Wrst universities; not, however upon the basis of medieval church unity, but rather upon the basis of the unity of human civilization and scientiWc work, the unity based on the modern ideal of humanity. The confessional character of the old territorial university was completely repudiated . . . and the university became an institution for the free inquiry after truth, unhampered by restriction.

But interestingly (in rhetoric akin to Fichte’s Reden an die deutsche Nation), Paulsen regarded the new universal discourse of ‘humanity’ and ‘science’ as a particular expression of ‘the good genius of the [German] nation’.211 Put diVerently (in a comparison that Paulsen would probably disapprove of), just as the confessional-territorial universities, in an age of religious division, still believed themselves to dispense universal Christianity, so too Paulsen thought that the new national university, in an age of competing nationalisms, could dispense a universal vision of science and humanitarian brotherhood. The modern German university, in brief, had a global mission, but one bequeathed to it by a distinctively national aptitude. Removed from the context of confessionalism and plunged headlong into an age that had witnessed ‘the emancipation of the spirit of the times from theology’, theological faculties were bound to change or face extinction. In the nineteenth century, change took two directions, according to Paulsen. One was defensive, an intellectual alliance with ‘the great political reaction against the revolutionary period’. The other direction, more consequential in Paulsen’s view, was ‘historical-critical theology’. This direction, Paulsen summed up, witnessed a more ‘strictly scientiWc treatment’ of Scripture, church history, and theology. Additionally, it redeWned theology’s purpose: ‘During the eighteenth century, the essential thing was a dogmatic-practical course, which bore directly upon the calling of a pastor. . . . But at present training in historical studies [and] . . . scientiWc research including investigation and criticism of sources are considered most important.’212 Exhibiting a commonplace prejudice against Catholicism, Paulsen opined that the modern scientiWc impulse was most naturally at home in Protestant theological faculties. Unlike their peers in Catholic theological faculties, who must adhere to an ‘external authority’, Protestant theologians possessed a historic mandate to pursue truth wherever it might lead, even if it led to unsettling conclusions. To be sure, Protestant theologians still had an ‘indissoluble relation to the church’, but their mode of service to the church diVered from the Catholic model.213 ‘The teachers in the Protestant theological faculties assume a fundamentally diVerent attitude: they do not aim to be servants of the 211 Paulsen, German Universities, 51–4.

212 Ibid. 59, 64.

213 Ibid. 137.

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church, but Wrst of all servants of Wissenschaft, servants of the church only through Wissenschaft.’214 Paulsen also indicated ways in which Protestant and Catholic theological faculties diVered in their relationship to the state. The seven Catholic theological faculties in the German Empire—Bonn, Breslau, Mu¨nster, Munich, Wu¨rzburg, Tu¨bingen, and Freiburg—were similar to Protestant faculties by virtue of the fact that they were both ‘state institutions’, whose members were appointed and paid by the government. They diVered however in that Catholic bishops possessed the right to reject a candidate ‘because of serious doubts concerning his orthodoxy or his conduct’.215 What is more, bishops enjoyed certain rights of visitation, the ability to review the content of lectures, and the privilege to grant or withhold ‘missio canonica’, i.e. the oYcial recognition that a given theologian represented the church.216 These rights, which in Prussia trace their roots to the eighteenth century, were curtailed during the Kulturkampf, but returned after this episode of church– state conXict had passed.217 Because of the more pronounced ecclesiastical control over Catholic theological faculties, Paulsen judged them decidedly inferior to Protestant ones. While he granted that one might question the merits of state control over universities, he deemed this ultimately salutary for theological science, as ecclesiastical bodies represented a greater threat to freedom of thought: Protestant theology especially would suVer both in power and signiWcance if it were placed under the control of the church and her organs. What it is and does is as a free self-developing science and only as such, only in constant interaction with the other 214 Ibid. 233 (emphasis added). 215 This phrasing comes from the statutes of the University of Breslau. Such language was typical of the statutes of Catholic theological faculties. See J. F. W. Koch, Die preussischen Universita¨ten (Berlin, 1840), i. 233. 216 On the often strained relationship between Rome and the Prussian state over the control of Catholic theological faculties, see Wilhelm Kahl, Die Missio Canonica: Zum Religionsunterricht und zur Lehre der Theologie an Schulen bezw. Universita¨ten nach dem Rechte der katholischen Kirche und dem staatlichen Rechte in Preußen (Stolp, 1907), and Ernst-Lu¨der Solte, Theologie an der Universita¨t: staats- und kirchenrechtliche Probleme der theologischen Fakulta¨ten (Munich: Claudius, 1971), 142 V. 217 During the Kulturkampf, the ‘May Law’ promulgated on 11 May 1873 required that all candidates for ministry, Protestant and Catholic, have at least three credentials: (1) pass the Gymnasium Abitur, (2) complete three years of courses at a German university, and (3) pass necessary state examinations. Study at a Catholic seminary could be substituted for study at a state university, but the relevant minister of education had to review the content of the courses. Because Catholic bishops protested against these measures, enrolments in Catholic faculties greatly declined, only to rise again once the government modiWed these requirements after the passing of the Kulturkampf. See Paulsen, German Universities, 144–6. Cf. Erich Kleineidam, Die katholisch-theologische Fakulta¨t der Universita¨t Breslau, 1811–1945 (Cologne: Wienand, 1961), 74–81.

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sciences, with philosophical and philological-historical investigation, can theology really live and prosper. A Protestant theology based merely upon the authority of the church would have no value at all.

If Protestantism was to remain faithful to its innermost principles, Paulsen reiterated, ‘she requires a scientiWc theology as a pathWnder for a developing understanding of the word of God in the Bible and the ways of God in history’.218 This understanding of Protestantism, he concluded, had laid the basis for the intellectual rigour and international esteem of Germany’s Protestant theological faculties. International esteem notwithstanding, Paulsen made clear that both Protestant and Catholic theological faculties faced mounting criticism toward century’s end. ‘[Theology] is a science of things of which we know nothing,’ he noted, repeating arguments advanced by secularists and adovocates of positivistic science, ‘and the theological faculty is a bald anachronism.’219 Against such charges, Paulsen defended theology’s place in the university. The nature of his defence, however, reveals the extent to which theology’s legitimation had come to rest on accommodation to reigning deWnitions of Wissenschaft. Appealing immediately to ‘history’, he argued that Christianity was an undeniable ‘historical fact in human life’, and not just any historical fact, but the most important religious inXuence on the Occident, the world’s ‘mightiest civilization’. Christianity should therefore remain an ‘object . . . of historical study surpassed by none in importance’. Dogmatic theology was also admissible in a scientiWc age, he reasoned, because some form of inquiry was necessary to help humanity ‘transcend . . . a highly fragmentary scientiWc knowledge with a complete worldview’. But the burden lay with dogma to accommodate to the modern world, not vice versa: ‘There will always be the problem to conceive of faith and its objects in such a way that they can be harmonized with the scientiWc conception of nature and historical facts.’ This was a worthwhile task and it warranted theology’s place in the university. In the Wnal analysis though, Paulsen admitted that contemporary intellectual conditions had rendered this eVort extremely diYcult: ‘This task is doubtless more diYcult today than ever before. It cannot be denied that since the beginning of modern times, advancing scientiWc knowledge has more and more deprived the objects of faith of the forms in which they were formerly conceived, yes, of the very possibility of their representation at all.’220 Among myriad late nineteenth-century exercises in university commemoration and retrospection, the semi-centennial and centennial anniversary 218 Paulsen, German Universities, 139–40 (emphasis added; trans. modiWed). Cf. Paulsen, Die deutschen Universita¨ten, 174. 219 Paulsen, German Universities, 384. 220 Ibid. 384–5.

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celebrations of the University of Berlin (1860, 1910) and the Chicago and St Louis World Fairs (1893, 1904) stand out in signiWcance. In direct and indirect ways, through symbol and substance, these events took stock of, celebrated, and narrated to German society and the world the meteoric rise of German universities. Given the times, they not surprisingly evinced a powerful nationalist sentiment and a devotion to the nineteenth-century cult of progress. Indeed, the intellectual climate surrounding these events oVers a stark contrast with that of the late eighteenth century, when many elites lamented universities as anachronistic impediments to modernity. By contrast, in the late nineteenth century, universities were widely lionized as the institutions par excellence to realize the Baconian anthem, ‘conquer nature, relieve man’s estate’. Hatcheries of scientiWc facts, pioneers of new academic Welds, oVering up ‘value-free’ knowledge to the needs of society and industry, German universities, many concluded, stood at the forefront of international higher education. In less than a century, institutions once derided as guilds and cloisters, remarkably, were championed as the ablest engines of modern progress. Given the widespread nature of these sentiments, traditional aspects of the university could be seen in a diVerent, non-threatening light. No longer were medieval traditions such as academic dress, processions, insignia, and the customary ordering of the faculties disdained as signs of decay and ‘monastic’ backwardness, as eighteenth-century critics had often charged; rather they were regarded as benign historical reminders of a venerable and ongoing, if transformed, tradition. In the words of Lowenthal, they helped ‘render the present familiar’ by symbolically aYliating it with the past.221 It is in this light that one should interpret the place of theology in the symbology of university commemoration and exhibition; for by the late nineteenth century the institutional clout of theology had diminished to the point where one could no longer see it as a threat to modernization. More often, it was recognized as an enduring and respectable, if marginal, Wxture of university life. Put diVerently, no longer confronted with the prospect of potential modernization but rather with the dizzying fact of actual modernization, the presence of the theological faculty (even as it too clamoured for the mantle of modern Wissenschaft) provided, at least for some, a reassuring sign of continuity in an era marked by rapid change. One should thus not be surprised that in commemoration rituals, theologians and religious language occupied a conspicuous place. All the same, one should not be misled. The subtext of these rituals was not the perdurance of theology, but the celebration of a host of 221 Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, 39.

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more dynamic processes: the vitality of the Kulturstaat ideal (understood in decidedly nationalist terms); the breathtaking rise of new disciplines and specializations; the expanded philosophical faculty; and, not least, what Eduard Spranger called ‘the endless waves of research’ emanating from the universities.222 The 1860 semi-centennial of the University of Berlin (held on 15–17 October) was an extraordinary event, designed in part to compensate for the meagre fanfare that had accompanied the actual opening of the university in 1810. Nearly 3,000 guests attended, invited from universities, academies, and governments throughout Europe. The opening of events was preceded by a procession from the university building down Berlin’s Unter den Linden boulevard to the Gothic St Nicholas Church, which had been bedecked with Xags, Xowers, and candles. Before a distinguished crowd, which included the Prince-Regent Wilhelm I, the ceremony opened with organ music and hymns. The ensuing events included a sermon by the theology professor and university chaplain, Karl Immanuel Nitzsch; an address by the rector and former disciple of Schleiermacher, August Twesten; and shorter speeches by faculty deans. Appropriately, the philologist August Boeckh, ‘the jewel of German Wissenschaft’ as one newspaper reported, gave the keynote address.223 The 1860 celebration was timed to coincide with two important publications. The Wrst was Rudolf Ko¨pke’s Die Gru¨ndung der Ko¨niglichen FriedrichWilhelms-Universita¨t Berlin (1860), a short history of the university and collection of documents from its founding era. The other was a new academic periodical, the Deutsche Academische Zeitung, whose editors proclaimed their dedication to academic freedom, student virtue and industry, and bringing the interests of two communities, the academic and the national, into closer harmony.224 Ko¨pke struck a similar nationalist chord in his book’s preface. While he extolled the intellectual signiWcance of Berlin’s founding, he also generously remarked on its ‘national meaning’, for the stirring of pan-German nationalism and the rebirth of the Prussian state.225 Similar sentiments, often including references to Berlin’s students and professors participating in the 1813 Wars of Liberation, characterized other anniversary addresses, and were reXected in the press coverage of the 222 Eduard Spranger, Wandlungen im Wesen der Universita¨t seit 100 Jahren (Leipzig, 1913), 25. 223 Other events included lavish banquets, balls, student speeches and presentations, and the granting of honorary degrees. The Prince-Regent, as one newspaper reported, was pleased by the festivities, especially by the ‘Vaterlandsliebe der Universita¨t’ patently demonstrated. For further details, see Ferdinand Ascherson (ed.), Urkunden zur Geschichte der Jubelfeier der Ko¨niglichen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universita¨t im October 1860 (Berlin, 1863). 224 Deutsche Academische Zeitung 1 (1860): 1–2. 225 Ko¨pke, Die Gru¨ndung der Ko¨niglichen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universita¨t Berlin (Berlin, 1860), p. iv.

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celebration. Indeed, the association of the University of Berlin’s founding with the awakening of German national consciousness emerged, arguably, as the leitmotif of the whole event. The progress of the university since its founding, August Boeckh reXected, had expressed ‘the persistent spirit of the Prussian state, whose spirit is inseparably bound with the German spirit’.226 In the following years, as nationalist passions quickened and took concrete political shape, this association was intentionally cultivated and developed into a potent aspect of academic and political mythology; it had the eVect of cementing close connections between the Emperor, the universities, and the new nation-state.227 A lavish and symbol-rich ceremony, the 1860 celebration was nonetheless greatly superseded by the centennial celebration of 1910. At this time, Germany was an empire, seeking its ‘place under the sun’ under the leadership of the mercurial, militaristic Wilhelm II. Universities in the late Kaiserreich thus no longer inhabited an ideal but a real national unity, one rife with colonial ambitions and the pursuit of political grandeur. As we have seen, universities had grown tremendously in size, scope, and international reputation between 1860 and 1910. As one of the Empire’s most accomplished universities and the only one located in the capital city, the University of Berlin took on heightened signiWcance as the showpiece of German Wissenschaft. Celebrating its hundredth birthday with great fanfare and ritual was therefore simply a matter of course. ‘The underlying thought of the celebration’, an American observer later wrote, ‘was to acclaim the high place of Wissenschaft in German life and culture, and to sound praises of those great men and scholars who had, in a short century, made Berlin one of the greatest intellectual capitals of the world.’228 Planning had begun as early as 1900, supported by 80,000 Reichsmark from the imperial government. SpeciWc steps of preparation were undertaken by university personnel under the direction of the rector and the senate, but oYcials in the Prussian Ministry of Culture and even the emperor took an active interest in the details.229 As one of its Wrst steps, the senate commissioned the historian Max Lenz to produce an exhaustive history of the university. The completed work, Geschichte der ko¨niglichen FriedrichWilhelms-Universita¨t zu Berlin, was later sent ‘by orders from his Majesty 226 August Boeckh, ‘Festrede zur Jubelfeier des fu¨nfzigja¨hrigen Bestehens’, in Boeckh, Gesammelte kleine Schriften (Leipzig, 1866), iii. 60–74. 227 Konrad Jarausch, Students, Society, and Politics in Imperial Germany: The Rise of Academic Illiberalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 174 V. 228 The observer was Columbia University’s president, Nicholas Murray Butler. See Columbia Alumni News (24 November 1919): 170–3. 229 Erich Schmidt (ed.), Jahrhundertfeier der Ko¨niglichen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universita¨t in Berlin 10–12 October 1910. Bericht im Auftrag des Akademsichen Senats (Berlin, 1911), 3.

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the Emperor’ as a sign of friendship (and presumably national pride) to other universities and educational establishments throughout the world. As the date of the event approached, letters of invitation were sent to former professors, distinguished faculty at other German universities, and foreign diplomats, as well as to prestigious universities, scientiWc academies, and educational establishments the world over. In many cases, university presidents and other high-ranking oYcials attended the event personally. Their letters of acceptance regularly included eVusive praise for German higher education generally and the University of Berlin in particular. The letter from the University of Chicago’s President Harry Pratt Judson is fairly typical: The contributions of German thought to the progress of the world have been of the utmost moment. Every civilized nation owes a debt to German scholarship. In the progress of German education the famous University [of Berlin] in whose honour this celebration is being held has been among the foremost agencies. Nearly every American institution of learning has on its faculty rolls the names of those who have been students in Berlin. In American science, therefore, the name of this University is very dear.230

Actual festivities began on 10 October and lasted for three days. Similar in form and content to the 1860 celebration, events included a worship service; the singing of hymns; a torchlit procession; and addresses by university and governmental dignitaries, including one by the then Minister of Culture, August von Trott zu Solz (1855–1938). In addition, the granting of honorary degrees, banquets, various student gatherings, and a host of cultural activities took place.231 University buildings and other key locations in the city were elaborately decorated for the occasion; busts of former faculty members were prominently and proudly displayed. Those in attendance included the emperor himself and the Reich chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg.232 The principal event on the Wrst day was a university worship service held in the imposing Berlin Cathedral. Julius Wilhelm Martin Kafton (1848–1926), professor of systematic theology and a former rector of the university, delivered the sermon. A student of Albrecht Ritschl and an admirer of Schleiermacher, Kafton preached a message beWtting the moment and one quite telling of the contemporary interrelations among the university, the nation, and science.233 230 A copy of the letter is found in Schmidt (ed.), Jahrhundertfeier, 248. 231 For the schedule of events, see ibid. pp. i–ii. 232 Jarausch, ‘Gebrochene Traditionen: Wandlungen des Selbstversta¨ndisses der Berliner Universita¨t’, JUG 2 (1999): 121–35. 233 On Kafton, see RGG iii. 1087–8.

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As his biblical text, Kafton selected 1 Corinthians 12: 4–12, where St Paul admonished Christians to remember that, though variously gifted, they formed one body in Christ: ‘For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.’234 Traditionally, exegetes have emphasized the ecclesiological content of this text: the simultaneous diversity and unity of the Christian church. Kafton however applied the text to the enterprise of modern science in the context of the university. ‘Various gifts, but one spirit; many members but one body,’ he stated; ‘one could not imagine a more appropriate description of the university.’235 He equated the ‘parts’ and ‘gifts’ mentioned by Paul to the Welds and expertises of science; and the ‘body’, in idealist fashion, he likened to the underlying unity of scientiWc knowledge. Kafton admitted that achieving unity in an age of specialization, or even recognizing unity as a desirable goal, could prove an elusive task. Just as it was among the early Christians, he averred, ‘so it is with the university and the organism of science on which it is founded. How diverse are the members, the gifts, the strengths. How diYcult it often is to maintain or regain unity.’ But unity was precisely the need of the moment: ‘Many abilities, but one spirit; many members, but one body. And the present with its unceasing, progressive splintering of the sciences (unaufho¨rlich fortschreitenden Verzweigung der Wissenschaften) is certainly not a time, in which [St Paul’s] warning would be beside the point.’ ‘If we do not pay heed [to the goal of unity],’ he elaborated, ‘then the whole falls apart. A bundle of specialized schools will replace the university. . . . But this should not come to pass. The German University should be maintained in the coming centuries. And so it will with God’s help.’236 Continuing with the Pauline metaphor, Kafton turned from an emphasis on the unity of the sciences to the place of the university in the nation. ‘But the image of the body has yet a further application,’ he stated, for ‘just as the university in one sense is a many-membered whole, so it is, in another sense, a single member of a greater whole. That whole is the life of the nation, which is assembled in the order of the state.’ Not only should the university seek scientiWc unity, but it must also seek external unity by ‘serving the nation and the state.’ He identiWed two senses in which the university could serve the nation-state, the greater whole. First, it should pursue knowledge apart from overly practical considerations. Second, it must educate the nation’s young people, remembering to raise up the youth and not merely instruct them (nicht bloß unterrichten, auch erziehen). Educating the next generation and 234 New Oxford Annotated Bible, NT 242. 235 Schmidt (ed.), Jahrhundertfeier, 20. 236 Ibid. 20–1.

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uninhibitedly pursuing science, were in fact intimately tied together, Kafton reasoned, invoking the commonplace understanding of the professor’s dual role, for ‘Wissenschaft itself is the incomparable means of teaching that lies in our hand.’ If the university faithfully pursued these goals, its value to the life of the nation remained of superlative importance: ‘No one can think of German culture and German intellectual life without the German universities. Their downfall would mean a collapse of the German nation—so important are they for the whole.’237 Kafton concluded the sermon with a brief prayer, thanking God for raising up such a mighty university from the darkest days of German history after the defeat by Napoleon. Upon conclusion of the prayer, the choir broke into Bach’s ‘Preis, Ehre, Macht und Herrlichkeit’. The august crowd then recited the Lord’s prayer, received a blessing, and exited to inspiring organ performances. The following days, 11 and 12 October, witnessed similar festive, if less explicitly religious, events. On the second day the government occupied a prominent role. Minister Trott zu Solz gave a speech, as did Emperor Wilhelm II, who took the opportunity to announce a major new government grant for scientiWc research. (Those in attendance stood respectfully during his entire address.) On the following day, the emperor received an honorary law degree. The events of the last day concluded with a lavish banquet at the royal palace.238 The most intellectually substantive event of the Wnal day was an address by Max Lenz, in which the esteemed historian surveyed the career of the University of Berlin and that of German universities generally over the past century. The address is notable for its scientiWc triumphalism, its invocation of the Kulturstaat ideology, and its sceptical assessment of university theology. Although Berlin was among the youngest of European universities, it had witnessed according to Lenz a century of dizzying scientiWc advance: The University of Berlin can only look back over one century. But in this century so many intellectual victories and achievements have taken place that those of previous centuries have been overshadowed. We may speak in this manner without exaggerating, for we are only expressing what is true for all Welds of scientiWc research, the representatives of which we have gathered with us today. From both hemispheres they have come to take part in our celebration.239

237 Schmidt (ed.), Jahrhundertfeier, 22–4. 238 Ibid. pp. i–v, 1 V. 239 Max Lenz, Rede zur Jahrhundertfeier der Ko¨niglichen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universita¨t zu Berlin gehalten in der neuen Aula der Universita¨t am 12 Oktober 1910 (Halle, 1910), 5, HUB, Speziallesesaal, Bu¨cher m. hs. Bern. 28.

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In an age of ‘geopolitical tensions’, amid ‘the intensive development of the principle of nationality’, Lenz extolled ‘the power of science to bring nations together’. As a recognized global leader in science, Germany in general and the University of Berlin in particular, therefore, had particular reason to feel gratiWed by the accomplishments of the century. The esteem represented by an audience of foreign dignitaries and scholars, Lenz implied, was richly deserved, even if he believed that science was a human possession, not a national one. Still, the University of Berlin, in Lenz’s view, made up a pivotal chapter in the story of modern science. Associating the university’s rise and the movement towards German nationhood, Lenz praised the Prussian state and the house of Hohenzollern. ‘If it is however admitted that our university enjoys special fame, this is only so because none other is so tied with the history of the ruling house, which today wears the crown of the Empire.’ From the moment of its birth, ‘the darkest moment in Prussian history’, until the present, Lenz elaborated, no other university could claim such a special relationship to a national identity and to the monarchy, which recognized the support of science as ‘[its] most sublime task’.240 Lenz admitted that the relationship between science and the state in the nineteenth century was not always a happy one, but what characterized the present moment, in Lenz’s view, was a harmonious relationship maintained by the state’s recognition that free science was in its own, and the German people’s, highest interest. The symbiosis of Wissenschaft and Staat, advanced by Kulturstaat theorists earlier in the century, had for Lenz become a reality in Wilhelmine Germany, conferring upon the state a progressive, distinctly modern aura of legitimacy: But we fear such conXicts [between science and the state] no longer . . . because the genius of our state is on our side. And also our sovereigns know . . . that the freedom of scientiWc inquiry is boundless, that knowledge has a world-conquering power. . . . They do not fear the unravelling (auXo¨sende) power of scientiWc enquiry, especially the historical disciplines, which leave no stone unturned, but submit everything to criticism, including state and church traditions and authority (as well as dogmas and customs), examining them in light of [their] historical foundation and inner justiWcation. . . . For such reasons we are thankful to them [our rulers], in the conWdence that the bond between our monarchy and university rests on such a bedrock . . . 241

Lenz depicted the post-1806 era as decisive for the development of both German science and nationhood. The impulses of this era, however, were only fully realized in post-1871 national uniWcation—a political boon to the German people and a scientiWc boon to humanity, he claimed. ‘Everything Wrst became possible in the new Empire. The development of science itself, 240 Ibid. 5–6.

241 Ibid. 29–30.

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the uniWcation of its methods and its goals, the simultaneous advance in which it goes forward today in all faculties—all of this stands in direct relationship with the attainment of our national unity.’ Seeking to bolster his point, Lenz catalogued recent achievements and statistics of the German universities since 1871, emphasizing the transformation of Berlin from a promising upstart to a ‘world university’.242 The theological faculty, however, presented an anomaly for Lenz. Most other Welds, especially those in the philosophical and medical faculties, had demonstrated impressive growth, but ‘compared to the other faculties, it [theology] was far behind’.243 To explain this situation, Lenz pointed to the character of modern science, which in his view encouraged inWnite development and experimentation, whereas theology was ‘bound by systematic principles’.244 He could still oVer theology faint praise, as it had ‘dug deep shafts’ within its own world of thought and had established fruitful ties with ‘neighboring Welds of knowledge’. In the main though, theology compared poorly to other university disciplines. For it to achieve similar results, he advocated that it redeWne itself as ‘Religionsgeschichte’. On this point Lenz made direct reference to the argument advanced by Fichte (who comes across in the address as Lenz’s truest intellectual hero) that theology did not belong in the university until it forsook its dogmatic and practical aspects. Furthermore, in classic Kantian-Fichtean fashion, Lenz argued that the philosophical faculty was the surest foundation of the university, and, accordingly, all genuine scientiWc knowledge must be either ‘historical’ or ‘natural’— a division that would admit theology under the former heading. ‘Is it not already expressed by theologians themselves’, Lenz then asked rhetorically, ‘that their discipline must develop into the comparative [historical] study of religions (vergleichenden Religionswissenschaft), and in fact is it not true that theology is already heading in this direction?’245 A further liability of theology, Lenz averred, was its inability to accord itself with the ‘practical-material direction of our time’. This direction was conducive to the ‘unceasing growth’ of such Welds as ‘chemistry, botany, zoology, geology, anatomy, and physiology’, for a world of scientiWc advance and industrial growth would always need scientists, doctors, engineers, and the like, whereas theologians, presumably, it could do without or get by with only a few. ‘The unprecedented ballooning of matriculations in the philosophical 242 Max Lenz, Rede zur Jahrhundertfeier der Ko¨niglichen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universita¨t zu Berlin gehalten in der neuen Aula der Universita¨t am 12 Oktober 1910 (Halle, 1910), 5, HUB, Speziallesesaal, Bu¨cher m. hs. Bern. 12 V. 243 Ibid. 18. 244 He conceded that this was also the case with the law faculty as well. 245 Ibid. 21.

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faculty’, Lenz therefore concluded, represented a salient example of a deeper historical force at work, one that had aVected ‘all faculties with the exception of theology’. This force was simply ‘the powerful economic development of Germany . . . coming to expression’.246 In the decades leading up to the University of Berlin’s centenary in 1910, the Chicago (1893) and St Louis (1904) world fairs had provided prior opportunities for Germany to showcase its universities. The general historical conditions under which these fairs took place resembled the 1910 celebration. All three events occurred during the reign of Wilhelm II, during the heyday of German university expansion and prestige, and under the powerful inXuence of Prussia’s Ministry of Culture.247 The global political backdrop for each, moreover, was characterized by rising nationalism, transatlantic industrialization, and extensive Western imperialism abroad. The idea behind America’s world fairs bore witness to many of these historical forces. Owing their precedent to London’s famous Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, the Chicago and St Louis fairs were preceded and succeeded by several other American and European fairs, but none could compare with these two in size, scope, and cost. After gaining the honour to hold the 1893 fair, Chicago chose to celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s journey to America—hence the fair’s oYcial title: ‘the World’s Columbian Exposition’. Extensive planning and investment ‘to celebrate the greatest era of civilized progress the world had ever seen’, as one commentator put it, made the Chicago fair ‘bigger and grander than anything before it’.248 Similar grandiose calculations and aspirations lay behind the 1904 St Louis fair, designed to remember the one-hundredth anniversary of Thomas JeVerson’s Louisiana Purchase. Both fairs, it should be emphasized, celebrated ‘the West’, the American frontier West and the more abstract ‘West’ of Western civilization, which through industrialization and imperialism stood at the apex of global supremacy. Despite myriad nationalist animosities among Western countries (many provoked by imperialism), the fairs were also designed as gestures of international brotherhood and cooperation. Finally, both fairs extravagantly celebrated scientiWc inquiry and industrial growth as engines of human progress. Perhaps the spirit of the fairs was summed up best 246 Ibid. 25. 247 Friedrich AlthoV was Minister of Education during the two world fairs. His oYce worked closely with the Empire’s Ministry of the Interior in the planning stages. Incidentally, AlthoV was so taken by the opportunity represented by America that he once wanted to found ‘a little German university’ on American soil. He was also instrumental in organizing professor exchanges between the two countries. See Bernhard vom Brocke, ‘Friedrich AlthoV’, in Treue et al., Wissenschaftspolitik in Berlin, 211–13. 248 William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 341–2.

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by President William McKinley (prior to his death in 1901) in his invitation to other nations on the occasion of the St Louis Fair: ‘I do hereby invite the nations of the earth to appoint representatives and send such exhibits as will most Wttingly and fully illustrate their resources, industries, and their progress in civilization.’249 The world fairs, McKinley stated in another context, were to be ‘timekeepers of progress’.250 Germany’s presence at both fairs was conspicuous. Championing science, progress, technology, and industry, Germany’s exhibitions and guidebooks rivalled or surpassed all others. At Chicago, this was true of both the general exhibition on the German empire and the smaller, more speciWc exhibition devoted to German universities. The general exhibition categories (agriculture and forestry, mining, machinery, engineering, transportation, horticulture, electricity, the chemical industry, and others) as conveyed by the ‘OYcial Catalogue Exhibition of the German Empire’ make this point quite clear.251 Twenty-nine of the thirty-eight university displays at Chicago, moreover, focused on the natural and medical sciences.252 The suggestion to the casual onlooker was the extensive role of German universities in fostering materialscientiWc and technological development. The universities did not come across, in other words, as centres of humanistic, soul-enriching inquiry, as Humboldt and others had envisioned, and certainly not as centres of corporate privilege, confessional identity, and theology’s supremacy. Nonetheless, theology could still lay claim to a small place in the 1893 Chicago fair: in a two-volume book on German universities, which had been commissioned for the occasion. Prepared and edited by Wilhelm Lexis of the University of Go¨ttingen ‘with the help of numerous university professors’, entitled straightforwardly Die deutschen Universita¨ten, the work sought to show the ‘the progress of science’ in various academic Welds in so far as German scholarship had made signiWcant contributions.253 The work was organized in accordance with the four faculties, although, notably, the entire second volume was devoted to natural science alone. But as custom would have it, theology, the ‘Wrst faculty’, came at the beginning with Protestant and Catholic theology treated separately. Each 249 Quoted in Dorothy Daniels Birk, The World Came to St. Louis: A Visit to the 1904 World’s Fair (St Louis: Bethany, 1979), 12. 250 Robert W. Rydell, ‘World’s Fairs’ in Eric Foner and John A. Garraty (eds.), The Reader’s Companion to American History (Boston: Houghton-MiZin, 1991), 1168–70. 251 World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago: OYcial Catalogue Exhibition of the German Empire (Berlin, 1893), 28 V. 252 Deutsche Unterrichts-Ausstellung in Chicago: Katalog der Universita¨ts-Austellung (Berlin, 1893), pp. vii–viii. 253 Wilhelm Lexis (ed.), Die deutschen Universita¨ten: Fu¨r die Universita¨tsaustellung in Chicago unter Mitwirkung zahlreicher Universita¨tslehrer, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1893).

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confession’s section contained an introductory essay followed by individual essays in biblical exegesis, church history, systematic theology, and practical theology. All essayists, but especially the Protestant ones, implied that the progress-of-science motif applied to theology as it might to mineralogy or botany. Since the essays’ objective was to take stock of recent developments, together they oVer an insightful vantage point on late nineteenth-century academic theology as a whole. The informed reader could not help but note the impressive range and depth of German theological scholarship; Protestant scholarship, in particular, was touted as transforming virtually every area of theological inquiry. Yet it would also have been apparent that theology, its own scientiWc claims notwithstanding, stood isolated from the dominant directions and energies of the contemporary university, even if the essayists often attributed the progress of their Welds to university dynamics. In his essay on Old Testament exegesis, for example, Emil Kautzsch of the University of Halle noted that in so far as Old Testament scholarship evinced a ‘solid scientiWc character’ it was ‘almost exclusively a product of the universities’. Private scholars and clergymen could simply not attain the same results given the ‘indispensability of the greatest scientiWc apparatus’, i.e. the university.254 The companion essay on New Testament studies, written by Erich Haupt of Halle, also trumpeted the indispensability of the university. Recent scholarship had brought about a ‘transformation’ in the Weld, no small feat, he held, given that the religiously sensitive material of the New Testament made it nearly impossible ‘to operate without presuppositions’, the standard of true science. Most signiWcantly, the transformation had enlarged ‘the historical understanding of early Christianity’. In earlier eras, scholars approached New Testament texts as a matter of ‘divine inspiration’, Haupt opined, whereas ‘nowadays . . . the main question is what the New Testament author wanted to say to his time, and what contemporary assumptions led him to express himself the way he did’.255 Haupt’s essay can also be read as a barometer of growing specialization. In New Testament studies alone, he delineated seven distinct subWelds, including textual criticism, grammatical studies, New Testament contemporary history (N. T. Zeitgeschichte), the history of the development of New Testament books (Entstehungsgeschichte der N. T. Bu¨cher), Gospel criticism, the study of the life of Jesus, and New Testament theology. Sensitive to the highly contentious nature of much scholarship in these subWelds, but nonetheless intent to square this situation with the idea of scientiWc progress, Haupt concluded his essay on the following note: 254 Ibid. i. 181.

255 Ibid. 188–9.

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[I]n large part the scientiWc movement among academic theologians is underway. Certainly, conXicts and still unsolved problems are numerous, but there is also a substantial and growing amount of consensually accepted results. And it may be permitted to call progress the fact that theologians of diVerent schools and orientations are beginning to learn from one another and conducting their scientiWc struggles with that respect and . . . propriety, which both science and Christianity demand.256

Church history was a vibrant and successful theological Weld, asserted Friedrich Loofs (1858–1928) in his essay on the subject. ‘Closely bound with the German universities’, its beginnings were traced by Loofs to J. L. von Mosheim, who ‘can be named the originator of a scientiWc theology’ because like few others he ‘stood above the theological currents of [his] day’. For Loofs, the impartial, objective vision of Mosheim remained the continuing basis of church history: ‘He [Mosheim] was the Wrst to attempt to treat the events of the church with the same pure historical interest and in the same manner that others treated the events of a state in the best political and provincial histories.’ This ‘pure historical discipline’ (rein historisch Disciplin)—presumably in contrast to older, more edifying approaches—had demonstrated in recent years ‘decisive progress’, Loofs proudly asserted. As evidence, he appealed to the historical works of Neander, Hagenbach, and, more recently, Adolf Harnack.257 For systematic and practical theology, it proved trickier to demonstrate progress, but nonetheless the essayists in these Welds, respectively Hermann Hering and Martin Ka¨hler, called attention to recent and ongoing advances in both areas. SigniWcantly, both invoked Schleiermacher (his Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums in particular) as pivotal for setting the modern agenda in these Welds.258 Hering referred to Schleiermacher’s work as ‘scientiWc leaven’ (wissenschaftlicher Sauerteig) that exerted inXuence long after eVorts of others had ceased to be relevant.259 In systematic theology, Ka¨hler contended that it was Schleiermacher’s legacy above others with which contemporary theologians were still forced to grapple. Elaborating his view, Ka¨hler indicated that Schleiermacher had rejected both the premise of orthodoxy, which had tied dogmatics to the biblical text, and the premise of ‘the rationalists’, which had tied dogmatics to ‘natural religion’, and instead had ‘considered . . . dogmatics under historical theology’.260 This outlook and the concurrent rise of ‘historical scholarship’ in the nineteenth century had 256 Wilhelm Lexis (ed.), Die deutschen Universita¨ten: Fu¨r die Universita¨tsaustellung in Chicago unter Mitwirkung zahlreicher Universita¨tslehrer, 188–94. 257 Ibid. 197–208. 258 Ibid. 208, 218. 259 Ibid. 219. 260 Ibid. 209.

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created diYcult questions for systematic theology, especially in regard to the ‘historicity of Christianity’. These diYculties were only compounded by Schleiermacher’s simultaneous insistence, particularly in his Reden u¨ber die Religion (1799), that Christianity was not only a historical phenomenon but an aspect of ‘religion’, that is, an interior phenomenon ‘original and selfstanding [and] located in the personal life’. Questions about the historicity of Christianity and the interior character of belief had in turn given rise to thorny conceptual questions about the nature of revelation and even religion itself. Systematic theologians of the late nineteenth century, Ka¨hler summed up, thus still faced a plethora of foundational questions bequeathed to them largely by Schleiermacher. Providing satisfactory answers demanded nothing less than a ‘thoroughgoing confrontation between the Christian world view and the various sciences’. Ka¨hler welcomed this state of aVairs, but conceded that it required ‘ongoing work’.261 The diYculties and challenges of systematic theology, however, were part and parcel of theology’s overall late nineteenth-century situation, which was sketched in the introductory essay by Erich Haupt (who also wrote the aforementioned essay on New Testament scholarship). In large measure, Haupt’s introduction is straightforwardly descriptive: he comments on the number of Protestant theological faculties in Germany (seventeen),262 the nature of instruction, the granting of degrees, the process of examinations, the transition from student to parish life, and the intellectual divisions of the faculty. Interspersed among these more pedestrian observations, however, are several noteworthy ones. He commented directly, for example, on the impact of specialization: ‘As in all sciences, theology has experienced a steady increase in individual disciplines, which has necessitated the division of labour.’ No one at present, he elaborated, could achieve the feat of a Schleiermacher, whose teaching covered practically all theological Welds and philosophy as well. Specialization also had increased the time it took students to complete their studies and diminished the time they had to devote to non-theological, elective topics.263 Haupt sought to respond to traditionalists critical of ‘scientiWc theology’. He defended theology’s place in the university and the indispensability of academic freedom for the theological task. ‘[T]he free search after truth’, he proclaimed, ‘Wnally must serve the truth, even if it leads through all kinds of 261 Ibid. 215 V. 262 The Protestant theological faculties of the German Empire c.1893 included nine Prussian ones: Berlin, Bonn, Breslau, Go¨ttingen, Greifswald, Halle, Kiel, Ko¨nigsberg, and Marburg. The remaining ones in other La¨nder included Erlangen, Leipzig, Tu¨bingen, Heidelberg, Giessen, Rostock, Jena, and Strasbourg. 263 Lexis (ed.), Die deutschen Universita¨ten, i. 172–3.

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errors. The Christian evangelical faith steadily becomes more pure and more sure-footed today through free inquiry.’ At the same time, Haupt recognized that introducing pious young people to critical scholarship during their university years regularly led to troublesome results: ‘Often in the beginning of their student years, students easily experience a conXict between the faith of their childhood Christian community and the results of Wissenschaft.’ For Haupt this did not call into question the operations of academic theology per se; it did suggest rather that professors should take a more personal interest in their students, safeguarding them from outright unbelief, on the one hand, but also encouraging them neither to fear nor forsake rigorous scientiWc inquiry.264 On a related point, Haupt addressed the fairly common criticism that academic theology had strayed too far from the needs of churches and that it often encouraged hostility to simple piety. To such critics, Haupt pled for patience, trusting that a necessary confrontation between scientiWc and religious interests would eventually resolve itself in favour of both Christian and scientiWc truth. On this note of quasi-Hegelian optimism in the slow, sure operations of history, he concluded his essay: The theological faculties, although formally completely free, provide in fact service to the evangelical church. If conXicts arise—and in our day they frequently do—between their work and that of the practical ecclesiastical circles; if one complains that intellectual criticism almost exclusively occupies [faculties], rendering students thereby unprepared for actual parish service: academic theologians will certainly not deny that many imperfections still adhere to their work. But they are convinced that any one-sidedness will be overcome by the further scientiWc and religious education of the students and especially by their work in the pastoral oYce. Indeed, we must have patience, and must look for reconciliation between science and faith, in the individual as well as in the whole church, from the steady cooperation of these two factors, and see that such reconciliation can only be slowly and gradually brought about. Theological science is an integral part of the totality of science, and an integral aspect of church life generally, and, Wnally, [it is] a means of creating in the holders of practical church positions independence of judgement and clarity of action.265

Although occasioned by the 1893 world’s fair, Haupt’s essay and those of others, it is safe to conclude, were surely lost on most visitors to Chicago.266 The essays on theology comprised but a brief section of Lexis’s book, which represented a small aspect of the exhibition on German universities, which in turn was yet one piece of a grandiose fair whose predominantly scientiWc, 264 Lexis (ed.), Die deutschen Universita¨ten, 172–6. 265 Ibid. 180. 266 The fact that all essays were presented untranslated bears witness to the reality that German had become a leading lingua franca of academic discourse, but it also surely limited the American readership.

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technological, and industrial displays suggested, in the memorable words of Henry Adams, ‘a step in evolution to startle Darwin’.267 Theology’s fortunes fared little better at the 1904 St Louis World Fair. As in Chicago, the university exhibition in St Louis—located in close proximity to the ‘Palace of Electricity’—focused predominantly on natural scientiWc and medical Welds. To accompany the exhibition, Wilhelm Lexis produced a much revised and expanded work of four volumes, Das Unterrichtswesen im Deutschen Reich.268 Most of the expansion was due to the inclusion of material on the technical universities (Technische Hochschulen) and the secondary school system. In this work, the Protestant theological faculty received just one small essay of sixteen pages written by D. G. Kawerau (1847–1918), who appeared less bent on demonstrating the ‘progress’ of theology than in oVering a descriptive and frank overview of theological study.269 He was so frank in fact that he admitted that treating religious material with the tools of science—which he held as academic theology’s proper task—often gave rise to problematic results. It led many students, for instance, to forsake clerical careers, just as it had led others, who continued on to the parish, to look back upon university theology as a ‘soul-endangering false path’ (seelengefa¨hrlichen Irrweg). But the truly praiseworthy student persisted and matured, learning to sort through conXicting bodies of opinion and his own doubts. Only through such struggles, Kawerau concluded, could the student learn to achieve ‘harmony’ between academic theology and the tasks of the clerical oYce.270 But again it is safe to conclude that at St Louis, as at Chicago, few visitors were terribly preoccupied with theology’s negligible lot among the sciences. Those who did puzzle over Germany’s university exhibits were far more likely to be captivated by the scientiWc, medical, and technological displays and literature, which accorded more with the ethos of the fairs. This indeed was the association made by the editor of the journal, The Monist, in a brief article, ‘The German Universities at the World’s Fair’, published during the Chicago fair. ‘While the French and English universities are advanced schools, whose business is to educate or to teach,’ the editor began, ‘the German university is above all other things a temple of science.’ The author also admired the academic freedom of German universities, which had been repeatedly and eVusively extolled in Lexis’s work. Interestingly, the editor saw in this freedom a kinship with the political ideals of the United States, and therefore 267 Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston: Houghton MiZin, 1961), 340. 268 Wilhelm Lexis (ed.), Das Unterrichtswesen im Deutschen Reich: Aus Anlaß der Weltaustellung in St. Louis unter Mitwirkung zahlreicher Fachma¨nner herausgegeben, 4 vols. (Berlin, 1904). 269 Ibid. i. 61–76. 270 Ibid. 74–6.

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concluded that it was only right and good for Americans to follow the lead of German universities—something American educators had already been doing for some time. ‘Academic liberty’, the editor wrote, makes the German university of kin to the constitution of our country. No wonder that between the German university and the United States a deep sympathy obtains. We Americans at least have . . . regarded the German university system as the best realization of the noblest idea of all higher education. . . . [T]he spirit that animates the German universities must and will Wnd and to some extent has already found a home on this side of the Atlantic, in the country of political liberty and humanitarian aspirations.271

5. ‘ THE AGE O F GE RMAN FOOTNOTES’: VISITORS FROM ABROAD, ADMIRERS FROM AFAR [A] generation that dreamed of nothing but the German University . . . German scholarship was our master and guide. Josiah Royce, 1891

Long before the world fairs, German universities had roused the interest of American and other foreign students, scholars, and educators. In part this was a consequence of expanded means of communication and publication, widespread immigration, and a rising literate middle class smitten by prospects of scientiWc progress and education as a means of social mobility. The increased ability to travel, moreover, whether by steamship, train, or more traditional means, also facilitated this interest, as it opened up new possibilities for crosscultural interaction and knowledge. Between 1870 and 1905 the number of foreign students attending German universities increased by almost seventy percent.272 From the United States alone in the nineteenth century came an estimated nine to ten thousand students.273 An age of historicism, the nineteenth century was thus also one of increased international academic exchange. This fact had great consequence not only for those who personally visited German universities but also for educators the world over who found themselves increasingly confronted and often captivated by the ‘German model’.274 271 ‘The German Universities at the World’s Fair’, The Monist 4 (Chicago, 1893–4): 106–8. 272 Jarausch, Students, Society, and Politics in Imperial Germany, 38. 273 Diehl, Americans and German Scholarship, 1770–1870, 1. 274 In the following discussion I restrict my focus largely to French, British, and American visitors to and admirers of German universities. However, the example of the German university was also inXuential in Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, and as far away as Japan. See HUE iii. 163–230.

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No doubt it would be a quixotic errand to survey here the vast literature left by foreign visitors or second-hand commentators on German universities in the nineteenth century.275 Even if I restricted my focus to those who remarked directly on theology and theological faculties, it would remain a daunting task, rendered more diYcult still by the fact that observations made while abroad under the inXuence of unfamiliar conditions are often exaggerated, prejudiced, and/or based on partial knowledge. Nevertheless, if we keep in mind these limitations, the body of opinion on German universities and academic theology left by foreigners is suYciently insightful (even unanimous in certain aspects) that it should not be passed over, even if we must proceed here in a rather selective and sketchy manner. What is more, the perception of outsiders can often exhibit a keen perceptiveness, inaccessible to insiders of any given institution. With respect to Protestant academic theology, outsiders’ insights are valuable for at least three reasons. First, the general shape of theological study rarely failed to elicit extreme reactions. Students and scholars of a conservative religious bent often decried the innovative and unorthodox currents of German theology; denunciations of German ‘inWdelity’ and ‘rationalism’ abound in the literature. Those of a more progressive outlook, conversely, more often admired German theology for its critical, liberal spirit; some even compared the work of German theologians to the Wrst Christians or to the Reformers for eVecting a watershed in humanity’s religious and intellectual emancipation. Second, a signiWcant number of foreign observers commented, often rather critically, on the relationship of university theology to the state. This was particularly true of visitors from the United States, who tended to regard Germany’s Erastian proclivities as inimical to heartfelt, voluntary faith. But, Wnally, whether one reacted favourably or unfavourably, few failed to acknowledge the intellectual rigor of theology in Germany and its ties to the ideals of academic freedom and pioneering research. For whatever reasons and to whatever future eVect, visitors and other interested parties abroad regularly concluded that Germany was leading the way in reinvigorating the age-old interplay between Athens and Jerusalem, knowledge and faith. And just as statesmen in the nineteenth century had to reckon with the French Revolution, religious elites—scholars, clergymen, and knowledgeable laypeople 275 For helpful introductions to some of this literature, see Ronald L. Gougher, ‘Comparison of English and American Views of the German University, 1840–1865: A Bibliography’, HEQ 9 (1969): 477–91; Lenore O’Boyle, ‘Learning for its Own Sake: The German University as Nineteenth-Century Model’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 25 (January 1983): 3– 25; and Rainer Christoph Schwinges (ed.), Humboldt International: Der Export des deutschen Universita¨tsmodells im 19. und 20.Jahrhundert (Basle: Schwabe, 2001).

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alike—were regularly confronted by the peril and promise of German academic theology. Like the great Revolution itself, it divided individuals even as it bound them by shared fascination. Not surprisingly perhaps, among the Wrst major post-revolutionary, foreign work to awaken interest in German universities and theology was Madame de Stae¨l’s De l’Allemagne. Based on her travels throughout Germany between 1803 and 1807, the work was Wrst published in 1810. Replete with questionable generalizations and coloured by the author’s own sympathies, the work nonetheless had the eVect of calling international attention, at a time of French hegemony, to important aspects of German culture.276 While best known for her high regard for German literature, de Stae¨l also expressed admiration for Germany’s universities and devoted an entire chapter to discussing their operations and merits. In her view the German universities surpassed all others: ‘All the north of Germany is Wlled with the most learned universities of Europe.’277 She regarded German professors as both savants and pedagogues: ‘Not only are the professors men of astonishing education, but what distinguishes them above all else is their extreme scrupulousness in the art of teaching.’278 For these and other reasons, she concluded, the German universities had signiWcantly contributed to ‘the native land of thought’ (la patrie de la pense´es) as she termed Germany, where ‘the genius of philosophy goes further than anywhere else’.279 Repeating a Protestant commonplace, de Stae¨l held that the legacy of the Reformation provided the key to understanding the achievements of German higher education.280 Protestant thinkers and theologians, brought to prominence ‘by means of the universities’, had exerted in her view an intellectual presence unmatched by their Catholic counterparts in the predominantly southern universities. ‘Since that epoch [of the Reformation],’ she wrote, ‘the Protestant universities have been incontestably superior to the Catholic ones, and the literary glory of Germany depends altogether on these institutions.’281 276 My citations are from the 1958–1960 edn.: De Stae¨l, De’l’Allemagne, 5 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1958–60). Cf. the German and English translations: De Stae¨l, Deutschland, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1814), and De Stae¨l, Germany, 3 vols. (London, 1813). On de Stae¨l generally and her inXuence, see John Claiborne Isbell, The Birth of European Romanticism: Truth and Propaganda in Sta¨el’s De’l’Allemagne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Also of relevance are the letters of her English travel partner, Henry Crabb Robinson (1775–1867). See Edith J. Morley (ed.), Henry Crabb Robinson in Germany, 1800–1805: Extracts from his Correspondence (Oxford, 1929). 277 De Stae¨l, De l’Allemagne, i. 244. 278 Ibid. 258. 279 Ibid. 21, 245. 280 Cf. the book by her friend and correspondent, Charles de Viller, Essai sur l’esprit et l’inXuence de la reformation de Luther (Paris, 1804). 281 De Stae¨l, De l’Allemagne, v. 63.

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The particular genius of German Protestantism, she elaborated, was its ability to wed Wrst-order intellectual inquiry with committed piety. She thus idealized ‘Protestant leaders in Germany’ for achieving ‘the union of a lively faith with the spirit of inquiry. Their reason did no injury to their belief, nor their belief to their reason; and their moral faculties were always put into simultaneous action.’ The fruit of Protestantism was borne out then most clearly in the northern universities, where ‘theological questions have been most agitated’. ‘Among German writers of the Protestant religion,’ she opined, subtly snubbing France, diVerent ways of thinking have prevailed, which have successively occupied attention. Many learned men have made inquiries, unheard of before, into the Old and New Testament. Michaelis [of Go¨ttingen] has studied the languages, the antiquities, and the natural history of Asia, to interpret the Bible; and while French philosophy was making a jest of the Christian religion, they made it in Germany into the object of erudition.

In the same vein, she praised ‘Schleiermacher and his disciples’ for simultaneously promoting piety and free inquiry and thereby achieving a truly ‘philosophical theology’—something which she found neither in France, where discord, she believed, prevailed between faith and reason, nor in the Catholic church generally, which, she held, had placed dogma and authority above knowledge and truth-seeking.282 Because of de Stae¨l’s disparaging comments about her native country, Napoleon banned and sought to destroy De l’Allemagne upon its initial publication 1810. But this perhaps only contributed to its eventual success; it was republished (in French) in London in 1813 and quickly translated into English and German. Boosted by the popularity of this work, a greater interest in German intellectual and cultural life came to preoccupy many European thinkers, writers, and statesmen.283 While the revolutionary-Napoleonic period had witnessed the overhaul of French education at all levels, the Restoration compromised or reversed many changes. The Catholic Church, for example, regained many powers over education lost during the Revolution. Not surprisingly, therefore, a fresh impetus for educational reform swept liberal circles during the July Revolution of 1830.284 This took place at a time when Prussia, under the educational leadership of Altenstein and Schulze, was gaining widespread attention for its university and secondary systems of education. In the early 1830s the French 282 Ibid. 27 V. 283 Isbell, The Birth of European Romanticism, 1–10. 284 Theodore Zeldin, ‘Higher Education in France, 1848–1940’, JCH 2 (1967): 55.

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government, therefore, decided to commission an oYcial study of education in Prussia and other German states. The product of this commission, undertaken by the philosopher and head of the E´cole Normale, Victor Cousin (1792–1867), resulted in his inXuential Rapport sur l’e´tat de l’instruction publique dans quelques pays de l’Allemagne, et particulie`rement en Prusse (1832). Based on Wrst-hand contact with educators and oYcials from across the Rhine, the study focused heavily on the Prussian secondary schools and the state’s administration of education, but it touched, glowingly, on universities as well. While in Berlin, Cousin met with Minister Schulze almost on a daily basis, and he developed great respect for the University of Berlin.285 The translation of his work into English by Sarah Austin in 1834 gave it a much wider audience: through Cousin, numerous educational leaders in Great Britain and the United States Wrst came to have a high regard for Prussian educational institutions.286 SigniWcantly, Cousin believed that the role of the state acting through the Ministry of Culture was of decisive importance for the successful shaping of higher education in Prussia. The Ministry of Altenstein and Schulze, he wrote, allowed for ‘complete unity in the central point, from which all emanates and to which all is addressed’. Accordingly, ‘science assumes her proper place in the state’—precisely what he thought France lacked, despite its own centralized system dating from the universite´ impe´riale of 1808. Although Cousin did not take a keen interest in theological education per se, he did Wnd it salutary that ‘faculties of theology’—unlike in France where clerical education took place largely in seminaries supervised by bishops—formed ‘an integral part of public instruction.’287 Other Frenchmen took a stronger interest in German theology. Indeed, despite confessional, linguistic, and institutional disparities between the two nations, aspects of German theology regularly made their way into France throughout the nineteenth century. Often this was a matter of individual scholars familiarizing themselves with German scholarship, visiting universities across the Rhine, or corresponding with professors on topics of shared interest. In 1858 a journal, La Revue germanique, was founded with the explicit purpose of following the latest trends in German theological 285 Cousin had already spent time in Berlin in the 1820s. See Hermann Joseph Ody, Victor Cousin: Ein Lebensbild im deutsch-franzo¨ischen Kulturraum (Saarbru¨cken: West-Ost, 1953), 54–60. 286 On Cousin’s reception in the United States, see James Turner and Paul Bernard, ‘The Prussian Road to University? German Models and the University of Michigan, 1837–c.1895’, Rackham Reports (1989): 13–14, 41. Cf. Henry A. Pochman, German Culture in America 1600– 1900, (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961), 102–8. 287 Cousin, ‘Report on the State of Public Instruction in Prussia’, trans. Sarah Austin, in Edgar W. Knight (ed.), Reports on European Education (New York, 1930), 123–5 (emphasis added).

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scholarship and spreading historical-critical methods. The editors hailed Germany as the land of ‘critical study’ where ‘ideas are produced and consumed prodigiously’.288 The frankness of this journal in expressing doubts about orthodox doctrines regularly alarmed the Catholic clergy in France, provoking numerous debates between orthodox churchmen and the journal’s editors.289 Perhaps the best known (if not necessarily representative) example of a French scholar looking to Germany for inspiration is that of Ernest Renan (1823–92). Already in the 1840s he had become persuaded of the superiority of German critical scholarship, even though it had led him to doubt the truths of Christianity.290 In 1849 he published a short article, ‘Les Historiens critique de Jesus’, which made clear his debt to German historical-critical scholarship.291 This proved an important step towards his more signiWcant work of 1863, La Vie de Je´sus, in which he portrayed Jesus as a purely historical character, a humble Galilean preacher, devoid of any supernatural element. Not unlike Strauss’s Leben Jesu earlier in the century, Renan’s book engendered sensational controversy, conWrming in the minds of more orthodox believers the perils of drinking too deeply from the wells of German theology.292 Not only individuals but institutions played leading roles in transmitting theological ideas across the Rhine. Dubbed a ‘hydra of Germanism’ by revolutionaries in the 1790s, the University of Strasbourg played a unique role in this respect throughout the century, both before and after Alsace was annexed to a uniWed Germany.293 Chartered as a Protestant university in 1621, converted into an ‘academy’ in Napoleon’s universite´ system after 1808, the Alsatian institution managed to keep alive its German heritage, despite contrary eVorts by the French government. Members of Strasbourg’s Protestant theological faculty (one of only two Protestant faculties in France, the other being at Montauban) in particular maintained close contact with ideas and peers across the Rhine, and regularly transmitted the fruit of German scholarship to their colleagues in France.294 In this respect, Stras288 See the editors opening statement, ‘De l’esprit franc¸ais et de l’esprit allemand’, La Revue germanique 1 (1858): 1–20. 289 Claude Digeon, La crise allemande de la pense´e franc¸aise (Paris: Presses universitaires de France 1959), 42. 290 ODCC 1383. 291 See Renan, Œuvres comple`tes, vii (Calmann-Le´vy, 1955), 116–67. 292 Vytas Gaigalas, Ernest Renan and his French Catholic Critics (North Quincy, Mass.: Christopher, 1972), 33 V. 293 Gustav Anrich, Die Kaiser-Wilhelms-Universita¨t Straßburg in ihrer Bedeutung fu¨r die Wissenschaft, 1872–1918 (Berlin, 1923). 294 The Strasbourg Protestant faculty was founded in 1818. See RGG vi. 413. On the Reformed-Protestant theological faculty at Montauban, see RGG iv. 1119.

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bourg’s Protestant theologians occupied a singular cultural niche in France, as John Craig has noted; they ‘saw it as their mission to mediate between French and German research or, more accurately, to introduce the French to the methods and results of German research’.295 What is more, Alsatian students, for evident linguistic reasons, were much more likely than other students in France to spend several semesters studying at German universities, which they regularly came to admire more than their own. ‘Of our students returning from tours of the universities across the Rhine,’ a Strasbourg professor wrote in 1870, ‘there is not one who fails to note . . . the relative inferiority of our institutions.’296 As is well documented, French higher education after 1870 experienced a major crisis, one that in many ways mirrored the crisis of Prussia after 1806— a historical parallel not lost on contemporaries. France’s defeat at the hands Bismarck’s Prussia strengthened the tendency among educational reformers, already underway for several decades, to disparage French science and higher learning and compare them unfavourably to ‘la science germanique’. Early nineteenth-century eductional reforms under Napoleon had reached the end of their line, many argued, and the new situation called for ‘research’ and the ‘university idea’ according to the German model.297 Drawing a direct historical analogy to Prussia in 1806, Renan called for the intellectual revitalization of the nation and for scholars and intellectuals to lead the way. After 1806 ‘the University of Berlin [became] the centre of the regeneration of Germany’, he wrote, suggesting that a similar regeneration should occur in France, even if Germany should by no means be imitated slavishly.298 Such reformist sentiments gained momentum in the late 1870s when a small but inXuential group of scholars and scientists—including Ernest Renan himself, Ernest Lavisse, E´mile Boutmy, Paul Bert, Hippolyte Taine, Fustel de Coulanges, Paul Gide, Louis Pasteur, and Marcellin Berthelot—formed the Socie´te´ de l’Enseignement Supere´ieur and founded the journal, Revue internationale de l’enseignement. Dedicated to helping France recapture its once recognized leadership in science and scholarship, this society and its journal became powerful forces of educational reform during the Third Republic.299 SigniWcantly, nearly all members of the society had cultivated close contacts 295 Craig, Scholarship and Nation Building, 11. 296 Charles Schu¨tzenberg, De la re´form de l’enseignement supe´rieur et des liberte´s universitaires (Strasbourg, 1870), 73; quoted in Craig, Scholarship and Nation Building, 19. 297 HUE iii. 639, and Louis Liard, L’Enseignement supe´rieur en France, 1789–1893 (Paris, 1894), ii. 335. 298 See H. W. Wardman, Ernest Renan: A Critical Biography (London: Athlone, 1964), 128. 299 On the stagnation and decline of French science after the 1820s, see Ben-David, The Scientist’s Role in Society, 88–107, and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: The French Scientist’s Image of German Science, 1840–1919 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1972).

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with German universities, and German scholarship, while not above criticism, was regularly commended for its methodological rigour and thoroughness.300 Major educational reform eventually did take place in France in the 1880s and 1890s. In 1895–6, most notably, legislation was passed that allowed for the re-establishment of universities with multiple faculties (something not seen since the Revolution) in partial imitation of the German model. This eVectively brought to an end the long reign of the Napoleonic universite´ with its network of academies and isolated faculties.301 While the reforms at century’s end defy monocausal explanation, the persistent invocation of the German example by reformers was everywhere apparent, spurring change if not always in predictable directions. ‘If there was a single continuing thread in this complex story,’ George Weisz has summed up, ‘it was the struggle to expand the social role of higher studies in France, with German universities serving as a model.’302 In contrast to Germany, however, theology had little place in late nineteenth-century French universities. Clerical education and training largely remained, as it had since the 1801 Concordat between Napoleon and the Pope, in the hands of diocesan seminaries. In 1905, the formal separation of church and state in France drove a yet deeper wedge between theological education and the public higher education, belatedly fulWlling some of the original impulses of the 1789 Revolution.303 On this count, the situation across the Rhine diVered markedly. As Napoleon’s empire rose and fell, English scholars and theologians, whether through Wrst-hand experience or second-hand reports, had begun to take a greater interest in German universities. Even prior to this time, signiWcant academic connections existed between the two countries. This had 300 Between 1878 and 1890, the Revue internationale de l’enseignement published thirty articles on German education, compared to nine on that of Britain, Wve on that of the United States, and six on that of Belgium. See George Weisz, The Emergence of Modern Universities in France, 1863–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 66. 301 Weisz, The Emergence of Modern Universities in France, 135–61. On the design and functioning of the l’universite´ impe´riale, see F. A. Aulard, Napole´on et le monopole universitaire: origines et fonctionnement de l’universite´ impe´riale (Paris, 1911). 302 Weisz, The Emergence of Modern Universities in France, 368. 303 Article 11 of the 1801 Concordat stated that ‘the bishops can have a chapter in their cathedrals and a seminary for their dioceses, without the Government being under obligation to endow them’. While some theological faculties were part of Napoleon’s Imperial University, the Catholic church actively opposed them because of their statist character. See John McManners, Church and State in France, 1870–1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 140 V. For more details on the social setting of theological education in France in the nineteenth century, see Bruno Nevo, ‘L’E´glise, l’e´tat et l’universite´: les faculte´s de theologie catholique en France au XIXe sie`cle’, in Nigel Aston (ed.), Religious Change in Europe: Essays for John McManners (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 325–44, and Bruno Nevo, L’E´glise et l’universite´ de France: les faculte´s de the´ologie catholique des academies (1808–1885) (Paris: Universite´ de Paris II, 1998).

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been mediated in part through the Scottish universities, which, lacking the Anglican restrictions of Oxford and Cambridge, allowed for freer intercourse with the Continent.304 It was also facilitated by way of the University of Go¨ttingen, which was administered until 1837 under the joined British and Hanoverian crowns. In theology, the works of English deism had been particularly inXuential at Go¨ttingen and many were translated into German.305 In biblical criticism, German scholars had attentively read the Oxford scholar Robert Lowth (1710–87), particularly his De sacra poesi Hebraeorum (1753).306 This work inXuenced Heyne, Michaelis, and Eichhorn of Go¨ttingen and, through them, laid the foundation for the ‘myth interpretation’ of biblical miracles. In turn Michaelis’s commentary on the New Testament was translated into English in 1793 by Herbert Marsh, Fellow at Oxford’s St. John’s College, who claimed in his preface that German theology had become the most learned in Europe.307 In 1798 Samuel Taylor Coleridge made his famous travels to the Continent, further opening up to Anglo-American thinkers the horizons of German theology, biblical scholarship, literature, and philosophy.308 The translation of de Stae¨l’s writings in 1813 had a similar eVect. Nonetheless, despite exceptions like Marsh and Coleridge, much ignorance about German universities and theology still prevailed in Britain at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Only a handful of scholars attempted to explain what was going on in Germany, and their work was either ignored or viewed suspiciously.309 This attitude manifested itself, for example, in copious warnings by Anglican divines to be on guard against the seductions of ‘German rationalism’ or the ‘infections of German divinity’. In some quarters an interest in the German language could even arouse suspicions of heresy. Cambridge’s Connop Thirlwall, the Wrst English translator of Schleiermacher, could thus note in 1825 that it would almost seem as if at Oxford the knowledge of German subjected a divine to the same suspicion of heterodoxy which we know was attached some centuries back to 304 George Haines, German InXuence upon English Education and Science, 1800–1866 (New London: Connecticut College, 1957), 3. 305 A. O. Doyson, ‘Theological Legacies of the Enlightenment: England and Germany’, in S. W. Sykes (ed.), England and Germany: Studies in Theological Diplomacy (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1982), 55 V. 306 On Lowth, see ODCC 1000. 307 J. D. Michaelis, Introduction to the New Testament, trans. Herbert Marsh, 2nd edn. (1802), 1. 308 On Coleridge in Germany, see F. W. Stokoe, German InXuence in the English Romantic Period (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), 89–143. 309 David Forrester, Young Doctor Pusey: A Study in Development (London: Mowbray, 1989), 33–4.

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Greek; as if it was thought . . . that a German theologian is dangerous enough when he writes in Latin, but that when he argues in his own language there can be no escaping his venom.310

Such an attitude toward German theology coloured H. J. Rose’s Discourses on the State of Protestant Religion in Germany (1826), Wrst given as a set of sermons at Cambridge in 1825 on the biblical text: ‘thy wisdom and knowledge hath perverted thee’ (Isaiah 47: 10). Based on his own travels to the Continent, Rose warned fellow Anglicans to take heed, for the scant inXuence exercised by German churchman over universities had led to a dangerous state of aVairs in Protestant theology, one in which unbelieving professors had obtained ‘the greater number of divinity-professorships in the many universities of Germany’.311 Rose’s alarmist treatise set the tone, in the century’s middle decades, for the reception of German theology among conservative churchmen. Nonetheless, the steady rise to pre-eminence of German universities and scholarship worked to elicit greater English admiration and respect.312 This was particularly the case among more progressive Anglicans, or ‘Broad Churchmen’, as well as among Unitarians and freethinkers, who deplored the Church of England’s tight grip over the universities (maintained by mandatory religious tests). But it could also characterize more conservative spirits, who, despite wariness toward German’s putative heterodoxy, admitted that German theological scholarship could be neither ignored nor easily refuted. One such conservative was the future Tractarian leader E. B. Pusey (1800–82), who spent time at Go¨ttingen and Berlin in the late 1820s and afterwards published An Historical Enquiry into the Probable Causes of the Rationalist Character Lately Predominant in the Theology of Germany (1828; vol. ii, 1830). This work reXected the author’s personal encounters with Schleiermacher, Neander, Nitzsch, No¨sselt, Lu¨cke, Tholuck, and other theologians. Tholuck’s lectures on modern church history, in fact, provided the basis for Pusey’s own work.313 310 See the translator’s introduction to Friedrich Schleiermacher, A Critical Essay on St. Luke’s Gospel, trans. Connop Thirlwall (London, 1825), p. ix. On Schleiermacher’s reception in Britain in the nineteenth century, see Ieuan Ellis, ‘Schleiermacher in Britain’, SJT 33 (1980): 417–52. This article also touches on the reception of German theology more generally. 311 See H. J. Rose, The State of Protestantism in Germany Described, 2nd edn. (London, 1829), 1. 312 Haines, German InXuence upon English Science and Education, passim. One might consider the translation of B. G. Niebuhr’s Ro¨mische Geschichte between 1828 and 1832 as an important turning point; its display of historical source criticism (Quellenkritik) inXuenced both theological and non-theological scholarship. See D. Andrews, ‘German InXuence on English Religious Life in the Victorian Era’, Evangelical Quarterly 44 (1972): 226. 313 Forrester, Young Doctor Pusey, 211.

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Pusey intended his Historical Enquiry as a critique of ‘German rationalism’ and, simultaneously, a rebuttal to the more categorical critique levelled by H. J. Rose. Pusey traced German rationalism back to Protestant ‘orthodoxism’ in the seventeenth century, which, he held, had overly intellectualized Christianity and separated it from personal experience and the human will. Pusey praised the rejuvenating spirit of pietism at the University of Halle, which he likened to ‘Geneva of old, the heart from which the impulse of the new principles became felt in every part of the system’. But pietism too had its negative element according to Pusey; it fostered an individualism that in men less pious than Spener or Francke led to contempt for proper church authority. Throughout his work, Pusey attempted evenhandedness, seeking to convince a sceptical English readership that even Germany’s most critical theologians often exhibited ‘an earnestness of mind and love of their God’. The methods of German scholarship, he also made clear, were second to none—‘much more solid than . . . among us’, he had written to his friend, John Henry Newman. Finally, Pusey predicted that a new era in theology would be dated from Schleiermacher’s writings.314 Perceiving, however, a worrisome ‘gentle tone’ towards German theologians, Pusey’s critics, who included the inXuential Bishop Charles BlomWeld, responded to his work with particular severity. Pusey later wrote to Tholuck that some had called him a ‘rash innovator’ while others charged that he had denied the inspiration of the Scriptures. Ironically then, because of Pusey’s qualiWed esteem for German academic rigour, a work intended to criticize its subject was perceived as a subtle defence of German theology. Pusey later regretted writing the work and requested in his will that it not be republished.315 The controversy over German theology quietened down in the 1830s, at which time Pusey himself became caught up in the High-Church renewal known as the Tractarian or Oxford Movement.316 However, the controversy was powerfully aggravated in 1846 after Marian Evans (later George Eliot) translated into English Strauss’s Life of Jesus, reproducing in Britain some of the same passionate quarrels and worries that had raged on the Continent after the book’s original publication in 1835.317 A decade and half later, in 314 Forrester, Young Doctor Pusey, 32–50, 211 V. 315 Noted in Ellis, ‘Schleiermacher in Britain’, SJT 33 (1980): 427. 316 R. William Franklin explores the impact of Pusey’s time in Germany on the Oxford Movement. See Franklin, ‘The Impact of Germany on the Anglican Catholic Revival in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Anglican and Episcopal Church History 61 (December 1992): 433–48. On the Oxford Movement in general, see ODCC 1205–6. 317 On the Strauss reception in Britain, which actually predated Eliot’s translation, see Timothy Larson, Contested Christianity: The Political and Social Contexts of Victorian Theology (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 43–58.

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1860, doubts and debate about German academic tendencies reappeared in the wake of the publication of Essays and Reviews, a collection of essays by seven Oxford scholars, who, drawing inspiration from German precedents, called for a more forthright historical examination of the Bible, treating it ‘like any other book’ subject ‘to the same rules of evidence and the same canons of criticism’.318 It should not surprise that two of the leading essayists, Mark Pattison (1813–84) and Benjamin Jowett (1817–93), had emerged at mid-century as the leading advocates of university reform in England, each appealing to the German model. While their ideas diverged at numerous points and they often saw one another as rivals, they could at least agree that theological education needed reform. For Pattison, who had travelled extensively in Germany in the 1850s, the modernization of theology and the reform of the university in fact went hand in hand. Calling for the ‘scientiWc treatment of theology’, he lamented the control that the Church of England had exercised over university life, noting that ‘science or knowledge cannot exist under such a system; it requires for its growth the air of free discussion and contradiction’.319 Jowett, who also commanded Wrst-hand knowledge of Germany, considered the current university system ‘abominable’, noting in particular that it ‘makes true theology or theological education impossible’.320 Pattison and Jowett were not alone. The 1850s through the 1870s represent an extraordinary period of criticism, discussion, and reform of English higher education. Until this time, the sway of the past remained strong: the dominance of Oxford and Cambridge remained largely unchallenged; the grip of the Anglican church was Wrm;321 extensive powers resided in well-endowed, individual colleges (not in the universities per se); pride was taken in the 318 On the inXuence of German theology and biblical criticism on this publication, see Victor Shea and William Whitla (eds.), Essays and Reviews: The 1860 Text and its Reading (Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 109–18, 180, 263, 278–9, 542–3, passim. 319 Mark Pattison, Memoirs (London, 1885), 317. Cf. Pattison, Suggestions on Academical Organization, with Special Reference to Oxford (Edinburgh, 1868), in which he upheld the German universities as models of research, and John Sparrow, Mark Pattison and the Idea of a University (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967). 320 Eveyn Abbot and Lewis Campbell (eds.), The Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett (London, 1897), 275. I should reiterate that Pattison and Jowett often had very diVerent ideas of how the German example should be applied in Britain, and neither were hesitant to criticize certain aspects of German higher education. See George Haines, Essays on German InXuence upon English Education and Science, 1850–1919 (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1969), 90 V. 321 The one institution that actually challenged the Oxbridge, Anglican establishment was the University of London (1836), a non-confessional state institution, which oVered a more practical curriculum. Incidentally, the chief originator of this institution, Thomas Campbell, had visited Germany and had the highest regard for its universities. In fact, the idea for a metropolitan university in London occurred to him after visiting the University of Bonn in 1820. See Negley Harte, The University of London, 1836–1986 (London: Athlone, 1986), 61.

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elitist and classical character of higher learning; and gentlemanly ideas of the professor as belle-lettrist took precedence over newfangled, ‘German’ notions of innovative research and criticism. It was a staple of the conservative press, in fact, to portray the German scholar as a humourless pedant preoccupied with arcane minutiae. The rapid economic growth and industrialization of Germany during this time, however, and the military and political events of 1866–71 powerfully jolted the English system, forcing more and more Englishmen to look enviously (and anxiously) to the Continent for educational and scientiWc leadership.322 ‘To the student of Science,’ as one scholar wrote in 1861, reXecting the new attitude, ‘familiarity with German is essential; without it he is cut oV from . . . the most earnest and successful cultivators of every part of this vast domain [of science]; and we know men who would willingly make any sacriWce in their power to recover, through the mastery of that language, a quarter of the time that was bestowed . . . upon classical study.’323 The growth of such sentiments after 1850 (despite the persistence of countervailing ones) helped create a self-critical climate conducive to reform.324 This in turn spawned numerous scholarly discussions on the university’s purpose, parliamentary debates on the future of higher education, and a host of educational commissions and reports. In 1865, to cite one signiWcant example, the poet and literary critic Matthew Arnold was charged by the British Schools Enquiry Commission with the task of investigating education on the Continent to help obtain a better comparative perspective. After seven months abroad, Arnold published Schools and Universities on the Continent (1868). Especially impressed by Germany, the ‘country in which intellectual life has been carried the farthest’ as he once wrote,325 he republished part of his report in 1874 under the title Higher Schools and Universities in Germany. Both books bear an epigraph from Wilhelm von Humboldt: ‘The thing is not to let the schools and universities go on in a drowsy and impotent 322 Haines, Essays on German InXuence, 47 V. 323 ‘The Universities and ScientiWc Education’, Westminster Review 75 (April 1861): 396. 324 To be sure, the period prior to 1850 is not bereft of calls for educational reform and appeals to the German university. For example, Walter C. Perry, in a survey of the history and organization of German universities, concluded that, despite the heavy hand of the state, Germany had produced a culture ‘where it is necessary to be serious, industrious, and wise’, and its universities were the ‘admiration and delight’ of Europe. Accordingly, he found English universities wanting and advocated Germany as a model for reform. See Walter C. Perry, German University Education; or the Professors and Students of Germany (London, 1846), 2–3. 325 Letter of 6 Janaury 1865; quoted in Paul Nash’s introduction to Matthew Arnold, Culture and the State: Matthew Arnold and Continental Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1966), 18.

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routine; the thing is, to raise the culture of the nation ever higher and higher by their means.’326 Arnold’s chapter on ‘Superior or University Instruction in Prussia’ is marked by uncritical, idealizing admiration. ‘The paramount university aim in Germany’, he opined, ‘is to encourage a love of study and science for their own sakes.’ For this and other reasons, Arnold esteemed the German universities above all others and recommended that their example be followed in England. Such . . . is the system of the German universities. Lehrfreiheit and Lernfreiheit, liberty for the teacher and for the learner; and Wissenschaft, science, knowledge systematically pursued and prized in and for itself are the fundamental ideas of that system. . . . It is in science that we most need to borrow from the German universities. The French university has no liberty, and the English universities have no science; the German universities have both.327

But, again, Arnold’s report was but one of many reform eVorts—some explicitly invoking the German example, some inspired by it, but others neither. Already in 1850 a Royal Commission had introduced a number of reforms, opening up the universities to more students, elevating the importance of academic merit, expanding the professoriate, and challenging the Anglican monopoly—thus paving the way for the abolition of mandatory religious tests by the Universities Tests Act in 1871.328 Further commissions and reports followed in the 1860s and 1870s, laying the groundwork for a host of additional reforms, which, among other things, accelerated patterns of specialization and professionalization, expanded academic freedom, increased state involvement (although the persistence of corporate powers at English universities remained pronounced), abolished clerical restrictions on fellowships and college headships, and diverted funds from individual colleges for the uses of the universities, often for the purpose of establishing prestigious chairs in particular Welds.329 All the while, more and more students travelled to Germany in search of inspiration and scholarly expertise. ‘If a man wishes to make himself a thorough scholar,’ wrote Mark Pattison in 1876, ‘he must go to Germany 326 Noted in S. M. Stirk, German Universities (London, 1946), 13–14. 327 Matthew Arnold, Schools and Universities on the Continent, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964), 263–4. 328 On these religious tests and their abolition in 1871, see David Bebbington, ‘The Secularization of British Universities since the mid-Nineteenth Century’, in George Marsden and Bradley J. Longfellow (eds.), The Secularization of the Academy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 259–77. 329 On the extensive reforms during this period, see Christopher Harvie, ‘Reform and Expansion, 1854–1871’, in M. G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys (eds.), The History of the University of Oxford, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), iv. 1. 697–730.

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and learn method there, and improve by his eVorts on what he has learned.’330 For the many more who stayed at home, more translations were becoming available. ‘What strides have been made . . . by the great intellect of Germany,’ one scholar wrote; ‘all our deeper books in grammar, history, science, and theology come from thence.’331 (In 1850, incidentally, Schleiermacher’s Kurz Darstellung des theologischen Studiums had been translated into English by the Congregationalist William Farrer.332) Furthermore, German scholars were no strangers to English academic turf. Among several examples, two notable ones include Friedrich Max Mu¨ller (more about him later) and Otto PXeiderer. German by birth and education, Mu¨ller made his career at Oxford championing the comparative study of world religions.333 PXeiderer spent time in both English and Scottish universities; in 1890 he published (in English) The Development of Theology since Kant and its Progress in Great Britain since 1825. GratiWed by what he perceived as the British appropriation of German Kritik throughout the century, PXeiderer ended the book with the grand assertion that ‘the days of a Newman and a Pusey are forever past for Oxford and for England’.334 In sum, the modernization and reform of English universities in the second half of the nineteenth century owes much to the German impetus and inXuence, directly in some cases, but more often indirectly, a persistent external goad, as it were, to pursue internal reforms. As in France, the nature of the reforms deWes simple summary and monocausal explanation, and in no way did they simply aim to reproduce the German system: criticism and attentiveness to indigenous traditions accompanied every new step. Nonetheless, a common denominator in such projects during this whole period was the catalysing eVect of German scholarship and university norms, particularly as championed (and, admittedly, often idealized or misunderstood) by those who themselves had studied or travelled in Germany. As George Haines has nicely summed up, ‘[T]he widely and continuously cited German example, the intensively fostered fear of German industrial competition, and the German experience of many of the leading teachers played important roles in providing an impulse [for university reform].’ Or, as Lord Acton laconically put it in 1886, ‘every branch of [our] knowledge has felt its [Germany’s] inXuence’.335 330 Mark Pattison et al. (eds.), Essays on the Endowment of Research (London, 1876), 259. 331 Quoted in Haines, Essays on German InXuence, 95. 332 Schleiermacher, Brief Outline of the Study of Theology, trans. William Farrer (London, 1850). 333 RGG iv. 1172. 334 PXeiderer, The Development of Theology since Kant and its Progress in Great Britain since 1825 (London, 1890), 401. 335 Lord Acton, ‘German Schools of History’, English Historical Review 1 (1886): 39. It is worth noting that this essay on German scholarship was the lead article in the initial volume of England’s Wrst major national journal of professional historiography.

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As one might surmise, the build-up to and outbreak of war with Germany in 1914 gave many British educators and scholars pause, prompting a critical reassessment of German inXuences. But in many cases, such reassessments only made clear, often worrisomely clear, the extent of the prior inXuence. In theology this was particularly true. ‘For well nigh a century’, the Unitarian minister Lawrence Pearsall Jacks wrote in 1915, Germany has been the source, or the chief source, of the movements and ‘tendencies’ which have kept the theological mind of the world in a state of perpetual unrest. There is no denying the immense contribution which German thinkers have made to theological science in all its departments. But these contributions have been so numerous, so disturbing, so various . . . that to follow them was to dance attendance on a feather tossed by the wind. I am not in the least concerned to underestimate the debts which so many of us owe to individual German thinkers; but I do not hesitate to say that the net result on British theology of the paramount German inXuence has been to produce a degree of confusion and unrest. . . . Nor can there be a doubt that our habit of leaning on the German prop, and supporting our arguments by German footnotes, has greatly restricted the range of our own originality. . . . And now, all of a sudden, that prop has been knocked away from us.336

The country destined to absorb the most extensive inXuence from German universities was neither Great Britain nor France, but the United States. Lacking their own long-standing university traditions, Americans Xocked to Germany in the mid- and late nineteenth century to complete their education and take in the latest developments and techniques in a wide variety of academic Welds.337 The list of distinguished Americans who spent time in German universities reads like a survey course in nineteenth-century American intellectual history: George Ticknor, Edward Everett, Joseph Green Cogswell, George Bancroft, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Noah Porter, Edward Robinson, Timothy Dwight, Daniel Coit Gilman, Andrew Dickson White, Henry Adams, Herbert Baxter Adams, Nicholas Murray Butler, Henry E. Dwight, and thousands more sought out and gained intellectual nourishment in German institutions. Many went on to become leaders in their Welds and sought to adapt what they had learned to American conditions. As President 336 Lawrence Pearsall Jacks, ‘A Theological Holiday—And After’, Hibbert Journal 14 (1915): 5. Jacks characterized the pre-1914 period as ‘the age of German footnotes’ in this article. Cf. Stuart Wallace, War and the Image of Germany: British Academics 1914–1918 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1988). 337 There had been limited American contact with German universities prior to the nineteenth century. Cotton Mather, for example, had corresponded with Francke at Halle, and the fame of this university was known to many Puritan leaders. Benjamin Franklin had visited the Royal Society of Science at Go¨ttingen in 1766 and became acquainted with the university there as well. A few students had also frequented Go¨ttingen in the late eighteenth century. See Daniel B. Shumway, ‘Go¨ttingen’s American Students’, German-American Review 3 (June 1937): 21 V.

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Frederick Barnard of Columbia University put it in 1886: ‘[I]n past years it has seemed to be an impression almost universally prevailing among the young men . . . with aspirations for making a career in a learned or scientiWc profession . . . that a residence of one or more years at a German university was indispensable to anything like signal success.’338 Similarly, George Marsden has noted that by the late nineteenth century ‘it would be rare to Wnd either a university leader or a major scholar who had not spent some years studying in Germany’.339 The Wrst American scholars of note to spend extensive time at German universities were the New Englanders George Ticknor and Edward Everett, who set sail together for Go¨ttingen on 16 April 1815. Ticknor, incidentally, was inspired to make the trip after reading de Stae¨l’s De l’Allemagne.340 The diaries, memoirs and correspondence of these men oVer a rich and revealing picture of early nineteenth-century German academic life from an American perspective.341 A letter of Ticknor’s to his friend Thomas JeVerson (soon to found the University of Virginia) from October of 1815 sheds particular light on Germany’s already vaunted academic freedom and its impact on theological study: Every day books appear . . . [on] religion which in the rest of Europe would be suppressed by the state. . . . They get perhaps a severe review or a severe answer, but there [sic] are weapons which both parties can use and unfairness is very uncommon. Indeed everything in Germany seems to me to be measured by the genius of acuteness or learning it discovers without reference to previous opinion or future consequences to an astonishing and sometimes alarming degree. . . . If truth is to be obtained by freedom of inquiry, as I doubt not it is, the German professors and literati are certainly in the high road.342

Following the path of Ticknor and Everett, George Bancroft, later to become the United States’ Wrst distinguished historian, began his studies at Go¨ttingen in 1818, supported by a scholarship from Harvard. At Wrst Bancroft intended to pursue theology, but he switched his focus to philology, history, and philosophy, and received his doctoral degree in 1820 from the philosophical faculty. Thereafter he studied for a semester in Berlin, which he 338 Quoted in Herbst, German Historical School in American Scholarship, 2. 339 George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 104. Cf. Laurence R. Veysey’s discussion of the ‘lure of the German university’ in The Emergence of the American University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 125–32. 340 William Long, Literary Pioneers: Early American Explorers of European Culture (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), 5. 341 See esp. The Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor (Boston, 1876). 342 Letter from Ticknor to JeVerson, 14 October 1815; quoted in Long, Literary Pioneers, 19–20.

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enjoyed better than Go¨ttingen. During his studies, Bancroft rubbed shoulders with some of Germany’s leading academic lights: Eichhorn, Planck, Sta¨udlin, Wolf, Schleiermacher, Savigny, Boeckh, and Hegel, among others. He also traveled to Weimar and met Goethe, as had his American predecessors. In contrast to Ticknor, who celebrated German theology, Bancroft evinced a more circumspect attitude. In a letter to President John T. Kirkland of Harvard, he expressed himself candidly on the matter: I add one word about German theology. I have nothing to do with it, except so far as it is merely critical. Of their inWdel systems I hear not a word; and I trust I have been too long under your eye . . . to be in danger of being led away from the religion of my Fathers. . . . I say this explicitly because before I left home I heard frequently expressed fears, lest I should join the German School.343

Bancroft also complained of a deWcit of religious sentiment in Go¨ttingen’s theological lecture halls. ‘I have never heard anything,’ he wrote, ‘like moral or religious feeling manifested in their theological lectures. . . . The bible is treated with very little respect, and the narratives are laughed at as an old wife’s tale, Wt to be believed in the nursery.’344 Bancroft grew to dislike other aspects of his surroundings at the Georgia Augusta. He deplored the ‘barbarian’ customs of the bearded, duelling, drinking students, whom he described as ‘more hairy than the wild father of the Ishmaelites’. The semester he spent in Berlin, therefore, proved to be a welcome change. In fact, he was overwhelmed by the Prussian capital, its university, and the professors he met there. ‘No Government,’ he wrote, ‘knows so well how to create Universities and high schools as the Prussians.’ ‘How glad I am that I left Go¨ttingen,’ he noted elsewhere, ‘to pass the winter in Berlin! What can be more gloriously interesting than intimate communion with the vast minds which are found here?’ Among Berlin’s ‘vast minds’, Schleiermacher appears to have appealed to him the most. ‘I honour Schleiermacher above all German scholars. He abounds in wit and is inimitable in satire; yet he has a perfectly good heart, is generous and obliging.’ Impressed by Schleiermacher’s ability to wed criticism and religious sentiment, Bancroft even considered, despite earlier reservations about theology, devoting his life to ‘raising among us [in America] a degraded and neglected branch of study, which in itself is so noble, and to aid in establishing a thorough school of Theological Critics’—something he never pursued further, devoting his subsequent career to history and politics instead.345 343 Long, Literary Pioneers, 115. 344 Ibid. 120–21 345 Quoted in Herbst, German Historical School in American Scholarship, 76.

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The pioneering studies of Ticknor, Everett, Bancroft, and others paved the way for what one scholar has called ‘the great migration of American students to German universities throughout the nineteenth century’.346 Not surprisingly, many students devoted their energies to theology. Throughout the Wrst two-thirds of the century, in fact, statistical evidence indicates that the theological faculty, next only to the philosophical faculty, witnessed the most frequent academic commitment by American students—leading over the other two professional faculties of law and medicine.347 One of these theological students, Edward Robinson (1794–1863), left behind a remarkable, and now largely overlooked, series of observations on ‘theological education in Germany’ in the journal Biblical Repository, which he founded in 1831.348 According to his biographers, this journal represented ‘the Wrst grand impulse given to the American evangelical theology by the evangelical theology of Germany’.349 Born in Connecticut in 1794, Robinson studied at Hamilton College in New York and later under Moses Stuart at Andover Seminary in Massachusetts, which had become a (mostly) conservative stronghold of orthodox Calvinism in contrast to more liberal tendencies at Harvard. Nonetheless, under Stuart’s leadership, Andover sought to remain in contact with contemporary European theological developments, and Stuart therefore felt it necessary ‘to master German critical studies and use them in the cause of orthodoxy’.350 It was probably Stuart who Wrst suggested that Robinson study in Germany.351 Thus, in 1826 at the age of 32 Robinson travelled to Germany ‘in quest of philological opportunities’, as his biographers put 346 Diehl, Americans and German Scholarship, 1. Another major factor contributing to this phenomenon was the interest in German studies among New England Transcendentalists and Unitarians. See Pochman, German Culture in America, 207 V. 347 While precise numbers are elusive, Diehl notes that between 1810 and 1870, 15.9% of all American students were enrolled in German theological faculties. For this period, it was the largest percentage enrolment of the three higher faculties. See the ‘statistical tables of American students in German universities’ in Diehl, Americans and German Scholarship, 155 V. 348 In 1843 Robinson founded another journal, Bibliotheca sacra. In 1851 the two journals merged, using the title of Bibliotheca sacra. 349 Henry B. Smith and Roswell D. Hitchcock, The Life, Writings, and Character of Edward Robinson (New York, 1863), 54–5. 350 Jerry Wayne Brown, The Rise of Biblical Criticism in America, 1800–1870 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1969), 97. Cf. Moses Stuart, ‘The Study of the German Language’, Christian Review 6 (1841): 457 V. However, Andover’s board of trustees worried that the study of German posed theological risks to the seminarians. In 1825, trustees appointed a commission to investigate the problem. The commission reported that ‘the unrestrained cultivation of German studies has evidently tended to chill the ardor of piety, to impair belief in the fundamentals of revealed religion, and even to induce, for the time, an approach to universal skepticism’. Quoted in Daniel D. Williams, The Andover Liberals; A Study in American Theology (New York: King’s Crown, 1941), 17. 351 Brown, The Rise of Biblical Criticism in America, 112.

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it.352 He spent the lion’s share of his time in Berlin, Go¨ttingen, and Halle. In 1828 he married a German woman, Therese Albertine Luise von Jakob, the daughter of Heinrich von Jakob, professor of philosophy and political studies at Halle. This marriage greatly facilitated his entry into the world of German scholarship, and his wife would later help translate some of his own works into German. Returning with his new bride to America in 1830, Robinson taught and served as the librarian at Andover; later he accepted a post at the Union Theological Seminary in New York, which had been founded in 1836.353 For his extensive scholarship, heavily indebted to German models, one scholar has called him the most accomplished and only internationally renowned American biblical scholar before the Civil War.354 Drawing from time spent in German universities, the Wrst four volumes of his Biblical Repository contained articles by Robinson on German theological education and university life. After introducing the German university system as a whole in the Wrst article, Robinson focused attention in the second on ‘the course of studies at German universities’ for theology students and in the third on theological examinations and the role of the state vis-a`-vis theological faculties. In the fourth article he provided a translation of a student handbook on ‘Directions for Theological Students Entering the University of Halle’.355 A theological conservative, Robinson exhibited a fairly typical wariness of the critical tendencies of German theology, often faulting university theologians for prioritizing scientiWc exertion over personal piety. ‘The students of theology’, he wrote, ‘indeed have theological instruction, but it’s mostly of the scientiWc kind; and although a pious professor sometimes takes occasion to make an appeal to the hearts and consciences of his pupils, yet this is not customary and would generally be regarded as travelling out of the way.’356 352 Smith and Hitchcock, The Life, Writings, and Character of Edward Robinson, 48. 353 At Union ‘Robinson [remained] conversant with the growing technical specialization of the disciplines of theology as centered in German universities. . . . His work was highly inXuential in bringing the new seminary into the forefront of developments in theological education.’ See Robert T. Handy, A History of Union Theological Seminary in New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 14. 354 See Brown, The Rise of Biblical Criticism in America, 124. For a brief overview of Robinson’s life, see Dumas Malone (ed.), Dictionary of American Biography (New York, 1935), xvi. 39–40. Robinson’s principal international renown came to be associated with his activities as a historical geographer of biblical sites in Palestine. Of crucial signiWcance was his Biblical Researches in Palestine, published simultaneously in Boston, London, and Halle in 1841. See Albrecht Alt, ‘Edward Robinson and the Historical Geography of Palestine’, The Journal of Biblical Literature 58 (1939): 373–7. 355 Each article was entitled ‘Theological Education in Germany’. The four-part series began in January 1831 and concluded in October 1831. My citations will simply refer to Robinson, ‘Theological Education’ followed by the individual article number. 356 Robinson, ‘Theological Education’, III. 426.

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‘[T]he students are never questioned in regard to their motives in thus devoting themselves to the sacred oYce,’ he complained further, ‘nor in any shape examined as to their personal piety, nor in respect to their belief in revelation, or even in the existence in God.’ Consequently, one found in German theological faculties, both among students and professors, individuals who appeared ‘destitute of any personal religion’.357 Robinson explained this situation as resulting from the over-application of principles derived from the Reformation. Like most educated Protestants, he believed the Reformation represented the historical triumph of reason, liberal inquiry, and freedom of thought over religious authoritarianism and superstition; yet as a theologian sympathetic to the cause of conservative Protestant orthodoxy, he still felt that critical reason must, Wnally, submit to divine revelation. German academic theology, however, had often allowed reason to ride roughshod over revelation. ‘The light of the Reformation has not yet departed from Germany,’ as he put it, ‘although its glory has been obscured in these latter days by urging to an extreme the fundamental principles on which it proceeded. The Reformers, with all their zeal for liberty of thinking and freedom of investigation, never had a thought of subjecting the form and matter of revelation to the decisions of human reason.’ This tendency to privilege reason over revelation, in Robinson’s view, had become quite customary in many German universities and had given rise to ‘rationalism’, which he regarded as a ‘poison [that] has spread through the body of the church itself ’.358 Nonetheless, Robinson remained persuaded of the critical superiority of German theological scholarship and insisted that any future theology must not ignore its formidable achievements. What he especially liked was the fact that the German system seemed to promote intellectual meritocracy, which led to a progressive, dynamic understanding of theological scholarship. Every division of theology, he noted, could lay claim to have experienced ‘progress’, an assumption he regarded as prevalent ‘throughout the German theological world’: It is taken for granted that there is a constant progress in every science; and that a learned man of the present day stands on higher ground than one of former days, possessing as he does all the results of the labours and investigations of those who have preceded him, as well as those his own industry and sagacity may have enabled him to supply. His works are therefore supposed to be, prima facie, superior to former works on the same subjects.359

357 Robinson, ‘Theological Education’, II. 211. 358 Ibid. I. 2–3. 359 Ibid. III. 430.

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Robinson felt it incumbent upon American scholars, therefore, to learn the German language and culture, because of Germany’s ‘eminent scholars’ and ‘the treasures of criticism which that language contains’.360 As an enthusiastic supporter of American voluntarism in religious matters, Robinson was troubled by Germany’s Erastian church-state arrangements, which inXuenced the operations of universities and theological faculties. Robinson blamed ‘impiety’ at the universities, therefore, on the dulling of religious passion brought about by the government’s tight grip over churches and universities. The government mixes itself in everything, prescribes everything, will know everything, and prohibits everything, which does not strictly coincide with its own interests and will. In this system of things, the universities act a conspicuous and necessary part. They have been established, and are supported by the governments . . . to train up and qualify young men for the oYces of church and state,—those oYces which the governments alone can give, and which, as a universal rule, they give only to such as have received a university education. . . . The universities are interwoven with the very system of government . . . [and] remain under its immediate control.361

What was true of universities, according to Robinson, also applied to churches: ‘the church [in Germany] is but the slave of the civil power, and must do all its bidding. No man can devote himself to the service of the divine Master, and proclaim salvation to the perishing souls of his fellow man, but in the way which the government directs.’362 Robinson repeatedly contrasted this to the American principle of religious voluntarism, which he greatly preferred: ‘Let then American Christianity rejoice, that the churches are here thrown back upon their primitive foundation, the hearts and aVections of the followers of Christ; that they neither receive nor claim support from the civil power.’ In America, he concluded (presumably in contrast to Germany), ‘to be regarded as a theologian’ one must also ‘be regarded as a sincere Christian.’363 A critic of state meddling in educational and religious aVairs, Robinson, paradoxically, also attributed a measure of the success of German universities to the government. In particular, the role of the state in professorial appointments, preferment, and civil service examinations, Robinson opined, often provided incentives for diligence among students and scholars alike. But the chief secret lies here . . . in the direct power of the government over all places of honour and proWt; in the general requisition of a university education as a sine qua 360 361 362 363

Smith and Hitchcock, The Life, Writings, and Character of Edward Robinson, 49–51. Robinson, ‘Theological Education’, I. 43. Ibid. 42. Ibid. II. 212, 226.

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non preparation for every public station and lastly and principally in the fact that no one is . . . admitted into any profession, nor to hold any oYce whatever, without being Wrst subjected to two, and sometimes three, severe examinations. Here is the strong hold of the government upon the students, and the main secret of the good behavior and diligence of the latter. . . . It is here that the governments press with their whole weight upon the students, and compels a diligence which can know neither remission nor rest, until its great object be accomplished.364

At the heart of the well-ordered, state-dominated university system—which Robinson likened at one point to a steam engine—was its ability to foster and recognize Wrst-order intellectual distinction; this element outshone all others, to both good and ill eVect. On the one hand, it promoted intellectual meritocracy, of which Robinson approved. But, again, it also often led theological students and scholars to discount the importance of personal piety and ecclesiastical interests in the pursuit of academic plaudits: ‘[T]he desire of distinction, which the system doubtless tends to foster, has sometimes taken a wrong direction, and sought its object in novelty and strangeness, rather than in the power of tracing and developing the character and relations of truths already known.’365 At its worst, this impulse gave birth to a restless spirit of novelty: ‘The rage seems to be for new men and new books; and the old are laid aside as of less value or as obsolete. It is at Wrst very striking to a foreigner, to see how few books of any antiquity are referred to in the course of a theological education.’366 But Robinson was, ultimately, quite captivated by the universities and theological faculties of Germany, viewing them as seats of ‘a spirit of liberal inquiry and deep-seated investigation’—this despite the fact that he also regarded them as ‘creatures of the government’. He encouraged his American readership to ‘pray without ceasing’ that in these formidable institutions ‘pure and undeWled religion may again prevail and abound’ so that they may ‘become once more, what they once have been, a rich blessing to the church and the world’.367 In sum, Robinson represents a curious case of old Puritan piety convinced of the merit of German Wissenschaft; and this makes him, from a historian’s standpoint, a interesting bird indeed. Today he is, sadly, almost completely forgotten. If Robinson was among the Wrst major New World apostles of German theological learning in America, Philip SchaV (1819–93) represents his Old World counterpart. Twenty-Wve years Robinson’s junior but like-minded in many respects, SchaV cuts a remarkable and complex Wgure in nineteenthcentury American and European intellectual history. A native of rural 364 Robinson, ‘Theological Education’, 45. 367 Ibid. I. 43.

365 Ibid. 12.

366 Ibid. III. 428–9.

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Switzerland and of humble origins, SchaV studied theology in the 1830s and 1840s at Tu¨bingen, Halle, and Berlin, where he came under the inXuence of a number of Germany’s leading scholars, including Baur, Neander, Hengstenberg, Tholuck, and Twesten, among others.368 He was particularly inXuenced by Neander, Berlin’s highly decorated church historian, whom SchaV once, hyperbolically, called ‘the most original phenomenon in the literary world of the nineteenth century’.369 Anticipating a call to a German or Swiss university, SchaV received an unexpected invitation in 1843 from the Pennsylvania Synod of the German Reformed Church in America370 to teach at its newly established seminary in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania371 and bring with him the latest fruits of German science and culture. After initial hesitation, SchaV Wnally accepted, encouraged to do so by Berlin’s theological faculty and even by oYcials in Prussia’s Ministry of Culture. In 1844, a self-proclaimed ‘missionary of Wissenchaft’,372 SchaV sailed to America, where, with unXagging industry, he would teach, write, and extol an irenic but traditional Protestant orthodoxy373 for fortynine years, Wrst at Mercersburg Seminary and after 1870 at Union Theological Seminary in New York.374 During this time, he travelled back to Europe no less than sixteen times, to pursue research and renew old friendships. Adolf von Harnack once compared him to St Jerome, ‘the theological mediator between East and West’.375 368 On SchaV’s university experiences in Germany, see the biography by his son, David S. SchaV, The Life of Philip SchaV (New York, 1897), 17–37, and also a recent work by Klaus Penzel, The German Education of Scholar Philip SchaV: The Formative Years, 1819–1844 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2004). 369 Philip SchaV, Germany; its Universities, Theology, and Religion (Philadelphia, 1857), 270. 370 On the early history of the German Reformed Church in America, see Syndey E. Ahlstrom, Religious History of the American People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 245–50. 371 It was located in the isolated hills of south-western Pennsylvania. 372 Noted in Klaus Penzel (ed.), Philip SchaV: Historians and Ambassador of the Universal Church: Selected Writings (Mercer, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1991), p. xxxv. 373 With his colleague, John Williams Nevin (1803–86), SchaV is regarded as the founder of the so-called ‘Mercersburg Theology’, a vigorous if short-lived theological movement in the nineteenth century, which in the name of tradition, ecclesial authority, and church unity sought to combat ‘the highly individualistic and subjectivist tradition of American evangelicalism’. See Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, i. 227. Cf. James C. Nichols, Romanticism in American Theology: Nevin and SchaV at Mercersburg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961). The founding text of this movement was SchaV’s The Principle of Protestantism as Related to the Present State of the Church (Chambersburg, Pa., 1845). 374 His oYcial title at Union was ‘Professor of Theological Encyclopedia and Christian Symbolism’. On his time at Union, see Handy, A History of Union Theological Seminary in New York, 35, 38, 47–51, passim. 375 See the ‘Congratulatory Address from the Theological Faculty of the University of Berlin’, in Penzel (ed.), Philip SchaV, 343 V. Penned by Harnack, this document was sent to SchaV, at the end of his career, on the occasion of the Wftieth anniversary of his reception of the venia legendi from the University of Berlin.

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What makes SchaV remarkable with respect to German university life was the fact that he represents both an insider and an outsider in relation to it. A student and Privatdozent in German theological faculties for over a decade in the 1830s and 1840s, he, not surprisingly, celebrated the rigours and accomplishments of German theological scholarship. However, as a native of Switzerland and, after 1844, an adopted citizen of the United States, he also possessed a critical distance from many norms characteristic of the German professoriate. Frequently, SchaV referred to himself as ‘Swiss by birth, German by education, and American by choice’.376 In his ‘Autobiographical Reminiscences’ SchaV described himself as having been ‘Americanized in feeling and sympathy’;377 he heartily embraced American political liberty and religious voluntarism and contrasted these features of the New World with the ‘evils’ of Old-World ‘state-churchism’. ‘It . . . cannot be denied’, he wrote in a short work on America, that the American system of general political freedom and equality . . . with its kindred doctrine of the rights, and duties of self-government and active co-operation of the people in all the aVairs of the commonwealth, is, in some sense, a transferring to the civil sphere the idea of the universal priesthood of Christians, which was Wrst clearly and emphatically brought forward by the Reformers.378

Precisely this (‘Swiss-American’) political sensibility, married to his thorough knowledge of German academic culture, informed his 1857 book, Germany; its Universities, Theology, and Religion. In the preface, he called the book an attempt to see ‘the old world from the standpoint of the new’ and thereby bring ‘the German and American mind into closer union’. What is more, he wanted the book to serve as ‘[a] guide . . . through the luxuriant forest of Teutonic systems and opinions’. The preface left no doubt as to his high esteem of German theology: The universities of Germany are regarded by competent judges as the Wrst among the learned institutions of the world. . . . The German theology of the last thirty or forty years, whatever its errors and defects, its extravagance and follies, which we would be among the last to deny, or to defend, is, upon the whole, the most learned, original, fertile, and progressive theology of the age, and no active branch of Protestantism can keep entirely aloof from its contact without injuring its own interests.379

376 David SchaV, The Life of Philip SchaV, 1. 377 Quoted in Gary K. Pranger, Philip SchaV (1819–1893): Portrait of an Immigrant Theologian (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 72. 378 Philip SchaV, America: A Sketch of its Political, Social, and Religious Character, ed. Perry Miller (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), 86 f. 379 SchaV, Germany; its Universities, Theology, and Religion, 8–10.

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The book itself breaks into three parts. In the Wrst, SchaV treated the universities, sketching both their history and current organization. He then oVered proWles of individual universities, beginning, not surprisingly, with Berlin, which he praised as occupying ‘the Wrst rank’ of all European universities.380 In addition, he discussed Halle, Bonn, Go¨ttingen, Leipzig, Jena, Heidelberg, and Tu¨bingen—presumably his list of Germany’s leading universities. Together, these institutions represented ‘the pride and glory of Germany’. They exert more inXuence there than similar institutions in any other country. They are the centers of the higher intellectual and literary life of the nation and the laboratories of new systems of thought and theories of action. . . . They receive the best minds from the lowest as well as the highest ranks, to mold them for the learned professions and Wt them for public usefulness. From them emanate principally the ideas and maxims which rule the land, either in the service of the existing order of things, or in the interests of progress. It is characteristic that the Reformation in Germany proceeded, not from princes and bishops, as in England, but from theological professors. The great philosophical and theological revolution [i.e. the Enlightenment] of the last century, and the counterrevolution of the present century [i.e. German Idealism], have likewise proceeded mainly from the studies and lecture rooms of academic teachers.381

The second part of the book concentrates on German theology and religion. Here SchaV discussed a variety of issues, including church–state relations, the Protestant Church Union of 1817, church parties, the Tu¨bingen School, the inXuence of Friedrich Schleiermacher, and ‘the latest form of inWdelity’, i.e. the Left Hegelianism of D. F. Strauss, Bruno Bauer, and Ludwig Feuerbach, that had recently roiled the theological world. In the book’s Wnal section, SchaV presented ‘sketches of German divines’, restricting his discussion to distinguished contemporary pastors and theology professors, many of whom SchaV knew personally.382 Throughout the book, SchaV generously dispensed praise. However, like Robinson, SchaV questioned the extensive power of the state over educational and religious matters, contrasting what he called ‘the cold step-motherly arm of [the] nominally Christian state’,383 which he rejected in Germany, to the ‘voluntary principle’ of American religious life, which he had adopted as his own. ‘The state-church system [in Germany]’, he wrote, ‘tends to secularize the church, to convert it into a sort of higher police, an institution of the government for the intellectual and moral training of its subjects, and to Wll the ranks of the clergy with unconverted men, who seek the holy ministry simply from secular motives, like any other state oYce.’384 This had especially 380 Ibid. 63. 381 Ibid. 27–28. 384 Ibid. 111–112.

382 Ibid. 261 V.

383 Ibid. 70.

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problematic consequences, he held, for university theology. By contrast, America presented a better way. Echoing sentiments in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, SchaV opined, ‘The glory of America is free Christianity, independent of the secular government, and supported by voluntary contributions from free people. This is one of the greatest facts in modern history . . . [I]t marks gigantic progress.’385 Admittedly, like other Europeans, SchaV was appalled by the ‘sectarianism’ unleashed by America’s constitutional liberties. Still, on balance, he regarded this as a lesser evil than ‘state-churchism’, the peculiar ‘mis-alliance’ of the Old World.386 A defender of American religious and political liberties, SchaV also defended German academic freedom. Similar to Robinson, SchaV recognized that the teaching and learning freedom (Lehr- and Lernfreiheit) of German universities, not unlike American freedoms in the political sphere, often fostered a spirit of experimentation and novelty. In SchaV’s view, this sometimes had the unfortunate result of separating the goals of academic theology from those of the church. ‘[T]he German universities,’ he wrote, ‘aVord an unbounded freedom of thought and doctrine to the professors and students. With a rare amount of invaluable learning and useful theories, they have brought forth also many fantastic, absurd, and revolutionary views and systems. They have been the hot-houses of rationalism, skepticism, pantheism, and all sorts of dangerous novelties.’387 While SchaV lamented these tendencies, he felt the solution did not lie in curtailing academic freedom in theological faculties, as some critics had recommended, for this would only turn them into ‘mere seminaries’ and discourage liberal education. ‘[T]he liberty of teaching,’ he made clear, ‘is one of the chief excellences of the German universities, and accounts for their extraordinary literary and scientiWc fertility. It must be borne in mind that the theological faculties of that country have after all a more comprehensive vocation than a . . . seminary for the training of preachers. They ought to cultivate . . . and promote the sacred sciences in the most thorough and liberal manner.’388 To be sure, much more could be said about SchaV and this important book, but on the whole, qualiWcations and caveats notwithstanding, SchaV had high praise for German universities—‘the pride and glory of Germany’—and he recommended that their example be followed in America—‘the land of the future’—even if certain alterations should be made to accommodate ‘the 385 Ibid. 105. For a fuller account of SchaV’s appraisal of religious life in the Untied States, see Stephen R. Graham, Cosmos in the Chaos: Philip SchaV’s Interpretation of Nineteenth-Century American Religion (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995). 386 SchaV, Germany; its Universities, Theology, and Religion, 105 V. 387 Ibid. 48. 388 Ibid. 57 f.

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peculiar genius of our [American] people’.389 Aspiring American theologians, it followed, had no choice in SchaV ’s view but to immerse themselves in the riches of German theological scholarship. They could not, as some did, simply rail against German ‘inWdelity’ and ‘rationalism’, and stand aloof from German science, for the battle for orthodoxy, according to SchaV, depended on the orthodox appropriating Wissenschaft for their own purposes: ‘After gunpowder [i.e. Wissenschaft] had been invented,’ he reasoned, ‘victory could no longer be obtained with bow and arrow.’ The astute theologian should thus master German theology and apply its extensive learning to bolstering orthodoxy. Dabbling in German theology was not enough: ‘He who makes a superWcial acquaintance with German theology . . . runs the great risk of doing injury to his simple, child-like faith; but he who contends with it manfully, and passes through the whole intricate and tedious process of investigating the deepest grounds of our most holy faith, will come out more Wrmly grounded in orthodoxy than before.’390 SchaV died in 1893. In his later years he witnessed an even vaster student and scholarly migration to German universities and, concomintantly, greater German inXuence on American higher education and seminary life. No doubt a portion of this was encouraged by SchaV himself. ReXecting the trends of the times, in 1877 Union Theological Seminary, with SchaV ’s prodding, inaugurated ‘Prize Fellowships’ to send its ‘best graduates, for two years, to German Universities, and particularly Berlin, to Wnish their studies’.391 SigniWcance should also be accorded to the publication of SchaV ’s Theological Propaedeutic, among the few German-style ‘theological encyclopedias’ produced in the United States, and one that became a staple in many centres of theological learning.392 Of equal importance was his pioneering role in producing the SchaV-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, a multivolume alphabetic encyclopedia modelled on the popular Realencyklopa¨die fu¨r protestantische Theologie und Kirche (22 vols., 1868), edited by the German scholars Johann Jakob Herzog and Albert Hauck.393 Finally, SchaV played a crucial role in shaping American biblical scholarship and church history by editing and translating the massive biblical commentary of J. P. 389 Ibid. 27, 59. 390 Philip SchaV, ‘German Literature in America’, Bibliotheca sacra 4 (1847): 512–13. 391 Penzel (ed.), SchaV, 348. 392 Philip SchaV, Theological Propaedeutic: A General Introduction to the Study of Theology Exegetical, Historical, Systematic, and Practical, including Encyclopedia, Methodology and Bibliography (New York, 1894). 393 The original SchaV-Herzog Encyclopedia appeared between 1889 and 1891. After SchaV’s death, a greatly expanded and revised version—The New SchaV-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge (1909)—appeared, ed. Samuel Macauley Jackson. For a fuller account, see vol. i. of the ‘new’ edn., pp. ix–xii.

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Lange,394 by helping found the Society for Biblical Literature and Exegesis (1880) and by launching the American Society of Church History (1888). In the Wnal analysis though, SchaV is perhaps more historically noteworthy, at least in the context of this study, as a symptom of more pervasive academic and theological trends taking place in his lifetime. His career in the United States, for example, corresponded almost exactly with that of the meteoric rise of the University of Michigan, which under the chancellorship of Henry P. Tappan (1805–81), ‘the John the Baptist of the German University Ideal’, deliberately sought to emulate aspects of German universities. In his widely regarded University Education (1851), Tappan in fact had asserted that ‘the Universities of Protestant Germany stand forth as model institutions, if there are to be found; and the whole [German] system of education . . . exhibits an intellectual progress which commands our admiration’.395 In the following decades, the epochal foundings of Cornell University (1868) and Johns Hopkins (1876) took place; many of these institutions’ original professors had studied in Germany and often sought to realize German scholarly ideals on American soil. Astoundingly, of the Wfty-three professors and lecturers on Johns Hopkins roster in 1884, nearly all had studied at German universities, and thirteen had been awarded there the doctoral degree. The doctoral degree itself, a German import, rose dramatically in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. Before 1860 not a single Ph.D. had been oVered by an American institution; by the time of Philip SchaV’s death in 1894, the number had crested 3,000.396 Indeed, by the late nineteenth century SchaV’s high regard of German Wissenschaft was no solitary phenomenon: the multitude of American students and scholars returning from Germany magniWed the importance of German higher learning, both in its sacred and secular aspects. Arguably, the apotheosis of these trends in theological education came in a famous manifesto, ‘Shall the Theological Curriculum be ModiWed, and How?’, published in 1899 by the Hebrew scholar and president of the newly founded University of Chicago (1890), William Rainey Harper (1856–1906).397 While more Baptist churchman and zealous democrat than Germanophile, Harper nonetheless 394 Philip SchaV (ed.), A Commentary on the Holy Scriptures by John Peter Lange, 25 vols. (New York, 1864–80). 395 Henry P. Tappan, University Education (New York, 1851), 39. On Tappan, see Marsden, The Soul of the American University, 103–10. 396 Richard Hofstadter and Walter P. Metzger, The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), 377 V. Cf. Hugh Hawkings, Pioneer: A History of the Johns Hopkins University, 1874–1899 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1960), 31–2, 39–40, 59–60, passim. 397 For Harper’s activity in founding the University of Chicago, see Marsden, The Soul of the American University, 232–48.

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gave expression to the increasingly German-inXuenced academic milieu when he contended that theological study in the United States henceforth must be scholarly and professional ‘to meet the requirement of the modern times’. To bring the student ‘into touch with the modern spirit of science’, he opined, theological learning could no longer be conWned to denominations and seminaries, the American norm, but must be ‘organized in connection with a university’.398 While Harper’s manifesto and its direct subject, the new Divinity School at the University of Chicago, by no means instantly revolutionized American theological learning, they were powerful symbols of changes afoot and harbingers of ones to come. These changes, notes David H. Kelsey, were substantively and symbolically ‘wissenschaftlich’ and distantly ‘rooted in Schleiermacher’s rationale for a school of theology in the University of Berlin.’399 To be sure, throughout the late nineteenth century American populist and anti-intellectual currents sometimes fomented criticism of scholarly, scientiWc theology—criticism that often emanated from denominational seminaries, the founding of which continued apace during this period.400 For later commentators, therefore, the impact of German theology in America did not appear as a harmonious development, but rather as a violent clash of institutional and religious cultures. In his The American and German University (1928), for example, Charles Thwing noted that the German faculty of theology . . . was and is primarily a condition and force of scholarship. The Wrst relationship, therefore, of the German university to the American theological school should be interpreted by a word hardly less severe than collision. For German theological scholarship was broad; American denominational. . . . German theological education was independent, free both to learn and to teach, yet insisting upon methods of thinking and of research Wtted to speciWc Welds; American theological education could not avoid the charge of narrowness.401

398 W. R. Harper, ‘Shall the Theological Curriculum be ModiWed, and How?’ American Journal of Theology 3 (1899): 45–66. On the pivotal importance of this document in the development of American theological education, see David H. Kelsey, Between Athens and Berlin: The Theological Education Debate (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 51 f. 399 Kelsey makes this comment, discussing two early twentieth-century works that developed Harper’s ideas on theological education: Robert L. Kelly, Theological Education in America (New York, 1924), and Willam Adams Brown and Mark A. May, The Education of American Ministers, 4 vols. (New York, 1934). See Kelsey, Between Athens and Berlin, 51–5. On Harper’s importance for shaping theological education in the United States, see Conrad Cherry, Hurrying toward Zion: Universities, Divinity Schools, and American Protestantism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 1–13, passim. 400 On American populist opposition to scholarly theology, see Richard Hofstadter, AntiIntellectualism in American Life (New York: Knopf, 1963). 401 Charles F. Thwing, The American and German University (New York, 1928), 189.

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Nevertheless, Thwing, a strong supporter German scholarship, was pleased by the extent of the foreign inXuence, noting in particular the debt American theology owed to students who went to Germany and returned to occupy posts in seminaries, colleges, and universities in the United States. ‘Scores upon scores of American students have studied theology and ecclesiastical history under the [German] theological faculty. . . . [E]ach of them has gained a knowledge, and received vast enlargement in the power of thinking on deep and high themes.’402 Nonetheless, as in Germany itself, nineteenth-century changes in American theological learning were regularly overshadowed by the explosive rise of the natural sciences, the equally impressive growth of ‘the humanities’, and the expansion of the university system itself, particularly after the landmark Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862, which paved the way for the establishment of numerous public universities with practically oriented curricula. Yet these factors notwithstanding, American theological education, like university education itself, underwent a sea change in the late nineteenth century under, because of, and often in fruitful conXict with the persistent inXuence of German institutional and scholarly norms. Granted, one should not confuse German inXuence with the replication of German models; for, as American historians have judiciously pointed out, German ideas and practices were habitually modiWed to suit the distinctly American conditions of popular democracy, religious voluntarism, and capitalistic individualism. Granted too, Americans sometimes misunderstood and/or inordinately idealized German scholarship. But these caveats do little to alter the basic fact that the decisive foreign inXuence on American elite theology and higher education in the half century before the watershed of 1914 Wnds its origin in the land Joseph Green Cogswell once hailed as ‘the holy land of the scholar’.403

6 . ‘ T H E C R I S I S O F T H E T H E O LO G I C A L FAC U LT Y ’ : LAGARDE, OV ERBECK, AND HARNACK While German academic theology was gaining renown abroad in the late nineteenth century, it began to Wnd itself in a predicament at home—a ‘crisis of the theological faculty’ as some expressed it.404 The shape of the predicament 402 Ibid. 201–2. Thwing discusses numerous American students who either studied in Germany or were deeply inXuenced by German theology. See pp. 184–207. 403 Noted in Joseph A. McCaughey, ‘The Transformation of American Academic Life: Harvard University, 1821–1892’, Perspectives in American History 8 (1974): 264. 404 See Haenssler, Die Krisis der theologischen Fakulta¨ten.

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deWes easy summary, for it had many sources, many ramiWcations, and appeared bound up, in the eyes of contemporaries, with the seemingly inexorable march of modernity itself. At one level though, it was epistemological in nature, owing its existence to the rise of historicism in the nineteenth century. In this sense, theology, and indeed Christianity itself, faced an unprecedented challenge from the relativizing consequences of historical ways of thinking. The very intellectual forces that had once supported theology’s claim to be a critical, scientiWc enterprise, in other words, now turned out to threaten theology with wholesale delegitimation, dissolving all religious verities, so some charged, into mere time-bound, human-constructed phenomena unworthy of the assent of faith. Such was the general shape of the intellectual dilemma that gave birth, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to numerous treatises on ‘the crisis of historicism’ or ‘the problem of historical knowledge’, culminating in Ernst Troeltsch’s classic confrontation with the issue in his Der Historismus und seine Probleme (1922).405 This epistemological crisis prompted an institutional dilemma, which might be understood as the re-emergence of the critique of the theological faculty levelled by Fichte at the time of the founding of the University of Berlin. Fichte, it will be remembered, argued that theology, if it desired a future in a modern university, must assume ‘a completely diVerent form’ (eine ganz andere Gestalt) compatible with scientiWc modes of inquiry, particularly historical and philological criticism.406 To be sure, theology certainly had sought the mantle of science in the nineteenth century, even if it never, as Fichte also advocated, severed its connections with biblical revelation and ecclesiastical bodies. Yet these connections, late nineteenth-century critics were quick to charge, denied theology the authenticating stamp of true science and hence should deny it university citizenship as well. Two additional factors exacerbated the dilemma. The Wrst was the emergence shortly after mid-century, at Wrst largely outside Germany, of a new academic discipline, alternatively designated as ‘the science of religion’ (Religionswissenschaft), ‘the history of religion’ (Religionsgeschichte) or ‘comparative religious history’ (vergleichende Religionsgeschichte). Those championing this discipline implicitly criticized the status quo of German theological faculties. Since theology had increasingly turned from dogmatic and apologetic considerations to more demonstrably scientiWc historical and philological modes of inquiry, why did faculties still restrict their focus exclusively to Christianity and not broaden their scope to investigate other world religions? (Various world religions after all were becoming better 405 Iggers, The German Conception of History, 124 V., 177–95. 406 Fichte, ‘Deduzierter Plan’, in Anrich, Die Idee der deutschen Universita¨t, 160 V.

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known through European colonialism and missionary activity abroad.) Implied by this question was the yet more powerful critique that theology, its own rhetoric notwithstanding, could never function as a genuine science so long as it kept a traditional tie to ecclesiastical Christianity; the logic of science demanded a critical historical investigation of religion in general shorn of all residual attachments to any particular religion and its supporting institutions. The second factor giving Fichte’s arguments new saliency was political and legal in nature. It found expression especially among social democratic and socialist critics, who argued, on the basis of the liberal doctrine of separation of church and state, that an exclusively Christian theology with ecclesiastical ties, no matter how tenuous, did not belong in a modern, publicly funded scientiWc institution. Like Fichte, these critics thought theological training (if it should exist at all) must be relocated to ecclesiastical seminaries and funded by private sources, whereas the universities should become the seats of the neutral, critical investigation of religion. Not surprisingly, under the political conditions of the early Second Empire with its anti-socialist laws, such criticisms did not gain much ground. However, the lifting of the anti-socialist laws by Wilhelm II, the subsequent rise of Social Democracy, and then the collapse of the Empire in 1918 gave critics an unprecedented, if ultimately unsuccessful, opportunity to realize their goals. After sketching in greater detail the emergence of the factors precipitating theology’s late nineteenth-century predicament, I examine in what follows how several theologians understood and experienced it. Two of these Wgures, though, might in fact be considered contributors to the predicament: Paul de Lagarde (1827–91) of Go¨ttingen and Franz Overbeck (1837–1905) of Basle. Although both trained in theology, they oVered trenchant criticisms of the university theology of their day, contending that in the light of modern circumstances few honest options presented themselves but for theology to mutate into a general science of religion, cutting all former ties to dogmatic Christianity.407 Overbeck even argued that the logic of ‘modern theology’ itself was to blame for this state of aVairs; its headlong pursuit of scientiWc credibility and accommodation to modernity had in eVect already rendered theology no longer ‘Christian’ in any meaningful sense. In sharp contrast to Lagarde and Overbeck stands their younger contemporary Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930), whom we have already encountered on a number of occasions. The indisputable heir at Berlin of Schleiermacher’s liberal theological agenda, Harnack was not only a commanding theological mind, but arguably the most prominent academic personality in Wilhelmine Germany. A former pupil of Albrecht Ritschl, Harnack served as professor at 407 Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science, 256, 259.

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the University of Berlin, Director of the Royal Library, Secretary for the Prussian Academy of Science, and cofounder and president of the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Society, the forerunner of the present-day Max Planck institutes.408 While principally a scholar of the early church, Harnack wrote and spoke on a wide range of issues, and he rarely kept aloof from important public debates. In the late Wilhelmine and Weimar periods, he defended both the project of liberal theology and the university status of theological faculties against their many detractors, whether conservative churchmen sceptical of science, advocates of the science of religion sceptical of theology, or social democrats sceptical of theology’s university status. Paradoxically, Harnack’s positions proved both timely and untimely. Against those (for whatever reason) in favour of eliminating theological faculties, he oVered persuasive countervailing arguments. Yet the nineteenth-century intellectual assumptions on which his arguments drew their strength were coming undone amid the post-war cultural turmoil, and they were pointedly contested by the young upstart, Karl Barth, and the theological challenge he and his associates mounted in the 1920s.409 Although criticisms of theology in the name of science, as we have seen, certainly predate the second half of the nineteenth century, it was only at this time, roughly in the 1860s and 1870s, that a coherent alternative Weld of inquiry— ‘the science of religion’—came into its own. While not all practitioners of the new science sought to displace theology, its very existence posed new challenges. Despite their wissenschaftlich aspirations, few theologians, in Germany or elsewhere, had questioned the superlative status of Christianity among world religions or sought to broaden their scope of inquiry to include non-Christian religions. The ‘science of religion’ made such questioning and broadening not only possible, but the fundamental assumption of a ‘new science’. Prior to the 1860s, numerous factors contributed to the feasibility and growth of this Weld. Most fundamentally perhaps, data and artefacts collected by Western colonialists, missionaries, and explorers had made available in Europe a hitherto unknown wealth of ethnological information on ‘primitive’, non-Western cultures, languages, and religions. Of early signiWcance, in 1822, Jean-Franc¸ois Champollion famously deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs and shortly thereafter published his famous Panthe´on e´gyptien. At roughly the same time, excavations in Mesopotamia unearthed thousands of cuneiform documents in the great Babylonian and Assyrian palaces and libraries, while 408 Lothar Burckhardt, ‘Adolf von Harnack’, in Treue et al., Wissenschaftspolitik in Berlin, 215– 33. On Harnack’s career generally, see Zahn-Harnack, Adolf von Harnack. 409 Douglas J. Cremer, ‘Protestant Theology in Early Weimar Germany: Barth, Tillich, and Bultmann’, JHI 56 (April 1995): 289–96.

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the discovery of important Eastern texts in Avestan, Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese, Tibetan, and Mongolian allowed European scholars to study and translate them for the Wrst time.410 Often underlying these scholarly eVorts was the Christian impulse to understand and convert non-Christian peoples, something which, many argued, necessitated thorough knowledge of foreign systems of belief and their histories.411 The sudden availability of so much material stimulated and stretched the imagination of European scholars, who already in the eighteenth century had evinced a strong (if often naive) interest in exotic, non-Western peoples and their world-views. For example, Charles de Brosses’s Du culte des dieux fe´tiches (1760) had introduced the word ‘fetishism’ to the West as a means of explaining animistic religious practices. Bernard Picard and J. F. Bernard’s multivolume Ce´re´monies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peoples du mond (1723–43), Hume’s Natural History of Religion (1755), Herder’s Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–91), Christoph Meiners’s Grundriss der Geschichte aller Religion (1785), Joseph von Go¨rres’s Mythengeschichte der asiatischen Welt (1810), and Friedrich Creuzer’s Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Vo¨lker, besonders der Griechen (1810), are additional examples of European interest in the origins and practice of non-Christian cultures and the general phenomenon of ‘religion’. In his 1799 Reden Schleiermacher gave additional stimulus to this interest by suggesting that Christian theology itself should take seriously the general nature of religion, understood as a transcultural, experiential reality present in the lives of all human beings. Finally, one should bear in mind that historical and philological methods, reWned by such scholars as Wolf, Niebuhr, Ranke, and Boeckh, coincided with the intellectual ‘discovery’ of non-Western peoples. It was only a matter of time, presumably, before these methods were widely applied to non-Western religious texts as well. The cumulative impact of these developments gave birth by mid-century to an outpouring of general histories of religion and the establishment throughout Europe of university chairs in religion (frequently called ‘history and philosophy of religion’).412 Friedrich Max Mu¨ller (1823–1900) is the scholar most widely credited with placing the new Weld on Wrm methodological grounds and popularly promoting it. German by birth, Mu¨ller studied at the University of Leipzig, receiving his doctorate in 1843 in comparative 410 Joseph M. Kitagawa and John S. Strong, ‘Friedrich Max Mu¨ller and the Comparative Study of Religion’, in Ninian Smart et al. (eds.), Nineteenth Century Religious Thought in the West, iii. 179–80. 411 On this point, see Karl Hammer, Weltmission und Kolonialismus: Sendungsideen des 19.Jahrhunderts im KonXikt (Munich: Ko¨sel, 1978), 49–58. 412 Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, ii. 173–4.

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philology, concentrating in Sanskrit, which was just beginning to be taught there by the accomplished linguist Hermann Brockhaus. After Leipzig, Mu¨ller spent time in Berlin before taking up his studies in Paris in 1845. From Paris he moved on to London and then Oxford, where in 1854 he received the Taylorian Professorship of Modern Languages and made a Fellow of All Souls College. Among Mu¨ller’s numerous works and translations, his critical edition of the Sanskrit text of the Rig-veda stands out—a labour of twenty-four years.413 More pertinent, however, for the genesis of the ‘science of religion’ was a series of lectures Mu¨ller delivered in 1870 at the Royal Institution in London and subsequently published as Introduction to the Science of Religion (1873). While not without competitors, this work has been widely hailed as the founding document of the science of religion, not necessarily because Mu¨ller brought forth new and original points of view, but because he focused attention on enormous labours already underway and pointedly made the case for a new, independent Weld of scientiWc inquiry. ‘A Science of Religion’, he proclaimed, based on an impartial and truly scientiWc comparison of all, or at all events of the most important, religions of mankind is now only a question of time. . . . Its title, though implying as yet a promise rather than a fulWllment, has become more or less familiar in Germany, France, and America; its problems have attracted the eyes of many inquiries, and its results have been anticipated either with fear or with delight. It becomes therefore the duty of those who have devoted their life to the study of the principal religions of the world in their original documents, and who value religion and reverence it in whatever form it may present itself, to take possession of this new territory in the name of true science.414

Mu¨ller also made the case that Christianity should have no privileged position within this new science; rather it should be regarded as one area of inquiry among others, in which all were treated with the same neutral tools of critical investigation. This was not meant to detract from Christianity, Mu¨ller reasoned, but rather to enhance its understanding through the ability to compare and contrast it with other global religions: ‘He who knows only one [religion], knows none,’ Mu¨ller often remarked, alluding to a famous statement of Goethe’s on language.415 Mu¨ller’s ideas found broader resonance in the late nineteenth century, evidenced by the founding of university chairs devoted to general religious 413 Kitagawa and Strong, ‘Friedrich Max Mu¨ller and the Comparative Study of Religion’, in Ninian Smart et al. (eds.), Nineteenth Century Religious Thought in the West, iii. 181–5. 414 Friedrich Max Mu¨ller, Introduction to the Science of Religion (London, 1873), 34 (emphasis added). 415 Quoted in Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, 134.

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history and comparative religion. The most striking early developments took place in the Swiss and Dutch universities. The University of Basle founded a professorship of the ‘general history of religion’ as early as 1840; Lausanne and Geneva added similar chairs respectively in 1871 and 1873. To each of the four Dutch universities (Amsterdam, Gro¨ningen, Leiden, and Utrecht) was added, in 1877 and 1878, a chair in general and comparative history of religions. (Concurrently, theological faculties in Holland were divested of their ecclesiastical ties). Similar professorships were established at Uppsala (1878), the Colle`ge de France (1880), Brussels (1884), Oxford (1886), Cornell (1891), and the University of Chicago (1892), among other seats of learning. Even the newly founded Imperial Japanese University at Tokyo established in 1903 a chair for ‘the science of religion’.416 Occupants of these chairs and other scholars produced an impressive general literature on the science of religion in the late nineteenth century. Excluding the voluminous works of Friedrich Max Mu¨ller, importance should be accorded to the work of Albert Re´ville (of Paris), especially his Prole´gome`nes de l’histoire des religions (1881) and his Wve-volume Historie des religions (1883–8), and that of Pierre Daniel Chantepie de la Saussaye (of Amsterdam), particularly his two-volume Lehrburch der Religionsgeschichte (1887, 1889). Additional works by Cornelius Petrus Tiele (of Leiden), Euge`ne Goblet d’Alviella (of Brussels), Conrad von Orelli (of Basle), George Foot Moore (of Harvard), among others, should also be taken into consideration.417 Conspicuously absent from this list, however, were the works of scholars at German universities. This fact appeared as curious to scholars in the late nineteenth century as it does to us today. Given the reputation of German universities for groundbreaking scholarship, it would seem after all that they would have been at the forefront of the movement to establish a science of religion. Such dismay was well expressed by Louis Jordon in his 1905 work, Comparative Religion, an early attempt to chronicle the development of the new science. Despite the fact that German universities had ‘constantly enrich[ed] the thought of the world’, Jordon lamented that ‘Comparative Religion, regarded as a distinct discipline, has received in that country only very scanty aid, and scarcely a vestige of oYcial recognition. . . . [T]his fact is all the more to be regretted, since the assistance which has reasonably been looked for would, if yielded, have proved to be of the very highest order.’418 416 On the founding dates, titles, and occupants of these chairs, see Jordon, Comparative Religion, 579–91. 417 For greater bibliographical detail on these authors and others, see Jean Jacques Waardenburg, Classical Approaches to the Study of Religion, 2 vols. (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999). 418 Jordon, Comparative Religion, 197.

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Indeed, although often in the vanguard of scholarly and curricular innovation, German universities were not quick to establish formal chairs in Religionswissenschaft. At the same time, they were not unaVected by the movement, the existence of which after all owed much to one of their own, the German expatriate Mu¨ller. Numerous scholarly monographs and translations, originating in both the philosophical and theological faculties of German universities, contributed to the general knowledge of comparative religion.419 Moreover, the expansion of German missions and German colonial eVorts in Africa and the Far East during the Wilhelmine period opened up new contacts with and hence an impetus to study non-Western religions.420 Such developments and the example of foreign universities founding chairs of religion placed acute pressures on German universities to follow suit. What ensued instead was a protracted, theoretical debate on the nature and purpose of theological study, a debate that pitted those in favour of a more general Religionswissenschaft (the new avant-garde) against defenders of wissenschaftliche Theologie (the old avant-garde) as it had developed in German universities since the time of Schleiermacher. Much was at stake in this debate, but two issues were of particular signiWcance. First, what status should be accorded to Christianity in university study? Did it possess a unique standing among world religions, meriting special handling, or should its scholarly treatment be indistinguishable from, say, Zoroastrianism or Buddhism? Second, how did the practical function of the theological faculty (equipping society with learned clergymen) bear on the scientiWc content of its instruction? In other words, should a faculty committed to the production of Christian clergymen have legitimate business spending extensive time on the study of non-Christian religions? Both issues, it should be clear, presented a fundamental challenge to the dual conception of theological study articulated by Schleiermacher, who, despite his musings on the general importance of ‘religion’, had never questioned the superlative position of Christianity and had legitimized the theological faculty (the seat of a ‘positive science’) on the basis of its practical task of training Christian clergymen. The debate over Religionswissenschaft as a challenge to wissenschaftliche Theologie was forcefully, if somewhat oddly, brought to a head in Germany by the University of Go¨ttingen’s eccentric nationalist Paul de Lagarde (1827– ¨ ber das Verha¨ltnis des deutschen 91, In 1873, he published a short essay, ‘U Staates zu Theologie, Kirche und Religion’, later included in his Deutsche Schriften (1878), a collection of vituperative essays criticizing the religious and political status quo in Germany. Specializing in the Old Testament and 419 e.g. see Otto PXeiderer, Philosophy and Development of Religion (New York, 1894), based on the GiVord lectures he delivered. 420 Hammer, Weltmission und Kolonialismus, 241 V.

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Near Eastern languages, Lagarde had studied at Halle and Berlin.421 After receiving his doctorate in 1849 he lectured at Halle and later worked as a private scholar and tutor, only belatedly securing a professorship at Go¨ttingen in 1869. During his academic sojourn Lagarde acquired the reputation of an iconoclast. He viewed most of his fellow academics with contempt. Politically, he regarded himself as a ‘conservative radical’; rejecting both the liberalism of 1848 and the Bismarckian solution of 1871, he preferred the creation of a ‘Greater Germany’ that included Austria. His ties with Christianity became extremely tenuous; several years before Nietzsche’s declaration that ‘God is Dead’, Lagarde proclaimed the bankruptcy of institutional Christianity and called for the creation of a new national ‘Germanic religion’.422 In his 1873 essay Lagarde focused explicitly on what he regarded as the problematic character of theological faculties. He felt that their existence as still semi-confessional institutions did not comport with the secular nature of the modern state and society, and hence they should be doomed to obsolescence.423 In their place, he called for faculties to be converted into seats of the comparative study of religion. Properly understood, theology was not dogmatic knowledge of a particular religion but a ‘historical discipline’ that should seek after ‘knowledge of religion in general’ (Wissen um die Religion u¨berhaupt). Transforming theological faculties in this manner would serve both a scholarly and an ideological purpose, for this ‘new theology’ would also function, in his nationalist vision, as ‘a pathWnder of the Germanic religion’ (PfadWnderin in der deutschen Religion). ‘The new theology’, he elaborated, ‘would reveal the essence of all religion and thus help fashion the religion of the future’, for ‘a national religion is necessary for every nation’. Lagarde granted that traditional churches were free to establish their own seminaries, but the state should withhold funding in an eVort to hasten their demise. Unlike Schleiermacher, Lagarde concluded that the aims of Wissenschaft and ecclesiastical interests were essentially at odds, and he even expressed admiration for those theology students who, fearful of hypocrisy, refused to take an oath of ordination and switched to secular careers instead.424 421 On his time in Berlin, see Paul de Lagarde, Ueber einige Berliner Theologen und was von ihnen zu lernen ist (Go¨ttingen, 1890), which includes a harsh criticism of contemporary Protestantism. 422 On Lagarde’s life and thought, see Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), 3–94, and RGG iv. 200–1. 423 Lagarde, Deutsche Schriften (1878), 41–3. 424 Ibid. 6 V., 43–44. Cf. Robert Hanhart, ‘Paul Anton de Lagarde und seine Kritik an der Theologie’, in Bernd Moeller (ed.), Theologie in Go¨ttingen (Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987), 271–305.

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Because of their extreme character, Lagarde’s ideas were taken up by few other theologians. An important exception was the Basle theologian Franz Overbeck (1837–1905), who, shortly after the appearance of Lagarde’s essay, ¨ ber die Christlichkeit unserer heutigen Theopublished his own controversial U logie (1873), a scathing assault on German academic theology, in which he favourably discussed Lagarde’s ‘stimulating and imaginative’ work.425 Born in St Petersburg, the son of a German businessman and a Russian-born, French Catholic mother, Overbeck regarded himself as an outsider to the mainstream of German culture. His earliest spoken languages were Russian and French; he mastered German only after his family relocated to Dresden in 1850, when he was 13 years old. He studied theology and church history at Leipzig and Go¨ttingen, motivated less out of religious conviction than scholarly interests and a vague sense of humanitarianism. All he got out of the critical theology of his university years, he later conveyed, was the loss of any remnants of his childhood faith.426 An apostate theologian, he nonetheless received and accepted a call to the University of Basle in 1870—a call instigated by Basle’s liberal faction, who mistakenly saw in Overbeck a promising representative of theological liberalism.427 Overbeck arrived in Basle one year after the appointment of Friedrich Nietzsche, who became his fast friend and housemate before Overbeck’s marriage in 1876.428 The moderate, somewhat reclusive political atmosphere in Basle, which Overbeck once called the ‘refuge’ for his theology, only further distanced Overbeck from the dominant currents of Prussian-German intellectual and political life. Although brieXy caught up in German nationalism by the events of 1870–1, Overbeck soon came to share Nietzsche’s sentiment that Prussia’s victories, in the Wnal analysis, represented the triumph of ¨ ber die Christlichkeit unserer heutigen Theologie, repr. of 2nd edn. 425 Franz Overbeck, U (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1981), 120. Cf. Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science, 259. 426 Noted in Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt, 421. Cf. Franz Overbeck, Selbstbekenntnisse, ed. Eberhardt Vischer (Basle, 1941) and Martin Henry, Franz Overbeck: Theologian? (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1995). 427 The liberal Reformverein of Basle believed Overbeck would ‘represent a more critical direction’ in theology. See Hermann Schultz’s letter to Overbeck (15 November 1869). Ernst Staehelin and Mattha¨us Gabathuler (eds.), Overbeckiana: Die Korrespondenz Franz Overbecks (Basle: Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1962), i. 86. 428 On the Nietzsche–Overbeck relationship, see C. A. Bernoulli, Overbeck und Friedrich Nietzsche: eine Freundschaft, 2 vols. (Jena, 1908), and, more recently, Andreas Urs Sommer, Der Geist der Historie und das Ende des Christentums: Zur ‘WaVengenossenschaft’ von Friedrich Nietzsche und Franz Overbeck (Berlin: Akademie, 1997). Incidentally, Overbeck called Nietzsche’s attention to Lagarde’s essay and Nietzsche in turn urged his friend Erwin Rohde ‘not to neglect this short and most astonishing work which says Wfty things wrongly, but Wfty things rightly and truthfully, thus a very good work’. Friedrich Nietzsche, Gesammelte Briefe, 2nd edn. (Leipzig, 1903), ii. 394.

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philistinism and naked political power at the expense of ‘genuine’ German culture. At Basle, Overbeck also increasingly fell out of step with the dominant liberal theological trends, represented at Berlin, especially by Adolf von Harnack, whose brand of modern theology and proximity to political power Overbeck came to criticize with unsparing zeal. ‘Harnack’, Overbeck once opined, ‘provides the service of a hair stylist for the theological wig of the Emperor—just as Eusebius of Caesarea once did for the Emperor Constantine the Great.’429 More generally, Overbeck held that the nineteenth century’s attempted marriage of Wissenschaft and faith represented a stupendous failure. Far from preparing students to serve the church, as Schleiermacher or Harnack held, scientiWc theology represented the ruin of genuine Christianity. In fact theology itself, Overbeck contended, had hammered the Wnal nails in the coYn of Christianity, which he believed had virtually expired as a vital cultural force in the modern, bourgeois world. Put most bluntly, Overbeck once called modern theology the ‘Satan of religion’ and critical theologians ‘the traitors to the cause they are to defend’.430 While not one to mourn Christianity’s passing, Overbeck kept most of his radical views to himself, especially in the classroom where he played the incongruous role of a professor of church history. However, with Nietzsche’s encouragement, Overbeck did publicize some of ¨ ber die Christlichkeit unserer heutigen Theologie appeared in the his ideas: his U same year (1873) and by the same publisher as Nietzsche’s famous critical essay on David Friedrich Strauss, the Wrst of his so-called ‘Untimely Meditations’.431 While Overbeck validated Lagarde’s call for a comparative study of religion, his own views were much more destructive than constructive, and he rejected outright Lagarde’s contention that a ‘new theology’ could prepare the way for some future ‘Germanic religion’. ‘Theologies,’ he dryly observed, ‘have always followed their religions; in fact, the more energetic and unquestioned the original religious impulse, the longer it took before theology made its appearance. That a theology should precede a religion is unheard of, and it is scarcely to be expected that something of that kind could happen in the future.’432 429 Overbeck, Christentum und Kultur: Gedanken und Anmerkungen zur modernen Theologie, selected and edited from Overbeck’s Nachlass by C. A. Bernoulli, 2nd edn. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963), 209. Cf. Klaus Peter Blaser, ‘Harnack in der Kritik Overbecks’, TZ 21 (1965): 96–112. 430 Overbeck, Christentum und Kultur, 236. 431 Nietzsche and Overbeck had their works bound together in two single volumes, and each presented one of the volumes to the other as a gift and sign of friendship. Gossmann, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt, 417. ¨ ber die Christlichkeit unserer heutigen Theologie, 129. 432 Overbeck, U

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In Overbeck’s judgment, theology ‘als Wissenschaft’, whether its practitioners tended toward conservatism or liberalism, had enervated the essence of Christianity, which Overbeck regarded as eschatological and world-denying. ‘World-denial’, he wrote, ‘is the innermost soul of Christianity.’433 In contrast to moderns, early Christians expected the imminent end of the world and they accordingly categorically denied the powers of this world, such as the state, learning, and culture. The only place Overbeck saw genuine Christianity still alive was in strict monastic communities, among those who sought to Xee ‘this world’. By contrast, modern academic theology, desirous of scientiWc respectability and dependent on state support, contradicted the eschatological character of Christianity and hence poisoned its own historical taproot.434 ‘Nowadays,’ Overbeck wrote, ‘people hear it often said that Christianity has an ‘‘inclination to science’’ (Zug zur Wissenschaft). . . . On the contrary . . . Christianity, as does every religion, has the most unequivocal aversion to science,’ adding that ‘the antagonism between faith and knowledge is one that is permanent and thoroughly irreconcilable.’435 Overbeck acknowledged that his views would be regarded as unpopular and he candidly admitted the peculiarity of his own identity: a theologian, neither traditionalist nor modern, who regarded the existence of his own profession as a contradiction in terms. Such an outlook, he wrote, amounted to ‘a leap into the air’ (sich in die Luft stellen), a suspenseful step into an unprecedented and uncertain condition. By publishing such a work, moreover, Overbeck was fully aware that he had ‘embroiled himself in an unresolvable conXict with the dominant theological current in the German empire [typiWed by Harnack] and in consequence was condemned to exile’—in Swiss Basle.436 As with Lagarde, the extremity of Overbeck’s views resulted in more raised eyebrows than esteem. Toward the end of his life, Overbeck was able to count a mere thirty references in German and English journals to his book.437 One might conjecture that the failure of the comparative study of religion to gain a foothold in Germany owed something to the fact that its earliest boosters— Lagarde and Overbeck—were associated with both radical anti-Christian and 433 Ibid. 91. 434 Of Christianity and the state, Overbeck once wrote: ‘ ‘‘Das urspru¨ngliche Christentum ist Abolition des Staates’’ (Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Wille zur Macht. Versuch einer Umwertung. Leipzig 1901 S. 109f.). Wer das nicht einsieht, mit dem lohnt sich in der That nicht weiter u¨ber das Verha¨ltniss von Christenthum und Staat zu einander zu reden.’ From Overbeck’s Nachlass; portions reprinted in Sommer, Der Geist der Historie, 147–8. ¨ ber die Christlichkeit unserer heutigen Theologie, 22. 435 Overbeck, U 436 Quoted in Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt, 421–2. ¨ ber die Christlichkeit unserer heutigen Theologie, (postscript to the 2nd edn.), 437 Overbeck, U 150–2.

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anti-modern sentiments, which few others were willing to embrace. Nonetheless, their criticism of ‘wissenschaftliche Theologie’ was not to pass from the scene. In fact, it assumed a diVerent, less vituperative but nonetheless powerful, outlet in the 1880s and 1890s with the emergence, largely at the University of Go¨ttingen, of the ‘History of Religions School’ (religionsgeschichtliche Schule).438 Unlike Lagarde and Overbeck, the scholars associated with this School— principally Albert Eichhorn (1856–1926), Hermann Gunkel (1862–1932), Johannes Weiss (1863–1914), and Wilhelm Bousset (1865–1920)439—were not prone to make sweeping statements about the demise of Christianity or theology. Rather, their challenge to the status quo was largely methodological. Eschewing dogmatic considerations and making extensive use of the historical methods reWned by Ranke, Mommsen, and others, they argued that the religious outlook and stories in the Old and New Testament could not be understood apart from the detailed study of other religions of the Near East. At Wrst the School conWned itself to tracing historical developments within Judaism and Christianity, but it soon expanded its search for antecedents and parallels in Egyptian, Babylonian, and various Hellenistic religious systems. Several members of the School claimed that various key Old Testament biblical passages derived from non-Hebrew sources. Bousset and Weiss argued that the eschatological ideas underlying the terms ‘Messiah’ and ‘Kingdom of God’ were also largely of non-Jewish origin, while others found extrabiblical antecedents for such crucial theological ideas as ‘Holy Spirit’ and ‘Saviour’. Not surprisingly, the work of these scholars both intrigued and disturbed the theological community, as they made a forceful case that Christianity could not be understood apart from detailed knowledge of the origin and history of other world religions.440 In short, they boldly aYrmed Friedrich Max Mu¨ller’s maxim that ‘he who knows only one [religion], knows none’. The cumulative impact of the writings of Lagarde and Overbeck and the rise of the religionsgeschichtliche Schule, not to mention the simultaneous, mounting plea by the political Left for the separation of church and state, placed acute pressures to change on German theological faculties, which still rested on its dual foundation, championed by Schleiermacher, of scientiWc training for church service. This pressure was intensiWed near the cusp of the 438 Lagarde himself is often considered one of the intellectual progenitors of this School. 439 Ernst Troeltsch is often considered the ‘systematic theologian’ of this School. See Troeltsch, ‘The Dogmatics of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule’, AJT 17 (July 1913): 1–21. 440 ODCC 1379–80 and Gerd Lu¨demann, ‘Die Religionsgeschichtliche Schule’, in Moeller (ed.), Theologie in Go¨ttingen, 325–61. Cf. the essays in Gerd Lu¨demann (ed.), Die ‘Religionsgeschichtliche Schule’: Facetten eines theologischen Umbruches (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996).

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twentieth century by international factors. In 1893 in conjunction with the Chicago’s World Fair, the Wrst World’s Parliament of Religions took place, an unprecedented seventeen-day aVair of religious dialogue between ‘the ten great religions of the world’. One eVect of this meeting was greater recognition for the growth and institutional needs of the comparative study of religion.441 In 1897 the Wrst international Congress for the Science of Religion met in Stockholm, Sweden, where the progress and future of comparative religious studies were discussed. In these discussions, German universities were found wanting.442 Similar conclusions were reached at the Congress’s meeting in Paris in 1900. Here Albert Re´ville (holder of the newly founded chair of religious history at the Colle`ge de France) boasted of the new discipline’s extensive international progress, but he noted that Germany lagged behind. He explained this fact as a consequence of the persistence of ecclesiastical ties among German theological faculties, and he called for theology to prioritize its scientiWc character by including the general science of religion as one of its principal foci.443 The implications of the aforementioned developments, again, placed theological faculties in Germany in a defensive and uncertain position. ‘If the religious historical method has in fact arrived,’ the Halle theologian Max Reischle summed up, ‘it brings with it a problem for theology. Implicit in the proclamation of its methodology is the contention that the erstwhile activity of theology does not suYce.’444 The debate over Religionswissenschaft and the future of Germany’s theological faculties played out in numerous church conferences, academic discussions, and periodicals in the early Wilhelmine period. However, arguably no single event is more important for interpreting its meaning for the German academic scene than Adolf Harnack’s 1901 rectorial address at the University of Berlin, ‘The Task of the Theological Faculties and the General History of Religion’.445 At the time of the address, Harnack was not only a highly esteemed theologian and church historian but rapidly becoming one of Germany’s leading public intellectuals. His fame had just been widened through a popular series of lectures delivered in the winter semester of 441 Richard Hughes Seager, The World’s Parliament of Religions: The East/West Encounter, Chicago, 1893 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). 442 See P. D. Chantepie de la Saussaye, ‘Die vergleichende Religionsforschung und der religio¨se Glaube, Vortrag gehalten auf dem ersten religionswissenschaftlichen Kongresse in Stockholm am 31.August 1897’ (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1898). 443 Albert Re´ville, ‘La Situation actuelle de l’enseignement de l’histoire des religions’, Revue de l’histoire des religions 43 (1901): 58–74. 444 Max Reischle, Theologie und Religionsgeschichte (Tu¨bingen, 1904), 21. 445 Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, ii. 125. The address was given on 3 August 1901. It was later published in his Reden und Aufsa¨tze (Giessen, 1906), ii. 159–88.

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1899–1900, later published as Das Wesen des Christentums, often regarded as the quintessential statement of modern liberal Protestantism. What is more, Harnack had become among the principal advisers to Minister Friedrich AlthoV, not to mention a favourite of the Emperor.446 In short, Harnack’s words carried great inXuence and symbolic importance; and his reputation was only to grow in the coming decades.447 In his address, delivered in the ceremonial Aula of the university, Harnack sized up the problem straightforwardly: should the theological faculty restrict itself primarily to the Christian faith or should it evolve into a faculty for the general study of religious history and comparative religion? Or, at a minimum, should it include professorships of religious science to complement those in the customary subdivisions of the theological faculty? In principle, Harnack was willing to concede many points to the advocates of Religionswissenschaft. He admitted that religion was a ‘general concept’ experienced by all people at all times, and hence it was a concept worthy of serious and sustained critical investigation. Furthermore, other religions, like Christianity, lent themselves to historical inquiry, and hence their study would entail no major methodological obstacles. Finally, the current situation of Christianity, its global expansion and increasing contact with foreign cultures, clearly suggested the importance of the general investigation of religion. With these considerations in mind, Harnack thus recognized why some thought a preponderant focus on Christianity represented an ‘inadmissible constraint’ placed on academic theology.448 But ultimately Harnack was unsympathetic to the winds of change. Contending that an ‘inner reason’ (innere Vernunft) resided in the customary fourfold organization of the faculties, he praised the founders of the University of Berlin for retaining it in 1810, despite pleas to do otherwise. With respect to the theological faculty in particular, he claimed that powerful countervailing arguments advised against transforming it into a seat for the general study of religion. Religion, he reasoned, cannot after all be studied apart from historical inquiry into the political, linguistic, economic, and social foundations of the civilization of which it is a part. If one tried to isolate the religious dimension of all civilizations and study it severed from its historical context, ‘dilettantism’ would result.449 If such inquiry were located 446 Ru¨diger vom Bruch, ‘Adolf von Harnack und Wilhelm II’, in Kurt Nowak and Otto Gerhard Oexle (eds.), Adolf von Harnack: Theologe, Historiker, Wissenschaftspolitiker (Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001), 23–38. 447 Stefan Rebenich, Theodor Mommsen und Adolf Harnack: Wissenschaft und Politik im Berlin des ausgehenden 19.Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1997), 116 V., 537 V. 448 Adolf Harnack, ‘Die Aufgabe der theologischen Fakulta¨ten und die allgemeine Religionsgeschichte’, Reden und Aufsa¨tze (Giessen, 1906), ii. 164–6. 449 Ibid. 167.

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in the theological faculty it might duplicate similar eVorts in the philosophical faculty, which Harnack held as the more suitable place for the general study of religion. More fundamentally, Harnack made the normative liberal-Protestant argument that Christianity represented the most historically advanced of all world religions; as such it both encompassed and transcended other forms of religious expression. Reversing Mu¨ller’s maxim, Harnack proclaimed that the one who knew Christianity gained the greater capacity to know other religions as well: ‘Wer diese Religion nicht kennt, kennt keine, und wer sie samt ihre Geschichte kennt, kennt alle.’ Furthermore, in a pointed rebuke to the religionsgeschichtliche Schule, Harnack argued that Christianity’s similarities to other religions were not the important thing, but rather the degree to which Christianity exhibited superlative qualities that had allowed it to foster progressive civilization and command the admiration of the world. The Bible was the book above all others for Harnack, and neither the Vedas nor the Koran could measure up to it. In it one gained contact with a great variety of religious moods and expressions and with the whole intellectual wealth of the ancient world. Whoever investigates the Bible carefully, Harnack proclaimed, ‘does not need to study any multiplicity of religion in order to know the way of religion and religious history’. Scholars of the Bible, therefore, are less dependent on students of other religions; rather they are dependent on biblical scholars.450 In short, Christianity—its texts, history, and theology— represented for Harnack the fullness of human religious expression, not to mention the dominant cultural inXuence on occidental and increasingly world civilization. Harnack thus validated the theological faculty’s customary goal—in essence, reasserting the twofold task bequeathed to modern theology by Schleiermacher. On the one hand, academic theology should freely pursue scientiWc knowledge about Christianity—and Harnack adamantly insisted there be no ecclesiastical constraints on this pursuit. On the other hand, theology was the servant of the church, in the sense that it oVered the church the results of its scientiWc inquiry for the task of leading it to purer forms of expression. In the Wnal analysis, Harnack wrote, ‘we [should] stick by the old task of our theology’.451 But on an interpretative note, it should be clear that this ‘old task’ was by no means the traditional confessional or dogmatic task of theology. At the time of his address, Harnack had long since parted company with orthodoxy and the confessional churches, whose representatives remained among his 450 Ibid. 168–69. Cf. Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century, ii. 126. 451 Harnack, ‘Die Aufgabe der theologischen Fakulta¨ten’, 173–7.

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foremost critics. Rather, Harnack’s ‘old task’ was the formerly ‘new task’ born in the late Enlightenment and prominently institutionalized, as we have seen, by Schleiermacher in conjunction with the founding of the University of Berlin. Harnack now perceived the theological eVort of his illustrious forebear to be under attack from more radical elements, and he found himself in a position not unlike those members of the Third Estate confronted by Jacobinism, who sought to preserve their achievements against both reactionary elements on the one hand and hyper-revolutionary ones on the other. Although one cannot attribute the weakened position of Religionswissenschaft in Germany in the early twentieth century solely to Harnack’s inXuential address, a number of his contemporaries and later commentators interpreted this to be the case, and I am inclined to think there is merit in this view.452 Whatever the case, an independent science of religion did not gain the institutional foothold in Germany that it did in other lands, even if Germany, as many proclaimed, was the indisputable birthplace of the critical methods for this new Weld. Still, some inroads were made. For example, the journal Archiv fu¨r Religionswissenschaft, founded around the time of Harnack’s address, promoted the new Weld of study to a German academic readership.453 Individual chairs in Religionsgeschichte were established at Berlin and Leipzig respectively in 1910 and 1912, and they were followed by a handful of others, seated either in the theological but more often in the philosophical faculty.454 Additionally, the advent and spread of the ‘science of missions’ (Missionswissenschaft), in part a consequence of colonial expansion, gave some institutional space for the study of non-Christian religions.455 Nonetheless, despite some innovations, theological faculties largely stuck with their twofold

452 To be sure, Harnack also faced opposition in Germany: e.g. Martin Rade, editor of the inXuential journal, Christliche Welt, was a strong supporter of establishing chairs in religious history and comparative religion. In 1901 Rade and Harnack exchanged opinions on the issue in Rade’s journal. 453 Published at Leipzig, the journal began in 1898 and was edited by Albrecht Dieterich and Thomas Achelis. Nevertheless, this journal was founded twenty-eight years after its French counterpart, Revue de l’histoire des religions (1870). 454 See Ernst Lu¨der Solte, Theologie an der Universita¨t; 232, and Adolph Deissmann, Der Lehrstuhl fu¨r Religionsgeschichte (Berlin, 1914). In 1933 there were Wve chairs devoted to Religionswissenschaft in Germany. See Leonore Siegele-Wenschkewitz and Carsten Nicolaisen (eds.), Theologische Fakulta¨ten im Nationalsozialismus (Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993), 90. 455 See Gerhard Rosenkranz, ‘Missionswissenschaft als Wissenschaft’, ZTK 53 (1956): 103–27. Following an earlier example at Halle (1897), a ‘Missionsgeschichtliches Seminar’ was founded at Berlin in 1917 and soon renamed ‘Missionswissenschaftliches Seminar’. In 1935 it was again renamed as ‘Institut fu¨r Allgemeine Religionsgeschichte und Missionswissenschaft’. This latter title reXects the reality that the study of missions and non-Christian religions often went hand in hand. See the guide to the ‘Theologische Fakulta¨t Dekanant’, HUA.

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mandate bequeathed by Schleiermacher and also with the traditional fourfold division into exegetical, historical, systematic, and practical branches. Nearly two decades after his 1901 rectorial address, Harnack helped face down a diVerent kind of threat to the theological faculty, this time however its origins were more political in nature. The Social Democratic Party’s opposition to the status quo, in religious policy and other areas, was muted by the wave of patriotic sentiment that swept over Germany after 1914. At this time, political parties of all persuasions largely put aside their diVerences and rallied behind the Kaiser in the war eVort. (Incidentally, Harnack, despite his sympathy for socialism, supported the war, signing the infamous ‘Manifesto of the 93 Intellectuals’ and once opining that the experience of war ‘was closely akin to true religious feeling and aided many men to recognize the greater importance of ideals over material wealth’.)456 The Armistice and the Revolution of November 1918 came as the destruction of an entire world order for most segments of the German population. The ending of the Kaiserreich and the abdication of Wilhelm II, Prussia’s erstwhile summus episcopus, also created conditions conducive for the realization of the SPD’s political objectives, including its church–state policies. Indeed, the reorganization of the church–state relationship became one of the major and most contentious issues in the constitutional deliberations at Weimar that took place in the spring and summer of 1919, preceding the epochal adoption of the Weimar Constitution on 11 August 1919.457 Leaving aside the manifold complexities of these deliberations, two observations hold true with respect to church–state relations. First, despite early proclamations of radical disestablishment along the lines adopted by France in 1905, the outcome of church–state deliberations in the Weimar Assembly moved in a moderate direction, resulting in the prohibition of an oYcial state church but also the recognition of the public character of churches.458 As one churchman later wrote, ‘How we feared the immediate future of the church when the church-hostile Revolution broke out! And yet how smoothly—if we overlook outbursts and agitation—the deliberations went in the National Assembly.’459 Second, the future of theological faculties, their ‘right of existence’ (Existenzrecht) in the universities, became an important point of debate, 456 Quoted in Douglas F. Tobler, ‘Scholar between Worlds: Adolf von Harnack and the Weimar Republic’, ZRG 28 (1976): 211. On the Manifesto, the German professoriate, and the First World War, see Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, 180–99. 457 Kurt Nowak, Geschichte des Christentums in Deutschland: Religion, Politik und Gesellschaft vom Ende der Aufkla¨rung bis zur Mitte des 20.Jahrhunderts (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1995), 205 V. 458 E. R. Huber and Wolfgang Huber (eds.), Staat und Kirche im 19. und 20.Jahrhundert (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1988), iv. 127. 459 Quoted in Daniel R. Borg, The Old-Prussian Church and the Weimar Republic: A Study in Political Adjustment, 1917–1927 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1984), 94.

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pitting radicals, who argued for their abolition, against moderates and traditionalists, who argued for their retention. The gauntlet for this debate was thrown down in November of 1918 in a memorandum on disestablishment drafted by the socialist Alfred Dieterich, who advocated ‘the abolition of the theological faculties and the transference of the sciences of religion . . . as historical disciplines into the philosophical and legal faculties’.460 Similar views were held by Adolf Hofmann, who became, brieXy, Prussia’s Minister of Culture after the November Revolution.461 Eventually, however, more moderate voices prevailed. While the adopted Constitution declared ‘Es besteht keine Staatskirche’ (§137), it also made clear that ‘die theologischen Fakulta¨ten in den Hochschulen bleiben erhalten’ (§149).462 Thus, an element of continuity was maintained amid a backdrop of fundamental political and social change.463 Despite the moderate outcome, one should not fail to note the extraordinary symbolic meaning of the conXict itself: the venerable ‘sacred faculty’, already eliminated in many European countries, stood in the wake of Europe’s then greatest human disaster before the bar of political and legal modernity in an eVort to justify its existence in Germany. That it did so successfully is considerably, if not exclusively, due to the determined eVorts, once again, of Adolf von Harnack. Of the academic Wgures summoned by the Weimar Assembly for expert advice and consultation, Harnack stands out. Already a highly visible and respected intellectual, Harnack had open sympathy for many social democratic causes464 and his liberal theological views put him in good graces with many members of the Weimar Assembly. Moreover, although a favourite of the Kaiser and a war supporter, after November 1918 Harnack recognized— unlike many churchmen and academics—that the Kaiserreich was ‘forever past’ (unwiederbringlich) and that the ‘age of democracy and socialism’ was here to stay.465 For all these reasons and more, Harnack’s words on the Assembly weighed quite heavily. Harnack’s advice was sought on a variety of matters pertaining to education, religion, and science; and he had a decisive impact on framing issues 460 See the memorandum in Huber and Huber (eds.), Staat und Kirche, iv. 8–13. 461 Ibid. 3. 462 Ibid. 129–32. 463 For more details of the debate over theological faculties, see Walter Delius, ‘Die theologischen Fakulta¨ten als Problem der Revolution vom Jahre 1918’, Theologia viatorum 10 (1965): 34–54. 464 e.g. Harnack had participated with Friedrich Naumann (1860–1919) in founding the Evangelical Social Congress in 1890, a Protestant organization that sought to address the ‘social question’. Harnack served as its chairman for eight years, 1903–11. See Tobler, ‘Scholar between Worlds’, 197. 465 Harnack, ‘Politische Maximen fu¨r das neue Deutschland, der akademischen Jugend gewidmet’, in Harnack, Erforschtes und Erlebtes (Giessen, 1923), 321.

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relevant to the theological faculties. He articulated his views before the National Assembly at Weimar between 1 and 4 April 1919,466 but they were even more forcefully and cogently set forth in a short article, ‘On the SigniWcance of the Theological Faculties’, which appeared in the inXuential Preussiche Jahrbu¨cher in March of 1919, in anticipation of his own appearance before the Assembly.467 Rhetorically well-crafted and sensitive to the lingering appeal of nationalism, the article reXects Harnack’s deep knowledge of and experience with German academic and political culture. In it, he sought to refute the view that ‘the abolition of the theological faculties’ in the universities logically followed from the Social Democratic platforms of ‘church and state must be separated’ and ‘religion is a private matter’. For Harnack the matter was far more complicated; the current argument for abolition was both unexamined and reXective of a penchant in modern thought to advocate change uncritically. ‘Religion builds communities [and] are communities,’ he asked rhetorically, ‘also exclusively a private matter?’ On the contrary, he argued that the public domains of science and government (Wissenschaft and Staat) must take supreme interest in the fate of the theological faculties, for their own highest goods were also at stake in the debate over theology’s right to exist as a university faculty.468 To highlight what in his view were the mutually beneWcial relations between science, theology, and the state, Harnack turned to history. Appealing to the liberal, anticlerical proclivities of many representatives at the National Assembly, Harnack pointed out that recent history made clear that the two most vocal critics of university theology had been Protestant pietists and ultramontane Catholics. Both wanted to relocate theology from the precincts of the university to special ecclesiastical seminaries. Is it not strange, Harnack mused, that those ‘moderns’, who ‘advocate the abolition of the theological faculties in the name of enlightenment and the neutral state have evangelical pietists and ultramontane politicians as bedfellows’?469 Furthermore, Harnack argued that the place of the theological faculty, the hitherto ‘centrepiece of the intellectual world’, occupied a place of preeminent signiWcance for the history of modern German culture. Supporting his claim, he appealed to the lives of Luther, Herder, and Schleiermacher, 466 See Verhandlungen der verfassunggebenden Deutschen Nationalversammlung, 336 (Berlin, 1920), 192 V., and 366 (Berlin, 1920), 216 V. ¨ ber die Bedeutung der theologischen Fakulta¨ten’, PJ 61 (March 467 Adolf von Harnack, ‘U 1919): 362–74. 468 Ibid. 363. 469 Ibid. 364.

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among others.470 Although scholars might quibble over details, it cannot be denied, Harnack asserted, that Luther qua ‘a Wittenberg professor of theology’ assisted in the ‘dissolution of the medieval world’ and the ‘freeing of knowledge’ from clerical control, a development of unrivalled importance for present-day universities and intellectual life. Harnack attributed a similar epochal signiWcance to Herder, ‘a Protestant theologian’, who as the pioneer of German idealism and nationalism represented the ‘the blossoming of the distinct character of the German spirit’.471 Turning to his illustrious predecessor at Berlin, Harnack called attention to Schleiermacher and his inXuential labours in the early nineteenth century at the theological faculties of Halle and Berlin. Schleiermacher’s fame as the author of Reden u¨ber die Religion (1799) and as the translator of Plato were perhaps overstated, Harnack argued, because he was just as important ‘as the organizer of theology, the human sciences, the university and the academy’. ‘In my studies on the history of the Berlin Academy of Science,’ Harnack elaborated, I gained knowledge of numerous memoranda, written over a period of Wfteen years in conjunction with the founding of the University of Berlin and the reorganization of the Academy. . . . The result was that Schleiermacher’s stature and signiWcance measures up directly next to that of Wilhelm von Humboldt, and he even exceeds Humboldt in organizational acumen and direct inXuence. Without exaggeration one may say that the internal reconstruction of the human sciences, and the reconstruction of the . . . German universities, were essentially the service of this professor of theology.472

From historical examples Harnack turned to the present situation, asking about the current relationship of ‘contemporary science to Protestant theology and its faculties’. He regretted that the recent founding of the University of Frankfurt am Main (1914) had once again emboldened voices who deemed theological faculties as unnecessary.473 This had elicited objections from 470 He also mentioned F. C. Baur—as well as Hegel and Schelling, who, though not technically theologians in their mature years, ‘never denied their heritage in theology’. Ibid. 366. 471 Ibid. 365. Harnack attributed the fact that Herder never actually held a chair in a theological faculty to ‘mere chance’, pointing out that eVorts were once made to secure one for him at Go¨ttingen. 472 Ibid. Harnack makes reference to his Geschichte der ko¨niglich Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 3 vols. (Berlin, 1900). On the overstated importance of Humboldt for the founding of the University of Berlin, see Walter Ru¨egg, ‘Der Mythos der Humboldtschen Universita¨t’, in Matthias Krieg and Martin Rose (eds.), Universitas in theologia—theologia in universitate (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag Zurich, 1997), 155–76. 473 In point of fact, the University of Frankfurt am Main was founded in 1914 without a theological faculty. This was an exceptional development as was the university itself, for the founding endowment had come from private not public sources. The lack of a theological

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rectors and other faculties throughout Germany, including non-theological faculties. Harnack cited a memorandum from the University of Marburg, where he had once taught, proclaiming that the retention of the theological faculty was ‘indispensable’ for the functioning of a university and along with other faculties theology was required for ‘the ediWce of modern German science and culture’. Outside the university, he held, theology would inevitably succumb to a narrow ‘one-sidedness’.474 Harnack reiterated this point several times, noting that theology and philosophy especially stood in need of one another. Could one imagine the philosophical brilliance of a Hegel or Schelling, he mused, apart from the fact both had studied Protestant theology in their youth? Having made clear his general position, Harnack argued that there were yet more convincing reasons for theology’s continuing legitimacy. Here he took his point of departure from Schleiermacher’s classic twofold justiWcation of the theological faculty. On the one hand, this faculty served society and the state by providing well-trained, intellectually sophisticated clergymen able to mediate advanced knowledge about Christianity to the German people, thus leading the nation as a whole to a more developed religious and ethical life (which for Harnack, it should be kept in mind, meant away from many orthodox Christian doctrines). Second, it served as the seat of human knowledge about history’s most important event—the emergence of Christianity— and its far-reaching implications in the ancient and modern world. The Bible, Catholicism, and Protestantism, Harnack argued, had bequeathed to human civilization objects of contemplation of the highest order. For this reason, the work of the theological faculties ‘will never be exhausted’ so long as the ‘scientiWc urge’ lives on in human beings.475 Finally, Harnack sought to defend the theological faculty against three criticisms not directly related to the political issue of church–state separation. First, he returned to the question of whether theology should move in the direction of Religionswissenschaft; referring to his 1901 rectorial address, he again suggested that such a development would result in incurable dilettantism, and that the best place for general religious inquiry remained in the philosophical faculty. Second, he sought to refute those who, while admitting faculty is partly explained by the fact that many of the key donors were Jewish and indiVerent to the establishment of a Christian theological faculty. At the time of the founding, Harnack vigorously opposed the absence of a theological faculty, arguing that ‘our culture is saturated by the spirit of Protestantism, and a university is not allowed to dispense with professorships concerned with [understanding] the roots of this spirit’. For this quotation and other material about the founding of the University of Frankfurt sans theological faculty, see Paul Kluke, Die Stiftungsuniversita¨t Frankfurt am Main 1914–1932 (Frankfurt am Main: Kramer, 1972), 110–37. ¨ ber die Bedeutung der theologischen Fakulta¨ten,’ 367. 474 Harnack, ‘U 475 Ibid. 368–9.

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the scientiWc credibility of exegetical and historical theology, rejected that of systematic and practical theology.476 Against such critics, Harnack reasserted Schleiermacher’s point that practical theology was the ‘crown’ of theology; if it and systematic theology were separated from exegesis and church history, then church leadership (Kirchenleitung) and pastoral care (Seelenfu¨hrung) throughout Germany would be intellectually diminished. Third, Harnack took aim at those critics who argued that the theological faculty was an ‘alien body’ (Fremdko¨rper) in the university because many of its chair holders professed a particular creed and maintained ecclesiastical connections. Harnack admitted that this often posed serious problems, especially when faculties succumbed to church inXuence by appointing candidates based on their theological views instead of on ‘scientiWc ability’ alone, as Harnack insisted was appropriate. But Harnack also contended that credal commitment per se did not necessarily invalidate the legitimacy of a particular candidate. St Paul, Augustine, and Luther, he reasoned, all expressed views that many would Wnd unpalatable in the modern university, but should these great teachers therefore be excluded from the university? To the contrary, echoing an argument made by Schleiermacher during the establishment of Berlin’s theological faculty, Harnack suggested that a plurality of viewpoints within the theological faculty constituted a positive good.477 Summarizing his main points, Harnack emphasized that university theology was by no means an exclusive concern of the church, and hence it should not be expelled from the university on the grounds of ‘separation of church and state’. Rather, he concluded, Wissenschaft and Staat should take a protective interest in maintaining the position of the theological faculty against both its progressive and reactionary detractors. Failure to do so would constitute ignorance of the lessons of history, a disparagement of the German-Protestant spirit, and a misunderstanding of the scientiWc mission of German universities and the Kulturstaat’s role in protecting this mission. Characteristically, Harnack’s words were taken with great seriousness. Shortly after the publication of the article he received a personal letter from Konrad Haenisch (1876–1925), the new Prussian Minister of Culture, acknowledging the importance and timeliness of Harnack’s views. ‘You may rest assured,’ Haenisch wrote, ‘that I will immediately attend to this matter with great earnestness and scrupulousness. To this end your essay . . . [and] your personal advice as well, is of the highest importance.’ Harnack also received a letter from Wilhelm Kahl, a delegate at the Weimar Assembly, expressing the 476 See Bernoulli, Die wissenschaftliche und die kirchliche Methode in der Theologie. ¨ ber die Bedeutung der theologischen Fakulta¨ten’, 370–4. 477 Harnack, ‘U

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opinion that Harnack’s article ‘appeared at the perfect time to aid the resolve of several vacillating spirits (einige schwankende Gemu¨ter). I conWdently hope that the theological faculties will be anchored in the constitution itself.’478 That the Weimar Constitution eventually oVered such explicit protection for the theological faculties—setting an important legal precedent in the twentieth century and one that has set the German university system apart from that of many Western liberal nations—suggests the powerful and enduring inXuence of Harnack’s defence.479 The continuation of theological faculties also indirectly suggests the abiding inXuence of Schleiermacher’s legacy, the spirit of which hovers over Harnack’s 1919 essay, indeed over Harnack’s entire career. One should, accordingly, not overlook the historical parallels between Schleiermacher’s defence of the theological faculty and university organization after the political crisis of 1806 and Harnack’s after the crisis of 1918. Both men understood themselves to be defending a particular German intellectual and institutional heritage against the materialistic and utilitarian depredations ushered in by a conquering ‘Western’ power. Removing theological faculties from the universities, for Harnack as for Schleiermacher before him, would mean spiritual capitulation to a foreign imperium that conWgured relations between theology, science, and the political order quite diVerently—certainly not ‘in the German sense’ and certainly not in Wdelity to the Kulturstaat ideology as it had developed in the nineteenth century. At another level, removing theological faculties would mean turning one’s back on the Reformation heritage and what this movement symbolized for both German culture and modern liberal Protestant thought. It would violate, as it were, the ‘eternal covenant’ that Schleiermacher had so eloquently written about to Friedrich Lu¨cke, to whom he had interpreted the Reformation as the union of ‘a living Christian faith’ and ‘a freely working and independent science’. It was to Lu¨cke too that Schleiermacher had posed the famous question: ‘Is the knot of history [in our day] to be unravelled by linking Christianity with barbarism and science with 478 Quoted in Zahn-Harnack, Adolf von Harnack, 387. 479 The relationship between church and state was not exclusively deWned by the Weimar Constitution. Individual legal arrangements (Staatskirchenvertra¨ge) between the national state and the churches of various La¨nder also contributed to the post-1918 outcome; Prussia’s Staatskirchenvertrag dates from 1931. See Hans-Georg Babke, Theologie in der Universita¨t: aus rechtlicher, theologischer und wissenschaftstheoretischer Perspektive (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2000), 25–6. While the 1949 Constitution (Grundgesetzt) did not oVer theological faculties explicit protection, such protections were continued in individual Landesverfassungen, the constitutions of the various German states. See Solte, Theologie an der Universita¨t, 112 V. Cf. Martin Heckel, Die theologischen Fakulta¨ten im weltlichen Verfassungsstaat (Tu¨bingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1986).

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unbelief?’480 After 1806 and again after 1918, the forces of barbarism had overrun the gate, and both Schleiermacher and Harnack, in the impressive breadth and limitations of their cultural horizons, strove tenaciously to answer this question negatively. 480 Schleiermacher, Sendschreiben an Dr. Lu¨cke (Giessen, 1908), 37–40.

6 Conclusion: Janus Gazing [Theology] best illustrates the time-honored and profound word: ‘faculty.’ It is a landscape, like the landscape of Umbria or Tuscany, in which distant perspectives are always clear. . . . But of all the sciences there is none which is so beset with diYculties . . . It is the science which is most easily diVused or petriWed, and which can become its own worst caricature. Karl Barth, 1934 It is the destiny of our generation to stand between the times. We never belonged to the period presently coming to an end; it is doubtful whether we shall ever belong to the period which is to come. . . . So we stand in the middle—in an empty space. Friedrich Gogarten, 1920

On a number of occasions I have characterized the theological faculty’s passage into modernity as ‘Janus-faced’. The expression has helped convey both the scholarly virtuosity attained by Protestant academic theology in the nineteenth century and also theology’s institutional diminution (and near eviction) in the context of the expanding and modernizing university system. Let us not forget, however, that in antiquity Janus’s two faces were intimately linked with time, with endings and beginnings: one face gazed contemplatively at the happenings of the past, the other scrutinized the future. Janus stood, as it were, between the times. This aspect of Janus I would now invoke, for with the post-war years, 1919 to 1923 in particular, one observes both an ending and a beginning. Adolf von Harnack’s eloquent and successful apologia for the theological faculty in the Preussische Jahrbu¨cher (1919) marked in many respects a culminating statement for nineteenth-century university theology: the theological faculty’s public, national vindication despite much criticism and amid dizzying social and political changes. At the same time, it signalled an ending. Harnack’s publication coincided with that of Max Weber’s famous ‘Wissenschaft als Beruf ’, which in the wake of a war that ‘dealt a staggering blow to epistemological conWdence’1 spawned numerous 1 David N. Myers, Resisting History: Historicism and its Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 2.

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highly-charged discussions about ‘the crisis of learning’ in general and ‘the crisis of the university’ in particular.2 Many commonplace assumptions of academic life during the Wilhelmine era suddenly found themselves out of place or under Wre. What is more, Harnack’s article coincided with the beginning of an era that we have come to regard—due to Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Friedrich Gogarten, and others—as a ‘revolution’ in academic theology, indeed as one of the most consequential developments in modern Christian thought.3 I shall return to this ‘revolution’ shortly, but only after attending to a prior matter. In the Introduction, I indicated that this study should be understood at two levels: as an exercise in intellectual history, on the one hand, and as an interpretative foray into the history of Christian theology, on the other. The foregoing discussion of Harnack’s activities and writings have largely been a matter of the former. Turning to the latter, a more comprehensive, if more speculative, analysis of Harnack’s broader signiWcance requires moving beyond immediate intellectual and political circumstances, or at least placing these in a broader framework of interpretation, one that takes into consideration and takes seriously the history of Christian thought tout court. If we were to engage in a thought experiment and consider the esteemed Berlin scholar’s words not from the perspective of the collapsing German Empire and early Weimar Republic, but instead from the standpoint of Harnack’s own particular area of expertise, the patristic era, a rather diVerent picture emerges than the one oVered in the preceding chapter. Given the exemplary status enjoyed by this era for all major Christian traditions today, I have not selected it arbitrarily. However, I invoke it here heuristically, not normatively, to propound the idea that modern theological phenomena require both synchronic and diachronic contextualization, for consideration of a remoter past helps bring into relief the shared assumptions and general tendencies of any given present.4 2 See Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969), 352 V., 367 V. On the prevalence of ‘crisis thinking’ generally in the early twentieth century, see Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 6, 21, passim. 3 See F. W. Graf, ‘Die ‘‘antihistorische Revolution’’ in der protestantischen Theologie der zwanziger Jahre’, in Jan Rohls and Gunther Wenz (eds.), Vernunft des Glaubens: wissenschaftliche Theologie und kirchliche Lehre (Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988), 357–76. Cf. Hans Frei, ‘The Doctrine of Revelation in the Thought of Karl Barth, 1909 to 1922: The Nature of Barth’s Break with Liberalism’, Ph.D. diss. (Yale University, 1956), p. iii. 4 By considering the patristic era here, I highlight the heuristic value of contrast. An equally interesting comparative endeavour would be to consider the university theology of the High Middle Ages in relation to the university theology of Wilhelmine Germany, examining in particular the meanings and values attributed respectively to scientia and Wissenschaft in both periods.

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It might be beneWcial to isolate one aspect of Harnack’s thought as symptomatic of Wn-de-sie`cle liberal academic theology generally: his contention that a theology conducted under an ecclesiastical aegis posed a grave threat to the credibility of theology, particularly its intellectual credibility.5 In most Christian epochs perhaps, but certainly in the patristic period, this would come across as something wholly alien, even unintelligible. For the early church fathers, as Robert Louis Wilken has pointed out, ‘there was no Christian thinking without the church’. The tasks of Christian understanding were regarded simply as the intellectual outgrowth of the ecclesia, the fruit of reXecting on the liturgy, the sacraments, Scripture, and prayer. With few exceptions, such as Clement of Alexandria, practically every major theological Wgure in antiquity held an ecclesiastical post, and their intellectual exertion (no matter how they deWned the relationship between Athens and Jerusalem) grew organically from the pastoral oYce.6 The best-known case undoubtedly is Augustine—bishop of Hippo. Harnack’s close linkage of theology with the modern forces of Verwissenschaftlichung and Verstaatlichung would appear equally foreign to the ancient churchmen whom Harnack studied. In particular, the critical, innovative spirit of Wissenschaft, nourished by nineteenth-century institutional arrangements, would have conXicted sharply with at least two principal criteria of theological reXection in antiquity: the regulative role of tradition and the necessary association of theological insight with one’s personal spiritual progress in the context of ascetic or communal practices. For the early church, to quote Wilken again, Christian thought was ‘inescapably bound up with the lives and words of actual persons, for the truth of what was handed on rested Wnally on the faithfulness of the traditores, those who did the handing on’.7 To risk stating the obvious, traditores were emphatically not Wissenschaftler in the modern sense: seminar-trained, furnished with historical and philological methods, and driven by powerful institutional incentives to make a mark in what Harnack himself had called the ‘Großbetrieb der Wissenschaft’, the large-scale industry of science. They were rather regarded as exemplars of a spiritual and virtuous life, who approached Scripture and theological subjects not as historical phenomena requiring historical investigation—even if still as history, but history in a putatively 5 Cf. Hermann Mulert, Evangelische Kirchen und theologische Fakulta¨ten (Tu¨bingen, 1930), 30 f. 6 Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 46. 7 Quoted in Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, 46. Cf. Manilo Simonetti, Biblical Interpretation in the Early Church: An Historical Introduction to Patristic Exegesis, trans. John A. Hughes (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1994).

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deeper and truer sense, as Heilsgeschichte not Weltgeschichte. History thus conceived stood above, overwhelmed, and helped decipher the profane world and its manifold contingencies; knowledge of it held out the possibility of purging the soul of untoward attachments and desires.8 Far from being understood as a modern university science or as a cultural pillar of a particular nation-state, as Harnack had skilfully argued, theology was largely a way of reading Scripture (the ultimate source of Heilsgeschichte) that furthered one’s own spiritual advancement and thereby contributed to the life of the church. ‘You will progress in understanding the Holy Scripture’, Gregory the Great wrote, ‘only to the degree that you yourself have made progress through contact with them.’9 Study detached from spiritual ediWcation, in other words, did one little good. And at worst, it could contribute to what medieval thinkers regarded as the vice of curiositas, knowledge of important things lodged in minds unsuited to steward them. The positioning of academic theology under the oYcialdom and guardianship of the modern Kulturstaat as pursued, administratively, in the early nineteenth century by Altenstein and typiWed, intellectually, in the early twentieth century by Harnack, also provides a stark contrast with Christian antiquity. While the symbioses of theology and the political order (and the problems inhering therein) in other epochs of Christian history should be candidly acknowledged, it stands to reason that the liberal-critical theology that took shape under the umbrella of the Kulturstaat ideal in modern Germany—with Prussia setting the pace but with family resemblances existing in other states—represents a new departure in Christian intellectual and institutional history. One should Wnd it noteworthy indeed, Hans Frei once suggestively wrote of Prussia, to Wnd a modern state handing the training of its clerics ‘to the very institution, the university, which was bound to be most uneasy, perhaps even deeply skeptical, about the compatibility of such training [and] its own ideal of Wissenschaftlichkeit and the intellectual freedom and institutional independence guaranteed by the same state that governed the Church’.10 But precisely these conditions had emerged in the late nineteenth century, provoking numerous complaints, heard most clearly among pietist and orthodox theologians, that the imperatives of the universities and the interests of the pastoral oYce were drifting further and further apart.11 8 This would, of course, apply to much of what Hans Frei calls ‘precritical interpretation’. See Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 17–50. 9 Quoted in Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, 79. 10 Hans Frei, Types of Christian Theology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 101. 11 Reinhold Seeberg, Die Kirche Deutschlands im neunzehnten Jahrhundert (Leipzig, 1904), 238 V.

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But for those like Harnack, who regarded academic theology as a strictly wissenschaftlich endeavour, these institutional conWgurations (however they might appear from the broader sweep of Christian history) made it only natural to look to the state, not churches or ecclesiastical bodies, as the rightful protector of theology’s intellectual integrity and social inXuence. (Remember, Harnack’s own culturally powerful position at Berlin originated as an act of state power directed against ecclesiastical interests.) To do otherwise, representatives of the regnant liberal theology regularly maintained, would mean to succumb to regressive historical forces—above all residually ‘Catholic’ elements still not wholly exorcized from modern Protestantism.12 Indeed, throughout the nineteenth century, and particularly during and after the Kulturkampf, Catholicism served as the necessary ‘other’, not only for general Protestant self-deWnition, as is often noted, but also for deWning the relationship between Protestantism and public institutions. Without the protective space of state institutions, Harnack indicated, Protestantism risked becoming ‘a sorry double of Catholicism’.13 Or, as Friedrich Paulsen put the matter: Protestantism must not be deprived ‘of an independent theology or the freedom of scientiWc endeavor, and therefore one must not deliver the theological faculties into the hands of an ecclesiastical party. The public administration of universities . . . has thus far guaranteed the independent development of Protestant theology and can best guarantee it in the future.’ A Protestant theology too tied to churchly interests, Paulsen added, would ‘simply mean Catholicism’ and ‘have no value at all’.14 Indeed, this species of Protestant theology was quite indiVerent to and perhaps ultimately unable to count itself, in Jacques Maritain’s phrase, among ‘the things that are not Caesar’s’. The opposite held true. Theology took its place, intentionally and, at least in the case of Harnack, inXuentially, at the table of the modern German nation-state, in the bosom of a state-managed Kultus, seeking and Wnding justiWcation as an able contributor to ‘the ediWce of modern German science and culture’.15 In the nineteenth century, this 12 On the broader historical reasons for the strong anti-Catholic elements in Protestant academic theology, see Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 1866–1918 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1993), 364 V. 13 Harnack, Das Wesen des Christentums, ed. Trutz RendtorV (Gu¨tersloh: Gu¨tersloher Verlagshaus, 1993), 257. 14 Friedrich Paulsen, The German Universities and University Study, trans. Frank Thilly and William W. Elwang (New York, 1906), 139–40. After 1907 such anti-Catholic sentiments were especially directed against the encyclical of Pius X, Pascendi dominici gregis, which condemned ‘the doctrines of the modernists’. This was followed in 1910 by the requirement that all Catholic theologians take an ‘anti-modernist oath’. See Eilert Herms, ‘Theologischer ‘‘Modernismus’’ und lerhamtlicher ‘‘Antimodernismus’’ in der romischen Kirche am Anfang des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts’, Troeltsch-Studien 4 (1987): 13–55. ¨ ber die Bedeutung der theologischen Fakulta¨ten’, PJ (March 1919): 367. 15 Adolf von Harnack, ‘U

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partnership of power and spirit had conferred on the state a quasi-sacred moral agency all its own, which for a vocal minority—such as the extreme but revealing Wgure of Richard Rothe and, before him, Hegel—rendered churches functionally superXuous institutions, cooperative appendages to the state at best, and, at worst, purveyors of dogmatic anachronisms that only impeded the full realization of a ‘New Protestantism’, a modernized form of Christendom, Christianity understood as broad, civilizational project delivered from the husks of older doctrinal or ecclesiastical considerations.16 One may disagree about the extent and relative merits of this partnership of power and spirit, but under it one can say, at a minimum, that the state was decidedly not viewed with great scepticism by Protestant academic mandarins such as Harnack; and it was emphatically not understood in Augustine’s dictum as ‘the city of this world, a city which aims at dominion . . . but is itself dominated by the very lust of domination’.17 Viewed in this light, Harnack’s politically successfully eVorts to defend theology’s legitimacy in the university (though ostensibly conservative when measured against more strident scientiWc and social democratic voices), rests on and brings to seasoned expression a much greater discontinuity in the nineteenth century: the redeWnition of Protestant theology (or at least inXuential sectors thereof) not as an apologetic, practical, confessional, or ecclesial enterprise, but as a critical, academic, scientiWc and, indeed, profoundly statist one—the submission of Heilsgeschichte to the criteria of Weltgeschichte, the submission of theology to the guidance of Wissenschaft, the submission of the training of future church leaders to the custody of the state. Perhaps Ernst Troeltsch recognized this situation most acutely when— to quote him liberally—he wrote in 1908: Theology, too, has become far more indiVerent to the problems of the church. The special position of theological faculties as state institutions and members of large academic corporations has given it a relative independence against ecclesiastical inXuences. This independence is produced and maintained partly by the state. . . . [Protestant theologians] consider Protestantism to be the principle of free research in religious matters. . . . This, however, has given theological science a new character. In truth it is confessionless, Protestant only insofar as the freedom of science is regarded as a Protestant demand. All liberations from historical Protestantism are equated with [further] deliverance from Catholicism. [Theology] has accepted

16 As in Ch. 4, I draw implications from Hajo Holborn’s provocative article, ‘German Idealism in the Light of Social History’, in Germany and Europe: Historical Essays by Hajo Holborn (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1971), 1–32. Cf. Harnack’s discussion of Protestantism in Das Wesen des Christentums, 250–62. 17 Augustine, The City of God, ed. David Knowles (Baltimore: Penguin, 1972), 5.

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the general scientiWc methods of [its] sister faculties. . . . The apologetic tendency has greatly declined.18

Harnack’s argument for retaining theological faculties as members of the public university drew its strength, Wnally, on this redeWnition of theology, which, while not without sceptics (including other university-seated theologians) had become increasingly normalized in the late nineteenth century.19 Paradoxically, it was precisely this modern rationale for theology that allowed Harnack and his sympathizers to buck the modern insistence of strict church– state separationists, securing for the theological faculties of Germany explicit legal sanction in the Weimar Constitution itself: ‘Die theologischen Fakulta¨ten in den Hochschulen bleiben erhalten’ (§149). The legacy of this sanction lives on today.20 In addition to this glancing contrast with patristic thought, one gains illuminating perspective on the regnant liberal Protestantism of the early twentieth century by considering divergent contemporaneous voices. As we have seen, to the ‘left’ of Harnack stood proponents of Religionswissenschaft and (often irreligious) voices of social democracy, who regularly sought the removal of the theological faculty from the university. To the ‘right’ stood a mix of confessional Protestants, pietists, and ultramontane Catholics. The latter were alarmed by what they regarded as theology’s overly complaisant attitude toward science in general; and they often pleaded either for seminaries free from state control and/or for dogmatic and pastoral theology to play a greater role in theological education at the universities. Finally, we should keep in mind those ‘alienated theologians’ such as Lagarde and Overbeck (and one might also Wgure in here critics such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, or Jacob Burckhardt), who, neither conventionally progressive nor reactionary, felt that the whole project of ‘modern theology’ with its attachments to ‘science’ and the ‘historical method’ was simply a curious enterprise, a bourgeois academic parlour game, the ironic enervation of Christianity carried out in the name of some of its highest principles.21 18 Ernst Troeltsch, ‘Ru¨ckblick auf ein halbes Jahrhundert der theologischen Wissenschaft’, ZWT 51 (1908): 100–1. 19 Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, ‘Protestantische Theologie in der Gesellschaft des Kaiserreichs’, in Graf (ed.), ProWle des neuzeitlichen Protestantismus: Kaiserreich (Gu¨tersloh: Gu¨tersloher Verlagshaus, 1992), ii. 8 V. 20 Hans-Georg Babke, Theologie in der Universita¨t: aus rechtlicher, theologischer und wissenschaftstheoretischer Perspektive (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2000). 21 Karl Lo¨with, From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought, trans. David E. Green (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1964), 158–62, 301–5, 359–88. Cf. Van A. Harvey, ‘The Alienated Theologian’, in Robert A. Evans (ed.), The Future of Philosophical Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1971), 113–43.

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However, the critic that came to concern Harnack the most was none of the above, but one of his own former pupils. Only a few months before Harnack published his defence of the theological faculty in the Preussische Jahrbu¨cher, the young Swiss theologian Karl Barth published the Wrst edition of his Ro¨merbrief, a work, as one commentator famously put it, that fell ‘like a bombshell in the playground of the theologians’.22 In the winter term of 1906–7 the young Barth had enrolled at Berlin in the church history seminar of Harnack, whom he later described as ‘the theologian of the day’.23 As the seminar method encouraged, Barth produced for Harnack a lengthy, wissenschaftlich research paper (158 pages) on ‘Paul’s Missionary Work according to the Acts of the Apostle’. This work promised a bright career along the path that Harnack himself had trodden—a path extended in the following years by Barth’s warm relationships with Wilhelm Hermann and Martin Rade, who together with Harnack constituted a formidable liberal-theological triumvirate on the eve of the First World War.24 Yet as is well known, in the ensuing years Barth parted intellectual company with Harnack and his theological world, deeply shaken by his former mentor’s endorsement of Germany’s war aims in 1914 and convinced by his own experiences as a pastor in rural Safenwil, Switzerland that the prevalent critical trends of theology in German universities had little to say to the workaday lives of actual people, especially those of the lower classes.25 By the early 1920s, Barth had emerged as the pugnacious leader of a new ‘dialectical’ movement in theology, a ‘theology of crisis’, destined to become among the dominant theological currents of the twentieth century, aVecting North American as much as European theology.26 Barth’s development troubled Harnack. In 1920 he heard his former pupil speak at a student conference in Aarau, Switzerland and afterwards oVered the striking confession to a friend that ‘the eVect of Barth’s lecture was just staggering. Not one word, not one sentence could I have said or thought. . . . [I]ts theology frightened me. . . . Instead of losing any of its force, it appears to me more and more hazardous, yes, in a way even scandalous.’27 The intellectual 22 The commentator was the Catholic theologian Karl Adam and the comment was actually made in reference to the 2nd edn. of Barth’s work from 1922. 23 Quoted in Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1976), 39. 24 On Barth’s early ‘liberal’ phase, see his Wrst published article, ‘Moderne Theologie und Reichsgottesarbeit’, ZTK 19 (1909): 317 V. 25 Busch, Karl Barth, 33 V. On Barth’s experience of the First World War and his reaction to the German professoriate during this time, see Wilfried Ha¨rle, ‘Der Aufruf der 93 Intellektuellen und Karl Barths Bruch mit der liberalen Theologie,’ ZTK 72 (1975): 207–24. 26 Sydney E. Ahlstrom, ‘Continental InXuence on American Christian Thought since World War I’, CH 27 (1958): 256–72. 27 Quoted in Agnes von Zahn-Harnack, Adolf von Harnack (Berlin: Hans Bott, 1936), 532.

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divide between Harnack and Barth is, to be sure, a complex and multifaceted topic, but from the standpoint of this study it bears considering that a signiWcant aspect of it had to do with Harnack’s view that Barth threatened to sever the relationship between theology and Wissenschaft, the premise of theology’s inclusion in the university. Some years after the Aarau conference, Harnack wrote to Barth, telling him as much directly: ‘I am Wlled with anxiety for the future of scientiWc theology.’28 Although Barth insisted that theology, above all, was a function of the church, he did not repudiate the theological faculty’s position in the university. (After Safenwil, Barth himself would spend the rest of his life occupying academic posts—at Go¨ttingen, Mu¨nster, Bonn, and Basle.) Like Harnack, Barth validated the public character of theological faculties and he was sceptical of the movement to found the ‘science of religion’ as a separate discipline.29 However, Barth’s rationale for the theological faculty diVered fundamentally from that of his former mentor. In Barth’s interpretation, the nineteenth century had witnessed the conXation of the oYce of the theologian and the historian; a vocation dedicated to engaging positively and actively the most pressing issues of life had been reduced to the ‘passive detachment of an observer.’ Historical inquiry was necessary, Barth always maintained, but its assignment was ultimately ancillary to more important, i.e. dogmatic and ecclesiastical, theological tasks. Already in the foreword to his Ro¨merbrief of 1919, this was clear: ‘The critical historical method . . . has its place; it points to a preparation for understanding that is never superXuous.’30 In the revised 1922 edition, Barth ampliWed and expanded these sentiments, and commented quite derogatively about his own student experiences at the university. ‘I know what it means’, he wrote, ‘to have to go into the pulpit year in and out, obliged to understand and explain, and wishing to do so, yet being unable to do it, because we were given almost nothing at the university except the famous ‘‘respect for history,’’ which despite the beautiful expression means simply the renunciation of earnest, respectful understanding and explanation.’ What came to trouble his critics was not so much that Barth rejected historical understanding (although some accused him of this), but rather that he had summarily downgraded its signiWcance for the task of theology generally. In Barth’s eyes, those ‘critical theologians’ preoccupied with the 28 Letter to Harnack, quoted in Eduard Thurneysen (ed.), Karl Barth-Eduard Thurneysen Briefwechsel, 1921–1930 (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1974), ii. 135. 29 Karl Barth, ‘Das Wort Gottes als Aufgabe der Theologie’, in Barth, Vortra¨ge und kleinere Arbeiten, 1922–1925, ed. Holger Finze (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1990), 156–7. 30 Barth, Ro¨merbrief (1919), in Ju¨rgen Moltmann (ed.), Die Anfa¨nge der dialektischen Theologie (Munich: Kaiser, 1966), i. 77.

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‘merely historical’ had either put oV or abandoned the truly important theological task of reckoning with the ‘permanent crisis of time and eternity’; they had elevated method over content, observation over engagement, criticism over dogma, and, in biblical exegesis, words over the Word. What nineteenth-century liberal theology had trumpeted as scientiWc advances in theology, Barth regarded as both stupendously impressive and, simultaneously, a tragic withering of the theological task. It was a preamble so masterful as to mistake itself for a Wnished work. ‘[A]re these historians, whom I truly respect as scholars, quite unaware that there is [after all] a content, a cardinal question, a Word in the words?’31 In 1922 Barth gave an address, ‘The Word of God and the Task of Theology’, in which he commented explicitly on the relationship between theology and the university. Delivered just a few years after the ratiWcation of the Weimar Constitution, the question of the theological faculty’s justiWcation within the university remained a subject of concern and discussion—and Barth himself had just moved from the pulpit to the lectern, accepting a position on Go¨ttingen’s theological faculty. For Barth, the theological faculty existed in the university as the church existed in society. Just as the church, according to conventional Christian teaching, was not to mirror the norms and expectations of its surrounding culture, and instead often contradict and question them, so theology was under no strict methodological obligation to imitate its neighbouring faculties. Both the church and the theological faculty functioned as ‘a signal of distress’ (Notzeichen), an indication that ‘all is not well, even in the universitas litterarum’, that the human condition and human knowledge, Wnally, presented one with a dire and terrible predicament. If this were not the case, Barth reasoned, theology’s critics were right and there was no justiWcation for theology in the university. But Barth went further still to say that as an academic faculty compared to other faculties, theology had no right to exist in the university; it existed at the extremity of scientiWc possibilities as a reminder of something that needs to be said by all disciplines but which, the world being mendacious and human knowledge Wnite, can only be said as an ‘emergency measure’ (Notstandmaßnahme). In Barth’s own formulation: It is clear that theology’s existence in the university does not stand in need of a priori justiWcation. It is there as a response to a crisis, but one not to be removed because this crisis is permanent. This marks its similarity to the church in society. It is the paradoxical but undeniable truth that as a science like other sciences theology has no right to its place; for it becomes then a wholly unnecessary duplication of 31 Barth, Ro¨merbrief (1919), in Ju¨rgen Moltmann (ed.), Die Anfa¨nge der dialektischen Theologie (Munich: Kaiser, 1966), 112.

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disciplines belonging to the other faculties. Only when a theological faculty undertakes to say, or at least points out the need for saying, what the others . . . dare not say, or dare not say aloud, only when it keeps reminding them that a chaos, though wonderful, is not a cosmos, only when it is a question mark and an exclamation point at the outermost edge of scientiWc possibility—or rather, in contrast to the philosophical faculty, beyond the outermost edge—only then is there a reason for it.32

In this sense, the theological faculty is both necessary and exceptional, because the Christian faith is both necessary and exceptional, a scandal to the intellect by some measures and powerfully explanatory in the context of its own Wrst principles. Theology therefore, as Barth was fond of saying, was both a ‘possible impossibility’ and ‘impossible possibility’.33 This kind of talk made Harnack wince. He likened his former student at one point to the ancient heretic Marcion and also to Thomas Mu¨nzer, the Wery apocalyptic leader of the 1525 peasants’ revolt in Germany, which threatened to discredit the Reformation in its infancy.34 The diVerences and mutual misgivings between Harnack and Barth steadily mounted in the early 1920s, Wnally giving birth in 1923 to an extraordinary exchange of opinions between the two men, aired in the journal Die Christliche Welt, edited by their mutual friend, Martin Rade.35 Harnack instigated the exchange by publishing 32 Barth, ‘Das Wort Gottes als Aufgabe der Theologie’, in Barth, Vortra¨ge und kleinere Arbeiten, 1922–1925, 155–7. DeWned in this manner, theology for Barth could still be regarded as the Wrst faculty: ‘Theology, once the mother of the whole university, still stands in a unique and primary position in relation to the other faculties, albeit perhaps with her head a little bowed.’ See p. 157. In his Church Dogmatics, Barth wrote, moreover, that theology ‘cannot regard itself as a member of an ordered cosmos, but only as a stopgap in a disordered one’ (Lu¨ckenbu¨ ßerin in einem ungeordneten Kosmos). Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik I. 1, 7th edn. (Zurich: Evangelischer Verlag, 1955), 8. Cf. Christoph Schwo¨bel, ‘Theology’, in John Webster (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Karl Barth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 22–3. 33 Schwo¨bel, ‘Theology’, ibid. 21. As Barth wrote in his 1922 address, ‘Das Wort Gottes als Aufgabe der Theologie’: ‘Wir sollen als Theologen von Gott reden. Wir sind aber Menschen und ko¨nnen als solche nicht von Gott reden. Wir sollen Beides, unser Sollen und unser NichtKo¨nnen, wissen und eben Gott die Ehre geben. Das ist unsere Bedra¨ngnis. Alles Andre is daneben Kinderspiel.’ Moltmann (ed.), Die Anfa¨nge der dialektischen Theologie, i. 199. 34 Barth alludes to Harnack’s comments about him in a letter (14 July 1920) to his friend, Thurneysen. See Thurneysen (ed.), Karl Barth-Eduard Thurneysen Briefwechsel, 1913– 1921, i. 410. 35 The exchange appears in its entirety in Moltmann (ed.), Die Anfa¨nge der dialektischen Theologie, i. 323–47. An English translation is found in H. Martin Rumscheidt, Revelation and Theology: An Analysis of the Barth-Harnack Correspondence of 1923 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 29–53. Unless otherwise indicated, I cite from Rumscheidt. For a thoughtful treatment of the exchange, see Dietrich Braun, ‘Der Ort der Theologie’, in Parrhesia: Karl Barth zum achtzigsten Geburtstag (Zurich: Evangelischer Verlag Zurich, 1966), 11–49. In focusing here on the signiWcance of Barth’s conXict with Harnack, I should nonetheless make clear that the theological spectrum on the issue of theology’s scientiWc status had other strong voices in the early 1920s, including Ernst Troeltsch and Paul Tillich. Troeltsch came closest to the

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a set of questions, ‘Fifteen Questions to the Despisers of ScientiWc Theology among the Theologians’, motivated by fears that the new directions set in motion by Barth and his allies would render theology incapable of retaining ‘its status at the university, its status of being a scientiWc discipline’.36 Harnack’s central complaint therefore focused on whether Barth, by insisting that the message of the Bible transcended human categories of experience, had driven a wedge between one’s subjective religious experience and the public, wissenschaftlich task of academic theology, allowing the former to take precedence, indeed to ride roughshod, over the latter. ‘May one leave the determination of the content of the gospel solely to personal knowledge (Erfahrung) and experience (Erlebnis),’ Harnack pointedly asked, ‘or does one not rather need here historical knowledge and critical reXection?’ Revealingly, this phrase—‘geschichliches Wissen und kritisches Nachdenken’— appears Wve times in the short treatise, a clear indication of what Harnack felt Barth lacked. If one followed Barth’s lead, Harnack pressed further, one would wind up with a ‘gnostic occultism’, bereft of the intellectual puriWcation that rational discourse brings to religious phenomena. To avoid the dead ends of subjectivism and gnosticism, Harnack therefore concluded, one had no choice but to embrace ‘critical-historical study’ and ‘scientiWc theology’. ‘Is there any other theology’, he asked, ‘than that which has strong ties and is in a blood-relationship with science in general (Wissenschaft u¨berhaupt)?’37 Barth accepted Harnack’s challenge and replied, point by point, to the questions of his former teacher. Interestingly, Barth, by all accounts a critic of historicism as it impinged upon theology, sought to historicize Harnack’s concept of ‘Wissenschaft u¨berhaupt’. In contrast to Harnack, his understanding of the concept was not as the timeless means of rational inquiry, but merely as the ‘opinio communis’ of the German academic guild as it had developed in the nineteenth century. ‘Someone objecting to that form of Protestant theology’, Barth wrote, ‘which has become determinative since science-of-religions approach, whereas Tillich advocated a theology of culture and apologetics in contrast to Barth’s dogmatic theology. See Paul Tillich, ‘Theology of Culture and the Theology of the Church’, in Tillich, What is Religion?, ed. James Luther Adams (New York: Harper & Row, 1969); Robert P. Scharlemann, ‘The No to Nothing and the Nothing to Know: Barth and Tillich and the Possibility of Theological Science’, JAAR 55 (1987): 57–72; and the introduction by Robert Morgan to Ernst Troeltsch: Writings on Theology and Religion, trans. Robert Morgan and Michael Pye (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1990), 1–51. 36 Rumscheidt, Revelation and Theology, 54. At Wrst Barth was unsure whether these questions had been directed towards him, but indicated nonetheless that he was prepared to respond to them ‘point by point’. See the circular letter (23 January 1923) about the matter that he sent to several friends in Thurneysen (ed.), Karl Barth-Eduard Thurneysen Briefwechsel, ii. 134. 37 Harnack, ‘Fu¨nfzehn Fragen an die Vera¨chter der wissenschaftlichen Theologie unter den Theologen’, in Harnack, Aus der Werkstatt des Vollendeten, ed. Axel von Harnack (Giessen, 1930), 51–4.

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Pietism and the Enlightenment, especially during the last Wfty years of German history, is not necessarily a ‘‘despiser of scientiWc theology.’’ Indeed, Barth did not reject ‘critical study’ and ‘historical knowledge’ per se; rather he sought to place strict limits on their eYcacy in the theological Weld. In fact, in a mode of reasoning that one, mutatis mutandis, is tempted to liken to that of Thomas Aquinas, Barth contended that historical-critical inquiry served most honestly when it led one to the awareness of its own limits—that in the Wnal analysis it did not possess the intellectual resources either to aYrm or deny knowledge of divine things. AYrmation could only come through the ‘Word of God’ and ‘God-awakened faith’. Pushed to its limits, therefore, historical-critical inquiry would become self-conscious of its restricted domain, and the necessity of a type of knowledge existentially needful but not immanent in the human condition, knowledge not ‘according to the Xesh’, would take on greater urgency. Although admitting the intellect’s limited domain might ‘frighten’ at Wrst, Barth contended, that ‘this [nonetheless] might turn out to be the service which ‘historical knowledge’ can render to the actual task of theology.’38 Theology itself had the yet bolder prophetic task of proclaiming the ‘Word of God’ in the marketplace of human ideas and institutions. ‘The task of theology is at one with the task of preaching,’ Barth therefore put forth. ‘It consists in the reception and transmission of the Word of the Christ.’39 Academic theologians’ failure to do this adequately represented, in Barth’s judgment, an inappropriate understanding of vocation, one that grew out of a long-standing and obsequious deference to the prevailing intellectual climate and university norms. Barth therefore sought to turn the tables on his former teacher, asking (somewhat quixotically, no doubt, given the times) why the other faculties should not still, as they had once, look to theology for intellectual leadership: If theology were to regain the courage . . . to bear witness to the Word of revelation, of judgment and of God’s love, the outcome might well be that ‘‘science in general’’ would have to seek ‘‘strong ties and a blood-relationship’’ with theology instead of the other way around; for it would be better perhaps also for jurists, physicians and philosophers if they knew what theologians ought to know. Or must the present fortuitous opinio communis of others really be the instance through which we have to let our [theological] work be judged . . . ?40

Another round of exchange between Harnack and Barth followed the initial one. But the second round only made clear the intellectual chasm between the two men. After complaining that much of Barth’s response was ‘wholly 38 Rumscheidt, Revelation and Theology, 31–5. 40 Ibid. 35 (trans. modiWed).

39 Ibid. 32.

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incomprehensible’, Harnack sought to counter Barth’s eVort to historicize scientiWc theology. ‘You see in contemporary scientiWc theology an unstable and transitory product . . . and that it has the value of an opinio communis. I see in it the only possible way of grasping the object epistemologically. This way is old and new at the same time, new because it has attained greater clarity and maturity only since the eighteenth century and old because it began when man started thinking.’ Furthermore, Harnack categorically rejected Barth’s equation of the task of theology with that of preaching, reaYrming that ‘the task of theology is at one with the task of science in general ’.41 In Barth’s Wnal eVort to state his position, he took particular issue with Harnack’s contention that theology had received greater ‘clarity and maturity’ since the eighteenth century, indicating that he was not alone in holding older theologians in higher esteem than modern ones. ‘We have been irresistibly impressed by the material superiority of those [Wgures of the Reformation] and older theologians, however little they may Wt in the present scheme of the guild. We, therefore, cannot feel ourselves relieved by the protest of the spirit of modern times (which perhaps has to learn to understand itself Wrst!)’ Then, calling explicit attention to the universities, Barth complained of ‘the chaotic business of today’s faculties’ (chaotische Fakulta¨tsbetrieb unsere Tage), which had privileged ‘research’ and ‘method’ over the actual ‘object’ of theology. Again, Barth did not reject the tools of research and method per se, but he made clear that the primary theological task of the future—in dialectical confrontation with that of recent past—was one of bringing to life again ‘classical theological train[s] of thought’, albeit ‘in and for our times’, as a means of gaining perspective on and transcending the contemporary theological milieu.42 One can vividly imagine the elderly Harnack shaking his head as he read Barth’s words and prepared a Wnal response. ‘I sincerely regret’, he wrote, ‘that the answers to my questions only point out the magnitude of the gap that divides us.’ Accusing Barth of oVering a ‘tormenting interpretation’ of faith and theology, he called an end to the debate—yet not before coldly remarking that Barth himself had now become for him an object of scientiWc curiosity: ‘Paul and Luther are for me not primarily subjects, but objects of scientiWc theology as is Professor Barth and all those who express their Christianity as prophets or witnesses like preachers.’ For the ‘scientiWc theologian’, he

41 Rumscheidt 36 (emphasis added). ‘Die Aufgabe der Theologie ist eins mit den Aufgaben der Wissenschaft.’ Moltmann (ed.), Die Anfa¨nge der dialektischen Theologie, i. 330. 42 Rumscheidt, Revelation and Theology, 41 f.

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deWantly insisted, there ‘is only one scientiWc method [and] . . . only one scientiWc task: the pure cognition of the object’.43 Having successfully defended the theological faculty from outsider threats, from proponents of Religionswissenschaft and strict church–state separationists, Harnack was, Wnally, at a loss of what to say to the insider challenge from one of his brightest former students—a challenge that had begun to gain a wide hearing through the newly founded journal Zwischen den Zeiten.44 For Harnack, Barth’s development constituted a disease of the heart, not of the skin. Here was a theologian, nourished in the best traditions of modern Wissenschaft, who had nonetheless fallen out of step with the entire world of theological modernity as championed by Harnack and embodied in the internationally esteemed German university system. Interestingly, to Harnack’s daughter and biographer, Agnes von ZahnHarnack, Barth’s problem was largely one of nationality, his Swissness, a trait, she was quick to point out, that he shared with several other major Wgures in the movement of dialectical theology. These theologians emphasized the ‘wholly other’ character of God and the limits of the human intellect, she explained, because they had experienced the war from the standpoint of neutral Switzerland. Theirs was an otherworldly, a spectator’s theology, one that did not and could not comprehend the obligations of power and knowledge, the necessity of acting and thinking responsibly, in this world. Of the war they had only felt ‘its horror, sinfulness, and wanton destruction’; they had no grasp of ‘the sense of exaltation (Erhebung) that can tremble through a nation, which is ready to lay down its life for its brother’.45 But for Harnack himself, the problem with Barth was deeper still, beyond questions of nationality and the experience of the Great War. It had to do with an inexplicable failure to take up the torch of Wissenschaft, which Harnack had done with such virtuosity, pride, and sense of historical purpose. One might admire the intensity of the new theology, Harnack conWded to Martin Rade in 1928, but ‘how weak it is as Wissenschaft. . . . What seems to be lost entirely is the link between theology and the universitas litterarum.’46 The young upstart appeared to have turned his back on Schleiermacher’s ‘eternal covenant’, forsaking the modern pact between theology and university typiWed by Berlin after 1810. To be sure, Barth and a younger generation of 43 Ibid. 42–53. ‘denn wie es nur eine wissenschaftliche Methode gibt, so gibt es auch nur eine wissenschaftliche Aufgabe—die reine Erkenntnis der Objekts’. Moltmann (ed.), Anfa¨nge der dialektischen Theologie, i. 346. 44 The journal was founded in 1923 and became the principle organ of dialectical theology in the 1920s. On the circumstances of its founding, see Busch, Barth, 144 V. 45 Zahn-Harnack, Adolf von Harnack, 529–30. 46 Letter of 13 August 1928; cited in Zahn-Harnack, Adolf von Harnack, 536.

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Conclusion: Janus Gazing

theologians had staked out a new agenda for theology in the twentieth century, one that has since ramiWed far beyond the boundaries of German and Protestant thought. Yet the price for such an uncompromising (even dismissive) attitude towards the nineteenth century, one is hard pressed to deny, has ensured that this formidable epoch’s questions and issues would remain alive and well, particularly those concerning the relationship between theology and the university; between deeply held articles of faith and criticalscientiWc understanding; between the traditions of Christianity and their public, cultural expression; in short, between what Schleiermacher had called the ‘religious interest’ and the ‘scientiWc spirit’. The legacy then of the 1923 debate bristles with signiWcance even as it admits no easy interpretation. The debate’s polarizing points and counterpoints, its echoes of past and anticipation of future conXicts, and the far-reaching institutional, intellectual, and deeply personal stakes involved, remain today, a rich and relevant heritage, and a profoundly conXicted one.47 We remain, perhaps, between the times. 47 Of course, the contemporary literature on theology and the university, religion and higher education, and cognate topics is quite large. See Linell E. Cady and Delwin Brown (eds.), Religious Studies, Theology, and the University: ConXicting Maps, Changing Terrains (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), and Matthias Krieg and Martin Rose (eds.), Universitas in theologia—theologia in universitate (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1997).

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Index In the majority of cases, European city names refer to seats of universities. Abelard, Peter 52, 57 absolutism 46, 50, 90, 104, 213–14, 220–2, 229 academic freedom 25, 91, 97, 98, 100, 108–10, 125, 131, 132, 143, 175, 177, 180, 182, 183, 185, 188, 189, 243, 245, 254–6, 258, 264–5, 271, 273, 288–91, 298, 300, 334, 335, 348, 349, 361, 368, 374, 406; as a constitutional law 25, 256, 291 academies, knightly (Ritterakademien) 81, 84, 105 academies, scientiWc 47, 112, 116, 118, 121, 123, 167, 173, 336; see also Berlin Academy of Science Acton, Lord 143, 172, 362 Adams, Henry 347, 363 Altdorf 49, 84, 135 Altenstein, Karl von 19, 24, 27, 268, 269, 273, 275, 280, 284, 287, 288, 296, 297, 301, 351, 352, 406; inXuence of idealist philosophy on 23, 214–15, 224–5, 228–9, 240–6; tenure as Prussian Minister of Culture 214, 215, 224, 225, 228–30, 235, 236, 237, 239–67 Altertumswissenschaft; see classical studies and philology AlthoV, Friedrich 27, 294, 297–300, 302, 392 America; see United States of America American Revolution 21 American students at German universities 363–78 Amsterdam 384 Anabaptism 70, 71, 74 Andover Theological Seminary 367 Anglicanism 235, 356–7, 359 anti-Catholicism 7, 244, 244n.116, 246, 292, 330–2, 407; see also Kulturkampf anticlericalism 23, 224, 397 anti-Semitism 244 Anton, Paul 93

Aquinas, Thomas 52, 77, 78, 415; see also medieval scholasticism Aristotle, Aristotelianism 14, 54–6, 73, 74, 77, 78, 80, 306 Arnold, Matthew 44, 360–1 arts faculty (facultas artium); see philosophical faculty Aufkla¨rung; see Enlightenment Augsburg Confession 61, 64, 66, 67, 72, 75, 92, 106, 109, 126, 193, 216, 255; see also Lutheranism, Lutheran orthodoxy Augustine 16, 64, 65, 74, 83, 303, 306, 321, 400, 405, 408; see also Church Fathers Austria 144, 267, 292, 326, 386 awakening, pietist (Erweckungsbegwegung) 253, 264; see also pietism Baden 197, 208 Bahrdt, Carl Friedrich 85 Bamberg 49, 134 Bancroft, George 363–6 Barth, Karl 9, 200, 206, 270, 272, 303, 312, 322–3, 381, 404, 410–18; and historical criticism 411–12; conXict with Adolf von Harnack 410–18; see also dialectical theology Basle 49, 67, 76, 272, 288, 304, 312, 380, 384, 387–9, 411 Bauer, Bruno 37, 208, 227, 250, 253, 288–90, 373; see also Left Hegelianism Bauer, G. L. 158 Baumgarten, Sigmund Jacob 99, 101 Baur, Ferdinand Christian 112, 120, 250, 279–81, 371 Benary, Ferdinand 253 Ben-David, Joseph 264 Berlin 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 12, 15, 16, 24, 28, 30, 31, 34, 36, 37, 38, 41, 42, 47, 81, 85, 88, 90, 99, 103, 112, 119, 123, 129, 130–8, 141,

458

Index

Berlin (cont.) 198, 200, 201, 207, 209, 210, 226, 230, 233, 242, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 254, 259, 261, 263, 266, 270, 271, 272, 273, 276, 277, 278, 280, 282, 284, 286, 288, 294, 298, 299, 300, 303, 304, 310, 312, 324, 329, 333, 352, 354, 357, 365, 367, 371, 373, 375, 377, 379, 380, 386, 387, 391, 392, 394, 400, 404, 407, 410, 417; Academy of Science in 84, 113, 145, 148, 149, 154, 173, 179, 199, 208, 381, 398; founding of university in 36, 142–55; university statutes 178–83, 259; establishment of theological faculty in 155–97; founding of theological seminar in 185–6; statutes of theological faculty 183–93; early operations of theological faculty 178–97; semicentennial celebration of university (1860) 325, 334–5; centennial celebration of university (1910) 325, 335–41 Berne 292 Bernoulli, C. A. 322 Bethmann-Hollweg, Theobald von 336 Beyme, Karl Friedrich 145–52, 154, 160 biblical criticism; see historical criticism Biedermann, Alois Emmanuel 208 Bildung 28, 131, 138, 141, 174, 176, 181, 273 Bildungsbu¨rgertum 19 Bismarck, Otto von 267, 291–3, 300, 302, 354, 386 Bodelschwingh, Friedrich 15 Boeckh, August 180, 274, 277–9, 334–5, 365, 382 Boethius 51–2, 54, 56 Bok, Derek 43 Bonaparte, Napoleon 2–4, 13, 19, 20, 38, 133–5, 142, 143, 144, 148, 150, 151, 159, 166, 181, 196, 214, 215, 221–3, 229, 230, 239, 246, 287, 325, 338, 351, 354, 355; see also France Bonaventure 52 Bonn 38, 254, 259, 261, 262, 263, 268, 288, 289, 312, 331, 373, 411; founding of university in 246–8 Bosse, J. R. 297 Bousset, Wilhelm 390 Brandenburg 88–9, 216, 219 Brandes, Ernst 114

Breithaupt, Joachim Justus 93 Brentano, Clemens 179, 180 Breslau 38, 134, 135, 237, 246, 248, 331 Bretschneider, Karl Gottlieb 260 Brockhaus, Hermann 383 Brunner, Emil 404 Brussels 384 Burckhardt, Jacob 38–9, 277, 312, 324, 409 Butler, Nicholas Murray 363 Calixtus, Georg 75, 79, 107, 135 Calovius, Abraham 75, 79, 80 Calvin, John 236 Calvinism 23, 71, 76, 89, 90, 113, 114, 184, 193, 217, 220, 229, 231, 235, 248, 366 Cambridge 82, 356, 357, 359 Catherine the Great of Russia 2 Catholic Church, Catholicism 29, 34, 49, 52, 60, 69, 70, 78, 134, 135, 136, 185, 217, 218, 220, 235, 241, 244, 246, 247, 281, 292, 298, 299, 326, 330, 350, 351, 387, 397, 399, 407–9 Catholic theology, theological faculties 7, 7n.26, 17, 23, 25n.97, 26, 77, 135, 136, 202, 246, 285, 311, 330–2, 342, 353 censorship 102, 109–10, 124, 179, 182–3, 234, 28 Chicago 336 Chicago World’s Fair and German universities 325, 333, 341–7, 391 Church Fathers 306, 327, 404–5, 409 church history 76, 112, 117, 120, 165, 183–5, 191, 194, 195, 196, 206, 210, 262, 279, 312, 317, 320, 330, 343, 344, 357, 375, 388, 400; see also historical theology Church of England; see Anglicanism churches, church bodies 14–17, 23, 24, 26, 106, 136, 150, 161, 168, 169, 175, 177, 185, 187, 189, 196, 203–17, 220, 224–30, 232, 234, 237, 238, 239, 240, 242, 244, 256, 257, 263, 264, 266, 270, 300, 301, 310, 314, 316, 319, 320–3, 329–32, 337, 346, 368, 369, 373, 379, 386, 388, 390, 391, 393, 395, 400, 405, 406, 407, 411–12; see also clergy church-state relations 21, 24, 26, 37, 38, 69, 207, 212, 213, 264, 269, 380, 390, 395, 397, 399, 400, 409; in early modern central

Index Europe 215–22; in Prussia after 1806 222–39; see also Erastianism and Prussia church-state separation; see church-state relations civil religion 26 classical studies (Altertumswissenschaft) 116–19, 137, 138, 185; see also philology Clement of Alexandria 16, 17, 405 clergy 11, 24, 34, 35, 70, 103, 122, 157, 164, 186, 188, 201, 212, 224, 228, 230, 232, 233, 234, 236, 246, 255, 261, 265, 270, 274, 287, 290, 291, 300, 305, 312, 320, 328, 330, 346, 347, 349, 352, 355, 357, 361, 373, 374, 385, 398, 399; see also churches, church bodies Cogswell, Joseph Green 363, 378 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 356 Cologne 48, 57, 134, 246 colonialism 335, 341, 380, 385, 394 Columbia University 364 comparative religion; see science of religion confessionalism, confessionalization 1, 7, 14, 15, 25, 26, 27, 43, 46, 49, 68, 79, 82, 89, 91, 92, 93, 104, 108, 110, 111, 114, 128–31, 163, 167, 175, 184, 185, 187, 189, 192, 193, 199, 207, 209, 215, 216, 218, 220, 221, 225, 230, 231, 235, 237, 241, 255, 264, 269, 270, 289, 298, 299, 316, 319, 326, 330, 342, 343, 352, 386, 393, 408, 409 Congress of Vienna 23, 181, 183, 220, 231, 286; see also Restoration Conrad, Johannes 285, 328–9 consistories 22, 150, 216–19, 221, 224, 229–32, 234; see also churches, church bodies Copenhagen 145 Cornell University 131, 376, 384 Council of Trent 70 Cousin, Victor 352 Creuzer, Friedrich 382 crisis theology; see dialectical theology culture state (Kulturstaat) 20, 26–7, 37, 91, 127, 143, 158, 175, 177, 180, 213, 214, 226, 239, 240, 242, 243, 245, 261, 297, 298, 301, 325, 334, 338, 400–1, 406 Curtius, Ludwig 301–2

459

Danz, J. L. T. 318 Darwin, Charles 347 de Wette, W. M. L. 37, 120, 178, 194–5, 197, 198, 208–10, 242, 247, 254, 258, 312–13; conXict with Schleiermacher 199; dismissal from the University of Berlin 287–8 deconfessionalization 11, 184, 408 deism 46, 98–9; see also Enlightenment dialectical theology 270, 272, 303, 322, 410, 417; see also Karl Barth Diderot, Denis 2, 80 Dietrich, Alfred 396 Dillingen 49, 134 Dillmann, August 15–17 Dilthey, Wilhelm 116, 166, 312 Dohna, Alexander von 152, 214, 224, 229, 232 Do¨llinger, J. J. Ignaz von 326–8 Dresden 93, 387 Drey, Johan Sebastian 202, 311 du Bois-Reymond, Emil 297 Duisburg 49, 83, 89, 148 Eichhorn, Albert 390 Eichhorn, Friedrich 257, 289, 290 Eichhorn, J. G. 105, 119, 356, 365 encyclopedia 28–9, 42, 130, 139, 162, 201, 260, 271, 304, 306, 309–10, 314; see also theological encyclopedia Engel, J. J. 147–8, 375 Enlightenment 1, 3, 5, 35, 41, 44, 46, 48, 55, 71, 73, 76, 80, 83, 84, 86, 95, 97, 99, 100, 103, 105, 111, 124, 125, 128, 131, 135, 142, 144, 145, 165, 198, 213, 219, 223, 224, 394, 415 Erasmus, Desiderius 61–2, 71–2, 306 Erastianism 22, 23, 26, 37, 213, 215, 216, 219, 241, 264, 265, 349, 369; as characterizing the Prussian Reform Era 222, 225, 226, 230, 231, 235, 237, 239; see also churchstate relations Erfurt 48, 57, 82, 84, 135, 148 Erhard, J. B. 148 Erlangen 148, 160, 194, 195, 196, 242, 319 Erlangen Theology 319 Ernesti, August Wilhelm 308 Essays and Reviews 359 Evangelical Social Congress 396 n.464

460

Index

Everett, Edward 363–4, 366 examinations 24, 25, 27, 54, 65, 102, 132, 186, 191, 192, 208, 233, 283, 284, 305, 331n.217, 345, 367, 369, 370 faculties, university: four-faculty system 6, 11, 45, 51, 52, 60, 65, 86, 92, 97, 109, 121–2, 126, 131, 147, 157, 163, 167, 168, 179, 180, 181, 342; theological 2, 3, 4, 6, 10–18, 24, 25, 26, 33, 36, 37, 38, 40, 45, 46, 48, 51, 52, 53, 56, 57, 62, 64, 66, 69, 70, 71, 76, 85, 92, 93, 95, 98, 99, 101, 103–11, 114, 116, 117, 120, 122, 125–32, 136, 143, 146, 147, 148, 155, 156, 157, 159, 163, 164, 165, 167, 168, 169, 179, 180, 181, 183, 189, 191–9, 207, 208, 209, 212, 213, 215, 233, 242, 245, 247, 248, 250, 252, 253, 254, 255, 259, 260, 263, 265, 269, 270, 272, 274, 281, 284, 285, 286, 288, 289, 290, 291, 292, 294, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 320, 325, 326, 328, 329, 330, 332, 333, 340, 342, 345, 346, 347, 349, 352, 366, 368, 372, 374, 377, 378, 379, 381, 384, 385, 386, 390, 391–401, 403, 407–13; legal 6, 11, 45, 51, 104, 109, 122, 126, 136, 147, 157, 163, 167, 168, 179, 180, 181, 252, 299, 342, 396; medical 6, 11, 45, 51, 109, 122, 126, 136, 147, 157, 163, 167, 168, 179, 180, 181, 251, 252, 259, 294, 299, 340, 342; philosophical 3, 6, 11, 36, 41, 45, 47, 48, 51, 53, 60, 61, 62, 66, 73, 81, 95, 97, 104, 105, 109, 110, 114–29, 131, 136, 137, 138, 147, 155, 157, 159, 162, 163, 165, 167, 168, 169, 170, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 203, 204, 250, 251, 252, 258, 259, 261, 262, 270, 281–6, 294, 296, 298, 311, 320, 328, 334, 340, 341, 342, 364, 366, 385, 393, 394, 396, 399, 413 Falk, Adalbert 27, 297, 299, 302 Farley, Edward 308 Farrer, William 362 Feuerbach, Ludwig 373; see also Left Hegelianism Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 3, 20, 23, 28, 31, 34, 37, 179, 194, 198, 202, 204, 214, 224–6, 230, 242, 243, 245, 246, 248, 249, 251, 273, 278, 301, 303, 309, 310, 314, 330, 340, 379, 380; and the founding of the University of Berlin 131, 139, 141, 142, 143, 145, 146,

150, 151, 153, 155, 156, 160–6, 172, 175; see also German idealism Fischer, Fritz 229 Flexner, Abraham 5 Foerster, Erich 213, 221, 224, 234, 239 foreign students in German universities 348–78 France 1, 2, 20, 48, 51, 87, 212, 219, 223, 224, 229, 233, 234, 282, 287, 292, 347, 350, 351, 354, 362, 363, 395; system of higher education in 4, 135–7, 144, 166–7, 172, 352–5; inXuence of German universities and academic theology in 352–3; see also French Revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte Francke, August Hermann 35, 95–9, 101, 137, 255, 306, 321, 358; and the founding of The University of Halle, 89–90; and theological study at Halle, 93–4; see also pietism Franco-Prussian War 268, 354 Frankfurt am Main 398 Frankfurt an der Oder 49, 67, 83, 89, 135 Frankfurt Assembly (1848) 272, 290, 291; see also Revolution of 1848 fraternities (Burschenschaften) 247 Frei, Hans 10, 37, 40, 406 Freiburg im Breisgau 49, 285, 331 French Revolution 1–3, 19, 24, 36, 87, 102, 134, 136, 160, 198, 222–3, 228, 267, 309, 324, 349, 350, 355; see also France Friedrich I, king in Prussia, 219 Friedrich II (the Great), king of Prussia 82, 84, 96–8, 101, 123, 154, 219, 220, 289 Friedrich Wilhelm I, king of Prusssia 82, 84, 96, 219 Friedrich Wilhelm II, king of Prussia 83, 123, 174, 184, 219 Friedrich Wilhelm III, king of Prussia 23, 30, 103, 143, 149, 152–4, 181, 228, 232, 235–7, 249, 254–6 Friedrich Wilhelm IV, king of Prussia 290 Fries, Jacob Friedrich 194, 199 Fulda 134 Gabler, Johann Philipp 158, 194 Gatterer, Johann Christoph 116–17

Index Gebhard, J. B. 87 Geisteswissenschaften; see humanities Geneva 384 George II, king of England and elector of Hanover, 45–6 Gerhard, Johann 75–9, 306 Gerlach, Ernst Ludwig von 255 Gerlach, Otto von 254 German Confederation 182, 218, 220, 287 German Evangelical Church Conference 219 German idealism 20, 32n.27, 36, 44, 134, 139, 140, 141, 144, 146, 179, 214, 235, 237, 239, 242, 273, 274, 306, 309–10, 313, 322, 398; and science 28–32, 278–9, 285; and the founding of the University of Berlin 155–77; inXuence on the Prussian Reform Era 23–4, 222–30 German national uniWcation 13, 387, 267–8, 292, 339, 387 German Reformed Church in America 371 Gesenius, Friedrich 25, 120, 254–6 Gesner, Johann 115, 118–19 Giessen 49, 194, 282 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 2, 85–6, 115, 119, 137, 250, 282, 365, 383 Gogarten, Friedrich 404 Go¨rres, Joseph von 382 Go¨ssler, Gustav von 297 Go¨ttingen 12, 35–6, 38, 45–7, 79, 81, 82, 84, 99, 122, 131, 135, 137, 146, 148, 153, 184, 185, 194, 195, 197, 223, 242, 247, 248, 268, 272, 277, 308, 324, 342, 356, 357, 364, 365, 366, 373, 380, 385–7, 390, 411–12; founding of university at 87–8, 104–21; inXuence of J. L. von Mosheim during founding period 107–14; development of the idea of academic freedom at 108–10; development of philosophical faculty in the eighteenth century 114–21 Graf, Friedrich Wilhelm 26 Graz 49 Great Britain 18, 282, 293, 327, 347, 352; inXuence of German universities and academic theology in 355–63 Great War 7, 267, 272, 293, 303, 322, 395, 410, 417 Gregory the Great 406

461

Greifswald 49, 67, 261 Griesbach, J. J. 194, 308 Gro¨ningen 384 Grotius, Hugo 95 Gunkel, Hermann 390 Habilitation, Habilitationsschrift 190, 259 Haenisch, Konrad 400 Hagenbach, Karl Rudolf 202, 208, 210, 311, 344; and theological encyclopedia 270–1, 304, 311–18, 322, 344 Halle 1, 12, 25, 35–6, 38, 47, 81, 83, 105, 106, 111, 115, 121, 122, 124, 135, 146, 148, 149, 150, 152, 154, 159, 184, 185, 196, 197, 201, 247, 248, 261, 274, 285, 304, 307, 308, 319, 343, 358, 366, 371, 373, 386, 391, 398; founding of university at 87–94; as seat of pietism 93–5; and Christian WolV, 95–8; as a seat of rationalist theology and biblical criticism 98–104, 254–5 Haller, Albrecht von 112, 113 Hamburg 197 Hammerstein, Notker 92 Hanover 35, 45, 104, 105, 113, 115, 146, 356 Hardenburg, Karl August von 19, 214, 222, 224, 228–9, 233, 242, 245, 251 Harless, G. C. Adolf von 319 Harnack, Adolf von 9, 15, 16, 17, 22, 205, 241, 243, 269, 272, 278, 293, 298, 303, 344, 371, 380, 388, 389, 403–9; calling to Berlin 299–301; as defender of the theological faculty 391–402; conXict with Karl Barth 410–18 Harper, William Rainey 376–7 Harvard University 43, 364, 365, 366, 384 Hauck, Albert 375 Haupt, Erich 343, 345–6 Hegel, G. W. F. 4, 12, 23, 28, 32, 98, 134, 139, 140, 159, 208, 210, 214, 224–6, 240, 252, 278, 279, 301, 309, 314, 365, 399, 408; calling to Berlin 248–50 Hegelianism 32, 37, 98, 140, 196, 198, 199, 240, 250, 253, 281, 289, 316, 318, 346; and research imperative 278–9; see also Left Hegelianism Heidelberg 37, 48, 51, 61, 62, 67, 135, 194, 195, 196, 197, 249, 285, 373 Heidelberg Confession 321

462

Index

Heinrici, Georg 12, 311; and theological encyclopedia 320–2 Helmstedt 12, 49, 79, 105, 107, 110, 135 Hengstenberg, E. W. 37, 254–5, 264, 288, 371 Herborn 82 Herder, J. G. 80, 119, 137, 194, 199, 307, 382, 397, 398 Hering, Hermann 344 Hermann, Wilhelm 269, 410 Hermes, Georg, 246–7 Herzog, J. J. 260, 375 Heyne, Christian Gottlob 113, 115, 118–19, 185, 277, 356 historical criticism 24, 37, 98, 100, 120, 195, 199, 205, 207, 209, 210, 247, 249, 264, 275, 277–81, 305, 308, 313, 316, 317, 321, 330, 339, 346, 353, 359, 362, 380, 394, 409, 411, 414, 415; see also historicism and exegetical theology historicism 76, 100, 206, 271, 279, 311, 313, 315–18, 321, 324, 348, 379, 414; see also historical theology and historical criticism history of religion; see science of religion History of Religions School (religionsgeschichtliche Schule) 390, 393 history: development as an academic discipline 115–17, 275–6, 344; see also Leopold von Ranke Hofmann, A. W. 277, 284–5 Hofmann, J. C. K. von 319 Hohenzollern dynasty 88–9, 94, 105, 297, 339 Holborn, Hajo 24, 225–6, 239 Holy Roman Empire 1, 14, 49, 68, 134, 141, 218–19, 222 Huber, E. R. 265 humanism 49, 53–4, 59, 60–8, 71–3, 117, 312 humanities, human sciences 28, 41, 136, 278, 284, 285, 378, 398; see also philosophical faculty Humboldt, Alexander von 146, 282 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 31, 37, 85, 88, 104, 119, 178, 180, 184, 193, 215, 230, 232, 241, 245, 268, 273, 275, 282, 295, 342, 360, 398; and the founding of the University of Berlin, 131, 138, 143, 146, 151–5, 160, 172–7; and the reform of Prussia’s secondary school system, 283–4

Hume, David 382 Hyperius, Andreas Gerhard 75, 76, 306 idealist philosophy; see German idealism imperialism; see colonialism Industrial Revolution 267 industrialization 29, 251, 267–9, 293–7, 340–2, 360 Ingolstadt 49, 134 Innsbruck 49 institutes 30, 261, 274, 294–5, 302; see also seminars Italy 329 Jacks, Lawrence Pearsall 269, 363 Japan 293 Jaspers, Karl 312 JeVerson, Thomas 364 Jena 12, 49, 67, 75, 77, 96, 105, 124, 146, 156, 160, 194, 197, 242, 265, 373; as a stronghold of German idealism in the late eighteenth century, 139 Jews, Judaism 23, 26, 121, 186, 208, 241, 244; see also anti-Semitism Johns Hopkins University 5, 376 Jonas, Justas 66–7 Jordon, Louis 384 Joseph II, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire 144 Jowett, Benjamin 359 Judon, Harry Pratt 336 July Revolution (1830) 351 Kafton, J. W. M. 336–8 Ka¨hler, Martin 344–5 Kaiser Wilhelm Society 381 Kaiserreich; see Second German Empire Kant, Immanuel 3, 36, 41, 47, 79, 96, 98, 100, 104, 194, 198, 199, 225, 230, 246, 251, 299, 308, 340; and ‘‘the conXict of the faculties’’ 121–91; impact of thought on the founding of the University of Berlin 131, 139, 155–63, 175–6 Karlsbad Decrees (1819) 25, 182–3, 240, 264, 286, 296 Kattenbusch, Ferdinand 9 Kaufmann, Georg 50, 324

Index Kautsch, Emil 343 Kawerau, D. G. 347 Kiel 49, 268, 292 Kierkegaard, Søren 16, 409 Kingdom of Westphalia 148, 149, 159 Ko¨nigsberg 36, 38, 49, 67, 79, 83, 89, 123, 124, 144, 160, 230, 254, 261, 262 Ko¨pke, Rudolf 334 Kortum, Carl Arnold 83 Kotzebue, August von 287 Kulturkampf 299, 331, 407 Kulturprotestantismus; see liberal Protestantism Lachmann, Karl 275 Lagarde, Paul Anton de 272, 380, 385–90, 409 Landeshut 134 Lausanne 384 Left Hegelianism 227, 249, 288, 373; see also Hegelianism Lehr- und Lernfreiheit; see academic freedom Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 81, 84, 86, 95, 96 Leiden 384 Leipzig 49, 59, 66, 75, 89, 90, 93, 94, 276, 373, 382, 383, 387, 394 Lenz, Max 146, 156, 182, 298, 324, 325, 338–40 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 2, 85, 86, 308 Lexis, Wilhelm 342, 346–7 liberal arts (artes liberales) 54–5 liberal Protestantism 3, 26, 34, 60, 200, 205, 241, 270, 298, 299, 303, 327, 392, 393, 401, 405, 407–9, 412; in the criticism of Karl Barth 410–18 Liebig, Justus 282 Linz 49 Lombard, Peter 56–7, 59, 65, 311 London 47, 112, 341, 351, 383 Loofs, Friedrich 344 Lowth, Robert 356 Lu¨cke, Friedrich 37, 208, 209, 247, 248, 254, 312, 357, 401 Luther, Martin 1, 63, 68, 73, 76, 109, 137, 175, 216, 236, 321, 397, 398, 400, 416; on the need for university reform 61–2; on theological education 72–3 Lutheranism, Lutheran orthodoxy 23, 61, 71–80, 89, 90, 92, 96, 99, 106, 150, 184, 193, 194, 199, 213, 218, 220, 221, 231, 232,

463

235–7, 241, 248; see also Protestant scholasticism Lyotard, Jean-Franc¸ois 29, 42–3, 128 MacIntyre, Alasdair 41–3, 125 Mainz 49, 134 Mannheim 84 Marburg 12, 49, 67, 96, 97, 135, 268, 299, 399 Marheinecke, Philipp Konrad 37, 178, 194–9, 208–9, 214, 250, 253, 288 Maritain, Jacques 21, 407 Marsden, George 42, 364 Marsh, Herbert 356 Marx, Karl 249 Massow, Julius E. W. E. von 143–6, 221 mediating theology (Vermittlungstheologie) 188, 247–8, 313 Meinecke, Friedrich 235 Meiners, Christoph, 122–3, 324, 382 Melanchthon, Philip 61, 95, 101, 116, 117, 260, 306; on the reform of German universities, 63–9; on the study of theology 71–8 Michaelis, J. D. 82, 105, 113, 115, 116, 119, 120, 122, 308, 351, 356 Milbank, John 41 mission canonica 331 modern state 10, 13–15, 18, 19, 27, 35, 98, 110, 127–9, 132, 133, 170, 171, 174, 175, 177, 210, 214, 215, 224, 226, 265, 266, 406, 408; and centralization, 20, 22, 91, 132, 152, 172, 176, 215, 219, 221, 223, 224, 227, 229, 232, 237, 239, 253, 296 modernity, modernization 5, 8, 11, 18, 21, 22, 27, 36, 38, 40, 41, 48, 60, 68, 97, 104, 111, 114, 128, 132, 156, 169, 172, 179, 198, 199, 207, 214, 219, 224, 225, 242, 264, 265, 293, 326, 333, 359, 362, 379, 380, 386, 396, 403, 418 Mommsen, Theodor 275, 298, 390 Montauban 353 Montgelas, Count Maximilian von 135 Morill Land Grant Act (1862) 378 Mosheim, Johann Lorenz von 36, 76, 79, 122, 307; inXuence on the founding of the University of Go¨ttingen 107–14; as a pioneering church historian 112, 344

464

Index

Mulert, Hermann 17 Mu¨ller, Friedrich Max 362, 390, 393; and the science of religion 382–5 Mu¨ller, Johannes 252, 282 Mu¨nchhausen, Gerlach Adolf von 105–8, 112, 113, 114 Munich 30, 84, 134, 135, 285, 326, 331 Mu¨nster 134, 148, 261, 331, 411 Mursinna, Samuel 307 Mu¨sebeck, Ernst 225, 246 myth criticism of the Bible 120, 195, 210; see also historical criticism national education (Nationalerziehung) 20, 23, 141, 224, 237, 242, 261, 264 National Socialism 302 nationalism 10, 134, 156, 214, 287, 312, 325, 330, 333, 334, 341, 386, 387, 397, 398; during the founding of the University of Berlin 141–2, 150–1 natural law 95 natural philosophy (Naturphilosophie) 157, 281–2 natural science 8, 27, 96, 145, 182, 251, 260, 281–3, 285, 294, 296, 328, 342, 347 Naturwissenschaften; see natural science Neander, August 37, 178, 194, 196–7, 200, 208, 209, 247, 312, 344, 357, 371 neohumanism (Neuhumanismus) 118–19, 131, 137, 138, 141, 144, 146, 179, 275 neology (Neologie) 98–9, 102, 199 neo-orthodoxy; see dialectical theology. Newman, John Henry 358, 362 Nicolovius, Ludwig 214–15, 230, 237, 241, 246 Niebuhr, Barthold Georg 275–6, 382 Niemeyer, A. H. 100–3, 124, 254 Nietzsche, Friedrich 270, 272, 274, 312, 386–8, 409; as friend and housemate of Franz Overbeck 387–8 Nipperdey, Thomas 19, 20, 177 Nitzsch, Karl Immanuel 37, 188, 247–8, 254, 312, 334, 357 Nolte, J. W. H. 150 No¨sselt, J. A. 100–3, 124, 307–8, 357 November Revolution (1918) 216, 395–6

Oaths, of confessional loyalty 29, 46, 58, 92, 120–1, 192–3, 291–2, 386 Old Lutherans 26, 237, 244 Olmu¨tz 49 Origen 311 Osnabru¨ck 49 Overbeck, Franz 272, 312, 380, 387–90, 409 Oxford 51, 82, 356, 359, 362, 383–4 Oxford Movement 358 Paderborn 49, 134, 148 Pannenberg, Wolfhart 207, 311 Paris 12, 47–53, 56, 57, 66, 112, 135, 245, 282, 329, 383, 391; inXuence on make-up of German universities 49–51 pastors, pastoral oYce; see clergy patronage rights 217–18, 221, 230, 232–4 Pattison, Mark 359, 361 Paulsen, Friedrich 15, 16, 50, 70, 97, 166, 269, 301, 324, 329–32, 407 Paulus, H. E. G. 194 Peabody, Francis G. 269 Peace of Augsburg 216, 218 Peace of Tilsit 149, 151, 160 Peace of Westphalia (1648) 68, 216, 218 Pestalozzi, Heinrich 138, 141, 160, 230 PXeiderer, Otto 269, 299, 362 philology 8, 66, 99, 104, 116, 118–20, 138, 147, 163–6, 168, 202, 204, 252, 261, 262, 263, 269, 270, 274–8, 281, 282, 310, 314, 327, 364, 366, 379, 383, 405; see also classical studies philosophes; see Enlightenment pietism 15, 26, 80, 90, 98, 99, 100, 137, 236, 253, 254, 260, 266, 269, 270, 289, 306, 308, 358, 397, 406, 409, 415; at the University of Halle 93–6; see also Philipp Jakob Spener and August Hermann Francke Planck, J. G. 194, 307–8, 365 Plato 164, 199, 205 positive science 157–8, 203, 310, 314, 389 positivism 29, 30–1, 33, 44, 134, 268, 269, 270, 271, 273, 332 post-liberal theology 44 Prague 48, 49, 51, 145 presbyteries; see churches, church bodies private lecturers (Privatdozenten) 117, 182, 190–1, 209, 247, 257–8, 288, 294, 372

Index professionalization 25, 116, 138, 241, 264, 273–6, 284, 361 Protestant Church Union (1817) 23, 26, 89, 184, 193, 211, 230, 235–7, 247, 248, 264, 373 Protestant scholasticism 14, 68, 71, 72, 90, 93, 95, 101, 306; and the study of theology, 75–80 Prussia 1, 4, 6, 7, 10, 12, 13, 18–27, 35, 38, 82, 83, 84, 87, 88, 91, 96, 98, 100, 101, 105, 113, 121, 124, 125, 128, 133, 134, 138, 141, 142, 144, 145, 147–50, 156, 159, 160, 167, 177, 182, 183, 191, 196, 210, 213, 214, 218–23, 248, 249, 267, 268, 274, 283, 284, 285, 287, 288, 290, 312, 325, 326, 334, 335, 339, 351, 352, 354, 361, 365, 387, 395, 406; Civil Code of (Allgemeines Landrecht) 6, 22, 181, 182, 219–21; during Reform Era 19, 20, 22, 37, 132, 152, 172, 177, 210, 213, 222–34, 250, 261, 264, 302, 401; Constitution of 1850 and academic freedom 25, 256, 291; activities of Ministry of Culture (Kultusministerium) in nineteenth century 22–7, 37, 132, 152, 174, 176, 188, 215, 220, 222, 229–35, 236, 237, 239–66, 276, 283, 294, 296–302, 335, 336, 341, 352, 371, 396, 400; state’s spending on universities 251, 297; territorial church of 16, 18, 207, 213, 214, 216–22, 261, 289; church-state relations in 22–5, 212–39; inXuence on German university system during imperial era 267–8, 297, 301 Pufendorf, Samuel 46 Pusey, E. B. 357–8, 362 Rade, Martin 17, 241, 269, 410, 413, 417 Ranke, Leopold von 116, 261, 382, 390; and the shaping of the historical profession 276–8 rationalism (Rationalismus) 98–9, 103, 228, 254–5, 271, 308, 319, 344; as a catch-all characterization of German theology by foreigners, 349, 356–8, 368, 374–5 Reformation, Protestant 7, 14, 34, 49, 50, 53, 54, 82, 98, 109, 116, 131, 151, 196, 199, 211, 213, 239, 306, 307, 319, 349, 350, 368, 372, 401, 413; and German universities 60–70; eVects on theological study 70–80; eVects

465

on church-state relations 215–22; tercentary celebration of 235–6 Reformed Christianity; see Calvinism Reichdeputationshauptschluß (1803) 222, 234 Reimarus, Hermann Samuel 86 Reischle, Max 391 religious toleration 89–91, 97, 219, 220 Renaissance 49, 50, 54, 60 Renan, Ernest 353, 354 research, reseach imperative 32, 40, 132, 137, 140, 162, 167, 168, 173–5, 188, 192, 198, 241, 250, 258, 262, 269, 273, 274–9, 281, 283, 286, 295, 298, 313–15, 321, 326, 329, 334, 338, 349, 354, 416; see also science (Wissenschaft), German idealism, and positivism Restoration 4, 210, 351; see also Congress of Vienna Reuchlin, Johann 62, 63 Re´ville, Albert 384, 391 Revolution of 1848 267, 272, 290–1, 386; see also Frankfurt Assembly Rhineland 23, 235, 246–8, 288 Ringer, Fritz 291, 302 Rinteln 49, 135 Rites Controversy (Agendenstreit) 230, 236 Ritschl, Albrecht 241, 269, 320, 336, 380 Robinson, Edward 363, 366–70, 373, 374 Romanticism 119, 157, 179 Rome 71, 153, 230 Rose, H. J. 357–8 Rosenkranz, Karl 318 Rostock 49, 82 Rothe, Richard 15, 16, 24, 62, 208, 318, 408 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 138, 141 Ruge, Arnold 288 Salzburg 49 Sand, Karl 287 Saussaye, Pierre Daniel Chantepie de la 384 Savigny, Karl Friedrich von 179, 180, 252, 278, 365 SchaV, Philip 197, 208, 266, 311; on German universities and theology 370–6 Scheibel, Johannes G. 237

466

Index

Schelling, Friedrich 30, 34, 139, 142, 146, 151, 153, 155, 194, 196, 199, 203, 225, 282, 309, 399; on academic study and theology 156–9 Schiller, Friedrich 146–7, 153, 156, 194 Schlatter, Adolf 300n107 Schlegel, A. W. 119, 145 Schlegel, Friedrich 119 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 3, 6, 9, 28, 36, 76, 101, 207, 209, 210, 226, 228, 229, 231, 236, 247, 248, 250, 254, 256, 262, 265, 268, 270, 272, 273, 280, 287, 295, 327, 334, 336, 344, 345, 351, 356, 357, 358, 362, 365, 377, 380, 382, 385, 386, 388, 390, 393, 394, 395, 397, 398, 400, 401, 417, 418; and the founding of the University of Berlin, 131, 133, 141, 146, 149, 150, 151, 153, 155, 156, 159, 166–72, 173, 174, 175, 177; as a pastor, 196, 208; activities on Berlin’s Wrst theological faculty, 178–89, 193, 194, 195; eVorts to reenvision theological education, 197–207; general inXuence in nineteenth-century theological education, 303, 304, 306, 307, 310–21, 323 Schlo¨zer, A. L. 115–17 Schmalz, T. A. H. 146–7, 149, 150, 154 scholarship, see research and science (Wissenschaft) scholasticism, medieval 54–9, 61, 63, 65, 67, 71, 72, 74, 76, 78 Schuckmann, Friedrich 154, 180, 181, 182, 230, 240, 241, 246 Schulze, Johannes 24, 27, 215, 241, 245, 249–64, 269, 275–6, 280, 296–7, 302, 351–2 Schwarz, Karl 208 science (Wissenschaft) 2, 6, 7, 11, 13–18, 36, 40, 41, 43, 55, 76, 77, 114, 126, 128, 179, 187, 189, 192, 193, 199, 202–11, 215, 241, 243, 245, 247, 249, 260, 263, 264, 265, 266, 270, 273, 274, 277, 278, 280, 283, 284, 288, 289, 292, 293, 295, 300, 327, 328, 331, 332, 333, 334, 335, 337, 338, 339, 340, 341, 342, 344, 346, 347, 354, 360, 361, 370, 371, 375, 376, 377, 379, 386, 388, 397, 400, 401, 405, 406, 408, 409, 411, 414, 417; growth of

idea of in nineteenth century 27–35, 130–2, 137–42; in theoretical discussions preceding the founding of the University of Berlin 143, 147, 153, 155–62, 164, 167–77; in the literature of theological encyclopedia 305, 308, 310, 312, 314, 319–23; as an ideology (Wissenschaftsideologie) 28, 137, 138, 157, 167, 288, 306, 309, 310, 312; see also research, research imperative; German idealism; positivism; and specialization science of missions (Missionswissenschaft) 11, 186, 394 science of religion (Religionswissenschaft) 11, 165, 320, 340, 379–85, 391, 392, 394, 399, 409, 411, 416–17; university chairs devoted to 383–5, 394 ScientiWc Revolution 47, 83 scientiWc theology (wissenschaftliche Theologie) 6, 143, 242, 264, 266, 270, 272, 274, 289, 312, 332, 344, 345, 359, 362, 372, 385, 389, 411, 414–16 Scotland 356, 362 Second German Empire (1871–1918) 13, 26, 241, 268, 269, 292–303, 331, 335, 339, 342, 380, 381, 385, 389, 391, 395, 396, 404; see also German national uniWcation Second World War 301 secondary schools: Gymnasium 138, 145, 167, 283–4, 295–6; Realschule 296 secularism, secularization 8, 9, 22, 43, 50, 68, 69, 218, 219, 230, 234, 329 seminar, seminar method 24, 30, 98, 99, 118, 120, 140, 185, 186, 209, 247, 261–4, 274, 276, 281, 294, 295, 301, 405, 410 seminary 5, 70, 135, 136, 164, 248, 320, 352, 355, 366, 374, 375, 377, 378, 380, 386, 397, 409 Semler, Johann Salomo 76, 99, 100–1, 111, 307–08 separation of chuch and state; see church-state relations Sigismund, Johann 23 social democracy 241, 268, 291, 380–1, 395–7, 408–9 Social Democratic Party (SPD); see social democracy

Index Sola scriptura 64, 66, 70, 316; see also Reformation Solz, August von Trott zu 336, 338 Sombart, Werner 302 Sonderweg 26, 225 Sorbonne 136 Spahn, Martin 298 specialization 29–33, 241, 250–2, 258, 268, 273, 277, 278, 282, 284–6, 295, 306, 309, 313, 315, 320, 322, 327, 334, 337, 343, 345, 361; see also research, research imperative; science; and positivism Spener, Philipp Jakob 80, 94, 101, 137, 306, 358; see also pietism Spranger, Eduard 29–31, 334 St. Louis World’s Fair and German universities 325, 333, 341–2 Stae¨l, Madame de 350–1, 356, 364 Sta¨udlin, Carl Friedrich 36, 124, 365 SteVens, Heinrich 141, 149, 150–1, 155, 159–60, 282 Stein, Karl von 151–2, 214, 222–4, 227–9, 232, 289 Strasbourg 75, 268, 285, 298, 353–4 Strauss, David Friedrich 37, 120, 195, 208, 210, 227, 265, 279, 280–1, 289, 317, 353, 358, 373, 388; see also myth criticism of the Bible Stuart, Moses 366 Studia humanitatis; see humanism Studt, Konrad von 297 superintendents 216, 231 Su¨vern, Johann Wilhelm 214, 230, 241, 246 Switzerland 160, 208, 288, 292, 312, 371, 372, 384, 410, 417 Sybel, Heinrich von 32, 33, 224 synods; see churches, church bodies Tappan, Henry P. 376 technical universities (Technische Hochschulen) 295, 297, 347 Teller, Wilhelm A. 85, 122 territorial church (Landeskirche) 68–9, 207; development in post-Reformation era, 214–16 theological encyclopedia 13, 32, 38, 71, 101, 150, 190, 270, 271, 303–23; and Friedrich

467

Schleiermacher 197–207, 310–11; and Karl Rudolf Hagenbach 311–18; and Karl Barth 322–3 theological prolegomena 70–80 theology, ‘‘queen of the sciences’’ 3, 6, 8, 56, 58, 123, 129, 131, 327 theology, branches of study: exegetical 10, 11, 76, 99, 120, 183–5, 191, 194, 195, 202, 206, 262, 308, 313, 315–18, 321, 322, 343, 395, 400, 412; historical 11, 76, 165, 202, 205, 206, 308, 311, 313, 315–18, 321, 322, 343, 344, 395, 400; philosophical (or systematic) 11, 71, 183, 184, 191, 194, 202, 205, 308, 313, 315–18, 322, 332, 343, 344, 345, 395, 400; practical 11, 76, 94, 108, 183, 190, 202, 204, 205, 208, 210, 248, 263, 308, 310, 313–19, 322, 343, 344, 395, 400 theology, periodicals and journals 34, 209–10, 247, 254–6, 277, 366–7, 394, 397, 413, 417 Thirty Years War 82 Thirwall, Connop 356 Tholuck, F. A. G. 37, 254, 260, 264, 319, 357, 371 Thomasius, Christian 46, 89, 90, 94, 95, 122 Thwing, Charles 377–8 Ticknor, George 363–6 Tocqueville, Alexis de 21, 226, 374 Tokyo 384 toleration; see religious toleration Treitschke, Heinrich von 37, 240, 312 Trier 49, 134 Troeltsch, Ernst 18, 212–13, 242, 269, 379, 408 Tu¨bingen 38, 49, 62, 67, 75, 96, 135, 208, 249, 279–80, 285, 311, 331, 371, 373 Tu¨bingen School; see Tu¨bingen Turner, R. Steven 28, 140, 264 Twesten, August 37, 206, 208, 334, 371 Union Theological Seminary (New York) 367, 371, 375 Unitarianism 357, 363 United States of America 5, 8, 19, 21, 24, 26, 42, 115, 212, 224, 237, 293, 305, 313, 327, 335, 336, 341, 347–9, 352, 410; inXuence of German universities and academic theology in 363–78 Universities Tests Act (1871) 361 University of Chicago 376–77, 384 University of London 359 n.321

468

Index

University of Michigan 376 University of Virginia 364 university: ceremonies and commemorative events 46, 58, 156, 179, 189, 192, 271, 324, 325, 332–41; academic degrees (including doctorate) 53, 54, 56, 58, 65, 67, 86, 111, 185, 186, 190–92, 248, 259, 325, 332, 338, 345, 364, 376; dress and insignia 192, 333; statutes and regulations 12, 46, 49, 52, 64, 65, 91–3, 104, 106, 108–11, 114, 117, 120, 178–85, 294; worship services in 185, 187–8, 248, 336; see also Berlin, Go¨ttingen, Halle, and other universities Uppsala 384 urbanization 293 Utrecht 105, 384 Vatke, Wilhelm 37, 208, 253 Vienna 17, 48, 51, 59, 145, 235, 292 Virchow, Rudolf 30–1, 142, 282, 283 Voltaire 2, 80, 86, 219 Walch, J. G. 307 Wars of Liberation (1813) 181, 334 Wartburg Festival (1817) 240 Weber, Max 9, 30–1, 257, 273, 297, 301–2, 329, 403 Wednesday Society (Mittwochsgesellschaft) 87, 121–2 Wegscheider, J. A. 25, 254–56 Weimar 119, 194, 365, 381, 395 Weimar Constitution 67, 272, 291, 395–6, 401, 409, 412 Weimar Republic 38, 238, 272, 397, 404

Weiss, Johannes 390 Welch, Claude 10, 34, 198 Wellhausen, Julius 105, 195, 269 Westphalia 235, 248 White, Andrew Dickson 33, 131, 363 Wilhelm I, king of Prussia and German emperor 334 Wilhelm II, king of Prussia and German emperor 300, 303, 335, 338–9, 341, 380, 388, 392, 395–6 Wilken, Robert Louis 405 Willich, Henriette von 201 Winckelmann, J. J. 119, 137 Wissenschaftlichkeit; see science Wittenberg 1, 12, 15, 49, 62, 75, 77, 79, 89, 90, 93, 135, 194, 247–8, 398; reform of university and theological curriculum during Reformation 63–7 Wolf, F. A. 119, 146–7, 149, 150, 153, 185, 261, 365, 382; role in shaping philology as an academic discipline 274–7 WolV, Christian 47, 94–9 104, 106, 111, 122 Wo¨llner, Johann Christoph, and Religious Edict of 1788, 101–4, 123–5, 143, 174, 198, 219, 221 World War I; see Great War World’s Parliament of Religions 391 Wu¨rttemberg 208, 270 Wu¨rzburg 48, 331 Zahn-Harnack, Agnes von 417 Zedlitz, K. A. Freiherr von 98, 123, 221 Zorn, Philipp 16