The Pope and the Professor: Pius IX, Ignaz von Döllinger, and the Quandary of the Modern Age by Thomas Albert Howard (review)

For many of us, there is no "quandary of the modern age." We are at home with our liberal presumptions. They have afforded many millions of us with a new form of fraternity (the nation-state) founded on structures of liberty and equality our peasant ancestors could never have imagined. As a result of this familiarity, we find it difficult to imagine a time when the presumption of liberty, equality, and fraternity as ends in themselves did not exist. Thomas Albert Howard's new book on Pope Pius IX, Ignaz von Döllinger, ultramontanism, and historicism is a sophisticated antidote to this incapacity in our modern imagination. Seeking to bring us into some of the central tensions of nineteenth-century European Church–state relations, Howard expertly guides us through a charitable engagement with people, ideas, and movements we can scarcely countenance. This is an impressive accomplishment, and I commend this book to both Catholic and Protestant scholars desiring a wider historical perspective on our current contexts in Europe and the United States.

As a historical narrative, the book is straightforward and a pleasure to read. The first chapter sets the stage for the nineteenth century by treating the French Revolution as a kind of "trauma" suffered by the European Church, and by the papacy in particular. Howard presents ultramontanism as a response to this trauma. In providing this context, Howard provides us with something sorely needed from our post–Vatican II perspective: a nuanced vision of the Catholic Church and its theological, social, and political motives in the nineteenth century. This vision is necessary for the clarification of our perspective for several reasons, not least of which is the ease with which we assume the American and French revolutions created a world that was providentially ordained and, so, inevitable. Howard thus guards us against the "enormous condescension of posterity."

That we would even be sensitive to such condescension is due in part to the influence of minds like Döllinger's. So, Howard's second chapter is an introduction to and retrieval of the life, training, and work of one of the most universally respected scholars in nineteenth-century Christendom (such as it was). Howard's portrait of Döllinger is painstaking, fascinating, inspiring, troubling, tragic, and intimidating all at once. Readers will be surprised that Döllinger has not received more critical attention in anglophone scholarship. But readers will also discern some of the reasons for Döllinger's obscurity. He is after all, despite his impressive learning and reputation, yet one more German scholar convinced of the purgative utility of historical inquiry and its necessity in the face of the (supposed) excesses of neo-Scholastic thought. Readers of this journal will be especially interested in Döllinger's story as it pertains to the story of Thomism in the decades prior to Vatican II. In my estimation, it would be inappropriate to label Döllinger a modernist or a proto-modernist. But for those of us versed in that controversy, Döllinger's life, training, and work will simultaneously corroborate and challenge our perspectives.

In the third chapter, Howard provides us with a history of the First Vatican Council, told through the lens provided by the plentiful correspondence between Döllinger and Lord Acton. This is the crisis point of the book, for it places Döllinger's careful historical researches into the history of the papacy's temporal power in contradistinction to the ultramontanism fueling the infallibilists' position at the Council. All of the ugliness and sorrow of the Church's ordeal in the nineteenth century is on full display here: Pius IX's plight in the midst of kulturkampf after kulturkampf, especially with Italy, France, and Germany; "Roman" theology versus "German" theology; the Vatican and runaway national churches; and not least, the excommunication of...