The Council of Aachen
862 (extracts)
Translated from
MGH Concilia IV, pp. 71-78.
For a full translation, see Charles West, The Fall of a Carolingian Kingdom (University of Toronto Press, forthcoming)
Document B: the Booklet
of proclamation of Lothar II
The Complaint of Lothar appealing to the Bishops about conceding
marriage to him.
O holy priests and venerable Fathers, you who are placed as
mediators between God and men, and to whom is committed the care of our souls,
who provide medicine to the wounds of sin, who have the power of binding and
loosing, and who are our doctors and leaders – to you I humbly proclaim, and
trustingly I demand your kindness and faithful counsel.
Royal power should
acknowledge the sublime authority of the sacerdotal dignity, by which two
orders the church of the believers by God’s will is ruled and guided. But we
know that one is as superior to another, as much as we rightly venerate the
excellence of heavenly teaching that is closer to God. Therefore we who offend
or lightly or wilfully stray by human frailty before God, we solemnly hasten
back and flee to your pastoral dignity. I myself, recognising my own errors by
the inspiration of divine clemency, and frightened by and shuddering at the
stains of such sins, I seek the remedy of salvation from Christ through you, by
suppliantly confessing and by demanding pardon. I trust greatly in your
Piety, and do not at all doubt that I
will be mercifully and measuredly accepted and treated in spiritual compassion,
[
p. 75] according to what the Apostle says: ‘Who is weakened, and I am not
weakened?’ ‘For if someone is preoccupied in some sin, let you, who are
spiritual, instruct in the spirit of leniency, considering you yourself, that
you may not be tempted’. And another Scripture warns, ‘Do not break the crushed
reed’.
As the rest, Fathers, I thank you very much, since you kept
the faith owed to our lord father [Lothar I], and after his death you have been
kind and faithful to us in all things. And since you generally and in many ways
attended to our adolescence and unstable time of life, and also specially and
diligently watched out for the deceit
imposed on us through that above named wife. About that business, what was done
by your advice we know that you have deeply in memory. For by your order we separated from ourselves
that woman, who freely confessed about a terrible and incestuous contagion of
fornication, according the precept of Saint Paul, who said 'Do not mingle with
fornicators'. Whatever I have done afterwards in the fragility of incontinence
whether by necessity or will, it is your duty to emend opportunely and rationally,
and it is my duty willingly to obey.
For you know that I was brought up from infancy and
childhood amongst women, and that I desired to reach the threshold of
legitimate marriage, for the good of chastity and to avoid the wickedness of
indecency. I am not unaware that whatever is beyond licit union can be ascribed to the wickedness of fornication and noxious pollution. I know
that a concubine is not a wife, and I do not wish to have what is illicit, but
what is licit. You therefore, mindful of my youth, consider what I should
do, to whom neither is conceded a wife nor
is permitted a concubine. It is known to you that the Apostle says “I wish the
younger ones to marry, to procreate children”. And “Who cannot contain himself,
let him marry. For it is better to marry than to burn”. And again, “Let
everyone have his own wife for the sake of [avoiding] fornication. And the
Apostle Matthew: “God blessed marriage, and permitted love to rule in the bodies
of men”.
Therefore I speak straightforwardly, and I confess that I am
not at all able to endure without any conjugal bond. And in truth I wish to be
separated from all fornication ‘according to the inward man’. And now, my dear
ones, we suppliantly beg your Sanctity and beg for the love of Him who redeemed
us, that in the kindness of love and devoted fidelity, you will not defer from
aiding the peril of our body and soul, for the utility of the holy Church of
God and the kingdom committed to us: so that we may equally rejoice and exult
both in prosperity and in our most prompt devotion towards you.
