A Glimpse at a Historic University: Erfurt

The history of universities shaped in many ways the history of culture. The University of Bologna in Italy, which started around 1088 A.D., is commonly cited as the world’s first university. While this claim has been disputed, it generally stands. Within a century or two, universities sprang up around Europe.

The universities of Europe in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance years were structured differently than the universities of North America in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

While the daily lives of students at the universities were more regimented than the universities of five to ten centuries later, the classes and professors were less coordinated. To obtain a degree, a student read whichever books, attended the number variety of classes and lectures, which he thought would best prepare him for examinations. There was no set number of semesters or courses needed to graduate.

When a student felt ready, he would request to be examined. He would then undergo days of detailed and intense testing, most of it spoken before a panel of professors, rather than written. When the examinations were over, the professors conferred among themselves, and decided whether or not the student had earned a diploma.

The students lived in buildings controlled by the university. The medievals had a balanced view of alcohol. While drunkenness was forbidden, and students would be punished for it, a glass of beer or wine was served with most meals.

Writing from a twenty-first century perspective, historian Eric Metaxas describes student life at Erfurt, one of Europe’s most significant universities:

By our own standards, life at the university was quite regimented, with students arising at 4:00 a.m. for devotions and going to bed at 8:00 p.m. All students lived in a residential college called a bursa, of which there were six in Erfurt. Students paid for room and board. Two meals per day were served, the first at 10:00 a.m., after four hours of exercises and lectures. After the first meal, there were more exercises and lectures until 5:00 p.m.

The exercises were, of course, mathematical and grammatical exercises, not physical ones. Regarding the bursa, Metaxas notes:

Bursa is the Latin word for sack or purse; this term is still with us in modern universities, where the treasurer or business officer is called the bursar.

Debate was a central activity at a medieval university. A student was given a viewpoint or hypothesis, prepared for several days, and then debated against another student. Often, the students were required to switch sides, and have the debate again a few days later. In this way, the students learned detailed evidence for both sides of the question.

Sometimes the debates were done in teams, with several students on each side.

Erfurt’s university excelled at debate, and its reputation for well-reasoned debates spread across Europe, as historian Lyndal Roper writes:

Founded in 1392, the university was the oldest German institution to have a charter, and in the early sixteenth century it boasted an outstanding collection of humanists, interested in the revival of ancient learning and in returning to the sources.

Particularly in the universities north of the Alps, linguistic skills were highly valued. Students already knew Latin when they arrived at the university. They expanded their Latin skills, learned Hebrew, and learned to distinguish between classical Greek and koine Greek.

The demands of precise scholarship caused professors and students to look at texts in their original languages. Aristotle and Plato were read in Greek, Cicero and Tacitus in Latin, and the Bible in Hebrew. To rely on a translation was to compromise one’s intellectual and rational standards.

Understanding Edmund Burke: The Difference Between Change and Reformation

The eighteenth century includes both the French Revolution and the American Revolution, and an axiomatic insight into those years is the failure of the French Revolution and the success of the American Revolution. Why, and how, did the one backfire, while other other one triumphed?

Part of the answer is to be found in the writings of Edmund Burke. He saw the clear difference between the two.

Both revolutions began with a quest for liberty - yet the American Revolution succeeded in increasing individual freedom, while the French Revolution ended with a harsh dictatorship’s limitations on personal liberty. Why the difference?

As constitutional scholar Mark Levin writes:

Natural law and the civil society or social order are not at odds with the individual’s liberty but in harmony with it - each requiring the other.

The difference was that the American Revolution sought to overthrow the government, and to change the political order, while the French Revolution sought to change society and destroy the culture.

The American Revolution worked to preserve a civil order which had a historical basis of liberty: the American Revolution did not attack, but rather appealed to, the Magna Carta and the English Bill of Rights of 1689, both documents enshrining civil rights.

The French Revolution, on the other hand, misidentified the problem. Rather than attacking the absolutist monarchy, which had abused its power and limited freedom, the French Revolution attacked French society and culture. In so doing, it assaulted the very basis on which liberty might be based.

Mark Levin gives further insight into Edmund Burke’s views of the two revolutions:

The prominent British statesman and scholar Edmund Burke (1729 - 1797) emphasized another fundamental characteristic of the civil society - valuing human experience, tradition, and custom. Burke was outspoken in his sympathy for the American colonists and condemned the oppressions of the British monarchy that led to the American Revolution. However, he was also repulsed by the French Revolution. Burke saw the latter as a revolt led by elites and anarchists who had as their purpose not only redress against French rule but the utter destruction of French society, traditions, and customs.

Looking at Burke’s own words, he riffs on the words ‘change’ and ‘reform’ - as marking the distinction between the two revolutions. The word ‘reform’ refers to the act of directing, or redirecting, a system back to its original and foundational purposes and goals: so it was that the English system, based on the Magna Carta and the 1689 Bill of Rights, was oriented toward individual freedom and political liberty. The American Revolution was simply a redirecting of the system back toward those essential documents.

On the other hand, ‘change’ refers to the destruction of foundations. If the French Revolution wanted change, it wanted to destroy the civil and societal and cultural bases for freedom and liberty. If the French Revolution hoped to gain freedom and liberty via this route, it was sadly mistaken.

As Burke himself wrote:

There is a manifest, marked distinction, which ill men with ill designs, or weak men incapable of any design, will constantly be confounding, that is, a marked distinction between change and reformation. The former alters the substance of the objects themselves; and gets rid of all their essential good, as well as of all the accidental evil, annexed to them. Change is novelty; and whether it is to operate any one of the effects of reformation at all, or whether it may not contradict the very principle upon which reformation is desired, cannot be certainly known beforehand. Reform is, not a change in the substance, or in the primary modification, of the object, but, a direct application of a remedy to the grievance complained of. So far as that is removed, all is sure. It stops there; and, if it fails, the substance which underwent the operation, at the very worst, is but where it was.

With accuracy, Burke predicted the course and conclusion of the French Revolution; he died before it was over. He saw how it must go; the series of events could have only one conclusion.

The French Revolution, Burke foretold, having destroyed, or at least wounded, the social and cultural order, would proceed with a succession of random samplings, unable to establish its hoped-for new order. The French Revolution could not settle on a new pattern, and so implemented a sequence of new patterns, and kept each but for a short while.

Instead of instituting a new and better system, the French Revolution weakened the nation by confusing it with a series of experiments in government, as Burke writes:

By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways, as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of a summer.

The French Revolution failed for at least two reasons. One of them was that it hoped to fix a governmental and political wrong by changing, not the government and not the political system, but rather culture and society.

Political and governmental problems have political and governmental solutions. For this reason, the American Revolution, having identified such problems, did not undertake to change society and culture. Rather, it sought to change political and governmental structures.

The problems which led to the French Revolution did not have their roots in culture and society, yet the leaders of that revolution undertook to change both. They misidentified the source of the problems, and therefore prescribed the incorrect actions to repair those problems.