15 2.3 RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION
The Rise of Humanism
The effect of the “new learning” on the German universities was revolutionary. At first the Humanist professors got on fairly well with the rest of the faculty; but when they asserted their superiority as representatives of the only real knowledge, bitter attacks and recriminations ensued. The Humanists ridiculed the form of Latin used in the university and the poor translations of Aristotle used in commentaries and lectures. Next, they attacked the Scholastic method of teaching with its endless hair-splitting and disputations, and strove to substitute rhetoric for dialectic. Finally they struck at the content itself, declaring that much time was spent in gaining very little knowledge of hardly any value.
All the charges were drawn up in publications marked by brilliant style and sharp invective; e.g. the “Epistolae obscurorum virorum”, written against the professors of arts and theology, especially those of Leipzig and Cologne. This violent satire contained much that was false or exaggerated, and therefore calculated rather to add new disturbance than to effect the reform which was really needed. The better days of Scholasticism, in fact, had passed; the universities had no longer such leaders of thought as the thirteenth century had produced; both studies and discipline were on the decline.
Humanism triumphed, in the first place, because, as a reaction and a novelty, it appealed to the younger men who were anxious to be free from the dryness of Scholastic exercises and the restrictions imposed by college statutes. Their unruly conduct and their ceaseless brawls with the townsfolk afforded the princes and the city authorities a pretext to undertake university reforms; and the reforming was accomplished by placing the Humanists in control. These conflicts and remedial measures, however, were only the surface of a much deeper movement.
Before it asserted itself in the universities, Humanism had won over the higher and more influential classes of the people by catering, in the form of literature, to the spirit of luxury which the growth and increasing wealth of the cities had engendered. There was no doubt a charm in the elegant diction of the Humanists; but their attractive force lay in the rehabilitation of those views and ideals of life which the naturalism of the pagan world had expressed in perfect form and which brought men back to themselves and to earth. Aristotle had triumphed in the thirteenth century; he was overcome in the fifteenth by the orators and poets.
The Reformation
The Renaissance, originating in Italy, had thence spread to the northern countries. Its introduction into the universities of Italy and France did not lead to revolt against the Church; the popes were its patrons, and many distinguished Humanists remained loyal to Catholicism.
In Germany and England, on the contrary, the Renaissance coalesced with another movement which had far more serious consequence – the Reformation. Luther, though not in sympathy with Humanism, was bent on sweeping away Scholastic theology by returning, as he claimed, to the pure teaching of the Gospel; and he would have made an end to the universities, which he denounced as the devil’s workshops.
The violent theological discussions aroused by the Reformation movement had a disastrous effect, not only on Humanism but also on the life of the universities. Some of them closed their doors, and nearly all were in danger of dissolution for want of students. Melanchthon declared that philosophy was the worship of idols and that the only knowledge necessary for a Christian was to be obtained from the Bible.
The reformers, however, soon realized that their cause could not dispense with the higher education; and it was Melanchthon himself who reformed the existing universities and organized the new, i.e. Protestant, foundations, Marburg (1527), Königsberg (1544), Helmstadt (1574). The endowment was supplied chiefly from the revenues of confiscated monasteries and other church properties; Classic philology and the new theology took the place of Scholasticism; and the universities became state institutions under the control of secular princes.
As a result, the universities lost in great part their international character. In place of the medieval studium generale, there arose a multitude of institutions each limited to its own territory and devoted to the creed of its founders. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the traditional organization was preserved; but Classical culture was on the wane, and there was little progress in other lines. “At the end of the seventeenth century the German universities had sunk to the lowest level which they ever reached in the public esteem and in their influence upon the intellectual life of the German people . . . Academic science was no longer in touch with reality and its controlling ideas; it was held fast in an obsolete system of instruction by organization and statutes and toilsome compliance was the sole result of its activity. Added to this was the prevailing coarseness of the entire life. The students had sunk to the lowest depths, and carousals and brawls, carried to the limits of brutality and bestiality, largely filled their days” (Paulsen, “The German Universities”, p.42).
When Erasmus came to England in 1497, Classical studies imported from Italy were already cultivated at Oxford by men like Colet, Groeyn, Lynacre, and Sir Thomas More. In 1516, Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester, endowed the first lectureship in Greek and founded Corpus Christi College.
In 1525, Wolsey founded Cardinal College and engaged eminent teachers to “cultivate the new literature in the service of the old Church” (Huber). But his princely designs were checked by the question of Henry’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon. At Cambridge also the Renaissance movement was furthered by the teaching of Erasmus and the exertions of Bishop Fisher; but at the same time the writings of Luther were being studies by a group of scholars under Tyndale and Latimer, and it was Cranmer, then a fellow of Jesus College, who suggested that the legality of Henry’s marriage should be referred to the universities of Christendom. After some opposition both Oxford and Cambridge gave an opinion favourable to the king; and finally they declared for the separation from Rome which was consummated by the Act of 1534.
By the Royal Injunctions of 1535, the teaching of canon law and of the Sentences was abolished; Aristotle, however, was retained, and the study of civil law, Hebrew, mathematics, logic, and medicine was encouraged. The spoliation of the monasteries, which had sheltered many of the poorer scholars, reduced the numbers at the universities. In 1549 a royal visitation eliminated from the statutes every trace of popery, and abolished numerous stipends that had formerly been given for Masses. In a spirit of iconoclasm, altars, images, and statutes were torn from the college chapels, and many valuable manuscripts of the libraries were burned. Under Mary’s brief rule the Protestants in turn suffered; Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer perished at the stake at Oxford, and the anti-Catholic statutes were repealed. During Elizabeth’s reign and Leicester’s chancellorship, every Oxford student above sixteen years of age was obliged at matriculation to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles and the Royal Supremacy, a measure which made the university an exclusively Church of England institution.
At Cambridge a royal mandate in 1613 required all candidates for B.D. or for the doctorate in any faculty to subscribe to the Three Articles. In both universities, Puritanism was a disturbing element, and a number of its adherents were obliged to withdraw from Cambridge. In 1570 the Elizabethan statutes were enacted “on account of the again increasing audacity and excessive licence of men” as the preamble declares. These new regulations circumscribed the powers of the proctors and provided that they should be elected, not as formerly, by the regents, but according to a cycle of colleges. The Elizabethan code remained in force for nearly three centuries. Under Charles I similar provisions were made for Oxford byt he Laudian statutes (1636), and the whole administration of the university was entrusted to the vice-chancellor, the proctors, and the heads of colleges. “This statute effectually stereotyped the administrative monopoly of the colleges, and destroyed all trace of the old democratic constitution which had been controlled only by the authority of the medieval Church” (Brodrick). Oxford was governed by this code until 1854.
In Scotland, after the abolition of papal jurisdiction and ratification of Protestant doctrine in 1560, the universities suffered severely. “To St. Andrews, as to the other universities, the Reformation did serious injury. Their constitution and orgnization were upset by ecclesiastical dissent; their income was sadly reduced by the rapacity of the nobles who appropriated the lion’s share of the patrimony of the Church. From a greatly diminished income they had to uphold the stipends of the parishes which belonged to them. This was necessarily accompanied by a reduction of the salaries of the professors, for which certain grants by successive administrations made small but inadequate amends. The attendance of students was also injuriously affected” (Kerr, p. 108). Though various schemes of reform were proposed, especially by Knox, they proved ineffectual owing to the tumults about religion and the alternations between presbytery and episcopacy. The universities became institutions of the state in 1690 and religious tests were enforced for all teachers and officials. Curricula and organizations, however, retained for a long time their medieval features. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, various modifications were introduced in the courses of study; new chairs were founded and the financial condition improved.
At Paris this period witnessed the long struggle between the university and the Jesuits, the inroads of Gallicanism and Jansenism, and the substitution of royal for papal supremacy. As far back as 1475, Charles VII had placed the university under the jurisdiction of the Parlement; by the end of the sixteenth century the secularization was complete. If Richelieu, by rebuilding the Sorbonne, and Mazarin, by establishing the Collège des Quatre-Nations, enhanced the outward spendour of the university, they did not endow it with vitality sufficient to check the new philosophical movement which culminated in the work of the Encyclopedists and the Revolution. In 1793 the university was suppressed and with it all the other universities of France. Napoleon I reorganized them as faculties under the one imperial university situated at Paris; and this arrangement continued until, in 1896, the faculties were restored to university rank.
