Louis Bouyer's Apocalyptic Cosmology

In 2015 I gave extended coverage to the publication of Louis Bouyer's memoirs, especially his time on the liturgical commission which did such damage to the Latin Church from the late 1960s to the present day. It was a fascinating read.

Now Angelico Press has brought another book into print, The Apocalypse of Wisdom: Louis Bouyer's Theological Recovery of the Cosmos by Keith Lemna (2019), 524pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Although the French Oratorian priest Louis Bouyer was one of the most comprehensive, influential, and prescient theologians of the twentieth century, only in recent years have some major European studies begun to uncover the rich treasury of his thought. In the present book, the first of its kind in English, Keith Lemna contributes to this body of scholarship a comprehensive study of Bouyer's cosmological vision. Commencing with his seminal monograph Cosmos: The World and the Glory of God, Lemna explores in depth Bouyer's sophiological and apocalyptic theology of creation, detailing especially his profound engagement with scientific, philosophical, religio-mythic, and poetic cosmologies. As the work of possibly the greatest twentieth-century Catholic "sophiologist," the French theologian's cosmology emerges as a path forward for a much-needed reintegration of human knowledge centered on the Mystery at the heart of God's eternal Wisdom revealed in the economy of grace.

Now What? Whither Goest Latin Liturgy? A Post-Script to Bouyer

In three parts this month, I discussed The Memoirs of Louis Bouyer: From Youth and Conversion to Vatican II, the Liturgical Reform, and After, concluding by asking why, once Bouyer had revealed to Pope Paul VI the fact that Bugnini had swindled him and pulled off a giant heist, the pope did not sooner sack Bugnini and, especially, rubbish his proposed "reforms" and start over. Why persist with pushing through the results of a manifestly flawed, if not wicked, process? I shall return to this question, but for now want to consider the much larger and far more troubling ecclesiological and ecumenical question: by what lights did that pope, or any pope, believe himself to have the authority to dismantle an entire liturgical tradition and appoint a commission to jerry-rig a new one? The short answer is that no pope has ever had such authority, and no pope today has it, and no pope until Paul VI would dared to have dream that he did in fact have such authority.

As in many things, this question is not my own, but comes from Joseph Ratzinger, especially in his Milestones: Memoirs, 1927-1977. There--but also in other works--he raises an uncomfortable question about how much contemporary Catholicism has over-estimated the power and importance of the pope, resulting in gross distortions not only of his office, but of the entire Church. Having been subjected to a papal celebrity tour only last week here in the US, and having watched for years now how every papal sneeze or Tweet gets acres of coverage, nobody can dispute that we are and have been--for well over four decades at least--in the era of superstar popes, which is a development one should be highly skeptical over.

Ratzinger rightly notes that at no other period in 2000 years of history did anyone--including even such ultramontanist die-hards as Joseph de Maistre--conjure up the bizarre theory that popes had unlimited power to do anything, even abolishing age-old liturgical traditions and replacing them with committee-engineered products. Such a vision of the papacy really is the stuff of Eastern Orthodox nightmares, and rightly so. It deserves to continue to be challenged and dismantled at every opportunity.

Nearly a half-century after the Latin "reforms," and more than half a century after Vatican II's decree on liturgy, where are we? What can we hope for in the coming years? This question deserves a longer answer than I shall attempt here
--though it is one I hope to come back to precisely in longer form elsewhere--but in the meantime some suggestions are clearly to be found in a book to be published in December: Alcuin Reid, ed., T&T Clark Companion to Liturgy (T&T Clark, 2015), 584pp.

About this book we are told:

In the decades following the Second Vatican Council, Catholic liturgy became an area of considerable interest and debate, if not controversy, in the West. Mid-late 20th century liturgical scholarship, upon which the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council were predicated and implemented, no longer stands unquestioned. The liturgical and ecclesial springtime the reforms of Paul VI were expected to facilitate has failed to emerge, leaving many questions as to their wisdom and value.

Quo vadis Catholic liturgy? This Companion brings together a variety of scholars who consider this question at the beginning of the 21st century in the light of advances in liturgical scholarship, decades of post-Vatican II experience and the critical re-examination in the West of the question of the liturgy promoted by Benedict XVI. The contributors, each eminent in their field, have distinct takes on how to answer this question, but each makes a significant contribution to contemporary debate, making this Companion an essential reference for the study of Western Catholic liturgy in history and in the light of contemporary scholarship and debate.

Louis Bouyer's Memoirs (III): the Great Catastrophe

In the previous two installments treating The Memoirs of Louis Bouyer: From Youth and Conversion to Vatican II, the Liturgical Reform, and After, I noted some of Bouyer's wide-ranging publications, and then his contacts with some of the leading lights of Orthodoxy, especially in France after the 1917 Russian revolution. In this final installment, let us turn our attention to Bouyer's involvement with and analysis of the Second Vatican Council and in particular the disastrous liturgical "reforms" carried on in its name in the later 1960s.

Bouyer was a participant in both the council and the commission charged with reforming the liturgy. Before that, he was appointed to the commission for reforming seminaries, and he does not leave his readers guessing as to what he thought of his fellow commissioners: "a mass of worthless idiots," "mere blockheads obstinately clinging to their own limitations." They do and did nothing to prevent what Bouyer saw as the already longstanding "collapse of ecclesiastical culture in the seminaries."

Bouyer notes the debates about Latin at the council: often, he maintains, those most obstinate in defending Latin were the least capable of speaking it; and those who had facility in Latin did not see why it had to be imposed always and everywhere on everyone.

One of the major goals of Vatican II was the achievement of Christian unity. But every time that "ecumenism" comes up in Bouyer's memoirs, the unease is palpable. Though the reasons for his unease are not always clear, at one point his characteristic bluntness reasserts itself by quoting the Anglo-Catholic Eric Mascall's denunciation of "'Alice in Wonderland Ecumenism': Everybody has won and all must have prizes!" Bouyer objects to the fact that in the rush to unity, significant and serious doctrinal disagreements are merely dismissed as unimportant, "the important thing being to agree that one may behave or believe as he pleases."

In his various ecumenical activities over the years, Bouyer came into contact with other Orthodox figures after Lossky and Bulgakov (discussed in Part II of this series) had passed from the scene, including Metropolitan Nikodim of Leningrad and Metropolitan Georges Khodr of Lebanon. Strikingly, he would also encounter "Bishop Kiril of Viborg" who, in 2009, was elected Patriarch of Moscow. Bouyer would go on to serve from 1979 on the official commission for dialogue between the Catholic and Orthodox Church.

Bouyer was skeptical about how much official dialogues could achieve. What he thought more important and more efficacious was "a common effort of purification, of understanding, and especially of humble faithfulness to what is authentic." Bouyer despaired that few 20th-century churchmen, both Catholic and Orthodox, understood the need for, and were themselves capable of offering, such purification and reconciliation. Of the few he thought capable of doing this, he mentions Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras, Metropolitan Nikodim again, Popes John XXIII and Paul VI, and Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky.

Let us turn at last to Bouyer's experience with the commission reforming the Latin liturgy ostensibly in the name, and with the purported mandate, of Vatican II. He had the expertise to be able to take part in this effort, but equally the intelligence to see that what the others were trying to pull off was in fact a giant swindle--manipulating data to accord with pre-arranged conclusions and decisions; manipulating people to make them do what others had chosen for them to do. And the worst culprit here, the greatest fraudster and master manipulator was, of course, Annibale Bugnini, whose The Reform of the Liturgy (1948-1975) attempts to offer a grand self-justification. Bugnini's machinations eventually caught up with him and he was exiled from Rome in disgrace but his deeply damaging actions remain in place to the present day--and defended as recently as 2007 in the altogether absurd and risible book of Piero Marini, A Challenging Reform: Realizing the Vision of the Liturgical Renewal. (I cannot improve on George Rutler's take-down of this book.)

Bugnini was adept at playing off members of the commission against one another and especially playing the commission off against the rather hapless Pope Paul VI. But we must not be too hasty to blame Paul for employing Bugnini, who had in fact begun his destructive reign at the behest of Pope Pius XII in the 1940s. Thus we see--once more--the lie that Pius was some towering figure of unflinching and unchanging "tradition." Pius brought in major liturgical revisions on his own initiative, and many of these were of provenance and rationale as dubious as those promulgated after Vatican II. (As a side note, it remains more than curious to me that Pope Paul VI has yet to be the object of a major scholarly biography. The only English biography I know of is Paul VI: The First Modern Pope by the deceased journalist Peter Hebblethwaite--an entertaining read, as I recall from many years ago now, but clearly prejudiced and not very intellectually rigorous. Pius XII, for his part, has been often studied but almost always entirely in connection with what he did, or did not, do during World War II; few focus on his liturgical views as far as I know.)

Bouyer begins his reflections on his experience by noting that "I should not like to be too harsh on this commission's labors," not least because it had some decent people on it with both intelligence and genuine pastoral solicitude. But all that was lost as the commission was hijacked by the "mealy-mouthed scoundrel" Bugnini, "a man as bereft of culture as he was of basic honesty." The "deplorable conditions" under which the commission operated were a direct result of "the despicable Bugnini" who "cobbled together" a "slapdash Mass" (the infamous Eucharistic Prayer 2 in the Roman Missal, the most widely used prayer today, was hastily jerry-rigged in the space of one evening over plates of pasta in a Roman trattoria the night before Bugnini wanted to send everything in). Bugnini knew he had to proceed with such indecent haste in order to rush all the changes through before people wisened up and got to the pope to stop Bugnini.

Bugnini was not alone in some of his most damaging activities but instead aided by a "trio of maniacs" whom Bouyer does not name. The alterations to the calendar, the suppression of ancient feasts and the octaves of others, the yanking around of saints' days, and the destruction of the ante-Lenten periods of preparation (to say nothing of fasting, which Bouyer does not treat) were all raced through the commission by the simple expedient of telling members "but the pope wills it!" and telling the pope "the commission wants this" and forbidding the other commissioners from talking independently to the pope. Both were kept in the dark and the "subterfuge Bugnini used" proved successful.

Only at the end did the mask slip and some of the game be given away. Thus Bouyer records his own private conversation with Pope Paul VI in which an incredulous pope asks why the commission did certain things, only to be staggered when Bouyer tells him that "'simply because Bugnini had assured us that you absolutely wished it.' His reaction was instantaneous: 'Can this be? He told me himself that you were unanimous on this!'"

It remains a great mystery--and on this Bouyer says nothing--as to why the pope, seeing that he had been played for a fool, and knowing the commission led by a wicked and manipulative man of massive mendacity, did not send that swine Bugnini off a Gadarene cliff sooner, and disband the commission or at the very least reject its findings and start over. Why would he have allowed all this to go through once the game was up? Why not start over? Why push forward reforms about which he himself, for many reasons, was justifiably and understandably ambivalent? What was he afraid of?

It seems, according to the speculations of such historians as Eamon Duffy (see his Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes) that Paul VI was himself a deeply conflicted man about many things, and so perhaps for all his unease about the changes nonetheless felt that some of them were good and he could sincerely appreciate and promote them. Perhaps too he was aware of the propensity for divisions to increase and be magnified in the Church after past councils, and he would not block liturgical changes if doing so would run the risk of schism (which, ironically, came precisely because he did push the reforms through!).

I think, in the end, that any assessment of Paul's pontificate must never collapse this irreconcilable tension: his great achievement (let it be counted unto him as righteousness!) in holding the line in Humanae Vitae set alongside his great failure in pushing through liturgical reforms whose results, as Ratzinger famously said, could only be catastrophic.

In concluding this series, I should say some things I forgot to mention at the outset: the book is superbly presented in its translation and editing. The footnotes are wonderful and almost lavish in their details, but never excessive; enough detail is given about more obscure references or persons to make their role in Bouyer's life plain without overwhelming the reader. The translation reads very nicely too, and this is no small achievement given Bouyer's cosmopolitan learning and lyrical, sometimes lapidary French. In sum, this is an important book and it has been given the translation and editing commensurate with its status.

Concluded. 

Louis Bouyer's Memoirs (II): the Christian East

When we were last gathered together, I mentioned some of the works of Louis Bouyer I had read over the years and gave a bit of context for his Memoirs of Louis Bouyer: From Youth and Conversion to Vatican II, the Liturgical Reform, and After, to which we now turn in some detail.

It is striking how quickly the Christian East immediately factors into Bouyer's life in ways I had either not known about or else forgotten. Already in the early pages of the Preface to this English edition (much of whose material, we are told in a footnote, is borrowed from the "Postface" in Jean Duchesne's French original published in Paris in 2014 by Cerf), we are told of Bouyer's friendship with the great Orthodox theologian Sergius Bulgakov (about whom more later), and in particular his even deeper relationship with "A Monk of the Eastern Church," that is, Lev Gillet.

Gillet is of course a fascinating figure himself, and Peter Galadza and I collaborated on editing his correspondence with Met. Andrey Sheptytsky in a book also published in Paris in 2009. In Bouyer's long move out of Protestantism, it seems that for a time he contemplated becoming Orthodox, and thus we are told that from Gillet he received the sacraments of Chrismation, Confession, and the Eucharist at one point notwithstanding his doubts about doing so. He would continue to receive the Eucharist from Gillet, though with decreasing frequency and increasing worry about the propriety of what he was doing.

All this was, of course, during a period when such boundaries were much more strictly policed by most Catholics and Orthodox than they are today, at least on the Catholic side. As I have written on here and elsewhere several times, part of what I admire most about Gillet is precisely his almost impish (some would, of course, say impious) willingness deliberately to blur those boundaries in a recognition that the Catholic and Orthodox Church is at heart one, appearances and ideologies of division notwithstanding. Gillet began as a French Roman Catholic, became Eastern Catholic under Sheptytsky (to whom, for the rest of his life, even in Orthodoxy, he referred as "my spiritual father"), and then finally Orthodox. (See the winsome biography of him written by another equally fascinating figure, Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, Lev Gillet: A Monk of the Eastern Church.)

Gillet deploys all these arguments to work on Bouyer for a time, telling him that all Bouyer need do is believe the faith of the "undivided Church," the "faith of the Ecumenical Councils" in order to receive the sacraments from Gillet. Bouyer is suspicious of these arguments, but goes along for a time, later regretting that he doubted his doubts. He would eventually come to find Gillet's arguments a bridge too far.

Bouyer's journey thereafter would be more straightforward: he would be received into the Roman Catholic Church and go on to become one of her most prolific theologians. But during his more uncertain phase, when he encounters Gillet, Bouyer gets pulled into the interesting and messy inter- and intra-Orthodox squabbles of the inter-war period, many of them provoked by the divisions following on from the Bolshevik revolution.

What I found prescient about his comments on peoples and their projects from this period is how early and easily he sees right through the fraudulent attempt, especially in France, to gin up some kind of "hazy Occidental Orthodoxy," as he puts it, complete with "its dress-up costume clergy." As an historian, Bouyer knew too much to be taken in by such transparently tendentious projects as pretending there was a "Gallic Orthodox Church" in the first millennium or other such fantasies. That, however, has not stopped many later proponents from attempting to invent such things right down to our own day.

Though skeptical of some of Gillet's arguments, and aware of the problems in Orthodoxy, Bouyer in his Catholic period is not grudging when he comes to recognize the spiritual genius of the East precisely in not breaking or undermining the link between theology and spirituality, which Bouyer regards as so fundamental but so often weakened in the West. Here Bouyer explicitly cites the genius of Vladimir Lossky ("one of the most solid minds it has ever been granted me to come near to") in the modern period, and before him Sts. Symeon the New Theologian and St. Gregory Palamas.

The other figure of prominence singled out for high praise is Sergius Bulgakov, whom Bouyer calls "the unquestionable genius that he was--an intellectual genius above all, to be sure, but whose intellectualism was shot through with the most unquestionably Christian, if not Christic, religion." Here again, however, Bouyer knows too much and is aware of the controversy surrounding Bulgakov, to which he seems to refer off-handedly by noting "ill-exorcized gnosticism...in Bulgakov's and his group's synthesis."

Finally, the other Orthodox figure who comes in for more critical discussion late in the book is Aleksei Khomyakov and his ecclesiology, especially his notion of sobornost found in The Orthodox Doctrine On the Church. Bouyer notes that he early on found Khomyakov's vision compelling but his experience at Vatican II disabused him of this positive assesment.

In addition to his knowledge of the major contemporaries of Orthodoxy in France, Bouyer seems to have known everybody who was anybody in Catholicism, having met many of the most prominent theologians of the 20th century, but also not a few Anglican and Orthodox hierarchs and of course several popes, including John XXIII who asked Bouyer to be involved in one of the commissions at Vatican II (the one on seminaries, headed by Cardinal Pizzardo, of whose idiocy Bouyer has not a doubt, as he makes clear in comments almost as scathing as Congar's).

But it was in taking on the assignments given him by Pope Paul VI that Bouyer would find himself pulled into what was the Great Swindle and the Great Catastrophe of 20th-century Catholicism: the vandalistic "reform" of the Latin liturgy. In the next installment, we shall see what Bouyer thought of that.

To be continued. 

Louis Bouyer's Memoirs (I)

As I have noted several times on here in the past, I am an inveterate and unapologetic reader of diaries, the blunter the better. In this absurd and ghastly age, where offense and outrage are now manufactured in ever finer gradations by brutish bourgeois brats sniveling about "micro-aggressions" and claiming to find "racism," "trans-phobia," and "misogyny" (etc., etc., etc.) under every fig leaf, it seems that private diaries are increasingly the only place where one may speak frankly without being hounded to death by mobs of juveniles whom a better age would have brought up to shut up if not to grow up.

In recent years, we have seen the publication of the diaries and memoirs of a number of prominent Catholic and Orthodox scholars of the last century, as I noted at the link. Now we have another set freshly translated into English just this year: The Memoirs of Louis Bouyer: From Youth and Conversion to Vatican II, the Liturgical Reform, and After (Angelico Press, 2015), 272pp.

I read these with great interest, and to my surprise there was a lot more here than I expected. By that I mean two things: first, the bulk of the text is devoted to his early life, including his Protestant period; Vatican II and its liturgically disastrous aftermath are only treated relatively briefly towards the end. Bouyer seems to have known just about everybody of prominence in Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox circles, and he is not at all shy about name-dropping.

Second, I had forgotten--if I ever knew--just how prolific Bouyer was. I had of course read some of his works, including The Church of God: Body of Christ and Temple of the Holy Spirit. And for a time, Bouyer's historical works, including Orthodox Spirituality and Protestant and Anglican Spirituality, The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism, and in particular his Introduction to Spirituality seemed to be on every Roman Catholic theology and seminary curriculum and you couldn't escape them even if you wanted to.

His study of the founder of the Oratory and the "apostle of Rome," St Philip Neri: A Portrait was a valuable little book when I was myself exploring a vocation with the Oratorians--though I have to confess that as far as biographies of Neri are concerned, I preferred Philip Neri: The Fire of Joy by the German Paul Türks. It was translated by the priest-scholar Daniel Utrecht of the Toronto Oratory, who introduced me to the book in the late 90s when I spent several wonderful weeks at the Toronto Oratory, which I have elsewhere described as a rare and shining jewel in the Catholic Church in Canada.

When I was working on a very early draft of the dissertation which became Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity, I had a chapter that at one point included a lengthy discussion of the founder of the modern Oratory in the Anglophone world, John Henry Newman, about whom Bouyer wrote such studies as Newman: His Life and Spirituality that I found valuable if a bit dated (it came out in 1958). Since the late 50s, Newman scholarship has of course exploded and there are so many books on him now that I cannot possibly describe them all here. (Start with Ian Ker's absolutely splendid and unrivaled John Henry Newman: A Biography if you are at a loss for where to begin.)

Perhaps more than any other work--and the above are only the ones I have read, and only a fraction of what Bouyer wrote--I found his Life and Liturgy a useful book in bridging the gap between, well, liturgy and life. It's one thing to read pious phrases from the Fathers about the home being a "domestic Church," but it's another to see someone think through some of the implications of what that means. Bouyer was the first to help me do that, but there were other books that helped to bridge that gap, including, on the Orthodox side, Lev Gillet's  Year of Grace of the Lord; on the Catholic side, Joseph Ratzinger's valuable early little study, The Feast of Faith: Approaches to a Theology of the Liturgy; and then, for greater history and deeper philosophy and anthropology, Catherine Pickstock's After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy, a book I still regard as the most important and damning, but neglected, work of liturgical criticism in English of what happened to the Latin liturgy after Vatican II. The fact that her criticism of the structural defects in the new Mass has never been adequately answered so far as I have seen says to me that all the defenders of Latin liturgical reform are quite simply incapable of answering it and thus have conceded the correctness of her views here, with which I am entirely in agreement.

On the question of liturgical reform, I forget where I first read an oft-cited quotation attributed to Bouyer who apparently already within just a year or two of the new Pauline missal (the "Novus Ordo") had concluded that "we must speak plainly: there is practically no liturgy worthy of the name today in the Catholic Church." That struck me as a touch polemical at the time and perhaps just a tad too sweeping a generalization.

But, having now read The Memoirs of Louis Bouyer: From Youth and Conversion to Vatican II, the Liturgical Reform, and After, I see that blunt and sweeping criticisms are Bouyer's stock in trade. And, of course, Bouyer's blunt assessment would also be seconded by others, most notably Ratzinger in his Milestones: Memoirs, 1927-1977. Late in the book, Bouyer reflects on his first encounters with Ratzinger at the council, and praises the German's "clearness of views, his wide knowledge, his intellectual courage as well as his penetrating judgment....[and] his humor, which was so full of kindness; he was, however, nobody's fool" (p.226).

I will give further examples of Bouyer's blunt analysis, and discuss the early chapters in more detail, in subsequent entries.

To be continued.