Adoptionism and the Song of Songs: Exegesis, Controversy, and Context

chapter 2 Adoptionism and the Song of Songs: Exegesis, Controversy, and Context In the 790s, the religious reform Charlemagne had instituted came aggressively of age. From the Council of Frankfurt in 794, culminating in Charlemagne’s coronation in Rome in 800, the tight circle of Charlemagne’s religious advi- sors at court argued for Frankish religious precedence over the Byzantine East while still offering due deference to the pope in Rome.1 As a consequence, it was a decade marked by religious controversy both vehement and complex, as Charlemagne and the court scholars pronounced upon a variety of issues— Spanish adoptionism, Byzantine iconoclasm, and the controversy over the procession of the Holy Spirit— not so subtly arguing for their own role as a new Nicaea, presided over by a Eusebian Constantine.2 Biblical exegesis was one arena in which Carolingian scholars could make this argument, demonstrat- ing their mastery of, and connection to the patristic tradition, the undisputed source of doctrinal authority. In that respect, Carolingian biblical exegesis was by definition a traditional genre, preserving a core of patristic teaching on a scriptural text. Across the ninth century, Carolingian exegetes would consis- tently read the Song of Songs as an ecclesiological text, with a particular focus on the role of the clergy, containing a call to preaching and reform. However, the commentary tradition is only a part of the much larger story of how the Carolingians read the Song of Songs, and I would argue, can only be under- stood in the context of that larger narrative. In particular, the eighth and ninth- century debates around adoptionism in the Frankish world are the historical context by which we need to understand the sudden blossoming in the ninth century of Carolingian exegesis on the Song of Songs. Formal Carolingian commentary on the Song of Songs, in fact, grew out of the adoptionist controversy and was predicated upon the threat 1 790, it has been recently argued, marks the “primary political transition” in Charlem- agne’s reign of over forty years. Jennifer R. Davis, Charlemagne’s Practice of Empire (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 25. 2 Adoptionism was intimately linked with the Carolingian need to demonstrate and defend correct Christology, and in turn with the controversy over the procession of the Holy Spir- it and in turn with the Filioque. See Douglas Dales, Alcuin: Theology and Thought (Cam- bridge: James Clark and Co., 2013), 59– 60, 70– 74. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004389250_004 60 chapter that it posed. Alcuin, redacting Bede’s Song commentary at the same time that he was engaged in writing anti-adoptionist treatises, is perhaps the most ob- vious link between adoptionism and formal Song exegesis, but Ambrose Aut- pert, Paulinus of Aquileia, Benedict of Aniane, Agobard of Lyons, Paschasius Radbertus and others all drew on the imagery of the Song of Songs as one tool among many in their arsenal to combat heresy. The Carolingians needed the Song of Songs, in fact, and needed a reassuring- ly conventional understanding of it in particular, precisely because they were in the thick of hashing out highly complex and loaded questions about how to understand and, in some cases, literally how to see Christ, the king, and their own empire. In this context, religious and political questions not only ran par- allel with one another, they were inextricably linked, even one and the same.3 The Song of Songs provided a narrative and a fund of imagery that addressed all of these questions in turn in a highly flexible and compelling way. Over time, Carolingian exegesis on the Song of Songs, while remaining doctrinally consistent, would be used in anti- adoptionist polemic as a text to create social cohesion among a body of trained doctores, to reflect on the relation of the king with the church, and ultimately to inspire a particular kind of devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary. Over time, the nature and shape of the frame of Song exegesis was transformed by Carolingian exegetes, even as they preserved much of its central core of doctrinal content and theological teaching. Early medieval heresy is usually characterized as intellectual and theological error rather than as social movement, this error being confined to a few elites or the odd individual teacher. At first blush, eighth- century Spanish adoptionism, which bears no real historical relation to the late antique heresy of the same name, appears to fit that paradigm: a Christological aberration, highly obscure and complex in its terminology. We know of only two named individ- uals owning to the heresy: Elipandus, bishop of Toledo, and Felix of Urgell in the Pyrenees.4 In the face of full-throated Frankish disapproval, adoptionism 3 “… Carolingian theology was politics on a cosmic scale.” Matthew Bryan Gillis, Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire: The Case of Gottschalk of Orbais (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 7. 4 James Williams has proposed that, given its lack of historical connnection to late antique adoptionism, that the “heresy” be known instead as Felicianism, a term used also by Benedict of Aniane. Precisely because I would like to argue for its regional and cultural nature, however, I am reluctant to associate it overmuch with Felix of Urgell in particular, and so I have continued to employ the most commonly used term in scholarship. See James Williams, The Adoptive Son of God, the Pregnant Virgin, and the Fortification of the True Faith: Heterodoxy, the Cult of the Virgin Mary, and Benedict of Aniane in the Carolingian Age (Ph.D. dissertation: Pur- due University, 2009), 39– 43..

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