Luther, vol. 6 of 6

by Hartmann Grisar

Holy Scripture, especially the Gospel, was to be everywhere “the chief and main object of study.” “Would to God that every town had also a school for girls where little maids might hear the Gospel for an hour a day, either in German or in Latin.… Ought not every Christian at the age of nine or ten to be acquainted with the whole of the Gospel? Young folk throughout Christendom are pining away and being pitiably ruined for want of the Gospel, in which they ought always to be instructed and exercised.”

“I would not advise anyone to send his child where Holy Scripture is not the rule. Where the Word of God is not constantly studied everything must needs be in a state of corruption.”[54]

In the event, the Bible, together with Luther’s Catechism which had to be committed to memory, and the hymn-book, became the chief manuals in the Lutheran schools. On these elements a large portion of the young generation of Germany was brought up.

For the study of languages Luther, like Melanchthon, recommended the “Disticha” ascribed to Cato and Æsop’s Fables. “It is by the special mercy of God,” he says, “that Cato’s booklet and the Fables of Æsop have been preserved in the schools.”[55] We shall describe elsewhere the efforts he himself made to expurgate the editions of Æsop which had become corrupted by additions offensive to good morals. Various Latin classics which Humanists were wont to put in the hands of the scholars he characterised in his Table-Talk as unsuitable for school use. “It would be well that the books of Juvenal, Martial, Catullus and also Virgil’s ‘Priapeia’ were weeded out of the land and the schools, banished and expelled, for they contain coarse and shameless things such as the young cannot study without grievous harm.”[56] Of the Roman writers (with the Greeks he is much less at home) he extols Cicero, Terence and Virgil as useful and improving. As a whole, however, Luther always remained “at heart a stranger to true Humanism.… Though not altogether inappreciative of elegance of style, he is far from displaying the enthusiasm of the Humanists.”[57] Although he shows himself fairly well acquainted with the writings of the three authors just mentioned, and though he owed this education to his early training, yet, in his efforts to belittle the olden schools, he complains, that “no one had taught him to read the poets and historians,” but, that, on the other hand, he had been obliged to study the “devil’s ordure and the philosophers.”[58]

It must not be overlooked that he, like the Instructions for the Visitors, recommends that Terence and other olden dramatists should be given to the young to be read, and even acted, though, as he admits, they “sometimes contain obscenities and love stories.” This advice he further emphasised in 1537 by declaring that a Protestant schoolmaster of Bautzen was in the right, when, regardless of the scandal of many, he had Terence’s “Andria” performed. Luther agreed with Melanchthon in thinking that the picture of morals given in this piece was improving for the young; also that the disclosure of the “cunning of women, particularly of light women,” was instructive; the boys would thus learn how marriages were arranged, and, after all, marriage was essential for the continuance of society: Even Holy Scripture contained some love stories. “Thus our people ought not to accuse these plays of immorality or declare that to read or act them was prohibited to a Christian.”[59]

The regulations for the Protestant schools, in following Luther in this matter, merely trod in the footsteps of the older German Humanists, who had likewise placed Terence and Plautus in the hands of their pupils. On the contrary Jakob Wimpfeling, the “Teacher of Germany,” was opposed to them and wished to see Terence banished from the schools in the interests of morality. At a later date in the Catholic Grammar schools this author was on moral grounds forbidden to the more youthful pupils, and only read in excerpts.[60]

In his suggestions on the instruction to be given in the Latin schools (for in reality it was only of these that he was thinking) Luther classes with languages and other arts and sciences “singing, music and mathematics as a whole.”[61] Greek and Hebrew no less than Latin would also be indispensable for future scholars. He further wished the authorities to establish “libraries” to further the studies; not, however, such libraries as the olden ones, containing “mad, useless, harmful, monkish books”—“donkey’s dung introduced by the devil”—“but Holy Scripture in Latin, Greek, Hebrew and German, and any other languages in which it might have been published; besides these the best and oldest commentaries in Greek, Hebrew and Latin, and furthermore such books as served for the study of languages, for instance, the poets and orators,” etc. “The most important of all were, however, the chronicles and histories … for these are of wonderful utility in enabling us to understand the course of events, for the art of governing, as also for perceiving the wonderful works of God. Oh, how many fine stories we ought to have about what has been done and enacted in the German lands, of which we, sad to say, know nothing.” In his appreciation of the study of history and of the proverbial philosophy of the people Luther was in advance of his day.

Owing to his polemics the judgment he passed on the olden libraries was very unjust; the remaining traces of them and the catalogues which have been published of those that have been dispersed show that, particularly from the early days of Humanism, the better mediæval collections of books had reached and even passed the standard Luther sets up in the matter of history and literature.

Very modest, not to say entirely inadequate, is the amount of time Luther proposes that the children should daily spend in the schools. Of the lower schools, in which Latin was already to be taught, he says, it would be enough for “the boys to go to such a school every day for an hour or two and work the rest of their time at learning a trade, or doing whatever was required of them.… A little girl, too, could easily find time to attend school for an hour daily and yet thoroughly perform her duties in the house.” Only the “pick” of the children, those, namely, who gave good promise, were to spend “more time and longer hours” in study.[62]