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Huldrych Zwingli's Dream of the Lord's Supper

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Huldrych Zwingli's Dream of the Lord's Supper Huldrych Zwingli’s Dream of the Lord’s Supper Bruce Gordon Did Huldrych Zwingli dream his teaching on the Lord’s Supper? Or did a ma- lign spirit deceive Zwingli as he slept? In August 1525 the Zurich reformer made the extraordinary claim in print that during the night before the first celebration of the Reformed sacrament in the Grossmünster in Zurich a fig- ure had appeared to him in his sleep to admonish him to declare the true doctrine of the table. Zwingli’s numerous opponents, Lutheran and Cath- olic, had little difficulty believing there had been an apparition, but their interpretation was distinctly less charitable. In the hands of his adversaries, the story was of a devil, not an angel, who visited Zwingli in the night of 13 April 1525. A reviled heretic had been counseled to further apostasy by demonic forces known to haunt the weak and reprobate during the hours of sleep. For Zwingli, the nocturnal revelation was anything but evil: the mysteri- ous visitor had pointed the sleeping reformer to a true and proper under- standing of the Lord’s Supper, providing the insight that the sacrament was the Passover of the ancient Israelites. Zwingli’s eyes were opened to the con- nection between the Old and New Testaments, the fulfillment of the salva- tion story of the Israelites in the body and blood of Christ. In the dream, divine intervention had rescued him from a losing battle with hostile inter- locutors over the nature of Christ’s words “This is my body.” Yet, the dream was fraught with the anxieties expressed by Protestants about the nature of revelation in a somnolent state. How was the dream to be verified? Was it indeed the work of the devil on a vulnerable and troubled soul? In the story of Zwingli’s dream we find the confluence of medieval and early modern perceptions of sleep and dreaming with Reformation claims for prophetic authority. The little-known incident of Zwingli’s dream, which rarely finds men- tion in biographies of the reformer, is remarkably ambiguous, sustaining multiple interpretations. Its verity, however, was resolutely maintained by both Zwingli and those of his successors who chose to mention the inci- dent. For Zwingli, the dream was of great significance, a turning point, and although he only wrote of it once, the Zurich reformer placed a full and carefully crafted account in a major work on the sacraments, the Subsidi- um sive coronis de eucharistia of August 1525, written four months after the © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004356795_020 HULDRYCH ZWINGLI’S DREAM OF THE LORD’S SUPPER 297 event.1 The text was soon translated into German in 1526 by Georg Binder (1495–1545).2 Binder was a student of Vadian’s, a schoolmaster in Zurich and a close supporter of Zwingli, whom he knew well. A zealous advocate of the Reformation, Binder translated many documents from Latin into Ger- man and was particularly engaged with theatre in the city.3 Printed in 1526 at the height of the battle over the sacraments, Binder’s translation of the dream of Zwingli’s account would have ensured the story was well known. It is unlikely that such publicity would have happened without Zwingli’s knowledge and permission. He wanted his dream propagated at the mo- ment when the Reformation was seeking to establish itself in Zurich: it was conformation of his prophetic authority. Zwingli’s dream, and the manner of its interpretation by other writers, be- longs to the early modern culture of sleep and visions and the fear of nocturnal visitation.4 There were many aspects to the dream. The manner in which the reformer told the story is suffused with anxiety about the status of revelation through extraordinary means. Yet, out of this anxiety emerged a confident as- sertion that his interpretation of the sacrament was consistent with scripture and that it had been given to him to proclaim the true doctrine. Fear, pedagogy, the cultivation of exemplary conduct, echoes of humanist vitae, and preaching were interwoven in a dream story intended to justify the reform movement and confirm Zwingli’s status. What took place in the night of 13 April 1525 before the celebration of the first Reformed Lord’s Supper in Zurich? We have only Zwingli’s memory of what transpired, and his Latin account was carefully constructed theological- ly. The dream story was placed in the middle of a polished Latin tract on the Lord’s Supper that was intended for an international audience. It was another intervention in the sacramental struggle with Martin Luther. The dream was 1 Huldrych Zwingli, Subsidium sive coronis de eucharistia (17 August 1525) in Huldreich Zwing- lis sämtliche Werke, vol. 4 (Leipzig: Heinsius, 1927) (Corpus Reformatorum 91), 458–504. 2 Huldrych Zwingli, Naachhuot von dem Nachtmal oder Dancksagung Christi / durch Huldry- chen Zvingli in Latin beschryben und durch Georgen Binder verdütschet, trans. Georg Binder (Zürich: Hager, 1525). 3 Conradin Bonorand, Personenkommentar II zum Vadianischen Briefwerk (St Gallen: VGS, Verl.-Gemeinschaft, 1983), 228–231. 4 The literature on dreams in the Reformation is limited; see Dreams and History: The Interpre- tation of Dreams from Ancient Greece to Modern Psychoanalysis, ed. Daniel Pick and Lyndal Roper (London: Routledge, 2003); Alec Ryrie, “Sleeping, Waking, and Dreaming in Protestant Piety,” in Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain, ed. Jessica Martin and Alec Ryrie (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 73–92. Also, A. Roger Ekirch, At Day’s Close—Night in Times Past (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005)..
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