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Sympathy for Mussulmans, Love for Jews: Emilie Loyson-Meriman (1833–1909), Hyacinthe Loyson (1827–1912) and their Efforts towards Interreligious Encounter*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
In 1905, Madame Hyacinthe Loyson published her travelogue To Jerusalem through the Lands of Islam among Jews, Christians, and Moslems. In this work, Emilie Loyson, who had some experience as a journalist, described the couple’s travels in the Orient and their encounters with those of other religions, which – unusually for the time – took place on a footing of equality. This essay will first introduce the author, before turning to the religious and interreligious commitment of Emilie Loyson and her husband. Whilst in the 1870s they were engaged in ‘ecumenical’ efforts, over time their interest in interreligious encounter developed. The essay will examine – primarily from Emilie’s point of view – how the couple perceived Islam, and in particular Muslim women, as well as their understanding of Judaism and Eastern Christianity. Finally, it will ask what the couple were able to achieve.
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2015
Footnotes
*
I would like to thank Martin della Valle and Charlotte Methuen for their translation of, and comments on, earlier versions of this essay, and to my student assistant Nadja Heimlicher for her preparatory work.
References
1 Loyson, Madame Hyacinthe, To Jerusalem through the Lands of Islam among Jews, Christians, and Moslems (Chicago, IL, and London, 1905)Google Scholar.
2 So, in their index of persons, Dessain, Charles Stephen and Gornall, Thomas, eds, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, 24: A Grammar of Assent, January 1868 – December 1869 (Oxford, 1973), 419 Google Scholar.
3 As, for example, in a frequently cited recent encyclopaedia article: ‘His marriage to the eccentric American Emilie Meriman deepened the break’ [i.e. with his order and the Roman Catholic Church]:Victor Corzemius, ‘Loyson, Charles’, in Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, 3rd edn, 11 vols (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1993–2001), 6, col. 1074Google Scholar.
4 Between 1948 and 1957, the Loyson Papers were donated to the Bibliothèque de Genève by Laura Loyson, née Bucknell, the widow of Paul-Hyacinthe Loyson, the couple’s son, but some were embargoed until 2012. They include important correspondence by both Hyacinthe and Emilie, Hyacinthe Loyson’s journal, and an unpublished autobiography written by Emilie Loyson: see Marie-Pierre Gilliéron-Graber, ‘Un prêtre marié á la BPU: Charles Hyacinthe Loyson’, in Bibliothèque publique el uniuersitaire. Bibliothèque musicale. Institut et Musée Voltaire: Rapport annuel 2004 (Geneva, 2005), 43–6. I am currently preparing an annotated edition of Emilie’s autobiography for publication.
5 For what follows, see Geneva, Bibliothèque de Genève, Loyson Papers, MS fr. 3906, Madame Hyacinthe Loyson, ‘Autobiography, 1:The Evolution of a Soul. From the Great American Forest to the Vatican Council’, n.d. Planned additional volumes did not materialize due to Emilie’s death in 1909. See also Zwianzek, Georges, ‘Emilie Loyson. Die Wandlung einer Seele’, Christkatholisches Kirchenblatt 122 (1999), 222–4Google Scholar.
6 Loyson, , ‘Autobiography’, 16 Google Scholar.
7 Ibid. 19.
8 For a detailed biography and additional relevant literature, see Berlis, Angela, ‘Hyacinthe Loyson (1827–1912) dans le vieux-catholicisme: un esprit libéré des frontières religieuses’, in Amsler, Frédéric and Scholl, Sarah, eds, L’Apprentissage du pluralisme religieux au XIXe siècle (1815–1907). Le cas genevois dans son contcxte Suisse (Geneva, 2013), 189–214 Google Scholar.
9 Loyson, J, ‘Autobiography’, 268–9.Google Scholar
10 Ibid. 266.
11 Hyacinthe Loyson to Emilie Meriman, 17 July 1868, cited in Albert Houtin and Paul-Louis Couchod, Du Sacerdoce au manage. Le Père Hyacinthe (1867–1870) (Paris, 1927) [hereafter: Du Sacerdoce I], 80.
12 On Döllinger, see Berlis, Angela, ‘Ignaz von Döllinger and the Anglicans’, in Brown, Stewart J. and Nockles, Peter, eds, The Oxford Movement: Europe and the Wider World, c.1830 – c.1930 (Cambridge, 2012), 236–48Google Scholar. On the Old Catholic movement, see Berlis, Angela, Frauen im Prozess der Kirchwerdung. Eine historisch-theologische Studie nach der Anfangsphase des deutschen Altkatholizismus (1850–1890) (Frankfurt, 1998)Google Scholar; in English, see von Arx, Urs, ‘The Old Catholic Churches of the Union of Utrecht’, in Avis, Paul, ed., The Christian Church:An Introduction to the Major Traditions (London, 2002), 157–85Google Scholar; compare also (albeit somewhat outdated) Moss, C. B., Tlie Old Catholic Movement, its Origins and History (London, 1948; repr. 2005)Google Scholar
13 Albert Houtin, Cf. and Couchod, Paul-Louis, Du Sacerdoce au manage, Gratry et Loyson (1870–1872). Lettres et journaux intimes (Paris, 1927)Google Scholar [hereafter: Du Sacerdoce II], 268–9; see also Berlis, Angela, ‘Père Hyacinthe Loyson und Emilie Meriman-Loyson: ihre Begegnung, ihr Einfluss aufeinander und ihre Zusammenarbeit’ (provisional title), forthcoming in Internationale Kirchliche Zeitschrift 105 (2015)Google Scholar.
14 For instance, on 16 June 1869 Hyacinthe Loyson wrote in his diary that Emilie Meriman had told him that she felt ‘that she, I and GOD together are one, and that we are working towards the birth of a new church’: Houtin and Couchod, Du Sacerdoce I, 141. The sense that God was revealing himself through their love, that their relationship might be the precursor to the birth of a new Church, or that their marriage offered a clear sign of the reform of the Church was also portrayed by the couple in their public utterances: ibid. 85, 141, 169; Houtin and Couchod, Du Sacerdoce II, 244–8. On 25 August 1872, just a few days before his marriage to Emilie in London, Hyacinthe Loyson published in Le Temps a justification for his decision, ‘Pourquoi je me marie’, which would frequently be reprinted. In English:‘Concerning my Marriage’, in Hyacinthe, Father, Catholic Reform: Letters, Fragments, Discourses, transl. Hyacinthe-Loyson, Madame [sic] (London, 1874), 114–26Google Scholar.
15 See Scholl, Sarah,‘Le Kulturkampf comme tentative d’intégration des catholiques à la nation. Le projet des catholiques libéraux genevois’, in Amsler, and Scholl, , eds, L'Apprentissage; 97–114 Google Scholar; compare also eadem, , En quête d'une modernité chrétienne. La Création de l'Église catholique-chrétienne de Genève au coeur du Kulturkampf (1870–1907) (Neuchâtel, 2014)Google Scholar. For the Kulturkampf in Switzerland in general, see Bossard-Borner, Heidi, ‘Village Quarrels and National Controversies’, in Clark, Christopher and Kaiser, Wolfram, eds, Culture Wars: Secular-Catholic Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge 2003), 255–84Google Scholar.
16 For this period, see Cross, Anthony John, ‘Père Hyacinthe Loyson, the Église Catholique Gallicane (1879–1893) and the Anglican Reform Mission’ (PhD thesis, University of Reading, 2011)Google Scholar.This otherwise careful work, which makes ample use of Hyacinthe Loyson’s diaries and is based on solid archival research, unfortunately does not draw on the sources held in Old Catholic archives. Cross depends for his knowledge of Old Catholicism on Moss’s now outdated work (ibid. 350; see n. 12 above), and does not refer to any more recent studies, which leads him to draw a number of erroneous conclusions. For instance, the ‘cuke public libre’ which Loyson founded in Geneva in 1874 had nothing to do with the liberal ‘national Catholics’; by then he had ceased to be a pastor for the Église catholique nationale (which later became part of the ‘Christian Catholic Church’, as the Old Catholic Church is known in Switzerland). In spring 1874, when Loyson travelled through the Netherlands, he was not welcome in Amersfoort. Until 1893 when, after his resignation, the Gallican Catholic congregation in Paris came under the jurisdiction of the archbishop of Utrecht, as a former monk and priest his marriage (and, indeed, his self-confident wife!) represented an insurmountable impediment to deeper relations with the Church of Utrecht. Consequently, he was unable to enter into negotiations with the Dutch Old Catholics about ‘episcopal assistance’ (ibid. 98). Cross's depiction of the relationship between Loyson and the Swiss Old Catholic bishop Eduard Herzog, and of the relationship between the Old Catholics and Loyson's Église Catholiquc Gallicatie (ECG) would also have profited from reference to Old Catholic archives in Switzerland and the Netherlands. However, Cross does have interesting things to say about Emilie Loyson's prominent role ‘in the work of the ECG’ (ibid. 206–21, 286–7, quotation at 221) and the Anglican disapproval (which was shared by Old Catholics) of Emilie's unwillingness ‘to play the discreet, supporting role of parson's wife’, of her role as an intermediary in Loyson's English correspondence, and of her perception of herself – which was shared by her husband – as a partner in ministry (ibid. 220). For a more detailed consideration of Loyson's relationship to the Old Catholic movement and Church, see Berlis, Angela, ‘Père Hyacinthe Loyson (1827–1912). Ein Vertreter Frankreichs im Altkatholizismus’, in Meester in kerk en recht. Vriendenbundel voor Jan Hallebeek bij zijn 25-jarig jubileum ah docenl kerkelijk recht, ed. van Buuren, Lidwien and Smit, Peter-Ben, Publicatieserie Stichting Oud-Katholiek Seminarie 50 (Amersfoort, 2013), 187–206Google Scholar.
17 von Döllinger, Ignaz, Conférences sur la réunion des églises, transl. Loyson, Madame Hyacinthe (Paris, [1880])Google Scholar.
18 ‘Difficulties and Grounds of Hope’ is the title of his last lecture. Here he mentions also Pusey’s Eirenicon and the Oxford Movement as agents for unity: John J. I. von Döllinger, Lectures on the Reunion of the Churches (London, Oxford and Cambridge, 1872), 146–7Google Scholar.
19 Ibid. 7.
20 Ibid. 33.
21 Döllinger engaged with Islam, at least theoretically, at several points during his life. His view of Islam was influenced by the Catholic theologian Johann Adam Möhler (1796–1838), the most influential representative of the Catholic ‘Tübingen School’ of the early nineteenth-century, whose works Döllinger subsequently edited; however (and unsurprisingly), Döllinger’s view of Islam remained bound by the polemics of his age: see Bobzin, Hartmut, ‘Döllingers Sicht des Islam’, in Geschichtlichkeit und Glaube: Gedenkschrift zum 100. Todestag Ignaz von Döllingers, ed. Denzler, Georg and Grasmück, Ernst Ludwig (Munich, 1990), 459–75Google Scholar.
22 Döllinger’s views on Judaism changed significantly between his early and later writings. In the 1820s he was against the emancipation of Jews in Bavaria: Jews would not be granted equal rights there until the late 1860s. Towards the end of his life, in 1881, in response to the debate on the so-called Judenfrage (the ‘question of the Jews’) in the German Kaiserreich, which had been initiated in 1879 by the conservative Prussian historian and member of the Reichstag, Heinrich von Treitschke – the so-called Berliner Antisemitismusstreit – Döllinger gave his ground-breaking lecture, ‘Die Juden in Europa’: I. von Döllinger, Akademische Vorträge, I (Nordlingen, 1888), 209-41. For the development of his ideas, see Bulin, Rudolf, ‘Ablehnung des Antisemitismus bei Döllinger und Reinkens. Ein Vergleich’, part 1, Internationale Kirchliche Zeitschrift 87 (1997), 16–42 Google Scholar.
23 Bulin, , ‘Ablehnung’, 33 Google Scholar.
24 Döllinger, , ‘Die Juden in Europa’, 236.Google Scholar
25 In 1910, at a congress organized by the International Council of Unitarian and other Liberal Religious Thinkers, Hyacinthe Loyson said of Döllinger: ‘With him we dreamt of the unification of all Christian churches; now we have become wiser and we seek a rapprochement and alliance of all religions which are worthy of this name … The true Church includes all people’: Loyson, Hyacinthe, ‘Die Allianz der Religionen’, in Fischer, Max and Schiele, Friedrich Michael, eds, Fünfter Welkongress für freies Christentum und religiösen Fortschritt. Protokoll der Verliandlungen (Berlin, 1910), 737–44Google Scholar, at 743.The same sentiment is found in the French inscription on Hyacinthe Loyson’s gravestone in the Père Lachaise cemetery, Paris: ‘The strata inhabited by my soul are so high that I can be simultaneously Catholic and Protestant, Greek and Latin, Christian and Jew or even Mussulman. These different forms of faith are beautiful in different ways. None is absolutely true under these different names.’
26 Further research is needed to establish the people and religious trends to which the Loysons were linked. For instance, the extent of their connection to the 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago is currently an open question. In an obituary published in the magazine Tlie Open Court, the editor remarks that ‘Father Hyacinthe came into connection with Tlte Open Court soon after the Religious Parliament, held in Chicago in 1893’: Open Court 26 (1912), 129.
27 Loyson, , Jerusalem, 26, 100 Google Scholar.
28 See, for example, ibid. 77.
29 See, for example, ibid. 88, 100 (in Tunis).
30 Ibid. 300.
31 Ibid. 117. Emilie observed that ‘rapprochement’ means ‘strictly speaking: “A coming together in friendly relations’”: ibid.
32 Ibid. 8.
33 Ibid. 2.
34 Ibid. 7.
35 Ibid. 8.
36 Ibid. 254. Emilie objected to the fact that Roman Catholic missionaries had persuaded around 100,000 Copts to leave their Church, thus creating a schism. She understood mission in terms of help and support of local Churches, rather than proselytizing.
37 It is significant that their primary interlocutors shared a monotheistic faith.Thus Emilie Loyson points out that Muslims are amongst the ‘firmest monotheists’: Loyson, Jerusalem, 8.
38 It would be interesting to explore the extent to which Emilie’s puritan family history played a part in her thinking. The couple’s contacts with the Unitarian movement also deserve further investigation.
39 Loyson, , Jerusalem, 63 Google Scholar.
40 One exception was their visit to Hebron: ibid. 290-1.
41 Ibid. 185.
42 Ibid. 134.
43 Ibid. 107.
44 Ibid. 214.
45 Ibid. 9–10.
46 Ibid. 101.
47 Ibid. 121–2.
48 Ibid. 319.
49 Ibid. 35. For another visit to a harem, see ibid. 163–6.
50 Ibid. 142. Compare Döllinger, Lectures on Reunion, 25:‘The woman is a being of lower grade, so that throughout the East it is commonly supposed that only men have souls, and accordingly women are oppressed, maltreated, shut out from all means of education, bought and sold like merchandise, and surrendered to the arbitrary caprice of men like slaves or beasts of burden’.
51 Loyson, Cf., Jerusalem, 60 Google Scholar: ‘I believe their marriages are as happy, taking it all in all, as among so called Christians’.
52 As a young woman in the United States, she had invented an alternative to the corset: Zwianzek, ‘Emilie Loyson’, 222; see also Loyson, Jerusalem, 97.
53 Loyson, , Jerusalem, 201–5.Google Scholar
54 Ibid. 205. Another evil, in her eyes, was ‘the augmented Oriental somnolence and inactivity resulting from the general use of tobacco – by both sexes’: ibid. Emilie Loyson was a real apostle against smoking.
55 Ibid. 61.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid. 62.
58 Ibid.
59 Emilie Loyson makes explicit reference to the Dreyfus affair in her introduction: ibid. 10. For a recent account, see Begley, Louis, Why the Dreyfus Affair matters (New Haven, CT, 2009)Google Scholar. See also the views of Judaism expressed in Döllinger, ‘Die Juden in Europa’, as well as Bulin,‘Ablehnung’.
60 Loyson, Jerusalem, 120–6, quotation at 122 (Malta), 127–31 (Alexandria).
61 Ibid. 226.
62 Ibid. 167.
63 Ibid. 232.
64 Ibid. 236.
65 Ibid. 282–3. The Coptic and Armenian Churches belong to the family of so-called Oriental Orthodox Churches, which do not accept the Chalcedonian Christological definition of 451.
66 Loyson, Jerusalem, 231–9, cf. 267–70.
67 Ibid. 239. She also records that several Egyptian newspapers published Hyacinthe's correction of this story: ibid. The Loysons’ own confessional allegiance at this time was somewhat ambiguous.
68 Ibid. 214.
69 Ibid. 296.
70 Ibid. 297.
71 Ibid. 236–7.
72 Ibid. 263–4.
73 [Emilie Loyson], Alliance des Femmes Orientales el Occidentals pour le Progrès des Relation amicales entre toutes les Nations (Paris, 1903), 17. The brochure contains a list of members and donors, amongst whom was the widow of the late French president, Felix Faure (ibid. 34–6). Princess Nazli of Egypt was honorary president of the alliance: Loyson Papers, MS fr. 2960, fol. 164. Her involvement and the high social status of the other women on the board, and of those women and men sympathetic to the association, indicate that the organization was potentially influential.
74 See, for example, her two letters (under the letterhead of the alliance) to world peace and woman's rights activist May Wright Sewall (1844–1920): Indianapolis, IN, Indianapolis Public Library, May Wright Sewall Papers, online at: <http://digitallibrary.imcpl.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/mws>, accessed 1 July 2014. On 17 September 1900 Emilie Loyson invited Sewall to take part in a ‘glorious pilgrimage’ to Jerusalem, in order to build ‘the tent of the new covenant of peace’.
75 Loyson, , Jerusalem, 46 Google Scholar. The mosque was built in the fifth arrondissement (the Quartier Latin). Its construction was in part an expression of French gratitude for Muslim support against the German Reich during the First World War.
76 Emilie was well aware of this: Loyson, , Jerusalem, 8 Google Scholar.
77 For an example, see ibid. 181.
78 Ibid. 223–4.
79 On their travels, the Loysons also had contact with other Churches, Eastern and Western: ibid. 284–6.
80 According to the Armenian journal 
(‘Times’), he was ‘the last great ally of the Armenian Church’: Geneva, Archives of the Paroisse Catholique-Chrétienne, ‘Hyacinthe Loyson devant l'histoire 1912–1913’.The archives include obituaries from across the world.
81 Loyson, , Jerusalem, 281 Google Scholar; Döllinger, cf., Lectures on Reunion, 30 Google Scholar; for him Palestine and Jerusalem were ‘the meeting-place of Churches that hate one another’. Therefore he pleaded for praying ‘for a fresh outpouring of the Spirit of Unity, that we may keep a new Pentecost of enlightenment, peace, and brotherly love’: ibid. 31.
82 Loyson, , Jerusalem, 82–3Google Scholar.
83 Bern, Bischöfliches Archiv, AH 71, E. Herzog to J. H. Reinkens, 8 April 1895 (transcription of the German text by Ewald Kessler).
84 Ibid., AH 74, E. Herzog to R.Jenkins Nevin, 5 April 1897 (transcription of the German text by Hubert Huppertz). According to Herzog, Loyson was by this time no longer to be considered an Old Catholic (Berlis, ‘Hyacinthe Loyson’, 213), although outsiders still saw him as such. As noted above, Loyson's ecclesiastical identity is hard to define; as Nigel Yates has put it, he moved within ‘an exceedingly complicated ecclesiastical triangle’ made up of the Church of England and the Dutch and the German-speaking Old Catholic Churches: ‘Old Catholics and Reformed Catholics in late Nineteenth-Century Europe’, in Brown and NockJes, eds, Oxford Movement, 249–65, at 262. Loyson, especially in the last phase of his life, would probably have defined himself in a quite different way, answering questions of belonging by claiming a universal religious identity – ‘simultaneously Catholic and Protestant, Greek and Latin, Christian and Jew or even Mussulman’– as his epitaph shows (see n. 25). In his final years, he was frequently in Geneva. Nonetheless, and contrary to the impression given by Bishop Herzog, the Old Catholic Church in Switzerland later reappropriated Hyacinthe: in 1928 the Old Catholic parish of Geneva held a public celebration to mark the unveiling of a plaque in his memory in the Church of St Germain. The inscription reads:‘Agir comme s'il n'y avait au monde que sa conscience et Dieu.’
85 Herzog to Nevin, 5 April 1897.
86 Cf. for instance, Madame Hyacinthe Loyson, The Religious Condition of Oriental