Medieval France
. The official Carolingian rebuttal to the iconodulist Second Nicene Council (787). Completed in 793 by Theodulf of Orléans, the treatise is divided into four books of chapters attacking acta by the eastern council, based on a Latin translation of the council’s Greek decrees that had been prepared earlier in Rome. Despite the care taken over the contents and wording of the Carolingian response, evident from the erasures and rewriting still visible on the extant, original manuscript of the Libri, the document was never promulgated. The decision not to do so resulted probably from the Carolingians’ realization, only after Theodulf had begun his work, that Pope Hadrian I approved of the Second Nicene decrees. The pope’s views were made evident in his reply to the Carolingian Capitulare adversus synodum, a list of chapter headings to be included in the Libri Carolini that was sent to Rome most likely in 792. Once the response to the Capitulare had been received, the Libri were more or less finished, but under the circumstances Charlemagne did not wish to set himself against Hadrian by presenting him with the treatise.
The Latin rendering of the council’s decrees available to Theodulf was flawed at numerous points. Above all, it consistently used the word adoratio, which implies the type of worship owed to God alone, to translate references in the Greek to an inferior kind of reverence that the Byzantine iconodules believed was justifiably bestowed on works of art. But although such errors led Theodulf to misunderstand aspects of the eastern position, his teachings in the Libri Carolini merit attention in their own right and reveal in their author a carefully developed, highly Augustinian conception of the role and nature of the Christian artistic image, its relation to the spiritual realm, and indeed of the entire world of matter to the sacred.
Celia Chazelle
[See also: THEODULF OF ORLÉANS]
Theodulf of Orléans.
Libri Carolini sive Caroli Magni capitulare de imaginibus, ed. Hubert Bastgen. Hanover: Imprensis Bibliopolii Hahniani, 1924.
——. Opus Caroli regis contra synodum (Libri Carolini), ed. Ann Freeman. MGH Legum sectio 3, Concilia 2, Neubearbeitung. (Forthcoming.)
Chazelle, Celia. “Matter, Spirit, and Image in the Libri Carolini.” Recherches augustiniennes 21 (1986):163–84.
Freeman, Ann. “Carolingian Orthodoxy and the Fate of the Libri Carolini.” Viator 16 (1985):65–108.
——. “Theodulf of Orléans and the Libri Carolini.” Speculum 32 (1957):663–705.
Gero, Stephen. “The Libri Carolini and the Image Controversy.” Greek Orthodox Theological Review 18 (1973):7–34.
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