LANFRANCO of PAVIA. - Benedictine theologian and Archbishop of Canterbury, born in Pavia at the beginning of the 11th century, died at Canterbury on 28 May 1089. Of noble family, he received an excellent education in the law schools, which then flourished in Pavia. Disheartened at not finding teaching positions in Avranches and Rouen, where he had gone, he sought peace in the abbey of Bec (Normandy). Saddened by internal opposition, he decided to withdraw to a life of contemplation, but Abbot Herluin appointed him prior and head of the monastic school.
The early years of his teaching were difficult, but a circumstance changed the situation: at that time (1047), Berengar of Tours began to spread his Eucharistic errors, and L., having gone to Italy with Leo IX (1049), attended the Councils of Rome and Vercelli, where he engaged in a decisive, sometimes harsh, struggle against the heretic, which he continued in France. His stance pleased the bishops and the duke, who now regarded him as the champion of orthodoxy; thus L. became famous, and the school of Bec gained great renown: among those who flocked there were St Anselm of Aosta, Ivo of Chartres, and Anselm of Lucca (the future Alexander II); from Rome, Nicholas II sent his chaplains to perfect their skills in dialectic and rhetoric.
Having become a friend and advisor to William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, he was made Abbot of St Stephen’s in Caen, and after the conquest of England (1066), Archbishop of Canterbury (1070), where he waged many battles to defend the primatial rights contested by York and, above all, to reform the Church. In this he followed the directives of Gregory VII, though he softened the Pope’s intransigence on the two key points of clerical celibacy and lay investiture. This displeased the Pope, with whom L. maintained rather cool relations. When Henry IV opposed Gregory with the antipope Guibert (Clement III), L., together with the exiled English, took refuge in a comfortable and equivocal neutrality.
A man of action, gifted with political genius, L. was not a professional scholar; yet he knew how to address the issues that circumstances imposed upon public consideration. Some of his works, e.g., the Commentary on the Psalms, are lost; the following remain: Commentary on the Epistles of St Paul (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 celandia cognitione (ibid., 624-332), 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, valuable for the history of canon law and theology (Ep. 33 on the Communion of children and the necessity of the Eucharist); Libellus de Sacramento corporis et sanguinis Christi contra Berengarium (ibid., 407-42), L.’s best-known work. In the first part he refutes Berengar, reproaching him for vacillating between a simple explanation (that of Hubert of Silva Candida, expressed in the oath imposed on him by Nicholas II in 1059) and a subtle one (that of John Scotus Eriugena, then credited with the Eucharistic opusculum of Ratramnus (q.v.)), whereas one had to accept or reject the doctrine of the Church, which rejects pure symbolism, devoid of any foundation in the texts of St Ambrose and St Augustine, so often cited. In the second part he expounds Catholic teaching in a positive manner, 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 the Fathers. He adduces texts, some of which he interprets accurately (e.g., in the case of St Ambrose), others more forcibly (e.g., in the case of St Augustine); yet he defends, with theological precision, the compatibility 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, 421-427).
It is to L.’s credit that he exposed the rationalistic tendency underlying Berengar’s theological method and firmly defended the primacy of authority in theology. Thus his Eucharistic work is a vigorous witness to traditional faith rather than an attempt to penetrate the dogma.