In this elegant and sparkling study, which is rich in both scope and material, Thomas Albert Howard juxtaposes Pius ix, ‘the Pope’, with Ignaz von Döllinger, ‘the Professor’. He argues convincingly that it is only possible to appreciate the full extent of Döllinger's tragic fate, his fall from feted Catholic theologian to troublesome excommunicated priest, by placing him firmly within the political, religious and intellectual history of the long nineteenth century. The long reign of Pius ix (1846–78), and the shift from Sentire cum ecclesia to Sentire cum papa, provides the backdrop to Döllinger's hardening stance towards the papacy. In April 1871 Döllinger was excommunicated by the archbishop of Munich, Gregor von Scherr.
Like Cardinal Newman, Ignaz von Döllinger's life encompassed almost the entire nineteenth century. He was born in 1799 and died in 1890. There is hardly any other nineteenth-century figure whose life reflects ‘the quandary of the modern age’ as well as that of the Bavarian academic, priest, politician and public figure. From 1826 Döllinger held the chair of church history at the newly established University of Munich and together with Joseph von Görres, Franz von Baader, Friedrich von Schelling and J. A. Möhler he was instrumental in making Munich one of the centres of the revival of Catholic theology. They all shared a vision of bringing about a renewal of the Catholic Church in Germany. Döllinger was a proponent of employing the critical historical method in the writing of history, following Ranke's dictum: ‘bloß zeigen, wie es eigentlich gewesen [just show how it actually was]’. His speech at the Munich Congress in 1863 is one of the clearest expositions of his visions for a historical theology; it remains as relevant today as it was then.
The professor, tremendously prodigious in output, entertained a never-ending stream of international visitors to his book-lined home in Munich, and as so many of his contemporaries he was a tireless correspondent. It is not least through the steady stream of letters that flowed between him and his two ‘pupils’, the historians John Acton and Charlotte Blennerhassett, whose first tentative steps into the writing of history he patiently guided, that we gain an insight into his growing frustration with Rome. Both were in the city during the First Vatican Council (1869–70).
Döllinger was immortalised wickedly, yet undeniably wittily, in the revolutionary year 1848 by the poet Heinrich Heine who regarded him as the epitome of an ultramontane Catholic cleric. And well into the 1850s Döllinger was an internationally renowned and highly respected church historian until he became increasingly caught up in the conflict between Liberal Catholicism and (neo-) Ultramontanism, and between critical historical methodology and neo-Scholasticism; conflicts that marked the pontificate of Pius ix. The story of how the revolutions of 1848 turned a liberal-orientated Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti into an unyielding opponent of Italian Unification has been told elsewhere; but Howard shows that the yoke of being a divinely ordained spiritual and temporal leader was a heavy one to carry for Pius ix, as for his predecessors.
Howard asserts that Döllinger's legacy throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has suffered, and today his name mostly evokes two reactions: firstly, that the professor was excommunicated following his emphatic and very public refusal to accept the infallibility of the pope being elevated to a dogma at the First Vatican Council, as he found it lacked any historical justification. And, secondly, that his name has been ‘usurped’ by different factions of Alt-Katholiken, who at the time of Vatican I, as now, considered him their spiritual father. Döllinger, however, never pledged himself to the Alt-Katholiken but devoted much of his time to attending conferences with the Eastern Orthodox and Anglicans.
I would like to offer a rather mundane suggestion that may go some way towards explaining why Döllinger, if one subscribes to Howard's view, has become a minor character in the dramatis personae of continental Catholicism in the nineteenth century that we are familiar with today, and that is the question of ‘accessibility’. Döllinger has been rather poorly served by the low standard offered in some of the translations of his works into English, Italian and French that were undertaken from the 1860s and until the early twentieth century. And, if the reader does not have at least a rudimentary grasp of German, (s)he is unlikely to gain a good understanding of Döllinger's at times convoluted manner of expressing himself. Further, there is a richness to be found in the outstanding scholarship devoted to different aspects of Döllinger's life and work that has been published over the past eight decades, from Victor Conzemius through Georg Schwaiger to Peter Neuner and Franz Xaver Bischof – to mention but a few – but they have all been written in German. Howard's work is, to my knowledge, the first monograph written in English to focus in extenso on Döllinger and for that alone he deserves praise.
Howard wishes to ‘reclaim’ the contributions of Döllinger on two fronts: as a ‘proto-ecumenical theologian’ whose visions of Christian unity were vindicated with Lumen gentium and Unitatis redintegratio at Vatican II (1962–5). Were Döllinger's visions of a Christian unity actually vindicated at Vatican II? And as for the pertinent question of conscience, and the role that Döllinger's Gewissen played in his inability to subscribe to papal infallibility over the infallibility of the Church, did Döllinger actually have as full an understanding of conscience as we find in Newman or Aquinas? I am not convinced thereof.
On a final note, I find Thomas Albert Howard's references to the reception of Döllinger by some of his contemporaries within a North American locus absolutely fascinating; they strike me as a potentially important contribution in establishing the extent to which transatlantic relations between Catholics took place before the last century.
