never detailed a full and explicit doctrine of the Eucharist in contrast to
the traditionalist one. That was neither his method nor his goal: it was
not his goal, for that was to deprive traditionalist recourse to the ancient
Church, not the proffering of any formal creed; it was not his method,
for to articulate a Eucharistic dogma would ultimately open him up to
the same tactics as he had used on the Catholics.^93 The arguments
Jewel used mirror ones Martyr used in the Dialogue, but actually twisted
them. Martyr’s syllogism works for it seeks to show that the power
that produced the miracles that accompanied Peter, et al., had no
bearing upon the question of Christ’s presence and his human nature.^94
As John Rastell pointed out in his Confutation, Jewel’s argument
about the ascension of Christ (Martyr’s point against Brenz) is
without effect in addressing Catholic Eucharistic thought, as substance
does not have place, a property that only obtains of accidents.^95 As a
consequence, the substance of Christ’s body may be anywhere and
everywhere.
Jewel’s arguments with Harding in the context of the Challenge
Sermon, and as Harding would emphasize in his later writings, primarily
revolved around not merely Jewel’s denial of the traditional Catholic
understanding of the Eucharist, but how this denial was effected. For all
the energy that Jewel must have put into the controversy, there is little
that commends itself to a student wondering just what Jewel would have
asserted were his own beliefs, not merely about the Eucharist, but about
the authority of the ancient Church. At times he would use the Church
Fathers approvingly; at other times he would cite them, admitting that
he did not necessarily believe what they had said, but used them
nonetheless because they bolstered his arguments.^96
Harding saw that many of Jewel’s categories in the Challenge Sermon
were so many deflections that dealt with few substantial issues; they
instead focused on matters which, according to the Catholics, having
found their origins in Patristic understandings, only fully developed in the
medieval period. One of these was the use of the canopy. The canopy, or
baldachin, was a covering or ‘veil’ widely used in English churches for the
THE STRUGGLE FOR THE ELIZABETHAN CHURCH 77
theological and personal assumptions led him astray on this point.
(^93) For Jewel’s Eucharistic theology see Chapter Three and the discussion regarding both
the question of consecration in Cranmer’s Prayer Book Communion service, and how
union is effected in Communion.
(^94) Donnelly, Dialogue, pp. 140–42.
(^95) Rastell,Confutation, f. 101a.
(^96) This can be seen in the above use of the story that St Bartholomew walked through a
door, as reported by one Abdias, bishop of Babylon (Works, I, p. 483). Jewel on the one
hand calls it ‘but a vain fable’ and then writes ‘and yet it may not easily be denied. For ...
Abdias ... as Master Harding supposeth, saw Christ in the flesh’.