'We do not call the Sacrament our God': Laudians against Corpus Christi day

On this Thursday after Trinity Sunday, laudable Practice offers extracts from leading Laudians highlighting how observance of Corpus Christi does not cohere with the eucharistic theology and - no less significant - piety of the classical Prayer Book tradition. The point of these extracts is not to critique our brothers and sisters in the Roman Catholic tradition in their celebrations of Corpus Christi, reflecting the distinctives of that tradition's eucharistic theology. It is, rather, to encourage a faithful confidence in the classical Prayer Book tradition not including the observance. 

The absence of the observance of Corpus Christi in the classical Prayer Book tradition is no weakness, no unfortunate oversight, no Protestant 'excess'. Rather, it witnesses to a rich, dynamic eucharistic theology and vibrant sacramental piety, rooted in patristic teaching and practice in a manner demonstrably not the case with medieval Latin and Tridentine devotions. On this basis Laudians rejected - and those who are shaped by this noble tradition should continue to reject - the observance of Corpus Christi. It is a festival which encourages a static, localised understanding of the gift of the Lord in the Holy Eucharist, radically different to the transformative dynamism of the heavenly and spiritual partaking of the Prayer Book Holy Communion (wonderfully described by Hooker as effecting "a kind of transubstantiation in us", not the bread and wine: LEP V.67.11); and promoting sacramental devotions which obscure the nature and reality of our participation in Christ in the Sacrament.

John Cosin in The History of Transubstantiation:

And we also deny that the elements still retain the nature of sacraments when not used according to divine institution, that is, given by Christ's ministers, and received by His people; so that Christ in the consecrated bread ought not, cannot be kept and preserved to be carried about, because He is present only to the communicants ...

And among the subscribers to transubstantiation there grew a thicket of thorny and monstrous questions, wherewith the schoolmen were so busy, that it may with great truth be affirmed, that then came to light a divinity concerning the holy sacrament, and the adoration of it, which was not only very new, but very strange also, and never heard of among the fathers. 

Jeremy Taylor in The real presence and spiritual of Christ in the blessed sacrament:

The Commandment to worship God alone is so express; The distance between God and bread dedicated to the service of God is so vast, the danger of worshipping that which is not God, or of not worshipping that which is God, is so formidable, that it is infinitely to be presumed, that if it had been intended that we should have worshipped the holy Sacrament, the holy Scripture would have called it, God, or Jesus Christ, or have bidden us in express terms to have adored it; that either by the first, as by a reason indicative, or by the second as by a reason imperative we might have have had sufficient warrant direct or consequent to have paid a divine worship. Now that there is no implicit warrant in the Sacramental words of [This is my body] I have given very many reasons to evince, by proving the words to be Sacramental and figurative ...

We worship the flesh of Christ in the mysteries (saith S. Ambrose) as the Apostles did worship it in our Saviour.  For we receive the mysteries as representing and exhibiting to our souls the flesh and blood of Christ; So that we worship it in the sumption, and venerable usages of the signs of his body. But we give no divine honour to the signs: We do not call the Sacrament our God. 

John Bramhall in The Answer to La Milletière and Schism Guarded:

We deny not a venerable respect unto the consecrate Elements, not only as love-tokens sent us by our best Friend, but as the instruments ordained by our Saviour to convey to us the Merits of His Passion; but for the Person of Christ, God forbid that we should use of this Holy Sacrament; we believe with St. Austin, "that no man eats of that Flesh, but first he adores": but that which offends us is this, that you teach and require all men to adore the very Sacrament with Divine honour. To this end you hold it out to the people. To this end Corpus Christi Day was instituted about three hundred years since ... But that which weighs most with us is this, that we dare not give Divine worship unto any creature, no, not to the very Humanity of Christ in the abstract (much less to the Host), but to the Whole Person of Christ, God and Man, by reason of the hypostatical union between the Child of the blessed Virgin Mary, and the Eternal Son, "Who is God over all Blessed for ever." Shew us such an union betwixt the Deity and the Elements, or accidents, and you say something. But you pretend no such things. 

... the Grecians know no Feast of Corpus Christi, nor carry the Sacrament up and down, nor elevate it to be adored. They adore Christ in the use of the Sacrament, so do we: they do not adore the Sacrament, no more do we.

Such a Laudian rejection of Corpus Christi does not signal a rejection of Anglican-Roman Catholic dialogue on the Eucharist. As the ARCIC Elucidation on the agreed statement on the Eucharist noted, "there can be a divergence in matters of practice and in theological judgements relating to them, without destroying a common eucharistic faith". 

That there can be a common eucharistic faith between Anglicans and Roman Catholics was a consistent Laudian conviction. We see this, for example, in Cosin's declaration of what Anglicans and Roman Catholics should affirm in common:

In commemorating at the Eucharist the Sacrifice of Christ's Body and Blood once truly offered for us. In acknowledging His sacramental spiritual true and real Presence there to the souls of all them that come faithfully and devoutly to receive Him according to His own institution in that holy Sacrament.

For Cosin the Laudian, this - quite rightly - was sufficient for 'a common eucharistic faith'. Such a common faith certainly does not require the practices of adoration which Cosin, of course, rejected:

the holding of that Sacrament over the Priest's head to be adored the exposing of it in their churches to be worshipped by the people, the circumgestation and carrying of it abroad in procession upon their Corpus Christi day.

In other words, a common eucharistic faith, rooted in Scripture and patristic practice, is more fully embodied by the absence of practices which - to use words from the ARCIC Elucidation - "can hardly fail to produce such an emphasis upon the association of Christ's sacramental presence with the consecrated bread and wine as to suggest too static and localized a presence that disrupts the 

movement as well as the balance of the whole eucharistic action (cf. Article 28 of the Articles of Religion)".