Louis Bouyer by Jean Duchesne (review)

Book Reviews Jean Duchesne Louis Bouyer Collection Penseurs Chrétiens Perpignan: Éditions Artège, 2011 127 pp. Paperback € 13.50. The theological and liturgical ressourcement that marked the early and mid-twentieth centuries has recently received scholarly attention from both theological and historical perspectives; the works of Hans Boersma (reviewed in Antiphon 15.2:207-209 and 16.1:71-74) and Jürgen Mettepenningen (reviewed in Antiphon 16.1:66-68) and the excellent collection of essays edited by Gabriel Flynn and Paul Murray (Oxford, 2012) have discussed the contributions of de Lubac, Congar, and Daniélou among others. Apart from one essay in the Flynn and Murray volume (by Jake Yap, and indeed a helpful piece), and an article in Communio some twenty years ago (1989), significantly less attention has been given to the convert and Oratorian Louis Bouyer (1914-2004). This has begun to be remedied, first by the work of Karin Heller (1996), and the studies of Davide Zordan (2008; 2009), and now by Jean Duchesne. We await such sustained attention in English; there are as yet unpublished dissertations on Bouyer’s theological project by Richard Walling and Keith Lemna (Washington), as well as Jan Chaim (Rome) and Jake Yap (Oxford). After a very brief biographical summary, Duchesne identifies six fundamental themes or poles around which to arrange and understand Bouyer’s theological contribution: the primacy of Scripture, the Fathers of the Church, the centrality of the Liturgy to the Christian life, humanistic education, monasticism, and an engagement with historical theology (including its state during his lifetime). Though far less well known than Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theological trilogy (the aesthetics, the theo-logic and the theo-drama ), Bouyer himself produced two trilogies: the first, a theological anthropology-ecclesiology-cosmology/eschatology (1957-1982), and the second, a Trinitarian theology (1974-80; the last volume of which, Le Consolateur, has yet to be translated into English). To these Duchesne suggests a third, the (to date) three-volume History of Christian Spirituality, which Bouyer conceived, contributed to, and edited. One should perhaps also include the three volumes published in the last decade of his literary activity, Mysterion (1996), Gnosis (1992), and Sophia (1994); only the first of these has been translated into English. Antiphon 16.3 (2012): 225-241 226 Antiphon 16.3 (2012) From the epilogue of Mysterion, it is clear that Bouyer himself had conceived these as a trilogy, even before having written the second and third volumes. These various trilogies provide the material (though not the structure) of the book’s six chapters, which discuss Bouyer’s theological anthropology, the Liturgy, the Scriptures, Ecclesiology, Mariology (not, for Bouyer, an ancillary topic, but fundamental to the understanding of human personhood and the Church), and the relationship between Church and culture. While Bouyer no doubt contributed to the theological, scriptural, and liturgical ressourcement (among many examples, in his beautiful meditation on the Triduum, Mystère Pascal, published in 1947, and his Liturgical Piety of 1955), he was at the same time, like many of those who had initially been suspected by Roman authorities of promoting a nouvelle théologie, vocal in his criticisms of what he viewed as postconciliar excess or abuse. Duchesne does not shy from discussing Bouyer’s estrangement from many of his peers in France in the decades following the Council, as his Decomposition of Catholicism (1968; English, 1969) and Religieux et clercs contre Dieu (1975) bear at points acerbic witness—Bouyer’s intellectual impatience with tendentious argumentation and shabby historical revisionism are known to all who have read his works. Duchesne goes so far as to suggest that, following the Council, Bouyer had been considered by Paul VI a candidate for the red hat, a distinction that went instead to the Jesuit, Jean Daniélou. Bouyer’s mercurial temperament, however, did not efface his deep love for the Word of God, living and mediated through the Church’s liturgy, a love that is equally obvious to those who have had the privilege of reading his works. In his comprehensive theological vision, the Word is no mere text, no matter how revered or sacred, but a Living Person, the very same Person who...