Results from an extensive relativistic many-body analysis utilizing a reali
stic effective QCD Hamiltonian are presented for the meson spectrum. A comp
arative numerical study of the BCS, Tamm-Dancoff (TDA), and RPA treatments
provides new, significant insight into the condensate structure of the vacu
um, the chiral symmetry governance of the pion, and the meson spin, orbital
, and flavor mass splitting contributions. In contrast to a previous glueba
ll application, substantial quantitative differences are computed between T
DA and RPA for the light quark sector with the pion emerging as a Goldstone
boson only in the RPA.