Reusch’s reflections on the interview with his Archbishop show what resistance cost him. “How painful it was, he wrote, although I continued calm and the Archbishop always friendly, you can well imagine. But I formed a gloomier opinion of his narrow-mindedness than ever before.” Melcher’s insistence on the duty of unlimited intellectual submission left, so far as Reusch could see, no room for reason. It provoked the criticism that the Archbishop would credit four Persons to the Trinity if a papal constitution demanded it. But for himself, Reusch wrote in terms almost of despair. That he might no longer pursue his mission as a teacher was hard enough. That he might no more discharge his priestly functions, nor obtain absolution and communion was terrible. But yet he would be more unhappy still if these had been obtained at the price of assenting to the dogma. And Reusch uttered his grief in the words of Ecclesiastes:—
“Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive. Yea, better is he than both they, which hath not yet been, who hath not seen the evil work that is done under the sun.”
There remained, however, a work for Reusch to do. He found within the old Catholic communion a freedom to retain unaltered the faith which, up to that year, he had taught within the communion of Rome.
4. The fate of Langen, Theological Professor of Bonn, was somewhat similar to that of Reusch. When asked for his assent to the new Decree, Langen contended that the University statutes secured him his office conditionally on assent to the decisions of Trent; and that no alteration of these conditions could be made without approval of the Government. The Archbishop overruled this contention, and Langen declined to submit. Like Reusch, he was excommunicated. Langen has left behind him a history of the Roman See, and an extremely learned and exhaustive history of interpretation of the Scripture-texts usually adduced in behalf of the papal claims. Both these works display that Langen could not accept the new definition without falsifying the facts of history.
5. Another German rejection of the doctrine is that of Dr Hasenclever.[419]
“With countless other companions in faith I find myself reduced by the Papal Decree of 18th July 1870 to the alternative of either denying against my conscience the ancient faith as I received it, and on the basis of which I have remained for five and twenty years in the Catholic Church, or of placing myself in hopeless antagonism to a justly revered authority through refusal to submit.”
Undoubtedly the principle is true that when the Church has once spoken all uncertainty is taken away; but no less undoubted is the principle that where a contradiction exists, a manifest deviation from tradition, it is impossible that it is the Church which has spoken. It is impossible, he says, for him to bring into harmony the new teaching on the Pope’s Infallibility with the Catholic Faith taught him by the Tridentine and Roman Catechism.
The constitution of the Church, he argued, differs from that of a State, for while the latter may assume at various periods a democratic, an aristocratic, a monarchical form—the former must maintain its self-identity. This principle of identity and continuity is, he acknowledges, recognised in the Anglican Church which, while uncertain of the validity of its claims, he admits, is thereby distinguished from the Protestant types. But his sympathies are with the principle that the constitution of the Church cannot change its form. He is as opposed to a spiritual dictatorship as to Protestantism itself. Is it possible that the conception of supreme authority in the Church which has held good for eighteen hundred years, is no longer decisive? So men enquired in amazement when the news of the schemes of the Roman Curia began to circulate. That some reforms should be necessary was natural enough; but that a radical change must be made in the constitution of the supreme teaching body—this was incredible even to many of the blindest followers of the Curia. The Church has never exhibited a trace of uncertainty on the method of securing finality in a question of faith. It has been through the Collective Episcopate united with its chief. In the Collective Episcopate as representative of Christendom at large, the Church has acknowledged the apostolic teaching office, the witness to its faith, the judge of error. The mission of a Universal Council is to give collective testimony to the faith of the Fathers. This collective testimony might be voiced through the Holy See, but it is impossible to discover in Revelation a basis for the theory that the collective testimony is not valid until the Holy See endorses it. The ancient principle is to rest in the testimony of all churches:—
“Ecumenical Councils,” says Alzog, speaking of the early centuries, “the real representatives of the Catholic spirit, were in these ages of burning controversy the decisive authority, the supreme tribunal which ended all dogmatic disputes. And,” adds Hasenclever, “it was exactly when this principle became challenged by another that the risk of schism appeared.”
Moreover, a mathematical formula may illustrate the effect of the papal claim on the Episcopate. If a+b=a then b=0; or, at any rate, is a practically negligible quantity.
Hasenclever complains that he can nowhere obtain a direct response to the question, How is it that innumerable treatises and works of all kinds approved by the Church have hitherto affirmed that Papal Infallibility is no part of the Catholic Faith? What particularly scandalised him was the sudden condemnation, by placing on the Index, books which have been for a considerable period accepted authorities within the Church. He failed to see that to bestow sanction publicly upon a treatise, and afterwards to pronounce it heretical, was consistent with the maintenance of an unchanged faith. Moreover, if Papal Infallibility had been the traditional principle, the entire history of the Church must have presented a very different appearance from what it does. Where, he asks, is any faith in an infallible Pope exhibited in the Church during the Arian struggles? Certainly the Bishops of the Sixth Ecumenical Council conducted matters on somewhat different lines from those suggested to us by infallibilists to-day. They treated the Pope Honorius just as they would have treated any other heretic. And his successors did the same. The infallibilist falls into Scylla if he escapes Charybdis. When entreated to make a sacrifice of his intellect to this demand of the Vatican Decree, Hasenclever can only reply that such sacrifice paralyses the innermost depths of personal existence. To him it is nothing less than a suicidal suppression of that characteristic which raises us into resemblance to God. Those who cannot bring themselves to this abandonment of their human dignity will be constrained to say, in spite of all the seductions of superficial and sophistic reasonings, that the doctrine of the personal infallibility of the Pope stands in irreconcilable contradiction with the actual faith of the Catholic Church; and, accordingly, it is impossible that a real Ecumenical Council should have decreed it.
6. But these were minor incidents. The religious attention of Germany centred on Döllinger at Munich. On 17th July Archbishop Scherr of Munich left Rome with the minority. On the 18th the new dogma was proclaimed. On the 19th Archbishop Scherr was back in Munich again. On the 21st the Theological Faculty, headed by Döllinger, met him. Scherr’s criticisms of the Roman procedure, says Döllinger’s German biographer, Friedrich, confirmed them in the views of the Council which they had already taken. But, said Scherr, Rome has spoken. There was nothing for it but submission. The Theological Faculty were totally unprepared for the Archbishop’s surrender. Upon Döllinger it created the most painful impression. He knew that the Archbishop’s convictions, better judgments, sympathies, were all on the other side; and that, like the other Bishops of the minority, he had abandoned the Council because he could neither bring himself to acquiesce silently in the proclamation of what he deprecated, nor summon courage to protest for what he had hitherto believed. The feebleness of the Archbishop’s excuses, the frank condemnation pronounced by him on the methods by which the result had been secured, only set in stronger light the incongruity of his submission. Naturally they served to confirm Döllinger still more in his opinion of the absence of real freedom in the Council Chamber at St Peter’s.
Dr Liddon, who was in Munich on 29th July, gave the following account of Döllinger some ten days after the passing of the Decree:—
“A large amount of our conversation, of course, turned on the Council and the Definition; and he speaks with the most entire unreserve. He says that the great danger now is lest the Bishops of the minority, being separated from each other, and exposed to the powerful influences which can be brought to bear on them, should gradually acquiesce. Nothing would be worse for the cause of the Church in Germany than the spectacle of such submission to a purely external and not really competent authority (he dwells much on the scheme de concilio, as completely destroying the freedom, and so the authority, of the Council), with a notorious absence of any internal assent. The Archbishop of Munich is very anxious. He told Dr Döllinger that the deputation which went to the Pope, begging him to spare the Church, nearly carried its point.”
It is clear from this and other sources that the Archbishop of Munich, if left to himself, had no desire to proceed to extremities with the opponents of the Decree. But Döllinger fully realised, ever since the first mention of Infallibility as a subject for decision, that excommunication lay before him if the Decree was passed. Archbishop Scherr found himself reluctantly driven to the painful task of imposing on the theologians a reversal of belief similar to that which he had himself undergone. Rome was determined that the Munich stronghold of the minority should be brought into line with the new Decree. The Archbishop was made the instrument for effecting this. He wrote a letter to the Munich Faculty of Theology, in which he said that harassing doubts widely prevailed as to the attitude which the Theological Faculty meant to adopt toward the Vatican Council. It was his duty as Archbishop to set these doubts at rest. As for himself, he frankly owned that, during the deliberation at Rome, he gave utterance to his own opinion with all the positiveness of a conviction attained after mature consideration. “But,” he added, “I never intended to retain this conviction of mine if the decision should turn out differently.” Accordingly he invites the Theological Faculty to follow suit. The faculty, as a body, complied. But neither Friedrich nor Döllinger. The Archbishop waited two months. Then he wrote entreating Döllinger to conform. To this Döllinger replied that assent to the recent Decree would require him to refute his lifelong historical teaching. He would have to declare that his doctrine hitherto was false and perverted. In the face of his public declarations no one would believe in the sincerity of his submission. All the world would consider the transition a hypocritical instance of convictions denied from fear and personal interest. In the terribly painful situation into which recent events had brought him, Döllinger asked for further delay. This was granted, but, of course, to no purpose. Just in this hour of critical suspense, when the decisive step must be taken, came the piteous appeal from Hefele. Was no compromise with the Archbishop possible? That Döllinger, the first of German theologians, should be suspended or even excommunicated; and that by an Archbishop who had not done a thousandth part of the service Döllinger had rendered to the Church! This was terrible. Hefele’s letter gave Döllinger what he calls the first completely sleepless night in his life. But it could not alter his convictions. Döllinger sent his answer in to the Archbishop. He took his definite and final stand on the ancient principles. He could do no other. Döllinger said, in his reply, that the Jesuits, in advancing their scheme of papal absolutism, assured their adherents and disciples, and convinced many, even Bishops, that the noblest Christian heroism consists in the sacrifice of the intellect, and in surrendering one’s mental judgment and self-acquired knowledge and power of discernment to an infallible papal magisterium as the only sure source of religious knowledge. This, in his opinion, was to elevate mental sloth to the dignity of a meritorious sacrifice, and to renounce the rights and the claims of history.
The question of Papal Infallibility was an historical question, which must be tested by historical investigation; by the patient scrutiny of facts in the centuries past. If this doctrine were true, it would assuredly be not merely one truth among many, but the actual foundation of the rest. How could the basal principle have been obscured through centuries?
“We are still,” wrote Döllinger to the Archbishop, “waiting the explanation how it is that, until 1,830 years had passed, the Church did not formulate into an article of faith a doctrine which the Pope, in a letter addressed to your Grace, calls the very foundation principle of Catholic faith and doctrine? How has it been possible that for centuries the Popes have overlooked the denial of this fundamental article of faith by whole countries and in whole theological schools? And was there a unity of the Church when there was a difference in the very fundamentals of belief? And—may I further add—how is it then that your Grace yourself resisted so long and so persistently the proclamation of this dogma? You answer, because it was not opportune. But can it ever be ‘inopportune’ to give believers the key to the whole building of faith, to proclaim the fundamental article on which all others depend? Are we not now all standing before a dizzy abyss which opened itself before our eyes on the 18th July?” Döllinger concluded with a deliberate and emphatic rejection of the new Decree: “As a Christian, as a theologian, as a historian, as a citizen, I cannot accept this doctrine.”
Döllinger’s biographer assures us that this reply to the Archbishop of Munich brought Döllinger hundreds of letters, telegrams, addresses from Germany, Austria, and Italy, in congratulation for his firmness and strength. The Archbishop was in great perplexity. He sent a telegram to Rome asking what his next move should be. Antonelli replied promptly and curtly that the whole affair was exclusively within the Archbishop’s jurisdiction. This cut off all delay and all retreat. Archbishop Scherr was thus driven forward from Rome, and reluctantly forced to take the final step. A protest signed by forty-three Catholic professors against episcopal tyranny was naturally without effect. So also was an appeal with many thousands of signatures. Theological students in Munich diocese were now forbidden to attend his lectures; and he was informed that although the Archbishop could not prevent his lecturing, yet he could only continue to do so in open opposition to his Bishop. This was followed a fortnight later by his formal excommunication, in which his biographer, Friedrich, was included.[420]
The exasperation at Munich is shown in a strongly worded protest[421] issued at Whitsuntide 1871, in which the signatories declare themselves confirmed in refusing the Vatican Decree by the duty, which neither Popes nor Bishops can dispute, of abiding in loyalty to the ancient faith even though an angel should teach them otherwise. It has been hitherto no doctrine of the Church, no part of Catholic faith, that every Christian possesses in the Pope an absolute overlord and master, to whom he is directly and immediately subjected, and whose decisions in faith and morals he is bound under penalty of eternal damnation to obey. It is notoriously no part of the teaching of the Church hitherto that the gift of Infallibility is entrusted to one individual. Peter speaks unmistakably to us in Scriptures through his deeds and his words and his letters; but all these breathe a totally different spirit from that of papal absolutism. The German minority Bishops show their bewilderment in their Pastoral letters. For none of them can induce themselves to follow Manning and the Jesuits in interpreting the Decrees in their natural obvious meaning. Moreover, the undersigned deplored that the Bishops are not ashamed to answer the conscientious outcry of their own dioceses with invectives against reason and learning. In previous centuries, when Bishops resorted to excluding a man from the Church, they did so on the ground of the novelty and untraditional character of his teaching. It was reserved for the present generation to see, what eighteen centuries have never beheld, a man condemned and excluded precisely because he clings to a doctrine which his fathers in the Church have taught him; refuses to change his faith as a cloak might be exchanged. That an unjust excommunication can only injure its inflicters—not the individual upon whom it is inflicted—is the universal teaching of the Fathers. Such excommunications are as invalid and ineffective as they are unjust. They cannot deprive the believer of the means of grace, nor a priest of his right to dispense them.
Such was the strain in which the Munich protest was written. Among the signatures which follow are those of Döllinger, Lord Acton, and Reinkens, afterwards Bishop of the Old Catholic Communion. The German Catholics, whom the Decree of Infallibility had excluded, gathered to form the Old Catholic Community.
Döllinger confesses that he had no hope whatever that under the next or one of the next Popes any important or essential change would be made for the better, since the order of the Jesuits formed the soul and sovereign of the whole Roman Church. Formerly there were counterbalancing influences: powerful religious orders, full of vitality, correcting the tendencies of the followers of Loyola. But these had become either powerless shadows, or satellites of the Jesuit dominating body.
“The tendency of events since 1870 was shown,” said Döllinger, “in the solemn proclamation of Liguori as Doctor of the Church:—
“A man whose false morals, perverse worship of the Virgin, constant use of the grossest fables and forgeries, make his writings a storehouse of errors and falsehoods. In the whole range of Church history I do not know a single example of such a terrible and pernicious confusion.”
The public papers repeatedly announced Dr Döllinger’s reconciliation with the Roman Communion. On one occasion he replied:—
“This is now the fourteenth time that my submission has been announced by Ultramontane papers; and it will often occur again. Rest assured that I shall not dishonour my old age with a lie before God and man.”
Ten years after the Vatican Decision, Döllinger received a pathetic, imploring appeal from a lady of high social position, entreating him to rescue himself from the everlasting destruction which his exclusion would entail, and to have mercy on his own unhappy soul.
Döllinger’s answer is memorable:—
“I am now in my eighty-first year, and was a public teacher of theology for forty-seven years, during which long period no censure, nor even a challenge that I should defend myself, or make a better explanation, has ever reached me from ecclesiastical dignitaries, either at home or abroad. I had never taught the new Articles of Faith advanced by Pius IX. and his Council.... Then came the fatal year, 1870.... It was in vain that I begged them to let me remain by the faith and confession to which I had hitherto been faithful without blame and without contradiction. Yesterday still orthodox, I was to-day a heretic worthy of excommunication; not because I had changed my teaching, but because others had considered it advisable to undertake the alteration, and to make opinions into Articles of Faith.”
But why not make a sacrifice of his intellect:—
“Because,” says Döllinger, “if I did so in a question which is for the historical eye perfectly clear and unambiguous, there would then be no longer for me any such thing as historical truth and certainty; I should then have to suppose that my whole life long I had been in a world of dizzy illusion, and that in historical matters I am altogether incapable of distinguishing truth from fable and falsehood.”
But this would undermine his whole confidence in historic fact, and thereby shatter the foundation of his religion. For it is on historic facts that Christianity itself reposes. Prior to the historic problem of the Papacy is the historic problem of the Apostolic times. “I must first be convinced that the principal events narrated in the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles are essentially true and inviolable.” And to destroy confidence in historic judgment in one case is to ruin its validity in all others.
Archbishop Scherr was succeeded in the diocese of Munich in 1878 by Von Steichele, a former pupil of Döllinger, and attached to him by feelings of the deepest veneration. Von Steichele made overtures for Döllinger’s reconciliation with the Papacy. He wrote in 1879 a delightful letter:—
“With the thankfulness of a pupil to a venerable teacher; with the respect of a disciple for the honoured bearer of the richest knowledge; with the love of an anxious Bishop for the brother who unhappily is not yet at one with him in things of highest moment.”
Döllinger sent a frank but decided reply. Return was impossible. He said that his excommunication had been unjust, his treatment unexampled in the history of the Church. The mediæval theory of excommunication rendered the individual liable to bodily harm. It would appear that this theory was not obsolete; for the chief of the police had warned him to be on his guard, as they had knowledge that an act of violence was plotted against him. Friedrich says elsewhere that the house in which he and Döllinger lived, was specially protected by the police for a year after the excommunication. These dangers, said Döllinger, were long since past. But he could not enter again into relationship with the authors of these actions. He had long ago challenged his former colleagues to know how they reconciled acceptance of the Vatican expositions with their conscience and their knowledge of the facts:—
“The answer was always an evasive one, or an embarrassed shrug of the shoulder. They said that this was a question of detail, which the individual priest or layman did not need to enter into. Or they said that the very essence and merit of believing consisted precisely in giving oneself up blindly and implicitly to the powers that be, and in leaving it to them to settle any contradictions that might exist. I do not need to tell you what an impression deplorable subterfuges of this kind have made upon me.”
This was Döllinger’s final attitude toward the Roman Communion up to the last moment of consciousness on earth. He never by any act of will deviated from testimony to the Church’s traditional Faith, in which the theory of Papal Infallibility was not included. To the end of his days he held that this theory could not possibly be reconciled with the broad facts of Christian history.
The new decree was profoundly uncongenial to the mind of Lord Acton. He had already expressed his sense that recent developments of papal authority were inconsistent with the earlier principles of Christendom, and disastrous alike to freedom of investigation, and to the real interests of the Church. Manning’s theories on papal sovereignty were a trial to Lord Acton’s historical intellect. Manning simply reproduced the mediæval exaggerations of temporal power which had done incalculable mischief ever since Boniface VIII. endorsed them in his struggle with France.
“You are certainly not too severe on Manning’s elaborate absurdities,” wrote Lord Acton;[422] “I had no idea he had gone so far.... It is impossible to exaggerate the danger of such doctrines as his. I wish you would take the line of Catholic indignation a little.”
While the Council sat, Lord Acton was in Rome, where popular opinion ascribed the Articles in the Augsburg Gazette to his instrumentality. “People do not venture to proceed against Acton,” wrote Gregorovius;[423] “but it is known that he writes, and that he pays highly for the materials that are supplied him.”
Archbishop Manning had positive knowledge that Lord Acton was in constant communication with Mr Gladstone, supplying him with information hostile to the Council; “poisoning his mind,” as Archbishop Manning phrases it, against Papal Infallibility and the Pope’s friends and supporters. Lord Acton, as a friend and disciple of Dr Döllinger, had great influence with the German Bishops, who, for the most part belonged to the Opposition; and was also on confidential terms with Mgr. Darboy, Archbishop of Paris, and with the Bishop of Orleans, and had not a little to do with bringing into closer union the Bishops of France and Germany. He was also active in furnishing the Opposition with Dr Döllinger and Professor Friedrich’s historical criticisms of the Papacy. Lord Acton, as Manning knew well,[424] did more than any other man, except the Bishop of Orleans, in exciting public feeling, especially in Germany and England, against the Vatican Council.
When, therefore, the Vatican Decree was passed and the process of reducing objectors to uniformity began, it was scarcely probable that Lord Acton would be left unchallenged. Nor did he continue silent. He published a sketch of the history of the Vatican Council[425] which, while confined strictly to facts, must have been supremely distasteful to the victorious side. When he said that Pius was bound up with the Jesuits; made them a channel for his influence and became himself an instrument of their designs; when he gave illustrations of authority overriding history, and the unscrupulous suppression of uncongenial facts; when he quoted at length Montalembert’s emphatic letter on the transformation of Catholic France into an anti-chamber of the Vatican—he was recording what was calculated to advance the other side. Yet, of course, the registration of adverse facts is a different province from personal belief.
But Acton went so far as to describe the Infallibility doctrine as independent of reason or history.
“The sentiment,” he wrote,[426] “on which Infallibility is founded could not be reached by argument, the weapon of human reason; but resided in conclusions transcending evidence, and was the inaccessible postulate rather than the demonstrable consequence of a system of religious faith.” The opponents were, according to Acton, “baffled and perplexed by the serene vitality of a view which was impervious to proof....
“No appeal to revelation or tradition, to reason or conscience, appeared to have any bearing whatever on the issue.”
This persistent attempt to render authority independent of evidence was, if especially prominent in the Infallibility disputes, a deeply seated and long existing disease. It pervaded the theological school then dominant in Rome, but it had, according to Acton, exerted its baneful influence over the Roman Church for centuries. The Jesuit theologian, Petavius, in the seventeenth century supported existing authority at the expense of the past.
“According to Petavius, the general belief of Catholics at a given time is the word of God, and of higher authority than all antiquity and all the Fathers. Scripture may be silent, and tradition contradictory, but the Church is independent of both. Any doctrine which Catholic divines commonly assert, without proof, to be revealed, must be taken as revealed.... In this way, after Scripture had been subjugated, tradition itself was deposed; and the constant belief of the past yielded to the general conviction of the present. And as antiquity had given way to universality, universality made way for authority.”
Thus in Acton’s view the dominant school in the Roman Church were resolved that “authority must conquer history.” He went so far as to say that:—
“Almost every writer who really served Catholicism fell sooner or later under the disgrace or the suspicion of Rome.” Also that “the division between the Roman and the Catholic elements in the Church made it hopeless to mediate between them.”
Acton’s description of the Vatican Assembly itself could only leave one conclusion as to its methods and impartiality, on the reader’s mind. He records how the Bishops on arriving in Rome, were “received with the assurance that nobody had dreamt of defining Infallibility, or that, if the idea had been entertained at all, it had been abandoned.” He records the Pope’s assurance that “he would sanction no proposition that could sow dissension among the Bishops.” He asserts that the freedom of the Bishops was taken away by the regulations of the Bull Multiplices inter imposed upon them without their consent, and with refusal even to allow their protests to be uttered. He says that many Bishops were “bewildered and dispirited,” by the character of these Regulations. He says:—
“It was certain that any real attempt that might be made to prevent the definition could be overwhelmed by the preponderance of those Bishops whom the modern constitution of the Church places in dependence on Rome.”
He reveals his sympathies in the strongest way by pouring out his moral indignation on the minority Bishops for their weakness.
“They showed no sense of their mission to renovate Catholicism....
“They were content to leave things as they were, to gain nothing if they lost nothing, to renounce all premature striving for reform if they could succeed in avoiding a doctrine which they were as unwilling to discuss as to define.”
The contemplation of all this causes Acton to write:—
“The Church had less to fear from the violence of the majority than from the inertness of their opponents. No proclamation of false doctrines could be so great a disaster as the weakness of faith which would prove that the power of recovering the vital force of Catholicism was extinct in the Episcopate.”
And then Acton traces the gradual tightening of the cords as the feeble and unhappy minority are more and more overcome. The new Regulations determined that decrees should be carried by majority. They could not be accepted by the minority without virtual admission that the Pope must be infallible. For
“If the act of a majority of Bishops in the Council, possibly not representing a majority in the Church, is infallible, it derives its Infallibility from the Pope.”
“But it was a point which Rome could not surrender without giving up its whole position. To wait for unanimity was to wait for ever, and to admit that a minority could prevent or nullify the dogmatic action of the Papacy was to renounce Infallibility. No alternative remained to the opposing Bishops but to break up the Council.”
This was exactly where their courage failed them. They protested, but submitted. And here comes Acton’s judgment on their submission:—
“They might conceivably contrive to bind and limit dogmatic Infallibility with conditions so stringent as to evade many of the objections taken from the examples of history; but in requiring submission to Papal Decrees on matters not Articles of Faith, they were approving that of which they knew the character, they were confirming without let or question a power they saw in daily exercise, they were investing with new authority the existing Bulls, and giving unqualified sanction to the Inquisition and the Index, to the murder of heretics and the deposing of kings. They approved what they were called on to reform, and solemnly blessed with their lips what their hearts knew to be accursed.”
The effect of this moral feebleness on the Roman authorities was, says Acton, that
“the Court of Rome became thenceforth reckless in its scorn of the opposition, and proceeded in the belief that there was no protest they would not forget, no principle they would not betray, rather than defy the Pope in his wrath. It was at once determined to bring on the discussion of Infallibility.”
Lord Acton’s objections to the Infallibility school were clearly of a triple character. In relation to History: it betrayed a resolve to instate Authority independently of proof. It was the product of indifference to fact. “The serene vitality of a view impervious to proof,” could only shock and distress a profound veneration for the actual. To those who build on facts such disregard for evidence must appear as building without foundation. In relation to method: if the origin of the doctrine was insecure, no less unsatisfactory was the method by which it was decreed. Acton’s description makes the Decree the product of cowardly weakness on the one side, and unscrupulous coercion on the other. The spiritual value of the result obtained might be measured by the immorality of the means employed. It could not, it did not, enlist his loyalty or command his reverence. In relation to results: plainly Acton did not believe that the limitless exaltation of Authority was beneficial, or that it could lead to anything but results disastrous to the real interests of the Church. The severity of his judgment on the minority, for investing with new Authority the Papal Decree, was born of a deep conviction that already, on countless occasions, that Authority had proved excessive, injurious to the advance of truth, and the freedom of the individual. It is probably quite correct that Acton’s objections were more on the moral and political or social side than on the strictly theological. But his sharp distinction between the Catholic and the Roman elements within the Church is really a distinction in dogmatic principles. And nothing can exceed his loathing for principles commonly known as Ultramontane. Acton and Manning stand at the opposite poles in their anticipations of the results of the dogma of Infallibility.
But Lord Acton went far beyond all this. He wrote a letter[427] to a German Bishop reproaching the minority with inconsistency in discontinuing their opposition after the Infallibility Decree was published. In this letter he gives the actual language of the leaders of the minority, and concludes—
“The Council is thus judged by the lips of its most able members. They describe it as a conspiracy against truth and rights. They declare that the new dogmas were neither taught by the Apostles nor believed of the Fathers.”
This letter was described by the Dublin Review[428] as “an open and decisive revolt against the Church.”
Yet it does not appear that the writer was challenged to express his adhesion to the new Decree. But Lord Acton’s letters during this period are yet to be published. Abbot Gasquet[429] omits all the critical years from 1869–1874. Lord Acton, however, did not ultimately escape unchallenged. He was not in Manning’s Diocese or we may feel fairly certain that the Archbishop of Westminster would have pounced upon him.
Meantime Mr Gladstone argued that the Vatican Decrees involved political consequences adverse to modern freedom.[430] The Church’s power to employ coercion was asserted by the Syllabus, and acknowledged by Newman.[431] Now that such consequences could be drawn from the Vatican Decrees Lord Acton did not dream of denying.[432] Gladstone’s argument could not be met by denial. And, of course, the whole sympathies of Acton’s mind were with Gladstone so far as repudiation of the use of coercive force in religion is concerned. Nothing in the world roused Acton’s moral indignation more than Inquisition and Liguori’s ethics. He admitted with characteristic sincerity that “Gladstone had not darkened the dark side of the question.” All he could answer was that it does not follow that inferences which can be drawn will actually be made. He held that “the Council did not so directly deal with these matters as to exclude a Catholic explanation.” The Council had not so acted “that no authentic gloss or explanation could ever put those perilous consequences definitely out of the way.” This was certainly a curious defence of an Ecumenical Decree. It does not exclude a Catholic explanation. But this was all he could say. He could not even say what that true explanation was; for on that ground his own authorities might reject him. “I could not take my stand, for good or evil, as an interpreter of the Decrees, without risk of authoritative contradiction.” This attitude, says Acton, “was no attack on the Council, although it was an attack on Ultramontanism.”[433]
But Lord Acton proceeded to defend the Council in the Times newspaper[434] from Mr Gladstone’s inferences.
“I affirmed that the apprehension of civil danger from the Vatican Council overlooks the infinite subtlety and inconsistency with which men practically elude the yoke of official uniformity in matters of opinion.”
And, as an illustration of this infinite subtlety in eluding authority, he quoted the example of Archbishop Fénelon, who “while earning admiration for his humility under censure [by the Pope] had retained his former views unchanged.” Fénelon wrote:—[435]
“I accept this Brief ... simply absolutely and without shadow of reserve. God forbid that I should ever be remembered except as a pastor who believed it his duty to be more docile than the humblest of his sheep, and who placed no limit to his submission.”
Three weeks later Fénelon wrote to a friend:—
“I acknowledge no uncertainty either as to the correctness of my opinions throughout or as to the orthodoxy of the doctrine which I have maintained.... Unless competent persons rouse themselves in Rome the faith is in great danger.”
It was no more than natural, after such public letters, that Lord Acton should be called in question by the authorities of his Communion. It was asserted in the Roman Church that he did not believe the Vatican Decrees. Manning wrote to enquire what construction he placed upon them in order that the minds of the multitude might be reassured. A curious and very instructive correspondence[436] ensued. Lord Acton took advice as to the answer he should give.
“The great question is,” he wrote privately to a friend, “whether I ought to say that I submit to the acts of this as of other Councils, without difficulty or examination (meaning that I feel no need of harmonising and reconciling what the Church herself has not yet had time to reconcile and to harmonise), or ought not the word submit to be avoided, as easily misunderstood.”
After further reflection Lord Acton proposed to say:—
“I do not reject—which is all the Council requires under its extreme sanctions. As the Bishops who are my guides have accepted the decrees, so have I. They are a law to me as much as those at Trent, not from any private interpretation, but from the authority from which they come. The difficulties about reconciling them with tradition, which seem so strong to others, do not disturb me a layman, whose business it is not to explain theological questions, and who leaves that to his betters.[437]
“Manning ... says he must leave the thing in the hands of the Pope, as everybody tells him I don’t believe the Vatican Council. He means, it seems to me, that he simply asks Rome to excommunicate me—a thing really almost without example and incredible in the case of a man who has not attacked the Council, who declares that he has not, and that the Council is his law, though private interpretations are not, whose Diocesan has, after enquiry, pronounced him exempt from all anathema.”[438]
Against Lord Acton no further action was taken. The disastrous effect of the excommunication of Döllinger may have made Authority cautious in the exercise of this deadly weapon. Acton indeed submitted; but Manning’s misgivings seem more than justified. It is difficult to define the sense in which Acton became a believer in the new Decree. “He remained all his life,” says Bryce,[439] “a faithful member of the Roman Communion, while adhering to the views which he advocated in 1870.”
It is quite true that Acton was not an Anglican; he was still less a Protestant. He never joined the old Catholic movement, and is said to have dissuaded his friends from taking that course. But it is certain that he was never an Ultramontane. The distinction he drew between Catholic and Roman elements in the Church helps to explain his own position. He was a Catholic as opposed to the modern Roman type.
If, as Pius IX. asserted, Catholic and Ultramontane are synonymous, then Acton’s position was precarious. But their identity is what he persistently and firmly denied. He considered Ultramontanism as an unhappy and mischievous influence perverting truths and ignoring history, speculative in its origin, and injurious in its results. He was well aware, his historic insight made it clearer to him than to many, that the school he resented was a long-standing disease; that its presence could be traced for centuries, if in a less pronounced and virulent form than to-day. But the long-standing nature of the disease did not shake his faith in the certainty of a remedy, and a removal sooner or later. He did not, it has been well said, identify the long-lived with the eternal.
Sooner or later then, Ultramontanism, according to Acton’s views, was destined to pass away. It was no more than a temporary, if protracted, disease from which the Church must at length recover. Meanwhile, therefore, he held to his post, accepting the present discomfiture in the hope of better days; waiting until this tyranny be overpast. He had no thought of departure. The Roman Communion was the Church of his birth and of his devotional affinities. He spoke of it reverentially as “the Church whose communion is dearer to me than life.”[440] He would never have left it of his own accord. But, while wholly identified with the ancient Catholic conceptions, he absolutely repudiated the principles of the Ultramontane. By what process he retained his place while Döllinger was exiled seems not altogether clear. Acton felt acutely the possibility that, like Döllinger, he also might be cast out.
Whether wisdom or prudence or diplomacy refrained from him and let him alone, there at any rate he lived and died. But the legitimacy or consistency of his position was the theme of a fierce and bitter controversy in the Roman journals after he was dead.
So the great struggle in the Roman Communion between the episcopal and the papal conceptions of Authority, the collective and the individual, came to an end. Every Bishop of the minority submitted. This is a magnificent tribute to the power of Rome. It held its defeated Episcopate in unbroken unity. Only the old Catholic movement created an independent community. But when the motives are considered which induced the minority to yield, the strongest principle appears to be the maintenance of external unity. The abler minds resisted, after the Decree was known, so long as resistance was possible. Only when the presence of threatened excommunication drew them to an ultimate decision, the Bishops submitted, with what grace they could, to a Decree which they dared no longer resist. But the submission is, even then, cautious, reluctant, and reserved. In some instances it is yielded in a tone of curtness or asperity. In other instances, with comments and explanations, in private letters, wholly inconsistent with genuine faith. It is difficult to find in a single minority submission the joyous devotion which is surely due to a heaven-sent revelation of eternal truth. They do not accept the doctrine as a blessed enlightenment, but rather as a heavy burden to which they are unwillingly obliged to coerce their priests. They do not appear like men whose intensity of conviction enables them to say:—“It seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us.” They would infinitely sooner ask no questions, if Rome would only let them. They are driven to excommunicate others, much against their will, for continuing to hold what they themselves had taught them, and were, until recently, inwardly persuaded was true. It is a painful and unattractive sight. In the frankness of confidential utterances after the event they owned with manifest sincerity that they did not believe the Decision valid, nor the Doctrine part of the Historic Faith. But, being forced by Authority to choose between submission and excommunication, they mostly preferred submission. The choice is intelligible. They loved the Church. Taught to regard its limits as practically identical with those of the Kingdom of Heaven—yet certain that history contradicted what they were now required to believe, they were placed in the terrible dilemma of loyalty to reason against religious interest, or to religious interest against their reason. The issue was solemn whichever side they chose. But the prior question which the alternative raises is this: “What is the spiritual value of an Absolute Authority which inflicted such an awful dilemma upon its own devoted sons?”