Dear Marion,

As you know, once I start writing, I have difficulty putting
an end to my words.

For me, the controversy surrounding transsubstantiation,
initiated by Bengarius Turonensis, the early Scholastic who
died in 1088, 22 years after the Battle of Hastings, is
obviously of no theological significance. I can dispense
with the pros and cons of the implicit latter-day cannibalism.
What strikes me as significant about Bengarius, is the diversity 
and arguable triviality of the issues which in the course of
millenia, have seemed worth arguing about, have seemed worth
violence and wars.

This human propensity for conceptual conflict, it seems to me, is
of more immediate concern to ourselves than we might assume. Lessing
was berated by Goeze for publishing the Bengarius manuscript, and
although he tried to reason with Goeze in a civil and humble manner,
Goeze apparently needed the controversy to maintain his political
clout (shades of 21. Century USA) and Lessing felt sufficiently
threatened to fight back with mounting acrimony. Kierkegaard
himself at the end of his short life, found it necessary to
engage his church in conflict over a seemingly trivial matter:
After the death of Kierkegaard's friend and patron Bishop Jacob
Peter Mynster, when Mynster's successor Hans Lassen Martensen
eulogized Mynster as an "irreplaceable ... veritable witness
to the Truth," Kierkegaard erupted into a rage that strikes me
as a badge of insanity, - but who am I to talk, - and castigated
Martensen for having defiled the memory of true martyrs. 
Could Kierkegaard's meaning have been himself? In any event,
controversy often, if not always, has its inapparent roots.
Conflict, it seems, is an ineradicable expression of human
nature. Is the pacifist, someone like myself who refuses to
fight, a coward, or merely an idiot.  We've been here before:
Things are seldom as they seem, skimmed milk masquerades as cream.

A postscript concerning Kierkegaard and the Christian "communion".
Although a theologian, and I believe an ordained pastor of the
Lutheran Church, the author of numerous printed sermons, on his
death bed at age 42, Kierkegaard is said to have refused "communion".