From Notre Dame to the Holy Roman Empire by Thomas A. Brady, Jr. 1

From Notre Dame to the Holy Roman Empire by Thomas A. Brady, Jr. Two other boundaries shaped my young life. One was politics. My father’s family were what we called “Yellow Dog Democrats.” They, as my Virginia-born grandmother declared, “would vote 1. From Missouri to Notre Dame for a yellow dog if he were on the Democratic ticket.” Second and far more subtle were the religious boundaries. My father’s There is an old and largely futile argument about whether people were Protestants, mostly Presbyterians, while my mother’s History is a science. In my opinion, it is not. To be sure, given family belonged to the sparsely strewn Catholic archipelago in the skill, imagination, and hard work, through our sources we can to great Protestant ocean. some degree learn to speak with the dead. As my dear Berkeley friend Arthur Quinn (1942-1997) wrote, “These shades from time gone” require “only a little of our blood to return to 2. A Stranger in a Strange Land – Notre Dame fleeting life, to speak with and through us.”1 As the great German theologian Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923) declared a In 1955 I left my world to cross the Mississippi River for the first century ago, “For all [the] striving after exactitude, objectivity, time, bound for the University of Notre Dame. My new home and minuteness of investigation, the historian [is] constantly puzzled me in two respects. First, my classmates came mostly obliged to come back to present experience, . it is by the aid of from the Catholic tribes of the North and the East. While I analogies drawn from the life of to-day . that we reach the recognized the Irish and the Germans, to me the Lithuanians, causal explanation of the events of the past.”2 Understanding Croats, and Hungarians; Slovaks, Poles and a variety of Italians history requires both learning and imagination. were quite exotic. Many of them came from the great eastern cities, which made them feel superior to those whose vowels they My own history has fueled my imagination in just this way. My judged too long or accents to be unintelligible. One anecdote native place is Columbia, Missouri, in my youth a fair-sized will suffice. A few years ago, I crossed paths with my old county town both nourished and irritated by the presence of a classmate and friend, the journalist Mark Shields. “Do you significant public university. It sits very near the crossing of two remember,” I asked this Massachusetts Irishman, “when we first great borders: Hamlin Garland’s “Middle Border” which met I had to ask you to repeat at least twice everything you said marked off vertically our country’s West from its East; and the to me?” “Yes,” he replied, “and do you remember that I asked horizontal border that once divided the South from the North. you to do the same for me?” During the late unpleasantness between the states, my father’s people fought under the man they called “Old Jack” or My other sense of Notre Dame’s strangeness arose from what I “Stonewall”—and my mother’s under the man they called felt to be a pedagogical pressure in favor of Europeanization. My “Uncle Billy”—William Tecumseh Sherman. teachers—some refugees from Hitler’s Europe and some indigenous—agreed that we were little lost Europeans, who My reception of this new vision came to light one day when I should reclaim our rightful heritage of Western Civilization. To went to the Notre Dame’s Library to consult a passage in Edward me, this was a very bizarre notion. Neither then nor later did I Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. When I asked ever think of myself as a European. As for civilization, on that for this classic, the librarian responded that it was “in the cage,” subject I agreed with Huckleberry Finn, a fellow Missourian who that is, it was forbidden to Catholics unless by permission of an closes his tale with these lines: “But I reckon I got to light out for officer of the Church. I was stunned. I told the librarian that the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to Mr. Gibbon’s work sat in the library of my father, who was a adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there historian and a devout Catholic convert. True, but of no avail. before.” From this, my sole encounter with the Index of Prohibited Books, I retained a very sour taste in my mouth and a certainty At Notre Dame I soon learned that I wasn’t smart enough to that I was neither heretical, lascivious, nor anti-clerical. study Philosophy as I had planned. So I said farewell to Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas. At Notre Dame we did not After I left Notre Dame in 1959 I saw Father Dolan only twice, study Kant, Hegel, or—God forbid!—Karl Marx or Friedrich both times in St. Louis. At the second encounter he told me that Nietzsche.3 And so I turned to History, my father’s discipline, he had resigned his professorship at Notre Dame, his membership and struck gold in the person of a truly inspiring young teacher of in the Congregation of the Holy Cross, and the Catholic Christianity and Europe. John Patrick Dolan, C.S.C., was a priesthood. He subsequently taught in the University of South young priest from Iowa, who had received his PhD in History Carolina, where he died in 1982 at age 59. Possibly, I am not the from the University of Bonn in Germany. He returned to only living “Domer” who remembers him with fondness and America with a new—at least to me—and exciting understanding respect. of the history of Christianity. Our own history textbooks taught the story of Western Civilization, which rolled through the ages from Egypt, Greece, and Rome, cruised through the Christian 3. The Holy Roman Empire and Its Peculiarities Middle Ages, and then yielded to the glories of the Enlightenment, capitalism and Europe’s twentieth-century wars. At the center of the world John Patrick Dolan taught lay the mysterious and commonly scorned political body known as the Young Father Dolan, by contrast, initiated his students into the “Holy Roman Empire.” In those days very few Americans dawn of Vatican II. He taught that Catholicism and studied the huge, loosely aggregated polity that had embraced the Protestantism were two closely related streams of a single religious lands of modern Germany and Austria, much of eastern France, culture, the common roots and essential inspirations of which the Netherlands and Belgium, much of Poland and the Baltic sprang from late medieval Christianity. Soon, perhaps, the future lands, and also the Czech kingdom and a good many other odd would restore the old unity. bits and pieces. By the 12th century these lands stood under the authority of the pope at Rome, of course, and also that of the proved far more durable than the militarized principalities of the German king who bore the title of “Holy Roman Emperor.” The great aristocratic German dynasties. This durability depended, I greatest difference between these lands and the more consolidated believe, on three predominant characteristics of the Empire. kingdoms of France, England, and Spain, was that the Empire so long preserved its configuration into many relatively small, secular 1) First, between the 13th and the 18th centuries the Empire polities ruled by princely dynasties, bishops and archbishops, created and preserved elaborate Imperial institutions, most abbots and abbesses, free knights and self-governing peasant notably the Imperial High Court and the regional parliaments. communities. [MAP: Holy Roman Empire] Alongside the big, These bodies, Gerald Strauss wrote, "performed concretely and showy pieces—Austria, Bavaria, and Saxony—one found truly effectively what the empire as a whole stood for but could not do. curious things, such as the cluster of thirty-nine villages on It defended and preserved fragmented sovereignty and the Leutkirch Heath in the South German region of Swabia. These privileges of the weak as well as the strong, and of the complex folk recognized no overlord but the Holy Roman Emperor in and shifting political relationships on which the feudal order in Vienna, and they formed perhaps Europe’s most remarkable Germany rested.” At the Empire’s head was the king-emperor culture of self-respect and political independence. elected by both spiritual (or ecclesiastical) and temporal (or secular) princes: four archbishops and three dynastic princes. This picture of highly fragmented German lands seems to support the traditional Western Europe image of German backwardness 2) In the German lands the state-building process occurred on a vs. progressive Franco-British civilization. [MAP: Germany 1500] "territorial," that is, regional, rather than a "national" level. Only This view of German culture was famously enshrined in a one German state—the Kingdom of Prussia—ever became large pretentious comment by the French philosopher François Arouet enough and predatory enough to be compared with the (1694-1778), known as Voltaire. He sneered at “this “Western” European states. By contrast, in the Empire’s older agglomeration which was called and which still calls itself the and more populous southern and western states we find, as Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Strauss wrote, an “astonishing ability of the political and social empire.”4 Today’s picture of the Empire, by contrast, agrees with establishment in Germany to absorb, adapt and even utilize the view of the late Gerald Strauss that “the Holy Roman Empire progressive and potentially disruptive forces.” Central Europe’s no longer strikes us as quite the sideshow monstrosity depicted in small principalities, whether secular or ecclesiastical, retained far the older historiography.”5 more local control of their institutions and bore less crushing burdens of taxation for military and imperial purposes, than did What can today’s historian learn from the Empire’s history? Over the subjects of Western Europe’s monarchs.

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