theology proper. As Moehler, who was essentially a theologian, deserted
divinity to compose inferior treatises on the gnostics and the false
decretals, Doellinger, by choice and vocation a divine, having religion
as the purpose of his life, judged that the loftier function, the more
spiritual service, was historical teaching. The problem is to know how
it came to pass that a man who was eminently intelligent and perspicuous
in the exposition of doctrines, but who, in narrative, description, and
knowledge of character, was neither first nor second, resolved that his
mission was history.
In early life he had picked up chance copies of Baronius and Petavius,
the pillars of historic theology; but the motives of his choice lay
deeper. Church history had long been the weakest point and the cause of
weakness among the Catholics, and it was the rising strength of the
German Protestants. Therefore it was the post of danger; and it gave to
a theologian the command of a public of laymen. The restoration of
history coincided with the euthanasia of metaphysic; when the foremost
philosophic genius of the time led over to the historic treatment both
of philosophy and religion, and Hamilton, Cousin, Comte, severally
converted the science into its history. Many men better equipped for
speculation than for erudition went the same way; the systematic
theology was kept up in the universities by the influence of Rome, where
scholasticism went on untouched by the romantic transformation. Writing
of England, Wiseman said: "There is still a scholastic hardness in our
controversial theology, an unbendingness of outward forms in our
explanations of Catholic principles, which renders our theologians dry
and unattractive to the most catholicly inclined portion of our
Protestants." The choice which these youths made, towards 1830, was,
though they did not know it, the beginning of a rift that widened.
Doellinger was more in earnest than others in regarding Christianity as
history, and in pressing the affinity between catholic and historical
thought. Systems were to him nearly as codes to Savigny, when he
exhorted his contemporaries not to consolidate their law, lest, with
their wisdom and knowledge, they should incorporate their delusions and
their ignorance, and usurp for the state what belonged to the nation. He
would send an inquiring student to the _Historia Congregationis de
Auxiliis_ and the _Historia Pelagiana_ rather than to Molina or Lemos,
and often gave the advice which, coming from Oriel, disconcerted Morris
of Exeter: "I am afraid you will have to read the Jesuit Petavius." He
dreaded the predominance of great names which stop the way, and
everything that interposes the notions of an epoch, a region, or a
school between the Church and the observer.
To an Innsbruck professor, lamenting that there was no philosophy which
he could heartily adopt, he replied that philosophies do not subsist in
order to be adopted. A Thomist or a Cartesian seemed to him as a
captive, or a one-armed combatant. Prizing metaphysicians for the
unstrung pearls which they drop beyond the seclusion of system, he loved
the _disjecta membra_ of Coleridge, and preferred the _Pensieri_, and
_Parerga und Paralipomena_ to the constructed work of Gioberti and
Schopenhauer. He knew Leibniz chiefly in his letters, and was
perceptibly affected by his law of continuous progression, his general
optimism, and his eclectic art of extracting from men and books only the
good that is in them; but of monadology or pre-established harmony there
was not a trace. His colleague, Schelling, no friend to the friends of
Baader, stood aloof. The elder Windischmann, whom he particularly
esteemed, and who acted in Germany as the interpreter of De Maistre, had
hailed Hegel as a pioneer of sound philosophy, with whom he agreed both
in thought and word. Doellinger had no such condescension. Hegel
remained, in his _eyes_, the strongest of all the enemies of religion,
the guide of Tuebingen in its aberrations, the reasoner whose abstract
dialectics made a generation of clever men incapable of facing facts. He
went on preferring former historians of dogma, who were untainted by the
trail of pantheism, Baumgarten-Crusius, and even Muenscher, and by no
means admitted that Baur was deeper than the early Jesuits and
Oratorians, or gained more than he lost by constriction in the Hegelian
coil. He took pleasure in pointing out that the best recent book on the
penitential system, Kliefoth's fourth volume, owed its substance to
Morinus. The dogmas of pantheistic history offended him too much to give
them deep study, and he was ill prepared with counsel for a wanderer
lost in the pervading haze. Hegelians said of him that he lacked the
constructive unity of idea, and knew the way from effect to cause, but
not from cause to law.
His own lectures on the philosophy of religion, which have left no deep
furrow, have been praised by Ketteler, who was not an undiscriminating
admirer. He sent on one of his pupils to Rosmini, and set another to
begin metaphysics with Suarez; and when Lady Ashburton consulted him on
the subject, he advised her to read Norris and Malebranche. He
encouraged the study of remoter luminaries, such as Cusa and Raymundus,
whose _Natural Theology_ he preferred to the _Analogy_; and would not
have men overlook some who are off the line, like Postel. But although
he deemed it the mark of inferiority to neglect a grain of the gold of
obsolete and eccentric writers, he always assigned to original
speculation a subordinate place, as a good servant but a bad master,
without the certainty and authority of history. What one of his English
friends writes of a divine they both admired, might fitly be applied to
him:
He was a disciple in the school of Bishop Butler, and had learned as
a first principle to recognise the limitations of human knowledge,
and the unphilosophical folly of trying to round off into finished
and pretentious schemes our fragmentary yet certain notices of our
own condition and of God's dealing with it.
He alarmed Archer Gurney by saying that all hope of an understanding is
at an end, if logic be applied for the rectification of dogma, and to
Dr. Plummer, who acknowledged him as the most capable of modern
theologians and historians, he spoke of the hopelessness of trying to
discover the meaning of terms used in definitions. To his archbishop he
wrote that men may discuss the mysteries of faith to the last day
without avail; "we stand here on the solid ground of history, evidence,
and fact." Expressing his innermost thought, that religion exists to
make men better, and that the ethical quality of dogma constitutes its
value, he once said: "Tantum valet quantum ad corrigendum, purgandum,
sanctificandum hominem confert." In theology as an intellectual
exercise, beyond its action on the soul, he felt less interest, and
those disputes most satisfied him which can be decided by appeal to the
historian.
From his early reputation and his position at the outpost, confronting
Protestant science, he was expected to make up his mind over a large
area of unsettled thought and disputed fact, and to be provided with an
opinion--a freehold opinion of his own--and a reasoned answer to every
difficulty. People had a right to know what he knew about the end of the
sixteenth chapter of St. Mark, and the beginning of the eighth chapter
of St. John, the lives of St. Patrick and the sources of Erigena, the
author of the _Imitation_ and of the _Twelve Articles_, the _Nag's Head_
and the _Casket Letters_. The suspense and poise of the mind, which is
the pride and privilege of the unprofessional scholar, was forbidden
him. Students could not wait for the master to complete his studies;
they flocked for dry light of knowledge, for something defined and
final, to their keen, grave, unemotional professor, who said sometimes
more than he could be sure of, but who was not likely to abridge thought
by oracular responses, or to give aphorism for argument. He accepted the
necessity of the situation. A time came when everybody was invited, once
a week, to put any imaginable question from the whole of Church history,
and he at once replied. If this was a stimulus to exertion during the
years spent in mastering and pondering the immense materials, it served
less to promote originality and care than premature certitude and the
craving for quick returns. Apart from the constant duty of teaching, his
knowledge might not have been so extensive, but his views would have
been less decided and therefore less liable to change.
As an historian, Doellinger regarded Christianity as a force more than as
a doctrine, and displayed it as it expanded and became the soul of later
history. It was the mission and occupation of his life to discover and
to disclose how this was accomplished, and to understand the history of
civilised Europe, religious and profane, mental and political, by the
aid of sources which, being original and authentic, yielded certainty.
In his vigorous prime, he thought that it would be within his powers to
complete the narrative of the conquest of the world by Christ in a
single massive work. The separated churches, the centrifugal forces,
were to have been treated apart, until he adopted the ampler title of a
history of Christianity. We who look back upon all that the combined and
divided labour of a thousand earnest, gifted, and often instructed men
has done and left undone in sixty years, can estimate the scientific
level of an age where such a dream could be dreamed by such a man,
misled neither by imagination nor ambition, but knowing his own
limitations and the immeasurable world of books. Experience slowly
taught him that he who takes all history for his province is not the man
to write a compendium.
The four volumes of _Church History_ which gave him a name in literature
appeared between 1833 and 1838, and stopped short of the Reformation. In
writing mainly for the horizon of seminaries, it was desirable to eschew
voyages of discovery and the pathless border-land. The materials were
all in print, and were the daily bread of scholars. A celebrated
Anglican described Doellinger at that time as more intentional than
Fleury; while Catholics objected that he was a candid friend; and
Lutherans, probing deeper, observed that he resolutely held his ground
wherever he could, and as resolutely abandoned every position that he
found untenable. He has since said of himself that he always spoke
sincerely, but that he spoke as an advocate--a sincere advocate who
pleaded only for a cause which he had convinced himself was just. The
cause he pleaded was the divine government of the Church, the fulfilment
of the promise that it would be preserved from error, though not from
sin, the uninterrupted employment of the powers committed by Christ for
the salvation of man. By the absence of false arts he acquired that
repute for superior integrity which caused a Tyrolese divine to speak of
him as the most chivalrous of the Catholic celebrities; and the nuncio
who was at Munich during the first ten years called him the "professeur
le plus eclaire, le plus religieux, en un mot le plus distingue de
l'universite."
Taking his survey from the elevation of general history, he gives less
space to all the early heresies together than to the rise of
Mohammedanism. His way lies between Neander, who cares for no
institutions, and Baur, who cares for no individuals. He was entirely
exempt from that impersonal idealism which Sybel laid down at the
foundation of his review, which causes Delbrueck to complain that
Macaulay, who could see facts so well, could not see that they are
revelations, which Baur defines without disguise in his
_Dreieinigkeitslehre_: "Alle geschichtlichen Personen sind fuer uns
blosse Namen." The two posthumous works of Hegel which turned events
into theories had not then appeared. Doellinger, setting life and action
above theory, omitted the progress of doctrine. He proposed that Moehler
should take that share of their common topic, and the plan, entertained
at first, was interrupted, with much besides, by death. He felt too
deeply the overwhelming unity of force to yield to that atomic theory
which was provoked by the Hegelian excess: "L'histoire n'est pas un
simple jeu d'abstractions, et les hommes y sont plus que les doctrines.
Ce n'est pas une certaine theorie sur la justification et la redemption
qui a fait la Reforme: c'est Luther, c'est Calvin." But he allows a vast
scope to the variable will and character of man. The object of religion
upon earth is saintliness, and its success is shown in holy individuals.
He leaves law and doctrine, moving in their appointed orbits, to hold up
great men and examples of Christian virtue.
Doellinger, who had in youth acted as secretary to Hohenlohe, was always
reserved in his use of the supernatural. In the vision of Constantine
and the rebuilding of the temple, he gives his reader both the natural
explanation and the miraculous. He thought that the witness of the
fathers to the continuance of miraculous powers could not be resisted
without making history _a priori_, but later on, the more he sifted and
compared authorities, the more severe he became. He deplored the
uncritical credulity of the author of the _Monks of the West_; and, in
examining the Stigmata, he cited the experience of a Spanish convent
where they were so common that it became a sign of reprobation to be
without them. Historians, he said, have to look for natural causes:
enough will remain for the action of Providence, where we cannot
penetrate. In his unfinished book on _Ecclesiastical Prophecy_ he
enumerates the illusions of mediaeval saints when they spoke of the
future, and describes them, as he once described Carlyle and Ruskin, as
prophets having nothing to foretell. At Frankfort, where he spoilt his
watch by depositing it in unexpected holy water, and it was whispered
that he had put it there to mend it, everybody knew that there was
hardly a Catholic in the Parliament of whom such a fable could be told
with more felicitous unfitness.
For twenty years of his life at Munich, Goerres was the impressive
central figure of a group reputed far and wide, the most intellectual
force in the Catholic world. Seeing things by the light of other days,
Nippold and Maurenbrecher describe Doellinger himself as its most eminent
member. There was present gain and future peril in living amongst a
clever but restricted set, sheltered, supported, and restrained by
friends who were united in aims and studies, who cherished their
sympathies and their enmities in common, and who therefore believed that
they were divided by no deep cleft or ultimate principle. Doellinger
never outlived the glamour of the eloquence and ascendancy of Goerres,
and spoke of him long after his death as a man of real knowledge, and of
greater religious than political insight Between the imaginative
rhetorician and the measured, scrutinising scholar, the contrast was
wide. One of the many pupils and rare disciples of the former complained
that his friend supplied interminable matter for the sterile and
unavailing _Mystik_, in order to amuse him with ropes of sand: and the
severest censure of Doellinger's art as an historian was pronounced by
Goerres when he said, "I always see analogies, and you always see
differences."
At all times, but in his early studies especially, he owed much to the
Italians, whose ecclesiastical literature was the first that he
mastered, and predominates in his Church history. Several of his
countrymen, such as Savigny and Raumer, had composed history on the
shoulders of Bolognese and Lombard scholars, and some of their most
conspicuous successors to the present day have lived under heavy
obligations to Modena and San Marino. During the tranquil century
before the Revolution, Italians studied the history of their country
with diligence and success. Even such places as Parma, Verona, Brescia,
became centres of obscure but faithful work. Osimo possessed annals as
bulky as Rome. The story of the province of Treviso was told in twenty
volumes. The antiquities of Picenum filled thirty-two folios. The best
of all this national and municipal patriotism was given to the service
of religion. Popes and cardinals, dioceses and parish churches became
the theme of untiring enthusiasts. There too were the stupendous records
of the religious orders, their bulls and charters, their biography and
their bibliography. In this immense world of patient, accurate, devoted
research, Doellinger laid the deep foundations of his historical
knowledge. Beginning like everybody with Baronius and Muratori, he gave
a large portion of his life to Noris, and to the solid and enlightened
scholarship that surrounded Benedict XIV., down to the compilers,
Borgia, Fantuzzi, Marini, with whom, in the evil days of regeneration by
the French, the grand tradition died away. He has put on record his
judgment that Orsi and Saccarelli were the best writers on the general
history of the Church. Afterwards, when other layers had been
superposed, and the course he took was his own, he relied much on the
canonists, Ballerini and Berardi; and he commended Bianchi, De
Bennettis, and the author of the anonymous _Confutazione_, as the
strongest Roman antidote to Blondel, Buckeridge, and Barrow. Italy
possessed the largest extant body of Catholic learning; the whole sphere
of Church government was within its range, and it enjoyed something of
the official prerogative.
Next to the Italians he gave systematic attention to the French. The
conspicuous Gallicans, the Jansenists, from whom at last he derived much
support, Richer, Van Espen, Launoy, whom he regarded as the original of
Bossuet, Arnauld, whom he thought his superior, are absent from his
pages. He never overcame his distrust of Pascal, for his methodical
scepticism and his endeavour to dissociate religion from learning; and
he rated high Daniel's reply to the _Provinciales_. He esteemed still
more the French Protestants of the seventeenth century, who transformed
the system of Geneva and Dort. English theology did not come much in his
way until he had made himself at home with the Italians and the primary
French. Then it abounded. He gathered it in quantities on two journeys
in 1851 and 1858, and he possessed the English divines in perfection, at
least down to Whitby, and the nonjurors. Early acquaintance with Sir
Edward Vavasour and Lord Clifford had planted a lasting prejudice in
favour of the English Catholic families, which sometimes tinged his
judgments. The neglected literature of the Catholics in England held a
place in his scheme of thought, which it never obtained in the eyes of
any other scholar, native or foreign. This was the only considerable
school of divines who wrote under persecution, and were reduced to an
attitude of defence. In conflict with the most learned, intelligent, and
conciliatory of controversialists, they developed a remarkable spirit of
moderation, discriminating inferior elements from the original and
genuine growth of Catholic roots; and their several declarations and
manifestoes, from the Restoration onwards, were an inexhaustible supply
for irenics. Therefore they powerfully attracted one who took the words
of St Vincent of Lerins not merely for a flash of illumination, but for
a scientific formula and guiding principle. Few writers interested him
more deeply than Stapleton, Davenport, who anticipated Number XC.,
Irishmen, such as Caron and Walshe, and the Scots, Barclay, the
adversary and friend of Bellarmine, Ramsay, the convert and recorder of
Fenelon. It may be that, to an intellect trained in the historic
process, stability, continuity, and growth were terms of more vivid and
exact significance than to the doctors of Pont-a-Mousson and Lambspring.
But when he came forward arrayed in the spoils of Italian libraries and
German universities, with the erudition of centuries and the criticism
of to-day, he sometimes was content to follow where forgotten
Benedictines or Franciscans had preceded, under the later Stuarts.
He seldom quotes contemporary Germans, unless to dispute with them,
prefers old books to new, and speaks of the necessary revision and
renovation of history. He suspected imported views and foregone
conclusions even in Neander; and although he could not say, with
Macaulay, that Gieseler was a rascal, of whom he had never heard, he
missed no opportunity of showing his dislike for that accomplished
artificer in mosaic. Looking at the literature before him, at England,
with Gibbon for its one ecclesiastical historian; at Germany, with the
most profound of its divines expecting the Church to merge in the State,
he inferred that its historic and organic unity would only be recognised
by Catholic science, while the soundest Protestant would understand it
least. In later years, Kliefoth, Ritschl, Gass, perhaps also Dorner and
Uhlhorn, obliged him to modify an opinion which the entire school of
Schleiermacher, including the illustrious Rothe, served only to confirm.
Germany, as he found it when he began to see the world, little resembled
that of his old age, when the work he had pursued for seventy years was
carried forward, with knowledge and power like his own, by the best of
his countrymen. The proportion of things was changed. There was a
religious literature to be proud of, to rely on: other nations, other
epochs, had lost their superiority. As his own people advanced, and
dominated in the branches of learning to which his life was given, in
everything except literary history and epigraphies, and there was no
more need to look abroad, Doellinger's cosmopolitan characteristic
diminished, he was more absorbed in the national thought and work, and
did not object to be called the most German of the Germans.
The idea that religious science is not so much science as religion, that
it should be treated differently from other matters, so that he who
treats it may rightly display his soul, flourished in his vicinity,
inspiring the lives of Saint Elizabeth and Joan of Arc, Moehler's fine
lectures on the early fathers, and the book which Gratry chose to
entitle a _Commentary on St. Matthew_. Doellinger came early to the
belief that history ought to be impersonal, that the historian does
well to keep out of the way, to be humble and self-denying, making it a
religious duty to prevent the intrusion of all that betrays his own
position and quality, his hopes and wishes. Without aspiring to the calm
indifference of Ranke, he was conscious that, in early life, he had been
too positive, and too eager to persuade. The Belgian scholar who,
conversing with him in 1842, was reminded of Fenelon, missed the acuter
angles of his character. He, who in private intercourse sometimes
allowed himself to persist, to contradict, and even to baffle a bore by
frankly falling asleep, would have declined the evocation of Versailles.
But in reasonableness, moderation, and charity, in general culture of
mind and the sense of the demands of the progress of civilisation, in
the ideal church for which he lived, he was more in harmony with Fenelon
than with many others who resembled him in the character of their work.