BERENGAUDUS. – Author of an important Latin commentary on the *Apocalypse*: *Expositio super septem visiones libri Apocalypsis* (PL 17, 765-970).
His first editor, Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of Durham (England), attributed it to St Ambrose, among whose works he included it (Paris 1548). Yet the *Expositio* not only cites St Augustine, St Jerome, St Gregory the Great and St Ambrose himself, but also reveals the author’s name at the beginning of the epilogue (omitted, like the names of the Fathers, in Tunstall’s edition): ‘Quisquis nomen auctoris scire desideras, litteras expositionum in capitibus septem Visionum primas attende [= BRNGVDS]. Numerus quatuor vocalium quae desunt, si graecas posueris, est LXXXI [szzo]’. Hence *Bérengaudos*. The Latin manuscript 2476 (12th century) in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris contains the original scribe’s note: ‘Auctor huius libri Bérengaudos appellatur’.
The Maurist Fathers, followed by R. Ceillier, identified B. with the Benedictine B. of the abbey of Ferrières, whom his abbot Lupus sent in 859 to study at St-Germain d’Auxerre (PL 119, 592 and 597). B. indeed knows and cites the Benedictine Rule, writes good Latin like his teachers Lupus of Ferrières and Heiric of Auxerre, mentions the fall of the Lombard kingdom (PL 17, 914), and stigmatizes the avarice of archdeacons (ibid. 17, 919), as do the 9th-century councils. A few (E. Dupin, P. Rangelard) identified him with B., deacon of Angers (c. 1040).
B. divides the whole *Apocalypse*, like St Bede and A. Autpert, into seven visions; he is original and careful in expounding the theological sense (he does not dwell on the literal sense of the symbols), blending the spiritual and the familial. Denis the Carthusian and Bossuet, in the preface to his *Apocalypse*, praise him highly; Bossuet follows him in explaining *Apocalypse 17, 17-18*. Like St Bede, B. sees the Church’s situation in the various ages, not predictions of single events; in the seven churches (chaps. 1-3) ‘one Catholic Church is designated’ (PL 17, 771 f., 796). Babylon, which at a given historical moment represents ‘Rome in particular’, is ‘the city of the devil, i.e. all the multitude of the reprobate’ (PL 17, 916, 918). He places the ‘recapitulation’ among the seven seals, the seven trumpets and the seven bowls: they represent the ages of the world, from Adam to the Catholic Church. The ‘woman’ of 12, 1 is the Church; ‘the head of the Church is Christ, and the twelve stars are the twelve apostles’ (PL 17, 881); the ‘heads’ of the Beast are all the reprobate, and the Antichrist will be the seventh, appearing in the seventh age (PL 17, 887-94). The ascetic-mystical commentary abounds in fine insights: the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit (ibid. 799-804), prayer and holiness (ibid. 807 f.), the ‘seven principal vices’ (ibid. 887 f.), the number 24 (ibid. 806), the twelve gems (ibid. 952-56).