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.
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
