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Dictionary of the History of Ideas

Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas
  
  
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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-


421

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.