By JUDE P. DOUGHERTY
Fried, Johannes. Charlemagne. Translated by Peter Lewis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016. xi +673 pp.
Charlemagne was born in 748 on an estate somewhere between Paris and Compiègne. The son of Pepin the Short, he ruled from 768 until his death in 814.
Johannes Fried is a distinguished historian and medievalist, who until his recent retirement was professor of medieval history at the University of Frankfurt am Main. The present work follows on his authoritative volume, The Middle Ages.
Charlemagne is not a biography in the usual sense. Fried calls it a work of fiction, because he has amplified and interpreted what is known of Charlemagne’s life. Although his profile is always warranted by data and draws upon Fried’s own in-depth knowledge of the period, his narrative is not always supported by textual evidence.
Although this is a book about the Frankish king, there is much in Fried’s narrative of interest to philosophers.
As a boy Charles enjoyed the benefit of a full religious and scholarly education. As king he desired, in his own words, “to constantly improve the state of our Church, to zealously renew the discipline of learning which through the neglect of our forefathers is now almost forgotten, and insofar as we are able, to encourage a mastery of the liberal arts.”
Fried adds, “To mend what was defective, to renew and to urge people to study, sums up the key task that Charles would set for himself as king.”
With Pepin, his father, Charles traveled extensively throughout the Europe, which at the time constituted his father’s empire. Years later he encountered, probably in Vienna, Alcuin of York, an eminent Anglo Saxon scholar and theologian, whom he managed to attract to his court at Aix.
At Charlemagne’s court, Alcuin bore the title “Master of the Palace School.” The king took Alcuin as his personal tutor and continued to study under his direction.
Charles, given his early education, was acquainted with the biblical sources of his faith and to some extent with the fathers of the Church. He knew and held in esteem Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana as well as his De Civitate Dei.
As his studies progressed, it became clear that Charlemagne’s mother tongue, an earthy form of Frankish, was not suited for scholarly philosophical and theological study. It could not cope with dialectics, for example.
Charles recognized early on in his reign that the recovery of ancient learning had to begin with Latin. Schools had to be established, and he established many. Charles himself became fluent in Latin. He could understand Greek but could not speak it. An early biographer claimed that his oratorical skills approached those of Cicero. Writing, at the time, was considered a servile art, one which the nobility did not have to acquire, and that may explain the sparsity of first-person accounts of Charles’ motivation and activity.
The king had an abiding interest in mathematics, astronomy, calendrical calculations, and the natural science of his day. He plagued Alcuin with questions. Charlemagne wanted to know the age of the Earth. He was particularly interested in the movement of the planet Mars, which had just appeared in the heavens. He wanted to know whether Mars had its own orbit, or whether its course was influenced by the sun.
Many questions he put to Alcuin were not answerable for another 800 years, until Tycho Brahe’s calculations became available to Johannes Kepler, court astronomer to the Holy Roman emperor, Rudolf II in Prague. In fact, Kepler based his four laws of planetary motion on Brahe’s calculations.
Alcuin himself is known primarily for two works produced while in the service of the king. His Dialectics was written to introduce the Carolingian court to Aristotle’s doctrine of the categories, in particular to the Peri Hermeneias. Another work, On Rhetoric, was intended to help the clergy and others to embellish and polish their rhetorical skills, perhaps to hone their arguments, and to help them advance in the art of persuasion.
Initiated by Charlemagne’s court, an Aristotelian form of intellectualism spread throughout the schools of the West. It was an outlook distinct from those of Byzantium and the Arab-speaking worlds. In stages, the entire Organon of Aristotle was introduced into the Frankish educational system. Boethius’ De Devisione was known at the time.
Aristotle’s De Anima, Physics, and Metaphysics became available only in the twelfth century, but it was at the court of Charlemagne that a Western style of thought was developed and began to spread. Numerous cultural centers came into being as a result of Charlemagne’s effort to educate the masses. New schools whose importance soon transcended their local regions began to flourish at St. Denis and Corbie in Picardy, to mention only two.
“Corbie,” Fried tells us, “was a Merovingian foundation dating from the seventh century, that combined material wealth, a body of highly educated monks, a wonderfully appointed library that contained valuable tomes of canon law and literature.”
Marmoutier Abbey in Tours, founded by St. Martin, came under the care of Alcuin from 786 to his death in 804. Alcuin, a thoroughgoing Aristotelian, taught that philosophy is the mistress of all virtue, intellectual and moral.
“The light of learning,” he wrote, “is innately at the disposal of the human intellect, but without proper instruction, it remains a trapped spark. . . . Wisdom is an eternal treasure of the human soul and the path to it proceeds via the seven steps of the liberal arts, grammar, rhetoric, dialectics, arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy.”
Alcuin’s promotion of an Aristotelian propaedeutic may be considered part of the wellsprings of the movement later known as Scholasticism.
Almost as a footnote Fried observes that with few exceptions scarcely a trace of ancient learning and literature would still be extant, including the works of the Church fathers, if the scribes and scholars employed by Charlemagne and subsequently by other monarchs had not used vellum (expensive calfskin) for their transcriptions.
Early biographies of Charles acknowledged his stature, but the honorific title of “the Great” became firmly established only around AD 1000 and has stuck with him ever since. In German he is known as Karl der Grosse. In French the honorific title became an integral part of his name, Charlemagne.
This reviewer would be remiss if he did not mention the very readable translation of the volume by Peter Lewis.
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