Alcuin's Epitaph

Midweek Vespers

The Seventh Week of Easter

Today the Church commemorates two medieval English saints: Alcuin of Northumbria, and Dunstan of Wessex. I know not everyone shares my penchant for history, let alone my love for the medieval North Sea, but like most Christians I have always found value in the stories of the saints for their sheer variety. How dreadfully similar history’s great sinners! How wondrously unique is each and every saint.

We, the people of God, the sinners He saints, hail from every time and clime, every station and vocation. No matter who you are, or where and when you live, God is there: calling, forgiving, making us His saints, His “little Christs” for the world; one in Jesus’ Body, one in the Holy Spirit; the firstfruits of the Resurrection which will one day encompass the world. Whoever you are, O saint, there has been a saint like you.

Dunstan lived some thousand years ago, studying under Irish monks in the ruins Glastonbury Abbey. He served as abbot there; as bishop, in Worcester and London; and even as Archbishop of Canterbury. Quite the storied career! But he is most famous, and most beloved, for working with his hands. He was an artist and illuminator. What’s more, he was a silversmith, highly skilled in metalwork, with hammer, tongs, and flame.

Legend states that one day an old man asked Dunstan to make him a chalice, and while he began to work, he noticed out of the corner of his eye that this customer kept changing shape: from an old man to a young boy to a lithe and seductive woman. But Dunstan didn’t let on; he simply went about his task. And once his tongs were good and hot, he pulled them out of the fire, latched them firmly upon the devil’s nose, and yanked with all his might, stretching out Satan’s schnoz as the demon howled and roared with fright.

This led to a popular English folk rhyme:

St Dunstan, as the story goes,
Once pull’d the devil by the nose
With red-hot tongs, which made him roar,
That he was heard three miles or more.

Now did the devil really show up in bodily form to Dunstan’s forge? Did Dunstan grab him with tongs of iron, and manhandle him out of his cell? I suppose I’ve heard stranger things. But I like to think that the lesson here is that for as much formal schooling as we might or might not have, for as many titles and airs as we may have put upon us, what really puts the devil to flight is working with our hands: the living and the doing of God’s Word, beyond merely hearing it and leaving it at that.

By all means, dear Christian, learn, read, study. But stay grounded. Work with your hands. Touch and feel the depths of God’s Creation, in the crackling of the fire, in the mud of the garden, in the living of our lives as well as our awareness of these gifts. Thus we too may seize the devil by the nose, and toss him out on his red-tailed rear.

This evening’s other saint is Alcuin, who lived a century or two before Dunstan, and whom I must confess to be a personal favorite figure. He isn’t known for great miracles or martyrdom, but for his love of learning and his skills as a teacher. Alcuin was a poet, a deacon, and a scholar, whose defining trait, beyond piety, was insatiable curiosity.

On an official errand to Rome, Alcuin fell in with the Emperor Charlemagne, and I wish I could’ve witnessed the meeting of these two. Charlemagne was crowned first Emperor of the West since the Fall of Rome, universally hailed even today as the Father of Europe. He was a man of war, conquest, and brutality—yet who knew the value of learning, even if he struggled with his letters throughout life.

This rough and royal brute, whose might commanded a continent, convinced Alcuin to stay on in his court and spearhead what would become the Carolingian Renaissance, a new birth of learning and education in the midst of the Middle Ages. Alcuin convinced Charlemagne, a bit of a barbarian himself, that religion must be a free assent of the will and not a coerced act; thus, the emperor lifted his death penalty for paganism at the scholar’s reasoned insistence—might giving way to right.

Alcuin was gentle, faithful, and brilliant. His mind rekindled the fires of learning throughout the whole of Europe for generations to come. But he may be most famous for Alcuin’s Epitaph, a poem he composed to be carved over his own grave. Let’s give him the last word, shall we?

Here, I beg thee, pause for a while, traveler,
And ponder my words in thy heart,
That thou mayest understand thy fate in my shadow:
The form of thy body will be changed as was mine.
What thou art now, famous in the world, I have been, traveler,
And what I now am, thou wilt be in the future.

I was wont to seek the joys of the world in vain desire:
Now I am ashes and dust, and food for worms.
Remember therefore to take better care of thy soul
Than of thy body, because that survives, and this perishes.

Why dost thou look for possessions? Thou see’st in what a little cavern
This tomb holds me: Thine will be equally small.
Why art thou eager to deck in Tyrian purple thy body
Which soon in the dust the hungry worm will devour?
As flowers perish when comes the menacing wind,
So also thy flesh and all thy glory perish.

Give me, I beg thee, O reader, a return for this poem,
And pray: “Grant, O Christ, forgiveness to thy servant.”
I implore thee, let no hand profane the holy rights of this tomb,
Until the angelic trumpet announces from Heaven high:
“Thou who liest in the tomb, rise from the dust of the earth,
The Mighty Judge appears to countless thousands.”

My name was Alcuin, and wisdom was always dear to me.
Pour out prayers for me when thou quietly readest this inscription.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.