Abstract
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the biblical critic Alfred Loisy (1857–1940) advanced a reform agenda that had significant political and theological implications and that helped to define “Modernism.” Contemporary scholars have explored many facets of this reform agenda, but have not so far investigated Loisy’s ideas about ritual. Based on an analysis both of Loisy’s own religious practice and of his most important Modernist book, this article fills that gap. Loisy approached ritual, particularly the Eucharist, as an historian of religion with a growing interest in, and commitment to, comparative work. At the same time, Loisy celebrated the mystical and sacramental character of the Eucharist, its capacity to help Christians experience a genuine communion with God. This effort to combine critical history and Christian spirit, although imperfectly realized, defined Loisy’s Modernist spirituality.
Scholars of Roman Catholic Modernism typically consider Alfred Loisy (1857–1940) to have been, first and foremost, a biblical critic, and rightly so given his voluminous and wide-ranging output on that subject. His biblical critical conclusions were not, however, what ultimately made Loisy so controversial. Loisy put his biblical expertise to work advancing a reform agenda that had significant political and theological implications for the structure of the Church and its relation to civil society. But rather than advancing his desired reforms, his publications contributed to an anti-Modernist reaction by the Catholic hierarchy. Contemporary scholars of Loisy have explored many facets of his reform agenda, but scholars have not so far shown much interest in Loisy’s reflections or proposals concerning the liturgy. 1
And yet, Catholic ritual was clearly important to Loisy. He devoted the final chapter of the apologetic section of his great unpublished manuscript from the last years of the nineteenth century to the topic. Drawing largely from this “Livre inédit,” he concluded his most famous book, L’Évangile et l’Église (1902), with a long section entitled “Catholic Worship,” and he acknowledged (1931–1932, vol. 2: 168)
Loisy’s critics expressed comparable, if hostile, interest. Loisy suggested that the lack of originality in his discussion of liturgy and sacrament made it “more intelligible” to orthodox theologians and that it therefore “chilled” them more than anything else he had said, presumably because they were more easily able to discern his actual views. As an example, he offered (1931–1932, vol. 2: 255–256)
Loisy’s comments on Catholic ritual in L’Évangile et l’Église repay attention today because they illuminate two sides of his Modernist faith. Most obviously, Loisy approached ritual as an historian of religion with a growing interest in, and commitment to, comparative work. Writing as a critical scholar, he traced the historical development of the Christian cult in terms of the historical development of religion more generally. As a result, ritual serves as a kind of case study, exemplifying his ideas about the nature of religion and his philosophy of historical development both as it had occurred in the past and as he hoped it would occur in his own day.
The second feature of his Modernist faith that is illuminated by his comments on Catholic ritual is less well-known: his spirituality. Loisy wrote L’Évangile et l’Église at least in part to defend Catholicism against the attack of a liberal Protestant. As many scholars have noted, his apology for Catholicism implied sometimes radical reforms in the teaching and institutional structure of the Church of his day. But, particularly in his chapter on worship, it also articulated his understanding of the enduring value of his religious tradition and thus sheds light on the more neglected topic of Loisy’s spirituality. Though Loisy insisted that Christian doctrines, rituals, and institutional structures changed over time following generally applicable laws of historical development, and though he could describe Christianity as one religion among others, he also celebrated the mystical and sacramental character of Christianity, its capacity to help its adherents to experience a genuine communion with God. This effort to combine critical history and Christian spirit, although imperfectly realized, defined Loisy’s Catholic Modernism.
1. Biographical Context
In broad outline, Loisy’s biography is relatively well-known, particularly for the years of the Modernist Crisis (Hill, 2002a; Goichot, 2002).
3
For the purposes of this essay, the important period of Loisy’s life is the years immediately before and after the publication of L’Évangile et l’Église. Loisy had first established his academic reputation as a critical exegete while teaching at the Institut catholique de Paris in the 1880s and early 1890s, but he lost his position there in 1893 and became chaplain to a school run by Dominican sisters. For the next several years, he worked on a large manuscript entitled “La crise de la foi dans le temps présent: Essais d’histoire et de critique religieuses” (“Essais”), which served as the basis for his most famous Modernist publications in the first years of the new century. 4 A physical breakdown in 1899 forced him to abandon his work as a chaplain, with two significant implications for his treatment of the liturgy in his Modernist publications.
First, after his recovery, Loisy essentially ceased to say Mass publicly. In 1899, he sought and obtained permission to say Mass privately at his home for the next seven years due to his poor health. In retrospect, this privatization of his religion marked the beginning of his departure from the Church. Years later, the expiration of the “indult” granting him this permission marked another important step in his progressive disengagement from Catholicism. In 1906, two years after the condemnation of L’Évangile et l’Église and his submission to the judgment against his works, Loisy applied to renew this indult. His application unsuccessful, he said his last Mass on 1 November 1906. He commented in his Mémoires (1931–1932, vol. 2: 493)
Both points about his attitude towards the Eucharist are important. Through the years of controversy over L’Évangile et l’Église, Loisy continued to say Mass and to find religious meaning in it. At the same time, he dissociated Mass from the regular worship life of the Church. Indeed, in so far as Mass remained associated in his mind with the Catholicism of his day, he found it increasingly objectionable. The result was a personal ambivalence about the Eucharist that informed his comments in L’Évangile et l’Église.
The second consequence of his departure from the convent school was Loisy’s turn to the public university, where he became an adjunct professor teaching courses in the comparative study of religion. This turn to more comparative work was not entirely new for Loisy, but it reflected a growing concern on his part for his academic reputation in the secular university, which itself stemmed from his progressive alienation from the Catholic Church (see Hill, 2002b: 28–30). Moreover, his work in the secular university reinforced a tendency, already apparent in his earlier critical work, to reflect on the nature of early Christianity in the context of other religious traditions. This academic interest in Christianity as one among many religions resurfaces in his comments about the historical development of Catholic ritual in L’Évangile et l’Église.
Taken together, these two consequences of his departure from the convent school shifted the context within which Loisy experienced Christian liturgy from the Church community to the academic community, with its quite different modes for interpreting the meaning of religious worship. Loisy had inhabited the semi-hostile worlds of the Academy and the Church for more than a decade by this time, but he found himself more removed from the ordinary liturgical life of the Church and more professionally committed to the secular community of scholars in the first years of the new century than ever before. As a result, he faced with a new urgency the question of how to combine Christian faith and practice with critical scholarship. That question shaped L’Évangile et l’Église as a whole, and in particular his comments on Catholic worship.
2. Catholic Worship according to a Critic
In 1902, Adolf Harnack’s apologia for liberal Protestantism, Das Wesen des Christentums, was translated into French. Loisy promptly set out to compose a refutation, which he drew largely from his unpublished “Essais,” and in a matter of months he had finished L’Évangile et l’Église. In contrast to Harnack’s book, which proceeded chronologically, Loisy organized L’Évangile et l’Église topically, devoting a concluding section of three chapters to “Catholic Worship.” Like the other sections of L’Évangile et l’Église, this section began with a very brief introduction (a single paragraph), followed by a short chapter summarizing Harnack’s argument (three pages), and then two chapters on Loisy’s alternative (twenty-seven and nineteen pages, the longest and third longest chapters in the entire book). Particularly in the second chapter of the section, Loisy described Catholic worship using the academic language of critical history and philosophy rather than the theological language of the Church.
Loisy’s introduction to the section on “Catholic Worship” identified the basic historical and philosophical themes that he elaborated at greater length in what followed. “History,” he began, “knows no instance of a religion without a ritual, and consequently the existence of a Christian ritual should surprise no one.” Although Harnack apparently preferred a religion of such purity as to exclude external forms of worship, this was impossible “for men destined to live together on the earth” (Loisy, 1904: 226). 5 Despite his appeal to history, Loisy here made a philosophical claim about the nature of religion. Every religion, including Christianity, was, by definition, social. Religion was for people destined to live together. It therefore necessarily included rituals.
Like every religious tradition, Loisy continued, Christianity conformed to what he believed were fundamental laws of historical development. Until the very end of Jesus’ public ministry, he explained, Jesus did not break from Judaism. To that point, “the Mosaic rites practiced by the Saviour and His disciples … satisfy the need that all religion feels to express itself in acts of worship” (230). When Christianity broke with Judaism, these Mosaic rites no longer sufficed. “As a religion,” Christianity then “needed a ritual, and obtained it, of such a nature as its origin permitted or compelled” (231). Loisy described the “intimate inevitable necessity” of developing a Christian ritual, and added that “the same necessity that presided at the birth of Christian ritual caused its increase” (232, 233). Underlying all of the particular developments that Loisy described later in the chapter was this sense of necessity. Because religion was a social phenomenon, religion required ritual expression. As Christianity became a religion separate from Judaism, it necessarily developed, and then necessarily expanded, its own set of rituals. In this, Christianity was like any other emerging religious tradition.
Loisy then articulated a second necessary law of historical development to complement his first claim that religion required ritual. “Now, the institutions, the external and traditional forms, which are indispensable to the existence or to the preservation of a religion, are necessarily adapted, in one way or another, to the surroundings wherein they are established; they even result, to some extent, from their surroundings, as the adaptation is made” (236). More, he spoke (238) of “the law which demands a form of worship suitable to all the conditions of existence and to the character of the people that believe.” The law here identified by Loisy was simple: as they developed, religions adapted to their circumstances, drawing beliefs and practices from the cultures that surrounded them in a way that made sense to the adherents of the time.
Loisy went one step farther still: the value of any single adaptation derived largely from its historical circumstances. For example, circumcision: “In the abstract,” he insisted (236–237), “[circumcision] may be considered absurd and ridiculous. Nevertheless, in the time of Antiochus Epiphanes, when it was a symbol of fidelity to God, it became something worthy, noble, and holy.” What was true of circumcision was true of any ritual. Rituals did not have absolute value, value in the abstract, but rather, value relative to a particular historical and cultural context. Indeed, “the number and variety, even to some extent the quality of the symbols [thus adapted], are things indifferent or unimportant in themselves” (236). What mattered was the symbol in its historical context.
By insisting that the value of particular adaptations derived from their historical context, Loisy staked a claim to authority on behalf of historians and over against theologians. To assess the value of any particular religious practice, one had first to understand both the circumstances of its origin and its ongoing adaptation to new circumstances. These were historical issues. After all, only historians had the expertise to appreciate both the general laws of historical development that mandated development in some form and also the specific historical context that gave any single development its significance for that context. Theologians might articulate abstract theories about the Eucharist, but historians could explain what the Eucharist had meant in any given context as well as how its meaning had evolved over time.
Importantly, Loisy shared these assumptions about religious history with colleagues interested in the comparative study of religion at the secular university more than with theologians rooted in Catholic tradition. The dominant view among Catholic theologians of his day laid greater emphasis on the unique revelation in Christ, who founded the Church hierarchy and instituted the sacraments. For example, the first canon on the sacraments at the Council of Trent (1547) anathematized anyone who said that “the sacraments of the New Law were not all instituted by Jesus Christ, our Lord.” The syllabus of Pius X, Lamentabili sane exitu (1907),
3. The “Spirit” of a Religion
As always in his Modernist works, however, Loisy refused to define religious belief or practice only as an historian and thus entirely in terms of its historical context. Religions adapted to their circumstances, but this adaptation was not just in one direction. Religions also had a “permanent influence,” a “spirit” that distinguished them from each other and that, in theory, infused their every practice, no matter its origin. Derived from its founder, the spirit of any religion took various external forms according to the laws of historical development as they played out in successive contexts. But the spirit somehow remained constant through all of this historical development. For example, Judaism incorporated pagan beliefs and practices, Loisy admitted, but “the worship, as a whole, however diverse the services of its elements, was one by the spirit that penetrated it, the spirit of Moses and the Prophets, eliminating or neutralizing the spirit of pagan tradition.” The same was true for Christian worship (233–235): “these rites [of pagan origin] ceased to be pagan, when accepted and interpreted by the Church.” Rites could be Christianized by being infused with a Christian spirit even as Christianity incorporated them from without as part of its adaptation to changing historical circumstances.
To understand any religious rite properly, one therefore had to consider not only its historical origin and adaptation, but also the spirit that animated it. Speaking in a way applicable to any religion, Loisy claimed (236) that “principles [here used as a synonym for ‘permanent influence’ or ‘spirit’] are the soul of a religion,” even if “principles, without religious institutions and doctrines, are, in sober truth, a soul without a body.” He made the same point in the next chapter, speaking in specifically Christian language. “Just as God the Spirit is made manifest in the Incarnate Word, so the life of the Spirit is communicated and maintained by Spiritual sacraments” like baptism and the Eucharist (260). The spirit of any religion, its foundational principles, necessarily found diverse expression in different contexts. One could analyze the spirit of Christianity historically by studying these diverse expressions or one could describe the Christian spirit more theologically in terms of the incarnational and sacramental spirituality characteristic of Catholic Christianity.
Loisy here battled with opponents on his left and on the right. Against theologians to his right, Loisy resisted identifying the spirit of Christian worship with any single historical manifestation of it, whether in the Thomistic synthesis favored by many Catholics in his day, or in the earliest Christian Church, as Protestants like Harnack tended to do. But over against secular critics, Loisy also resisted any tendency to reduce the value of Christian worship entirely to its historical context. Historians could say much about Christian ritual (or any other religious belief or practice), but they could not exhaust its spiritual significance.
This emphasis on the spirit of a religion enabled Loisy to move beyond a pure historical relativism by providing him with a means to evaluate particular developments. “The adaptation of Christianity was inevitable,” he insisted (239). “The important question is whether the adaptation has served the spread and preservation of the gospel or whether the gospel itself has been lost in it.” That is, does a particular adaptation preserve the spirit of Christianity in a new set of circumstances? In asking this question, Loisy followed the lead of John Henry Newman, whose Essay on Development informed Loisy’s own thinking. But where Newman devoted significant space to proposals about how one might distinguish between authentic developments and corruptions, Loisy did not normally define the gospel with enough specificity to be helpful in answering this question. Indeed he sometimes used the simple fact that a development had occurred as evidence of its necessity in its historical context, particularly in his polemics with liberal Protestants (1904: 133–154). Still, Loisy raised the question of how one might assess the religious authenticity of an historical development. This was ultimately a theological question concerning the spirit of a religion as expressed in a particular historical moment.
Loisy did offer one example (and only one) from history of a development that seemingly failed the test of preserving the spirit of the gospel, and it appeared in the section on Christian worship. Development as Loisy presented it was generally cumulative. So, for example, the law of historical development that led to the first Christian rituals also led to the multiplication of Christian rituals. For one thousand years, the same was true for offices in the Church. After the Church developed a three-tiered hierarchy of bishops, priests, and deacons, lower offices multiplied. Ultimately the western Church had sub-deacons, acolytes, readers, exorcists, and door-keepers. And then development suddenly flowed in the opposite direction. “The orders below the subdiaconate, later even the subdiaconate, and finally the diaconate itself, ended by becoming in the Latin Church no more than preparatory steps to the priesthood.” Loisy called this (241) “a special example … of what may be called a suppressed development, like a stunted branch on a tree that grows vigorously in another direction.” Orders multiplied, and then contracted.
In L’Évangile et l’Église, Loisy said nothing more about suppressed developments. One can, however, follow his train of thought farther by referring to the “Essais” from which the passage about suppressed developments was drawn virtually verbatim. In the “Essais,” Loisy went on to discuss (7:614/299) changes in the ceremonies of ordination, and concluded, “A better knowledge of antiquity has provoked a grand disarray in scholarly theology. … A curious chapter in liturgical history, meditation on which one cannot recommend too strongly to those who profess the immutability of the sacramental rites and the determination by Christ himself of the matter and form for each sacrament.” Here, as elsewhere, Loisy insisted, against the dominant theology of the Church in his day, on the reality of religious change over time. Always his implication was that the Church of his day could continue this process by instituting needed reforms. In this case, however, the change was not an addition; it was a reversal, and this reversal offered an important lesson to contemporary theologians. Presumably the lesson was that a similar reversal was at least conceivable in the first decade of the twentieth century.
Arguments from silence are notoriously weak, but Loisy’s silence about how developments were suppressed may well be significant. He did not suggest that any particular theologian or Churchman took the lead in eliminating Church offices. Rather the change simply happened. Particularly because the change was liturgical, in that it involved dropping ordination ceremonies and redefining the liturgical roles of the remaining offices, his comments on other liturgical developments apply. “In matters of worship,” Loisy explained (238), “the religious feeling of the masses has always preceded the doctrinal definitions of the Church. The fact is full of significance; it attests the law which demands a form of worship suitable to all the conditions of existence and to the character of the people that believe.” Later in the chapter, commenting specifically on the sacraments, Loisy added (250), “the importance … of the work of scholastic theologians must not be exaggerated.” Theologians interpreted developments after they occurred. Speaking through its institutional leadership, the Church pronounced on the legitimacy of developments, also after they occurred. But the agent of development, particularly in questions of worship, was the worshipping community itself (see Loisy, 2010a: 10–11; Hill, 2002a: 112–115). That was true in the past and, Loisy must have believed, would be true again in his own day.
At this point, it is possible to summarize the beliefs that Loisy brought to his discussion of Christian worship. He began with assumptions about the nature of religion that reflected his training as a critical historian. Most fundamentally, he insisted that religion was necessarily social. Because religion was social, it required ritual expression and institutional leadership. As any new religion took independent shape, it drew elements from its historical context, infused them with its own spirit, and developed particular rites and institutional structures. Over time, the rites and institutional structures developed, always adapting to the evolving historical context. To these critical assumptions, Loisy added an appreciation for spirit. The spirit of any tradition derived from its founder and informed, or at least should inform, all subsequent developments. In principle, then, one could ask if any single development preserved the original religious spirit of the tradition, though this question was nearly impossible to answer in practice. Changes simply happened, and some of them stuck, to be subsequently interpreted by theologians and ratified by Church authority. Still, academic analysis of any religious tradition that failed to take spirituality into account missed an essential element of that tradition.
4. The Eucharist in History and Spirit
Loisy’s comments on the Eucharist in L’Évangile et l’Église illustrate his critical assumptions, his understanding of Christian spirituality, and the difficulty of combining them in a coherent way. He introduced his historical survey in terms of the general philosophy summarized above. “The sacraments,” he suggested (242), “are born of a thought, an intention, of Jesus, interpreted by the apostles and their successors, in the light and under the pressure of facts and circumstances.” About the Eucharist itself, he claimed (238–239) that it was “specifically Christian” and yet had “an element doubtless at bottom common to several religions, if not to all, but which recalls rather the pagan mysteries than the unadorned conception of sacrifice of post-exilic Judaism.” Rooted in the spirit of Jesus, the Eucharist developed by adapting elements from the surrounding culture—especially the pagan mysteries—as a way of giving Christian expression to a universal religious impulse in a particular historical context.
Loisy briefly traced the history of these adaptations, but the most interesting aspect of his survey for the purposes of this article concerned his claims about the spirit of the Eucharist as celebrated by the early Christians. According to Loisy (246), “The Supper of the early Christians was a memorial of the Passion and an anticipation of the festival of the Messiah, whereat Jesus was present.” The Eucharist ritually recalled Christ’s death, giving it an historical connection to Jesus. But moving beyond history into the realm of faith, Loisy asserted that Jesus was really present at this meal of remembrance and anticipation. The presence of Jesus in the Eucharist remained a constant of Christian piety, even as the theology of the Eucharist developed. Loisy continued (246), “There is no very marked difference between the Pauline conception of the Eucharist and the idea that simple Christians have of it today, those who are strangers to the speculations of theology, who believe that they enter into real communion with God in Christ by taking the consecrated bread.” 7 Loisy here downplayed theological speculation, the development of which historians could trace, highlighting instead the continuity of Christian experience. Like Paul, contemporary Christians could experience a genuine communion with God in Christ by participating in the Eucharist, regardless of how they might explain this communion theologically. 8
After thus pointing his readers to the experiential character of the Eucharist, Loisy briefly surveyed its historical development. “The entire Christian worship,” he began (247), “developed around the supper of the Eucharist.” The blessing and the distribution of bread and wine were then detached from the meal and supplemented by readings, prayers, and hymns to become the Mass. The Mass commemorated Christ’s sacrifice on the cross and ultimately came to have a sacrificial character of its own. Loisy ended his quick survey by noting that the evolution culminated “in private masses for priests and communions of piety for the faithful.” In the “Essais,” from which he drew this short (roughly one page) survey, he called this evolution of private Masses the “individualization” of the sacrament (7:609/294).
Loisy did not explicitly criticize this individualization, but everything else that he said about the nature of religion and religious worship makes this individualization problematic. Religion, Loisy had insisted (2010b; 1904: 167–168), was inherently social. Indeed the social character of religion was precisely what made the development of forms for public worship necessary. The Eucharist itself began as a common meal. How, then, could one defend the evolution of a social ritual into a private one? In Loisy’s own terms (239), “the important question is whether the adaptation has served the spread and preservation of the gospel, or whether the gospel itself has been lost in it.” The individualization of the Eucharist would seem to compromise the social character of the Christian gospel (or of any religion) rather than spreading and preserving it. But Loisy did not argue this point. Why not?
5. Sacramental Spirituality
One possible reason Loisy might have decided against criticizing private Masses is that he himself said Mass privately at this time. With this in mind, his comments about the historical development of penance are relevant. Loisy defended the development of penance into a more individualistic practice based on an appeal to experience. The efficacy of penance for individuals, he insisted (246), “can only be equitably judged by those who make use of [penance], and they find it an aid and not an obstacle to piety.” Presumably the same was true for the Mass. As he acknowledged many years later in his Mémoires, he still found value in saying Mass privately at the time he wrote L’Évangile et l’Église. Perhaps the fact that saying private Mass was an aid to Loisy’s own piety, rather than an obstacle, was enough to prevent him from attacking the practice.
What, then, was the religious value of the Mass for Loisy? Apparently not its social character. Indeed the value he admitted to finding in the Mass depended on the fact that his experience of it was not social. In so far as saying Mass implied the profession of official Catholicism, it lost religious significance and became an obstacle to his piety. That is, the Mass was meaningful to him despite, not because of, the way it linked him to other Catholics and to the Church of his day. His positive experience of saying Mass was necessarily an individual experience, not a social one.
This tension between Loisy’s emphasis on the social character of religion on one hand and his own experience of religion on the other seems not to have been limited to the Mass. Loisy strongly emphasized the social character of religion already by the mid-1890s, as, for example, in the “Essais” and the articles he excerpted from it, through the years of his major Modernist publications like L’Évangile et l’Église, and until the end of his academic career decades later in publications like the 1934 Y a-t-il deux sources de la religion et de la morale? (35), where he once again argued that religion was necessarily social. But despite this consistent refrain about the social character of religion, Loisy was not himself a particularly social person. On the contrary, he was intensely private, to the point that a former friend alleged him incapable of true friendship (Houtin, 1960: 14, 36, 138–139; see also Hill, 2008b: 113–114). Moreover, he continued to describe himself as religious to the end of his life—having “Priest” inscribed on his tombstone, for example—even though he belonged to no religious community. His experience of religion, as distinguished from his theory, was thus not social in any recognizable way. Indeed his emphasis on the social character of religion may have stemmed in part from a sense of his own individualistic tendencies and a desire to compensate for them. Regardless, Loisy’s critical philosophy of religion seems in tension with his own experience of Christian piety.
If Loisy’s experience of the Mass was not social in the most obvious sense of the term, and yet Mass continued to have religious significance for him, what might that significance have been? When describing the religious value of Catholic worship, Loisy emphasized a mystical and sacramental communion with God. He defined and defended this mystical and sacramental vision in the final chapter of his section on worship, which was also the concluding chapter of L’Évangile et l’Église as a whole.
Predictably, Loisy described the sacramental vision of Christianity in largely comparative terms. “The life of a religion,” he reminded his readers (263), “consists not in its ideas, its formulas and its rites as such, but in the secret principle which first gave an attractive power, a supernatural efficacy, to the ideas and formulas and rites.” For Christianity, this efficacy came from Christ, so “the sacraments have no meaning for the Christian except through Jesus or His Spirit acting in the material symbol; they figure and realize the constant action of Christ in the Church.” But this was just the Christian form of sacrament. “Every religion is sacramental,” insisted Loisy (265), meaning every religion used material things to symbolize the sacred and to communicate its own secret principle in its own way.
Because every religion was sacramental, Loisy continued (265–266), “every religion is also more or less deifying, offering man a means of raising himself to Divinity, conceived first by analogy in the image of man.” Sacramental spirituality grew out of this most basic sense that the transcendent God communicates with human beings through creation by infusing material things with a sacred spirit. The deification of humanity, the infusing of human beings with the divine spirit, was for Loisy at the time he wrote L’Évangile et l’Église the most basic religious impulse of all. He called it (268) “the primitive revelation, the revelation that has never been specified in a formal doctrine, that mankind bears in the depths of its religious consciousness written in indistinct characters. The sole article that constitutes this unexplained revelation … is that God reveals Himself to man in man, and that humanity enters with God into a Divine association.” This revelation, common to all religions, gave every religion a mystical and sacramental character.
Christianity differed from other religions on this point not in kind but in degree. “Jesus manifested [the primitive revelation] in Himself and in His life as much as in His teaching, and was the first to show [it] in a clear and intelligible manner because He realized it in Himself.” Loisy initially identified the revelation in more or less generic terms (268): “God reveals Himself to man in man, and … humanity enters with God into a Divine association.” Then he Christianized it: in Christ, “the eternal principle of the passage of the Divine through the human … received a new application.” Behind every Christian doctrine and practice stood this mystical and sacramental experience of communion with God in Christ. Indeed this experience constituted Christianity itself. In Loisy’s words (269), “this application was the Christian religion and the worship of Jesus, and … it could be nothing else.”
These pages seem to indicate what was finally important to Loisy about the sacrament, and about Christian spirituality, and also what was not. In none of these pages did Loisy refer to the apocalyptic preaching of Jesus, though that was central to his interpretation of the historical Jesus (1904: 37–45). Indeed the historical person, Jesus, has here dropped out of view. So, for example, Loisy quoted the gospel of John in his comments on sacramental spirituality in preference to the synoptic gospels even after he had “conceded that the Fourth Gospel shall be set aside and the synoptic texts regarded as ‘the books of the gospel teaching’” when determining the outlines of Jesus’ public ministry (1904: 24). 9 Loisy called (259–260) “the system of John … a perfect whole”; and he insisted that “Catholic worship does nothing but apply the theory of John.” Loisy’s failure to integrate his apocalyptic understanding of the historical Jesus into his mystical and sacramental vision of the Eucharist is striking. The experience of communion with God “was the Christian religion,” and yet Jesus’ apocalyptic preaching was peripheral to its sacramental expression in Loisy’s discussion.
Loisy also said surprisingly little in these pages about the social character of religion. He repeated that “the social character of Christianity exacts a regulation of external worship and a division of duty in the acts which constitute it” (265). “Nonetheless,” he continued, “there is a direct relation between God and all those who, under different titles, participate in the symbolic actions of Christian ritual.” The social character of religion mandated an external order that brought people together, but each participant experienced God directly, as an individual. The spiritual communion with God in Christ, though made possible within a social context, was individual, and it was this individual experience of communion with God that gave the social ritual its value. So, at least, was it for Loisy himself.
Conclusion and Assessment
Loisy was trying to do many things in L’Évangile et l’Église. Among them, he sought to articulate a sacramental spirituality that was recognizably Catholic, as opposed to the liberal Protestantism of Harnack. But Loisy’s sacramental spirituality differed in significant ways from the dominant Catholic view of the sacraments in his day and shared much with the historical and comparative perspective more typical of the secular university. We have seen the result. Loisy began with a primitive religious desire to experience communion with God. This religious impulse was, by definition, social and therefore required external form: doctrines, rituals, hierarchies. These external forms evolved over time to meet the needs of people in different historical contexts. However, every religion was also defined by a “spirit” derived from the way that its founder experienced communion with God, and this spirit remained consistent over time even despite sometimes radical changes in its forms of expression. In the case of Christianity, the founder was Jesus, and the spirit that informed the resulting religion satisfied the basic religious impulse common to all people more purely than did any other religion.
In this summary, we can glimpse Loisy’s religious vision. At its core, it was mystical and sacramental. It was mystical, though Loisy only began to use that word consistently after he left the Church, because it was based on the experience of communion with God in Christ. It was sacramental, his word of choice in L’Évangile et l’Église, because Loisy always insisted that human beings could only know God in and through the tangible stuff of creation. Although this was, at some level, a theological claim, Loisy could argue that it was rooted in, or at least consistent with, the best critical history and philosophy of his day.
However, Loisy did not fully succeed in integrating his thoughts on sacramental spirituality with his philosophy of religion. As noted above, he said little about the social character of religion in his discussion of the Eucharist or of sacramental spirituality more generally, despite his emphasis on the social character of religion in other places in L’Évangile et l’Église. On this point, his view of Christian spirituality and his philosophical claims about the nature of religion are in real tension. Given the controversy that followed L’Évangile et l’Église and Loisy’s subsequent disengagement from the Church, he did not have an opportunity to work at reconciling this tension.
More problematic still was the gap between Loisy’s critical history and his claims about Christian spirit. By the time he wrote L’Évangile et l’Église, Loisy had come to believe that Jesus was primarily an apocalyptic preacher of the kingdom to come, and he never wavered on this point. But Loisy said virtually nothing about the implications of Jesus’ apocalypticism for the Mass as practiced in Loisy’s own day. Instead Loisy emphasized a doctrinal claim: God was incarnate in the person of Christ. Loisy thus ran the risk of developing a theory about Christian spirituality that could not withstand the kind of critical historical scrutiny to which he subjected other theories. Here, too, Loisy could have benefited from more time to work on the relationship between his claims about the Christian spirit and his critical history of Christianity.
To acknowledge the limitations of Loisy’s work is not, however, to suggest that it is without value. On the contrary, it simply indicates the difficulty of what Loisy was trying to do. Loisy hoped to articulate a distinctively modern Christian spirituality that preserved what was best of the Catholic tradition while absorbing what was best of the modern age. The tradition contributed a sacramental vision that Loisy continued to find compelling even as his commitment to the Church began to ebb. Modernity contributed historical insight into the person of Jesus as well as a sophisticated understanding of religion in historical and comparative contexts. Loisy wanted it all. In that imperfectly fulfilled desire, he was not, and is not, alone.