The Council of Aachen 862

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.