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 useful toward every good. He who lives in chastity, says Alcuin, has “an angelic way of life on earth.”130 And just as with alms and prayer, Alcuin 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