Review

Guides to the Perplexing

The Memoirs of Louis Bouyer: From Youth and Conversion to Vatican II, the Liturgical Reform, and After
J. Pepino, trans.
French ed., Éditions du Cerf, 2014;
English trans., Angelico Press, 2015
(272 pages, $19.95, paperback)

Louis Bouyer: Memoirs
J. E. Nash, trans. and annot.
Ignatius Press, 2015
(304 pages, $18.95, paperback)

reviewed by S. M. Hutchens

The practical difference between these two concurrently published English-language editions of Bouyer's Mémoires is the number and length of the annotations. That of Angelico Press is very heavily footnoted, bearing the notes of both the French editor and the English translator, while the Ignatius Press edition is more lightly annotated by its translator. Those knowledgeable of modern European culture and the intellectual world of twentieth-century Catholicism may prefer the Ignatius edition, others that of Angelico Press.

Memoirs, while autobiographical, are not quite autobiography, but imply a different sort of recollective discipline, being written in finer print, as it were, and often with a more intimate readership in mind. The assistance of a biography for companion reading is often desirable, especially when the memorialist is as complex, polymathic, and active as Louis Bouyer (1913–2004), who here compresses an account of his astoundingly productive life into 300-odd pages. While two short books on Bouyer's thought exist (by Jean Duchesne in the Penseurs Chrétiens series [Perpignan, 2011] and Davide Zordan [Cerf, 2008]), both in French, I can find no biography. Doubtless,
this situation will not persist for long.

Born to Protestant parents in Paris and trained at the Sorbonne and Strasbourg, Bouyer was a Lutheran pastor before his conversion to the French Oratory under the strong influence of Newman's writing. A wide-ranging theologian, actively involved in preparations for the Second Vatican Council, he is variously assessed within the Catholic Church. In the Forward to the Angelico Press edition, Peter Kwasniewski notes that many Catholics find him perplexing:

Part of the problem is surely that Fr. Bouyer, although he came across as rather avant-garde in preconciliar years, ended up looking extremely conservative as he protested with increasing stridency against the depressing postconciliar auto-demolition of the Church. His honesty in assessing both the damage and the motivations . . . was surely not destined to win him a favored place at the table of public opinion or a memorial from friends grateful for his criticism. (p. 1)

Distancing from Both Sides

In these memoirs and in books like The Decomposition of Catholicism (1969) and Religieux et Clercs Contre Dieu (1975), Bouyer indicates that his distancing by both the conservative and progressive ascendancies of the Catholic world was frequently accompanied by the charge that in the depths of his Roman chest beat a very imperfectly converted heart, one far too interested in the Bible, a well-catechized laity, and liturgical renewal that returned to the living primitive sources rather than what actually happened after Vatican II—a proliferation of the shabby, the incompetent, and the ephemeral.

His emphases bothered the progressives because the idea of the Bible as the irreplaceable central stream of Christian tradition was as obnoxious to them as it was to their counterparts among Protestant liberals. As for the traditionalists, Bouyer discovers in them enough resistance to releasing the Bible to the people and involving them in the life of the Church to confirm every Protestant suspicion from Tyndale forward on that account. He tended to regard them as pampered, stuffy, insular, and self-congratulating religious aristocrats, as mere conservatives every bit as damaging to the life of the Church as the leaven of the progressives.

These considerations should mark Bouyer as a person of interest to many Touchstone readers. For Protestants especially I would recommend reading his Memoirs, as obscure as they may be in some respects, and perhaps several other of his books, before embarking on the unhappy voyage of The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism (1956)—to this reviewer's mind a mixture of shrewd and accurate analysis and the mistake, made by as many Protestants as Catholics, of finding a Protestant "spirit" at the beginning and end of the analytical road. •