62 Kant: A Biography
should not be underestimated. Academic citizenship was an important first
step to higher honors for many young men in eighteenth-century Prussia
and elsewhere. It was definitely a move up for young Emanuel.^4
Normally, those who were inscribed in the register had to swear their
allegiance to school and country and their love of the true Christian reli¬
gion. This meant that for a long time neither a Catholic, nor a Jew, nor
even a Reformed Protestant could be sworn in.^5 Only Lutherans were
believed to be capable of loving the true Christian religion. While the
Reformed could be sworn in after 1740, Catholics and Jews continued to
be discriminated against.^6 Emanuel, being only sixteen years old, was
exempted from this requirement. He had only to promise that he would
obey. Most students had to take an examination by the dean of the faculty
in order to obtain a "testimonium initiationis" before they could be registered.
The requirements for admission, formulated by none other than Schulz,
stated that
no one is to be admitted to the university who has not explicated with some compe¬
tence a somewhat difficult author such as Curtius or the Selected Orations of Cicero
and has delivered a small oration without grammatical errors. He should also under¬
stand tolerably well what is said in Latin. In Logic he should understand the most
essential parts of the syllogism. He should also know what is absolutely necessary in
geography, history and epistolography. He should as well be able to explain and ana¬
lyze at least two of the gospels, such as Matthew and John in Greek and the thirty-one
initial chapters of the Mosaic books in Hebrew.^7
Kant, having graduated from the Collegium Fridericianum, would not have
had the slightest difficulty in passing this test.^8 This was precisely what his
studies had prepared him for. Nor should one be surprised that mathe¬
matics and natural philosophy were conspicuous only by their absence from
the list of the necessary requirements.
One might have expected Kant to take the easy way and to follow es¬
sentially the same career as most of his predecessors and classmates. Had
he done so, he would, after attending the obligatory courses in philosophy,
have gone on to study theology. After the fifth semester, he would have
become a teacher at the Collegium Fridericianum, or have obtained one of
the numerous fellowships open to theologians. Finally, he would have been
ordained as a pastor, and taken up a parsonage or become a professor of
theology at the university (perhaps even both, insuring a relatively com¬
fortable and secure income). Kant took neither a stipend nor a fellowship,
nor did he ever teach at the Collegium Fridericianum. He chose an entirely
different road. We cannot be certain which course of study Kant declared