Louis Bouyer

Louis Bouyer is a catholic Théologien French born with Paris the February 17th 1913 and dead the October 22nd 2004, also in Paris.

Biography

Born in a Protestant family, Louis Bouyer , after an arts degree in the Sorbonne, made theological studies with Protestant faculties of Paris, then of Strasbourg. It was ordered Pasteur Lutheran in 1936, then occupied the load of vicar of the parish Lutheran of the Trinity of Paris until the Second world war. In 1939, the study of the Christologie and Ecclésiologie of saint Athanase of Alexandria led Pasteur towards the Catholic church.

Received the Catholic church with the Abbey of Saint-Wandrille (Seine-Maritime) in 1944, it entered for the remainder of its life the congregation of the priests of the Oratoire. He was professor with the catholic Institut of Paris until in 1963 and taught then in England, Spain and with the the United States. In 1969, he wrote the book the decomposition of the Catholicism , which showed the difficulties liturgical and dogmatic that the Church lived.

Twice named by the pope at the International commission of theology, it was consulting with the council of the Vatican II for the liturgy, the Congregation for the Worship and the Secretariat for the unit of the Christians. It accepted in 1999 the price of the Cardinal-Grente of the French Academy for the whole of its work. He has died on October 22nd 2004 with Paris, victim for several years of the disease of Alzheimer. He was buried in the monastic cemetery of the Saint-Wandrille abbey.

Work

Eclectic theologist, it constituted throughout his life a masterly and sometimes polemical work on:

Central themes:

the mystery Pascal; The Eucharistie; the throne of Wisdom; The son eternal; The invisible father; The consolator;
Cosmos: the world and the glory of God;
Gnosis: The knowledge of God in the writing; Sophia or the World as a God; Participation in the review " Bible and life chrétienne"

Ecclesiology: the Church of God; The incarnation and the Church body of Christ .

the liturgy: the rite and the man, the life of the liturgy, Structures and liturgy .

Oecumenism: Of Protestantism to the Church , Newman its life its spirituality .

Lampoons: Religious and clerks against God .

Mystical: Life of saint Antoine by Athanase saint, contemplative meditation, the direction of the monastic life, female mystical Figures, spiritual knowledge at Marie of the incarnation, Introduction to the spiritual life, the spirituality of Cîteaux, the fourth Gospel .

Others: Around Érasme, the dignity and the vocation of the woman, apostolic writings of fathers, the direction of the sacerdotal life, Human or Christian, the spirituality of New Testament, the worship of the mother of God in the Catholic church, Holy Philippe Neri, Christian Initiation, Christian initiation .

Bouyer and Tolkien

Louis Bouyer was one of the first French readers of Tolkien and one of his friends:

" Tolkien indeed, with agreement with the best contemporary historians of the compared religions, like a Georges Dumézil or Mircea Eliade, was not satisfied to show the character, not only of perenniality but of essential truths, and for this reason imperishable, of the myths, where was projected the intuition first direction of the universe and human life. But, like best the exégètes (…) Tolkien is also of those which best included/understood and explained how the innovation of what Jewish and Christian believed to be the divine word could be expressed humanly only by endorsing, was this by transfiguring them, the images of the mythes" ( magic places of the legend of Graal , 1986).

Topicality of the thought of Louis Bouyer

Having undergone in his youth the infuence of Oscar Culmann and the school formal-history (Formgeschichtliche Method) in the interpretation of the Writings, Louis Bouyer was receptive with the scientific contributions as for the comprehension of the writings while refusing picturesque interpretations or symbolic systems distanciant itself with the text, until the relativism. He belongs for this reason to the Biblique current but with a lighting on and T (T) radition (S).

During and following the council the Vatican II, Louis Bouyer always maintained the relevance of a " third voie" during tearings between progressists and traditionalists thanks to the redécouverte of an alive Tradition paradoxically fully catholic and oecumenical. The theology of Louis Bouyer is marked in this by a historical and spiritual perception in unquestionable shift, but not in contradiction, with a Cartesian vision, legal or thomist of the faith.

It is today, for the Catholic church, one of the most complete theologists, fertile and recognized as well as Henri de Lubac, Jean Daniélou and Hans the USSR von Balthasar. The contact with the thought of Louis Bouyer is effective means of including/understanding the message with its nuances, its tensions and its coherence of the last pontiffs Jean-Paul II and Benoît XVI.

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