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From Italy to Harvard: George LaPiana and Catholic Modernism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2014

Elizabeth A. Clark
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Modernism: What was it? When was it? Does Modernism name “a break with the past,” proclaim the present as “qualitatively distinct and new”—or is Modernism's self-representation as an “ideology of rupture, opposition, and anti-institutionality” over-hyped? And when was the “when” of Modernism? Do Modernism's origins trace back to the era of Romanticism? Or to the 1880s and Baudelaire? Or to 1913 and Stravinsky's “Rite of Spring”? Or to 1922: the publication of Ulysses, “The Waste Land,” and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus?

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Church History , Volume 83 , Issue 1 , March 2014 , pp. 145 - 153
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Copyright © American Society of Church History 2014 

Modernism: What was it? When was it? Does Modernism name “a break with the past,” proclaim the present as “qualitatively distinct and new”Footnote 18—or is Modernism's self-representation as an “ideology of rupture, opposition, and anti-institutionality” over-hyped?Footnote 19 And when was the “when” of Modernism? Do Modernism's origins trace back to the era of Romanticism?Footnote 20 Or to the 1880s and Baudelaire? Or to 1913 and Stravinsky's “Rite of Spring”? Or to 1922: the publication of Ulysses, “The Waste Land,” and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus?Footnote 21

The voluminous Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, while de-centering notions of rupture and stressing socio-cultural and material factors,Footnote 22 devotes only one chapter to religion. To the author of this chapter, Modernism in religion betokens psychical research, spiritualism, theosophy, and the occult.Footnote 23 Precisely five sentences describe Modernism within less exotic brands of Christian theology.Footnote 24 Largely overlooked is Catholic Modernism of the 1890s through the early twentieth century. To help fill that gap, I here focus on one of its representatives, George LaPiana of Harvard, and ask, “what was modern about the Modernism LaPiana espoused?”

I. George LaPiana

George LaPiana (whose memoirs are preserved in the Harvard Divinity School archives) was born in 1878 near Palermo, Sicily.Footnote 25 Educated at the Seminary in Monreale (where the curriculum bypassed historical studies),Footnote 26 he was ordained to the priesthood at twenty-two.Footnote 27 As a teacher at the Seminary, he joined a Modernist discussion group that endorsed historical criticism.Footnote 28 When conservative colleagues in 1907 or 1908 protested his Modernist views, LaPiana resigned the Chair of History and left Italy for a year's study.Footnote 29 Back in Palermo, he became Director of the College of San Rocco, a lay institution that required no anti-Modernist oath.Footnote 30

In 1913, LaPiana visited family members in Milwaukee.Footnote 31 There, a Unitarian minister befriended him, recommending him to Harvard Divinity School.Footnote 32 LaPiana was offered a modest fellowship, followed by an Instructorship.Footnote 33 (He was assured that he need not become a Unitarian.)Footnote 34 During World War I, he was solicited to teach a course on church historyFootnote 35 and thus became the first Catholic to teach at Harvard Divinity School.Footnote 36 When, in October 1922, Fascists seized power in Italy, LaPiana's anti-Fascist activities precluded his return to his native land.Footnote 37 His fate in America was sealed. In 1926, he was appointed Full Professor at Harvard, where he taught ancient and medieval, Eastern and Western, church history until his retirement.Footnote 38 He was the dominant force in church history at Harvard from the 1920s to 1947.

LaPiana's own religious commitments remain obscure. He claimed that he stood “outside any ecclesiastical organization,” though “officially” a Catholic Modernist.Footnote 39 Archival materials do not suggest that he had a close continuing relationship with the Catholic Church. Yet at the end, he received Extreme Unction, though insisting on his own interpretation of Catholicism.Footnote 40

II. Roman Catholic Modernism

“Modernism” was the name given by Pius X and his advisors “to describe and condemn certain liberal, anti-scholastic, and historico-critical forms of thought occurring in the Roman Catholic Church between c.1890 and 1914.”Footnote 41 Modernism emerged in France, Italy, and England, with different emphases—theological, philosophical, historical, biblical-critical.Footnote 42

Modernist approaches to history held that relativity marked all historical narration, as there could be no unmediated grasp of the past.Footnote 43 Christianity, on this reading, had developed and adapted to “varying circumstances throughout the centuries.”Footnote 44 Pius X, elected in 1903 and resolutely opposed to modern currents of thought, soon had five of Modernist Alfred Loisy's writings put on the Index.Footnote 45 In 1907, two Vatican decrees condemned Modernism. Biblical criticism, the theory of historical development, the sharp separation of “history” from “faith,” and “immanentist” philosophy, with its appeal to “experience” as a ground of authority, were all condemned.Footnote 46 In a much-quoted phrase, Pius declared Modernism to be “the synthesis of all heresies.”Footnote 47 Disciplinary measures, issued in 1910, required an anti-Modernist oath of clergy and professors in theological seminaries.Footnote 48 “Councils of Vigilance” were to be established in every diocese to apprehend any signs of Modernism.Footnote 49 In Italy, hundreds of clergy either voluntarily left Catholicism or were forced out.Footnote 50

Modernism in Italy had two distinct aspects: one, social and political, the other, historical and theological.Footnote 51 Its historical wing is associated with church historian Ernesto Buonaiuti, whose anonymously published book of 1907, The Programme of Modernism, was a seminal document.Footnote 52 LaPiana, friend of Buonaiuti for over forty years, considered him the most important influence in Italian Modernism, and claimed that he had founded modern religious studies in Italian universities.Footnote 53

III. George LaPiana and Modernism

“Modernism,” in LaPiana's view, aimed to make Christianity “the leaven of national, political, social and economic life . . . . It conceived of the Church as an instrument of world civilization rather than of world-renunciation: and so it tried . . . to cooperate with all the generous hopes of the modern democratic movement.”Footnote 54 Today, LaPiana told Harvard students, liberal scholars reject the static idea of revelation and truth; all is a continuous becoming, “nothing is, everything becomes.” “Motion and change is the essence of life.”Footnote 55

Yet LaPiana rejected some emphases of other European Modernists, such as Buonaiuti's on “religious experience” and mysticism.Footnote 56 Likewise, he deemed George Tyrrell's immanentist, mystical theology “pietistic.” Yet LaPiana shared with Buonaiuti both the notion that historic Christianity was the religion of a community, not merely of individuals, and an appreciation for Pragmatist philosophy, especially that of William James. On the other hand, LaPiana eschewed what he called the “absolute rationalism” of Modernist Alfred Loisy, who abandoned institutional Catholicism entirely.Footnote 57

IV. LaPiana on Historical Method

LaPiana distinguished a “theological” from a “historical” approach to history. The former starts from the premises of faith, holding that the dogma of Jesus' divinity, as well as the Church's sacramental system and hierarchical organization, were God-given from Christianity's inception. On this view, there had been no evolutionary development of dogma.Footnote 58

The historical method, by contrast, rejects these theological premises. History, LaPiana asserted, has nothing to say about whether the church has a divine origin, whether Jesus is divine or even founded a church. These are matters of faith. “And if your faith is of the kind that moves mountains,” he slyly added, “you may be able to read in the gospel the theory of pontifical autocracy as well as the theory of free Congregationalism.”Footnote 59

Like other historians of his era, LaPiana wished to be “scientific,” but he readily conceded that the historian's work is unavoidably colored by his convictions. There is no truly objective history, he told students, but there is an “honest history which may reach a certain degree of objectivity.” The historian may be a believing Christian, but when he writes as a historian, “he must not mix up his faith with his historical method.”Footnote 60

Christianity, then, is to be studied as are all other religions, with an emphasis on contextualization.Footnote 61 Historical criticism shows that traditional views of the authorship, dating, and relationships of and among Biblical books; of revelation and inspiration; of Church dogma's “formal identity” with Scriptural statements, must all be abandoned.Footnote 62

What factors had spurred the change in historical practice? Text-critical methods applied to the Bible; the study of history of religions, comparative religion, primitive religions, and anthropology; the psychology and philosophy of religion.Footnote 63 Kantian philosophy, followed by Hegelianism, LaPiana claimed, “changed altogether the basis and foundations upon which the whole intellectual structure stood.”Footnote 64

At first, La Piana told students, the Catholic Church refused to countenance these developments. Pius IX's Syllabus of Errors in 1864 “proclaimed the impossibility of any conciliation between the Church and theology and the modern thought.” While Leo XIII encouraged historical scholarship, opened the Secret Vatican Archives, and promoted to the cardinalate John Henry Newman, who had advanced a theory of historical development, his advocacy of scholastic philosophy insured that any revisions “would remain within the boundaries of dogma and of the institutional principles of the Church.” But the results of this intellectual revival, LaPiana argued, went far beyond what Leo wished. Young Catholic students found the traditional ways and new methods irreconcilable. The development of dogma entailed more than Newman's unfolding of an original kernel; it meant real change, genuine newness, which required an immanentist philosophy. Pius X, however, “crushed Modernism” by excommunications and disciplinary measures,Footnote 65 carried out in “a spirit of brutality worthy of Prussia”!Footnote 66

Although Protestant scholars, LaPiana conceded, had experienced an easier time introducing critical methods, new research on Christian origins, Jewish traditions, and Hellenistic religions appeared as “fatal” to orthodox Protestant as to Catholic historiography. LaPiana deemed Barthianism a retreat to conservative foundations: it “presupposes a historical interpretation that is fundamentally that of the centuriates [centuriators] of Magdeburg.”Footnote 67

V. LaPiana on Current Theological Emphases

LaPiana faulted liberal Protestant attempts to justify and explain religious ideas and practices by an appeal to sentiment, to moral instincts and the will: these approaches he deems “anti-intellectualist.” He suspects that the phrase “religious experience,” with its appeal to individual and group psychology, not to history, often covers “a multitude of sins of omission in learning.” Unlike some other Catholic Modernists, LaPiana considered “experience” a weak criterion: how could you test its “solidity”? The pragmatic appeal to “success” fails as a test, since the most varied and opposed experiences have been “successful.” “Unless the interpretation of Christianity in terms of experience comes out of the fog and of the vagaries of an intangible theology,” he told students, “it cannot be successfully used as a criterion of reconstruction of Christian history.” The appeal to “experience” so dilutes the characteristic features of historical Christianity that they “dissolve in thin air.” Such accounts scarcely differentiate between Christianity's alleged “essence” and the “essence” of all other religions. This alignment may appeal to mystics, but not to historians, LaPiana concluded.Footnote 68

“Essence” was in fact a category that LaPiana disliked. Harnack's search for an “essence” of Christianity was not truly “historical,” incongruous with a dynamic view of history. The process of development, LaPiana argued, is the constitutive element to be stressed.Footnote 69 For him, Harnack's reduction of the essence of Christianity to a “vague notion of the Fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man” is “even for a Protestant . . . too much thin air over which to build a church, no matter how spiritual its character might be.”Footnote 70 Also, contra Harnack's view of the Hellenization of Christianity, LaPiana rejected philosophical speculation as the key emphasis in the history of dogma: “the ancient Church did not claim to be a philosophy or a school but a practical way of salvation.”Footnote 71 Even church doctrine aimed at “practice.”

LaPiana's critical approach is shown in his emphasis on (for example) Christianity's borrowing of institutions and functions from Roman society;Footnote 72 on looking to anthropology and primitive societies to illuminate early Christianity's radical hostility to what he calls the “natural sexual instinct”Footnote 73; on stressing the economic causes that led to the downfall of the Roman Empire (Rostovtzeff is featured here).Footnote 74 He rejected the traditional Protestant explanation of Christianity's “decline” from a pristine origin.Footnote 75

LaPiana also distinguished himself from many Protestant historians by his insistence on studying Christianity as a social, churchly organization. He often critiqued Protestant historians' individualistic, “spiritualized” version of Christianity that neglected the Church as a social institution.Footnote 76 “The distinction between religion and church,” he reminded audiences, “was unknown in early Christianity.”Footnote 77 LaPiana borrowed Ernesto Buonaiuti's phrase, “the associated life,” to describe Christianity's movement toward “the salvation of the whole social complex,” embracing political, economic, moral, spiritual, intellectual, cultural relations, and cultural institutions.Footnote 78This is Jesus' message.Footnote 79 Although the Kingdom the early Christians had expected did not come, from it could be distilled the hope for “the associated life.”Footnote 80

LaPiana also offered a strong critique of the Church's social and economic practice through the ages. Repeatedly, the Christian spirit was betrayed by its “official representatives,” who were entangled with the political and economic interests of the wealthier classes. LaPiana sarcastically observed that it took church officials forty years after Karl Marx's 1848 Manifesto to note the social message of scripture; only then did they come forward “blasting their trumpets to tell the bewildered working man that their cause was the cause of the church.” While “preaching social justice and indulging in pleasant demagogical exercise, they never forgot to pass around the basket for the collection, squeezing the pennies even from the meager pocket of the proletariat.”Footnote 81 Preaching “resignation and patience,” the Church tells the poor that their poverty prevents temptation and sin, thus “making it easier for them to reach the Kingdom of Heaven.” By fostering a “psychology of resignation,” LaPiana claimed, the Church has encouraged rampant superstition, advising the poor to seek help from saints, angels, and the Virgin Mary.Footnote 82

VI. LaPiana and “the Modern”

If we entertain theorist Paul de Man's claim that modernity “lives off the capital accumulated by . . . predecessors,”Footnote 83 then Christianity, having amassed vast cultural capital through the centuries, might also claim its own versions of Modernism. If, with some recent theorists, we understand Modernism more as “recontextualizing,” a rethinking that does not center upon “the ideology of the break,”Footnote 84 then George LaPiana's version of Christianity qualifies as “modern.” His endorsement of Biblical criticism and historical study, his emphasis on the churchly and social quality of early Christianity, his sharp critique of Vatican politics, all suggest a “modern” approach, even while his rejection of the appeal to “experience” and to Tyrell's mystical theology distinguished him from other Modernists. Yet his rejection of “essences” and of traditional grand narratives of Christianity, his suspicion of the category of “experience,” his emphasis on praxis, and his willingness to reconfigure the building blocks of an older formation to design a new structure, all suggest that he had one foot in the camp of the post-modern.

References

18 The George LaPiana Archives are housed in Harvard Divinity School Library; all references are listed simply by “LaPiana.” Ross, Stephen, “Introduction: The Missing Link,” in Modernism and Theory: A Critical Debate, ed. Ross (London: Routledge, 2009)Google Scholar, 3.

19 Schoenbach, Lisi, Pragmatic Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)Google Scholar, 12.

20 de Man, Paul, “What is Modern?” in de Man, Critical Writings, 1953–1978, ed. Waters, Lindsay (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989 [original essay: 1965])Google Scholar, 139.

21 Also the year in which F. Scott Fitzgerald set The Great Gatsby and Virginia Woolf began Mrs. Dalloway. On the significance of 1922, see North, Michael, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar, esp. v–vi, 3–8.

22 Brooker, Peter, “Introduction,” The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, eds. Brooker, et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 8.

23 Roger Luckhurst, “Religion, Psychical Research, Spiritualism, and the Occult,” in Oxford Handbook, 429–444.

24 Luckhurst, “Religion, Psychical Research,” 432–433. Ezra Pound declared that the Christian era ended on October 30, 1921, when James Joyce wrote the final words of Ulysses: see North, Reading 1922, 3, citing [Ezra Pound], “The Little Review Calendar,” The Little Review 8 (Spring 1922): 2.Google Scholar

25 LaPiana, “Memoirs” (bMS104/1 [3], “Childhood,” pp. 2–3). On his life, see Williams, George H., “Professor George LaPiana (1878–1971): Catholic Modernist at Harvard (1915–1947),” Harvard Library Bulletin 21, no. 2 (April 1973): 117–143.Google Scholar

26 LaPiana, “Memoirs” (bMS104/1 [3], “Childhood,” pp. 7, 9); (bMS104/1 [4], “Education and Vocation,” n.p.).

27 LaPiana, “Memoirs” (bMS104/1 [4], “Education and Vocation,” pp. 1–2, n.d.).

28 LaPiana, “Modernism-Origin” (bMS104/1 [5], p. 4).

29 LaPiana, “Memoirs” (bMS104/1 [4], “Education and Vocation,” n.p.); “Modernism-Origin” (bMS104/1 [5], p. 5).

30 LaPiana, “Memoirs” (bMS104/1 [4], “Education and Vocation,” another version, n.p.). He regretted keeping his clerical status (“Memoirs” [bMS104/1 (4), “Education and Vocation,” n.d., pp. 5–6]).

31 Elsewhere, 1913 is given: probably correct, because LaPiana was in America when World War I erupted: see LaPiana, “Wars” (bMS104/1 [8], p. 2); “Memoirs” (bMS104/1 [6], “San Rocco,” another version, p. 2); (bMS104/1 [7], “San Rocco to America,” pp. 2–3) and “San Rocco to America,” another version, n.p., n.d.).

32 LaPiana, “Memoirs” (bMS104/1 [7], “San Rocco to America,” another version, n.p.).

33 LaPiana, “Memoirs” (bMS104/1 [8], “Harvard Divinity School,” “Divinity School,” 5).

34 LaPiana, “Memoirs” (bMS104/1 [7], “San Rocco to America,” another version, n.p.).

35 LaPiana, “Memoirs” (bMS104/1 [8], “Harvard Divinity School,” “Divinity School,” pp. 3, 5).

36 LaPiana, “Memoirs” (bMS104/1 [8], new draft, p. 2). When conservative (“narrow”) Boston Catholics protested, Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell protected him.

37 LaPiana, “Wars” (bMS104/1 [8], pp. 4–5).

38 LaPiana, “Memoirs” (bMS104/1 [8], “Visiting in Italy,” pp. 1, 6 and “Return from Italy,” pp. 1–2).

39 LaPiana, “Unitarian and Catholic Controversies” (bMS104/1 [11], p. 1). On early leanings toward agnosticism: LaPiana, “Memoirs” (bMS104/1 [4], “Education and Vocation,” n.p.).

40 Williams, “Professor George LaPiana,” 141–143.

41 The name is given in the encyclical Pascendi gregis of 1907, in [Buonaiuti, Ernesto], The Programme of Modernism, trans. Tyrrell, George, introduction by Lilley, A. Leslie (New York and London: G. P. Putnam's Sons/ Knickerbocker Press, 1908)Google Scholar, 153. The name was given by adversaries: see Alfred Loisy, Simples réflexions sur le décret du Saint-Office Lamentabili sane exitu et sur l'encyclique Pascendi dominici gregis (Ceffonds: Chez l'auteur, 1908), 13–14.Google Scholar For discussion: Gabriel Daly, OSA, “Theological and Philosophical Modernism,” in Catholicism Contending With Modernity: Roman Catholic Modernism and Anti-Modernism in Historical Context, ed. Jodock, Darrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 102; Morghen, Raffaello, “Il modernismo e la Storia del Cristianesimo,” in Ernesto Buonaiuti Storico del Cristianesimo, A Trent' Anni della Morte (Roma: Istituto Storico Italiano per Il Medio Evo, 1978)Google Scholar, 18.

42 Vidler, Alex R., The Modernist Movement in the Roman Church: Its Origins and Outcome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934)Google Scholar, chapter 23; Darrell Jodock, “Introduction II: The Modernists and the Anti-Modernists,” in Catholicism Contending, 24. Germany was less affected by the movement.

43 Background: Lease, Gary, “Modernism and ‘Modernism’: Christianity as Product of Its Culture,” Journal for the Study of Religion 1 (September 1988): 17–18.Google Scholar

44 Petre, M. [Maude] D., Modernism: Its Failures and Its Fruits (London: T. C. and E. C. Jack, Ltd., [1918])Google Scholar, 202. Also see Vidler, Modernist Movement, 5–6. On Biblical criticism as central: Reardon, Bernard M. G., Roman Catholic Modernism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970)Google Scholar, 13, 197; Loisy, Simples réflexions, 143–144.

45 Vidler, Modernist Movement, 133; Reardon, Roman Catholic Modernism, 10, 35–36; Harvey Hill, “The Politics of Loisy's Modernist Theology,” in Catholicism Contending, 185.

46 English translation of Pascendi in [Buonaiuti], Programme, pp. 149–245. On the condemnations: Reardon, Roman Catholic Modernism, 63; Vidler, Modernist Movement, 217–219; Kurtz, Lester R., Politics of Heresy: The Modernist Crisis in Roman Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 150–154.Google Scholar

47 Pascendi gregis, in [Buonaiuti], Programme, 214.

48 The decree regarding the oath (Sacrorum Antistitum of September 8, 1910) required clergy to affirm that “external proofs of revelation,” such as miracles and prophecies, were “very certain signs of the divine origin of the Christian religion”; that the Church was “directly and immediately instituted by the true and historic Christ Himself, during his life amongst us”; that “the heretical supposition of the evolution of dogmas” must be rejected. The oath-takers subscribe to the condemnations of Pascendii and Lamentabili, “especially in all that concerns the history of dogma.” See Petre, Modernism, 179–182; Fogarty, Gerald P., , S.J., American Catholic Biblical Scholarship: A History from the Early Republic to Vatican II (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989)Google Scholar, 170.

49 Pascendi gregis, in [Buonaiuti], Programme, 232–236. For history, see Vidler, Modernist Movement, chap. 26; Darrell Jodock, “Introduction I: The Modernist Crisis,” in Catholicism Contending, 1–19; Kurtz, Politics of Heresy, 150–154, 158.

50 See LaPiana, “Ernesto Buonaiuti's Spiritual Vision,” An Address Delivered on September 24, 1946, at the Opening Session of Harvard Divinity School, in Pilgrim of Rome: An Introduction to the Life and Work of Ernesto Buonaiuti, eds. Nelson, Claude and Pittenger, Norman (Welwyn [U.K.]: James Nisbet and Company, 1969)Google Scholar, 7, 11.

51 The social-political side of the movement was associated with the party Lega Democratica Nazionale, founded by the politically progressive (but theologically conservative) Dom Romolo Murri. See Reardon, Roman Catholic Modernism, 60; Kurtz, Politics of Heresy, 87–88; Ranchetti, Michele, The Catholic Modernists: A Study of the Religious Reform Movement 1864–1907, trans. Quigley, Isabel (London: Oxford University Press, 1969)Google Scholar, 95, 97, 103, 115, 152, 153, 177.

52 See n39 above for bibliographical information.

53 LaPiana, “Modernism” (bMS104/1 [5], p. 3); “Modernism in Italy” (bMS104/1 [5], p. 2); “Ernesto Buonaiuti's Spiritual Vision,” in Pilgrim of Rome, 6.

54 LaPiana, “The Roman Catholic Church from the Council of Trent to the Present Day, February–May 1917: Modernism” (bMS104/17 [6], p. 424).

55 LaPiana, unidentified lecture [on historical method] (bMS104/18 [8], n.p.).

56 LaPiana, “Modernism” (bMS104/1 [5], pp. 3–4); “Modernism in Italy” (bMS104/1 [5], pp. 2, 4): his training in philosophy encouraged rationalism.

57 LaPiana, “Modernism” (bMS104/1 [5], pp. 3, 5, 4, 2).

58 LaPiana, untitled sheet (bMS104/16 [10], n.p., n.d.). Print version: LaPiana, “Theology of History,” in The Interpretation of History, ed. Strayer, Joseph R. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1943), 149–186.Google ScholarPubMed

59 LaPiana, “Democratic Ideals in the History of the Church”: The Southworth Lectures at Andover Seminary (bMS104/8 [2], p. 4).

60 LaPiana, unidentified lecture [on historical method] (bMS104/20 [2], pp. 5–6).

61 LaPiana, unidentified lecture [on historical method] (bMS104/20 [2], p. 5).

62 LaPiana, “The Roman Catholic Church from the Council of Trent to the Present Day, February–May 1917: Modernism” (bMS104/17 [6], pp. 417, 418, 420–422). Jesus had no concept of a Church; LaPiana cites Loisy's thesis on the Kingdom that did not come and the Church that did (lecture, class on early Christianity (bMS104/20 [1], p. 70, September 25, 1946).

63 LaPiana, “Christian Historiography” (bMS104/18 [9], pp. 1–4, November 8, 1938). The study of comparative religions suggested that Christianity had developed in ways similar to other religions (pp. 6–7).

64 LaPiana, “Christian Historiography” (bMS104/18 [9], p. 8, November 8, 1938).

65 LaPiana, “Christian Historiography” (bMS104/18 [9], pp. 10–11, 12, November 8, 1938).

66 LaPiana, “The Roman Catholic Church from the Council of Trent to the Present Day, February–May 1917: Modernism” (bMS104/17 [6], p. 427).

67 LaPiana, “Christian Historiography” (bMS104/18 [9], pp. 13–14, 15, November 8, 1938).

68 LaPiana, “Christian Historiography” (bMS104/18 [9], pp. 16–17, 18–19, November 8, 1938).

69 LaPiana, unidentified pages on Harnack (bMS104/6 [1], pp. 1–2). Emphasis added.

70 LaPiana, “Christian Historiography” (bMS104/18 [9], p. 14, November 8, 1938).

71 LaPiana, “Christianity and the Roman Government” (bMS104/23 [5], p. 8).

72 For example, the system of patronage: see LaPiana, “The Social History of the Church: College Lectures” (bMS104/23 [4], Lecture VII, p. 9, October 20, 1937).

73 LaPiana, “The Social History of the Church: College Lectures” (bMS104/23 [4], Lecture VIII, pp. 7–8, October 25, 1937).

74 LaPiana, “The Social History of the Church: College Lectures” (bMS104/23 [6], Lecture XX, p. 2, December 15, 1937). In another class, LaPiana assigns the last chapter of Rostovzeff's Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (LaPiana, unidentified class lecture [bMS104/23 (5), Lecture XIV, p. 4], November 17, 1937).

75 LaPiana, untitled address (bMS104/3 [3], p.8, March 10, 1926).

76 For example, Tyrrell, George, “Reflections on Catholicism,” in Scylla and Charybdis, or the Old Theology and the New (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907), 32–36Google Scholar; Loisy, Alfred, The Birth of the Christian Religion, trans. Jacks, L. P. (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1948 [French original: 1933])Google Scholar, 151.

77 LaPiana, “Democratic Ideals in the History of the Church”: The Southworth Lectures at Andover Seminary (bMS104/8 [2], p. 8).

78 LaPiana, unidentified class lecture (bMS104/17 [7], Lecture II, pp. 2–3, October 4, 1937); unidentified talk (bMS104/17 [7], pp. 10–11).

79 LaPiana, “The Social History of the Church: College Lectures” (bMS104/23 [4], Lecture VII, p. 6, October 20, 1937).

80 LaPiana, “Expansion and Propagation of Christianity” (bMS104/16 [10], Lecture IX, pp. 48–49); LaPiana, unidentified course lecture (bMS104/17 [7], Lecture II, p. 9, October 4, 1937).

81 LaPiana, “The Social History of the Church: College Lectures” (bMS104/23 [4], Lecture XI, pp. b, c, d, Nov. 3, 1937).

82 LaPiana, “The Social History of the Church: College Lectures” (bMS104/23 [8], Lecture XXXVI, pp. 7–9, April 11, 1938).

83 De Man, “What is Modern?” in de Man, Critical Writings, 137–138.

84 Schoenbach, Pragmatic Modernism, 13, with a nod to Richard Rorty.