DÖLLINGER, IGNAZ von. - Historian and theologian, b. at Bamberg on 28 Feb. 1799, d. at Munich on 10 Jan. 1890.
After an apprenticeship of disparate studies (history, literature, philosophy, theology, mathematics, natural sciences) he decided to devote himself principally to theology, for which reason he chose the ecclesiastical state. Dissatisfied with the theology courses at the University of Würzburg and at the seminary of Bamberg, he made up for them with personal study, without however managing to compensate for the deficiencies of his properly dogmatic formation. A priest in 1822, after a few months of pastoral care he devoted himself to academic activity: a professor in 1823 at the lyceum of Aschaffenburg, and in 1826 at the University of Munich, where he carried out his activity until his death.
Through his merit that University became one of the principal centers of influence for the renewal of Catholic studies. In Munich he soon became part of the circle of Görres and of the editors of the Eos. He shared their politico-religious ideas, and fought alongside them the battle for the freedom of the Church from the interference of the State and for the penetration of the Christian ideal into every field of life.
Sent in 1848 to the Parliament of Frankfurt, he there upheld the independence of the Church from the State (not their separation), and the equal treatment of all confessions by the State. With no less tenacity he pursued the program of a unified, or national, German Catholic Church, not autonomous with regard to the Apostolic See or privileged in comparison with other nations, but closely united, in its members, around the national synod of bishops and a primate. Thus the Catholic half of the German people would have been able more easily to make itself respected in the various States and by the various confessions, and would have brought the entire nation back to the fulfillment of a great mission in the service of truth and of Catholicism. These ideas D. set forth at the first convention of Catholic organizations at Mainz (1848), at the Episcopal Conference of Würzburg (1848), before the Austrian Catholics (Linz 1849), before the political authorities, in every field where his very wide sphere of action could reach. In these years D. was perhaps the most eminent personality of German Catholicism. However, if one compares his position, for example, with that of the canonistic school (Phillips), characteristic for its strong accentuation of the Roman primacy, or with the wave of general enthusiasm of the population, which from the arrest of the archbishop of Cologne (1837) onward saw in the Holy See the first guarantee and protection of ecclesiastical freedom in Germany, one finds that D. is completely absent from these currents. In reality his action began in these years to arouse the first suspicions in the Catholic camp. D. had always been more a man of study and science than of action and life, therefore easily apt to stiffen on theoretical positions, often hesitant and subject to the influence of others.
The decade 1850-60 marks a phase of exclusively literary and scientific activity. Having returned to the chair in 1849, D. added to his works of the preceding years (among them a Lehrbuch der Kirchengeschichte
Ratisbon 1836-38; a study on Mohammed, Mohammeds Religion, 1838; and the celebrated Die Reformation [3 vols., ibid. 1846-49], his most important writings in the field of ecclesiastical history: Hippolyten und Kallitus (ibid. 1853), Heidentum und Judentum (ibid. 1857), Christentum und Kirche (ibid. 1860): the latter was to constitute an effective counterweight on the Catholic side against the rationalistic interpretation (Bauer-Strauss) of apostolic Christianity.
A study trip by D. to Italy in 1857 left him disappointed because of the diffidence encountered in Rome on account of the constantly negative position he had maintained in the question of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.
Around 1860 he returned to politico-religious activity. His position toward Rome became publicly known in a sensational manner after his lectures of 1861 in the Odeon of Munich (later elaborated in the book: Kirche und Kirchen, Papstthum und Kirchenstaat, Munich 1861) in which D. expressed his impressions on the situation of the Papal State, and the prediction of its imminent fall. Meanwhile in the world of ecclesiastical studies the struggle was raging between the neo-Scholastic movement and the so-called German theology, cultivator of the evolutionary aspect in dogmas and in the history of the Church, and averse to any limitation by means of authoritative dogmatic decisions.
The struggle was on both sides very harsh and not always conducted with due charity. The neo-Scholastic tendency enjoyed, in principle, the support of Rome, the other side leaned ever more on the political powers and with this was D. Implicated in a question so difficult and dragged into an ever more exasperated opposition (which broke out openly at the Congress of German Catholic scholars in Munich in 1863), the great scholar gradually moved away from the ecclesiastical point of view. Noteworthy, along this line, are his campaign against the erection of episcopal seminaries, and his harsh opposition to the Syllabus. In the thesis of pontifical infallibility he saw an overturning of the ecclesiastical constitution and a danger for the State. Therefore, on the eve of the Vatican Council, he devoted to the opposition all his knowledge and all his political influence.
Excluded from the preparatory consultations of the council, D. intensified his propaganda among the clergy and the people, with articles, with the Reflections (Erwägungen, etc.), addressed to the bishops of the Council in Oct. 1869, and with an assiduous action with the various governments to foment their diffidence and oppositions. He went so far as to present infallibility as including the dominion of the Pope over the entire temporal order, therefore destructive of state authority, and to invoke the intervention of the State against the conciliar decisions. During the Council D., informed by persons present in Rome, wrote from Munich the Briefe vom Konzil and other writings of violent opposition, until Apr. 1870 when he was invited to silence. Once pontifical infallibility was proclaimed, D. refused to submit, respected the excommunication while contesting its legitimacy, abandoned his chair at the university, where however he continued to have a significant influence as president of the Academy of Sciences (he celebrated the Akadem. Vorträge, later published in 3 vols., 1889-91). In the origin of the sect of the «Old Catholics» he had no active part, nor did he ever enter it. On his influence on the policy of the Kulturkampf it is for now impossible to pronounce. He worked with enthusiasm for a reunion of the separated Churches, on the basis of a broad tolerance of the various confessions, but with a meager and ephemeral outcome. An indefatigable scholar even into the latest years of his old age, he still brought to completion a publication of sources on the history of the Council of Trent (Ungedruckte Berichte..., 2 vols., 1876), a Geschichte der Moralstreitigkeiten in der röm.-kath. Kirche seit dem 16. Jahrhundert (2 vols., 1889), the 2 vols. of his Geschichte der gnostisch-manichäischen Sekten im früheren Mittelalter (Munich 1890), and various other writings. For the knowledge of the politico-religious activity of D. in the various periods of his life, the publication of his Kleinere Schriften edited by F. H. Reusch in 1890 is also very useful. Until his death, D. refused to submit to the Council.
The importance of D. lies in having opened the ways for a severely objective study of ecclesiastical history. His influence on the development of positive theological studies can hardly be overestimated.