Evangelization, Catechesis, and the Beginnings of Western Eucharistic Theology Mary Collins, O.S.B

Louvain Studies 23 (1998) 124-142

Evangelization, Catechesis, and the Beginnings of Western Eucharistic Theology Mary Collins, O.S.B.

The document commonly identified as the first extended theological treatment of the Eucharist in the western church has been the subject of many scholarly analyses by theologians. Is there room for an alternative reading of De Corpore et Sanguine Domini by Paschasius Radbertus (here- after, Radbert), monk of the abbey of Corbie in the kingdom of the Franks?1 I think so, on the basis of internal evidence and external data that invite such a rereading. Bede Paul, editor of the critical edition of De Cor- pore, notes that Radbert wrote it between 831 and 833 in response to a request from Warin, a former student of his, who was a young abbot in Saxony.2 Warin needed an intelligible explication of the Eucharist in a popular style for the instruction of his young monks, newly converted Saxon nobles. His monastic mentor obliged, producing the document that has had lasting impact on western understanding of the Eucharist. Two matters shape my focus in this presentation: the Saxon provenance of the document and its catechetical purpose. An even larger question informs my interest: how this particular eucharistic catechesis so engaged our Germanic ances- tors in the faith that it effectively shaped the western church’s approach to eucharistic belief throughout the entire second Christian millennium.

Catechist for the Saxons: Radbert of Corbie

Radbert was not himself a Saxon, nor was Warin; both were Franks, at one time confreres at the seventh-century Merovingian monastic

1. Pascasius Radbertus, De Corpore et Sanguine Domini, ed. Bede Paul, Corpus Christianorum: Continuatio Mediaeualis, 16 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1969). 2. Ibid., viii-x. WESTERN EUCHARISTIC THEOLOGY 125 foundation of Corbie. So my claim about establishing a Saxon ambiance for authentic reading of De Corpore et Sanguine Domini needs support. To do this, a brief review of Radbert’s life is in order. Born at Soissons in 786, he spent an orphan’s childhood with the sisters of Adelhard, abbot of Corbie, in their convent; there he was educated.3 He became a monk of Corbie in 814 and, he was soon made master of the juniors. In Radbert’s early years there, monks of Corbie made their first recon- naissance excursion to newly conquered Saxon territory, constructing earthen buildings and establishing a cloister in 815.4 This foundation lasted five years; then, when the buildings were destroyed, the monks withdrew. Two years later, in 822, Radbert was a member of an abbatial party from Corbie that reentered Saxon territory. This time the monks made their foundation in the fortified Weser Valley; it was named New Corbie, or Corvey. Shortly thereafter, some of the abbatial party, Radbert among them, returned home. In 826, the monastic community at Corvey elected Warin, Radbert’s former student, as its first abbot. Corvey thrived. During the ninth century, 177 young Saxon nobles joined this new monastery at Corvey.5 What gave the place its attractive- ness? The story of the Carolingian conquest and “conversion” of the Saxons is one of the bleaker episodes in the history of Christian mission.6 Yet in the generations after Charlemagne’s “preaching with an iron tongue,”7 many sons of Saxon nobles embraced Christianity in order to be inte- grated into the upper classes of the conquering Franks. Who was better prepared to assist with their transition into Frankish Christian culture than a Frankish monastic foundation in Saxony?8 Abbot Warin had no easy time of it, however, and he turned to his confrere and mentor at Corbie for assistance in teaching the young Saxons. Sometime between 831 and 833, Radbert sent Warin a catechesis on the Eucharist. In composing it he undoubtedly remembered his brief stay in Saxony a decade earlier.9

3. Eugene Choisy, Paschase Radbert: Étude historique sur le 18e siècle et sur le dogme de la Cène (Geneva: Maurice Richter, 1888) 20. 4. Ibid.; see also C. C. Sumpf, Bursfelde: Geschichte im Überblick (Hann. Munden, 1989) I. 5. Ruth M. Karras, “Pagan Survivals and Syncretism in the Conversion of Sax- ony,” The Catholic Historical Review 72 (1986) 556; she cites Klemens Honselmann, “Die Annahme des Christentums durch die Sachsen im Lichte sächsischer Quellen des 9. Jahrhunderts,” Westfälische Zeitschrift 108 (1958) 217. 6. Ibid., 554: “The conversion of Saxony ... was a sudden operation, carried out under Charlemagne’s military banner.” 7. Ibid., 555. 8. Sumpf, Bursfelde: Geschichte, I. 9. Radbert notes in his cover letter to Warin that he is writing during the time of his own abbot Wala’s exile from Corbie because of conflicts with the court of Louis the Pious. De Corpore, vii; also 3. 126 MARY COLLINS

What Radbert wrote is evidently the fruit of his regular monastic reading of scripture, his lectio divina. The genre of De Corpore et Sanguine Domini is not systematic exposition but answers to a series of twenty-two related questions about the mystery of the Eucharist. His responses are constructed through meditative juxtaposition and commentary on biblical texts drawn from the Old and New Testaments, with timely citations of some patristic authors.10 One critical reader of Radbert’s De Corpore said of him that he is “not a dialectician, but a literate monk impressed by the grandeur and seriousness of the destiny of believers.”11 In other words, his is an exercise in traditional monastic theology, akin to what is called mystagogy in other contexts. The dialectical theology of the schools would develop only several generations after him. The matter of monastic literacy in the Frankish realm warrants some general remarks. Literary historian Heinz Rupp notes that it was Charlemagne who initiated the moves “to reintegrate the Frankish empire into the literary tradition of the Roman empire.” However, that needs some qualification. Corbie, a Merovingian monastery, had had its own links with Anglo-Saxon traditions of learning and thus with the literature of Christian antiquity. The intellectual resources of Corbie were independent of and preceded the eighth century cultural develop- ments associated with Alcuin of York, student of the Venerable Bede, and Charlemagne’s “Minister of Culture.”12 Corbie’s efforts in Saxony contributed directly to the carolingian effort to train new generations of Christian thinkers in the German areas. This required language skills, namely, the ability to express the heritage of Latin Christianity with a northern tongue. Monks and clergy used the Germanic tongue for oral instruction, for prayer formulas like the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s prayer, for baptismal vows and adjuration and confession formulas. Written Ger- man was also used in the monasteries, although for a limited purpose, namely, the facilitation of the learning of Latin by the Germanic elites. Textual testimony to this literacy project can be found in the German glosses on and interlinear versions of Latin documents.13 Linguistic resources adequate to the appropriation of the wisdom of Christian antiquity were not ready at hand in the warrior culture of

10. Radbert names Cyprian, Ambrose, Augustine, Hilary, Isidor, John [Chrysos- tom], Gregory, Jerome, Hesychius [of Jerusalem] and Bede, ix; also 7. 11. Choisy, Paschase Radbert, 93. 12. Heinz Rupp, “The Adoption of Christian Ideas into German, with Reference to the ‘Heliand’ and to Otfrid’s Evangelienbuch,” Parergon 21 (1978) 34. 13. Ibid., 35-36. WESTERN EUCHARISTIC THEOLOGY 127 the Saxons.14 So the language dividend for what has been called “a colossal intellectual investment” in the monastic milieu came slowly. The immediate beneficiaries were few. How many of the ninth-century Saxon monks at Corvey, whether nobles or peasants, could read the Latin text on the Eucharist when Radbert first produced it for their instruction? Did its potential readership at Corvey extend far beyond the abbot Warin who had requested it? How did he use it, if at all, for his catechetical purposes? Was De Corpore et Sanguine Domini a resource book for him? We do not know what use was made of it at Corvey. His- torians of ideas have been more successful in tracing the influence of this early eucharistic catechesis on the later development of scholastic eucharistic theology.15 Another set of questions must also be acknowledged in any adequate rereading of Radbert’s De Corpore et Sanguine Domini. Scholars often assert that the text is the first “full” treatment of the Eucharist in the western Church. But, of course, it is no such thing. Rather, the twenty-two questions and answers that comprise this eucharistic catechesis are carefully focused: on the salvific purpose of Eucharistic celebration and on the effecting of Christ’s real presence in the eucharistic elements. There is no direct interest in the ecclesial mystery of the Holy Spirit in the assembly of the baptized who celebrate Eucharist, nor in the workings of the Holy Spirit in liturgy of the Word, nor in the general intercessions of the priestly people for the salvation of the world, nor in the trinitarian structure and theology of the Eucharistic prayer, although these were all matters of vital interest in Christian antiquity. Why this particular set of questions, and not others? Why these particular answers?16 What gave this exposition its compelling authority in its milieu? Recently Patricia McCormick Zirkel proposed an interesting answer to the question of the subsequent authority of Radbert’s De Corpore.17 Her argument focuses on the later use made of this text. It is well known that Radbert produced a second edition in 843 or 844. He simply recycled the text written for Warin, sending it with a new cover letter

14. James Russell, The Germanization of Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) 204-208. 15. See Gary Macy, The Theologies of the Eucharist in the Early Scholastic Period (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). 16. Contemporaries who wrote on the Eucharist offered different readings of the tradition, among them his confrere Ratramnus of Corbie and Rabanus Maurus, abbot of Fulda. See Choisy, Paschase Radbert, 98. 17. Patricia McCormick Zirkel, “The Ninth-Century Eucharistic Controversy: A Context for the Beginnings of Eucharistic Doctrine in the West,” Worship 68 (January 1994) 2-23. 128 MARY COLLINS to the emperor Charles the Bald, grandson of Charlemagne, when the reigning monarch asked him – as well as Ratram, another monastic confrere from Corbie – for their explanations of the Eucharist. She argues on the basis of traditions of Frankish-Germanic kingship, that it was Charles the Bald’s approbation of Radbert’s work that gave it its authori- tative status within the western tradition. “Charles the Bald … assumed the responsibility of promulgating a teaching on the Eucharist for his subjects.”18 While the proposed political explanation is initially attractive, in the end it is not compelling. Under scrutiny, Zirkel’s argument seems built on a tacit assumption that since the document accrued authority Charles the Bald must indeed have promulgated it. But she provides no evidence of such an act of promulgation. Nor does she answer the question why the emperor would have favored Radbert’s views over those of his confrere. The answer to this question is not self-evident. Editor Paul notes that a large number of manuscripts of Radbert’s De Corpore are extant, evidence of its wide circulation.19 While this may show that the text did accrue authority, it does not establish that the source of authority lay in a decisive act of the emperor. But what else might explain its cogency? Historians of western eucharistic theology commonly point out that Radbert’s theological orientation is “Ambrosian,” while the orientation of his confrere Ratram is “Augustinian.” But there is no reason to believe that Charles the Bald would have understood such subtleties. Nor did he have any reason, even as Holy Roman Emperor, to question the orthodoxy, much less the theological acumen, of either of these Latin fathers. I would argue, rather, that whatever authority Radbert’s presentation of the Eucharist held for Frankish emperor or Saxon monk lay in its intelligibility for the northern European religious imagination during the people’s transition toward a German Christian culture. With or without royal approbation, what Radbert wrote “fit,” and it accrued authority in its milieu because of its fittingness.

Evangelization in the Saxon Milieu

We come then to the second focus for this new reading of Rad- bert’s work, De Corpore, namely its internal witness to the ninth-century

18. Ibid., 20-21: “The early Carolingians continued to hold themselves responsible for the religious well-being of their subjects” … “In his assumption of such responsibility, Charles was probably imitating to some extent his Byzantine counterparts …” 19. De Corpore, ix-xii. WESTERN EUCHARISTIC THEOLOGY 129 evangelization and catechesis of the Saxons. My intention is to locate the religious outlook of Radbert’s De Corpore on the basis of an exami- nation of the religious horizon of the Heliand, a ninth-century telling of the gospel story in old Saxon. My goal is to try to understand why these particular questions and not some others were posed in this Eucharistic catechesis. Prior to doing so, it will be useful to lay the ground by looking at additional witnesses to the persistence of the Saxon religious outlook in the north European appropriation of the Christian tradition. At a place called Bursfelde on the Weser river, not far from the location of Corvey in Saxony, is a religious site with a rich history. It was once a sacred grove where the Saxon tribes had gathered long before the Christian monks built a chapel there after the carolingian conquest.20 A late eleventh century basilica still stands there; the spot maintained its ancient sacrality for the peoples of the place long after their adherence to the Christian religion. Geological surveys attest to the presence of a strong magnetic or gravitational force, quite possibly the reason Saxon peoples had first come there for sacred rites. The baptismal font of the Christian basilica sits within this powerful force field. The floor surrounding the baptismal font is scored with four sets of three concentric crosses, themselves arranged to form a larger central cross. These crosses will be discussed shortly as Christian runes. The ancient sacrality of the church’s site is specified by other architectural features. The church is dedicated to St. Thomas the apostle, whose feast comes December 21 on the liturgical calendar, the day of the winter solstice. The axis of the church from door to altar table is oriented to the point of sunrise on that day. The interior columns of the Bursfelde further connect the site’s pagan Saxon past with its Christian present. A major structural column is fashioned as the tree of life, a tree grounded in its pagan roots in the Sun; its capital opens onto symbols of the Christian mystery. Bursfelde historian Sumpf, suggests that just as pagans once walked in procession through the sacred grove to the place of sacrifice so Christians “do their procession along a alley of columns toward their altar. ”21 Bursfelde provides clear evidence that an indigenous religious horizon continued to inform local appropriation of the Christian faith in this Saxon land three hundred years after the monks of Corbie settled near this place along the Weser. For the historian of western liturgy, the

20. C. C. Sumpf, Bursfelde: Guidance in English (Hann. Münden, 1989) 1. 21. Ibid., 5. 130 MARY COLLINS

Bursfelde church built in 1093 is a powerful reminder of the creative possibility that emerges where popular religion intersects with official traditions of public worship. It is also a healthy reminder that the mystery of salvation in Christ invites rich symbolic mediation to the believer, physically and imaginatively as well as discursively. As French sacramental theologian Louis-Marie Chauvet argues, symbols are a medium of recognition of oneself in relationship.22 Bursfelde “worked” for the Saxon Christians who gathered there to celebrate their own participa- tion in the mystery of Christ’s dying and rising. Even when the words of Latin liturgy were not accessible to the people of the place and the priest’s ritual practices all but hidden from them, Saxon Christians could recognize themselves as a people redeemed by Christ within this architectural setting. These observations return us to the matter of evangelization and catechesis among the Saxons and suggest the value of rereading Radbert’s De Corpore as the eucharistic catechesis it originally was. Thanks to G. Ronald Murphy’s recent masterful English translation of and commentary on the Old Saxon gospel, known to scholars as the Heliand, historians of theology and catechesis are in a good position to do a critical rereading at the end of the twentieth century.23 The so-called Heliand, an epic poem extant in seventy-one fitts or episodes written in Old Saxon, dates from 830. Composed during the reign of Louis the Pious, successor to Charlemagne and predecessor to Charles the Bald, it is contemporaneous with Radbert’s Latin catechesis on the Eucharist for these same Saxons. Translator and commentator Murphy locates the origins of this epic retelling of the gospel story in the same Saxon-monastic milieu along the Weser river from which came Warin’s request to Radbert. Murphy notes that an extant ninth-century manuscript, most likely a very early copy of the original, is done in the handwriting style of Corbie, indicating that it was known at Corvey.24 Perhaps it was even composed at Corvey by a first-generation Saxon monk, although Murphy himself prefers locating its origins in the Anglo-Saxon monastery of Fulda on the banks of the Fulda river, a tributary of the Weser. Whatever the case, it is clear that the milieu for which both documents were composed is the Weser valley in the

22. Louis-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A Sacramental Interpretation of Christian Existence, trans. P. Madigan and M. Beaumont (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995) 124-130. 23. G. Ronald Murphy, The Heliand: The Saxon Gospel (New York: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1992) and The Saxon Savior: The Germanic Transformation of the Gospel in the Ninth-Century Heliand (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 24. Murphy, Saxon Savior, 12. WESTERN EUCHARISTIC THEOLOGY 131 decade 830, and the same audience is intended: young Saxon nobles newly come to Christianity. The Heliand mediates a meeting of the gospel narrative with the northern Germanic religious world view and the traditional religious practices of the Saxons. Murphy is a scholar of early medieval German literature with an ear finely attuned to this meeting, and he provides an empathetic account of the Heliand as witness to the task that faced ninth-century evangelists and catechists in communicating the message of Christian godspell to conquered Saxons warriors. His work comple- ments Ildefons Herwegen’s earlier philosophical exploration of the ten- sions among the world views of pre-Christian and Christian antiquity arising in the mediterranean climate and the Germanic outlook grounded in a north European experience of the world.25 The latter was a harsh world in which fate, power, and magic operate. Two matters – runic practice and sacral power – will concern us in this attempt to reread Radbert’s Latin eucharistic catechesis, De Corpore et Sanguine Domini, through the horizon of newly converted Saxons, as this religious outlook is more directly attested to in the evangelization document, the Heliand. I intend to argue that Radbert’s distinctive focus on the salvific purpose of the Eucharist and on the effecting of the real presence of Christ in the eucharistic elements corresponds to Saxon religious preoccupations evident in the Heliand. Earlier I identified as “runes” the concentric cross design on the stone floor of the baptismal area at Bursfelde. Runes are words or apho- risms, letters or characters believed to have mystical significance and talismanic or occult powers. Runes could be spoken or inscribed. As a cultural phenomenon of the pre-Christian northern European world, their presence signaled a belief in magic. Runic scholar Ralph Elliott documents the widespread presence in northern Europe of Christian crosses among other runes on memorial stones, walls, pillars, bells and doors of churches.26 The cruciform markings found at Bursfelde thus had a broader cultural context. The word “rune” connotes whisper, secret, or mystery. In northern mythological tradition, runes are associated with gods, especially with Woden or Odin, “the High One,” who came to wisdom and knowledge of the runes through suffering. As he hung upon the evergreen world ash (Yggdasil), the runes came to him, and he became known as god of

25. Ildefons Herwegen, Antike, Germanentum, Christentum (Salzburg: Verlag Anton Pustet, 1932). 26. Ralph W. V. Elliott, Runes: An Introduction (2nd ed.; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989) 93. 132 MARY COLLINS the runes of love and magic, eloquence and poetry.27 Runic consciousness is operative in the Heliand’s presentation of the Christian mystery. In what follows I draw heavily on Murphy’s text, notes, and commentary, making my own point with them, however, in anticipation of my return to a proposed rereading of Radbert’s De Corpore. First, it is clear that the author of the Heliand intends his readers to understand Jesus as comparable to, but greater than, Woden (just as the evangelist Matthew depicted Jesus as the new Moses). In telling the story of the Baptism of Jesus in the Jordan, for example, he exploits pertinent symbolic overlap, reporting: As [Christ] stepped out onto the land, the doors of heaven opened up and the Holy Spirit come down from the All-Ruler above to Christ – It was like a powerful bird, a magnificent dove – and It sat upon our Chieftain’s shoulder, remaining over the Ruler’s Child.28 (Song 12) Murphy alerts modern readers to what the Saxon hearer would have recognized immediately. Woden’s iconographic image depicted him with the bird(s) of consciousness and memory on his shoulder. Our author has it both ways; he stays faithful to the gospel narrative which reports the Holy Spirit hovering over Jesus, but only after he has first placed the magnificent dove on the shoulder of the New Woden. The poet also makes inventive use of the Yggsdasil, or evergreen world ash, the tree of life, which is central to the Woden narrative, in what Murphy calls his intercultural telling of the gospel. In Song One he makes his first concealed allusion to the tree, intentionally criticizing the earlier Frankish Christian mission of conversion by conquest. In his judgment, such slaughter had been unnecessary. Speaking of the power at work in the four evangelist’s chanting of the godspell about the Chief- tain Christ, the poet writes: Nothing can ever glorify the Ruler, our dear Chieftain more! Nor is there anything that can better fell every evil creator or work of wickedness, nor better withstand the hatred and aggression of ene- mies. This is so, because the one who taught them God’s spell, though generous and good, had a powerful mind…29 (Song 1) Saxons would have heard in this assessment of the gospel’s power a judgment that Boniface and Charlemagne were mistaken in their mis- sionary methods in an earlier era. Boniface (680-754) had erroneously thought he could destroy the power of Woden by felling the symbolic

27. Elliott, Runes, 87. 28. Murphy, Heliand, 35; emphasis added here and in subsequent citations. 29. Ibid., 4. WESTERN EUCHARISTIC THEOLOGY 133 world tree in the sacred grove. The poet evangelist to the Saxons had confidence rather in the power of the Word of him who, like Woden, had suffered on a tree. In a later song he would have Jesus observe, “Do not think for a moment that I have come to this world to destroy the old law, to chop it down among the people ...” Even “in the olden days, when earls held the old law, very wise men spoke in words ...”30 (Song 17). As Murphy notes, “the author [of the Heliand] … was obviously enamored of the power of words [and] seems to have been very much impressed by the first chapter of the book of Genesis. where the entire universe is described as being created by a series of spoken words.” In fact, “the author makes an essential connection between the creating power of those primal words …, the gospel’s words, and the powerful magic words of Germanic religion.”31 Also recurrent in the Heliand are explicit depictions of Jesus as the one who soothsays, disclosing God’s plans, and as the one who knows and sometimes teaches runes. For example, Jesus’s presentation of the eight beatitudes is given the form of fortune-telling or soothsaying, making the event “an interesting revelation of mankind’s (good) fortune, told by the Ruling God, the Fortune-teller.”32 In summary of the Beatitudes, the Heliand poet says, “Thus he spoke wisely, and told God’s spell.” He interprets the Lord’s Prayer in another vein, as Jesus’s response to the request of his earls: “… teach us the secret runes.” They are given the prayer, in a Saxon dynamic-equivalence translation, with the admo- nition, “This is how you men should pray in your words when you bow in prayer to ask the ruling God to pardon the evils of mankind.” (Song 19) Murphy comments: “… the Lord’s prayer is seen as secret runes which … are as powerful as any Germanic charm or spell. They give immediate results, direct access through the [secret] words to the Power[s] of the other world – in this case, to the ruling God.”33 The Cana narrative, the narrative of the calming of the sea, and the narrative of the feeding of the crowd are all constructed within this same magical horizon, although each is treated distinctively. Reporting the Cana crisis, the Saxon evangelist says: Six stone jars were standing there empty. God’s mighty Child gave his orders very quietly so that a lot of people would not know for sure how he said it with his words. (Song 24)

30. Murphy, Heliand, 49. 31. Ibid., 4, n. 6. 32. Ibid., 45, n. 71. 33. Ibid., 54; also n. 88. 134 MARY COLLINS

Recounting the episode on the sea with his “weather-wise” but worried warriors, the Heliand poet notes: Then He spoke to the wind and also to the sea itself, and he told both of them to behave themselves more calmly. They carried out the command, the Ruler’s word. The storm winds died down and the wind became tranquil. (Song 27) With the great crowd of earls all looking for something to eat and his warrior-companions reporting to him on the lack of food, Jesus both speaks and acts: Then the Best of those born spoke to his followers and told them to bring out the bread and the fishes. The people waited quietly; the enormous company of warriors sat. At the same time the Chieftain of Mankind, the holy King of Heaven, hallowed the food by his own power, broke it with his hands, gave it out to his followers, and told them to bring it to the people and divide it among them. (Song 34) An unexpected thing happens when the followers obey the Chief- tain’s orders to distribute the food. The magic power and its implica- tions are spelled out for the Saxon listeners. The powerfully hallowed food “grew between their hands … and the people praised the Heaven- King, they said that never would a wiser wizard ever come to this light who would have more power with God here in the middle world or a more sincere mind.” Murphy’s commentary on the four songs underscores the differences in access Jesus’s followers had to his runes.34 The Lord’s Prayer is given them for their use. But the words for changing water into wine are concealed, “making it important in the text that no one learns these secret magic words.” Why? Murphy surmises: “It seems clear that the Saxon audience would love to learn (and use!) the formula for changing clear water into apple wine …” so “both Mary and Jesus are made to take explicit means to see that the words and actions are kept quiet.” The words for the calming of the wind and sea also remain hidden, as do the wise words of the wizard Christ that gave the food power to grow. All the more significant, then, is the poet’s treatment of the Lord’s supper. In this evangelizing narrative of the supper, the words which are readily available in the canonical gospels go unspoken, although it is said of Christ that he “spoke many a word” and he admonished them, “Believe Me clearly … that this is My body and also My blood.” Despite their omission, the power of the unrecorded words is given

34. Murphy, Heliand, Song 19, 54, n. 88; Song 24, 68, n. 102; Song 34, 92, nn. 128, 129. WESTERN EUCHARISTIC THEOLOGY 135 emphasis. The Chieftain’s son “made bread and wine holy.” He then told his meal companions: Always continue to do what I am doing at this supper, tell the story of it to many men. This body and blood is a thing which possesses power: with it you will give honor to your Chieftain. It is a holy image: keep it in order to remember Me, so that the sons of men will do it after you and preserve it in this world, and thus everyone all over this middle world will know what I am doing out of love to give honor to the Lord.35 (Song 56) Murphy’s commentaries on the text makes several significant points. Two are noteworthy here. No mention is made of eating or drinking holy food but rather of preserving a “holy image.” In this godspell composed for the Saxons, the Eucharist is a product, a thing, to be kept. Further, it is a power-filled (magic) thing. After extended philological reflection on the Saxon idiom “thit is mahtig thing,” Murphy arrives at the judgment that the poet clearly intends the meaning “this is magic thing, or more conservatively, this is a thing that possesses power.”36 The poet’s purpose is “to make the Eucharist comprehensible in terms of Germanic religion.” Taking a longer view, Murphy also observes, In cross culturally interpreting the Eucharist in this manner, the Heliand poet may be one of the first to have participated in the shift of sacramental emphasis ... to the instrumental, or secondary. causes beloved of Northern Europeans: the water used in baptism … and, of course, the bread and wine together with their accompanying for- mulae and gestures (perceived and presented) as performative spells. … The Heliand may be an instructive instance of the need, among the Saxons at least, for the concept of magic in order to come to serious understanding of the ‘powers’ Christians possessed. Ildefons Herwegen’s 1931 critical commentary on the Germanic grasp of Christianity from the ninth century to the twentieth makes similar, if more general, observations.37 He speaks of the Germanic world view as concerned with Technik, with production. He judges that an Augustinian or ecclesial and mystical appreciation of the Eucharist would have eluded the Germanic peoples from the start. Rather, he says, their preoccupation with the concrete and the tangible would have provided them with their orientation toward analyzing the moment of consecration for its objective (dingliche) reality. Out of the Germanic desire to lay hands on, to grasp the spiritual at least with the eye, came

35. Murphy, Heliand, 153, n. 235. 36. Ibid., 207-210. 37. Herwegen, Antike, Germanentum, Christentum, 51-52. 136 MARY COLLINS the twelfth and thirteenth century ecclesiastical legitimation of ocular communion, with ostensoria for showing the host and for elevations of the host and chalice. Research by Peter Browe confirms that this same predilection for the concrete gave rise to hands-on magical uses of the host as love tokens and poultices for healing, popular uses officially condemned as illegitimate.38 Herwegen the theologian seems to fault his countrymen for their Germanic impulse to “make it happen” now, to want “the mystery present.”39 Murphy, the cultural and literary historian, is less judgmental. A larger question worth further reflection is whether this preference for productivity is not central to the practice of popular religion in any culture, popular Christianity in its early Saxon form being only a case in point. It is against this particular cultural ground, within this particular religious horizon, however, that we will return to read Radbert’s De Corpore et Sanguine Domini, written as a catechesis for Saxons being evangelized orally through the Heliand.

How the Saxon Life-World Shaped Radbert’s Catechesis

Radbert’s series of twenty-two questions can be located within the religious world view presented in the Heliand. In making this judgment, I am not making the claim of a direct or even indirect relationship between the two texts or the two monastic authors. I am claiming that they are both directed to make the Christian faith intelligible within a specific milieu, the world of the newly converted Saxons in the Weser valley in the second quarter of the ninth century. But the texts are also distinguishable, and the differences are at least as significant as their commonality. Herwegen helps to locate this difference through his discussion of distinctions to be made among the world views of three cultures: pagan antiquity, Christian antiquity, and Germanic Christianity, all of which are distinguishable from the original cultural milieu of the gospel writers. Using Herwegen’s schematization, it is possible to locate both the Heliand poet and Radbert. The poet is engaged in an intercultural mediation between the world of the gospel and the Germanic world view of

38. Peter Browe, “Die Eucharistie als Zaubermittel im Mittelalter,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 20 (1930) 134-154. 39. Is there an echo here in this discussion of German Christian origins of Herwegen’s theological view vis-à-vis the contemporary theological argument of his Maria Laach confrere Odo Casel about Mysteriengegenwart, “mystery presence”? WESTERN EUCHARISTIC THEOLOGY 137 the heretofore pagan Saxons, ignorant (like himself?) of the cultures of antiquity but enthralled by a good story well told. Radbert’s and Warin’s religious horizons are more variegated, for the established monastic culture of Corbie had been shaped through direct access to the texts of Latin antiquity and also to some earlier Anglo-Saxon and Frankish mediations of Christian antiquity. Corbie had both library and scripto- rium, and its choir monks had Latin literacy well before the Carolingian renaissance. Yet they had been born into a Frankish world, which had comprehended and appropriated the ideas of Augustine and Ambrose, Gregory the Great and Jerome on their own Frankish terms. The Saxon world into which these Franks had only recently entered had still different questions to put to the ancient traditions of Christian faith. Radbert’s first point in his De Corpore et Sanguine Domini is that belief in the presence of the body and blood of the Lord is reliable.40 This is the same point the Heliand poet made in his narration of the Lord’s supper, citing Jesus’s own exhortation, “Believe me clearly …” But Radbert’s task is catechesis, requiring explanation and exploration as well as proclamation of the story. So he offers further warrants from various biblical narratives to show that what God wills God does, con- cluding with the Pauline dictum that the just live by faith. His second point is that the body and blood of Christ is a sacrament that is to be consumed worthily. In this he goes beyond the Heliand, which called the sacramental elements a holy image. Radbert argues for daily eucharistic consumption, drawing from accounts of sacrificial meals in Leviticus. In his argument he concurs with the point made in the Heliand narrative, namely that this is a sanctifying reality.41 In response to the question what sacrament means and why it is called this, Radbert offers a secreto as an equivalent, as well as the Greek mysterium, which he then explains as referring to what is secret and invisible.42 He notes that what is visible points to the interior visible reality. In introducing the vocabulary of Christian antiquity, he is address- ing Saxon concerns, specifically the reality of occult power. He identifies that concealed power as Spiritus Sanctus and Spiritus divinus. He says that it is the same Spirit that created hominem Christum in the virgin’s womb who gives power to the bread and wine made the body and blood of Christ.

40. De Corpore, 18: “… quod Christus est Veritas, Veritas autem Deus est. Et si Deus Veritas est, quicquid Christus promisit in hoc mysterio, utique verum est.” 41. Ibid., 20-23. 42. Ibid., 23-27. 138 MARY COLLINS

Radbert acknowledges the difficulty of relating figura and veritate in this mystery. How can the sacrament be eaten without grinding Christ with one’s teeth? It is no more difficult for the Holy Spirit to negate dental grinding and to effect mystical immolation than it is for the Holy Spirit to have created Christ without coition. He meditates on the mystery of the incarnation as evidence that God can operate in ways contrary to nature.43 Then he reminds himself and his reader: per fidem ambulam et non per speciem – faith, not sight, is the path to understanding. The evangelizing poet of the Heliand had not presented the eucharistic elements as food to be consumed; so he did not have to address the question of worthiness to eat and drink the body and blood of Christ. The catechist Radbert presses on to the questions of sin- fulness, the rebirth in the baptismal font, the dangers of presumption, and the importance of being acceptable.44 He inserts a moral tale from Christian antiquity to shore up his point. He points to Judas as an example of one who eats the body and blood of Christ to condemnation rather than to salvation. Radbert also introduces an important distinction, drawing on aspects of the heritage of Christian antiquity that the Heliand poet had not attended to. He points out that corpus Christi is a phrase with multiple referents. The bread and wine of the sacrament are truly the body and blood of Christ. The church, too, is the body of Christ, He and head and the baptized the members. So also, the body born of the virgin, which hung on the cross (lignum vitae), was buried in the tomb, rose from the dead, entered the heavens, and now intercedes for us in eternity, is properly called the body of Christ. How are these realities related? Radbert proposes an identity between the eucharistic body and the historical body born of the virgin through the power of the Holy Spirit who causes each. He leaves unaddressed the relation of those two referents to that body of Christ which is the church, Augus- tine’s eucharistic forte. Does Radbert not know Augustine? I suspect he did, since he had access to the same library that his confrere Ratramnus used. But the matter of the ecclesial body was not an immediate concern for the milieu that Radbert was catechizing. The Saxons were focused on the secret, the mystery of the altar table. As Herwegen observed, the Germanic imagination grasped the Eucharist in concrete, personal terms. Eucharistic liturgy was not intelligible

43. De Corpore, 27-31. 44. Ibid., 34-37. WESTERN EUCHARISTIC THEOLOGY 139 as an ecclesial event but rather as a means to individual experience of divine power.45 Radbert formulates another interesting question and then answers it at length. What is the necessity of Christ’s daily immolation and their daily reception of haec mystica?46 He becomes an advocate in his reply, perhaps because he is writing for Warin, whose Saxon neophytes, junior monks, and young clergy lack conviction on the matter. Still it is useful to wonder why he asked the question in terms of Christ’s daily immolatio. Is the reference point for this question and answer Saxon sacrificial practice: e.g., their occasional but not daily immolation to their gods? In any case, Radbert’s reply begins simply: we sin daily. Then he develops an argument with reference to the arbor vitae in paradiso where Adam and Eve were tested and failed; he contrasts this state of affairs with the reconciliation God effects in Christ through the sacrament of his body and blood, when believers feed on his flesh. Germanic concreteness is Radbert’s mode at this point. Two more points remain to be addressed briefly in support of my catechetical rereading of De Corpore et Sanguine Domini. The first is Radbert’s treatment of the “words by which this mystery is brought about” (conficiatur).47 The other is his earlier treatment of the role of the priest in this process.48 His positions on both of these questions are intelligible within the religious horizon set out in the Heliand. Concerning the powerful words, Radbert begins with what is not contested: the (common sense) assertion that the words of Christ are divine and efficacious (like runes). Saxons would have little reason to doubt the efficacy of divine words. What is important for young monks and clergy being formed at Corvey is that the right words are handed and to them. So people are baptized “in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti,” as Jesus had directed. Similarly, words have been given for the mystery of the body and blood. “In hoc ergo verbo creatur illus corpus,” Radbert wrote: “Hoc est corpus meum …” Similarly, where previously there had been only water and wine, blood is brought about by words: “Accipite et bibite ex hoc omnes … Hic est calix sanguinis mei, noui et aeterni testamenti.” Why these words? Because these words are divine and full of power. To bolster his argument he cites the Matthaean dictum

45. De Corpore, 20-23. 46. Ibid., 52-65; for an extended discussion, see Patricia McCormick Zirkel, “‘Why Should It Be Necessary That Christ Be Immolated Daily?’ – Paschasius Radbertus on Daily Eucharist,” American Benedictine Review 47 (1996) 240-259. 47. De Corpore, 92-96. 48. Ibid., 76-83. 140 MARY COLLINS that Christ’s words will never pass away. Powerful words not disclosed in the Heliand, because this epic was composed for evangelization in “meadhall and monastery”49 can be entrusted to those baptized believers for whom Warin was responsible. In the end, the tells Warin, the issue is faith: “quantum fides capit.” Lastly, Radbert teaches how important it is that they grasp their own standing in relation to these powerful words. (Was it Radbert or Warin or the young Saxons who wanted the question posed and answered?) Are the words efficacious if the minister is wicked?50 Radbert prefaces his reply by saying his answer is what is held within the Catholic church. Then he points out that the words are not the priest’s words but the words of Christ. They have their power through the working of the Holy Spirit. So when the priest speaks them, non ex se dicit, he acts because of his office, not because of his merit. What is the cultural context within which this question of the priest’s personal powerlessness is framed, a teaching which will become the basis for later scholastic discourse on the priest as an instrumental cause of eucharistic real presence? Medieval historian Valerie Flint considered the prevalence of magic in the Frankish realm, as evidenced by the proliferation of writings on magic by ninth century monks for the court of Louis the Pious.51 She argues that in the barely chris- tianized carolingian empire, there was “an official determined with- drawal of the priesthood” from the cultural role of magus, the possessor of sacral powers. The distanciation she describes was necessary to avoid confusion about the distinct Christian understanding of the locus of sacral power. Two moves were involved. Because royal figures were traditionally understood to have sacral power by blood, sacral kingship had to be reinterpreted. Episcopal anointing by bishops of Christian kings and emperor served to accomplish this purpose. Further, it had to be affirmed that in the Christian realm only Christ was bearer of divine power. The ordained were chosen agents of this power according to their relative place in clerical service. This concern to order clerical power would be further refined in the medieval west with assistance from the writings of an anonymous Syrian bishop of the sixth century whom Thomas Aquinas called “the Aeropagite.” Yet Radbert’s declaration that what he expounds as Catholic teaching – the priest as someone to whom Christ’s

49. Murphy, Heliand, 16. 50. De Corpore, 76-83. 51. Valerie Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991) 370-392. WESTERN EUCHARISTIC THEOLOGY 141 powerful words are entrusted – is fully intelligible as doctrine in this ninth-century milieu. It speaks to an emergent question in his day.

Summary Observations

Why should theologians, evangelists and catechists living on the cusp of the third Christian millennium concern themselves with this earlier moment in the western Catholic ecclesial tradition? Several observations are in order. First, the re-reading of De Corpore et Sanguine Domini against the background of its original milieu reinforces our appreciation that the church is always a living community of believers connecting the story of salvation in Jesus and the faith of previous generations with the issues of their own times. Traditional Christian wisdom is not “ageless” but “timely.” Eucharistic issues shaped by the runic consciousness of ninth- century Christians are not identical with issues shaped by the modern consciousness and post-modern consciousness of North Atlantic culture and the post-colonial consciousness of the southern hemisphere. We need to attend to our timely issues. The mystery of human salvation through divine-human communion, revealed in Jesus, eludes rational explanation in every culture; yet the mystery is proclaimed for the appropriation to all the nations and people for the world. For believers, the Holy Spirit abiding in the churches continues speaking so that each can hear and respond in their own language, as the Pentecost narrative announces. Second, in reading these two ninth-century texts, an evangelization epic and a eucharistic catechesis, we are reminded that texts that survive from once-living communities of believers take on unexpected lives of their own in the forward-flowing of belief we call a living tradition. Such texts are often accorded greater authority than they had at the time of their origins because they are precious witnesses to the faith of ances- tors in the great communion of saints. Radbert and the Heliand poet could hardly have anticipated how so much of their timely local effort to announce the gospel and explain it to their conquered Saxon contemporaries would be given normative value by university theologians and bishops who came after them. They might be relieved to have their voices better contextualized, still valued for their timely wisdom, but not overvalued. Third, the rereading of ninth-century texts in their contexts reminds us that living faith is a gift of the Holy Spirit. Faith is mediated by texts 142 MARY COLLINS of all kinds: holy scriptures, biblical commentaries, philosophically grounded expositions of beliefs, prayers, creeds and so on. But texts are not co-extensive with living tradition in the Catholic understanding of things. No texts can clearly explain or explain away the living eucharistic faith of the Catholic people. Practice of faith involves a surplus of meaning, some authentic and some distorted, that goes ahead of systematic reflection on communal traditions of living of faith. What then have these ninth-century believers offered for our continued reflection? Faith-filled liturgy always requires local communities to be actively involved in making connections and making distinction between their human wisdom and the Christian mystery. Not all the connecting and distinguishing starts in the composition and correction of texts. The Saxons of the Weser valley connected solar axis and altar table; they related earthly magnetism with the life-giving power of God; they tied the tree of life with the tree of the cross; they saw Woden’s suffering as the source of their traditional runes and Jesus’s suffering as the source of new godspell. All these matters invited – needed – connecting. They struggled with whether the bread and wine of the eucharistic offering were food to be eaten or a holy thing to be honored. They carefully distinguished God’s powerful presence from the power of magic runes and human sacrality. They lived with their questions, found answers that seemed to fit them, and left these records of their timely appropriation of the faith as their testimony to later generations. It would hardly have occurred to them to make claims for the universality of their spiritual insights. Finding “fits” between people’s life worlds and the reign of God requires spiritual discernment grounded in prayerful attention to the voice of the Holy Spirit speaking to the churches. Making good connections and introducing necessary distinctions still remains the basic challenge for those called to evangelize and catechize and reflect theo- logically in a world church. Solid witness to that continuing ecclesial process is a rich heritage from the ninth-century Saxon church in the Weser valley.