Can the Pursuit of History Result in a Single Truth?

Lord Acton, who died 99 years ago, may have been the greatest of English historians during the second half of the 19th century. He had dazzling connections and an impressive career. The Acton family was old English Catholic and cosmopolitan. They were intermarried with at least two of the most ancient noble families of the Holy Roman-German empire. Acton’s grandfather, though English, was prime minister of the kingdom of Naples, for a while a close friend of Emma Hamilton and Lord Nelson. Acton’s father was a cosmopolitan aristocrat, a period figure whose life and character may have been even beyond his contemporary Balzac’s powers to limn. He died relatively young, at 36, having caught pneumonia when he returned to his home in Paris after a night of gambling and drinking; his wife had him locked out. To his funeral came the ambassadors of all the great powers of Europe and a representative of the king of France. His widow married the future earl of Granville, eventually foreign secretary at the apogee of the Victorian Age. When his father died, John Acton (more precisely, Sir John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, 8th Baronet, 1st Baron) was 3 years old.

His education was English and German. He read, spoke and wrote perfectly at least five European languages, besides his sufficiency in Latin and Greek. His avocation was threefold: the causes of liberalism, Catholicism and historicism. He lived at a time when publications of the largely German-inspired professional study of history multiplied rapidly. Astonishingly, most such books were noticed, collected and read by a universal, multilingual historian such as Acton. He began writing studies and articles in his 20s. That was a time when journals and reviews were read by many influential people in England. He wooed and eventually married the young and beautiful Bavarian countess he loved. For a while he was a member of Parliament. Lord Tennyson and Cardinal Newman respected him; George Eliot admired him; the pope (Pius IX) feared him. He was one of-perhaps the-closest friend of Gladstone, one of whose daughters may have been a little in love with Acton. He had a private library of about 70,000 volumes. Andrew Carnegie helped him out by buying that library, which, after Acton’s death, went to Cambridge; Queen Victoria also helped him by making him her lord-in-waiting. Then she and the prime minister, Lord Rosebery, made him Regius Professor in Cambridge. He was one of the founders of the English Historical Review, and the appointed creator and director of the Cambridge Modern History series. When he was measured for the robes and the cap at his installation, his head was the largest on record.

He lived for another seven years and then died, surrounded by his family in their villa on the beautiful Bavarian lake of Tegernsee, in the 69th year of his life, 1902. During the century that followed, dozens of serious studies and books were written about him. The present one is the largest and fullest one-volume biography, superbly researched and well-written by Roland Hill, whose interest in Acton and whose relations with some of his descendants had begun decades ago. It merits much praise because, in addition to the enormous amount of material relating to Acton’s life and thought, that life and Acton’s mind were not simple.

They were not simple for many reasons, the main one being Acton’s struggle to reconcile his liberalism and his Catholicism. One of his obiter dicta became famous: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.” (The “tends to” is often omitted, wrongly.) Acton’s contempt and fear of absolute power formed his liberalism. He believed in intellectual freedom and in the protection of minorities; he was unalterably opposed to absolute power given to a state, a king or a pope, including Pius IX’s dogma of papal infallibility. He did not live to see the populist state dictatorships of the 20th century. But his often trenchant and noble propositions of liberty inspired his various admirers during the century after his death. Politically too he was a committed and old-fashioned Gladstonian liberal. Hill is correct when he writes that “Acton meant the history of liberty to be a philosophy of history.” Yet unlike Tocqueville (there is curiously little evidence that Acton read or considered Tocqueville extensively), Acton gave not much benefit of doubt to democracy. Despite his abhorrence of slavery, he favored the South in the American Civil War. Toward the end of his life, he recognized the rising forces of nationalism and socialism. Unlike Gladstone, with whom he agreed on so many things (including Home Rule for Ireland), Acton did not believe in “national self-determination.” He, rightly, regarded nationalism at least as dangerous and more ominous than socialism.

His Catholicism was more deep-seated than his liberalism. And more controversial too. His fear that Pope Pius IX strove for absolutism governed the most difficult and tortured period in Acton’s life. He worked, assiduously and incessantly, against the proclamation of the dogma of papal infallibility before and during the First Vatican Council in 1869-’70 in Rome, at times with the dedication of a political manager. He incurred many enemies, foremost among them the rigid Cardinal Manning of England. The greatest influence on Acton’s mind was that of the extraordinary German Catholic Church historian and thinker Ignaz von Dllinger. As late as 1874, Acton feared that he would be excommunicated. Unlike Dllinger, he accepted the new dogma of infallibility and thought it necessary to state this privately and publicly.

The pope and the Infallibilists were probably wrong in exaggerating the dangers to the church and faith resulting from political and scientific liberalism, and especially from the loss of the temporal power of the papacy in 1870, when the Italians occupied Rome. But Acton was probably wrong too by exaggerating the consequences of the infallibility doctrine. In one of his notes there are the words of a friend, a priest: “Religion alone makes a good death,” to which he added: “Religion alone cannot make a good life.” His wife was often irritated with him. According to their daughter, his custom was to kneel next to the marital bed after lovemaking and pray that his act would lead to conception: We may assume that she was not amused. Yet his family and his neighbors loved him, and he died in his wife’s arms in their Tegernsee villa. That villa is now a health spa, and Acton’s grave in the local cemetery has been neglected: It is nearly impossible to find.

Acton never wrote a book. His aim was too high: to write the history of liberty. He wrote important and impressive articles, studies and lectures, and an astounding amount of other papers and notes that, as the great English historian Herbert Butterfield once wrote, amounted to “a tremendous intellectual system, which has stimulated many commentators and interpreters in our time.” Acton’s fame is that of a historian, not of a liberal or a Catholic. Yet the three vocations of his mind and life were inseparable from one another. Through the science of history he wished to purify the record and the prestige of the church and especially of the papacy. He was liberal enough to dismiss all hero-worshipers such as Carlyle and to insist that the greatest names in history have been often coupled with the greatest of crimes. In an unquestioned and unquestionable acceptance of the universal infallibility of the papacy, he saw “a small-minded Catholic distrust and fear.” He thought, as Hill puts it, that “Catholics everywhere were particularly suspicious of historical study, because, as the study of facts, it was less amenable to authority and less controllable by interest than philosophical speculation.”

Yet Newman-with whom Acton’s relationship was, alas, not close-was right when he said that Acton “seems to me to expect from History more than History can furnish.” Till the end of his life, Acton believed, and claimed, that historical science had reached a stage when a story of the Battle of Waterloo could be written that would not only be perfectly acceptable to French and British and Dutch and Prussian historians, but that would be unchanging, perennial and fixed. A century later we have (or at least ought to have) a more chastened and realistic view of historical objectivity, indeed, of truth. Acton believed that history, very much including the history of the church, was a supremely important matter-yes-and that the purpose of history is the definite, and final, establishment of truth-no. The purpose of history is the reduction of untruth.