Chapter 6
The ‘End of History’?
In the history of the controversial movement Liberal Catholicism/Catholic Liberalism, the most eminent proponent of the political, philosophical and intellectual principles and premises on which it was to evolve in England in the nineteenth century was the author of the famous maxim, ‘power tends to corrupt and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely’, Lord Acton (1834–1902).
A devout Catholic and a fervent Liberal, Lord Acton led the way for a thorough reflection on a possible reconciliation between the tenets of liberalism and the doctrines of Catholicism in post-revolutionary modern societies. Founding and participating in the major organs which fuelled and propagated the Liberal Catholic thought and ideology (The Rambler (1848–62), The Chronicle (1867–68), the North British Review (1869–71)),1 he became regius professor at Cambridge, at the end of his life, in 1895, and inaugurated the Cambridge Modern History. If he was influenced by his Catholic mother’s aristocratic and cosmopolitan background, he was above all marked by his intellectual apprenticeship and education in Paris with Félix Dupanloup (1802–78) and notably in Munich by the liberal Catholic Church historian and theologian Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger (1799–1890).
Published at the time when the Springtime of the Peoples, the unification of Italy, and the annexation of papal territories deeply questioned the temporal and spiritual power of the Pope, most of his work – placed on the Index – was devoted to the theorising of a Catholic approach to liberalism. In Rome before and during the First Vatican Council, Lord Acton played a major role in the debate which opposed the ultramontane to the liberal bishops by providing the minority with an impressive knowledge of ecclesiastical history in works that were published between 1864 and 1874 and by systematically contradicting the Pope’s partisans’ position. Following the publication of the Pope’s encyclical Quanta Cura and Syllabus of Errors issued in 1864, the affirmation of papal infallibility by the First Vatican Council (1869–70) – the doctrine that the Pope, acting as a supreme teacher and under certain conditions, cannot err when he teaches in matters of faith or morals – was the response of the papacy to the post-revolutionary society.
This modern and scientific age posed not only a political problem to the church, that of power and authority, but also an intellectual one, that of knowledge. Was ist Aufklärung? (What is Enlightenment?): as Kant had put it in 1784, knowledge became the arbiter of truth and the true vehicle and warrant of power for a whole generation of historians influenced by German scientific research, such as Lord Acton. It is as a scientific historian that his work needs to be considered. Beyond the possible reconciliation between Catholicism and liberalism, the relationship between power and knowledge that Lord Acton proposed highlights both the tensions and coherence of his liberal Catholic thought.
To what extent did this combination of liberalism and Catholicism lead Lord Acton to condemn papal infallibility as a power against liberty, science and history? How must historical, ecclesiastical knowledge and the ‘end of history’ in Lord Acton’s work weaken the papal power and allow for the reconciliation between ecclesiastical and liberal history, between Christian providentialism and social bliss? We will first look into Acton’s questioning of the infallible power of the Pope before probing the role of science in history and politics and tackling papal absolutism as a power against history and history’s ‘end’: liberal democracy.
Since the First Vatican Council (1869–70), the concept of infallibility has presided over the theological debate. Until the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), which proposed a detailed development of this idea, the question of infallibility was extensively discussed by theologians who sought to decipher its paramount theological expression.2 The notion of infallibility was, in the New Testament, founded on the passages where Jesus Christ bestowed on the disciples or to the apostles the authority to teach, and on the definition of the church, the manifestation of the ‘revealed religion’ instituted by Christ, as epitomising the column and foundation of truth (Lacoste, 1998). The aim of its very existence was, as Acton maintained, ‘expressly for the purpose of preserving a definite body of truth’ (Acton, 1985–88 [orig. ed. 1864], p. 244). It was the guardian of the whole Christian truth. According to the Roman Catholic doctrine, the charisma or power of infallibility is granted to the church as well as to the episcopal body when the latter exerts the magisterium jointly with the successor of Peter (Lacoste, 1998). According to the First Vatican Council, the exercise of an infallible magisterium was a papal prerogative. The dogmatic constitution Pastor Aeternus assigned, in effect, infallibility to the Pope when he intervened ex cathedra i.e.: ‘that in his character as Pastor and Doctor of all Christians, and by virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he lays down that a certain doctrine concerning faith or morals is binding upon the universal Church’. Taking up Döllinger’s thesis, Acton insisted:
The Christian Fathers not only teach that the Pope is fallible but deny him the right of deciding dogmatic questions without a council […] those passages of Scripture which are used to prove that it is infallible are not so interpreted by the Fathers. They all, eighteen in number, explain the prayer of Christ for Peter, without reference to the Pope. Not one of them believes that Papacy is the rock on which He built His Church. [Acton, 1985–88 [orig. ed. 1869], p. 282]
If the Catholic doctrine of infallibility pointed out that the revealed truth had remained unaltered in the proclamation of the church, this quality has, nonetheless, been subjected to given historical conditions and to the analogical nature of every theological statement (Acton, 1985–88 [orig. ed. 1869]). The fundamental problem posed by this notion of infallibility was thus to determine the legitimacy of a priori infallible theses. ‘No institution’, Lord Acton claimed, ‘could obtain with immediate certainty that knowledge as a council was not a priori ecumenical and the Holy See not separately infallible’ (Acton, 1985–88 [orig. ed. 1869]) in as much as the truth of these propositions would then not need to be recognised by the faithful. Yet, as Acton assessed, no doctrine could be used if it was not accepted by those to whom it was destined.
In the history of the dogma, infallibility was, above all, envisaged as a divine characteristic. Thomas Aquinas contemplated it as a consequence of divine prescience and providence. That is why the concept of infallibility could not be directly extended to the earthly church. As Acton argued, one of the most common and vulgar mistakes was to ‘confound the human element with the divine in the Holy See’, to ignore the distinction between the ‘sinful agents and the divine institution’, between the eternal church and the earthly church (Acton, 1985–88 [orig. ed. 1864]). According to the symbol of Nicaea (325), the church was holy but the theologians had also described it in its concrete reality as a corpus permixtum composed of sinful members. The council texts have, however, endeavoured not to attribute the predicate of sanctity to the eternal church alone but also to the earthly church, insisting on the ‘subjective’ holiness of its members and not on the ‘objective’ sanctity of institutions and doctrines (Lacoste, 1998; Acton, 1985–88 [orig. ed. 1864]). A genuine doctrine of infallibility was then inconceivable for the historical critic. In the sense of an impossibility of falling into error, there was as little mention of infallibility in the texts of Scripture, as in the rare quotations from the Fathers, for Acton. ‘Great doctrinal errors have been sometimes accepted, and sometimes originated by Popes’ (Acton, 1985–88 [orig. ed. 1864]). Though the human element in ecclesiastical administration endeavoured to keep itself out of sight and to deny its own existence, ‘the most severe exposure of the part played by this human element is found in histories which show the undeniable existence of sin, error or fraud in the high places of the Church’ (Acton, 1985–88 [orig. ed. 1864], p. 241). That is why, even infallible doctrinal decisions could not express the entire truth of the supernatural object of faith and no authority could impose error. And, if it resisted the truth, the truth had to be upheld until it was admitted.
But how and by whom? How to obey whatever authority expresses that knowledge of which the church is the keeper, how to legitimate a human authority aimed at protecting, preserving and propagating the eternal divine truth and Catholic dogma if it was not infallible were the issues which Acton attempted to explain in his work via scientific knowledge and methodology.
In the 1860s, Roman Catholic theologians sought to adapt the church to the Modern Age, to reconcile the recent acquisition in knowledge with the demands pertaining to faith. The Munich Congress, which Acton attended, chaired by Döllinger and held in 1863, illustrated this will. German science had raised the issue of the just autonomy of university research in relation to the legitimate doctrinal authority of the church. The main object was to ‘found faith on the spirit of the time and not to integrate the spirit of the time to faith’ (Lacoste, 1998).
The Brief that the Pope addressed on 21 December 1863 to the archbishop of Munich, following the Congress, clearly displayed its opposition to this initiative touching upon the action of the German divines. As Acton put it, the Brief affirmed that the common opinions and explanation of Catholic divines ‘ought not to yield to the progress of secular science and that the course of theological knowledge ought to be controlled by the decrees of the Index’ (Acton, 1985–88 [orig. ed. 1864], pp. 251–52). Paramount consideration was given to the ‘fear of scandal’, as Acton ascertained, in order to adjust the relations between science and authority. Books were forbidden, not merely because their statements were denied but because they seemed injurious ‘to morals, derogatory to authority or dangerous to faith’. And to be so, Acton claimed, it was not necessary that they should be untrue. The policy was therefore to allow such truths to be put forward only hypothetically or altogether to suppress them. The latter alternative being especially appropriate, according to Acton, to historical investigations as they contained ‘most elements of danger’ (Acton, 1985–88 [orig. ed. 1864], p. 241).
The increase in the means of inquiry into ecclesiastical history fostered the effort made to keep the knowledge of ecclesiastical history from the faithful. The main instrument for preventing this historical scrutiny was and had long been the Index of prohibited books which was accordingly directed ‘not against falsehood only but particularly against certain departments of truth’ and gave ‘currency to a fabulous and fictitious picture of the progress and action of the Church’ (Acton, 1985–88 [orig. ed. 1864], pp. 243–44). This fictitious picture was particularly useful for those who used Scripture to prove the infallibility of the Pope, according to Acton. ‘The passage from the Catholicism of the Fathers to that of modern Popes was accomplished by wilful falsehood and the whole structure of traditions, laws, and doctrines that support the theory of Infallibility […] stood on a basis of fraud’ (Acton, 1985–88 [orig. ed. 1869], p. 283).
The substitution of the ancient constitution of the church with another system, contrary to it ‘in principle, in spirit and in action’ and based on fraud dated back to the middle of the ninth century as Acton made clear. Since then, the papacy ‘ha[d] taught false doctrines, ha[d] excommunicated men who were right while Rome was wrong’ by using devices by which it obtained acceptance and a ‘spurious code’ that replaced ‘the authentic law of the Church’. It had led popes to proclaim ‘as a dogma what [was] false’, a grave error that had long ‘overclouded the Church’ and became the basis of the modern Roman theory. ‘The chronic malady’, as Acton called it, had become acute and a serious crisis was at hand, according to him.
One of the crucial elements of the controversy that appeared during the First Vatican Council was the use of history in theological debate. The application of the historical and literary critical methodology to the Holy Scripture and to the history of the origins of the church prompted the crisis. The emergence of historical consciousness was pioneered by Christian scholars and notably by German universities in the nineteenth century. Döllinger spearheaded this historicising of religious texts in applying the methodology that Leopold von Ranke was to expound in history to theology.
The main problem, for Acton and Döllinger, was that the theory of infallibility propounded by the partisans of the Pope resided in conclusions transcending evidence and relied on inaccessible postulate ‘rather than [on] a demonstrable consequence of a system of religious faith’. It was not only founded on an illogical and uncritical habit but on ‘unremitting dishonesty in the use of texts’ (Acton, 1985–88 [orig. ed. 1870], p. 306) according to them. As the resources of medieval learning were too slender to preserve an authentic record of the growth and settlement of the Catholic doctrine, Acton explained, many writings of the Fathers were interpolated, others were unknown so that spurious matter was accepted in their place (Acton, 1985–88 [orig. ed. 1870], p. 308). The Word of God and the authority of the church came to be declared the two sources of religious knowledge. ‘Divines of this school’, Acton explained, ‘after preferring the Church to the Bible, preferred the modern Church to the ancient, and ended up by sacrificing both to the Pope’.
Accordingly, as the church was being emancipated from the obligation of proof, ‘infallibility could be defined without argument’ (Acton, 1985–88 [orig. ed. 1870], p. 309). And if any fact contradicted a dogma, it was a warning to science to revise the evidence. On the contrary, for Acton, new knowledge through the full use of the archives, and especially the Vatican archives to which he had access between 1864 and 1868, and insight, called for revised assumptions about the Christian past which could only be thoroughly comprehended through ‘methodical investigation or scientific evidence’ (Acton, 1985–88 [orig. ed. 1864], p. 241). ‘If the past has been an obstacle and a burden’, Acton maintained, ‘knowledge of the past is the safest and the surest emancipation […] the earnest search for it is one of the signs that distinguish’ the Modern Era from the Middle Ages. And ‘historical science has been one of its instruments’ (Acton, 1906 [orig. ed. 1895]).
Since the Renaissance, the world had devoted its best energy and treasures to ‘the sovereign purpose of detecting error and vindicating entrusted truth’ and nobody was better entitled to this purpose than historians. The historian was, for Acton, superior to all other authorities in discerning truth. ‘The philosopher cannot claim the same exemption as the historian. God’s handwriting exists in history independently of the Church and no ecclesiastical exigence can alter a fact. The divine lesson has been read, and it is the historian’s duty to copy it faithfully without bias’ (Acton, 1985–88 [orig. ed. 1864], p. 244). Only the scientifically trained historian could competently stand as the final arbiter in theological dispute as his standard was based on objective rational inquiry. ‘That which is not decided with dogmatic infallibility’ is for the time susceptible only of a ‘scientific determination which advances with the progress of science’ and becomes absolute where science ‘has attained its final results’ (Acton, 1985–88 [orig. ed. 1864], p. 252).
But this capacity to distinguish truth from falsehood was, however, not a prerogative entrusted to the historian only. For Acton, every man and woman was endowed with reason and had the faculty to judge theological matters provided he or she used historical facts and evidence to corroborate demonstrable truth or condemn falsehood and mendacity. That’s what he expected from the minority bishops and from anyone who found him or herself censured or in contradiction with the Holy See. One must believe ‘in his conscience that he [is] in agreement with the true faith of the Church’ and not proceed to ‘consider the whole Church infected with the liability to err from which its rulers are not exempt’. One’s liberty of conscience allowed for ‘knowledge deposited in [one’s] mind by study and transformed by conscience into inviolable convictions’ (Acton, 1985–88 [orig. ed. 1864], p. 257), for the collective and individual autonomy of judgment through a rational and critical inquiry of historical facts and evidence. Liberty of conscience represented for Acton the first and foremost liberty, an idea that Christianity instituted as its founding principle according to the Catholic historian.
If Lord Acton did not succeed in achieving what should have been his masterpiece, the result of years devoted to research and inquiry, a History of Liberty, his entire life’s work aimed at and gave substance to it.
The history of humanity had shown that ‘liberty was not only a means to a higher end, it was in itself the higher end’ (Acton, 1985–88 [orig. ed. 1864]). Espousing a teleological approach to the historical process, Acton was persuaded that the history of humanity tended necessarily towards liberty (Acton, 1985–88 [orig. ed. 1877b]). For Acton, not only was liberty an idea or a notion that he championed and cherished but it was and had been the driving force in history. ‘The advance of knowledge and the development of ideas […] are the charter of progress and the vital spark in history’. This constancy of progress in the direction of organised and assured freedom was for him the characteristic fact of modern history (Acton, 1906 [orig. ed. 1895], p. 11) and its method was revolution. The world owed religious liberty to the Dutch revolution, constitutional government to the English, federal republicanism to the Americans, political equality to the French and its successors (Acton, 1906 [orig. ed. 1895], p. 13). Whether it be the English revolutions, both the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution, the American Revolution or the French Revolution, they all participated in the acquisition of modern liberties. Binding those revolutions together allowed for making their fights, their legitimacy and their process alike, that of the right of the individual to break away from tyranny, whether political or religious. Ideas, which in religion and in politics were truths, in history were forces (Acton, 1906 [orig. ed. 1895], p. 17). As Acton put it in his Inaugural Lecture on the Study of History:
The triumph of the Revolutionist annuls the historian. By its authentic exponents […] the Revolution of the last century repudiates history […] but the unexpected truth, stranger than fiction, is that this was not the ruin but the renovation of history. Directly and indirectly, by process of development and by process of reaction, an impulse was given which made it infinitely more effectual as a factor of civilization than ever before, and a movement began in the world of minds which was deeper and more serious than the revival of ancient learning. [Acton, 1906 [orig. ed. 1895], p. 14]
As Pierre Manent explained, ‘after the French Revolution, the men of the nineteenth century would not only live in civil society or in the State, they would first live in a third element […] history’ (Manent, 2001, p. 176). This universal character of liberty which found its fullest expression in the Declaration of Man and of the Citizen was particularly praised by Lord Acton who drew a parallel with Catholic universalism. For Acton, liberty was rooted and originated in Christianity. ‘Liberty occupies the final summit, it profits by all the good that is in the world and suffers by all the evil, it pervades strife and inspires endeavour, it is almost if not altogether the sign and the prize and the motive in the onward and upward advance of the race for which Christ was sacrificed’. Liberty and religion are made inseparable entities, in Acton’s work, to the point that history was religion as liberty stemmed from the latter. Recounting the idea of liberty from its origin to the modern period in his two lectures devoted to the ‘History of Freedom in Antiquity’ and the ‘History of Freedom in Christianity’ (1877), Lord Acton claimed that liberty was ancient and despotism modern. The government of the Israelites, the first demonstration of political liberty, was a voluntary federation of self-governing families. The example of the Hebrew nation laid down the parallel lines on which all freedom has been won, the principle that all political authorities must be tested and reformed according to a code which was not made by man. After Greece and Rome, it was the Stoics who pushed the theory of liberty one step forward with the doctrine of a law of nature that was superior to the law of nations and the will of the people. Men were equal in rights as in duties. It was left to Christianity, however, to combat and thwart absolutism.
When Christ said, ‘Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s’, he gave, for Acton, to the state a legitimacy it had never before enjoyed and set bounds to it that it had never yet acknowledged. As he pointed out in his Lectures on the French Revolution regarding the Preamble to the Declaration of Man and of the Citizen, ‘authorities were constituted and laws were made in order that the original, essential and supreme possessions of all mankind, their universal and natural rights, may be preserved’. This system of guarantees was for him ‘as sacred as the rights which they protect’ (Acton, 1910 [orig. ed. 1895–99]). To limit the power of the state became the perpetual charge of a universal church. And that this idea stemmed from the religious authorities themselves represented a founding innovation of Christianity which, at the same time, sought to situate the religious conscience, epitomised by the Pope, beyond the temporal power and to impose to the latter the respect of moral rules.
As a fervent Catholic, Acton did not intend to deny in principle the authority of the Pope as the spokesperson of Catholic dogmas and morality provided that the Pope respected and was true to his function as a moral mediator among nations. ‘I cannot accept’, Acton assessed, ‘[the] canon that we are to judge Pope and king unlike other men […] there is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at which the negation of Catholicism and the negation of Liberalism meet’ (Acton, 1887, p. 60). Acton takes up here the liberal political fight founded on the theory of the right of resistance to tyranny and absolutism. ‘Let everything be conceded to them that is compatible with their avowed character and traditions; but see that you do nothing that could shelter them from the scorn and execration of mankind’ (Acton, 1879). As Gertrude Himmelfarb pointed out, nothing was heretical in this attitude according to Acton as Catholic theologians had applied to the Pope the teaching of Aquinas on kingship, arguing that it is legitimate to disobey a Pope who orders the commission of a sin or passes a decree subversive of the church (Himmelfarb, 1993, p. 232). On behalf of the liberty of conscience and of scientific reasoning, blind submission to authority could not be tolerated and was not tenable. Because Acton looked upon the church with its institutions as a potential force of great magnitude in the service of liberty, he inveighed against popes who did not allow or call for the respect of the liberty of conscience and failed in their mission becoming absolutist tyrants, and first among them, Pope Gregory VII who initiated the absolutist trend of the church and Pius IX who proclaimed absolutism as church dogma.
Among the causes which have brought dishonour on the Church in recent years, none have had a more fatal operation than those conflicts with science and literature which have led men to dispute the competence, or the justice, or the wisdom of her authorities […] and induced a suspicion that the Church in her zeal for the prevention of error represses that intellectual freedom […] and that she claims a right to restrain the growth of knowledge to justify an acquiescence in ignorance, to promote error and even to alter at her arbitrary will the dogmas that are proposed to faith. [Acton, 1985–88 [orig. ed. 1864], p. 234]
These words that served as an introduction to his article ‘Conflicts with Rome’, published a few months before the Syllabus was issued, epitomise Lord Acton’s thought on the church’s supposed opposition between power and knowledge. The distinction he made between Rome or the Pope and Catholic dogmas and truths revealed by God account for his understanding of both the role and power of religion in modern liberal societies. The confusion between dogma and opinion, on the one hand, and between power and authority, on the other, explain the weakness and illegitimacy of the position adopted by the religious institution as well as the artificiality of the absolutist power of the papacy in the nineteenth century. Acton believed that the only legitimate authority in political as well as in ecclesiastical matters was that of science as it confirmed divine truth and design through a thorough examination of historical and ecclesiastical facts. Without opposing the Rights of Man to the Rights of God, liberty to truth, liberty to authority, the Catholic historian defended on the contrary the temporal and spiritual power of a liberal earthly church as a human and legitimate authority provided it expounded eternal truth through the constant reaffirmation of knowledge. ‘The knowledge of the past, the record of truths revealed by experience is eminently practical as a power that goes to the making of the future’ (Acton, 1906 [orig. ed. 1895], p. 27). By going against the movement of history – the history of liberty, being Christian and Catholic by definition – and against science – the only means to obtain and attain divine truth –, the Pope and the Catholic Church lost their legitimate power as spiritual authorities but also their political power as checks to the might of the modern state. If the historical and political context required an increase in papal power, it should not have been translated into absolutism, in conflict with the ideals of liberty and progress entrenched in Christianity, but into espousing the end of and not putting an end to history. It represented the great disillusionment of Lord Acton. But as Philippe Raynaud put it, it may be the very quest and belief in the end of history and power of liberty which was in itself illusionary.
Aude Attuel-Hallade
Keywords: liberalism, Catholicism, Christianity, truth, authority, power, history, science
In the delicate transition from a liberal to a democratic age, the place of religion as a political, religious and moral authority was the subject of debate among liberals. They all questioned the achievements of the French Revolution in a desire to redefine the relationship between state, church and society, power and the individual, the individual and God. The affirmation of papal infallibility by the First Vatican Council in 1869–70, which fundamentally challenged the principles and doctrines of liberalism, only served to reinforce the divisions and uncertainties associated with this current of thought, and more specifically those of Catholic liberalism. The Cambridge Whig historian Lord Acton, a liberal and Catholic, glorified the heritage of 1789 and sanctioned the French Revolution not so much by virtue of the Protestant Reformation, as found in the Whig philosophy of history, as by virtue of Catholic universalism. By linking Catholic universalism and democratic universalism, Lord Acton spoke out against ‘a conspiracy to establish a power that would be the most formidable enemy of freedom and science in the world’ (1870). At a time when history is being professionalised, we need to understand how Lord Acton’s ecclesiastical and historical knowledge and sense of history should weaken the power of the papacy and enable a reconciliation between ecclesiastical history and liberal history, Christian providentialism and social happiness.