Eucharist by Louis Bouter (review)

384 BOOK REVIEWS Eucharist. By Loms BoUYER. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968. Pp. 496. $14.00. This book which bears the subtitle, Theology and Spirituality of The Eucharistic Prayer, is really an historical study of the origin and development of the Canon from its Jewish cradle to the post-Vatican II liturgical renewal and the return of Protestantism to traditional Eucharistic forms. We have come to expect from Bouyer sound scholarship and brilliant, original insights. This monumental study, the fruit of twenty years of painstaking research, does not disappoint that expectation. The Eucharistic Prayer is, Bouyer insists, original and profoundly Christian; but it is not a creatio ex nihilo. Its roots lie deep in the liturgical soil of Judaism. The first Christians, all converts from Judaism, regarded themselves as the Israel of God, the people of the new and everlasting covenant. Just as the Christologies of Paul and John are unintelligible without continual reference to the authors' Jewishness, so also the unique Christian community act of worship, the Eucharist, cannot be understood without immediate reference to the Jewish worship from which it sprang and of which it is the fulfillment. Western theology would have been spared the bizarre theories on the sacrificial aspect of the Eucharist which cluttered the post-Tridentine manuals had the Jewish concept of " memorial " been clearly grasped. Bouyer sees the Eucharistic Prayer (the Canon) holding in primitive Christian worship the place occupied by the Berakoth in the Synagogue worship. The Eucharist, like the Berakoth, is the response of God's people to the reading of his word. Gregory Dix (The Shape of the Liturgy) pointed out the similarity of the dialogue which introduces the Canon with the dialogue between the President and the members of the Chaburah which preceeded the Berakah of their fraternal meal. J. P. Audet, 0. P., (Revue biblique, 65 [1958], 871-899) argued convincingly that the primitive eucharistia, like the Berakah of synagogue worship, was essentially a proclamation of the mirabilia Dei. C£. I Cor. 11:26. Bouyer agrees with Audet, but he insists that the Berakah expresses the people's dedication to the divine will as well as proclaiming the mirabilia Dei. The Berakah, as the people's response to the word of God, replaced in the Synagogue worship the sacrifice which could not be offered outside the Temple of Jerusalem. The essential element of the sacrifice, the people's dedication to God, is found in the Berakoth. Scholars dispute the exact nature of the prayers of Chapters IX and X of the Didache, but there is general agreement that they are Christian adaptations of the Berakoth. Bouyer, like many others, regards them as Eucharistic prayers. What is disputable in Bouyer's presentation is his acceptance of the collection of prayers of Book Seven of the Apostolic Constitutions as evidence that the primitive Eucharistic prayer was a BOOK REVIEWS SS5 christianization of the Berakoth, the Qedushah, and the Keter which are found in the ninth-century collection Seder Amram Gaon. The parallels are striking. The prayers of Book Seven of the Apostolic Constitutions are unquestionably Jewish prayer formulas. But a problem still remains, and Bouyer has not faced it squarely. Are the prayers of Book Seven of the Apostolic Constitutions liturgical prayers used in the Christian Eucharist, or, are they a collection of Jewish prayers made by a Christian convert from Judaism? Some Patrologists of note, e. g., Quasten, regard these prayers as "a very interesting collection of Jewish prayers." When we remember that the author of the Didascalia which comprise the first six books of the Apostolic Constitutions was, in all probablity, a convert from Judaism, the suspicion is strong that the prayers of Book Seven were taken from a Jewish prayer collection and not from a Christian Eucharistic liturgy. This English translation of Bouyer's book contains a supplementary chapter on the reform of the Roman Canon and the three new Canons recently added to the Roman liturgy. The author remarks in his Foreword: " this reform has fulfilled some of the most important desiderata of this book, a fulfillment which could never have been hoped for at the time that I undertook to write it." Indexes...