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Görres. The line taken by Vanden Heuvel means that he presents
Görres’s late pamphlet, Athanasius, as an appeal to the newly discovered
political power of the masses, without mentioning Görres’s
associated speculations on the philosophy of history. Vanden Heuvel
also provides a conventional account of Görres’s Ultramontanism,
unavoidable in connection with his late development, without
acknowledging the serious criticism which Margaret L. Anderson
had levelled at him as early as 1991 (Journal of Modern History, vol. 63,
pp. 704 f.). Vanden Heuvel overlooks the fact that in Teutschland und
die Revolution, Görres had seen Ultramontanism as a necessary complement,
in terms of the sociology of organization, to the separation
of the Church from the state which he advocated, without thereby
himself already becoming a fully convinced Ultramontane. In such
theological and philosophical respects, the author of this biography
leaves his flanks exposed to criticism.
This brings us to the problem faced by every biographer of
Görres: the immense mass of material which can hardly be dealt with
satisfactorily from a literary point of view. Vanden Heuvel’s solution
is to neglect what he considers less important. Thus he mentions the
success of Athanasius, which sold quickly, but passes over not only
the changes and additions in later editions but also the writings in
which Görres, provoked by the response to Athanasius, replied to his
critics. This lack of completeness is the price to be paid for a 400-page,
readable book. In-depth studies of Görres’s entire œuvre would have
filled several volumes. But there is another conceivable method
which Vanden Heuvel chose not to use, namely, to uncover a consistent
inner unity behind the immense variety and external changes.
Vanden Heuvel’s book is, nevertheless, a considerable achievement.
It will be the first port of call for anyone seeking information about
Görres for the foreseeable future, thus providing the basis on which
all future research will build.
Should another edition or a German translation be under consideration,
a number of factual errors could be corrected on such an
occasion. Examples are: Johann Michael Sailer was bishop not of
Landshut (p. 230), but of Regensburg; ‘major’ Scharnhorst, who was
Görres’s guest after the victory over Napoleon, cannot have been the
famous army reformer suggested in note 53 on p. 229 because he was
a general and was already dead at that time (as the footnote mentioned
reveals); and the prince-bishop of Breslau, Baron von Diepen-
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