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Chapter 1

The Authority of the Ascetic Male

In contemplation he transcends heaven, and yet in his concern he does not forsake the carnal bed, because he is joined simultaneously to the highest and the lowest by the bond of caritas. By the strength of spirit within him he is vigorously snatched into the heights above, and by his pietas for others he is calmly rendered weak.

—Gregory the Great, Regulae pastoralis liber 2.5.19–27

In a popular tale from the late fourth or early fifth century CE, St. Martin of Tours (d. 397) happens upon a humble beggar alongside the road on a freezing winter’s day in the north of Europe. The weather is so severe that people have been dying in the streets. The poor beggar, barely dressed, entreats passersby to help him, yet all ignore his pleas for assistance. All save Martin, who immediately rushes to the beggar’s aid. At first, the future saint is at a loss for what to do. Martin is a young man, not yet entered into the professional religious life but rather serving as a soldier in the Roman frontier army, a common career path for a male of his birth and status within the Gallo-Roman patrician elite. He himself is clad only in a cloak and has very little else to give because, we learn, he had already offered the rest of his clothing earlier that day to others in need. Ever resourceful, Martin draws his sword, reaches around for his cloak, cuts it in two, and gives half to the poor man so that he can be warm. Witnesses have mixed reactions. Some laugh at Martin because he now looks foolish, standing in the cold, wrapped only in a ruined half-cloak among proper society. Others, however, feel shame. They chastise themselves because they had more to give than Martin and could have clothed the poor man without reducing themselves to nakedness; it had simply not occurred to them to do so. Later that night, as Martin sleeps in his bed, a vision appears to him in a dream. It is Christ, wearing the tattered half-cloak that Martin had given to the poor man earlier that day. Christ praises Martin and declares to a chorus of angels that in clothing the beggar, Martin has in fact clothed him. Quietly acknowledging the honor that Christ has granted him but not glorying in it, Martin humbly seeks out baptism and continues on to a remarkable career as a holy man and miracle worker.¹

The trope of the deity hiding in the disguise of the poor was not a Christian invention, nor was the notion that random acts of care could win divine favor. What makes this story distinctly Christian and thus a useful opening exemplum for the discussion that follows is its specific framing of such behavior as a denial of worldly norms and a special marker of ascetic masculinity. The story comes from the Vita Sancti Martini, written by Sulpicius Severus (d. c. 425), and in the context of the vita as a whole, it is only the most dramatic of an entire litany of early life reversals and extreme behaviors that St. Martin performs in defiance of Roman social tradition. We learn that throughout his adolescence, Martin had persistently sought to turn away from the “natural” privileges of a wealthy Roman male and toward more spiritual pursuits. When Martin was ten years old, he had begged his parents, wealthy members of the aristocracy, to allow him to become a catechumen. They refused. At age twelve, the precocious youth decided that he would like to take the necessary vows to become a hermit—a denial of his birthrights. He was deemed too young. And when Martin finally did reach adulthood and entered the military service that was expected of him, he defied norms there, too. He took with him only one slave rather than an entourage, and it was Martin himself who did most of the serving. Martin polished his slave’s boots and served the meals that they ate together, not separately.² During his three years of soldier’s service, Martin chose to remain “free from the vices in which men of this kind usually become entangled”—namely, violent and rough behavior.³

The vita continues to explain, however, that Martin’s actions require no special praise because his fellows already considered him to be not a soldier but a monk. The text’s term for Martin’s general demeanor is frugalitas—a word that in contemporary parlance conveyed not thrift (frugality) so much as self-denial: sobriety, simplicity, temperance, restraint. As a monk, Martin demonstrates his frugalitas through qualities such as benignitas (“benignity” or “kindness”), mira caritas (“wondrous love”), patientia (“patience”), and humilitas ultra humanum modum (“humility beyond the human norm”).⁴ He regularly performs bona opera (“good deeds”) in the service of others: aiding the suffering, working for the poor, feeding the needy, clothing the naked, and accepting only the military pay that he requires for his daily sustenance and nothing more.⁵ Last, he inspires the adoration of his fellow soldiers, with whom he bonded readily and easily, the text says, and who revered him in return miro adfectu (“with wondrous emotion”).⁶ The vita thus intimates that Martin is the rarest and strangest of birds among the rest of humanity, be they his military brothers or the passersby who relate to the beggar with either ridicule or oblivion. As a monk, however, Martin’s behavior is quite normal. As a monk, he rejects the normative rhythms of worldly society. As a monk, he manifests this rejection through deeds enacted on behalf of and in emotional response to the perceived need and welfare of others.

This chapter traces in broad strokes the history of the late antique associations between fellow-feeling and Christian ascetic manhood that the story of St. Martin and the Beggar depicts. Early Christian ideologies of ascetic male authority have received extensive study in recent decades, fomented in great part by Peter Brown’s magisterial history of Christian sexuality and sexual renunciation, The Body and Society (1988).⁷ The interplay between these ideologies and discourses of affect, however, has not. As the chapter will show, cultural connections between ascetic masculinity and other-oriented emotion and care developed neither organically nor self-evidently but rather through complex and hard-fought fifth- and sixth-century philosophical discussions about the possibilities of New Testament morality in a world of Christian majority. The discourse of these debates would breathe new connotative meaning into ancient terms—pietas, clementia, and misericordia—and it would link these terms to a relatively new and distinctly Christian concept: caritas. These terms and the interrelations of meaning that they acquired during these centuries would become essential components of Carolingian ideologies of masculine authority in the centuries that followed.

The chapter begins with the highly influential exegesis of Augustine of Hippo (d. 430), who wrote passionately about the radicalism of early Christian ethics and the ways in which the New Testament founded Christian identity upon a bedrock of boundless other-oriented emotional care. The chapter then shows how, after the slow conversion of the Roman Empire during the fourth century CE, this extreme form of affective connection became increasingly associated with monks and the monastic cloister. Augustine would again be an authoritative voice, arguing that worldly Christianity had to adopt a more metaphoric understanding of New Testament ethics in order for society to thrive. A final section explores the writing of another towering pre-Carolingian intellect, Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604). Gregory sought to reconnect monastic and worldly Christianity through the articulation of a universal ideology of Christian power. For Gregory, the ascetic male remained the paragon of Christian manhood and authority. Yet bishops and priests, whose duty it was to live and to work within the secular world—the saeculum—could gain vital access to this authority through the embodiment of deep emotional connection and care for the souls over whom they governed. Fellow-feeling became the bridge by which the secular Christian elite would ideologically traverse an ever-widening gap between the countercultural ideals of the first Christian sects and the new hegemonic exigencies of Christianity’s expansion throughout Europe.

Caritas, Pietas, Clementia, Misericordia: Stoic Philosophy and Early Christian Moral Discourse

The earliest Christians of the ancient Eastern Mediterranean separated themselves from the dominant Roman and Roman-Judean cultures of the region by advancing fierce, public critique of contemporary moral assumptions. Since Jewish law advocated loving one’s neighbor, early Christians asked why one’s neighbor should be the fixed limit. Why not love a stranger? Why not even love an enemy? Since Greco-Roman culture advocated a balance between compassion and firmness in the exercise of justice, Christians asked why justice should be the limit. Why not be compassionate and indulgent even toward those who deserved to be punished? Why not, instead of seeking justice against criminals for their wrongdoing, turn the other cheek and accept without retaliation the injuries inflicted by others? New Testament ethics identified the “natural” limits of traditional moral thinking and proposed that such limits might not be natural at all.⁸

“You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,’ ” preaches Jesus of Nazareth in his Sermon on the Mount; “But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.”⁹ This famous passage from the Gospel of Matthew is nothing less than a direct salvo against the most fundamental moral presumptions of the ancient world. Jesus of Nazareth quotes the Old Testament maxim “an eye for an eye” not as a call to vengeance, which is how we commonly misunderstand the phrase in today’s discourse. Rather, he invokes the phrase as a reference to the ancient social ideal of balanced justice.¹⁰ The Sermon preaches that true justice only exists in the heavenly realm and can never be achieved on earth. Worldly society should therefore build itself upon a different principle: agape.

In Christian writing, the Koine Greek word agape (α̉γάπη) signified more than its simple denotation of “love.” It represented a particular kind of lovingness—an unmitigated, boundless form of emotional identification with the other that was designed directly, in its expression, to break free from traditional moral limits and expectations.¹¹ Early Christian writers seem to have chosen the word precisely because of its rarity in ancient usage. And in the Vulgate, St. Jerome (d. 420) translated agape into Latin with a similarly rare term in Western Roman usage: caritas.¹²

Augustine of Hippo, whose exegesis of the Sermon on the Mount would be authoritative for the duration of the European Middle Ages, took great interest in the underlying structures and mechanisms by which New Testament ethics worked. For Augustine, pre-Christian moral philosophy was not wrong; it was simply incomplete. As he explained, the ancient limit to violence that “an eye for an eye” represented was “a great step” (magnus gradus), for it kept revenge from exceeding injury. This was only the beginning of peace, however. “Perfect peace,” he continued, “is to have no desire at all for such revenge.”¹³

He described the dynamic between victim and attacker as a series of progressive increments that ultimately link the two together. The person who inflicts injury upon another without cause occupies the lowest step. On the next step is the person who refrains from inflicting unprovoked injury but who, when provoked, returns injury greater than what was inflicted. This is what “eye for an eye” is meant to correct, says Augustine. And it is an enlightened advance, he argues, because it requires restraint not to retaliate beyond due measure. The next two steps logically involve returning less than the injury inflicted and, finally, exacting no retribution at all.¹⁴ This act of exercising no retribution at all approaches what Jesus of Nazareth teaches, Augustine wrote, but even it does not suffice:

For it still appears a small matter to the Lord if you do not pay back the evil that you have received with no evil in return, unless you are prepared to receive more. For this reason he does not say, “But I say to you not to repay evil for evil,” even though this is a great command. Instead he says, “Do not resist evil in such a way that you not only do not repay the injury done to you but even so that you do not resist for fear that something else may be inflicted on you.” This is what he goes on to explain: But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, offer him the other as well. He does not say, “If anyone strikes you, do not strike back,” but, “Present yourself again to the one who strikes you.”¹⁵

The call here, Augustine explains, is for a “perfected” morality in the same sense of the Latin that Dhuoda invoked for her son: a morality carried out to its fullest possible extreme, moving beyond the limits of “common” ethics toward ultimate completion.¹⁶ Humans were not only supposed to exact less vengeance or punishment than equal justice demanded; they were also not to exact any vengeance or punishment at all. Instead, they were to give further. If struck on the cheek by an offender, they were not to strike back, as balanced justice would sanction. They were to turn their other cheek toward their attacker and face a potential second attack. If an offender wished to take something by force, the victim was not supposed to take something from the offender in retaliation; the victim was to offer the offender even more in addition.

This state of perfection involved the achievement of deep emotional connection between the self and all others. “You have heard that it was said,” continues the Sermon on the Mount,

“You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax-collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.¹⁷

Many learn how to offer the other cheek to an attacker, Augustine wrote in reference to this passage, but few understand how to exhibit lovingness toward the one who wrongs them. For Augustine, the solution involved collapsing the boundaries between self and other entirely, allowing all human beings to recognize themselves as fellow creatures, regardless of station, regardless of friendship or enmity. To do so, one had to recognize, like a physician, an enemy’s ill will as a symptom of the soul’s sickness, finding connection through this recognition as one would with a rebellious child or stricken friend.¹⁸ “For indeed a human being, who is commanded by the lord of all even to love his enemies, ought to love another as much as he loves himself,” Augustine explained.¹⁹

In his De civitate Dei (“On the City of God”), a book so important to the Carolingian world that Einhard could claim it as Charlemagne’s favorite, Augustine connected caritas to two other ancient terms.²⁰ The first was pietas.²¹ The Latin word pietas and the parallel Greek word eusebeia (εủσέβεια), Augustine wrote, are commonly understood to mean worship of God or duty toward one’s parents. In the everyday vernacular, however, he continued, pietas refers to works of misericordia.²² These notions of interconnectedness between caritas, pietas, and misericordia would govern discourses of other-oriented emotion and fellow-feeling for the rest of the Middle Ages.

Augustine’s emphasis on the association between caritas, pietas, and misericordia in De civitate Dei was composed in direct reference to a debate within Stoic philosophy about the proper balances to which a society should adhere in its regulation of justice. Seneca the Younger (d. 65) had taught that true justice could only be reached through a proper balance of severity and leniency. His term for ideal leniency in the service of justice was clementia, the root of the modern English word “clemency.” For Seneca, clementia entailed “restraint of the mind when it is able to take revenge, or the leniency of the more powerful party towards the weaker in the matter of settling penalties,” a definition readily quoted throughout the Middle Ages.²³ Articulating a common Stoic position, he believed that the essential nature of all humans was to be emotionally peaceful and nonviolent. Humans in the right state of mind are the gentlest creatures in existence, he wrote in his treatise, De ira (“On Anger”), embodying the opposite of anger:

What is more inclined to love others than a human? What is more hostile than anger? The human is born to give and receive assistance—anger, to destroy. The one wants to form associations, the other, to secede; the one wants to be of benefit, the other, to do harm; the one wants to aid even strangers, the other, to assault even the nearest and dearest. Human beings are prepared even to sacrifice themselves for the sake of others’ advantage; anger is prepared to plunge into danger, provided it drags the other down. Does anyone, then, show greater ignorance of the nature of things than the person who ascribes this bestial, destructive vice to nature’s best and most polished creation?²⁴

Only negative emotions had the power to lead humans astray from their essential nature and to cause them to commit harm against others. Control of such emotions offered the path to true wisdom; too much anger or even too much joy could disrupt the soul and limit its capacity to do good.²⁵ Clementia was therefore the quality that humans were to cultivate most fervently, for it created peace and calm out of potential strife and conflict.²⁶ It was the primary attribute that separated a low human spirit from an exalted one.²⁷

Importantly, however, while the Stoics strongly encouraged the affects that tempered overly harsh justice, they still recognized firm limits for the application of those affects in human affairs. Compassion and indulgence, although vitally important to society, remained subordinate to the ideal of balance. One had to acknowledge, in other words, the existence of faults that blatantly undermined social cohesion and that therefore deserved proper punishment. Those who committed such faults were the enemies of society and the common good. Compassion and indulgence did not apply to them and in fact posed danger when exercised in relation to them. This was an ancient sensibility, inherited from Platonic and Aristotelian traditions that had both warned repeatedly against the abuses of compassion and indulgence, as well as the potential problems that such abuses posed to social well-being.²⁸ Infractions of the law constituted an attack against the very forces that bound society together; too much compassion and indulgence could lead to complete social collapse. Thus, such ideals applied most to human interactions within limited boundaries—mainly the family or the immediate community. One had to be compassionate and indulgent with friends but severe with potential enemies. In the power politics between city-states, for example, indulgence held little place at all.²⁹

And so even in advocating clementia, Stoic philosophy still acknowledged the existence of enemies who were real threats to communal peace and the common good and argued that the compassionate indulgence of clementia could not and did not apply to them. Again, Seneca serves as an authoritative voice. “It is not proper to grant pardon indiscriminately,” he wrote; “the reason is that when the distinction between the bad and the good is removed, the result is confusion and an outbreak of bad behavior.”³⁰ To ward against this danger, Seneca outlined a semantic distinction between clementia and a second related term, misericordia, which he defined as compassion for and indulgence of human suffering without regard to its causes. Misericordia in Seneca’s usage was a negative quality, associated with “elderly women and silly females who are so affected by the tears of the nastiest criminals that they would break open the prison if they could. Misericordia focuses on the situation, not its cause, whereas clementia sides with reason.”³¹ Unchecked emotional connection with hardened criminals was not clementia, for it worked against the common good. Nor was it manly, as his misogynistic gendering of the behavior makes clear to his reader. Clementia only made sense when it was controlled, placed within limits, and combined with the firm maintenance of order. Public welfare depended on this delicate balance of compassion and firmness. When it descended (in Seneca’s view) into misericordia, it threatened the very fabric that held society together.

It was precisely this definition of misericordia to which Augustine referred when discussing the new Christian vernacular usage of pietas as a term for works of misericordia. Augustine wrote in De civitate Dei that he was deeply uncomfortable with the Stoic conception of misericordia as a vice, preferring instead to follow Cicero, who lauded Caesar’s misericordia as a virtue.³² Like the Stoics, Augustine was careful to note the necessity of enacting misericordia according to reason and without violating social well-being, signaling his awareness of the potential danger that misericordia could pose.³³ Yet he had considerable trouble bringing himself to think of it as a negative quality. “What is misericordia,” he queried rhetorically, “but a kind of fellow feeling in our hearts for the misery of another which compels us to help him if we can?”³⁴ For “fellow-feeling,” he uses the Latin term compassio—literally the “fellow suffering.” The Sermon on the Mount’s call for love of one’s enemy, coupled with the Gospels’ emphasis on simple penitence as the only requirement for God’s ultimate absolution of sins, made difficult the notion that a human society could identify specific crimes that were entirely unworthy of forgiveness.

Indeed, unlimited emotional interconnection among humans could never be a sin for Augustine because it was part of the very nature of God. “From this manner of speaking,” he wrote, in further discussion of misericordia and the common meaning of pietas, “it has also come about that God himself is called pius. The Greeks, however, never call him eusebes in their own discourse, although they also commonly use eusebeia to mean misericordia.”³⁵ Pietas in the Christian idiom was thus similar to the more ancient notion of philanthropia in that it referred to an innate disposition, but where philanthropia most often referred generally to a disposition of calm and nonviolence, Christian pietas referred to a disposition of caritas—the embodiment, that is, of unlimited love and fellow-feeling toward all others, friend and enemy alike.³⁶ No longer hemmed in by practical sensibilities or classical ideals of the public interest, Christian ethical philosophy in the Augustinian tradition was the completion and perfection of what he considered to be the flawed moral and social paradigms that had dominated the ancient world.

“Not in the Body but in the Heart”

In the earliest centuries of Christianity, the public performance of this radical form of emotional interconnection became a key marker of elite Christian discipleship.³⁷ Incredulous Romans described Christians acting out New Testament moral extremity in very literal ways in defiance and protest of imperial authority.³⁸ These Christians were, of course, the holy martyrs—witnesses to God’s love who willingly suffered, even sought out persecution through their strict adherence to pacifism, nonviolence, and nonresistance toward their oppressors and executioners. They were quite literal incarnations of caritas to the absolute letter of the Gospel. As the Western Roman imperial elite slowly converted to Christianity over the course of the fourth century CE, however, Christianity had to adapt to its new majority status. Martyrdom could no longer signify discipleship in the same manner that it once did. This sea change in circumstance rendered the performance of unlimited love to the letter of the Gospel far more theologically complex.³⁹

Sulpicius Severus wrote his story of St. Martin and the Beggar during precisely this transitional moment in the history of Christian social thought. At the turn of the fifth century CE, he and a remarkable concentration of talented contemporaries—not just Augustine and Jerome but also Ausonius of Bordeaux (d. c. 395), Ambrose of Milan (d. 397), and Paulinus of Nola (d. 431), among others—contemplated what Christian society and practice should become. Christianity was now the “official” spiritual affiliation of the Empire, and as the fifth century continued, political, social, and economic distress made redefinition of its worldly identity imperative. Wealth poured into churches like never before, and the Christian elite needed to reconcile their new political and social power with the countercultural energy of early Christian moral philosophy.⁴⁰

The story of St. Martin and the Beggar depicts one of the most prominent developments: the association of caritas with new Christian figures who lived beyond the borders of society and chose to escape the normative structures of worldly life. These new types of Christians actively defined themselves in separation from the general population and elected to live their lives within artificial societies that were designed to resemble more closely the Kingdom of Heaven in their laws and structures. These were the hermitages and cells of the first cenobitics. Ascetics withdrew from society not only because they wished to live beyond the structures that governed it but also because they believed that these structures themselves created sin. Monastic spaces became testing grounds for new social rules, spaces constructed specifically to allow “true” and literal New Testament ethics to be performed freely.⁴¹

The rule that the Carolingians would adopt and propose as the standard for all monastic life was the Rule of St. Benedict (d. 547), compiled originally for his abbey at Monte Cassino.⁴² According to this rule, a true monk is humble in all action. He “turns the other cheek” and patiently endures all injuries without retaliation.⁴³ Benedict’s Rule orders monks to follow the commandments of the Lord: to refrain from murder, adultery, and theft.⁴⁴ A brother ought to live by the Golden Rule.⁴⁵ Furthermore, he ought not indulge his anger or seek revenge; he ought not return evil for evil and instead love his enemies.⁴⁶ He ought to hate no one nor be contentious; he ought to pray for his enemies, treat them with misericordia, and make peace with them without delay.⁴⁷

This rule makes clear that true Christianity is rooted in caritas but, importantly, that this Christianity can only exist within the “workshop” of the monastery.⁴⁸ Caritas guides the abbot in the fair and just discipline of his fellow monks.⁴⁹ It affords him the capacity to care for wayward brothers with compassion and without despair.⁵⁰ Caritas is the final destination of the monk’s twelve steps of humility.⁵¹ Caritas is the product of the brothers’ mutual service within the community.⁵² It is the foundation of a brother’s obedience.⁵³ And it is the binding affect that all brothers are to show toward each other, toward their abbot, and even toward visitors.⁵⁴

The notion that true Christian discipleship might require escape from the world became an issue of fervent debate. For Christians who wished to command the authority of God and yet still serve society itself as its leaders, New Testament moral extremes posed real and significant difficulties. An act of misericordia could indeed turn into an act of harm toward innocent Christians; forgiving a murderer his crimes could place a society of men and women who now self-identified as Christian in danger of discord. And in what were increasingly unstable political times, Christian soldiers had to reconcile their devotion with their duty to fight and to kill; Christian leaders had to reconcile their commitment to misericordia with their duty to protect. Martin’s solution of pacifism could not serve as a practical solution for all.⁵⁵

Augustine is yet again a key theological source. In his letter against Faustus the Manichean, which likely dates from around the year 410 CE, Augustine refutes a heterodoxy with which he himself had identified as a young man.⁵⁶ It is a document best known to the modern world for its articulation of Christian “just war” theory, which sanctioned certain kinds of violence in the service of God and the protection of Christian society.⁵⁷ The letter is important for the purposes of this discussion, however, because Augustine founded his arguments for just war upon a principle of interiorized and thus metaphoric New Testament morality. This would endure as a central component of Christian secular male ideology for the remainder of the Middle Ages.

We only know Faustus’s arguments, which had likely been written some decades earlier, from their rearticulation by Augustine in the letter itself. Part of Faustus’s challenge seems clearly to have involved exposing the inconsistencies between the moral precepts of God as described in the Old Testament and the ethical demands of Jesus in the New Testament. Why, Faustus had asked, does the Old Testament praise the patriarchs as righteous men when they marry multiple wives, a clear ingression against the New Testament? Why do Moses and the Israelites wage war and kill when the New Testament calls for unmitigated love of neighbor, stranger, and even enemy? How can a Christian Rome wage war against its enemies and protect its citizens when the New Testament advocates nonviolence and nonresistance?

Augustine’s response had profound implications for the later Christian cultures that drew directly from his teachings. He proposed, revealing the Platonic influences within his theology, that the morality described in the New Testament refers in fact to ideal forms that can only exist completely in the Kingdom of Heaven. Here on earth, form must vary in accordance with need. Sometimes moral righteousness requires a passivity and attitude of nonresistance that closely resembles the letter of the New Testament ideal; at other times, it requires ferocity and force. The reason that these forms can seem opposite and confusing to humans is because the nature of earthly life renders the human mind imperfectly able to discern between the moral “rightness” and “wrongness” of specific actions. Moral action on earth is always subordinate to its required end, according to Augustine, and humans simply cannot always see that end.

Augustine grounded his arguments against Faustus in repeated assertions that God is and can only be a purely benevolent power. Thus, while the Old Testament might describe, for example, God’s jealousy when the Israelites worship the Golden Calf, God’s anger when humans transgress his command, or God’s vengeance when he wreaks havoc upon the enemies of Israel, Augustine claimed that these are not emotionally negative responses. They are evidence of God’s “quiet goodness” (tranquilla bonitas) in desiring to protect souls from corruption and exploitation through the service of false gods. God does not kill in retribution for offenses inflicted upon him, Augustine wrote. God kills so that the world may benefit from fear of him and act rightly because of it. He punishes both sinners and the righteous for the purpose of perfecting both, based upon what he deems necessary for a given soul to achieve the Kingdom of Heaven in the end.⁵⁸

This is, Augustine admits freely in making his argument, difficult at best for humans to comprehend. Humans live, according to Augustine’s philosophy, in a continual state of confusion about morality and moral behavior. God’s reality (true reality) and human comprehension of that reality are fundamentally disconnected. The virtues of great minds, Augustine explains, can resemble quite closely the vices of lesser ones “in appearance, but not in reality” (nonnulla specie, sed nulla aequitatis comparatione). Those who condemn the Old Testament prophets as adulterers, he wrote, or who deem Christ a simpleton when, for example, he looks to a tree for fruit out of season, simply fail to comprehend these actions from the proper perspective. For Augustine, this sort of logic was akin to the criticism of schoolchildren who correct their classmates according to the letter, rather than the spirit, of the teacher’s rules.⁵⁹

Human confusion over the actual form of right moral behavior on earth is a function of sin itself. Yet importantly, sins are not a fixed set of actions deemed “wrong” by God, says Augustine, nor are virtues a fixed set of actions deemed “right.” Sins are rather those acts, words, or even desires that fail to preserve the natural order of things as divinely set forth. In humans, Augustine continues, this is a natural order by which reason controls the soul, which in turn controls the body. Reason, furthermore, is divided into contemplation and action, of which contemplation is the superior element. The object of contemplation, says Augustine, is God himself.⁶⁰ And there is a further complication: on earth, humans are unable to see God. They must rely on their faith for the image of God to appear to them in contemplation; only in the afterlife can humans once again see God as he truly is. The natural order according to Augustine’s argument against Faustus, therefore, was rational action controlled by contemplation of God, which on earth was exercised through faith. And faith, in the end, for Augustine, was a function of love. Humans live righteously when they live, he wrote, “by the genuine faith that works through love” (ex fide non ficta, quae per dilectionem operatur).⁶¹

For Augustine, therefore, a man whose faith in God drove his actions was able to restrain all mortal desires within their natural limit—that is to say, he was able to prioritize higher order before the lower. To sin was to indulge in a lower part of the human order at the expense of the higher—to indulge the body at the expense of the soul, for example, or to indulge the soul at the expense of reason. Augustine was careful not to suggest that humans should completely ignore their bodies, for he was uncomfortable with any notion other than that God had created humans to be living, breathing creatures with flesh and desires.⁶² To indulge the body could never be sinful in and of itself. It was only sinful when this indulgence was directed toward ends beyond the invigoration of the individual or species. Sin occurred only when the desires of the body controlled reason and pushed behavior past the norms of temperance.⁶³

Because Augustine defined sin in terms of preservation of order and not in terms of specific acts, in his philosophy, some actions were sanctioned in some instances while condemned in others: “That eternal law, which commands that the natural order be preserved and forbids that it be disturbed, has located certain deeds in a middle position for human beings so that it deservedly reprehends a boldness in undertaking them and rightly praises an obedience in carrying them out. It makes a great difference in the natural order who does what and under whose authority one acts.”⁶⁴ That the value of an act depended solely on the actor and the situation and not the act itself was as remarkable to say in the fifth century as it is today because of what it suggests and the potential freedom that it allows in the interpretation of moral rules. For Augustine, New Testament commands could not and should not be understood literally—not just because of the nature of language and interpretation but also because of the very “science” of moral activity on earth. Sins and virtues could never be reduced to a list of good and bad acts.

Augustine developed his point in his argument against Faustus by focusing on the duties of the Roman emperor to conduct war and the apparent clash of such duties with New Testament moral ideals. The evil in war, Augustine wrote, is not in the killing and the use of arms but rather in the love of violence and the hatred that sometimes accompanies it. Humans confuse killing in and of itself with evil when, in fact, it is only the ends of that killing that determine whether the action is right or wrong. Necessities of the general welfare sometimes require behavior that seems contradictory to the ideal of caritas, he explained, but only when this ideal is understood literally and not metaphorically. While it was always necessary for Christians to embody the tenets of New Testament morality in spirit, it was not always practical or even morally correct to act upon them in body. “If, however,” he wrote, “they think that God could not have commanded the waging of war because the Lord Jesus Christ later said, ‘I tell you not to resist evil, but if anyone strikes you on your right cheek, offer him your left as well,’ let them understand that this disposition lies not in the body but in the heart.”⁶⁵

Toward a Universal Ideology of Christian Authority

Following this more metaphoric understanding of New Testament morality, late Roman and Merovingian writers debated and developed a far more complicated understanding of the nature of worldly Christian identity than had ever before existed. We see as a result, in contemporary descriptions of the fifth- and sixth-century world, a sense of general uncertainty over the proper moral authority that was to govern human interaction. In his Historiarum libri decem, for example, Gregory of Tours (d. 594) wrote about the holy recluse, Eparchius of Angoulême, who was particularly interested in the needs of the poor and in freeing the imprisoned from incarceration.⁶⁶ In one episode, a secular count presides over the execution of a thief who was considered by the local inhabitants to be guilty of numerous crimes, not just robberies but murders as well. Eparchius sends a messenger to petition the count to remand the sentence of death and to release the thief, “although guilty,” as he clearly states (scilicet culpabilis), into his custody.⁶⁷ A mob gathers in opposition to the holy man, however, and demonstrates for the cause of justice: they shout and threaten the judge with insulting language, arguing that to free the man would be prudent for neither the district nor the judge. The count declares it impossible to free the condemned criminal, who is promptly tortured and brought to the gallows. Gregory writes that the messenger returns and recounts the scene to Eparchius, who then declares that “the Lord will grant us of his own gift what man has refused” (quem homo reddere noluit, Dominus suo munere redonabit).⁶⁸ Eparchius then prays for God’s assistance, and the gallows breaks miraculously. In the ensuing confusion, the holy man is able to gather the thief into his care.

It is an account assumed to express conflict between the Gallo-Roman clergy and new Frankish structures of social power.⁶⁹ Certainly it does. The source of conflict, however, is not power over coercive force; it is power over the correct arbitration of benevolent force. That is, in Gregory’s story, what is most at issue is the proper form that a good deed should take in the world. Ostensibly, both Eparchius and the count are trying to perform the “right” deed for love of the community. But, demonstrated by God’s miraculous intervention, only one of these men acts correctly in God’s eyes. A hardened, repeat offender stands accused of crimes that he did in fact commit. The holy man, not the count, takes the unpopular political position. Protection of the community and justice for the criminal’s victims seem to demand that the criminal be punished for his unjust actions—and because of the grievous nature of his crimes, that punishment is death. The mob reminds us that clementia does not apply in this case, for it would not serve the common welfare. It is seemingly the count’s duty to protect the integrity of the social order and to secure justice for his people. He has the support not only of his subjects but also of the law. However, this support is precisely what Eparchius seeks to challenge. He is not championing a man unjustly accused; he is championing a higher understanding of God’s love. In this case, Eparchius simply has clearer knowledge—he knows better than the rest that the correct application of pietas in this case is to set the criminal free and not to condemn him to torture and death. Eparchius’s superior knowledge and the reality of the mob’s (and our) inability to discern right morality, which he alone can see, are confirmed only by the miraculous breaking of the gallows and the freeing of the prisoner.

It was another Gregory, Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604), who would ultimately articulate these principles of moral discernment and define them as the foundation of elite secular Christianity. For this Gregory, the confusion about God’s love on earth seems to have been something of a personal obsession. His masterpiece, Moralia in Job, is an extended meditation on the human incapacity to comprehend the wisdom of God. Job is a good man, yet God afflicts him with misfortune after horrible misfortune before ultimately rewarding him with happiness, riches, and extended life. Building upon Augustinian thought, Gregory’s Moralia explains in minute detail how and why humans have such terrible difficulty understanding that both acts of God—the misfortune and the reward—are equal manifestations of his benevolent love.⁷⁰ Gregory would codify the cultivation of superior knowledge as the primary function and role of the elite Christian male.

Among Gregory’s many contributions to Western thought was the clear relationship that he described between God’s capacity to know caritas in all of its forms and the power that the Christian secular elite held within society as God’s representatives on earth. Gregory’s most pragmatic discussion of these matters came in the form of the small but highly influential treatise that he wrote on the subject of good earthly Christian leadership, the Regulae pastoralis liber.⁷¹ Gregory theorized in this book what kind of man could and should be a leader of Christian society.⁷² Following Christian ascetic ideology, he fully recognized the corrosive effect of the secular world on the soul, addressing the need to ward off this corrosion at all costs. But he was also deeply unsatisfied with the habit of the most devout Christians to flee to the cloister in fear. The world needed, he argued, its holiest of men to live among the people as moral guides—arbiters who could determine right moral action under God and aid souls in the achievement of salvation.

This ability to arbitrate right moral behavior, Gregory suggested, could be nurtured and developed through the proper positioning of body and mind—through, in effect, a toeing of the thin line that separated earthly and heavenly space. As the Eparchius story shows, there was still a tendency within contemporary Christian intellectual culture to associate true love of God with the special elite outsiders of the Christian community who withdrew from society. Gregory effectively merged this association with Augustinian notions of metaphoric New Testament interpretation.

A Christian pastor, says Regulae pastoralis liber, is a “neighbor” (proximus) to all in sympathy but exalted above all in contemplation. Through the “bowels” (viscera) of pietas, he transfers the sickness of others onto himself, and through “lofty speculation” (speculationis altitudinem), he aspires to see the invisible. He must neither despise the weakness of his neighbors nor forget his aspiration for higher pursuits. Like Paul in the New Testament, says Gregory, he is borne high through his contemplation of heaven, which is not visible to human eyes.⁷³ “Behold,” he writes,

he is rooted in heavenly haunts, yet through the bowels of condescension he carefully studies the den of the carnal; and with compassion for that which, having himself been lifted up, he raises toward the spiritual, he turns the eye of his heart toward the haunts of the infirm. In contemplation he transcends heaven, and yet in his concern he does not forsake the carnal bed, because he is joined simultaneously to the highest and the lowest by the bond of caritas. By the strength of spirit within him he is vigorously snatched into the heights above, and by his pietas for others he is calmly rendered weak.⁷⁴

The passage exquisitely encapsulates the ideology of worldly Christian authority that the Carolingians would adopt and transform for their own use. For Gregory, caritas is not simply “love” or “charity”; it is the very connective tissue that joins the human to both the spiritual and the material realms. Pietas is not “piety” or “pity”; it is the happy burden that anchors a human being to the earth and reminds him of his essential frailties. Caritas and pietas become metaphoric tethers in Gregory’s world—bonds that moor the elite Christian within a liminal space between worlds, rendering him simultaneously high and low, betwixt and between, and able to converse with both.

The Christian pastor had to dwell, to use another modern metaphor, on both sides of the fence that separated humanity from the Kingdom of Heaven. He had to occupy both the extreme and the center in order to do his work. Since worldly life could corrupt the soul, he needed to avoid excessive contact with it. To govern souls properly, he had to return periodically to cloistered space in order to cleanse himself of the poisons inescapably acquired through worldly leadership. He had to meditate daily on the precepts of scripture “so that the words of divine admonition might restore in him the power of solicitude and of provident circumspection toward celestial life, which the frequent enjoyment of a human way of life ceaselessly destroys.”⁷⁵ Gregory states that a good pastor must take great care because in hearing the temptations and trials of others, he also opens his own mind to attack by these same temptations. “The same bathwater,” he says, “in which a multitude of people are washed is without doubt polluted itself, for while it takes on the filth of those bathing in it, it loses, as it were, the serenity of its cleanliness.”⁷⁶ But this ought not deter a good pastor, for under God, “who nicely balances all things” (subtiliter cuncta pensante), the pastor is rescued from temptation by his misericordia (again, used in the Augustinian sense) for the temptation of others.⁷⁷

It was a positioning of body and mind that mirrored precisely the higher knowledge that the pastor had to employ as part of his duties in saving souls. Gregory devotes the entire third book of the four that compose the Regulae pastoralis liber to pragmatic guidelines for the exhortation of the flock. As teacher (doctor), the pastor “ought to touch the hearts of his hearers out of one doctrine, but not one and the same exhortation, so that he might edify all in the one virtue of caritas”—that is, he must act with the inward disposition of New Testament love that Augustine discussed, but the form of his action must vary according to need.⁷⁸ “One and the same exhortation is not good for all,” says Gregory; “for often what benefits some impedes others, because the herbs that might nourish one animal will kill another, and the gentle whistling that quiets horses can excite small dogs, and the medicine which cures one disease gives strength to another, and the bread that nourishes the fully-grown will kill infants.”⁷⁹

This third book of the Regulae pastoralis liber works as a self-contained tutorial for helping the pastor understand the correct application of caritas for the benefit of the souls within his care. There is a difference between the love that he should show to the poor and the love that he should show to the rich; there is a difference between the love that he should show toward the joyful and toward the sad, toward subjects and prelates, servants and masters, the wise and the unlearned, the impudent and the bashful, those who are patient and those who are impatient, those who are whole in body and those who are infirm, even between the married and the unmarried.⁸⁰ A pastor must study these differences carefully and learn them by heart so that he may best apply his art to the minds of his listeners. He is, suggests Gregory, a bit like the masterful musician who, through skill and practice, learns to pluck the different strings of the lyre with the proper force and technique and in the proper rhythm and order, so that they might create a harmonious tune.⁸¹

Indeed, the Liber demonstrates quite clearly that a pastor’s capacity as an arbiter of caritas derives not from special innate capacity but from assiduous study. It is his knowledge and higher comprehension of worldly physics, not mystical power, that separates him from his flock. Gregory was suggesting far more than the traditional compromise between the ancient ideals of the vita contemplativa and vita activa.⁸² He was articulating a new ideology of worldly Christian power and authority that linked ascetic principles with the capacity to bond and to connect on an emotional level with other human beings. His guiding metaphors were spatial: the elite Christian male danced a blurry line between worlds. He transcended the life of average folk in the same manner that the life of the shepherd transcends that of the sheep. And yet, he still had to remember his essential sameness with the rest of humanity. He lived in orbit around the world at the thin atmospheric edge of society—bound within its gravity but able to see and sometimes even to touch the heavenly stars above.

Conclusion

Gregory’s ideal of Christian discipleship developed from two key but somewhat paradoxical aspects of caritas: its association with ascetic world denial and its conceptualization as the very source of worldly authority. In trying to determine a compromise between its centripetal and centrifugal forces, the middle ground that Gregory proposed—a state of earthly power combined with partial, interiorized asceticism—would become the standard ideal of worldly Christian masculinity. It was an ideal that Christian writers of the seventh and eighth centuries directed especially toward the episcopal and priestly leaders of Christian spiritual communities. And the Christian professional elite closely guarded their power to arbitrate caritas’s proper form as their primary role and function in society.

Importantly, however, Gregory’s ideology of Christian power and authority could theoretically be applicable to anyone who wished to follow its tenets. At its heart was the notion that caritas was the essential “glue” that cohered all of Christian society together into a singular, unified whole. Through caritas, all men could potentially perform asceticism inwardly as part of their worldly life. Gregory was adamant that, even though the world greatly reduced the ability of those within its bounds to comprehend love’s many forms, caritas was never beyond the grasp of the average Christian. Writers of the seventh and eighth centuries would carry on this tradition. An eighth-century commentator on the Gospel of Matthew, for example, wrote that those who thought that the command to love one’s enemy was impossible to achieve were wrong. Old Testament precedent proved it, for David was able to love Saul even after their friendship had deteriorated into bitter enmity, and Saint Stephen prayed for his persecutors even as he martyred himself at their hands.⁸³ It was simply that the forms that caritas could take in worldly space were myriad and unfixed. What might be the right act in one situation was wrong in the next. And without an education in the “science” of caritas, there was simply no way to tell.

Cultivating caritas became a matter of nurturing a correct alignment of the inner will through outward forms of bodily world denial—forms that were not ends unto themselves but rather catalysts that helped the human mind to break free from the obfuscation that the world imposed upon it. Penitential discipline became based on the idea that certain ascetic acts could cleanse the soul of wrongdoing—acts that quieted the carnal urges of the human body and allowed the spiritual will to take better control.⁸⁴ The related custom in Merovingian and Carolingian culture of imprisoning aristocratic criminals in monastic spaces did not derive simply from the fact that monasteries had walls.⁸⁵ Walls could be breached. It was rather an act that placed the body of the criminal, whose sins were the result of a carnal will too strong, into a specialized space where, it must have been hoped, even the most recalcitrant wrongdoer might have a chance for rehabilitation—where the criminal might see God’s will more clearly and learn to follow right behavior.⁸⁶

Fundamentally, therefore, while the bishops and priests in the sixth and seventh centuries imagined the arbitration and teaching of caritas’s proper form to be their primary role and function in human society, Gregorian ideology left open a door: all Christians could achieve an inward disposition of caritas if they chose to pursue it. This fundamental potential for each and every Christian to comprehend and to act with caritas would become central to Carolingian ideologies of secular power in the centuries to come. Powerful laymen would increasingly ask their spiritual advisors for more sophisticated knowledge about how to serve their God while also serving their earthly king. And in return, those advisors would teach them the universal model of worldly Christian leadership that they themselves aspired to follow.