A Witty French Preacher in the English Court, Dryden, and the Great Debate on the Real Presence, 1661-1688

At the start of the Restoration, the Real Presence in the sacrament became a major issue again, at least for the top segment of English society. As Anglican Bishop Samuel Parker observed, the words real presence had not been mentioned during the Interregnum, “the whole matter” being at that time “resolved into a meer Sacramental Figure and Representation, and a Participation only of the Benefits of the Body and Blood of Christ by Faith,” that is, into the metaphorical Lord’s Supper of the reformer Ulrich Zwingli. ¹ The hallmark of Zwingli had been to juxtapose the Ascension of Christ with the Real Presence and declare that the two doctrines were contradictory. In his view, the ascended Christ was localized millions of miles away at the right hand of the Father and could not, even if he wanted to, occupy two places at once. The “outward signes” of bread and wine, therefore, were intended only to stir us up “to weigh and consider more diligentlye the grace of God geven us by the death of Christ.” ² Whereas Calvin and his Anglican followers Richard Hooker, Lancelot Andrewes, and John Donne had spoken of a hidden miracle in the sacrament, of the Holy Spirit’s bringing the real substance of Christ’s body into the soul of the worthy receiver at the very moment of communion, Zwingli had taught that there was no such Presence to the communicant’s soul at the Lord’s Supper. ³

But since Zwingli’s communion gave no benefit that could not be gained more easily by hearing a sermon, it seemed supererogatory. For this reason, the rite of communion was rarely used during the Zwinglian ascendancy that was the Interregnum. In The Hind and the Panther, Dryden recalls the Puritan clergy’s using communion as a penitential rite: “So fulsome is their food, that flocks refuse / To bite, and onely dogs for physick use.” ⁴ By the word physick he alludes to their long, somber purgings of the soul in preparation for “worthy receiving” of the Lord’s Supper. The dramatist Henry Payne observes that in 1661 nine-tenths of the nation were what “we now call Phanaticks,” that is, had sworn to uphold the Puritan Covenant with its metaphorical sacrament. Likewise, in his history of the sacramental test more than a century later, the Presbyterian Samuel Heywood notes that in 1661 the Church of England was as yet only “tacitly re-established,” because the clergy of the Interregnum had been allowed to keep their livings in the expectation that there would be alterations “in the liturgy and discipline of the church of England, as should comprehend them in the establishment.” ⁵

Indeed, in December 1661, the expected alteration was made when a “Post-Communion Rubric popularly known as the Black Rubric” was inserted in the liturgy, creating what one historian of the Book of Common Prayer calls the “most important” change in the 1662 edition. ⁶ The Anglican bishops at first refused to add the Black Rubric: they protested that it was not “in the Liturgy of Queen Elizabeth, nor confirmed by law,” and that the world was “now in more danger of profanation than of idolatry.” ⁷ In fact, they had been moving in the opposite direction in their meetings at Ely House shortly before the Savoy Convocation reconvened on 21 November 1661, having decided to make Laudian or high-church revisions in the liturgy. The margins of the “Durham Book” attest to their desire to restore the Catholic liturgy of 1549, and yet their influence is “barely apparent” in the 1662 Prayer Book. ⁸ Instead, we find the Black Rubric, which echoes Zwingli by stating that Christ is “not here” at communion but far away at the Father’s right hand, and thus that the obligatory kneeling for communion—a posture which Presbyterians and Independents had long condemned as idolatry—is not worship of the Real Presence, for such worship would constitute idolatry. ⁹ To those who adhered to the Elizabethan and Jacobean Church, the “not here...