John of Salisbury and the medieval Roman renaissance

Irene O'Daly

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526109521
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Britische Geschichte

This book is a detailed but accessible treatment of the political thought of John of Salisbury, a twelfth-century author and educationalist who rose from a modest background to become Bishop of Chartres. It shows how aspects of John's thought – such as his views on political cooperation and virtuous rulership – were inspired by the writings of Roman philosophers, notably Cicero and Seneca. Investigating how John accessed and adapted the classics, the book argues that he developed a hybrid political philosophy by taking elements from Roman Stoic sources and combining them with insights from patristic writings. By situating his ideas in their political and intellectual context, it offers a reassessment of John's political thought, as well as a case study in classical reception of relevance to students and scholars of political philosophy and the history of ideas.

1

The Roman inheritance

In his seminal study, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art, Michael Camille identified two ways in which the pagan content of classical material forms was ‘neutralised’ in the Middle Ages. The first was through an appreciation of the material legacy of the antique in a purely ‘aesthetic’ manner, reducing its representational significance. The second involved an ‘allegorical reclassification’ of the purpose of an object, so that sites of temples became sites of Christian worship, and antique gems retained a high-status function by being incorporated into bishops’ rings.¹ This chapter investigates, in part, the relevance of Camille’s modes of neutralisation for John of Salisbury’s attitudes towards antiquity, particularly with regard to the apparent paradox between John’s interest in the classics as a mode of authority and his relative lack of interest in the material culture of the classical age. In line with the methodological approach favoured by Skinner and Pocock, which was outlined in the Introduction, this chapter will also consider what John ‘was doing’ at the points of composition of his texts, notably the clues found in his own writings regarding his visits to Rome and the evidence we can glean from them regarding the sources to which he had access. It will conclude by summarising the classical sources available to John, and examine where he would have accessed them, and in what form.

John’s visits to Rome

A cleric affiliated to the episcopal court of Theobald of Canterbury and a scholar, John is a prime example of the cosmopolitan traveller of the twelfth century. He provided an account of his travels in the prologue to the third book of the Metalogicon: ‘Leaving England, I have crossed the Alps ten times, journeyed through Apulia twice, often negotiated the affairs of my superiors and friends at the Roman Church, and as various cases emerged, travelled many times through not only England, but also Gaul.’² That said, it is difficult to be precise about the number of times John had visited Rome by 1159, the likely date of completion of the Metalogicon. When John mentions Rome in his writings he sometimes uses the place name as symbolic shorthand for meetings of the papal curia – at Benevento or Ferentino, for example.³ Thus, John’s occasional mentions of his business at the curia in his letters and works by no means constitute a precise account of his purpose or time in Rome. In addition, there is a persistent confusion in scholarship about whether his ten journeys across the Alps constituted ten individual trips or five there-and-back trips. In their introduction to A Companion to John of Salisbury, Grellard and Lachaud prefer the first interpretation, suggesting that from 1149 to 1159 John would have travelled to Italy ‘on average once a year’.⁴ Given Christopher Brooke’s reasoned speculation that John was resident with the curia (in Italy) for most of the period from 1150 to 1153, combined with the evidence about his career that can be drawn from the Historia pontificalis, Lachaud and Grellard seem unduly optimistic about the number of times John could have travelled in subsequent years.⁵ Reginald Poole preferred the second interpretation, that is, that John’s ten journeys across the Alps were five independent return journeys, although as Brooke has noted, Poole’s datings of these supposed trips do not concur with the evidence.⁶ Brooke refers to ‘four crossings’ made in about 1149, in early 1154 and in 1155 and 1156, and conjectures that John may have been travelling in 1153 or in 1158–59, but concludes that ‘we can only be certain of four out of the ten’, implying that he too is referring to ten independent trips.⁷ That John is referring to five back-and-forth crossings of the Alps seems to coincide more clearly with the available evidence. Either way, as Brooke has established, it is clear that on at least two of those visits John was definitely in Rome: between November 1149 and February 1150, during the visit of Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester, and in December 1153 when Anastasius IV granted a privilege to the abbey of Celle, an occasion on which it is likely that John acted as Peter of Celle’s representative.

Antiquity as example

What did John think of Rome? At the opening of the Policraticus, John alludes briefly to the city’s triumphal arches, noting that they ‘benefit the glory of illustrious men because the writing upon them teaches for what cause and for whom they have been inscribed’, and commenting that the inscription is the key to understanding the significance of the Arch of Constantine; it identifies the emperor as ‘liberator of his country and promoter of peace’.⁸ Herbert Bloch regarded this reference to the Arch as exemplifying ‘an unusual awareness of the monuments of ancient Rome’.⁹ Michael Camille, on the other hand, saw it as an example of how classical material forms were neutralised for a medieval audience: ‘only a scholar brought up in a tradition of monastic scriptural record and the logocentric culture of the cloister would make the arch of Constantine an aesthetic object as a text rather than an image of power’.¹⁰ It is likely that John saw the Arch on one of his trips to Rome, but a mention alone does not satisfy Bloch’s statement that John was showing here ‘an unusual awareness’ of the value of antiquity. On the other hand, John’s words do not fully support Camille’s claim that he rejected the ‘representational language’ of the monument by focusing only on its ‘narrowly verbal communication’.¹¹ What it demonstrates, however, is that John viewed the residual heritage of ancient Rome instrumentally, seeking whatever moral lessons it could offer. In the context of the opening passages of the Policraticus, the message the Arch conveys is that a good ruler must rule by promoting peace. The Arch preserves Constantine’s memory in the same fashion as Scripture preserves the lives of the apostles and prophets – as exempla worthy of emulation.

In Policraticus, Book II. 15, John also uses the remnants of antiquity as a source for a moral message. He describes a statue that was built by the city fathers to honour the majesty of Rome. The sculptor assured his patrons that the statue, a figure of a woman holding a globe in her right hand, would not collapse until a virgin gave birth. Upon the birth of Christ, however, the statue fell. The lesson to the reader is that ‘the kingdom of man contracts as the kingdom of the divine expands’.¹² Two parallels to this account are found in Master Gregory’s Narracio de mirabilis urbis Romae, a text composed in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century which describes the monuments of Rome’s pagan past.¹³ In one tale Gregory refers to a flame that was kept perpetually burning in a great hall. When asked if it would ever go out, the artificer responded that it would be extinguished only when a virgin gave birth. According to Gregory, on the day Christ was born the flame went out and the hall in which it was lit collapsed.¹⁴ At another point, Gregory describes the destruction of the statue of the Colossus, which he claims was burned by Pope Gregory I. Master Gregory ends his account of this legend by noting that ‘The head, and the right hand holding the sphere, did however survive the fire, and these make a wonderful sight for onlookers, elevated on two marble columns in front of the papal palace.’¹⁵ John’s story seems to be a conflation of the two narratives later presented by Gregory, adding to the likelihood that he was reporting a tale in common circulation. Given that both John and Gregory recount how the statue held a sphere in its right hand, it is probable that they were referring to the same bronze, displayed at that point outside the Lateran – a location with which John was likely to have been familiar.¹⁶ Once again, the symbolism of John’s account is striking; far from demonstrating an aesthetic appreciation of the antique, it is instead a tale of the moral triumph of Christianity over paganism. We must conclude that John perceived the remnants of ancient Rome – the Arch of Constantine and the statues outside the papal palace – without a sense of historical distance. His anachronistic tendency to reshape the lessons of the past to serve the needs of a medieval present is also apparent in his treatment of classical texts, as will be shown later in this chapter.

In Master Gregory’s account, Gregory the Great is responsible for the fiery destruction of the Colossus. Pope Gregory I is also associated with the eradication of the pagan past of ancient Rome in John’s writings, where he is linked to the destruction of classical books and notably of the Palatine Library, the public library founded by Octavian in 28 BC in the temple of Apollo.¹⁷ John offers two accounts of the burning of the Palatine Library, and in so doing propagates a myth that would persist throughout the Middle Ages.¹⁸ In the first account, John describes how Gregory proscribed the use of astrology in the court, but also burned books that claimed to offer insights into planetary movements and heavenly secrets.¹⁹ In the second account John notes that some believe that the library was destroyed when the Capitol was struck by lightning – divine retribution for the sins of the reign of Commodus – but ultimately claims, rather prosaically, that Gregory burned its contents so as to make more room for works of Scripture and to encourage their study.²⁰ In an instance of historical elision, John comments that ‘the two stories are not incompatible, however, since they might have happened at different times’.²¹ John ascribes different motivations to Gregory in each account. In the first, Gregory is engaged in an explicit act of condemnation – an act that neatly coincides with the broader theme of this section of the Policraticus, that is, the rejection of astrology and other methods of prognostication, so-called sciences which surpass the boundaries of what we should know. In the second, Gregory is championing Scripture over pagan texts. In neither instance is the act regarded as regrettable, nor the destruction of the books considered in any way a loss. It is odd that Gregory is associated in th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Editions and translations used
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The Roman inheritance
• 2 Nature and reason
• 3 Defining duties: the cooperative model of the polity
• 4 Political relationships in context: the body politic
• 5 Moderation and the virtuous life
• 6 The princely head
• Conclusion
• Select bibliography
• Index