This may be true, or at least intelligible, of Christ's humanity or
personal identity as
Greek: nóaeton ti
, but applied to the phenomenal
flesh and blood, it is nonsense. For if every atom of the human frame be
changed by succession in eleven or twelve years, the body born of the
Virgin could not be the body crucified, much less the body crucified be
the body glorified, spiritual and incorruptible.
construe the words of
Clement of Alexandria, quoted by Taylor below,
literally, and they
perfectly express my opinion; namely, that Christ, both in the
institution of the Eucharist and in the sixth chapter of John, spoke of
his humanity as a
noumenon,
not of the specific flesh and blood
which were its
phænomena
at the last supper and on the cross. But
Jeremy Taylor was a semi-materialist, and though no man better managed
the logic of substance and accidents, he seems to have formed no clear
metaphysical notion of their actual meaning. Taken notionally, they are
mere interchangeable relations, as in concentric circles the outmost
circumference is the substance, the other circles its accidents; but if
I begin with the second and exclude the first from my thoughts, then
this is substance and the interior ones accidents, and so on; but taken
really, we mean the complex action of co-agents on our senses, and
accident as only an agent acting on us. Thus we say, the beer has turned
sour: sour is the accident of the substance beer. But, in fact, a new
agent, oxygen, has united itself with other agents in the joint
composition, the essence of which new comer is to be sour: at all
events, Taylor's construction is a mere assertion, meaning no more than
'in this sense only can I subscribe to the words of Bertram, Jerome, and
Clement.'
If a re-union of the Lutheran and English Churches with the Roman were
desirable and practicable, the best way,
Greek: h_os emoige dokei
would be, that any remarkable number should offer union on a given
profession of faith chiefly negative, as we protest against the
authority of the Church in temporals; that the words agreed to by Beza
and Espencœus, on the part of the Reformers and Romanists respectively,
at Poissy, used with implicit faith, shall suffice.
Credimus in usu
cœntæ Dominicæ vere, reipsa, substantialiter, seu in substantia, verum
corpus et sanguinem Christi spirituali et ineffabili modo esse,
exhiberi, sumi a fidelibus communicantibus.
Ib.
s. in. p. 434.
The other Schoolman I am to reckon in this account, is Gabriel Biel.
Taylor should have informed the reader that Gabriel Biel is but the echo
of Occam, and that both were ante-Lutheran Protestants in heart, and as
far as they dared, in word likewise.
Ib.
s. vi. p. 436.
So that if, according to the Casuists, especially of the Jesuits'
order, it be lawful to follow the opinion of any one probable doctor,
here we have five good men and true, besides Occam, Bassolis, and
Mechior Camus, to acquit us from our search after this question in
Scripture.
Taylor might have added Erasmus, who, in one of his letters, speaking of
Œcolampadius's writings on the Eucharist, says
"ut seduci posse
videantur etiam electi,"
and adds, that he should have embraced his
interpretations,
"nisi obstaret consensus Ecclesiæ;"
that is,
Œcolampadius has convinced me, and I should avow my conviction, but for
motives of personal prudence and regard for the public peace.
index p. 3
Ib.
p. 436.
cannot but think that the same mysterious truth, whatever it be, is
referred to in the Eucharist and in this chapter of St. John; and I
wonder that Taylor, who makes the Eucharist a spiritual sumption of
Christ, should object to it. A = C and B = C, therefore A = B.
Ib.
s. iv. p. 440.
The error on both sides, Roman and Protestant, originates in the
confusion of sign or figure with symbol, which latter is always an
essential part of that, of the whole of which it is the representative.
Not seeing this, and therefore seeing no
medium
between the whole
thing and the mere metaphor of the thing, the Romanists took the former
or positive pole of the error, the Protestants the latter or negative
pole. The Eucharist is a symbolic, or solemnizing and
totum in
parte
acting of an act, which in a true member of Christ's body is
supposed to be perpetual. Thus the husband and wife exercise the duties
of their marriage contract of love, protection, obedience, and the like,
all the year long, and yet solemnize it by a more deliberate and
reflecting act of the same love on the anniversary of their marriage.
Ib.
s. ix p. 447-8.
That which neither can feel or be felt, see or be seen, move or be
moved, change or be changed, neither do or suffer corporally, cannot
certainly be eaten corporally; but so they affirm concerning the body
of our blessed Lord; it cannot do or suffer corporally in the
Sacrament, therefore it cannot be eaten corporally, any more than a
man can chew a spirit, or eat a meditation, or swallow a syllogism
into his belly.
Absurd as the doctrine of Transubstantiation may thus be made, yet
Taylor here evidently confounds a spirit,
ens realissimum,
with a
mere notion or
ens logicum.
On this ground of the spirituality of
all powers
Greek: donámeis
it would not be difficult to evade many of
Taylor's most plausible arguments. Enough, however, and more than enough
would be left in their full force.
Ib.
p. 448.
Besides this, I say this corporal union of our bodies to the body of
God incarnate, which these great and witty dreamers dream of, would
make man to be God.
But yet not God, nor absolutely.
I am in my Father, even so ye are in
me.
Ib.
s. xxii. p. 456.
By this time I hope I may conclude, that Transubstantiation is not
taught by our blessed Lord in the sixth chapter of St. John:
Johannes de tertia et Eucharistica cæna nihil quidem scribit, eo
quod cæteri tres Evangelistæ ante ilium eam plene descripsissent.
They are the words of Stapleton and are good evidence against them.
I cannot satisfy my mind with this reason, though the one commonly
assigned both before and since Stapleton: and yet ignorant, when, why,
and for whom John wrote his Gospel, I cannot substitute a better or more
probable one. That John believed the command of the Eucharist to have
ceased with the destruction of the Jewish state, and the obligation of
the cup of blessing among the Jews, — or that he wrote it for the Greeks,
unacquainted with the Jewish custom, — would be not improbable, did we
not know that the Eastern Church, that of Ephesus included, not only
continued this Sacrament, but rivalled the Western Church in the
superstition thereof.
Ib.
s. i. p. 503.
Now I argue thus: if we eat Christ's natural body, we eat it either
naturally or spiritually: if it be eaten only spiritually, then it is
spiritually digested, &c.
What an absurdity in the word 'it' in this passage and throughout!
Vol. X. s. iii. p. 3.
The accidents, proper to a substance, are for the manifestation, a
notice of the substance, not of themselves; for as the man feels, but
the means by which he feels is the sensitive faculty, so that which is
felt, is the substance, and the means by which it is felt is the
accident.
This is the language of common sense, rightly so called, that is, truth
without regard or reference to error; thus only differing from the
language of genuine philosophy, which is truth intentionally guarded
against error. But then in order to have supported it against an acute
antagonist, Taylor must, I suspect, have renounced his Gassendis and
other Christian
Epicuri.
His antagonist would tell him; when a
man strikes me with a stick, I feel the stick, and infer the man; but
pari ratione,
I feel the blow, and infer the stick; and this is
tantamount to, — I feel, and by a mechanism of my thinking organ
attribute causation to precedent or co-existent images; and this no less
in states in which you call the images unreal, that is, in dreams, than
when they are asserted by you to have an outward reality.
Ib.
p. 4.
But when a man, by the ministry of the senses, is led into the
apprehension of a wrong object, or the belief of a false proposition,
then he is made to believe a lie, &c.
There are no means by which a man without chemical knowledge could
distinguish two similarly shaped lumps, one of sugar and another of
sugar of lead. Well! a lump of sugar of lead lies among other artefacts
on the shelf of a collector; and with it a label, "Take care! this is
not sugar, though it looks so, but crystallized oxide of lead, and it is
a deadly poison." A man reads this label, and yet takes and swallows the
lump. Would Taylor assert that the man was made to swallow a poison? Now
this (would the Romanist say) is precisely the case of the consecrated
elements, only putting food and antidote for poison; that is, as far as
this argument of Jeremy Taylor is concerned.
Ib.
p. 5.
Just upon this account it is, that St. John's argument had been just
nothing in behalf of the whole religion: for that God was incarnate,
that Jesus Christ did such miracles, that he was crucified, that he
arose again, and ascended into heaven, that he preached these sermons,
that he gave such commandments, he was made to believe by sounds, by
shapes, by figures, by motions, by likenesses, and appearances, of all
the proper accidents.
A Socinian might turn this argument with equal force at least, but I
think with far greater, against the Incarnation. But it is a sophism,
that actually did lead, to Socinianism: for surely bread and wine are
less disparate from flesh and blood, than a human body from the
Omnipresent Spirit. The disciples would, according to Taylor, Tillotson,
and the other Latitudinarian common sense divines, have been justified
in answering: "All our senses tell us you are only a man: how should, we
believe you when you say the contrary? If we are not to believe all our
senses, much less can we believe that we actually hear you."
And Taylor in my humble judgment gives a force and extension to the
words of St. John, quoted before, —
That which was from the beginning,
which we have seen with our eyes, which we have beheld, and our hands
have handled of the word of life
(1 Ep.1.), — far greater than they
either can, or were meant to, bear. It is beyond all doubt, that the
words refer to, and were intended to confute, the heresy which was soon
after a prominent doctrine of the Gnostics; namely, that the body of
Christ was a phantom. To this St. John replies: I have myself had every
proof to the contrary: first, the proof of the senses; secondly,
Christ's own assurance. Now this was unanswerable by the Gnostics,
without one or the other of two pretences; either that St. John and the
other known and appointed Apostles and delegates of the Word were liars;
or that the Epistle was spurious. The first was too intolerable:
therefore they adopted the second. Observe, the heretics, whom St. John
confutes, did not deny the actual presence of the Word with the
appearance of a human body, much less the truth of the wonders performed
by the Word in this super-human and unearthly
vice-corpus,
or
quasi corpus:
least of all, would they assert either that the
assurances of the Word were false in themselves, or that the sense of
hearing might have been permitted to deceive the beloved Apostle, (which
would have been virtual falsehood and a subornation of falsehood),
however liable to deception the senses might be generally, and as sole
and primary proofs unsupported by antecedent grounds,
præcognitis vel
preconcessis.
And that St. John never thought of advancing the
senses to any such dignity and self-sufficiency as proofs, it would be
easy to shew from twenty passages of his Gospel. I say, again and again,
that I myself greatly prefer the general doctrine of our own Church
respecting the Eucharist, —
rem credimus, modum nescimus,
— to
either Tran- (or Con-) substantiation, on the one hand, or to the mere
signum memoriæ causa
of the Sacramentaries. But nevertheless, I
think that the Protestant divines laid too much stress on the abjuration
of the metaphysical part of the Roman article; as if, even with the
admission of Transubstantiation, the adoration was not forbidden and
made idolatrous by the second commandment.
Ib.
s. vi. p. 9.
And yet no sense can be deceived in that which it always perceives
alike: 'The touch can never be deceived.'
Every common juggler falsifies this assertion when he makes the pressure
from a shilling seem the shilling itself. "Are you sure you feel it?"
"Yes." "Then open your hand. Presto! 'Tis gone." From this I gather that
neither Taylor nor Aristotle ever had the nightmare.
Ib.
p.10.
The purpose of which discourse is this: that no notices are more
evident and more certain than the notices of sense; but if we conclude
contrary to the true dictate of senses, the fault is in the
understanding, collecting false conclusions from right premises. It
follows, therefore, that in the matter of the Eucharist we ought to
judge that which our senses tell us.
Very unusually lax reasoning for Jeremy Taylor, whose logic is commonly
legitimate even where his metaphysic is unsatisfactory. What Romanist
ever asserted that a communicant's palate deceived him, when it reported
the taste of bread or of wine in the elements?
Ib.
s. i. p. 16.
When we discourse of mysteries of faith and articles of religion, it
is certain that the greatest reason in the world, to which all other
reasons must yield, is this — 'God hath said it, therefore it is true.'
Doubtless: it is a syllogism demonstrative. All that God says is truth,
is necessarily true. But God hath said this;
ergo,
&c. But how is
the
minor
to be proved, that God hath said this? By reason? But
it is against reason. By the senses? But it is against the senses.
Ib.
s. xii. p. 27.
First; for Christ's body, his natural body, is changed into a
spiritual body, and it is not now a natural body, but a spiritual, and
therefore cannot be now in the Sacrament after a natural manner,
because it is so no where, and therefore not there: It is sown a
natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.
But mercy on me! was this said of the resurgent body of Jesus? a
spiritual body, of which Jesus said it was not a spirit. If tangible by
Thomas's fingers, why not by his teeth, that is, manducable?
Ib.
s. xxviii. p. 44.
So that if there were a plain revelation of Transubstantiation, then
this argument were good when there are so many seeming
impossibilities brought against the Holy Trinity ... And therefore we
have found difficulties, and shall for ever, till, in this article,
the Church returns to her ancient simplicity of expression.
Taylor should have said, it would have very greatly increased the
difficulty of proving that it was really revealed, but supposing that
certain, then doubtless it must be believed as far as nonsense can be
believed, that is, negatively. From the Apostles' Creed it may be
possible to deduce the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity; but assuredly
it is not fully expressed therein: and what can Taylor mean by the
Church returning to her first simplicity in this article? What less
could she say if she taught the doctrine at all, than that the Word and
the Spirit are spoken of every where in Scripture as individuals, each
distinct from the other, and both from the Father: that of both all the
divine attributes are predicated, except self-origination; that the
Spirit is God, and the Word is God, and that they with the Father are
the one God? And what more does she say now? But Taylor, like Swift, had
a strong tendency to Sabellianism.
It is most dangerous, and, in its distant consequences, subversive of
all Christianity to admit, as Taylor does, that the doctrine of the
Trinity is at all against, or even above, human reason in any other
sense, than as eternity and Deity itself are above it. In the former, as
well as the latter, we can prove that so it must be, and form clear
notions by negatives and oppositions.
Ib.
s. xxix. p. 45.
Now concerning this, it is certain it implies a contradiction, that
two bodies should be in one place, or possess the place of another,
till that be cast forth.
So far from it that I believe the contrary; and it would puzzle Taylor
to explain a thousand
phænomena
in chemistry on his certainty.
But Taylor assumed matter to be wholly quantitative, which granted, his
opinion would become certain.
Ib.
s. xxxii. p. 49.
The door might be made to yield to his Creator as easily as water,
which is fluid, be made firm under his feet; for consistence or
lability are not essential to wood and water.
Here the common basis of water, ice, vapour, steam,
aqua
crystallina,
and (possibly) water-gas is called water, and
confounded with the species water, that is, the common base
plus
a given proportion of caloric. To the species water continuity and
lability are essential.
Ib.
p. 50.
The words in the text are Greek: kekleismén_on t_on thyr_on in the
past tense, the gates or doors having been shut; but that they were
shut in the instant of Christ's entry, it says not: they might of
course, if Christ had so pleased, have been insensibly opened, and
shut in like manner again; and, if the words be observed, it will
appear that St. John mentioned the shutting the doors in relation to
the Apostles' fear, not to Christ's entering: he intended not (so far
as appears) to declare a miracle.
Thank God! Here comes common sense.
Ib.
ss. xvi-xvii. pp. 71-73.
All most excellent; but O! that Taylor's stupendous wit, subtlety,
acuteness, learning and inexhaustible copiousness of argumentation would
but tell us what he himself, Dr. Jeremy Taylor, means by eating Christ's
body by faith: his body, not his soul or Godhead. Eat a body by faith!
index p. 3
Part I.
Ib.
s. ii. p. 137.
The sentence of the Fathers in the third general Council, that at
Ephesus; — 'that it should not be lawful for any man to publish or
compose another faith or creed than that which was defined by the
Nicene Council.'
Upon what ground then does the Church of England reconcile with this
decree its reception of the so called Athanasian creed?
Ib.
s. iv. p. 145.
We consider that the doctrines upon which it (Purgatory) is pretended
reasonable, are all dubious, and disputable at the very best. Such are
... that the taking away the guilt of sins does not suppose the taking
away the obligation to punishment; that is, that when a man's sin is
pardoned, he may be punished without the guilt of that sin as justly
as with it.
The taking away the guilt does not, however, imply of necessity the
natural removal of the consequences of sin. And in this sense, I
suppose, the subtler Romanists would defend this accursed doctrine. A
man may have bitterly repented and thoroughly reformed the sin of
drunkenness, and by this genuine
metanoia
and faith in Christ
crucified have obtained forgiveness of the guilt, and yet continue to
suffer a heavy punishment in a schirrous liver or incurable dyspepsy.
But who authorized the Popes to extend this to the soul?
Ib.
p. 153.
St. Ambrose saith that 'death is a haven of rest.'
Consider the strange and oftentimes awful dreams accompanying the
presence of irritating matter in the lower abdomen, and the seeming
appropriation of particular sorts of dream images and incidents to
affections of particular organs and
viscera.
Do the material
causes act positively, so that with the removal of the body by death
the total cause is removed, and of course the effects? Or only
negatively and indirectly, by lessening and suspending that continuous
texture of organic sensation, which, by drawing outward the attention
of the soul, sheaths her from her own state and its corresponding
activities? — A fearful question, which I too often agitate, and which
agitates me even in my dreams, when most commonly I am in one of
Swedenborg's hells, doubtful whether I am once more to be awaked, and
thinking our dreams to be the true state of the soul disembodied when
not united with Christ. On awaking from such dreams, I never fail to
find some local pain,
circa-
or
infra-
umbilical, with
kidney affections, and at the base of the bladder.
Part II. Introduction.
P. 227.
But yet because I will humour J.S. for this once; even here also 'The
Dissuasive' relies upon a first and self-evident principle as any is
in Christianity, and that is,
Quod primum verum.
I am surprised to meet such an assertion in so acute a logician and so
prudent an advocate as Jeremy Taylor. If the
quod primum verum
mean the first preaching or first institution of Christianity by its
divine Founder, it is doubtless an evident inference from the assumed
truth of Christianity, or, if you please, evidently implied therein; but
surely the truth of the Christian system, composed of historical
narrations, doctrines, precepts, and arguments, is no self-evident
position, still less, if there be any tenable distinction between the
words, a primary truth. How then can an inference from a particular, a
variously proveable and proof-requiring, position be itself a universal
and self-evident one?
But if
quod primum verum
means
quod
prius verius,
this again is far from being of universal application,
much less self-evident. Astrology was prior to astronomy; the Ptolemaic
to the Newtonian scheme. It must therefore be confined to history: yet
even thus, it is not for any practicable purpose necessarily or always
true. Increase in other knowledge, physical, anthropological, and
psychological, may enable an historian of A.D. 1800 to give a much truer
account of certain events and characters than the contemporary
chroniclers had given, who lived in an age of ignorance and
superstition.
But confine the position within yet narrower bounds,
namely, to Christian antiquity. In addition to all other objections, it
has this great defect; that it takes for granted the very point in
dispute, whether Christianity was an
opus simul et in toto
perfectum,
or whether the great foundations only were laid by Christ
while on earth, and by the Apostles, and the superstructure or
progression of the work entrusted to the successors of the Apostles; and
whether for that purpose Christ had not promised that his Spirit should
be always with the Church.
Now this growth of truth, not only in each
individual Christian who is indeed a Christian, but likewise in the
Church of Christ, from age to age, has been affirmed and defended by
sundry Latitudinarian, Grotian and Sociman divines even among
Protestants: the contrary, therefore, and an inference from the
supposition of the contrary, can never be pronounced self-evident or
primary.
Jeremy Taylor had nothing to do with these mock axioms, but to
ridicule them, as in other instances he has so effectually done. It was
sufficient and easy to shew, that, true or false, the position was
utterly inapplicable to the facts of the Roman Church; that, instead of
passing, like the science of the material heaven, from dim to clear,
from guess to demonstration, from mischievous fancies to guiding,
profitable and powerful truths, it had overbuilt the divinest truths by
the silliest and not seldom wicked forgeries, usurpations and
superstitions. J.S.'s very notion of proving a mass of histories by
simple logic, he would have found exposed to his hand with exquisite
truth and humour by Lucian.
1810.
In the preceding note I think I took Taylor's words in too literal a
sense; the remarks, however, on the common maxim,
In rebus fidei,
quod prius verius,
seem to me just and valuable.
2. March, 1824.
Ib.
p. 297.
When he talks of being infallible, if the notion be applied to his
Church, then he means an infallibility antecedent, absolute,
unconditionate, such as will not permit the Church ever to err.
Taylor himself was infected with the spirit of casuistry, by which
saving faith is placed in the understanding, and the moral act in the
outward deed. How infinitely safer the true Lutheran doctrine: God
cannot be mocked; neither will truth, as a mere conviction of the
understanding, save, nor error condemn; — to love truth sincerely is
spiritually to have truth; and an error becomes a personal error, not by
its aberration from logic or history, but so far as the causes of such
error are in the heart, or may be traced back to some antecedent
un-Christian wish or habit; — to watch over the secret movements of the
heart, remembering ever how deceitful a thing it is, and that God cannot
be mocked, though we may easily dupe ourselves: these, as the
ground-work with prayer, study of the Scriptures, and tenderness to all
around us, as the consequents, are the Christian's rule, and supersede
all books of casuistry, which latter serve only to harden our feelings
and pollute the imagination. To judge from the Roman casuists, nay, I
ought to say, from Taylor's own
Ductor Dubitantium,
one would
suppose that a man's points of belief and smallest determinations of
outward conduct, — however pure and charitable his intentions, and
however holy or blameless the inward source of those intentions or
convictions in his past and present state of moral being, — were like the
performance of an electrical experiment, and would blow a man's
salvation into atoms from a mere unconscious mistake in the arrangement
and management of the apparatus.
See Livy's account of Tullus Hostilius's unfortunate experiment with one
of Numa's sacrificial ceremonies.
trick not being performed
secundum artem,
Jupiter enraged shot him dead.
Before God our
deeds, which for him can have no value, gain acceptance in proportion as
they are evolutions of our spiritual life. He beholds our deeds in our
principles. For men our deeds have value as efficient causes, worth as
symptoms. They infer our principles from our deeds. Now, as religion or
the love of God cannot subsist apart from charity or the love of our
neighbour, our conduct must be conformable to both.
Ib.
p. 305.
Only for their comfort this they might have also observed in that
book, — that there is not half so much excuse for the Papists as there
is for the Anabaptists; and yet it was but an excuse at the best, as
appears in those full answers I have given to all their arguments, in
the last edition of that book, among the polemical discourses in
folio.