# Illustrations of the History of Medieval Thought and Learning/Chapter VII

CHAPTER VII.
JOHN OF SALISBURY.
Johannes Parvus, John Little or Short—little, according to his own paraphrase, in name, less in skill, least in worth—was born at Salisbury, it seems of English stock, about the middle of Henry the First's reign. The year of his birth is commonly given as 1110; but this is evidently a mere calculation from the date of his death, 1180, on the presumption that he was then seventy years old, and it is contradicted by his own statement that he was but a lad, adolescens admodum, when he went to Paris in 1136. Studies in those days began early, and it is nearly inconceivable that a man of six-and-twenty should enter, as John did, upon a course of education lasting ten or twelve years. We shall certainly be safer then if we place his birth between 1115 and 1120. As a child, he tells us, he was sent to a priest, as the manner was, to learn his Psalms. The teacher happened to have a ​turn for magic, and used his pupils as assistants in his mysterious performances. John, however, proved a disturbing influence: he could see no ghosts, and his services were not again called for.
If this is all we know about his youth, we are very fully informed of his early manhood. The place in the Metalogicus in which he relates the progress of his learning when he went to France is one of those autobiographical passages rare in medieval literature which tell us even more of the life of the time than they do of their immediate subject. John was a witness of the disputes of the schools when they were in their first vigorous activity. The impulse in dialectical questions which
Abailard had excited in the early years of the century
had been continually gaining strength since his retirement from Paris. Now in the decline of his hard-beset
life he was again teaching there, and it was from him
that John received his first lessons in logic. But the student's thirst for all obtainable knowledge would not be satisfied with the expositions of a single master. John seems to have made it his object to learn from as many different sources as possible. He attended the masters of one and then the other side; but his critical faculty was always foremost. Except in politics, where a strong religious sympathy attached him to the hierarchical doctrine of his friend and patron, saint Thomas Becket, he never let himself become a partisan; and his notices of the intellectual struggle of his time are invaluable from their coolness and keen judgement. Hitherto we have used them as illustrating the careers and aims of several of his teachers: we have now to consider them as a part of the personal history of the scholar.
When as a lad, John says, I first went into Gaul for the cause of study (it was the next year after that the glorious king of the English, Henry the Lion of Righteousness, departed ​from human things) I addressed myself to the Peripatetic of Palais, who then presided upon Mount Saint Genovefa, an illustrious teacher and admired of all men. There at his feet I acquired the first rudiments of the dialectical art, and snatched according to the scant measure of my wits,—pro modulo ingenioli mei,—whatever passed his lips with entire greediness of mind. Then, when he had departed, all too hastily, as it seemed to me, I joined myself to master Alberic, who stood forth among the rest as a greatly esteemed dialectician, and verily was the bitterest opponent of the nominal sect. Thus Abailard was for a moment upon the scene of his early triumphs; but not now at Paris but near it (as Paris then was) on the hill of Saint Geneviève. When John of Salisbury heard him in 1136, he was once more, at the age of seven-and-fifty, lecturing as he had begun on dialectics. But his return again to public work doubt less reäwakened the hostility of teachers and churchmen to which he had previously been exposed. He left his school to Alberic, and John of Salisbury knew him no more as a teacher. His successor was a leading advocate of the logical system which he had spent his life in resisting.
Being thus, John continues, for near two whole years occupied on the Mount I had to my instructors in the dialec- ​tical art Alberic and master Robert of Melun (that I may designate him by the surname which he hath deserved in the governing of schools; howbeit by nation he is of England): whereof the one was in questions subtil and large, the other in responses lucid, short, and agreeable. They were in some sort counterparts of one another; if the analytical faculty of Alberic had been combined in one person with Robert's clear decision our age could not have shewn an equal in debate. For they were both men of sharp intellect, and in study unconquerable . . . Thus much, John adds, for the time that I was conversant with them: for afterwards the one went to Bologna and unlearned that which he had taught; yea, and returned and untaught the same; whether for the better or no, let them judge who heard him before and since. Moreover the other went on to the study of divine letters, and aspired to the glory of a nobler philosophy and a more illustrious name. Whatever may be the exact meaning of the reference to Alberic's defection there is no reason to suppose that there was any lasting estrangement between him and John. In after-years we gather from h the latter’s correspondence that the master and scholar were good friends, when Alberic was archdeacon of Rheims and John a companion of Becket in exile. In his Metalogicus too our author includes his old master in a list of the most highly reputed teachers in France. Of Robert of Melun he could not now foretell the future, when as bishop of Hereford, twenty-five years later, he proved a prelate after Henry the Second's own heart and a sturdy combatant against the archbishop's party. At present John knows only his achievements as a theologian, in which quality he was greatly esteemed as a systematic and most orthodox writer. He appears to have set himself as a moderating influence against the reckless application of dialectical theories which was popular in his time. Like Gilbert of La Porrée he placed the idea of God ​wholly outside the field of human reasoning, and by a careful definition of the relation borne by the universe to its Creator, sought to erect an impassable distinction between the two. In thus guarding against the pantheistic issues to which realism was liable, he was obliged to divorce the two spheres of logic and theology which the schools had always been inclined to confuse.
With these, proceeds John, I applied myself for the full space of two years, to practice in the commonplaces and rules and other rudimentary elements, which are instilled into the minds of boys and wherein the aforesaid doctors were most able and ready; so that methought I knew all these things as well as my nails and fingers. This at least I had learned, in the lightness of youth to account my knowledge of more worth than it was. I seemed to myself a young scholar, because I was quick in that which I heard. Then returning unto myself and measuring my powers, I advisedly resorted, by the good favour of my preceptors, to the Grammarian of Conches, and heard his teaching by the space of three years; the while teaching much: nor shall I ever regret that time. John therefore turned to grammar after dialectic; he had by this time become conscious of an intellectual appetite which would not be satisfied by the formal routine of logical teaching. Alberic and Robert, he says, might have done good work in physical science had they stood as fast upon the tracks of the elders as they rejoiced in their own discoveries. It was their new-fangled system which he wanted to exchange for the less fashionable but more solid study of grammar. He was therefore glad when an opportunity presented itself for him to attend the master whose writings shew him chiefly as a natural philosopher, but whom John distinguishes for his peculiar eminence as a grammarian.
John does not name the place where William of Conches taught, but the minute description which he elsewhere gives of the school of Chartres—a description to which particular attention has been directed in a preceding chapter,—not to speak of his many personal reminiscences of its former head Bernard and of Gilbert of La Porrée, ​being at that time chancellor of Chartres, who was afterwards the venerable bishop of Poitiers, leave us in no doubt as to the locality. It was at Chartres therefore that John laid the foundation of his classical learning, and under Bernard's successors, William of Conches and Richard l’Évêque; the latter, as he proceeds to explain, a man whose training was deficient almost in nothing, who had more heart even than speech, more knowledge than skill, more truth than vanity, more virtue than show: and the things I had learned from others I collected all again from him, and certain things too I learned which I had not before heard and which appertain to the Quadrivium, wherein formerly I had for some time followed the German Hardwin. I read also again rhetoric, which aforetime I had scarce understood when it was treated of meagrely by master Theodoric, the brother of Bernard, who also became in time chancellor of Chartres and who shared his philosophical, if not exactly his literary, interest. The same I afterwards received more plenteously at the hand of Peter Helias, a teacher who is known to us only as a grammarian, and as a grammarian of high repute; his surviving works being a Commentary ​on Priscian and two metrical treatises, one a grammar, the other a glossary of rare words. It will not escape notice, as evidence of the breadth of training then demanded from scholastics, that hardly one of John's masters was lecturing on the subject which he had chosen for special and mature study: their general acquirements were such as to enable them to give competent instruction in almost any branch of what we may call the customary academical curriculum. In the later centuries of the middle ages such an experience would rarely indeed be attainable.
By the time at which John had now arrived he had ceased to be a mere pupil; he was also a private student, and a teacher as well. Since, he says, I received the children of noble persons to instruct, who furnished me with living—for I lacked the help of friends and kinsfolk, but God assuaged my neediness,—the force of duty and the instance of my pupils moved me the oftener to recall what I had learned. Wherefore I made closer acquaintance with master Adam, a man of exceeding sharp wits and, whatever others may think, of much learning, who applied himself above the rest to Aristotle: in such wise that, albeit I had him not to my teacher, he gave me kindly of his, and delivered himself openly enough; the which he was wont to do to none or to few others than his own scholars, for he was deemed to suffer from jealousy. Adam of the Petit Pont was an Englishman who ultimately became bishop of Saint Asaph. He had his surname from the school which he afterwards set up on the little bridge connecting the City of Paris with what was perhaps already known as the Latin Quarter. John had a genuine respect for the logician, whose name he once associates with those of Abailard and Gilbert of La Porrée, as of the scholars to whom he owed most in this department of learning. But his opinion of Adam in his public capacity was very different. Adam's book, the Art of Reasoning, he says, was generally considered ​to have been written with a wilful obscurity of language: although his friends and advocates ascribe this to subtilty, most have explained it as proceeding from the folly or arrogance of a vain man. Adam's pupils of course exaggerated his faults. They gloried in their own inventions and had a great contempt for their elders. Adam encouraged them, having, it should seem, a purely mercenary principle of teaching. He used to say that he would have few hearers or none if he propounded dialectic with that simplicity of terms and easiness of sentences, with which it ought to be taught. John emphatically disclaims being the pupil of such a man. I was, he adds immediately, his familiar, by constant intercourse and exchange of books, and by almost daily discussion upon such topics of discourse as sprang up. But I was his disciple not for one day.
Thus before the end of five years of student life John was already entering on the career of a teacher: but to his earnest mind this resolve necessitated a further training at least equally extended. He returned to Paris and applied himself to the study of theology. The language in which he relates this movement leaves no doubt that the interval between his attendance on William of Conches and his masters in divinity was not all spent at Paris. For part of it he may have remained at Chartres; the spirit of that school has left an impress upon his mind so deep and uneffaceable that we cannot be persuaded but that his residence there was continued as long as possible; although a reference in a letter which he wrote in later years to Peter of La Celle has suggested the conjecture that he lived some time at Provins and perhaps Rheims. Paris however was already tending rapidly to become the intellectual metropolis of Europe and a poor man like John would be sure to turn his steps thither in the hope of getting employment, for it was poverty that arrested him in the middle of the Quadrivium course to which he had been introduced by Hardwin and Richard. From hence, he says, I was withdrawn by the straitness of my ​private estate, the instance of my companions, and the counsel of my friends, that I should undertake the office of a teacher. I obeyed: and thus returning at the expiration of three years, I found master Gilbert and heard him in logic and divinity; but too quickly was he removed. Gilbert left Paris, as we have seen, when he was elected in 1142 to the bishoprick of Poitiers. His successor, proceeds John, was Robert Pullus, whom his life and knowledge alike recommended. Then I had Simon of Poissy, a trusty lecturer, but dull in disputation. But these two I had in theologies alone. Thus, engaged in diverse studies near twelve years passed by me.
No doubt the reason why John adverts so perfunctorily to his theological studies is that the entire narrative upon which we have hitherto commented is inserted in the middle of a dialectical disquisition. Dialectics furnish its motive, and beyond them John does not think fit to pursue his story. Gilbert of La Porrée he heard in dialectics as well as theology: then he attended Robert and Simon; but these, he explains, as though to excuse his not continuing a digression from his principal subject, I heard in theologies alone. Nor can we allow ourselves to be detained by an enquiry as to the influence which these masters had upon him. The character, the transcendental character, we should say, of Gilbert's theological system has been already sufficiently discussed; but John was his pupil but for a short time. Robert Pullen also (if this is to be preferred of the many forms in which his name is written) did not remain long at Paris; and of Simon of Poissy we know next to nothing. Robert, who became a cardinal and chancellor of the Roman church, was held by his contemporaries in singular honour as a theologian, although it has been suspected that his famous Sum of Theology borrowed something more than its method ​from Abailard: but it is impossible to conjecture in what particular branch of his faculty John of Salisbury heard him. Probably enough the lessons which John attended were merely concerned with the exposition of the Scriptures. At any rate the tone of the scholar's theology is manifestly derived from another source than that of the teachers mentioned. The spirit of humanism, in fact, which was the distinctive essence of the school of Chartres, he brought into alliance with a totally different spirit derived unmistakably from the mysticism of Hugh of Saint Victor. The union was no doubt exceptional, for the ethical theology of the Victorines was rather calculated to recommend the life of a recluse than to countenance the wide interests and the wide reading of a man like John of Salisbury; yet as his writings shew, it is this ethical principle far more than any metaphysical or dogmatic system, that ruled his thoughts. To this characteristic of him we shall revert hereafter: at the present moment we notice it, as John notices his theological studies, just incidentally. Besides there is no evidence that Hugh, whom John only refers to twice in all his works, was ever actually his teacher; the current may have been communicated as effectively by private association with Hugh or with fellow-members of the abbey.
John concludes the record of his school-studies in a curious epilogue, half-humorous, half-grave, which shews how far his sympathy had been withdrawn, through his later training, from the absorbing religion of Saint Geneviève into which he had entered with such breathless ardour twelve years previously. And so, he says, it seemed pleasant to me to revisit my old companions on the Mount, whom I had left and whom dialectic still detained, to confer with them touching old matters of debate; that we might by mutual comparison measure together our several progress. I found them as before, and where they were before; nor did ​they appear to have readied the goal in unravelling the old questions, nor had they added one jot of a proposition. The aims that once inspired them, inspired them still: they only had progressed in one point, they had unlearned moderation, they knew not modesty; in such wise that one might despair of their recovery. And thus experience taught me a manifest conclusion, that, whereas dialectic furthers other studies, so if it remain by itself it lies bloodless and barren, nor does it quicken the soul to yield fruit of philosophy, except the same conceive from elsewhere.
Such on John's final judgement on the ruling passion of his time: he felt that he had outgrown logic when he advanced to the study of theology. Still throughout his life, though he esteemed theology as the noblest subject on which the mind could exercise itself, his sympathies ran even more strongly to yet another branch of learning, the study of the classics. The external events of his career hardly concern us, and may be briefly summarised. On the completion of his theological course he spent some time with his friend Peter, abbat of the Cistercian monastery of Moustier la Celle near Troyes, and after wards his own successor in the see of Chartres. Here in 1148 he had the opportunity of witnessing that council at Rheims in which saint Bernard failed to silence Gilbert of La Porrée, and of which we have John's record, pointed with characteristic shrewd criticism. Here too he must have been admitted to friendly intercourse with the redoubtable abbat of Clairvaux, who afterwards recommended him to the notice and favour of archbishop Theobald of Canterbury. The latter had also been present ​at the Rheims council and had there, it seems, made
John's acquaintance. He accordingly received him on his return to England the more readily and at once attached him to his clerical establishment. For the next fifteen years or so John was constantly employed not only in the administrative routine of the primate's court, but also in delicate negotiations with the Roman curia. He was the firm and intimate friend of the English pope Hadrian the Fourth, and was the agent by means of whom the latter's sanction was obtained to king Henry the Second's conquest of Ireland. Writing in 1159 he says, I have ten times passed the chain of the Alps on my road from England; I have for the second time traversed Apulia, The business of my lords and friends I have often transacted in the Roman church, and as sundry causes arose I have many times travelled round not only England but also Gaul.
John's position as secretary to archbishop Theobald, and afterwards to his successors, Thomas Becket and Richard, doubtless disposed him to form those hierarchical views which we find expressed with such emphasis in his Policraticus. Nowhere could he find the conflicting claims of secular and ecclesiastical jurisdiction more clamorous for solution; nor had he any hesitation in deciding that the independence, the supremacy, of the church was essentially bound up with the existence of Christianity. Holding these principles, it does not surprise us to learn that for some reason—the details have not survived—he fell into the king's displeasure. Whether for the time he had to give up his post we are not told; but it is certain that his income was withdrawn, and that he had to struggle with poverty and debt, as well as with danger menacing his personal safety. It is to this interval ​of enforced idleness that we owe the production of his two most important works, the Policraticus and the Metalogicus. Both were written during the time when the king was absent at the tedious siege of Toulouse in 1159: the one was completed before, the other just after, the death of Hadrian the Fourth on the first day of September in that year. The storm which had impended over John of Salisbury seems soon to have passed by: but in 1161 his patron, archbishop Theobald, died, and the favour which was continued to him by Thomas Becket came to be a source of anxiety rather than of advantage. After an absence of more than four years king Henry was again in England in January 1163. The fact possibly determined John's withdrawal. He left the country only to return with Becket seven years later, and to witness his murder. During this time of exile he was the truest, because the wisest, champion of the archbishop. The intemperate and wanton means by which the latter sought to promote his cause, John was the first to reprove. He did not spare his warnings, and, when necessary, would denounce Becket's actions not as impolitic but simply as unchristian. Still his hearty adhesion to the hier​archical principle with which Becket was popularly identified, made him stand firmly by his chief. In the revulsion of general feeling that followed his murder, John was reëstablished in the court at Canterbury, and finally in
1176 his loyalty to the cause was rewarded by his elevation
to the bishoprick of the city in which so large a part of his student-life had been passed, and to which he owed his introduction to classical learning. He was bishop of Chartres however only for four years; he died in 1180 and was succeeded by his life-long friend Peter of La Celle.
The quality that first strikes one in reading the works of John of Salisbury—and they stand nearly alone in medieval literature for the wide circle of readers to which they appeal—is what almost may be described as their modern spirit. It is this, we suspect, which has laid their author open to the charge of cynical indifference and insincerity. His judgement is generally so liberal that it is perhaps difficult for those who merely read him in snatches, as the older classical scholars used to do, to believe that it is genuine. Yet it is in this freedom of outlook that John's individual distinction as a writer lies. There are some things in respect to which nothing would induce him to relax his positiveness. These are the affairs, the interests, of religion; and these, especially in the political atmosphere of John's time, covered a large enough field: for all knowledge, all thought, all the facts of life were to be estimated by reference to the supreme arbitration of theology. Yet even this restriction leaves a considerable space for free and irresponsible questioning, and John is evidently seen at his best when, having made the necessary stipulations and reservations in favour of catholic truth, he can range at pleasure among the memories of antiquity, and illustrate whatever comes to hand from the stores of his classical reading or from the shrewd observation of his own experience.
​The Policraticus, John's most extensive work, allows full play to his characteristic genius: indeed the multitude of digressions and episodes which enliven its course is apt to distract one from appreciating its real purpose. It cannot be fairly called a satire upon the society of the time; while on the other hand it is far from being a methodical treatise on morals. The former description has this excuse, that the author touches with a light hand the follies he sees about him; but the satire, like Juvenal's, is prompted by a deep underlying seriousness: nor is it in any way the motive of the book, in which the positive ethical element greatly preponderates. The title, according to the only plausible interpretation that has been put upon it, designates it as The Statesman's Book: its alternative, sive de Nugis Curialium et Vestigiis Philosophorum, marks its two-fold aim. But the first part of the work is by no means mainly critical: the vanities of courts are thus styled by comparison with the more solid realities of philosophy which form the subject of the second part. The former deals with politics in the wide acceptation of the term, the latter with what one may term the internal polity of a man's self.
John begins in the first three books by clearing away the obstacles to the healthy life of the state, the vices and follies that impede its motion: in the next three he makes the first attempt since Augustin to frame an ideal system of government, on the basis of the necessary subordination of the secular to the religious state; a view to which we shall have occasion to return hereafter. In the second section of the work, the last two books, John passes to the individual: he proceeds from a review of the different schools of philosophy to lay down the principles of true knowledge, and seeks to determine the aim of philosophy, the assertion of the supremacy of the spirit over the senses, of the ideal over the material. ​The latter part of the Policraticus covers substantially the same ground, although with far greater elaboration and relative completeness, as the elegiac poem, the Entheticus, which John appears to have originally written as an introduction to it. The latter is however by no means superseded by the prose work, and we can readily forgive the jejune rhythm of its imitation of Ovid for the pointed epigrammatic accuracy with which it depicts the learning and manners of the day. The framework of the Policraticus gives but a slight notion of the variety of its contents. It is to some extent an encyclopædia of the cultivated thought of the middle of the twelfth century. As an authority for the political history of the time, for the history of learning and philosophy, it is invaluable for the simple reason that it is not a professed history. The facts are introduced naturally, for illustration; and not on account of their intrinsic or obvious importance. The general liberality of sentiment to which the work bears witness is all the more significant because of its author's eminence in the religious world, which in turn gave his work a wider influence than if he had been suspected of making a compromise between orthodoxy and profane learning. Such men by their silent help towards raising the intelligence of their age have often done more than the ambitious protestant against established creeds or the wilful martyr of theological idiosyncrasy.
From the abundant materials offered by John of Salisbury's works we can only select two points for observation: one relates to his use of the classics, the other to his position in regard to the philosophy of the time. The distinctive mark of the Policraticus is a humanism which seems to remove it from medieval associations. Beyond dispute the best-read man of his time, no one is fonder than John of illustrating by quotation or anecdote every statement he makes; and the illustrations are taken, as if by preference, from the classics more frequently than from the Bible. No doubt ​he disclaims any idea of treating the two as coördinate: yet in ethical and even in theological matters he repeatedly confirms and, as it were, recommends the authority of Scripture by that of Plato or of Latin antiquity, just as though he had been the pupil of Abailard in other things besides dialectic. John's classical predilections assisted in his case a confusion of thought with which the happy ambiguity of the word scriptura had a good deal to do. Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning, he would like to understand of literature at large; and he quotes the maxim of saint Jerom, Love the knowledge of the Scriptures and thou wilt not love the lusts of the flesh, in proof of the advantage that springs from all reading. He is speaking now of the study of the classics, and warns us so to read them that authority do not prejudice to reason. Authority here is that of the masters of antiquity, and reason is the mental faculty considered as educated and enlightened by Christianity. The typical opposites have for the moment changed places; and the change is highly indicative of the regard in which the classics could now be held even by men the correctness of whose religious character was no less assured than was that, let us say, of the arch-enemy of learning, the champion of a 'rustic' faith, saint Peter Damiani, a century earlier.
John's classical tastes had no small share in determining his attitude towards the philosophy and especially the dialectics of his time. We have seen from the language in which he concludes the narrative of his youthful studies, how dissatisfied he was with the prevalent method of teaching logic. The nominalists had brought it into vogue as a means of asserting the rights of human reason; the realists had been driven to cultivate it in support of the religious tradition: but now both parties were subdued by the overmastering sway of argumentation. Dialectics had become not a means but an end; its professors were interested not to discover truth but to prove their superiority over rival disputants. The result was a competitive ​system of smatterers and sophists. The first period in the medieval study of logic had in fact passed its zenith and was already nearing its fall. A new one arose in the following century, far more important from a scientific point of view, but really less characteristic for the history of western culture because its materials were imported ready-made and in gross from Byzantine compilations and from the Arabic versions of Aristotle. It was not like the older western logic, of native growth, painfully preserved through dim ages, and in some remarkable cases depending for existence upon the chance survival of a single seed, which sent the acutest observer back upon his own mental resources even to guess at the form and structure of the mature organism. At the time however with which we are concerned logic had for the most part been degraded into idle casuistry and trifling; it had
fallen into the hands of inferior men. The name of Aristotle was dragged down by people who, in William of Conches' phrase, were not worthy to be his scullions; and these conceited pretenders—even Adam of the Petit Pont, who knew better—designedly made their lessons as obscure and intricate as possible, in order to attract pupils who learned only for display. The more capable teachers were gradually forsaking the schools or else giving themselves up to theology, to natural science, or to some other study which was not so much infested by the noisy crowd.
John of Salisbury therefore, who had praise only for sound and honest work, and for the modesty and tolerance of the true philosopher, early parted company with the professional dialecticians. Afterwards at Canterbury, where though he did not perhaps actually occupy the post of a teacher, he seems to have been regarded in ​some sort as the representative of learning in the archbishop's household, he was constrained to take up the defence of those principles of knowledge which he had acquired at Chartres, against the vain substitutes for it which were everywhere forcing themselves into notice. His Metalogicus supposes a state of things somewhat different from, somewhat more degenerate than, that to which we have just now alluded. His opponents were not solely the logical fanatics whose acquaintance he had made at Paris, although they were as fond of splitting hairs. On the contrary they were animated by an impartial contempt for all the educational tradition of the schools: logic they scorned as heartily as they did grammar, and were confident of becoming philosophers by rule of thumb. John had no difficulty in combating this supercilious attitude, but the interest of his treatise is that it gives him occasion to discuss at large his favourite theme of the interdependence of the several arts that relate to the laws and functions of language, in other words, of the Trivium: for he maintains it is only by a thorough study of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, considered as mutually connected and auxiliary, that we can lay the foundations of genuine knowledge. Dialectic itself, valuable and necessary as it is, is like the sword of Hercules in a Pigmy's hand unless there be added to it the accoutrement of the other sciences.
The Metalogicus has in one respect a peculiar value: it is the first work in the middle ages in which the whole of Aristotle's Organon is turned to account. Having thus a surer basis to build upon than any of his predecessors, John relies entirely upon Aristotle for his logical theory. In reference to the crucial question of the universals he is the loyal disciple of Abailard, whose principles he elaborates from the newly discovered source. But even on a point to which supreme importance was attached by his contemporaries John declines to be positive: he chooses the conclusion of Aristotle not because of its absolute scientific truth but because it is the best ​adapted to the study of logic. For the same reason, except in this one department of learning, he avows his allegiance to Plato, whose general view of things he accepts by reason of the free range it concedes to enquiry and speculation. I am not ashamed, he once says, to number myself among the academics, since in those things about which a wise man may doubt, I depart not from their footsteps. It is not that he is in favour of a general scepticism, far less of a general indecision and vacillation. Certain facts John conceives to be irrefragably established by authority; others stand on a secure foundation of reason: but there is a large class of problems in reference to which he holds his judgement in suspense, because they are not definitely solved by either of the prime arbiters of truth, nor yet verified by observation. Accordingly he gives a long and most curious list of things about which a wise man may doubt ... so however, he prudently adds, that the doubt extend not to the multitude. The items are strangely mixed; they bring into vivid light on the one hand the immense interval between the certainties of modern knowledge and the vague gropings that had to serve for physical science in John's age, and on the other the eternal limitations of the human mind which forbid the elevation of metaphysics or theology to the rank of an exact science.
In reading this catalogue one cannot repress the thought, how many sects and divisions would have been spared the church in other ages and in our own time, had men been willing to confess with John of Salisbury that there are many questions which every man has a right to answer or to leave unanswered for himself. Among these John reckons providence and fate, chance and free will; even those things which are reverently enquired about God himself, who surpasses the examination of all rational nature and is exalted above all that the mind can conceive. Other questions which are included in the same large enumeration—the nature and origin of the soul; matter and motion; the causes and beginnings of things; the use and end of virtues and vices, and their source; whether a man who ​has one virtue has all virtues, and whether all sins are equal and equally to be punished—may appear to have a less direct bearing upon theology; but it will not escape observation that hardly one of them but has come to make part, if not of the formal creed, still of the accepted tradition of some one of the sects of Christendom. In the middle ages the association was the more closely felt because theology was almost universally the standard of knowledge, the test by which the goodness of a philosophical tenet was tried. We do not indeed presume to say that John of Salisbury calculated the issues to which he committed himself; certainly if any connexion of the sort just named could be proved he would have been the first to withdraw the problem in question out of the class of 'doubtfuls.' Still it is his signal virtue, a virtue which, if we mistake not, he derived immediately from Bernard of Chartres, that, although he held as strongly as any man to the principle just mentioned, he distinctly limited it to facts with regard to which authority was precise, and left the rest open questions.
He did more than this: he enlarged the conception of authority; for the divine influence, he maintained with Abailard, is not to be sought only in the written revelation but in its indwelling in man's reason.
Est hominis ratio summae rationis imago
Quae capit interius vera docente Deo.
Ut data lux oculis tam se quam cetera monstrat
Quae sub luce patent et sine luce latent,
Claraque fit nubes concepto lumine solis,
Cum dependentes flatus abegit aquas:
Subdita sic ratio formam summae rationis
Sordibus expulsis induit, inde micat.
The reasonable soul is the habitation of God, by participation in whom all things exist: the good man therefore, for virtue is the antecedent of the right exercise of reason, may be trusted to know. It is thus that John is able to declare that freedom is the most glorious of all things, because it is inseparable from, if not identical with, virtue.
​John of Salisbury is the youngest exponent of a great and vigorous intellectual movement. The generation of its founders began in the last quarter of the eleventh century; John carries on its current past the middle of the twelfth. But the tide has been already long ebbing, and the thirteenth century hardly begins before the Physics of Aristotle, now first made known to the Latin world, are solemnly interdicted by a council at Paris; a few years later the proscription is extended to the Metaphysics. That was in fact the meeting-time of two eras, and the opening of the new period of philosophical progress, created by the importation of the works of Aristotle, was threatened, as the efforts of Roscelin and Abailard had been, by the anathema of the church. Now, however, a reconciliation was soon arranged; and the church herself had the glory of claiming as her own the men who reared the stupendous fabric of the mature scholastic philosophy. Into this, the second and greater, period in the history of scholasticism we do not propose to enter; its magnitude and importance make it a subject by itself. In the following chapters our attention will be confined to a small department of it, one to which we are naturally led, since of the theories formed in the middle ages respecting the nature and functions of the state John of Salisbury's is the first that aspires to a philosophical character.
* ↑ This is a plausible inference from John's language in the Entheticus, ver. 137 sqq., in which he ridicules the courtier who is anxious to pass as a Norman; so that the authors of the Histoire littéraire de la France 14. 89, should seem to be in error in writing his name Petit. See the biography by professor C. Schaarschmidt, librarian at Bonn, to which reference has frequently been made in the foregoing pages; a model book to which I cannot too heartily express my obligations. My citations from the Entheticus refer to the edition by C. Petersen, Hamburg 1843, of the Entheticus de dogmate philosophorum, and not to the other poem bearing the same title which is prefixed to the Policraticus. Peterson's commentaries are learned and valuable, but vitiated by a constant endeavour to bring the author into connexion with Oxford, which is a pure delusion: cf. Schaarschmidt 11-21. [In the present edition I have adjusted the references to the Policraticus to the volumes and pages of the admirable edition of that work published by Mr. C. C. J. Webb; Oxford 1909. I have also altered the numbering of the letters so as to agree with that in J. A. Giles's edition of John's Works, vol. 1, 2; Oxford 1848.]
* ↑ Petersen, p. 73, thinks not before the latter date; Dr. Schaarschmidt, p. 10, between 1110 and 1120.
* ↑ The title occurs also in the Policraticus vi. 18 vol. 2. 48. It indicated the fulfilment of a prophecy of Merlin: see Stubbs, Constitutional History of England, i. § 111, ed. Oxford 1880.
* ↑ It has been supposed that this Alberic of Rheims, Metalog. i. 5 p. 746 (if, as is probable, the reference there is to him), was the same person who took the lead in Abailard's prosecution at Soissons in 1121; Brucker, Historia critica Philosophiae 3. 755, Leipzig 1743 quarto; Schaarschmidt p. 71: and the identification has the colour of support from the terms in which John speaks of him, as though he had signalised himself by his opposition to nominalism. If, however, the facts stated in the Histoire littéraire, 12. 74 sq., are correct, there can be no doubt that Abailard's assailant is the same Alberic who was made archbishop of Bourges in 1136 and who is designated on the occasion of his preferment by pope Innocent the Second, as of Rheims, a specification which also appears in documents of 1128 and 1131. This is also the view taken by Andre Duchesne, In Hist. Calam. not. xxx, Abacl. Opp. 1. 54, ed. Cousin. Alberic died in 1141. John of Salisbury's teacher on the other hand left Paris in 1137 or 1138 in order to continue his studies at Bologna, and M. Hauréau, Histoire de la Philosophie scolastique 1. 430, is certainly right in distinguishing the two persons. It is likely, though there is no proof, that John's master is the man whom he entitles, in one of his letters, nr cxliii. Opp. 1. 206, Alberic de Porta Veneris. Schaarschmidt is mistaken in saying that John speaks of him as archdeacon of Rheims.
* ↑ He is mentioned for instance by John of Cornwall, Ad Alex. III., as one of those 'quos in theologia nihil haereticum docuisse certissimum est:' Martens et Durand Thes. nov. Anecd. 5. 1669 b.
* ↑ This connexion, the importance of which I have attempted to draw out in chapter iv, is due to the acute criticism of Dr. Schaarschmidt, p. 22. It may however be doubted whether John's words, 'Reperi magistrum Gilbertum,' Metal. ii. 10 p. 805, necessarily imply a previous acquaintance. I am glad to observe that M. Hauréau, who has devoted special attention to the literary history of Chartres, although he had passed the fact by in his two works on the scholastic philosophy and in his Singularités historiques et littéraires, now in the Comptesrendus of the academy of inscriptions for 1873, 3rd series, vol. 1.81, regards Dr. Schaarschmidt's hypothesis as conclusively established.
* ↑ The words Postmodum vero Richardum . . . secutus sum might lead one to suppose that John attended this master after the three years of which he speaks in relation to William of Conches: but since those years run from 1138, and since his later master Gilbert of La Porrée left Paris in 1141, it is plain that there is no possible interval between the two periods and that Richard's lectures must be included in the former. Even so there remains but a very narrow margin for Gilbert's teaching, and I suspect that John's calculations are not intended to be understood too exactly.
* ↑ When Emo, afterward abbat of Werum (Wittewierum) in Groningen, went to study at Paris, Orleans, and Oxford, about 1190, he learned his grammar principally from Priscian and Peter Helias: see the Chronicon Menconis, in Hugo's Sacrae Antiquitatis Monumenta 1. 505.
* ↑ What John calls the Ars disserendi is apparently the treatise entitled in an imperfect manuscript at Paris, De arte dialectica. Some extracts from this work, which do not immediately concern us, are printed by Cousin, Fragments philosophiques 2. 386-390.
* ↑ The editions have duodecennium or duodennium; the former of which I take to be a gloss upon the latter. Duodennium however itself is considered by Dr. Schaarschmidt, pp. 24 sq., to be a corruption from decennium: yet compare above, p. 181 n. 7. [See also my article in the English historical Review, 35 (1910) 336.]
* ↑ See Hauréau, Histoire de la Philosophie scolastique, 1. 484. The work in question, Roberti Pulli sententiarum libri viii, Paris 1655 folio, I have not had an opportunity of consulting.
* ↑ We need not suppose with Dr. Schaarschmidt, p. 25, that Peter was John's junior. He certainly survived the latter by seven years, but John died at no great age, and Peter as bishop of Chartres is described as old and infirm.
* ↑ Mabillon, in loc., dates the letter 1144; but Bernard says, 'Praesens vobis commendaveram eum,' and now that we know of an occasion on which the three were together, namely, at Rheims in the spring of 1148, it is needless to conjecture any other. The letter however cannot have been written very long after the council, since John in the autumn of 1159 speaks of having been nearly twelve years, 'annis fere duodecim,' occupied in the business of the court: Policr., prol., vol. 1. 14. [it is probable that Eugenius when at Rheims took him into his employment and that for some time he was engaged as a clerk in the papal chancery. See my article on John in the Dictionary of national Biography, 29. 440 sq.; 1892.]
* ↑ John was in Apulia before 1154 'regnante Rogero,' Policr. vii. 19 vol. 2. 173; and again in company with pope Hadrian, i. e. between 1154 and 1159, ibid., lib, vi. 24 vol. 2. 67.
* ↑ He again found hospitality at the hands of Peter of La Celle, who became abbat of Saint Rémy at Rheims some time after April 1162, Gallia Christiana 9. (1751) 234; and it was at this time that he composed the Historia pontificalis which has been assigned on internal notices to 1162 or 1163 (see Giesebrecht, Sitzungsberichte der philosophisch-philologischen und historischen Classe der königlichen Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 3. 124) and which is dedicated to the abbat. [But the work was not written until 1164 at earliest. See the Dictionary of national Biography, 29. 442.] Whether it was at this time or during his former stay with Peter of La Celle that John acted as the latter's clerk, 'quondam clericus noster,' as Peter wrote in 1176, Epist. vii. 6, Maxima Bibliotheca Patrum 23. 886 c, it is perhaps impossible to decide: Dr. Schaarschmidt, p. 26, seems to think it was on the earlier occasion.
* ↑ See a pointed example in a letter addressed to Becket, to which Dr. Schaarschmidt, p. 47 n. 3, draws attention. Among other things John says, 'Si enim litterarum vestrarum et ipsius [Becket's reply and his opponent's letter] articuli singuli conferantur, ex amaritudine potius et rancore animi quam ex caritatis sinceritate videbitur processisse responsio.' He would not treat the pope's courier with the contumely which Becket had thought fit to use towards a cardinal legate of the apostolic see: Epist. ccxx. Opp. 2. 72 sq.
* ↑ Cum cunctas artes, cum dogmata cuncta peritus Noverit, imperium pagina sacra tenet: Enthet. 373 sq.
* ↑ Dr. Schaarschmidt's suggestion, p. 145, is that John knew the Greek name Polycrates and supposed it to be derived from Πόλις. Hence he formed the title of his book, with no doubt an implied play on the meaning of the word town.
* ↑ William of Conches has more than one description of these coxcombs; see below Appendix vi and vii. Compare too the Dragmaticon (De substantiis physicis) iii. p. 63: 'In nugis sunt subtiles, in necessariis tardi et hebetes, sed ne nil fecisse cum repatriaverint videantur, ex pellibus vitulinis bene pumicatis et levigatis cum amplis interlineis libros componi faciunt, eosque coopertoriis rubeis et impressis vestiunt: sicque cum sapiente sacculo et insipiente animo ad parentes suos recurrunt.'
* ↑ The general fact of this condemnation is clear, though it is also certain that a confusion arose with John Scotus's work, on account, no doubt, of its title Περί φύσεων μερισμού. See Jourdain in the Mémoires de l'Académie des Inscriptions 26(2) 486-489, Hauréau, Histoire de la Philosophie scolastique 2(1) 100-106.