Histoire, mystère, sacrements: L’Initiation chrétienne dans l’œuvre de Jean Daniélou by Guillaume Derville (review)

Other than the collection edited by Jacques Fontaine (Actualité de Jean Daniélou, 2006) and the work of Marc Nicholas (Jean Daniélou’s Doxological Humanism, 2012), there is scant extended treatment of this intriguing figure of the twentieth-century ressourcement in Catholic theology. Daniélou’s short essay in Études in 1946, calling for a renewal in theological method and pedagogy, caused quite a stir—raising the hackles of, among others, the Dominican Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange who famously asked “Where is the New Theology Taking Us?” Daniélou nevertheless exercised considerable influence in the pre- and post-conciliar Catholic world, in areas as diverse as biblical exegesis, historical theology, interreligious dialogue, and political theology.

Msgr. Derville has written a lengthy study of Daniélou’s thought, in some ways a daunting task (acknowledged by the author), given the fact that he was not a systematic thinker and he published so broadly and frequently; a full bibliography of his many articles and essays is itself almost overwhelming. In the face of one so prolific, however, Derville identifies what might be the “golden thread” linking so much of his work: meditation on the question of history and the divine engagement with that history, culminating in the person and work of Jesus Christ. In fact, perhaps the best of Daniélou’s works reflecting this preoccupation is his 1953 Essai sur le mystère de l’histoire (which appeared five years later in English as The Lord of History: Reflections on the Inner Meaning of History), one his lesser known works but one which repays the reader’s attention. Derville’s focus is particularly the “extension” (prolongement) or continuation of the saving mysteries of Christ communicated to the life of the Church through the sacraments, particularly the sacraments of initiation.

Following a preliminary survey of Daniélou’s life, focused largely on the influences on his intellectual formation, the work is arranged into four large parts: salvation history, the sacraments as mediating the mystery of Christ, Baptism and Confirmation, and the Eucharist.

The sacraments “insert” the Christian into the pulcherrimum carmen of which Augustine wrote in City of God XI.18, the magnificent song being the ordo of history, in which God’s Providence works to bring about his saving plan. The Church’s sacraments communicate grace precisely by extending in time and space (taught by St Thomas in his Tertia Pars) the definitive salvific work of Christ in his Incarnation, death and Resurrection. The Church, formed wholly by Christ’s self-gift, as later articulated beautifully and succinctly in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 766, embodies an economy of spousal love, and those who share in sacraments (particularly the Eucharist, the “sacrament of sacraments”) thus both enter into this economy and enabled or capacitated to participate in it; a love that both transcends the world precisely for the sake of the world. The Christian, by the sacraments, shares in the mysteries of Christ’s life, simultaneously manifesting and actualizing the paschal love consummated on the Cross.

In an increasingly secular age in which “church” (even among some Catholics) means little more than a voluntary association of those who may share like convictions and ideals, or who possess shared sentiments about a particular course of social action, the retrieval of Daniélou’s thought offers a helpful corrective in the articulation of a distinctively Catholic ecclesiology, one which is articulated from within, one might say, rather than approached from without (merely phenomenologically or sociologically, for example); the Church and its sacramental life pour forth from the pierced side of the Bridegroom, for the life of the world, sign and instrument of the solidarity and unity of the human race, fragmented by sin. Further, this rich ecclesiology grounds the sacramental life of the Church properly in Christ’s life, again from within, rather than extrinsically as a...