Sacrifice as Gift: Eucharist, Grace, and Contemplative Prayer in Maurice de La Taille. By MICHON M. MATTHIESEN.

Abstract

T he German Reformer Martin Luther declared his aim to ‘rid the Mass of all that reeked of sacrifice’, but as the Danish theologian Gustaf Aulén and Regin Prenter convincingly demonstrated in the mid-twentieth century, Luther himself realized that the notion of sacrifice was itself too rooted in eucharistic origins to be entirely expunged. In Roman Catholic circles the notion of eucharistic sacrifice was revisited by Maurice de La Taille in his major work Mysterium Fidei , first published in French in 1921. An English translation, minus the third book which has never been translated, was published in 1940 and received mixed reviews. In this timely study Matthiesen presents a critical and tellingly appreciative account of La Taille’s work. In nine chapters, divided into three parts, the author sets out to reappraise La Taille’s work not only in relation to his original critics and retractors, but also by bringing it into conversation with the work of contemporary sacramental theologians such as Louis-Marie Chauvet. Matthiesen amply demonstrates how the root metaphor of sacrifice is robustly persistent and cannot be discounted in any systematic treatment of the topic of eucharistic theology. Further, the notion is shown to be firmly anchored in eucharistic practice and devotion. Matthiesen’s distinctive contribution is to present La Taille’s untranslated work on the contemplative mode of eucharistic participation, a horizon of meaning that has been expounded by Godfried Cardinal Daneels in a collection of essays on liturgy in postmodernity (2003).