Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of EvilLeibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Freiherr von
Religion
Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Freiherr von
Free will and determinism; Theism; Theodicy
18. The two Protestant parties are tolerably in agreement when it is a
question of making war on the Socinians; and as the philosophy of these
sectaries is not of the most exact, in most cases the attack succeeded in
reducing it. But the Protestants themselves had dissensions on the matter
of the Eucharistic Sacrament. A section of those who are called Reformed
(namely those who on that point follow rather Zwingli than Calvin) seemed
to reduce the participation in the body of Jesus Christ in the Holy
Communion to a mere figurative representation, employing the maxim of the
philosophers which states that a body can only be in one place at a time.
Contrariwise the Evangelicals (who name themselves thus in a particular
sense to distinguish themselves from the Reformed), being more attached to
the literal sense of Scripture, opined with Luther that this participation
was real, and that here there lay a supernatural Mystery. They reject, in
truth, the dogma of Transubstantiation, which they believe to be without
foundation in the Text; neither do they approve that of Consubstantiation
or of Impanation, which one could only impute to them if one were
ill-informed on their opinion. For they admit no inclusion of the body [85]
of Jesus Christ in the bread, nor do they even require any union of the one
with the other: but they demand at least a concomitance, so that these two
substances be received both at the same time. They believe that the
ordinary sense of the words of Jesus Christ on an occasion so important as
that which concerned the expression of his last wishes ought to be
preserved. Thus in order to show that this sense is free from all absurdity
which could make it repugnant to us, they maintain that the philosophic
maxim restricting the existence of, and partaking in, bodies to one place
alone is simply a consequence of the ordinary course of Nature. They make
that no obstacle to the presence, in the ordinary sense of the word, of the
body of our Saviour in such form as may be in keeping with the most
glorified body. They do not resort to a vague diffusion of ubiquity, which
would disperse the body and leave it nowhere in particular; nor do they
admit the multiple-reduplication theory of some Schoolmen, as if to say one
and the same body could be at the same time seated here and standing
elsewhere. In fine, they so express themselves that many consider the
opinion of Calvin, authorized by sundry confessions of faith from the
Churches that have accepted his teaching, to be not so far removed from the
Augsburg Confession as one might think: for he affirmed a partaking in the
substance. The divergence rests perhaps only upon the fact that Calvin
demands true faith in addition to the oral reception of the symbols, and
consequently excludes the unworthy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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