John of Salisbury, the Policraticus, and political thought.

AuthorTaylor, Quentin
PositionCritical essay

Introduction

Given his reputation as the most learned and literate man of his time, it is remarkable that John of Salisbury (ca.1120-1180) is not better known to the Western world. Granting the general "obscurity" of the Middle Ages, it remains odd that the man uniformly recognized as the "finest flower" of the twelfth-century renaissance has not attracted greater attention. (1) What makes this state of affairs doubly ironic is that John is among the most readable of medieval authors. By common consent, he was a stylist of the first order, and as a humanist he speaks in a language intelligible to the modern reader. Indeed, it is difficult to identify another writer between Augustine and Chaucer with a greater appeal to modern sensibility than the Sage of Salisbury. (2)

Perhaps the root cause of the general neglect of John is the failure of modern scholarship to make his principal work, the Policraticus, readily available to teachers, students, and the reading public. To this day there is no complete English translation of the Latin original. (3) This peculiarity is echoed in the relative dearth of studies devoted to John. There has been only one biography to date, and that was published over seventy-five years ago. (4) The only other full-length study is over a half-century old. (5) Beyond these works (and a compilation of papers published in the mid-1980s (6)), the last century of scholarship has produced a mere two dozen articles and essays, many published in specialized journals. Indeed, had it not been for Cary Nederman, who has almost single-handedly sustained Salisburian scholarship for the last twenty years, it is certain that John would have fallen into even greater obscurity. (7)

In fairness, the general neglect of John of Salisbury is partially attributable to his ambiguous status as a litterateur. Was he a moralist or an historian? A political thinker or a poet? A pedagogue or a philosopher? In fact, he was all of these, as well as a prominent homme d' affaires--a papal envoy at Rome, a friend of Pope Adrian IV, and secretary to the archbishop of Canterbury. Accordingly, it is not altogether surprising that, in our age of disciplinary boundaries and narrow specialization, a man of broad learning and achievement should fall through the cracks. Yet even in his own day John's writings failed to attract much attention among his literate countrymen. It was only years after his death, in the later Middle Ages, that the Policraticus found an audience and exerted some influence. (8) Ironically, until the sixteenth century he was rarely credited with its authorship, as readers habitually confused the work's title with its author's name. Nevertheless, such readers (the majority of whom resided on the Continent) kept his ideas alive at a time when those of his medieval contemporaries were in eclipse. The reasons for this interest often had as much to do with civil controversies as with scholarly interest, but in either case it was John's ideas on government and law that were cited, lauded, and enlisted by subsequent generations. (9) For this reason, John is known to posterity as principally a political thinker.

Most of what his been written on John centers on the political ideas of the Policraticus. As a whole, it is a rather modest body of scholarship, hardly on a scale with the literature dedicated to the political thought of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Marsiglio of Padua, or William of Ockham. Indeed, most surveys of Western political thought devote only a few paragraphs to John or ignore him altogether. (10) He has faired only slightly better in histories of medieval political thought. (11) Even the handful of specialized studies on John fail to do justice to the political teaching of the Policraticus. In each case, it is not so much a question of what has been included, as of what has been overlooked. Not only have scholars neglected some of the most salient aspects of the Policraticus, they have largely failed to integrate John into the canon of political philosophy. It is the aim of this essay to remedy these defects. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate the merits of John's teaching, while duly noting its weaknesses. More specifically, I argue that John of Salisbury was not only a particularly insightful political thinker for his time, but a remarkably progressive one as well. Establishing this thesis will leave little doubt regarding the need to reassess John's status in the history of political thought or the relevance of Policraticus to students of political theory.

Historical Background

The appearance of the Policraticus in 1159 was closely linked to the high politics and leading personages of the day. Its author had been collecting materials for a number of years, but his decision to complete the work was occasioned by his opposition to Henry II's policy of taxing the Church to finance a war of conquest in France, and his conviction that court society was subverting the religious and ethical foundations of the realm. In the first instance, John responded to what he considered a direct assault on the independence and sanctity of the Church; in the second, he discerned a pernicious threat to the moral ideals and social values of Christianity. Convinced that John harbored such sentiments, Henry and his court branded the churchman an enemy of the king and suspended him from his duties at Canterbury. (12)

While a final showdown with Henry was postponed, John took the occasion of his initial "disgrace" to complete the Policraticus, as well as the Metalogican, his other major treatise. Both works were dedicated to Thomas Beckett, Henry II's chancellor and boon companion. As Beckett was the king's closest advisor and confidant (as well as the man responsible for enforcing the church tax), John hoped to appeal to the better angels of his mercurial nature. It was not that John had a poor opinion of the chancellor; the two men had been friends for over a decade. Rather, he aimed to alert Beckett to the evils of the times, namely those typified by an "epicurean" court and a host of corrupt officials. Conversely, he hoped to inspire the chancellor with a vision of the higher moral purpose of his office. It is also likely that John intended indirectly to influence the king himself, whom he believed was fast becoming the Church's most dangerous foe.

Whatever his intentions, John was realistic about the immediate results, fully aware that his book on "the frivolities of courtiers and the footsteps of philosophers" would likely fall on deaf ears or worse. This "garrulous piece of work," he confided to a friend, "will scarce find a single friend at court." (13) Predictably, the Policraticus made no initial impact on Beckett, and did nothing for John's strained relations with court and king. Whether John's book (or his personal overtures) played a role in Beckett's volte face as archbishop of Canterbury a few years later remains a mystery. It is probable, however, that Henry had the Policraticus in mind when he forced John into exile in 1164.

What followed John's banishment (and the archbishop's flight in the same year) is well known to history, but of little consequence in the present context. It suffices to note that, among his other activities, John (who still served as the archbishop's official secretary) worked on behalf of Beckett's cause, both to affect conciliation with the king and to moderate the choler of his friend and master. When the two exiles returned to England in 1170, John accompanied Thomas to Canterbury, where the latter wasted no time excommunicating his enemies. John was also present when Beckett's murderers entered the cathedral to do the bloody business. In vain, he attempted to cool the fiery temper of the headstrong primate, who taunted the knights as they went to arm themselves for the unholy deed. "You have always been like that," John is said to have admonished the archbishop. "Not a soul wants to die here excepting you."

Following Beckett's murder John vigorously sought the canonization of the slain prelate, and worked diligently to restore good order in the Church. In 1176 the king of France, another of John's eminent friends, offered him the bishopric of Chartres, where John had received the basics of his classical education nearly forty years earlier. Active in Church affairs to the last, John of Salisbury, Bishop of Chartres, died on October 25, 1180.

Method and Orientation

Only about half of the Policraticus, a tome of some 250,000 words, falls under the category of political thought liberally defined. It is this part of the work, the so-called "Statesman's Book" (viz., books 4, 5, and 6), which had the greatest influence on later writers and has most interested modern scholars. While there are a few passages in John's other writings which bear on his politics, the "Statesman's Book" may be said to contain the sum of his political teaching. In what follows I reconstruct this teaching and consider its broader significance in the history of political thought. The former task includes identifying a number of features that have been neglected or ignored by most of John's expositors. As for the latter, I will be less concerned with John's influence on posterity than with his relation to ancient and (especially) modern political thought.

Before proceeding to the heart of the Policraticus, it will be useful to consider some general features of the work. Stylistically, it represents the height of twelfth-century humanist culture, whose distinctive feature was the fusion of classical and Christian sources in an attempt to "demonstrate a fundamental consistency between ancient moral philosophy and medieval moral theology." (14) Discursive, rambling, and larded with numerous (and often lengthy) citations, the Policraticus has been described as "a strange farrago of political and moral observations interspersed with more sustained passages containing something like a systematic...

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