Trois contemporains, Harnack, Freud, Loisy devant la notion de paternité divine
Authors: Mathieu Jean-Marie 
Published: April 2024

This paper is about an out-of-date conception in religious anthropology, divine fatherhood. With this particular reference, it is a study concerning two divines (Harnack and Loisy) and a physician (Freud) living at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. All three were present and active when the Holy sciences became the Religious sciences. Ending with theoretical considerations, each section begins with a biographical sketch concerning successively H.'s, Fr.'s, L.'s attitudes to their father or to fatherly figures.

Section I (Harnack) insists upon a focal idea in his theological views : considering God as a father, is the religious truth, the essence of Christianity, the core in the experience and the teaching of Jesus. This idea was permanent with him, whatever were the variations accepted in the detailed exegetical work.

Section II (Freud) insists upon the relation between Freud's self-analysis and his ideas about divine fatherhood. Without this self-analysis and the discovery of the Oedipus complex, saying that, in the human thinking, a personal God is nothing more than a sort of a father, could just have been an expression of the religious attitudes in those days. According to Freud : (1) successions of events similar to the story of Oedipus were performed when new religions were founded, such as totemism, or when Moses (and Paul) were religious reformers ; (2) God is a father, but the devil is also a father ; (3) thinking of God as a father is important in maintaining religious institutions ; (4) but the existence of the "oceanic" sensation (this - religious ? - experience about which Romain Rolland wrote to Freud) is a problem for the theory of religion.

At the beginning of section III (Loisy), two points can be noted : (1) his father was not for him an authoritarian figure ; (2) he had a difficult relationship with fatherly figures within the Roman church, including the Holy Father, until he became excommunicated. Besides, his faith and prayer were subjected to a crisis about the years 1885-1886. Before this happened, he had a mystical attitude when praying, while he was after this crisis morally faithful to God and to the Church. When he fights against protestant individualism, considering God as a father is to him only part of the religious feeling. In L'Evangile et l'Eglise, his critical study of Harnack's L'Essence du Christianisme, Loisy aims at psychological interpretations concerning scriptural expressions such as "the Son of God", "Father",.... After his excommunication, his religious thinking is still similar : God is the mystery ; religion is mysticism ; mystic, mystery, mysticism, and words alike, can be used concerning primitive magic, a sense of depersonalisation towards a cosmic unity, or the spiritual achievements of Monsieur Ollier as well. To be respectful - an ambivalent attitude - is also to him identical with religious feeling ; notwithstanding this ambivalence, he nowhere suspects that this respectful attitude could be equivalent to a son's reverence for his father.

In the conclusion, this paper does not insist upon links connecting the temperamental biography (and/or the communautarian identity) with the religious thought of these three men. Harnack's ideas ar not far from a common religious feeling that was widespread in the XIXth century and which Freud studied. Although Freud and Loisy observed the existence of the same religious attitudes, including a son-to-father relationship and a sense of merging with boundless spaces and ages, their theories about the religious feeling are truly opposed. Consequently, questions must be asked about the use of the exact words and/or the unity of the subject matter, when we study religion, or religious feeling.