Although he had been translated into several languages and was widely known in his own country, he had not yet built himself a European name. At Oxford, in 1851, when James Mozley asked whom he would like to see, he said, the men who had written in the Christian Remembrancer on Dante and Luther. Mozley was himself one of the two, and he introduced him to the other at Oriel. After thirty-two years, when the writer on Dante occupied a high position in the Church and had narrowly escaped the highest, that visit was returned. But he had no idea that he had once received Döllinger in his college rooms and hardly believed it when told. In Germany, the serried learning of the Reformation, the author's energy and decisiveness in public assemblies, caused him to stand forth as an accepted spokesman, and, for a season, threw back the reticent explorer, steering between the shallows of anger and affection.
In that stage the Philosophumena found him, and induced him to write a book of controversy in the shape of history. Here was an anonymous person who, as Newman described it, "calls one pope a weak and venal dunce, and another a sacrilegious swindler, an infamous convict, and an heresiarch ex cathedrâ." In the Munich Faculty there was a divine who affirmed that the Church would never get over it. Döllinger undertook to vindicate the insulted See of Rome; and he was glad of the opportunity to strike a blow at three conspicuous men of whom he thought ill in point both of science and religion. He spoke of Gieseler as the flattest and most leathern of historians; he accused Baur of frivolity and want of theological conviction; and he wished that he knew as many circumlocutions for untruth as there are Arabian synonyms for a camel, that he might do justice to Bunsen without violation of courtesy. The weight of the new testimony depended on the discovery of the author. Adversaries had assigned it to Hippolytus, the foremost European writer of the time, venerated as a saint and a father of the Church. Döllinger thought them right, and he justified his sincerity by giving further reasons for a conclusion which made his task formidable even for such dexterity as his own. Having thus made a concession which was not absolutely inevitable, he resisted the inference with such richness of illustration that the fears of the doubting colleague were appeased. In France, by Pitra's influence, the book was reviewed without making known that it supported the authorship of Hippolytus, which is still disputed by some impartial critics, and was always rejected by Newman. Hippolytus und Kallistus, the high-water mark of Döllinger's official assent and concurrence, came out in 1853. His next book showed the ebb.
He came originally from the romantic school, where history was honeycombed with imagination and conjecture; and the first important book he gave to a pupil in 1850 was Creuzer's Mythology. In 1845 he denounced the rationalism of Lobeck in investigating the Mysteries; but in 1857 he preferred him as a guide to those who proceed by analogy. With increase of knowledge had come increase of restraining caution and sagacity. The critical acumen was not greater in the Vorhalle that when he wrote on the Philosophumena, but instead of being employed in a chosen cause, upon fixed lines, for welcome ends, it is applied impartially. Ernst von Lasaulx, a man of rich and noble intellect, was lecturing next door on the philosophy and religion of Greece, and everybody heard about his indistinct mixture of dates and authorities, and the spell which his unchastened idealism cast over students. Lasaulx, who brilliantly carried on the tradition of Creuzer, who had tasted of the mythology of Schelling, who was son-in-law to Baader and nephew to Görres, wrote a volume on the fall of Hellenism which he brought in manuscript and read to Döllinger at a sitting. The effect on the dissenting mind of the hearer was a warning; and there is reason to date from those two hours in 1853 a more severe use of materials, and a stricter notion of the influence which the end of an inquiry may lawfully exert on the pursuit of it.
Heidenthum und Judenthum, which came out in 1857, gave Lasaulx his revenge. It is the most positive and self-denying of histories, and owes nothing to the fancy. The author refused the aid of Scandinavia to illustrate German mythology, and he was rewarded long after, when Caspari of Christiania and Conrad Maurer met at his table and confirmed the discoveries of Bugge. But the account of Paganism ends with a significant parallel. In December 69 a torch flung by a soldier burnt the temple on the Capitol to the ground. In August 70 another Roman soldier set fire to the temple on Mount Sion. The two sanctuaries perished within a year, making way for the faith of men still hidden in the back streets of Rome. When the Hellenist read this passage it struck him deeply. Then he declared that it was hollow. All was over at Jerusalem; but at Rome the ruin was restored, and the smoke of sacrifice went up for centuries to come from the altar of Capitoline Jove.
In this work, designed as an introduction to Christian history, the apologist betrays himself when he says that no Greek ever objected to slavery, and when, out of 730 pages on paganism, half a page is allotted to the moral system of Aristotle. That his Aristotelian chapter was weak, the author knew; but he said that it was not his text to make more of it. He did not mean that a Christian divine may be better employed than in doing honour to a heathen; but, having to narrate events and the action of causes, he regarded Christianity more as an organism employing sacramental powers than as a body of speculative ideas. To cast up the total of moral and religious knowledge attained by Seneca, Epictetus, and Plutarch, to measure the line and rate of progress since Socrates, to compare the point reached by Hermas and Justin, is an inquiry of the highest interest for writers yet to come. But the quantitative difference of acquired precept between the later pagan and the early Christian is not the key to the future. The true problem is to expose the ills and errors which Christ, the Healer, came to remove. The measure must be taken from the depth of evil from which Christianity had to rescue mankind, and its history is more than a continued history of philosophical theories. Newman, who sometimes agreed with Döllinger in the letter, but seldom in the spirit, and who distrusted him as a man in whom the divine lived at the mercy of the scholar, and whose burden of superfluous learning blunted the point and the edge of his mind, so much liked what he heard of this book that, being unable to read it, he had it translated at the Oratory.
The work thus heralded never went beyond the first volume, completed in the autumn of 1860, which was received by the Kirchenzeitung of Berlin as the most acceptable narrative of the founding of Christianity, and as the largest concession ever made by a Catholic divine. The author, following the ancient ways, and taking, with Reuss, the New Testament as it stands, made no attempt to establish the position against modern criticism. Up to this, prescription and tradition held the first place in his writings, and formed his vantage-ground in all controversy. His energy in upholding the past as the rule and measure of the future distinguished him even among writers of his own communion. In Christenthum und Kirche he explained his theory of development, under which flag the notion of progress penetrates into theology, and which he held as firmly as the balancing element of perpetuity: "In dem Maass als dogmenhistorische Studien mehr getrieben werden, wird die absolute innere Nothwendigkeit und Wahrheit der Sache immer allegingr einleuchten." He conceived no bounds to the unforeseen resources of Christian thought and faith. A philosopher in whose works he would not have expected to find the scientific expression of his own idea, has a passage bearing close analogy to what he was putting forward in 1861:
It is then in the change to a higher state of form or composition that development differs from growth. We must carefully distinguish development from mere increase; it is the acquiring, not of greater bulk, but of new forms and structures, which are adapted to higher conditions of existence.
It is the distinction which Uhhorn draws between the terms Entfaltung and Entwickelung. Just then, after sixteen years spent in the Church of Rome, Newman was inclined to guard and narrow his theory. On the one hand he taught that the enactments and decisions of ecclesiastical law are made on principles and by virtue of prerogatives which jam antea latitavere in the Church of the apostles and fathers. But he thought that a divine of the second century on seeing the Roman catechism, would have recognised his own belief in it, without surprise, as soon as he understood its meaning. He once wrote: "If I have said more than this, I think I have not worked out my meaning, and was confused—whether the minute facts of history will bear me out in this view, I leave to others to determine." Döllinger would have feared to adopt a view for its own sake, without knowing how it would be borne out by the minute facts of history. His own theory of development had not the same ingenious simplicity, and he thought Newman's brilliant book unsound in detail. But he took high ground in asserting the undeviating fidelity of Catholicism to its principle. In this, his last book on the Primitive Church, as in his early lectures, he claims the unswerving unity of faith as a divine prerogative. In a memorable passage of the Symbolik Möhler had stated that there is no better security than the law which pervades human society, which preserves harmony and consistency in national character, which makes Lutheranism perpetually true to Luther, and Islamism to the Koran.
Speaking in the name of his own university, the rector described him as a receptive genius. Part of his career displays a quality of assimilation, acquiescence, and even adaptation, not always consistent with superior originality or intense force of character. His Reformation, the strongest book, with the Symbolik, which Catholics had produced in the century, was laid down on known lines, and scarcely effected so much novelty and change as the writings of Kampschulte and Kolde. His book on the first age of the Church takes the critical points as settled, without special discussion. He appeared to receive impulse and direction, limit and colour, from his outer life. His importance was achieved by the force within. Circumstances only conspired to mould a giant of commonplace excellence and average ideas, and their influence on his view of history might long be traced. No man of like spirituality, of equal belief in the supreme dignity of conscience, systematically allowed as much as he did for the empire of chance surroundings and the action of home, and school, and place of worship upon conduct. He must have known that his own mind and character as an historian was not formed by effort and design. From early impressions, and a life spent, to his fiftieth year, in a rather unvaried professional circle, he contracted homely habits in estimating objects of the greater world; and his imagination was not prone to vast proportions and wide horizons. He inclined to apply the rules and observation of domestic life to public affairs, to reduce the level of the heroic and sublime; and history, in his hands, lost something both in terror and in grandeur. He acquired his art in the long study of earlier times, where materials are scanty. All that can be known of Cæsar or Charlemagne, or Gregory VII., would hold in a dozen volumes; a library would not be sufficient for Charles V. or Lewis XVI. Extremely few of the ancients are really known to us in detail, as we know Socrates, or Cicero, or St. Augustine. But in modern times, since Petrarca, there are at least two thousand actors on the public stage whom we see by the revelations of private correspondence. Besides letters that were meant to be burnt, there are a man's secret diaries, his autobiography and table-talk, the recollections of his friends, self-betraying notes on the margins of books, the report of his trial if he is a culprit, and the evidence for beatification if he is a saint. Here we are on a different footing, and we practise a different art when dealing with Phocion or Dunstan, or with Richelieu or Swift. In one case we remain perforce on the surface of character, which we have not the means of analysing: we have to be content with conjecture, with probable explanations and obvious motives. We must constantly allow the benefit of the doubt, and reserve sentence. The science of character comes in with modern history. Döllinger had lived too long in the ages during which men are seen mostly in outline, and never applied an historical psychology distinct from that of private experience. Great men are something different from an enlarged repetition of average and familiar types, and the working and motive of their minds is in many instances the exact contrary of ordinary men, living to avoid contingencies of danger, and pain, and sacrifice, and the weariness of constant thinking and far-seeing precaution.
We are apt to judge extraordinary men by our own standard, that is to say, we often suppose them to possess, in an extraordinary degree, those qualities which we are conscious of in ourselves or others. This is the easiest way of conceiving their characters, but not the truest They differ in kind rather than in degree.