Liberal defenders of a government which made a principle of persecution
had to decide whether they approved or condemned it. Where was their
liberality in one case, or their catholicity in the other? It was the
simple art of their adversaries to press this point, and to make the
most of it; and a French priest took upon him to declare that
intolerance, far from being a hidden shame, was a pride and a glory:
"L'Eglise regarde l'Inquisition comme l'apogee de la civilisation
chretienne, comme le fruit naturel des epoques de foi et de catholicisme
national." Gratry took the other side so strongly that there would have
been a tumult at the Sorbonne, if he had said from his chair what he
wrote in his book; and certain passages were struck out of the printed
text by the cautious archbishop's reviser. He was one of those French
divines who had taken in fuel at Munich, and he welcomed _Kirche und
Kirchen_: "Quant au livre du docteur Doellinger sur la Papaute, c'est,
selon moi, le livre decisif. C'est un chef-d'oeuvre admirable a
plusieurs egards, et qui est destine a produire un bien incalculable et
a fixer l'opinion sur ce sujet; c'est ainsi que le juge aussi M. de
Montalembert. Le docteur Doellinger nous a rendu a tous un grand
service." This was not the first impression of Montalembert. He deplored
the Odeon lectures as usurping functions divinely assigned not to
professors, but to the episcopate, as a grief for friends and a joy for
enemies. When the volume came he still objected to the policy, to the
chapter on England, and to the cold treatment of Sixtus V. At last he
admired without reserve. Nothing better had been written since Bossuet;
the judgment on the Roman government, though severe, was just, and
contained no more than the truth. There was not a word which he would
not be able to sign. A change was going on in his position and his
affections, as he came to regard toleration as the supreme affair. At
Malines he solemnly declared that the Inquisitor was as horrible as the
Terrorist, and made no distinction in favour of death inflicted for
religion against death for political motives: "Les buchers allumes par
une main catholique me font autant d'horreur que les echafauds ou les
Protestants ont immole tant de martyrs." Wiseman, having heard him once,
was not present on the second day; but the Belgian cardinal assured him
that he had spoken like a sound divine. He described Dupanloup's defence
of the Syllabus as a masterpiece of eloquent subterfuge, and repudiated
his _interpretations equivoques_. A journey to Spain in 1865 made him
more vehement than ever; although, from that time, the political
opposition inflamed him less. He did not find imperialism intolerable.
His wrath was fixed on the things of which Spain had reminded him:
"C'est la qu'il faut aller pour voir ce que le catholicisme exclusif a
su faire d'une des plus grandes et des plus heroiques nations de la
terre.--Je rapporte un surcroit d'horreur pour les doctrines fanatiques
et absolutistes qui ont cours aujourd'hui chez les catholiques du monde
entier." In 1866 it became difficult, by the aid of others, to overcome
Falloux's resistance to the admission of an article in the
_Correspondant_, and by the end of the year his friends were unanimous
to exclude him. An essay on Spain, his last work--"dernier soupir de mon
ame indignee et attristee"--was, by Dupanloup's advice, not allowed to
appear. Repelled by those whom he now designated as spurious, servile,
and prevaricating liberals, he turned to the powerful German with whom
he thought himself in sympathy. He had applauded him for dealing with
one thing at a time, in his book on Rome: "Vous avez bien fait de ne
rien dire de l'absolutisme spirituel, quant a present. _Sat prata
biberunt_. Le reste viendra en son temps." He avowed that spiritual
autocracy is worse than political; that evil passions which had
triumphed in the State were triumphant in the Church; that to send human
beings to the stake, with a crucifix before them, was the act of a
monster or a maniac. He was dying; but whilst he turned his face to the
wall, lamenting that he had lived too long, he wished for one more
conference with the old friend with whom, thirty-five years before, in a
less anxious time, he had discussed the theme of religion and liberty.
This was in February 1867; and for several years he had endeavoured to
teach Doellinger his clear-cut antagonism, and to kindle in him something
of his gloomy and passionate fervour, on the one point on which all
depended.
Doellinger arrived slowly at the contemplation of deeper issues than that
of churchmen or laymen in political offices, of Roman or German pupils
in theological chairs. After seeing Baron Arnim, in 1865, he lost the
hope of saving the papal government, and ceased to care about the things
he had contended for in 1861; and a time came when he thought it
difficult to give up the temporal power, and yet revere the Holy See. He
wrote to Montalembert that his illusions were failing: "Ich bin sehr
ernuechtert.--Es ist so vieles in der Kirche anders gekommen, als ich es
mir vor 20-30 Jahren gedacht, und rosenfarbig ausgemalt hatte." He
learnt to speak of spiritual despotism almost in the words of his
friend. The point of junction between the two orders of ideas is the use
of fire for the enforcement of religion on which the French were laying
all their stress: "In Frankreich bewegt sich der Gegensatz blos auf dem
socialpolitischen Gebiete, nicht auf dem theologisch-wissenschaftlichen,
weil es dort genau genommen eine theologische Wissenschaft nicht gibt"
(16th October 1865). The Syllabus had not permanently fixed his
attention upon it. Two years later, the matter was put more definitely,
and he found himself, with little real preparation, turning from
antiquarian curiosities, and brought face to face with the radical
question of life and death. If ever his literary career was influenced
by his French alliances, by association with men in the throng, for whom
politics decided, and all the learning of the schools did not avail, the
moment was when he resolved to write on the Inquisition.
The popular account which he drew up appeared in the newspapers in the
summer of 1867; and although he did not mean to burn his ships, his
position as an official defender of the Holy See was practically at an
end. He wrote rapidly, at short notice, and not in the steady course of
progressive acquisition. Ficker and Winkelmann have since given a
different narrative of the step by which the Inquisition came into
existence; and the praise of Gregory X., as a man sincerely religious
who kept aloof, was a mark of haste. In the work which he was using,
there was no act by that pontiff; but if he had had time to look deeper
he would not have found him, in this respect, different from his
contemporaries. There is no uncertainty as to the author's feeling
towards the infliction of torture and death for religion, and the
purpose of his treatise is to prevent the nailing of the Catholic
colours to the stake. The spirit is that of the early lectures, in which
he said: "Diese Schutzgewalt der Kirche ist rein geistlich. Sie kann
also auch einen solchen oeffentlichen hartnaeckigen und sonst unheilbaren
Gegner der Kirche nur seiner rein geistlichen kirchlichen Rechte
berauben." Compared with the sweeping vehemence of the Frenchmen who
preceded, the restrained moderation of language, the abstinence from the
use of general terms, leaves us in doubt how far the condemnation
extended, and whether he did more, in fact, than deplore a deviation
from the doctrine of the first centuries. "Kurz darauf trat ein
Umschwung ein, den man wohl einen Abfall von der alten Lehre nennen
darf, und der sich ausnimmt, als ob die Kaiser die Lehrmeister der
Bischoefe geworden seien." He never entirely separated himself in
principle from the promoters, the agents, the apologists. He did not
believe, with Hefele, that the spirit survives, that there are men, not
content with eternal flames, who are ready to light up new Smithfields.
Many of the defenders were his intimate friends. The most conspicuous
was the only colleague who addressed him with the familiar German _Du_.
Speaking of two or three men, of whom one, Martens, had specially
attacked the false liberalism which sees no good in the Inquisition, he
wrote: "Sie werden sich noch erinnern ... wie hoch ich solche Maenner
stelle." He differed from them widely, but he differed academically; and
this was not the polish or precaution of a man who knows that to assail
character is to degrade and to betray one's cause. The change in his own
opinions was always before him. Although convinced that he had been
wrong in many of the ideas and facts with which he started, he was also
satisfied that he had been as sincere and true to his lights in 1835 as
in 1865. There was no secret about the Inquisition, and its observances
were published and republished in fifty books; but in his early days he
had not read them, and there was not a German, from Basel to
Koenigsberg, who could have faced a _viva voce_ in the _Directorium_ or
the _Arsenale_, or who had ever read Percin or Paramo. If Lacordaire
disconnected St. Dominic from the practice of persecution, Doellinger had
done the same thing before him.
Weit entfernt, wie man ihm wohl vorgeworfen hat, sich dabei Gewalt
und Verfolgung zu erlauben, oder gar der Stifter der Inquisition zu
werden, wirkte er, nicht den Irrenden, sondern den Irrthum befehdend,
nur durch ruhige Belehrung und Eroerterung.
If Newman, a much more cautious disputant, thought it substantial truth
to say that Rome never burnt heretics, there were things as false in his
own early writings. If Moehler, in the religious wars, diverted attention
from Catholic to Protestant atrocities, he took the example from his
friend's book, which he was reviewing. There may be startling matter in
Locatus and Pegna, but they were officials writing under the strictest
censorship, and nobody can tell when they express their own private
thoughts. There is a copy of Suarez on which a priest has written the
marginal ejaculation: "Mon Dieu, ayez pitie de nous!" But Suarez had to
send the manuscript of his most aggressive book to Rome for revision,
and Doellinger used to insist, on the testimony of his secretary, in
Walton's _Lives_, that he disavowed and detested the interpolations that
came back.
The French group, unlike him in spirit and motive, but dealing with the
same opponents, judged them freely, and gave imperative utterance to
their judgments. While Doellinger said of Veuillot that he meant well,
but did much good and much evil, Montalembert called him a hypocrite:
"L'Univers, en declarant tous les jours qu'il ne veut pas d'autre
liberte que la sienne, justifie tout ce que nos pires ennemis ont jamais
dit sur la mauvaise foi et l'hypocrisie des polemistes chretiens."
Lacordaire wrote to a hostile bishop: "L'Univers est a mes yeux la
negation de tout esprit chretien et de tout bon sens humain. Ma
consolation au milieu de si grandes miseres morales est de vivre
solitaire, occupe d'une oeuvre que Dieu benit, et de protester par mon
silence, et de temps en temps par mes paroles, contre la plus grande
insolence qui se soit encore autorisee au nom de Jesus-Christ." Gratry
was a man of more gentle nature, but his tone is the same: "Esprits faux
ou nuls, consciences intellectuelles faussees par l'habitude de
l'apologie sans franchise: _partemque ejus cum hypocritis ponet_.--Cette
ecole est bien en verite une ecole de mensonge.--C'est cette ecole qui
est depuis des siecles, et surtout en ce siecle, l'opprobre de notre
cause et le fleau de la religion. Voila notre ennemi commun; voila
l'ennemi de l'Eglise."
Doellinger never understood party divisions in this tragic way. He was
provided with religious explanations for the living and the dead; and
his maxims in regard to contemporaries governed and attenuated his view
of every historical problem. For the writers of his acquaintance who
were unfaltering advocates of the Holy Office, for Philips and Gams, and
for Theiner, who expiated devious passages of early youth, amongst other
penitential works, with large volumes in honour of Gregory XIII., he had
always the same mode of defence: "Mir begegnet es noch jede Woche, dass
ich irgend einem Irrthum, mitunter einem lange gepflegten, entsage, ihn
mir gleichsam aus der Brust herausreissen muss. Da sollte man freilich
hoechst duldsam und nachsichtig gegen fremde Irrthuemer werden" (5th
October 1866). He writes in the same terms to another correspondent
sixteen years later: "Mein ganzes Leben ist ein successives Abstreifen
von Irrthuemern gewesen, von Irrthuemern, die ich mit Zaehigkeit festhielt,
gewaltsam gegen die mir aufdaemmernde bessere Erkenntniss mich stemmend;
und doch meine ich sagen zu duerfen, dass ich dabei nicht _dishonest_
war. Darf ich andre verurtheilen _in eodem luto mecum haerentes_?" He
regretted as he grew old the hardness and severity of early days, and
applied the same inconclusive deduction from his own experience to the
past. After comparing Baronius and Bellarmine with Bossuet and Arnauld
he goes on: "Wenn ich solche Maenner auf einem Irrthum treffe, so sage
ich mir: 'Wenn Du damals gelebt, und an seiner Stelle gestanden waerest,
haettest Du nicht den allegingn Wahn getheilt; und er, wenn er die Dir zu
Theil gewordenen Erkenntnissmittel besessen, wuerde er nicht besseren
Gebrauch davon gemacht haben, die Wahrheit nicht frueher erkannt und
bekannt haben, als Du?'"
He sometimes distrusted his favourite argument of ignorance and early
prepossessions, and felt that there was presumption and unreality in
tendering such explanations to men like the Bollandist De Buck, De
Rossi, whom the Institute elected in preference to Mommsen, or
Windischmann, whom he himself had been accused of bringing forward as a
rival to Moehler. He would say that knowledge may be a burden and not a
light, that the faculty of doing justice to the past is among the rarest
of moral and intellectual gifts: "Man kann viel wissen, viele Notizen im
Kopf haben, ohne das rechte wissenschaftliche Verstaendniss, ohne den
historischen Sinn. Dieser ist, wie Sie wohl wissen, gar nicht so haeufig;
und we er fehlt, da fehlt auch, scheint mir, die volle Verantwortlichkeit
fuer das gewusste."
In 1879 he prepared materials for a paper on the Massacre of St.
Bartholomew. Here he was breaking new ground, and verging on that which
it was the policy and the aspiration of his life to avoid. Many a man
who gives no tears to Cranmer, Servetus, or Bruno, who thinks it just
that the laws should be obeyed, who deems that actions done by order are
excused, and that legality implies morality, will draw the line at
midnight murder and wholesale extermination. The deed wrought at Paris
and in forty towns of France in 1572, the arguments which produced it,
the arguments which justified it, left no room for the mists of
mitigation and compromise. The passage from the age of Gregory IX. to
that of Gregory XIII., from the Crusades to the wars of Religion,
brought his whole system into jeopardy. The historian who was at the
heels of the divine in 1861, and level with him in 1867, would have come
to the front. The discourse was never delivered, never composed. But the
subject of toleration was absent no more from his thoughts, filling
space once occupied by Julian of Eclanum and Duns Scotus, the Variata
and the Five Propositions. To the last days of 1889 he was engaged in
following the doctrines of intolerance back to their root, from Innocent
III. to the Council of Rheims, from Nicholas I. to St. Augustine,
narrowing the sphere of individual responsibility, defending agents, and
multiplying degrees so as to make them imperceptible. Before the
writings of Priscillian were published by the Vienna Academy the nature
of their strange contents was disclosed. It then appeared that a copy of
the _Codex unicus_ had been sent to Doellinger from Wuerzburg years
before; and that he had never adverted to the fact that the burning of
heretics came, fully armed, from the brain of one man, and was the
invention of a heretic who became its first victim.
At Rome he discussed the council of Trent with Theiner, and tried to
obtain permission for him to publish the original acts. Pius IX.
objected that none of his predecessors had allowed it, and Theiner
answered that none of them had defined the Immaculate Conception. In a
paper which Doellinger drew up, he observed that Pallavicini cannot
convince; that far from proving the case against the artful Servite, the
pettiness of his charges indicates that he has no graver fault to find;
so that nothing but the production of the official texts can enforce or
disprove the imputation that Trent was a scene of tyranny and intrigue.
His private belief then was that the papers would disprove the
imputation and vindicate the council. When Theiner found it possible to
publish his _Acta Authentica_, Doellinger also printed several private
diaries, chiefly from Mendham's collection at the Bodleian. But the
correspondence between Rome and the legates is still, in its integrity,
kept back. The two friends had examined it; both were persuaded that it
was decisive; but they judged that it decided in opposite ways. Theiner,
the official guardian of the records, had been forbidden to communicate
them during the Vatican Council; and he deemed the concealment prudent.
What passed in Rome under Pius IX. would, he averred, suffer by
comparison. According to Doellinger, the suppressed papers told against
Trent.
Wenn wir nicht allen unseren henotischen Hoffnungen entsagen und uns
nicht in schweren Konflikt mit der alten (vormittel-alterigen) Kirche
bringen wollen, werden wir doch auch da das Korrektiv des
Vincentianischen Prinzips (_semper, ubique, ab omnibus_) zur
Anwendung bringen muessen.
After his last visit to the Marciana he thought more favourably of
Father Paul, sharing the admiration which Venetians feel for the
greatest writer of the Republic, and falling little short of the
judgments which Macaulay inscribed, after each perusal, in the copy at
Inveraray. Apart from his chief work he thought him a great historian,
and he rejected the suspicion that he professed a religion which he did
not believe. He even fancied that the manuscript, which in fact was
forwarded with much secrecy to Archbishop Abbot, was published against
his will. The intermediate seekers, who seem to skirt the border, such
as Grotius, Ussher, Praetorius, and the other celebrated Venetian, De
Dominis, interested him deeply, in connection with the subject of
Irenics, and the religious problem was part motive of his incessant
study of Shakespeare, both in early life, and when he meditated joining
in the debate between Simpson, Rio, Bernays, and the _Edinburgh Review_.
His estimate of his own work was low. He wished to be remembered as a
man who had written certain books, but who had not written many more.
His collections constantly prompted new and attractive schemes, but his
way was strewn with promise unperformed, and abandoned from want of
concentration. He would not write with imperfect materials, and to him
the materials were always imperfect. Perpetually engaged in going over
his own life and reconsidering his conclusions, he was not depressed by
unfinished work. When a sanguine friend hoped that all the contents of
his hundred note-books would come into use, he answered that perhaps
they might, if he lived for a hundred and fifty years. He seldom wrote a
book without compulsion, or the aid of energetic assistants. The
account of mediaeval sects, dated 1890, was on the stocks for half a
century. The discourse on the Templars, delivered at his last appearance
in public, had been always before him since a conversation with Michelet
about the year 1841. Fifty-six years lay between his text to the
_Paradiso_ of Cornelius and his last return to Dante.
When he began to fix his mind on the constitutional history of the
Church, he proposed to write, first, on the times of Innocent XI. It was
the age he knew best, in which there was most interest, most material,
most ability, when divines were national classics, and presented many
distinct types of religious thought, when biblical and historical
science was founded, and Catholicism was presented in its most winning
guise. The character of Odescalchi impressed him, by his earnestness in
sustaining a strict morality. Fragments of this projected work
reappeared in his lectures on Louis XIV., and in his last publication on
the Casuists. The lectures betray the decline of the tranquil idealism
which had been the admiration and despair of friends. Opposition to Rome
had made him, like his ultramontane allies in France, more indulgent to
the ancient Gallican enemy. He now had to expose the vice of that
system, which never roused the king's conscience, and served for sixty
years, from the remonstrance of Caussin to the anonymous warning of
Fenelon, as the convenient sanction of absolutism. In the work on
seventeenth-century ethics, which is his farthest, the moral point of
view prevails over every other, and conscience usurps the place of
theology, canon law, and scholarship. This was his tribute to a new
phase of literature, the last he was to see, which was beginning to put
ethical knowledge above metaphysics and politics, as the central range
of human progress. Morality, veracity, the proper atmosphere of ideal
history, became the paramount interest.
When he was proposed for a degree, the most eloquent lips at Oxford,
silenced for ever whilst I write this page, pointed to his excellence in
those things which are the merit of Germans. "Quaecunque in Germanorum
indole admiranda atque imitanda fere censemus, ea in Doellingero maxime
splendent." The patriotic quality was recognised in the address of the
Berlin professors, who say that by upholding the independence of the
national thought, whilst he enriched it with the best treasure of other
lands, he realised the ideal of the historian. He became more German in
extreme old age, and less impressive in his idiomatic French and English
than in his own language. The lamentations of men he thought good
judges, Mazade and Taine, and the first of literary critics, Montegut,
diluted somewhat his admiration for the country of St. Bernard and
Bossuet. In spite of politics, his feeling for English character, for
the moral quality of English literature, never changed; and he told his
own people that their faults are not only very near indeed to their
virtues, but are sometimes more apparent to the observer. The belief in
the fixity and influence of national type, confirmed by his authorities,
Ganganelli and Moehler, continued to determine his judgments. In his last
letter to Mr. Gladstone, he illustrated the Irish question by means of a
chronicle describing Ireland a thousand years ago.
Everybody has felt that his power was out of proportion to his work, and
that he knew too much to write. It was so much better to hear him than
to read all his books, that the memory of what he was will pass away
with the children whom he loved. Hefele called him the first theologian
in Germany, and Hoefler said that he surpassed all men in the knowledge
of historical literature; but Hefele was the bishop of his predilection,
and Hoefler had been fifty years his friend, and is the last survivor of
the group which once made Munich the capital of citramontane
Catholicity. Martensen, the most brilliant of Episcopalian divines,
describes him as he talked with equal knowledge and certainty of every
age, and understood all characters and all situations as if he had lived
in the midst of them. The best ecclesiastical historian now living is
the fittest judge of the great ecclesiastical historian who is dead.
Harnack has assigned causes which limited his greatness as a writer,
perhaps even as a thinker; but he has declared that no man had the same
knowledge and intelligence of history in general, and of religious
history which is its most essential element, and he affirms, what some
have doubted, that he possessed the rare faculty of entering into alien
thought. None of those who knew Professor Doellinger best, who knew him
in the third quarter of the century, to which he belonged by the full
fruition of his powers and the completeness of his knowledge, will ever
qualify these judgments. It is right to add that, in spite of boundless
reading, there was no lumber in his mind, and in spite of his classical
learning, little ornament. Among the men to be commemorated here, he
stands alone. Throughout the measureless distance which he traversed,
his movement was against his wishes, in pursuit of no purpose, in
obedience to no theory, under no attraction but historical research
alone. It was given to him to form his philosophy of history on the
largest induction ever available to man; and whilst he owed more to
divinity than any other historian, he owed more to history than any
other divine.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 338: _English Historical Review_,1890.]
XII
CARDINAL WISEMAN AND THE HOME AND FOREIGN REVIEW[339]
It is one of the conditions inseparable from a public career to be often
misunderstood, and sometimes judged unfairly even when understood the
best. No one who has watched the formation of public opinion will be
disposed to attribute all the unjust judgments which assail him to the
malice of individuals, or to imagine that he can prevent misconceptions
or vindicate his good name by words alone. He knows that even where he
has committed no errors he must pay tribute to the fallibility of
mankind, and that where he is in fault he must also pay tribute to his
own. This is a natural law; and the purer a man's conscience is, and the
more single his aim, the less eager will he be to evade it, or to defend
himself from its penalties.