Paschasius Radbertus
Radbertus was born about 790 near Soissons and entered the monastery of Corbie in northern France about 812. He became its abbot in 844, resigned in 851, and died on April 26, 865. In 831 he wrote the first doctrinal treatise devoted wholly to the Eucharist, On the Body and Blood of the Lord, and in 844 he presented a revised edition to Charles the Bald.1
Radbertus taught that a miracle of divine power occurs in the elements, so that after consecration the Eucharist is the very flesh of Christ, the same flesh that was born of Mary and crucified. He did not use the word “transubstantiation,” but, as Sam Storms observes, “he defended the idea.” He also appealed to stories of the bread seen on the altar in the form of a lamb or a child. Rabanus Maurus and Radbertus’s fellow monk Ratramnus objected, holding with Augustine that Christ’s presence in the Supper is spiritual. Radbertus’s view prevailed.2
He also exalted the Virgin Mary in terms that grew common in the eighth and ninth centuries:
the blessed and glorious Virgin Mary is sung and proclaimed everywhere as the one who has been exalted in great glory above the choirs of the angels.3 Paschasius Radbertusas quoted by Jaroslav Pelikan
His Legacy
Radbertus gave the Western church its first full doctrine of the real, physical presence of Christ in the sacrament. The dispute carried into the scholastic period, where, in Storms’s words, “the doctrine of Radbertus eventually won the day,” and Innocent III made it dogma at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. The Reformers, with Ratramnus and Augustine, rejected the idea that the elements become the flesh of Christ.4
