5
Erasmian Humanism and
the Elizabethan Hermeneutics
of the Eucharist
Torrance Kirby
INTRODUCTIONOne of the key‘forms of conversion’that contributed substantially to the
intellectual transformation of Europe and its worlds during the early modern
period is the purposeful turn of humanist scholars and reforming theologians
alike towards the Forms themselves. I refer to the conscious, indeed fervent,
embrace of the Platonic epistemology of illumination exemplified by Erasmian
humanist reform. Underpinning many early modern forms of conversion is a
conversion of the deepest assumptions of the theory of cognition itself—how
do we know what we know? And in the sixteenth century, as I hope to
demonstrate, the application of this epistemological revolution is of especially
decisive significance in the hermeneutics of the sacraments.
The central purpose of this chapter is essentially twofold:first, to consider
broadly the revolutionary import of Erasmus’s humanistic theory of know-
ledge, and secondly, to explore certain aspects of its consequences by looking
at the major reformulation of the doctrine of sacramental presence undertaken
by certain English Protestant reformers later in the sixteenth century. To this
purpose I propose to begin with a brief look at Erasmus’s humanist reform of
epistemology as laid out in hisEnchiridion militis Christiani, the so-called
‘Manual of the Christian Knight’, and then follow up with a somewhat more
extended discussion of John Jewel’s and Richard Hooker’s application of the
assumptions implicit in this newly Reformed theory of knowledge to their
radically revisionist interpretation of the relationship between sacramentalres
andres significata,‘sign’and the‘thing signified’, in the context of the Eucharist.
The overall goal is to assess the linkage between Renaissance humanist epis-
temology and Reformed Protestant hermeneutics of the sacrament.