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Louis Bouyers Defense of Religion and the Sacred: Sacrifice and the Primacy of Divine Gift in Christian Liturgy
Keith Lemna
In one of his published correspondences with Henri de Lubac, tienne Gilson wrote that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin had once approached him at a conference on evolutionary theory in New York City with what he took to be a shocking question. Hey, Teilhard querried Gilson with a slap on the back, can you tell me if anybodys ever going to give us the scoop on this religionless Christianity weve all been waiting to hear about? As shocking as this question may have seemed to Gilson, it was expressive of a growing sentiment among Catholic intellectuals in the middle of the twentieth century. The expression religionless Christianity comes from Protestant theologian Dietrich Boenhoeffers prison reflections in the last days of his life. Some secularist theologians in the 950s and 960s enthusiastically latched onto the phrase in their efforts to reshape the Church. Teilhards enthusiasm for the expression is surely one of
 Henri de Lubac, Letters of tienne Gilson to Henri de Lubac: With Commentary by Henri de Lubac, trans. Mary Emily Hamilton (San Francisco: Ignatius, 988) 60.  James Hitchcocks study of the effects of secularizing theologies in the Church during the period surrounding the Council remains valuable. See The Recovery of the Sacred (New York: Seabury, 97). See also E. L. Mascall, The Secularization of Christianity (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 965).  Dietrich Boenhoffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, trans. Reginald Fuller (New York: Macmillan, 96) 9. Cf. Cornelio Fabro, God in Exile: Modern Atheism, trans. Arthur Gibson (New York: Newman, 968) 0-. In these pages, Fabro masterfully dissects Boenhoffers suggested proposal for a religionless Christianity.  See J. A. T. Robinson, Honest to God (Philadelphia: Westminster, 96); Harvey Cox, The Secular City: Secularization and Urbanization in Theological Perspective (New York: Macmillan, 966). For a critical examination of the movement, see Fabro, God in Exile: Modern Atheism, 0-58.

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the first endorsements of it by a prominent Catholic theologian. The expression captures a distinctly modern project for Church reform. Many in the Churchs intellectual class in the last half of the century shared certain assumptions in common with the popular consciousness of the day, namely, that religion is out of date and that ritual has no essential connection to everyday human existence. Catholic intellectuals of this cast of mind would be inclined, of course, to rescue the Church from her Tridentine liturgy.5 In the Catholic theological community of the twentieth century there were precious few who fought consistently to replace this disorienting perspective. Certainly, there was at least one important group of influential theologians in the Church, albeit loosely associated, who, although they were sympathetic to modern thought, possessed a basic impulse contra the desire for religionless Christianity. I refer to the so-called ressourcement movement from mid-century, represented most notably by Henri de Lubac (896-99) and Hans urs von Balthasar (905-988).6 The proponents of this approach to theology expressed a vision of man, nature, and the Church that is profoundly and irreducibly religious. The positive legacy of this movement of thought has been keenly felt in our own day, in the papal magisterium of John Paul II and especially of Benedict XVI. The former created de Lubac a cardinal. The latter has acknowledged his debt to de Lubac, and his writings and teachings consistently display a liturgical, eucharistic vision of man and cosmos that is not amenable to religionless Church reform.7 It is to be hoped that the current Holy Fathers governance, writings, and teachings are orienting the Church definitively away from anti-religious liturgical and theological programs.8 Although it is true that many of the mid-century theologians who returned to the sources can be interpreted to have fought implicitly for the rights of religion in the Church, no one among them was as important in striving to counteract constructively and
5 See Hitchcock, Recovery of the Sacred, -9. 6 For a summary of the theological movement associated with the expression ressourcement, see Aidan Nichols, Thomism and the Nouvelle Thologie, in The Thomist 6 (000) -9. See also tienne Fouilloux, La collection Sources chrtiennes (Paris: Cerf, 995) 5. 7 See Henri de Lubac, Catholicism and the Common Destiny of Man, trans. Lancelot C. Sheppard and Elizabeth Englund (San Francisco: Ignatius, 988) -. In these two pages, Joseph Ratzinger gives a foreword to the book showing its seminal influence on his own thinking. 8 See Joseph Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, trans. John Saward (San Francisco: Ignatius, 000). See also Jean-Franois Thomas, Notes sur le sacr et la liturgie chez Louis Bouyer et Joseph Ratzinger, Communio [French Edition]  (006) 5-6.

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systematically the desire for religionless Christianity than the French oratorian priest, Louis Bouyer (9-00). Indeed, Father Bouyers vast scholarly corpus spanning the course of six decades and comprising fifty books and many articles is oriented consistently to the task of showing the permanent value of religion.9 Bouyer knew that it makes no sense to seek for a religionless Church. He recognized, against the guiding impulse of many modern humanists, Christian or otherwise, that to do so is to pursue a decidedly anti-humanist enterprise. Bouyer knew and argued throughout his career that it is only through religion that man is put in touch with God, with himself, and with the cosmos. A-religious or anti-religious Church reform goes against human nature and denies the capacity of human nature to mediate the divine Word to creation. It will be my purpose in this paper to expound Bouyers defense of religion and the sacred, with an eye toward showing the importance of this defense for the theology of liturgy. I shall follow, in my exposition, the basic outline of his theology of liturgy given in his book Le mtier de thologien, though I shall draw on several other writings of his as well.0 I shall begin, in a first section, by simply giving some basic facts about Bouyers dissatisfaction with post-conciliar liturgical reform, which he considered to be hostile to religion and the sacred. In a second section, I shall examine Bouyers theological analysis of religion and the sacred, which is meant in part to counter the de-sacralizing movement of liturgical reform. I shall demonstrate that Bouyer centered his theology of religion and the sacred on the principle of the analogia entis (the analogy of being) and on the christological transformation of natural patterns of religious symbolism and meaning. I shall expound, in a third section, Bouyers application of the principles noted in the second section to the paradigmatic religious action, namely, ritual sacrifice. I shall focus on Bouyers handling of the question of whether the eucharistic liturgy is a sacrifice or a meal. I shall demonstrate that Bouyer identifies sacrifice and sacred meal, and that he argues that the symbolism of the sacred meal captures the gift-character of sacrifice. It will be seen that Bouyers analysis of sacrifice stresses the typology and analogy of religious sacrifice,
9 Cf. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, Louis Bouyer the Theologian, Communio 6 (989) 56-8. See also Jean Duchesne, Whos (Still) Afraid of Louis Bouyer? Communio  (005) 8-90. 0 Louis Bouyer, Le mtier de thologien: Entrentiens avec Georges Daix (Geneva: Ad Solem, 005) 6-9. See Duchesne for a summary of Bouyers writings.

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which is ultimately expressive of the human desire for communion with God. Sacramental theologians and liturgists often downplay the sacrificial dimension of liturgy, opposing the vertical and horizontal dimensions of worship and emphasizing the centrality of the latter. Bouyer, on the contrary, sees no essential opposition between the vertical and the horizontal. He stresses the sacrificial dimension of liturgy in connection with the identity of the fully religious and the fully human. True sacrifice is true religion, and true religion stems from a divine, vertical intervention in history meant to bring the human race to salvation. He argues that the redemptive mission of the transcendent Word in history brought true sacrifice, true religion, and the truth about God and man. Christs sacrifice is offered entirely for our sake. In a fourth and concluding section, I shall suggest that the permanent value of Bouyers defense of religion, of the sacred, and of sacrifice lies in his connecting Gods transcendent action in history with the fulfillment of human nature. only through grace can nature be perfected. It is only through the acknowledged primacy of the vertical that the horizontal can be affirmed. Christian community can be valued by a theology of liturgy only if it stresses the primacy of the sacrificial act of the divine Word, who calls the community together in the Eucharist in order to save us by joining us to his eternal self-gift to the Father. In emphasizing the transcendent, sacrificial, religious character of the liturgy, we attend at the same time to our deepest desire for perfect, eternal communion with God. This desire is left unacknowledged in theologies of liturgy that locate the fundamental reality of liturgy in what is taken to be the entirely-immanent, humanly-constructed words and deeds of the eucharistic assembly.

LiturgicaL MaLforMations
Before entering into the main parts of this paper, it will be helpful to mention briefly Bouyers eminent status as liturgist and his assessment of post-conciliar liturgical reform, for his theology of religion and the sacred reflects his concern with the liturgy. Bouyer played
 The question of vertical liturgy versus horizontal liturgy centers on whether or not Gods act in the liturgy is constitutive of the eucharistic assembly or whether the constitutive actions of liturgy belong first and foremost to the assembly itself. See Jonathan Robinson, The Mass and Modernity: Walking to Heaven Backward (San Francisco: Ignatius, 005) 9-66. Robinson provides a perspective on the debate concordant with Bouyers, namely, that Gods redemptive act is the constitutive act of Christian liturgy.

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a central role in the liturgical movement in France in the middle of the twentieth century. In addition to his numerous and influential studies, he was instrumental in setting the mission for the Centre de Pastorale Liturgique (the Center for Pastoral Liturgy or CPL) in Paris. Father Pie Duploy, o.P. (906-990), one of the founders of the CPL, considered a long letter that Bouyer had written to him in 9, when Bouyer was 0 years old, and before he had been converted to Catholicism, to be the founding charter of the CPL. The letter contains many suggestions for liturgical renewal that would later be taken up and canonized by the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum concilium. But it would not be long after the council that Bouyer would fall out of favor with the liturgical establishment in Paris and would famously comment that Catholic liturgy has become little more than an embalmed cadaver.5 The CPL would become the Centre National de Pastoral Liturgique (the National Center for Pastoral Liturgy or NCPL), an organization in which Bouyer was never at home. The full story of Bouyers role in the liturgical movement in France and the story of his falling out of favor with the powers that be at the NCPL would be of great interest to tell in full.6 It is not my intention to do so here, but there are important parts of the story that must be recounted. Bouyer adamantly opposed many aspects of the concrete manner in which the post-conciliar liturgical reform was carried out, at least in France. In Le mtier de theologien, he lists the many ways in which those who implemented the reform diminished the mystical symbolism of the traditional Roman Rite of the Mass. He thought that the orientation of liturgical reform after the council rendered the Churchs liturgy profane. The tale he tells of the situation in France reveals his deep dissatisfaction with the fruits of the post-conciliar reform: church architecture was no longer oriented to the reserved Eucharist; within the liturgy itself, biblical readings were replaced with secular texts; eucharistic prayers were reedited to make it seem as if liturgy is only about the celebration of everyday life; the translation of the missal did not reflect the transcendent character of the Mass; the style of new liturgical vestments was bland and homogenized; the use of plain tables as altars made the liturgy a symbol of little more
 Bouyer, Mtier, 6.  Bouyer, Mtier, 7-85. These pages include the whole text of Bouyers letter to Duploy.  Bouyer, Mtier, 6-65. 5 Bouyer, Mtier, 6 : La liturgie catholique ntait plus gure quun cadavre embaum. 6 Bouyers memoirs await publication.

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than an everyday meal; and the position of the priest versus populum undercut the eschatological symbolism of the liturgy.7 Bouyer was initially quite pleased with the councils directives for liturgical reform. He fully endorsed Sacrosanctum concilium. Indeed, he was a member of the Concilium for Implementing the Constitution on the Liturgy, especially in regard to the revision of the Roman Missal. He had been involved in France in the earliest stages of the translation of the missal into French. But he and others protested directives that were given to the French translators, apparently from within the French episcopacy, to remove language involving oblation, immolation, and sacrifice from the translation. According to Bouyer, those who so protested were removed from the project, and the work of translation was given over entirely to the NCPL, from which Bouyer had earlier withdrawn. The liturgical reform in France thus was given over to those who had an inherent animosity toward the religious and the sacred, and there was no place left in France for truly religious thinkers to guide the post-conciliar reform of the liturgy.8

DefenDing reLigion

anD the

sacreD

Behind the desacralization that had overtaken much of the post-conciliar liturgical reform were theories, which abounded in the 960s, asserting that the complete secularization of culture was the inevitable outcome of human progress. The death of God theologians in Protestantism welcomed the news. Many respected Catholic figures also rejoiced at the prospect.9 Bouyer adamantly opposed these trends, arguing that theories of inevitable secularization are scientifically unsustainable and that proposals regarding the death of God are theologically superficial. According to Bouyer, theories equating secularization and progress show an ignorance of the fact that religious science has long since uncovered the irreplaceable, religious roots of culture.0 Death of God theologians had fallen into a dialectical vision of the relation of God and the world, transcendence and immanence, and nature and grace that is a betrayal of the profoundest meaning of the Gospel. They were the inheritors of the nominalist rejection of the
7 Bouyer, Mtier, 6-95. Bouyer lists several other problems as well. 8 Bouyer, Mtier, 95. 9 See Hitchcock, Recovery of the Sacred, -9. 0 Still fundamental and relevant in demonstrating the sacral basis of all culture is the work of Mircea Eliade, to which Bouyer himself often refers. Cf. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 957).  Bouyer, Mtier, 98-99. For a more thorough account of the

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analogia entis, a rejection which had rendered much of modern theology incapable of reconciling the infinite with the finite. Symptomatic of the distorted theology of the death of God theologians was a tendency radically to oppose natural religion and Christian faith. Death of God theologians held that an absolute separation must be carried out between religion and the true, existential message of the Gospel, leading them to promulgate a modern form of iconoclasm. The opposition between faith and religion was first proposed not by the death of God theologians. It was first and most famously proposed by theologian Karl Barth (886-968), although Barth himself follows in the line of Albert Ritschl (8-899) in this regard. Barths absolutist opposition of faith to religion paved the way for his followers to propose a Christian justification for the radical secularization of culture.5 Barth thought that in order to preserve Gods sovereign transcendence one has to reject the Catholic doctrine of the analogia entis, which he famously labeled anti-christic.6 His followers succumbed to immanentism by virtue of a dialectical necessity that follows when one, in rejecting the analogy of being, projects God into an otiose transcendence.7 The death of God theologians stand in this post-Barthian train of thought. Post-Barthians are Hegelian in their account of divinity, seeing in the divine nothing more than the fulfilled potential of human nature.8 Presciently, Bouyer sees that their a-religious Christianity reduces the faith to a mere political humanism. Having forsaken any living connection with the divine, they are left to see in the Gospel little more than a propadeutic for socio-political radicalism.9 Bouyer directly confronts the radical opposition of the Barthian dialectic. He does, indeed, hold that there is some truth in Barths opposing of faith to religion. After all, Christianity is the religion of the Word, the religion of grace, the religion of the God who reveals and communicates himself to man, who cannot by his own, unaided
philosophical and theological incoherence of death of God theology, whose general features are in line with Bouyers, see Fabro, 0-58.  See especially Bouyer, Cosmos: The World and the Glory of God, trans. Pierre de Fontnouvelle (Petersham MA: Saint Bedes Publications, 988) 7-9.  Bouyer, Mtier, 97-07.  Bouyer, Mtier, 98. 5 Bouyer, Mtier, 98-99. 6 Karl Barth, Doctrine of the Word, trans. G. T. Thomson (Edinburgh: Clark, 96) x. 7 Bouyer, Mtier, 98-99. 8 Bouyer, Mtier, 99. 9 Bouyer, Mtier, 0.

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efforts enter into the divine life.0 Thus Christianity is set apart from natural religion. But there is not an absolute opposition between Christian faith and religion. Natural religion retains a sense of that mysterious reality that causes the unity of our whole existence and our relation to the world and of the world itself. Natural religions, although confused in their perception of the divine, are not entirely the work of men because in them there are certainly traces left by God. For, even in its fallen state, creation as a whole bears the marks of the creator, except he does not subsist in it. other religions point to the divine, although it is present in them only as a dream (rve) and a memory (souvenir).5 Bouyer distinguishes conceptually the religious (le religieux) and the natural sacred (le sacr naturel). He associates the religious with the divine source of creation and the natural sacred with the fundamental development of human culture. The natural sacred is the sign of the religious in the cosmos, which inspires human response or worship.6 This response is embodied in the ritual and mythic symbols that man uses to convey his nostalgia for the religious reality at the foundation of his existence.7 The natural sacred exists as:
an element of human language, inherent in human nature and exists in it ... as an indelible nostalgia for the presence of God, for that active presence of God without which there would have been no creation, and, for a stronger reason, of life expanding into grace, since this is participation in the life of God.8 0 Bouyer, Mtier, 99: la religion de la Parole, la religion de la grace, la religion du Dieu qui se rvle et qui se communique lhomme.  Bouyer, Mtier, 99.  Bouyer, Mtier, 0-: cette ralit mystrieuse qui fait lunit de toute notre existence et de notre relation au monde et du monde luimme.  Bouyer, Mtier, 99: sont pas entirement loeuvre des hommes car en elles il y a certainement des traces laisses par Dieu dans sa cration.  Bouyer, Mtier, 99: porte les marques du crateur, sinon elle ne subsisterait pas. 5 Bouyer, Mtier, 99. 6 Bouyer, Mtier, 0-. 7 Bouyer, Mtier, 0-. 8 Bouyer, Mtier, 0: un lment du langage humain, inhrent la nature humaine et qui subsiste en elle, je le rappelais linstant, comme une nostalgie ineffaceable de la prsence de Dieu, de cette prsence active de Dieu sans laquelle il ny aurait pas de cration, et bien plus forte raison de vie panouie dans la grce, puisque celle-ci est participation la vie mme de Dieu.

0

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God makes himself known to man through the sacred element that is fundamental to his life in the world. According to Bouyer, it is in and through the natural sacred, where the relationship of finite and infinite being is most strongly realized and expressed in fallen culture, that God opens channels for his definitive communication with man in the Christian dispensation. Gods gift to us of divinization is a transfiguring consecration of the natural sacred.9 Bouyer thus is obviously in conflict with Rudolf Bultmann (88976) and his project of demythologization. Bultmann held that the mythic or religious mode of thought prevalent throughout the New Testament is repugnant to the sensibilities of contemporary, scientific humanity.0 Myth, according to Bultmann, entails the idea of an intervention by God into finite nature, and modern man, who understands the world to be a self-enclosed system of mechanical causality, cannot accept such an idea. Thus he can see in the Gospels narratives of Incarnation, of Redemption, and of the effusive presence in the world of the Holy Spirit nothing more than mythical accretions that must be discarded. If, in Bultmanns view, the Gospel is to be credibly preached to modern humanity, it must be stripped of images that imply supernatural actions in the world. These images must be seen as merely a faade that covers a universal, timeless truth, a subjective, spiritual kerygma that calls us out from inauthentic life to an authentic life of faithful obedience to God. Bouyer holds that there is a grain of truth in what Bultmann maintains. Indeed, Christianity does entail demythologization. Myths outside of the Covenant of Abraham did not express the ultimate truth of God, of cosmos, or of history. In several writings, Bouyer shows in exemplary fashion that pre-Christian myths mixed together creation and the Fall. He shows that distinctive, finite existence was understood to be essentially fallen existence in the myths, and that the salvation expressed in myths could come only through decreation. The mythical gods were not considered free from the deter9 Bouyer, Mtier, 0. 0 Bouyer, Rite and Man: Natural Sacredness and Christian Liturgy (Notre Dame IN: Notre Dame Press, 96) 7.  Bouyer, Rite and Man, 7.  Bouyer, Rite and Man, 7. See also Roch Kereszty, Jesus Christ: Fundamentals of Christology (New York: Alba House, 998) 5-58.  See Bouyer, The Christian Mystery: From Pagan Myth to Christian Mysticism, trans. Illtyd Trethowan (Petersham MA: Saint Bedes Publications, 990).  Bouyer, Rite and Man, 95-; Christian Mystery, 9-0; Cosmos, -95; The Invisible Father, trans. Hugh Gilbert (Petersham MA: St. Bedes Publications, 999) 8-.

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minate destiny of impersonal existence, which is, for the myths, the true reality either purely cosmic or wholly a-cosmic behind the illusory world of appearances.5 Thus, our understanding of divinity and creation and their relation to one another had to be purified of mythic confusions by the Gospel.6 Bouyer argues, however, that the definitive demythologization had already been accomplished by the work of the divine Word in the economy of salvation.7 Contrary to Bultmann, he argues that the Gospel itself does not need to be demythologized, for it is, one might say, true myth.8 Bultmann directs a particular mistrust toward the accounts of Jesus miracles and the accounts of his resurrection, which he thinks can have a modern significance only if they are understood anew, in entirely subjectivist or existentialist categories of thought.9 Bouyer, on the other hand, argues that it is precisely in taking the miracle and resurrection accounts of Jesus as objective realities that the true scope of Christs demythologization is recognized. It is incoherent to maintain that the Gospel doctrine of the bodily resurrection of Christ must be subjectivized and therefore demythologized.50 Indeed, it is precisely the traditional, supernatural doctrine of the bodily resurrection of Christ that shatters the deformations of the old myths: it was precisely Christs bodily resurrection that broke through the closed-in cosmic cycles beyond which the purveyors of ancient mythology could not see.5 Because the definitive demythologization was accomplished in Christs bodily resurrection, it is not left up to moderns, operating within the confines of a narrow, technologically-oriented intelligence, to strip the Gospel of its presumed mythological elements.5 Moreover, even though the Gospel demythologizes the ancient myths, it does not obliterate our natural, religiously-oriented intelligence.5 The Gospel is not opposed to the symbolic, religious sensitivity that is the human foundation of the myths. Indeed, to think that it is so constitutes a scandalous aspect of Bultmanns project. In failing to see that man is essentially homo religiosus, Bultmann propagates an anti-humanist

5 6 7 8 9 50 5 5 5

Bouyer, Cosmos, 8-8. Bouyer, Mtier, 0-6. Bouyer, Mtier, 0-6. Bouyer, Mtier, -5. See Kereszty, Fundamentals of Christology, 56. Bouyer, Christian Mystery, 99-0. Bouyer, Christian Mystery, 87-95. Bouyer, Christian Mystery, 7-7. See Bouyer, Mtier, 97-9.



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and anti-scientific theology.5 He denies the very foundation for any encounter between God and man. This is no less true for him than it is for the more overtly anti-humanist theologians who sit at his opposite on the dialectical spectrum, namely, those who would argue that Gods transcendent existence and sovereignty come at the price of human existence and freedom.55 The divine Word did not entirely abandon the imperfect and even devious sketches of the ancient myths and rites.56 Instead, the Word brought a redressing and correction of these sketches.57 The imperfect sketches of natural religion are brought to their full accomplishment in Christ.58 Gods revelation of himself to man converts human nature, whose depths are inaccessible to anti-religious theologians.59 Christ brings to man true religion and the supernatural sacred, not a-religion and profanation.60 Gods revelation to man is not the substitution of a divine for a human language, for the Word speaks to man through humanitys natural, sacred language.6 But, in using this language, God says something with it that never before had been said.6 He restores in this way the true vision of God and of his original relation with us and, on this very basis, opens the prospect for a reconciliation or divine adoption.6 Bouyer compares the process of the transfiguration of the natural sacred effected by Christ to poetic creation. Just as a great poet or artist uses common words to say something that never before has been said, so the divine Word uses the sacred language of humanity to express the heretofore unuttered truth of Gods love for humanity.6 The divine Word transforms human words, like the words and the letters of a poorly
5 For an alternative account to Bultmann, see Bouyer, Invisible Father, -5. 55 Bouyer, Mtier, . 56 Bouyer, Mtier, 07: abandon des bauches imparfaites et mme dvies des mythes et des rites. 57 Bouyer, Mtier, 07: redressement et dune correction de ces bauches. 58 Bouyer, Mtier, 07: qui sont portes leur plein accomplissement. 59 See Bouyer, Invisible Father, -6. 60 See Bouyer, Cosmos, 7-, 5-60. 6 Bouyer, Mtier, 07. 6 Bouyer, Mtier, 07. 6 Bouyer, Mtier, 0: la vraie vision de Dieu et de sa relation originelle avec nous, et, sur cette base mme, souvrent les perspectives dune rconciliation ou dune adoption qui nest pas simplement juridique mais bien relle, qui nous fait entrer en partage de la vie divine. 6 Bouyer, Mtier, 0.

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expressed sentence which are reexamined and rewritten into an accurate sentence, one that is truly revelatory of the real.65 Man, in his response to the natural sacred, expresses his innate recognition that he must be called out from his profane, fallen condition if he is to have true and everlasting life. There is an eschatological dimension in the natural sacred. Human civilization creates the profane, inscribing an area of the world as its own, immanent domain of mastery. It either excludes the gods from this domain or domesticates their presence within it. By contrast, homo religiosus recognizes that there is a more fundamental reality than the profane that he has created, that is, a divine reality to which he must give obedience and service. Thus, there is a distinction between religion and magic. The latter tries to master the gods, to put them at the service of man, to serve the profane realm that man has fabricated. The natural sacred, on the other hand, is the concrete domain where the reality and sovereignty of the divine leaves its trace and is acknowledged as the most basic level of human existence.66 The natural sacred is the vessel into which God pours his Spirit in history, first by reshaping it in the old Covenant and then by giving it definitive, transfigured form in the New Covenant.67 Natural religion bears the mark of the Fall. Its ritual and mythic language has to be redressed, for it is mixed with error.68 The history of salvation is the history of the progressive redressing of mans sacred language, a redressing that comes to its perfect accomplishment when the supernatural sacred is made fully present in Christ in time and space.69 Mans naturally sacred language is definitively corrected by the redemptive mission of Christ, who did not come simply to consecrate our fallen state, that is, to bless our quotidian activities, leaving us precisely as we are in our fallen condition.70 Rather, he brought a transfiguration of what is highest in us by nature. He corrected our myths and reoriented the transcendental intentionality of our ritual symbolism. Most importantly of all, he instituted a truly efficacious sacrificial praxis.7 The highest in natural human culture is a response to the natural sacred, but it is only through the supernatural sacred
65 Bouyer, Mtier, 05: comme les mots et les letters dune phrase fausse qui sont repris et recomposs dans une phrase vraie, vritablement rvlatrice du rel. 66 Bouyer, Rite and Man, 80-8. 67 Bouyer, Mtier, 0-6. See also, Rite and Man, -. 68 Bouyer, Rite and Man, -. 69 Bouyer, Cosmos, 7-96. 70 Bouyer, Cosmos, 7. 7 See Bouyer, Dictionary of Theology, trans. Charles underhill Quinn (New York: Descle, 965) 99.



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that religion is made truly efficacious. only by Gods direct action in the world is our connection to the divine restored and our religion made truly meaningful.7 Bouyer argues that post-conciliar liturgical reformers, having fallen into a progressivist, Pelagian naturalism, akin to that of the death of God theologians, de-sacralize Christian existence.7 Liturgy for them has become little more than a fabricated celebration of profane life, a blessing of what we already are and not of what God bids us to become. Humanity, just as it is, and not Christs exemplary words and deeds, becomes the norm of Christian existence.7 The post-conciliar liturgical reforms fail to take into sufficient account the divinization that God wills to impart to man. He is especially critical of liturgists who render profane the whole of the eucharistic meal instituted by Christ by reducing it to a mimesis of everyday meals.75 The liturgy that they fabricate is no longer turned to the celebration of the glory of the cross.76 It is no longer understood to be a representation of Christs sacrificial, divinizing death, but a celebration of fallen human nature.77 ultimately, as we shall see more fully in the next section, because it ceases to be sacred, it ceases likewise to be fully human.

reLigion, sacrifice,

anD the

fuLLness

of

Man

Bouyer defends religion and the sacred as the praeparatio evangelii. Human nature is made open to the fullness of reality through the sacred, which can mean only that secularization is a dehumanizing affair. So far, I have looked at Bouyers general theology of religion and the sacred. In this section, I shall explore a concrete issue that Bouyer recurrently addresses in regard to the essence of religion and the sacred, namely, the structure and importance of ritual sacrifice. He argues that ritual sacrifice is the highest expression of the sacred in our lives, the paradigmatic rite, and so is quite fittingly taken into the Christian dispensation by Christ in the Eucharist.78 Sacrifice is the action whereby man is made fully alive, whereby he is nourished by the very life of the divine.79 Sacrifice is fundamentally a transcendent, divine, vertical act, but it is given to man so that he might reach

7 7 7 75 76 77 78 79

Bouyer, Mtier, 06-7. Bouyer, Mtier, 06-7. Bouyer, Mtier, 7. Bouyer, Mtier, 75-76. Bouyer, Mtier, 9. Bouyer, Mtier, 7-75. Bouyer, Rite and Man, 78-86. Bouyer, Invisible Father, 8.

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5

the fullness of his being through filial adoption into Christ.80 True sacrifice is dimly foreshadowed in the sacrifices of natural religion, and it is more clearly anticipated in the old Covenant.8 It is given its full, effective significance in the institution of the Eucharist by Christ. Bouyer addresses the disputed question of the relationship of meal and sacrifice in the Eucharist by examining the analogical character of sacrifice. He is able thereby to show the intersection of the transcendent and the immanent, or the vertical and the horizontal, in Christian liturgy. Bouyer argues that natural, sacrificial ritual was taken up and redressed by the divine Word and now constitutes the core of the Churchs existence. Drawing largely on the work of phenomenologists of religion and influenced by Dom odo Casels mystery theology, he came to the rather bold conclusion that the eucharistic liturgy of the Church is a sacrifice precisely because it is a sacred meal.8 It is his argument that any interpretation of the liturgy that locates the essence of its sacrificial dimension in immolation or even oblation confuses secondary, tangential elements of sacrifice for the primary, historical element.8 There is a fundamental, universal material action of ritual sacrifice, which is found by paying attention to history, and Christian sacrifice is a transcendent fulfillment of this natural, sacred act. Any theology of sacrifice must first pay heed to this historical reality of sacrifice, in both its natural and supernatural manifestations. Based
80 Bouyer, Christian Mystery, 87-9. 8 Bouyer, Cosmos, 6-7. 8 Cf. Bouyer, Rite and Man, . The most important influences on Bouyers thinking in this regard are Gerard van der Leeuw, R. K. Yerkes, and E. o. James. See Van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation, trans. J. E. Turner (New York: Harper and Rowe, 96); R. K. Yerkes, Sacrifice in Greek and Roman Religions and in Primitive Judaism (New York: Scribner, 95); E. o. James, Origins of Sacrifice (London: Murray, 9). See also odo Casel, The Mystery of Christian Worship, trans. Burkhard Neunheuser (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 96). Bouyer was critical of Casel, but acknowledges that Casels studies of religion and liturgy helped in the development of his own thinking. 8 Pope Benedict XVI has similarly shown that sacrifice is not primarily immolation or oblation. Cf. Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, -. Ratzinger, on p. 8, argues here that sacrifice is not immolation or destruction because it is the action whereby man and creation are united to God, which cannot be by way of destruction: Belonging to God has nothing to do with destruction or non-being. It means losing oneself as the only possible way of finding oneself (cf. Mk 8:5; Mt 0:9). Indeed, the pages noted here bear, as a whole, a strong resemblance to Bouyers theology of the sacred and sacrifice.

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on history, though studied in phenomenological perspective, one can see that the universality of the material element of sacrifice consists in its character as sacred meal:
a sacrifice is nothing but a meal. It is of course a distinctly sacred meal but this in no way means that it is not truly or fully a meal. Precisely the opposite is the case. It is a meal that has retained or rediscovered everything a meal can and should be and really is, if still genuine and inviolate, with its integrity unimpaired. It is a meal at which mans life is consciously recharged by the life of the cosmos; a meal at which the individual, the society in which he shares the meal and even the totality of things into which this society is reintegrated by the act of eating, all reassimilate this life; a life apprehended each time as something in and beyond each and every one of us, its source somewhere above and beyond everything in the world while it gives the world all the value it has.8

To sacrifice, to make sacred (sacrum facere), is not to confer sacrality artificially on that which is not inherently sacred. Rather, to sacrifice is to produce that which is naturally sacred.85 In line with his understanding of the human fabrication of the profane, Bouyer holds that to make sacred is to acknowledge or to rediscover the sway that the divine should have on our lives.86 This is precisely the significance of festal sacrifice. It expresses the fundamental truth that human eating has an inherently sacred quality. He connects in this way the gift-character of sacrifice with the human action of feast. He argues that in natural festal sacrifice man expresses the fact that he could not continue to exist in this world if it were not for the fact that the gift of material nourishment the fundamental gift that sustains his life is provided to him by a force or forces beyond his power to obtain.87 Religious sacrifice is distinct from merely magical performances in that it is understood by homo religiosus to be the work of the gods, not of man:
When we say a sacrifice is a sacred meal, we must understand this in the sense of its being a meal which is fundamentally a meal of the gods but with which man is associated, whether it be because he has paid for, or prepared it, or even, as frequently happens, because he takes part in it in some way or other. There can even be cases among the primitives where man himself eats all the food 8 85 86 87 Bouyer, Invisible Father, 8. Bouyer, Invisible Father, 7. Bouyer, Invisible Father, 7-7. Bouyer, Invisible Father, -6.

LouIS BouYERS DEFENSE oF RELIGIoN that makes up the substance of sacrifice. But the meal is not the less sacred for this since the food taken is recognized for what it is, that is, something belonging to God and connected with Gods own life communicated to man. This was certainly the case with the sacrifice of the Pasch, which according to some was the only sacrifice the Israelites had before they settled in Canaan, and it is also the case with the Eucharistic sacrifice of Christians.88

7

Sacrifice, the heart of religion, is, even at the fundamental, natural level, understood by religious man to be the work of the divine by which man enters into the activity of the divine. Religious sacrifice is not simply a prescribed set of ritual incantations meant to compel the gods to serve man. Religious myths, as opposed to mere fables or stories, arise in order to call religious people back to awareness that ritual must be the act of the gods.89 But, as noted in the previous section, myths are mixed with error. A phenomenological analysis of sacrifice shows the difference between Christian and pagan sacrifice: Christians alone recognize sacrifice as the possibility for entrance into full and eternal communion with God.90 For in the Christian Eucharist alone is encountered the true source of all life, the invisible Father, in his perfect, eternal image.9 God gave manna from heaven to his people in the desert of Sinai, and he gave his only Son to us as the very Bread of Life for everlasting spiritual nourishment by the power of his oblation on the cross.9 There is a movement progressing from natural religion, to the old Covenant, to the fulfillment of sacrifice in the Eucharist instituted by Christ. The universal, material envelope of sacrifice maintains its basic structure in this movement, but its meaning is transformed.9 An essential point of sacrifice for natural religion is the sense that sacrifice engages man in an interchange of life between himself and his gods that enables him to live.9 This is why blood rites are included in most primitive sacrificial rituals blood being representative of life itself. The sacrificial rites of the Hebrews are, at first, materially identical to those of natural religion, though human sacrifice is absolutely prohibited by them. But the meaning of sacrifice is transformed in the old Covenant when it becomes clear that sacrifices derive their
88 89 90 9 9 9 9 Bouyer, Rite and Man, 8-85. Bouyer, Invisible Father, -8. Bouyer, Christian Mystery, 87-9. Bouyer, Invisible Father, -6. Bouyer, Dictionary of Theology, 98-99. Bouyer, Rite and Man, 7-88. Bouyer, Rite and Man, 85-86.

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value entirely from Gods covenant with the Hebrews and take their origin entirely in his commands. Sacrifice in the old Covenant is memorial. It is an act that consecrates history, connected especially to the Passover and the establishment of the Mosaic Covenant on Mount Sinai. At the same time, sacrifice involves the response of the people, who express in performance of the prescribed sacrificial rites their will to be ever faithful to the commands of God.95 The prophetic influence on the religious character of the people of Israel led to the spiritualization of both the memorial and response aspects of sacrifice. A sacrificial character was thereby ascribed to the whole of life.96 At the time of the Gospel, this notion of sacrifice is expressed in the berakoth (blessings), which faithful Israelites proclaim in thanksgiving for the mirabilia Dei.97 These divine works inspire them to offer every action in obedient faithfulness to God.98 Also, in this period, the community meals of the faithful demonstrate the desire to establish a spiritualized equivalent of the Temple sacrifices. These developments prepare the way for the Christian Eucharist.99 In the Last Supper, Christ takes over the two basic rites of the community meals of the Israelites: the breaking of the bread with the accompanying of the blessing at the beginning of the meal, and the serving of the last cup with its solemn blessing at the end.00 In so doing, Jesus institutes a new rite that anticipates his entrance into death. Putting the point rather strongly, Bouyer tells us that it is in instituting the new rite at the Last Supper that the cross is given its properly sacrificial significance. The community meals of the people are transformed into the memorial representation of the definitive covenant established by the shedding of his blood.0 It is in allusion to the sacred meal that the cross is connected to the material action of ritual sacrifice. Consequently, it is in the context of his understanding of the history of religion that Bouyer answers the Protestant question of how the Mass can be both sacrifice and meal: it is a sacrifice precisely
95 Bouyer, Dictionary of Theology, 98. 96 Bouyer, Dictionary of Theology, 98. 97 Bouyer, Dictionary of Theology, 98-99. See also, Bouyer, Eucharist: Theology and Spirituality of the Eucharistic Prayer, trans. Charles underhill Quinn (Notre Dame IN: university of Notre Dame Press, 968) 50-90. 98 Bouyer, Dictionary of Theology, 98-99. 99 Bouyer, Dictionary of Theology, 98. See also, Bouyer, Eucharist, 9-5. This is one of the main points of Bouyers famous study on the Eucharist. 00 Bouyer, Dictionary of Theology, 98-99. 0 Bouyer, Dictionary of Theology, 99.

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9

because it is a sacred meal. The truly biblical aspect of sacrifice is communal memorial, established along the general trajectory of the natural religions and the religion of the old Covenant. Bouyer himself summarizes the connection of cross and meal:
the cross derives its sacrificial significance from its relationship to the first Mass and consequently to all others that follow. In instituting the Christian Eucharist at the Last Supper, Jesus made this ritual action of his the consecration of his offering that was immolated on the cross, thereby giving to the cross its substance as the new covenant sacrifice. At the same time, he made this unique offering the source for all time of all the Eucharistic celebrations that would perpetuate this efficacious memorial. They would be guaranteed this character by the mysterious but supremely real presence of the crucified body and shed blood under the consecrated species, as a consequence of the Lords words: This is my body, this is my blood.0

We can see from this quotation that Bouyer does not at all deny the efficacious power of the oblation of the cross, although he stresses the primacy of Christs consecratory action of ritual institution. Immolation and oblation are not absent from Bouyers account of sacrifice but take their true significance for him in the context of the sacred meal. They are carried out in preparation for communion between God and man; they do not constitute the heart of the sacrifice itself.0 ultimately, for Bouyer, the religious meaning of sacrifice lies in its gift-character. He agrees with Augustines doctrine of sacrifice, which he summarizes as telling us that sacrifice is every work done to establish us in a holy fellowship with God.0 Indeed, our whole life must be made a sacrifice.05 Everything we are must be given to God. But in order for this to be possible, we must be nourished by and assimilated to the very gift of the Eternal Son.06 ultimately, the gift that we present in order for sacrifice to be religiously transformative must be first and foremost a divine reality.07 one can see from the connections that Bouyer makes, particularly the connection of the oblation of the cross to the holy meal that anticipated it, that the gift-character of sacrifice is not annihilation but the act whereby
0 Bouyer, Dictionary of Theology, 99. 0 Bouyer, Rite and Man, 86-88. 0 Bouyer, Paschal Mystery, trans. Mary Benoit (Chicago: Regnery, 950) 8. 05 Bouyer, Paschal Mystery, 8. 06 Bouyer, Christian Mystery, 90. 07 Bouyer, Christian Mystery, 90.

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man is incorporated into the eternal Eucharist of the Son to the Father. The meal is a gift that nourishes us, that gives life and fills us rather than decimates us. The Eucharist, as sacrifice, is a true and perfect recharging of life. Sacrifice is connected to immolation only inasmuch as true sacrifice requires a dying to our unregenerate, sinful selves. But this is so only that we may be reborn into our true selves in being joined with the eternal Word of God and made the creatures whom God from all eternity willed us to be.08 Like Augustine, Bouyer understands that sacrifice, although it remains the full expression of agape, is connected in its depths to finite eros. Christ, in taking on human nature, does not neglect our deepest desires. It is precisely through his taking on human flesh, and reconciling God with man, that he lifts human nature to a condition of integral wholeness. He thus fulfills our deepest desires by redeeming them.09 Christs perfecting of human nature is a fundamental insight of traditional theology and an implicit consequence of the Chalcedonian dogma that Christ is one divine person with two natures, divine and human0 Contrary to Nietzsche, whose polemics pitted the crucified Christ against Dionysus and thus the charity of Christ against eros, it is precisely in the crucifixion of Christ that eros is united to its transcendent object. unfulfilled eros is the root condition of natural religion. There is a longing manifested in the cults of natural religion, which can be understood to express ritually and in myth the subconscious desire of man for connection with infinite Love. The history of religion shows that the instinct for perfect love is connected with the reality of death, and this is why true sacrifice entails conversion. Love and death mysteriously intertwine in our inescapable, human sense that the meaning of life is connected to the reality of gift.5 We are given the gift of life by God, and we desire to reciprocate that gift. The rituals of natural religion and the myths that try to capture their importance express this sense of meaning inchoately.6 The sacrifices offered by the priests of natural religion
08 Bouyer, Christian Mystery, 87-95. 09 Bouyer, Cosmos, 7. 0 See David Schindler, Heart of the World, Center of the Church (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdman, 996) xiii.  Bouyer, Christian Mystery, 06-9.  Bouyer, Cosmos, 7.  Bouyer, Christian Mystery, 5-6.  Bouyer, Christian Mystery, 5. 5 Bouyer, Christian Mystery, 87-95. 6 Bouyer, Christian Mystery, 7-7.

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do not open human life to the full reality of reciprocal gift.7 The dying and rising gods of the mystery cults, for instance, do not offer the hope of a true resurrection. They do not overcome or transform death.8 They do not give us the gift of true life. Since they are not, in fact, creators, they cannot break out of the closed cycle of cosmic rhythms. They cannot break the cycle of birth and rebirth, of death and re-death. The dying and rising gods of the pagan mystery cults express, through a glass darkly, the fact that in our fallen world the gift of new life can be brought about only by the passing away of old life. But the pagan mystery rites do not effect true rebirth.9 Pagan religion, then, does not fully foresee the possibility of inititiation into the fullness of new life that is enabled by the dying and rising of the Savior of the world. The transfiguration of the natural sacred and religion that Christ renders through his Paschal Mystery, though it connects to the deepest level of our humanity, ontologically transforms human nature and the cosmos.0 Christ gives us the gift of full and eternal life in a sacrificial giving that becomes our own in the Eucharist. He himself is the offerer, the priest, and the victim. In natural religion, man expressed his sense that only the gods could give sacrifice, although they never truly did so, and therefore certainly never communicated to humanity a participation in divine agape. God, in Christ, awakens our humanity to new, unexpected levels of hope and meaning:
the Christian ritual, the eucharist, does not just express what is left of creations sacred character, unable to extricate itself from the human and cosmic fall, for now the crust of a world turned cold and turned in upon itself is pierced by the creative and recreative Word of God in which he is expressed and presented to give himself to us. Thus overcoming the death of his creatures by taking it into the divine life of love, the Christian Mystery frees us from our fatal pride and egoism by winning our consent to that death which they have brought upon us and restoring us to the eternal life which is nothing else than eternal love.

In his book Feast of Faith, Joseph Ratzinger briefly summarized his own understanding of the connection in Christian liturgy between meal and sacrifice. His thoughts bear a striking resemblance to Bouyers
7 8 9 0   Bouyer, Christian Mystery, 7-7. Bouyer, Christian Mystery, 5-6 and 87-95. Bouyer, Cosmos, 7-. Bouyer, Cosmos, 6-. Bouyer, Rite and Man, 9. Bouyer, Christian Mystery, 9.



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conclusions and can serve as a fitting denouement to what I have expounded in this section:
throughout the entire history of religions, sacrifice and meal are inseparably united. The sacrifice facilitates communio with the divinity, and men receive back the divinitys gift in and from the sacrifice. This is transformed and deepened in many ways in the mystery of Jesus Christ: here the sacrifice itself comes from the incarnate love of God, so that it is God who gives himself, taking man up into his action and enabling him to be both gift and recipient.

concLusion
Bouyer, following Augustine, connects Christian sacrifice with the natural experience of love or gift. His theology of sacrifice is important for post-Vatican II liturgical reform precisely because he carries out a sustained study of this connection. His theology of religion is at once truly religious and truly humanist, and this is a great lesson for those in the Church who contend that in order for Christianity to be mediated to modern humanity it must be made less vertical, less transcendent, less objective, and so forth. There is no doubt that his work requires development in some regards and remains vulnerable to criticism in other regards. Yet, one must surely admit that few if any Catholic theologians in the twentieth century underscored, in such a consistent and fruitful study of analogy, the connection between natural religion and the Christian dispensation. Bouyers is perhaps the most sustained and systematic alternative produced by his generation to syncretism in theology and to progressivist liturgical humanisms that radically immanentize the liturgical act. He shows that the vertical and the horizontal do not exist in opposition to each other, although the latter is ontologically dependent on the former.
 Ratzinger, Feast of Faith, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius, 986) 9-9.  one criticism that Bouyer faced, immediately after his publication of Rite and Man, was that he tied meal and sacrifice too closely together. Cf. Matthew J. oConnell, review of Louis Bouyer: Rite and Man, Theological Studies  (96) 0-6. See also, Hans urs von Balthasar, The Mass, A Sacrifice of the Church? in Explorations in Theology: Creator Spirit, vol. , trans. Brian McNeil (San Francisco: Ignatius, 99) 85-. In these pages, amidst a larger analysis of the connection of liturgical sacrifice and the Church, Balthasar offers a critical yet appreciative summary of Bouyers Eucharist. Balthasar wonders if Bouyers ecumenism has led him to tie the sacrifice of the Mass too closely to the Church. See especially -5.

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In emphasizing Christs transfiguration of the sacred, Bouyer strove to express a liturgical, christological humanism that stresses first and foremost the power of the descent of the divine Word into our world for our redemption. This descent of the Word heals our fractured sacredness, our deepest expression of longing for divine communion. Some contemporary theologians and liturgists, although not anti-religious in the Barthian sense, risk reducing religion to purely subjective story and symbol.5 The objectivity of specifically Christian ritual is likewise denied. The work of the transcendent Word in liturgy is subordinated to the act of the worshipping assembly, and the standard for liturgy becomes the shifting consciousness and malleable symbolic expressions of the assembly over time.6 In all of these respects, there arises a shallow understanding of love or gift that ignores a fundamental datum of our human experience: we need the God of love to work within us really and concretely if our restless hearts are to find peace. We need the transformative action of the transcendent, the divine, that which comes from above, in order to become fully human, in order truly to be redeemed and saved. There is no fundamental opposition, as nominalism would have it, between the transcendent and the immanent, the vertical and the horizontal; though the latter is given its true significance and meaning by the former. Christ calls the Church into being as a eucharistic assembly, and it is only by our concrete incorporation into him, through his body and blood in the sacrifice of the Mass, that we are fully nourished. To defend religion as Bouyer does is to defend the primacy of the divine in our lives, a primacy that has to be acknowledged in any honest analysis of human subjectivity and history.
5 A subjectivist understanding of religious symbolism is present, for example, in Karen Armstrong, Faith and Modernity, in The Betrayal of Tradition: Essays on the Spiritual Crisis of Modernity, ed. Harry oldmeadow (Bloomington IN: World Wisdom, 005) 7-76. Armstrong writes in purely experientialist terms of the value of myth, which becomes true only in an aesthetic sense, when it is embodied in ritual and has an effect on worshippers perception of or sensitivity to beauty. A certain type of religious syncretism is present in such a conceptualist and experientialist understanding of religion. 6 Cf. Joseph Martos, Doors to the Sacred: A Historical Introduction to Sacraments in the Catholic Church (Liguori Mo: Liguori/Triumph, 00) 6768. Martos, in summarizing here approaches to the Eucharist prevalent since the 980s, completely reverses the direction of liturgical action emphasized by Bouyer. For Martos, it is the eucharistic assembly that is the principle actor in the liturgy, making eucharistic worship happen. The worshiping community makes it possible for Christ to be present (67).



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Likewise, it is right to lament, as he does, the prospect of a liturgy without the centrality of the cross, without sacrifice, wholly absent of immolation, without recognition that we must be transformed if we are to be healed. We must be purified by the blood and water of the cross if we are to partake of the eternal gift of love to the Father that marks the personal character of the eternal Son. If we ignore the cross we lose touch with the reality of our fallen nature. We lose touch with our profoundest desire and human yearning. We lose touch with our humanity. We fail to recognize that what is best in us must be marked out, set aside, made the preparatory channel of Gods transforming and healing grace. only the cross can heal us or make us integrally whole again. Christian sacrifice is a divine gift that is made ours, while always being the supreme divine activity. Yet, Christ died in order to rise again, and in order to bring us to new life, not to absorb or annihilate our natures, nor to cover us over with a sanctifying grace that can never truly sanctify us, as in theories of extrinsic justification. We are called to share in a love that can never fail, but that we can obviously not initiate on our own effort in a fallen world. In order for us to be fully realized, Christ must penetrate us with his love, really and concretely. He must call us out of the world in order to be a light to the world. Any theology of liturgy that is truly concerned with the worshipping community must value sacrifice, and therefore the sacred, which is a divine activity before it is human. only in this way can a theology of liturgy truly be connected to and express concern for the worshipping community. It is only by acknowledging our need to be set apart by God that we honestly express our innate longing for him, and our need for him to reconcile us to himself, to one another, and to our very selves. Bouyers defense of religion, of the sacred, and of sacrifice, in stressing the foregoing points, provides a suggestive theology of liturgy, one that harmonizes the transcendent with the immanent precisely in recognizing the primacy of the gift of the divine Word in the Christian sacred. Keith Lemna holds a Ph.D. in Systematic Theology from The Catholic University of America and is Visiting Professor of Theology at Belmont Abbey College, Belmont, N.C.