stitute the nature of wine and bread are still there; only that which is made up by these accidents, the subject, the substance, is wanting, is changed into flesh and blood. But all the properties together, whose combination forms this unity, are the substance itself. What are wine and bread if I take from them the properties which make them what they are? Nothing. Flesh and blood have therefore no objective existence; otherwise they must be an object to the unbelieving senses. On the contrary: the only valid witnesses of an objective existence—taste, smell, touch, sight—testify unanimously to the reality of the wine and bread, and nothing else. The wine and bread are in reality natural, but in imagination divine substances.
Faith is the power of the imagination, which makes the real unreal, and the unreal real: in direct contradiction with the truth of the senses, with the truth of reason. Faith denies what objective reason affirms, and affirms what it denies.[1] The mystery of the Lord’s Supper is the mystery of faith:[2]—hence the partaking of it is the highest, the most rapturous, blissful act of the believing soul. The negation of objective truth which is not gratifying to feeling, the truth of reality, of the objective world and reason,—a negation which constitutes the essence of faith,—reaches its highest point in the Lord’s Supper; for faith here denies an immediately present, evident, indubitable object, maintaining that it is not what the reason and senses declare it to be, that it is only in appearance bread, but in reality flesh. The position of the Schoolmen, that according to the accidents it is bread, and according to the substance
- ↑ “Videtur enim species vini et panis, et substantia panis et vini non creditur. Creditur autem substantia corporis et sanguinis Christi et tamen species non cernitur.”—Bernardus (ed. Bas. 1552, pp. 189-191).
- ↑ It is so in another relation not developed here, but which may be mentioned in a note: namely, the following. In religion, in faith, man is an object to himself as the object, i.e., the end or determining motive, of God. Man is occupied with himself in and through God. God is the means of human existence and happiness. This religious truth, embodied in a cultus, in a sensuous form, is the Lord’s Supper. In this sacrament man feeds upon God—the Creator of heaven and earth—as on material food; by the act of eating and drinking he declares God to be a mere means of life to man. Here man is virtually supposed to be the God of God: hence the Lord’s Supper is the highest self-enjoyment of human subjectivity. Even the Protestant—not indeed in words, but in truth—transforms God into an external thing, since he subjects Him to himself as an object of sensational enjoyment.
