Eucharist

Theology and Spirituality of the Eucharistic Prayer

Louis Bouyer, Charles Underhill Quinn

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 1989
• ISBN:
  9780268076375
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Rituals & Practice

Eucharist is a detailed history of the Christian Eucharistic formularies. Bouyer gives a thorough analysis of the Jewish meal prayers, the berakoth, to which he traces the origins of the eucharistic rite, and ends with the recent addition of new eucharistic prayers to the Roman rite. He also includes the history of the various forms of the early Christian liturgies, of the Byzantine, Gallican, and Mozarabic Eucharists, of the changes introduced during the Reformation, and of developments in the Anglican, Lutheran, and Reformed traditions.

12

Modern Times: Decomposition and Reformation

BEGINNING WITH THE TWELFTH CENTURY, THE OFFICES REcited by the choir in the West during the eucharistic prayer, although practically independent from its content, were in the process of disappearing. They were progressively replaced by another development, which is not without its analogy with that of the choir chants in the East, although its virtue is even more uncertain. It is not that entirely new chants or responses were added, but that people began to amplify the Sanctus and Benedictus (and all the other chants of the ordinary) with what were called tropes. Their origin seems to be Germanic, but they were soon seen to proliferate throughout all of “Gothic” Europe, with the one exception of Italy. Concurrently with the melodic and soon to be polyphonic developments of the old chants, interpolative words came to be introduced into the flowery vocalizations which had begun by indefinitely extending the individual syllables. Either in Latin or the vernacular, they started out as a paraphrase of the basic text. But from paraphrase a transition to free amplification was soon to be made, and this became less and less connected with the original text.¹

THE EUCHARIST BURIED UNDER UNTRADITIONAL FORMULARIES AND INTERPRETATIONS

These tropes are a reflection of the religious feeling of the times: adoration of the humanity of the Savior present in the eucharist, an effective recall of his passion, an expression of the feeling of unworthiness on the part of those who approach the august mystery are their better themes. But all sorts of ideas soon came to be added. At the end of the Middle Ages, in the compositions with multiple parts, it was not uncommon to hear one of the voices sing the words of a popular song which had been taken over for use in the liturgy, intermingled with the Latin phrases of the Sanctus.

For the priest himself, the apologies and the acts of affective devotion to the Savior as present and sacrificed still continued to inflate the recitation of the canon.²

Beginning with the thirteenth century a new factor presented itself, which was to weigh heavily on the evolution of the eucharist. This was the new elevation of the species which was introduced immediately after the institution narrative, and the raising up of the host for all to see which was its reason. Attended by motets composed precisely for this action, in order to adore the presence of the Savior, this ceremony was to draw the whole popular devotion in the mass to itself. It was the result of a theology that was developed to counteract Berengarius and his denial of a real presence of the true body of Christ: as a reaction, the entire mass tended to center around the production of this presence, which was seen as the result of the repetition of Christ’s words over the bread and wine,³

At the same time, as communions became rarer, so-called private masses came into being. They were offered for the most varied intentions, which were often mingled with a superstition undeniably more magical than religious. At the very least, there resulted a tendency to look upon the mass as a sort of recommencement of Calvary, which was destined to obtain for us each time everything that we might especially be wishing for. The later assertion of the Augsburg Confession (which stated that people had come to believe that the Cross had atoned for original sin alone, and that each mass was destined to atone for actual sins) is perhaps an exaggeratedly systematized description. Yet is is hard to deny that it does express a tendency that was at least in the air and which was not even the worst of the deformations that were to be found at the time.⁴

Without going so far as these extreme cases, we must admit that the best commentaries on the mass produced for the use of priests during the Middle Ages, such as that of Innocent III,⁵ or later with Gabriel Biel,⁶ in which Luther’s eucharistic piety was formed, one could find merely traces of the original sense of the eucharist as a thanksgiving for the mirabilia Dei, or of the anamnesis as the sacramental presence of the redemptive mystery. The “thanksgiving” was reduced to an expression of gratitude for the gift of God received in communion, or expected from the celebration. The sacramental actuality of the sacrifice gave way to the consideration of the “fruits” that were expected from it and which no one tired enumerating. But, most often, they had very little in common with the ancient view of the whole Church being fulfilled in its common participation in the one redemptive sacrifice, so magnificently expressed by St. Augustine.

In the piety of the best of these commentaries, the mass appears as a “representation” of the sacrifice, not in the sacramental sense such as the word might have with Tertullian, for example, but in the sense of a devotional play. Through its figured recall of Calvary, it was to excite feelings of compassion and compunction which the immediate and tangible presence of Calvary could awaken in pious souls. Spirituality, like theology, retained only the words of institution among the formulas of the canon since they seemed to resurrect this spectacle for the soul meditating upon them at the moment where they renewed the real presence of the body broken and blood shed for our sins.

Fr. Francis Clark, S.J. has recently attempted to prove erroneous those Protestant or Anglican (… and even Catholic) historians who pointed out these deformations. To do this he gleaned a few fine formulas in which something of the ancient tradition had survived down to the end of the Middle Ages.⁷ It goes without saying that this tradition could not become completely defunct in the Church, but the whole question is to what extent these formulas were really characteristic of the average piety either of the clergy or the simple faithful. One of Fr. Clark’s confreres, Fr. Stephenson, had no difficulty in establishing that we are quite wide of the mark.⁸ He went so far as to maintain that the “re-praesentatio” of the Cross in the eucharist for St. Thomas himself must be understood in the purely imaginative sense in which we understand the word “representation” today. Without being fully convinced by this counter-proof, we must acknowledge that a few formulas of the saintly doctor do reflect something of such a notion. The least that can be said is that it was already one of the most widespread ideas in the context in which he found himself.

In any case, we may say that the best theologians and divines at the beginning of the sixteenth century were convinced that all of this required an energetic “reformation” along with many other things in the practice and even the theory of the Church. In addition, through returning to the sources it so praised, the best of Christian humanism was capable of rediscovering what was essential; it recovered the original and restored its genuine interpretation which had been forgotten or warped through so much overlay and so many aberrant commentaries. The misfortune of the Protestant Reformation, on this point as on many others, was that a more enthusiastic than enlightened impetuosity often rejected the best with the worst, instead of returning to the most authentic sources. The result was that instead of retaining what was original and essential, it was the most secondary and the most recent that remained.

The story of the Missa Illyrica, which we have mentioned, is such a perfect illustration of this failure that it seems hardly believable.⁹ At the height of the controversies on the eucharist between Protestants and Catholics, Flacius Illyricus came upon an eleventh century manuscript giving a series of priestly devotions containing a prayer for each rite or formula of the traditional mass. But no clear expression of the real presence was to be found, even though it had become obsessive in the following centuries as a reaction against Ratramnus and Berengarius. Nor was there any mention of the eucharistic sacrifice as the Fathers had conceived of it. Eveything boiled down to a childish explanation of the ritual, interpreted as an itemized evocation of every detail of the Passion. Onto this canvas there was added a series of prayers of penance and emotional meditations on the sufferings of the Savior. Flacius Illyricus thought he had brought to light a primitive liturgy that was unharmed by medieval corruptions, and he published his discovery as a justification of the Protestant theses and practices regarding the eucharist. In reality, as he soon had to acknowledge, all he had disinterred was a compilation of late formulas aimed at riddling the traditional liturgy with their fanciful additions. But he had unwittingly demonstrated that those liturgies and theologies which boasted about being the most “reformed,” instead of returning to the original eucharist, actually retained only those developments of the medieval eucharist which had no foundation in Christian antiquity.

LUTHER’S FORMULA MISSAE AND DEUTSCHE MESSEF THE LAST PRODUCT OF MEDIEVAL DEVIATION

These findings are all the more striking since Luther might have seemed relatively well equipped for getting back to the original subsoil through the morass of medieval excrescences. In the first place, as Gustaf Aulen so well showed in his beautiful book Christus Victor, Luther certainly did very soon rediscover something of the patristic idea of the Cross as God’s victory in Christ, overturning all the powers of enmity between man and God and restoring man to a filial relationship with the heavenly Father.¹⁰

On the other hand, Yngve Brilioth has no less justly underlined the spiritual riches, which are equally as patristic, in the sermon Von dem hochwürdigen Sakrament des heiligen wahren Leichnams Christi und von den Brüderschaften (1519). This is a renewed expression of the Augustinian notion that in the eucharist Christ is present with his whole mystical body in order to incorporate us in it and to make us live from then on a life which is but the unfolding in us of his saving mystery. Nor is Brilioth wrong in underlining that Luther retained his attachment to the forms of the traditional eucharist, not out of a simple conservatism but on account of an indelible impression of man’s encounter with the divine mystery that the devout use of these forms had left with him.¹¹

Yet, after 1523, when under the pressure of those about him he wished to translate all of this into liturgical innovations, it became not only warped but even devitalized. If we try to find out why, it soon becomes evident that his polemical preoccupations, however weighty they may have been, were much less the cause than the inertia of medieval notions and practices from which he was no more capable of freeing himself than the other Protestants who came after him. Undoubtedly, from this point on, he was obsessed by a fixed idea: to rid the concept of the sacrifice of the mass of every idea that tended to make it a sacrifice different from that of the Cross and one which man could offer for novel ends. But to do this he saw no other possibility than to get rid of any notion of a presence of Christ’s sacrifice in the mass, and therefore to remove from the canon of the mass every thing which expressed such a notion. Yet in doing so he merely stretched the logic of the medieval Latin idea that only the words of institution, isolated from their traditional context, were essential for the eucharistic consecration. And without further resistance, he yielded to the devotion which as a consequence of this centered on the showing forth of the consecrated host and its adoration.

Doubtless other factors did tend to compensate to a certain extent for these two defects inherited from the Middle Ages and pushed to their ultimate extreme. Luther’s reaction against the abusive multiplication of private masses, together with the reintegration of the communion of both the faithful and the priest as being an essential aspect of the celebration had a positive effect. But this was soon weakened by the fact that Luther, still following the medieval pattern, looked upon the communion as the foremost opportunity for acts of penance grafted upon the worship of the Christus passus. The sole “thanksgiving” he retained was the medieval thanksgiving for the assurance of forgiveness that was renewed in this way.

His idea that the mass is above all Christ’s “testament,” giving us his body and blood as a perpetual witness to the forgiveness of our sins, with the richness that his idea of the redemption gave to this expression, might have allowed him to link up with the primitive idea of the eucharistic “memorial.”¹²

Actually, the polemical way in which he flatly opposed it to the idea of a presence of Christ’s sacrifice prevented him from drawing the most positive consequences from it. He was well aware that the eucharist must involve us in a pure “sacrifice of thanksgiving” for the gift received from the Savior. But, for him, and even more narrowly for his followers, this gift tended to be reduced to the subjective awareness of forgiveness. In this way, we come face to face with the greatest paradox of the Protestant eucharist: in order to prevent the mass from appearing to be a new sacrifice, distinct from Christ’s, which the priests could perform at will, no other sacrifice was admitted than the subjective self-offering made by the believer in his grateful commitment to God’s service elicited by his renewed sense of forgiveness. Among strict Lutherans, for whom this is possible only on the basis of an effective communion in the dead and risen Christ, this was to be a possible starting point of a return—at least in embryo—to the patristic views on our participation in the unique saving sacrifice. But, as Eric Mascall rightly observed, with the other Protestants who more or less decidedly reject the real presence, there can no longer be any other sacrifice in the eucharist than the very Pelagian sacrifice that man, and man alone, offers to God in gratitude for his benefits.¹³ How could it be otherwise, since they have excluded every notion of a participation in the unique and completely divine sacrifice in rejecting the sacramental communication of its reality?

The Formula Missae brought out by Luther in 1523 is a kind of monument to his basic failure, even though the best of the Lutheran liturgies down to our own day have been taken from it. With the exception of the restoration of general communion, it in no way represents a return to the original eucharist. On the contrary, it is the final result of certain of the most aberrant tendencies that threatened the whole practice and theory of the eucharist in the Middle Ages. Yet we must not neglect to acknowledge its undeniable literary merit, although this simply resulted from having adapted, more ably and more daringly than anything that had been attempted previously, the old eucharist to the eucharistic piety and theology of the Middle Ages in what was most foreign there to the original tradition. To do this, it was necessary, as Luther did, to throw out all the elements whose meaning had tended to be lost even before Luther, and refashion the others in a sense which was no longer theirs.

Luther kept the common preface, but only up to the Per Christum Dominum nostrum. At this point, through a clever discovery, he immediately introduced the Qui pridie pateretur and the rest of the institution narrative. Only then do we have the Sanctus. During the Benedictus, the priest raised the host and cup together. At this moment, the eucharist properly s...