CHAPTER 9
Zeal against heretical waywardness has to be combined
with knowledge and discretion if errors of judgment
are to be avoided
51. The faithful, however, have to combine zeal with discretion and knowledge if they are to avoid St. Paul’s admonishment, ‘I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but it is not enlightened.’*(85) {OLR} Holy zeal coming from God is not to be confused with defects arising from human weakness. Pure zeal has to be free from every rash judgment involving doctrine and persons. It has to be directed against recognised and sure evil, without doing harm to what is good, or ignorantly judging what is good as though it were bad. I am not speaking of latter-day Pharisees who under cover of burning zeal directed at godless innovations air their own malice or secret passion, or even insinuate error. My target rather is the defect found in eager, half-educated, impetuous souls who easily become the involuntary instruments of the Pharisees mentioned above. The same defect is present in others whose lack of clear vision, while making them hesitant and uncertain in their judgments, gives them a strong distaste for every kind of controversy, which they look upon as out of place. They are afraid of disturbing charity, as though someone willing to maintain charity could do so by sacrificing the truth.
These over-delicate, perpetual fence-sitters have caused as much trouble to wise men in the history of the Church as that inflicted upon them by malicious persons. The attempt by the wise to throw more light on the most difficult questions has led to accusations of error or at least of imprudence, despite the approval given by the Church to wise teachers whose doctrines she has praised.
Amongst the down-hearted at the time of St. Augustine were those wearied by the arguments about the question of the dogma of predestination, and overcome by its difficulty. For them, it would have been better if Augustine had never spoken about it: ‘They were so disturbed by what he was saying and so affected by weariness that the meaning of predestination, which he was constantly and urgently preaching, would, they thought, be better not mentioned. It seemed either on the verge of falsity or, as it were, extremely dangerous.’*(86) {OLR}
It is true that the arguments occasioned by the teaching of St. Augustine were endless, but finally, to the great embarrassment of his adversaries, the Catholic Church precluded all dissent by the canons of the 2nd Council of Orange which, accepted by the whole Church, attained the authority of an ecumenical council. These canons were composed of Augustine’s own words. The Roman church also declared on several occasions that her teaching on grace and free will was the same as Augustine’s much maligned doctrine.(87)
53. The history of sacred theology is full of similar examples, one of which will be sufficient to illustrate the rest. St. Paschasius Radbertus, whom we have mentioned above, threw new light on the doctrine of the holy Eucharist. His famous book On the Lord’s Body and Blood was simply a faithful exposition of the doctrine of the Church about the Eucharist, but the precision of its formulas gave it an air of novelty, and caused a good deal of hesitation amongst contemporary Catholic teachers who had not sufficiently examined the argument. To some, it seemed that Paschasius had given more force to expressions used by Jesus Christ than they did in fact possess;(88) others found their faith undermined through not recognising their own beliefs in the expressions employed by Paschasius (Frudegard, to whom the saint wrote a long letter, seems to have been amongst these); finally, Paschasius’ book gave others the opportunity of raising a question that had long remained unclear: was the body of Christ the same as that touched and seen (in a word, did it act in a physical way on our sensory organs), or was the body and blood of Christ only present under the veil of the species of bread and wine?
What had the holy Abbot done? Remaining faithful to the doctrine of the Church, he had tried to make the teaching clearer and easier to understand for the children of Saxon converts at school in the monastery of Corbie. He says: ‘Although I wrote nothing in this book worthy of its readers (I dedicated it to youngsters), nevertheless I hear that it has helped many to an understanding of this mystery, enabling them to think worthily of Christ…’*(89) {OLR} St. Odo of Cluny witnesses to the value of the work in illustrating the mystery when he says that Paschasius had written it in accordance with the opinions of the Fathers ‘in order to enhance reverence towards the holy mystery and reveal its majesty. If anyone reads it, even an educated person, I believe he will learn as much about this mystery as he thinks he already knows.’*(90) {OLR}
This is the kind of explanation of dogmas and mysteries that we have already spoken of; it is the aim of Catholic theologians and teachers as they strive to add understanding to their study of the faith. Noël Alexandre made the same point in his learned defence of Paschasius against the accusation of innovation brought against him by the Calvinists. He affirms that the understanding of the mystery of the Eucharist encouraged by Paschasius amongst so many of the faithful is not confined to the ordinary knowledge brought by faith and needed for salvation, but is a kind of enlightened, excellent knowledge which takes account of the circumstances of the mysteries, analogy with the prophets of the Old Testament, the purpose, the effects and benefits, and the dispositions needed in order to take part in them.’*(91) {OLR} Alexandre continues his comment on what I may call the learned knowledge of the dogmas of faith, saying: ‘This knowledge is called “understanding” by St. Augustine also. It does not precede, but follows faith as a reward. “So accept, so believe”, he says in sermon
51 on the words of the Lord, “that you may be rewarded with understanding. For faith must precede understanding if understanding is to be the reward of faith”.’*(92) {OLR}
Notwithstanding the clarity with which Paschasius had expounded the Church’s doctrine on the sacrament of the holy Eucharist, he became the unsuspecting occasion of argument, censure and hesitant faith. His clarity, in fact, served to fuel the dispute. Those who felt they were fully instructed, but were ignorant of what Paschasius taught about the great mystery, thought that his teaching was an innovation incompatible with the doctrine of faith, because their belief lacked the intellectual light with which his books enhanced it. This light blinded the unsuspected weakness of their own eyes. They grumbled in secret and even their faith suffered, although they dared not contradict him openly. Paschasius knew very well that their errors were the result of their ignorance: ‘and so although it is ignorance which leads them to err in this matter, no one is prepared to come out into the open and contradict that which the whole world believes and confesses.’*(93) {OLR} A little later he calls them: ‘Chatterboxes rather than learned,’*(94) {OLR} although this does not prevent him from instructing them and trying to show them where they were wrong.
The Church gained two special advantages from the discussions stimulated by Paschasius’ book, both of which are of great importance. First, many questions were clarified which previously had not been treated in depth; in addition, as a consequence of the first advantage, more precise language was discovered and determined in relationship to the Eucharist. This language, in harmony with the expressions used by Radbertus, was then sanctioned by the Church.
In his book, and in his letter to Frudegard, Paschasius had said that the Eucharist was simultaneously truth and figure. Rathmanus, a monk of the same monastery of Corbie, who had written a book on the Eucharist at the command of Charles the Bald, accepted the real presence, but took the word truth for manifestation, the meaning which, according to him, Gregory had given it.(95)
As a result, he denied that Christ was present in truth in the Eucharist, and asserted that he was there only in mystery or in figure, that is, covered by the veil of the species. This teaching differed only in expression from that of Paschasius; but it was a substantial question relative to those who erroneously thought that Christ himself was perceptible to the senses in the eucharistic bread and wine. Rathmanus did not distance himself from Catholic dogma, but the expression he used, taken out of its context, was open to equivocation.
In his historical preface to Rathmanus’ book, Jacques Boileau, a Parisian theologian (1712), shows how the monk had been accused of heresy, even by very learned persons, and his work placed on the list of prohibited books; later he was proclaimed the precursor of Calvinism by Arduin in a dissertation on the subject. Boileau goes on in his appendix to the book to show how Rathmanus had finally been fully justified and proved free of every suspicion of heresy.*(96) {OLR} This defence of Rathmanus has been recognised as solid by later historians of theology.
Rathmanus himself offers a twofold example of the ease with which people too sure of their own judgment can deceive themselves when they lack depth of doctrine and neglect to examine a subject carefully before accusing writers, who otherwise are wholly Catholic, of godless and dangerous innovations. On the one hand, Rathmanus is an example of this in his opposition to Paschasius, if indeed it is true that he intended to attack Radbertus’ book in his own work of the same name, De Corpore et Sanguine Domini, as Erigerus claims in a book commonly attributed to the anonymous Cellotian; on the other hand, Rathmanus himself has been accused of heresy by learned men throughout the ages.
St. Paschasius’ book gave rise to another question. He had affirmed that in the holy Eucharist the flesh of our Saviour was ‘without doubt that which was born of Mary, and suffered on the cross, and rose from the tomb.’*(97) {OLR}
St. Ambrose had already given his support to this way of speaking.(98) Nothing, in fact, could be more Catholic. But at the time such a precise expression appeared an unusual innovation, not only amongst the uneducated, but even to the learned. Rabanus Maurus, for example, the famous bishop of Magonza, opposed it. He had discovered that St. Augustine and St. Jerome had spoken as though three bodies of the Lord could be distinguished, the Church, the Eucharist, and that born of the Virgin. He accused Paschasius of not having taken care to reconcile St. Ambrose with the statements of the other two Fathers. Mabillon shows that Rabanus’ affirmation did not depart from Catholic doctrine of the real presence. He did not deny that the body of Christ in the Eucharist is identical naturaliter, that is, really and substantially, with the body born of the Virgin Mary and crucified, but only specialiter, that is, according to species and outward form.(99) It has to be admitted that this is idle subtlety, because the identity or non-identity of the body does not lie in the external species, but in its substantial union with the soul.
In this sense, Paschasius’ way of speaking is absolutely true, and later accepted universally by theologians. Nevertheless, Rabanus censured it, as Rabanus himself later encountered unmerited censure.
58. I could have given many other examples of controversies arising from writers’ expounding with greater conceptual clarity and verbal precision the Catholic dogma they wished to illustrate. The clarity was new, and the precision unusual, to many who had not examined their faith to the same degree. Accustomed to less exact language and somewhat indeterminate concepts, they were nevertheless convinced that their knowledge was sufficient and their belief fully enlightened.
Disputes arose, and accusations of error were brought against people who least deserved them. But from all this God drew advantage for his Church; the truth surfaced, and shone more brilliantly as a result.
Notes
(85) Rom 10: 2.
(86) c. 35 [Remigius of Lyons, Liber de tribus epist.].
(87) St. Hormisdas’ statement on the matter in his letter to Possessor is one amongst many, and will suffice here: ‘What the Roman, that is, the Catholic Church, follows and preserves about free will and the grace of God can be discovered in various books of blessed Augustine, especially those written to Hilary and Prosper, etc…’*{OLR}
(88) He himself affirms this in his Commentaries on St. Matthew: ‘I have said this more at length and expressly because I have heard that some take me up as though in that book which I wrote about the sacraments of Christ I had wanted to give more force to these words than the Truth himself did.’*{OLR}
(89) Letter to Frudegard.
(90) Conferences, bk. 2, c. 30, 31.
(91) Ecclesiastical History, 9th and 10th Centuries, Diss. 10, §4.
(92) Ibid.
(93) Letter to Fredugard.
(94) Ibid.
(95) The words used by Gregory are: ‘Lord, may your sacraments perfect in us what they contain, so that what we do now in specie, we may receive in rerum veritate.’* {OLR}These words have been misused by many heretics. But they refer to what we perceive of the sacrament, not to the sacrament itself, and they ask that the Christ whom we now receive under the species, that is, contained in the sacred sign, we may one day receive without veil or mystery.
(96) [Jacob Boileau, Dissertation on the book ‘The Lord’s Body and Blood’].
(97) [On the Lord’s Body and Blood].
(98) On the Mysteries, c. 9.
(99) Mabillon, Preface to Part 2 of 4th century [Acta Sanctorum ordinis Benedictini in saeculorum classes distributa] where again he justifies Rabanus against another accusation, that is, that the body of Christ, when received by a communicant, undergoes the same changes as other foods.