Prelude to the Modernist Crisis: The “Firmin” Articles of Alfred Loisy by Christine E. Thirlway (review)

The reaction to the publication of Alfred Loisy’s L’Évangile et l’Église (The Gospel and the Church, London, 1902) helped precipitate Loisy’s excommunication in 1908 and Pope Pius X’s condemnation of “modernism” in 1910. Between 1898 and 1900, writing under the pseudonym of A. Firmin, Loisy published five articles in the Revue du clergé français. They were like stepping stones on the way to The Gospel and the Church, examining themes that reappeared, sometimes in more developed form, in that book. Prelude to the Modernist Crisiscontains translations of the first four of those articles. An expanded version of the fifth, “La religion d’Israël,” has been available in English for a long time ( The Religion of Israel, London, 1910). After almost a century, Loisy’s essays are still of theological interest.

His writing aroused opposition from those who thought he was ceding too much to contemporary thought. One such opponent was Charles Maignen, who published Nouveau catholicisme et nouveau clergé(Paris, 1902), a portion of which is translated and included here. In his introduction, C. J. T. Talar points out that Maignen’s response is important not only for its content but also for its tone: “The condemnation of modernism in Pascendi dominici gregis[1910] cannot be really appreciated apart from the climate of fear for orthodoxy that permeated Catholicism over those years” (p. xxii). Maignen is “representative of a school that equated its theology with Catholic orthodoxy and reacted accordingly to revisionist alternatives” (p. xxiii).

Prior to 1898, Talar observes, Loisy had been content to work on fairly technical questions of exegesis, because he had not yet figured out a way to integrate the results of his historical studies with Catholic teachings regarding inspiration, inerrancy, and the like. The overarching idea of historical development opened a way for him to achieve this integration. In article one, Loisy examines Blessed John Henry Newman’s use of this concept. Newman’s approach, Talar notes, “accelerated Loisy’s thought along the lines it was already following” (p. xiv). The idea of development enabled Loisy to affirm the role of dogma and the Church while disagreeing with Liberal Protestants and with neo-Scholastic Catholics. He argued against the emphasis on the individual that he saw in the former and against their lack of appreciation for the corporate and the institutional. He also objected to what he perceived to be the overly rational apologetics of the Catholics. Religion, Loisy says in these essays, is reasonable but more a matter of intuition, experience, and reflection than of unchanging propositional truths.

In his Firmin articles Loisy develops several important ideas, including the social nature of religion, the development of church teachings over time, the continuity and corporate coherence provided by the institutional Church, and religion’s need for symbols and rituals. “Christianity is a living reality and not a concept of the mind” (p. 24). Doctrine is one element in religion, not the whole of it (p. 62).

Maignen’s chief objection is to the idea of development, which he calls “Evolutionism”: “The incursion of this theory into the domain of theology is the greatest danger threatening the faith today” (p. 87). Maignen goes on to insist that “the revelation of dogmas was perfect and transparent from the beginning” (p. 91). Even the dogmas not yet defined were believed by “the Saints and Doctors of the Church.” “It is not the dogma which develops and is transformed, it is the human mind, assisted by grace, which penetrates more deeply into the knowledge of the faith” (p. 91).

Talar’s introduction, the four articles, and Maignen’s response provide helpful background for the development of Loisy’s thought and the emerging conflict. We see...