'The heresy of Calvin is not new': the irony of the Tractarian attempt to invoke Ratramnus

As our readings from In The Teaching of the Anglican Divines in the Time of King James I and King Charles I on the Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist (1858) - by Henry Charles Groves, a clergyman of the Church of Ireland - begin to draw to a close, we turn today to a reference to the 9th century Frankish theologian Ratramnus (or Bertram). Groves notes that Keble and Pusey both appeal to Bertram's work, De corpore et sanguine Domini, in defence of their own eucharistic teaching. For Groves, such invocation is very odd:

Both he and Dr. Pusey appeal to the book of Bertram often. And yet, with their profound learning, I should have thought that they would rather have avoided a book which was placed in the Index librorum prohibitorum, which speaks so strongly against the Objective Presence, that some Roman authors, as Sixtus Senensis and Possevin, (Cosin, Hist. of Transub., p.131,) affirmed that it was written by the Zuinglian, Ecolampadius; a book, of the author of which the Jesuit Turrianus hesitated not to say, "To cite Bertram, what else is it but to say, that the heresy of Calvin is not new?" (Ussher, Answer to the Jesuit, p.69.)

As Groves rightly states, Ratramnus is indeed a very odd source for the Tractarian rejection of Reformed eucharistic theology. Ussher the Reformed Conformist approvingly quotes from Ratramnus in Answer to a Jesuit:

the bread and the wine are the body and blood of Christ figuratively ... that for the substance of the creatures, that which they were before consecration, the same are they also afterward ... that they are called the Lord's body and the Lord's blood, because they take the name of that thing of which

they are a sacrament; and that there is a great difference betwixt the mystery of the blood and body of

Christ, which is taken now by the faithful in the Church, and that which was born of the Virgin Mary, which suffered, which was buried, which rose again, which sitteth at the right hand of the Father.

And in the same work Ussher does indeed quote the rather damning words of the Jesuit theologian Turrianus in order to demonstrate that Reformed eucharistic teaching had significant roots in the Latin West:

Whereupon Turrian the Jesuit is driven for pure need to shift off the matter with this silly interrogation: "To cite Bertram," (so Ratrannus is more usually named,) "what is it else but to say, that the heresy of Calvin is not new?" As if these things were alleged by us for any other end than to shew, that this way which they call heresy is not new, but hath been trodden in long since by such as in their times were accounted good and catholic teachers in the Church.

Groves is correct: Ratramnus, a source that Ussher - in common with other Reformed divines - regarded as supporting Reformed eucharistic theology, cannot meaningfully be invoked by Tractarians against a Reformed understanding of the Sacrament. What is more, it is also the case that Cosin the Laudian likewise quotes extensively from Ratramnus and for the same purpose - to defend the Church of England's Reformed eucharistic theology:

"It is evident," saith he, "that that bread and wine are figuratively the body and blood of Christ. According to the substance of the elements, they are after the consecration what they were before; for the bread is not Christ substantially. If this mystery be not done in a figure, it cannot well be called a mystery" ... "Let it not be thought," saith he, "because we say this, that therefore the body and blood of Christ are not received in the mystery of the sacrament, where faith apprehends what it believes, and not what the eyes see; for this meat and drink are spiritual, feed the soul spiritually, and entertain that life whose fulness is eternal".

And, echoing Ussher, Cosin delights in the discomfort and imprudent words of Roman theologians regarding Ratramnus:

All this the fathers of Trent and the Romish inquisitors could not brook, and therefore they utterly condemned Bertram, and put his book in the catalogue of them that are forbidden ... For as for that which Sixtus Senensis and Possevin affirm, that that book of the body and blood of the Lord was writ

by Ecolampadius under the name of Bertram, it is so great an untruth that a greater cannot be found.

That Counter-Reformation polemicists suggested that Ratramnus' book was actually authored by Oecolampadius only further emphasises how that work cannot seriously function as a source for the Tractarian revision of the Church of England's traditionally Reformed eucharistic theology. Note too, by the way, how Cosin the Laudian does not seem at all embarrassed by the suggestion that the Ratramnus' eucharistic theology equates to that of Oecolampadius.  Indeed, earlier in The History of Transubstantiation, Cosin approvingly quotes Bucer's defence of the Swiss churches adhering to the eucharistic teaching of Zwingli and Oecolampadius:

But that their own doctrine and belief concerning that sacrament was, that the true body and blood of Christ was truly presented, given, and received, together with the visible signs of bread and wine, by the operation of our Lord, and by virtue of His institution, according to the plain sound and sense of His words; and that not only Zuinglius and Ecolampadius had so taught, but they also, in the public confessions of the Churches of the upper Germany, and other writings, confessed it.

Ironically, by attempting to invoke Ratramnus, Keble and Pusey actually point us to Ussher and Cosin affirming a distinctly and clearly Reformed eucharistic theology.