Medieval Egyptian Euchology

As part of their new series Christian Arabic Texts in Translation, Fordham University Press, early next year, is bringing out Guides to the Eucharist in Medieval Egypt: Three Arabic Commentaries on the Coptic Liturgy by Yūḥannā ibn Sabbā‘, Abū al-Barakāt ibn Kabar, and Pope Gabriel V of Alexandria, trans. Deacon Arsenius Mikhail (FUP, February 2021), 240pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us this:

The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries witnessed a rising interest in Arabic texts describing and explaining the rituals of the Coptic Church of Egypt. This book provides readers with an English translation of excerpts from three key texts on the Coptic liturgy by Abū al-Barakāt ibn Kabar, Yūh.annā ibn Sabbā‘, and Pope Gabriel V. With a scholarly introduction to the works, their authors, and the Coptic liturgy, as well as a detailed explanatory apparatus, this volume provides a useful and needed introduction to the worship tradition of Egypt’s Coptic Christians. Presented for the first time in English, these texts provide valuable points of comparison to other liturgical commentaries produced elsewhere in the medieval Christian world.

Bulgakov on the Eucharistic Sacrifice

Interest in the works of Sergius Bulgakov remains justly high, and consistently so for at least the last twenty years. Numerous publishers have brought out his works in English--Eerdmans is especially praiseworthy in this regard. In September we will have Mark Roosien's translation of Bulgakov's The Eucharistic Sacrifice (University of Notre Dame Press, 2021), 136pp. to look forward to. 

About this book the publisher tells us this:

This first English translation represents Sergius Bulgakov’s final, fully developed word on the Eucharist.

The debate around the controversial doctrine of the Eucharist as sacrifice has dogged relations between Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant churches since the Reformation. In The Eucharistic Sacrifice, the famous Russian theologian Sergius Bulgakov cuts through long-standing polemics surrounding the notion of the Eucharist as sacrifice and offers a stunningly original intervention rooted in his distinctive theological vision. This work, written in 1940, belongs to Bulgakov’s late period and is his last, and most discerning, word on eucharistic theology. His primary thesis is that the Eucharist is an extension of the sacrificial, self-giving love of God in the Trinity, or what he famously refers to as kenosis. Throughout the book, Bulgakov points to the fact that, although the eucharistic sacrifice at the Last Supper took place in time before the actual crucifixion of Christ, both events are part of a single act that occurs outside of time.

This is Bulgakov’s concluding volume of three works on the Eucharist. The other two, The Eucharistic Dogma and The Holy Grail, were translated and published together in 1997. This third volume was only first published in the original Russian version in 2005, and has remained unavailable in English until now. The introduction provides a brief history of Bulgakov’s theological career and a description of the structure of The Eucharistic Sacrifice. This clear and accessible translation will appeal to scholars and students of theology, ecumenism, and Russian religious thought.

Eastern Christians Eating Virtuously

Several years ago I taught a very fun freshman seminar called "Eating God." We looked at the history, economics, politics, geography, psychology, philosophy, and theology of food around the world and across cultures, culminating in a unit on the Eucharist and the daring Orthodox-Catholic claim to be eating God. So books in this genre continue to interest me, including one just released: Food, Virtue, and the Shaping of Early Christianity by Dana Robinson (Cambridge University Press, 2020), 257pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

In this book, Dana Robinson examines the role that food played in the Christianization of daily life in the fourth century CE. Early Christians used the food culture of the Hellenized Mediterranean world to create and debate compelling models of Christian virtue, and to project Christian ideology onto common domestic practices. Combining theoretical approaches from cognitive linguistics and space/place theory, Robinson shows how metaphors for piety, such as health, fruit, and sacrifice, relied on food-related domains of common knowledge (medicine, agriculture, votive ritual), which in turn generated sophisticated and accessible models of lay discipline and moral formation. She also demonstrates that Christian places and landscapes of piety were socially constructed through meals and food production networks that extended far beyond the Eucharist. Food culture, thus, provided a network of metaphorical concepts and spatial practices that allowed the lay faithful to participate in important debates over Christian living and community formation.

We are also given the Table of Contents:

1. Introduction
2. The medicine moderation: John Chrysostom and the true fast
3. From dinner theater to domestic church in late antique Antioch
4. Shenoute's botanical virtues: fruit, labor, and ascetic production
5. The places of God: festivals, food service, and Christian community
6. Meals, mouths, and martyrs: Paulinus of Nola and sacrificial spaces
7. Conclusion.

The Florentine Fate of the Epiclesis (Updated)

Given the sheer volume of books emerging today, it is hard to maintain excitement for a lot of them, but there are some coming along to which I am greatly looking forward as much for the topic as for the author, and one such book, just released, is The Epiclesis Debate at the Council of Florence (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019), 380pp., by Christiaan Kappes, whom I previously interviewed about his groundbreaking and revealing work on the Immaculate Conception. I've been on panels with him, and read some of his other articles, and both he and them are always dynamite, so we have every reason to look forward with delight to this new book. I am also in contact with him about a blog interview, to which he's agreed. So I hope to be able to run that in the coming weeks.

The council of Ferrara-Florence has not occasioned a lot of recent scholarship, which is curious if it is indeed the last "council of union" between East and West. Cambridge University Press, back in 2011, sent me a republished copy of Joseph Gill's 1959 study, but apart from that I have not seen a lot. So this book will be welcome for more than one reason.

Before reading the publisher's blurb, listen to what one widely respected scholar, no stranger to this blog, says about this forthcoming book:

“In this book Christiaan Kappes lays before the reader the genesis of an important, albeit often neglected, ecumenical stumbling block. Although the filioque, papacy, and azymes are traditionally considered the three great causes of the Catholic-Orthodox split, for many today the epiclesis debate remains a significant unresolved issue dividing the two churches. By detailing the theology, setting, and personalities of the first stage of that debate, along with the translation of relevant texts, Kappes has indeed provided an invaluable service to all liturgists, ecumenists, and interested historians of dogma.” --A. Edward Siecienski, Clement and Helen Pappas Endowed Professor of Byzantine Civilization and Religion, Stockton University.

And from the publisher we learn this:

The Epiclesis Debate at the Council of Florence is the first in-depth investigation into both the Greek and the Latin sides of the debate about the moment of eucharistic transubstantiation at the Council of Florence. Christiaan Kappes examines the life and times of the central figures of the debate, Mark Eugenicus and John Torquemada, and assesses their doctrinal authority. Kappes presents a patristic and Scholastic analysis of Torquemada’s Florentine writings, revealing heretofore-unknown features of the debate and the full background to its treatises. The most important feature of the investigation involves Eugenicus. Kappes investigates his theological method and sources for the first time to give an accurate appraisal of the strength of Mark’s theological positions in the context of his own time and contemporary methods. The investigation into both traditions allows for an informed evaluation of more recent developments in the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church in light of these historical sources. Kappes provides a historically contextual and contemporary proposal for solutions to the former impasse in light of the principles rediscovered within Eugenicus’s works. This monograph speaks to contemporary theological debates surrounding transubstantiation and related theological matters, and provides a historical framework to understand these debates. The Epiclesis Debate at the Council of Florence will interest specialists in theology, especially those with a background in and familiarity with the council and related historical themes, and is essential for any ecumenical library.

Let's Eat!

Just this past week in my sacraments class I was talking with my students about the different connotations and implications of what we call our Sunday eucharistic gatherings, and for a thought experiment I was proposing that we reconsider resurrecting the name "love-feast" which, by virtue of being unfamiliar and unused, sounds at the very least more intriguing and perhaps less boring than "Mass" or "Divine Liturgy" or "Holy Communion." I was more serious in proposing to them that we resurrect the practice of having a full meal together (or a very substantial coffee hour, which is in effect a mini-brunch), mentioning how common this is in many Eastern parishes, both Catholic and Orthodox, on a regular basis, where the coffee hour is sometimes referred to as the "eighth sacrament."

Along comes a new book from to advance this discussion in what look to be helpful ways: We Will Feast: Rethinking Dinner, Worship, and the Community of God by Kendall Vanderslice (Eerdmans, 2019), 176pp. About this book the publisher tells us this:

The gospel story is filled with meals. It opens in a garden and ends in a feast. Records of the early church suggest that believers met for worship primarily through eating meals. Over time, though, churches have lost focus on the centrality of food— and with it a powerful tool for unifying Christ’s diverse body.

But today a new movement is under way, bringing Christians of every denomination, age, race, and sexual orientation together around dinner tables. Men and women nervous about stepping through church doors are finding God in new ways as they eat together. Kendall Vanderslice shares stories of churches worshiping around the table, introducing readers to the rising contemporary dinner-church movement. We Will Feast provides vision and inspiration to readers longing to experience community in a real, physical way.

Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through

The Greek Orthodox scholar and priest John Panteleimon Manoussakis, whom I interviewed here about his recent splendid book, posted something to Facebook recently about a book I had not read, but which he was finding profitable: Marcus Pound, Theology, Psychoanalysis and Trauma (SCM Press London: 2007), 210pp.

Psychoanalytic thought is not entirely foreign to Eastern Christianity, though scholarly efforts to study and integrate it are not nearly as frequent or far advanced as for psychoanalysis and Western Christianity, not least in Jungian terms. I noted here a recent scholarly monograph, and gave some fuller thoughts here to the uses and abuses of Freud.

About this book by Pound the publisher tells us:

Marcus Pound's book develops a specifically theological form of psychotherapy rooted in liturgy and arising from engagement with postmodern psychoanalysis. Jacques Lacans claim that the unconscious is structured like a language radically challenged psychoanalysis and Pound uses this as the basis for his work in this volume. Postmodern psychoanalysis has been anticipated by theology, and Pound goes further in this claim to argue there has been a return to theology in psychoanalysis.

I returned to Freud this year in writing my lecture for last month's OTSA conference at Fordham, where I took up the uses and abuses of "forgetting" in various forms as an integral part of how Christian tradition develops, not least in the history of Catholic-Orthodox estrangement and reconciliation. As I think we have all learned by now thanks to him and modern psychology, not all forms of forgetting are regrettable, and not all forms of remembering are commendable.

So I went back to Freud, especially his short essays "Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through" as well as "Motivated Forgetting" from The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (The Standard Edition).


I also found two other works very insightful and helpful here, beginning with Paul Ricoeur's  Memory, History, Forgetting. Ricoeur is of course no stranger to Freud, having engaged him for decades, not least in his Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation.

Even more than Ricoeur the work of a contemporary scholar is very suggestive and illuminating: Bradford Vivian of Syracuse University's  Public Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of Beginning Again is an interesting and suggestive work that argues about how, when it comes to such things as cultural conflicts and reconciliation, deliberate forgetting can be as beneficial ritualized remembrance. In witness of this, consider recent debates over what to do with the Confederate flag in the south. The move to have it removed from official public display suggests that culturally many people are understandably prepared to "forget" that history instead of seeking ad perpetuam rei memoriam.

The importance of forgetting remains an important and under-appreciated one for Catholics and Orthodox still struggling to come to terms with our dolorous and divisive past. We remember and repeat, Freud showed, in order to work through--or (as we say today), "move on." Let it be so, and soon. 

The Search for Unity Continues

I was recently asked to review a new collection of essays for the journal Reviews in Religion and Theology. I cannot reprint that review here, but suffice it for me to say this is an important collection that belongs on every bibliography of Christian, and particularly ecumenical, history of the twentieth century: John Radano, ed., Celebrating a Century of Ecumenism: Exploring the Achievements of International Dialogue (Eerdmans, 2012), 356pp.

I mention this now in late January, which, for over a century, has been celebrated as a week of special prayer, between January 18 and 25th, for the unity of all Christians. (The history of this week of prayer, the so-called unity octave, is recounted in part in Catherine Clifford, ed., A Century of Prayer for Christian Unity.) The strides we have made in the last century are very considerable indeed, but we have not yet achieved the longed-for goal of full Christian unity. The prayer and work can and must continue.

Our conception of what "full Christian unity" would look like has changed over the century. Many, if not most, of the early models envisaged a complete, structured, "institutional" unity of one hierarchy, a model that is now largely abandoned. Such a model was often bound up with assumptions that the way to achieve such a unified structure was through an "ecumenism of return" in which the wayward "heretics" or "schismatics" returned to whatever the "mother-Church" was thought to be (Rome, Constantinople, etc.). Today we realize not only is such a model not very possible, but in some very important respects it is not even desirable. Instead, many today, especially in the context of East-West or Orthodox-Catholic ecumenism, have, rightly, recovered the model of "full communion," which model seems to have obtained in most of the early Church. In this model, there is no "ecumenism of return" because no one party unilaterally, let alone contumaciously, walked away from the other. Rather, both parties, through an enormously complex historical process, grew estranged from one another and the communion that obtained for most of the first millennium (not without problems and occasional breaks) was increasingly lost.

We conventionally date the East-West estrangement to 1054, though that is more a heuristic than anything. It is not as though there was some magical expiration date on unity that came due in July 1054 after which all unity vanished. Those who know the history know several things, not least that it is highly likely, canonically speaking, that Cardinal Humbert's actions lacked "validity" because the pope in whose name he was acting had died already. In addition, his actions, and the corresponding actions of Patriarch Michael Cerularius, were thought only to pertain to each other and their delegations: they were never intended to be church-dividing in the way we often assume. (Even if they were, the mutual lifting of those excommunications in 1965 by Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras should have taken care of this problem. De iure it is arguable that they did, but de facto they manifestly did not, alas.) In proof of this, there is ample evidence of Catholics and Orthodox continuing to share the Eucharist as late as the seventeenth century in some parts of Greece, and well into the twentieth century in the former USSR, Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere.

And today? Today officially most Orthodox Churches will refuse to share the Eucharist with Catholics, while Catholics are in fact permitted to share the sacraments with those Orthodox who request them. But officially neither side will condone a full eucharistic celebration with priests, let alone bishops, together. Both sides, in other words, maintain that we are not yet ready for that--that some kind of doctrinal agreement must take place first in which lingering issues are resolved. I am of course deeply aware of what the last and greatest of those issues is said to be, and I treat the papacy extensively in Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity.

But since finishing the book, I am increasingly inclined to think two things. First, the idea that we have to have some kind of perfect doctrinal accord, a complete unity of dogmatic understanding, is to hold ourselves to an artificial, unhistorical, and wholly unnecessary standard. Nobody in the first millennium, and arguably for much of the second, would have thought such a standard necessary beyond, say, reciting the Nicene Creed together. If Orthodox and Catholic bishops can do that--and they can--then what else is necessary?

Now, to be sure, we need--and I argue this in more detail than anyone else has--some kind of modus operandi allowing Eastern and Western bishops to work together in full communion together with their brother, the bishop and pope of Rome. I still think my proposal could and would work, and I am gratified that in all the serious reviews to date, nobody has shown me otherwise or come up with a plausible alternative proposal.

The second thing on which I have changed my mind is precisely the question of the Eucharist. I used to hold to the so-called traditional position of most Catholics and Orthodox today that we cannot celebrate the Eucharist until every point of doctrinal disagreement is resolved. I no longer believe that, and in every instance of the half-dozen or so authors who have changed my mind on this question, they have all been Orthodox:

• Lev Gillet
• Olivier Clément
• Antoine Arjakovsky
• David Bentley Hart
• Nikos Nissiotis
• Catholicos Aram of Cilicia
• Michael Plekon

I stress this because I know that for some Orthodox anybody advocating eucharistic sharing is automatically dismissed as some kind of "ecumaniac" or Roman stooge who is living in a dream-world c. 1968. Anyone pressing for greater Orthodox-Catholic unity is summarily convicted of the "pan-heresy of ecumenism," a phrase both amusing and increasingly tiresome. For that phrase presupposes that those pushing for Christian unity are doing so with only one method, and only one purpose: the watering down, if not outright elimination of, major doctrinal truths so that we are left with only one commandment: "Be nice to each other and believe whatever you want." Nobody--nobody--is actually advocating that. Certainly no responsible theologian or hierarch, in Orthodoxy or Catholicism, is advocating that. If they were, then we would have achieved unity a long time ago, for such a method would have made unity an overnight accomplishment instead of the long, arduous, painstaking process it is. It is painstaking precisely because nobody can or will simply dismiss or dilute doctrine. The people who think this are guilty of a great slander against the bishops and theologians involved in ecumenical dialogue and are rightly dismissed as cranks to whom no attention should be paid. If we achieve nothing else between this unity octave 2013 and next year's, let it at least be the complete abandonment of this fatuous notion of ecumenism as a "pan-heresy."

But let's not aim so low. I think all Catholics and Orthodox who care about this--and who cannot?--should spend the rest of the year challenging their fellow communicants to work harder for East-West unity. And one way to do that would be through the inspiration, and perhaps even intercession, of Lev Gillet. Gillet was a fascinating figure who moved from French Roman Catholicism to Greek Catholicism (in the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church, whose primate, Metropolitan Andriy Sheptytsky, he saw as being his spiritual father even after Gillet became Orthodox), to Eastern Orthodoxy, all the while blurring the sacramental-spiritual-ecclesial boundaries along the way. That is what is needed today: to blur those artificial and wholly sinful boundaries we have erected until such time as they disappear entirely. And what better way to do it than through that medicine of immortality which heals all wounds, the Eucharist?

Yummy Roasted Lamb

Hillenbrand continues to bring out books particularly in the area of liturgical theology, as I have noted recently. One of its most recent offerings is Roch Kereszty, Wedding Feast of the Lamb: Eucharistic Theology from a Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Perspective (Hillenbrand E-Book, 2012).

About this book the publisher tells us:

This text places the Eucharist in the universal context of world religions and shows how the Eucharist is God's response to the universal human quest for the perfect sacrifice of expiation, thanksgiving, and communion. It not only discusses the explicit Eucharistic texts of the New Testament but also shows the role and meaning of the Eucharist within each Gospel, within the theology of Paul, the Letter to the Hebrews, and the Book of Revelation.
It cites forgotten texts and recovers surprising insights from the Fathers that disclose the link between the Eucharist and mystical experience, the presence of all the mysteries of Christ (in particular his death, resurrection, and his coming in glory) in the Eucharistic celebration. The systematic part is developed in dialogue with Protestant concerns regarding the Eucharistic presence of Christ and the Eucharist as sacrifice. It also shows the importance of the Greek Fathers' doctrine on the ontological transformation of the Eucharistic elements for transcending the impasse of the contemporary debate on transignification. This book is an essential resource for the study of the Eucharist.

An Electronic Epiclesis

First published in 2008, and now this month released as an e-book, is the important study of John McKenna, The Eucharistic Epiclesis: A Detailed History from the Patristic to the Modern Era (Hillenbrand). The epiclesis, as I noted before, is one of those issues that certain Eastern apologists sometimes make into a major issue even though they have little to no factual basis for doing so.

About this book the publisher tells us:

For centuries the Eucharistic epiclesis, one of the gems of the early Christian anaphoras, has become a point of controversy rather than a bond of unity between various Christian traditions. The Eucharistic Epiclesis: A Detailed History from the Patristic to the Modern Era, seeks new avenues in exploring this question.

A healthy theology must rest on solid historical and liturgical foundations.  The first part of this study, presents the data of the early liturgical texts on the epiclesis as well as a brief history of the prayer's entanglement with the "moment of consecration question." Part II focuses on the interpretations of modern liturgists and theologians of the Eucharistic epiclesis. Finally in a synthesis, John McKenna suggests new approaches to this discussion in Eucharistic theology and draws out the implications from this prayer which is so central to the ancient anaphoras.
John H. McKenna's classic study examines the interpretations of the Eucharistic epiclesis by modern theological writers.  This thorough text will deepen the appreciation, understanding beauty of the theology of the epiclesis. 

And the greatest liturgical historian of our time, Robert Taft, has this to say about McKenna's work:

Some issues in the history of theology never go away. John McKenna's 1965 book Eucharist and Holy Spirit, of which the present update is more precisely entitled The Eucharistic Epiclesis, tackles one such intractable problem. Along with Edward Schillebeeckx's 1963 Christ, the Sacrament of the Encounter with God, McKenna's study remains one of the most important liturgical publications in English to emerge from that heady, immediate post-Vatican II fallout that changed Catholic sacramental theology for the better and-dare we still hope?-forever. McKenna's deceptively simple discourse and clear language, like that of Schillebeeckx, results from the clarity, not the simplicity, of his thinking on a still disputed and more often than not misunderstood topic in eucharistic and ecumenical theology: in the eucharist who offers what, to whom, when, and how? Every professor of liturgical and ecumenical theology should  have this book in his or her library.

Robert F. Taft, S.J
Professor Emeritus of Oriental Liturgy
Pontifical Oriental Institute, Rome

Eucharistic Communion and the World

I am delighted that T&T Clark has just now put into my hands the most recent book of the great Greek theologian John Zizioulas, Eucharistic Communion and the World (2011, xv+186pp). What is this book about? The publisher tells us that:

The theology of John Zizioulas presents a beautiful vision of the Church as Eucharistic communion, in which human persons both are gathered into Jesus Christ and are sent back into the world. In his previous books, Zizioulas focused on the way this communion is related to the communion of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, which calls us to understand being as communion and provides the only foundation for otherness and identity. With its sustained attention directly to the Eucharistic communion, this volume provides the context for those discussions. Zizioulas here explores the biblical dimensions and eschatological foundation of the Eucharist, the celebration of the Eucharist by the Church, and the ethos of the Eucharistic community. These essays are provocatively concrete and practical, showing once again that Zizioulas’ teaching on persons, communion and otherness has radical implications for the life of the Church and its relationship to the world. 

In addition, the publisher supplies the following table of contents:

Chapter One: Biblical Aspects of the Eucharist

Chapter Two: The Eucharist and The Kingdom of God

Chapter Three: Symbolism and Realism in Orthodox Worship

Chapter Four: The Ecclesiological Presuppositions of the Holy Eucharist

Chapter Five: Reflections on Baptism, Confirmation and Eucharist

Chapter Six: The Eucharistic Vision of the World

Chapter Seven: Proprietors or Priests of Creation?

Chapter Eight: Preserving God's Creation

Food and Faith

Today is Pure Monday for most Eastern Christians, that day of strict fast and abstinence by which we mark the beginning of Great Lent. As we have, over the past two weeks, gradually given up first meat and then dairy, and now enter into a time of rigorous askesis, it is always worth considering why it is we fast, asking not only the significance of our giving up food, but the significance of food itself for a people and a faith that has at its heart the eucharistic feast.

Three recent books by two very interesting Orthodox thinkers have helped us to further understand the connections between theology, gardening, and food: Vigen Guroian, Inheriting Paradise: Meditations on Gardening and Idem., The Fragrance of God (which I reviewed here), and Rod Dreher, Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots.

Now Cambridge University Press, later this spring, will be bringing out another volume attempting to explore some of these connections:

Norman Wirzba, Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating (CUP, 2011), 264pp.

The book has a foreword by Stanley Hauerwas.

The publisher provides us the following foretaste:

This book provides a comprehensive theological framework for assessing eating's significance, employing a Trinitarian theological lens to evaluate food production and consumption practices as they are being worked out in today's industrial food systems. Norman Wirzba combines the tools of ecological, agrarian, cultural, biblical, and theological analyses to draw a picture of eating that cares for creatures and that honors God. Unlike books that focus on vegetarianism or food distribution as the key theological matters, this book broadens the scope to include discussions on the sacramental character of eating, eating's ecological and social contexts, the meaning of death and sacrifice as they relate to eating, the Eucharist as the place of inspiration and orientation, the importance of saying grace, and whether or not there will be eating in heaven. Food and Faith demonstrates that eating is of profound economic, moral, and theological significance.

Eucharistic Praying East and West

One of the great achievements of the twentieth-century ecumenical movement was the recovery of the very ancient eucharistic ecclesiology which understood that the Eucharist makes the Church. This movement has gone hand-in-hand in many ways with the movement, in the West especially, of liturgical reform. Scholars continue to ponder the meaning and implications of all this.

Recently a group of scholarly essays has been gathered together in a new collection edited by Maxwell Johnson of Notre Dame and just published by Liturgical Press:

Issues in Eucharistic Praying in East and West: Essays in Liturgical and Theological Analysis (Lit. Press, 2011), xvi+395pp.

Johnson, who has written the introduction and the eighth chapter ("Recent Research on the Anaphoral Sanctus: An Update and Hypothesis")  has gathered together an impressive collection of twelve other scholars. What is very much a pleasant surprise is that, unlike similar collections in which one almost invariably finds that "East and West" means 90% of the chapters concern the West, and 10% the East, at least half of the chapters in the present volume are in fact devoted to Eastern questions in particular.

Johnson's introduction, which you may read here,  tells us that this current book is in someways a successor picking up where Paul Bradshaw's Essays on Early Eastern Eucharistic Prayers (Liturgical Press, 1997) left off.  The great Robert Taft, on the back cover of this book, acknowledges the continuity between the volumes and notes:

the topical importance of this anthology. And Johnson’s excellent introduction provides a careful guide to its riches, which no theological library can henceforth be without. For Johnson’s summary of his book’s purpose (p. xv) is perfectly fulfilled:    ‘ . . . one of the primary goals of this volume has been to offer an update on the state of the question on various Eucharistic prayers today and, as such, it is hoped that these essays will become required reading for students of liturgy.’ Amen to that!

 The publisher provides the following description:

This collection provides several "state of the question" essays on current research in a variety of Eucharistic prayers in the Churches of East and West, including attention to other issues of Eucharistic praying and theology. In addition to essays by already recognized scholars in the field, this collection also introduces readers to a new generation of liturgiologists who are emerging within the academy as notable contributors to the field of liturgical studies.

For students and teachers of liturgy, indeed, for all who seek solid and up-to-date scholarship on Eucharistic liturgy and theology, this volume offers an ecumenical guide from New Testament texts through Addai and Mari, the so-called Apostolic Tradition, and Roman Canon, through the diversity of Eastern and Oriental Orthodox anaphoras, up to and including the sources for the prefaces of the Missal of Paul VI. Close attention is also given to questions such as the origins of the Sanctus, Eucharistic consecration, as well as other historical and theological questions from within Eucharistic praying.

 Some of the Eastern contributors include:

• Nicholas Russo, “The Validity of the Anaphora of Addai and Mari: Critique of the Critiques”
• Bryan Spinks, "The Mystery of the Holy Leaven (Malka) in the East Syrian Tradition" 
• John Paul Abdelsayed, "Liturgical Exodus in Reverse: a Re-evaluation of the Egyptian Elements in the Jerusalem Liturgy"
• Hans-Jürgen Feulner, "The Armenian Anaphora of St. Athanasius"
• Anne Vorhes McGowan, "The Basilian Anaphroras: Rethinking the Question"
• Michael Zheltov, "The Moment of Eucharistic Consecration in Byzantine Thought"

Of these articles, I think Russo's especially important, along with Zheltov. In the former, we read a thorough response to Latin critics of the decision by Rome in 2001 to recognize as legitimate and valid (because indisputably ancient) the Anaphora of Addai and Mari, for which decision Robert Taft provided much of the scholarship. A few Latins got their lace surplices in a twist over that decision and tried (foolishly) to take on Taft's impeccable scholarship. Russo takes up the debate from where Taft left off and demolishes the Latin criticisms.

Zheltov's article is fascinating and important, especially for those Orthodox who fetishize the "epiclesis" even to the point of artificially shoe-horning one into the Roman canon (whose lack of an "epiclesis," at least in a recognizably "Byzantine" form, is simply proof of the canon's very great antiquity: it antedates the Christological and pneumatological controversies) in those Orthodox churches that use the "Western rite" in some variation or other. Byzantine views of the epiclesis are not at all what many Orthodox polemicists, apologists, and liturgists today would have us believe, and the history is neither so neat nor so straightforward as is fondly imagined by those who--in Taft's memorable phrase--do not have their views encumbered by anything so bothersome as facts. The burden of Zheltov's article is to "demonstrate...that, while the Byzantines undoubtedly were very concerned about the epiclesis recited during their Eucharistic liturgy, its mere existence did not always signify the importance it is ascribed in late- and post-Byzantine theological literature. For the Byzantines often pointed to some other elements of the rite as 'consecratory' and were in nowise strangers to the idea of a Eucharistic consecration independent of an epiclesis" (263). Zheltov goes on to show that neither the East nor the West was, especially between the fourth and eighth centuries, univocal in its views on the precise "moment" of the consecration. Is it the words of institution? epiclesis? the elevation of the gifts during the ekphonesis? some or all of these? Zheltov goes to show that most scholars (save for Taft) have overlooked how often the elevation at the ekphonesis ("Ta agia tois agiois") is thought to be the key moment especially in the post-Iconoclastic period. In the end, Zheltov concludes that there has been a diversity of practices and beliefs in the Byzantine world, and that more often than not, what matters is not so much the words--whether epicletic or institutional--so much as the manual priestly acts accompanying them.

In addition to these, at least two other chapters treat in part Eastern traditions:

• Walter Ray, "Rome and Alexandria: Two Cities, One Anaphoral Tradition"
• Albertus G.A. Horsting, "Transfiguration of Flesh: Literary and Theological Connections between Martyrdom Accounts and Eucharistic Prayers"

Issues in Eucharistic Praying in East and West: Essays in Liturgical and Theological Analysis will be reviewed at length later this year in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies. 

Saint Maximus the Confessor

There has been a veritable explosion in studies on Maximus the Confessor over the last fifteen years or so. In 1994, Aidan Nichols published a "bibliographical" book about scholarship on Maximus right before nearly a dozen new books, in English alone, appeared.  In 1995 we had a book on his anthropology. In 1996 we had Andrew Louth's important contribution to the acclaimed, highly welcome, and still ongoing Routledge series on the Fathers. In 2003 we had three significant publications: SVS Press brought out another in their series "Popular Patristics" on Maximus. Also that year we had, at long last, a suitable English translation (by Notre Dame's renowned patrologist and historian Brian Daley, SJ) of a signal work on Maximus by the late Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar: Cosmic Liturgy: the Universe According to Maximus the Confessor. Finally in that year we had a collection of important documents shedding new light on Maximus precisely as "confessor" of the faith exiled for refusing--as we might say today--to go along to get along. In 2005, we had Demetrios Bathrellos's excellent The Byzantine Christ on Maximus's Christology. We also had in that year an important and fascinating study on the role of the body in Maximus by the Australian scholar Adam Cooper. In 2007 we had a study on the ideas of union and distinction in Maximus. In 2008 we had, also in the excellent Oxford Early Christian Studies Series, a book on Maximus's cosmology.

Now two more books have recently appeared on the horizon:



Despina Prassas, trans. St. Maximus the Confessor's Questions and Doubts (Northern Illinois U Press, 2009), 234pp.


As I have noted before, Northern Illinois Press has started a new, and highly welcome, imprint on Eastern Christian studies, and this is one of the first books to appear.


In addition to the above, we have, published just last month, the latest study on Maximus with the mouthful of a title:


Nikolaos Loudovikos, A Eucharistic Ontology: Maximus the Confessor's Estachological Ontology of Being as Dialogical Reciprocity, trans. Elizabeth Theokritoff (Holy Cross Press, 2010), 266pp.

Maximus is notoriously difficult to translate and understand, but the above book, notwithstanding its having a title only an academic could love, has been praised by Louth for making Maximus accessible to us again today in a Western context whose philosophical currents the author engages, ending by saying that for Maximus as for all of us the telos of our life consists in eucharistic communion with God.

These two most recent studies on Maximus will be reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies in 2011.