Be a Perfect Man. Andrew J. Romig
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been lifted up, he raises toward the spiritual, he turns the eye of his heart toward the haunts of the infirm. In contemplation he transcends heaven, and yet in his concern he does not forsake the carnal bed, because he is joined simultaneously to the highest and the lowest by the bond of caritas. By the strength of spirit within him he is vigorously snatched into the heights above, and by his pietas for others he is calmly rendered weak.74
The passage exquisitely encapsulates the ideology of worldly Christian authority that the Carolingians would adopt and transform for their own use. For Gregory, caritas is not simply “love” or “charity”; it is the very connective tissue that joins the human to both the spiritual and the material realms. Pietas is not “piety” or “pity”; it is the happy burden that anchors a human being to the earth and reminds him of his essential frailties. Caritas and pietas become metaphoric tethers in Gregory’s world—bonds that moor the elite Christian within a liminal space between worlds, rendering him simultaneously high and low, betwixt and between, and able to converse with both.
The Christian pastor had to dwell, to use another modern metaphor, on both sides of the fence that separated humanity from the Kingdom of Heaven. He had to occupy both the extreme and the center in order to do his work. Since worldly life could corrupt the soul, he needed to avoid excessive contact with it. To govern souls properly, he had to return periodically to cloistered space in order to cleanse himself of the poisons inescapably acquired through worldly leadership. He had to meditate daily on the precepts of scripture “so that the words of divine admonition might restore in him the power of solicitude and of provident circumspection toward celestial life, which the frequent enjoyment of a human way of life ceaselessly destroys.”75 Gregory states that a good pastor must take great care because in hearing the temptations and trials of others, he also opens his own mind to attack by these same temptations. “The same bathwater,” he says, “in which a multitude of people are washed is without doubt polluted itself, for while it takes on the filth of those bathing in it, it loses, as it were, the serenity of its cleanliness.”76 But this ought not deter a good pastor, for under God, “who nicely balances all things” (subtiliter cuncta pensante), the pastor is rescued from temptation by his misericordia (again, used in the Augustinian sense) for the temptation of others.77
It was a positioning of body and mind that mirrored precisely the higher knowledge that the pastor had to employ as part of his duties in saving souls. Gregory devotes the entire third book of the four that compose the Regulae pastoralis liber to pragmatic guidelines for the exhortation of the flock. As teacher (doctor), the pastor “ought to touch the hearts of his hearers out of one doctrine, but not one and the same exhortation, so that he might edify all in the one virtue of caritas”—that is, he must act with the inward disposition of New Testament love that Augustine discussed, but the form of his action must vary according to need.78 “One and the same exhortation is not good for all,” says Gregory; “for often what benefits some impedes others, because the herbs that might nourish one animal will kill another, and the gentle whistling that quiets horses can excite small dogs, and the medicine which cures one disease gives strength to another, and the bread that nourishes the fully-grown will kill infants.”79
This third book of the Regulae pastoralis liber works as a self-contained tutorial for helping the pastor understand the correct application of caritas for the benefit of the souls within his care. There is a difference between the love that he should show to the poor and the love that he should show to the rich; there is a difference between the love that he should show toward the joyful and toward the sad, toward subjects and prelates, servants and masters, the wise and the unlearned, the impudent and the bashful, those who are patient and those who are impatient, those who are whole in body and those who are infirm, even between the married and the unmarried.80 A pastor must study these differences carefully and learn them by heart so that he may best apply his art to the minds of his listeners. He is, suggests Gregory, a bit like the masterful musician who, through skill and practice, learns to pluck the different strings of the lyre with the proper force and technique and in the proper rhythm and order, so that they might create a harmonious tune.81
Indeed, the Liber demonstrates quite clearly that a pastor’s capacity as an arbiter of caritas derives not from special innate capacity but from assiduous study. It is his knowledge and higher comprehension of worldly physics, not mystical power, that separates him from his flock. Gregory was suggesting far more than the traditional compromise between the ancient ideals of the vita contemplativa and vita activa.82 He was articulating a new ideology of worldly Christian power and authority that linked ascetic principles with the capacity to bond and to connect on an emotional level with other human beings. His guiding metaphors were spatial: the elite Christian male danced a blurry line between worlds. He transcended the life of average folk in the same manner that the life of the shepherd transcends that of the sheep. And yet, he still had to remember his essential sameness with the rest of humanity. He lived in orbit around the world at the thin atmospheric edge of society—bound within its gravity but able to see and sometimes even to touch the heavenly stars above.
Conclusion
Gregory’s ideal of Christian discipleship developed from two key but somewhat paradoxical aspects of caritas: its association with ascetic world denial and its conceptualization as the very source of worldly authority. In trying to determine a compromise between its centripetal and centrifugal forces, the middle ground that Gregory proposed—a state of earthly power combined with partial, interiorized asceticism—would become the standard ideal of worldly Christian masculinity. It was an ideal that Christian writers of the seventh and eighth centuries directed especially toward the episcopal and priestly leaders of Christian spiritual communities. And the Christian professional elite closely guarded their power to arbitrate caritas’s proper form as their primary role and function in society.
Importantly, however, Gregory’s ideology of Christian power and authority could theoretically be applicable to anyone who wished to follow its tenets. At its heart was the notion that caritas was the essential “glue” that cohered all of Christian society together into a singular, unified whole. Through caritas, all men could potentially perform asceticism inwardly as part of their worldly life. Gregory was adamant that, even though the world greatly reduced the ability of those within its bounds to comprehend love’s many forms, caritas was never beyond the grasp of the average Christian. Writers of the seventh and eighth centuries would carry on this tradition. An eighth-century commentator on the Gospel of Matthew, for example, wrote that those who thought that the command to love one’s enemy was impossible to achieve were wrong. Old Testament precedent proved it, for David was able to love Saul even after their friendship had deteriorated into bitter enmity, and Saint Stephen prayed for his persecutors even as he martyred himself at their hands.83 It was simply that the forms that caritas could take in worldly space were myriad and unfixed. What might be the right act in one situation was wrong in the next. And without an education in the “science” of caritas, there was simply no way to tell.
Cultivating caritas became a matter of nurturing a correct alignment of the inner will through outward forms of bodily world denial—forms that were not ends unto themselves but rather catalysts that helped the human mind to break free from the obfuscation that the world imposed upon it. Penitential discipline became based on the idea that certain ascetic acts could cleanse the soul of wrongdoing—acts that quieted the carnal urges of the human body and allowed the spiritual will to take better control.84 The related custom in Merovingian and Carolingian culture of imprisoning aristocratic criminals in monastic spaces did not derive simply from the fact that monasteries had walls.85 Walls could be breached. It was rather an act that placed the body of the criminal, whose sins were the result of a carnal will too strong, into a specialized space where, it must have been hoped, even the most recalcitrant wrongdoer might have a chance for rehabilitation—where the criminal might see God’s will more clearly and learn to follow right behavior.86
Fundamentally, therefore, while the bishops and priests in the sixth and seventh centuries imagined the arbitration and teaching of caritas’s proper