John Wyclif and the Cult of the Eucharist

Abstract

The storm centre of John Wyclif’s quarrel with the Church was his doctrine of the Eucharist. The critic of clerical dominion over secular things and of the authority of the pope had passed through ecclesiastical censure almost unscathed; but the proponent of a revisionist theology of the eucharistic sacrament would at once lose the countenance of academic colleagues and public opinion alike, and would suffer the consequences. The crisis of Wyclif’s career came with striking rapidity after he broadcast, in his Confessio or public statement in the Oxford schools on 10 May 1381, his opinion that the presence of the Body of Christ in the Eucharist was figurative, ‘sacramental’, or in some sense, to anyone not acquainted with the terms of his own mental world, less than real.

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