XI (continued 2)

The revolution in method since he began to write was partly the better use of old authorities, partly the accession of new. Döllinger 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 In the use and knowledge of unpublished matter he still belonged to the old school, and was on a level with Neander.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 Schottmüller, 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, Schottmüller 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. Döllinger 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 Döllinger 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 mediæval palæographers, showed him the sheets of a work containing 247 Carolingian acts unknown to Böhmer, who had just died with the repute of being the best authority on Imperial charters. During several years Döllinger 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 Döllinger 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.

The question came forward in France in the wake of the temporal power. 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'apogée de la civilisation chrétienne, comme le fruit naturel des époques 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 Döllinger sur la Papauté, c'est, selon moi, le livre décisif. C'est un chef-d'œuvre admirable à plusieurs égards, et qui est destiné à produire un bien incalculable et à fixer l'opinion sur ce sujet; c'est ainsi que le juge aussi M. de Montalembert. Le docteur Döllinger nous a rendu à 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 bûchers allumés par une main catholique me font autant d'horreur que les échafauds où les Protestants ont immolé 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 interprétations équivoques. 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 là qu'il faut aller pour voir ce que le catholicisme exclusif a su faire d'une des plus grandes et des plus héroïques nations de la terre.—Je rapporte un surcroît 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 âme indignée et attristée"—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 à présent. 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 Döllinger his clear-cut antagonism, and to kindle in him something of his gloomy and passionate fervour, on the one point on which all depended.

Döllinger 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 ernüchtert.—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 öffentlichen hartnäckigen 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 Bischöfe 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 Männer 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 Königsberg, 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, Döllinger 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 Erörterung.

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 Möhler, 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 pitié de nous!" But Suarez had to send the manuscript of his most aggressive book to Rome for revision, and Döllinger 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 Döllinger said of Veuillot that he meant well, but did much good and much evil, Montalembert called him a hypocrite: "L'Univers, en déclarant tous les jours qu'il ne veut pas d'autre liberté que la sienne, justifie tout ce que nos pires ennemis ont jamais dit sur la mauvaise foi et l'hypocrisie des polémistes chrétiens." Lacordaire wrote to a hostile bishop: "L'Univers est à mes yeux la négation de tout esprit chrétien et de tout bon sens humain. Ma consolation au milieu de si grandes misères morales est de vivre solitaire, occupé d'une œuvre que Dieu bénit, et de protester par mon silence, et de temps en temps par mes paroles, contre la plus grande insolence qui se soit encore autorisée au nom de Jésus-Christ." Gratry was a man of more gentle nature, but his tone is the same: "Esprits faux ou nuls, consciences intellectuelles faussées par l'habitude de l'apologie sans franchise: partemque ejus cum hypocritis ponet.—Cette école est bien en vérité une école de mensonge.—C'est cette école qui est depuis des siècles, et surtout en ce siècle, l'opprobre de notre cause et le fléau de la religion. Voilà notre ennemi commun; voilà l'ennemi de l'Eglise."

Döllinger 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 höchst duldsam und nachsichtig gegen fremde Irrthümer werden" (5th October 1866). He writes in the same terms to another correspondent sixteen years later: "Mein ganzes Leben ist ein successives Abstreifen von Irrthümern gewesen, von Irrthümern, die ich mit Zähigkeit festhielt, gewaltsam gegen die mir aufdämmernde bessere Erkenntniss mich stemmend; und doch meine ich sagen zu dürfen, 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 Männer auf einem Irrthum treffe, so sage ich mir: 'Wenn Du damals gelebt, und an seiner Stelle gestanden wärest, hättest Du nicht den allegingn Wahn getheilt; und er, wenn er die Dir zu Theil gewordenen Erkenntnissmittel besessen, würde er nicht besseren Gebrauch davon gemacht haben, die Wahrheit nicht früher 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 Möhler. 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 Verständniss, ohne den historischen Sinn. Dieser ist, wie Sie wohl wissen, gar nicht so häufig; und we er fehlt, da fehlt auch, scheint mir, die volle Verantwortlichkeit für 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 Döllinger from Würzburg 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 Döllinger 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, Döllinger 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 Döllinger, 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 müssen.

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 mediæval 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 Fénelon, 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, Montégut, 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 Möhler, 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 Höfler said that he surpassed all men in the knowledge of historical literature; but Hefele was the bishop of his predilection, and Höfler 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 Döllinger 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.

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