In the above letter to Metzsch Luther briefly gives as follows the principal reason for the decay of learning: People were in the habit of saying, “If my son has learnt enough to gain his living then he is quite learned enough.”[70]
The contempt for learned studies was “largely due to the strongly utilitarian temper of the age.” “Owing in the first place to the flourishing state of the towns in the 13th and 14th century, and further to the influence of the great political upheaval which resulted from the discoveries and inventions of the day, a sober, practical spirit, directed solely to material gain, had been aroused throughout a wide section of the German nation. Preference was shown for the German schools where writing and reckoning were taught and which prepared children for the calling of the handicraftsman or the merchant.”[71] Against this tendency of the day Luther enters the lists particularly in his second work on the schools dedicated to the syndic of Nuremberg; at the same time he deals, not in the best of tempers, with the objections advanced by the merchant and industrial classes.[72] He speaks so harshly as almost to place in the same category those who refused to bring up their children “to art and learning” and those who turned them “into mere gluttons and sucking pigs, intent on food alone” (to Metzsch). “The world would thus become nothing but a pig-sty”; these “gruesome, noxious, poisonous parents were bent on making simple belly servers of their children,” etc.[73]
It is a question, however, whether the development of the material trend, so surprisingly rapid, with its destructive influence on study was not furthered by the religious revolution with which it coincided. Luther had sapped the respect which had obtained for the clerical life and for those callings which aimed at perfection, while at the same time, by belittling good works he loosened the inclinations of the purely natural man; by his repudiation of authority he had produced an intellectual self-sufficiency or rather self-seeking, which, in the case of many, passed into mere material egotism, though, of course, Luther’s work cannot be directly charged with the utilitarianism of the day.
What, however, made his revolt to contribute so greatly to the decline of learning was its destruction of the wealth of clergy and monks, and its confiscation of so many livings and foundations established for educational purposes. By far the greater number of students had always consisted of such as wished to obtain positions in the Church among her secular clergy, or to become priests in some monastery. The ranks of these students had been thinned of late years now that the Catholic posts no longer existed, that the foundations which formerly provided for the upkeep of students had disappeared and that an avalanche of calumny and abuse had descended on the monasteries, priests and monks.[74] In addition to this there was the fear aroused in Catholic parents and pastors by the unhappy controversies on religion, lest the young should be infected in the higher schools these being so frequently hot-beds of the modern spirit, of hypercriticism and apostasy. Then, again, there was the distrust, springing from a similar motive, felt by the Catholic authorities for the centres of learning, and their niggardliness in making provision for them, an attitude which we meet with, for instance, in Duke George of Saxony. This was encouraged in the case of the rulers by the fear of social risings, such as they had experienced in the Peasant War, and which they laid to the charge of the new ideas on religion.
Among those favourable to Lutheranism the Wittenberg professor himself awakened a distaste for the Universities by telling them they must not allow their sons to study where Holy Scripture “did not rule” and “where the Word of God was not unceasingly studied.”[75] No one ever depreciated the Universities as much as Luther, who principally because their character was still Catholic, was never tired of calling them the “gates of hell,” and places worse than Sodom and Gomorrha.[76] Nor did he stop short at the condemnation of their religious attitude. Luther’s antagonism to the whole system of philosophy, which the Universities, following the example of Aristotle and the schoolmen, had been so criminal as to admit, to the liberty they allowed to crazy human reason in spiritual matters, and to their championship of natural truth and natural morality as the basis of the life of faith, all this, when carried to its logical conclusion, necessarily brought Lutheranism into fatal conflict with the learned institutions.
As Friedrich Paulsen points out: “Luther shared all the superstitions of the peasant in their most pronounced form; the methods of natural science were strange to him and any scattering of the prevalent delusions he would have looked upon as an abomination.”[77] The latter part of the quotation certainly holds good in those cases where Luther fancied that Holy Scripture or his explanation of it was ever so slightly impugned. When, on June 4, 1539, the conversation at table turned on Copernicus and his new theory concerning the earth, of which the latter had been convinced since 1507, Luther appealed (just as later opponents of the theory were to do) to Holy Scripture, according to which “Josue bade the sun to stand still and not the earth.” The new astronomer wants to prove that the earth moves. “But that is the way nowadays: whoever wishes to seem clever, pays no attention to what others do, but must needs advance something of his own; and what he does must always be the best. The idiot is bent on upsetting the whole art of astronomy.”[78]
Luther’s condemnation of philosophy found a strong echo among the Pietists, who were an offshoot of Lutheranism, and even claimed to be its truest representatives. The loud denunciations of Aristotle were, for instance, taken up by the theologian Zierold.[79] But even from the common people who looked up to him we hear such sayings as the following: “What is the use of our learning the Latin, Greek and Hebrew tongues and other fine arts seeing we might just as well read in German the Bible and the Word of God which suffices for our salvation?” Luther was not at a loss for an answer. He says first: “Yes, I know, alas, that we Germans must always remain beasts and senseless animals.” Then he falls back on his usual plea, viz. that languages “are profitable and advantageous” for a right understanding of Scripture; he forgets that he has here to do with the common people, and that a critical or philosophical interpretation of the Bible was of small use to them. Such a thing might be profitable to those who were being trained for the ministry, though many even of the preachers themselves declared that the illumination from above sufficed, together with the reading of the Bible.[80]
Carlstadt was even opposed to the Wittenberg graduations because they promoted pride of learning and the worldly spirit instead of humble Bible faith. Melanchthon, at a time when he was still full of Luther’s early ideas, i.e. in Feb., 1521, in a work written under the pseudonym of Didymus Faventinus, attempted to vindicate against Hieronymus Emser his condemnation of the whole philosophy of the universities; physics as taught there consisted merely of monstrous terms and contradicted the teaching of the Bible; metaphysics were but an impudent attempt to storm the heavens under the leadership of the atheist Aristotle. “My complaint is against that wisdom by which you have drawn away Christians from Scripture to reason. Go on, he-goat,” he says to Emser, “and deny that the philosophy of the schools is idolatry”; your ethics is diametrically opposed to Christ; at the Universities human reason had degraded the Church to Sodomitic vices. Nothing more wicked and godless than the Universities had ever been invented; no pope, but the devil himself was their author; this even Wiclif had declared, and he could not have said anything wiser or more pious. The Jews offered young men to Moloch, a prelude to our Universities where the young are sacrificed to heathen idols.[81]
To such an extent had the darksome pseudo-mysticism which seethed in Luther’s mind laid hold for a while upon his comrade—glaringly though it contradicted the humanistic tendency found in him both earlier and later.
If we look more closely into the decline of the schools, we shall find that it came about with extraordinary rapidity, a fact which proves it to have been the result of a movement both sudden and far-reaching.