Berengar of Tours - Significance

Significance

Berengar's real significance for the development of medieval theology lies in the fact that he asserted the rights of dialectic in theology more definitely than most of his contemporaries. There are propositions in his writings which can be understood in a purely rationalistic sense. But it would be going quite too far to see in rationalism Berengar's main standpoint, to attribute to him the deliberate design of subverting all religious authority—Scripture, the Fathers, popes, and councils. This would be to ascribe to a man of the 11th century views of which his age knew nothing, which it even had no terms to express.

The contrast which he sets forth is not between reason and revelation, but between rational and irrational ways of understanding revelation. He did not recognize the right of the prevailing theology to claim his assent, because it made irrational assertions; the authorities to which he refused to submit were, in his judgment, only human authorities.

Berengar's position was never diametrically opposed to that of his critics, though he had excommunication fulminated against him twice. But the controversy that he aroused forced people to reconsider the ninth-century discussion of the Eucharist, as Paschasius Radbertus had left it, and to clarify the doctrine of transubstantiation. Further, when both Berengar and his critics used the secular disciplines of logic and grammar to express a matter of Christian doctrine, the way was open to the scholasticism of the twelfth century.

He spoke bitterly and unjustly of popes and councils, unable to forgive them for making him untrue to himself; but this meant no rejection of the Catholic conception of the Church. His opposition was limited to the eucharistic doctrine of his time, and he controverted the theory of Paschasius not least because he believed it was contrary to Scripture and the Fathers, and destructive of the very nature of a sacrament.

Berengar of Tours died on the island of St. Cosme, near that city, in 1088.