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Chapter 2

Manifestos of Carolingian Power

Among the precepts of God, caritas obtains the first place … neither martyrdom nor contempt of the secular world, nor generosity of alms, could accomplish anything without the duty of caritas.

—Alcuin of York to Count Wido of Brittany, De virtutibus et vitiis 3

In March of the year 789, King Charlemagne of the Franks (not yet emperor of the Romans) convened a select group of counselors from throughout his realm to discuss matters of concern. No contemporary annalist ever recorded the event, and it may not have been considered an “official” assembly at all, yet scholars of the Carolingian era typically rank this royal conference among the more important moments in the early developmental history of European society and culture. It produced a capitulary document known as Admonitio generalis (the “Common Reminder” or, as it is often more woodenly translated, the “General Admonition”)—a listing of eighty-two social and moral decrees for the Frankish aristocracy to follow, pronounced from on high in the voice of Charlemagne himself.¹

This was perhaps the most complete articulation of the program of renovatio and correctio that would transform Frankish culture over the course of the next century.² After Admonitio generalis, Christianity became conversatio—a “way of life,” to quote an early summation by Rosamond McKitterick—for the Frankish people as a whole.³ Christian rituals and ideologies would gradually bind the diverse regions of Charlemagne’s empire together. Frankish and Christian identity would effectively merge into one. And the deep structural foundations for the pan-European Latin Christendom of the High Middle Ages and beyond would begin to appear.

This chapter examines the ideology of Frankish aristocratic power that undergirded and naturalized this broad social and cultural transformation. Adapted directly from the ideological associations discussed in Chapter 1, it framed caritas not simply as an ideal that Frankish men were encouraged to enact but quite literally as the foundation of Frankish authority. After an initial section that explores in further detail the contents and expressed purposes of Admonitio generalis, two Carolingian writers take center stage: Paulinus of Aquileia and Alcuin of York. Both men served Charlemagne as trusted courtiers and likely played guiding roles at the council of 789.⁴ Both men ended their careers in prestigious positions of spiritual leadership—Paulinus as patriarch of Aquileia and Alcuin as Abbot of Marmoutier at Tours, the ancient monastic house founded by none other than St. Martin, whose cloak had now become a sacred relic kept in the possession of the Frankish royal line.⁵ Finally, both men composed, at the direct request of powerful Carolingian lay magnates, treatises in which they articulated and defined the ideal life of the Christian layman.

In separate but complementary ways, the treatises written by Paulinus and Alcuin each drew upon the traditional ideological links between caritas and ascetic male power to grant nonroyal laymen direct and explicit access to divine authority. They defined lay and “professional” religious men as separate but fundamentally equal parts of the same collective whole, their power deriving from the same source, their duties of heavenly and earthly service the same, their separate identities purely a worldly distinction, completely irrelevant in the eyes of God. Far more than simple manuals of pragmatic moral advice, which until now has been the primary lens through which these texts have been read, Paulinus and Alcuin wrote nothing less than ideological manifestos for the Frankish aristocracy. Their meditations on the ideal lay Christian life explained and made normative the notion that earthly society was “naturally” the domain of the Frankish aristocracy to command and to protect as a unified family of souls.

Social Prophylaxis and the Aristocratic Male

Charlemagne had just entered his third decade as king when he called upon his counselors in that early European spring of 789. He had thus far achieved more worldly success than anyone else he knew or about whom he had ever heard. His armies had swept across virtually the whole of the continent, fighting victorious campaigns in Aquitania, Gascony, Brittany, Bavaria, and Lombardy and effectively restoring centralized control to the territories once governed by his Merovingian predecessors. He had assembled a royal court that was beginning to rival not only the material splendor but also the intellectual and artistic floridity of the Byzantines at Constantinople, the Abbasids at Baghdad, and the Umayyads at Cordoba.

Despite these considerable accomplishments, Charlemagne still had significant reason for concern. At the age of forty-seven, he had far outlived the average life expectancy of a Frankish warlord.⁶ He was old enough to have been easily among the eldest of his entourage and could never have realistically guessed that he would rule for another twenty-five years and die quietly, surrounded by loved ones, in his own luxurious bed.⁷ His reign had also not been exclusively a success. A decade earlier, a band of recalcitrant Basques had ambushed and decimated the Frankish rear guard in the infamous Pyrenees mountain pass at Roncesvalles.⁸ And a particularly violent revolt had taken place only months before, when Duke Tassilo of Bavaria had led an armed rebellion against his king. The chronicles tell us that all ended well for Charlemagne—Tassilo was captured and the insurrection extinguished—but it could just as easily have gone badly.⁹ These military and political challenges would certainly have lingered at the forefront of Charlemagne’s mind, for during the same time in which he and his court were composing Admonitio generalis, they were also in the process of planning a campaign against the Slavic lands to the east and south for that very summer.¹⁰

Worldly stresses would have been compounded further by spiritual uncertainties. In calling for correctio, Charlemagne followed an ancient tradition of Roman emperors and Frankish kings, who saw it as their duty to eradicate scelus—sin and crime—in order to ensure the continued health and prosperity of society. In Admonitio generalis, he famously compares himself to the Old Testament King Josiah, who had been responsible for restoring his people to the correct faith and for decreeing the commandments of Moses as law for his people.¹¹ The moral reforms of Admonitio generalis cast this traditional duty in a distinctly millenarian hue, however. As leader of the Franks who dreamed of his people as the new Israel, it was Charlemagne’s solemn responsibility not simply to root out sin but also to ready the world for the end of days. Admonitio generalis suggests a degree of urgency on this issue, describing how a certain “letter from heaven” with an apocalyptic message had apparently circulated throughout the land but was not to be believed; “in the last days” (presumably very much at hand), Admonitio generalis warns, “there will appear false teachers, as the Lord himself foretold in the gospel.”¹²

The broad social and cultural ramifications that we now attribute to Admonitio generalis were thus most certainly beyond even Charlemagne’s considerable ambitions. To be sure, he and his court were interested in social renewal and correction, but their aim would have been to address far more immediate concerns. We must recognize Admonitio generalis and the entire program of Carolingian correctio itself as a prophylactic, designed to shield Charlemagne and, by extension, the Frankish people under his dominion against an unknown future.¹³ The document is a pledge from the Franks to redouble their efforts to enact righteous behavior in exchange for the continued favor and protection of the divine. This was indeed its expressed purpose. Its preface declares that God had shown more favor to the Franks than to any other civilization in history. Simple thanks would not suffice. Bishops and parish priests needed to work harder in their efforts to lead souls to salvation while also corralling “the erring sheep”—men who did not wish to devote themselves to the protection and health of Frankish society—back into the fold. All Frankish men, laity and churchmen alike, had to follow the precepts of God with more devout energy and passion. The consequence of failure was nothing less than the unchecked rampage of the devil on earth.¹⁴

Admonitio generalis thus placed the burden of responsibility for the continuation of Frankish prosperity squarely on the shoulders of Frankish aristocratic men. It reminded them of this burden by laying forth the cooperative duties and jurisdictions that they were required to observe in order to please their God. The first three quarters of the document consist of regulatory dicta from the most important ecumenical councils of centuries past.¹⁵ Rules address different groups of aristocratic men (“to bishops,” “to priests,” “to clerics and monks,” “to all,” etc.—the last including laymen) and outline the correct hierarchies of power that are to exist among them.¹⁶ Priests are to be subordinate to bishops, monks subordinate to abbots; “professional” religious—that is to say, men who had professed either priestly or monastic vows—are not to be subject to most secular legal jurisdiction; monks in particular are to avoid secular engagement as much as they are able. Lay and professional religious men are defined, in this section, as separate but equally important cogs of a well-oiled social machine. If maintained in good order, the capitula imply, this machine will lead the Franks toward further divine favor.

The last twenty-two capitula continue to define the ideal workings of society but break free from conciliar tradition and bear the distinctive stamp of Charlemagne’s court itself. Historians frequently emphasize capitulum 72, which asks for the correction of liturgical books and scripture, along with the creation of schools for educating young men not only in grammar but also in music and computation.¹⁷ The majority of this last section, however, actually advances far more abstract social ideals—ideals that intensify bonds of collective identity and diminish local and professional affiliations. There is to be peace and concord “between bishops, abbots, counts, judges, and all persons everywhere, of greater or lesser status.”¹⁸ Judges are to judge justly, petitioners and oathtakers are to swear honestly, hatred is to be outlawed, unlawful killings are to be anathema, and all children henceforth are to honor their parents.¹⁹ Here Admonitio generalis decrees not specific behaviors so much as ideal states of mind that all Franks are to cultivate, regardless of station, regardless of person. It is an updated Ten Commandments, a collection of universal rules for membership among God’s chosen people, newly augmented with New Testament moral principles.

It is no surprise, therefore, that in the final summary capitulum of Admonitio generalis, we find the shorthand phrase “love of God and neighbor,” which would be invoked throughout the ninth century and the rest of the Middle Ages in reference to caritas. Capitulum 82 commands bishops and priests to remind their flocks, “with all urgency,” “about love of God and neighbor (dilectione Dei et proximi), about faith and hope in God, about humility and patience, about chastity and continence, about kindness and mercy (misericordia), about giving alms and the confession of their sins, and that they forgive their debtors their debts according to the Lord’s prayer, knowing most certainly that because they do such things they will possess the kingdom of God.”²⁰ This call for love of God and neighbor reveals nothing of the deep philosophical concerns that so worried men such as Augustine and Gregory the Great. It simply recalls the affective interconnection between self, deity, and other that the Gospels demanded and upon which the Book of Pastoral Rule had founded its ideology of worldly masculine authority.

It might be tempting, especially in light of Charlemagne’s campaigns against the pagan Saxons and Avars that he launched at exactly this same moment of his reign, to read the absence of “love of enemy” in this formulation as a cynical misrepresentation of the doctrine that caritas represents—an intentional omission of the more difficult-to-follow aspects of New Testament ethics by priestly members of the Church who were interested less in directing Christian fellow-feeling inward than in directing Christian aggression outward. Jonathan Riley-Smith made precisely this argument for the discursive invocation of “love of God and neighbor” three hundred years later, during Urban II’s preaching campaign for the first crusade.²¹ Such a reading, especially for the Carolingian world, would be the wrong inflection. Not only would it overestimate the power that spiritual leaders held within the governing structures of Carolingian society, but it would also fail to recognize the discursive power that caritas had come to hold within Christian culture.

In Admonitio generalis (and the call to crusade, for that matter), the phrase “love of God and neighbor” serves rhetorically, first and foremost, as a common denominator of collective identity. It passes unassumingly and unproblematically as the first among a summary list of behaviors and qualities that the document promises will lead any Frank to salvation. In so doing, it diminishes allegiances to professional or local affiliation. It furthermore renders the document’s constructed associations between cooperative aristocratic behavior and divine favor not only logical but also perfectly natural. Since all Franks learn the same core values—values that will lead to salvation, the very essence of divine sanction—it is only natural, the document’s underlying logic suggests, that they would be called as one collective body to the same duty of service and fidelity to their heavenly and earthly lords.

Admonitio generalis as a whole, therefore, and this final section in particular both articulate an ideology of shared and universal aristocratic identity and rely on that ideology for their provisions to be persuasive and logical. Without doubt, this ideology was already a driving force behind the convocation of the council of 789 and the drafting of Admonitio generalis in the first place—the boldness and scope of the document imply nothing less. The success of the document’s program of correctio over the course of the next century, furthermore, suggests that this ideology exerted a significant degree of influence upon the aristocratic receivers of Admonitio generalis as well. Regardless of whether the document reflected established thinking or created it anew, however, it can be no coincidence that within a few years of 789 and the dissemination of Admonitio generalis throughout the realm, we also find the first extended explications of the ideology that supported it. This ideology made caritas—“love of God and neighbor”—the core aristocratic value from which all other values derived. Caritas was the aristocrat’s key to both salvation and his worldly power, for it linked him directly to the authority of God.

Reading the “Lay Mirrors”

In 795 or 796, Paulinus of Aquileia wrote a treatise on the ideal lay life that we now call Liber Exhortationis (the “Book of Exhortation”).²² Just a short time later, in 799 or 800, Alcuin of York wrote a similar work, known today as De virtutibus et vitiis (“On the Virtues and Vices”).²³ Both authors wrote at the direct request of powerful Carolingian frontier warlords: Paulinus for Eric of Friuli (d. 799), lord of the southeastern march, and Alcuin for Wido (Guy) of Brittany (d. 818), lord of the northwestern march.

These texts were the earliest of a small group of didactic books written specifically for lay, nonroyal aristocrats during roughly the first half of the ninth century.²⁴ Scholars once referred to them as “ascetic florilegia”—“florilegia” because they excerpt and collect late antique patristic texts and “ascetic” because a majority of these patristic texts were written originally for monastic audiences and accordingly espouse quite traditional Christian ideologies of ascetic masculinity.²⁵ We now label these books as a subcategory of the ancient “mirror for princes” genre: Laienspiegel, or “mirrors for the laity.”²⁶ This new classification has been helpful in encouraging scholars to recognize at least a shade of art where previous readers found little. We now acknowledge that the mirrors do not simply collect patristic wisdom; they arrange, narrate, and adapt it to new purposes. Still, historians generally tend to regard these texts as rather dull and derivative. And even their closest apologists wonder about their ultimate significance as historical artifacts: how widely they were actually read and followed and whether they truly had an impact upon the majority of the Carolingian world.²⁷ The question of what, exactly, these texts represent, not only as objects unto themselves but also in relation to their actual function within Carolingian aristocratic culture as a whole, deserves further consideration here.

J. M. Wallace-Hadrill once described the advice in these little books as “all very practical”—a line often quoted in discussion of the mirrors but with which very few scholars have agreed.²⁸ Most interpreters have in fact assumed, with rather astonishing uniformity, that the mirrors could only have been received as problematic. At best, these scholars argue, the mirrors espoused a form of Christianity that would have been completely incongruent with the general character of Frankish secular values—values that included glory in war, hunting, conspicuous wealth, and sexual virility.²⁹ Heinrich Fichtenau summed up this view with the dramatic claim that throughout the ninth century and until the mid-tenth century at the earliest, anyone who wished to lead a particularly devout Christian existence had to embrace an ideal of living that stood in “stark contrast” to the traditional Frankish way of life. Most, he suggested, were forced to choose a path of “lesser evils,” of marriage and almsgiving, of endowing churches and monasteries, and of doing private penance for the sins of the flesh that they could not or would not conquer.³⁰ Pierre Riché believed that the incongruence between Christian and secular Frankish values was in fact so great that it created a lay “anxiety complex”—widespread fear throughout the lay world about whether they could possibly achieve salvation as the lowest members of a society “dominated” by the clergy.³¹

Other scholars, taking perhaps an even more skeptical position, have regarded the mirrors as largely toothless, featuring little in the way of focused advice or specific liturgical teaching. Janet Nelson has described the mirrors’ advice to the laity as “at once too specific and too vague” and “often banal.”³² Rachel Stone, who has conducted the most careful and extensive readings of the mirrors to date, recently quipped that Alcuin’s De virtutibus et vitiis is so bland that it “seems … to assume an audience less of ‘spiritual athletes’ than ‘spiritual couch-potatoes.’ ”³³ Rafaele Savigni, merging the major themes of these scholarly positions into one all-encompassing theory, has argued that the corpus of lay mirrors therefore suggests two different and quite contradictory orientations with regard to laypersons in ninth-century ecclesiology: one “ascetic-monastic” (and therefore too strict and out of touch), the other focusing more on almsgiving and the channeling of violence (and therefore too banal and a conciliation to the “warrior” values of secular society).³⁴

Reading the mirrors for their explicit and implicit ideological function frees us from this interpretative quagmire. It allows us namely to see how these texts would have served writers and readers within their historical moment and why they would have made perfectly logical sense to them. Focusing on the ideological messages of these texts suggests that actually there was no contradiction between the Christianity that the mirrors espouse and Carolingian secular life, as scholars have presumed. Nor do they represent a concession of “true” Christian values in favor of “lesser” forms. They do not call for monastic withdrawal from the world, nor do they “impose” a foreign set of “clerical” values upon a refractory or anxious warrior culture. Instead, they articulate exactly the ideology of worldly Christian masculinity that Gregory the Great explained in his Regulae pastoralis liber—an ideal of masculinity within which caritas allowed men to perform their allegiance to the Kingdom of God symbolically, providing them access to correct knowledge of right and wrong and, with it, divine authority. The crucial innovation of these texts is that they explicitly extended this authority to laymen as well as men “in religion.”

In other words, we must change the way in which we read the lay mirrors and understand what they can reveal about the cultural forces that produced them. Paulinus and Alcuin did not simply write books of practical (or impractical) advice. They wrote ideological narratives of their world. These narratives explained, both directly and by implication, the correct order of God’s creation and the role that Carolingian aristocratic men were destined to play within it. They articulated and framed connections between lay aristocratic masculinity, secular prosperity, and divine sanction as completely natural, rendering normative the aristocratic cooperation and moral rectitude for which Admonitio generalis called. In the end, it ultimately matters little, therefore, how widely these texts may or may not have been read and digested in their moment. They are significant because they codify the completely constructed logic that authorized Carolingian aristocratic power at the turn of the ninth century. This logic enabled Carolingian men to wield that power whether they were consciously aware of its ideological foundations or not.

Paulinus and Eric

Paulinus was Aquileia’s Patriarch, a title granted to that episcopal see during the sixth century as a means of demarcating its autonomy and primacy among the other powerful sees of the region, including the strongholds of Ravenna and Rome.³⁵ It was a position, in other words, of highest spiritual authority. Yet in writing his Liber exhortationis for the most powerful secular lord in that region, Paulinus was still writing as a subordinate. We must always remember that Carolingian society was not the society of the European High Middle Ages. Charlemagne allied with the papacy and the episcopacy, but the arms of Carolingian spiritual power worked for the laity, not the other way around. Lay magnates enlisted their learned priestly and monastic brothers because they were their trusted advisors. Part of the solemn duty of “professional” religious leadership was to teach worldly lords how Christianity pertained to their lives and, of equal importance, how better to make their religion do work for them, both personally and in their contributions to the empire.

If Liber exhortationis ever had an opening epistle, we no longer have record of it. The text itself is extant in some thirty manuscripts that collectively date from the ninth through the fifteenth centuries. Only one, from the mid-ninth century, attributes authorship to Paulinus.³⁶ Furthermore, it states only that Paulinus wrote for a friend in saeculo militans (“serving as a warrior in the secular world”). We know that Eric of Friuli was by far the most likely original recipient of the text from other evidence of the close relationship between the two men.³⁷ We also have a corroborating document that reveals not only something of the power dynamic between them but that Eric very likely requested the little book completely of his own volition. There is little in the document to suggest that he was driven by feelings of inferiority, as Riché believed. Instead, his diction implies straightforward and pragmatic interest.

The clarifying document is a letter addressed to Eric of Friuli, not from Paulinus but from Alcuin. This letter responds to a request from Eric for spiritual advice and suggests that Eric may have asked Alcuin about these matters first before eventually turning to Paulinus.³⁸ In the letter, Alcuin obsequiously thanks the duke for deigning to visit him in his humble home, praying for God’s protection of the duke against all enemies, worldly and otherworldly. He entreats Eric to observe God’s precepts so that he may rule in prosperity and be deemed worthy of this divine protection. Finally, Alcuin closes by saying that he would write more “about the observation of Christian pietas” if Paulinus (to whom Alcuin humbly refers as his own teacher) were not already at hand to do so.³⁹

Alcuin’s fawning diction is no doubt epistolary convention, and thus we need not read into its abject deference too strongly. Yet the fact that he chose this language in the first place demonstrates something of the hierarchy of power between the two men. Eric is the superior in the exchange. Furthermore, Eric is actively seeking knowledge not out of submission to spiritual authority but rather via its enlistment. Eric was a warrior, yet he was also clearly educated in letters and Christian doctrine. Liber exhortationis teems with quotations from a wide array of patristic authorities: Gregory the Great’s Moralia in Job, the De vita contemplativa of Julianus Pomerius (d. c. 500), and the Admonitio ad filium spiritualium of Basil the Great (d. 379), along with significant references to the Old Testament Book of Psalms, several books of the prophets (particularly Isaiah), the New Testament Gospels (particularly Matthew and John), and the letters of St. Paul.⁴⁰ Paulinus not only used these texts but also counted on his reader to understand them. Liber exhortationis is an erudite, philosophical tract for, we must presume, an erudite, philosophical man. It is only to be expected that, as such a man, Eric would seek out all the resources at his disposal in order to ensure his continued power and authority.⁴¹

Because this mirror (and the mirror of Alcuin, which I discuss in the following section) is frequently quoted without a great deal of regard to structural context, it will be important to pay special attention here to both structure and composition. Liber exhortationis seems to have been originally composed in the sixty-six small chapter sections that are preserved in its most recent published version, a scholarly edition from the early eighteenth century.⁴² Paulinus uses the word caritas and the phrase “love of God and neighbor” interchangeably throughout his text, and the phrase provides a loose structural frame for the book itself. Early chapters dwell on “love of God,” the theme introduced by the first capitulum. Lessons involve human nature and its relationship to divinity, followed by a long section excerpted directly from Julianus Pomerius concerning the secular world and its corrosive influences.⁴³ Paulinus then expands upon the general themes of the Pomerius section, shifting the book toward “love of neighbor,” the theme introduced explicitly in capitulum 22. In this section of the book, he encourages Eric to cultivate virtutes animae, a phrase that we should certainly read in the modern sense of “the soul’s ‘virtues’ ” but also in its more explicitly gendered etymological sense, which would have been clear to any Latin speaker: “manly vigor of the soul.” Lessons about virtus cover a range of worldly behaviors, from confession, to prayer, to care of household, but they also address the states of mind and being that are conducive to salvation, such as humility and patience. Subsequent lessons expand more directly upon the meanings of salvation and redemption, describing both the reward to come for all who create good in this life and the sadness that all men must feel for the inevitable destruction of those souls who seek only evil. The work ends with a series of meditations on mala carnis—“evils of the flesh”—presented not as a condemnation of the secular world or of the body but rather as a warning for Eric always to be aware of the secular distractions that might keep him from maintaining focus on salvation and the heavenly otherworld.

Reading with greater attention to structure allows us to see how effectively the text creates an image of secular Christian life that not only encourages Eric toward salvation but, more importantly, explains and naturalizes his power as an aristocratic male—a power that he and Paulinus equally share. In the service of this image, the book advances at least four interwoven ideological arguments. Paulinus argues that a man’s true power comes from his cultivation of correct knowledge—knowledge about who he truly is and about God’s loving nature. Paulinus argues that laymen and clergy are at essence the same; they have the same complementary duty, which is to protect and to care for souls through the cultivation of emotional bonds with others. He argues that the deeds that flow from “love of God and neighbor” are what earn a man access to his authority from God, expressing the relationship between the aristocracy and God as precisely the same type of relationship that earthly vassals have with their lords. And finally, he argues explicitly that worldly pleasures are empty and corrosive, but caritas and the emotional interconnection that it entails can keep worldly Christian men safely linked to the heavenly realm. This last argument does not advocate monastic withdrawal from the world. Quite the opposite, it renders normative and perfectly natural the ideological connections between worldly and divine authority upon which the Carolingian aristocracy relied in the exercise of their power.

An Ideology of Mind: “To Your Head, God Has Added the Grace of Spiritual Knowledge”

The treatise begins with an exhortation that to love God and to cling to him with one’s entire will is the highest good and the greatest beatitude.⁴⁴ Paulinus writes in the rhetorical style of the learned pastor, making clear the duty of laypeople to obey the clergy in matters of the Christian faith.⁴⁵ Yet to think of Liber exhortationis as little more than a preacher’s sermonizing is to misread the text entirely. In the opening section and throughout the book, Paulinus addresses Eric as charissime frater (“dearest brother”)—a monastic address that levels authority and establishes an egalitarian tone.⁴⁶ The exchange between author and reader evokes not hierarchy, in other words, but brotherhood. Paulinus acts as the doctor of souls that Gregory the Great described. He responds to a direct request for knowledge about the physics of moral behavior itself, and from his learned vantage, suspended between worlds, he passes on what he can more clearly see. None of what he teaches is new doctrine; all is quite standard theology. Paulinus simply explains to Eric how he, too, can achieve the traditional vantage of Gregory the Great’s pastoral leader and properly judge right and wrong behavior for himself.⁴⁷

For Paulinus, understanding the love of God begins with a lesson in human biology. Eric’s interior homo (“interior man”) bears the image of its Builder, God; for inside the body the intellect, will, and memory all imitate the Holy Trinity.⁴⁸ Still, wrote Paulinus, now alluding to the second half of caritas upon which he would expand later in the book, love of God is insufficient unless there is also work—action. “Understanding God alone is insufficient,” the Liber explains, “if our will is not made in his love; nay, even this does not suffice unless work is added along with memory and will.”⁴⁹ Right action, just as Gregory the Great explained, depends on the cultivation of right knowledge.

“To your person” (capiti—literally “to your head”), Paulinus’s biology lesson continues, God has added “the grace of spiritual knowledge, that it may illuminate your judgment and lead you toward eternal life.”⁵⁰ Following the long exegetical tradition of original sin, Paulinus wrote later in his book that the “human race” (genus humanum) is damned because of the actions of its first parents. Adam and Eve’s sins were lust and pride, but importantly, their pride stemmed from their “damnable” neglect of the likeness of God in which they were made.⁵¹ Eric must always remember that he is not simply a count with secular duties of office and family; he is a “work of divine majesty,” formed in divine likeness. The metaphor of construction is invoked again and again throughout the text; the more Eric loves his Builder, says Paulinus, the more he will understand himself to be built by God.⁵²

An Ideology of Equality: “Persona Has No Meaning in the House of God”

After explaining to Eric his true nature, the remainder of the book expands on the emotional bonds that a man must strive to create in order to earn salvation. Paulinus taught that, because the inner self is far more important than the outer in the eyes of God, all persons, regardless of their rank or way of life, must follow the same rules and guidelines for living, which center on emotional interconnection with and care for other souls. Eric must develop feeling for all others, whether they are of his station or below. “I beg you,” Paulinus entreats him, “although a layman, be prompted to all work of God, kind to the poor and sick, consoler to the dying, compassionate to the miseries of all people, generous in alms, mindful of the widow’s two mites in the Gospel, and of the prophet saying, ‘Break your bread with those who are hungry,’ but on the other hand foreseeing discretion of alms, so that everyone, namely giver and receiver, might have solace.”⁵³ The key term in the passage is quamvis: “although.”⁵⁴ Although a layman, Eric must perform God’s work. Although not a priest, Eric must be kind to the sick and to those less fortunate than he. Although not a monk, he is to console the dying and to show compassion for the woes of others. The moral burden of God’s work, the passage claims, is shared equally by all Christians.

Through comparative statements about relative duty, Paulinus placed particular emphasis in his book on the equality of professional religious and lay aristocratic men. Paulinus urges Eric at a later point in Liber exhortationis to command the members of his household and all those subject to him to live a life of sobriety while at the same time not taking too much pride in their abstinence. With God’s help, they are to do all things “temperately, justly, kindly, and religiously” because, Paulinus explains, Christ poured out his blood “not only for us clerics, but also for the whole human race, who are predestined for eternal life.”⁵⁵ The Kingdom of Heaven was promised not only to “us” (by which, again, Paulinus refers to himself and his “professional” religious identity—that is to say, his identity as a man who has professed formal vows) but to all laypersons who serve God’s precepts “with their whole heart.”⁵⁶ The message is for all, he says; no laypersons, clerics, or sacral virgins should neglect the salvation of their souls.⁵⁷

Paulinus’s comparative diction directly calls into question what he perceives to be a prevalent assumption among laypersons—namely, that the lay Christian life requires fundamentally different precepts for living. Without question, for Paulinus, it does not. At first, he pressures Eric to learn Christian doctrine. There is “great confusion among lay souls” who believe that “a clergyman … should do the things that a clergyman does” and who thus fail to appreciate the importance of learning their Christian duties. In order to share in the goods of the earth provided by God and the happiness of the Kingdom of Heaven, all must “carry the yoke of Christ with equal labor.”⁵⁸ “What good is it,” he continues, “for there to be men exalted by such things on one side within the secular world [i.e., the side of bishops and priests], and made lowly on the other [i.e., the lay side]?”⁵⁹ Equality among aristocratic worldly men is Paulinus’s main theme. “Let there be no worry about being a layperson,” he writes, “for persona” (literally, one’s “mask”) “has no meaning in the house of God.”⁶⁰

Taken out of context, the thrust of such statements may seem to support Riché’s observation of an inferiority complex inflicted by a sanctimonious and strict clergy upon the Carolingian lay world. Within context, however, it becomes clear that Paulinus is simply making a claim for shared responsibility. Thereby, he actually elevates the status of the layman to equal authority with his professional Christian brethren. He uses the word “persona”—the ancient Roman word for the theatrical mask—inflecting his lesson with the notion that worldly distinctions are simply the roles that humans play in life. He invokes traditional Christian corporal metaphors and explains to Eric that the celestial kingdom is open to all men—just as much for laymen as for clerics and monastics—because all men are in Christ and Christ is in all men.⁶¹ Once again, the novelty of what Paulinus writes lies not in the rhetoric or the doctrine but rather in the fact that he extends and recasts tradition to make a specific argument for equal lay and clerical authority. He rhetorically asks Eric how one hand could be the enemy of the other, how one foot could hate the other. In the body of the Christian ecclesia, God is the head. Layman and cleric are both hands, both feet. Neither is subordinate to the other. They are equal parts of the same holy body.⁶² Paulinus neither assuages nor creates feelings of lay inferiority. He instead calls for all aristocratic men to recognize their common identity and duty.

To this end, he employs further metaphors of cohesion and cooperation: a city that is fortified in one part but ruined in another is open to enemy attack, he says; even the strongest boat will still sink if a single plank of its wood has a hole.⁶³ God calls upon “every layman, cleric, and monk equally,” he writes, to exhibit faith, hope, and caritas; to serve God with his whole heart; to make true confession and to do worthy penance.⁶⁴ All men share these qualities and deeds together because worldly differences are indistinguishable in the divine gaze.

An Ideology of Affect: “Faith Is Our Capacity to Feel, and Caritas Is Our Health”

For both laymen and the professional religious, therefore, the performance of God’s service in the form of good works constitutes the sole criterion for discipleship, and caritas is the binding force that drives these works. Indeed, Paulinus describes active good works as the primary manifestation of caritas, working in concert with faith and hope to complete the Christian soul. Paulinus tells Eric that “there are three things” compared to which “in this world there are no better: the soul of a spiritual man persevering in good works, which is more brilliant than the sun; the holy angels who take up that soul; and paradise, into which that soul is led.”⁶⁵ This call to work runs throughout the Liber: “faith is our capacity to feel,” he explains, “and caritas is our health. Faith believes, caritas works, hope strengthens.”⁶⁶

Yet again, this is a long and well-established tradition of Christian doctrine cast within a particularly Carolingian ideological frame. The good works of caritas described within the Liber include the primary duties of the Frankish aristocrat. True holiness for Paulinus rests in doing works of “justice” (iustitia), defined not in the classical sense of balance but instead in terms of discipleship and correct understanding of the divine order: doing what God wills and not doing what God prohibits.⁶⁷ Paulinus urges Eric to obey the teachings of the clergy, but he also encourages him to read scripture for himself. The holy books are a direct message from God, he says, about what he expects from humanity: “God himself, our Lord, speaks to us through them, and shows us feeling (affectum) with his pius will.”⁶⁸ This statement would be extraordinarily rare to find in later centuries of the Christian church, but in this Carolingian text, it demonstrates just how clearly each individual Christian was thought to have control over his (or her) connection with the divine. All men should read scripture for themselves because the pius will of God—here used in the Augustinian sense not of “pious” but “infinitely loving”—is the primary exemplar for the depth of feeling that each and every human should show toward others.⁶⁹

It is true, as readers of Liber exhortationis have previously noted, that Paulinus describes God’s direct message in terms that Eric, a warlord in the service of Charlemagne, would certainly have understood.⁷⁰ If a mission comes from the king, Paulinus asks Eric rhetorically, “do we not then accept the letters, throwing our cares aside with readied will and with all devotion?” Certainly, since the “King of kings and Lord of lords” has seen fit to direct his letters (that is, scripture) to Eric and to the rest of humanity through his prophets and apostles, Eric should respond with all the more diligence to his divine command.⁷¹ This is not, however, a simplification of the message so as to make it palatable for a lay audience. Rather, it frames the enactment of caritas in terms of a metaphor that both Paulinus and Eric, as Frankish aristocrats, know well. Just as they are equally in their service of their earthly lord, they are equally servants of their heavenly king.

An Ideology of Inner Asceticism: “May the Sweetness of This World Not Separate Us in Any Way from the Love of Christ”

Throughout its discussion, Paulinus’s text naturalizes the ideological authority of the ascetic male, presenting it as a given that need not even be explained. This “natural” authority of the ascetic does not, however, require all Christian men to be monks. Instead, just as in Gregory the Great’s Regulae pastoralis liber, it requires men of the world to perform their asceticism symbolically and to tether themselves to God through affective deeds of caritas.

“Do not obscure your goodness through the malice of others,” Paulinus continues, “but as much as you have power, may you everywhere appear lovable before God and all people.”⁷² Paulinus serves as his own model for the emotional bond that caritas represents, following exactly from Gregory the Great’s ideology—his pastoral caritas for his flock is more than a simple expression of care; it is also the means by which, as a man of the secular world, he avoids worldly corruption. Paulinus explains how Eric, too, must embody caritas in order to separate himself from worldly influences. “I desire and entreat God with all the feeling (affectu) of my heart,” he says, “that you stretch toward what is preeminent, reach for the lofty crown of everlasting beatitude, and not allow the nobility of your soul to be altered from the love of Christ by either the counsel of friends or secular ambition.”⁷³ This is not a condemnation of the secular world, describing it as incongruent with Eric’s position. It is traditional Gregorian ideology of worldly authority. The Christian leader must live within the boundaries of the secular world but learn to keep his mind firmly connected to the heavenly world beyond.

Caritas—love of God and neighbor—is the key to worldly authority because emotional connection between souls is the form of world denial that all men can perform. “Let us have the love of God and of neighbor inside us,” Paulinus urges. From love of God and neighbor comes tranquility, he writes. Hatred brings only disaster and ruin.⁷⁴ Paulinus demonstrates in his discussion the differences between the Christian man with caritas in his heart and the Christian who harbors hatred. Fusing the language of the Gospel with Stoic, Augustinian, and Gregorian interpretations, he explains that the “meek” and “kindly” man (mitis et benignus), even if he suffers evil, does not retaliate in the face of injury, while the “evil man” (inequus) takes offense at even the slightest word: “He who is filled with caritas walks with tranquil soul and most serene face.”⁷⁵

The text describes the second component of caritas, love of neighbor, in terms of emotional interconnection and shared feeling. If Eric sees his neighbor turning good deeds, he is to rejoice with him (congratulare). If his neighbor suffers sadness, Eric must make that sadness his own.⁷⁶ Returning to his recurring theme of the “interior man,” Paulinus explains this call for other-oriented emotional connection with a rousing call to inner manly vigor of the soul: spiritual virtus. “ Virtus of your soul is to love God and to hate those things that God does not love,” he writes, invoking the artful repetition and rhetorical crescendo of the popular preacher.⁷⁷

Virtus of your soul is to follow patience and to avoid all impatience. Virtus of your soul is to guard chastity, of body as well as soul. Virtus of your soul is to despise the vain glory of this world and to spurn all fallen things and to work for the love of him who redeemed you while you live in the body. Virtus of your soul is to strive for humility and to abhor pride. Virtus of your soul is to confine and to repress anger and fury. Virtus of your soul is to decline from all folly and to embrace divine wisdom. Virtus of your soul is to subordinate all love of the flesh and to raise your mind toward Christ. Therefore, you can easily and readily obtain these virtutes if you will yourself to avoid caring for secular things and fallen things and earthly matters, and if you place nothing before the love of Christ.⁷⁸

Virtus of the soul, in other words, involves that which keeps a man properly connected to the heavenly otherworld and protected from the dangers of the secular world and carnal will. Eric must demonstrate his inner connection with God through outward deeds toward his fellow man. “God is not a hearer and inspector of words,” Paulinus tells Eric, referring to the Old Testament’s Book of Wisdom 1:6 and echoing Augustine’s language of the interior will, “but a hearer and inspector of the human heart.”⁷⁹ For laymen just as for clergymen, Paulinus explains, virtus flows from making God one’s most prized possession: “If we desire to possess anything in this secular world, let us possess with unencumbered mind God, who possesses all things, and let us hold in him whatever we happily and in a holy manner desire.”⁸⁰

Christ himself becomes the model for secular living. Paulinus tells Eric that he must attempt to walk in Christ’s footsteps according to the Gospel: “What is it to walk just as Christ walked except to despise the vanity and happiness of this secular world and not to fear adversities suffered in his name? … May the sweetness of this wretched secular world not separate us in any way from the love of Christ, and let there not be namely the excuse of a wife or the influence of one’s children, nor more glut of gold and silver, love of possessions.”⁸¹ “Alas,” he exclaims in another passage, “how subtly does the ancient enemy trick us by deceiving us, and draw blindness over the eyes of our mind, lest we succeed in discerning between the joys of this secular world and the joys of the eternal kingdom!”⁸²

Liber exhortationis fully and unabashedly espouses ascetic philosophy in these passages, borrowing heavily from works written expressly for monks. The secular is wretched (miserabilis); wives and children are mere baubles of distraction like any other trinket of gold or silver. Nevertheless, Paulinus is not calling for monastic withdrawal from secular life.⁸³ He makes patently clear that God does not expect bodily renunciation from Eric. Instead, God wishes only that Eric effect a correct ordering of priorities—a right valuation of his heavenly goals above his secular pursuits. Achieving salvation is a matter not of indiscriminate renunciation but rather of education—of “discerning” (discernere) between secular and heavenly delights. As Paulinus explains, if Eric desires the promise of eternal life, he needs to guard the Lord’s precepts within himself against the world’s distractions. He must understand the limited value of friends and family, gold and silver, gems, bountiful vineyards, and farms—these are not necessarily evil, but they offer no protection for the soul.⁸⁴

Paulinus even suggests that Eric strive to be “dead to sin and to the world”—a staggeringly ascetic demand when read out of context. Within context, however, it is clear that Paulinus is portraying a state of mind. Paulinus describes “being dead to sin” as a metaphor. The dead body, he says, does no harm. The dead man commits no robbery. He is violent toward no one. He blames no one without proof. He oppresses no one. He neither envies good people nor insults the bad. A soul that is dead to the world is never a slave to the luxuries of the flesh. He does not drink too much. He does not incite hatred in others. He does not glorify the rich and powerful.⁸⁵ Conversely, living by the flesh in the secular world entails the opposite: indulging in pleasures, going where one wants, sleeping when one wants, speaking what one wants and to whomever one wants, seeking whatever pleases the senses, and taking delight in “beautiful clothing and cavalry and weapons” just as one wants. Being dead to the world, according to Paulinus, is to live by God’s will; to live carnally is to live by one’s own.⁸⁶

Underlining further the correct prioritization of mental before physical renunciation of worldly things, the Liber reminds Eric that worldly joy is not in and of itself evil. Paulinus affirms that jubilation is quite acceptable as long one simply refrains from rejoicing in sin.⁸⁷ God seeks only spiritual gifts from humans and nothing more, Paulinus teaches in another passage.⁸⁸ “I beg you, my brother, that you never let the love of the flesh block celestial love from you,” he tells Eric.⁸⁹ “Always, always,” Paulinus urges with rhetorical repetition in a later section, “let our flesh be subject to the soul like a handmaid to her mistress.”⁹⁰ In other words, Eric must never allow illicit forces to command his body lest it commit war against his spirit, and the flesh must always be subject so that it can properly obey the orders of the Holy Spirit.⁹¹ But subjection of the flesh does not mean renunciation for Paulinus.

When Paulinus does suggest physical asceticism to Eric, he always takes into account Eric’s situation within the world. He understands perfectly well, that is, that Eric does not live in the cloister and therefore cannot renounce his worldly life entirely. He must give to the less fortunate, but Paulinus also urges him do so with discretion, “so that everyone, namely giver and receiver, might have solace.”⁹² When Paulinus discusses the excesses of indulging in too much food, he appeals not so much to Eric’s inner spirituality as he does to his sense of health: “excessive dishes” hurt the body as well as the soul. Too much food and drink weaken the stomach. An abundance of blood and cholera leads to a number of “table diseases.” He encourages Eric to avoid delicacies and over-opulence of food—if not all the time, then as much as he can, and at the very least on days of fasting and atonement.⁹³ Likewise, when Paulinus warns Eric to refrain from “superfluous speech,” he is not recommending monastic silence. Rather, he is reminding Eric that the tongue is meant to bless and to praise God and not to speak badly of anyone. “Let us not,” he says, “grow accustomed to our worst habits in our every act, or even thought, because a habit that has been greatly prolonged and affirmed is avoided and rejected with no small labor.”⁹⁴ In his injunction against drinking too much, Paulinus declares that God gave wine to humanity “for the happiness of the heart, not for drunkenness.” Eric is to drink only as is dictated by “natural weakness,” but Paulinus does not ban drinking altogether; Eric must simply use alcohol for its positive medicinal effects and not assign to the soul’s ruin what God gave for bodily healing.⁹⁵ Discussing Eric’s earthly parents, Paulinus explains that Eric’s devotion to God should always supersede his allegiance to his family, yet he does so through an appeal to the filial loyalties that he knows Eric will always have. “If we love our earthly parents, who sustained labor on our behalf for a short time, with so much feeling (affectu),” he writes, “should not our celestial Father, who was nailed to the cross for us, be loved all the more?”⁹⁶

These are not specific injunctions or practices that Paulinus teaches Eric to follow so much as they are variations on the same ideological theme. Paulinus understands Eric’s worldly status completely, just as well as he understands his own worldly status. He makes no suggestion whatsoever that Eric should renounce the world, nor does Paulinus frame the conduct that he teaches as a “lesser evil.” Eric simply needs to conduct his worldly life with the proper priorities and an inner will oriented toward the right kind of manliness. In this, he and Eric are effectively partners, bound to the same earthly duty. The key to our unlocking of Liber exhortationis as a historical artifact is to recognize the ways in which, textually, the book does far more than simply present a pragmatic listing of Eric’s Christian obligations. It tells an ideological tale of who a Christian man is and whence his authority derives.

At the end of the book, Paulinus vividly describes the drama of final judgment. It is a courtroom scene in which God weighs all of the evidence of a man’s life in order to make his decision. The chief prosecutor is the “Demon Accuser” who “will throw in our face whatever we have done, and on what day we have sinned, and in what place, and what good work we ought to have done then in that time.”⁹⁷ If a man is guilty, the Demon Accuser will plead convincingly. Paulinus brings to life the demon’s voice and the speech that he will make before the divine judge:

For then the devil will have to say, “Most Fair Judge, judge that man, who did not wish to be yours through grace, to be mine on account of his guilt. He is yours through nature; he is mine through misery. He is yours because of your Passion; he is mine because of my persuasion. He is disobedient to you; to me he is obedient. From you he received the stola of immortality; from me this tattered tunic in which he is clothed. He casted away your clothing; he arrived here in my clothing. What sexual perversion did he commit? What intemperance? What avarice? What anger? What pride? What of the rest of my parts? He sent you away; he sought refuge in me.… Judge that man to be mine and to be damned along with me!”⁹⁸

The function of the scene is not to scare the reader with fire and brimstone. It is rhetorically so frightening precisely because of its procedural cool. The Accuser addresses God, the judge, in the respectful tone of the most well-trained legal scholar. His airtight arguments list sin after sin, error after neglectful error of obliviousness and disloyalty. All are unassailable. And most tragically, all could have been easily avoided. Structurally, the theater of this final moment makes perfect sense as a performed end to the guiding life narrative that the book lays forth. The narrative begins with human origins and concludes with the two possible outcomes of human existence: salvation and damnation. In salvation, the soul rejoices from at last reconciling with God and returning home. In damnation, the reader must hear the demon’s voice and feel the cold terror of him speaking not lies but hard and sad truths.

Far from a simple manual of conduct, therefore, we can see just how fundamentally the text serves as an explanation of Eric’s humanity and what it specifically entails. It warns Eric to do everything within his power to avoid damnation but also provides him with the macroscopic view that will help him to do so—knowledge about who he is, where he is going, and how the secular world in which he lives compares to the heavenly world to which he truly belongs. This macroscopic view, the same view that Gregory the Great advocated for the Christian bishop, is where we must focus our interpretative energy when reading the text. Paulinus does not just describe traits and practices to which Eric should or should not adhere. He also narrates the philosophy of mind—the correct orientation of the will through caritas—that enfranchises Eric’s power, his purpose, and his ultimate authority to lead those under his care to their own eventual salvation.

Alcuin and Wido

Alcuin refrained from writing for Eric of Friuli, advising him to turn instead to Paulinus. Yet in 799 or 800, the abbot of Marmoutier did write a lay mirror of his own for the march-lord closer-by, Count Wido of Brittany—the same post held by the tragic hero Roland, who may have been Wido’s close relative.⁹⁹ Alcuin’s book, De virtutibus et vitiis, would become his most well-known work after his death, achieving significantly more popularity during the Middle Ages than anything else he wrote and certainly more than any of the other lay mirrors. The book would be translated into no fewer than four vernacular languages during the later Middle Ages and is extant today in more than 140 surviving manuscripts.¹⁰⁰

The composition, brevity, and relative stylistic simplicity of De virtutibus et vitiis lend Alcuin’s book its own distinctive flavor when compared to Liber exhortationis. Unlike Paulinus’s text, Alcuin’s work contains an introductory address, clarifying both author and recipient. Even with this opening nuncupatoria, however, Alcuin’s book is shorter than Liber exhortationis by more than two thirds. Alcuin’s Latinity is also less ornate than Paulinus’s, favoring shorter syntactical constructions and far fewer extended displays of exegetical freeplay.¹⁰¹ His principle sources are different, too. Although he certainly drew on the same kinds of patristic authorities that Paulinus did (including, importantly, Gregory the Great), Alcuin seems to have favored more direct use of scripture: the Old Testament books of Psalms and Prophets and the New Testament Gospels (Matthew and John) and letters of St. Paul. Clearly influencing Alcuin as well was the work of Augustine and, perhaps but not necessarily through Augustine, Cicero.¹⁰² Finally, Alcuin’s work has a different structure and flow than Liber exhortationis. Divided into thirty-six short capitula, his book still begins with caritas as the guiding theme and ends on salvation, but De virtutibus et vitiis presents less of a narrative arc from creation to end of days and is rather focused more intently, as the title indicates, upon the explication of various aspects of virtus (which, once again, we should understand both in its modern sense of “virtue” and its gendered etymological sense of “manly vigor”) and their corresponding negative vices.

Still, the term that Alcuin used to describe the contents of his book is precisely the one that Paulinus used—exhortatio. And just as with the relationship between Paulinus and Eric, Alcuin wrote for Wido as his spiritual advisor, not as a hierarchical superior. If we can take Alcuin at his word (we have no reason not to do so), Wido is neither a reluctant recipient nor stricken with feelings of inferiority. Alcuin states only that he wrote his book in response to Wido’s direct request for brief advice regarding his occupation as a warrior.¹⁰³ These words have received many different interpretations in modern scholarship, leading some to wonder whether Wido would have been happy with what he received. The book does not truly discuss war much at all.¹⁰⁴ To make sense of the text’s logic, we must picture more generously that Wido, like Eric, wished to know how to make his religion apply more directly to his secular duties. Alcuin’s reply, like Paulinus’s, was to teach the nature of worldly power itself—how Wido could perform his worldly duties in a manner that would grant him greater access to God’s protection and authority.

The most important parallels between the two texts, therefore, involve their ideological themes and arguments, which are effectively the same. Alcuin argues that both spiritual and lay power derive from exactly the same source, caritas. He argues that caritas involves cultivating an emotional connection with both equals and subordinates and acting upon that emotional connection with good deeds. He therefore claims that laymen and clergy have equal power and duty within the secular world because they are engaged in the same duties toward their fellow Christians and the same fight against evil. Finally, he teaches that the emotional bonds created by caritas are what connect the Christian layman to the heavenly realm, allowing him to rise above the corruption of the secular world and to see it more clearly. Just as with Liber exhortationis, Alcuin’s book espouses quite traditional Christian ideologies of ascetic masculinity, yet it would be a mistake to interpret this as urging Wido to retire from the world. While Alcuin describes the imagined ideological link between caritas and ascetic authority, he also shows Wido how to access that authority while still living and working as a secular lord and military commander.

An Ideology of Power: “Neither Martyrdom nor Contempt of the Secular World… Could Accomplish Anything Without the Duty of Caritas”

De virtutibus et vitiis begins with a discussion of true wisdom and the obscurity of worldly knowledge. Meditation on true wisdom—correct knowledge—so central to the moral philosophies of Augustine and Gregory the Great sets the tone for Alcuin’s book as a whole. Citing 1 Cor 3:19, Alcuin writes that what seems to be wisdom in the world is stultitia (“folly” or “stupidity”) in the eyes of God. To achieve perfect wisdom, one must achieve cognitio divinitatis. Translated woodenly, this means “recognition of divinity,” yet Alcuin’s use of the pregnant phrase suggests not only contemplation of God’s nature but also recognition of the divinity that exists within the manly self. “ Cognitio divinitatis,” Alcuin continues, “is the virtus of good work, and the virtus of good work is the reward of eternal blessing.”¹⁰⁵ All is intertwined and interconnected. As with Paulinus, nothing that Alcuin writes is theologically new per se, but he innovates by applying a traditional Gregorian ideology of spiritual authority to lay power.

Caritas is Alcuin’s foundation for all service to God. Caritas is the first principle, he writes, because nothing pleases God without it.¹⁰⁶ Caritas is so fundamental, in fact, that “neither martyrdom nor contempt of the secular world … could accomplish anything without the duty of caritas.”¹⁰⁷ This is a remarkable statement to flow from the pen of an abbot. In claiming that the physical acts of the ascetic and martyr accomplish nothing without the foundation of caritas, Alcuin makes caritas the key component of ascetic authority. This, in turn, allows him to build further ideological connections between caritas and Wido’s comital authority.

Alcuin defines caritas as loving God and neighbor with complete conviction. It is the great leveler, the glue that binds Christian society together into one unified whole. “If by chance anyone asks what a neighbor is,” Alcuin writes, “let him know that every Christian is rightly called neighbor, because all are sanctified in the baptism of the son of God, so that we are brothers spiritually in perfect caritas.”¹⁰⁸ To our modern eyes, Alcuin’s exclusion of non-Christians in his definition is distasteful at best. Yet the thrust of the passage is not so much to advocate Christian exclusivity as it is to teach a philosophy of aristocratic inclusivity. By claiming that all Christians are spiritual brothers in caritas, he is explaining to Wido that all men, highborn or low, lay or clergy, are part of the same harmonious community. “Our spiritual family is nobler than the fleshly one,” he adds in support.¹⁰⁹ His words seek not to enforce boundaries between Christian and non-Christian but rather to perforate fixed boundaries of familial identity and partisanship.

From this discussion, Alcuin moves toward a methodical explication of the manly qualities—the virtutes—that lead directly from caritas. Hope for salvation compels men toward good works. Good works lead to peacemaking. Peacemaking leads to just and righteous judgment. Alcuin’s emphasis on peacemaking and judicial justice has led interpreters to claim that his text perhaps pays more attention to the duties of a secular lord than the mirror of Paulinus.¹¹⁰ Reading these sections in the context of the entire book’s structure, however, suggests more that Alcuin was simply interested in outlining a standard hierarchy of qualities that descend from the love of God. Caritas is his integrating precept, and in the secular world, caritas manifests in emotional connection with others, both superiors and inferiors, and the performance of caring, loving deeds.

An Ideology of Secular Ascetic Sacrifice: “We Can Be Martyrs Without Sword and Flames If We Observe Patience with Our Neighbors Honestly in Our Soul”

The virtus that was to be of particular use to Wido in performing love of God and neighbor was misericordia, or mercy.¹¹¹ Carolingian writers did not make the same semantic distinctions as the Stoics between clementia and misericordia.¹¹² However, Alcuin certainly knew Augustine’s discussions in De civitate dei and very likely read Seneca’s De clementia as well.¹¹³ Alcuin mirrors Augustine’s discussion of “an eye for an eye” in that he presents mercy as the first step on a path that leads to an inner disposition of truly unmitigated love and emotional connection with the other.¹¹⁴

Just as Seneca had written about clementia, Alcuin had no illusions that in the secular world, mercy must work in tandem with penalty. If there is only mercy, his text explains, it gives subjects license to sin, but if there is always only discipline, the soul is turned toward delinquency out of despair.¹¹⁵ “Everyone who judges properly holds the scales in hand,” he writes in a later passage on the role of the secular judge; “in another sense, he holds justice and mercy, so that for justice he returns sentence for sins and for mercy he tempers the penalty for the sinner.”¹¹⁶ Misericordia, therefore, helps the Christian lord achieve justice—balance and fairness—in his governing duties. This is of vital importance, Alcuin argues, because “the people are battered almost more severely by wicked judges than they are by the cruelest enemies. No robber among strangers is as greedy as an unfair judge among his own. Unfair judges are worse than enemies. Enemies can often be escaped by flight; judges cannot be avoided because of their power.”¹¹⁷

Still, the higher purpose of misericordia for Alcuin is that it helps the judge to receive mercy from God in final judgment. “No sinner can hope for mercy from God,” Alcuin writes, “who does not himself exercise mercy toward the sinners among him.”¹¹⁸ Alcuin moves Wido quickly from a discussion of public caritas in the form of balanced mercy and justice to a discussion of private, interpersonal connections of affect through the virtutes of patience and tolerance. A judge who does not balance mercy and discipline will not merit the mercy of God, “but,” Alcuin continues, “a man ought to begin this mercy with himself.”¹¹⁹ Flipping Stoic clementia on its head, mercy becomes not about indulging criminality or reducing penalty for others. It involves the regulation of the self, making right decisions in the first place and avoiding the need for penance or restitution altogether. “How can he who is cruel to himself be merciful to others?” Alcuin argues.¹²⁰ Through rhetorical repetition of the word “himself” (“seipso … seipso … seipso”), he narrows the focus of his lesson from judicial acts of mercy to the person of the individual Christian lord: “He who prepares for himself perpetual flames with his sins is cruel to himself. He who begins with himself, and diligently guards himself lest he be punished along with the devil, is truly merciful. And thus he may offer to others what he observes to be good for himself.”¹²¹ Wido exercises mercy upon himself by refusing to sin and to invite damnation. And this is precisely what gives him his authority, because it proves that he understands the good well enough to bestow it upon others.

As Alcuin’s focus continues to narrow, the sections that follow his discussion of misericordia begin to address more personal issues as well. Alcuin explains that the merciful act of pardon (indulgentia) is important not just in the public forum but also in personal relationships: “He who knows how to pardon sins with clementia receives the clementia of divine pietas in return. For it is granted to us so that we may grant it to those who harm us with whatever malice.”¹²² Pardon, in turn, leads to patience (patientia) in the face of personal injury. This, according to Alcuin, is the virtus that completes mercy for it ends injury. He is careful to explain that patience is not the art of lying in wait for the next opportunity for revenge. True patience involves pardoning from the heart, with no intention of later retaliation or vengeance. True patience, the passage suggests, will provide Wido with the facility to pardon others their transgressions against him. Yet patience also leads to something even greater. It is better to deflect injury with silence than with a response, Alcuin writes. What is best, in other words, is to make no judgment at all and to endure without retaliation or penalty. “We can be martyrs without sword and flames,” Alcuin’s text proclaims triumphantly, “if we observe patience with our neighbors honestly in our soul. It is more praiseworthy to deflect injury by being silent than to overcome it by responding. He who patiently tolerates evil will deserve the everlasting crown in the future.”¹²³

It has been suggested that Alcuin’s “martyrs without sword or flame” is nothing more than cynically grandiose and hyperbolic.¹²⁴ I am not persuaded by this reading. Alcuin would have understood completely the implications of his words. The gravity of his diction conveys not grandiosity, not naivety, not guilelessness or concession to “secular” laxity but rather the force of Alcuin’s ideological claim. Caritas links to asceticism in a series of logical steps that move from peacemaking to mercy to pardon to patience and, finally, to complete acceptance and nonretaliation. Followed to its end, caritas offers the worldly man the same prestige and divine authority as the martyrs of old.

An Ideology of Merit: “Each Will Be Crowned in Perpetual Glory According to the Merit of Good Work”

Because caritas is the source of all Christian power and authority, Alcuin argues that laymen and clergy are both called equally to the same dedication to God’s service and to the protection of his chosen people. Salvation is the common goal of all humanity, and thus it is the duty of society’s leaders to guide those over whom they rule toward that goal. “Let not the nature of your lay habit or of your secular association frighten you,” he tells the count, “as though in this garb you will not be able to enter the gateway of celestial life. For just as the blessedness of the kingdom of God is preached to all equally, so is the entrance to the kingdom of God open to all sexes, ages, and persons equally according to the worthiness of their merits. For there, there is not the distinction which there is in the secular world between layman and cleric, rich man and poor man, young man and old, slave and master. Rather, each will be crowned in perpetual glory according to the merit of their good work.”¹²⁵ Alcuin’s inflection is slightly different from the passages of Liber exhortationis in which Paulinus makes similar claims for shared duty. Rather than rhetorically suggesting that there are certain laymen who believe that they are not called to the same service as their priestly brethren, Alcuin focuses more strongly on the relationship between human souls and the divine. In this, Alcuin echoes more closely Paulinus’s argument that persona is meaningless in the eyes of God.¹²⁶

Heaven is a meritocracy within Alcuin’s theology. All souls are judged on precisely the same basis: the worthiness of the deeds that they performed in life. As with the corresponding passages about human equality in Liber exhortationis, our interpretation should not be that Alcuin is only reassuring an anxious Wido that he, too, has access to heaven. Far more than this, Alcuin is making a call for equality and shared service—“all sexes, ages, and persons,” “layman or cleric, rich man or poor.” Such worldly distinctions matter not at all in the economy of salvation. God only sees good work and all souls are called to that work.

An Ideology of Manliness: “Virtus Is Clothing for the Soul”

Of particular interest in Alcuin’s statement of equality and shared service is his inclusion of male and female gender as part of his list of worldly distinctions that have no bearing upon God’s ultimate judgment of the soul and the merit of good works. In part, this seems to support modern arguments that the Carolingians judged both men and women according to a single scale of Galenic gender, recognizing difference between male and female bodies but defining the latter as a derivative subcategory of the former.¹²⁷ We can interpret Alcuin’s use of terms here in this context, perhaps, yet I think that his particular inflection gestures toward a different end. Alcuin’s words suggest, at least rhetorically, not that the female is subordinate to and lesser than the male but rather that in his worldview, gender itself was an accidental rather than essential quality of the human. Like Paulinus’s “virtus of the soul,” the virtus that Alcuin teaches is neither innately male nor female; rather, it must be taught, learned, and performed.

Reflecting further on the thought with which De virtutibus et vitiis begins, Alcuin teaches that good works can flow only through proper knowledge of the nature of the world and its effects on the human soul—a knowledge to which all humans potentially have access. Understanding the nature of the world not only allows human beings to guard against its potential harms but also teaches them how to transcend the world and to connect with the heavenly realm. In this way, Alcuin does not simply set forth rules of behavior for Wido to follow blindly. Instead, he teaches that ritual bodily deprivations and renunciations are means to pragmatic ends. Alcuin advises fasting “in alms and prayer” because, through these, “the spiritual man … is conjoined with the angels and connects freely with God.”¹²⁸ Alcuin tells Wido that abstaining from excessive food and drink reveals celestial mysteries to the human soul: “Unclean spirits insert themselves among confidants in the places where they see carousing and drunkenness being exercised.”¹²⁹ In a passage on chastity, Alcuin follows traditional Christian ascetic ideology in which bodily chastity holds the highest distinction: he writes that the chaste modesty of youth, by which he seems to refer not just to young age but also to adolescent childhood, is beautiful, lovable to God, and useful toward every good. He who lives in chastity, says Alcuin, has “an angelic way of life on earth.”¹³⁰ And just as with alms and prayer, Alcuin describes the virtus of chastity as a link between the secular and heavenly worlds: “chastity connects a man to heaven and makes him a fellow-citizen with the angels.”¹³¹ Still, Alcuin has no illusions about Wido’s sexual life. As a married person with a “legitimate wife,” Wido must “legitimately use her at suitable times in order to merit from God the blessing of sons.”¹³² His chastity is simply a means of attuning his will toward heaven.

What God ultimately wants, Alcuin teaches, is consistency—perseverance in what is good throughout the duration of a man’s life. One must carry out good works to the end of one’s days.¹³³ Alcuin’s ultimate definition of virtus, therefore, like that of Paulinus, extends from his definition of the world. Virtus, once again, is not just a list of strict rules to follow but rather a higher knowledge of the basic principles that determine what to avoid and what to nourish. “Virtus,” teaches Alcuin, “is clothing for the soul—nature’s glory, life’s reason, the pietas of morals, divine splendor, human honor, and the reward of eternal blessedness.”¹³⁴ It protects the soul against the harsh elements endured through life. Like Paulinus, Alcuin is very clear that he does not expect laymen to withdraw fully from the world. He simply advises Wido to be aware of the dangers that the world poses to his soul and to act with proper precaution.

Thus, for Alcuin, as for Paulinus, the world is dangerous but never “evil” in and of itself. It is the neutral battleground on which good and evil fight for souls. Caritas is both Wido’s prize and his weapon. If you commit fraud, the text states, “you have lost better riches [than any gold or silver]: faith, justice, and love of God and neighbor.”¹³⁵ “Envy is the enemy of all things good,” it says in another passage; “Where there is envy there can be no caritas. And where there is no caritas, there can be no good whatsoever.”¹³⁶ If a man is proud in performing his good works, “he loses through pride what he gains through caritas.”¹³⁷ In explication of avarice, the text presents a long list of crimes that lead from greedy sensibilities; “these are incompatible,” Alcuin writes, “with misericordia, alms for the poor, and all pietas for the downtrodden. They are conquered through fear of God, and through fraternal caritas.”¹³⁸ “Whatever good a man does,” Wido learns, “let him do it for love of God and for the salvation of his soul and for fraternal caritas.”¹³⁹

Alcuin ended his book with the same style of dramatic and vivid narrative imagery that Paulinus had used to end his own. Instead of a formidable “Demon Accuser,” however, Alcuin’s text depicts psychomachia on an epic scale. The “four most glorious dukes of the Christian religion,” namely the four Stoic virtues of the classical Roman world—prudence, justice, strength, and temperance—wage battle against the “warriors of diabolic evil.”¹⁴⁰ These eight “dukes of evil” and their armies are “the strongest warriors of diabolic fraud against the human race.”¹⁴¹ Formidable as they may be, they are still no match for the “warriors of Christ,” whom God helps to win easily through the holy virtutes: one by one, each evil duke—pride, gluttony, fornication, greed, anger, sloth, sadness, and vainglory—falls to the strength of humility, abstinence, chastity, patience, the pursuit of good work, spiritual joy, and finally, the caritas of God himself.¹⁴²

Ultimately, concludes Alcuin, there can be no better wisdom for the man living in the secular world than the love of God. It leads him to know and to fear God “according to the little measure of the human mind” and to believe in future judgment.¹⁴³ God, Alcuin writes, is eternal, invoking an ancient category of the divine. The nature of the secular world is change, flux, and effervescence. Is it not better, he asks rhetorically, to love an eternal God over the ephemeral material of the world? The man who merits the eternal glory of fellowship with the angels of God is the man who loves and honors God tirelessly, Alcuin explains. This man embraces what is permanent and lets go what is transient.¹⁴⁴

For Alcuin, just as for Paulinus, correct spiritual advice for the lay aristocrat was not a listing of acts to perform, strategies for governance and warfare, or traits to embody in the performance of devotion. The correct advice involved instead a narrative explanation of what human beings actually are, of the relationships that they have to each other, and of the obligations that they collectively share in the service of their God. Most of all, it involved teaching the qualities of mind that a man needed to cultivate in order to perform caritas and earn salvation and God’s favor. As with Eric of Friuli, Wido was taught to endeavor throughout his life against sin. But the lesson came in the form of a macroscopic view, an explanation of the world and its workings designed to give Wido the proper knowledge to make correct choices on his own and thus the authority to lead. Alcuin’s De virtutibus et vitiis may be less philosophically and linguistically complex than Paulinus’s Liber, but just like Paulinus’s work, it narrates a philosophy of mind that enfranchises the combined power of Frankish lay and “professional” religious aristocratic men and makes that harmonious fusion of power seem logical and natural.

Conclusion

Around the year 820, Bishop Jonas of Orléans (d. 843 or 844) wrote another treatise about the ideal lay Christian life in response to the petition of another lay warlord, this time the lord of the southwestern imperial frontier, Count Matfrid of Orléans (d. 836).¹⁴⁵ Historians have traditionally regarded Jonas’s De institutione laicali, as it was called, as a third Carolingian “mirror” text written specifically for the lay, nonroyal aristocracy. Jonas was familiar with the works of both Paulinus and Alcuin on the subject. And although his work is significantly longer and more exegetically detailed than either of the earlier mirrors, Jonas most certainly tailored his De institutione laicali to resemble the works of his predecessors in form and in style.¹⁴⁶ Jonas asserts the same doctrine that allowed secular Christians access to the privileged authority of the ascetic male through the merits of their deeds.¹⁴⁷ Jonas articulates the same ideology of aristocratic power and shared aristocratic obligation in God’s service: “The law of Christ,” he says, “is attributed by the Lord not specially to clerics, but is to be observed generally by all the faithful.”¹⁴⁸

Key differences, however, between Jonas’s text and the earlier mirrors signal that Jonas’s worldview was not the same as those of either Paulinus or Alcuin. Jonas still argues for the centrality of caritas as the component of masculinity that connects a Carolingian lord to the authority of God, but Jonas does so with even greater fervor. He defines the ideal more strongly as not just love of God and neighbor but love of God more than the self and love of neighbor just as much as the self. Jonas also emphasizes in explicit, rather than simply implied, language that caritas involves love for one’s enemy—a key distinction, he explains, between New Testament and Old Testament law.¹⁴⁹

Historians have frequently noted the most obvious difference of De institutione laicali—namely, that it pays far more attention than the earlier mirrors to the categories and attributes that render the lay way of life distinct, particularly marriage.¹⁵⁰ Jonas also draws much clearer lines between ascetics and secular Christians. Like the earlier mirror authors, Jonas was careful to articulate that God decreed his law for all Christians, not just clergy. Yet in his text, he adds a clarification: “Although in the Gospel there are certain special precepts which are only appropriate for despisers of the world and emulators of the apostles; the rest are decreed indiscriminately without pretext to all the faithful, each of course according to the order by which one vows to serve God.”¹⁵¹ Ascetics—contemptores mundi et apostolorum sectatores—follow separate rules of living that do not apply to secular Christian laymen and priests.

None of these distinctions between Christian male types was new doctrine, nor are they even completely absent in the earlier mirrors. What is most significant is that neither Paulinus nor Alcuin felt it necessary to make such distinctions so explicitly clear. Jonas advances the same ideological arguments that Paulinus and Alcuin did, but his inflection has shifted. Where Paulinus and Alcuin intoned their exhortationes with an unimpeachable enthusiasm and optimism, one detects in Jonas’s text the unmistakable hints of pessimism.

Jonas urges Matfrid never to emulate those laypeople who falsely believe that the precepts of God pertain only to clerics and not to them. Again, Paulinus and Alcuin both conveyed the same message. Instead of framing the issue as a matter of “confusion” about whether there are separate precepts for laity and clergy, however, as Paulinus and Alcuin did, Jonas frames the issue as a problem of negligence. There are many laymen who manage to understand their Christian duties and to perform them as diligently as they are able, says Jonas, rhetorically explaining that this is not simple confusion or miseducation. The problem is that some know their calling and choose not to live by it; others falsely believe that they can glorify themselves with the name of Christ and be saved by this simple profession of faith alone.¹⁵² Jonas’s wording changes the orientation of the message from pastoral teaching to pastoral reprimand.

Jonas also speaks in De institutione laicali of clergy and laity who participate in mutual negligence, something that the earlier mirrors do not address. There are many laymen, he explains, who revere members of the priesthood based solely on their power and wealth, not their ministries. These laymen show disrespect to poorer members of the clergy and to priests who have renounced their worldly riches—not inviting them to their table as equals but instead compelling them into service, making them administrators and overseers of their properties as if they were laypersons. They only want to be seen to have their own priests in name, Jonas rails, not to have proper intercessors among them. This is not only reprehensible and dishonest but also dangerous, he warns—a serious problem of aristocratic negligence for which both laymen and clergy must be held accountable.¹⁵³

It is possible that the change in tone of Jonas’s mirror reflects an actual change of imperial circumstance in 820—the emergence of new abuses that Paulinus and Alcuin never saw the need to rebuke. Jonas’s world had indeed changed significantly from the one that Paulinus and Alcuin knew. Charlemagne had died in 814, leaving the entirety of his domain to his son, Louis “the Pious.” Conflict and insurrection, which would plague Louis for the entirety of his reign, had already boiled over in 817.