| dc.description.abstract | The aim of this thesis is to describe a contemporary site for eucharistic celebration. In
the Introduction, we begin with the premise that a common context for understanding
the liturgy, and in particular the Eucharist, as the public language of the Roman
Catholic Church, has been lost. In order to restore the practice of the Eucharist, it is
therefore necessary to restore a common context in relation to which the Eucharist
makes sense. In Chapter One, we begin this task by exploring the history of the
relationship between the Eucharist and the Church with the help of an important
recent book by P.J. FitzPatrick, In Breaking ofBread: The Eucharist and Ritual. We
look in particular at how the form of the Eucharist is shaped by the centralization and
clericalization of power in the Church. In Chapters Two and Three, we take up
FitzPatrick's suggestion that the way forward for our understanding of the Eucharist
is to describe it as a ritual. What this accomplishes is to situate us within the arena of
human action. In these two chapters, we explore what it means to say that the world
is linguistically-structured. Language, as we discover, is not simply a tool for naming
objects, rather, it embodies patterns of meaning and relationship which form us at a
pre-conscious, bodily level. Likewise, the purpose of the liturgy as the Church's
public language is not to pass on consciously-held beliefs or knowledge, but to give
Christians a particular, pre-conscious bodily formation. Describing the Eucharist as a
ritual is not sufficient, because the Church's rituals express whatever kind of life the
Church is actually leading. Unless the Church is living the Gospel in practice, her
rituals will not provide an adequate Christian formation.
In Chapter Four, we situate this discourse in relation to the discourses of modernity
and post-modemity. With the breakdown of the unified social vision of the Middle
Ages, we find, in modernity, the hope that differences can be united through a
common rationality. In post-modemity, we discover the extent to which our
rationality is itself contingent - tied to our formation at particular locations in space
and time. This awareness of the limits of what we say creates a crisis in human
action. We can find no basis for common action which does not appear to eliminate
differences, and we cannot act individually without being aware that what we do and
say is put in question by the position of others. It is within this context that the
theologian John Milbank proposes a return to Christianity as a metanarrative. Only
Christianity, he argues, provides an account of difference which is not simply the
occasion of violence. Milbank demonstrates how secular rationality, which
presupposes the inevitability of violence, arises out of an heretical departure from
Christian orthodoxy. The problem with Milbank, however, is that he creates a
dichotomy between the Church and the secular which gives the impression that there
is such a thing as the Christian Church uncorrupted by collusion with the secular
order. Milbank creates what the philosopher Gillian Rose calls a "holy middle", a
sociality outside time and space, and therefore, not a real beginning for action. Rose,
by contrast, is concerned in her idea of the broken middle of modernity with the
problem of how to act, aware of the limits which always already constrain us, but not
paralyzed by them. We explore Rose's metaphor of modernity in Chapter Six.
In the Conclusion, we return to the question of the Eucharist to show how Rose's
broken middle of modernity locates for us a contemporary site for eucharistic
celebration. The revolution which Christ embodies has to do with his relationship to
those who fall outside the Law. Jesus teaches that love is the medium of this
encounter. This love, however, demands the kind of risk which Gillian Rose
describes, because it involves a movement outward from our present categories of
understanding towards a greater vision which we cannot yet articulate. The poor are
those who fall outside our present vision of the social whole. It is only from the
perspective of the poor, therefore, that the Church can celebrate the Eucharist as the
sacrament of Christ's real presence in the world. | en |
