Monday, June 8, 2020

Brett Salkeld on the Eucharistic Theology of Ratramnus

 

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)