Currently reading: The Caroline Divines and the Church of Rome by Mark Langham 📚
For the Anglican theologians, the supposed identification of gazing at the monstrance or the elevated host as a form of spiritual or ‘ocular’ communion was a perversion of the intention of Christ in establishing this sacrament (Pope Clement VIII had promulgated the Quarant’Ore devotion in 1592). It took considerable subtlety and scholarship to disentangle popular devotion from genuine Eucharistic theology. John Bramhall seems to have understood the problem when he spoke of the ‘gross mistaking and misstating of the question on both sides’ and saw the nub of the controversy as the inability to distinguish ‘what is the proper adequate Body which is contained under the species or accidents; whether a material Body, or a substantial Body, or a living Body or an organical Body, or a human Body’.