BERENGAR OF TOURS. - Heretic of the 11th century, b. at Tours in the early years of the 11th century and d. there on 6 Jan. 1088. He studied at the school of Chartres, and later taught at St. Martin of Tours, where he had St. Bruno as a disciple. He was probably chancellor of that same school and certainly archdeacon of Tours. Around 1047, he began to spread his opinions on the Eucharist. A letter of his addressed to Lanfranc, who later became archbishop of Canterbury, reached its recipient in Rome, and, read at a Council of 1050, aroused such indignation that the author was excommunicated. The condemnation was repeated at Vercelli (1 Sept. 1050) and the following year at Paris (16 Oct. 1051). However, he had himself absolved in 1054 by a Council of Tours, which contented itself with a profession of faith that was not erroneous, but very generic. Hildebrand, the future Gregory VII, who was at Tours, advised bringing his case to Rome. Indeed he appeared before the Lateran Council in Apr. 1059, and was forced to read a retraction of his opinions. But, having returned to France, he resumed teaching the same doctrine as before. Summoned back to Rome, he ended by accepting 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 After this, having withdrawn to the vicinity of Tours, he lived outwardly at peace with the Church, but persisted in his opinions.
B.'s principal work, the one that allows his thought to be best assessed, is his De sacra coena, which he wrote before 1070 in reply to Lanfranc's De corpore et sanguine Domini. Discovered in the 18th century by G. E. Lessing, the work was published at Berlin by Aug. F. and Friedr. Th. Vischer in 1834, and in 1941 by W. H. Beckenkamp at The Hague. Against the Lateran Council of 1059, he responded with a writing cited by Lanfranc, Contra praefatum synodum (PL. 150, 409 ff.), and another against the councils of 1078-79 (in E. Martène, Thesaurus, IV, pp. 103-109). There also survive by him some verses more limpid than his prose, which is convoluted and inelegant (Iuste index, Iem Christe, in Martène, op. cit., pp. 115-16), and 23 letters.
Although other errors are imputable to B., it was his eucharistic doctrine that caused scandal and gave rise to an important literature.
He first 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 passed to denying the real presence as well. According to B., through the act of 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 in his hands, divides and distributes to the faithful the body of the Savior; but in eating the bread and drinking the wine, we also nourish our soul with the remembrance of the Incarnation and Passion of the Son of God. In short, the eucharistic bread and wine are only a symbol that represents to us the Body and Blood of Christ, but does not really contain them. B. appealed to certain words of Scripture, to certain texts of St. Ambrose and St. Augustine and especially to the doctrine of Ratramnus and to dialectic, which he placed above authority. He said, for example, that nothing can be converted into a thing that already exists, that the body of Christ cannot be in different places, that it could not be contained within the space of the species. The immediate condemnation that struck him attests the faith of the Church, and the writings that combated him advanced eucharistic theology.
Bibliography6 works
Carlo Boyer