Chapter 1 From Protégé to Peer Reimarus at the Hamburg School of Polyhistors

Humanism in Crisis?

On 16 June 1714, Reimarus wrote a letter from Jena to his mentor, the Hebraist Johann Christoph Wolf in Hamburg.1 Just a few months after he enrolled at the Salana, as the university was affectionately called, Reimarus had already made up his mind about his fellow students and the overall conditions at what was still one of Germany’s finest institutions of higher education. With nine print- ing shops and eight bookstores, it assumed the second position only to Leipzig, and between 1711 and 1720, with an average of 720 newly admitted students per year, it was second to none.2 Most prominent among students was the depart- ment of theology,3 which boasted a tradition that did not at all have to hide behind Wittenberg. During the sixteenth century, both Matthias Flacius (1520– 1575) and Simon Musaeus (1521–1576) were members of its faculty; from 1616 until 1637, Johann Gerhard (1582–1637) was on its payroll; and when Reimarus was there, the theological faculty was spearheaded by Johann Franz Buddeus (1667–1729), probably the most important representative of philosophical eclecticism after Christian Thomasius (1655–1728).4 One of the institution’s jewels was the library. Within just a short period of time, it had amassed a total of over 10,000 volumes, excluding a substantial collection of manuscripts, so that by 1680, one of Jena’s professors, the his- torian Caspar Sagittarius (1643–1694), could boast that the “Academic library was not only on par with those of other German institutions, but left most

1 See Johann Heinrich von Seelen, Vita, scriptis et meritis in Rempublicam Literariam Viri [. . .] Ioan. Christoph. Wolfii [. . .] (Stade, 1717); Martin Mulsow, “Johann Christoph Wolf (1683–1739) und die verbotenen Bücher in Hamburg,” in 500 Jahre Theologie in Hamburg: Hamburg als Zentrum christlicher Theologie und Kultur zwischen Tradition und Zukunft, ed. Johann Anselm Steiger (New York, 2005), 81–111; “Johann Christoph Wolf,” in Lexikon der hamburgischen Schriftsteller, ed. Hans Schröder, vol. 8 (1888), 143–48. 2 Max Steinmetz et al., eds., Geschichte der Universität Jena, 1548/58–1958, vol. 1 (Jena, 1958), 175–76. 3 Karl Heussi, Geschichte der Theologischen Fakultät zu Jena (Weimar, 1954), 176. 4 Johann Günther, Lebensskizzen der Professoren der Universität Jena seit 1558 bis 1858 (Jena, 1858), 7–23; also Arnold F. Stolzenburg, Die Theologie des Jo. Franc. Buddeus und des Chr. Matth. Pfaff (Berlin, 1926); more recently, Friederike Nüssel, Bund und Versöhnung: zur Begründung der Dogmatik bei Johann Franz Buddeus (Göttingen, 1996).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004272989_003 From Protégé To Peer 21 of them at a considerable distance.”5 And Sagittarius was right. Compared to collections of fewer than one thousand books at Greifswald and Marburg, this was impressive at the time. True, there had been reason for some concern about the library since then. An official inspection in 1696 had exposed serious deficiencies. But the administration had responded promptly with an invest- ment of four thousand thalers for a major expansion of the library premises. Also, its former director, the polyhistor Burkhard Gotthelf Struve (1671–1738),6 had started to crack down on the professors’ liberal abuse of their borrowing privileges.7 Such conditions would most likely have incited envious looks from the margins of the Respublica literaria, where skilled instruction and access to knowledge were precious commodities.8 But Reimarus himself seemed far from appreciative of his fortune:

Almost all the other [professors] actually do nothing else but dictate the Latin words of Buddeus, which they themselves have copied from a sheet onto their paper, and they reproduce them in more elaborate German, not because of their ignorance of the material, but due to the extreme lack of knowledge and the incredible stupidity of the other students. Those who come here from the country have barely advanced beyond the mere basics of grammar and dutiful conduct; like the dogs on the Nile,9 once they have lightly touched on the most important principles of doc- trine, they will quickly leave again [. . .]. I had promised myself much from the library here at Jena, which has indeed accumulated a pretty large collection of books; but since they are all scattered and disorga- nized, it is thus far hardly useful to anyone [. . .].10

5 “[. . .] nostra bibliotheca academica multas germanicarum academiarum non modo aequat, sed plerasque longo post se relinquit intervallo”; quoted in Geschichte der Universitätsbibliothek Jena, 1549–1945 (Weimar, 1958), 191. 6 On Struve, see August Ritter von Eisenhart, “Struve, Burkhard Gotthelf,” ADB 36 (1893), 671–76. 7 Steinmetz et al., Geschichte der Universität Jena, 179–80. 8 See, for instance, Anne Goldgar’s hypothetical minister in the Pays de Vaud, in her splendid Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680–1750 (New Haven, 1995), 12–13. 9 Pliny the Elder (Natural History VIII.149.1–3) wrote of Egyptian dogs: “Certum est iuxta Nilum amnem currentes lambere, ne crocodilorum aviditati occasionem praebeant” [It has been ascertained that they run near the Nile while drinking from it so that they may not fall victim to the voracity of the crocodiles]. 10 Letter from Reimarus to Wolf, 16 June 1714, SUB HH, Sup. ep. 119, fols. 417v–418r: “Ceteri vero plerique omnes nil agunt aliud, quam ut ea, quae charta in papyrum descripsere ipsi, dictitent in calamum l[ingua] Latina Buddei verba, germanicis iisque amplioribusque