1. Comparative Religion and/as Modernist Theology: L’Évangile et l’Église and the Neuilly Essais

The publication of L’Évangile et l’Église in 1902 was a milestone in Loisy’s trajectory, as well as a landmark in the intellectual history of the Church. Often considered as the starting point of the Modernist crisis in the Catholic Church, the book was the main cause of the intensification of its anti-Modernist politics, culminating in the Syllabus Lamentabili sane exitu and the Encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis in 1907, followed by the so-called anti-Modernist oath in 1910.1 The volume was the first of the petits livres rouges, Loisy’s series of historical and philosophical essays.2 In it, he offered a historical-critical account of primitive Christianity and analyzed the relation of Jesus’ original gospel to the later development of the Church, and of Christian doctrine and cult. Loisy decided the time had come to abandon the protection of the pseudonyms he would normally use to publish on delicate topics.3 In L’Évangile et l’Église he openly insisted on the necessary historicization of early Christianity and consistently applied his now fully developed evolutionary philosophy of history. His rewriting of the Christian origins conveyed a radical reform program for early 20 century Catholicism. It was a plea for a systematic redefinition of the asymmetrical relationship between science and faith in the Church, and, ultimately, for a new understanding of Catholic faith itself. Loisy’s book was condemned locally by Cardinal Richard in early 1903, but it wasn’t until late 1903, after Pius X had come to power, that the volume was placed on the Index of forbidden books.4 In 1903, Loisy published several other “dangerous” volumes, such as Autour d’un petit livre (1903), his second petit livre rouge, in which he tried to defend