which He fought and died, and not only that idea which we may
consider to be still a living force to day”; that “it is supremely
arbitrary to decree that Christianity must be essentially what
the Gospel did not borrow from Judaism, as though what the
Gospel owes to Judaism were necessarily of secondary worth”;
that “whether we trust or distrust tradition, we know Christ only
by means of, athwart and within the Christian tradition”;
that “the essence of Christianity resides in the fulness and totality
of its life”; and that “the adaptation of the Gospel to the
changing conditions of humanity is to-day a more pressing need
than ever.” The second edition was enlarged by a preliminary
chapter on the sources of the Gospels, and by a third section
for the Son of God chapter. The little book promptly aroused
widespread interest, some cordial sympathy and much vehement
opposition; whilst its large companion the Études évangéliques,
containing the course on the parables and four sections of his
coming commentary on the Fourth Gospel, passed almost unnoticed.
On the 21st of January 1903 Cardinal Richard publicly
condemned the book, as not furnished with an imprimatur, and
as calculated gravely to trouble the faith of the faithful in the
fundamental Catholic dogmas. On the 2nd of February Loisy
wrote to the archbishop: “I condemn, as a matter of course, all
the errors which men have been able to deduce from my book,
by placing themselves in interpreting it at a point of view
entirely different from that which I had to occupy in composing
it.” The pope refused to interfere directly, and the nuncio,
Mgr Lorenzelli, failed in securing more than ten public adhesions
to the cardinal’s condemnation from among the eighty bishops of
France.
Pope Leo had indeed, in a letter to the Franciscan minister-general (November 1898), and in an encyclical to the French clergy (September 1899), vigorously emphasized the traditionalist principles of his encyclical Providentissimus of 1893; he had even, much to his prompt regret, signed the unfortunate decree of the Roman Inquisition, January 1897, prohibiting all doubt as to the authenticity of the “Three Heavenly witnesses” passage, 1 John v. 7, a text which, in the wake of a line of scholars from Erasmus downwards, Abbé Paulin Martin had, in 1887, exhaustively shown to be no older than the end of the 4th century A.D. Yet in October 1902 he established a “Commission for the Progress of Biblical Studies,” preponderantly composed of seriously critical scholars; and even one month before his death he still refused to sign a condemnation of Loisy’s Études évangéliques.
Cardinal Sarto became Pope Pius X. on the 4th of August 1903. On the 1st of October Loisy published three new books, Autour d’un petit livre, Le Quatrième Évangile and Le Discours sur la Montagne. Autour consists of seven letters, on the origin and aim of L’Évangile et l’Église; on the biblical question; the criticism of the Gospels; the Divinity of Christ; the Church’s foundation and authority; the origin and authority of dogma, and on the institution of the sacraments. The second and third, addressed respectively to a cardinal (Perraud) and a bishop (Le Camus), are polemical or ironical in tone; the others are all written to friends in a warm, expansive mood; the fourth letter especially, appropriated to Mgr Mignot, attains a grand elevation of thought and depth of mystical conviction. Le Quatrième Évangile, one thousand large pages long, is possibly over-confident in its detailed application of the allegorical method; yet it constitutes a rarely perfect sympathetic reproduction of a great mystical believer’s imperishable intuitions. Le Discours sur la Montagne is a fragment of a coming enlarged commentary on the synoptic Gospels. On the 23rd of December the pope ordered the publication of a decree of the Congregation of the Index, incorporating a decree of the Inquisition, condemning Loisy’s Religion d’Israël, L’Évangile et l’Église, Études évangéliques, Autour d’un petit livre and Le Quatrième Évangile. The pope’s secretary of state had on the 19th December, in a letter to Cardinal Richard, recounted the causes of the condemnation in the identical terms used by the latter himself when condemning the Religion d’Israël three years before. On the 12th of January 1904 Loisy wrote to Cardinal Merry del Val that he received the condemnation with respect, and condemned whatever might be reprehensible in his books, whilst reserving the rights of his conscience and his opinions as an historian, opinions doubtless imperfect, as no one was more ready to admit than himself, but which were the only form under which he was able to represent to himself the history of the Bible and of religion. Since the Holy See was not satisfied, Loisy sent three further declarations to Rome; the last, despatched on the 17th of March, was addressed to the pope himself, and remained unanswered. And at the end of March Loisy gave up his lectureship, as he declared, “on his own initiative, in view of the pacification of minds in the Catholic Church.” In the July following he moved into a little house, built for him by his pupil and friend, the Assyriologist François Thureau Dangin, within the latter’s park at Garnay, by Dreux. Here he continued his important reviews, notably in the Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses, and published Morceaux d’exégèse (1906), six further sections of his synoptic commentary. In April 1907 he returned to his native Lorraine, to Ceffonds by Montier-en-Der, and to his relatives there.
Five recent Roman decisions are doubtless aimed primarily at Loisy’s teaching. The Biblical Commission, soon enlarged so as to swamp the original critical members, and which had become the simple mouthpiece of its presiding cardinals, issued two decrees. The first, on the 27th of June 1906, affirmed, with some significant but unworkable reservations, the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch; and the second (29th of May 1907) strenuously maintained the Apostolic Zebedean authorship of the fourth Gospel, and the strictly historical character of the events and speeches recorded therein. The Inquisition, by its decree Lamentabili sane (2nd of July 1907), condemned sixty-five propositions concerning the Church’s magisterium; biblical inspiration and interpretation; the synoptic and fourth Gospels; revelation and dogma; Christ’s divinity, human knowledge and resurrection; and the historical origin and growth of the Sacraments, the Church and the Creed. And some forty of these propositions represent, more or less accurately, certain sentences or ideas of Loisy, when torn from their context and their reasons. The encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis (Sept. 6th, 1907), probably the longest and most argumentative papal utterance extant, also aims primarily at Loisy, although here the vehemently scholastic redactor’s determination to piece together a strictly coherent, complete a priori system of “Modernism” and his self-imposed restriction to medieval categories of thought as the vehicles for describing essentially modern discoveries and requirements of mind, make the identification of precise authors and passages very difficult. And on the 21st of November 1907 a papal motu proprio declared all the decisions of the Biblical Commission, past and future, to be as binding upon the conscience as decrees of the Roman Congregations.
Yet even all this did not deter Loisy from publishing three further books. Les Évangiles synoptiques, two large 8vo volumes of 1009 and 798 pages, appeared “chez l’auteur, à Ceffonds, Montier-en-Der, Haute-Marne,” in January 1908. An incisive introduction discusses the ecclesiastical tradition, modern criticism; the second, the first and the third Gospels; the evangelical tradition; the career and the teaching of Jesus; and the literary form, the tradition of the text and the previous commentaries. The commentary gives also a careful translation of the texts. Loisy recognizes two eye-witness documents, as utilized by all three synoptists, while Matthew and Luke have also incorporated Mark. His chief peculiarity consists in clearly tracing a strong Pauline influence, especially in Mark, which there remodels certain sayings and actions as these were first registered by the eye-witness documents. These doctrinal interpretations introduce the economy of blinding the Jews into the parabolic teaching; the declaration as to the redemptive character of the Passion into the sayings; the sacramental, institutional words into the account of the Last Supper, originally, a solemnly simple Messianic meal; and the formal night-trial before Caiaphas into the original Passion-story with its informal, morning
