All Manner of Precious Stones: Civic Discourse and the Construction of the Early Medieval City

Abstract

This chapter concentrates on how early medieval authors instrumentalised the malleable connotations concerning stone and construction as part of their broader applications of civic discourse throughout the early medieval period. Over five sections, this chapter uncovers these important connections through a unique body of sources. It first concentrates on how late antique and early medieval exegetes correlated abstract conceptualisations of living stones of the heavenly city with explicit links to citizens in the terrestrial realm. With the link between the heavenly and terrestrial citizens established, the chapter then moves to an understudied liturgical rite in order to demonstrate how the bonds between these two bodies were emphasised in an effort to seek divine protection for a city on earth. The possibilities and limitations of the creation of sanctified space on earth through construction are then explored through two further bodies of evidence: the ideal construction of sanctified space on earth through the Vita s. Chrothildis and the problematic nature of this ideal in two ninth-century letters composed during the Carolingian period. Together, this analysis of these diverse sources illuminates the ongoing correspondence between medieval conceptions of civic space and civic bodies throughout each of these diverse texts.

1 Introduction

Civic discourse provided an important avenue along which early medieval authors traveled between spiritual and terrestrial loci. At the same time, this discourse provided the language through which citizens themselves could be figured as part of the physical fabric of civic space. This tension, so this chapter argues, persisted in early medieval conceptions of cities both heavenly and terrestrial, virtuous and vicious. Conceptions of the heavenly city offer insights into how particular authors conceptualised how earthly cities and civic communities should function. At the same time, outsize concern for terrestrial cities troubled some early medieval authors, who feared that a focus on their perfectability would cause their citizens to lose sight of the celestis urbs.

In order to demonstrate these connections, this chapter concentrates on how early medieval authors instrumentalised the malleable connotations concerning stone and construction as part of their broader applications of civic discourse throughout the early medieval period. Each section concentrates on one body of sources, starting with scriptural exegesis. The first section concentrates on how late antique and early medieval exegetes correlated abstract conceptualisations of ‘living stones’ (vivi lapides) of the heavenly city as present in the Psalms and Revelations with explicit links to citizens in the terrestrial realm in their works. With the link between the heavenly and terrestrial citizens established, the following section concentrates on the liturgical rite known as the Missa pro civitatis sive loci custodia in order to demonstrate how these bonds between these two bodies and citizens and civic spaces were emphasised in an effort to seek divine protection for a city on earth. The possibilities and limitations of the creation of sanctified space on earth through construction are then explored through two further bodies of evidence: the ideal construction of sanctified space on earth through the Vita s. Chrothildis and the problematic nature of this ideal in two ninth-century letters composed during the Carolingian period. Together, this analysis of these diverse sources illuminates the ongoing correspondence between medieval conceptions of civic space and civic bodies throughout each of these diverse texts.

2 Civic Stones: Exegesis, Urban Structures, and Virtue

Scripture furnished late antique and early medieval exegetes with the material through which they could explain the qualities of specific civic structures and expand upon their broader allegorical meaning in order to exhort those within Christian communities to emulate and enact virtuous action.¹ The image of walls surrounding temporal and sacred structures, for instance, inspired vivid reflections on how the church protects and guides its members. At the same time, such reflections led late antique and early medieval theologians to contemplate the composition of the heavenly city’s foundational gemstones. Such gems furnished potent imagery through which exegetes explored how individual and collective bodies should mold themselves into citizens of these sacred spaces.

The walls of celestial Jerusalem anchored both theological musings on the composition of Ecclesia as a civic space and consideration of the roles of individual members as ideal citizens. Bishop Ambrose of Milan (d.c.397) grasped onto this very dynamic towards the end of his apologia addressed to the reigning emperor Theodosius on the biblical king David, with a commentary on the penitential Psalm 50.² In the final chapter, Ambrose centered on the allegorical implications of crying out for the walls of Jerusalem to be built in the context of professing one’s own sins. Such muri Hierusalem, in Ambrose’s view, constitute ‘the ramparts of faith, the defences of disputations, the bulwarks of the virtues’.³ Ambrose delved further, proceeding from the abstract to the more concrete expressions of these walls in Ecclesia herself. For, so Ambrose claimed, ‘the walls of Jerusalem are the gatherings of the churches established throughout the whole world’.⁴ After casting Song of Songs 8:10 in the voice of Ecclesia (‘I am the wall, and my breasts are like towers’), Ambrose went on to aver that the walls of Jerusalem were not only constituted by the collective conventus of churches but even unto the individual members, ‘since everyone who enters the church by good faith and good works becomes a citizen and inhabitant of that city on high that comes down from heaven’.⁵ Thus, Ambrose concluded, the structura of living stones builds these walls, the walls of the church and the walls of heavenly Jerusalem alike.⁶

Such structures and their constituent parts, however, must be constantly guarded, lest they be altered for devious ends. In his widely influential libellum regularum for unlocking the hidden treasures imbedded within Scripture, Ambrose’s contemporary, the North African theologican Tyconius (d.c.400) underscored the dual potential of precious stones.⁷ After noting that God listed twelve stones to denote perfect wholeness, Tyconius argued that while God only constructs goodness, the devil can indeed change their application, if not their nature.⁸ In this leap from naturam to usum, Tyconius also leapt from the divine to the human. All people of outstanding sense and powerful character, Tyconius averred, ‘are gold and silver and precious stones by nature’.⁹ However, their ultimate civic destiny lay not in their innate character, but by their own will, for Tyconius asserted that ‘they will belong to the one in whose service they employ their powers, by choice not by nature’.¹⁰

Early medieval exegetes ruminated on these same passages, crafting interpretations that emphasised defensive civic structures, while also deriving nuanced distinctions that reflected contemporary concerns. As a scholar well versed in the works of both Ambrose and Tyconius, the eighth-century Northumbrian monk Bede (d.735) likewise capitalised on the interpretative potential springing from the intersection of civic bodies and civic construction in his own extensive exegetical works.¹¹ In his commentary on the Song of Songs, Bede declared that Ecclesia is rightly called a wall because she was composed of living stones joined together by the glue of charity, which can withstand any blow of any heretical battering ram.¹² Bede, however, made an important distinction in rank by highlighting the physical features of these defensive structures. Ecclesia’s towers, Bede claimed, signify those that have been granted greater grace by God ‘so that through the extraordinary height of their virtues they surpass the common life of the faithful as much as towers surpass walls’, and, like towers ‘repel all the spears of those who have gone astray with their superior powers of speaking’.¹³ In essence, Bede concluded, Ecclesia embodies these defensive structures since she ‘constantly drives hostile armies away from injuring that city and always strives to rear new peoples’ for God.¹⁴

This image of Ecclesia as a well-defended city, however, could be inverted. The Carolingian abbot Paschasius Radbertus often reflected upon the civic construction of Holy Jerusalem and its effects on the civic body of the church in his biblical commentaries, including in his commentary on Matthew.¹⁵ In Book III, Paschasius contemplated why the civitas seated on a mountain cannot be hidden. Amongst his discussion of the twelve splendid gems of Holy Jerusalem and the fortifications of the virtues, Paschasius reflected upon how the rex et artifex of this city forbids its citizens (cives) from concealing their faith, so that they may be surrounded by the stronger arms of the virtues.¹⁶ This carefully crafted balance, however, could face significant challenges from within its very structures. In his Expositio in Lamentationes, Paschasius correlated the walls of the Ecclesia with pastores, claiming that when these walls, these guardians of souls, ‘are destroyed by their own acts, the enemy easily pulls down and plunders all precious things within and becomes like a city which is being sacked’.¹⁷ Strong structures figured as cities are not enough; those who populate the figurative city must themselves persist in virtuous action in order for the city and her inhabitants to survive.

Returning to Bede, the monk from Wearmouth-Jarrow famously elaborated upon the specific gemstones that constituted the walls of the New Jerusalem, as described by John in Revelations, in his Expositio Apocalypseos.¹⁸ The various gemstones signified the virtues, not only of the physical stones themselves and their ability to withstand any potential spiritual enemy, but also of those inhabitants of the celestial city. Earlier exegetes crafted this correlation between celestial Jerusalem’s gems, the virtues, and the saints.¹⁹ Bede, however, further emphasised how these stones-as-saints shone as moral exempla for inhabitants of the terrestrial realm. Sapphire, for instance, signified not only the radiant light of the mind of the saints (sanctorum animus) illuminated by rays of divine light, but the light they emanated persuaded others to raise their minds to the skies and seek the eternal.²⁰ The gold and gemstones that pave the streets of New Jerusalem signified for Bede that ‘there are many, even of a commoner and lower life, who are surrounded with the highest virtues in the Church, and who shine with a purity of mind and effulgence of work’.²¹ For Bede, therefore, the metaphors assigned to these foundational stones reached beyond the spiritual world, signifying the ways in which God’s saints and martyrs could influence and persuade even ordinary people who adhere to Christian virtues.

While the stones that structure the heavenly city emanate the virtues of the saints for earthly citizens to contemplate and emulate, the precious stones and ornamentation that adorn the terrena civitas often serve in Bede to illustrate the temporary delights tied to the human body. The kings, merchants, and sailors lament their fallen city, as Babylon’s adornments signify how ‘all the ostentation of the world, and indeed those things that are gratifying to the body, or convenient to external uses, is failing’.²² Instead of reflecting the internal virtue of the heavenly citizen, the different kinds of metal that glimmer on Babylon only delight the external sense of sight, a hollow sensation.²³ Bede further compares the civitas saeculi, loaded down by the burden and delusion of its sins, to an unstable mass that will not be able to weather the coming storm.²⁴ The Church stands in direct opposition with the secular world as she bears the qualities of ‘a stone, but one that is stable and steadfast, which spurns the assaults of the tempests’.²⁵

Such a stone cannot weather external storms or hostile enemies without vigilance and sacrifice. In his commentary on 1 Peter 2:5, Bede declared that the stones that compose the paries of the Christian community must be hewn, cutting away all imperfections. As vivi lapides, those who long to be within this wall must have ‘at the discrimination of a learned teacher, their undesirable actions and thoughts cut off, as if squared off by the blow of an axe’.²⁶ Such incisions would then allow these living stones to be held up by the righteous who came before them ‘just as some rows of stones in a wall are held up by others'.²⁷ At the same time, those freshly carved stones could now themselves instruct and support those who follow.²⁸

In subsequent centuries, early medieval authors adopted this metaphorical interplay between individual celestial stones, virtues, and civic language. One tenth-century anonymous monk, for instance, condensed and reconfigured pertinent passages from Bede’s Expositio Apocalypseos into a new hymn that survives in more than twenty extant manuscripts.²⁹ In the first and last stanzas, the author surrounded the celestial stones and their attendant virtues with civic terminology, situating the cives already in heaven and those who strive to become their co-citizens in conversation with one another. In the first line, the hymn implored ‘Citizens of the celestial patria / sing together to the King of kings’.³⁰ God not only ruled over all, but also was acknowledged as the supremus artifex of the heavenly city, whose foundation will now be explored through the recitation of the twelve gemstones that structure the uranica civitas.³¹ After dedicating a stanza to each of the stones, the hymn drew the conclusion that ‘these precious stones / signify human beings of flesh and blood / the variety of colors is / the multiplicity of virtues’.³² The stones themselves represented carnal beings, capable of sin, but also capable of harnessing the virtues on the path to eternal life. Indeed, so the hymn averred, ‘Whosoever shall have flowered in these / can be their fellow-citizen (concivis)’.³³ After speaking directly to Jerusalem herself, the hymn closes by entreating God as king of the civitatis celice to grant those present the consortium with those who already reside above.³⁴ ‘Together in the companies of the saints’, the hymn beseeches, ‘let us sing songs to thee’.³⁵ Through the perfection of the virtues embodied in the celestial stones, and through the songs reverberating on earth and in heaven, this hymn made audible the abstract notions found in scriptural exegesis and in moral instruction, crossing from the celestial realm to the terrestrial city.

3 The Celestial and the Terrestrial City Meet: Missa pro civitatis sive loci custodia

The dangers associated with the terrestrial city—invasion, structural collapse, and moral decay—and their spiritual solutions to these issues found expression in a wide array of early medieval genres, including in the liturgy. An extraordinary addition to a sacramentary contained in Tours, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 184 (s.ix^ex) makes an anxious connection between the celestial city and God’s protection for a civitas and the civic community that resides in her.³⁶ Together with Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 9430, this Tours manuscript features as one of two manuscript compilations of three ninth-century sacramentaries, whose gatherings had at some point been dissevered and subsequently reassembled into two manuscripts.³⁷ Originally, these sacramentaries were copied in the later ninth- and early tenth-centuries, the earliest of which (identified by Jean Deshusses as Tu1) was copied for usage at the Abbey of Saint Martin de Tours, while the later two (Tu2 and Tu3) were copied for the usage of the cathedral of Tours, which was dedicated at that time to St. Maurice, with Tu3 copied from Tu1.³⁸ On fol. 286r of Tours MS 184, a significant addition stands out from the page in comparison with the original text with its lighter ink, lack of rubrication, and later additions in much darker ink that provided alternative terminology and grammatical endings for a rite that primarily focused on the more generic term of locus. On this folio following a Mass praying to St. Maurice to defend his congregation, a tenth-century scribe added a new Missa pro civitatis sive loci custodia that is a votive Mass ‘for the protection of the city or region’.

The first line of the Mass calls upon the sempiternal God as the ‘builder and guardian of the city of Jerusalem’ to protect this city (civitate ista) along with its inhabitants, so that they may live in a domicilium of safety and peace.³⁹ In quick succession, this missa ties the spiritual and terrestrial spaces together, imploring God to extend his protection of his own civitas to the inhabitants of this earthly city, in effect warding off any and all threats to their city’s moral and physical health. The missa then invokes the intercession of the blessed mother Mary and of all the saints, that is the citizens of heavenly Jerusalem. Together with the earthly city’s prayers, the collected saintly and terrestrial community might entreat God to govern and sustain this familiam civitatis with care in times of insecurity and through the bestowal of the virtue of fortitudo in times of hardship.⁴⁰ From the internal character of the civic family, the prayers then turn to the physical defence of the city, as they prayed to God to liberate them from all adversity. The Mass ends by entreating to God to ‘surround this city with its inhabitants with the wall of your protection so that with all adversity having been repelled’ it would always be a domicilium of tranquility and peace.⁴¹

This remarkable missa wove the heavenly and secular city and their citizens into one sacred temporal space through the recitation and interpolation of older prayers applied originally not to the civic arena, but the monastic. This final prayer can be found in the mid-eighth-century manuscript known as the Old Gelasian Sacramentary, a remarkably influential work composed in Francia, possibly at Chelles around 750. In an oratio for the monastery, the prayer calls for the murus custodiae to envelop not the city and her citizens, but instead the holy sheepfold (sanctum ovile) of the monastic foundation.⁴² Likewise, a complex late ninth or early tenth-century liturgical manuscript known as the Leofric A (as part of the so-called Leofric Missal) contained this very prayer to surround their own holy flock in the wall of God’s protection, as well as a further prayer later found in the Missa pro civitatis sive loci custodia.⁴³ Instead of the familiam huius civitatis, however, these prayers beseeched Mary and the other saints to intercede for ‘this family of monks’.⁴⁴ Such a figuration of the monastery or convent as the celestial city and its monks or nuns as co-citizens of the heavenly patria featured as a significant expression of the broader appropriation of civic discourse in the late antique and early medieval worlds.⁴⁵ The sacred words that were once the province of those protected by monastic enclosures now were appropriated to sanctify and unify members of an earthly civic family.

In the centuries that followed, the prayers and collects contained in this short missa continued to be applied to both monastic and civic spaces. Such orations appeared in collects for a monastic foundation in an eleventh-century Benedictine sacramentary now housed in Barcelona, as well as in a Mass ‘for the protection of the monastery and its inhabitants’ in the twelfth-century liturgical manuscript known as the Corpus Irish Missal.⁴⁶ These prayers were also incorporated into new liturgical rites reflecting present concerns, including entreaties to God for the protection of specific terrestrial cities. Cecilia Gaposchkin has elucidated how, for instance, the Hospitaller priory at Autun interwove the prayer that opened this missa pro civitate into a Mass for the feast of the liberation of Jerusalem in a missal dated to the fourteenth century.⁴⁷ The collect in question encourages the gathered congregation, in Gaposchkin’s view, to pray not only for the protection of their own city, but also for the protection of the earthly city of Jerusalem itself.⁴⁸

These prayers for protection of constructed and communal space echoed throughout several centuries, finding expression in manuscripts throughout medieval Christendom. The initial pleas for God to guard monastic communities to their celestial civitas inspired a tenth-century scribe to implore God in His role as custos to protect not a monastic but a civic space. In doing so, the scribe did not eradicate the previous application, but instead built upon this sacral foundation, extending God’s protection and presence to the entire civic familia who dwelled within the walls of the city while at the same time directing the inhabitants of this civic space towards their ultimate destination: the celestial city of Jerusalem. While later rites would add further temporal dimensions to these prayers for the earthly Jerusalem, the tenth-century Tours Missa pro civitatis sive loci custodi crafted an intercessory link between the celestial and terrestrial civic spaces, as it sought to create a peaceful, well-guarded domicilium on earth as God has built in heaven.

4 Constructing the Kingdom: Vita s. Chrothildis

As the Missa pro civitate sive loci custodi concentrated on the communal bond of its citizens through their prayers for protection to God, other authors narrowed in on the role of the individual. In early medieval vitae, prominent members of civic communities could personally shape their wider community’s relationship to the celestial city through construction in the terrestrial realm. The vita of the Merovingian queen, Clothild, presents a remarkable exposition of this intricate connection between a sanctified individual, sanctified space, and a sanctified community.⁴⁹ The vita itself survived in only a few manuscripts, the earliest of which dates to the twelfth century.⁵⁰ Karl Werner and others, however, have dated the composition of Clothild’s life to the tenth century, drawing specific connections with the tenth-century Queen Gerberga and her intellectual circle at the late Carolingian court.⁵¹

The vita frames its entire narrative through the language of civic construction from the initial line of text. The first word, urbis, situated the minds of its audience in an urban context through which the author could then create two contrasting edifices: the destroyed buildings of Jericho and the shimmering palaces of Jerusalem.⁵² More specifically, the author distinguished between the fabrication of the inanimate stones and marble of the terrestrial city and the construction of Jerusalem’s palatium with the ‘souls of the holy’. The former were doomed to fail; the latter ‘will never crumble but will stand forever’.⁵³

After setting this urban scene, the author of Clothild’s life concentrated on one particular structure: the celestial city’s gate. This porta urbis gleams with precious pearls, pearls which themselves are the blessed apostles, martyrs, confessors, virgins, widows, and spouses who inhabit the celestial city.⁵⁴ Through these gates configured of all the saintly exemplars, God as rex huius urbis populated his city with devoted subjects ‘from all the people of the world of both sexes’.⁵⁵ These men and women, after suffering the trials and uncertainty of the temporal sphere, were liberated as they entered and became united with those who had come before into their new urbs ‘whose walls will never fall’.⁵⁶ In their extended discussion of Jerusalem’s structure, the author fused the physicality of the city gate and its walls with the composition of her citizens themselves, thereby underscoring the living quality of the eternal city as distinct from the lifeless structures of the present world.

At two significant junctures, the vita’s author recalled the construction of the celestial city: at the beginning of marriage negotiations between Clothild and her future husband, Flodoveus, and at the end of her life, when she was buried at St. Peter’s and St. Paul's basilica in Paris. After King Flodoveus declared his desire to wed Clothild, the author momentarily turned their gaze from the distant past into the Carolingian present. Praising Flodoveus’ choice, the author declared that it was proper that from Clothild’s noble lineage, the future kings of the Franks would spring. These kings, in the author’s view, were ‘destined to build for God, the immortal king, the many monasteries that now exist all over Gaul’.⁵⁷ By constructing such ‘perishable churches’, the Frankish kings and queens might gain ‘the joys of the celestial Jerusalem, the church which endures forever’.⁵⁸

After her life’s end, Queen Clothild found her final resting place in a church she herself founded, namely the basilica dedicated to Sts. Peter and Paul in Paris. The vita’s author noted that in this very church resided the relics of Clothild’s contemporary Saint Geneviève.⁵⁹ Clothild’s hagiographer exclaimed how fitting it was that this religious site should ‘be adorned by the body of that virgin and the limbs of so glorious a queen, so devout a widow, mother of Roman Emperors, and the genetrix of the king of the Franks’.⁶⁰ As the gates of celestial Jerusalem were composed of the precious pearls of the holy choirs and the city composed of the souls of the saints, so too was this Parisian basilica founded upon the bodies of these sanctified corpora.

The fundamental importance of construction in creating the ideal space and community, with the corresponding destruction of illicit spaces, recurred as a prominent theme throughout Clothild’s vita. The Merovingian queen embarked on a program of intensive building of churches and monasteries in or near cities including Paris, Rouen, and Laon that continued throughout her life.⁶¹ Indeed, on one such building site, Clothild herself sent the builders a cup from which habitually transformed water into wine of a superior vintage, so long as the builders worked on their foundation.⁶²

Yet, the transformative connection between physical structures and its community found its clearest expression at the central moment of Clothild’s vita: the Baptism of the Merovingian king Flodoveus, who arose from the baptismal waters as Clovis. After the king decided to convert to Christianity, Clothild first prayed (orat) for the Frankish populus and their conversion, and then immediately adorned (ornat) the church with a host of ecclesiastical ornaments.⁶³ In the ceremony of Baptism itself, however, Clothild not only proceeds through the space which she had adorned, but she becomes a living embodiment of Ecclesia. The Holy Spirit, according to this vita, had ordered the key figures of the baptismal procession into the church to represent a deeper symbolism, for in his view, the royal couple’s counselor and legendary bishop, Remigius, proceeded at the head of the procession vice Christi Iesu, while Clothild followed vice ecclesie.⁶⁴

Together, the newly baptised king and his stalwart queen set out to redraw the boundaries of those who should belong—and, more directly, who should not belong—within their regnal and Christian community. At a public assembly in Paris soon thereafter, Clovis declared to his collected people that he wanted to oust the Arians from Gaul, from the newly sanctified land with its newly sanctified king.⁶⁵ Clothild, according to her hagiographer, then counseled the king that if he wished to succeed in his endeavour that they should ‘build in this place an ecclesia in honor of Saint Peter, the Prince of the Apostles, that with his help you will succeed in subjugating the Arian peoples to yourself’.⁶⁶ Clovis agreed, and while the king and his armies attacked, Clothild remained in Paris to build this church into which the royal couple would at the end of their lives be interred.

The public approval and success of this new church functioned as a victory for Clothild. Previously, on her wedding night, Clothild had implored her new husband to grant her three interrelated requests: to convert to Christianity, to destroy his idols, and to restore the Christian churches he had destroyed.⁶⁷ In both moments, Clothild connected Clovis’ success in the subjugation and removal of a heretical faith with the construction of a new church. The building of St. Peter’s basilica in Paris and the destruction of non-Christian spaces, in Clothild’s view, could lead directly to the construction of a better regnal community.

5 The Celestial and the Terrestrial City Diverge: Epistolary Counsel and the Limits of the City

The creation of the ideal city or kingdom on earth, however closely it approached the celestial patria, was always understood as a mere approximation. However much an early medieval author or ruler desired to replicate celestial civic structures, their ultimate aim should always be not perfection on earth, but instead working towards their entry as citizens of their true patria in heaven. The exegetical, liturgical, and hagiographic sources analysed above touched on this tension, but its overt expression finds an immediacy in another body of early medieval evidence, namely letters. The letters below—one sent from Alcuin of York to Charlemagne in the wake of grief; one sent by Bishop Elipandus to his rival Migetius in the midst of an aggressive dispute—illustrate the rhetorical potential imbedded in the long-standing association of civic bodies and construction beyond the idealised citizen and structures crafted by the authors discussed above. Even in their divergent contexts, the two letters below both reflect on this tension imbedded in the ideal city and its place on earth, one from the consolatory reflection on mortality and loss and the other as a biting invective against a political foe.

Unexpected death inspired the first reflection on the ideal city and the impossibility of truly emulating it in the terrestrial sphere. On 4 June 800, the young Carolingian queen Liudgard suddenly died of an unknown illness at the monastery of Saint Martin of Tours, while traveling with Charlemagne and the Frankish court through Neustria.⁶⁸ In two extant missives, the learned abbot Alcuin of Tours sent letters of praise for the deceased and consolation and counsel to the king in the aftermath.⁶⁹ After his salutatio, Alcuin opened the latter missive with praise for his ruler’s empire as a perpetuae pacis civitas through the juxtaposition of Jerusalem, as a failed biblical ruin and as the city yet to come.⁷⁰ While the latter city was ‘destroyed by the Chaldean fires’, Charlemagne governed and guided his present-day kingdom as the heavenly civitas, constructed with the blood of Christ and ‘whose living stones are bound together by the glue of caritas and whose walls of heavenly edifice from the various gems of the virtues stretch to lofty heights’.⁷¹ Instead of calling upon two cities, Alcuin grounded his civic binary in the single entity of Jerusalem as both a historical ruin and the celestial civic ideal. In doing so, the erudite abbot deftly appropriated terminology associated with the construction of the heavenly city in order to apply these charged metaphors to Charlemagne himself in his role as this city’s builder, governor, and guardian.⁷²

Under Charlemagne’s protection, Alcuin figures himself in this letter not only as part of Charlemagne’s court, but of his civitas.⁷³ As the living stones of both the celestial and Charlemagne’s city are bound by love, so Alcuin is sending his letter to help heal the Frankish ruler’s wounds as he mourns his recent loss. In the letter that follows, Alcuin counsels Charlemagne to remember that they, as Christians, are but exiles from their patria, pilgrims who should seek the road towards the city of heavenly Jerusalem.⁷⁴ ‘Death of good people', so Alcuin writes, ‘is a migration towards a better life, which is not to be mourned, but instead to be celebrated’.⁷⁵ The emphasis must be placed on the boni homines, for in this life Alcuin asserts that they must continue to endeavour to do good works, so that they might be worthy to belong to their heavenly civitas and patria in the future. Alcuin, in essence, reminds Charlemagne that although his own kingdom, his own civitas, emulates the ideal city, he must always remember that he too is still a pilgrim towards his true patria.⁷⁶

There is a tension inherent in Alcuin’s letter regarding replicating the celestial city on earth that was borne out further not in another consolatory missive, but instead in a combative one: Bishop Elipandus of Toledo’s epistolary invective against his fellow Iberian author, Migetius.⁷⁷ Scholars have rightly concentrated on this letter in relation to Iberian theories of the human and divine natures of Christ—often termed Spanish Adoptionism—and Carolingian responses to these theological debates.⁷⁸ In this letter, Elipandus crafted a biting response to a (now lost) letter sent by Migetius, a letter that Elipandus characterised as written with such madness that Migetus’ words emitted the most foul odor.⁷⁹ Amongst a series of evocative metaphors to castigate his recipient, Elipandus framed his response with civic terminology. Migetius’ aegritudo had passed the point of smooth remedies of wine and oil, but required the sharp end of the sword to excise him completely, as one must do with a rotting wound.⁸⁰ The civic imagery becomes more explicit, as Elipandus related this extreme remedy would be administered:

We first advance to shatter the citadel of your pride with the battering-ram of justice, lest the shadow of its error should be applied to the faithful as a pernicious malady. We first endeavour to ruin the construction of your insanity with the stone of reason, lest it should endeavour to offer a fortification of defence for the foolish.⁸¹

Migetius’ false edifice must crumble in a public fashion, lest the others fall prey to such foolish notions and find refuge in the wrong urban space in their minds.

Such violent language inverted the civic imagery that described the celestial city as depicted by late antique and early medieval exegetical authors. Ambrose, for instance, had described the walls of heavenly Jerusalem as disputationum munimenta; here, Elipandus described the work of Migetius as a dangerously insane fabrica, which if not torn down, would provide munimentum for fools’ speech. Likewise, Bede’s characterisation of Ecclesia as a wall that could withstand any strike of an heretical battering ram was turned around by Elipandus, as he promised to strike Migetius’ fabrica with a battering ram of justice. Whether direct references or not, Elipandus called upon civic imagery of construction and deconstruction of the ideal or damned city in a provocative fashion to inflict sound rhetorical blows and to redirect Migetius back towards the right path.

As the letter concluded, Elipandus waged a final charge at Migetius: his insistence that Rome was the New Jerusalem.⁸² According to Elipandus, Migetius sought to exalt Rome as an episcopal seat without parallel, which alone possessed the potestas dei and therefore persisted as the only church on earth without blemish.⁸³ Elipandus scoffs at Migetius’ impudence and foolishness by subverting the idea that Rome as an episcopal see and as a civic body was ever virtuous. He inquires how Migetius could ever think so, when the fourth-century Pope Liberius was damned amongst the heretics, and, extending even further into the city of Rome itself, he reminds Migetius that Gregory the Great ‘protest[ed] that so many wicked men were in Rome’.⁸⁴

From the fallen humanity of Rome’s citizens, Elipandus then moves on to refuting Migetius’ remarkable claim about Rome’s civic structures. According to Elipandus, Migetius had claimed ‘that the stones of the same urbs or the walls of the very civitas…have descended from heaven’.⁸⁵ Elipandus found this assertion beyond the realm of sanity, particularly as St. Peter himself had labeled the city as Babylon.⁸⁶ While scholars have suggested that Elipandus’ sensitivity on this point may have stemmed from a long-standing tradition of the See of Toledo’s relative independence from the Holy See, it is important to note the process through which Elipandus constructed his biting invective against Migetius’ claims about Rome as the celestial city on earth. Whereas Alcuin redirected Charlemagne through praise and gentle instruction, Elipandus deconstructed Migetius’ arguments for Rome’s exalted position with biting invective. Elipandus inverted Rome as populated with citizens as wicked, instead of virtuous, and its structures not as descended from heaven, but instead the embodiment of the worst aspects of the terrestrial city figured as a fallen Babylon.

6 Conclusion

In the early Middle Ages, civic stones transversed many boundaries: from the vicious to the virtuous, from the terrestrial to the celestial, from life to death. Their animate qualities laid bare in Scripture reverberated across the early medieval theological landscape and beyond, transcending the written word into the lived environments of early medieval civic and sacred communities. Yet, throughout these diverse assortment of texts analysed here, each author emphasised an element of choice as exercised by the stones themselves. The citizens that constructed the celestial city all had to subject themselves to hewing and honing in order to find their perfect place in the impregnable walls of heavenly Jerusalem; the citizens that dwelled on earth had to choose constantly to orient their minds and their bodies to travel to their true patria by crafting perishable structures and imperfect arguments in this world. In each realm, the vivi lapides ultimately determined the fate of their city, whether they would shine for eternity or crumble into the dust of the past.

Appendix

Missa Pro Civitatis . Sive Loci Custodia

Omnipotens sempiternae deus aedificator et custos hierusalem .

+ locum istum

ciuitatis superne custodi ciuitatem istam cum habitatoribus

suis . ut sit in ea domicilium incolumitatis et pacis . per. alia

+ loci

Familiam huius ciuitatis quaesumus domine intercedente beata dei geni

trice Maria . atque omnibus sanctis tuis . perpetuo guberna mode

ramine . ut adsit nobis et insecuritate cautela et inter

aspera fortitudo . per . Super oblatam Piis sacrifitiis domine quaesumus

placatus intende . ut qui proprius oramus absolui delicitis . non

grauemur externis . et ab omnibus liberemur aduersis . per.

+ hunc l⁸⁷

Ad complendum. suscipe domine preces nostras et muro custodie tue hanc

ciuitatem cum habitantibus in ea circumda . ut omni aduersi

tate depulsa sit semper domicilium tranquillitatis et pacis . per .