The succession of Ratramnus, Berengar, Wycliffe: Cranmer's 'Answer to Gardiner'

One of the lines of argument used by Gardiner in his critique of Cranmer's Reformed eucharistic theology was that such a view of the Sacrament was an innovation, contrary to established 'catholic' (the term was, of course, contested) teaching. Gardiner pointed to condemnations of Ratramnus, Berengar, and Wycliffe to illustrate this. 

In his Answer to Gardiner (1551), however, Cranmer turns this argument against his opponent. The very fact that Ratramnus in De corpore et sanguine Domini (c.831), Berengar in De sacra coena (c.1050), and Wycliffe in De Eucharistia Tractatus Maio (1379) denounced corporeal presence and affirmed a spiritual partaking of Christ by the faithful, is evidence of antecedents of Reformed teaching across the centuries. 

Cranmer first considers Ratramnus (Bertrame):

And as for Bertrame, he did nothing else but at the request of King Charles set out the true doctrine of the holy catholic Church from Christ unto his time, concerning the sacrament. And I never heard nor read any man that condemned Bertrame before this time, and therefore I can take no hinderance, but a great advantage at his hands. For all men that hitherto have written of Bertram, have much commended him. And seeing that he wrote of the sacrament at King Charles' request, it is not like that he would write against the received doctrine of the Church in those days. And if he had, it is without all doubt that some learned man, either in his time or sithence, would have written against him, or at the least not have commended him so much as they have done.

By placing Ratramnus as the advocate of a well-established eucharistic doctrine - and noting that he was invited by Charles the Bald to set forth his teaching - Cranmer quite rightly emphasises that Ratramnus was no innovator. His sacramental understanding was, indeed, commonplace (albeit, not without alternatives) in the early 9th century Frankish kingdom. There was good reason for Cranmer and other Reformed figures to invoke Ratramnus. His teaching on the Eucharist cohered with Reformed concerns:

As far as they [i.e the consecrated Bread and Wine] are corporally handled, they are in their nature, corporeal creatures, but in their power, and as they are spiritually made, they are the mysteries of the Body and Blood of Christ.

And, as Willemien Otten states in his excellent essay 'Between Augustinian Sign and Carolingian Reality', Ratramnus invoked a key scriptural text central to Reformed eucharistic teaching:

He fittingly ends his treatise with a quote from John 6:63: Spiritus est qui vivificat, nam caro nihil prodest.

It was this eucharistic understanding that was also expounded by Berengar in the 11th century:

Berengarius of himself had a godly judgment in this matter, but by the tyranny of Nicholas the Second he was constrained to make a devilish recantation, as I have declared in my first book, the seventeenth chapter.

Cranmer is here referring to his work A Defence of The True and Catholic Doctrine of the Sacrament of the body and blood of our Saviour Christ (1550), in which he had lamented the recantation "which Nicholas the Second constrained [Berengar] to make". Again, Cranmer saw in Berengar an antecedent of Reformed eucharistic theologies:

Eternal salvation is given us if we receive with a pure heart the body of Christ, that is, the reality of the sign [rem sacramenti], while we are receiving the body of Christ in sign [in sacramento], that is, in the holy bread of the altar, which belongs to the temporal order.

Then there is Wycliffe. 

And asfor John Wiclef, he was a singular instrument of God in his time to set forth the truth of Christ's gospel, but Antichrist that sitteth in God's temple, boasting himself as God, hath by God's sufferance prevailed against many holy men, and sucked the blood of martyrs these late years.

Wycliffe framed his rejection of transubstantiation as a retrieval of patristic thought, an approach that would be significant for the Reformed:

And though I once took the utmost pains to explain Transubstantiation in agreement with the sense of the early Church, yet I now see that the modern Church contradicts the Church of former times, and errs in this doctrine.

Likewise, Wycliffe, following Ratramnus and Berengar, provided another precedent for the Supper as spiritual feeding:

The Communion of Our Lord's body consists, not in the mere bodily reception, touching or eating of the consecrated Host, but in the feeding of the soul upon that faith which brings forth fruit.

Cranmer's response to Gardiner is significant, a confident assertion that Reformed eucharistic theologies stand in a long line of what Otten, referring to Ratramnus' views, describes as "Augustine's figurative interpretation":

Because of his use of the term figura and his spiritualizing interpretation, Ratramnus ought to be seen in the tradition of Augustine, whom he frequently quotes.

Against Gardiner's allegation that Cranmer cannot account for "howsoever Scripture hath been understanded hitherto", undermining any Reformed claim to "catholic doctrine", Cranmer points to this Augustinian succession of eucharistic thought, re-received at the Reformation. Although "the true doctrine in this matter hath not prevailed these five hundred years", such doctrine had its witnesses throughout those centuries.