5. Teaching of the Reformers

Considering the infinity of varying views which the first fifteen centuries produced, we shall not be surprised to find that the Reformation period was ohias able to evolve but few new ones. Many abuses which had grown up around the sacrament were swept away, many ideas which distorted and dis honored it were denied; the sacrifice of the mass, as a propitiatory offering, was no more; the adoration of the sanctissimum, exposition, the festival of Corpus Christi, were abolished, and communion in both kinds restored. But the positive ideas of the Reformation, even Luther's own, are scarcely any of them new. If Luther, after 1520, replaced transubstantiation by the presence of the body and blood of Christ in the untranaformed elements, he was only following out a possibility already indicated by Nominalist schoohnen; he appeals to Pierre d'Ailly when he first brings forward this idea (De captivitate Babylonicd, in Tl'erke, vi. 508). He placed the benefit of the sacrament almost exclusively in the remission of sins, as the upholdders of the symbolio-sacrificial view had done before him; and when he twice connected the immortality of the body with reception, he was adopting the Greek realistic-dynamic view which he knew from Irenæus. The doctrine of ubiquity on which he based his conception of the real presence (see Ubiquity) was taken from the Nomina,liats, though carried further than scholasticism had carried it. [It seems probable that Luther's doctrine of ubiquity was closely connected with his doctrine of the Communicatio Idiomatum (q.v.), which latter came to him through mysticism from the Neo-Plar tonic Christian thought. If so, it had its root in realism rather than in nominalism and was essentially Eutychian. Luther's mind was not sufficiently philosophical to grasp the points at issue between realism and nominalism, to which fact were due in part his inconsistencies.-w. a. N.] The really new thing with Luther is the explanation of the "this is " by the grammatical figure of synecdoche, by which "one names a whole and means only a part," as when " a mother points to the swaddling-clothes in which her child is wrapped, saying, ` This is my child."' Zwingli and Calvin followed Augustinian paths. The former accepted only the symbolic-sacrificial idea, separated, of course, from any thought of a sacrifice in the Eucharist; Calvin has also the notion of the "spiritual eating of the body and blood of Christ " in a form modified by realiatiodynamic ideas. That both of them found the symbolic part of the " this is my body " in " is " ( = signifual) has, it is true, no exact parallel in ancient days. But the point where they placed the symbol is comparatively unimportant-this "tropical" explanation was not new, and the gloss of Œcolampadius-" this is a figure of my body "--combines Augustine's sense with words of Tertullian.