Thomas Cranmer's Doctrine of the Eucharist Also by Peter Newman Brooks

THOMAS CRANMER'S DOCTRINE OF THE EUCHARIST ALSO BY PETER NEWMAN BROOKS CHRISTIAN SPIRITUALITY Essays in Honour of Gordon Rupp (editor and contrihutor) CRANMER IN CONTEXT REFORMATION PRINCIPLE AND PRACTICE Essays in Honour of A. G. Dickens (editor and contrihutor) SEVEN-HEADED LUTHER Essays in Commemoration of a Quincentenary, 1483-1983 (editor and contrihutor) *THOMAS CRANMER'S DOCTRINE OF THE EUCHARIST An Essay in Historical Development "'Also published by Palgrave Macmillan THOMAS CRANMER'S DOCTRINE OF THE EUCHARIST An Essay in Historical Development SECOND EDITION BY PETER NEWMAN BROOKS Fellow 01 Robinson College, Cambridge FOREWORD BY PATRICK COLLINSON, FBA Regius Professor 01 Modem History University 01 Cambridge M © Peter Newman Brooks 1965, 1992 Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1st edition 1992978-0-333-54541-6 Foreword © Macmillan Academic and Professional Ltd 1965, 1991 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this pub/ication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provision of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act Ig8S, or under the terms of any Iicence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W 1P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be Iiable to eriminal proseeution and civil claims for damages. First edition 1965 Second edition 1992 Published by MACMILLAN ACADEMIC AND PROFESSIONAL I.TD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world Typeset by Footnote Graphics, Warminster, Wiltshire British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Brooks, Peter Newman 1931- Thomas Cranmer's doctrine of the Eucharist. - -znd cd. I. Eueharist I. Tide 264.36 ISBN 978-1-349-12165-6 ISBN 978-1-349-12163-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-12163-2 MATRI PATRIQUE OCTOGENARIIS Contents PAGE FOREWORD to the Second Edition by Patrick Collinson viii FOREWORD to the First Edition by Gordon Rupp XVll AUTHOR'S NOTF. on the Second Edition XlX PREFACE xx ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xxv LIST ÖF ABBREVIATIONS XXVll INTRODUCTION CHAPTER I Phase One: From Roman Transubstantiation to a Scriptural Notion ofthe Real Presence 3 II Phase Two: From 'Real' to 'True' Presence 38 III The Continental Background 61 IV Thomas Cranmer's Mature Concept of 'True' Presence Doctrine 72 V Pastoral Practice: The Book 01 Common Prayer 1 12 APPENDIX: An English 'Real' Presence Tract ofthe mid-sixteenth century 163 BIBLIOGRAPHlCAL NOTE 173 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SECONDARY SOURCES 176 INDEX 181 vii Foreword to the Second Edition BY PATRICK COLLINSON, F.B.A. Regius Professor of Modern History, Universiry of Cambridge It was in those still insular 'sixties, a quarter of a eentury ago, that Peter Newman Brooks first offered to take Arehbishop Cranmer back into the European eommon market of Reformation Studies in the original edition of his 'Essay in Historieal Development', Thomas Cranmer's Doc trine of the Eucharist. In no more than a hundred pages, this seminal little book signalIed the passing of a long epoeh in the study of the liturgical theology of the reformed Chureh of England and of the mind of its prineipal arehiteet. By no means dusty in scholarship - Professor Sir Henry Chad wiek has been heard to speak of the 'Rolls-Royee minds' deployed by some of the nineteenth-eentury exegetes of the Anglican formularies - this epoeh had been marked, and I think, marred, by a prejudiee against 'eontinental' as a prefix to this or that theological proposition or platform whieh is reminiseent ofthe no longer justified taste on ce feIt for eontinental trains and lavatories. In 1958 in The Mass and the English Reformers Clifford Dugmore wrote of the liturgieal work of sixteenth-eentury English divines as rooted in 'the aneient tradition of the Chureh', an enter prise quite distinet from that of 'the newly-emerged Protes- viii Foreword to the Second Edition lX tant churches ofthe continent'. 'Their whole approach was different' - which was to say better, more 'catholic', wh ether in upper- or lower-case. Professor Dugmore went on to explain that he considered himself to be redressing the balance of emphasis on the Continental and native English springs of reform. In his view altogether too much had been made of the continent. 'One is so tired of reading that everything said by Cranmer or Ridley, Frith or Latimer or Jewel, was derived from Luther, Zwingli or Calvin, as if they had no theological training, no knowledge of the Schoolmen or the Fathers, and were utterly incapable of thinking for themselves.' But it was that very sense of a Continental-English dichotomy, suggesting the need for a balance to be struck, wh ich was at fault; as was the inference that the Continental Refor mers had cut themselves off from patristic and scholastic sources of inspiration which remained only accessible to their English counterparts. Continuity rather than radical Protestant discontinuity was the hallmark of sixteenth century Anglicanism, and apparently of Anglicanism alone. Dugmore called the sacramental doctrine for which the English Reformers, and especially Ridley and Cranmer, contended a 'non-papist Catholic doctrine of the Euchar ist'. This was a doctrine of the middle way, derived more or less independently from an ancient Augustinian tradition predating 'papal Catholicism'. The source of that was a divergent Ambrosian tradition which, having passed through the Aristotelian sea-change of translation into scholastic categories, emerged in the high Middle Ages as transubstantiation, a doctrine (or, in Cranmer's perception, x Foreword to the Second Edition 'opinion') at the heart of the Mass understood as a constantly-renewed sacrifice of Christ's immolated body, really present on the altar. It was the realist-symbolist understanding of the Eucharist, anti-transubstantiationist, which came to be enshrined in Cranmer's Prayer Book, profoundly affecting the whole English-speaking world. Thus far Professor Dugmore. One 'continental' influence in particular had threatened to strangle the emergent Anglican tradition at birth, according to a succession of commentators. This was 'Zwinglianism', supposedly a eucharistie theology so nega tively ultra-protestant as to be not unfairly called a doctrine of 'the real absence'. While there have been distin guished exceptions, notably the work ofDr. C. C. Richard son, Anglophone scholarship (not excluding Dom Gregory Dix in The Shape 0/ the Liturgy, 1945) has made something of a caricature of the Swiss strand in protestant eucharistie theology. The pressure exerted by 'Zwinglianism' was held to have been so insidious and potent, especially at the time of the second, 1552 recension of the Prayer Book, that it was necessary for Anglican scholars to engage in some special and rather tortuous pleading in order to defend their Church against the charge, fundamental to Pope Leo XIII's discovery of 1896 that its orders were null and void, that the Church of England was not Catholic in any proper sense. It was said that while the 1552 Book involved a more drastic departure from the traditional liturgical sequence than 1549 it was the work ofpoliticians and only marginally involved qualified churchmen like Cranmer. Or that Cran mer, while suffering some damage to his liturgical sensibili- Foreword to the Second Edition XI ties, worked defensively and with some success to preserve a solid non-papal 'catholic' core even in 1552, and conse quently in the later vers ions of 1559 and 1662. This was the germ of an Anglicanism which continued to differ in fundamentals from the reformed churches ofthe Continent, and especially from 'Zwinglianism'. We owe much to the late Gordon Rupp, Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the University of Cambridge, for restoring a truer, because historically well-grounded, perception of how sixteenth-century English theology re lated to Protestantism, and indeed for putting English Reformation theology into its proper category as Protestant theology. For Rupp, as it happens a Methodist rather than an Anglican, was one of that always select band of English Reformation scholars who have asked, 'What do they know of England, who only England know?' He knew about Continental schools ofthought at first hand and was neither affronted by caricatures nor scared of the German lan guage. Thus in some of his Studies in the Making of the English Protestant Tradition ( 1947) Rupp demonstrated that the English, indeed in a proper sense Anglican, doctrine of salvation was not different from those Lutheran paradoxes which were the doctrinal heart of the Protestant Reformation, as the classical commentators on the Thirty Nine Articles had contended, but made a lucid and balanced exposition of essentially Lutheran teaching, especially in the Homilies of Salvation, of Faith, and of Good Works. These were statements which Thomas Cranmer hirnself composed and which form to this day a kind of authorized appendix to the Articles. XlI Foreword to the Second Edition So the tide deeds of the reformed Church of England were protestant. Wh at of the fabric and furnishings of the edifice to which the tide deeds belong? What, in particular, of Professor Dugmore's 'non-papist Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist' and its liturgical expression in the Prayer Book? Cranmer's doughty and wily enemy Bishop Gardiner commented on the Homilies: 'Whoever has admitted the doctrine of "only faith" in justification is compelled to reject the sacrament of the Eucharist in the way we profess it.' Lex credendi, lex orandi. 'The way we profess it' was the tradition al Mass according to the Sarum Use, which Gar diner professed to believe was still implied, ifnot enshrined, in Cranmer's cautiously composed 1549 service. That was special pleading, to be taken with a pinch of salt, and this Cranmer in his Answer proceeded to apply.

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