The Czechoslovak Review/Volume 3/University of Prague (1)

by Ernest Denis

University of Prague

By Ernest Denis.

The Czechoslovak nation owes a great debt of gratitude to Ernest Denis, a Frenchman who devoted his long life to the study of Bohemian history. His “End of Bohemian Independence” and “Bohemia after the Battle of White Mountain” are known to every educated Czech. From the outbreak of the great war Denis, the historian of Czech downfall, gave all his time to the fight for Czech resurrection and was instrumental in committing France early to the cause of Czechoslovak independence.

After the liberation of the nation the University of Prague conferred upon Denis the doctor’s degree, and when the diploma was tendered to him in Paris, Denis pronounced the following address which is an example of his great scholarship and philosophical spirit. The translation is from La Nation Tchéque, of which Denis formerly was editor.

The University of Prague! One can well say that its history is a summary of the history of the entire nation. It is like to the center of the nervous system on which all external phenomena are registered; its life reflects the life of the people.

It is not possible to trace the outlines of its tragic existence in a brief address; I will simply indicate its main periods. There are five of them, very sharply distinguished. First of all there is the Christian University, studium generale, founded by Charles IV; it sends out in the fourteenth century the shining ray of Catholic civilization upon all central and eastern Europe. This ecumenical, Christian University is succeeded by the Revolutionary University, from 1400 to 1434. From 1434 to 1622 there is the Militant University, disputing about confessions and parties. After the donwfall of Bohemia we see for two centuries Enchained University, which is finally succeeded by the Triumphant University which greets us today.

The rector has just recalled the fact that the University of Paris had a Czech master for its rector in 1355; but Adalbert Ranconis de Ericinio, this rector, was by no means the first of those who came to Paris from Bohemia to study. From a very early period the Czechs, menaced by German infiltration, looked instinctively for support elsewhere, and from the 12th century, even before Sorbonne existed, quite a number of Czech students made their appearance in Paris.

The feeling of the Czechs for the Germans was not very different then from what it is now. “The hatred between Germans and Czechs is ancient,” writes Ludolf de Sagan in the 14th century,” and deeply rooted, for as the Jews once would have nothing in common with the Samaritans, so is even the sight of a German hateful to the Czech.”

The struggle with the Germans became more bitter, and the number of students grew who, in order to get away from German influence, resorted to the University of Paris, which was then the uncontested center of science. Beside Master Adalbert we find at the Sorbonne John of Jenstein, who later became archbishop of Prague, Jerome of Prague, the colleague of Hus in his struggle and his death, and before him a master whose singular value has only recently been recognized, Matthew of Janov, the real precursor of Czech reform. Thanks to these travelers taste for philosophy grew and Bohemia prepared itself to become in its turn a great center of civilization, of progress and intellectual and moral life.

The first half of the 14th century was for the Czechs a period of anarchy, of troubles, of misery. The national dynasty of the House of Přemysl was extinguished, and Germans tried to profit thereby in order to get the country under their domination. Factions encouraged by strangers struggled for control; the nobility usurped public offices and lands, royal authority was discredited, the people were oppressed and miserable, commerce was ruined. As a consequence there was moral trouble and intellectual anarchy, famine, plague, heresies. The young King Charles I. of Bohemia understood the necessity of strengthening the ties that held together the various parts of the Crown of St. Václav, of restoring authority, of uniting the people through common ideas. He wanted to gather all his subjects under the law of Christ. He established the University in 1348.

This University was destined to become a source of light, an advance guard of civilization, a shining torch which carried western thought into the East. It cannot be doubted that from the second half of the 14th century Bohemia has been the intellectual and moral capital of central and eastern Europe.

During the reign of Charles which is still the splendor and glory of the Czech nation—and we have the right to recall it with legitimate pride—Latin and Czech, French and Slav civilizations were bound together so closely that it is impossible to say what belongs to Bohemia and what to France.

It is at this time that the royal castle of Prague rises on the Hradčany, modeled after the Louvre; at this time one of our architects builds the magnificent cathedral of St. Vitus, and the whole land adorns itself with churches and castles which were inspired by our art and reflected our thought.

Charles I. could be satisfied with his work. He found at his accession a kingdom torn by internal quarrels, scourged by revolutionary spirit, empoverished; he left to his son a prosperous, mighty, united state. German historians are severe toward Emperor Charles IV. Their reproaches are unjust; at the bottom of their criticism one always finds the same complaint: they cannot forgive him because he loved the Czech people and placed it at the head of the world.

Christian civilization in the Middle Ages did not affect the various countries with the same degree of penetration; the center of that civilization was found in Latin and Germanic countries. Bohemia was on the periphery of this zone. From the more advanced and richer lands there passed to the eastern countries, less densely populated, groups of resolute individuals, men of enterprise and with important capital, who brought with them new methods and novel ideas, social forms more highly developed: it was capitalistic colonization, with manners more polite and habits more refined. These newcomers, Latins, Germans, Jews, did not identify themselves with the mass of the population, but constituted distinct groups, independent islands, united with each other by community of customs, by international ties that paid no attention to political organizations of the country, which were rather unstable and which by this penetration were made even less solid. Without denying the good effects which these foreign elements probably had upon the economic, social and moral evolution of the people, it is certain that they constituted a great menace to its independence. In the 14th century Bohemia ceased to be an ethnic unity, and it was running a great risk of losing its nationality.

The principal merit of Charles IV. was to have perceived this danger. For the rest he only continued with more determination and firmness national resistance which the Slav element of the kingdom had offered. Germans in Bohemia make up a considerable group, and have done so for a long time. But they have always been regarded as intruders; they have never attempted to create a state; the kingdom of Bohemia has been the exclusive work of the Slav element.

Charles sought his support naturally in the national group, in the party which held to the unity and independence of the kingdom. It gathered itself around the sovereign. It earned his confidence by assuring him a sort of preponderance in central Europe; it aroused in him the sentiment of national dignity and patriotism.

His piety was profound and sincere; as head of the Holy Roman Germanic Empire he was in any case obliged to lean on the Holy See, and he was always an ardent champion of the faith. He saw in the Catholic doctrine the means of strengthening the tie that united him with his subjects. But his policy brought results contrary to those he had in view. On the one hand by extending his favor to the clergy he favored abuses and increased corruption; the evils with which the Church suffered appeared the more scandalous, the more ardent were the convictions. It was natural that the revolt against papacy should break out in the very country in which the Christian idea had penetrated most deeply into the souls of the people.

On the other hand, Charles by restoring national unity strengthened the moral personality of the people which manifested itself in the desire for independence. Created by the Chucrh, it defended against it its own right to individual existence.

The 15th century is the period in which the unity of Christendom is definitely broken, when national civilizations detach themselves from the Catholic universality. In Bohemia this movement of emancipation was accompanied by unusual violence, and it found its expression above all in the University.

I would never advise sovereigns who desire to instruct their people in the cult of tradition to go for their model to Paris. The French people are revolutionary by temperament, by a natural instinct. Over against Germany, conservative, devoted to tradition, inert, incapable of getting by its own effort out of a given situation, France has the desire, the need of change, of progress, of movement, because it is a country which lives, which thinks, which searches, which is never content with what it has, which never believes to have arrived at its goal. And this restlessness of spirit, this search for perfection explains the immense attraction which it exercises over souls.

The masters, the students who returned to Prague after spending several years in Paris, brought with them, without a doubt, a revolutionary virus; professors under whom they sat taught them progressive nominalism, which had been introduced by William Occam. They had listened to startling appeals of Peter d’Ailly or Nicholas Clemengue.

For a quarter century a series of preachers and writers, Conrad Waldhauser, Milič, Štítný, Janov, many others, denounced the sins of the clergy and preached a return to Christianity more nearly resembling that of the apostles. They gathered around them quite a number of disciples, exalted piety, created a certain mystic enthusiasm. Such religious revivals were frequent in the Middle Ages, and the popes were not afraid of them. The movement did not acquire a real importance until it found support and center in the University. Its intervention resulted in lending the innovators an authority which they could have never gained otherwise. However remarkable may be the devotion and eloquence of an individual, if he remains isolated his influence is almost always impotent or fleeting. The University gave to the reformers a numerous and faithful audience, prone to enthusiasm, an audience which dispersed itself throughout the kingdom and spread the new doctrine; it gave them co-workers who cleared up their counsels, set aside their doubts and lent to their words something of the almost sacred character and weight which belonged to the University. It also gave to ecclesiastical disputes a more precise, more dogmatic character; it switched them over into the field of doctrine.

It is, in my opinion, one of the most remarkable achievements of Czech historical science to have shown that the great movement of reform which is summed up in the names of Hus and Jerome of Prague is the conclusion of a long collective effort on the part of the entire University. But in order to accomplish this work it was first needed that she should be freed from the domination of the German masters. The famous decree of Kutná Hora (January 18, 1409) made the University purely Czech; it transformed the Christian University into the National University; it made of the studium generale of Charles IV. a forum of Czech thought. It cannot be a matter of indifference to us that in this decree of 1409, which is one of the landmarks in the history of the Czech people, we are entitled to claim some share of credit. At the time King Václav IV. signed it he had before him an embassy of our King Charles VI. What the role of our envoys was we do not know exactly; but it is certain that at the instigation of Charles VI., King Václav labored at the restoration of Christian unity, broken by the great schism, and that the opposition of German masters induced him to take away from them the unfair privileges which they had enjoyed up to that time.

From this moment the reformers were in control of the University, and Hus found there the needed support.

The questions which were the subject of dispute among the professors of Prague, and which let loose furious passions, seem to us today trifling. We are all of us in France, more or less, disciples of Bayle and Voltaire, and we are inclined to look contemptuously on disputants who with the weapons of syllogisms quarrelled about distinctions which we cannot even perceive. Let us beware, nevertheless, of being deceived by terms. If we go to the bottom of things, we realize soon that the real questions at issue were essential principles on which modern society is founded.

At what moment did the struggle become more violent? When the Archbishop Zbyněk ordered the burning of Wycliffe’s books because he had condemned them as heretical. Hus and his friends refused to obey. To what motives did they appeal? First, that in order to learn what is in a book it is not very sensible to burn it; but granting that the book is heretical, that is not a good reason not to read the book, for it is possible that beside heresies it contains useful passages.

Two doctrines clash here, eternal and eternally irreconcilable, authority and liberty, tradition and research, faith and investigation. The struggle which for centuries disturbed mankind appeared in Bohemia at this moment in sharper outlines than ever. The conflict is still with us, although one may affirm that the issue is no longer in doubt. In these precincts of the Sorbonne, citadel of science, cathedral of the independence of spirit, surely we shall appreciate those Czech masters of the 15th century who raised the banner of revolt against absolute authority and who prepared the emancipation of spirits and souls.

At Constance the Sorbonne was opposed to the young audacity of the Prague insurgents, and among the adversaries of Hus Gerson was one of the most implacable. Perhaps it should be said that the germs of the revolt which excited him, and against which he fulminated anathemas, were to be sought in Paris. In spite of cruel divisions which separated them in 1415, Paris and Prague had on the whole worked to gether to prepare the insurrection of spirits and the ruin of the Middle Ages. *** Revolutions, even those that are most necessary, tend to paralyze studies; if they do not completely arrest it, they at least make scientific work extremely difficult. But even when the compacts of Basle ended, outwardly at least, the crisis opened by the condemnation of Hus, peace did not return to the land and university life remained suspended. The decay of the University was aggravated by the long period of hesitation in which the country was kept for more than a century. Among the followers of Hus many were seized with horror at the thought of complete break with the Church, and they attempted to follow an impossible road. Gradually they forsook the spirit of the Reform to adhere to hollow formulas. Thus they committed themselves to a miserable and false life in a murky atmosphere, where souls become anemic and spirits shrink.

And yet this period which is rightly considered to be a period of decadence proves what intellectual resources, what vitality, did the Czech people and the University of Prague preserve in spite of all. At the moment of the definite triumph of Catholic reaction, when as a result of the battle of White Mountain the country was brought low and Ferdinand II. delivered it to the dragoons of Lichtenstein and the Jesuits, the University hoped to secure the future by bequeathing to it a double heritage.

Among the martyrs of June 21, 1621, was a former rector of the University, Jesenius. A physician and scholar famous in his day, Jesenius was also an eloquent orator. His renown and his talents signaled him out for important diplomatic missions. The judges of the emperor sentenced him to have his tongue torn out, after that to be beheaded and then have his body quartered. Jesenius heard the sentence without emotion: It is, he said, a great pity to have a tongue which addressed so many sovereigns torn out by the hand of the executioner. But, after all, what does it matter? The day will surely come when Ferdinand II. will expiate his cruelties and God’s cause will triumph.

Together with Jesenius, the great teacher, Komenský (Comenius), the greatest thinker produced by the Czech Reformation, must be regarded as the legacy of the University to the country. The University of Charles exercised a general supervision over schools, appointed instructors and directed the teaching. Even in the midst of its humiliation it did not forget this task; it tried to widen and improve public instruction. It helped to maintain in the nation a taste for things of the spirit; it also favored the movement of the Unity of Bohemian Brethren, the church from which sprang Komenský, a soul of crystal and a magnificent intelligence, one of the noblest spirits and most generous hearts which have ever honored humanity, the precursor of modern patriotism, who united with passionate love of his race a profound faith in definite reconciliation of all peoples, and who in the midst of the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War predicted the dawn of a society in which all the peoples, emancipated of evil and hate, will gather together under the eye of God to work for the establishment of the law of Christ. The University of Prague might disappear; but it accomplished its work to the end.

(To be concluded.)