Hippolyte Delehaye | |
|---|---|
| President of theSociety of Bollandists | |
.jpg) | |
| Church | Catholic Church |
| Orders | |
| Ordination | 1890 |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 19 August 1859 Antwerp, Belgium |
| Died | 1 April 1941(1941-04-01) (aged 81) Etterbeek, Belgium |
| Occupation | Scholar |
| Education | University of Louvain |
Hippolyte Delehaye,SJ (19 August 1859 – 1 April 1941) was a BelgianJesuit who was ahagiographical scholar and an outstanding member of theSociety of Bollandists.
Born in 1859 inAntwerp, Delehaye joined theSociety of Jesus in 1876,[1] being received into thenovitiate the following year. After making his initial profession ofreligious vows in 1879, he was sent to study philosophy at theUniversity of Louvain from 1879 to 1882.[2] He was then assigned until 1886 to teach mathematics at theCollège Sainte-Barbe inGhent (named for theschool inParis,alma mater ofIgnatius of Loyola).[3] Delehaye was ordained in 1890.[4]
In 1892 Fr Delehaye was appointed by his Jesuit superiors to be a fellow of the Society ofBollandists, named for the 17th-century hagiographical scholarJean Bolland, S.J., and founded the early seventeenth century specifically to studyhagiography, research towards the gathering and evaluation of historical documentary sources regarding the life and cult of Christian Saints. Delehaye soon displayed great competence in the field. He was an editor of theBibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca (1895), a technical catalogue of Greek hagiographical writings, and of the journalAnalecta Bollandiana. In 1912 he became the president of the Society.[1]
In the earlier part of the twentieth century fears arose in the Catholic Church about the theological consequences of some methods used in critical historical studies, including biblical scholarship. Later the Church accepted the principle of critical methodology, and in 1930Pope Pius XI, himself a historical scholar, established a special historical section operating on similar lines, within theSacred Congregation of Rites. However, at an earlier juncture suspicion fell for a time on a wide variety of Catholic scholarly institutes, including the Bollandists, whose purpose was to establish scholarly editions ofhagiographical texts that were based on applying thecritical method of sound documentary scholarship. These concerns about theological deviations generally referred to asModernism prompted the 1907encyclicalPascendi dominici gregis, in whichSt. Pius X condemned them.[5][6]
As a consequence, in those years critical method encountered difficulties, within theJesuit Order, within the Holy Office and among "integrist" opponents of critical approaches.[7] As part of the controls put in place by the Catholic authorities, theBollandists' scholarly journalAnalecta Bollandiana, was subject to censorship by theHoly Office during the years 1901–1927.
These were issues of broader scope that did not prevent Fr Delehaye from continuing as a priest in good standing to pursue his researches with theBollandists for the greater part of his long life and maintaining his international reputation as a respected and able scholar. He was a member of the Austrian Archaeological Institute, and named Knight of theOrder of Leopold. Delehaye wrote a number of articles for theCatholic Encyclopedia.[1]
Delehaye died on the first of April 1941 in Belgium.[4]
Delehaye's major publications, works of method and synthesis that are of general use to historians, are:
Other important works, with more restricted focus, are:
Posthumous collections of fugitive pieces were published in 1966 asMélanges d'hagiographie grecque et latine and in 1991 asL'ancienne hagiographie byzantine: les sources, les premiers modèles, la formation des genres, the previously unpublished texts of lectures delivered in 1935.
This article incorporates text from this source, which is in thepublic domain.
