As we have seen in connection with the growth of idolatry, there was even in the Dark Ages an earnest minority within the Church which resisted the downward bias of the majority and of their hierarchical rulers. In no period, probably, was the spirit of reason wholly absent; and from time to time it bore distinct witness. Thus we find alongside of the effort of Claudius and Agobard against idolatry and extraneous superstitions a less vigorous but no less remarkable testimony against the central superstition of the priestly system. When the Frankish monk Paschasius Radbert (831) put flatly what had become the orthodox doctrine of Rome as to the transubstantiation of the eucharist, some of the northern scholars who had preserved the pre-barbaric tradition were found to gainsay him. As the discussion continued long, the liberal-minded Frankish emperor, Charles the Bald, invited special replies; and a learned monk, Ratramnus, wrote a treatise to the effect that the "real presence" was spiritual, not corporeal. But John the Scot (then = Irishman), otherwise known as Erigena, wrote on the same invitation to the effect that the bread and wine were merely symbols or memorials of the Last Supper--a heresy so bold that only the emperor's protection could have saved the utterer. And his freethinking did not end there, for in the discussion on predestination begun by the monk Gottschalk, in which John was invited to intervene by the bigoted abbot Hincmar, the Irish scholar was again recalcitrant to authority; while on the question of Deity and Trinity he held a language that anticipated Spinoza, and brought upon his memory, when he was long dead, the anathema of the papacy. Another Irishman of the same period, Macarius or Macaire, taught a similar pantheism in France. John Scotus, however, was by far the greatest thinker of the Dark Ages, and it was impossible that his ideas should become normal. Not for two hundred years was there any overt result from his and Ratramnus's heresy on the eucharist. Then (1045) Berengar of Tours set forth a modified doctrine of the eucharist which rested on that of Ratramnus, and brought on him a series of prosecutions at Rome for heresy, from the punishment for which he was saved by Hildebrand, as papal adviser and later as pope; but also by his own formal retractations, to which however he did not adhere. The populace, he tells us, would gladly have slain him; and more than once he had narrow escapes. After all he did but affirm a "spiritual real presence"; and while some of his party went as far as John Scotus, the stand for reason was soon tacitly abandoned, the great majority even of the educated class accepting the priestly dogma. Not till the Reformation was it again firmly challenged, and even then not by all the reformers.