The life and work of Constantijn Huygens: An introduction

Huygens’ parents had both moved from the Southern Netherlands to escape Spanish Catholic rule, so that they could practise their Calvinist faith more freely. Constantijn was baptised as a Calvinist and it seems clear that he remained loyal to this tradition throughout his life, but this does not mean he was a strict, conservative Calvinist. One of the defining moves in the history of Calvinism in the United Provinces was the Remonstrance against stricter forms of Calvinism, made to the States of Holland in 1610. The man who penned the Remonstrance was Huygens’ friend, the preacher, Johannes Uytenbogaert (1557–1646). He was forced into exile in 1618 and did not return to the United Provinces until 1626.Footnote ³ However, Huygens certainly did not forget him during his exile and sent him a copy of versifications of the Twelve Articles and the Ten Commandments he wrote in 1619.Footnote ⁴

Another hint that Huygens looked beyond the confines of strict Calvinism is that it is difficult to discern from his writings which side he took at the Synod of Dort (1618–19). One might have expected him to come out clearly on the side of the strict Calvinists, or Counter-Remonstrants, who were victorious at Dort, particularly as he continued to be a member of the Calvinist, as opposed to the Remonstrant, church. But there is no firm evidence for this.Footnote ⁵ As well as Uytenbogaert, Huygens had friendships with other Remonstrants, including the Amsterdam Professor of Philosophy, Caspar Barlaeus (1584–1648). Perhaps what was more important to Huygens than narrow confessional concerns was the need for church unity in the Netherlands. We see this in his poem, Hofwijck, completed in 1651. Here he not only distances himself from the strict Calvinists, or Gomarists as they were sometimes known, but also chides the Remonstrants, or Arminians. Both of them, as he sees it, are to blame for causing division in the church in the Netherlands.Footnote ⁶

Yet, in his poems on the Eucharist, or Lord's Supper, it is not so much the division between Calvinists and Remonstrants which is a major cause for concern for Huygens, but rather the division between Calvinists and Catholics, which crystallises in his rejection of the doctrine of transubstantiation. This did not stop Huygens from having friends and acquaintances who adhered to the Catholic faith, and these included the French-born philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650), who settled in the United Provinces in 1628.Footnote ⁷

There may be some who question what a person's friendships can tell us about that person's own confessional position. That is certainly a reasonable point, though it would be difficult to imagine a strict Calvinist having the same warm relationships with Uytenbogaert, Barlaeus and Descartes as Huygens did in the first half of the seventeenth century in the United Provinces. However, perhaps a couple of examples from Huygens’ own works will suggest that we are dealing with someone who would not have been entirely comfortable in a strict Calvinist environment.

The only play that Huygens wrote, Trijntje Cornelis (1653), is notable for several reasons not least of which is that, as Reinder P. Meijer puts it, it shows ‘with great candour the down-to-earth, crude and sometimes vulgar side of Huygens's personality’.Footnote ⁸ On a different note, Huygens was willing and able to challenge practices in the Calvinist church with which he disagreed. Since a previous Synod of Dort, in 1574, the use of organs had been banned in Calvinist church services. Huygens wanted this ban to be overturned, and so in 1641 he published a treatise advocating the playing of the organ during church services titled ‘Use or Non-use of the Organ in the churches of the United Netherlands’.Footnote ⁹ There was a delay between Huygens writing the treatise and its publication, and this may point to the delicateness of the subject in the church at that time.Footnote ¹⁰ However, it was published and provided an impetus for the gradual reintroduction of organ playing in Calvinist church services.

There is much more to say on Huygens’ life and work,Footnote ¹¹ but what I have tried to do in this overview is to paint a picture of someone who, whilst remaining loyal to the Calvinist church, moved beyond narrow confessional confines. What I suggest we shall see as we move on to consider Huygens’ poems on the Lord's Supper is a similarly nuanced relationship with Calvinist (eucharistic) theology. On the one hand, we shall see an affirmation of themes considered central to this theology, such as human sin and divine grace, but on the other, we shall see reflections on the ontology and efficacy of the sacrament, some of which in the first instance seem at odds with it. This will lead us to re-examine aspects of Calvinist eucharistic theology and we shall be reminded that rather than being at odds with this theology, these reflections point us both to the richness of it, but also to the erosion of meaning in the celebration of the sacrament in churches in this tradition today.

Huygens’ poems on the Lord's Supper: sin, grace and repentance

So, let us make a start by considering what Huygens has to say about human sin, divine grace and the need for repentance. What we shall see is a familiar pattern in the Christian tradition: the original sin of Adam and Eve placing humanity in bondage, mitigated by the saving grace of God who sent his only son, Jesus Christ, to live and die for us so that we might be saved through his atoning sacrifice on the cross. However, as we might expect, Huygens works out from this pattern to develop a series of deep theological reflections using a variety of poetic techniques, rhetorical devices and reconfigurations of familiar tropes.

To begin with, it is clear to Huygens that there was original sin and that the sin in the world has its source in the disobedience of Adam.Footnote ¹² In one poem he writes ‘for one man's sin we stand together in all guilt’Footnote ¹³ and in another he refers to his own sin as ‘the yeast of Adam's fall’, which may owe something to Jesus’ injunction to beware the yeast of the Pharisees (Matt 16:6).Footnote ¹⁴ In a poem written in 1652, he refers to a ‘reptile on the ground’, and calls it ‘the creature you (God) first punished’, which is a clear allusion to the serpent in Genesis 3. Interestingly, Huygens seems to be likening himself to the serpent here, as if he is the lowest of the low, crawling along the ground. He emphasises his own lowliness when he says in the very next line that he is worthy of no better food than the leftovers of what dogs have eaten. A few lines earlier, he again abases himself when he reminds us of the Gentile woman whom Jesus encounters in Mark 7:28 and refers to himself as a dog barking for crumbs.Footnote ¹⁵ This image might seem slightly artificial and somewhat exaggerated but it is clear that Huygens was very aware of his own sinfulness and he referred to it in his poetry in a number of ways. Again, he recalls the actions of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, on the occasion when they became aware of their own nakedness, and writes, ‘no fig in this land seen/Has leaves whose widths suffice to hide my shameful sin’.Footnote ¹⁶

Another trope Huygens uses on a number of occasions to refer to his own sinfulness is that of being clothed in a soiled garment. In an allusion to Revelation 19, in which the church is referred to as the bride of Christ the Lamb, and has been granted a garment that is ‘bright and pure’, Huygens seeks a way of making clean his own garment, soiled, as it were, by his own sins. He writes:

Huygens recognises that he cannot remove his sins on his own and at the end of the same poem he calls on God to do this, or as he puts it, continuing with the trope of the wedding garment, to make him ‘snow-white’:

As the reader will note, for Huygens here it is the blood of Christ crucified which can cleanse him of his sin. He makes this point again in a sonnet he wrote in 1649 in which he also alludes to Christ's washing of his disciples’ feet at the Last Supper (John 13:1–17). He writes:

In a later poem, written in 1668, he invokes the trope of a spotless garment once more. However, here, rather than suggesting that Christ's blood can clean his foul, sinful garment and make it spotless, it is the blood-stained garment which Christ himself wore during his Passion which can clothe Huygens and hide his sinfulness:

Interestingly, though, the trope of a dirty garment, alluding to sin, did not find universal favour. One poet, for example, Geertruyd Gordon (1649–1728), wrote that she considered the trope inappropriate on theological grounds. For her, those who confess belief in Christ are thenceforth always worthy and their garment never becomes sullied. She opposed those such as Huygens who, as she saw it, placed too much emphasis on man's sinfulness, preferring instead to concentrate on the love of Christ.Footnote ²¹

Another way in which Huygens alludes to his own sinfulness is to equate this with his old self and to contrast it with his new self in Christ. In a poem he wrote in 1660, he conceives of the relationship between his old sinful self and his new self in Christ in terms of a battle, one which by his own admission he wins at times and at other times loses.Footnote ²² This division between the old and new self is also at work in an earlier poem in which he writes:

Here, we might even get an insight into the nature of the sin about which Huygens so regularly chastises himself. He talks of vanity, but also of ‘haughty crimes’ or ‘pride’, which, of course, St Augustine asserted was the beginning of all other sin.Footnote ²⁴ Huygens wrote this poem in 1643, but a year earlier, in 1642, he had written a sonnet in which he also talked of a dual self. Here, though, he talks in terms of his body and soul and seems to equate his body with the old sinful self and his soul with the new self in Christ. He does this in the context of asking God to perform a miracle, namely the breaking apart of his body and his soul. He writes:

What we are not talking about here, though, is salvation. Huygens, it seems, is secure in the knowledge that he is saved, but is equally clear that it is solely by the mercy of God that this is so. In a sonnet written in 1649, he makes the point unambiguously. Here, he appropriates the Pauline trope of running the race and asks, rhetorically as so often, whether he can be saved by running the race, i.e. by his own efforts, and by his own will: ‘Shall I reach the goal, by will or running the race?’Footnote ²⁶ Unsurprisingly, the answer is a resounding ‘no’, and he concludes the sonnet with the line, ‘My will and course are naught; your mercy saves my life’.Footnote ²⁷ In a poem written four years later, in 1653, he makes a similar point: ‘By your grace, I am saved’.Footnote ²⁸

Although Huygens is assured of the saving grace of God, this does not mean that he feels he can sin at will and then ask God simply to forgive him and help him move away from sin. This, it seems, was a charge levelled at him by a contemporary, Jan Zoet (1614–74), in his response to Huygens’ 1645 sonnet cycle, ‘Holy Days’.Footnote ²⁹ Huygens makes this clear, in later poems at least, where he recognises that divine grace does not simply give him an excuse to sin and then apologise: he still needs to repent of his sins. In a poem written in 1660, almost as if responding to Zoet's charge, he tells us:

The question of repentance arises again in an epigram Huygens wrote three years earlier, in 1657. In this poem he conjures up the image of Judas’ betrayal of Christ, suggesting that only God knows if any of those amongst Huygens and his fellow communicants would now want to betray Christ and thus be condemned by God. It is not clear from the poem itself who would be betraying Christ here. One suggestion is that Huygens has in mind the verse from 1 Corinthians 11:29,Footnote ³¹ where we are told that those who do not discern the body of Christ eat and drink a judgement upon themselves. This may lead us to think that Huygens is referring to unbelievers here. But I wonder whether this is how things were in fact viewed in the Calvinist tradition in general and by Huygens in particular. For John Calvin, it seems that, rather than being condemned, the unbeliever simply does not enjoy the spiritual benefits of the Lord's Supper, instead merely eating the physical bread and wine.Footnote ³² For him, faith and repentance are necessary to enjoy the benefits of the Lord's Supper.Footnote ³³ The Heidelberg Catechism talks in similar terms when in Question 81 it asks ‘For whom is the Lord's Supper instituted?’ The Answer begins ‘for those who have repented of their sins and believe that they are forgiven them’. However, it goes on to say that those who do not sincerely turn to God and repent eat and drink a judgement upon themselves. So, from these passages, it seems that it is those who do not repent of their sins before coming to the Lord's table who betray Christ. Whether or not this was who Huygens had in mind in his 1657 epigram is unclear, but it is certainly a possibility. The question then is whether believers have to repent fully before partaking of the Lord's Supper without bringing judgement upon themselves.

Calvin recognises human failings and writes, ‘it is a perilous mode of teaching which some adopt, when they require perfect reliance of heart and perfect penitence, and exclude all who have them not’,Footnote ³⁴ and Huygens himself makes a similar point in two of his epigrams, one written in 1668 and the other in 1684. In the former, he again makes reference to the trope of a wedding garment, this time alluding to the guest in Matthew 22:11–14, who came to a wedding feast without the appropriate garment and was bound up ‘hand and foot, and throw[n] into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth’ (NRSV). He writes:

Here we may take references to God knowing whether things are good on the inside of the guests and to guests coming without a wedding garment as allusions to whether the guests have fully repented of their sins before coming to the Lord's table, and Huygens of course concludes that if only those who have done so were to come to the table, then there would be few present at it. In the 1684 poem, he makes the point even more strongly, saying that if only those who were completely worthy of God were to sit at the Lord's table, then it would stand empty.Footnote ³⁶ However, what is critical for Huygens in the struggle with sin is not simply repentance, full or otherwise, but rather intention to move away from sin, and he recognises this in a poem he wrote in 1654.

In the first thirty-three lines, he tries to give answers to the question of what it is that constitutes sufficient repentance, and after each answer asks rhetorically ‘Is this not enough repentance?’. After recognising that his initial answers do not suffice, in line 34 he realises that it is intention which is the key to repentance, for without the intention to change his old ways he would merely repeat them again, however much he repented of them. That said, for Huygens intention is not merely a function of the will, but he again recognises that he requires God to stir his heartFootnote ³⁷ in order to give him this intention to change his old ways.

So, we have seen here Huygens’ recognition of his own sinfulness, which ultimately he ascribes to the sin of Adam, his understanding of divine grace, which is not only salvific but also necessary to take him away from his old, sinful, self, and in addition his need to repent and to intend, with God's help, to turn away from that old self. And, although such themes may be expected in poems on the Lord's Supper by a Calvinist, what I have tried to demonstrate is that Huygens has used the form and language of poetry to present these themes in unexpected ways.

Before we move on to consider our other main theme in this part of the article, the ontology, and indeed efficacy, of the Lord's Supper, it is briefly worth mentioning that two other themes central to Calvinist eucharistic theology, thankfulness and forgiveness, do not occur explicitly as frequently as one might expect, given their importance in this theology. One exception to this is a poem Huygens wrote in 1653. Alluding to Matthew 11:30, he begins by asking a rhetorical question, which he then goes on to answer:

He recognises thankfulness does not of itself suffice, and acknowledges, with reference to Matthew 6:14, that he needs to forgive his neighbour in order to receive forgiveness from God. This reminds us that, although these poems are often deeply personal addresses by Huygens to God, he is also very aware of his fellow man, and this gives the poems a deeply ecclesiological dimension, a theme to which we shall return.

The ontology and efficacy of the Lord's Supper for Constantijn Huygens

For now, let us turn our attention to the sacrament itself and ask how Huygens understood this. To start with, it seems that for Huygens the Lord's Supper was very much a celebration or a feast. But of course this was no ordinary feast. In the poem on the Lord's Supper in his sonnet cycle, ‘Holy Days’, Huygens starts by asking the question ‘Is it your high Feast again?’Footnote ³⁹ and elsewhere, in a poem he wrote in 1652, he refers to it as a feast of peace, contrasting this with the internal strife which he himself is experiencing:

It was common at this time in the Calvinist tradition to consider the Lord's Supper as a spiritual banquetFootnote ⁴¹ and this is very much how Huygens himself viewed it. The fact that the Lord's Supper was typically celebrated only four times a yearFootnote ⁴² gave the faithful an opportunity to examine and prepare themselves spiritually for partaking of the bread and wine, and several of Huygens’ poems on this subject are meditations on the significance of the sacrament, which may have helped him to prepare to receive it. Such infrequent celebrations of the sacrament no doubt added to the special significance ascribed to it and this is another reason why Huygens often refers to it as a feast. He develops this trope in several of his poems by referring to himself as a guest at the feast. In one poem written in Latin in 1654, Huygens begins:

He uses the motif of guest again in an epigram in 1645, and here seems to suggest that God will grant guests at his table who are worthy of the host.Footnote ⁴⁴ Here, as elsewhere for Huygens, the host is Christ, which should not surprise us, but what is particularly striking about this and other poems by Huygens is its deeply personal and conversational tone, with the poet often addressing Christ himself directly. For Huygens, though, Christ is of course not merely the host at the feast, but the one whose atoning work on the cross allows our sins to be forgiven. In a poem of 1653, he addresses Christ saying:

This is not unexpected, but interestingly, when alluding to Christ's atoning work elsewhere, Huygens does so using language borrowed from the world of commerce. In language similar to that used by Anselm of Canterbury in Cur Deus Homo, Huygens understands our sin in terms of a debt which only Christ's self-sacrifice can pay off. In one place he talks of a victory over the forces of evil ‘bought with [Christ's] dear blood’Footnote ⁴⁶ and elsewhere, again evoking the trope of the wedding garment, he says that he cannot pay for the garment but only Christ can do so with his precious blood.Footnote ⁴⁷

As well as paying the price for our sin, another important aspect for Huygens of Christ's death on the cross is that in and of itself it is one complete sacrifice. In what is possibly Huygens’ earliest verse on the Lord's Supper, which he wrote to accompany his poems on the Ten Commandments in 1619, he concludes by saying:

It is possible to read too much into these lines but, given that only a few years later Huygens was praising the English for their opposition to the doctrine of transubstantiation,Footnote ⁴⁹ it might be reasonable to surmise that here Huygens is asserting that Christ's death on the cross was a ‘complete sacrifice . . . once and for all’, to contrast his position with that of propitiatory sacrifice, an important part of Catholic eucharistic doctrine. So, for Huygens, Christ's work on the cross, recorded in the Gospels, was a once and for all action, which was determinative for his relationship and that of others to God. This being so, it is not surprising that for Huygens one of the more important aspects of the Lord's Supper is that it is a meal of memorial. We see this in one of his later poems on the sacrament, which he begins with the line, ‘You told us to do this (i.e. celebrate the Lord's Supper) in memory of you’,Footnote ⁵⁰ and in an earlier poem, with reference to the part of the church service in which the events of the Passion were recalled, before the bread and wine were distributed, he talks of ‘this awful tale’.Footnote ⁵¹ However, I have already noted that Huygens saw the Lord's Supper as a feast or celebration, and suggested in particular that he would have understood it in terms of a spiritual banquet. This necessarily leads us to ask whether he believed it had any spiritual significance beyond this for those who partake of it. To put it another way, we might ask whether he considered that communicants could draw any benefits from the Lord's Supper beyond those which might arise merely by recalling the events of the Passion.

In sermons of this time, it seems that preachers felt the need to address this question. Further, it seems that an important analogy which was used to frame this discussion was the idea that the Lord's Supper might be some kind of medicine. In a sermon published in 1653, the Calvinist preacher, Focco Johannes (born c.1587), refers to the Lord's Supper in ways which may be expected, such as ‘a guest-meal’, ‘a heavenly meal’ and ‘a spiritual table’, but also calls it ‘a medicine of the soul’.Footnote ⁵² Almost as if responding to Focco, another Calvinist preacher, Casparus Streso (1603–64), tells us what the Lord's Supper is not. As well as not being a sacrifice of expiation, or a bodily food for the mouth, which we may take to be an allusion to the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, he says that it is not something which makes the human heart alive in the way in which medicine cleans and strengthens the body.Footnote ⁵³ So, it seems that there was a question mark over the effective power of the Lord's Supper itself in the Reformed tradition.Footnote ⁵⁴ When we come to consider what Huygens’ own position would have been, we have to begin by admitting that he does not use the term ‘medicine’ to refer to the sacrament in the poems under discussion. That said, he does recognise Christ's ongoing work in wiping away his own sin.Footnote ⁵⁵ Although he makes this point in poems on the Lord's Supper, it is not necessarily the case that he would believe that this could only happen by celebrating the sacrament. However, perhaps we get a hint of something more in a poem Huygens wrote in 1684, shortly before he died. Here he writes:

For some these lines may be easily explained. The sentiments expressed here do not seem to depart from the idea that the bread and the wine of the sacrament are merely signs,Footnote ⁵⁷ which bring gifts of spiritual nourishment analogous to the bodily nourishment which bread and wine ordinarily bring, or, to use Brian Gerrish's succinct phrase, they ‘present what they represent’.Footnote ⁵⁸ However, I suggest it may be worthwhile examining more closely the language Huygens uses to refer to the bread and wine to ask whether for him they have any value over and above that of being signs pointing beyond themselves to spiritual realities.

Ordinarily, we might expect Huygens to ascribe no intrinsic value to the bread and wine, and this is certainly what we see in some of his poetry. In one of his later poems, he addresses Christ saying:

With the words ‘livid hue of your mortal flesh’, he is of course referring to the white colour of the bread in the Lord's Supper,Footnote ⁶⁰ and here is saying that the faithful need to draw close to Christ, who, in contrast to the bread before their eyes, is the true living bread. Elsewhere, he is equally dismissive of the bread, referring to it as ‘a feeble crumb of wheat’.Footnote ⁶¹ But this is not the whole story. In one of his witty epigrams, Huygens draws a distinction between the Calvinist understanding of the bread and that of the Catholic Church. He begins with the lines:

Here we note that in the first line and a half, although he recognises that the bread of the Lord's Supper is made by human, therefore sinful, hands, it is almost like a door,Footnote ⁶³ which God opens for the faithful to be able to access the eternal bread, i.e. Christ. It may be argued that this again ascribes no special worth to the bread itself, for it is God and not the bread doing the work here, but we could look at things the other way round and say that, without the bread and celebration of the Lord's Supper, the faithful might, at least to a certain extent, have reduced access to Christ. Elsewhere, Huygens also seems to ascribe some significance to the bread and the wine, when he refers to them as ‘Holy Bread’ and ‘healing dew’ in a poem he wrote in 1660.Footnote ⁶⁴ Some may argue that Huygens commits a category error here and confuses efficient cause with instrumental cause; God, with the means by which God mediates himself to the faithful.Footnote ⁶⁵ The danger of such an error seems to have been appreciated by a preacher in this period, who, whilst wanting to ascribe some special significance to the sacramental elements, said it is only ‘in regard to their use that they are much more excellent than ordinary Bread and Wine’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Another possibility is that Huygens means us to take these phrases figuratively. He might argue that to say the wine is ‘healing dew’ has something in common with a figurative interpretation of the words of institution, to which he and fellow Calvinists would ascribe. To put it another way, just as the eucharistic bread has something in common with Christ's body, but is not equivalent to it, so too the wine has something in common with healing dew, but is not equivalent to it. Huygens himself makes a similar point in a poem he wrote in 1655.Footnote ⁶⁷ Here he somewhat playfully suggests that, if we take the words of institution literally, then with reference to various passages in the Gospel of John, we should also consider that Christ is a Way to tread on, a Door to open and an actual Vine. He concludes in line 57 by asking whether people have not heard of the language of Canaan, i.e. figurative language.

But I wonder if we can say that Huygens is using figurative language when he writes in another poem in 1668 that Christ ‘fill[s] the table with nothing less/Than [His] own flesh and blood’.Footnote ⁶⁸ To my mind, this may well not be the case, for it is orthodox Calvinist theology to assert that believers do indeed eat Christ's body and drink his blood in the Lord's Supper. But this is not the end of the matter, since for Calvinists Christ remains in heaven and the eating and drinking is effected by the Holy Spirit.Footnote ⁶⁹ So, it should strike us as strange that Huygens says Christ ‘fill[s] the table . . . ’, i.e. here on earth. It may be that Huygens is telling us that this is how he experiences the sacrament. But more likely what it points to is an inherent tension in Calvinist eucharistic theology between heaven and earth. In a recent study of Calvin's theology, Randall Zachman points to this tension saying that, on the one hand, Calvin insists that ‘the Lord . . . exhibits and presents the body and blood of Christ in the bread and wine of the Supper . . . [but] on the other hand, [he] insists that Christ is not to be sought in the symbols of bread and wine but in heaven’. Zachman argues that, in the final edition of the Institutes, Calvin seeks to resolve this tension by claiming ‘the descent of Christ to us both by the symbols and by the Spirit takes place so that we might thereby ascend to Christ in heaven’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Calvin himself writes, ‘for they think they only communicate with [the body of Christ] if it descends into bread; but they do not understand the manner of descent by which he lifts us up to himself’.Footnote ⁷¹ However, phrases such as ‘the manner of descent’ do leave Calvin open to the charge often levelled at him by his opponents that he was overly reliant on the use of reason in his eucharistic theology. It is not my intention here to try and square this theological circle, but rather to consider whether there is another approach to dealing with the vexed question of the meaning of the words of institution. And here we come back to Huygens for, in a Latin poem he wrote in 1643, he reflected on possible alternative meanings of the word ‘body’ in this context.Footnote ⁷²

In this poem, Huygens takes the words hoc enim est corpus tuum (‘for this is your body’), a slight but important variation on the Latin words of institution, hoc enim est corpus meum (‘for this is my body’), and offers up four possible suggestions for what the word ‘body’ means in this context.Footnote ⁷³ On the first occasion, in line 7, he suggests it stands for the body of Christ broken for us on the cross. On the second, it is now Christ's glorified body in heaven, to which his own soul is attached in the Lord's Supper, to which it refers. In line 26, he repeats the phrase and this time he says that it is his own body, which will be raised from the dead on the final day, and which will become like Christ's glorified body. Finally, in line 42, he suggests that the eucharistic body is the body of Christ as the church. These reflections on the body raise a couple of important points.

First, it shifts discussions away from the meaning of ‘is’ in the words of institution and, further, allows us to move beyond dichotomies such as ‘is’ versus ‘is like’, figurative language versus literal, and indeed heaven versus earth, which seem to dominate debates on these words, and which may ultimately remain unresolved.Footnote ⁷⁴

Second, the final part of the poem reminds us that the faithful are to be united with each other, as the body of Christ, the church, and that this union takes place through the feeding on Christ's flesh and drinking of his blood by the power of the Holy Spirit in the Lord's Supper.Footnote ⁷⁵ In a series of sermons we have looked at already, some of the titles refer to the place of community in the celebration of the Lord's Supper.Footnote ⁷⁶ We see this of course in our own word for the sacrament ‘communion’, more fully ‘holy communion’, and it is clear that, for Huygens, the communal aspect of the Lord's Supper was very important. We saw earlier that he often refers to the sacrament as a feast, and when he does so he often takes account of other believers who have come to the Lord's table. He starts a poem written in 1668 with the words ‘Here's good company at the feast’,Footnote ⁷⁷ and in a poem written in 1653, after admitting his own sin, asks whether any of his fellow guests are without stain.Footnote ⁷⁸ In a poem he wrote a year earlier, Huygens begins by acknowledging all those things which he struggles with in life and the first of these is his fellow man.Footnote ⁷⁹ But, despite this, he comes to the feast and wants to celebrate it with his fellow man. So, for Huygens, as we note above, there is a deeply ecclesiological dimension to the Lord's Supper, in which he and his fellow believers can be united with one another and with Christ, and this finds expression in several of his poems, including the one he wrote in 1643.

As we know, the church of Huygens’ day, like the church of our day, was not united, and perhaps paradoxically, although as he understood it, the telos of the Lord's Supper was that he and his fellow believers would be united with Christ, it was differing understandings of the sacrament, particularly as he saw it the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, which divided the church of his day.Footnote ⁸⁰