Faith & Spirit Quote by Alcuin

Crowds make a convenient theology: call them “the people,” baptize their noise as divine, and suddenly dissent looks like heresy. Alcuin’s line is a preemptive strike against that rhetorical trick. A cleric and court intellectual in Charlemagne’s orbit, he’s writing from a world where legitimacy is fragile, information is slow, and mass emotion can become policy faster than reason can catch up. The target isn’t ordinary people so much as the slogan-makers who launder political pressure through piety.

The sentence works because it flips a sanctifying proverb into a warning label. “Vox populi, vox Dei” sounds humble and democratic; Alcuin treats it as spiritual ventriloquism. By saying “Those people should not be listened to,” he spotlights the mediators who claim to speak for “the people” and for God at once. The subtext is clerical: truth is guarded by disciplined interpretation, not by volume. But it’s also administrative: governance requires brakes, not just acclamation.

“Riotousness” is doing heavy lifting. He isn’t describing civic participation; he’s describing the crowd as a force that can tip into frenzy, where contagion of feeling replaces judgment. The phrase “always very close to madness” isn’t clinical; it’s moral and political. It casts collective anger as a proximity to sin and instability, a state rulers and bishops must resist, not romanticize.

Read now, it lands as an early critique of populist holiness: when someone insists the mob is God’s mouthpiece, Alcuin hears not revelation but manipulation.