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  • Experience and Discourse, Revelation and Dogma in Catholic Modernism
  • Guy Mansini O.S.B.

Introduction

In the first two sections, I will sketch the positions of Alfred Loisy and George Tyrrell. Then, I work back to what is in back of them—Henri Bergson, Auguste Sabatier, Immanuel Kant. Then I look forward to their continuing relevance if not influence. I conclude with a sobering thought.

Alfred Loisy (1857–1940)

After the storm of L'évangile et l'église (1902), Loisy composed an explanatory, exculpatory collection of essays on this, that, and the other issue raised therein called Autour d'un petit livre (1904). I confine myself mostly to this second book. In reading L'évangile et l'église, one has to correct for the aim he takes at Adolf von Harnack in order to find his real target—contemporary Catholic theological method and dogma. Loisy is therefore a little more open in Autour as to what he is up to—supposing that characterization could ever be wholly appropriate for Alfred Firmin Loisy.

Loisy's Historical Criticism and Its Results

The first essay in Autour is called "On the Origin and Object of L'évangile et l'église." Together with the second, "On the Biblical Question," it deals with the bedrock of Loisy's theological position, his understanding of historical criticism as independent of faith and the creed in both its method and its results. Criticism demands this independence even if undertaken in service to the Church and to the true and accurate apprehension of the life of Jesus [End Page 1119] and the relation of his life and teaching to the New Testament. Loisy writes that the historical point of view is imposed on him by the nature of the task of responding to Harnack: Harnack pretends to give a purely historical account of the relation of the Church to the Gospel; Loisy undertakes to criticize this account historically.1 But in fact, Loisy has no other point of view to offer. Catholic dogma was not invoked in L'évangile et l'église, not only because it was addressed to Harnack, "but because it cannot be received in the order of historical investigation."2

Loisy's sobriquet at the Institut Catholique (1890–1893) was "le petit Renan."3 This tells us of Loisy the historian: he undertakes a positivist reading of texts, in Loisy's case a reading entirely blind, without any criticism of the rationalist and naturalist presuppositions such a reading brings with it. But the sobriquet tells us also of Loisy the man. "The little Renan" shared also with Ernest Renan (1823–1892) an indefatigable conviction of the moral worth of religious sensibility and sentiment. Attending Renan's lectures for three years, Loisy conceived the project of rescuing Christianity from Renan's strictures by a more thorough, more scientific, more exigent historical criticism.4

Loisy produces a historical reconstruction of Christian origins within his positivist parameters. As little will the historian find anything divine in the text of the New Testament, Loisy holds, as will a geologist in the strata of the earth: "History grasps only phenomena, with their succession and their connection; it perceives the manifestation of ideas and their revolution; it does not reach the bottom of things."5

Loisy's critical reconstruction of events reveals a discontinuity between his own historical Jesus and the faith of the New Testament and subsequent Church, as he makes plain in the fourth essay, "On the Divinity of Jesus Christ."6 "One can clarify the faith by history, but one cannot found history on faith"; and again, "it would be a contradiction to suppose that an ecclesiastical definition would render historically certain a fact of [End Page 1120] the human order that would be otherwise indemonstrable."7 So, as Père Lagrange pointed out in his review of L'évangile et l'église in the Revue biblique: "Entre Jésus et le Nouveau Testament il y a un hiatus infranchissable" ("Between Jesus and the New Testament there is an insuperable gap").8

The rest of Loisy's position can be understood as a matter of working out the consequences of this alleged gap between Jesus and the New...

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