History of the Reformation. Thomas M. Lindsay

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СКАЧАТЬ he adds with honest indignation, “of the shameful and vicious life by which our worthy youth have been so grievously corrupted.” Two or three of the autobiographies of these wandering students have survived; and two of them, those of Thomas Platter and of Johann Butzbach, belong to Luther's time, and give a vivid picture of their lives.26

      Germany had no lack of schools and universities, but it can scarcely be said that they did more than serve as a preparation for the entrance of the Renaissance movement. During the fifteenth century all the Universities were under the influence of the Church, and Scholasticism prescribed the methods of study. Very little of the New Learning was allowed to enter. It is true that if Köln and perhaps Ingolstadt be excepted, the Scholastic which was taught represented what were supposed to be the more advanced opinions—those of John Duns Scotus, William of Occam, and Gabriel Biel, rather than the learning of Thomas Aquinas and other great defenders of papal traditions; but it lent itself as thoroughly as did the older Scholastic to the discussion of all kinds of verbal and logical subtleties. Knowledge of every kind was discussed under formulæ and phrases sanctioned by long scholastic use. It is impossible to describe the minute distinctions and the intricate reasoning based upon them without exceeding the space at our disposal. It is enough to say that the prevailing course of study furnished an imposing framework without much solid content, and provided an intellectual gymnastic without much real knowledge. A survival can be seen in the Formal Logic still taught. The quantity of misspent ingenuity called forth to produce the figures and moods, and bestowed on discovering and arranging all possible moods under each figure and in providing all with mnemonic names—Barbara, Celarent, Darii, Ferioque prioris, etc.—affords some insight into the scholastic methods in use in these universities of the fifteenth century.

      Then it must be remembered that the scholarship took a quasi-ecclesiastical form. The universities were all monastic institutions, where the teachers were professional and the students amateur celibates. The scholars were gathered into hostels in which they lived with their teachers, and were taught to consider themselves very superior persons. The statutes of mediæval Oxford declare that God created “clerks” with gifts of intelligence denied to mere lay persons; that it behoved “clerks” to exhibit this difference by their outward appearance; and that the university tailors, whose duty it was to make men extrinsecus what God had made them intrinsecus, were to be reckoned as members of the University. Those mediæval students sometimes assumed airs which roused the passions of the laity, and frequently led to tremendous riots. Thus in 1513 the townsfolk of Erfurt battered in the gates of the University with cannon, and after the flight of the professors and students destroyed almost all the archives and library. About the same time some citizens of Vienna having jeered at the sacred student dress, there ensued the “Latin war,” which literally devastated the town. This pride of separation between “clerks” and laity culminated in the great annual procession, when the newly capped graduates, clothed in all the glory of new bachelors' and masters' gowns and hoods, marched through the principal streets of the university town, in the midst of the university dignitaries and frequently attended by the magistrates in their robes. Young Luther confessed that when he first saw the procession at Erfurt he thought that no position on earth was more enviable than that of a newly capped graduate.

      Mediæval ecclesiastical tradition brooded over all departments of learning; and the philosophy and logic, or what were supposed to be the philosophy and logic, of Aristotle ruled that tradition. The reverence for the name of Aristotle almost took the form of a religious fervour. In a curious mediæval Life of Aristotle the ancient pagan thinker is declared to be a forerunner of Christ. All who refused to accept his guidance were heretics, and his formal scheme of thought was supposed to justify the refined sophisms of mediæval dialectic. His system of thought was the fortified defence which preserved the old and protected it from the inroads of the New Learning. Hence the hatred which almost all the German Humanists seem to have had for the name of Aristotle. The attitudes of the partisans of the old and of the new towards the ancient Greek thinker are represented in two pictures, each instinct with the feeling of the times. In one, in the church of the Dominicans in Pisa, Aristotle is represented standing on the right with Plato on the left of Thomas Aquinas, and rays streaming from their opened books make a halo round the head of the great mediæval theologian and thinker. In the other, a woodcut published by Hans Holbein the younger in 1527, Aristotle with the mediæval doctors is represented descending into the abodes of darkness, while Jesus Christ stands in the foreground and points out the true light to a crowd of people, among whom the artist has figured peasants with their flails.

§ 6. The earlier German Humanists.

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      When the beginnings of the New Learning made their appearance in Germany, they did not bring with them any widespread revival of culture. There was no outburst, as in Italy, of the artistic spirit, stamping itself upon such arts as painting, sculpture, and architecture, which could appeal to the whole public intelligence. The men who first felt the stirrings of the new intellectual life were, for the most part, students who had been trained in the more famous schools of the Brethren of the Common Life, all of whom had a serious aim in life. The New Learning appealed to them not so much a means of self-culture as an instrument to reform education, to criticise antiquated methods of instruction, and, above all, to effect reforms in the Church and to purify the social life. One of the most conspicuous of such scholars was Cardinal Nicolas Cusanus27 (1401–1464). He was a man of singularly open mind, who, while he was saturated with the old learning, was able to appreciate the new. He had studied the classics in Italy. He was an expert mathematician and astronomer. Some have even asserted that he anticipated the discoveries of Galileo. The instruments with which he worked, roughly made by a village tinsmith, may still be seen preserved in the Brother-house which he founded at his birthplace, Cues, on the Mosel; and there, too, the sheets, covered with his long calculations for the reform of the calendar, may still be studied.

      Another scholar, sent out by the same schools, was John Wessel of Gröningen (1420–1489), who wandered in search of learning from Köln to Paris and from Paris to Italy. He finally settled down as a canon in the Brotherhood of Mount St. Agnes. There he gathered round him a band of young students, whom he encouraged to study Greek and Hebrew. He was a theologian who delighted to criticise the current opinions on theological doctrines. He denied that the fire of Purgatory could be material fire, and he theorised about indulgences in such a way as to be a forerunner of Luther.28 “If I had read his books before,” said Luther, “my enemies might have thought that Luther had borrowed everything from Wessel, so great is the agreement between our spirits. I feel my joy and my strength increase, I have no doubt that I have taught aright, when I find that one who wrote at a different time, in another clime, and with a different intention, agrees so entirely in my view and expresses it in almost the same words.”

      Other like-minded scholars might be mentioned, Rudolph Agricola29 (1442–1485), Jacob Wimpheling30 (1450–1528), and Sebastian Brand (1457–1521), who was town-clerk of Strassburg from 1500, and the author of the celebrated Ship of Fools, which was translated into many languages, and was used by his friend Geiler of Keysersberg as the text for one of his courses of popular sermons.

      All these men, and others like-minded and similarly gifted, are commonly regarded as the precursors of the German Renaissance, and are classed among the German Humanists. Yet it may be questioned whether they can be taken as the representatives of that kind of Humanism which gathered round Luther in his student days, and of which Ulrich von Hutten, the stormy petrel of the times of the Reformation, was a notable example. Its beginnings must be traced to other and less reputable pioneers. Numbers of young German students, with the talent for wandering and for supporting themselves by begging possessed by so many of them, had tramped down to Italy, where they contrived to exist precariously while they attended, with a genuine thirst for learning, the classes taught by Italian Humanists. There they became infected with the spirit of the Italian Renaissance, and learned also to despise the ordinary restraints of moral living. There they imbibed a contempt СКАЧАТЬ