HEIKO AUGUSTINUS OBERMAN - American Philosophical Society

HEIKO AUGUSTINUS OBERMAN
15 october 1930 . 22 april 2001
PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY VOL. 147, NO. 3, SEPTEMBER 2003

iographical memoirs
AT ALMOST the same time that the borderland between biology
and chemistry was developing into a territory in its own right,
the boundaries between various of the conventional “periods”
and specialties of traditional modern historiography were becoming
increasingly permeable. Led by several members of the American Philosophical
Society, the effort to see late antiquity as an identifiable period of
“post-classical” and yet “pre-medieval” and “pre-Byzantine” history has
by now matured enough to produce various graduate programs, a substantial
reference book, and an ever-growing bibliography of monographs.
Meanwhile, at the other end of medieval history, the categories of
“Ren ‘n Ref” with which my generation grew up in the 1940s have
also given way to a similar redrawing of the map: the renowned Institut
für Reformationsgeschichte at the University of Tübingen is now called
Institut für Spätmittelalter und Reformation. It acquired that new name
when its longtime director, the German Reformation scholar Hanns
Rückert, was succeeded in 1966 by the Dutch/American scholar Heiko
Augustinus Oberman, then thirty-five years old. His Jünglingswerk,
entitled, with echoes of his countryman Johan Huizinga’s Waning of the
Middle Ages of 1919, was The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel
Biel and Late Medieval Scholasticism, which Harvard University Press
published in 1963 while the author was a member of the Harvard faculty.
It had described the thought of the later Middle Ages neither as a
betrayal of the supposedly grand synthesis of “the thirteenth, the greatest
of centuries” and its Thomism, nor as a self-effacing “forerunner”
(à la St. John the Baptist) of Luther and the Reformation, but as a philosophical
and theological phenomenon that deserved attention in its own
right. It is fair to say that Reformation history has never been the same
since that book, and many of the major chairs in the field here and
abroad are now held by scholars, not all of them Obermanschüler in the
formal sense, who, instead of producing yet another dissertation on
Luther or Calvin, worked on figures of the fifteenth and early sixteenth
century such as Jean Gerson or Johann Staupitz or Gabriel Biel.
From The Harvest of Medieval Theology it would have been possible
for Heiko Oberman to move in several directions. Its insights into
what happened to the understanding of the relation between divine
grace and human free will, for example, could have led Oberman
straight back to a fundamental reconsideration of the philosophicaltheological
system of Augustine, with which he had dealt en passant in
his first book, Archbishop Thomas Bradwardine, a Fourteenth Century
Augustinian of 1957. This would have entailed an examination of
the fateful consequences of “Augustine’s failure to learn Greek,” which
Peter Brown has called “a momentous casualty of the Late Roman educational
system,” as a result of which “he will become the only Latin
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philosopher in antiquity to be virtually ignorant of Greek.” Despite
several brilliant essays on that prehistory, including a provocative article
already in 1962 on the patristic and medieval history of the concept of
tradition in relation to Scripture, his scholarly interests—and, it seems
quite clear, also his own existential concerns—moved into the center of
Reformation studies. As an ordinarius at the University of Tübingen,
which has both a Roman Catholic theological faculty and a Protestant
one, he was fascinated by the role of the sixteenth-century universities
not only in the genesis of Reformation ideas but in their dissemination
throughout Europe. His Werden und Wertung der Reformation of 1977,
whose English translation of 1981 carries the unfortunately individualisticsounding
title Masters of the Reformation, is in fact a history of the
founding of the University of Tübingen (“Initia Universitatis” is the subtitle
of its first part) seen as a portrait of the Reformation as a whole.
It was unavoidable that this grounding in the vocabulary of the
nominalists, the structure of the universities, and the coming-of-age of
the nationalities in the sixteenth century would prepare Heiko Oberman
to redefine the study of the thought and personality of Martin Luther.
While initially shaped by the picture of Luther’s theology that had come
from the work of his colleague and mentor, Gerhard Ebeling (to whom
Werden und Wertung der Reformation was dedicated), Oberman’s predominantly
historical methodology moved beyond Ebeling’s predominantly
theological concentration to produce a portrait of Luther in
which the Reformer’s personal struggles were seen as Luther himself had
seen them: Luther: Man Between God and the Devil (Berlin, 1982; New
Haven, 1989). Translated into several languages, this study corrected the
tendency of many biographers to make Luther the young rebel seem
more “modern” than in fact he was, while avoiding the Freudian and
Marxist reductionisms that were so fashionable a decade or two ago.
Nor was Oberman blind to the darker side of all of this. While he
was working on his Luther, he was also preparing what became in many
ways his most provocative and controversial book, published in 1981 in
German, in 1983 in Dutch, and in 1984 in English: The Roots of Anti-
Semitism in the Age of Renaissance and Reformation. Everybody knows
about the vile language of Luther’s screeds against the Jews, which
were collected into a special edition under the Nazis and which provoked
the widely discussed From Luther to Hitler. Examining with great
sensitivity and skill the implications but also the limitations of the usual
apologetic distinction between “anti-Judaism” as a theological position
and “anti-Semitism” as a racial and political position, Oberman’s
book locates Luther’s vituperations in the late medieval context and
asks both what he shared with his contemporaries and what made his
rantings different from those of other sixteenth-century figures. For

296 biographical memoirs
many readers, its most surprising, even shocking, section was the one
dealing with Desiderius Erasmus, the scholar’s role model (and every
Dutchman’s hero): his mastery of Greek and Latin makes his anti-
Semitic rhetoric even more offensive in many ways.
In 1984, Heiko Oberman returned to the United States, becoming
professor of history, and four years later Regents’ Professor of History,
at the University of Arizona, as well as director of its Division for Late
Medieval and Reformation Studies. For almost two decades, several
new generations of students flocked to his seminars and research institutes.
Although he would sometimes complain (as do we all!) about
their lack of preparation in languages, above all in his beloved Latin,
and about their ignorance of the basic components either of the classical
or of the Judaeo-Christian tradition (as a colleague of mine used to
say, “They don’t know just what it is they ought to have such difficulty
believing!”), he took them by the hand, firmly and even patiently, and
introduced them to their ancestors. Almost in spite of themselves and
without the prior benefits of a schooling in the classical Gymnasium,
they became accomplished scholars—even if sometimes it took considerably
longer than the university bureaucracy might have preferred.
In each of his scholarly habitats—Utrecht, Indonesia, Oxford, Harvard,
Tübingen, Arizona—Heiko Oberman was a scholar of almost
overpowering energy, a teacher of profound dedication, and a colleague
of rigorous demands but of no less unrelenting loyalties. Sometimes
this integrity could make him seem acerbic, as I personally had
reason to learn when we first met forty years ago. But his respect,
which had to be earned, came to express itself in deepening friendship
and generosity, even when differences both of belief and of style persisted.
I was a guest of his Institut für Spätmittelalter und Reformation
in Tübingen (when the Swabian countryside was in bloom and the trout
were at their most succulent), and then of his Division for Late Medieval
and Reformation Studies in Tucson. For both visits, the students
were ready with sharp and well-informed questions (“Why did you close
the first volume of The Christian Tradition at 600?” the Arizona cohort
chanted in chorus, obviously having been rehearsed), and with several of
them at both places I instituted a correspondence that went on for a couple
of years. And I shall never forget the warm personal hospitality of
Heiko and Toetie (Geertruida) Oberman on both occasions.
Elected 1991
Jaroslav J. Pelikan
Sterling Professor of History Emeritus
Yale University