Modernists and Mystics

6. Henri Bergson and Alfred Loisy: On Mysticism and the Religious Life

6 Henri Bergson and Alfred Loisy On Mysticism and the Religious Life Harvey Hill Many Catholics around the turn of the twentieth century viewed appeals to religious experience as suspect. After all, Protestants often emphasized religious experience over against the objective truths enunciated by the Catholic Church through the centuries. And looming behind the Protestant emphasis on experience was the even more fearsome specter of Kantian subjectivism, the idea that all truth was relative to the knower. In response, many Catholic intellectuals turned to neo-Thomistic philosophy and theology, which were believed to provide a solid foundation for a properly orthodox Christian faith in properly deferential lay Christians. But not all Catholics shared this distrust of religious experience. Those who would later be identified and condemned as Modernists by Pope Pius X, as well as a number of their fellow travelers, argued that appeals to religious experience were consistent with fidelity to the Catholic tradition. Their heroes were the mystics and the spiritual writers , not the theologians, and many insisted that neo-Thomism without reference to religious experience was an empty abstraction, divorced from the reality of Christian life. The task, they believed, was to use modern religious experience to enliven traditional Catholic teaching 104 Henri Bergson and Alfred Loisy 105 so that the Church could remain a vital religious force in the modern world.1 Among those Modernists who appealed to religious experience was Alfred Loisy (1857–1940), a priest and biblical scholar who sought to combine his two vocations until he was excommunicated in 1908. After his excommunication, Loisy continued his scholarly work in the secular academy, but religious controversy continued to dog him. Attacked from both his left and his right as a closet rationalist who had remained in the Church under false pretenses, Loisy defended the integrity of his Christian faith before his excommunication and his consistency thereafter in a series of autobiographies.2 Loisy had defenders as well, including Henri Bremond (1865–1933), a priest and noted scholar of Christian mysticism. In Un clerc qui n’a pas trahi, Bremond presented Loisy as a mystic of sorts.3 Loisy, who worked with Bremond on his book, approved of this description of himself. But even while still a Catholic, Loisy was not a mystic in the commonly understood sense of that term, and he was not widely regarded as having mystical sensibilities . As Émile Poulat notes, “the Critic and the Mystic are often presented as the faces of Modernism, illustrated by the contrasting figures 1. Recent histories of Modernism include Marvin O’Connell, Critics on Trial: An Introduction to the Catholic Modernist Crisis (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1994), and Pierre Colin, L’audace et le soupçon: La crise moderniste dans le catholicisme français (1893–1914) (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1997). 2. In 1980 Ronald Burke surveyed the various opinions about Loisy’s sincerity and articulated what appears to be the consensus: that Loisy had at least a “Catholic kind of faith” during his Catholic years. See “Loisy’s Faith: Landshift in Catholic Thought,” Journal of Religion 60 (1980): 138–64. The most important of Loisy’s autobiographies are Choses passées (Paris: Émile Nourry, 1913) and Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire religieuse de notre temps, 3 vols. (Paris: Émile Nourry, 1930–1931). On the similarities and differences in them, see Harvey Hill, “More Than a Biblical Critic: Alfred Loisy’s Modernism in Light of His Autobiographies,” in Personal Faith and Institutional Commitments: Roman Catholic Modernist and Anti-Modernist Autobiography, ed. Lawrence Barmann and Harvey Hill (Scranton, Penn.: University of Scranton Press, 2002), and in shorter form, in Anglican Theological Review 85 (2003): 689–707. 3. Une Œuvre clandestine d’Henri Bremond: Sylvain LeBlanc, Un Clerc qui n’a pas trahi: Alfred Loisy d’après ses Mémoires, ed. Émile Poulat (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1972). Bremond’s authorship of Un clerc qui n’a pas trahi was only definitively established in 1966. See Émile Poulat, “Modernisme et intégrisme: Documents nouveaux,” Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 76 (1981): 337–55, at 338–47; “Introduction,” Un clerc qui n’a pas trahi, 13–18; and Critique et mystique: Autour de Loisy ou la conscience catholique et l’esprit moderne (Paris: Le Centurion, 1984): 49–54. 106 Harvey Hill of Loisy and Tyrrell.”4 What, we might therefore ask, did Loisy mean by mysticism...