Treasures From the Storeroom: Medieval Religion and the Eucharist

Treasures From the Storeroom: Medieval Religion and the Eucharist. By Gary Macy. Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 1999. xxi + 201 pp. $24.95 (paper).

In his introduction to this collection of essays, Gary Macy notes: "these articles provide an important backdrop" to a plenary address that he gave at the 1997 meeting of the Catholic Theological Society of America. That address, included as the final essay in this volume, occasioned a minor theological dustup in Commonweal magazine, not least because Macy's address, along with other addresses at the meeting, seemed to call into question traditional Roman Catholic teaching on the Eucharist. Macy offers the essays in this volume as "a fuller presentation of the research underpinning that presentation" (p. xi).

This is not the only reason Macy gives for collecting these essays, but it is perhaps the most pertinent. For while the essays present interesting information and competent scholarship on medieval eucharistic theology and practice, it is impossible to read them without taking into account current Roman Catholic disputes over the Eucharist, the sacraments in general, and, ultimately, the nature of the Church and its claims to be the transmitter of divine revelation. Macy's historical scholarship is at the service of a plea for greater tolerance of theological diversity. As he puts it in the introduction, "the central theological point made again and again" is that "the true tradition of the Church is diversity" (p. xiv). Macy rejects the narrowing down of the past to a normative tradition and celebrates the diversity of theology in the Middle Ages. Specifically, Macy attacks the normative status of the eucharistic theology of Aquinas by showing that, in his "metaphysical" concerns about transubstantiation, Aquinas was a minority figure, and that a "symbolic" and subjective approach to the Eucharist was in fact the more common approach in the Middle Ages. The lesson to be drawn is that the Middle Ages tolerated a diversity of opinions on Eucharistic presence, and thus there is no reason why the Roman Catholic Church today cannot do the same.

I would raise two points about this collection. First, in some of the texts that he presents, Macy simply does not convincingly make his case that they support the position he ascribes to them. For example, in an essay describing various commentaries on the Eucharist from the early scholastic period, he makes much of the fact that many of them say that what ultimately matters is "spiritual eating" rather than "sacramental eating" and claims that this reflects an emphasis "on psychology rather than metaphysics" (p. 150). However, Aquinas himself holds this position and does not see it entailing a rejection of metaphysical reflection on the Eucharist. Indeed, the very opposition between "metaphysics" and "psychology" is misleadingly anachronistic. One begins to suspect that all this has much more to do with current debates than with medieval ones.

Second, Macy's ultimate target seems to be the very notion of theological normativity. In theology, the most that one can say is that "the language of faith has provided a series of metaphors for God by which Christians have lived and died in hope that these metaphors have a referent" (p. 13). Macy explicitly leaves unresolved "the question of how one judges past (or present) language about God to be truly about God" (p. 13). This sounds at first like commendable academic humility, until one realizes that this is not simply an historian recognizing his limits qua historian, but rather seems to be a limit imposed upon the believer qua believer. However, if this is the case, one is left asking what justification there can be for any piece of religious language except, "Well, it works for me." And if that is all the justification one can offer for the language of faith, there seems little reason to live, much less die, by it.

F. C. BAUERSCHMIDT Loyola University Chicago Chicago, Illinois

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