rejoice with him (congratulare). If his neighbor suffers sadness, Eric must make that sadness his own.76 Returning to his recurring theme of the “interior man,” Paulinus explains this call for other-oriented emotional connection with a rousing call to inner manly vigor of the soul: spiritual virtus. “ Virtus of your soul is to love God and to hate those things that God does not love,” he writes, invoking the artful repetition and rhetorical crescendo of the popular preacher.77
Virtus of your soul is to follow patience and to avoid all impatience. Virtus of your soul is to guard chastity, of body as well as soul. Virtus of your soul is to despise the vain glory of this world and to spurn all fallen things and to work for the love of him who redeemed you while you live in the body. Virtus of your soul is to strive for humility and to abhor pride. Virtus of your soul is to confine and to repress anger and fury. Virtus of your soul is to decline from all folly and to embrace divine wisdom. Virtus of your soul is to subordinate all love of the flesh and to raise your mind toward Christ. Therefore, you can easily and readily obtain these virtutes if you will yourself to avoid caring for secular things and fallen things and earthly matters, and if you place nothing before the love of Christ.78
Virtus of the soul, in other words, involves that which keeps a man properly connected to the heavenly otherworld and protected from the dangers of the secular world and carnal will. Eric must demonstrate his inner connection with God through outward deeds toward his fellow man. “God is not a hearer and inspector of words,” Paulinus tells Eric, referring to the Old Testament’s Book of Wisdom 1:6 and echoing Augustine’s language of the interior will, “but a hearer and inspector of the human heart.”79 For laymen just as for clergymen, Paulinus explains, virtus flows from making God one’s most prized possession: “If we desire to possess anything in this secular world, let us possess with unencumbered mind God, who possesses all things, and let us hold in him whatever we happily and in a holy manner desire.”80
Christ himself becomes the model for secular living. Paulinus tells Eric that he must attempt to walk in Christ’s footsteps according to the Gospel: “What is it to walk just as Christ walked except to despise the vanity and happiness of this secular world and not to fear adversities suffered in his name? … May the sweetness of this wretched secular world not separate us in any way from the love of Christ, and let there not be namely the excuse of a wife or the influence of one’s children, nor more glut of gold and silver, love of possessions.”81 “Alas,” he exclaims in another passage, “how subtly does the ancient enemy trick us by deceiving us, and draw blindness over the eyes of our mind, lest we succeed in discerning between the joys of this secular world and the joys of the eternal kingdom!”82
Liber exhortationis fully and unabashedly espouses ascetic philosophy in these passages, borrowing heavily from works written expressly for monks. The secular is wretched (miserabilis); wives and children are mere baubles of distraction like any other trinket of gold or silver. Nevertheless, Paulinus is not calling for monastic withdrawal from secular life.83 He makes patently clear that God does not expect bodily renunciation from Eric. Instead, God wishes only that Eric effect a correct ordering of priorities—a right valuation of his heavenly goals above his secular pursuits. Achieving salvation is a matter not of indiscriminate renunciation but rather of education—of “discerning” (discernere) between secular and heavenly delights. As Paulinus explains, if Eric desires the promise of eternal life, he needs to guard the Lord’s precepts within himself against the world’s distractions. He must understand the limited value of friends and family, gold and silver, gems, bountiful vineyards, and farms—these are not necessarily evil, but they offer no protection for the soul.84
Paulinus even suggests that Eric strive to be “dead to sin and to the world”—a staggeringly ascetic demand when read out of context. Within context, however, it is clear that Paulinus is portraying a state of mind. Paulinus describes “being dead to sin” as a metaphor. The dead body, he says, does no harm. The dead man commits no robbery. He is violent toward no one. He blames no one without proof. He oppresses no one. He neither envies good people nor insults the bad. A soul that is dead to the world is never a slave to the luxuries of the flesh. He does not drink too much. He does not incite hatred in others. He does not glorify the rich and powerful.85 Conversely, living by the flesh in the secular world entails the opposite: indulging in pleasures, going where one wants, sleeping when one wants, speaking what one wants and to whomever one wants, seeking whatever pleases the senses, and taking delight in “beautiful clothing and cavalry and weapons” just as one wants. Being dead to the world, according to Paulinus, is to live by God’s will; to live carnally is to live by one’s own.86
Underlining further the correct prioritization of mental before physical renunciation of worldly things, the Liber reminds Eric that worldly joy is not in and of itself evil. Paulinus affirms that jubilation is quite acceptable as long one simply refrains from rejoicing in sin.87 God seeks only spiritual gifts from humans and nothing more, Paulinus teaches in another passage.88 “I beg you, my brother, that you never let the love of the flesh block celestial love from you,” he tells Eric.89 “Always, always,” Paulinus urges with rhetorical repetition in a later section, “let our flesh be subject to the soul like a handmaid to her mistress.”90 In other words, Eric must never allow illicit forces to command his body lest it commit war against his spirit, and the flesh must always be subject so that it can properly obey the orders of the Holy Spirit.91 But subjection of the flesh does not mean renunciation for Paulinus.
When Paulinus does suggest physical asceticism to Eric, he always takes into account Eric’s situation within the world. He understands perfectly well, that is, that Eric does not live in the cloister and therefore cannot renounce his worldly life entirely. He must give to the less fortunate, but Paulinus also urges him do so with discretion, “so that everyone, namely giver and receiver, might have solace.”92 When Paulinus discusses the excesses of indulging in too much food, he appeals not so much to Eric’s inner spirituality as he does to his sense of health: “excessive dishes” hurt the body as well as the soul. Too much food and drink weaken the stomach. An abundance of blood and cholera leads to a number of “table diseases.” He encourages Eric to avoid delicacies and over-opulence of food—if not all the time, then as much as he can, and at the very least on days of fasting and atonement.93 Likewise, when Paulinus warns Eric to refrain from “superfluous speech,” he is not recommending monastic silence. Rather, he is reminding Eric that the tongue is meant to bless and to praise God and not to speak badly of anyone. “Let us not,” he says, “grow accustomed to our worst habits in our every act, or even thought, because a habit that has been greatly prolonged and affirmed is avoided and rejected with no small labor.”94 In his injunction against drinking too much, Paulinus declares that God gave wine to humanity “for the happiness of the heart, not for drunkenness.” Eric is to drink only as is dictated by “natural weakness,” but Paulinus does not ban drinking altogether; Eric must simply use alcohol for its positive medicinal effects and not assign to the soul’s ruin what God gave for bodily healing.95 Discussing Eric’s earthly parents, Paulinus explains that Eric’s devotion to God should always supersede his allegiance to his family, yet he does so through an appeal to the filial loyalties that he knows Eric will always have. “If we love our earthly parents, who sustained labor on our behalf for a short time, with so much feeling (affectu),” he writes, “should not our celestial Father, who was nailed to the cross for us, be loved all the more?”96
These are not specific injunctions or practices that Paulinus teaches Eric to follow so much as they are variations on the same ideological theme. Paulinus understands Eric’s worldly status completely, just as well as he understands his own worldly status. He makes no suggestion whatsoever that Eric should renounce the world, nor does Paulinus frame the conduct that he teaches as a “lesser evil.” Eric simply needs to conduct his worldly life with the proper priorities and an inner will oriented toward the right kind of manliness. In this, he and Eric are effectively partners, bound to the same earthly duty. The key to our unlocking of Liber exhortationis as a historical artifact is to recognize the ways in which, textually,