THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT A CRIME. Not just
any crime, to be sure, but one of the worst, most heinous, most
abominable crimes imaginable to Christians. On Thursday, 12 September
1776, according to the magistrate in the Swiss city of Zurich, somebody
placed deadly
poison in the
communion wine of the main cathedral in the
heart of the city. And to crown the infamy, this particular Thursday
coincided with one of the most important dates of the liturgical
calendar: the General Day of Prayer and Repentance. To poison the
communion wine in a cathedral on such an occasion was nothing less than
the consummate act of desecration, a sacrilege so monstrous that one
contemporary pastor compared the poisoner to Judas and the poisoning to
the Crucifixion.1 Besides being a horrific act of
desecration, such a crime was a serious threat to the cohesion of a
tightknit community. Scarcely 10,000 inhabitants dwelled within the
heavily fortified walls of eighteenth-century Zurich, and all of the
citizens of the city belonged to the reformed Protestant church, the
only one tolerated since the Reformation, which had abolished the mass
and transformed the sacrament of communion. In the reformed Protestant
church, taking communion in both kinds was not a privilege reserved for
the clergy (both clergy and laity drank the wine), nor was the
sacrament handed down from on high, distributed from the altar by a
priest who mediated between God and the faithful. The communion service
was organized, as it were, along a horizontal rather than a vertical
axis. The communion cup circulated throughout the congregation, passing
from hand to hand and from mouth to mouth. As a result, the communion
service took on a double role: it was not only a sacrament but also a
civic rite--or rather a sacrament of citizenship. When Zurichers came
together to celebrate communion, they were affirming not only their
individual ties to their God but also their collective ties to one
another, cementing their bonds of fellowship through the sharing of a
common meal: literally, a "supper"
. The poisoning of
the communion wine threatened to dissolve those bonds, sowing seeds of
suspicion and mistrust, turning citizen against citizen.the cathedral was not just any church. It was one of
the four main parish churches within the walls of the city and the one
where some of the most prominent citizens, such as the mayor, came to
worship:3 a few drops of a lethal substance placed in the
communion wine of the cathedral and virtually the entire ruling class
of an Old Regime state could be dispatched in the twinkling of an eye.
No wonder that the government took the affair so seriously, and that
for months afterward it gave as much attention to this as to any other
matter of state.4 But members of the ruling councils were
not alone in treating the affair with such gravity. Pastors in Zurich
devoted their sermons to it, thundering from their pulpits against this
monstrous crime. Newspapers and journals throughout the German-speaking
world discussed it.Almost from the very beginning, however, the affair was
also unfolding in an arena much broader than that of Zurich. Within
weeks of the General Day of Prayer and Repentance, news of the crime
had spread all across the German-speaking world, transmitted by scores
of newspapers, which blanketed the territories of the old Reich. Even
Germans who cared little about Swiss politics now found their attention
riveted upon the spectacle unfolding in Switzerland, as if Zurich had
suddenly become the stage for a drama of universal significance. And in
a sense, the poisoning of the communion wine was a drama of
universal significance, a drama that enacted one of the most
fundamental problems confronted by intellectuals in the age of
Enlightenment: the problem of evil. If the various currents of
Enlightenment thought converged at any one point, it was their common
rejection of the Christian doctrine of original sin, the
quasi-biological notion of hereditary fault, which traced the origin of
evil to the disobedience of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.Not even a political motive (assuming there was one) could
adequately account for the deliberate, premeditated attempt to massacre
hundreds upon hundreds of worshipers, most of whom were simple artisans
with little or no connection to the small circle of governing
magistrates. Such a crime seemed to expose the very limits of rational
understanding and to point beyond reason toward a moral depravity so
terrifying that it could only be described as diabolic.In sermons,
journal articles, pamphlets and personal letters, German and Swiss
intellectuals debated the implications of the crime, advancing
interpretations and counter-interpretations in a sequence of passionate
exchanges. Not all of the contributors to the debate identified
themselves with the Enlightenment.in the form,
however, if not its content, the debate was very much in the spirit of
the Enlightenment.By following that process as it unfolded in
response to the crime in Zurich, this book brings to life an important
episode in the intellectual history of the late eighteenth century, an
episode in which the Enlightenment was forced to interrogate the very
limits of reason itself.What sets this book apart is that it collapses
the historical and methodological levels: it is bound to confront the
problem of evidence explicitly because that problem lies at the center
of the story it seeks to reconstruct. SO THE AFFAIR OF
THE POISONED COMMUNION wine opens onto some very large topics
indeed--from the political crisis of an Old Regime state, to the
self-critique of Enlightenment and the problem of evil, to the
interpretation of evidence and the nature of historical knowledge.
But enough of such large and weighty matters!"The Case of the Poisoned Communion Wine" would be a worthy match for
the deductive powers of Sherlock Holmes. If only one were allowed to
smoke a pipe in the archives. . . .
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