Re-Envisioning Christian Humanism

(Martin Jones) #1

By mid-century Döllinger had emerged as one of the most eminent Catholic
theologians and historians in Europe, publishing numerous works and main-
taining an extensive international correspondence in several languages. Until this
time, he had the full confidence of bishops in Germany; many regarded him as
exemplar of orthodoxy, while Protestants viewed him as a redoubtable critic.^11
But changes in his outlook were afoot. In 1848–9, he spent a year at
Frankfurt am Main as a member of the German parliament, which ultimately
failed to unify Germany under a liberal constitution. From this experience,
and also as a representative at the Bavarian upper house, he gained a deeper
appreciation of the political complexities roiling Europe, not least those
involving church and state. The church–state question was felt acutely on
the Italian peninsula, where movers and shakers in theRisorgimentohad
begun, under Count Cavour’s mantra of‘a free church in a free state’(libera
chiesa in libero stato), to call for the end of the Papal States as a condition of
Italian unification. This represented blasphemy for the ultramontane imagin-
ation, the representatives of which, following Pope Pius IX, regarded Italian
church holdings as sacrosanct, as‘the very robe of Jesus Christ on earth’.^12
As the church moved in a strongly ultramontane direction in the coming
years, Döllinger began to swim against the tide. In 1861 he argued that faithful
Catholics could accept the cessation of the Pope’s temporal power. In a famous
address from 1863, ‘On the Past and Present of Catholic Theology’,he
recapitulated older humanist critiques of scholasticism by criticizing the
neo-scholastic direction of Catholic theology, arguing instead for a balance
between older scholastic concerns and the philological and historical methods
pioneered especially among German Protestant scholars and by the so-called
‘Catholic Tübingen School’. Döllinger viewed the‘Syllabus of Errors’(1864)
with great alarm, and he began worrying in the 1860s that a new‘Papalist’,or
‘Vaticanist’, church had overtaken the ‘one holy Catholic and apostolic
Church’of the Nicene Creed. Not surprisingly, he came out strongly against
‘Papal Infallibility’once he discovered that this was on the agenda to be
discussed at the Vatican Council (1869–70). In fact, with his friend Lord
Acton, Döllinger emerged as the behind-the-scenes intellectual head of the
anti-infallibilist position, publishing numerous articles against the doctrine
under the pseudonyms‘Janus’and‘Quirinus’right before and during the
Council.^13 After the Council, he was asked to submit to the doctrine by


(^11) Franz Xaver Bischof,Theologie und Geschichte: Ignaz von Döllinger (1799–1890) in der
zweiten Hälfte seines Lebens(Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1997), 12–41.
(^12) Giacomo Martina, SJ,Pio IX (1851–1866), Miscellanea Historiae Pontificiae, vol. 51 (Rome,
1986), 85–152.
(^13) The work by‘Janus’,Der Papst und das Concil(1869), was placed on the Index just before
the opening of the Vatican Council. See Walter Brandmüller,‘“Janus”auf dem Index’, in Albert
Portmann-Tinguely (ed.),Kirche, Staat und katholische Wissenschaft in der Neuzeit: Festschrift
für Heribert Raab zum 65.Geburtstag am 16 März 1988(Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh,
224 Thomas Albert Howard

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