favour by closing the doors of the smallest universities or forcing them to
consolidate with others, once the Holy Roman Empire had expired (1806).
The revolutionary tide also brought new ideas and individuals to the fore, the
net effect of which was to have a determinative influence on intellectual life
and education in Germany.^35
Not surprisingly, Döllinger singles out the foundation of the epoch-making
University of Berlin (1809–10), an‘event’still shrouded in myth today.^36 ‘At
this new epoch, however, a new institution was about to arise, which was
destined...while still a babe in the cradle, to eclipse all others and to realize the
highest point in university education which Germany has yet attained.’^37
Graced in its infancy with illustrious names such as Wilhelm von Humboldt,
Friedrich Schleiermacher, Fichte, F. A. Wolf, Friedrich Carl von Savigny, this
first‘modern university’was to have catalysing influence on other German
universities, Protestant as well as Catholic, and, indeed, over much of Western
higher education in the nineteenth century.^38 Indeed, Berlin helped precipitate
nothing less than a revolution in university education, according to Döllinger:
Now if we contrast with all this [the period before 1810] the honourable position
held by German universities in the present [1866], if we consider that they are the
places in which all the higher movements in the intellectual life of the country
often originate, and are always fostered and promoted; and then remember how
short the time has been—something likefifty years—in which this transformation
has taken place, in which this wonderful productivity in all areas of learning (diese
bewundernswürdige Productivität in allen Wissenschaften) has been developing;
we must confess that there is scarcely a parallel to it to be found in the whole
course of world history.^39What precisely did Döllinger have in mind by‘transformation’(Umschwung)
of learning in the early nineteenth century? Like others before and after him,
he claimed that a new conception of scholarship or science (Wissenschaft)
became dominant at this time, with the University of Berlin leading the way.
In an effort to further define this newWissenschaft, he offers two qualifying
phrases:‘organic whole’ (Organismus des Ganzen) and the new ‘German
historical sense’(historische Sinn der Deutschen). On the one hand, although
knowledge was growing and splintering by leaps and bounds, there remained,
in his view, an organic connection among allfields of inquiry. On the other
(^35) Universitäten, 20ff. On the Catholic universities of Germany and the French Revolution,
see Max Braubach,‘Die katholischen Universitäten Deutschlands und die französische Revolu-
tion’,Historisches Jahrbuch49 (1929), 263–303.
(^36) On the University of Berlin’s founding, see Howard,Protestant Theology, 130ff.
(^37) Universitäten,20–1;Universities, 17.
(^38) Howard,Protestant Theology,4–5. Cf. Brad S. Gregory,The Unintended Reformation: How
a Religious Revolution Secularized Society(Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2012), 343ff.
(^39) Universitäten, 25;Universities,20–1 (translation modified).
Ignaz von Döllinger and the University 231