down the barriers’that prevented excellence in the arts or philosophical
faculty. But he regretted that universities soon became pawns in the confes-
sional politics, the‘territorial system’, of the time. This served neither Catholic
nor Protestant universities and it stunted the fullflowering of humanism.
Catholic universities were soon‘vegetating, rather than living, on their scanty
diet and in their narrow and confined atmosphere’. Similarly,‘the Protestant
bodies stagnated under the overwhelming influence of theological interests
and controversy; and their history is almost exclusively a history of the conflict
between Lutheran orthodoxy on the one hand, and Calvinism, Syncretism,
Pietism, on the other’.^31 As an index of the sad situation of universities,
Döllinger profiles Leibniz:‘It is a remarkable sign of the low state of the
universities that Leibniz, the greatest man in Germany, amid all his plans
and projects for the advancement of scholarly learning, took no heed of the
universities; he seems to have thought that they were sunk too low and that
reforming them would be hopeless.’^32
By the eighteenth century, however, times were changing, at least incre-
mentally. While mediocrity reigned at many universities, Döllinger felt, a
glimmer of light was seen at the University of Helmstedt in the seventeenth
century, where a spirit of humanism and irenicism briefly prevailed over
scholasticism and confessionalism.^33 Significantly more light came with the
foundations of the universities of Halle (1694) and Göttingen (1734). In
Döllinger’s estimation, these were examples of genuine reform universities,
where freedom and a spirit of inquiry managed to outmanoeuvre the strictures
of the time. Döllinger had a special fondness for Göttingen, because here the
discipline of history made great strides.‘In one department especially, the
influence of Göttingen upon the German intellect was of great importance, viz
that of history.’The study of the past moved from being a mere collection of
examples to illustrate a point (often a confessional or a moral one) to becom-
ing‘history proper’(eigentliche Geschichte), a critical engagement with past
documents and‘readable’scholarship.^34
The late eighteenth century witnessed notable achievements at a few other
German universities; Döllinger briefly profiles Königsberg (the well-known
seat of Immanuel Kant) and Jena (the seat of Fichte, Schelling, et al.). But
because of the middling, impecunious state of most central European univer-
sities, Döllinger appears to welcome the‘creative destruction’that arrived with
the French Revolution, which did German higher learning an unsolicited
(^31) Universitäten,13–15;Universities,10–12.
(^32) Universitäten, 17;Universities, 14 (translation modified).
(^33) On Helmstedt’s irenicism, especially as seen in the theologian Georg Calixtus, see
W. A. Kelly,The Theological Faculty at Helmstedt(East Linton: Cat’s Whisker’s Press, 1996).
(^34) Universitäten, 18;Universities,14–15. On the place of Halle and Göttingen in the devel-
opment of the modern German university, see Thomas Albert Howard,Protestant Theology and
the Making of the Modern German University(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 87–120.
230 Thomas Albert Howard