Alfred Loisy - Life and Work

Life and Work

Born on February 28, 1857 at Ambrières, Loisy was educated within the Catholic system, from 1874-1879 at the Grand Séminaire de Châlons, and entered the Institut Catholique at Paris in 1878/1879. He was ordained on June 29, 1879. After an illness he returned to the Institut in 1881 as a professor of Hebrew. He published his "Five Thesis" which was firmly rejected. The Thesis stated that the Pentateuch was not the work of Moses, that the first five chapters of Genesis are not literal history, that the New Testament and the Old Testament do not possess equal historical value, that there has been a development in the religious doctrine in scripture, and that the sacred writings have the same limitations as all other authors of the ancient world. In 1899 he resigned and was appointed lecturer at École Practique des Hautes Études, which was not an ecclesial institution.

In 1902, he started to pay attention to Adolf van Harnack's Das Wesen des Christentum. Harnack believed that the essence of Christianity was the relationship between individual and God, making an organized church a largely unnecessary creation. Loisy disagreed with the idea that the organized church was unnecessary, but the nature of his disagreement brought him controversy. From 1901 to 1903 he wrote several works that would be condemned by the Church. These include La Religion d'Israel, Études évangéliques, L'Évangile et L'Église, Autour d'un petit livre, and Le quatrième Évangile. His 1908 Les Évangiles Synoptiques would cause his excommunication. In his works he argued against Harnack, trying to show that it was necessary and inevitable for the Catholic Church to form as it did. He also argued that God intended this and compared his own ideas on this to those of John Henry Newman.

Another controversial thesis of Loisy, developed on La Religion d'Israel, is the distinction between a pre-Moses period, when the Hebrews worshipped the god El, also known by the plural of this name, Elohim, and a later stage, when Yahweh gradually became the only deity of the Jews.

His assertions on Jesus went further than Newman and caused more controversy. He argued that Harnack had been partly correct that an organized church was created in a way unrelated to any plans by Jesus. Loisy argued that Jesus lacked a conscious understanding that he was consubstantial with God the Father and therefore Jesus did not know how the Catholic Church would "transform". Loisy also indicated that many of the ideas on consubstantiality came from the Council of Nicaea and would have been unknown to Jesus or his first followers, who saw him largely in Jewish messianic terms.

In July 1907 the Holy Office (after Vatican II renamed as Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) issued a decree, signed by pope Pius X, entitled Lamentabili Sane Exitu (or "A Lamentable Departure Indeed"), which formally condemned sixty-five modernist or relativist propositions concerning the nature of the Church, revelation, biblical exegesis, the sacraments, and the divinity of Christ. This was followed by the encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis (or "Feeding the Lord's Flock"), which characterized Modernism as the "synthesis of all heresies." The documents made Loisy realise that there was no hope for reconciliation of his views with the official doctrine of the Church. He made a comparative study of the papal documents to show the condemned propositions in his own writings. He also confirmed as true his earlier various New Testament interpretations, which he had previously formulated in conditional form. In his journal he wrote:

Christ has even less importance in my religion than he does in that of the liberal Protestants: for I attach little importance to the revelation of God the Father for which they honor Jesus. If I am anything in religion, it is more pantheist-positivist-humanitarian than Christian.

— Mémoires II, p. 397

His Catholic critics commented that his religious system had as its residue a great society, which he believed to be the continuation of the Church of which the past had been so glorious. For many, the attitude of Loisy and his followers was incomprehensible. What troubled Modernists was, How can the Church survive?, while for Pius X the question was, How can these men be priests?

Loisy was excommunicated vitandus the following year, on March 7, 1908. After his excommunication he became a lay intellectual. He was appointed chair of history of religions in the Collège de France. He served there until 1931. He died in 1940.