La correspondance bilatérale entre Alfred Loisy et Franz Cumont : brève présentation et projet d’édition

Lannoy, Annelies

doi:10.4000/anabases.1894

Cited by 5 publications

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“…The correspondence will be published by A. Lannoy, C. Bonnet and D. Praet in 2018 (Mémoires de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres). For a concise presentation : Lannoy 2011. comes the true object of religion. Christianity, in Comte's positivistic philosophy of history of religion, is not the final stage of development.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Lannoy¹,

Bonnet²

2018

Archiv Für Religionsgeschichte

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In their grand narratives on the ancient history of religions, the Belgian historian of religions, Franz Cumont (1868 -1947) and his French colleague and correspondent, Alfred Loisy (1857-1940) both assigned a prominent place to the so-called pagan mystery religions. This paper seeks to identify the specific theories of religion and the deeper motivations underpinning Cumont's and Loisy's historiographical construction of the mystery cults as a distinct type of religion within their evolutionary accounts of the history of religions. Through a comparative analysis of their rich correspondence (1908 -1940) and a selection of their publications, we demonstrate how their historical studies of the religious transformations in the Roman Empire, their in-depth dialogues in the troubled times in which they lived, and their philosophical views on the overall history and future of religion, were in fact mutually constitutive.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Lannoy¹,

Bonnet²

2018

Archiv Für Religionsgeschichte

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Coming to Terms with the “Oriental Religions of the Roman Empire”

Gordon

2014

Numen

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

Praet

Lannoy

2017

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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.

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La correspondance bilatérale entre Alfred Loisy et Franz Cumont : brève présentation et projet d’édition

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

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

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

Coming to Terms with the “Oriental Religions of the Roman Empire”

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

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