Döllinger Contra Ecclesiam
"Unless a man is able to say to himself, as in the Presence of God, that he must not, and dare not, act upon the Papal injunction, he is bound to obey it" - St. John Henry Newman
Few people know the name of Ignaz von Döllinger (1799-1890) today, but in the time of the late 19th century, Döllinger was perhaps the most famous, well-respected and prestigious Catholic historians in the world. Döllinger's obstinate refusal to submit himself to the decrees of the First Vatican Council (1869-1870) commanded international attention among Catholics, Protestants, and secular newspapers alike. By some he was hailed as a new Martin Luther arising in Germany, and by others, such as the Old Catholic movement born in the aftermath of Vatican I, he was viewed as an indispensable intellectual forefather and theological inspiration. His correspondents spanned Europe, including clerics, lords and prime ministers alike. It is hard to downplay the prestige of Döllinger in his day, but it is somewhat of a tragedy that his name has slipped into relative obscurity by the time of the early 21st century. In the same time that Pius IX, finally overtaken by Italian nationalist forces in Rome in 1870, was declaring himself 'the prisoner in the Vatican', in Munich Döllinger had become a prisoner of his own conscience, incapable of assenting to what he saw as the innovations coming out of ultramontane Rome.
The case of Döllinger and his eventual excommunication by Archbishop Gregor von Scherr in April 1871 presents us with a panoply of fascinating things to ponder and observe, some of which I hope to cover in this post. These include the growth of history as a discipline in the 19th century, the dialectic between history and magisterium, the supremacy of conscience, recognizing and resisting error, and how in many ways Ignaz von Döllinger may be seen as harbinger of the currents of the 20th century. The case of Döllinger is far from clear-cut. Figures as eminent as St. John Henry Newman viewed the event as a "cruel trial" (Howard 174), while apparently even Pope Leo XIII sotto voce "regretted the handling of the Döllinger affair" (Howard 215). Döllinger was a man of boundaries and paradoxes. He existed in a world between secularism and Christendom, historicism and tradition. Striving to adhere to "that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all" (St. Vincent of Lérins, ch. 2) even after his excommunication, Döllinger also gave fuel to the Old Catholic movement. Being a staunch Catholic until the end in spirit, he was also instrumental to the foundation of the modern ecumenical movement. The affair of Ignaz von Döllinger raises many questions still relevant to Catholics today.
The Study of History and its Relationship to Christian Truth
It has been said, not without some truth, that historical criticism began as a Protestant impulse. Though the slogan of ad fontes—"back to the sources" existed in the time of the humanists, the radicalization of this humanistic impulse took on a life of its own in the 16th century in response to the unprecedented crises of Church authority and corruption. Faced with this situation, the question on the lips of many was the following: "What was the true Gospel of Jesus Christ?" This is the question that animated the so-called Reformers, and it was, at its root, a question of suspicion or of skepticism. Not skepticism in the Gospel itself, but in what was being presented as the Gospel to the vast majority of the Christian world. The Reformers would soon advocate for a return to the sources of Christian truth, to the Old and New Testaments. We can easily understand the impulse that animated these men. Seeing the problems in the Church, they thought that it was necessary to look beyond the accretions, abuses and errors of that had cropped up over the course of history, and to turn back to the earliest sources of the Christian message. In the same way that a ship accumulates barnacles in the course of its journey on the seas, so had the Church, they believed, accumulated many things at odds with the Gospel in the course of the centuries, to the extent of obscuring its central message. Of course, we should not understand the impulse of the Reformers for Sola Scriptura as Nuda Scriptura, given that even a cursory overview of the writings of John Calvin, Ulrich Zwingli and Martin Luther, among others, will reveal that they often fell back on the authority of figures such as St. Augustine, St. Jerome, St. John Chrysostom, and varied patristic testimonies in order to attempt to establish the legitimacy of their theological program. Regardless, something of world-historical significance had begun with the Protestant Reformation. No longer would the notion of a "seamless robe" of Scripture, tradition, and Church authority be an uncontested notion.
Starting in the 17th century, the project of historical criticism was more and more turned from the Catholic Church to the Scriptures themselves. Historical critics would discover that just as Church history was complex, full of dissenting and unorthodox views—even among the Fathers—so was the Bible itself, they said, something that had a complex and uncomfortably human history behind it. This is particularly true when one looks at the list of Biblical canons drawn up by various Church Fathers and synods throughout the early Church. While there is a great deal of agreement on the core of the Old and New Testaments alike, there was no perfect uniformity on the question. For many, the Bible, the cornerstone of the Protestant Reformation, and for all Christians the written source of God's revelation and dealings with the people of Israel and the founding of the Christian Church, was now itself not beyond doubt. Reason, seen by many in the age as a faculty of great clarity and enlightenment, was in fact introducing more and more doubt, serving as the great wrecking ball for the hallowed sureties of the past. Was the foundation of rock actually one of sand?
Of course, the investigation and historicization of Christianity need not necessarily produce skepticism and disintegration of the faith, and to characterize this historical turn as nothing but this would be misrepresentative. There would soon be many eminent thinkers who would recognize the vagaries and complicated character of history and its relationship to Christianity, and put the data to use in order to defend Christian orthodoxy. Many of these figures and intellectual movements would hail from the German world. The Catholic Tübingen School in the 19th century serves as one prominent example, offering a more organic and historicist theology in contrast to the Rome-oriented neo-scholastic / neo-Thomistic school hailing from Mainz. The ideas that the Catholic Tübingen School employed regarding the the Church and its history will likely be eminently familiar to readers - this was the metaphor of the acorn growing into the oak tree. Thomas Albert Howard provides a good synopsis of the basic idea:
"Like a growing tree, the Church had developed and matured from its obscure origins in ancient Palestine, becoming something quite different from the original "acorn". At the same time, it did not develop haphazardly, but according to certain principles present in its inception. Unlike the tree, however, members of the Church (and human beings generally) possess both free will and fallibility; and while divine providence superintends the Church's growth at one level, human beings have the freedom to work in concert with the Church or to mess things up. The job of theologians was to make sure that the Church was on track. To distinguish between legitimate growth and deviation, Catholic scholars were obliged to know history; they had to bring scholarly historical knowledge, as pioneered and employed by their Protestant colleagues, to the task of theology, but enlist this knowledge in the service of the Catholic Church." (Howard 73)
Such views, quite familiar today, were put forward by Catholic scholars at Tübingen such as Johann Sebastian Drey (1777-1853), and Johann Adam Möhler (1796-1838), both of whom embraced these ideas of organic development in Christian history. For Drey, historical competence was important for Catholics in that it prevented the Church from ossifying into a lifeless form fixed nostalgically on the past. Instead, he argued, the Church ought to advance confidently into the future, not discarding the doctrinal achievements of the past, but engaging with them, criticizing them if necessary, and embracing more recent ideas and developments in human thought. "The acorn, in short, should not shrink from its noble vocation of becoming a tree" (Howard 74). The thought of Möhler was summarized in a similar way, with the message of the Church not being
"given and received as something immediately understood, but rather as something to be pondered and fathomed gradually. This was never, even in apostolic times, the task of the individual; it was the community concern of the entire Church. It is this community, spreading horizontally across the world and vertically across the ages, that is possessed of the Spirit, and is protected—the individual is not-from distorting or losing any of Christ's teaching" (Howard 76).
The idea of development was also on the mind of John Henry Newman, who would later in his life convert to Catholicism and even be elevated to the rank of Cardinal. The Oxford Movement / Tractarian Movement, which Newman was a part of, was initiated in the late 1830s by members of the University of Oxford. It was largely a response to the religion of the day, a religion with emphasis on individual piety, personal Bible study, conversion experiences and justification by faith, such that the sacraments were seen as secondary or unimportant. By the late 1830s, the the Tractarians had shifted towards the worship, devotion and architecture of the medieval Church, growing more and more openly critical of Protestantism, and proclaiming the Church of England to be a true branch of the universal catholic Church (Brown & Nockles 1-2). It was popular in such circles to appeal to the authority of St. Vincent of Lérins in order to distinguish between what was truly catholic, and what was an accretion to the Gospel. Though quoted above already, in the larger context St. Vincent explains what is 'catholic':
"[W]e hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all. For that is truly and in the strictest sense Catholic, which, as the name itself and the reason of the thing declare, comprehends all universally. This rule we shall observe if we follow universality, antiquity, consent. We shall follow universality if we confess that one faith to be true, which the whole Church throughout the world confesses; antiquity, if we in no wise depart from those interpretations which it is manifest were notoriously held by our holy ancestors and fathers; consent, in like manner, if in antiquity itself we adhere to the consentient definitions and determinations of all, or at the least of almost all priests and doctors." (Vincent of Lérins, ch. 2)
Though it is worth noticing that St. Vincent himself realizes that uniformity may not be absolute in the final sentence in referring to "or at the least of almost all priests and doctors", it has been found by many, including by Newman himself, that the so-called Vincentian Canon is not a panacea for resolving disputes between the different sects and traditions of the Christian world. I myself have ran into this problem in my exploration of the history of the Church. The more and more one reads of the history of the Church, whether we are talking from primary or secondary sources, the murkier and clearer things become simultaneously. It is a paradox, of course, but it is the truth. One good example I like to appeal to is the history of the veneration of images. It is quite easy to assemble a florilegium of different early Church figures who seem to be quite hostile to what was later declared as a dogma of the faith at the Second Council of Nicea in the 8th century - just think of St. Epiphanius of Salamis, and the famous episode of him tearing down a curtain with an image of Jesus or a saint within a church for being "contrary to the teaching of the Scriptures" (St. Jerome, Letter 51), or, less well-known, the comments of St. Augustine against those within the Church who worship pictures and linger around tombs:
"Do not summon against me professors of the Christian name, who neither know nor give evidence of the power of their profession. Do not hunt up the numbers of ignorant people, who even in the true religion are superstitious, or are so given up to evil passions as to forget what they have promised to God. I know that there are many worshippers of tombs and pictures. I know that there are many who drink to great excess over the dead, and who, in the feasts which they make for corpses, bury themselves over the buried, and give to their gluttony and drunkenness the name of religion. I know that there are many who in words have renounced this world, and yet desire to be burdened with all the weight of worldly things, and rejoice in such burdens" (St. Augustine, Of the Morals of the Catholic Church, ch. 34).
In short, Church history is complicated, and often quite murky. What constitutes orthodoxy today is not always the dominant trend in the Church. Just think of the period of the Arian crisis, where, in the words of St. Jerome, "The whole world groaned in astonishment to find itself Arian". More pertinent for the overarching topic of this essay, even in later Church history we can find the issue of different trends of thought all existing within the one stream of Christian history, such as papal infallibility versus conciliarism, an issue which I have touched on in other essays as well.
But how are we to distinguish between error and actual development? In 1870, the bishops gathered in Rome for the First Vatican Council proclaimed the following in the document Pastor Aeternus:
"[F]aithfully adhering to the tradition received from the beginning of the christian faith... we teach and define as a divinely revealed dogma that when the Roman Pontiff speaks EX CATHEDRA, that is, when, in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church, he possesses, by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed his Church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals. Therefore, such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are of themselves, and not by the consent of the Church, irreformable."
The idea of papal infallibility was not a novelty in and of itself, as I have already discussed in my review / discussion of John O'Malley's book Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church. The two examples that I gave, among many that could be given, were that of St. Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621), and St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622), both of whom lived long before the First Vatican Council. However, large sections of the Church vehemently rejected this teaching, the prime examples being the French Church, with its age-old independent spirit and dogged defense of its so-called 'Gallican Liberties', or the ideas of Johann Nikolaus von Hontheim (1701-1790), also known as Febronius, author of the influential 1763 work On the State of the Church and the Lawful Power of the Pope, written to Reunite Christians who Differ in Religion, who essentially argued that claims of papal supremacy and infallibility were misguided, and that the See of Rome was only one of several in the ancient world, and that the pope was the primus inter pares—the first among equals. Utilizing historical scholarship, he pointed out that the source of the hypertrophic growth of papal power across the ages was largely rooted in forgeries such as the False Decretals of Isidore or the Donation of Constantine. If infallibility had a place, it was properly a charism of the Church Universal and ecumenical councils, not the Bishop of Rome alone (Howard 62-63).
Though such ideas were often opposed from the center, de facto this constituted the character of Catholicism in wide swathes of the Catholic world. Here is where Ignaz von Döllinger steps back into the picture. When Pastor Aeternus defined the dogma of papal infallibility, did the Council ipso facto trump history? Of course it is at this conjunction that we must point out that history is a fickle thing. Our sources are fragmentary, and there is always a degree of selectivity and limitation even among the greatest and most clear-headed interpreters of the past. In Döllinger's mind, the answer to the question of whether the magisterium of the Catholic Church trumps history was a resounding 'no'. For Döllinger, it was a question of conscience, which he refused to violate, even when faced with the threat of excommunication and endless waves of vitriol from the Ultramontane press. Another German had stood up and declared 'Hier stehe ich!' before the Church. For Döllinger, assenting to the new dogma of Vatican I would be to throw his life's work and studies away. If he were to submit to the new teaching for him "there would no longer be any such thing as historical truth and certainty; I should then have to suppose that my whole life long I had been in dizzy illusion, and that in historical matters I am altogether incapable of distinguishing truth from fable and falsehood" (Howard 216).
For me, the previous quote was the most powerful line I have read from Döllinger. Though we are far from perfect interpreters of history, history must surely have some weight and some authority, should it not? Döllinger clearly falls into the camp which affirms this supposition, while Ultramontanes like Archbishop Henry Edward Manning would take the opposite position, writing "Are we to understand... that the rule of faith is to be tested by history, not history by the rule of faith?" Archbishop Scherr, who excommunicated Döllinger, took a similar position, writing that "As the intellectual head...against the Vatican Council, [you have] set historical investigation above the Church" (Howard 12).
Rejecting Sola Scriptura, it seems as if Sola Ecclesia has been substituted. Does not such a view reduce the study of history to a farce when it comes to Church matters? Or does not the study of the Church Fathers itself become useless, since that if they have views that are different, it is irrelevant, since the magisterium today trumps what the Fathers of the past said, no matter how many Fathers said something to the contrary. We see a similar move done with Protestants and their appeal to the Scriptures, with many of them today seeing little to no need to appeal to the Fathers of the Church on matters since they really do not need anything except for the Scriptures. Both points being presented here are being presented in their purest forms, needless to say, rarely will one perfectly fit into a given category, but it should be clear, I think, of how one is just as problematic as the other is. I fully sympathize with Döllinger, I have to say. Not in the sense that I necessarily agree with him in his rejection of the decrees of Pastor Aeternus, but in that I deeply understand his refusal to budge when faced with the choice between betraying his own conscience, and submitting to the decrees on infallibility. Tried as he might, Döllinger was never able to convince himself that Vatican I was not in error. Writing to Archbishop Scherr in early 1871, he confided that:
"Should I succeed in gaining the conviction that this doctrine [Infallibility] is the true one as warranted by the Scripture and by tradition, and I, who have hitherto believed the opposite, as the large majority of German theologians have done, am in error, I shall then not hesitate to confess this before the world without reservation... Yet this is to be done only on one condition, namely that he [the one who confesses] is also actually convinced of the veracity of what he is to confess anew, and of the falseness of what he has previously taught; for without this conviction, a submission of this kind would, of course, be a grievous sin and a gross lie" (Howard 159-160)
When faced with this dilemma, Döllinger ultimately decided that it was wrong for him to submit to the Vicar of Christ in Rome, since he was bidden by what John Henry Newman would famously call "the aboriginal vicar of Christ", i.e. the conscience, to not submit. It is worth quoting Newman's remarks on this in his A Letter Addressed to the Duke of Norfolk on Occasion of Mr. Gladstone's Recent Expostulation:
"Conscience is not a long-sighted selfishness, nor a desire to be consistent with oneself; but it is a messenger from Him, who, both in nature and in grace, speaks to us behind a veil, and teaches and rules us by His representatives. Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ, a prophet in its informations, a monarch in its peremptoriness, a priest in its blessings and anathemas, and, even though the eternal priesthood throughout the Church could cease to be, in it the sacerdotal principle would remain and would have a sway."
Thus, "Certainly, if I am obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts, (which indeed does not seem quite the thing) I shall drink—to the Pope, if you please,—still, to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards."
But conscience can be erroneous, can it not? Indeed it can, but according to doctors of the Church such as St. Thomas Aquinas in his Disputed Questions, an erroneous conscience indeed binds:
"Sin is principally in the will. But whoever decides to transgress a divine commandment has an evil will. Therefore, he sins. Whoever believes that something is a command and decides to violate it wills to break the law. Therefore, he sins. Moreover, one who has a false conscience, whether in things intrinsically evil or in anything at all, believes that what is opposed to his conscience is contrary to the law of God. Therefore, if he decides to do that, he decides to act contrary to the law of God, and, so, he sins. Consequently, conscience, no matter how false it is, obliges under pain of sin."
In Döllinger's case, he refused to sin against his conscience, and this is honorable.
Recognize and Resist
Interesting as it may be, I will not delve too deeply into the history of the emergence of the so-called 'Old Catholic' movement in this essay. Its origins are, however, rooted in the aftermath of the First Vatican Council, its decrees of infallibility, and the excommunication of Ignaz von Döllinger. Indeed, many of the leading lights of the Old Catholic movement came from the same academic milieu as Döllinger himself. Despite this close association and even collaboration to some extent, the exact relationship of Döllinger with the Old Catholics always remained somewhat ambiguous. Though the movement started slowly, soon the question of the formation of parishes and separate ecclesiastical jurisdiction began to come up. Döllinger recognized that they found themselves in an "emergency situation", but in his view, crucially "all emergency measures must be carried out within the Catholic Church, and one must avoid pitting "parish against parish, altar against altar"" (Howard 183). In his own words,
"At present we are within the Church like good seeds, [like] the salt that prevents the rot and which looks to the future in hope... In this light, the principle applies: when it comes to the reform of the Church, it must take place within the Church. Reformatio fiat intra ecclesiam has always been the mantra of all enlightened men of the Church. From this correct insight [it merits nothing] that once one steps out of the Church and finds oneself extra ecclesiam, then one can no longer exercise action and influence on the Church one left behind" (ibid.)
In essence, Döllinger advocated for a 'recognize and resist' strategy, or from a different perspective, somewhat of a 'Reconquista' strategy that some Protestants have tried to attempt on the Mainline Protestant churches in our own day. Splitting from the Church must be avoided at all costs. This was the error of Martin Luther and the other Reformers. The movement against the 'infallibilist errors' would not be won overnight. It would be like the situation in the 4th century against the Arians. Long-suffering and faithful Catholics would remain within the Church, avoiding schism. It is interesting how the logic of Döllinger echoes that of many Traditionalists in our own day, who refuse to leave the Church on principle despite the many errors that have cropped up since the Second Vatican Council. Some of these groups likewise exist in an ambiguous ecclesial situation - the Society of St. Pius X comes into mind immediately. It would be highly interesting in light of all of this to further investigate the case of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre (1905-1991), perhaps the most famous of the Traditionalists, and founder of the aforementioned SSPX, who, resisting elements of the Second Vatican Council that he viewed as erroneous such as the Novus Ordo of Paul VI and documents such as Dignitatis Humanae on religious liberty, was eventually led to the point of consecrating four bishops (1988), for which he was excommunicated by John Paul II. Perhaps I will write more on this in the future, but it seems as if Archbishop Lefebvre himself could likewise be considered yet another martyr of conscience coming up against the Magisterium of the Catholic Church.
The Old Catholics did eventually go down the path of schism though, linking up with the Church of Utrecht, with J.H. Reinkens being consecrated as the first Old Catholic Bishop on August 11th, 1873. Now interestingly, Bishop Loos from Utrecht died on the very day of Reinkens' election. Make of that what you will, but the Ultramontane press certainly had a field-day with this (Howard 186). In all of this, Döllinger did not protest publicly. In fact, he would be influential in the Bonn Conferences of 1874 and 1875 held under Old Catholic sponsorship, and where Anglicans, Eastern Orthodox, and even some Lutherans and Reformed would gather for discussing the matter of Church reunion and unity. Only a single Catholic appeared in the first session, and none at the second. These conferences, though ultimately a failure, are very important for the history of ecumenical dialogue, which, in the 20th century would become a major force in the Christian world across confessional and traditional boundaries. Though the Catholic Church up until 1962 would be almost invariably hostile to the ecumenical movement, following the Second Vatican Council, the position of the Church would change, ultimately coming closer to the advocacy of Döllinger in the previous century. With this concern for the reunion with the separated brethren, his emphasis on the collegiality of bishops against a more monarchical conception of the papacy, and his advocacy for historicism versus 'Roman theology', Döllinger in many ways served as portent for the Church in the 20th century, even if this role, most likely indirect, is today largely obscured by the sands of history. This is not to claim that Vatican II represents any sort of capitulation to the ideas of Döllinger, but the echoes are unmistakable. And thus, as I began this essay, the affair of Ignaz von Dollinger raises many questions still relevant to Catholics today, whether it is the relationship between conscience and magisterium, or the thornier question of the place of history and evidence versus the magisterium.
Sources
Brown, Stewart J. & Nockles, Peter B. The Oxford Movement: Europe and the Wider World 1830-1930
Howard, Thomas Albert, The Pope and the Professor: Pius IX, Ignaz von Döllinger, and the Quandary of the Modern Age
Links
A Letter Addressed to the Duke of Norfolk on Occasion of Mr. Gladstone's Recent Expostulation by St. John Henry Newman: https://www.newmanreader.org/works/anglicans/volume2/gladstone/index.html
Commonitory by St. Vincent of Lerins: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3506.htm
Disputed Questions by St. Thomas Aquinas: https://isidore.co/aquinas/QDdeVer17.htm
Letter 51 by St. Jerome: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3001051.htm
Of the Morals of the Catholic Church by St. Augustine: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1401.htm