In his Challenge Sermon preached at Paul’s Cross in 1559, shortly after the accession of Elizabeth Tudor, John Jewel’s argument for a sacramental distinction between ‘signum’ and ‘res significata’ – between ‘sign’ and ‘thing signified’ – was characteristic of a distinctive and already well-established hermeneutic of figural meaning grounded firmly in the authority of Augustine, in particular in his little treatise De doctrina Christiana, On Christian Teaching. In interpreting sacramental presence – the dominant theme in Jewel’s exchanges with his principal Papist adversary, Thomas Harding, and indeed throughout the so-called ‘Great Controversy’ of the 1560s, a debate precipitated by this very sermon – Jewel invokes Augustine’s appeal to the formula ‘sursum corda’, ‘lift up your hearts’ as the liturgical archetype for the distinction between signs and things signified. Retained by Cranmer in his vernacular liturgies of both 1549 and 1552, the ancient responsary ‘Lift up your hearts/ We lift them up unto the Lord’ preceded the words of institution in the Order for the Lord’s Supper, as indeed they had in the canon of the mass all the way back to the third-century liturgy of Hippolytus of Rome. Adhering to an Erasmian hermeneutic of signs, Jewel attaches the highest theological significance to this liturgical formula as representing the preparation of the mind for the mystical act of receiving communion; while the ‘figure’ of the thing (the signum) is not to be confused with that which it represents, the ‘thing itself’ or the ‘thing signified’ (res significata), nonetheless through a dynamic motion within the conscience of the faithful receiver the connection between sign and signified may be effected. Jewel ties the sacramental hermeneutic to the logic of Augustine’s account of justification as metanoia, conversion of the mind:
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