Thesis advisor: John Baldovin / Traditionally, Church teaching has examined the Eucharist in metaphysical terms (‘what is it?’: substance, presence, and causality) and its liturgical celebration as a sacrifice (a re-presentation of Christ’s self-sacrifice on the cross). Prompted by Vatican II’s exhortation to the faithful for ‘full, conscious, active participation’ in the liturgy (cf. Sacrosanctum Concilium 14, 27, 30), this dissertation re-interprets the Eucharistic liturgy and participants’ role in it through the root metaphor of gift: a gift of desire, which impacts participants’ desires, relationships, and selfhood. It proposes a ‘relational approach’ to the Eucharist by asking: What is going on ‘relationally’ in the Eucharistic celebration? How might the Eucharist impact our desire, relations, identity? How does or ought the liturgy of the Eucharist concern relationships between the participants and others? What specifically does the Church celebrate in its liturgy of the Eucharist? Louis-Marie Chauvet’s ‘symbolic exchange’ model of the Eucharistic Prayer, when put in conversation with both Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology of gift and René Girard’s mimetic theory, yields an understanding of the Eucharist as God’s gracious and scandalous gift of divine desire. The gift is gracious as an embodied expression of divine love, and also scandalous as it challenges recipients’ autonomy with a radical call to charity demanding an existential response. This dissertation upholds Christ’s self-gift as the ultimate decision to love in a perfect reversal of sacrificial violence, which Christians are called to imitate. It emphasizes the liturgy’s structure as a dynamic event of being encountered by God’s gift of himself and reception of this gift through particular responses. This understanding aims to re-appropriate traditional Catholic teaching on the Eucharist in more contemporary terms. It aims to explain how ‘fully conscious and active participation’ in the sacred mysteries occurs, that liturgy and life may be more richly interrelated. / Thesis (STD) — Boston College, 2019. / Submitted to: Boston College. School of Theology and Ministry. / Discipline: Sacred Theology.

The Roman Catholic and the Orthodox Churches, as well as other Christian communities, are faced with the challenges of postmodern thought, which calls into question some of the foundational theological and philosophical constructs through which Christianity has articulated the mystery of Eucharistic presence. Louis-Marie Chauvet, Alexander Schmemann and John Zizioulas, the interlocutors presented in this dissertation, recognize that for centuries, Eucharistic theology has been shaped within a metaphysical/Scholastic framework which confines, in many respects, the experiential/relational aspects of the divine/human dynamic as mediated in the Eucharistic celebration. An appeal for a paradigmatic shift is made evident in their respective works based on a renewed understanding of the various strata of the symbolic order and the paradigm of relationality as being the primary contexts within which the people of God celebrate his presence. This shift is necessary in order to correct the problematic of a causal, mechanistic, reductionist, overly-metaphysical, dualist framework as well as a static onto-theological construct, to which Eucharistic theology has been subjected to for centuries. There is a call for a re-thinking of Eucharistic presence in light of a theology which is rooted in the mutually supportive principles of lex orandi est lex credendi and of a Patristic theological landscape. The methodology of this dissertation is comparative and dialogical in nature in which each theologian articulates the need for a scholarship of Eucharistic presence to be established on new terrain and a new trajectory which will prove to be more appropriate in expressing the mystery of presence as it is grounded and expressed within the Apostolic faith and practice.<br>By appealing to and implementing the theologies here presented, we can develop a renewed vision of Eucharistic presence that may provide a common ground for an ecumenical enterprise, reaffirming the most essential component of faith: God's presence among humanity and in creation. This ecumenical enterprise must not remain within the realm of the abstract or theoretical, but needs to culminate in a true union of the churches born of a common unity in faith and eventual Eucharistic practice. In addition, these three theologians' contributions will continue to provide contemporary and future scholars in sacramental theology with an innovative approach to further articulate the mystery of presence through media which speak to the contemporary world while remaining rooted in antiquity. / McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts; / Theology; / PhD; / Dissertation;

The period of tumultuous religious reformation during which George Herbert lived demanded of people a strict adherence to the paradigmatic structures that prescribed the ways in which public displays of religious conviction were to be manifested. The freedom, indeed the necessity, to doubt is taken for granted by the modern reader, but for Herbert it was a matter of spiritual life and death. As country parson, he diligently labored to guide his parishioners, administer the sacraments, and exemplify the “right path.” This persona—reinforced by necessarily performative, faith-demonstrating actions—is continually destabilized by the experience of doubt, which leads Herbert to address his own persistent despair at the absence of God through poetry. His masterful use of the structural and thematic patterns of the Psalms in many of the poems of The Temple draws on the rich tradition of lament in contrast to the prescriptive, ideological agendas of the Book of Common Prayer and the Common Lectionary which privilege faith. The poems demonstrate an extensive knowledge of the epistemological foundations and history of both official Church doctrine and of medieval mystical thought and become a tool for exploring the paradoxes of human existence. His philosophical and rhetorical engagement with the Christological and ecclesiastical theology specific to Dionysian mysticism demonstrates the intensity of Herbert’s preoccupation with Divine absence and his near obsessive search for the ideal apophatic presence, that silent, knowing-unknowing that defines oneness with God. Nowhere are Herbert’s existential dilemmas more evident than in Memoriae Matris Sacrum, a sequence of poems written immediately following the death of his beloved mother, which reveals an inner life of the poet that his more controlled poetic voice of The Temple often conceals. These elegiac poems, written in Latin and Greek, show the poet as a “mourning child” and lay bare his most intimate fears about the constancy of his own faith and the uncertain terms of Christian death and resurrection embodied in the sacred ritual of the Eucharist. The poetic closure often ascribed to Herbert’s poems in fact disguises the nature of spiritual and psychological dilemmas which remain for Herbert persistent and unresolved.