The History of Freedom Part 24

The first eminent thinker whom he saw and heard was Baader, the poorest of writers, but the most instructive and impressive talker in Germany, and the one man who appears to have influenced the direction of his mind. Bishop Martensen has described his amazing powers; and Dollinger, who remembered him with more scant esteem, bore equal testimony to the wealth and worth of his religious philosophy. He probably owed to him his persistent disparagement of Hegel, and more certainly that familiarity with the abstruse literature of mysticism which made him as clear and sure of vision in the twilight of Petrucci and St. Martin as in the congenial company of Duperron. Baader is remembered by those who abstain from sixteen volumes of discordant thought, as the inventor of that system of political insurance which became the Holy Alliance. That authority is as sacred and sovereignty as absolute in the Church as in the State, was an easy and obvious inference, and it had been lately drawn with an energy and literary point to which Baader was a stranger, by the Count de Maistre, who was moreover a student of St. Martin. When the ancient mystic welcomed his new friend, he was full of the praises of De Maistre. He impressed upon his earnest listener the importance of the books on the pope and on the Gallican church, and a.s.sured him that the spirit which animates them is the genuine Catholicism. These conversations were the origin of Dollinger's specific ultramontanism. It governed one half of his life, and his interest in De Maistre outlasted the a.s.sent which he once gave to some of his opinions. Questions arising from the Savoyard's indictment against Bacon, which he proposed to Liebig, formed the connection between the two laboured attacks on the founder of English philosophy.

Much of that which at any time was unhistoric or presumptive in his mind may be ascribed to this influence; and it divided him from Mohler, who was far before him in the fulness of the enjoyment of his powers and his fame, whom he survived half a century, and never ceased to venerate as the finest theological intellect he had known. The publication of the _Symbolik_ made it difficult for the author to remain in Wirtemberg; Tubingen, he said, was a place where he could neither live nor die happy; and having made Dollinger's acquaintance, he conceived an ardent wish to become his colleague at Munich.

Im Verkehre mit Ihnen, und dem Kreise in dem Sie leben, habe ich mich aufs anmuthigste erheitert, sittlich gestarkt, und religios getrostet und ermuthigt gefunden; ein Verein von Einwirkungen auf mich wurde mir gewahrt, deren aller ich in fast gleichein Grade bedurftig war.

Dollinger negotiated his appointment, overcame the resisting ministerial medium through the intervention of the king, and surrendered his own department of theology, which they both regarded as the most powerful agency in religious instruction. Mohler had visited Gottingen and Berlin, and recognised their superiority. A public address to Planck, praising the Protestant treatment of history, was omitted by Dollinger from the edition of his miscellaneous writings. They differed so widely that one of them hesitated to read Bossuet's _Defensio_, and generally kept the stronger Gallicans out of sight, whilst the other warmly recommended Richer, and Launoy, and Dupin, and cautioned his pupils against Baronius, as a forger and a cheat, who dishonestly attributed to the primitive Church ideas quite foreign to its const.i.tution. He found fault with his friend for undue favour to the Jesuits, and undue severity towards Jansenism. The other advised him to read Fenelon, and succeeded in modifying this opinion.

Sie werden vielleicht um so geneigter sein, mir zu verzeihen, wenn ich Ihnen melde, da.s.s ich inzwischen recht fleissig die Jansenistischen Streitigkeiten, durch Ihre freundliche Zuschrift angeregt, studirt habe, und Ihrer Darstellung ohne Zweifel jetzt weit naher stehe als fruher. Selbst die Bulle Unigenitus erscheint mir in einem weit gunstigeren Lichte als fruher, obschon ich die Censur mancher Quesnel'scher Satze immer noch nicht begreifen kann. Sie schrieben mir, da.s.s die Fenelon'sche Correspondenz einen grossen Einfluss auf Ihre Betrachtungsweise ausgeubt habe. Auch bei mir ist dieses der Fall.

But in describing the failure of scholastic theology, the exaggeration of De Maistre, the incompetence of the Roman censorship, the irreligion of Leo X., and the strength of Luther's case against the Papacy, the sensitive Suabian made a contrast, then, and long after, with Dollinger's disciplined coolness and reserve.

Dann war wirklich die bestehende Form der Kirche im hochsten Grade tadelhaft, und bedurfte der Reinigung. Die Papste waren Despoten, willkuhrliche Herrscher geworden. Gebrauche hatten sich angehauft, die im hochsten Grade dem Glauben und der christlichen Frommigkeit entgegen waren. In vielen Punkten hatte Luther immer Recht, wenn er von Missbrauchen der Romischen Gewalt spricht, da.s.s dort alles feil sei.--Tetzel verfuhr ohnediess auf die emporendste Weise, und ubertrieb, mit einer religiosen Rohheit und einem Stumpfsinn ohne Gleichen, das Bedenkliche der Sache auf die ausserste Spitze.

The disagreement which made itself felt from time to time between the famous colleagues was not removed when one of them wished the other to change his confessor before his last illness.

Mohler claimed the supreme chair of ecclesiastical history as a matter of course, and by right of seniority. He apologised for venturing to supersede one who had gained distinction in that lecture-room, but he hinted that he himself was the least fit of the two for dogmatics.

Ich habe mich fur die historischen Facher entschieden. Ihr Opfer, wenn Sie Dogmatik lesen, anerkenne ich, aber ich bitte das meinige nicht zu ubersehen. Welcher Entschluss, ich mochte sagen, welche Unverschamtheit ist es, nach Ihnen und bei Ihren Lebzeiten, Kirchengeschichte in Munchen zu doziren?

Dollinger took that branch for the time, but he never afterwards taught theology proper. As Mohler, who was essentially a theologian, deserted divinity to compose inferior treatises on the gnostics and the false decretals, Dollinger, by choice and vocation a divine, having religion as the purpose of his life, judged that the loftier function, the more spiritual service, was historical teaching. The problem is to know how it came to pa.s.s that a man who was eminently intelligent and perspicuous in the exposition of doctrines, but who, in narrative, description, and knowledge of character, was neither first nor second, resolved that his mission was history.

In early life he had picked up chance copies of Baronius and Petavius, the pillars of historic theology; but the motives of his choice lay deeper. Church history had long been the weakest point and the cause of weakness among the Catholics, and it was the rising strength of the German Protestants. Therefore it was the post of danger; and it gave to a theologian the command of a public of laymen. The restoration of history coincided with the euthanasia of metaphysic; when the foremost philosophic genius of the time led over to the historic treatment both of philosophy and religion, and Hamilton, Cousin, Comte, severally converted the science into its history. Many men better equipped for speculation than for erudition went the same way; the systematic theology was kept up in the universities by the influence of Rome, where scholasticism went on untouched by the romantic transformation. Writing of England, Wiseman said: "There is still a scholastic hardness in our controversial theology, an unbendingness of outward forms in our explanations of Catholic principles, which renders our theologians dry and unattractive to the most catholicly inclined portion of our Protestants." The choice which these youths made, towards 1830, was, though they did not know it, the beginning of a rift that widened.

Dollinger was more in earnest than others in regarding Christianity as history, and in pressing the affinity between catholic and historical thought. Systems were to him nearly as codes to Savigny, when he exhorted his contemporaries not to consolidate their law, lest, with their wisdom and knowledge, they should incorporate their delusions and their ignorance, and usurp for the state what belonged to the nation. He would send an inquiring student to the _Historia Congregationis de Auxiliis_ and the _Historia Pelagiana_ rather than to Molina or Lemos, and often gave the advice which, coming from Oriel, disconcerted Morris of Exeter: "I am afraid you will have to read the Jesuit Petavius." He dreaded the predominance of great names which stop the way, and everything that interposes the notions of an epoch, a region, or a school between the Church and the observer.

To an Innsbruck professor, lamenting that there was no philosophy which he could heartily adopt, he replied that philosophies do not subsist in order to be adopted. A Thomist or a Cartesian seemed to him as a captive, or a one-armed combatant. Prizing metaphysicians for the unstrung pearls which they drop beyond the seclusion of system, he loved the _disjecta membra_ of Coleridge, and preferred the _Pensieri_, and _Parerga und Paralipomena_ to the constructed work of Gioberti and Schopenhauer. He knew Leibniz chiefly in his letters, and was perceptibly affected by his law of continuous progression, his general optimism, and his eclectic art of extracting from men and books only the good that is in them; but of monadology or pre-established harmony there was not a trace. His colleague, Sch.e.l.ling, no friend to the friends of Baader, stood aloof. The elder Windischmann, whom he particularly esteemed, and who acted in Germany as the interpreter of De Maistre, had hailed Hegel as a pioneer of sound philosophy, with whom he agreed both in thought and word. Dollinger had no such condescension. Hegel remained, in his _eyes_, the strongest of all the enemies of religion, the guide of Tubingen in its aberrations, the reasoner whose abstract dialectics made a generation of clever men incapable of facing facts. He went on preferring former historians of dogma, who were untainted by the trail of pantheism, Baumgarten-Crusius, and even Muenscher, and by no means admitted that Baur was deeper than the early Jesuits and Oratorians, or gained more than he lost by constriction in the Hegelian coil. He took pleasure in pointing out that the best recent book on the penitential system, Kliefoth's fourth volume, owed its substance to Morinus. The dogmas of pantheistic history offended him too much to give them deep study, and he was ill prepared with counsel for a wanderer lost in the pervading haze. Hegelians said of him that he lacked the constructive unity of idea, and knew the way from effect to cause, but not from cause to law.

His own lectures on the philosophy of religion, which have left no deep furrow, have been praised by Ketteler, who was not an undiscriminating admirer. He sent on one of his pupils to Rosmini, and set another to begin metaphysics with Suarez; and when Lady Ashburton consulted him on the subject, he advised her to read Norris and Malebranche. He encouraged the study of remoter luminaries, such as Cusa and Raymundus, whose _Natural Theology_ he preferred to the _a.n.a.logy_; and would not have men overlook some who are off the line, like Postel. But although he deemed it the mark of inferiority to neglect a grain of the gold of obsolete and eccentric writers, he always a.s.signed to original speculation a subordinate place, as a good servant but a bad master, without the certainty and authority of history. What one of his English friends writes of a divine they both admired, might fitly be applied to him:

He was a disciple in the school of Bishop Butler, and had learned as a first principle to recognise the limitations of human knowledge, and the unphilosophical folly of trying to round off into finished and pretentious schemes our fragmentary yet certain notices of our own condition and of G.o.d's dealing with it.

He alarmed Archer Gurney by saying that all hope of an understanding is at an end, if logic be applied for the rectification of dogma, and to Dr. Plummer, who acknowledged him as the most capable of modern theologians and historians, he spoke of the hopelessness of trying to discover the meaning of terms used in definitions. To his archbishop he wrote that men may discuss the mysteries of faith to the last day without avail; "we stand here on the solid ground of history, evidence, and fact." Expressing his innermost thought, that religion exists to make men better, and that the ethical quality of dogma const.i.tutes its value, he once said: "Tantum valet quantum ad corrigendum, purgandum, sanctificandum hominem confert." In theology as an intellectual exercise, beyond its action on the soul, he felt less interest, and those disputes most satisfied him which can be decided by appeal to the historian.

From his early reputation and his position at the outpost, confronting Protestant science, he was expected to make up his mind over a large area of unsettled thought and disputed fact, and to be provided with an opinion--a freehold opinion of his own--and a reasoned answer to every difficulty. People had a right to know what he knew about the end of the sixteenth chapter of St. Mark, and the beginning of the eighth chapter of St. John, the lives of St. Patrick and the sources of Erigena, the author of the _Imitation_ and of the _Twelve Articles_, the _Nag's Head_ and the _Casket Letters_. The suspense and poise of the mind, which is the pride and privilege of the unprofessional scholar, was forbidden him. Students could not wait for the master to complete his studies; they flocked for dry light of knowledge, for something defined and final, to their keen, grave, unemotional professor, who said sometimes more than he could be sure of, but who was not likely to abridge thought by oracular responses, or to give aphorism for argument. He accepted the necessity of the situation. A time came when everybody was invited, once a week, to put any imaginable question from the whole of Church history, and he at once replied. If this was a stimulus to exertion during the years spent in mastering and pondering the immense materials, it served less to promote originality and care than premature cert.i.tude and the craving for quick returns. Apart from the constant duty of teaching, his knowledge might not have been so extensive, but his views would have been less decided and therefore less liable to change.

As an historian, Dollinger regarded Christianity as a force more than as a doctrine, and displayed it as it expanded and became the soul of later history. It was the mission and occupation of his life to discover and to disclose how this was accomplished, and to understand the history of civilised Europe, religious and profane, mental and political, by the aid of sources which, being original and authentic, yielded certainty.

In his vigorous prime, he thought that it would be within his powers to complete the narrative of the conquest of the world by Christ in a single ma.s.sive work. The separated churches, the centrifugal forces, were to have been treated apart, until he adopted the ampler t.i.tle of a history of Christianity. We who look back upon all that the combined and divided labour of a thousand earnest, gifted, and often instructed men has done and left undone in sixty years, can estimate the scientific level of an age where such a dream could be dreamed by such a man, misled neither by imagination nor ambition, but knowing his own limitations and the immeasurable world of books. Experience slowly taught him that he who takes all history for his province is not the man to write a compendium.

The four volumes of _Church History_ which gave him a name in literature appeared between 1833 and 1838, and stopped short of the Reformation. In writing mainly for the horizon of seminaries, it was desirable to eschew voyages of discovery and the pathless border-land. The materials were all in print, and were the daily bread of scholars. A celebrated Anglican described Dollinger at that time as more intentional than Fleury; while Catholics objected that he was a candid friend; and Lutherans, probing deeper, observed that he resolutely held his ground wherever he could, and as resolutely abandoned every position that he found untenable. He has since said of himself that he always spoke sincerely, but that he spoke as an advocate--a sincere advocate who pleaded only for a cause which he had convinced himself was just. The cause he pleaded was the divine government of the Church, the fulfilment of the promise that it would be preserved from error, though not from sin, the uninterrupted employment of the powers committed by Christ for the salvation of man. By the absence of false arts he acquired that repute for superior integrity which caused a Tyrolese divine to speak of him as the most chivalrous of the Catholic celebrities; and the nuncio who was at Munich during the first ten years called him the "professeur le plus eclaire, le plus religieux, en un mot le plus distingue de l'universite."

Taking his survey from the elevation of general history, he gives less s.p.a.ce to all the early heresies together than to the rise of Mohammedanism. His way lies between Neander, who cares for no inst.i.tutions, and Baur, who cares for no individuals. He was entirely exempt from that impersonal idealism which Sybel laid down at the foundation of his review, which causes Delbruck to complain that Macaulay, who could see facts so well, could not see that they are revelations, which Baur defines without disguise in his _Dreieinigkeitslehre_: "Alle geschichtlichen Personen sind fur uns blosse Namen." The two posthumous works of Hegel which turned events into theories had not then appeared. Dollinger, setting life and action above theory, omitted the progress of doctrine. He proposed that Mohler should take that share of their common topic, and the plan, entertained at first, was interrupted, with much besides, by death. He felt too deeply the overwhelming unity of force to yield to that atomic theory which was provoked by the Hegelian excess: "L'histoire n'est pas un simple jeu d'abstractions, et les hommes y sont plus que les doctrines.

Ce n'est pas une certaine theorie sur la justification et la redemption qui a fait la Reforme: c'est Luther, c'est Calvin." But he allows a vast scope to the variable will and character of man. The object of religion upon earth is saintliness, and its success is shown in holy individuals.

He leaves law and doctrine, moving in their appointed orbits, to hold up great men and examples of Christian virtue.

Dollinger, who had in youth acted as secretary to Hohenlohe, was always reserved in his use of the supernatural. In the vision of Constantine and the rebuilding of the temple, he gives his reader both the natural explanation and the miraculous. He thought that the witness of the fathers to the continuance of miraculous powers could not be resisted without making history _a priori_, but later on, the more he sifted and compared authorities, the more severe he became. He deplored the uncritical credulity of the author of the _Monks of the West_; and, in examining the Stigmata, he cited the experience of a Spanish convent where they were so common that it became a sign of reprobation to be without them. Historians, he said, have to look for natural causes: enough will remain for the action of Providence, where we cannot penetrate. In his unfinished book on _Ecclesiastical Prophecy_ he enumerates the illusions of mediaeval saints when they spoke of the future, and describes them, as he once described Carlyle and Ruskin, as prophets having nothing to foretell. At Frankfort, where he spoilt his watch by depositing it in unexpected holy water, and it was whispered that he had put it there to mend it, everybody knew that there was hardly a Catholic in the Parliament of whom such a fable could be told with more felicitous unfitness.

For twenty years of his life at Munich, Gorres was the impressive central figure of a group reputed far and wide, the most intellectual force in the Catholic world. Seeing things by the light of other days, Nippold and Maurenbrecher describe Dollinger himself as its most eminent member. There was present gain and future peril in living amongst a clever but restricted set, sheltered, supported, and restrained by friends who were united in aims and studies, who cherished their sympathies and their enmities in common, and who therefore believed that they were divided by no deep cleft or ultimate principle. Dollinger never outlived the glamour of the eloquence and ascendancy of Gorres, and spoke of him long after his death as a man of real knowledge, and of greater religious than political insight Between the imaginative rhetorician and the measured, scrutinising scholar, the contrast was wide. One of the many pupils and rare disciples of the former complained that his friend supplied interminable matter for the sterile and unavailing _Mystik_, in order to amuse him with ropes of sand: and the severest censure of Dollinger's art as an historian was p.r.o.nounced by Gorres when he said, "I always see a.n.a.logies, and you always see differences."

At all times, but in his early studies especially, he owed much to the Italians, whose ecclesiastical literature was the first that he mastered, and predominates in his Church history. Several of his countrymen, such as Savigny and Raumer, had composed history on the shoulders of Bolognese and Lombard scholars, and some of their most conspicuous successors to the present day have lived under heavy obligations to Modena and San Marino. During the tranquil century before the Revolution, Italians studied the history of their country with diligence and success. Even such places as Parma, Verona, Brescia, became centres of obscure but faithful work. Osimo possessed annals as bulky as Rome. The story of the province of Treviso was told in twenty volumes. The antiquities of Picenum filled thirty-two folios. The best of all this national and munic.i.p.al patriotism was given to the service of religion. Popes and cardinals, dioceses and parish churches became the theme of untiring enthusiasts. There too were the stupendous records of the religious orders, their bulls and charters, their biography and their bibliography. In this immense world of patient, accurate, devoted research, Dollinger laid the deep foundations of his historical knowledge. Beginning like everybody with Baronius and Muratori, he gave a large portion of his life to Noris, and to the solid and enlightened scholarship that surrounded Benedict XIV., down to the compilers, Borgia, Fantuzzi, Marini, with whom, in the evil days of regeneration by the French, the grand tradition died away. He has put on record his judgment that Orsi and Saccarelli were the best writers on the general history of the Church. Afterwards, when other layers had been superposed, and the course he took was his own, he relied much on the canonists, Ballerini and Berardi; and he commended Bianchi, De Bennettis, and the author of the anonymous _Confutazione_, as the strongest Roman antidote to Blondel, Buckeridge, and Barrow. Italy possessed the largest extant body of Catholic learning; the whole sphere of Church government was within its range, and it enjoyed something of the official prerogative.

Next to the Italians he gave systematic attention to the French. The conspicuous Gallicans, the Jansenists, from whom at last he derived much support, Richer, Van Espen, Launoy, whom he regarded as the original of Bossuet, Arnauld, whom he thought his superior, are absent from his pages. He never overcame his distrust of Pascal, for his methodical scepticism and his endeavour to dissociate religion from learning; and he rated high Daniel's reply to the _Provinciales_. He esteemed still more the French Protestants of the seventeenth century, who transformed the system of Geneva and Dort. English theology did not come much in his way until he had made himself at home with the Italians and the primary French. Then it abounded. He gathered it in quant.i.ties on two journeys in 1851 and 1858, and he possessed the English divines in perfection, at least down to Whitby, and the nonjurors. Early acquaintance with Sir Edward Vavasour and Lord Clifford had planted a lasting prejudice in favour of the English Catholic families, which sometimes tinged his judgments. The neglected literature of the Catholics in England held a place in his scheme of thought, which it never obtained in the eyes of any other scholar, native or foreign. This was the only considerable school of divines who wrote under persecution, and were reduced to an att.i.tude of defence. In conflict with the most learned, intelligent, and conciliatory of controversialists, they developed a remarkable spirit of moderation, discriminating inferior elements from the original and genuine growth of Catholic roots; and their several declarations and manifestoes, from the Restoration onwards, were an inexhaustible supply for irenics. Therefore they powerfully attracted one who took the words of St Vincent of Lerins not merely for a flash of illumination, but for a scientific formula and guiding principle. Few writers interested him more deeply than Stapleton, Davenport, who antic.i.p.ated Number XC., Irishmen, such as Caron and Walshe, and the Scots, Barclay, the adversary and friend of Bellarmine, Ramsay, the convert and recorder of Fenelon. It may be that, to an intellect trained in the historic process, stability, continuity, and growth were terms of more vivid and exact significance than to the doctors of Pont-a-Mousson and Lambspring.

But when he came forward arrayed in the spoils of Italian libraries and German universities, with the erudition of centuries and the criticism of to-day, he sometimes was content to follow where forgotten Benedictines or Franciscans had preceded, under the later Stuarts.

He seldom quotes contemporary Germans, unless to dispute with them, prefers old books to new, and speaks of the necessary revision and renovation of history. He suspected imported views and foregone conclusions even in Neander; and although he could not say, with Macaulay, that Gieseler was a rascal, of whom he had never heard, he missed no opportunity of showing his dislike for that accomplished artificer in mosaic. Looking at the literature before him, at England, with Gibbon for its one ecclesiastical historian; at Germany, with the most profound of its divines expecting the Church to merge in the State, he inferred that its historic and organic unity would only be recognised by Catholic science, while the soundest Protestant would understand it least. In later years, Kliefoth, Ritschl, Ga.s.s, perhaps also Dorner and Uhlhorn, obliged him to modify an opinion which the entire school of Schleiermacher, including the ill.u.s.trious Rothe, served only to confirm.

Germany, as he found it when he began to see the world, little resembled that of his old age, when the work he had pursued for seventy years was carried forward, with knowledge and power like his own, by the best of his countrymen. The proportion of things was changed. There was a religious literature to be proud of, to rely on: other nations, other epochs, had lost their superiority. As his own people advanced, and dominated in the branches of learning to which his life was given, in everything except literary history and epigraphies, and there was no more need to look abroad, Dollinger's cosmopolitan characteristic diminished, he was more absorbed in the national thought and work, and did not object to be called the most German of the Germans.

The idea that religious science is not so much science as religion, that it should be treated differently from other matters, so that he who treats it may rightly display his soul, flourished in his vicinity, inspiring the lives of Saint Elizabeth and Joan of Arc, Mohler's fine lectures on the early fathers, and the book which Gratry chose to ent.i.tle a _Commentary on St. Matthew_. Dollinger came early to the belief that history ought to be impersonal, that the historian does well to keep out of the way, to be humble and self-denying, making it a religious duty to prevent the intrusion of all that betrays his own position and quality, his hopes and wishes. Without aspiring to the calm indifference of Ranke, he was conscious that, in early life, he had been too positive, and too eager to persuade. The Belgian scholar who, conversing with him in 1842, was reminded of Fenelon, missed the acuter angles of his character. He, who in private intercourse sometimes allowed himself to persist, to contradict, and even to baffle a bore by frankly falling asleep, would have declined the evocation of Versailles.

But in reasonableness, moderation, and charity, in general culture of mind and the sense of the demands of the progress of civilisation, in the ideal church for which he lived, he was more in harmony with Fenelon than with many others who resembled him in the character of their work.

He deemed it catholic to take ideas from history, and heresy to take them into it. When men gave evidence for the opposite party, and against their own, he willingly took for impartiality what he could not always distinguish from indifference or subdivision. He felt that sincere history was the royal road to religious union, and he specially cultivated those who saw both sides. He would cite with complacency what clever Jesuits, Raynaud and Faure, said for the Reformation, Mariana and Cordara against their society. When a Rhenish Catholic and a Genevese Calvinist drew two portraits of Calvin which were virtually the same, or when, in Ficker's revision of Bohmer, the Catholic defended the Emperor Frederic II. against the Protestant, he rejoiced as over a sign of the advent of science. As the Middle Ages, rescued from polemics by the genial and uncritical sympathy of Muller, became an object of popular study, and Royer Collard said of Villemain, _Il a fait, il fait, et il fera toujours son Gregoire VII._, there were Catholics who desired, by a prolonged _sorites_, to derive advantage from the new spirit. Wiseman consulted Dollinger for the purpose. "Will you be kind enough to write me a list of what you consider the best books for the history of the Reformation; Menzel and Buchholz I know; especially any exposing the characters of the leading reformers?" In the same frame of mind he asked him what pope there was whose good name had not been vindicated; and Dollinger's reply, that Boniface VIII. wanted a friend, prompted both Wiseman's article and Tosti's book.

In politics, as in religion, he made the past a law for the present, and resisted doctrines which are ready-made, and are not derived from experience. Consequently, he undervalued work which would never have been done from disinterested motives; and there were three of his most eminent contemporaries whom he decidedly underestimated. Having known Thiers, and heard him speak, he felt profoundly the talent of the extraordinary man, before Lanfrey or Taine, Hausser and Bernhardt had so ruined his credit among Germans that Dollinger, disgusted by his advocacy, whether of the Revolution, of Napoleon, or of France, neglected his work. Stahl claims to be accounted an historian by his incomparably able book on the Church government of the Reformation. As a professor at Munich, and afterwards as a parliamentary leader at Berlin, he was always an avowed partisan. Dollinger depreciated him accordingly, and he had the mortification that certain remarks on the sovereign dialectician of European conservatism were on the point of appearing when he died. He so far made it good in his preface that the thing was forgotten when Gerlach came to see the a.s.sailant of his friend. But once, when I spoke of Stahl as the greatest man born of a Jewish mother since t.i.tus, he thought me unjust to Disraeli.

Most of all, he misjudged Macaulay, whose German admirers are not always in the higher ranks of literature, and of whom Ranke even said that he could hardly be called an historian at all, tried by the stricter test.

He had no doubt seen how his unsuggestive fixity and a.s.surance could cramp and close a mind; and he felt more beholden to the rivals who produced d'Adda, Barillon, and Bonnet, than to the author of so many pictures and so much bootless decoration. He tendered a course of Bacon's Essays, or of Butler's and Newman's Sermons, as a preservative against intemperate dogmatism. He denounced Macaulay's indifference to the merits of the inferior cause, and desired more generous treatment of the Jacobites and the French king. He deemed it hard that a science happily delivered from the toils of religious pa.s.sion should be involved in political, and made to pa.s.s from the sacristy to the lobby, by the most brilliant example in literature. To the objection that one who celebrates the victory of parliaments over monarchs, of democracy over aristocracy, of liberty over authority, declares, not the tenets of a party, but manifest destiny and the irrevocable decree, he would reply that a narrow induction is the bane of philosophy, that the ways of Providence are not inscribed on the surface of things, that religion, socialism, militarism, and revolution possibly reserve a store of cogent surprises for the economist, utilitarian, and whig.

In 1865 he was invited to prepare a new edition of his Church history.

Whilst he was mustering the close ranks of folios which had satisfied a century of historians, the world had moved, and there was an increase of raw material to be measured by thousands of volumes. The archives which had been sealed with seven seals had become as necessary to the serious student as his library. Every part of his studies had suffered transformation, except the fathers, who had largely escaped the crucible, and the canon law, which had only just been caught by the historical current. He had begun when Niebuhr was lecturing at Bonn and Hegel at Berlin; before Tischendorf unfolded his first ma.n.u.script; before Baur discovered the Tubingen hypothesis in the congregation of Corinth; before Rothe had planned his treatise on the primitive church, or Ranke had begun to pluck the plums for his modern popes. Guizot had not founded the _ecole des Chartes_, and the school of method was not yet opened at Berlin. The application of instruments of precision was just beginning, and what Prynne calls the heroic study of records had scarcely molested the ancient reign of lives and chronicles. None had worked harder at his science and at himself than Dollinger; and the change around him was not greater than the change within. In his early career as a teacher of religion he had often shrunk from books which bore no stamp of orthodoxy. It was long before he read Sarpi or the _Lettres Provinciales_, or even Ranke's _Popes_, which appeared when he was thirty-five, and which astonished him by the serene ease with which a man who knew so much touched on such delicate ground. The book which he had written in that state of mind, and with that conception of science and religion, had only a prehistoric interest for its author. He refused to reprint it, and declared that there was hardly a sentence fit to stand unchanged. He lamented that he had lost ten years of life in getting his bearings, and in learning, unaided, the most difficult craft in the world. Those years of apprenticeship without a master were the time spent on his _Kirchengeschichte_. The want of training remained. He could impart knowledge better than the art of learning. Thousands of his pupils have acquired connected views of religion pa.s.sing through the ages, and gathered, if they were intelligent, some notion of the meaning of history; but n.o.body ever learnt from him the mechanism by which it is written.

Brougham advised the law-student to begin with Dante; and a distinguished physician informs us that Gibbon, Grote, and Mill made him what he is. The men to whom Dollinger owed his historic insight and who mainly helped to develop and strengthen and direct his special faculty, were not all of his own cast, or remarkable in the common description of literary talent. The a.s.sistants were countless, but the masters were few, and he looked up with extraordinary grat.i.tude to men like Sigonius, Antonius Augustinus, Blondel, Petavius, Leibniz, Burke, and Niebuhr, who had opened the pa.s.ses for him as he struggled and groped in the illimitable forest.

He interrupted his work because he found the materials too scanty for the later Middle Ages, and too copious for the Reformation. The defective account of the Albigensian theology, which he had sent to one of his translators, never appeared in German. At Paris he searched the library for the missing information, and he asked Resseguier to make inquiry for the records of the Inquisition in Languedoc, thus laying the foundations of that _Sektengeschichte_ which he published fifty years later. Munich offered such inexhaustible supplies for the Reformation that his collections overran all bounds. He completed only that part of his plan which included Lutheranism and the sixteenth century. The third volume, published in 1848, containing the theology of the Reformation, is the most solid of his writings. He had miscalculated, not his resources, of which only a part had come into action, but the possibilities of concentration and compression. The book was left a fragment when he had to abandon his study for the Frankfort barricades.

The peculiarity of his treatment is that he contracts the Reformation into a history of the doctrine of justification. He found that this and this alone was the essential point in Luther's mind, that he made it the basis of his argument, the motive of his separation, the root and principle of his religion. He believed that Luther was right in the cardinal importance he attributed to this doctrine in his system, and he in his turn recognised that it was the cause of all that followed, the source of the reformer's popularity and success, the sole insurmountable obstacle to every scheme of restoration. It was also, for him, the centre and the basis of his antagonism. That was the point that he attacked when he combated Protestantism, and he held all other elements of conflict cheap in comparison, deeming that they are not invariable, or not incurable, or not supremely serious. Apart from this, there was much in Protestantism that he admired, much in its effects for which he was grateful. With the Lutheran view of imputation, Protestant and Catholic were separated by an abyss. Without it, there was no lasting reason why they should be separate at all. Against the communities that hold it he stood in order of battle, and believed that he could scarcely hit too hard. But he distinguished very broadly the religion of the reformers from the religion of Protestants. Theological science had moved away from the symbolical books, the root dogma had been repudiated and contested by the most eminent Protestants, and it was an English bishop who wrote: "Fuit haec doctrina jam a multis annis ipsissimum Reformatae Ecclesiae opprobrium ac dedecus.--Est error non levis, error putidissimus." Since so many of the best writers resist or modify that which was the main cause, the sole ultimate cause, of disunion, it cannot be logically impossible to discover a reasonable basis for discussion. Therefore conciliation was always in his thoughts; even his _Reformation_ was a treatise on the conditions of reunion. He long purposed to continue it, in narrower limits, as a history of that central doctrine by which Luther meant his church to stand or fall, of the reaction against it, and of its decline. In 1881, when Ritschl, the author of the chief work upon the subject, spent some days with Dollinger, he found him still full of these ideas, and possessing Luther at his fingers' ends.

This is the reason why Protestants have found him so earnest an opponent and so warm a friend. It was this that attracted him towards Anglicans, and made very many of them admire a Roman dignitary who knew the Anglo-Catholic library better than De Lugo or Ripalda. In the same spirit he said to Pusey: "Tales c.u.m sitis jam nostri estis," always spoke of Newman's _Justification_ as the greatest masterpiece of theology that England has produced in a hundred years, and described Baxter and Wesley as the most eminent of English Protestants--meaning Wesley as he was after 1st December 1767, and Baxter as the life-long opponent of that theory which was the source and the soul of the Reformation. Several Englishmen who went to consult him--Hope Scott and Archdeacon Wilberforce--became Catholics. I know not whether he urged them. Others there were, whom he did not urge, though his influence over them might have been decisive. In a later letter to Pusey he wrote: "I am convinced by reading your _Eirenicon_ that we are united inwardly in our religious convictions, although externally we belong to two separated churches." He followed attentively the parallel movements that went on in his own country, and welcomed with serious respect the overtures which came to him, after 1856, from eminent historians. When they were old men, he and Ranke, whom, in hot youth, there was much to part, lived on terms of mutual goodwill. Dollinger had p.r.o.nounced the theology of the _Deutsche Reformation_ slack and trivial, and Ranke at one moment was offended by what he took for an attack on the popes, his patrimony. In 1865, after a visit to Munich, he allowed that in religion there was no dispute between them, that he had no fault to find with the Church as Dollinger understood it. He added that one of his colleagues, a divine whose learning filled him with unwonted awe, held the same opinion. Dollinger's growing belief that an approximation of part of Germany to sentiments of conciliation was only a question of time, had much to do with his att.i.tude in Church questions after the year 1860. If history cannot confer faith or virtue, it can clear away the misconceptions and misunderstandings that turn men against one another.

With the progress of incessant study and meditation his judgment on many points underwent revision; but with regard to the Reformation the change was less than he supposed. He learnt to think more favourably of the religious influence of Protestantism, and of its efficacy in the defence of Christianity; but he thought as before of the spiritual consequences of Lutheranism proper. When people said of Luther that he does not come well out of his matrimonial advice to certain potentates, to Henry and to Philip, of his exhortations to exterminate the revolted peasantry, of his pa.s.sage from a confessor of toleration to a teacher of intolerance, he would not have the most powerful conductor of religion that Christianity has produced in eighteen centuries condemned for two pages in a hundred volumes. But when he had refused the test of the weakest link, judging the man by his totals, he was not less severe on his theological ethics.

Meinerseits habe ich noch eine andre schwere Anklage gegen ihn zu erheben, namlich die, da.s.s er durch seine falsche Imputationslehre das sittlich-religiose Bewusstseyn der Menschen auf zwei Jahrhunderte hinaus verwirrt und corrumpirt hat (3rd July 1888).

The revolution of 1848, during which he did not hold his professorship, brought him forward uncongenially in active public life, and gave him the means of telling the world his view of the const.i.tution and policy of the Church, and the sense and limits of liability in which he gave his advocacy. When lecturing on canon law he was accustomed to dwell on the strict limit of all ecclesiastical authority, admitting none but spiritual powers, and invoking the maxims of pontiffs who professed themselves guardians, not masters, of the established legislation--"Canones ecclesiae solvere non possumus, qui custodes canonum sumus." Acting on these principles, in the Paulskirche, and at Ratisbon, he vindicated Rome against the reproach of oppression, argued that society can only gain by the emanc.i.p.ation of the Church, as it claims no superiority over the State, and that both Gallicans and Jesuits are out of date. Addressing the bishops of Germany in secret session at Wurzburg, he exhorted them to avail themselves fully of an order of things which was better than the old, and to make no professions of unconditional allegiance. He told them that freedom is the breath of the Catholic life, that it belongs to the Church of G.o.d by right divine, and that whatever they claimed must be claimed for others.

From these discourses, in which the scholar abandoned the details by which science advances for the general principles of the popular orator, the deductions of liberalism proceed as surely as the revolution from the t.i.tle-page of Sieyes. It should seem that the key to his career lies there. It was natural to a.s.sociate him with the men whom the early promise of a reforming pope inspired to identify the cause of free societies with the papacy which had Rosmini for an adviser, Ventura for a preacher, Gioberti for a prophet, and to conclude that he thus became a trusted representative, until the revolving years found him the champion of a vanished cause, and the Syllabus exposed the illusion and bore away his ideal. Harless once said of him that no good could be expected from a man surrounded by a ring of liberals. When Dollinger made persecution answer both for the decline of Spain and the fall of Poland, he appeared to deliver the common creed of Whigs; and he did not protest against the American who called him the acknowledged head of the liberal Catholics. His hopefulness in the midst of the movement of 1848, his ready acquiescence in the fall of ancient powers and inst.i.tutions, his trust in Rome, and in the abstract rights of Germans, suggested a reminiscence of the _Avenir_ in 1830.

Lamennais, returning with Montalembert after his appeal to Rome, met Lacordaire at Munich, and during a banquet given in their honour he learnt, privately, that he was condemned. The three friends spent that afternoon in Dollinger's company; and it was after he had left them that Lamennais produced the encyclical and said: _Dieu a parle_. Montalembert soon returned, attracted as much by Munich art as by religion or literature. The fame of the Bavarian school of Catholic thought spread in France among those who belonged to the wider circles of the _Avenir_; and priests and laymen followed, as to a scientific shrine. In the _Memoires d'un Royaliste_ Falloux has preserved, with local colour, the spirit of that pilgrimage:

Munich lui fut indique comme le foyer d'une grande renovation religieuse et artistique. Quels n.o.bles et ardents entretiens, quelle pa.s.sion pour l'Eglise et pour sa cause! Rien n'a plus ressemble aux discours d'un portique chretien que les apologies enflammees du vieux Gorres, les savantes deductions de Dollinger, la verve originale de Brentano.

Rio, who was the earliest of the travellers, describes Dollinger as he found him in 1830:

Par un privilege dont il serait difficile de citer un autre exemple, il avait la pa.s.sion des etudes theologiques comme s'il n'avait ete que pretre, et la pa.s.sion des etudes litteraires appliquees aux auteurs anciens et modernes comme s'il n'avait ete que litterateur; a quoi il faut ajouter un autre don qu'il y aurait ingrat.i.tude a oublier, celui d'une exposition lucide, patiente et presque affectueuse, comme s'il n'avait acc.u.mule tant de connaissances que pour avoir le plaisir de les communiquer.

For forty years he remained in correspondence with many of these early friends, who, in the educational struggle which ended with the ministry of Falloux in 1850, revived the leading maxims of the rejected master.

As Lacordaire said, on his deathbed: "La parole de l'Avenir avait germe de son tombeau comme une cendre feconde." Dollinger used to visit his former visitors in various parts of France, and at Paris he attended the salon of Madame Swetchine. One day, at the seminary, he inquired who were the most promising students; Dupanloup pointed out a youth, who was the hope of the Church, and whose name was Ernest Renan.

Although the men who were drawn to him in this way formed the largest and best-defined cl.u.s.ter with which he came in contact, there was more private friendship than mutual action or consultation between them. The unimpa.s.sioned German, who had no taste for ideas released from controlling fact, took little pleasure in the impetuous declamation of the Breton, and afterwards p.r.o.nounced him inferior to Loyson. Neither of the men who were in the confidence of both has intimated that he made any lasting impression on Lamennais, who took leave of him without discussing the action of Rome. Dollinger never sought to renew acquaintance with Lacordaire, when he had become the most important man in the church of France. He would have a prejudice to overcome against him whom Circourt called the most ignorant man in the Academy, who believed that Erasmus ended his days at Rotterdam, unable to choose between Rome and Wittemberg, and that the Irish obtained through O'Connell the right to worship in their own way. He saw more of Dupanloup, without feeling, as deeply as Renan, the rare charm of the combative prelate. To an exacting and reflective scholar, to whom even the large volume of heavy erudition in which Rosmini defended the _Cinque Piaghe_ seemed superficial, there was incongruity in the attention paid to one of whom he heard that he promoted the council, that he took St. Boniface for St Wilfrid, and that he gave the memorable advice: _Surtout mefiez-vous des sources_. After a visit from the Bishop of Orleans he sat down in dismay to compose the most elementary of his books. Seeing the inferiority of Falloux as a historian, he never appreciated the strong will and cool brain of the statesman who overawed Tocqueville. Eckstein, the obscure but thoughtful originator of much liberal feeling among his own set, encouraged him in the habit of depreciating the attainments of the French clergy, which was confirmed by the writings of the most eminent among them, Darboy, and lasted until the appearance of d.u.c.h.esne. The politics of Montalembert were so heavily charged with conservatism, that in defiance of such advisers as Lacordaire, Ravignan, and Dupanloup, he p.r.o.nounced in favour of the author of the _coup d'etat_, saying: "Je suis pour l'autorite contre la revolte"; and boasted that, in entering the Academy he had attacked the Revolution, not of '93 but '89, and that Guizot, who received him, had nothing to say in reply. There were many things, human and divine, on which they could not feel alike; but as the most urgent, eloquent, and persevering of his Catholic friends, gifted with knowledge and experience of affairs, and dwelling in the focus, it may be that on one critical occasion, when religion and politics intermingled, he influenced the working of Dollinger's mind. But the plausible reading of his life which explains it by his connection with such public men as Montalembert, De Decker, and Mr. Gladstone is profoundly untrue; and those who deem him a liberal in any scientific use of the term, miss the keynote of his work.

The political party question has to be considered here, because, in 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 r.e.t.a.r.ded the growth of liberty, which he identifies with the cause of morality, and the condition of the reign of conscience. Dollinger never subjected his mighty vision of the stream of time to correction according to the principles of this unsympathising philosophy, never reconst.i.tuted 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, religiosen, 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.