THEODORE BEZA

Therefore, was this great man also a Marcionite or an Eutychian? Far from it. Did he also think that, with the passion of the Lord having been completed so many centuries before him, the humanity of Christ is useless to us? Not at all. For who, having professed himself a Christian, has been so insane? But the matter is this. He saw that, given your oral manducation of the essential flesh of Christ itself, it follows necessarily, in your opinion, that the very essence of the flesh of Christ is joined in actual fact to the essence of our own flesh, and thus to the very bodies of the faithful, or those approaching worthily, to be συνάπτεσθαι joined together and συναρμόζεσθαι fitted together: namely, that no differently than daily food taken by the mouth and assimilated to our bodies, as the physicians say, it so fosters this natural life in them, though in some unknown way, from the essential flesh of Christ, likewise ingested by the faithful and digested by the heat of faith, as it were, it flows into the believers as eternal life. However, this monstrous σαρκοφαγίαν flesh-eating and portentous συναφὴν conjunction, although smeared with the sprinkling of some unknown mode of the omnipotence of God, this pious man could not bear, both because it expressly contradicts Christ's incarnation, ascension, and future return, and because by this reasoning the Church is not spiritually and mystically, but corporally