Why Modern Christians Need the Eucharist – Prof. Michael Dauphinais

The Thomistic Institute

Religion & Spirituality, Society & Culture, Philosophy, Christianity, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 873 Ratings

🗓️ 27 March 2026

⏱️ 53 minutes

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Summary

Prof. Michael Dauphinais contends that modern Christians, formed by empiricism, individualism, and a this‑worldly hope that easily turns to despair, especially need the Eucharist because it is the concrete, sacramental way Christ draws us into the Trinitarian communion for which we were created, making his paschal mystery present and reproducing his own filial relation to the Father in us.

This lecture was given on November 14th, 2025, at University of Oklahoma.

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About the Speakers:

Michael A. Dauphinais, Ph.D., serves as the Fr. Matthew Lamb Professor of Catholic Theology and the co-director of the Aquinas Center for Theological Renewal at Ave Maria University, Ave Maria, Florida. He has co-authored with Matthew Levering Knowing the Love of Christ: An Introduction to the Theology of Thomas Aquinas; Holy People, Holy Land: A Theological Introduction to the Bible; and The Wisdom of the Word: Biblical Answers to Ten Questions about Catholicism. He specializes in C.S. Lewis, the Bible, and St. Thomas Aquinas. He speaks frequently in both academic and popular settings, and particularly enjoys visiting Thomistic Institute student chapters. Dr. Dauphinais hosts The Catholic Theology Show podcast to help a wide audience discover the richness of coming to know and love God as he has revealed himself in Jesus Christ.

Keywords: Aquinas on the Eucharist, Creed and Sacraments, Gospel of John, Modernity and Empiricism, Paschal Mystery, Real Presence, Sacramental Communion, Trinitarian Self‑Gift, 1 Corinthians

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tumistic Institute podcast. Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square. The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Tumistic Institute chapters around the world. To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at
0:21.7	to mystic institute.org. So this basic question of what's a modern? And I highlight five
0:28.3	steps in what I think is the modern mentality. First, it's fundamentally shaped by empiricism,
0:35.5	nominalism. Those might be fancy terms, materialism, but
0:39.3	the basic ideas, empiricism means that we can only know what my senses perceive.
0:44.3	John Locke is one of the great empiricists and very influential on our modern approach to things and our political world.
0:53.3	Nominalism is the idea that there are no true natures in the world.
0:57.0	I only know individual things and I name them.
1:00.0	So I'm encountering a world of individual things through my senses,
1:03.0	and at the sense level, everything is in competition.
1:07.0	At the sense level, everything is in competition with everything else.
1:12.6	This also means that I'm going to trust in the modern project to use my rationality, my empirical rationality, to conquer the problems of man materially through politics and science.
1:28.3	Science, especially Francis Bacon, politics marks in everyone after.
1:33.3	We're going to somehow, there is conflict that's intrinsic to the world, but we can overcome it.
1:40.3	There's a hope then of an earthly future, and just as we get utopian novels, very quickly we fall into dystopian novels because we begin to despair rather quickly that this earthly future is attainable.
1:53.7	C.S. Lewis, in his weight of glory, would say that almost all of our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man
2:02.6	is to be found on this earth. He will actually speak of this as the myth of worldliness or
2:10.4	the enchantment of worldliness, this kind of spell that we're under where we just assume
2:15.2	that our genuine good is in this world and we need
2:18.0	to use rationality to achieve it. Now, the Christian story is a little different. Here we have
2:25.1	what I'm identifying as a five-fold pattern. Original communion with God, loss of communion due to
2:33.0	pride, restoration of that communion in Jesus Christ,
	...

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