Ignatius Von Böllinger

IT would be impossible to sum up Döllinger’s character as a man and a scholar more concisely and more completely than in the words of his own device : “Nil temere, nil timide, sed omnia virtute atque consilio 舡 (Nothing recklessly, nothing timidly, but all things with courage and circumspection). It was by strict adherence to the principle here so comprehensively expressed that he matured so well intellectually, and, contrary to the general law of evolution in things theological, grew broader and more liberal with age, and at ninety could put himself in the place of a person holding opinions radically different from his own much more readily and sympathetically than he would have been able to do at thirty. Instead of becoming crabbed and gnarly with years, his spirit was like a choice fruit which mellows and sweetens as it ripens.

Döllinger’s life covered a period of full three generations, and his memory went back to the contemporaries of the greatgrandfathers of those who are now entering upon early manhood. He saw Napoleon I. review his troops at Bamberg, and had a distinct recollection of him as an undersized and somewhat pursy man, with features clean-cut and cold as marble, and an amber drop of liquid snuff depending from the tip of his nose.

Corresponding to the three generations comprised in his long career are the three periods of his intellectual growth and development. His external life can be summed up in a few lines. He was born at Bamberg on February 28, 1799, and, after pursuing his theological studies in Würzburg and in his native city, was ordained priest in 1822. He then officiated for a short time as curate at the market town of Scheinfeld, in the diocese of Bamberg. In 1826 he was appointed professor of church history and canon law in the university, which had just been transferred from Landshut to Munich, and held this position, with a short interruption occasioned by the Lola Montez. episode, till his death on the evening of January 10, 1890.

Döllinger, like Jonathan Edwards, was a marvel of intellectual precocity. He began to study Latin at five years of age, and Greek at seven. His father was his first teacher, but although a distinguished professor, he does not seem to have been a patient pedagogue. As the boy’s exercises contained a greater number of grammatical errors than was deemed admissible, he was told that if his next lesson were not wholly free from mistakes he should be bound out as an apprentice and learn a trade. The child took the threat very seriously, and lay awake all night thinking what mechanical occupation he would prefer, and finally decided to become a bookbinder. The blunt alternative served its purpose and made him henceforth more heedful of his accidence. His next performance proved perfectly satisfactory, and he was glad to escape the necessity of devoting the rest of his days to the mere outside of books.

Döllinger was led to choose the clerical profession, not from any strongly religious feeling, but solely from his love of learning, which was innate, intense, and insatiable. His quiet scholarly tastes and his powers of sedentary endurance rendered him far better fitted for the cultivation of science than for the cure of souls. His father’s example and the influence of early associations would naturally have turned his attention to medicine and physiology or to some branch of physics, and in his youth he showed a peculiar talent for entomological researches ; but although his faculty for acute and exact observation was remarkable, his fondness for erudition as embodied in written records was still stronger and determined his career. As a hoy he looked forward eagerly to the coming vacation, not because it would relieve him from the irksomeness of school, hut because it would enable him to visit an uncle who had a fine collection of books, in which he reveled as other boys are wont to do in the pleasures of playday and the freedom of field and forest. Whatever literary flavor or bookish proclivity may come to a man from having “ tumbled about in a library ” as a child he surely did not fail to get. " All men,” says Holmes, “ are afraid of books that have not handled them from infancy.” It is a familiarity, however, which, instead of breeding contempt, produces in them affection and reverence for the printed page. Ancestral influences and the atmosphere of his home tended in the same direction. His is grandfather was professor of medicine and physician in ordinary to the Prince-bishop of Bamberg, and his father one of the most eminent anatomists and physiologists of his day. Agassiz, who studied embryology under the guidance of the latter at Munich, says that from him he “learned to value accuracy of observation.” “ Döllinger,舡 he adds, “ was a careful, minute, persevering observer, as well as a deep thinker; but he was as indolent with his pen as he was industrious with his brain. He gave his intellectual capital to his pupils without stint or reserve, and nothing delighted him more than to sit down for a quiet talk on scientific matters with a few students, or to take a ramble with them into the fields outside the city, and to explain to them, as he walked, the result of any recent investigation he had made. If he found himself understood by his listeners he was satisfied, and cared for no further publication of his researches. I could enumerate many works of masters in our science which had no other foundation than these inspiriting conversations.”

What is here said of the father was eminently true of the son. He was, as his academical colleague Professor Riehl happily characterized him, “ a receptive genius in the highest sense of the phrase.” His power of work kept pace with his zeal, and both were immense. His faculty of absorbing and assimilating knowledge was quite phenomenal, and his tenacious memory never let a fact or principle slip from its grasp. This rare endowment was invulnerable to old age ; even fourscore years did not diminish it, nor touch it with any traces of decay. A young professor, who had come across a small and rather rare book of the seventeenth century, mentioned his discovery to Döllinger. “Yes,” he replied, “ that is an interesting little treatise; I read it some thirty years ago.” He then proceeded to give an analysis of its contents as full as though he had just perused it. He had an extraordinary talent for languages: he was a good Hebrew scholar, an accomplished Latinist and Grecian, and perfectly at home in English, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, speaking and writing them with ease and accuracy. From all these sources he gathered, with untiring industry and during a long life, treasures of erudition in the provinces of theology, ecclesiastical and general history, and philosophy such as none of his contemporaries possessed. In these departments of research his library is probably the most complete private collection of books in Europe. His economical habits of life enabled him to devote considerable sums to this purpose, and in his visits to France and Italy he always managed to pick up at a moderate price some rare volume of great value in obscure second-hand bookstalls, or among the apparently hopeless rubbish of the itinerant antiquaries of the Pont-Neuf or the Portico degli Uffizzi.

At the same time, notwithstanding the extent of his strictly professional studies, he seems to have found ample leisure for general literature, and not only kept abreast, with the numerous productions in belles-lettres of his own countrymen, but was well versed in the literatures of England and France and the nations of southern Europe. He was a thorough student of Dante and a recognized authority as an interpreter of the magno poeta, with whom he had some marked intellectual traits in common, and to whose features his own bore a most striking resemblance, noted by many, as he lay in the calm composure of his shroud. He had also a fair knowledge of jurisprudence, and was familiar with the results of the most recent scientific researches, in which he took a lively interest.

Although his published writings would fill a goodly number of volumes, like his father he was relatively 舠 indolent with his pen.” In conversation with appreciative pupils and other congenial persons, he poured forth the treasures of his vast learning with generous profusion, and thus communicated to younger scholars more material for books than he himself ever printed or wrote. For this reason nearly all his works have more or less of what might be called an “ occasional ” character ; in other words, they are the products of unexpected events and exigencies of the moment. Such, for example, during the past twenty years, have been his critical and controversial treatises directed against ultramontanism, and his brilliant addresses delivered at stated periods, by virtue of his office as president of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. Yet there are no signs of hasty composition or rash conclusions in any of these performances. In no instance did he ever place the fruits of his investigations before the public until they were fully matured in his own mind, and all available sources of information upon the subject had been exhausted. Thus his Beiträge zur Sektengeschichte des Mittelalters was the result of researches and reflections extending over a period of fifty years, and his last academical discourse in vindication of the order of the Templars, delivered November 15, 1889, had been the subject of thought and study since 1840.

Döllinger’s simple habits of life not only enabled him to devote a large portion of his comparatively limited means to the purchase of books, as has been already stated, but also gave him what was of still greater moment, increased length of days, and strength of body and mind for the profitable use of them. His sole passion was for scholarly pursuits, which his moderation in matters pertaining to food and drink permitted him to indulge with impunity. He was firmly convinced that the majority of men die suicides, digging their graves with their teeth; or, as he was wont to express it, “ L’homme ne meurt pas, il se tue.” He had no reminiscences of physical excesses on his conscience or on his nerves; and his meals were as frugal as those of an anchorite. His breakfast consisted of a cup of coffee and a small roll. At noon he took a plate of soup, a piece of meat with some vegetable, and a light dessert followed by coffee, of which he was extremely fond, although at supper he usually contented himself with a glass of water. In dining out he would drink a single glass of champagne, and during the last few years of his life took a little red wine mingled with water at his own table, in accordance with the advice of his physician. On hearing of the death of one of his acquaintances, he remarked to a friend : ” I never thought that he would live to be old, since I paid him a visit one morning and found a glass of wine on the table before him. People who drink wine in the forenoon never live long. 舠 As the man died at seventyfive, the observation indicates Döllinger’s conception of what constitutes old age, as well as his views concerning the fatal effect of morning draughts upon the human constitution. Beer he positively abhorred, and was one of the very few Bavarians who never let a drop of it pass their lips, believing that it made men stupid and brutal. That so many monks and priests in Bavaria are unfaithful to their vows of chastity, he was inclined to attribute to the demoralizing and sensualizing influence of the nutbrown beverage. He went to bed at nine and rose at four, in winter at five, and thus got from seven to eight hours’ sound sleep. Young’s hackneyed verse,

was a favorite quotation with him as with Bismarck, commending itself to them, perhaps, less as a poetic sentiment than as a hygienic truth, which each had learned to appreciate in his own experience. This enviable gift of sleep, more precious than any preparations of chloral, was always at his command, even by day, and rendered him capable of dropping off into a refreshing nap at any time, in a meeting of his academical or professorial colleagues, when the discussions failed to interest him, or on account of his increasing hardness of hearing were only partially intelligible to him. It was this beneficent faculty that helped him not a little to hoard his strength, so that as a nonagenarian he showed no perceptible diminution of capacity for literary labor at his writing-desk, or abatement of vigor and endurance as a public speaker. As a remedy for occasional insomnia, in the last half dozen years of his life, he learned the first three books of the Odyssey so that he could repeat them.

His favorite recreation, which he seldom failed to take, was a long daily walk, a form of exercise that became as necessary to him as riding on horseback was to Lord Jeffrey and George Bancroft. In the summer he made excursions in the Bavarian highlands with some congenial companion, and the burden of fourscore years and ten did not interfere with this pleasure, nor with that of bathing in Lake Tegern, where he was wont to pass several weeks of each season. In these wanderings he usually carried his hat in his hand, a practice which may account for the fact that his head never grew hoary, but remained to the last covered with a thick mass of brown hair. Another Munich professor, Dr. Sepp, has the same habit, and although now seventy-five years of age has a head as shaggy as a lion’s mane, but somewhat gray. These instances would seem to show that hats are promoters of baldness, and that a free circulation of fresh air is the most effective hair-preserver. Perhaps, too, it tends to make a man cool-headed. In the summer of 1874, as Döllinger was walking in this way with Gladstone through the Munich park known as the English Garden, a tall and.dignified prelate met them and passed by, lifting his hat high above his head and looking straight forward into space. 舠 Who is that right reverend ecclesiastic ? ” inquired Gladstone. “ That is the Archbishop of Munich, by whom I was excommunicated,” replied Döllinger, without the slightest trace ot bitterness, and then continued the conversation, unruffled by this sudden encounter with the man who but recently had called down curses upon him with such superfluity of bluntness and brutality.

Reference has already been made to the three periods of Döllinger’s development, marking the radical change which he gradually underwent in his attitude towards the Roman hierarchy. It must be remembered, however, that this transformation involved no renunciation of principle or essential lack of self-consistency. There was never any change in his ideal of the Catholic church, or in his conception of what, historically considered, it ought to be, but simply a clarifying and rectifying of his perception of what it actually is. His development was therefore a slow and painful process of disillusion.

On the 31st of October, 1817, the Protestants of Germany celebrated the three hundredth anniversary of Luther’s bold and decisive step in nailing on the door of the Wittenberg Schlosskirche his ninety-five theses against indulgences. The great enthusiasm excited by this event, and the fear lest the contagion might extend to the fold of the faithful, caused the Catholics to reprint, as a counteractive, Luther’s rather coarse polemical treatise Against the Papacy at Rome founded by the Devil, and to disseminate it diligently among the students of their theological seminaries. Döllinger, although for a young man of eighteen already well up in patristic theology, and familiar with the voluminous writings of Baronins and Petavins and other lights of the church, had not yet paid much attention to the literature of the Reformation, and now for the first time read this anti-papistic pasquinade and was exceedingly indignant at it; conceiving thereby a prejudice against its author which it took many years to overcome, and which finds an echo in his Luther, eine Skizze, published in 1851. It was precisely this effect which the promoters of the reprint wished to produce. This feeling was strengthened by the perusal of J. A. Möhler’s work, entitled Die Einheit der Kirche oder das Princip des Katholicismus, dargestellt im Geiste der Kircheuväter der drei ersten Jahrhunderte, which appeared at Tübingen in 1825, Here he found a delineation of the church as developed by the apostolic fathers and their immediate successors which corresponded to his own pure ideal of such an institution, and was the very reverse of the diabolical organization described by Luther in the pamphlet that now seemed to him more than ever a wanton caricature and wicked calumny.

He knew well enough that the Roman hierarchy had not always realized this ideal of “ a fresh and living Christianity,” which lay buried under the ecclesiastical rubbish and rank sacerdotal overgrowth of centuries ; but he flattered himself with the notion that Catholicism in its dogmatic and historical evolution had, through all abuses and aberrations, remained essentially true to it, and that it was the mission of theological science to free it from all incrustations and defects, and restore it to its primitive purity. That the Holy See was sound at the core, and that the head of the church and its councils would welcome the aid and accept the results of the best Catholic scholarship in effecting this revival and reformation, he did not doubt. This illusion he labored under, with occasional misgivings, growing constantly more earnest and more frequent, until about the year 1850.

In 1826 Döllinger published a volume entitled Die Lehre von der Eucharistie in den drei ersten Jahrhunderten, which served also as a dissertation for taking the degree of doctor, conferred upon him by the theological faculty of the university of Landshut. It was directed against the views concerning the eucharist set forth in 1811 by P. K. Marheineke, professor of theology in Heidelberg, and afterwards Schleiermacher’s pastoral colleague in Trinity Church, Berlin. Marheineke had maintained that during the first three centuries the reformed doctrine of the merely symbolical presence of Christ in the sacrament prevailed in the church, but that in the five following centuries it had given place to the Lutheran doctrine of the actual and substantial presence of the body of Christ with the bread and wine (consubstantiation), and in the ninth century to the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, or the conversion of the consecrated elements into the real body and blood of Christ. Döllinger held that the Catholic doctrine had been taught from the beginning, and laid down the following general proposition or axiom, on which his whole argument is based : 舠 It is well known to be the primal and most sacred principle of the Catholic church to accept no dogma that is not founded upon the tradition of all centuries.” This application of the motto “ Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus,” which the Romish church has inscribed upon its banner, and on which it rests its claims to catholicity, received the unequivocal commendation of the highest ecclesiastical authorities. Döllinger, who thus announced this fundamental principle in his first published work, always adhered to it, and made it the standard by which he tested and rejected the new-fangled dogmas of the immaculate conception of the Virgin and the ex cathedra infallibility of the Pope.

In Munich Döllinger came into more or less intimate connection with the circle of which Joseph von Görres, publicist and professor, revolutionist and reactionary, romanticist and mystic, was the centre, and which represented the political and religious ideas of Lamennais sicklied over with German sentimentalisms and special enthusiasms. Each member of the coterie had his hobby, which he trotted out on all occasions, and took particular pride in showing off the caprices and eccentricities of his wild and willful garran. But the united purpose, to the promotion of which these individual crotchets were supposed to contribute, was to harmonize mediæval ultramontanism and the arrogant assumptions of the theocracy, as formulated in the xxvii Dictatus of Gregory VII,, and enforced by Boniface VIII. in his notorious bull Unam Sanctum, with modern constitutional liberty and the principles of the French Revolution.

Döllinger sympathized with the general aims and aspirations of these enthusiasts, but did not share their extravagances. The severe historical studies in which he was then engaged exerted a sobering influence upon his mind, and showed him the hopelessness of reconciling such antitheses. He saw that Catholicism could be brought into harmony with modern thought and the modern state only by keeping ultramontanism out of it; and to this end all the efforts of his life were directed, but they were destined to prove futile, and he was later forced to realize what an equally acute and less optimistic observer would have clearly foreseen. Indeed, about all that remained to him from his associations with this group of genial visionaries were his close relations of friendship with Lamennais’s distinguished disciple Montalembert, who began his career as a stout champion of the church, and, after glorifying monasticism in five volumes (Les Moines d’ Occident, Paris, 1860— 67), ended by denouncing the Jesuitic intrigues and revolting against the decrees of the Vatican Council; passing away March 13, 1870, with fiery protests on his lips. It is worthy of note that even at that early date Marie Görres used to prophesy of Döllinger that he would “ die a heretic,” proving how thoroughly she appreciated. his character and position, and with what keenness of discernment she perceived the permanency of the papal reaction which had set in after the return of Pius IX. from Gaeta, with Antonelli and the Jesuits in the ascendant. What Döllinger regarded as an eddy in the current she recognized as its main course. The extraordinary utterances of the Pope concerning his pontifical authority and divine prerogatives might be laughed at as the expressions of egregious personal vanity stimulated by continuous adulation, but it was quite a different matter when shrewd and unscrupulous cardinals turned this foolishness to account and reduced it to a system, seriously proclaiming the doctrine of vox Papœ vox Dei as a dogma of the church, and damning all who reject it.

His next work of importance was a Compendium of Church History (Lehrbuch der Kirchengeschichte, Regensburg, 1836—38), in two volumes, extending to the period of the Reformation. A second edition appeared in 1843; but when the publisher wished to issue a third the author refused, on the ground that, owing to the great change in his historical views, the revision would not leave a line of the former editions without important modifications.

In 1832 Möhler published his Symbolik, in which he contrasted the Catholic and Protestant creeds ; extolling and idealizing the former, and sharply criticising and discrediting the latter. This very clever work excited immense sensation, and called forth a whole literature of controversial writings, the most noted and valuable of which, on the Protestant side, was F. C. Baur’s The Antithesis of Catholicism and Protestantism. It also influenced Ranke’s German History in the Age of the Reformation (6 vols., Berlin, 1839—47), and unquestionably imparted to it a less judicial and more polemical character than it would otherwise have possessed.

Döllinger did not wait for the final volumes of this history to appear before he began to publish his answer to it, entitled The Reformation, its Inner Development and its Workings within the Precincts of the Lutheran Confession (Die Reformation, ihre innere Entwicklung and ihre Wirkungen im Umfange des Lutherischen Bekenntnisses, 3 vols., Regensburg, 1846-48). He had long been convinced that the doctrine of justification by faith, which was the corner-stone of Luther’s theology, and the theory of imputed righteousness, which formed an essential part of it, are logically untenable and extremely immoral in their tendencies, and that the Reformation, therefore, dogmatically considered, rests upon a principle psychologically absurd and ethically pernicious. This he tried to show, and brought together a vast amount of material in proof of the injurious moral, religious, educational, and social effects of the movement inaugurated by the Wittenberg reformer.

The theoretical part of this thesis was comparatively easy of demonstration. Justitia imputativa, whether applied to the sin of Adam or the atonement of Christ, is opposed to man’s natural sense of right and wrong, and can be brought home to his conscience only through the medium of a subtle and perverse metaphysics. The facts adduced were also questionable ; but the argument sometimes lapsed, as is apt to be the case in tracing events to special causes, into the fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc, and attributed to the Reformation evils which, although following it chronologically, had no logical connection with it. This work stirred up bitter animosities and, while establishing the author’s fame as a scholar, procured for him the reputation of a narrow and bigoted apologist of Catholicism and an arch-enemy of Protestantism ; and it was this notoriety that gave point to Heine’s scoffing inquiry : —

But the work so fiercely denounced and decried by Protestants as captious and calumnious was hailed by Döllinger’s coreligionists as an unanswerable defense of their faith and an utter discomfiture of their foes, and several important conversions to Catholicism — among others that of Archdeacon, afterwards Cardinal Manning — were directly attributable to it.

In order to form a correct estimate of it, however, one must remember that it is professedly polemical, and was provoked by excessive laudation of the reformatory movement of the sixteenth century and its influence. The writer’s express purpose was to call attention to some offensive features and harmful effects which he had detected in it, and which its eulogists had either overlooked or ignored, and he therefore necessarily presented the darker side of the subject. It was his original intention to describe in another series of volumes the corrupt condition of the Roman Catholic church which led to the Reformation ; and this project, if it had been carried out, would have relieved him in the eyes of Protestants from the imputation of blind partisanship, and put a damper upon Catholic exultation. But, as he himself stated in explaining why this was not done, “my friends never ceased to entreat me not to make myself impossible by such an undertaking;” and they seem to have convinced him that he would thereby so injure his influence as to prevent him from effecting that purification and spiritual regeneration of the papacy which he might otherwise accomplish and which he had sincerely at heart. Still, he always kept this plan in mind, and many years later, according to Professor Friedrich, when Janssen appeared as the extenuating and embellishing historiographer of the Holy See, Döllinger urged upon a distinguished Protestant ecclesiastical historian the necessity of doing this work, and generously offered to place at his disposal all the valuable material which he himself had collected. He held that there could be no radical cure without a thorough scientific diagnosis, and in an address delivered in Munich on September 28, 1863, he compared German theology to the spear of Achilles, which healed the wound it inflicted.

Döllinger’s aversion to the Jesuits originated in his perception of the evil effects of their whole system of education. As a specimen of the kind of instruction imparted to their pupils, he states that on being called upon to examine one of their students, a candidate for holy orders, he began with the question, “ What is that branch of knowledge which we call theology ? ” and received the remarkable reply, “Theology is that branch of knowledge which has St. Catherine for its patroness.” “ But what is the branch of knowledge,” he asked, “of which St. Catherine is the patroness? ” “St. Catherine is the patroness of theology,” answered the young man, with parrot-like facility and intense self-complacency; and no ingenuity of interrogation could get anything else out of him. This systematic substitution of superstition for science excited Döllinger’s indignation, and made him the uncompromising foe of Jesuitism in the province of education long before he had any presentiment of the disastrous influence exerted by the Society of Jesus upon Catholicism, through its ambitious domination of the papal hierarchy. For this reason he was always opposed to the admission of this religious order to Bavaria, and regarded it as a crime for the government to place any institution of learning under the direction of the disciples of Ignatius Loyola, the demoralizing and stupefying effects of whose teaching he had had occasion to observe not only in the incipient priest aforementioned, but in all the pupils of the Collegium Germanicum at Rome during his visit to that city in 1857.

In the second period of Döllinger’s career, extending from 1850 to 1870, he began to perceive more and more clearly that the Jesuits were masters of the ship of St. Peter, and that, as the result of their manœuvring, it was dragging its sheet anchor of general tradition, and drifting away from its safe moorings in the decrees of œcumenical councils, and in danger of going to wreck on the very reefs which he had hitherto regarded as lying so far out of the proper course of the vessel as to be a source of little or no anxiety. If he had occasionally thrown the lead on that side, he seemed satisfied with the soundings, and put perfect confidence in his plummet.

The tendency of events was sufficiently indicated by Pius IX.’s definition and proclamation of the dogma of the immaculate conception in 1854, 舠on his own authority, without the coöperation of a council; ” by the demonstrative anger of the nuncio excited by Döllinger’s views on the temporal power of the Pope, embodied in his lecture at the Munich Odeon in 1861; by the condemnation of his address On the Past and Present of Catholic Theology, delivered in the same city in 1863; by the notorious syllabus of 1864; and by the canonization of Peter Arbues and the consequent indorsement of the mediæval inquisition in 1867. Döllinger’s silence in the presence of such manifestations of the spirit prevailing in the Vatican is explicable only on the theory that his mind was so fully prepossessed by his own pure and lofty conception of Catholicism that he could not see them in their true light, or regard them as anything more than temporary aberrations and infatuations. He never accepted the doctrine of the immaculate conception, nor did he suffer himself to be seriously disturbed by it. He was convinced that it had no foundation either in Holy Writ or in sacred tradition, and the manner in which it had been decreed and promulgated rendered it formally null and void, and reduced it to the mere utterance of a vain and weak old man, led to say and to do foolish things by adulatory and unscrupulous advisers. In a keen criticism of the syllabus, written in January, 1865, and printed from his posthumous papers in the volume of Kleinere Schriften (Stuttgart, 1890, pp. 196-227), he exposed the hostility of the Romish curia to modern culture in all its forms ; and his opinion of the saintliness of Arbues is expressed in a series of articles on the Roman and Spanish inquisition, originally published in the Allgemeine Zeitung and the Vienna Freie Presse in 1867 and 1868, and now collected in the Kleinere Schriften (pp. 286-404). It was under Döllinger’s influence, if not at his direct instigation, that Kaulbach produced his powerful sketch of Arbues condemning a Jewish family to the stake, which was exhibited at this time in Munich, and came near creating a riot.

Honest historical research he held to be the foe most feared by ultramontanism and most fatal to its arrogant pretensions, and he determined to attack it on this vulnerable side. In accordance with this idea he planned two great works: a general history of the Christian church, embracing all the influences which contributed to its genesis and growth, and a special history of the papacy. Of the first work he issued two parts : Heathenism and Judaism as the Vestibule of Christianity (Heidenthum und Judenthum als Vorhalle des Christenthums, Regensburg, 1857), and Christianity and the Church in the Time of the Foundation (Christenthum und Kirche in der Zeit der Grundlegung, Regensburg, 1860). For the second work he simply cleared the ground of legendary rubbish in his Papal Fables of the Middle Ages (Papstfabeln des Mittelalters, Munich, 1863). In his volume on Hippolytus and Callistus, published in 1853, and called forth by the discovery of the so-called Philosophoumena, of which he proved Hippolytus to be the author, he had already furnished a valuable contribution to the history of the Romish church in the first half of the third century, but there he stopped. His Papal Fables was based upon an exhaustive study of German, Italian, and Spanish archives ; but the farther he pushed his investigations in this direction, the greater difficulty he had in discovering any historical reality corresponding to his ideal of the Church. On the contrary, he found that the main pillars of the imposing mediæval structure which he would fain disencumber and restore had hardly any other foundation to rest upon than the wretched rubbish he was engaged in removing. Under these circumstances it behooved him to proceed with extreme caution, lest the work of radical redintegration should involve the ruin of the whole edifice. Still he continued to the last to collect materials on this subject, much of which he utilized in public addresses, newspaper articles, and other writings. It was because he had such materials at his command that he was able to produce a book like that on Church and Churches (Kirehe und Kirchen, Papstthum und Kirchenstaat, Munich, 1861) in five months, to prepare the remarkable series of papers on Das Concilium und die Civiltà which appeared in the Allgemeine Zeitung from the 10th to the 15th of March, 1869, and to publish in the same year Der Papst und das Concil von Janus, in which one scarcely knows which to admire most, the immense erudition, the earnestness of conviction, or the intellectual vigor it displays.

It was not until 1870 that, as he himself confesses, “ the scales fell from his eyes” and he was completely disillusioned. The events of this third and last period of his life are still fresh in the public mind and need not be dwelt upon in detail. His correspondence on this subject with the Munich archbishop Von Scherr, who excommunicated him, and with others, and his views of the question of papal infallibility, have been recently published (Briefe und Erklärungen von I. von Dellinger fiber die A aticanischen Decrete 1869-1887, Munich, 1890), and are sufficiently familiar to all who are interested in the matter. His final declaration, made on March 28, 1871,— “As a Christian, as a theologian, as an historian, as a citizen, I cannot accept this doctrine,舡 — recalls Luther’s words uttered at the Diet of Worms on April 17,1521: 舠Unless refuted by testimony of Holy Writ, or overcome publicly by clear and distinct reasons, I cannot and will not recant, since it is neither safe nor advisable to do anything against one’s conscience. Here 1 stand. I cannot do otherwise. God help me ! Amen.”

It may be said that the cases are not parallel, since Döllinger’s statement, while calling down upon his head the fulmen brutum of the Vatican, exposed him to no personal danger. There was no dungeon of the inquisition awaiting him, and no pyre prepared to burn him alive before the Virgin’s Column on the Marienplatz. Still it is certain that the excommunication put him in peril of his life. The archiepiscopal ban declared him subject to all the pains and penalties and liabilities which canon law attaches to ecclesiastical maledictions. One of these consequences, according to a decretal of Urban II., was to put him out of the pale and protection of law. “ For,” as that Pope expressly states, “ we do not deem those persons homicides who, burning with zeal for their Catholic mother against excommunicates, happen to kill any of them.” (Non enim eos homicidas arbitramur, quos, adversus excommunicatos zelo Catholicæ matris ardentes, aliquos eorum trucidare contigerit.) This principle arms with a dagger the hand of every religious fanatic, and places a heretic’s life at the mercy of any Catholic “ crank.” That the danger to Döllinger was not purely imaginary is evident from the fact that the chief of police in Munich informed him that plots were being devised for his assassination, and warned him not to go out unattended.

Meanwhile, it became daily more evident that in excommunicating the greatest Catholic theologian of this or perhaps of any century the infallible Pope had made a fearful blunder. It was a boomerang curse which returned to smite the man who hurled it. Repeated efforts were made by the bishops Steichele and Hefele, and by the nuncio Rutfo Scilla and other emissaries of the Holy See, to entice him back into the fold. Ladies of royal rank joined right reverend ecclesiastics in earnest entreaties to him to return. The portals of the sanctuary would have been thrown open to readmit him on the easiest terms, and indeed on almost any conditions that he might choose to stipulate. Leo XIII. urged him to come to Rome. 舠 The times of Pius IX.,”he said, “ are past. Apply directly to me, and declare merely that you still adhere to the views concerning the papacy which you have formerly expressed, and nothing more will be required.” Döllinger might have done so with a good conscience, for his opinion concerning the powers and prerogatives of the papacy had undergone no change whatever. But he knew that such a declaration would be interpreted as a recantation and submission, and would place him in a false position before the world ; and he refused to entertain for a moment this Jesuitical compromise with his conscience. As he subsequently remarked, “ I would not sully my old age with a lie, nor seem by any sort of implication to accept a dogma which to me was equivalent to asserting that two and two make five instead of four.”

The honest independence and firmness with which he met all threats and solicitations excited everywhere admiration and enthusiasm. Learned corporations of Germany and other countries vied with each other in doing him honor. Civic and academic distinctions were showered upon him. In 1866 he had been rector of the Munich University, and in 1872, when this institution celebrated the four hundredth anniversary of its foundation, he was again chosen to this position. On the death of Liebig, in the following year, the king appointed him president of the Academy of Sciences, a triennial office to which he was reappointed five times in succession, and which he held during the rest of his life. The frequent attempts of the Vatican to deprive him of his prebendal and sacerdotal dignities were thwarted by the steadfastness of Ludwig II., who conferred upon him the highest orders of the state, and took every occasion to express the liveliest appreciation of his courage and integrity. Every birthday brought him the warmest congratulations of this monarch, who, in a letter dated February 28, 1870, urged him not to be weary in the warfare which he was waging in the interests of both religion and science, but to carry it on to victory for the welfare of the church and the state ; and in another letter, of Februury 28, 1871, he contrasts Döllinger’s manliness with the cowardice of Abbot Haneberg, who through so-called ‘‘humility proved faithless to his convictions. “ This is in my opinion,” remarks the king, " a very false conception of humility ; it is a low hypocrisy.” “ Despicable and pitiable,” he adds, “ is the conduct of the archbishop who so soon fell away. His flesh is indeed strong and his spirit weak, as he himself inadvertently stated in one of his pastoral letters. Strange irony of accident! 舡 The comparison of Bollinger to Bossuet and Haneberg to Fénelon which Ludwig II. institutes, thereby representing himself inferentially as Louis XIV., is well meant, but rather wide of the mark, and does justice neither to Döllinger nor to Fénelon.

Döllinger never entered into full fellowship with the Old Catholie communion, and the assembly of anti-infallibilists held at Munich in May, 1871, formed this organization contrary to his judgment and advice. He maintained that the excommunication of a person for not accepting a dogma which is opposed to all Ihe teachings and traditions of the church is of no validity, and that those who refused to submit to the Vatican decree should not take any step that would have the appearance of separatism. His fear lest the government should regard such a society as a sect was well founded, since this is virtually the position in which the decision of the Bavarian Minister of Worship, Baron von Lutz, now leaves the Old Catholics.

It is probable, however, that if Döllinger had identified himself with the movement and placed himself at the head of it the result would have been different, and that he might have realized his idea of a German church which should be national without ceasing to be Catholic, — an idea which he had advocated as early as 1848. But, notwithstanding his unquestionable courage, he had not the high spirit which led Luther to reply to Spalatin that, though there were as many devils in Worms as tiles on the housetops, he would go into that city. He had the shrinking, scholarly temperament of Melanchthon, and deemed it his mission to combat error with the weapons of the spirit drawn from the armory of science. To become personally the centre of any outward agitation was positively painful to him. Thus on September 24, 1871, as he reached the entrance of the Glass Palace in Munich, where the Old Catholic congress was holding its last session, he heard the shout ” Bollinger hoch! ” (Hurrah for Döllinger! ) and turning on his heel fled as for his life. If such a demonstration met him on the threshold, he imagined how much greater it would be within the building, and could not face it. Acclamations that would have been a welcome stimulus to the born reformer, and have strengthened him in his purpose, served only to distress and discomfit the soul of this cloistered scholar. He was importuned to celebrate mass on the Thursday of Holy Week, April 6, 1871, in All Saints’ Church (the royal chapel), immediately after his final declaration, but could not be persuaded to do so. Had he complied with this request the king and the court would have been present, and this one act might have changed the whole course of events.

It would be hard to find in the annals of literature a more charming and cheering illustration of the art of growing old with serenity and dignity than that furnished by the nonagenarian Döllinger. He is one of the very few illustrious men, like Goethe, Humboldt, Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, and George Bancroft, whose age showed no sensible inroads of time, and never degenerated into senility. " We do not count a man’s years,” says Emerson, “ until he has nothing else to count.”It required an effort of memory and an arithmetical computation to realize that Döllinger was fourscore and ten. His young colleagues never thought of him as belonging to the generation of their greatgrandfathers, except as his vastly superior learning and wisdom caused them to remember how long he had sat among his folios, and what far-reaching experiences and rare opportunities of observation he had enjoyed. He did not fossilize under ninety layers of birthdays, but was in close touch with all the great interests and burning questions of the day. It is remarkable how completely he kept himself abreast with current events and the most recent researches in all departments of literature and science, and how the range of his studies and his sympathies constantly “widened with the process of the suns.” His academical addresses are distinguished not only for elegance of style, but also for the thoroughness and originality with which the most varied topics are discussed, such as The Historical Growth and Present Mission of the Munich Academy, Germany’s Conflict with the Papacy under the Emperor Lewis the Bavarian, Aventin and his Time, The Study of German History, The Significance of Dynasties in the World’s History, The Jews in Europe, The Oriental Question in its Origins, The Relations of the City of Rome to Germany in the Middle Ages, The History of Religious Freedom, the Politics of Louis XIV., The Political and Intellectual Development of Spain, The Most Influential Woman of French History, Dante as Prophet, The Influence of Greek Literature and Culture on the Western World in the Middle Ages, The Part of North America in Literature, and The Vindication of the Templars. The two last-mentioned addresses he was engaged in revising for the press at the time of his fatal illness. It may be interesting to add that, in a letter addressed to the present writer, in which he mentions this fact, he speaks in high terms of 舠 the American scholar Henry C. Lea.”

He fully appreciated the disagreeable impressions of spiritual despotism which Montalembert brought back with him from Spain in 1865, and wrote on this occasion: “ I too am greatly sobered. Many things in the church have turned out so differently from what I thought and painted to myself in rosy hues twenty or thirty years ago.” He frankly acknowledged and deeply regretted the hardness and narrowness with which he had often judged others at an earlier period of his life. In 1866 he confessed that every week he was constrained to renounce some long-cherished error, — plucking it, as it were, out of his breast; and added that such an experience ought to make one extremely tolerant and considerate of others’ mistakes. Again, in 1882 he wrote: " My whole life has been a successive stripping off of errors to which I have clung with persistency, violently resisting the better knowledge as it began to dawn upon me; and yet I can say that in acting thus I was not dishonest. Ought I then to condemn others stuck in the same slough, — in eodem luto mecum hœrentes?” In referring to Baronins and Bellarmin and their contemporaries of the sixteenth century, he says; “ When I detect such men in error, I say to myself, If you had lived then and had been in their place, would you not have shared the general illusion ? And if they had possessed your means of knowledge, would they not have made better use of it, and recognized and confessed the truth sooner than you have done ? ” The older he grew, the more forcibly he felt how rare it is to find an intellect capable of doing justice to thinkers of the past; it is a power as rare as the possession of the historical sense, which no learning can supply. “ One can know much and have one’s head crammed with information without the right scientific understanding or historical sense. This gift, as you are well aware, is not so very common ; and where it is wanting methinks there can be no full responsibility for what is known. It is this faculty of seeing events in their true relations that makes them live again to the mind ; where it is lacking, facts, however correct and carefully collected, serve only to confirm erroneous inferences, and to entangle the scholar who gropes after them in a net of false generalizations.”

It is to Döllinger’s credit that, although he was at first ranked with the foes of freedom, he did not hesitate to take a firm stand among its friends when he once perceived what principles were at stake in that eternal conflict between liberty and servitude in the social, political, moral, and intellectual life of the race, of which history is merely the more or less faithful record.

E. P. Evans.