This study of the history of mystical body of Christ theology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is very well done and a fine resource for college libraries, with applicability for graduate courses, especially doctoral courses. I add a disclaimer here: as the author points out in his acknowledgments, I provided feedback to him as he developed the manuscript.

Although the phrase “mystical body of Christ” has generally been taken as an ecclesiological term referring to the church, this book analyzes what the author calls three “streams” of mystical body of Christ theology: German, Roman, and French. It presents a convincing case that in the French stream the theology associated with this phrase constituted a worldview grounded especially in liturgy and not merely an account of the church. In the German stream, as found in the work of Karl Adam, for example, the unity of Christ's mystical body is grounded in racial unity. Though never himself a Nazi, Adam's work had all too much affinity with Nazi race rhetoric about the German Volk. In the Roman stream, typified by Sebastian Tromp, the unity of Christ's mystical body is grounded in the hierarchical structure of the Roman Catholic Church. In the French stream, found in Émile Mersch, Lambert Beauduin, and others, mystical body thinking “pervaded theology” (7), and for Beauduin in particular it was an “all-encompassing vision” that drove his concern for connecting liturgy and social activism (38–39). Deeply influenced by Beauduin, the American Virgil Michel saw in this theology a way to integrate liturgical and social action. In Michel's own words, “The liturgy is … the life of the mystical body of Christ” (73; Michel's emphasis), but, again in Michel's words, “that which the liturgy offers should be translated into action” (76).

The author ably demonstrates how mystical body of Christ theology receded in the post–World War II era, in part because of the sour aftertaste of elements of the German stream, in part because advances in biblical scholarship raised questions about the grounding of the phrase in the New Testament, and, in America at least, because postwar nationalism and prosperity dulled the edge of the social and economic critique associated with mystical body theology. Yet this theology persisted in the work of Henri de Lubac, above all in his 1944 Corpus Mysticum and his 1953 Splendor of the Church. De Lubac's analysis shows how the phrase corpus verum applied originally to the church, while corpus mysticum applied to the Blessed Sacrament. Under pressure from the crisis in eucharistic thinking provoked by the dialectic approach of Berengar of Tours, theologians emphasized the truth and reality of the Real Presence, and corpus verum began to be applied to the sacrament, and corpus mysticum to the church. Gabrielli summarizes the import of this switch: “It is not simply a flip-flop of the terms ‘mystical’ and ‘true’ that occurs with Berengar but rather a new division between mystical, sacramental, and true that had not really existed before the twelfth century” (142). Like others in the French stream, de Lubac had a vision of solidarity grounded in sacramental practice.

Louis-Marie Chauvet continues this effort to retain the richness of symbolic thinking by emphasizing an intrinsic connection between sacramental celebration and ethical conduct outside of formal worship. Indeed, for Chauvet, Christian identity as such is a reality mediated through the three poles of Scripture, sacrament, and ethics. Drawing on the rites themselves, Chauvet notes the invocations of the Holy Spirit to counterbalance the potential Christomonism of mystical body theology. By engaging the thought of Martin Heidegger, Jacques Lacan, Emmaneul Levinas, and others, Chauvet's work constitutes in the words of the author a “renewed investigation” of the French stream of mystical body theology (182).

This book demonstrates fine command of sacramental theology and of the wider vision of sacramentality characteristic of the French stream of mystical body theology (as opposed to the German and Roman streams). Just as important, this book is a fine historical investigation of the subject. Footnotes abound, and there is always a clear and vital sense of which thinkers have been in conversation with which other thinkers. This book advances the conversation in sacramental theology.