Admonitio generalis thus placed the burden of responsibility for the continuation of Frankish prosperity squarely on the shoulders of Frankish aristocratic men. It reminded them of this burden by laying forth the cooperative duties and jurisdictions that they were required to observe in order to please their God. The first three quarters of the document consist of regulatory dicta from the most important ecumenical councils of centuries past.15 Rules address different groups of aristocratic men (“to bishops,” “to priests,” “to clerics and monks,” “to all,” etc.—the last including laymen) and outline the correct hierarchies of power that are to exist among them.16 Priests are to be subordinate to bishops, monks subordinate to abbots; “professional” religious—that is to say, men who had professed either priestly or monastic vows—are not to be subject to most secular legal jurisdiction; monks in particular are to avoid secular engagement as much as they are able. Lay and professional religious men are defined, in this section, as separate but equally important cogs of a well-oiled social machine. If maintained in good order, the capitula imply, this machine will lead the Franks toward further divine favor.
The last twenty-two capitula continue to define the ideal workings of society but break free from conciliar tradition and bear the distinctive stamp of Charlemagne’s court itself. Historians frequently emphasize capitulum 72, which asks for the correction of liturgical books and scripture, along with the creation of schools for educating young men not only in grammar but also in music and computation.17 The majority of this last section, however, actually advances far more abstract social ideals—ideals that intensify bonds of collective identity and diminish local and professional affiliations. There is to be peace and concord “between bishops, abbots, counts, judges, and all persons everywhere, of greater or lesser status.”18 Judges are to judge justly, petitioners and oathtakers are to swear honestly, hatred is to be outlawed, unlawful killings are to be anathema, and all children henceforth are to honor their parents.19 Here Admonitio generalis decrees not specific behaviors so much as ideal states of mind that all Franks are to cultivate, regardless of station, regardless of person. It is an updated Ten Commandments, a collection of universal rules for membership among God’s chosen people, newly augmented with New Testament moral principles.
It is no surprise, therefore, that in the final summary capitulum of Admonitio generalis, we find the shorthand phrase “love of God and neighbor,” which would be invoked throughout the ninth century and the rest of the Middle Ages in reference to caritas. Capitulum 82 commands bishops and priests to remind their flocks, “with all urgency,” “about love of God and neighbor (dilectione Dei et proximi), about faith and hope in God, about humility and patience, about chastity and continence, about kindness and mercy (misericordia), about giving alms and the confession of their sins, and that they forgive their debtors their debts according to the Lord’s prayer, knowing most certainly that because they do such things they will possess the kingdom of God.”20 This call for love of God and neighbor reveals nothing of the deep philosophical concerns that so worried men such as Augustine and Gregory the Great. It simply recalls the affective interconnection between self, deity, and other that the Gospels demanded and upon which the Book of Pastoral Rule had founded its ideology of worldly masculine authority.
It might be tempting, especially in light of Charlemagne’s campaigns against the pagan Saxons and Avars that he launched at exactly this same moment of his reign, to read the absence of “love of enemy” in this formulation as a cynical misrepresentation of the doctrine that caritas represents—an intentional omission of the more difficult-to-follow aspects of New Testament ethics by priestly members of the Church who were interested less in directing Christian fellow-feeling inward than in directing Christian aggression outward. Jonathan Riley-Smith made precisely this argument for the discursive invocation of “love of God and neighbor” three hundred years later, during Urban II’s preaching campaign for the first crusade.21 Such a reading, especially for the Carolingian world, would be the wrong inflection. Not only would it overestimate the power that spiritual leaders held within the governing structures of Carolingian society, but it would also fail to recognize the discursive power that caritas had come to hold within Christian culture.
In Admonitio generalis (and the call to crusade, for that matter), the phrase “love of God and neighbor” serves rhetorically, first and foremost, as a common denominator of collective identity. It passes unassumingly and unproblematically as the first among a summary list of behaviors and qualities that the document promises will lead any Frank to salvation. In so doing, it diminishes allegiances to professional or local affiliation. It furthermore renders the document’s constructed associations between cooperative aristocratic behavior and divine favor not only logical but also perfectly natural. Since all Franks learn the same core values—values that will lead to salvation, the very essence of divine sanction—it is only natural, the document’s underlying logic suggests, that they would be called as one collective body to the same duty of service and fidelity to their heavenly and earthly lords.
Admonitio generalis as a whole, therefore, and this final section in particular both articulate an ideology of shared and universal aristocratic identity and rely on that ideology for their provisions to be persuasive and logical. Without doubt, this ideology was already a driving force behind the convocation of the council of 789 and the drafting of Admonitio generalis in the first place—the boldness and scope of the document imply nothing less. The success of the document’s program of correctio over the course of the next century, furthermore, suggests that this ideology exerted a significant degree of influence upon the aristocratic receivers of Admonitio generalis as well. Regardless of whether the document reflected established thinking or created it anew, however, it can be no coincidence that within a few years of 789 and the dissemination of Admonitio generalis throughout the realm, we also find the first extended explications of the ideology that supported it. This ideology made caritas—“love of God and neighbor”—the core aristocratic value from which all other values derived. Caritas was the aristocrat’s key to both salvation and his worldly power, for it linked him directly to the authority of God.
Reading the “Lay Mirrors”
In 795 or 796, Paulinus of Aquileia wrote a treatise on the ideal lay life that we now call Liber Exhortationis (the “Book of Exhortation”).22 Just a short time later, in 799 or 800, Alcuin of York wrote a similar work, known today as De virtutibus et vitiis (“On the Virtues and Vices”).23 Both authors wrote at the direct request of powerful Carolingian frontier warlords: Paulinus for Eric of Friuli (d. 799), lord of the southeastern march, and Alcuin for Wido (Guy) of Brittany (d. 818), lord of the northwestern march.
These texts were the earliest of a small group of didactic books written specifically for lay, nonroyal aristocrats during roughly the first half of the ninth century.24 Scholars once referred to them as “ascetic florilegia”—“florilegia” because they excerpt and collect late antique patristic texts and “ascetic” because a majority of these patristic texts were written originally for monastic audiences and accordingly espouse quite traditional Christian ideologies of ascetic masculinity.25 We now label these books as a subcategory of the ancient “mirror for princes” genre: Laienspiegel, or “mirrors for the laity.”26 This new classification has been helpful in encouraging scholars to recognize at least a shade of art where previous readers found little. We now acknowledge that the mirrors do not simply collect patristic wisdom; they arrange, narrate, and adapt it to new purposes. Still, historians generally tend to regard these texts as rather dull and derivative. And even their closest apologists wonder about their ultimate significance as historical artifacts: how widely they were actually read and followed and whether they truly had an impact upon the majority of the Carolingian world.27 The question of what, exactly, these texts represent, not only as objects unto themselves but also in relation to their actual function within Carolingian aristocratic culture as a whole, deserves further consideration here.
J.