Instead of posting links to my essays on Lord Acton, as I’ve done in the past on his birthday (e.g., see here and here, which sport links of their own), I will sound a critical note on this master of historical sources.
Like his fellow Victorian, John Henry Newman, he knew better (an understatement) than to take at face value just-so stories about about what Christians have allegedly always believed, even in the first century, despite there not being a shred of evidence to that effect. The Vatican sets the boundaries of what its scholars can find and, more importantly, what they cannot contradict. The First Vatican Council (1869-1870) tested Newman and Acton’s integrity, especially with respect to defining the dogma of papal infallibility, formally binding on members of the Roman Catholic communion.
“To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant,” Newman aphorized, and his reasons for breaking with the Church of England are of biographical interest. To affirm, however, that the Bishop of Rome as the “Vicar of Christ” is protected from propounding doctrinal error (under certain conditions) was the constant and ancient belief of Christians is to abandon history for pious historical fictions and the attendant pleasures of belonging. Same for the earlier dogma of Immaculate Conception (1854) and that of the Bodily Assumption of Mary (1950).
Newman and Acton caved. Newman, a brilliant intellect who, in the end, came to know his place and kept it, smothered his historically grounded “reservations.” Acton sought and got the protection of his diocesan bishop from the grasp of his nemesis, Cardinal Manning. He had an escape hatch as exquisitely lawyerly in its expression as is the dogma.[1]
So, one cheer for his love of liberty, another for his productivity (which, however, never resulted in a book). For his “yielding obedience,” not to sola scriptura, of course, but sola ecclesia, a Bronx cheer.
Note
[1] “. . . Acton protested [to his bishop] ‘that I have given you no foundation for your doubt. . . . I have yielded obedience to the Apostolic Commission which embodied those decrees, and I have not transgressed . . . obligations imposed under the supreme sanction of the Church.’ That satisfied Acton’s ordinary, and that was that.” Anthony Flood, Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic, 2019, 310.