PASTOR, LUDWIG von. - Historian, baron by imperial conferment (1908), b. at Aachen on 31 Jan. 1854, to a Lutheran father, d. at Innsbruck on 30 Sept. 1928. His Catholic mother raised him in her own religion, and he was always a believing and professing Catholic. During his university studies he began his research in Church history and had as his teacher the priest J. Janssens (v.), a noted historian; he was also a disciple of Sickel in Vienna and of Weiss in Graz, where he took his degree with a study on the religious policy of Charles V (18 July 1878). He was a lecturer (1881-85), then holder of the chair of history at the University of Innsbruck (1886-1900), court councillor (Hofrat) in 1899, director of the Austrian Historical Institute in Rome (1901-15, 1921-28) and Austrian minister plenipotentiary to the Holy See (1921-28).
The polemics between Catholic and Protestant scholars that accompanied Bismarck's Kulturkampf in Germany led him to attempt a systematic examination of the papal political tradition from the Catholic point of view, in opposition to the destructive Lutheran criticism (especially that of Ranke in his History of the Popes); while the events of the early and medieval Church did not interest him, those of the Renaissance and of the Catholic Reformation, insofar as they preceded and accompanied the Protestant revolution, formed the principal object of his research. From these derives the Geschichte der Päpste seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters, whose first volume appeared in 1886, the same year in which Pastor ascended the chair of history at the University of Innsbruck. However, the intention of writing this history already went back to the feast of the Immaculate Conception (8 Dec.) of 1873. Pope Leo XIII appreciated from the very
Council of Constance to the death of Pius VI (1799); there are sixteen volumes in twenty-two tomes.
Pastor's Geschichte was received by scholars with the greatest respect and admiration for its author, a wonderful investigator of documents of the Vatican Archives, indeed of those of Italy and of all Europe, for the history of the popes and of the Church over a period of four centuries, as no one had ever done before. Completely renewing traditional historiography, Pastor places the Roman Church at the center of a great historical panorama, showing that it dominated European civilization from the early Renaissance. In political events, in the development of letters and the arts, in the spread of European Christian civilization to the new continents, the work of Rome appears dominant, and upon it Pastor throws new light.
Certainly Pastor's work is not without defects; despite the scrupulous honesty and impartiality in seeking to establish historical truth, there is sometimes a lack of critical acuteness and of depth of conception and judgment. Often the facts set out analytically prevent Pastor from rising to a broad historical vision, as is manifest from his assessments regarding the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation, where polemic sometimes gets the better of the historian. The very immense mass of documents that the archives offered him contributed to the aforementioned critical deficiencies of Pastor, and for which too often he found no support from preparatory research that might have facilitated his synthesis.
As regards the posthumous volumes, moreover, at his death Pastor had not drafted the whole treatment indicated in the general plan: the publishing house entrusted the elaboration to others, to whom the responsibility for the judgments is in part due (v. preface to vols. XIV, XV, XVI). For the chapters concerning Clement XIV and the suppression of the Society of Jesus, which have given occasion to lively polemics about their true authorship and therefore about the use of sources and the evaluation of things and persons, cf. G. Kratz-P. Leturia, Intorno al Clemente XIV del barone von P., Rome 1935. All this does not detract from the fact that Pastor's work has a monumental character: it does not, moreover, close but opens the way to new extensive research and corrections. Pastor accompanied the work of his Geschichte with many important parallel studies: among others, mention should be made of the new edition of the Geschichte des deutschen Volkes seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters by Giovanni Janssen, which he then furnished with ten volumes of Erläuterungen und Ergänzungen (1900-20). His manuscripts are now preserved in the Vatican Library. In the Tagebücher (cit. in bibl.) one will find the list of the editions and versions of the Storia dei papi (pp. 911-15), of the minor works (pp. 916-918) and the bibliography relating to Pastor (pp. 918-20).
Bibliography
from the very beginning the grandiose plan that Pastor intended to carry to completion according to the canons of the most rigorous historical criticism, and no less favor was shown him by Pius X and his successors; but Pastor was never the official historian of the papacy, as was sometimes insinuated. Subsequently he brought out no fewer than eleven volumes; after his death, through the work of various collaborators, vols. XIII, XIV, XV, XVI still appeared; thus in 1934 the Geschichte was complete according to the plan established by Pastor: from the
The Italian version begun by C. Benedetti (first 3 vols. from the 2nd German edition, Trent 1800-66) was taken up for the same vols. in the 4th edition by A. Meresti and continued by P. Cenci (Rome 1910-34). There are translations into French and English, Spanish and Dutch. Among the various judgments of Pastor's work on the part of Catholics and Protestants, one may recall: I. F. Dengel, Ludwig Freiherr v. P., in Hist. Jahrbuch, 40 (1929), p. 1 ff. (Catholic) and W. Goetz, in Hist. Zeitschrift, 145 (1932), Protestant. Cf. also P. Cenci, Il barone L. v. P., in Pastor (L. ed. 1942, pp. vii-xxvii). Very recent and of great importance for knowledge of Pastor's thought, of the time and environment in which he lived and worked, is the vol.: L. v. P., Tagebücher-Briefe-Erinnerungen, edited by N. Wühr, Heidelberg 1930. Cf. on this matter A. Pelzer, L'historien L. v. P. d'après ses journaux, sa correspondance et ses souvenirs, in Rev. d'hist. ecclés., 46 (1951), pp. 192-201.
Francesco Cognasso