John of Salisbury, Policraticus, Books 1, 2, 3
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John of Salisbury, Policraticus, Books 1, 2, 3 FRIVOLITIES OF COURTIERS AND FOOTPRINTS OF PHILOSOPHERS Being a Translation of the First, Second, and Third Books and Selections from the Seventh and Eighth Books of the Policraticus of John of Salisbury JOSEPH B. PIKE 1972 OCTAGON BOOKS New York FOREWORD Copyright 1938 by the University of Minnesota Reprinted 1972 by special arrangement with The University of Minnesota Press OCTAGON BOOKS A DIVISION OF FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX, INC. 19 Union Square West New York, N. Y. 10003 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 77-159199 ISBN 0-374-94213-7 Manufactured by Braun-Brumfield, Inc. Ann Arbor, Michigan Printed in the United States of America THE PORTIONS of the Policraticus which Professor Pike here presents in translation not merely make available a complete English version of the great twelfth-century masterpiece, but include those parts of file:///D|/07%20AMH%201/3%20FD%20UNL/Licenciatura/...0of%20y,%20Policraticus,%20Books%201,%202,%203.htm (1 of 402)16-02-2005 20:08:22 John of Salisbury, Policraticus, Books 1, 2, 3 the work which have the widest appeal to students of thought and manners, and best illustrate the author's learning, breadth of interests, and characteristic independence of mind. The accidental circumstances which cause these chapters to appear separately, rather than as integral parts of the complete version which Professor Pike might otherwise have given us, should not obscure the fact that they are portions of a single treatise, intimately linked in intention and argument with the rest. The theme of the Policraticus is the art of rulership; and to understand the author's approach to that theme it is necessary to recognize that, in accordance with the orientation of his age and tradition, John of Salisbury was emphatically an exponent of what has sometimes been called the "good man" theory of government. He regards good government, that is to say, as being fully as much, if not more, a matter of the personal character of the ruler, and of the conformity of that character to morality and "divine law," than of human laws and institutional arrangements. It is probably not too much to say that he would not even have been able to perceive a distinction between the two. Since Machiavelli, the distinction has been in the ascendant; technical opinion has accepted the view that 'Tis not the mildness of the man that rules Makes the mild regimen, or, as Dr. Johnson put it, it is no more true that "who rules o'er free men should himself be free" than that "who drives fat oxen should himself be fat." Only in the last few years have certain extraordinary developments of our own time once more raised a doubt as to whether or not institutions alone can dispense with those personal virtues which, to John of Salisbury, constituted the essence of the problem of government. It is John's conception of the art of government as essentially a matter of personal character which accounts for the inclusion in the Policraticus of the portions of the work presented in this volume by Professor Pike. These sections deal broadly with two classes of subject matter: first, the vices and follies which are apt to prevail among princes and their entourage; and, secondly, the different types of philosophical ideas and viewpoints which may be expected to lead to wisdom on the one hand or folly on the other. The chapters on the vices and follies of courts, dealing as they do with such subjects as hunting, gaming, music, theatricals, magic, dreams, superstitions, flattery, and the like, have always seemed to me, from the standpoint of the historical investigator, distinctly disappointing. Chapters such as these might be expected to afford a rich mine of detailed information concerning the life and habits of the twelfth century. Instead they are singularly devoid of contemporary flavor and the emphasis is on the abstract rather than the concrete. John is too deeply implicated in the tradition of the classic satirists who before him had castigated the vices of a degenerate age, and follows too closely in the footsteps of the patristic literature of the early Empire, to allow himself to give us the direct accounts of what was going on under his own eyes in the London and Paris and Rome of his own day, for which we would gladly exchange his wealth of quotation from Juvenal, Perseus, Horace, Martial, Tertullian, Jerome, Augustine, St. Isidore, and the rest. But if these chapters are disappointing in the light they shed on John's times, they are not so in the light file:///D|/07%20AMH%201/3%20FD%20UNL/Licenciatura/...0of%20y,%20Policraticus,%20Books%201,%202,%203.htm (2 of 402)16-02-2005 20:08:22 John of Salisbury, Policraticus, Books 1, 2, 3 they shed on John himself. Puritanical and ascetic as their tone necessarily is, and sincerely as John accepts the ecclesiastical tradition to which he gives expression, he tempers that tone and tradition with a moderation and practical reasonableness which are peculiarly his own. Thus, for example, in speaking of hunting, after repeating the usual condemnations, he goes on to say that for his own part he is willing to regard it as in itself a matter of indifference unless carried to the immoderate degree where it unduly excites the spirits and subverts the reason. On the other hand, as a relaxation from labor, or a means of preventing corpulence, it deserves no reproach. Gaming likewise may be an innocent recreation. It is only intemperance which converts these pastimes into vices. John brings this same spirit of moderation and common-sense reasonableness to his discussion of the more profound and theoretical issues of philosophy with which he deals in connection with his treatment of superstition in the first book and in his critique of different philosophical schools in the seventh book. In these portions of the work he traverses many of the familiar battlegrounds of earlier and later speculation — substance and accident, universal and particular, predestination and free will, scientific law and miracles, skepticism and absolutism — always seeking some common-sense via media between competing extremes of theory. It is interesting to compare the treatment of such themes in the Policraticus with their later development in the great age of scholastic philosophy. In the light of such a comparison, John's dialectics are pedestrian. Nor is he any match in subtlety for contemporaries or immediate predecessors like Abelard and Anselm; he is always the enlightened layman rather than the technical expert — a Cicero rather than an Aristotle of medieval thought. Yet far more than the technical philosophers he leaves definitely the impression of attempting to arrive by hard and sustained thinking at practical solutions of practical problems, and, in so far as possible, by the light of experience. Such an objective so pursued with urbanity, good taste, and honest conviction constitutes the essence of John's way of thought. The constant recurrence to experience is noteworthy in a medieval writer; equally noteworthy are the clean-cut clarity of style, the conscious fear of superstition, and the total absence of any spirit of mysticism. In his deliberate avoidance of subtlety, his freedom from emotionalism, his sound scholarship and good taste, his insistence on the teachings of experience, and his suspicion of every form of extreme, John not merely foreshadows but represents an intellectual temper which was to become characteristically English; and incidentally, he produced a masterpiece which because of these qualities has still a real contribution to make to the cause of sober good sense in spite of all the changes in the trappings and forms of thought which have intervened in following centuries. It is to be hoped that as a result of Professor Pike's labors, a somewhat wider circle of readers will be able to know at first hand that there was common sense, if not before Agamemnon, at least before the Age of the Enlightenment. JOHN DICKINSON University of Pennsylvania August 23, 1938 file:///D|/07%20AMH%201/3%20FD%20UNL/Licenciatura/...0of%20y,%20Policraticus,%20Books%201,%202,%203.htm (3 of 402)16-02-2005 20:08:22 John of Salisbury, Policraticus, Books 1, 2, 3 PREFACE THE PURPOSE of this volume is to make accessible in English the part hitherto untranslated of the Policraticus of John of Salisbury, the most pretentious and longest work of a writer who is regarded as the most learned man of his time. There appeared in 1927, under the title The Statesman's Book in a political science series,1 an excellent translation by John Dickinson of that part of the Policraticus in which its author expounds his political philosophy. The portion of the Policraticus comprised in the Dickinson translation is a fairly systematic and lucid statement of its author's views on the state, its prince, its members, its administration of justice, its army, and the bond between its members. These matters are discussed in the fourth, fifth, and sixth books of the Policraticus. The selections from the seventh book on ambition and the wiles of the ambitious and those from the eighth book on tyrants and tyrannicide are more discursive. If the word Policraticus2 connotes "statesman's book," as it undoubtedly does, whatever its etymology, that is a fitting title for the translation of the part of the work just mentioned. The portion of the Policraticus contained in this volume is far less coherent than the preceding; in fact it is so discursive that it may, not inaptly, be called an encyclopedia of the culture of the age.