Alfred Loisy’s Comparative Method in Les mystères païens et le mystère chrétien

Abstract

While the work of the “father of Roman Catholic Modernism” prior to his excommunication in 1908 has been extensively studied, Alfred Loisy’s later career as professor of Histoire des Religions at the Collège de France has received less attention. This article examines his original contribution to comparative methodology for the interrelation between early Christianity and the pagan mystery cults. Loisy’s explicit aim was to integrate the historical, sociological, psychological, and anthropological approaches of his time into an original and all-encompassing methodological framework. Our article pays special attention to Loisy’s predominant yet hitherto unnoticed use of a model of analogy. Crucial to this interpretation are (a) the idea that the Christian mystery and the pagan mysteries are the result of a universal and independent, analogous evolution of religions, and (b) the theory that ritual precedes myth, adopted from the Cambridge Myth and Ritual School. We show that Loisy’s novelty resided in the fact that he consistently applied these principles to both the pagan cults and to Christianity, but it will also become clear that his systematic approach entailed major problems for the individual features of the compared cults, problems which he tended to overlook. Loisy combined this analogical framework with a psychological interpretation of the genesis of the belief in Christ’s resurrection and with a historical-genealogical explanation of Paul’s knowledge and use of the mystery cults. The article also uses unpublished material from Loisy’s correspondence with Franz Cumont.

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

“…A similar process took place for baptism, though this was a ritual from the very beginning: a Jewish purification ritual which was reinterpreted as an initiation ritual representing the death and rebirth of Christ. To account for the far-reaching similarities of the pagan mysteries and Early Christianity, Loisy combined an anthropological model of universal analogy with a genealogical explanation (Praet, Lannoy 2017). People like Paul were acquainted with the pagan mystery cults because they were part of their religious environment.³³ They used this knowledge to transform Jesus' gospel into a universal mystery.…”

“…tive project equally well, or perhaps even better, because it would have enabled Loisy to easily draw comparisons between them and to prove that these religions constituted a distinct type of religion. But, interestingly, Loisy hardly ever drew explicit comparisons between individual mysteries, and historical contacts between them are rarely mentioned, either (Praet, Lannoy 2017). The implications of his compositional decision are twofold.…”