Liam Walsh

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS The Eucharistic Mystery: Revitalizing the Tradition. By DAVID N. POWER, O.M.I. New York: Crossroad, 1992. Pp. xiii + 370. Historical enquiry in the field of theology can he done with any number of interests in mind. What David Power offers in this hook is a way of doing it in the interests of systematic theology. He takes it that the contemporary theologian is in necessary conversation with the tradition of faith. The theologians of today are asking their own questions, which, when they are intellectually alert, will take account of questions raised by what is increasingly called "postmodernity." The theologian is putting these questions to a series of records that are them· selves the response of a particular generation of believers, in a par· ticular place, to its own questions. The records to he examined are not just the written texts that tell how people thought; they are also the multitudinous indications of how they acted and of the human situations in which they acted and thought. The tradition that is examined by theology is one of practice as much as, and in intimate as· sociation with, theory. There is an art, and even a philosophy, in reading such a tradition today. One has to he able to respect the historical in its historicity and yet let the historical he prophetic in response to today's concerns. Without committing himself to or seeking to establish any particular theory of interpretation, Power draws on contem· porary studies in hermeneutics to suggest how a reading of the tradition of faith should he done today regarding the Eucharist. The contemporary standpoint that he adopts is one of particular sensitivity to the cultural crisis that is associated with "postmodernity." He formulates the contemporary task of a hermeneutical theology on p. 13 as one of asking "... how is it possible to engage in a conversation with the past amid the ruins of a culture and a civilization." Having stated his intentions in a first chapter, Power spends the next two chapters on the Eucharist in the New Testament: the dominant con· cern in the first of these is with what the texts say; in the other it is with what might emerge from a contemporary re·reading of them. Then come four chapters on the Patristic period, before and after Nicaea. One appreciates particularly how the interplay of eucharistic practice, prayer, and theology is handled. At the heart of the four chapters on the Eucharist in the later Middle Ages is a detailed study 137 138 BOOK REVIEWS of the theology of the Eucharist in St. Thomas Aquinas. This theology of Thomas also has a major place in the final group of four chapters, which has the title, "Revitalizing the Eucharistic Tradition Today." On page 238, there is a helpful list of six factors in Thomas's thought that have been found of particular interest and importance in contemporary theology of the Eucharist. General hermeneutical theory requires that the writings of a theologian like Thomas on the Eucharist be set within the social and religious world of his day. Power gives two chapters to analysing the social role and practice of the Eucharist in that mediaeval world. Without being doctrinaire about it he does make a good case for the value of such analysis for uncovering the point of what a mediaeval theologian like Thomas might be saying, and not saying, to a contemporary theologian of the Eucharist. The study of the text of Thomas in chapter 10 is no less thorough and objective for its sensitivity to what a contemporary theologian of the Eucharist might usefully hear in it. One appreciates particularly the explanation of how there is at least as much of negation as of affirmation in the theory of transubstantiation (pp. 222-225), and the refined analysis of how Thomas sees the Eucharist to be sacrifice without really separating sacrifice from communion (pp. 226-230). One would question, however, his use of the term "substantial change " as a euphemism for " transubstantiation " in a contemporary reading of Thomas. The term already has a technical meaning in Thomistic Philosophy, which might be attributed to the changing of water into wine, but...