Note (return) — Chapter I
Neil Buchanan translation
The history of dogma as a historical and critical discipline had its origin in the last century through the works of Mosheim, C. W. F. Walch, Ernesti, Lessing and Semler. Lange gave to the world in 1796 the first attempt at a history of dogma as a special branch of theological study. The theologians of the Early and Mediæval Churches have only transmitted histories of Heretics and of Literature, regarding dogma as unchangeable.12 This presupposition is so much a part of the nature of Catholicism that it has been maintained till the present day. It is therefore impossible for a Catholic to make a free, impartial and scientific investigation of the history of dogma.13 There have, indeed, at almost all times before the Reformation, been critical efforts in the domain of Christianity, especially of western Christianity, efforts which in some cases have led to the proof of the novelty and inadmissibility of particular dogmas. But, as a rule, these efforts were of the nature of a polemic against the dominant Church. They scarcely prepared the way for, far less produced a historical view of, dogmatic tradition.14 The progress of the sciences15 and the conflict with Protestantism could here, for the Catholic Church, have no other effect than that of leading to the collecting, with great learning, of material for the history of dogma, the establishing of the consensus patrum et doctorum, the exhibition of the necessity of a continuous explication of dogma, and the description of the history of heresies pressing in from without, regarded now as unheard-of novelties, and again as old enemies in new masks. The modern Jesuit-Catholic historian indeed exhibits, in certain circumstances, a manifest indifference to the task of establishing the semper idem in the faith of the Church, but this indifference is at present regarded with disfavour, and, besides, is only an apparent one, as the continuous though inscrutable guidance of the Church by the infallible teaching of the Pope is the more emphatically maintained.16