THE DÖLLINGER SCANDAL.
FROM THE HISTORISCH-POLITISCHE BLAETTER.
During the course of the year 1857 we published in these pages an exhaustive article on the philosophy of Baader. Before the article was sent to press, the editor of Baader’s complete works gave to the public the author’s correspondence in another volume, the appearance of which occasioned the most painful surprise among the admirers of the great thinker. The book showed that, in his later years, Baader’s mind was out of harmony with the church; and that his tone towards it had grown to be one of bitterness even. As was wont to be the case in those happier days, the editors of these pages turned to Dr. Döllinger for an explanation of the glaring contradictions between the earlier and later views of Dr. Baader. The result was a postscript to the article above referred to, written by Dr. Döllinger, and which may be seen in the fortieth volume of the Historisch-Politische Blätter, p. 178.
In this postscript, Dr. Döllinger pointed out from the correspondence itself what were the reasons of the change, and showed that Baader’s animosity against the church rested only on extraneous and accidental causes, and had nothing to do with his philosophy. “No further key”—these are Döllinger’s concluding words—“will be needed to understand how the broad chasm that separates the calm convictions of the ripe man in his prime from the passionate, almost childlike, outbursts of mental impotence of the old man in his decline, was overleaped.”
These lines were written by Dr. Döllinger thirteen years ago, and we have often read them since. Step by step, he has himself proceeded in a course towards the church which he so severely censured in the philosopher of Munich.
The fall of the two men is to a certain extent the same. The gray-haired church historian, too, is separated by a great chasm from what he was in his prime—at a great distance from the convictions that guided him when he was in the zenith of his intellectual power.
His deportment and language betray signs of ungovernable passion, incompatible with the self-possession of a man who understands his own mind.
We have a right to seek in his case, also, for a psychological solution of the change that has left him the very reverse of what he was. In his case, as in that of Baader, it will be seen that the reasons have nothing to do with his erudition as a church historian; that they are of a purely “extraneous and accidental character.” But, indeed—and this is the great difference between the two—in Baader’s case, the motives were of a private, domestic nature; in the case of Döllinger, they are of a public and political nature. To express it in a word, it is the spirit of the times and of the world that has carried Döllinger into the fatal gulf. Döllinger’s fall, his breaking off from all he was in the past, is only a piece of the political history of Bavaria during the last twenty years. The Council and the definition of the 18th of July have only hastened the matter; they
have merely given the disease, in its crisis, an acute form; but, without them, the break would still have taken place; for a current of thought had set in in Döllinger’s mind which would have necessitated it. When, therefore, we are asked how it happens that a highly learned and highly respected man, like Döllinger, in the enjoyment of a completely independent position, could cast himself into a current running counter to his whole previous life, our answer is very simple; for, from the very beginning of a certain period in the history of Bavaria, every true Catholic was called upon to bear his cross with the church; and it is not given to every one to choose being put in the background when he needs only to yield in order to reap his share of the honors of this world.
It was beyond a doubt impossible for Döllinger to add anything to his reputation for learning. Was he not the head and ornament of the Catholic school of Munich? And, by the way, it is beyond a doubt that that school had taught as a body, concerning the ex cathedrâ decisions of the Holy See, neither more nor less than is now required by the decrees of the Council of the Vatican. Witnesses can be found for every day and year, from among the students of the Munich theological faculty, from the Bishop of Mainz down to the humblest parish priest, to show from their notes and memoranda that Döllinger himself taught exactly what the Archbishop of Munich requires him now to subscribe to. Whoever questions the infallibility of the Papal decisions contradicts the present and past testimony of the church, and must deny the infallibility of the church itself—such was the view of the whole Munich school; such was Döllinger’s own view.