During a dispute on the Eucharist from May 29, 1549, we have the following exchange:
[Andrew] Chedey: It is true
that Tertullian and Augustine say that it is a figure, yet they do not exclude
the thing itself, so that the figure and the figured are the same. Likewise to
the Hebrews: “The Son if the image of the Father’s substance” (Heb. 1:3), and
yet is the same as the Father’s substance. But if you say in that place: he is
a figure of the Father’s substance; therefore he is not the Father’s substance,
you see clear that the argument does not hold. So in the present matter, to say
it is a figure of the body of Christ and therefore it is not the body of
Christ, does not follow.
Martyr:
Whether it follows or not is not in question; I only say this, that in that
style of speech, “This is my body,” the Fathers identified a figure, as their
own words show, for they often use a figure and a representation. In this
treatise On Christian doctrine and elsewhere, Augustine clearly declares
that the saying about eating the body of Christ is figurative: what you deny,
he affirms at length (Augustine, De doctrina christina III.9 [PL
34.70-71]). When you allege that sign and signified are one, it is beside the
point, nor could you easily prove it. To the place in the letter to the Hebrews
that the Son is called a figure of the Father’s substance, I say that Paul
there speaks of the Son insofar as he is human, and in this respect is a
figure, and not the substance of the Father. Through the figure antonomasia he
comes to have the image of the Father, which fits him more nobly than other
men. Here are the words of the letter: “I many and various ways God spoke of
old to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us
by a son” (Heb. 1:1). If you understand “Son” in regard to his divinity, God
spoke through him as well as the prophets in the Old Testament, as he spoke to
us in our time. But the difference lies in this, that now through his humanity
he performed what he did not in antiquity. If you argue that this speech must
be understood of the divine person, it still would not prove that sign and signified
are one. For the Greek words are “the likeness of his substance” (tēs
hypostasês auton [Heb. 1:3]). What our interpreter simply called “substance”
is in Greek hypostasis. Since the person of the Son is not the person of
the Father, in terms of divinity the Son may well be called the substantial
figure [figura hypostaseos] of the Father. Yet it does not follow that figure
and figured are one; for between persons there is (as they term it) a real
distinction (The Nicene-Constantinopolitan theology of the Trinity held “three
persons in one substance,” distinguishing among the three without ontological
separation). (Peter Martyr Vermigli, “A Disputation on the Sacrament of the Eucharist,”
in The Oxford Treatise and Disputation on the Eucharist [trans. Joseph
C. McLelland; The Peter Martyr Library 7; Moscow, Idaho: The Davenant Press,
2018], 188-89)
