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
