1 Comparative Religion and/as Modernist Theology: L’Évangile et l’Église and the Neuilly Essais
The publication of L’Évangile et l’Église in 1902 was a milestone in Loisy’s trajectory, as well as a landmark in the intellectual history of the Church. Often considered as the starting point of the Modernist crisis in the Catholic Church, the book was the main cause of the intensification of its anti-Modernist politics, culminating in the Syllabus Lamentabili sane exitu and the Encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis in 1907, followed by the so-called anti-Modernist oath in 1910.1 The volume was the first of the petits livres rouges, Loisy’s series of historical and philosophical essays.2 In it, he offered a historical-critical account of primitive Christianity and analyzed the relation of Jesus’ original gospel to the later development of the Church, and of Christian doctrine and cult. Loisy decided the time had come to abandon the protection of the pseudonyms he would normally use to publish on delicate topics.3 In L’Évangile et l’Église he openly insisted on the necessary historicization of early Christianity and consistently applied his now fully developed evolutionary philosophy of history. His rewriting of the Christian origins conveyed a radical reform program for early 20th century Catholicism. It was a plea for a systematic redefinition of the asymmetrical relationship between science and faith in the Church, and, ultimately, for a new understanding of Catholic faith itself. Loisy’s book was condemned locally by Cardinal Richard in early 1903, but it wasn’t until late 1903, after Pius X had come to power, that the volume was placed on the Index of forbidden books.4 In 1903, Loisy published several other “dangerous” volumes, such as Autour d’un petit livre (1903), his second petit livre rouge, in which he tried to defend and clarify the positions of the first volume for his critics.5 Still, there is no doubt that his excommunication was most significantly accelerated by the publication of L’Évangile et l'Église.
Loisy’s seminal book almost instantly attracted attention from specialized and non-specialized audiences inside and outside of the Church. Until today, it has remained his best-known work. The first edition numbered 1500 copies, which were sold out in no time.6 The book was later translated into various languages (English, German, Spanish and Italian) and would receive a total of five editions (1903², 1904³, 19084, 19295). Since the rise of scientific interest in this significant period of Catholic Church history,7 Loisy’s book has been the subject of extensive and detailed scholarship. The dominant focus has been on his notable reinterpretation of the relationship between history and theology, and its implications for the power and the status of the Church, and for the meaning of Catholic dogma.8 But the book has also received ample attention from biblical scholars and historians of Christianity, who have shown how Loisy propagated the new exegetical methods which were being developed in Liberal-Protestant Germany and in secular French scholarship (especially Renan), among his French Catholic peers.9
Despite these multifarious approaches, there is an aspect of the book which has not yet received the attention it deserves, that is, the vital role of comparative religion in Loisy’s historical argumentation. While several scholars have studied his innovative views on Jesus’ interrelation to Judaism, his original approach to early Christianity’s dependence on Greco-Roman paganism has gone virtually unnoticed, and the same is true for his (careful) consideration of a universalizing anthropological approach to religion. The book’s statements on early Christianity’s relationship to surrounding Jewish and pagan religious cultures invite further investigation of a hitherto largely neglected context of interpretation: the secular discipline of history of religions.10 In our introduction it has been pointed out that Loisy steadily attempted to bridge the gap between the then strictly separated Catholic and secular scientific worlds. The present chapter will show how Loisy’s essay carefully unveiled his position toward methods used in the French and international history of religions, where the comparability of Christianity had been one of the most debated issues since the late 19th century. New insights into this Modernist manifesto may be gained when we consider the possibility that his theory of religious evolution—which was highly indebted to the theological views of Cardinal John Henry Newman11—was further consolidated when Loisy entered into a dialogue with the evolutionary models of history writing which were at use at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and the Collège de France.
The principal objectives of this chapter, then, are to reveal the function of comparative religion within Loisy’s evolutionary historiography, and to position his comparative views within the two ideological-scientific contexts that constituted his intellectual horizon. First, Loisy’s thought was diametrically opposed to traditional Catholic scholarship, but it is important to remember that L’Évangile et l’Église was aimed at defending the Church, though of course in the future modernized form he envisioned.12 The book was presented as a refutation of the famous essay Das Wesen des Christentums (1900) by the German Liberal-Protestant scholar Adolf von Harnack.13 Harnack’s peculiar comparative views nourished Loisy’s, even if they mostly served as a negative point of reference. Secondly, we want to demonstrate Loisy’s indebtedness to some of the comparative paradigms in use in the nascent academic discipline of history of religions.14 By this context we do not only mean the French institutionalized discipline, which was heavily dominated by Liberal-Protestant scholars like father and son Albert and Jean Réville, or Auguste Sabatier.15 We will also focus on Loisy’s relation to independent scholars like Reinach and Cumont who did not occupy chairs in history of religions, but still dominated the French and international comparative debates in the early 20th century.16 This chapter’s exploratory journey into Loisy’s Modernist views, Harnack’s Liberal-Protestant ideas, and the popular comparative frameworks of the science laïque will ultimately enable us to address the overarching question of the scientificity of Loisy’s comparative religion at the turn of the century. Even if Loisy firmly qualified himself as a “historian,” his critical scholarship was inextricably intertwined with a deep religious commitment.17 To what extent was his historical argumentation, indeed, “scientific,” when one compares it to the work of his contemporaries?
L’Évangile et l’Église is a prime example of a highly premeditated and strategic self-representation. When writing this work, Loisy was working in an environment that was particularly hostile to any method that could question the uniqueness of Christianity and the historical truthfulness of the Bible. For a correct interpretation of his book, it is necessary that we first examine how this anti-scientific setting affected the publication. The second section of this chapter deals with Harnack’s ideas on the comparative history of Christianity. Thereafter follows the analysis of L’Évangile et l’Église, complemented by the study of two slightly earlier texts of Loisy’s—his Neuilly Essais18 and pseudonymous A. Firmin article “La religion d’Israël.” The final part of this chapter is devoted to Loisy’s correspondence with several leading personalities of the Sciences religieuses department at the École pratique, and aims at determining how Loisy’s Évangile et l’Église and its subsequent condemnation affected his position at this prominent institution.
1.1 On the Interpretation of L’Évangile et l’Église
Regardless of one’s particular focus of research, L’Évangile et l’Église is a highly difficult work for any scholar to interpret due to the conflicting voices it conveys.19 Its ambivalent character reflects Loisy’s complex psychology at this point of his Catholic career. On the one hand, his dismissal from the Institut catholique made him painfully aware that his scientific and religious views radically conflicted with the traditional teachings of the Catholic Church.20 In a letter to his friend Friedrich von Hügel,21 Loisy explained that he was unsure whether he would actually have the courage to publish the book.22 He rightly anticipated that the publication would set off what may be called without any exaggeration a tsunami of troubles with ecclesiastical authorities. On the other hand, Loisy still hoped that the Church—or at the least a good part of his fellow Catholics—would come on board, and comprehend the inherent value of his modernizing ideas.23 This constant wavering between realism and hope led Loisy to wrap his views in an apologetic anti-Protestant packing, which is alternatingly purely strategic and completely sincere.24
In his introduction, Loisy explained that his volume offered a study of Harnack’s Wesen des Christentums.25 In the following part of our chapter, Harnack’s ideas will be discussed in great detail. For now it suffices to note that this Protestant scholar claimed to have written a purely historical enquiry into the essence of Christianity, while, in reality, he combined advanced historical criticism with a Liberal-Protestant reading of Jesus’ life and message. Harnack’s evident conclusion was that the Catholic Church had no foundation in this original message. When the French translation of Harnack’s essay came out, Loisy could no longer resist the urge of writing a reaction. He explained that his sole aim was to “catch the point of view of history.”26 It is worth underlining that Loisy and Harnack both believed that in their controversy over Jesus’ original gospel it was history which was at stake, and not religion. Loisy emphatically disavowed having written “an apologia for Catholicism or traditional dogma.”27
But although Loisy stated differently, his Évangile et l’Église most definitely served apologetic goals.28 In truth, it did not defend traditional Catholicism, but a thoroughly modernized Church. The book’s anti-Harnackian point of departure was sincere in the sense that Loisy was absolutely convinced of Harnack’s theological abuse of history, but it was an unequivocally strategic choice, too. In reality, Loisy’s ideas showed much closer resemblance to Harnack’s than to those of his conservative Catholic colleagues.29 With the contention that he had not intended to offer “an apologia for Catholicism,” he anticipated the criticism of those who would see through the strategy and figure out that Loisy’s anti-Protestantism was indeed neither a synonym nor a guarantee for traditional Catholicism. Harvey Hill has recently adduced conclusive proof of the fact that Harnack’s Wesen offered an excellent apologetic pretext for Loisy to publish historical views he had actually developed well before 1900 in his Neuilly Essais.30 This, however, does not imply that Harnack’s ideas are not crucial to understand Loisy’s. The key ideas of Harnack’s Wesen were perfectly analogous to those of his famous Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte (1886 – 1890),31 which was explicitly mentioned in the Essais together with other recent (German and French) Liberal-Protestant publications.32
For Loisy’s views on comparative religion—which are outside of the scope of Hill’s enquiry—the added value of the Neuilly document is somewhat limited, in the sense that the ideas exposed in this document are not substantially different from those published in his pseudonymous work. We will see (1.4) that the first section of the chapter “La religion d’Israël” of the Neuilly manuscript sheds very interesting new light on the comparative fram...
