German Universities

Rosentock-Huessy’s discussion of German universities is closely linked to his treatment of the Reformation. The universities took on prominence during the Reformation because the princes of various German territories had to find some authoritative voice to judge in religious matters. Universities also provided a unifying institution within Germany, and so the princes had political interests in defending the rights of the universities.

One feature of the German university that comes from the Reformation is the notion of the university teacher as a “Public Professor,” who has a Katheder, a chair, that stands as a continuing challenge to the Vatican’s cathedra. In Germany, the universities are considered “keepers of the nation’s conscience” (playing a role similar to that ERH assigned to the Chancellor in the English system). German theologians had to systematically rethink “the whole framework of the old visible church” so that they could rebuild the church. As a result “These heavy German minds developed an unheard-of technique of systematic training in generalities.” Scholarship took on a “salvation-character,” and it was thought that “any dissertation might dislodge the keystone from the Holy Sepulchre of the real Christian faith.” The criticisms of German professors were heard beyond Germany: “Empress Catherine the Great of Russia could say she trembled before its criticism.”

This is connected to the German interest in expertise and the German acceptance of the institution of “privy counselors,” hated by the English. For Germany, issues of great moment are decided by experts, many from the universities, not by the ups and downs of public opinion. And becoming a privy counselor to the High Magistrate was one of the aspirations of ambitious Germans. As princes took on the papal role of Peter, the counselors took on the role of Paul: “The Reformation bestowed the function of St. Paul on the universities.” Like the Chancellor in England, the universities “stood for the national will against the interference of any arbitrary power.” In other countries, someone who wanted to sway the direction of culture might take up journalism or political organizing; in Germany, “nothing but the public chair was surrounded by this halo of partnership in the national spirit.” During the early part of the twentieth century, however, the universities were inundated with too many professors, who became too numerous to be respected. As a result, Germany lost its public conscience, its voice of the national spirit.

Princes competed freely for the best counselors, those who were best formed, gebildet, a formation that was seen as a protection against the pressures and temptations of power and wealth. This formation takes place not only in organized formal education, which depends on a “preformation” or “Bildung” that takes place in the family and the church. Church and state thus maintain a kind of tension and mutual support: “Free acceptance of the word of Scripture in the audible Church and loyal obedience in the service of a Christian State mutually balance each other. One would be intolerable without the other. But together they give the soul what it needs in order to be human and to breathe freely.”

Through the Reformation and its political effects, Germany was saved from being “Fascist.” The papacy had taught Christians that “rulers, kings, and princes were mere mortals and poor sinners and no better than their subjects,” thereby removing from the state all claims to be an agent of salvation. But this secular state could also become a mere mechanism to maintain order, and this “degradation of secular princes is well stated by Machiavelli,” who discerned that a day was dawning when despots no longer need to veil their secular ambitions with piety. Luther broke into this situation and prevented the state from becoming thoroughly secularized. The reason the secular state held such power was because people had “crippled and paralyzed [their] moral courage” through an over-dependence on the “artificial safety of a visible church.” Church and State as visible institutions were maintained in “two watertight compartments,” so that “The Church becomes a theatre with splendid decorations; the State can receive no real stream of power or influence from a Church which is only a neighbour in space instead of a precursor in time.” Luther’s invisible church could not be confined to space, and thus had the freedom to permeate the State, preventing the prince’s power from becoming thoroughly arbitrary.

Catechetical training was one of the institutions guaranteeing freedom and curbing tyranny. Every Christian passed through a “phase which was wholly devoted to his systematic training in catechism,” and this included princes. Princes formed by the catechism responded to the informed, and Reformed, advice of their privy counselors, and there even developed the remarkable habit of prince’s renouncing their power. This possibility “made the prince into a human being, since it distinguished his dutiful struggle for power from his individual lust for power.” Lutheran learning “kept the world alive and human for another century.”

The Lutheran notion of a Christian state can be clarified by comparing it to the theory of Bodin. For Bodin, theology had no role to play in politics. Bodin’s High Magistrate is sovereign, like the Lutheran prince, but Bodin “isolates the highness of the Prince into an independent function.” His theory would cut of the state from Christianity, and leaves the Magistrate all-powerful within his realm: “Bodin is the devil of territorial and moral sovereignty stealing into the garden of the Christian Commonwealth . . . No State is morally sovereign. That is the difference between a Christian and a pagan government.”

One of the key differences between Bodin and Lutheran society is that Bodin considers the life of the mind as an “appurtenance of the individual thinker.” He polarizes society between the sovereign State and the “tiny, tiny cell” of the individual thinker. Luther, however, saw that “teaching and learning have nothing to do with the individual mind or soul. Love has created a stream of language, a Word, an inspiration, and sent it into the valley of tears, where men live blinded by their sins and in despair.” Once the “stream of instruction” begins to flow, “then all the chains of the oppressed, all the tears of the blind, will cease to be.” The “prereforming voice of the Redeemer restores Creation to its old glory and true meaning.” Through the “stream of teaching and learning,” flows the pure Evangelium. Bodin’s thought and philosophy are a “mere philosophical, after-dinner reflection”; for Luther, the life of the mind depends on the pure teaching of the gospel.

Luther and his followers invented the term “Middle Ages” to describe the Christian faith that was not interested in purification. He made this separation because “he believed in the fruits of time: The Gospel preceded the political reality; the pulpit of the university trained boys of twenty so that, as men of fifty, they might run the government.” For Luther, the Church was not a “neighbor in space” with the state, but a “prophet in time.” Lutheran churches close during the week; only on Sunday does the “Donnerwort of Eternity” break into the secular world.

The State in Germany has also found inspiration again and again in “prophesies from the chair.” Rosenstock-Huessy notes the e

ffects of German study of law, German philosophy, German classics, and German theology on the development of the German state. German philosophy maintained its roots in German theology long after philosophy detached itself from the gospel in other countries: “The German professor of the nineteenth century remained the preacher and confessor of a power which he flet to be responsible for the ‘rechte Geist,’ the right inspiration of the ‘Weltgeist’ everywhere.” Universities retained their position as “the upper half of the church, far above the level of the individual congregation.”

The Reformation thus lives on into the present as Kultur, the German equivalent of French civilization, and the German weapon to combat the infiltration of the French Enlightenment into Germany.