The contents of the two articles here reprinted from The Month (January and February 1937) sufficiently explain themselves, but I should like to point out that since their appearance Dr. Coulton has published a bulky pamphlet entitled Sectarian History, which reproduces the text of the correspondence between us and is preceded by a long and acrimonious tirade in which several other opponents besides myself are taken to task.
Nevertheless, Dr. Coulton has not ventured to defend a single one of the blunders which in answer to his challenge are duly set out with exact references in the investigation which follows. On the contrary, he has even gone so far as to say: “I am forced to confess that Father Thurston has damaged Lea’s accuracy in these ten pages more than I expected.”
Agreat part of the brochure Sectarian History, as well as occasional references in a still more recent publication by Dr. Coulton, entitled Divorce, Mr. Belloc, and “The Daily Telegraph,” are devoted to past controversies, such as those, for example, which figure in my booklet, Some Inexactitudes of Mr. G. G. Coulton (see below, note 4).
Apart from his strictures on other opponents, Dr. Coulton charges me with “exploiting to the full my facilities for wholesale slander,” with “garbling his letters,” “unblushingly falsifying his conclusions,” etc., not to speak of his plain insinuation that in more than one instance I have been guilty of deliberate falsehood.
I have no intention of attempting any further reply to allegations which have been fully answered in the booklet just referred to, but I may mention that some comments on Sectarian History will be found in The Tablet for September 8, 1937, and in The Month for October 1937. On Dr. Lea’s misrepresentation of the early history of Confession I have written further in The Month for January 1938, making reference to a previous article in December 1928, which appeared in the same periodical.
The Controversy
In the course of September 1936 I received a rather bulky letter from Dr. G. G. Coulton, the well-known assailant of mediaeval ecclesiasticism, addressed to me from Cambridge. The letter came by registered post — obviously because, in Dr. Coulton’s idea, when you write to people like Jesuits you have to take such precautions; otherwise, if it suited their convenience, they would declare that the letter had never reached them.
It appeared that a C.T.S. [Catholic Truth Society] pamphlet of mine on “Catholics and Divorce” had come into Dr. Coulton’s hands and that his feelings had been outraged by a sentence in which I spoke of “undocumented assertions borrowed from Dr. H. C. Lea and other writers equally reckless and prejudiced.”
Dr. Coulton began by declaring that Catholic controversialists were making it a practice to attack Dr. Lea “now that he is dead” and to slander him as an inaccurate and untrustworthy writer. He reminded me about the good opinion of Lea’s History of the Inquisition expressed by such scholars as Lord Acton and Vacandard, and, as the main point of his letter, he challenged me to justify the language I had used, asking me also to name any books or articles in which Dr. Lea’s contentions had been fairly met.
In a brief reply I pointed out that I was not attacking Lea’s Inquisition volumes, which had never specially engaged my attention, but that I had in mind mainly his History of Confession and Indulgences and the History of Sacerdotal Celibacy. These books had sufficed to convince me that Lea was entirely out of his depth when dealing with the internal discipline of the Catholic Church and that his work abounded in reckless deductions from inadequate evidence. I went on to mention the criticisms of Lea which formed the substance of a small volume printed in Germany by Dr. P. M. Baumgarten in 1908, and I referred to sundry articles of my own, [Amongst those which I specified was an article in The Dublin Review for January; three contributions to The Tablet, February and March 1905; and a note in The Month, March, 1908, p. 311. Dr. H. C. Lea died in 1909.] published, not after Lea’s death, but while he was still in full literary activity. Amongst these was a contribution to The American Catholic Quarterly Review for July 1903, in which I commented upon Lea’s chapter on “The Eve of the Reformation” in the first volume of the Cambridge Modern History.
Apparently the American periodical was not accessible to Dr. Coulton at Cambridge, but after he had found an opportunity of paying a visit to the British Museum, I received at the beginning of November another registered packet containing objections and new requests for references. There were eighteen quarto pages of writing in all. Frankly, I did little more than glance at the contents.
I felt that I had neither the time nor the energy to plunge into the details of a controversy which had occupied me more than thirty years ago and which I had hardly thought of since. But my attention was caught by some vehement language very characteristic of the writer, in which he commented upon my article in the American review just named. That article ended with these words, words which I have so far found no reason to wish to modify: “Great [I wrote] as may be the industry of Dr. Lea, I believe his capacity for misconception and misrepresentation to be even greater, and the attempts that I have occasionally made to follow up his trail and to compare his assertions with his sources have always ended in a more deeply rooted distrust of every statement made by him. It would be a safe thing probably to say that in any ten consecutive pages ten palpable blunders may be unearthed. At any rate I should like to submit that estimate to the test of experiment. Would Dr. Lea, I wonder, be prepared to accept such a challenge and to elect to stand or fall by the third volume of his Auricular Confession and Indulgences or his chapter on the causes of the Reformation in the Cambridge Modern History ?”
This proposal of mine, though only read by Dr. Coulton thirty-three years after it was written, seems in its effect to have been almost as provocative as the proverbial red rag to a bull. I can only congratulate myself that I live at a safe distance. In his letter to me of November 2, 1936, he says: “I assert with every sense of responsibility that your challenge is libellous and false to a ludicrous and almost inconceivable degree” and to omit other flattering amenities of the same type, [By way of specimen, the concluding words of Dr. Coulton’s letter of November 14 may suffice. He writes: “It is idle for you to plead that the slander is now thirty-three years old. If it was true then, it is equally true now; if (as I confidently assert) it is not grossly false, then you have been thirty-three years before the world with this falsehood upon your conscience.”] he writes again on November 11 desiring to know “whether you are prepared to stand by the very insulting challenge delivered to Dr. Lea.”
As I explained to my assailant, I am eighty years of age, and there are other extrinsic reasons, such as a protracted illness last summer, press of work now long overdue, a sense of the futility of nearly all controversy, etc., which make me reluctant to pick up such ancient threads of which I retain little memory. But protests only led to a further multiplication of letters, and, of course, to the unpleasant insinuation that I, like his other Catholic opponents, was only intent on backing out of the encounter I had provoked.
When, therefore, Dr. Coulton, without awaiting my consent, applied to Professor G. E. Moore, who (though he was, to quote his own words, “in complete ignorance of the issue”) was good enough to assign at random ten definite pages in volume I of the History of Auricular Confession and Indulgences, I decided to accept the terms proposed. It might, I thought, be good for Dr. Coulton to learn once again [I have in view a little shilling booklet of mine, Some Inexactitudes of Mr. G. G. Coulton, Sheed & Ward, 1927. See especially p. 41 of the booklet in question.]the lesson that if his opponents were reluctant to plunge into controversy in answer to his interminable challenges, that reluctance did not necessarily arise from the consciousness that they had nothing to say in reply.
I may note that the volume selected was not that which I specially indicated in my American article. Knowing the Indulgence volume best, I had proposed volume III, but as volume I had been settled on, I saw no reason to quarrel with the choice made. On the other hand, Dr. Coulton, with a great display of magnanimity, in order that the section might begin and end with a complete paragraph, threw in an extra page and a half. I was free to hunt for errors from the middle of page 199 to the top of page 211.
But my opponent ends his letter characteristically with these words: “I defy you to find even a single patent blunder in all these twelve pages, and I must put it to you very plainly that you are now in a position in which your very worse [sic ] policy is that of obstinate muteism [sic ].” Did Dr. Coulton, I wonder, intend to write “muleism”?
I am afraid that in my recoil from “muteism,” it may unfortunately be necessary to discuss in some detail the crop of corrigenda which the pages assigned abundantly supply. The list of blunders may most conveniently be divided into two groups, the second being introduced with a few words of explanation.
Blunder No. 1
As Dr. Coulton in writing to me on November 14, 1936, drew my attention, as though it were a conclusive piece of evidence, to the passage in which Dr. Lea appeals to St. Bernard’s Life of St. Malachi, I may as well begin with this characteristic example of the American scholar’s lapses.
After mentioning a case in which, according to St. Bernard’s report, a woman’s character was completely changed when she had made her confession to St. Malachi, Lea adds: “Apparently confession had previously not been practised in Ireland, for St. Bernard includes it among the unknown rites introduced [c. 1130] by Malachi when he romanized the Irish Church.”[ Lea, Auricular Confession and Indulgences, vol. I, p. 208.]
There is no foundation for any such inference in the words used by St. Bernard. The phrase he employs is de novo instituit, which certainly does not mean “He introduced for the first time.” Ireland before the twelfth century had been repeatedly ravaged by the Vikings, and what with this, the scarcity of priests, and the internal dissensions of the people, a deplorable neglect of religious practices had resulted in many districts. St. Bernard, describing the reforms effected by St. Malachi, writes as follows:
“Hence it is that to this day there is chanting and psalmody in these churches at the canonical hours after the fashion of the whole world. For there was no such thing before, not even in the city [Armagh]. He, how ever, had learnt singing in his youth, and soon he introduced song into his monastery while as yet none in the city nor in the whole bishopric could or would sing. Then Malachi instituted anew the most wholesome usage of confession, the sacrament of confirmation, the marriage contract-of all of which they were either ignorant or negligent.” [St.Bernard’s Life of St.Malachi, pp. 16-18; cf. p. 37.]
This is from St. Bernard’s Life of St. Malachi in the translation of Dr. H. J. Lawlor (the Protestant Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin), published by the S.P.C.K. Moreover, Dean Lawlor emphasizes in a footnote the point which here concerns us. He says: “The word ‘anew’ (de novo ) seems to indicate St. Bernard’s belief that it was only in comparatively recent times that the usages to which he refers had fallen into desuetude.” Further, in an appendix to the same volume, we read: “It may be true that confession had been much neglected among some classes of the people . . . but it is remarkable that the anmchara (soul-friend) or confessor is frequently mentioned in Irish literature. . . . And penance is often alluded to in the obituary notices of distinguished persons clerical and lay.” [Ibid., pp. 161-162. It was a proverbial phrase that a person without a confessor was like a body without a head. See the Martyrology of Oengus (Ed. Whitley Stokes), p. 182; and cf. pp. 8, 12, 64.]
So, too, it is plain from St. Bernard’s words that if we suppose Malachi to have introduced confession for the first time he must also have introduced the sacrament of confirmation and the Church chant for the first time. But, as Dean Lawlor points out: “The rite of confirmation has always been used in the Irish Church though possibly neglected at some periods. St. Patrick tells us that he ‘confirmed in Christ those whom he had begotten to God.’ ”
I may note the fact that Dean Lawlor is the author of many important works dealing with the early Irish Church and that he is also Secretary of the Royal Irish Academy. Another writer whose work has everywhere been accepted as of supreme authority in all questions bearing on the ecclesiastical history of Ireland is Dr. James F. Kenney. He happens to commend this very book of Dean Lawlor’s just quoted, as probably “the best study” of the organization of the early Church in Ireland. Further, he remarks elsewhere:
“A subsidiary controversy has arisen out of the theory of Loening that private penance was originally a purely monastic practice which the Irish and Anglo-Saxon missionaries extended to the lay world. Be that as it may, it seems certain that one of the features of the strict and enthusiastic monastic church of the sixth and seventh centuries which contrasted with the more lax Christianity of the Continent was the emphasis laid on confession and works of penance.” [The Sources of the Early History of Ireland, vol. I (New York, 1929), p. 239.]
In the light of these quotations it does not seem to me that I am exaggerating if I describe Lea’s attempt to show on St. Bernard’s sole authority that auricular confession was unknown in Ireland before the twelfth century as “a palpable blunder.”
Blunder No. 2
As we have been speaking of St. Bernard it may be convenient to turn at once to another statement made by Dr. Lea. He writes: “On the other hand, Abelard’s great antagonist, St. Bernard, is never weary of extolling the virtues of confession. Yet it is not sacramental confession that he urges, for this had not yet been formulated; we hear from him nothing of absolution and little of penance.” [Lea, Auricular Confession and Indulgences, vol. I, p. 207.]
The assertion that St. Bernard says nothing of absolution is simply untrue. Witness the following passage from the Liber ad Milites Templi, chapter xii, which begins with a reference to the confessionis sacramentum et sacerdotalis ministerii mysterium, a phrase which seems to agree ill with Dr. Lea’s contention that in St. Bernard’s time “sacramental confession had not yet been formulated.” But further on in the chapter St. Bernard remarks: “Wherefore it is necessary that priests who are ministers of the Word should keep a very careful eye on two points, viz., that on the one hand they should prick the hearts of sinners with such moderation of language that they on no account frighten them away from outspoken confession-in other words that they open their hearts without stopping their lips-on the other hand that they should not absolve even the conscience-stricken unless they see that he has made confession, since “with the heart we believe unto justice, but with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.” [Migne, P.L., vol. 162, c. 938.]
There can be no question about the reading sed nec absolvant etiam compunctum; I have verified the passage in other editions besides that of Migne. The curious point is that in a group of references printed in a footnote on Lea’s next page this very chapter of the Liber ad Milites Templi is prominently cited. Moreover, he has managed to forget that on page 134 of the same volume he himself admits that St. Bernard does mention absolution. The fact that the reference is brief only shows that absolution normally followed on confession.
We may readily admit that an explicit mention of absolution and of the penance enjoined is of comparative rarity in St. Bernard’s writings. But why should we expect these adjuncts to be alluded to? They were, long before this, an essential part of the rite, as I hope to make quite clear further on when discussing another blunder of Dr. Lea’s connected with the Cistercian statutes. When Longfellow tells us of Evangeline:
But a celestial brightness, a more ethereal beauty
Shone on her face and encircled her form
when, after confession
Homeward serenely she walked with God’s
benediction upon her.
the poet does not think it necessary to explain that she had received absolution and had said her penance. All the rest was included in the idea of confession. In any case, I submit that Lea’s statement that “we hear from St. Bernard nothing of absolution” is a palpable blunder, and it is a blunder which supports most conveniently the historian’s theory of the very late recognition of confession as a sacrament.