LANFRANC of PAVIA. - Benedictine theologian and archbishop of Canterbury, b. at Pavia at the beginning of the 11th century, d. at Canterbury on 28 May 1089. Of a noble family, he received an excellent formation in the schools of law that then flourished at Pavia. Discouraged at finding no teaching at Avranches and Rouen, where he had gone, he sought peace in the abbey of Bec (Normandy). Embittered by internal adversities, he decided to withdraw to the eremitical life, but the abbot Herluin appointed him prior and head of the monastic school.
The beginnings of his teaching were hard, but a circumstance changed the situation: since at that time (1047) Berengar of Tours had begun to spread his eucharistic errors, L. went to Italy with Leo IX (1049), attended the Councils of Rome and Vercelli, where he engaged the heretic in a determined struggle, at times over-zealous, which he continued in France. His attitude pleased the bishops and the duke, who now regarded him as the champion of orthodoxy: thus L. became famous and the school of Bec acquired great renown: St. Anselm of Aosta, Ivo of Chartres, Anselm of Lucca (the future Alexander II) flocked there; from Rome Nicholas II sent the papal chaplains there to perfect themselves in dialectic and rhetoric.
Having become the friend and counsellor of William the Conqueror, duke of Normandy, he was made abbot of St. Stephen of Caen, and, after the conquest of England (1066), archbishop of Canterbury (1070), where he sustained many struggles for the defense of the primatial rights contested by York and above all for the reform of the Church. In this he followed the directives of Gregory VII, though tempering their intransigence on the two capital points of celibacy and lay investiture. This displeased the Pope, with whom L. had rather cool relations. At the moment when Henry IV opposed to Gregory the antipope Guibert (Clement III), L., together with the English episcopate, took refuge in a comfortable and equivocal neutrality.
A man of action, endowed with political genius, L. was not a scholar by profession; he nevertheless knew how to treat those subjects that circumstances imposed upon public attention. Some works, for example the Commentarius in Psalmos, are lost; there remain instead: Commentarius in epist. s. Pauli (PL. 150, 101-406), whose authenticity has been debated; Decreta pro Ordine s. Benedicti (ibid., 443-516), a minute exegesis of the Rule of St. Benedict; Liber de celanda confessione (ibid., 624-32), important for the history of the sacramental seal and for medieval conceptions of the necessity of Confession; Epistolarum liber (ibid., 505-624), some sixty letters, precious for the history of canon law and of theology (Ep. 33 on the Communion of children and on the necessity of the Eucharist); Libellus de Sacramento corporis et sanguinis Christi contra Berengarium (ibid., 407-42), the best-known work of L. In the first part he refutes Berengar, whom he reproaches for oscillating between a simple explanation (that of Humbert of Silva Candida, expressed in the oath imposed on him by Nicholas II in 1159) and a subtle one (that of Scotus Eriugena, to whom the eucharistic opuscule of Ratramnus (v.) was then attributed), whereas the question was whether or not to accept the doctrine of the Church, which rejects pure symbolism, devoid of any foundation in the texts of St. Ambrose and St. Augustine, so willingly cited. In the second part he sets forth Catholic thought in positive form, formulating, in very felicitous terms, the three truths of the mysterious presence of the body and blood of Christ, of Transubstantiation and of the objective reality of the external species. He then justifies his position by invoking the authority of Scripture and of the Fathers. He adduces texts, of which he provides an exegesis at times exact (for example, as regards St. Ambrogio), sometimes forced (e.g., regarding St. Augustine); in any case he defends, with theological precision, the compossibility within the same mystery of the Sacramentum and the res. As for the mode of Transubstantiation, he limits himself to observing: «Mysterium fidei credi salubriter potest, vestigari utiliter non potest» (PL. 150, 421-27).
It is L.'s merit to have unmasked the rationalistic tendency, the basis of Berengar's theological procedure, and to have defended, with firmness, the primacy of authority in theology. Therefore L.'s eucharistic work is a vigorous testimony of traditional faith, rather than an attempt at penetrating the dogma.
Bibliography13 works
Antonio Piolanti