Vertheidigung der katholischen Religion. Sammt einem Anhange von der Möglichkeit einer Vereinigung zwischen unserer, und der evangelischlutherischen Kirche (1789) (review)

The German church historian Ulrich Lehner, an associate professor at Marquette University, is a scholar of the Catholic Enlightenment. He is to be congratulated on his edition of Beda Mayr’s work Defense of Catholic Religion. Mayr (1742–94), who became a Benedictine in 1762, was a professor of philosophy and an intellectual who searched for a way to reunify the divided Christian denominations. In 1778 he wrote Der erste Schritt zur künftigen Vereinigung der katholischen und der evangelischen Kirche (The First Step toward Future Reunification between the Catholic and Protestant Churches). Five years after the work was published, it was placed on the Roman Index of Forbidden Books. The Defense of Catholic Religion (1789) was the third volume in Mayr’s Defense of Natural, Christian, and Catholic Religion (consisting of three volumes published in four parts). It is this part of Mayr’s main work that Lehner edits in this volume.

Lehner presents the unabridged text in the original German language and the orthography of the late-eighteenth century, with Mayr’s footnotes (350 pages). He adds an introduction (sixty-six pages), a list of Mayr’s works, a bibliography (eleven pages), and a combined index for Mayr’s work and his own text. Lehner comments on the Catholic Enlightenment and monastic erudition in general and discusses the reasons for the lack of acknowledgment of Mayr’s contributions:

The reason that Mayr never achieved the fame of Febronius or others is connected to the late publication of his main work, more specifically the second and third volume, in the year the French Revolution started. The events in France finally crushed the German Church.

(p. xiv)

He discusses monastic enlightenment and ecumenism as well as the influence of Christian Wolff and Immanuel Kant. He also provides an overview of the life and work of Mayr and a special survey of Mayr’s work on the Defense of Natural, Christian, and Catholic Religion; examines the ecumenical desire; and discusses the reception of and the resistance to Mayr’s work. It is interesting that the famous prince-abbot Martin II Gerbert, O.S.B., of St. Blasien felt that Mayr’s First Step book failed, especially in its criticism of infallibility (p. xxxiii). Infallibility was, in Mayr’s view, the most important obstacle to reunification. Lehner examines this topic in the context of eighteenth-century discussions as well as discusses the beginning of historical-critical scholarship (Jean Mabillon and others) and its influence on Mayr. Finally, he notes Mayr’s compromises in dogmatics designed to obtain reunification: “All teachings that are accepted only by Catholics” do not “necessarily belong to the order of salvation”; “the church does not force these teachings on Protestants as directly revealed teachings”; “if the teachings are only speculative character, the Protestants should have a free choice to believe them”; “even if the Protestants do not accept these doctrines and do not exercise the actions which are connected with them, they cannot be called heretics”(p. lxxi). For example, Mayr’s view of the sacraments seems designed to effect reconciliation:

When, for example, the Council of Trent declared the Seven Sacraments to be directly instituted by Christ, whereas Protestants accept only baptism and Eucharist as sacraments because of their biblical foundation, Catholicism could regard the latter two as directly revealed teaching, the other five as indirectly revealed through Christ in the Church.

(p. lxiv)

Mayr himself expressed doubt (p. 10): “Eine baldige Vereinigung erwarte ich aber gar nicht. Daran ist noch sehr lange nicht zu gedenken. Die politischen Hindernisse einer Vereinigung sind noch viel zu gross. Und diese können alle Theologen zusammen nicht heben” (“I, however, do...