BERENGARIO di TOURS. — Heretic of the 11th century, born at Tours in the early years of the 11th century and died there on 6 January 1088. He studied at the school of Chartres and later taught at S. Martino di Tours, where s. Bruno was among his pupils. He was probably chancellor of that school and certainly archdeacon of Tours. Around 1047, he began to disseminate his opinions on the Eucharist. A letter of his addressed to Lanfranco, who later became archbishop of Canterbury, reached its addressee in Rome and, when read at a Council in 1050, aroused such indignation that its author was excommunicated. The condemnation was repeated at Vercelli (1 September 1050) and the following year at Paris (16 October 1051). Nevertheless, he obtained absolution in 1054 from a Council of Tours, which was content with a profession of faith that was not erroneous, but very general. Ildebrando, the future Gregorio VII, who was in Tours, advised him to bring his case to Rome. Accordingly, he appeared before the Lateran Council in April 1059 and was compelled to read a retraction of his opinions. But, having returned to France, he resumed teaching the same doctrine as before. Recalled to Rome, he finally accepted an orthodox formula before the Lateran Synod of 1079. After this, having withdrawn to the vicinity of Tours, he lived outwardly at peace with the Church, but persisted in his opinions.
The principal work of B., the one that best permits his thought to be assessed, is his De sacra coena, which he wrote before 1070 in response to Lanfranco’s De corpore et sanguine Domini. Discovered in the 18th century by G. E. Lessing, the work was published in Berlin by Aug. F. and Friedr. Th. Vischer in 1834, and in 1941 by W. H. Beckenkamp at The Hague. In opposition to the Lateran Council of 1059, he replied with a writing cited by Lanfranco, Contra praefatum synodum (PL. 150, 409 ff.), and another against the councils of 1078–79 (in E. Martène, Thesaurus, IV, pp. 103–109). There are also some verses by him, clearer than his contorted and inelegant prose (Iuste index, Iem Christe, in Martène, op. cit., pp. 115–16), and 23 letters.
Although other errors are also imputable to B., it was his Eucharistic doctrine that caused scandal and gave rise to an important body of literature.
He initially intended to deny the conversion of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist; but from this denial he seems to have proceeded to deny the real presence as well. According to B., through consecration the bread and wine are not changed, but the spiritual, intelligible presence of Christ is added to them. It is therefore not true that the priest holds, divides, and distributes the Savior’s body to the faithful; rather, in eating the bread and drinking the wine, we also nourish our soul with the remembrance of the Incarnation and the Passion of the Son of God. In short, the Eucharistic bread and wine are merely a symbol representing to us the Body and Blood of Christ, but do not actually contain them. B. appealed to certain words of Scripture, to certain texts of s. Ambrogio and s. Agostino, and especially to the doctrine of Ratrammo and to dialectic, which he placed above authority. He said, for example, that nothing can be converted into an existing thing, that Christ’s body cannot be in different places, and that it could not be contained within the space of the species. The immediate condemnation that struck him attests to the faith of the Church, and the writings that opposed him advanced Eucharistic theology.