Paschasius

Paschasius Radbertus was a ninth-century Frankish Benedictine monk, abbot, and theologian, and one of the principal Latin ecclesiastical writers of the Carolingian age. Abandoned as an infant, he was received and brought up by the nuns of the convent of Notre-Dame at Soissons. From that house he passed to the Benedictine abbey of Corbie in Picardy, where he was formed under Abbots Adalard and Wala, kinsmen of the Carolingian dynasty and leading figures of monastic and court reform. At Corbie he was ordained to the diaconate and became a master in the abbey school, which under his influence ranked among the notable centres of learning in the Frankish realms.

His most consequential work is the treatise De Corpore et Sanguine Domini, written in the early 830s for the monks of Corvey, the Saxon foundation of Corbie. It is the first substantial Latin monograph devoted to the Eucharist. Radbertus set out a strongly realist account of the real presence, identifying the eucharistic body with the body of Christ born of the Virgin, crucified, and risen, made present by the words of consecration. A fellow monk of Corbie, Ratramnus, later composed a work of the same title that treated the sacramental presence in a more figurative sense. The contrast between the two treatises became a standing reference in later medieval eucharistic controversy, especially in the eleventh century.

Radbertus was also a prolific exegete, Marian writer, and hagiographer. He produced an extensive commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, a commentary on the Lamentations of Jeremiah, and an exposition of Psalm 44. He wrote De Partu Virginis in defence of Mary’s virginity in childbirth, and he is now identified as the true author of the letter Cogitis me on the Assumption of Mary, long circulated under the name of Saint Jerome. His Life of Saint Adalard and the dialogue-form Epitaphium Arsenii (the life of Abbot Wala) are important narrative sources for Carolingian political and monastic history, particularly for the reign of Louis the Pious and the crises that followed it.

In 844 the community of Corbie elected him abbot. His tenure was troubled by internal discord and by the wider disorders of the later Carolingian kingdom. He resigned the abbacy about 851, withdrew for a time to the abbey of Saint-Riquier, and afterwards returned to Corbie to live as an ordinary monk given over to study and writing. He died at Corbie in the mid-ninth century; later tradition assigns the year 865 and commemorates him on 26 April. He has been venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church, especially in northern France and in Benedictine calendars. No record of a formal papal canonization in the later juridical sense is known; his cult rests on medieval monastic veneration.