Filonenko O. Eucharistic anthropology: critical analysis

The thesis, for the first time on a national scale in theological and philosophical studies,presents eucharistic anthropology as a new branch of philosophical and theological anthropology, which studies practices of gratitude as recognition of the Other and paths of human dignity after dehumanizing practices of the 20th century anthropological catastrophe. The urgency of eucharistic anthropology is defined by the context of the return of Reality, Subject and the Sacred after their elimination from the philosophical field of modern and postmodern thought; this return is described as the presence of the Other. Reflections on the spatial dimension of this presence, which is determined by the ethical demand of E. Levinas and aesthetical proposal of J.-L. Marion, provides eucharistic anthropology with a conceptual framework. In the center of examination is the space of the encounter with the Other (with God as well as with man), which outlines the paths of human personification through the work of gratitude. The author describes the interaction between the philosophical and the theological contexts of eucharistic anthropology by addressing the Orthodox religious and philosophical tradition (S. Frank, Rev. P. Florensky, metropolitan Anthony Bloom, among others). The tools of eucharistic anthropology aim at describing man and the path of his upbringing (pedagogical anthropology) in contemporary culture of presence outside modern and postmodern languages; those tools are oriented at the possibilities of theoasethetics, theodrama and theologics, which have been developed in the theological proposal of H. U. von Balthasar. The author develops an anthropological language sensitive towards theology and pedagogics, which lets one describe ways of overcoming the postideological crisis through practices of gratitude; the protagonist of the presence culture is represented as a hymnographer, a story-teller, and a gardener. Eucharistic anthropology offers one to consider philosophy and theology of witnessing in the Ukrainian context, in which the theological disciplinary matrix is currently taking shape after a long period of the philosophy of suspicion domination.