December
1076 A.D. Eucharist,
Synod of Poitiers, 1076 & Berengar of Poitiers
See the URL for varied footnotes. They have been removed here while retaining
the body of Mr. Hardwick’s exposition.
The second controversy that sprang up in the Carolingian era of the
Church related to the mode in which the Body and Blood of Christ are taken and
received in the Lord's Supper. It employed the leading theologians of the west
for several years: and when religion had emerged from the benumbing darkness of
the tenth century, it furnished a perplexing theme for the most able of the
schoolmen. As the spirit of the Western Church contracted a more sensuous tone,
there was a greater disposition to confound the sacramental symbols with the
grace they were intended to convey, or, in a word, to corporealize the
mysteries of faith. Examples of this spirit may be found in earlier writers who
had handled the great question of the Eucharist: but it was first distinctly
manifested by Paschasius Radbert in 831. He was a monk, and afterwards
(844—851) the abbot, of Corbey; and in a treatise1, On the Sacrament
of the Body and Blood of Christ, appears to have maintained that, by the
act of consecration, the material elements are so transformed as to retain no
more than the appearance (' figura') of their natural substance, being truly,
though invisibly, replaced by Christ Himself in every way the same as He was
born and crucified2. The work of Radbert was composed in the first instance for
a pupil, but when he presented a new edition of it (844) to Charles the Bald,
it startled nearly all the scholars of the age. Rabanus Maurus8 wrote against
it; but unhappily no full account of his objections is preserved. Another monk
of Corbey, Ratramnus, whom we saw engaging in a former controversy, was the
main antagonist of Radbert. He put forth, at the request of the emperor, a
treatise On the Body and Blood of the Lord. It is divided into two
parts, the first entering on the question, whether the body and blood of Christ
are taken by the faithful communicant in mystery or in truth ('in mysterio an
in veritate2'); the second, whether it is the same body as that in which Christ
was born, suffered, and rose from the dead. In answering the former question he
declared, with St Augustine, that the Eucharistic elements possess a twofold
meaning. Viewed externally they are not the thing itself (the 'res
sacramenti'); they are simply bread and wine: but in their better aspect, and
as seen by faith, the visual organ of the soul, they are the Body and Blood of
Christ. The latter question was determined in the same spirit, though the
language of Ratramnus is not equally distinct. While he admitted a 'conversion'
of the elements into the body of the Lord, in such a manner that the terms were
interchangeable, he argued that the body was not Christ's in any carnal sense,
but that the Word of God, the Bread Invisible, which is invisibly associated
with the Sacrament, communicates nutrition to the soul, and quickens all the
faithful who receive Him3. Or, in other words, Ratramnus was in favour of a
real, while he disbelieved a corporal, or material presence in the Eucharist.
His views were shared, to some extent at least, by Floras, Walafrid
Strabo, Christian Drathmar, and others on the continent, and were identical
with those professed in England till the period of the Norman conquest. The
extreme position on the other side appears to have been taken by Erigena, who
was invited, as before, to write a treatise on the subject of dispute. Although
his work has perished, we have reason to infer from other records of his views,
that he saw little more in the Eucharist than a memorial of the absent body of
the Lord,—or a remembrancer of Christian truths, by which the spirit of the
faithful is revived, instructed, and sustained.
Paschasius, unconvinced by opposition, stedfastly adhered to his former
ground; and as the theory which he defended was in unison with the
materializing spirit of the age, it was gradually espoused in almost every
province of the Western Church. The controversy slumbered, with a few
exceptions, for the whole of the tenth century, when it broke out with
reinvigorated force. The
author of the second movement, Berengarius, was archdeacon of Angers (1040),
and formerly the head of the thriving schools attached to the cathedral of
Tours. Embracing the more spiritual view of the Eucharist, as it had been
expounded by Ratramnus", he was forced at length into collision with a
former school-fellow, Adelmann, who warned him in 1045 and 1047 of scandals he
was causing in the Church at large by his opinions on this subject. Like the
rest of the mediaeval reformers, Berengarius had inherited a strong affection
for the works of St Augustine; and his confidence in the antiquity and truth of
his position is expressed, with a becoming modesty, in his appeal to the
celebrated Lanfranc, prior of Bee, in Normandy. This letter had been
forwarded to Rome, where Lanfranc was in 1050, and on being laid before a
council6, which was sitting at the time, its author was condemned unheard. His
friends, however, more particularly Bruno, bishop of Angers, did not abandon
him in this extremity; and after a short interval of silence and suspense, he
was relieved from the charge of heresy in a provincial synod held at Tours in
1054. The papal representative was Hildebrand, who listened calmly to the
arguments of the accused, and when he had most cordially admitted that the
bread and wine are (in one sense) the Body and Blood of Christ, the
legate took his side, or was at least completely satisfied with the account he
gave of his belief. Confiding in the powerful aid of Hildebrand, he afterwards
obeyed a summons to appear in Rome (1059), but his compliance ended in a bitter
disappointment of his hopes. The sensuous multitude, who had become impatient
of all phrases that expressed a spiritual participation in the Eucharist, now
clamoured for his death, and through the menaces of bishop Humbert, who was
then the leading cardinal, he was eventually compelled to sign a formula of
faith, in which the physical
conversion of the elements was stated in the most revolting terms.
The insincerity of this confession was indeed soon afterwards apparent: for on
his return to France he spoke with bitterness, if not contempt, of his
opponents, and at length proceeded to develop and defend his earlier teaching. His chief antagonist was
Lanfranc, who, while shrinking from expressions such as those which emanated
from the Roman synod, argued strongly for a change of substance in the bread
and wine. The controversy, in their hands, became a battle-field for
putting the new dialectic weapons to the proof; and in a long dispute,
conducted with no common skill, they both were able to arrive at clearer
definitions than had hitherto been current in the Church. The feverish
populace, however, with the great majority of learned men, declared for
Lanfranc from the first; and more than once his rival only just escaped the
ebullition of their rage. The lenient tone' of Alexander II. in dealing with
reputed misbelief, was due perhaps to the pacification of his favourite,
Hildebrand; and when the latter was exalted to the papal throne as Gregory VII.
(1073), the course of Berengarius promised to grow smoother. But that interval
of peace was short. His adversaries, some of whom had private grounds of
disaffection to the reigning pontiff, made common cause with the more stringent
cardinals; and in 1078, the author of the movement, which continued to distract
the Western Church, was cited to appear a second time at Rome. The pope
himself, adducing the authority of Peter Damiani as an equipoise to that of
Lanfranc, was at first content with an untechnical confession that 'the bread
and wine are, after consecration, the true Body and Blood of Christ;' which the
accused was ready to accept. But other members of the Roman church, incited by
the cardinal Benno, Gregory's implacable opponent, now protested that, as
formulae like these did not run counter to the faith of Berengarius, he should
be subjected to a stricter test. To this demand the pope was driven to accede,
and in a numerous council, held at Rome in the following February (1079), the
faith of the accused again forsook him. He subscribed a new confession teaching the most rigorous
form of transubstantiation, and retired soon afterwards from Rome with
testimonials of his orthodoxy granted by the pope. As in the former case, his
liberation was accompanied by bitter self-reproach; but though he seems to have
maintained his old opinions8 till his death, in 1088, no further measures of
repression were adopted by his foes.
In him expired an able but inconstant champion of the primitive belief
respecting the true Presence in the Supper of the Lord. While he contended that
the substance of the elements is not destroyed at consecration, he regarded
them as media instituted by the Lord Himself for the communication, in a
supernatural manner, of His Body and His Blood to every faithful soul. He
argued even for the fitness of the term 'conversion' as equivalent to
'consecration,' and in this respect allowed a change in the bread and
wine; a change, however, which, according to his view, was nothing like a
physical transubstantiation, but was rather a transfiguration, which the
elements appeared to undergo, when contemplated by a living faith in Christ,
who had appointed them as representatives and as conductors of Himself.
The great bulk of the church-writers
who had been produced in the period under our review, are far less worthy of
enumeration. We must not, however, pass in silence men like Alfred the Great,
the Charlemagne of England (871—901) who, after struggling with the barbarous
Northmen, and at length subduing them, stood forward as the ardent patron of
the Church and a restorer of religion. Almost every trace of native scholarship
had been obliterated in the conflict with the Danes, but through the holy
efforts of the king himself, assisted by a band of literati1, a new impulse was communicated
to the spiritual and intellectual progress of the Anglo-Saxon race.
The English, it is true, like other churches of the west, was not
exempted from the corruptions which prevailed so widely in the tenth century:
but from the age of
Alfred, a more general diffusion of religious truth, in the
vernacular language, raised the standard of intelligence. His
policy was -carried out by Elfric, the Canonist, Homilist, Grammarian, Monastic
Reformer, and Hagiographer, to whom we are indebted for a large proportion of the
vernacular literature of
his age, but whose identification is one of the most obscure
problems of English
History. Aelfric left behind him a set of eighty
Anglo-Saxon Homilies for Sundays and great festivals, compiled in almost every
case from the earlier doctors of the west; and a second set for Anglo-Saxon
Saints' days. There is extant also a collection of contemporary Homilies
ascribed to a Bishop Lupus, who has been conjecturally identified with
Archbishop Wulfstan of
York.
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