Background
Alfred Loisy was born to a peasant family at Ambrières, a village east of Paris, on February 28, 1857.
(Excerpt from Etudes Bibliques Pour ne fournir aucun pre...)
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(Alfred Loisy was a priest until he was 51 years old. Unti...)
Alfred Loisy was a priest until he was 51 years old. Until his excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church in 1908, he was one of the acknowledged leaders of that movement in the Roman Church which is known as 'Catholic Modernism.' The French republic was in the hands of clerically minded royalist leaders. The Roman Catholic Church controlled the schools. Loisy became convinced that only free institutions of learning could possibly perform the necessary task. The discontent in France reached its climax in what has become known as the Dreyfus Affair. Alfred Dreyfus was an officer in the French Army on the General Staff; he was also a Jew. In 1894, the very year after Loisy was obliged to leave the faculty of the Institut Catholique because of his critical studies of the Old Testament, Dreyfus was court-martialled on a charge of high treason. What has all this to do with Loisy, the priest and teacher? This incident taught him that a reactionary government, in close association with ecclesiastical interests, is fatal to the life of freedom in every area. Loisy became a dedicated advocate of the separation of Church and State. Loisy's conclusions are often radical and developed with the utmost thoroughness from the scientific apparatus employed in the study of non-religious history, with no regard for the theological or devotional results which may follow. But the fact that the conclusions are often radical does not mean the writer's intention was to 'destroy faith.' Loisy remained always a religious man, despite renouncing his allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church.
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(Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)
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(Book by Loisy, Alfred Firmin)
Book by Loisy, Alfred Firmin
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(Excerpt from Études Bibliques Pour ne fournir aucun prét...)
Excerpt from Études Bibliques Pour ne fournir aucun prétexte à d'inutiles polé miques, on a supprimé, au dernier moment, une préface qui avait été écrite spécialement en vue de cette édition et qui occupait 96 pages. C'est pourquoi la pagination du volume commence au folio 97. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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Alfred Loisy was born to a peasant family at Ambrières, a village east of Paris, on February 28, 1857.
His vocation for the priesthood appears to have begun early, and in 1874, without having completed his secondary school education, he entered the seminary at Châlons-sur-Marne. "I was shocked by the vulgarity that reigned there, " Loisy wrote 10 years later. Disturbed by the contrast between the faith of his peasant childhood and the textbook rationalism he was taught at the seminary, he began to study Hebrew on his own and soon found in philology the serenity of which orthodox theology had deprived him.
In 1881 Duchesne invited him, after 2 years as a country priest, to return to Paris, first as a student, then as lecturer in Hebrew and Holy Scripture.
In 1879, despite his scruples over his faith, he became a priest.
In 1878 Loisy made the acquaintance of the historian Louis Duchesne at the newly established Catholic Institute in Paris. Traditional Catholic exegesis at this time was essentially fundamentalist. Meanwhile, Ernest Renan at the Collège de France was reading the Bible as an ordinary historical document and denying it the quality of inspired revelation. Loisy soon believed he had found his true vocation in tracing a middle way between the two.
Loisy set forth his views most fully in the second edition of The Gospel and the Church (1903). In from an apologetic attack on Adolf von Harnack's What Is Christianity? (1900), it was at the same time an attack on traditional Catholic exegesis and dogma.
The defenders of orthodoxy quickly attacked the work. In 1893 Loisy had been dismissed from the Catholic Institute for his radical views. In 1903 five of his books were placed on the Index; in 1907 many of the views he espoused were given the name "modernism" and condemned by the papacy; the following year he was excommunicated. Since 1900 he had been teaching at the Sorbonne. Immediately after his excommunication he was named professor at the Collège de France. He continued to publish works of biblical criticism to the time of his death at Ceffons, June 1, 1940.
(Excerpt from Etudes Bibliques Pour ne fournir aucun pre...)
(Excerpt from Études Bibliques Pour ne fournir aucun prét...)
(Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We h...)
(Alfred Loisy was a priest until he was 51 years old. Unti...)
(Book by Loisy, Alfred Firmin)
Loisy insisted that historical criticism could not distinguish in Scripture between the personal religion of Jesus and his disciples' interpretation of that religion. The Gospels present the impression Jesus made on his listeners, as they understood and interpreted him. On the one hand, therefore, Jesus could be known only through tradition, the apostolic tradition and the tradition of the Church. On the other hand, the tradition was itself the creation of man's religious imagination, the product of specific times and places, requiring constant reinterpretation as humanity progressed.
He wrote in his diary, "If I am anything in religion, it is more pantheist-positivist-humanitarian than Christian. "
