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The life of Heiko Augustinus Oberman
15 October 1930 - 22 April 2001
by G. H. M. Posthumus Meyjes, trans. Julian Deahl
In The Work of Heiko A. Oberman: Papers from the Symposium on His Seventieth
Birthday, ed. Thomas A. Brady, Jr. et al (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003),
195-202.
On 22 April of this year
Heiko Augustinus Oberman died at the age of seventy in Tucson, Arizona, where
since 1984 he had held a professorship in modern history. From 1963
he had been a corresponding member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences.
With his death an end came to a very rich, very varied and international life
in the service of historical science in general, and of the history of theology
in particular.
As fifth and penultimate child of Dr G.W. Oberman and Elza
H. Graanboom, he was born in 1930 in the Maliebaan in Utrecht. His
father was a well-known Dutch Reformed clergyman there, known either as the
"Red" or as the "Roman" parson, according to whether emphasis was laid on
his strong social conscience or on his advocacy of an ecumenical Catholicism.
He was known for his contacts with Archbishop De Jong, with whom he was to
be occasionally seen strolling along the Maliebaan.
Oberman senior was a man whose studiousness was matched by
his sense of humor and who had a tendency towards provocation and anti-establishment
stances, but he was also a great lover of soccer, in short someone ideally
suited to captivate young people in particular. I should add that at
an early date he came into contact with the "Confessing Church" in Germany
and thus was well prepared for the horrors to come. This contributed
to the fact that in the war he proved to be a very courageous patriot, in
particular by vigorously taking up the cause of Dutch Jews and other victims
of the occupiers.
I evoke this portrait of his father, because many of his characteristics
lived on in his son and were to be given a strikingly idiosyncratic effect
in him. And not only in his scholarly activities and theological preferences,
but also in his remarkable gifts of performance and organization, and above
all in his warm relations with his many students and friends, wherever in
the world they happened to be.
Initially Oberman junior had intended to study medicine, but
during his final years of high school he decided against this, because theology
attracted him more. He transferred in high school from sciences to humanities,
indeed changed schools to do so—from a Christian to the Municipal Grammer
school—thanks to help from his mother who had graduated in classical languages,
and he did so without missing a school year, even if this was a very close
call.
He joined his father, who in the meantime had become a minister
in Batavia (Dutch East Indies), for a few months and discussions with him
led to a final decision to continue the family tradition and—by this time
in the third generation—to study theology, in Utrecht itself.
In the beginning he was less enthused by what the faculty had
to offer him than by the attractions of student and fraternity life (Secor
Dabar). As a fraternity member he was regularly seen at the student
club PHRM, in which for a year he held the position of wine-fellow.
So it is indeed doubly fitting that it was with the Heineken prize of all
things that the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences honored him in 1996.
The pleasures of student life did not however prevent him from concluding
his studies (including his doctorate) within 8 years.
In 1955, shortly after his church examinations for the ministry,
Oberman married Geertruida (Toetie) R. Reesink, who was to bear him four children—two sons and two daughters—and who was to provide him with exceptional
support throughout his life. The first years of their marriage took
the young couple to Oxford, where Oberman in a short time managed to prepare
his MA examination and also to complete his dissertation, entitled Thomas
Bradwardine, a fourteenth-century Augustinian, with which on 24 October
1957—at the age of just 27—he obtained his doctorate cum laude
. His supervisor was Professor Dr M. van Rhijn. Looking back
over his whole oeuvre this work clearly set the tone for what, in ever widening
circles, was to remain his main focus of interest: continuity and discontinuity
in the period from the late Middle Ages and Reformation, in particular illustrated
by the development of nominalism.
After his doctorate Oberman served for a short time as a teaching
assistant, a post which he combined with that of curate in Holten, where the
family owned a country retreat "Ekeby." For him, the "flying Dutchman,"
who in the course of his life—as a sought-after speaker, guest professor
or prize winner—visited all the continents for shorter or longer periods
of time, this was and remained a precious home-base, where time after time,
surrounded by his immediate and wider family, and friends, he found rest and
refuge.
After he had been ordained by his father in June 1958 as a
Dutch Reformed minister in general employ, he left for the United States
in order as of August 1 to accept the position of instructor in church history
and dogma at the Harvard Divinity School. Immediately students, of
both divinity and other subjects, were attracted to him as by a magnet and
he acquired a position and reputation in his new surroundings. The
consequences of this were appointments as early as 1959 as associate professor,
in 1963 (after Yale University has in vain tried to lure him away) as full
professor, and in 1964 as Winn Professor in Church History at Harvard University.
Even in his early years as professor at Harvard he had looked
for a home for the book output of his students in the first place, but also
of others. This led to a contract with E.J. Brill (now Koninklijke Brill)
of Leiden for the launching of two book series in the history of church and
dogma, each with a select editorial board headed by Oberman. This turned
out to be a very good choice, for both series gained an excellent international
reputation and now comprise more than 180 volumes.
Shortly before the Second Vatican Council Oberman had, together
with Daniel J. Callahan and Daniel J. O'Hanlon S.J., written a book: Christianity
Divided (1961), in which the most important points of disagreement between
Rome and the Reformed churches were explained. Its publication attracted
unexpectedly high interest, which probably explains why he, although not belonging
to the denomination, was asked by the Congretionalists to attend the Council
as an observer. And so it came to pass. At the age of 32 he was
the youngest observer.
Despite expectations, the stay in Rome was not to be a period
of rest and study, for he was immediately swallowed up by a maelstrom of meetings.
"I landed," he once said in an interview, "in an endless round of introductory
meetings and discussions with bishops and their advisers, the periti
, extraordinarily absorbing." By means of articles in magazines and
newspapers he kept America and the home front in Holland informed of his
experiences in Rome. In the corridors of the Council he was much sought-after
as a discussion partner, not only for the periti but also for the representatives
of the media, for whom he was—thanks to his well developed feeling for
publicity—an ideal fielder of questions and a clear interpreter of the
historical background of the conciliar discussions. He had the advantage
above many other observers that the Latin in which the discussions took place
posed no problem at all for him.
That Oberman had not marked time in Harvard was clear from
the fact that he was able to complete in Rome the foreword of a weighty new
book that—in an allusion to Huizinga's Harvest of the Middle Ages—was entitled: The Harvest of Medieval Theology (1963).
One would be right in saying that none of his later works contributed more
to his reputation in the international theological world. Building
on his previously published in-depth studies of schools and directions within
nominalism and Augustinianism, he had two aims with this work. On the
one hand, to rehabilitate late medieval nominalism, by a thorough analysis
of the theology of the fifteenth century scholastic Gabriel Biel. On
the other hand, to trace the traditon of theology and piety in which Luther
was to grow up. Luther himself was however not yet discussed in
The Harvest. This would come later.
Following in the footsteps of Paul Vignaux in particular, he
laid to rest the widely held opinion—chiefly still defended in handbooks—that nominalism was a system of thought tending to disintegration, which
had destroyed the Thomistic synthesis and had called into being an essentially
uncatholic and anticatholic theology, which had no place for mysticism and
which had undermined any certainty of faith. All this was considered
to have contributed in a significant way to the emergence of a Reformation.
Oberman countered that one definitely could not deny a synthetic character
to nominalism, and he showed convincingly that nominalism and mysticism were
not mutually exclusive. In his Forerunners of the Reformation
(1965) which appeared shortly afterwards, an anthology of late medieval
theological texts with commentaries, he presented his insights in an accessible
form.
In Germany his innovative publications had not gone unnoticed.
This led to an invitation, together with simultaneous requests from other
Universities, in 1966, to accept an appointment to a chair in the Protestant
theological faculty at Tübingen, traditionally an important center for
Luther research. He agreed, primarily because the number of staff that
he would have in his charge here was larger than in Harvard and he could thus
spread his wings further. He succeeded his predecessor, Hanns Rückert,
in two posts: as professor and as director of the Institut für
Reformationsgeschichte. At Oberman's initiative the terms of reference
of the institute were broadened and altered to Institut für Spätmittelalter
und Reformation. Under his responsibility fell the preparation
of an analytic index to the collected works of Luther—the so-called Weimar
edition. In addition he acted as head of an interdisciplinary research
group in the field of the late Middle Ages and Reformation, and under his
discretion critical editions were produced of works by Gabriel Biel, the
Augustinian theologian Gregory of Rimini, and the 15th century figure, Johannes
von Paltz.
Even more than in Harvard he made a name in Tübingen as
a thorough organizer of scholarly enterprises. Both demanding and humane
to his collaborators, he ensured that they were molded into a close team.
And in this he had outstanding success, judging by the fact that the German
academic grapevine spoke of the "Oberman trust" in Tübingen, in contrast
to some other institutes in the Federal Republic, which were labeled disparagingly
as "people's enterprises", on the East German model.
On the occasion of the 500th anniversary of the University
of Tübingen in 1977, Oberman produced a major new work, more heavily
documented than ever—it was almost bent double under the weight of its
footnotes—entitled Werden und Wertung der Reformation. It
is a highly audacious work, presenting an overwhelming body of material,
written in a very self-confident manner, full of associations and "witty"
speculations, at one point extremely detailed and at another dogmatically
sweeping, although its composition was less of a success. The main
thesis of the book is that the disputes within the University of Tübingen
in the first 70 years of its existence has a very far-reaching influence
on the development of the Reformation in general.
Distancing himself forcefully from modern research, he argued
that the decisive factors affecting the Reformation were not primarily humanist
influences, or even social or economic conditions, but that it was above all
the University "Wegestreit" of this period between the via antiqua
and the via moderna that had led to it. Anyone knowing the
author's preferences will not be surprised to hear that in his depiction of
this controversy he was strongly inclined to side with the followers of the
via moderna.
In preparation for the commemoration of Luther's 500th birthday
in 1983, Oberman began two studies, the first of which—most strongly than
any others in his immense list of publications—bears witness to an intense
personal involvement with the subject of his choice. I refer to a small
but very substantial book from 1981: Wurzeln des Antisemitismus:
Christenangst und Judenplage im Zeitalter von Humanismus und Reformation
(1981). It goes without saying that courage was needed to grasp such
a sensitive theme as this, but Oberman realized that clarity was required
on precisely this point, before he could produce a new biography of Luther.
And this came about a year later with his Luther—Mensch zwischen Gott
und Teufel (1982).
It has been said of this book that it can be seen as probably
the most original contribution of the 20th century to an understanding of
the Reformer (Peter Blickle). And justifiably so, for here Oberman succeeded
in liberating Luther from later glosses and in returning him completely to
his own time. He shows elegantly how in the late Middle Ages people
felt wedged in between God and the devil, and both suffered on this account
and drew strength from it. Luther, who lived with the awareness of being
called to be a prophet, was placed by Oberman in this framework, and Oberman
described him as someone who was convinced that the Last Judgment was nigh.
The book was largely written during a study leave in Jerusalem and is one
of Oberman's best-known works. It went through may printings and was
translated into several languages; the same happened, by the way, to all
his other major works mentioned above.
In 1984 an end came to Oberman's stay in Tübingen.
After 18 years of bravely enduring the damp climate there, he had to look
for a warmer domicile, because of Toetie Oberman's arthritis. And this
was more than adequately provided by the desert city of Tucson (Arizona).
The local University was not known as a center for the study of the late Middle
Ages and the Reformation. Yet that was not seen as an objection, but
rather as a challenge to build a center of this type here. And this
indeed worked. Oberman's international reputation meant that students
flew in from all quarters to be trained by him. The University played
its part by providing the necessary facilities. In this way, shortly
after his death, a center for the study of the Reformation was established
in Tucson, with a second position in Reformation history. At the same
time Oberman's awe-inspiring personal library was donated to the University.
In his final years he occupied himself largely with preliminary studies for
a larger work on Calvin.
During his time at Tucson, Oberman flew 31 times to the Netherlands
as a member of the "Committee of Inquiry into Theology," set up in 1987 by
Dutch Minister Deetman. Its remit was "to describe, evaluate and if
necessary to reorganize the field of academic theology in the Netherlands."
The committee did some very thorough and useful work, although this did not
occur without much tumult, anger and sorrow on the part of some of the persons
and institutions concerned. But I need not go into this. I would
only recollect that when in March 1989 the final report of the Committee was
presented to the institutes at a large meeting in the Free University of
Amsterdam, Professor Dr A.H. Smits opened the session and announced with a
smile that he had the honor of being the chairman of what was referred to
in informal circles as the "Oberman Committee."
It is well enough known that throughout his career Oberman received
an unbroken stream of scholarly prizes and other accolades, and, given his
outstanding ability, this should hardly be cause for surprise. Without
claiming to be comprehensive, and ignoring his many memberships of learned
associations, editorial boards of journals, and so on, I shall limit myself
to the honorary doctorates he received. These were awarded him by the
Universities of Harvard, St. Louis, Aberdeen, and Valparaiso (Indiana).
Finally an attempt to offer a portrait of Oberman in a few
sentences: 1. A driven, unusually focussed and rapid worker.
2. A highly ambitious scholar with strong journalistic and commercial talents.
3. A leader, organizer, builder and positive thinker: as such demanding,
authoritarian and idiosyncratic. 4. A true pastor: as such loyal, warm
and sympathetic, and much loved as a teacher. 5. A verbally gifted
man with strong powers of persuasion and a sense of humor: for this reason
a born performer and an exceptional preacher. In short: a phenomenon
without equal, whose singular personality and impressive oeuvre will not
quickly be lost from memory.
1. See Jan van Miert, ed., Een gewone stad in een
bijzondere tijd, Utrecht 1940-1945 (Utrecht 1995), p. 82.
2. G. Puchinger, Gesprekken over Rome-Reformatie
(Delft 1965). Contains an interview with Oberman, pp. 89-114 (93).
3. Rapport van de Verkenningscommissie Godgeleerdheid.
Prof. dr. A.H. Smits, Prof. dr A. van der Kooij, Prof. dr H.A. Oberman.
Ministerie van Onderwijs en Wetenschappen ('s-Gravenhage, March 1989),
p. 3.
4. For Oberman's bibliography see: Robert J. Bast
and Andrew C. Gow, eds., Continuity and Change. The Harvest of Late-Medieval
and Reformation History. Essays presented to Heiko A. Oberman on his
70th Birthday. Leiden-Köln-Boston 2000, pp. 431-446.
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