In September 1776, in the fairytale-like Swiss town of Zurich, a plot believed to be of a diabolical nature took place in the city's main church.
Someone, it seems, had put poison in the Communion wine.
That something like this could happen in a place as orderly as Zurich-- and that it would have occurred on one of the most important festival days of the German Protestant Church, the Day of Repentance and Prayer; but that this crime took place in the city's main church, the very place where the ruling elite routinely gathered to pray, quickly turned the case into a great late 18th century cause célèbre.
It was not by mere chance that I had picked up historian Jeffrey Freedman's wonderful book on the case, A Poisoned Chalice, on the day after Christmas. For I had myself come down on Christmas night with the worst case of the flu I have had in living memory. No one else was ill in the family, and I had spent the week preceding Christmas home alone sitting by the fire reading. How could I have gotten this sick and where could I have picked it up? Pondering things, a creeping doubt entered my head: Had I gotten sick from Christmas Eve service during Communion? I felt sheepish even considering this since, well, can one get sick from the wine made holy???
Pondering my situation, I remembered Freedman's book on the poisoned chalice. (I like to buy any book with the word chalice in the title and have had this one for quite some time).
What sounds like a TV detective novel is actually a wonderfully-written book of serious history. They call it micro-history, where a small event in time is analyzed in order illuminate larger themes and currents. Freedman is a dazzling writer and this book is a real page-turner!
First, I should assure you that no one actually died after drinking from the Cup-- but such was the fuss around the foul taste of the wine and other hints at intrigue that an inquiry was undertaken. This was the city's main church, after all, where all the prominent townspeople came to worship. So doctors were called in to analyze the contaminated wine and it was concluded that someone had indeed put arsenic in it.
How did one come to such a conclusion in the days before chemical analysis? Simple, they heated it up and sniffed the vapors. Arsenic gives off a telltale garlic stench.
Freedman doesn't dwell on this fact but I think it does bear to keep in mind that this all happened in what was Ulrich Zwingli's church, the famous Zurich Grossmünster. Last year in Zurich, out on a walking tour of the city, our guide pointed to the church from across the river and said, Under Zwingli this city was a theocracy. They were religious fanatics like the Taliban. And that over there, he said still pointing at the church, was Taliban headquarters. Zwingli and his revolution was all almost two hundred years in the past by the time of the case of the poisoned chalice--but it is interesting to note (and historically ironic) that events took place in this church-- of all churches. Zwingli, considered the father of the Reformed tradition, is less well known these days than Calvin, who came in after Zwingli's death to shape the new traditions, which would eventually sweep across southern German and France, and then on to Holland, England and Scotland among the Congregationalists and Presbyterians,--before traveling further still over to the New World. We very much live in Zwingli reformed world.
Preaching from the Grossmunster, this ancient church, believed to have been founded by Charlemagne in the 8th century, was stripped of all its stained glass and treasures and was reborn as a reformed church. A kind of ground zero, if you will. Doing away with Lenten fasting and encouraging the clergy to marry, Zwingli's most radical stand was concerning the Eucharist. Differing from Martin Luther, who believed that Christ's presence was contained "in, with, and under" the bread and wine, Zwingli begged to differ. Believing that it was rather a commemoration of the last supper, he insisted the wine and bread to be solely symbolic.
In 2016, I was auditing a religious studies class at Caltech with a small group of undergraduates in which the professor brought in a dialogue from the Marburg Colloquy. Called in 1529 by the German ruler, Philip I, Landgrave of Hesse, who had hoped to unite the various Protestant thinkers of the age so as to unite the Protestant states into a political alliance, many famous thinkers of the time were present--from Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli to Philipp Melanchthon, and Andreas Osiander. In class, I was given the part of Luther and will never forget the awkwardness of the undergraduates--all future scientists-- trying to read out the lines of this debate that was utterly incomprehensible to them.
ZWINGLI: I insist that the words of the Lord's Supper must be figurative. This is ever apparent, and even
required by the article of faith: "taken up into heaven, seated at the right hand of the Father." Otherwise, it
would be absurd to look for him in the Lord's Supper at the same time that Christ is telling us that he is in
heaven. One and the same body cannot possibly be in different places....
LUTHER: I call upon you as before: your basic contentions are shaky. Give way, and give glory to God'
ZWINGLI: And we call upon you to give glory to God and to quit begging the question! The issue at stake is
this: Where is the proof of your position? I am willing to consider your words carefully-no harm meant! You're
trying to outwit me. I stand by this passage in the sixth chapter of John, verse 63 and shall not be shaken from it.
You'll have to sing another tune.
LUTHER: You’re being obnoxious.
Indeed!
And so here we were again.
Despite the fact that no one died, that someone would do such a thing hinted for the people of Zurich of a moral depravity that defied reason. This was only two decades after the infamous mega-quake of 1755, the Lisbon Earthquake. And as if the earthquake wasn't enough, the massively devastating earthquake was followed by fires and then a great tsunami that caused the complete destruction of one of the world's greatest cities of the time. Indeed, the human suffering was so terrible that the disaster sparked philosophical and religious debates on the nature of Evil that continued across Europe for a long time afterward; Voltaire's Candide being perhaps among the most famous. In one of the vivid scenes of the novel, as Candide is lying there trapped under the rubble, he begs for wine and light. The sailor has gone off to pillage-- but what of Candide's companion Pangloss? Well, our man Pangloss is too busy philosophizing to be of any real help. Though thousands have perished, he tells his friend lying under the rubble, still everything is just as it should have been, for: "How could Leibnitz have been wrong?"
How indeed?
At the time the Lisbon earthquake had a profound affect on the collective imagination, and theologians and philosophers across Europe struggled with the question of evil and God (if God was Omnipotent and All-Loving how could he permit suffering of this scale? Either he is not omnipotent or his is not all loving). The case of the poisoned chalice struck the people of Switzerland and then Germany in a similar manner. What was the nature of evil? Preachers gave fiery sermons on the diabolical meaning of the crime for simply no rational person would ever want to murder hundreds of fellow church-goers.There was also a social aspect to the crime since people came together in trust. The Protestant rite was conducted for both clergy and people (not only priests but all participated), with the Cup being passed from hand to hand within the congregation. So social cohesiveness was also being undermined.
Everything we know about cases like this calls out for a scapegoat. I was surprised that the Jewish community was not quickly targeted until Freedman explained that there were no longer any Jewish people living within the walls of the city, as they had all been driven out a hundred years earlier after a supposed poisoning of a well. Not surprisingly a suspect was found: the church grave digger and bell ringer. In Freedman's words, this was always considered a lowly occupation and in this case could serve as a replacement scapegoat for the crime. A well publicized trial was then conducted. Not enough evidence was found and the accused was eventually released but much like with the Lisbon earthquake the crime touched on a nerve an a great debate was sparked in conversations taking place in newspapers and journals across Germany in Switzerland about the case in terms of Enlightenment philosophy--that starting from questions concerning the nature of evil led to a questioning of truth itself.
It's a wonderful book that I cannot recommend enough.
Top photo from Wikipedia and below from Steffen Jacobs
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