Alfred Loisy and the Making of History of Religions: A Study of the Development of Comparative Religion in the Early 20th Century 3110583771, 9783110583779

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Annelies Lannoy Alfred Loisy and the Making of History of Religions

Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten

Herausgegeben von Jörg Rüpke und Christoph Uehlinger

Band 74

Annelies Lannoy

Alfred Loisy and the Making of History of Religions A Study of the Development of Comparative Religion in the Early 20th Century

ISBN 978-3-11-058377-9 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-058435-6 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-058413-4 ISSN 0939-2580 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: 2020935443 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

[E]n 1893, j’ai été chassé de l’Institut catholique pour avoir dit que la vérité des Écritures était relative. J’ai été, sans le savoir, l’Einstein de l’histoire des religions. Il faut que je continue. Letter of Alfred Loisy to Franz Cumont, January 17, 1922.

Acknowledgments It is with pleasure that I here express my appreciation to those persons and institutions that have been crucial to the research for and writing of this book. This book is the synthesis of the research I carried out at Ghent University during my first and part of my second postdoctoral fellowship. To a lesser extent, it draws on research I conducted as part of my PhD thesis. My thanks go to the Research Foundation—Flanders for generously funding these postdoctoral fellowships and the doctoral research project G. 0126.08. I could not have written this book without the support and continued encouragement of Danny Praet, who has been a generous mentor for over 10 years now, and who first broached the idea for this study. I thank him for having introduced me to the work—and humor—of Alfred Loisy, while making personal efforts to keep me far away from Loisy’s way of life. I am profoundly grateful for his many insightful comments and invaluable guidance during all stages of writing. Over the past years, his critical historical thinking has been a source of inspiration and model for my own research and teaching. In addition, special thanks are due to C.J.T. Talar, who has also read the entire manuscript in various forms, provided many critical suggestions, and corrected grammatical errors. I am appreciative of the support he has been providing me since my early years as a PhD student, and I wish to thank him for having given me the opportunity to present my research during the sessions of the Alfred Loisy Unit at the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion in San Francisco (2011), Baltimore (2013), Boston (2017), and San Diego (2019). I am also profoundly grateful to Corinne Bonnet, who has been a relentless source of motivation since I first met her in 2008, and who has offered invaluable professional and personal support. Her work, and the many stimulating conversations we had about our distant predecessors have been instrumental in helping to shape the ideas presented in this book. Thanks to her, I was able to spend an inspiring time at the University of Toulouse—Jean Jaurès in March – April 2018. I am thankful for the warm welcome she offered me, and for the enthusiastic interest of her colleagues from the LabEx Structuration des Mondes Sociaux. I discussed versions of what have become chapters at several conferences and meetings with colleagues. I especially wish to thank the President of the Société Internationale d’Études sur Alfred Loisy, Frédéric Amsler, the Honorary President of the Société Pierre-Eugène Leroy, and members Jean-Michel Roessli and Francesca Prescendi, for their interest in my research. I extend my thanks to my American colleagues, Jeffrey Morrow, David Schultenover, and William Portier, for their comments during the aforementioned AAR meetings. Others https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110584356-002

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who deserve special mention for their interest and support over the past years are Christoph Auffarth, Suzanne Marchand, André Motte, Jan Nelis, Jörg Rüpke, Sigrid Sterckx, and Jan Verplaetse. I would like to thank the series editors Jörg Rüpke and Christoph Uehlinger of the RGVV for giving me the chance to contribute to the series and for believing in this project. I also wish to thank the editorial staff at De Gruyter, especially Aaron Sanborn-Overby, for the kind support, patience, and helpful advice. This book draws substantially upon research I conducted at multiple archives and libraries. My thanks go to the staff of the Ghent University Libraries, the Manuscript Department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, the archives of the Gaasbeek Castle, the Bibliothèque d’histoire des religions of the Sorbonne, the Victor Cousin Library of the Sorbonne, the Méjanes Library in Aixen-Provence, and the library of the Academica Belgica in Rome. I owe much to my colleagues from the Philosophy Department and the Department of Greek Literature at Ghent University, who offered moral support, friendship, and a great deal of fun. Turning to my family and friends, I am deeply indebted to my mother, my brother, my parents-in-law, and Lieven, Manu, and Aagje, who offered all kinds of help. Lastly, and most importantly, I thank my husband Bavo, who has read and commented extensively on the entire manuscript, and whose love, intelligence, creativity, and great faith in my abilities have kept me going. I dedicate this book to my parents, Marie-Rose and Paul, with gratitude and admiration.

Note to Reader This book makes extensive use of unpublished manuscripts and correspondence (see the bibliography at the end of this book for all references). The transcriptions of the quoted extracts strictly follow the original spelling, punctuation, and word and line spacing of the manuscripts. When original French, German or Italian publications by Loisy and his contemporaries were available in English translations, I referred to and quoted these English sources. If not, I quoted the texts in their original language and paraphrased the content in English; for some particularly dense passages from Loisy’s work I included a personal translation in an accompanying footnote (indicated as: my translation). The following abbreviations are frequently used throughout this book: CF CRAI EE EPHE Essai MEFRIM MPMC RHLR RHR

Collège de France Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres Loisy, Alfred. L’Évangile et l’Église. Paris: Alphonse Picard, 1902 École Pratique des Hautes Études Loisy, Alfred. Essai historique sur le sacrifice. Paris: Émile Nourry, 1920 Mélanges de l’École française de Rome—Italie et Méditerranée Loisy, Alfred. Les Mystères païens et le mystère chrétien. Paris: Émile Nourry, 1919 Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses Revue de l’histoire des religions

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Contents Introduction 1 1 . What This Book Is About . Prologue to the First Chapter: A Very Short Introduction to Loisy’s 8 Formative Years and Early Comparative Studies  . . . .. .. .. . .

 . . .. ... ... ... ... .. .. . . .. ..

Comparative Religion and/as Modernist Theology: L’Évangile et l’Église and the Neuilly Essais 16 20 On the Interpretation of L’Évangile et l’Église Comparative Religion in Adolf von Harnack’s Das Wesen des Christentums 26 36 L’Évangile et l’Église Jesus and Judaism 39 Pagan Religion and the Development of Christian Doctrine and 45 Cult L’Évangile et l’Eglise: An Intermediate Conclusion 56 History of Religion or History of Religions? The Essais and the Firmin Article “La Religion d’Israël” 57 The Consequences for Loisy’s Position at the École 69 pratique An Intricate Piece of Institutional History: The Elections for the Chair of History of Religions at the Collège de France (1908 – 1909) 75 On the Sources to Study the Elections and on the Election Procedures at the Collège 78 The Complex Methodological and Historical Context 83 83 Loisy’s Main Rivals George Foucart 83 Jules Toutain 85 86 Maurice Vernes 87 Marcel Mauss Loisy’s Scientific and Ideological Image in 1908 88 From Historicism to Sociology, and the Social Question in Early 90 20th Century France The Marquise Arconati-Visconti and Her Jeudistes 96 Loisy’s Appointment: Why and How? 106 Anticlericalism: Trump Card and Stumbling Block 107 Sociology Equals Socialism… 120

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.. ... ... ... .  . . .. .. .. . .. .. .. .. .  . .. .. . .. .. .. . .. ..

Contents

“M. est israélite”: The Complex Role of Mauss’s Jewishness 127 127 Salomon Reinach and the Jeudistes 128 Reinach’s Ties with Durkheim and Mauss Philo-Semitism and Anti-Semitism in the Elections 138 The Outcome

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Taking a Stand: Magic, Science, and Religion; History of Religions in 141 the École laïque The Programmatic Inaugural Speech at the Collège de France (1909) 145 151 Orpheus and the Bellum Orphicum Salomon Reinach: A Further Introduction 152 The Origins of Religion According to Salomon Orpheus 155 165 Loisy’s Main Criticisms Magic, Science, and Religion, or How Loisy Used Hubert and 169 Mauss to Fight Frazer Magic and Religion 171 Magic and Science 176 178 Religion and Science: A Narrow Perspective 182 The Emergence of the Religion de l’Humanité Concept 187 History of Religions and the École laïque A Crack in the Historicist Wall: Myth Ritualism as a Weapon against the Christ Myth Theory 195 The Christ Myth Theory in the Early 20th Century 201 Arthur Drews’s Christus Mythe and the Professional Comparative 201 Study of Early Christianity Jesus the Mock King: The Theories of Frazer and Reinach 208 214 Loisy’s Historicist Struggle with the Christ Myth The Mock King Theory: Testimonies from the Loisy–Reinach Correspondence 215 217 Fighting the Christ Myth: “Le Mythe du Christ” (1910) Towards a Theory of Myth: A Glance at Loisy’s Letters to Cumont 223 Myth and Ritual in Les Mystères païens et le mystère chrétien (1913 – 1914) 228 The Same but Not the Same 229 Loisy’s Ritualist Theory of Myth: Between Science and AntiProtestantism 236

Contents

. .. ..

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The Christ Myth Debates and the Professionalization of History of Religions 248 248 Paul-Louis Couchoud’s Mythological Project and Team Histoire du christianisme Is Not Histoire des religions: Loisy’s Jubilé (1927) 253



Back to the Future: The Religion of Humanity and the History of 259 Sacrifice . The War: Nationalist Christianities and the Universal Religion of Humanity 266 .. The Failures of Christianity: Protestant and Catholic 268 274 .. Christianity Historically Revised . Religion as Mystical Faith: La Religion (1917) 277 .. Faith, Religion, and Morality: An Indissoluble Link 278 282 .. Mysticism Versus Intellectualism and Sociology .. The Religious History of Humanity 288 291 .. The Religious Future of Humanity and the Role of Sacrifice . Hybridity Reigning Supreme: The Essai historique sur le sacrifice (1920) 294 297 .. The Nature and Origin of Sacrifice 297 ... Loisy’s Explicit and Implicit Definition of Sacrifice 309 ... The Origin of Sacrifice ... The Way Sacrifice Works (but Actually Doesn’t Work) 315 .. The History and the Future of Sacrifice 318 Conclusion

324

331 Bibliography Unpublished sources 331 A) Bibliothèque nationale de France. Papiers Alfred Loisy— 331 Correspondence B) Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne—Victor Cousin. Correspondence received by the Marquise Arconati-Visconti, born Marie Peyrat 331 C) Bibliothèque Méjanes d’Aix-en-Provence. Fonds Salomon 332 Reinach. Correspondence received by Reinach D) Kasteel Van Gaasbeek. Correspondence by Marquise ArconatiVisconti 332 Published sources 332

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Index of Modern Names Subject Index

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Introduction 0.1 What This Book Is About This book has a double goal. The first is to study a largely neglected part of the scientific oeuvre of Alfred Loisy (1857– 1940); the second is to use this scholar’s work as a window into the development and the dynamics of history of religions as a scientific discipline during the first two decades of the 20th century. Best known as the “Father of Roman Catholic Modernism,”¹ this French priest and scholar of ancient Judaism and early Christianity was one of the protagonists of the Modernist crisis in the Church in the first decade of the 20th century. Loisy famously developed an intellectual reform program for a profound modernization of Catholicism, with the aim to make it more compatible with the results of his critical historical research, and with modern society at large. His reform endeavor was forcefully rejected by the Church and led to his excommunication in 1908, when he was labelled vitandus. In 1909, after an intensely polemical election campaign, he was appointed to the chair of Histoire des Religions at the Collège de France. There, he developed a rich but as yet largely underexplored career as an independent scholar, until his official retirement in 1932. Alfred Loisy’s intellectual legacy has received detailed scholarly attention almost without interruption since the 1960s, when Émile Poulat initiated the modern study of Roman Catholic Modernism.² Thus far, scholarship has tended to concentrate on his role in the Modernist crisis, and has predominantly focused on his achievements in theology and biblical criticism.³ Yet, both as a Catholic,  Among the many scholars who have used this expression, see Friedrich Heiler, Alfred Loisy. Der Vater des katholischen Modernismus (München: Erasmus, 1947).  Seminal studies on Loisy by Poulat include his Histoire, dogme et critique dans la crise moderniste (Paris: Casterman, 1979), first published in 1962; and Critique et mystique. Autour de Loisy ou la conscience catholique et l’esprit moderne (Paris: le Centurion, 1984). Poulat also edited and published Loisy’s biography by Albert Houtin and Félix Sartiaux: Albert Houtin and Félix Sartiaux, Alfred Loisy. Sa vie—son œuvre (Paris: CNRS, 1960). Given the strained relations between Loisy and these biographers, this document is one to be interpreted with great caution. For its complex history, see the introduction by Émile Poulat, at pages v – xi.  The literature on Loisy’s Modernist writings is vast. Among many excellent studies, the interested reader may consult the studies of Émile Poulat mentioned in the previous note, as well as: Pierre Colin, L’Audace et le soupçon: la crise moderniste dans le catholicisme français (1893 – 1914) (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1997); C.J.T. Talar, (Re)reading, Reception, and Rhetoric. Approaches to Roman Catholic Modernism (New York: Peter Lang, 1999); Émile Goichot, Alfred Loisy et ses amis (Paris: Cerf, 2002); Harvey Hill, The Politics of Modernism, Alfred Loisy and https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110584356-004

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Introduction

and later as an independent scholar, Loisy was also particularly active in the comparative study of religion. Although comparative religion is a vital thread running through most of his work, his contribution to this field of inquiry has often been overlooked.⁴ In the last few years, however, an increasing number of studies has been devoted to Loisy’s comparative scholarship, both before and after 1908.⁵ In 2018, Jeffrey Morrow published the first comprehensive study of younger Loisy’s contribution to the fields of Assyriology and the comparative study of the Old Testament between roughly 1880 – 1900.⁶ At present, no such reliable encompassing study is available on the development of his compa-

the Scientific Study of Religion (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2002); the contributions to François Laplanche, Ilaria Biagioli, and Claude Langlois, eds., Autour d’un petit livre. Alfred Loisy cent ans après (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007); Claus Arnold and Giacomo Losito, eds., La Censure d’Alfred Loisy (1903). Les documents des Congrégations de l’Index et du Saint Office (Vatican: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2009). Last but certainly not least, we should also mention Loisy’s autobiographical accounts of his role in the Modernist crisis: Choses passées (Paris: Nourry, 1913) and his monumental Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire religieuse de notre temps, 3 vols. (Paris, Nourry, 1930 – 1931). We will return to the difficulties in interpreting his autobiographical writings in our first chapter.  This is the case in most of the aforementioned studies focusing on Loisy’s Modernist work, but his name is also only briefly mentioned in seminal historical surveys of comparative religion, like Eric Sharpe’s Comparative Religion. A History (London: Duckworth, 1986), 168, or Jonathan Z. Smith’s Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Pres, 1990), 42.  Among the first to draw attention to this point, are the following two studies by Ivan Strenski in which Loisy’s comparative work receives ample attention: Contesting Sacrifice: Religion, Nationalism and Social Thought (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002) and Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice (Leiden: Brill, 2003). Furthermore, the following recent publications deserve special mentioning: François Laplanche, La Crise de l’origine; Laplanche, Biagioli, and Langlois, eds., Alfred Loisy cent ans après; the contributions to Frédéric Amsler, ed., “Dossier: Quelle place pour Alfred Loisy dans l’histoire de la recherche en exégèse biblique et en sciences des religions?” Special issue, Mythos. Rivista di storia delle religioni 7 (2013): 9 – 143. Also interesting but with a predominant focus on Loisy’s exegetical work post 1908 are Peter Klein, Alfred Loisy als Historiker des Urchristentums. Grundzüge seiner neutestamentlichen Arbeit (Bonn: Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelmsuniversität, 1977) and Alan H. Jones, Independence and Exegesis. The Study of Early Christianity in the Work of Alfred Loisy (1857 – 1940), Charles Guignebert (1867 – 1939) and Maurice Goguel (1880 – 1955) (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck: 1983). In the context of our edition of Loisy’s correspondence to the Belgian historian of religions Franz Cumont (for all details, see infra in this introduction), Corinne Bonnet, Danny Praet, and I have recently published several studies of Loisy’s comparative religion. For all references, see our introduction to ‘Mon cher Mithra’… La correspondance entre Franz Cumont et Alfred Loisy (Paris: Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 2019), i – lv.  Jeffrey Morrow, Alfred Loisy & Modern Biblical Studies (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press).

0.1 What This Book Is About

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rative methods during his career at the Collège de France. ⁷ The present book intends to fill this lacuna. Upon his appointment to the Collège de France, Loisy was officially integrated in the secular academic study of religion in France. This branch of the science laïque had been institutionalized at the Collège de France in 1879, and at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in 1886, as an integral part of the laicization politics of the young Third Republic.⁸ The events in France were part of a wider European trend, even if there were large national differences in the specific institutional contexts.⁹ In the course of the long nineteenth century, the academic study of religion (cf. “sciences religieuses,” “godsdienstwetenschappen,” “Religionswissenschaft,” “scienza delle religioni,” etc.) had progressively detached itself from the disciplines of theology, philology, and philosophy. Starting from the 1870s, it was institutionalized as an independent academic discipline at several European universities (for example, 1873: Geneva; 1877: Leyden, Utrecht, Groningen, Amsterdam; 1878: Uppsala; 1884: Brussels),¹⁰ even if in some national set-

 This period is covered in Houtin and Sartiaux’s Alfred Loisy, but their account is polemic (cf. note 2).  See infra, chapter 2 for the extensive bibliography on the institutionalization of the Sciences religieuses (in contrast to the Sciences sacrées performed at the faculties of theology) in late 19th century France.  A much debated question was whether or not the new chairs were to be integrated in the faculties of theology or in the faculties of letters and/or history, or even whether the academic “sciences of religion” should substitute the faculties of theology entirely, as was the case in France. The making of the academic study of religion and its very specific religious and political national backgrounds have been the object of detailed scholarly attention. Among many fine studies, we refer the interested reader to Walter Capps, Religious Studies: the Making of a Discipline (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995); Arie L. Molendijk and Peter Pels, eds., Religion in the Making: The Emergence of the Sciences of Religion (Leiden: Brill, 1998); Hans G. Kippenberg, Discovering Religious History in the Modern Age, trans. Barbara Harshav (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Gerard Wiegers, ed., Modern Societies & The Science of Religions. Studies in Honour of Lammert Leertouwer (Leiden: Brill, 2002).  For specific national settings, see (again, among many other): Arie L. Molendijk, The Emergence of the Science of Religion in the Netherlands (Leiden: Martin Nijhoff/Brill, 2005); Philippe Borgeaud, “L’histoire des religions à Genève. Origines et métamorphoses,” Asdiwal. Revue genevoise d’anthropologie et d’histoire des religions 1 (2006): 13 – 22; Marjorie Wheeler-Barclay, The Science of Religion in Britain: 1860 – 1915 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010); Jean-Philippe Schreiber, ed., L’École bruxelloise d’étude des religions: 150 ans d’approche libreexaministe du fait religieux (Fernelmont: E.M.E., 2012); Mario Mazza and Natale Spineto, eds., La storiografia storico-religiosa italiana tra la fine dell’800 e la seconda Guerra Mondiale (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2014).

4

Introduction

tings this would not be accomplished until well into the 20th century.¹¹ Most of the newly created positions were chairs in “History of religions” (cf. “Histoire des religions,” “Godsdienstgeschiedenis,” “Religionsgeschichte,” “Storia delle religioni,” etc.), which immediately reveals the key objectives of the young discipline: to break through the monopoly of the Judeo-Christian tradition as a privileged object of inquiry, and to develop a scientific, historical-critical and comparative perspective on religions of the past and the present. However, in spite of these shared objectives, there were fierce debates between rival schools about the methodological, religious, and ideological profile of the professional historian of religions. The main focus of this book is on Loisy’s contribution to this science laïque after 1908, and on his intellectual dialogue with the inherently comparative, but multifarious and often conflicting methodological currents in this young national and international discipline.¹² It is important, however, to note that no sharp division may be drawn between his comparative insights before and after 1908. When comparing his career as a Catholic and later as an independent scholar, we can observe certain discontinuities, but many ideas remain remarkably consistent over the years. To corroborate this point, this book will begin with a chapter on his Modernist writings, and the comparative methods used therein. The four remaining chapters focus entirely on his career at the Collège de France. In reconstructing the development of Loisy’s views, this book seeks to investigate what he compared, and how he compared. Was the scholar attentive to differences, or did he predominantly adopt a discourse of sameness? How did Loisy— who had been educated in the historicist-philological comparative tradition of Ernest Renan¹³—respond to the theoretical, meta-historical or even a-historical, comparative approaches developed in the late 19th and early 20th century fields of anthropology, sociology, and psychology? At the time when he assumed the chair of history of religions, these methods fueled an intense debate on whether history truly was the best way to recover what religion really and objectively is at  In Germany, for instance, strong theological resistance against the new discipline prevented it from being institutionalized until 1910 (Berlin). For bibliography on the German situation and on the important factor of the reluctance of Adolf von Harnack, see chapter 1 (1.2). In Catholic Spain, the first chair in history of religions wasn’t created until 1954: see Francisco Díez de Velasco, “Ángel Álvarez de Miranda y la cátedra de Historia de la Religiones de la Universidad de Madrid: un proyecto truncado,” Bandue. Revista de la Sociedad Española de Ciencias de las Religiones 1 (2007): 83 – 133.  An excellent first introduction to the methodological conflicts of Loisy’s time is François Laplanche, “L’histoire des religions en France au début du XXe siècle,” MEFRIM 111 (1999): 623 – 634. A detailed account of the methodological rivalries in the field follows in chapter 2 (2.2).  On Loisy’s formative years, see the second part of this introduction.

0.1 What This Book Is About

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any point in time. To what extent did Loisy open up to the insights of the then widely influential Victorian anthropologists Edward B. Tylor, James G. Frazer, William Robertson Smith, and their French spokesman, historian of religions and anthropologist Salomon Reinach? How did he respond to the seminal work of the French sociological school of Émile Durkheim, and emerging psychoanalytical approaches to religion? To what extent did he get involved in these scholars’ obsession with the quest for the (one) origin of religion? Loisy was convinced that comparison could give access to much needed, deeper generic knowledge on religion. Important parts of this book are concerned with investigating his general theory of religion, and how it shaped his detailed historical studies.¹⁴ To these questions, another, no less important one should immediately be added. This book also, and perhaps especially, aims at understanding why it was such a vital necessity for Loisy to study comparative religion, and why he made the methodological choices he made. This book follows the lead of leading intellectual historians like, for example, Hans Kippenberg,¹⁵ Ivan Strenski,¹⁶ and Kocku von Stuckrad,¹⁷ who all made a forceful plea for the profound historicization of the study of religion itself. These three scholars forcefully argued that, instead of showing how very wrong our 19th and early 20th century predecessors were, the much more interesting aim of the study of scholarship of religion is to try to determine by comparison with their contemporaries what is reasonable to expect from them in their own historical context. In and through their reconstructions of the religious past, historians of religions—past and present—have always subtly and less subtly reflected on the role of religion in their own time and life.¹⁸ Although this book is not primarily an enquiry into Loisy’s per-

 As has been conclusively shown by Strenski’s Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice, and as will further become clear in this book, Loisy profoundly disliked the term “theory.” Instead, he preferred the term “philosophy” to refer to his general reflections on religion and its history. On these issues, see especially chapters 4 and 5.  Hans G. Kippenberg, Discovering Religious History in the Modern Age, trans. Barbara Harshav (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).  Ivan Strenski, Understanding Theories of Religion. An Introduction. Second Edition (Malden– Oxford: Blackwell, 2015). See also Strenski, Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice, 15: “As a bonus, the historicizing of theories can be especially valuable in helping us avoid misdirected criticism.”  Kocku von Stuckrad, The Scientification of Religion. An Historical Study of Discursive Change, 1800 – 2000 (Berlin–Boston: De Gruyter, 2014).  Apart from the awareness raised on this topic by Kippenberg, von Stuckrad, and Strenski, see also Guy Stroumsa, A New Science. The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason (Cambridge

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Introduction

sonal religion or socio-political ideology, it will regularly prove necessary to investigate both his religious life and his broader worldviews in order to better appreciate his comparative methods. In its attempt to give the fullest possible account of Loisy’s comparative religion, this book will not exclusively focus on his historical writings, but occasionally also offer analyses of key philosophical texts such as his wartime essay La Religion (1917). Another important corpus of documentary evidence used in this study, consists of private writings and correspondence. These largely unpublished documents often provide the most intimate insight into what Loisy really meant by what he wrote in his published work. The two files that are most important for our purposes, are the scientific correspondence between Loisy and the influential French scholar Salomon Reinach, and the one between Loisy and the Belgian historian of religions Franz Cumont. As we will see, the methodological profiles of Reinach and Cumont were substantially different (as were their personal relationships with Loisy), but they did share a profound interest in the comparative study of ancient religions.¹⁹ To provide the necessary contextualization of Loisy’s views, we will also study the correspondence of relevant contemporaries, such as that between Reinach and Frazer. In addition, we will focus on the letters of powerful political personalities like the French statesman Émile Combes, and the Marquise Arconati-Visconti who held an influential political-academic salon in Paris, and fiercely supported Loisy’s candidature at the Collège. ²⁰ In this study, substantial attention will be devoted to the dialogues between both academic and non-academic, national and international networks in the study of religion, as well as to the dissociations and boundaries between them. This last point brings us to the second goal of this study. This book wants to be more than just a study of Loisy’s comparative religion. Its second goal is broader in nature than the first, and applies to the history of the academic study of religion as a scientific discipline. Our study of Loisy’s development as a historian of religions aims to advance new insights on the professionalization of the non-confessional study of religion in the first two decades of the 20th century, and on the way this budding discipline was embedded in re-

MA.–London: Harvard University Press, 2010), who focuses on the Enlightenment period, but starts with a broad theoretical introduction on “the study of religion as cultural criticism,” 1– 13.  Reinach’s published work and correspondence with Loisy are at the core of chapters 3 and 4, Cumont’s is discussed in chapters 1 and 4.  All references to these correspondence files, as well as the necessary biographical background information on their authors, will be provided infra (chapter 1, 1.4, chapter 3, 3.2, chapter 4, 4.2.3, and passim). For a complete overview of all unpublished sources used in this study, see the bibliography at the end of the book.

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ligion, politics, and society. Our second chapter on Loisy’s election campaign at the Collège will reveal the role of powerful networks of academics and non-academic politicians who tried to gain control over the symbolic chair of history of religions in order to consolidate their hegemony over French society. This part of the book aims at uncovering these networks’ mechanisms of social inclusion and exclusion, and at elucidating how these mechanisms were inspired not only by socio-political ideologies and religious beliefs, but also by anti-Semitic or philoSemitic sentiments towards rising stars like Marcel Mauss. The relation between the discipline of history of religions and politics is also discussed in the third chapter, which includes an account of the polemical debates about the instruction on religion in the strictly secular French public schools (the école laïque). As professor at the prestigious Collège, Loisy had an authoritative voice in these public debates. By contrast, the last chapter on Loisy’s wartime writings will in part pursue a rather different goal, as it demonstrates the danger of excessive historicization. In particular, it will be argued that the Great War does not provide all answers to the questions as to how and why Loisy’s scientific views developed between 1915 and 1920. Concerning the point of professionalization, the fourth chapter examines the largely unknown impact of dilettante scholars who flirted with the institutionalized academic study of religion. The focus is on advocates of the Christ Myth theory which gained some popularity in late 19th and early 20th century Europe, claiming that Jesus was never a historical person. The theory’s infiltration in “respectable” scientific journals, conferences, and institutions forced professional historians of religions to reflect on their own, often poorly developed comparative methods, and laid bare quite striking differences between the disciplines of history of religions and history of Christianity, the latter of which was clearly not considered as part of the former. Here, too, the focus will not exclusively be on Loisy: we will also consider the work of scholars like Frazer, Reinach, Cumont, and Hermann Gunkel, who were confronted with the exact same challenges. The chronological scope of this book covers the development of Loisy’s ideas between roughly 1900 and 1920, the main focus being on the period between 1909 and 1921. This choice requires some explanation because it does not encompass his entire career at the Collège de France, which officially ended in 1932, nor his later writings dating from the period of 1932– 1939. Upon his appointment to the Collège, Loisy formulated a comparative research program on the then topical subject of sacrifice, a topic which he was planning to study across different periods and geographical areas. This comparative research—which, in fact, went far beyond the topic of sacrifice to also include contentious issues such as myth and magic—was completed during the First World War, probably somewhere between 1916 and 1917. In 1915 – 1916, Loisy had started to return to his old love.

8

Introduction

Simultaneously to his last course at the Collège de France on sacrifice, he began investigating the birth of Christianity, and devoted himself to the exegetical analysis of the Old and New Testament. In their polemical biography, Albert Houtin and Félix Sartiaux wrote that Loisy took strategic advantage of the wartime years to shift his attention from the general history of religions to his beloved study of early Christianity and Bible exegesis.²¹ Although their account is a problematic source of information, Houtin and Sartiaux may have had a point here, because it is certainly true that he had completely abandoned the general history of religions by the end of the war. Biblical exegesis, early Christianity, and ancient Judaism constituted the almost exclusive topics of inquiry for the remaining years of his scientific career, which stopped only shortly before his death in 1940. These later exegetical and historical writings were informed by his earlier comparative investigations, and Loisy continued to compare primitive Christianity to surrounding religious traditions, but he did so to a much lesser degree than before. This book is especially²² concerned with Loisy’s views on the general history of religions. The chronological scope will therefore not encompass the period after 1921.

0.2 Prologue to the First Chapter: A Very Short Introduction to Loisy’s Formative Years and Early Comparative Studies Our book will begin with a chapter about Loisy’s comparative methods from the late 1890s and early 1900s, focusing especially on his best-known Modernist essay, L’Évangile et l’Église (1902), and related private writings of 1897– 1899. These particular texts provide excellent insight into his early comparative paradigms, and their intricate relation to his philosophy of religion and religious history. They were, however, not the first studies of Loisy to have a comparative outlook. In order not to start this book in medias res, the present prologue to the first chapter will give a brief and schematic overview of Loisy’s formative years, his first publications on comparative religion, and the first problems he encountered with his ecclesiastical superiors from the 1890s onwards. When Loisy first entered the Institut catholique in Paris as a student in 1878, its theological faculty had only just been founded. A few years before, in 1875,  Houtin and Sartiaux, Alfred Loisy, 178 – 179.  Chapters 1 and 3 mainly focus on Loisy’s comparative study of the history of Christianity, but they, too, are especially interested in the largely implicit theoretical and methodological conclusions that can be drawn from detailed historical writings such as Les Mystères païens et le mystère chrétien (Paris: Nourry, 1919).

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the regime of the new Third Republic had passed a law by which it hoped to gain political support from hostile Catholics. The relevant law decreed that Catholics could establish their own institutions for higher education.²³ In his later autobiographies, Choses passées (1913) and the Mémoires (1930 – 1931), Loisy was critical of the education he had received at the Institut. François Laplanche has convincingly shown that Catholic higher education substantially lagged behind in comparison to the critical methods for historical and textual exegesis that were being developed in German biblical scholarship.²⁴ At the Institut catholique, only one exception stood out because of his acceptance of historical-critical methodology, namely Louis Duchesne. Although Loisy greatly downplayed this scholar’s importance in his later autobiographical writings, Duchesne was paramount to his early intellectual development.²⁵ Without any doubt, it was this prominent historian of the early Catholic Church who first introduced him to historical criticism, and who mentored his early readings of German exegesis. Shortly after his arrival at the Institut, Loisy fell seriously ill and was forced to leave Paris. In June 1879, he received ordination to the priesthood, and was charged with parochial ministry in two villages close to his place of birth in the rural Champagne region. Contact with Duchesne seemed to have continued almost uninterruptedly during Loisy’s absence from Paris, and Duchesne certainly played a role in his return to the Institut in May 1881. Because of his critical teachings on early Christian history, Duchesne himself was forced to leave the Institut in 1883, after which he was appointed to the Fourth Section of Sciences historiques et philologiques of the École pratique (the Fifth of Sciences religieuses was not founded until 1886²⁶). When Loisy later unsuccessfully applied for the

 For the context of these events: Émile Poulat, “L’institution des ‘sciences religieuses’,” in Cent ans de sciences religieuses en France, ed. Jean Baubérot (Paris: Cerf, 1987), 60; Hill, The Politics of Modernism, 50 – 52; Laplanche, La Crise de l’origine, 26. The rapid creation of new Catholic schools and universities soon triggered strong anticlerical reactions, and as of 1880, new laws substantially enhanced state control over these institutions and formally forbade them to carry the title of university. On this context: Hill, The Politics of Modernism, 51.  Laplanche, La Crise de l’origine, 22. For Loisy’s own evaluation, see his Mémoires, I, 72– 74.  Loisy, Mémoires, I, 105 – 107, and also 170 where Loisy is immensely critical of Duchesne’s historical work. On their complex relationship: Émile Poulat, 362– 365; Goichot, Alfred Loisy et ses amis, 17– 22, and especially Brigitte Waché, “Les relations entre Alfred Loisy et Louis Duchesne,” Société internationale d’études sur Alfred Loisy, URL: http://alfred.loisy.free.fr/ pdf/loisyduchesne_wache.pdf. Brigitte Waché also authored a fine intellectual biography of Duchesne: Monseigneur Louis Duchesne (1843 – 1922): historien de l’Église, directeur de l’École française de Rome (Rome: École française de Rome, 1992).  See also infra, chapter 2, which deals with the institutionalization of the French study of religion.

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Introduction

vacant chair of Assyriology at that same section, he felt that Duchesne insufficiently supported his candidature, and their relations grew strained.²⁷ This was, however, not the only reason why Loisy retroactively disassociated himself from Duchesne. The two scholars were distinctly different in temperament, religious beliefs, and attitudes towards the Catholic Church, of which Duchesne remained a member until his death in 1922, notwithstanding the many problems he experienced because of anti-Modernist hostilities towards his work.²⁸ For our purposes, it is important to mention that Duchesne was certainly well-familiar with comparative research of the Old and New Testament, which was steadily gaining ground in France, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe during the later decades of the 19th century. That he preferred not to touch upon these topics in his own publications, or only reluctantly so, does not mean that he didn’t discuss them with Loisy during the many private conversations they had.²⁹ If Loisy later deliberately downplayed his indebtedness to Duchesne, he did entirely the opposite for his intellectual relationship to France’s 19th century giant in the historical and comparative study of ancient Judaism and early Christianity.³⁰ Profoundly dissatisfied over his education at the Institut catholique, he soon turned to self-study, and simultaneously began to take courses at the leading secular institutions for higher education, in preparation of his doctoral thesis. Starting from 1882– 1883, we find Loisy at the Collège de France, following the lectures of Ernest Renan, and at the Fourth Section of the École pratique, taking courses in Assyriology and Egyptology.³¹ In his Mémoires, Loisy provided multiple pieces of evidence for the way Renan’s courses had imbued him with an inherently comparative take on ancient Judaism and early Christianity. In

 Loisy, Mémoires, I, 165.  Loisy’s later letters to Cumont reveal that Loisy closely followed Duchesne’s difficulties with the Curia. See the index in Lannoy, Bonnet, Praet, Mon cher Mithra, II. Duchesne’s problems mainly revolved around his magnum opus, Histoire ancienne de l’Église, 3 vols. (1906 – 1910), of which the Italian translation was put on the Index in January 1912. On this topic see Lannoy, Bonnet, Praet, Mon cher Mithra, II, 58.  Unfortunately, the correspondence between Duchesne and Loisy is incompletely preserved. The letters Loisy wrote to Duchesne are lost, and only a selected few of Duchesne to Loisy have been preserved. They were published by Bruno Neveu, “Lettres de Monseigneur Duchesne, directeur de l’École française de Rome, à Alfred Loisy (1896 – 1917) et à Friedrich von Hügel (1895 – 1920),” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome. Moyen-Âge. Temps modernes 84 (1972): 283 – 307 and 559 – 599.  See especially his Mémoires, I, 117, where Loisy explicitly opposed Duchesne and Renan.  It is significant that Loisy didn’t follow the courses of the Liberal-Protestant scholar Albert Réville, who was the first holder of the chair of history of religions (founded in 1879). On Réville see infra, chapter 2 (2.2.3).

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his diary of 1883 (quoted in the Mémoires), he explained how Renan substantially contributed to his growing awareness that the OT and NT were incomprehensible without taking into account their religious environments. In the following extract from this diary, his musings on Renan’s classes took the form of a fictitious (and quite humoristic) dialogue between himself and the personified Catholic Church. This may well be the earliest proof we have of his interest in comparing Christianity: Jérusalem, Babylone et la Perse, Alexandrie t’ont fourni ton Credo ; tu l’as accommodé avec la philosophie d’Aristote, et il en est résulté un monument d’un effet assez grandiose, mais tu devrais reconnaître avec nous que l’édifice est bien froid, obscur, qu’il menace ruine en plus d’un endroit, ou plutôt qu’il est bâti sur le sable. Kant, un Allemand dont tu as sans doute entendu prononcer le nom, a ruiné la métaphysique. On a retrouvé ta création et ton déluge sur les briques de Ninive. Les Juifs ont emprunté les anges et les démons à la Perse ; ils t’ont fourni ainsi de quoi peupler ton ciel (et ton enfer). Et ton ciel lui-même, ton Elysée et ton Tartare, la Grèce te les a transmis afin que tu pusses remplacer avantageusement le shéol hébreu, où les morts étaient si près du néant qu’on ne sait s’ils y étaient heureux ou malheureux.³²

Whereas Kantian philosophy had ruined metaphysics, Loisy argued, comparative religion now deprived the Catholic Church from its claims to absolute uniqueness by showing its resemblance to the religions and philosophies of other cultures such as Babylonia (where similar myths of creation and deluge had been found), Persia (which had borrowed its angels and demons to Judaism), Israel and Greece (which had profoundly influenced its credo). While the result of these assimilations had once been grand and monumental, the Catholic Church had now become cold and obscure to many, according to Loisy. In short, the Church stood on shaky grounds and was in dire need of reform. Both in his inaugural speech of 1909, and in his later autobiographical writings, Loisy framed himself as Renan’s legitimate successor at the Collège, which strictly speaking he was not, because the chair of history of religions didn’t exist in Renan’s time.³³ When writing these later texts, Loisy had already been excommunicated from the Church, and had effectively been recuperated by the comparative science laïque, on which Renan had had an immense impact. It made perfect sense, then, for the later Loisy to trace his intellectual genealogy to Renan. However, at the time when he was actually following Renan’s courses, Loisy was in a quite different religious and intellectual state of mind. This is not to say that

 Loisy, Mémoires, I, 121– 122.  For an analysis of Loisy’s inaugural speech of 1909 and his strategic reasons for presenting himself as the direct heir of Renan, see infra, chapter 3 (3.1).

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Renan was not important for his intellectual development (he most certainly was), but when reading Loisy’s later writings, one would almost forget that back in the 1880s, he had been very critical of Renan, with whom, it is instructive to point out, he never established any form of personal contact.³⁴ On the one hand, he felt that Renan had been wrong to conclude that Catholicism was theoretically incompatible with modern science. On the other hand, he criticized Renan’s altogether limited knowledge of ancient Mesopotamian languages, which was a further incentive to set sail to the École pratique. Loisy’s intense training in the then vibrant French field of Assyriology is an important, yet often overlooked part of his education. This lacuna has recently been filled by C.J.T. Talar, and especially Jeffrey Morrow, who have shown that Loisy took courses with leading figures such as Jules Oppert, Joseph Halévy, and Arthur Amiaud.³⁵ After his studies, he applied for the chair in Assyriology, left vacant by the untimely death of Amiaud (1849 – 1889). Unable to obtain that position, he taught courses in Assyriology at the Institut catholique, where he was appointed to the chair in Écriture sainte immediately after obtaining his doctoral degree in theology. Loisy’s very first publications in comparative religion date back to the 1890s. Not unsurprisingly, they all concern the interrelation between the Old Testament, especially the Pentateuch, and ancient Babylonian religions.³⁶ Following the example of Renan, Loisy’s comparative approach is strongly philological and deeply historicist.³⁷ His early publications show a method that is focused on rigid textual analysis, and reveal a primary interest in the comparison of ancient mythology. As Jeffrey Morrow has shown, his comparative work on Genesis was not only inspired by the strong French tradition in Assyriology, but also by the seminal research of the Religionsgeschichtliche

 For Loisy’s criticism of Renan, see especially Loisy, Mémoires, I, 117; on this testimony, Morrow, Alfred Loisy & Modern Biblical Studies, 59. For a good account of Loisy’s relationship to Renan, see also Jones, Independence and Exegesis, 1– 13.  Morrow, Alfred Loisy & Modern Biblical Studies, 45 – 50, and C.J.T. Talar, “Between Science and Myth: Alfred Loisy on Genesis,” in Amsler, ed., Quelle place pour Alfred Loisy, 27– 42.  See, for instance, Alfred Loisy, Les Mythes chaldéens de la Création et du Déluge (Amiens: Rousseau–Leroy, 1892), and Les Mythes babyloniens et les premiers chapitres de la Genèse (Paris: Picard, 1901), which is a compilation of articles earlier published in the Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses. For a full account of all of Loisy’s early publications in Assyriology and OT studies: Morrow, Alfred Loisy & Modern Biblical Studies, 64– 72.  On Renan’s comparative methodology, see most recently Perrine Simon-Nahum, “Renan passeur: de la science des religions à l’histoire des religions,” in Laurens, ed., Ernest Renan. La science, la religion, la République, 263 – 369; Robert D. Priest, The Gospel According to Renan. Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 27– 31, and passim.

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Schule at the theological faculty in Göttingen.³⁸ Early on, Loisy had started reading Hermann Gunkel’s innovative work on the Old Testament, but he was also well acquainted with the writings of other members like Wilhelm Bousset and Johannes Weiss. It would not be until 1902 that Loisy published his first reviews of the Schule’s research on early Christianity.³⁹ His earliest publications of the 1890s exclusively focused on Judaism, which was definitely a less risky field of inquiry for a Catholic scholar. Still, it did not help him to stay out of trouble with the anti-Modernist hierarchy of the Catholic Church of his time. In 1892, Loisy founded his own journal L’Enseignement biblique to further disseminate the content of his courses in Scripture at the Institut, and published a series of articles which clearly relativized the divine inspiration of the Bible.⁴⁰ At this point, his critical enquiries came to the attention of his local superiors and instigated what Harvey Hill aptly called an “early round of the Modernist crisis.”⁴¹ Loisy’s publications put the pressing Question biblique high on the Catholic agenda: to what extent, and how could the results of historical-critical research of the Bible be reconciled with the dogmatic teachings of the Church? Under the papacy of Leo XIII, the Church had reservedly supported scholarly initiatives to modernize the Catholic science of religion, for example by allowing the organization of the Congrès scientifiques internationaux des catholiques (1888 – 1900).⁴² But at the same time, it forcefully stressed the absolute superiority of theology over history and exegesis, and with the encyclical Aeterni Patris

 See infra, chapter 4 (4.1.1) for the bibliography on the pioneering achievements of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule.  Loisy for instance published a positive but nuanced review of Hermann Gunkel’s Zum religionsgeschichtlichen Verständnis des Neuen Testaments in the Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses 9 (1904): 573 – 574. On this work by Gunkel, see infra, chapter 4 (4.1.1).  See, e. g., “Histoire critique du texte de l’Ancien Testament,” Enseignement biblique 1 (1892): 1– 76, 77– 156, 157– 236, 237– 313.  Harvey Hill, “Leo XIII, Loisy, and the ‘Broad School’: an Early Round of the Modernist Crisis,” Catholic Historical Review 89 (2003): 39 – 59.  The first initiative for these three-yearly conferences came from Loisy’s rector at the Institut catholique, Mgr. Maurice d’Hulst. The first edition took place in Paris and was attended by 1118 Catholic scholars, among whom Loisy and Duchesne (Loisy, Mémoires, I, 163). The last conference took place in Munich in 1900, after which the initiative was discontinued due to the then increasingly hostile scientific politics in the Church. On the conferences: Albert Houtin, La Question biblique chez les catholiques de France au XIXe siècle (Paris: Alphonse Picard et fils, 1902), 126 – 1930, and Francesco Beretta, “Les Congrès scientifiques internationaux des catholiques (1888 – 1900) et la production d’orthodoxie dans l’espace intellectuel catholique,” in Le Catholicisme en Congrès, eds. Claude Langlois and Christian Sorrel, 155 – 203. URL: https:// halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00453294/document.

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Introduction

(1879) it had especially proposed a renewal of thomistic philosophy as the answer to the call of modern science.⁴³ At the beginning of academic year 1892 – 1893, seminarians of Saint-Sulpice were no longer permitted to attend Loisy’s course in Scripture. One year later, in May 1893, Loisy was dismissed from his chair in Écriture sainte, but was still allowed to give his classes in Hebrew and Assyriology. Some days before the promulgation of the encyclical Providentissimus deus on November 18, 1893, he was dismissed entirely from the Institut catholique. In December that same year, he was forced to stop the publication of his journal. The encyclical on biblical scholarship marked a significant phase in the “early round of the Modernist crisis”: Providentissimus deus was the first of a long series of increasingly repressive texts by which the Church tried to call a halt to critical Catholic scholarship. Leo XIII encouraged Catholic scholars to investigate the Bible, but at the same time decreed that all exegetical and historical inquiries should tie in with traditional theological premises. The following encyclical, Depuis le jour, of 1899, addressed the French clergy, and formally forbade historical criticism to be part of its education. This much sterner tone was further radicalized during the papacy of Pius X (1903 – 1914), under whom a true witch-hunt of Modernist priests was instigated which paralyzed critical scholarship in the Catholic Church for years.⁴⁴ After his dismissal from the Institut, Loisy was transferred to the Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, where he worked as a chaplain at a Dominican girls’ school. Deprived from decent libraries, he used these years of forced academic silence to work on an all-encompassing apology of a profoundly modernized Catholic Church under which critical scholarship would flourish. The private manuscript containing these views carries the double title of La Crise de la foi dans le temps présent: Essais d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses. Written between 1897– 1899, it reveals Loisy’s search for a philosophical framework that could overcome the strong shortcomings he detected in both thomistic essentialism and in the dominant Liberal-Protestant definitions of (Christian) religion.

 For Leo XIII’s position on the Question biblique: Hill, “Leo XII, Loisy, and the ‘Broad School,” 50 – 53.  On the organization of this witch-hunt : Émile Poulat, Intégrisme et catholicisme intégral: un réseau secret international antimoderniste: La “Sapinière” (1909 – 1921) (Paris–Tournai: Casterman, 1969). In this study, Poulat investigates the so-called “Sodalitium Pianum,” which was a secret network of spies who reported Modernist authors to Rome. It was founded in 1909 by Mgr. Umberto Benigni, member of Pius’s ultraconservative entourage.

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First published in its entirety by François Laplanche in 2010,⁴⁵ the Neuilly manuscript is a pivotal text for the reconstruction of Loisy’s intellectual development in the 1890s. It discloses his deeply evolutionary philosophy of religious history, which, as this book will show, was never to disappear from his oeuvre. For Loisy, alias the self-declared “Einstein of the history of religions,”⁴⁶ history shows how religious truth has always been in the making, in constant flux. The Neuilly manuscript was the main source from which he drew his L’Évangile et Église. Before turning to the first chapter, one last crucial piece of background information remains to be provided. While in Neuilly, Loisy conceived of the idea to create a successor to his deceased Enseignement biblique. In 1896, the Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses was born.⁴⁷ He wanted this new journal to further disseminate the results of the scientific study of religion among both non-specialist and specialist Catholic audiences. The Revue was uncompromisingly historical and critical. Although Catholic hostility towards his scientific activities was now such that he could not direct the journal himself without incurring new difficulties, his silent collaboration behind the scenes still brought Loisy into direct contact with the work of leading national and international scholars in the secular study of religion. Special attention should be drawn to the work of Reinach and Cumont, who both contributed to the Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses. As the first chapter will now try to show, their work would soon begin to leave traces in Loisy’s own scientific output.

 Alfred Loisy, La Crise de la foi dans le temps présent (Essais d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses), ed. François Laplanche (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), with introductions by Laplanche himself, Christophe Théobald, and Rosanna Chiappa.  For this self-designation, see Loisy’s later letter to Cumont quoted at the beginning of this study and also analyzed in chapter 5 (5.3.2).  On the creation of the RHLR and the pivotal role of French Latinist Paul Lejay who anonymously directed the journal, see Annelies Lannoy, “‘Envoyez-nous votre taurobole et que Bellone nous protège.’ Franz Cumont, Paul Lejay and the Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses,” Forum Romanum Belgicum 12 (2015): 1– 19.

1 Comparative Religion and/as Modernist Theology: L’Évangile et l’Église and the Neuilly Essais The publication of L’Évangile et l’Église in 1902 was a milestone in Loisy’s trajectory, as well as a landmark in the intellectual history of the Church. Often considered as the starting point of the Modernist crisis in the Catholic Church, the book was the main cause of the intensification of its anti-Modernist politics, culminating in the Syllabus Lamentabili sane exitu and the Encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis in 1907, followed by the so-called anti-Modernist oath in 1910.¹ The volume was the first of the petits livres rouges, Loisy’s series of historical and philosophical essays.² In it, he offered a historical-critical account of primitive Christianity and analyzed the relation of Jesus’ original gospel to the later development of the Church, and of Christian doctrine and cult. Loisy decided the time had come to abandon the protection of the pseudonyms he would normally use to publish on delicate topics.³ In L’Évangile et l’Église he openly insisted on the necessary historicization of early Christianity and consistently applied his now fully developed evolutionary philosophy of history. His rewriting of the Christian origins conveyed a radical reform program for early 20th century Catholicism. It was a plea for a systematic redefinition of the asymmetrical relationship between science and faith in the Church, and, ultimately, for a new understanding of Catholic faith itself. Loisy’s book was condemned locally by Cardinal Richard in early 1903, but it wasn’t until late 1903, after Pius X had come to power, that the volume was placed on the Index of forbidden books.⁴ In 1903, Loisy published several other “dangerous” volumes, such as Autour d’un petit livre (1903), his second petit livre rouge, in which he tried to defend  For the extent to which L’Évangile et l’Église (henceforth EE in the notes) inspired the content of these anti-Modernist documents: Poulat, Histoire, dogme et critique, 102, and Claus Arnold and Giacomo Losito, eds., Lamentabili sane exitu (1907). Les documents préparatoires du Saint Office (Vatican: Liberia Editrice Vaticana, 2011).  After EE, Loisy published another 14 petits livres rouges (the last one, La Crise morale du temps présent et l’éducation humaine, was published in 1937, three years before his death). For all references, see the bibliography by Émile Poulat in Houtin and Sartiaux, Alfred Loisy, 305 ff.  See especially his Firmin articles, published between 1898 and 1900 in the Revue du clergé français, which defined the evolutionary philosophical framework for his historical and exegetical work. Also available in English: C.J.T. Talar, ed., Prelude to the Modernist Crisis. The “Firmin” Articles of Alfred Loisy, trans. Christine E. Thirlway (Oxford, OUP, 2010). On the frequent use of pseudonyms by Modernist priests: Poulat, Histoire, dogme et critique, 621– 676 (with a list).  In his Mémoires II, 169, Loisy explained that at first “the zealots of orthodoxy” were hesitant about their position toward the book. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110584356-005

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and clarify the positions of the first volume for his critics.⁵ Still, there is no doubt that his excommunication was most significantly accelerated by the publication of L’Évangile et l’Église. Loisy’s seminal book almost instantly attracted attention from specialized and non-specialized audiences inside and outside of the Church. Until today, it has remained his best-known work. The first edition numbered 1500 copies, which were sold out in no time.⁶ The book was later translated into various languages (English, German, Spanish and Italian) and would receive a total of five editions (1903², 1904³, 19084, 19295). Since the rise of scientific interest in this significant period of Catholic Church history,⁷ Loisy’s book has been the subject of extensive and detailed scholarship. The dominant focus has been on his notable reinterpretation of the relationship between history and theology, and its implications for the power and the status of the Church, and for the meaning of Catholic dogma.⁸ But the book has also received ample attention from biblical scholars and historians of Christianity, who have shown how Loisy propagated the new exegetical methods which were being developed in Liberal-Protestant Germany and in secular French scholarship (especially Renan), among his French Catholic peers.⁹  We should also mention the publication of Loisy’s commentary Le Quatrième Évangile (Paris: Picard, 1903), which strongly denied the historical character of the fourth gospel, and was put on the Index at the same time as EE and Autour d’un petit livre. On this topic, see Claus Arnold and Giacomo Losito, eds., La Censure d’Alfred Loisy (1903). Les documents des Congrégations de l’Index et du Saint Office (Vatican: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2009).  Marvin R. O’Connell, Critics on Trial. An Introduction to the Catholic Modernist Crisis (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1994), 241.  Modern scholarship of Roman Catholic Modernism was instigated by Émile Poulat’s highly influential Histoire, dogme et critique (1962). See our introduction, for a selected bibliography on Loisy’s role in Catholic Modernism.  The most recent list of theological publications on EE is included in Carl-Friedrich Geyer, Wahrheit und Absolutheit des Christentums—Geschichte und Utopie. “L’Évangile et l’Église” von Alfred F. Loisy in Text und Kontext (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010), 220 – 224, although it should be noted that its focus is on German scholarship. This list can be complemented by the extensive bibliography in Hill, The Politics of Modernism, 211– 222, and Harvey Hill, “Loisy’s L’Évangile et l’Église in the light of the ‘Essaisʼ,” Theological Studies 67 (2006): 73 – 98.  See, among many others: Bernard B. Scott, “Adolf von Harnack and Alfred Loisy: a Debate on the Historical Methodology of Christian Origins” (PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 1971); Peter Klein, Alfred Loisy als Historiker des Urchristentums. Grundzüge seiner neutestamentlichen Arbeit (Bonn: Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelmsuniversität, 1977); Christoph Theobald, “L’Exégèse catholique au moment de la crise moderniste,” in Le Monde contemporain et la Bible, eds. Claude Savart and Jean-Noël Aletti (Paris: Beauchesne, 1985), 387– 439; C.J.T. Talar, “Innovation and Biblical Interpretation,” in Catholicism Contending with Modernity, ed. Darrell Jodock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 191– 211. Yet another research focus in scholarship on EE in-

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Despite these multifarious approaches, there is an aspect of the book which has not yet received the attention it deserves, that is, the vital role of comparative religion in Loisy’s historical argumentation. While several scholars have studied his innovative views on Jesus’ interrelation to Judaism, his original approach to early Christianity’s dependence on Greco-Roman paganism has gone virtually unnoticed, and the same is true for his (careful) consideration of a universalizing anthropological approach to religion. The book’s statements on early Christianity’s relationship to surrounding Jewish and pagan religious cultures invite further investigation of a hitherto largely neglected context of interpretation: the secular discipline of history of religions.¹⁰ In our introduction it has been pointed out that Loisy steadily attempted to bridge the gap between the then strictly separated Catholic and secular scientific worlds. The present chapter will show how Loisy’s essay carefully unveiled his position toward methods used in the French and international history of religions, where the comparability of Christianity had been one of the most debated issues since the late 19th century. New insights into this Modernist manifesto may be gained when we consider the possibility that his theory of religious evolution—which was highly indebted to the theological views of Cardinal John Henry Newman¹¹—was further consolidated when Loisy entered into a dialogue with the evolutionary models of history writing which were at use at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and the Collège de France. The principal objectives of this chapter, then, are to reveal the function of comparative religion within Loisy’s evolutionary historiography, and to position his comparative views within the two ideological-scientific contexts that constituted his intellectual horizon. First, Loisy’s thought was diametrically opposed to traditional Catholic scholarship, but it is important to remember that L’Évangile et l’Église was aimed at defending the Church, though of course in the future

volved its reception by the ecclesiastical authorities: Francesco Turvasi, The Condemnation of Alfred Loisy and the Historical Method (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1979), 61– 82; C.J.T. Talar, (Re)reading, Reception, and Rhetoric, 8 – 34; Arnold and Losito, La Censure d’Alfred Loisy; Arnold and Losito, Lamentabili sane exitu; Claus Arnold, “‘Lamentabili Sane Exitu’ (1907). Das Römische Lehramt und die Exegese Alfred Loisys,” Zeitschrift für Neuere Theologiegeschichte 11 (2004): 24– 51.  The context of the French science laïque is summarized in Talar, “Innovation and biblical interpretation,” 206 – 208 and more elaborately discussed in Hill, The Politics of Modernism, 45 – 49. Talar and Hill both focus on the exegetical methods at use in the independent sector; comparative methodology lies beyond their scope.  For Loisy’s evolutionary philosophy of religion, see infra, 1.4.

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modernized form he envisioned.¹² The book was presented as a refutation of the famous essay Das Wesen des Christentums (1900) by the German Liberal-Protestant scholar Adolf von Harnack.¹³ Harnack’s peculiar comparative views nourished Loisy’s, even if they mostly served as a negative point of reference. Secondly, we want to demonstrate Loisy’s indebtedness to some of the comparative paradigms in use in the nascent academic discipline of history of religions.¹⁴ By this context we do not only mean the French institutionalized discipline, which was heavily dominated by Liberal-Protestant scholars like father and son Albert and Jean Réville, or Auguste Sabatier.¹⁵ We will also focus on Loisy’s relation to independent scholars like Reinach and Cumont who did not occupy chairs in history of religions, but still dominated the French and international comparative debates in the early 20th century.¹⁶ This chapter’s exploratory journey into Loisy’s Modernist views, Harnack’s Liberal-Protestant ideas, and the popular comparative frameworks of the science laïque will ultimately enable us to address the overarching question of the scientificity of Loisy’s comparative religion at the turn of the century. Even if Loisy firmly qualified himself as a “historian,” his critical scholarship was inextricably intertwined with a deep religious commitment.¹⁷ To what extent was his historical argumentation, indeed, “scientific,” when one compares it to the work of his contemporaries? L’Évangile et l’Église is a prime example of a highly premeditated and strategic self-representation. When writing this work, Loisy was working in an environment that was particularly hostile to any method that could question the uniqueness of Christianity and the historical truthfulness of the Bible. For a correct interpretation of his book, it is necessary that we first examine how this antiscientific setting affected the publication. The second section of this chapter deals with Harnack’s ideas on the comparative history of Christianity. Thereafter follows the analysis of L’Évangile et l’Église, complemented by the study of two

 Loisy, Choses passées, 233, where EE is characterized as “une sorte de programme de catholicisme progressiste.”  First edition: Adolf Harnack, Das Wesen des Christentums (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs, 1900). We use the second edition of the English translation: What is Christianity?, trans. Thomas Bailey Saunders (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1908).  We will come back to the history of the institutionalization of history of religions, and the role played by Liberal-Protestant scholars, in the following chapter on Loisy’s appointment at the Collège de France.  The comparative views of the Liberal Protestants at the EPHE will turn out to be at wide variance both with each other and with those of German Liberal Protestants like Harnack.  See infra, 1.4 for more information on these two important scholars.  For the intricate ways in which the academic study of religion itself created new religious truth claims, see the fine analysis of Kocku von Stuckrad, The Scientification of Religion.

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slightly earlier texts of Loisy’s—his Neuilly Essais ¹⁸ and pseudonymous A. Firmin article “La religion d’Israël.” The final part of this chapter is devoted to Loisy’s correspondence with several leading personalities of the Sciences religieuses department at the École pratique, and aims at determining how Loisy’s Évangile et l’Église and its subsequent condemnation affected his position at this prominent institution.

1.1 On the Interpretation of L’Évangile et l’Église Regardless of one’s particular focus of research, L’Évangile et l’Église is a highly difficult work for any scholar to interpret due to the conflicting voices it conveys.¹⁹ Its ambivalent character reflects Loisy’s complex psychology at this point of his Catholic career. On the one hand, his dismissal from the Institut catholique made him painfully aware that his scientific and religious views radically conflicted with the traditional teachings of the Catholic Church.²⁰ In a letter to his friend Friedrich von Hügel,²¹ Loisy explained that he was unsure whether he would actually have the courage to publish the book.²² He rightly anticipated that the publication would set off what may be called without any exaggeration a tsunami of troubles with ecclesiastical authorities. On the other hand, Loisy still hoped that the Church—or at the least a good part of his fellow Catholics—would come on board, and comprehend the inherent value of his modernizing ideas.²³ This constant wavering between realism and hope led Loisy to wrap his views in

 See our introduction to this book for more information about this massive manuscript, which was first published in 2010.  The difficulties to interpret EE have been discussed abundantly: Poulat, Histoire, dogme et critique, 89 – 90; Talar, (Re)reading, Reception, and Rhetoric, 9 – 18; Geyer, Wahrheit und Absolutheit des Christentums, 9 – 15.  See supra (introduction) for Loisy’s first confrontations with Roman intransigence. His autobiographical writings testify to this state of mind, see for instance the extract from his diary (October 13, 1902) in his Choses passées, 242.  British-based scholar Baron Friedrich von Hügel (1852– 1925; Austrian father, Scottish mother) was an influential figure in Roman Catholic Modernism. A deeply religious scholar, he was especially interested in philosophy of religion and the study of mysticism. Von Hügel was the nerve center, so to speak, of an extensive network of liberal religious scholars, including, for instance, Maude Petre (see infra, chapter 5, 5.2.2) and George Tyrrell. On von Hügel, see (among many others): Lawrence F. Barmann, Baron Friedrich von Hügel and the Modernist Crisis in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972).  Letter of August 10, 1902, quoted in Loisy, Mémoires, II, 124.  Loisy, Mémoires, II, 134.

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an apologetic anti-Protestant packing, which is alternatingly purely strategic and completely sincere.²⁴ In his introduction, Loisy explained that his volume offered a study of Harnack’s Wesen des Christentums. ²⁵ In the following part of our chapter, Harnack’s ideas will be discussed in great detail. For now it suffices to note that this Protestant scholar claimed to have written a purely historical enquiry into the essence of Christianity, while, in reality, he combined advanced historical criticism with a Liberal-Protestant reading of Jesus’ life and message. Harnack’s evident conclusion was that the Catholic Church had no foundation in this original message. When the French translation of Harnack’s essay came out, Loisy could no longer resist the urge of writing a reaction. He explained that his sole aim was to “catch the point of view of history.”²⁶ It is worth underlining that Loisy and Harnack both believed that in their controversy over Jesus’ original gospel it was history which was at stake, and not religion. Loisy emphatically disavowed having written “an apologia for Catholicism or traditional dogma.”²⁷ But although Loisy stated differently, his Évangile et l’Église most definitely served apologetic goals.²⁸ In truth, it did not defend traditional Catholicism, but a thoroughly modernized Church. The book’s anti-Harnackian point of departure was sincere in the sense that Loisy was absolutely convinced of Harnack’s theological abuse of history, but it was an unequivocally strategic choice, too. In reality, Loisy’s ideas showed much closer resemblance to Harnack’s than to those of his conservative Catholic colleagues.²⁹ With the contention that he had not intended to offer “an apologia for Catholicism,” he anticipated the criticism of those who would see through the strategy and figure out that Loisy’s anti-Protestantism was indeed neither a synonym nor a guarantee for traditional Cathol-

 Loisy later admitted that he had “discretely” integrated his own reform program in his refutation of Harnack, but denied that this was a strategic decision: Mémoires, II, 168.  The intellectual relation between Harnack and Loisy has been studied extensively (though not or rarely from the viewpoint of comparative religion). See, among many others: Poulat, Histoire, dogme et critique, 43 – 73; Scott, “Adolf von Harnack and Alfred Loisy,” 211– 306 (focus mostly on exegesis); Stephen Sykes, The Identity of Christianity. Theologians and the Essence of Christianity from Schleiermacher to Barth (London: SPCK, 1984), 123 – 147; Guglielmo Forni Rosa, The “Essence of Christianity”: the Hermeneutical Question in the Protestant and Modernist Debate (1897 – 1904) (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995).  We here use the English translation: The Gospel and the Church, trans. Christopher Home (London: Isbister & Company Limited, 1903).  Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, 22.  The same is true for Harnack’s “historical” essay, see infra (1.2).  In his Mémoires II, 270, Loisy admitted this.

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icism. Harvey Hill has recently adduced conclusive proof of the fact that Harnack’s Wesen offered an excellent apologetic pretext for Loisy to publish historical views he had actually developed well before 1900 in his Neuilly Essais. ³⁰ This, however, does not imply that Harnack’s ideas are not crucial to understand Loisy’s. The key ideas of Harnack’s Wesen were perfectly analogous to those of his famous Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte (1886 – 1890),³¹ which was explicitly mentioned in the Essais together with other recent (German and French) LiberalProtestant publications.³² For Loisy’s views on comparative religion—which are outside of the scope of Hill’s enquiry—the added value of the Neuilly document is somewhat limited, in the sense that the ideas exposed in this document are not substantially different from those published in his pseudonymous work. We will see (1.4) that the first section of the chapter “La religion d’Israël” of the Neuilly manuscript sheds very interesting new light on the comparative framework behind L’Évangile et l’Église, but it should immediately be added that Loisy published an almost unaltered version of this text in his article “La religion d’Israël” (1900).³³ This pseudonymous article had been condemned by Cardinal Richard shortly after its publication in 1900, so at the time of writing L’Évangile et l’Église, Loisy knew from experience what sort of historical arguments were better omitted in a book which he intended as an invitation for Catholics to pause for thought, but not as shock therapy.³⁴ The comparison between the Firmin article and L’Évangile et l’Église will allow us to uncover the strategies at work in the latter work, which in the end—in spite of Loisy’s precautions—was nothing short of a bombshell in the Catholic world.  Hill, “Loisy’s L’Évangile et l’Église.” See also Rosanna Ciappa, “La réforme du régime intellectuel de l’Église catholique,” in Alfred Loisy. La Crise de la foi dans le temps présent, ed. François Laplanche (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 574– 585. This is indirectly confirmed by Loisy himself, Mémoires, II, 125.  Michael Basse, Die dogmengeschichtlichen Konzeptionen Adolf von Harnacks und Reinhold Seebergs (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001), especially at 208 – 224.  Alfred Loisy, La Crise de la foi dans le temps présent (essais d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), 37: “Le Manuel d’histoire des dogmes de M. Harnack, l’Esquisse d’une philosophie de la religion de M. Sabatier, l’Histoire israélite de M. Wellhausen, la Théologie du Nouveau Testament de M. Holtzmann.” For the anti-Liberal-Protestant character of the Essais: Ciappa, “La réforme du régime intellectuel,” 558 – 565.  For the history of this “Firmin” paper, see Talar, Prelude to the Modernist Crisis, vii, xii-xv; Jeffrey L. Morrow, “Alfred Loisy’s Developmental Approach to Scripture: Reading the ‘Firmin’ Articles in the Context of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Historical Biblical Criticism,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 15 (2013), 325. For more information about the relation between Loisy’s pseudonymous publications and the Neuilly Essais, see infra, 1.4.  Loisy, Mémoires, II, 134.

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Another factor that is vital for the correct interpretation of Loisy’s book, is his failed ambition to join in with the secular academic study of religion in France.³⁵ After the condemnation of his Firmin article Loisy tried to strengthen ties with the science laïque. With help of his influential friend, the French philosopher and later founder of the Décades de Pontigny, Paul Desjardins (1859 – 1940),³⁶ he managed to obtain a position as conférencier libre at the 5ième Section of the École pratique in 1900.³⁷ Thus integrated in the department that was the intellectual showpiece of the anticlerical politics of the Third Republic, Loisy’s courses were to meet the strictly non-confessional standards that were the scientific tenets of the institution. At the turn of the century, the scientific spirit of the Fifth Section was characterized by a critical historical and comparative approach to religion.³⁸ By entering the École, Loisy found himself in a troubling situation. On the one hand, he was surrounded by the “highly advanced ideas”³⁹ of renowned and pioneering scholars like Albert Réville, Maurice Vernes, Jules Toutain, and starting from 1901 also Marcel Mauss (the latter three were to be his rivals for the Collège de France in 1909).⁴⁰ On the other hand, he was still member of a profoundly anti-scientific Catholic Church, which was anything but

 On Loisy’s time at the EPHE, see the first chapter of his Mémoires, II, 5 – 33. The history of the institutionalization of history of religions in France will be discussed in more detail in the following chapter.  Anne Heurgon-Desjardins, ed., Paul Desjardins et les décades de Pontigny. Études, témoignages, et documents inédits (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964); Émile Poulat, Modernistica. Horizons, Physionomies, Débats (Paris: Nouvelles Éditions Latines, 1982) and François Chaubet, Paul Desjardins et les décades de Pontigny (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2002). The “Décades de Pontigny” were ten-day meetings, organized by Desjardins in the former Cistercian Pontigny Abbey. Founded in 1910, they were attended by European intellectuals who discussed themes related to literature, philosophy, ethics, and politics. The meetings took place between 1910 – 1913 and 1922– 1939.  Hill, “Loisy’s L’Évangile et l’Église,” 81– 82.  François Laplanche, “L’histoire des religions en France au début du XXe siècle,” MEFRIM 111 (1999): 623 – 634 (especially 628 for the École); Laplanche, La Crise de l’origine, 36; Ivan Strenski, “The Ironies of Fin-de-Siècle Rebellions against Historicism and Empiricism in the École Pratique des Hautes Études,” in Religion in the Making. The Emergence of the Sciences of Religion, eds. Arie L. Molendijk and Peter Pels (Leiden–Boston–Köln: Brill, 1998), 159 – 180. In the next chapter on Loisy’s appointment at the Collège we will discuss the methodological controversies at the École in more detail.  Loisy, Choses passées, 222.  On the exact composition of the Fifth Section in 1900: John I. Brodes III, “The Durkheimians and the Fifth Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études: An Overview,” in Reappraising Durkheim for the study and teaching of religion today, eds. Thomas A. Idinopulos and Brian C. Wilson (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 89 – 90. For more details on Vernes, Mauss, and Toutain, see chapter 2 (2.2.1).

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happy about this new connection with the secular scientific world. In the following chapter we will discuss the institutional context of the academic study of religion in more detail, but in order to understand the truly symbolic meaning of Loisy’s position in 1900, it is useful to mention now that the Fifth Section in Sciences religieuses was established in 1886, just one year after the State Faculties in Catholic Theology had been abolished. In 1900 Loisy started to work at an institution which was explicitly represented by the Third Republic as the scientific replacement for the Catholic theological approach to religion. By joining in with the secular forces, Loisy basically confirmed the inadequacy of the latter tradition and the superiority of the former. At the École, Loisy first taught a comparative course on Les Mythes babyloniens et les premiers chapitres de la Genèse. With this topic, he took a clear-cut stand against the ecclesiastical hierarchy which had earlier condemned his historical-critical Firmin article on “La religion d’Israël.”⁴¹ In his Mémoires, Loisy explained that at first Cardinal Richard had not dared to intervene, because he had been afraid of political repercussions. In the aftermath of the polemical institutionalization of the 5ième Section and in the build-up to the separation of Church and State in 1905, a Catholic blowing the whistle at an employee of the State funded École could certainly produce political tension. And thus Loisy continued his course, although the students of the Institut catholique in Paris were advised by their superiors not to attend it.⁴² Loisy’s integration into the École pratique significantly enlarged his scientific autonomy, and positively affected his desire to further perfect the implementation of a purely historical methodology. From a letter to his friend von Hügel, it is very clear that Loisy intended to build a future at the Sorbonne for himself. To this end, he thought it necessary to move beyond the study of Judaism and the Old Testament, and to finally begin publishing his far more dangerous historical-critical studies on the New Testament, such as his commentary on the gospel of John (published in 1903). With the prospect of a permanent position at the École pratique, Loisy was now willing to take the risk of an ecclesiastical condemnation, even if he admitted that he would be seriously distressed should this actually occur: “J’achève mon saint Jean et je ne le garderai pas indéfiniment dans mes cartons. Pour mon avenir à la Sorbonne, il faut que je publie des travaux scientifiques. Si le Saint-Office et l’Index en éprouvent quelque peine, j’en serai moi-même fort affligé ; mais je serai obligé de passer outre.”⁴³

 Loisy, Mémoires, II, 9.  Loisy, Mémoires, II, 28 – 29.  Loisy, Mémoires, II, 27.

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Shortly after writing this letter, Loisy’s hopes for such a future were shattered.⁴⁴ In 1901 he applied for the chair of ancient Christian literature at the Fifth Section, left vacant by the Liberal-Protestant scholar Auguste Sabatier (infra, 1.4.). The larger part of the selection committee voted against a candidate whom they believed to be able to jeopardize the confessional neutrality of the institution. Loisy’s colleagues at the École believed that his scientific-comparative approach to Judaism provided no guarantees for a similar treatment of Christianity.⁴⁵ A bitter pill for Loisy to swallow, as he now personally experienced the ill effects of the highly polarized study of religion in France. His deep disappointment over “the narrowmindedness of the science laïque”⁴⁶ seems to have had a double effect on L’Évangile et l’Église. On the one hand, it increased the emphasis he laid on a purely “historical” argumentation. Hardly one year had passed since his setback at the École, when Loisy published his first undisguised historical narrative on early Christianity. It is very reasonable to assume that his emphatic use of “the historical method” should not just be understood as a reply to Harnack’s proclaimed purely historical account, but also as an attempt to demonstrate his scientific credibility to the secular circles which had rejected him.We may even assert that, once again, Harnack was a kind of victim of Loisy’s personal agenda, for we will see that he misrepresented Harnack’s limited but existing comparative approaches, quite likely with the intention of highlighting the scientific character of his own position. On the other hand, and rather paradoxically, there is Hill’s correct observation that Loisy’s disappointment seemed to have driven him back into the arms of the Catholic Church. At about the time he was writing L’Évangile et l’Église, Loisy learned that he was in the running for the bishopric of Monaco, which in the end also didn’t happen.⁴⁷ The fact that he most probably wanted that appointment, may indeed explain why he adopted a well-articulated apologetic discourse in his book, all the while sticking to the conviction that consistent historical criticism was the future of the Catholic science of religion.

 Note that in 1888 Loisy had applied for the chair of Assyriology at the Fourth Section, but he had not obtained the position. The affair led to a rift with his former mentor Louis Duchesne, who held a position at the Section and had done little to support Loisy’s candidacy, see supra, introduction.  In 1902 Loisy proposed to dedicate his course to “Le ministère du Christ dans les Synoptiques.” According to Loisy (Mémoires, II, 122), there was quite some resistance among the members of the École against this topic. Only after Jean Réville ensured them that Loisy was a “radical even in exegesis of the gospels,” the topic was approved.  Loisy, Mémoires, II, 32.  Hill, “Loisy’s L’Évangile et l’Église,” 88.

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1.2 Comparative Religion in Adolf von Harnack’s Das Wesen des Christentums Das Wesen des Christentums compiles a series of lectures Harnack gave to a large audience of about 600 students at the University of Berlin in the winter semester of 1899 – 1900. It is safe to say that the essay caused as big a stir in the Protestant world as Loisy’s Évangile et l’Église did among Catholics, and it has since received just as much scholarly attention.⁴⁸ The style and aim of Das Wesen des Christentums were purposefully modest. Harnack “simply” wanted to offer “a plain statement of the gospel and its history” which would focus the attention of Christians and non-Christians on the permanent moral and spiritual value of Christianity. Harnack’s emphasis on the simplicity of Jesus’ message was a reaction against the 19th century Leben Jesu Forschung which had produced a vast array of widely divergent analyses of the gospel and the life of the historical Jesus. Historical criticism had progressively annihilated the historical believability of the gospels. Harnack anticipated Albert Schweitzer’s observation that the frantic attempts at reconstructing a new “historically truthful” image of Jesus revealed the personal beliefs of the scholars in question, rather than those of Jesus himself.⁴⁹ Theological and ideological presuppositions were overclouding Jesus’ message.⁵⁰ It was time, Harnack argued, for a historical back to basics.

 See the extensive bibliography in Thomas Hübner, Adolf von Harnacks Vorlesungen über das Wesen des Christentums unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Methodfragen als sachgemäßer Zugang zu ihrer Christologie und Wirkungsgeschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1994); Kurt Nowak, ed., Adolf von Harnack als Zeitgenosse. Reden und Schriften aus den Jahren des Kaiserreichs und der Weimarer Republik (Berlin–New York: de Gruyter, 1996); Uwe Rieske-Braun, “Vom Wesen des Christentums und seiner Geschichte. Eine Erinnerung an Adolf Harnacks Vorlesung (1899 – 1900),” ThLZ 125 (2000): 471– 488; Kurt Nowak, Otto Gerhard Oexle, et al., eds., Adolf von Harnack. Christentum, Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003); Sonja Lukas-Klein, Das ist (christliche) Religion—Zur Konstruktion von Judentum, Katholizismus und Protestantismus in Adolf von Harnacks Vorlesungen über “Das Wesen des Christentums” (Berlin: LIT, 2014).  Albert Schweitzer, Von Reimarus zu Wrede. Eine Geschichte der Leben Jesu Forschung (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1906). We quote from the following English translation: The Quest of the Historical Jesus. A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede, trans. W. Montgomery (London: A. & C. Black, 2010), 398 – 399: “He [the historical Jesus, my remark] will not be a Jesus Christ to whom the religion of the present can ascribe, according to its long-cherished custom, its own thoughts and ideas, as it did with the Jesus of its own making.”  It seems that Harnack especially had problems with the Marxist approach which considered Jesus as a “social deliverer”: Harnack, What is Christianity?, 2– 3. On “Jesus the socialist,” David Burns, The Life and Death of the Radical Historical Jesus (Oxford: OUP, 2013).

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Just like Loisy, Harnack was in essence trying to reconcile the results of his historical scholarship with his Christian faith by propagating a new interpretation of Christian religion. The historical-critical study of the Bible placed the Christian scholar before a major dilemma: “There are only two possibilities here: either the Gospel is in all respects identical with its earliest form, in which case it came with its time and has departed with it; or else it contains something which, under differing historical forms, is of permanent validity. The latter is the true view.”⁵¹According to Harnack, Christianity had a core which remained unchanged throughout history, and which, correspondingly, could never be deconstructed by historical criticism.⁵² To distinguish this presupposed ahistorical essence from the timely and particularistic religious circumstances in which it is always embedded, he used the terms “kernel” (Kern) and “husk” (Schale).⁵³ Harnack asserted that every Christian has an innate sense of what the essence is, but it is historical science that leads to the most precise definition of the “kernel,” by removing it from the constantly changing “husk.” Harnack’s dichotomist conception inherently offered an irresolvable problem for his “purely historical” enquiry. There is a diametrical opposition between his belief in such a thing as a “timeless essence,”⁵⁴ and his claim to determine this “internal flame” historically. Distinguishing “kernel” from “husk,” Harnack admitted, was indeed not an easy task. There were two steps for the historian to follow in order to determine the permanent value of Christianity. The first and most important task is to uncover the essence of Jesus’ gospel by a critical analysis of the gospels, which Harnack tried to do in the first part of his book. Thereafter, he concentrated on the subsequent history of Christianity: first on the apostolic age: “because every great and powerful personality reveals a part of what it is only when seen in those whom it influences”;⁵⁵ secondly on all “later products of its spirit” (in Harnack’s essay this is second century Christianity, Roman Catholicism, the Orthodox Church, and Protestantism). In short, we can say that Harnack considered  Harnack, What is Christianity?, 14.  Harnack’s search for this essence was by no means unique or new in German theology, see Lucas-Klein, Das ist (christliche) Religion, 89 f.; Rieske-Braun, “Vom Wesen des Christentums,” 477– 479; Karl-Heinz Menke, Die Frage nach dem Wesen des Christentums (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2005).  The terminology is used throughout the essay; see, for instance, Harnack, What is Christianity?, 59. On these terms, Hill, The Politics of Modernism, 123 – 124; Christian Nottmeier, Adolf von Harnack und die deutsche Politik 1890 – 1930 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), 237; Lucas-Klein, Das ist (christliche) Religion, 88.  On the “timeless” nature of the essence: Harnack, What is Christianity?, 160.  Harnack, What is Christianity?, 10.

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the history of Christianity before the Reformation as a progressive evolution toward a religion that focused on an external (i. e. doctrinal and ritual) “husk,” which often was of pagan origin. In other words, he observed a growing corruption of the fully inward (moral and spiritual) and pure “kernel” which had been the focus of Jesus himself. Unsurprisingly, he qualified the Reformation as the “greatest movement”⁵⁶ in Christian history because it checked this corruption by its “critical reduction to principles,” but he did underline that Protestantism, too, needed further reform (read: further individualization) in order to come closer to the essence.⁵⁷ This conviction—together with Harnack’s highly critical assessment of the gospels (for instance, his skepticism on miracles)—explains why the German scholar’s work was far from unanimously accepted in the Protestant world.⁵⁸ Equally important for understanding L’Évangile et l’Église is Harnack’s position on the new discipline of history of religions which was taking root in several European countries at that time. In 1901 Harnack delivered his famous “Rektoratsrede” in which he took a decisive stand against the introduction of Religionswissenschaft and Religionsgeschichte in the theological faculty of the University of Berlin.⁵⁹ His speech heavily insisted on the uniqueness of Christianity and forcefully rejected the universalizing taxonomies of fellow Liberal-Protestant scholars, like the Dutch scholar Cornelis Petrus Tiele and, closer to home for Loisy, the Révilles at the École pratique in Paris, who subjected the development of Christianity to laws of evolution they deemed applicable to all religions, regardless of chronology and geography.⁶⁰ Instead, Harnack centered Christianity  Harnack, What is Christianity?, 287.  Harnack, What is Christianity?, 295 – 296. See Lucas-Klein, Das ist (christliche) Religion, 79 – 80 for Harnack’s views on traditional and Liberal Protestantism.  On Harnack’s problems to obtain his position at the University of Berlin in 1888: Kurt Nowak, “Historische Einführung,” in Adolf von Harnack als Zeitgenosse. Reden und Schriften aus den Jahren des Kaiserreichs und der Weimarer Republik, ed. Kurt Nowak (Berlin–New York: de Gruyter, 1996), 17– 18.  Version here used: Adolf Harnack, “Die Aufgabe der theologischen Fakultäten und die allgemeine Religionsgeschichte,” in Reden und Aufsätze, II (Giessen: Alfred Töpelmann, 1904), 159 – 188. Reprinted in Nowak, ed., Adolf von Harnack als Zeitgenosse, I, 797– 824. On the relationship between theology and Religionswissenschaft in Germany and Harnack’s views: Arie L. Molendijk, “Der Kampf um die Religion in der Wissenschaft,” in Religion(en) deuten. Transformation der Religionsforschung, eds. Friedrich Wilhelm Graf and Friedemann Voigt (Berlin– New York: de Gruyter, 2010), 35 – 37. On the development of the German Religionswissenschaft see Udo Tworuschka, Einführung in die Geschichte der Religionswissenschaft (Darmstadt: WBG, 2014), 69 – 96, for Harnack: 91– 92.  For an introduction on Tiele’s typology of religion see Hans G. Kippenberg, “One of the Mightiest Motors in the History of Mankind. C.P. Tiele’s Impact on German Religionswissenschaft,”

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as the sole object of religious studies: “Wer die Religion nicht kennt, kennt keine, und wer sie samt ihrer Geschichte kennt, kennt alle.”⁶¹ This statement did not imply that Harnack rejected comparative religion altogether. In part, the underlying idea was that in the course of its long history—which he traced all the way back to primitive Judaism—“die Religion” (first in its Judaic and later in its historical Christian form) had constantly interacted with other nonJudeo-Christian religions. According to Harnack, comparativism is scientifically valid when it focuses on the concrete historical interactions of Christianity with other religions, though it is interesting to note that the examples he gave of these influences and interactions only involved pre-Christian Judaism and the Catholic Christian tradition.⁶² But in spite of the fact that Harnack allowed for some degree of comparison between the Christian tradition and other religions, the first intention of his statement was to corroborate the absolute superiority of the Christian religion, which was not one religion among many other, but the religion to be studied in the faculties of theology: Wir wünschen, daß die theologischen Fakultäten für die Erforschung der christlichen Religion bleiben, weil das Christentum in seiner reinen Gestalt nicht eine Religion neben anderen ist, sondern die Religion. Es ist aber die Religion, weil Jesu Christus nicht ein Meister neben anderen ist, sondern der Meister, und weil sein Evangelium der eingeborenen, in der Geschichte enthüllten Anlage der Menschheit entspricht.⁶³

Contrary to Loisy who adopted a positive attitude toward the research of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule,⁶⁴ Harnack was quite negative about the work of these fellow Protestant scholars who had embraced comparative religion and applied it to the earliest stages of Christianity. Suzanne Marchand’s studies of Orientalism in 19th century Germany have shown that the opposition between Harnack and the Schule was also due to the fact that philhellenic Harnack was very skeptical about the Schule’s interest in Hellenized Oriental religions.⁶⁵ The reti-

in Modern Societies & the Science of Religions, eds. Gerard A. Wiegers and Jan G. Platvoet (Leiden–Boston–Köln: Brill, 2002), 71 ff.  Harnack, “Die Aufgabe der theologischen Fakultäten,” 168.  Harnack, “Die Aufgabe der theologischen Fakultäten,” 169: “So zeigt denn bereits die alttestamentliche Religion einen äußeren und inneren Kontakt mit Babylonien und Assyrien, mit Ägypten und Griechenland, d. h. mit der Universalgeschichte der Alten Welt.” For Catholicism, see, e. g., 170.  Harnack, “Die Aufgabe der theologischen Fakultäten,” 172– 173.  See supra, introduction, for Loisy’s reviews of the members of the Schule.  On the comparative methodology of the Schule, see chapter 4. On the antagonism between the “liberal” tradition of Harnack and the “neo-romanticist” tradition of the Schule, Suzanne Marchand, “From Liberalism to Neoromanticism: Albrecht Dieterich, Richard Reitzenstein,

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cence felt by Harnack toward history of religions was widely shared by German Protestant theologians. This and Harnack’s key position in German politics of science accounts for Germany’s relatively late institutionalization of the discipline, and it is of paramount importance to understand Das Wesen des Christentum. ⁶⁶ According to Harnack, the permanent value of Jesus’ gospel consisted in: “Firstly, the kingdom of God and its coming. Secondly, God the Father and the infinite value of the human soul. Thirdly, the higher righteousness and the commandment of love.”⁶⁷ Each of these points is interpreted in light of Jesus’ alleged emphasis on the individual and direct relation of each Christian to God the Father: they are basically “variations on a single theme.”⁶⁸ Congruent with his distinction between ahistorical kernel and historical husk, Harnack’s views on the comparability of Jesus’ gospel are double. When the essence is concerned, his approach is mostly non-comparative. Jesus’ genius had succeeded in condensing religion into something universally human by centering individual spirituality and moral responsibility. This timeless message appeals to the inner life of man, who also remains more or less the same throughout history. No doubt it is true that the view of the world and history with which the Gospel is connected is quite different from ours, and that view we cannot recall to life, and would not if we could; but “indissoluble” the connection is not. I have tried to show what the essential elements in the Gospel are, and these elements are “timeless.” Not only are they so; but the man to whom the Gospel addresses itself is also “timeless,” that is to say, he is the man who, in spite of all progress and development, never changes in his inmost constitution and in his fundamental relations with the external world.⁶⁹

Interestingly, Harnack’s belief in the fundamental uniformity of man’s “inmost constitution” did not induce him to compare the Christian essence with other, non-Christian religions which also appeal to the religious individual. The uni-

and the religious turn in fin-de-siècle German classical studies,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 46, S79 (2003): 139 – 140, 143 – 144 for Harnack.  Germany was, however, also the homeland of Friedrich Max Müller, who worked in Oxford. On the institutionalization of Religionswissenschaft in Germany (in 1910), see Volkhard Krech, Wissenschaft und Religion. Studien zur Geschichte der Religionsforschung in Deutschland 1871 – 1933 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), 123; Niclaas Petereit, “Zur Einrichtung der Religionswissenschaft in Münster,” in 103 Jahre Religionswissenschaft in Münster. Verortungen in Raum und Zeit, eds. Martin Radermacher, Judith Stander, and Annette Wilke (Münster: Lit, 2015), 13 – 15; Tworuschka, Einführung, 92– 96.  Harnack, What is Christianity?, 55.  Hill, The Politics of Modernism, 124.  Harnack, What is Christianity?, 160.

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formity does not seem to be universal, but remains strictly limited to the constitution of the Christian believer. The Christian essence itself is the unique result of a personal innovation of Jesus, based on what Harnack vaguely qualified as Jesus’ “deeper knowledge.”⁷⁰ This religious knowledge is radically disconnected from Jesus’ Judaic background. But Harnack was of course too solid a historian to discard the fact that, like any other historical human being, Jesus’ ideas and actions had been subject to a historical-religious context. He admitted that even the tripartite essence of Jesus’ gospel showed at least a few similarities to surrounding ancient religions.⁷¹ When discussing these similarities, Harnack deployed an evolutionary framework that was very popular among 19th and early 20th century historians.⁷² He pointed out that individualizing and soteriological trends had already existed in pre-Christian Judaism and Hellenism.⁷³ And the same is true for the Christian concept of righteousness, which had been independently developed by Greek thinkers and Palestine prophets.⁷⁴ Furthermore, Alexander the Great had initiated a tendency toward religious universality to which Judaism, too, had succumbed.⁷⁵ Like that of many contemporary historians of religions, Harnack’s comparative narrative was deeply teleological: similar tendencies in pre-Christian Judaism and Hellenism were of major importance because they prepared the non-Christian mind for the prompt acceptance of Jesus’ gospel.⁷⁶ How, then, did Harnack explain the similarities between the different constituents of the religious evolution he observed in Antiquity? We have seen that he took a dim view of the anthropological frameworks which were increasingly popular in the discipline of history of religions, and explained similarities as the result of universal laws. In this sense, Harnach’s ideas were different from

 Harnack, What is Christianity?, 60.  Harnack, What is Christianity?, 50 – 53, especially 51: “The spring of holiness had, indeed, long been opened.”  See for the views of, e. g., Ernest Renan and Franz Cumont: Danny Praet, “Oriental religions and the conversion of the Roman empire: the views of Ernest Renan and of Franz Cumont on the transition from traditional paganism to Christianity,” in Competition and Religion in Antiquity, eds. David Engels and Peter Van Nuffelen (Brussels: Editions Latomus, 2014), 285 – 307. See also Sigurd Hjelde, “The Science of Religion and Theology: The Question of Their Interrelationship,” in Religion in the Making. The Emergence of the Sciences of Religion, eds. Arie L. Molendijk and Peter Pels (Leiden–Boston–Köln: Brill, 1998), e. g., 117 for Max Müller’s discourse.  Harnack, What is Christianity?, 143.  Harnack, What is Christianity?, 82.  Harnack, What is Christianity?, 215.  Harnack, What is Christianity?, 215. See also 187, on Judaism of the Diaspora as a “preliminary stage in the history of Christianity.”

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those of the French Liberal Protestants at the École pratique, who adopted a more open (but still careful) attitude toward anthropological methodology.⁷⁷ The scarce instances where Harnack offered an explanation of Jesus’ similarities to the religious cultures of his time, mostly reveal a historicist, genealogical interpretation on the basis of historical contact between religions. Overall, though, he struggled to reconcile historical criticism with his conviction that Jesus’ gospel was something else, something irreducible to history. At various points one gets the impression that for Harnack, the gospel of Jesus and even the religion of his first followers, really did fully coalesce with the ahistorical essence. The major ambiguity in Harnack’s comparative approach concerns Jesus’ interrelation with Judaism. On the possibility of pagan influences on Jesus’ gospel and, by extension, on that of the first communities, he was abundantly clear: Hellenism did not play any role. Harnack distinguished between three phases of pagan influence, aside from the aforementioned stage of “preparation.” The first phase is the infiltration of Greek philosophical thought which started in the second century. The second phase began in the third century: “Greek mysteries, and Greek civilization in the whole range of its development, exercise their influence on the Church, but not mythology and polytheism; these were still to come.”⁷⁸ In the fourth century, finally, “Hellenism as a whole” integrated in the Catholic Church. This compartmentalization allowed Harnack to isolate the much appreciated “treasure” of Greek philosophy (with its “monotheistic piety”), while Catholicism absorbed the clearly inferior features of pagan worship. The three-phased scheme reflects a scale of values, which logically placed the “Greek mysteries” with their higher individualism before the ultimate evil of “mythology and polytheism” of “traditional” paganism.⁷⁹ Needless to say that Harnack’s proto-typically Protestant myth of the immaculate first century Christianity was a thorn in Loisy’s side.⁸⁰ Harnack’s ideas on Judaism are far more subtle and more difficult to gauge. The question of early Christianity’s interrelation to Judaism remained a particularly hot topic at the turn of the century, when several German scholars—headed by Johannes Weiß and Albert Schweitzer— were rediscovering the eschatological character of the kingdom of God notion

 See infra, 1.4.  Harnack, What is Christianity?, 216.  The then much-discussed pagan “oriental” religions are conspicuous by their absence in Harnack’s Wesen.  On the historiography of this perpetual discussion between Catholic and Protestant scholars, Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine (note, though, that Smith’s focus is on Anglo-Saxon scholarship, therefore Harnack, Loisy and other protagonists of the early 20th century debates are only very summarily dealt with). We will come back to these debates in this chapter and in chapter 4.

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in the gospels and drawing attention to its link to apocalyptic Judaism.⁸¹ Harnack did not follow the advanced comparative ideas of Weiß, whose influential book Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes (1892) was generally very negatively received by Liberal-Protestant scholars.⁸² Overall, Harnack’s picture of Jesus is distinctly anti-Judaic.⁸³ Jesus’ major achievement was to have freed religion from the “earthly” burden of “external forms of religious worship and technical observance,”⁸⁴ which were self-sufficient in Judaism and drew attention away from deeper morality and spirituality.⁸⁵ For Harnack’s Jesus, religion is the personal belief in God the Father and its moral consequences. In line with this conception of religion, Harnack did not consider Jesus as the instigator of a movement within Judaism, but as the founder of a completely new religion, even if he hadn’t instituted Christian cult or doctrine, or socially organized the first Chris See especially Johannes Weiß, Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1892) and Schweitzer’s Von Reimarus zu Wrede, which used eschatology as a criterion to evaluate the Leben Jesu Forschung. On the rediscovery of eschatology in late 19th century German Protestant scholarship, Hans Schwarz, Eschatology (Grand Rapids–Cambridge UK: Eerdmans, 2000), 108 – 109. On the opposition between Weiß and other Liberal-Protestant scholars, Anders Gerdmar, Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism. German Biblical Interpretation and the Jews, from Herder and Semler to Kittel and Bultmann (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 146 – 147.  Benedict T. Viviano, “Eschatology and the Quest for the Historical Jesus,” in The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology, ed. Jerry L. Walls (Oxford: OUP, 2008), 79: “The effect of the book was like that of a brick hurled at a plate-glass window. The book was so offensive because liberal theology had a bad conscience about its suppression of Jesus’ eschatology. It was not ignorant of it. It simply hoped to keep it a dirty little secret. Thanks to Weiss, the liberal emperor was seen to have no clothes.”  To account for the anti-Judaism in Das Wesen, various scholars have pointed to Harnack’s friendship with Houston Stewart Chamberlain (see, for instance, Notmeier, Adolf von Harnack und die deutsche Politik, 254– 255; Lukas-Klein, Das ist (christliche) Religion, 148). Although Harnack never accepted Chamberlain’s notorious anti-Semitism and forcefully rejected his “Rassenreligion,” his apparent anti-Judaism remains important background information to frame his ideas on Jesus. On the intellectual relationship of Harnack and Chamberlain, Stefan Rebenich, Theodor Mommsen und Adolf von Harnack. Wissenschaft und Politik im Berlin des ausgehenden 19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin–New York: de Gruyter, 1997), 411; Richard Steigmann-Gall, The Holy Reich. Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919 – 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 39. It also puts Harnack’s later fascination with Marcion in perspective: Wolfram Kinzig, Harnack, Marcion und das Judentum. Nebst einer kommentierten Edition des Briefwechsels Adolf von Harnacks mit Houston Stewart Chamberlain (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2004). By contrast, the overall absence of anti-Judaic ideology in Loisy’s biography will not be unimportant to understand his profoundly Judaic Jesus.  Harnack, What is Christianity?, 77.  Harnack, What is Christianity?, 73: “By being bound up with religious worship and petrified in ritual observance, the morality of holiness had, indeed, been transformed into something that was the clean opposite of it.”

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tian community. Rituals are virtually absent from Harnack’s account of Jesus and of the first disciples.⁸⁶ As for Christian doctrines, Harnack firmly rejected any form of dogma in Jesus’ teachings.⁸⁷ The gospel is not knowledge, but experience. Gruesome wars have been fought over the Christological creed, Harnack explained, even though Jesus had never represented himself as a god. Admittedly, Jesus qualified himself as the Son of God, but he only used this notion in a figurative sense of someone with intimate knowledge of the Father. Jesus also regarded himself as the Messiah, but, for Jesus and for his followers, this admittedly Judaic concept no longer corresponded to the image of a “warlike, god-sent ruler.” Instead, its meaning had passed “from a political and religious into a spiritual and religious one.”⁸⁸ Jesus was the Messiah in the sense of a spiritual leader who guided men to the gospel, but he had no position in the gospel himself: “The Gospel, as Jesus proclaimed it, has to do with the Father only and not with the Son.”⁸⁹ The social features of Christianity had not been directly shaped by Jesus, but were a natural consequence of the shared belief in the infinite value of every individual human soul.⁹⁰ On a horizontal axis, the fatherhood of the Father and the moral example set by Jesus naturally implied the solidarity and brotherhood of men (who are all children of the Father). If Harnack indeed did establish some genealogical relations between Jesus and his Judaic environment, these all concerned the husk of the message: “Husk were the whole of the Jewish limitations attaching to Jesus’ message; husk were also such definite statements as ‘I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’ In the strength of Christ’s spirit the disciples broke through these barriers.”⁹¹ By means of his distinction between husk and kernel, Harnack was able to nuance his pronounced anti-Judaic picture of Jesus.⁹² An important example is his theory of Jesus’ double interpretation of

 Only in the lectures on Protestantism did Harnack broach the possibility of baptism and the last supper being instituted by Jesus himself. According to Harnack, the original meaning of these rituals was, of course, purely symbolic, instead of sacramental: What is Christianity?, 298.  Cf. the central thesis of Harnack’s monumental Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte in 3 volumes (1886, 1887, 1890) on Christian dogma as a post-Biblical Hellenistic creation. A new edition of this work has recently been published by the Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft (Darmstadt, 2015).  Harnack, What is Christianity?, 148.  Harnack, What is Christianity?, 154.  Harnack, What is Christianity?, 108.  Harnack, What is Christianity?, 193.  For more details on the Judaic “husk,” see the excellent overview in Lukas-Klein, Das ist (christliche) Religion, 28 – 31, and 70 – 73, where the author aptly summarizes (at 70): “In den Harnack’schen Vorlesungen werden ‘das christliche Eigene’ und ‘das jüdische Fremde’ in

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the kingdom of God. On the one hand, Jesus was imbued with the hope of deliverance from Israel’s long suppression by foreign rulers. As a result, he indeed considered the kingdom eschatologically, as a future event which would bring forth a fully external rule by God in society. But, at the same time, he also advocated the highly original view that God’s kingdom is an already present, spiritual-moral link to God, realized in “the heart of individuals”:⁹³ There can be no doubt about the fact that the idea of the two kingdoms, of God and of the devil, and their conflicts, and of that last conflict at some future time when the devil, long since cast out of heaven, will be also defeated on earth, was an idea which Jesus simply shared with his contemporaries. He did not start it, but he grew up in it and he retained it. The other view, however, that the kingdom of God “cometh not with observation,” that it is already here, was his own.⁹⁴

For modern scholars, Harnack explained, such a juxtaposition is problematic, but for Jesus it was not: the eschatological view was easily spiritualized into the “already present kingdom,” which was, of course, the dominant conception in Jesus’ gospel. Beside Judaic eschatology, Harnack also acknowledged the influence of “the ethical system Jesus found prevailing in his nation,” but, again, he carefully disconnected Jesus’ particularly “pure” understanding of “the higher righteousness and the commandment of love” from Judaic history, by emphasizing that it really had no precedent whatsoever in religious history. All in all, comparative religion, for Harnack, was a tool to disentangle Jesus’ essential gospel from its Judaic background, and to prove the superiority of the former over the latter. How, then, does one go from a religion that fully coalesced with a spiritualmoral experience to a fully developed Christian cult and creed, and, ultimately, to the institution of the Church? At a certain point, “externality” kicked in. According to Harnack, however, this did not happen in the first communities which remained perfectly true to the non-dogmatic and non-ritualistic teachings of Jesus.⁹⁵ Aside from the substantial modification produced by the belief in the resurrection and the corresponding hope for the imminent return of the resur-

einem problematischen Identifikations- und Abgrenzungsprozess asymmetrisch aufeinander bezogen und bestimmt. Hier liegt ein dichotomisches Modell mit Herrschaftsverhältnissen, Ausschlusmechanismen und hierarchisierten binär gesetzten Polen, ein exklusives Identitätskonzept, ein antijudaistisch sich identifizierendes Christentum vor.”  Harnack, What is Christianity?, 60.  Harnack, What is Christianity?, 58.  Harnack did add—parenthetically—that there were some “well-marked traces” of Greek thought in Paul, Luke and John. Harnack, What is Christianity?, 215.

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rected Christ, the first community was the “living realization” of Jesus’ gospel.⁹⁶ Unsurprisingly, Harnack’s account of the first disciples was characterized by the same ambiguous relationship to Judaism, as that of Jesus himself.⁹⁷ Moving on to Paul, Harnack almost ecstatically explained that he had been the one who truly “understood the Master and continued his work,” and “delivered the Christian religion from Judaism.”⁹⁸ All last traces of Jesus’ Judaic past were now erased in order to root the gospel in “gentile soil.” Harnack hereby carefully avoided addressing the question of Paul’s involvement in the development of the Christian cult. Only at the end of his lectures on the apostolic age, and as a bridge to his subsequent discussion of Catholicism, he suggested: But the founding of churches and “the Church” on earth brought an entirely new interest into the field; what came from within was joined by something that came from without; law, discipline, regulations for ritual and doctrine were developed, and began to assert a position by a logic of their own. The measure of value applicable to religion itself no longer remained the only measure, and with a hundred invisible threads religion was insensibly worked into the net of history.⁹⁹

This quote is the perfect conclusion for this brief summary of Harnack’s ideas, as it captures the perpetual ambivalence in his work on the question as to what extent Christianity was already “time-bound” before the Church entered the scene.

1.3 L’Évangile et l’Église In order not to fall into the trap set up by Loisy’s strategic emphasis on his opposition to Harnack, it may be useful to begin this analysis by underlining that Loisy and Harnack were agreed upon the paramount importance of historical scholarship for the future of Christianity. Both scholars distanced themselves from their traditional orthodox colleagues by asserting that Christian faith needed to be reformulated so that it was no longer at variance with modern scientific-

 Harnack summarized the basic features of the first community as follows (p. 165): “(i) The recognition of Jesus as the living Lord; (ii) the fact that in every individual member of the new community—including the very slaves—religion was an actual experience, and involved the consciousness of a living union with God; (iii) the leading of a holy life in purity and brotherly fellowship, and the expectation of the Christ’s return in the near future.”  Harnack, What is Christianity?, 187.  Harnack, What is Christianity?, 190.  Harnack, What is Christianity?, 196.

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historical insights. Both were deeply convinced of the autonomy of history with regard to theology, and emphasized the significance of history for theology, instead of the other way around. The opposition between Harnack and Loisy was caused by their profound disagreement on what constituted the most accurate historical picture of early Christianity, which can be explained by the deep divergence between their philosophies of religion.¹⁰⁰ The central research question of L’Évangile et l’Église immediately reveals that their controversy was indeed not a purely historical discussion: “Our aim is only to determine if his ‘Essence of Christianity,’ instead of being an absolute religion, absolute Christianity, entities that have little chance of taking a place in history, does not rather mark a stage in Protestant development, or form merely a basic formula of Protestantism.”¹⁰¹ Throughout his volume, Loisy rebuked Harnack for his dangerous mix up of history and theology. By isolating the “essence” of Christianity from history, Loisy stated, Harnack had left the field of historical inquiry and, instead, presented “the profession of a personal faith in the form of a historical review.”¹⁰² The idea of an absolute, unchanging truth in Christianity caused an allergic reaction in Loisy, who was instantly reminded of the traditional Catholic belief in the absoluteness of dogma. For Loisy, Harnack’s solution was not much better than the neo-thomist subordination of history to theology which was so heavily restraining his own scientific autonomy. As a Catholic, Loisy furthermore had major problems with Harnack’s conception of religion as a purely moral-spiritual experience. The fact that Harnack had projected his personal religion onto the original gospel of Jesus, and his corresponding conclusion that Catholicism had “perverted”¹⁰³ Jesus’ message, were completely unacceptable for Loisy. According to Loisy, religion is primarily a social institution, its collective character manifesting itself in ritual and in shared beliefs. The most-quoted sentence from L’Évangile et l’Église (“Jesus foretold the kingdom, and it was the Church that came”¹⁰⁴) indicates perfectly well that he agreed with Harnack on the fact that Jesus had not instituted the Church, but their parallel historical conclusions served completely opposite religious agendas. According to Loisy, this did not imply that the existence of the Church and the changes it had directed were illegitimate and discontinuous with regard

 The divergences and similarities in their philosophies of religions have been studied extensively in modern scholarship. For a good introduction: Hill, The Politics of Modernism, 127– 132; for a more detailed account, see Poulat, Histoire, dogme et critique, 89 – 102.  Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, 22.  Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, 1.  Harnack, What is Christianity?, 198.  Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, 166.

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to the original gospel. In fact, when one examines the real historical meaning of the gospel, it was Protestantism which seemed to be a historical side-product. Loisy severely attacked Harnack’s distinction between ahistorical kernel and historical husk as being nonsensical, because the essence of Christianity is never different from its historical expressions.¹⁰⁵ According to Loisy, it constantly changes according to new religious needs. In accordance with his evolutionary philosophy of religion,¹⁰⁶ Loisy preferred the image of a tree, of the organic growth of Christianity from the seed that was Jesus’ gospel. Christianity’s true essence, he asserted, is its vitality and ability to assimilate and to change: All these elements of Christianity, in all the forms in which they have been preserved, why should they not be the essence of Christianity? Why not find the essence of Christianity in the fullness and totality of its life, which shows movement and variety just because it is life, but inasmuch as it is life proceeding from an obviously powerful principle, has grown in accordance with a law which affirms at every step the initial force that may be called its physical essence revealed in all its manifestations? Why should the essence of a tree be held to be but a particle of the seed from which it has sprung, and why should it not be recognized as truly and fully in the complete tree as in the germ?¹⁰⁷

Loisy’s evolutionary philosophy of history not only entailed a more positive evaluation of the entire Christian tradition and a historical legitimization of the Church, it also allowed for a far more radical historical criticism and matching comparativism. In L’Évangile et l’Église, Loisy strictly distinguished between the tasks of the historian and of the theologian. The task of the historian is to understand the gospel of Jesus within its historical context and to describe historical change, while the theologian should be occupied with the necessary reformulation of the religious meaning of the gospel: “The gospel has an existence independent of us; let us try to understand it in itself, before we interpret it in the light of our preferences and our needs.”¹⁰⁸ Loisy accused Harnack of a theolog-

 Or as Hill aptly formulated in The Politics of Modernism, 130: “the whole was kernel.”  It should be reminded that Loisy had developed this philosophy of religion before Harnack’s Wesen, and, in the first place as a reply to traditional Catholic theology. His philosophical views had been published pseudonymously in the Firmin articles.  Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, 16. On the relation between Loisy’s ideas and Henri Bergson’s élan vital, Harvey Hill, “Henri Bergson and Alfred Loisy: On Mysticism,” in Modernists & Mystics, ed. C.J.T. Talar (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), 120 – 124. On Loisy and Bergson, see also chapter 5 (5.2.2).  Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, 8. In his correspondence with the German Liberal-Protestant scholar Adolf Jülicher, Loisy firmly repeated this argument. In November 1905, Jülicher had sent Loisy a copy of his as yet unpublished paper “Die Religion Jesu und die Anfänge des Christentums bis zum Nicaenum (325),” in which he had accused Loisy’s EE of a “poor con-

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ical abuse of comparative religion: “It is […] in the highest degree arbitrary to decide that Christianity in its essence must be all that the gospel has not borrowed of Judaism, as if all that the gospel has retained of the Jewish tradition must be necessarily of secondary value.”¹⁰⁹ The comparison of Christianity to other religions is a historical tool to uncover which non-Christian elements have been incorporated in Christianity in order to satisfy the needs of new converts. Loisy believed that Catholicism had absolutely nothing to fear from the discovery of such genealogical interconnections with other religions, because the assimilated elements had been profoundly transformed and thus had stopped being pagan or Jewish once they had been incorporated in Christianity. Moreover, it was implied in Loisy’s argumentation (but for logical reasons never expressed explicitly) that the Church could only gain from acknowledging such assimilations because they testified to her respect for the vitality of the gospel. As such, Loisy’s comparative religion is well integrated in his Modernist reform program. With Loisy’s philosophical framework well in mind, one can now understand the many historical parallels the Catholic scholar drew between Christianity and other ancient religions in L’Évangile et l’Église. His evolutionism allowed for a quite advanced comparative inquiry. We can break Loisy’s approach down to the following three points: (1) the intense interconnection of Jesus and contemporary Judaism, (2) the genealogical relation between the first Christian communities and pagan religions, and (3) the careful adoption of a universalizing anthropological perspective for the early Christian interpretation of the Eucharist.

1.3.1 Jesus and Judaism After a first section on the gospels as complex sources for the study of the historical Jesus, two sections follow which discuss Jesus’ relationship to Judaism: section II focuses on Jesus’ conception of the kingdom of heaven, while section III discusses the titles Son of God and Messiah. Loisy painted a distinctly Judaic picture of Jesus. Crucial for his historical reconstruction of Jesus’ original gospel

ception” of the moral value of the gospel. This paper later appeared in Die Kultur der Gegenwart I, 4, 1 (1906), 41– 128. Loisy replied on November 13, 1905, repeating his ideas on the relative truthfulness of Christian beliefs and their historical character. Faith, not history, gives these beliefs their aura of absoluteness: “La définition originelle a été nécessairement conditionnée par les circonstances, et c’est en vertu d’un acte de foi que l’on accorde à cette définition un caractère absolu. […].” Loisy’s draft of the letter is preserved in the BnF, NAF 15645, f° 382.  Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, 10.

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was Judaic eschatology. In line with the prominence of eschatological hope in contemporary Judaism, Jesus’ gospel mainly revolved around the expectation of the end of the existing world order and the hope for a subsequent renewal which would instigate the rule of God on earth.¹¹⁰ By emphasizing the Judaic-eschatological character of Jesus, Loisy took sides with the comparative approach of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule, in particular of Johannes Weiß, against Harnack.¹¹¹ Harnack’s statement that Jesus had primarily considered the kingdom as an already present subjective spiritual-moral experience is not historical, but the result of a modern Liberal-Protestant projection on intentionally decontextualized biblical texts: “The historian must resist the temptation to modernize the conception of the kingdom.”¹¹² Loisy admitted that Jesus’ teachings involved the preaching of moral repentance, but this was a condition to enter the future kingdom, and not an indication of an already existing inner kingdom.¹¹³ To give an example of Loisy’s strategic argumentation, it may be pointed out that he chose to omit Harnack’s double kingdom theory. Loisy’s focus on the Judaic origins of Jesus’ conception of the kingdom certainly was far more consistent than Harnack’s, but we have seen that Harnack was aware of the historical importance of Jesus’ Judaic context, too. This specific misrepresentation of Harnack’s ideas had two advantages for Loisy. It highlighted the alleged scientificity of his own historical approach, and, for the Catholic readership Loisy addressed, it again added an apologetic touch to his less than orthodox historical ideas. Loisy’s emphasis on Harnack’s wrong individualist interpretation of the kingdom, allowed him to draw attention to the social dimension of the collective world end and salvation which is implied in his own Judaic-eschatological interpreta-

 Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, 53.  Loisy didn’t refer to Weiß’s Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes. Modern scholarship on their intellectual relationship widely agrees on the fact that Loisy was influenced by Weiß, but that he had his own original approach. See Friedrich Heiler, Alfred Loisy. Der Vater des katholischen Modernismus (München: Erasmus, 1947), 44– 45; Dieter Hoffmann-Axtheim, “Loisy’s l’Évangile et l’Église: Besichtigung eines zeitgenössischen Schlachtfeldes,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 65 (1968): 297; Dietrich S. Wendell, “Loisy and the Liberal Protestants,” Studies in Religion/ Sciences religieuses 14 (1985): 303 – 306.  Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, 12, 73. Especially Luke 17:20 – 21: “Being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, he answered them, ‘The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, ‘Lo, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.”  Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, 59: “The idea of the celestial kingdom is then nothing but a great hope, and it is in this hope or nowhere that the historian should set the essence of the gospel.”

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tion. Catholicism is then an organic development out of Jesus’ gospel, while individualizing Liberal Protestantism should be seen as a product of discontinuity. The logical consequence of Loisy’s emphasis on Jesus’ eschatological beliefs is that Jesus had never intended to found a new religion. His gospel was an enlargement of Judaism, but it still was profoundly Judaic: He had no other pretension than to fulfill the law and the prophets; without doubt He wished to enlarge and perfect the former revelation, but, while enlarging and perfecting, He meant to retain it; He is not set before the world as the revealer of a new principle; if He never gives His definition of the kingdom of God it is because the kingdom of which He is the messenger and the instrument is identified in His thought, as in the minds of His hearers, with that that the prophets have foretold.¹¹⁴

Contrary to Harnack, Loisy emphasized that Jesus had followed the Law. His moral teachings had also been perfectly Judaic, as were his gospel about the kingdom and his role in it as the Messiah. Jesus had not instituted a Christian cult, nor had he developed Christian doctrines or dogma.¹¹⁵ And he had certainly not provided any guidelines for institutionalizing a primitive form of the Church. Since Jesus had believed that the coming of the kingdom was imminent, this kind of elaborations had simply been unnecessary.¹¹⁶ Through his discovery of the importance of eschatology, Loisy developed ideas on Jesus’ (non‐)relation to Christian ritual, doctrine and the Church, which were in themselves strikingly similar to Harnack’s. But behind their similar conclusions lurked substantial differences. Loisy’s views were the result of his intense historical contextualization of Jesus’ gospel within Judaism, while Harnack’s followed from his minimalist moral interpretation of the same gospel. Loisy’s Jesus considered Judaic rituals as “abstractions”: he followed them in anticipation of their radical transformation in the kingdom.¹¹⁷ Harnack’s Jesus, by contrast, abolished these external religious forms, because they polluted the universal inward essence and linked it to one particular form of human culture. We will come back to this point when discussing Loisy’s ideas on the development of Christian doctrine and cult. Loisy also applied his Judaic contextualization to the meaning Jesus attributed to the titles “Son of God” and “Messiah,” and to Jesus’ conception of his own role in the gospel. The “Son of God” title is not to be reduced to a purely psychological notion which indicates Jesus’ awareness of his special bond to  Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, 65.  Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, 75.  For Loisy’s emphatic enumeration of the consequences of the eschatological meaning of the kingdom on Jesus’ thought: The Gospel and the Church, 81.  Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, 82– 83.

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God.¹¹⁸ Instead, it is a Judaic concept which is equivalent to the Messiah title.¹¹⁹ As for Jesus’ qualification as the Messiah, Harnack had failed to understand the deeply eschatological meaning of this Judaic title, by explaining it as the title of a moral guide who leads people to the gospel. Loisy observed: “It is truly curious to see how embarrassed certain Protestant theologians become over this ‘Jewish’ conception [i. e. the Messiah], which they would willingly eliminate from the gospel and attribute to apostolic tradition in order to shape themselves a Christ after their own heart.”¹²⁰ Loisy agreed that Jesus was a religious-spiritual guide, but it was not in this quality that he called himself the Messiah. Jesus believed himself to be the future Messiah, and as such, he expected to fulfill a prominent role in the kingdom to come. Loisy emphatically underlined that Jesus’ kingdom had not just been about God but also about the Son of God. In other words, he opposed the Liberal-Protestant view that the gospel was essentially about the “Man Jesus” and about his humanist ethics.¹²¹ The gospel was about the future and about the divine Christ. Loisy thus provided later Christology with a solid foundation in the original gospel, and established the continuity which Harnack had purposefully refused to the Catholic tradition. On the other hand, and in huge contrast with the traditional Catholic opinion, he agreed with Harnack that Jesus’ gospel did not contain any doctrine on the divinity of the Christ.¹²² His

 Harnack had substantiated his theory by Matt 11:27: “All things have been delivered to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.” Harnack, What is Christianity?, 137– 138.  Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, 91. See also Luigi Salvatorelli, “From Locke to Reitzenstein: The Historical Investigation of the Origins of Christianity,” The Harvard Theological Review 22, no. 4 (1929): 339.  The Gospel and the Church, 98.  Compare, e. g., with Hegel’s ideas on Jesus and Judaism, Friedrich Hegel on Christianity: Early Theological Writings, trans. T.M. Knox (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1948), 77: “A teaching different from that which the Jews already possessed in their sacred documents they were disposed to accept only from this Messiah. The hearing which they and most of his closer friends gave to Jesus was based in the main on the possibility that he was perhaps this Messiah and would soon show himself in his glory. Jesus could not exactly contradict them, for this supposition of theirs was the indispensable condition of his finding an entry into their minds. But he tried to lead their messianic hopes into the moral realm and dated his appearance in his glory at a time after his death.”  Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, 108: “There is no question of a doctrine to be put forward touching Himself and His office.”

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theory about Jesus as the “future” Messiah thus stood at wide variance with both Harnack’s ideas and with traditional Catholic scholarship.¹²³ In spite of his in-depth historical criticism and comparative approach, Loisy in the end also felt the need to somehow save Christianity from the intricate historical dependencies he had established. At several points in L’Évangile et l’Église there are remarkable attenuating mechanisms, which reveal that he did establish a clear hierarchy between Judaism and Christianity. There is, for example, an omnipresent discourse of “inevitability” and “necessity,” and a clear distinction between faith and the symbols that express faith, which certainly reminds of Harnack’s ideas: Jesus, on the earth, was the great representative of faith. Now, the religious faith of humanity always has been and always will be supported by symbols more or less imperfect […]. The choice and the quality of the symbols are necessarily related to the stage of evolution of faith and of religion. The conceptions of the kingdom and of the Messiah are not merely the features that made it possible for Christianity to come forward beside Judaism, they are the necessary form in which Christianity had to be born in Judaism before spreading out into the world.¹²⁴

It is fair to say, however, that Loisy’s historical-critical ideas on the Judaic-eschatological character of Jesus’ gospel were, overall, advanced. To his critics at the École pratique, they unmistakably demonstrated that he was able to study early Christianity according to their strictly historical-critical standards. In fact, he proved to his predominantly Liberal-Protestant colleagues of the Fifth Section that he was even more capable to do so than Harnack, who had a well-deserved reputation in the field of history of Christianity, both in Germany and beyond. Harnack’s Wesen had actually met with little interest among the Protestant circles of the Fifth Section.¹²⁵ Harnack’s position on Judaism differed substantially

 On Loisy’s ideas on the Messianic consciousness of Jesus, and their relation to Catholicism and Liberal Protestantism, see Frédéric Amsler, “Pourquoi l’histoire des origines du christianisme proposée par Loisy a-t-elle posé problème?” URL: http://alfred.loisy.free.fr/pdf/colloque_ loisy_amsler.pdf. On the contrast with Harnack, Bernard Reardon, Liberalism and Tradition. Aspects of Catholic Thought in Nineteenth-century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 273.  Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, 120.  Harnack’s close connection to German politics may explain why the French Liberal-Protestant historians of the EPHE, who voiced the ideals of the French Third Republic, refrained from paying much attention to this work. On this topic see Pascale Gruson, “Entre la crise moderniste et les exigences de la modernité. Quelques questions posées par la réception de ‘L’essence du Christianisme’ en France,” in Adolf von Harnack. Theologe, Historiker, Wissenschaftspolitiker, eds. Kurt Nowak and Otto Gerhard Oexle (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001), 320 –

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from the Liberal-Protestant scholars who held the most powerful positions in the French history of religions, like, for example, Albert Réville (1826 – 1906) who was the then director of the Fifth Section and held the chair in history of religions at the Collège de France. First of all, their positive attitude toward comparative religion was distinctly different from Harnack’s reluctant position.¹²⁶ The Liberal Protestants of the Fifth Section generally venerated Ernest Renan’s historical-critical scholarship on early Christianity (which means that a lot of attention was paid to Jesus’ Judaic background), even if they didn’t accept his theory on the Aryan victory over the inferior Semitic origins.¹²⁷ As an example, we may mention Albert Réville’s Jésus de Nazareth (1897, in 2 volumes), which dedicated over 200 pages to the study of Judaism.¹²⁸ Aside from Renan’s legacy, we should also point to the importance of the Dreyfus-affair as a historical context for Réville’s Jesus, which has been observed by Robert Priest: “Réville’s assertion of Jesus’s Jewishness appears to have been intimately related to his defence of Dreyfus’s Frenchness.”¹²⁹ In a similar vein, Loisy’s profoundly Judaic Jesus should be seen against the background of his close personal relations with Salomon Reinach who was a leading personality of the pro-Dreyfus camp.¹³⁰ All of this may help to explain Loisy’s easy access to the Dreyfusard salon of the Marquise Arconati-Visconti in 1908, who fiercely supported his candidature at the Collège de France, as we will see in the next chapter.

321. We will come back to the political ideology of the Sciences religieuses at the EPHE in the following chapter, where we also briefly discuss the importance of the Franco-Prussian War (1870 – 71).  For the reply Albert Réville’s son Jean Réville formulated against Harnack’s Rektoratsrede in 1901, see Hjelde, “The Science of Religion and Theology,” 118. For the relation of the theological views of Harnack and Jean Réville, see Bernard Reymond, “Jean Réville et le protestantisme libéral,” Bulletin de la société de l’histoire du protestantisme français 154 (2008): 397– 408.  On Renan’s highly complex views on Jesus and Judaism see, among many other: Simon C. Mimouni, “Les Origines du christianisme aux XIXème et XXème siècles en France. Questions d’Épistémologie et de méthodologie,” in L’Orient dans l’histoire religieuse de l’Europe. L’invention des origines, eds. Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi and John Scheid (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), 105 – 106 (this overview, surprisingly, does not include a discussion of Loisy’s work); Thomas Römer, “Renan et l’exégèse historico-critique,” in Laurens, ed., Ernest Renan. La science, la religion, la République, 145 – 162; Robert D. Priest, The Gospel according to Renan. Reading, Writing & Religion in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford: OUP, 2015), 24, 52, 63.  For the close link between Albert Réville and Renan: Priest, The Gospel according to Renan, 214– 218.  Priest, The Gospel according to Renan, 217.  For Salomon Reinach see chapters 2, 3, and 4 (and the index).

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1.3.2 Pagan Religion and the Development of Christian Doctrine and Cult Loisy’s comparative study of early Christianity was not limited to its Judaic environment, but also took into account the importance of surrounding pagan cultures. From a purely historical point of view, the crux of the controversy with Harnack was not the issue of the genealogical interconnection of pagan religion and Catholicism. Unlike traditional Catholic scholars, Loisy wholeheartedly conceded the Church’s assimilation of pagan beliefs and rituals in its doctrine and cult. He did not limit this concession to the influence of “Greek intelligence” in dogma, which was acknowledged by the Church Fathers themselves and was quite unproblematic in traditional Christian scholarship.¹³¹ He also admitted pagan influences in Catholic rites, and in the much debated worship of the saints and of the Virgin.¹³² In stark contrast to Harnack’s negative evaluation of these religious developments, Loisy evidently regarded the assimilating role of the Roman Catholic Church as a necessary and positive expansion of the gospel. This is what he really meant when he wrote the famous sentence: “Jesus foretold the kingdom, and it was the Church that came; she came, enlarging the form of the gospel, which was impossible to preserve as it was, as soon as the Passion closed the ministry of Jesus.”¹³³ Jesus’ Judaic message could never appeal outside of its originally Judaic context. Indeed, Jesus did not institute Christian ritual, doctrine or the Church, but for Loisy there was indissolved continuity between all these later developments and Jesus’ original teachings. The diametrical opposition to Harnack’s comparative argumentation on pagan religion resided in the fact that Loisy also considered the possibility of pagan influence in first century Christianity. In what follows, we will discuss his comparative ideas on the belief in the resurrection and on the development of the Eucharist. Jesus’ Messianic consciousness is crucial for Loisy’s explanation of the belief in his resurrection. Jesus was put to death because he publicly presented himself as the future Messiah. Well aware that his life was in danger, Jesus personally developed a religious explanation which said that his future death actually was the condition for the future realization of the kingdom.¹³⁴ Loisy basically provided two interdependent explanations for the belief in Jesus’ resurrection. The first explanation was psychological. Filled with the hopes of the future king Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, 193 – 195.  Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, 235. See also the extract of Loisy’s diary from 1883, Mémoires, I, 121– 122.  Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, 166.  Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, 119, 123.

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dom and the belief that Jesus would be the Messiah, the first followers were unable to accept that Jesus was gone, and that his teachings about the kingdom had been wrong. Jesus’ own providential account of his death helped them to “correct the brutal fact of the death by the glory of the resurrection.”¹³⁵ Harnack, by contrast, had not explained the resurrection as the result of their belief in Jesus as the Messiah, and neither had he believed that Jesus himself had speculated on the religious meaning of his death. Instead he had insisted on the enormous impression Jesus’ personality had made on the disciples: “it was a life never to be destroyed which they felt to be going out from him; only for a brief span of time could his death stagger them; the strength of the Lord prevailed over everything.”¹³⁶ But to explain, then, why this death was conceived of as an atonement, Harnack had adopted a psychological-anthropological approach which was not so very different from Loisy’s: “no reflection of the ‘reason’, no deliberation of the ‘intelligence’, will ever be able to expunge from the moral ideas of mankind the conviction that injustice and sin deserve to be punished, and that everywhere that the just man suffers, an atonement is made which puts us to shame and purifies us.”¹³⁷ Both historians relegated the belief in the historicity of the resurrection to the realm of theology, and explained the origins of the belief scientifically, as a collective, psychological correction by the first followers.¹³⁸ Loisy’s second explanation, however, was the complete opposite of Harnack’s. According to Loisy, the psychological correction could only happen because the disciples were pre-acquainted with conceptions of resurrection and immortality. While Harnack had explained the origins of these beliefs as a strictly internal Christian development (emanating from Jesus’ impressive force of life), as the result of a form of universal (Kantian) morality, Loisy drew attention to the pagan and Judaic environment in which Christianity was born. The following quotes illustrate the wide differences between the comparative approaches of Harnack and Loisy. Harnack, for his part, dismissed the hermeneutical value

 Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, 130.  Harnack, What is Christianity?, 175 – 176. Harnack also included other explanations: the belief in Jesus’ immortality also naturally followed from the idea of “infinite value of the human soul,” which could unite with that of God.  Harnack, What is Christianity?, 171.  The cognitive-psychological approach to the resurrection is still very much present in modern research on early Christianity. See, for instance, Gerd Theißen and Petra von Gemünden, eds., Erkennen und Erleben. Beiträge zur psychologischen Erforschung des frühen Christentums (München: Gütersloher Verlag, 2007).

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of Platonism, or Persian and Judaic religion to explain the origin of the belief in the resurrection: Whatever may have happened at the grave and in the matter of the appearances, one thing is certain: This grave was the birthplace of the indestructible belief that death is vanquished, and there is a life eternal. It is useless to cite Plato; it is useless to point to the Persian religion, and the ideas and the literature of later Judaism. All that would have perished and has perished; but the certainty of the resurrection and of a life eternal which is bound up with the grave in Joseph’s garden has not perished, and on the conviction that Jesus lives we still base those hopes of citizenship in an Eternal City which make our earthly life worth living and tolerable.¹³⁹

Loisy reacted against these words of Harnack by emphasizing the importance of this historical-religious environment: There is some exaggeration in dismissing Plato, the religion of the Persians, and the beliefs of Judaism after the exile, as though they had in no way aided in creating the certainty of eternal life, and as though this certainty came once and for all from faith in the resurrection of Christ. […] Jesus Himself found among the Jews a belief in the resurrection of the dead, and He spoke conformably to this belief. The idea of His personal resurrection presupposes the acceptance of the idea of a general resurrection.¹⁴⁰

For Harnack, conceptions of immortality existing in the religious Umwelt are completely unnecessary to understand Christianity. Furthermore, his words are also an emphatic profession of faith on the absolute superiority of the own Christian tradition. Unlike Harnack, Loisy did not just consider these parallels in other religions as facilitators of the spread of Christianity. He decisively moved beyond the teleological discourse of “preparation” by establishing explicit genealogical interrelations between paganism and Judaism, and between this Judaism influenced by other traditions and Jesus himself. This way he not only annihilated the traditional theological ideas on the absolute originality of the revelation, but also questioned the presupposed “purity” of the earliest Christian traditions. Loisy’s statements about the importance of a historical-comparative approach to the resurrection heralded his later theory (1911) about Paul’s transformation of the resurrected Christ into a dying and resurrecting savior god. The genesis of this theory has often been situated in 1910 (the year in which he read Reitzenstein’s influential Hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen), but there are very good reasons to assume that it had actually been developed much ear-

 Harnack, What is Christianity?, 174– 175.  Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, 135.

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lier.¹⁴¹ In L’Évangile et l’Église, Loisy didn’t discuss direct pagan influences on the beliefs in the resurrected Christ of the first Christian generations. The pagan elements had been indirectly transmitted via Judaism. From his private correspondence of 1903 – 1905, however, it is clear that he really did explore the option of direct pagan influences on Christianity.¹⁴² It was probably Salomon Reinach who triggered him to explore such cases. Reinach himself advocated an extreme comparativism and adhered to the so-called Christ Myth theory which denied Jesus’ historicity and (often) explained this fully mythical Jesus as the pendant version of the pagan mystery gods. Loisy’s negative reception of the Christ Myth will be discussed in great detail in our fourth chapter. This theory became a particularly prominent subject of discussion in France in the 1910s, but Loisy’s correspondence with Reinach shows that he had already enthusiastically plunged into the question in 1905. Reinach’s importance to Loisy’s intellectual development in the early 1900’s cannot be underestimated. Reinach frequently visited Loisy and they wrote each other regularly, although they had widely different opinions on a vast array of topics in the field of religious studies.¹⁴³ In an illuminating letter of December 10, 1905, which we will quote and discuss in more detail in chapter 4, Loisy showed to be very well acquainted with contemporary theories on the influence of pagan mystery cults and primitive Christianity.¹⁴⁴ When interpreting his relatively moderate comparative statements in L’Évangile et l’Église (“there is some exaggeration”), we should consider the possibility that behind them lurked much more advanced views and stronger opinions on the importance of comparative religion. These views were obviously not expressed in their most radical form in Loisy’s Modernist manifesto, which—it is worth repeating—aimed at convincing (progressive) Catholics of the necessity of a scientific modernization, and therefore adopted a “soft approach.” This is not only confirmed by his corre-

 This has been pointed out by Jones, Independence and Exegesis, 69, who referred to Loisy’s early reviews of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule but largely overlooked the role of comparative religion in his EE. On EE’s relation to Loisy’s later work on the mystery cults, see Danny Praet and Annelies Lannoy, “Loisy’s comparative method in Les mystères païens et le mystère chrétien,” Numen. International Review for the History of Religions 64, 1 (2017): 68.  Note that Loisy also excluded these private views from his apology Autour d’un petit livre, see 119 – 129, where he discussed the transformations the preaching on the resurrected Christ underwent when entering the pagan world.  See also infra (chapter 2) for the relationship and correspondence between Loisy and Reinach. For their different opinions about the definition of religion, see chapter 3; about the function of myth: chapter 4.  Draft of Loisy’s letter to Reinach preserved in BnF, NAF° 15645, f° 383. In this letter, Loisy also compared Artemis Orthia to Notre-dame-de-l’épine of his birth place Châlons.

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spondence, but it will also become clear from the analysis of his pseudonymous publications (1.4). Although Loisy proceeded cautiously, L’Évangile et l’Église managed to send out the signal to the secular French world that he not only embraced a comparative approach to Judaism, but was ready to extend it to Christianity and pagan religions. The letters Loisy and Reinach wrote to each other between 1896 – 1908 show that a highly independent and anticlerical (and powerful) scholar like Reinach indeed regarded Loisy as a serious discussion partner for the comparative study of Christianity. When Reinach sent some of his most thoroughly comparative studies to Loisy, such as his paper “La flagellation rituelle” (1904)¹⁴⁵ which discussed ritual flogging in various pagan cults and its persistence in popular Medieval customs, Loisy enthusiastically replied by adding other local Christian parallels.¹⁴⁶ The early scientific connection between Loisy and Reinach is clear proof of Loisy’s growing credibility among scholars of the science laïque. The preceding analysis may suggest that Harnack was the only one, then, who blurred the distinction between a strictly historical method and his religious beliefs when he dismissed comparative religion on the basis of religious truth claims about the uniqueness of Christianity. But when we take a closer look at Loisy’s overall argumentation in L’Évangile et l’Église, this appears to be a wrong conclusion. First of all, Loisy agreed with Harnack on the superiority of Christianity over the traditions which had influenced it. It has been mentioned before, though, that blaming Loisy and Harnack for this view is committing an anachronism, since it was a widely accepted view among religious and non-religious scholars at that time. What was, by contrast, truly detrimental to the scientificity of Loisy’s argumentation—also to the scientific standards of his own day—was the fact that he “theologized” his historical narrative by (repeatedly) stating that a “spirit” fueled Christian and pre-Christian assimilations: If it [Christianity, my remark] was not (and it was far from being) the chance product of a combination of heterogeneous beliefs, from Chaldea, Egypt, India, Persia, and Greece, if it was born of the incomparable word and action of Jesus, it is none the less true that Jesus gathered up and vivified the best of the religious wealth amassed by Israel before Him, and that He transmitted this wealth not as a simple deposit that the faith-full of all time had but to guard, but as a living faith in the form of a collection of beliefs, which had to live and grow after Him, even as they had grown and lived before, by the preponderating influence

 Salomon Reinach, “La flagellation rituelle,” L’Anthropologie (1904): 47– 54. Reprinted in Salomon Reinach, Cultes, Mythes et Religions, I (Paris: Leroux, 1905), 173 – 183. Note that in this article Reinach drew on the religious anthropological theories established by James G. Frazer, whose work will have great influence on Loisy’s later ideas: see infra chapter 4 (4.3).  Draft of Loisy’s letter to Reinach of May 22, 1904, preserved in BnF, NAF 15645, f° 374.

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of the spirit that animated them. By isolating Him in history, Herr Harnack makes his Christ no greater, but only less intelligible and less real.¹⁴⁷

Even if Loisy asserted elsewhere that Jesus’ ideas were perfectly Judaic, he still felt the need to reaffirm the traditional belief in the incomparability of his “words and actions.” Furthermore, the remark on “the preponderating influence of the spirit that animated them” seems to point to some sort of supernatural intervention in history. The contrast in this one sentence raises the question as to whether such “rectifications” were genuine or strategic statements of Loisy’s. Did Loisy try to “soften up” his evolutionary reconstruction of Christianity (with its implicit invitation to the contemporary Church) by confirming Jesus’ superiority and by suggesting the possibility of a “spirit” which fueled religious change as part of a divine plan? For now, we must leave this question unanswered. We will come back to it when discussing the Neuilly Essais and the pseudonymous Firmin article in the next section of this chapter. Just like in his discussion of Christian dogma, Loisy used comparative religion as a weapon against the traditional Protestant recrimination that the development of Christian cult was mostly a Catholic integration of pagan features into a presumably pure apostolic Christianity.¹⁴⁸ Loisy not only transferred the comparative question from Harnack’s fourth century Catholic Church to pre-Christian Judaism, but also examined pagan influences in the first century cult. After underlining just how many pagan elements had already infiltrated in pre-Christian Jewish rites,¹⁴⁹ he explained that a similar process of natural assimilation had also occurred during the early development of the Christian baptism and the Eucharist. While baptism had organically developed out of the Judaic rite which had been practiced by John, Jesus and the first disciples, the Eucharist—“the central act of worship”—had actually been a last-minute creation of Jesus himself. Quite transparently, Loisy still wanted to link the most important Catholic sacrament to Jesus himself, all the while trying to hold on to his view that  Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, 137– 138.  For an elaborate analysis of Loisy’s Modernist philosophy of Catholic ritual, see Harvey Hill, “Modernist Spirituality: Alfred Loisy on the History and Spirit of the Eucharist,” Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 42, 2 (2013): 23 – 37.  Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, 234: “All the rest of the forms of worship may have been borrowed, before Moses, or after him, from other religions, with certain changes affecting the meaning, rather than the form, of the rites. While running the risk of corruption through the admixture of foreign elements, the Mosaic ritual realized successively the transformations that its preservation and progress demanded. […] When human groups are thus mingled, not only physical and racial, but also intellectual and moral qualities, customs and traditions are blended together. More than one Canaanitish rite has been canonized in Deuteronomy or Leviticus.”

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Jesus hadn’t instituted Christian cult. According to Loisy, Jesus had broken away from his Judaic background at the very end of his life.¹⁵⁰ His symbolic interpretation of the last Supper was the conscious ending of Judaic ritual, although it was not the conscious and direct beginning of a Christian cult. After Jesus’ death, the first community continued to regard their meals as anticipations of the kingdom, but they were also celebrated as a commemoration of the Passion.¹⁵¹ While Loisy granted to the Protestants that Jesus’ understanding of the meal had been symbolic, he did stress that the meals had instantly acquired a sacramental meaning after Jesus’ death.¹⁵² Jesus Christ was believed to be present, and, through the meals, there was believed to occur a transmission of “Divine life.”¹⁵³ In L’Évangile et l’Église Loisy didn’t provide any information on the roots of the Last Supper. Was this an ordinary meal, later ritualized by the disciples? Was it the ritual Passover meal? In itself, the fact that Loisy reserved this information for his Essais, already gives us an indication that his views were anything but traditional-Catholic. As for the early development of the Eucharist into a ritual of communion, Loisy combined an internal-psychological and a historic-religious explanation: The real communion with Christ in the Eucharist was exacted by the Christian conscience as imperiously as the Divinity of Jesus; nevertheless the Divinity of Christ is not a dogma conceived in the spirit of Jewish theology, neither is the Eucharist a Jewish rite; dogma and rite are specifically Christian, and proceed from the apostolic tradition, without altering the fact that the influence of Greek wisdom can be perceived in the traditional way of understanding the first, and in the manner of understanding the second, 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-exilian Judaism. If it were not to become Greek, Roman, or German in its form of worship, Christianity must have avoided the Greeks, the Romans, and Germans; the adaptation of Christianity was inevitable.¹⁵⁴

In the context of Loisy’s relation to the contemporary science laïque, it is important to give some further thought to this brief, yet very meaningful comparative comment on the Eucharist. The statement is of course an integral part of his argumentation against Harnack, who had situated the influence of the mystery  Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, 230 – 231.  Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, 246 – 247.  When Loisy left the Church, his ideas on this particular point would change significantly. Jesus’ own understanding of the last supper was then no longer symbolic according to Loisy, it was just a plain meal. The commemoration of the last meal was no longer sacramental in the first communities. See chapter 4 (4.3).  Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, 233.  Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, 238 – 239.

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cults in the third and fourth centuries.¹⁵⁵ According to Loisy, the influence became operative from the very moment Christianity started to spread in places where the mystery cults were present, which happened well before the third century. Loisy did not provide any details on the exact timing, but it is reasonable to surmise that he again sought to close the strict Harnackian division between apostolic and post-apostolic evolutions. At the same time, though, the aforementioned quote is more than just another instance of the classical Catholic-Protestant feud. In the late 19th and the early 20th centuries, the interrelationship of early Christianity and the pagan mystery cults¹⁵⁶ on the one hand, and the comparative theories on the origin of sacrifice on the other, gave rise to wide international debates which mobilized not only historians of Christianity, exegetes and theologians, but also historians of religions, anthropologists, and classicists.¹⁵⁷ Somewhat in passing, Loisy here showed to be familiar with what really were the most important debates in the religious studies of that time,¹⁵⁸ and, more importantly even, he seemed ready to embrace the comparative methods of his secular colleagues to tackle these historical problems. In the passage quoted, Loisy appeared to be considering two different comparative explanations for the early Christian development of the Eucharist. The first possibility is a specific relationship between early Christianity and the mystery cults: the interpretation of the Eucharist as a “communion with Christ” “recalls” the meaning of the sacrificial rites of the pagan mystery cults. Loisy did not claim that the similarity was the result of an imitation by Christians, but this is certainly what was implicitly suggested by his general theory on the “necessary assimilations,” which started when the Christians entered into contact with

 Harnack, What is Christianity?, 221.  On the pivotal figures in these debates, see the contributions to Annelies Lannoy and Danny Praet, eds., ‘Between crazy mythologists and stupid theologians.’ Early Christianity and the pagan mystery cults in the work of Franz Cumont and in the history of scholarship (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, in preparation).  Our chapter 4 will discuss the debates about the pagan mystery cults, while chapter 5 will deal with those on sacrifice.  Harnack was, of course, also familiar with them. He discussed the mystery cults most extensively in his later Die Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums in den ersten drei Jahrhunderten, Band II: Die Verbreitung (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrich, 1906), 270 – 275, where he allowed for some degree of influence on the propagation of Christianity, but rejected pagan influence on Christianity’s formation, which was the central focus of the contemporary debates. Salvatorelli, “From Locke to Reitzenstein,” 306, and Jan N. Bremmer, The rise of Christianity through the eyes of Gibbon, Harnack and Rodney Stark (Groningen: Barkhuis, 2010), 39. In the German Protestant world, the participation was mostly assured by the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule and by classicists, as Hermann Usener, Richard Reitzenstein and Albrecht Dieterich, see infra, chapter 4 (4.1.1).

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pagans. The theory of substantial influence of the pagan “oriental” mystery cults on apostolic Christianity was about to become the trademark of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule. Still, it is unlikely that these scholars were Loisy’s source of inspiration, because they published their most influential books on the mystery cults almost simultaneously to L’Évangile et l’Église or slightly later.¹⁵⁹ At this point of Loisy’s intellectual trajectory, it makes more sense to look in the direction of his role model Ernest Renan, who had paid substantial attention to the mystery cults in his much quoted Marc Aurèle ou la fin du monde antique (1882), although Renan had been especially interested in the late-antique “rivalry” between these cults and Christianity, rather than in the origin of their similarities.¹⁶⁰ Another option is that it was the work of Franz Cumont (1868 – 1947) which served as the main catalyst for Loisy’s views. His contributions to the Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses on the mystery cults were certainly “close to home” for Loisy.¹⁶¹ In fact, just one year before L’Évangile et l’Église came out, Cumont had published an article, “Le taurobole et le culte de Bellone,” in which he had drawn attention to pagan blood sacrifices and to the related belief that the absorption of the blood of the victim established an union between the worshipper, the victim and the god identified with the victim.¹⁶² Although this particular article of Cumont’s can certainly not account for Loisy’s statement (which is already included in the earlier Essais ¹⁶³), it does show

 One of their first publications on the matter is Hermann Gunkel’s Zum religionsgeschichtlichen Verständnis des Neuen Testaments (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1903). See also Wilhelm Heitmüller, In Namen Jesu. Eine sprach- und religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchung zum Neuen Testament, speziell zur altchristliche Taufe (Göttingen: Huth, 1903) and Id., Taufe und Abendmahl bei Paulus. Darstellung und religionsgeschichtliche Beleuchtung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1903).  Praet, “Oriental Religions and the Conversion of the Roman Empire,” 287– 290.  For Cumont’s collaboration to the Revue, see supra (introduction). His first contribution to the RHLR on the mystery cults was published in 1897: “La propagation des mystères de Mithra dans l’empire romain,” RHLR 2 (1897): 289 – 305, 408 – 423.  Franz Cumont, “Le taurobole et le culte de Bellone,” RHLR 6 (1901): 97– 110. Cumont’s article investigated the origins of the taurobolium of the cult of Cybele and the role of the war goddess Mâ-Bellone in the spread of this ritual over the western Roman Empire. Cumont’s article has been thoroughly analyzed by Danny Praet, “Symbolisme, évolution rituelle et morale dans l’histoire des religions: le cas du Taurobolium dans les publications et la correspondance de Franz Cumont et d’Alfred Loisy,” in Amsler, ed., Quelle place pour Alfred Loisy, 131– 143. See also Annelies Lannoy, “Envoyez-nous votre taurobole et que Bellone nous protège. Franz Cumont, Paul Lejay and the Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses,” Forum Romanum Belgicum (2015): 14.  Note, though, that Loisy’s formulation (“the pagan mysteries”) in EE was more in conformity with the lexicon used in the history of religions, than the terminology in the Neuilly Essais,

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that Loisy’s views fit in perfectly with the Belgian and French secular scientific contexts. Cumont’s studies on the so-called Oriental religions significantly intensified the debates about the pagan mystery cults and early Christianity in France. His famous volume Les Religions orientales dans le paganisme romain was the result of a series of lectures he gave at the Collège de France in 1905, and in Oxford (Hibbert Lectures) in 1906.¹⁶⁴ Cumont would diplomatically divide the “scoop” of his new volume among the Modernist Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses and its Liberal-Protestant rival, the Revue de l’histoire des religions of the École pratique, which both got to publish one chapter of the upcoming book.¹⁶⁵ Once again, Loisy’s comparative interests and methods were particularly close to those circulating in the secular academic study of religion. Loisy’s second explanation entails that the conception of sacrifice as communion is a belief common to all religions. The importance of this suggestion —even if it seems to be discarded in favor of the first genealogical account— can hardly be overestimated. To say that Christianity borrowed from (inferior) pagan cults is one thing, but to acknowledge that the beliefs attached to the most important Christian ritual are basically the same as in any other religion, yet another. It has been pointed out that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries universalizing-anthropological comparative models gained popularity in the French history of religions.¹⁶⁶ The anthropological postulate of the uniformity of the human mind allowed for an advanced comparative approach: advocates of these paradigms did not confine themselves to compare religions which had entered into historical contact, but compared religions of different times and places in order to uncover universal laws of independent evolution. Loisy’s statement on sacrifice as communion seems to echo the theory of one of the Anglo-Saxon pioneers of what François Laplanche has aptly called “La nouvelle

where he wrote: “[…] et dans la manière d’entendre le second quelque chose qui sans doute appartient au fond commun de toutes religions mais qui ressemble plus au mystère de l’antiquité profane.” Loisy, La Crise de la foi, 297.  On the reception of Cumont’s book, Françoise Van Haeperen, “La Réception des Religions orientales de Fr. Cumont: l’apport des comptes rendus,” Anabases 6 (2007): 159 – 185. More details on Cumont’s work follow infra, chapter 4.  Franz Cumont, “Les cultes d’Asie Mineure dans le paganisme romain,” RHR LIII (1906), 1– 24 and Franz Cumont, “L’astrologie et la magie dans le paganisme romain,” RHLR 11 (1906): 24– 55. It was Jean Réville himself who had requested this article (see the letter of Jean Réville to Franz Cumont, October 27, 1905, Academia Belgica, CP3611). Another part of the book was published in a Belgian journal on which Cumont collaborated: “Rome et l’Orient,” Revue de l’instruction publique en Belgique XLIX (1906): 73 – 89.  See also chapter 2 (2.2.3), for more information on the methods that were being frequently used in the early 20th century French history of religions.

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méthode comparative” (in contrast to comparative philology and mythology à la Müller and Renan): William Robertson Smith’s theory on the totemic origins of sacrifice. This will indeed be confirmed by the Essais and the Firmin article “La religion d’Israël,” where Loisy called the theory by its proper name. Robertson Smith’s theory was highly important for the development of Loisy’s views on sacrifice after 1909, and it will be discussed in greater detail in later chapters. By hinting at Robertson Smith’s theory, Loisy once again addressed an issue that was very topical in the contemporary French history of religions. Ivan Strenski’s extensive scholarship on the reception of Robertson Smith’s theory in finde-siècle France has shown that the intensity of the debates had everything to do with the theological consequences of the theory. The Liberal-Protestant leaders of the École pratique were wary of a theory that focused attention on the central position of ritual and on the essentially collective character of ancient religion, but they still found ways to incorporate it in their comparative research.¹⁶⁷ On the other hand, Salomon Reinach and other “liberal Jewish iconoclasts”¹⁶⁸ like Durkheim and Mauss more enthusiastically received these views. Without explicitly mentioning it, Loisy used Robertson Smith’s theory on totemism to attack Harnack’s purely individualist-moral interpretation on the genesis of the Eucharist. And at the same time he showed that, just like the main protagonists of the French science laïque (and unlike Harnack), he considered the possibility of putting Christianity on a par with any religion. In our subsequent discussion of the Essais, it will become clear just how well he knew the universalizing paradigms used in the École pratique, and to what extent he was willing to apply them. Before moving on to an intermediate conclusion, it is important to point out that in his section on worship, too, Loisy tried to amend the religious consequences of his thoroughly historical arguments. Our analysis has thus far been focused on the scientific-comparative argumentation in Loisy’s second “historical” chapter on worship. But after this historical refutation of Harnack, follows a final chapter in which Loisy returned to the viewpoints of the Catholic theologians which he had in fact been implicitly attacking throughout his refutation of Harnack.¹⁶⁹ In these Catholic-theological chapters of L’Évangile et l’Église, the abso-

 Ivan Strenski, Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice (Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2003), 98 – 100 for the Liberal Protestants and Salomon Reinach. For Strenski’s illuminating views, see especially infra, chapter 2 (2.2.3) and 5.  Strenski, Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice, 98.  Loisy’s section on dogma follows the same structure: chapter I: exposition of Harnack’s ideas; chapter II: refutation of Harnack, chapter III: return to the Catholic-theological position. For a close textual analysis of the chapters on dogma, see Talar, (Re)reading, Reception and Rhetoric, 16 – 17.

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lute superiority of Christian worship over pagan worship is emphatically affirmed.¹⁷⁰ And to legitimize the pagan assimilations of the Church, Loisy furthermore explained: The life of a religion 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. The sacraments have no meaning for the Christian except through Jesus or His Spirit acting in the material symbol.¹⁷¹

1.3.3 L’Évangile et l’Eglise: An Intermediate Conclusion In L’Évangile et l’Église Loisy presented himself as a historian and called for a consistent comparative study of early Christianity and its religious environment. But the book displays a complex interplay of different horizons, which leads to a remarkable alternation of highly scientific and religious arguments. Comparative religion was Loisy’s scientific tool for the historicization of all phases and aspects of Christianity. At the same time it was a weapon against Liberal Protestantism and against the contemporary Catholic Church. By rooting the earliest phases of Christianity in Judaic and pagan contexts, Loisy shattered the Protestant myth of a pure first century Urchristentum and “normalized” the later pagan assimilations in the Catholic Church. By comparing Christianity to pagan religions and Judaism, he was able to substantiate his necessary assimilation theory and to introduce a perspective of relativity in the history of the Catholic Church. This relativity theory urged the early 20th century Church to continue its incessant renewal of the gospel and to reformulate its dogmas so that they were no longer at odds with modern science. This being said, we have seen that Loisy, too, was susceptible to religious adjustments of his historical argumentation, especially when he tried to link the creation of the Eucharist and the conception of the resurrection to the historical Jesus in order to establish direct continuity with the Church. Loisy’s book reveals a progressive concern for strictly historical argumentations, but, as for Harnack, the scientific study of religion was also explicitly a means to a higher end: it served to historically legitimize the supremacy of his own religious tradition. L’Évangile et l’Église constitutes a pivotal step in Loisy’s intellectual development because of its adoption and propagation of the comparative—genealogical and analogical—methods used in the contemporary academic history of reli-

 Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, 266.  Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, 263.

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gions. It should, however, be noted that the comparative argumentation was often concise and quite matter-of-factly, especially for pagan religion. In other words, Loisy rarely bothered to elaborate his views on the pagan infiltrations in early Christianity; time, place and nature of such interactions are never discussed. This absence is certainly to be explained by the envisioned broad readership of the book. Its main purpose was to demonstrate the importance of comparative religion on a general level, as the historical substantiation of theological evolutionism. Yet another explanation may be that Loisy was essentially trained as a biblical exegete and philologist.¹⁷² The textual-exegetical arguments exposed in L’Évangile et l’Église are a lot more confident and elaborate than the historical-comparative ones. Except for his one remark on sacrifice, we have not found any other instance of an anthropological-inspired universalizing perspective on Christianity. Is the omission of this kind of comparative framework connected to the hybrid religious-scientific nature of Loisy’s Modernist project? If the idea of Christianity’s interrelation to Judaism and paganism has disastrous consequences for its presumed originality, this is a fortiori the case when Christianity is included in a universal comparative paradigm. We see three possible explanations for Loisy’s omission: (1) the idea of universal laws of evolution indeed implied too much relativism with regard to Christianity, even for Loisy; (2) he had scientific objections and thought that the model of universal analogy had a more limited hermeneutical value than the genealogical framework; or (3) we are dealing with a strategic omission, meaning that Loisy did believe in the scientific value of this type of comparativism, but chose not to explore it in L’Évangile et l’Église in order not to hurt Catholic feelings more than he had done already by his theory of assimilation. A closer look at his private and pseudonymous writings can help us to determine which one(s) of these options is (are) the most valid.

1.4 History of Religion or History of Religions? The Essais and the Firmin Article “La Religion d’Israël” Alfred Loisy extracted L’Évangile et l’Église, sometimes verbatim, from the historical chapters of the vast theological-philosophical-historical synthesis he had written in Neuilly.¹⁷³ The Essais include a total of five historical chapters: La re From Loisy’s correspondence with Cumont we know that his knowledge of Greco-Roman religion was rather limited before the start of his career at the Collège de France. See infra, chapter 4 (4.2).  For a first introduction to the Neuilly Essais, see supra, introduction.

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ligion d’Israël; Jésus-Christ; L’Évangile et l’Église; L’Église et le dogme chrétien; and L’Évangile et le culte catholique. L’Évangile et l’Église is based on the latter four. Overall, Loisy’s historiography of Christianity is fairly consistent in both texts. Scholarship by Harvey Hill and by Rosanna Ciappa has shown that the most substantial difference concerns Jesus’ Judaism.¹⁷⁴ In the few years between writing the Essais and L’Évangile et l’Église, Loisy clearly developed a more radical historical criticism, which especially disclosed itself in the greater level of importance attached to Jewish eschatology in his analysis of Jesus’ gospel.¹⁷⁵ Hill has furthermore demonstrated that this change in historical views went hand in hand with a far more strict division of theology and history. In the Essais, the lines between historical and theological arguments are indeed often non-existing or vague.¹⁷⁶ The progressive distinction coincides with Loisy’s changing scholarly ambitions after his entrance at the École pratique in 1900. Rather than entering into the minutiae of the differences between L’Évangile et l’Église and the Essais, we will instead focus on the illuminating comparative argumentation in the first “historical” chapter of the Essais: “La religion d’Israël.” While the content of the last four historical chapters was integrated into L’Évangile et l’Église, this first chapter was meant to be published (in three parts) in the series of pseudonymous Firmin articles. In the end, only the first section of this long chapter got published (1900), because Cardinal Richard condemned the article and the Revue du clergé français stopped the publication of the following two parts.¹⁷⁷ Loisy thereafter decided to publish the entire chapter as an individual volume, La Religion d’Israël (1901) which he only distributed privately.¹⁷⁸ Of the six articles that were finally published in the “Firmin” series, the first five are philosophical demonstrations of Loisy’s theory of religion, while the final article “La

 For an excellent comparison of the Essais and Loisy’s EE, see Hill, “Loisy’s L’Évangile et l’Église in light of the ‘Essais’,” and Ciappa, “La réforme du régime intellectuel de l’Église catholique,” 574– 585.  In the Essais Loisy gave a far more moral interpretation of Jesus’ kingdom, which made his analysis much more similar to Harnack’s: Hill, “Loisy’s L’Évangile et l’Église in light of the ‘Essais’,” 82– 83.  Hill, “Loisy’s L’Évangile et l’Église in light of the ‘Essais’,” 78 – 80.  Alfred Loisy, “La religion d’Israël,” Revue du clergé français 15 octobre (1900): 337– 363. On the condemnation of the article by Richard, and its importance for Loisy’s later problems with the Index (1903): Claus Arnold, “Le cas Loisy devant les Congrégations romaines de l’Index et de l’Inquisition (1893 – 1903),” in La Censure d’Alfred Loisy, eds. Arnold and Losito, 20 – 30.  As pointed out by Morrow, “Alfred Loisy’s Developmental Approach to Scripture,” 325 – 326, the first edition of the book La Religion d’Israël (1900), which was the unaltered chapter of the Essais, is very different from the second edition (1908), which is actually a completely new book.

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religion d’Israël” exposed the corresponding historical and exegetical methodology.¹⁷⁹ This Firmin article is the unaltered version of the first section of the chapter in the Essais. ¹⁸⁰ Although Loisy knew he would be easily recognized as the author of the Firmin articles, “La religion d’Israël” is definitely another type of text than L’Évangile et l’Église. It is a more free and less strategic expression of his thought, and it adopts a historical-methodological focus which is virtually absent in the latter volume. The article allows a more direct access to the theoretical views on comparative religion that were implicitly underpinning the volume. But before discussing this article, we should mention that the Neuilly Essais and related Firmin articles were the result of Loisy’s ambition to develop a Catholic science de la religion that could meet the standards of the science laïque, and served as the intellectual pillar for the modernization of the Church and as an apology against Liberal-Protestant attacks.¹⁸¹ The Essais reflect his attempt to turn relativity into the founding principle of a general philosophy of religion, which applied the ideas of evolutionism and of relativity to all aspects of Christianity, including the cult and the ecclesiastical institution itself, and to all periods of Christianity, including its Judaic ancestor. Extensive research of Loisy’s Modernist philosophy has shown that it was indebted to the Catholic theologian John Henry Newman (1801– 1890), who had been especially interested in the development of doctrine.¹⁸² Loisy especially wanted to take Newman’s theological notion of development to a higher, more historically substantiated level. In his Essais, he insisted on the necessity for Catholic scholars to gain deeper knowledge on the history of ancient religions, on the original meaning of sacrifice, on the “fonds primitif” of Christianity, etc., in other words, about all the issues debated in the contemporary academic discipline of history of religions.¹⁸³ To convincingly substantiate the principle of relativity, he argued, the historical out-

 Jeffrey Morrow has studied Loisy’s exegetical argumentation in “La religion d’Israël” in the aforementioned paper “Alfred Loisy’s Developmental Approach to Scripture.”  Ciappa, “La réforme du régime intellectuel de l’Église catholique,” 568. We will quote from the chapter from the Essais on the following pages.  Here nourished by Harnack’s Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte (1885 – 1890), Auguste Sabatier’s Esquisse d’une philosophie de la religion d’après la psychologie et l’histoire (1897), and Julius Wellhausen’s Israelitische und jüdische Geschichte (1894). On the anti-Liberal-Protestant perspective of the Essais, Ciappa, “La réforme du régime intellectuel de l’Église catholique,” 558 – 565.  For a nuanced account of Loisy’s relationship to Newman, and a comprehensive overview of the vast literature on the subject, see Morrow, Alfred Loisy & Modern Biblical Studies, 133 – 142.  Loisy, La Crise de la foi, 76 and 80. This part of the Essais has been published as A. Firmin, “Le développement chrétien d’après le Cardinal Newman,” Revue du clergé français 1 décembre (1898): 5 – 20, and has been translated in Talar, Prelude to the Modernist Crisis, 3 – 16.

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look should indeed be large. Do the Essais (and the published pseudonymous equivalents) reveal a Loisy who was ready to do history of religions, instead of history of (Christian) religion? The answer is yes and no. The Essais show that for Loisy, the necessary adoption of a larger historical scope was first and foremost tantamount to the extension of the chronological frame within the study of Christianity. This means that he stuck to the study of Judeo-Christian tradition, but argued for tracing its history all the way back to its prehistorical beginnings. Christianity, Loisy explained, was a development out of post-exilic Judaism, which in turn stemmed from prophetic Judaism, which itself had its origins in primitive Jahwism, which had developed out of the religion of the patriarchs, which had its roots in the religion of prehistoric humanity: On aura étendu plus expressément qu’il [Newman, my remark] n’a fait et appliqué plus en détail à toute l’histoire de la religion depuis le commencement ce principe du développement qu’il a surtout appliqué à l’histoire du christianisme, mais qui est la clef de tout pour le passé de la religion, et la meilleure garantie de son avenir, qui est applicable à l’Évangile par rapport au judaïsme, et à la religion mosaïque par rapport à ce qui a précédé. Car le christianisme est, en un sens très vrai, un développement du judaïsme postexilien, lequel est un développement du iahvéisme prophétique, lequel est un développement du iahvéisme primitif, lequel est un développement de la religion patriarcale, laquelle a ses origines dans la religion de l’humanité préhistorique. Dans ce développement bien des fois millénaire le plus sort du moins, comme il arrive dans tout développement vital, sous l’influence d’une force cachée qui se révèle à nous par son action. Cette force est divine, disons surnaturelle, car elle ne se rattache pas dans notre conception au même ordre d’activité que la force, divine aussi et non moins mystérieuse qui préside au mouvement de l’univers et au développement de la vie dans le monde…¹⁸⁴

While Newman himself had limited his scope to Christianity, Loisy was convinced that his developmental theology was the interpretation key for the entire religious past, as well as the best guarantee for the future of religion. This development, as he significantly added, was the result of the supernatural action of a well-hidden divine force operative in history. It is very meaningful that throughout the Essais, Loisy consistently spoke of histoire de la religion and not of histoire des religions. This in itself is an indication of the fact that Loisy’s vertical-chronological extension of the historical scope was not be accompanied by a horizontal expansion. Comparisons with non-Judeo-Christian religions were important to Loisy in so far as they helped him to identify pagan assimilations in the Judeo-pagan tradition, and, thus, to

 Loisy, La Crise de la foi, 81.

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historically attest evolution. But comparative religion did not, or only rarely, serve to uncover an analogy between the evolution of Christianity and the historical development of other religions which were not necessarily chronologically and geographically related to Christianity or Judaism. The quote above illustrates particularly well how the Essais paradoxically reveal an argumentation which is at the same time more scientific and more religious than the one in L’Évangile et l’Église. More scientific because Loisy pushed his evolutionary theory to the utmost limit by establishing continuity between primitive religion at the earliest stages of humanity and Christianity. Clearly, he thought it wise to suppress any reference to the “religion of prehistoric humanity” in L’Évangile et l’Église. On the other hand, his religious discourse is much more pronounced in the Essais. ¹⁸⁵ In L’Évangile et l’Église the motor behind the “necessary” historical evolution was vaguely indicated as a “spirit.” The Essais show that we should not consider this religious intrusion in Loisy’s scientific discourse as a strategic accommodation to the Catholic Church so as to help it digest his Modernist program. At the time of writing, Loisy genuinely believed in divine intervention in history. To account for what thus seems to be a genuine opposition between science and faith in his thought, we should draw attention to the complex psychological implications of his progressively critical scholarship. This psychology is a common feature among Catholic Modernist scholars who tried to reconcile their critical findings with their faith and with their membership of the Roman Catholic Church.¹⁸⁶ The conclusions of their critical scholarship contradicted everything  Note the difference, though, between the Essais and the corresponding Firmin article “Le développement chrétien d’après le Cardinal Newman.” See the English translation in Talar, Prelude to the Modernist Crisis, 9: “In order to allow the theory of development its proper amplitude by extending the historical base without which it would be nothing, its principle needs to be more explicitly drawn out and applied, in greater detail than was done by Newman himself, to the whole of the history of religion since the origins of humanity. This principle, which he applied mainly to the history of Christianity in relation to the Gospel, also applies to the Gospel in relation to Judaism and to the Mosaic religion in relation to what preceded it. For Christianity is in a very true sense a development from postexilic Judaism, which is a development from the religion of the prophets, which is a development from primitive Mosaic Yahwism, which is a development from the religion of the patriarchs, which had its beginnings in the religion of prehistoric humanity. The great moments of revelation which mark the different phases of this development do not upset its continuity […].” On the question of continuity—discontinuity, see also infra, chapters 3 to 5.  See especially C.J.T. Talar, “The Faith of a Rationalist. Prosper Alfaric on Christian Origins,” in Lannoy and Praet, eds., ‘Between crazy mythologists and stupid theologians,’ in preparation: “For any number of Modernists, particularly in France, one may construct a template, tracking their evolution from pious childhood through seminary formation; from initial tensions between

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they had been taught to believe since at young age. Coming to terms with such ground shaking scientific conclusions, implied a thorough reconsideration of one’s religious identity and this was very rarely a matter of swift, clear-cut transformations. The growing scientificity of Loisy’s comparative ideas ran parallel to his progressive emancipation from the Catholic Church. This emancipation was a long process which was significantly accelerated by his disappointment about the Church’s systematic rejection of his reform program, and, as we will see in chapter 5, by World War I. Loisy extensively discussed the question of primitive religion in the first section of his Neuilly chapter/Firmin article “La religion d’Israël.” His quest for the most primitive stage of Judaism naturally compelled him to address the question of a universalizing anthropological approach to religion. Had there been a universal primitive religion at the dawn of humanity, and if so, why not extend the universality to the later development from that shared origin? Loisy gave extensive thought to these questions. The Essais show that the single sentence in L’Évangile et l’Église about the potential universality of sacrifice conceptions, was not just a stray thought but the result of careful consideration. The late 19th and early 20th century academic study of the history of religions developed a whole spectrum of theories on laws of religious development. Loisy decided to focus his attention on the one he had found in August Sabatier’s Esquisse d’une philosophie de la religion d’après la psychologie et l’histoire (1897), the book which he had also discussed in several other parts of his Essais. ¹⁸⁷ Sabatier (1839 – 1901) held the chair in ancient Christian literature at the École pratique (for which Loisy would apply in 1901).¹⁸⁸ He was a Liberal-Protestant philosopher and theologian with a distinct openness toward comparative religion.¹⁸⁹

traditional belief and modern scholarship to attempts to resolve the challenges posed by critical exegesis, critical philosophy, or modern democracy; through erosion of faith to final unbelief. While details vary with each individual, the overall trajectory is applicable.”  And in the corresponding Firmin articles, Talar, Prelude to the Modernist Crisis, xvi.  On Auguste Sabatier, Bernard Reymond, Auguste Sabatier et le procès théologique de l’autorité (Lausanne: l’Age d’Homme, 1976), especially 61 ff., for his evolutionism; Id., Auguste Sabatier: un théologien à l’air libre 1839 – 1901 (Genève: Labor et Fides, 2011); Forni Rosa, The Hermeneutical Question, 5 – 24 (Chapter “The Liberal Evolutionism of Auguste Sabatier”). For an introduction into Sabatier’s Liberal-Protestant religious views, see Bernard M.G. Reardon, Religious Thought in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 208 – 210.  Sabatier was, however, a fierce advocate of the conservation of the faculties in Protestant theology at the State Universities: Laplanche, La Crise de l’origine, 127. Sabatier’s religious-theological ideas were close to Harnack’s (as also pointed out by Reardon, Liberal Protestantism, 50), but his openness toward comparative religion was distinctly different.

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Sabatier’s evolutionary model relies on a distinction between the mythological (paganism), the dogmatic (Catholicism and Orthodox Protestantism), and the final psychological-spiritual stage of religion, which in his view is closest to the psychological experience religion actually is.¹⁹⁰ These stages of progressive development further break down into a number of sub-stages.¹⁹¹ In his analysis of Sabatier’s ideas, Loisy especially focused on the development of the conceptualization of the divine, which Sabatier schematized as follows: (1) religion originates in fetishist animism; (2) the spirits become autonomous beings and they are structured in polytheistic systems; (3) the power of the leader of the tribe, and later, of the nation, is reflected in the supreme god who holds the highest position in the pantheon. Gradually polytheism evolves toward monolatry; (4a) the monotheism of the Indo-European family is morally perfected by the philosophers, but it can never compete with (4b) the truly moral monotheism which was developed by the prophets of Israel.¹⁹² The one thing Loisy appreciated about this and similar evolutionary schemes is that they allow historians to impose some hypothetical structure on the mass of heterogeneous historical evidence.¹⁹³ But other than that, he felt that their usefulness was extremely limited. His objections can be categorized into two groups: (a) general objections which basically apply to any historical model of universal religious evolution, and (b) specific objections to the scheme proposed by Sabatier. To start with (a), Loisy was clearly bothered by the universality claim and the corresponding postulate of fundamental unity of human behavior and thought. He allowed for some degree of psychological unity, but this was limited to “l’homme primitive.”¹⁹⁴ With Sabatier (and Victorian anthropologist Edward B. Tylor) Loisy readily acknowledged that the origins of religion were universally animistic, but he strongly opposed the idea of a universal law of evolution. Such generalizing theories, he explained, are detrimen-

 Sabatier exposed his ideas on the history of religions in chapter 4 “Le développement religieux de l’humanité,” of his Esquisse d’une philosophie de la religion d’après la psychologie et l’histoire (Paris: Fischbacher, 1897), 103 – 136. He discussed the lines of development thematically: first the gradual expansion of the geographic frame (tribal, national, universal), then the progressive development of the conception of the divine (animism, polytheism, monotheism), finally the development of rituals with focus on the spiritualization of prayer. For Sabatier’s views on prayer as the most important form of cult, and his dissension with the sociological school see Donald A. Nielsen, “Auguste Sabatier and the Durkheimians on the Scientific Study of Religion,” Sociological Analysis 48 (1987): 283 – 301.  Reymond, Auguste Sabatier et le procès théologique de l’autorité, 69.  Sabatier, Esquisse d’une philosophie de la religion, 120 – 123.  Loisy, La Crise de la foi, 127.  Loisy, La Crise de la foi, 93.

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tal to the factual complexity and heterogeneity of historical reality. Instead, Loisy asserted, religions follow distinct individual courses of development. This particular course of development is determined by their interaction with other religions, or the lack thereof. The Essais show that, at this point of his intellectual trajectory, Loisy’s thought on religious change is essentially diffusionist. Each “race” has its own specific religious features; when religious agents migrate, these features travel along and mingle, causing religious change. For the religion of the “ancient Semites” Loisy used a typifying discourse which explicitly relied on Renan (“La race sémitique a eu le don d’intuition profonde, de passion ardente, de volonté tenace […]”¹⁹⁵), but he rejected the Renanian subordination of the intuitive, passionate, tenacious “Semitic spirit” to the “Aryan genius.”¹⁹⁶ In this context, it is interesting to point to a feature of Loisy’s Évangile et l’Église which has hitherto remained unmentioned. When discussing the differences between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, Loisy lapsed into a pronounced nationalist discourse: “In Rome, and in the Latin countries, religion is readily conceived as a discipline and a social duty. For the German races, it is a principle of inner life […].”¹⁹⁷ Such a nationalist-ideological approach to the history of Christianity may help us to understand the completely unbridgeable divide between Harnack and Loisy during WWI, which will be discussed in the final chapter (5.1.1).

 Loisy, La Crise de la foi, 131.  Loisy, La Crise de la foi, 131– 132. The wide use of racial theories and approaches in late 19th and early 20th century European historiography of ancient religions has been the subject of extensive scholarship. Among many excellent studies see: Christhard Hoffmann, Juden und Judentum im Werk Deutscher Althistoriker des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Leiden: Brill, 1988); Hayim Lapin and Dale B. Martin, eds., Jews, antiquity and the nineteenth-century imagination (Bethesda: Penn State University Press, 2003); Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus. Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 27ff; Suzanne Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire. Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Paul Lawrence Rose, “Renan versus Gobineau: Semitism and Antisemitism, Ancient Races and Modern Liberal Nations,” History of European Ideas 39 (2013): 528 – 540; Eline Scheerlinck, Danny Praet, and Sarah Rey, “Race and Religious Transformations in Rome. Franz Cumont and Contemporaries on the Oriental Religions,” Historia. Zeitschrift für alte Geschichte 65, 2 (2016): 220 – 243; Amos Morris-Reich and Dirk Rupnow, eds., Ideas of ‘Raceʼ in the History of the Humanities (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). On Renan, see: Robert D. Priest, “Ernest Renanʼs Race Problem,” The Historical Journal 58 (2015): 309 – 330.  Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, 201. This nationalist discourse is an integral part of Loisy’s anti-Protestantism, see page 162: “Had there been any actual autonomy of the individual Churches, Christianity would have been completely submerged in superstition and Germanic feudalism.”

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Loisy’s second critique of Sabatier’s evolutionary framework concerned the underpinning idea of a linear and systematic progressive evolution. Loisy certainly didn’t deny that religious history was a history of progress, but he did assert that only the Judeo-Christian tradition displayed a regular line of progress. As for the non-Judeo-Christian religions, there were “various influences” which accelerated religious progress in one given people, but slowed down or even destroyed progress in another. Although people were at times driven to downright folly because of “moral, intellectual or physical deficiencies,” Loisy also asserted that mankind always had “a sense of what was true and what was good,” allowing it to eventually develop or adopt “a pure” religion like Christianity.¹⁹⁸ Thirdly and perhaps most importantly, the “Religion d’Israël” chapter shows that Loisy struggled with the tension between innovation and tradition he found lingering in the evolutionary multi-phased schemes at use in the history of religions. The compartmentalization of religion in different types, which correspond to stages in the overall religious evolution of mankind, presented a major problem to his conception of evolution in terms of “organic growth” and “continuity.”¹⁹⁹ Between the phases in those models of development Loisy perceived fault lines, which implied that, when a religion enters a new phase, something of the previous phase is irrevocably lost. The mere suggestion of discontinuity and rupture in history made models with successive stages of evolution completely unsuitable for his own intellectual project. To accept this intellectual frame was to reject the uninterrupted continuity between the original gospel of Jesus and the Catholic Church. And to reject this continuity was to give up the principal argument for the necessary modernization of that Church. We will see that long after Loisy’s excommunication, the tension between continuity and discontinuity in the history of religions remained a focal point of his comparative work. Loisy’s “continuity view” ran totally counter to that of the Liberal-Protestant leaders of the Fifth Section of the École pratique. ²⁰⁰ Ivan Strenski has rightly pointed out that Albert Réville was a real advocate of “a non-transitive or discontinuous view of historical change,” a view shared by his son and successor at the

 Loisy, La Crise de la foi, 128.  Loisy, La Crise de la foi, 127.  Albert Réville, Prolégomènes de l’histoire des religions (Paris: Fischbacher, 1886), 71: “Il est un facteur qui pourrait très bien expliquer la plupart de ces traits communs, sinon tous […]. Ce facteur, beaucoup trop négligé, c’est l’unité de l’esprit humain s’appliquant à résoudre les mêmes questions avec les mêmes éléments de solution.”

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Collège de France, Jean Réville.²⁰¹ Still, it would be wrong to oppose Loisy’s view to the entire section, because not all of its Liberal-Protestant members were in favor of universalizing paradigms to study the history of religions. Maurice Vernes for instance adopted a very skeptical attitude toward the approach of the Révilles.²⁰² And his skepticism was shared by several other protagonists of the academic history of religions, like the ancient mystery cult specialists Jules Toutain and Franz Cumont, who concurred in favoring Vernes’s historical-empiricist “stick to the sources” method.²⁰³ Once again, it is important to emphasize that what really made Loisy different from all these aforementioned scholars, was the recurrent infiltration of a distinct and explicit theological-supernatural discourse in his historical argumentation. At the end of his discussion of primitive Judaism, he for instance added that nothing was more helpful to understand the unique supernatural development of Judaism than to compare this religion with contemporary pagan cults. In a first phase, these religions showed striking similarities, but these gradually disappeared: what came to full force and fruition in Judaism, was suffocated (“étouffés”) by myth and liturgy in pagan cults. Rien n’aide mieux à concevoir le développement surnaturel de la religion israélite, que cet examen d’institutions qui touchent à leur origine à un état de la pensée religieuse très analogue à celui dont témoignent les cultes païens. La distinction s’affermit et grandit entre la religion israélite et les religions païennes par la force et l’accroissement extraordinaire que prennent en Israël certains germes qui, dans les cultes païens, sont restés étouffés sous la tradition mythologique et liturgique. Dans la religion israélite, ils ont modifié la tradition, ils en ont renouvelé l’esprit, en attendant qu’ils fussent assez puissants pour en laisser

 Ivan Strenski, “Durkheim, Judaism and the Afterlife,” in Reappraising Durkheim for the Study and Teaching of Religion Today, eds. Thomas A. Idinopulos and Brian C. Wilson (Leiden–Boston–Köln: Brill, 2002), 122– 123.  On Vernes’s methodological breach with the Révilles, see Strenski, “The Ironies of Fin-deSiècle Rebellions,” 162– 165.  The fact remains, however, that they, too, imposed a philosophical-ideological scheme on their historical narrative. On Cumont’s Hegelian philosophy of religion, see Praet, “Oriental Religions and the Conversion of the Roman Empire,” 294– 295; and Danny Praet, “Franz Cumont, the Oriental Religions, and Christianity in the Roman Empire: A Hegelian View on the Evolution of Religion, Politics, and Science,” Papers of the Nineteenth-Century Theology Group AAR XLII (2011): 133 – 158. For Toutain, see Julien Cazenave, “Le ‘mystère Toutain’ à la lumière de sa contribution au Dictionnaire des antiquités grecques et romaines,” Anabases 4 (2006): 197– 203. Toutain’s rejection of the comparative method is abundantly clear from his later text: “L’histoire des religions de la Grèce et de Rome au début du XXe siècle,” Revue de synthèse historique 20 (1910): 73 – 100.

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tomber les symboles vieillis, après s’être concentrés dans l’Évangile et vivifiés au souffle de Jésus.²⁰⁴

Loisy’s claims about the singularity of each religious evolution find their origin in his view that a supernatural force was at work in Judaism, which prepared it for giving birth to Christianity and leaving behind its own outdated symbols. This force remained dormant in pagan religions.²⁰⁵ As for the more specific criticism of Sabatier’s animism-polytheism-monotheism scheme, Loisy heavily opposed Sabatier’s reversal of the traditional Urmonotheismus theory. Clearly, he had problems to accept the logical consequences of the by him acknowledged animistic origins of religion, i. e. that Judaic monotheism had developed out of polytheism. Loisy adjusted this picture by explaining that the religion of Israel showed very early signs of a primitive form of monotheism and always contained the “seed” of the conception of an almighty god. At first, there must have been multiple spirits, but the polytheistic nature of the primitive Israelite religion was not a “real and practiced polytheism,”²⁰⁶ it was instead an “animism neutralized in one sovereign spirit.”²⁰⁷ According to Loisy, the development of polytheism in ancient pagan religions was primarily generated by a mix of civilizations. An isolated tribal religion like that of the Israelites managed to stay clear from such mixtures.²⁰⁸ Against Sabatier (and likeminded historians of religions), Loisy furthermore argued that polytheistic religions can never truly develop into monotheism.²⁰⁹ Polytheism remains polytheism until it is replaced by Christian monotheism. To conclude this discussion of the “Religion d’Israël” chapter, we briefly want to return to Loisy’s ideas on primitive sacrifice. In L’Évangile et l’Église we caught a glimpse of his openness toward an anthropological approach to sacrifice. The “Religion d’Israël” text shows that Loisy was indeed thinking of Robertson Smith’s theory on totemism when he formulated this suggestion, and this was also noticed by Salomon Reinach who greatly admired the Scottish

 Loisy, La Crise de la foi, 141– 142.  For a teleological reading of Judaic history, see especially Loisy, La Crise de la foi, 162– 163 (“Le judaïsme a connu son immense destin historique par le christianisme”).  Loisy, La Crise de la foi, 129.  Loisy, La Crise de la foi, 145.  Loisy, La Crise de la foi, 129.  Interestingly, Sabatier himself had made a distinction between the monotheism which developed the Indo-European religions and the superior moralist monotheism of the Semites. Sabatier, Esquisse d’une philosophie de la religion, 122.

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Old Testament scholar.²¹⁰ We have seen that Loisy insisted against his LiberalProtestant opponents that religion is a social institution, consolidated in the collective performance of rites which establish a “communion” between the community and the worshipped god. Robertson Smith provided Loisy with the perfect scientific foundation of these ideas. Robertson Smith had equally insisted on the dominant position of sacrificial ritual in ancient religions, and his theory on totemism underlined the social function of sacrifice. In our fourth chapter we will discuss Loisy’s intellectual relationship with Robertson Smith in more detail, and especially focus on the very different religious views which underpinned their scientific theories of sacrifice.²¹¹ With regard to Loisy’s comparative views on Christian ritual, there is just one last difference between the Essais and L’Évangile et l’Église which deserves our attention. In the latter work Loisy never explained the origins of the Eucharist. He only referred to the “communion” interpretation when discussing the later development of the beliefs attached to the ritual. In the pseudonymous Essais, he explicitly wrote that Jesus had continued an existing ritual of sharing bread and wine, which was perfectly analogous to other ancient oriental religions and based on the same idea of communion.²¹² All in all, we can say that the question “Is Loisy ready to do history of religions” calls for a nuanced answer. While Loisy’s argumentation against Sabatier’s model certainly reveals the intention to protect the distinctness of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the analysis of the Essais has also uncovered his highly consistent emphasis on Christianity’s comparability, his acceptance of contemporary theories on animism and totemism, and his willingness to apply

 Loisy, La Crise de la foi, 136: “L’idée fondamentale du sacrifice apparaît encore assez clairement dans les anciens textes: une victime de choix, une victime sainte sert à fonder ou à raffermir la société vivante du dieu et de ses fidèles, moyennant la participation à une même chair sacrée, qui est censée contenir la vie divine, commune au dieu de la tribu et à ses membres. D’où que vienne cette persuasion, qu’elle se rattache plus ou moins à ce qu’on a appelé le totémisme, à l’idée que le dieu ancêtre a la forme d’une espèce animale dans laquelle il est comme incarné, ou bien à une autre façon, à une façon nécessairement assez analogue, de concevoir le rapport de la vie animale avec la vie divine et la vie humaine, il paraît évident que telle est la signification originelle du sacrifice ; une communion de vie divine par l’immolation d’une victime, identifiée en quelque façon au Dieu lui-même et que s’incorporent les fidèles avec le dieu.” When Reinach wrote to Loisy to congratulate him on his condemned Firmin article, he pointed to Loisy’s unnamed source of inspiration: “Vous trahissez l’influence de cet admirable Robertson Smith.” See the letter of Reinach to Loisy, s.d., BnF, NAF 15660, f° 241.  For Loisy’s intellectual relation to Robertson Smith, see infra, chapter 4 (4.3.2) and 5 (5.3.1.2); for Loisy and the Durkheimians, see infra, chapter 3 (3.3) and 5 (5.3.1.3).  Loisy, La Crise de la foi, 187.

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them to Judaism and Christianity. Methodologically speaking, Loisy had become a very close ally of the French institutionalized history of religions. Why, then, did he resign from the École pratique in 1904?

1.5 The Consequences for Loisy’s Position at the École pratique We have seen that the Catholic Church grimly accepted Loisy’s integration in the École pratique as conférencier libre in 1900. Students of the Institut catholique were discouraged by local hierarchies to attend Loisy’s course starting from March 1901, but his local superior Cardinal Richard did not intervene in the content of the course.²¹³ The attitude of the Church changed in 1903 when it put L’Évangile et l’Église on the Index. Loisy’s book was officially condemned by the Holy Office on December 16th, 1903, together with four other volumes: La Religion d’Israël, Études évangéliques, Autour d’un petit livre, and Le Quatrième Évangile. As a result, there was an instant multiplication of Loisy’s audience at École pratique, so much so that the classroom simply became too small to fit all curious listeners.²¹⁴ In 1904 Loisy resigned from the École and completely disappeared from public life.²¹⁵ His resignation was the result of his negotiations with Rome about his submission to the decision of the Inquisition, and was most probably intended to avoid excommunication. In this final section of our chapter on Loisy’s Modernist career, we briefly discuss the reactions of his Liberal-Protestant colleagues at the École to this resignation.²¹⁶ Loisy’s correspondence with these scholars shows that he carefully strategized this exit. After its condemnation by the Church, L’Évangile et l’Église came to symbolize Loisy’s affirmation of the superior scientific study of religion propagated by the Third Republic. But with the impending law on the separation

 In his Mémoires, II, 19 Loisy explained that Richard had someone following Loisy’s classes and reporting about them to him. The information was transmitted to Rome.  Loisy, Mémoires, II, 369.  He moved to the French countryside, and stayed in a cottage provided by the Thureau-Dangin family, with whose members Loisy was close; Émile Goichot, Alfred Loisy et ses amis (Paris, Cerf: 2002), 78 – 79. See also chapter 2.  The different phases in Loisy’s relations to Rome between 1903 and his final excommunication in 1908 have been identified sufficiently by Loisy himself and in modern research on the documents of the Office: Claus Arnold, “Loisy, la congrégation de l’Index et le Saint-Office (1900 – 1908),” in Alfred Loisy cent ans après. Autour d’un petit livre, eds. François Laplanche, Ilaria Biagioli, and Claude Langlois (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 61– 68. On Loisy’s submission in 1904, see Houtin and Sartiaux, Alfred Loisy, 117– 127.

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of State and Church (1905), the academic position of Loisy became untenable when he showed no signs of wanting to leave the Church after his condemnation of 1903.²¹⁷ No scientific and personal appreciation for Loisy could prevent that there was wide apprehension among the protagonists of the Fifth Section over the enormous conflict of interest raised by Loisy’s attitude. To fully grasp the reactions towards Loisy’s final resignation in 1904, it is important to mention that the anti-scientific climate in the Catholic Church had in fact been straining the relations between the Modernist scholars and the institutionalized Sciences religieuses since the late 1890s. It is true that the Church waited until 1907 to issue the anti-Modernist documents that decreed the full stop of these collaborations. Pius X’s encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis (1907), for example, formally forbade priests to follow courses at secular universities for which there was an “alternative” at a Catholic institution.²¹⁸ Henceforth, priests also needed the explicit permission of their superiors when they wanted to attend a conference²¹⁹ and to assume an editorship of a scientific journal. But in reality, many of the collaborations between the Catholic and the secular scientific worlds had stopped well before 1907. Since the final years of Leo XIII’s pontificate, “Modernist”²²⁰ priests had become increasingly cautious. The history of the Revue d’Histoire et de Littérature Religieuses testifies to the growing anxiety among ecclesiastics to collaborate on the journal. From previous scholarship we know that its anonymous director, Paul Lejay,²²¹ was having more and more trouble to find ecclesiastical collaborators and strategically asked non-ecclesiastics like Franz Cumont for contributions of a more “technical” character in order

 Loisy’s actions were the subject of much attention in the contemporary press, and there was wide speculation over his submission. Houtin and Sartiaux, Alfred Loisy, 119 – 120.  Pascendi dominici gregis, §49, URL: http://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-x/en/encyclicals/ documents/hf_p-x_enc_19070908_pascendi-dominici-gregis.html.  Pascendi dominici gregis, § 54: “At Congresses of this kind, which can only be held after permission in writing has been obtained in due time and for each case, it shall not be lawful for priests of other dioceses to take part without the written permission of their Ordinary.”  “Modernist” avant la lettre, since the term “Modernism” only gained currency among Italian bishops around 1905 (although it existed before): see William L. Portier, Divided Friends. Portraits of the Roman Catholic Modernist Crisis in the Unites States (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2013), 19. On the problems this term presents, C.J.T. Talar, The Modernist as Philosopher. Selected Writings of Marcel Hébert (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2011), 21.  On the role of Lejay in the RHLR, Lannoy, “‘Envoyez-nous votre taurobole’.”

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to divert the attention of the Curia from the articles of ecclesiastical collaborators.²²² Yet another example of the forced divide between Catholic scholars of religion and their non-Catholic colleagues is the absence of Catholic priests from the first international Congrès d’histoire des religions which was held in Paris in 1900.²²³ On January 20th, 1899 Jean Réville, who was the secretary of the conference,²²⁴ wrote a letter to Loisy in which he expressed his regret over the fact that Loisy followed the decision of the Rector of the Institut catholique in Toulouse, Pierre Batiffol, to decline the invitation to form part of the organizing committee of the Congrès. Paris-Auteuil 4, Villa de la Réunion 20 janvier 1899 Monsieur, J’ai le vif regret de vous annoncer que M. l’abbé Batiffol, recteur de l’Institut Catholique de Toulouse, ne croit pas pouvoir faire partie du Comité d’organisation du Congrès international d’histoire des religions en 1900. Ce qui double mon regret et celui de mes collègues, c’est que d’après la conversation que j’ai eu l’honneur d’avoir avec vous, le refus de M. Batiffol entraîne aussi le vôtre. Je vous serais bien obligé néanmoins de me confirmer encore vos intentions définitives. Je n’abandonne pas encore l’espoir que vous consentiez à faire partie du Comité. Sur le terrain tout scientifique où nous nous sommes placés je ne vois pas quelles raisons de conscience pourraient retenir des membres du clergé catholique de s’associer à notre entreprise. Je serais désolé qu’ils s’abstinssent systématiquement. Maintenant que le Congrès est décidé et s’annonce déjà comme devant réussir, il me semble qu’il y aurait tout intérêt à ce que les savants appartenant au clergé ne s’en excluent pas eux-mêmes. Je garde donc l’espoir qu’il y en aura qui seront disposés à entrer dans notre Comité et que ceux-là mêmes qui ne croiraient pas pouvoir s’associer à l’organisation du Congrès, y prendront part néanmoins comme adhérents, soit en présentant quelque rapport scientifique, soit en prenant part aux délibérations. […] Veuillez agréer, Monsieur, l’expression de mes sentiments distingués et dévoués, Jean Réville²²⁵

 On Lejay’s correspondence to Franz Cumont, see Lannoy, “‘Envoyez-nous votre taurobole’,” 13 – 15.  On the first history of religions congress, see Arie L. Molendijk, “Les premiers congrès d’histoire des religions ou comment faire de la religion un objet de science,” Revue germanique internationale 12 (2010): 91– 103.  His father Albert Réville was the president. The congress was entirely organized by the Fifth Section of the EPHE: Actes du premier congrès international d’histoire des religions (Paris: Leroux, 1901) (in two volumes), i–ii.  Jean Réville to Loisy, January 20, 1899, BnF, NAF 15661, f° 69 – 70.

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Clearly, Jean Réville had great trouble imagining the difficult situation of the Catholic clergy, when he asked what “conscientious objections” Catholic priests could possibly have against the purely scientific meeting that was the Congrès d’histoire des religions. Unable to grasp the full consequences of the hostile climate in which Catholics like Loisy worked, the Liberal-Protestant leaders of the Fifth Section stared at their Catholic-ecclesiastic colleagues across a gulf of complete incomprehension. In the end, neither the list of the conference committee members, nor the list of the conference participants included the names of Loisy, or of any other French priest.²²⁶ In a similar vein, the fear for the anti-scientific intransigency of the ecclesiastic authorities also put a stop to all intra-Catholic discussions about the modernization of Catholic science. The year 1900 marked the end of the Congrès scientifiques internationaux des catholiques, with the last meeting being held in Munich in that same year.²²⁷ Louis Duchesne, who was going to organize the new meeting (in Rome nota bene), decided that a new conference was no longer desirable. After the condemnation of his work in December 1903, Loisy first formulated two half-hearted submissions which were instantly rejected by Rome.²²⁸ Finally, on February 28, 1904 he wrote a letter to Pius X in which he affirmed: “Je veux vivre et mourir dans la communion de l’Église Catholique.”²²⁹ In this letter, Loisy announced that he would resign from the École pratique and refrain from publishing the results of his ongoing research, for the “pacification des esprits.” This argument of “appeasing the minds” was also the reason mentioned in Loisy’s letter of resignation to the director of the Fifth Section, Albert Réville, on March 27, 1904.²³⁰ It is quite interesting to compare these pieces of information with a letter Maurice Vernes wrote to Loisy in November 1907. This letter is a reply to a lost letter in which Loisy had clearly rebuked Vernes for having inadequately said that his former resignation for the sake of peace (“la paix des esprits”) was an act of weakness (“défaillance”). After reading Loisy’s letter, Vernes withdrew this negative evaluation. His letter also explained how his former judgment had been the result of his deep dissappointment with the departure of a collea-

 Actes du premier congrès international, vii–xxi.  On the history of these five conferences (1888, 1891, 1894, 1897, 1900), which were strictly controlled by Rome, Houtin, La Question biblique, 126 – 130; Hill, The Politics of Modernism, 53 – 55; Beretta, “Les Congrès scientifiques internationaux des catholiques (1888 – 1900).” For their context see also supra, introduction.  Loisy, Mémoires, II, 367.  Letter quoted in Mémoires, II, 351.  Letter preserved at BnF, NAF 15645, f° 372, and quoted in Mémoires, II, 376.

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gue whom he himself had earlier (and unsuccessfully) proposed for appointment to the chair of Sabatier in 1901. Paris, 21 novembre 1907 248, Bard Raspail (14e) Monsieur et cher ancien collègue, Je me félicite d’avoir provoqué vos explications par l’emploi du mot défaillance que je retire volontiers, comme je reviens sur la façon sévère dont j’avais apprécié votre séparation d’avec nous. C’est que je m’étais constitué votre soutien et en quelque mesure—d’une façon toute spontanée—votre garant. J’avais proposé votre candidature à la succession de notre collègue Aug. Sabatier pour la critique du Nouveau Testament, candidature que ne trouva d’écho qu’auprès de Jean Réville. Votre retraite se produisait sans explication—car, dans la courte lettre qui nous fut communiquée par feu Albert Réville, vous visiez, si j’ai bonne mémoire, deux points: 1° votre crainte de ne pas trouver chez nous les conditions assurées d’un enseignement calme comme il convient à la sentence, 2° votre désir de contribuer à la paix des esprits—avait [sic] provoqué chez la plupart une pénible surprise, mais chez moi, tout spécialement, un sentiment de déception et la sensation d’une défection. Vos explications modifient mon appréciation de l’époque et je m’empresse de vous le dire. Quant à la situation présente du groupe de savants en tête duquel vous marchez, je la compare soit à celle des réformateurs du 16e siècle dans leur première phase, soit à celle des protestants libéraux (de 1850 à 1865) ; ni les uns ni les autres n’ont réalisé ce qu’ils se proposaient de faire et, néanmoins, les uns comme les autres ont abouti en une réelle mesure et ont changé l’orientation courante. […] Maurice Vernes PS Il va sans dire que je tiendrai toute communication pour strictement personnelle.

Aside from the interesting parallel Vernes drew between the Catholic Modernists and the (Liberal) Protestants (it is very doubtful whether Loisy agreed on this point), this letter shows that Loisy’s final submission to the Catholic Church and his corresponding resignation met with wide disappointment from those scholars who had been supporting Loisy’s integration into the Fifth Section. Vernes (and Albert Réville²³¹) believed that Loisy had given up his position because he was threatened with excommunication. Vernes’s letter makes us won-

 Compare with the interview with Albert Réville, published in Le Temps of April 6th, 1904, in which Réville also drew a parallel with Protestant ancestors: “Que l’abbé Loisy ait capitulé devant une excommunication, je ne peux pas m’en étonner outre mesure, car, à maintes reprises, il m’a répété qu’il était très attaché à l’Église catholique. Rappelez-vous que Calvin a longtemps hésité à se séparer de Rome parce que la majesté de l’Église lui en imposait.”

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der, then, what additional information Loisy gave that made him change his mind. The Mémoires may help us to ascertain the content of Loisy’s original letter to Vernes. Loisy here explained that his submission to the Church had everything to do with his deteriorating health at that time.²³² But the second factor, Loisy retrospectively admitted in 1931, was the earlier failure to obtain Sabatier’s chair in 1901. Not submitting to the Church, he knew, meant being excommunicated. And this excommunication could have urged the École pratique to offer him the permanent position which he believed he should have rightfully obtained years ago.²³³ It is quite reasonable to surmise that Loisy didn’t mention this second—and probably most important—reason in his letter to Vernes. In that case, Vernes likely wouldn’t have withdrawn his accusation so easily. Despite the fact that Loisy’s scientific views bore a much closer similarity to those of the Liberal-Protestant scholars of the École pratique, it seems that his grudge against this institution prevailed over his resentment toward a profoundly anti-scientific Catholic Church. This attitude was going to change drastically in 1908.

 Loisy, Mémoires, II, 347: “il m’apparut, le 27 [February, the day before he wrote his letter of submission, my comment], comme dans un éclair, que, l’excommunication intervenant, ma santé ne me permettrait pas de continuer, au milieu du bruit qui ne manquerait pas d’en résulter, mes travaux et mon enseignement.”  Loisy, Mémoires, II, 348.

2 An Intricate Piece of Institutional History: The Elections for the Chair of History of Religions at the Collège de France (1908 – 1909) After a long series of strenuous condemnations of Loisy’s work, the Catholic Church promulgated the sentence of his vitandus excommunication on March 7, 1908, thus ending his (almost) thirty years as a priest.¹ At that moment, Loisy was 51 years old. One year before the excommunication, he had decided to get settled in Ceffonds, a little town in the Champagne region near his place of birth. Here, he had planned to spend the few years he personally believed he had left, surrounded by his family and continuing his research as an independent scholar.² Loisy explained this decision by referring to his poor health, which had suffered from the last stressful years in the Church. There was, however, another reason which he omitted, probably intentionally, in his autobiography. With his Catholic past, it would be very difficult (to put it mildly) for him to pursue a secular academic career in Third Republic France. In early 20th century France, academic positions that were exclusively devoted to the non-confessional study of religion, were scarce. There was the chair of history of religions at the Collège de France, and the professorships at the Fifth Section of the École pratique. But at most French state universities, the study of religion was integrated in other disciplines such as philology, within the Facultés des Lettres. ³ The chair at the Collège (1879) and the Section des Sciences religieuses (°1886) had been created in the context of the laicization program of the

 The vitandus excommunication is one of the gravest forms of ecclesiastical condemnation, which entails that Catholics are to avoid the excommunicated priest. Several other Modernists (e. g., the Italian historian of Christianity Ernesto Buonaiuti and the French historian of Christian dogma Joseph Turmel) were declared vitandi. Loisy’s final excommunication was the result of Pius’s X Motu proprio of November 18, 1907, which “excommunicated anyone who disagreed with Lamentabili or Pascendi.” Hill, The Politics of Modernism, 201; and Loisy’s Mémoires, II, 618 – 651.  Loisy, Mémoires, III, 5.  Émile and Odile Poulat, “Le développement institutionnel des sciences religieuses en France,” Archives de sociologie des religions 21(1966): 29; Michel Meslin, “Histoire ou science des religions: le cas français,” in Modern Societies & the Science of Religions. Studies in Honour of Lammert Leertouwer, ed. Gerard A. Wiegers (Leiden—Boston—Köln: Brill, 2002), 42– 43. For the wider European context in which the French institutionalization should be situated: see Tworuschka, Einführung, 97– 107 for a general overview, and the references provided in the introduction to our book. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110584356-006

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young Third Republic.⁴ The shifts in academia had been an integral part of encompassing reforms of the French public education system, and were considered a forceful instrument for the governing republicans to eviscerate the power of the clergy over French society.⁵ Detailed scholarship by Patrick Cabanel and Ivan Strenski on the first—almost all Liberal-Protestant—holders of the newly created positions has conclusively shown how very closely the academic study of religion and republican ideology were interconnected.⁶ The present chapter aims to complement their studies. It will try to demonstrate through the study of Loisy’s appointment to the Collège de France in 1909, that three decades after its institutionalization, the academic discipline continued to be inextricably intertwined with French politics, society, and culture. In the years after the promulgation of the law on the Separation of Churches and State (1905), it was not exactly written in the stars that a scholar with a clerical past—even if that scholar had been excommunicated—would be able to obtain a position in religious studies at either the Collège or the École. ⁷ To this major obstacle we should add two other complicating factors which likely prevented Loisy from entering secular academia in 1908. The first was a matter of bad timing: the chair at the Collège had only recently been assigned to Jean Réville (1854– 1908), who had become the successor of his father Albert in 1907. As for the École pratique, Loisy had seriously compromised the possibility of building himself a future there, when he had left—not without antagonizing some of his colleagues—to avoid excommunication in 1904.⁸ On May 6, 1908, the untimely death of Jean Réville suddenly opened up at least the theoretical possibility for Loisy to enter both institutions. Réville had  See infra, chapter 3, for bibliographical references on the educational politics of the Third Republic.  At the heart of the education reform lay the famous Jules Ferry Laws (1881– 1882) on public primary education (the école laïque), which was made compulsory, free, and secular. In the following chapter, we will come back to the prominent positions academic historians of religions took up in the debates over the organization of religious education in the école laïque.  Patrick Cabanel, “L’institutionnalisation des ‘sciences religieuses’ en France (1879 – 1908). Une entreprise protestante?,” Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français 140 (1994): 33 – 80; Id., Le Dieu de la République. Aux sources protestantes de la laïcité (1860 – 1900) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2003); Ivan Strenski, Contesting Sacrifice: Religion, Nationalism and Social Thought (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002); Id., Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice (Leiden: Brill, 2003). For the prominence of Liberal-Protestant scholars of religion in the institutionalized discipline, see infra (2.2.3).  We will be able to further illustrate this by the “Scheil Affair” of 1905, when the then Minister of Education refused to ratify the appointment of the Dominican assyriologist Jean-Vincent Scheil to the CF. See 2.1.  See supra, chapter 1 (1.5).

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combined his position at the Collège with a professorship in Histoire des origines chrétiennes at the École. ⁹ The two newly vacant chairs seemed, at least from a scientific point of view, a perfect fit for the now unemployed Loisy. In his Mémoires, Loisy retrospectively revealed his thoughts on the two vacancies. Self-conscious as he was, he foresaw the possibility of being invited by scholars who had previously sympathized with his Modernist struggle, to apply for the chairs.¹⁰ Vindictively, he ruled out the École. ¹¹ For Loisy, that ship had sailed. A future at the Collège, by contrast, seemed to be a far more welcome prospect. Behind his personal objection that the position would likely be detrimental to his health, one easily uncovers that he very much liked the idea of obtaining a chair at this prestigious institution.¹² But he was realistic about his chances of success. He knew that right from the moment this chair became vacant, the then already famous anthropologist Marcel Mauss was the widely acknowledged favorite.¹³ But much in contrast to what Loisy, Mauss himself, and many others thought, it was not Mauss but Loisy who finally got appointed in March 1909. The present chapter is devoted to the question as to how Loisy’s and Mauss’s fortunes could change so drastically in the course of their polemical election campaigns between June 1908 and March 1909. To find the answer to this question, we will need to focus our attention on the deep embeddedness of the academic discipline of history of religions within early 20th century French society and politics. This chapter will show that behind the overall quite poor scientific argumentations lurked not only a complex set of mutually interrelated religious, social, and political viewpoints, but probably also peculiar sentiments towards Marcel Mauss’s Jewish background. Together, these beliefs, values, and worldviews constitute the historical background for the scientific debates (on magic, myth, and sacrifice) we will study in the following three chapters. The French holders of the positions in the academic study of religions usually were highly influential voices in the then topical public debates on the po-

 Furthermore, Jean Réville had been the director of the Revue de l’histoire des religions, a position now also left vacant (it would be filled by René Dussaud and Paul Alphandéry). François Laplanche, “La méthode historique et l’histoire des religions; les orientations de la Revue de l’histoire des religions,” in La Tradition française en sciences religieuses, ed. Michel Despland (Québec: Université Laval, 1980), 85 – 105.  Loisy, Mémoires, III, 33.  Loisy gave other reasons why he didn’t want to apply for the position at the EPHE, such as the substantial teaching load and the fact that the salary would be insufficient to rent an apartment in Paris and, at the same time, keep his house in Ceffonds. Loisy, Mémoires, III, 35.  Loisy, Mémoires, III, 36.  The different reasons why the appointment of Mauss seemed assured, will be discussed in detail infra, 2.2.

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sition of religion in the rapidly secularizing French society. One issue which had been a recurrent subject of discussion ever since the Jules Ferry Laws had banned religion from public primary education, was the question as to whether some form of religious instruction should be reintroduced in the école laïque. After the Separation Law of 1905, these discussions rapidly regained topicality. Among various (academic and non-academic, left and right) intellectual milieus, it was well known that the future holder of the chair at the Collège would have a privileged access to those debates. Our next chapter will discuss the debates about the “vulgarization” of scientific knowledge on religion in more detail, but in this second chapter we already need to bear in mind that the debates over the elections at the Collège ran parallel to those about the école laïque. It is safe to say that a lot more was at stake in 1908 than just appointing the scholar with the best scientific credentials.

2.1 On the Sources to Study the Elections and on the Election Procedures at the Collège Loisy’s election and election campaign are exceptionally well documented. First of all, there is his own account of the events in his Mémoires. ¹⁴ This autobiography is, however, a problematic source of information. Loisy’s supposedly factual survey diligently minimized the role of those to whom he really owed his election, and it excluded crucial information on the deeper motives for their support. Secondly, the archives of the Collège preserve a file with reports on the internal secret elections, press clippings, official correspondence between the candidates for the chair etc. These documents have been investigated in preceding studies by Pierre Burger, Pierre-Eugène Leroy, and Rafael Faraco Benthien.¹⁵ Their pub-

 Loisy, Mémoires, III, 33 – 88 (Chapter XLII “Candidature professorale” and Chapter XLIII “L’élection).  Pierre Burger, “Alfred Loisy au Collège de France (1909 – 1932),” paper presented during the conference “Histoire et vérité: Alfred Loisy à l’épreuve du temps,” Châlons en Champagne, 2003, consulted online, URL: http://alfred.loisy.free.fr/pdf/pierre_burger_2003.pdf; Pierre-Eugène Leroy, “Loisy et le Collège de France. Les conditions de l’élection, les circonstances de la leçon d’ouverture,” Revue de Théologie et de Philosophie 142 (2010): 105 – 122; Rafael Faraco Benthien, “Les durkheimiens et le Collège de France (1897– 1918),” Revue européenne des sciences sociales 53 (2015): 191– 218. The reference of this file, which I have not studied, is: CF, Archive Loisy, Alfred, Carton n° 33, 16 CDF 268. A description of its contents (titles of press articles, general content of letters, etc.) can be found online, via Salamandre (https://salamandre.college-defrance.fr/), the search engine for the CF archives. To complete this bibliography of scholarship on Loisy’s appointment, I also refer to Marcel Fournier, Marcel Mauss. A Biography (Princeton:

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lications have shown which professors of the Collège supported Loisy’s application,¹⁶ and clarified the course of the internal elections: no less than five (!) election rounds were needed for Loisy to obtain the necessary majority.¹⁷ Furthermore, they have revealed the difficult circumstances in which Loisy gave his Leçon d’ouverture, which the militant fractions (the so-called Camelots du roi) of the Action française threatened to disturb,¹⁸ and finally, their studies of press articles have allowed to conclude that republican anticlericalism played a major role in this significant episode of French institutional history.¹⁹ But in addition to Loisy’s Mémoires and the documents at the Collège archives, an extensive amount of correspondence on the elections has also been preserved.²⁰ Importantly, we do not only have Loisy’s own letters to and from relevant contemporaries, but also the correspondence between scholars, politicians, and other interested parties about the events. This large corpus of letters has hitherto remained almost completely unexplored. The correspondence between Loisy and his “support team” constitutes the basis for the new analysis offered in this chapter. From the studies of Burger, Leroy and Benthien, it has become clear that the Marquise Arconati-Visconti, a very powerful personality in the French intellectual life of that time, played an important role during the elections.²¹ We know that she mobilized the high ranking members of her influential Parisian salon to get Loisy appointed, but the questions as to how this tentacular network tried to control the elections, and why it became so involved, remain to be answered.²² At present, historical and sociological scholarship on Arconati’s salon is still at an early stage.²³ No conclusive information is as yet Princeton University Press, 2006), especially Chapter 9 (A Heated Battle at the Collège de France), 149 – 167, although only pages 152– 154 are devoted to the elections.  Burger, “Alfred Loisy au Collège de France,” 5 – 7.  Benthein, “Les Durkheimiens et le Collège de France,” 211– 212.  Leroy, “Loisy et le Collège de France,” 109 – 112.  For analyses of several press articles (which we will leave out of consideration), see especially Burger, “Alfred Loisy au Collège de France” (passim) and Leroy, “Loisy et le Collège de France,” 110 – 112.  We will identify these relevant correspondents infra, and provide all references to the correspondence files used in this chapter, when we’ll first mention them.  For the introduction of the Marquise and her intellectual salon, see infra, 2.3.  The most detailed analysis on Arconati’s involvement is given by Leroy, “Loisy et le Collège de France,” 114– 116.  A research project on Arconati’s salon was conducted at the University Jean Jaurès of Toulouse by Jan Nelis in 2017. In 2015, large parts of Arconati’s correspondence with Franz Cumont were scanned and transcribed by a team coordinated by Jan Nelis at Ghent University. In contrast to the well-studied salons of, for instance, Mme de Cavaillet or Mme Strauss, Arconati’s did not include famous artists or writers, which may explain why it has not received the same

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available about its range of influence, its modes of operation, the role of Arconati herself, and the common beliefs and values that linked its members. The present chapter hopes to partially fill this gap in our knowledge of the sociological context of the French religious studies. Until today, the Collège de France has remained a prestigious research institution which takes pride in its high scientific independence.²⁴ It has no permanent chairs for specific subjects of research, and it does not grant degrees of higher education. The courses are freely accessible to anyone interested, without prior subscription. Whenever a chair becomes vacant, the subject is put up for debate, meaning that the Collège has the institutional freedom to keep up with the most recent scientific innovations and to integrate new scientific disciplines.²⁵ The Administrateur is the general director who oversees the daily organization. In 1908, this position was held by Émile Levasseur, a liberal and a versatile scholar who worked in the fields of geography, history and economics.²⁶ The real power over the Collège, however, resides with the general Assembly which includes all incumbent professors. They normally determine the subjects of the vacant chairs, and decide to whom those chairs should be assigned. The usual election procedure is that the Assembly selects two candidates. The best candidate is proposed “en première ligne,” the second-best “en seconde ligne.”²⁷ After the secret internal elections, the Collège sends the reports on its deliberations and conclusions to the Ministère de l’Instruction publique. The Min-

scholarly attention. For an overview of the salons of the Third Republic, see Anne Martin-Fugier, Les Salons de la IIIe République. Art, littérature, politique (Paris: Librairie académique Perrin, 2003).  This short survey is based on: Benthien, “Les durkheimiens et le Collège de France,” 193 – 201; Collège de France, “Le Collège de France. Quelques données sur son histoire et son caractère propre,” Annuaire du Collège de France 109 (2008 – 2009), 59 – 71; Céline Surprenant, “Titulaire ou intitulé. Deux critères pour sélectionner les candidats au Collège de France,” in La Politique des chaires au Collège de France, ed. Wolf Feuerhahn (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2017), 147– 171; the short and instructive introduction of the election procedure in Lucy O’Meara, Roland Barthes at the Collège de France (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), 47. For the history of the CF, see Abel Lefranc, Histoire du Collège de France depuis ses origines jusqu’à la fin du Premier Empire (Paris: Hachette, 1893).  This freedom to integrate new scientific insights, also incorporating those developed outside of academia, was further enhanced by the fact that chair holders didn’t need to have a doctoral degree.  On this scholar, Pascal Clerc, “Émile Levasseur, un libéral en géographie,” L’Espace géographique 36 (2007): 79 – 92. For Levasseur’s role in the elections, see infra (2.3).  During the election, each candidate is verbally recommended by one or two incumbent professors of the CF. These presentations are followed by deliberations, which are concluded by the secret voting.

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istry then submits the names of the two selected candidates for approval to the relevant Académie of the Institut de France. Usually, this ratification is a formality. The appointment procedure is concluded by the formal signature of the Minister of Education, who, likewise, usually follows the proposition of the Collège. In light of Loisy’s election, however, it is important to underline that there have been notable exceptions to this normal procedure, where the Minister and/or the relevant Académie did not follow the decision of the Assembly. A noteworthy exception had happened only four years before: the “Affaire Scheil.”²⁸ In the turbulent year of 1905, the Collège voted on the new holder of the chair of Assyriology, which had been left vacant by Jules Oppert. The Dominican scholar Jean-Vincent Scheil, who was a worldwide authority in the field (especially known as the first editor and translator of the Hammurabi Codex), won the internal elections.²⁹ Charles Fossey, who held a chair in Assyriology at the École pratique, was selected “en seconde ligne.” The decision of the Collège was approved by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (of which Scheil was a member).³⁰ But immediately after the elections, several leading personalities of the anticlerical left started a vilification campaign against Scheil. They urged the then Minister of Education Jean-Baptiste Bienvenu-Martin of the anticlerical Parti républicain, radical et radical-socialiste not to ratify the decision, and instead appoint Fossey, who was known for his socialist sympathies and was affiliated with the sociological school of Émile Durkheim.³¹ One of the most conspicuous interventions in this very public polemic was the one of Georges Clemenceau, the radical republican who had been involved in the foundation of the Third Republic and would become Prime Minister the next year (1906 – 1909). In his article “Saint Dominique au Collège de France,” published in the radical republican newspaper L’Aurore, he fiercely attacked Scheil.³²

 On this affair, see also Benthien, “Les durkheimiens et le Collège de France,” 206 – 208.  For the pioneering work of Scheil in the field of Assyriology, see the note by Franz Cumont, who held Scheil’s work in high esteem: “Commémoration du Père Scheil,” Atti della Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeologia. Rendiconti XVII (1940 – 41): 1– 8. See p. 5 for a short reference to the affair at the CF, which Cumont found unjust. See also the longer article by Mario Roques, “Dernier hommage à la mémoire du regretté père Scheil,” CRAI (1940): 372– 385. We will see that Loisy heavily supported the government’s decision to reject Scheil, and emphatically dissociated his own candidature from that of Scheil, whom he considered “sécularisé pour la forme seulement.”  Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, “Séance du 29 décembre,” CRAI (1905): 794.  We will come back to the ideological and political orientations of this school in 2.2.1.4 and 2.2.3.  The article was published on the front page of L’Aurore, on December 30, 1905.

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The precedent of Scheil’s non-ratification did not forebode well for Loisy’s candidacy. The elections of 1909 took place under Clemenceau’s government. Moreover, there was little hope among Loisy’s supporters that the Académie des sciences morales et politiques, which was the one consulted for the chair of history of religions, would be on Loisy’s side. At that time, many members of this Académie had a relatively conservative political and religious profile.³³ The fears of Loisy’s supporters turned out to be justified, for the appointed committee of the Académie indeed refused to appoint Loisy, and instead proposed his two conservative rivals, George Foucart and Jules Toutain. But we will see that the then Minister of Education, Gaston Doumergue, had already been won for Loisy’s cause well before the Académie cast its vote. Most chairs at the Collège followed the aforementioned procedure of secret internal elections (first on the subject of the chair, then on the candidate), followed by ratification by the relevant Académie and the Minister of Education. There were, however, two types of chairs for which this procedure did not apply. The first was the chairs which were created by the government, and for which the government held the right to appoint the first holder by decree.³⁴ This had been the case for the chair of history of religions, which was created by the then Minister of Education Jules Ferry and assigned to Albert Réville. When the chair became vacant after Réville’s death in 1906, the normal procedure started to apply: the decision on its subject and its holder now fell under the authority of the general Assembly. This was not the case for the second type: the chairs funded by private individuals, who assigned them to a scholar of their own choice. Such chairs ceased to exist once the private funding stopped. Moreover, scholars who held a privately funded chair, did not have the right to vote in the Assembly. A notable example is the chair of “Histoire générale et méthode historique,” which the Marquise Arconati-Visconti instituted in 1906 for her close friend, the Liberal-Protestant historian Gabriel Monod, who was about to become an ardent supporter of Loisy.³⁵ For most scholars then, the most plausible way to enter the ranks of the Collège, was to wait for a vacancy and to hope that one could find sufficient support

 See 2.2.1 for the introduction of Loisy’s rivals. For the members of this committee, Académie des sciences morales et politiques, “Séance du 13 février,” Séances et travaux de l’Académie des Sciences morales et politiques (1909): 578 – 579.  The creation of such chairs was rare, as pointed out in Benthien, “Les durkheimiens et le Collège de France,” 197 (only five chairs between 1897 and 1918).  Pim den Boer, History as a Profession: The Study of History in France 1818 – 1914, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 288. See infra (2.3) for the relationship between Monod and Arconati, and for their involvement in Loisy’s appointment.

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among the incumbent professors. But internal support did not suffice. There were multiple factors—especially the support of influential academics from other institutions, of politicians, and even of powerful private persons like Arconati Visconi—who had a profound impact on the final outcome. Benthien was quite right in observing that the key to success was for the interested candidate to find the right balance between “naivety and immoderate ambition.”³⁶

2.2 The Complex Methodological and Historical Context Compared to the elections after the death of Albert Réville, the number of applicants for the chair of history of religions had more than doubled in 1908.³⁷ In addition to Loisy’s, the Collège received letters of application from the following scholars (in alphabetical order): Émile Amélineau, Albert Dufourcq, George Foucart, Marcel Mauss, Alexandre Moret, Eugène Revillout, Jules Toutain, and Maurice Vernes. In what follows, we will not discuss the candidacies of Egyptologists Émile Amélineau (1850 – 1915), Alexandre Moret (1868 – 1938), and Eugène Revillout (1843 – 1913), and of Albert Dufourcq (1872– 1952) who was a specialist of the history of Christianity. None of these four scholars was ever a threat to Loisy. His direct rivals were Mauss, Foucart, Toutain, and Vernes, who each stood for a specific methodological approach to the study of religion. The majority of the voters at the Collège, however, were non-specialists with little to no expertise in the field of religious studies. Many votes were motivated by personal sympathy for the ideological and religious backgrounds of the candidates.

2.2.1 Loisy’s Main Rivals³⁸ 2.2.1.1 George Foucart George Foucart (1865 – 1943) was an Egyptologist with a pronounced penchant for the comparative study of religions.³⁹ In the final stage of the election cam-

 Benthien, “Les durkheimiens et le Collège de France,” 197.  The applicants for the chair of history of religions in 1907 had been Jean Réville, Marcel Mauss, Maurice Vernes and George Foucart.  This concise overview of the major tendencies in the voting behavior at the CF is meant as an introduction to the analysis of the correspondence in the subsequent sections of this chapter. For an overview of the individual votes of each CF professor, see Burger, “Alfred Loisy au Collège de France,” 5 – 8; Fournier, Marcel Mauss. A Biography, 152– 153 (which, however, contains several factual errors on Loisy’s campaign); Loisy, Mémoires, III, 43 and passim. An interesting way to

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paign (early 1909), he published his controversial volume La Méthode comparative dans l’histoire des religions, in which he strongly defended his by then wellknown plea to take Egyptian religion as the absolute standard for any comparison in the history of religions. In his book, Foucart attacked the universalizing comparative methods developed by the contemporary anthropological and sociological schools. Except for his questionable and often criticized thesis that knowledge of the history of Egyptian religion leads to knowledge of the evolution of any other religion, Foucart’s underlying method was a relatively conservative one, in the sense that it first prescribed a traditional historical study of Egypt. Only in a second stage, these findings could be compared with findings from other disciplines such as anthropology.⁴⁰ Although many contemporary historians of religions were very skeptical of Foucart’s scholarship, he could count on a great deal of support. His candidature was supported by his father Paul Foucart who was the professor of Greek epigraphy at the Collège. The figure of Foucart senior accounts for the strange fact that George Foucart was the main candidate of the conservative Catholics of the Collège. Unlike his father, he didn’t have a conservative ideological profile. He was a socialist,⁴¹ and while his personal religious views remain unknown, it is clear that his theory on Egyptian religion being the starting point for the study of any religion—including Christianity—was a far stretch from the traditional Christian belief in the unique character of Christianity. But clearly, personal sympathies for Paul Foucart won the day among conservative Catholic voters, even at the time when the highly polarizing conflict of the Modernist crisis was raging through the Catholic Church.⁴² evaluate the changes in the course of the election campaign, is to compare the extensive forecasts included in the correspondence: see, for instance, the letters of Joseph Bédier to ArconatiVisconti, November 23, 1908, Sorbonne, MSVC 263, f° 64– 65, and January 30, 1908, f°68; Louis Havet to Loisy, November 23, 1908, BnF, NAF 15654, f° 292; and Loisy to Arconati-Visconti, November 22, 1908, BnF, NAF 15646, f° 4757.  Since 1903, Foucart taught Eastern history and religion at the university of Aix-en-Provence. His work has, as yet, not been the subject of detailed scholarship. Cumont’s highly nuanced reviews of the two editions of La Méthode comparative are helpful to evaluate the reception of this work among contemporaries: Franz Cumont, “C.r. Georges Foucart, La Méthode comparative dans l’histoire des religions,” RIB LII (1909): 32– 36 and “C.r. Georges Foucart, Histoire des religions et méthode comparative,” BAB (1913): 194– 98.  He explained this position extensively in the introduction to the second edition of La Méthode comparative (Paris: Picard, 1912), i – clxiv.  Loisy, Mémoires, III, 68 and 78.  Previous scholarship on the identities of the Collège professors between 1870 and 1914 has demonstrated that the majority was Catholic (going from highly conservative to determinedly liberal), and that the two main political orientations were conservative and liberal republicanism. The group of conservative Catholic voters was definitely not insignificant. See Benthien,

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2.2.1.2 Jules Toutain Much to the relief of Mauss, Vernes and Loisy, the conservative votes were divided between two candidates (of the same age): George Foucart and Jules Toutain (1865 – 1961).⁴³ Toutain was an expert in ancient Mediterranean religions (especially of North-Africa) and a well-respected archaeologist and epigraphist. He was also an authoritative voice in the contemporary debates over the spread of the so-called religions orientales (the term is F. Cumont’s) in the Roman Empire.⁴⁴ Formerly a member of the École française de Rome, he worked at the Fifth Section of the École at the time of the elections. Although Toutain was one of the translators of Frazer’s Golden Bough,⁴⁵ he had a traditional historicist methodological profile. He openly criticized the excesses of comparative methodology, but was carefully positive about “la nouvelle méthode historique,” which critically incorporated the new insights ethnologists, anthropologists and sociologists had been developing since the last decade of the 19th century.⁴⁶ Toutain’s personal worldviews and life are a mystery.⁴⁷ Loisy called him a socialist, but we have found no confirmation of this information.⁴⁸ From the combined perspective of methodology and ideology, it seems that he was commonly perceived as the most neutral candidate among those discussed in this overview. Toutain nevertheless became the favorite of a few conservative Catholics who had no sympathy for the Foucarts, and of some moderate Catholics who were wary of both Foucart and Loisy. Unlike Foucart and Mauss, he was never considered

“Les durkheimiens et le Collège de France,” 200 – 201; Christophe Charle and Eva Telkès, Les Professeurs du Collège de France (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1988).  See, for instance, Mauss’s letter to his family, quoted in Benthien, “Les durkheimiens et le Collège de France,” 210: “Toutain et Foucart ont 9 voix sûres. Ce sont les candidats réactionnaires. Heureusement qu’ils sont deux. Sans cela, si Toutain était seul, il aurait des chances de passer, bien qu’il soit un imbécile.” The same relief is expressed by Loisy, though without criticizing Toutain, in his Mémoires, III, 68.  Toutain was very critical of Cumont’s views: Corinne Bonnet, “L’empire et ses religions. Un regard actuel sur la polémique Cumont-Toutain concernant la diffusion des religions orientales,” in Die Religion des Imperium Romanum. Koine und Konfrontationen, eds. Hubert Cancik and Jörg Rüpke (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 55 – 74.  James G. Frazer, Le Rameau d’or: étude sur la magie et la religion, trans. R. Stiebel and Jules Toutain (Paris: Schleier Frères, 1903 – 1911), (3 vol.).  See Toutain’s strong statements in “L’histoire des religions de la Grèce et de Rome au début du XXe siècle.” See also Laplanche, “L’histoire des religions en France,” 627– 28.  The lack of information on his personal life and ideas is confirmed by Robert Schilling, “Jules Toutain (1865 – 1961),” Annuaire de l’École pratique des hautes études. Section des sciences religieuses 73 (1961– 62): 33 – 35 and by Cazenave, “Le ‘mystère Toutain’.” I thank Corinne Bonnet for the clarifications on the subject of Toutain’s personal life.  Loisy, Mémoires, III, 68.

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Loisy’s main rival, but, unexpectedly, he did become the candidate elected “en seconde ligne.”⁴⁹

2.2.1.3 Maurice Vernes Maurice Vernes (1845 – 1923) was the candidate of most Liberal Protestants at the Collège. This professor at the Fifth Section and founder of the Revue de l’histoire des religions, was an Old Testament scholar.⁵⁰ Strenski, Cabanel and Laplanche have all pointed to the fact that Vernes decisively rejected the introduction of any form of “philosophy” in history of religions.⁵¹ He promoted a strictly anti-theoretical approach, and heavily criticized his Liberal-Protestant colleagues at the École pratique (especially the Révilles) for adopting the then popular evolutionary philosophies of history in their scholarship. Although Vernes definitely had an interest in wider methodological questions related to the history of religions,⁵² he basically offered little guarantees that he would be studying anything other than ancient Judaism. This position was problematic for a chair that had been created with the explicit aim to break the privileged position of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Since its first two Liberal-Protestant holders, Albert and Jean Réville, had focused mainly on the history of Christianity,⁵³ many a liberal voter believed it was time to take the chair out of Liberal-Protestant hands.

 We will discuss infra (2.5) how this could happen.  See supra (1.5) for a first introduction of Vernes.  On Vernes’s method to study religion, and his position within French Liberal-Protestant scholarship of that time: Strenski, Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice, 110 – 15, Patrick Cabanel, “Un fils prodigue du protestantisme: Maurice Vernes (1845 – 1923) et l’histoire des religions,” Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire du protestantisme français 149, 3 (2003): 481– 509. See also Laplanche, “La méthode historique et l’histoire des religions.”  See, for instance, Maurice Vernes, L’Histoire des religions. Son esprit, sa méthode et ses divisions. Son enseignement en France et à l’étranger (Paris: Leroux, 1887). On Vernes and the école laïque: infra (3.4).  Loisy strategically discussed their focus on Christian history in his Leçon d’ouverture du cours d’histoire des religions au Collège de France (Paris: Nourry, 1909), 7– 20, with the clear intention to underline the originality of his own approach. See infra (3.1) for a detailed analysis of this inaugural speech.

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2.2.1.4 Marcel Mauss This brings us to Loisy’s main rival, Marcel Mauss (1872– 1950).⁵⁴ This youngest candidate (36 years old) was Vernes’s and Toutain’s colleague at the Fifth Section. He had been a candidate for the chair at the Collège in 1907, but out of respect for Jean Réville, who then was his head of department at the École pratique, Mauss had explicitly asked to be considered only for the elections “en seconde ligne,” which he won.⁵⁵ Then as now, the famous anthropologist and ethnologist is well-known as one of the main proponents of the sociological school of his uncle Émile Durkheim. From a methodological perspective, this entails that his approach was diametrically opposed to that of his colleagues Vernes and Toutain. His approach to religion was non-historical, theoretical, and comparative. In more ways than one, we will see (2.2.3), Mauss’s methodology of religion was a reaction against the typically Liberal-Protestant historicist approach. The methodological clash between historicism and sociology, and its underlying socio-political context are essential backdrops against which the elections of 1909 should be analyzed. In 1908, Mauss had already published his famous essays on sacrifice and magic with Hubert. Based on the scientific and ideological identities of the scholars who probably voted for Mauss, there seemed to have been several reasons (in different combinations and measures) why they did so. Mauss’s friends, Antoine Meillet (chair of “Grammaire comparée”), Charles Fossey (chair of “Philologie et Archéologie assyriennes”⁵⁶), and his “second uncle”⁵⁷ Sylvain Lévi (chair of “Langue et Littérature sanscrites”) had sympathy for the Année sociologique team. In addition, some of the so-called scientifiques, that is, the “hard science” scholars, felt that the sociological method would make for the most scientific and objective approach.⁵⁸ Another reason was sympathy for Mauss’s

 Modern research literature on Mauss and the school of Émile Durkheim is vast. For what follows here and in 2.2.3, I especially used Jean-François Bert, L’Atelier de Marcel Mauss. Un anthropologue paradoxal (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2012); Fournier, Marcel Mauss. A Biography; Jeffrey C. Alexander and Philip Smith, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Ivan Strenski, Durkheim and the Jews of France (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1997); Strenski, Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice.  Fournier, Marcel Mauss. A Biography, 150.  Fossey had been the rival of Père Scheil.  Fournier, Marcel Mauss. A Biography, 43.  For the perceived thematic and methodological affiliation between the sociologists and the “scientifiques,” see Gabriel Monod’s letter to Arconati-Visconti, of which she included a quote in her letter to Loisy of November 10, 1908, BnF, NAF 15646, f° 79: “Il ne me semble pas que Maus [sic] aie beaucoup de voix, mais il est pourtant possible qu’il rallie pas mal de scientifiques, la préhistoire touchant aux sciences naturelles.” In the next section (2.2.3) we will discuss the

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political opinions. As a student, he had been member of the Groupe des Étudiants Collectivistes, and later he became a militant member of the Parti Ouvrier Français, and of the Parti Ouvrier Socialiste Révolutionnaire. ⁵⁹ Socialists were a minority at the Collège,⁶⁰ but we will see that Mauss also got the progressive votes from center-left and left republican scholars who were not necessarily socialist, but who refused to vote for Loisy because of his Catholic background.⁶¹ Finally, there is also the complex issue of Mauss’s Jewishness, to which we will return later in this chapter (2.4.3.3). Jewish scholars constituted a minority at the Collège. We will see that Salomon Reinach, who had an enormous amount of influence on the elections, probably supported Mauss because he was a “coreligionnaire.” Moreover, especially after the traumatic Dreyfus Affair, support for Jewish scholars was not at all confined to scholars who were Jewish. On the other hand, we will see that anti-Semitic sentiment towards Mauss may have incited some scholars not to vote for him.

2.2.2 Loisy’s Scientific and Ideological Image in 1908 The reasons for Loisy’s appointment will be discussed in the following sections of this chapter, but, by way of introduction, we should discuss the common perception of Loisy at the time when he officially decided to enter the race in late May 1908. Opponents and sympathizers alike knew him as the defender of history against theological intrusions, but aside from being a strong advocate of historical criticism, Loisy didn’t propagate any exclusive method (unlike Mauss’s sociology or Vernes’s strict historicism). Furthermore, his earlier comparative work on ancient Judaism and Assyrian religion was virtually unknown among nonspecialized audiences. In his Mémoires, Loisy complained that multiple voters had objected that he was a specialist of biblical studies and early Christianity,

focus of Mauss on “primitive” religion, which served as the comparative basis for his general theory on the social construction of religion. For more information about the historicist profile of Monod and his involvement in Loisy’s campaign: 2.3 and 2.4.  Fournier, Marcel Mauss. A Biography, 4 and especially 25 ff., which also discusses Durkheim’s complex relationship with socialism. For the relationship between socialism and sociology, see infra 2.4.2.  An example of a socialist scholar who voted for Mauss was the professor of Labour History, Georges Renard.  Here, the best known example is Grégoire Wyrouboff, professor of history of science. Loisy, Mémoires, III, 44, and Fournier, Marcel Mauss. A Biography, 153.

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and of nothing more.⁶² To many, it seemed as if he was seeking to enter a field he was unfamiliar with and unqualified for. Another factor that influenced his scientific image, was the alleged connection between Loisy and French Liberal-Protestant scholarship of religion, which was acknowledged by the Liberal Protestants themselves,⁶³ in spite of Loisy’s frequent attacks on their individualistic and moralizing theories of religion. We know from our previous chapter that Loisy shared several views with the Révilles, but that their “historical truths” also showed unbridgeable differences.⁶⁴ In the present chapter, we need to put this more nuanced reality aside, and especially keep in mind that there was a perception that Loisy stood for the continuation of the tradition of the first two holders of the chair at the Collège, both thematically (early Christianity) and methodologically (an open-minded historicism). From a religious point of view, however, Loisy’s controversial image was very different from the aura of impartiality which irradiated from the Révilles (infra, 2.2.3.). Conservative Catholics abhorred the prospect of Loisy becoming their colleague, while several non-Catholic scholars who had previously had sympathy for his Modernist fight against the Catholic Church, now heavily doubted whether he would be able to study religion in a fully objective way. In a letter to the Marquise Arconati-Visconti of June 25, 1908 (written just some weeks after he had formally decided to apply), Loisy pointed out to her that it would be necessary to convince both the Right and the Left that he was neither an apologist nor an adversary of any religion. Peut-être aurait-elle [his candidacy, my remark] besoin de vaincre à droite et à gauche certains préjugés dont elle ne triomphera pas facilement. Il est assez évident qu’elle a un caractère purement scientifique, et que je ne suis l’apologiste ni l’adversaire d’aucune religion, à commencer par le catholicisme. Certains ont l’air de me prendre pour un théologien, provisoirement exclu de l’Église par une erreur de Pie X…⁶⁵

Loisy’s testimony referred to the insistent rumor that his excommunication was only provisional and that he would return to the Catholic Church the moment Pius X had died. In the course of the election campaign, this rumor popped up several times, presumably instigated by Loisy’s anticlerical opponents.

 Loisy, Mémoires, III, 44, where he defended himself: “Je suis orientaliste, assyriologue, et plus universel, en fait, que tous les autres candidats sans exception” (the emphasis is Loisy’s).  See chapter 1 (1.3.2) for the positive Liberal-Protestant reception of EE in France.  In anticipation of the following chapters on the scientific views Loisy developed during his time at the CF, it may be useful to point out that in many regards, the water between Loisy and the Liberal-Protestant scholars would continue to be very deep.  Loisy to Arconati, June 25, 1908, Sorbonne, MSVC 282, f° 4735.

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2.2.3 From Historicism to Sociology, and the Social Question in Early 20th Century France Based on the previous overview we can distinguish three main groups of voters: (1) the conservative Catholics voting for either Foucart or Toutain, (2) most Liberal Protestants preferring Maurice Vernes, and (3) a third, more heterogeneous group of center to center-left voters with a non-religious or liberal religious profile, who preferred either Loisy or Mauss. Precisely because Loisy and Mauss were mainly fishing in the same pool, it was their campaigns which clashed most radically. The letters of Loisy’s “campaign team” were not predominantly directed against Foucart, whose supporters surely were his most virulent opponents, but against Mauss. This being the case, it is essential to understand Mauss’s position within the academic study of religion of that time, and within contemporary French politics. Until this very day, a lot of scholarly attention is devoted to the historical and scientific context, the genesis, and the implications of the sociological method of religion which was developed by Durkheim, Mauss, Henri Hubert and other members of the Année sociologique. ⁶⁶ Modern research has shown that the break-through of sociology of religion in the first decade of the early 20th century posed a direct scientific threat to the hegemony of Liberal-Protestant historicism over the academic study of religion of that time.⁶⁷ The starting point for under-

 What follows is mainly based on the research of Patrick Cabanel and Ivan Strenski about the position of Mauss and Hubert within the 5th Section of the EPHE and their criticism of LiberalProtestant scholarship of religion. For the sake of completeness, it is important to mention that Durkheimian theory was not only a reaction against Liberal-Protestant religious studies, but also —in the adjacent fields of history and sociology—against Marxist historical materialism, which tended to reduce religion to economics. On this issue, see the interesting letter of Durkheim to Mauss, quoted by Marcel Fournier, “Les Formes élémentaires comme œuvre collective: les contributions d’Henri Hubert et de Marcel Mauss à la sociologie de la religion d’Émile Durkheim dans sa période avancée,” Canadian Journal of Sociology 39 (2014): 527: “[…] je le prévois et je l’espère, de l’Année sociologique va se dégager une théorie qui, exactement opposée au matérialisme historique si grossier et si simpliste, malgré sa tendance objectiviste, fera de la religion, et non plus de l’économie, la matrice des faits sociaux.” For an exhaustive bibliographical overview of scholarship on the Durkheim school, from the early 20th century until 2010, see Valeer Neckebrouck, Denken over religie. Antropologische theorie en godsdienst (Leuven: Universitaire Pers Leuven, 2011), 40 – 45 (note 32). See also the extensive bibliographies in the contributions to Masimo Borlandi, ed., Émile Durkheim: Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, un siècle après, special issue of L’année sociologique 62 (2012): 281– 521; and those to Erwan Dianteill, ed., Marcel Mauss. L’Anthropologie de l’un et du multiple (Paris, PUF, 2013).  Note that this methodological shift did not only take place in French religious studies, but also in several other European contexts. For a wider perspective, Volkhard Krech, “From Histori-

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standing why sociology was such a threat to Liberal-Protestant scholarship is, once again, the institutionalization of French religious studies in the 1880s.⁶⁸ There were strategic political reasons why the republican politician Jules Ferry appointed Albert Réville to the new chair of history of religions at the Collège: the scholar was an ardent defender of republican ideology, and his Liberal-Protestant identity could avert Catholic accusations that the chair served anti-religious goals. To these two crucial factors, a third one should be added. LiberalProtestant scholarship of religion conveyed worldviews which closely corresponded with those of the ruling republican elites on a deeper, sociological level. Even if the positivist “histoire historisante” of the Liberal Protestants heavily emphasized the necessity of strict objectivity, their reconstruction of the “historical truth” entailed a number of theologizing impositions on the “pure historical facts,” too.⁶⁹ Ivan Strenski instructively described the Liberal Protestants who dominated the French institutional study of religion (i. e. the Révilles, Vernes, and Auguste Sabatier), as the heirs of “that portion of the reformed tradition most influenced by a combination of Renaissance humanism and Enlightenment rationalism.”⁷⁰ They adopted a deistic interpretation of Christianity, and combined a highly individual spirituality with a strong awareness of individual moral responsibility. Their positions in public debates on religion were generally perceived to be fairly “neutral” by non-Protestant republicans, first of all because they showed an intimate connection with the rationalist free-thought and the humanistic positivism which were flourishing among the ruling republican, higher bourgeoisie.⁷¹ And secondly, because the individualistic undertone cism to Functionalism: The Rise of Scientific Approaches to Religions around 1900 and Their Socio-Cultural Context,” Numen 47, 3 (2000): 244– 265.  Loisy’s position towards sociology of religion is not discussed here: it will receive ample treatment in the third chapter on magic, and in the final chapter on sacrifice. His views took shape during the election campaign in 1908 – 1909. This is abundantly clear from his correspondence with Arconati-Visconti of 1908. See, e. g., his letter of December 11, 1908, BnF, NAF 15646, f° 4761: “Je travaille tranquillement, ébauchant un plan de cours sur l’origine de l’histoire des sacrifices dans les différents cultes. Cela ne manque pas d’intérêt. M.M. Hubert et Mauss ont publié sur ce sujet, en 1898, dans l’Année sociologique, une dissertation que je viens de lire.”  Strenski, Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice, 109 – 114.  Strenski, Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice, 80.  Liberal Protestantism was often considered as “a form of free thought touched with Christianity,” see Strenski, Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice, 82. It should be noted that French 19th century free-thought was, of course, not monolithic. There were two major positions towards religion: those who rejected religion as a fully superseded phenomenon, and those who were in favor of the development of a humanistic “foi laïque.” On this matter, Priest, The Gospel according to Renan, 195 – 6 and, especially, Jacqueline Lalouette, La Libre-pensée en France 1848 – 1940 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1997).

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of the Liberal-Protestant modes of thinking was compatible with this elite’s worldviews. Starting from the 1890s, however, the presupposed impartiality and universal validity of the typically Liberal-Protestant méthode historique met with increasing criticism. The late 19th century saw the rise of new methods to study religion, coming from new academic disciplines like psychology, anthropology, ethnology and sociology. The French Liberal Protestants showed some interest in psychology of religion—which was compatible with their own focus on religiosity, spirituality and individual piety—but were reluctant to adopt the other new methods. More often than not, these methods clashed with their own views on religion and on the history of religions.⁷² To take the example of Edward B. Tylor’s anthropology of religion, his theory on survivals argued that elements of lower cultural stages persisted in more advanced phases of development, and thus opposed the Liberal-Protestant focus on discontinuity in the evolution of religion. But the most direct attack on the typical Liberal-Protestant focus on individual belief and inner spirituality, came from the sociological school of Émile Durkheim.⁷³ While Durkheim himself worked at the Sorbonne (since 1902⁷⁴), two of his most important “lieutenants,” Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert, managed to get positions at the École pratique in the early 1900s.⁷⁵ The correspondence between Durkheim and his nephew shows that Durkheim advised Mauss to strategically disguise his methodological identity during his job interview with the Director of the Fifth Section, Albert Réville.⁷⁶ After his appointment, Mauss,

 For more extensive analyses, Cabanel, “L’Institutionnalisation des ‘sciences religieuses’,” 61– 7; and Strenski, Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice, 93 ff.  We will discuss sociological theory of religion in somewhat more detail in chapter 3 on magic, and chapter 5 on sacrifice. I here confine myself to those elements which are necessary to understand Loisy’s appointment.  Marcel Fournier, “Durkheim’s life and context: something new about Durkheim?,” in The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim, eds. Jeffrey C. Alexander and Philip Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 43.  For the intellectual relationship between Mauss and his “twin brother” Hubert: Fournier, Marcel Mauss. A Biography, 48. The term “lieutenants” is Cabanel’s, “L’Institutionnalisation des ‘sciences religieuses’,” 62.  Philippe Besnard and Marcel Fournier, eds., Émile Durkheim. Lettres à Marcel Mauss (Paris: PUF, 1998), 292– 293. For an English translation, see Strenski, Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice, 155: “Regarding your visit tomorrow with (Albert) Réville: just watch out for yourself! Don’t do anything which might surprise or upset the old man. And, forget about trying to win him over. The important thing is that you don’t give him any reason to think ill of you. Let him run the conversation, and don’t pressure him. You’re there so he can get to know you,

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assisted in this endeavor by Hubert,⁷⁷ began to openly attack the methods of his Liberal-Protestant colleagues and condemn their complete neglect of the inherently social nature of religion. According to the functionalist and demythologizing approach of the Durkheimians, religion is an abstraction of social and cultural realities in society. Instead of “vouloir exprimer d’emblée le contenu de la vie religieuse,” the school took interest in observable religious phenomena such as sacrifice in order to gain insight into the function and working of religion.⁷⁸ Another point of dissension with the Liberal Protestants was the study of the so-called religions of the “uncivilized peoples,” which had been integrated under this specific title in the program of the Fifth Section. Mauss—who took over this chair from Léon Marillier in 1901⁷⁹—deeply disagreed with the depreciative title and treatment of these religions. Following the example of his uncle, he regarded “primitive religions” (as they preferred to call them) as the ideal starting point for developing general theories about religion, and rejected the Liberal-Protestant reluctance to extend the research results on “primitives religion” to other religions, as euro-centric and crypto-Christian. But perhaps the most important methodological gulf between Liberal-Protestant and Durkheimian scholarship of religion, as Strenski pointed out, consisted in their very different ideas about the necessity of theory to understand religion.⁸⁰ Trained as philosophers, both Mauss and Durkheim developed a decisively theoretical approach to the study of religion, which strongly conflicted with the Liberal-Protestant veneration of positivist history. Among the first generation of French academic scholars of religion and among later scholars who followed the same historicizing models, sciences religieuses basically was the equivalent of histoire des religions. ⁸¹ To put the spotlight on a meta-historical theory was, in their eyes,

not so you can preach to him. It will get you nowhere if he knows exactly what you do, and what methods you employ.”  Henri Hubert had won the elections for the succession of Auguste Sabatier in 1901, for which Loisy had also been a candidate (see supra, chapter 1). Fournier, Marcel Mauss. A Biography, 87 for the strategies Mauss and Hubert together plotted to get Hubert appointed.  Cabanel, “L’Institutionnalisation des ‘sciences religieuses’,” 61 who quotes Émile Durkheim.  Fournier, Marcel Mauss. A Biography, 89 on the elections.  Strenski, Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice, 102 ff., and passim.  For the progressive importance of history in 19th century French religious studies, and the crucial role of Renan in this movement: Perrine Simon-Nahum, “L’histoire des religions en France autour de 1880,” Revue germanique internationale 17 (2002): 177– 192. For the Liberal-Protestant roots of the French term “sciences religieuses”: Émile Poulat, “L’institution des ‘sciences religieuses’,” in Cent ans de sciences religieuses en France, ed. Jean Baubérot (Paris: Cerf, 1987), 53 – 54. See also: Meslin, “Histoire ou science des religions: le cas français,” 41 on the French terminology, and Strenski, “The Ironies of Fin-de-Siècle Rebellions,” 159 – 179.

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nothing short of the beginning of the end of true science of religion. Later in this chapter, it will become clear that History (sic) was a central weapon by which Loisy’s partisans refuted Mauss. Behind the distinct methodologies of the Liberal Protestants and the Durkheimians also lurked divergent religious and ideological worldviews. A first crucial point was that the Durkheimians mainly were agnostics or atheists, although it should immediately be added that Durkheim and Mauss—who came from a conservative Jewish family and both broke away from Judaism at a young age — had complex relationships with their Jewish backgrounds.⁸² Secondly, the socio-political orientation of the school was very different. While most Liberal-Protestant scholars supported liberal republican parties, Durkheim, Mauss, and Hubert all sympathized—to various degrees—with socialism.⁸³ As for Mauss, it is interesting to quote the following sentence from Fournier’s biography: “He was one of the militant students who wished to deal ‘a fatal blow to the intellectual dictatorship of the bourgeoisie’.”⁸⁴ While it is unnecessary for our purposes to discuss the turbulent political history of early 20th century France in much detail, it is of paramount importance to mention that the first decade of this century was crucial for the rise of socialism. This was the time when the poignant problem of the profound social class inequality in French society entered the foreground of the political arena. Modern scholarship on the young Third Republic widely agrees that the enormous efforts of the ruling bourgeois elites to reduce clerical power were absolutely disproportionate to the poor measures they took to change the asymmetric power relations between social classes.⁸⁵ To be sure, primary education was now free and compulsory, but secondary and higher education remained very difficult, if not impossible, for lower social class groups to access.⁸⁶ In the first decades of the Third Republic, social and political power mostly remained in the hands of the higher bourgeoisie.⁸⁷

 We will return to Mauss’s Jewish background in 4.3 of this chapter, but the link between his scholarship of religion and his Jewish background lies beyond the scope of our analysis. On Durkheim’s relation to Judaism, see Fournier, “Durkheim’s Life and Context,” 46 – 48, and Ivan Strenski, Durkheim and the Jews of France. For Mauss, Fournier, Marcel Mauss. A Biography, 12, and 337: Judaism, for Mauss, was “a sense of belonging, a culture.”  We cannot enter into the details of the differences between the individual members of the school. Unlike Mauss, Émile Durkheim had a complex relation to socialism: Fournier, “Durkheim’s Life and Context,” 48 – 51.  Fournier, Marcel Mauss. A Biography, 34.  Jean-Marie Mayeur and Madeleine Rebérioux, The Third Republic From Its Origins to the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 153.  Mayeur and Rebérioux, The Third Republic, 88.

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Towards the end of the 19th century, the social question came to the forefront of the political agenda. Opposition against the governing moderate republicans mainly came from the radical republicans and from the different socialist parties which existed at that time.⁸⁸ The union of the republican anticlerical left was largely due to the deeply polarized political climate during the Dreyfus Affair, which temporarily minimized the ideological differences between socialists, radicals, and center-left moderates. In 1899, the left united in opposition against the governing moderate republicans, by establishing the so-called Bloc des Gauches. This Bloc comprised the radical republicans, under the lead of Émile Combes, the socialist parties, of whom Jean Jaurès was the leading man, and several other left-wing parties.⁸⁹ In 1902 the Bloc won the elections, and started its drastic anticlerical politics under Prime Minister Combes, which later culminated in the Separation Law of 1905. But in 1904, the socialist fractions withdrew from the Bloc, partially because of the still unsatisfactory social politics of the radicals, who procrastinated the reforms they had promised to implement. In 1905, Combes’s government fell, while the different socialist parties had meanwhile united in the Parti socialiste unifié, of which Mauss was a militant member.⁹⁰ Between 1906 and 1909, the radical republican cabinet of Georges Clemenceau was in charge. It was a time of intense social unrest with multiple strikes of the working classes and uproars of agrarian militants, which Clemenceau forcefully and violently suppressed. Profound disagreements about the legitimacy of the strikes (and on Clemenceau’s way of handling them) further opposed the once united socialists and radicals. It is certainly also in light of these social and political tensions that we need to analyze the elections for the vacant chair of history of religions in 1908 – 1909.

 On the social backgrounds of the republican politicians between 1880 and 1914: Harry W. Paul, From Knowledge to Power. The Rise of the Science Empire in France 1860 – 1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 26. On the longstanding socialist opposition against the “bourgeois Republic,” Robert Stuart, Marxism at Work. Ideology, Class and French Socialism during the Third Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 223 – 251.  For a concise introduction of the very complex socialist landscape in late 19th and early 20th century France: Mayeur and Rebérioux, The Third Republic, 137– 146, 219 – 220; Roger Magraw, France 1800 – 1914. A Social History (London–Edinburgh: Pearsons education, 2002), 104.  Mayeur and Rebérioux, The Third Republic, 214– 220.  Mayeur and Rebérioux, The Third Republic, 260.

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2.3 The Marquise Arconati-Visconti and Her Jeudistes ⁹¹ In his Mémoires Loisy insisted that he had not taken the initiative to run for the chair, but was invited to do so.⁹² Although there is little reason to believe his overall display of disinterestedness, his correspondence does confirm that he was invited by several professors of the Collège to be a candidate.⁹³ The first three invitations probably came from the Latinist Louis Havet, the historian of medieval literature Joseph Bédier, and the medieval historian Gabriel Monod.⁹⁴ Two other professors who quickly became involved in Loisy’s campaign, were the French literature expert Abel Lefranc and the Hispanist Alfred Morel-Fatio.

 The following two sections of this chapter (2.3 and 2.4) are based on my research of Loisy’s correspondence and of Arconati-Visconti’s correspondence (with Loisy and others). The letters received by Loisy are preserved at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Papiers Loisy). There are several hundreds of letters of Arconati to Loisy (and vice versa): BnF, NAF 15646 – 15648. The letters received by Arconati-Visconti are preserved at the Victor Cousin Library of the Sorbonne. For the letters of Loisy to Arconati: MSVC 282– 284. To gain more insight into Arconati’s views, I studied her active correspondence with Franz Cumont—who was a close friend of Loisy and Arconati. Arconati’s letters to Cumont are preserved in the archives of the Gaasbeek Castle, which Arconati inherited from her husband and gifted to the Belgian state in 1921. They have not been catalogued and are almost all undated. When referring to letters from this corpus, we will use the indication ‘Gaasbeek.’ Cumont’s letters to Arconati are preserved at the Victor Cousin Library, MSVC 267– 70. The Cumont-Arconati correspondence numbered almost one thousand letters (1905 – 1923). My sincere gratitude goes to the team at Ghent University which transcribed the Cumont-Arconati correspondence, especially Dr. Jan Nelis, for generously making their work available to me for consultation. Except for the correspondence, my account of Arconati and her salon is based on Cumont’s posthumously published “La Marquise Arconati-Visconti (1840 – 1923). Quelques souvenirs,” Gasebeca 7 (1978): 5 – 42. Cumont’s testimony is far from objective, but it still is an important source of information, as he didn’t avoid more delicate issues (like the rumor that Arconati had been the mistress of Léon Gambetta, which he denied, at p. 14). Lastly, I also made use of the excellent studies by Gérard Baal (references infra), which focus on the complex position of Jean Jaurès in this network, and by Ruth Harris (also infra) who discusses Arconati’s involvement in the Dreyfus Affair, and provides precious insights into gender related issues.  Loisy, Mémoires, III, 33.  Louis Havet to Loisy, May 8, 1908, BnF, NAF 15654, f° 277– 8, and Arconati to Loisy, BnF, NAF 15646, f° 38. See also Loisy, Mémoires, III, 36.  Havet to Loisy, May 8, 1908 (the day of Jean Réville’s funeral), BnF, NAF 15654, f° 277– 278: “C’est vous, Monsieur, que je souhaiterais de voir entrer au Collège de France pour y enseigner l’histoire des religions,” and, in conclusion: “[V]otre voix est la première à gagner.” No correspondence between Joseph Bédier and Loisy has been preserved, but the first letter Arconati wrote to Loisy, on June 24, 1908, BnF, NAF 15646, f° 38 confirms that Bédier was one of Loisy’s earliest supporters.

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Aside from being specialized in the areas of literature and history, Bédier, Lefranc, Monod and Morel-Fatio had another, more peculiar interconnection: they were all Jeudistes, members of the Parisian salon organized on Thursdays by the Marquise Arconati-Visconti. In his Mémoires, Loisy mentioned that Bédier and Morel-Fatio had been the enthusiast “patrons” of his candidature. He also explained that Arconati had been in favor of his appointment, mainly because she was a close friend of the latter two scholars.⁹⁵ But Loisy explicitly denied that Arconati had played any significant role in the elections.⁹⁶ And he carefully omitted the fact that Bédier and Morel-Fatio were Jeudistes, which means that he also kept silent about the role of the influential network to which they belonged. From her correspondence we know that Arconati was won for Loisy’s candidacy right from the moment the chair became vacant, probably even before some of her Jeudistes. ⁹⁷ And, much in contrast to what Loisy claimed, her correspondence shows that she played a vital role in securing his victory. In this section of our chapter, we will give a general introduction of the Marquise and her network. The following section is devoted to why and exactly how they intervened in the elections. Marie-Louise Arconati-Visconti (1840 – 1923) was the daughter of the French journalist and self-made historian Alphonse Peyrat, who was one of the founding fathers of the Third Republic and a close friend of Léon Gambetta, and whose memory she vigorously cultivated.⁹⁸ Marie Peyrat grew up in poverty,⁹⁹ but she later acquired great wealth through her marriage with the Italian Marquis Gianmartino Arconati-Visconti, who died two years after their wedding and left her with an enormous fortune. Gianmartino’s father Giuseppe Arconati-Visconti had been involved in the Risorgimento and lived in exile in the Gaasbeek Castle, near Brussels. He was a friend of Alphonse Peyrat, who sympathized—as several

 According to Loisy, Morel-Fatio was the one who involved Arconati in the elections: Loisy, Mémoires, III, 40.  Instead he insisted on the support of Bédier and Morel-Fatio, Loisy, Mémoires, III, 59: “Ce sont ces messieurs qui me l’ont gagnée [his victory, my remark].”  There is a letter from Gabriel Monod to Arconati, of May 13, 1908, Sorbonne, MSVC 286, f° 5906, which shows that Arconati had clearly attempted to gain Monod for Loisy’s cause. It remains, however, unclear whether Morel-Fatio convinced the Marquise to support Loisy (or vice versa). There are no letters to confirm this information.  Cumont, “La Marquise Arconati-Visconti,” 8 – 9. The Marquise closed her first letters to Loisy with her signature “Marquise Arconati-Visconti,” to which she consistently added “née Peyrat.”  Cumont, “La Marquise Arconati-Visconti,” 10, explains that her father had a very modest income as a journalist. He had to sell a part of his library to pay for the funeral of his wife. The financial situation of the Peyrat family remained precarious even after Peyrat became president of the Senate under the Third Republic.

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other French republicans—with the Italian cause. Gianmartino was the sole heir of the Arconati-Visconti fortune. Her marriage and wealth gave the Marquise a high social status of which she was particularly fond. Throughout her childhood and adolescence, Arconati had been imbued with the radical republicanism of her father and his political friends. As a result, she was fiercely anticlerical, liberal and patriotic, and she took great interest in national and international politics. In an undated letter to Cumont, she aptly described how she breathed politics: “J’ai commencé à faire de la politique dans le ventre de ma mère, mes cendres en feront encore dans mon urne.”¹⁰⁰ Arconati actively sought the companionship of eminent republican politicians, for instance by writing them letters of congratulations for their electoral victories, and by inviting them to her salon. As a woman, she did not have access to active political life. We will see that her correspondence and salon were the instruments by which she tried to compensate being cut off from that part of the French public life which interested her most. She established a life-long friendship with the republican politicians Léon Gambetta, Joseph Reinach (brother of Salomon Reinach), and Henri Brisson.¹⁰¹ For a more restricted period of time, she was also close with Émile Combes and Jean Jaurès. Because of her fiery political opinions her friendships were fragile. The Marquise was not the one to easily tolerate divergent political opinions from her friends, and quite easily cut off friendships because of them.¹⁰² This, then, brings us to her strong and eccentric personality. The Marquise reportedly was deeply misogynist.¹⁰³ She only had a handful of female friends, and allowed no women to her salon. Cumont reported that upon their first encounter in Paris, she welcomed him in her house by underlining the exclusivity of her invitation: “Ne croyez pas monsieur que beaucoup de monde entre chez moi; d’abord

 Undated letter to Cumont, probably 1910, Gaasbeek archives.  The Victor Cousin Library preserves the vast amount of letters Arconati received from leading politicians of her time, e. g. Henri Brisson (MSVC 263); Émile Combes (MSVC 266); Jules Ferry (MSVC 276); Léon Gambetta (MSVC 277); or Joseph Reinach (MSVC 290 – 294).  On her turbulent relationship with Jean Jaurès: Gérard Baal, “Un salon dreyfusard, des lendemains de l’affaire à la grande guerre: la Marquise Arconati-Visconti et ses amis,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 27 (1981): 433 – 463; and Id., “Jaurès et les salons,” in Jaurès et les intellectuels, eds. Madeleine Rebérioux and Gilles Candar (Paris: Éditions de l’atelier, 1994), 96 – 118. We will come back to Arconati’s anti-socialism.  On this issue, see Jean Stengers, “Une intellectuelle misogyne la marquise Arconati-Visconti (1840 – 1923),” Sextant 13 – 14 (2000): 211– 225. We should, however, nuance some of the strongest statements about the Marquise. Several letters of, e. g., Gabriel Monod or Joseph Reinach thank Arconati for sending gifts to their spouses, and they show that these women had met Arconati frequently, only not in the context of her exclusively male salon.

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je ne reçois jamais aucune femme.”¹⁰⁴ Arconati frequently transgressed the traditional gender lines and social conventions of her time.¹⁰⁵ When in Gaasbeek, she liked to dress up as a renaissance page—a fact documented by several photographs.¹⁰⁶ Furthermore, her correspondence reveals that she often expressed her personal opinions in a “delightfully crude”¹⁰⁷ way. Her passionate style of writing ran counter to all contemporary norms for private correspondence in upper class milieus. It included an ample usage of exclamation marks, as well as frequent swearing and a rich collection of fantasies about the future death of personal enemies. To stay in the context of the elections, a good illustration of her usual style of writing can be found in the confidential letter she wrote to Loisy on July 11, 1908. Here she discussed Salomon Reinach’s intervention on Loisy’s behalf for the Prix Lefèvre-Deumier. This scientific award was granted by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres or by the Académie des Sciences morales et politiques, for a work in “Mythologies, philosophies et religions comparées.” In 1908 it had gone to Les Mystères de Mithra (1900) of Franz Cumont and to the French industrial Émile Guimet, who financed the Revue de l’histoire des religions and many other projects in the academic study of religion. Evidently, receiving the reward could have been a great advantage for Loisy’s candidature. Although Cumont was already a friend of Arconati at that time, and he regularly attended her salon, she was particularly dissatisfied with the outcome, for which she blamed Louis Duchesne,¹⁰⁸ as well as Paul Foucart whom she called a miserable scoundrel (“Cette canaille de Foucart”). C’est mon tour de vous dire “entre nous.” Salomon m’a dit qu’il avait écrit à Mgr. Duchesne pour le prix L. Deumier, et qu’il avait dit non. Je n’avais pas bien compris—Salomon parle sans s’arrêter et il bafouille—lui avait-il dit de venir voter pour vous, ou quoi ???…..[sic] encore une chose honteuse, qu’on ne vous ait pas donné ce prix-là ! Cette Canaille de Foucart a fait ce jour-là une sortie. Quel Misérable!¹⁰⁹

In an undated letter to Cumont (probably of 1911), we find an example of Arconati’s frequent rants against Jean Jaurès, with whom, at that time, she had bro-

 Cumont, “La Marquise Arconati-Visconti,” 8.  Ruth Harris, “Two Salonnières during the Dreyfus Affair: The Marquise Arconati-Visconti and Gyp,” in Confronting Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle France. Bodies, Minds and Gender, eds. Christopher E. Forth and Elinor Accampo (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 235 – 49.  See, for instance, the photograph published in Ruth Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island. Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair that Divided France (London: Allen Lane, 2010), 287.  Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island, 290.  On the troubled relationship between Duchesne and Loisy, see supra (introduction).  Arconati to Loisy, July 11, 1908, BnF, NAF 15646, f° 52.

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ken off all contact and whom she now wished dead: “J’avais l’espoir que Jaurès serait dans un train saboté.”¹¹⁰ In her study of Arconati’s “humour of disdain,”¹¹¹ Ruth Harris made the interesting observation that her “unladylike” curses of personal enemies were a means to claim a place for herself in a male dominated society.¹¹² To this valuable interpretation, we may perhaps add that Arconati’s peculiar modes of behavior also served to—consciously or unconsciously—distinguish herself from the aristocratic milieus by which she was never accepted. Arconati openly distanced herself from the tastes of the Parisian high society. She never went to the theatre, hated the opera, and prided herself on being socially reserved.¹¹³ But she did have a distinct interest in collecting art, and she just loved the grandeur of the Gaasbeek Castle. In many regards, she was a walking contradiction. In her attempt to propagate her republican values and beliefs, Arconati not only interacted with the leading politicians of her time. For our purposes, it is especially important to point out how very well she understood the societal power of Science (often written by her with capital letter), and of education. She royally sponsored the école laïque and instituted scholarships for gifted (male and female) students. Furthermore, she strategically financed a whole series of universities and research institutions (e. g. the Sorbonne, the Collège, the École pratique), with a particular focus on the promotion of historical scholarship.¹¹⁴ Needless to say that Arconati’s money bought her an enormous amount of power over academic decision-making. Cumont observed that she meticulously selected scientific projects that were in line with her own ideology. “Clio”—as  Arconati to Cumont, undated (probably 1911), Gaasbeek.  The expression is Harris’s, “Two Salonnières during the Dreyfus Affair,” 244. For more examples of Arconati’s (often Italian) “Rabelaisian humour,” e. g. her hilarious description of Paty de Clam as “the mortadella of Bologna, half pig and half donkey”: Harris, The Man on Devil’s Island, 290.  Harris, “Two Salonnières during the Dreyfus Affair,” 236 – 237 and 243 on Arconati’s “gender turmoil.” Harris’s article observes interesting similarities between Arconati and other salonnières (such as the anti-dreyfusard Gyp) with regard to their social roles and psychology.  Arconati to Loisy, February 24, 1909, BnF, NAF 15646, f° 144: “Ci-inclus ce que m’envoie Ferdinand Dreyfus—C’est lui qui m’a signalé “le grand salon”—mon salon n’a jamais été grand que par la qualité, car j’ai au contraire une maison très fermée.” The emphasis is Arconati’s.  To give only a few examples: she funded libraries and museum collections, created chairs at universities, financially supported scientific journals (such as Loisy’s Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses), and after her death, her fortune was bequeathed to museums, universities, etc. For an overview of the causes Arconati funded for the University of Paris: Thérèse Charmasson, “La marquise Arconati-Visconti ‘bienfaitrice’ de l’Université de Paris,” in Femmes de sciences de l’Antiquité au XIXe siècle, ed. Adeline Gargam (Dijon: Éditions universitaires de Dijon, 2014), 275 – 294. I thank Jan Nelis for drawing my attention to this publication.

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Gambetta used to call her and she often designated herself—for instance sponsored Abel Lefranc’s edition of Rabelais¹¹⁵ and applauded Lefranc’s depiction of him as a radical atheist. She exalted the work of Voltaire and Dante (a nickname she used for Joseph Reinach). Cumont furthermore explained that she had very little interest in the Church-dominated Middle Ages (“livré à la domination de l’Église”¹¹⁶), but all the more so in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. While Arconati’s precision in selecting scientific projects is relatively wellknown, there is another aspect of her scientific patronage which has, as yet, been overlooked: this is, her affinity with Liberal-Protestant historicism, and, linked to this, the fact that several of her closest friends were Protestants. It has been mentioned that Arconati funded Gabriel Monod’s chair in historical methodology at the Collège and sponsored his influential journal La Revue historique. Dreyfusard, strongly anticlerical, and descending from a family of Huguenot clergymen and scholars, Monod (1844 – 1912) was one of the main apostles of “la méthode historique.”¹¹⁷ As the president of the Fourth Section (History and Philology) of the École pratique (1895 – 1912), he played a crucial role in the professionalization of history as a scientific discipline, and is often regarded as one of the main proponents of the late 19th century French school of “historical positivism.”¹¹⁸ Arconati’s life partner—the art collector Raoul Duseigneur—came from a family of rich Protestant industrials, and Alfred Morel-Fatio, who was Arconati’s exécuteur-testamentaire, was a deeply religious Liberal-Protestant scholar. By contrast, Arconati herself and several of her Jeudistes were what Cumont called “mécréants.”¹¹⁹ Her correspondence demonstrates that she was an atheist free-thinker,¹²⁰ which was also confirmed by Cumont. In his Souvenirs he recal-

 Abel Lefranc et alii, eds., Œuvres de François Rabelais (Paris, Champion Éditeurs: 1912– 1931), and later Genève: Droz, in 6 volumes.  Cumont, “La Marquise Arconati-Visconti,” 10.  den Boer, History as Profession, 286 ff.  On Monod’s methodology, which was strongly indebted to contemporary German historicism: Walter Kudrycz, The Historical Present. Medievalism and Modernity (London–New York: Continuum, 2011), 170 – 171; den Boer, History as a Profession, 286 and passim; Gabriele Lingelbach, Klio macht Karriere. Die Institutionalisierung der Geschichtswissenschaft in Frankreich und den USA in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), 178 and passim.  For Cumont’s own highly nuanced philosophy of religion at that time, see especially Danny Praet, “The End of Ancient Paganism and the End of Modern Organized Religion in the Thought of Franz Cumont,” in The end of religion, eds. Jeffrey Tyssens and Anne Morelli (Brussels: KVAB– Peeters, forthcoming).  Arconati to Loisy, July 9, 1908, BnF, NAF 15646, f° 99: “Levasseur comme moi est libre-penseur.” And especially: Arconati to Loisy, January 11, 1909, f° 99, where she quite passionately en-

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led how little interest Arconati had in religious affairs, not even in the scientific writings of Loisy, whom she had so virulently supported: “Elle était la personne la plus étrangère à toute préoccupation religieuse que j’ai connue. Je me souviens qu’un jour Loisy lui ayant envoyé un de ses volumes d’exégèse du Nouveau Testament, elle m’exprima sa surprise: ‘Trouve-t-on vraiment encore des gens pour s’intéresser à ces choses-là ?’”¹²¹ Reading Cumont’s words, it certainly seems unlikely that intrinsic appreciation for Loisy’s scholarship was an important factor for Arconati to throw herself in his campaign. Arconati held two salons for what Cumont, himself an irregular guest, selfconsciously called “esprits d’élite”¹²²: one on Tuesdays for her acquaintances of the artistic and literary world (artists, writers, curators etc.), and another one on Thursdays for a more heterogeneous circle of politicians, scholars and high-ranking officials. In the two decades these gatherings took place (roughly from the late 1890s until WWI), the composition of her salon changed. Among the regulars of the political world, there was Émile Combes, Joseph Reinach, and Henri Brisson.¹²³ The academic world was usually represented by the aforementioned professors of the Collège, and occasionally by two Belgian scholars: Franz Cumont and the medieval historian Henri Pirenne (both Ghent University). Two other regulars were the administrator of the Comédie-Française Jules Clarétie and the director of Fine Arts (and former secretary of Jules Ferry) Henri Roujon. We know that Arconati carefully selected her guests, and that her salon was exceptional in that it connected the academic and the political world,¹²⁴ but, so far, it remains unclear to what extent cross-pollination between politics and science really took place.¹²⁵

vied those who were able to believe in something: “Je commence à être très agitée [about the upcoming elections on January 31st, my remark], de plus, j’ai une fièvre herpétique qui m’enlève mon focus—sont-ils heureux ceux qui croient à q.q. chose!!! Je me ruinerais en cierges et en prières… dévouement, dévouement, dévouement Arconati.”  Cumont, “La Marquise Arconati-Visconti,” 9.  The term is Cumont’s, “La Marquise Arconati-Visconti,” 6. See infra, for Cumont’s own elitism.  Other attending politicians were Joseph Magnin, Antonin Dubost, Henri Roujon, and the Belgian liberals Émile de Mot and Paul Hymans. For the complete list (with short biographical introductions) of the attending politicians and scholars: Cumont, “La Marquise Arconati-Visconti,” 23 – 32, which was completed by Baal, “Un salon dreyfusard,” 436 – 7.  Harris, “Two Salonnières during the Dreyfus Affair,” 237.  Cumont, “La Marquise Arconati-Visconti,” 25 explains that the politicians mostly took the floor, with the academics listening, but more research on the correspondence is definitely needed to answer this question.

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Although there were substantial differences between the Jeudistes, for instance with regard to their professional occupations, they shared quite a lot of ground.¹²⁶ The first tenets which were absolute prerequisites to be part of Arconati’s circle, were strict anticlericalism and pro-Dreyfus sympathy. As Baal and Harris have shown, the salon had its roots in the strong left republican indignation over the Dreyfus Affair and Arconati’s desire to give a forum to like-minded anticlerical politicians and scholars.¹²⁷ For our purposes, it is not necessary to enter into the full complexity of the Dreyfus Affair. It suffices to note that Arconati’s salon had several Jewish members, among whom not only Joseph Reinach, but also Alfred “Captain” Dreyfus himself, and the republican senator and lawyer Ferdinand Dreyfus (who was not related to Alfred). Furthermore, Arconati was also a close friend of Joseph’s brother, Salomon Reinach, although he probably did not attend her salon. It is clear from her correspondence with these high-profile Jewish personalities that Arconati kept them well informed about Loisy’s campaign.¹²⁸ In the final section of this chapter we will come back to the complex role of Salomon Reinach in the elections, and the surprising lack of involvement of Joseph Reinach.¹²⁹ Alfred and Ferdinand Dreyfus, on the other hand, were enthusiastic supporters of Loisy. Even if we haven’t found this explicit comparison in their correspondence, it is plausible that several of Arconati’s Jeudistes drew a parallel between Captain Dreyfus’s and Loisy’s sufferings at the hand of the Catholic Church. We do, however, have testimonies from both Ferdinand and Alfred Dreyfus which clearly show that they highly valued the anticlerical symbolism of Loisy’s appointment. In an undated letter to Arconati, written shortly before the elections, Alfred Dreyfus expressed his contentment over the fact that Loisy’s application seemed to gain wide approval, which he considered a rightful slap in the face of the Cath-

 Again, more research on the individual members of the network is needed to gain a more nuanced and comprehensive picture. The following account gives only a general impression.  Harris, “Two Salonnières during the Dreyfus Affair,” 236 – 237; Baal, “Un Salon dreyfusard,” 433.  For the letters she received from Alfred Dreyfus: Sorbonne, Victor Cousin Library, MSVC 272– 275. Arconati’s own letters have only very fragmentarily been preserved. A selection of letters from this vast correspondence (including some of Arconati) is published by Philippe Oriol, Alfred Dreyfus. Lettres à la Marquise. Correspondance inédite avec Marie Arconati-Visconti (Paris: Grasset, 2017). For the letters she received from Ferdinand Dreyfus: Sorbonne, Victor Cousin Library, MSVC 276. For the letters she received from Salomon Reinach: Sorbonne, Victor Cousin Library, MSVC 294.  Surprisingly, only 11 letters of Salomon to Arconati have been preserved. These do not discuss the election, but we have other sources (e. g. the correspondence between Arconati and Loisy) to reconstruct his role (see 2.4.3).

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olic Church: “non seulement, il a tous les titres pour la chaire qu’il sollicite, mais encore, comme vous le dites, ce sera un soufflet à Rome.”¹³⁰ Shortly after January 31, the day Loisy was elected, Ferdinand Dreyfus happily commented that the election of this “successor of the divine Renan” marked a significant stage in the history of the freedom of thought: “Vive le Collège de France! chère amie. La date du 31 Janvier 1909 marque une étape dans l’histoire de la liberté de pensée—à quand la leçon inaugurale du grand successeur du divin Renan.”¹³¹ In 1908, when the Dreyfus Affair still was a fresh trauma, indignation over cases of ecclesiastical injustice continued to be a binding factor for the Jewish, Liberal-Protestant, and other free-thinking members of Arconati’s salon. Another feature which interconnected the Jeudistes, was their common social background in the middle and higher bourgeoisie. Most came from wealthy families, and had a well-articulated sense of being “esprits d’élite,” as Cumont put it. Although it would be wrong to establish a simple link between their social backgrounds and political opinions, the generally elevated social status of the Jeudistes certainly accounts in part for another of their more or less widely shared ideas in 1908. Gérard Baal’s articles on the changing position of Jean Jaurès in Arconati’s salon have conclusively shown that most Jeudistes were vehemently anti-socialist at the time of the elections for the chair.¹³² The friendship between Jaurès, Arconati and her Jeudistes especially flourished at the time of the Bloc des gauches, but during and especially after its disintegration, Jaurès’s position in the salon became increasingly difficult. In November 1910, he was no longer invited to the meetings because of his support to the strike of the French railroad workers. After having been re-invited in 1911, the friendship between Arconati and Jaurès broke off for good in 1913.¹³³ As Baal has indicated, the attachment of the bourgeois Jeudistes to the existing social order was only one of many reasons for their strong anti-socialism.¹³⁴ Other key factors were their different opinions on international politics (e. g. the Tanger Crisis and the upcoming

 Alfred Dreyfus to Arconati, undated, Sorbonne, MSVC 272, f° 2520. Several other letters reveal Dreyfus’s interest in the elections: e. g., f°2782, 2788, 2789, 2797 (all undated).  Ferdinand Dreyfus to Arconati, February 2, 1909, Sorbonne, MSVC 276, f° 3270. Note that Loisy was not literally the successor of “Saint Renan,” because Renan had been appointed to the chair of Hebrew. On Loisy’s self-representation as Renan’s successor, see infra (3.1).  For a short discussion of each member’s political profile: Baal, “Jaurès et les salons,” 102– 103 (this account, however, focuses on 1904), and Baal, “Un Salon dreyfusard,” especially 441– 453 for the period 1906 – 1909.  Baal, “Jaurès et les salons,” 106 – 110. Arconati’s sympathy for Jaurès’s personality and erudition explain why he was allowed to attend the salon until 1910.  Baal, “Un Salon dreyfusard,” 441.

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War with Germany), their fervent patriotism and belief in an authoritative state which used force when necessary.¹³⁵ Arconati profoundly disliked Jaurès’s pacifism and strongly condemned his alliance with the revolutionary left which, in her view, would leave France in pure anarchy and chaos. In the following letter to Cumont, probably written in March 1911 when Jaurès was temporarily re-invited to the salon, Arconati wrote that she had warned the socialist (in “her usual soft tone”) that she did not give a “single damn about class struggle, the rise of the proletariat,” and other such matters, but instead believed in the necessity of “order in the streets and a strong national defense.” Hier Jeudi, rentrée officielle de Jaurès, tout heureux de retrouver ce milieu de professeurs— Il n’a pas osé—il est en face de moi—se lancer, d’autant plus qu’à peine après, je lui ai dit du ton doux que vous me connaissez; Quant à la lutte des classes, à l’avènement du Prolétariat, à la socialisation du capital, à l’avènement de l’ordre collectiviste dans l’Humanité, … je m’en fous, refous et contrefous: l’ordre dans la rue, une forte défense nationale, voilà les deux nécessités vitales, les deux plats de résistance de la nourriture d’un peuple, le reste, c’est de la confiture (comparaison facile, quand on est à table).¹³⁶

Arconati (and most of her Jeudistes) was certainly not oblivious to the misery of the less-privileged.¹³⁷ She supported Joseph Reinach’s initiatives to stop the quick rise of alcoholism among factory workers, and she set up relief funds to support the families of injured firemen and policemen.¹³⁸ Cumont also mentioned that she was enormously proud of her modest upbringing, and reported how she liked to repeat that she had personally known poverty.¹³⁹ At the same time, however, Arconati had the same sense of superiority as most of her elitist friends.¹⁴⁰

 On nationalism as bourgeois hegemony in fin-de-siècle France: Robert Stuart, Marxism and National Identiy. Socialism, Nationalism, and National Socialism during the French Fin de Siècle (New York: State University of New York Press, 2006), 29 – 48.  Arconati to Cumont, undated (probably 1911), Gaasbeek. Baal, “Un Salon dreyfusard,” 444– 447, showed that these ideas were shared by several Jeudistes (Bédier, Roujon, and others).  For a good illustration, see the letter (quoted in Baal, “Un Salon dreyfusard,” 439) from Alfred Dreyfus to Arconati (undated): “Je ne suis pas socialiste, en ce sens que je ne suis pas collectiviste, mais j’estime que la masse qui peine et qui travaille a droit à sa part de bonheur et que nous nous devons efforcer de la lui donner.” See Baal, “Jaurès et les salons,” 104 for the similar opinions of Monod, J. Reinach, and Bédier.  Cumont, “La Marquise Arconati-Visconti,” 34, who subtly added that this support was fully in line with her belief in the necessity of a strong police force in France.  Cumont, “La Marquise Arconati-Visconti,” 10.  Her correspondence with Cumont clearly demonstrates that, although Cumont himself belonged to the high bourgeoisie, she did not consider him as her equal. In an undated letter

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To sum up, it was their common anticlerical republicanism, their shared social class backgrounds, and, last but certainly not least, their profound personal friendships¹⁴¹ which, together, offer a plausible explanation as to why the religious beliefs of Liberal Protestants and Liberal Jews were not an insurmountable obstacle in Arconati’s network. In one of his letters to Arconati, Monod jokingly addressed the Marquise as “Madame et chère coreligionnaire,”¹⁴² which we may perhaps interpret as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the exact fact that their different religious opinions never overshadowed all the values and worldviews they shared.

2.4 Loisy’s Appointment: Why and How? In their correspondence, Arconati and Jeudistes Bédier, Monod and Morel-Fatio (who were most involved in the campaign¹⁴³) mainly motivated their support for Loisy by referring to his scientific merits, but their letters never provided many detailed arguments for his presupposed scientific superiority. In fact, they especially insisted on the vast quantity of Loisy’s publications.¹⁴⁴ The first letter Arconati wrote to Loisy in June 1908, provides a good illustration of

(Gaasbeek) she addressed Cumont as “mon cher ami,” explaining that she no longer wanted to use the more formal title of “Monsieur.” She invited Cumont to return the favor by henceforth addressing her as… “ma chère Marquise.”  For a beautiful example of the affection the Jeudistes felt for their patroness, see the letter of Joseph Bédier to Arconati, July 22, 1908, Sorbonne, MSVC 263, f°59: “Et moi aussi, je vous dois de grands bienfaits; le moindre n’est pas cette décoration; mais le plus grand est que vous m’ayez admis dans ce petit groupe d’hommes charmants qui vous entourent, vous taquinent et vous aiment; si vous y gardez toujours ceux dont vous connaissez bien l’affection, chère Isolde, vous y garderez toujours… le roi Marc.”  Monod to Arconati, March 15, 1909, Sorbonne, MSVC 286, f° 5992. The letter discusses the socio-economic politics of Clemenceau.  The subject of the elections is most prominently present in the letters Arconati received from Loisy, Morel-Fatio (Sorbonne, MSVC 288), Bédier (Sorbonne, MSVC 263), Monod (Sorbonne, MSVC 286), and, though to a lesser extent than the previous four, with Combes (Sorbonne, MSVC 266). The frequency of the correspondence between Arconati and Cumont increased especially after 1910. Unfortunately, their correspondence of 1908 – 1909 didn’t discuss the subject. As for Loisy’s correspondence, the elections are most frequently discussed in the letters he received from Arconati, Louis Havet (BnF, NAF 15654), Henri Bergson (BnF, NAF 15649), and Salomon Reinach (BnF, NAF 15660).  By 1908, Loisy had written 21 books (among which Bible commentaries and monographs), about 115 articles, and numerous reviews. For Loisy’s complete bibliography, see URL: http:// alfred.loisy.free.fr/.

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the type of “scientific” argumentation which was commonly used in her correspondence. According to Arconati and her Jeudistes, Loisy was the only scholar truly qualified for the job. Monsieur, Je viens de vous envoyer le livre de mon père.¹⁴⁵ Je suis une amie de M.M. Morel-Fatio, de Bédier, de Lefranc trois professeurs du Collège de France qui voteront pour vous, considérant qu’il serait une honte pour le Collège que vous n’occupiez pas la chaire d’histoire des religions, car vous êtes le seul homme vraiment qualifié en France pour occuper cette chaire. Avec Gabriel Monod et Salomon Reinach, deux bons amis à moi, nous parlons bien souvent de vous. Il me paraît de plus en plus certain que la majorité des professeurs ira à vous—la liste de vos travaux est écrasante pour les autres candidats. Je vous envoie Monsieur l’assurance de mon respect et de mon admiration. Mise Arconati-Visconti, née Peyrat […].¹⁴⁶

While they emphasized Loisy’s scientific value, his supporters flatly denied the quality label “Science” to the scholarship of his opponents. Paradoxically, it is precisely by analyzing the often vicious accusations against Mauss that it is possible to uncover the true motivations to support Loisy.

2.4.1 Anticlericalism: Trump Card and Stumbling Block In many letters of Loisy’s support team the dominant reason for their belief in the absolute necessity of his appointment, was the forceful message it would deliver to those who had earlier rejected him from their ranks. The appointment of the excommunicated Modernist priest to a chair that truly symbolized the state patronage of Science, was considered as a powerful consolidation of the Separation Law of Churches and State. Loisy’s battle for the emancipation of science from religion and for intellectual autonomy was seen as the perfect parallel of the republican attempts to free French society from clerical control. Arconati explained to Loisy in her letter of July 8th, 1908 that conservative Catholics were right to fume because the “religious edifice” was weaker than ever: Ils [the French conservative Catholics, my remark] ont raison d’ailleurs de rager, car leur édifice religieux tremble plus que jamais sur sa base et Pie X le mène avec une confiance

 She is probably referring to Alphonse Peyrat’s essay Histoire élémentaire et critique de Jésus (Paris: M. Lévy, 1864).  Arconati to Loisy, June 24, 1908, BnF, NAF 15646, f° 38. See, e. g., also Havet to Loisy, May 26, 1908, BnF, NAF 15654, f° 281: “votre force est dans le mérite de votre œuvre.”

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admirable—sans compter, que les grandes controverses qui vont s’élever sur vos deux derniers ouvrages¹⁴⁷, permettront vraisemblablement de réaliser définitivement une séparation bien autrement importante, bien autrement générale, que celle de la République française et de l’Église romaine, Celle [sic] de l’Église et de la Science [sic].¹⁴⁸

A very similar statement was made by Émile Combes who was one of Loisy’s biggest fans.¹⁴⁹ In a letter to Arconati, he applauded Loisy’s success as the consolidation of the 1905 law: “Sa nomination est le coup le plus rude qui ait asséné [sic] au pape et à son Église depuis la loi de séparation.”¹⁵⁰ The anticlerical hope that Loisy’s appointment would damage the power of the Church found its most radical expression in the letters of Louis Havet. Havet was probably the first professor of the Collège who invited Loisy to apply for the chair and offered his services for gaining the necessary votes.¹⁵¹ A fierce dreyfusard, Havet had been a founding member of the combative anticlerical Ligue française pour la défense des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, as was Gabriel Monod.¹⁵² He was, however, not a member of Arconati’s network, and the Jeudistes (especially Arconati herself and Morel-Fatio) were not particularly fond of his demarches on Loisy’s behalf. It is not entirely clear what the exact reasons for this distance were. The letters of Arconati especially reveal a personalitybased dislike of Havet.¹⁵³ They also show that Arconati and her friends wanted to keep absolute control over Loisy’s campaign themselves, and that they were reluctant to involve outsiders, even if they had similar anticlerical reasons for

 Arconati referred to the two very critical books Loisy had recently published on the antiModernist politics of the Catholic Church under Pius X: Simples réflexions sur le Décret du Saint Office Lamentabili sane exitu et sur l’Encyclique Pascendi dominici gregis (Ceffonds, chez l’auteur, 1908) (3rd petit livre rouge) and Quelques Lettres sur des questions actuelles et des événements récents (Ceffonds, chez l’auteur, 1908) (4th petit livre rouge).  Arconati to Loisy, July 8, 1908, BnF, NAF 15646, f° 45.  Combes to Arconati, July 5, 1908, Sorbonne, MSVC 266, f° 891: “Je souhaite vivement, comme vous, que Loisy soit nominé à la chaire de l’histoire des religions au Collège de France.”  Combes to Arconati, March 15, 1909, Sorbonne, MSVC 266, f° 906.  For more information about this international specialist of Latin metric and linguistics: Maurice Holleaux, “Notice sur la vie et les travaux de M. Louis Havet, membre de l’Académie,” CRAI (1939): 527– 546.  On their anticlericalism and adherence to the Ligue: Vincent Duclert, “La Ligue de ‘l’époque héroïque’: la politique des savants,” Le Mouvement social 183 (1998): 27– 60, especially 33 (Havet) and 42 (Monod).  See, e. g., Arconati to Loisy, February 4, 1909, BnF, NAF 15646, f°127: “Havet ne dit que des bêtises, et est le gaffeur par excellence […].”

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supporting Loisy.¹⁵⁴ In a letter to Arconati of November 1908, Havet exposed a plan to strategically use Loisy’s future victory for the destabilization of the Catholic clergy, through the launch of a series of measures that would help young critical priests leave the Catholic Church.¹⁵⁵ Interestingly, Havet didn’t expose this “œuvre” to Loisy himself, although they frequently wrote each other before the elections. It was Arconati who informed Loisy about Havet’s grand scheme by passing his letter on to Loisy.¹⁵⁶ Loisy’s reply was positive. He showed to be more than willing to lead future ex-priests by example, although he self-consciously added that, of course, not all the priests who would hypothetically leave the Church, were predestined for great futures outside of its walls. Je vous retourne la carte de M. Havet. Entre nous, je crois que son œuvre a une raison d’être. Il importe seulement qu’elle soit conduite par des agents sûrs et intelligents, parce qu’il y a des sujets de valeur très inégale parmi les prêtres qui abandonnent l’Église. Tous peuvent être intéressants en tant qu’indigents, mais il y en a qui peuvent mériter davantage, surtout parmi les jeunes.¹⁵⁷

Arconati’s accompanying letter and later reply to Loisy do not reveal her personal thoughts on Havet’s plans, but, given the fact that she usually didn’t hesitate to express her disagreement, it seems plausible that she was not unsympathetic towards the idea to set up an exit program for Catholic clergy. In any case, the intervention by Arconati immediately reveals one of the important roles she assumed during Loisy’s campaign: she was, so to speak, its single-handed communication office. She forwarded letters (mostly without the authors knowing this), and repeatedly asked the addressees to send these letters back so that she could send them on to others. It will, however, become clear that her contribution went well beyond that. Whereas the network of Arconati and other anticlerical scholars like Louis Havet found Loisy’s Catholic past an absolute incentive to support him, anticlericalism was also the motor of very hostile reactions towards his application. We  See Arconati to Loisy, October 14, 1908, BnF, NAF 15646, f° 68: “Croyez-moi, demandez à Morel-Fatio quand vous devez venir à Paris, il sera de meilleur conseil qu’Havet—je partage presque toutes les opinions de ce dernier, mais il a fait q.q. gaffes, et je n’ai aucune confiance dans son jugement.”  Havet to Arconati, November 22, 1908, Sorbonne, MSVC 278, f° 3948: “Il y a un lien logique entre la question Loisy et l’œuvre dont je serais heureux d’être autorisé à vous parler à votre retour. Il s’agit de faciliter aux jeunes prêtres la sortie de l’Église. […] Ils sont des centaines, qui ne demandent qu’à devenir des citoyens utiles; combien ont dû à Loisy le premier éveil de leur critique!”  Arconati to Loisy, November 25, 1908, Sorbonne, MSVC 278, f° 78.  Loisy to Arconati, November 27, 1908, Sorbonne, MSVC 282, f° 4759.

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saw that Loisy expected to find opposition also among left republican milieus, and multiple letters of the Jeudistes confirm that these fears became reality in the course of the election campaign.¹⁵⁸ Apparently, quite a few anticlerical scholars feared that Loisy’s past stood in the way of a critical and comparative study of religions. Convinced that under Loisy’s lead histoire des religions would, once again, mostly be the equivalent of histoire du christianisme,¹⁵⁹ more than one of them preferred Mauss.¹⁶⁰ Several Jeudistes wrote that the tactic of Mauss’s supporters was to spread the rumor that Loisy’s excommunication was only temporary.¹⁶¹ Another, more unexpected accusation formulated by Loisy’s anticlerical opponents (and by conservative Catholics) was that his candidature was merely a “candidature de combat,” which would seriously jeopardize the reputation of absolute scientific independence of the Collège. That this specific rumor circulated widely and was very harmful for Loisy’s chances of success, is virtually certain because Arconati and the Jeudistes took great pains to refute it. The prominent rhetoric of neutralité was intimately connected to the history of the chair at the Collège. But since its institutionalization, neutralité had never really been a synonym of objectivité. Until 1908, the criterion of neutralité had led to the appointment of (Protestant) scholars who were neither reactionary Catholics, nor atheist freethinkers. Since conservative Catholics considered Loisy a freethinker, and freethinkers often regarded him as a Catholic, neutrality was a convenient rhetorical weapon for virtually all of his opponents. Arconati and her Jeudistes were well aware of the danger anticlericalism could represent to Loisy’s candidacy. Nothing, they knew, could be done about the votes of conservative Catholics, but there was some hope that the anticlerical opposition towards Loisy’s controversial past

 See, e. g., Arconati’s quote of Monod’s letter in her letter to Loisy of November 2, 1908, BnF, NAF 15646: “Cette âme évangélique a déjà expérimenté ce que valent les âmes ecclésiastiques, il apprendra maintenant ce qu’est la politique des libre-penseurs et il trouvera peut-être que partout le courage et la droitesse sont rares.”  Loisy to Arconati, July 4, 1908, Sorbonne, MSVC 282, f° 4739: “Quelques professeurs du Collège de France acceptent sa candidature [of Mauss, my remark] pour sortir, disent-ils, de l’histoire du christianisme.” On the deep divide between histoire des religions and histoire du christianisme, which was not primarily a matter of different research themes, see infra, 4.4.2.  In this study, the focus is on the vast correspondence of Loisy himself and his supporters. As for the correspondence of the other candidates, we have consulted Besnard and Fournier, eds., Émile Durkheim. Lettres à Marcel Mauss; Rafael Faraco Benthien, “Lettres d’Émile Durkheim à Salomon Reinach,” Durkheimian Studies/Études Durkheimiennes 16 (2010): 19 – 35 (especially 29 – 30). The study of Mauss’s received letters, which are preserved in the archives of the CF, lies beyond the scope of our analysis.  See the undated letter of Morel-Fatio to Arconati, BnF, NAf 15646, f° 79.

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could be countered. To convince anticlerical voters that Loisy was radical enough, and moderate voters that he was not too radical, Arconati’s network developed several strategies, some more aggressive than others, but all of them extremely well-thought-out. Interestingly, both the academics and the politicians of the Jeudistes were involved in these maneuvers. Loisy’s election thus provides a striking example of just how powerful this group could be when its members decided to unite forces. A first concern was to find the necessary political support so that the incumbent Minister of Education would ratify the decision of the Collège if Loisy’s campaign proved to be successful. The Scheil precedent and the leading role therein of Clemenceau, were sound reasons to doubt that such ratification would automatically happen. Between 1906 and 1910, the Minister of Education (de l’Instruction publique) was the radical republican Gaston Doumergue.¹⁶² Doumergue came from a Protestant family and became a freemason in 1901. As Minister of Education, he took vigorous action to defend the école laïque which was subject of a renewed attack by French conservative Catholics in 1908.¹⁶³ In a highly confidential letter, Arconati explained to Loisy that Émile Combes and Henri Brisson were in charge of convincing Clemenceau and Doumergue, respectively. These demarches, she insisted, were to be kept strictly secret as they could raise the impression that Loisy’s election was politically arranged. Combes, qui connaît bien Doumergue, me disait hier qu’en tout état de cause il tiendrait tête à Clemenceau, si celui-ci faisait pour vous ce qu’il a fait pour Scheill [sic]. Brisson se chargeait de Doumergue, tout ira bien—seulement de ceci pas un mot à personne—il faut éviter que votre nomination prenne une tournure politique. Brisson qui est venu me voir ce matin, me le disait, lui aussi.¹⁶⁴

Combes and Brisson were not only members of the same party as Doumergue and Clemenceau, they were also free-masons, which may have further helped

 Between 1906 and 1910, Doumergue was also Ministre du Commerce de l’Industrie. After various other offices (among which two Prime Ministries), he became Président de la République in 1924. On his political career, see Jean Rives, Gaston Doumergue: du modèle républicain au Sauveur Suprême (Toulouse: Presses de l’Institut d’études politiques de Toulouse, 1992).  André Lanfrey, Sécularisation, séparation et guerre scolaire: les catholiques français et l’école (1901 – 1914) (Paris: Cerf, 2003), 308 and Patrick Cabanel, Entre religions et laïcité: la voie française: XIX-XXIe siècles (Toulouse: Privat, 2007), 188 – 193. One of the measures he took in 1908 was to impose penalties to parents who refused to let their children follow the full curriculum of the école laïque. On the école laïque, see chapter 3.  Arconati to Loisy, July 9, 1908, BnF, NAF 15646, f° 47.

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their mission.¹⁶⁵ According to Arconati, Combes and Brisson were heavily engaged in the campaign for Loisy.¹⁶⁶ This deep involvement also explains why Combes’s actions were not limited to securing political support.¹⁶⁷ Shortly after the elections, Combes wrote to Arconati that he had also mobilized personal friends to put pressure on the voting professors of the Collège. ¹⁶⁸ Before turning to the other strategies Loisy’s supporters plotted, it is interesting to note that Loisy was highly indignant about the comparison many of his anticlerical opponents apparently drew between Scheil and himself. While the injustice inflicted to Scheil had been condemned nationally and internationally by Catholic and non-Catholic scholars (like Franz Cumont¹⁶⁹), Loisy himself radically distanced himself from the assyriologist whom he regarded as a Dominican scholar pur sang, without any scientific autonomy. Many of those who had voted for Scheil, Loisy believed, had done so precisely for that reason, and out of political hostility towards the incumbent government. Madame, Je n’aurais jamais pensé que mon cas pût être assimilé à celui du Père Scheil. Cet élu du Collège de France était membre d’une congrégation non autorisée¹⁷⁰; on savait qu’il était sécularisé pour la forme seulement, et qu’il relevait toujours du Général des Dominicains. Il était donc prêtre et religieux. Et plusieurs de ses partisans, surtout à l’Académie des

 From my study of the correspondence, it remains unclear to what extent freemasonry played a role in the election.  Arconati to Loisy, July 8, 1908, BnF, NAF 15646, f° 44: “Mes amis politiques sont très agités de votre nomination, Combes et Brisson, des amis de 30 ans—Brisson, l’élève et le disciple de papa, est aussi passionné que moi en votre faveur—.”  In the correspondence between Brisson and Arconati, the elections are only discussed in a letter of 1908 (month and day unknown), Sorbonne, MSVC 263, f° 285, in which Brisson reports on his mission to convince Doumergue. We know from their letters that Arconati and Brisson saw each other very often between 1908 – 1909.  Combes to Arconati, January 31, 1909, Sorbonne, MSVC 266, f° 904: “Julien est en relations d’amitié intime avec trois professeurs du Collège de France. J’en ai profité pour plaider auprès de lui la cause de Loisy. […] Mon ami s’est mis en campagne avec ardeur et, à son tour, il a obtenu de ses trois amis qu’ils votassent pour notre candidat. Je m’applaudis de pouvoir penser, que ce sont ces trois voix qui ont décidé du résultat de l’élection.” Combes’s friend was Alexis Julien, professeur libre d’anatomie in Paris.  For Cumont’s subtle words on the affair: “Commémoration du Père Scheil,” 5. Scheil was Cumont’s colleague at the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. According to Cumont, Scheil “se contentât de prouver par son exemple vivant, comment la science peut se concilier avec la foi.”  On the Lois contre les congrégations promulgated in the first years of the 20th century: Guy Laperrière, Les Congrégations religieuses. De la France au Québec, 1880 – 1914 (Sainte-Foy: Les Presses de l’Université de Laval, 1999), 55 ff.

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Inscriptions, n’avaient voté pour lui que pour ce motif, et pour mettre le gouvernement dans l’embarras.—Au fond, cette nomination a été fort mal conduite; tous les assyriologues étrangers mettent mon élève Thureau-Dangin au-dessus de Scheil, et aucun d’eux n’aurait voté pour Fossey.—Actuellement, je ne suis même plus catholique. Pie X l’a déclaré: et même les catholiques sont tenus de me fuir. Il serait piquant—et absurde—que notre gouvernement vînt dire au Pape: “Pardon, Sainteté, nous considérons toujours L. comme catholique orthodoxe et comme prêtre; nous le regardons comme votre sujet fidèle, et, pour cette raison, nous ne voulons pas l’admettre au Collège de France.” Il serait impossible de faire au Pape une plus grosse injure… et un plus grand plaisir.¹⁷¹

Motivated by his sympathy for his friend and his former Assyriology student François Thureau-Dangin, Loisy defended the government’s decision to refute Scheil. And he added that Scheil had been a priest and a member of a conservative and illegal religious order when he had applied for the chair at the Collège, whereas he himself no longer was a member of the Church in 1908. Even if he had only ceased to be a priest four months earlier, his letter clearly implied that he considered himself fully secularized on the outside as well as on the inside, and, thus, as a truly viable candidate. Quite sarcastically, he underlined the irony of the fact that the anticlerical government would refuse to appoint a candidate who had been declared vitandus by the Catholic Church, because it thought that he was still a faithful “orthodox Catholic and priest.” Yet another major concern of Arconati and her Jeudistes was to get rid of the perception that Loisy was an “homme de combat.” To do so, it was essential to find the right Collège professor to present Loisy’s candidacy to the general Assembly during the election meeting. This person was usually chosen some time before the election. He was generally considered as the official patron of the candidate in question, and therefore extremely important for the entire election process. The patron ideally had a least some expertise on the relevant research domain, but even more important criteria were (a) to be a well-established professor who knew the ins and the outs of the Collège de France and had a solid network of befriended colleagues, and (b) especially for this specific chair, enjoyed wide moral authority in public debates.¹⁷² The Jeudistes knew they were not suited for the job themselves. The research areas of Bédier, Lefranc, and Morel-Fatio were not directly relevant for religious studies, and they were all relatively new at the Collège. ¹⁷³ Gabriel Monod, on the other hand, was the perfect  Loisy to Arconati, July 10, 1908, Sorbonne, MSVC 282, f° 4742.  Havet to Loisy, June 9, 1908, BnF, NAF 15654, f°286: “L’autorité et les autorités font beaucoup dans une assemblée de peu compétents, et il faut d’ailleurs, par la variété de vos patrons, effacer toute impression d’une candidature de combat.”  Loisy, Mémoires, III, 45.

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person for the position, but he was excluded from the elections because he held a privately funded chair. From the correspondence, it becomes clear that the Jeudistes wanted to follow a strategy that showed at least some resemblance to what Jules Ferry had done for Albert Réville in the 1880s. In Arconati’s opinion, the ideal “patron” was the Protestant Philippe Berger, a disciple of Renan and his successor to the chair in Hebrew.¹⁷⁴ An expert in Phoenician religion and epigraphy, former Protestant pastor, and professor at the Collège since 1893, Philippe Berger could substantially enhance the much needed aura of religious neutralité for Loisy’s application.¹⁷⁵ Moreover, Berger was a left-wing republican senator (since 1904). If he accepted the job, it would certainly seem as if the Protestants—with their distinct affiliation to the Third Republic—embraced Loisy as their candidate. But not unexpectedly, Berger had already agreed to support his coreligionnaire Maurice Vernes. In his Mémoires, Loisy summarized the letter in which Berger had explained his preference for Vernes: he, too, felt that Loisy was too specialized in the history of early Christianity, and had sincere concerns about the impartiality of a scholar who had formerly been a Catholic priest.¹⁷⁶ An interesting objection given the fact that Vernes himself was mainly an expert of Judaism and also had a confessional (though, of course, Protestant) profile. In the end, it was Arthur Chuquet (holder of the chair of Langues et littératures d’origine germanique since 1893) who represented Loisy, although Berger did agree to add a few words in Loisy’s favor after Chuquet’s presentation.¹⁷⁷ Aside from being an expert of Germany, radical republican Chuquet was especially known for his expertise on the French Revolution. As the director in chief of the influential Revue critique d’histoire et de littérature, he had a vast scientific network, and, since 1900, he was also a member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques, where Loisy’s supporters expected to encounter wide opposition. In contrast to Berger, however, Chuquet had no immediate expertise in the field of religious

 Arconati to Loisy, June 30, 1908, Bnf, NAF 15646, f° 41: “On dit que Chuquet présenterait vos titres—C’est bien. J’aurais préféré Philippe Berger, qui a la chaire de Renan et qui de plus est protestant. Or, comme vous avez parfois malmené les protestants il serait très bien de montrer que la vache de Colas [sic] ne vous tient pas rigueur.” Arconati here literally copied a letter from her Protestant friend Morel-Fatio (see his letter of June 4, 1908, Sorbonne, MSVC 289, f° 6462) which again proves that her role mainly consisted in transmitting the opinions of others.  On Philippe Berger, see Dominique Bourel, “Succéder à Renan: Salomon Munk et Philippe Berger,” in Laurens, ed., Ernest Renan. La science, la religion, la République, 297– 309.  Loisy, Mémoires, III, 39.  Loisy, Mémoires, III, 79.

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studies, so Berger’s final intervention on behalf of Loisy was far from superfluous. A third and final anticlerical obstacle which Loisy’s team needed to overcome, was the apparent opposition against his appointment by none other than Émile Levasseur, the then Administrator of the Collège de France, who was known to be a radical anticlerical. Levasseur was not a member of Arconati’s salon, but they did know each other quite well.¹⁷⁸ Arconati put herself in charge of convincing Levasseur. From her correspondence with Loisy, we know that she first of all did this by repeatedly visiting him and talking to him about Loisy’s vast superiority over other candidates, but her modes of operation became more and more invasive. Arconati explained to Loisy that Levasseur had sympathy for him, but still wanted to make a well-informed choice between Mauss and Loisy on the basis of the quality, and not the quantity of their publications.¹⁷⁹ When Levasseur asked Arconati to send some of his most representative publications, she asked Loisy himself to recommend one of his volumes in a letter that may well have been the most diplomatic one she had ever written: Morel-Fatio que j’ai vu après M. Levasseur m’a dit de vous demander ce que vous croiriez devoir lui faire lire? Puisque vous m’offrez q.q. chose, envoyez-moi celui de vos ouvrages que vous désirez qui soit lu par lui, et je les lui prêterai. Je me permettrai de vous avouer q.q. chose—M. Levasseur est comme moi LibrePenseur—le Pasteur [sic], le prêtre lui font un peu peur en tant que professeur, il a toujours peur qu’on laisse un peu de son indépendance… Vous me comprenez. M’envoyez donc celui de vos ouvrages où on ne sentira que le savant. Je suis qu’un peu gênée pour vous dire ça, je dois m’être expliquée très mal. Monsieur Levasseur est comme vous le savez, un des hommes les plus respectables de notre temps—je le vénère à l’égal de papa—.¹⁸⁰

Although we have little reason to assume that Arconati was more than superficially acquainted with his scientific work, her request for a volume that was purely scholarly (“où on ne sentira que le savant”) unmistakably insinuated that not every work Loisy had written, had the same level of scientificity. Since free-thinking Levasseur was clearly sceptical about the scientific impartial-

 Their correspondence is not very frequent, but shows that they were personally acquainted.  Levasseur to Arconati, August 5, 1908, Sorbonne, MSVC 280, f°4454. For the argument of Loisy’s amount of publications, see, e. g., Arconati to Loisy, July 9, 1908, BnF, NAF 15646, f° 47: “M. Levasseur m’a montré vos titres, on a raison de dire qu’ils sont écrasants quand on les compare à ceux de vos adversaires, nous sommes enchantés qu’ils soient nombreux […].”  Arconati to Loisy, July 9, 1908, BnF, NAF 15646, f° 47– 48.

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ity of religious scholars, Catholic (“le prêtre”) and Protestant (“le Pasteur”), it was quintessential to send him not just any work. Our previous chapter has shown that many of Loisy’s Modernist writings indeed had an ambivalent character, in the sense that his scientific arguments were entangled with an unmistakably theological and apologetic discourse. By formulating this well-intentioned advice to Loisy, Arconati (and the friends who had suggested the idea to her) basically admitted the flaws in their argumentation that Loisy was the only truly scientific candidate. Even if Arconati admitted that she felt quite embarrassed to ask this question, her letter did seem to voice a personal concern, or at least a personal request for a solid confirmation by Loisy that he really would to be able to put his religious beliefs aside. This was, in any case, how Loisy understood her letter. He sent Arconati a polite, but rather dry and very extensive reply of several pages which meticulously explained his position towards the Church and towards religion in general at that point in time. The most interesting paragraph is the one where Loisy exposed the deistic and deeply moral philosophy of religion which he had come to embrace during his final years in the Church. Quite remarkable is his emphasis on the “infinite and mysterious power” which “works in us and through us on the progress of truth and justice.” Here we find the germs of the theory of religion which will occupy us in the following chapters. Je n’admets pas de révélation au sens propre du mot. Je ne regarde pas Dieu comme un grand individu qui nous aurait fait un jour par des intermédiaires choisis. Je crois à la fin morale de l’univers, au caractère absolu du devoir (bien que les formes de nos obligations particulières sont relatives); la puissance infinie et mystérieuse qui est au fond de tout ne nous impose aucun théorème, et sans doute elle travaille en nous, par nous, au progrès de la vérité et de la justice.¹⁸¹

While Loisy ended his long religious self-justification with the suggestion that Arconati could use this letter to convince Levasseur, he surely also intended to reassure Arconati herself and the Jeudistes. We know too little about Arconati’s exact religious beliefs to determine to what extent Loisy’s deistic humanism was in line with her own state of mind, but it certainly was compatible with the beliefs reigning among French Liberal Protestants, and widely circulating among free-thinking bourgeois milieus.¹⁸²

 Loisy to Arconati, July 10, 1908, Sorbonne, MSVC 282, f° 4743.  On deistic free-thought and its connection to Protestantism: Lalouette, La Libre Pensée en France, 143 – 151 (Ch. IV La Libré Pensée déiste et spiritualiste).

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In the end Levasseur read Loisy’s newest exegetical volumes, Les Évangiles synoptiques (2 vol., 1907– 1908), which was beyond doubt the most critical work he had published on early Christianity, so far. But this was not the work Loisy had personally recommended to Arconati. Loisy had suggested his most recent volume (and 4th petit livre rouge) Quelques lettres sur des questions actuelles et des événements récents (Paris 1908), which was a compilation of letters he had written to various persons during his last years in the Church (1904 – 1908). One can quite easily figure out why Arconati preferred to send Levasseur a highly technical, exegetical study instead of this little volume. With Quelques lettres, Loisy had especially aimed to convince Catholics and non-Catholics of the sincerity of his Catholic faith during those final years before his excommunication.¹⁸³ In his Mémoires, he explained that some Catholics had regarded him as a fraud who no longer had been a sincere Catholic in 1904, and merely wanted to stay a priest in order to be able to attack the Church from within. Among non-Catholic milieus, Loisy added, some people thought he was nothing more than a sensation-seeking trouble maker. Quelques lettres was a personal apology in which the focus was very much on Loisy’s complex religious beliefs, and less on his scientific ideas.¹⁸⁴ Arconati thus preferred to follow the advice of Monod, who was the one who had recommended her to send Levasseur Les Évangiles synoptiques. ¹⁸⁵ But the strategy of Arconati and Monod backfired. In his letter of August 5, 1908, Levasseur wrote to Arconati that the Évangiles certainly displayed a great deal of erudition, but was “a bit hard to digest” (“un peu dur à digérer”¹⁸⁶). Instead, he wanted to read a more philosophical-religious type of text: “Je voudrais maintenant pouvoir me faire une idée du philosophe en face des problèmes de foi et du sentiment général de la religion.”¹⁸⁷ Given the central position of the chair of history of religions in French society, the erudition of its future holder was hardly more important than his religious views. As Levasseur knew very well, these ideas would decisively determine future positions in wider public debates, and therefore could be just as harmful for the reputation of the Collège, as a lack of erudition. The Administrator was not so easily manipulated as Arconati and Monod had expected.

 Loisy, Mémoires, III, 14.  See Loisy’s short preface to Quelques lettres, 5 – 8. For the volume’s importance to reconstruct Loisy’s political views, see 2.4.2.  Monod to Arconati, July 3, 1908, Sorbonne, MSVC 286, f° 5929. Along with this specific volume, Monod also recommended other exegetical studies like, e. g., Alfred Loisy, Le Quatrième Évangile (Paris: Picard, 1903).  Levasseur to Arconati, August 5, 1908, Sorbonne, MSVC 280, f° 4454.  Levasseur to Arconati, August 5, 1908, Sorbonne, MSVC 280, f° 4454.

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Aside from subtly trying to shape Loisy’s academic image, Arconati was not afraid to take more aggressive measures. The first opportunity was in fact offered by Levasseur himself. At almost the exact same time Arconati asked him to support Loisy, Levasseur asked her to put in a good word with her friend Aristide Briand, then Ministre de la Justice, for his son, who was postulating for the office of Chef de Bureau at Briand’s department.¹⁸⁸ Although they never included even the slightest insinuation that this was a quid pro quo service, almost all letters Levasseur wrote to Arconati between June 1908 (when Loisy had already decided to be a candidate) and December 1908 (a month before the elections), discuss strategic interventions of Arconati on behalf of his son’s appointment. After August 1908, the subject of the upcoming elections is conspicuous by absence in Levasseur’s letters to Arconati, but Arconati’s letter to Loisy of July 10 (her reply to his clarification of his religious beliefs) suggests that the two matters were somehow related since she mentioned them in one breath: “Pensez à ce que je dois donner à lire à M. Levasseur. J’ai été aujourd’hui demander à mon ami Briand de nommer le fils de M. Levasseur chef de Bureau […]. Quel malheur qu’il ne soit plus à l’Instruction publique.”¹⁸⁹ The tight web of personal connections between Arconati and the political world was of paramount importance for Loisy’s final victory. The third and most aggressive way in which Arconati finally tried to convince anticlerical Levasseur to vote for Loisy, was by shamelessly blackmailing the Collège de France. She explained to Loisy that if he was not appointed, she would withdraw her legacy of a million francs to the Collège. ¹⁹⁰ Letters from Levasseur, Bédier, Morel-Fatio, Monod and Lefranc show that Arconati regularly donated large sums of money to the Collège. Her latest donation (of 50.000 Fr.) dated from June 25th, so at a moment when Loisy already was an official candidate for the chair.¹⁹¹ At the bottom of the aforequoted letter of Arconati, Loisy wrote down a short comment warning future investigators of this correspond-

 Levasseur to Arconati, Sorbonne, MSVC 280, f° 4450, the letter is dated on June 20, 1909, but seems to fit in with the content of the other letters of 1908. The correspondence between Briand and Arconati, which mainly consists in very short replies to invitations to the salon (Sorbonne, MSVC 263), does not mention Arconati’s intervention.  Arconati to Loisy, July 10, 1908, BnF, NAF 15646, f° 50.  Arconati to Loisy, October 16, 1908, BnF, NAF 15646, f° 73: “J’espère pour le Collège que tout se passera bien, car si vous n’étiez pas nommé, si d’autres considérations que les sciences faisaient agir les professeurs, je lui retirerai le million que je lui donne dans mon testament. Je ne me gênerais pas du reste pour le dire à M. Levasseur quand je rentrerai à Paris.” In the end, Arconati established the University of Paris as her sole legatee in 1923.  See the letter of Levasseur to Arconati, June 25, 1908, Sorbonne MSVC 280, f° 4452 for this donation.

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ence (!) not to take Arconati’s outbursts with regard to her testament too seriously.¹⁹² But even if there is no written proof that she eventually did blackmail Levasseur, we at least know from her correspondence that she took her plan very seriously. She discussed it with Morel-Fatio, who agreed it was a good idea but advised her to only mention it to Levasseur.¹⁹³ And, even more importantly, she explained in a later letter to Loisy that she had contacted her exécuteur testamentaire Ferdinand Dreyfus. Without so much as a hint of self-reflection, she wrote that she would only support those who genuinely cared about Science (sic) and the honor of the Collège: Je lui [Dreyfus] avait dit la dernière fois que je le vis à Paris: si le Collège ne nomme pas L. ça sera une telle honte, que je ne lui laisserai rien. J’ai donné 50.000 fr. pour les 4 chaires occupées par mes amis, quand ils auront dépensé leurs 12.500, je leur en redonnerai, mais je ne ferai rien pour des gens qui obéiraient aux sentiments que vous savez, oubliant, que la Science seule, devrait être leur unique souci, la Science et l’honneur du Collège— J’attends donc pour faire mon testament de voir ce que feront les Messieurs.¹⁹⁴

At the start of the campaign, Arconati had also spread the rumor that she would fund a chair for Loisy at the École pratique, if he was not elected at the Collège. But when this rumor turned out to be a reason for some professors not to vote for Loisy (who thus had a back-up plan), she quickly withdrew this “promise,” asserting to Loisy that it was indeed all or nothing: “Aujourd’hui je suis de votre avis, le Collège de France ou rien.”¹⁹⁵ In conclusion of this long first section on the prominent role of anticlericalism, we especially want to stress the possibility that Arconati and, presumably, some of her Jeudistes may themselves have had some doubts about Loisy’s ability to break away from his Catholic past. The question which then immediately presents itself is: why didn’t they support Mauss instead of Loisy? From the perspective of anticlericalism, Mauss could be considered the safer option. He

 Note made by Loisy on the letter of Arconati of October 16, 1908, BnF, NAF 15646, f° 72. Loisy regularly addressed future investigators of his personal archives. We know from his correspondence to Cumont that he organized (and burned) parts of his personal correspondence and archives in the years 1926 – 1927.  Morel-Fatio to Arconati, November 22, 1908, Sorbonne, MSVC 288, f° 6292: “Au sujet de vos intentions testamentaires, je crois que vous ferez bien d’en parler à M. Levasseur, mais à lui seul. Il ne faudrait pas avoir l’air d’exercer une pression sur les professeurs.”  Arconati to Loisy, October 25, 1908, BnF, NAF 15646, f° 74. Loisy didn’t include any comment here. In a later letter to Loisy of November 29, 1908, f° 81, Arconati wrote that Levasseur had contacted Dreyfus behind her back to inquire whether she had really changed her testament.  Arconati to Loisy, July 8, 1908, BnF, NAF 15646, f° 46, the emphasis is Arconati’s.

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was an atheist, and was close to Jeudiste Jaurès, who had been one of Combes’s most important political partners for designing the Separation of Churches and State.¹⁹⁶ But Mauss was also two other things Loisy was not: a militant socialist and a Jew.

2.4.2 Sociology Equals Socialism… More than any other candidate, it was Mauss who was under attack in the letters of Arconati and the Jeudistes. This was first and foremost because Mauss was Loisy’s most dangerous rival, but the kind of accusations hurled at Mauss also hint at a deeper animosity towards his persona, his political views, and his methodology. In the turbulent years under Clemenceau’s government, the mere thought that a militant socialist scholar would occupy the chair of history of religions, thus getting the opportunity to further expand his influence over French society, made Arconati and several Jeudistes more than just a bit uncomfortable. Jaurès’s support of Mauss was beyond doubt an additional reason for his progressive isolation in their network at that time.¹⁹⁷ Loisy himself didn’t take the initiative to be a candidate, but was explicitly invited to do so by a network with a distinctly anti-socialist profile. And thus one may perhaps wonder whether this network really invited Loisy because of an intrinsic belief in his scientific value and symbolic (anticlerical) significance, or because only he would be able to counter Mauss’s almost self-evident victory? Generally speaking, one can subdivide the objections raised against Mauss in the correspondence, into four categories: (a) ad hominem criticisms of his personality, which mostly included that he was lazy and too talkative, (b) strong disapproval of his political views, (c) the “scientific” argument that he had less publications than Loisy and still was a junior scholar of religion at that time,¹⁹⁸ and (d) the objections against his methodology, which were scientific and ideological. To come to a nuanced evaluation of the role of anti-socialism, it is important to point out that criticisms against Mauss are most predominantly present in the correspondence between Arconati, Morel-Fatio, and Monod. This does not imply that it did not play a role in the motivations of other Jeudistes;

 For Mauss and Jaurès, see Fournier, Marcel Mauss. A Biography, 96 – 112 (Ch. 5: Citizen Mauss).  Arconati to Loisy, July 8, 1908, BnF, NAF 15646, f° 55, where Arconati briefly mentions that during her last “jeudi”, Jaurès and Bédier clashed because of their sharply divergent positions on the upcoming elections.  We will come back to why this evaluation of Mauss is unjust.

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we simply don’t have the means to know. On the other hand, it is perhaps not insignificant that criticism against Mauss is especially present in the letters of Arconati and her two Liberal-Protestant friends. We have seen that Liberal Protestants controlled the French academic field of “history” in the 19th century. Monod’s historicist methodology was strongly affiliated with the history of religions of Vernes and the Révilles, which the sociological school of Mauss & co had so vigorously attacked.¹⁹⁹ On May 15, 1908, barely a week after Jean Réville’s death, Gabriel Monod wrote to the Marquise that he had contacted Loisy’s friend Paul Desjardins and asked him to persuade Loisy to apply for the chair. In this same letter, he included a very unflattering portrayal of Mauss. Yes, Mauss is intelligent, Monod admitted, but “he’s not the right caliber.” He is lazy (dixit Durkheim himself), and is a lot more concerned about socialism than about science. And what is even worse, Monod added, he is a sociologist rather than a historian, and sociologists are not to be trusted.²⁰⁰ They merely “put useless commonplaces in solemn and pseudo-scientific formulas”: À mon avis, il n’a nullement l’envergure nécessaire. Il s’occupe beaucoup plus de socialisme unifié que de science et son oncle Durkheim déplore toujours qu’il ne soit pas plus laborieux scientifiquement. On le dit très intelligent—mais c’est un sociologue beaucoup plus qu’un historien et l’histoire des religions doit être traitée de point de vue historique avant tout. C’est une lapalissade que les sociologues méconnaissent. Je me méfie passablement des sociologues. Ils revêtent d’ordinaire de formules solennelles et pseudoscientifiques d’inutiles lieux communs.²⁰¹

Interestingly, the letter of Monod—who was known for his strong resistance against political interference in science²⁰²—only mentioned Mauss’s political activities as a further demonstration of his lack of academic commitment. He established no link between Mauss’s political identity and his sociological method. This was rather different for Arconati who did see a close connection between the two.²⁰³ In fact, in most of her letters to Loisy, she referred to Mauss as “le socialiste-unifié,” without ever mentioning his scientific activities. In this reduc-

 See on Monod and religious studies (especially Renan, but also Vernes): Priest, The Gospel according to Renan, 194– 195; Laplanche, La Crise de l’origine, 82 and 100.  On Monod’s views about sociology and history, and about the necessary historicization of sociology: den Boer, History as Profession, 330.  Monod to Arconati, May 15, 1908, Sorbonne, MSVC 286, f° 5911.  den Boer, History as Profession, 148 and passim; Isabel Noronha-Divanna, Writing History in the Third Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge scholars publishing, 2010), 111.  See, for instance, the letter Arconati wrote to Loisy, June 30, 1908, BnF, NAF 15646, f° 41, in which she almost literally copied Monod’s words, though leaving out important nuances.

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tionist viewpoint, she was confirmed by Morel-Fatio, who simply called Mauss “l’Unifié,” and in one letter wrote about Mauss as “le candidat d’un petit groupe d’anarchistes,”²⁰⁴ by which he probably referred to the team of the Année sociologique. ²⁰⁵ Before turning to the political guarantees Loisy himself offered in 1908, let us just briefly return to the scientific argument Monod adduced against Mauss. Monod’s letter shows a striking resemblance with the position of another Jeudiste, Franz Cumont, towards sociology. Unfortunately, we don’t have any correspondence of Cumont on Loisy’s election, even though he was already intimately acquainted with Arconati at that time. But in his correspondence with Loisy, which started right after the latter’s appointment to the Collège, Cumont repeatedly expressed his reticence towards sociology of religion. In this regard, we especially refer to his letter of July 13, 1911. At this point, he had officially left Ghent University after the so-called Affaire Cumont. This affair was ignited when the then Catholic Minister of Education refused to appoint Cumont to a higher academic position because of his liberal ideological profile, and because of his comparative research which highlighted Christianity’s similarities to surrounding pagan religions.²⁰⁶ In an attempt to offer his friend some consolation, Loisy had written to Cumont that he would certainly have a shot at succeeding him at the Collège de France somewhere in the next ten years, provided that Cumont assumed French nationality. Thereupon Cumont replied to Loisy that he should definitely keep his chair and stay alive, unless he wanted to be replaced by some “smoky sociologist”: “Mon cher ami, Merci de vos bons souhaits mais gardez-vous d’abandonner votre chaire et surtout de mourir, vous seriez remplacé par quelque sociologue fumeux qui n’enseignerait plus l’histoire des religions parce qu’il n’aurait même pas l’idée de ce qu’on entend par ‘histoire’.”²⁰⁷ Monod’s and Cumont’s words are clear proof that the sociological turn towards a more theoretical, meta-historical discussion of religion, was very hard to accept

 See the letter (a copy) of Morel-Fatio to Arconati, in NAF 15646, f° 79. See also Morel-Fatio to Arconati, Sorbonne, MSVC 288, f° 6462: “Ceux que je crains beaucoup, sont les partisans de l’Unifié.”  See Fournier, Marcel Mauss. A Biography, 66 on the modes of operation of this tight team of scholars: “From the outside, the Année Sociologique might easily look like a cult or a militia.”  The affair was first studied by Corinne Bonnet, “Franz Cumont et les risques du métier d’historien des religions,” Hieros 5 (2000): 12– 29. Most recently, see Danny Praet, “L’affaire Cumont. Idéologies et politique académique à l’université de Gand au cours de la crise moderniste,” in Praet and Bonnet, eds., Science, Religion and Politics, 339 – 401; Corinne Bonnet, “L’affaire Cumont entre science, politique et religion,” in Praet and Bonnet, eds., Science, Religion and Politics, 403 – 418.  Cumont to Loisy, July 13, 1911; Lannoy, Bonnet and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 35.

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for the preceding generations of historians of religion(s), who had been the makers of history and history of religions as scientific and autonomous disciplines, and had fiercely protected the autonomy of their research against theological intrusions. This is not to say that socio-political worldviews are not quintessential to understand the objections of upper-class bourgeois scholars like Monod and Cumont. To a certain extent, their historiography was a typically individualistic kind of history, which was very different from the social focus of Mauss.²⁰⁸ But within the Arconati network, it seems that we need to draw a fault line between those for whom Mauss only was a socialist (Arconati and Morel-Fatio), and those like Monod who were capable of carrying the discussion on a scientific level. Many scholars—during Mauss’s life and after—have conclusively demonstrated the enormous scientific value of his work, so we may confine ourselves to briefly pointing out that Arconati’s reproaches of non-scientificity were entirely misdirected. It is true that Mauss never had the same number of publications as Loisy,²⁰⁹ but his seminal essays on sacrifice, magic,²¹⁰ and the gift,²¹¹ have been vastly more influential for the field of comparative religious studies than Loisy’s. In 1908, Mauss had already published, together with Hubert, the Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice (1899)²¹² and the Esquisse d’une théorie générale de la magie (1902), which had instant resonance and immediately established his well-deserved reputation as a scholar of religion. But in the context of the elections—which depended on the votes of non-specialists—perception was everything. Whereas the “Maussistes” likely tried to vilify Loisy on the basis of his Catholic past, Loisy’s supporters did the same on the basis of Mauss’s political sympathies. And in the end, the strategy of the latter group appeared to be the most successful. A letter from Émile Durkheim to Salomon Reinach shows us that Mauss’s revolutionary, radical socialist views were the subject of hostile and

 In the same vein, Mauss’s sociology implicitly served ideological (in casu socialist) goals. For the subtle infiltration of Cumont’s bourgeois background in his historiography of religion, see Annelies Lannoy, “Les masses vulgaires et les intelligences élevées. Les agents de la vie religieuse dans Lux Perpetua et leur interaction,” in Bonnet, Ossola, and Scheid, eds., Rome et ses religions: culte, morale et spiritualité: en relisant Lux Perpetua de Franz Cumont, 63 – 81.  For Mauss’s list of scientific publications: Josef Gugler, “Bibliographie de Marcel Mauss,” L’Homme. Revue française d’anthropologie 4 (1964): 105 – 112.  Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, “Esquisse d’une théorie générale de la magie,” L’Année sociologique 6 (1902– 1903): 1– 146. On Loisy’s reception of their theory of magic, see infra (3.3).  Marcel Mauss, “Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques,” L’Année sociologique NS 1 (1923 – 1924): 30 – 186.  Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, “Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice,” L’Année sociologique 2 (1899): 29 – 138. On this work, see infra (5.3).

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highly damaging rumors. Reinach was very close with the Durkheimian scholar Henri Hubert. Durkheim wanted to know from him if it was really true that Monod and Bédier were spreading these rumors on Mauss’s socialist sympathies, as Reinach had previously mentioned to Hubert. Samedi, 260, r. S. Jacques [1907 or 1908] Cher Monsieur, Il me revient que Gabriel Monod propage un bruit d’après lequel Mauss serait hervéiste²¹³ et, à ce titre, impossible au Collège de France. Y aurait-il quelque indiscrétion à vous demander si je suis exactement informé et si je puis faire état du renseignement, comme venant de vous, puisque c’est indirectement de vous que je le tiens (via Hubert) ? Mon intention serait simplement d’écrire à Monod et Bédier, qui aurait été mis en cause lui aussi, pour démentir auprès d’eux un bruit qui est une calomnie. Jusqu’à présent, c’est le seul obstacle qu’ait rencontré cette candidature qui reçoit le meilleur accueil. Je vous remercie d’avance et vous prie de me croire votre bien dévoué, É. Durkheim²¹⁴

Reinach’s letters to Durkheim have probably not been preserved, but we can derive his negative reply from Durkheim’s following letter.²¹⁵ Durkheim therein explained to be relieved that Monod (no further mention is made of Bédier) did not, or at least not intentionally, spread such rumor. But at the same time, Durkheim added that Monod had really insisted that Mauss’s political identity stood in the way of his appointment to this particular chair, in a private conversation with one of his colleagues of the Collège. How extraordinary, Durkheim significantly added, that a “monk like Scheil or a Protestant pastor” posed no problem for Monod, while a socialist did! Ce qui a dû aider à l’erreur commise c’est que G. Monod, dans une conversation avec un professeur du Collège, avait, il y a 8 – 10 jours environ, insisté sur la situation politique de Mauss, dans laquelle il paraissait voir une objection grave à sa candidature, surtout pour un enseignement comme celui dont il s’agit. Il serait pourtant extraordinaire que la qualité de moine (Scheil) ou de pasteur protestant ne fût pas une objection, et que, seule, celle de socialiste disqualifiât son homme.

 On the peculiar political trajectory of Gustave Hervé, who was first a radically antimilitarist socialist and later became a fascist, see Gilles Heuré, “Itinéraire d’un propagandiste: Gustave Hervé, de l’antipatriotisme au pétainisme (1871– 1944),” Vingtième Siècle 55 (1997): 16 – 28.  Letter published in Benthien, “Lettres d’Émile Durkheim à Salomon Reinach,” 28.  Letter published in Benthien, “Lettres d’Émile Durkheim à Salomon Reinach,” 29 – 30 (undated letter).

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Whatever the truth about these rumors and their initiators may be, the most important conclusion for us to draw is that anti-socialism certainly was a key motivation for some members of the Arconati network to support Loisy. Was it, then, sufficient for these scholars that Loisy was not a militant socialist like Mauss, or did Loisy also give more concrete political assurances to Arconati and to the Jeudistes? In his letters to Arconati on the elections, Loisy himself never adduced any political arguments against Mauss. From a scientific point of view, he even showed a great deal of appreciation for his rival, however not without severe criticism as we will see in our third and fifth chapter. For now, it suffices to mention that Loisy never agreed with the sharp line Monod and Cumont drew between historical and sociological methodology. He read and reviewed the work of Mauss and Durkheim, and we will see that he integrated at least some of their insights in his own work.²¹⁶ As for Loisy’s political opinions, it is difficult to paint an accurate picture of what these were at the moment he left the Church. Little information on his political identity can be retrieved from his letters. It seems that Loisy took relatively little interest in national and international politics until 1913, when the imminent danger of the First World War forced every self-respecting French intellectual to follow political decision-making. In one of her letters to Cumont, probably written in 1910, Arconati later complained about Loisy’s lack of political commitment towards the Republic: “Loisy se fout de la R.P. comme moi du pape.”²¹⁷ Knowing Arconati’s aggressive anticlericalism, this was saying something. But obviously, she had come to know, in one way or another, that Loisy had republican sympathies. Otherwise, any friendly relationship, let alone the massive support she gave to him between 1908 and 1909, would have been unimaginable. Right after his excommunication, Loisy had published his aforementioned Quelques Lettres, in which he had very cleverly outed himself as a republican. Although the main aim of this volume was to offer a religious self-apology, he had included a letter in which he passed a quite positive judgment on the Separation Law of 1905.²¹⁸ Seeing that Loisy was a master strategist, it is almost im-

 It is meaningful that Marcel Mauss also participated in Loisy’s anniversary conference, Le Congrès d’histoire du christianisme, which was held in his honor in 1927. On this Congrès, see infra (4.4.2).  Arconati to Cumont, undated (probably 1910), Gaasbeek.  Loisy, Quelques lettres, 55. The published letter was written on December 20, 1906 and addressed to a certain “Sir R.B.”. As Loisy explained in his Mémoires, III, 17 this was the RomanCatholic Anglo-Irish politician Sir Rowland Blennerhasset. In the letter Loisy explained that he understood the reasons for the strictness of the Separation Law: “Étant donné l’état des esprits

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possible not to interpret this letter as an attempt to prepare the way for a later secular academic career.²¹⁹ During his time in the Church, Loisy had carefully confined such political opinions to his private correspondence.²²⁰ At the time Arconati, Monod, Bédier and others decided to approach Loisy for the vacant chair, they probably had little to no first-hand information about his precise political views, except perhaps for what he wrote in Quelques lettres. In a letter Loisy wrote to Arconati after the successful elections, he explicitly underlined that he had no political aspirations whatsoever and wanted to keep politics and science strictly separated: “Je n’entends rien à la politique et je n’ai pas de conseils à donner au gouvernement.”²²¹ But just one year later, he did publish an extensive essay on the organization of religious instruction in the French école laïque,²²² with which he unquestionably entered the political arena. In the following chapter, we will evaluate to what extent this extraordinary text should be seen an attempt to meet the expectations of his former support team. To return now to our initial question concerning the possibility of a purely strategically motivated invitation of Loisy as a worthy “anti-Mauss,” the right answer seems to be that this probably was true for some Jeudistes, but that there surely were also other, authentically pro-Loisy motivations at play. In defense of the “strategy hypothesis,” there is a letter of Morel-Fatio to Arconati, in which the scholar mentioned that Loisy was seriously ill, and suggested that Arconati should perhaps start thinking about replacing him (“suppléer Loisy, s’il est vraiment si gravement atteint”²²³). Such a suggestion certainly gives the impression that Loisy was replaceable, and that Morel-Fatio’s support was more about countering the other candidate(s) than about supporting “Loisy for the en France, et non seulement dans les Chambres législatives, on ne pouvait obtenir une loi qui laissât plus de liberté intérieure à l’Église. Et vu l’attitude politique du clergé depuis la fondation de la République, l’État aurait commis une imprudence en lui laissant une liberté extérieure sans contrôle et sans limites.”  The preface of the book was dated on March 15, 1908, seven days after his excommunication. The book was published late March.  He explicitly underlined at the beginning of the letter that its content was strictly confidential: Loisy, Quelques lettres, 58: “Inutile de vous dire, Monsieur, que ces réflexions ont un caractère purement confidentiel, et que je serais désolé de les voir arriver, de manière ou d’autre, à la publicité. Mon nom a été assez mêlé à d’autres querelles pour que je ne souhaite pas qu’il soit lancé encore dans celle-ci.”  Loisy to Arconati, March 6, 1909, Sorbonne, MSVC 280, f° 4791.  Alfred Loisy, “De la vulgarisation et de l’enseignement de l’histoire des religions,” Correspondance de l’Union pour la Vérité (1909 – 1910): 1910-02-01: 257– 272; 1910-03-01: 209 – 225; 1910-05-01: 330 – 342; 1910-06-01: 309 – 408. For a detailed analysis of this essay, see chapter 3 (3.4).  Morel-Fatio to Arconati, August 10, 1908, Sorbonne, MSVC 288, f° 6460.

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sake of Loisy,” so to speak. But other than this letter, there are no further traces of this specific position. Of course, it is likely that strategies like these were discussed in person rather than in written correspondence, but too many letters of the Jeudistes insist on Loisy’s merits to discard their overall sincerity in supporting him.

2.4.3 “M. est israélite”: The Complex Role of Mauss’s Jewishness Aside from anticlericalism and anti-socialism, there is a third factor which requires our attention in order to gain a comprehensive picture of the reasons behind Loisy’s appointment. But much in contrast to the straightforward way in which anticlerical and anti-socialist statements were expressed in the correspondence between Loisy’s supporters, this final factor was a lot more obscurely present in their letters. Its precise importance is therefore much more difficult to gauge. Even if Salomon Reinach claimed that Loisy’s final victory was due to blatant anti-Semitism, direct racial or religious arguments against Mauss’s Jewish background are rare to find.

2.4.3.1 Salomon Reinach and the Jeudistes Attitudes towards Mauss’s Jewish background, however, certainly played a role in the elections, but in a very specific way and among specific members of Arconati’s network. The subject only comes to the fore in the correspondence between Loisy, Arconati, Salomon Reinach and Combes, and in all of these letters (except the one by Combes), the suspicion of Reinach’s secret support of Mauss featured at the center of the conversation. Reinach didn’t work at the Collège de France (he was appointed to the National Museum of Antiquities at Saint-Germain-enLaye), but that didn’t make him any less of an influential personality in the elections.²²⁴ Together with his brothers Joseph (the politician) and Théodore (the archaeologist and politician), he was a leading personality in the French intellectual life of his time. As the editor of the Revue archéologique, he had an extensive network of scholars (at the Collège and elsewhere), and he was also friendly with

 For an intellectual biography of S. Reinach see especially Hervé Duchêne, “Salomon Reinach devant les hommes et les religions”, in Salomon Reinach. Cultes, mythes et religions, ed. Hervé Duchêne (Paris: Laffont, 2009), v – lxxxi. On the Reinach family and Salomon’s brothers: the contributions to Les Frères Reinach, eds. Sophie Basch, Michel Espagne, and Jean Leclant (Paris: AIBL, 2008). A more detailed account of Salomon Reinach’s biography follows infra (3.2.1).

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several high-profile politicians.²²⁵ Reinach was a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres and had many contacts at the Institut de France. ²²⁶ His support could make a considerable difference with regard to the decision of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques. Just like his brother Joseph, Salomon Reinach was a very close friend of the Marquise.²²⁷ Her letters to Loisy show that Reinach was involved in Loisy’s campaign since the very beginning.²²⁸ We know from Loisy’s correspondence with Reinach that the radical anticlerical scholar had a great deal of scientific and personal respect for Loisy. The relationship between these two headstrong personalities is best not described as an intimate friendship, but until July 1908 they definitely were on friendly terms. In his letters Reinach repeatedly expressed his sympathy for Loisy’s Modernist struggle and his appreciation for his critical scholarship, but right from the start (in 1896), their correspondence also reveals unbridgeable scientific differences.²²⁹ In the following two chapters, we will return to their scientific disputes in more detail. From July 1908 onwards, rumors started to circulate that Reinach was secretly also in favor of Mauss, and because of this double sympathy, had finally decided to withdraw from supporting either one of the candidates.

2.4.3.2 Reinach’s Ties with Durkheim and Mauss As far as we can judge on the basis of Reinach’s correspondence, he was not as intimately connected with the network of the Année sociologique, as he was with Arconati, Loisy, and Jeudistes like Cumont and Monod. Reinach had clear scien-

 The correspondence Reinach received (which amounts to several thousands of letters) is preserved in the Bibliothèque Méjanes, in Aix-en-Provence. The inventory of this correspondence (which includes high profile intellectuals like Georges Sorel, Marcel Mauss, James G. Frazer, Franz Cumont) can be consulted online: URL: http://www.citedulivre-aix.com/IMG/pdf/s._re inach_2014.pdf.  Reinach even knew Paul Foucart quite well, as Foucart had been his teacher at the École française d’Athènes. Duchêne, “Salomon Reinach devant les hommes et les religions,” xix.  In her correspondence with Loisy, Arconati mentioned that she saw Reinach very regularly. Their correspondence, however, is limited. There are 16 letters from Arconati to Reinach (Bibliothèque Méjanes), which we have not consulted, and 11 letters from Reinach to Arconati (Sorbonne, MSVC 294), which are not relevant for Loisy’s appointment.  Arconati to Loisy, June 24, 1908, BnF, NAf 15646, f° 38 about the elections: “Avec Gabriel Monod et Salomon Reinach, deux bons amis à moi, nous parlons bien souvent de vous.”  For a first example of their scientific dissension, see supra, 1.4. A detailed analysis of their divergent views on the definition of religion and comparative methodology will follow in chapters 3 and 4.

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tific affinities with the school of Durkheim, but his attempts to scientifically affiliate himself with its members were met by them with little enthusiasm, and at times even with hostility.²³⁰ Reinach considered himself the French representative of the British anthropological school, which had also been crucial for the development of the theories of Durkheim, Hubert, Mauss and others. Although Reinach and the Durkheimians had essentially different approaches to key themes such as totemism and taboo, it is safe to say that from a methodological point of view, Reinach’s connection with the “Maussistes” was certainly more tight than with the traditional “méthode historique” which was commonly defended by the scholars of Arconati’s salon.²³¹ The key to understand why Reinach was closer with the Jeudistes partially lies in their shared social background. Whereas the Reinach brothers were born into an upper class bourgeois family in Saint-Germain-en-Laye (the western suburbs of Paris), Mauss and Durkheim came from a socio-economically modest Jewish family from the Alsace-Lorraine region.²³² This translated into very different socio-political worldviews, with Mauss—as we’ve seen—being a strong opponent of the elevated social power rich families like the Reinachs had over French society. What further complicates Reinach’s relationship to Mauss and his supporters, is the highly complex issue of their Jewish identity, both in a religious and an ethnic sense.²³³ In light of what will follow, we especially need to emphasize Reinach’s strong commitment to the modernization of Judaic religion, and his intimate conception of Judaism as a shared sense of ethnic belonging. He was a rationalist scholar who distanced himself from and even attacked most  Strenski, Durkheim and the Jews of France, 69 explains this distance in different ways: scientific rivalry, but also different social class backgrounds, and different positions towards Judaism.  For their scientific differences, see Aron Rodrigue, “Totems, Taboos, and Jews: Salomon Reinach and the Politics of Scholarship in Fin-de-Siècle France,” Jewish Social Studies 10, 2 (2004): 1– 19. See also infra, chapter 3.  Fournier, Marcel Mauss. A Biography, 10 (Mauss’s father was a merchant, Durkheim’s a rabbi).  Mauss’s and Durkheim’s ambivalent attitudes towards Judaism are discussed in a very nuanced way in Fournier, Marcel Mauss. A Biography, 13 – 15 (Durkheim), 17– 18 (Mauss), and in W.S.F. Pickering, “Mauss’s Jewish background. A biographical essay,” in Marcel Mauss. A Centenary Tribute, eds. Wendy James and N.J. Allen (New York–Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1999), 43 – 60 ; W.S.F. Pickering, “The enigma of Durkheim’s Jewishness,” in Debating Durkheim, eds. W.S.F. Pickering and Herminio Martins (London: Routledge, 1994). They are also the main subject of Strenski, Durkheim and the Jews of France. For Reinach: Duchêne, “Salomon Reinach devant les hommes et les religions,” lxi–lxiii; Rodrigue, “Totems, Taboos, and Jews,” 2; and Perrine Simon-Nahum, “Une famille d’intellectuels juifs en République: les Reinach,” Revue des études juives 146 (1987): 245 – 254.

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Jewish practices and instead considered Judaic religion mainly as a set of moral guidelines.²³⁴ But aside from his attempts at accelerating the modernization of Judaism through his critical scholarship of religion, Reinach was deeply committed to Jewish communal activism. He was the vice-president of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, a cofounder of the Jewish Colonization Association, and a very active member of the Société des Études Juives. ²³⁵ On the mission of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, Rodrigue explains: The Alliance, which had created a vast network of French Jewish schools around the Mediterranean basin, was the very incarnation of the message of Franco-Judaism. Its efforts on behalf of Jewish emancipation throughout the world and its spreading of the message of modernity through its schools were designed to remake Jews everywhere in the image of the emancipated French Jew, and they represented a self-imposed civilizing mission that was emblematic of the belief in the normative nature of the French Jewish path of emancipation.²³⁶

Mauss and Durkheim both broke away from Judaic religion and abandoned Jewish practices at an early age. Like all three brothers Reinach, they remained strongly attached to their Jewish cultural and ethnic heritage. And, once again just like the Reinachs, Mauss and Durkheim were deeply involved in the Dreyfus Affair.²³⁷ Mauss also joined the Alliance, although only in the 1930s, which was a very different historical context than Reinach’s involvement in the first two decades of the 20th century. On the other hand, there were also substantial differences between Mauss, Durkheim and Reinach especially with regard to their active commitment towards modernizing Judaism—which was generally absent with Mauss and Durkheim.²³⁸ For the analysis of the following letters, we especially need to keep in mind that Reinach’s strong sense of inter-Jewish solidari-

 Duchêne, “Reinach devant les hommes et les religions,” lxiii.  Rodrigue, “Totems, Taboos, and Jews,” 1. For Reinach’s involvement in the Science du Judaïsme and the Société which was founded in 1879 to enhance “l’étude du passé de la France israélite et d’Israël en général”: André Lemaire, “Les Reinach et les études sur la tradition juive,” CRAI (2007): 1105 – 1116; Perrine Simon-Nahum, La Cité investie. La “Science du Judaïsme” et la République (Paris: Cerf, 1991).  Rodrigue, “Totems, Taboos, and Jews,” 2.  It should nevertheless be underlined with Pickering (“Mauss’s Jewish background,” 47) that “Dreyfusards consisted of free thinkers, socialists, Protestants, and a few liberal Catholics. The affair did not necessarily reveal the unique attitudes of Jews, for example, the degree to which they were or were not assimilated.”  A detailed account of the differences between Reinach, Mauss, and Durkheim with regard to their Jewishness lies beyond the scope of this study. For a solid orientation: Strenski, Durkheim and the Jews of France, 69.

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ty²³⁹ and his scientific-methodological opinions drew him to the “Maussistes,” while from a social class and ideological-political point of view, he was intimately connected to the Jeudistes. And not to forget, Reinach also had a lot of appreciation for Loisy’s critical scholarship. This double (but in se highly divergent) compatibility left Reinach with a very difficult choice to make.

2.4.3.3 Philo-Semitism and Anti-Semitism in the Elections It was Loisy who first brought up the rumor about Reinach’s presupposed sympathy for Mauss in his letter to Arconati of July 4, 1908.²⁴⁰ Arconati acted on the spot. She immediately wrote to Reinach to confront him with these rumors,²⁴¹ and received a prompt reply, which she sent to Loisy with a personal letter on July 8. From a brief note Loisy later attached to Arconati’s original letter,²⁴² we know that Reinach had indeed written to Arconati that Loisy’s publications were superior to those of Mauss only because of their quantity. ²⁴³ In a later letter to Arconati, Loisy added that rumor went around that Reinach supported Mauss because he was Jewish, and because he had similar scientific ideas on debated issues such as taboo and totemism. Mes travaux sont donc remarquables surtout par la quantité, non pas par la qualité, qui est l’apanage de Mauss. Je ne m’insurgerai pas contre ce jugement, qui est dicté par les circonstances et auquel pourrait opposer l’autorité de M. S.R. lui-même, dans des articles publiés. Quelqu’un qui a vu M. S.R. pense qu’il soutient M. pour deux raisons : 1° parce que M. est israélite ; 2° parce que ledit M. a professé sur les tabous et les totems des idées qui sont celles de M. S.R. Dans ces conditions, M. ne peut être qu’un homme de très grand talent, si cela ne va pas jusqu’au génie.²⁴⁴

 This solidarity did however not imply an uncritical appreciation or support of any kind of Judaism, for Reinach was a strong opponent of Zionism. On how the question of Zionism divided early 20th century French Judaism, see Fournier, Marcel Mauss. A Biography, 39 – 40 and multiple contributions to Doris Bensimon and Benjamin Pinkus, eds., Les Juifs de France, le sionisme et l’État (Paris: Publications Langues’ O, 1989). On this question see also infra, 3.2.1.  Loisy to Arconati, July 4, 1908, Sorbonne, MSVC 282, f° 4739.  In her letter to Reinach—of which we have only been able to consult the parts she copied in her letter to Loisy—we once again recognize Monod’s words: “On prétend que vous êtes pour Mauss. Cela m’étonne, car il n’a rien fait, ou presque, passe sa vie à bavarder et s’occupe beaucoup plus de Socialisme que de Science.” Arconati to Loisy, July 8, 1908, BnF, NAF 15646, f° 46.  The note is dated on May 22, 1927: Arconati to Loisy, July 8, 1908, BnF, NAF 15646, f° 44.  I have not found the original letter of Reinach to Arconati in the Arconati archives in the Victor Cousin Library.  Loisy to Arconati, July 9, 1908, Sorbonne, MSVC 282, f° 4740.

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Loisy’s sarcastic comment that as an “israélite” and sociologist, Mauss could not but seem the most talented candidate to Reinach, suggests that he believed the rumors about Reinach’s reasons to prefer Mauss. In the same letter to Arconati, he furthermore exposed a conspiracy theory which, in his view, confirmed Reinach’s dishonesty. According to Loisy, Reinach had strategically encouraged him to apply for Réville’s position at the École pratique (where Mauss already worked), in order to divert his attention from the more prestigious chair at the Collège de France which he wanted to go to Mauss. After reading Loisy’s letter, Arconati instantly decided to pay Reinach a visit. Her brief but clear and dramatic (“I am spent”) account of this visit followed in a letter to Loisy of July 10: “Je suis finie depuis ma dernière visite à Salomon, il ne nous aidera pas. Il ne fera rien contre vous, mais ne fera rien contre le socialiste unifié.”²⁴⁵ Arconati made no mention of Reinach’s presupposed philo-Semitism. Her reference to Mauss as “le socialiste unifié” rather insinuates that she found political grounds were at the basis of Reinach’s decision to support neither Loisy or Mauss.²⁴⁶ But while Arconati preferred not to mention this to Loisy, she did talk to Reinach about his Jewish sympathy for Mauss. Some months after Arconati’s visit, Reinach wrote a furious letter to Loisy in which he came back to the unpleasant conversation he had had with the Marquise in July. The immediate cause of Reinach’s anger was a letter he had received from Baron Friedrich von Hügel, who was a friend of both Reinach and of Loisy.²⁴⁷ After having heard from Loisy that Reinach secretly worked against Loisy and for Mauss, von Hügel had written to Reinach to convince him that Loisy really was the better candidate,²⁴⁸ and to incite him to support Loisy. Insulted by von Hügel’s reprimand, Reinach decided to raise the matter with Loisy himself. Reinach’s letter to Loisy is worth reproducing in extenso. This way it will become clear that Loisy’s Mémoires, which quoted only parts of Reinach’s letter, purposefully left

 Arconati à Loisy, July 10, 1908, BnF, NAF 15646, f°49.  I have not been able to find proof which can confirm this. Salomon Reinach was acquainted with the French revolutionary philosopher Georges Sorel, but their (rare) correspondence especially shows that with regard to history of religions and politics they had substantial differences of opinion: Hervé Duchêne, “Georges Sorel et l’histoire des religions. Lettres de Georges Sorel à Salomon Reinach (1911– 1921),” Mil neuf cent. Revue d’histoire intellectuelle 32 (2014): 181– 206 (especially 193 – 194).  On Von Hügel, see supra, 1.1.  The reasons von Hügel gave to support Loisy were scientific, symbolic (the message of Loisy’s appointment for the Church), and purely practical. According to von Hügel, Mauss was a very good candidate, but he was still young, so he could have the chair after Loisy, but for Loisy it was now or never. See Loisy’s Mémoires, III, 56.

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out a very meaningful passage. The italics are those parts of Reinach’s letter which Loisy did not quote in his autobiography.²⁴⁹ Monsieur l’abbé, Du haut de votre ermitage, vous pouvez contempler en la sérénité du rage les luttes dont votre candidature est l’occasion. Moi, qui n’ai cessé de recommander votre élection, non seulement comme un acte de justice scientifique, mais comme un beau geste, j’apprends avec étonnement, pour la seconde fois, que je vous suis hostile, et cela par tendresse pour un concurrent circoncis. La première fois, ç’a été la marquise A., qui est arrivée chez moi, toute furieuse, et m’a permis à grand peine à lui expliquer qu’elle était mal informée ; nulement [sic], ni à elle, ni à d’autres je n’ai jamais caché les c.r.’s que je fais des travaux profonds et originaux de M. C’est une erreur bien féminine de croire que les concurrents d’un candidat favori sont des imbéciles. Après la marquise, voici l’excellent Hügel aux oreilles de qui le même bruit est parvenu et de qui je reçois une belle homélie qui prêche un converti mais l’accuse à tort. Ce qui me déplait beaucoup dans tout cela, c’est cette stupide idée d’un syndicat dont les membres seraient décidés à Non monstrare vias, eadem nisi sacra colenti.²⁵⁰

 Reinach’s letter is difficult to paraphrase. This is the literal translation of the quote (my translation): “Your reverence, From the vantage of your hermitage, you can serenely contemplate the battles that are fought over your candidature. I, who have relentlessly recommended your election, not just as an act of scientific justice, but as a beautiful gesture, I learn with amazement, for the second time already, that I would be hostile to you, out of fondness for a circumcised rival. The first time it was the marquise A., who came to me, all outrageous, and who barely allowed me to explain to her that she was ill-informed. I have never hidden, neither from her, nor from others, the reviews I’ve written on the profound and original work of M. It’s a quite feminine mistake to believe that the rivals of a favorite candidate are imbeciles. After the marquise, it’s now the excellent Hügel who picked up the same rumor, and from whom I received a fine homely which preaches to a convert but wrongly accuses him. What I find particularly displeasing about all of this, is this stupid idea of an association whose members would be decided upon not showing the way to anyone except a fellow worshipper. This letter doesn’t call for an reply. I especially ask you not to tell Hügel, to whom I have replied directly.”  The Latin verse quoted by Reinach comes from Juvenal’s Satires (second half 1st century— early 2nd century CE): Book V, Satire XIV, 103 where the Roman poet paints a very negative picture of a Roman proselyte. The satire discusses a partially observant father who instills in his son the desire to become fully converted to Judaism, and to actively spread Judaism. On Juvenal’s hostility towards Judaism, and the historical context of his reluctance towards the success of Judaic proselytism, see John G. Gager, The Origins of Anti-Semitism: Attitudes toward Judaism in Pagan and Christian Antiquity (New York–Oxford: OUP, 1985), 56 – 58 and passim. The translation of the passage of which this particular verse (in italics, my emphasis) is part, is: “And with their habit of despising the laws of Rome, they study, observe, and revere the Judaic code, as handed down by Moses in his mystic scroll, which tells them not to show the way to anyone except a fellow worshipper and if asked, to take only the circumcised to the fountain.” Susanna Morton

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[…] Cette lettre n’appelle pas à réponse. Je vous prie surtout de n’en rien dire à Hügel, auquel j’ai répondu directement. […].²⁵¹

Reinach’s letter unmistakably denied that he supported Mauss rather than Loisy, and that he did so because of their shared Jewish identity. By quoting the Roman poet Juvenal, who expressed explicit aversion against the exclusive character of Judaism (and underlined the danger such exclusivity represented to Rome), Reinach turned the tables on Arconati and von Hügel, and subtly accused them of anti-Judaism (or worse). What is also particularly striking in the specific passage on Arconati, is that he dismissed her accusation of Mauss’s scientific incapability as the result of the “typically feminine mistake to regard the rivals of their own candidate as idiots.” This way, Reinach established a strategic distinction between serious and intelligent men like Loisy and himself on the one hand, and unknowing, quick to judge (and perhaps even racist) women like Arconati, on the other. This emphasis on their shared male and thus valuable judgment of opinion is a rhetorical trick at the expense of his female friend. We know from our preceding analysis of the correspondence that Arconati was evidently not the only one who liked to reserve the quality label of “Science” for her own motivations and her own candidate. This typically human behavior is, by the way, not just at work among the Jeudistes, but something Mauss himself was also guilty of, as most other candidates without doubt.²⁵² It is significant that Loisy chose to omit Reinach’s clear stance of male gender superiority from his Mémoires. One cannot help but wonder whom exactly he wanted to protect by doing so, especially when we also take into account that Loisy preferred to deliberately diminish Arconati’s part in his appointment. As for Reinach’s words on the accusation of a united “syndicat” of Jewish academics, it is interesting to see how Loisy later denied that von Hügel or Arconati had ever insinuated this: “Il va sans dire que ni von Hügel ni la marquise Arconati n’avaient parlé de syndicat. C’est M. Reinach qui postule derrière leurs remarques et leurs exhortations une accusation de sémitisme qui y était tout au plus sous-entendue comme explication possible de son attitude.”²⁵³

Braund, ed. and transl., Juvenal and Persius, Loeb Classical Library 91 (Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 2004), 467.  Reinach to Loisy, BnF, NAF 15660, f°297. The letter is undated. See also, Loisy, Mémoires, III, 57.  Cf. the letter of Mauss quoted in note 44, where Mauss describes Toutain as an “imbécile.”  Loisy, Mémoires, III, 58.

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Loisy’s statement that the suspicion of sémitisme was a complete figment of Reinach’s imagination, is a manifest lie. The accusation of a Jewish “syndicat” may be somewhat exaggerated, but the correspondence between Loisy and Arconati conclusively demonstrates that they really did believe Reinach was supporting Mauss because he was a Jew. Whereas Loisy’s own complaints were, at the worst, sarcastic comments of the type we’ve seen, Arconati didn’t hesitate to express her opinion in a more crude and indignant way.²⁵⁴ After her visit of July and multiple failed attempts to convince Reinach, she (temporarily) broke off all contact with Reinach, and repeatedly informed Loisy of her rage about what she called Reinach’s “small cowardly actions” (“petites lâchetés”²⁵⁵). The most direct accusation she formulated against Reinach and Mauss, can be found in her letter of October 4, 1908. In a preceding letter, Loisy had suggested that Reinach had perhaps refused to support him, because he had been hoping that the chair would be offered to himself.²⁵⁶ But to Arconati, it was perfectly clear that self-interest was not the reason for Reinach’s lack of support. She was disgusted by his refusal to support Loisy, which according to her was “only because that clown of a Mauss is Jewish, while Salomon is perfectly aware of the difference between a louse and a lion” (“uniquement parce que ce farceur de Mauss est Juif, car Salomon sait très bien, la différence qu’il y a entre un pou et un lion”²⁵⁷). For the correction interpretation of Arconati’s words, it is important to underline that in contrast to the preceding sentence, the French metaphor of the “louse” and the “lion” was probably not an insult which was specifically directed against Mauss’s Jewish identity. Arconati repeatedly used adaptations of Victor Hugo’s verse “Combien de poux faut-il pour manger un lion?”²⁵⁸ to refer to the inequality she believed to exist between Loisy (“the lion”) and all other candidates (“the lice”, the English equivalent of the French expression would be: the thorns in his side), who could make the lion

 E. g. Loisy à Arconati, July 31, 1908, Sorbonne, MSVC 282, f° 4748: “Beaucoup de gens, surtout en Israël, annoncent le succès de Mauss.”  Arconati à Loisy, October 25, 1908, BnF, NAF 15646, f°74 : “Quant à Salomon, j’étais finie lors de la dernière visite que je lui fis—soyez tranquille je ne lui parlerai de rien, par la bonne raison que je ne veux pas le voir, je trouve toutes ces petites lâchetés ignobles—Je pense comme mon père, qui, dans les 20 ans de sa vie politique à la Chambre et au Sénat, ne s’est jamais abstenu. Car il disait: que l’abstention, neuf fois sur dix, n’était que de la lâcheté—Somme toute, Salomon est pour son coreligionnaire, un point c’est tout.”  This letter has probably not been preserved.  Arconati to Loisy, October 4, 1908, BnF, NAF 15646, f° 66 – 67.  Hugo was a witness at Arconati’s wedding. For the verse: Victor Hugo, La Légende des siècles (Paris: Hetzel, 1859), 158 (part of the Légende du roi de Gallice).

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uncomfortable, but would never be able to defeat him.²⁵⁹ In his letters to Arconati, Loisy frequently insisted that Reinach was the one who spread the recurrent rumor that he would one day return to the Church. And in several later letters of 1909, he complained—first to Arconati and later also to Cumont—that Reinach still addressed him as “abbé.”²⁶⁰ However, at the time of the elections, neither Loisy, nor Arconati seemed to consider the possibility that Reinach—like many other left republican intellectuals—preferred Mauss over Loisy for anticlerical reasons. Both the rumor about Reinach’s personal ambitions and about his reluctance towards Loisy’s Catholic past, were dismissed as strategic cover-ups for the real, underlying Jewish sympathy for Mauss.²⁶¹ To fully contextualize Arconati’s and Loisy’s views, it is important to recall that two other Jewish friends of Arconati, Alfred and Ferdinand Dreyfus, supported Loisy, and not Mauss. The Marquise kept both of them well informed of Reinach’s “misstep,” and even wrote to Loisy that Ferdinand Dreyfus had suggested a Jewish alliance in favor of Loisy, to which she, obviously, didn’t have any objection.²⁶² Unfortunately we don’t have much information on the position of Arconati’s closest Jewish friend, Joseph Reinach. Arconati wrote to him about the elections, but he replied only briefly: “Je ne connais pas M.” And then added that

 See, e. g., Arconati to Loisy, July 10, 1908, BnF, NAF 15646, f°50, about Briand who couldn’t do much for Loisy (see supra, 2.4.1): “Quel malheur qu’il ne soit plus à l’Instruction publique. Ça ne fait rien, j’ai bon espoir—je pense au vers de V. Hugo: ‘Combien de poux faut-il pour manger un lion?’.” See also Arconati to Loisy, October 16, 1908, on rumors about an alliance between Toutain and Mauss: “Je vais répondre à Morel et lui raconter ce que vous me dites au sujet de Mauss et de Toutain—Il ne faut rien négliger de ce qui est dit et ne pas oublier, surtout, qu’il ne faut pas donner trop d’importance à Mauss en ne prononçant que son nom. Je crois très heureux, qu’il y ait tant de ‘poux’.”  A good example can be found in Loisy’s letter to Arconati of October 17, 1909, which Arconati subsequently forwarded to Cumont; Lannoy, Bonnet and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 12. Loisy here commented on the fact that Reinach had addressed him with the Catholic title of “abbé”: “Il n’a pas encore digéré ma nomination et il aurait continué à me décerner les plus grands éloges si j’avais bien voulu poser en chef du modernisme catholique, menant directement campagne contre le catholicisme officiel, au lieu de venir au Collège de France en savant indépendant.” See also Loisy, Mémoires, III, 39.  Von Hügel considered a combination of several factors, see his letter to Loisy quoted in the Mémoires, III, 57.  Arconati to Loisy, January 28, 1909, BnF, NAF 15646, f° 112: “Ferdinand me disait tout à l’heure: ‘Dites donc à Salomon d’empêcher nos coreligionnaires de voter pour Mauss.’—Je lui ai répondu: c’est inutile, je sais ce qu’il m’a dit en juillet, du reste, si Loisy est battu, ça sera de la faute et doublement des Maussistes, car cela prouverait qu’au second tour ils n’ont pas voté pour lui—somme toute, je suis très nerveuse et je donnerais je ne sais quoi pour être à dimanche.”

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certain scholars had preferred his brother, whom Joseph himself considered “by far the best candidate,” but that Salomon had refused.²⁶³ Joseph Reinach’s rather laconic answer leads to suspect that he wanted to stay out of this affair.²⁶⁴ Unlike for Brisson and Combes, we don’t have any proof that Reinach—who belonged to the more moderate republican Alliance démocratique—got politically or personally involved on behalf of Loisy. In his letters to Arconati no more information can be found about Salomon’s motivations. There is only one letter of Arconati to Loisy in which she quoted a letter she had received from Joseph, which seems to confirm the assumption that Mauss’s Jewishness really did matter to Salomon. Apparently Salomon had said to Joseph that he was personally in favor of Loisy, but that “Israel should not support him too much.”²⁶⁵ It will, however, be clear by now that Arconati’s words should be handled with utmost care; sometimes they were literal copies of the original, but sometimes they absolutely were not. As for Reinach’s accusations of anti-Semitic sentiment, can we say that Arconati’s and Loisy’s hostility towards Reinach’s Jewishness was only the result of their disappointment in Reinach’s apparent lack of support for Loisy, or do we have solid proof that a deeper, racially motivated animosity underpinned their indignant reactions? For Loisy, the answer to this question is negative: we have not found any indication of a general anti-Semitic aversion towards Mauss or Reinach. For Arconati, the answer is less clear. Doubt on her position especially follows from one passage of her correspondence. The particular fragment actually comes from a letter of Émile Combes to Arconati, which she later copied in a letter to Loisy (without mentioning it was Combes’s opinion). We have seen that Combes had been trying to convince Gaston Doumergue to support Loisy. In the quoted letter of July 5, 1908 Combes had reported on his progress, and explained to the Marquise that he had doubts about Doumergue’s “republican solidness” because of his recent “Semitic appointments”: Je souhaite vivement, comme vous, que Loisy soit nominé à la chaire de l’histoire des religions au Collège de France. Mais, si j’en aurais eu l’espoir très fondé il y a deux ou trois ans, je ne l’ai plus au même degré aujourd’hui, le caractère de Doumergue, en raison de

 Joseph Reinach to Arconati, May 20, 1908, Sorbonne, MSVC 292, f° 7115.  This is also clear from Joseph Reinach’s letter to Arconati of November 4, Sorbonne, MSVC 292, f° 7122 where he mentioned the letter Salomon had written to Loisy to address the existing “soupçons” (quoted supra), but here, too, he remained impartial.  Arconati to Loisy, November 10, 1908, BnF, NAF 15646, f°77: “Salomon Reinach a dit à son frère qui me l’écrit: ‘la M.ise me boude parce qu’elle croit que je suis contre Loisy, elle a tout à fait tort, mais il ne faut pas qu’Israël le soutienne trop’…… [sic].” I have not been able to find the original letter of Joseph Reinach.

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quelques nominations sémites, ne m’offrent [sic] plus les mêmes garanties de fermeté républicaine qu’auparavant.²⁶⁶

Combes had been an ardent Dreyfusard, but he was also the architect of the Separation Law of 1905 who had used the vehement anticlericalism the Affair provoked to gain momentum for his law. This law (which was passed after Combes was forced to resign due to a scandal) predominantly affected Catholicism, but also had consequences for Protestant and Jewish minorities.²⁶⁷ This specific sentence of Combes could point to his radical republican viewpoint that politics and religion should be strictly separated. However, given the usage of the term “sémites”—which refers to ethnicity or race rather than to religion—the much more plausible interpretation is that Combes and Arconati truly feared that post-Dreyfus political correctness towards Jews was going astray. And such a position really does imply genuine reluctance towards high profile Jewish scholars like Mauss or Durkheim who were climbing the social ladder and making their way to the academic top. So, even if Arconati had many (rich) Jewish friends, the aforementioned fragment may be an indication that it was not just Mauss’s social(ist) background which explains why she didn’t want Mauss on the chair.

2.5 The Outcome In the end, Loisy was elected as the candidate “en première ligne,” and quite surprisingly Jules Toutain became the one “en seconde ligne.” The fact that Mauss didn’t even make it in the second selection had everything to do with George Foucart’s withdrawal from the elections after Loisy had been elected, and with the fact that Loisy’s and Mauss’s teams had not made any prior agreements for the “seconde ligne.” After the victory of Loisy, Paul Foucart angrily withdrew the candidacy of his son. The Catholic votes which were previously div-

 Combes to Arconati, July 5, 1908, Sorbonne, MSVC 266, f°892. Partially written at the end of the line, the word “sémites” is difficult to decipher. The most plausible transcription is “sémites,” which is clearly also what Arconati read and wrote. Arconati repeated in her letter to Loisy of July 8, 1908, BnF, NAF 15646, f° 45: “Doumergue nous servira-t-il comme il le devrait?! Il y a deux ou trois ans, j’aurais répondu de lui [sic], mais aujourd’hui en raison de q.q. nominations sémites, il ne m’offre plus les mêmes garanties de fermeté républicaine qu’autrefois.”  See Patrick Cabanel, “Autour de Zadoc Kahn et de la Séparation: l’union sacrée des juifs et des protestants,” in Zadoc Kahn. Un grand rabbin entre culture juive, affaire Dreyfus et laïcité, eds. Jean-Philippe Chaumont and Jean-Claude Kuperminc (Paris: Éditions de l’Éclat, 2007), 203 – 217.

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ided between Foucart and Toutain, now all went to Toutain, who was also supported by some of Loisy’s supporters. Several professors who had voted for Loisy clearly preferred the more “neutral” Toutain over Mauss. As for the elections “en première ligne,” it is useful to quote Benthien’s overview to see what happened: Le vote se tient dans un contexte particulièrement tendu. Sur 36 votants, le premier tour donne 12 voix à Foucart, 9 à Loisy, 7 à Mauss, 5 à Toutain, 2 à Vernes et une seule voix à Amélineau. Au second tour, Foucart passe à 13 voix, Loisy à 11, Mauss à 8 et Toutain à 4. Toutain écarté, Loisy passe alors en tête avec 17 voix, suivi de Foucart avec 15 voix, Mauss ne conservant que 4 voix. Au quatrième tour, Loisy conserve 17 voix, Foucart passe à 16 voix, 2 voix restant à Mauss, avec un vote nul. Les deux derniers soutiens de Mauss préfèrent alors opter pour “l’excommunié.” Au cinquième et dernier tour, Loisy obtient 19 voix contre 16 pour Foucart.²⁶⁸

From this overview, we can derive that (1) the Liberal-Protestant votes for Vernes went to Loisy (in the second round); (2) some votes for Toutain went to Foucart while others went to Loisy (in the third round), and (3) almost all votes for Mauss in the end went to Loisy. Clearly, there was little mobility between the conservative Foucart & Toutain group and the progressive Mauss & Loisy group. In spite of the prior hostilities between Loisy and Mauss, the Maussistes finally preferred the “excommunicated one” over the candidates of the conservative Catholics.²⁶⁹ Toutain’s election for the “seconde ligne,” however, shows that the feelings of the Loisysistes were not mutual. Loisy’s election was not ratified by the Académie des sciences morales et politiques. The appointed committee elected Foucart, but, luckily, Combes and Brisson had done their job very well. The Académie voted on Saturday February 27, and Doumergue published his decision to appoint Loisy just 3 days later, on March 2, meaning that he had not needed a lot of time to make up his mind.²⁷⁰ Loisy’s appointment attracted an enormous amount of attention from the press, with reactions going from very hostile to highly positive. We would like to end this chapter with the short notification which was published in the left republican paper L’Action nationale: organe de la ligue républicaine d’action nationale. The author, Alfred Détrez, who was a correspondent of Salomon Reinach, wrote that the candidacy of “Abbé Loisy” was never supported by

 Benthien, “Les Durkheimiens et le Collège de France,” 211.  For a more complete analysis of the election rounds, see Burger, “Alfred Loisy au Collège de France (1909 – 1932),” 7– 8 and Benthien, “Les durkheimiens et le Collège de France,” 211.  Loisy, Mémoires, III, 89 mentions: “Le 28 février étant un dimanche, le ministère n’avait pas pu faire plus grande diligence, et l’acte de l’Académie était arrivé juste à temps pour être vu dans le décret” (the emphasis is Loisy’s).

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the entire Left of the Collège, and that a large part of these votes actually went to Mauss. But, Détrez added, “this distinguished representative of the school of religious anthropology” had the major disadvantage of being Jewish.²⁷¹ Détrez made a similar observation on the elections for the “seconde ligne.” Unlike what one would expect, he wrote, Mauss never obtained the same number of votes as Loisy had in the first round. In the article, Détrez conjectured that an old trace of latent anti-Semitism may have been the main obstacle to Mauss’s success.²⁷² Loisy was quick to observe that the source of Détrez must have been Salomon Reinach, and to refute the accusation of latent anti-Semitism. We have seen, though, that this accusation was not completely unjustified—and the same goes for the philo-Semitism imputed to Reinach, but anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism were, in our view, not at the core of the elections. The really deciding factors were anticlericalism and anti-socialism, the former being the intrinsic reason for voting for Loisy, and the latter an immensely important incentive not to vote for Mauss.

 Alfred Détrez, “La Candidature de l’abbé Loisy au Collège de France,” L’Action nationale: organe de la ligue républicaine d’action nationale February (1909), 212: “La gauche du Collège de France ne s’y ralliait cependant pas toute entière. Un représentant très distingué de l’école d’anthropologie religieuse, M. Mauss avait de ce côté un certain nombre de partisans; mais on assurait que sa qualité d’israélite l’empêcherait, quel que fût l’événement, de grouper sur son nom une majorité.”  Détrez, “La Candidature,” 213: “Un vieux reste d’antisémitisme latent dans certains cœurs fut peut-être le principal obstacle à son succès.”

3 Taking a Stand: Magic, Science, and Religion; History of Religions in the École laïque On becoming the holder of what was at that time the most symbolic chair of the Collège de France, Loisy immediately took up the double challenge that came with the territory. On the one hand, he entered the debates that were at the heart of the contemporary discipline of history of religions: the tenacious international quest for the (one) origin of religion. And he formulated the ambitious research project that would shape his future courses at the Collège: a comprehensive, historical and comparative study of sacrifice. On the other hand, he got involved in the then topical public debates on the integration (or not) of instruction on religion in the curricula of the école laïque. If Loisy felt he had no time to waste to make his position on these delicate matters known to his peers and to a broader audience of non-specialist readers, this had everything to do with the publication of Salomon Reinach’s Orpheus earlier that year.¹ Subtitled A General History of Religions, this book offered a deeply rationalistic interpretation of the development of religion from its most primitive origins up until the Modernist crisis in the Church, all the while underlining: “what a consoling prospect the reign of reason and the enfranchisement of thought opens out before the human mind.”² Orpheus singlehandedly fueled a whole series of intense controversies, academic and non-academic, many of which (though not all) concerned the then much debated issue of the origin of religion. Central in these debates was Orpheus’s soon-famous—or infamous—definition of religion as: “A sum of scruples which impede the free exercise of our faculties.”³ But there was also Reinach’s theory that religion had first originated in purely arbitrary taboo; not to mention his systematic discovery of totemism in all religions around the globe, but with special devotion to totemic survivals in Judaism and Christianity. And as the icing on the cake, Reinach expressed strong

 For more extensive introductions of the controversies raised by Orpheus, see A.H. Jones, “The Publication of Salomon Reinach’s ‘Orpheus’ and the Question of Christian Origins,” Religion 7 (1977): 46 – 65; Rodrigue, “Totems, Taboos, and Jews”; Laplanche, La Crise de l’origine, 76 – 89; C.J.T. Talar, “Salomon Reinach’s Orpheus. Catalyst for Debate over the History of Religions in France,” in Praet and Bonnet, eds., Science, Religion and Politics, 49 – 72.  We use the following English translation Orpheus. A General History of Religions, trans. Florence Simmonds (London–New York: William Heinemann–G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909). For the sentence quoted here, see p. 408.  Reinach, Orpheus, 3. The original French sentence reads: “Un ensemble de scrupules qui font obstacle au libre exercice de nos facultés.” https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110584356-007

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skepticism on the historicity of Jesus’ crucifixion. To a certain extent, he even doubted the historicity of Jesus himself.⁴ A true public intellectual, Reinach felt it was his duty to instruct the broader French public on the scientific progress of history of religions. The propagation of scientific knowledge on religion was, however, not a goal per se to him, but mostly a means to a higher end. For Reinach, it was the quintessential instrument to “liberate the human mind” from religious restraints.⁵ Orpheus was intentionally written for a broad readership and Reinach had even suggested that it could serve as a textbook for instruction on religion in the public école laïque. In doing so, the scholar took up a discussion that had been stirring minds since the foundation of the école laïque in the early 1880s with the legal prohibition to teach religion in public schools.⁶ After the Separation Law of 1905, the question as to whether scientific instruction on religion should be integrated in the public schools’ curricula, regained topicality and deeply divided republican supporters of the école. At the same time, the fight for educational hegemony between Catholics and anticlerical republicans reached a new climax during the so-called Guerre des manuels between 1908 – 1910.⁷ On September 14, 1909 (a few months after Orpheus saw daylight) the French bishops wrote a collective pastoral letter in which they publicly condemned 14 primary school textbooks (especially in history and ethics) used in the école laïque. In some French regions, their exhortations not to read or even possess these textbooks led to their public burning. It is against these backgrounds that we should understand Reinach’s endeavor and Loisy’s strong reactions to it.

 This particular dimension of Reinach’s Orpheus will be discussed in our next chapter, 4.1.2.  Reinach, Orpheus, 24.  See among many other: Liliane Maury, Les Origines de l’école laïque en France (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1996); Pierre Ognier, Une école sans Dieu?: 1880 – 1895: l’invention d’une morale laïque sous la IIIe République (Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Mirail, 2008); Yves Verneuil, “L’École et la laïcité, de l’Ancien Régime à nos jours: enjeux du passé, enjeux dépassés?” Tréma 37 (2012): 130 – 143; Jean Baubérot, “La Morale laïque sous la IIIe République,” in Double défi pour l’école laïque: enseigner la morale et les faits religieux, eds. Isabelle Saint-Martin and Philippe Gaudin (Paris: Riveneuve Editions, 2014), 23 – 40. On the question of the French “laïcité,” more generally, see especially Jean Baubérot, Histoire de la laïcité en France (Paris: PUF, 2007).  Christian Amalvi, “Les Guerres des manuels autour de l’école primaire (1899 – 1914),” Revue historique 532 (1979): 367– 382; Louis-Pierre Sardella, “La Condamnation de la neutralité et des manuels scolaires par les évêques français en 1909. Archéologie d’un texte,” Revue d’Histoire de l’Église 87, 1 (2001): 71– 85; Jean-François Condette, “Les Deux ‘guerres’ des manuels scolaires dans le Nord et le Pas-de-Calais (1882– 1883 et 1908 – 1910),” in Éducation, religion, laïcité (XVIe —XXe siècle), eds. Jean-François Condette (Villeneuve d’Ascq: IRHiS/CEGES, 2010), 407– 459.

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All of the few scholars who studied Loisy’s career at the Collège de France have pointed to the enormous importance of Reinach’s Orpheus. ⁸ A lot, however, remains to be said on the specifics of this relationship, especially with regard to their theoretical views on the origin of religion on the one hand, and their historical-anthropological study of the origins of Christianity on the other. It was not just Reinach who was important for Loisy. Loisy was also one of the scholars most quoted in Orpheus (together with Voltaire!), especially in the chapters on Christianity. The two scholars also sustained a lively correspondence. Their letters further demonstrate that the influence indeed was mutual.⁹ In this chapter and the next, Reinach’s Orpheus will serve as our point of departure for the study of the development of Loisy’s comparative religion after 1909. The present chapter focuses on their quest for the origin of all religions, while the following chapter will deal with Reinach’s and Loisy’s anthropological theory of myth and ritual, and how they used it to compare primitive Christianity to the pagan mystery cults. After his appointment to the Collège, Loisy wrote no less than five articles against Orpheus, several of which were returned with a reply by Reinach.¹⁰ With each new article, their very public dialogue grew more and more polemical and personal. This strikingly personal undertone is confirmed by their intense correspondence of that time.¹¹ For a full appreciation of the polemic between

 See Jones, Independence and Exegesis, 45, 49 – 51; Laplanche, La Crise de l’origine, 82– 83; Talar, “Salomon Reinach’s Orpheus.”  See also supra, chapter 1 (1.4) and chapter 2 (2.4.3), for this correspondence.  Loisy published a first short review in the Revue historique together with Gabriel Monod (see infra, 3.2.3, for its content): Gabriel Monod et Alfred Loisy, “L’Orpheus de M. S. Reinach [Mélanges et documents],” Revue historique 102 (1909): 300 – 313 (300 – 304 by Monod, 304– 313 by Loisy). A detailed refutation by Loisy followed with “Remarques sur une définition de la Religion,” Union pour la Vérité. Correspondance 1909 – 1910 (October 1, 1909): 1– 22, which was followed by Reinach’s reply: “Quaedam pro Orpheo,” Union pour la Vérité. Correspondance 1909 – 1910 (November 15, 1909): 101– 109. Loisy in turn replied with: “Un mot d’explication,” Union pour la Vérité. Correspondance 1909 – 1910 (December 15, 1909): 157– 164. A final reply by Reinach concluded the discussion: “Solvuntur objecta,” Union pour la Vérité. Correspondance 1909 – 1910 (January 15, 1910): 209 – 216. Two substantial papers which were still triggered by Reinach’s views, but had a wider scope, were Alfred Loisy, “Magie, science, religion,” RHLR NS 1 (1910): 144– 174, and Loisy’s essay “De la vulgarisation et de l’enseignement de l’histoire des religions,” Union pour la Vérité. Correspondance 1909 – 1910, February 1: 257– 272; March 1: 209 – 225 (with reply by Reinach, 226 – 227); May 1: 330 – 342, June 1: 390 – 408. Most of these writings against Orpheus were collected in the volume À propos d’histoire des religions (Paris: Émile Nourry, 1911), which it is—unless noted otherwise—the version used in this chapter.  The long and fully preserved correspondence of Loisy and Reinach is as yet completely unexplored. In this chapter (and the next) we will occasionally refer to their letters, but our main

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Loisy and Reinach, we should definitely take into account Loisy’s deep frustration over Reinach’s lack of support for his election at the Collège. Without wanting to engage in an analysis of Loisy’s character, it may nevertheless be useful to mention that he was not very forgiving by nature.¹² In this chapter we will focus on Loisy’s reaction against Reinach’s theory of religion. In more ways than one, this chapter introduces the key themes and issues which will occupy us in the next two chapters on myth and on sacrifice. The more important aim of the present chapter is to analyze two largely unknown articles Loisy wrote against Reinach: (1) his article “Magie, science et religion” (1910), which sheds interesting new light on Loisy’s reception of Mauss’s and Hubert’s sociology of magic, and of Frazer’s evolutionary model of magic, religion and science (NB the inverted order in Loisy’s title); and (2) his article “De la vulgarisation de l’histoire des religions” (1910), which is one of the rare instances where he participated in the public political debates on religious instruction. To fully grasp Loisy’s ideas, this chapter will need to give a detailed analysis of Reinach’s theory of religion, which has often been misrepresented. But before turning our attention to Orpheus, we will first examine the programmatic inaugural speech Loisy gave at the Collège de France on May 3, 1909 and which set the tone for the years to come.¹³ The Leçon d’ouverture unfolded the research journey on which the new professor was about to embark, and it provides crucial information on his methodological opinions. No less importantly, the speech also was a skillful attempt to appease the minds of his new colleagues after the deep ruptures that had been exposed during the polemical elections.

focus is on their publications. A profound investigation of its content and vast scope deserves treatment in a monograph of its own.  Especially in his correspondence to Arconati-Visconti, it becomes clear that Loisy could hold a mean grudge. In several letters he repeated that Reinach had begrudged him the chair at the Collège. For an example, see letter 11 in the Loisy–Cumont correspondence, which is a copy made by Cumont of a letter of Loisy to Arconati: Lannoy, Bonnet and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 9–10, and II, 13 – 14 for the complex history of this letter.  The text was printed before the speech was delivered. While the printed text indicates April 24, Loisy explained in his Mémoires (III, 96) that the lecture was postponed until May 3 at the request of Doumergue. For Doumergue’s part in Loisy’s election, see chapter 2 (especially 2.4.1).

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3.1 The Programmatic Inaugural Speech at the Collège de France (1909) Loisy delivered his highly anticipated inaugural speech under massive police surveillance. His Mémoires and correspondence to Arconati and the Jeudistes reveal real concern for disturbances (or worse) by militant activists of the Action française and its youth organization, the Camelots du Roi ¹⁴, but there was also fear for reactions by far-left anticlerical republicans.¹⁵ Under such grim circumstances, it becomes all the more understandable why Loisy explicitly wanted to appease rather than start a new polemic. In spite of his semi-political nomination, he began his massively attended speech with an overt attempt to depoliticize the chair of history of religions, stating that the chair did not have its roots in the political concerns of the republican regime: “Elle ne dut pas son origine aux préoccupations politiques du moment, et elle avait sa raison d’être ailleurs que dans un intérêt de circonstance.”¹⁶ While it is certainly true that the scientific study of the history of religions in France had originated long before its institutionalization under the Third Republic, it will be clear from the preceding chapter that the creation of the chair itself definitely was part of a well-articulated political agenda. In our analysis of L’Évangile et l’Église we have seen how very well Loisy mastered the art of strategic self-representation.¹⁷ This skill was also put in good use in his inaugural speech. The speech seemingly began with a transparent captatio benevolentiae, as it praised the work done by the previous chair holders, Albert and Jean Réville.¹⁸ But in reality, Loisy especially discussed the research of his Liberal-Protestant predecessors in such a way that marked himself as the true consensus figure that they had supposedly failed to be. Loisy extensively praised Albert Réville for his comparative study of the religions of Mexico, China, Egypt, Assyria, etc. and for his highly independent historical criticism of the Old and New Testament,¹⁹ but he ended his eulogy with the most severe  On the circumstances of the inaugural speech and the organization of police forces before and during: Burger, “Alfred Loisy au Collège de France,” 14; Leroy, “Loisy et le Collège de France,” 107– 108.  In the meanwhile, the conservative Catholic press published warnings, stating that Catholics were forbidden to attend the lectures of the vitandus. Loisy, Mémoires III, 92.  Alfred Loisy, Leçon d’ouverture du cours d’histoire des religions au Collège de France (Paris: Émile Nourry, 1909), 3.  See chapter 1 (1.1 and passim).  On the Liberal-Protestant worldviews and historical methods of Albert and Jean Réville, see chapter 1 (1.4) and chapter 2 (2.2.3).  Loisy, Leçon d’ouverture, 8 – 9.

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criticism one could basically address to any self-respecting historian of religions. In his otherwise magisterial Jésus de Nazareth (1896), Loisy argued, Albert Réville had adopted a theological rather than a historical discourse, projecting his modern Liberal-Protestant views on the Christ, as a fully human figure who preached a purely moral kingdom of God.²⁰ Loisy’s strong antagonism against Liberal Protestantism also inspired the second part (II) of his speech, which discussed the work of Jean Réville. Again, appraisal in the first paragraphs—in which Loisy applauded Réville’s innovative work on third century Christianity and pagan syncretism²¹—is overshadowed by the criticism with which he ended. More careful in his rebuking of this recently deceased scholar, Loisy criticized Jean Réville for having focused his studies predominantly on individual religiosity.²² While acknowledging that the spiritual needs of the individual are an important point of attention for the historian of religions, Loisy countered that religion was just as well (and in his opinion clearly even more so) an inherently social and collective phenomenon. To what extent he realized that his anti-Protestantism made him turn closer to the sociological methodology of his main rival for the chair, remains a big question mark at this point of his intellectual development.²³ Only in the third part of his speech (III) did Loisy finally come to the point. He began the exposition of his own views by reflecting on the spirit (esprit) of history of religions as a properly scientific discipline where impartiality reigned (or rather: should reign). Loisy firmly positioned himself in the tradition of Ernest Renan, to whom he had already referred in the very beginning of the speech as the “incomparable master” who had initiated him in the history of religions.²⁴ Seeing his subtle attempts to downsize the legacy of the Révilles, and his reference to Renan as the true French pioneer of the discipline, it is perhaps not surprising that Loisy has so often been wrongly considered the successor of Renan, who had in fact held the chair of Hebrew.²⁵ Whereas the Révilles had secretly confounded their Christian faith with rationalism and put history of religions in service of their Liberal-Protestant theology,²⁶ Loisy was convinced

 Loisy, Leçon d’ouverture, 11.  Loisy especially discussed Jean Réville’s Religion à Rome sous les Sévères (1886), which had in fact been written before Réville became a professor at the Collège de France in 1907.  Loisy, Leçon d’ouverture, 20.  For Loisy’s ideas on sociology, see also infra, this chapter (3.3) and chapter 5 (5.3.1.3).  Loisy, Leçon d’ouverture, 7.  See, e. g., Strenski, Theology and the first theory of sacrifice, 119, note 178.  It is interesting to see how he actually continued to refer to his predecessors (without calling them by their names) as negative examples throughout the entire speech. For a good example,

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that Renan had taken up a much more transparent position about the impartiality criterion in the science of religion. Loisy especially applauded Renan’s recommendation that to write the history of a religion, it was necessary that one had believed in it at some point so that one had intimate knowledge of it, but also that one should later have abandoned that faith so as to have absolute freedom of judgement.²⁷ One can easily see why Renan’s autobiographically inspired guidelines appealed to Loisy, although he did admit that things were not quite as simple as Renan had suggested them to be. Loisy gave his own twist to Renan’s advice by interpreting it as a plea for the historian of religions to adopt an intrinsically positive attitude (“impartialité intelligente et bienveillante”²⁸) toward his object of inquiry. This, however, did not mean that all religions were of equal value to Loisy. His evolutionary philosophy of religious history here provided a welcome solution. In spite of the fanaticisms, the inertia, and the resistances of some religions, the religions of the past (with their “imaginary myths,” “bizarre, crude and often cruel cults”) represented necessary steps towards the realization of “higher,” more moral religions. In all of them, Loisy said, one can discern the human aspiration for a “vaguely perceived and desired ideal of a good society and a satisfied conscience”: À travers les mythes imaginaires, les cultes bizarres, grossiers, souvent cruels, derrière le fanatisme ardent des religions qui grandissent, la puissance d’inertie de celles qu’a figées une tradition immobile, la résistance irritante de celles qui luttent désespérément contre un progrès qui les menace, il faut savoir, encore et toujours, discerner l’aspiration de l’humanité vers un idéal, vaguement perçu et voulu, de société bonne et de conscience satisfaite.²⁹

Loisy unmistakably wrote these words (as well as other, similar passages of his speech) with Orpheus in mind.³⁰ Reinach’s negative definition of religion and his conceptualization of the history of religions as a history of errors bothered Loisy a great deal, as we will see further on. The quote also shows that the new pro-

see p. 27, where he wrote: “La science des religions ne peut servir aucune théologie particulière, et les théologies particulières sont incompatibles avec la science des religions […] Mes regrettés prédécesseurs étaient, au moins par l’intention, dégagés de tout préjugé théologique.”  Loisy, Leçon d’ouverture, 21: “Renan lui-même ne disait-il pas que, pour raconter comme il faut l’histoire d’une religion quelconque, il était bon d’y avoir cru, parce qu’ainsi on la connaissait mieux, et indispensable de n’y plus croire, afin d’en juger librement.”  Loisy, Leçon d’ouverture, 26.  Loisy, Leçon d’ouverture, 25.  The last sentence of the quote was the reason why Loisy wrote his later article “Magie, science et religion” against Reinach. On this sentence and its interpretation, see infra, 3.3.

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fessor firmly stuck to the evolutionary mindset he had developed in the context of his Modernist philosophy. To this point, too, we will return when we discuss his dissension with Reinach. Congruent with his conviction that all religions (past and present) in se represent valuable attempts to enhance moral behavior, Loisy ended this part of his speech with the idealistic warning not to let history of religions slip into a scale of values, for which the own Christian religion would be the ultimate measurement standard. Although he thus seemed to be perfectly conscious of the main trap enclosed in his evolutionary framework, we will see in this and the following chapters that Loisy never completely avoided falling into it. After having addressed the to him crucial issue of impartiality, Loisy sketched the outlines of his own methodology and theory of religion. That his method would be comparative, was a given, but comparison requires further specification (“il y a comparaison et comparaison”³¹). In what followed, the new professor paradoxically confirmed his radically historicist position, while at the same time conveniently explaining that he aimed to transcend the rivalries between the mostly mutually exclusive methodological schools of his day.³² Largely a newcomer to the ongoing debates between comparative mythologists, psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, and strict historicists, he used his newcomer’s profile to his advantage. He saw in it an opportunity to present himself as the consensus figure he was definitely not from a religious and ideological point of view. A solid historical method, Loisy explained, was a comprehensive method which critically encompassed sociological, anthropological, etc. perspectives.³³ In his presentation of these multifarious methods, however, it immediately becomes clear that they were certainly not all of equal interest or importance to Loisy. It is especially because of its succinct assessment of existing methods that the speech constitutes an interesting prelude to what was to follow in Loi-

 Loisy, Leçon d’ouverture, 29.  On this methodological part of the speech, see also Laplanche, “L’histoire des religions en France.”  Loisy, Leçon d’ouverture, 37: “Écoutons donc la sociologie, comme nous écoutons l’anthropologie, comme nous écoutons toute autre science qui peut nous renseigner sur l’objet de nos études. Mais ne nous inféodons à aucune de ces sciences. Nous sommes l’histoire, et ce n’est pas pour rien. La méthode qui convient ici est une méthode historique indéfiniment compréhensive, s’aidant de toutes les contributions que lui fournissent les sciences de l’humanité, traitant tous ces apports comme des témoignages, et les utilisant avec une sage critique. Car sans critique il n’y a pas d’histoire. […] Appliquons simplement, de notre mieux, la critique historique à l’histoire des religions.” Loisy heavily insisted on the novelty of such a multidisciplinary approach in his Mémoires, III, 101.

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sy’s future years at the Collège. Not quite unsurprisingly, comparative mythology and psychology of religion got the lowest rates. Religion, Loisy asserted decisively, is not primarily belief in myth or theological reflection on myth.³⁴ Comparative mythology has its merits because of the insights it has produced on the historical transformations of mythological thinking, but in the end it concerns a less important aspect of religion. In much the same vein, he condemned theories (notably those of Edward B. Tylor and James G. Frazer, who are not mentioned by name) which regarded religion, and myth more particularly, as a stage in the intellectual development of mankind, and thus primarily as a pre-scientific attempt at explaining reality. According to Loisy, religion is first and foremost “a traditional custom, authorized by its usage, which seems to want to satisfy emotional needs and life needs, rather than the curiosity of the mind.” And he added empathically that “mythology and theology are a product of religion rather than religion itself.”³⁵ Furthermore, as was to be expected from the preceding criticism of Liberal-Protestant individualism, Loisy’s account of psychology of religion is only moderately enthusiastic, although he did acknowledge the role of emotion and individual religiosity in religion. Remarkably, anthropology and sociology got the highest scores. Loisy’s short but positive account of the anthropological focus on ritual and the study of totemism, seems to indicate a first major change of ideas in comparison to his Modernist work. We have seen in the first chapter that previously, he had strongly objected to the anthropological premise of universal laws of religious development.³⁶ But in his speech, the new professor now acknowledged that comparison between chronologically and geographically divergent religions is epistemologically valid because of the parallel evolution they all undergo.³⁷ This is a point to

 Still, a close analysis of Loisy’s historiographical writings will show that faith in the myth was a lot more important than he seemed to suggest. On this point see especially the next chapter on myth, see infra, 4.3.2.  For this (“Mythologie et théologie sont plutôt un produit de la religion que la religion même”), and the preceding quote (“une coutume traditionnelle, autorisée par l’usage, et qui semble vouloir satisfaire encore plus aux exigences du sentiment et de la vie qu’à la curiosité de l’esprit”): Loisy, Leçon d’ouverture, 30.  See supra, 1.4.  Loisy, Leçon d’ouverture, 32: “Il n’est pas moins certain que, pour expliquer les religions modernes, pour comprendre les religions des peuples civilisés, on doit remonter le plus haut possible dans les cultes de l’antiquité, on doit interroger les religions des non civilisés. Car les grandes religions, soit nationales, soit universalistes, sont à la longue, sorties des cultes préhistoriques, comme les nations particulières et les empires sont issus des premiers groupements de la plus ancienne humanité. Le développement des unes et des autres a suivi une marche parallèle, et, d’un côté comme de l’autre, les empreintes originelles se perpétuent, de manière ou

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which we will return in great detail in the following chapter on myth and ritual. Still, the method which unmistakably received most attention in the speech, and clearly stuck out as by far the most positively evaluated, is the sociological approach of his former rival Marcel Mauss, and the année sociologique school of Durkheim. With his overall positive, but still nuanced evaluation of the school, Loisy definitely enforced his reputation of a highly autonomous thinker. The strongly anti-sociological opinions of the network that supported his election clearly did not withhold him from recognizing the merits of a method of which we will see that it concurred in more ways than one with his own attention for the social dimension and collective force of religion.³⁸ Loisy formulated the aim to reflect on all aforementioned methods, which he did, but it is quite clear from his inaugural speech that his main concern was to address the challenges raised by Durkheim’s school.³⁹ This may also show in the new appointee’s choice to devote his future courses to the comparative study of sacrifice, which meant stepping into very Maussian grounds,⁴⁰ although it should immediately be noted that sacrifice had been a topical object of scientific inquiry since the late 19th century.⁴¹ Were his choice for sacrifice and desire to develop a historically viable sociological methodology the decisions of a selfconscious scholar who wanted to prove that he really was the better candidate for the chair of history of religions? And/or was it because he was aware of the scientific opportunities sociology offered to secularize his own—still largely Catholic inspired—interest in the social, and to revisit the ritual of all rituals? Without ruling out the first possibility, we can certainly find support for the latter hypothesis in the Mémoires. Here, Loisy retrospectively wrote that it had always been his aim to end his scholarly world tour with a thorough reexamination of the Eucharist.⁴² The inaugural speech cleverly anticipated the criticism which such a Christian point of departure (or arrival) would assuredly receive. When discussing the confessional identity of Albert Réville and his predominant interest in Christianity, Loisy defended Réville—and thus himself. Whether one likes it d’autre, à travers les degrés successifs de la commune évolution.” In the last sentence, one also recognizes E.B. Tylor’s theory of “survivals.” We will come back to this point further in this chapter (3.2.3).  The familiarity between the sociological methodology and the theories of Modernist Catholics like Loisy has already been pointed out by Strenski, Theology and the first theory of sacrifice, 192– 196. We will return to it in chapter 5.  See also Loisy’s testimony on the 1909 inaugural speech in his Mémoires, III, 101 where the sociological method of Mauss is the only one mentioned.  This has also been pointed out by Praet and Lannoy, “Loisy’s comparative method,” 66.  Again, see especially Strenski, Theology and the first theory of sacrifice.  Loisy, Mémoires, III, 102.

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or not, he stated, Christianity has been a quintessential factor in the history of religions. And in countries of Christian tradition, it is only logical that it constitutes the point of departure and the primary axis of comparison for the study of religion: Regretter qu’on n’ait point, dès l’abord, confié cette chaire à un savant qui n’aurait vu dans l’histoire des religions qu’un thème de recherches curieuses, et qui aurait été moins préoccupé du christianisme que des religions des peuples non civilisés⁴³, serait méconnaître l’importance capitale de cette histoire, qui n’est pas simple affaire d’archéologie et d’érudition, et les raisons profondes qui, dans nos pays de civilisation chrétienne, font tout naturellement du christianisme, qu’on le veuille ou non, le point de départ et le point essentiel de comparaison pour de telles études.⁴⁴

Although Loisy did not share Harnack’s opinion that studying the history of Christianity basically was studying the history of all religion(s),⁴⁵ Christianity— and Catholicism more specifically—will remain his explicit and implicit hermeneutical horizon throughout his studies of sacrifice.

3.2 Orpheus and the Bellum Orphicum In the previous chapters, we have come to know Salomon Reinach as an immensely influential scholar of religion. Born into a liberal bourgeois Jewish family, he was also a prominent member of the Parisian high society. A close friend of Arconati-Visconti,⁴⁶ he shared her radical anticlericalism and republican ideology. And like her, he had voiced great sympathy for the Modernist cause pivoted by Loisy. But in 1909, anticlerical suspicion towards the Catholic background of the vitandus, as well as a strong sense of inter-Jewish solidarity and sympathy for Mauss’s sociology, lead Reinach to abstain from supporting

 It is difficult not to see in this sentence an implicit reference to the research of Marcel Mauss and the other Durkheimians, which very much centered on the study of primitive cults.  Loisy, Leçon d’ouverture, 8 – 9. Loisy will make much the same point in his later publications, see, e. g., the preface to his À propos d’histoire des religions, 22– 23. We will see in the next section that this Christian-centered view was surprisingly shared by Reinach.  See chapter 1 (1.2) for Harnack’s point of view. Compare also with Loisy’s more nuanced statement in his Mémoires, III, 102: “L’histoire du christianisme aide à comprendre celle des autres religions, et réciproquement.”  Arconati had been the first to draw Loisy’s attention to the publication of Orpheus (in her letter of February 28, 1909, BnF, NAF 15646, f° 149: “J’ai aussi reçu ce matin le petit livre de Salomon Orpheus. Maintenant que vous êtes nommé, il pense que je suis calmée”). After her friendship with Reinach was repaired, she greatly applauded the book.

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Loisy.⁴⁷ Before discussing the content of his Orpheus, it is necessary to add some further biographical details about this scholar who has been so important for the development of Loisy’s views after 1909.⁴⁸

3.2.1 Salomon Reinach: A Further Introduction A brilliant normalien and agrégé de grammaire, the erudition and research interests of Salomon Reinach knew virtually no limits. His main research interests were situated in the field of Greek religious anthropology, and of ancient history of religions more generally, but a glance at his vast bibliography immediately reveals that it would be wrong to label Reinach an ancient historian tout court. His long list of publications also shows writings in the fields of philosophy (ancient and modern, from Plato to Schopenhauer), art history, education, psychology, archaeology (from ancient Greece, Africa and Gaul to the famous Glozel controversy of 1924⁴⁹), philology and literary criticism, not to mention numerous essays on contemporary political matters. His impressive correspondence reveals a tentacular network including major national and international representatives of all aforementioned fields, among whom we may cite George Sorel⁵⁰, Sigmund Freud⁵¹, Franz Cumont⁵², James G. Frazer⁵³ (and his French wife Lily), or Émile

 Reinach himself claimed that he had also abstained from supporting Mauss, though. See supra, chapter 2, 2.4.3.  The following account is based on my own findings, and on Hervé Duchêne’s detailed biography, “Salomon Reinach devant les hommes et les religions,” v–lxxxi; Rafael Faraco Benthien, “Sous le signe d’Orphée: vie et œuvre de Salomon Reinach,” in Bérose. Encyclopédie en ligne sur l’histoire de l’anthropologie et des savoirs ethnographiques, URL: http://www.ber ose.fr/?-Reinach-Salomon-1858 -1932-&lang=fr  In 1924 a large number of artifacts were unearthed at Glozel, near Vichy, and quickly became the subject of a heated archaeological controversy on whether they were authentic prehistoric finds or forgeries. Reinach held that the finds were Neolithic: Salomon Reinach, Glozel, la découverte, la controverse, les enseignements (Paris: KRA, 1928). On the history of the controversy: Alice Gerard, Glozel: Bones of Contention (New York–Lincoln–Shanghai: iUniverse Inc., 2005).  Duchêne, “Georges Sorel et l’histoire des religions.”  Freud was an avid reader of Reinach. On his use of Reinach’s work on totemism: Duchêne, “Salomon Reinach devant les hommes et les religions,” lxxvi–lxxxi; and Jacques Le Rider, “Freud, lecteur de Salomon Reinach—Reinach, juge du ‘freudisme’,” in Les Frères Reinach, eds. Basch, Espagne, and Leclant, 339 – 346.  On their relationship: Henri Lavagne, “Lettres inédites de Franz Cumont à Salomon Reinach,” CRAI (2000): 763 – 774. The publication of their rich active correspondence is planned by Henri Duchêne and Corinne Bonnet.

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Durkheim.⁵⁴ But even if several of those intellectual relationships were strong, Reinach struggled with being taken seriously by many of his peers.⁵⁵ To be sure, there was general admiration for his erudition and astonishing knowledge of the most diverse literary and archaeological sources, but much more often, there was disapproval of what Loisy called “la redoutable polygraphie de M. Reinach,”⁵⁶ and scorn towards the controversial and scarcely substantiated hypotheses Reinach regularly put forward.⁵⁷ Not rarely such criticism was deserved, but the contempt of ivory-tower academics like Loisy himself for Reinach’s popularizing mission also motivated misplaced disdain. Hervé Duchêne’s well-researched biography of Reinach shows that the scholar had been drawn towards the study of religion since at young age. During his time at the Rue d’Ulm, young Reinach apparently went through “une crise de mysticisme,”⁵⁸ which eventually paved the way for his strictly rationalistic approach to religion. In the previous chapter, we have seen that his attitude towards Judaism and to religion more generally was complex. A non-practicing, liberal Jew, he condemned Jewish ritualism (ancient and modern).⁵⁹ He did, however, have high praise for Jewish moral values and defined himself as a supporter of an “inner” Judaism. As pointed out by Ivan Strenski, Reinach’s Modernist Judaism showed more than one similarity to Loisy’s Modernist Catholicism.⁶⁰

 We will return to his correspondence and intellectual relationship with Frazer in the next chapter (4.1.2).  The letters of Durkheim to Reinach have been published by Benthien, “Lettres d’Émile Durkheim à Salomon Reinach.”  For the reluctance of the Durkheimians toward his work, see chapter 2 (2.4.3.2).  Loisy to Cumont, August 24, 1913; Lannoy, Bonnet and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 73 (letter 89).  In the following account of Orpheus, we will have ample opportunity to give examples (for instance, Reinach’s statement that totemism was at the roots of the Jewish and Islamic prohibition of pork). In fields other than history of religions, we may especially refer to his implication in the affair of the tiara of Saitaphernes, a fake the Louvre had bought in 1896 on advice of Reinach and others. On this affair, Hervé Duchêne, “‘Nous n’étions pourtant pas si bêtes de croire à la tiare!’—Edmond Pottier, Salomon Reinach: deux amis dans l’épreuve,” Journal des Savants (2005): 165 – 211.  Duchêne, “Salomon Reinach devant les hommes et les religions,” xvi–xvii, and the letter on p. xxxiv.  But Reinach did marry religiously with a Jewish Russian doctor, Rose Morgoulieff. For his membership of the Alliance israélite, and his involvement in the Jewish colonization movement, see supra, chapter 2 (2.4.3.2). In his Durkheim and the Jews of France, Strenski aptly refers to Reinach as being “full of unresolved tensions in being Jewish,” 182, with references to writings of Reinach on the reform of contemporary Judaism.  Strenski, Durkheim and the Jews, 69.

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And we will see that this resemblance also holds true for Loisy’s later, post-Christian conception of a moral religion de l’humanité. ⁶¹ Reinach’s personal aversion of conservative institutionalized religion left numerous traces in his scholarly writings. In the preface to his Orpheus, he unambiguously stipulated what was the general perspective of the book: I have tried not to wound any conscience; but I have said what I believe to be the truth with the emphasis proper to truth. I do not think that the persecution of the Bacchanals by the Roman Senate, and of dawning Christianity by the Emperors, the furies of the Inquisition, of St. Bartholomew’s Eve and of the Dragonnades ought to be coldly chronicled as insignificant episodes in history. I execrate these judicial murders, the accursed fruits of a spirit of oppression and fanaticism, and I have shown this plainly. There are zealots still among us who glorify these crimes, and would wish to see them continued. If they attack my book, they will do both me and it a great honour.⁶²

Despite Reinach’s overall negative attitude towards organized religion, or perhaps precisely because of it, he is strongly convinced that religion should be the object of serious scientific inquiry. Science is the one instrument by which the precise historical role of religion can be brought to light. Moreover, the scientific reconstruction of the history of religions, Reinach declared, will automatically reveal the intrinsically primitive (and thus reprehensible) nature of the religions of his own day. To be fair, there are passages in Orpheus which show a more benign attitude, for instance when religions are qualified as “the infinitely curious products of man’s imagination and of man’s reason in its infancy.”⁶³ We will also see that Reinach supported Frazer’s theory that religion is an essential stepping stone for the realization of a fully scientific worldview. As a guideline for our following analysis of Orpheus, we may usefully mention Duchêne’s evaluation of Reinach’s writings on religion (compiled in his Cultes, mythes et religions ⁶⁴) as a “series of exorcisms”: “Elles viennent au terme d’un cheminement spirituel tourmenté. Il faut lire ces essais comme une série d’exorcismes, comme une suite d’exercices destinés à éviter toute rechute.”⁶⁵

 On the emergence of this concept, see 3.3.4.  Reinach, Orpheus, vii–viii.  Reinach, Orpheus, vii.  Starting from 1905, Reinach had begun to publish his multi-volume series Cultes, mythes et religions, which was a collection of his many articles and book chapters on the topic, and constituted the preliminary studies on which Orpheus was based. A total of five volumes was published between 1905 and 1923.  Duchêne, “Salomon Reinach devant les hommes et les religions,” v.

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Although a widely influential voice in French and international religious studies, Reinach never held an academic position in history of religions.⁶⁶ His entire active career, he was attached to the National Antiquities Museum of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, close to Paris. In 1902, he was also appointed as a professor to the École du Louvre, which further increased his scientific status.⁶⁷ From a methodological point of view, he was a maverick scholar with an eclectic method which substantially changed over time.⁶⁸ First an adherent to Max Müller’s comparative mythology, he later came to criticize his predominant oriental focus (“mirage oriental”) and Müller’s theorem that similar products in different religious cultures necessarily derive from one historical source. When the French translation of Tylor’s Primitive Culture came out in 1876, Reinach familiarized himself with the ideas of the father of English anthropology, and soon adopted Tylor’s view that similarities between different religions stem from the universal uniformity of the human psyche. In the following years, he closely followed the publications of William Robertson Smith and Frazer, both of whom he deeply admired. Reinach’s own theory of religion was mostly the result of an adaptation, simplification and combination of their views. But no other scholar of religion put the anthropological notions of taboo, animism, totemism, and magic on the French academic and general public agenda like Reinach did. Although Loisy was well acquainted with the work of Robertson Smith from his earlier Old Testament studies, there can be no doubt that Reinach’s Orpheus was a key influence for the anthropological turn his comparative work took after 1909. In his article “Magie, science et religion,” he duly admitted that Reinach had forced him to take up a position on this and other topical anthropological debates (much sooner than he had personally wanted).⁶⁹

3.2.2 The Origins of Religion According to Salomon Orpheus The reasons Reinach adduced for writing under the auspices of Orpheus give away a lot about the central aims of his book. Aside from being “the theologian par excellence” and “the interpreter of the gods,” the figure of Orpheus with the lyre “is the only mythological motive which appears and recurs in Christian

 As we’ve seen in chapter 2 (introduction to the chapter), secular academic positions in history of religions were scarce at that time.  Duchêne, “Salomon Reinach devant les hommes et les religions,” xxxvi.  Duchêne, “Salomon Reinach devant les hommes et les religions,” lvi–lvi.  Loisy, “Magie, science et religion,” 144.

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paintings of the catacombs.”⁷⁰ “Salomon Orpheus” (as Loisy and Arconati regularly called him in their letters) was highly critical of the then often used textbooks of Conrad von Orelli and Pierre Daniel Chantepie de la Saussaye because these scholars had omitted Christianity from their accounts on the history of religions.⁷¹ “I see no reason,” Reinach declared in his preface, “for isolating Christianity in this manner. It has fewer adherents than Buddhism; it is less ancient.”⁷² With Orpheus Reinach aimed to rectify this omission. Orpheus takes off with an important theoretical introduction on the origin of religion, to which we will return shortly. Thereafter follow five chapters with brief accounts of a wide array of non-Christian religions (including, for instance, Hinduism, Greco-Roman religions, Chinese and African religions), as well as a very short sixth chapter of eight pages on Islam, and a surprisingly concise seventh chapter (about 40 p.) devoted to Judaism. By contrast, no less than five chapters (making up almost half of the book) are devoted to the history of Christianity, from the historical Jesus until the role of the Catholic Church during the Dreyfus affair. Well-aware of the distortion such extensive attention for Christianity may suggest in a general history of religions, Reinach declared: “It is not my fault if, during the last two thousand years, the history of Christianity has intermingled to some extent with universal history, and if, in sketching the one, I have been obliged the make a brief abstract of the other.”⁷³ His point of departure thus concurs with the typically Western-centered Christian outlook of Loisy (and many others). One of the most ironic results of this perspective is that orphism receives little to no attention in Orpheus. Equally misleading is Reinach’s choice to stress the survival of orphic motives in Christian iconography at the outset of his book. Such an emphasis on

 Reinach, Orpheus, v.  Hans Konrad von Orelli, Allgemeine Religionsgeschichte (Bonn: Marcus & Weber, 1899) (2 vol.); Pierre Daniel Chantepie de la Saussaye, Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschichte (Freiburg in Br.: Mohr, 1887– 1889) (2 vol.). Chantepie’s Lehrbuch knew multiple editions and was translated in several languages, including French, English and Polish. On the genesis of the French translation of the Lehrbuch: Strenski, Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice, 161. Loisy himself had also been extremely critical of Chantepie’s work and the absence of Christianity and Judaism in the reviews he published between 1904 and 1905 in his RHLR. For these reviews, see Strenski, Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice, 162, note 31. Strangely enough, Reinach didn’t mention Tiele’s Geschiedenis van de godsdiensten tot aan de heerschappij der wereldgodsdiensten, better known in its German translation as Kompendium der Religionsgeschichte (first Dutch edition from 1876, first English translation in 1877, German and French translations in 1880, multiple other translations and editions), where Christianity was also absent.  Reinach, Orpheus, vi.  Reinach, Orpheus, vii.

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Christian borrowings suggests that his frame of interpretation will be diffusionist. However, the focus of Orpheus is not primarily on historical interactions between religions.⁷⁴ The central argument of the book is that all religions originate in universal human experiences and in specific characteristics of the human psyche, and that they similarly preserve traces (read: Tylorian survivals) of these universal beginnings, regardless of their differing stages of development.⁷⁵ How and why religion(s) come(s) into existence, were key issues for Reinach to address before starting his journey around the world. Just like many pivotal contemporary scholars of religion (including now Loisy), he believed that the “search for dreamtime”⁷⁶ would uncover the key to understand what religion essentially was at any time or place. His introductory chapter (subtitled “The origin of religions, definitions and general phenomena”) summarized some of the answers that had previously been formulated to these questions by colleagues and explained his own eclectic solution. This is one of the chapters that has been most virulently attacked by all of Orpheus’s critics, and it was also the one featuring at the center of the polemic between Reinach and Loisy.⁷⁷ As far as we know, no detailed and objective discussion of Reinach’s first chapter is available today. Accounts by his contemporaries show a strong personal bias, and modern scholars have dealt with it only succinctly. To understand Loisy’s reaction, we must therefore first provide an account of Reinach’s main ideas. Like many others who engaged in the 19th and early 20th century quest for origins, Reinach believed that there was one recurrent answer to the question as to how any religion historically emerged at a specific place or moment in  Reinach clarified this universalizing anthropological perspective further on in his preface. After having explained the Moses-Orpheus genealogy defended by the Church fathers, he continued: “Modern criticism seeks the explanation of these analogies in a hypothesis less daring than that of a supposed relation between Moses and Orpheus. It recognises that Orphism has traits in common not only with Judaism and Christianity, but with other more remote creeds such as Buddhism, and even with the very primitive beliefs of existing savages. If on examination we find something of Orphism in every religion, it is because Orphism made use of elements common to them all, drawn from the depths of human nature, and nourished by its most cherished illusions.” Reinach, Orpheus, vi.  As has been pointed out by Rodrigue, Reinach’s decisively universalizing discourse cannot be dissociated from the drastic rise of anti-Semitism before and during the Dreyfus Affair, against which it reacted. Rodrigue, “Totems, Taboos, and Jews,” 6.  I here refer to the seminal study of Tomoko Masuzawa, In Search of Dreamtime. The Quest for the Origin of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), which focuses on the quests of Müller, Durkheim and Freud.  The second most criticized chapter undoubtedly was the one on the origin of Christianity, see infra, chapter 4.

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time.⁷⁸ According to Reinach, a theory of religion should explain religion on the basis of natural causes, and thus move beyond the perspective of the worshipper her/himself. He found the key to such an explanation in well-hidden psychological processes, although attention is also devoted to the social.⁷⁹ He built his theory on the notions of taboo, animism, totemism, and magic. Before delving into the details of his theory, it should be noted that the precise relation between those four constitutive elements is overall difficult to gauge in Reinach’s thinking. Without doubt, this lack of clarity contributed to Reinach’s contemporaries having read very different and even contradictory things in Orpheus. Sometimes Reinach formulated his views imprecisely, maybe out of uncertainty. But the highly schematic structure of Orpheus also contributes to the problem. As all other chapters, the introduction was written very schematically, and subdivided in numbered paragraphs of which the interconnection is far from clear. Yet, if one thing really is unmistakably clear from Reinach’s first chapter, it is that taboo and animism are the most primitive/essential of the constitutive elements of religion. Following the example of Tylor, Reinach proposed a minimalistic definition of religion which putatively applied to any religion. But in Reinach’s view, the lowest common denominator is not animism, but scruples or taboos, hence his definition of religion as A sum of scruples which impede the free exercise of our faculties. Although Reinach was firmly convinced of the foundational role of animism in the emergence of religion, he meaningfully excluded “the belief in spiritual beings”⁸⁰ from his definition. He mostly motivated this decision by stating that an animistic definition would not be viable for religions in the wider, derivative sense of the word, such as, for instance, religions of the family or the fatherland.⁸¹ But this argument cannot disguise his more predominant conviction that religion is originally—and essentially—about purely arbitrary prohibitions and interdictions. For Reinach, religion is not primarily about faith nor about the attempts of the “savage philosopher” to explain the

 On the different ways to understand “origin,” see Daniel Pals, Nine Theories of Religion (Oxford: OUP, 2014), 13.  He decisively rejected theological explanations of religion, but also the narratives of 18th century rationalists like Voltaire, who explained religion as an imposture of fraudulent priests. Reinach, Orpheus, 7.  I have used the first American edition of Edward B. Tylor’s, Primitive Culture. Researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, language, art and custom (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1874), I, 424 for Tylor’s definition of religion. The first edition of the book came out in 1871.  Reinach understandably received severe criticism for not distinguishing his metaphorical use of the concept “religion” from its usual interpretation.

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world. It is about “sentiment, and the expression of this sentiment by acts of a particular nature, which are rites.”⁸² The most ancient roots of religion lie in taboo, which is a highly individual—but inherently human and thus collective —psychological prohibition. And taboo itself is “the offspring of fear, the fruit of hasty generalizations and of arbitrary comparisons such as children and ignorant persons are constantly making.”⁸³ In his psychological-individualistic treatment of taboo, Reinach’s definition differed from Durkheim’s, who was also interested in indictment and taboo, but saw them as the product of social imagination. According to Reinach, taboo does not emerge at the dawn of humanity, but is transmitted from animal to man. Superior animals, Reinach explained, observe prohibitions regarding “the blood of their own kind,” and abstain from the killing and eating of their own. This blood taboo is the earliest of human scruples. Religion developed as a mechanism to organize this and later taboos in rites and laws. But taboo is not all that man inherited from “beast.”⁸⁴ Animism also seems to be such a heritage. In his discussion of animism, Reinach thus substantially differed from Tylor who considered animism a sui generis feature of mankind, and believed it originated from typically human experiences, such as dreams and reflections after loss by death. In Orpheus, it remains unclear what the precise relation between taboo and animism is. The two seem to have independent origins and appear to be unconnected in the prehistory of religion. Reinach also believed them to be individually responsible for two different dimensions of religion: Animism on the one hand, and taboos on the other, such are the essential factors of religion. To the natural, I might almost say the physiological, action of animism are due the conceptions of those invisible genii with which nature teems, spirits of the sun and of the moon, of the trees and the waters, of thunder and lightning, of mountains and rocks, not to speak of the spirits of the dead, which are souls, and the spirit of spirits, who is God. To the influence of taboos, which create the ideas of sacred and profane, of things or actions forbidden or permitted, religious laws and piety are due. The Jehovah of the rocks and clouds of Sinai is a product of animism; the Decalogue is a revision of an old code of taboos. ⁸⁵

   

Reinach, Reinach, Reinach, Reinach,

Orpheus, 1. Orpheus, 20. Orpheus, 4– 5. Orpheus, 7 (the emphasis is Reinach’s).

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The question as to when the observance of initially arbitrary taboos began to presuppose a belief in a spiritual being (as was the case in the Decalogue example), remains unanswered. Similar confusion reigns in the subsequent accounts of totemism and magic. Reinach tells us with great emphasis that totemism and magic are less primitive than animism and taboo, but the precise interrelation between these four elements remains largely ambiguous.⁸⁶ One hypothesis about his reasoning may be the following. While animism and taboo seem to explain for him why religion originated for the first time, totemism and magic appear to be the main two characteristics religion originally assumes (in what form it emerges, how it first operates). And on the basis of his analysis of totemism and magic, he then seems to draw conclusions about the universal functions of religion.⁸⁷ Totemism, Reinach argued, is the result of the socialization of taboos and animism in “a kind of worship rendered to animals and vegetables, considered as allied and related to man.”⁸⁸ Assuming an almost Durkheimian perspective, he explained totemism as “nothing but an exaggeration, a hypertrophy of the social instinct.”⁸⁹ But the differences between Reinach’s and Durkheim’s views on totemism were substantial. While Durkheim considered the vibrant social dynamics (the so-called “effervescence”) he found embodied in totemism as the fundamental constituents of religion,⁹⁰ Reinach believed that totemism ultimately went back to taboo. For him, totemism is first and foremost the collective observance of religious scruples that protect both the clan’s members and the totem. The status of the totem furthermore derives from “the illusion of animism,” which adduces primitive man to “recognize everywhere spirits similar to

 A good example of this ambiguity is the fact that there are several passages in Orpheus, where totemism and animism are set at exactly the same height of importance. See, e. g., Orpheus, 20: “all that is deep and essential in religion came from animism, of which the worship of the dead is a consequence, and from totemism, which preceded anthropomorphic religions and imbued them with its elements.”  On the importance of disentangling such questions in the field of religious theory, see Robert A. Segal, “Theories of religion,” in The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion, ed. John R. Hinnells (London–New York: Routledge, 2010), 75 – 76 (and passim). On the importance of totemism in late 19th and early 20th century France: Frederico Rosa, L’Âge d’or du totémisme. Histoire d’un débat anthropologique (1887 – 1929) (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2003), 75 for Reinach. A more general introduction can be found in Sharpe, Comparative Religion, 72– 96. We will return to the question of totemism in its relation to sacrifice in chapter 5 (especially 5.3.1.1).  Reinach, Orpheus, 14.  Reinach, Orpheus, 15.  On totemism, see especially the second volume of Émile Durkheim, Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse. Le système totémique en Australie (Paris: Alcan, 1912).

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his own.”⁹¹ While Reinach recognized the social function of religion/totemism (as organized taboo), the defining qualities of religion are first psychological taboo and then animism. For Reinach, totemism is just as universal as the taboos and animism from which it derives. Throughout Orpheus, major attention is devoted to recovering totemic traces in all of the religions discussed (for example, in Greek myths of animal metamorphoses, Jewish and Islamic prohibition of pork, Hindu reverence for cows, folkloristic animal fables, etc.).⁹² The historical development of totemism is twofold. In conservative totemic societies, the totem always remains taboo and members of the clan will perpetually abstain from eating it. This explains the Jewish indictment to eat pork: “The pious Jew abstains from pork because his remote ancestors, five or six thousand years before our era, had the wild boar as their totem.”⁹³ For the second development, Reinach found inspiration in Robertson Smith’s theory on the totemic sacrifice. Some totemic clans sacrifice the totem—first on special occasions, later more widely—and eat it to assimilate its strength and to enter into communion with the totemic god and with each other. This “instinct” is at the roots of the Eucharist: “If primitive Christianity, with its theophagistic practices, conquered Europe so rapidly, it was because this idea of the manducation of the god was not new, but simply the presentation of one of the most profound religious instincts of humanity in a more spiritual form.”⁹⁴ A few words, finally, on the role of magic in Reinach’s theory. The reconstruction of its role is not an easy task because the two pages devoted to magic do not fit in very well with the rest of the chapter and, overall, Reinach’s views are poorly developed. It is as if the scholar had arrived at the end of his introduction and all of a sudden realized that he had forgotten to mention magic, which could of course not be missing in a book that aimed at introducing Victorian anthropology of religion to the French public. Reinach’s account of magic seems to be suffering from two interrelated problems. The first is that the relationship between religion and magic is not entirely clear. The second is that his account of magic adopts a strongly intellectualist approach, while he had quite decisively rejected such an approach in the preceding parts of the chapter about religion. To be true, Reinach had previously acknowledged that

 Reinach, Orpheus, 14.  Reinach, Orpheus, 17: “When there are no traces of totemism in a monument of popular literature, it is because they have been erased by revisers.”  Reinach, Orpheus, 18.  Reinach, Orpheus, 18. For a more detailed account of Reinach’s views on the origins of Christianity we refer the reader to the following chapter.

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some animal fables/myths were not the result of totemic taboo, but instead stemmed from “a naïve interpretation of the great phenomena of Nature.”⁹⁵ But congruent with his focus on “sentiment” and “rites,” he had considered such explanatory myths to be purely literary productions and not intrinsically religious phenomena. In this sense, his theory of religion concurs with Loisy’s rejection of the intellectualism of both Tylor and Frazer. In the following part of this chapter, we will discuss Frazer’s views in more detail. For now, it is sufficient to recall that Frazer had considered the difference between magic, religion and science not as one of kind, but as one of degree. Frazer postulated a purely magical stage at the dawn of humanity, which preceded a religious, a magical-religious, and a final scientific stage. For Tylor, on the other hand, magic and religion coexisted from the very beginning. Both Tylor and Frazer agreed that the future of humanity would be a purely scientific, secular one, in which magic or religion would no longer play any role.⁹⁶ With regard to the relation between magic and science, Reinach unambiguously followed Tylor and Frazer when he explained that magic is “false science,” but nevertheless “the mother of all true sciences.”⁹⁷ Magic plays a crucial role in the “progressive secularization which is by no means complete yet.”⁹⁸ It works on the basis of the belief in the “solidarity of phenomena,” which is a scientific principle, “in spite of the illusions by which it is misled.”⁹⁹ Concerning the relation between magic and religion, however, Reinach’s views deviated from both Victorian anthropologists in that he considered magic to be the later product of religion. Magic is defined by Reinach as “the strategy of animism,”¹⁰⁰ as the pre-scientific instrument by which man tries to gain control over the spirits that surround him. It presupposes religion. On the one hand, Reinach’s negative definition of religion suggests that religion cannot have a positive role in the intellectual development of mankind, because it is an arbitrary interdiction based on fear.¹⁰¹ But on the other hand, Reinach stated that religion does produce magic as the prescientific tool to overcome its own limitations. With this paradoxical evaluation of religion, Reinach concluded his introductory chapter:

 Reinach, Orpheus, 20.  A good introduction on the (minor) differences between the views of Tylor and Frazer, which we will not further discuss here, may be found in Pals, Nine Theories of Religion, 15 – 48.  Reinach, Orpheus, 21.  Reinach, Orpheus, 21.  Reinach, Orpheus, 22.  Reinach, Orpheus, 21.  Just like taboo, animism also has its origin in failing mental capacities, i. e. primitive man’s tendency to project its own volition “outwards.” Reinach, Orpheus, 5 – 6.

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I might show that all the great inventions of primitive humanity, including that of fire, were made under the auspices of religion, and by the indefatigable ministry of magic. It is true that magic did not produce the same results everywhere. It needed a propitious soil, but though in civilized countries it exists now only as a survival, after the manner of totemism, it is to magic and to totemism that the modern world owes the elements of its civilization. Thus—and this seems to me an essential result of our inquiry—we find that the origin of religion is merged in the origin of human thought and intellectual activity; its decadence and its limitation is the history of the progress it alone has made possible.¹⁰²

This quote shows quite well how religion (cause) and magic (effect) are carelessly confused by Reinach. His oscillation between religion as a psychological prohibition and as the mother of magic, which in turn is the mother of science, reveals an overt contradiction in his thought. To understand this ambivalence, we can take our cue from Duchêne’s advice to read Reinach’s writings on religion as “a series of exorcisms.” But it is also clear that Reinach was unable to disentangle two different questions in his quest for the origin of religion: (a) why did religion come into being, and (b) why did it not disappear/what is its function?¹⁰³ Taboo was his negative answer to the first question. Totemism and magic—the two characteristics of (primitive) religion—provided the key to the second. If religion still lived today, this was due to its positive social function (totemism) and because of its intellectual-explanatory function (magic). Even without discussing the no less controversial content of the chapters on Judaism and Christianity, it will be clear why Orpheus triggered such vehement reactions from Jews and Christians, conservative and liberal, in academia and in popular press. It should also be mentioned that all of the examples Reinach adduced in support of his main arguments, came from Judaism and Christianity.¹⁰⁴ Orpheus not only received negative reception among religious scholars,

 Reinach, Orpheus, 22.  In our chapter on sacrifice, it will become clear that Loisy did keep these questions strictly separated. See especially infra, 5.3.1.2.  As Talar, Laplanche and other modern scholars have shown, Orpheus mobilized very strong reactions from Catholic scholars. Not rarely, these were motivated by strong anti-Semitic sentiment; see, for instance, Alfred Baudrillart, “La vengeance de Dreyfus,” Revue pratique d’apologétique 1 avril (1909). But quite surprisingly, Reinach was also forced to resign from his functions in the Alliance israélite in the aftermath of the Bellum Orphicum. Reinach himself explained his problems with the Alliance by the fact that his book had paid much more attention to Christianity than to Judaism. Duchêne’s biography of Reinach, however, has conclusively shown that Jewish hostility toward Reinach had everything to do with his strong anti-Zionist opinions. Duchêne, “Salomon Reinach devant les hommes et les religions,” xlii–xliii. On Zionism, see Orpheus, 211. The same page also includes Reinach’s opinion on Hasidic Jews: “In Galicia, Poland and Lithuania they constitute communities hostile to the modern spirit; their noisy and disor-

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but was also met with substantial criticism by the scholars whom Reinach regarded his intellectual mentors. It is especially revealing to look at an illuminating and entertaining letter from the fascinating correspondence between Reinach and Frazer. After receiving Orpheus, Frazer wrote to Reinach: St Keyns Cambridge 2 March 1909 My dear Reinach Many thanks indeed for the present of your charming volume Orpheus. I have been dipping into it with pleasure. It seems to me a remarkable combination of wide and solid learning with lucidity, lightness, and grace of presentation. Such a book, I suppose, could only have been written by a Frenchman. Think what a German would have made of it! I foresee a wide circulation and a great success for your book. The plan seems excellent. Such a general survey of the history of religion, so clear, succinct, and well-informed, was much wanted, and I believe will do much good at a time when, if I am not mistaken, there are signs of attempts to revive old superstitions under new and more specious names. I congratulate you on a notable achievement. Your definition of religion will be much criticized, and I cannot say that I accept it. It seems to me too wide and general and to lack the differentiae necessary to a good definition. It has also a little the air of a man of straw put up on purpose to be knocked down again. However, I suppose you have thought it out carefully and are prepared to stand by it. The clerical batteries will of course open fire on you, but that no doubt you expect and perhaps desire […].¹⁰⁵

Some months later, on July 21, 1909, Frazer wrote a second time to Reinach about Orpheus, now formulating a more precise critique: I brought “Orpheus” here with me on my holiday and have read it through with pleasure and profit. […] In dealing with the beginnings of religion I think you make too much of totemism and not enough of the worship of the dead, which, I am inclined to believe, was probably the most important factor in the evolution of religion. But that is a matter of opinion.¹⁰⁶

Perhaps we can read in Frazer’s words a criticism of Reinach’s ambiguous ideas on the role of animism, which we have seen to be an important element in his

derly form of worship has all the appearance of a religious frenzy.” In our next chapter, we will briefly return to the context of French anti-Semitism. But because much more research remains to be done on this specific context, it largely falls beyond the scope of our book.  Bibliothèque Méjanes, Aix-en-Provence, Papiers Salomon Reinach, Correspondance Reinach-Frazer, f° 26 – 27.  Bibliothèque Méjanes, Aix-en-Provence, Papiers Salomon Reinach, Correspondance Reinach-Frazer, f° 28 – 29.

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theory, although completely inferior to taboo and its “socialization” in totemism. Like Tylor, Frazer believed that animism was the quintessential key to understand the origin of religion. In his view, animism stemmed from human confrontation with death, through which primitive man gained consciousness of a duality between the body and the soul that animates it.¹⁰⁷ If Frazer’s remark is indeed an indirect criticism of the secondary importance Reinach attributed to animism, his viewpoint was remarkably compatible with Loisy’s.

3.2.3 Loisy’s Main Criticisms In our introduction to this chapter we have seen that Loisy wrote not just one refutation, but in fact declared war on Orpheus with no less than five attacks. Obviously, Reinach had struck a chord. We may usefully begin our discussion of these criticisms by quoting a passage from a letter in which he explained to Reinach what was essentially at stake for him in the Bellum Orphicum. Reinach should “praise the heavens” that there was no one of sufficient intelligence to subject his Orpheus to a severe criticism of its methods, logic, and conclusions: Bénissez le ciel qu’il n’y ait à ce moment dans l’Église catholique personne d’assez intelligent, ou d’assez construit, ou d’assez courageux, pour soumettre Orpheus à un examen sévère tant au point de vue de la méthode qu’au point de vue de la logique et des conclusions ! C’est ce que je craignais devoir arriver, non pas précisément pour vous, mais pour cette science des religions qui en est encore à se faire accepter. On aurait pu entamer sur le dos d’Orpheus le procès de la science laïque. C’est, pour cela, je vous l’avouerai, que j’ai pris les devants, sauf à retomber, le cas échéant, sur celui qui aurait voulu, après moi, vous malmener.¹⁰⁸

Quite obviously, this letter is a testimony to Loisy’s enormous self-consciousness. The underlying message of the first sentence is that there no longer was a worthy Catholic opponent with the intellectual abilities to criticize Orpheus, now that he himself had left the Church. Loisy was convinced that Reinach’s ideological bias provided well-thinking Catholics with good reasons to legitimately attack the  For Frazer, the belief in the survival of the soul after death is one of the keys to understand the human evolution from the purely magical stage to the magical-religious stage of development. For his views, see, Robert Ackerman, J.G. Frazer: His Life and Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 262– 263. In 1913, Frazer would begin to publish The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead (3 vol., 1913 – 1924), in which he explored the idea of the persistence of the soul after death in primitive cultures.  Bibliothèque Méjanes, Aix-en-Provence, Papiers Salomon Reinach, Correspondance Reinach-Loisy. Letter of Loisy to Reinach, January 6, 1910, f° 87.

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non-theological science of religions (“la science laïque”) which Reinach claimed to represent, and, consequentially, to throw out the baby with the bathwater. It was in anticipation of such legitimate attacks by Catholics, and in defense of the true science laïque that Loisy felt the strong need to react. His first refutation was published in the Revue historique, which immediately reveals the lasting influence of Arconati-Visconti’s network on his new career. The Revue historique was the life work of Gabriel Monod, whom we’ve got to know in the previous chapter as Arconati’s closest friend and a fierce supporter of Loisy’s nomination. Loisy’s review was published with one by Monod himself under the same heading title.¹⁰⁹ Like many contemporaries, Monod especially rejected Reinach’s definition of religion as taboo, and the overall neglect of faith and religious sentiment in Orpheus. But quite interestingly, and unlike other contemporary historicizing historians, Monod did not question the validity of the theoretical quest for the recurrent origin of religion throughout history.¹¹⁰ The problem for Monod was not the quest itself, but the fact that Reinach had the origin of religion all wrong. In a way, one could say that Reinach’s interest in the most primitive and most essential nature of religion shows a remarkable parallel to the historical-theological Essence (“Wesen”) Harnack and other Liberal Protestants had sought to reconstruct of Christianity.¹¹¹ In his part of the review, Loisy politely (and briefly) endorsed the views of Monod, focusing himself on the factual mistakes Reinach had committed in the Christian chapters. But when later that year he was asked by his friend Paul Desjardins to write an elaborate refutation of Orpheus for the Correspondance de l’Union de la vérité,¹¹² Loisy much more thoroughly attacked Reinach’s theory of religion.¹¹³ For our central

 Monod and Loisy, “L’Orpheus de M. S. Reinach.” On Monod, see supra, 2.3. and passim.  Monod, “L’Orpheus de M. S. Reinach,” 303: “Les superfétations que M. Reinach écarte sont devenues avec les siècles l’essentiel de la religion, et l’on risque avec son système de constituer une histoire des religions où une seule chose serait absente, à savoir la religion, cette religion dont Renan disait: ‘Les religions passent, la religion est éternelle.’ M. Reinach le laisse bien entendre, lui aussi (p. 36), mais il ne voit dans cette persistance que ‘les illusions de l’animisme ancestral’.”  See supra, chapter 2.  Paul Desjardins was the pivotal figure of a neo-Christian mystic movement in France. His Union pour la vérité was founded in 1905 to replace the Union pour l’action morale which had been founded during the Dreyfus Affair and united intellectuals of humanist conviction from different ideological (Protestants, Catholics, Jews, freemasons, freethinkers) and professional backgrounds. For the bibliography on Desjardins, see supra, chapter 1.  Loisy, “Remarques sur une définition de la Religion”; we have used the reprint in Loisy’s À propos d’histoire des religions, 49 – 99.

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purpose of understanding his later article on magic, science, and religion, the following schematic overview suffices to identify the key elements of this first detailed refutation (or better: annihilation) in La Correspondance. (1) First and foremost, Reinach’s theoretical approach to the origin of religion rang a theological Liberal-Protestant and Catholic neo-thomistic bell to the recently declared vitandus. ¹¹⁴ Loisy strongly criticized Reinach’s definition for being insufficiently empirically grounded.¹¹⁵ Not unsurprisingly, his refutation started by affirming his own strictly historicist and non-theoretical approach to religion. Although Loisy was convinced that his own historical views were solely informed by historical facts, much of his criticism of Reinach’s approach is motivated by the philosophical incompatibility he perceived between Reinach’s quest for the invariable core (=origin) of religion and the strong evolutionary relativism he himself had developed in his Modernist years. Even if it were true that all religions originated in taboo—which obviously Loisy thought they didn’t—, every religion would have constantly developed completely new and idiosyncratic formulations, interpretations, and explanations of taboo. (2) In a somewhat similar vein, Loisy also rejected Reinach’s use of the Tylorian notion of survival. To Loisy, this paradigm for interpreting religious change suggested an inadmissible invariability in the history of religions: “L’animisme, le tabou, la magie ne subsistent pas sous la religion, ils ont évolué avec elle et sont devenus autre chose que ce qu’ils étaient d’abord.”¹¹⁶ Loisy did agree with Reinach (and Robertson Smith) that the Eucharist could have developed out of ancient totemic

 On the interrelation Loisy perceived between Harnack’s philosophy of religion and the official neo-thomism promoted by the Catholic Church, see chapter 1 (especially 1.3).  Loisy, “Remarques sur une définition,” 49.  These words are preceded by the following criticism of Reinach’s supposed claim that religions remained the same underneath their historical changes (“Remarques sur une définition,” 88): “Ce qui se comprend moins est l’idée qu’il se fait des religions plus élevées, où il ne retrouve toujours que les mêmes ‘faits et phénomènes caractéristiques’, par lui ‘constatés à l’état naissant’ dans les religions inférieures, mais conservés ultérieurement ‘sous une couche d’altérations et d’alluvions plus ou moins épaisses, dans tout le développement du germe’. Suivons la comparaison de l’embryologie, puisqu’on nous l’a suggérée. Est-il vrai que l’embryon subsiste dans l’homme ‘sous une couche d’alluvions’? N’est-il pas vrai qu’il s’est perpétuellement transformé en s’assimilant les éléments dont il s’est nourri? Il est toujours le même, ou plutôt il est toujours lui, et pourtant il est autre.” It may be useful to mention that we find a somewhat similar imagery in the thought of Franz Cumont on religious change. In his magisterial work on Roman afterlife, Lux Perpetua, Cumont used geological metaphors: new ideas are represented as sediments or layers on a primitive substrate. For an analysis of this imagery, Lannoy, “Les masses vulgaires et les intelligences élevées,” 63 – 81.

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ideas about sacrifice.¹¹⁷ What he rejected, was Reinach’s suggestion that the Eucharist and primitive totemism were the same underneath their different covers. (3) As was to be expected, Loisy also criticized Reinach’s definition of religion, and he strongly rejected his view on the relation between taboo and animism. In Loisy’s eyes, Reinach’s minimalistic and negative definition failed to do justice to the “soul” of religious life¹¹⁸ (but what this soul is, is not further specified) and to the positive effects of religion. More interesting still, is Loisy’s fierce attack of Reinach’s views on the independent origins of taboo and animism. There is no time in human history, Loisy argued, when taboo has been unrelated to and unmotivated by a belief in some kind of spiritual force. Reinach’s theory on the primitive arbitrariness of religious scruples was completely wrong, and Loisy forcefully debunked many of Reinach’s historical examples by showing that they were not an arbitrary taboo, or not even a taboo in the first place. From Loisy’s criticism, the outlines of his own implicit theoretical views can quite easily be derived: animism always antedates taboo. Without mentioning him, Loisy clearly followed Tylor when he stated that religion has its origin in the belief that nature is animated by spiritual forces. There is, however, a major difference between Tylor and Loisy. Unlike Tylor, Loisy didn’t explain the origin of this foundational belief in spirits.¹¹⁹ The belief in the existence of spiritual forces seems to be his further irreducible explanation of religion.¹²⁰

 We will come back to this point in chapter 5 (especially 5.3.2). In his Essai historique sur le sacrifice Loisy mainly insisted on the fact that in both totemic sacrifice and the Eucharist, divine communion was a means to a higher end.  Loisy, “Remarques sur une définition,” 85: “il a étudié surtout l’histoire extérieure; mais on peut dire, semble-t-il, avec tout le respect dû à son caractère comme à sa science, et sans faire tort à la vérité, que leur âme s’est très peu révélée à lui.” NB the word “reveal” (révéler), which seems to suggest that producing scientific knowledge on the “soul” of religion is a religious-like experience!  For Tylor’s natural explanation of animism by dreams and human confrontations with death, see his Primitive Culture, 428. The most final explanation of animism we get from Loisy, is the following (“Remarques sur une définition,” 57): “Ce n’est pas sans quelque raison vaguement perçue, d’ailleurs imaginaire en tout ou en partie, que les tabous se sont produits. On a supposé que tel lieu, tel temps, tel objet, telle personne, dans tel état, tombaient particulièrement sous l’influence de ce que, faute d’expression assez compréhensive, nous appelons la force invisible, l’esprit, les dieux.” Loisy legitimized his rather vague explanation of animism as the human belief in “the influence of an invisible force” by saying that the reconstruction of the origins of animism was not the task of the historian but of the psychologist: “Ne nous avançons pas trop sur ce terrain, qui n’est pas celui de l’histoire, mais de la psychologie et du raisonnement” (p. 58).  Loisy will later combine the inside perspective of the mystical-inspired worshipper with social, psychological and anthropological explanations, although his mystical outlook always remained his dominant perspective on religion. On this point, see chapter 5.

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(4) Not only was Reinach’s explanation of religion a failed attempt to understand the origin of religion, Loisy also accused Reinach of neglecting the—in his view much more important—social function of religion. This criticism is perfectly in line with the apparent rapprochement to Durkheimian sociology in his Leçon inaugurale. (5) Finally, we should draw attention to Loisy’s ideas on Reinach’s radical application of the anthropological uniformity theorem to explain similarities between religions. As was already clear from his inaugural speech, he was now more sympathetic towards the idea of a universal law of religious transformation. But Loisy did disagree with Reinach’s exclusivist use of independent analogy as interpretative tool, and he criticized his overall lack of attention for historical contacts between religious cultures.¹²¹ Loisy’s desire to combine an anthropological model of independent analogous evolution with a considerate historicist-diffusionist scheme will be a central point of attention in our next chapter.

3.3 Magic, Science, and Religion, or How Loisy Used Hubert and Mauss to Fight Frazer In our previous analysis of Reinach’s textbook, we have seen that it dealt with magic only succinctly and superficially. But still Loisy explained that it was because of Orpheus that he felt compelled to plunge into one of the most heavily debated issues within the humanities of his time: what is the relationship, if any, between magic, religion and science in the history of mankind? In his article “Magie, science et religion” (1910), Loisy for the first time took an explicit stand on the views of influential contemporary scholars of religion like Frazer and Mauss. The article is immensely important as it provides intimate insight into the development of his own decisively moral outlook on religious history, in reaction against those other theorists. As was his usual, Loisy provided his readers with a detailed account of his reasons for writing the article. He explained how it was prompted by the preface

 See for instance Loisy’s rejection of Reinach’s explanation of the Jewish indictment to pronounce the name of God. According to Reinach this was the result of a primitive taboo preserved among the Pharisees, who reintroduced it at a later stage. No such thing happened, Loisy argued: “Il n’est pas du tout nécessaire d’admettre que les pharisiens auraient gardé seuls une tradition plus ancienne en Israël que la Bible même. Diverses raisons et même des influences extérieures peuvent expliquer la diffusion chez les Juifs d’un scrupule que leurs ancêtres n’avaient pas eu.” Loisy, “Remarques sur une définition,” 78 – 79.

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Reinach had added to the sixth edition of his Orpheus (also 1909). In this additional preface, Reinach had defended himself against the allegation that he had completely neglected religious sentiment and experience. Reinach found this criticism was unjust, since religious emotion ultimately derived from the much more fundamental notions of animism, taboo and magic. In further defense of himself, he thereafter added the following, rather enigmatic statement: “Si la magie est la science non encore laïcisée, il n’est pas étonnant que la religion ait longtemps paru promettre aux hommes ce que la science leur fait espérer plus timidement aujourd’hui: ‘un idéal de société bonne et de conscience satisfaite’, suivant l’expression de l’abbé Loisy dans sa leçon d’ouverture au Collège de France.”¹²² In his inaugural speech, Loisy had indeed expressed his firm conviction that religions slowly progressed toward higher morality, continually driven by their striving for “the ideal of a good society and a satisfied conscience.”¹²³ But nowhere in this speech, any mention of an interrelation between magic, science, and religion was made. Loisy clearly understood Reinach’s altogether confusing statement as an insinuation that he regarded magic, religion and science as genealogically related stages of the moral development of mankind. It is unclear if that was really what Reinach had meant to say.¹²⁴ For the record, it should be added that a moralistic outlook on the connection between magic, religion and science was absent from Orpheus. But as we’ve seen, Reinach never was the scholar to worry much about an inconsistency or two. As for Loisy, it is true that he had never defended a moral genealogy between magic, religion and science, not in his Leçon or anywhere else. Even though Loisy admitted that the timing was bad because his views on the magic-religion-science puzzle were still premature, not reacting was not an option. It was his most intimate conviction that was being attacked by Reinach, that is, that only religion can be the standard bearer of moral behavior. Loisy’s article subsequently dealt with the relation between magic and religion, magic and science, and religion and science. The connecting thread between the three subsections is his strong belief that the striving for morality is the sui generis quality of religion. From a moral point of view, which is for Loisy the only correct perspective to study religion, the difference between magic, religion

 Salomon Reinach, Orpheus (Paris: Picard, 1909; sixth edition), xii. On Reinach’s perhaps sarcastic use of the Catholic title of “abbé” to designate Loisy, see supra, chapter 2 (2.4.3.1).  See supra, 3.1 (Leçon inaugurale, 25).  A literal translation of Reinach’s words offers little help: “If magic is science not yet secularized, it is not surprising that religion has long seemed to promise mankind what science makes it hope for more tentatively today.”

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and science is one of category and not of degree. This conviction made him face not just Reinach, but also, and perhaps even especially, Frazer. The title of Loisy’s article is a direct attack of Frazer’s theory on magic, religion, and science being evolutionary stages in the intellectual development of mankind. We have seen that Reinach himself was critical of such an intellectualist approach, so while Orpheus may certainly have been an incentive for Loisy to reflect on magic, religion and science, his article was much more than just another refutation of Reinach.

3.3.1 Magic and Religion In his account of the relationship between magic and religion, Loisy was especially keen on rejecting the Frazerian claim that a stage of pure magic preceded the beginning of religion (which, we may repeat, Reinach also rejected). Frazer had argued that during this magical stage, primitive man performed magical rites without any belief in the intervention of spiritual beings.¹²⁵ These practices found their origin in the primitive conviction that nature followed mechanical laws of magical sympathy. Magic thus acted on nature directly. It was only at a later stage of human development, Frazer asserted, during the subsequent magical-religious stages, that man started to believe that nature was controlled by the voluntarist decisions of divine intermediaries, and that the rites would try to influence those intermediaries, instead of nature itself. Against Frazer, Loisy postulated a first, magical-religious phase at the dawn of humanity, during which magic and religion could in no way be distinguished from each other, and neither of the two had evolutionary priority over the other. In a way that is reminiscent of his criticism of Reinach’s arbitrary taboo, he argued that magic was in this first stage inextricably entangled with an animistic belief in some spiritual force at work in nature, for primitive man did not simply regard nature as one phenomenon following the other. This force was confusingly believed to be neither personal nor impersonal, and to operate neither according to mechanical natural laws nor as a self-governing spiritual (but not yet supernatural) entity.

 See especially Chapter III of the third edition of The Golden Bough on Sympathetic Magic (vol. 1). Literature on Frazer’s intellectualist evolutionary sequence of magic, religion and science is extensive. See most recently, Jason A. Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment. Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017), 125 ff.

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On ne conçoit même pas que l’ordre de la nature aît pu être, pour le primitif, une simple succession de choses qui auraient été regardées comme de purs phénomènes procédant les uns des autres. On y doit supposer la notion, aussi vague qu’on voudra, d’une force; c’est cette force que le magicien prétend conduire. Et dans l’enfance de l’esprit humain, cette force n’était pas sans doute ni personnelle ni impersonnelle, selon la rigueur de ces termes, et elle était plus ou moins l’un et l’autre, en ce sens, qu’elle n’était pas censée purement mécanique ni purement spirituelle.¹²⁶

Throughout his entire article, Loisy insisted in a strikingly forceful way that magic never was a fully non-spiritual procedure, and vice versa, that religion was from the very beginning entangled with the magical reasoning that the spiritual (natural and later supernatural) could be influenced through a “moyen physique.” Loisy’s view on the magical-religious roots of all historical religions is without doubt informed by his teleological philosophy of religious history. One can quite easily see how convenient this particular theoretical viewpoint is for acknowledging—and legitimizing—the presence of magical elements in later Christianity, and especially the Eucharist, which could then be considered as a natural and organic development since the earliest form of religion.¹²⁷ Loisy’s 1910 article strongly reminds of the evolutionary philosophy he developed in his Modernist manifesto L’Évangile et l’Église: the “essence of a tree” is “in the complete tree as in the germ.”¹²⁸ In spite of the unmistakable fact that even modern religions still bear magical elements within them, Loisy did see a progressive differentiation between magic and religion taking place in the course of time. This viewpoint necessarily led him to the by him much dismayed territory of definition and theory, for what is it, then, that eventually made magic and religion distinct systems? Clearly, Loisy explained, the difference cannot be in the ritual practices themselves, because the rites performed in magical and in religious cults can hardly be distinguished.¹²⁹ Furthermore, the difference can also not reside in the logic behind the supposed efficiency of the rites, because he was convinced that both imply the belief in a spiritual force. For Loisy, the single most important demarcation

 Loisy, “Magie, science et religion,” 180. See also p. 170: “[…] ce qu’on appelle magie, à savoir la recherche d’un effet transcendant, par un moyen physique employé en vue de cet effet, une influence sur le monde invisible, poursuivie par une sorte de procédé mécanique.”  For Loisy’s theory of the Eucharist as magical practice, see infra, chapter 5 (especially 5.3.1.3 and 5.3.2).  See supra, chapter 1 (1.3): “Why should the essence of a tree be held to be but a particle of the seed from which it has sprung, and why should it not be recognized as truly and fully in the complete tree as in the germ” (EE, 16).  Loisy, “Magie, science et religion,” 173.

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criterion is socio-moral. The differentiation process (whenever and wherever it occurs) starts when human groups become more socially organized. Rites and beliefs that are qualified as religious, enhance the social coherence of society parallel to the prescription of moral behavior. Magic, by contrast, serves purely individualistic interests and lacks the aspiration for the ideal of doing right for fellow group members. While religion is at the very core of society, magic progressively moves into its margins.¹³⁰ While religion is official and public, legal and socially consolidating, magic is private, illegal, and often subversive. And thus, Loisy argued, we may reasonably surmise that the growing opposition between religion and magic was the result of the growing social consciousness within, and self-consciousness of every individual. [L]a distinction de la magie et de la religion, la sélection de leurs pratiques respectives, leur opposition grandissante tournent autour d’un principe social: la religion est un culte officiel et public; la magie est une espèce de rituel privé, souvent mal vu et même prohibé. L’on est donc autorisé à conjecturer que ce sont les progrès mêmes de l’organisation sociale, le sentiment plus vivant de l’intérêt commun, la conscience plus forte de ce qu’on peut appeler la personnalité sociale, conscience qui n’a pas grandi sans un certain affermissement de la conscience personnelle dans les individus, et la personnification des puissances invisibles, reflet des personnalités individuelles et de la personnalité sociale, qui ont opéré une réglementation et un choix des anciennes pratiques, pour adapter cellesci aux exigences et aux aspirations nouvelles des sociétés. L’idée d’obligation morale et de devoir social se fait ainsi jour, mais enveloppée de ce nuage prestigieux qui vient de l’invisible au-delà et qui se définit dans le sacré : c’est la religion.¹³¹

It is only within religion that an expanding ideal of moral obligation and social duty gradually develops, even if this means that this moral ideal is thus “wrapped in the prestigious cloud of the invisible hereafter.” And measured by this ideal, religion and magic are polar opposites to Loisy. Loisy’s use of a social criterion for distinguishing magic and religion unambiguously reveals the influence of Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert. When criticizing Frazer’s paradigm, he explicitly employed several of the main arguments of their Esquisse d’une théorie générale de la magie (1902).¹³²

 In his later Essai historique sur le sacrifice (Paris: Nourry, 1920) Loisy will make this point even more emphatically, p. 26: “On pourrait presque dire que, dans l’évolution historique du sacrifice, la signification sociale de celui-ci a grandi aux dépens de sa signification magique et en s’y substituant.” For Loisy’s views on sacrifice, see infra, chapter 5.  Loisy, À propos d’histoire des religions, 184– 185.  First published as Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, “Esquisse d’une théorie générale de la magie,” L’Année sociologique 7 (1902– 1903): 1– 146. For Loisy’s reference to this work: “Magie, science et religion,” 183 and passim. The essay of Hubert and Mauss has been exceptionally im-

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(a) They, too, had criticized Frazer for radically distinguishing magical and religious rites, as supposedly obeying a completely different logic (mechanicalphysical coercive versus arbitrary-spiritual submissive). In view of Loisy’s particular objections, it is especially important that Mauss and Hubert had underlined that some magical rites did entail the belief in the intervention of a spiritual being, while some religious rites were mainly based on the mechanical law of sympathy.¹³³ (b) Essential to their theory of magic and religion, was the belief in the presence of an ambivalent force, called mana, which gives efficacy to magical and religious rites, and constitutes the common source from which they both sprang.¹³⁴ A somewhat similar force (sometimes called vertu,¹³⁵ sometimes puissance or force) was also central in Loisy’s views. (c) Furthermore, Loisy used the binary categories of social versus individual, morality versus purely personal interests, legal versus illegal, etc. which Hubert and Mauss had suggested at the outset of their Esquisse. ¹³⁶ Their definition of magic as “every rite which does not form part of an organized cult, private, secret, mysterious and tending at the margin towards the forbidden rite” (“tout rite qui ne fait pas partie d’un culte organisé, rite privé, secret, mystérieux et tendant comme limite vers le rite prohib锹³⁷) is clearly echoed in the previous quote from Loisy’s article.

portant for the study of magic in the 20th century. It has been widely studied and discussed. For a solid introduction into the complexity of the question and how it is embedded in the research project of the Année sociologique, see Wouter B. Belier, “Religion and Magic: Durkheim and the Année Sociologique Group,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 7, 2 (1995): 163 – 184. In writing these paragraphs on Mauss and Hubert, we have also benefitted from reading the following studies: Neckebrouck, Denken over religie, 174– 184; and especially Nicolas Meylan, Mana: A History of a Western Category (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 65 – 69.  We necessarily limit this comparison between Frazer and the Durkheimians to those points that are relevant for Loisy. Hubert’s and Mauss’s criticism of Frazer was a lot more nuanced than that of Loisy. For a detailed comparison between Frazer and Hubert-Mauss, see Marcello Carastro, “La fabrique de la notion moderne de magie: pratiques du comparatisme chez Frazer, Hubert et Mauss,” Revista di História (2010): 231– 248.  On this principle: Hubert and Mauss, “Esquisse,” 107. See also infra, chapter 5 (5.3.1.3).  The notion of “vertu,” in English literally: property or virtue, but in Loisy’s usage also to be translated as mystical property or force, is the central analytical tool in his Essai historique sur le sacrifice. See especially infra, 5.3.1.3.  Hubert and Mauss, “Esquisse,” 18 – 19. See the conclusion at the bottom of page 19: “On voit que nous ne définissons pas la magie par la forme de ses rites, mais par les conditions dans lesquelles ils se produisent et qui marquent la place qu’ils occupent dans l’ensemble des habitudes sociales.”  Hubert and Mauss, “Esquisse,” 19, italics as in the original.

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But in spite of his rapprochement towards a sociological analysis of the magic/religion divide, there are also remarkable differences with great significance for his thought. Overall, Loisy’s sociological explanation of magic and religion was much more superficial than the theory of Mauss and Hubert. Especially with regard to the force (mana) which they all agreed to be operative in magical and in religious rites, it is clear that the postulation of its existence was for Loisy the end point of his reflection, while for Mauss and Hubert it was only the beginning. Mauss and Hubert considered the mana as a form of the sacred, and took great efforts to explain it as the symbolization of the collective forces of society.¹³⁸ The belief in the efficacy of magical rites was for them the result of shared emotions of need and anxiety in a collective setting.¹³⁹ Loisy, on the contrary, considered this force the further irreducible explanation of magic and religion. Their essential aim was to understand magic as “fait social,” and to explain how its origins in a collective tradition could be reconciled with the fact that magic was being used by individuals for individualistic goals. For Loisy, such sociological understanding of magic was not the final objective. His main aims were to show that religion was moral, and magic was not, and to fight Frazer’s intellectualist interpretation of non-spiritual magic. Sociological theory only mattered to the extent that it could help him to make those claims. While social changes in society instigated the differentiation between magic and religion, it was morality that drew the final line between them. The striking fact, however, that Loisy left the quintessential force unexplained, was not the result of his focus being on morality rather than on social life. It is much more plausible that he didn’t accept its sociological demystification by Hubert and Mauss, because he felt that this force was not the symbol of anything. We will come back to this point in the final chapter, when discussing Loisy’s wartime theory of faith, religion, and sacrifice. What remained implicit in 1910, would be made emphatically explicit between 1915 – 1916.

 Hubert and Mauss, “Esquisse,” 122: “Il ne nous suffit donc pas de dire que la qualité de mana s’attache à certaines choses en raison de leur position relative dans la société, mais il nous faut dire que l’idée de mana n’est rien autre que l’idée de ces valeurs, de ces différences de potentiel.”  Meylan, Mana, 69.

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3.3.2 Magic and Science The Esquisse of Hubert and Mauss was also the main source of inspiration for Loisy’s views on the relationship between magic and science.¹⁴⁰ In their essay, they had studied magic in a very comprehensive way, examining not only its link with religion, but also that with science and technology. Like them, Loisy rejected Frazer’s strictly intellectualist interpretation of magic as pre-science. Literally following Hubert and Mauss, he explained how magic presupposes an obligatory a priori belief in an efficacious force. The authority of this belief is such that it survives even when the magical ritual fails to realize its objective. Because of this force, magical belief is the clean opposite of science, which is characterized by the a posteriori principle of free experimentation and falsification.¹⁴¹ According to Mauss, Hubert and Loisy, Frazer was wrong to purport that magic only works through the belief in laws of sympathy, and thus also in asserting that magic is strictly rational and pre-scientific. Primitive man, Loisy explained, did not have exact notions of absolute laws. Loisy adopted Hubert and Mauss’s set of sociological tools for differentiating between science and magic. Magic, he agreed, is grounded in a collective tradition but this tradition is individually exploited for individual interests (“exploitée par des individus pour des intérêts individuels”¹⁴²). The magician usually follows the magical tradition slavishly and her/his individual creativity plays next to no role. In science, the foundational principles are also “élaborés collectivement et transmis par tradition,”¹⁴³ but the goals are beneficial for society. Moreover, and herein resides the main difference with magic, the individual scientist is typically free to break with the tradition on the basis of his own intellectual capacities, for instance when the tradition contradicts his own experimental findings. In repeating this point of Mauss and Hubert, Loisy also adopted one of the most debated ambivalences in their theory: that magic is essentially individualistic when compared to religion, but especially the deposit of a collective tradition when compared to science.¹⁴⁴ In spite of the differences between magic and science, Loisy did acknowledge a genealogical connection between them, as Hubert and Mauss had done

 Loisy, “Magie, science et religion,” 187.  See for this distinction, Hubert and Mauss, “Esquisse,” 91.  Loisy, “Magie, science et religion,” 188, which is a summary of Hubert and Mauss, “Esquisse,” 88 – 89.  Loisy, Loisy, “Magie, science et religion,” 188.  The interested reader can find an excellent account of the problem in Randall Styers, Making Magic: Religion, Magic, and Science in the Modern World (New York: OUP, 2004).

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before him.¹⁴⁵ After the first magical-religious phase, or, in other words, when magic and religion have gone their separate ways, magic further develops in the margins of society. Unbound by social control or convention, magic can go where religion cannot.¹⁴⁶ Over time, Loisy explained, some forms of magic develop a more experimental character and eventually transform into science. In a way very parallel to the gradual differentiation between magic and religion after their initial coalescence,¹⁴⁷ he postulated a hypothetical magical-scientific stage, from which magic and science gradually part ways.¹⁴⁸ Whereas morality and social behavior function as the demarcation principles for magic and religion, it is the sociological criterion of individual creativity and intelligence which operates a distinction between progressively superior scientific forms of magic and inferior non-scientific magic. From the moment the magician is performing experiments, and no longer mechanically applying a priori valid laws, “il est sur le chemin de la science.”¹⁴⁹ Interestingly, Loisy didn’t pay all that much attention to the reasons why the magician started to experiment. In this regard, his article was, once again, much different from the work of Hubert and Mauss.¹⁵⁰ Their focus was on understanding magic itself, Loisy’s sole focus was on showing how distinct magic was from religion. For his purposes the particularities of the magic-science link were of lesser importance. After all, this was a development taking place on the non-moral side of history. After having thus established the (dis)connection of science and magic, Loisy returned to the moral point he wanted to make and brought in a crucial delimitation to his preceding explanation. Only the sciences of nature (“sciences de la nature”) had developed out of magic, not the humanities (“sciences de l’humanité”).¹⁵¹ The humanities had nothing to do with magic, but had instead developed out of religion, again by a process of gradual differentiation: “Or ces sciences [the humanities, my remark] procèdent plus ou moins de la religion, comme les autres [the natural sciences] procèdent de la magie, et par une voie

 It should be added, however, that the outlook of Loisy is altogether much more evolutionary and diachronic than the mainly synchronic perspective of Hubert and Mauss.  Loisy, “Magie, science et religion,” 190.  For a schematic representation of Loisy’s views, see p. 180.  Loisy, “Magie, science et religion,” 189.  Loisy, “Magie, science et religion,” 189.  Hubert and Mauss for instance reflected on the natural knowledge which magicians at a certain point started to develop to finetune their rituals. In their eyes, this quest for natural knowledge distinguished magic and science from the metaphysical knowledge developed in religion. See on this point, Styers, Making Magic, 131.  According to Loisy the humanities include history, philosophy, psychology, moral sciences, sociology. Loisy, “Magie, science et religion,” 191.

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analogue, c’est-à-dire par une sorte d’émancipation graduellement effectuée à l’égard de la tradition religieuse.”¹⁵² For Loisy, the difference between the natural sciences and the human sciences is emphatically not that only the first would be experimental, and supposedly solely worthy of the qualification “science.” The difference resided in their origins and object of study. Loisy insisted on the divide between natural and human sciences, but didn’t enter into the then very topical debates among philosophers of science about the epistemological and methodological differences between those sciences.¹⁵³ His sharp bifurcation between magic and natural sciences on the one hand, and religion and humanities on the other, served a very different goal: while natural sciences could never make any legitimate moral claims because of their non-moral magical roots, the situation was quite different and far more complicated for the humanities, which, to a certain degree, could be an ally of religion.

3.3.3 Religion and Science: A Narrow Perspective As can be expected from an article that is especially directed against an intellectualist understanding of religion, it is the relation between religion and science (natural and human) and their respective value as propagators of moral progress, which makes up the larger part of Loisy’s article. Before taking a closer look at this analysis, it is quite interesting to observe that Loisy substantiated his radical distinction between the evolutionary lines of magic/natural science and of religion/humanities, only by referring to the medieval history of science in Western Europe.¹⁵⁴ And yet, he still claimed universal validity for his evolutionary scheme. When we take into account that Loisy had been trained as an

 Loisy, “Magie, science et religion,” 191, where he furthermore explained the reasons for this development: “Tout ce que la religion prétendait expliquer dans le passé, tout ce qu’elle voulait imposer, le régime de vie individuelle, domestique et sociale qu’elle voulait prescrire, elle-même a instruit les hommes à le discuter, parce qu’elle avait été obligé de le justifier.”  The depth of Loisy’s reflections on the classification of the sciences differed greatly from those of his former teacher, Ernest Renan, with which Loisy definitely was familiar but which he never quoted in his article. For Renan’s similar distinction between “les sciences de la nature et les sciences de l’humanité,” based on the distinction between “le monde physique et le monde moral”, see Annie Petit, “Le prétendu positivisme d’Ernest Renan,” Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines (2003): 106.  In the Western Middle Ages, he explained, theology encompassed and controlled the entire scientific spectrum, except for the natural sciences which fell largely outside of ecclesiastical control. See especially Loisy, “Magie, science et religion,” 191.

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assyriologist¹⁵⁵ and had excellent knowledge of ancient Babylonian culture, his drastic denial of any link between natural sciences and organized religion is very difficult to gauge. In ancient Babylonia, as Loisy surely must have known, astronomical observations had been deeply embedded in religious-astrological thinking. It was precisely on the basis of the intricate link between Babylonian science and religion,¹⁵⁶ that Loisy’s friend, Franz Cumont, had painted a very different picture of the ancient history of science. Using a (modified¹⁵⁷) Comtian framework, Cumont had described the history of all science as a long process during which each science gradually disentangled itself from religion. In Loisy’s framework, the development of natural science was strictly severed from that of religion. Natural sciences originated from magic, but only after natural magic had already dissolved itself from magical religion as a distinct system of belief. Still, Loisy did not exclude the possibility of exchanges between religion and the natural sciences. He for instance acknowledged that religious changes could have their impact on the development of science. As a case in point, he gladly referred to the “Protestant heresy.” The Reformation radically diminished the Church’s authority and the natural sciences which had hitherto been an underground phenomenon, took advantage to enter the public sphere.¹⁵⁸ But this and other nuances notwithstanding, Loisy was especially concerned with keeping the natural sciences separated from religious beliefs. This becomes especially clear when we draw up a scheme of his views on the history of magic, science and religion.

 See supra, introduction.  In Cumont’s thesis about the religions orientales, the doctrines of all mystery cults that spread over the Mediterranean were deeply influenced by this astrological Babylonian legacy.  For a detailed analysis of the relation between science and religion in Cumont’s philosophy of history, I refer the interested reader to Danny Praet, “‘Le problème de l’astrologie’ dans le contexte idéologique de l’affaire Cumont: les relations entre religion et sciences dans l’Antiquité et dans les universités d’État belges,” in Franz Cumont. Astrologie, eds. Danny Praet and Béatrice Bakhouche (Rome–Torino–Turnhout: Academia Belgica and BHIR), xlii-lvii, and to Praet, “The End of Ancient Paganism.” The author makes the interesting point that Cumont referred to the (mutually contradicting) views of Frazer, and Hubert and Mauss in his chapter VII “L’Astrologie et la magie” of his Religions orientales dans le paganisme romain (Franz Cumont, Les Religions orientales dans le paganisme romain, eds. Corinne Bonnet and Françoise Van Haeperen [Rome– Torino: Aragno, 2006], 280 n. 75). Cumont more or less circumvented the problem of the relation between magic and religion, by referring to magic as a form of religious thought.  Loisy, “Magie, science et religion,” 192.

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Figure 1: Schematic Representation of Loisy’s Moral History of Magic, Science, and Religion

The one and only reason for Loisy’s sharp distinction between the phenomena on the left and on the right hand side of the vertical line, was his strictly moral theory of religion. Always a critical scholar, Loisy could not have been oblivious to the intricate intertwinement of religion and science, nor to the fact that religion does satisfy intellectual needs and can serve as a system of explanation. But in his severe criticism of Reinach—on whom he projected Frazer’s views— and of Frazer himself, Loisy completely discarded any intellectualist consideration of religion. From his scheme it clearly emerges that religion and natural sciences both have a genealogical link with magic, but Loisy hastened to say that this link is completely irrelevant from a moral point of view.¹⁵⁹ Moreover, he argued, the link is not a real link, because religion developed out of primitive spiritual magic, while science later developed out of a different, material-mechanical kind of natural magic.¹⁶⁰ Quite paradoxically, he felt it important to

 Loisy frequently repeated this point, but it perhaps received its clearest formulation at the end of the article, p. 216 – 217: “l’histoire nous répond que cet idéal [i. e. of morality] est complètement étranger à la magie, et que la magie n’a pu le transmettre ni à la religion ni à la science. Cet idéal est ce qui a fait la religion, ce qui l’a élevée au-dessus de la magie, ce qui a été son unique fonction, sa seule utilité, son incomparable service [my emphasis].”  See especially Loisy, “Magie, science et religion,” 203: all religions contain traces of “magie spirituelle et morale, en comparaison de l’autre, qui était matérielle et mécanique.” Strangely, Loisy here referred to spiritual magic as moral, whereas elsewhere in his essay morality is strictly reserved to the religious sphere. In the passage from which this sentence is extracted, Loisy discussed the presence of magical beliefs in religion. It is probably by association that he here re-

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stress these different kinds of magic, only to conclude that both were equally non-moral. If science makes moral claims today, he argued, this is not because science inherited moral awareness from its magical ancestor, but because it has borrowed such awareness from religious traditions. Morality is, in other words, never an essential characteristic of science, unless science itself becomes a religion. Il est clair que la science, pas plus que la religion, n’a pu tenir de la magie un idéal que celle-ci n’a jamais connu. Si donc la science y prétend aujourd’hui, ce ne peut être en tant qu’elle procède de la magie, mais en tant qu’elle l’a emprunté à la tradition religieuse et qu’elle lui conteste la faculté de l’accomplir, en revendiquant cette faculté pour elle-même, et pour elle seule. […] Il appartiendrait à la science de faire régner l’ordre, la justice, le bonheur dans la société, en élevant les individus à la hauteur morale qui est la condition de ces avantages. Entendre ainsi la science est en faire une religion.¹⁶¹

Especially in those parts of the article that criticized the evolutionary line Salomon Reinach had putatively drawn between magic, religion, and science as subsequent stages in the moral development of mankind, Loisy was truly a man on a mission. From a genealogical-historical point of view, (natural) science and religion were unconnected, and this “division of labor”¹⁶² was to stay firmly in place. Religion should not make claims on “what is true” (“le vrai”), but the more emphatic point here was that science should not pretend to incarnate “what is good” (“le bien”¹⁶³). At their very best, the humanities could formulate a convincing critique of existing morality and propose a new theory of morality, but Loisy emphasized that the step from theory to practice was an insurmountable one for science. Religion, by contrast, was not theory or knowledge, but spiritual action and sentiment and therefore truly incarnated morality, which is action and sentiment, too.¹⁶⁴ To make his distinction between science and religion complete, Loisy recurred to the aforementioned spiritual force. It is this force which purportedly makes religion the only possible agent of moral progress.¹⁶⁵ When applying this idea to

garded this religious magic as moral. We will return to the magical survivals in religion in the following section on the religion de l’humanité, and especially in chapter 5, 5.3.1.3.  Loisy, “Magie, science et religion,” 193.  Loisy, “Magie, science et religion,” 193.  Loisy, “Magie, science et religion,” 194, or put differently: “La science est connaissance; la morale individuelle et sociale est sentiment et action.”  See infra, chapter 5 for Loisy’s theory of sacrifice as “action sacrée” (especially 5.3.1.1).  Loisy, “Magie, science et religion,” 194: “Pour agir, dans l’ordre moral comme dans l’ordre physique, il faut une force; et la science n’est qu’une lumière.”

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Christian ethics, Loisy made some statements that were quite remarkable for a scholar who was in dire need to shake off his Catholic image. Ecclesiastical concepts such as the grace of god, he for instance argued, are not empty words, but ideas that are permeated by this same mysterious force which makes people capable of rising above themselves and performing extraordinary sacrifices.¹⁶⁶ On the basis of this and similar statements, it is not very difficult to understand why many scholars—then and now—have believed that Loisy always remained Catholic by heart.

3.3.4 The Emergence of the Religion de l’Humanité Concept Loisy’s history of religions and underpinning theoretical insights basically revolved around the same questions that had also occupied the minds of Reinach, Frazer, Mauss, and so many others: what role, if any, can religion play in modern society? Can there be true morality without religion? Loisy was strongly convinced that religion had been the one and only beacon of true, individual and collective morality since the dawn of humanity, and he believed that it would continue to do so in the future. But the religion of the future, he admitted, should be radically different from the traditional (Christian¹⁶⁷) religions of the past and of his own day.¹⁶⁸ These religions, Loisy wholeheartedly agreed, were no longer up to the task. One of the major reasons for their shortcomings was precisely their failure to pay science its dues. Moreover, traditional religions proved to be completely unable to adapt to the new political and social landscapes of modern society. However, these shortcomings did not by implication mean—as Reinach had asserted—that religion was now disqualified, and science could take over the moral challenge. “Cette discipline toute sèche,” Loisy repeated, “ne constituera jamais l’idéal de société bonne et de conscience satisfaite au-

 Loisy, “Magie, science et religion,” 196: “Ce que l’Église appelle grâce de Dieu et moyen de grâce, n’est pas un vain mot. Il y avait, il y a encore dans tout cela une puissance mystérieuse qui soulève les âmes et les rend capables d’extraordinaires sacrifices […].” This sentence is preceded by a similar statement: “Les siècles ont formé dans les Églises chrétiennes une sorte de pédagogie traditionnelle dont l’efficacité ne peut être contestée que par ceux qui n’y ont jamais participé.”  Throughout the article the perspective is exclusively Christian. We will return to this point shortly.  On the consequences of this strong discontinuity in Loisy’s philosophy of religious history, see infra, chapter 5 (5.3.1 and 5.3.2.)

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quel aspire l’humanité. Un idéal de vie morale ne peut pas être définitivement réglé comme un théorème de géométrie.”¹⁶⁹ In the final pages of the article Loisy launched a concept that would be fundamental for his future studies on history and philosophy of religion: the religion de l’humanité. His views on the historical relationship between religion and science were nevertheless quite different from those of the great French positivist philosopher and sociologist with whom this concept is indissolubly connected. To begin, Auguste Comte’s philosophy of history offered a far more comprehensive evolutionary account of human knowledge, social organization and moral behavior.¹⁷⁰ Comte furthermore believed that socio-political and moral progress of society were inextricably entangled with, and even driven by the intellectual progress of mankind. Religion, metaphysics and science were famously seen by him as three evolutionary stages in the socio-intellectual development of mankind. Comte’s double focus on history of science and on socio-political life, was substantially different from Loisy’s own narrow, moralistic philosophy of history. In our fifth chapter, we will see how Loisy wrote to his friend Maude Petre in 1917 that he had never read Comte. But even if this were true, he certainly knew what Comtian positivism was about. What Loisy will doubtlessly have found compelling about it, was the attention it paid to the positive functions of religion. At a later point in his intellectual development, Comte had acknowledged that the positivist end phase of human history would never be realized if it only satisfied intellectual needs. Man was not just intellect, but also sentiment.¹⁷¹ Positivism—in the double sense of a truly social society and a fully rationalist outlook on reality—could only be successful when it offered a full package that

 Loisy, “Magie, science et religion,” 200.  Research literature on Comte’s religion de l’humanité is vast. For this paragraph, the following studies have been very useful: Michel Bourdeau, “Auguste Comte,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, URL: https://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/sum2018/entries/comte/; Michel Bourdeau, Les Trois États: science, théologie et métaphysique chez Comte (Paris: Cerf, 2006); Andrew Wernick, Auguste Comte and the Religion of Humanity. The Post-Theistic Program of French Social Theory (New York–Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Most recently see also: Michel Bourdeau, Mary Pickering and Warren Schmauss, ed., Love, Order, & Progress. The Science, Philosophy, & Politics of Auguste Comte (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), especially the contribution of Andrew Wernick, “The Religion of Humanity and Positive Morality.”  Auguste Comte, The Catechism of Positive Religion, trans. Richard Congreve (London: John Chapman, 1858), 11: “Positive religion, then, gives full satisfaction to the intelligence of man, and to his activity. Impelled onwards by the character of reality which distinguishes it, it has embraced the region of sentiment.”

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appealed to all dimensions of human existence. And thus, Comte had argued, a positivistic religion de l’humanité should be developed to replace traditional religion, all the while taking over those religious functions which he valued positively: its ability to stimulate individual moral behavior, to unite individuals in a cohesive society, and its capacity to satisfy man’s sentimental needs. It goes without saying that Comte’s predominant focus on worship may also have had an immense appeal for Loisy. But with this point, we are running ahead of our story, because in 1910, Loisy’s views on the religion of humanity were still immature. We will need to return to the legacy of Comte in our last chapter (5.2), which will analyze Loisy’s later and more elaborated views on this topic. For now, it is important to note that for Loisy, the religion of humanity would be the crowning piece of history, albeit of a different kind of history than Comte’s. In Loisy’s philosophy of history, impulses for religious changes seem to come from moral progress.¹⁷² The progress of human knowledge is a perspective ignored by him. In contrast to Comte’s religion of humanity, which would infiltrate in the totality of social reality (intellectual as dogme, sentimental as culte and moral as régime), Loisy gave an exclusively moral interpretation to this concept. In his view, the religion of humanity is the ever-changing ideal of collective and individual morality, which slowly perfects itself throughout the history of religions. Some religions have come closer to realizing this ideal than others, but none of the religions that have existed so far, have been able to fully embody it. On the lowest evolutionary stage are the cults of the non-civilized (“les cultes des non-civilisés”), where spiritual-religious and material-mechanical magic coexist and the divine order issues only vaguely moral precepts. On the other, highest end of the evolution are spiritual religions with strong moral obligations (“une conception spirituelle de la vie, de sa destinée et des ses lois”¹⁷³). The intermediate stages are those in which religions gradually get rid of their magical features by progressively sublimating them into spiritual interpretations.¹⁷⁴ When a religion has finally exhausted its capacities to transform and to keep up with the ever progressing moral standards of humanity, it is replaced by a new, superior religion: “des religions se sont succédé qui marquaient tour à

 Later, in La Religion (1917), Loisy explained in great detail that he believed religion and morality to be in a mutually constitutive relationship. See infra, chapter 5 (5.2.1).  Loisy, “Magie, science et religion,” 204.  Loisy illustrated this evolution with a rather long account of the evolution from primitive Judaism to modern Catholicism, see Loisy, “Magie, science et religion,” 207– 214.

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tour une avance sur ce qui avait existé antérieurement.”¹⁷⁵ The conviction that every religion can fulfill only a limited degree of development after which it enters into irrevocable Dekadenz ¹⁷⁶ and is replaced by a new religion, is radically different from Loisy’s former belief that Catholicism could eternally reinvent itself. Although the newly appointed historian of religions left little doubt that Catholic Christianity really was the highest realization of the religion of humanity so far, this religion, too, would inevitably be replaced by a new one.¹⁷⁷ The question as to what this new religion would look like, was left unanswered, except for one aspect: the ideal of morality would no longer be personified as the transcendent personal god which Loisy himself had rejected.¹⁷⁸ Instead, man would come to realize that its true teachers had not been heavenly instituted, but had been produced by mankind itself. Or, ce qui nous devient inconcevable, ce qui nous est indémontré, ce que nous croyons voir indémontrable, est précisément cette personnification de l’idéal en esprit transcendant qui se serait fait une fois pour toutes l’instituteur de l’homme, en ne lui laissant plus rien à découvrir dans le champ de sa destinée. Ce qui nous apparaît est que la vérité se fait jour peu à peu dans l’humanité ; qu’elle n’est pas offerte, mais qu’elle s’acquiert ; que la société des hommes n’a pas de maîtres institués d’en haut, mais qu’elle-même produit ses vrais maîtres, d’en bas […].¹⁷⁹

At this point, Loisy quite abruptly broke off his essay, reminding his readers (and himself) not to leave the territory of history: “L’actualité n’est pas de notre domaine, l’avenir encore moins. L’histoire seule est à nous.”¹⁸⁰ Strikingly unaware of the deeply teleological and ideological dimension of his own philosophy of religious history, he ended the article by reaffirming his strictly historicist methodology. The described relations between magic, science and religion, as well as

 Loisy, “Magie, science et religion,” 204– 205.  It is unclear by which French or international authors Loisy was inspired for his recuperation of the then widely popular narratives on Décadence in historiography of antiquity. Perhaps we may think of Franz Cumont, with whose work Loisy certainly was well acquainted at this point. On Cumont’s original adaptation of the Dekadenz narrative, see Corinne Bonnet and Françoise Van Haeperen, “Introduction historiographique,” in Les Religions orientales dans le paganisme romain (Brussels–Rome: Aragno, BHIR, Academia Belgica, 2006), xvii ff.; Praet, “The End of Paganism.”  Compare this discontinuous view of history, with the great emphasis on the continuity of magic (though perpetually reinterpreted) in religion.  For a precious insight into Loisy’s religious convictions, see his letter to Arconati quoted in chapter 2, 2.4.1.  Loisy, “Magie, science et religion,” 215 – 216.  Loisy, “Magie, science et religion,” 216.

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the religion of humanity manifesting itself behind and in historical religions, were there for any (good) historian to behold, according to Loisy. It would, by the way, not be very long before he felt morally obliged to further develop and publish his views on the new post-Christian religion of humanity. Loisy’s later urgency to do so had everything to do with the dramatic turn his own reality took under impact of the First World War.¹⁸¹ Before concluding this section on magic, science and religion, there are three further points that require our attention. The first concerns the notion of universality. The new Collège de France professor clearly adopted a much more universalizing perspective in his 1910 essay than he had done when a Modernist priest. But he still only referred to the history of Judaism and Christianity, which he qualified as “particularly instructive” for the history of any religion. Such a narrow perspective can of course find an explanation in the fact that Loisy was writing against Reinach’s Orpheus, which had also dedicated most attention to Judaism and Christianity. There is, however, an enormous difference between the two scholars. Reinach had consistently applied his taboo-totemism-animismmagic scheme to all other religions discussed in Orpheus (for instance to GrecoRoman mythology), while there was only one mention of non-Judeo-Christian religion in Loisy’s entire 30-page article. Here, we touch upon an aspect of Loisy’s thought that would radically change in the years to come, when he set out to study and compare religions of the entire globe. The second point concerns his exclusivist moral theory of religion. In sharp contradiction to his overall attention for the social function of religion, Loisy explicitly stated that the only function of religion was enhancing morality.¹⁸² Although he claimed to be open to and make use of all modern theories and methods, he firmly excluded those theories that contradicted his own Catholiccollective outlook on religion. In the years to come, he would develop a nuanced point of view on Frazerian thought, especially with regard to its theory on the nexus of myth and ritual,¹⁸³ and he would further define his position toward Durkheimian theory.¹⁸⁴ Thirdly, a brief comment should be made about the profound cross-pollination between Loisy’s “scientific” account of the history of religions and his moral philosophy of religion. For Loisy, the non-moral character of science and the predominantly moral nature of religion were historically grounded, unbiased scien-

   

See See See See

infra, chapter 5 (5.1). the passage quoted in note 159. infra, chapter 4 (4.3). infra, chapter 5 (5.2.2 and 5.3.1.3).

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tific facts. Even though history of religions itself—as science—can never be a source of morality, Loisy did consider this discipline as a crucial ally for the future installation of the true religion de l’humanité. In his article, there was a wellarticulated concern for demonstrating the compatibility between the study of religion (and of humanity at large) and the creation of a moral—and therefore in his eyes necessarily religious—society.¹⁸⁵ In a certain sense, one almost gets the impression that the ultimate raison d’être of history of religions as a scientific discipline was not the intellectual pursuit of scientific knowledge, but the establishment of this humanist religion. If this is true, the article very much echoed his Modernist endeavor to reconcile science and religion. A similar aim seems to have guided his views on the organization of instruction on religion in the école laïque, to which we now turn.

3.4 History of Religions and the École laïque In the introduction to this chapter we have seen that Reinach had written his Orpheus for popularizing purposes. He had even suggested that the volume could be used as a textbook in the école laïque. Because of Reinach’s popularizing claims Loisy decided to get involved in the highly delicate public question on the instruction on religion in the école laïque. He explained his views on the matter in an important but often overlooked article entitled “De la vulgarisation et de l’enseignement de l’histoire des religions,” which was again published in the Correspondance of Paul Desjardins’s Union pour la Vérité in 1910 and reprinted in Loisy’s later volume À propos d’histoire des religions (1911).¹⁸⁶ The necessity to introduce some form of instruction on religion in the école laïque had been a matter of dispute ever since its foundation in the 1880s.¹⁸⁷ The question regained topicality against the backdrop of the Separation of State and Church in 1905.¹⁸⁸ It virulently opposed conservative Catholics who were pro tra-

 One will recall Loisy’s conviction that only religion harbors the mysterious force that gives a moral drive to humanity.  Alfred Loisy, “De la vulgarisation et de l’enseignement de l’histoire des religions,” Correspondance de l’Union pour la Vérité (1909 – 1910), 1er février: 257– 272; 1er mars: 209 – 225, 1er mai: 330 – 342, 1er juin: 390 – 408; and reprint in À propos d’histoire des religions (Paris: Nourry, 1911), 100 – 165. We quote from the latter reprint.  One may notice (at p. 101) that Loisy himself labeled the debate as relatively new, simply because he was new to it.  See the introduction to this chapter for relevant bibliographical references on the école laïque.

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ditional religious instruction and republican opponents of any kind of instruction on religion. Since the 1880s, the question of neutralité scolaire had mobilized influential academic voices, like, for instance, Maurice Vernes.¹⁸⁹ Vernes strongly believed that the new discipline of history of religions could provide a neutral way out of the ideological conflicts.¹⁹⁰ The rationale of scholars like Vernes obviously was that there was one historical (in casu Republican and Liberal-Protestant) truth, and that—when taught properly—history of religions could be a cohesive force in a deeply disrupted French society. And then, after decades of disputes on which historical truth was the right one to teach, came Reinach’s Orpheus, with the ambitious intention to settle the question once and for all. Strongly aware of the public authority that came with his appointment to the Collège de France, Loisy felt it was his duty to take a stand. He agreed with Vernes and Reinach that the main insights of academic history of religions should receive a privileged position in the curricula of the école laïque, be it in a strongly adapted version. Loisy explained on the side that he would not distinguish between child and adult education. His essay only discussed the école laïque, but Loisy argued that its conclusions were explicitly applicable to popularizing work among adults as well.¹⁹¹ This being said, one of the major differences between academic and popular history of religions, in his eyes, concerned their distinct attitudes towards religious identities. While academic history of religions may in no way be affected by the religious beliefs of scholars or students, such a detached discourse on religion was not recommendable when popularizing history of religions. The reality was that most pupils (and their parents)—especially at the French countryside—still were religious. Education on the history of religions, he argued, should avoid working as an aggressive machine de guerre against religion. But on the other hand, the historical truth may also not be muzzled by the religious teachings of the pupils’ churches. Instruction on the history of religions could and should be organized in such a way that it didn’t hurt anyone’s (religious or non-religious) feelings.¹⁹² The larger part of Loisy’s article was devoted to the question as to how history of religions could be reconciled with the much-contested notion of neutralité.

 See chapter 2 (2.2.1.3 and passim) for Vernes, who had been a rival of Loisy for the chair at the CF in 1909.  On the intervention of Vernes, and his proposal for a focus on ancient Judaism (as an exemplum for French patriotic behavior): Cabanel, “L’institutionnalisation des ‘sciences religieuses’,” 44– 52.  Loisy, “De la vulgarisation,” 106.  Loisy insisted: “Les sentiments les plus délicats, sur lesquels repose, au fond, l’économie de la société, sont en cause.” Loisy, “De la vulgarisation,” 106.

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Loisy’s deeply moralistic theory of religion offered the for him evident solution to this question. Pierre Ognier’s research on the école laïque has conclusively shown that non-religious moral education was a point of paramount importance to its legislators.¹⁹³ It was in this moral-republican program of the école that Loisy saw a perfect window for history of religions.¹⁹⁴ Although he didn’t mention his religion de l’humanité conception in this essay, it is very clear that he nevertheless regarded history of religions as trailblazer of a universal and inherently religious morality. Much in contrast to Reinach, he thought that the ultimate reason for including history of religions in secular education was not the abolishment of religion and the installation of “the reign of reason” in French society, but the preparation of a new era in which scientific knowledge on religion and religious humanism peacefully coexisted. Given Loisy’s strong belief in the indissoluble link between religion and morality in the history of religions, it is hardly surprising that he referred to the textbook of his dreams as “un petit catéchisme.”¹⁹⁵ Throughout his argumentation, Loisy regularly played the devil’s advocate against his own ideas, with the main devils being the churches (but mostly the Catholic Church) and Salomon Reinach. Yet, it should be noted that several of the skeptical questions he raised against his own arguments, were doubts that might have been legitimately raised by anyone interested in the matter. The first such question was whether there was sufficient scientific consensus on the main insights of history of religions? If academic historians of religions failed to agree within their strictly secular settings, how could one expect to obtain any decent results in a context where religious bias was the rule rather than the exception? Loisy was the first to agree that the academic discipline was prone to methodological exclusivisms and scientific dissensions, but he was nevertheless convinced that there was real consensus underneath the methodological differences. Outsiders should not think of the sociological, anthropological, psychological or any other method as competing schools, but rather as symptoms of the “perfectionnement de la méthode et pénétration plus intime de son objet.”¹⁹⁶ In Loisy’s advice, one easily recognizes the challenge he had set himself in his Leçon d’ouverture (1909) to deploy insights of all methods.

 Ognier, Une école sans Dieu?, 155 – 177 for a good overview of the moral question in the earlier years of the école laïque. For a short chronological account of the question: Guy Coq, “La laïcité et l’école de la République,” Tréma 37 (2012): 144– 164.  In our final chapter we will discuss the patriotic discourse that Loisy was about to develop on the religion de l’humanité from 1914 onwards.  Loisy, “De la vulgarisation,” 107; on this textbook he adds: “il ne doit pas être un manuel de religion, ni un manuel d’irréligion.”  Loisy, “De la vulgarisation,” 102.

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Implicitly criticizing Orpheus, he warned against exclusivist and all too restrictive definitions of religion. Although wary of the Big Origins Quest, and of definitions of religion more generally, Loisy still believed that it was useful to try to define religion,¹⁹⁷ and that it was possible to do so in unanimously accepted terms for popularizing purposes. With the following rhetorical questions Loisy, revealed what elements such a definition should ideally include: La religion n’a-t-elle pas été partout et toujours la consécration de certaines formes de vie sociale qui sont censées obligatoires et qui comprennent ou impliquent un fonds de croyances communes? Et ce qui fait le caractère sacré de ces coutumes, de ces pratiques et de ces croyances n’est-il pas le relief particulier que leur communique un rapport supposé avec un principe supérieur aux individus et aux groupes humains ?¹⁹⁸

Rather unsurprisingly, he mainly hinted at a collective-sociological understanding of religion (“la consécration de certaines forms de vie sociale”), all the while explaining the sacred character of these collective customs, practices and beliefs by means of a “principle” which was superior to both the individual and the group. Although it is certainly true that this suggestion was able to gain broader support than Reinach’s sum of scruples, the vague notion of a “superior principle” definitely represented a problem of its own. Secondly, Loisy voiced the concerns of those Republicans who had decided to ban any instruction on religion from the école laïque. Granted that there was indeed sufficient scientific consensus within the secular discipline, why would anyone want to jeopardize the principle of neutralité by introducing a course that would be ferociously criticized by the churches? Loisy’s reply was strongly informed by his idealistic belief that neutral education on religion was possible, and by the conviction that scientific knowledge could bring about a positive change in society. Historical understanding of the function of religion, he explained, is extremely poor among free-thinking and religious citizens alike. In times of peace, the immediate consequences of this ignorance are altogether manageable, but in times of national crisis, ignorance can easily aggravate the excesses of religious or anti-religious fanaticism.¹⁹⁹ Moreover, important political decisions on religious matters²⁰⁰ have been made by people who have no objec-

 Loisy, “De la vulgarisation,” 104: “Parce qu’un historien des religions aura mis au jour un système plus ou moins fantastique sur les origines et le développement religieux, on n’est pas autorisé à conclure que tout est fantaisie en un tel sujet.”  Loisy, “De la vulgarisation,” 103.  Loisy, “De la vulgarisation,” 109.  Loisy referred to the Separation Law of 1905 and thus implicitly criticized Émile Combes, whom Arconati had mobilized for his election at the Collège de France (see chapter 2, 2.4.1).

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tive knowledge whatsoever on religion. Education on the history of religions—as the natural demonstration of the moral function of religion—will help children to make an informed choice about their personal spiritual life.²⁰¹ And, it will automatically transform them into more moral citizens. Interestingly, Loisy was especially critical of the ignorance of self-declared non-religious parents on religious matters. In his view, many free-thinkers²⁰² only rejected religion because they wanted to imitate free-thinking intellectuals for purposes of social status. In reality, Loisy continued, these people had no idea of what religion is.²⁰³ Moreover, they are often much more religious than they care to admit. In comparison to these free-thinking hypocrites, Loisy certainly seemed to be more lenient towards authentic religious people. When reading his accusations against ignorant religious freethinkers, it is hard not to draw a link to the Marquise Arconati-Visconti, who was fiercely non-religious without having much knowledge on religion. Although he never shared the socio-economic elitism of herself and her bourgeois entourage, his essay reveals a great deal of intellectual elitism. It certainly seems as if only those who possessed scientific knowledge of religion had the right to call themselves non-religious. How should education on the history of religions be organized? In Loisy’s view, its success was completely dependent on the schoolteacher. Loisy’s guidelines for the teachers to follow, were based on his interpretation of the basic tenets of the laïcité: “l’autonomie de la science, l’autonomie de la conscience, l’autonomie de la société civile et politique.”²⁰⁴ The principal caveat was to respect the serenity and peace of mind of the child by all means necessary.²⁰⁵ It is very clear that Loisy was especially concerned of the well-being of religious (Catholic) children; they represented the largest group, and history of religions would most radically conflict with their views. Loisy firmly underlined the autonomy of science against theology,²⁰⁶ and he agreed that the emancipation process of scientific education from theology was far from completed. At the same time, though, he stated that instruction on the history of religions should avoid to fron-

 Loisy, “De la vulgarisation,” 110.  For the heterogeneity of French free thought, see chapter 2, 2.2.3.  Loisy, “De la vulgarisation,” 111: “beaucoup affectent l’incrédulité pour se donner l’air d’être aussi intelligents que les savants qui ne croient pas; au fond, un assez grand nombre ne sont pas très rassurés sur le sort qui pourra leur échoir dans l’autre monde.”  Loisy, “De la vulgarisation,” 118.  Loisy, “De la vulgarisation,” 133.  He did so at different points in his essay, see, e. g., also Loisy, “De la vulgarisation,” 120 – 121.

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tally attack theology.²⁰⁷ In Loisy’s positivist mindset a non-offensive but truly scientific education was easy enough. The schoolmaster should simply let the historical facts speak for themselves. And when the historical truth clashed with religious truth claims (as Loisy knew very well it did), he should certainly not change the content of his historical teachings, but he did need to refrain from “negatively” adding that conflicting religious beliefs were unhistorical and untrue.²⁰⁸ The task was a delicate but not an impossible one, Loisy argued. Yes, it required tact, absolute impartiality and prudence, but given the fact that religion and science were categorically different, he considered the task an altogether fairly simple one. Religious doctrines plainly fell outside of the teacher’s scope, which was restricted to the scientific, experimental and historical domain: “Le maître laïque enseignera positivement ce qui est de vérité scientifique, expérimentale, historique. Il se dispensera d’y ajouter, il ne devra pas y ajouter des négations visant les doctrines religieuses qui se prêchent à l’église voisine. Ces doctrines, au fond, ne le regardent pas.”²⁰⁹ It is true, Loisy admitted, that most religions fail to stay on their side of the science–religion divide, but the proponents of scientific history of religions should not despair. Only historical knowledge is really true, and it will eventually prevail.²¹⁰ At the same time, he also warned rationalists not to enter religious grounds, because these cannot be understood on rationalist premises. Moreover, he added, religious teachings may very well be less threatening than they think: “nonobstant ses prétentions, l’enseignement religieux n’est pas autre chose qu’un message d’exhortation morale et de consolation. Laissons-le faire son œuvre.”²¹¹ Coming from a scholar who knew from first-hand experience how the Catholic Church had secured sociopolitical and cultural hegemony through

 Loisy, “De la vulgarisation,” 119: “[L]a laïcisation et la neutralisation de l’enseignement ne peuvent avoir pour effet de le livrer pieds et poings liés au bon plaisir d’une autorité théologique dont il était émancipé auparavant. Cette émancipation était loin d’être complète; mais elle existait dans une large mesure. Maintenant la science ne peut avoir d’autres limites que celles où s’arrêtent ses lumières et ses recherches. Elle a fait son chemin dans le passé en ne choquant pas de front les théologies: c’était la neutralité scientifique de ce temps-là; c’est encore aujourd’hui la vraie neutralité, la seule neutralité nécessaire, la seule légitime, la seule possible.”  Loisy also referred to this guideline as “la non intervention dans le domaine des religions existantes” (p. 122).  Loisy, “De la vulgarisation,” 121.  Loisy, “De la vulgarisation,” 122: “ayons assez de foi dans notre vérité pour n’essayer pas de la garantir en dénonçant les erreurs d’à-côté. Cette vérité se répandra plus vite assurément, si elle n’est point agressive.”  Loisy, “De la vulgarisation,” 121– 122.

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education, this statement that religious education was altogether harmless because it essentially offered moral encouragement and solace, was remarkably naïve. Interestingly, his warning against rationalist misconceptions of religious teachings also shows that Loisy remained very much his own man, in the sense that he clearly didn’t pay lip service to Arconati and the jeudistes who had put him on the chair of history of religions. Without doubt, many of them would have strongly disagreed with him on the harmlessness of traditional religious education, even if some might have supported his plea for non-polemical historical education on religion. The very reason for the foundation of the école laïque—which was so vigorously supported by the jeudistes—had been the belief that public religious education did much more than offering moral support; it enforced Catholic power over French society. With regard to what specific topics of the history of religions should be taught, Loisy unmistakably stipulated: “de quelque manière qu’on s’y prenne, les origines du christianisme seraient un sujet plus passionnant que celles des monarchies égyptienne et assyrienne, même que celles de l’empire romain.”²¹² Following the exact same reasoning as Reinach, he emphasized that the historical importance of Christianity in France is such that it deserves a central position. And special attention should go to the origins of Christianity. Difficult themes such as the resurrection may not be avoided, but should be approached in the following terms: “some people believed that Jesus had resurrected.”²¹³ But the teacher should also focus on other religions, and when doing so, the perspective should be resolutely evolutionary. The following quote illustrates perfectly how Loisy’s scientific-historical views and religious-moral convictions completely overlapped: S’il [the teacher, my remark] n’y [in education on religion] peut signaler l’action incessante et visible de personnalités transcendantes et invisibles, l’intervention merveilleuse d’êtres surnaturels, conduisant plus ou moins capricieusement les affaires du monde et celles des hommes, il y montrera sans difficulté le premier effort des sociétés naissantes vers une organisation de la vie, la forme spontanée du développement humain pendant de longs siècles, la source d’un idéal qui, dans ses expressions variées et successives, a contribué aux différentes civilisations, si même il n’en a pas déterminé le caractère ; bref, un élément profond de la vie des hommes et de la vie des peuples dans tous les siècles.²¹⁴

For Loisy it was essential that the teacher focused on the similarities (their moral nature), rather than the differences between religions. When Loisy emphasized how

 This quote is taken from the preface Loisy later added to his article in À propos d’histoire des religions, 22.  For detailed examples of model explanations: Loisy, À propos d’histoire des religions, 130 f.  Loisy, “De la vulgarisation,” 125 – 126.

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all historical religions were essentially manifestations of one and the same moral ideal, we clearly see his belief in the religion de l’humanité shimmering through.²¹⁵ Even though Loisy asserted that the finality of school education on the history of religions was not religious or anti-religious, there is a strong undertone in the entire article that those who understood the positive moral power of religion were the ones better off.²¹⁶ Although this is never explicitly stated, the bottom line of his article certainly seemed to be that history of religions in education was beneficial for all, because it would show that all religions enhanced moral behavior (be it in different ways and to varying degrees). Free-thinking children would gain insight in the moral benefits of religion. As for Catholic children, Loisy explained that most of them would automatically abandon traditional religion in their adolescence or early adulthood.²¹⁷ Ideally, the schoolteacher anticipated this event, but without accelerating it. Instead of trying to annihilate their faith by explaining the Eucharist as a survival of primitive totemism, the teacher should help them preserve the positive aspects of their religion, that is, the ineffaceable moral value of the main Christian beliefs.²¹⁸ Interestingly, Loisy formulated the task of the teacher “to save what could be saved” in such a way that one may reasonably conjecture that it was also his personal mission: “Ce qui nous est d’obligation stricte, c’est de soustraire l’âme de la France au naufrage de sa religion; c’est de sauver ce qui peut être sauvé de notre passée religieux, ce qui mérite de l’être.”²¹⁹ With Loisy’s exhortation we end this chapter to delve into yet another one of the controversies raised by Reinach: the Christ Myth. In the following chapter, Loisy’s moral theory of religion will temporarily recede into the background, but in the final chapter on sacrifice it will occupy the front of the stage.  Loisy, “De la vulgarisation,” 136: “Dans l’ordre des choses morales, la vérité ne consiste pas en une série de propositions aussi exactement définies que des théorèmes de géométrie, aussi immuables que des calculs arithmétiques. Ce sont des approximations plus ou moins délicates, représentant un idéal qui devient efficace par les sentiments qu’il excite, par les volontés, les actions qu’il provoque, les habitudes qu’il entretient. Sur les grandes lignes de cet idéal on est généralement d’accord, et beaucoup plus qu’on ne croit ; il n’en va pas de même en ce qui regarde les formes particulières et la façon de comprendre. Sur ces derniers points, les différences ne laissent pas d’être considérables et pratiquement irréductibles, les hommes d’une même génération n’étant pas véritablement contemporains.” The last sentence of this quote is remarkably Comtian, in the sense that it explained differences on the basis of the different evolutionary stages in which their holders found themselves.  See also Loisy, “De la vulgarisation,” 134 where he wrote that most parents want “que leurs enfants ne prennent pas trop de religion, mais qu’ils en prennent toujours un peu, et que ces mêmes enfants n’aillent pas plus que leurs parents jusqu’à l’incrédulité absolue et militante.”  Loisy, “De la vulgarisation,” 139 – 140.  Loisy, “De la vulgarisation,” 144.  Loisy, “De la vulgarisation,” 152.

4 A Crack in the Historicist Wall: Myth Ritualism as a Weapon against the Christ Myth Theory Whether Loisy would have liked it or not, Salomon Reinach’s Orpheus is a crucial source of information for anyone interested in the history of religious studies. The volume provides an impressive repository of the controversies that divided French and international historians of religions at the beginning of the 20th century. The previous chapter has shown how his definition of religion catalyzed French debates on polyvalent and contentious notions such as magic, totemism, and taboo. But this was not all. Already in its first paragraphs, Orpheus raised another question widely disputed at that time: what does the study of myth offer to our understanding of religion? The terms religion and mythology are often confounded in common parlance. […] This confusion is natural and excusable, for religion is the basis of all mythology; but it must be avoided when we enter the domain of scientific inquiry. Mythology is a collection of stories, not exactly invented, but combined and embellished at will, the actors in which cannot be subjected to the tests of real history. Religion is primarily a sentiment, and the expression of this sentiment by acts of a particular nature, which are rites.¹

One will immediately recognize the very similar distinction Loisy had made between religion and mythology in his inaugural speech, and his shared interest in ritual.² These points attest to an important shift that had been taking place in the scientific study of religion in France and several other European settings since well before the turn of the century.³ For a good part of the 19th century comparative mythology had been the standard method, but the rise of new anthropological and sociological methods at the end of that century was drawing more and more attention to the study of ritual. Reinach’s and Loisy’s firm distinction between religion and mythology was informed by the increasingly widespread, though far from unanimously accepted opinion that religion is first and foremost

 Reinach, Orpheus, 1.  See chapter 3 (3.1). This similarity should, of course, not divert our attention from the very real differences between their theory of religion. We have seen that Reinach’s psychological focus on emotion and taboo was far removed from Loisy’s theory of religion as social-moral action. Psychology will, however, gain importance in Loisy’s history of religions, see infra, chapter 5 (5.3.1.2).  François Laplanche, “L’histoire des religions en France,” 624– 626. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110584356-008

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a matter of things done and experienced, instead of a myth or doctrine believed. ⁴ The exponents of such a behaviorist approach regarded their focus on ritual as a new step toward further objectification of religion, as their research was purported to be based on the empirical study of observable acts/facts. Following the example of Robertson Smith and Frazer, Reinach regularly (but not always) favored a ritualist theory of myth, seeing myths as roadmaps leading back to long lost rituals.⁵ Myth, he argued, was often developed to offer explanation of rites when their original meaning was forgotten or no longer relevant. It was this myth ritualism that lead Reinach to what undoubtedly was the single most controversial statement of his entire Orpheus. Drawing on a theory previously developed by Frazer, he suggested that Jesus’ crucifixion had actually been an ancient annual human sacrifice, which Judaism supposedly had borrowed from Babylonian religion.⁶ Reinach thought it was clear that the Passion stories were mythical elaborations of this ritual, and that the gospel writers themselves no longer understood its true origin. Given the evident non-historical nature of the gospel accounts, he continued, one may even legitimately question whether a historical Jesus had ever existed at all. Reinach himself concluded, though, that Jesus’ historical existence still was the more plausible option.⁷ Loisy profoundly disapproved of these suggestions of a non-historical Jesus, but the myth and ritual theory Reinach defended, was to become highly influential for his own comparative work after 1909. With his skepticism on the historicity of Jesus, Reinach entered a long and fiercely polemical controversy in biblical studies: what is the role played by myth in the biblical narratives? First initiated by the publication of David F. Strauss’s Leben Jesu volumes in 1835 – 36,⁸ these debates took a radical turn in

 Ivan Strenski, “The Rise of Ritual and the Hegemony of Myth: Sylvain Lévi, the Durkheimians and Max Müller,” in Myth and Method, eds. Wendy Doniger and Laurie L. Patton (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 52– 81. The importance of William Robertson Smith can hardly be overestimated with regard to this “rise of ritual.” See the famous theoretical introduction to his Lectures on the religion of the Semites. The fundamental institutions (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1889), especially at 17– 19: “But the antique religions had for the most part no creed; they consisted entirely of institutions and practices.” On Smith’s ritualism, Robert A. Segal, Theorizing about myth (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 37– 39. See also infra, 4.3.2, in this chapter.  As we will see further in this chapter (4.3.2), the views of Robertson Smith and Frazer on the myth ritual nexus were not identical.  Reinach, Orpheus, 229 – 230. For all details on Reinach’s theory, see infra, 4.1.2.  Reinach, Orpheus, 231.  David F. Strauss, Das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet (Tübingen: C.F. Osiander, 1835 – 1836) (2 vol.). On this question, see, among many others, George S. Williamson, The Longing for Myth

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late 19th century Germany, when a few scholars of religion and several non-academic writers claimed that Jesus had never been a historical figure. Using the insights of the increasingly critical Leben Jesu Forschung, several Christ Myth theories emerged, first in Germany, later also in the Netherlands, the UK, the USA, Italy,… and in France, where Reinach’s Orpheus first opened the discussion.⁹ In France (as anywhere else), the theory never attracted more than a modest group of supporters, but it did give rise to intense polemics, both in academia and outside of it.¹⁰ One can hardly overestimate the importance of comparative religion for the work of the mythologues, as Loisy liked to call the advocates of the Christ Myth theory.¹¹ Since the 19th century, various scholarly traditions had been devoting themselves to the challenge of historicizing early Christianity, and more particularly of determining its precise relation to other, Greco-Roman and Oriental religions. In the work of well-respected orientalists, biblical scholars, classicists, theologians, and anthropologists, the mythologists found the materials with which they built their theories.¹² A favored subject of comparison were the ancient mystery cults. These cults’ relation to primitive Christianity was a matter of heated international debate among academic scholars of religion when

in Germany. Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (Chicago–London: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 151– 179. A seminal study of the discussion on myth and history in French biblical studies is François Laplanche, La Bible en France, entre mythe et critique. XVIe—XIXe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994).  The origins of the non-existence hypothesis are mostly dated back to the late 18th century Frenchmen Charles François Dupuis (1742– 1809) and Constantin-François Chasseboeuf de Volney (1757– 1820). The revival of the theory in the late 19th century is attributed to the German philosopher and historian of early Christianity Bruno Bauer (1809 – 1882). For a detailed account of the late 19th century German Christ Myth: Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, 161– 179. A detailed but biased summary of the history of the Christ Myth theory can also be found in the work of the German Christ Myth advocate, Arthur Drews. See, e. g., The Christ Myth, trans. C. Delisle Burns (London–Leipzig: T. Fisher Unwin, 1910), 7– 12. We will discuss this volume further in this chapter (4.1.1).  Today, the Christ Myth theory is still very much alive, but unlike the debates in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the discussion has now become almost entirely non-academic.  He often used the term in his correspondence with Cumont; see, for instance, Lannoy, Bonnet, Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 68 (letter 79), but also in his publications, for instance in Alfred Loisy, “De la méthode en histoire des religions,” RHLR NS 8 (1922): 35.  In this chapter we use the term “mythologist” only for advocates of the theory that the historical Jesus never existed, and not for scholars (like Loisy) who acknowledged that myth played a crucial role in the transformation of the historical Jesus into the resurrected Christ.

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Reinach published his Orpheus in 1909.¹³ Not quite unsurprisingly, the question came to be Loisy’s main research interest between 1910 and 1914. Between 1913 and 1914, he published a full series of articles on his findings in his Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses. In 1919, these collected articles were published as a volume: Les Mystères païens et le mystère chrétien. Loisy took great care to embed this study in his research program on sacrifice, but the comparative study of the pagan mystery cults and primitive Christianity had, in fact, been on his todo list for years. In our first chapter we have seen that it had been impossible for him to take a public stand on such a delicate issue before 1908.¹⁴ Loisy’s first participation in the debate came shortly after his election, and we will see that it was triggered by Orpheus and the emergence of other Christ Myth theories at that same time. In the past decade, substantial research has been done on the theory Loisy developed about the mystery cults and their relation to primitive Christianity, and on his main sources of inspiration. Alan Jones and Jean-Michel Roessli have highlighted the profound influence of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule, and of the German classicist Richard Reitzenstein, for the importance Loisy attributed to Paul and his Hellenized Judaic environment.¹⁵ Corinne Bonnet, Danny Praet, and I have investigated Loisy’s relation to Cumont, who was the leading international expert on Mithraism and the other religions orientales. ¹⁶

 I have studied these debates in my PhD dissertation (in Dutch), “Het christelijke mysterie. De relatie tussen het vroege christendom en de heidense mysterieculten in het denken van Alfred Loisy and Franz Cumont in de context van de modernistische crisis” (PhD diss., Ghent University, 2012), supervised by Danny Praet. Among many fine studies of this historiography, the following deserve special mention: Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine; Christoph Auffarth, “‘Licht vom Osten’: Die antiken Mysterienculten als Vorläufer, Gegenmodell oder katholische Gift zum Christentum,” Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 8 (2006): 206 – 226; Giovanni Casadio, “Ancient Mystic Religion: the Emergence of a New Paradigm from A.D. Nock to Ugo Bianchi,” Mediterraneo antico 9 (2006): 485 – 534. See also the conference acts currently under preparation by Danny Praet and myself, ‘Between Crazy Mythologists and Stupid Theologians.’ Early Christianity and the Pagan Mystery Cults in the Work of Franz Cumont and in the History of Scholarship (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag). More details on these debates and major representatives follow infra.  See chapter 1 (1.3.2) for the careful and mostly implicit references to these debates in his Modernist work.  Jones, Independence and Exegesis, 66 – 77; Jean-Michel Roessli, “Les mystères païens et le mystère chrétien d’Alfred Loisy (1857– 1940) et sa place dans les débats sur les origines du christianisme au début du XXe siècle,” in Amsler, ed., Quelle place pour Alfred Loisy, 73 – 95. These scholars have especially drawn attention to the influence of Reitzenstein’s Hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen (1910), and Wilhelm Bousset’s Kyrios Christos (1913).  Danny Praet, “Symbolisme, évolution rituelle et morale,” 127– 142; Annelies Lannoy, “Comparing Words, Myths and Rituals: Alfred Loisy, Franz Cumont and the Case of ‘Gaionas le dei-

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In the intense scientific correspondence of Cumont and Loisy, the comparative study of early Christianity featured at the center of many a letter. Most recently, Danny Praet and I have focused attention on Loisy’s anthropological approach to this question and his use of a ritualist theory of myth.¹⁷ Loisy combined a genealogical and an analogical explanation for the similarities between the pagan mysteries and Christianity. He believed that Paul had imitated the mystery cults of his environment (be it unconsciously¹⁸), while also stressing that the pagan mysteries and the “Christian mystery” resembled each other because they represented the same evolutionary stage in the general history of religions. The present chapter wants to complement these previous studies by determining the as yet unexplored influence of the Christ Myth debates on Loisy’s comparative religion, and by further investigating the sources and implications of the myth ritualism he embraced to refute Reinach and others. Early 20th century Christ Myth theories have received little to no attention in modern scholarship on the history of religious studies.¹⁹ This is easy enough to understand. These theories were mainly propagated by non-academic amateur-scholars. They were the subject of popular and sensational writings with poor methodological foundations, and strong ideological or religious bias. More recently, however, scholarly awareness has been growing that these writings can teach us a great deal about the early 20th century history of the humanities.²⁰ This chapter aims to show that the Christ Myth theory influenced Loisy’s history of religions in at least two significant ways. Methodologically, it drove him away from his anti-theoretical historicism, and pushed him toward a more wellthought-out anthropological type of comparativism, and toward a more or less pnokritès,” in Amsler, ed., Quelle place pour Alfred Loisy, 111– 125; Annelies Lannoy and Corinne Bonnet, “Narrating the Past and the Future: the Position of the Religions Orientales and the Mystères Païens in the Evolutionary Histories of Religion of Franz Cumont and Alfred Loisy,” Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 20, 1 (2018): 157– 182. We will briefly discuss Cumont’s views infra.  Praet and Lannoy, “Alfred Loisy’s Comparative Method in Les mystères païens et le mystère chrétien,” Numen. International review for the history of religions 64, 1 (2017): 69 – 96.  We will come back to this point in 4.3.1.  Notable exceptions are the analyses in Walter Weaver, The Historical Jesus in the Twentieth Century: 1900 – 1950 (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1999), 49 – 54; Peter de Mey, “The Influence of Metaphysical and Epistemological Presuppositions on Jesus Research Then and Now: Reconsidering the Christ-Myth Debate,” Unpublished paper; Suzanne Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire, 258, 287– 288; C.J.T. Talar, “The Faith of a Rationalist.”  See especially George S. Williamson, “Myth,” in The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-century Christian Thought, eds. Joel D.S. Rasmussen, Judith Wolfe, and Johannes Zachhuber (Oxford: OUP, 2017), 196 – 221 and Id., “The Christ Myth Debate: Radical Theology and German Public Life, 1909 – 1913,” Church History 86, 3 (2017), 728 – 764. A volume on the Christ Myth of Arthur Drews is currently in preparation by George Williamson and James Carleton Paget.

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functionalist consideration of myth. Sociologically, the mythologists raised his disciplinary awareness about the distinctive characteristics of history of religions. They made Loisy think about the necessary qualities of the professional historian of religions. We will begin this chapter by discussing the largely unknown Christ Myth theories which were most important to Loisy’s comparative methodology: those of the German philosopher Arthur Drews, and of Salomon Reinach. Special attention will go to the scientific genealogy of these theories. Both skillfully integrated the work of Loisy, Cumont, Frazer, and other well-respected academics in their argumentations. In depth and range the scientific knowledge of these professional scholars far exceeded that of the mythologists, but it will become clear that their comparative methodology was often not much more developed. This thin methodology posed serious problems when a professional like Loisy tried to refute the mythologists. Two final preliminary remarks are in order. First, the scope of the Christ Myth debates far transcends the case of Loisy and French history of religions. Many famous international scholars of religion (like, for instance, Frazer, Bousset, or Frederick Conybeare), were confronted with these theories, and felt obliged to take a stand.²¹ Each of them did so in very specific ways and in particular scientific, theological and national contexts. A lot of research remains to be done to map the peculiarities of these national debates, and to evaluate their trans-European scope in the early 20th century. The present chapter only focuses on those other national settings in so far as they are necessary to understand the French debates. Second, it is important to keep in mind that Loisy’s theory of the Christian mystery was intertwined with his theory of sacrifice.²² In this chapter, our main focus is on (sacrificial) myth.We will discuss Loisy’s ideas on the Eucharist and on the sacrifices of the mystery cults, but his general ideas on the nature and function of sacrifice will be the central subject of the following chapter.

 Frazer’s contribution to the debate will be discussed in great detail in this chapter, those of Bousset and Conybeare are here left out of consideration. Wilhelm Bousset, “Die Bedeutung der Person Jesu für den Glauben: Historische und rationale Grundlagen des Glaubens,” in Fünfter Weltkongress für Freies Christentum und Religiösen Fortschritt, Berlin 5. Bis 10. August 1910: Protokoll der Verhandlungen, eds. M. Fischer and M. Schiele (Berlin-Schöneberg: Protestantischer Schriftenvertrieb, 1911), 291– 305. For Bousset’s contribution, see De Mey, “The Influence of Metaphysical and Epistemological Presuppositions.” Frederick C. Conybeare refuted the theory in his monograph: The Historical Christ. Or, an Investigation of the Views of Mr. J.M. Robertson, Dr. A. Drews, and Prof. W.B. Smith (London: Watts&Co, 1914).  In the following chapter we will see that Loisy himself believed his study of sacrifice was non-theoretical. Still, he did focus much attention on aspects of continuity in the many sacrificial rites he studied.

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4.1 The Christ Myth Theory in the Early 20th Century The Christ Myth theory made its first appearance in Loisy’s bibliography in 1910, when he published his long article “Le Mythe du Christ”²³ against the theory of Arthur Drews. This section first discusses the views of Drews, and thereafter focuses on those of Salomon Reinach, which were developed more or less simultaneously. We will also take a closer look at Frazer’s ideas on the birth of Christianity, because they were the main source of inspiration for Reinach’s views, and have been influential for those of Loisy.

4.1.1 Arthur Drews’s Christus Mythe and the Professional Comparative Study of Early Christianity In France, the Christ Myth theory first gained academic momentum in 1909 – 1910. This was not only because of Reinach’s Orpheus, but also due to the publication of an equally controversial book in Germany that same year: Die Christus Mythe of the German philosopher Arthur Drews (1865 – 1935). Just like Orpheus, Die Christus Mythe was soon translated in other languages (French and English in 1910) and knew many reprints. In Germany, Drews’s volume provoked largescale public debates. The most dramatic one took place in the zoological garden of Berlin on January 31st and February 1st 1910, and was attended by an audience of over two thousand listeners. This turmoil reached the French academic world, but it was only in the 1920s that the Christ Myth became the subject of a similarly public controversy in France. This French controversy was especially triggered by the publications of Paul-Louis Couchoud (1879 – 1959) and Prosper Alfaric (1876 – 1955), to whom we will return in the final part of this chapter.²⁴ Couchoud and Alfaric were close acquaintances of Loisy, but their writings had little impact

 Loisy, “Le Mythe du Christ,” RHLR NS 1 (1910), 401– 435, reprinted in À propos d’histoire des religions (Paris: Nourry, 1911), 264– 323. We will here quote from À propos d’histoire des religions (which offers an unchanged version of the journal article).  For a good, if not entirely unbiased account of the early 20th century French debates, see the article by the Protestant scholar Maurice Goguel, “Recent French Discussion of the Historical Existence of Jesus Christ,” The Harvard Theological Review, 19, 2 (1926): 115 – 142. Goguel explained the lateness of the French debates (in comparison to Germany, the UK, and USA) by the enduring influence of Renan’s Vie de Jésus: “It helped to give the French people a lively sense of the reality of Jesus” (at p. 117).

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on his comparative method. By the time they began to publish their work, Loisy had already largely abandoned the comparative study of religion.²⁵ As his critics never failed to notice, Arthur Drews was an outsider to the study of early Christianity. He was trained as a philosopher, and lectured philosophy at the Karlsruhe Technische Hochschule. Drews was heavily influenced by the evolutionary monist philosophy of religion of Eduard von Hartmann (1842– 1906), which—without going into detail—was a form of pantheism that regarded god as an impersonal and unconscious but all-knowing metaphysical principle.²⁶ As has been recently shown by George Williamson, Drews was strongly committed to propagate his monist religious worldviews outside of academia.²⁷ Never a successful academic philosopher, but all the more a zealous religious activist, he wrote popularizing books on Christian religion with the aim to break its absolute truth claims. In the final section of his Christus Mythe, entitled “The Religious Problem of the Present,” Drews revealed the monist philosophy of religion that underpinned his thesis of the mythical Jesus, and especially lashed out at Liberal Protestantism.²⁸ The typical Liberal-Protestant emphasis on Jesus’ extraordinary human personality²⁹ was diametrically opposite to Drews’s own beliefs in a neoplatonic-like immanent and impersonal god. Drews made no secret of his own religious motivation for opposing a purely mythical and divine Jesus Christ against the all too human Liberal-Protestant historical Jesus. In his view, the Liberal Protestants had completely overshadowed what had always been the most powerful idea of Christianity, that is, that man himself had now become god: God must become man, so that Man can become God and be redeemed from the bounds of the finite. The idea of Man which is realized in the world must itself be a divine idea, an idea of the Deity, and so God must be the common root and essence of all individual men and things; only then may Man attain his existence in God and freedom from the world, through his consciousness of his supernatural divine essence. Man’s consciousness of himself and of his true essence must itself be a divine consciousness.³⁰

 See the introduction of this book for the chronology of Loisy’s comparative research.  For a more detailed discussion on Hartmann’s philosophy and its importance to Drews: Williamson, “The Christ Myth debate,” 733 – 734. For Hartmann’s evolutionary ideas on Christianity, see particularly his essay Die Selbstzersetzung des Christenthums und die Religion der Zukunft (Berlin: Carl Duncker’s Verlag, 1874).  Williamson, “The Christ Myth debate,” 735.  We have used the English translation of the third edition, Arthur Drews, The Christ Myth, trans. C. Delisle Burns (London–Leipzig: T. Fisher Unwin, 1910).  See, for instance, the views of Adolf von Harnack in chapter 1. See also Williamson, “The Christ Myth debate,” 737– 743.  Drews, The Christ Myth, 296.

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Although Catholicism and Protestantism were both wrong “to represent the God in Man as a God outside of Man,”³¹ Drews is noticeably more lenient on Catholicism for having understood that the gospel of Jesus was an inherently social project.³² For our analysis of Loisy’s refutation of Drews in the next section, Drews’s dislike of Protestant individualism is important. The central thesis of Die Christus Mythe was that Jesus had originally been a syncretic Judeo-pagan god. By the first century BCE, Drews argued, there were several syncretic Judeo-pagan sects worshipping a purely mythical Messiah figure. This divine savior was known by the name Joshua, after the Old Testament Joshua, or by his Greek equivalent name, Jesus.³³ Still according to Drews, neither Joshua nor Jesus had been historical figures. Joshua was originally an ancient Ephraimitic Sun God, who later acquired a messianic dimension. Because of his dying and rising character, this god was easily assimilated with the gods of the surrounding oriental religions. Following Frazer, Drews explained that the myths of these agrarian gods all followed a pattern of death and resurrection. The result of the association with gods like Adonis or Tammuz, was that the Jewish Joshua/Jesus also adopted the features of a suffering god, who was believed to have self-sacrificed to redeem mankind.³⁴ Furthermore, Drews also heavily insisted on the infiltration of Persian soteriology in Judaism. The question as to how a human and supposedly historical Jesus finally came to feature at the center of Christianity, Drews answered by referring to the writings of Paul. In Paul’s letters, Drews explained, Jesus still was a mythical figure, but there was an unmistakable first impulse towards his humanization. Pauline theology turned the divine Jesus into a symbolic ideal Man.³⁵ The humanizing process was finalized when different Jesus communities conflicted in the first century CE. The Judaic community of Jerusalem was opposed to the inclusion of pagan converts in the Pauline communities, and claimed authority by stating that Jesus had appeared to them in a vision. Jesus thus became the historical leader from whom they claimed to descend.³⁶

 Drews, The Christ Myth, 297.  Drews, The Christ Myth, 287.  Drews, The Christ Myth, 57.  Drews, The Christ Myth, 84.  Drews, The Christ Myth, 191.  Drews, The Christ Myth, 161: “Judaism in general, and the form of it at Jerusalem in particular, needed a legal title on which to base its commanding position as contrasted with the Gentile Christianity of Paul; and so its founders were obliged to have been companions of Jesus in person, and to have been selected for their vocation by him. For this reason Jesus could not remain a mere God, but had to be drawn down into historical reality.”

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Drews’s book was by far the most influential apology of the Christ Myth in Germany and beyond around 1910. Its thesis was, however, all but original. The central idea of Jesus being a syncretic pagan god was borrowed from the volume Pagan Christs. Studies in Comparative Hierology (1903) of the Scottish journalist and mythologist John Mackinnon Robertson (1856 – 1933).³⁷ But furthermore, and more importantly for our purposes, Drews also deployed arguments that were inspired by the comparative research done by German and international academic scholars who were no supporters of the Christ Myth theory at all. Among German comparative scholars, Drews especially drew attention to the pioneering research of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule, and more particularly to the work of Liberal-Protestant scholars Hermann Gunkel (1862 – 1932)³⁸ and Wilhelm Bousset (1865 – 1920).³⁹ In early 20th century Germany, the Schule represented by far the most systematic attempt to study the Judeo-Christian tradition comparatively.⁴⁰ Gunkel’s and Bousset’s conception of Judaism as a melting pot of foreign oriental influences was essential for Drews’s theory.⁴¹ But Drews also

 This work was also an inspiration for the American mathematician William Benjamin Smith (1850 – 1934), who published his version of the Christ Myth around the same time as Drews, and first did so in German: Der vorchristliche Jesus: Vorstudien zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Urchristentums (1906), followed by Ecce deus: Studies of Primitive Christianity (1912). For a detailed account of the mythologists who preceded Drews and inspired him, such as e. g. the radical theologian Albert Kalthoff: Williamson, “The Christ Myth Debate,” who is very right to observe at p. 749: “Drews was merely riding the crest of a wave.”  See Drews, The Christ Myth, 22 for the importance he attached to Gunkel’s influential Zum religionsgeschichtlichen Verständnis des Neuen Testaments (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1903).  Especially important was Wilhelm Bousset’s Die Religion des Judentums im neutestamentlichen Zeitalter (Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1903), which proposed a very antithetic account of early Christianity (as an inward religion of the heart) and contemporary Judaism (which was mostly an externalist, legalistic religion). For the Liberal-Protestant theological views of Bousset who forcefully insisted on the powerful personality of Jesus (which allowed Jesus to liberate himself from Judaism): Williamson, “The Christ Myth Debates,” 739 – 740, and the references below in note 41.  The most recent overview of the extensive bibliography on the Schule may be found in Konrad Hamman, Hermann Gunkel. Eine Biographie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), and in Anders Klostergaard Petersen, “Franz Cumont and the History of Religion School,” in Lannoy and Praet, eds., ‘Between crazy mythologists and stupid theologians,’ in preparation.  While Gunkel had pointed to a wide array of influencing pagan cultures, Bousset was especially interested in the role of Persian soteriology. There was an anti-Semitic sentiment at the roots of Drews’s and Bousset’s interest in Persian religion. For Drews’s anti-Semitism, see Williamson, “The Christ Myth Debate,” 736, 747. For Bousset, Marchand, German Orientalism, 282– 284; Anders Gerdmar, Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism, 143 – 188. A closer investigation

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looked at other scientific traditions, outside of Germany, to make his mythologist claims. Two such international scholars who caught his attention, were Frazer and Cumont, who both had backgrounds not in theology (as Gunkel and Bousset), but in classical philology.⁴² The views and methodological paradigms of Cumont and Frazer were very different,⁴³ but their interest to Drews was nevertheless exactly the same. Both had extensively studied the Oriental⁴⁴ and GrecoRoman mystery cults that had spread in the Roman world under the Empire. Systematic comparison of these cults’ myths and rituals led Frazer and Cumont (mainly independently) to consider them as a more or less coherent group of religions.⁴⁵ Frazer and Cumont both had—implicitly and explicitly—put the spotlight on the many similarities between these pagan mysteries and early Christianity, and raised the question as to what extent Christianity was a mystery, too.

of the Christ Myth debates from the perspective of anti-Semitism would make for a highly interesting subject of research.  In doing so, Drews was quite innovative in his day. Frazer was long neglected by German Liberal-Protestant theologians: Marchand, German Orientalism, 231, and much the same can be said of Cumont’s work.  While Frazer adopted a historical-anthropological perspective, Cumont’s eclectic methodology was overall historical and philological. Bibliography on both scholars is vast. On Frazer, Ackerman, J.G. Frazer: His Life and Work. On Cumont, see most recently Praet, “Oriental Religions and the Conversion of the Roman Empire”; Lannoy and Bonnet, “Narrating the Past and the Future”; and forthcoming: Praet, “The End of Ancient Paganism.”  The oriental origin of the mystery cults of Mithras, Attis, Adonis, etc. is no longer accepted today. Today’s opinion is that the mystery cults should be considered as a development within Greco-Roman religion. On this reevaluation of Cumont’s “oriental” thesis, see among many other: Corinne Bonnet, Jörg Rüpke and Paolo Scarpi, eds., Religions orientales—culti misterici. Neue Perspektive—nouvelles perspectives—prospettive nuove (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2006); Corinne Bonnet, Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge and Danny Praet, eds., Les Religions orientales dans le monde grec et romain: cent ans après Cumont (1906 – 2006) (Rome–Brussel, BHIR, 2009).  The later work of Loisy (his MPMC), and especially that of Raffaele Pettazzoni, I Misteri (1924) further consolidated the conception of the “mysteries” as a cross-cultural comparative category. Because the mystery cults were an option within Greco-Roman polytheism, and not independent religious systems, scholars today prefer the term cult over religion. On this topic, see especially Walter Burkert’s seminal study, The Ancient Mystery Cults (Cambridge (Mass.)–London: Harvard University Press, 1987). Modern research literature on the mystery cults is vast. Most recent publications include: Giovanni Casadio and Patricia A. Johnston, eds., Mystic Cults in Magna Graecia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009); Christoph Auffarth, “Mysterien (Mysterienkulte),” in Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum 25 (2013), 422– 471; Jan N. Bremmer, Initiation into the Mysteries of the Ancient World (Berlin–Boston: de Gruyter, 2014); Nicole Belayche and Francesco Massa, eds., Les “Mystères”: questionner une catégorie, in Métis. Anthropologie des mondes grecs anciens NS 14 (2016), 5 – 132.

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Drews eagerly used the publications of Cumont and Frazer as a Fundgrube for the endless enumerations of pagan parallels to Christianity in his book. Drews’s argumentation provides the perfect illustration of how proponents of the Christ Myth usually proceed(ed). He lumped together data from divergent religious traditions, and artfully rearranged them into a sensational narrative with no regard whatsoever for the particularities of the historical encounters between Christianity and those religions. The mythologists traditionally played the card of overwhelming their readers with a superficial discourse of sameness, while, in fact, their catalogues of similarities explained nothing. The work of Drews displays no reflection whatsoever on the origin, the meaning, or the function of myth (or ritual) in different religious cultures. The historical sensibility and methodological awareness that make comparative religion worth the while, are missing completely.⁴⁶ In anticipation of our analysis of Loisy’s refutation of the mythologists, however, it is important that the latter point, that is, a solid comparative method, was often also lacking in the comparative approach of professional, non-mythologist scholars of religion, like, for instance, Gunkel or Frazer.⁴⁷ In their enthusiasm over the historicization of primitive Christianity, they, too, had often overemphasized the similarities between Christian and pagan traditions, not infrequently to the detriment of the peculiarities of those pagan cults. Although we need to be careful of overgeneralization, there is one argument that quite regularly recurred among professional historians of religions with very different backgrounds. That is, that the right and sound way to do comparative religion simply was a matter of “historical common sense,” which should not be formalized. This is not to say that scholars like Gunkel or Frazer didn’t actually develop theories/philosophies of religion which served as the analytical frameworks for their historical inquiries. They certainly did. But their comparative discourse was still very much informed by the positivistic belief that the sources spoke for themselves.⁴⁸ A good illustration of just how thin the line could be between mythologist dilettantes and academic professionals, may usefully be provided by Gunkel’s Zum religionsgeschichtlichen Verständnis des Neuen Testaments (1903), which

 On the methodological importance of a discourse of difference in comparative studies, Smith, Drudgery Divine, 51.  To a certain degree, this claim also holds true for Cumont, who also downsized differences between the religions orientales though to a far lesser extent than Frazer, Gunkel, or Loisy. For a comparison between the methods of Cumont and Loisy, see Praet, “Symbolisme, évolution rituelle et morale”; Lannoy and Bonnet, “Narrating the Past and the Future.”  For Frazer, e. g., see Robert Ackerman, The Myth and Ritual School. J.G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists (New York– London: Routledge, 1991), 53.

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was a key source of inspiration for Drews.⁴⁹ In this short volume, the pivot of the German Religionsgeschichte argued that Christianity was an inherently syncretic religion because it had originated from an equally syncretic Judaism.⁵⁰ According to Gunkel, the Orient of the centuries before our era saw the birth of a multitude of syncretic gnostic mystery cults, which centered around the belief in suffering, dying and resurrecting savior gods.⁵¹ This pagan mythology was also adopted in secret pre-Christian Judeo-pagan sects, where it was assimilated with the belief in the Messiah.⁵² After the crucifixion of the historical Jesus, this composite savior myth was easily projected onto him. Interestingly, Gunkel saw a massive flood of pagan elements streaming into pre-Christian Judaism, but he rejected any direct influence of this pagan Umwelt on the historical Jesus himself, or on his first followers. The similarities between their rites and beliefs and those of other oriental religions were exclusively explained as the result of preceding infiltrations in pre-Christian Judaism. Gunkel’s syncretism thesis constituted the perfect breeding ground for the Christ Myth theory. It is but a small step, really, from Gunkel’s pre-Christian mythical Messiah later projected onto the historical Jesus, to no historical Jesus at all. Moreover, the comparative method Gunkel adopted in this NT essay was also not so very different from Drews’s. To prove the “foreign” origin of myths in Judaism, he mainly enumerated pagan parallels, all the while stating: “Ob der Mythus ursprünglich babylonisch oder ägyptisch sei, ist eine sekundäre Frage; darüber mögen sich spätere Geschlechter den Kopf zerbrechen.”⁵³ In conclusion of this short introduction of Drews, we briefly want to point to the peculiarities of the German and the French reception of Die Christus Mythe.

 Gunkel was so irritated with Drews’s many references to his work that he wrote a refutation which heavily insisted on the difference between dilettantism and professionalism; Williamson, “The Christ Myth debates,” 753.  Hermann Gunkel, Zum religionsgeschichtlichen Verständnis, 35 : “Unsere These ist für das Folgende, dass das Christentum, aus dem synkretistischen Judentum geboren, starke synkretische Züge aufweist.”  Gunkel, Zum religionsgeschichtlichen Verständnis, 20: “von dergleichen Geheimsekten muss der Orient ganz voll gewesen sein.”  Gunkel, Zum religionsgeschichtlichen Verständnis, 78: “Auch in diesen Stücken gibt es letzlich keine andere Erklärung als dass die Figur eines sterbenden und auferstehenden Gottes im Hintergrunde steht, die sich das Judentum nach seiner Weise zurechtgelegt, als einen grossen Jahvepropheten gedeutet und mit den Zügen des Geschickes Israels ausgestattet hat.” Drews referred to these ideas in his Christ Myth, 22.  Gunkel, Zum religionsgeschichtlichen Verständnis, 55.

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Whereas the German debates over Drews’s theory were openly theological,⁵⁴ we will see that Loisy’s refutation of Drews’s work was putatively strictly historical. This difference had everything to do with the very different institutional context of history of religions in France and Germany. Whereas the French histoire des religions had a secular character, German Religionsgeschichte was embedded in a theological institutional setting. The comparative research of the Göttingen Schule was an integral part of a theological commitment for the cultural renewal of Christianity on the basis of historical consciousness.⁵⁵ Ernst Troeltsch (1865 – 1923), who is often called the systematic theologian of the Schule, explained the mission of the Religionsgeschichte in the following way: “This task consists, first of all, in establishing on the basis of a historical and philosophical comparison of religions the fundamental and universal supremacy of Christianity for our own culture and civilization.”⁵⁶ That the stakes of the French debate were quite different, becomes unmistakably clear when we take a look at Reinach’s Christ Myth theory.

4.1.2 Jesus the Mock King: The Theories of Frazer and Reinach In France, Salomon Reinach was the first to pick up on the Christ Myth theory since its emergence in late 19th century Germany. Although he never explicitly denied Jesus’ historical existence, he did publish a number of articles expressing profound skepticism, which was easily misinterpreted as a formal denial by contemporaries like Loisy.⁵⁷ The conclusions of those articles were emphatically repeated in Orpheus. Reinach’s volume did not just aim to rectify the usual absence of Judaism and Christianity in textbooks on the history of religions.⁵⁸ On top of that, he also wanted to provide the non-specialist reader with a radically new account of the birth of Christianity. The main sources for his chapter on “The

 These are discussed in detail by De Mey, “The Influence of Metaphysical and Epistemological Presuppositions,” and Williamson, “The Christ Myth Debates.”  Marchand, German Orientalism, 259 ff.  Ernest Troeltsch, “The Dogmatics of the ‘Religionsgeschichtliche Schule’,” The American Journal of Theology 17, 1 (1913): 10.  See especially “Le roi supplicié,” L’Anthropologie (1902): 620 – 627, reprinted in Cultes, mythes et religions, ed. Hervé Duchêne (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1996), 113 – 120, and “Simon de Cyrène,” Revue de l’université de Bruxelles XVII (1912): 721– 728, reprinted in Cultes, mythes et religions, 897– 902.  See supra, chapter 3, 3.2.

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Christian Origins” were the critical commentaries Loisy had previously published on the gospels,⁵⁹ and the Golden Bough of his all-time hero, Frazer. While Arthur Drews ultimately used myth to reconfirm the mythical-divine character of Jesus Christ against the all too humanistic approach of Liberal Protestantism, Reinach operated within a rationalist frame of mind. He regarded myth as the perfect instrument to prove that the gospels were lies, and Christianity itself a fraud. It was certainly because of his commitment to “install the reign of reason”⁶⁰ that Reinach was drawn to the Christ Myth. But Drews and Reinach not only differed with regard to their personal motivations, there was also a major difference between their theoretical comparative frameworks. Reinach adopted a behaviorist and psychological-oriented approach to religion, placing taboo and rituals at its core, and myth in the periphery. Such a theory was in se incompatible with Drews’s suggestion that Christianity had originated from an intellectual bricolage of mythical beliefs.⁶¹ With the help of Frazer’s writings, Reinach developed a theory on Christianity which fit in perfectly with his own ritualistic views. To understand Reinach’s ideas (and later Loisy’s), it is, thus, necessary to first examine Frazer’s.⁶² Several modern scholars have pointed to the ambivalence of Frazer’s monumental comparative study on the slain God-King with regard to Christianity.⁶³ As a young man, Frazer had radically distanced himself from his pious upbringing in the Free Church of Scotland. One of the main aims of his Golden Bough was, indeed, to help bury modern Christianity (in all forms) by demonstrating the many pagan elements it contains. At first, Frazer believed that it was his task to simply reveal the parallels, and that it was up to the readers to draw the conclusions themselves. Explicit references to Christianity are rare in his first edition (1890), although Christian religion does seem to constitute the implicit hermeneutic horizon of the work. In the second edition of 1900,⁶⁴ Frazer broke silence,

 Especially Loisy’s Évangiles synoptiques.  Reinach, Orpheus, 408.  It may be useful to mention that Drews’s work included no theoretical reflections on myth.  Drews also mentioned Frazer’s views in his Christ Myth, 71– 76, but it was just one argument among others, and not the center of his argumentation as it was with Reinach.  See, among many others, Timothy Larsen, The Slain God. Anthropologists and the Christian Faith (Oxford: OUP, 2014), 37– 79; Smith, Drudgery Divine, 92. For an extensive overview of scholarship on Frazer, see Neckebrouck, Denken over religie, 268 – 269.  First edition 1890 (2 vol.), second edition (3 vol.) in 1900, and the third edition in 12 volumes between 1911– 1915. Frazer’s theory on the crucifixion can be found in vol. III of the second edition, The Golden Bough (London: Macmillan and Co., 1900), 186 – 198; and in vol. IX of the third edition: The Scapegoat (London: Macmillan and Co., 1913), 412– 423. In what follows, we have

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and included his controversial theory about the crucifixion, which he interpreted along his model of the dying and resurrecting God-King.⁶⁵ Frazer himself had found the inspiration for his theory when Cumont published the Acts of Saint Dasius, a Roman soldier who had supposedly died in Durostorum (modern Silistra, Bulgaria) under the persecutions of Diocletian.⁶⁶ The text includes a remarkable description of the Saturnalia celebrations among the Roman legions in which Dasius served. It narrates how the soldiers appointed a mock king by lot during this Roman Carnival, who was to kill himself at the end of the celebrations, and how Dasius was killed when he refused to be the king. In their article, “Le Roi des Saturnales” (1897), Cumont and his colleague Léon Parmentier had drawn attention to this peculiar passage, and argued in favor of the historicity of the Roman human sacrifice.⁶⁷ They argued that the Saturnalia were historically related to the sacrificial celebrations for the dying and resurrecting God-King in oriental religions, and more specifically, to the Babylonian festival of the sacaea, during which a king was appointed and killed.⁶⁸ While Cumont didn’t say a word about a possible link to the gospel accounts of the Passion, others were quick to draw that parallel for him. His publication instigated an international controversy on the authenticity of the martyr’s passion, on the oriental origins of the Saturnalia, and on the festival’s relation to Christianity. It was the German classicist Paul Wendland (1864 – 1915) who first wrote on the similarity between the Satur-

used the abridged version, edited by Robert Fraser (Oxford–New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).  In the course of the subsequent editions, Frazer would also include explicit comparisons to other aspects of Christianity, for instance, between Mary and Cybele. See Strenski, Understanding Theories of Religion. An Introduction. Second Edition (Malden MA–Oxford: Blackwell, 2015), 72– 73 for other examples.  Franz Cumont, “Les actes de saint Dasius,” Analecta Bollandiana XVI (1897): 5 – 16. Cumont and Frazer were regular correspondents. Their correspondence on Frazer’s crucifixion theory has been studied in detail and partially published by Francesca Prescendi, Rois éphémères. Enquête sur le sacrifice humain (Genève: Labor et Fides, 2015). The book provides an excellent account of the genesis of Frazer’s theory. On this theory, see also H.S. Versnel, Transition and Reversal in Myth and Ritual, in Inconsistencies in Greek and Roman Religion, II (Leiden–New York–Köln: Brill, 1993), 210 – 227.  Léon Parmentier and Franz Cumont, “Le roi des Saturnales,” Revue de philologie 21 (1897): 143 – 153.  Evidence on the sacaea is scanty, and the assimilation with the Babylonian New Year’s festival akitu is commonly rejected today. On the role of this festival in Frazer’s argumentation, Robert Fraser, The making of The Golden Bough: the origins and growth of an argument (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990).

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nalia celebrations and the gospel passages on how Jesus was mocked as the King of Jews (Matt 27:28 – 31; Mark 15:17– 20; Luke 23:34– 38).⁶⁹ Fascinated by Wendland’s comparison, Frazer started to look for other parallels to the ritual murder of a mock king. Most appealing to him, was the link Cumont himself had drawn with the Babylonian sacaea, a festival with agrarian roots which both scholars situated at the Spring equinox and regarded as a New Year’s celebration. According to Frazer, the ritual murder of a mock king was adopted in Judaism during the Babylonian exile, and traces of it could be found in the Purim festival. During Purim celebrations an effigy of Haman is traditionally destroyed. This custom, Frazer argued, was a survival of an earlier Jewish practice. Based on Esth 7:9,⁷⁰ he speculated that the Jews had originally reenacted the assassination of Haman in a ritual play, during which a condemned criminal had assumed the role of Haman and had been crucified. Although Frazer admitted that the chronology posed serious problems,⁷¹ he still argued that Jesus could have been crucified as the annually killed Haman. According to Frazer’s theory, the gospel accounts guided the attentive reader to a now superseded ritual. The hypothesis that the crucifixion with all its cruel mockery was not a punishment specially devised for Christ, but was merely the fate that annually befell the malefactor who played Haman, appears to go some way towards relieving the Gospel narrative of certain difficulties which otherwise beset it. If, as we read in the Gospels, Pilate was really anxious to save the innocent man whose fine bearings seems to have struck him, what was to hinder him from doing so? He had the power of life and death; why should he not have exercised it on the side of mercy, if his own judgment inclined that way? His reluctant acquiescence in the importunate demand of the rabble becomes easier to understand if we assume that custom obliged him annually at this season to give up to them a prisoner on whom they might play their cruel pranks. On this assumption Pilate had no power to prevent the sacrifice; the most he could do was to choose the victim.⁷²

 Paul Wendland, “Jesus als Saturnalien-Koenig,” Hermes 33 (1898): 175 – 179.  Esth 7:9 – 10: “Then said Harbo’na, one of the eunuchs in attendance on the king, ‘Moreover, the gallows which Haman has prepared for Mor’decai, whose word saved the king, is standing in Haman’s house, fifty cubits high.’ And the king said, ‘Hang him on that.’ So they hanged Haman on the gallows which he had prepared for Mor’decai. Then the anger of the king abated.”  Jesus’ crucifixion reportedly took place at the time of Passover, while Purim fell a month earlier. Frazer suggested several solutions for the chronological problems, but added (The Golden Bough, 668): “I am fully conscious of the doubt and uncertainty that hang round the whole subject; and if in this and what follows I throw out some hints and suggestions, it is more in the hope of stimulating and directing further enquiry than with any expectation of reaching definite conclusions.”  Frazer, The Golden Bough, 670.

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Still according to Frazer, the link between the crucifixion and the oriental godking rituals explained why the historical Jesus was so easily divinized after his death, and why Christianity could spread so quickly over Western Asia, the homeland of so many of these gods.⁷³ Frazer included Christ in his universalizing dying and resurrecting god model,⁷⁴ but he never denied Jesus’ historicity. Instead, he argued that the myth of the dying and resurrecting god helped to consolidate the belief in the resurrection after Jesus’ death.⁷⁵ Francesca Prescendi’s study of Frazer’s correspondence with Cumont demonstrates that he remained strongly convinced of his hypothesis for a long time, although Cumont never corroborated it. But in the third edition of the Golden Bough, he decided to move the theory to the appendices, and in the first abbreviated version of 1922, it completely disappeared. As Frazer’s self-proclaimed French spokesman, Reinach felt it was his duty to make this “important” theory known to the French people. But Reinach did more than just translate this particular passage of The Golden Bough. In his Orpheus, he offered a personal interpretation which especially differed with regard to the historical believability of the gospels. It is not entirely clear to what degree Frazer regarded the gospels as mythical accounts of a ritual. In the above quote, he displayed a strikingly naïve belief in the historicity of the gospel accounts of Pontius Pilate who allegedly wanted to save Jesus’ life. Reinach seemed to agree with Frazer that the crucifixion was a Jewish human sacrifice, but not that everything had gone as the gospels told. Using Frazer’s well-known myth ritualism, Reinach asserted that the Passion stories were themselves a fully invented, explanatory myth, with no historical reliability whatsoever and a pronounced anti-Judaic bias.⁷⁶ He thus emphatically pointed out what remained conspicu-

 Frazer, The Golden Bough, 674: “It is obvious, therefore, that the new faith had elements in it which appealed powerfully to the Asiatic mind.”  See especially Frazer, The Golden Bough, 674: “through the veil which mythic fancy has woven round this tragic figure we can still detect the features of those greatly yearly changes in earth and sky which, under all distinctions of race and religion, must always touch the natural human heart with alternate emotions of gladness and regret, because they exhibit on the vastest scale open to our observation the mysterious struggle between life and death.”  Infra, 4.4.1, we will show that Frazer did have sympathy for the Christ Myth theory of PaulLouis Couchoud.  Although we cannot pursue this question in detail, it is important to underline how absolutely striking it is that Reinach took over Frazer’s theory in the first place. At the time when he first adopted the theory, in 1902, the Dreyfus Affair was bringing about a radical resurgence of old medieval accusations of ritual murders against the Jews. This dimension of Reinach’s volume and his dialogue with Frazer is a topic that requires a further investigation. On Frazer’s position towards Judaism, see Robert Ackerman, “J.G. Frazer and the Jews,” Religion 22, 2 (1992):

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ously unnoticed in Frazer’s explanation: “In the first place, these accounts show a bias; they try to exonerate Pilate, and to inculpate the Jews.”⁷⁷ Thus carefully correcting Frazer’s historical appreciation of the gospel narratives, Reinach concluded that those narratives were entirely mythical, and that no historical elements could be retrieved from them. Unlike Frazer, he asserted that Jesus’ historical existence could not be proven. Reinach added that it couldn’t be disproven either, but his own preference often did seem to go to the non-existence thesis. In support of his skepticism, Reinach liked to refer to the historical-exegetical deconstruction work done by Loisy. Clearly, his distrust of Loisy’s religious background did not withhold him from using his critical exegesis in support of his views.⁷⁸

135– 150. On the accusations of Jewish ritual murders: Pierre Birnbaum, “De l’affaire Raphaël Lévy à l’affaire Dreyfus,” in Les Frères Reinach, eds. Basch, Espagne, and Leclant, 251– 269.  Reinach, Orpheus, 229. The question as to whether Frazer’s lack of attention for the anti-Jewish bias of the Passion accounts was naiveté or something else, is too complex to answer within the limits of this chapter. What we can say, is that Frazer’s Golden Bough contains several passages that must not have been particularly pleasant for Reinach to read. Let us give just one example. For his theory to hold, Frazer needed to confront the objection that it was not the Jewish people, but Roman soldiers who had been mocking Jesus. Frazer asserted that there were two ways to overcome this apparent objection. Either it was not the soldiers of Pilate, but those of Herod who mocked Jesus: “and we may fairly assume that Herod’s guards were Jews” (The Golden Bough, 670). Or, the soldiers were indeed Roman and here Frazer added the following comment: “Soldiers everywhere are ready to go with a crowd bent on sport, without asking any curious questions as to the history or quality of the entertainment, and we should probably do the humanity of Roman soldiers too much honour if we imagined that they would be deterred by any qualm of conscience from joining in the pastime, which is still so popular, of baiting a Jew to death” (The Golden Bough, 669). Frazer and Reinach, it should be added, were friends and frequently wrote to each other. Frazer’s letters to Reinach, which we consulted at the Bibliothèque Méjanes in Aix-en-Provence, reveal a great fondness of Reinach and of his family.  For a good example, see Orpheus, 217, where Reinach asked himself: “What confidence can we feel in texts [the gospels, my remark] which have been so tampered with? The conclusion of liberal exegesis in this delicate matter has been formulated as follows by the Abbé Loisy: ‘To allege that the earliest testimony as to the origin of the Gospels is certain, precise, traditional and historical is to falsify its character entirely; it is, on the contrary, hypothetical, vague, legendary and partisan; it shows that at the period when the Gospels were brought forward to check the extravagances of Gnostic heresy, only the vaguest information exists as to their origin.” Loisy was extremely irritated that Reinach addressed him as “abbé.” See his Mémoires, III, 148 and his letter to Arconati-Visconti, of October 17, 1909; Lannoy, Bonnet and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, 11 (letter 11). See also chapter 2, note 260 for Reinachʼs use of this title.

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4.2 Loisy’s Historicist Struggle with the Christ Myth When the controversy over Drews’s book reached France in the months after the publication of Orpheus, Loisy felt the time had come to set a couple of things straight about the comparative arguments of Drews and Reinach. In 1910, Loisy was far from a newcomer to the myth/history debates on the Bible narratives. In the early 1890s, he had first entered the comparative study of myth from his background in Assyriology.⁷⁹ His early comparative research of Babylonian myth and Genesis was impressive because of his profound knowledge of Assyro-Babylonian language and culture. The same esteem can, however, not be accorded to his methodology. Loisy had formulated a narrow and ill thought-out definition of myth, which he had simplistically labeled “the dogmas of pagan religions.”⁸⁰ He had furthermore pointed to a whole series of similarities between the Old Testament and Babylonian mythology, but had (understandably) left the question open as to where these resemblances found their origin, and what their exact significance was. Talar and Morrow have recently shown that Loisy’s underdeveloped scientific matrix for comparing myth went hand in hand with much more pronounced theological ambitions. Loisy had been primarily concerned with defining the relation between history and myth in such a way that the religious truthfulness of Scripture could be secured. While acknowledging that a fair share of the Old Testament narrative could not possibly be historical, his much more important aim had been to show that the presence of myth in the Bible did not necessarily have to be problematic from a religious point of view, since myth could still be the vehicle of religious truth. When Loisy decided to react against the Christ Myth theory of Drews and Reinach in 1909, his frame of mind had radically changed. In a letter to Salomon Reinach, written shortly after his appointment to the Collège de France, he explained that his new intellectual project was firmly situated in the disciplines of history and philosophy of religion: “les développements théologiques et apologétiques ne sont pas à leur place dans un livre d’histoire, et c’est sur le terrain de l’histoire ou de la

 See, e. g., Les Mythes chaldéens de la création et du déluge (Amiens: Rousseau-Leroy, 1892), and especially Les Mythes babyloniens et les premiers chapitres de la Genèse (Paris: Picard, 1901), which united a series of earlier articles. For the complete list of Loisy’s publications in the field of Assyriology and OT studies, see Morrow, Alfred Loisy and Modern Biblical Studies, especially at 64– 72.  Essential for understanding Loisy’s comparative study of the OT and Babylonian mythology, are C.J.T. Talar, “Between Science and Myth: Alfred Loisy on Genesis,” in Amsler, ed., Quelle place pour Alfred Loisy, 27– 42; and Morrow, Alfred Loisy and Modern Biblical Studies.

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philosophie religieuse en général, que je me place maintenant.”⁸¹ The Christ Myth debate really was the perfect occasion for the freshly appointed professor to declare his views on a number of pressing issues in the discipline of history of religions. Taking up a position against Drews and Reinach, was taking a stand on the topical question as to what a good, scientific comparison should look like, and how similarities or differences between religious cultures ought to be explained.⁸² And, not unimportantly given the immense resistance against Loisy’s appointment, participation in the Christ Myth debate finally also allowed him to show that he was prepared to give up the uniqueness of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Even if Loisy asserted that his interest in the Christ Myth was purely scientific-methodological, the truth is that the debate was so inflated with religious and anti-religious agendas, that one could simply not address one question without also touching the other.

4.2.1 The Mock King Theory: Testimonies from the Loisy–Reinach Correspondence A considerable span of time lies between Loisy’s comparative mythology of the 1890s and his first article on the Christ Myth in 1910. His private correspondence partially bridges that void in our sources. It is particularly interesting to take a brief look at some of the letters exchanged between Reinach and Loisy in the first years of the 20th century.⁸³ These letters show that Loisy was well acquainted with Reinach’s theory since he had first published it in 1902. After having sent his article on the mock king theory (“Le roi supplicié,” 1902) to Loisy, Reinach instigated a lively conversation on Jesus’ historicity and the historical believability of the gospels. In a first reaction to Reinach, Loisy completely dismissed Frazer’s (and thus also Reinach’s own) theory as “a fantasy” (“fantaisiste”).⁸⁴ Perhaps, he acknowledged, some influence of pagan mock king rites could indeed be found in the gospel passages on Jesus being mocked by the soldiers of Pilate, but the theory of an annual Jewish sacrifice made things unnec-

 Loisy to Reinach, undated draft of letter preserved in BnF, NAF 15645, f° 419.  As mentioned before, Loisy reprinted his refutation “Le Mythe du Christ,” together with his writings on Orpheus, in his volume À propos d’histoire des religions, where he explicitly underlined the methodological importance of the various chapters (at p. 5). This argument is later repeated in his inaugural lecture of 1921: “De la méthode en histoire des religions,” 13 (we will return to this text infra).  For the rupture in their relationship, see supra, chapter 2 (2.4.3), and the introduction to chapter 3.  Letter of Loisy to Reinach, November 9, 1902, Bibliothèque Méjanes, Fonds Reinach, f° 17– 18.

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essarily complicated. Jesus had been crucified by the Jews because he had claimed to be the Messiah, and, Loisy added, the later belief in his redeeming death is much more easily and convincingly explained by the development of the Messiah concept within Judaism: “À qui bon imaginer cette hypothèse quand l’idée messianique et son développement connue fournissent précisément la notion d’un être surnaturel mourant pour le salut des hommes?”⁸⁵ Reinach, however, did not admit defeat so easily, and in his following letters, he continued to defend his theory and tried to adduce new evidence for it. He did so by invoking examples of similar annual sacrifices in neighboring religions, but also insisted on Ps. 22:17– 19,⁸⁶ which many a mythologist regarded as the source of inspiration for the later “invention” of the crucifixion. In yet another letter, he tried to convince Loisy by producing evidence for a pre-Christian gnostic cult of the cross. Loisy each time reacted surprisingly diplomatically, answering that Reinach’s arguments were interesting, but that he found the evidence far from solid and that the non-existence theory remained to him on the whole unconvincing. By far the most interesting letter for the development of Loisy’s views on myth in the years after L’Évangile et l’Église is the one he wrote to Reinach on December 10, 1905, after he had read Reinach’s article “Le verset 17 du Psaume XXII.” In this article, Reinach defended the same view he had earlier explained in his letters: the evangelists had completely made up the Passion story, with Ps 22:17 as their source of inspiration.⁸⁷ Their main reason for having done so, he argued, had been a strong hostility toward Judaism. Loisy wholeheartedly agreed on the anti-Jewish perspective of the gospels, and on their theological rather than historical character. It had been Pilate, indeed, who had condemned Jesus for political motives, after Jesus had been reported by the religious leaders of Israel. This historical fact later posed serious problems for attracting gentiles, and thus, Loisy agreed with Reinach, the gospels had tried to inculpate the Jews by inventing the passage on Jesus’ condemnation by the Sanhedrin. However, Loisy remained convinced that the full rejection of the historicity of the crucifixion itself made absolutely no sense. In fact, he explained, Reinach’s theory completely reversed the natural order of events:

 Letter of Loisy to Reinach, November 9, 1902, Bibliothèque Méjanes, Fonds Reinach, f° 17– 18.  Ps 22:16 – 18: “Dogs surround me, a pack of villains encircles me; they pierce my hands and my feet. All my bones are on display; people stare and gloat over me. They divide my clothes among them and cast lots for my garment.”  Obviously, Reinach’s argument here contradicted Frazer’s mock king theory, which underlined the historicity of the crucifixion, as the celebration of a human sacrifice. It was not untypical for Reinach to use mutually contradicting arguments to make one and the same point. For the contradictions in his theory of religion, see chapter 3 (3.2.2).

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it was only after Jesus’ death that the pagan myth of the dying and resurrected god was used to substantiate their belief in the resurrection. And this belief itself had originated from the first disciples’ psychological incapacity to accept that Jesus had really died. La condamnation par Pilate était aussi un gros embarras devant les Gentils. On fit effort pour transporter la responsabilité du jugement sur les Juifs, et de là vient cette scène invraisemblable de la condamnation prononcée par le sanhédrin au milieu de la nuit. Votre hypothèse abonde dans le sens de l’apologétique primitive, mais elle renverse ce qui de plus en plus me paraît être la base solide des Synoptiques: prétention messianique avouée par Jésus à Jérusalem et condamnation par Pilate seul, pour motif politique, sur la dénonciation des chefs religieux d’Israël. La tradition mythologique du dieu mort et ressuscité servit plus tard à donner corps à la croyance de la résurrection lorsque la foi des apôtres se fut rattachée à celle-ci, en s’autorisant encore d’arguments tirés de la Bible. Mais cette élaboration des données historiques, psychologiques, exégétiques ne rend pas superflu le fond sur lequel elle s’est encrée; elle le suppose et je ne la vois pas intelligible sans lui. Le christianisme n’est pas bâti en l’air.⁸⁸

This letter reveals two developments of Loisy’s earlier views on myth. Congruent with the careful but unmistakably positive statements we’ve seen him make on comparative religion in L’Évangile et l’Église, the belief in the resurrection was now no longer exclusively explained through the Jewish Messiah conception. Loisy explicitly recognized influences from the pagan cults of dying and resurrecting gods. Second, and more importantly from a methodological point of view, myth was no longer simplistically defined as “pagan dogma.” In this letter, myth was seen as an instrument of “elaboration,” by which Christians had rationalized and given body to their belief in the resurrection. It was precisely in this reflection on the function of myth that Loisy would eventually find his most conclusive answer to the mythologists, but it would take another few years before he came to realize that.

4.2.2 Fighting the Christ Myth: “Le Mythe du Christ” (1910) In 1910, Loisy wrote a first detailed refutation of the Christ Myth theory with his article “Le mythe du Christ,” which was published in the first volume of his resurrected Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses, and later included

 Letter of Loisy to Reinach, of December 10, 1905, Bibliothèque Méjanes, Fonds Reinach, f° 40 – 41.

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in À propos d’histoire des religions (1911).⁸⁹ In 1907, the Revue had been forced to suspend its publication because of the hostile anti-Modernist climate in the Church.⁹⁰ In a letter to Cumont of 1909, Loisy explained that he deeply regretted its forced disappearance and wanted to revive it. In his eyes, the main French journal in history of religions, the Revue de l’histoire des religions, was only addressing specialists in the field, whereas the former Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses had had a much wider readership. But the same letter to Cumont also revealed another, probably much more important problem Loisy had with the Revue de l’histoire des religions: its Protestant affiliation.⁹¹ His own Revue, he asserted, would be the non-specialist and neutral alternative to the Revue de l’histoire des religions. ⁹² To understand Loisy’s assessment of the Christ Myth, and his later adoption of myth ritualism, this strong anti-Protestant bias is of paramount importance. It may be somewhat misleading to say that “Le mythe du Christ” was a refutation of Drews’s Christusmythe, because, in reality, Loisy lashed out much more fiercely against the (Protestant) theologians who had violently attacked Drews, than against Drews himself. In the preface to À propos d’histoire des religions, Loisy clarified that he had not so much wanted to rebuke the mythologists, as to set a couple of things straight on comparative methodology for both mythologists and their theological opponents. But while it is certainly true that the Christ Myth prompted his general reflections on comparative methodology, his correspondence to Reinach very well indicated that he also had other, more personal reasons for getting involved in the debates. In a letter of June 1909, Loisy argued that the mythologist excesses of Drews and the like not only jeopardized the true value of his comparative project (“ce qu’il y a de

 On this volume, which almost exclusively included essays written against Orpheus, see chapter 3 (introduction).  On the first series of the RHLR and its forced suspension in 1907: Lannoy, “Envoyez-nous votre taurobole,” 1– 19.  Loisy to Cumont, July 31, 1909; Lannoy, Bonnet and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 5 (letter 4): “Il me semble que la Revue de l’histoire des religions, très estimable en elle-même, ne répond pas tout à fait aux exigences de la situation. C’est une revue de spécialistes ; elle n’initie pas le public à la science des religions. Et pour ce qui est de la Bible et des origines chrétiennes, par ce qu’elle dit, et par ce qu’elle ne dit pas, je ne sais si on ne pourrait pas s’autoriser à soutenir qu’elle a été et qu’elle reste un organe du protestantisme libéral. C’est là, d’ailleurs, qu’est une bonne partie de sa clientèle.” See also chapter 2 for the Protestant orientation of the Revue de l’histoire des religions.  In his Mémoires, III, 148 Loisy also evoked the reaction of his friend Paul Lejay, secretary of the first RHLR series: the resurrection of the Revue would also be an affront to the Catholic Church.

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vrai dans son affaire”), but also—and worse even—gave an aura of scientificity to the theological arguments their Liberal-Protestant opponents formulated against comparative religion. In comparison to the fully mythical Christ of the mythologists, the historical Jesus of the Liberal Protestants may wrongly appear to be the preferred and indisputable solution: Je consacrerai un article au livre de Drews précisément pour montrer comment ce docte professor compromet ce qu’il y a de vrai dans son affaire par l’extravagance de sa méthode et l’exagération de sa thèse. Inutile de vous dire que je tirerai encore de ce cas une petite moralité: les alertes que certains auteurs imprudents s’imaginent donner à la foi peuvent tourner en épreuves dangereuses pour la science, et les auteurs dont il s’agit servent réellement la cause qu’ils veulent combattre ; par exemple Drews étant réfuté facilement sur nombre de points par les protestants libéraux, le Jésus historique de ceux-ci pourra sembler à beaucoup de gens, même éclairés, au dessus de toute contestation. On pourrait ajouter d’autres exemples à celui de Drews.⁹³

With the very last sentence that there were others like Drews, Loisy undoubtedly referred to Reinach himself, whose views had thus far been criticized especially by the Liberal-Protestant representatives of the French science laïque. ⁹⁴ The quote shows how Loisy’s preoccupation for protecting real science of religion was, once again, inextricably entangled with his own anti-Protestant agenda. In his article “Le mythe du Christ,” he forcefully rebuked Drews for mixing up scientific views and religious (monist) commitments. But, at the same time, he was simply unable to hide his appreciation for Drews’s attack against Protestant historiography of Jesus. The former author of L’Évangile et l’Église found in Drews an ally against the Harnacks and Révilles of his world. Loisy’s article insisted on the inconvenient truths the mythologists pointed out against (Protestant and Catholic⁹⁵) theologians who entirely or largely rejected the interrelation between the Bible and neighboring religions. He even went as far as to admit that he almost regretted that the mythologists were wrong.⁹⁶ To be clear, Loisy left no doubt whatsoever that the mythologists really were wrong, but he also made significant concessions. To start, he loosened the strictly his-

 Loisy to Reinach, June 14, 1909, Bibliothèque Méjanes, Fonds Reinach, f° 95.  See especially Jean Réville’s reaction to Reinach’s article on Ps 22: “Le verset 17 du Psaume XXII: Réponse à l’article precedent,” RHR 52 (1905): 267– 275. For the intricate intertwinement between the Liberal Protestants and the secular study of religion, see supra, 2.2.  See especially, Loisy, À propos d’histoire des religions, 316 – 319, where he explained that traditional Catholic accounts of the historical Jesus were also wrong, but mostly insisted on the “Christ prétendu historique du protestantisme libéral.”  Loisy, À propos d’histoire des religions, 40: “La saveur très particulière du mépris dont on l’accable [Drews] au nom de la science ferait presque souhaiter qu’il ait eu davantage raison.”

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toricist principles he had set out in his Leçon inaugurale of 1909, to now make a remarkably strong plea in favor of more hypothesis and speculation in history of religions. If historians only stick to the facts that are documented in the historical sources, historiography becomes a boring catalogue of meaningless juxtapositions of data. Instead, Loisy incited, they should venture to formulate hypotheses which depart from the historical records.⁹⁷ Only this way, science can truly progress: “La science humaine n’existe que grâce à ces ébauches plus ou moins provisoires et toujours perfectibles.”⁹⁸ Loisy stressed that there are good and bad hypotheses, Drews’s theory obviously falling into the latter category. But his methodological argumentation against Drews was somewhat ambivalent. On the one hand, he emphatically adduced historicist commonplaces, like respect for “the natural meaning” of the text, and historical “common sense,” as the main basis for good comparisons.⁹⁹ One can easily see how such hazy arguments could backfire. The mythologists themselves had no doubt that their findings were founded on historical common sense, and that they had uncovered the true “natural meaning” of the gospels. On the basis of such arguments, Loisy’s plea for speculation was a dangerously slippery slope. On the other hand, though, he also tried to make more formal methodological objections. Comparison, he agreed, is the only way to gain necessary, deeper philosophical knowledge on religion and its development, but it is an epistemological tool to be handled with utmost care.¹⁰⁰ Drews put comparative religion in a bad daylight because of his complete lack of attention for chronology, but Loisy also criticized him for not having paid any attention to the function and the meaning of mythical elements in their particular historical and religious contexts. The main problem with this last, and very correct objec-

 We find similar views in Loisy’s private correspondence, see especially his letter to Cumont of December 30, 1916; Lannoy, Bonnet, and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 150 (letter 150), where Loisy and Cumont discussed the origins of Pauline dualism, and Loisy criticized Cumont’s reluctance to acknowledge a genealogy between Christian and Persian dualism: “On ne fait l’histoire qu’avec les témoignages; mais on ne doit pas se dissimuler que l’histoire est bien loin d’être contenue tout entière dans les témoignages.”  Loisy, “Le mythe du Christ,” 223.  In his preface to À propos d’histoire des religions, 44, Loisy explained the qualities of good historical arguments as follows: “Ces arguments appartiennent à l’espèce commune de ceux qui ont cours en philologie classique et en histoire profane: raisonnements de bon sens et interprétations fondées sur la signification naturelle des textes […].” From this particular quote one can recover the long-lasting influence of Renan’s critical historical method and philological approach. On this topic, see Perrine Simon-Nahum, “Renan passeur: De la science des religions à l’histoire des religions,” 266 – 270.  Loisy, “Le mythe du Christ,” 320 – 321.

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tion was that Loisy himself failed to practice what he preached. This becomes clear in the second half of his article which briefly outlined his own views on the birth of Christianity. No longer muzzled by the fear of ecclesiastical sanctions, Loisy uncovered several newly developed views, and older ideas he had previously restricted to his private writings. The major change in comparison to his former Modernist writings was the considerable role now assigned to myth. But unlike Drews, the members of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule, or Reinach, Loisy didn’t discuss the possibility of deep-seated pagan influence on pre-Christian Judaism. In his eyes, influence of pagan mythology started with Paul.¹⁰¹ As he had previously done in L’Évangile et l’Église, Loisy stressed that the historical Jesus could only be understood within the context of contemporary Judaism.¹⁰² The Jewish gospel of Jesus was deeply eschatological and centered the imminent coming of the kingdom of God. When Jesus preached in Jerusalem and claimed for himself the position of the future Messiah in the kingdom, he was accused of inciting to riot by the Jewish religious authorities, brought before Pilate, and executed. Unable to let go of their hopes and dreams, Jesus’ first followers started to believe that he had resurrected. The resurrection idea was well familiar to them from their Judaic background. Loisy granted to Drews that Paul had been crucial for the development of Christianity, but his role had been diametrically opposite to what Drews argued. In Pauline Christology, Loisy stressed, the Jewish Jesus Christ was mythicized into a dying and resurrecting god, who was sent to earth by God, and who self-sacrificed for the redemption of the whole of mankind. In this universalizing mythical elaboration, Loisy continued, Paul was influenced by the myths of the dying and resurrecting gods known to him from his Hellenistic environment.¹⁰³ But even if Loisy explained that Paul had used pagan myth to render the originally Jewish notion of the Messiah more intelligible to pagan converts, he heavily insisted that Paul had imitated pagan myth only unconsciously and spontaneously. ¹⁰⁴ We will come back to  It is unclear whether Reitzenstein’s influential Mysterienreligionen (1910), which also focused on the role of Paul in the hellenization of Jesus’ gospel, had already been published when Loisy wrote this article, or if Loisy had already read it.  Loisy, “Le mythe du Christ,” 286: “Jésus, étant juif, ayant été élevé dans le judaïsme, ne dit rien qui ne se puisse expliquer par le judaïsme.”  Loisy, “Le mythe du Christ,” 312.  Loisy, “Le mythe du Christ,” 303: “Paul n’est pas homme à prendre consciemment de toutes mains les éléments du culte religieux qu’il organise dans ses communautés. S’il y a, dans ses doctrines et ses prescriptions, des influences païennes, les idées qu’il a ainsi reçues se sont comme spontanément adaptées, dans sa mentalité visionnaire, à la croyance au Christ, qu’il doit aux premiers fidèles.”

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this paradox in our next section on Loisy’s volume Les Mystères païens et le mystère chrétien. In Loisy’s article, the outline of his own views immediately followed the strict caveats he formulated for Drews. Perhaps, this makes it all the more painful that Loisy himself was in no way concerned with such questions as which pagan cults could have influenced Paul, or what the distinct function of myth might have been in the influencing pagan religions and in Christianity. One may of course say in his defense that he only wanted to sketch the outlines of his ideas, and that a detailed account of the historical relation between pagan and Christian myth fell beyond the scope of this article. But in an article which Loisy himself explicitly presented as a methodological rectification of Drews, his complete lack of attention for the historical details of the comparisons he himself drew, is problematic.¹⁰⁵ And what’s perhaps even more striking about his argumentation, is that he not once questioned whether Christianity could theoretically originate from myth. Unlike Reinach, who had actively sought a theory that fit in with his ritualist theory of religion, Loisy seemed to have forgotten about the firm distinction he had made between religion and mythology in his Leçon d’ouverture. ¹⁰⁶ In 1910, Loisy’s main problem with Drews’s theory was not that Christian religion would have had its roots in a mythical construction. His main objection was that there was no conclusive evidence (yet) for the existence of such a pre-Christian Jesus myth.¹⁰⁷ Especially in the conclusion of the article, it is clear that he didn’t completely rule out the possibility that the mythologists could, in theory, be right. In his view, it was simply “too early” for serious historical criticism to understand the conditions in which the Christ Myth would have been conceived: “Il est trop tôt, vraiment, de proclamer le mythe du Christ, quand il est impossible à une critique sérieuse de se prononcer sur les conditions dans lesquelles ce mythe se serait constitué, et quand on n’a pas montré que le témoignage évangélique et celui du Nouveau Testament ne

 In this sense, Loisy’s following criticism of Drews was somewhat painful: “C’est pratiquer fort mal la méthode comparative que d’aligner des croyances qui semblent analogues, sans avoir au préalable fixé la signification particulière de chacune, la forme, la date, l’étendue de ses attestations; de parler d’emprunts avant d’avoir établi la position respective des parties qu’on veut supposer l’une donnante et l’autre prenante […],” Loisy, “Le mythe du Christ,” 321.  See supra, chapter 3 (3.1).  Loisy, “Le mythe du Christ,” 280: “Pour que la thèse fût soutenable, il faudrait qu’un mythe bien défini eût existé dans quelque secte juive, et que ce mythe se fût peu à peu déterminé en histoire. Or, ce mythe et cette secte, on le les découvre pas. On trouve des mythes en quantité, des sectes nombreuses; mais pas le mythe qu’il faudrait, pas la secte dont on a besoin.”

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sont aucunement recevables.”¹⁰⁸ One can see how mythologists would feel encouraged rather than discouraged by such a reply. “Le mythe du Christ” is an interesting read to understand Loisy’s intellectual development in the very first years after his excommunication. The article displays internal contradictions, but also contains the germs of the cohesive theory he would later develop on the relation between the pagan mystery cults and early Christianity. On the one hand, Loisy sensed that the problem of the Christ Myth could be solved most convincingly by generic methodological arguments on comparative religion, and he clearly favored a more speculative reflection on the history of religions. On the other hand, he recurred to typically historicist criticisms of the mythologists’s lack of historical “common sense,” and he was unable to fight the mythologists on a theoretical-methodological level, that is by drawing formal arguments from his earlier formulated premise that myth always is the later product of religion. Loisy furthermore failed to convincingly attack Drews’s idea of a pre-Christian judeo-pagan god, because he was just as ignorant as Drews about the pagan mystery cults which interested them both. On all these points, Loisy was about to make substantial progress.

4.2.3 Towards a Theory of Myth: A Glance at Loisy’s Letters to Cumont A regular contributor to the first series of the Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses and a close friend of Arconati-Visconti,¹⁰⁹ Franz Cumont had been one of the first to congratulate Loisy upon his appointment to the Collège de France. His letter of congratulations was the start of a long and lively correspondence of over 400 letters which lasted over three decades, the last letter dating from just a few days before Loisy’s passing.¹¹⁰ This scientific correspondence includes letters on the most topical discussions in the history of religions of that time. It shows that Loisy enthusiastically began to study the pagan mystery cults in 1910. Dur-

 Loisy, “Le mythe du Christ,” 321. In this regard, his article is congruent with his letters to Reinach, in which he never ruled out that Reinach could be right, but mainly insisted that Reinach’s evidence was not convincing.  See supra, chapter 2 (2.4.2).  For more information on the content of these letters (which were often several pages long) can be found in the introduction by Annelies Lannoy, Corinne Bonnet and Danny Praet to the edition of this correspondence, Mon cher Mithra, I, i-lvi. Relevant references will be provided infra. For a first presentation of this file: Annelies Lannoy, “La correspondance bilatérale entre Alfred Loisy et Franz Cumont: brève présentation et projet d’édition,” Anabases. Traditions et réceptions de l’Antiquité 13 (2011): 261– 265.

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ing his inquiries, he could count on scientific guidance of Cumont Mithra (as Loisy liked to address his colleague). Not unsurprisingly, the interrelation of Christianity and the mystery cults quickly became one the most prominent topics of conversation in these letters. It was the scientific interest Cumont and Loisy shared. Around 1911, Loisy clearly felt self-confident enough to question some of the theoretical assumptions behind Cumont’s historiography on the pagan cults. On June 25, 1911, he wrote a letter to Cumont which reveals that he had been actively searching for a generic-theoretical framework to guide this comparative research of early Christianity. It may be useful to recall that Loisy now studied Christianity (along with many other religions) to uncover the generic qualities of religion at any time or place. Whereas ritual had receded into the background of his 1910 article against the mythologists, it now occupied the front of the stage. In his letter to Cumont, Loisy wondered why the Belgian scholar had consistently interpreted mithraic bas-reliefs as scenes of a myth when he was perfectly aware that the mithraic myth of the tauroctony and the rites of initiation were closely interconnected. Picking up on Cumont’s belief in the intricate intertwinement of mithraic myth and rites, Loisy suggested that the depictions of the tauroctony (“la scène principale”) in fact referred to a ritual, which itself may have stemmed from an annual sacrifice for the fertility of vegetation. Mithraic myth, he argued, had originated as the interpretation of this slowly transforming ritual. Perhaps, he continued, there had originally been some sort of identification between the sacrificed bull and Mithras himself? And if this really had been so, wasn’t it possible that the mythical sacrifice of Mithras had been acted out during a real sacrifice in the cult? J’aurais aussi, mon cher Mithra, bien des questions à vous poser sur l’histoire de votre divinité. D’abord il me semble que les scènes des bas-reliefs concernent à la fois le mythe de Mithra et les rites de l’initiation, l’un étant dans un rapport étroit avec les autres. Vous l’avez indiqué en plusieurs endroits, mais je me demande pourquoi vous parlez ordinairement de la scène principale comme d’un mythe et pas comme d’un rite. Le mythe procède d’un rite, et je croirais volontiers que le mythe procède d’un sacrifice annuel pour la végétation, peu à peu transformé et interprété. Est-il impossible même qu’il y ait eu à l’origine une sorte d’identification de Mithra et le taureau ? Et le sacrifice mythique n’était-il représenté dans le mystère par un sacrifice réel?¹¹¹

 Loisy to Cumont, June 25, 1911; Lannoy, Bonnet and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 29 (letter 37). On this particular passage of the correspondence, see also Aline Rousselle, “Cumont, Loisy et la Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuse,” MEFRIM 111 (1999): 577– 598.

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Both Bonnet and Praet have pointed out that Cumont’s research of ancient religion indeed showed a predominant attention for doctrines and croyances, rather than for ritual, although he certainly didn’t neglect its importance.¹¹² With his firm statement that the Mithraic myth of the tauroctony was the product of an earlier sacrificial rite (“Le mythe procède d’un rite”), Loisy’s ways parted from those of Cumont, who never confirmed this hypothesis. The letter also shows that Loisy had progressively familiarized himself with Frazer’s anthropological theory on the sacrificed spirit of vegetation, and with the ritualist theory of myth developed by English anthropologists of religion. These theories had been popularized in France by Reinach, but had also been picked up by Hubert and Mauss in their Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice, with which Loisy was also well familiar. We will return to myth ritualism in detail in our next two sections. Another remarkable point about the quoted letter is the way Loisy tried to fit Mithras into the Frazerian mold of the dying and resurrecting god of vegetation, by conjecturing a close assimilation between Mithras and the victim bull sacrificed in his honor (“une sorte d’identification de Mithra et le taureau”). Cumont himself had found the pattern of death and rebirth to be present in almost all of the oriental religions he studied, but understandably not in the cult of Mithras, where iconography left no doubt that it was the bull and not the god himself which was killed. Frazer himself had likewise excluded Mithras from his analysis in The Golden Bough. ¹¹³ Loisy, by contrast, would grow only more and more convinced that Mithras, too, was a dying and resurrecting god, and that the sacrifice of a bull was the core ritual of the cult. Quite likely, he had found the inspiration for the identification of the bull and Mithras in Hubert’s and Mauss’s Essai on sacrifice.¹¹⁴ One of his main motivations for this conviction, we will see in the

 See on Cumont: Corinne Bonnet, “‘L’histoire séculière et profane des religions’ (F. Cumont): observations sur l’articulation entre rite et croyance dans l’historiographie des religions de la fin du XIXe siècle et de la première moitié du XXe siècle,” in Rites et croyances dans les religions du monde romain, ed. John Scheid (Genève: Vandœuvres, 2007), 1– 37. For a comparative study of Cumont’s and Loisy’s models of explanation: Praet, “Symbolisme, évolution rituelle et morale.” Cumont refrained from systematizing and exclusivist explanations, meaning that he sometimes explained the origins of ritual through myth, and sometimes vice versa. On this point, see especially Praet, “Symbolisme, évolution rituelle et morale,” 127– 142.  This point in Loisy’s argumentation has been discussed in more detail in Praet and Lannoy, “Alfred Loisy’s Comparative Method,” 64– 96.  Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function, trans. W.D. Halls (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1964), 87– 88: “All in all, they are forms of the same god.” Hubert and Mauss had argued that Mithras was the divine personification of the vegetation spirit which was originally embodied in the sacrificed victim. Once the ties between the incarnated

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next section, was his firm belief that all pagan mystery cults had—more or less independently—developed similar myths and rites of salvation. Because Loisy ultimately wanted to show that this universal development also applied to Christianity, no pagan mystery cult could be left behind, and especially not Mithraism, which many scholars at that time regarded as the highest moral and mystic expression of all pagan mystery cults, and therefore as the one most similar to Christianity.¹¹⁵ Interestingly, the Loisy-Cumont correspondence also further reveals the catalyzing role of Reinach’s work for Loisy’s reflections on myth. Their conversations between 1911 and 1913 show Loisy’s irritation and concern over the work of Reinach, who continued to publish skeptical articles about Jesus’ historical existence.¹¹⁶ Well aware that a new polemic (after the one on Orpheus) could jeopardize his own scientific reputation, Loisy had first decided not to react publicly.¹¹⁷ But growing frustration made him change his mind, and in 1913, he published an article “De quelques arguments contre l’historicité de la Passion,”¹¹⁸ in which he rather aggressively annihilated Reinach’s arguments. To avoid the impression of yet another personal polemic, the article was written against the “mythologists” in general, but the target clearly was Reinach. Loisy’s fierce condemnation of Reinach stood in remarkably sharp contrast with his earlier, much more nuanced article against Drews. This hadn’t escaped Reinach, either. How is

victim and the spirit were loosened, and the spirit became an independent god, myth helped to give the vague personality of the god a more individualized and well-determined identity.  For Loisy: Lannoy and Bonnet, “Narrating the Past and the Future,” 175; for Cumont, see especially the analysis of the structure of Cumont’s Les Religions orientales dans le paganisme romain by Danny Praet, “‘Wird rein durch Feuer, Wasser, Luft und Erden’: Teleologie, universalisme en de symboliek van de elementen in de godsdienst-filosofie van Franz Cumont,” in Door denken en doen: essays bij het werk van Ronald Commers, ed. Tom Claes (Ghent: Academia Press, 2012): 177– 219.  In 1912, Reinach changed his argumentation against the historicity of the Passion. Largely abandoning the argument of the similarities between Jesus’ crucifixion and the gods and rituals of the pagan mystery cults, he now focused attention on Docetism. In his “Simon de Cyrène,” he asserted that the gospel passages where Simon of Cyrene was compelled to carry the cross (Mark 15:21, Matt 27:32, Luke 23:26) were a completely non-historical invention directed against contemporary docetic beliefs that Simon had been crucified instead of Jesus.  Maybe, Loisy explained to Cumont, people would start to see him as an “anti-Salomon.” See his letter to Cumont, August 24, 1913; Lannoy, Bonnet and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 75 (letter 89).  Published in RHLR NS 4 (1913): 261– 271.

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it possible, Reinach asked in a public response,¹¹⁹ that Loisy was so forgiving for the “stupidities” (“inanités”) of Drews, and at the same time so set on ridiculing the putatively much more convincing arguments of himself? Without doubt, the reason for Loisy’s ambivalent position can be found in fact that he had personal sympathy for Drews’s anti-Liberal-Protestant project, while he rejected Reinach’s rationalist agenda. Reinach’s question in any way revealed the painful truth about the strong bias of Loisy’s own views on the Christ Myth. But that was not all Reinach did. In further accusation of Loisy, he also mentioned to his readers that Loisy’s article against himself had been applauded by the conservative Catholic press.¹²⁰ On June 7 1913, the reactionary Catholic newspaper La Croix had, indeed, published an article “Les mythologues confondus,” in which Loisy was considered an ally of conservative Catholic forces in their fight against the Christ Myth theory. In a letter of June 16, 1913, Cumont hinted at the irony of the situation, jokingly adding that Loisy was now “almost restored to orthodoxy”: “On m’a dit que ‘La Croix’ portait aux nues votre article sur les mythologues, mais je n’ai pas vu ce bon journal. Vous voilà presque rétabli en orthodoxie. Le successeur de Pie X vous fera des avances, vous verrez.”¹²¹ No reply from Loisy came, but it remains highly doubtful whether he found Cumont’s tongue-in-cheek comment very amusing. In one and the same article, Reinach quite convincingly succeeded in accusing Loisy of siding with Drews and with Catholic conservatives. This paradox once more uncovers the heavy ideological bipolarization surrounding the discipline of history of religions in France. If Loisy condemned the excesses of Reinach, he was accused of being too Catholic, and effectively recuperated by the very same people who had earlier applauded his excommunication. The Loisy-Cumont correspondence shows us how absolutely essential it was for Loisy to develop a clear and coherent thesis on the birth of Christianity and the role of myth therein; a thesis which would conclusively mark his difference vis-à-vis conservative théologues (Protestant and Catholic), and his opposition against the mythologues (Reinach and Drews). Throughout his later letters to Cumont, mythologists and theologians continuously constituted the powerful neg-

 Salomon Reinach, “Les Luperques, l’historicité de la Passion et M. Loisy,” Revue Archéologique XXI (1913): 429 – 432. In the same article, Reinach also reacted against an article Loisy had written about the Lupercalia, but the larger part was devoted to the Christ Myth theory.  In his correspondence with Cumont, Loisy had anticipated such criticism from Reinach; see his letter to Cumont, June 4, 1913; Lannoy, Bonnet and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 68 (letter 79): “Salomon continuera de pondre des articles contre la passion et à me dénoncer comme un affreux clérical.”  Cumont to Loisy, June 16, 1913; Lannoy, Bonnet, and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 72 (letter 84).

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atives against which Loisy developed his own views. In 1913, those views were taking clear shape, and in anticipation of his publications, Loisy summarized them for Cumont in the following way: Plus j’avance dans mon travail, plus il me semble que les mythologues sont fous de prétendre que le christianisme a brutalement emprunté toutes ses croyances au paganisme, et que les théologues [sic] sont bêtes de soutenir qu’il ne lui doit rien. Il ne lui doit rien en ce sens que pas une seule croyance un peu importante n’a été empruntée telle quelle, et il lui doit tout en ce sens qu’il ne s’explique réellement que par une transposition totale de l’Évangile, chose juive, en une économie de salut, en un beau mystère, supérieur à tous les autres, mais visiblement formé dans la même atmosphère et en exploitant le même fonds de mysticisme oriental plus ou moins hellénisé.¹²²

Loisy’s entire theory on Christianity can essentially be drawn from this quote: Christianity successfully “transposed” the profoundly Jewish gospel of the historical Jesus into a “beautiful mystery, superior to all others” by exploiting the same oriental mysticism as the mystery cults which were part of its more or less Hellenized environment.¹²³

4.3 Myth and Ritual in Les Mystères païens et le mystère chrétien (1913 – 1914) By the end of 1911, Loisy felt that his own views on the relation between the pagan mystery cults and primitive Christianity were sufficiently mature to integrate them in his lectures at the Collège. ¹²⁴ That same year, he also published a first summary of his views in the English article “The Christian Mystery,” published in The Hibbert Journal. ¹²⁵ In 1913 followed his full-blown theory, with first

 Loisy to Cumont, June 4, 1913; Lannoy, Bonnet, and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 68 (letter 79).  This quintessential quote is difficult to paraphrase; an English translation may be of help: “The more progress I make with my work, the more it seems to me that the mythologists are crazy to claim that Christianity has brutally borrowed all of its beliefs from paganism, and the theologists [sic] are idiots to claim that it doesn’t owe anything to paganism. It doesn’t owe it anything in the sense that not a single belief of some importance has been borrowed as such, and it owes everything to paganism in the sense that Christianity can only be really understood as a total transposition of the Gospel, which was Jewish, into a system of salvation, into a beautiful mystery, superior to all others, but visibly made in the same atmosphere, by exploiting the same forms of more or less Hellenized, oriental mysticism.” The translation is mine.  Loisy, Mémoires, III, 231.  Alfred Loisy, “The Christian Mystery,” The Hibbert Journal (October 1911): 45 – 64. The article was translated from a French original and does not always seem to render Loisy’s original words

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his articles on the individual pagan mystery cults,¹²⁶ and in 1914 his articles on the Christian mystery.¹²⁷ In what follows, we will first summarize Loisy’s main thesis, as well as recent research on his comparative method by Danny Praet and myself.¹²⁸ The second part of this section will build on this research to further examine the specifics of Loisy’s ritualist theory of myth, its sources, and implications.

4.3.1 The Same but Not the Same Loisy’s work devoted much attention to the individual pagan mystery cults. This made his comparative approach very different from many other scholars who engaged in this debate, and especially from the members of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule, of whom he has so often been called the French representative.¹²⁹ Still, the theory proposed in Les Mystères païens et le mystère chrétien was, in fact, much more than a French adaptation of the Schule. The Schule’s interest in the mystery cults strictly derived from its aim of gaining deeper understanding of Christianity. In Loisy’s work, this was also the underlying motivation, but he did treat these cults as autonomous research objects.¹³⁰ After an important introductory chapter entitled “Religions nationales et cultes de mystères,” follow five independent studies consecutively devoted to Dionysos and Orpheus, Eleusis, Cybele and Attis, Isis and Osiris, and Mithras. The second half of the book reproduces Loisy’s four articles on the development of the Christian mystery.

(often indicated between brackets) very well. In our following account, we will quote from this article and the book MPMC.  Alfred Loisy, “Les mystères païens et le mystère chrétien,” RHLR NS 4 (1913): 1– 19; “Dionysos et Orphée,” RHLR NS 4 (1913): 130 – 154; “Les mystères d’Eleusis,” RHLR NS 4 (1913): 193 – 225; “Cybèle et Attis,” RHLR NS 4 (1913): 289 – 326; “Isis et Osiris,” RHLR NS 4 (1913): 385 – 421; “Mithra,” RHLR NS 4 (1913): 497– 539.  Alfred Loisy, “L’Évangile de Jésus et le Christ ressuscité,” RHLR NS 5 (1914): 63 – 87; “L’Évangile de Paul,” RHLR NS 5 (1914): 138 – 174; “L’initiation chrétienne,” RHLR NS 5 (1914): 193 – 226; “La conversion de Paul et la naissance du christianisme,” RHLR NS 5 (1914): 289 – 331; “Le mystère chrétien. Conclusion,” RHLR NS 5 (1914): 425 – 441. In this chapter we will quote from the volume Les Mystères païens et le mystère chrétien (Paris: Nourry, 1919).  Praet and Lannoy, “Loisy’s comparative method.”  The less flattering suggestion has been that Loisy was the unoriginal epigone of the Schule. This qualification is undeserved, as we will here try to demonstrate.  A small but perhaps not insignificant detail is that in his MPMC volume, the part Les mystères païens of the title was printed in a much bigger font than le mystère chrétien.

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The introductory chapter is the key to understand the structure and main aims of the book. It explains the two theoretical principles which constitute the connecting threads between the loosely interconnected “pagan” chapters, and the four chapters on the Christian mystery. In spite of Loisy’s usual reluctance towards theory in his historical work, Danny Praet and I have shown that Les Mystères païens et le mystère chrétien is unmistakably constructed as an attempt to explain the particulars of the individual mystery cults and Christianity through pre-conceived and largely implicit theoretical ideas on the general characteristics of religion, myth, and the history of religion(s). And vice versa, his detailed research on the mystery cults and early Christianity further convinced him that his theoretical presuppositions were correct. Loisy’s framework rested on two theoretical assumptions: (a) his strongly evolutionary belief that universal laws of development were at work in the history of religions, and (b) a ritualist theory of myth. To begin with the former point, it should be pointed out that Loisy’s unfaltering evolutionism clearly remained the decisive horizon for his historical inquiries. But whereas Modernist Loisy had rejected laws of evolution that were supposedly valid for all religions,¹³¹ he now further explored an anthropologically inspired evolutionism which stressed the uniformity of the human mind, and the universal analogy of religious developments.¹³² All religions, including Judaism and Christianity, walk the same unilinear path of three distinct, evolutionary phases.¹³³ Congruent with his Modernist philosophy of history, Loisy still emphasized the uninterrupted continuity between those stages. The mystery cults and Christianity elaborate, reformulate, and sublimate the primitive magical-religious beginnings of religion.¹³⁴ They develop higher individual morality, universality, spirituality, and mysticism, though, as will become clear further on, never to the same degree. One can easily see the philosophical religion of humanity lurking behind Loisy’s history writing.

 See supra, chapter 1 (1.4).  Loisy had already indicated this change of opinion in his Leçon inaugurale and in the disputes over Reinach’s theory of religion, see supra, chapter 3 (3.2.3). MPMC is the first historical work in which he consistently applied it.  Loisy did insist on the fact that numerous exceptions could be found, and that history was too complex to completely fit into rigid schemes or models. See, for instance, MPMC, 19 – 20.  Loisy, MPMC, 20. For the continuity argument—which allowed Loisy to demonstrate that Modernist Catholicism was congruent with Jesus’ gospel—see chapter 1 (1.3) and 3 (3.3.4). The primitive magical roots of Christianity will become a point of great emphasis in Loisy’s Essai historique sur le sacrifice, see infra, chapter 5 (5.3.1.3).

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In his introductory chapter, Loisy sketched the outlines of his grand narrative of the history of religions, which will receive its most complete articulation in his later volumes La Religion (1917) and the Essai historique sur le sacrifice (1920).¹³⁵ From our previous chapter, we know that for him, religion begins with primitive magical-religious rites which aim to control the powers (“puissances”) that putatively animate nature, and that it initially had a largely nonmoral, materialistic character.¹³⁶ Over time, the spirits of nature become independent entities. As tribes become nations, the tribal cults transform into national religions, and the formerly impersonal agrarian gods become anthropomorphic tutelary gods. In this second phase, the idea of an afterlife is underdeveloped, and the gods still only prescribe a limited set of moral rules. In the third and final phase, universal économies de salut (“systems of salvation”) develop within the national religions. The gods of these salvation religions address the individual regardless of her/his national identity. Their myths of death and rebirth convey the promise of immortality to their worshippers, and their self-sacrifices offer the religious individual a direct moral example to follow. By dramatically enacting the myth in the initiation rites, the worshipper enters into a mystical union with her/his gods and becomes immortal her/himself.¹³⁷ Essential for Loisy’s thesis is his claim that the pagan mystery cults and Christianity all correspond to the third type of religion, the économie de salut category. Just like the mysteries of Isis & Osiris, Attis & Cybele, or Mithras developed within the national religions of Egypt, Anatolia and Persia, Christianity emerged as a universal mystery out of national Judaism. Before taking a closer look at the emergence of the Christian mystery, we will first discuss Loisy’s second premise, the myth and ritual paradigm. Although the worshippers themselves believed that their initiation rites had been instituted by the god, and were the liturgical expressions of his divine myth, Loisy emphatically stressed that the myth of the self-sacrificing god is in fact entirely dependent on a preceding ritual.¹³⁸ Right from the introductory chapter, it is clear that he now did pick up on the distinction he had earlier

 Both volumes will be discussed in the next chapter.  Loisy, MPMC, 7– 8; see also supra, chapter 3.  Loisy, “The Christian Mystery,” 47: “In the chief of these cults a divine myth, expressed in one way or another by liturgical acts, was, as it were, the prototype of the salvation promised to the initiate. The initiate participated mystically in the trials of the divinity; thereafter he was associated with him in his joy and in his triumph; he saw the god and was united with him. This revelation and this union became the pledge of his own immortality.”  Loisy, MPMC, 18. A closer analysis of this passage follows in the next part of this section.

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made between mythology and religion in his Leçon inaugurale. In his analyses of the pagan mysteries, he each time posited a sacrificial initiation rite at the cultic center. Following the sacrificial theory of Robertson Smith, he interpreted this sacrifice as an alimentary communion between worshipper and god through the victim.¹³⁹ Following that of Frazer, he asserted that these initiation rites have their roots in magical-religious sacrifices which attempted to assure fertility of nature. The sacrificial victim was believed to incarnate the vegetation spirit.¹⁴⁰ Through the victim, the spirit is killed, in order to enable it to powerfully resurrect in Spring. In specific communities (confréries) within primitive tribes (and later within national religions), Loisy argued, the victim is eaten in order to mystically assimilate the power of the spirit. This act consolidates the bond between the community members. Gradually, the original sacrifice of vegetation here develops into an initiation ritual. When the original meaning of these agrarian rituals has been forgotten, or is no longer relevant, the myth of the self-sacrificing god who instituted them, enters. Quite interestingly, Loisy only seemed to observe myth ritualism in the économies de salut. In primitive cults, no myths exist about the vaguely conceived spirits.¹⁴¹ In public national religions, the myths about the gods and the sacrifices performed in their honor are not, or only very loosely, interconnected. It is only in the mysteries that myth and ritual seem to be indissolubly entangled, and operate together. The spiritual myth of the self-sacrificing god gives the primitive sacrificial rite a new, more personal, and moral meaning. In anticipation of our following section, it should be underlined that performance of the ritual and faith in the myth give access to salvation together. Let us now take a closer look at Loisy’s theory on the Christian mystery. Loisy argued that the Jewish gospel of Jesus and the non-cultic meals held by his first followers, developed into a universal mystery religion in two consecutive phases.¹⁴² The first phase began after Jesus’ death, when his disciples started to believe in the resurrection because they couldn’t accept that their teacher was

 For Loisy’s early acquaintance with the work of Robertson Smith, see supra, chapter 1 (1.4). Danny Praet and I have investigated Loisy’s frequent references to Robertson Smith: Praet and Lannoy, “Loisy’s comparative method,” 74, note 26.  For more information on this particular influence of Frazer, see also Praet and Lannoy, “Loisy’s comparative method,” 78 – 80, and passim.  Loisy, MPMC, 9: “Si les rites sont pour nous de la magie, les dieux ne sont que des personnalités vagues et mal définies, la notion concrète de la fin qu’on poursuit par le rite.”  For a much more detailed analysis of Loisy’s theory on the birth of the Christian mystery, I refer the interested reader to Praet and Lannoy, “Loisy’s comparative method.”

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gone, and their hopes for the coming kingdom shredded.¹⁴³ In commemoration of the last meal Jesus had shared with them, they celebrated communal meals and gradually grew more convinced that Jesus Christ was invisibly present in them. The later Eucharist originated from these originally non-ritual meals.¹⁴⁴ Baptism was first a Jewish purification ritual performed by Jesus and his disciples.¹⁴⁵ After Jesus’ death, it transformed into a ritual through which the disciples entered into a vaguely perceived union with the resurrected Jesus Christ. In this embryonic stage of the Christ cult, the disciples still practiced the Law, and their belief in the resurrected Messiah conveyed hope of salvation for Jews only. The transformation taking place in Loisy’s first phase, is on the whole explained by both psychological and social dynamics among the first followers, and not on the basis of influences by the mystery cults. In a second phase, however, the Jewish cult of Jesus Christ developed into a universal religion by assuming the form of a mystery religion, with a deeply interconnected myth and ritual of salvation. This development is attested in the writings of Paul, to whom Loisy assigned a key role in the process, although he was aware that unknown others had also contributed to it.¹⁴⁶ In the second edition of Les Mystères païens et le mystère chrétien (1930), he would downsize Paul’s importance and insist on the wider Hellenizing movement of which Pauline theology was now considered a symptom rather than a guiding force. This change of opinion was without doubt inspired by the publication of Wilhelm Bousset’s Kyrios Christos in 1913, in which much attention had been devoted to the earliest Hellenized Judaic communities worshipping Christ.¹⁴⁷

 On this process: Loisy, MPMC, 215 – 216. The psychological explanation Loisy gives for the genesis of this belief is exactly the same as in his EE and “Mythe du Christ.” Essential for Loisy is that the disciples already believed that Jesus was the Messiah when he was still alive. Their strong belief in Jesus-Messiah made it fairly easy for them to correct his traumatizing death.  On the development of the Eucharist: Loisy, MPMC, 219 – 223 (first phase), 281– 295 (second).  On the development of baptism into an initiation ritual: Loisy, MPMC, 218 (first phase), 270 – 281 (second).  Loisy, MPMC, 303. For a detailed analysis of Loisy’s views on Paul, and their strong antiProtestant bias: Annelies Lannoy, “St Paul in the Early 20th Century History of Religions. ‘The Mystic of Tarsus’ and the Pagan Mystery Cults after the Correspondence of Franz Cumont and Alfred Loisy,” Zeitschrift für Religions-und Geistesgeschichte 64, 3 (2012): 222– 239.  The full title is: Kyrios Christos. Geschichte des Christusglaubens von den Anfängen des Christentums bis Irenaeus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht) in 1913. Loisy published a detailed and positive review of this work, after his own theory on the Christian Mystery had already been published in 1914: “Kyrios Christos,” RHLR NS 5 (1914): 385 – 401.

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In Pauline writings, the resurrected Jesus Christ had been transformed into a universal savior god with his own myth of salvation. According to this myth, Christ came to earth in human form and voluntarily died an expiatory death on the cross.¹⁴⁸ In Paul’s theology, the heavenly Christ had become a fully mythical mystery god, like Adonis, Mithras or Dionysos. Relying on his theoretical conviction that myth always is a posterior elaboration, Loisy could confidently grant to the mythologists: “The Christian myth was no more a fact of history than were the pagan mysteries.”¹⁴⁹ In the second phase, the semi-ritual commemorative meals were further ritualized, and transformed into mystery rituals. Paul connected the myth of Christ’s expiatory death to the commemorative meals. He reinterpreted them as the liturgical expression of this myth of salvation, and further consolidated their sacramental efficiency by claiming that the Eucharist was instituted by Jesus Christ himself (1 Cor: 11). Similarly, Rom 6 shows baptism as a full-blown initiation ritual, which liturgically enacted Christ’s death and resurrection.¹⁵⁰ But, Loisy explained, although the Christian worshipper believed that the rites found their origin in a preceding myth, the truth is that the ritual practices had originated independently from the myth. The entire “Christian” half of Loisy’s volume is dedicated to demonstrating that Paul had used myth for two purposes. His myth of Christ’s expiatory death and victorious resurrection first of all served to further elaborate and rationalize the belief in the resurrection. Secondly, Pauline mythology came to give new meaning to the two main rituals of the Christian cult—the Eucharist and baptism—of which the real origins had soon been forgotten. As we have shown elsewhere, the analogy which Loisy almost constantly drew between the myth-ritual nexus in the pagan cults and Christianity, was, in fact, incomplete.¹⁵¹ In the

 In evidence of this theory, Loisy (MPMC, 245) referred to Phil 2:6 – 8: “Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!” The very same verses were quoted by Drews, Reinach, and other mythologists in defense of their fully mythical Jesus.  Loisy, “The Christian Mystery,” 60.  Loisy, MPMC, 19: “Et il paraît bien aussi que le baptême fut d’abord adopté par les premiers sectateurs de Jésus comme un simple rite de purification, et la fraction du pain célébrée par eux comme un repas de fraternité, avant que Paul s’avisât d’interpréter le rite baptismal en symbole de mort et le rite eucharistique en mémorial de la passion. Jésus lui-même n’avait pas spéculé sur sa propre mort, et c’est encore saint Paul qui a transformé cet événement réel, naturel et humain, en mythe de salut. Par la même occasion il donnait au christianisme une autre base que celle qu’il tenait du judaïsme, et il en faisait un véritable mystère.”  Praet and Lannoy, “Loisy’s Comparative Method,” 85 – 86.

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Christian mystery, the myth of the self-sacrificing Christ arose independently from the practices that were at the roots of the later Eucharist (non-ritual meals) and baptism (Jewish purification rite). According to Loisy, it was by means of the sacrificial myth that the originally non-sacrificial meals got reinterpreted as a real ritual sacrifice.¹⁵² In the pagan mysteries, by contrast, the myth of the dying and resurrecting god had its roots in preceding sacrificial rites that killed a victim incarnating the spirit of nature, in order to revitalize that spirit. Once this myth had come into existence as an explanation of the original magical rites, it was further moralized and spiritualized into an act of salvation. And in turn, this myth of salvation then transformed the preceding agrarian rites into mystery rituals of salvation. The praxis remained more or less the same, but the meaning changed. According to Loisy, the Pauline transformations of myth and ritual were heavily influenced by the pagan mysteries he knew from his Hellenized environment.¹⁵³ As we’ve seen in his letter to Cumont, Loisy used the term transposition to refer to this transformation. The Jewish beliefs and cult of the first followers of Jesus Christ are transposed by Paul (and others like him) into a universal mystery religion.¹⁵⁴ Again, Loisy stressed that Paul’s borrowings from the pagan cults had happened spontaneously and unconsciously. The “spontaneous” and “unconscious” nature of Paul’s imitation process is immensely important for Loisy’s theory.¹⁵⁵ On the one hand, these delimitations allowed him to reconcile Paul’s individual creativity and historical circumstances with the universal laws of development which all religions collectively and necessarily undergo. As shown elsewhere, Loisy thus innovatively combined a traditional historicist interpretation of religious change through historical-religious contacts with an anthropological paradigm of independent analogy.¹⁵⁶ On the other hand, Loisy’s empha-

 On Loisy’s (Catholic) belief in the “real” sacrificial nature of the Eucharist, see our next chapter (5.3.2).  Loisy, MPMC, 322– 323, where Loisy suggests that the cult of Mithras was present in Tarsus. On the scarce and problematic historical sources for that statement, see Praet and Lannoy, “Loisy’s Comparative Method,” 88.  Loisy, MPMC, 334.  Loisy, MPMC, 259: “Inconsciemment, sur toute la ligne, il transpose l’Évangile parallèllement aux mystères.”  For a more detailed analysis: Praet and Lannoy, “Loisy’s comparative method,” 87– 88, where we’ve shown that in this sense, Loisy was far from an unoriginal epigone of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule and Reitzenstein’s Die hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen nach ihren Grundgedanken und Wirkungen (Leipzig–Berlin: Teubner, 1910). Because Reitzenstein’s work had no impact on Loisy’s theory of myth and ritual, it is here left out of consideration. For the relationship between Loisy and Reitzenstein: Loisy, “The Christian Mystery,” 58 – 59 and es-

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sis was without doubt also religiously motivated: to acknowledge that Christianity belonged to the same type of religion as the pagan mystery cults is one thing. To assert that Paul had intentionally performed this change to win over pagan converts, is something else entirely. Especially toward the end of his book, Loisy made several superiority claims, stating that the Christian mystery was the best realization of the économie de salut category, and its moral value unlike that of any pagan mystery cult.¹⁵⁷ But Loisy’s theory of the Christian mystery also made more specific and implicit Catholic self-superiority claims against Protestantism. In the now following section, it will become clear how his myth ritualism supported those claims.

4.3.2 Loisy’s Ritualist Theory of Myth: Between Science and Anti-Protestantism The greatest novelty of Les Mystères païens et le mystère chrétien in comparison to Loisy’s earlier historical work unmistakably resides in its consistent implementation of a ritualist theory of myth. Even though Loisy himself would most definitely have disagreed on this point, his myth ritualism is a largely pre-conceived theory which was not strictly induced from historical observations.¹⁵⁸ The anthropological-inspired myth and ritual theory served as his main hermeneutical key for comparing the pagan mystery cults and primitive Christianity. It provided him with a weapon to fight the mythologists on a deeper, meta-historical level: neither the Christian mystery nor the pagan mysteries (or any other religion, for that matter) could possibly originate from myth, because myth is essentially a posterior tool of elaboration. The myth of the self-sacrificing dying

pecially Loisy’s review of Die Hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen in RHLR NS 2 (1911): 585 – 589. See also Lannoy, “Comparing Words, Myths and Rituals,” 112– 115, and the references in note 15. On Reitzenstein: Marchand, “From Liberalism to Neoromanticism,” 151– 158, and passim; Nicolaos Kalospyros, “The Hellenistic Aspects of the Mystery Cults: Richard Reitzenstein and his contribution to the History of Religions,” in Lannoy and Praet, eds., ‘Between crazy mythologists and stupid theologians,’ in preparation.  See Loisy, MPMC, 343 – 345, and 361– 363.  As Ivan Strenski convincingly argued in his Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice, 218, comparison always involves a move away from positivist historicism, and a turn towards theory. Strenski, however, was convinced that Loisy first turned away from historicist methodology under influence of WWI. We will come back to his arguments in our next chapter, but it may be useful to mention here that Loisy’s first break from historicism can in fact be situated in the years before the War, and, as we try to argue in the present chapter, this happened in response of Drews and Reinach between 1910 – 1913.

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and resurrecting god had different roots in the pagan mysteries (agrarian sacrifice) and the Christian mystery (the traumatizing death of Jesus), but its position and function is the same in these religions. Something more primary should already be in place, before myth can enter the scene and do its meaning-giving, rationalizing job. This theoretical argument worked perfectly well against Drews who had posited a constructed syncretic myth at the origin of Christianity. But as a refutation of Reinach’s mock king thesis, it is less convincing. Loisy’s myth ritualism actually confirmed the theoretical premises of Reinach’s views. As was his usual, Loisy failed to mention the scholars who had pioneered myth ritualism, thus implicitly suggesting that it was his own creation. As a result, one French expert in early Christianity, Maurice Goguel, indeed credited Loisy with the development of this theory.¹⁵⁹ He also didn’t mention Reinach, or Hubert and Mauss, whose propagation of myth ritualism may have been instrumental in revealing its importance to Loisy. That Loisy used the myth and ritual nexus as a systematic tertium comparationis for his study of the mystery cults and Christianity, was a scientific step forward in his comparative methodology. It resulted in better-focused comparisons of specific aspects of these religions. The myth and ritual theory was also an improvement in the sense that his historical inquiries were no longer strictly limited to understanding religion from the inside perspective of the worshipper. While the worshipper believes that the divine act of salvation lies at the origin of her/his sacrificial rites, the scholar knows better. Loisy offered a more or less functionalist (psychological) explanation of the origin of myth, but it should immediately be added that he would never do the same for the more primitive rites from which they supposedly originated. We will return to this issue in detail in our next chapter. Loisy’s profound interest in the rites of the ancient mystery cults may strike us as particularly modern. We have seen that his account represented a clear break, indeed, with the predominant focus on doctrine and belief by contemporary experts of ancient religions like Cumont. Still, it would be a grave mistake to impute to Loisy a modern, ritualist interpretation of the mystery cults. In his eyes, myth was chronologically secondary to ritual, but it was explicitly not of secondary importance in these cults.¹⁶⁰ To the Christian and the pagan worship-

 Maurice Goguel, “A. Loisy: Les mystères païens et le mystère chrétien,” Revue de l’histoire des religions 82 (1920): 106.  We will further illustrate this with an excerpt of the Loisy–Cumont correspondence, see infra in this section.

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pers, he argued, belief in the myth of salvation and performance of the rites were equally important.¹⁶¹ Overall, a discourse of sameness prevailed in Loisy’s account, to the detriment of the distinct ritualist features of Greco-Roman religion, and of the peculiarities of the individual pagan cults (e. g. his depiction of Mithras as just another dying and resurrecting mystery god). When evaluating Loisy’s theory, however, it is necessary to keep in mind that he worked at a time when many scholars had difficulties even to acknowledge that there were Christian–pagan similarities at all. Harsh criticism of his all too Christian interpretation of these cults is misdirected because anachronistic. But, that being said, Loisy’s analysis of the pagan and Christian myth and ritual nexus was not only the result of an evident Christianocentrism. It was also informed and shaped by virulent anti-Protestant bias, and this bias did seriously jeopardize his scientific objectivity, even measured by the standards of his own day. Previously in this chapter, we have pointed out Loisy’s appreciation for Drews’s anti-Protestantism. His theory concurred with Drews’s in that it also positioned a divine god at the center of primitive Christianity. Loisy’s own attacks on the Liberal-Protestant focus on the humanity of Jesus resulted in one of the most striking paradoxes in Les Mystères païens et le mystère chrétien. We have seen how Loisy was convinced that the pagan mysteries and the Christian mystery had the more or less similar configuration of an économie de salut, but at the same time displayed a profound moral inequality. In proof of Christianity’s superiority, he referred to the moral perfection of the historical figure who was at the roots of the Christian myth. Jesus set a historical example which morally lifted Christianity above any comparison with the spiritualized, but in origin crudely materialistic spirit of the pagan mystery cults.¹⁶² In other words, while myth helped Loisy to save primitive Christianity from Protestant recuperations,

 Loisy, MPMC, 17– 18: “L’efficacité des rites étant fondée en dernière analyse sur le fait divin que raconte le mythe, l’initié est bien véritablement justifié par la foi au dieu sauveur, en entrant par le rite dans la communion de ses douleurs terrestres et de sa céleste félicité.”  See, for instance, Loisy, MPMC, 248, note 1: “Les mythes païens des dieux sauveurs n’étaient pas exclusifs de toute idée morale, mais leur caractère originairement naturiste ne permettait pas de les moraliser à fond.” See also MPMC, 344 on the historical Jesus: “Sa morale était pure, et son existence avait été à la hauteur de sa morale. Tout cela s’interprétait, s’élargissait dans le mystère, mais donnait aussi au mystère une couleur de haute moralité que n’avaient jamais eue, que ne pouvaient jamais avoir les vieilles fables de Dionysos, de Déméter, de Cybèle, d’Isis, de Mithra. […]. Par Jésus le mythe du Christ était vivant, au lieu que les mythes païens ne vivaient que par le sentiment qui en voilait à moitié la signification première, dépourvue de moralité.” In our next chapter, we will see how WWI drastically changed Loisy’s belief in Christianity’s moral value. In his Essai historique sur le sacrifice (1920), the Eucharist is regarded as the continuation of the same magic-materialistic ideas that were at the roots of the pagan cults.

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it was history which enabled him to safeguard its absolute uniqueness with regard to the pagan cults. Returning now to the myth ritual connection, Loisy’s anti-Protestantism may perhaps also help us to understand why he was unable to recognize the distinctive orthopraxy of the pagan mystery cults; why he believed that myth is posterior to ritual, but never of secondary importance. His views on this matter clearly engaged with the long-standing dispute between Protestants and Catholics on the faith/works dilemma. As Danny Praet and I have pointed out elsewhere, Loisy’s ritualist theory of myth was inspired by the English Myth and Ritual School.¹⁶³ For the present purpose of evaluating his anti-Protestantism, it is necessary, however, to be somewhat more specific about the scholars who were his main sources of inspiration. Even if it was the leading principle of his entire book, Loisy only very briefly discussed his theoretical axiom, and he didn’t provide any references to other sources.¹⁶⁴ But when reading between the lines, it nevertheless becomes quite clear that he especially took his cues from William Robertson Smith, and perhaps also from James G. Frazer, although not without some personal adaptions and corrections. Strictly speaking, however, Smith and Frazer were predecessors to the Myth and Ritual School, which was Jane Ellen Harrison, Gilbert Murray, Francis Macdonald Cornford, and Arthur Bernard Cook.¹⁶⁵ Frazer and Robertson Smith shared a profound interest in the tie between ritual and myth, but they explained this connection differently, and developed distinct views on the importance of myth and ritual in ancient religions. Robertson Smith started his famous Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (1889) by disclosing the stringent theoretical and methodological principles on which his analyses were based.¹⁶⁶ This introduction quickly became one of the

 Praet and Lannoy, “Loisy’s comparative method.” On the Myth and Ritual School see the fine book of Robert Ackerman, The Myth and Ritual School.  Loisy, MPMC, 18: “Dans la réalité, les rites ont précédé les mythes; le fait divin, fondement supposé de la foi, n’a jamais eu lieu; c’est la foi elle-même qui le conjecture et le crée pour l’explication des rites et pour se contenter elle-même.” In fact, “theory” may be a somewhat exaggerated qualification for this incredibly short explanation.  Loisy was familiar with Jane Ellen Harrison’s work, but it was probably not of major influence on his thought. We have not found any reviews of her work by Loisy, but he did occasionally refer to her publications in other reviews in the Chronique of his RHLR. See, e. g., RHLR NS 3 (1912): 394. Harrison’s Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903) is mentioned in his MPMC, 70 note 2, and repeatedly in his later Essai historique sur le sacrifice (1920). In what follows, we will only focus on the theories of Smith and Frazer. For the theories of Harrison, Cook, etc. and their differences to Smith and Frazer: Segal, Theorizing about myth, 37– 46.  See chapter 5 (5.3.1), for Loisy’s reaction against Robertson Smith’s theory of sacrifice.

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most important 19th century methodological contributions to the study of religion, and it remains of great relevance today. In it, the author delivered a powerful plea for contemporary scholars to stop their Christianizing interpretations of ancient religions, and to start focusing instead on the distinctive ritualist features of those religions. Unlike modern Christianity, Robertson Smith explained: “the antique religions had for the most part no creed; they consisted entirely of institutions and practices.”¹⁶⁷ Providing the inspiration for Durkheim and the Cambridge Ritualists, he argued that the rites were traditional customs which had originated as sanctions to protect the divinized social order of the community.¹⁶⁸ The worshippers obviously attached some meaning to their rites, but this belief could be very meager. It had no religious power, nor did it trigger any religious sanctions. According to Robertson Smith, myth only originated as the explanation of a ritual when its original sense had been lost.¹⁶⁹ In almost all antique religions, myth was entirely dependent on ritual.¹⁷⁰ It had only secondary, accessory importance for the worshippers, who were free to take it, or leave it: Belief in a certain series of myths was neither obligatory as a part of true religion, nor was it supposed that, by believing, a man acquired religious merit and conciliated the favour of the gods. What was obligatory or meritorious was the exact performance of certain sacred acts prescribed by religious tradition. This being so, it follows that mythology ought not to take the prominent place that is too often assigned to it in the scientific study of ancient faiths.¹⁷¹

Importantly, the modern topicality of Robertson Smith’s ideas should not divert attention from the fact that they were embedded in a pronounced Liberal-Prot-

 Robertson Smith, Lectures, 18.  Ackerman, The Myth and Ritual School, 42. Importantly, Robertson Smith argued that only primitive religions originated in social behavior. Christianity—which is in his eyes essentially different from those primitive religions—owes its distinctness to supernatural intervention.  Robertson Smith, Lectures, 19: “Now by far the largest part of the myths of antique religions are connected with the ritual of particular shrines, or with the religious observances of particular tribes and districts. In all such cases it is probable, in most cases it is certain, that the myth is merely the explanation of a religious usage; and ordinarily it is such an explanation as could not have arisen till the original sense of the usage had more or less fallen into oblivion.”  By claiming that ancient myth was dependent on ritual, Robertson Smith took a stand against Tylor’s intellectualist interpretation of myth as an autonomous pre-scientific knowledge system. Ackerman, The Myth and Ritual School, 44; Segal, Theorizing about myth, 39. Robertson Smith’s friend Frazer did accept Tylor’s intellectualist ideas. See infra, for his views.  Robertson Smith, Lectures, 19.

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estant program.¹⁷² Smith had been brought up in a highly conservative family attached to the Scottish Free Church. He was a professor at the Free Church College in Edinburgh but got into trouble because of his historical-critical teachings on the Bible. In 1881 he lost his position in Edinburgh, and soon afterwards began to travel in Arabia. In 1883 he obtained a professorship in Cambridge, where he met Frazer in 1884 – 85.¹⁷³ As Strenski, Segal, and other scholars have convincingly argued, Robertson Smith’s religious views evolved toward a “hyper-liberal”¹⁷⁴ type of Protestantism, which he himself regarded as perfectly compatible with his scientific views. His ideas on the ritualist nature of ancient religions were grounded in an evolutionary philosophy of religious history, which strongly opposed those religions to modern (Liberal-Protestant) Christianity.¹⁷⁵ Robertson Smith acknowledged that Christianity (as well as Judaism and Islam) had primitive Semitic origins, but drew a very sharp line of distinction between ancient and modern Christianity. The Reformation was as a game changing milestone which marked a deep religious rupture, a move away from the primitive ritualist materialism still present in Catholicism, and toward a modern, truly spiritual and belief-centered faith. From this very short introduction of Robertson Smith’s views, two significant differences with Loisy immediately come to surface. The first, which we will address in great detail in our following chapter, is that Loisy strongly disagreed on ancient rites being mainly unthinking acts, which had their origins in social behavior. For Loisy, we will see, it is primitive man’s innate mysticism and premature, childish-like rationality which explain the creation of and the belief in the efficacy of the rites.¹⁷⁶ First, there is primitive man’s mystical and pre-rationalmagical consideration of life, second the rites with the original magical-material

 Several scholars have studied the interrelation between science and faith in Robertson Smith’s thought. See, e. g., the interesting analyses of Gillian M. Bediako, Primal Religion and the Bible. William Robertson Smith and His Heritage (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), especially 135 sq; Strenski, Understanding Religion, 55 – 64; Robert A. Segal, “William Robertson Smith: Sociologist or theologian?” Religion 38 (2008): 9 – 24; Bernhard Maier, William Robertson Smith: His life, His Work, and His Times (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009).  Ackerman, The Myth and Ritual School, 47.  The term is Strenski’s, Understanding Religion, 63.  Segal, “William Robertson Smith,” 14: “He does not propose that modern religion as well be looked at from the side of ritual foremost. He draws a rigid hiatus between primitive and modern religion. He approaches modern religion no differently from others of his time. It is creedal first and ritualistic second—no doubt a reflection of Smith’s anti-ritualistic, Protestant viewpoint.”  As we will see in the next chapter, this belief in supernatural powers is for Loisy a natural human instinct, imprinted, so to speak, in our cognitive DNA (see especially 5.3.1.2).

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function to stimulate nature, and third, when the magical significance faded, appeared the meaning-giving spiritual myths. The second and related difference is that Loisy never believed that myth only offered an almost casual, take-or-leave explanation. In the phase of the économies de salut, the myth takes the place of the primitive magical beliefs, as a necessary meaning-giver. Loisy agreed that the ritual acts performed during the mystery rites existed long before the myth of the self-sacrificing god was created. But without the myth of the self-sacrificing god, the mystery ritual—as the dramatic representation of the spiritual myth—simply wouldn’t exist. In this sense, the myth of salvation actually preceded the mystery ritual. In order for a ritual action to change its meaning, it needs myth. In the same way as Smith’s belief in the distinctness of modern Liberal Protestantism motivated his emphasis on the pure ritualism of primitive, ancient religions, Loisy’s Catholic-inspired, continuous philosophy of history explains why pagan religions could never be purely ritualistic for him. Since Catholic Christianity was about ritual and belief, it followed by implication that ancient pagan religion (and even the most primitive beginnings of religion) should be about ritual and belief, too. In Les Mystères païens et le mystère chrétien, Loisy wanted to show to his Liberal-Protestant peers that ritual had been much more central to the Urchristentum than they had wanted to make believe. The pagan mystery cults which deeply influenced primitive Christianity were teleologically constructed as a case in point. The Loisy–Cumont correspondence sheds interesting light to exactly this issue. It shows explicitly what remained more implicit in Loisy’s book. When Loisy and Cumont discussed the relation between the pagan mysteries and Christianity, the anti-Protestant underpinning of Loisy’s interest in ritual can really not be missed. After having received a copy of Loisy’s commentary on Paul’s Galatians (1916), Cumont congratulated his friend on his new publication. In that same letter, he wrote that during his readings, he had wondered about a possible analogy between Pauline reflections on the validity of the Law, and the concerns of the initiates in the pagan mysteries. To be sure, Cumont argued, the pagan worshippers must also have struggled with the question as to whether faith in their god and his mythical sufferings, sufficed for them to obtain salvation. In his reply to Cumont, Loisy explained that his friend had it all wrong. The question of faith and works had very different roots in Pauline theology and in the pagan mysteries. Paul’s rejection of the Law did not stem from anti-ritualism, as many Protestant scholars have claimed, but from the fact that the Law was a Jewish set of rituals which were incompatible with his universalist Christian salvation mystery (“mystère de salut”). If Paul opposed faith and works, he did so for purely polemical anti-Judaic purposes. It was not as absolute a distinction, as Protestants later claimed, and it was definitely not because he had an aversion of

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ritual, per se. The anti-ritualist interpretation of the Pauline faith-works question had been developed during the Reformation to attack the Catholic Church. In fact, Loisy argued in his letter, the performance of ritual and faith in the myth that gives it meaning, are not mutually exclusive to any reasonable “croyant,”¹⁷⁷ whether Christian or pagan. Il ne me semble pas que la question de la foi et des œuvres se soit posée dans les mystères comme elle se posait pour saint Paul. Celui-ci répudie les pratiques de la Loi parce qu’elles constituent un ensemble complètement étranger à son mystère de salut. Il ne regrette pas autant qu’on pouvait croire le rite comme tel, car il attribue une valeur mystique au baptême et à l’eucharistie. La distinction absolue qu’il établit entre la foi et la Loi, qui est l’œuvre et le rite, a surtout une valeur polémique. Ce sont plutôt les protestants qui l’ont érigée en principe absolu. Paul, en tout cas, n’en tirait point par rapport aux sacrements chrétiens les conséquences que ces Messieurs de la Réforme en ont voulu tirer. Notez que la Réforme a repris contre l’Église catholique la distinction de Paul, l’opposition de la foi à la Loi. Mais pour des croyants qui ne sont pas dans cette position violente, la foi et les œuvres ou les rites ne sont pas choses qui s’excluent réciproquement, attendu que c’est la foi qui fait le mérite des œuvres et la vertu des rites. La mutilation du galle ne le sauve pas indépendamment de la foi qui a provoqué cette mutilation. Et les rites mosaïques ne sont incompatibles avec la foi chrétienne que parce qu’ils expriment une autre foi. En fait, il n’était point de foi sûre, ni d’œuvre religieuse qui n’implique point de foi. Beaucoup de bafouillamentum theologicum a été répandu sur cette question.¹⁷⁸

We want to conclude this evaluation of Loisy’s theory of myth by drawing attention to the remarkable parallels between his rejection of Robertson Smith’s pure ritualism, and the myth ritualism of the latter’s most famous friend. Loisy had certainly been acquainted with Robertson Smith’s work before he read Frazer’s. But given the lack of bibliographical references in Loisy’s work, it is impossible to know whether he came to his conclusions independently, or rather took them from Frazer. Without wanting to rule out the second possibility, we should mention that Frazer’s myth-ritual interpretation changed substantially in the course of time, and that it was far from unambiguous at any given moment. By contrast, Robertson Smith’s programmatic introduction to his Lectures was as clearly for-

 From the same concern with continuity between the pagan mysteries and primitive Christianity, Loisy regarded all pagan mystery rituals as sacramental. In the work of many contemporary Protestant scholars, we see the opposite reasoning. A scholar like Carl Clemen, to give just one example, described the pagan initiation rituals as purely symbolic, in opposition to the sacramental value of baptism and the Eucharist in Christianity.  Letter of December 26, 1915; Lannoy, Bonnet, and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 119 (letter 128). Loisy’s anti-Protestant history-writing became more pronounced during WWI. On this issue, see chapter 5 (5.1).

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mulated as could be. Like Smith, Frazer was convinced of the strong connection between myth and ritual, but he was a much more eclectic and volatile thinker. Modern research has shown that Frazer’s views on myth were exceptionally fluid.¹⁷⁹ The author of the Golden Bough combined at least three different theories, and did so in different ways over the various editions of his work: (1) the tylorian intellectualist theory we came across in our previous chapter; (2) a classical euhemerist interpretation; and (3) a ritualist theory of myth, which will be our focus here. Originally, this ritualist theory of myth was very similar to Smith’s, but Robert Ackerman has shown that, in the 1900s—when his work became well-known—Frazer had already abandoned Smith’s pure ritualism and assigned an increasingly prominent role to myth.¹⁸⁰ As we’ve seen in our previous chapter, Frazer postulated a purely magical stage at the dawn of humanity. It may be useful to repeat that according to Frazer, the first magical actions mechanically worked on the basis of sympatheia, following either the law of similarity, or the law of contagion.¹⁸¹ Unlike Smith’s social origins of ritual, Frazer believed these magical practices were rooted in prescientific rationality. In the following phase—the stage of religion—the belief in spirits (and later, gods) animating nature arises. At a later point, myths are invented to account for the magical practices in which the spirit is now believed to be killed with the victim.¹⁸² In a way somewhat similar to what we’ve earlier said about Loisy’s national religion, Frazer believed that in the phase of religion, myths about the spirits/gods, and rituals coexist but they are barely interconnected.¹⁸³ As Robert Segal has pointed out, myth ritualism for Frazer is strictly

 On the myth theories of Frazer, see Ackerman, The Myth and Ritual School, 53 – 63; Segal, Theorizing about myth, 39 – 41.  This development eventually led to a break with Harrison and the Cambridge ritualists who had considered him their intellectual father. See Ackerman, The Myth and Ritual School, passim and 53.  See chapter 3 (3.3) on magic.  According to Frazer, the rise of religion was the result of the progress of human rationality, as mankind eventually discovered that the magical rites didn’t work. But in another way, Frazer was negative about religion, because human dependence on the gods downplayed man’s rational creativity. The magical stage was closer to the scientific end stage than religion, as magic considered nature to follow orderly, mechanical laws, while religion explained nature through personal interventions of gods. On this point, Styers, Making Magic, 79.  Segal, Theorizing about myth, 39: “Myths describe the character and behavior of gods, where rituals seek to win divine favor.”

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limited to the magical-religious phase between religion and science.¹⁸⁴ Only then, rites and myth become deeply intertwined and operate together. Segal has very well summarized how Frazer’s views were thus different from Smith’s: In Frazer’s true myth-ritualist scenario, myth arises prior to ritual rather than, as for Smith, after it. The myth that gets enacted in the combined stage emerges in the stage of religion and therefore antedates the ritual to which it is applied. In the combined stage, myth, as for Smith, explains the point of ritual, but not only once the meaning of the ritual has been forgotten. Rather, myth gives ritual its meaning. In the combined stage, ritual would not ritualistically enact the death and rebirth of the god of vegetation without the myth of the death and rebirth of that god.¹⁸⁵

It is important to observe that a similar interpretation of the myth and ritual nexus can also be found in the highly influential Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice (1898) of Mauss and Hubert, with which Loisy was also very familiar when writing Les Mystères païens et le mystère chrétien. In their last chapter on “The Sacrifice of the God,” the authors identified the different steps in the development of the sacrificial myth, and similarly concluded: “Priest or victim, priest and victim, it is a god already formed that both acts and suffers in the sacrifice […]. Once the myth has taken shape it reacts upon the rite from which it sprang and is realized in it.”¹⁸⁶ Even if Loisy’s adaptation of Robertson Smith’s theory was not necessarily inspired by Frazer, or by Hubert and Mauss, it is very clear that others had drawn attention to the importance of myth before him. Loisy’s weapon against the Christ Myth was, so to speak, for the taking. Before turning to some sociological observations on Loisy’s close personal contacts with several French mythologists, a remark needs to be made on his methodological self-representation. In our introduction to this book, we have noted that comparative religion largely disappeared from his bibliography after 1920. At the beginning of academic year 1921– 1922, Loisy gave a remarkable Leçon inaugurale, entitled “De la méthode en histoire des religions,” which was published in the very last issue of his Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses. ¹⁸⁷ In this lecture, Loisy took stock of his personal achievements in the field. At the time of writing the text, the Christ Myth theory was becoming an in-

 Segal, Theorizing about myth, 39. Given Frazer’s strong dichotomy between magical and religious thought, he had great difficulties explaining their very frequent co-existence. On the religious-magical stage that follows the emergence of religion, Styers, Making Magic, 80 – 81.  Segal, Theorizing about myth, 41.  Hubert and Mauss, Sacrifice: its nature and function, 80. For more details on the sacrificial theory of Hubert and Mauss, see the next chapter (5.3.1).  The article was published in RHLR NS 8 (1922): 13 – 37.

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creasingly prominent point of debate in France due to the publications of PaulLouis Couchoud, to whom we will return shortly. The delivered lecture consisted of two parts. The first gave an overview of his insights in the study of sacrifice, which will occupy us in the following chapter. But the second part discussed his comparative work on early Christianity and addressed the rising popularity of the mythologists. Loisy’s lecture reveals the very same paradox we have come across throughout this entire chapter, that is, the significant discrepancy between his self-representation as an anti-theoretical, historicist thinker, and his transparent use of myth and ritual theory to fight the mythologists. In the introduction to the lecture, Loisy looked back on the methodological goals he had formulated in his inaugural speech of 1909.¹⁸⁸ But when summarizing those goals, he significantly distorted the views he had exposed some 12 years earlier. The historical method, he now argued, is very well able to accomplish on its own all that the new methods promise individually, and to do so better because it refrains from exclusivist and pre-conceived theories. Quant à la méthode, il me semblait que la méthode historique, bien comprise, l’art d’interpréter et d’utiliser les témoignages selon leur sens et leur valeur, de voir, autant que possible, comme elles furent, les choses du passé, pouvait réaliser tout ce que présentaient d’avantages positifs les méthodes nouvelles, les méthodes à panache et à révélation, méthode anthropologique, méthode sociologique, méthode comparative, tout en écartant les inconvénients des théories préconçues et des systèmes absolus.¹⁸⁹

In 1909, Loisy had actually promised not to stick to the historical-critical method exclusively, but to enrich it, instead, by incorporating insights from those very same methods (anthropology, sociology, comparative religion) which he now called “stylish and revealed” (“à panache et à révélation”). And to be true, that is exactly what he had done in the previous years, if we just think about his adoption of anthropological insights on the myth and ritual nexus, or his partial use of sociological theory in the study of magic, or his attention for the psychological mechanisms which activated myth in primitive Christianity, etc.¹⁹⁰ However, at important occasions for scholarly self-representation, it seems that Loisy preferred to position himself within the strictly historicist tradition. His downright horror for non-historical intrusions in the study of religion must  See chapter 3 (3.1) fort his speech.  Loisy, “De la méthode en histoire des religions,” 13. Loisy emphatically repeated these words in a letter to Cumont of August 6, 1921; Lannoy, Bonnet, and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 279 (letter 242).  We will come back to his reception of sociology in chapter 5 (5.3.1.3).

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certainly be one of the reasons why he seemed oblivious to his own move away from historicism. The overt disappearance of his previous, more conciliatory attitude towards other methods may perhaps be explained by the different context in which he now worked. In 1909, Loisy had strategically used his speech to restore serenity after the strong opposition against his election.¹⁹¹ In 1921, after more than 10 years at the Collège, this self-apologetic context is less salient, and perhaps this meant that he felt free to openly express his (negative) opinion on other methods. Myth ritualism is the instrument with which Loisy defended the epistemological value of comparison for the discipline of history of religions.¹⁹² Even if his comparisons mainly led to a discourse of sameness, his—admittedly still thin — theoretical reflection on the function and origin of myth made all the difference with the superficial similarities pointed out by the mythologists. In Loisy’s eyes the entire mythological discussion could be closed by this one theoretical argument. When one understands the nature of myth, the Christ Myth theory simply becomes a non-discussion. The door Loisy had previously left open, was now firmly closed.¹⁹³ Knowing this, however, it becomes all the more difficult to understand why he still felt it was necessary to publish two volumes against the mythologists at the end of his life.¹⁹⁴ This can only be fully explained by taking a look at the relationship Loisy entertained with the authors of those volumes he so virulently annihilated, and by examining the questions these mythologists raised about the professionalization of history of religions as a scientific discipline.

 See supra, chapter 3 (3.1).  See, by the way also the views exposed in the lecture’s first part on sacrifice: Loisy, “De la méthode en histoire des religions,” 19.  Strategically selecting a voice which enforced his own image of a secular scholar, Loisy ended his speech with a quote from Nietzsche’s Wille zur Macht: “Si réduit que puisse sembler le rôle de Jésus, il restera toujours essentiel et indispensable, ne serait-ce que dans le sens où l’entendait Nietzsche (Wille zur Macht, Aph. 178) quand il disait, précisément au sujet du Christ: “Un fondateur de religion peut être insignifiant. Une allumette, rien de plus.” Loisy, “De la méthode en histoire des religions,” 36.  Alfred Loisy, Histoire et mythe à propos de Jésus-Christ (Paris: Nourry, 1938); Autres mythes à propos de la Religion (Paris: Nourry, 1938), and also the article “Was Jesus an historical Person?” The Hibbert Journal (1938): 380 – 394 (April issue), 509 – 529 (July issue).

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4.4 The Christ Myth Debates and the Professionalization of History of Religions In the 1920s, some 40 years after the institutionalization of history of religions in France, the Christ Myth theory of the French physician Paul-Louis Couchoud revived debates on professionalism in history of religions. One can roughly subdivide these debates in two sets of questions. On the one hand, there is the fact that most (French and international) exponents of the Christ Myth were dilettantes without a university degree in history or theology, who still managed to use high-profile academic communication channels for propagating their theories. This blurring of the boundaries between professional vs. dilettante history of religions fueled discussions on what it meant for a historian of religions to be a professional.¹⁹⁵ On the other hand, Christ Myth theories were thematically situated at the crossroads between history of religions, history of Christianity, biblical studies, and theology. “Professional” replies against the Christ Myth theories differed widely, depending on the disciplinary-methodological and confessional backgrounds of those involved. Aside from the divide between professional and dilettante history of religions, the Christ Myth also questioned the boundaries between history of religions and those other academic disciplines.

4.4.1 Paul-Louis Couchoud’s Mythological Project and Team Couchoud (1879 – 1959) obtained his degree as agrégé in philosophy from the prestigious Parisian École normale supérieure (1898), before starting his studies of medicine.¹⁹⁶ At a young age, he traveled to Japan and China and developed a life-long fascination for Asian poetry. In several of his books on primitive Christianity, he referred to those Asian travels, and how he was struck by the mystic spirituality he had encountered in religious life and literature. Couchoud him Similar (though not entirely the same) questions had been raised during disputes over Drews’s Christus Mythe in Germany. In the preface to later editions of his Christus Mythe Drews deeply regretted that none of the professionals in the field of theology took his work seriously: “whoever, though not a specialist, invades the province of any science, and ventures to express an opinion opposed to its official representatives, must be prepared to be rejected by them with anger, to be accused of a lack of scholarship, “dilettantism”, or “want of method”, and to be treated as a complete ignoramus.” Drews, The Christ Myth, 13 (preface to the first and second edition).  On the life and work of Couchoud: Goguel, “Recent French Discussions,” 115 – 142; Jones, Independence and Exegesis, 106; Weaver, The Historical Jesus, 300 – 304. See also Loisy’s Mémoires, III, 442– 443, 455 – 456.

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self, however, was a convinced rationalist. He was the personal physician and a close friend of the fiercely anticlerical, later Nobel prize winner Anatole France (1844 – 1924), who seemed to have had an enduring influence on his intellectual development.¹⁹⁷ Equally important was Reinach’s Orpheus, which first introduced Couchoud to the Christ Myth theory. Triggered by Reinach’s account of the crucifixion, Couchoud read and studied the German and British mythologist publications that had also inspired Reinach. Couchoud initially rejected what we may perhaps best call the comparative argumentations of the Christ Myth, like, e. g. Drews’s Judeo-pagan god Jesus. In his first writings—the article “L’Énigme de Jésus” (1923) and Le mystère de Jésus (1924)¹⁹⁸—he developed his own theory, which explained the belief in the nonhistorical Jesus as an internal development within apocalyptic Judaism.¹⁹⁹ Our interest in Couchoud’s Christ Myth here being mainly sociological, it suffices to observe that his theory took its departure from the assertion that ancient Judaism would have never tolerated a divinized human at the side of Jahweh. A loyal follower of Loisy’s lectures at the Collège de France, Couchoud was deeply impressed by his eschatological interpretation of the historical Jesus, and by his theory on the progressive mythification that took place after Jesus’ death. He agreed with Loisy that Pauline literature provided the real key to understanding the origins of Christianity. But according to Couchoud, Jesus had not been a historical figure gradually mythified, but a god progressively humanized.²⁰⁰ Referring to his own medical experience with psychiatric pathologies, Couchoud explained the first historical appearance of this humanlike Jesus to a group of

 Loisy pointed to this fact repeatedly in his correspondence with Cumont (see, e. g., his letter of May 5, 1923, Lannoy, Bonnet, and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 307), and in his Mémoires, III, 437.  Paul-Louis Couchoud, “L’Énigme de Jésus,” Mercure de France CLXII (1923): 344– 466; Id., Le Mystère de Jésus (Paris: Rieder, 1924). The article was translated in English and published as a book, The Enigma of Jesus (London: Watts & Company, 1924), with a preface by no one less than Frazer (to which we will return shortly). In his mythologist writings of the 1930s, Couchoud would largely abandon the argumentation of Le Mystère de Jésus. See his Jésus. Le Dieu fait homme (Paris: Rieder, 1937).  Couchoud, Le Mystère de Jésus, 114– 185, especially 145.  Couchoud, Le Mystère de Jésus, 90 and 145: “La foi chrétienne eut un développement régulier. Son histoire se débrouille et s’éclaire dès qu’on a bien perçu ce fait primordial : Jésus n’est pas un homme progressivement divinisé, mais un Dieu progressivement humanisé. […] Son histoire humaine n’est pas primitive. Pierre et Paul ont vu un Dieu. Après Paul seulement on a donné à ce Dieu un masque humain, un semblant d’état civil, et on l’a inséré indûment dans l’histoire.”

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followers of the god, as the result of a collective mystical hallucination.²⁰¹ Couchoud would long reject the notion of “myth” as a label for his theory, preferring the term “spiritual Jesus” over “Christ Myth.” Couchoud’s article of 1923 and small volume of 1924 caused a stir in academic and non-academic, religious and free-thinking intellectual milieus, inciting mostly very negative reactions. But among a small group of rationalists, the thesis was met with enthusiasm, so much so that Couchoud later became a prominent spokesman on religious matters at the Union rationaliste which was created in 1930.²⁰² In the Union’s journal (the Cahiers rationalistes) the mythological thesis received ample attention. Around Couchoud, a rather tight network of supporters united, even if they often favored different arguments. Interestingly, three of Couchoud’s allies were former Catholic priests who had lost their faith during their historical and/or philosophical studies, and left the Church around the time of the Modernist crisis. Just like Couchoud himself, they were all personal acquaintances of Loisy. Later vice-president of the Union rationaliste, Prosper Alfaric had left the Church in 1910, and became one of the most ardent proponents of the Christ Myth from the 1920s onwards.²⁰³ He was a frequent correspondent of Loisy, and a close collaborator of the Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses. Another scholar associated with Couchoud, was the former priest Albert Houtin (1867– 1926), the well-known “historiographer of Modernism” and biographer of Loisy,²⁰⁴ with whom he had a quite turbulent relationship until his death in 1926.²⁰⁵ Houtin never defended the Christ Myth in personal publications, but he did actively contribute to Couchoud’s book series.  Such a psychological approach to the mental health of Jesus himself and his followers, was by no means new at that time. Jesus’ mental health was for the first time openly questioned by the French physician and psychologist Charles Binet-Sanglé (1868 – 1941), author of La Folie de Jésus (in 4 volumes, 1908 – 1915).  On the beginnings of the Union: Fabienne Bock, “Les débuts de l’Union Rationaliste: 1930 – 1940),” Raison présente 200 (2016): 7– 14. It was founded by physician Paul Langevin to promote science and reason in society.  On Alfaric’s life and work, see his autobiography: Prosper Alfaric, À l’école de la raison. Études sur les origines chrétiens (Paris: Publications de l’Union rationaliste, s.d.) with a biographical preface by J. Marchand at pages 9 – 43; and also Talar, “The Faith of a Rationalist.” For Loisy’s tight relationship to Alfaric: Loisy, Mémoires, III, 161– 163. With help of Reinach, Alfaric managed to get appointed to the chair of history of religions at the University of Strasbourg.  See the introduction for more details on this biography, Alfred Loisy. Sa vie, son œuvre, which was continued after Houtin’s death by Félix Sartiaux, and finally published and edited by Émile Poulat in 1960.  On this complex relationship: Goichot, Alfred Loisy et ses amis, 141– 144. For Houtin’s life and work, see also his autobiography in two volumes: Mon expérience. Une vie de prêtre (1867 – 1912) (Paris: Rieder, 1926); and Mon expérience II. Ma vie laïque (1912 – 1926) (Paris: Rieder, 1928).

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Houtin’s friend, Félix Sartiaux (1876 – 1944), who further completed Houtin’s biography of Loisy after his passing, was also close to Couchoud. Without any doubt, this explains why the Houtin-Sartiaux biography tried to depict Loisy as the mythologist he never was.²⁰⁶ A last scholar to whom we want to draw attention, was the Modernist priest Joseph Turmel (1859 – 1943). Like Alfaric and Houtin, Turmel had lost his faith but, unlike them, he had decided to stay in the Church.²⁰⁷ Using a myriad of pseudonyms, he published many radically historical-critical accounts on the history of the Church, many of them in Loisy’s Revue. Couchoud not only managed to form a “mythologist” équipe around him, he also knew very well how to market their views, among academic professionals and larger audiences, thus succeeding in bridging the sociological divide with “real” history of religions. Couchoud founded and edited a book series, Christianisme (published by Rieder, 1924 – 1932), which intended to propagate the rationalist approach to religion among large audiences. Admittedly, the series covered a broad range of subjects, not all of them related to the Christ Myth theory, but all manifesting a strictly historical-critical approach to religion, and many of them touching upon delicate issues, such as ecclesiastical celibacy, or Roman Catholic Modernism. Aside from Loisy, who published an abbreviated version of his Actes des Apôtres (1925), other contributors included Alfaric, Houtin, Sartiaux, Turmel (writing under pseudonyms), but also the then recently excommunicated Modernist priest and prominent historian of Christianity, Ernesto Buonaiuti. As for the propagation of Couchoud’s theory among academics, the list of mythological interventions by him and his network is long. We may for instance mention that Couchoud and his supporters managed to publish their views in the well-respected Revue de l’histoire des religions, and in Loisy’s own Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses (until 1922). They also gave lectures during the meetings of the Société Ernest Renan, the official asso-

 Loisy’s MPMC was in part based upon the notes Sartiaux took during Loisy’s lectures at the CF. For more details, see Roessli, “Les mystères païens et le mystère chrétien,” 74.  Turmel was “unmasked” at the end of the 1920s, and excommunicated in 1930. For his life and work, see his autobiography (with a critical edition by C.J.T. Talar), “Martyr to the Truth.” The autobiography of Joseph Turmel, translated by C. J. T. Talar and Elizabeth Emery, edited by C. J. T. Talar (Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2012). Turmel’s biography was written by Félix Sartiaux, on this biography see the interesting analysis of C.J.T. Talar, “The Morality of Apostasy. Félix Sartiaux’s Biography of Joseph Turmel,” in Harvey Hill, Louis-Pierre Sardella and C.J.T. Talar, By those who know them. French modernists left, right, centre (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 17– 39.

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ciation for the scientific study of religions in France (founded in 1919).²⁰⁸ Of course, the fact that the mythologists were able to defend their views at such prestigious places of academic knowledge, does not imply that they were also taken seriously. Many mythologist interventions were followed by severe refutations by professional academics who repeated the criticism of “dilletantism.” But not all professionals who rejected the Christ Myth theory, were convinced that its exponents were automatically “dilletants.” One such scholar who never denied the historicity of Jesus but did use his authority to raise academic awareness for at least some insights of the mythologists, was Frazer. Unlike many other scholars who took a dim view of their work being quoted by the mythologists, Frazer was flattered that mythologists took up his comparative research, and he engaged fellow academics to face the challenges raised by the Christ Myth. Frazer wrote the introduction to the English translation of Paul-Louis Couchoud’s Enigma of Jesus (1924), in which he underlined that “his friend” had all the right intellectual qualities to be taken quite seriously by academic scholars.²⁰⁹ It was far from necessary, Frazer explained, to accept Couchoud’s theory on the purely fictional nature of Jesus (“To me, I confess, it seems to create more difficulties than it solves”²¹⁰), but one should at least be able to acknowledge that the French mythologist had “laid his finger on a weak point in the chain of evidence on which hangs the religious faith of a great part of civilized mankind.” Frazer admitted to being greatly tempted by the innovative psychological perspective Couchoud tried to introduce in history of religions. For many scholars, though, the idea of being associated with Couchoud’s radical views was something they wished to avoid at all costs. We know, for instance, that Couchoud also invited Cumont to collaborate to his series, but no volume of his was ever published in it.²¹¹ It is worth the while to take a closer look at Cumont’s reservations, as they make a significant point about the then perception of the nature of history of religions as a scientific discipline.

 The reports of the meetings of the Société were published in the Revue de l’histoire des religions. On the Société Ernest Renan, Laplanche, La Crise de l’origine, 92– 95.  James G. Frazer, “Introduction,” in Paul-Louis Couchoud, The Enigma of Jesus (London: Watts & Co, 1924), vi–xv. See especially page vii: “The problem of which he now offers a tentative solution is of profound and perennial interest, and he has many qualifications for dealing with it.”  Frazer, “Introduction,” xiv.  Annelies Lannoy, “Le congrès d’histoire du christianisme: Franz Cumont et Alfred Loisy face aux visages divers de l’histoire des religions indépendante”, in Praet and Bonnet, eds., Science, Religion and Politics, 428 – 429.

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4.4.2 Histoire du christianisme Is Not Histoire des religions: Loisy’s Jubilé (1927) The radical ideas of Couchoud, Alfaric, Houtin, Turmel, and Sartiaux, were a repeated subject of strong criticism in the letters of Loisy and Cumont, who both closely followed their publications.²¹² In the next chapter it will become clear that Loisy’s own theory of religion was very different from the beliefs of these rationalists, but his own radical historical criticism did inspire much admiration from them. Loisy’s letters to Cumont show that he was not entirely indifferent to their repeated displays of scientific esteem. Was it because Loisy felt flattered that he initially refrained from attacking their theories as aggressively as he had previously done with Reinach’s? Again, from Loisy’s correspondence with Cumont, it is clear that he suffered from the lack of recognition his work received from prestigious French institutions such as the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, which he often sneeringly called the “Comédie.”²¹³ How else than by personal sympathy can we explain that he accepted to have his honorary Jubilé (1927, infra) organized by Couchoud, and that he agreed to collaborate with Couchoud’s book series? Except for a critical review of Couchoud’s work in 1924,²¹⁴ Loisy did little to avoid association with Couchoud’s radical school during the 1920s. Earlier in this chapter, we have seen how the strong bipolarization in the French study of religion made it difficult for Loisy to be seen as an independent scholar. Not reacting could easily turn him into an ally of Couchoud in the public opinion, and it did.²¹⁵

 See the index of Lannoy, Bonnet, and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, II, for a full overview of these letters, and our historiographical introduction in volume I.  See, for a good example, Lannoy, Bonnet, and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 191 (letter 179).  In this review, Loisy explained that he had much personal sympathy for the author. Because of that, and thinking that nobody would take Couchoud seriously anyway, he had first decided to keep silent. But unexpectedly, Couchoud’s thesis received a lot of public attention, which made Loisy change his mind. Whatever reason he personally adduced for writing the review after all, it is quite clear that the unexpected attention for the Christ Myth theory made him fear for his own reputation. Alfred Loisy, “Cr. Couchoud, Le Mystère de Jésus,” Revue critique d’histoire et de littérature 15 November (1924): 447– 452, at p. 452: “M. C. étant un des hommes auxquels je veux le plus de bien, je m’étais résolu à n’en point parler, persuadé qu’elle [i. e., Couchoud’s theory] tomberait toute seule. La grande publicité qu’on essaie de lui faire maintenant m’oblige à dire aux lecteurs de la Revue Critique pourquoi je suis moins optimiste que M. C. touchant l’avenir de sa découverte.”  The letters of Couchoud to Loisy are preserved at the Bibliothèque nationale de France: BnF, ms. NAF 15651, f. 14– 50 (1920 – 1938). We have been unable to find any letters of Loisy to Couchoud.

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Much more importantly than the unique insight in Loisy’s complex psychology, his and Cumont’s many letters on the mythologists reveal to us how Couchoud’s writings raised debates on professionalism among the different scholars who were active in the field of history of religions. For Loisy, professionalism was mainly a question of historical methodology, and to drive this point home, he drew an interesting parallel between mythologists and sociologists. With his usual dry sense of humor, he wrote to Cumont that Couchoud’s work had better cut back on the compliments addressed to him and on the historical stupidities it contained. Even if they were geniuses, he wrote to Cumont, mythologists were not good historical critics. And in that sense, he ironically but meaningfully added, mythologists were not much different from sociologists, who were all geniuses, too. Unfortunate “peelers of texts” (“éplucheurs de textes”), like himself and Cumont, he argued, were no more than old idiots.²¹⁶ Loisy’s negative references to the school of Durkheim—with which he actually had more than just one affinity—was certainly not a coincidence. In our second chapter, we have seen that Cumont was very critical of the Durkheimians, for scientific and for ideological reasons.²¹⁷ It is important to mention that almost all of the letters Cumont and Loisy wrote about Couchoud, are to be situated against the backdrop of Loisy’s Jubilé which took place at the Collége de France in April 1927. Elsewhere, we have analyzed these letters in great detail and studied the scientific-disciplinary and ideological stakes of the Jubilé. ²¹⁸ Here we want to briefly summarize how the correspondence reveals what an internationally reputed professional like Cumont considered to be the main pitfall of the mythologists, and what exactly he regarded as the distinctive features of history of religions as a scientific discipline. But first, it is necessary to provide some more background information about the Jubilé.

 Letter of Loisy to Cumont, May 5, 1923; Lannoy, Bonnet, and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 347 (letter 268): “Couchoud aurait mieux fait de ne pas m’adresser tant de compliments et de dire un peu moins d’inepties. On ne s’improvise pas critique et historien, quand même on aurait du génie. Car les mythologues sont tous comme les sociologues de l’école Durkheim, ils ont tous du génie. Nous autres, infortunés éplucheurs de textes, nous ne sommes que de vieilles ganaches.”  See supra, chapter 2 (2.4.2).  Lannoy, “Le Jubilé Loisy de 1927,” and Lannoy, “Le Congrès d’histoire du christianisme.” For more details about the conference and its stakes, I kindly refer the interested reader to these two articles.

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After WWI, international meetings in the field of religious studies were resumed only with great difficulty.²¹⁹ At about the same time as attempts were made to revive the international series of Congrès d’histoire des religions,²²⁰ Couchoud and other loyal followers of Loisy’s lectures at the Collège decided to organize an international conference in honor of his 70th birthday. The honorary conference received the official title of Congrès d’histoire du christianisme but was also named Jubilé Loisy in press. Since his early career, history of Christianity had been the center of Loisy’s scientific interests, which certainly explains the title. But still, the choice for this particular title may be perceived as somewhat peculiar, as it was the honorary conference of the Collége de France professor of histoire des religions. In the highly polemical climate that reigned after the Separation Law of 1905 and was still very much alive around the time of Loisy’s election, this title would have been quite unthinkable. In a way, one could say that the Congrès d’histoire du christianisme title is the perfect proof that the fears of Loisy’s anticlerical opponents had been very much grounded in 1909. Starting from 1915 – 1916, it was, indeed, histoire du christianisme and not histoire des religions that was being taught at the Collégé. However, we will immediately see that for Loisy, Cumont, and probably several other contemporary scholars, these terms didn’t have the same meaning they have for us today. It is instructive to point out that the members of the honorary committee of the Congrès d’histoire du christianisme—who had been invited after consultation with Loisy—included historians of Christianity like Adolf von Harnack, but also scholars like Frazer, Raffaelle Pettazzoni, and Cumont himself who self-identified as historians of religions, and decisively not as historians of Christianity.²²¹ The Jubilé not only celebrated Loisy’s long career, it also marked the end of his activities at the Collége de France. Although Loisy only retired in 1932, he gave his last lecture in 1927, after which he let himself be replaced by Jean Baruzi

 On this topic, see Corinne Bonnet and Annelies Lannoy, “‘Elle est tombée Babylone’: reconfigurations du champ disciplinaire des religions durant et après 1914– 1918,” Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines 33 (2018): 59 – 85.  The Congrès d’histoire des religions finally took place in 1928 (in Lund), which made Loisy’s Jubilé the first meeting in the field of religious studies in which several German scholars participated. On these series of conferences: Molendijk, “Les premiers congrès d’histoire des religions.”  In his letter of February 13, 1926, Cumont explained to Loisy that he felt underqualified (“peu qualifié”) to be member of the honorary committee, as he had mostly focused on “pagan studies” (“études païennes”). While this is false modesty on behalf of Cumont—who had published frequently on the history of Christianity and had excellent knowledge of early Christian and Medieval literature—it is clear from Cumont’s words that the title of the Congrès raised problems. Lannoy, Bonnet, Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 348 (letter 306).

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(1881– 1953), a French expert in Christian mysticism.²²² In Spring 1926, when Couchoud started the organization of the conference, no substitute (“suppléant”) had been appointed yet. Soon after having consented to be member of the honorary committee, Cumont wrote to Loisy to express his concerns about Couchoud’s motives for organizing the Congrès d’histoire du christianisme. A first concern was that Couchoud himself was actually looking to substitute Loisy at the Collége, and that he only organized the conference to win favor of Loisy. When Loisy finally decided upon Jean Baruzi in July 1926, Cumont wrote that he couldn’t have made a better decision. Pour le choix de votre suppléant vous avez entièrement raison. Parmi les mythologues et leurs amis il a causé une déception qui n’était pas purement scientifique. Inde irae. Mais des quelques conversations que je viens d’avoir à ce sujet, il résulte qu’en dehors de ce petit groupe, vous êtes généralement approuvé et l’on s’accorde à reconnaître les mérites de Baruzi et sa haute valeur intellectuelle et morale.²²³

For a correct interpretation of this letter, it should be added that Cumont typically expressed his own opinions by putting them in the mouth of unspecified others (“on”). We especially want to draw attention to Cumont’s appraisal for Baruzi’s intellectual and moral qualities (“sa haute valeur intellectuelle et morale”), and his indirect suggestion that he found those qualities lacking in the mythologists. What those moral qualities exactly entailed, is not clear. The simple fact that Baruzi was no mythologist, may have sufficed for Cumont to assign those qualities to him. If this conjecture is true, Cumont’s evaluation of the mythologists was different from Loisy’s, for whom their main shortcoming was methodological. The second, more important concern Cumont expressed to Loisy, was based on a rumor that apparently circulated among French academic milieus. The rumor was that Couchoud only organized the conference to propagate his Christ Myth theory and claim authority for it by association with Loisy.²²⁴ Loisy shared this concern with Cumont, but at the same time he was noticeably more irritated about the scholars who had started and spread those rumors. He regarded their attempts to vilify Couchoud only as a way to get to himself, and to boycott his conference. Without calling these scholars by their names, he considered the instigators of the rumors to be the very same “respectable” academics who had never given him any academic recognition. While Loisy finally retained his con On Jean Baruzi: Lannoy, Bonnet, and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, II, 517.  Cumont to Loisy, 10 July 1926; Lannoy, Bonnet, and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 355 (letter 313).  For all letters here mentioned, we refer to Lannoy, “Le Jubilé Loisy de 1927,” 451– 452.

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fidence in Couchoud’s good intentions, Cumont did not. He decided to withdraw from the committee. The letters with which he communicated this decision to Loisy and to Couchoud, have both been preserved. In his letter to Loisy, Cumont not only blamed the mythologists for their deficient historical method, but he also—and even more so—condemned the putatively combative anticlericalism of Couchoud. There are several other letters where Cumont insisted on this second point, explaining that independent spirits (“esprits libres”) like himself refused to have anything to do with a conference from which religious—Catholic and Protestant—scholars would feel excluded because of its anticlerical organizers. Cumont’s concern for religious scholars is somewhat strange, because he always defended a strictly scientific, unbiased study of religion. Moreover, his suspicions turned out to be wrong, because several Protestant and Catholic scholars attended the conference. In his letter to Couchoud, of which a draft has been preserved in his personal archives, Cumont provided a more diplomatic explanation for his decision to withdraw. He here included a remarkable distinction between the disciplines of history of Christianity and history of religions, which further explains his concern for the absence of religious scholars: L’histoire des religions [deleted: est une science laïque] elle est née en dehors des églises et l’on comprend qu’on réunisse en un Congrès purement laïc les savants qui s’en occupent. Mais les neuf dixièmes au moins des érudits qui [deleted: applique leur érudition] qui se consacrent à l’histoire du christianisme [deleted: de l’Église] sont des catholiques ou des protestants orthodoxes : [deleted: ils ne viendront], ni les uns ni les autres [deleted: pour des mo] ne se rendront à la réunion [deleted: à une réunion telle que celle] que vous projetez. Ou bien vous n’aurez qu’un petit nombre d’adhérents et votre Congrès sera un simulacre de Congrès, ou [deleted: ce qui] pire encore, vous y admettrez des gens peu qualifiés comme savants et ce Congrès prendra l’allure d’une simple manifestation anticléricale.²²⁵

Cumont obviously showed himself a fine diplomat as he didn’t say anything about his personal mistrust of Couchoud’s opportunistic motives. Underneath the strongly rhetorical style of the letter, we find a most interesting point being made. History of religions, Cumont argued, was “born outside of the churches” (“née en dehors des églises”), and a conference in history of religions therefore logically united purely secular scholars. By contrast, Cumont seemed to suggest, no such standards could be asked of a conference in history of Christi-

 Cumont to Couchoud, draft letter attached to the reply of Couchoud to Cumont (of 27 September 1926), Academia Belgica in Rome, Cumont archives, cote 8127 XL. See also Lannoy, “Le Congrès d’histoire du christianisme,” 451.

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anity, where the majority of the scholars was putatively religious (“sont des catholiques ou des protestants orthodoxes”). A rationalist meeting in the history of Christianity, Cumont implied, would fail because it would only attract a minority of qualified secular scholars, or, worse, it would attract people (like Couchoud himself, Cumont implied) who were no qualified scholars at all (“des gens peu qualifiés comme savants”). One wonders what Loisy would have thought of these strong dichotomies, but given his strong commitment to a secular and unbiased history of Christianity, we can make an educated guess. Cumont’s words, however, do seem to confirm that the academic field of history of religions was first and foremost defined by its secular, non-theological character, and less so by its topic of inquiry, or even by its comparative methodology. In this regard, they make it more understandable to a modern reader why Loisy’s decision to exclusively study the history of Christianity since 1915 – 1916 was for him not incompatible with his chair of history of religions, because he did believe this research to be purely secular. Without wanting to restrict the whole contemporary field of history of religions to the activities of Loisy at the Collége, his move away from the comparative method may have had a particular hand in raising the perception that history of religions actually was a “non-existing discipline.” After his official retirement in 1932, Loisy explained to Cumont that many at the Collège were in favor of the abolition of his chair, adducing exactly this reason.²²⁶ In 1938, for reasons not only unknown to us but also to Couchoud himself, Loisy published a destructive refutation of Couchoud’s new book Jésus le dieu fait homme (1937).²²⁷ Maybe Loisy wanted to get rid of his common association with the mythologists since after his Jubilé ? While we need to leave this question unanswered, this chapter has hopefully demonstrated that the importance of the Christ Myth theory for Loisy’s earlier development during the 1910s cannot be overlooked. Now that we know how he explained the origin of myth, it is time to tackle the logical next question: what about the origin of ritual?

 See Lannoy, Bonnet, Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 411 (letter 371, 2 August 1932): “D’aucuns même, et de fort considérables, vont presqu’à dire que l’histoire des religions est une discipline inexistante.” In the end, Loisy’s chair was transformed into a chair of “Histoire des civilisations modernes” for Lucien Febvre. But in January 1933, the chair of “Épigraphie et antiquités grecques” was transformed into a new chair of “Histoire des religions,” and assigned to Jean Baruzi who held it until 1951. For more information on the chair: Lannoy, Bonnet, Praet, Mon cher Mithra, II, 477.  Lannoy, Bonnet and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, II, 510 and 511, where a letter is quoted of Couchoud to Loisy, which shows that Couchoud himself was surprised by the aggresive tone of Loisy’s volume.

5 Back to the Future: The Religion of Humanity and the History of Sacrifice In our previous chapter we have investigated Loisy’s theory of myth and seen how he explained the central myths of the pagan mystery cults and Christianity as elaborations and explanations of preceding rituals. Even if he argued that belief in myth was by no means of peripheral concern to the worshipper, Loisy’s theory of myth as a product of religion clearly left a much more fundamental question about religion unanswered: why and how did the rituals themselves come into being? The present chapter’s quest for the answer to those questions leads us to the very heart of his historical and philosophical scholarship of religion. Ever since the first development of his evolutionary philosophy of religious history in the 1890s, he had considered ritual to be the most fundamental expression and manifestation of the spirit of religion.¹ His quest for the origin of ritual is inextricably intertwined with that for the origin of religion itself, although it will become clear that the two questions do not completely overlap for Loisy. In no other part of his scientific oeuvre, perhaps, is his historical research more intimately entangled with his ubiquitous philosophical concerns than in his comparative research of sacrifice. For Loisy, as for many other contemporary scholars of religion, the ritual of all rituals was, indeed, sacrifice.² Not incidentally, this fifth and final chapter on his reflections about the nature, function, and development of sacrifice, will unite many of the key issues discussed in the previous chapters. Not only his deeply evolutionary and “continu-

 Loisy, La Crise de la foi, especially 88 – 89.  Loisy, Mémoires, III, 100 on his comparative research program: “Je commençais par les sacrifices, les rites étant, dans toutes les religions, l’élément le plus consistant, le plus durable, celui où se reconnaît le mieux l’esprit de chaque religion, et le sacrifice ayant été au premier plan de tous les rituels dans les religions de l’antiquité.” Loisy’s study of sacrifice went, however, far beyond the study of Antiquity. He also paid substantial attention to the primitive tribes of his own day, which he believed to be representative for the beginnings of religion at the dawn of humanity. In his Essai historique sur le sacrifice, 16 Loisy similarly wrote: “Une histoire complète du sacrifice serait presque une histoire du culte religieux dans l’humanité.” A similar point of view was expressed by Salomon Reinach, “La théorie du sacrifice,” in Cultes, mythes et religions (Leroux: Paris, 1905), 96: “Le sacrifice est le centre de tous les cultes.” For more context, see especially Strenski, Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice, 28, who importantly clarified: “The nineteenth-century founders of the study of religion assumed that the study of sacrifice was important because it was a privileged way to understand the ‘real’ nature of religion […], or that it demonstrated human ritual behavior in an exemplary way.” We will return to the difficult conceptual distinction between ritual and sacrifice in 5.3.1.1. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110584356-009

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ous” understanding of history, but also his interpretation of magic, and his moral theory of religion will be our guiding threads.³ Loisy started his comparative research program on sacrifice immediately after his appointment at the Collége de France in 1909.⁴ He began his travels through time and space with the sacrificial rites of ancient Judaism, and ended his investigations in 1915 – 1916 with the study of the cults of the “noncivilized.” Incidentally, he thus investigated the purportedly most primitive forms of religion at a moment when the putative superiority of European civilization became less than self-evident. In the years between 1909 and 1916, he had concentrated on the religions of Babylonia, Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome, the ancient mystery cults and Christianity, followed by the religions of India, China, and America (especially Mexico), each time presenting his observations and major conclusions in his lectures at the Collége. ⁵ The synthetizing monograph with his main conclusions, entitled Essai historique sur le sacrifice,⁶ was written between late 1915 and early 1916, but only got published in 1920 due to the wartime mobilization of Loisy’s publisher Émile Nourry.⁷ Embittered by the overall meagre attention his previous publications had received from the representatives of the science laïque—which basically left him with only the hostile reactions of conservative religious voices—, Loisy was skeptical about the reception of his Essai, all the more so because he believed that its conclusions were far from “orthodox.”⁸

 See supra, chapter 3, for Loisy’s views on magic (3.3.1) and his religion of humanity concept (3.3.4).  See supra, chapter 3, 3.1 for his programmatic inaugural speech of 1909.  For the exact sequence of the studied religions, Renée Koch-Piettre, “Loisy et ses études sur le sacrifice,” Alfred Loisy cent ans après. Autour d’un petit livre, eds. François Laplanche, Ilaria Biagioli, and Claude Langlois (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 73; Marc Kolakowski, Agnes A. Nagy, and Francesca Prescendi, “L’Essai historique sur le sacrifice d’Alfred Loisy: la confession de foi d’un humaniste,” in Amsler, ed., Quelle place pour Alfred Loisy, 98.  The choice for this particular title may have been motivated by the author’s desire to engage in discussion with Hubert and Mauss’s Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice, where the word historique is obviously missing. The work of the French sociological school is a crucial context for Loisy’s theory of sacrifice, as will become clear further on (especially 5.3.1.2 and 5.3.1.3).  Loisy also considered his MPMC (1919) as a part of his sacrifice research, which it was, but only partially, because it offered a complete synthesis on the ritual and theological origins of Christianity, and included much exegetical work.  See the letter Loisy wrote to Cumont on April 25, 1920; Lannoy, Bonnet, and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 251 (letter 222). In 1928, Loisy finally received his long-desired academic recognition when the Essai was awarded the prestigious Prix Lefèvre-Deumier by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres.

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From his private correspondence, it is nevertheless abundantly clear that he personally attached great importance to this volume. In a letter to Cumont, he explained that its publication was much more important and urgent than that of his volume on the ancient mystery cults, which would eventually come out one year before the Essai. ⁹ And in his Mémoires, he wrote that never in his entire life, had he learned more on religion than from his comparative study of sacrifice at the Collège. ¹⁰ That statement is a significant one, especially when one takes into account that this comparative research took him only six, maybe seven years at the very most, in what was an exceptionally long career of over fifty years. On the other hand, though, it should be noted that Loisy’s scholarly interest in the Eucharist, and in the Christian cult more generally, dated all the way back to the 1890s. In our analysis of L’Évangile et l’Église we have uncovered the first traces of a cautiously comparative understanding of the Eucharist.¹¹ Again in his Mémoires, Loisy retrospectively explained that it had always been his firm intention to eventually use his deeper comparative understanding of sacrifice to revisit the origins of the Eucharist.¹² As Renée Koch-Piettre very well pointed out in her analysis of the Essai, this intention resulted in an almost obsessional coming back to the question of the Eucharist throughout this entire work.¹³ The main aim of this chapter is to investigate Loisy’s theory and historiography of sacrifice as articulated in his Essai historique sur le sacrifice. To this central aim, though, a second one should immediately be added. It is impossible to understand the explicit and implicit message of the Essai, without paying substantial attention to Loisy’s contemporary philosophical work. At about the same time as he finished the Essai, Loisy began writing La Religion (1917), his eighth petit livre rouge. This philosophical essay offered his now fully developed

 Loisy to Cumont, August 24, 1919; Lannoy, Bonnet, and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 228 (letter 208).  Loisy, Mémoires, III, 276, where he at the same time stressed the originality of his volume: “Cependant je ne crois pas qu’aucune des études que j’ai poursuivies au cours de ma vie m’ait appris autant que celle-là, et l’on me persuadera difficilement que je n’ai pas fait alors autre chose qu’apprendre ce que tout le monde savait, excepté moi.”  See chapter 1 (1.3.2).  Loisy, Mémoires, III, 102. Loisy’s most elaborated discussion of the Eucharist and the early Christian cult will follow in La Naissance du Christianisme (Paris: Nourry, 1933), 275 – 314. This volume which largely repeated the insights of MPMC, falls outside our scope. On its content, Simon C. Mimouni, “Alfred Loisy et la ‘naissance du christianisme’,” in Alfred Loisy cent ans après. Autour d’un petit livre, eds. François Laplanche, Ilaria Biagioli, and Claude Langlois (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 121– 130.  Koch-Piettre, “Loisy et ses études sur le sacrifice,” 73.

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theory of religion as an innate mystical intuition of a moral ideal, and his interpretation of the history of religions as the growing consciousness of this ideal.¹⁴ These are the very same ideas that subtly and less subtly underpinned his historiography and theory of ritual sacrifice. This chapter will, however, begin with a few significant testimonies from Loisy’s private correspondence with Cumont, which serves as a window into the poignant historical context in which both his philosophy of religion and historiography of sacrifice were grounded. The unseen brutality of the industrialscale massacres during WWI plunged the typical 19th and early 20th century belief in the progressive evolution of mankind in deep crisis. And, as in many other scientific disciplines, the “mobilization of intellect” left deep marks in the field of the study of religion.¹⁵ Longstanding disputes between Catholic and Protestant scholars over the true origins and essence of Christianity acquired a heavily nationalistic significance, as the Great War was explicitly legitimized with religious rhetoric by all belligerent nations. International scientific networks in the field of religious studies got disrupted, philosophies of religious history were revised, and histories of religions rewritten. This was no different for Loisy, but still an important caveat is in order. Using WWI as the sole explanation for his specific views on sacrifice, and on religion more generally, between roughly 1914– 1920, is a pitfall to be avoided. First of all, it should be emphasized that several of the views for which it is temptingly attractive to ascribe them to the war context, had actually taken root in his mind since well before 1914. Let us take the example of his ideas on the religion

 Loisy will keep on elaborating his moral philosophy of religion in several later writings, which will be left out of consideration here because they largely lack the historical-religious substantiation that is central to La Religion. Alfred Loisy, La Paix des nations et la Religion de l’avenir (Paris: Nourry, 1919); Alfred Loisy, De la discipline intellectuelle (Paris: Nourry, 1919); Alfred Loisy, La Morale humaine (Paris: Nourry, 1923).  Research literature on the mobilization of intellect during WWI is vast. Relevant references on the field of religious studies will be provided infra. The following studies with a more general perspective have been especially useful for writing the present chapter: Martha Hanna, The Mobilization of Intellect: French Scholars and Writers During the Great War (Cambridge Mass.–London: Harvard University Press, 1996); Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “German Artists, Writers and Intellectuals and the Meaning of War, 1914– 1918,” in State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War, ed. John Horne (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997), 21– 38; Anne Rasmussen, “Science and Technology,” in A Companion to World War I, ed. John Horne (Malden–Oxford: Wiley–Blackwell, 2012), 307– 322, and Christophe Prochasson, “Intellectuals and Writers,” in A Companion to World War I, ed. John Horne (Malden–Oxford: Wiley–Blackwell, 2012), 323 – 337; Anne Rasmussen, “Mobilising Minds,” in The Cambridge History of the First World War, ed. Jay Winter (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014), 390 – 417.

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of humanity. While it cannot be denied that Loisy further developed and substantiated his religion of humanity theory under influence of the war, C.J.T. Talar has rightly pointed out that its very first roots can be dated all the way back to his Modernist interpretation of the Catholic Church as a moral force.¹⁶ With regard to his much later, post-Christian conception of this religion of humanity, our third chapter has shown that it was first developed in reaction against Reinach’s controversial theory of religion, right after his election in 1909. Secondly, it is of paramount importance to point out that Loisy’s comparative investigations of sacrifice especially engaged in discussion with multifarious French and international scholarly traditions which, themselves, dated back to the (late) 19th century. These included the conservative Catholic-theological paradigms in which he had been educated at the Institut Catholique; the symbolical-spiritual LiberalProtestant theories of his predecessors at the Collége de France, but most of all Loisy wanted to formulate an answer to the seminal work done by the sociological school of Durkheim, and the English anthropological school of Tylor, Robertson Smith, and Frazer. These traditions and their cultural-religious contexts are just as important as the wartime background to understand what Loisy was really saying with his theory of sacrifice. It is the great merit of the American scholar Ivan Strenski to have studied public and academic discourse on ritual and moral sacrifice in 19th and early 20th century France in two important monographs: Contesting Sacrifice: Religion, Nationalism and Social Thought (2002), and Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice (2003).¹⁷ Especially the latter volume, which particularly focuses on the history of academic scholarship, has been immensely helpful for developing the analyses presented in this chapter. Strenski’s Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice meticulously reconstructs the scientific, cultural, political, and religious-ideological background against which the first scientific theory of ritual sacrifice saw daylight, that is, the seminal Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice (1898) of Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss.¹⁸ Their Essai is Strenski’s focal point, but it is extensively compared to, and contrasted with the views of the Liberal Protestants of the Fifth Section of the École pratique des Hautes Études and to those of Modernist Catholic scholars, among whom Loisy receives

 C.J.T. Talar, “Alfred Loisy and the Great War,” in Roman Catholic Modernists confront the Great War, eds. C.J.T. Talar and Lawrence F. Barmann (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 20.  Ivan Strenski, Contesting Sacrifice: Religion, Nationalism and Social Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), and Theology and the first Theory of Sacrifice (Leiden: Brill, 2003).  We here use the English translation: Sacrifice: its Nature and Function, transl. W.D. Halls (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1964).

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special attention.¹⁹ Further in this introduction and chapter, we will discuss Strenski’s analysis of Loisy in more detail. But here it should already be pointed out that our own focus is not entirely the same as Strenski’s. Strenski is especially interested in the continuum that existed between scientific theories on ritual sacrifice and ideological-moral views on the role of civic sacrifice in French society. Whereas he seeks to evaluate to what extent scholarly discourses on ritual sacrifice also usefully served as a public discourse on the role of moral sacrifice in a wider metaphorical sense, our own scope is more narrowly focused on reconstructing and explaining Loisy’s theory on, and history of ritual sacrifice.²⁰ These historical views are rather succinctly analyzed in Strenski’s account of Loisy. Our aim is to complement his convincing but at times perhaps somewhat too generalizing analysis of Loisy’s thought by more detailed investigations of his Essai, and related published and private writings. To end this introduction, we want to draw attention to three important conclusions Strenski formulated about the French scholarly landscape, for these will serve as our focal points when analyzing Loisy’s views. (1) Strenski convincingly opposed the theoretical approach of the sociological school of Hubert, Mauss, and Durkheim himself, to the self-proclaimed strictly anti-theoretical historicism of leading French Liberal-Protestant academics like the Révilles, and of Modernist Catholics like Louis Duchesne and Loisy.²¹ Strenski conclusively showed that behind the putatively anti-theoretical approach of the latter two theologizing traditions lurked ideas on sacrifice that were based just as much on non-historical presuppositions as the sociological theory of the Durkheimians.²² (2) Strenski also focused attention on the confessional context of the scientific disputes on ritual sacrifice between Catholic Modernists and Liberal Protestants, which was inspired by their radically different theological interpretations of the Eucharist. French Liberal-Protestant scholars (like the Révilles or Auguste Sabatier) only regarded the Eucharist as a sacrifice in a purely symbolical

 For Strenski’s analysis of Loisy’s thought: Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice, 192– 219.  We certainly acknowledge that Loisy’s ideas on moral civil sacrifice are quintessential to an understanding of his theory of ritual sacrifice (infra, 5.2.3), but it is especially ritual sacrifice which we seek to understand here.  See chapter 2 (2.2.2) on the close relationship between Loisy’s historicism and that of the French Liberal Protestants.  The author reserves the term “theory” for the Durkheimians, while labelling the approaches of Protestants and Catholics as “theologizing,” but he is highly attentive to the ideological bias of the first, and to the scientific achievements of the second group of scholars. Strenski, Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice, 152.

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sense.²³ This specific interpretation of the Eucharist went hand in hand with a negative appreciation of ritual sacrifice in other religions, and it lead to a typically discontinuous history of religions, in which the Eucharist was radically cut off from all religions where ritual sacrifice was practiced.²⁴ Much in contrast, the Essai of Loisy is for Strenski a prime example of the Modernist-Catholic position. Here, the Eucharist is regarded as a real sacrificial ritual, and this interpretation goes accompanied with a continuous history of religions, of which the Eucharist is considered the climax.²⁵ Strenski was also correct to assert that Loisy’s entire theory of ritual sacrifice was, in fact, essentially Catholic in inspiration. In this chapter, however, we hope to show that it was much more than just that. Moreover, it seems as if Strenski is more or less unaware of the fact that Loisy vehemently criticized ritual sacrifice, both in non-Christian and Christian form. In this chapter we will show that his Essai is a plea for mankind to henceforth leave ritual sacrifice behind. (3) The third point we retain from Strenski is his central argument that scientific theories of ritual sacrifice can simply not be disentangled from what their architects thought about sacrifice in the civic realm, or put differently, on sacrifice understood in the general-metaphorical sense of a denial of personal interests for the sake of others. In 19th and early 20th century France, public and academic discourse on civic sacrifice was heavily loaded with patriotic fervor. Throughout the 19th century, Strenski argued, it was deeply influenced by conservative Catholic conceptions of sacrifice as a total self-denial, as the complete annihilation of the individual to expiate the sins of the nation.²⁶ Mostly concentrating on La Religion, Strenski rightly pointed out that such moral self-sacrifice was a central notion in Loisy’s future religion of humanity, and that his interpretation of the sacrifice of soldiers for France as the highest moral good, picked up on typically 19th century Catholic imagery and ideas. Especially important for our purposes is Strenski’s convincing claim that Loisy’s wartime philosophy of religion drew no categorical difference between ritual and civic sacrifice. The selfsacrifice of Christ ritually enacted in the Eucharist, and the self-sacrifice of the soldier on the battlefield were seen by him as two sides of the same coin. This

 For the views of the Révilles, Sabatier, and the other Liberal Protestants at the EPHE: Strenski, Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice, 69 – 133 (especially 85 – 93), and passim.  For the uneasiness of the French Protestants with regard to Robertson Smith’s theory on sacrificial totemism, Strenski, Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice, 99 – 101.  In the previous chapters we have had ample opportunity to analyze Loisy’s focus on continuous history. See chapter 1, 3, and 4. See also Strenski, Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice, 214– 216.  Strenski, Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice, 32– 49.

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point is very much congruent with what we know from our third chapter about Loisy’s belief in the inextricable entanglement of religion and morality. The only problem with Strenski’s account is, however, that it draws a remarkably sharp contrast between the historical Essai and the philosophical volume La Religion, describing the latter, theoretical work as a later development, and break away from the former, supposedly historicist volume.²⁷ An important aim of our chapter, then, is to show that the two viewpoints were mutually constitutive and contemporary, rather than representing a shift. In Loisy’s thought intense cross-fertilization took place between his historical and philosophical insights. Even if he eagerly presented his historical work as strictly historicist, he constantly wavered between historicist and meta-historical approaches to religion. With his Essai, Loisy wrote a history of sacrifice that very well matched, and may even have served to substantiate his perfectly contemporary philosophical-religious ideas about the role of moral sacrifice in society.

5.1 The War: Nationalist Christianities and the Universal Religion of Humanity The Great War made a profound impression on Loisy’s personal life, even if, unlike many other families, he didn’t suffer any losses of family members, or material losses.²⁸ His house in Ceffonds, in the Haute-Marne region, was situated at less than 15 km from the south-eastern frontline during the first Battle of the Marne in September 1914.²⁹ In his Mémoires and correspondence, Loisy wrote that he had seen large streams of refugees passing through. Among the most

 Strenski, Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice, 213 – 214.  In the past decade, several studies have been published on the impact of the Great War on Loisy’s philosophical and historical ideas: Talar, “Alfred Loisy and the Great War”; Corinne Bonnet and Annelies Lannoy, “Penser les religions anciennes et la ‘religion de l’humanité’ au début du XXe siècle. Le dialogue Loisy—Cumont,” RHR 234, 4 (2017): 797– 822; Lannoy and Bonnet, “Narrating the Past and the Future,” 175 – 179; Bonnet and Lannoy, “‘Elle est tombée Babylone’.” In November 2018, an entire conference was organized on Loisy and the Great War, by the Société internationale d’études sur Alfred Loisy, in Châlons-en-Champagne (close to Loisy’s place of birth).  See especially Loisy’s letter to Cumont of February 9, 1915, which is the reply to Cumont’s letter after a long silence since July 1914; Lannoy, Bonnet, and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 97 (letter 110). See also Loisy, Mémoires, III, 288. Somewhere in between Autumn 1915 and Spring 1916, his house was confiscated by the French army, as Loisy wrote in a letter to Cumont of July 11, 1916; Lannoy, Bonnet, and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 134 (letter 138). In this letter, he wrote without a hint of irony that upon his return, he had found his hen house transformed into a prison.

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traumatizing events for him personally, was without doubt the loss of his friends René Duchamp de Lageneste (1890 – 1914) and Ernest-Charles Babut (1875 – 1916), who both died on the battlefield. The first was a young student and regular correspondent of Loisy since 1909,³⁰ the second an expert in early Christianity and close collaborator on his Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses. ³¹ Even if his own family was spared from personal tragedies, Loisy was deeply moved by those of others. Like many other French and international intellectuals, he felt a strong responsibility to somehow make sense of the war, patriotically and religiously, and to take up the challenge which the German scholarly world had thrown before them when it legitimized the war as a defense of not only German, but European Kultur at large (cf. 5.1.1, for the appeal “To the cultural world!”). It is difficult to overemphasize the impact of WWI on Loisy’s intellectual activities.³² It immediately shows in the drastic increase of his philosophical writings, including: Guerre et religion (1915, 1915²), Mors et vita (1916, 1917²), La Religion (1917, 1924²), La Paix des nations et la religion de l’avenir (1919), De la discipline intellectuelle (1919), and La Morale humaine (1923, 1928²). It is also clear from the no less than three substantial chapters devoted to the war in his Mémoires, where he meticulously described the development of his philosophy of war and peace, and kept track of the views of others.³³ Less well-known, but equally revealing are the hundreds of wartime newspaper clippings and journal articles which he kept in his private archives.³⁴ But perhaps the most intimate evidence of how deeply the war and the difficult establishment of post-war peace dominated his thoughts and infiltrated both his philosophical ideas and history writing, is his correspondence with Cumont. With a significant increase in frequency between 1915 – 1920,

 See Loisy, Mémoires, III, 282 on Lageneste. The publication of the lively correspondence between Loisy and Lageneste is currently in preparation by Pierre-Eugène Leroy. For the work of Babut, see Sylvain J.G. Sanchez, “Ernest-Charles Babut (1875 – 1916). Un spécialiste oublié du christianisme ancien,” Études théologiques et religieuses 87 (2012): 219 – 230.  Loisy mourned their losses in his petit livre rouge, Mors et vita (Paris: Nourry, 1916), 44– 46 (Babut), and 45 – 47 (Lageneste); second edition of 1917: 50 – 51 (Babut), and 51– 53 (Lageneste). See also his article “À nos morts,” RHLR NS 6 (1920): 5 – 6. In these writings he also mentioned the loss of the French priest Louis Riest, to whom he was, however, less close. See also Lannoy, Bonnet, and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, II, 194.  For more information on Loisy’s family during the war: C.J.T. Talar, “Alfred Loisy and the Great War,” 17.  Loisy, Mémoires, III, 288 – 376.  These are currently preserved in his archives at the Bibliothèque d’histoire des religions of the Sorbonne. Loisy’s private archives at the Sorbonne are, as yet, unclassified.

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the letters show that Cumont and Loisy were perspicuous observers and sagacious commentators of the war in all its political, military, and cultural complexities. Yet, as can be expected from two scholars of religion, it was especially the religious-intellectual appropriations of the dominant nationalist interests which retained their attention. Among a great multitude of remarks and observations, there are two broad themes which frequently recurred in these letters, and are of great relevance for our purposes: (a) the mobilization of Christian, and more specifically Lutheran religion by eminent German, Liberal-Protestant colleagues in the field of history of Christianity, and (b) the moral bankruptcy of the Catholic Church, and of the papal institution more particularly. Indignation over these two issues contributed a lot to the significant shift which took place in Loisy’s appreciation of the position of Christianity in his overall history of religions. Before moving on to his philosophy of religious history as exposed in La Religion (1917), these issues therefore require some more attention.

5.1.1 The Failures of Christianity: Protestant and Catholic At the outbreak of the war, the correspondence between Cumont and Loisy came to a complete stop between Summer 1914 and February 1915.³⁵ In the very first letter Loisy thereafter wrote to Cumont, no time was wasted in sharing his thoughts on the battle of ideas that was being fought alongside the military atrocities. Loisy carefully suggested his intention to develop a philosophy of contemporary history that was “more true, more serious, more free, and better” (“une philosophie de la même histoire, plus vraie, plus sérieuse, plus libre et meilleure”) than the nationalist philosophies of that same history which were being proposed by the German scholars in defense of their Kultur. This philosophical project, he believed, would be able to provide guidance in the turbulent present, and it could prepare the minds for “the resumption of the intellectual and scientific relations after the war” (“la reprise des relations intellectuelles et scientifiques après la guerre”): En voyant comment les savants allemands se groupent pour soutenir l’esprit national et défendre la cause de leur Kultur, je n’ai pas pu m’empêcher de penser, je pense encore qu’il y aurait opportunité à suivre leur travail et à montrer les défauts de leur thèse. Ces gens-là

 In this brief examination of the Loisy-Cumont correspondence, our focus is entirely on Loisy. For a detailed analysis of the impact of the War on Cumont’s life, work, and extensive network of German scholars: Bonnet, Le “Grand atelier de la science”, 285 – 360.

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mènent la bataille d’idées aussi méthodiquement—et guère plus scrupuleusement—que l’autre. Mon idée aurait été d’opposer à leur philosophie de l’histoire contemporaine, une philosophie de la même histoire, plus vraie, plus sérieuse, plus libre et meilleure. J’y voyais double avantage, orienter et soutenir les esprits dans le présent, préparer les reconstructions de l’avenir, la reprise des relations intellectuelles et scientifiques après la guerre.³⁶

When formulating these accusations against his German colleagues, Loisy doubtlessly had in mind the appeal “To the cultural world!” (“An die Kulturwelt!”), otherwise called the “Manifesto of the 93,” which was issued on October 4, 1914, and signed by 93 leading German artists and scientists.³⁷ Translated in 14 languages, sent off in thousands of copies to the neutral countries, and published widely in international press, this text revealed the strong alliance between German Kultur, militarism, and nationalist expansionism (“The German Army and the German people are one”³⁸). The text famously adduced a series of arguments in defense of the German invasion of Belgium (especially the destruction of Leuven), and spread the myth of the Belgian Franktireurkrieg. It refuted the accusations that circulated about the atrocities committed by the German army, and the severe violations of international laws. Some days later, on October 16, the “Declaration of university teachers of the German Empire” (“Erklärung der Hochschullehrer des Deutschen Reiches”) was issued, signed by over 3000 university teachers, and conveying a similar message of a sacred union between German science and nation.³⁹ Both documents produced a shock effect in the international scholarly community. Many European scholars of religion had had their training in Germany and/or were substantially influenced by its leading biblical exegesis, theology, philology, philosophy, Altertums-

 Loisy to Cumont, February 9, 1915; Lannoy, Bonnet, and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 97– 98 (letter 110).  On this Manifesto, see especially Jürgen and Wolfgang Von Ungern–Sternberg, Der Aufruf “An die Kulturwelt!” Das Manifest der 93 and die Anfänge der Kriegspropaganda im Ersten Weltkrieg (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2013); Jürgen von Ungern-Sternberg, “Les conséquences de la guerre sur la communauté scientifique en Europe,” in Autour de 1914 – 1918: nouvelles figures de la pensée. Sciences, art et lettres, ed. Antoine Compagnon (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2015), 59 – 84.  We quote from the English translation by Bernhard vom Brocke, “‘Scholarship and Militarism’: The Appeal of 93 ‘to the Civilized World!”, available at the website German History in Documents and Images. URL: http://ghdi.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=938.  One of the initiators of this Erklärung was the classical philologist, and close acquaintance of Cumont, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, who also signed the earlier Manifesto. On the Erklärung: Trude Maurer, “Universitas militans. Von der Militarisierung der deutschen Universität im späten Kaiserreich zur Rechtfertigung des Militarismus im Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Kollegen— Kommilitonen—Kämpfer. Europäische Universitäten im Ersten Weltkrieg, ed. Trude Maurer (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2006), 67– 68.

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wissenschaft, or one of the many other branches of the influential German Kulturwissenschaft. ⁴⁰ Like many of these scholars, Loisy had to come to terms with an intellectual legacy that was now perceived of as particularly problematic.⁴¹ Among the prominent signers of the internationally condemned German propaganda texts, were two scholars of religion, with whose work Loisy was more than intimately acquainted: Adolf von Harnack and Adolf Deissmann.⁴² A colleague of Harnack in Berlin, Deissmann was a prominent Liberal-Protestant theologian and esteemed historian of Christianity, who authored several important studies, such as Licht vom Osten (1908) on the history of New Testament language and religion.⁴³ In his early wartime writings, he adopted a passionately belligerent rhetoric and believed that the Germans were waging a “Heilige Krieg,”⁴⁴ but it should immediately be added that as the war progressed, Deissmann became a leading force in inter-Protestant solidarity and the Christian ecumenical movement.⁴⁵ Not quite unsurprisingly, however, it was especially

 For biblical scholarship and theology, see most recently the many fascinating contributions to Andrew Mein, Nathan MacDonald, and Matthew A. Collins, eds., The First World War and the Mobilization of Biblical Scholarship (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2019), and to Joachim Negel and Karl Pinggéra, eds., Urkatastrophe. Die Erfahrung des Krieges 1914 – 1918 im Spiegel zeitgenössischer Theologie (Freiburg: Herder, 2016).  It may be added that since the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, French science of religion had been progressively dissociating itself from its strong German heritage. The institutionalization of the secular study of religion in the 1880s should, perhaps, not only be seen against the backdrop of the republican laicization program. It could also be considered the result of the ongoing political attempts to restore national pride through the empowerment of French science (and technology). For the development of the French “science empire,” Harry W. Paul, From Knowledge to Power. The Rise of the Science Empire in France 1860 – 1939 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press), 1985.  For the Altertumswissenschaftler who signed the Manifesto, and were previously part of Cumont’s vast international network, Bonnet, Le “Grand Atelier de la science”, 232, 300, and 310 – 311.  Adolf von Deissmann, Licht vom Osten. Das Neue Testament und die neuentdeckten Texte der hellenistisch-römischen Welt (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1908). On the life and work of Deissmann, Albrecht Gerber, Deissmann the Philologist (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010); the contributions to Cilliers Breytenback and Christoph Markschies, eds., Adolf Deissmann: Ein (zu Unrecht) fast vergessener Theologe und Philologe (Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2019).  See especially his speech “Der Krieg und die Religion. Rede am 12. November 1914,” Deutsche Reden in schwerer Zeit (Berlin: Heymann, 1914).  Christoph Markschies, “Revanchismus oder Reue? Der Erste Weltkrieg und die Frage nach Kontinuität und Diskontinuität im Denken von Reinhold Seeberg, Adolf Deissmann und Adolf von Harnack,” in Urkatastrophe. Die Erfahrung des Krieges 1914 – 1918 im Spiegel zeitgenössischer Theologie, eds. Joachim Negel and Karl Pinggéra (Freiburg: Herder, 2016), 256 – 264 (on Deissmann), 265 – 276 (on von Harnack).

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Harnack whom Loisy regarded as the incarnation of the intricate and much despised marriage between German science, Protestantism, militarism, and nationalism. As we’ve seen in our first chapter, Loisy’s scientific animosity toward Harnack’s work went all the way back to the 1890s. And a subtly nationalistic discourse about the distinct Christian religions of the German and the Roman peoples had already been well-present in their dispute over the essence of Christianity.⁴⁶ Harnack had since long been close to Kaizer Wilhelm II (who raised him to nobility in 1914), and also to other such prominent statesmen as Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg. Regularly acting as an imperial advisor, especially with regard to state support for the advance of science, he had become the powerful president of the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Society in 1911. Reportedly, he was also the one who helped drafting the Emperor’s public address “to the German people” (“An das Deutsche Volk”), the call to arms which was delivered on August 6, 1914, and ended on an explicitly religious note: “Never yet was Germany conquered when she was united. Then forward march with God! He will be with us as He was with our fathers.”⁴⁷ Still, as for Deissmann, modern research has demonstrated that Harnack’s position on the war substantially changed over time.⁴⁸ It was in any way far more complex than Loisy wanted to see, at least at that point, because he did invite Harnack to the honorary committee of his Jubilé in 1927.⁴⁹ In Loisy’s correspondence to Cumont, it was Harnack and Deissmann indeed, who were the favorite object of repeated and acrimonious disapproval.⁵⁰ Loisy severely accused them of having instrumentalized their internationally appraised scientific knowledge on religion to provide the war with a Protestant legitimization. The Christian god whom they claim to defend, and who is said to

 See chapter 1 (1.4) for his sharp distinction between the Christian religion of the “German and the Roman races.”  We quote from the English translation in Lewis Copeland, Lawrence W. Lamm, and Stephen J. McKenna, The World’s Great Speeches (Mineola–New York: Dover Publications, inc., 1999), 127– 128. For Harnack’s role in drafting the address: Nottmeier, Adolf von Harnack und die Deutsche Politik, 378 – 384.  Again, research literature on Harnack’s tight relationship to German politics, before, during, and after the war is vast. See, among many other, Nowak and Oexle, eds., Adolf von Harnack; Nottmeier, Adolf von Harnack und die Deutsche Politik; Rebenich, Theodor Mommsen und Adolf von Harnack; Nowak, “Historische Einführung,” 76 – 83.  See chapter 4 (4.4.2) for Loisy’s Jubilé. Although the invitations were written by Couchoud, it was Loisy who decided on the composition of the committee.  On this point, the correspondence is perfectly similar to the focus in Loisy’s published work: Guerre et religion (Paris: Nourry, 1915²), in which Deissmann and Harnack were similarly attacked.

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side with the German nation, Loisy argued, is not the God of Jesus’ gospel, but a nationalized German war god.⁵¹ When in 1915 Adolf Deissmann published the text of his earlier delivered speech of November 12, 1914, Der Krieg und die Religion, this publication triggered a strong reaction from Loisy.⁵² After having written his first wartime petit livre rouge, Guerre et religion,⁵³ with the aim to enter the public battle of ideas, he explained to Cumont that he doubted whether or not to publish the volume, sharply stating that the Germans ought to be fought with exchange of cannon fire, and not with ideas (“Ce sont des coups de canon qu’il faut tirer sur les Allemands et nos jeux d’idées ne servent pour ce moment à rien”). In Loisy’s letter, the progressive sharpening of the war discourse on German colleagues is clear to see. Je ne pense pas que ma dissertation paraisse avant le 1er mai. Je pense et j’espère qu’elle ne sera point remarquée. Je me suis même demandé si je ne la supprimerais point. Ce sont des coups de canon qu’il faut tirer sur les Allemands et nos jeux d’idées ne servent pour ce moment à rien. J’ai quelques considérations sur le dieu allemand qui auraient gagné à être développées à part. Mais il m’aurait été utile pour cela d’avoir des documents que je n’ai pu me procurer. Il y a, en particulier, une brochure de Deissmann, Krieg und Religion, que je n’ai pas réussi à faire venir ici d’Allemagne par la Suisse. J’aurais eu un certain plaisir à fusiller le dieu de Deissmann et Deissmann lui-même, qui est exégète et auteur d’une vie de saint Paul.⁵⁴ Le dieu de Harnack me paraît être un élément du dieu allemand, et même celui de Luther. Notre bonne vieille Trinité n’aurait pas été si facilement mobilisable. Le dieu de l’âme et Jahvé Sabaoth ont contribué plus que les anciennes divinités de la Germanie à former le dieu de Guillaume II.⁵⁵

 On this point see also C.J.T. Talar’s analysis of Loisy’s Guerre et religion, “Alfred Loisy and the Great War,” 19: “This venerable god is the essence of Germany, its tutelary genius, the mystical embodiment of its brutality. He is not the personification of a great and humane ideal, of a civilization that is really universal in its principles and effects, but only of German culture; that is, of a science put at the disposal of the narrowest Germanic interests, and of Germany’s covetous and greedy appetites.”  For the reference of the speech, see note 44. On its content and religious rhetoric, Gerber, Deissmann the Philologist, 255 – 256.  For the content of this volume, see infra, 5.1.2.  Adolf Deissmann, Paulus: eine kultur- und religionsgeschichtliche Skizze (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1911). In the exegetical wartime battle of ideas, the figure of Paul occupied a central position. On Loisy’s anti-Protestant bias in his historical discussion of Paul, see the brief accounts in Lannoy, “‘The Mystic of Tarsus’,” 227, 233 – 234; Bonnet and Lannoy, “‘Elle est tombée Babylone’,” 77– 78, but the topic would require a more detailed investigation. For the central role of Paul, in Loisy’s comparative account of the Christian origins, see supra, 4.3.1. Loisy added a chapter on Deissmann’s Krieg und Religion in the second edition of Guerre et religion, 134– 151.  Loisy to Cumont, April 18, 1915; Lannoy, Bonnet, and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 104 (letter 114).

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The letter illustrates particularly well how the longstanding opposition between Catholic and Protestant Christianities was conflated with nationalist interests. Loisy wrote that he had wanted to develop some ideas on “the German god”, with the aim to “shoot the god of Deissmann and Deissmann himself” (“fusiller le dieu de Deissmann et Deissmann lui-même”). Yet, he had been prevented from doing so because he had been unable to obtain a copy of Deissmann’s Krieg und Religion. Aside from Deissmann, he added, the god of Harnack, and of Luther himself were contributing to the conception of the war god of Wilhelm II. This war god was much more indebted to the Protestant god of the soul (“le dieu de l’âme”) and Yahweh Sabaoth than to the ancient (read: pagan) German divinities. And to those statements, he meaningfully added that “our good old Trinity” (my emphasis, “Notre bonne vieille Trinité”) would not have been so easily mobilized. Based on the hitherto quoted excerpts from the correspondence, one might be led to think that Loisy only criticized German Protestantism for its overt mobilization. Nothing, however, was farther from the truth. If we return for a moment to his first wartime letter to Cumont of February 1915, we there find him to be at once extremely critical of the Catholic Church. Just like many of his compatriots—Catholic and non-Catholic—, he denounced the self-proclaimed neutrality of the Pope.⁵⁶ He severely condemned Benedict XV for being an immoral and opportunistic Pope-politician who failed to take up the much needed role of a spiritual and moral leader, and instead favored Germany (with largely Catholic Bavaria) and the other Central Powers (among which Catholic Austria) to safeguard the little political power the Church still had left. In Loisy’s letters, Georges Clemenceau’s qualification of Benedict XV as the “Pape boche” may, perhaps, even be considered one of the more gentle labels he adopted for Benedict XV, when we compare it to other, like “Pilate XV,”⁵⁷ or “the runt” (“l’avorton”⁵⁸).

 On the controversial role of Benedict XV in the war: John F. Pollard, The Unknown Pope: Benedict XV (1914 – 1922) and the Pursuit of Peace (New York: Geoffrey Chapman, 1999); Nathalie Renoton-Beine, La Colombe et les tranchées. Les tentatives de paix de Benoît pendant la Grande Guerre (Paris: Cerf, 2004); Marcel Launay, Benoît XV (1914 – 1922). Un pape pour la paix (Paris: Cerf, 2014); Paul Christophe, Benoît XV et la Grande Guerre (Paris: Cerf, 2016); Jan De Volder, Benoît XV et la Belgique durant la Grande Guerre (Brussels–Rome: BHIR, 1996). A particularly instructive work on the role of religion among the French troops is Annette Becker, La Guerre et la foi: de la mort à la mémoire (Paris: Armand Colin, 1994), translated in English as War and Faith: The Religious Imagination in France, 1914 – 1930, transl. Helen McPhail (Oxford: Berg, 1998).  Loisy to Cumont, June 10, 1918; Lannoy, Bonnet, and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 198 (letter 185). This appellation was first used by anticlerical politician Léon Bloy.

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But however severe his criticism of Benedict XV, Loisy regarded his failure to confront the moral and religious challenges of the War, perhaps not so much as the personal failure of this particular pope, but as the result of the bankruptcy of the papacy as an institution.⁵⁹ The war made painfully clear that the papacy had no moral authority whatsoever, and that the Roman Curia had lost all sense of what a “religion of humanity” truly stands for. In light of Loisy’s moral philosophy of religion, which now occupied the very center of his attention, the ecclesiastical institutions were less than a shadow of his universal religion of humanity ideal. But still, if we just very briefly compare Loisy’s critique of the Catholic Church⁶⁰ with his condemnation of German Protestantism, it is quite interesting to observe that these do not exactly seem to be of the same kind and degree. Whereas his criticism of Catholicism concerned the political corruption of the Roman ecclesiastical hierarchy, and the Church as institute, one may have noticed that his condemnation of German Protestantism goes straight to the theological heart of Lutheranism, where he identified the very central conception of the spiritual “god of soul” (“Le dieu de l’âme”) as the key problem. Loisy’s criticism of the papacy did not change the crypto-Catholic, anti-Protestant views which we’ve seen at work in our previous chapters.

5.1.2 Christianity Historically Revised Loisy’s subtly different but altogether negative appreciation of both Catholicism and German Protestantism brought him to profoundly reevaluate the religious value of Christianity as a whole, and its position within the history of religions. Before taking a look at his wartime reflections on these issues, let us just briefly take a step back in time, and bring into mind the development of his ideas on Christianity in the years preceding the war. In our previous chapter we have drawn attention to his evolutionary categories of “primitive cults,” “national re-

 Loisy to Cumont, September 4, 1916; Lannoy, Bonnet, and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 140 (letter 143). It was Loisy’s and Cumont’s mutual friend Louis Canet who seemed to have come up with this particular defamation.  See also Loisy to Cumont, July 31, 1915; Lannoy, Bonnet, and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 111 (letter 122): “Je crois qu’il ne faut pas s’en rendre à lui et que c’est l’institution même de la papauté qui apparaît simplement ce qu’elle est, au-dessous de toutes les exigences actuelles de l’humanité. La crise présente fait ressortir cette infériorité, mais elle ne l’a point créée. Même un pape de génie serait aussi impuissant que Benoît XV, à moins de révolutionner la papauté. Mais la papauté peut-elle être révolutionnée sans cesser d’être ?…”  Loisy, Guerre et religion, 65 – 80, and passim.

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ligions,” and “universal systems of salvation” (économies de salut).⁶¹ To the latter type of religion belonged both the pagan mysteries and the Christian mystery, but Loisy was convinced that Christianity was by far the best realization of the lot, and in certain regards incomparable even to the rest. In Les Mystères païens et le mystère chrétien, the scope was obviously restricted to the history of Antiquity, but from his more theoretical writings against Reinach (1910), we know that he regarded Catholic Christianity as the best realization of the religion of humanity ideal, as yet seen.⁶² He agreed with Reinach, though, that Catholicism had exhausted its faculty to further transform, and unlike Reinach he believed that a new and better religion would come to replace it. In a lecture Loisy gave in 1912 at the École pratique on the overall history of religions, he confirmed that Christianity was completely losing its appeal in modern Western societies.⁶³ As a possible explanation, he there already hinted at its religious and moral-humanist shortcomings. Traditional Christianity was incapable of fulfilling the modern need for something “more intimate, profound, and true.”⁶⁴ The brutal war waged between Christian nations only consolidated this already existing conviction that the era of Christianity was coming to an end. But the wartime experience did sensibly enhance his reflections on the reasons why exactly Christianity was falling short. Why was it that Christianity (of any denomination) was unable to answer to the modern call for something more intimate and real, something more essentially human? How is it possible that the Christian universalist message of love, fraternity, and charity was unable to transcend the deeply patriotic sentiments of the Christian nations at war?⁶⁵ These  See supra, chapter 4 (4.3.1).  See supra, chapter 3 (3.3.4).  The lecture was published as “Les données de l’histoire des religions,” Revue Bleue (Revue politique et littéraire) 14 Juin (1913): 743 – 749, see at 748: “Et l’histoire des derniers siècles, l’histoire de notre temps, nous fait assister, au moins dans notre monde occidental, à la crise des économies de salut éternel.” Loisy had a strong Western-European focus, and mainly had in mind Christianity and the ancient mystery cults when he discussed the religions of salvation category in this text. There is one paragraph dedicated to Islam, and it passed a negative judgment on its “warlike temperament,” at page 748.  Loisy, “Les données,” 748.  The very same questions obviously occupied many of Loisy’s contemporaries. We may, for instance, refer to Loisy’s English friend and longtime discussion partner, Maude Petre, to whom we will return infra, 5.2.2. Petre got into troubles with her diocese during the Modernist crisis, but never left the Catholic Church. During the war, she actively struggled with the question as to how Christian faith and patriotism could, or rather in her view could not be reconciled. Her essay Reflections of a Non-Combatant (London: Longmans, Green and co, 1915) was an important point of reference for Loisy’s own ideas. On their wartime discussions: Talar, “Alfred Loisy and the Great War,” 26 – 32.

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questions were the central axes of reflection in Loisy’s first wartime volume Guerre et religion (first and second edition in 1915). For our purposes, it is not necessary to discuss this essay in great detail.⁶⁶ Aside from denouncing Germany’s crushing responsibility for the war, it especially elaborated the issues Loisy had discussed in his letters to Cumont: the mobilization of Lutheran Protestantism as integral part of the German Kultur, and the moral and spiritual failures of the papacy.⁶⁷ But furthermore it also showed Loisy’s strong criticism of the French Catholics who claimed that the Union sacrée of Catholic and non-Catholic republicans was the result of the revitalized faith of the latter, and thus used the Union to regain their hegemony on a society in distress. If the Union effectively united Catholics and non-Catholics in one brotherhood, Loisy argued, this was not because the latter had (re‐)embraced Catholic faith, but because all citizens shared the same values of an essentially civil religion. In his Guerre et Religion Loisy laid the groundworks for his later ideas on a religious humanism which should be organized on a national level, but at the same time envisioned a strong international solidarity.⁶⁸ It is in the context of this civil religion that Loisy’s exaltation of the willingness to self-sacrifice for the higher good of others, made its first entry.⁶⁹ This idea will be further developed in La Religion. ⁷⁰ Before turning to Loisy’s later La Religion, there is one more point about Guerre et religion to which we want to draw attention. In his analysis of the essay, C.J.T. Talar importantly highlighted that Loisy now explained the modern deficit of Christianity as the result of a weakness that was already embedded in Jesus’ original gospel.⁷¹ This gospel wrongly and simplistically interpreted the principle of human brotherhood as something already realized by god, and

 For a fine analysis of the two editions of Loisy’s volume, and of some of the reactions it provoked: Talar, “Alfred Loisy and the Great War,” 18 – 31.  Loisy, Guerre et religion, 58 – 59 for Germany’s responsibility for the war.  Talar, “Alfred Loisy and the Great War,” 46: “One gets the sense of need for a civil religion on a national level, but one in turn disciplined and preserved from a myopic nationalism by a kind of international civil religion.”  See especially Guerre et religion, 87 where Loisy included a remarkable quote from an anonymous French officer who praised the “gladly consented” willingness for “total and permanent sacrifice” in battle: “L’harmonie du combat et sa grande poésie ne sont pas dans sa musique, non plus dans le spectacle, fort peu animé somme toute, qu’il offre aux regards. Elles sont tout entières, à un degré extrêmement élevé, dans la notion du sacrifice total et permanent que consent volontairement chacun des combattants et qu’il consent avec une allégresse soutenue.”  See infra, 5.2.4.  Talar, “Alfred Loisy and the Great War,” 20 – 21.

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not as an ideal perpetually in the making.⁷² To make sense of Christianity’s contemporary failures, Loisy would furthermore redeploy the three evolutionary categories that constituted the theoretical framework for his historical work since 1910. The économie de salut category was no longer regarded as one of universal religions, but as one of national religions with universalizing tendencies. The philosophical and historical reasons for this significant shift will find their most elaborated articulation in La Religion.

5.2 Religion as Mystical Faith: La Religion (1917) La Religion is an important volume for our interest in Loisy’s history of religions because it unfolds the philosophical ideas on the future religion of humanity, which pervaded his historiography of ritual sacrifice. Before discussing its content, however, we first need to clarify the somewhat complex relation between this philosophical work and Loisy’s later published Essai historique sur le sacrifice (1920). The way Loisy liked to present things, it was his putatively purely historicist research into the history of religions (in concreto of sacrifice) which had unveiled to him the religion of humanity, or simply: la Religion which underlies all historical religions.⁷³ This one religion and the major phases of its ever-progressing appearances are the central topic in his essay La Religion. ⁷⁴ Although published three years later, the historical Essai was largely completed before Loisy wrote La Religion in late 1916, early 1917. This chronology may perhaps suggest that the hybrid historical-philosophical essay that is La Religion, was a later development out of the Essai. Similarly, one may be led to think that the historical Essai —which Loisy himself presented as almost purely historicist in the preface—remained unaffected by the philosophical conclusions on the link between ritual and moral sacrifice, which were articulated in La Religion. In his account of Loisy’s ideas on sacrifice, Ivan Strenski has pointed in the direction of exactly that conclusion, thus more or less following Loisy’s own lead.⁷⁵ He suggested

 Loisy, Guerre et religion, 61.  On this point, see already chapter 3, 3.3.4.  For the strong historical dimension of La Religion: Alfred Loisy, La Religion (Paris: Nourry, 1917), 34.  Strenski, Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice, especially 213: “Where the historicist Loisy confined his usage to the letter of sacrifice as a particular kind of ritual, the later Loisy seemed eager to liberate the ‘spirit’ of sacrifice to range beyond the narrow ritual meaning he had given it in his Essai historique sur le sacrifice.” In our view, Loisy’s moral interpretation

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that Loisy transformed from an anti-theoretical (but implicitly theologizing) historicist in the Essai and preceding work, into a more theoretical-philosophical thinker in La Religion. This intellectual shift, Strenski argued, may on the one hand have occurred under influence of the war, and on the other hand it may have been the result of Loisy’s progressively comparative approach to history. In our previous chapter, we have seen that comparative religion (and, more particularly, its mythologist excesses) indeed pushed Loisy towards a less historicizing approach to religion. This was, however, a development that had begun well before the war. From Loisy’s correspondence to Cumont, it is clear that no more than two years, at the very most, lay between the completion of the Essai and La Religion, which is a short time for such a very significant transformation of thought.⁷⁶ But two even more important objections against Strenski’s (and Loisy’s) chronology between the two works, is that (a) both volumes partially reproduced historical and philosophical ideas that had been well present in Loisy’s pre-war writings, and especially that (b) the whole Essai is pervaded by Loisy’s supposedly “later” conviction of the link between ritual and moral sacrifice, as we will try to show in our section on the Essai. ⁷⁷ All in all, we feel that it is very difficult, and perhaps also not very productive for understanding Loisy’s thought to establish this kind of chronological genealogy. In what follows, we have chosen to discuss La Religion first, and then the Essai, instead of the other way around.

5.2.1 Faith, Religion, and Morality: An Indissoluble Link If the Essai is the apotheosis of Loisy’s historical-comparative study of religion, La Religion may perhaps be considered the equivalent for his long-standing philosophical interest in religion and its evolution.⁷⁸ La Religion begins with a pref-

of sacrifice also looms large in the Essai. However, Strenski is right that in Loisy’s Modernist work we can only find an exclusively ritual conception of sacrifice, see especially 215.  Loisy’s plans for writing La Religion are first mentioned in his letter of December 30, 1916; Lannoy, Bonnet, and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 151 (letter 150). In his letter of September 26, 1915, he wrote to Cumont that he was working on the Essai; Lannoy, Bonnet, and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 114 (letter 1924).  From his letters to Cumont, we furthermore know that Loisy rewrote parts of his Essai in 1919, prior to its publication in 1920. This, too, explains why important insights from La Religion are included in the Essai. See the letter of Loisy to Cumont, June 8, 1919; Lannoy, Bonnet, and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 219 (letter 200).  Research literature on Loisy’s La Religion is altogether limited. There is a long but very biased discussion in Houtin and Sartiaux, Alfred Loisy, 235 – 247. For an objective analysis we es-

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ace about the war, and the moral mediocrity it has brought to surface in Christian religions, but it quickly moves into more abstract waters with a long first chapter on the relation between religion and morality.⁷⁹ The central question guiding Loisy’s reflections is explicitly the “question of morality and humanity,” and the way it is related to what he calls “the religious problem,” which in his view comes down to the intimate connection between “human life” and the “superior principles” that dominate it.⁸⁰ The war may have further convinced Loisy of the deep shortcomings of Christianity, it did in no way undermine his strong belief in the moral force and overall usefulness of religion, nor in the unfaltering progress of humanity. From his first chapter “Religion et morale,” it is abundantly clear that he retained his earlier conviction that no true morality is possible outside religion.⁸¹ It is this longstanding conviction which is now further theorized by means of a mystical approach to moral behavior. The key idea around which Loisy structured the intimate relation between morality and religion, is his belief that every human being has an innate mystical intuition of a superior (read: transcendent) ideal of humanity. This “mysticalmoral sentiment” is the essence of what Loisy alternatingly called faith (foi), or la religion: “ce qui constitue proprement la religion […] c’est le sentiment mystico-moral que l’homme […] ressent pour l’univers, pour ses semblables et pour

pecially refer the interested reader to Talar, “Alfred Loisy and the Great War,” 41– 46. See also Pierre Guerin, “La pensée religieuse d’Alfred Loisy,” Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 37 (1957): 317– 321; Pierre Colin, “Loisy devant le problème de la religion,” in Autour d’un petit livre, eds. Laplanche, Biagioli, and Langlois (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 287– 298. Émile Poulat furthermore published an interesting autobiographical text in which Loisy described his religious development from “belief to faith” (“De la croyance à la foi): Émile Poulat, Critique et Mystique. Autour de Loisy ou la conscience catholique et l’esprit moderne (Paris: le Centurion, 1984), 13 – 43.  Loisy’s first, rather dense chapter with the abstract exposition of the philosophical ties between religion and morality, earned him a comparison to the Ethics of Spinoza by Cumont, see his letter of April 29, 1917; Lannoy, Bonnet, and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 164 (letter 159): “Il ne sera pas lu par le profanum vulgus et beaucoup d’esprits superficiels ou sceptiques s’arrêteront au premier chapitre. Comme lui et par une nécessité semblable, l’Éthique de Spinoza débute par les questions les plus abstraites de tout l’ouvrage, et celui-ci n’a jamais fait les délices des débardeurs d’Amsterdam, ce qui ne l’a pas empêché de faire son chemin dans le monde.”  Loisy, La Religion, 19 – 20: “Au fond de tous les grands problèmes contemporains est donc une question plus grande encore, et qui donne à tous une signification commune, la question de moralité, la question d’humanité, question, qui par sa nature même, s’identifie au problème religieux, c’est-à-dire à l’organisation de la vie humaine conformément aux principes supérieurs qui la dominent.”  See chapter 3 (3.3.4).

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lui-même.”⁸² It is not only a feeling of deep respect for, but also of confident dependence on a superior, rationally incomprehensible but mystically sensed, moral reality, in which the individual loses himself to become part of something larger than life and personal self-interest. For understanding this quintessential point in Loisy’s philosophy, one may usefully quote the words of his close friend, Maude Petre: “He [i. e. Loisy] was ever conscious of a certain eradicable element of human life, of a faith in something beyond the perception of the senses, beyond the scope of reason; of faith in something which defied clear knowledge, and was yet not all unknown.”⁸³ For Loisy, the further inexplicable feeling of respect for ethical rules is a kind of respect sensed as if for a “superior principle” which commands obedience.⁸⁴ Somewhat confusing is the fact that Loisy used the term “religion” in two different ways throughout his volume. On the one hand, religion (la religion) is identified with this innate “mystical-moral sentiment,” or “faith” (foi), which he regarded as the permanent foundation of all historical religions and all moral actions. On the other hand, religion is used as a collective noun, pointing to the historical exteriorization and socialization of mankind’s mystical-moral instinct, in and through the ever-changing historical god conceptions, and rituals.⁸⁵ It is by means of these historically variable beliefs and rituals that the innate sentiment can become concrete moral action.⁸⁶ This alternating usage may be considered as symptomatic for Loisy’s constant wavering between his self-denied but nevertheless transparent quest for the essential unity of all religions on the one hand, and the strictly evolutionary relativity he assigned to all historical religions, on the other. In this particular regard, once again, little had changed since L’Évangile et l’Église. In Loisy’s eyes, religion and morality are theoretically distinguishable, even if both in theory and in history they are indissolubly connected. Morality implies the idea of an obligation, which is not a priori the case in religion. Religion essentially revolves around respect and reverence (“la considération des choses en  Loisy, La Religion, 55.  Petre, Alfred Loisy. His religious significance, p. 79. We will return to Loisy’s mysticism in the following section 5.2.2.  Loisy, La Religion, 60.  Loisy, La Religion, 49: “En son idée la plus générale, la religion est le rapport spécial où l’homme croit se trouver et se met à l’égard des êtres ou des principes supérieurs dont il s’estime dépendant, rapport qui s’affirme et se réalise principalement dans ce qu’on appelle le culte, c’est-à-dire la façon de traiter les êtres ou principes dont il s’agit, lesquels sont regardés plus ou moins comme des personnalités transcendantes, susceptibles d’être affectées en quelque manière, honorées ou offensées, par la conduite des humains.”  See Loisy, La Religion, 183, for this innate faith.

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tant que vénérables”⁸⁷), which is not a priori the case in morality. Yet both morality and religion relate to “the superior life of humanity,” of which they can be considered the two mutually determining aspects. Religion is “the spirit that animates morality,” and which gives moral rules the “sacred character of an obligation.” Morality is, so to speak, “the practical application of religion” (“la pratique de la religion”). But since both are in the end concerned with “the perfection of humanity,” they tend to be one and the same thing.⁸⁸ For Loisy, religion is both morality as “action,” and the mystical intuition of dependence on a sacred ideal which serves as the spiritual motor of those moral actions.⁸⁹ In the following section of this chapter, we will discuss the role of the rites, which seem to have lost their core position in this essay, and we will reveal the uneasy relationship that existed between ritual and moral action in his thought. Loisy’s strong conviction of morality and religion factually being one and the same thing, explains why he would later feel forced to write a volume against Henri Bergson’s famous Les Deux sources de la morale et de la religion (1932).⁹⁰ In 1917, however, Loisy did personally admit to Cumont that the similarities between his own philosophy of religion, and Henri Bergson’s highly influential volume L’Évolution créatrice (1907) were substantial (“Mon livre est quelque peu bergsonien”). However, he also wrote twice (!) to Cumont that he had only read Bergson’s Évolution after having written La Religion. Only after finishing, he claimed, he had wanted to read some “recent works on morality and moral education, and philosophy.” Given Loisy’s usual habit of not, or only scarcely, revealing his sources of inspiration, it is difficult to determine whether or not he was telling truth about not having been familiar with Bergsonian philosophy of action.

 Loisy, La Religion, 69.  Loisy, La Religion, 69.  Loisy, La Religion, 73: “L’ensemble est un système pratique, orienté vers l’action, pour la subsistance, mais en même temps un système mystique.”  Alfred Loisy, Y a-t-il deux sources de la religion et de la morale? (Paris, Nourry: 1933, 1934²). See his letter of May 6, 1917; Lannoy, Bonnet, and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 166 (letter 167). On the relationship between Bergson and Loisy: Ghislain Waterlot, “Bergson et Loisy face à la mystique: deux inconciliables,” Revue de théologie et de philosophie 142, 2 (2010): 135– 159; Harvey Hill, “Henri Bergson and Alfred Loisy: On Mysticism and the Religious Life,” in Modernists & Mystics, ed. C.J.T. Talar (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), 104– 135. Given the fact that our own interest in this monograph lies with Loisy’s comparative historical research, a study of the sources of inspiration for his philosophy lies beyond our scope, but it should be noted, of course, that many of his contemporaries, like Bergson or Durkheim, were also struggling with determining the ties between religion and morality.

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[M]on livre est quelque peu bergsonien. Je m’en suis aperçu après coup, et je n’y ai rien changé. Quand j’ai eu terminé ma rédaction j’ai voulu lire quelques ouvrages récents sur la morale et l’éducation morale, et aussi de la philosophie; j’ai lu pour la première fois l’Évolution créatrice. C’est un fort beau livre, infiniment mieux construit que le mien mais pas plus facile à lire. Je me suis trouvé d’accord avec Bergson, pour le principal, dans sa théorie de la connaissance. J’hésite à le suivre dans sa cosmogonie. Aussi bien m’a-t-il avoué qu’il ferait une plus grande place que moi à la métaphysique comme base de la morale—j’ai tâché de construire la morale sur une base non métaphysique, et je considérerais plutôt la métaphysique comme un couronnement de tout, de la morale.⁹¹

Loisy thus explained to Cumont that he was himself struck by surprise when discovering the similarities to Bergson. According to Loisy, Bergson’s Évolution was a beautiful book (“un fort beau livre”), better structured than his own, but also far from an easy read. Overall, he agreed with the Bergsonian theory of knowledge (“sa théorie de la connaissance”), but he wrote that he had doubts about Bergson’s cosmogony. The more important part of the letter, however, is where Loisy discussed the link between morality and metaphysics. Whereas Bergson admitted a metaphysical foundation of morality, Loisy emphasized how he had precisely tried to construct an ethic without metaphysical grounds. Metaphysics, he argued, were the crowning achievement (“le couronnement”) rather than the foundation of morality. We will now somewhat further pursue this point, as it remains unclear what the foundations of Loisy’s morality were, if not metaphysical.

5.2.2 Mysticism Versus Intellectualism and Sociology With his mystical-moral theory of religion, Loisy firmly stuck to his former rejection of intellectualist theories of religion, and also marked his distance from the sociological school of Durkheim.⁹² To begin with the first, La Religion set forth a particularly strong criticism of those scholars like Frazer or Tylor⁹³ who saw religion as a form of pre-science and believed in a future without religion, with human reason as the sole basis for moral behavior.⁹⁴ At once condemning an-

 See his letter of August 10, 1917; Lannoy, Bonnet, and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 172. See also his letter of May 6, 1917; Lannoy, Bonnet, and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 166 (letter 167).  See supra, chapter 3 (3.3).  In La Religion none of these two scholars were mentioned by name, but we know from his 1910 essay on magic, religion, and science that he certainly had Frazer in mind when rejecting intellectualist theories of religion: see supra, 3.3.1.  Loisy, La Religion, 55.

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cient Greek philosophy and 18th century philosophical deism, Loisy argued that reason and science could never be the basis for moral action, for the simple reason that true morality always relies on a mystical intuition which precisely evades the scope of reason. Without this mystical kernel, religion and morality are dead.⁹⁵ All attempts to successfully establish a purely secular set of morals (“une morale laïque”) have therefore logically failed. This critique against intellectualism largely corresponded with what Loisy had earlier written in his “Magic, science, and religion” (1910), but with one striking difference: the now explicit and emphatic mystification of his moral religion. Throughout his entire book, Loisy incessantly repeated that religion stems from the “mystical color and sentiment” which since the very beginning of mankind, have been an inherent part of human thought.⁹⁶ In our analysis of the Essai, we will see that this particular statement is greatly nuanced in Loisy’s historical work, and that quite inconsistently, he therein partially linked the origin of sacrifice and animism to the premature rationality of primitive mankind.⁹⁷ In 1910, Loisy had accused the intellectualists of failing to comprehend that mankind has always believed that a force (puissance) was at work in reality, even at the dawn of humanity. In 1917, this force occupied the front of the stage, and was now explicitly theorized as the product of mankind’s mystical intuition. As a Collège de France professor, Loisy realized perfectly well that his mystical theory of religion might be seen to transgress the boundaries of the scientific secular study of religion. In his defense, he adduced the religionist argument that religion can only be scientifically explained by sui generis religious categories, and not by reducing them to “crude facts” (“le fait brut”⁹⁸). For Loisy, it is a scientifically established fact that religious-moral life is rooted in something beyond reason: “Ce n’est pas manquer à la saine raison que de reconnaître au fait religieux et moral sa vraie nature.”⁹⁹ His central objection against the sociology of Durkheim then came down to a very similar condemnation of their complete demystification and reduction of human existence to the “fait social.” Still, just like in his 1910 essay, his overall evaluation of sociology is much more nuanced

 Loisy, La Religion, 80.  Loisy, La Religion, 55 – 56: “Ce n’est pas la naïveté de ses pensées [i. e. of man] qui a fait sa religion, c’est leur couleur mystique et le sentiment mystique qui s’y est attaché, sentiment qui a commandé sa conduite en lui prescrivant les égards proportionnés à la valeur mystique des objets de sa pensée.”  See infra, 5.3.1.2.  Loisy, La Religion, 40.  Loisy, La Religion, 40 – 41.

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than that of intellectualism.¹⁰⁰ Paramount for understanding Loisy’s ideas on the sociological school, is his aforementioned distinction between the individual but collectively shared mystical intuition or faith, which is qualified as la Religion, and religions as the socialized expression of that faith in the cult.¹⁰¹ With regard to the latter religions, Loisy wholeheartedly agreed with the Durkheimians against the Liberal Protestants that the cult is the beating heart of religion, and that there really is no such thing as individualistic religion, since the identity of the individual is always defined by the group to which it belongs.¹⁰² He furthermore embraced sociological theory by accepting that the object of religions—the animated nature, spirits, gods, or god, addressed in the cult—is, indeed, nothing more than society itself, divinized and idealized. The gods are an illusion, and so are the purportedly effective rituals to worship them. The gods symbolize the highest ideal of humanity which can be imagined by a specific society at a certain moment in time. As social life progresses, so do the gods.¹⁰³ The unbridgeable difference with Durkheim, which Loisy himself didn’t fail to emphatically underline, is situated on the territory of la Religion, and Durkheim’s completely overlapping definitions of religion and society.¹⁰⁴ Whereas society was for Durkheim a physical reality (again: “fait brut”¹⁰⁵) which can be understood entirely on rational premises, Loisy insisted that social relations always entail a non-physical component. They constitute what Loisy called “a

 Overall, his nuanced but in the end negative appreciation of sociology in La Religion largely echoed the conclusions of his long review of Durkheim’s Formes élémentaires: “Sociologie et religion,” RHLR NS 4 (1913): 45 – 76.  One may usefully compare the following two passages, with the distinct ways in which Loisy used the term “religion”: Loisy, La Religion, 52: “quand nous parlons religion, nous l’entendons naturellement d’un culte rendu à la divinité.” Compare to La Religion, 53: “Un trait néanmoins existe qui paraît se perpétuer dans toute la suite du développement religieux, et où l’on pourrait mettre l’essence de la religion: ce je ne sais quoi d’auguste et de mystérieusement impressionnant qui appartient aux objets de la foi et du culte religieux, et qui inspire le respect.” It should be noted that Loisy used the terms “mysterious” and “mystical” without distinction in meaning.  See supra, chapter 3 (3.3.1) and see also, Loisy, La Religion, 82.  Loisy, La Religion, 108, and at 155 – 156: “les dieux n’étant que l’idéal ou la formule mystique de la société qui les sert.” He also acknowledged the role of the progress of human reason in the transformation of the god conceptions, see infra, 5.2.3.  Émile Durkheim, Émile Durkheim on Morality and Society, ed. Robert N. Bellah (Chicago– London: The University of Chicago Press, 1973), 191: “If religion has given birth to all that is essential in society, it is because the idea of society is the soul of religion.”  Loisy, La Religion, 90.

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mystical reality,” which cannot be explained on rational terms.¹⁰⁶ Loisy agreed with the Durkheimians on the social function of religion, but he disagreed with their entirely functionalist definition of religion, which he found reductionist. While a close investigation of Loisy’s philosophical mysticism definitely lies beyond the scope of this book, it still is important to take a closer look at its position in his theory of religion, because his conception of the inherently mystical nature of mankind will also have a dominant role in his Essai. ¹⁰⁷ As mentioned above, the vague idea of a further undefined force at work in the history of religions had always been present in Loisy’s work. When analyzing his pre-war writings, we have repeatedly wondered what it meant to him.¹⁰⁸ In La Religion, it finally becomes clear that he left the ubiquitous notions of “mystical reality,” “mystical ideal,” “mystical-moral intuition,” “mystical-moral sentiment,” etc. unexplained, because he believed them to be intrinsically undefinable. In his 300-paged volume, he thoroughly discussed the ideal of humanity, while in the end still leaving the reader with the sensation of not having grasped what the metaphysical status of this mystical ideal exactly was. A source that is immensely helpful to answer that question, is Loisy’s correspondence with Maude Petre (1863 – 1942), a Catholic religious who had been deeply involved in the Modernist crisis in the Roman Catholic Church through her close friendship with pivotal figures like Loisy himself, George Tyrrell, Henri Bremond, and Friedrich von Hügel.¹⁰⁹ In her book on Loisy’s religious thought (1944), she included English translations of several letters she received from her French friend and discussion partner. Given Petre’s own theological interests, the letters

 Loisy, La Religion, 66: “Le fait de la vie en groupe procède d’une sorte d’instinct social et n’est aucunement compris en nécessité physique mais en réalité mystique,” and 68: “Mais il est tout aussi clair, pour qui n’a pas préalablement pris le parti de résumer cette histoire et cette vie en une formule géométrique,—que cet idéal n’a jamais été, qu’il n’est pas actuellement, que sans doute il ne pourra jamais être un programme tout rationnel.”  The fullest articulation of Loisy’s mysticism will follow in the second edition of La Religion in 1924, to which Loisy added a new preface of over 50 pages entirely dedicated to his theory of mysticism.  See supra, 1.2.3 (for his Modernist EE), and 3.3.1 (for his reaction against Reinach).  On Petre and her tight friendship with Loisy: Ilaria Biagioli, “Histoire d’une amitié: Maude Petre et Alfred Loisy,” Alfred Loisy cent ans après. Autour d’un petit livre, eds. François Laplanche, Ilaria Biagioli, and Claude Langlois (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 225 – 238. For an interesting introduction on Petre’s life and work, see also James J. Kelly, ed., The Letters of Baron Friedrich von Hügel and Maude D. Petre. The Modernist Movement in England (Leuven–Paris: Peeters, 2003).

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often discussed Loisy’s religious and theological ideas. A first letter to which we want to draw attention, is the one he wrote to her on September 29, 1917 about La Religion. In this letter he explicitly underlined the apophatic and transcendent nature of his mystical ideal of humanity: Certainly I believe in the transcendent, in the ideal and its reality, as something other in itself than humanity. But I abstain from defining this otherness, and I have endeavoured to construct my moral religion without metaphysics, without an explicit doctrine of that transcendence that escapes us, though we do not escape it. It seems to me that the economy of faith, which I have endeavoured to sketch, is not for that reason more inadequate than that of religions provided with a metaphysic that is, at bottom, conjectural and outworn. I think that I have preserved the moral significance of the transcendent in relation to humanity. Can the sentiment or intuition of this signification not be acquired without a definition of the unknowable? I think so.¹¹⁰

Because of his strong belief that the ideal of humanity is in constant transformation, he found the attempts of moral scientists who wanted to develop a secular theory of morality, just as inaccurate and dogmatic as theological attempts to formulate a fixed theory of this ideal.¹¹¹ Reason—theological or secular—fails to define what the heart instinctively feels.¹¹² Even if Loisy never stopped emphasizing his differences with Liberal-Protestant theories of religion, the deeply moral and subjective-emotional dimensions of his religion of humanity rings more than a bell. Very clearly, then, Loisy’s non-rational religion of humanity with its implicitly supernatural origin, was not the secular religion Auguste Comte had previously indicated with the same term.¹¹³ Interestingly, Loisy also wrote a letter to Maude Petre in which he addressed his indebtedness—or rather, the lack thereof—to Comte. On October 23, 1917, he surprisingly wrote to Petre: “I have never read a single work of Comte’s. I had to confess this with shame to a positivist, who delicately reproached me for not having acknowledged in my book what I owed to this great precursor.”¹¹⁴ Even if it were true that he hadn’t read

 Maude D. Petre, Alfred Loisy. His Religious Significance (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1944), 83. The book of Maude Petre is a peculiar testimony; it mostly gives her personal interpretation of Loisy’s religious ideas.  For a similar point, see also Loisy, Mémoires, III, 107, and 155.  A similar point is made in Loisy’s Mémoires, III, 343.  In our third chapter, we have briefly observed that Loisy’s anti-intellectualist consideration of the history of religions was quite different from Comte’s historical sociology of knowledge. See supra, 3.3.4.  Petre, Alfred Loisy, 118. Maude Petre indicated that the emphasis in the first sentence was Loisy’s own.

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Comte, he still had excellent knowledge of Comtian philosophy of knowledge and religion. This is already abundantly clear from his Neuilly Essais (1897– 1899), which included an elaborate summary and rejection of the Comtian historical matrix.¹¹⁵ Significantly, his purported lack of knowledge also didn’t stop Loisy from self-consciously emphasizing the originality of his own ideas. Interestingly, he now explicitly situated this distinctness in his own affirmation of “a spiritual beyond,” and “implicit metaphysic,” which was indeed absent from Comte’s positivist religion. So far as I can judge, in my ignorance of Comte, there is first the difference that you indicate: Comte denies any spiritual beyond; I am fully disposed to affirm without defining it; I am perfectly conscious of admitting an implicit metaphysic; what I do not admit is the necessity of a learned metaphysic, of a philosophical theology as the foundation of religion and morality.¹¹⁶

The attentive reader will have noticed that this affirmation of an “implicit metaphysic” is quite different from his earlier letters to Petre and Cumont, in which he had rejected metaphysical grounds for morality. It is safe to say that his ideas on this matter were far from unambiguous. A second, much less justified difference Loisy drew between Comte and himself, was that he himself was a historian, who had derived the perpetually changing ideal of humanity from his empirical studies. Comte, Loisy argued, was a strictly philosophical thinker who had a fixeddogmatic understanding of what humanity is, and will always be. And Loisy added to Petre: “In all this I maintain that I am closer to reality than Comte, with his theory, which is as absolute as scholasticism, of the three states.”¹¹⁷ With this particular attack of Comte, Loisy once more showed himself to be a faithful pupil of Ernest Renan, who more than half a century earlier had pronounced a very similar criticism in his L’Avenir de la science (1848 – 49): “La méthode de M. Comte […] est le pur a priori.” If the law of the three stages really was correct, Renan passionately added, “all the noble-minded” (“toutes les belles âmes”) would have committed suicide so as not to waste their time with what would appear to be only insignificant forms of progress.¹¹⁸

 Loisy, La Crise de la foi, 61– 62. On these Essais, see supra, chapter 1 (1.4).  Petre, Alfred Loisy, 118.  Petre, Alfred Loisy, 119.  Quotes from Renan come from the interesting study by Annie Petit, “Le prétendu positivisme d’Ernest Renan,” Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines 1 (2003): 15.

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5.2.3 The Religious History of Humanity After his introductory chapter on the relation between morality and religion, then follow two historical chapters in which Loisy offered a comprehensive account of the history of religions. Strikingly unaware of his own scholasticism, he systematically fit the wide array of discussed religions into his three-phased law of evolution: primitive cults, national religions, and religions of salvation with universalizing tendencies.¹¹⁹ For the latter category, he took great care, indeed, to now consistently use terms such as “universalizing” (“religions de tendance universaliste”¹²⁰), or “a relative universalism.”¹²¹ In his historical account, however, Christianity still received most attention. As a further result of his reflections on its deficit in his own age, Loisy now explained in much detail how geopolitical reasons had incited the making of more universalizing religions in Antiquity. The Roman empire needed religions that could bring harmonization, and faith spontaneously catered for those needs (“La religion nécessaire se fit d’elle-même”¹²²). Early Christianity’s superiority over other universalizing religions such as the mystery cults, resided in its unique combination of Hellenistic mysticism, Jewish eschatological idealism, and the historical figure behind the Christian savior god.¹²³ But like the pagan mystery religions, Christianity still was “the product of the Roman Empire,”¹²⁴ and, as such, it was nationalist by default. The inherently Christian power of assimilation guaranteed its long survival, but it was also the main cause for the nationalist fragmentation that was causing its downfall in Loisy’s own time.¹²⁵ Quite unexpectedly, the main point being made in the two historical chapters, is that history is the progressive consciousness of true morality in and through religion. This process of moral awareness entails the progressive interiorization of respect for the collective good. In the first stages of religion, moral

 See supra, 4.3.1 for this three-phased law.  See, e. g., Loisy, La Religion, 115 and 129.  Loisy, La Religion, 131.  Loisy, La Religion, 132.  Loisy, La Religion, 137. For the importance of the historical Jesus in Loisy’s Christian superiority discourse, see chapter 4 (4.3.2).  Loisy, La Religion, 139. By way of comparison, it may be useful to note that Franz Cumont had made a very similar point about the national roots of early Christianity. On this point: Praet, “The End of Paganism,” and Lannoy and Bonnet, “Narrating the Past and the Future,” 170.  Loisy, La Religion, 140. See chapter 1 (1.3.2) for the exclusively positive appreciation of Christianity’s power of assimilation in Loisy’s EE.

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conduct is a purely exteriorized, collectively enforced affair.¹²⁶ In more advanced religions, interiorized morality becomes more and more important, and it is rewarded by personal immortality. In the ideal religion of humanity on which Loisy sets his hopes for the future, individuals will want to act morally, not because of exterior sanctions by the gods, or divine rewards, but because they spontaneously and freely feel the need to do so. In his eyes, the process of interiorization is a necessary condition for a more deeply felt, true humanism. But this individualization is a means to a higher end, and anti-Protestant Loisy left no doubt that the individual should never be the object of religion itself. “Religious individualism,” he asserted, “is a true heresy with regard to humanity.”¹²⁷ Catholicism is applauded for having stimulated the social conscience of humanity, but criticized for its complete lack of attention for individual freedom. To explain the historical transformations of religions, Loisy mentioned various agents of religious change, but the foremost important one is faith itself. In the historical chapters of La Religion, faith is cleverly defined as a “un sentiment indestructible de confiance en la vie et sa valeur morale.”¹²⁸ Its transcendent basis is here largely left unmentioned, and makes way for “a feeling of confidence in life and its moral value.” Perhaps, Loisy’s omission anticipated criticism of the circular fallacy that logically resides in a historical explanation of religion through (mystical) faith. This being said, he unhesitatingly stipulated that faith always generates the specific beliefs and rituals that best answer mankind’s religious-moral, social, psychological, and even purely materialistic-biological needs at any given time or place.¹²⁹ Important for understanding his Essai is his emphasis on the symbolic nature of beliefs and rituals. They are what he calls “figurations” of faith. While these beliefs and rituals are illusory and perishable, faith itself has always survived, and will continue to do so in the future.¹³⁰ For faith to be able to bring about religious change, Loisy argued that it needs to be in a state of crisis, thus picking up his previously developed idea

 In our next section we will return Loisy’s ideas on “primitive” religion in great detail. In anticipation, it may useful to mention here that he didn’t regard totemism as the universal characteristic of the first stage of religion. On totemism, see infra (5.3.1.1 and 5.3.1.2).  Loisy, La Religion, 193: “En soi et quelques services qu’il ait pu rendre, le principe de l’individualisme religieux est une véritable hérésie à l’égard de l’humanité.”  Loisy, La Religion, 181.  Loisy, La Religion, 273: “L’homme s’est procuré la religion qu’il lui fallait pour la sécurité de son existence et pour la satisfaction de son désir.”  Loisy, La Religion, 180, it is born with mankind and will die with it.

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of Dekadenz and subsequent innovation.¹³¹ Interestingly, he added that the fall of historical religions was often the result of mankind’s intellectual laziness. Human intellect has always displayed a strong tendency to content itself with fixed formulas of faith. Religious beliefs present themselves as absolute and final representations of an ideal that itself is neither absolute nor final, and thereby declare their own ruin. At a certain moment, these static beliefs do not longer grasp the ideal which has already moved on to a new and higher interpretation. When religions do not address this incompatibility in a satisfactory way, as they mostly don’t, faith itself is plunged into a crisis, and abandons the old religion for a new one.¹³² In spite of his anti-intellectualism, Loisy acknowledged that reason was another important agent of religious change, but one which in ideal circumstances functioned in close alliance with faith. The intellectual progress of mankind has positively affected the ideal of humanity, as reason has helped faith to regulate its moral aspirations by criticizing existing religious beliefs, and formulating new ones.¹³³ Between the lines, one reads the story of our Einstein’s personal struggle against the Church. Loisy’s continued Modernist hopes for an alliance between reason and (a now post-Christian) faith, may have been the reason why Cumont applauded the Hegelian synthesis between “traditional faith” and “freethought” he saw defended in Loisy’s La Religion: “Il est bien probable que nous allons vers quelque forme de religion de l’humanité […]. Les antinomies de la foi traditionnelle et de la libre pensée se résoudront ainsi en une synthèse plus haute. Hegel vous aurait approuvé.”¹³⁴ Still, after reading Loisy’s particularly strong condemnations of reason, and his overall much more positive appreciation of mysticism, it seems unlikely that he hoped for a perfect synthesis in which reason and faith were equal partners. In his ideal faith-reason alliance, faith does seem to have the upper hand. It is certainly true that he was attentive to the role of reason in the progressive history of religions, and we know that he attached a great deal of importance to the autonomy of science with regard to religion. But, on the other hand, it is reason which Loisy holds responsible for formulating religious beliefs that are a priori inadequate expressions of the undefinable ideal of humanity. Moreover, in his historical chapters, it is often reason, and not faith, which seems to bear the heavy responsibility for the many

   

On this topic, see also chapter 3 (3.3.4). Loisy, La Religion, 180. Loisy, La Religion, 186. Letter of April 29, 1917; Lannoy, Bonnet, and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 164 (letter 159).

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wrongdoings that happened in the name of religion, with the Catholic Inquisition as a prime example: “L’inquisition a été un produit de la raison théologique et politique.”¹³⁵

5.2.4 The Religious Future of Humanity and the Role of Sacrifice It will be unmistakably clear by now that Loisy’s entire historical account of religion was written against the backdrop of his hopes for the future, and vice versa, that his mystical-moral take on the history of religions further convinced him that faith was so much inherently human, that it would only die when mankind itself dies. Furthermore, La Religion is also the teleological demonstration of his strong belief that no truly universal religion of humanity had as yet seen daylight.¹³⁶ Loisy’s views on the future of humanity oscillated between realism and optimism. To a certain extent, his religion of humanity often seemed to be of the purely asymptotic type. Still, he was firmly convinced that a new religion would come and represent a higher ideal than had ever been realized before.¹³⁷ In the last chapters of La Religion, Loisy formulated a wide array of detailed moral guidelines (what he called: “une discipline”) for the future religion of humanity, on the level of the family, the nation, and international human solidarity.¹³⁸ As for the specific beliefs and rituals in which the new faith would manifest itself, he was much more vague.¹³⁹ These beliefs should obviously be non-dogmatic, and certainly no longer concentrate on a personal, individual god.¹⁴⁰ As for its rituals, he suggested to create new national and international festive days, to enhance the sentiments of universal cohesion and solidarity.

 Loisy, La Religion, 200. This statement is part of Loisy’s argumentation against drawing an all too sharp contrast between religion and reason; reason infiltrates religion, and, vice versa, some religious sentiment penetrates science.  Loisy, La Religion, 116.  Loisy, La Religion, 95: “L’humanité se cherche, la morale se fait, les religions évoluent lentement, très lentement, vers la religion.”  These guidelines for instance included his reflections on divorce (238), state-funded child allowance (239), as well as extensive reflection on the organization of moral instruction in the école laïque (which largely concurs with his 1910 essay on education, see chapter 3, 3.4).  In defense of this vagueness, Loisy argued that the process of the decomposition of the old religions was still ongoing, and times were therefore premature to see where the beliefs and rituals of a new religion would be going.  Loisy, La Religion, 225. On his rejection of an individual-personal god, see 2.4.1 (his letter to Arconati of 1908).

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What is particularly salient about Loisy’s reflections on the religious future, is his strong belief that the new religion of the future will represent a radical break away from all preceding historical forms of religion (though, obviously not from the underlying foundational faith).¹⁴¹ This conception of radical discontinuity was new in his thought, and will be of paramount importance for understanding the Essai. What is exceptionally clear from La Religion, is that Christianity is now an integral and fully comparable part of the history of religions: a straight and uninterrupted line ran from the most primitive cult to modern Christianity. And, a sharp line of discontinuity and radical transformation is drawn after contemporary Christianity—Protestant and Catholic. As we will see in the Essai, the direct historiographical implication of this idea is that Loisy will now much more strongly insist on the essentially primitive-magical nature of the Eucharist, and Christianity at large.¹⁴² And just like any other kind of illusory magical ritual, the Eucharist is to be abandoned in the future. Loisy himself accounted for his belief in a profound break point in human history by referring to the war. His strongly teleological mindset helped him to make sense of this monstrous disaster. In light of the radical innovation of the future, the war could then be explained as a necessary crisis: “Sans doute était-il nécessaire qu’elle [humanity, my remark] connût un tel paroxysme de folie, de haine et de cruauté, tout l’épanouissement de sa laideur, pour embrasser avec plus de foi et d’énergie un idéal de sagesse, d’union et de bonté, toute la perfection qu’elle se promet.”¹⁴³ Loisy thus convinced himself that the radical transformation of religion could only be realized after a crisis of this proportion, which had the benefit of simultaneously revealing the moral insufficiency of traditional (Christian and non-Christian) religions to the religious, and the limits of human reason to the rationalists. Only this “paroxysm of folly, hatred and cruelty” was able to bring out with “more faith and energy an idea of wisdom, union, and goodness.” In spite now of Loisy’s sharp criticism of the contemporary Church,¹⁴⁴ Ivan Strenski was right to observe that his hopes for the future still seemed to crystalize around an essentially Catholic-inspired form of humanism. This becomes most clear when we take a closer look at what Loisy wrote about the role of sac-

 It should be added, however, that Loisy strongly advised against a forced revolution of religion, and instead made a plea for a carefully managed modification: La Religion, 27.  This emphasis is absent in his earlier MPMC which was written between 1913 and 1914. See supra, 4.3.1.  Loisy, La Religion, 148.  Loisy, La Religion, 193, where the Catholic Church is called the “tyran des intelligences et des volontés.”

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rifice in the future religion of humanity. In his eyes, this future fully depended on mankind’s commitment to true love, and this true love is for Loisy the equivalent of the willingness to self-sacrifice. Strenski convincingly argued that within the civil religion Loisy envisioned, sacrifice is seen as a (Christ-like) total self-denial, as the willingness to heroically die for the nation.¹⁴⁵ Loisy’s conception of this moral sacrifice is radically different in kind from the ritual sacrifice performed in the religions of history, but the historical links between the two are nevertheless real. In his eyes, it is no coincidence that the same term is used in modern language to indicate the purely moral “gift of the self in the performance of one’s duty” and the ritual action, the “offering by means of which the security of all is guaranteed by the protection of satisfied divinities.” However different the moral and ritual conceptions of sacrifice have become, the similarity between the two is more than “a simple analogy.” Ce n’est pas sans raison que le langage moderne emploie, pour désigner ce don de soi dans l’accomplissement du devoir, le mot dont la religion se servait pour désigner l’acte central et souverainement efficace du culte, l’offrande moyennant laquelle était censée garantie la sécurité de tous et de chacun par la protection de divinités satisfaites. Si différentes que soient réellement devenus la conception rituelle du sacrifice et la conception toute morale du dévouement personnel, il existe entre les deux un rapport beaucoup plus étroit que celui de la simple analogie.¹⁴⁶

Importantly, Loisy explained that the purely moral ideal of altruism and “the gift of the self” (“don de soi”) has developed out of ritual sacrifice. Even the most primitive, most brutal forms of ritual sacrifice had a moral significance, although the worshippers themselves were completely unaware of it. These rites always entailed a kind of renunciation (“une sorte de renoncement”) for the gods, which were nothing more than society itself.¹⁴⁷ In La Religion (and in the Essai, as we will see), Loisy was hard on sacrificial rites, labelling them as “aberrations,” “illusions,” and “costly follies,”¹⁴⁸ and he regretted the fact that they had not yet been completely eradicated from contemporary religions. The religion of humanity of the future should leave ritual sacrifice behind, to center the fully conscious and freely consented, purely moral act of sacrifice. However, Loisy insisted that moral sacrifice is still essentially religious, because it is made on the basis of “a mystic ideal and the respect to which one feels this ideal is entitled.” Correspondingly, it is his firm conviction that self-sacrifice is “the    

Strenski, Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice, 214. Strenski, Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice, 48 – 49. Loisy, La Religion, 63. Loisy, La Religion, 63.

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most religious action of all, all the more so when one consents to it consciously and voluntarily.”¹⁴⁹ With this conception of moral sacrifice, we are finally in possession of all necessary keys to tackle the analysis of Loisy’s Essai on the nature and history of ritual sacrifice. This entire work can basically be condensed to the following two, continuously contradicting aims: (a) to show the reprehensible, self-alienated and magical nature of all sacrificial rites, and (b) to demonstrate how these rites nevertheless instigated moral progress right from the moment they made their appearance in the history of religions.

5.3 Hybridity Reigning Supreme: The Essai historique sur le sacrifice (1920) Both in his correspondence to Cumont, and in his later Mémoires, Loisy explained that the Essai was, perhaps, of all his books, the one that had cost him most effort.¹⁵⁰ With no less than 552 pages, the volume unites an impressive amount of information about sacrificial rites of the most diverse times and places, thus displaying the author’s astonishing erudition on the matter.¹⁵¹ But notwithstanding this Frazerian-like inventory of sacrificial data, Loisy still wrote to

 Loisy, La Religion, 64. On this particular passage, see also the interesting observations by Strenski, Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice, 49: “What later became a ‘secular’ call to patriotism was derived originally from and maintained by a peculiar kind of Catholic theology, especially as articulated in theology of the Eucharist as sacrifice.”  Loisy, Memoires, III, 393 : “Mon Essai sur le Sacrifice parut en juillet 1920. Ce pourrait bien être de tous mes livres celui qui m’a coûté le plus de recherches et de soins. C’est aussi bien l’un de ceux dont on a le moins parlé.” For writing this section, the following general works on ritual have been of great help: Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (New York–Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Jeffrey Carter, ed., Understanding Religious Sacrifice. A Reader (London–New York: Continuum, 2003); and various contributions (references will be provided infra) to Jens Kreinath, Jan Snoek, and Michael Stausberg, eds., Theorizing Rituals. Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts (Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2006). My analysis of Loisy’s Essai was also advanced by the following detailed studies of the volume: Koch-Piettre, “Loisy et ses études sur le sacrifice,” and Kolakowski, Nagy, and Prescendi, “L’Essai historique sur le sacrifice.” A brief but useful account can also be found in Émile Poulat, Maria Daraki, André Padoux, and René Luneau, “Le sacrifice. De l’histoire comparée à l’anthropologie religieuse,” Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions 51, 2 (1981): 156 – 159.  The great documentary value of Loisy’s Essai is also acknowledged by present-day experts in sacrificial studies such as Renée Koch-Piettre, who is nevertheless understandably critical of Loisy’s theory of sacrifice. Koch-Piettre, “Loisy et ses études sur le sacrifice,” 75.

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Cumont that he was far from satisfied with the final result: “Le livre est mal fait, lacuneux et squelettique.”¹⁵² In our analysis we will predominantly focus on the first three chapters of the Essai, which offer Loisy’s generic interpretation of the many sacrificial rites described in the following eight chapters. It is worth the while to take a look at the structure of those eight chapters, as this gives away a lot about the approach that will be dominant throughout the entire comparative study. The eight center chapters are thematically structured, and consecutively devoted to sacrifices performed in (1) funerary rites and the cult of the dead, (2) seasonal rites, (3) divinatory rites, (4) rites to seal alliances and sermons, (5) rites of purification and expiation, (6) consecration rites, (7) initiation rites, and (8) the ordinary service for the gods. Loisy thus classified the rites according to the context in which they were performed, and, more particularly, according to the intentions of the worshippers: what was the function they assigned to their rites? This focus on the intentions of worshipper, on the belief system, on the faith which is attached to the ritual, is perfectly congruent with the conclusions of our last chapter on myth.¹⁵³ At the very outset of the Essai, Loisy emphasized that rites were the most conservative part of religion, and therefore gave privileged access to its most primitive origins. Yet, his primary interest was never with the praxis itself. In the Essai little to no reflections on the ritual meaning of the victim, on the internal logic and structure of the ritual gestures, or on other such matters can be found. Loisy’s interest lies with uncovering the primitive magical-religious beliefs which had first expressed the worshipper’s faith in the efficacy of the praxis, and which, in his eyes, continued to be operative at later stages of development. The study of contemporary primitive cults—for Loisy (as for Durkheim) especially exemplified by the Australian Arunta—occupies an exceptionally important place in his narrative. They provide the key to the essence of sacrificial rites at any time or place, although Loisy’s horizon always remained dominated and delimited by Christianity. Or, as he wrote to Cumont, the book especially demonstrates the magical nature of sacrifice, “from the totemic rites of the Arunta until the Christian mystery”: Les gens comme vous trouveront peut-être que le sujet a été pris tout de même dans toute son ampleur, et qu’on y voit un peu plus clair à mesure qu’on avance vers la fin du volume. Il va sans dire que la conclusion n’est pas orthodoxe; et que la [sic] caractère magique du

 Letter of April 25, 1910; Lannoy, Bonnet, and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 251 (letter 222).  From our previous chapter, we know that Loisy was convinced that the ritual actions themselves remained remarkably conservative throughout history; it was the meaning attached to them that constantly changed.

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sacrifice, depuis les rites totémiques des Arunta jusqu’au mystère chrétien, y est nettement dénoncé.¹⁵⁴

In each of his eight historical chapters, Loisy organized the discussed material in his characteristic tripartite structure of primitive cults, national religions, and universalizing religions of salvation. Due to this highly systematizing approach, the hundreds of pages can be summarized into a well-confined set of key ideas on the origins of sacrifice, and its main phases of development. These conclusions follow in the final chapter of the volume, where Loisy also exposed his hopes for a future, purely moral, non-ritual interpretation of sacrifice. In his introduction to the Essai, Loisy clarified that it had especially been the first three interpretative chapters which had given him headaches. At this point of our study, it will no longer surprise anyone that he started the Essai by taking a strongly anti-theoretical and historicist stand.¹⁵⁵ The “crack in the wall” is nevertheless evident, for Loisy did admit to his readers that the job of formulating a historically grounded “philosophy”¹⁵⁶ of sacrifice had been a lot more difficult than he had expected it to be. Unlike what he previously had thought, the general nature of sacrifice had not automatically revealed itself after his critical considerations of the historical facts.¹⁵⁷ But although intense thinking (read: speculation) had admittedly been necessary to uncover the fundamental unity behind the multifarious historical rites, Loisy remained convinced that his philosophy of sacrifice was the (almost) self-evident result of his historical enquiries.

 Letter of April 25, 1910; Lannoy, Bonnet, and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 252 (letter 222).  See supra, especially chapter 3 (3.3.3) and chapter 4 (4.3.2).  Loisy had a transparent dislike of the term “theory.” He consistently reserved the term to refer to the ideas of other scholars, while referring to his own theory as “philosophy.”  Loisy, Essai, 1, where he referred to himself in the third person, and corrected his initial belief that the general philosophy of sacrifice would naturally flow from a purely historicist consideration of the facts: “La synthèse historique et la philosophie générale du sacrifice, pensait-il, se feraient d’elles-mêmes, à la fin, par la récapitulation des conclusions certaines et des hypothèses qui auraient été vérifiées les plus probables. Espérance téméraire sans doute, puisque de telles synthèses ne se construisent jamais toutes seules.” This passage is accompanied by a reference to his Leçon inaugurale where he had also insisted on his strict historicism. See supra, 3.1. As Renée Koch-Piettre rightly pointed out, the difficulty experienced by Loisy may also be explained by the fact that his investigations on primitive cults necessarily implied a move away from the analysis of literary sources. Koch-Piettre, “Loisy et ses études sur le sacrifice,” 75.

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5.3.1 The Nature and Origin of Sacrifice Just like La Religion, the Essai shows a remarkable continuity with his Modernist writings, in the sense that it reveals the exact same tension between his strictly evolutionary, anti-essentialist convictions, and his unambiguous belief in the basic continuity underneath the historical changes and transformations.¹⁵⁸ For the “Einstein of the history of religions,” nothing was more important than stressing the constant flux and relativity of the sacrificial beliefs throughout history. But for the mystical and religious thinker Loisy simultaneously was, there was one inherently human, mystical-moral faith that underpinned all those perishable historical beliefs. In the Essai, the religious philosopher of La Religion recedes into the background of the narrative, but never to disappear completely.

5.3.1.1 Loisy’s Explicit and Implicit Definition of Sacrifice Loisy’s strong eye for the historical complexity of human cultures, religions, and societies, doubtlessly explains why he began his Essai by forcefully opposing the then popular idea that all sacrificial rites should have sprung from one common ancestor, one specific rite which would have contained the formative idea and corresponding praxis of all sacrifices to come. Sacrifice, he argued, is a “specific genus” of ritual, but not “a distinct species.” In reality, he continued, there had been a wide array of sacrificial practices and ideas coexisting right from the beginning of sacrifice.¹⁵⁹ With this statement, Loisy implicitly criticized influential scholars of religion such as Tylor, Frazer, Robertson Smith, whose theories he found reductionist and historically unsatisfactory.¹⁶⁰ In the eight center chapters of the Essai, Loisy each time traced back the most primitive intentions behind sacrifices in funerary rites, rites of consecration, rites of initiation, etc., seemingly without assigning evolutionary priority to any of them.

 This tension is perhaps best articulated in Loisy’s later “De la méthode en histoire des religions,” 14– 15 which gives a summary of his studies on sacrifice.  Loisy, Essai, 2: “Le sacrifice est, pour l’historien des religions, tout un monde de rites variées, employés à des fins multiples […]. Le sacrifice n’est pas une espèce, c’est un genre de rites qui comprend un grand nombre d’espèces.”  See especially Loisy, Essai, 4, where he emphatically explained that there is neither a foundational rite, nor a foundational principle or idea which can explain the nature of sacrifice, or even of religion as such, in its entirety. Formulating a definition of sacrifice is just as difficult, he significantly added, as defining religion itself.

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Significantly, the Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice of Hubert and Mauss was the only work explicitly mentioned in the introduction to the Essai. ¹⁶¹ Their theory of sacrifice was a highly important point of reference to Loisy, both in a positive and negative way. Hubert and Mauss had also rejected the historical-evolutionary priority of one particular type of sacrifice or formative idea.¹⁶² They were nevertheless strongly convinced of a generic unity underlying all sacrificial forms, which they placed in the always returning mechanism of sacralization and subsequent desacralization (or vice versa). This mechanism did have priority in their eyes, but a logical priority, not a historical one.¹⁶³ Notwithstanding his emphasis on the irreducible historical complexity of sacrificial rites, Loisy, too, was convinced of their essential unity, but we will see that he radically disagreed on the consecration mechanism postulated by Hubert and Mauss. And we will also show that, unlike them, he did actually assign historical-evolutionary priority to the principle he himself posited at the core of sacrifice. For now, we will leave their theory aside, but not without mentioning that it was without doubt by following the example of Hubert’s and Mauss’s seminal text that Loisy began his Essai by formulating a definition of sacrifice: Le sacrifice est une action rituelle,—la destruction d’un objet sensible, doué de vie ou qui est censé contenir la vie,—moyennant laquelle on a pensé influencer les forces invisibles, soit pour se dérober à leur atteinte lorsqu’on les a supposées nuisibles ou dangereuses, soit afin de promouvoir leur œuvre, de leur procurer satisfaction et hommage, d’entrer en communication et même en communion avec elles. ¹⁶⁴

There is a lot in this one dense sentence that requires careful consideration.¹⁶⁵ The first and most obvious point is that the definition sticks to the inside per-

 Loisy, Essai, 7 and 18.  In their introduction, Hubert and Mauss had discussed contemporary theories of sacrifice, and similarly added on Frazer and Robertson Smith; Hubert and Mauss, Sacrifice, 5: “The great flaw in this system is that it seeks to bring the multiplicity of sacrificial forms within the unity of an arbitrarily chosen principle.” However, they later clarified, 13: “Thus as we allowed ourselves to surmise when we reproached Smith with reducing the expiatory sacrifice to a communion sacrifice, it was not to establish the original and irreducible diversity of sacrificial systems. It was because their unity, though real, was not of the kind he claimed.”  Hubert and Mauss, Sacrifice, 8.  Loisy, Essai, 5. Italics as in the original.  Because of its density, an apt English paraphrase of this sentence is quite difficult. A literal translation may be more useful: “Sacrifice is a ritual action—the destruction of a tangible object, endowed with life or which is believed to contain life, by means of which invisible forces have been believed to be influenced, either in order to evade their reach when they have been thought harmful

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spective of the worshippers, as we had already deduced from the central chapters’ titles. For Loisy, the theories of Tylor, Frazer, Robertson Smith, and others alike, are not only insufficient because they reduce all sacrificial rites to one type, but also—and perhaps especially—because they explain that prototype on the basis of purely secular, natural causes. His main aim was to enter into the mind of the worshipper, and to distill from those empathic observations an essentially religious explanation of sacrifice as transcendent action. At various points of his narrative, and especially in the conclusion, this “inside” approach led to a strange, self-apologetic discourse, with Loisy feeling the strong need to stress that the rites really were pure illusion, since they never realized the objectives which the worshippers attached to them.¹⁶⁶ According to Franz Cumont, one of the greatest merits of the Essai was precisely that his friend had described the rites as if he had performed them himself.¹⁶⁷ But then as now, this particular approach has also received strong criticism. As Ivan Strenski pointedly formulated: “Loisy has written an entire volume (and more) on sacrifice, that volume is almost purely descriptive. For the most, it explains nothing.”¹⁶⁸ Strenski was absolutely right that the Essai never explained sacrifice on strictly secular grounds. As we will see further on, Loisy’s arguments were at times strikingly circular. And yet, it will also become clear that this statement may be somewhat overgeneralizing, for Loisy did try to combine his religionist account with observations on human psychology and social behavior. In this sense, too, hybridity reigned supreme in the Essai. While the second part of the definition insists on the irreducible heterogeneity of the functions ascribed to sacrificial rites by the worshippers, it is especially to the beginning of the sentence that we should turn in order to recover the keys of what constituted its essential unity: “a ritual action —the destruction of a tangible object, endowed with life or which is believed to contain life.” As is usual with definitions, this short sentence contains a lot more than meets the eye. It is, in fact, only after one has read the entire Essai, that it becomes clear what and dangerous, or to stimulate their doings, to satisfy them, to pay homage to them, and to enter into communication, and even into communion with them” (my translation).  See, for instance, Loisy, Essai, 9: “Le sacrifice prétend être une action; prenons-le pour ce qu’il veut être, quand même son efficacité serait nulle par rapport à l’objet qu’il se propose. Zeus n’a jamais existé; il n’empêche qu’on a immolé à Zeus beaucoup de taureaux et qu’on a pensé lui être agréable en les lui sacrifiant.” We will return to this point in 5.3.1.3.  Letter of July 5, 1920; Lannoy, Bonnet and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 254 (letter 224): “J’ai été émerveillé d’abord de l’étendue de votre érudition, vous connaissez les sacrifices des sauvages et des civilisés, comme si vous y aviez pris part sous tous les climats et dans toutes les parties du monde.”  Strenski, Theology and the First Theory of Sacrifice, 18.

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is really meant by it. In order to interpret this sentence correctly, it should be noted that Loisy developed two distinct interpretations of the nature of sacrifice in the Essai. Strangely enough, both interpretations are absent from the definition, but they are nevertheless quintessential to understand it. What further complicates things, is that one of those two interpretations is emphatically formulated and explicitly the most important one for Loisy himself, while the second one remains more implicit. The explicit interpretation is that sacrifice is a ritual action with a primitive magical-religious nature.¹⁶⁹ Even if its primitive beginnings got sublimated over time, sacrifice has always remained for the worshipper an effective material-visible imitation of the transcendent-invisible action she/he seeks to trigger.¹⁷⁰ This magical nature evoked Loisy’s negative evaluation of ritual sacrifice as illusion, since the magic obviously never actually worked. His second, much more submerged and at times perhaps even unconscious interpretation is that sacrifice is an oblation or gift, which for Loisy implies that it is an act of collective or individual abnegation to obtain something in exchange from the gods.¹⁷¹ Since the gods are society itself, this interpretation entails that sacrifice is from the very beginning moral by nature, even if at first only to a limited degree and especially without the worshippers themselves realizing it. Although Loisy repeatedly and empathically stated that sacrifice could not be reduced to one formative idea, some sort of gift theory often seemed to guide his thoughts. In what follows, we will further explain how this is the case. If we return first to the definition, one can perhaps recognize an implicit hint at the idea of sacrifice being an oblation, in its central focus on the destruction of an object that is believed to contain life. Loisy clarified that such a destruction of life enhanced and liberated the mystical property (in French: vertu) of the victim, which could then be used to control (avert or stimulate) spiritual forces.¹⁷² But for all its prominence in the definition, the idea of destruction receives very little consideration in the Essai. As we mentioned before, the internal logic of the ritual gestures, or even the role of the victim or object sacrificed was not his primary interest. Interestingly, the eight descriptive chapters also include oblations which didn’t entail any kind of destruction (such as slaughter, burning, drowning, eating, etc.). Certain offerings simply placed at the sanctuary, were still in-

 From the third chapter it has become clear that magic is always inherently religious according to Loisy, see 3.3.1; we will return to this point infra, 5.3.1.3.  Loisy, Essai, 9 and passim.  What this “something” is, depends on the specific evolutionary phase, see infra, 5.3.1.2.  Loisy, Essai, 22.

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dicated by Loisy as sacrifice.¹⁷³ Sacrifice, then, did not primarily seem to be the act of destruction, but rather the total act of offering of life, regardless of the method in which it was performed. The question then immediately arises as to why the element of destruction was given such a prominent position in Loisy’s definition.¹⁷⁴ One way to look at this particular element of the definition, is by considering its theological inspiration. The notion of destruction unmistakably introduced the idea of a violent death¹⁷⁵ into the definition, and this idea may very well be inspired by Loisy’s conviction that the Eucharist with its ritual imitation of Christ’s total and radical giving of his life, was a real ritual sacrifice. There is, however, another, perhaps more convincing way to go about Loisy’s definition, and this second option especially surfaces when taking a look at the Essai of Hubert and Mauss. They, too, had explained: “we must designate as sacrifice any oblation, even of vegetable matter, whenever the offering or part of it is destroyed.”¹⁷⁶ With their emphasis on destruction, Hubert and Mauss had specifically wanted to distinguish sacrifice from what they called an offering (offrande), which means that: “the object consecrated is simply presented as a votive offering; consecration can assign it to the service of the god, but it does not change its nature by the mere fact that it is made to pass into the religious domain.”¹⁷⁷ According to Hubert and Mauss, sacrifice was indeed always an oblation,¹⁷⁸ but it is

 For a good example see Loisy, Essai, 54: “Le geste est nécessaire pour la présentation de l’offrande, si le sacrifice a pris le caractère d’une oblation. Il est nécessaire également pour la destruction de la matière sacrificielle, s’il s’agit d’un sacrifice complet, où la mort de la victime est la partie essentielle et la condition de son efficacité.” It is clear here that the first non-destroyed oblations where “offerings” are “presented” by “gestures” are also called sacrifices. Loisy did distinguish these first sacrifices from “complete sacrifices” where “the death of the victim is the essential part and condition of its efficacy.”  The notion of destruction reemerges in the conclusion of the Essai, see, e. g., Loisy, Essai, 521.  Unlike later scholars like René Girard and Walter Burkert, Loisy didn’t theorize the link between violence and sacrifice in his Essai. Although he did include non-animal oblations in his definition of sacrifice, the killing of an animal victim is mostly the self-evident and non-further questioned form of sacrifice he has in mind. An excellent account of modern theories on sacrifice and violence may be found in Kathryn McClymond, “Sacrifice and Violence,” in The Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence, ed. Andrew R. Murphy (Oxford: Wiley–Blackwell, 2011), 320 – 330.  Hubert and Mauss, Sacrifice, 12.  Hubert and Mauss, Sacrifice, 11.  This is obviously in perfect agreement with Mauss’s later masterpiece, Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques, first published in l’Année Sociologique n.s. 1 (1925).

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the idea of a nature-changing consecration which constitutes its determining characteristic. To them, sacrifices are oblations which modify the nature of both the offered object and the sacrifier (the sacrifier is: “the subject to whom the benefits of the sacrifice thus accrue”), hence their definition: “Sacrifice is a religious act which, through the consecration of a victim, modifies the condition of the moral person who accomplishes it or that of certain objects with which he is concerned.”¹⁷⁹ In their account, the moment of destruction is essential in the communication between the profane and the sacred. Oblations where the transformation of the victim (and with it that of the sacrifier) from profane to sacred (or vice versa), did not occur, were offerings, not sacrifices.¹⁸⁰ Loisy completely disagreed with Hubert and Mauss on sacrifice being a consecration. We will return to this point in our section on how sacrifice works.¹⁸¹ For our present purposes, it is important that notwithstanding their different reasons for doing so, Loisy was just as concerned as Hubert and Mauss with excluding what he called “simple gifts” (“le don simple”), or “simple offerings” (“offrandes simples”), from his definition of sacrifice. Our hypothesis is that he included the notion of destruction in his definition to exclude votive offerings which were placed at the sanctuary without “something more” happening. In his eyes, then, this “something more” is always present in oblations where the act of destruction is included within the rite. It was when Loisy explained in what way “simple gifts” are substantially different from sacrificial gifts, that he revealed the absolutely fundamental constituent of his explicit theory of sacrifice: gifts are only sacrificial when they transmit a divine force, or to use Loisy’s terminology: when they are sacred action (action sacrée): Beaucoup n’ont voulu voir dans le sacrifice que le don rituel, et il est certain que le sacrifice affecte souvent¹⁸² la forme d’une oblation. Mais il est quantité de sacrifices qui n’ont rien d’une offrande, surtout d’un service alimentaire, n’ayant pas, à proprement parler, de

 Hubert and Mauss, Sacrifice, 13.  The precise direction (from profane to sacred, or sacred to profane) depends on the specific kind of sacrifice. For expiatory rites, the direction goes from sacred to profane. Research literature on the Essai of Hubert and Mauss is vast. We have especially benefitted from reading Strenski’s Theology and First Theory of Sacrifice, but also Louis Dupré, “The Structure and Meaning of Sacrifice: from Marcel Mauss to René Girard,” Archivio di Filosofía 76 (2008): 253 – 259; Nick Allen, “Using Hubert and Mauss to Think about Sacrifice,” in Sacrifice and Modern Thought, eds. Julia Meszaros and Johannes Zachhuber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 147– 162; Melissa Ptacek, “Durkheim’s Two Theories of Sacrifice,” Durkheimian Studies/Études Durkheimiennes 21, 1 (2015): 75 – 95.  See infra, 5.3.1.3.  Here one sees a clear proof of the fact that Loisy’s factual interpretation of sacrifice as gift, was inconsistent. For Loisy, sacrifices were not often oblations, they were always oblations.

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destinataires ; et ce qui caractérise essentiellement le sacrifice, ce n’est pas le don comme tel,—le simple don n’étant pas par lui-même un sacrifice,—mais c’est l’action sacrée, le rite efficace, l’influence mystique, soit que l’on comprenne cette efficacité, pour ainsi dire, comme physique et immédiate, soit qu’on ait fini par la comprendre, au moins dans une certaine mesure, comme morale et s’exerçant à la façon d’une prière sur de hautes personnalités spirituelles.¹⁸³

The entire first theoretical chapter of the Essai is devoted to the key concept of sacred action, which Loisy considered the only legitimate focal point of the study of sacrifice, since this was the way the worshippers themselves saw it: “Le sacrifice prétend être une action; prenons-le pour ce qu’il veut être.”¹⁸⁴ Religious acts that are sacred action, he explained, have two characteristics: (a) they are mystical: they manage an invisible, unverifiable, and unexplainable “transcendent” and “divine”¹⁸⁵ force of life, which Loisy indicated with the term of vertu (which we already encountered in chapter 3), and (b) they are (wrongly) believed to be an effective influencing of “invisible forces.” Although Loisy acknowledged that, in theory, “simple gifts” could be in possession of this vertu, and thus serve as an effective instrument to influence the gods, they did not necessarily have these properties, while rites which included the destruction of living objects always did. In spite of all their differences, Loisy agreed with Hubert and Mauss that the destruction of the sacrificed object was a way to enhance and liberate its sacred force.¹⁸⁶ At the same time, however, the Essai also includes several hints at the Frazerian idea that the ritual destruction of life is the necessary condition for its regeneration.

 Loisy, Essai, 5. Again, a translation rather than a paraphrase may be useful: “Many have only wanted to see sacrifice as a ritual gift, and it is certain that sacrifice often assumes the form of an oblation. But there is a good number of sacrifices which is nothing like an offering, an alimentary service more particularly, since they strictly speaking don’t have an addressee; and that what essentially characterizes sacrifice, is not the gift as such—as the simple gift is not in itself a sacrifice—but the sacred action, the effective rite, the mystical influence, whether one understands this efficiency as, so to speak, physical and immediate, or one has ended up understanding it, at least to a certain degree, as moral and as exerting itself like a prayer on high spiritual personalities.” The possibility of a link between Loisy’s sacred action, and the philosophy of action of Henri Bergson and Maurice Blondel would make for an interesting topic of further research. It falls, however, beyond the scope of our own study.  Loisy, Essai, 9.  Loisy, Essai, 20: “L’action dont nous parlons et que nous qualifions de sacrée est une action transcendante, en quelque manière une action divine.”  Loisy, Essai, 22: “détruire pour créer, libérer par la mort la vertu qui est latente dans un être vivant, la multiplier et la sublimer, en quelque façon par le rite de l’immolation.”

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In his retrospective inaugural speech “De la méthode de l’histoire des religions,”¹⁸⁷ Loisy situated the greatest merit and originality of his Essai in his interpretation of sacrifice as sacred action. However, just like his interpretation of sacrifice as oblation, this interpretation is overall absent from the definition. The reason for its absence may be twofold. First, an explicit definition of sacrifice as transcendent, sacred action immediately raises the (correct) impression of a traditional Christian interpretation of sacrifice, which was something Loisy wished to avoid. He may have felt that a focus on sacred action in his definition, without having the space to explain exactly what he meant by it, could overshadow the scientific qualities of his Essai. The second, more submerged but no less important reason, is that defining sacrifice as “sacred action” failed to do justice to the fact that to him, it really was more than just that. However primitive a sacrificial rite may be, it was always also a (moral) act of giving for Loisy, even if he sometimes appeared to be unconscious of this interpretation. When reading through the Essai, it becomes progressively clear that he didn’t regard sacred action as the sui generis determining quality of sacrifice, although he so often said that it was. We will immediately show that sacred action—in other words practical religion itself—existed well before sacrifice emerged according to Loisy. However, once sacrifice had originated, it became the sacred action of all sacred actions, the ritual of rituals, the very synonym, really, for religion which is realized in and through sacrifice.¹⁸⁸ In this vein, Loisy confidently asserted: “Une histoire complète du sacrifice serait presque une histoire du culte religieux dans l’humanité.”¹⁸⁹ An important passage to understand the precise difference between Loisy’s sacred action and sacrifice, is his reflection on the totemic cult of the Australian Arunta. Although he had been extremely critical of Durkheim’s argument that this cult revealed the formes élémentaires of all religions,¹⁹⁰ the religion of the Arunta did also play a foundational role in his own reflections on sacrifice, and on religion more generally. Between 1911 and 1915, Loisy had closely followed ongoing discussions on the link (or not) between totemism and the origin of sacrifice, religion, and organization of social life. In his Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses he had published a long series of summaries of Frazer’s ongoing research on the matter.¹⁹¹ And in his Essai, the seminal eth-

 Loisy, “De la méthode en histoire des religions,” 19 – 20.  Loisy, Essai, 16.  Loisy, Essai, 26.  See especially, Loisy, “Sociologie et religion,” 45 – 46.  Alfred Loisy, “Le totémisme et l’exogamie,” RHLR NS 2 (1911): 1– 43, 183 – 199, 276 – 296, 401– 430, 557– 583; NS 3 (1912): 193 – 229, 401– 420; NS 4 (1913): 171– 186; Alfred Loisy, “La Cos-

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nographical studies, The Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899) and The Northern Tribes of Central Australia (1904), of Baldwin Spencer and Francis Gillen, were among the most cited volumes. These groundbreaking publications had been the basis of, and the bones of contention between Frazer’s Totemism and Exogamy (1910) and Durkheim’s Formes élémentaires. ¹⁹² Spencer’s and Gillen’s detailed ethnographical information on the social and religious life of the Australian tribes had forcefully debunked many of the then existing myths on totemism, among which Robertson Smith’s belief in the deep entanglement of totemism and the social organization (for instance, marriages) of the observed tribes, and the longstanding assertion that the totem could not or only on special occasions be eaten by a totem member.¹⁹³ Following their conclusions, Loisy emphatically stated that totemism revealed nothing about the origin of human societies or religions. Moreover, he added, it was not a universal phenomenon.¹⁹⁴ But very clearly, these statements did not withhold him from considering totemic rites as indicative of the most primitive origins of religion, just not in Robertson Smith’s, Reinach’s, or Durkheim’s interpretation of totemism as a sacrifice. ¹⁹⁵ Following the totemic theory of Frazer, and Spencer and Gillen themselves,¹⁹⁶ Loisy argued that the Arunta’s totemic rites weren’t religious rites,

mogonie des Arunta,” RHLR NS 5 (1914): 252– 274; Alfred Loisy, “Les rites totémiques des naturels australiens,” RHLR NS 6 (1920): 7– 61.  For an illuminating analysis of the differences between Frazer’s magical interpretation of totemism, and Durkheim’s interpretation of totemism as religion: Alexandra Maryanski, Émile Durkheim and the Birth of the Gods (New York–Oxon: Routledge, 2018).  For a detailed account of the close collaboration between Spencer, Gillen, and Frazer: Maryanski, Émile Durkheim.  Loisy, Essai, 5 – 6: “on n’a pas prouvé l’universalité du totémisme, et il n’y a pas lieu de chercher dans le totémisme l’origine des sociétés humaines ni celle des religions.”  Durkheim profoundly revised Robertson Smith’s interpretation of totemism as a sacrifice of communion, but like him he accepted that the totemic meal was a form of communal sacrifice. On the relation between Robertson Smith and Durkheim: Carter, Understanding Religious Sacrifice, 129; Jones, “Robertson Smith, Durkheim, and sacrifice.”  Remember, though, that Loisy himself did have another interpretation of magic than Frazer. While Frazer rejected the idea that primitive magic was animistic, Loisy embraced it. See supra, 3.3.1. Baldwin Spencer and F.J. Gillen, “Some Remarks on Totemism as Applied to Australian Tribes,” Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 28 (1899): 275 – 280: “The hypothesis which is now suggested, and which has been advanced independently also by Mr. Frazer, is that in our Australian tribes the primary function of a totemic group is that of ensuring by magic means a supply of the object which gives its name to the totemic group, and that further, the relation between totemism and exogamy is merely a secondary feature.”

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but magical rites for the reproduction of the totem. Unlike Frazer, however, Loisy believed that the rites were exceptionally important to understand not the origin of sacrifice, but the most primitive, universal origins of sacred action itself, out of which sacrifice would develop at a later point. While totemism itself was indeed not universal, Loisy argued that its foundational idea of magically controlling forces of nature to produce food, was. He never denied that a communion (transcendent and inter-human) took place during the totemic meal, but this communion idea was neither universal, nor essential. Moreover, it was only a means to realize a higher end.¹⁹⁷ The most primitive and most central intention of the alimentary rite was to stimulate the reproduction of the totem, and to promote the prosperity of the community.¹⁹⁸ But if the determining sui generis quality of sacrifice itself was not sacred action (first manifested in the magical rites of nature), nor the communion rites of Robertson Smith and Durkheim, what was it, then? At several points in the Essai, Loisy argued that primitive sacred actions only become sacrificial when the idea of a gift is attached to it.¹⁹⁹ Even if he explicitly stated that in sacrificial rites, the idea of an alimentary gift is “accessory and adventitious” (“accessoire et adventice”²⁰⁰) in comparison to the much more primitive and more essential idea of magical sacred action, it is quite clear that it is the element of oblation, and not that of the sacred action itself, which distinguishes sacrifice from the preceding non-sacrificial magical rites of nature (which are also sacred action). Magical sacred actions and ritual gifts to the gods have different, independent and nonsacrificial roots. Sacrifice only originates as the synthesis of the two at a more advanced stage of human development. In light of what we know from La Reli Loisy, Essai, 26.  Loisy, Essai, 24.  Loisy, Essai, 26: “Le sacrifice ne procède pas que d’une seule idée ni d’une seule pratique; il n’apparaît qu’à un certain dégrée de l’évolution religieuse, et comme une sorte de synthèse où sont entrés des éléments divers. Par son fond, il tient des opérations magiques telles que sont les cérémonies totémiques des Arunta d’Australie, et qui n’étaient pas un hommage rendu à des puissances supérieurs, ni un tribut, ni un présent, ni un aliment à elles offert, mais des recettes pour promouvoir le travail de la nature, ou pour écarter les influences dangereuses ; et d’autre part, il tient aussi du don alimentaire qui s’est pratiqué un peu partout dans le culte des morts, même des esprits, et qui par lui-même, en tant que simple offrande, n’est pas un sacrifice.”  Loisy, Essai, 25: “Dans cette économie du sacrifice, l’idée d’offrande, là où elle se fait jour, est accessoire et adventice, on peut dire non primitive. L’idée dominante, originairement l’idée unique, est celle de l’action.” See also, on page 7: “La communion divine n’est pas plus à la base de toute l’économie des sacrifices que le don alimentaire; elle en fait partie comme lui; l’une et l’autre contribuent à diverses fins de l’action sacrificielle; ni l’une ni l’autre ne constituent l’élément essentiel de cette action sous toutes les formes où elle se présente dans les diverses religions.”

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gion, this historical disconnection between the origins of ritual sacrifice and those of religion and humanity itself, is without doubt motivated by Loisy’s belief that the future religion of humanity can again abandon it because the two are not indissolubly connected.²⁰¹ In Loisy’s view, sacrifice was thus absent during the magical-animistic beginnings of humanity, when spirits or forces always inhabited physical entities in nature. According to Loisy, the idea of a gift—and thus of sacrifice itself— can only originate at a later point, when there are well-articulated ideas about the now independent divine addressees (no longer tied to a physical entity), who can receive the gift. As the Arunta have no such gods, their totemic rites cannot be sacrificial.²⁰² Ancestor worship, which first existed independently alongside the magical cult of the spirits of nature, played a crucial role in the development of ritual gifts according to Loisy. Loisy conjectured that a certain degree of social development was needed for the idea of ritual gifts to develop, and societies needed to be able to produce the necessary alimentary resources to survive. Once those conditions were met, the conception of spirits of nature along the lines of the deceased ancestors made it quite “natural” that the practice of offering gifts was now also introduced in the cult of those spirits, and combined with the magical sacred actions. That was the beginning of sacrifice. Yet another explanation Loisy adduced, was that sacred actions consisting in bloody immolations, became interpreted as gifts offered to the nature spirits which were now independent from the objects of nature they controlled: L’idée du sacrifice qui nous est familière²⁰³ implique l’association du don rituel avec l’action sacrée. Les Arunta d’Australie, qui connaissent l’action magico-religieuse, ignorent à peu près l’oblation. C’est peut-être que le don rituel suppose, avec des idées assez nettes sur les esprits, un certain développement de la vie sociale et les moyens de se procurer assez largement des ressources alimentaires. Mais, ces conditions étant réalisées, l’idée d’esprits de la nature, conçus d’après les imaginations qu’on se fait des morts ou du double des vivants, conduit naturellement à la pratique d’offrandes dans le culte de ces esprits, comme on en fait dans le culte des défunts. Et comme ces esprits et les morts eux-mêmes sont supposés intervenir dans les affaires de ce monde, il est naturel que l’on adjoigne des

 This idea that sacrifice was not born at the start of mankind and thus should not perish with it, is more explicitly formulated in the conclusion, see Loisy, Essai, 521: “Le sacrifice n’est pas dans l’humanité une institution qui n’ait pas eu d’autre commencement que celui de l’humanité même, et qui ne doive pas avoir d’autre fin.”  Loisy, Essai, 17 and 203. Loisy did believe that there was mystical communion, just not with a god, but with a force present in the totem.  This delimitation seems to imply that there are other origins for sacrifices with which we are less familiar, but in the conclusion it becomes sufficiently clear that the combination of magical action and oblation is for Loisy a universal feature of sacrifice, see Loisy, Essai, 521.

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offrandes alimentaires aux rites efficaces, ou bien que les actions sacrées qui consistent en immolations sanglantes soient interprétées comme des oblations et se tournent pour ainsi dire en oblations adressées aux esprits par lesquels sont conduits les phénomènes de la nature, maintenant distingués de leurs causes.²⁰⁴

In this long quote one can once again see Loisy’s enormous indebtedness to Frazer, even if they disagreed on the animistic nature of primitive magic. For Loisy, the emergence of sacrifice seems to mark the progressive disentanglement between magic on the one hand, and religion (with its magical heritage) on the other hand, after the completely indistinguishable magical-religious begin phase.²⁰⁵ As we will see further on, the specific addressee of the sacrificial gift (first the dead ancestors and spirits of nature, then gods, god, and ultimately man himself) is paramount for him to determine the evolutionary status of a sacrificial rite. From our preceding analysis of La Religion, we already know that the divine addressees of sacrifice in fact symbolize the worshippers’ moral commitment to society. It is in this sense that we need to understand his (here more careful) statement that a certain degree of social development is perhaps necessary before sacrifice can make its appearance. But although sacrifice serves a crucial social function, its origin and nature were for Loisy far from identical to social life.

 Loisy, Essai, 26. Again, a literal translation of this important quote may be useful: “The idea of sacrifice that is familiar to us, implies the association of ritual gift with sacred action. The Arunta of Australia, who know this magical-religious action, are more or less ignorant of oblation. This is perhaps because ritual gift supposes, together with well-articulated ideas on spirits, a certain development of social life and the means to obtain rather large alimentary resources. But, these conditions being fulfilled, the idea of spirits of nature, conceived of along the lines of the images developed on the dead or on the doubles of the living, naturally leads to the practice of offerings in the cult of those spirits, as they exist in the cult of the deceased. And, since those spirits and the deceased themselves are supposed to intervene in the affairs of this world, it is natural that alimentary offerings are added to effective rites, or, else, that those sacred actions which consist of bloody immolations are interpreted as oblations and become, so to speak, oblations addressed to the spirits which lead the phenomena of nature, now distinguished from their causes.”  On this process of disentanglement of magic and religion from the magical-religious first phase of humanity, see chapter 3, 3.3. In the Essai Loisy clearly picked up on ideas he had already developed in 1910. The sole difference, perhaps, is that in 1910 Loisy wrote about the progress of religion as less and less magical, while in 1920 he described religion as a progressively religious magic. The emphasis on the negative magical heritage of religion—which should disappear in the future—is the reason for this change of perception. For an example in the Essai, see page 39: “quand la magie se fait de plus en plus religieuse.”

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5.3.1.2 The Origin of Sacrifice In line with his explicit assertion that magical rites of nature (and not the gift idea) constituted the true essence of sacrificial rites, Loisy paradoxically answered the questions as to why and how sacrificial rites had first originated, actually by explaining how and why the very first—in fact: pre-sacrificial—magical sacred actions had emerged. In his third chapter on the reasons for the emergence of sacrifice, he almost entirely forgot about his explanation that ritual sacrifice only originated when the magical rite was combined with the act of offering. What he actually discussed, was the origin of ritual itself. The fact that he explained the origins of sacrifice by solely focusing on the most primitive magical rites of nature, and not on oblation, has important consequences for the social-moral meaning of sacrifice, which is ambivalent as we will see. Loisy’s explanation of the origins of sacrifice is an often confusing combination of natural and supernatural causes. As was the case with his definition, there is a lot of reading between the lines to do in order to understand what he really meant by what he wrote. Let us begin with what Loisy himself called the human “faculty of faith” (“la faculté de foi”²⁰⁶). With this concept he referred to the psychological (cognitive and emotional) conditions which enable mankind to create and believe in imaginary spiritual entities on the one hand, and imaginary instruments (rites) to influence those entities on the other hand. Like many of his contemporaries, Loisy was convinced that the emergence of the belief in spiritual forces animating nature was the logical result of the underdeveloped rationality of primitive mankind. It is because of his childish reason (“sa logique d’enfant”²⁰⁷) that primitive man wrongly believes that his imaginations (dreams, hopes, simple thoughts, etc.) were real doubles, even if their objective existence could not be verified by observation.²⁰⁸ In Loisy’s eyes, the oldest imaginary spiritual beings were either vague powers animating nature, or the equally vague spirits of deceased ancestors. The emergence of the latter is not only the result of this natural tendency of primitive man to project his imaginations onto reality, but also of the emotion-

 Loisy, Essai, 101. In spite of the fact that the term is the same as Friedrich Max Müller’s faculty of faith, Loisy’s faculté de foi covers a different meaning. Loisy’s term especially refers to the psychological predisposition of mankind to believe in imaginary spiritual beings. For Müller this was a religionist term which mainly referred to the innate mystical intuition of the Infinite. On Müller’s view of religion see most recently Arie L. Molendijk, Friedrich Max Müller and the Sacred Books of the East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 156.  Loisy, Essai, 109.  Loisy, Essai, 100.

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al incapacity of human beings to accept their own future death.²⁰⁹ Loisy here hinted at contemporary psychological theories which placed the origin of religion in death anxiety, but that point is not further elaborated.²¹⁰ Even if Loisy never accepted Reinach’s views on religion finding its origin in arbitrary indictments, his own emphasis on human psychology—both in the sense of the pre-rational thinking structures and the purely irrational-emotional nature of religious beliefs and rites—showed at least some similarity to that of his rationalist enemy.²¹¹ The major difference between the two, however, is that Loisy considered this psychological explanation as only one side of the coin, and, so it seems, as the less important one. Psychology explained that mankind had the mental skills, the natural disposition to believe in imaginary entities and imaginary instruments to affect them, but this natural ability does not sufficiently explain for Loisy why mankind actually, and so pertinaciously, had faith in its own imaginations.²¹² Loisy contrasted the faculty of faith, to what he called the willingness (“volonté de foi”), or the deep need (“besoin intime”) to have faith. In other words, for sacrifice to originate, there needs to be a deeper cause that triggers the human faculty of faith, a need which makes people wanting to put their skill in action. It is this need which leads us to the very first reasons why primitive man performed (again: pre-sacrificial) sacred actions. The willingness to have faith in sacred action, Loisy argued, first emerged out of the deeply human need for confidence in life and assurance of life, at times and places where staying alive was a hardship.²¹³ He also explained this volonté as nothing more than the typically human longing for confidence in oneself, which mankind sadly sought to get by illusory tricks and spiritual entities

 Loisy, Essai, 100.  The causal relation between religion and death anxiety is a longstanding popular topic of investigation in theories of religion, including those of, for instance, Hume, Feuerbach, Freud, and later Malinowski. No explicit mention is made in the Essai of Freud’s Totem und Tabu (1913).  See for instance, Reinach, Orpheus, 6: “We may declare the savage and the child to be animists; i. e., they project their own volition outwards, and invest the world, more especially the beings and objects that surround them, with a life and sentiments similar to their own. I might give innumerable instances of this tendency; to find conclusive examples we have but to carry our minds to our earliest recollections of childhood.” For an analysis of Reinach’s origins of religion, see supra, 3.2.2.  Loisy, Essai, 101: “la foi de l’homme en la vertu de l’action sacrée n’est pas qu’une erreur inévitable de son esprit. Sa disposition naturelle à tenir pour objectivement réelles ses imaginations et sa pensée explique sa faculté de foi, elle n’explique pas suffisamment le besoin intime, la nécessité morale de cette foi.”  Loisy, Essai, 532.

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outside himself.²¹⁴ That mankind especially created sacred action out of the need to have faith in life, leads Loisy to quite circular statements, including that primitive man created sacred actions for the sake of the satisfaction of believing in them: “il [primitive man, my remark] crée, il fait l’action sacrée pour avoir la satisfaction d’y croire.”²¹⁵ Loisy explained that the specific kind of assurance sought, changed substantially over time. At first, it was the basic assurance of food, while at the highest stages of religious development the need to perform sacred action was deeply moral and spiritual. In a typically Hegelian way, Loisy described the development of the volonté de foi as a process of growing human self-consciousness. It slowly but steadily evolves from an external-physical, self-alienated conception of life to a deeply humanist one.²¹⁶ The constant transformation of the faith attached to sacrifice, is itself the result of mankind’s social, intellectual, and moral progress towards a broader spiritual conception of humanity. But notwithstanding the importance attached to this evolution, Loisy’s negative conception of the most primitive stage penetrates his interpretation of ritual sacrifice at any stage of development. Primitive man first performed magical sacred actions out of purely material self-interest. This happened both in the negative sense of protecting oneself against whatever can threaten those material means, as in the positive sense of stimulating whatever is thought to produce them.²¹⁷ Throughout his Essai, Loisy repeated that the purely self-interested, primitive-material needs always remained an underlying incentive even at later spiritual-moral stages of development.²¹⁸ This transparently negative take on the non-moral origin of ritual and its persistence throughout the history of religions, can be easily explained when one keeps in mind that Loisy now believed in a radically different future with a religion of humanity that was the clean opposite of personal selfinterest. It was in light of the radical discontinuity that was about to come, that

 Loisy, Essai, 101.  Loisy, Essai, 101. For another example see 104: “on avait besoin de croire à la vertu mystique du chef comme on avait besoin de croire à la vertu mystique de l’action sacrée, parce qu’on avait besoin de croire à la vie.”  Loisy, Essai, 532.  Loisy made no categorical distinction between “positive” (e. g., propitiatory) or “negative” (e. g. expiatory) rites. We will briefly return to this point in the following section.  Loisy, Essai, 439: “Tout le souci que l’homme a eu de nourrir ses dieux n’était que pour la conservation de sa propre existence; il nourrissait pour être nourri.” At page 534, by contrast, Loisy more insisted on the sublimation of self-interest in the universalizing religions of salvation, although still only “to a certain extent”: “Les rites qui donnent l’immortalité ont donc été, ils sont devenus, au moins dans une certaine mesure, une suggestion de courage intérieur, de sentiments humains, en opposition avec l’égoïsme naturel.”

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Loisy once again teleologically constructed the history of sacrifice as the negative antithesis of the future. And the following passage with an unmistakable hint at WWI in the last sentence, shows that Christianity is now unambiguously part of that history. Même quand l’action sacrée, devenue essentiellement un rite de communion mystique avec des dieux qui font à leurs adeptes participation de leur immortalité, n’a plus de rapport direct avec les saisons et qu’elle n’en a pas davantage avec les événements qui concernent la vie nationale, pratiquement elle s’y adapte par une accommodation qui sans doute est indispensable pour retenir la masse des fidèles,²¹⁹ plus sensibles aux avantages temporels qu’aux biens de l’éternité. Ainsi la cène chrétienne est par elle-même une action sacrée qui ne concerne pas les produits du sol ni les intérêts de la cité; elle semblerait même n’y avoir aucun regard, puisqu’elle vise proprement à réaliser la communion des fidèles avec le Christ Sauveur. Cependant nous voyons le Dieu des chrétiens solennellement invoqué pour faire cesser la sécheresse ou arrêter les inondations, pour bénir les moissons, aussi pour favoriser les intérêts d’un peuple et lui donner la victoire dans ses guerres avec ses voisins.²²⁰

In the Eucharist, Loisy here explained, the original primitive sacred action has completely transformed into a highly spiritual rite of communion with god, and any direct connection with the seasons, or with the subsequent national concerns of cities or countries is lost. But even if this rite actually aims to realize the union of the faithful with god, it clearly accommodates itself to the purely material interests of the majority of the faithful. And thus, Loisy concludes, one sees how “the God of the Christians is solemnly invoked to stop drought or floods, for blessings of the harvest, and to favor the interests of a people and to grant it victory in war against its neighbors.” Overall, ritual sacrifice thus carried a particularly heavy burden, but Loisy’s antithesis with the purely moral, non-ritual sacrifice of the future was not consistent, as soon will become clear. However, we first want to draw attention to the fact that Loisy regularly formulated his beliefs on the origin of sacrifice in

 Loisy here hinted at the two speeds at which religion progresses, the one of the “masses,” who are more prone to primitive interests, and the one of an elite. This idea is strikingly similar to the viewpoint of his friend Cumont, who had wondered in a reaction to La Religion whether Loisy had not been too optimistic about the morality of their fellow man; Lannoy, Bonnet, and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, I, 159 (letter 159, of April 29, 1917). For this antithetic idea in Cumont’s historiography: Lannoy, “Les masses vulgaires et les intelligences élevées.”  Loisy, Essai, 123.

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direct opposition to the sociological school of Durkheim.²²¹ As we have seen previously, he explicitly agreed with the Durkheimians on the social function of sacrifice, but for him this social function was the effect and not the primal cause (or essence) of sacred action. He acknowledged that primitive man never was an isolated being. The members of a primitive community shared the same alimentary needs. As they performed the rites together, the cult enhanced social cohesion, group consciousness, and moral behavior.²²² From the very beginning, these social-moral effects are the positive but unconscious corollary of sacred action. For his explanation of its first cause, however, Loisy firmly stuck to the perspective and the intentions of the worshipper, to what she/he was consciously after when they first performed sacrifice, and that was control over the fertility of nature to assure material well-being.²²³ Social cohesion was a positive but unsought function of sacrifice, and therefore not the essence of sacrifice to Loisy.²²⁴ Gradually, he argued, mankind grew conscious of its inherently social nature, and over time the social concern for the prosperity of the nation itself became a conscious reason to perform sacrifice. In universalizing religions of salvation the sacrifice became the ritual enactment and commemoration of the god’s supreme act of morality. But the social and moral value of sacrifice was Loisy’s functionalist answer to the question why sacrificial rites didn’t disappear, in spite of the fact that they were complete nonsense. Since the origins of sacrifice resided in material interests and stemmed from primitive non-rationality, the first sacred actions were non-moral and non-rational “absurdities”.²²⁵ Potentially, sacred action could even be anti-social, since the material self-interests of the members within a  Loisy never made much of a distinction between the nevertheless quite different sacrificial theories of Durkheim, and Hubert and Mauss. On this topic see Ptacek, “Durkheim’s Two Theories of Sacrifice.”  Loisy, Essai, 533.  Loisy, Essai, 26, but see also 116 for a similar remark.  Loisy, Essai, 69: “L’action sacrée,—le grand mérite de M. Durkheim et de son école est d’avoir reconnu et mis en relief ce fait important,—est un sacrement effectif et conservateur de l’unité sociale, quelle qu’ait pu être d’ailleurs l’intention formelle et directe de cette action. Elle contribue à la formation et à la conservation du lien social. Elle fait la communion du groupe dans l’intérêt de sa vie collective et dans le sentiment de sa permanence à travers les générations qui se succèdent. Mais il ne faut pas confondre ce résultat naturel avec l’objet propre et initial de l’action sacrée, ni prétendre que celle-ci ne soit pas autre chose que l’expression directe du sentiment social.”  The conclusion of the book: Loisy, Essai, 523: “L’histoire du sacrifice, comme en général celle de la religion, s’est déroulée selon une certaine logique dont on peut dire qu’elle a peu à peu, et un peu plus ou un peu moins dans les différentes religions, rationnalisé, moralisé des pratiques en elles-mêmes dépourvues de raison et de moralité. Le point de départ est dans l’absurdité nue, évidente pour nous, de l’opération magique et du don rituel.”

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community, and of one community to another, could conflict. Again, Loisy’s particularly negative appreciation of the origins of ritual sacrifice can only be understood in light of his conviction that moral sacrifice should radically sever itself from its ritual ancestor. But, at the same time, it should be added that he also had theological-philosophical objections against the Durkheimian belief that the origin and essence of sacrifice (read: of religion) essentially was human commitment to society. At certain points in the Essai, Loisy’s philosophical belief in the innate mystical-moral drive of mankind shimmers through, and when it does, it seriously conflicts with his otherwise predominant emphasis on the strictly non-moral beginnings of sacred action. For example, in the passage where he introduced his concept of the willingness to have faith, he suggested that a moral need is the primal cause of sacrifice. Here, he explained that man’s faith in the power of the sacred action was not just the result of his premature rationality. This predisposition to confound reality and imaginations explains the faculty of faith but not “the intimate need, the moral necessity” (“le besoin intime, la nécessité morale de cette foi”), which triggers this faculty.²²⁶ In La Religion, we have seen Loisy claiming that rituals are the symbolical expression of mankind’s desire to do good. In this philosophical work, the mystical intuition of an ideal of morality is unambiguously the deeper, primary cause of ritual sacrifice.²²⁷ In the Essai, by contrast, Loisy oscillated between morality as pure effect, and the mystical awareness of morality as cause of sacred action, with a clear predominance of the former position. On the one hand, these doubts on the non-moral/moral origins of sacred action—and, of religion itself—, may be explained by his nuanced anthropology. In each human being, he explained, there is a constant battle between natural passion and moral obligation, between sensual desires and idealist ones, between egoism and humanism. This ambivalent anthropology may explain why Loisy was inconsistent with regard to the emergence of sacrifice, which was sometimes situated in primitive self-interested magic, and sometimes said to only begin with the later connection of magic to ritual gifts. On the other hand, his continuous wavering between a negative-materialist and a positive-moralizing interpretation of sacrifice may also be connected to his frequent and paradoxical shift of perspective. Loisy wanted to understand sacrifice from the perspective of the worshipper (whose first intentions are non-moral), but at the same time, he could not help but insist how

 Loisy, Essai, 101.  Faith is, however, not the sole cause. In La Religion, too, Loisy insisted on primitive psychology for the emergence of rituals.

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wrong the worshipper was. It is especially towards the end of the Essai that the philosopher stepped forward to discuss the unresolved paradox the historian saw running throughout his entire volume: that is, that the high (moral) profit mankind has really gained from sacrifice has never been the low (material) one it actually sought to obtain from it. Perplexed by the discrepancy between the crude magical rites and their elevated moral effects, Loisy felt forced to conclude that in this paradox resided “the mystery of religion,” or even, “the mystery of humanity.”²²⁸

5.3.1.3 The Way Sacrifice Works (but Actually Doesn’t Work) It will be abundantly clear by now that magic is the beating heart of ritual sacrifice for Loisy. In his narrative, however, magic is a term with several, quite distinct meanings. The two most important sets of usage—both with negative connotation—are the following. On the one hand, magic was used by Loisy to refer to the material objectives of the most primitive sacred actions which were orientated towards influencing nature. In this sense, magic is for him often synonym to non-social and nonmoral.²²⁹ This point of view is perfectly congruent with his 1910 essay on magic and religion, and his sociological understanding of the differences between the two.²³⁰ On the other hand, though, and much more frequently, magic is the term Loisy used to describe the determining mechanism of sacred actions, or, put differently: the particular way in which the worshippers understand the efficacy of their rite.²³¹ In agreement with Frazer, he believed that the essence of this mechanism can be retrieved from the most primitive rites of nature. The main difference with the gradually (but never entirely) disappear-

 Loisy, Essai, 532: “Ces avantages, qui se rencontrent sur toute la ligne du développement religieux, dont ils marquent le progrès, ne sont pas moins aisés à vérifier que l’inconsistance des croyances et des pratiques, et sans doute peut-on dire que dans le rapport de cette inconsistance avec la réalité de ces avantages indiscutables gît le mystère de la religion, l’on serait presque tenté d’ajouter, le mystère de la connaissance humaine, ou le mystère de l’humanité.”  Loisy, Essai, 26: “On pourrait presque dire, que dans l’évolution historique du sacrifice, la signification sociale de celui-ci a grandi au dépens de sa signification magique et en s’y substituant.”  See supra, 3.3.  For useful general reflections on the crucial notion of efficacy in ritual studies: Jørgen Podemann Sørensen, “Efficacy,” in Theorizing Rituals. Issues, Topics, Approaches, Concepts, eds. Jens Kreinath, Jan Snoek, and Michael Stausberg (Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2006), 523 – 532. For theoretical considerations on the equally important notion of “action,” see in the same volume: James Laidlaw and Caroline Humphrey, “Action,” 265 – 283.

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ing magical-material objectives attached to the rites, is that the primitive magical mechanism pertinaciously continued to be of prominent importance to all later sacred actions. When Loisy referred to the Eucharist as primitive magic, he had in mind the survival of the primitive efficacy attached to this rite, with the traditional Catholic transubstantiation as prime example.²³² How, now, should we understand the magical mechanism of sacrifice? To answer that question, Loisy took his departure from the mental configuration of the very first worshippers. By lack of scientific-technological knowledge on how nature works, the primitive mind necessarily resorts to purely imaginary tools.²³³ In a typically Frazerian way, Loisy explained that these imaginary instruments work on the basis of the primitive belief in sympathetic magic, and mainly on the basis of primitive analogical thinking.²³⁴ Primitive man will act out (“figurer”) as meticulously as possible whatever he wants to make happen. The gestures performed, the words spoken, the materials used,… are all believed to be efficacious representations. So far, one would be inclined to think that Loisy is purely following Frazer’s account of magic as a form of pre-technology. However, this explanation on the basis of primitive pre-rationality is, once again, only one side of a much wider picture. For Loisy, primitive man is not just a pre-rational being. From the very beginning, Loisy argued, the material representation of the desired effect is believed to carry within it a vague but unmistakably supernatural property (vertu). Although the primitive worshipper was hardly conscious of this supernatural force, sacrifice was never a purely mechanical-physical procedure to him.²³⁵ It was always a “mystically efficacious sacred action,” or, in other words, a sacrament. The false principle of causality is one instrument of support for its efficacy, the mystical nature of mankind the other. The central analytical key in Loisy’s interpretation of how pre-sacrificial and sacrificial sacred actions work, is his notion of vertu, which we may freely translate as the specific form of mystical-transcendent efficacy attached to a material-physical action. In the first magical rites of nature, this vertu is a confused combination of physical-natural

 For his implicit agreement with Protestant voices on the magical nature of the Catholic Eucharist, see infra, 5.3.2.  Loisy, Essai, 100.  Frazer’s other law of contagion receives less attention in Loisy’s account.  In the animistic stage of religion, there was no clear distinction between the natural and the supernatural. Loisy, Essai, 19: “Le sacrifice est l’action par excellence, l’action sacrée mystiquement efficace. On pourrait même parler d’efficacité surnaturelle si, aux premiers degrés de l’évolution humaine et religieuse, la distinction du naturel et du surnaturel n’était pas ignorée.”

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and spiritual-supernatural power. In higher stages of development, the spiritual component will become more dominant. Importantly, Loisy was convinced that all objects, agents, words, and gestures that are part of a sacred action, are believed to be in possession of this vertu before the ritual starts. On this particular point, he fiercely criticized Hubert and Mauss: La vertu du sacrifice existe radicalement dans la victime, et le rite sert à l’exciter, à l’expliciter, à la sublimer et à la conduire. La définition des sociologues a bien mis en relief la vertu du sacrifice; mais, en interprétant uniquement cette vertu en idée sociale, en expression de force sociale, elle en altère le sens. Car la vertu du sacrifice n’appartient point comme telle à l’ordre des choses purement sociales,—si un tel ordre existe;—cette vertu magico-mystique appartient à l’ordre des puissances physico-morales que la pensée religieuse postule dans l’univers.²³⁶

Loisy acknowledged the great analytical value of Hubert’s and Mauss’s notion of mana, which was for him the equivalent of his vertu,²³⁷ and he applauded the attention their theory had drawn to the social. But that is about as far as the agreement went. According to Hubert and Mauss, mana was a quality which was assigned to the victim (and the “sacrificer”) during the rite, on the basis of collective sociological and psychological mechanisms. It was almost never the inherent quality of a gesture, a person, or a specific object.²³⁸ For Loisy, that is the world completely upside down. The vertu of the victim, he asserted, cannot be fully reduced to the social sphere (“en idée sociale”). This combined “magical-mystical” vertu should be understood as belonging to the “physical” (= magical) and “moral” (= mystical) powers which religious man sees at work “in the universe.” According to Loisy, the simple logic behind any sacred action is that the vertu of the rite acts on the vertu which is believed to be present in animated nature, and later in independent spirits, gods, or god. This conception of sacrifice further explains why “simple” gifts are excluded from his definition: they are theological symbols, but not sacrifice. Even in later sacrifices, which no longer directly act on animated nature, but honor the gods who are now believed to

 Loisy, Essai, 8.  Loisy, Essai, 471.  Hubert and Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function, 19: “Sacrifice is a religious act that can only be carried out in a religious atmosphere and by means of essentially religious agents. But, in general, before the ceremony neither sacrifier nor sacrificer, nor place, instruments, or victim, possess this characteristic to a suitable degree. The first phase of the sacrifice is intended to impart it to them.” They do acknowledge that some victims have “a divine characteristic by nature” (29), but in most cases, “it had nothing sacred about it” when the rite begins.

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control nature, the idea of an efficacious magical-mystical force is present. It is now manifested in the belief that the gods are materially nourished by the vertu in the alimentary oblation. Needless to say that this peculiar interpretation of sacrifice as sacrament, which is the word Loisy explicitly used for sacrifice in general, and not just for the Eucharist, is deeply informed by his Catholic background.²³⁹ Given the prominence of this altogether shallow analytical tool in his narrative, Ivan Strenski was quite right, indeed, to state that Loisy’s notion of vertu explains nothing, whereas Renée Koch-Piettre aptly referred to his method as a Procrustean bed.²⁴⁰ Loisy did not feel the need, for instance, to theorize much about important points of debate in contemporary sacrifice studies, such as the differences between “positive” (propitiatory) or “negative” (expiatory) sacrifices, which he quite simply explained as the positive or negative handling of the vertu. ²⁴¹ And as Marc Kolakowski, Agnes Nagy, and Francesca Prescendi have shown, he also didn’t problematize the much-discussed relation of human sacrifice to other sacrificial rites.²⁴² For him, human sacrifice was a sacrifice among others, which had its primitive origins in the fact that the first human beings indistinctly consumed both human and animal food.

5.3.2 The History and the Future of Sacrifice In line with La Religion, the Essai’s account of the historical development of sacrifice from its most primitive appearances up until and including Christianity, was one of undissolved continuity. In conclusion of this chapter, we briefly

 For Loisy’s analysis of the Eucharist, see infra, 5.3.2.1.  Koch Piettre, “Alfred Loisy et ses études sur le sacrifice,” 81.  See especially, Loisy, Essai, 521: “La combinaison du don rituel ou de son idée avec le rite d’efficacité positive fait le sacrifice commun dans le service divin; la combinaison du don rituel ou de son idée avec le rite magique d’efficacité négative fait le sacrifice dit expiatoire.” To be true, Hubert and Mauss had also stated that these types of sacrifice were “all the same in essence,” (Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function, 17– 18), but they had profoundly analyzed how the same mechanism of sacralization was differently applied to expiatory and propitiatory rites.  The authors also interestingly show that Loisy’s procrustean analysis has the beneficial effect that he doesn’t feel the need to insist on the monstrous character of human sacrifice, as many contemporaries did. Loisy also didn’t situate the emergence of human sacrifice at the dawn of humanity (thus disconnecting it from civilization), which didn’t know any form of sacrifice, but instead argued that human sacrifice probably made its first appearance among the first civilizations. In this regard, too, his analysis of human sacrifice was different from that of many contemporaries. See the fine analysis of Kolakowski, Nagy, and Prescendi, “L’Essai historique sur le sacrifice d’Alfred Loisy,” 100 – 103;

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want to summarize the three major steps Loisy identified in this historical development, and discuss the conclusion of the Essai, at the end of which the historian of religions stepped aside to let the philosopher back in.²⁴³ Throughout the previous sections we have had ample chance to discuss the crucial first phase, with the primitive cults of what Loisy called the “non-civilized” and “semi-civilized.”²⁴⁴ At the most primitive point of non-civilization, mankind is in a state of permanent confusion, with a complete overlap of physical and mystical considerations of reality.²⁴⁵ Supernatural forces inhabit physical entities, and the magical rites are decisively non-sacrificial, as no independent divine addressees as yet exist. The magical rites are self-effective, in the sense that the vertu is the internal quality of the gestures, the (animated) material handled, the words spoken,… This vertu is not placed there by the external intervention of a god, as will be the case in later religions, such as, for instance, in Christianity, where bread and wine only get their vertu through “contact” with Christ. In the course of the primitive first phase, the forces inhabiting nature gradually detach themselves from their physical entities.²⁴⁶ It is within the cult of the deceased ancestors that the idea of an alimentary oblation originated, independent from the magical rites of nature. When “demi-civilization” sets through, magical sacred action and alimentary oblation are combined, in ways that make perfect sense to the primitive mind who believes that the spirits of na-

 Renée Koch-Piettre, and Marc Kolakowski, Agnes Nagy, and Francesca Prescendi provide excellent accounts of this historical development (especially with regard to the Eucharist), which makes yet another account unnecessary here. Koch-Piettre, “Alfred Loisy et ses études sur le sacrifice,” 79 – 80; and especially Kolakowski, Nagy, and Prescendi, “L’Essai historique sur le sacrifice d’Alfred Loisy,” 99 – 100, and 103 – 105.  It may be interesting to note that both in the Essai and in La Religion Loisy is considerate of the rational abilities and the germs of moral behavior in primitive cults: “Ces pauvres systèmes d’humanité inférieure, grossiers essais de religion, de morale et de raison, contenaient en germe tout le développement humain” (La Religion, 104). Both works contain a remarkable plea against the self-superiority claims of Europe over against the early 20th century purportedly uncivilized primitive tribes in Australia, Africa, etc. See especially La Religion, 96 – 98, and Essai, 525. He also warns against a diametrical opposition between primitive cults and European Christianities, since the latter have proven to be capable of sheer barbary, while the former are not always as primitive as one would suspect. To explain the apparent relapse of European religions, Loisy explained that not all human beings found themselves in the same stage of religious and intellectual development at the same time.  Loisy, Essai, 19.  Loisy, Essai, 26. This development from animated nature to independent supernatural spirits and gods receives little attention in Loisy’s account. In this sense, too, his Essai is very different from the Essai of Hubert and Mauss, who had explained this process as one that had its cause in the ritual act of sacrificing itself.

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ture and the spirits of the deceased control reality in similar ways. The first sacrificial rites are ambivalent. On the one hand, the sacrificed victim is still self-effective, its vertu is internal, as it incarnates the god or spirit to whom the sacrifice is offered. On the other hand, the sacrificial rite clearly presupposes an independent supernatural addressee.²⁴⁷ The sacrifice is by no means only a homage, it is also, and at first especially, a magical attempt to assist in assuring the fertility of nature.²⁴⁸ In Loisy’s second stage of the national religions, the spirits of nature have become personified and transcended gods with a will of their own. As tribes grow into nations, they become tutelary gods. The rise of agriculture gradually dissipates the first alimentary needs to sacrifice. Seasonal rites remain important, but the growing of the crops is progressively perceived as the result of divine voluntarism. In the sacrificial rites, the idea of magical sacred action recedes into the background, while the idea of an alimentary gift and homage gains importance. Various forms of sacred action get combined in one type of rite, which can be used for different purposes. Sacrificial myths arise to explain that the rites have been instituted by the gods themselves to organize the mutual relation between the city/nation and their gods. The benefits sought from sacrifice, become more social but remain completely self-interested. The gods are thanked to protect the city and to procure prosperity. The magical mechanism of the rite remains firmly in place. Sacrifices are interpreted as divine meals which aim to materially nourish the gods (“divinités nourricières”²⁴⁹). In many cases, however, the vertu of the offered aliments had now been placed there by the gods themselves. As early as in Antiquity, Loisy added, many people were conscious of the fact that the gods could not possibly be really fed by the sacrifice. However, the social function of the sacrifice was such that the magical rites continued to be meticulously performed. Judaism is the one exception of an ancient national religion which abandoned its empty ritual sacrifice, but this renouncement only happened because it was enforced by external circumstances. As a Jewish sect, the first followers of Jesus also had a non-sacrificial cult. It was due to its close contacts with the ancient mystery cults that Christianity conquered the West as an inherently sacrificial religion. The third and highest phase of the historical development of sacrifice is, indeed, the one reserved for the ancient mystery cults and Christianity, the universalizing systems of salvation (économies de salut). Within these religions, the

 Loisy, Essai, 51.  Loisy, Essai, 65.  Loisy, Essai, 3.

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promise of a personal and blissful afterlife, which was virtually absent in the previous phase, occupies the front of the scene. Geopolitical developments introduced a larger, universalizing scope in these religions. Sacrifices of communion are central in their cult.²⁵⁰ By performing the sacrifice, the worshipper enters into communion with the savior god, and the immortality of the god is imparted onto him. While there is definitely still a part of self-interestedness in the desire for immortality, the crudely primitive origins of sacrifice have now been deeply spiritualized and moralized. Essential for this development are the ritualist myths which make the worshipper believe that the rite has been instituted by the god himself, and which turn the preceding seasonal sacrifices into the liturgical, efficacious reenactment and commemoration of the moral self-sacrifice of the god. As Renée Koch-Piettre observed, it is Christianity which in every single chapter makes up the lion share of the pages.²⁵¹ Loisy explained almost ad nauseam how the death of the historical Jesus got interpreted (by Paul and contemporaries) as a sacrifice due to the contacts with the influential sacrificial myths of the pagan self-sacrificing gods. The myth of Christ’s redeeming death on the cross included both the negative idea of sacrificial expiation, and the positive idea of sacrificial communion. Once conceived, this myth converted the mystical-commemorative meals of Jesus’ first followers into ritual sacrifices.²⁵² Just like any other historical religion, Christianity has not been able to shake off ritual sacrifice. And what’s even worse, it has succeeded in reintroducing ritual sacrifice in an initially non-sacrificial cult, be it in the highest possible spiritual and moral expression. It is true that Loisy emphasized how the Eucharist is, in a way, only sacrificial in a symbolical sense, because the only real sacrifice for Christians is obviously that of Jesus Christ himself. But on the other hand, he argued at great length that the Eucharist is a real ritual sacrifice, because its determining mechanism is fully in line with the primitive magic of the first sacred actions. It magically reenacts and perpetuates the redeeming self-sacrifice of the Christ. As in the previous phase, the mystical properties of the bread and wine are not what we may call “self-inherent,” they are the result of the verbal-magical contact with Christ. The Eucharist thus is spiritual magic, but magic nevertheless. Importantly, Loisy also admitted that the Catholic interpretation of Eucharist is  For a more detailed account of the pagan mystery cults and Christianity, see supra, 4.3.1 and 4.3.2.  Koch-Piettre, “Alfred Loisy et ses études sur le sacrifice,” 79.  As we mentioned in our previous chapter, the sacrificial myth precedes the actual ritual, even if Loisy perniciously insisted that it was the other way around.

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a lot more primitive than the Protestant one, as Catholics believe that a material miracle takes place within the bread and wine.²⁵³ In a similar vein, it is quite interesting to observe that he even referred to the Liberal-Protestant classicist Hermann Usener who had adopted a typically Lutheran “pagano-papist” approach in his comparative studies of Greco-Roman religion and early Christianity, insisting on the continuity between paganism and Catholicism.²⁵⁴ But in the end, Loisy explained, Protestants are also guilty of continuing magical ideas since they, too, believe that the Eucharist is a mystically efficacious tool to become one with god. As modern scholars have recently underlined, Loisy passed a particularly negative judgment on Christianity, even if he greatly valued its central idea of an expiatory gift for the sake of others.²⁵⁵ Without doubt, this severe criticism is the result of a deep disappointment with its inability to get rid of the magical ideas that stand in the way of a truly conscious moral sacrifice. The Eucharist is qualified as the continuation of a primitive “irrational logic,”²⁵⁶ as a ritual which keeps up with the “despicable” idea of human sacrifice, at least symbolically, and as a sacrifice which shows no real difference with the dionysiac omophagy, which, in turn, is the continuation of the primitive totemic cult of the Arunta tribes: “l’idée essentielle de l’eucharistie chrétienne est la même que celle de l’omophagie dionysiaque, et l’idée essentielle de l’omophagie dionysiaque est la même que celle de la communion totémique chez les Arunta d’Australie, pour ce qui est de l’élément symbolique, du procédé mystique, du ressort magique de l’action sacrée.”²⁵⁷ In the nearly two decades that separate L’Évangile et l’Église (1902) and the Essai historique sur le sacrifice, comparison always remained for Loisy a quintessential scientific ally to substantiate future religious reform, be it in quite contradictory ways. In his Modernist work, comparison positively showed how the true essence of Christianity was never lost underneath historical transformations, and it helped him make the claim that transformations were necessary to keep this valuable essence alive. In the Essai, comparison shows that in spite of transformations, evolutions, and sublimations, all historical religions have continued the same irrational and futile magical ideas. In 1902, comparison shows the need

 Loisy, Essai, 30.  Loisy, Essai, 59, note 1, reference to Usener’s paper “Heilige Handlung,” Archiv für Religionswissenschaft 7 (1904): 281– 339.  Kolakowski, Nagy, and Prescendi, “L’Essai historique sur le sacrifice,” 105.  Loisy, Essai, 31.  Loisy, Essai, 530.

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for a new but still inherently Christian transformation. In 1920, it shows the need for a radically new post-Christian religion. And still, it should immediately be added that this was only one of the two conclusions of the Essai. As in La Religion, Loisy also insisted on the continuity between the religious past and future, in the sense that the future of humanity will be intrinsically religious: “religions die, but, to be true, religion does not.”²⁵⁸ Loisy explained that in the religion of the future moral behavior should be the only and strictly obligatory sacrifice.²⁵⁹ After the war, however, he wrote to Cumont that he was reluctant to continue his reflections on the religious future of humanity due to the chaos which then reigned in national and international politics. In a remarkable letter of 1922, he nevertheless tried to convince himself to keep on “prophesying.” Self-consciously but not without a hint of self-irony, Loisy declared himself the “Einstein of the history of religions” while explaining to Cumont what had been his unfaltering mission throughout his entire career, Modernist and post-Modernist: Devant ce chaos, je n’ose plus prophétiser. Je ne regrette pourtant pas mes anciennes prophéties sur l’avenir religieux de l’humanité, la société des nations, etc. D’abord, ces prophéties ont toujours été conditionnelles. De plus, il est avéré, par l’histoire des religions, que les meilleures prophéties ont toujours comporté une forte part d’illusion. Illusion d’optique surtout. Encore est-il que du point de vue de l’éternité, une erreur d’optique sur la longueur de temps n’est rien. D’autant qu’il y a maintenant la relativité. Quand je dis maintenant, c’est une façon de parler. Car, en 1893, j’ai été chassé de l’Institut catholique pour avoir dit que la vérité des Écritures était relative. J’ai été, sans le savoir, l’Einstein de l’histoire des religions. Il faut que je continue.²⁶⁰

 Loisy, Essai, 539.  Loisy, Essai, 540.  Letter of January 17, 1922; Lannoy, Bonnet, and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, 288 – 289: “In face of this chaos, I no longer dare to prophesy. I don’t regret, however, my former prophecies on the religious future of humanity, the society of nations, etc. First of all, those prophecies have always been conditional. Moreover, it turns out, from the history of religions, that the best prophecies have always included a good portion of illusion. Optical illusion especially. But even then, an optical illusion on the length of time is nothing from the perspective of eternity. All the more so because there now is relativity. And when I say now that’s just a manner of speaking. Because, in 1893, I was chased away from the Institut catholique for having said that the truth of the Scriptures is relative. Without knowing it, I have been the Einstein of the history of religions. I have to go on.”

Conclusion Loisy’s inaugural lecture of his 1921– 1922 course at the Collège de France marked the end point of his research on the general history of religions. Looking back on his accomplishments since his appointment in 1909, he prided himself on the simplicity of his purportedly unchanged method, which in his eyes primarily was a matter of having the right intellectual and moral faculties: “notre méthode n’était pas autre chose qu’une application sincère, totale, ordonnée, de nos facultés intellectuelles et morales, à la réalité de notre sujet.”¹ Methodology, he asserted, had received too much attention in the field of history of religions. When correctly applied, historical method could, on its own, perfectly well cover the comparative study of religion in all its depth and width. According to Loisy, little could, indeed, be gained from the “stylish” and “revealed” methods developed in the fields of anthropology and sociology. Throughout this book, we have had ample opportunity to point out how wide a gulf often existed between what Loisy himself believed he did, and what he actually did, between what he explicitly wrote, and what he implicitly meant by what he wrote. This is no different for this inaugural speech. Even if he stated differently, his historical method of 1920 was not the same as the one of 1909. As he had set out to do in 1909, and now “forgot” to mention in 1921, he really did explore the scientific opportunities and challenges posed by anthropological, sociological, and (though less so) psychological comparative methods and theories of religion. These theories were highly instrumental in the progressive secularization of his comparative paradigms after 1908. Loisy never was a paragon of modesty. There is a very good chance that this self-conscious scholar strategically downplayed his debt to those other theories in order to emphasize his own scientific independence and originality. On the other hand, though, we have seen how important it really was for Loisy to present himself as strictly historicist. In our first chapter, we have seen that his Modernist manifesto, L’Évangile et l’Église, already made the first careful rapprochements to a more universalizing anthropological approach toward religion. But in the late 1890s and the 1900s, Loisy’s comparative research was predominantly focused on the Judeo-Christian tradition, and his comparisons were strictly confined to religions which had been historically related to that tradition. Although Loisy considered many aspects of ancient Judaism and early Christianity comparable to other ancient religions, the historical development of those two religions was radically set aside from that of  Loisy, “De la méthode,” 13. For a short analysis of this inaugural lecture, see supra, 4.3.2. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110584356-010

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any other religion in his Modernist work. If there really were universal laws of development at work in history, Loisy agreed with his Liberal-Protestant nemesis Adolf von Harnack that these did not apply to Judaism or Christianity. The JudeoChristian tradition had a development of its own, seeing that it was the only one subject to divine intervention. Upon his appointment to the Collège de France, Loisy immediately seized the opportunity to further familiarize himself with the theories of religion developed in contemporary anthropology and sociology, and instantly adopted a much wider geographical and chronological scope. Histoire de la Religion made way for Histoire des religions. His comparative research program on sacrifice included investigations of religions from all over the globe, and Loisy quickly entered the ongoing Big Origins Quest. Christianity remained the alpha and omega of his comparative enquiries, but its comparability drastically increased. In our fourth chapter, we have seen how Christianity became almost completely the same as the pagan mystery cults. And in the later wartime years discussed in our fifth chapter, Loisy claimed that the personal Christian god and the efficacy of the Eucharist were no more real, and thus no less reprehensible than the gods and sacrificial rites of any other historical religion. This increase of Christianity’s comparability went hand in hand with Loisy’s progressive acceptance of a more theoretical meta-historical approach to religion. Like many contemporaries, he became convinced that the key to understand religion at any time or place was in reconstructing its most primitive and universally recurrent origin. In chapter three to five, we followed him on his historical and philosophical quest for the nature of religion. We saw him wading through the weeds of magic and myth, and clearing the road for the investigation of what he considered to be the true core of religion: faith, with the cult as its most fundamental historical expression. As early as 1910, Loisy was indeed fighting Salomon Reinach and James G. Frazer on their own anthropological grounds. Using the sociological-anthropological insights of Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, he took a stand against Reinach’s and especially Frazer’s intellectualist theories of magic, and against Frazer’s postulation of a stage of pure, pre-scientific (read: non-animistic) magic at the dawn of humanity. Between 1913 and 1914, he made their anthropological myth ritual theory his own, and used it to develop a new account of the historical interrelationship between early Christianity and its pagan surroundings. Slightly later, between probably 1914 and 1916, the crack in his historicist wall further widened when he closely investigated the tribal religions of the so-called “non-civilized” and “demi-civilized,” and was forced to rethink his usual method, which had always largely consisted in the historical-critical analysis of textual sources. His extreme criticism notwithstanding, Loisy adopted

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the basic point of Durkheim’s Formes élémentaires (1913) on religions being the symbolical representation of their societies, and on cult being the instrument by which social group commitment is enforced. This insight scientifically substantiated his own Catholic inspired belief that religion was first and foremost a collective phenomenon, and it became a key analytical tool for his comparative theory of sacrifice. Loisy furthermore included psychological reflections, when he referred to the flawed mental configuration of primitive mankind and death anxiety reactions to explain the emergence of the belief in imaginary beings, and in imaginary instruments to influence them. By the time he wrote his inaugural speech of 1921, his historical method had thus become one that was deeply informed by contemporary anthropology and sociology. Contrary to what he suggested, his deeply enriched historical method was by no means the mere result of his independent “intellectual and moral faculties.” Loisy was too often irritatingly silent or vague about the sources that inspired his work. Our study of his correspondence often helped to confirm his true sources of inspiration. Since the early 1900s, and especially from 1908 onwards, he had been devouring the work of prominent scholars like Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Émile Durkheim, William Robertson Smith, James G. Frazer, Franz Cumont, Henri Bergson, not to forget Salomon Reinach, whose controversial Orpheus definitely was a major incentive to further acquaint himself with the writings of those aforementioned scholars. Throughout his entire career, Loisy was a scholar who developed his own ideas by fiercely criticizing and attacking those of others. The sad result is that he overemphasized his differences to others, and often seemed intentionally oblivious to what he actually owed to them. To his credit, however, it should immediately be added that he never just copied others’ methods. He critically constructed his very own, eclectic method which was far away from the exclusivisms that often marked the rivaling schools of his time. The distinct characteristic—and perhaps even the major originality—of Loisy’s approach is his transparent attempt to redeploy secular social-anthropological methods in such a way that they became compatible (or at least seemed to be) with a strong, pre-Eliadean belief that religion is a topic of inquiry different from any other, which therefore needs a sui generis scientific method. According to Loisy, the historicist method was the best fit for that basic position. Throughout the entire timeframe of our study, a remarkably consistent guiding thread interconnected his criticisms of contemporary anthropological, sociological, and psychological theories of religion. For the religious scholar Loisy was and always remained, those approaches were helpful but in se insufficient tools to understand what religion really is. They give access to an explanation of historical religions, with their endlessly different and volatile bodies of

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rites, beliefs, and habits. And they usefully accounted for the social and emotional functions these religions unmistakably served. They fail, however, to explain La Religion, the innate and indestructible mystical faith in a moral ideal of humanity which is the motor of all those different historical phenomena. For Loisy, as Maude Petre wrote, human existence and its essentially religious nature always retained an element that cannot be fully explained on secular grounds. This book has tried to show how the gradual opening of Loisy’s historicist paradigm was entangled with the development of his philosophical ideas on the further irreducible mystical-moral nature of religion. One of our conclusions is that the more abstractly mystical and the less Christian his personal religious views became, the less historicist his comparative paradigms. Loisy himself was firmly convinced that his theory on the religion of humanity was the strictly rational result of preceding, historical inquiries. In reality, there was much more cross-fertilization going on between his historiographical studies, his philosophical writings, and his intimate religious beliefs than he wanted or could admit. It is plainly impossible to understand the historian without taking into account the religious philosopher. Because of the chronological focus of this book, we have had little chance to discuss the seminal historical-comparative and philosophical work of Ernest Renan whose historical-philological method nevertheless was of major influence for Loisy’s early biblical exegesis in the 1890s.² Given the clear anthropological and sociological turn of Loisy’s comparative work between 1909 – 1921, Renan’s methodological influence has been less directly relevant for our purposes. However, in a quite different but no less important way, the shadow of Renan loomed large over this entire book. Loisy’s science of religion and personal faith substantially changed between the 1890s and the end of WWI. But never did he give up on the ambition which he first developed when a young critical student of Renan’s at the Collège de France, that is, to demonstrate the intrinsic compatibility between science and faith. The clear dechristianization and further mystification of Loisy’s religious views accommodated his progressive acceptance of secular, social-scientific methodology. In our final chapter, we have seen how these developments were consolidated (though not instigated) during the Great War. Mysticism, however, was not the only one instrument by which Loisy reconciled his scientific study of religion with his personal beliefs. The other unfaltering tools of reconciliation

 On this point, see Morrow, Alfred Loisy & Modern Biblical Studies, 59; Hill, The Politics of Modernism, 26 – 27. On Renan’s (ambivalent) influence see also the introduction to the present book.

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were relativity and evolutionism. First developed as integral part of his reform program for the Church, Loisy firmly stuck to his evolutionary paradigms long after their first apologetic-Modernist context of origin had disappeared. They constituted the fixed frame of reference for his persistent reflections on the relation between historical continuity and change, between what is essential (la Religion) and perishable (les religions). His strong belief in the relativity of religious truth claims and historical changeability of religious beliefs is the common thread running through his entire oeuvre. It was inextricably intertwined with a deeply continuous take on history: throughout and because of historical changes, the essence of religion is preserved. At several points in our study, we have seen how Loisy teleologically constructed the past to meet his ideas on the role and nature of religion in his own age. It is because of his desire to make history work, that he drew attention to the sameness of non-Christian, lower-developed religions to Catholic Christianity. The Catholic tradition thus appeared to be the only legitimate heir and climax of a long historical development. Anti-Protestantism was yet another common thread running through his long scientific career. It was the main reason why Loisy was blind for the distinctness of non-Judeo-Christian ancient religions, such as the pagan mystery cults. Loisy’s evolutionism survived the enormous threat of WWI, though not unscathed. During the war, something crucial changed in his construction of the past. Past, present, and future were no longer seen as continuous phases on an uninterrupted line of development. Conceptions of radical rupture and discontinuity entered his reflections on the religious future of humanity, and they strongly informed his new reconstruction of the past. This past was no longer only seen as a positive and progressive evolution, it was now also the despised continuation of the most horrendous delusions. Loisy had not an inch of doubt about the fact that the future of morality really would and should continue to be religious. But his hopes were now set on a religious humanism which would for once and always dissolve mankind’s moral self-alienation, and thus get rid of traditional god conceptions and magical rituals. His negative description of the way historical religions continued magic, entailed a positive prescription of how things should be in the future. This book wanted to be about more than Loisy and his comparative religion. Throughout our different chapters, we have not only focused on the intellectual dialogues and the sociological context in which his scientific views took shape, but also on the deep embeddedness of the discipline of history of religions in French society, religion, and politics. In our second chapter on his appointment to the Collège de France, it became clear that influential networks of academics and politicians tried to take hold of the highly symbolic chair of history of reli-

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gions in order to tighten their grip on a society that was socially, politically, and religiously disrupted, and to consolidate their own socio-cultural status. Initially, the support of the powerful Marquise Arconati-Visconti and her salon was not a choice for Loisy, but a choice against Mauss, whose political identity and sociology were seen as two aspects of the same threatening coin. Moreover, anti-Semitic sentiments against Mauss seemed to have played a not insignificant role. Both among these non-specialist interested parties, and among specialist networks of scholars of religion, Loisy’s position was an exceedingly ambivalent one. Too Catholic for some, not Catholic enough for others, our study showed a continuous interplay of rejections and recuperations of Loisy by the very same networks. In line with its polemical context of institutionalization, the discipline of history of religions was a heavily polarized field of inquiry in France. Our fourth chapter on the Christ Myth has shown the often paradoxical social dynamics that stemmed from that bipolarization. When the excommunicated priest defended the historicity of Jesus against mythologists such as Reinach, he was denounced as a “terrible Catholic” by the radical anticlerical scholarly milieus within the institutionalized history of religions (and temporarily embraced by the conservative Catholic networks which had earlier applauded his excommunication).³ If we add the factor of Loisy’s difficult personality to his already difficult sociological situation, it becomes all the more understandable why he was never really accepted by “respectable” historians of religion, and why in general his comparative work received little attention from the authoritative institutions in the field. It wasn’t until 1928, and after many fruitless attempts, that he received academic recognition for his work from the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. By that time, however, Loisy had already left the general history of religions to re-concentrate on exegesis and on the history of Christianity and Judaism. For Loisy this return to critical, mainly textual analysis of the Bible was in no way at odds with the mission of the chair in history of religions. From the Loisy–Cumont correspondence, it became clear that neither of these two scholars seemed to regard comparative methodology as the primary defining quality of the French discipline of history of religions in the early 20th century. First and foremost, the discipline was characterized by its roots in the French laïcité. Loisy’s abandonment of the general history of religions may, however, have had a hand in raising the perception that seemed to reign around the time of his  Note, however, that conservative Catholic resistance against Loisy’s scholarship of religion always remained strong. In 1932, the Catholic Church put Loisy’s autobiographical Mémoires and all of his other publications which had not previously been condemned, on the Index of Forbidden Books, repeating the same procedure once more in 1938 for all his new writings published between 1932 and 1938.

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retirement in 1932, that is, that the discipline didn’t need a chair of its own, because religious history could just as well be incorporated in the discipline of general history. Given his self-declared mission to create a truly scientific method which profoundly recognized the distinctness and autonomy of religion as research subject, it will not come as a surprise that Loisy regarded this opinion as a particularly grave and upsetting insult to his entire scientific career at the Collège de France. In 1932, Loisy’s chair was transformed into a chair of “Histoire des civilisations modernes” (for Lucien Febvre). However, as soon as 1933, a new chair of “Histoire des religions” was created by transforming the former chair of “Épigraphie et antiquités grecques.”⁴ And this new chair of history of religions was assigned to Loisy’s candidate, Jean Baruzi.⁵ In the end, Loisy really did receive recognition from the science laïque to which he was devoted so passionately.

 For more details on this part of the institutional history of the Collège, see: Lannoy, Bonnet and Praet, Mon cher Mithra, II, 477.  For Jean Baruzi see chapter 4, 4.4.2.

Bibliography All Bible quotes come from the Revised Standard Version Bible, consulted online. URL: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/r/rsv/browse.html

Unpublished sources A) Bibliothèque nationale de France. Papiers Alfred Loisy—Correspondence NAF 15644 – 15645: Loisy to Marquise Arconati-Visconti; Ernest-Charles Babut; Louis Canet; Franz Cumont; Baron Friedrich von Hügel. NAF 15646 – 15648: Marquise Arconati-Visconti to Loisy. NAF 15649: Henri Bergson to Loisy. NAF 15650: Ernesto Buonaiuti, Louis Canet, and Carl Clemen to Loisy. NAF 15651: Paul-Louis Couchoud and Franz Cumont to Loisy. NAF 15653: James G. Frazer to Loisy. NAF 15654: Louis Havet to Loisy. NAF 15657: Adolf Jülicher to Loisy. NAF 15658: Gustave Lanson, Paul Lejay, Émile Levasseur, and Hans Lietzmann to Loisy. NAF 15659: Gabriel Monod and Alfred Morel-Fatio to Loisy. NAF 15660: Salomon Reinach and Henri Hubert to Loisy. NAF 15661: Albert Réville, Jean Réville, and Nathan Söderblom to Loisy. NAf 15662: Émile Vandervelde, and Maurice Vernes to Loisy.

B) Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne—Victor Cousin. Correspondence received by the Marquise Arconati-Visconti, born Marie Peyrat MSVC MSVC MSVC MSVC MSVC MSVC MSVC MSVC MSVC MSVC

276 – 270: Franz Cumont to Arconati-Visconti. 271 – 275: Alfred Dreyfus to Arconati-Visconti. 276: Ferdinand Dreyfus, Louis Duchesne, and Jules Ferry to Arconati-Visconti. 278: Louis Havet to Arconati-Visconti. 280: Abel Lefranc, and Émile Levasseur to Arconati-Visconti. 282 – 284: Alfred Loisy to Arconati-Visconti. 286 – 287: Gabriel Monod to Arconati-Visconti. 288 – 289: Alfred Morel-Fatio to Arconati-Visconti. 291 – 293: Joseph Reinach to Arconati-Visconti. 294: Salomon Reinach to Arconati-Visconti.

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D) Kasteel Van Gaasbeek. Correspondence by Marquise Arconati-Visconti Letters of Arconati-Visconti to Franz Cumont—unclassified.

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Index of Modern Names Alfaric, Prosper 61n186, 201, 250 – 251, 253 Alphandéry, Paul 77n9. See also Subject Index: Jeudistes Amélineau, Émile 83, 139 Amiaud, Arthur 12 Arconati-Visconti, Marquise (= Marie Peyrat) 6, 44, 79 – 82, 84n38, 87n58, 89, 91n68, 96 – 138, 144n12, 145, 151, 156, 166, 185n178, 190n200, 191, 193, 213n78, 223, 291n140, 329, 331 – 332. See also Subject Index: Jeudistes Arconati-Visconti, Gianmartino 97 Babut, Ernest-Charles 267, 331 Baruzi, Jean 255 – 256, 258n226, 330 Batiffol, Pierre 71 Baudrillart, Alfred 163n104 Bauer, Bruno 197n9 Bédier, Joseph 84n38, 96 – 97, 105n136 – 137, 106 – 107, 113, 120n197, 124, 126. See also Subject Index: Jeudistes Benedict XV 273 – 274. See also Subject Index: Papacy Berger, Philippe 114 – 115 Bergson, Henri 38n107, 106n143, 281 – 282, 303n183, 326, 331 Bienvenu-Martin, Jean-Baptiste 81 Blondel, Maurice 303n183 Bousset, Wilhelm 13, 198n15, 200, 204, 204n39 – 41, 205, 233. See also Subject Index: Religionsgeschichtliche Schule Bremond, Henri 285 Briand, Aristide 118, 136n259 Brisson, Henri 98, 102, 111 – 112, 137, 139. See also Subject Index: Jeudistes Buonaiuti, Ernesto 75n1, 251, 331 Canet, Louis 274n58, 331 Chasseboeuf de Volney, Constantin-François 197n9 Chuquet, Arthur 114 Clarétie, Jules 102 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110584356-012

Clemen, Carl 243n177 Clemenceau, Georges 81 – 82, 95, 106n142, 111, 120, 273 Combes, Émile 6, 95, 98, 102, 108, 111 – 112, 120, 127, 137 – 139, 190n200. See also Subject Index: Jeudistes Comte, Auguste 179, 183 – 184, 194n215, 286 – 287 Conybeare, Frederick C. 200 Couchoud, Paul-Louis 201, 212n75, 246, 248 – 258, 271n49, 331. See also Subject Index: Christ Myth Theory Cumont, Franz v, 2n5, 6 – 7, 10n28, 15, 19, 31n72, 52n156, 53 – 54, 57n172, 64n196, 66, 70, 71n222, 79n23, 81n29, 84n39, 85, 96n91, 97n98 – 99, 98 – 102, 104, 105, 106n140 – 143, 112, 119n192, 122 – 123, 125, 128, 136, 144n12, 152, 153n56, 167n116, 179, 185n176, 197n11, 198 – 200, 204n40, 205 – 206, 210 – 212, 218, 220, 223 – 228, 235, 237, 242, 246n189, 249, 252, 258, 260n8, 261, 266n28, 267 – 268, 269n39, 270n42, 271 – 273, 274n58 – 59, 276, 278, 279n79, 281 – 282, 287, 288n124, 290, 294 – 295, 299, 312n219, 323, 326, 329, 331. See also Subject Index: Jeudistes Deissmann, Adolf 270 – 273 Desjardins, Paul 23, 121, 166, 187 Détrez, Alfred 139 – 140 Dieterich, Albrecht 29n65 D’Hulst, Maurice 13n42 Doumergue, Gaston 82, 111, 112n167, 137 – 139, 144n13 Drews, Arthur 197n9, 199n20, 200 – 208, 209, 214 – 215, 218 – 223, 226 – 227, 234n148, 236n158, 237 – 238, 248n195, 249. See also Subject Index: Christ Myth Theory Dreyfus, Alfred (Capitain) 44, 103, 104n130, 105n137, 136, 331. See also Subject Index: Dreyfus Affair

Index of Modern Names

Dreyfus, Ferdinand 100n113, 103 – 104, 119, 136, 331 Duchamp de Lageneste, René 267 Duchesne, Louis 9 – 10, 13n42, 25n44, 72, 99, 264, 331 Dufourcq, Albert 83 Dupuis, Charles François 197n9 Durkheim, Émile 5, 55, 81, 87, 88n59, 90, 92 – 94, 110n160, 121, 123 – 125, 128 – 130, 138, 150, 153, 157n76, 159 – 160, 174n132, 240, 254, 263 – 264, 281n90, 282 – 284, 295, 304 – 306, 313, 326. See also Subject Index: Durkheimians Duseigneur, Raoul 101 Dussaud, René 77n9 Einstein (as metaphor) Eliade, Mircea 326

v, 15, 297, 323

Ferry, Jules 76n5, 78, 82, 91, 98n101, 102, 114, 331 Firmin, A. (Pseudonym of Loisy) 16n3, 20, 22 – 24, 38n106, 50, 55, 57 – 62 Fossey, Charles 81, 87, 113 Foucart, George 82 – 85, 90, 138 – 139 Foucart, Paul 84, 99, 128n226, 138 France, Anatole 249 Frazer, James G. 5 – 7, 49n145, 85, 128n225, 144, 149, 152, 153n53, 154 – 155, 162, 164 – 165, 169 – 180, 186, 196, 200 – 201, 203, 205 – 206, 208, 211 – 213, 215, 216n87, 225, 232, 239, 240n170, 241, 243 – 245, 249n198, 252, 255, 263, 282, 294, 297, 298n162, 299, 303 – 305, 308, 315 – 316, 325 – 326, 331 Freud, Sigmund 152, 157n76, 310n210 Gambetta, Léon 96n91, 97 – 98, 101 Gillen, Francis 305 Goguel, Maurice 201n24, 237, 248n196 Gunkel, Hermann 7, 13, 53n159, 204 – 207. See also Subject Index: Religionsgeschichtliche Schule Harnack von, Adolf 4n11, 17n9, 19, 21 – 22, 25, 26 – 36, 37 – 38, 40 – 52, 55 – 56,

357

58n175, 59n181, 62n189, 64, 151, 166, 167n114, 202, 219, 255, 270 – 273, 325 Harrison, Jane E. 239, 244 Hartmann von, Eduard 202 Havet, Louis 84n38, 96, 106n143, 107 – 109, 113n172 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm F. 42n121, 66n203, 290, 311 Heitmüller, Wilhelm 53n159. See also Subject Index: Religionsgeschichtliche Schule Hervé, Gustave 124 Houtin, Albert 1n2, 3n7, 8, 13n42, 16n2, 69n216, 70n217, 72n227, 250 – 251, 253, 278n78 Hubert, Henri 87, 90, 91n68, 92 – 94, 123 – 124, 129, 144, 169, 173 – 177, 179n157, 225, 237, 245, 260, 263 – 264, 298, 301 – 303, 313n221, 317, 318n241, 319n246, 325 – 326, 331. See also Subject Index: Durkheimians Hugo, Victor 135 – 136 Jaurès, Jean 95, 96n91, 98 – 100, 104 – 105, 120. See also Subject Index: Jeudistes Jülicher, Adolf 38n108, 331 Kant, Immanuel

11, 46

Lefranc, Abel 80n24, 96, 101, 107, 113, 118, 331. See also Subject Index: Jeudistes Lejay, Paul 15n47, 53n162, 70, 71n222, 218n92, 331 Leo XIII 13 – 14, 70 Levasseur, Émile 80, 101n120, 115 – 119, 331 Lévi, Sylvain 87 Marillier, Léon 93 Mauss, Marcel 7, 23, 55, 77, 83, 85, 87 – 88, 90, 91n68, 92 – 95, 107, 110, 115, 119 – 140, 144, 150 – 151, 152n47, 169, 173 – 177, 179, 182, 225, 237, 245, 260n6, 263 – 264, 298, 301 – 303, 313n221, 317, 318n241, 319, 325 – 326,

358

Index of Modern Names

329. See also Subject Index: Durkheimians Meillet, Antoine 87 Monod, Gabriel 82, 87n58, 88n58, 96 – 97, 98n103, 101, 105n137, 106 – 108, 110n158, 113, 117 – 118, 120 – 126, 128, 131n241, 143n10, 166, 331. See also Subject Index: Jeudistes Morel-Fatio, Alfred 96 – 97, 101, 106 – 108, 109n154, 110n161, 113, 114n174, 115, 118 – 120, 122 – 123, 126, 136n259, 331. See also Subject Index: Jeudistes Moret, Alexandre 83 Müller, Friedrich Max 30n66, 31n72, 55, 155, 157n76, 309n206, 53n159 Newman, John Henry Nietzsche 247n193 Oppert, Jules

18, 59 – 60, 61n185

12, 81

Parmentier, Léon 210 Petre, Maude 20n21, 183, 275n65, 280, 285 – 287, 327 Pettazzoni, Raffaele 205n45, 255 Peyrat, Alphonse 97, 107n145 Peyrat, Marie. See Arconati-Visconti, Marquise Pirenne, Henri 102. See also Subject Index: Jeudistes Pius X 14, 16, 70, 72, 75n1, 89, 108n147 Richard, François-Marie 16, 22, 24, 58, 69 Reinach, Joseph 98, 101 – 103, 105, 127 – 128, 136 – 137. See also Subject Index: Jeudistes Reinach, Salomon 5 – 6, 15, 19, 44, 48 – 49, 55, 67 – 68, 88, 98 – 99, 103, 106n143, 107, 123 – 124, 127 – 140, 141, 143 – 144, 147 – 148, 151 – 169, 170 – 171, 180 – 181, 186, 187 – 190, 193 – 194, 195 – 200, 208 – 213, 214 – 217, 218 – 219, 221 – 222, 223n108, 225 – 227, 230n132, 234n148, 236n158, 237, 249, 250n203, 253, 259n2, 263, 275, 285n108, 305, 310, 325 – 326, 329, 331

Reitzenstein, Richard 29n65, 47, 52n158, 198, 221n101, 235n156, 236n156 Renan, Ernest 4, 10 – 12, 17, 31n72, 44, 53, 55, 64, 93n81, 104, 114, 121n199, 146 – 147, 166n110, 178n152, 201n24, 220n99, 287, 327 Renard, Georges 88n60 Réville, Albert 10n31, 19, 23, 28, 44, 65 – 66, 71n224, 72 – 73, 82 – 83, 86, 89, 91 – 92, 114, 121, 145 – 146, 150, 219, 264, 331 Réville, Jean 19, 25n45, 28, 44n126, 54n165, 66, 71 – 73, 76 – 77, 83n37, 86 – 87, 89, 91, 96n94, 121, 132, 145 – 146, 219, 264, 331 Revillout, Eugène 83 Robertson, John Mackinnon 204 Robertson Smith, William 5, 55, 67 – 68, 155, 161, 167, 196, 232, 239 – 245, 263, 265n24, 297, 298n162, 299, 305 – 306, 326 Roujon, Henri 102, 105n136 Sabatier, Auguste 19, 22n32, 25, 59n181, 62 – 68, 73 – 74, 91, 93n77, 264, 265n23 Sartiaux, Félix 1n2, 3, 8, 250n204, 251, 253, 278 Scheil, Jean-Vincent 76n7, 81 – 82, 87n56, 111 – 113, 124 Schweitzer, Albert 26, 32, 33n81, 197n9 Smith, William Benjamin 204n37 Sorel, Georges 128n225, 132n246 Spencer, Baldwin 305 Strauss, David F. 196 Thureau-Dangin, François 69n215, 113 Tiele, Cornelis Petrus 28, 156n71 Toutain, Jules 23, 66, 82 – 83, 85 – 86, 87, 90, 134n252, 136n259, 138 – 139 Turmel, Joseph 75n1, 251, 253 Tylor, Edward B. 5, 63, 92, 149, 150n37, 155, 157 – 159, 162, 165, 167 – 168, 240n170, 244, 263, 282, 297, 299 Tyrrell, George 20n21, 285 Usener, Hermann

52n158, 322

Index of Modern Names

Vernes, Maurice 23, 66, 72 – 74, 83, 86 – 88, 90 – 91, 114, 121, 139, 188, 331 Voltaire 101, 143, 158n79 Von Hügel, Friedrich 20, 24, 132 – 134, 136n261, 285

Wendland, Paul 210 – 214 Wilhelm II 271 – 273 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff von, Ulrich 269n39 Wyrouboff, Grégoire 88n61

359

Subject Index Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 81, 99, 108n151, 112n169, 128, 253, 260n8, 329 Académie des Sciences morales et politiques 82, 99, 114, 139 Action, philosophy of 60, 181, 195n2, 280 – 283 Action française 79, 145 Action sacrée (= sacred action) 181n164, 298 – 304, 306 – 307, 308n204, 309 – 317, 320 – 322 Alliance israélite 130, 153n59, 163n104 Ancestor cult. See Cult of the ancestors Animism 63, 67 – 68, 155, 158 – 161, 162, 164 – 165, 166n110, 167 – 168, 170 – 171, 186, 283 – 284, 305n196, 307 – 308, 310n211, 316n255, 317, 319, 325 Anthropology 4 – 5, 31 – 32, 39, 46, 49, 52, 54 – 55, 57, 62 – 63, 67, 77, 84 – 85, 87 – 88, 92, 123, 129, 140, 143, 148 – 150, 152, 155, 157, 161 – 162, 168n120, 169, 189, 195, 197, 199, 205 – 206, 209 – 213, 215, 225, 230 – 235, 236 – 246, 263, 304 – 308, 314, 324 – 327 Anti-Modernism (Roman Catholic) 1, 10, 13 – 14, 16, 20, 22 – 24, 58, 79 – 72, 75, 108n147, 329n3 Anti-Protestantism 20 – 22, 36 – 39, 41 – 47, 50 – 52, 56, 62 – 65, 145 – 146, 179, 218 – 219, 227, 233n146, 236 – 243, 270 – 274, 276, 289, 328 Anti-Semitism 7, 33, 44, 64, 88, 127, 131 – 138, 140, 157n75, 163n104, 204n41, 211 – 213, 329 Arunta 295 – 296, 304 – 308, 322 Aryan 44, 64 Assyriology 2, 10, 12, 14, 25n44, 76n7, 81, 87 – 88, 89n62, 112 – 113, 179, 193, 214 Astrology 54n165, 179 Babylonia 11 – 12, 24, 29n62, 179, 196, 207, 210 – 211, 214, 260 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110584356-013

Baptism 34n86, 50, 233 – 235, 243. See also Cult, Christian Belgium 6, 54, 96n91, 102, 269 Bible (general) 8 – 9, 13 – 14, 19, 27, 40, 57, 88, 196 – 197, 214, 217, 218n91, 219, 241, 239. See also Old Testament; New Testament; individual Bible books Bloc des gauches 95, 104 Cambridge ritualists (Myth and Ritual School) 206, 225, 239 – 240, 244. See also Myth Camelots du roi 79, 145 Canaan 50n149 Catholicism/Catholic Church 1, 9 – 15, 16 – 25, 27, 29, 32, 36 – 37, 39, 41 – 43, 45, 50, 55 – 57, 59, 61 – 65, 69 – 74, 75, 84 – 85, 89 – 90, 103, 107 – 110, 112 – 117, 123, 136, 138 – 139, 142, 151, 153, 156, 163n104, 165, 167, 182, 184n174, 185, 187, 189, 191 – 192, 203, 218n92, 227, 230n134, 236, 239, 241 – 243, 250 – 251, 257, 263 – 265, 268, 273 – 275, 285, 289, 291 – 292, 316, 318, 322, 326, 328 – 329 Christ 25n45, 26n49, 36, 42, 47 – 49, 50 – 52, 146, 202, 209, 212, 217, 219n95, 221, 233 – 235, 247n193, 265, 293, 312, 319, 321 Christ Myth Theory (= mythologists/mythologues) 7, 195 – 224, 226 – 228, 234, 236, 245 – 247, 248 – 258, 278, 329. See also Myth Christianity (general) 1, 7 – 10, 16 – 74, 83 – 84, 86, 88 – 89, 91, 93, 114, 117, 122, 141, 143, 146, 148, 150 – 151, 154 – 157, 161, 163, 166, 172, 182, 186 – 186, 193 – 194, 259 – 262, 265 – 277, 288, 292, 295, 304, 312, 318 – 324, 325, 327 – 328 Collège de France ix, 1, 3 – 4, 6 – 8, 10 – 11, 18, 23, 44, 54, 57n172, 66, 75 – 140, 141, 143 – 151, 170, 186, 188, 190n200, 214, 223, 228, 247, 249, 251n206, 254 –

Subject Index

256, 258, 260 – 261, 263, 283, 324 – 325, 327 – 328, 330 Communion. See Ritual Comparative mythology (=mythologie comparée) 55, 148 – 149, 155, 195, 215. See also Myth Congrès d’histoire du christianisme. See Jubilé Loisy Congrès d’histoire des religions 71 – 72, 255 Congrès scientifiques internationaux des catholiques 13, 72 I Corinthians 234. See also Paul Cult Cult (general) 63n190, 174, 205n45, 216, 224, 284, 292, 304, 307 – 308, 313, 321, 325 – 326 Cult, Christian 16, 33, 35 – 36, 41, 45 – 55, 59, 233 – 235, 261, 320. See also Baptism; Eucharist – Cult, ancient mystery. See mystery – Cult of the ancestors 160n86, 164, 165n107, 295, 307 – 309, 319 – 320 Cybele 53n162, 210n65, 229, 231, 238n162 Dasius (Saint) 210 Decalogue 159 – 160 Deism 91, 116, 283 Deuteronomy 50n149 Dionysos 229, 234, 238n162, 322 Docetism 226n116 Dogma, Catholic 13, 17, 21 – 22, 34 – 35, 37, 41, 45, 50 – 51, 55n169, 56, 63 Dreyfus Affair 44, 88, 95, 96n91, 100n112, 101, 103 – 104, 166n112, 212n76, 213. See also Index of Modern Names: Dreyfus, Alfred Durkheimian(s) 5, 55, 81, 87 – 88, 90, 92 – 94, 121, 124, 128 – 131, 150, 153, 160, 169, 174n133, 186, 254, 263 – 264, 282, 284 – 285, 302, 304 – 305, 313 – 314, 326. See also Sociology; see also Index of Modern Names: Durkheim, Hubert, Mauss Dying and resurrecting god(s) 47, 48n142, 203, 207, 210, 212, 217, 221, 225, 231 – 238

361

École laïque 7, 76n5, 78, 100, 111, 126, 141 – 142, 187 – 194, 291n138 École Pratique des Hautes Études ix, 3, 9 – 10, 12, 18, 20, 20 – 23, 28, 32, 43, 54 – 55, 58, 62, 65, 69 – 74, 75 – 78, 81, 85 – 87, 92, 100 – 101, 119, 132, 263, 275 Économie de salut 228, 231 – 232, 234 – 236, 238, 242, 275, 277, 306n200, 320 Egypt 49, 84, 145, 193, 207, 231, 260 Egyptology 10, 83 – 84 English School/École anglaise 5, 55, 20n21, 129, 155, 225, 239 – 241, 243 – 245, 263. See also anthropology; Cambridge ritualists; see also Index of Modern Names: Frazer, Harrison, Robertson Smith, Tylor Eleusis 229, 238n162 Entretiens de Pontigny 23 Epistles of Paul. See Paul; individual epistles Eschatology 32 – 33, 35 – 36, 39 – 43, 45, 58, 221, 233, 249, 288 Essais d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses (= La Crise de la foi dans le temps présent; the Neuilly Essais) 14 – 15, 20, 22, 50 – 51, 53, 55, 57 – 68, 287 Essai historique sur le sacrifice ix, 168n117, 173n130, 174n135, 230n134, 231, 238n162, 239n165, 259n2, 260 – 261, 266, 277 – 278, 283, 285, 289, 292, 294 – 323 Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice 123, 225, 245, 263 – 265, 298, 301 – 302, 317, 318n241, 319n246. See also Index of Modern Names: Hubert, Mauss Essence (= Wesen) 14, 21, 26 – 36, 37 – 41, 43n125, 157 – 159, 166, 172, 202, 262, 271, 279 – 280, 284n104, 295, 297 – 298, 306, 309, 313 – 314, 322, 328 Esther 211 Eucharist 39, 45, 50 – 56, 67 – 68, 150, 161, 167 – 168, 172, 194, 200, 232 – 236, 237, 238n162, 243, 261, 264 – 265, 292, 294n149, 301, 312, 316 – 318, 319n243, 321 – 322, 325. See also Cult, Christian Evolutionism/evolution theory of religion 15 – 16, 18, 28, 31, 38 – 39, 43, 50, 54, 57 – 67, 84, 86, 92, 105, 144, 147 – 150,

362

Subject Index

164, 165n107, 167 – 168, 171 – 172, 177n145, 178, 181 – 185, 193, 199, 202, 230 – 232, 241, 259, 262, 274 – 276, 277, 280, 288 – 292, 297 – 298, 306n199, 308, 311, 315, 322, 328 Excommunication 1, 11, 17, 65, 69, 73 – 74, 75 – 76, 89, 107, 110, 117, 125 – 126, 139, 223, 227, 251n207, 329 Force (= puissance) 38, 60, 66 – 67, 168, 171 – 176, 181 – 182, 187n185, 283 – 285, 298, 300, 302 – 303, 307, 309, 316 – 318, 319. See also Vertu Franco-Prussian War 44n126, 270n41 Freethought 91, 101, 104, 110, 115 – 116, 130n237, 166n112, 190 – 191, 194, 250, 290 Gaasbeek 96 – 100, 332 Galatians 242 – 243. See also Paul Genesis 12, 214 Germany 4n11, 9 – 10, 17, 19, 26 – 36, 38n108, 43, 51, 52n158, 64, 101n118, 105, 164, 197 – 198, 200 – 208, 210, 248n195, 249, 255, 262, 266 – 274, 176, 312 Gift theory 123, 293, 300 – 304, 306 – 309, 318 – 320, 322. See also Sacrifice; Selfsacrifice Gospel of the historical Jesus 16, 21, 26 – 27, 30 – 36, 37 – 43, 45, 58, 65, 221, 228, 230n134, 232, 272, 276 – 277 Gospels (general) 25n45, 26 – 28, 33, 39, 117, 209, 211 – 213, 215 – 216, 220. See also Gospel of the Historical Jesus; individual gospels Greco-Roman religion (general) 11, 18, 31 – 32, 39, 48 – 54, 56 – 57, 85, 133, 143, 146, 154, 156, 167, 186, 197 – 198, 205 – 206, 210 – 213, 217, 221 – 223, 228 – 236, 237 – 238, 288, 321 – 322, 236. See also Mystery; names of gods of mystery cults (e. g. Mithras) Greece (ancient) 11, 32, 49, 152, 156, 205, 238, 258n226, 260. See also Hellenism

Hellenism 29, 31 – 32, 34n87, 47, 198, 221, 228, 233, 235, 270n43, 288 Histoire des religions (as scientific discipline) 1, 4, 7 – 8, 10n31, 18 – 19, 23, 28 – 31, 44, 54 – 57, 59 – 60, 62, 65 – 66, 68 – 69, 75 – 77, 82 – 84, 86, 91, 95, 117, 120 – 121, 123, 141 – 142, 145 – 151, 155, 182, 187 – 194, 200, 208, 215, 218, 220, 223, 227, 247, 248 – 258, 275, 297, 323 – 324, 328 – 330 Histoire du christianisme (as scientific discipline) 7, 29, 43, 110, 125n216, 151, 248, 253 – 258, 268, 329 Historicism 4 – 5, 7, 12, 16, 21, 24 – 25, 32, 56, 85, 87 – 93, 101, 121, 148, 166 – 167, 169, 185, 195 – 197, 199 – 200, 206, 214, 217 – 223, 235 – 236, 246 – 247, 264, 266, 277 – 278, 296, 324 – 327 Humanities (= sciences de l’humanité) 148n33, 169, 177 – 178, 181, 199 Index Librorum Prohibitorum 10n28, 16, 17n5, 58n177, 69, 329n3 Institut Catholique de Paris v, 8 – 10, 12 – 14, 20, 24, 69, 71, 81, 128, 263, 323 Intellectualism 149, 161 – 162, 171, 175 – 178, 180, 183 – 184, 187, 209, 240n170, 244, 282 – 284, 286, 290, 325 Isis, cult of 229, 231 Islam 156, 241, 275n63 Israel 11, 20, 22, 34 – 35, 49, 55, 57 – 59, 62 – 63, 66 – 67, 130, 135n254, 137, 169n121, 207n52, 216 – 217 Italy 3, 70n220, 75n1, 97 – 98, 205n45 Jerusalem 11, 203, 217, 221 Jesus 7, 16, 18, 21, 26 – 28, 30 – 51, 56, 58, 65, 67 – 68, 107n145, 142, 146, 156, 193, 196 – 197, 199, 201n24, 203 – 204, 207 – 208, 211 – 213, 215 – 217, 219, 221, 226, 228, 230n134, 232 – 234, 237 – 238, 247n193, 249 – 250, 252, 258, 272, 276, 288, 320 – 321, 329 Jeudistes 96 – 106, 107 – 108, 110 – 111, 113 – 114, 116, 119 – 120, 122, 125 – 131, 134, 145, 193

Subject Index

Jewish Colonization Association 130, 153n59 Jewish identity 88, 94, 103 – 104, 127 – 138, 140, 151 – 154, 163, 213 John, gospel of 24, 35n95. See also Gospels John the Baptist 50 Joshua (OT figure) 203 Jubilé Loisy (= Congrès d’histoire du christianisme) 125n216, 252 – 258, 271 Judaism 1, 8, 10 – 11, 13, 18, 24 – 25, 29, 31 – 36, 39 – 51, 56 – 62, 66 – 67, 69, 89, 88, 94, 114, 129 – 134, 141, 153, 156 – 157, 161, 163, 169, 184n174, 186, 188n190, 196, 198, 203 – 204, 207 – 208, 210 – 213, 215 – 217, 221, 228, 230 – 235, 241 – 242, 249, 260, 288, 320, 324 – 325, 329 Kingdom of God 30, 32 – 35, 37, 39 – 46, 51, 58n175, 146, 221, 233. See also Eschatology L’Année sociologique 87, 90, 91n68, 122, 123n210, 128, 150, 173n132, 174n132, 301n178. See also Durkheimians; sociology; see also Index of Modern Names: Durkheim, Hubert, Mauss L’Enseignement biblique 13, 15 L’Évangile et l’Église ix, 8, 15, 16 – 25, 28, 36 – 58, 61 – 62, 64, 67 – 69, 145, 172, 216 – 217, 219, 221, 261, 280, 322, 324 Last Supper 34, 51, 312 Law (Judaism) 41, 233, 242 – 243 Les Mystères païens et le mystère chrétien ix, 8n22, 48n141, 198, 205n45, 222, 228 – 247, 251n206, 261, 275, 292 Lefèvre-Deumier, Prix 99, 260 Leviticus 50n149 Luke, gospel of 35n95, 40n112, 211, 226n116. See also Gospels Luther 272 – 273 Magic 7, 77, 87, 91n68, 92n73, 123, 144, 155, 158, 160 – 163, 165, 167, 169 – 181, 184 – 186, 230 – 232, 235, 238n162, 241 – 242, 244 – 246, 260, 283, 292,

363

294 – 295, 300, 305 – 309, 311, 314 – 322, 325, 328 Mana 174 – 175, 317 Manifest der 93 269 Mark, gospel of 211, 226n116. See also Gospels Matthew, gospel of 42n118, 211, 226n116. See also Gospels Messiah/Messianism 34, 39, 41 – 46, 203, 207, 216 – 217, 221, 233 Mithras 53n161, 99, 198, 205, 224 – 226, 229, 231, 234, 235n153, 238 Modernism (Roman Catholic) 1 – 2, 4, 8 – 15, 16 – 26, 36 – 57, 61, 65, 69 – 75, 77, 84, 89, 107, 116, 122, 128, 136n260, 141, 148 – 149, 151, 153, 167, 172, 186 – 187, 221, 230, 250 – 251, 263, 265, 275n65, 285, 290, 297, 322 – 323, 324 – 325, 328 Morality, theory of 26, 30, 33n85, 34, 37, 40 – 41, 46, 58n175, 63, 67n209, 89, 116, 130, 146 – 148, 154, 169 – 170, 173 – 175, 177 – 187, 189, 191, 193 – 194, 230 – 232, 235 – 236, 238, 262 – 266, 274, 276 – 277, 278 – 294, 296 – 297, 300, 304, 308, 311 – 315, 319, 321, 323, 327 – 328 Moses 50n149, 61, 133, 157n74 Mystery, cult/religion (general) 32, 47 – 49, 51 – 54, 66, 99, 143, 179n156, 197 – 200, 205 – 207, 221 – 226, 228 – 245, 259 – 261, 275, 288, 295, 320 – 321, 325, 328. See also Oriental Religions; names of gods of mystery cults (e. g. Mithras) Mysticism 20n21, 38n107, 153, 166n112, 168n120, 174n135, 226, 228, 230 – 232, 241, 248, 250, 256, 262, 277 – 287, 290 – 291, 293, 297, 300, 303, 307n202, 309n206, 314, 316 – 319, 321 – 322, 327 Myth Myth & Ritual School. See Cambridge ritualists Myth of the dying and resurrecting god. See Dying and resurrecting gods Myth ritualism 143, 186, 196, 199 – 200, 209, 212 – 213, 218, 222, 224 – 225, 229 – 247, 259, 320 – 321, 325

364

Subject Index

Mythologie comparée. See comparative mythology Mythologists/mythologues. See Christ Myth Theory Mythology 12, 32, 63, 66, 149, 155, 162, 186, 195 – 196, 207, 214 – 215, 217, 221 – 222, 224 – 225 National religions 63n190, 149n37, 231 – 232, 244, 274 – 277, 288, 291, 296, 312, 320 Nationalism 64, 105, 262 – 263, 266 – 274, 276, 288 Neuilly Essais. See Essais d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses New Testament (general) 8, 11, 24, 73, 102, 145, 207, 222, 270. See also individual NT books Old Testament (general) 2, 10 – 13, 24, 86, 145, 155, 203, 214. See also individual OT books Omophagy 322 Oriental religions (= religions orientales) 29, 32n79, 53 – 54, 68, 85, 179n156, 185n176, 197 – 198, 203 – 207, 210, 212, 224 – 225, 228 – 229, 231. See also Mystery; names of gods of mystery cults (e. g. Mithras) Orpheus (essay by Salomon Reinach) 141 – 144, 147, 151 – 159, 170 – 171, 186 – 188, 190, 195 – 198, 208 – 213, 215, 218, 226, 249, 310n211, 326 Orpheus (god) 155 – 156, 157n74, 229 Pagan/paganism (general) 18, 28, 32, 39, 45 – 57, 60, 63, 66 – 67, 122, 143, 146, 198 – 199, 203 – 213, 214 – 217, 221 – 243, 259 – 273, 275, 288, 321 – 322, 325, 328 Papacy 13 – 14, 268, 273 – 274, 276. See also Index of Modern Names: Leo XIII, Pius X, Benedict XV Pascendi dominici gregis (encyclical) 16, 70, 75n1, 108n147 Passion 45, 51, 142, 196, 207 – 213, 215 – 223, 226 – 227, 232 – 235, 249

Paul (Saint) 35n95, 36, 47, 53n159, 198 – 199, 203, 220n97, 221 – 222, 229, 233 – 236, 242 – 243, 249, 272, 321. See also individual epistles Persia 11, 47, 49, 203 – 204, 220n97, 231, 260 Philippians 234n148. See also Paul Philology (general) 3 – 4, 9, 12, 55, 57, 75, 101, 152, 205, 220n99, 269, 327 Philosophy of religion 3, 5n14, 6, 8, 11, 14 – 16, 20n2, 26 – 28, 32, 36 – 39, 57, 59 – 60, 62 – 63, 66n203, 86, 93, 101n119, 116 – 117, 147 – 148, 152, 158, 167 – 168, 172 – 187, 197n9, 200 – 203, 206, 208, 214 – 215, 220, 230, 241 – 242, 248, 259, 261 – 262, 264 – 265, 268 – 269, 276, 277 – 294, 296, 303n183, 314 – 315, 322 – 323, 325 – 328 Pilate, Pontius 211 – 213, 215 – 217, 221, 273 Plato 47, 152 Positivism 91, 93, 101, 178, 183 – 184, 192, 206, 236n158, 286 – 287. See also Index of Modern Names: Comte, Monod Protestantism 14, 17, 19, 21 – 23, 25 – 36, 37 – 39, 40 – 47, 50 – 52, 54 – 56, 59, 62 – 74, 76, 82, 86 – 87, 89 – 94, 101, 104, 111, 114 – 116, 121, 124, 130, 138 – 139, 145 – 146, 149, 166 – 167, 179, 188, 201n24, 202 – 205, 209, 218 – 219, 236 – 238, 241 – 243, 257, 262 – 264, 268 – 274, 276, 284, 286, 289, 292, 322, 325 Providentissimus deus (encyclical) 14 “Primitive” cults/religion/origins 29, 60 – 63, 66 – 67, 88n58, 93, 141, 151n43, 154 – 157, 158 – 165, 167 – 171, 176 – 180, 194, 230 – 232, 240n168, 241 – 242, 259n2, 260, 274, 283, 288 – 289, 292 – 293, 295 – 297, 300, 304 – 306, 308 – 318, 319, 322, 325 – 326 Psalms 216, 219n94 Psychology (general) 4 – 5, 41, 45 – 46, 51, 62 – 63, 92, 148 – 149, 152, 158 – 159, 163, 168n119, 177n151, 189, 195n2, 209, 217, 233, 237, 246, 250n201, 252, 289, 299, 309 – 310, 314n227, 317, 324, 326 Purim 211 – 212

Subject Index

Question biblique

13 – 14

Race, ideas/theories of 50n149, 64, 67, 127 – 140, 204 – 205, 212 – 213. See also Anti-Semitism Relativity theory v, 15, 56, 59, 280, 297, 323, 328. See also Evolutionism Religion de l’humanité 91, 116, 147, 154, 181n160, 182 – 187, 189, 194, 230, 262 – 263, 265 – 266, 274 – 276, 277 – 282, 3284 – 293, 307, 311, 315, 323, 327 – 328 Religionsgeschichtliche Schule 7, 12 – 13, 29 – 30, 40, 48n141, 52 – 53, 198, 204 – 208, 221, 229, 235n156. See also Index of Modern Names: Bousset, Gunkel, Heitmüller Religions orientales. See Oriental religions Republicanism/Republican. See Third Republic Resurrection of Christ 35, 45 – 48, 56, 193, 197, 212, 217, 221, 232 – 235, 237. See also Dying and resurrecting gods Revue de l’histoire des religions 54, 77n9, 86, 99, 218, 252n208 Revue d’histoire et de littérature religieuses 12n36, 15, 53 – 54, 70, 100n114, 198, 217 – 218, 223, 245, 250 – 251, 267, 304 Rite/ritual (general) 34, 36 – 37, 41, 45, 49 – 55, 63n190, 67 – 68, 149 – 150, 161, 172 – 173, 195, 199, 205, 208 – 213, 215 – 216, 222, 224 – 226, 228, 230 – 247, 259 – 262, 263 – 266, 280, 289, 291 – 294, 295 – 323, 326 – Communion, rites of 51 – 52, 54, 68, 161, 168, 232, 238, 298 – 299, 305n195, 306, 307n202, 312, 313n224, 321 – 322 – Expiatory rites 234, 265, 295, 298n162, 302, 311, 318, 321 – 322 – Fertility/vegetation rites 211, 224 – 225, 232, 235, 237, 242, 245, 306, 309, 313, 315, 319 – 320 – Funerary rites 295, 297, 307 – Initiation rites 224, 231 – 234, 242 – 243, 295, 297 – Purification rites 233 – 235, 295

365

Ritual and myth. See Cambridge ritualists; Myth ritualism See also Baptism; Cult; Eucharist; Gift; Omophagy; Sacaea; Sacrifice; Saturnalia; Self-sacrifice Romans 234. See also Paul Rome (ancient) 51, 85, 133n250, 134, 154, 186, 205, 210 – 213, 260, 288 Rome (= Catholic Curia) 14n44, 20, 64, 69, 72, 73n231, 104, 274 Sacaea 210 – 212 Sacrifice 7 – 8, 51 – 55, 59, 62, 67 – 68, 87, 91n68, 93, 123, 141, 150 – 151, 161, 163n103, 168, 173n130, 196, 198, 200, 210 – 216, 224 – 225, 232, 235 – 327, 245 – 246, 259 – 266, 277 – 278, 283, 291 – 293, 294 – 323. See also Gift; Selfsacrifice Saint Sulpice 14 Salon 6, 44, 79, 97 – 106, 115, 129, 329. See also Jeudistes; see also Index of Modern Names: Arconati-Visconti, Marquise Saturnalia 210 – 211 Science laïque 3 – 4, 11, 18n10, 19, 23, 25, 49, 51, 55, 59, 165 – 166, 188, 190 – 191, 219, 257, 260, 330 Self-sacrifice 182, 203, 221, 231, 235 – 237, 242, 265, 276 – 277, 291 – 294, 314, 321 Separation between Churches and State in France (1905) 3, 24, 69, 75 – 76, 78, 95, 107 – 108, 120, 125 – 126, 138, 142, 187 – 188, 190n200, 255 Socialism 26n50, 81, 84 – 85, 88, 94 – 95, 98, 104, 105, 120 – 127, 130n237, 131 – 132, 140. See also Index of Modern Names: Jaurès, Mauss Société des Études Juives 130 Société Ernest Renan 251 Sociology 4 – 5, 63n190, 81, 84 – 85, 87 – 88, 90 – 92, 120 – 127, 128, 132, 144, 146, 148 – 151, 169, 173 – 177, 183, 189 – 190, 195, 246, 254, 260n6, 263 – 264, 282 – 284, 286n113, 301 – 302, 304 – 306, 313, 317, 324 – 327, 329. See also Durkheimians; L’Année sociologi-

366

Subject Index

que; see also Index of Modern Names: Comte, Durkheim, Hubert, Mauss Spirits of nature/vegetation 159, 168, 171, 225 – 226, 231 – 232, 235, 244, 284, 307 – 310, 317, 319 – 320. See also Animism Taboo 129, 131, 141, 155, 158 – 171, 186, 195, 209 Teleology 31, 47, 67n205, 172, 185, 242, 291 – 292, 312, 328 Theology (general) 1, 3, 4n11, 8 – 9, 12 – 14, 17 – 18, 21, 24, 26 – 27, 28 – 30, 37 – 38, 42, 44n126, 46 – 47, 49, 51 – 52, 55, 57 – 62, 66, 88 – 89, 91, 116, 123, 146 – 149, 155, 158n79, 166 – 167, 178, 191 – 192, 197, 200, 203 – 205, 208, 214, 216, 218 – 219, 227 – 228, 233 – 234, 242 – 243, 248, 263 – 265, 269 – 271, 274, 278, 285 – 287, 291, 294, 301, 314, 317 Third Republic/Republican 3, 9, 23 – 24, 43n125, 69 – 70, 75 – 76, 79 – 81, 84n42, 88, 91, 94 – 95, 97 – 100, 103, 106 – 108, 110 – 111, 114, 125 – 126, 136 – 140, 142, 145, 151, 188 – 190, 270n41, 276 (Neo‐)Thomism 14, 37, 167

Totemism 55, 67 – 68, 129, 131, 141, 149, 152n51, 153n57, 155, 158, 160 – 165, 167 – 168, 186, 194, 195, 265n24, 289n126, 295, 304 – 307, 322 Union pour la vérité 126n222, 143n10, 166n112, 187 Union sacrée 276 Universalism/ universal religions 18, 28, 29n62, 31, 39, 41, 46, 54 – 55, 57, 62 – 63, 66, 84, 92, 149, 155 – 157, 161, 169, 178, 186, 189, 212, 221, 226, 230, 235, 242, 266, 272n51, 274 – 277, 288, 291, 296, 305 – 306, 313, 320 – 321, 324 – 325 Vertu 174, 243, 300, 303, 310n212, 311n215, 316 – 320 War, Franco-Prussian. See Franco-Prussian War World War I 7 – 8, 62, 64, 105, 125, 186, 236, 243n178, 255, 262 – 263, 266 – 277, 278 – 279, 292, 312, 323, 327 – 328 Zionism

131, 163n104