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Among the more puzzling and interminable questions regarding the sacrament of the Eucharist is the enigma of Christ’s choice of bread and wine as the “sacramental matter” that perpetuates his corporeal presence on earth. Though undoubtedly part of the answer lies in the Last Supper’s context either proximate to or precisely within the Jewish Passover meal, this or any other historical evidence that could be garnered must remain suggestive, partial, and largely circumstantial. Like any historical event, it remains utterly a part of the realm of the contingent, of the achingly determinate and settled past that now gives only fragmentary clues as to the conscious mental acts that performed them. Why, then, Christ would have chosen these elements has been subject not so much to debate but rather to various heuristic suggestions that range from exploiting the typological significance of these elements to noting the anthropological fittingness of having both a solid food to nourish the body as well as drink to enliven the soul, and everything in between. To appropriate this theologoumenon for our purposes here- that is, of finding the place of Hans Urs von Balthasar within the history of Eucharistic theology- we can note that this history can be schematically divided with regards to how various theologians have reflected one or another of the various properties of these two objects of dominical decision.
Without creating procrustean epochs of eucharistic reflection, there certainly have been times when sacramental theology has tended to reflect the solidity or even desiccation of bread: a theology aimed at precision, comprehensiveness (within a limited frame of reference), and perspicacity. At other times it has been protean, reproducing the unruliness of the liquid state, the inebriation and excesses induced by wine: a theology of praise, heedless of fine distinctions, equally aimed at comprehensiveness, but with a breadth lacking any limitations or strictures. The former is clearly found in the great scholastics, in which the particularity of the sacramental economy is analyzed in rigorous detail and distinguished from all else, and the latter is found, though differently, in both the patristic era and in the dominant sacramental theologians of the twentieth century, in which the realm of the “sacramental” has been so greatly expanded as to include all else within it.
The overall tenor of Balthasar’s own Eucharistic theology, to which this book is dedicated, must be understood by his attempts to navigate the great benefits as well as the dangers of the regnant eucharistic theologies represented by the two sacramental elements. In Balthasar’s mind, neither tendency is given exclusive rights to sacramental discourse, as each, without the balance of the other, tends towards pernicious excesses. Balthasar’s eucharistic theology is uniquely marked by its simultaneous commitment to both the bread of scholastic precision and order and the wine of mystical flights and the overflowing of sacramentality. He is, at least regarding the scope and intention of his eucharistic theology based on our concocted division (and certainly not with regards to denying concomitance or being liturgically insistent), a supremely utraquist theologian. One could say, at the risk of reducing our chosen metaphor into something overly precious, that Balthasar’s eucharistic theology is a theology of intinction: of the traditional soaked in the poetic, of the scholastic saturated by the monastic.
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