Be a Perfect Man. Andrew J. Romig
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grounds for new social rules, spaces constructed specifically to allow “true” and literal New Testament ethics to be performed freely.41
The rule that the Carolingians would adopt and propose as the standard for all monastic life was the Rule of St. Benedict (d. 547), compiled originally for his abbey at Monte Cassino.42 According to this rule, a true monk is humble in all action. He “turns the other cheek” and patiently endures all injuries without retaliation.43 Benedict’s Rule orders monks to follow the commandments of the Lord: to refrain from murder, adultery, and theft.44 A brother ought to live by the Golden Rule.45 Furthermore, he ought not indulge his anger or seek revenge; he ought not return evil for evil and instead love his enemies.46 He ought to hate no one nor be contentious; he ought to pray for his enemies, treat them with misericordia, and make peace with them without delay.47
This rule makes clear that true Christianity is rooted in caritas but, importantly, that this Christianity can only exist within the “workshop” of the monastery.48 Caritas guides the abbot in the fair and just discipline of his fellow monks.49 It affords him the capacity to care for wayward brothers with compassion and without despair.50 Caritas is the final destination of the monk’s twelve steps of humility.51 Caritas is the product of the brothers’ mutual service within the community.52 It is the foundation of a brother’s obedience.53 And it is the binding affect that all brothers are to show toward each other, toward their abbot, and even toward visitors.54
The notion that true Christian discipleship might require escape from the world became an issue of fervent debate. For Christians who wished to command the authority of God and yet still serve society itself as its leaders, New Testament moral extremes posed real and significant difficulties. An act of misericordia could indeed turn into an act of harm toward innocent Christians; forgiving a murderer his crimes could place a society of men and women who now self-identified as Christian in danger of discord. And in what were increasingly unstable political times, Christian soldiers had to reconcile their devotion with their duty to fight and to kill; Christian leaders had to reconcile their commitment to misericordia with their duty to protect. Martin’s solution of pacifism could not serve as a practical solution for all.55
Augustine is yet again a key theological source. In his letter against Faustus the Manichean, which likely dates from around the year 410 CE, Augustine refutes a heterodoxy with which he himself had identified as a young man.56 It is a document best known to the modern world for its articulation of Christian “just war” theory, which sanctioned certain kinds of violence in the service of God and the protection of Christian society.57 The letter is important for the purposes of this discussion, however, because Augustine founded his arguments for just war upon a principle of interiorized and thus metaphoric New Testament morality. This would endure as a central component of Christian secular male ideology for the remainder of the Middle Ages.
We only know Faustus’s arguments, which had likely been written some decades earlier, from their rearticulation by Augustine in the letter itself. Part of Faustus’s challenge seems clearly to have involved exposing the inconsistencies between the moral precepts of God as described in the Old Testament and the ethical demands of Jesus in the New Testament. Why, Faustus had asked, does the Old Testament praise the patriarchs as righteous men when they marry multiple wives, a clear ingression against the New Testament? Why do Moses and the Israelites wage war and kill when the New Testament calls for unmitigated love of neighbor, stranger, and even enemy? How can a Christian Rome wage war against its enemies and protect its citizens when the New Testament advocates nonviolence and nonresistance?
Augustine’s response had profound implications for the later Christian cultures that drew directly from his teachings. He proposed, revealing the Platonic influences within his theology, that the morality described in the New Testament refers in fact to ideal forms that can only exist completely in the Kingdom of Heaven. Here on earth, form must vary in accordance with need. Sometimes moral righteousness requires a passivity and attitude of nonresistance that closely resembles the letter of the New Testament ideal; at other times, it requires ferocity and force. The reason that these forms can seem opposite and confusing to humans is because the nature of earthly life renders the human mind imperfectly able to discern between the moral “rightness” and “wrongness” of specific actions. Moral action on earth is always subordinate to its required end, according to Augustine, and humans simply cannot always see that end.
Augustine grounded his arguments against Faustus in repeated assertions that God is and can only be a purely benevolent power. Thus, while the Old Testament might describe, for example, God’s jealousy when the Israelites worship the Golden Calf, God’s anger when humans transgress his command, or God’s vengeance when he wreaks havoc upon the enemies of Israel, Augustine claimed that these are not emotionally negative responses. They are evidence of God’s “quiet goodness” (tranquilla bonitas) in desiring to protect souls from corruption and exploitation through the service of false gods. God does not kill in retribution for offenses inflicted upon him, Augustine wrote. God kills so that the world may benefit from fear of him and act rightly because of it. He punishes both sinners and the righteous for the purpose of perfecting both, based upon what he deems necessary for a given soul to achieve the Kingdom of Heaven in the end.58
This is, Augustine admits freely in making his argument, difficult at best for humans to comprehend. Humans live, according to Augustine’s philosophy, in a continual state of confusion about morality and moral behavior. God’s reality (true reality) and human comprehension of that reality are fundamentally disconnected. The virtues of great minds, Augustine explains, can resemble quite closely the vices of lesser ones “in appearance, but not in reality” (nonnulla specie, sed nulla aequitatis comparatione). Those who condemn the Old Testament prophets as adulterers, he wrote, or who deem Christ a simpleton when, for example, he looks to a tree for fruit out of season, simply fail to comprehend these actions from the proper perspective. For Augustine, this sort of logic was akin to the criticism of schoolchildren who correct their classmates according to the letter, rather than the spirit, of the teacher’s rules.59
Human confusion over the actual form of right moral behavior on earth is a function of sin itself. Yet importantly, sins are not a fixed set of actions deemed “wrong” by God, says Augustine, nor are virtues a fixed set of actions deemed “right.” Sins are rather those acts, words, or even desires that fail to preserve the natural order of things as divinely set forth. In humans, Augustine continues, this is a natural order by which reason controls the soul, which in turn controls the body. Reason, furthermore, is divided into contemplation and action, of which contemplation is the superior element. The object of contemplation, says Augustine, is God himself.60 And there is a further complication: on earth, humans are unable to see God. They must rely on their faith for the image of God to appear to them in contemplation; only in the afterlife can humans once again see God as he truly is. The natural order according to Augustine’s argument against Faustus, therefore, was rational action controlled by contemplation of God, which on earth was exercised through faith. And faith, in the end, for Augustine, was a function of love. Humans live righteously when they live, he wrote, “by the genuine faith that works through love” (ex fide non ficta, quae per dilectionem operatur).61
For Augustine, therefore, a man whose faith in God drove his actions was able to restrain all mortal desires within their natural limit—that is to say, he was able to prioritize higher order before the lower. To sin was to indulge in a lower part of the human order at the expense of the higher—to indulge the body at the expense of the soul, for example, or to indulge the soul at the expense of reason. Augustine was careful not to suggest that humans should completely ignore their bodies, for he was uncomfortable with any notion other than that God had created humans to be living, breathing creatures with flesh and desires.62 To indulge the body could never be sinful in and of itself. It was only sinful when this indulgence was directed toward ends beyond the invigoration of the individual or species. Sin occurred only when the desires of the body controlled reason and pushed behavior past the norms of temperance.63
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