The History of Freedom, and Other Essays

by Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton Acton

You have exhibited the gradual departure of the government in the states of the church from all those conditions which made it tolerable to the sense and reason of mankind, and have, I think, completely justified, in principle if not in all the facts, the conduct of those who have determined to do away with it.

The policy of exalting the spiritual authority though at the expense of sacrifices in the temporal, the moderation even in the catalogue of faults, the side blow at the Protestants, filling more than half the volume, disarmed for a moment the resentment of outraged Rome. The Pope, on a report from Theiner, spoke of the book as one that might do good. Others said that it was pointless, that its point was not where the author meant it to be, that the handle was sharper than the blade. It was made much more clear that the Pope had governed badly than that Russia or Great Britain would gain by his supremacy. The cold analysis, the diagnosis by the bedside of the sufferer, was not the work of an observer dazzled by admiration or blinded by affection. It was a step, a first unconscious, unpremeditated step, in the process of detachment. The historian here began to prevail over the divine, and to judge Church matters by a law which was not given from the altar. It was the outcome of a spirit which had been in him from the beginning. His English translator had uttered a mild protest against his severe treatment of popes. His censure of the Reformation had been not as that of Bossuet, but as that of Baxter and Bull. In 1845 Mr. Gladstone remarked that he would answer every objection, but never proselytised. In 1848 he rested the claims of the Church on the common law, and bade the hierarchy remember that national character is above free will: "Die Nationalität ist etwas der Freiheit des menschlichen Willens entrücktes, geheimnissvolles und in ihrem letzen Grunde selbst etwas von Gott gewolltes." In his Hippolytus he began by surrendering the main point, that a man who so vilified the papacy might yet be an undisputed saint. In the Vorhalle he flung away a favourite argument, by avowing that paganism developed by its own lines and laws, untouched by Christianity, until the second century; and as with the Gentiles, so with the sects; he taught, in the suppressed chapter of his history, that their doctrines followed a normal course. And he believed so far in the providential mission of Protestantism, that it was idle to talk of reconciliation until it had borne all its fruit. He exasperated a Munich colleague by refusing to pronounce whether Gregory and Innocent had the right to depose emperors, or Otho and Henry to depose popes; for he thought that historians should not fit theories to facts, but should be content with showing how things worked. Much secret and suppressed antagonism found vent in 1858, when one who had been his assistant in writing the Reformation and was still his friend, declared that he would be a heretic whenever he found a backing.

Those with whom he actively coalesced felt at times that he was incalculable, that he pursued a separate line, and was always learning, whilst others busied themselves less with the unknown. This note of distinctness and solitude set him apart from those about him, during his intimacy with the most catholic of Anglican prelates, Forbes, and with the lamented Liddon. And it appeared still more when the denominational barrier of his sympathy was no longer marked, and he, who had stood in the rank almost with De Maistre and Perrone, found himself acting for the same ends with their enemies, when he delivered a studied eulogy on Mignet, exalted the authority of Laurent in religious history and of Ferrari in civil, and urged the Bavarian academy to elect Taine, as a writer who had but one rival in France, leaving it to uncertain conjecture whether the man he meant was Renan. In theory it was his maxim that a man should guard against his friends. When he first addressed the university as Rector, saying that as the opportunity might never come again, he would employ it to utter the thoughts closest to his heart, he exhorted the students to be always true to their convictions and not to yield to surroundings; and he invoked, rightly or wrongly, the example of Burke, his favourite among public men, who, turning from his associates to obey the light within, carried the nation with him. A gap was apparent now between the spirit in which he devoted himself to the service of his Church and that of the men whom he most esteemed. At that time he was nearly the only German who knew Newman well and appreciated the grace and force of his mind. But Newman, even when he was angry, assiduously distinguished the pontiff from his court:

There will necessarily always be round the Pope second-rate people, who are not subjects of that supernatural wisdom which is his prerogative. For myself, certainly I have found myself in a different atmosphere, when I have left the Curia for the Pope himself.

Montalembert protested that there were things in Kirche und Kirchen which he would not have liked to say in public:

Il est certain que la seconde partie de votre livre déplaira beaucoup, non seulement à Rome, mais encore à la très grande majorité des Catholiques. Je ne sais donc pas si, dans le cas où vous m'eussiez consulté préalablement, j'aurais eu le courage d'infliger cette blessure à mon père et à mes frères.

Döllinger judged that the prerogative even of natural wisdom was often wanting in the government of the Church; and the sense of personal attachment, if he ever entertained it, had worn away in the friction and familiarity of centuries.

After the disturbing interlude of the Roman question he did not resume the history of Christianity. The second century with its fragments of information, its scope for piercing and conjecture, he left to Lightfoot. With increasing years he lost the disposition to travel on common ground, impregnably occupied by specialists, where he had nothing of his own to tell; and he preferred to work where he could be a pathfinder. Problems of Church government had come to the front, and he proposed to retraverse his subject, narrowing it into a history of the papacy. He began by securing his foundations and eliminating legend. He found so much that was legendary that his critical preliminaries took the shape of a history of fables relating to the papacy. Many of these were harmless: others were devised for a purpose, and he fixed his attention more and more on those which were the work of design. The question, how far the persistent production of spurious matter had permanently affected the genuine constitution and theology of the Church arose before his mind as he composed the Papstfabeln des Mittelalters. He indicated the problem without discussing it. The matter of the volume was generally neutral, but its threatening import was perceived, and twenty-one hostile critics sent reviews of it to one theological journal.

Since he first wrote on these matters, thirty years earlier, the advance of competitive learning had made it a necessity to revise statements by all accessible lights, and to subject authorities to a closer scrutiny. The increase in the rigour of the obligation might be measured by Tischendorf, who, after renewing the text of the New Testament in seven editions, had more than three thousand changes to make in the eighth. The old pacific superficial method yielded no longer what would be accepted as certain knowledge. Having made himself master of the reconstructive process that was carried on a little apart from the main chain of durable literature, in academic transactions, in dissertations and periodicals, he submitted the materials he was about to use to the exigencies of the day. Without it, he would have remained a man of the last generation, distanced by every disciple of the new learning. He went to work with nothing but his trained and organised common sense, starting from no theory, and aiming at no conclusion. If he was beyond his contemporaries in the mass of expedient knowledge, he was not before them in the strictness of his tests, or in sharpness or boldness in applying them. He was abreast as a critic, he was not ahead. He did not innovate. The parallel studies of the time kept pace with his; and his judgments are those which are accepted generally. His critical mind was pliant, to assent where he must, to reject where he must, and to doubt where he must. His submission to external testimony appeared in his panegyric of our Indian empire, where he overstated the increase of population. Informed of his error by one of his translators, he replied that the figures had seemed incredible also to him, but having verified, he found the statement so positively made that he did not venture to depart from it. If inclination ever swayed his judgment, it was in his despair of extracting a real available Buddha from the fables of Southern India, which was conquered at last by the ablest of Mommsen's pupils.