Radbertus

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Radbertus Paschasius or Saint Paschasius (c. 790 - 865) was a Frankish Benedictine theologian and saint.^[1]

[edit] Biography

He was born at or near Soissons towards the close of the 8th century. He has been indicted as a forger, someone behind the Pseudo-Isidore forgeries.

He was a foundling left on the steps of Notre Dame of Soissons. The nuns there sent him to the monastery of St. Peter. Although a monk with tonsure, his behavior was inappropriate for ordination or advancement. At the age of 22, he became a monk of Corbie, near Amiens in Picardy, in 814, and assumed the cloister name of Paschasius. He soon gained recognition as a learned and successful teacher, and the younger Adalhard; St Anskar the apostle of Sweden; Odo, Bishop of Beauvais; and Warinus, abbot of Corvei in Saxony were his pupils.

From 822 to 849, Paschasius travelled throughout France, Germany, and Italy at the dictates of the church and was a noted councilor and negotiator.

In 844 the monks of Corbie chose him as abbot. Around 851 he resigned his office, due to trouble at the monastery, although it is not known whether these were doctrinal or disciplinary troubles. He then retired to the monastery that had been founded by Saint Riquier at Centula. There, he continued to write. He flung himself, he said, "into the arms of philosophy and wisdom, so as to be fed in the autumn of life with the same milk of Scriptures" he had imbibed in the spring. He later returned to Corbie as a monk and continued to write historical and theological works.

His works include a Commentary on the Book of Lamentations and a Commentary on the Book of Matthew. He is best known for De Corpore et Sanguine Domini (831, revised 844), which was written to instruct the Saxon monks, and it is the first doctrinal monograph on the eucharist. He argued that the bread is transubstantially flesh born of Mary, which had suffered on the Cross and risen again, and which is multiplied by God's omnipotence at every celebration. However, he insisted that this was spiritually the case and not physically so, and yet, unlike Thomas Aquinas later, he never specified how and to what degree it is spiritually true. This ontological understanding of eucharist was attacked by Ratramnus and Rabanus Maurus, who argued for a more spiritual conception of the divine presence. It is also probable that he was the author of the Pseudo-Jerome's epistle ix, Cogitis me, which is an important document in the history of the belief in the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the western church.

Recent research has assembled evidence that Radbertus may have been the mastermind behind the forgeries of the Pseudo-Isidore, a vast complex of forged and genuine texts from papal letters, council texts and Carolingian legislation composed during the second quarter of the ninth century in Corbie.

His feast day in the Roman Catholic Church is April 26.