RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Caroline Books
taught the veneration of images by word or example; it is an error to compare them with the ark of the covenant, and an absurdity to place them in the same category with the eucharistic host; nor must they be likened to the cross of Christ, the sacred vessels, or the Scriptures, all of which are venerated in their own way and measure for different reasons.
Book III. begins with a confession of faith, for the purpose of evincing the orthodoxy of the Frankish Church. This is supposed to be taken from Jerome, but is really almost verbally the profession of Pelagius (the Libellus fidei ad Innocentium of 417), which throughout the Middle Ages was received as orthodox, under the name of Symbolum Hieronymi or Sermo Augustini. The author then attacks the patriarch Tarasius on the ground of the irregularity of his consecration and the error of his teaching on the procession of the Holy Ghost. The latter reproach and that of further doctrinal aberrations are brought against the other members of the council, and one chapter attacks the impropriety of the empress Irene's
8. Book III. assumption of the teaching office.
A special onslaught is made on a proposition assumed to have been uttered by one of the bishops which clearly rests upon a gross mistranslation. A distinction is drawn between images and relics; and even if it is true that some of the former have worked miracles, no adoration is therefor due them. Still less can dreams and visions, or absurd apocryphal inventions, be adduced in favor of the "adoration of images." Not this, but the keeping of the divine precepts, is the beginning of the fear of the Lord.
Book IV. continues the attack upon expressions of individual members of the council, and upon its authority as a whole. It can in no wise be compared with the First Nicene Council; that asserted the equality of the Son with the Father, while this
places pictures on a level with the
9. Book IV. Trinity. Apart from all the unseemly,
obscure, perverted, absurd, illogical, and untheological expressions to be found in the acts of the latter, it does not deserve the name of ecumenical given to it by the Greeks, because it neither utters the pure Catholic faith nor is recognized by all the churches.
The Caroline Books, then, in their fundamental conceptions, attempt to preserve the golden mean indicated by Gregory the Great in his letter to Serenus of Massilia: " We approve unreservedly because you have forbidden to worship them [images]; but we do not approve of their being broken; if any one wants to make images, at least forbid him; but shun in every way the worshiping of them." But their polemic (apart from its vehement, almost passionate tone)
10. Char- does material injustice to the Nicene acterization Fathers by ignoring their distinction of the Caro- between latreia [worship] which is due line Books, to God alone, and proskunesis timetike
[honoring obeisance] which may be given to creatures, and in ascribing to them the blasphemous proposition that the same "servitude of adoration " is due to the images as to the Holy
Trinity. This is explained by the imperfection of the version of the acts sent to Charles, which always renders the Greek proskunesis by adoratio, and by a particular misunderstanding or wrong reading already referred to.
The work as a whole, however, may be taken as giving a good general view of Frankish and Anglo- Saxon theology in its day, of considerable importance for the dogmatic, exegetical, dialectic, and critical attainments of the age. Of special interest is the attitude assumed toward the great fundamental questions of medieval theology — the relations of Scripture and tradition, authority and reason, the Roman and the universal
11. Impor- Church. In spite of all its recogtance of nition of the teaching authority of the
the Work. Church, and particularly of the Roman Church, the work postulates the right of critical examination in a way seldom found in the Middle Ages — though it will not do to interpret this tendency in terms of modern views. The theological standpoint of the book as a whole is that of Gregory the Great, a somewhat weakened Augustinianism which allows the author to accept the profession of Pelagius as" the Confession of the Catholic Faith." He follows Gregory, as in the question of images, so also in the doctrines of original sin, of the replacing of the fallen angels by an equal number of redeemed men, of purga-
12. Theo- tory and prayers for the dead. Other logical patristic authorities cited are espe-
Standpoint. cially Augustine and Jerome, and sometimes Ambrose and Sedulius. The author attempts to show his universal culture by all sorts of grammatical, rhetorical, philosophical, historical, and literary remarks; by quotations from Plato and Aristotle, Vergil and Cicero, Macrobius and Apuleius, Cato and Josephus; and by the use of scientific terminology and logical formulas. The work, however, has not the character of a theological treatise written by a private person; it is a state document, an official protest on the part of the Frankish Church against Byzantine and Roman superstition and against the unjustified anathemas pronounced by both the Greek and the Roman Church on all who differed from them as well as on their own purer past.
The effect of this protest can not here be followed out in detail. Adrian was clearly much disturbed by it, and sent his defense to Charlemagne with many conciliatory expressions, declaring that he had not as yet given an answer to the Byzantine emperor, because the latter still persisted in his usurpation of what belonged to the Roman See, but that he must, following the ancient tradition of his predecessors, condemn those who refused to venerate the sacred images. Charles's answer was the Synod of Frankfort, the presence at which of the papal legates beto-
13. Later kened Adrian's submission. The pope Influence died on Christmas day, 795, and the
of the Caro- question slumbered until it came up
line Books, once more, under Louis the Pious and
Eugenius II., at the Synod of Paris in
825. This synod adhered to the position of the
Libri Carolini and the Synod of Frankfort,
Carpenter Carpzov