Sacrament an Alter (2) Can God be touched?

Frost includes full, scholarly, lucid notes on the text he is publishing. He enables us to contemplate the discomfort Thomas Cranmer must have felt in dealing with the fact that S Thomas the Apostle Touched God (bus e dochya). And we "touch God" also (indella ny a ra touchia Christ i'n sacrament, rag Christ ew the vos touchis, rag e vos eff keveris dew ha deane).

(By the way: Frost includes a glossary, with information about such matters as lenition, covering every Cornish term in the text. Even words borrowed into Cornish from English, like touchia.)

Cranmer, so I find myself conjecturing, never really internalised the Council of Ephesus. The Theotokos dogma intended to teach the hypostatic union in Christ of Full Godhead and Full Manhood (dew ha deane in the Cornish above). What Mary bore in her womb, and suckled, was God. Mary bore God and the elite crucified God and the Apostle put his hand into the Side of God. Even the oaths of medieval Catholics ... God's Body ... God's Wounds [Zounds] ... expressed the Divinity of the Man from Nazareth in a way that many modern Christians are embarrassed to handle and, in my view, Cranmer also did not really understand. In his 1549 Prayer Book, his adaptation of the Communicantes ,"Mary, mother of thy sonne Jesu Christe our lorde and god" is his closest, cautious, approach to the term so natural to those who used the Roman and Byzantine liturgies, Theotokos/Dei Genetrix. 

But Catholics and Protestants, during the Reformation years, were concerned rather more with Soteriology and Sacramental theology; rather less with the implications of the Incarnation. 

In one of his purple passages, Dix imagined Cranmer's thoughts "as he hurried of his own accord out of S. Mary's along the Turl to where the stake stood in the Broad outside Balliol ... Would English christians always be rent henceforward?--(Here was the stake at last)--This was what it all came to in the end--the bread had nothing to do with the Body--That is what he was dying for--"

Three centuries after Cranmer's execution, a few hundred yards South of S Mary's, in the Cathedral Church of Christ in Oxford, Dr Pusey preached before the University, deploying an array of 'realistic' Patristic quotations on the Eucharist very similar to that which Cranmer's accusers had used. 

For this, Pusey was found guilty and suspended for two years from preaching before the University.