13 APRIL 1944, Page 18

Solitary Passenger ?

Alfred Loisy. By M. D. Petre. (Cambridge University Press. 7s. 6d.)

IN this, the last book we shall have from her, Maude Petre describes herself (as reported by her editor) as "a solitary marooned passenger, the sole living representative of what has come to be regarded as the lost cause of modernism in the Catholic Church." At the end of her life her mind was still occupied with memories of the leaders of the movement and with the question, had it all been in vain? The brief study of Alfrel Loisy which she has left us is most valuable material for the estimation of the purposes of those distinguished men who made so much stir in ecclesiastical circles at the beginning of the century. Miss Petre was on terms of close friendship with all of them—even with Loisy, with whom, one suspects, continued intimacy was not always easy. In some respects, Loisy was the most significant of the modernists. At the outset he had a clear idea of what he wanted to do: nothing less than to fashion a new apologetic which should use the results of historical criticism on behalf of a Catholicism, transformed but not radically changed. It was Loisy's writings which furnished the greater part of the material collected under the name " Modernism," and condemned in the Encyclical Pascendi in 1907. Loisy, unlike his fellows in this, accepted the decision as final, and, from the moment of his excommunication, ceased to regard himself as, in any sense, a member of the Roman Catholic Church. But he did not cease to reflect on religion, and Miss Petre's book is chiefly con- cerned with his later thought on its nature and future. We need another study which will sum up his contribution to Biblical exegesis. Loisy's later theology might be described as a mysticism of humanity, though the phrase would be misleading if it suggested any close affinity with Auguste Comte. It is not the "Grand Etre " of Positivism that Loisy reverences, brat Wine spirit which realises itself progressively in man. We must confess that Miss Petre has not succeeded in making very clear what this theology really means, but the fault is in her author, not in herself. The three men who had the greatest influence, Loisy, Von Hilgel and Tyrrell, were strangely different in temperament, and perhaps in aim, and there is tragedy in the fact that, after the catastrophe, they drifted apart. Loisy was the simplest and most direct character. He did not allow the ruin of his hopes for the Church to ruin his life, but give himself, with the unwearying diligence of the French peasants from whom he came, to the work of scholarship. We ,return to the question which Miss Petre put to herself : was it all-labour in vain? Did the drastic purge, which followed the Encyclical, root out all effects of the movement? Did ecclesiastical totalitarianism succeed in its object? Not completely, Miss Petre thinks ; things are z,aid by Roman Catholic Theologians which could not have been said but for the Modernist ferment. This is a subject on which an Anglican can express no opinion, but he may believe that, sooner or later, what Loisy and others attempted will have-to be attempted again, perhaps more wisely and more slowly—and one gathers that it is doubtful whether or not the Encyclical Pascendi is infallible.

W. R. MATTHEWS.