Lanfranc - Teacher and Scholar

Teacher and Scholar

Lanfranc was then persuaded by Abbot Herluin to open a school in the monastery. From the first he was celebrated (totius Latinitatis magister). His pupils were drawn not only from France and Normandy, but also from Gascony, Flanders, Germany and Italy. Many of them afterwards attained high positions in the Church; one possible student, Anselm of Badagio, became pope under the title of Alexander II; another, Anselm of Bec succeeded Lanfranc as the Archbishop of Canterbury. In this way Lanfranc set the seal of intellectual activity on the reform movement of which Bec was the centre. The favourite subjects of his lectures were logic and dogmatic theology. He was therefore invited to defend the doctrine of transubstantiation against the attacks of Berengar of Tours. He took up the task with the greatest zeal, although Berengar had been his personal friend; he was the protagonist of orthodoxy at the councils of Vercelli (1050), Tours (1054) and Rome (1059).

To Lanfranc's influence is attributed the desertion of Berengar's cause by Hildebrand and the more broad-minded of the cardinals. Our knowledge of Lanfranc's polemics is chiefly derived from the tract De corpore et sanguine Domini, which he wrote many years later (after 1079), when Berengar had been finally condemned. Though betraying no signs of metaphysical ability, his work was regarded as conclusive and became for a while a text-book in the schools. It is often said to be the place where the Aristotelian distinction between substance and accident was first applied to explain Eucharistic change. It is the most important of the surviving works attributed to Lanfranc.