the godly prince and the right of regional churches, while little can be
drawn from his writings that will give us the shape of his theology. He
had no long explications on the sacraments as did Luther, Calvin, Martyr
and Cranmer; no running dialogues on the bondage of the will; nor did
he have any positive program for the reform of the Church. Jewel’s was
a church beholden to its monarch, centered more around rite and order,
than around any finely articulated set of doctrines: Jewel died before the
united front of both Commons and clergy were able to force the question
of even something so minimally doctrinal as the Thirty-nine Articles as
normative for the faith of England. Both its critics and its apologists saw
in England’s polity a doctrinally bereft church.
Whether this was his intent, Jewel, by rearranging canonical norms as
regards piety, rite, authority and polity, had made the prince a new
standard of doctrine largely commensurate with St Vincent of Lerin’s
canonquod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est. By
destroying the notion of a unity among the Fathers, and valorizing a
creed of the lowest common denominator, he has made what is believed
by all rather narrowly circumscribed, but not so limited a parameter that
he cannot get other things in, such as justification by faith alone. So what
he denies to the papists with one hand he gives to the Church of England
with the other. Yet he does this by how he had effected for England the
first of Vincent’s two canons, for the authority of quod ubiquehe has
stripped from the emperor who had held it as a universal prerogative and
given it to the prince. Though this necessarily raises the question of how
the emperors held the imperium in the first place if it was the authority
of the pope, acting as the mediator of heaven, that had been given to
them? Nonetheless, the prince now held this imperium and as such
possessedquod ubique. This goes hand-in-glove with quod semper, for
according to Jewel, it had always been the emperor, and not the
Apostolic See that, while perhaps not the definer of doctrine, was still its
guardian. Jewel’s prince, as shall be seen in Chapter Four, had lordship
over the subjects’ consciences, for by fiatthe prince had the power to
make the corrupt clean and the befouled pure. Jewel does limit all of the
prince’s prerogatives to the Word of God, but even then, the prince
possessed the final guardianship, if indeed not magisterial authority over
what Scripture proclaimed.
Jewel spent his career as an Elizabethan cleric largely arguing for the
merits of his communion against the edifice of traditional Catholicism.
Jewel’s Church hardly possessed the historical doctrinal pedigree his
antagonists did, and his most effective weapon was to cut this out of the
debate, thereby making tradition not a positive tool in the formulation
of dogma, but a negative one. The extant works he left of his 11 years
as Elizabeth’s dutiful servant attest to this. What is not there is any well-
lily
(lily)
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