fact, it is decisive. A liberal who thinks his thought out to the end
without flinching is forced to certain conclusions which colour to the
root every phase and scene of universal history. He believes in upward
progress, because it is only recent times that have striven
deliberately, and with a zeal according to knowledge, for the increase
and security of freedom. He is not only tolerant of error in religion,
but is specially indulgent to the less dogmatic forms of Christianity,
to the sects which have restrained the churches. He is austere in
judging the past, imputing not error and ignorance only, but guilt and
crime, to those who, in the dark succession of ages, have resisted and
retarded the growth of liberty, which he identifies with the cause of
morality, and the condition of the reign of conscience. Doellinger never
subjected his mighty vision of the stream of time to correction
according to the principles of this unsympathising philosophy, never
reconstituted the providential economy in agreement with the Whig
Theodicee. He could understand the Zoroastrian simplicity of history in
black and white, for he wrote: "obgleich man allerdings sagen kann, das
tiefste Thema der Weltgeschichte sei der Kampf der Knechtschaft oder
Gebundenheit, mit der Freiheit, auf dem intellectuellen, religioesen,
politischen und socialen Gebiet." But the scene which lay open before
his mind was one of greater complexity, deeper design, and infinite
intellect. He imagined a way to truth through error, and outside the
Church, not through unbelief and the diminished reign of Christ.
Lacordaire in the cathedral pulpit offering his thanks to Voltaire for
the good gift of religious toleration, was a figure alien to his spirit.
He never substituted politics for religion as the test of progress, and
never admitted that they have anything like the dogmatic certainty and
sovereignty of religious, or of physical, science. He had all the
liberality that consists of common sense, justice, humanity,
enlightenment, the wisdom of Canning or Guizot. But revolution, as the
breach of continuity, as the renunciation of history, was odious to him,
and he not only refused to see method in the madness of Marat, or
dignity in the end of Robespierre, but believed that the best measures
of Leopold, the most intelligent reformer in the era of repentant
monarchy, were vitiated and frustrated by want of adaptation to custom.
Common party divisions represented nothing scientific to his mind; and
he was willing, like De Quincey, to accept them as corresponding halves
of a necessary whole. He wished that he knew half as much as his
neighbour, Mrs. Somerville; but he possessed no natural philosophy, and
never acquired the emancipating habit which comes from a life spent in
securing progress by shutting one's eyes to the past. "Alle Wissenschaft
steht und ruht auf ihrer historischen Entwicklung, sie lebt von ihrer
traditionellen Vergangenheit, wie der Baum von seiner Wurzel."
He was moved, not by the gleam of reform after the conclave of Pius IX.,
but by Pius VII. The impression made upon him by the character of that
pope, and his resistance to Napoleon, had much to do with his resolution
to become a priest. He took orders in the Church in the days of revival,
as it issued from oppression and the eclipse of hierarchy; and he
entered its service in the spirit of Sailer, Cheverus, and Doyle. The
mark of that time never left him. When Newman asked him what he would
say of the Pope's journey to Paris, for the coronation of the emperor,
he hardly recognised the point of the question. He opposed, in 1853, the
renewal of that precedent; but to the end he never felt what people mean
when they remark on the proximity of Notre-Dame to Vincennes.
Doellinger was too much absorbed in distant events to be always a close
observer of what went on near him; and he was, therefore, not so much
influenced by contact with contemporary history as men who were less
entirely at home in other centuries. He knew about all that could be
known of the ninth: in the nineteenth his superiority deserted him.
Though he informed himself assiduously his thoughts were not there. He
collected from Hormayr, Radowitz, Capponi, much secret matter of the
last generation; and where Brewer had told him about Oxford, and
Plantier about Louis Philippe, there were landmarks, as when Knoblecher,
the missionary, set down Krophi and Mophi on his map of Africa. He
deferred, at once, to the competent authority. He consulted his able
colleague Hermann on all points of political economy, and used his
advice when he wrote about England. Having satisfied himself, he would
not reopen these questions, when, after Hermann's death, he spent some
time in the society of Roscher, a not less eminent economist, and of all
men the one who most resembled himself in the historian's faculty of
rethinking the thoughts and realising the knowledge, the ignorance, the
experience, the illusions of a given time.
He had lived in many cities, and had known many important men; he had
sat in three parliamentary assemblies, had drawn constitutional
amendments, had been consulted upon the policy and the making of
ministries, and had declined political office; but as an authority on
recent history he was scarcely equal to himself. Once it became his duty
to sketch the character of a prince whom he had known. There was a
report that this sovereign had only been dissuaded from changing his
religion and abolishing the constitution by the advice of an archbishop
and of a famous parliamentary jurist; and the point of the story was
that the Protestant doctrinaire had prevented the change of religion,
and the archbishop had preserved the constitution. It was too early to
elucidate these court mysteries; instead of which there is a remarkable
conversation about religion, wherein it is not always clear whether the
prince is speaking, or the professor, or Schelling.
Although he had been translated into several languages and was widely
known in his own country, he had not yet built himself a European name.
At Oxford, in 1851, when James Mozley asked whom he would like to see,
he said, the men who had written in the _Christian Remembrancer_ on
Dante and Luther. Mozley was himself one of the two, and he introduced
him to the other at Oriel. After thirty-two years, when the writer on
Dante occupied a high position in the Church and had narrowly escaped
the highest, that visit was returned. But he had no idea that he had
once received Doellinger in his college rooms and hardly believed it when
told. In Germany, the serried learning of the _Reformation_, the
author's energy and decisiveness in public assemblies, caused him to
stand forth as an accepted spokesman, and, for a season, threw back the
reticent explorer, steering between the shallows of anger and affection.
In that stage the _Philosophumena_ found him, and induced him to write a
book of controversy in the shape of history. Here was an anonymous
person who, as Newman described it, "calls one pope a weak and venal
dunce, and another a sacrilegious swindler, an infamous convict, and an
heresiarch _ex cathedra_." In the Munich Faculty there was a divine who
affirmed that the Church would never get over it. Doellinger undertook to
vindicate the insulted See of Rome; and he was glad of the opportunity
to strike a blow at three conspicuous men of whom he thought ill in
point both of science and religion. He spoke of Gieseler as the flattest
and most leathern of historians; he accused Baur of frivolity and want
of theological conviction; and he wished that he knew as many
circumlocutions for untruth as there are Arabian synonyms for a camel,
that he might do justice to Bunsen without violation of courtesy. The
weight of the new testimony depended on the discovery of the author.
Adversaries had assigned it to Hippolytus, the foremost European writer
of the time, venerated as a saint and a father of the Church. Doellinger
thought them right, and he justified his sincerity by giving further
reasons for a conclusion which made his task formidable even for such
dexterity as his own. Having thus made a concession which was not
absolutely inevitable, he resisted the inference with such richness of
illustration that the fears of the doubting colleague were appeased. In
France, by Pitra's influence, the book was reviewed without making known
that it supported the authorship of Hippolytus, which is still disputed
by some impartial critics, and was always rejected by Newman.
_Hippolytus und Kallistus_, the high-water mark of Doellinger's official
assent and concurrence, came out in 1853. His next book showed the ebb.
He came originally from the romantic school, where history was
honeycombed with imagination and conjecture; and the first important
book he gave to a pupil in 1850 was Creuzer's _Mythology_. In 1845 he
denounced the rationalism of Lobeck in investigating the _Mysteries_;
but in 1857 he preferred him as a guide to those who proceed by analogy.
With increase of knowledge had come increase of restraining caution and
sagacity. The critical acumen was not greater in the _Vorhalle_ that
when he wrote on the _Philosophumena_, but instead of being employed in
a chosen cause, upon fixed lines, for welcome ends, it is applied
impartially. Ernst von Lasaulx, a man of rich and noble intellect, was
lecturing next door on the philosophy and religion of Greece, and
everybody heard about his indistinct mixture of dates and authorities,
and the spell which his unchastened idealism cast over students.
Lasaulx, who brilliantly carried on the tradition of Creuzer, who had
tasted of the mythology of Schelling, who was son-in-law to Baader and
nephew to Goerres, wrote a volume on the fall of Hellenism which he
brought in manuscript and read to Doellinger at a sitting. The effect on
the dissenting mind of the hearer was a warning; and there is reason to
date from those two hours in 1853 a more severe use of materials, and a
stricter notion of the influence which the end of an inquiry may
lawfully exert on the pursuit of it.
_Heidenthum und Judenthum_, which came out in 1857, gave Lasaulx his
revenge. It is the most positive and self-denying of histories, and owes
nothing to the fancy. The author refused the aid of Scandinavia to
illustrate German mythology, and he was rewarded long after, when
Caspari of Christiania and Conrad Maurer met at his table and confirmed
the discoveries of Bugge. But the account of Paganism ends with a
significant parallel. In December 69 a torch flung by a soldier burnt
the temple on the Capitol to the ground. In August 70 another Roman
soldier set fire to the temple on Mount Sion. The two sanctuaries
perished within a year, making way for the faith of men still hidden in
the back streets of Rome. When the Hellenist read this passage it struck
him deeply. Then he declared that it was hollow. All was over at
Jerusalem; but at Rome the ruin was restored, and the smoke of sacrifice
went up for centuries to come from the altar of Capitoline Jove.
In this work, designed as an introduction to Christian history, the
apologist betrays himself when he says that no Greek ever objected to
slavery, and when, out of 730 pages on paganism, half a page is allotted
to the moral system of Aristotle. That his Aristotelian chapter was
weak, the author knew; but he said that it was not his text to make more
of it. He did not mean that a Christian divine may be better employed
than in doing honour to a heathen; but, having to narrate events and the
action of causes, he regarded Christianity more as an organism employing
sacramental powers than as a body of speculative ideas. To cast up the
total of moral and religious knowledge attained by Seneca, Epictetus,
and Plutarch, to measure the line and rate of progress since Socrates,
to compare the point reached by Hermas and Justin, is an inquiry of the
highest interest for writers yet to come. But the quantitative
difference of acquired precept between the later pagan and the early
Christian is not the key to the future. The true problem is to expose
the ills and errors which Christ, the Healer, came to remove. The
measure must be taken from the depth of evil from which Christianity had
to rescue mankind, and its history is more than a continued history of
philosophical theories. Newman, who sometimes agreed with Doellinger in
the letter, but seldom in the spirit, and who distrusted him as a man in
whom the divine lived at the mercy of the scholar, and whose burden of
superfluous learning blunted the point and the edge of his mind, so much
liked what he heard of this book that, being unable to read it, he had
it translated at the Oratory.
The work thus heralded never went beyond the first volume, completed in
the autumn of 1860, which was received by the _Kirchenzeitung_ of
Berlin as the most acceptable narrative of the founding of Christianity,
and as the largest concession ever made by a Catholic divine. The
author, following the ancient ways, and taking, with Reuss, the New
Testament as it stands, made no attempt to establish the position
against modern criticism. Up to this, prescription and tradition held
the first place in his writings, and formed his vantage-ground in all
controversy. His energy in upholding the past as the rule and measure of
the future distinguished him even among writers of his own communion. In
_Christenthum und Kirche_ he explained his theory of development, under
which flag the notion of progress penetrates into theology, and which he
held as firmly as the balancing element of perpetuity: "In dem Maass als
dogmenhistorische Studien mehr getrieben werden, wird die absolute
innere Nothwendigkeit und Wahrheit der Sache immer allegingr
einleuchten." He conceived no bounds to the unforeseen resources of
Christian thought and faith. A philosopher in whose works he would not
have expected to find the scientific expression of his own idea, has a
passage bearing close analogy to what he was putting forward in 1861:
It is then in the change to a higher state of form or composition
that development differs from growth. We must carefully distinguish
development from mere increase; it is the acquiring, not of greater
bulk, but of new forms and structures, which are adapted to higher
conditions of existence.
It is the distinction which Uhhorn draws between the terms _Entfaltung_
and _Entwickelung_. Just then, after sixteen years spent in the Church
of Rome, Newman was inclined to guard and narrow his theory. On the one
hand he taught that the enactments and decisions of ecclesiastical law
are made on principles and by virtue of prerogatives which _jam antea
latitavere_ in the Church of the apostles and fathers. But he thought
that a divine of the second century on seeing the Roman catechism, would
have recognised his own belief in it, without surprise, as soon as he
understood its meaning. He once wrote: "If I have said more than this,
I think I have not worked out my meaning, and was confused--whether the
minute facts of history will bear me out in this view, I leave to others
to determine." Doellinger would have feared to adopt a view for its own
sake, without knowing how it would be borne out by the minute facts of
history. His own theory of development had not the same ingenious
simplicity, and he thought Newman's brilliant book unsound in detail.
But he took high ground in asserting the undeviating fidelity of
Catholicism to its principle. In this, his last book on the Primitive
Church, as in his early lectures, he claims the unswerving unity of
faith as a divine prerogative. In a memorable passage of the _Symbolik_
Moehler had stated that there is no better security than the law which
pervades human society, which preserves harmony and consistency in
national character, which makes Lutheranism perpetually true to Luther,
and Islamism to the Koran.
Speaking in the name of his own university, the rector described him as
a receptive genius. Part of his career displays a quality of
assimilation, acquiescence, and even adaptation, not always consistent
with superior originality or intense force of character. His
_Reformation_, the strongest book, with the _Symbolik_, which Catholics
had produced in the century, was laid down on known lines, and scarcely
effected so much novelty and change as the writings of Kampschulte and
Kolde. His book on the first age of the Church takes the critical points
as settled, without special discussion. He appeared to receive impulse
and direction, limit and colour, from his outer life. His importance was
achieved by the force within. Circumstances only conspired to mould a
giant of commonplace excellence and average ideas, and their influence
on his view of history might long be traced. No man of like
spirituality, of equal belief in the supreme dignity of conscience,
systematically allowed as much as he did for the empire of chance
surroundings and the action of home, and school, and place of worship
upon conduct. He must have known that his own mind and character as an
historian was not formed by effort and design. From early impressions,
and a life spent, to his fiftieth year, in a rather unvaried
professional circle, he contracted homely habits in estimating objects
of the greater world; and his imagination was not prone to vast
proportions and wide horizons. He inclined to apply the rules and
observation of domestic life to public affairs, to reduce the level of
the heroic and sublime; and history, in his hands, lost something both
in terror and in grandeur. He acquired his art in the long study of
earlier times, where materials are scanty. All that can be known of
Caesar or Charlemagne, or Gregory VII., would hold in a dozen volumes; a
library would not be sufficient for Charles V. or Lewis XVI. Extremely
few of the ancients are really known to us in detail, as we know
Socrates, or Cicero, or St. Augustine. But in modern times, since
Petrarca, there are at least two thousand actors on the public stage
whom we see by the revelations of private correspondence. Besides
letters that were meant to be burnt, there are a man's secret diaries,
his autobiography and table-talk, the recollections of his friends,
self-betraying notes on the margins of books, the report of his trial if
he is a culprit, and the evidence for beatification if he is a saint.
Here we are on a different footing, and we practise a different art when
dealing with Phocion or Dunstan, or with Richelieu or Swift. In one case
we remain perforce on the surface of character, which we have not the
means of analysing: we have to be content with conjecture, with probable
explanations and obvious motives. We must constantly allow the benefit
of the doubt, and reserve sentence. The science of character comes in
with modern history. Doellinger had lived too long in the ages during
which men are seen mostly in outline, and never applied an historical
psychology distinct from that of private experience. Great men are
something different from an enlarged repetition of average and familiar
types, and the working and motive of their minds is in many instances
the exact contrary of ordinary men, living to avoid contingencies of
danger, and pain, and sacrifice, and the weariness of constant thinking
and far-seeing precaution.
We are apt to judge extraordinary men by our own standard, that is to
say, we often suppose them to possess, in an extraordinary degree,
those qualities which we are conscious of in ourselves or others.
This is the easiest way of conceiving their characters, but not the
truest They differ in kind rather than in degree.
We cannot understand Cromwell or Shaftesbury, Sunderland or Penn, by
studies made in the parish. The study of intricate and subtle character
was not habitual with Doellinger, and the result was an extreme dread of
unnecessary condemnation. He resented being told that Ferdinand I. and
II., that Henry III. and Lewis XIII. were, in the coarse terms of common
life, assassins; that Elizabeth tried to have Mary made away with, and
that Mary, in matters of that kind, had no greater scruples; that
William III. ordered the extirpation of a clan, and rewarded the
murderers as he had rewarded those of De Witt; that Lewis XIV. sent a
man to kill him, and James II. was privy to the Assassination Plot. When
he met men less mercifully given than himself, he said that they were
hanging judges with a Malthusian propensity to repress the growth of
population. This indefinite generosity did not disappear when he had
long outgrown its early cause. It was revived, and his view of history
was deeply modified, in the course of the great change in his attitude
in the Church which took place between the years 1861 and 1867.
Doellinger used to commemorate his visit to Rome in 1857 as an epoch of
emancipation. He had occasionally been denounced; and a keen eye had
detected latent pantheism in his _Vorhalle_, but he had not been
formally censured. If he had once asserted the value of nationality in
the Church, he was vehement against it in religion; and if he had joined
in deprecating the dogmatic decree in 1854, he was silent afterwards. By
Protestants he was still avoided as the head and front of offending
ultramontanism; and when the historical commission was instituted at
Munich, by disciples of the Berlin school, he was passed over at first,
and afterwards opposed. When public matters took him to Berlin in 1857,
he sought no intercourse with the divines of the faculty. The common
idea of his _Reformation_ was expressed by Kaulbach in a drawing which
represented the four chief reformers riding on one horse, pursued by a
scavenger with the unmistakable features of their historian. He was
received with civility at Rome, if not with cordiality. The pope sent to
Cesena for a manuscript which it was reported that he wished to consult;
and his days were spent profitably between the Minerva and the Vatican,
where he was initiated in the mysteries of Galileo's tower. It was his
fortune to have for pilot and instructor a prelate classified in the
pigeon-holes of the Wilhelmsstrasse as the chief agitator against the
State, "dessen umfangreiches Wissen noch durch dessen Feinheit und
geistige Gewandtheit uebertroffen wird." He was welcomed by Passaglia and
Schrader at the Collegio Romano, and enjoyed the privilege of examining
San Callisto with De Rossi for his guide. His personal experience was
agreeable, though he strove unsuccessfully to prevent the condemnation
of two of his colleagues by the Index.
There have been men connected with him who knew Rome in his time, and
whose knowledge moved them to indignation and despair. One bishop
assured him that the Christian religion was extinct there, and only
survived in its forms; and an important ecclesiastic on the spot wrote:
_Delenda est Carthago_. The archives of the Culturkampf contain a
despatch from a Protestant statesman sometime his friend, urging his
government to deal with the Papacy as they would deal with Dahomey.
Doellinger's impression on his journey was very different. He did not
come away charged with visions of scandal in the spiritual order, of
suffering in the temporal, or of tyranny in either. He was never in
contact with the sinister side of things. Theiner's _Life of Clement the
Fourteenth_ failed to convince him, and he listened incredulously to
his indictment of the Jesuits. Eight years later Theiner wrote to him
that he hoped they would now agree better on that subject than when they
discussed it in Rome. "Ich freue mich, dass Sie jetzt erkennen, dass
mein Urtheil ueber die Jesuiten und ihr Wirken gerecht war.--Im kommenden
Jahr, so Gott will, werden wir uns hoffentlich besser verstehen als im
Jahr 1857." He thought the governing body unequal to the task of ruling
both Church and State; but it was the State that seemed to him to suffer
from the combination. He was anxious about the political future, not
about the future of religion. The persuasion that government by priests
could not maintain itself in the world as it is, grew in force and
definiteness as he meditated at home on the things he had seen and
heard. He was despondent and apprehensive; but he had no suspicion of
what was then so near. In the summer of 1859, as the sequel of Solferino
began to unfold itself, he thought of making his observations known. In
November a friend wrote: "Je ne me dissimule aucune des miseres de tout
ordre qui vous ont frappe a Rome." For more than a year he remained
silent and uncertain, watching the use France would make of the
irresistible authority acquired by the defeat of Austria and the
collapse of government in Central Italy.