LOIRE, NA? (anc. Liger), France, the largest river of the country, dividing it into two nearly equal portions. It rises on the western slope of the Cevennes, in the department of Ardeche, and flows generally northwest and west to its outlet in the Bay of Biscay below Nantes. Its principal affluents on the right are the Arroux, NieVre, Maine, etc.; on the left the Allier, Vienne, Cher, Indre, etc. Below Nantes, it is more a tidal estuary than a river, and is studded with islets. Above Nantes navi gation is much impeded by shallows. Its whole course is about 645 miles, of which about 450 miles are navigable. The river is subject to disastrous inundations, and dikes (levees) have been constructed along its course. It is connected by canals with the Saone, Seine and Vilaine.
LOISY, Alfred Firmin, French ecclesiastic and exegete: b. Atnbrieres (Marne), 28 Feb. 1857. Of peasant extraction, he attended the school of his native village. Two prizes, one in history and one in orthog raphy, which he received in his last year at school (1868), drew attention to him and led to his being sent to the college at Vitry. The Franco-Prussian War interrupted his studies and returned him to his family; but in October of the following year we find him back at col lege, this time, however, at Saint Dizier. Dur ing a religious retreat he conceived the desire of becoming a priest and, rather against the wishes of his family, entered the Grand Semi naire of Chalons-sur-Marne, without taking his degree. Among his instructors was Abbe Ludot, who fell tinder the suspicion of insinu ating into his students the ideas of Montalem bert and Lacordaire. In November 1878, after he had been ordained subdeacon, Loisy was designated by his bishop, Monsignor Meignan of Chalons, later cardinal-archbishop of Tours, to continue his studies in the newly organized Institut Catholique in Paris. He did not, how ever, enter into the spirit of the new founda tion, and in less than two months returned to his seminary at Chi.lons, where in June of the next year (1879) he was ordained by special papal dispensation a priest in the 23d year of his age, and at once appointed cure of Broussy le-Grand and later of Landricourt, the latter quite near his native Ambrieres. Academic studies being more to his liking, however, than parochial duties in a small curacy, Loisy ob tained the permission of his diocesan to resume his interrupted course at the Institut Catho lique. Here he threw himself with such ardor into the study of Hebrew and Biblical exegesis that in little more than a year he was given a lectureship in Hebrew, to which was added in 1883 a course in Old Testament exegesis based directly on the Hebrew text, and in 1886 still another in Assyriology. All the while he was engaged on his own dissertation for the doc torate (tHistoire du Canon de l'Ancien Tes tament)), which was published in 1890. Al ready therein he exhibits a bias toward the new Scriptural criticism which later on was defined by papal encyclicals as "Modernism?' The tendency was so marked in his next work, "Les mythes Chaldeens de la creation et du deluge' (1892), that the seminarians of Saint Sulpice were forbidden to attend his lectures. His dis missal from the Institut followed the appear ance of a number of articles of adjudged modernistic trend in the L'Enseignement bib lique, a bimonthly, written throughout and published by himself. This publication he voluntarily suppressed shortly thereafter on the issuance of the encyclical "Providentissimus Deus" of Pope Leo XIII, which condemned the very critical views championed by Loisy. A retirement for the next five years to the chaplaincy of a girls' school at Neuilly-sur Seine, under the direction of a convent of Dominican nuns, afforded Loisy the necessary leisure to perfect his apologetic method and prepare for his weighty articles in the Revue d'histoire et de littirature religieuse and the Revue du clergy francais under various pseu donyms, until, after the appearance in the latter of the first of a series of articles on "La religion d'IsraeP (October 1900), Cardinal Richard forbade their acceptance. Separated from the Institut and denied the clerical jour nals, Loisy asked and obtained leave from the Minister of Instruction to give courses in the P.cole des Hautes Etudes, which he continued until 1904. The works of Loisy which brought him most sharply in conflict with the Church were 'La Religion d'Israel' (1901); 'Etudes evangeliques) (1902); (L'Evangile et l'Eglise) (1902, Eng. trans. 1903); d'un petit livre) (1903), an elaboration of the views ex pressed in the preceding work; and (Le quat rieme (1903). All these books were
condemned by the Congregation of the Index on 4 Dec. 1903. Five years later he was ex communicated on the publication of 'Les Evangiles synoptiques.' He thereupon ceased the attempts he had previously made at recon ciliation with the Church, discarded the clerical garb and accepted the chair of history of reli gions in the College de France. Among the modernistic French clergy in the last decade of the 19th century and the first of the 20th Loisy was the very storm centre of the movement, carrying its critical exegesis to the logical con clusion of denying to the Church all vestige of dogmatic inagisterium in the traditional sense. Yet throughout the whole period of his most active participation in the movement, at least up to the moment of his formal excommunica, Lion, he stoutly maintained his devotion to the See of Peter and the Church for which it stands, 'Catholique catholique je reste,) he wrote to Bailey Saunders in 1904 ('Quelques Lettres, p. 21) ; hut he adds, "Critique fetal:, critique je reste" His friends and foes alike, both within his communion and without it, expressed surprise at this attitude. Yet it was not that he was merely straddling the fence. His anomalous position is perhaps understandable from the nature of his reply in "L'Evangile at l'Eglise) to Harnack's tWesen des Christentums.' Against the ultra-Protest antism of Harnack that the essence of Chris tianity, being the interior and individual reali zation of God in the human soul, does at the present time not only not need an organized church, which, at all events has deteriorated from its pristine purity, but is perhaps better off without it, Loisy strenuously maintained the necessity of the church's being a genuine organization, with all hierarchic and governing machinery, with sacraments and means of grace, ordained by God and directed by Him, whose specific function it is to mediate God to the inward man, of course, but to mediate Him through externalities and symbols, and whose function thus to mediate God ever be comes more perfect. Harnack conceives the transformations through which the Church has past under the metaphor of a stream issuing from a pure fountain, but becoming polluted by the soils through which it flows and discol ored and vitiated by the tributaries that pour into it; Loisy, who claimed to regard the de velopment of the Church in the same light as Newman did, looks upon these transformations as necessary and inevitable, as much so as those of a tree from the seed. But he leaves Rome when he refuses to admit that this Church was really founded by Christ in the form it later assumed. Rather he regards it as the eschat ological °kingdom," which in the designs of God was tv become the repository of faith by a process of development, but which the his torical Jesus of the Gospels, when that narra tive is stripped of later Christian accretions, knew naught of, nor could know aught of, be cause He was unconscious of divine consub stantiality with the Father and assumed the Messianic role only in the sense in which it was understood by the Jews of His time. It was only with the Council of Nicea that Jesus was recognized to be, in the words of its Creed, "true God of true God; begotten not made; consubstantial with the Father.* With this explanation of the development of the Gospel, Loisy was prepared to accept the whole authoritative teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. The objection usually brought against Loisy's method of apologetics, by Catholic as well as Protestant opponents, is that, whereas he professes to be a historical critic, he is rather a rationalistic philosopher; that instead of reasoning from critically authenticated facts of history, he puts reason above history; whence too readily that which is thought to be counter to reason is necessarily assumed to be unhistorical and fictitious.
A sympathetic biographical sketch is furnished by Alfred Detrez, Loisy: Biographie critique, etc.' (1909) con taining a bibliography of Loisy's books and principal articles, and some critical references. Fair but adverse criticisms of Loisy's views may he found in Sterrett, J. M., 'The Freedom of Authority' (1905) and Lepin, M., 'Les The ories de M. Loisy: Expose et Critique' (1909). Consult also Pesch. C., 'Theologische Zeit fragen' (4 Folge, 1908) ; Lilley, A. L., 'Mod ernism' (1908) ; 13ampton, J. M., 'Modernism and Modern Thought' (1914); Gisler, A., (2d ed., 1912).