Rankes "Papste" auf dem Index. Dogma und Historie im Widerstreit (review)

Historical monographs too rarely make exciting reading. A happy exception is this story of how Leopold von Ranke's History of the Popes was placed on the Roman Index in 1841. Until 1989 only the fact of the book's condemnation was known. This team of three has now uncovered much of the story of how this happened and has set it in an institutional, intellectual, and political context. Their study presents, first, the discovery that Ranke's book underwent not one but two processes before the Roman Congregation of the Index (abolished in 1966), which ended respectively with a dismissal (1838) and an approval (1841) of the charges. Second comes a documentary section that reproduces hitherto unknown documents from the archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (successor to the Holy Office, 1966) concerning the first and second examinations of Ranke's work. In the third part, Ulrich Mühlack examines how the findings bear on the hypothesis of a clash between two cultures of knowledge (Wissenskulturen), historicism, a free, empirically grounded historical science, and a history managed in terms of Catholic dogma (hence the book's subtitle).

Nothing was known about Ranke's processes until fifteen years ago, when Horst Fuhrmann obtained a document from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith which, in the absence of other evidence, could not be identified. When the congregation's archives were recently opened, astonishingly enough nothing was known about how the Congregation of the Index had operated in the nineteenth century, and the team's reconstruction of its rules, procedures, and customs is alone worth a book. On the basis of a vote by experts, consultants, who in turn were informed by a referee, the vote of the congregation's members was reported to the pope, who had the final word. The congregation's secretary, who oversaw every step, from initial citations of books to informing the pope, commanded the entire process. The congregation, which met two to six times a year, kept no regular records. It routinely contravened the procedural rules laid down by Pope Benedict XIV, and its administrative culture suffered from arbitrariness, disregard for rules, and string-pulling.

The team discovered that the Congregation of the Index had examined Ranke's History of the Popes not once but twice—the French translation in 1838, the original German version in 1841. The former passed; the second was condemned. In the first process, Michele Domenico Zecchinelli, a north Italian Jesuit, recommended condemnation, but a consultant named Antonino de Luca, a Sicilian Dominican, opposed this step and carried the cardinals against it. The outcome of the process turned on differences of opinion about scholarship, rivalry between the orders, and the desire not to antagonize the Prussian government or to ruin the reputation of Alex de Saint-Chéron, the French editor and a Catholic.

By 1841 the situation in Catholic Germany, where Ranke's work had been well received, had changed radically. The Cologne Troubles, which began in 1837, arose from the archbishop's condemnation of a group of Catholic Kantians at Bonn and from the breakdown of negotiations with the Prussian state over confessionally mixed marriages. When Prussian troops arrested the archbishop in his own palace, the mood in German Catholicism quickly shifted toward what was called "ultramontanism." At Munich the circle around Joseph Görres, including the young Ignaz von Döllinger, now turned strongly anti-Rankean and called for a new Catholic historiography, true both to the Church's authority and to the new historical discipline. They saw, as Zecchinelli had seen, that Ranke intended to write a purely historical account that absorbed the papacy into political history which was anti-supernaturalist but not atheistic.

The changed mood in Germany, the team has discovered, was signaled in Rome by the condemnation of a work on the primacy of...