Bertram and the Reformers

http://www.churchsociety.org/churchman/documents/Cman_003_2_Taylor.pdf

[Churchman] 30 Oct 2009--It is now more than a thousand years since Bertram wrote his famous treatise “On the Body and Blood of the Lord,” against the rising error of the “Real Presence” and Transubstantiation; and unhappily the controversy still exists. Not only so, but the error is being steadily pressed forward by some of the clergy in the National Church, from whose standards it has been authoritatively rejected.

Bertram, or Ratram, lived in the ninth century. He flourished about the year A.D. 840, though probably the treatise mentioned was written a few years later—A.D. 845. His real name is supposed to have been Ratramnus, and this, with the prefix Beatus expressed thus, B. Ratramnus, was in process of time corrupted or abbreviated into Bertram.1 He was a priest or presbyter in the Church, and a monk of the monastery of Corbie in France, in the diocese of Amiens. His reputation for learning was great, and he wrote two or three other treatises besides that on the Lord’s Supper—viz., on “Predestination,” and on “The Manner of our Lord’s Birth,” &c. The century in which he lived was a very important and eventful one in many respects. It was one of the dark, if not the darkest, of the Middle Ages; exceeded in this respect only by the tenth, according to Baronius. The famous image controversy was at its height, and, unhappily, the images carried the day, kings and councils notwithstanding. It was the century when the forged decretals first saw the light, those huge impostures on which the Papal supremacy to a large extent founded and bolstered up its increasing and gigantic despotism. It was a century when the externals of religion, ceremonies and sacraments, were being multiplied—the form of godliness without the power thereof. The worship of, or superstitious veneration for, relics became quite a mania among the people, and the priests were nothing backward in encouraging them, as well as in supplying them with appropriate objects. “To see clearly,” says Mosheim, “the heights which ignorance and perversity reached in this age, it is only needful to consider its extravagant or, more properly, senseless fondness for saints, and for their dead bodies and bones.”

In this the greatest part of religion and piety was placed. Everybody believed that God would never be found propitious to those who had not secured some intercessor and friend among the inhabitants of heaven. Hence arose the rage for making, almost daily, new objects of deification. And the priests and monks were most successful in dispelling the darkness that concealed the wondrous deeds of holy men, or rather in fabricating the names and the histories of saints that never existed; so that they might have patrons enough for all the credulous and senseless people. . . . . The corpses of holy men, either brought from distant countries or discovered by the industry of the priests, required the appointment of new feast days, and some
variation in the ceremonies observed on these days. And as the success of the clergy depended on the impressions of the people respecting the merits and the power of those saints whom they were invited to venerate, it was necessary that their eyes and their ears should be fascinated with various ceremonies and exhibitions. Hence the splendid furniture of the temples, the numerous wax candles burning at mid-day, the multitudes of pictures and statues, the decorations of the altars, the frequent processions, the splendid dresses of the priests, and masses appropriate to the honour of the saints (vol. i. p. 571).

Such is the description of the ceremonialism and superstition of the ninth century, and it is sad and painful to reflect that it is just as applicable now, not merely to the unreformed Churches of Christendom, but also to many of the churches of England. Between the ceremonialism of the ninth and the ritualism of the nineteenth century there is not much to choose. The latter portion of the extract given above would suit admirably for a verbal and literal account of what is taking place in our very midst.