The case of Berengar of Tours

Summary

‘For he called pope Leo IX not pontifex but pompifex and pulpifex; the Roman Church a council of vanity, the church of the malignant; and the Apostolic See the seat of Satan.’ This hostile epitaph, and more in the same vein, was written in 1088, the year that Berengar died. They are perhaps unequal crimes: to call even a scion of the German aristocracy ‘not pope but a maker of pomp’ or (worse still) ‘pulp’, and to reject the entire Roman Church as an institution. The charges are based on Lanfranc's indictment of twenty-five years before: that Berengar had ignored the judgements of pope and council and despised the testimony of the faithful throughout the ages, saying that in himself and his followers only was the true Church to be found on earth. It is not for claims like these that Berengar is now remembered: he has his niche in Gratian and the ecclesiastical dictionaries as an exponent of views on the Eucharist rather than as a schismatic from the Roman Church. But in his own day Berengar's eucharistic theology did not strike all men as heretical: Peter Damian, for example, is said to have been undecided. For his contemporaries the issue that Berengar raised was as much one of authority as one of doctrine. When rightly or wrongly Leo IX and Nicholas II condemned Berengar, he continued to teach and write. For nearly thirty years he provoked papal interest, resolutions in provincial synods, letters and tracts from individual critics: and still there was no final and effective judgement.