divided counsels. The episcopate supported the papal sovereignty, and a
voluntary tribute, which in a few years took shape in tens of millions,
poured into the treasury of St. Peter. A time followed during which the
Papacy endeavoured, by a series of connected measures, to preserve its
political authority through the aid of its spiritual. Some of the most
enlightened Catholics, Dupanloup and Montalembert, proclaimed a sort of
holy war. Some of the most enlightened Protestants, Guizot and Leo,
defended the Roman government, as the most legitimate, venerable, and
necessary of governments. In Italy there were ecclesiastics like
Liverani, Tosti, Capecelatro, who believed with Manzoni that there
could be no deliverance without unity, or calculated that political
loss might be religious gain. Passaglia, the most celebrated Jesuit
living, and a confidential adviser of the pope, both in dogma and in the
preparation of the Syllabus, until Perrone refused to meet him, quitted
the Society, and then fled from Rome, leaving the Inquisition in
possession of his papers, in order to combat the use of theology in
defence of the temporal power. Forty thousand priests, he said, publicly
or privately agreed with him; and the diplomatists reported the names of
nine cardinals who were ready to make terms with Italian unity, of which
the pope himself said: "Ce serait un beau reve." In this country, Newman
did not share the animosity of conservatives against Napoleon III. and
his action in Italy. When the flood, rising, reached the papal throne,
he preserved an embarrassed silence, refusing, in spite of much
solicitation, to commit himself even in private. An impatient M.P. took
the train down to Edgbaston, and began, trying to draw him: "What times
we live in, Father Newman! Look at all that is going on in
Italy."--"Yes, indeed! And look at China too, and New Zealand!"
Lacordaire favoured the cause of the Italians more openly, in spite of
his Paris associates. He hoped, by federation, to save the interests of
the Holy See, but he was reconciled to the loss of provinces, and he
required religious liberty at Rome. Lamoriciere was defeated in
September 1860, and in February the fortress of Gaeta, which had become
the last Roman outwork, fell. Then Lacordaire, disturbed in his
reasoning by the logic of events, and by an earnest appeal to his
priestly conscience, as his biographer says: "ebranle un moment par une
lettre eloquente," broke away from his friends:--
Que Montalembert, notre ami commun, ne voie pas dans ce qui se passe
en Italie, sauf le mal, un progres sensible dans ce que nous avons
toujours cru le bien de l'eglise, cela tient a sa nature passionnee.
Ce qui le domine aujourd'hui c'est la haine du gouvernement
francais.--Dieu se sert de tout, meme du despotisme, meme de
l'egoisme; et il y a meme des choses qu'il ne peut accomplir par des
mains tout a fait pures.--Qu'y puis-je? Me declarer contre l'Italie
parce que ses chaines tombent mal a propos? Non assurement: je laisse
a d'autres une passion aussi profonde, et j'aime mieux accepter ce
que j'estime un bien de quelque part qu'il vienne.--Il est vrai que
la situation temporelle du Pape souffre presentement de la liberation
de l'Italie, et peut-etre en souffrira-t-elle encore assez longtemps:
mais c'est un malheur qui a aussi ses fins dans la politique
mysterieuse de la Providence. Souffrir n'est pas mourir, c'est
quelquefois expier et s'eclairer.
This was written on 22nd February 1861. In April Doellinger spoke on the
Roman question in the Odeon at Munich, and explained himself more fully
in the autumn, in the most popular of all his books.
The argument of _Kirche und Kirchen_ was, that the churches which are
without the pope drift into many troubles, and maintain themselves at a
manifest disadvantage, whereas the church which energetically preserves
the principle of unity has a vast superiority which would prevail, but
for its disabling and discrediting failure in civil government. That
government seemed to him as legitimate as any in the world, and so
needful to those for whose sake it was instituted, that if it should be
overthrown, it would, by irresistible necessity, be restored. Those for
whose sake it was instituted were, not the Roman people, but the
catholic world. That interest, while it lasted, was so sacred, that no
sacrifice was too great to preserve it, not even the exclusion of the
clerical order from secular office.
The book was an appeal to Catholics to save the papal government by the
only possible remedy, and to rescue the Roman people from falling under
what the author deemed a tyranny like that of the Convention. He had
acquired his politics in the atmosphere of 1847, from the potential
liberality of men like Radowitz, who declared that he would postpone
every political or national interest to that of the Church, Capponi, the
last Italian federalist, and Tocqueville, the minister who occupied
Rome. His object was not materially different from that of Antonelli and
Merode, but he sought it by exposing the faults of the papal government
during several centuries, and the hopelessness of all efforts to save it
from the Revolution unless reformed. He wrote to an English minister
that it could not be our policy that the head of the Catholic Church
should be subject to a foreign potentate:--
Das harte Wort, mit welchem Sie im Parlamente den Stab ueber Rom
gebrochen haben--_hopelessly incurable_, oder _incorrigible_,--kann
ich mir nicht aneignen; ich hoffe vielmehr, wie ich es in dem Buche
dargelegt habe, das Gegentheil. An die Dauerhaftigkeit eines ganz
Italien umfassenden Piemontesisch-Italiaenischen Reiches glaube ich
nicht.--Inzwischen troeste ich mich mit dem Gedanken, dass in Rom
zuletzt doch _vexatio dabit intellectum_, und dann wird noch alles
gut werden.
To these grateful vaticinations his correspondent replied:--
You have exhibited the gradual departure of the government in the
states of the church from all those conditions which made it
tolerable to the sense and reason of mankind, and have, I think,
completely justified, in principle if not in all the facts, the
conduct of those who have determined to do away with it.
The policy of exalting the spiritual authority though at the expense of
sacrifices in the temporal, the moderation even in the catalogue of
faults, the side blow at the Protestants, filling more than half the
volume, disarmed for a moment the resentment of outraged Rome. The Pope,
on a report from Theiner, spoke of the book as one that might do good.
Others said that it was pointless, that its point was not where the
author meant it to be, that the handle was sharper than the blade. It
was made much more clear that the Pope had governed badly than that
Russia or Great Britain would gain by his supremacy. The cold analysis,
the diagnosis by the bedside of the sufferer, was not the work of an
observer dazzled by admiration or blinded by affection. It was a step, a
first unconscious, unpremeditated step, in the process of detachment.
The historian here began to prevail over the divine, and to judge Church
matters by a law which was not given from the altar. It was the outcome
of a spirit which had been in him from the beginning. His English
translator had uttered a mild protest against his severe treatment of
popes. His censure of the Reformation had been not as that of Bossuet,
but as that of Baxter and Bull. In 1845 Mr. Gladstone remarked that he
would answer every objection, but never proselytised. In 1848 he rested
the claims of the Church on the common law, and bade the hierarchy
remember that national character is above free will: "Die Nationalitaet
ist etwas der Freiheit des menschlichen Willens entruecktes,
geheimnissvolles und in ihrem letzen Grunde selbst etwas von Gott
gewolltes." In his _Hippolytus_ he began by surrendering the main point,
that a man who so vilified the papacy might yet be an undisputed saint.
In the _Vorhalle_ he flung away a favourite argument, by avowing that
paganism developed by its own lines and laws, untouched by Christianity,
until the second century; and as with the Gentiles, so with the sects;
he taught, in the suppressed chapter of his history, that their
doctrines followed a normal course. And he believed so far in the
providential mission of Protestantism, that it was idle to talk of
reconciliation until it had borne all its fruit. He exasperated a Munich
colleague by refusing to pronounce whether Gregory and Innocent had the
right to depose emperors, or Otho and Henry to depose popes; for he
thought that historians should not fit theories to facts, but should be
content with showing how things worked. Much secret and suppressed
antagonism found vent in 1858, when one who had been his assistant in
writing the _Reformation_ and was still his friend, declared that he
would be a heretic whenever he found a backing.
Those with whom he actively coalesced felt at times that he was
incalculable, that he pursued a separate line, and was always learning,
whilst others busied themselves less with the unknown. This note of
distinctness and solitude set him apart from those about him, during his
intimacy with the most catholic of Anglican prelates, Forbes, and with
the lamented Liddon. And it appeared still more when the denominational
barrier of his sympathy was no longer marked, and he, who had stood in
the rank almost with De Maistre and Perrone, found himself acting for
the same ends with their enemies, when he delivered a studied eulogy on
Mignet, exalted the authority of Laurent in religious history and of
Ferrari in civil, and urged the Bavarian academy to elect Taine, as a
writer who had but one rival in France, leaving it to uncertain
conjecture whether the man he meant was Renan. In theory it was his
maxim that a man should guard against his friends. When he first
addressed the university as Rector, saying that as the opportunity might
never come again, he would employ it to utter the thoughts closest to
his heart, he exhorted the students to be always true to their
convictions and not to yield to surroundings; and he invoked, rightly or
wrongly, the example of Burke, his favourite among public men, who,
turning from his associates to obey the light within, carried the nation
with him. A gap was apparent now between the spirit in which he devoted
himself to the service of his Church and that of the men whom he most
esteemed. At that time he was nearly the only German who knew Newman
well and appreciated the grace and force of his mind. But Newman, even
when he was angry, assiduously distinguished the pontiff from his court:
There will necessarily always be round the Pope second-rate people,
who are not subjects of that supernatural wisdom which is his
prerogative. For myself, certainly I have found myself in a different
atmosphere, when I have left the Curia for the Pope himself.
Montalembert protested that there were things in _Kirche und Kirchen_
which he would not have liked to say in public:
Il est certain que la seconde partie de votre livre deplaira
beaucoup, non seulement a Rome, mais encore a la tres grande majorite
des Catholiques. Je ne sais donc pas si, dans le cas ou vous
m'eussiez consulte prealablement, j'aurais eu le courage d'infliger
cette blessure a mon pere et a mes freres.
Doellinger judged that the prerogative even of natural wisdom was often
wanting in the government of the Church; and the sense of personal
attachment, if he ever entertained it, had worn away in the friction and
familiarity of centuries.
After the disturbing interlude of the Roman question he did not resume
the history of Christianity. The second century with its fragments of
information, its scope for piercing and conjecture, he left to
Lightfoot. With increasing years he lost the disposition to travel on
common ground, impregnably occupied by specialists, where he had nothing
of his own to tell; and he preferred to work where he could be a
pathfinder. Problems of Church government had come to the front, and he
proposed to retraverse his subject, narrowing it into a history of the
papacy. He began by securing his foundations and eliminating legend. He
found so much that was legendary that his critical preliminaries took
the shape of a history of fables relating to the papacy. Many of these
were harmless: others were devised for a purpose, and he fixed his
attention more and more on those which were the work of design. The
question, how far the persistent production of spurious matter had
permanently affected the genuine constitution and theology of the Church
arose before his mind as he composed the _Papstfabeln des Mittelalters_.
He indicated the problem without discussing it. The matter of the volume
was generally neutral, but its threatening import was perceived, and
twenty-one hostile critics sent reviews of it to one theological
journal.
Since he first wrote on these matters, thirty years earlier, the advance
of competitive learning had made it a necessity to revise statements by
all accessible lights, and to subject authorities to a closer scrutiny.
The increase in the rigour of the obligation might be measured by
Tischendorf, who, after renewing the text of the New Testament in seven
editions, had more than three thousand changes to make in the eighth.
The old pacific superficial method yielded no longer what would be
accepted as certain knowledge. Having made himself master of the
reconstructive process that was carried on a little apart from the main
chain of durable literature, in academic transactions, in dissertations
and periodicals, he submitted the materials he was about to use to the
exigencies of the day. Without it, he would have remained a man of the
last generation, distanced by every disciple of the new learning. He
went to work with nothing but his trained and organised common sense,
starting from no theory, and aiming at no conclusion. If he was beyond
his contemporaries in the mass of expedient knowledge, he was not before
them in the strictness of his tests, or in sharpness or boldness in
applying them. He was abreast as a critic, he was not ahead. He did not
innovate. The parallel studies of the time kept pace with his; and his
judgments are those which are accepted generally. His critical mind was
pliant, to assent where he must, to reject where he must, and to doubt
where he must. His submission to external testimony appeared in his
panegyric of our Indian empire, where he overstated the increase of
population. Informed of his error by one of his translators, he replied
that the figures had seemed incredible also to him, but having verified,
he found the statement so positively made that he did not venture to
depart from it. If inclination ever swayed his judgment, it was in his
despair of extracting a real available Buddha from the fables of
Southern India, which was conquered at last by the ablest of Mommsen's
pupils.
He was less apprehensive than most of his English friends in questions
relating to the Old Testament; and in the New, he was disposed, at
times, to allow some force to Muratori's fragment as to the person of
the evangelist who is least favourable to St. Peter; and was puzzled at
the zeal of the Speaker's commentator as to the second epistle of the
apostle. He held to the epistles of St. Ignatius with the tenacity of a
Caroline prelate, and was grateful to De Rossi for a chronological point
in their favour. He rejected the attacks of Lucius on the most valued
passages in Philo, and stood with Gass against Weingarten's argument on
the life of St. Anthony and the origin of Monasticism. He resisted
Overbeck on the epistle to Diognetus, and thought Ebrard all astray as
to the Culdees. There was no conservative antiquarian whom he prized
higher than Le Blant: yet he considered Ruinart credulous in dealing
with acts of early martyrs. A pupil on whose friendship he relied, made
an effort to rescue the legends of the conversion of Germany; but the
master preferred the unsparing demolitions of Rettberg. Capponi and Carl
Hegel were his particular friends; but he abandoned them without
hesitation for Scheffer Boichorst, the iconoclast of early Italian
chronicles, and never consented to read the learned reply of Da Lungo.
The _Pope Fables_ carried the critical inquiry a very little way; but he
went on with the subject. After the Donation of Constantine came the
Forged Decretals, which were just then printed for the first time in an
accurate edition. Doellinger began to be absorbed in the long train of
hierarchical fictions, which had deceived men like Gregory VII., St.
Thomas Aquinas, and Cardinal Bellarmine, which he traced up to the false
Areopagite, and down to the Laminae Granatenses. These studies became the
chief occupation of his life; they led to his excommunication in 1871,
and carried him away from his early system. For this, neither syllabus
nor ecumenical council was needed; neither crimes nor scandals were its
distant cause. The history of Church government was the influence which
so profoundly altered his position. Some trace of his researches, at an
early period of their progress, appears in what he wrote on the occasion
of the Vatican Council, especially in the fragment of an ecclesiastical
pathology which was published under the name of Janus. But the history
itself, which was the main and characteristic work of his life, and was
pursued until the end, was never published or completed. He died without
making it known to what extent, within what limit, the ideas with which
he had been so long identified were changed by his later studies, and
how wide a trench had opened between his earlier and his later life.
Twenty years of his historical work are lost for history.
The revolution in method since he began to write was partly the better
use of old authorities, partly the accession of new. Doellinger had
devoted himself to the one in 1863; he passed to the other in 1864. For
definite objects he had often consulted manuscripts, but the harvest was
stacked away, and had scarcely influenced his works. In the use and
knowledge of unpublished matter he still belonged to the old school, and
was on a level with Neander. Although, in later years, he printed six or
seven volumes of Inedita, like Mai and Theiner he did not excel as an
editor: and this part of his labours is notable chiefly for its effect
on himself. He never went over altogether to men like Schottmueller, who
said of him that he made no research--_er hat nicht geforscht_--meaning
that he had made his mind up about the Templars by the easy study of
Wilkins, Michelet, Schottmueller himself, and perhaps a hundred others,
but had not gone underground to the mines they delved in. Fustel de
Coulanges, at the time of his death, was promoting the election of the
Bishop of Oxford to the Institute, on the ground that he surpassed all
other Englishmen in his acquaintance with manuscripts. Doellinger agreed
with their French rival in his estimate of our English historian, but he
ascribed less value to that part of his acquirements. He assured the
Bavarian Academy that Mr. Freeman, who reads print, but nevertheless
mixes his colours with brains, is the author of the most profound work
on the Middle Ages ever written in this country, and is not only a
brilliant writer and a sagacious critic, but the most learned of all our
countrymen. Ranke once drew a line at 1514, after which, he said, we
still want help from unprinted sources. The world had moved a good deal
since that cautious innovation, and after 1860, enormous and excessive
masses of archive were brought into play. The Italian Revolution opened
tempting horizons. In 1864 Doellinger spent his vacation in the libraries
of Vienna and Venice. At Vienna, by an auspicious omen, Sickel, who was
not yet known to Greater Germany as the first of its mediaeval
palaeographers, showed him the sheets of a work containing 247
Carolingian acts unknown to Boehmer, who had just died with the repute of
being the best authority on Imperial charters. During several years
Doellinger followed up the discoveries he now began. Theiner sent him
documents from the _Archivio Segreto_; one of his friends shut himself
up at Trent, and another at Bergamo. Strangers ministered to his
requirements, and huge quantities of transcripts came to him from many
countries. Conventional history faded away; the studies of a lifetime
suddenly underwent transformation; and his view of the last six
centuries was made up from secret information gathered in thirty
European libraries and archives. As many things remote from current
knowledge grew to be certainties, he became more confident, more
independent, and more isolated. The ecclesiastical history of his youth
went to pieces against the new criticism of 1863, and the revelation of
the unknown which began on a very large scale in 1864.
During four years of transition occupied by this new stage of study, he
abstained from writing books. Whenever some local occasion called upon
him to speak, he spoke of the independence and authority of history. In
cases of collision with the Church, he said that a man should seek the
error in himself; but he spoke of the doctrine of the universal Church,
and it did not appear that he thought of any living voice or present
instructor. He claimed no immunity for philosophy; but history, he
affirmed, left to itself and pursued disinterestedly, will heal the ills
it causes; and it was said of him that he set the university in the
place of the hierarchy. Some of his countrymen were deeply moved by the
measures which were being taken to restore and to confirm the authority
of Rome; and he had impatient colleagues at the university who pressed
him with sharp issues of uncompromising logic. He himself was reluctant
to bring down serene research into troublesome disputation, and wished
to keep history and controversy apart. His hand was forced at last by
his friends abroad. Whilst he pursued his isolating investigations he
remained aloof from a question which in other countries and other days
was a summary and effective test of impassioned controversy. Persecution
was a problem that had never troubled him. It was not a topic with
theoretical Germans; the necessary books were hardly available, and a
man might read all the popular histories and theologies without getting
much further than the Spanish Inquisition. Ranke, averse from what is
unpleasant, gave no details. The gravity of the question had never been
brought home to Doellinger in forty years of public teaching. When he
approached it, as late as 1861, he touched lightly, representing the
intolerance of Protestants to their disadvantage, while that of
Catholics was a bequest of Imperial Rome, taken up in an emergency by
secular powers, in no way involving the true spirit and practice of the
Church. With this light footfall the topic which has so powerful a
leverage slipped into the current of his thought. The view found favour
with Ambrose de Lisle, who, having read the _Letters to a Prebendary_,
was indignant with those who commit the Church to a principle often
resisted or ignored. Newman would admit to no such compromise:
Is not the miraculous infliction of judgments upon blasphemy, lying,
profaneness, etc., in the apostles' day a sanction of infliction upon
the same by a human hand in the times of the Inquisition?
Ecclesiastical rulers may punish with the sword, if they can, and if
it is expedient or necessary to do so. The church has a right to make
laws and to enforce them with temporal punishments.