SOURCE: Chase, Colin. “Alcuin's Grammar Verse: Poetry and Truth in Carolingian Pedagogy.” In Insular Latin Studies, edited by Michael W. Herren, pp. 135-52. Toronto, Canada: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1981.

[In the following essay, Chase takes other scholars to task for projecting their own attitudes and interests onto those of Alcuin.]

In recent years, a marked tendency towards deductive analysis has characterized Alcuinian studies. The purpose of the deduction has been to abstract from Alcuin's work a systematic treatment of areas of human thought which he dealt with only implicitly or casually. Thus, in 1959, Luitpold Wallach in Alcuin and Charlemagne¹ outlined a political philosophy based on his analysis of the Dialogus de Rhetorica et Virtutibus, though Alcuin purported to be treating only the subject implied by his title, that is, the essential nature and manner of acquisition of the art of rhetoric and the four cardinal virtues. Again, in 1965, Wolfgang Edelstein in Eruditio und Sapientia concentrated on the letters in order to deduce a sociology for Alcuin and his period.² Finally, in 1978, W. F. Bolton in Alcuin and Beowulf compiled references, drawn from the whole corpus, but principally from the exegetical commentary, the didascalia, and the polemical writing, to construct a theory of literary criticism according to which Alcuin might have read Beowulf.³

The deductive character of these investigations does not invalidate them. Although Edelstein's methodology would have been foreign to Alcuin or anybody of his time, in my opinion, the conclusions drawn are thoroughly consonant with the period, for the author carefully and consistently distinguishes between attitudes implicit in his analytic method and attitudes which might conceivably have belonged to the Carolingians themselves. Thus, there is no implication in Edelstein's study that Charlemagne and his court would have been any more interested than the Hatfields and the McCoys in the excitements of sociological analysis.

The same, regrettably, cannot be said for the others: the very statement that Alcuin had a political theory or a theory of literary criticism which might be applied to secular vernacular verse involves presuppositions respecting the uses of power and the enjoyment of beauty in Carolingian Europe which I suspect are largely anachronistic. The process of deductive analysis, in these instances, devolves into a search for hints and fragments to satisfy the intellectual curiosities of our own time and not to discover Alcuin's.

For the literary scholar this turn of events is alarming. When the solid sober Wissenschaft of our more learned cousins in history and the social sciences becomes tinged with this kind of subjectivity, what is to become of us? “If they do these things in the green wood, what will they do in the dry?” For many years now, we in literature have existed comfortably enough with an approach to Alcuin's poetry which, if not wholly modern, is at least Victorian in outline. We have anthologized, translated, and commented frequently upon four poems: the “Farewell to His Cell,” the “Elegy for a Nightingale,” the “Debate Between Winter and Spring,” and the “Epitaph,” despite a nagging doubt that the first (possibly), the third (probably), and the last, (given the circumstances), are likely not to have been written by Alcuin at all.⁴ Beyond these four, we generally acknowledge the importance of the poem on the church at York—particularly with reference to its list of authors represented in the library there—, the versified life of Willibrord, and the poem on the destruction of Lindisfarne, not because they are to be admired as literature, but because they relate to Alcuin's biography, to the intellectual life of the times, to its missionary activity, and to the history of the Viking invasions.⁵ Such reasons are excellent, but they do not put us in touch with Alcuin's sense of what he was about in the composition of poetry. Such reasons also explain why we more often know about these poems than read them.

But even when we discuss the poems we read and reread, there is an inescapable impression that we read them with concerns and preoccupations more appropriate to our modern than their medieval setting. For example, Peter Dale Scott in an article of 1964 entitled “Alcuin as a Poet: Rhetoric and Belief in his Latin verse,”applies a subtle intellect and a sensitive ear to appreciating principally the “Farewell to His Cell” and the “Elegy for a Nightingale.”⁶ Beginning with the hypothesis that at given periods in history style becomes fixed and ceases to express interior attitudes, Scott goes on to describe the character of his interest in Alcuin's poetry:

To harmonize our inner and outer habitations, a readjustment of rhetoric and belief is called for. This occurred, for example, during the Romantic Revival, and many have called for it in our time. I propose to study Alcuin, not just as a poet in his own right, but as an example of such a readjustment. In his age as in our own, language, the great conservative medium of a culture (in which all is convention and only the habitual survives) had become a problematic and challenging link with a largely alienated past.⁷

The comparison is tempting. Just as Wordsworth in the preface to the second (1800) edition of The Lyrical Ballads had called for a return to “the very language of men” and for greater freedom and simplicity in poetic language, Alcuin demonstrably wrote poetry in which he “effectively censored out the rhetorical overworking, the penchant for the antheron plasma or flowery style” which characterized so much of the poetry in the tradition he inherited.⁸ The comparison, as I say, is tempting, until one recollects the basic facts of Alcuin's linguistic context. Alcuin wrote Latin verse. During his life he lived successively at York, Aachen, and Tours, where “the language of men” was Old English, Frankish, and an Italic dialect no longer recognizable as Latin. In fact, less than a decade after Alcuin's death at Tours, a council meeting at that place decreed that bishops were to translate their homilies into rustica Romana lingua or into Germanic so they could be understood.⁹ In such an historical and linguistic context, the comparison with England of the Romantic Revival becomes equivocal, for while the romantics were declaring their independence of both tradition and the classroom, Alcuin's clarity and simplicity were part of a re-emphasis on both the tradition of Donatus and Priscian and the necessity for constant academic exercise to master the universal language of western Europe and the church. There is much that is valuable in Scott's article, but much of that value is vitiated by the presumption that Alcuin's attitude towards rhetorical tradition was something like Wordsworth's.

Such a romantic stance—that poetry defines itself through opposition to the traditions and culture of its own society—influences not only the poems we select to read and the way we describe their historical context but also the way we understand those poems. Myra Uhlfelder's 1975 article on the Farewell to His Cell is a good example.¹⁰ In this description of the poem's strategy, the poet “is led astray by the gloomy thoughts and feelings induced by preoccupation with this world, until his very excess and intensity—his explcit rejection of belief in stability and permanent values—appear to shock him into renewed awareness and affirmation of his Christian faith. Finding himself, he returns to the Way and the Life.”¹¹ In this reading, the poet's absorption with the vanity and evanescence of life represents a kind of nihilism, expressed most completely in the couplet:

Nil manet aeternum, nihil immutabile vere est
Obscurat sacrum nox tenebrosa diem.

(25-26)

This gives way finally to a reaffirmation of faith in God, “Pectore quem pariter toto laudemus, amemus,” not by a linear extension of the process of reflection, but by a reversal stimulated by the sudden realization that he has wandered so far from the paths of faith. This is much like Keats' realization in the famous nightingale ode, where—enchanted and “half in love with easeful Death” from listening to the bird's song—the poet is similarly recalled by a sudden thought:

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.

(71-4)

In both Keats' ode and in Myra Uhlfelder's interpretation of the “Versus ad Cellam,” poetry is an inevitable tension with the traditional values of culture. It is a siren sound, inviting the poet to a thrilling but potentially dangerous encounter with mysterious and irrational forces. This interpretation expresses clearly and forcefully the sort of value our generation has looked for in its verse. Such values are, in my view, wholly contrary not only to the ordinary attitudes of the time, but also to Alcuin's explicitly enunciated goals and aspirations. The identification of some of those central, controlling aspirations is a primary objective of this paper.

My premise, then, is that we can better understand not only the mind of Alcuin but also any given product of that mind if we begin by examining work more closely related to his central preoccupations than to ours. The verse associated with his lifelong commitment to pedagogy provides a convenient expression of these preoccupations, though this verse has to be clarified with reference to the pedagogical prose works of which they are frequently a part. To call this verse “grammar poetry” may seem perverse, but the expression is an attempt to avoid distortion by using his concept rather than ours, for in Alcuin's day the classical notion that grammatici were poetarum interpretes or explanatores was still current.¹² At the same time, grammar had some of the association with the fundamentals of education it still has, without the restrictive, pejorative connotation deriving from its later status as the first and lowest of the arts of the trivium, a word which does not appear for more than a century after Alcuin's day. In his time, while grammatica was considered the first of the seven liberal arts,¹³ its cultivation was not limited to any one phase of education, but provided the basic methodology for all of them. Thus, knowledge was considered to consist in natural, moral, and rational science, called respectively Physica, including the arts later called the quadrivium; Ethica, including the four cardinal virtues; and Logica, or rational science, including rhetoric and dialectic but not grammar, for grammar was held to be a constituent element of all the sciences. Hence, the term “grammar poetry,” which implies both the interpretation of poetry and the investigation of first principles.¹⁴

While this overview gives an accurate notion of the way the Carolingians conceived the different branches of learning to be related, in practical terms, most of the time was apparently spent in the last-mentioned branch, Logica, or rational science. Furthermore, this was accomplished at the same time as the arts of liturgical singing and calligraphy were being pursued, so that students would be sent off in groups to the chantry, the scriptorium, or to a lectio master, who—as I understand it—would drill them in the progressive acquisition of the liberal arts.¹⁵ The poetry I am looking at relates to these day-to-day practical and pedagogical activites at which Alcuin spent his life.

A convenient example is offered by the first two lines of the versified prologue to Alcuin's De Dialectica:

Me lege, qui veterum cupias cognoscere sensus,
Me quicunque capit, rusticitate caret.(16)

“The one that understands me is without … what? Rusticity?” Today, that might not seem a very inviting promise. A book promising to relieve its readers of rustic charm does not promise much. For Alcuin, however, rustici, or people from the rus, inhabit the same semantic category as pagani, or people from the pagus or country, or in his native Old English the haethen or “health-dwellers”—all of them living in darkness, all of them a little suspect and somewhat alien for reasons strikingly similar to those for which, by contrast, the early nineteenth century began to find country people and country places so charming: that is, because both the people and the places seemed very much as nature had made them. Isidore of Seville explains, “Gentiles are so named because they remain just as they were geniti,” which for him meant “just as in the flesh they have descended under the power of sin, serving idols and not yet regenerati.”¹⁷ The process of education was seen, then, as a process by which man in his natural state, rudis and indoctus, is brought to eruditio and doctrina. It was parallel to and partly identified with the process which brought the unbaptized to a rebirth in Christ. How different is this attitude to education from that implied in Wordsworth's “Immortality Ode,” in which the uninstructed child is addressed as “Best Philosopher …

Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest
Which we are toiling all our lives to find

(110,114-16)

The contrast is not random or fortuitous. Dominated by a post-romantic sense of the function of poetry, we have chosen to read those poems of Alcuin which concern nature, natural scenery, and the relations between man and nature. We have, moreover, brought to them a post-industrialized preoccupation with the alienation of man from his natural surroundings. In both instances we have inevitably distorted Alcuin's meaning. For him, rusticitas was never a positive word.¹⁸

Some sense of the major concerns which do appear to have occupied Alcuin can be gained by a brief look at the short poem he appended to his Dialogus de Rhetorica et Virtutibus. The poem suggests what Alcuin feels to be among the chief difficulties and the chief rewards of a life of study:

O vos, est aetas, iuvenes, quibus apta legendo,
Discite: eunt anni more fluentis aquae.
Atque dies dociles vacuis ne perdite rebus:
Nec redit unda fluens, nec redit hora ruens.
Floreat in studiis virtutum prima iuventus,
Fulgeat ut magno laudis honore senex,
Utere, quisque legas librum, felicibus annis,
Auctorisque memor dic: “miserere deus.”
Si nostram, lector, festucam tollere quaeris,
Robora de proprio lumine tolle prius:
Disce tuas, iuvenis, ut agat facundia causas,
Ut sis defensor, cura, salusque tuis.
Disce, precor, iuvenis, motus moresque venustos,
Laudetur toto ut nomen in orbe tuum.(19)

A persistent concern apparent in this poem, as in many of Alcuin's is the swift passage of time. The fourth line, based on a couplet of Ovid's, is a favourite of Alcuin's, appearing again and again in his verse.²⁰ In the verses written apparently to dedicate the walls of a chantry, he makes a plea much like that just quoted:

Instruat in studiis iuvenum bona tempora doctor,
Nam fugiunt anni more fluentis aquae.(21)

or again in the verses added to his commentary on Ecclesiastes, he laments:

Omnia fluxa fluunt saeclorum gaudia longe
Nec redeunt iterum more fluentis aquae.(22)

This preoccupation with the swift passage of time and with the mutability of human joy is not surprising in a man of this period, and certainly not in an Englishman, the poetry of whose native land is so filled with similar concern. What is, perhaps, a little disconcerting is his insistence on the topic in this particular context. His educational poems, the “grammar poetry” of my title, return to the theme with even greater regularity than the broad range of his verse. Why?

The answer, I believe, is to be found in the central passage of Alcuin's dialogue-introduction to his De Grammatica, in which master and student seek an answer to the age-old question: “What is true happiness?” and, “What is true wisdom?” As the dialogue proceeds, familiar ground is covered. True happiness cannot consist in anything exterior, for these cannot be securely possessed. Nor can it consist in any delight of mine which depends on such things. “Quid pulchrius luce?” says the master: “et haec tenebris succedentibus obfuscatur. Quid floribus venustius aestatis? qui tamen hiemalibus frigoribus pereunt. Quid salute corporis suavius? et quis hanc perpetuam habere confidit? … Si coelum terraque suis semper vicissitudinibus mutantur … quanto magis cujuslibet rei specialis delectatio transitoria esse necesse est?”²³ As the dialogue proceeds, it become clear that the one possession which one may keep despite external circumstances is sapientia. Here is the root of true happiness, for this is not subject to the same laws of change and decay as other things. At this point the dialogue begins to take a new turn, for the question of the soul's immortality is raised. To the question as to whether the soul's wisdom endures along with the soul, the master answers, “Is it not unreasonable that the soul should endure without that which makes it beautiful and worthy? Therefore it appears that both are everlasting.”²⁴

At this point the student begins to question his master about the acquisition of this wisdom, which is both perfect guarantor of happiness and not subject to change. In response, the master quotes from the Book of Proverbs: “Wisdom built herself a house; she fashioned seven columns,”²⁵ and goes on: “Quae sententia licet ad divinam pertineat Sapientiam, quae sibi in utero virginali domum, id est corpus, aedificavit, hanc et septem donis sancti Spiritus confirmavit: vel Ecclesiam, quae est domus Dei, eisdem donis illuminavit; tamen Sapientia liberalium litterarum septem columnis confirmatur; nec aliter ad perfectam quemlibet deducit scientiam, nisi his septem columnis vel etiam gradibus exaltetur”.²⁶

Thus, in Alcuin's pedagogy, the perception that time's swift chariot carries all before it does not represent a temptation to despair nor a statement of the meaninglessness of existence but the rational principle and motive for the attainment of learning. As we have seen, Alcuin identifies progress through academic learning as a necessary condition for attaining wisdom; at the same time, such wisdom is also identified with the state of the blessed soul after death. The conclusion to be drawn is not that Alcuin had devised a sort of academic Pelagianism (his doctrine of grace was sufficiently Augustinian to protect him from that), but rather that, in his time, scholarship and ultimate truth were more closely and optimistically identified with one another than they have often been since, and, perhaps more important, that reflection on the fickle quality of human happiness in more likely to be evidence of faith than despair in Alcuin.

In the context of the poem we were considering, the references to the passage of time fulfil the same kind of function that the thoughts of earthly mutability do in the preface to the De Grammatica, that is, they are a spur to activity and a warning against wasteful idleness:

Atque dies dociles vacuis ne perdite rebus:
Nec redit unda fluens, nec redit hora ruens.(27)

The difference is that the poem is not as explicitly concerned with the soul's eternal destiny as with praise and honour in a man's later years. The two were not unconditionally compatible with one another: in the preface to the De Grammatica, the master tells his student: “Est equidem facile viam vobis demonstrare sapientiae, si eam tantummodo propter Deum, propter puritatem animae, propter veritatem cognoscendam, etiam et propter seipsam diligatis; et non propter humanam laudem, vel honores saeculi, vel etiam divitiarum fallaces voluptates.”²⁸ At the same time, the two were not wholly antithetical. In this poem, Alcuin both asks for prayers for his own soul, “Auctorisque memor dic: ‘Miserere deus,’” and at the same time twice recommends the praise of men, first as the reward of a wise old age, then as the natural result of virtue learned in youth. Alcuin did not see any obvious contradiction between a serious Christian commitment and a reasonable respect for the opinion of men. In the concluding section of the preface to the De Grammatica he notes, after naming the seven liberal arts, that with their help the philosophers became more famous than kings,²⁹ and in an epigram ascribed to him he comments on the immortality of poets:

Vivere post mortem vates vis nosse viator?
Quod legis ecce loquor, vox tua nempe mea est.(30)

To me, this epigram expresses a beautiful balance between the human attraction and the ultimate fragility of earthly fame.

The references in this couplet to man as pilgraim or wayfarer points to the imaginative nucleus about which much of Alcuin's thought revolved. To him and to his contemporaries this world was seen, not only as a “faire that passeth soone as floures faire” but also as a journey home from exile, the direction and milestones for which were plotted by application to the study principally of the first three of the liberal arts, of scripture, and the fathers. These things ensured that the one thing necessary, ultimate understanding and eternal happiness, would be salvaged from the all-consuming power of time.

But to accomplish this one needs texts. Exposure to the word, both sacred and secular, would ensure the journey could be accomplished, but who was to guarantee that the word itself would survive the Heraclitean fire unscorched by time and unobscured by human ignorance or perversity? An anxious concern that man's ultimate happiness depends on such fragile, corruptible things as a good knowledge of syntax, clear articulation, a good pen, and dark ink goes far towards explaining the nagging, querulous note that whines through so many of Alcuin's letters and epistolary poems: “Whatever you may think of this page, keep it as a witness to my advice, and as often as you peruse it, recognize me speaking in your heart”; “hear the lector, not the harpist at your priestly banquet”; “have a better copy made of my letter to journey with you, to stay with you, and to speak to you in place of my paternal voice.”³¹ To the careless post-Merovingians of the 780's, Alcuin must have appeared the fussiest of curmudgeons and a champion pedant.

Something of this note can be heard in the last of the “grammar poems” to be examined. These are lines composed to adorn the walls of the scriptorium:

Hic sedeant sacrae scribentes famina legis,
Nec non sanctorum dicta sacrata patrum;
Hic interserere caveant sua frivola verbis,
Frivola nec propter erret et ipsa manus,
Correctosque sibi quaerant studiose libellos,
Tramite quo recto penna volantis eat.
Per cola distinguant proprios et commata sensus,
Et punctos ponant ordine quosque suo,
Ne vel falsa legat, taceat vel forte repente
Ante pios fratres lector in ecclesia.
Est opus egregium sacros iam scribere libros,
Nec mercede sua scriptor et ipse caret.
Fodere quam vites melius est scribere libros,
Ille suo ventri serviet, iste animae.
Vel nova vel vetera poterit proferre magister
Plurima, quisque legit dicta sacrata patrum.(32)

The last couplet is a reference to Matthew's text: “Every scribe learned in the kingdom of heaven is like the householder who brings forth from his treasure things both new and old.”³³ Just as the study of grammar and the liberal arts is the necessary condition for the attainment of wisdom and lasting happiness, so the activity of the scribe is the necessary condition for study of any kind. Without the results of his demanding labour, the word becomes garbled, illegible, or unpronounceable; the reader becomes confused and either misreads or falls into silence; and the soul lacks its proper food.

During the years that Alcuin was at Aachen and Tours, there were constant pressures both in his individual life and in the atmosphere of life at Charles' court which served to give added emphasis to the importance of clarity and functional intelligibility in communication at every level, from the simplest calligraphic exercise to the most sophisticated theological analysis, for to Alcuin and his time there was an unavoidable connection between word and Word. The pressure which demanded the most time and energy for Alcuin was that generated by the Adoptionist controversy, which not only engaged him in a long and complex correspondence with Felix and Elipandus, the chief proponents of Adoptionism, but also elicited his most sustained theological effort: seven books against the arguments of Felix and four against those of Elipandus, occupying nearly two hundred columns in Migne's reprint.³⁴ While Alcuin certainly engaged the central theological issues in these works, in many ways Felix's difficulties appeared to him to derive from a faulty grasp of grammar. Alcuin advises a female correspondent, who was apparently having difficulty answering the arguments of the Adoptionists: “Tu vero de grammatica tua profer regulas naturales … Interrogandum est, quid sit medium inter verum et non verum? Si dicit: nihil, inferendum est: ergo Christus secundum quod homo est, aut verus Deus est aut non verus. Sed valde absurdum est dicere Deum eum esse, sed non verum. Aut si hoc erubescit adversarius dicere, proferat, quid sit medium inter verum et non verum secundum artem dialecticam, interrogandum est, si una persona possit esse homo verus et homo pictus, qui est non verus homo. Si dicit, non posse, inferendum est: nec in Christo, qui est una persona, in duabus naturis verum esse potest et non verum, sed quicquid in eo est, verum est, quia ipse totus est Deus et totus verus filius Dei et tota veritas in eo est et nihil habet figmenti in se.”³⁵

In this sort of argumentation, one notices not only a strong pastoral desire to help a person who is possibly being upset by the arguments of those about her, but also an optimistic sense that even the deepest mysteries will yield their secrets if only we gain a sure enough grasp of the fundamental disciplines. As Alcuin put it at the conclusion of his preface to the De Grammatica, the seven liberal arts not only provide fame and happiness to philosophers, pagan or Christian, but “through them the holy and Catholic teachers and defenders of our faith have always overcome heretics in public debates.”³⁶

The argument just quoted, suggesting that one person cannot at the same time be a man and the picture of a man, is perhaps a faint reflection of the other major pressure at Charlemagne's court in Alcuin's time, emphasizing functional clarity of a verbal kind. This is the pressure of the iconoclastic controversy, for the misunderstood iconodule position was debated and condemned at the same Council of Frankfort which condemned Felix's position. Though I disagree with Professor Wallach's recently expressed opinion that Alcuin wrote the Libri Carolini,³⁷ there is nonetheless an interesting connection between that work and Alcuin's grammatical cast of mind. As with the Adoptionist controversy, much of the discussion, again, hinged on arguments drawn from grammar and its adjunct studies. According to the Libri, the iconoclastic synod of 754 had erred as badly as their iconodule children, since the earlier council had treated the species as a genus. The middle term of the argument is that, whereas all idols are images, not all images are idols: images are for ornamentation and for commemoration of the past, idols for superstitious worship.³⁸ This distinction is important, for there is evidence that such a functional definition of the uses of ecclesiastical art had some impact in the years following, partly because the original documents from the Council of Nicaea were not translated into a more accurate Latin version until the latter part of the ninth century, leaving a lasting impression that half of Christendom had lapsed into idolatry.

For example, Ermoldus Nigellus' description of the church built by Louis IV at Ingelheim describes a severely functional, chronologically arranged sequence of scenes, detailing Old Testament history on one wall, while “Altera pars retinet Christi vitalia gesta, / Quae terris missus a genitore dedit.”³⁹ If the poem is accurate, the pictorial detail is exhaustive, with a different scene suggested by nearly every four lines of the sixty-five.

A similar programme is described by the verses which are said to have been inscribed on the walls of St. Gall. In one part, possibly the entrance, there must have been a full sequence of pictures portraying the Nativity, including in order the angelic appearance of Zachary, the annunciation to Mary, the visitation, the naming of John, the angels and shepherds, the stable at Bethlehem, the coming of the Magi, the dream of Joseph, the flight into Egypt, and the slaughter of the innocents. A similarly detailed continuation of the life of Christ is said to occupy the right wall of what I understand to be the nave of the church, from the baptism of Jesus and the calling of the apostles through a long sequence from the passion, while the sequence is completed with a last judgement scene above and around the cathedra, featuring Gabriel's trumpets and a large shining cross above, and scenes of the blessed and damned below.⁴⁰

These later developments I tentatively connect with the pressures and fears generated by the iconoclastic controversy, because they conform so well to the function of church art approved in the Libri Carolini, and because, to my knowledge, these decorative programmes were so different from those which characterized ecclesiastical art before this period. If I am right, this iconographical tendency springs from the same suspicion of the ill-defined and the non-functional which governed Alcuin's attitude towards pedagogy. Just as faulty grammar can lead to heresy, non-functional art can breed idolatry. The guardian against all such excess is, again, the explicit statement, clear and functional. This is true, as Hrabanus Maurus was to put it,

Plus quia gramma valet quam vana in imagine forma,
Plusque animae decoris praestat quam falsa colorum
Pictura ostentans rerum non rite figuras.
Nam scriptura pia norma est perfecta salutis.(41)

The poem ends with a reminder that painting and the art of pigmentation first derived from Egypt, whose name means “anxious trouble” (angustans tribulatio) as does the art she discovered. By contrast, the Lord chose to carve the rock of the law with writing, which he entrusted to his magister to bring to the people. This fear and suspicion explains the impressive amount of monumental verse written by Alcuin and his successors. The word was always present to guard against idolatry.

The implications of this for poetry are extensive. When the visual icon is stripped of its power to mediate reality, the verbal icon becomes similarly caught, cabined, and put to work at the mill wheel of explicitly functional expression. Alcuin's verbal simplicity, noted by Peter Scott and discussed at the opening of this paper, is more than a simple “censoring out” of the “flowery style.” It is apparently part of a rigidly functional approach to learning, art, and the most challenging mysteries of life. The verdict of most critics who read Carolingian Latin poetry is that Theodulf of Orléans is a better poet than Alcuin. I would not challenge that verdict. Though we can learn more from Alcuin about the mood and temper of his time, Theodulf's poetry is always more evocative, complex, ambiguous, and—to continue the comparison—iconic. A supreme irony of Carolingian letters is the iridescent quality of the imagery employed in the Libri Carolini to sustain the attack on the iconodules. In this, Theodulf—who, as Paul Meyvaert has argued, probably wrote the Libri⁴²—illustrates what a complex, contradictory personality he was. As bishop of Orléans, he gave up writing poetry, partially for the reasons he gives to his friends, namely, that the responsibilities of his pastoral care did not leave him time for it.⁴³ I think it likely, also, that the plain, unvarnished style of the poetry written by Alcuin, and the even further simplified poetry by Angilbert, did not appeal to him. Certainly, when he returned to poetry in disgrace and exile, it was to the symbolic, fiercely apocalyptic style of his “Epistle to Modoin,” describing the portentous drying up of a river and the war of the birds.⁴⁴

As we have seen, the one area of experience which Alcuin could not reduce to the easy formulas of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric was his sense of the evanescence of all things human. Before this mystery he was capable of standing in wonder and, for that reason, of writing poetry about it. Even in therelatively dry, formal grammar verse I have been examining, the catch in the throat can be heard, the inescapable fear of our universal grave:

Nec bene namque senex poeterit vel discere, postquam
Tondenti ingremium candida barba cadit(45)

a couplet which, to me, refers both to old age and death.

Nam fugiunt anni more fluentis aquae …
Nec redit unda fluens, nec redit hora ruens …(46)

Though the “Farewell to His Cell” is better than Alcuin's other verse, and though it is certainly not representative of his general style of poetry, I still feel he probably did write it.⁴⁷ The note of fear and wonder is the same:

Nil manet aeternum, nihil immutabile vere est,
Obscurat sacrum nox tenebrosa diem.
Decutit et flores subito hiems frigida pulcros,
Perturbat placidum et tristior aura mare.
Qua campis cervos agitabat sacra iuventus,
Incumbit fessus nunc baculo senior.
Nos miseri, cur te fugitivum, mundas, amamus?
Tu fugis a nobis semper ubique ruens.
Tu fugiens fugias, Christum nos semper amemus.(48)

At the same time, the “sadder breeze” which “ruffles the peaceful sea” seems to me the very opposite of a breeze of despair. This is a sign that the world is wider than the grammatical and rhetorical categories into which Alcuin would fit it, and a sign of his sensitivity to mysteries beyond man's immediate capacity to comprehend. Fittingly, this was also the awareness which provided the urgent motive for his effective work in the reform of teaching and writing, for which he is justly best remembered.

Notes

1. Ithaca, New York, 1959.

2. Eruditio und Sapientia: Weltbild und Erziehung in der Karolingerzeit; Untersuchungen zu Alcuins Briefen (Freibrug im Breisgau, 1965).

3. New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1978.

4. MGH [Monumenta Germaniae Historica] Poetae Latini Aevi Carolini, 1:243-44 (no. 23), 270-72 (no. 58), 274-75 (no. 61), 350-51 (no. 123). See n. 47.

5. Ibid., pp. 169-206 (no. 1); 207-20 (no. 3); 229-35 (no. 9).

6. UTQ [University of Toronto Quarterly] 33 (1963-64), 233-57.

7. Ibid., p. 233.

8. Ibid., p. 238.

9. Cf. Dag Norberg, Manuel pratique de latin medieval (Paris, 1968), pp. 28-9.

10. “Classicism and Christianity: a Poetic Synthesis,” Latomus 34 (1975): 224-31.

11. Ibid., p. 229.

12. This idea that the grammaticus had a special responsibility to understand and interpret the poets is a commonplace among early medieval grammarians, e.g., Sergius' Commentary on Donatus, “Ars grammatica praecipue consistit in intellectu poetarum et in recte scribendi loquendive ratione,” H. Keil, Grammatici Latini (rep. Hildesheim, 1961), 4: 468; Asper's Ars Grammatica, “Grammatica est scientia recte scribendi et enunciandi interpretandique poetas,” Keil, 5: 547; Maximus Victorinus' Ars Grammatica, “Grammatica quid est? Scientia interpretandi poetas atque historicos et recte scribendi loquendique ratio,” Keil, 6: 188. Similarly in Marius Victorinus, Keil, 6: 4; in Cassiodorus, Keil, 7: 214; in Audax, Keil, 7: 321; in Dositheus, Keil, 7: 376, etc.

13. Cf. Alcuin, De Grammatica, PL 101: 853-54.

14. Idem, De Dialectica, PL 101: 947-50.

15. See, for example, MGH Epistolae, 4: 175-78 (no. 121), 166-70 (no. 114), and 542-44 (the letter of Leidrad).

16. PL 101: 951; for these lines elsewhere in Alcuin, see MGH Poet. Lat., 1: 298.

17. Etymologiae 8.10.2: “Dicti autem gentiles, quia ita sunt ut fuerunt geniti, id est, sicut in carne descenderunt sub peccato, scilicet idolis servientes et necdum regenerati.”

18. See Edelstein, pp. 106-11 and 231-32.

19. O youth, whose years are ripe for learning,
    Study hard: time passes like a flowing river.
    Don't waste this time for learning in idle games.
    The flowing wave does not come back, the fleeting hour does not return
    Your first youth should flower in pursuit of virtue.
    That age may shine in great honour and glory.
    Whoever should read this book, enjoy happy years
    And, mindful of its author, pray: “God have mercy.”
    If, reader, you look to take up our staff of freedom,
    First find strength by your own light:
    Learn as a young man to argue with eloquence
    That you may be to those about you, protector, remedy, and cause of happiness.
    In your youth, I pray, learn a pleasant character and behaviour,
    That your name may be praised over the whole world.

    MGH Poet. Lat., 1: 299-300 (no. 80); PL 101; 949-50.

    Dummler's MGH edition is easier to read, but Migne's reprint of Froben's edition more accurately indicates the purpose of the lines, since they are attached to the prose work for which they were written.

20. Ars Amatoria 3. 62-64.

21. “May a teacher instruct the good season of youth in studies, For the years flee like flowing water.” MGH Poet. Lat., 1: 319-20 (no. 93).

22. “All the fleeting joys of the word flow far away And like flowing water do not come back again.” Ibid., 297-99 (no. 76).

23. “And yet shadows come and darken it. What is more pleasant than the flowers of summer? But they perish in the winter's cold. What is sweeter than the body's health? But who believes he will always have it? … If the heavens and the earth are always changing in their various alternations … how much more must a particular delight in anything at all be transitory? PL 101: 849-54, esp. 851.

24. “Nonne absque ratione est, animam absque decore et dignitate sua esse perpetuam? Consequens videtur utramque esse perpetuam, animam scilicet et sapientiam,” PL 101: 852.

25. Prov. 9, 1: “Sapientia aedificavit sibi domum, excidit columnas septem.”

26. “Although this sentence pertains to the divine wisdom that built a house—that is a body—for itself in the womb of the virgin and confirmed it with the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, and illuminated it with the same gifts of the Church, which is the house of God, nevertheless, the wisdom of the liberal arts is established on seven pillars, nor does it lead anyone to perfect knowledge unless he is raised up by these seven columns or steps.” PL 101: 853.

27. MGH Poet. Lat., 299 (no. 80); PL 101: 949.

28. “Showing him the path of wisdom will be easy, so long as you love it for God, for purity of heart, for knowledge of truth, and for itself; and not for the praise of men, for worldly honours, or for the deceptive pleasures of wealth.” PL 101: 850. I have eliminated Froben's “propter rerum scientiam,” bracketed by Migne.

29. Ibid., p. 854.

30. Do you want to know, Pilgrim, how poets live after death? Observe how I speak as you read, for your voice is mine. PL 101:802.

31. See MGH Epistolae, 4: 107 (no. 65), 181 (no. 124), 166 (no. 114); or, for the first and last references, my Two Alcuin Letter-Books (Toronto, 1975), pp. 19 and 69.

32. Let those sit here who copy out the words of the divine law
    And the sacred sayings of the holy fathers.
    Here let them take care not to sow their nonense among the words,
    And for the sake of nonsense may their hand not wander freely.
    They should carefully acquire corrected copies
    So the goose-quill may follow a straight path.
    They should make the sense clear in clauses and phrases
    And put all the punctuation in its proper place
    Lest the lector in church read the wrong things
    Or perhaps fall suddenly silent before the pious brethren.
    It is an excellent work to copy out sacred books,
    And the scribe will not lack his reward.
    Copying books is better than planting vines.
    The one serves the body, the other the soul.
    The master who reads the sacred sayings of the fathers
    Will be able to bring forth a great many things both new and old.

    MGH Poet. Lat., 1: 320 (no. 94).

33. Matthew 13.52.

34. PL 101: 87-300.

35. “Bring out the natural rules of grammar to answer them … Ask what mean there is between something true and not true? If he says, ‘Nothing,’ then conclude: therefore Christ, insofar as he is man, is either true God or not true God. But it is plainly absurd to say that he is God but not true God. Or if your adversary blushes at saying this, ask what is the mean between the true and the untrue according to dialectics; you should question whether a single person could be a true man and the picture of a man, which is not a true man. If he says, ‘No,’ then conclude: neither in Christ, who is one person in two natures, can there be something true and not true, but whatever is in him is true, for he is wholly God and wholly the true son of God, and there is nothing fictitious in him.” MGH Epistolae, 4: 338-39 (no. 204).

36. “… iis quoque sancti et catholici nostrae fidei doctores et defensores omnibus haeresiarchis in contentionibus publicis semper superiores exstiterunt.” PL 101: 854.

37. Diplomatic Studies in Latin and Greek Documents from the Carolingian Age (Ithaca, N.Y., 1977), pp. 47-122. The presence of elements from the Mozarabic liturgy in the Libri seems to me incontrovertible evidence against Alcuin's authorship. See Ann Freeman, “Theodulf of Orléans and the Libri Carolini,” Speculum 32 (1957): 665-705, and “Further Studies in the Libri Carolini I-II,” Speculum 40 (1965): 203-289; “III,” Speculum 46 (1971): 597-612.

38. Hubert Bastgen, ed., Capitulare de Imaginibus: MGH Legum Sectio 3, Concilia 2, Supplementum (Hannover-Leipzig, 1912-24), p. 3.

39. “The other side holds the life-giving deeds of Christ which, he, sent by his father, brought to the world.” MGH Poet. Lat., 2: 63-65, lines 179-244; esp. 11. 219-20.

40. MGH Poet. Lat., 2: 480-82.

41. MGH Poet. Lat., 2: 196-97 (no. 38); esp. lines 4-7: “Because the letter is more powerful than the vain shape of an image, And provides more beauty for the soul than the false Coloured picture, unfittingly displaying the exteriors of things. For faithful Scripture is the perfect norm of salvation.”

42. “The Authorship of the ‘Libri Carolini’: Observations Prompted by a Recent Book,” RB [Revue Biblique] 89 (1979): 29-57.

43. “Cur Modo Carmina non Scribat,” MGH Poet. Lat., 1: 542 (no. 44).

44. Ibid., 563-69 (no. 72).

45. For the old man will not be able to learn very much
    After his white beard falls in the lap of the shearer.

    Ibid., 319.20 (no. 93).

46. For the years flee like flowing water …
    The flowing wave does not return, failing time does not come back …

    Ibid., 319-20 (no. 93); 299-300 (no. 80).

47. In a study published after this paper was complete, Peter Godman has provided solid support for the feeling expressed here that this poem is Alcuin's: “Alcuin's Poetic Style and the Authenticity of ‘O Mea Cella,’” SM [Studi Mediaevali] 3rd ser., 20 (1979): 555-83.

48. Nothing lasts forever, nothing is really changeless,
    Night shadows blot the sacred light of day.
    Icy winter's scythe surprises the loveliest flowers,
    And a sadder breeze ruffles the peaceful sea.
    Where once inviolate youth chases deer through the fields,
    A weary old man leans on his staff.
    Fickle world—why do we love you, poor fools?
    You always run from us, always fail us.
    Well, run on; we shall give our love to Christ.

    Ibid., 243-44.