Ratramnus’s thought is a bit slippery. In his
response to the falsely dichotomous question put to him by the emperor, Ratramnus
concluded that Christ was present in figure, not in truth. And while his
decision led to accusations of heresy for denying Christ’s presence, most
scholars reject this interpretation. Ratramnus did not deny that something
objective changed in the Eucharist at the consecration but, since he had
defined “truth” as that which is evident to the senses, he was forced to affirm
the alternative, Christ’s presence in “figure.” In point of fact, Ratramnus’s
theology was, in certain ways, more traditional than Paschasius’s. In its more nuanced
consideration of sign and its rejection of the kind of crude materialism that
occasionally crept into Paschasius’s work, it is more properly sacramental.
However, the unfortunate rejection of Christ’s presence in “truth,” and the
consequent denial that the eucharistic body could be identified with Christ’s
historical body, ensured that Ratramnus would not emerge as the voice of the
tradition Ratramnus, as Aidan Nichols puts it, “set out to combat the
Paschasian notion of a supernatural transformation of the bread and wine
extending to their very appearances, veiled though this be to our sensory perception;
in pruning back a theological excess, he cut too deep into the sap-bearing
trunk of the Church’s eucharistic faith. Neither articulation from Corbie was
satisfactory, but these ambiguities in Ratramnus cost him the field, and a
Paschasian realism gained increasing hold of eucharistic theology in the years
that followed.
If Ratramnus’s weakness was a rejection of
Christ’s presence in “truth” that could easily be misread as a denial of Christ’s
real presence in “truth” that could be easily misread as a denial of Christ’s
real presence, buttressed by a denial of identity between Christ’s eucharistic
and historical bodies, Paschasius’s weakness was “a failure to take the
sacramental signs with full seriousness.” This was especially evident in his
teaching that our senses are miraculously preserved from seeing Christ
physically on the altar. Such a suggestion leaves little room for the signs of
bread and wine to function sacramentally and turns them into mere disguises.
And, though Paschasius’s views had gained hegemony in Western eucharistic
theology, his failure in this regard would necessarily provoke a reaction in a
Western Church whose towering patristic authority was St. Augustine himself,
the key features of whose eucharistic theology included a careful analysis of
the relationship between sign and the reality signified. (Brett Salkeld, Transubstantiation: Theology, History, and
Christian Unity [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2019], 61-62)
