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Carolingian Religion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 May 2015

Thomas F. X. Noble
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Abstract

The Carolingian period, roughly the eighth and ninth centuries, was dynamic and decisive in European religious history. The ruling dynasty and the clerical elite promoted wave after wave of reform that I call “unifying,” “specifying,” and “sanctifying.” This presidential address argues that religion was the key unifying and universalizing force in the Carolingian world; that the Carolingians were obsessed with doing things the right way—usually the Roman way; and that the Carolingians sought to inculcate Christian behavior more than religious knowledge. The address concludes by arguing that the Carolingians put a markedly European stamp on Christianity and that they Romanized Christianity well before the papacy attempted to do so.

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Church History , Volume 84 , Issue 2 , June 2015 , pp. 287 - 307
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Copyright © American Society of Church History 2015 

In the year 811 an old, ill, and weary Charlemagne asked, plaintively, “Are we really Christians?”Footnote 1 The following pages will attempt to answer that question as Charlemagne's contemporaries might have answered it and as modern scholars might do so. From one point of view, my remarks will be addressed to those who, like me, specialize in the early Middle Ages, in particular in the Carolingian period, the period that takes its name from Charlemagne's grandfather Charles, that is Carolus, Martel. From another point of view, however, I am going to make two rather grand claims for the Carolingian period. Let me just state my claims now and then try, later, to substantiate them. First, the Carolingians Europeanized Christianity as most of the world subsequently knew it. The religion had Semitic beginnings and centuries of Mediterranean cultivation so there was nothing inevitable about what Charlemagne's dynasty did. Second, Roman Catholicism as an historical phenomenon, not as a theological or ecclesiological one, is a Carolingian construction. Bold claims, as I said. But I shall come back to them.

Let me begin by clearing some scholarly underbrush. My title is “Carolingian Religion.” Historians tend to worry less than religious studies scholars do about the meaning of the word “religion,” or indeed if it has any legitimate meaning at all. By now everyone must be familiar with the famous remark of Jonathan Z. Smith: “Religion is solely the creation of the scholar's study. It is created for the scholar's purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no existence apart from the academy.”Footnote 2 Not many people have over the last thirty-some years agreed fully with Smith. Yet he seems undaunted. In 1998 he argued that “religion” only emerged in the seventeenth century.Footnote 3 Just before that Wilfred Cantwell Smith argued that there is no phenomenon in the world that exactly corresponds to what scholars call “religion.”Footnote 4 Religion is complex and difficult to understand but I do not think that comprehension is advanced by arguments that look to me like reductiones ad absurdum. More sensible are the practical views of Martin Marty who says that “six marks” define a system of beliefs and practices as being religious: “That system must center on a matter of deep meaning, or ‘ultimate’ concern, and also involve socialization (believers tend to form communities), show a preference for symbolic language over everyday speech, use ceremonies (especially at birth, marriage and death), take a metaphysical view of life (there is more to the world than what one sees), and require behavioral adjustments (attending Sunday School or shunning pork).”Footnote 5 Those marks capture well phenomena that have existed in systemic relationship with each another for many millennia. I can find each of these marks in the Carolingian world. That world had, I insist, religion.Footnote 6 Nevertheless, I am not going to theorize religion but I am going to historicize Carolingian Christianity.

But, one may ask, what about Christianity? Needless to say even if one were to stipulate that Christianity is a religion, and that medieval, or more specifically Carolingian Christianity was a religion, then one could not claim that Christianity was uniquely a religion. That is fair enough. But in the Carolingian world Christianity was virtually the only game in town. Paganism was diminishing rapidly even if, to the fascination of historians of religion, its vestiges persist to this moment.Footnote 7 There were small, invisible, and inarticulate Muslim communities in the Pyrenees region and small Jewish communities in such cities as Lyons and Bordeaux.Footnote 8 But the Carolingian world was not diverse or multicultural.

Many would argue with considerable justification that the history of Christianity has always been marked by resistance, contestation, and diversity. I would agree with that characterization as a general proposition but then add that the Carolingian period is unusual. Ancient Christianity produced traditions that were Latin and Greek, Syriac and Coptic, Armenian and Georgian. There is absolutely nothing like this in Charlemagne's world. The patristic period generated such robust theologizing that heresies popped up everywhere. The Carolingian period was almost astonishingly eirenic.Footnote 9 This was a world of kerfuffles, not of mortal combats. Controversy over images wracked the Byzantine world while the West produced one iconoclast. Adoptionism stirred much discussion for a few years late in the eighth century but we can name exactly two “Adoptionists.” A lonely Carolingian devoté of predestination was silenced and attracted no followers. Two contemporary monks at Corbie disagreed about the Eucharist without consequences.Footnote 10 This is nothing like, say, Augustine and Pelagius on grace and free will, or the bitter struggles over Origenism, or the battles over Arianism and Miaphysitism.

If, then, Christianity occupied a privileged position in the Carolingian world and experienced little internal struggle, it remains to say what that Christianity was like. Bearing in mind that I am going to turn to two large-scale interpretive issues, I want to shift now to a characterization of Carolingian religion, that is, to an interpretation of Carolingian Christianity. Any scheme runs some risk of cutting Procrustes to fit his bed, but I do need some interpretive framework to organize my discussion. I am going to suggest that Carolingian religion was unifying, specifying, and sanctifying. I will explain what I mean by each term as I go along and I will also indicate why I think each term to be both an apt characterization of Carolingian phenomena and a useful heuristic device for us looking back some twelve centuries.

I. Unifying

Religion was the fundamental tool by means of which the Carolingians sought to unify and shape their society. The Saxons might well have used the word weapon where I use tool but it comes to the same thing. Sources of many kinds repeat phrases such as “common salvation,” “common utility,” and “communion of the faithful.”Footnote 11 The common element here is always shared faith and worship.

The Christian identity forged by the Carolingians had what might be called horizontal and vertical dimensions. By horizontal dimensions I mean the efforts of the vast Carolingian program of religious reform that extended across almost all of western Europe and was aimed at all people of every rank. I shall return to this point later. By vertical dimensions I refer to bonds of history and tradition. The many peoples of the Frankish realm were placed confidently within a tradition that reached back to the Old Testament world. In his magnificent Opus Caroli Regis, his theology of history, Theodulf of Orleans placed the Carolingian world along a line that reached back to the Hebrews and that included the apostles and the church fathers.Footnote 12 But it decidedly did not include Romans, in either their ancient or their contemporary instantiations. Rome was the heir of Babylon, Theodulf said.Footnote 13 Charlemagne's contemporaries variously flattered him by calling him David, and Josiah, and Solomon. It is as if the Hebrews were the ancestors of the Carolingians and the Carolingians were in some sense biblical figures.Footnote 14

Formulations like those of Theodulf had powerful ideological aspects but there were other historical reflections in the period that repay some consideration. The Anglo-Saxon missionary and reformer Boniface, while he was working to convert pagans and reform Christians in central Germany, wrote to his old friend and mentor Bishop Daniel of Winchester to ask for advice. Daniel's advice is clever both dialectically and culturally. He told Boniface not to argue with the pagans about the origins of their gods but instead to let them affirm that their gods and goddesses were born from the intercourse of males with females and that, after the manner of men, they had beginnings. This point established, Daniel said, one can ask them whether the world had a beginning. If they claim that the world always existed you can easily refute this. One may then ask them whether the gods are to be worshipped for temporal and immediate good or for eternal blessedness. If they choose temporal benefit, ask them whether they are better off than the Christians. Daniel tells Boniface that he can go through more arguments like these and then come to this one: If the gods benefit their followers in temporal matters how can they explain that everywhere the Christians are expanding while the followers of their gods are retreating? The world was once given to idol worship but is now more and more reconciled to Christ.Footnote 15 In short, Daniel urges Boniface to invite the pagans to join the story, to choose the winning side.

In 826 Louis the Pious, Charlemagne's son and successor, welcomed King Harald Klak of Denmark to his court to receive baptism. Ermoldus Nigellus, in his epic biography of Louis, relates the scene but also takes us back to 822 when Louis sent Archbishop Ebbo of Reims to Denmark to evangelize the Danes. Without taking time to correct for poetic license and rhetorical strategies, here is what Louis told Ebbo to tell the Danes. There is a God in heaven who created everything. He created man but Adam sinned and fell. Sinners and idolaters of every kind emerged but eventually God took mercy and sent his Son. He invited all to join God's everlasting kingdom. Tell them that it is a crime for man to abandon his reason and worship metal images. Louis concludes by telling Ebbo to tell the Danes stories from the Gospels.Footnote 16

A couple of years later Ebbo came back to join the Frankish court at Ingelheim and Ermoldus provides a remarkable description of a series of frescoes in the chapel of the imperial palace there. To the left, they begin with Eden and continue with the flood, then Abram and his offspring, then the deeds of Joseph, Moses, Joshua, and David. The right side begins with the annunciation, the shepherds, Herod, the flight into Egypt, various scenes from the life of Christ, the crucifixion, resurrection and ascension.Footnote 17

To return then to 826, Harald appears and tells what Ebbo has taught him. God has created the heavens and the earth. He sent his son to redeem fallen mankind. If a person confesses that Christ is God and receives baptism he will win a heavenly reward.

What these stories have in common is an historical, chronological, narrative core. Boniface's pagans and Ebbo's Danes were not taught theology. They were invited to join a story, to share a story with their foes and conquerors. My inspiration here is an old study by Arnaldo Momigliano in which he argued that becoming Christian in the Roman world meant discovering oneself the heir and beneficiary of and participant in a new history.Footnote 18 That was precisely a key dimension of Carolingian effort at Christianization. They asked people to join them in a story, to share something communis, common.

There is yet another way to think of Christianity as unitive force in the Carolingian world. Historical reflections had broadly cultural and also ideological connotations. There were also unitive reflections that were deeply ideological. Pope Paul I called the Franks a “New Israel.”Footnote 19 The second prologue to the Salic Law, a product, like Paul's letter, of the 760s echoes the theme of the Franks as a chosen people.Footnote 20 Theodulf called the Franks the “spiritual Israel.”Footnote 21 Alcuin, Charlemagne's closest adviser, spoke of the “chosen people of God.”Footnote 22 But he, like annals, letters, and treatises, spoke consistently from the 780s of the populus Christianus.Footnote 23 By the late 790s, before Charlemagne was crowned emperor, several writers spoke of an imperium Christianum.Footnote 24 As Mayke de Jong has pointed out, the second quarter of the ninth century saw a subtle shift from an identity based on the Franks and the faith to one based on the church: imperium as ecclesia is how she formulates it.Footnote 25 The Christian faith remained the glue that held the system together.

Christendom, as the western world has understood that term, is a Carolingian creation. It is perfectly true that Eusebius spoke of a single empire, emperor, and faith. But his contemporary or subsequent influence was severely limited and his description itself was fanciful. Of course the Carolingian claim was inaccurate—one might say illegitimate. The Carolingians did not rule the British Isles and they left the Christians of most of Iberia out of account. They did think about the Byzantines but dismissed them as heretics. The Christian faith, as believed and practiced by the Carolingians, marked out God's chosen people, his Israel, his polity.

Unity also had a significant ecclesial dimension. Quite a few scholars have noted that for a generation or two church history as either institutional or intellectual history has receded behind the history of Christianity as lived experience.Footnote 26 I am inclined to think that the pendulum has swung wildly off its arc and I am prepared to insist that one cannot talk about Carolingian religion without talking about the church. That church was organized around just over 220 bishoprics, about forty-five of them directly subject to Rome and the rest more or less built into the Carolingian system. The countryside, at least west of the Rhine and south of the Danube, “bristled” with churches, baptismal churches and oratories. There were also around 700 monasteries.Footnote 27 The numbers are impressive but growth is equally striking. Boniface worked to create new bishoprics in central Germany. Würzburg flourished but Buraburg and Erfurt failed. Boniface did create an ecclesiastical province with Mainz as its metropolitan see. He was unsuccessful in getting Sens and Rouen established as metropolitan sees in the western area of Frankish rule in his lifetime but his goal was achieved in the next generation. He worked to erect bishoprics in Bavaria and on his death Freising, Passau, Regensburg, and Salzburg were proper sees. In 798 Pope Leo III acceded to Charlemagne's plan to elevate Salzburg to metropolitan status. In about 787 Charlemagne sent Willehad to Bremen in Saxony. In the next decade or so, Münster and Paderborn were added. Under Louis the Pious, Halberstadt, Hildesheim, Minden, Osnabrück, and Verden were added and later Hamburg became a metropolitan see.Footnote 28

This increasingly dense ecclesiastical network contributed to unity in several ways. The tone and substance of religious life in the Carolingian world was set in the royal and later imperial court.Footnote 29 Many, probably most, bishops spent some time at the court where they both learned about and contributed to the elaboration of plans for reform and renewal.Footnote 30 The church did its collective business in councils.Footnote 31 Boniface famously, and not quite accurately, said that down to his day there had been no councils in the Frankish world for eighty years.Footnote 32 He held five councils in the 740s. Pippin III, the first Carolingian king, held five councils in the 750s and 760s. The Bavarian Church held three councils in 756, 770, and 771 and then a further six between 799 and 811. Charlemagne held no fewer than twenty-three councils and he summoned five of these in the year 813 alone. At least sixteen councils met in the time of Louis the Pious, with the year 829 especially prominent for its four councils. Down to the end of the ninth century, in the East, West, and Middle Kingdoms at least fifty councils assembled. Thinking about these councils as a whole, they exhibit some similarities and some differences. The range of issues treated in these councils remained remarkably consistent. It is easy to discern a few central concerns: clerical education and morality; the administration of churches and their lands; proper norms for worship. The scale of the meetings differed dramatically. Some councils were virtually “national” in scope while others were provincial or regional, or even quite local.

Those regional and local councils call for another comment. From the ninth century we have thirty-four episcopal statutes.Footnote 33 Bishops were supposed to meet with their priests twice each year and the extant statutes are products of those meetings. The great councils rarely speak about priests whereas the statutes speak of little else.Footnote 34 One theme that recurs in conciliar documents of all kinds is the need to preach to the laity.Footnote 35 Preaching in the vernacular was not only permitted but even recommended.Footnote 36 The pulpit was the place where court and populace met. We simply cannot know if bishops did actually meet with their priests twice each year—or three times if we include the chrism mass—or if meetings regularly resulted in the issuance of statutes. We cannot say how frequently lay people attended church. We cannot gauge the effectiveness of Carolingian preaching. What we can say is that from the mightiest metropolitans hovering about the palace to the humblest rural priests and peasant farmers we can see a remarkably articulated system that moved consistent messages up and down the chain of command for a century and a half. The church as an institution was indeed a powerful force for unity.

II. Specifying

In the second place: specifying. What I mean by this is that the Carolingians had an acute sense of their duty to do things right and to get everyone else to do things right as well. This sense extended to virtually every aspect of religious and secular life—and the Carolingians drew almost no distinction between the two. From the 740s to the middle years of Charlemagne's reign a phrase—norma rectitudinis—recurs in varying expressions and it catches well the tone of the Carolingian program.Footnote 37 Committed as they were to the idea that there was a “standard of rightness” the Carolingians took it as their task to identify what was right and then to demand its implementation.Footnote 38 Diversity was unacceptable.

One can find examples of this Carolingian mania for doing things the right way almost anywhere one cares to look. When Pope Stephen II spent most of the year 754 in Francia the Franks discovered that Roman liturgical singing differed from their own and a few years later they sought chant-masters from Rome.Footnote 39 A wonderful anecdote in Notker of St. Gall's delightful grab-bag of stories adds a bit of context.Footnote 40 In his travels Charlemagne discovered that the clergy sung differently from one place to the next. He investigated the matter and learned that the Roman chant masters who had come in his father's time were jealous of the Franks and plotted among themselves to teach each church differently. Charles made a plan to eliminate the differences, to hew to the norm. In 789 he required the Frankish clergy to learn and practice only the Roman chant.Footnote 41

When he was in Rome in 774 Charlemagne asked Pope Hadrian for a copy of the canon law then in force. Hadrian gave him a copy of what specialists call the Dionysio-Hadriana. There was no single body of canon law at that time but in Rome the sixth-century collection by Dionysus Exiguus was authoritative, if not official. Charles brought this text back to Francia and his palace scholars worked on it for about fifteen years before it was implemented in 789.Footnote 42

In the 780s Charlemagne concluded that the Rule of St. Benedict was the most excellent guide to monastic life and he asked the pope for a copy of the Rule. Hadrian complied but must have been a bit puzzled because Benedict's Rule had no official standing.Footnote 43 At court, Charlemagne gave the rule to a Visigothic courtier named, ironically, Benedict—his Gothic name was Witiza; he is generally referred to as Benedict of Aniane. Working over at least a decade and maybe two, Benedict assembled about a hundred monastic rules in his Codex Regularum and then read each of the seventy-three chapters of the Rule of St. Benedict against the monastic tradition and produced his Concordia Regularum. Charlemagne and then Louis required all monasteries to adopt the Rule of St. Benedict, and to implement it in the form taught by Benedict of Aniane.Footnote 44

From Pope Stephen's visit to Francia and from Charlemagne's visits to Rome, it became clear that Roman and Frankish worship differed in more than just singing. Accordingly, Charlemagne asked Pope Hadrian for a Gregorian Sacramentary. Hadrian complied and the Franks soon discovered that what was essentially a mass book for Roman stational liturgies was not well suited to the Frankish world. This book was also given to Benedict of Aniane for study and revision. After some years of work, Benedict generated a new sacramentary that in its temporal and sanctoral cycles and in its common and proper prayers was adapted to Frankish usage.Footnote 45 At about the same time, Charles commissioned Paul the Deacon to prepare a new lectionary so that all the churches of the Gauls would have readings “of great excellence.”Footnote 46

With respect to the Dionyso-Hadriana, the Rule of St. Benedict, the Gregorian Sacramentary, and the lectionary, it is important to note a few things. First, even as the Carolingians turned to Rome for authoritative books, they did not hesitate to apply their own scholarly resources to revising those books. Their serene confidence is impressive. Second, uniformity was never achieved in law, monastic practice, or worship. The Dionyso-Hadriana was influential but it nestled alongside several other legal texts and traditions. Not every monastery became Benedictine. Some prominent ones simply refused to comply. It is not clear that the court intended for the revised Gregorian to become the sacramentary in the Frankish world. It may have been viewed as more of a benchmark. Nevertheless, things were pushed in a uniform direction much further than ever before.

The Carolingians are famous for promoting schools and education. Every cathedral and monastery was required to have a school.Footnote 47 Lay boys were not excluded from those schools and we can name some prominent figures who emerged from them—Charlemagne's biographer Einhard, educated at Fulda, is probably the most distinguished example. Some of the exhortation and legislation surrounding the schools is revealing. The preface to the “General Admonition” of 789 says, “Let schools for teaching boys to read be established in every monastery and episcopal residence [and for learning] psalms, musical notation, singing, computation, and grammar. Correct carefully the catholic books because often some desire to pray to God properly but they pray badly because of faulty books. And do not permit your boys to corrupt them in reading or writing. If there is need of writing the Gospel, Psalter, and missal, let men of mature age do the writing with all diligence.”Footnote 48 At about the same time, Charlemagne sent a circular latter to the bishops and abbots of his realm. In promoting education he said, “Those who desire to please God by living rightly should not neglect to please Him by speaking correctly . . . For although correct conduct may be better than knowledge, nevertheless knowledge precedes conduct.” He went on to say that “in the past few years letters were often sent to us from several monasteries in which it was stated that the brethren who dwelt there offered up on our behalf sacred and pious prayers, we have noticed in most of these letters both correct thoughts and uncouth expressions.”Footnote 49 So he urged proper schooling under qualified teachers. Once again, norms.

The Carolingians were not shy about giving advice. Smaragdus of St.-Mihiel, Ermoldus Nigellus, Jonas of Orleans, Hincmar of Reims, and Sedulius Scottus wrote “mirrors for princes,” guidebooks for kings.Footnote 50 Ambrosius Autpert, Paulinus of Aquileia, Alcuin, Dhuoda, Jonas, Hincmar, and Rather of Verona wrote ethical treatises to guide the lives of prominent laymen.Footnote 51 Hrabanus Maurus produced the long Three Books on the Clerical Order, which is a how-to manual for priests.Footnote 52 Amalarius of Metz and Walahfrid Strabo wrote commentaries on the liturgy.Footnote 53 The belief in the necessity to do things the right way extended across a wide range of human endeavor.

On two occasions the Carolingians expended great effort to study the proper use of images in the church. In response to Byzantium's Second Council of Nicaea, which put an end to the first phase of iconoclasm, Charlemagne commissioned Theodulf of Orleans to produce his massive Opus Caroli Regis in the early 790s and the text was discussed at court. In 825, after Louis the Pious learned of renewed iconoclasm, he ordered several scholars to assemble in Paris to look at images once more. Their massive Libellus is an impressive achievement. Whereas Theodulf had said that images were permissible only for decoration and for commemoration, the Paris scholars expanded the list of authorized uses. For example, images could teach the unlettered, provoke worthy sentiments, and affirm the incarnation.Footnote 54

The two discussions of images actually fit into a wider context. The Carolingians encountered a suspicious Christology—Adoptionism—in the Spanish borderlands.Footnote 55 They also, on two or three occasions, learned that their understanding of the procession of the Holy Spirit differed from that of the Byzantines.Footnote 56 In their own realm they were challenged by Godescalc of Orbais and his idea of predestination.Footnote 57 The Carolingians developed a methodology for dealing with these controversies.Footnote 58 They assembled expert opinion. Sometimes experts were called together at court. Sometimes they were directed to meet in a specific place away from the court. Sometimes they were requested to send their considered opinions to the court in the form of treatises. In any case, the opinions were then sifted and an authoritative view was formulated. Once again we see them holding the line—the linea rectitudinis as an eighth-century text put it.

The Carolingians were a society of the baptized. Texts of every kind lay stress on the importance of baptism. Interestingly, when a foreign potentate submitted to Carolingian rule—say the Saxon leader Widukind, or the khan of the Avars, or the Danish King Harald—the sources never neglect to tell us about their baptism. In this regard it is interesting that in 810 Charlemagne wondered about the practice of baptism in his realm. Accordingly, he sent out a circular letter (I have already mentioned his circular letter on education) and asked bishops in particular to report back on the practice of baptism.Footnote 59 Sixty-one replies survive.Footnote 60 This project illustrates the “norm of rectitude” vividly. It also indicates a determined persistence alongside a typically Carolingian desire to understand exactly what it meant to do things right. Already in 789 Charlemagne had demanded that baptism be performed only according to the Roman rite. Since baptism was the badge of belonging in Christendom, the sacrament had to be understood properly and executed correctly.

III. Sanctifying

Third, and finally, sanctifying. The Carolingians tried hard to do everything right with respect to their New Israel so as to make a holy people. Sometimes the church sought to protect people from false saints or bad teaching. Sometimes the church tried to inculcate specific beliefs and behaviors. With only a few exceptions we cannot measure the effects of Carolingian efforts. But I do think that three common approaches are unhelpful and I shall attempt to sketch a fourth. I think Jacque LeGoff's famous idea about clerical and folkloric religion is simply unhelpful because its theoretical elegance is not matched by its explanatory power; there was no single thing that can be called clerical culture and folklore can mean almost anything.Footnote 61 Arnold Angenendt's idea that early medieval religion was archaic, ritualistic, and riddled with magic as compared with the authentic faith and spirituality of the later Middle Ages is pessimistic and clumsily reductionist.Footnote 62 Finally, Valerie Flint's thesis that the church basically split the difference with the pagans and left the world an enchanted place is explicitly contradicted by virtually every Carolingian text that bears on the topic of religion—partly, I think, because she does not lay down sharp enough boundaries between religion and magic.Footnote 63

In anticipation of my further comments, let me offer just a few examples of why I think these three approaches are unhelpful. In 789 Charlemagne legislated that “unknown names of angels are neither to be invented nor pronounced.” Only Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael were to have authority.Footnote 64 In 794 the king forbade the veneration or invocation of new saints or the creation of new shrines for them.Footnote 65 People were to have no truck with letters alleged to have fallen from heaven.Footnote 66 Frankish legislation forbade augury, sorcery, magic, casting lots, weather prophecy—Agobard of Lyon wrote a treatise on this topicFootnote 67—fashioning magical ligatures, or bringing candles to springs and groves.Footnote 68 While some of these practices may have been primordial, it is important to see that the Carolingian church never made bargains with them. All of these practices may have had a ritualistic dimension but ritual does not exhaust their meaning. Some may well be “primitive.” Most of these issues point directly to the assimilation, albeit perhaps to the imperfect assimilation, of Christian and pagan ideas. The situation on the ground was extremely complex and Carolingian leaders combatted, they did not compromise with, whatever they deemed wrong.

Carolingian sources permit some answers to Charlemagne's question about whether or not his people were Christian. I begin with expectations. Numerous sources from the eighth and ninth centuries consistently attest to the requirement that Christians be able to recite the Lord's Prayer and the Creed.Footnote 69 It was the responsibility of godparents to teach their godchildren this prayer and profession. Charlemagne on one occasion was distressed to discover people who could not recite them and he redoubled his efforts.Footnote 70 Records of episcopal visitations provide evidence that people were indeed checked on their ability to recite them. Many manuscripts witness to vernacular versions of the Lord's Prayer and creed and inspire some confidence in their dissemination.Footnote 71 The Pater Noster, moreover, was recited orally by all in the Mass, unlike most parts of the service that were recited silently by the officiant or sung by the clergy.Footnote 72 The creed in question was probably the Apostle's Creed and not the longer, more complicated Nicene version.

In fundamental respects the ability to recite the Pater Noster and Creed provides a base-line answer to Charlemagne's question. But there is more. Charlemagne's famous “General Admonition” of 789 demanded that all be taught that they are to believe “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit to be one God, omnipotent, eternal, invisible, who created heaven and earth, the sea and all things that are in them.” Furthermore, people were to be taught that the Son of God was made flesh by the Holy Spirit, out of Mary, ever virgin, for the salvation and renewal of the human race, and that he suffered, was buried, rose again on the third day, ascended into heaven, and will come again to judge the wicked and the righteous. Thus far, we have only an abbreviated summation of the creed. The text goes on. People were to be taught the sins for which they will be consigned to eternal fire: fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, sorceries, feuds, contentions, jealousies, animosities, wrath, strife, drunkenness, strife, dissensions, heresies, factions, malice, killings, and revellings.Footnote 73 These were indeed serious sins and they all had roots in both scripture and church teachings. Their eradication would also have contributed to social harmony in that the list of sins contains both individual offences and collective ones—feuds, contention, and factions, for example.

Some very interesting corroboration comes from a late eighth-century catechetical text from Bavaria.Footnote 74 A person who wishes to become a Christian should first be asked whether he wishes to do this voluntarily or by compulsion. If involuntarily, he should be taught with sweet and gentle words to pass from the lordship of the devil to that of Christ, from eternal fire to infinite joy. If voluntarily, he must be asked if he wishes only to gain something in his earthly life. He should also be taught about his immortal soul. Then the text turns, as catechetical manuals have done for centuries, to the Decalogue. He should be told that the one God has created him in his own likeness and has given him the law for him to win his salvation. The text then moves somewhat randomly through the Ten Commandments and embellishes them at certain points. For instance, it starts with no idols, kill no man, no adultery, no falsehood, no theft, no fortune telling, no auguries, no going to hills, or trees, or springs, or rivers. Later the text comes to Jesus's teaching to love God and love neighbor. The lists of teachings included in such texts are neither long nor intellectually ambitious. People were not expected to master complex theological issues. It was hoped that they would command the most elementary Christian truths and also behave decently towards one another.

The treatises on virtues and vices to which I referred earlier convey the same kinds of messages. To be sure, those treatises were addressed to noblemen but the same principles can be found in the instructions given by bishops to their clergy and in sermons. The elite used Latin, but language need not have been a fundamental problem. Charlemagne encouraged preaching “in lingua romana aut theotisca”—in French or German, we might say—and his exhortations were repeated later in the ninth century.Footnote 75

The Old Saxon Heliand—The Savior—is a vernacular retelling of the gospel narrative. That text dates from the 830s or so and is contemporary with Otfried von Weissenburg's Evangelienbuch, another vernacular summary of the New Testament. The Old High German Muspilli communicates basic Christian teachings and there are a number of extant prayers in Germanic dialects, notably the so-called “Wessobrun Prayer.”Footnote 76 One cannot say who heard these stories or prayed these prayers but one dare not suppose that no one did. Were they only heard in the halls of the mighty?

Language poses another interesting problem. In the lands north of the Danube and east of the Rhine, Latin was a learned language. It simply cannot have been known by more than a tiny fraction of the population. But west of the Rhine, in Italy, and in northeastern Spain the emerging romance was probably close to the Latin of everyday usage. One of the ironies of the so-called Carolingian Renaissance was that in fixing, in purifying Latin, the scholars separated it from the everyday language of the people, killed it, and turned it into a dead language. But before the linguistic reforms, one suspects, Latin was not a mandarin language but rather the language of everyday life.Footnote 77 One of the interesting features of the ethical manuals of the ninth century is that they consist of relatively lengthy patristic citations introduced and interpreted in contemporary language. These passages are effectively schoolhouse Latin. Andre Wilmart published four prayer books from the middle of the ninth century—and there were many more such books.Footnote 78 The sheer simplicity of the Latin in these prayers is instructive. A prayer on the Holy Trinity may serve as an example:

You are my help, Holy Trinity. Hear me, O hear me, my Lord. For you are my God, living and true. You are my holy father. You are my pious Lord. You are my great king. You are my just judge. You are my one master. You are my fitting support. You are my most powerful healer. You are my loveliest delight. You are my living and true bread. You are a priest forever. You lead me away from this world. You are my true light. You are my holy sweetness. You are my shining wisdom. You are my pure simplicity. You are my Catholic unity. You are my peaceful harmony. You are my entire protection. You are my good portion. You are my eternal salvation. You are my great mercy. You are my sturdiest wisdom, O Savior of the world, you who live and reign for ever an ever. Amen.Footnote 79

This prayer is actually one of the more complex ones in the prayer books. Yet it has only one complex sentence—the last one, which itself echoes the liturgy—and the range of vocabulary is restricted. Such prayers invite reflection on the penetration of the Carolingian program. I would not suggest that any farmer at his plow could recite a prayer like this but I suspect that thousands of political and social elites could have done so.

In his letter to Baugulf of Fulda Charlemagne expressed his hope that all would be “religious in heart, learned in discourse, pure in act, and eloquent in speech.”Footnote 80 That was a tall order. Learning and eloquence were certainly lofty ideals but there is no reason to imagine that those outside the elite were expected to attain them. But what about everyone else?

Through baptismal preparation and preaching most people would have had at least some encounter with the aspirations of society's leaders. Still, anyone who has ever preached, or taught, would be disinclined to equate what was said with what was heard. Counts were expected to announce the contents of the royal capitularies in their court sessions; Carolingian capitularies present about equal measures of secular and religious business. We have substantial testimony to the presence of people of all kinds at these court days.Footnote 81 In principle all free men were required to serve in the army and we know of preaching, praying, fasting, and penance on military campaigns. On several occasions fasting, prayers, and almsgiving were required of everyone before military campaigns and, on at least one occasion, fasts and prayers were demanded to seek divine mercy in a time of famine.Footnote 82 Virtually all churches were painted with historical scenes from the Gospels.Footnote 83 These must have been used in instructing the faithful. Three times Charlemagne required all adult males to swear allegiance to him.Footnote 84 We cannot say how effective this requirement was in practice but it is suggestive of the reach of the mighty.

Unfortunately, this capillary flow of aspiration and information cannot be matched with hard data on the success of the effort.Footnote 85 The sources provide hints, no more. We have no figures for mass attendance or reception of the Eucharist.Footnote 86 There are indications that both may have increased somewhat across the ninth century. Laws forbade servile work and judicial business on Sundays and insisted that priests not neglect their preaching but these laws do not tell us that people went to church.Footnote 87 Legislation constantly addressed sexual morality.Footnote 88 Repeated warnings about abortion and infanticide suggest that these practices were hard to eradicate. At the same time, there is evidence that efforts to make marriage public, monogamous, and durable had some success. Sources of many kinds attest to pilgrimages to healing shrines.Footnote 89 The great might have gone to Rome or to other famous sites but ordinary people seem to have availed themselves of local cult centers. The practice of penance seems to have rooted itself more and more deeply into society.Footnote 90 Three-fourths of all charters to St.-Gall reveal donations “pro salutis anime.”Footnote 91

Healing is an interesting and revealing practice. The large number of medical manuscripts copied in the Carolingian world suggests that scientific medicine as the ancient world understood it continued to be practiced.Footnote 92 But for many people the intercession of the saints was preferable to the ministrations of doctors. And healing could also be accomplished without traveling to a shrine. There exists a large corpus of medical charms in which, interestingly, the Pater Noster played a significant part. This material suggests two things. First, the dissemination of the Lord's prayer and second the Christianization of some aspects of folk medicine.Footnote 93

In sum, Carolingian religion was a force for the unification of the populus Christianus, a guide to right belief and practice, and a means of making the people “religious in heart and pure in act.” Jean Chélini once said, “Carolingian Catholicism assured the social and political order . . . religion invaded all domains of social life.”Footnote 94 Janet Nelson asks whether the Carolingian program of religious teaching and reform “beggars belief.” In fact, she argues, it “depended on belief—in the feasibility of a collective changing of minds and hearts.”Footnote 95

IV. Europeanizing and Romanizing

Charlemagne, his courtiers, and his successors sought to create a kind of Augustinian commonwealth, a city of God.Footnote 96 And that leads me to two concluding remarks that I shall spin out briefly in an attempt to be both suggestive and provocative after reflecting on these subjects for some four decades. Within the long stream of the history of the church, and particularly of its Catholic dimension, the Carolingian era is important for having Europeanized Christianity. To be sure, much was inherited from the ancient, Mediterranean church. By bringing most of Continental western Europe under their aegis, the Carolingians gave to Christianity as an institutional phenomenon and as a lived spiritual reality distinctive and durable characteristics. The alliance of throne and altar is much more a Carolingian than a late antique phenomenon. A tightly articulated territorial church was achieved in the eighth and ninth centuries more effectively than had ever been the case in the ancient world. A cultural expression of Christianity that was a synthesis of biblical, Roman, Germanic, and Celtic elements became visible in art and architecture and in poetry and music was Carolingian. Central to all of this was a faith, a people, and a realm that people for nearly a millennium called “Christendom.”

In the second place, the Carolingian era witnessed the Romanization of European Christianity. Let us recall that the Carolingians turned to Rome for chant masters, for a monastic rule, for canon law, and for a sacramentary. They professed and practiced baptism as the Roman church did. Chrodegang instituted stational liturgies at Metz on the Roman model. Carolingian churches mimicked Roman buildings. The art historian and liturgical scholar Carol Heitz said the Carolingians did things “more Romano.”Footnote 97 Carolingian missionary work was their own initiative, although they sometimes sought papal support. Christopher Dawson's once widely read The Making of Europe Footnote 98 said that in the early Middle Ages Europe was made—we would say “constructed” and use that word in two quite distinct ways—by two processes of Romanization. One came with Rome's legions and a second with papal endeavor. The former contention is only partly right for it was the Carolingians who incorporated and Christianized central Europe, lands Rome never ruled. As for the second contention, Dawson had it backwards. The Romanization of early medieval Europe was a Carolingian project, not a papal one. Peter Brown famously detected a series of microchristendoms extending across the lands that would become historical Europe.Footnote 99 Each of these believed itself to be the unique bearer of an ancient and authentic Christianity. It was the Carolingians, not the popes, who gathered those microchristendoms into one large and meaningful whole. Put a little differently, the Carolingians laid the foundations, established the preconditions, on which later papal leadership would be based. I suggest that Roman Catholicism was in surprising ways a Carolingian creation.

References

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85 The best assessments are Chélini, Jean, L'aube du moyen age: Naissance de la Chrétienté occidentale (Paris: Picard, 1991)Google Scholar and Julia M. H. Smith, “Religion and Lay Society,” in McKitterick, ed., The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 2, pp. 654–678.

86 Legislation required both, e.g.: Duplex legationis edictum, c. 25, MGH, Capitularia regum Francorum, ed. Boretius, p. 64; Concilium Cabillonense (813), c. 47, MGH, Concilia Aevi Karolini, ed. Werminghoff, vol. 1, p. 283.

87 Admonitio Generalis, c. 81, MGH, Capitularia regum Francorum, ed. Boretius, no. 22, p. 61; Concilium Arelatense, cc. 10, 16, Concilium Moguntinense, c. 37, Concilium Remense, c. 35, Concilium Turonense, c. 40, MGH, Concilia Aevi Karolini, ed. Werminghoff, vol. 1, pp. 251–252, 270, 256, 292.

88 Chélini, L'aube du moyen age, 133–237.

89 Albert, Bat-Sheva, Le pèlerinage à l'époque carolingienne (Brussels: Nauwelaerts, 1999).Google Scholar

90 Meens, Rob, Penance in Medieval Europe 600–1200 (New York: Cambridge University, 2014), 101–139.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

91 Smith, “Religion and Lay Society,” 668.

92 John J. Contreni, “Masters and Medicine in Northern France in the Reign of Charles the Bald,” in Charles the Bald, 33–50.

93 Ristuccia, “The Transmission of Christendom,” 396–414.

94 L'aube du moyen age, 496.

95 “Religion in the Age of Charlemagne,” 506. Mayr-Harting's “Charlemagne's Religion” aligns with Nelson.

96 The fundamental work remains Arquillière, Henri-Xavier, L'augustinisme politique, 2nd ed. (Paris: J. Vrin, 1955).Google Scholar

97 Heitz, Carol, L'architecture religieuse carolingienne: les forms et leurs fonctions (Paris: J. Vrin, 1980).Google Scholar

98 Dawson, Christopher, The Making of Europe: An Introduction to the History of European Unity (London: Sheed and Ward, 1932)Google Scholar and many subsequent editions; the book is still in print.

99 Brown, Peter, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200–1000, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University, 2003).Google Scholar