Paschasius Radbertus

Paschasius was born about 785 near Soissons, in northern France. He was abandoned as an infant on the steps of a convent and raised by the nuns of Notre-Dame at Soissons; he never knew his parents. As a young man he entered the abbey of Corbie, one of the best-endowed and best-read houses in the Frankish empire.

He taught there for years and was made abbot in 843. He was not suited to administration. The house was divided, the politics of the Carolingian civil wars reached inside the cloister, and in 851 he resigned. He spent the rest of his life at Corbie and at Saint-Riquier as an ordinary monk, writing. He died about 865.

His great book is De corpore et sanguine Domini, On the Body and Blood of the Lord, written around 831 for the monks of Corvey, a daughter house in Saxony, and later presented to Charles the Bald. It is the first treatise in the history of the church devoted entirely to the Eucharist.

His argument was direct. The bread and wine on the altar, after consecration, are the very body and blood that were born of Mary, that suffered on the cross, and that rose from the tomb, not a figure of them, not a likeness, but the thing itself, though the senses report bread and wine. He gathered miracle stories in support and pressed the identity as hard as language allowed.

It landed like a stone in water. Charles the Bald asked another monk of Corbie, Ratramnus, for a second opinion, and Ratramnus answered with a book of the same title arguing that the presence is real but spiritual, and that the sacrament is a figure, that what is on the altar is not the historical body in the crude sense Paschasius seemed to mean. The two books, written by two monks of the same monastery, opened the Eucharistic controversy of the Latin West.

That argument never really closed. It broke out again in the eleventh century over Berengar of Tours, produced the doctrine of transubstantiation in the thirteenth, and was the fault line on which the sixteenth-century Reformation split, Ratramnus's book was reprinted by Protestants, Paschasius's by Catholics, and both sides claimed the ninth century.

Paschasius also wrote a long commentary on Matthew, a treatise on the birth of Christ, biographies of two abbots of Corbie, and works of considerable literary polish.

Sources: Paschasius Radbertus, De corpore et sanguine Domini; Ratramnus of Corbie, De corpore et sanguine Domini; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. IV; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913).