ABSTRACT
The Lutheran reform of religion and education began as a two-man affair. It had started in 1517 with Martin Luther famously nailing the ninety-five theses on the door of a church in Wittenberg, theses which challenged many central points of Catholic doctrine and discipline. This particular church was the church of the new University of Wittenberg (founded 1502), where Luther was a professor, as well as being an Augustinian friar. The theses were a challenge to others to participate in a scholastic disputation. During the first tempestuous years of reform and – when the dust had settled – during the years of reconstruction, Luther always had at his side his fellow professor, the educationalist Philipp Melanchthon. Their characters were like their physiques. The one, Luther, was big and bold in body and in his ideas for reform; the other, Melanchthon, was lean and cautious, both physically and politically. Initially the reform impulse meant that the works of the heathen Aristotle – the mainstay of university teaching to this point – had to be rejected. But then the challenge of the yet more radical prophets of Zwickau and others meant that Aristotle had to be reincorporated into the reformed curriculum. Melanchthon is the person who performed this dextrous turn-around, making the heathen Aristotle acceptable to Protestants.
