“Throughout the whole of the German lands,” as Luther himself admits: “No one will any longer allow his children to learn or to study.”[93] At the same time contemporaries bitterly bewailed the wildness of the students who still remained at the Universities. With regard to Wittenberg itself we have grievous complaints on this score from both Luther and Melanchthon.[94]
The disorder in the teaching institutions naturally had a bad effect on the education of the people, so that Luther’s efforts on behalf of the schools may readily be understood. The ecclesiastical Visitors of the Saxon Electorate had been forced to adopt stern measures in favour of the country schools. The Elector called to mind Luther’s admonitions, that he, as the “principal guardian of the young,” had authority to compel such towns and villages as possessed the means, to maintain schools, pulpits and parsonages, just as he might compel them to furnish bridges, high roads and footpaths.… “If, moreover, they have not the means,” so Luther had said, “there are the monastic lands which most of them were bestowed for this very purpose.”[95] But in spite of the measures taken by the Elector and the urgent demands of the theologians for State aid, even in towns like Wittenberg the condition of the intermediate educational institutions was anything but satisfactory. In the case of his own sons Luther had grudgingly to acknowledge that he was “at a loss to find a suitable school.”[96] He accordingly had recourse to young theologians as tutors.
The disappointment of the Humanists was keen and their lot a bitter one. They had cherished high hopes of the dawn of a new era for classical studies in Germany. Many had rejoiced at the alliance which had at first sprung up between the Humanist movement and the religious revolution, believing it would clear the field for learning. They now felt it all the more deeply seeing that the age, being altogether taken up with arid theological controversies and the pressing practical questions of the innovations, had no longer the slightest interest in the educational ideals of antiquity. The violent changes in every department of life which the religious upheaval brought with it could not but be prejudicial to the calm intellectual labours of which the Humanists had dreamed; the prospect of Mutian’s “Beata tranquillitas” had vanished.
Mutian, at one time esteemed as the leader of the Thuringian Humanists, retired into solitude and died in the utmost poverty (1526) after the Christian faith had, as it would appear, once more awakened in him. Eminent lawyers among the Humanists, Ulrich Zasius of Freiburg and Christopher Scheurl of Nuremberg, openly detached themselves from the Wittenbergers. Scheurl, who had once waxed so enthusiastic about the light which had dawned in Saxony, now declared confidentially to Catholic friends that Wittenberg was a cesspool of errors and intellectual darkness.[97] The reaction which the recognition of Luther’s real aims produced in other Humanists, such as Willibald Pirkheimer, Crotus Rubeanus, Ottmar Luscinius and Henricus Glareanus, has already been referred to.[98] It is no less true of the Humanists favourable to the Church than of those holding Lutheran views, that German Humanism was nipped in the bud by the ecclesiastical innovations. As Paulsen says: “Luther usurped the leadership [from the Humanists] and theology [that of the Protestants] drove the fine arts from the high place they had just secured; at the very moment of their triumph the Humanists saw the fruits of victory snatched from their grasp.”[99]
The event of greatest importance for the Humanists was, however, Erasmus’s open repudiation of Luther in 1523, and his attack on that point so closely bound up with all intellectual progress, viz. Luther’s denial of free-will.
Quite independent of this attack were the many and bitter complaints which the sight of the decline of his beloved studies drew from Erasmus: “The Lutheran faction is the ruin of our learning.”[100] “We see that the study of tongues and the love of fine literature is everywhere growing cold. Luther has heaped insufferable odium on it.”[101] He regrets the downfall of the schools at Nuremberg: “All this laziness came in with the new Evangel.”[102] He wished to have nothing more to do with these Evangelicals, he declares, because, through their doing, scholarship was everywhere being ruined. “These people [the preachers] are anxious for a living and a wife, for the rest they do not care a hair.”[103]
In the above year, 1523, at the beginning of his public estrangement with Erasmus, Luther had written: “Erasmus has done what he was destined to do; he has introduced the study of languages and recalled us from godless studies (‘a sacrilegis studiis’). He will in all likelihood die like Moses, in the plains of Moab [i.e. never see the Promised Land]. He is no leader to the higher studies, i.e. to piety”; in other words, unlike Luther, he was not able to lead his followers into the land of promise, where the enslaved will rules.[104]
Luther’s use of the term “sacrilega studia” invites us to cast a glance on the state of education before his day.