Hippolyte Delehaye: Hagiographie critique et modernisme (review)

Hippolyte Delehaye: Hagiographie critique et modernisme. By Bernard Joassart. 2 vols. [Subsidia hagiographica, 81.] (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes. 2000. Pp. viii, 442; 443-897. 150 Euros paperback.)

Although interest in critical church history and in hagiography has not been entirely absent in scholarship on the modernist period, it has not, until recently, received the attention it deserves. Brigitte Waché's 1992 biography of Louis Duchesne has gone a long way toward redressing the balance. Although not a biographical study, Joassart's work on the Bollandist Hippolyte Delehaye (1859- 1941) takes another significant step in illuminating these areas.

Joassart acknowledges his subject's contributions to "positive" hagiograpical research in the Bollandist tradition, especially in the area of Byzantine hagiography. But his focus is on the more "reflexive" side of Delehaye's production, on works of method and synthesis based on that research experience. These include Les légendes hagiographiques (1905, 1906, and 1927), Les origines des cultes des martyrs (1912), Les Passions des martyrs et les genres littéraires (1921), Sanctus (1927), and Cinq leçons sur la méthode hagiographique (1934). It is the first of these, the Légendes, that constitutes the core of this study, as Joassart traces the difficulties it encountred, within the Society of Jesus, then with the Holy Office, and with integralist opponents of critical approaches. The focus is appropriate, as the Légendes in its own right functioned as a "manifesto of critical hagiography" (p. vii) and remains a classic (an English translation was reprinted in 1998). Beyond this, it opens a perspective onto the controversies raised by the use of historical method in turn-of-the-century Catholicism.

After some preliminary materials--a chronology of Delehaye's life, a helpful list of Jesuit authorities, a chronological bibliography of Delehaye's publications, and a note on archival sources--Joassart traces in Part I the route followed by Delehaye in becoming a Bollandist. Part II fills in Bollandist background: the history and operating practices of this group of Jesuit scholars formed for the critical study of the lives of the saints. It then surfaces the difficulties the Bollandists encountered, culminating in Roman censorship of the Analecta Bollandiana, imposed in 1901. Despite repeated efforts on the part of the Bollandists, this surveillance would remain in place until 1920. This constituted the climate in which the Légendes appeared, first as a series of articles in the Revue des questions historiques in 1903, and in expanded book form in 1905. That climate worsened specifically with respect to the Bollandists as a result of three hagiographical controversies which surfaced in the course of 1906 (the year in which a second edition of the Légendes appeared), reinforced papal and curial suspicion of Bollandist activity, and evoked from the Jesuit Provincial the comment, "L'hagiographie est un terrain brûlant" (p. 203). That same year a liberal Italian journal included Delehaye's name, along with George Tyrrell's, in its short list of Jesuit "modernists."

Part III opens with an examination of integralist attacks on the Légendes over the course of 1912-1914 and various interventions which were made to save it from the Index. A second chapter provides the background to the issuance of the third edition of the Légendes in 1927. Then follows a summary of the book's contents, and its reception by contemporary scholars. A final chapter treats the four other "reflexive" works noted earlier.

The second volume provides documentation, much of it previously unpublished, in the form of correspondence--some of it selectively quoted in the first volume--along with relevant documents. In a second section the reports of Roman censorship from 1901 through 1914 are given. A final section identifies (where possible) authorship of articles and reviews in the Analecta through 1902.

The subtitle of these volumes indicates their wider significance. The focus on the contexts and career of Delehaye's Légendes lends coherence to an account that...