apostolicity.^100 Since this is so, why cannot Cranmer or the English
Church produce their own rite?
Jewel’s proffering the question of individuum vagum, a logical
distinction dealing with indifferent individuals and second intentions,
but applied by some late medieval theologians (Jewel cited the
nominalist Robert Holcot) to hocofhoc est corpus meum, can be seen
in the same light. Harding spent little time on the matter, for how did
scholastic meanderings substantially touch the Faith? Harding asserted
against Jewel’s point that Catholic piety had always professed that ‘in
this sacrament, after consecration, is the very body of Christ, and that
upon credit of his own words, Hoc est corpus meum’.^101 Harding
denounced what he took for the unlearned musings of Luther, Zwingli,
Calvin, Cranmer and Martyr. In response Jewel then provided a whole
litany of Catholic theologians who had made differing comments on the
words under question, individuum vagumbeing only one of their various
explanations. Jewel lays out the cacophony to attack the notion that
Rome had a unified teaching on the question of the real presence, even
though the whole matter was in fact whether the concept of individuum
vagumwas Patristic in its origin. Harding thought the point not worth
treating; Jewel used it to attack the notion of the unity of the Catholic
Faith.^102
Likewise when Jewel condemned and attacked monasticism he sought
to eradicate certain things (manners of devotion and piety) that had been
asserted as canon (ut legem, credendi statuat lex orandi). But, it is not
simply a manner of arguing against monasticism based on the
redefinition of the term ‘religious’, or of condemning the piety built
around monasticism. The Reformation agenda as a whole called for
more than a correction of abuses, but a wholesale reconstruction of piety
and dogma, liturgy and structure. A Reformed monasticism would not
be a cure, as monasticism at bottom was part of the problem. Late
medieval piety had assumed an ubiquitous presence in the life of the laity,
not merely on institutional levels, but in a reification of the sacred in all
sectors of the mundane.^103 There was as well a commensurate saturation
of all areas of the transmundane, that is, the cult of the saints. Facile
THE STRUGGLE FOR THE ELIZABETHAN CHURCH 79
(^100) Jewel,Works, I, p. 154, and IV, p. 887.
(^101) Quoted in Jewel, Works, II, p. 787.
(^102) John Henry Newman treats at length Jewel’s arguments that the seeming breadth of
theological opinion in the Catholic Church dwarfed the differences among the Protestants.
Certain Difficulties felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching. Vol I. Lecture 10. (London,
1850).
(^103) Johann Huizinga gives the illustration of the mystic Henry Suso. ‘At table Suso eats
three-quarters of an apple in the name of the Trinity and the remaining quarter in
commemoration of “the love with which the heavenly Mother gave her tender child Jesus