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
