[In the following essay, Houghton contends that Alcuin was a skillful weaver of others' texts, not a mere compiler, and that his work speaks in a single voice.]

Depreciation—ridicule, even—of the Carolingian renewal of the empire is an ancient, if not venerable, tradition¹, reaching back to contemporary sources: the Byzantine chronicler Theophanes the Confessor reports the events of Christmas Day, 800, with the mocking observation that the Pope anointed the King of the Franks “with olive oil from head to foot,” i.e., that the Bishop of Rome did not even know the proper form for anointing a Roman emperor.² The Chapel which Odo of Metz designed for Charlemagne's palatium at Aachen invites, by its borrowings of plan and material, a comparison with its models, San Vitale in Ravenna and the chrysotriklinos, the imperial throne room in Constantinople; but today, as in the ninth century, such a comparison easily suggests that the Franks were not up to the task they set for themselves. Even modern scholars of the Carolingian period often find themselves assessing the Carolingians as derivative and unoriginal, mere compilers inferior to their sources. At one recent conference of medievalists, a speaker referred to the careful weaving of patristic materials by Hrabanus Maurus only to have the moderator respond, “Let's just call compilers compilers.” While neither of them gives an unnuanced assessment, Katherine O'Brien O'Keeffe and Donald Bullogh illustrate the two positions (careful weaving or mere compilation) in their comments on Alcuin's Interrogationes (PL C,515-566). Investigation of two passages where Alcuin draws on both Bede and Augustine gives us a further insight into Alcuin's method, and helps to show him as weaver rather than compiler.

O'Keeffe compares Alcuin's work to Bede's; the latter writer, she seems to say, is a weaver, the former, a compiler.³ O'Keeffe first analyzes some typical examples of the several instances in which Alcuin quotes, either verbatim or in an edited form, statements from Bede's De natura rerum and In Genesim. Then she considers cases in which Alcuin differs with Bede's interpretation; finally, she examines instances in which Alcuin's quotations from Augustine can be shown to derive, in fact, from Bede's use of Augustine's commentaries.⁴ Bede's exposition, she says, strikes us as the more valuable, “an integrated work” with “careful structure and rhetoric.” In Alcuin's favor, O'Keeffe notes that his method of quotation results in “a commentary wholly orthodox, but bearing still the impress of his thought.”⁵ These favorable remarks must be taken, however, in the light of an earlier observation:

Bede's carefully structured commentary … is in marked contrast to Alcuin's Interrogationes. Seemingly an assemblage of various facts about Genesis, Alcuin's commentary has, in its own way, a distinct character with a rudimentary order and unifying concerns and interests.⁶

This is hardly a condemnation, but the contrast of “rudimentary order” to “careful structure” puts Alcuin distinctly in second place.⁷ The underlying scale of comparison in O'Keeffe's judgment is one of form: for her, Bede's work excels Alcuin's in terms of unity. Bede's work has careful structure and integrity, whereas Alcuin's is a compilation, with, certainly, a distinct character, but only a rudimentary order, unified in its concerns and interests and in the impress of its author's thought.

A different assessment of Alcuin's questions and answers is implicit in Bullogh:

Even when Alcuin uses sentences or phrases taken from earlier authors—principally but hardly exclusively Augustine—without change or with minor changes to expound his Genesis text, the context in which they occur and the adaptations (however slight) commonly have the effect of altering the sense of the source commentary.⁸

This “alteration of sense” in fact constitutes a new whole. An anthology might display a rudimentary order and bear the impress of its compiler's thought, as the Oxford Book of English Verse displayed the character of Quiller-Couch; but to give quoted material a new sense is to make a new thing, with its own integrity.

Consideration of two further examples of Alcuin's sources confirms O'Keeffe's account of his methods, but also suggests that we can, with Bullogh, be justified in bringing her contrast of Bede and Alcuin more closely into balance. Far from being a mere compilation, Alcuin's text in fact has a specific voice of its own. The first of these new examples is an instance of Alcuin quoting Augustine by way of paraphrasing Bede in Quaestio LXX. As O'Keeffe notes, tracing a paraphrase can be particularly difficult, but in this case, textual variants offer a shortcut to Alcuin's sources.⁹ The second example, Quaestio XXVIII, is a more complex case, in which Alcuin takes a position that differs materially from the ideas of Augustine and of Bede.

I: THE NATHANAEL PARAPHRASE

Quaestio XX reads:

Why, in their confusion, did they run to [MS, take refuge in] fig leaves (Gn 3:7)? Response—Because they had lost the glory of simple chastity, they fled the double itch of lust. [Thus the Lord Jesus said to Nathanael, “When you were under the fig, I saw you” (Jn 1:48), that is, when you were under the fig of original sin, I saw you in mercy and therefore I came down to set you free.]¹⁰

The three textual variants in this passage are clues to its sources. First, while the editio princeps of Molther has cucurrerunt, the reduplicative perfect form of currere, meaning simply “to run,” the two St. Emmerman MSS cited in Froben's Monitum Praevium (PL C,515-516) have concurrerunt, from concurrere, meaning at root “to run together, to concur,” but among many other extended senses, “to flee to, to take refuge in, to have recourse to.” Second, whereas the printed edition has the masculine ficulni, the MSS have the feminine, ficulneae. And, third, the manuscripts add the allegorical interpretation of Christ's words to Nathanael.

Simply on the level of sense, these variant readings seem somewhat more reasonable than the printed text. While there is no obvious reason why the fig tree which provided Adam's apron should have been female rather than male, it does make somewhat better sense to say that Adam and Eve resorted to fig leaves, rather than that they ran to fig leaves. In fact, the manuscript witness has clear parallels with Bede, who writes in In Genesim I, 1981-84:

Denique illa conturbatione ad folia ficulnea concurrerunt quae forte perturbati prima invenerunt, perizomata, id est succinctoria consuerunt. Et quia glorianda deseruerunt, pudenda texerunt.¹¹

Then, in this turmoil, they had recourse to fig leaves (which were perhaps the first things they came upon in their confusion) to sew succinctoria, that is, aprons. And because they had abandoned the things which were to be gloried in, they covered the things of which they were ashamed.

We see in Bede's text both of the manuscripts' variant expressions, and, in addition, more distant verbal echoes such as conturbatione/ perturbati … turbati, or glorianda deseruerunt … gloriam amiserunt. It seems clear that Alcuin is here paraphrasing Bede. But, as is often the case, Bede himself is borrowing from Augustine's De Genesi ad litteram—specifically from XI,xxxii,42, the source of all the italicized words in the passage just quoted, including concurrerunt and ficulnea. The manuscripts variants, then, seem to be reliable witnesses to Alcuin's original text and his sources. It is difficult to imagine that a scribe would modify only two words out of a passage to make the text look more like Bede, and easy enough to believe that these two specific words might have been changed in transmission.

The interplay between Bede and Augustine bears upon the third textual variant in Quaestio LXX. In De Genesi ad litteram XI,xxxii,42, Augustine states his opinion that the fig leaves had no particular significance in themselves, but that the action of taking them and making the aprons was motivated by some deep instinct to draw attention to lust as a part of the penalty for sin. Bede quotes this opinion in full at In Genesim I,1985-89, but goes on to cite two mystical interpretations of the fig tree. The first of these allegories connects the tree with the fig under which Nathanael sat: though it is lowly in height, too fragile for work, too soft for use, and sterile in its fruit, the fig is more useful than the vine or the olive, for it overshadows the appealing desire for the delights of the world. Bede attributes this reading to Ambrose, but Jones, the modern editor, gives the despairing note, “Amb. ubi? ex florilegio siue glossulis?” The second figurative reading is identifiably from Ambrose's Paradise, though Jones indicates that Bede has quoted it via Augustine's Contra Julianum. This interpretation says that Adam should have girded himself with the fruit of chastity rather than with useless leaves.

Clearly, the manuscripts' indication of a Nathanael interpretation in Quaestio LXX fits with Alcuin's model in Bede, and we have already seen that the other two witnesses from manuscripts seem preferable to the printed text. One might argue that a later hand, recognizing Alcuin's use of Bede in the earlier part of the answer, has added the Nathanael tag to Alcuin's original response; but such a redactor would reasonably have gone on with the plan by giving a paraphrase of Bede's interpretation of the fig. Alcuin's actual reading, however, is not the Pseudo-Ambrosian one which Bede gives in In Genesim; rather, it is a paraphrase of Bede's own opinion, as stated in a homily on John.¹² Moreover, we know that the Bedean homily was accessible to Alcuin, for he quotes from it at length, including this passage, in his own commentary on John (PL C,764C). The third manuscript variant, then, seems to be supported by external evidence, and points, as the earlier ones did, to the sources of Alcuin's paraphrase.

In Quaestio LXX, Alcuin has, in sum, followed Bede in the use of Augustine for the historical sense of the text, and followed Bede as well in rejecting Augustine's opinion (that the leaves have no figurative meaning) by connecting the passage in Genesis to a figurative reading of the one in John; but then he prefers the later Bede to the earlier by rejecting the Pseudo-Ambrosian interpretation for one of Bede's own. This is certainly a use of several sources, but it can hardly be labelled compilation.

II. UNFORMED MATTER

The second Quaestio is number XXVIII:

What is signified by the name “heaven and earth,” when it is said, “In the beginning God created heaven and earth?” (Gn 1:1). Response—That unformed matter, which God made from nothing, was called heaven and earth: not because it was already that, but because it was already able to be that. For one reads that on the second day this starry heaven was made, and on the third day, earth appeared and began to be covered with flowers. Or, in the name “heaven and earth,” the spiritual and earthly creatures can be understood.¹³

The second of these possible answers is straightforward: heaven refers to the spiritual creatures, and earth to the terrestrial ones. The first answer is somewhat more involved. It depends upon the idea that in Genesis 1:2, Moses describes a stage in creation in which only unformed matter has been made. In answering Quaestio XIX (“How many modes of divine operation are there?”), Alcuin has already introduced this idea. He quotes and condenses the first section of Bede's De natura rerum: there are four modes: the eternal existence of things in the dispensation of the word of God, the simultaneous creation of things in unformed matter, the distinction of things through six days of creation, and the ongoing reformation of things in accord with the primordial seeds.¹⁴ By following Bede here, Alcuin has taken an anti-Augustinian path. Augustine, in De Genesi ad litteram, repeatedly teaches that the literal meaning of Genesis 1 is that God created all at once some things in their proper natures—such as the angels and the soul of Adam—and all other things in their seminal causes, which were either implanted in the appropriate element (e.g., the seminal cause of Adam's body in the earth) or reserved in God himself (in the case of miracles to come). This single simultaneous creation was revealed in a sixfold way to the angelic intelligences, and they praised God for what was revealed—this process of revelation and praise being the cycle of morning and evening. At the same time, as a seventh revelation, the angels also understood the stability of God as the unmoving transcendent in whom all creation is at rest. In this elaborate system, Augustine preserves the “all at once” character of creation which he finds in Genesis 2:4, “In the day in which God created heaven and earth,” and in Ecclesiasticus 18:1, “He who lives eternally created all things at the same time.” Augustine's reading also insists on the reality of the six- and seven-fold nature of creation and rest, though the repetitions in his system are not repetitions in time. (cf. De Genesi ad litteram V,xxiii,46, V,xxiv,35, VII,xxviii,42, etc.).

Bede specifically considers and rejects Augustine's reading in In Genesim, I,1250-1270, his argument being that if we are to read “day” at Genesis 2:4 in a non-literal sense, it is more congruent with scriptural usage to take “day” as meaning “a period of time” (Bede cites 2 Co 6:2, “Behold, now is the day of salvation”) than as meaning “the moment before all days of the world in which all things were created at once.” For Bede, then, there are two phases of creation: before time, the simultaneous creation in unformed matter, then in time, the works of the six days, beginning with the creation of light ex nihilo (De natura rerum II,2-3). Beryl Smalley points out that the divergence between Augustine and Bede on this issue was exploited throughout the medieval period: “Since Bede was immensely popular, exegetes could choose, if they had the courage, between his opinion and St. Augustine's. Arguments for and against the Creation simul are a normal part of the twelfth-century sentence book.”¹⁵ By using De natura rerum in Quaestio XIX, and referring to that same stage of unformed matter in Quaestio XXVIII, Alcuin has certainly shown the courage to choose Bede over Augustine; but in his further discussion of this unformed matter, Alcuin proves brave enough to strike out entirely on his own.

The unformed matter of this early stage of creation, Alcuin says, is called “heaven and earth” by anticipation: while it is not yet heaven and earth literally, the starry heaven will be made from it on the second day and the dry land on the third. Thus Moses calls the matter, still unformed, by the names it will deserve when it has been formed. This is quite different from Bede's reading of the text. For him, “heaven” refers here to the supernal heaven, the abode of angels, which is created in its perfection with God as its light: Bede notes that it is only the earth which is inanis et vacua (In Genesim I,34 ff.). “Earth,” on the other hand, does refer to unformed matter, for the earth, though it has the character which earth has even today when submerged, is at this point under water and unlighted, as succeeding verses of Genesis show (In Genesim I,41-120 and 400-05). Whereas in Bede heaven refers to the perfected angelic heaven and earth to the unformed matter, Alcuin takes “heaven and earth” together to refer to unformed matter, having in mind the starry heaven rather than the angelic.

Alcuin, then, has taken a position based in Bede's thought, but different from Bede's reading in its details. When Alcuin abandons one of his auctoritates, it is not unreasonable to suspect that he may have another patristic source at hand—the suspicion strengthened in this case by the fact that Alcuin's second explanation, that heaven and earth refer to two classes of creatures, is one of four proposed by Augustine in De Genesi ad litteram I,1. Augustine, as is his habit, begins his discussion of the literal meaning of Genesis by posing a barrage of questions and tentative answers: which of several possible senses of “in principio” should be understood? How can God produce temporal change while remaining eternal and immutable? What is meant by “heaven and earth?” To the last of these he proposes four answers, ringing the changes on two themes: whether the reference is to proper natures or unformed matter and whether it encompasses spiritual and corporeal creatures or only corporeal ones. Thus the four possibilities are that “heaven and earth” refers to:

(1) spiritual and corporeal creatures

(2) corporeal creatures only

(3) spiritual and corporeal unformed matter

(4) spiritual creatures in their perfection and unformed corporeal creatures

Possibility (4) is supported by the statement that earth was without form and void, though the reference to darkness over the face of the abyss might be understood with reference to spiritual substances, thus supporting the third position. After several chapters of discussion, Augustine settles (I,xvii,32) on the third position: “heaven and earth” refers to the unformed spiritual and corporeal matter, while “Let there be light” refers to the formation and illumination of the spiritual matter. The sequence, Augustine is at pains to point out, is merely narrative: matter cannot exist without form, and the angels are in fact formed in the very moment of the creation of their spiritual unformed matter.

Bede's reading, we may note in passing, is Augustine's fourth answer, which Augustine rejects because in saying that the angels are created in perfection and the world as unformed matter, it implies that such matter can exist without form, that there is some sequence between the instantaneous perfection of the angels and the perfecting of corporeal matter. Bede, whose formless matter seems less like the philosopher's hyle than the chemist's stock of elemental ingredients, has no objection to thinking of the temporal existence of such a substance.

Alcuin's second answer is the first of Augustine's rejected proposals: but his first response arrives at a permutation Augustine has not considered, by combining the reference to corporeal creatures only from possibility (2) with the idea of unformed matter from possibility (3) and possibility (4). In effect, Alcuin's reading is Augustine's possibility (4)—the same one used by Bede—with the angels stripped away.

Alcuin elaborates on this answer by explaining why it is true. … Moses refers to unformed matter in this circuitous way to point to what is to come from the mass. Curiously, this fillip is itself paraphrased from De Genesi ad litteram I,6, where Augustine writes: “Hence, in the very beginning of creation in its inchoate state, which has been called heaven and earth because of what was to be produced from it, it is the Blessed Trinity which represented as creating.”¹⁶ The parallel with Alcuin's expression is obvious: but in the original context, it is clear that Augustine's “what is to be produced” refers to more than Alcuin's starry heaven and dry earth. Augustine continues, “[we understand] by the name of principle the Son, who is the principle, not for the Father, but first and foremost for the spiritual beings he has created, and then also for all creatures.”¹⁷ For Augustine, “heaven and earth” anticipates “first and foremost” the spiritual beings, that is, the angelic heaven, not Alcuin's starry firmament. In his answer, Alcuin has taken up Augustine's insight into the rhetoric of Genesis, while leaving the saint's larger point behind.

This decontextualization of Augustine's insight is of a piece with the highly manipulated paraphrase we considered in Quaestio LXX. On O'Keeffe's evidence, both cases are typical of the treatment Alcuin gives Bede. O'Keeffe offers as an example Quaestio XLVI, where Alcuin's response is based on four lines from the very end of the passage in which Bede rejects Augustine's reading of Genesis:

The significance of the word “day” leads Bede to focus on the various ways “day” must be understood in order to comprehend Genesis 2:5. Alcuin ignores this issue of interpretation, shifting the emphasis to the speed of God's creation. In this way he uses Bede's words but gives his answer an entirely different point.¹⁸

In his explanation of the reason for calling unformed matter “heaven and earth,” Alcuin has gone even further, using Augustine's idea, if not his words, to make a point which is not merely different from, but actually antithetical to, Augustine's own views.

III. THE SINGLE VOICE

The integrity and unity by which O'Keeffe weighs Alcuin against Bede could be posited in the author's intention (“Did Alcuin mean to write a unified text, or merely a compilation?”)—or in the text itself, or in the audience's reaction (“Did Alcuin's intended readers see the Interrogationes as a unified text?”) The first of these points is both the hardest to know and, as a result, the least influential. Nonetheless, there are indications that Alcuin thinks of the work as his own, rather than as a report of the views of others. Within the Interrogationes, Alcuin shows that he is perfectly capable of citing his sources. He refers the reader to Jerome in Quaestio XXVII and Quaestio CCXLIII, and to Augustine in Quaestio CXV. He does not say why he does not offer similar citations for such questions as the ones we have been studying, but other parts of his work suggest an explanation. In the Libri septem contra Felicem, Alcuin argues from the principle that a writer cannot play havoc with a source and still claim the authority of the original writer. In Book VII, beginning at section v, Alcuin accuses Felix of making misleading citations by omitting words, adding words, or even changing one word to another in the texts of Athanasius, Augustine, and Ambrose.¹⁹ As we have seen, Alcuin is willing to employ any of these manipulations himself; but precisely by omitting citations, he refrains from claiming that his collage represents the thought of Bede or Augustine. Insofar as his intention can be divined, Alcuin seems to mean for us to take the Interrogationes as his thought, whatever the sources of the words in which that thought appears.

The integrity of Bede's text is reflected, for O'Keeffe, by its careful structure. We may observe from the start that while Alcuin's exposition certainly has some out-of-sequence questions (some of I-XXV, plus XCIII and XCIV), the greater part of the Interrogationes has precisely the same structural principle as Bede's In Genesim, that is, to comment on verses in the order in which they appear in the text. Of two hundred eighty questions in Alcuin's book, only about ten percent are out of place. There are other indications, however, of the integrity of the text. Some questions are, for example, syntactically or grammatically linked, as Quaestiones XXIII-XXIV, with the repetition of volubilis … volubile, or Quaestio XXVIII where illa materia apparently refers back to the first mention of prime matter in Quaestio XIX. The most prominent of these indicators of textual integrity is a result of that careful attitude toward sources which we have just discussed: precisely because its many quotations and paraphrases are not marked off and identified as such, Alcuin's text presents itself as a single voice. Indeed, contrary to Alcuin's practice in other question-and-answer texts, the Interrogationes is a monologue, not a dialogue: there are no characters here, neither Frank nor Saxon, Carolus nor Albinus.²⁰ This emphatically single voice gives the exposition a fundamental unity, a basic textual integrity.

Authorial intention and textual characteristics might have led Alcuin's readers to take the Interrogationes as a unified whole: but Alcuin's freedom to distort and rework his sources would also have encouraged his intended audience to read his text as a single piece, rather than a compilation. His willingness to take Bede out of context, to replace the earlier Bede with the later, even to copy Augustine in the course of an anti-Augustinian remark, might go unnoticed by the rude reader for whom Bede had written. But Alcuin is explicitly writing for one who knows the fathers, the expert who cannot be bothered to carry some Carolingian version of Patrologia about with him, and wishes to have something to jog his memory. For such an erudite audience, the several instances of decontextualized, or even counter-contextualized, paraphrase and quotation will necessarily have the effect of recontextualizing all of Alcuin's borrowings by making them all his own. Even for a modern reader, much less accustomed to bearing in memory pieces of patristic commentary than any Carolingian scholar would have been, it is difficult to read more than a few sentences of Alcuin without thinking that one has seen this idea or that phrase somewhere before. But when one considers, on the one hand, the changes Alcuin has made to some of his “authoritative” texts, and, on the other, the overall structural integrity of his own work, one is forcibly reminded of the point already observed, that all of the discourse here is in Alcuin's own single voice.

The bronze of the lattice work in Charlemagne's palace chapel at Aachen is materially Roman, not Carolingian, and some of the lattice patterns are Roman as well; but other lattices show typical Northern interlace designs. In the midst of Odo of Metz's transformation—some would say, degradation—of late imperial architecture, all the screens, Roman and Northern alike, must be “read” in the Frankish architect's “voice,” not those of their first designers. So also with the patristic material incorporated into his own intellectual edifice by the master of Charlemagne's palace school: Alcuin's reworking of some of his patristic texts revalues all of them, appropriating all to his own discourse.

Notes

1. I am indebted to John Cavadini and Mark Delp for advice on the ideas of this paper, and to the Episcopal Church Foundation for a fellowship which partially supported its preparation.

2. The Chronicle of Theophanes, trans. Harry Turtledove (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), p. 155. For the interpretation of Theophanes' report as an insult, see Robert Folz, Le Couronnement impérial de Charlemagne (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 194: “Le chroniqueur joint le sarcasme en racontant que le roi des Francs fut oint par Léon III de la tête aux pieds.” See also Heinrich Fichtenau, The Carolingian Empire: The Age of Charlemagne, trans. Peter Munz (New York: Harper, 1964), p. 71, with references to earlier discussions.

3. K. O. O'Keeffe, “The Use of Bede's Writings on Genesis in Alcuin's Interrogationes,” Sacris Erudiri, 23 (1978-79), 463-83.

4. In introducing her discussion of these secondary quotations, however, O'Keeffe notes that Alcuin was not driven to use Bede by some lack of Augustinian texts: “It is clear,” she says, “from Alcuin's use of these works that he had independent access to them (ibid., p. 476).

5. Ibid., p. 480.

6. Ibid., p. 468.

7. As O'Keeffe points out, the assignment of Alcuin's work to an honorable second place only makes explicit what has been suggested before. She notes that Alcuin's question and answer form is a “time-honored, if time-worn, device” and cites G. Bardy, “La littérature patristique des ‘Quaestiones et Responsiones’ sur l'Ecriture Sainte,” Revue Biblique, 41 (1932), 210-36, 341-69; 42 (1933), 14-30, 211-39, 328-52; Alcuin, pp. 27-28, to support the opinion that by Alcuin's time, the form was merely “a vehicle for compilation” (ibid, p. 466).

8. D. Bullogh, “Alcuin and the Kingdom of Heaven,” in Carolingian Essays, ed. Uta-Renate Blumenthal (Washington: Catholic Univ. of America Press, 1983), p. 40.

9. O'Keeffe, p. 473, n. 11.

10. Inter. 70. Cur ad folia ficulni [Ms., ficulneae] turbati cucurrerunt [Ms., concurrerunt] (Gen. iii, 7)?—Resp. Quia gloriam simplicis castitatis amiserunt, ad duplicem libidinis pruriginem confugerunt. [Ideo Dominus Jesus dixit Nathanaeli: Cum esses sub ficu, vidi te (Joan. i,48), id est, cum esses sub ficu originalis peccati, per misericordiam vidi te, et ideo descendi liberate te.] PL C,523.

11. Bedae Opera, Pars II, Opera Exegetica, 1, Libri quatuor in principium Genesis usque ad nativitatem Isaac et eiectionem Ismahelis adnotationum, ed. Ch. W. Jones. CCL 118a.

12. Homelia I,xvii,201-10. Bedae Opera Pars III, CCL CXXII, 124-125. Bede says that the mystical sense of Jesus's remark “concerns the election of the spiritual Israel, that is, the Christian people, whom the Lord deigned to see in mercy when they had neither seen him nor been called by his apostles to the grace of faith, but were still hidden beneath the cover of concealing sin …” [super electione spiritalis Israhel, id est populi christiani, mystice intellegi quem dominus necdum se uidentem necdum per apostolos eius ad fidei gratiam uocatum sed sub tegimine adhuc peccati prementis abditum misericorditer uidere dignatus est …]

13. “Quid in coeli terraeque nomine significatur, quando dicitur: In principio fecit Deus coelum et terram (Gn 1:1)?—Resp. Informis illa materia, quam de nihilo fecit Deus, appellata est primo coelum et terra: non quia jam hoc erat, sed quia jam hoc esse poterat. Nam secundo die coelum istud sidereum factum esse legitur, et tertio die terram apparuisse et vestiri floribus coepisse. Sive, in coeli et terrae nomine spirituales et terrenae creaturae intellegi possunt.” PL C,519.

14. “Inter. 19. Quot modis est in operatio divina?—Resp. Quatuor. Primo, quod in verbi [Dei] dispensatione omnia aeterna sunt. Secundo, quod in materia informi qui vivit in aeternum, creavit omnia simul (Si 18:1). Tertio, quod per opera dierum sex varias distinxit creaturas. Quarto, quod ex primordalibus seminibus non incognitae oriuntur naturae, sed notae saepius, ne pereant, reformantur.” PL C,519. Cf. Bede, De natura rerum I, “De Quadrifario Dei opere,” in Bedae Venerabilis Opera, Pars VI, Opera Didascalia, 1, ed. Ch. W. Jones. CCL CXXIIIa, 192. Compare, too, Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram V,12, where a threefold distinction is made between creation in the word of God, in the works of the six days, and in continuing temporal production: “Cum ergo aliter se habeant omnium creaturarum rationes incommutabiles in verbo dei, aliter eius illa opera, a quibus in die septimo requieuit, aliter ista, quae ex illis usque nunc operatur.” CSEL 28, pars 1, 155.

15. B. Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1964), p. 132.

16. The Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. John Hammond Taylor, S.J., Ancient Christian Writers 41 (New York: Newman, 1982), p. 25: “… in ipso exordio inchoatae creaturae, quae caeli et terrae nomine propter id, quod de illa perficiendum erat, commemorata est, trinitas insinuatur creatoris …” CSEL 28, pars 1, 10.

17. Ibid.: “… intelligimus … filium in principii nomine, qui non patri, sed per se ipsum creatae primitus ac potissimum spiritali creaturae et consequenter et iam uniuersae creaturae principium est …”

18. O'Keeffe, p. 471: It is not quite accurate to say that Alcuin “ignores the issue” of dies; in fact, he treats of it in Quaestio XLV, reducing Bede's twenty lines to five.

19. PL CI,216 et seq. For example, VII.v begins, “De sancto Athanasio testimonium posuisti quod tuam sectam maxime destruit: et dum forte intelligeres quaedam in ejus testimoniis verba tuis sensibus contraria esse, omisisti in medio quae ait, ne contra te ipsum dicere videreris.”

20. Cf. E. Ann Matter, “Alcuin's Question and Answer Texts,” Rivista di storia della filosofia, 45 (1990), 654: “In some sense, the presence of Sigulf is felt throughout, but the structure of the treatise, numbered questions set up as ‘Interrogatio/Responsio,’ is impersonal, lacking the characterization and exchange of voices we have seen in the Opera didascalica.”