GOBLET D'ALVIELLA, EUGÈNE. - Belgian politician, a militant in the Liberal Party with an anticlerical coloring, and a historian of religions, b. in Brussels in 1846, d. there on 9 Sept. 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 current of religious ethnology championed by E. B. Tylor and H. Spencer.
His various minor contributions on the subject, at first published sporadically in the Revue de Belgique, the Revue de l'histoire des religions, the Revue des deux mondes, were later collected in three volumes under the general title Croyances, rites, institutions (Paris 1911).
He proposed to distribute 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; by hierosophy ("philosophy of the sacred") the whole body of theological and philosophical conclusions that can be deduced from the comparative examination of religious facts, especially with regard to man and his relation to God and to the universe.
A notable work is the Evolution religieuse contemporaine chez les Anglais, les Américains et les Hindous (Paris 1883), in which he intends to provide the material for the history of religious rationalism in the second half of the 19th century. And with respect to this aim the work, even from his point of view, proves useful because it sets out the development of the various Protestant currents in England and in America, as well as the influence exercised by Christianity on the cultivated minds of India, a region he visited in 1876 in the retinue of the future Edward VII; an influence that issued in the constitution of the Brahma Samaj (v.), the "Society of God," a mixture of Christian theism and Hindu pantheism, a society which then branched out into various others.
Other works by G. d'A. are the Introd. à l'histoire générale des religions (Paris 1887); Ce que l'Inde doit à 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, p. 365 ff.). Placed on the Index (decree of 26 Jan. 1893): L'idée de Dieu d'après l'anthropologie et l'histoire (Paris 1892).
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Nicola Turchi