reservation of the host. Canopies were erected over altars and from them
a pyx would be suspended, often in the shape of a dove, as the one alluded
to by Harding in a quote from St Basil, in which the consecrated host was
kept for the purpose of adoration. Harding had little to say about the
matter for he happily contended that the canopy was not an issue of any
great moment, but rather the reservation of the elements, for which the
canopy served.^97 Jewel sought by calling into question the accidents
surrounding the practice of reservation to call into question the practice
itself, and from thence to attack the notion of the real presence of Christ’s
body and blood in the elements. By this approach Jewel laid the
groundwork for his notion of worthy reception, that is, Christ was present
spiritually to those who in faith received him. To maintain this stance Jewel
not only had to vitiate the dogma of the real presence and all its forms
medieval or otherwise,^98 but the Patristic antecedents of it as well.
The canopy provided an easy target, for since it was a means later
developed for the veneration of the consecrated, reserved elements, Jewel
could attack it as an aberration, and thereby call into question the
doctrine on which it was predicated. But even within the eight pages of
arguments that comprise Jewel’s chapter on the Canopy (following the
commonplace of controversial literature, Jewel reprints the text from
Harding which he wished to refute), Harding still demonstrated that the
Fathers were not so Protestant as the bishop of Salisbury might have
hoped.^99 But in whatever respect they were not caused Jewel no real
alarm, for if they were not Protestant, neither were they popish. This is
the message of Jewel’s citing the liturgies of the Greek Church by way of
example, played out in both the Challenge Sermon, and in Jewel’s
Defense of the Apology, where Jewel cited the liturgies of St James,
St John Chrysostom, St Basil and the Armenian liturgy, all of which
testify that the Latin rite is not the sole claimant to antiquity and
78 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
(^97) ‘If Jewel would in plain terms deny the reservation and keeping of the blessed
sacrament, for which purpose the pix and canopy served in the churches of England ...’
quoted in Jewel, Works,II, p. 553.
(^98) Jewel in his letters, sermons and treatises virulently attacked both transubstantiation
and the Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation, that the presence of Christ existed in,
under, and through the sacramental elements. Cf. A Treatise of the Sacraments, Jewel,
Works, II, pp. 1098–139, and the varied and often weak response to Harding, noted above,
‘Of Real Presence’, Works, I, 445–79.
(^99) Harding readily admits that there is no mention of the canopy in the early Church,
but does not admit what Jewel hoped thereby to deny, the reservation of the sacrament in
a visible place at the altar. Jewel for his part cannot deny the quotation from
Amphilochius’s biography of Basil. For Harding’s quote of St Basil, in Jewel, Works, II, pp.
559–60. Also Harding, An Answere to Maister Ivelles Chalenge(Antwerpe, 1565. Reprint,
Scolar Press, 1975) pp. 155 verso–158 recto. The Scolar Press edition of Harding is part of
a larger collection of English recusant literature.
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