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Discerning the Body: Sign and Reality in Luther's Controversy with the Swiss

Erich Heller's The Disinherited Mind, in the American edition, has an epilogue on "The Hazard of Modern Poetry." In it, Heller's thoughts go back to the great debate between Luther and Zwingli at Marburg (1529), and he suggests that, so far from being a mere exercise in scholastic hairsplitting, the colloquy signaled a revolution: the reduction of symbols to the merely symbolic. "And ever since Zwingli the most common response to the reality of symbols has been a shrugging of shoulders or an edified raising of eyes and brows, or an apologia for poetry, or an aesthetic theory."' It would be absurd to lay all these dreadful consequences wholly at Zwingli's door, as though he alone were responsible. Heller is using words advisedly, I assume, when he says that the theological dispute signaled the revolution. But Zwingli would not mind being thought revolutionary. In his treatise On Baptism (1525) he announced, though with regret, so he said ("I would have preferred to keep silence"), that all the doctors of the church since the time of the apostles had been wrong because they had ascribed to the water of baptism a power it does not have.2 He detected a like error in what had been said for centuries about the bread of the eucharist, and the tragedy for the Protestant cause was that he detected this error in the writings of Luther.