the divine (he cited both Hilary of Poitiers and Gregory of Nyssa at
length on this point), a union effected by participation in the glorified life
of Christ, coming to the conclusion that
except this bodye of owrs, had a lyvelie bodye, by participation of
which, it should be payred: it were impossible, that it should ryse
agayne, when it were once by death cast downe. Not bycause, God
of his absolute power, were not able to have done it, which
withouwt the incarnation of his blessed soun myght have saved the
world, but the order most wyse and agreable once beyng sett owt,
by almightye God, that owr sowle by his spirite, owr body by his
flesh, should be properlye preserved: now, in this ordre and
wisedome, he, which taketh away from Christians a bodely reall
presence, he taketh awaye the proper and chiefest hope of the
resurrection of bodyes.^54For the Catholics the Christian’s participation in the sacramental life of
the Church brought about this union with Christ. Thus, to remove the
physical presence of Christ’s deified human nature from the sacraments
was to remove Christ from salvation. In his reply to Harding concerning
the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, Jewel listed four ways in
which Christ is corporally, really and substantially present in the
believer: by his nativity (that is, the Incarnation), by faith, by baptism
and by the Eucharist.^55 To explain how Christ and the Christian are
united Jewel employed the language of instrumentality, that Christ is in
the Christian naturally by means of the sacraments, but that does not
entail ‘that Christ is naturally in the sacrament’.^56 Jewel meanders into
truncated disquisitions on the Incarnation in which he posits Christ as
some form of ideal or archetype in his human nature, and that by the
Incarnation he has brought all of human nature into a union with the
divine nature, even noting at one point that Christ effected this union by
the one person of the Incarnation:
that wonderful conjunction and knitting that is between Christ and
us, whereby either is in other, he in us, and we in him; and that even
in one person in such sort as he is neither in angels, nor in the
archangels, nor in any other power in the heaven.^57Jewel then treated several quotations from the Fathers and came to a
rather bold conclusion on what it means that Christ ‘dwelleth in our
bodies; and not by way of imagination, or by figure or fantasy; but
really, naturally, substantially, fleshly, and indeed’:
THE CATHOLIC REACTION TO JEWEL 141
(^54) Rastell,Confutation,ff. 143b–44a. Doubtless Rastell’s nominalism would take both
Hilary and Gregory aback.
(^55) Jewel,Works, I, pp. 472 ff.
(^56) Ibid., p. 473.
(^57) Ibid., p. 474.