translate Hilary’s initial term, sacramentumthrough his later use of one
of its Greek equivalents, mysterium,and giving it an English connotation
based on a rendering of the Greek, and not the Latin, a rendering
incommensurate with its Patristic sense.^61 He did not justify why he did
this, but it did free him from admitting that the doctrine of real presence
was taught in the first 600 years of the Church’s existence.
Jewel’s notions of the Incarnation as deployed against Harding,
Nicholas Sander claimed, had completely eviscerated the relevance of the
Incarnation for salvation, as Jewel’s faulty thinking on the Eucharistic
presence of Christ demonstrated. Sander treated all the minutia of
Jewel’s arguments, contradicting his use of the Fathers, but also
attacking his theological imprecision. He was a bit unfair to Jewel in not
seeing Jewel’s use of nativity as a synecdoche for the Incarnation, though
his condemnation of how Jewel thought the Incarnation effected the
Christian’s union with Christ certainly placed Sander on the side of the
doctrine of the Fathers. Jewel’s giving to Christ’s human nature an
archetypical structure by his nativity, Sander noted, rendered Jewel’s
other three means of union with Christ superfluous. If Christ’s human
nature is identified with all of humanity’s by the fact of his Incarnation,
then why is there a need for baptism? and so on:
[for] we may well say, that Christ doth not only not dwell in every
mans body in his nativitie, but also that he dwelleth not in their
bodies or soules, who either did not partake of his flesh at al by
faith, or els did unworthely partake therof either by Baptism, or by
the Eucharist, or any other way.^62Sander saw in Jewel an ambiguous use of theological terms, a use that
led to contradictions, especially if Jewel wished to argue that Christ was
united to the believer, basing this argument on the same language used
by the Catholics when they taught that Christ was ‘in’ the sacrament of
the altar. Sander is aware that Jewel did not give the same meanings to
his terms, but nonetheless, his employment of the terms would entail
inconsistency:
you defend that Christes body may not be in many places at once.
which doutless you meane of his naturall body. and his body is by
no meanes more natural then by the nativity thereof. But you say144 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
(^61) See the two articles in Encyclopedia of the Early Church, ‘Sacraments’, pp. 749–51,
and ‘Sacramentum’, p. 751. Produced by the Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum, edited
by Angelo Di Berardino. trans. Adrian Walford (New York: Oxford University Press,
1992). Hilary, who had been exiled from Gaul to Asia Minor during the Arian controversy,
would have been well acquainted with the Greek term for the sacraments,
, and
thus Jewel’s imputation of the alternative meaning is fanciful at best, disingenuous in the
least, and betrays his cause, regardless.
(^62) Sander, Supper, f. 388b.
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