"It is bread and It is Christ's body too:" presence and sacrifice in the eucharistic theology of Jeremy Taylor
Barlow, Paul
(2019)
"It is bread and It is Christ's body too:" presence and sacrifice in the eucharistic theology of Jeremy Taylor.
PhD thesis, Dublin City University.
This thesis examines the eucharistic theology of Bishop Jeremy Taylor (1613 – 1667),
Bishop of Down and Connor. The introductory material surveys material written on
Taylor over the 20th Century and the second chapter then lays out the development of
eucharistic doctrine following the Reformation with a focus on the Church of England
in order to locate Taylor’s thought. Two chapters offer an analysis and exegesis of
Taylor’s important work The Real Presence and Spiritual of Christ in the Blessed
Sacrament Proved Against the Doctrine of Transubstantiation, including an
assessment of his understanding of transubstantiation. These are followed by a further
chapter investigating Taylor’s writing on the eucharist in other devotional and
apologetic works. Together this provides an assessment of Taylor’s understanding of
eucharistic presence, an evaluation of his term ‘spiritual presence’ and additionally an
exposition of his theology of eucharistic sacrifice. The analysis of Taylor’s writing
concludes with a chapter exploring his use of patristic material and the influence of
Platonism on his theology. Locating Taylor’s theology in the Augustinian framework
of sacraments as signs Taylor’s description of eucharistic presence is then
characterised using concepts from the 20th Century: transelementation, convaluation
and transelementation. The thesis shows how these concepts can help to express
Taylor’s thought by supplying new metaphysical lenses which were unavailable to
him, freeing his ideas from the Aristotelian concepts of substance and accidents which
dominated the Reformation era discussion of eucharistic presence. Taylor’s motif of
spiritual presence is then reimagined using these descriptions of eucharistic presence
to give a contemporary account of the eucharist.