Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/508

Rh 490 KEUCHLIN In 1496 Count Eberhard died, and enemies of Reuchlin had the ear of the new prince. He was glad therefore hastily to follow the invitation of John of Dalburg the scholarly bishop of Worms, and flee to Heidelberg, which was then the seat of the " Rhenish Society," a lively and active circle of humanists under Dalburg's presidency, equally zealous in the service of Apollo and Bacchus. In this court of letters Reuchlin's appointed function was to make translations from the Greek authors, in which his reading was already extremely wide. Many of these versions were never printed, but a considerable number of pieces Avere given to the press at intervals down to the year 1519, and formed an important element in his efforts to spread a knowledge of Greek. For, though Reuchlin had no public office as teacher, and even at Heidelberg was prevented from lecturing openly, he was during a great part of his life the real centre of all Greek teach- ing as well as of all Hebrew teaching in Germany. No young man of promise who came to him for help was rejected ; he taught many and found teachers for others, or gave direction and solution of difficulties to more advanced scholars. Thus he was a sort of unofficial general director of the studies of Germany, and to carry out this work he found it necessary to provide a series of helps for beginners and others. He never published a Greek grammar, though he had one in MS. for use with his pupils, but he put out several little elemen- tary Greek books ; and these with the series of transla- tions were in fact the text books of the German youth. Reuchlin, it may be noted, pronounced Greek as his native teachers had taught him to do, i.e., in the modern Greek fashion. This pronunciation, which he defends in Dia- logus de Recta Lot. Grzecique Serm. Pron., 1519, came to be known, in contrast to that used by Erasmus, as the Reuchlinian. At Heidelberg Reuchlin had many private pupils, among whom Franz von Sickingen is the best known name ; and all his relations, except with the monks who stopped his attempt to lecture on Hebrew, were very pleasant. With the monks he had never been well; at Stuttgart also his great enemy was the Augustinian Holzinger. On this man he took a scholar's revenge in his first Latin comedy Sergius, a satire on worthless monks and false relics which his young Heidelberg friends were eager to act. But, Dalburg thinking this unsafe, he wrote for them a new piece, Scenica Progymnasmata or Henno t based on the old French play of Maitre Pathelin, which is not without humour and sparkle of language, and much better constructed than the French piece. Through Dalburg, Reuchlin came into contact with Philip of the Pfalz, who employed him to direct his son's studies, and in 1498 gave him the mission to Rome which has been already noticed as fruitful for Reuchlin's progress in Hebrew. He came back laden with Hebrew books, and found when he reached Heidelberg that a change of Government had opened the way for his return to Stuttgart. His wife had remained there all along ; so that we may assume that he never looked on his exile as more than temporary. His friends were the party of order and good government, who could not long remain powerless. They had now again the upper hand, and knew Reuchlin's value. In 1500, or perhaps in 1502, he was named "triumvir of Swabia," a very high judicial office in the Swabian League, which he held till 1512, when he retired to a small estate near Stuttgart. By this time the long conflict which gives Reuchlin's life its chief interest had already begun. For many years Reuchlin had been increasingly absorbed in Hebrew studies, which had for him more than a mere philological interest. Though he was always a good Catholic, and even took the habit of an Augustinian monk when he felt that his death was near, he was too thorough a humanist to be a blind Catholic. He knew the abuses of monkish religion, and was interested in the reform of preaching (De Arte Predicandi, 1503 a book which became a sort of preacher's manual) ; but above all as a scholar he was eager that the Bible should be better known, and could not tie himself to the authority of the Vulgate. To him the Old Testament Scriptures meant the Hebrew text, and this he was determined to study with an independent love for truth : " I honour St Jerome as an angel; I value Lira as a master; but I worship truth as my God." The key to the Hebrew veritas was the grammatical and exegetical tradition of the mediaeval rabbins, especially of Kimhi, and when he had mastered this himself he was resolved to open it to others. In 1506 appeared his Rudimenta Hebraica grammar and lexicon mainly after Kimhi, yet not a mere copy of one man's teaching. The edition was costly and sold slowly. In 1510 he was glad to offer Amorbach seven hundred and fifty copies at the reduced price of a florin for three copies. Even then Amorbach could hardly find purchasers, but Reuchlin bade him be patient, " for if I live Hebrew must with God's help come to the front." One great difficulty was that the wars of Maximilian in Italy pre- vented Hebrew Bibles coming into Germany. But for this also Reuchlin found help by printing the Penitential Psalms with grammatical explanations (1512), and other helps followed from time to time. But Reuchlin had yet another interest in Hebrew letters. His Greek studies had interested him in philosophy, and not least in those fantastical and mystical systems of later times with which the Cabbala has no small affinity. Following Pico, he seemed to find in the Cabbala a profound theosophy which might be of the greatest service for the defence of Christianity and the reconciliation of science with the mysteries of faith an unhappy delusion indeed, but one not surprising in that strange time of ferment, when the old and the new intellectual life had not yet clearly dis- criminated themselves, and when men of progress sought less to free themselves from mere tradition than to find an ancient tradition of truth which had been lost in the darkness of mediaeval ignorance. Reuchlin's mystico- cabbalistic ideas and objects were expounded in the De Verbo Mirifico, 1494, and finally in the De Arte Cabba- listica, 1517. We see therefore that not only the philo- logical tradition but the most esoteric wisdom of the rabbins was in his eyes of the greatest value. Unhappily many of his contemporaries held other views, and thought that the first step to the conversion of the Jews was to conquer their obstinacy by taking from them their books. This view had for its chief advocate the bigoted John Pfefferkorn, himself a baptized Hebrew. Pfefferkorn's plans were backed by the Dominicans of Cologne; and in 1509 he got from the emperor authority to confiscate all Jewish books directed against the Christian faith. Armed with this mandate, he visited Stuttgart and asked Reuchlin's help as a jurist and expert in putting it into execution. Reuchlin evaded this demand, mainly because the mandate lacked certain formalities, but he could not long remain neutral. The execution of Pfeffer- korn's schemes led to difficulties and to a new appeal to Maximilian. It was resolved to call in the opinion of experts, and in 1510 Reuchlin was summoned in the name of the emperor to give his formal opinion on the suppres- sion of the Jewish books. His answer is dated from Stuttgart, November 6, 1510 ; in it he divides the books into six classes apart from the Bible which no one pro- posed to destroy and, going through each class, he shows that the books openly insulting to Christianity are very