LOISY, ALFRED. - Modernist exegete, b. at Ambrières (Haute-Marne) on 28 Feb. 1857, d. in Paris on 6 June 1940. In 1874 L. entered the major seminary of Châlons. Ordained a priest on 29 June 1879, he exercised the ministry for a while until he went to Paris in 1881, chiefly through the interest of Msgr. L. Duchesne. He attended the Institut, where he soon assumed the chair of Hebrew. According to his Mémoires (v. below, I, p. 154), L. in 1886 began to feel himself a stranger to the Church. His writings soon gave rise to grave suspicions concerning his orthodoxy. In 1893 L. gave up the course in exegesis to limit himself to the teaching of Hebrew. In 1894 he went to Neuilly, leaving the Institut, and in 1899 to the Assyriologist J. Thureau-Dangin. From 1909, by then already excommunicated, he went on to teach at the Collège de France. The book that placed him in open opposition to the Church was L'Évangile et l'Église (Paris 1903), condemned by the Holy Office on 16 Dec. 1903 together with Études évangéliques (ibid. 1902), Le quatrième évangile (ibid. 1903), Autour d'un petit livre (ibid. 1903) and La religion d'Israël (ibid. 1901).
L., who possessed an indisputable historical-philological culture, reveals himself in his many writings as the most typical representative of biblical modernism (v.). Not a few propositions of the decree Lamentabili (3 July 1907) are drawn from his books. Having denied the concept of inspiration and of the supernatural in general, L. applied to Holy Scripture the most extreme theories of German rationalism. Treating of the New Testament, his preferred subject, he assumed an utterly demolishing attitude in the criticism of the sources in order to present the Church as a conscious distortion of the Kingdom of God proclaimed by Jesus in a merely eschatological sense.
Among L.'s works, all condemned (decree of 1 June 1932 and following ones down to that of 20 July 1938), besides those already mentioned, the following should be remembered: Histoire du Canon de l'Ancien Testament (Paris 1890); Histoire du Canon du Nouveau Testament (ibid. 1891); Histoire critique du texte et des versions de l'Ancien Testament (2 vols., Amiens 1892-93); Les mythes babylonies et les premiers chapitres de la Genèse (Paris 1901); Les Évangiles synoptiques (2 vols., Ceffonds 1907-1908); Simples réflexions sur le décret du St-Office « Lamentabili sane exitu » et sur l'encycl. « Pascendi dominici gregis » (ibid. 1908); Quelques lettres sur des questions actuelles et sur des événements récents (Haute-Marne 1908); Jésus et la tradition évangélique (Paris 1910); A propos d'histoire des religions (ibid. 1911); L'Évangile selon Marc (ibid. 1912); Choses passées (ibid. 1913); L'Épître aux Galates (ibid. 1916); L'Évangile selon Luc (ibid. 1917); Les mystères païens et le mystère chrétien (ibid. 1919); Essai historique sur le sacrifice (ibid. 1920); Les Actes des Apôtres (ibid. 1920); L'Apocalypse de Jean (ibid. 1923); La religion (ibid. 1924); Religion et humanité (ibid. 1926); Mémoires pour servir d'histoire religieuse de notre temps (3 vols., ibid. 1930-31); Les origines du Nouveau Testament (ibid. 1936).
Bibliography9 works
Angelo Penna