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The Sacraments - The Word of God at the Mercy of the Body
Why, from its very beginnings, has the Church celebrated the sacraments, in particular baptism and Eucharist? Why, from its origin, has faith in Christ, which is expressed in a human, free, just, loving way of living, ruled by the gospel, also been expressed in the language of rites? The Sacraments by Louis-Marie Chauvet offers reflections on the theology, celebration, and pastoral usage of the sacraments. It is a textbook version of Chauvet's, Symbol and Sacrament published by The Liturgical Press in 1995 that was acclaimed by theologians as offering a fresh theology of the sacraments from a perspective other than scholastic theology.
240 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2001
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 25, 2018
Chauvet was recommended to me by Alastair Roberts after he read a draft of my book on the Eucharist and Passover.
The book is a shorter, less academic treatment of Chauvet’s larger work _Symbol and Sacrament_. There is much to admire about it. He construes the sacraments as mediations rather than instruments: that is, they are the context or milieu within which human beings become subjects. They do their work as symbols, a term which Chauvet defines in an unusual way: namely, things which put together (sum+ballo) two realms or aspects of reality, in this case the divine and human. As such, symbols are not the same as signs. They do not merely represent the divine; rather, they introduce human beings as subjects into the divine: “The goal of the sacraments is to establish between humanity and God a communication which theology calls ‘grace.’ So the symbol seems the fitting approach to the sacraments.”
One of the consequences of approaching the eucharist as a symbol in this sense is that ontological explanations are cut off: “Christ’s presence is not an available object to be seized with the hand. To want to take advantage of it by receiving communion as often as possible is to deny what is at stake. Like the manna, God’s gift decays as a gift as soon as one claims to ‘use’ it.”
Chauvet charges the high medieval theologians with an excessive reaction to the denial, by Berengar of Tours and others, of the real presence of Christ in the eucharist. They removed the sacrament from the liturgical milieu within which alone it can do its symbolic work of involving Christians as subjects in relation to Christ as subject. The result is that the deeply interpersonal exchange in which the sacrament unites (sum+ballei) Christ and the church by constituting the church as a subject in relation to Christ and God is replaced with a depersonalized, merely “ontological” functioning, in which the eucharistic elements just are the body and blood of Christ sitting on the table, even in isolation from the symbolic milieu of the liturgy. This causes the church to conceive of the eucharist in a more or less magical way: “One cannot isolate a symbol without destroying it and causing it to slip into the ineffable imaginary.”
This consideration of the eucharist in isolation from the Church’s celebration of it as a ritual is, Chauvet says, destructive of its purpose as a sacrament. “Sacramental theology is the theory of a practice. Its object is the church’s celebration itself. It has nothing relevant to say that does not stem from the way the church confers the sacraments. If one had always obeyed this golden rule many deviations would have been avoided. One example of these deviations pertains to the eucharistic presence of the Lord, which has been understood in isolation independently of its purpose as nourishment for its partakers, demonstrated by the gestures, the words, and even the material elements used in the narrative of the institution.”
Chauvet steals a bit of my thunder by approvingly quoting Gamaliel from the Mishnah about every Israelite who partakes of Passover being bound to regard himself as though he personally had passed out of Egypt: “Whereas the coming out of Egypt happened centuries ago (“the LORD did,” past tense), everyone deems that it still concerns her or him in the present (“for me when I came out of Egypt.”) Such is therefore the nature of the memorial: it involves the participants in the event which the feast commemorates. It is a “com-memoration,” that is, a common memory, the memory of a people.”
It is exciting to hear this insight articulated even by a Roman Catholic, for as Chauvet himself recognizes, it is precisely Roman Catholic theologians like Paschasius Radbertus and Thomas Aquinas who have done the most to insist on the onto-theology of the sacrament.
Chauvet uses the same Griemasian narratology diagrams that N. T. Wright used in The New Testament and the People of God. These enable Chauvet to explain the dynamics of interpersonal symbolic exchange at work in the eucharist by diagramming the narrative structure of different parts of the eucharistic prayer. I was struck by the fact that each of the symbolic exchanges which he diagrams can be found as a petition in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer’s liturgy for Holy Communion as well:
1. We —> Grace/Glory —> God. (“Let us give thanks unto the Lord our God.”)
2. God —> Historical and Glorious body of Christ —> Us. (All the prayers asking God to give us Christ in the sacrament, whether in an epiclesis or not. “Grant us, therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood...”)
3. God —> Ecclesial Body of Christ —> Us (“... that we are very members incor-porate in the mystical body of thy Son, which is the blessed company of all faithful people”)
The idea of using narrative diagramming is a good one. It helps us focus more clearly on what exactly our liturgy says is happening in the eucharist.
Are there problems with Chauvet’s approach? Yes. He relies rather heavily on French structural anthropology and literary theory. He fails to pursue his insight from the Mishnah all the way to where it might have led him: namely, to a thorough rethinking of eucharist in terms that were available to Jesus and Paul.
Nonetheless, I highly recommend this book. Liturgical protestants will find much to stimulate their thinking.
The book is a shorter, less academic treatment of Chauvet’s larger work _Symbol and Sacrament_. There is much to admire about it. He construes the sacraments as mediations rather than instruments: that is, they are the context or milieu within which human beings become subjects. They do their work as symbols, a term which Chauvet defines in an unusual way: namely, things which put together (sum+ballo) two realms or aspects of reality, in this case the divine and human. As such, symbols are not the same as signs. They do not merely represent the divine; rather, they introduce human beings as subjects into the divine: “The goal of the sacraments is to establish between humanity and God a communication which theology calls ‘grace.’ So the symbol seems the fitting approach to the sacraments.”
One of the consequences of approaching the eucharist as a symbol in this sense is that ontological explanations are cut off: “Christ’s presence is not an available object to be seized with the hand. To want to take advantage of it by receiving communion as often as possible is to deny what is at stake. Like the manna, God’s gift decays as a gift as soon as one claims to ‘use’ it.”
Chauvet charges the high medieval theologians with an excessive reaction to the denial, by Berengar of Tours and others, of the real presence of Christ in the eucharist. They removed the sacrament from the liturgical milieu within which alone it can do its symbolic work of involving Christians as subjects in relation to Christ as subject. The result is that the deeply interpersonal exchange in which the sacrament unites (sum+ballei) Christ and the church by constituting the church as a subject in relation to Christ and God is replaced with a depersonalized, merely “ontological” functioning, in which the eucharistic elements just are the body and blood of Christ sitting on the table, even in isolation from the symbolic milieu of the liturgy. This causes the church to conceive of the eucharist in a more or less magical way: “One cannot isolate a symbol without destroying it and causing it to slip into the ineffable imaginary.”
This consideration of the eucharist in isolation from the Church’s celebration of it as a ritual is, Chauvet says, destructive of its purpose as a sacrament. “Sacramental theology is the theory of a practice. Its object is the church’s celebration itself. It has nothing relevant to say that does not stem from the way the church confers the sacraments. If one had always obeyed this golden rule many deviations would have been avoided. One example of these deviations pertains to the eucharistic presence of the Lord, which has been understood in isolation independently of its purpose as nourishment for its partakers, demonstrated by the gestures, the words, and even the material elements used in the narrative of the institution.”
Chauvet steals a bit of my thunder by approvingly quoting Gamaliel from the Mishnah about every Israelite who partakes of Passover being bound to regard himself as though he personally had passed out of Egypt: “Whereas the coming out of Egypt happened centuries ago (“the LORD did,” past tense), everyone deems that it still concerns her or him in the present (“for me when I came out of Egypt.”) Such is therefore the nature of the memorial: it involves the participants in the event which the feast commemorates. It is a “com-memoration,” that is, a common memory, the memory of a people.”
It is exciting to hear this insight articulated even by a Roman Catholic, for as Chauvet himself recognizes, it is precisely Roman Catholic theologians like Paschasius Radbertus and Thomas Aquinas who have done the most to insist on the onto-theology of the sacrament.
Chauvet uses the same Griemasian narratology diagrams that N. T. Wright used in The New Testament and the People of God. These enable Chauvet to explain the dynamics of interpersonal symbolic exchange at work in the eucharist by diagramming the narrative structure of different parts of the eucharistic prayer. I was struck by the fact that each of the symbolic exchanges which he diagrams can be found as a petition in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer’s liturgy for Holy Communion as well:
1. We —> Grace/Glory —> God. (“Let us give thanks unto the Lord our God.”)
2. God —> Historical and Glorious body of Christ —> Us. (All the prayers asking God to give us Christ in the sacrament, whether in an epiclesis or not. “Grant us, therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood...”)
3. God —> Ecclesial Body of Christ —> Us (“... that we are very members incor-porate in the mystical body of thy Son, which is the blessed company of all faithful people”)
The idea of using narrative diagramming is a good one. It helps us focus more clearly on what exactly our liturgy says is happening in the eucharist.
Are there problems with Chauvet’s approach? Yes. He relies rather heavily on French structural anthropology and literary theory. He fails to pursue his insight from the Mishnah all the way to where it might have led him: namely, to a thorough rethinking of eucharist in terms that were available to Jesus and Paul.
Nonetheless, I highly recommend this book. Liturgical protestants will find much to stimulate their thinking.
May 8, 2021
I can’t think of anyone I would recommend this to. The author has a few decent analyses of Scripture and the Eucharistic Prayers, but has a philosophy that does not seek consonant with Catholicism. Whatever might be true about “symbol”, he seems to disregard the importance of the reality effected by the sacraments. Overall, he overestimates the value of symbol which even sounds superficial as he explains it. Oddly enough, when speaking of the Promised Land for the Israelites, he reverts to the language of “sign” and “thing” which belongs to traditional theology. It seems he would have done better as an Old Testament scholar than in dogma. Furthermore, he speaks about God himself in a way that is confused at best, but outright false at worst. Though he sometimes speaks of Christ as the sacrament of God, he more often speaks of “humanness” in God, which seems to muddy the subject more than anything. He also misrepresents earlier theologians. For example, he says discussions in Christology would take for granted that we know what God is, when St. Thomas is meticulous in maintaining the impossibility of knowing God’s essence.
Overall, I cannot recommend the book.
Overall, I cannot recommend the book.
March 17, 2024
Probably the best contemporary work on sacramental theology. Going to read his big book now.
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August 2, 2011An excellent work on the sacraments. Accessible, but probably not the first thing a beginner would want to read. I personally didn't find the numerous complicated diagrams all that helpful, but for people whose learning style works well with spatial reasoning, they might be excellent. Chauvet's chief strength is his ability to make sense out of Catholic sacramental theology in light of modern insights about language and culture. Even-handed without being wishy-washy, Chauvet's tone is invariably spot-on.
The last chapter (about how to deal with less than fully committed Catholics who approach the Church for the sacraments) is a must read for every ordained minister or lay pastoral worker in the Catholic Church.
The last chapter (about how to deal with less than fully committed Catholics who approach the Church for the sacraments) is a must read for every ordained minister or lay pastoral worker in the Catholic Church.
May 22, 2009
Chauvet writes from a postmodern perspective and delves particularly deeply into the role of language as a mediating influence between an external world and the internal perception of that world. He writes compellingly about the effect of language on and in sacramental ritual, and posits that the sacraments are a gift from God in which the reception of the gift requires a response, mainly action to live a life embodying love and justice (rather than the sacraments being events in which one simply receives, with no response required).
Sacramental theology is not my favorite subject, but Chauvet is my favorite writer about it.
Sacramental theology is not my favorite subject, but Chauvet is my favorite writer about it.
April 24, 2013
Dense. But, if you can get into it, very enlightening.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews