How the church suppressed knowledge

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This prevented us from having lunch every Monday in the 1980s: with rumbling stomachs, we students sat in a crowded auditorium at the University of Zurich and listened to lectures by the German professor Peter von Matt. When he talked about literature, it wasn’t just puffy hot-air soufflés that immediately collapsed, but strong statements with caustic food. After that, full of words and in love with the sentences, we set off at noon.

“Love in every sense (…) is an elemental force to which we are subject from the first to the last hour of our life, because otherwise we are subject only to hunger,” writes von Matt (85) in his recently published book. with his speeches, lectures and afterwords over the past 15 years. They don’t stop at the German-speaking borders, they cross into other territories – linguistically and thematically. Because Peter von Matt is actually a polymath.

“In the Controversy over the Faculties” – the first text in the book – gives an overview of Nidwaldner: von Mattt uses Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) to show how the powerful church used to ensure that theology in the universities, along with jurisprudence and medicine, belonged to three the best faculties. “The lower one was the philosophy department,” writes von Matt. “The latter, however, included everything that we today consider the humanities and natural sciences.”

‘Eat now, ah! Philosophy / Law and medicine / And, unfortunately, also theology! Carefully studied with great difficulty”, he then quotes the first verses from “Faust” (1808) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) and points out that “Faust defiantly inverts the hierarchy and the lower faculty, the philosophical, called the first and the first of the higher faculties , theology, last”. A revolution that is now a fact.

Today it is mostly about the conflict between the humanities and the natural sciences. Von Matt strongly defends himself against the ridicule of the humanities by politics. “The orchid fan metaphor, which is always used in this context, contains the assertion that there are scientific disciplines that are pure luxury,” says the Germanist. However, the obvious antonym “potato lovers” is never used.

Instead, von Matt focuses on what connects rather than what separates: “It is amazing to see how the category of storytelling is gaining new relevance today in a variety of sciences,” he writes. In fact, the popularity of podcasts or non-fiction stories speaks volumes. Ultimately, science has always been a hidden story, von Matt continues: “The church fathers already knew this. They were shocked and condemned (…) by the desire for new knowledge.”

Source: Blick