arduas significant. Ascendit autem euiusq; signi pretium cum aestimatione rei cuius est signum. Ut si res sit magna, pretiosa, et amplifica, iam signum eius rei eo maius reputetur…. Sic panis & vinum amicitiae illus quo deus humano generi per filium suum reconciliatus est, symbola sunt, quae non aestimamus pro materiae oretuim sed iuxta significatae rei magnitudinem.[They signify sublime things. Now the value of every sign increases with the worth of the thing of which it is the sign, so that if the thing be great, precious, and sublime, its sign is, therefore, accounted the greater…. So the bread and wine are the symbols of that friendship by which God has been reconciled to the human race through his Son, and we value them not according to the price of the material but according to the greatness of the thing signified.]29
By amplifying the concept of referentiality in the Eucharist, Zwingli paradoxically foregrounds the sign qua sign—that is to say, in correlating the objective value of the sign to the thing it signifies, Zwingli also recognizes that a sign itself has an objective value. Indeed, the intrinsic value of the sign as a material object provides the means by which we comprehend the signified:
Visus cum panem videt ac calicem … Christum enim velut ante oculos conspicit, quem mens eius inflammata pulchritudine deperit. Tactus panem in manus sumit, qui iam nÕ panis sed Christus est significatione. Gustus Olfacts’q; & ipsi huc advocantur, ut odorent quam suavis sit dominus, quam’q; beatus sit qui in illo fidit.
[When the sight sees the bread and cup … it sees Christ, as it were, before the eyes, as the heart, kindled by His beauty, languishes for Him. The touch takes the bread into its hands—the bread which is no longer bread but Christ by representation. The taste and smell are brought in to scent the sweetness of the Lord and the happiness of his that trusteth in Him.]30
Though those opposed to Zwingli’s sacramental theology dismiss his ritual symbolary as “bare tokens,”31 Zwingli’s explication of the tropes of the Eucharist postulates the sign as crucial because it is the material object of encounter, because it must be confronted as the apprehensible term of a hermeneutic act distinct from but assistive to its content. His formulation, shifting from one model of interpretive event to another, from sensorily imperceptible corporeal change to figurative memorialism, asserts the matter of the bread and wine as objects for meaningful sensory engagement, an approach that recognizes the sign itself—in and beyond its referential function—as a legitimate site of sacramental participation.32
Zwingli’s contentions turn the attention of Reformation theologians upon the question of the precise manner in which a sign interacts with its content, and upon the phenomenon of signification generally; in one way or another, each of the developing strains of sacramental theology over the course of the sixteenth century responds to the Zwinglian perspective, and thereby engages in a debate about the significative qualities of materiality. A generation after Zwingli’s period of greatest productivity, John Calvin situated his own view of the sacrament against what he considered the errors of both Zurich and Rome, warning, “ne aut in extenuandis signis nimii, a suis mysteriis ea divellere, quibus quodammodo annexa sunt: aut in iisdem extollendis immedici, mysteria interim etiam ipsa nonnihil obscurare videamur” [neither let us be seen diminishing the signs overmuch by wresting them from the mysteries to which they are in some fashion connected; nor extolling them immoderately so as to obscure in some way the mysteries themselves]. As he defines his position against these perceived misformulations of the sacrament, Calvin reveals that his primary anxiety concerns, again, the status of the sacramental elements as signs. The Lord’s Supper, Calvin argues, offers a tangible symbol or seal of grace, which “rem illic signatam effert et exhibet” [offers and exhibits the reality there signified]. It is against the specter of Zwingli’s argument that Calvin commits himself most explicitly when he takes up the question of referentiality and metaphor, parsing out the immanent meaningfulness of the eucharistic signs in and of themselves. It is worth quoting Calvin’s rather lengthy articulation of the relationship between the “symbolum” of bread and the “res,” or real thing, it symbolizes:
Nec est, quod obiiciat quispiam figuratam esse loquutionem, qua signatae rei nomen signo deferatur. Fateor sane, fractionem panis symbolum esse, non rem ipsam. Verum hoc posito, a symboli tamen exhibitione rem ipsam exhiberi, rite colligemus …. Itaque si per fractionem panis Dominus corporis sui participationem vere repraesentat, minime dubium esse debet, quin vere praestet atque exhibeat. Atque omnino istaec piis tenenda regula est, ut quoties symbola vident a Domino instituta, illic rei signatae veritatem adesse certo cogitent ac sibi persuadeant. Quorsum enim corporis sui symbolum tibi Dominus in manum porrigat, nisi ut de vera eius participatione te certiorem faciat? Quodsi verum est, praeberi nobis signum visibile ad obsignandam invisibilis rei donationem, accepto corporis symbolo, non minus corpus etiam ipsum nobis dari certo confidamus.
[Nobody can object that this is a figurative expression by which the name of the thing signified is given to the sign. Indeed, I acknowledge the breaking of bread to be a symbol, not the thing itself. But having posted this, we nevertheless infer that by the showing of the symbol the thing itself is also shown…. Therefore, if through the breaking of bread the Lord represents the participation of his body, there ought not to be the slightest doubt that he truly presents and shows himself therein. And the pious ought by all means to hold to this rule, that whenever they see symbols appointed by the Lord, they should think and be persuaded that the truth of the thing signified is certainly present there. Why should the Lord put in your hand the symbol of his body, except to make certain his true participation in it? But if it is true, that to us a visible sign is offered to seal the gift of a thing invisible, when the symbol of the body has been received, let us trust with just such a certainty that the body itself is also given to us.]33
As Calvin takes care to distinguish the “figuratum” of Zwingli’s referential sacrament from the “symbolum” of a sacrament in which God is actually present, he lays out a ritual in which signs become mysteriously and efficaciously substantial. In asserting elsewhere that “the inward substance of the sacrament is annexed to the visible signs,” Calvin argues for a material encounter with the signs themselves because the reality they signify inheres in them.34 Where Zwingli argues that the sign demands to be addressed as a distinct and assistive reality, Calvin insists that the “symbolum” manifests the fullness of the “res.” This recognition leads Calvin into an argument that has aesthetic implications: “Hac ratione Augustinus sacramentum verbum visibile nuncupat: quod Dei promissiones velut in tabula depictas repraesentet, et sub aspectum graphice atque είϰονιϰώς expressas statuat” [For this reason Augustine calls a sacrament a visible word: because it represents the promises of God just as if they were depicted in a picture, and places beneath our gazes an icon, a verisimilitude masterfully expressed].35 Calvin’s comparison registers the proximity between the symbolic action of the sacrament and the symbolic action of art, a similarity that does not differentiate the literary from the pictorial. Indeed, by understanding both eucharistic and verbal signs as kinds of icon, Calvin foregrounds their physical valences, offering a conception of signs that maintains their visual presence, their perceptible materiality. From this perspective, the sacramental elements are experienced as aesthetic objects of devotion, appealing to the spiritual precisely because they are material.
It is this legacy to which the English divines of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries are heir. As the Elizabethan church formulates its developing position out of wildly divergent confessional affinities, its theologians are at pains to justify a persistent sense that the eucharistic signs matter, in both senses of that term—that the bread and wine are both significant and significantly material. Mid-century reformer Nicholas Ridley, who rejects a doctrine of Real Presence, also rejects a view of the sacramental elements as “common baken bread … a bare sign, or a figure, to represent Christ, none otherwise than the ivy-bush doth represent the wine in a tavern; or as a vile person gorgeously apparelled may represent a king or a prince in a play”; rather, he asserts, Christ is effectually present in the bread in “the propertie of hys substance.”36 Edwin Sandys, who would
