Edward J. Kilmartin - The Eucharist in the West: History and Theology

Edward J. Kilmartin, S.J., Professor Ordinarius of liturgical theology at the Pontificio Istituto Orientale, died in Boston, Massachusetts on June 16, 1994.

Most of the text was on the hard drive of his laptop computer. Some gaps could be filled in from the set of backup diskettes he carefully maintained. What emerged was the draft of a book in eleven chapters of diverse length. Although conceptually complete, the book was, technically and stylistically, in very rough condition. It was filled with typographical errors, stylistic inconsistencies, and numerous inexact or garbled references. It was also generously sprinkled with passages that could be deciphered only with great effort. But shining through I recognized an exciting statement which, properly edited, could become one of the most important books on the Eucharist to appear in the twentieth century. My high estimation of the value of this book has been amply confirmed when, over the past three and one-half years, I have presented this project, or a part of it, on twelve different occasions to eight different groups, patristic, liturgical, and theological, in the United states and in Europe. Upon completion of this editing, and after publication of whatever else of publishable value can be found in Kilmartins Nachla, all his papers along with the essential record of my editing will be deposited in the Burns Library (archives) of Boston College.

I have devoted most of a sabbatical year (19961997) to this task. The first major task has been stylistic. Frequent instances of hasty composition and inconsistent style had to be smoothed out. In addition, numerous passages and sentences had to be decompressed in order to make Kilmartins meaning comfortably accessible. This will be no surprise to readers already familiar with Kilmartins writings. Once something was clear in his own mind, he tended to move on quickly to the next point, often inattentive to the fact that his readers would still be struggling to grasp what went before. This was compounded by the fact that Kilmartins thought ranged broadly across the biblical, patristic, historical, theological (both scholastic and modern), and liturgical disciplines. Not many readers can fly comfortably with him across all these disciplines. In the course of my various presentations and discussions of this material, I became deeply aware of the need to decompress Kilmartins prose.

Decompression, however, does not mean altering or significantly adding to what Kilmartin wrote. This book is written in Kilmartins voice, not mine. In the few instances where I was not sure that my decompressing and clarifying was precisely according to Kilmartins mind, I have indicated this by the use of brackets and my initials [RJD].

The second major editorial task has been in the documentation. Since Kilmartin was not physically able to check and verify his sources, there were scoresperhaps hundredsof instances of inexact or incomplete references and some instances of badly garbled references. In the course of this years work, and with the assistance of the superb library of the Philosophisch-theologische Hochschule Sankt Georgen, Frankfurt am Main, I have been able to verify, and in many cases make more exact, all but one of Kilmartins references to primary sources and secondary literature. However, the documentation had not only to be verified; it also had to be brought into the footnotes. In most cases Kilmartin had provided only the bare reference. In order to make the book more useful, I not only verified the sources and secondary literature; I also studied them enough to bring into the footnotes a sufficient selection of the texts and key secondary literature to enable careful scholars to verify for themselves the validity of Kilmartins analyses. The material gathered in the footnotes, therefore, while faithfully following Kilmartins often cryptic directions, and very rarely adding something he did not specifically point to [and these cases always editorially indicated] represent largely the work of the editor.

At one point in chapter ten, Kilmartin refers the reader to observations made on the subject of the methodological approach to the theology of the Eucharist contained in the introduction to this book. What follows in this foreword, therefore, is my attempt, as editor, to fill this gap.

First of all, is there a central vision, are there some dominant hermeneutical principles that guide Kilmartin in his work? The force and, indeed, the bluntness of many of his analyses and judgments lead one to assume that he must have had some central, guiding vision, or at least some clear sense of how things should be or must be. If we take this book manuscript, his final work, as our source, three figures stand out as foundational pillars of his method: (1) the Italian Jesuit liturgical scholar Cesare Giraudo, (2) the Irish theologian Brian McNamara, S.J. (and behind him Lonergan [implicitly] and Aquinas), and (3) Kilmartin himself.

(1) When painting with his broad brush, Kilmartin frequently insisted that the major liturgical theological task before us is the reintegration of lex orandi in a proper balance with lex credendi as a privileged source of theology, and that the achievement of this integration will be the work of the third theological millennium. This terminology and this vision are from Giraudo. The frequency of Kilmartins references to Giraudos Eucaristia per la chiesa suggest that the opening methodological chapter of that book, From a Present Static Theology to a Recovery of a Dynamic Theology, is a key source for Kilmartins historical and liturgical-theological method. In addition, Kilmartin seems to owe much to Giraudo for his conviction about the basically bipartite internal structure of the classical Eucharistic Prayers of both East and West, and that those prayers, thus structured, provide a critically central source for the theology of the Eucharist.

(2) Brian McNamara, a systematic theologian, provides Kilmartin with the terminology and conceptuality of higher perspectives. The search for a higher perspective from which to systematize more adequately the varied and often seemingly conflicting data from the different sources of liturgical theology is a central and recurring theme in Kilmartins journey toward that better, i.e., more authentically systematic theology of the liturgy and of the Eucharist which he predicts will be the achievement of the third theological millennium. McNamara acknowledges his debt to the Canadian theologian Bernard J. F. Lonergan. Like Lonergan, McNamara saw himself as continuing the work of Aquinas in seeking a higher intelligibility. I have found no indication that Kilmartin saw himself as a follower of Lonergan. If he had so seen himself, he surely would have referred, not just to some of Lonergans earlier works,