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Of transubstantiation, he wrote, “I believe that, of all the heresies by which the Church has ever been infected, none … deceives the people in such various ways … [I]t renders them idolaters … and … subverts Grammar, Logic, all natural science, and even (which is still worse) … completely destroys the sense of the Gospel.”⁴⁹

Wyclif’s argument turned on the word “hoc,” the “this” in the Latin source text from which he translated the Bible. “This is my body,” said Christ, breaking bread for his disciples at the original eucharist. “This” is a sign of directedness. It points to the meaning of the sacrament, the moment of Christ’s promise to sacrifice himself. Only cutlores signorum, said Wyclif, sign worshipers or idolaters, could think that a mortal priest could effect such a material change. “When writers write letters, words and sentences, the paper and ink remain beneath the symbols. But through custom and skill those who can read pay much more attention to the significance of the symbols than the natural characteristics of the signs … Much more so the habit of faith brings the faithful to grasp through the consecrated bread the true body of Christ.”⁵⁰ Wyclif issues an early warning of the coming epistemology of the protestant reformation, a new rationalism that sought to reconcile meanings manifest in the material with the ideal of faith. For his heretical views, Wyclif was expelled from Oxford University.⁵¹

Symbolism: Now we come to uncompromisingly Protestant meaning, in the founding canons of the Church of England, pronounced at the time of its split from Rome. Here is article XXVIII of the Thirty-nine Articles of 1571:

Transubstantiation (or the change of the substance of Bread and Wine) in the Supper of the Lord, cannot be proved by Holy Writ, but is repugnant to the plain words of Scripture, overthroweth the nature of a Sacrament, and hath given occasion to many superstitions. The body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten in the Supper, only after an heavenly and spiritual manner. And the means whereby the body of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper is Faith.⁵²

Now, the sacrament of the eucharist is a symbol, an abstraction.

In all three mysteries of meaning, the context is a traffic between the feeding bodies of priests and the eating and drinking bodies of supplicants. These are transpositions of form between spoken words, human gestures, and objects. Meanings are thus materialized, but the manner of their materialization is in each case different.^§MS3.1

Beyond each and every meaning-ritual of the communion table is a fraught history of sense making. The different versions of the sacrament of eucharist only make sense as alternatives offered by disputants in the larger histories of Catholicism and Protestantism, and for that matter the ongoing dialogue between materialist (Wyclif) and idealist (Lateran Council) ontologies.

In these contexts, the senses that are made through these three materializations of meaning indicate profoundly different ways of conducting the traffic between the material and the ideal. These are confounding differences, as between likeness, directedness, and abstraction. The intricacies of argumentation are bewilderingly endless. Just one of Wyclif’s texts, his de Eucharista Tractatus, perhaps his most important on this subject, runs to 348 pages.

The source of the confounding is the always-possible functional transposition of meaning, the fluid movement between likeness, directedness, and abstraction. The mystery of materialization is its ever-ready transposability. Even within his own lifetime, Wyclif had changed his mind. The Protestant Reformation tried to change the minds of congregants. And surely many a committed supplicant’s mind must still at times stray across the imminent possibilities of meaning as they partake in the bread and the wine.

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⁴⁸ Norman P. Tanner, ed. 1990, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, Volume 1: Nicea I to Lateran V, London: Sheed and Ward, p. 230.

⁴⁹ John Wyclif, c.1382 [1892], De Eucharista Tractatus, edited by I. Loserth, London: Trubner & Co, pp. iii, xx–xxi, xliii–xliv.

⁵⁰ Anthony Kenny, 1985, Wyclif, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 89.

⁵¹ Maurice Keen, 1986, “Wyclif, the Bible, and Transubstantiation,” pp. 1–16 in Wyclif in His Times, edited by A. Kenny, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

⁵² www.churchofengland.org/prayer-and-worship/worship-texts-and-resources/book-common-prayer/articles-religion#XXVIII

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 35–37. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

John Wyclif’s “De Eucharista Tractatus” §AS1.1.2a