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Acton, Oxenham, and the Temporal Power

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2015

Wayne M. O’Sullivan
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Extract

In his inaugural lecture on the study of history, delivered at Cambridge in 1895, Lord Acton exhorted his students to ‘try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong … If we lower our standard in history, we cannot uphold it in Church and State.’

This was Acton in his seventh decade, some seven years before his death. As a young man in his mid twenties, writing for The Rambler, which at that time Acton and his circle of liberal catholics hoped to use as the vehicle for educating their co-religionists into harmonizing their ancient faith with contemporary science and scholarship, he struck a very different note. This was the Acton who distinguished between Catholic and Protestant intolerance, excusing the former as the product of ‘external circumstances,’ while condemning the latter as an ‘imperative precept and a part of its doctrine.’ Acton was not, at any point in his life, a conventional thinker, and just as his later view of the historian as moral judge was, and remains, controversial, so his earlier reading of ecclesiastical history was disputed by friend and foe.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Catholic History , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , May 1994 , pp. 102 - 111
Copyright
Copyright © Catholic Record Society 1994

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References

Notes

1 Lord Acton, Lectures on Modern History with an introduction by Trevor-Roper, Hugh (New York: Meridien Books, Inc., 1961) pp. 38, 41.Google Scholar

2 Rufus Fears, J., ed., Selected Writings of Lord Acton, Vol. 2, Essays in the Study and Writing of History (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics 1985) 7 pp. 130–131.Google Scholar For an analysis of Acton's transition on this matter see Murphy, Terrence, ‘Lord Acton and the Question of Moral Judgments in History: The development of His Position,’ The Catholic Historical Review (April 1984) pp. 225–250 Google Scholar and Chadwick, Owen, Acton, Dollinger, and History (London: German Historical Institute, 1987).Google Scholar

3 cf. Altholz, Joseph, The Liberal Catholic Movement in England (London: Burns and Oates, 1962).Google Scholar

4 Oxenham's letters to Acton are found among the Acton Papers in Cambridge University Library; unfortunately, Acton's end of the correspondence does not seem to have survived. Oxenham's brother, replying to Lord Acton's request for Oxenham's correspondence with Ignaz von Döllinger, noted that Oxenham kept very few letters. E. L. Oxenham to JDA, 25 June 1890, CUL Add 8119/5/7.

5 Oakley, John, H. N. Oxenham, Recollections of an Old Friend (Manchester: Guardian Printing Works, 1888), p. 23.Google Scholar

6 RS-JDA, 14 December 1861, Altholz, Josef L., McElrath, Damian, and Holland, James C., The Correspondence of Lord Acton and Richard Simpson, 2 (Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 232.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 TW-JDA [?] 1863, CUL Add 8119.

8 JDA-Döllinger, 7 January 1863. Conzemius, Victor, Ignaz von Döllinger: Briefwechsel Vol.1 (München: C. A. Bech'sche Verlegsbuchhandlong, 1965).Google Scholar

9 TW-JDA, 3 January 1862, CUL Add 8119.

10 JDA-RS, 6 February 1863, Altholz et al, op. cit., pp. 261–263.

11 JDA-RS, 8 February 1862, ibidem, p. 263.

12 JDA-RS, 28 November 1861, ibidem, p. 213. Oxenham's illegible writing is a serious obstacle for the historian trying to reconstruct his views; his letters can be deciphered only with great effort and rarely in their entirety.

13 JDA-RS, 13 December 1861, Altholz et. al, op. cit., 2, pp. 227–228.

14 Fears, op. cit., p. 81.

15 Ibidem, p. 83.

16 Ibidem.

17 Ibidem.

18 Ibidem, pp. 130–131.

19 Ibidem, p. 138.

20 HNO-JDA, 15 December [1861], CUL Add 8119 (7)/387.

21 HNO-JDA, 21 December 1861, CUL Add 8119 (7)/390.

22 HNO-JDA, 15 December [1861], CUL Add 8119 (7)/387.

23 HNO-JDA, 17 December 1861, CUL Add 8119 (7)/510.

24 Ibidem.

25 Ibidem.

26 HNO-JDA, [?] March 1862, CUL Add 8119 (7)/405.

27 HNO-JDA 17 December 1861, CUL Add 8119 (7)/510.

28 HNO-JDA, 15 December [1861], CUL Add 8119 (7)/387.

29 HNO-JDA, 17 December 1861, CUL Add 8119 (7)/510.

30 Hales, E.E.Y., Pió Nono (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Co., 1962), pp. 228 ff.,Google Scholar argues that in 1861 the Pope momentarily considered renouncing his temporal claims in return for solid guarantees from Piedmont, but stiffened in the face of anti-clerical legislation in the recently annexed territories.

31 Himmelfarb, Gertrude, Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1952), p. 70.Google Scholar

32 Notes on the Present State of Austria, The Rambler (January 1861), p. 199.

33 Himmelfarb, op. cit., p. 72, quoting ADD MSS 5528.

34 JDA, ‘Cavour’, The Rambler (July 1861), pp. 141–165.

35 Ibidem, p. 169.

36 JDA, ‘The Roman Question.,’ The Rambler (November 1860), pp. 137–154.

37 Ibidem, p. 140.

38 TW-JDA, 31 January 1860, CUL Add 8119 (8).

39 HNO-JDA (partial letter), 1861, CUL Add 8119 (7)/514.

40 HNO-JDA, 21 December 1861, CUL Add 8119 (7)/390.

41 HNO-JDA, 29 November 1861, CUL Add 8119 (7)/383.

42 HNO-J DA, 26 November 1861, CUL Add 8119 (7)/382.

43 HNO-JDA, 29 November 1861, CUL Add 8119 (7)/383.

44 Ibidem.

45 HNO-JDA, 26 November 1861, CUL Add 8119 (7)/382.

46 HNO-JDA, 29 November 1861, CUL Add 8119 (7)/382.

47 HNO-JDA, 22 November 1861, CUL Add 8119 (7)/38l.

48 HNO-JDA, 26 November 1861, CUL Add 8119 (7)/382.

49 Entitled Kirche und Kirchen, Papsthum und Kirschenstaat, Historisch-Politische Betrachtungen (München, 1861).

50 Döllinger on the Temporal Power,’ Edinburgh Review (July 1862), pp. 261–293.

51 Ibidem, pp. 262 ff.

52 Ibidem, p. 273.

53 Ibidem, p. 263.

54 Ibidem, p. 281.

55 cf. Holland, James C., ‘Toleration Intolerable: Simpson's Suppressed Essay’ The Catholic Historical Review (January, 1989), pp. 1–54.Google Scholar Holland introduces and edits a copy of the Simpson manuscript with Döllinger's suggested revisions in italics.

56 Ibidem, p. 39, footnote 9. 1 do not agree with Holland's suggestion that Simpson may have authored ‘The Protestant Theory of Persecution’: the style and rationale are pure Acton.