it has left others before him. The principle of catholicity of St. Vincent of Lérins did not prevent Pius IX from proclaiming papal infallibility as the formal principle of the Catholic church.
Solov'ev was not clear in his own mind concerning the formal principle of the Catholic church in the sense of the catholicity he demanded, as we can discern from the conflicting nature of the criteria he adduces. In the end, however, he discerned divine truth in the syllabus of Pius IX and in the new dogma of that pope.
Characteristic was Solov'ev's attitude towards Döllinger and the Old Catholics.
Instead of examining the reasons put forward by these prominent theologians, and instead of enlightening himself as he should from their historical studies concerning the development of papal centralism and absolutism, he dismisses the whole movement with the remark that Old Catholicism is nothing more than professorial learning, the learning of the study, that the masses have remained unaffected by it, that at most Bismarck has favoured it as against the Catholic church. Solov'ev was greatly impressed by the fact that the entire Catholic world accepted the new dogma of infallibility, whereas Döllinger and his associates protested in the name of individual freedom against the authority of the church, thus rejecting the principle of the Catholic church in favour of the Protestant principle.
This criticism of Old Catholicism, written in the year 1883, is extremely uncritical. In the first place, it is not true that Bismarck favoured the Old Catholics, for Bismarck, like Solov'ev, considered that the masses were quite unaffected by the movement, and that for this reason it was devoid of significance for the Protestant statesman. "Quieta non movere" was Bismarck's leading principle in practical politics, and he did not lift a finger to set the masses in motion. It is not to Bismarck but to Solov'ev that we should look for an examination of the problem, for a consideration of the numerous and important points made against papal absolutism by such men as Döllinger, von Schulte, Maassen, Friedrich, Langen, and others. But in his studies of dogmatics and ecclesiastical history, Solov'ev did not get beyond an extremely uncritical dilettantism, and thus it was that in a question of such importance he could associate himself with Strossmayer, a man of scant competence in theological
