11
Ignaz von Döllinger and the University
Examining a German Christian Humanist of the
Nineteenth Century
Thomas Albert Howard
In the pantheon of Christian humanism, some names loom large. In the
sixteenth century,figures such as Erasmus, Thomas More, and Philipp Melanchthon
come readily to mind. If we turn our attention to the nineteenth century
(my own area of training) and add to our search the terms‘Catholicism’and
‘university’, practically all arrows would point towards John Henry Newman
and his famousThe Idea of a University, based on lectures delivered in
1854 on the occasion of founding a new Catholic university in Dublin. This
book ranks alongside Max Weber’s equally famous essayScience as a Vocation
as among the most frequently acknowledged reference points by subse-
quent scholars reflecting on the shape and purpose of higher education in the
modern era.
Newman of course argued for the perduring, intrinsic value of a humanist,
liberal education—a‘Gentleman’s education’—and championed a role for
theology amid the dizzying changes taking place in higher education at the
time.^1 By contrast, Weber argued that the modern university harboured in its
bosom the specifically‘God-foreign power’(gottfremde Macht), modern sci-
ence,Wissenschaft, that had called into being a world of infinite specializa-
tion, the proliferation of facts, analyses, and studies. But fastidious devotion to
this‘fact-world’, in Weber’s interpretation, appeared to render obsolete a
‘value-world’, the world of meaning, of prophetic insight, of the gods, of
religion. Protest if one want, the world appeared poised for‘disenchantment’.^2
(^1) J. H. Newman,The Idea of a University, ed. Frank Turner (New Haven, CN: Yale University
Press, 1996).
(^2) Max Weber,Wissenschaft als Beruf 1917/1919, Politik als Beruf 1919, ed. Wolfgang Mommsen
et al. (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1994), 9.