"The sentiment," he wrote,[1] "on which Infallibility is founded could not be reached by argument, the weapon of human reason; but resided in conclusions transcending evidence, and was the inaccessible postulate rather than the demonstrable consequence of a system of religious faith." The opponents were, according to Acton, "baffled and perplexed by the serene vitality of a view which was impervious to proof. …
"No appeal to revelation or tradition, to reason or conscience, appeared to have any bearing whatever on the issue."
This persistent attempt to render authority independent of evidence was, if especially prominent in the Infallibility disputes, a deeply seated and long existing disease. It pervaded the theological school then dominant in Rome, but it had, according to Acton, exerted its baneful influence over the Roman Church for centuries. The Jesuit theologian, Petavius, in the seventeenth century supported existing authority at the expense of the past.
"According to Petavius, the general belief of Catholics at a given time is the word of God, and of higher authority than all antiquity and all the Fathers. Scripture may be silent, and tradition contradictory, but the Church is independent of both. Any doctrine which Catholic divines commonly assert, without proof, to be revealed, must be taken as revealed. … In this way, after Scripture had been subjugated, tradition itself was deposed; and the constant belief of the past yielded to the general conviction of the present. And as antiquity had given way to universality, universality made way for authority."
Thus in Acton's view the dominant school in the Roman Church were resolved that "authority must conquer history." He went so far as to say that:—
- ↑ History of Freedom, pp. 512, 513.
