| #### 2. CAROLINGIAN CATHOLICISM: PIETY, LEARNING, MISSIONS |

| #### #### For the first thirty years or so of the period, Carolingian Catholicism continued to advance: the reform of Catholic life, the activity of the missionaries, and the fundamentally important work of intellectual revival. Louis the Pious did not share his father's failure to understand the real importance of monasticism. For him the monasteries were not merely centres of civilisation and intellectual life: they were primarily settlements of monks, sanctuaries wherein the primitive ideals of the Gospel, the perfect following of Jesus Christ, the life of prayer, were cherished and the best of opportunity provided for their realisation. Louis was the friend as well as the patron of St. Benedict of Aniane, and seconded the efforts of that great monastic reformer, as also those of his successors Arnulf of Marmoutiers and Jonas of Orleans. An imperial decree of 817 made the rule of St. Benedict obligatory on all monasteries, and laid especial emphasis on the necessity of manual labour and ascetic practices. In the same year the emperor issued, also, a rule for the canons regular and one for the nuns. #### Alcuin's work for liturgical uniformity was continued by his pupil Amalric, Bishop of Treves (811-850). It is from his antiphonary, and the treatises which he wrote to explain and defend it -- a combination of the Roman antiphonary and that of the church of Metz -- that the modern Roman rite largely derives. In the countrysides, the movement to establish parishes independent of those in the towns continued to make headway and, despite inevitable opposition, the movement to free these parishes from the power of the local lord. On the other hand the king, more than ever, kept the nomination of bishops in his own hands. and, for all his patronage of the monastic life, he continued, as the needs of policy dictated, to make over the abbeys to laymen. #### Nor did the missionary movement die with Charlemagne. Ebbo, Archbishop of Rheims, and foster brother of Louis the Pious, turned from his labours for the State to initiate the conversion of Denmark (822), whose king he baptised in 826. But the great name here is that of yet another Benedictine, Ansgar, a monk of Corbie. He was scarcely twenty-five when he went north to take up Ebbo's work and for nearly seventy years he spent himself to do for Denmark and the north of Germany what Boniface had done for the centre, and the Irish monks for the south. Like St. Boniface he was the pope's legate; and in Hamburg he created a second Fulda, cathedral, monastery, library and school. The apostolate in Sweden was at the same time given to Ebbo's nephew, Gauzbert. #### The intellectual life of this second generation of Carolingian Catholicism, the fruits of Alcuin's genius, was richer and more striking than that of the first. One of its leaders was the most famous of all Alcuin's pupils, Rabanus Maurus, Abbot of Fulda in 822 and Archbishop of Mainz from 847: no original thinker certainly, but a trained mind and a lover of learning of the type of Isidore of Seville, concerned to re-edit for his own generation, and to save for the future lest it should perish, the thought of the Christian past. He wrote Manuals of Grammar and Philosophy, commentaries on Holy Scripture, on the Canon Law, controversial writings on Predestination against Gottschalk, and an encyclopaedia that left no knowledge unexplored. As Abbot of Fulda, Rabanus Maurus formed Walafrid Strabo, the poet of the century and yet another commentator on Holy Scripture; and he formed Gottschalk too. Fulda, in his time, was the greatest of all the schools of the continent. Elsewhere, too, the work went on: lectures on the Bible, St. Augustine, Boethius, discussions of the old questions of Grace and Free Will, of the Infinite and the Finite, the existence and nature of Universals. #### In the political struggles which filled this unhappy century, churchmen had as prominent a place as they had occupied in the routine administration of the previous generation. Agobard, Archbishop of Lyons, and Ebbo of Rheims were the chiefs of the party that fought against the partition policy of Louis the Pious. When this finally triumphed, the bishops again worked strongly to set up, in place of the now destroyed unity of the single emperor, a system of permanent alliances based on the Gospel principles of brotherly love. They were successful up to a point. The kings solemnly swore to keep inviolate the rights of charity and brotherhood, and their fraternal pacts were ratified as such by the assemblies of the notables. From the royal alliances. thus inspired by the teaching of the Gospel, the peace of Christ would descend to nobles and people alike. The City of God on earth seemed a long step nearer to realisation. St. Augustine, the new age's greatest prophet, had come into his own. #### The idea, and these practical policies that enshrined it, provoked a new interest in the morality of politics, and produced a whole new literature -- the De Institutione Regia of Jonas of Orleans, the Via Regia of Smaragdus, the De Rectoribus Christianis of Sedulius Scottus and, above all, the De Regis Persona of Hincmar, Ebbo's successor at Rheims after 845. Not since the days of St. Ambrose had the claim for the Church's moral supremacy in life been so insistently set forth, and never, even then, had the practical conclusions of the doctrine been proclaimed more bluntly. Political duties are moral duties; kings are as much bound to keep the moral law in their public life as ordinary men in their private lives; the Church is the divinely appointed guardian of morality, and thereby the chief power in the State. "Bishops, " said Hincmar, "are the equals of kings. More, they are superior to the king since it is they who consecrate him. As it is their privilege to anoint him, so it is their right to depose him. " So far had theory travelled since the introduction into Gaul, a hundred and twenty years earlier, of the practice of consecrating the ruler. In the Christendom of Charlemagne's successor, where Church and State continued to be one, the roles were now apparently to be reversed. The king might name the bishops, but they were to be the judges of his activities. The same ideas, but expressed with far greater force and related to the most powerful tradition in Christendom, are to be seen at work in the activities of the greatest of the contemporary popes, St. Nicholas I (858-867). #### With the papacy of Nicholas I there reappears the explicit assertion of the Roman See's primitive claim to a universal primacy of jurisdiction over the Church as the consequence of Our Lord's promise to St. Peter. Thence derives Rome's unique power of summoning synods and of giving life and real value to their acts. The pope is the supreme judge of all ecclesiastical suits and the only judge in such greater causes as those to which a temporal sovereign is a party or those that concern the deposition of a bishop. In this last matter Nicholas I develops the earlier practice, according to which the popes, while reserving to themselves decisions that touched patriarchs, primates and metropolitans, left the deposition of bishops to their immediate superiors. A bishop may still be deposed by the provincial council, but the pope is insistent that the council’s decision, to be effective, must have his confirmation. Not on appeal alone, does the pope show himself the immediate superior of the local episcopate. #### This restorer of the idea of the papal monarchy within the Church faced 110 less boldly the great contemporary difficulty of the relations of the Church with its defender: the consecrated, Church-created empire. In the fifty years that followed Charlemagne's death the Church slowly but steadily reacted against his implied relegation of the bishops -- and the pope -- to the sanctuary. The conception that the cleric s sole clerical duty was prayer and study, while the emperor would take on himself the actual management and direction of Church affairs, was increasingly challenged. In this reaction the local episcopate led the way. It was not until Nicholas I that the papacy began to dominate the reaction. Church and State for this pope are definitely not one thing, and he urges this insistently, against the ideas implicit in the actions of Carolingians in the west and of the Byzantine emperor in the east. In its own domain each of these powers is sovereign. The State, therefore, must not interfere in Church matters. It is, however, the State's duty to assist the Church -- a principle which in a few centuries will be developed as far as the theory that the State is an instrument in the Church's hands for the realisation of the Christian ideal. Nicholas I, however, does not go so far. Nevertheless, quoting frequently the forty-fourth psalm, "Thou hast set them princes over all the earth, " he is conscious of the pope's duty to correct even kings should they break God's law. They, too, are subject to the penalty that shuts them out of the divine society. But while excommunication remains for princes, too, a possible ultimate sanction, it is not an excommunication to which any temporal consequences are attached; there is no hint that the pope may, or must, depose the excommunicated prince; and, of course, none at all of the later idea of a holy war to drive him forth. #### The question has been raised as to the sources of Nicholas I's doctrine and as to his own share in its formulation. The main ideas are, of course, not his own at all. They are the traditional policy of the Roman See and he could find the classic texts that express it in the collection of canons of Denis the Short, [ ] the decretals, that is to say, of the popes of the fourth and fifth centuries and the canons of the earlier councils. He had, too, in the well-stocked armoury of the archives of his see the letters of later popes, among which the decisions of Pelagius I (556-561) and St. Gregory the Great had a special importance. Was the contemporary collection which we call the False Decretals, among the sources Nicholas I employed? The question has, apparently, never been settled absolutely. M. Fournier speaks of "un certain parfum isidorien" as discernible in his writings after 865. At the most these fabrications did no more than give new support to ideas already traditional and formed from other sources. No one, certainly, will ever again accuse the great pope of being, through his possible use of them, " a conscious liar. " The material was not, then, of the pope's own creation. But he so used it to meet the particular problem of the day, and he restated it in forms so precise and so useable that, through his letters, something of his personality passed into all the collections and thereby did much to form the mind of all the later Middle Ages. #### There is a further aspect of the Carolingian attempt to restore the institutions of civilised government which must be noticed, namely the desire of the scholars who were the agents of Charlemagne and his son to relate their work to something more enduring than expediency, than the necessity of the moment or the convenience of the prince. The ultimate object of all their endeavours was the restoration of the rule of Law, and their first task, here, was to rediscover the Law. This was especially true of the movement to reform the Church, its clerics and laity alike. In the enthusiasm of these eighth- and ninth-century reformers, and in their desire to strengthen their case by the adducing of the best authority, are to be found the beginnings of the new science of ecclesiastical jurisprudence. These clerics are the ancestors of the systematised Canon Law of the later Middle Ages. #### By the time of Charlemagne's accession (768) the confusion in the minds of ecclesiastics as to the detailed rights deriving from, what all accepted, the Church's universal commission to save men's souls, was complete and entire. Three hundred and fifty years of continuous war and civil disturbance -- of a general breakdown of civilisation in fact -- had done their work. To the question what powers did the Church claim to possess according to the canons, or what powers had the Church exercised in the past, no one, anywhere, could give a satisfactory reply. #### Nearly three hundred years earlier, by the end of the fifth century, that is to say, in the time of Pope Gelasius I (492-496), there had been formed a carefully noted collection of all the canons of the councils so far, and of the decrees of the different popes deciding cases and enunciating thereby the principles by which future cases would be decided. Then came the complete break up of the old political unity. For the next two hundred and fifty years, Spain and Gaul went their own way. In Gaul this patrimony of the law was scattered, and in great part lost to sight. In Spain, on the other hand, where alone in these outlying lands the centralisation of the hierarchy round a single primatial see -- Toledo-survived, the collection continued to grow through the seventh century. But by 720 Spain, as an effective influence in Christendom, was dead, thanks to the Mohammedans; and Africa, the first real home of the collection of the canons, had, from the same cause, ceased to matter. The Church in Gaul was entering upon the most chaotic period of its history, and to the confusion from internal causes there was now added -- in this matter of the difficulty of knowing what was the Church's authentic tradition of law -- a new confusion from outside. This was the introduction into Gaul, through the monk-missionaries from Ireland and England, of the innumerable Penitentials -- privately compiled lists of offences and sins with arbitrarily decreed penances assigned to each. #### Again, from the time of St. Boniface the movement had never flagged that aimed at a complete renovation of the discipline of Christian life, in both clergy and laity, a renovation based on a reorganisation of the hierarchy; from 742 councils began to be held once more, and frequently: whence innumerable new canons of discipline and, thanks to the caesaro-papism of the Frankish kings, innumerable royal capitularies to supplement them. #### The confusion of laws was thus, ultimately, greater than ever. The idea still, however, persisted that the new laws were but attempts to restore the ancient discipline -- as the one means to restore the ancient world-unity -- and, in the minds of those who made these new laws, more important by far was the old law which lay preserved in some of the ancient collections. In these it was realised, lay salvation from the chaos. The practical problem was to decide which of the several collections of the old law was to be taken as official. #### It was under these circumstances that Charlemagne asked for, and received from, Pope Adrian I (772-795) the official collection used by the Roman Church itself. The book sent to Charlemagne -- which we call the Hadriana -- was made up of an early Roman collection, as arranged by Denis the Short for Pope Hormisdas (514-523), and the texts of the later African collection. It now spread rapidly through the empire, its prestige easily outdistancing that which any other collection could claim. The reformers had in it a code and precedents that put all lesser codes out of court. The Penitentials, for example, began to be condemned in one council after another. As the ninth century went by, the influence of the Hadriana, in conjunction and combination with the Spanish collection (the Hispana), grew steadily. But although much of the old confusion was thereby lessened, this ancient law was not sufficient to serve as a basis for the correction of later-day wrongs, nor to defend the Church against the new kinds of abuses which. in ninth-century Gaul, threatened its very nature. Particularly was the old law deficient in means to stem the development by which the Church's property was gradually passing into lay hands. Charles Martel, in the eighth century, had looted the Church to finance the State; his grandson, Charlemagne, in the ninth, had turned the abuse into a legalised form of government. Deriving from the scandals was a wholesale anarchy in nomination to abbeys and sees that was still more shocking. The most pressing problem, for the reformers of the time of Charlemagne's own grandchildren (for example Charles the Bald, 840-877), was how to defend the Church from the new danger of legalised secularisation. #### In the first place the bishops protested, and as their motives were open to the imputation that they sought their own aggrandisement, they turned for support to the impersonal argument of Sacred Scripture. To the new growing law of the State the Church must, ultimately, oppose its own older law -- the law that must exist, since the Church's claim was just and, in this matter, the State a usurper. The law must be fully stated; it must not be mere generality but deal with particular cases; most important of all it must possess a prestige greater than anything that the Carolingian State and the Church in Gaul could create; to serve its purpose it must be Roman, decrees of the ancient popes dealing with these very abuses in times gone by and expressing in legal form the Church's rights and claims. #### Here we approach a most extraordinary happening -- extraordinary to us, but hardly so, to such a degree, in a time which had other literary habits. The collection desiderated by the Carolingian reformers did not exist. Whereupon some of them deliberately created it; they composed, that is to say, of set purpose -- probably in the diocese of Le Mans, about the year 850, and for the defence of the rights of that see -- a whole body of law, assigning each decree to a particular council or pope, going as far back as the second century in their desire to heighten the prestige of what they produced. These are the famous False Decretals, once -- when all that was known about them was that they were forgeries -- a powerful weapon in the quiver of the anti-Roman controversialist. #### They served their purpose sufficiently for knowledge of them to spread. In an age that was enthusiastic for whatever bore the mark of the ancient Roman unity -- an age that knew not the science of criticism -- they were accepted for what they professed to be. Gradually they came into use at Rome too, and by the middle of the eleventh century were accepted there in their entirety. #### The real importance of the False Decretals is the new detail they bring in support of the already existing acceptance of the Roman Primacy. They were devised to help Le Mans, and the best way in which Le Mans could be helped was by the invocation of Rome -- magni nominis umbra. The invention, of its own nature, turned ultimately to help Rome. It showed the Roman primacy in function in numerous detailed ways and it expressed the rights of the primacy so functioning in apt legal formulae; it undoubtedly assisted the development of systematic routine appeals to Rome in cases that involved the bishops; it developed a new system in which the importance of the metropolitan declined; it assisted the extension of the Church's privilege to try delinquent clerics in her own courts; and it did very much indeed to secure recognition of the sacred character of ecclesiastical property. #### On the other hand, the general effect of the acceptance of the False Decretals, the effect of them as an agent to resolve the existing confusion of the law, was slight. The differences continued: differences between the cited authorities, differences between the books which inspired the reformers in different parts of the empire. As the ninth century drew to its close the Carolingian empire disappeared, and in the dreadful anarchy that ensued, the chances of the effective functioning of a central authority in the Church seemed as hopeless as the chances of the imperial authority itself. With the eleventh century the work of restoration had to begin yet once again. #### But this work of preserving the existing knowledge, the careful encyclopaedic surveys of Rabanus Maurus, the bold revival of St. Ambrose in Hincmar and St. Nicholas I, by no means exhaust the intellectual life of this renaissance doomed to disappear so soon. In the second half of the century, the years that saw the Northmen established on every frontier of the empire, and even in his own native country, there appeared in Gaul an Irishman of genius, the greatest speculative mind since Boethius three hundred years before. This was John Scotus Erigena. #### Erigena's learning was in its origin not Carolingian but Irish. [ ] Of his early life we know nothing. He makes his first appearance at the court of Charles the Bald in 847, and for thirty years he is the chief figure of this last generation of Carolingian culture. Then, after 877, history loses all trace of him. He had the advantage over all his contemporaries of a superior understanding of Greek, and he was the Catholic West's one really constructive mind between Boethius and St. Anselm. His influence on the first development of medieval philosophy was very great indeed. #### It is not hard to trace the intellectual pedigree of this Irish thinker: the two most philosophical of all the fathers, St. Augustine and St. Gregory of Nyssa -- Neoplatonists both -- St. Maximus the Confessor and, above all, the anonymous writer for so long called -- and thought to be -- Denis the Areopagite. #### This writer, who now for the first time begins to be a power in Western thought, had long been known in the East. [ ] The literary device behind which he hid caused him to be identified with that Athenian whose conversion was almost the sole recorded fruit of St. Paul’s famous visit. [ ] This identification -- whose truth the Middle Ages took for granted -- gave an immense prestige to the doctrines his works contained. Here was a contemporary of the apostles, no less, using the philosophy of Plato to expound his new faith. It had almost the effect of an apostle himself philosophising. The reality was very different. The author of these various books -- pseudo-Denis so to call him -- was no Athenian but a Syrian, not a contemporary of the apostles but a monk of the late fifth century. Nor was he a Catholic, though a convert from Paganism, but a Monophysite. He was a contemporary of Proclus (411-485) and of the furious controversies that were the aftermath of the Council of Chalcedon. [ ] #### The first reference to his works that has come down is, in fact, from the arch-heretic Severus in his controversial writings against the Church in the early sixth century. Later the Catholic theologian Leontius of Byzantium also cites him and in the next century, thanks to the prestige resulting from his glorious pseudonym, he has passed into the corpus of Catholic writers, and is used extensively as a witness against heresy. He is known and used by St. Gregory the Great, St. Sophronius of Jerusalem and St. Maximus the Confessor. It was probably the last named saint whose use of pseudo-Denis gave to these writings the last needed touch of orthodox warrant. For the pope St. Martin I at the Lateran Synod of 649 he is " Denis of blessed memory. " Pope Agatho cites him, too, in his letter to the General Council of #### 680; and the next General Council (Nicea II in 787) quotes Denis against the Iconoclasts. It was through the Greek monks in Rome that a knowledge of these books first began to spread in the West. Pope Paul I (757-767) sent a copy of them to Pepin; and Hilduin, abbot of St. Denis and arch-chaplain to Louis the Pious, translated them into Latin. But it was the translation, annotated, of John Scotus Erigena that was the real beginning of their striking effect on medieval thought. [ ] #### To translate Denis into Latin was one of the greatest things Erigena ever did. His other great achievement was to provide the first generation of medieval thinkers with a completed system which explained Catholicism as a philosophical whole. The inspiration of all this work was Neoplatonic, and, except for his use of Aristotle's dialectic, Erigena was himself nothing if not a Neoplatonist. Medieval philosophy had made its great start, and had made it with the initial confusion that it was not to work out of its system for centuries. The weakness and the strength were apparent in Erigena's own contribution to that philosophy, the De Divisione Naturae which appeared after his translation of Denis, somewhere about 867. In this book we are presented with the most ambitious effort of the Catholic mind since St. Augustine himself, a philosophical discussion of the whole vast subject of God and His universe. [ ] This elaborate attempt to explain the Catholic view of the universe through Neoplatonism was a rock of offence to Erigena's contemporaries, and to the orthodox of later generations. Its author's confidence in the power of reasoning to explain the date of Revelation is boundless. His own use of logic is as strong as it is subtle. But, too often, he is ruined by a love of paradox, by an artist's delight in phrase-making, and by an exuberance of language that, at times, does grave injustice to his thought. It is not difficult to understand how, for all his good intentions, he was criticised and condemned as a Pantheist. The universe, as Erigena conceives its origin, is not too easily distinguishable from its Creator. The well-worked-out scheme of the flux and reflux of creation from the Creator leaves no place for the fact of evil and its eternal consequences. His theory of human knowledge breaks under the criticism of facts, and his claim for reason as the all-availing expounder of mystery can again only lead to disaster. It is not to be wondered that Erigena was repeatedly condemned, at Valence and at Langres in his own lifetime and later, in 1050, with Berengarius whom to some extent he inspired. #### Erigena, nevertheless, had not lived in vain. He had stated the problems that were to occupy all the thinkers of the next four hundred years, the relations of faith and reason, the rational exposition of the data of faith, of the universe and its relation to God. He had produced, in his unsuccessful attempt to solve the problem, the first ordered systematic work of this kind that Latin Catholicism had so far seen. [ ] #### The intellectual revival had, in the main, been a work of restoration. Alcuin and the lesser men had been chiefly concerned first to amass themselves, and then to transmit to their pupils, whatever could be found of the erudition of the ages before the barbarian invasions. Grammar, rhetoric, the rules of reasoning, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music, medicine, the meaning of the Scriptures, the theological work of the fathers, particularly of St. Augustine and St. Gregory -- of all that these had to offer they made themselves living encyclopaedias. They were essentially schoolmasters; facts rather than ideas were their chief interest, and their writings inevitably tended to be compilations and manuals for the instruction of those less learned than themselves. The revival, in its first generation, could hardly do more. And before, in the next generation, scholars could, from this erudition, develop an interest in ideas, in intellectual speculation and the beginnings of a philosophical revival, the new invasions and the collapse of Charlemagne's political system had brought the whole movement to an end. ####  |