João de Salisbury

John of Salisbury (1115/20–1180)

John of Salisbury is one of the most learned and penetrating of twelfth-century Latin writers on moral and political matters. In his style as in his teaching, John represents a style of medieval philosophy heavily indebted to Roman models of rhetorical education. His interests in grammar, dialectic, politics and ethics are subordinated to an over-arching concern for moral formation. Three of John’s works stand out. The Entheticus de dogmate philosophorum (Entheticus of the Teaching of the Philosophers) is a satire on the pretensions and immoralities of those who divorce eloquence from philosophy in order to pursue power. The Metalogicon defends the traditional arts of the trivium and asserts the unity of eloquence and the other verbal arts with philosophy. By far the most important is the Policraticus, a sustained argument for philosophic wisdom against the vanities of worldly success, especially in politics.

 

1 Life

John of Salisbury is one of the most learned, acerbic, reactionary and penetrating of twelfth-century Latin writers of moral and political philosophy. His writing and teaching represent the culmination of a style of medieval philosophy heavily indebted to Roman models of rhetorical formation, especially to Cicero and Seneca. His discussions of grammar, dialectic, politics and ethics are subordinated to an over-arching concern for moral formation. Indeed, John may well be considered one of the pre-eminent figures for the history of moral philosophy in the Latin West before the re-introduction of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.

Little is known of John’s early life. He traveled in 1136 to Paris to study at Mont-Saint-Geneviève, then the site of numerous schools of the liberal arts and theology. From the Metalogicon we learn that John studied with Peter Abelard, William of Conches, Thierry of Chartres, Adam of Petit-Pont and Gilbert of Poitiers. In 1147, John joined the household of Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, traveling as his envoy to the Continent and managing his complex domestic affairs. Among Theobald’s other aides, and so among John’s friends, the most notable figure was Thomas Becket. In 1156, Henry II banished John from the English court for two years for being over-loud in defence of Church rights against the crown. He regained favour, only to lose it again by supporting Becket’s cause after 1162. He spent much of the 1160s in exile on the Continent, lobbying for the rights of the English church and trying to find some middle ground between the arrogance of the crown and the recalcitrance of his friend, the archbishop. After Becket’s murder, John returned to England and to new ecclesiastical offices. In 1176, he was called back to the Continent as bishop of Chartres, where he died in 1180.

John complained of the pressures of his ministerial occupations, but found time for a brilliant literary career. His writings fall into two classes. Before the struggles of the 1260s, John wrote a number of works in the liberal arts and philosophy. Three of these are notable for their philosophic teaching: Entheticus de dogmate philosophorum (Entheticus of the Teaching of the Philosophers), completed probably in 1156, the Metalogicon in 1159, and the Policraticus, also in 1159. Later, John turned to ecclesiastical history, writing his memoirs of the papal court, the Pontifical History, and very polished lives of Anselm of Canterbury and Becket.

 

2 Works

The Entheticus is the earliest of John’s major works, and it sketches out in poetic form some of the concerns that would preoccupy him in all of them. There is evidence that the Entheticus was never finished and, hence, never intended for circulation outside a small circle of friends. It is hard to imagine a satire of such specific ferocity ever being offered to the public. The work begins by defending the alliance of reason and eloquence against the decadence of John’s contemporaries. It next extols philosophy, bringing forward the principal teachers of antiquity. The conclusion of the hortatory argument is the superiority of Christian wisdom and the folly of an exclusive infatuation with logic. The poem then breaks off to describe, in harsh terms, the little book’s imagined voyage to the royal court. It ends with a brief epilogue on grace. Readers have found it hard to discern any single plan in the Entheticus; John took his patterns of composition from the dialectical, digressive masters of Roman oratory. He is less concerned with demonstration or analysis than with producing rhetorical effects by which the reader may be persuaded to a virtuous life.

The Metalogicon is often pillaged for what it records of the Parisian schools in the twelfth century. It deserves better. With the Metalogicon, John first achieves the kind of scope needed for his pedagogical project. The work presents itself as a reply to unnamed opponents who have, once again, arrogantly denied the importance of eloquence to philosophy, thereby upending the whole order of liberal arts and so wrecking the foundation of philosophy. John undertakes to show what unites the verbal arts with each other and why they are all necessary for philosophy. Much of what follows in the Metalogicon is an erudite rehearsal of lessons about the interrelations of grammar and logic, including all of the pieces of Aristotle’s Organon. Shorter, more elliptical lessons are recalled about philology and eloquence. However, John interrupts or enriches his rehearsal with explanations of the sources of cognition, the nature of moral virtue and the limitations of philosophy in regard to faith. The Metalogicon is not so much a handbook of the verbal arts, then, as an extended argument for the instrumental use of a unified trivium in the service of moral philosophy.

The Policraticus, John’s last and most famous philosophical book, is typically studied as a work of political philosophy, best known for some remarks on the justice of killing tyrants, but the work is considerably more. John intends it as an extended invitation to take up philosophic life, by which he means the pursuit of the moral good. The basic contrast of the Policraticus is between the ‘frivolity of courtiers’ and the ‘traces of the philosophers’, between the evident emptiness of lives squandered on worldly ambition and the alluring reminders of lives devoted to the pursuit of truth. For example, Book 1 shows how the talented are corrupted by cheap gifts into the pursuit of any number of unsuitable ends: hunting, gambling, theatre and especially the shams of magic. Book 2 then distinguishes useless superstition from the pious interpretation of natural phenomena as signs of divine will. This dialectical progression, of invective and instruction, of misuse and right use, runs throughout the Policraticus.

For that reason, the work cannot be mapped in a small space. Indeed, John takes different maps for different parts of his text. Policraticus 4, for example, is loosely ordered as a commentary on Deuteronomy 17: 14–20, a passage introduced to support the claim that princes ought to be subservient to the divine law. John not only dilates the commentary over eight chapters, he omits, perhaps deliberately, certain parts of the biblical text, such as its prescriptions for the selection of rulers. Book 5 develops an analogy between the human body and human government: the prince is the head, the senate the heart, and so on. Present throughout the work are bits of moral invective, poetic quotations and historical examples, both pagan and biblical. The examples are probably the most important element in John’s notion of moral teaching. He seems to find in these carefully chosen tales not just colour or incident, but the deeper logic of moral consequences.

If John’s larger structures are loose, they are not negligible. In one crucial case, the structure of his argument settles a vexed problem of interpretation: whether John does or does not advocate the killing of tyrants. The claim that he does usually relies on an extended discussion of tyranny in Policraticus 8, though the text seems very unsatisfying as a guide to assassination. It is a description of tyranny as a moral anti-type, as a negation of what should be sought in a philosophically ordered life. Tyrants live deformed lives and so meet with hideous deaths, which they deserve because their lives deform what is fundamental in human morality. The discussion of tyranny is a striking and even terrifying depiction of the anti-type of morality. The reader can learn this from Book 8’s rhetorical structure. It begins with a critique of the Epicureans, who, John says, taught self-love and self-indulgence, the fundamental vices from which tyranny springs and also, not coincidentally, the typical vices of courtiers. Hence the critique of Epicureanism, the antithesis of philosophy, is properly followed by the depiction of the tyrant and then by a moral peroration in which the reader is asked for a last time to reject the failed life of Epicureanism, the vanity of courtiers, in favour of the morally good life taught by philosophy (see Epicureanism).

What remains truly puzzling in the Policraticus is John’s integral appropriation of pagan philosophy even as he professes the Christian faith. He is fond of juxtaposing the two: he compares Christ with Odysseus, and supplements Socrates with the Bible. He does sometimes stop to justify at least a piece of his practice, as when he argues that he can use pagan examples because Paul used them. However, John seems most often to proceed as if Christianity could complete pagan philosophy without conflict and without remainder. If he censures pagan superstition, he immediately praises pagan wisdom, and he frequently quotes the Roman poets as moral authorities. In these details as much as in his professed teaching, John shows a characteristic confidence in the unity of human learning. He also shows his antipathy to the separation of philosophy either from the liberal arts that lead to it or from the Christian theology that completes it.