Standing Distant from the Fathers: Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel and the Reception of Early Medieval Learning

Abbot Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel elaborates on the practice of compilation in his ninth-century Liber comitis, a compendium of biblical exegesis organized around the readings used in the liturgy.¹ In the preface to this work, he makes it quite clear that the ideas expressed are not his own, but instead derive from the works of the church Fathers:

Seeing that many in the church wisely seek to investigate the mystical sense of the divine scriptures and pluck from them the figurative fruit, I have made an effort to gather one book from many, filled with the flowers of allegory, acting both as an abbreviator and deriver of the tractates and teachings of the great Fathers, namely of Hilary, Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine, Cyprian, Cyril, Gregory, Victor, Fulgentius, John Chrysostom, Cassiodorus, Eucharis, Tychonius, Isidore, Figulus, Bede, Primasius, and also of those who must be approached cautiously, such as Pelagius and Origen, as if reducing powerful rivers and whirling eddies of the sea into moderate currents.²

Smaragdus clearly identifies his task as that of a compiler, one who gathers from the teachings of earlier writers and situates this tradition in a new framework. However, while his homiliary has the appearance of a “pure compilation,” that is to say, a work consisting of unadulterated textual excerpts, modern scholars have acknowledged that Smaragdus’s activity went far beyond the mechanical preservation of sources.³ Even in the preface to this work, we see that it was his intention to gather the flores of the Fathers, their best and most useful teachings.⁴ This selection process necessarily involved critical judgments on the part of the compiler.⁵ Smaragdus also refers to himself an “abbreviator” and a “deriver,” suggesting that he did not transmit his sources in the form that they were handed down from antiquity. These two terms not only attribute to the compiler an active role, but also describe the manner in which Smaragdus transmitted existing knowledge to his audience.⁶ Smaragdus endeavored to reduce the learning of the past into a convenient and easily digestible form, while at the same time attempting to redirect it and make it relevant to the needs of his generation. It is indicative that Smaragdus compares the tools of compilation to those of an engineer whose task it is to contain and divert waterways. For him, the learning of the past was as imposing to the reader as “powerful rivers” or the “whirling eddies of the sea,” and so he worked as a compiler to channel the flow of this tradition.

Notwithstanding recent studies that have established the significance of Smaragdus’s writing in the context of ninth-century educational and ecclesiastical reform, he continues to be mostly overlooked in modern assessments of Carolingian scholarship on account of the derivative nature of his work.⁷ Rarely does Smaragdus deviate from his sources in order to pass judgment on the teachings of earlier writers or to advance new ideas. But it is precisely the infrequency of this practice that merits investigation. Smaragdus appears to have a reverence for his authorities shared by few in his day. If he was sometimes compelled to go beyond his sources and engage in independent work, I believe there must have been much at stake. It is my intention to examine Smaragdus’s critical approach to the teachings of earlier writers and to identify the principles that guided him as he worked to update this tradition for a new generation of readers. In particular, I examine how Smaragdus reconciled conflict in his sources, and how he accounted for the discrepancy between current monastic practice and the program of monasticism established in the Benedictine rule.

Smaragdus: Life and Works

Smaragdus was active in the early ninth century as a teacher, writer, and abbot. While very little is known about his life, the works he left behind tell us much about his association with the Carolingian court and his commitment to the education of monks in his day. His two best-known works are De processu spiritus...