This same stratagem spills over into Jewel’s equivocal use of sources.
When Jewel maintained that councils have greater authority than do
popes, and that the initial councils were all convened by the emperor, he
was quick to cite the most well-known of the conciliarists’ treatises,
Nicholas of Cusa’s De Concordantia Catholica and with it his smaller
tractDe presidentia.^118 Besides Cusanus, Jewel also quoted Pius II’s
Dialogues.With both of these, Jewel cited not only their works, but also
oddly their titles, Cardinal and Pope respectively: ‘Here specially to be
noted, that cardinal Cusanus saith [et cetera].’ Jewel somehow flagrantly
failed to mention that both of them when they wrote the respectively
quoted works, were Conciliarists looking for arguments for a conciliar
supremacy over the popes, at that time estranged from the papacy, and
that neither had yet the title by which Jewel would address them, titles
only obtained following their repudiation of Conciliarism.
Jewel’s use of tradition in his polemics surrounding the Challenge
Sermon, as either an authoritative norm or an heuristic prolegomenon,
follows no fixed pattern; he had no consistent canon in treating ancient
authorities. The patristic writings become a negative florilegium for
Jewel, a vast set of topoi and commonplaces whose only real, consistent
advantage is not as an authority, unless Jewel already agreed with them,
but as a hermeneutical via negativa: a means by which he can remove
any appeal to a uniform antiquity or ancient tradition that was itself a
canon for Christian dogmatics. The Catholic reaction and response to
Jewel’s Challenge will be treated in the next chapter, though two points
should be noted here, if only briefly. As can be seen, since Jewel
demanded evidence for Catholic theology he had no need to elaborate
any of his own, though what Jewel believed can be garnered, seemingly,
from what he wished his sources not to assert. But something more
occurred with Jewel. In his assertions about the ‘private mass’ and the
worship of images, Harding immediately replied that what Jewel
damned the Catholics for in fact did not obtain. Jewel refused to admit
certain distinctions fundamental to Catholic piety and theology; the one
on images shall stand here as exemplary. Harding quickly agreed with
Jewel that nowhere in the first 600 years of the history of the Church will
one find images set up in churches for worship, for images are not for
worship, but for veneration. Thus, since images were set up but not for
worship, Jewel’s point is irrelevant. Harding, instead of letting the point
end there does go on to argue the question (rather poorly as shall be
84 JOHN JEWEL AND THE ENGLISH NATIONAL CHURCH
(^118) Jewel,Works, IV, from De concordantia, pp. 922–23; and also from De presidentiae,
p. 1018, another of Cusanus’s conciliarist tracts. The editors of Jewel’s works have
confused the footnotes at this place, as they have a footnote 13, but no such footnote
appears in the text.
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