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
