Catholic University of Strasbourg

The Catholic University of Strasbourg is one of two rival universities whose doctors appear in the narrator’s account of debates over Martin Luther’s fate. Its professors claim that the circumstances of Luther’s birth prove he was predestined to damnation, making the institution a target of the novel’s comedy about scholarship that presents elaborate speculation as certainty.

Identity and Background

The novel identifies the Catholic University of Strasbourg as the institution founded by Leopold, Archduke of Austria. It sets the university alongside Strasbourg’s Lutheran university, founded in 1538 by Jacobus Surmis, a counsellor of the senate. The contrast establishes a confessional and intellectual rivalry: the two institutions approach Luther’s damnation from opposing positions, but the narrative treats both as participants in an increasingly elaborate academic controversy.

The Astrological Argument

The Catholic doctors undertake to demonstrate Luther’s damnation a priori, reasoning from the supposed necessary influence of the planets on 22 October 1483. Their account assigns significance to the Moon’s position in the twelfth house; Jupiter, Mars, and Venus in the third; and the Sun, Saturn, and Mercury together in the fourth. From this arrangement they conclude that Luther must inevitably have been damned and, by extension, that his doctrines must also have been damned.

The force of the university’s argument lies in its deterministic chain: a configuration of celestial bodies at a particular date is treated as proof of a person’s fate and then of the theological status of his teachings. The narrator presents this reasoning as a display of confidence rather than as a conclusion independently established by the story.

Rivalry and Distraction

The Lutheran doctors contest the Catholic professors’ account through a nautical metaphor. They argue that Luther had not sailed before the wind as the Catholic doctors claimed; the scholars then turn toward debating the direction and course of his supposed voyage. The passage makes the dispute’s method part of its comedy: theological judgment becomes an increasingly technical exercise in celestial navigation.

Neither university’s controversy retains public attention. The narrator says that the stranger’s exceptionally large nose drew the world’s notice away from the scholars’ proceedings. The Catholic University’s argument is thus placed within a wider pattern of learned inquiries being overtaken by spectacle and curiosity: an academic dispute that its participants regard as edifying becomes only one competing subject in a world readily diverted by a striking appearance.

Narrative Significance

The university’s episode extends the novel’s satire of systems that convert uncertain interpretation into apparently necessary conclusions. Its doctors use planetary positions to assert both an individual’s unavoidable fate and the condemnation of his doctrines; the rival university counters with its own elaborate account. The narrator’s comic framing leaves the dispute less as a settled theological judgment than as an example of scholarly ingenuity expended on claims whose certainty the narrative invites readers to question.