2. Criticism and Dogma.
The question of the Bible
and a new apologetic for Catholicism were
most
dramatically broached in the work by the French
scholar Alfred
Loisy. Loisy was a critical autodidact,
who escaped from rigid scholastic
and Gallican semi-
nary teaching into the study
of Bible languages, the
French liberal Catholics, Newman, and the
German
critics, especially the exponents of the consistent
eschatological school like Johannes Weiss. Alfred
Loisy's critical work had
radical theological implica-
tions which he
was not afraid to draw out in his teach-
ing,
unlike the more politic Louis Duchesne, another
pioneer in scientific
historiography, under whose
sponsorship Loisy came to the newly-founded
Institut
Catholique in Paris. Dismissed from his post at the
Institute
in 1893, for denying the inerrancy of scrip-
ture, and indirectly censured in Leo XIII's encyclical
(Providentissimus Deus) on Bible study in the same
year, Loisy developed a general theory of cultural and
religious evolution,
and presented it in the form of an
antiliberal Protestant polemic, L'Évangile et l'église
(“The Gospel and the Church,” 1902), a refutation of
the French edition of Harnack's popular Berlin lec-
tures, The Essence of Christianity (1900).
Loisy claimed
that he was not a theologian but simply a Catholic
and a
critic though he believed, contrary to the pro-
gressives who welcomed his work, that the Church
could not
merely translate its old formulas into a mod-
ern
language but needed to completely revise its
cosmology. He insisted on the
necessity of this under-
taking because he
saw the Church as the major pre-
modern
manifestation of man's spiritual evolution, and
a guarantee as well of
social order.
In his modernist works Loisy argued that Harnack
was wrong to see the
fatherhood of God and the
brotherhood of man as the essential Christian
gospel
obscured by the later development of Catholicism. The
original
gospel, as a rigorous but Catholic criticism
revealed it, was not the
source, but the product, of
the faith of the first followers of Jesus. Its
message
was exclusively messianic and eschatological. Jesus,
who
entered history as man, not as God, felt himself
to be the Messiah and died
for his belief. But if he
announced the kingdom, it was the Church
which
came. The “impulse of will” or “soul
of Jesus,” origi-
nally expressed in the messianic teaching, was given
new
forms. The theological formulations of Paul, who
was “compelled
to explain, since he could not narrate,”
and of the fourth
Gospel, and the whole rest of the
history of Christian doctrine were
successive symboli-
cal representations of
the original mystery, which is
itself inaccessible to the historian.
“The Church can
fairly say that, in order to be at all times
what Jesus
desired the society of his friends to be, it had to become
what it has become; for it has become what it had
to be, in order to save
the Gospel by saving itself”
(Loisy [1912], p. 151).
The theologian and the man of faith could make
larger statements than the
historian. The raw mate-
rials of historical
science did not reveal transcendence
any more than did the rest of the
natural world. “God
does not show himself at the end of the
astronomer's
telescope. The geologist does not find him in his sam-
ples, nor the chemist at the bottom of his
test tube.
God may very well exist through all the world, but
he is in
no way the proper object of science” (Loisy
[1903], p. 9). These
public statements paralleled a more
pantheistic personal religious stance:
Loisy's histori-
cism was apparently
Christian to those of his readers
who admired the emergence of a
sophisticated (and
polemically antiliberal Protestant) critical mind,
but
for himself, the personal incarnation of God was “a
philosophical myth,” and not simply because human
philosophy had
not yet developed a more adequate
notion of personality than those of the
Fathers and the
Councils. “More
pantheist-positivist-humanitarian than
Christian” in 1904
([1930-31], II, 397), Loisy still
insisted in 1936 that there was a
“moral and spiritual
supernatural” reality at work in
human history, and
he hoped for a new religion, “crown of the
Christian
religion and of every other,” concentrated
“on the
perfecting of humanity in the life of the spirit,
that
is, in communion with God” (1950, p. 32).
Loisy's ideas were the focus for a complex critical
and theological debate
long before the condemnation
of 1907. While his works were officially
censured and
he engaged in a cat-and-mouse game of conditional
retraction with the authorities, enthusiasts for a radical
freedom in
critical matters like Baron von Hügel (him-
self a Bible student, but better known for his writings
on
mysticism and his correspondence with the leading
figures of the crisis)
defended Loisy's work. Exegetes
who appreciated the dangers of historicism,
but who
wished for more and better critical work (Pierre
Battifol of
Toulouse, and Marie-Joseph Lagrange of the
École biblique), tried to separate the
two. The majority
of Loisy's critics rejected the technique along with
the evolutionary and culture-relative religious philoso-
phy implicit in his use of them.
