THE EUCHARIST AS PUZZLE.

The Eucharist in the West

History and Theology

Edward J. Kilmartin, S.J.

Pueblo Book, The Liturgical Press,

$49.95, 422 pp.

My favorite illustration of the different ways and different rates of the development of various Christian doctrines has always been the contrast between the Western doctrine of baptism and the Western doctrine of the Eucharist, which, at a first superficial glance, one would expect to have developed together as part of the general doctrine of the sacraments. Enumerating the gifts conferred by baptism, the "father of Latin theology," the North African Tertullian (c. 160-c. 225), attributed to it four effects: remission of sins, deliverance from death, regeneration, and the bestowal of the Holy Spirit. As an editor and translator of Tertullian, Ernest Evans, has observed, "by the end of the second century, if not fifty years earlier, the doctrine of baptism (even without the aid of controversy to give it precision) was so fully developed that subsequent ages down to our own have found nothing significant to add to it." Therefore Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and John Wesley were all agreed on it.

By contrast, the first full-scale discussion of the doctrine of the Eucharist in the Catholic West did not come until the ninth century, after it had been celebrated millions of times for more than eight hundred years-longer than the time that separates us from Thomas Aquinas-when two Benedictine monks at Corbie, Radbertus and Ratramnus (whose names are similar enough to generate endless confusion), exchanged treatises on the question of whether the Body of Christ that was on the altar was identical with the Body of Christ that was born of the Virgin Mary. And despite having had the benefit, in every century from then until now, of at least an ample measure of what Evans calls "the aid of controversy to give it precision," the development of the Western teaching on the Real Presence has defied settlement. Two of the most important and influential of all the Western so-called "ecumenical councils," the Fourth Lateran Council under Pope Innocent III in 1215 and the Council of Trent at its thirteenth session in 1551, attempted to achieve closure by giving "transubstantiation" an official standing in their decrees, but neither of them managed to still the controversy, even within Roman Catholicism, not to say within Protestantism. And it is still going on.

Eastern theology, in its contacts and controversies with the West, was obliged to address the Western questions, and eventually even coined the Greek word metousi-osis as a technical term literally translating "transubstantiation," a term that eventually found its way into more than one of the seventeenth-century Eastern Orthodox Confessions. The primary locus of Orthodox eucharistic teaching was and is the Divine Liturgy, in which, by contrast with the Latin West, it is the invocation of the Holy Spirit in the Epiclesis, not the words of Institution by themselves, that is seen as bringing about the eucharistic miracle: "O Lord, who didst send down Thy Most Holy Spirit upon Thine Apostles at the third hour: Take Him not from us, O Good One, but renew Him in us who pray to Thee, and make this Bread the precious Body of Thy Christ, and that which is in this Cup, the precious Blood of Thy Christ, making the change by Thy Holy Spirit." That Eastern emphasis was repeatedly and vigorously disputed by the West, but in the revision of the liturgy after the Vatican II there has been significant movement in the direction of a "double Epiclesis," praying that the Holy Spirit may come upon the congregation and upon the elements of the Sacrament.

All of that is the historical-and the ecumenical-context (and content) of this quite remarkable book by the late Jesuit theologian, Edward J. Kilmartin (who died on June 16, 1994), previously known chiefly for his Christian Liturgy: Theology and Practice, Part I, Systematic Theology of Liturgy, which was published in 1988. At Father Kilmartin's death the book was left unfinished (a sign of the times: not in manuscript, but on his laptop); and the arduous but also extremely delicate task of putting it into publishable condition was carried out by his Jesuit confrere, Robert J. Daly-always a delicate task, as I too have had reason to know, because the editor is torn between the conflicting duties of making the manuscript presentable and of not doing violence to the author's intentions. On the whole, the editor has succeeded in that task, although at times he does seem to have gone rather far in the direction of reconstructing what his colleague might have written rather than merely refurbishing what he actually has written. As the readers of Christian Liturgy are well aware, Kilmartin was a better theologian than he was a stylist, and in places this book is rather heavy going.

But it is worth the effort. For by applying to the Thomistic and Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist the fifth-century principle of Saint Prosper of Aquitaine that the rule of prayer (lex orandi) establishes the rule of faith (lex credendi), this book succeeds above all in restoring the doctrine of the Trinity to its central and normative position also for sacramental teaching. The two twentieth-century Roman Catholic eucharistic theologians with whom Kilmartin engages most directly are the Benedictines Anscar Vonier and Odo Casel, but he goes beyond both Vonier's interpretation of "sacrifice" and Casel's interpretation of "mystery" to make the case for seeing the Real Presence as the doctrine, but transubstantiation as one way of formulating the doctrine. After all, even the Council of Trent spoke of transubstantiation not so much as a dogma in itself as rather a "convenient and appropriate" term for the dogma.

It is one of the supreme ironies of Christian history that the Sacrament of unity has become a principal source of division. Not only for professional historians of doctrines and ideas, nor even for professional theologians alone, but for anyone willing to invest in a careful and solid historical-systematic analysis, The Eucharist in the West provides the resources for any serious Christian, regardless of denomination, to ponder the central act of Christian worship and devotion. n

Jaroslav Pelikan is Sterling Professor Emeritus of History at Yale. Among his many books are Mary through the Centuries (1996) and his five-volume The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine.