Döllinger.^55 Put in explicitly theological terms, Döllinger sometimes evinces a
deficit of‘Augustinian’ pessimism towards human undertakings and this
perhaps leads to a too accepting embrace of the‘modern university’and desire
to baptize it for Catholic ends.
Third, apart from these questionable aspects of his thought, Döllinger was
indisputably on to something of abiding significance in recognizing the
‘historical sense’and its role in the development of the modern university.
Permit me, again, to call this simply‘historicism’, and allow this term to serve
as a placeholder for the manifold gifts and burdens, traceable ultimately to the
humanists of the sixteenth century, that historical criticism and heightened
historical consciousness have occasioned for theological reflection in the
modern era. In his address, Döllinger speaks matter-of-factly about the emer-
gence of historical thought as itself a historical phenomenon. In other con-
texts, he advances a more normative argument for the appropriateness of
historical inquiry alongside, and often in rivalry to, the heavily metaphysical,
anti-historical modes of theology associated with the neo-Thomistic revival in
the nineteenth century, championed at Rome by the likes of Josef Kleutgen,
the leading German Thomist of the nineteenth century.^56 Within the inter-
necine struggles of the Catholic Church in his day, Döllinger, in championing
history, was swimming against the tide of neo-scholasticism, behind which
Pope Leo XIII put the full force of the Magisterium in his 1879 encyclical,
Aeterni Patris.^57 By contrast, Döllinger desired to downplay metaphysics as a
handmaid to theology and amplify history’s role instead. As he put it in‘On
the Past and Future of Catholic Theology’(1863): for Catholic theology to
have a future,‘the two eyes of theology,history and philosophy’must both be
‘cared for with attentiveness, love, and thoroughness’.^58
To be sure, Döllinger recognized that a historical theology indifferent to the
church posed problems of a different sort. He stressed therefore that for
faithful scholars‘the most severe criticism receives its validity when it [attempts]
to correctly understand church teaching’. Theologians ought to combine
‘fidelity to the church...with the free independence of scholarly inquiry’. But
for that to happen, time and patience were needed. Again, as stated in his
university address:‘[O]urs [Catholic scholars] is a more difficult task; because
(^55) See Alasdair MacIntyre,Three Rival Forms of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and
Tradition(Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990).
(^56) On Kleutgen, see F. Lakner,‘Kleutgen und die kirchliche Wissenschaft in Deutschland im
XIX. Jahrhundert’,Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie 57 (1933), 161–214, and Gerald
A. McCool,Catholic Theology in the Nineteenth Century: The Quest for a Unitary Method
(New York: Seabury Press, 1977), 167ff.
(^57) Alasdair MacIntyre,God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic
Philosophical Tradition(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 165ff.
(^58) Döllinger,‘Die Vergangenheit und Gegenwart der katholischen Theologie’, in Johann
Finsterhölzl (ed.),Ignaz von Döllinger: Wegbereiter heutiger Theologie(Graz: Verlag Styria,
1969), 251 (emphasis added).
Ignaz von Döllinger and the University 237