his philosophy, some actions were sanctioned in some instances while condemned in others: “That eternal law, which commands that the natural order be preserved and forbids that it be disturbed, has located certain deeds in a middle position for human beings so that it deservedly reprehends a boldness in undertaking them and rightly praises an obedience in carrying them out. It makes a great difference in the natural order who does what and under whose authority one acts.”64 That the value of an act depended solely on the actor and the situation and not the act itself was as remarkable to say in the fifth century as it is today because of what it suggests and the potential freedom that it allows in the interpretation of moral rules. For Augustine, New Testament commands could not and should not be understood literally—not just because of the nature of language and interpretation but also because of the very “science” of moral activity on earth. Sins and virtues could never be reduced to a list of good and bad acts.
Augustine developed his point in his argument against Faustus by focusing on the duties of the Roman emperor to conduct war and the apparent clash of such duties with New Testament moral ideals. The evil in war, Augustine wrote, is not in the killing and the use of arms but rather in the love of violence and the hatred that sometimes accompanies it. Humans confuse killing in and of itself with evil when, in fact, it is only the ends of that killing that determine whether the action is right or wrong. Necessities of the general welfare sometimes require behavior that seems contradictory to the ideal of caritas, he explained, but only when this ideal is understood literally and not metaphorically. While it was always necessary for Christians to embody the tenets of New Testament morality in spirit, it was not always practical or even morally correct to act upon them in body. “If, however,” he wrote, “they think that God could not have commanded the waging of war because the Lord Jesus Christ later said, ‘I tell you not to resist evil, but if anyone strikes you on your right cheek, offer him your left as well,’ let them understand that this disposition lies not in the body but in the heart.”65
Toward a Universal Ideology of Christian Authority
Following this more metaphoric understanding of New Testament morality, late Roman and Merovingian writers debated and developed a far more complicated understanding of the nature of worldly Christian identity than had ever before existed. We see as a result, in contemporary descriptions of the fifth- and sixth-century world, a sense of general uncertainty over the proper moral authority that was to govern human interaction. In his Historiarum libri decem, for example, Gregory of Tours (d. 594) wrote about the holy recluse, Eparchius of Angoulême, who was particularly interested in the needs of the poor and in freeing the imprisoned from incarceration.66 In one episode, a secular count presides over the execution of a thief who was considered by the local inhabitants to be guilty of numerous crimes, not just robberies but murders as well. Eparchius sends a messenger to petition the count to remand the sentence of death and to release the thief, “although guilty,” as he clearly states (scilicet culpabilis), into his custody.67 A mob gathers in opposition to the holy man, however, and demonstrates for the cause of justice: they shout and threaten the judge with insulting language, arguing that to free the man would be prudent for neither the district nor the judge. The count declares it impossible to free the condemned criminal, who is promptly tortured and brought to the gallows. Gregory writes that the messenger returns and recounts the scene to Eparchius, who then declares that “the Lord will grant us of his own gift what man has refused” (quem homo reddere noluit, Dominus suo munere redonabit).68 Eparchius then prays for God’s assistance, and the gallows breaks miraculously. In the ensuing confusion, the holy man is able to gather the thief into his care.
It is an account assumed to express conflict between the Gallo-Roman clergy and new Frankish structures of social power.69 Certainly it does. The source of conflict, however, is not power over coercive force; it is power over the correct arbitration of benevolent force. That is, in Gregory’s story, what is most at issue is the proper form that a good deed should take in the world. Ostensibly, both Eparchius and the count are trying to perform the “right” deed for love of the community. But, demonstrated by God’s miraculous intervention, only one of these men acts correctly in God’s eyes. A hardened, repeat offender stands accused of crimes that he did in fact commit. The holy man, not the count, takes the unpopular political position. Protection of the community and justice for the criminal’s victims seem to demand that the criminal be punished for his unjust actions—and because of the grievous nature of his crimes, that punishment is death. The mob reminds us that clementia does not apply in this case, for it would not serve the common welfare. It is seemingly the count’s duty to protect the integrity of the social order and to secure justice for his people. He has the support not only of his subjects but also of the law. However, this support is precisely what Eparchius seeks to challenge. He is not championing a man unjustly accused; he is championing a higher understanding of God’s love. In this case, Eparchius simply has clearer knowledge—he knows better than the rest that the correct application of pietas in this case is to set the criminal free and not to condemn him to torture and death. Eparchius’s superior knowledge and the reality of the mob’s (and our) inability to discern right morality, which he alone can see, are confirmed only by the miraculous breaking of the gallows and the freeing of the prisoner.
It was another Gregory, Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604), who would ultimately articulate these principles of moral discernment and define them as the foundation of elite secular Christianity. For this Gregory, the confusion about God’s love on earth seems to have been something of a personal obsession. His masterpiece, Moralia in Job, is an extended meditation on the human incapacity to comprehend the wisdom of God. Job is a good man, yet God afflicts him with misfortune after horrible misfortune before ultimately rewarding him with happiness, riches, and extended life. Building upon Augustinian thought, Gregory’s Moralia explains in minute detail how and why humans have such terrible difficulty understanding that both acts of God—the misfortune and the reward—are equal manifestations of his benevolent love.70 Gregory would codify the cultivation of superior knowledge as the primary function and role of the elite Christian male.
Among Gregory’s many contributions to Western thought was the clear relationship that he described between God’s capacity to know caritas in all of its forms and the power that the Christian secular elite held within society as God’s representatives on earth. Gregory’s most pragmatic discussion of these matters came in the form of the small but highly influential treatise that he wrote on the subject of good earthly Christian leadership, the Regulae pastoralis liber.71 Gregory theorized in this book what kind of man could and should be a leader of Christian society.72 Following Christian ascetic ideology, he fully recognized the corrosive effect of the secular world on the soul, addressing the need to ward off this corrosion at all costs. But he was also deeply unsatisfied with the habit of the most devout Christians to flee to the cloister in fear. The world needed, he argued, its holiest of men to live among the people as moral guides—arbiters who could determine right moral action under God and aid souls in the achievement of salvation.
This ability to arbitrate right moral behavior, Gregory suggested, could be nurtured and developed through the proper positioning of body and mind—through, in effect, a toeing of the thin line that separated earthly and heavenly space. As the Eparchius story shows, there was still a tendency within contemporary Christian intellectual culture to associate true love of God with the special elite outsiders of the Christian community who withdrew from society. Gregory effectively merged this association with Augustinian notions of metaphoric New Testament interpretation.
A Christian pastor, says Regulae pastoralis liber, is a “neighbor” (proximus) to all in sympathy but exalted above all in contemplation. Through the “bowels” (viscera) of pietas, he transfers the sickness of others onto himself, and through “lofty speculation” (speculationis altitudinem), he aspires to see the invisible. He must neither despise the weakness of his neighbors nor forget his aspiration for higher pursuits. Like Paul in the New Testament, says Gregory, he is borne high through his contemplation of heaven, which is not visible to human eyes.73 “Behold,” he writes,
he is rooted in heavenly haunts, yet through the bowels of condescension he carefully