GOBLET D'ALVIELLA, EUGÈNE. – Belgian politician, active in the Liberal Party with an anticlerical orientation, and historian of religions, born in Brussels in 1846, where he died on 9 September 1925. He was a senator from 1892 and professor of the history of religions in the chair created for him (1884) at the Free University of Brussels, where he followed the school of religious ethnology promoted by E. B. Tylor and H. Spencer.
His various minor contributions on the subject, first published separately in Revue de Belgique, Revue de l'histoire des religions, and Revue des deux mondes, were later collected in three volumes under the general title Croyances, rites, institutions (Paris 1911).
He proposed distributing the subjects pertaining to the history of religions into three branches: hierography, hierology, hierosophy, understanding by hierography (“description of the sacred”) the exposition of the beliefs and rites of the various peoples; by hierology (“doctrine of the sacred”) the treatment of the constitutive principles of the science of religions and of general religious phenomenology; and by hierosophy (“philosophy of the sacred”) the totality of the theological and philosophical conclusions that can be deduced from the comparative examination of religious facts, especially with regard to man and his relationship with God and the universe.
A notable work is Evolution religieuse contemporaine chez les Anglais, les Américains et les Hindous (Paris 1883), in which he intended to provide material for the history of religious rationalism in the second half of the nineteenth century. With regard to this purpose, the work, despite its standpoint, proves useful because it sets out the development of the various Protestant currents in England and America, as well as the influence exerted by Christianity on the educated minds of India, a region he visited in 1876 in the entourage of the future Edward VII; an influence that led to Brahma Samaj (v.), the “Society of God,” a mixture of Christian theism and Hindu pantheism, a society which subsequently branched out into various others.
GOAR, JACQUES — Εὐκολόγιον sive rituale Graecorum, Paris 1647, p. 210. Copy in the Vatican Library.
la Grèce (ibid. 1898); Eleusinia (ibid. 1903); Les sciences auxiliaires de l'histoire comparée des religions, in Trans. of III Intern. Congr. Hist. Rel. (II, Oxford 1908, pp. 365 ff.). It is on the Index (decree of 26 January 1893): L'idée de Dieu d'après l'anthropologie et l'histoire (Paris 1892).