them into it. When men gave evidence for the opposite party, and against
their own, he willingly took for impartiality what he could not always
distinguish from indifference or subdivision. He felt that sincere
history was the royal road to religious union, and he specially
cultivated those who saw both sides. He would cite with complacency what
clever Jesuits, Raynaud and Faure, said for the Reformation, Mariana and
Cordara against their society. When a Rhenish Catholic and a Genevese
Calvinist drew two portraits of Calvin which were virtually the same, or
when, in Ficker's revision of Boehmer, the Catholic defended the Emperor
Frederic II. against the Protestant, he rejoiced as over a sign of the
advent of science. As the Middle Ages, rescued from polemics by the
genial and uncritical sympathy of Mueller, became an object of popular
study, and Royer Collard said of Villemain, _Il a fait, il fait, et il
fera toujours son Gregoire VII._, there were Catholics who desired, by a
prolonged _sorites_, to derive advantage from the new spirit. Wiseman
consulted Doellinger for the purpose. "Will you be kind enough to write
me a list of what you consider the best books for the history of the
Reformation; Menzel and Buchholz I know; especially any exposing the
characters of the leading reformers?" In the same frame of mind he asked
him what pope there was whose good name had not been vindicated; and
Doellinger's reply, that Boniface VIII. wanted a friend, prompted both
Wiseman's article and Tosti's book.
In politics, as in religion, he made the past a law for the present, and
resisted doctrines which are ready-made, and are not derived from
experience. Consequently, he undervalued work which would never have
been done from disinterested motives; and there were three of his most
eminent contemporaries whom he decidedly underestimated. Having known
Thiers, and heard him speak, he felt profoundly the talent of the
extraordinary man, before Lanfrey or Taine, Haeusser and Bernhardt had so
ruined his credit among Germans that Doellinger, disgusted by his
advocacy, whether of the Revolution, of Napoleon, or of France,
neglected his work. Stahl claims to be accounted an historian by his
incomparably able book on the Church government of the Reformation. As a
professor at Munich, and afterwards as a parliamentary leader at Berlin,
he was always an avowed partisan. Doellinger depreciated him accordingly,
and he had the mortification that certain remarks on the sovereign
dialectician of European conservatism were on the point of appearing
when he died. He so far made it good in his preface that the thing was
forgotten when Gerlach came to see the assailant of his friend. But
once, when I spoke of Stahl as the greatest man born of a Jewish mother
since Titus, he thought me unjust to Disraeli.
Most of all, he misjudged Macaulay, whose German admirers are not always
in the higher ranks of literature, and of whom Ranke even said that he
could hardly be called an historian at all, tried by the stricter test.
He had no doubt seen how his unsuggestive fixity and assurance could
cramp and close a mind; and he felt more beholden to the rivals who
produced d'Adda, Barillon, and Bonnet, than to the author of so many
pictures and so much bootless decoration. He tendered a course of
Bacon's Essays, or of Butler's and Newman's Sermons, as a preservative
against intemperate dogmatism. He denounced Macaulay's indifference to
the merits of the inferior cause, and desired more generous treatment of
the Jacobites and the French king. He deemed it hard that a science
happily delivered from the toils of religious passion should be involved
in political, and made to pass from the sacristy to the lobby, by the
most brilliant example in literature. To the objection that one who
celebrates the victory of parliaments over monarchs, of democracy over
aristocracy, of liberty over authority, declares, not the tenets of a
party, but manifest destiny and the irrevocable decree, he would reply
that a narrow induction is the bane of philosophy, that the ways of
Providence are not inscribed on the surface of things, that religion,
socialism, militarism, and revolution possibly reserve a store of cogent
surprises for the economist, utilitarian, and whig.
In 1865 he was invited to prepare a new edition of his Church history.
Whilst he was mustering the close ranks of folios which had satisfied a
century of historians, the world had moved, and there was an increase of
raw material to be measured by thousands of volumes. The archives which
had been sealed with seven seals had become as necessary to the serious
student as his library. Every part of his studies had suffered
transformation, except the fathers, who had largely escaped the
crucible, and the canon law, which had only just been caught by the
historical current. He had begun when Niebuhr was lecturing at Bonn and
Hegel at Berlin; before Tischendorf unfolded his first manuscript;
before Baur discovered the Tuebingen hypothesis in the congregation of
Corinth; before Rothe had planned his treatise on the primitive church,
or Ranke had begun to pluck the plums for his modern popes. Guizot had
not founded the _Ecole des Chartes_, and the school of method was not
yet opened at Berlin. The application of instruments of precision was
just beginning, and what Prynne calls the heroic study of records had
scarcely molested the ancient reign of lives and chronicles. None had
worked harder at his science and at himself than Doellinger; and the
change around him was not greater than the change within. In his early
career as a teacher of religion he had often shrunk from books which
bore no stamp of orthodoxy. It was long before he read Sarpi or the
_Lettres Provinciales_, or even Ranke's _Popes_, which appeared when he
was thirty-five, and which astonished him by the serene ease with which
a man who knew so much touched on such delicate ground. The book which
he had written in that state of mind, and with that conception of
science and religion, had only a prehistoric interest for its author. He
refused to reprint it, and declared that there was hardly a sentence fit
to stand unchanged. He lamented that he had lost ten years of life in
getting his bearings, and in learning, unaided, the most difficult craft
in the world. Those years of apprenticeship without a master were the
time spent on his _Kirchengeschichte_. The want of training remained. He
could impart knowledge better than the art of learning. Thousands of his
pupils have acquired connected views of religion passing through the
ages, and gathered, if they were intelligent, some notion of the meaning
of history; but nobody ever learnt from him the mechanism by which it is
written.
Brougham advised the law-student to begin with Dante; and a
distinguished physician informs us that Gibbon, Grote, and Mill made him
what he is. The men to whom Doellinger owed his historic insight and who
mainly helped to develop and strengthen and direct his special faculty,
were not all of his own cast, or remarkable in the common description of
literary talent. The assistants were countless, but the masters were
few, and he looked up with extraordinary gratitude to men like Sigonius,
Antonius Augustinus, Blondel, Petavius, Leibniz, Burke, and Niebuhr, who
had opened the passes for him as he struggled and groped in the
illimitable forest.
He interrupted his work because he found the materials too scanty for
the later Middle Ages, and too copious for the Reformation. The
defective account of the Albigensian theology, which he had sent to one
of his translators, never appeared in German. At Paris he searched the
library for the missing information, and he asked Resseguier to make
inquiry for the records of the Inquisition in Languedoc, thus laying the
foundations of that _Sektengeschichte_ which he published fifty years
later. Munich offered such inexhaustible supplies for the Reformation
that his collections overran all bounds. He completed only that part of
his plan which included Lutheranism and the sixteenth century. The third
volume, published in 1848, containing the theology of the Reformation,
is the most solid of his writings. He had miscalculated, not his
resources, of which only a part had come into action, but the
possibilities of concentration and compression. The book was left a
fragment when he had to abandon his study for the Frankfort barricades.
The peculiarity of his treatment is that he contracts the Reformation
into a history of the doctrine of justification. He found that this and
this alone was the essential point in Luther's mind, that he made it the
basis of his argument, the motive of his separation, the root and
principle of his religion. He believed that Luther was right in the
cardinal importance he attributed to this doctrine in his system, and he
in his turn recognised that it was the cause of all that followed, the
source of the reformer's popularity and success, the sole insurmountable
obstacle to every scheme of restoration. It was also, for him, the
centre and the basis of his antagonism. That was the point that he
attacked when he combated Protestantism, and he held all other elements
of conflict cheap in comparison, deeming that they are not invariable,
or not incurable, or not supremely serious. Apart from this, there was
much in Protestantism that he admired, much in its effects for which he
was grateful. With the Lutheran view of imputation, Protestant and
Catholic were separated by an abyss. Without it, there was no lasting
reason why they should be separate at all. Against the communities that
hold it he stood in order of battle, and believed that he could scarcely
hit too hard. But he distinguished very broadly the religion of the
reformers from the religion of Protestants. Theological science had
moved away from the symbolical books, the root dogma had been repudiated
and contested by the most eminent Protestants, and it was an English
bishop who wrote: "Fuit haec doctrina jam a multis annis ipsissimum
Reformatae Ecclesiae opprobrium ac dedecus.--Est error non levis, error
putidissimus." Since so many of the best writers resist or modify that
which was the main cause, the sole ultimate cause, of disunion, it
cannot be logically impossible to discover a reasonable basis for
discussion. Therefore conciliation was always in his thoughts; even his
_Reformation_ was a treatise on the conditions of reunion. He long
purposed to continue it, in narrower limits, as a history of that
central doctrine by which Luther meant his church to stand or fall, of
the reaction against it, and of its decline. In 1881, when Ritschl, the
author of the chief work upon the subject, spent some days with
Doellinger, he found him still full of these ideas, and possessing Luther
at his fingers' ends.
This is the reason why Protestants have found him so earnest an opponent
and so warm a friend. It was this that attracted him towards Anglicans,
and made very many of them admire a Roman dignitary who knew the
Anglo-Catholic library better than De Lugo or Ripalda. In the same
spirit he said to Pusey: "Tales cum sitis jam nostri estis," always
spoke of Newman's _Justification_ as the greatest masterpiece of
theology that England has produced in a hundred years, and described
Baxter and Wesley as the most eminent of English Protestants--meaning
Wesley as he was after 1st December 1767, and Baxter as the life-long
opponent of that theory which was the source and the soul of the
Reformation. Several Englishmen who went to consult him--Hope Scott and
Archdeacon Wilberforce--became Catholics. I know not whether he urged
them. Others there were, whom he did not urge, though his influence over
them might have been decisive. In a later letter to Pusey he wrote: "I
am convinced by reading your _Eirenicon_ that we are united inwardly in
our religious convictions, although externally we belong to two
separated churches." He followed attentively the parallel movements that
went on in his own country, and welcomed with serious respect the
overtures which came to him, after 1856, from eminent historians. When
they were old men, he and Ranke, whom, in hot youth, there was much to
part, lived on terms of mutual goodwill. Doellinger had pronounced the
theology of the _Deutsche Reformation_ slack and trivial, and Ranke at
one moment was offended by what he took for an attack on the popes, his
patrimony. In 1865, after a visit to Munich, he allowed that in religion
there was no dispute between them, that he had no fault to find with the
Church as Doellinger understood it. He added that one of his colleagues,
a divine whose learning filled him with unwonted awe, held the same
opinion. Doellinger's growing belief that an approximation of part of
Germany to sentiments of conciliation was only a question of time, had
much to do with his attitude in Church questions after the year 1860. If
history cannot confer faith or virtue, it can clear away the
misconceptions and misunderstandings that turn men against one another.
With the progress of incessant study and meditation his judgment on many
points underwent revision; but with regard to the Reformation the change
was less than he supposed. He learnt to think more favourably of the
religious influence of Protestantism, and of its efficacy in the defence
of Christianity; but he thought as before of the spiritual consequences
of Lutheranism proper. When people said of Luther that he does not come
well out of his matrimonial advice to certain potentates, to Henry and
to Philip, of his exhortations to exterminate the revolted peasantry, of
his passage from a confessor of toleration to a teacher of intolerance,
he would not have the most powerful conductor of religion that
Christianity has produced in eighteen centuries condemned for two pages
in a hundred volumes. But when he had refused the test of the weakest
link, judging the man by his totals, he was not less severe on his
theological ethics.
Meinerseits habe ich noch eine andre schwere Anklage gegen ihn zu
erheben, naemlich die, dass er durch seine falsche Imputationslehre
das sittlich-religioese Bewusstseyn der Menschen auf zwei Jahrhunderte
hinaus verwirrt und corrumpirt hat (3rd July 1888).
The revolution of 1848, during which he did not hold his professorship,
brought him forward uncongenially in active public life, and gave him
the means of telling the world his view of the constitution and policy
of the Church, and the sense and limits of liability in which he gave
his advocacy. When lecturing on canon law he was accustomed to dwell on
the strict limit of all ecclesiastical authority, admitting none but
spiritual powers, and invoking the maxims of pontiffs who professed
themselves guardians, not masters, of the established legislation--"Canones
ecclesiae solvere non possumus, qui custodes canonum sumus." Acting on
these principles, in the Paulskirche, and at Ratisbon, he vindicated Rome
against the reproach of oppression, argued that society can only gain by
the emancipation of the Church, as it claims no superiority over the State,
and that both Gallicans and Jesuits are out of date. Addressing the
bishops of Germany in secret session at Wuerzburg, he exhorted them to
avail themselves fully of an order of things which was better than the old,
and to make no professions of unconditional allegiance. He told them that
freedom is the breath of the Catholic life, that it belongs to the Church
of God by right divine, and that whatever they claimed must be claimed for
others.
From these discourses, in which the scholar abandoned the details by
which science advances for the general principles of the popular orator,
the deductions of liberalism proceed as surely as the revolution from
the title-page of Sieyes. It should seem that the key to his career lies
there. It was natural to associate him with the men whom the early
promise of a reforming pope inspired to identify the cause of free
societies with the papacy which had Rosmini for an adviser, Ventura for
a preacher, Gioberti for a prophet, and to conclude that he thus became
a trusted representative, until the revolving years found him the
champion of a vanished cause, and the Syllabus exposed the illusion and
bore away his ideal. Harless once said of him that no good could be
expected from a man surrounded by a ring of liberals. When Doellinger
made persecution answer both for the decline of Spain and the fall of
Poland, he appeared to deliver the common creed of Whigs; and he did not
protest against the American who called him the acknowledged head of the
liberal Catholics. His hopefulness in the midst of the movement of 1848,
his ready acquiescence in the fall of ancient powers and institutions,
his trust in Rome, and in the abstract rights of Germans, suggested a
reminiscence of the _Avenir_ in 1830.
Lamennais, returning with Montalembert after his appeal to Rome, met
Lacordaire at Munich, and during a banquet given in their honour he
learnt, privately, that he was condemned. The three friends spent that
afternoon in Doellinger's company; and it was after he had left them that
Lamennais produced the encyclical and said: _Dieu a parle_. Montalembert
soon returned, attracted as much by Munich art as by religion or
literature. The fame of the Bavarian school of Catholic thought spread
in France among those who belonged to the wider circles of the _Avenir_;
and priests and laymen followed, as to a scientific shrine. In the
_Memoires d'un Royaliste_ Falloux has preserved, with local colour, the
spirit of that pilgrimage:
Munich lui fut indique comme le foyer d'une grande renovation
religieuse et artistique. Quels nobles et ardents entretiens, quelle
passion pour l'Eglise et pour sa cause! Rien n'a plus ressemble aux
discours d'un portique chretien que les apologies enflammees du vieux
Goerres, les savantes deductions de Doellinger, la verve originale de
Brentano.
Rio, who was the earliest of the travellers, describes Doellinger as he
found him in 1830:
Par un privilege dont il serait difficile de citer un autre exemple,
il avait la passion des etudes theologiques comme s'il n'avait ete
que pretre, et la passion des etudes litteraires appliquees aux
auteurs anciens et modernes comme s'il n'avait ete que litterateur; a
quoi il faut ajouter un autre don qu'il y aurait ingratitude a
oublier, celui d'une exposition lucide, patiente et presque
affectueuse, comme s'il n'avait accumule tant de connaissances que
pour avoir le plaisir de les communiquer.
For forty years he remained in correspondence with many of these early
friends, who, in the educational struggle which ended with the ministry
of Falloux in 1850, revived the leading maxims of the rejected master.
As Lacordaire said, on his deathbed: "La parole de l'Avenir avait germe
de son tombeau comme une cendre feconde." Doellinger used to visit his
former visitors in various parts of France, and at Paris he attended the
salon of Madame Swetchine. One day, at the seminary, he inquired who
were the most promising students; Dupanloup pointed out a youth, who was
the hope of the Church, and whose name was Ernest Renan.
Although the men who were drawn to him in this way formed the largest
and best-defined cluster with which he came in contact, there was more
private friendship than mutual action or consultation between them. The
unimpassioned German, who had no taste for ideas released from
controlling fact, took little pleasure in the impetuous declamation of
the Breton, and afterwards pronounced him inferior to Loyson. Neither of
the men who were in the confidence of both has intimated that he made
any lasting impression on Lamennais, who took leave of him without
discussing the action of Rome. Doellinger never sought to renew
acquaintance with Lacordaire, when he had become the most important man
in the church of France. He would have a prejudice to overcome against
him whom Circourt called the most ignorant man in the Academy, who
believed that Erasmus ended his days at Rotterdam, unable to choose
between Rome and Wittemberg, and that the Irish obtained through
O'Connell the right to worship in their own way. He saw more of
Dupanloup, without feeling, as deeply as Renan, the rare charm of the
combative prelate. To an exacting and reflective scholar, to whom even
the large volume of heavy erudition in which Rosmini defended the
_Cinque Piaghe_ seemed superficial, there was incongruity in the
attention paid to one of whom he heard that he promoted the council,
that he took St. Boniface for St Wilfrid, and that he gave the memorable
advice: _Surtout mefiez-vous des sources_. After a visit from the Bishop
of Orleans he sat down in dismay to compose the most elementary of his
books. Seeing the inferiority of Falloux as a historian, he never
appreciated the strong will and cool brain of the statesman who overawed
Tocqueville. Eckstein, the obscure but thoughtful originator of much
liberal feeling among his own set, encouraged him in the habit of
depreciating the attainments of the French clergy, which was confirmed
by the writings of the most eminent among them, Darboy, and lasted until
the appearance of Duchesne. The politics of Montalembert were so heavily
charged with conservatism, that in defiance of such advisers as
Lacordaire, Ravignan, and Dupanloup, he pronounced in favour of the
author of the _coup d'etat_, saying: "Je suis pour l'autorite contre la
revolte"; and boasted that, in entering the Academy he had attacked the
Revolution, not of '93 but '89, and that Guizot, who received him, had
nothing to say in reply. There were many things, human and divine, on
which they could not feel alike; but as the most urgent, eloquent, and
persevering of his Catholic friends, gifted with knowledge and
experience of affairs, and dwelling in the focus, it may be that on one
critical occasion, when religion and politics intermingled, he
influenced the working of Doellinger's mind. But the plausible reading of
his life which explains it by his connection with such public men as
Montalembert, De Decker, and Mr. Gladstone is profoundly untrue; and
those who deem him a liberal in any scientific use of the term, miss the
keynote of his work.