Be a Perfect Man. Andrew J. Romig

may be less philosophically and linguistically complex than Paulinus’s Liber, but just like Paulinus’s work, it narrates a philosophy of mind that enfranchises the combined power of Frankish lay and “professional” religious aristocratic men and makes that harmonious fusion of power seem logical and natural.

      Conclusion

      Around the year 820, Bishop Jonas of Orléans (d. 843 or 844) wrote another treatise about the ideal lay Christian life in response to the petition of another lay warlord, this time the lord of the southwestern imperial frontier, Count Matfrid of Orléans (d. 836).¹⁴⁵ Historians have traditionally regarded Jonas’s De institutione laicali, as it was called, as a third Carolingian “mirror” text written specifically for the lay, nonroyal aristocracy. Jonas was familiar with the works of both Paulinus and Alcuin on the subject. And although his work is significantly longer and more exegetically detailed than either of the earlier mirrors, Jonas most certainly tailored his De institutione laicali to resemble the works of his predecessors in form and in style.¹⁴⁶ Jonas asserts the same doctrine that allowed secular Christians access to the privileged authority of the ascetic male through the merits of their deeds.¹⁴⁷ Jonas articulates the same ideology of aristocratic power and shared aristocratic obligation in God’s service: “The law of Christ,” he says, “is attributed by the Lord not specially to clerics, but is to be observed generally by all the faithful.”¹⁴⁸

      Key differences, however, between Jonas’s text and the earlier mirrors signal that Jonas’s worldview was not the same as those of either Paulinus or Alcuin. Jonas still argues for the centrality of caritas as the component of masculinity that connects a Carolingian lord to the authority of God, but Jonas does so with even greater fervor. He defines the ideal more strongly as not just love of God and neighbor but love of God more than the self and love of neighbor just as much as the self. Jonas also emphasizes in explicit, rather than simply implied, language that caritas involves love for one’s enemy—a key distinction, he explains, between New Testament and Old Testament law.¹⁴⁹

      Historians have frequently noted the most obvious difference of De institutione laicali—namely, that it pays far more attention than the earlier mirrors to the categories and attributes that render the lay way of life distinct, particularly marriage.¹⁵⁰ Jonas also draws much clearer lines between ascetics and secular Christians. Like the earlier mirror authors, Jonas was careful to articulate that God decreed his law for all Christians, not just clergy. Yet in his text, he adds a clarification: “Although in the Gospel there are certain special precepts which are only appropriate for despisers of the world and emulators of the apostles; the rest are decreed indiscriminately without pretext to all the faithful, each of course according to the order by which one vows to serve God.”¹⁵¹ Ascetics—contemptores mundi et apostolorum sectatores—follow separate rules of living that do not apply to secular Christian laymen and priests.

      None of these distinctions between Christian male types was new doctrine, nor are they even completely absent in the earlier mirrors. What is most significant is that neither Paulinus nor Alcuin felt it necessary to make such distinctions so explicitly clear. Jonas advances the same ideological arguments that Paulinus and Alcuin did, but his inflection has shifted. Where Paulinus and Alcuin intoned their exhortationes with an unimpeachable enthusiasm and optimism, one detects in Jonas’s text the unmistakable hints of pessimism.

      Jonas urges Matfrid never to emulate those laypeople who falsely believe that the precepts of God pertain only to clerics and not to them. Again, Paulinus and Alcuin both conveyed the same message. Instead of framing the issue as a matter of “confusion” about whether there are separate precepts for laity and clergy, however, as Paulinus and Alcuin did, Jonas frames the issue as a problem of negligence. There are many laymen who manage to understand their Christian duties and to perform them as diligently as they are able, says Jonas, rhetorically explaining that this is not simple confusion or miseducation. The problem is that some know their calling and choose not to live by it; others falsely believe that they can glorify themselves with the name of Christ and be saved by this simple profession of faith alone.¹⁵² Jonas’s wording changes the orientation of the message from pastoral teaching to pastoral reprimand.

      Jonas also speaks in De institutione laicali of clergy and laity who participate in mutual negligence, something that the earlier mirrors do not address. There are many laymen, he explains, who revere members of the priesthood based solely on their power and wealth, not their ministries. These laymen show disrespect to poorer members of the clergy and to priests who have renounced their worldly riches—not inviting them to their table as equals but instead compelling them into service, making them administrators and overseers of their properties as if they were laypersons. They only want to be seen to have their own priests in name, Jonas rails, not to have proper intercessors among them. This is not only reprehensible and dishonest but also dangerous, he warns—a serious problem of aristocratic negligence for which both laymen and clergy must be held accountable.¹⁵³

      It is possible that the change in tone of Jonas’s mirror reflects an actual change of imperial circumstance in 820—the emergence of new abuses that Paulinus and Alcuin never saw the need to rebuke. Jonas’s world had indeed changed significantly from the one that Paulinus and Alcuin knew. Charlemagne had died in 814, leaving the entirety of his domain to his son, Louis “the Pious.” Conflict and insurrection, which would plague Louis for the entirety of his reign, had already boiled over in 817.